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He smiles. It’s a pleasant smile. The kind of smile that no doubt has women flocking and flirting and floozying with him. Women who like a man in uniform. In German uniform.
He picks up his duffel bag from the ground and follows me into the house. Upstairs, I lead him to the small room at the end of the hallway, the room situated next to mine.
“I hope this room is suitable for you?” I open the door to a room that once belonged to Jacques’s son. The room was dusty when I first came here, but I tidied it up as a way to say “thank you” to him for turning his home into a safe house.
Safe house.That’s the last thing you can call the farmhouse with a German officer staying here.
Anger pours into my veins like molten metal, burning and consuming me. Jacques’s son is missing, presumed in a German prison camp. And now a German officer will be staying in his old room.
I push down the pain I feel for Jacques and pick up a box of old toys I left on the desk when I was searching for hiding spots. “If you can give me a few minutes, I will clean the room and change the bedding.” I use a tone that has never had much exercise. The tone of a meek housewife.
I expect Schmidt to demand to see the other bedrooms, to throw his rank of captain in my face. Instead, he removes the box from my arms. “Let me help you with this. Where do you want me to put it?”
“It can go in the attic.”
I grab a box filled with sewing supplies that once belonged to Jacques’s wife. It feels disrespectful to Jacques and his family’s memory to put their things in the attic. But it’s better to put their possessions up there than to have Captain Schmidt burn them or demand I give them away.
Schmidt helps me move the boxes into the attic. We don’t talk. I get the sense he is mentally somewhere else, somewhere far from here. If only that was also true when it came to his body.
I open the bedroom window, dust, sweep, and make up the bed, all while silently hurling colourful curse words at him. In several languages.
Schmidt is downstairs in the drawing room, reading, when I enter to tell him his room is ready. “Thank you, Angelique.” He closes the book and sets it on his lap. I recognise it. The classic French novel belongs to Jacques.
“Will you be staying for dinner, Captain Schmidt?”
“Johann. Yes, if that isn’t an imposition on such short notice.”
It is, but I don’t expect that will make a difference. “We don’t have much food. The butcher was out of meat rations for the week.”
“That’s fine. I’ll ensure from now on there is more food made available to you. I plan to invite some of the officers for dinner tomorrow evening. Will that be all right with you? There will be seven in total.”
My stomach turns at being in close proximity with that many Nazis. It’s bad enough to be near them when I’m outside these walls. “I’m not familiar with how to cook your German foods.”
I lived in Austria as a teen, but I wasn’t involved in preparing our meals. We had a housekeeper who did that. And all the cookbooks in the farmhouse are for French cuisine. French cuisine that wasn’t designed for our meagre war rations.
Schmidt smiles, but this time he has the same amused mischief in his eyes that Mark Willmott had in Year Two when he put a tadpole on Miss Noble’s chair. “That’s fine. If Germany insists on us being here, they had better get used to the local fare.”
I nod. He doesn’t want to be here? That makes two of us. I don’t want him here either. “What time do you want dinner served?”
“We’ll eat tomorrow at twenty-one-hundred hours.”
“And what about this evening? Do you wish to dine at the same time?”
He gives me a peculiar glance that says he thinks I’m being daft. “I’ll eat when you and your father eat.”
I almost choke on my own tongue. “You plan to eat with us?”
“Yes, if that is all right with you.” He flashes me another of his smiles that at one time would have had me blushing and giggling.
But betrayal and war harden you. Change your priorities.
I nod once more because it’s not as if I can say no. “Well, I’ll leave you to…” To do whatever evil does at this time of day.
“I’m going for a walk.”
“Well, I hope you enjoy your walk,” I say without so much as a smile.
I slip into my room and move the ceramic vase to the left side of my windowsill, signalling to the local resistance group the farmhouse is no longer safe.
