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PROVENCE, 1939–40
The day they had all been dreading arrived. Germany broke their agreement and invaded Poland. France and Britain declared war.
On the same day that the news broke out, Monsieur Blanchet suffered a heart attack. He’d been worrying about it for months. He feared the loss of his nephews and what another war would do to their country.
‘We barely survived the last one,’ he kept saying.
His death hit Marianne hard. Apart from baby Marguerite, he was the last of her family here in France. This time, when she mourned, it was like the world did too. Widows from the first war wore black. Fathers looked at their sons with hopeless expressions, no one had an answer as to why it was happening again.
Like before, she spent as much time as she could with Sister Augustine.
Freddie phoned regularly asking her to consider moving to Britain, to raise her child there, but she couldn’t understand why he thought they would be safer there. She felt like she had given up so much over the last few years, she didn’t want to lose her home too.
Their time over the next few months was taken up with preparations. People began to stockpile food, and while the government assessed its borders and thought of their strategies, closer to home families were given drills on what to do in case of poisonous gas attacks. They were given masks and for those first few months, everywhere she went she took a mask for her and the baby. Carrying them as she walked through their beautiful hilltop village, she felt like she had entered some strange new world.
At the restaurant she heard tales of students preparing by hiding beneath their desks, which felt to Marianne so much so like closing one’s eyes and hoping someone else couldn’t see you. Wherever she walked, people looked up to the skies, worried that bombs might start raining down on their heads. But when nothing at first happened, everyone carried on as usual, and Marianne continued running the restaurant and raising her child.
Every day she wrote a one-line sentence to document baby Marguerite’s progress. It wasn’t always the big moments that caused her joy or pain when she thought of everything Jacques would never get to see, like the first time she smiled or laughed, it was all those other endless days that bled into the next that gave the ones after meaning.
Some days, despite having a baby to focus on, she felt like she was a ghost, in the way she had begun to see Monsieur Blanchet before he died; he had become stuck, roaming his vines, unable to join back into life. She tried to do a small thing every day, the way she had in the past, to push herself to get out of the house or out of her routine, like seeing the nuns, and spending time with Sister Augustine.
But the feeling lingered. The only thing that helped was baby Marguerite.
Every week she tended to Grand-mère and Monsieur Blanchet’s graves. She brought flowers for Grand-mère, and sometimes a new spice she decided to try out as part of her aim to do new things, though new spices were getting increasingly hard to come by.
With Monsieur Blanchet she spoke as if no time had passed and they were finally able to say the things they may have wanted to say but couldn’t before he died, like how much they had missed each other, but had struggled to be around one other because it hurt too much without Jacques. Though perhaps this wasn’t something either of them had needed to say, it had just been understood, and forgiven. She wished that she had told him while he was alive that he had filled that part of her that had longed for a father since the age of nine, and that when she’d thought of what a father was, he was what came to mind.
She had taken to playing a game of chess with him, and every week she brought one of the pieces, as if she was inviting him to make a move.
Sometimes when she returned she would find that the castle piece she had left had fallen or a knight piece had been blown elsewhere by the wind. But when she left a queen it stayed exactly where it was, and she wondered about that, as if somehow he was saying something to her.
Something about strength perhaps or courage.
