Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
LUCY
As Lucy headed back to the bookshop she walked past the small fish market, where she saw a man, wearing a woolly hat despite the summer heat, carrying a crate full of tiny, writhing octopuses.
Only a few metres away, a small family was buying ice creams and a little boy was tugging his dad’s sleeve, pleading with him to buy an inflatable crocodile that was twice his size.
Cordeval always hung together, despite its contrasts; the working harbour, the golden beach.
Lucy sat down on the harbour wall, taking in the view. A curious seagull approached her on bright yellow feet, its head cocked to one side.
‘So,’ a voice said brightly, from behind her. ‘When’s the wedding? Arielle was so excited for her little granddaughter’s big day.’
Lucy turned and saw Beatrice. She was chic as ever, in a light, floaty shirt paired with loose trousers, as if she was about to go shopping on the Champs-élysées. Her sunglasses were propped up in her white hair and the sunlight caught the simple gold chain she wore round her neck.
Lucy smiled to see her, but it faded quickly. She didn’t want to talk about the wedding, although she knew she’d have to.
‘I know she was, and when she passed away I was so sad that she wouldn’t be there.’ Lucy sighed heavily. ‘But there isn’t going to be a wedding, not any more.’
Beatrice knitted her brows and asked, ‘Whyever not?’
‘Because…’ Lucy suddenly felt defiant as she heard Andrew’s words in her mind. ‘What will people think?’ She lifted her chin as she told Beatrice, ‘Because just yesterday morning, I caught my fiancé in bed with another woman!’
Beatrice tutted. ‘Then I can tell you at last. Arielle thought he was a fool! She’d be broken-hearted for you, but glad he showed you what he was before you were tied to him.’ She reached out and patted Lucy’s hand. ‘Cordeval will mend your heart, little one. It has a magic to it.’
Lucy turned her hand over and squeezed Beatrice’s. She had been Mémé’s best friend, after all, and seemed to be as much a part of Cordeval as the harbour and the beach with its rusting tank. ‘Thanks, Beatrice. Although I wish Mémé had told me she felt like that about him!’
‘She wouldn’t interfere,’ Beatrice said gently. ‘Oh, I miss her. We were absolute menaces, the two of us. Right up to her last day, she was so full of life and silliness. When my Jules died, Arielle kept me going. The village always called us the merry widows; she was the best friend I ever had.’
Lucy smiled, even though her eyes were filling with tears. She wished she’d been here more to see Mémé, and now it was too late.
‘Sébastien lives up on the clifftops now, just along the way from your great-grandmother and great-grandfather’s old house,’ Beatrice told her. ‘They moved up there when the family outgrew the bookshop. A lovely family has their old cottage now; it’s always been such a happy house.’
Lucy hadn’t known about that, because for as long as she’d visited her grandparents in Cordeval they’d lived in the flat above the bookshop.
It made sense, though, that they’d lived somewhere bigger when they’d needed space as Lucy’s father and her uncle had got older.
Then they must’ve moved back to the flat once the boys had grown up and left home.
Lucy remembered going for walks past the cottages when she was a child, and now she understood the significance. She remembered playing in the ruins of a nearby cottage on the clifftops, which looked as if it’d been struck by lightning or was a victim of D-Day.
‘I’d love to go and see it!’ she said. ‘There’s so much about the history of this place and my family that I don’t know.’
She thought of Mémé’s letter that she’d found under the counter with Esther’s wrapped book, and the newspaper reporting the bonfire.
‘I found something in the bookshop earlier,’ she told Beatrice. ‘A newspaper from the occupation. There’s an article on the front page about the Nazis burning books – here, in Cordeval.’
Beatrice nodded. ‘I remember it,’ she replied, looking out to sea. ‘Hermann Goring was here.’
Although the summer sun was beating down, Lucy shivered. ‘You must’ve been terrified. You were only a kid!’
‘There’s so much you don’t know about Cordeval.’ Beatrice smiled ruefully.
‘Mémé left a letter for me, under the counter,’ Lucy told her. ‘She said something about there being a book club here during the war, and that there’s a secret to uncover. But I don’t know where to start. I don’t suppose she mentioned it to you?’
‘Oh, she mentioned it all right!’ Beatrice smiled.
‘We put our heads together and gathered up everything we could find that might help with the story. We knew we weren’t getting any younger and the village has a story that we wanted to tell.
We left it too late, Lucy. But maybe you can tell it instead. ’
‘Oh, I can’t wait to see what you’ve found!’ Lucy replied. ‘By the way, did she ever mention anything about the book club to you?’
‘I was in the book club myself. I used to hang around the shop and the women were planning to meet and… well, I just invited myself along. We called it the Resistance Book Club.’ Beatrice smiled and said, ‘Arielle wanted you to know the whole story.’ She slipped her arm through Lucy’s. ‘Will you let me show you?’
Lucy stared at the white-haired lady in amazement. ‘You called it the Resistance Book Club? As in, the French resistance? So did you do more than argue about novels and eat biscuits?’ she said. ‘Yes, Beatrice – please show me. This is just amazing!’
As they strolled, Beatrice said, ‘We didn’t know where to start.
It’s such a story, we didn’t know how to tell it.
’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘And as the years went on, we wondered if we’d really lived it at all.
How was I ever a little girl, playing in bombsites and carrying messages for the resistance?
I held more secrets in me by the time I was eleven years old than I ever have in the eighty-odd years that came after the war. ’
‘I can’t imagine having a childhood like that,’ Lucy replied. She thought of the photos of Cordeval’s harbour after D-Day’s fierce barrage. ‘It must’ve been terrifying.’
Instead of turning towards the street where the bookshop stood opposite Jojo’s, Beatrice guided them into the square.
The linden trees offered pools of shade for Papi’s friends sitting on their usual benches.
There were shops and houses around the square, apart from one side where the town hall stood, its thick, cream-coloured window blinds down as if it had fallen asleep.
‘Arielle and I used to sit here at the café, making eyes at the local boys. We courted our husbands here.’ Beatrice smiled.
She looked towards a building and through the windows, Lucy could see that the café had become a hairdresser’s in the years since.
‘We lost it when Victor retired.’ She patted her neat white crop.
‘But we gained a good salon.’ She strolled on towards one of the tallest trees, beneath which the sun was gleaming from a polished plaque. ‘This is part of our story.’
Lucy had seen it before on her visits to Cordeval, but it was only now that she looked at it properly. The Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the Free French and resistance, stood at the top.
IN MEMORY OF THE brAVE FIGHTERS OF THE FRENCH RESISTANCE WHO WERE EXECUTED HERE: 14 NOVEMBER 1941.
HEROES OF THE REPUBLIC. CHILDREN OF CORDEVAL.
Lucy swallowed and took off her sunglasses. She looked again around the square, which looked so innocent in the sunshine. It didn’t seem like the kind of place where anyone could die so brutally.
She wished she’d taken proper notice of this memorial before and had asked Mémé or Papi when they were still around to tell her.
‘Who were they, Beatrice?’ Lucy asked, her voice as hushed as if she was standing in a church.
‘They were brave people. They sacrificed everything,’ Beatrice replied.
‘The Nazis dragged us all out here to watch them die, one by one. People we all knew. Our friends, our families. One of them was a member of our Resistance Book Club. But we would’ve all laid down our lives, Lucy; every last one of us would’ve died to free France. ’
The strong sunlight seemed to dim as Lucy’s mind peopled the peaceful square with soldiers in uniforms dragging people out of their homes.
She heard crying, pleading, shouts of despair and vicious, barked orders.
She thought of Beatrice, only a child, being forced to watch, and her head swam with the horror of it all.
Sébastien came out of the bar carrying a tray laden with glasses of beer. He greeted the two women with a tight nod as he strolled to a table where a trio of men waited for their drinks. Beatrice gave him a bright smile, then drew in a sigh.
‘We met in the shop at midnight,’ she said.
‘Whenever I see a candle flame now, I go back there. Those brave women, wrapping their books one day and passing codes the next. Folding maps was the worst; they were so important but so unwieldy. I could never seem to get them to fold down small enough. They were given out to escaping prisoners or Allied airmen, anybody that needed to find their way through the warren of lanes around here. So many people were picked up from the beaches around here; some of them had travelled the length of France to meet the boats at Cordeval.’
Lucy’s mind was whirring. ‘That crate of books I found, it must be all that’s left of the Resistance Book Club. Beatrice, will you tell me everything you remember about it?’
She wondered who the other members of the book club were, besides Margot and Beatrice.
She glanced back at the group of Papi’s friends on their bench, and it occurred to her that their mothers or sisters might have been in the book club too.
But the occupation was such a painful memory that it wasn’t something older people easily talked about.
Beatrice hadn’t said a name, and she didn’t want to press. But who from the book club was murdered in this very square, on that dark day?