On the fourth day, Isabel opened the trunk and started removing items from its compartments and drawers, setting them on the floor around her one by one, until the room was awash with heirlooms and trinkets, unrelated but for the fact that they had once belonged to her mother. Her mother’s married name, Amélie Fleur Hart, appeared here and there, embroidered on a set of linen handkerchiefs, and written in dark blue ink on the face of a bundle of envelopes bearing French stamps. A card saved among the letters—a child’s sketch of a kingfisher—brought a pang of remembrance. Isabel could vividly recollect the careful observation she’d made of the bird, the race to sketch an outline in pencil, to observe the color of each feather.For Maman,she had written at the top,with love on your thirty-fifth birthday, Issy.
Although the trunk had not contained the answer to her life’s big question, she had at least recovered the teacup. She rinsed it at the small sink in her kitchenette, boiled the kettle, and selected Darjeeling, her mother’s favorite, over English breakfast. She was saved from making any more consequential choices about her life by the war, which began mere weeks later. She signed up at Whitehall and was put to work typing, delivering, and filing memoranda. The Phony War, the Battle of Britain, the Dunkirk Evacuation, and then the Fall of France: each phase rolled into the next, generating copious paperwork and terse instructions.
Mid-July 1940, on a warm, clear night, she was dragged to a soirée by a girlfriend from her typing pool and found herself trapped in conversation with a group of red-faced older men, pontificating loudly on the subject of capitulation.
“That’s our French friends done,” one of them puffed around his cigar.
“I hear they all but gift-wrapped Paris,” growled another. “The Germans simply walked in while the Parisians were buying bread.”
“Pétain says it himself: France is defeated and must give up the war. It’s just a shame we sacrificed so many of our finest in the process.”
“Not to mention the machinery,” added a thin man with a gloomy pallor.
Isabel’s head ached, and her girlfriend’s shoes were pinching hertoes. Her voice was sharper than she intended. “Pétain is a pandering fool. He doesn’t speak for the French any more than you do. The people have been betrayed, but they are not slaves, and they won’t capitulate.”
Silence met her pronouncement. And then: “Won’t capitulate?” The first man’s face had reddened further. He planted a thumb in his stretched waistband and ashed his cigar. “My dear, it’s a bit too late for that.”
“The Nazi flag flies over the Eiffel Tower,” said the second. “The only thing for it now is to leave them to it, and focus all our might on defending our own bloody borders.”
Smoke had made the room hazy, but Isabel’s thoughts were clear. “France will fight back, and she will win. When she does, it will be with no thanks to ‘friends’ like you.”
Her companions had not expected, nor did they appreciate, such sentiments, at least not from the likes of her. Little by little, they turned their backs, closing ranks before drifting away in search of more agreeable female companionship.
Isabel drained the last of her whisky and was deciding whether to have one more for the road when she became aware of an older woman she hadn’t noticed before standing by her side. Barely reaching Isabel’s shoulders, the newcomer was of perfectly plain appearance. Indeed, Mrs. Turner was to think back many times over the years that followed to their meeting in the stuffy room on Bedford Place, and although she could remember very well the worn leather of the chesterfield and the ticking of the clock, the heady fragrance of perfume coming from a giggling fawner near the cocktail trolley, she could not recall the details of the woman’s face. She did, however, remember what she’d said, her tone even, her volume low: “Were you in earnest before, about the situation on the Continent? Or was that just a clever girl’s clever talk?”
“I’m always in earnest.” Isabel realized as she said it that it was true.
“You have a connection to the Continent?”
“My mother was French.”
“Was?”
A short nod.
“And your father?”
“English.”
“Is?”
“Was.”
A small rectangular card was drawn from a pocket and proffered. “Ring this number,” the woman with the remarkably unremarkable face said. “We might be able to use you.”
Down in the house a door slammed shut, shattering the early morning stillness. Barnaby straightened, ears alert, as a sprinkling of fairy wrens dispersed from the top of the crabapple. Mrs. Turner glanced through the hedge. Someone was awake.
John. Enthusiasm had always made him effervescent, ever since he was a small child. He had been rising early all week, excited about something in the way only a thirteen-year-old boy could be. There was Christmas, of course, but she suspected there was more to it than that. He had beenlurkingand had posed a number of pointed questions recently about films and cameras. He had also struck up a friendship with a boy called Matthew McKenzie, the grandson of their neighbors, recently arrived from Adelaide.
Mrs. Turner stood, listening for further signs of life. From over at the McKenzie place came the distant drone of farm machinery. The Turners’ own shed, higher up the rise, remained quiet. Ordinarily, Mr. Drumming would have appeared by now to start his work, but this Christmas Eve the farm manager had arranged a day off. As he was to tell police early the next week, “I had some other business to take care of that morning, business of a private nature. I’d asked Mrs. Turner if it was all right for me to start late and she said there was no need to come in at all, that I could no doubt use the time off.”Pressed further, he answered that no, he wouldn’t say that she’ddiscouragedhim from coming to the property, it was more that she’d wanted to give him “a bit of a break,” and no, he hadn’t seen it as odd—he had worked for the Turners for as long as they’d lived at the Wentworth place and they “had an understanding.” Not himself and Mrs. Turner, he clarified, a hint of color burnishing his face; he had an understanding “with the pair of them.” He would, he told police, his voice snagging on the sentiment, regret not turning up for work that day “as long as I live.”
It was Mrs. Turner’s practice, each morning, to follow the perimeter of the inner paddocks before the children woke up. She valued walking highly and had recorded in the front of her current journal two quotes, the first from Rousseau:
There is something in walking that stimulates and enlivens my ideas. I can hardly think at all if I stay still. My body has to be on the move to set my mind going.
The second was a line from Wordsworth’s “In a Carriage, Upon the Banks of the Rhine”:
To muse, to creep, to halt at will, to gaze.
