Chapter Twenty-Three Chloe
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chloe
Chloe watched as Aletta blinked away visible tears. She understood why hearing it upset her, because Chloe had felt the same when Emma had shared their story – they’d both endured so much, knew so intimately the pain of loss.
‘Do you regret it?’ Aletta asked. ‘If you’d known where you’d end up, if you’d known you would be suffering like this . . .’
Chloe shook her head, her answer honest. ‘No, I don’t.
Because I knew I’d be able to survive whatever my fate was, that I’d be strong enough, but my brothers .
. .’ Chloe swallowed as Aletta kept rubbing her legs, and she found herself wishing it would never end.
She hadn’t been touched by someone who cared about her in a very long time.
‘I made a promise to my mother before she died that I’d do anything to protect my brothers, that I’d look after them, and the only thing I couldn’t live with would be having lied to her. ’
Aletta’s fingers stopped moving as tears fell fast down Chloe’s cheeks. They were unexpected, which was why they had slipped past her defences, and Chloe steeled her jaw to stop them.
‘I would rather die than break my promise to her.’
They sat in silence and Aletta moved closer, shuffling on the dirt until she could slide her arm around Chloe’s shoulders, holding her as her body trembled with emotion.
‘How did your mother die?’
Chloe shuddered, wishing she didn’t have to relive her pain but wanting to share her story with Aletta. ‘A lorry crashed into our car. My father had taken my mother and sister to a dance, and I was at home with my brothers, and he was the only one to survive.’
Aletta’s eyes widened as she turned to her. ‘They both died that night? Your mother and your sister?’
‘My sister died instantly, she didn’t stand a chance, but the doctors operated on my mother, and they told us she had a good chance of survival.
I sat beside her hospital bed every hour that she was in there, praying for her to make it, but she knew that she was dying.
She never believed she was going to recover. ’
‘That’s when she asked you to make her a promise?’
Chloe nodded. ‘She looked me in the eye and even though she was weak, she held my hand so tightly, and she begged me to look after them. To do anything I had to, to keep them safe.’
Aletta continued to hold her as if she were taking her time to digest what Chloe had told her. And then she softly spoke, changing the subject and taking Chloe by surprise.
‘If there was no war, if none of this had happened, what would you be doing right now?’ And then more softly. ‘What did you give up to care for them, Chloe?’
Chloe found herself leaning into Aletta as she considered her question. It had been a long time since she’d let herself dream about what might have been without the war.
The Block?lteste and her assistants began yelling then and Aletta pushed to her feet and held out her hand to help Chloe up.
‘I gave up university. I would have been the first in my family to go, and my dream was to be a poet or write a novel,’ Chloe said, quickly, before they were silenced. ‘Since I was a little girl, all I’ve ever wanted was to be a writer.’
‘The memories and recipes you’re keeping, that’s your way of honouring your dream? Of doing good but keeping that dream alive?’
Chloe closed her eyes for a beat, remembering how excited she’d been, the new notebooks she’d bought for university, the sense of anticipation about her life finally beginning, of being in charge of her future.
‘Yes. I suppose you’re right, it does keep my dream alive. It keeps me alive, and stops me from giving up.’ Just. Only just.
She saw Aletta hesitate as they stood on tired legs.
Chloe quickly tucked the papers into her top, grateful that she’d found a brassiere to wear beneath her shirt.
Her breasts had shrunk down to almost nothing, but it was the perfect place to hide a lot of the papers.
She only hoped they’d be undamaged and still legible if she ever escaped the camp.
‘I heard you reciting a poem to the children today. Was it one you wrote yourself?’ Aletta asked.
Chloe laughed, cringing when the movement hurt her ribs, but she never got to answer Aletta, because their ?lteste came and hurried them on, sending them scurrying after the other women who were still outside.
But this time when Chloe lay down beside Aletta, her legs curled up because there wasn’t enough space to stretch out.
Grateful for the warmth of her friend’s body, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother and her sister, wanting to talk about them.
Aletta had reached out to hold her hands as they lay in the dark.
When they were finally alone, the guards and ?lteste gone, Chloe whispered in a voice so low, it was barely audible.
‘You remind me of my sister, and your mother, she reminds me of my own.’ Chloe nearly added, I’ve almost started to think that she is my mother, she’s shown me so much love and kindness.
Chloe moved her hands so that it was her holding Aletta’s fingers warm in her palms. If Chloe closed her eyes and tried hard enough, she could almost imagine she was lying with her sister in the big bed they’d shared since they were little.
‘Ever since I arrived here, I’ve woken to the same memory, before my sister died,’ she told Aletta. ‘It’s like I’ve been taken back in time, as if my mind wants to keep returning to my last truly happy memory.’
‘Perhaps it’s our mind’s way of keeping us alive,’ Aletta murmured back.
‘Mine is the same, but I can’t stop wondering if remembering is harder than forgetting.
It makes the pain of being here seem so much worse, that desperation to get back to what you left behind.
’ They were silent for a long moment, and it was Aletta who finally whispered again.
‘Tell me about your sister,’ she said. ‘What was she like?’
Chloe smiled at the memory, closing her eyes.
Part of her was grateful that Julia wasn’t here with her.
She’d been so pretty, and Chloe knew that her time at any of the camps would have gone one of two ways – she’d have had her beautiful long hair shaved off and been treated even worse than the other girls, or she would have been taken to service the men at one of those awful brothels.
The thought of either made her want to be sick.
‘Julia wanted to be a teacher, just like you,’ Chloe eventually said.
‘She wanted a brood of her own children one day, but while she waited to meet her future husband, she wanted to teach the youngest pupils.’ Chloe smiled at the memory.
‘She always said that she wanted to make them love school, that she’d wipe their tears and make them smile, that she could think of nothing better than reading them stories and seeing their little imaginations come to life with excitement. ’
‘It sounds like you could have run the school here well enough without me. I’m sure you learnt a lot from her.’
Chloe closed her eyes, the memory of Julia so bright and clear in her mind. She only hoped it would always stay that way – the idea of it fading was too much to bear.
‘Chloe, you act as if they’re all little devils rather than darling little children,’ Julia teased as they lay in the sun, stretching out their oil-covered legs as they tried, rather unsuccessfully, to get a tan.
‘They do sound like little devils to me,’ Chloe said with a sigh.
‘We might need more teachers once the war begins,’ Julia said. ‘So many men will be off to war and––’
‘I’m not going to suddenly become a teacher if there’s a war,’ Chloe said, exasperated with her sister.
‘Can’t you imagine me doing something like coding poems for our soldiers?
I’ve heard talk of a home-front type of resistance being formed, a network that will be set up in case France falls so that we can still fight.
If I can’t attend university, then I’ll find a way to turn my words into weapons to help France. ’
‘Chloe, you can’t be serious! Do you have any idea how dangerous that would be? Mother would never allow it.’
Chloe sighed. She supposed Julia was right. ‘What she doesn’t find out won’t hurt . . .’
Julia groaned and turned over to sun her back. ‘Let’s just hope this maybe-war is over soon enough so that we can both marry and get on with our lives. If there is a war? It’ll take all the young men away, and we’ll be left old maids.’
Chloe laughed. ‘I might be left an old maid, but you’ll find a husband even if half the male population is depleted, Ju.’
‘You truly think so?’
‘I truly think so,’ Chloe said, shutting her eyes and lying back in the sun. ‘Who knows? You might meet a husband tonight while I’m left at home looking after the boys.’
Julia sighed. ‘It does seem unfair that you can’t come. I mean, you’re already eighteen, it’s not like—’
‘It’s fine,’ Chloe interrupted. ‘We both know that I’m being punished for what I said the other night. I’m happy to stay home, anyway.’
She still groaned when she thought of how upset her mother had become when she’d told her she wasn’t certain she wanted to get married – that she’d rather be alone than feel she had to marry someone she wasn’t in love with.
‘We’ll survive this war and both fall in love,’ Julia said with a grin. ‘Just you wait and see.’
Chloe opened her eyes and felt Aletta’s warm arm shift to cover her. She leaned into it, crying silently as she wished the memories away. To think that less than seven hours after that her sister had gone and her mother soon after.
And just like that, Chloe had gone from being so fiercely ambitious to the mother of their family.
Cooking, cleaning and doing laundry and caring for her brothers and father, the role she’d never seen for herself thrust upon her anyway.
Her dreams had fallen by the wayside, no longer important to her, not compared to keeping Adrian safe.
I’m staying alive for them.