Free The Collaborator by Margaret Leroy Page A

says. There’s a brief note of yearning in his voice. This startles me.
    ‘You must miss them,’ I say, immediately. Because he does—I can tell. Then I wonder why I said that, why I was sympathetic like that. I’m cross with myself—I don’t have to make any concessions, don’t have to give him anything. I feel entirely lost: I don’t know the right way to behave.
    His gaze flicks back to my face. I know he can read my confusion. Everything’s messy, all mixed up in my head—the fear I feel, the stern set of his face when he talked about the curfew; and now his kindness in bringing back the ball.
    ‘Well, then. Good morning, Mrs de la Mare. Remember the curfew,’ he says, and turns.
    I close the door rapidly. I feel exposed, in some way I couldn’t articulate or define. There are little red crescents in my palms, where I pushed my nails into my skin.
    ‘Vivienne.’ Evelyn is calling for me.
    I go to her.
    ‘The Hun came in the house,’ she says. ‘You opened the door to the Hun.’
    She’s agitated. She puts down her knitting; her crêpey hands flutter like little pale birds.
    ‘Evelyn—I couldn’t
not
open the door. The man’s living at Les Vinaires now.’
    ‘Fraternising is an ugly word. An ugly word for an ugly deed,’ she tells me severely.
    ‘Evelyn, I wasn’t fraternising. But we have to be civil. Stay on the right side of them. They could do anything to us …’
    She’s implacable.
    ‘You’re a soldier’s wife, Vivienne. You need to show some backbone. If he comes to the door again, don’t you go letting him in.’
    ‘No. I won’t, I promise.’
    ‘Never let them in,’ she says. Ardent. ‘Never let them in.’ As though the maxim is something to cling to amid all the chaos of life.
    She picks up her knitting. But then she puts it down again, looks vaguely in my direction. There’s a sudden confusion in her face, a blurring like smoke in her eyes.
    ‘Tell me who that was again—the man who came to the door? Who did you say he was, Vivienne?’
    I can’t face repeating everything.
    ‘It was one of our neighbours,’ I tell her.
    ‘Oh. You and your neighbours.’
    She takes up her knitting again.

CHAPTER 11
    A s darkness falls, I go out into the yard to take some vegetable peelings to the compost heap. Out there, I pause for a moment, breathing in the night air, all the sweet mingled scents that bleed from the throats of the flowers. I can smell the flowering stocks in the borders in my back garden, and the perfume of my tobacco plants, which always seems richer at night. The sky is profound, the shadows are long, everything turning to blue. From the Blancs Bois, where the entangled trees are drawing darkness to them, I hear the call of an owl-shivery, like a lost soul haunting the wood: unworldly.
    There’s a table-lamp lit in the kitchen of Les Vinaires, and the blackout curtains aren’t drawn yet. Lamplight spills across the gravel of my yard, leaching the colours from everything it falls on, so the petals of the geraniums in the pots beside my door are a sickly amber, without brightness. I look in at the window, see the man who is sitting there, at Connie’s kitchen table. He’s in his shirtsleeves, he has his top shirt button undone. At first glance I think it’s Captain Richter, who came to our kitchen door: but then I see it’s the other man, the scarred one. The lamplight falls on him, illumines one side of his face. I can seehis scar quite clearly, the jagged line of it, the pink, frail tissue that doesn’t match the rest of his skin. He seems different from when he came in the vehicle, sitting there alone in the light of the lamp—pensive, less authoritative.
    As I watch, he pushes up his cuffs—mechanically, not thinking about what he’s doing. His mind is somewhere else entirely. He’s reading something—a book, a letter; I can’t see what it is, the table is just below the level of the windowsill. I think it must be a letter: only a letter could hold