DECEMBER 1943
Whispers about the German troops were circulating around the rayon factory. Nobody knew which rumours to believe.
The Germans had destroyed Stalingrad, while Allied forces had defeated Vichy troops in North Africa. Italy was a mess. The battles sounded bloody and merciless. Millions of troops on all sides were shunted between front lines and mountain ranges, a trail of broken countries and broken bodies.
Locked in the prison bunkroom, Margot ruminated on this as she lay curled up on her side of the mattress, licking the tips of her burned fingers like a kitten. It was a desolate existence, trying to survive work each day. Her single consolation was that she had company to survive with.
She shifted onto her back and stared up at the slats of the top bunk, trying to ignore the stench of the overflowing bucket they took turns to squat over in the far corner.
A sharp knock at the door.
‘Time for work?’ Joséphine groaned as she threw off her blanket from the other side of the bed. She scratched another line on the wall to mark the beginning of a new day—and a new month.
Their section of grey wall between bunks was almost filled with twenty-one blocks of fine lines. Had they really been in Germany for over a year?
‘You’re annoying during the night,’ Joséphine told Margot in a good-humoured tone, ‘what with all your wriggling and fussing.’
Annika’s dimpled face appeared over the edge of the opposite bunk, blonde plait dangling down like rope. ‘Sorry you two have to share. I’d offer to swap, but I need my beauty sleep.’ Her blue eyes glinted.
‘You have enough to go around, Annika,’ said Joséphine. ‘Who did you seduce to get your own bed?’
‘And shampoo for your hair?’ muttered one of the other women.
‘Darlings,’ the Russian mimicked the voice of a movie star, ‘I think the question is, who didn’t I seduce? I look after the guards, they look after me.’ Her blend of flaxen hair, coquettish playfulness and icy self-preservation reminded Margot of Madame Munro.
Above Margot, Syphilis Susie snored on the top bunk with the brutality of a chainsaw. Susie’s unfortunate bunkmate, Elsie, dangled her wasted legs over the edge. Margot saw her waver a little. She was the newest inmate from Belgium, but work in the factory had already made the poor girl’s heart beat slower and occasionally thud in her chest at night—though the guards and wardress didn’t believe her or anyone else who complained of similar ailments.
Joséphine was suffering too: Margot noticed her bunkmate was walking more gingerly, and struggled to breathe, even when she was sleeping.
Prisoners who were slow or poorly were never given the day off to rest. Best they keep moving, without complaint. The previous resident of Susie’s top bunk had been sent to the ‘first-aid room’ only when she’d collapsed and rolled up the cuffs of her boilersuit to show raw legs weeping. She hadn’t returned.
The beefy warder rapped on their door again. ‘Twenty minutes to departure.’
‘Hate to be late! But first, a shower.’ Joséphine slid from the bunk and was first to the pail of icy water in the corner. Every day they all raced to be first, as the water was only changed once a day, and nobody wanted to wash after Syphilis Susie.
Margot sat up and removed her slip. She noticed in the morning light that the burns and welts from the viscose acid had wrapped their way around her arms like poison ivy. She thought of her mother, Vivienne, pressing calamine lotion into her hands when she’d had mere rose pricks on her skin—what would she make of these atrocious burns?
Margot rubbed her eyes and wondered if her mother was safe. She hadn’t heard from Vivienne since her deportation to Germany. She had received the last letter just before they left Fresnes Prison. Although she’d never been one for praying—Vivienne had insisted on church every week, but Margot had only attended for the fancy lunch and crème brûlée afterwards—she’d taken to saying a little something for her mother each night before she went to sleep. She didn’t believe in God now. How could she? But each night she threw hope up into the fetid air with her dreams. It was just enough to get her through the day.
Her scarred arms were wiry ropes, her legs thin but still strong. Years of being in service had prepared her body well for hard labour. Not so for some of the others, who’d never endured tough physical work. Joséphine had grown skinny and weak. But it seemed that for Joséphine, as long as her body moved, her heart remained strong and the pain did not become unbearable, she counted herself luckier than most of the prisoners who worked the twelve-hour shift at the Phrix Rayon Factory.
‘Christ!’ snorted Susie. ‘First, no breakfast. Now this freezing water.’ She swung her legs over the bunks, climbed down to the floor, then scooped her hands into the bucket of water and slapped it against her face, under her arms and up her skirt, before reaching for another scoop.
Margot gulped and resolved to wash earlier tomorrow. It wasn’t that she had anything against Susie, it was just she wasn’t sure whether you could catch syphilis by sharing water.
She would have given anything for a decent bath. Clean warm water. Soap. She’d last had a bath up in her little attic room on the day of her arrest.
Margot spent a good half-hour in the bath. For the first ten minutes or so, she finished the latest Agatha Christie she’d borrowed from Madame Munro’s library. Usually she loved these exciting mysteries, but today she was put off because it was pretty clear where her employer had found her inspiration for this ridiculous murder game.
Annoyed and nervous, Margot tossed about in the tepid bath, soaping her arms and scrubbing the gold paint from the lily stems off her fingertips as best she could. A shaft of afternoon sunlight illuminated a square on the floor. Usually, her baths were hurried affairs after supper. Every spare hand in the village was meant to be polishing glasses, placing silver candelabras in the entrance hall and on tables beside the pool, setting up fireworks and pressing tuxedos. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to climb out of the water.
Margot lolled her head sideways, her limbs heavy. The afternoon heat in her attic quarters was stifling, and all she wanted to do was take a nap. But that wouldn’t do—what if she overslept? She cupped some water with her hands and let it drip over her breasts. As she lifted her arms, she studied the thorn pricks on her skin; some were deeper than she’d realised.
She needed to shake off her torpor and get ready for tonight. She sighed, hoisted herself out of the bath, wrapped herself in her thin towel, padded across the room—ignoring the puddles trailing on the floor—and dropped facedown onto her tiny bed. The heat was cloying as she dabbed at her clammy skin. She tossed about, restless and jittery, unsure how to quell this strange mix of dread and elation.
The truth was, she was finding it harder and harder to keep Gabriel Laurent from her thoughts. From their first meeting since their school days a month ago, when he’d walked up the gravel driveway towards her with a broad smile, an ill-fitting woollen jacket and a reference in his hand, she had felt a frisson in his presence. He seemed to single her out whenever he could, flirting and trying to make her laugh, and telling stories of his travels. And she could not deny her attraction to him.
Earlier in the day, she’d hurried out of the kitchen after dropping off the deliveries to Chef, then run through the side door so she could make her way to the garden uninterrupted by the guests who lounged around the pool, demanding champagne, olive tapenade, goat’s cheese and baguettes. Although she didn’t approve of the murder game, it amused her to imagine the horror on these languid faces when they discovered that one of their own had been killed. How would they react when Madame Munro swanned in to declare the whole thing a hoax as she helped Mademoiselle Schramsburg to her feet? Would the guests lift their champagne coupes to whoop, clap and celebrate as Madame hoped?
The gravel crunched under Margot’s feet as she hurried across the terrace. Her pace eased a little when she made out the silhouette of a man balanced on a ladder, cutting back the huge bay hedge: Gabriel. Muscles strained across a tanned, sweaty back as he chopped and tugged at wayward branches. It took a mighty effort to tame the hedge protecting the villa from the harsh ocean breeze that whistled up the rocky cliffs.
Margot knew she should grab secateurs from the garden shed and get to picking the blush-pink roses as Madame had instructed, but she didn’t want to—not yet. With all the party preparations, she’d hardly had a moment off her feet. She decided to duck into the orchard for a minute and sit with her back against one of the old apple trees. Dappled leaves protected her from the harsh midday sun and prying eyes. Six fat white hens clucked and pecked about her feet, hoping for a handful of grain. She shooed them away, kicked off her shoes and stockings, and allowed her legs to rest on the soft grass while she tried to imagine what her days would look like if she were free to choose how she spent her time.
Gabriel dropped a branch into the barrow at the base of his ladder, then pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped up the sweat dripping from his face. His blond curls were tucked into a faded blue bandana. He looked across at the orchard as he stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket, but if he knew Margot was sitting under a tree watching him, he gave no sign.
Snip, snip, snip. He had turned again to his trimming, his back to Margot. A few times he held a rake across the top of the hedge, checking to make sure it was flat.
Margot had read about ‘aha’ moments in the novels she pinched from the villa library. Heroines were blindsided by love, made sick with it, like Anna Karenina and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. She’d devoured these books by candlelight up in her attic room while the rest of the villa slumbered. Within their pages, love seemed at once a blessing and a curse—powerful, cruel and dangerous. She’d marvelled at the noble sacrifices of the heroines, then raged against their hopeless circumstances. She found it curious that these fictional characters provoked such violent emotions in her, as she had never felt a man press against her, nor lifted her lips to be kissed.
She didn’t really believe the novels. Not a word. She wasn’t going to have her head turned by some giddy nonsense. But she wondered what it would be like to be kissed, and to have a different kind of life. She was jealous of Gabriel’s freedom—his ability to escape from a quiet life of service on the Côte d’Azur to perform in cities that never slept. Now, as she lay on her bed, still damp from her bath, she imagined dancing with Gabriel in a sea of silk and sequins, spinning to the rhythm of Billie Holiday or Glenn Miller.
But what if his flirtations weren’t serious? What if he saw her as a silly girl with a crush? And for her part, she wasn’t sure exactly what she desired—just that she wanted something different.
Still, tonight offered her a chance to find out if there could be anything between them. And she realised she had to take it.
She threw off the towel, grabbed her notebook and a pen, and fell back onto her bed, resting the notebook against her knees.
Cher Gabriel,
Je vous adore …
She ripped out the page, tore it into tiny pieces, screwed them into a damp ball and tossed it to the far corner of the room.
As she tapped her pen against the next page, she agonised over what to say. Should she explain that she was more—could offer more—than just domestic service? That she loved the way he described flying on a trapeze: how his heart thumped and time stilled in that long moment before he clasped the other acrobat’s hands mid-air. His lunchbreak yarns of clams sizzled in Spanish sherry and silky shreds of the creamiest aged ham handed out on platters in the illegal jazz bars of Barcelona, where the air was thick with humidity, cigar smoke and sex. That she both envied these adventures and yearned for them. But mostly, that she yearned for Gabriel.
Cringing and sweating, Margot scrawled out a short note that explained her feelings. She wondered how it could sound both too formal and too intimate, but she didn’t have time for another attempt. In the next line, she asked Gabriel to meet her behind the hedge half an hour after the fireworks finished. Madame’s foolish murder game would surely be wrapped up by then.
Margot hesitated, then signed off:
I will explain what I have done when we meet. Don’t tell anyone.
She glanced at the clock on the stone wall: 6 p.m. Chef would be missing her in the kitchen, yelling about scampi and discipline. She finished drying herself, slicked her lank hair back into a braid and tugged on her clean black skirt, matching shirt and neatly pressed white apron. As she brushed her teeth, she studied herself in the mirror: mousy hair, medium build, eyes the colour of whisky. Her skin was light brown, like the Côte d’Azur soil. Her stomach tightened and lip curled as she thought of the golden American, lying by the pool like some kind of queen, draped in turquoise silk that fluttered with the breeze.
Margot took one last look in the mirror, impatient for the murder game to be over. Then the second part of her night could begin.
She grabbed the letter, put it in an envelope and wrote Gabriel in her neatest hand, before slipping it into her pocket. Finally, she smoothed back her hair, tightened her apron, knelt and wiped the dust off the toes of her shoes, hitched up her stockings and slammed the door shut behind her. She stepped down the narrow staircase at the back of Villa Sanary that would take her from the attic into the chaos of a kitchen in full preparation for the party of the year.
Margot dressed quickly in her threadbare factory boilersuit and folded her slip under the pillow, hoping the two night-shift factory workers allocated to sleep in this bed for the day would not steal it. Next, she jammed her sore feet into wooden clogs and winced as they started to throb.
She’d decided not to wash from the bucket today, just in case. And she was still quite clean, relatively speaking, from last week’s disinfectant indignity. All the women had been lined up in a tin shed, where they were instructed to remove their clothes and march into the shower block, one by one. As they walked, elderly women in white coats, face masks and hairnets inspected all over their bodies for lice. They were then marched to a delousing room, then a steam room.
Wehrmacht factory policemen and SS guards stood in the steam room, staring at the women. Hitting some with rifles, pressing themselves against others. The men grabbed Elsie, who still had her long hair and curves, and shoved her up against the wall. Her arms were pinned above her head by a guard on either side, while her thick golden hair was hacked off with scissors by another at her rear. The belt buckle of the SS guard left a deep gouge in her buttocks.
When Elsie emerged from the steam room held up by Susie and Gertrude, Margot watched as Joséphine gently took her arm and said, ‘The shame is on those guards. On Germany.’ She brushed away Elsie’s tears and held her gaze. ‘The violation is theirs. They have lost their humanity. Their decency.’ Then she opened her arms to embrace Elsie. ‘Come. Let me help you dress.’
Back in the bunkroom, the women gathered to tenderly bind Elsie’s feet and hands in rags, and brush her short, hacked-off hair.
Now, as they all prepared to leave for the walk to the factory bus, Margot eyed her warm bed with longing. At least the night-shift workers would be grateful for the heat.
When Joséphine had finished dressing, she reached under her pillow to the gap between the mattress and the wall, and pulled out the precious paperback and pencil stub she had smuggled from Fresnes. She opened up the book and began to write in the margin.
‘Hurry up!’ Margot hissed at her. They were expected on the bus in ten minutes—if Joséphine was caught they would all be marched off to face punishment.
‘Done,’ said Joséphine with a satisfied smile, exactly two minutes later. She shoved the book and pencil back into their hiding place.
A few minutes later, Margot and her fellow prisoners marched in two lines through the village. Nazi flags had been hoisted in the town square, and German women in thick coats, carrying bread under their arms, averted their eyes and hurried their curious children along.
A guard whacked a prisoner in the back of the leg with the butt of his rifle for failing to march in neat lines.
As the Nazi flags flapped, and the rain beat down and trickled under her collar, Margot saw the exhausted night-shift workers marching towards her group. In the middle row, an unconscious woman was carried by two stick-like others. At the back of the line, a prisoner shuffled and sidestepped with one hand pressed against her buttocks, her face screwed up in excruciating pain; crippled with a back injury, she was still forced to march.
As always, the groups of prisoners passed each other without speaking. Margot tried to give a reassuring nod and smile to the grimacing woman clutching at her back.
A tall German guard, new this week, made eye contact with Margot as he fell into step beside her. She braced herself for a blow.
Two steps. Nothing.
She relaxed her wince and glanced to one side: the guard’s eyes were wide—sympathetic?
Joséphine, noticing this exchange, narrowed her eyes at Margot and gave a slight shake of her head.
Margot’s foot clipped the heel of the woman in front of her, and she fell to the cobblestones.
‘Margot!’ Joséphine stepped from her row and bent to pull Margot up, but the tall guard ushered her away. ‘Stay in line,’ he said softly. ‘It is better if you keep in step.’
After casting Margot a confused look, Joséphine marched to catch up.
Margot struggled to get to her feet. Her knee ached so much, she had to rub it.
As other prisoners marched away past the dreary, empty-looking shops flanked by soldiers, the new guard offered Margot his hand. Thinking this was some joke, or a preamble to a beating, she knelt forward and struggled to her feet without meeting his eyes.
He took a respectful step back, waiting for her to straighten her pinafore and tuck her foot back into her clog, before he indicated she should hurry forward to rejoin the two rows of prisoners.
Margot’s breath caught in her throat. By declining to hit or insult her, this Boche had behaved with kindness—more than she had been shown by her captors since her arrival in Germany.