THREE
Vianne knew something of war. Not its clash and clatter and smoke and blood, perhaps, but the aftermath. Though she had been born in peacetime, her earliest memories were of the war. She remembered watching her maman cry as she said good-bye to Papa. She remembered being hungry and always being cold. But most of all, she remembered how different her father was when he came home, how he limped and sighed and was silent. That was when he began drinking and keeping to himself and ignoring his family. After that, she remembered doors slamming shut, arguments erupting and disappearing into clumsy silences, and her parents sleeping in different rooms.
The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was as impossible as the other. In the years since he’d shipped her off to Carriveau, Vianne had made her own life. She sent her father Christmas and birthday cards, but she’d never received one in return, and they rarely spoke. What was there left to say? Unlike Isabelle, who seemed incapable of letting go, Vianne understood—and accepted—that when Maman had died, their family had been irreparably broken. He was a man who simply refused to be a father to his children.
“I know how war scares you,” Antoine said.
“The Maginot Line will hold,” she said, trying to sound convincing. “You’ll be home by Christmas.” The Maginot Line was miles and miles of concrete walls and obstacles and weapons that had been constructed along the German border after the Great War to protect France. The Germans couldn’t breach it.
Antoine took her in his arms. The scent of jasmine was intoxicating, and she knew suddenly, certainly, that from now on, whenever she smelled jasmine, she would remember this good-bye.
“I love you, Antoine Mauriac, and I expect you to come home to me.”
Later, she couldn’t remember them moving into the house, climbing the stairs, lying down in bed, undressing each other. She remembered only being naked in his arms, lying beneath him as he made love to her in a way he never had before, with frantic, searching kisses and hands that seemed to want to tear her apart even as they held her together.
“You’re stronger than you think you are, V,” he said afterward, when they lay quietly in each other’s arms.
“I’m not,” she whispered too quietly for him to hear.
*
The next morning, Vianne wanted to keep Antoine in bed all day, maybe even convince him that they should pack their bags and run like thieves in the night.
But where would they go? War hung over all of Europe.
By the time she finished making breakfast and doing the dishes, a headache throbbed at the base of her skull.
“You seem sad, Maman,” Sophie said.
“How can I be sad on a gorgeous summer’s day when we are going to visit our best friends?” Vianne smiled a bit too brightly.
It wasn’t until she was out the front door and standing beneath one of the apple trees in the front yard that she realized she was barefoot.
“Maman,” Sophie said impatiently.
“I’m coming,” she said, as she followed Sophie through the front yard, past the old dovecote (now a gardening shed) and the empty barn. Sophie opened the back gate and ran into the well-tended neighboring yard, toward a small stone cottage with blue shutters.
Sophie knocked once, got no answer, and went inside.
“Sophie!” Vianne said sharply, but her admonishment fell on deaf ears. Manners were unnecessary at one’s best friend’s house, and Rachel de Champlain had been Vianne’s best friend for fifteen years. They’d met only a month after Papa had so ignominiously dropped his children off at Le Jardin.
They’d been a pair back then: Vianne, slight and pale and nervous, and Rachel, as tall as the boys, with eyebrows that grew faster than a lie and a voice like a foghorn. Outsiders, both of them, until they met. They’d become inseparable in school and stayed friends in all the years since. They’d gone to university together and both had become schoolteachers. They’d even been pregnant at the same time. Now they taught in side-by-side classrooms at the local school.
Rachel appeared in the open doorway, holding her newborn son, Ariel.
A look passed between the women. In it was everything they felt and feared.
Vianne followed her friend into a small, brightly lit interior that was as neat as a pin. A vase full of wildflowers graced the rough wooden trestle table flanked by mismatched chairs. In the corner of the dining room was a leather valise, and sitting on top of it was the brown felt fedora that Rachel’s husband, Marc, favored. Rachel went into the kitchen for a small crockery plate full of canelés. Then the women headed outside.
In the small backyard, roses grew along a privet hedge. A table and four chairs sat unevenly on a stone patio. Antique lanterns hung from the branches of a chestnut tree.
Vianne picked up a canelé and took a bite, savoring the vanilla-rich cream center and crispy, slightly burned-tasting exterior. She sat down.
Rachel sat down across from her, with the baby asleep in her arms. Silence seemed to expand between them and fill with their fears and misgivings.
“I wonder if he’ll know his father,” Rachel said as she looked down at her baby.
“They’ll be changed,” Vianne said, remembering. Her father had been in the Battle of the Somme, in which more than three-quarters of a million men had lost their lives. Rumors of German atrocities had come home with the few who survived.
Rachel moved the infant to her shoulder, patted his back soothingly. “Marc is no good at changing diapers. And Ari loves to sleep in our bed. I guess that’ll be all right now.”
Vianne felt a smile start. It was a little thing, this joke, but it helped. “Antoine’s snoring is a pain in the backside. I should get some good sleep.”
“And we can have poached eggs for supper.”
“Only half the laundry,” she said, but then her voice broke. “I’m not strong enough for this, Rachel.”
“Of course you are. We’ll get through it together.”
“Before I met Antoine…”
Rachel waved a hand dismissively. “I know. I know. You were as skinny as a branch, you stuttered when you got nervous, and you were allergic to everything. I know. I was there. But that’s all over now. You’ll be strong. You know why?”
“Why?”
Rachel’s smile faded. “I know I’m big—statuesque, as they like to say when they’re selling me brassieres and stockings—but I feel … undone by this, V. I am going to need to lean on you sometimes, too. Not with all my weight, of course.”
“So we can’t both fall apart at the same time.”
“Voilà,” Rachel said. “Our plan. Should we open a bottle of cognac now, or gin?”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
“You’re right. Of course. A French 75.”