The months had gone by like a dream, smoothly and uneventfully.
The Germans had come to the house, it was true, but Madame had dealt with them, had made her own explanations and had granted their demands with a cool dignified disdain more insulting than abuse.
The Château was off the beaten track, they had not been required to billet men or Armies and they had not been molested in any way save that a certain part of the farm produce was removed, the car that had belonged to Lucien was taken from the garage and various farm implements were commandeered without explanation or excuse.
Otherwise the ways of the household had continued uninterrupted, except that at the back of their minds there was that fear, unexpressed but nevertheless as real as if each knew that they were being watched by some animal, crouched and waiting to spring.
It was there, always there, never for a moment could one escape it.
Even locked in her own bedroom two floors up in the Château and in the middle of the night, Fleur must take the wireless set from its hiding place, put it under the bedclothes and there listen in.
Sometimes she chided herself for being so very careful, yet she well knew that it was not cowardice but a simple realisation that they were surrounded by the enemy, that every wall had ears and that the slightest slip might bring death and destruction not only to herself but to those others who loved and housed her.
“We must think, Marie,” she said now. “We must think of something. In the meantime I will get up and dress.”
She finished her coffee, drinking it slowly, savouring every mouthful. It was a long time since she had tasted anything so good. It was delicious. And the biscuits too, how she craved at times for something sweet!
Marie pulled back the curtains and the afternoon sun, hot and golden, came streaming in.
“There have been no aeroplanes this afternoon?”
Marie shook her head.
“None,” she replied, “but Fabian came up from the village a little while ago and he told me that those devils had two down yesterday and one fell about ten miles from here in a field. The villagers ran to help, but it was too late. The brave men were burned, all save one, and the Germans took him away to hospital.”
“Was he badly hurt?”
“Fabian did not know, but I would much rather be in the hands of le bon Dieu than at the mercy of those cochons.”
Fleur swept back the hair from her eyes. For the thousandth time she wondered whether she would have preferred Lucien to have been a prisoner or to have been certain of his safe keeping, as Marie put it, in the hands of le bon Dieu.
Stories of the prisoners being hungry and without heat or the proper clothing had been whispered over France after the departure of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk. But now, if one could believe such reports, things were better and there was always a chance that the French prisoners might be repatriated.
Yet it was a slender hope as so very few had come back. There was a great deal of talk, a great deal of unquenchable optimism but nothing happened. Perhaps things were best as they were.
But it was hard to be certain when one thought of Lucien, shot down that first fortnight in September 1939, when the world had hardly grasped the fact that hostilities had begun or that the last war to end all wars, which had slaughtered the flower of the European nations, had been a failure.
In the first fortnight Fleur could remember, as vividly as if it was still happening, that moment of incredulous surprise, a moment more of astonishment than of agony, when she had heard that Lucien had been killed flying over the Maginot Line.
It was then that the coldness between herself and Lucien’s mother had broken and the barriers had fallen. The two women had wept together, united by an agony of loss as they could not have had Lucien lived.
Strange now to think how frightened she had been of the Comtesse and yet nothing in Fleur’s life had prepared her for someone like Lucien’s mother.
Now, at last, she could understand what had seemed to be the mystery surrounding her own French grandmother, after whom she was named, and could realise why her mother had always spoken of her with what amounted to reverence rather than affection.
Aristocrats! It was impossible, Fleur thought, for her or any of her generation to emulate the dignity, the poise and the composure of such women.
‘We do not have the leisure to be graceful and calm,’ she thought once. ‘So we have to grasp greedily at everything we want in case someone else gets it first.’
That made her think of Sylvia. Sylvia, with her red-painted nails, her red curving mouth and her bold eyes. Sylvia, slopping about the house until luncheontime in a tattered tawdry dressing gown and an old pair of slippers with worn down heels. Sylvia, blowsy untidy and sometimes dirty and yet always triumphantly beautiful with a lewd lustfulness that could not be ignored, flamboyant, gaudy and yet desirable.
Fleur could still shudder at the agony of the days when her father had first brought Sylvia home. When she had laughed at the decorations and at the treasures tender with childish memories, when she had turned the place upside down, filling it with her mocking laughter, her lipstick-stained cigarettes and her noisy rollicking friends.
Impossible to believe that any man could put such a woman in her mother’s place and yet, despite all her antagonism, despite what was a bitter live hatred, Fleur could understand a little of her father’s besotted infatuation.
Everything that was fastidious and decent within herself was revolted by her stepmother, but then she could not help seeing Sylvia’s attractions, the attractions of an animal, but so obvious that they could not be ignored.
At first Fleur had been bewildered, had withdrawn into an antagonistic reserve and then, when she realised the depth of Sylvia’s depravity she stood aghast, not for herself but for her father.
It was only slowly that she began to notice and to understand.
She had met a man who liked her and whom she brought to her home. Fleur was at first deceived by Sylvia’s acceptance of him and the charm with which she entertained him.
Then, when the man himself began to make many hesitant excuses and to avoid her, first shamefacedly and then self-consciously Fleur realised what had happened.
She could always remember walking right out of the house into a storm of teeming rain, tramping blindly along the cliffs, a mortal sickness making her oblivious of her surroundings and her soaked clothes.
She stayed on at home because despite all his weaknesses she loved her father. Arthur Garton was a clever man as far as literature was concerned, as regards women he was a fool.
He retired from the family business soon after he was forty-five and then settled down to write and to play golf, building himself a house bordering the links at Seaford. He was happy there, looking out over the downs, writing his books comfortably before his own fireside and trying all the time to improve his handicap.
After Fleur’s mother had died he might have continued the even tenor of his ways until he was an old man had he not met Sylvia.
Sylvia was looking for someone to pay her bills, someone weak and idealistic like Arthur Garton to give her a roof over her head. It was all too easy. They were married just a month after they had first met and Fleur was told only after the Ceremony had taken place.
It was too late then for her to protest and too late for her even to remind her father of the woman who had given him twenty years of her life and who had died loving him. Sylvia saw to that. Sylvia was clever at anticipating danger and at turning it aside before it harmed her.
Yet after four years of being married to Arthur Garton she had grown careless.
She underestimated him and underestimated too, the essential decency of a gentleman. When he found out for