Page 78 of The French Wife

‘You must have been devastated,’ Emma said, trying to come to terms with what had happened herself.

‘I was,’ Suzette replied. ‘She was the kindest, most caring, most generous person you can imagine,’ she said, her eyes growing misty. ‘She was beautiful too. She had an aura about her. It was the way she carried herself, her self-possession – it’s hard to describe. Everyone was drawn to her, but when the rumours started that she was carrying on with a German officer, people turned against her. Their admiration turned to jealousy and bitterness. Nobody in the town could say a good word about her.’

‘Did you ever meet him? Hans Bauer?’ Emma asked.

Suzette Vernay shook her head. ‘She never mentioned him to me and I never asked her. But she must have been deeply in love with him to take the risk of getting close to him. And despite him being a German officer, he must have been a good man or she would never have loved him.’

‘And what about Bruno?’ Emma asked.

Suzette frowned deeply and shook her head. ‘He was a brute. We used to cower in the cellar when they argued. We all knew he hit her, but we were terrified of him too. He held our lives in the palm of his hand, you see. Nobody dared challenge him, not even the menfolk.’

‘I’ve heard rumours that Amélie disappeared. Even that she might still be alive. Why do people say that?’

Suzette pursed her lips. ‘Because nobody knows what really happened to her.’

‘But you do, Madame Vernay?’

The old lady nodded. There was a long, heavy silence. And then she went on. ‘I was kneeling beside her body, still crying my eyes out when Étienne Moreau appeared as if from nowhere. He was crying too, but it wasn’t just grief, he seemed hysterical. He kept saying it was his fault, that everything was his fault. In the end I asked him why and he told me it was him who had tipped off the SS about the Resistance activities at the farm. I was shocked to the core, I couldn’t believe he would have done that.

‘He told me the SS paid him for the information and he needed the money for his mother’s medicine, but he said he also did it to teach Bruno a lesson. He’d seen him hitting Amélie and had challenged him, told him he shouldn’t beat her. Bruno got angry, told him to get lost, that he would never give him a job… So it was then that Étienne made the decision to tell the SS about what was going on at the farm. He never expected Amélie to be there when the soldiers came. He thought she would be safe at the mairie, and that her German lover would protect her. After he’d told me what he’d done, he collapsed on her body, crying hysterically.

‘I was angry with him, furious. Because of him, Amélie and the others were dead. I yelled at him to leave, that I wouldn’t have anything to do with him, but he pleaded with me. He was distraught, so contrite, and he said he would help me to hide. We sat there with Amélie for a long, long time. We talked about how we loved her despite the fact she’d loved a German. We talked about how people said malicious things about her in the town and how people hated her now.

‘“We can’t let anyone know where she’s buried,” Étienne said. “We must hide her away, somewhere no one will find her. Otherwise they are so full of hatred they might do anything. They might blame her for the raid, they might even desecrate her grave.”

‘So, right there and then, on that miserable, wet Monday in May 1943, we picked up Amélie’s body and we took her into the woods. She wasn’t heavy. She was tiny and delicate; none of us had enough to eat during the war years. But it was still a struggle for Étienne and me to carry her through the trees and up the hill. I knew where to take her, I knew a place where she would be safe.

‘It must have taken us an hour or so to get her up to the cave but once we were there, we laid her out on the earth floor and Étienne went back down to the farm to collect shovels. When he got back to the cave, we started digging. The ground was hard and it took us hours to dig Amélie’s grave. It was late afternoon by the time we’d finished. The light was fading when we lowered her into the pit we’d dug. We found some spring flowers and laid them on top of her, and we each said a prayer, then we filled the pit back in. I’ll never forget that terrible feeling of shovelling earth over her body. It felt wrong to cover her up like that, it was all so final.

‘Étienne found a slab of flat rock and laid it in the soil over her grave, to mark the spot, but we never wrote her name on it. We didn’t want anyone to know she was there. Then we went back to the farm and dug graves for Ivy and Henri at the edge of the wood. Bruno’s dogs had been killed during the gunfight as well, so we buried them too. By the time we’d finished it was dark and we were exhausted. We went back into the house and shut up the cellar and pulled the bookcase back over the door. I knew the Resistance stored things in there and I didn’t want the SS to find them if they came back to search the house. It would have made things worse for Raoul if they did.

‘When we’d finished, Étienne went home and I took some blankets and a torch and went back up to the cave to sleep. The weather had cleared by then, there was a beautiful full moon, and the stars had come out. They were so bright that night, the mountain was bathed in light. It was as if the stars were shining especially for Amélie. I could feel her presence as I lay down to sleep. It didn’t frighten me. On the contrary, I felt comforted by it, as if she was right there with me.

‘I stayed up there in that cave on the mountain for several months. I would go down to the house during the day and find things to eat. I fed the chickens in the courtyard and cooked their eggs in the kitchen, always with an ear out in case the soldiers came back. I fed the pigs and the cow in the barn. I milked the cow and drank its milk, but when the supplies of animal food ran out after a few months, I turned the animals out into the fields to fend for themselves.

‘It was a lonely time, but Étienne came to see me every couple of days and he would bring me food and supplies. I borrowed Amélie’s novels from the house and would spend hours reading. Nobody came to the farm. Not a soul. I think the people in St Marie were afraid to go there, it had been the scene of a horrific gunfight after all, and they knew several people had been killed there. Étienne told me once that a rumour had started that the place was haunted but I was still afraid in case the Germans returned. I kept the letter Amélie gave me in my pocket in case I was arrested. I’ve still got it, in fact.’

‘The letter?’ Emma asked.

‘Yes, the one she found in Glock’s drawer at the mairie. I’ll show you.’ Madame Vernay got up stiffly, went over to a cabinet under the window and rummaged in a drawer. ‘Here it is!’ She turned, holding up a flimsy envelope with faded writing on the front.

Emma looked at the faded black-and-white photograph and read the few scribbled lines that seemed to speak of the desperation of the times. How low and how terrified must that woman have been to have put her faith in that evil man, Glock, like that.

‘How very sad,’ Emma said.

Madame Vernay nodded. ‘I know. I didn’t want to use the letter, but I would have done if I’d had to. We were all desperate back then, we would have done anything to save our skins.’

‘How long did you stay in the cave?’ Emma asked.

‘When winter came I was forced to move back into the hayloft. It was too cold to stay up on the mountain, but too risky to sleep in the house. The months wore on. Étienne would tell me about the progress of the war when he came to the farm. Finally, when France was liberated in August 1944, I’d been living wild at Le Châtaignier for well over a year. Eventually I was able to go back into the town and return to our apartment. It was just as it had been left in 1942 when the soldiers had taken Maman and Papa away.’

She smiled at Emma through her tears, reached out her hand and touched Emma’s arm. ‘So that’s my story, my dear. And Amélie’s too. That’s what happened at Le Châtaignier during the war.’

‘That’s an amazing story, Madame Vernay,’ Emma said slowly. ‘Do you know what happened to Bruno and the others?’

‘After the war, news gradually began to filter through when the internment camps were liberated. I heard that Raoul had been executed for his Resistance activities, that Bruno died of typhus in Pigny internment camp near Carcassonne early in 1944, and that the Jewish families had been deported to Poland. I don’t know what happened to the farm workers, but none of them ever came back. After the war, Bruno’s body was brought back to St Marie by the mayor and he was given a proper funeral. Hailed as a hero. I refused to attend – Bruno Garnier was no hero in my eyes.’

After a pause Emma asked gently, ‘And what about your parents?’