I say.
She stands and turns to face me. With her hair in a plait she looks younger, her cheeks full and flushed, like a child’s—like when she was only seven, and still played in the Blancs Bois with Johnnie. Her face is troubled. She turns and goes up the stairs.
The next morning I clean my bedroom. It isn’t long since I last cleaned it—I just need something to occupy me. The work isn’t very vigorous, but my heart is beating too fast.
My bedroom is a pleasant room. The wallpaper has a pattern of cabbage roses, and there’s a taffeta eiderdown on the big double bed, and on my dressing table, all the special things I’ve collected: a perfume bottle that has a dragonfly glass stopper; my silver hairbrush and comb; a music box that I’ve had since I was a child. The music box was my mother’s. It has an Impressionist painting on it, two girls at a piano in a hazy, pretty room, all the colours running together as though they are melting and wet. It plays
Für Elise,
the sound at once ethereal and clunky, because you can hear the abrasion of all the tiny parts inside. The music always calls up a feeling of sweetness and yearning in me—a window open, a muslin curtain billowing, brown hair blown over a mouth—conjuring up the lavender scent of thepast. Just a trace of memory, and a longing I can’t satisfy. Playing this music is the nearest I can come to the mother I lost.
This bedroom is at the front of the house; from the window, you can see out over my yard, and the roof and front garden of Les Vinaires next door. I dust the sill, looking out. Connie loved plants, and her garden is full of the loveliest things—honeysuckle, and fuchsias, and Oriental poppies, their colours singing together, scarlet and amber and pink, so vivid, and fading so quickly, just one day in flower and then a bright blown litter of petals over the lawn. But the garden is looking neglected already, grass straggling into the borders, the roses gangly and reaching out over the path, all the neat boundaries blurring and lost—everything grows so fast in high summer. I remember Connie saying, ‘Keep an eye on things for me, won’t you, Viv?’ I feel guilty that I’d forgotten. I ought to try and do something—weed the borders, cut the grass. I tie a knot in my handkerchief to remind me.
A sound comes through my open window—the chunter of an engine drawing nearer down the lane. My pulse quickens. Someone must be disobeying the rules and using a car; whoever it is may be endangering us. I wait to see who will drive past.
But as I watch, a German vehicle draws up at Les Vinaires. Two men in uniform get out. They stand talking for a moment in the profound wet shade of the lane. A little wind ruffles the leaves and the shadows of leaves dance over them. I feel a sense of shock, my heart drumming, to see these invaders standing there, surrounded by the secret gardens and orchards of these deep valleys. Just as Blanche said, these men are tall, much taller than island men. The sunlight glints on their buckles and jackboots and the guns at their belts. They look entirelyout-of-place in the leaf-dappled light, amid the cowpats and the potholes, between the hedgebanks with their jumble of leaves and entangled flowers and briars.
They open the gate of Les Vinaires, walk up the path to the door. They seem too big for the garden. I notice that one of them has a clipboard in his hand. There’s a bang and a crack as the other man breaks the lock of the door.
Rage surges through me, and a hot flaring shame: that I can’t stop them, can’t protect Connie’s house from them. That I’m so utterly helpless.
In a little while they come out again, and go back down the path. My rage is blotted out by fear: it’s as though a small cold hand is fingering the back of my neck. Angie’s words are there in my mind.
They crucify girls. They rape them and crucify them …
What if these soldiers come in here and take our house, as well? They own us,
She stands and turns to face me. With her hair in a plait she looks younger, her cheeks full and flushed, like a child’s—like when she was only seven, and still played in the Blancs Bois with Johnnie. Her face is troubled. She turns and goes up the stairs.
The next morning I clean my bedroom. It isn’t long since I last cleaned it—I just need something to occupy me. The work isn’t very vigorous, but my heart is beating too fast.
My bedroom is a pleasant room. The wallpaper has a pattern of cabbage roses, and there’s a taffeta eiderdown on the big double bed, and on my dressing table, all the special things I’ve collected: a perfume bottle that has a dragonfly glass stopper; my silver hairbrush and comb; a music box that I’ve had since I was a child. The music box was my mother’s. It has an Impressionist painting on it, two girls at a piano in a hazy, pretty room, all the colours running together as though they are melting and wet. It plays
Für Elise,
the sound at once ethereal and clunky, because you can hear the abrasion of all the tiny parts inside. The music always calls up a feeling of sweetness and yearning in me—a window open, a muslin curtain billowing, brown hair blown over a mouth—conjuring up the lavender scent of thepast. Just a trace of memory, and a longing I can’t satisfy. Playing this music is the nearest I can come to the mother I lost.
This bedroom is at the front of the house; from the window, you can see out over my yard, and the roof and front garden of Les Vinaires next door. I dust the sill, looking out. Connie loved plants, and her garden is full of the loveliest things—honeysuckle, and fuchsias, and Oriental poppies, their colours singing together, scarlet and amber and pink, so vivid, and fading so quickly, just one day in flower and then a bright blown litter of petals over the lawn. But the garden is looking neglected already, grass straggling into the borders, the roses gangly and reaching out over the path, all the neat boundaries blurring and lost—everything grows so fast in high summer. I remember Connie saying, ‘Keep an eye on things for me, won’t you, Viv?’ I feel guilty that I’d forgotten. I ought to try and do something—weed the borders, cut the grass. I tie a knot in my handkerchief to remind me.
A sound comes through my open window—the chunter of an engine drawing nearer down the lane. My pulse quickens. Someone must be disobeying the rules and using a car; whoever it is may be endangering us. I wait to see who will drive past.
But as I watch, a German vehicle draws up at Les Vinaires. Two men in uniform get out. They stand talking for a moment in the profound wet shade of the lane. A little wind ruffles the leaves and the shadows of leaves dance over them. I feel a sense of shock, my heart drumming, to see these invaders standing there, surrounded by the secret gardens and orchards of these deep valleys. Just as Blanche said, these men are tall, much taller than island men. The sunlight glints on their buckles and jackboots and the guns at their belts. They look entirelyout-of-place in the leaf-dappled light, amid the cowpats and the potholes, between the hedgebanks with their jumble of leaves and entangled flowers and briars.
They open the gate of Les Vinaires, walk up the path to the door. They seem too big for the garden. I notice that one of them has a clipboard in his hand. There’s a bang and a crack as the other man breaks the lock of the door.
Rage surges through me, and a hot flaring shame: that I can’t stop them, can’t protect Connie’s house from them. That I’m so utterly helpless.
In a little while they come out again, and go back down the path. My rage is blotted out by fear: it’s as though a small cold hand is fingering the back of my neck. Angie’s words are there in my mind.
They crucify girls. They rape them and crucify them …
What if these soldiers come in here and take our house, as well? They own us,
Similar Books
