And then the seasons turned again and it was spring. In March, Scotland reeled as Clydebank was bombed and more civilian lives were lost. Ella had run out of contacts to write to in order to try and find out what had happened to Christophe, so she began all over again, pestering the organisations she had already tried, even wangling an introduction to a female SOE agent (through his contact with the pilots on the base, Sandy knew people who knew people), who was rumoured to be about to be deployed into France, and begging the girl to try to find out news of the Martet family of 3, rue des Arcades, should she make it to Paris. But still no word came.
One summer’s day, when even the blue sky and scudding white clouds above RAF Gulford couldn’t dispel the gloom of the war grinding on interminably with Germany’s recent invasion of Russia, Ella packed away her tools as usual and cycled back to her digs. When she walked into the kitchen, her parents were sitting at the table nursing cups of tea which Jeanie had brewed for them. And her heart stood still. Because they wouldn’t have come all this way, unannounced, unless there was news.
Her mother embraced her, with a careful gentleness that made Ella’s heart break into a thousand pieces. And then she handed Ella an envelope, addressed to the house in Morningside and franked with a Spanish postmark, which contained a note and another, longer letter.
The note was from Monsieur Martet to Mr and Mrs Lennox, asking them to read the enclosed letter from Caroline and to make sure that they were with Ella when she read it.
With trembling hands, scarcely able to breathe, Ella unfolded the letter. She hesitated, realising that even though it was the definite news for which she’d been longing for over a year, she didn’t want to begin to read. Because once she did, it would make the truth real. And maybe, after all, it was better to go on without knowing the truth, to be able to go on hoping, instead of knowing and giving up.
14 July 1941
Dearest Ella,
I write this letter not knowing whether it will ever reach you, like the others I have written over the past year. Maybe you have received them, but when there can be no reply we have no way of knowing. And so I must keep on trying, because I know you will be thinking about us and wondering and worrying. In any case, I hold out a little more hope that this one will get through because now we are on the island and Benoît will take this when he goes out to tend to his lobster pots. Like a message in a bottle, it will be borne by the waters of the Atlantic, bobbing from fishing-boat to fishing-boat on a secret tide which allows such messages to wash up in Spain, from where they can be sent onwards by more conventional means. I cast it out on these stormy and uncertain waters in the hope that, this time, it will finally reach you.
If you have had any of my other letters, then you will know the news of Christophe. I do not wish to re-open those wounds, which I know cannot possibly have healed, although I pray that time will work its magic on us all in the end so that we can get through each day without having to bear the searing pain of loss. But if they have not reached you then I must tell you again. He was killed on one of the first days of the Battle of France, in May last year. All we have of him is a scrap of paper with the Paris address scribbled on it in his handwriting, sent back with the letter from the Croix Rouge confirming that he died, without regaining consciousness, after being caught in machine-gun fire just outside Sedan when the German forces attacked in the Ardennes. The piece of paper was in the pocket of his jacket, which had his name clearly marked so that they were able to identify him. His body is buried, with the bodies of others who died that day, in a field far away on the other side of the country, so we cannot visit him and lay flowers on his grave. But one day we will do so, and he will smile down on us and know how much we all still love him even though he is gone from us for ever.
We stayed on in Paris, even after hearing the news. Maman was inconsolable, but refused to leave Papa and me, who still had our work there, even though we begged her to go to the island. The Nazis reopened the Louvre at the end of last summer, as a propaganda exercise to show how civilised the conquering force really was – a hollow charade of a public relations exercise as they had shut off many of the galleries and, I am convinced, have been stealing works of art right, left and centre to send back to their Fatherland.
But now, dear Ella, I must write of our further tragedy. In May, they came and took Maman away. We have been frantic, trying to find out where she has been sent. They are deporting anyone of Jewish descent, and we fear she is now in a deportation camp in Drancy. She was visiting Cousin Agnès at the time: they took her and the children too, so we can only hope that they are all together still, so that, wherever she may be, she is with those who love her, just as she will surely be supporting them through whatever they may be suffering.
Papa and I have fled to the island: we cannot stay in Paris any longer in these dreadful times, so filled with fear and the terrible, terrible pain of loss. We are still in the occupied part of France, and the Île de Ré is a strategic part of the Germans’ defences so the island is littered with hideous cement boxes and barbed wire. But you know that this place has always had its own spirit of wildness and indomitability, and this still prevails even today. If it weren’t for the curfew and a few restricted areas, you would scarcely know there was a war on here. We live very quietly and very simply, clinging to each other to get through the days until there is an end to this living nightmare in which we find ourselves.
Pray for us, dear Ella, as we pray for you. Please pray that Maman will be returned to us safely in the end. I know your heart will be broken, as ours are. Maybe that is the only comfort we can find now, in the knowledge that we are not alone in our pain and suffering, along with so many others who have lost so much in this terrible war.
May these words find their way to you, and may you be surrounded by those who love you best when you read them. I cannot bear to think of your suffering. And I know that Christophe too would not want you to suffer. He would want you to live your life, a life filled with as much beauty and joy and love as you can possibly cram into it. Do so, please, for his sake, and for ours.
Je t’embrasse très fort, ma chère Ella.
With all my love,
Caroline xxx
2014, Edinburgh
Ella is lying in her bed today, propped up on snowy pillows, too tired to get up and sit in her chair. The nurse had warned me that she might not be able to stay awake for long, that she’s been drifting this past week on the sea of memory that is beginning to carry her from us. But I have so many questions for her and, though I try to rein them in, I’m also conscious that time is running out and so I must ask them if I’m to get her story down before it’s too late. Her voice is a little weaker today, wavering, as she remembers.
‘The war changed everything, in ways we could never have imagined. From the most mundane aspects of our daily lives to the broadest principles of the world as a whole – everything we had once known, everything we’d taken for granted, was altered by that terrible war. You find that suddenly there are no certainties any more, you’re in unchartered territory, so much is destroyed . . . But there’s a freedom in destruction too. Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong when life can end at any moment? When that fact is brought home to you so brutally? Reading that letter of Caroline’s, I thought of the thousands of families across the world who had read letters like that and who would be reading more letters like that the next day and the day after that . . . I thought of Monsieur Martet and Caroline having had to read that awful news, and then to have Marianne taken from them, and I wondered how life could possibly go on for any of us . . .’
I rummage in my bag for a tissue, wiping my eyes and wondering why I seem to cry so often and so easily these days. I do so, silently, in the night when I lie awake listening to Dan’s gentle breathing, which serves only to magnify the widening gulf between us as we drift further apart. I grieve for our marriage, which has somehow become lost amongst the heaps of ironing, the clutter of Finn’s toys and the weight of our worries that have piled up, like flotsam on a flood-tide, in what used to feel like our family home.
And I’ve been grieving for Christophe too, ever since I read Caroline’s letter last night. As I’d transcribed her words on to the computer screen the tears had poured down my face.