The Girl from the Island. Lorna Cook

pushed her chair back from the table but Mrs Grant had already made her intention to follow Dido clear and had left the room.

      ‘All right?’ Jack asked Persey.

      She swallowed. ‘Yes, yes I think so,’ she said although she wasn’t fine really. Intense nerves made her voice shake. ‘I should have gone with Dido. Only I can’t seem to move.’

      ‘It’s actually more frightening than I anticipated,’ Jack said. ‘Isn’t it. Seeing them here. In that awful uniform and those boots. They look just like the photographs in the newspapers.’

      Persey nodded but her stomach felt hollow through nerves and lack of food. Jack reached down and took her hand from her lap and held it, giving her a look of solidarity.

      The men’s boots thudded dully on the stair runner and then they clunked noisily on the tiled hallway. Persey could take it no longer and although her legs felt wobbly she forced herself to follow them.

      ‘So …?’ she prompted as they made their way towards the front door.

      The second man spoke. ‘You have one bedroom suitable for an officer.’

      Her heart sank. She knew as much. But so soon?

      ‘You will need to start removing personal items—’

      But the first man gave his colleague a sharp look to silence him. Why wasn’t he saying who he was? It poured doubt into her mind. Was she wrong?

      He spoke softly. ‘My condolences to you and your sister on the passing of your mother.’

      ‘You don’t care,’ Dido said under her breath from behind Persey.

      ‘Thank you,’ Persey replied a little louder than she’d meant.

      She looked at him and he looked at her before he gave a small smile and turned to leave. They closed the door behind them.

      Dido and Mrs Grant entered the dining room first and resumed their seats although no one touched their food now.

      ‘They expect us to be grateful that they’re here? That we’re turfing Mother’s things out of her room? One day after her passing?’

      Persey hovered behind her chair, clutching it, unsure if she wanted to sit or stand, unsure of anything.

      ‘And how presumptuous of him, just assuming we’re sisters. I didn’t tell him,’ Dido said angrily.

      It was this that forced Persey into movement. She had to know now. She had to be sure. She let go of the chair back and turned, walking down the corridor and throwing open the front door. The men were already at the gate. Persey had expected to see a car but the men had arrived on foot.

      ‘Excuse me,’ Persey called. They stopped and turned back to her.

      The first man looked at her and then turned to his colleague and told him something in German that Persey could neither catch nor understand if she had heard. The second man walked further on and waited at a distance.

      Persey continued, gravel crunching underfoot until she stopped a few feet away. She glanced back to the house, sensing rather than seeing Dido staring after her from the dining room windows.

      Turning back to him, words escaped her. It could be him, it really could. She could see familiarity but she wondered if she was forcing herself to see it. The last time she’d seen Stefan had been that day at the cliffs in August 1930. It had been almost ten years ago. They’d been so young and now they were twenty-five. If it was him. He had left at the end of the summer, returned to Germany. And then … nothing. Stefan’s annual visits had come to an abrupt end that summer. He had never come back to Guernsey despite his promises he would. Persey had often wondered why he never returned, why he never wrote to them. She had thought about it over and over and now … It was him. It had to be him.

      She stood straight and searched his eyes. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

      Now she’d asked it, she felt mad and expected a rebuttal.

      But the man smiled and there it was, that smile and the slight narrowing of the eyes that had always come with it.

      ‘Hello, Persephone.’