The French Promise (4 page)

Luc liked this time of the day – when only the fishermen were up – and especially this spot on the South Downs, leading onto Beachy Head, the highest cliff in Britain. He shifted his gaze from the uninterrupted view of the town’s sprawl and its long shingle beach to where he could see one of
the fishing boats heading in. Behind it, like a welcoming party, was a flock of gulls, their wings beating furiously as they wheeled, dipped and powered forward, depending on where the next treat of fish cast-offs would be flung as the men busily gutted their catch.

Luc could smell the fresh haul now; the years had not blunted his almost freakish ability to pick out individual aromas. Even now
he could separate the salty, mineral notes of the fish from the ancient, earthy smell of coal fires burning in hearths of the houses below him. If he concentrated hard enough, he fancied he could even pick up a whiff of the darting rabbit in the distance that shared
this dawn with him, stirring the grasses and kicking up dust.

The cries of the excited birds were carried on the chilled
wind that chased through Luc’s still-bright hair, ruffling it from his forehead and then instantly blowing it back again. He pushed away the yellowy-gold hank that had fallen across his face and then gave up fighting it. He had given up fighting altogether, unless he counted the rows with his wife. Lisette deserved so much better. How had she come to terms so quickly with her losses, her life’s
changes, while he yearned for the past? There were moments when he felt there was nothing to fight for any more, and on those bleak occasions he had taken to digging his nails into a scar he carried on his wrist. Its memory of the wound he’d sustained at Mont Mouchet reminded him that he’d survived not only his injuries but the hail of bullets and storm of bombs, when so many other brave souls had
not. He remembered the young father who’d taken his last breath speaking of the family he loved as Luc had held his hand so he wouldn’t die alone. Luc couldn’t remember his name, didn’t want to; it only added to his self-loathing that he’d somehow slunk away from France’s suffering to let others bear her pain.

France had prevailed, however. The Nazis – those that the Allies could round up – had
been put on trial, the leaders and abusers executed. In the meantime soldiers had been repatriated, families reunited, and life postwar was beginning to form a more solid shape across Europe.

But Luc had still not shaken his guilt.

It had been nearly seven years since the liberation of Paris and they’d sailed away from France in a fishing boat that landed them on the shoreline of Hastings on Britain’s
south
coast. He desperately hadn’t wanted to leave his country but he couldn’t admit that to anyone, and in 1944 with the decimated German army retreating, the wounded animal was still dangerous and all he could think of was getting Lisette away to the relative safety of England. Her superiors had demanded it, reminding him that this British spy’s clandestine missions were behind her.

They were both injured emotionally but as Lisette had often reminded him, ‘Show me someone in this war who isn’t.’ It was her way of countering her pain – all of it connected with the loss of Markus Kilian – a Nazi colonel who had been her mission, become her lover and at some point taken part of her heart too. He was still struggling to come to terms with what had happened. In fact, both of them
found it easier not to mention Kilian at all.

And as the weeks had stretched into months until the German surrender, the loneliness of the Scottish Isles where they’d retreated to help Lisette finally bounce back from her wartime experiences, but Luc had never stopped pining for his homeland.

In summer the Luberon of Provence was hot and arid, carrying on its breeze the scent of lavender and thyme.
In the cooler months, its villages would pulse to a different perfume of olives giving up their precious oil and the yeasty smell of grapes being crushed. Around his own village he would wake daily to the smell of fresh baguettes baking and in spring the blossom from the expansive orchards surrounding Saignon would litter the ground.

He was a man of the Alps, of unforgiving terrain, with its white
winters and multicoloured summers and farms dotted here and there. But he was trying so hard, for his new
family’s sake, to become a man of the coast … of pebbly beaches with drifts of seaweed, and of tall, elegant houses, standing in a line on the seafront. Provence was a motley of brightly painted houses, where shutters of blue and yellow punctuated walls of ochre or pink. But in Britain’s south
it was a monotone palette; the large terraced homes favoured walls the colour of clotted cream and were framed by shiny black doors and iron railings. He couldn’t deny the quiet formality of Eastbourne where they now lived; it didn’t shout anything … it simply whispered a weary sort of elegance. He missed the loud colour and even louder voices of the French.

It was only up here – on
the desolate cliff tops, far away from real life – that Luc felt at home. He could never hide that truth from Lisette: she knew that from up here on a clear day he could look out across the English Channel and see France.

Luc wrinkled his nose at the sour smell that was reaching him from the boat and blinked at the sunrise just breaking over Eastbourne pier. Shadows of clouds stretched across
the lightening sky, while a finger of orange across the horizon pointed firmly at France.

Here is where you should be,
it baited.

But he couldn’t return to France. Not yet. His wounds still felt too fresh. He thought of the friends who’d given up their lives to bombs, bullets and the collaborator’s accusing nod. He thought of the villages destroyed all over France and the generations
it would take to restore them. But mostly he thought of the family he had lost: parents, sisters … his beloved grandmother, whom he’d cradled in death and whose talisman he now wore. Her pouch of lavender seeds was a constant reminder of all that had been taken from him – people, lifestyle, livelihood. The few
lavender heads inside had long since withered but if he closed his eyes and inhaled,
there was still a faint perfume of Saignon.

One day he would return.

He’d written to the International Tracing Agency in Germany a few years back. He’d been thrilled to learn that the ITA had been set up by the Red Cross in 1946 to help people find their missing families, and expressly for the purpose of helping the Jewish people with answers and news of those who had suffered genocide
at the hands of the Nazis. There had been two exchanges of letters with the ITA to date. It was more than a year since he’d heard back. But the silence was curiously comforting; as long as the organisation kept him waiting, there was hope.

He forced himself not to dwell too long or too often about his lost family because the darkness of it was toxic. It was his burden, not Lisette’s. His challenge
was to build a normal life for Lisette and Harry, now three. Luc hoped he’d teach him French as he grew – it would be so easy for them to speak it at home. Right now, though, the echoes of war were still ringing in everyone’s ears so to be speaking in any language other than English was madness. He’d worked hard to become fluent. Lisette was a chameleon; she could override the lilt of her French
accent with a southern English manner of speaking and was quickly losing her Frenchness in favour of fitting in completely. He’d never shake his accent, but no one bar Lisette and a couple of people at the defunct War Office would ever know the truth behind the brave French Resister who’d aided the Allied war effort.

It had been the new Defence Ministry’s idea, at the debriefing, to change his
true surname. Luc had to agree that with a name as German as Ravensburg, their new life
would never work. But Bonet, the adopted Jewish surname he’d accepted as his own for a quarter of a century, was no longer his name either. He couldn’t pinpoint when during the war he’d emotionally left it behind but he knew why. It was always a borrowed name, bestowed with love by the Jewish family that had
given him a life and a home. To take Lisette’s name didn’t feel right either. It was Lisette who’d suggested shortening his real name to Ravens. It had the right ring of truth to his proper name but would not attract negative attention.

Lisette had refused to hide or justify her role as a British spy in France, getting beneath the German command using the oldest cunning known to man
– the honey trap. Instead she had agreed to hole up in a lonely cottage on a remote island in the Orkneys for sixteen months, seeing out the war, until her once-shaved hair reached chin length again and she returned to Sussex to marry Luc in her grandparents’ local church. Once married, Lisette didn’t want to leave southern England, but there was no way Luc could agree to life in London or even a
large, busy town. She’d tried a new tack, suggesting positions on the south coast.

‘I’m a farmer … a specialist grower,’ he’d argued, when she’d told him about a job as a postman in Worthing or a carpenter’s hand in Rye. He’d lost track of the number of suggestions he refused. Her patience with him only darkened his mood because each time he shook his head meant another few months of living off
her savings. She never complained. Lisette was not without means but that was not the point. Luc wanted to support his family, yet every time she gave him the opportunity he turned away from it. It was a vicious cycle that stole his sense of worth and independence.

Eventually a job as a lighthouse keeper at Beachy Head bubbled to the surface. Luc remembered that day well; it was the first time
in years that he’d felt a weight lifting from his shoulders. Here at last was the loneliest of jobs in the most remote location. Luc had leapt at it and loved the smile it had returned to Lisette, knowing their future was being secured in Eastbourne where her parents had hoped to live.

Lighthouse families were provided accommodation but the cottages were based on the Isle of Wight and
Lisette was having none of that. While she was prepared to live alone for two months at a time, she had refused to be separated, with him on the mainland, her on an island again and Harry not seeing his father for such long periods. Instead she had dipped into her inheritance and rented them a small cottage in the Meads – sitting atop Eastbourne proper.

‘Luc, if you squint a bit, you could trick
yourself that it’s hilly Provence, couldn’t you?’ she’d said excitedly one warm afternoon as they’d strolled across Beachy Head, Harry suspended between them, holding a hand of each parent and lifing his legs from the grass, giggling his pleasure.

He should have said yes. Should have given her a hug and thanked her. Instead honesty had prevailed and did nothing but damage, especially as he had
muttered his wounded retort in French. ‘Place is about emotion; one loves somewhere not just because of how it looks but because of the way their heart reacts to it.’

The hurt had instantly shadowed across Lisette’s face. ‘Luc, you’ve got to snap out of this. For Harry’s sake, for my sake! This is our home now.’

The reality of her sentiment had only deepened his personal crisis.

When Luc took
the time to examine the chaos in his mind, he believed his discontent stemmed from his sense of impotency to fulfil promises. He had promised himself he would find his family, or at least find out what had happened to them. He had promised to return to central France one day and see young Robert and his grandmother, who had saved his life and nursed him back to health. Robert would be about twelve
now, and Luc had to wonder whether Marie was still alive. Who would be looking after that sunny, sweet child who’d bravely cut his thumb to share blood with him? ‘I’ll come back,’ Luc had promised, but years had passed.

He had also promised to find a German who had inflicted perhaps the greatest wound when he forced Luc to murder an old man he loved as a father.

Then there was the silent,
wounding despair that ate away at him day and night in not living up to his promise that he gave his beloved grandmother that he would be the keeper of the lavender; that he would never let its magic die and that he would plant it again one day.

‘It will save your life; give you life,’ she had said often enough in that singsong way of hers.

Perhaps the lavender’s magic had kept them safe, but
where was that magic now?

The single promise he’d fulfilled was the one he’d made to his enemy. Markus Kilian had been an enigma. As a decorated and beloved colonel in the Wehrmacht, he represented everything Luc despised. But strip away the uniform, the status, and Kilian embodied all that Luc admired in a man. Kilian had lost his life protecting Luc but both of them knew the sacrifice was ultimately
for Lisette … and her safety. Luc knew Kilian had hated the Nazis but he had loved Germany.
When he died, it was with Lisette’s name on his lips, a genuine and respectful smile for Luc, and an unblemished record of patriotism. It could so easily have been Luc bleeding out in the Tuileries Garden that terrible night as Paris was liberated.

As the colonel had counted his life in minutes,
Kilian asked Luc to post a letter for him upon his death. It had taken Luc a long period to do so, choosing the right time when letters wouldn’t be seized by the Allied forces. At the end of 1945 he had bought a British stamp and posted Kilian’s bloodstained letter within another envelope to Ilse Vogel in Switzerland. He’d accompanied the letter with a note of his own, written in French. He could
have written it in fluent German but that was too risky. He’d never heard back from Miss Vogel and didn’t expect to.

Luc knew he shouldn’t, but he frequently wondered how often Lisette thought about her German lover. When thoughts of them together crowded his mind he’d come here to the cliff edge – where far too many people willingly stepped off – to let the wind blow the jealousy away. For he
had made promises and needed to keep them … sometime, somehow, but not yet.

Luc stood, stretched and licked the salty film from his lips. The sky had brightened considerably. If he walked back around the headland he’d see the old Belle Tout lighthouse that had been decommissioned at the turn of the century. It was a wonderful old building on the highest part of the cliff face. If Luc had worked
there, he could have gone home each night, cuddled his son and kissed his wife, but the lighthouse had proved ineffective. When sea mists gathered or low cloud descended, the craft would sail perilously close to the cliffs.