Chapter 4
FOUR
MARGOT
Margot had got up early to stand in the queue outside the bakery, watching golden and orange leaves dance in circles along the cobbled street. Now she was back home, her face pink from the cold, salty wind from the sea, with a small brioche.
She ate half of it at her kitchen table with a scrape of jam, and would save the rest for lunchtime.
She had her now-usual cup of chicory coffee – the real thing was so hard to find – and closed her eyes as the steam melted against her face, remembering for a moment what life had been like, before the Germans had invaded.
After breakfast, she came downstairs to the bookshop to sweep the varnished wooden floor and polish the brass till. Once the shop was tidy, she unlocked the front door and turned the sign to Ouvert – Open.
Her first customer was Elodie Masson, one of the village’s schoolteachers, who had come by for some pencils and a Babar the Elephant storybook to give as a prize.
Then a small delivery of books arrived, the paper thin, the cover design very plain; the publishers were making so many cutbacks because everything was in such short supply.
The books weren’t pretty, but they still contained stories that wanted to be told. It saddened her, though, that the only books the publishers could send her were ones that passed muster with the country’s narrow-minded occupiers.
She began tidying the shelves of gardening books.
A few had sold today; although they weren’t too pinched for food in the countryside, it paid to be wise and people were growing their own.
She’d heard stories of Nazis commandeering crops, and sending the produce back to Germany.
What were the people of France supposed to feed themselves on? Fresh air?
She went back behind the counter and, after a quick glance into the street, checked through the newspapers and string she’d hoarded on the shelves underneath.
Each sheet of newspaper and each piece of string would wrap a banned book.
It was an enormous risk, but there wasn’t any choice.
She could either do something or live with her guilt at doing nothing at all.
When she’d come back to Cordeval from Rouen after her husband’s death, Margot had felt as if her world had fallen to pieces. She’d lost her father when she was a child, and her mother had died not long before her wedding. Serge had been her world, and suddenly she was without him.
But with her friends around her, she’d found hope. She used to work as a secretary for a book distributor in Rouen. When she’d typed up letters to send out to bookshops across France, she’d loved to imagine owning her own shop.
And so, with the help of her friends and her Aunt Sandrine, she’d opened her own bookshop in Cordeval. What else could she have called it other than Les Pages d’Espoir – Pages of Hope? Hope was all she’d had left back then.
Hope was hard to come by in these times, but Margot clung on.
She’d never planned to run a bookshop during a war.
She’d never imagined she’d have to criss-cross tape across the wide windows and obscure her displays, to stop the glass flying if a bomb dropped.
She couldn’t give up, even though she was barely selling enough books to make ends meet.
People were struggling to get by, and the books she stocked were costing more and more, despite the paper getting thinner and the print smaller.
But every time Elodie came to buy books, she reminded Margot how important it was that she kept the shop going.
Everyone needed books, no matter how old they were, no matter if they wanted to find something out or be transported by a story.
Occasionally, German soldiers came into the shop, and she tried her best to be polite to them.
She didn’t like accepting their money or their custom, but if she banned them the life she’d carefully rebuilt after Serge’s death would be torn from her.
Margot had wondered if she should start stocking German-language books, just to make more sales, but she decided she had to draw a line at that.
Aunt Sandrine polished the shop’s shelves once a week with beeswax, and they shone.
There were novels and histories, works of philosophy, guides for fishing, maps for tourists, but of course nothing on display was on the Liste Otto.
What she kept in the cellar was a secret for her and the rest of the Resistance Book Club.
It was satisfying to quietly resist the occupation by leaving banned books around the village, wrapped in old newspaper. It didn’t seem that the Germans had noticed them yet; no doubt they were too busy trying to find Chevalier to be bothered by them.
Margot’s supply wasn’t huge, consisting only of what she’d had in her storeroom before the first list was issued. More books were added to the Liste Otto all the time, so there were books sitting innocently on her shelves right now that, within a week or a month, could be banned too.
The ink inside the bottles on her stationery display started to tremble, and then she felt a vibration through her feet from the shop’s polished wooden floor.
Finally she heard it. A distant roar, getting louder and louder by the moment.
Margot’s heart was in her throat. For a moment, her breath caught at the fear that Allied planes were passing overhead, even though it was broad daylight. But no, the roar sounded as if it was coming up from the depths of the earth.
Through the stained-glass panels in the shop’s window, she saw Beatrice, running in the street. She threw open the door of the shop and told Margot breathlessly, ‘The SS are here! They’re looking for Chevalier!’
Margot looped one arm round Beatrice’s and drew her into the shop as she put her finger to her lips. What if the Nazis tore the village apart trying to find this man?
The local men who’d been drinking in Petit’s bar across the road had gathered at the door to look outside. Margot turned the sign on her shop’s door to Fermé – Closed – and she and Beatrice headed into the street. The noise was even louder out here.
She noticed a man on a bike riding by, his wheels turning through eddies of fallen brown and orange leaves.
The end of his striped, knitted scarf flew out behind him and the bicycle’s basket was loaded with groceries.
As he got nearer and she saw his neat moustache and tidily combed, dark blond hair, she realised it was the Professor.
His heavy overcoat was buttoned up against the October cold, and his brown lace-up shoes were polished to a sheen that reminded Margot of chestnuts.
Everything about him seemed to be carefully tidied and locked away.
Everything except for his damaged eye, which stared out sightlessly from his pale, unsmiling face.
‘Why doesn’t he go back where he came from?’ Beatrice said it loudly enough for the Professor to hear. It was a sentiment Margot had heard a few times since the Germans marched into France, but he had been here for far longer.
She could remember the Professor cycling through the village just after she was married.
He always greeted her politely, but things were different now.
Now he wasn’t simply the German émigré who lived in solitude on the edge of the village, he was just one more German in a region that was crawling with them.
‘Bea…’ Margot warned her. She’d have to speak to Joséphine about her daughter; she was going to put herself in danger. ‘You can’t say that.’
‘You!’ A young man whose uniform bore a swastika strode round the corner, barking orders in German-accented French. ‘Clear the street!’
The Professor pulled his bicycle in to the side of the street and turned to look behind him. As he did, Beatrice scowled up at him and whispered, ‘Go back to Germany.’
‘She’s just a girl,’ Margot pleaded with him, hoping he wouldn’t report them. ‘I’m sorry. She doesn’t understand.’
‘She does,’ the Professor replied in his quiet, careful voice.
Margot wasn’t sure what to make of that, but his attention shifted then and he settled his gaze on the sight that had just rounded the corner of their little cobblestone street.
Along the road, people were coming out of the shops and houses, and, as they watched, the door of Petit’s opened and Joséphine emerged, her hair in curlers and her silk dressing gown loose around her shoulders.
Margot heard the disapproving murmurs even over the noise, because the women who now folded their arms and regarded Joséphine with an even darker look than that which they reserved for the occupying Nazis meant Beatrice’s mother to hear.
Margot had heard it all before, and she hated that Beatrice had to hear what was being said about her own mother.
She followed the Professor’s gaze. Her fingers tightened round Beatrice’s arm.
Helmets, polished boots. Rifles, uniforms. The low, autumn sunlight glittering against bayonets. Margot was cold, down to her bones. It seemed as if a whole army was coming towards them, marching in perfect, relentless time. The faces were stern, the mouths set in firm, unsmiling lines.
Some of the old men who drank in Petit’s had fought in the Great War, some at sea, and some hundreds of miles away in the trenches. Margot glanced at their pale, worried faces. Goodness knew what memories were coming back to them as they watched.
The soldiers marched by, as if Margot and the rest of the village weren’t even there.
Behind them came a row of armoured cars bristling with huge guns, their engines growling so fiercely they made the street shake.
Even more soldiers followed, and then, coming up behind, a long-bodied Mercedes-Benz.
Small flags fluttered across the polished black wheel arches of the gleaming silver car, the red fabric emblazoned with black swastikas that glared out from a white background.
At the wheel sat a uniformed man, his face set like marble, while in the back of the car, like a monarch parading before his subjects, sat a straight-backed man.
Against the jet black of his uniform, the man looked deathly pale.
A duelling scar on one cheek stood out in vivid, fleshy pink, and on his collar the sunlight glinted from the silver lightning bolts of the SS.
It glinted too from the death’s head on his cap, and a chill went through Margot.
At her side she caught the suggestion of movement as the Professor started.
But a moment later, Beatrice darted across the path of the vehicle, dodging between the ranks of marching soldiers as she dashed towards her mother.
The man in the car said something and the car slowed to a near stop. As it crawled past, he looked towards Beatrice and said in a voice that was rich with mirth, ‘Be careful where you cross, little girl. We may decide to run you down one day.’
Anger blazed inside Margot. She bunched her hands into her fists, trying to hold it in.
How dare these Nazis come to their village to intimidate them, threatening even the children?
She felt the officer’s gaze sweep over her and willed herself not to react.
He was taking everything in. The little shops, the drinkers who’d come outside the bar, Joséphine.
Beatrice drew back against her mother, eleven years old again, and further along the road Margot saw Esther standing in the doorway of the bakery, so still that she seemed like a statue.
Her hands were tight on the handle of the blue pram that she was pushing, her gaze fixed, unblinking, on the man in the car.
But the man in the car had found something else to occupy him.
As its speed increased just a little, his head suddenly snapped round to where Margot and Professor Lauterborn were standing.
His thin lips were creased to give the barest hint of a smile and he nodded an acknowledgement at the man who stood beside her.
The Professor didn’t move, but Margot felt almost as though the air itself had changed, the warmth disappearing into a frigid cold.
Margot turned slowly to look at the Professor as a heavy, armoured car rumbled at the back of the procession on huge wheels, impassive soldiers visible through the darkened windscreen.
She tried to read the Professor’s frozen features.
There was nothing to see though; his expression was utterly emotionless as he turned his head to watch the car pass by.
Esther shrank back into the doorway as the man in the car continued on his journey.
Margot heard Isabelle give a grizzle of discontent and Esther reached into the pram to gently soothe her baby, but this time the car didn’t slow but carried the officer away through the village.
A shadow passed across Margot. Life in the village had changed again; darkness had arrived, deeper even than before. And she would do everything she could to fight it.