Free The Silent Hours by Cesca Major Page B

bench and had been there for hours. He said that he had his eyes open but they weren’t looking anywhere and his tongue was poking out and he’d been puffy and pale. His nanny got the police but when the police went to move the man from the bench they couldn’t make him go flat on the trolley so they had to cover him with a sheet and wait for the ambulance to drive into the park.
    Clarisse is dead.
    I look at Papa, who is waiting for me to say something.
    ‘So then she has gone to heaven,’ I say slowly.
    ‘Yes, yes, that is where she has gone.’
    I can’t imagine Clarisse in heaven, although I imagine she would be pleased as it is probably very, very clean and she always hated cleaning. She used to moan at me when I left mess in our playroom and was always going on about how I trailed mess around me like some kind of wild animal. I would roar at her and scamper off which made her laugh the first time, but hadn’t worked the rest. Clarisse was always full of energy; she didn’t seem the sort that would get ill and die.
    I picture her now at the oven in the kitchen in Paris, red-cheeked and sweating a little from the heat of the food. We crowd around her as she spoons out helpings for all of us. ‘Sit at the table,’ she shoos, wiping her hands on her apron and pointing to the places all laid out.
    Maman is standing in the corner, a list of instructions for the next day in her gloved hands. ‘Thank you, Clarisse.’
    ‘Thank you, Madame Soules.’ She ruffles my hair as I reach for the gravy boat.
    She’s not in the kitchen any more, she’s in heaven. I suppose it’s good to think of her somewhere but it seems strange that we’ll never see her again, that she is now somewhere else, a place we can’t reach because you can’t visit heaven. That thought makes me feel funny; I have a bit of a lump in my throat. I swallow but it won’t go. I think of Marcus’s dead man again and worry that Clarisse might have died with her tongue poking out, all puffed up and pale with her eyes wide open. I blink a couple of times but the image is still there. I hope Papa will tell me to go now as I suddenly feel afraid that I might cry and I don’t want to show him that I am a drip.
    ‘Eléonore might be a bit upset by the news so I want you to be extra nice to her over the next few days as she was close to Clarisse. Can you do that for me, Tristan?’
    I come out of my daze and then blush. Had Papa read my thoughts earlier? I nod and promise that of course I will look after my sister and then I leave and go upstairs to the playroom wiping the tears from my eyes with my hand. Clarisse is in heaven after all, so there is no real need to be upset.
    Eléonore clearly does not agree and spends the afternoon wailing on her bed. I bring her up a cocoa that Maman has made but when I go back later to see her she hasn’t touched it and I have to bite my tongue just in time because I can’t tell her off about that. It does seem a waste though, particularly as I know that is the last of the cocoa and we aren’t allowed another lot until next week.
    Clarisse liked cocoa, she used to drink it out of a mug with a rabbit on the outside. I think of Clarisse in heaven with lots of cocoa and her feet up. That cheers me up and I tell Eléonore of my thought. She smiles a little and reaches up to hug me. We don’t talk about Clarisse after that but now, whenever I think of her, I think of her in heaven just like that.

ISABELLE
    Darling Paul,
    The village has heard some terrible stories now. They arrive, refugees from the north and east. Some of them travelling miles, often on foot. Homes are left for looters, belongings are lost, sold or stolen.
    A woman broke down in the shop. Surrounded by a circle of sympatheticshoppers she told us how she was forced to leave her village in the middle of the night. Her husband had urged her to go for days, as the Germans were moving in, but she remained resolute. Her mother was confined to a wheelchair