‘I sincerely hope so. The sickness has been much better for two whole days now and I’m looking forward to a big Sunday lunch for once!’
‘There you go, spuds duly peeled and ready for roasting, ma’am.’
‘Thank you. In that case you may stand down now. I think I’ve got the rest of the meal under control. I just need to get these in the oven once they’ve come to the boil . . . Oh! That’ll be them.’
‘I’ll get the door. You finish up here. Don’t worry, Mrs Dalrymple, they’re going to approve wholeheartedly of what you’ve done to your new home.’
Ella took off her apron and hung it on a hook behind the scullery door, smoothing her hair into place as she hurried through to the sitting-room. Her parents hugged her and then went back to admiring the way they’d arranged the room with the sleek new furniture they’d bought. Angus poured glasses of sherry for the Lennoxes and a lemonade for Ella and they raised them in a toast. ‘To your future in your new home, and to your growing family,’ said Mr Lennox.
‘Oh, here you go, Ella, I almost forgot in all this excitement,’ Mrs Lennox delved into her handbag. ‘There’s a letter for you from Caroline at long last. She can’t have received your new address when she sent it.’ She squinted at the smudged postmark. ‘It looks as though it was posted back in May. It’s taken months to get here! I suppose it’s taking France a while to get things back to normal . . .’
‘Finally!’ Ella’s eyes lit up. This was the first news she’d had from her old friend and she felt relief flood her veins. Having heard nothing for so many months, despite the war being over and the postal service slowly getting back to normal, she’d begun to fear the worst for the entire Martet family. She’d tried telephoning the house in Paris once, but the operator had said that the number was disconnected, so she’d just had to hope that the letters she’d sent to the house on the Île de Ré would eventually find their way to Caroline, wherever she might be now.
‘Go ahead and open it. I know you can’t wait to read it. I’ll show your parents the rest of the flat while we leave you to it.’ Ella shot Angus a grateful look, and he ruffled her hair as he led her parents out of the room.
They came back into the sitting-room a little while later to find Ella sitting bolt upright, gazing, unseeing, out of the bay window at the trees whose leaves were showing the first golden flecks here and there amongst the green, hinting that the end of the summer was near. The letter was folded on the table in front of her.
‘Ella? Are you alright?’ her mother asked, concerned.
She turned to face them, looking dazed, and Angus came over and knelt in front of her, taking her hands in his. ‘What is it?’
Her eyes focused on his face slowly, as if she was coming back to the Edinburgh sitting-room from a very long way away. She nodded numbly, her expression a strange, unreadable mixture of emotions. She took a deep breath.
‘Marianne is dead. She was sent to one of the camps. She never came back.’
‘Oh, Ella, I’m so sorry. That was the worst of our fears. My poor, dear Marianne. And poor Caroline, her poor father. To have lost so much . . .’
Ella nodded, numbly.
‘But there’s more news too. Better news for them. Christophe is alive. He wasn’t killed, but injured and kept as a prisoner-of-war in a German camp. He’s coming home to them.’
Then she burst into heart-wrenching sobs, swept away by the tidal wave of conflicting emotions that the letter had brought.
Ste Marie de Ré
26 May 1945
Dearest Ella,
At last the grim nightmare of the war is over and I can write to you with our news. And what news there is to catch up on . . . I scarcely know where to begin. Papa and I are still in deep shock with all that we have had to come to terms with in the past weeks, and we still don’t know all the facts quite yet. There is such pain. But in the midst of our terrible sadness there is joy too. Our quiet life here on the island has been overturned by a maelstrom of conflicting emotions, at the facts that we have scarcely had time to absorb. So, please forgive the fact that this letter will be a confused jumble of darkness and light, but that is how our lives are now; perversely, they have become even more turbulent in the aftermath of the war, when peace has brought us such news . . .
First of all, I have to tell you of our terrible sadness. Maman is gone. I can still hardly believe it, even as I write those words and I look at them on the page, in black and white, in disbelief. The Croix Rouge has published a list of names of those deported from Drancy to the camps in Poland and on it is the name Marianne Martet. She was taken to Auschwitz in one of the first convoys that summer, not long after she arrived in Drancy, as were Agnès, Albert and Béatrice. None of them survived. We can only imagine the horrors that they suffered and hope that they managed to stay together and to support one another until the end came. I feel such anger and such despair as I think of it – my gentle, beautiful mother, taken, imprisoned like an animal and executed, simply because of who her forefathers were. Thank God, the forces of such inhuman evil have been defeated now, because I do not think I could carry on living in a world where they held sway.
You will understand, I know, what this news has done to us. My father is a broken man and it is truly awful to see. I fear for his heart. It was never strong and now there are days when I look at him and I wonder how much longer he will be able to carry on, bearing the unbearable for the days he has left in this world. I know he would rather be where she is.
And I thought he was on the brink of leaving this world, when the other news reached us and gave him something to live for, after all. A letter arrived from a hospital in Alsace. The handwriting was so familiar to us and yet, for a moment, we could not place it. And then we realised. Christophe. He is alive, dearest Ella, can you believe it? For I cannot quite, even now! He was not killed on that day in May five years ago. He was badly injured by shrapnel from a bombing raid in the Ardennes as the panzer divisions were advancing on the Maginot Line. His legs were shattered. His comrades knew the tanks were coming and so one of the officers exchanged his jacket and his identity documents for Christophe’s, knowing that they had to leave him to be taken prisoner and that he would stand a far greater chance of better treatment at the hands of the Nazis if they thought he was an officer. Christophe scribbled our address in Paris on a piece of paper torn from his sketch-book and asked the man to contact us, to let us know what had happened to him. But his colleague never made it – it was he who was killed at Sedan that day, his death reported to us as that of Christophe.
So, for all these years, Christophe has been incarcerated in Germany, in a prisoner-of-war camp. He had to maintain the charade of being an officer, but they were reasonably well looked-after there, he says. His injuries were treated, although there are still problems, which he is now having operations for at the hospital in Alsace. As soon as he can, he will come back home here, to the island. We are about to leave, to go and find him. We long to see him, to hold him in our arms and to help him regain his strength. To bring him home. We haven’t told him about Maman yet, fearing that he may not be strong enough to bear that news: it must wait until we are with him. But he has asked after you. And I hope that one day soon, when you have received my letter, you will write back to us with your news.
And, although I know I have no right to hope this, after all this time with no news of you, perhaps you will come back to France, as we had all dreamt, and our lives will pick up again together, as they were meant to be before Fate intervened and took our dreams from us for so long.
I must finish now as I will run to the post office to send this to you before we leave for Alsace this afternoon. We have a long journey ahead of us, in every sense, but there is light in the darkness now. Write to us soon, dearest Ella.
With my love,
Caroline xxx
2014, Edinburgh
I hold the letter closer to the lamp to make out one or two of the words which are slightly smudged. I found it at the bottom of the shoe-box full of letters, most of which are from Caroline. But this one, like a few of the others, is from Christophe. I brush my fingers across the page, imagining his hand holding the pen, writing the words, folding the sheets of paper, sealing them into an envelope. How heavy his heart must have been; and how mixed Ella’s emotions when she opened it with trembling fingers and read this letter from a ghost whose memory she thought she’d finally laid to rest.
Ste Marie de Ré
31 October 1945
Dear Ella,
I’ve come to the beach to write this letter, sitting with my back against the dunes and the sun on my face, which feels so good after all those months incarcerated in a hospital bed. As I struggle to find the words to write, the wind is trying to snatch the paper away, further hindering me in my task.
I have begun so many letters to you and then torn them up because it seems impossible to set down on paper all that I want to say. But at the same time, I feel I must write to you because, even if my letter causes us both some pain, the silence between us is unbearable.
I must start, though, by sending my congratulations on your marriage and on the news that you are to be a mother. And please believe me when I say that my good wishes are heartfelt. Angus is a very lucky man. You deserve much joy and much love.