“He’s in Suffolk right now, but is putting together a little exhibit. With so many men gone, he thought to highlight the work of some of the women at the Glasgow School of Art.”
I brought the mug up to my face and inhaled the sharp steam. “Mother loved it there, didn’t she?”
“Maud was a whirlwind when she was feeling creative. Yes, she loved it.”
“Then why did she leave school?”
“You know the answer to that. She met your father. She had you.”
“She was only there for a handful of years. Less than that. How much could she have learned?”
“How much could you learn from one summer and a few missives?” He slid Mr. Mackintosh’s letter back into the envelope. “She produced plenty. And that’s why young Mackintosh wrote. He asked for permission to exhibit a few of Maud’s pieces.”
All of those times I’d watch Mother through the window, sitting in front of an empty easel. “Do any still exist?”
“They do.” He crushed the envelope in his fist. “Ah, but they’re at Fairbridge.”
I pulled a pillow closer and tucked it up on my lap. “Grandfather, we’ve been away for a long time. At some point we need to stop wandering and return home.”
“Home?” He tossed the letter next to the teapot. “The world—”
“Is our home. I know.” I pressed my lips to the hot mug, took a scalding sip. “I don’t want to return to Fairbridge any more than you do.”
He exhaled. “I know.” He stared out the window, at the rain falling straight down. “Staying away, it doesn’t help. We can’t avoid sorrow.”
“Have the past three and a half years been sorrowful?”
He reached out and touched my hand. His fingers were cold against mine. “Of course not. But things will change, whether we’re there to see them or not. Look at what we missed while we were wandering in the wilderness.”
“Not everything has changed. Some things are constant. Today is Christmas Eve.”
“Ah, so it is.”
“Merry Christmas, Grandfather,” I said, and in my mind I sent out another. Merry Christmas, Luc, wherever you are.
Maman wrote to me of Christmas at Mille Mots. Her household had swelled to include three families of refugees—two Belgian and one French from near Saint-Quentin. Five children among them, so the hearth again had a row of shoes lined up, waiting for Père Noël to fill with nuts and candy. Not like Christmas used to be, she wrote. We didn’t have much of a réveillon feast. A goose couldn’t be found in all the valley, but we had a pair of chickens stuffed with prunes. Oysters, chestnuts, a fine Bayonne ham I’ve been saving.
My mouth, rusty with the taste of stale water and dried bread, watered.
The five little ones were worried they would be without Christmas this year, so far from their homes. The oldest amongst them is only eight and still has nightmares of his house burning. I hope to distract them. I gathered up the children and they helped me arrange the crèche. They implored me, and so I brought in some clay from the garden and sculpted five new santons to tuck around the manger. Do you remember when we used to do that? How many shepherds in the crèche have the face of my Luc?
She tried to sound dismissive, as though Christmas just wasn’t what it used to be, and maybe it wasn’t. But to me, reading her letter in between trudges through knee-high snow, through the half-frozen mud beneath, eating cold turnip and barley soup, my only carols the shells overhead, it sounded perfect.
Christmas passed by and, in the damp thaw of spring, I got leave, at last.
I arrived at a château edged in daffodils, ringing with the sound of laughter. Gray icicles melted from the roof. Overhead a swallow arched across the aching blue sky. Like a cool wash of water, the laughter, the yellow and blue, the soft dripping of the icicles, sluiced away the past ten months. In front of Mille Mots, I was cleansed.
As I stood on the front walk, breathing in tranquility, the front door pushed open. A boy in short trousers, followed closely by two curly-headed girls, tumbled out onto the lawn. He had one of my old footballs tucked under one arm, and the girls were in hot pursuit. I watched as the children, pink-cheeked and laughing, disappeared around the side of the house.
“They remind me of you and Clare.” Maman stood in the open doorway. “Younger, yes. But always off looking for adventure.” There were new lines on her face, and had she always been so small? But she was Maman.
I stepped forward, uncertain.
“Mon poussin.” Her voice broke with a little ripple. “Oh, my Luc.”
I let myself be drawn into the peace of the château.
—
“Your papa is happy,” she said later, as we walked arm-in-arm through the tangled hopefulness of the rose garden. The two Belgian women sang as they spread damp shirts on the lawn to dry. “Is that strange, to find satisfaction in war?” Children’s shouts drifted from the riverbank.
“He’s doing what he loves. And, besides, they all say that La Section Camouflage is a cushy job.”
She frowned. “Cushy?”
“One of those colonial words that the Tommies use.” I shrugged. “It means easy, soft, comfortable.”
“Easy?” She bristled. “Claude’s work isn’t easy. It’s important.”
“Of course.” I stepped carefully around a fallen bird’s nest. “On the battlefields, men are right out there in the open, for God and the Germans to see straight and clear. There needs to be a way to camouflage that.”
“It’s the perfect job for him.” She tipped her face up to the sun. “Art, innovation, and the discipline of the army.”
It was perfect. So perfect that, at times, I was envious. While I crawled through barbed wire and slept on dirt and loaded my rifle with cold-numbed fingers, Papa was in a well-lit room behind the lines, painting and drawing and designing, all in the name of patriotism.
“Both of you are staying safe, that’s all that matters.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “You’re not so near to the front lines, are you?”
Carefully worded letters gave that impression, I knew. I didn’t intend to be deceptive, at least not at first. But I didn’t want Maman to worry. So I wrote about the food (“not nearly as good as Marthe’s”), the conditions (“rainy, but hoping for a break in the weather”), the uniforms (“finally, they’ve replaced the garance red!”), and the future (“when this is all over, Cairo? You’ve always wanted to see the pyramids”). I didn’t tell her anything that was really happening.
“Not so near,” I lied, glad she wasn’t looking at me. “Really, it’s almost…cushy.”
She nodded with satisfaction. “And have you seen your papa often?”
There were soldiers stretched across half of France. Had she not read a newspaper in eight months? Not once looked at a map? “Maman, no. He’s in a different unit. He’s posted near Nouvons and I’m…” I couldn’t tell her how near to Mille Mots I was. “I’m somewhere else.”
A furrow appeared at the edge of her brow.
“But I hear much about the camoufleurs,” I said in a rush. “And once I even saw a group of them. They’d built a tree stump, all out of metal, but painted to look like bark and smoke and battlefield ruin. They brought it out to our line.”
“A tree stump? I thought they were painting barricades or designing uniforms.” She frowned. “Why would they need a tree stump?”
“A listening post? A sniper perch?” I shrugged. “Nobody tells me. But I saw them with that make-believe stump. They came in the dead of night to spirit it out into No-Man’s-Land.”