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.
As I watch the waves wash on to the sand, memories of you flood back. These memories are some of my most treasured possessions. They’ve kept me going when all has seemed lost. They are the things I am most thankful for. So, you should know, dear Ella, that you helped me to survive the terror and the horror of war and that, even in the darkest moments, I knew that truth and beauty would ultimately triumph because I carried them with me, untouchable and unbreakable, in my heart. You were with me, helping me face each ordeal . . .
The day it happened – the day life changed forever – I was at my post, but it was a sunny May morning and, from the canopy of fresh green leaves above my head I remember that a concerto of bird-song filled the air. So I put aside my rifle and pulled out my sketch-book. I would capture the beauty of this place and send it to you in my next letter . . . and you would smile when you opened it, understanding that I was still the same old Christophe, finding beauty in the most ordinary surroundings. I wanted to draw the way the sunlight dappled through the leaves on to the moss-covered stones beside that stream . . .
‘That’s funny,’ I thought, only half noticing as I sketched. ‘The birds have stopped singing.’
I glanced up the track that led through the woods, up the hill where the sun had risen that morning. And then I heard it. The reason why there was no more bird-song in the sunlit leaves above my head.
After the noise of the tanks crashing their way through the undergrowth, I don’t remember much. The captain of my battalion came to find me where I lay in the crater left by the shell. My legs were badly shattered and he knew I would stand more of a chance of survival if the Germans captured me. But he also knew I would be treated far better if I were taken prisoner as an officer and so he exchanged my jacket for his and swapped our overcoats and our identity papers. And so I became Captain Fabien Dumas for the remainder of the war, held in prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft VIII-A with other captured officers, once it was decided that I would survive and my injuries had been patched up in a German field hospital.
You were with me there, Ella, in the sketches I drew from memory which reminded me that there was a freedom in my heart that no prison could ever confine.