Cry to Dream Again Read online

  immortal souls

  vol. 2

  Cry to Dream Again

  (The Prequel to Silent Music)

  Jane Hawking

  ALMA BOOKS

  alma books ltd

  3 Castle Yard

  Richmond

  Surrey TW10 6TF

  United Kingdom

  www.almabooks.com

  First published by Alma Books Ltd in 2018

  © Jane Hawking, 2018

  Cover design: Jem Butcher

  Jane Hawking asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  isbn: 978-1-84688-437-5

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Cry to Dream Again

  for my dear daughter lucy

  1

  “Chérie, Édouard! Where are you?” Jacqueline’s sing-song voice rang out from within the old farmhouse one morning towards the end of the summer holidays of 1937.

  “We’re here, Maman!” her children called out in reply. “We’re outside – in the sun!”

  “Ah! So there you are!” their mother said as she appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her son and daughter were sitting at the rickety table under the eaves finishing their breakfast. “Would you like to come out with me for the last time before we leave?” she asked. “Your grandmother says the bread oven won’t heat up because there must be a blockage in the flue, so I said we would go down to the village to fetch a loaf from the baker’s, then we might call in at the épicerie. I know Louise will be pleased to see us, but I must call on Madame de Grandval first; she’s very ancient now.”

  She gave a light laugh and patted the boy on the shoulder. “Mother says we’re out of bread because you eat so much, Édouard! Thank goodness we still have a baker here in Trémaincourt; otherwise we would have to go all the way down to Séringy!” She sighed. “I do wish Mother would have the bread delivered, then she wouldn’t have to make it herself!”

  Rocking from side to side on the metal seat that had seen better days, her teenage son shook his head as he scraped the last traces of the sweet, milky coffee from the sides of his empty bowl. “No, Maman, sorry. I can’t come. Grandfather and I are very busy this morning: I’m going to collect the rest of the straw bales, and the horses are already harnessed. Then I have to get started on the ploughing in Long Field. I promised him I’d try to get that done before we leave. He’s out there waiting for me.”

  “Ah bon, I understand – well, what about you, Chérie? It’s fine now, so let’s go soon,” Jacqueline asked hopefully, turning to her seventeen-year-old daughter who was always known as Chérie in France because the pronunciation of Shirley, her English name, presented the French palate with too great a challenge, whereas the translation of her brother’s name consisted only of a change in spelling from Edward to Édouard with scarcely any alteration in pronunciation. The major difference, however, was that in England no one ever called him Edward, simply Ted.

  “Oh, yes, of course I’ll come!” Shirley agreed with a ready smile as she folded her napkin and pushed her bowl into the middle of the rusty old table. “I was intending to do some ballet practice, but I’ll come with you. I’d love to see Louise. I suppose I’ll have to wear my boots if we’re going to walk across the fields to see Madame de Grandval?”

  “Yes, of course you will! We can come back via the village for the bread, say hello to Louise and then cut through the wood,” Jacqueline replied thoughtfully, surveying the remains of a puddle in the middle of the yard. “The ground is still damp from that heavy shower last night, but let’s go now before those clouds coming in from the coast arrive.” Musing aloud, she added, “And maybe we’ll stop at the château here in Trémaincourt to see if Madame de la Croix and the family have returned from their holiday. We ought to call on them before we leave.”

  “Oh, Maman! Do we have to? She’s terrifying, and she’s so strict! I know she doesn’t like me,” Shirley protested, reacting with tongue-in-cheek horror. Her mock horror then turned to laughter and, tossing her blond curls, she said, “Oh well, I suppose she won’t eat us, but Madame de Grandval is so much gentler and nicer!”

  Her mother indignantly took up the defence of Madame de la Croix, saying, “Oh, come on! You are exaggerating, Chérie. She is a formidable lady and you know that’s how she behaves to everyone, but she has a heart of gold – it’s her manner, that’s all.”

  “Anyhow, at least she won’t want me to go inside the château in my boots, so that’s a relief,” said Shirley, comforting herself that for once her less-than-fashionable footwear would work to her advantage, and Jacqueline had to admit that her strong-minded daughter was right. Appearing before Madame de la Croix in wellington boots would not be well received, even if they were necessary for traipsing over the fields.

  “All right, then, maybe we’ll just call in at the back door to say good morning to Céline, without seeing the Countess,” she agreed. Céline, the housekeeper at the château in Trémaincourt, was after all a relative, a cousin of Mémé’s, Shirley’s grandmother, so there was no reason why they should not stop by to see her.

  Perhaps, Shirley decided, calling in at the château might not be so bad, since there was a chance that, today being a Saturday, Jean-Luc, the eldest son and heir to the title, might be home from Paris. She herself had just visited Paris for the first time, so that trip could provide a useful topic for a conversation that might renew the easy friendship that she and Ted had shared with Jean-Luc and his sister when they were children. In summer they had romped in the fields together, ridden home atop the bales of straw on the cart at harvest time and spread lavish picnics, prepared for them by Céline, on the grass down by the river. There came a time when adolescent shyness began to create a distance between Shirley and Jean-Luc, and this widened as a mutual awareness of the disparity in their backgrounds and their prospects grew. Undeterred, Shirley knew from the stories in her magazines that social differences counted for little where a pretty girl was concerned, and with her blue eyes and blond curls she was confident of being very pretty. After all, Pa was always saying so. “Ah, how’s my pretty girl?” was the first question he had always asked when he came home from work in the evening ever since she was quite little.

  Nowadays Pa’s opinion was confirmed by the wolf whistles that greeted her wherever she went, so she had no doubt that she could easily catch Jean-Luc’s eye. Indeed, last summer, whenever the two families had come across each other out on a long walk, she had positively enjoyed holding his gaze, although at that time they had little to talk about and the Countess had cast a very suspicious glare in her direction. She told herself defiantly, when challenged by the older woman’s behaviour, that her prospects were not as modest as might have been supposed from her background. Not only was she pretty, she was talented as well. Although people were always telling her that with her looks she ought to be a film star, that was not her major ambition and, despite all its glamour, came second best in her scheme of
things. She was determined to become a dancer, a ballerina, and that was the end to which she devoted herself in such waking hours as were not committed to tedious schoolwork.

  Jean-Luc was good-looking and faultlessly charming in an old-fashioned way. These qualities he had certainly not inherited from his mother, who made up for her lack of charm and grace in the energetic direction of matters of local concern – ­to the irritation of the mayor, whose authority she constantly usurped. In the village she was respected and admired, if somewhat feared on account of her forthright manner, whereas her husband, from whom Jean-Luc probably did inherit his dashing looks and wayward charm, was scarcely ever seen in Trémaincourt. “He’s so busy in Paris,” Madame de la Croix always explained.

  On the other hand, Madame de Grandval, over in Mont-Saint-Jean, a cousin by marriage of the de la Croix family, was much quieter and kinder, and treated the family with an affectionate courtesy. Her tumble­down château, with its profusion of brambles and nettles, would have made such an appropriate setting for the Sleeping Beauty that Shirley sometimes imagined that she was Princess Aurora and Madame de Grandval was the good fairy, if somewhat elderly. While her mother chatted with the old lady, she would turn her back on them and indulge this fancy by appearing to study the rusting piece of machinery, left there by some regiment or other after the Great War in gratitude for the hospitality of the château, but in fact giving her imagination free rein in this magical place.

  Ever since Shirley could remember, and certainly at least once during each of their stays at the family farm in northern France, Maman would insist on taking the track that emerged in the grounds of the château at Mont-Saint-Jean, and inevitably they would pass that monolithic piece of pockmarked equipment. “Ah, children,” she would say, if both her offspring were with her, “this old tank has been such a big part of my life. I have to come and see it to remind myself how important it was to your father and me.” She would indicate a bullet hole in the right-hand flank of the lumbering machine. “Do you see this? There, it’s still there! And look, that’s the hole made by the bullet that lodged in your poor Pa’s hip in the first tank offensive in the Battle of the Somme! Such a coincidence! This is the very tank that he was in!” Shirley and Ted would maintain impassive, bored expressions, as this story held little significance for them.

  The first time they heard it from their mother, the tale was lost on them because they were too young to understand, and these days, more than a decade later, talk of the Great War so remote from their own lives failed to interest them. They had heard it all so many times before: how Pa had volunteered to help the war effort when he read an advertisement summoning motorcycle mechanics to an interview in Birmingham. Abandoning his father’s workshop, he headed off for the interview and, in no time at all, found himself drafted into a motley company of engineers who, with no military training, were sent off to somewhere in Norfolk to await the arrival of the new secret weapon, the tank. Eventually they went to France in 1916 to join battle on the Somme, but the tanks available fell far short of the numbers required to mount an overwhelming surprise offensive: many ground to a halt in the mud and others were easy targets for the new metal-piercing German bullets. Pa was one of the victims, except that unlike the majority he was not killed, but escaped from the blazing machine and was helped to safety by a handful of straggling infantrymen who, their own forces decimated because the tanks had failed to obliterate the enemy, were hiding in shell craters until dark. Only then was it safe enough for them to make their way back to the British lines, dragging with them any other unfortunates they encountered on the way.

  Invalided out of the Heavy Section, Pa was sent home to England to recover, but on his discharge from hospital had been drafted to France again and had initially been posted to a desk job in the regimental HQ in the château at Mont-Saint-Jean, where he met and fell in love with Maman. She had trained as a secretary down in Saint-Pierre and learnt some English with old Madame Tisserand, who claimed to have English ancestry, before going to work at the château as a secretarial assistant. So intelligent and well respected was she that sometimes she was called upon to act as a courier, taking documents to the Bureau Central des Alliés, the Allied Headquarters in Paris.

  No sooner was Pa registered as fully fit than he was sent to supervise the tank workshops down in the valley, but this presented a problem for the young lovers, since he was expected to live in a billet down there, some three miles away. The solution was for Pa and Maman to marry, so that he could move into the farmhouse with her and her parents, and cycle down the hill to work every morning. The commander declared the situation highly irregular, but he agreed to it out of gratitude for Pa’s invaluable expertise and Maman’s dedication to the cause, and moreover he provided the newly-weds with a sumptuous champagne reception, which took place in the de Grandval château. A photo of the wedding party standing on the steps of the house stood on a shelf at the farm, and there was another one on the sideboard at home back in London. A younger Madame de Grandval, together with her husband, since deceased, featured in all the photos. So, although it could hardly be said that they were close friends, it did appear that there had been a mutual understanding and respect, derived from the shared experiences of wartime, between the unpretentious noble lady and unassuming but hard-working little Maman.

  Wedded bliss was short-lived for the Anglo-French couple: in the critical months before the tide turned, every able-bodied tank engineer was called back into active service to confront the last-ditch German counteroffensive that threatened the workshops down in the valley and even the local villages and the two châteaux. Pa, who was regarded as able-bodied according to the criteria of the moment, was no exception, and once again he found himself in the cramped, stuffy interior of a tank going blindly into battle. In Maman’s opinion it was particularly on account of this, his second exposure to the front line, that he had become so badly damaged: he had been injured a second time, in more or less the same place, by a German bullet. Far worse than that was the effect of the numerous tank sorties in which he had been involved, and which had left him listless and depressed, prone to hallucinations and nightmares.

  If the double damage to Pa’s hip had left him with a permanent limp and much discomfort, even more troubling for the family were the long spells of melancholy into which he would sink periodically. Horrific memories arose to haunt him day and night, causing him to scream out in his sleep or sit motionless and expressionless for hours on end. Maman used to sit with him, patiently soothing his anguish, encouraging him with her bright smile and eventually restoring his good spirits, though her encouragement had never been enough to persuade him to revisit France. Of late, nineteen years after the end of the war, her patience with him seemed to be wearing a little thin, and her reactions to his so-called “black days and nights” had sometimes grown peevish. It was obvious that she longed for her native country and missed her parents, Pépé and Mémé, the children’s grandparents.

  The maid who came to the door at Mont-Saint-Jean was new and did not recognize Maman. Her manner was brusque, and when Jacqueline asked if Madame de Grandval was at home, she answered sharply that Madame was not well and should not be disturbed. Jacqueline was disappointed, and Shirley was indignant, but there was no arguing with the maid, so mother and daughter had to set off forlornly back to Trémaincourt. “Let’s call on Madame de la Croix now, shall we?” Maman suggested. “Though I’m sorry that poker-faced maid would not let us visit Madame de Grandval. I know she would have been pleased to see us and, who knows, we might have been able to cheer her up.” Shirley was less than happy about seeing Madame de la Croix, but to humour her mother she agreed.

  They took the short cut through the woods to Trémaincourt and found the château there closed up. Céline was out, but while they were standing wondering what to do next, old Claude, one of the stable hands, came stumbling out of a barn. After the Great War that château had for a couple of years b
ecome a hospital for some of the local victims of warfare, one of whom, Claude, his face disfigured and his mind damaged by German shrapnel, was one of those patients. There, in the château, he had received treatment, rehabilitation, lodging and, eventually, work, and so had become a permanent inhabitant, living in the cowshed and receiving his food from the kitchen. He managed to impart the information that the house was empty, and Madame and the family were away. Shirley’s relief at not having to face Mme de la Croix was tempered by a tinge of disappointment at not seeing Jean-Luc.

  2

  Before the war, Louise had run the grocer’s shop, the épicerie, in the village, while her husband Philippe ran the estaminet, where, as a rule, women did not enter, and men could relax with a beer or some rather stronger drinks, smoke, read the newspapers and play cards, darts, or jeu de grenouilles (frogs’ game), or jeu de marteau (hammer game), or other such favourites, often to the accompaniment of the accordion played by a local enthusiast. The two establishments were, in fact, the converted front rooms of the couple’s house, divided by the entrance. The épicerie was on the right of the front door and the estaminet on the left.

  The arrangement worked very satisfactorily for everyone: women shopped at the épicerie for the wide range of basic commodities that they could not concoct for themselves, such as dried raisins and currants, spices, household soaps and sugars, salt and yeast, plus a selection of medicaments, syrups and pastilles, painkillers, cures for insomnia, slimming products and ointments, for which otherwise they would have to make the journey to town. Louise also purveyed a few fabrics, cottons, linens and serge for making and repairing garments for everyday wear.

  After all the effort involved in spending too much money, her female customers could spend even more by sitting down with a cup of the coffee or other non-alcoholic beverage that plump, bustling, enterprising Louise started to provide when she became aware of the need for such a service. For male customers, the end wall of the épicerie was devoted to minor items of hardware filling the shelves, such as hammers, screwdrivers, nails and screws in boxes, candles and oil lamps, and a couple of forks and spades hanging from hooks for customers in urgent need of such utensils. In those early days, the men would take their purchases and go to join their friends in the estaminet away from the feminine chatter.