“Quite unlike her.” (Will was trying to be subtle, but Miss X is Daphne Post. She has round vacant eyes like a cow’s and is famous for her trembling soprano in the church choir.)
And then there is Miss Y, a local seamstress. When the Germans arrived, they had only packed one Nazi flag. This they needed to hang over their headquarters, but that left them with nothing to run up a flag pole to remind the Islanders they’d been conquered.
They visited Miss Y and ordered her to make a Nazi flag for them. She did—a black, nasty swastika, stitched onto a circle of dingy puce. The surrounding field was not scarlet silk, but babybottom-pink flannel. “So inventive in her spite,” said Will. “So forceful!” (Miss Y is Miss Le Roy, thin as one of her needles, with a lantern jaw and tight- folded lips.)
Which did I think would make the best companion for a man’s nether years, Miss X or Miss Y? I told him that if one had to ask which, it generally meant neither.
He said, “That’s exactly what Dawsey said—those very words. Isola said Miss X would bore me to tears, and Miss Y would nag me to death.
“Thank you, thank you—I shall keep up my search.
He put on his cap, bowed, and left. Sidney, he may have been polling the entire Island, but I was so flattered to have been included—it made me feel like an Islander instead of an Outlander.
Love,
P.S. I was interested to learn that Dawsey has opinions on marriage. I wish I knew more about them.
19th July, 1946
Dear Sidney,
Stories of Elizabeth are everywhere—not just among the Society members. Listen to this: Kit and I walked up to the churchyard this afternoon. Kit was off playing among the tombstones, and I was stretched out on Mr. Edwin Mulliss’s tombstone—it’s a table-top one, with four stout legs—when Sam Withers, the cemetery’s ancient groundskeeper, stopped beside me. He said I reminded him of Miss McKenna when she was a young girl. She used to take the sun right there on that very slab—brown as a walnut she’d get.
I sat up straight as an arrow and asked Sam if he had known Elizabeth well.
Sam said, “Well—not as to say real well, but I liked her. She and Eben’s girl, Jane, used to come up here together to that very tombstone. They’d spread a cloth and eat their picnic—right on top of Mr. Mulliss’s dead bones.”
Sam went on about what catbirds those two little girls were, always up to some mischief—they tried to raise a ghost one time and scared the daylights out of the vicar’s wife. Then he looked over at Kit, who’d reached the church gate by then and said, “That’s surely a sweet little girl of hers and Captain Hellman’s.”
I pounced on that. Had he known Captain Hellman? Had he liked him?
He glared at me and said, “Yes, I did. He was a fine fella, for all he was a German. You’re not going to throw off on Miss McKenna’s little girl because of that, are you?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it!” I said.
He waggled a finger at me. “You’d better not, missy! You’d best learn the truth of certain matters, before you go trying to write any book about the Occupation. I hated the Occupation, too. Makes me mad to think of it. Some of those blighters was purely mean—come right into your house without knocking—push you around. They was the sort to like having the upper hand, never having had it before. But not all of them was like that—not all, by a long shot.”
Christian, according to Sam, was not. Sam liked Christian. He and Elizabeth had come upon Sam in the churchyard once, trying to dig out a grave when the ground was ice-hard and as cold as Sam himself. Christian picked up the shovel and threw his back into it. “He was a strong fella, and he was done as soon as he started,” Sam said. “Told him he could have a job with me anytime, and he laughed.”
The next day, Elizabeth came out with a thermos jug full of hot coffee. Real coffee from real beans Christian had brought to her house. She gave him a warm sweater too that had belonged to Christian.
Sam said, “Truth to tell, as long as the Occupation was to last, I met more than one nice German soldier. You would, you know, seeing some of them as much as every day for five years. Greetings were bound to happen.
“You couldn’t help but feel sorry for some of them—there at the last—stuck here and knowing their folks back home were being bombed to pieces. Didn’t matter then who started it in the first place. Not to me, anyway.
“Why, there’d be soldiers riding guard in the back of potato lorries going to the army’s mess hall—children would follow them, hoping potatoes would fall off into the street. Soldiers would look straight ahead, grim-like, and then flick potatoes off the pile—on purpose.
“They did the same thing with oranges. Same with lumps of coal—my, those were precious when we didn’t have no fuel left. There was many such incidents. Just ask Mrs. Godfray about her boy. He had the pneumonia and she was worried half to death because she couldn’t keep him warm nor give him good food to eat. One day there’s a knock on her door and when she opens up, she sees an orderly from the German hospital on the step. Without a peep, he hands her a vial of that sulfonamide, tips his cap, and walks away. He had stolen it from their dispensary for her. They caught him later, trying to steal some again, and they sent him off to prison in Germany—maybe hung him. We’d not be knowing which.”
He glared at me again suddenly. “And I say that if some toffee-nosed Brit wants to call being human Collaboration, they’ll need to talk to me and Mrs. Godfray first!”
I tried to protest, but Sam turned his back and walked away. I gathered Kit up and we came on home. Between the wilted flowers for Amelia and the coffee beans for Sam Withers, I felt I was beginning to know Kit’s father—and why Elizabeth must have loved him.
Next week will bring Remy to Guernsey. Dawsey leaves for France on Tuesday to fetch her.
Love,
22nd July, 1946
Dear Sophie,
Burn this letter; I would not care to have it appear among your collected papers.
I’ve told you about Dawsey, of course. You know that he was the first here to write me; that he is fond of Charles Lamb; that he is helping to raise Kit; that she adores him.
What I haven’t told you is that on the very first evening that I arrived on the Island, the moment Dawsey held out both his hands to me at the bottom of the gangplank, I felt an unaccountable jolt of excitement. Dawsey is so quiet and composed that I had no idea if it was only me, so I’ve struggled to be reasonable and casual and
Dawsey came over to borrow a suitcase for his trip to Louviers—he is going to collect Remy and bring her here. What kind of man doesn’t even own a suitcase? Kit was sound asleep, so we put my case in his cart and walked up to the headlands.
The moon was coming up and the sky was colored in mother-of-pearl, like the inside of a shell. The sea for once was quiet, with only silvery ripples, barely moving. No wind. I have never heard the world be so silent before, and it dawned on me that Dawsey himself was exactly that silent too, walking beside me. I was as close to him as I’ve ever been, so I began to take particular note of his wrists and hands. I was wanting to touch them, and the thought made me light-headed. There was a knife-edgy feeling—you know the one—in the pit of my stomach.
All at once, Dawsey turned. His face was shadowed, but I could see his eyes—very dark eyes—watching me, waiting. Who knows what might have happened next—a kiss? A pat on the head? Nothing?—because in the next second we heard Wally Beall’s horse-drawn carriage (that’s our local taxi) pull up to my cottage, and Wally’s passenger called out, “Surprise, darling!”
It was Mark—Markham V. Reynolds, Junior, resplendent in his exquisitely tailored suit, with a swath of red roses over his arm.
I truly wished him dead, Sophie.
