Chapter 2 #2
‘Like a proper resistance meeting,’ beamed Beatrice.
Her eyes shone with excitement and Margot couldn’t help but admire the young girl, with her untidy hair and her scraped knees showing from under a dress that she was growing out of.
What they were doing was dangerous, so dangerous that no child should be involved.
But eleven-year-old Beatrice wouldn’t be told no.
Instead, she had almost turned it into a game.
Margot went over to the door and bolted it, then found a chair for Beatrice and added it to the circle beside Brigitte, the doctor, who was determined to come to their book club meetings so long as her patients didn’t need her. She looked up at Beatrice and patted the empty chair.
Beatrice scrambled up onto the seat, as Esther told her, ‘You shouldn’t be here, Beatrice. You should be at home in bed.’
Beatrice shrugged and told them, ‘Bed can wait. We’ve got a war to win.’ She leaned forward a little and whispered, ‘Not many Krauts knocking about tonight. They’re not bothered about a place like this, not when there’s casinos and fancy women just up the coast!’
But Margot knew that Beatrice’s mother, Joséphine, wouldn’t be in their apartment above the bar across the street to know if her daughter was safe in her bed. They had been in the same class at school, but their lives had taken different paths.
Joséphine would be at work, either tending the bar or with one of the clients she entertained.
It was a trade that had earned her the distrust of most of the women in the village.
Margot felt for her; she had a child to support without any help from anyone.
It wasn’t right that she had to do it, but who could blame her if she needed the money?
She worried what it meant for Beatrice, though. Would she be the same when she grew up?
Margot glanced at the sleeping Isabelle, holding tight to the little stuffed goose that her mother had knitted for her in the last days of her pregnancy.
Esther and Joséphine were so lucky. She’d once hoped to be a mother herself, back in Rouen with her husband, Serge.
But it’d never happened, and Serge had been taken from her.
She was in her early thirties now; there was still time to have children, but she couldn’t risk falling in love again, especially during a war.
Esther was a young widow, too, her baby would never know her father. And who knew who Beatrice’s father was. Margot would do anything she could to look after them; now that they lived in the shadow of the Nazis.
Sylvie fidgeted, twisting a length of her blonde hair round her finger. ‘That’s true, the Germans are all over the casinos, throwing their money around. They’re ordering dresses from me to send back home to their wives. I wish I could say no… but I don’t have a choice.’
‘Exactly,’ Colette remarked. ‘If it wasn’t for the Germans ordering flowers for the hotels in Clarenville, I wouldn’t have a job any more.’
Before the war, she’d brought Margot a bunch of chrysanthemums or whatever she could spare each week for the bookshop. Now the Nazis commandeered Colette’s best flowers, and Colette had to go grubbing about for wildflowers for the locals.
‘Maybe they’ll leave us alone in Cordeval if everyone in Clarenville can keep them distracted there!’ Claudine said.
‘I hope so,’ Margot replied. ‘And I understand. I thought of banning the Germans from my bookshop, but where does that get me? There won’t be a bookshop if I do that.’
Then she reached round behind her chair for the box of books that were waiting there. She turned back, holding up a copy of Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum.
Her hand trembled. She shouldn’t be holding the book at all, or even have it in her shop, despite the fact that a glittering Hollywood film had been made of it not that long ago, and the story offered welcome escape. Baum was Jewish, and that was enough for her book to be banned.
‘Our first book for our club, from the Liste Otto,’ Margot announced, her voice sounding braver than she felt.
The Liste Otto had been drawn up by Germany’s ambassador to Vichy France, the area down south where they had embraced the Nazis. He’d compiled a list of banned books – no one in France was to possess them or sell them.
The publishers weren’t allowed to print them. And certainly, no book club should be reading them.
‘And if you need a bookmark, I’ve got just the thing!
’ Beatrice brandished a piece of paper above her head.
Then she held it in the light of the candle and said, ‘They’ve stuck wanted posters for Le Chevalier up all over town.
As if he’s anything to do with us! Wish he was, he’d put a bomb right up them! ’
‘I wonder who he could be,’ Margot said. She’d watched in dismay that afternoon as two German soldiers had pasted one of their wanted posters onto her shop’s window. Le Chevalier was an underground resistance fighter.
‘They shoved one of their fliers at me earlier, when I was on my way to see a patient.’ Brigitte folded her arms. ‘As if I have time to do their own manhunting for them. If I knew who this Chevalier was, I’d shake him by the hand.’
Esther smiled. ‘We may not be resistance heroes like him,’ she said, ‘But we are doing our own little bit now, with this book club.’
‘Yes, we are,’ Margot said. She produced more copies of Grand Hotel and passed them around the circle. ‘They’ve taken over our country, but they can’t take over our minds. We’ll leave copies around the village.’
As the women opened the pages of the banned book, Margot felt hope stir inside her.
She’d named her bookshop Les Pages d’Espoir, and the name fitted so well tonight.
Because France had fallen and Nazis walked the streets of the village they called home.
The waves crashed against the shore as they had for countless centuries, indifferent to it all.
But here, in the candlelight, the women of the Resistance Book Club of Cordeval read on.
Reading to resist, as if it was a kind of freedom.
Their defiance and quiet solidarity lifted her, but the truth crawled beneath her skin.
If they were discovered, there would be no mercy at all.