Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Pierre Moreau
Pierre began his morning as usual by firing up the ovens and tying his white apron around his waist. From a burlap sack of flour, he took several large scoops and sieved the powder into a bowl.
He no longer needed to measure the amounts, he could tell by eye alone.
Then it was time for the sugar. There was hardly any left.
The shopkeeper had promised last week that the sugar delivery would arrive that very day, although given that was what he had promised a fortnight before, Pierre decided to hold back a little.
Having folded the flour into some beaten eggs, he finally mixed the batter into melted butter, giving the madeleines their distinctive golden taste.
Within minutes, they were in the oven and filling the basement with the warm scent of sugar caramelising.
Pierre was a rather shy man. He kept himself to himself, but to his customers, he was the most reliable man alive.
He could always be depended upon and ran his bakery like clockwork.
Of course, there was some idle gossip as to why such an eligible bachelor remained single, but such was the magnificence of his pastries, they were willing to ignore this seeming oversight of not having found a wife.
‘Perhaps he is not attracted to women, eh?’ Arnaud, owner of the nearby tabac, used to say.
Every community has an Arnaud. The one who must immerse himself in everyone else’s business.
As if knowing everyone else’s private business will give them some kind of advantage and shield their own inconsequential lives from scrutiny.
Not only did Arnaud sell the newspapers, he invented his own news about everyone in the town.
Idle gossip was one thing, but in wartime, someone like Arnaud became very dangerous indeed.
He stood in his doorway, watching the comings and goings of everyone on Rue de Paris.
He bellowed a loud ‘Bonjour!’ and waved at Pierre, without smiling, on the morning he had set off to deliver some baguettes to the station master.
No one would have guessed by Pierre’s stoical demeanour that he was struggling to keep the bakery going, what with the rationing of every essential ingredient he needed to bake.
Butter, milk and eggs were all in short supply.
But it was the ingredient that made his pastries extra special – that was the ingredient he missed the most. His precious vanilla beans, whose flowers grew at the base of cacao trees in the jungles of South America.
At the start of the war, the seller he had met at the market had simply disappeared and along with him Pierre’s secret ingredient.
One last jar remained and so he preserved the contents in a brandy liqueur, saving their precious effect for only very special occasions.
For now, it was his duty to feed the inhabitants of Compiègne and so he cycled down the street, five golden baguettes jostling in the wicker basket.
Trucks passed him by on the road and threw up dust into the air.
At the back of one truck, the cloth cover opened slightly to reveal rows of German soldiers sitting on each side, holding their rifles, laughing and joking in the midday sunshine.
It gave Pierre a nauseous, churning feeling in the pit of his stomach.
How could they smile like that? Knowing the suffering that they were inflicting.
It seemed so unnatural and inhumane. And yet they were human beings, made of the same flesh and bone as Pierre.
‘L’espoire fait vivre,’ he whispered to himself, believing that to give up hope was to let the enemy win.
Just as he arrived at the station, a train was pulling in.
The harsh sound of metal and machine coming to a halt, something that used to excite him as a child, held no such wonder for him now.
He took the bread from the basket and walked along the platform towards the station master’s office.
He caught sight of his reflection in one of the carriage windows.
He had lost weight and his tall, lean physique had narrowed with every passing month of the occupation.
He took off his cap and ran his fingers through his dark hair.
He needed a haircut. Caught in this absent-minded thought, he didn’t notice them at first: the woman and the little girl.
She was staring back at him from the other side of the glass.
There was something desperate in her eyes.
She hurried out of the carriage, hardly taking her eyes off of him, as though he were the finishing line to a race.
The platform, at this point, was full of people, and soldiers, too.
The woman walked right up to him and gave him an imploring look, but no words.
The war had robbed everyone of their beauty, it seemed to Pierre, but this woman was lit from within.
Even he could see that. The child clutched her hand tightly, her grimy face streaked with tears.
He looked back to the woman and that was when he noticed her split lip and the bruise just above her eyebrow.
It must have only been seconds, but to Pierre, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.
‘Cheri!’ the woman said loudly. One of the soldiers turned to look at them and all at once, Pierre understood.
‘Welcome home, my darlings,’ he said, embracing these two strangers as though they were his own.
Little did he know that day, this woman was about to change his life.