Chapter 24
Florence had postponed her second visit to her mother, but now that the weather was so much nicer, she asked for a few days off and took the train just as she had before, this time arriving as the blossom was at its prettiest. The war wasn’t over yet, but the cheerful flowers blithely declared that it soon would be.
She remembered Claudette’s pinched white face the last time she’d seen her, but this time her mother met her at the door and immediately took both her hands in her own.
Florence had worried Claudette might still be buried somewhere in her lost chances and broken dreams, but instead she was smiling.
If there had been soul-searching since Florence’s last visit it wasn’t showing.
‘Chérie, it has been too long. I was hoping you might come sooner.’
‘I’ve been working, saving money to go to Malta. I did explain. And I’m trying to figure out how I might get there. Even when the war ends, I don’t think it’s going to be easy.’
‘You said your job was part-time.’
‘It is, evenings and weekends, but every evening and weekend except over Christmas.’
‘I can help you with money to get to Malta,’ Claudette offered. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you’re here now. Come on in and I’ll make some tea. I’m afraid it’s only mint tisane: just can’t get hold of decent black tea. They sweep it off the floor along with the dust, I’m certain.’
‘The shortages are getting worse. But it will be over soon won’t it, the war?’
Her mother nodded. ‘Just a few days ago I heard on the wireless that American troops had taken Okinawa, the last island held by the Japanese.’
At first, Florence thought her mother had forgotten her promise to be more open, as they spent much of the afternoon peacefully working together in the garden and listening to the wireless in the evening.
The door to the past remained firmly closed, but her patience was rewarded on the evening of the second day when Claudette spoke up, almost out of the blue.
‘I did love the man you believed was your father,’ Claudette said. ‘You asked me about that when you were here before.’
Florence wondered if her mother was about to rewrite history, wondered if she might hear some anodyne version of the truth and she held her breath for a moment, aware of the open door to the hall and the ticking of the grandfather clock.
Exhaling slowly, she tried to hold in her own emotions. ‘Yes, and honestly I’m so relieved to hear it.’
‘He was a good man, but Friedrich … well, he was different.’
‘I liked him,’ Florence said simply. ‘And his son Anton, my half-brother. I don’t know how long after the war it will be until I can see them again.’
Her mother narrowed her eyes. ‘You definitely want to see them?’
‘I think so, but I’m not sure I could go to Germany … You said Friedrich was different from Father. Do you mind telling me in what way?’
Florence felt the atmosphere in the room change and a distant look came into her mother’s eyes. ‘Oh chérie … he was my soul, my life.’
Florence reached out a hand and her mother squeezed it.
‘When you were here before I was too shocked to speak. I had concealed everything for so long, buried it, tried to stamp it out. I thought I’d succeeded but when you said you’d met him and my secret was out, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.’
‘Maman,’ Florence murmured, feeling a little guilty to have caused such distress.
Claudette sighed and her eyes glazed over.
‘You don’t have to tell me, Maman, it’s all right.’
Claudette held up a hand to silence her and it seemed as if she were suddenly there, lost in the time when all this had happened.
‘I could not bear to go to him and leave you girls behind. Friedrich would have been happy to have you all, but how could I take you away from your father in England? It would have broken his heart.’
Florence spoke softly almost in a whisper. ‘So you stayed with him because of us?’
Claudette glanced at Florence with a puzzled expression but then nodded slowly. ‘Yes. I suppose that is what I did.’
‘And you were unhappy.’
‘I don’t see what else I could have done.
’ Her eyes had grown wide and bleak. ‘But I could not even breathe without Friedrich … there was this eviscerating pain in my body. Every day I lived after that, I felt I might die from it. I wanted to die from it. It sounds ludicrous now, but I wasn’t on solid ground.
I held on to the furniture when you girls were at school or with the nanny.
I needed to be tethered or I would fall apart.
That’s how it felt. They were dark, dark days, chérie. ’
Florence was shocked, her heart twisting for her mother, her eyes brimming with tears. This was raw and almost too upsetting to hear.
She watched Claudette sitting with a trembling hand covering her mouth.
The pain her mother had never shared or expressed was plain to see. It had hardened her over the years until the person she had once been became trapped behind a brittle shell.
Claudette was speaking again. ‘Looking back, maybe there might have been another way, but I couldn’t see it. I did what I thought was best for all of you.’
‘You sacrificed your own happiness.’
‘It was not mine to have. I was married …’
Florence felt her tears beginning to spill now.
‘But you’re right, I wasn’t happy. One day something collapsed inside me, and I took an overdose. Your father found me and forced saltwater down my throat until I was sick.’
Florence stared, her tears still falling, her breathing shallow. This was so much worse than she’d imagined, and she hadn’t known any of it. Had Hélène or élise known?
‘It …’ Claudette paused. ‘It hurts so much to admit it, but I wasn’t a good mother.’
Florence’s heart twisted again. ‘Please don’t say that,’ she begged.
‘It is the truth. I am so sorry, Florence. You were my precious girls, and I didn’t know it.
I see my failure in Hélène’s eyes, I see it when élise glowers at me and I see it in you too, my darling girl.
Too wrapped up in my own unhappiness, I wasn’t there when you needed me.
I was never there. That’s why I sent you to France.
Better that than rely on a mother who was present in body but not in heart or mind.
In France you would learn to rely on each other instead. ’
Florence didn’t speak, couldn’t speak. But, taking a breath, she rose from her seat and went to her mother, wrapping her arms tightly around her.
Claudette was thin, much too thin, and Florence could feel her trembling and then her poor mother began to sob.
Florence closed her eyes and continued to hold her.
It had cost her mother a great deal to speak about the life she had hidden for so long.
They went to bed soon after that and the next day Claudette told her why Rosalie had run away.
The family in Paris had been on the verge of a scandal for which they blamed Rosalie.
In fact, it hadn’t been her fault at all.
She’d merely been the messenger but was so unhappy she’d felt there was no choice but to go.
And, of course, Rosalie had never got on with her strict strait-laced parents who wanted her to marry a suitable man and settle down.
She didn’t want that, she wanted to be a dancer.
‘Here,’ Claudette said, just before the taxi arrived to take Florence to the station. ‘This is for you.’
She dropped a glittering silver charm bracelet into Florence’s palm. ‘Wear it all the time. Rosalie has the same one, with duplicate charms. She wore it every day, said it brought her luck. If you find the identical bracelet, you’ll find Rosalie.’
‘Is there anything more you can tell me about her?’
Claudette looked pale, as if her revelations the day before had worn her out, but her eyes were strangely bright.
‘Just that she was a cabaret dancer in Paris. Our parents didn’t know but she confided it to me.’
‘All right, but Maman, you don’t look too well,’ Florence said. ‘I could stay, help you here.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Claudette snapped. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’
And the look of irritation in Claudette’s eyes made Florence smile, glad – well, almost glad – to see her mother hadn’t lost the irascible self that had been her protection for so long.
‘I love you, Maman,’ Florence said, gave her a hug and then the taxi arrived.
For most of the journey her eyes were blurred with tears and when Jack picked her up from Exeter station, she still could not speak.
Back at Meadowbrook he asked if she was all right and could he turn on the wireless and she nodded.
It was 12 April, and they heard the news that after twelve years as President of the United States of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had died from a massive stroke.
Florence listened in shock. This was the man who had led his country through the worst of times to the impending defeat of Nazi Germany, with the Japanese in full retreat.
‘Oh,’ she said, her voice choked. ‘It’s terribly sad that he didn’t get to see the very end.’
Jack held out his arms to her and she went to him. She cried then for the American President, and she cried for her mother, for herself and Jack, for her two sisters and all they’d been through, and she cried for a world in which war and so many senseless pointless deaths were possible.
As they waited for an end to the war, Florence swung between a growing sense of relief and anxiety that something might still go wrong.
Jack assured her it wouldn’t, and he seemed not to have to go away so much, except for occasional days to somewhere in Dorset when he took only a penknife, a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and a compass.
He’d said the SOE wouldn’t be wound up until the end of the year or maybe the beginning of the next, but most of his work would be tying up loose ends.
It was the most he’d ever said about what he was doing.
The good news was that Belinda had finally accepted the divorce must happen and had given up insisting on a share of Meadowbrook.
Jack seemed happier after that, although he hadn’t known what had changed her mind.
Florence suspected that with the end of the war in sight Belinda, like everyone else, wanted to make a fresh start.
Jack was talking about Sicily again and long before any date was set, or even a definite decision about going, Florence began to read about the island, to talk about it, and even to dream about it.
Although she had decided to go to Malta alone, it would be so much better if Jack came too.
When she thought of Sicily, she saw herself soaring free like some mythical winged creature flying over sunlit buildings and shimmering blue seas.
In her dreams she walked barefoot on empty beaches, feeling the warm sand as she wriggled her toes, the water lapping at her feet.
She looked at the island in Jack’s world atlas, followed its contours with her fingertip. Strangely Sicily called to her in a way that, so far, Malta had not. Might Rosalie have felt the same way, stayed on in Sicily, swum in its surging seas and decided to stay put?
‘What do you think of this one?’ she asked Jack and in her mind’s eye pictured the characters from the Sicilian legend she was reading about in her library book.
He murmured something indistinct.
‘The legend of the Fountain of Arethusa in Syracuse, Jack. I’d love to go there. Do you think we might?’
‘Well, if we go, and remember nothing is settled yet – this wretched war needs to end—’
‘Yes. Yes, I know,’ she interrupted irritably.
He laughed at her, not unkindly. ‘The ferryboat to Malta sails from Syracuse so I suppose it’s possible.’
Florence glanced down at the book again. ‘The water flows out from a fissure in the natural rock and forms a pool. They say the goddess Artemis changed a Grecian nymph called Arethusa into a spring that flowed underground and emerged at Ortygia to help her escape pursuit.’
‘She had direct access to the goddess then?’ Jack said.
Florence smiled. ‘Doesn’t every beautiful nymph? Apparently the fountain is enchanted, a place where people in love touch the waters and pray for fertility and happiness.’
‘And well they might. I just think the legend of Etna and the giant Enceladus, or the story of Cyclops, is more my cup of tea. I was forced to study classics at school and had to read some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.’
‘Ugh. One-eyed giants. No thanks.’
He covered one eye and pulled a ghastly face.
She grimaced and threatened him with her cushion. ‘You like non-fiction don’t you? War stories, battles and so on.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Not entirely true. I like Graham Greene’s novels and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of my favourite books.’
‘What else?’
‘Madame Bovary. You’d like that, I’m sure.’
‘Who wrote it?’
‘Flaubert, first published in 1856. It’s about this woman, Emma Rouault, who marries thinking she’ll have a life of luxury and passion. But her husband is dreadfully dull, and she has an affair. But then her lover betrays her, and she spirals into deceit and despair.’
‘Sounds grim.’
‘What makes it wonderful is the way the author reveals a world of flawed individuals with narrow lives and narrow minds. Nobody comes out smelling of roses.’
Florence thought about what he’d said. The mention of betrayal made her itch with guilt.
Wasn’t that exactly what she was doing by falling in love with Jack even though Hélène loved him?
By not leaving and staying here in Devon, despite the fact he had more or less said he didn’t love her, and she had made her own decision to move on? Yet still had not.