out from her eyes for the man she loved, but who had left her. ‘I wasn’t supposed to be in the city today—’
‘Does it matter, Mama? He’s all alone. Talk to him.’
Her hand gripped the knob tighter before she let go of it completely, putting her fingers to her lips. ‘I can’t.’ She turned away. ‘Not now. Not after—’
She clutched her chest, glancing at Charlotte’s boutique.
Damn my sister. ‘Let’s get you home.’
I moved to walk away and a spray of rosewater hit me like a pie in the face, the mist falling onto my arms and hands. ‘Collaborator,’ I heard in a breathy whisper. A woman in a striped shirt walked the opposite way.
‘Mme Dubois.’ The smell of the rose against my skin, and the faint taste of it in my mouth was as vile as a shot of sour milk.
‘Shake it off, Adèle,’ Mama said. ‘Shake it off.’
I watched Mme Dubois walk away, her floral skirt ruffling against her little legs. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever take a liking to rosewater.’
‘I understand why,’ she said.
Mama handed me a hanky from her pocketbook, and I wiped the mist from my face.
‘Mama,’ I said. ‘What were you doing at church? Since when are you Catholic?’
‘I’m Catholic,’ she said. ‘When I want to be.’
I gave her back the hanky, and she picked up the catchfly Charlotte had thrown on the ground. ‘Now,’ she said, wrapping the hanky around the catchfly’s sticky stem. ‘Let’s show this weed some respect.’ She threw her head back, smiling, and for a moment I saw a glimpse of the youthful woman she had been before the armistice, before Papa had left, when she looked more like Coco Chanel than a widow with grey streaking through her hair.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Respect.’
We walked down the street, the catchfly in Mama’s hands. ‘Mama, how’d you get here? I have Monsieur Morisset’s car.’
She looked at me, her eyes shifting slyly. ‘You’re not the only one with friends in Vichy.’
*
That night, Luc and I lay in the field behind the chateau on a blanket, wild grass growing up around us as we gazed into the speckled night sky. Catchfly had grown in patches, trying to take over the field as much as it had the hill. ‘You should have seen her eyes,’ I said, rolling over on my side to face him. ‘Like Pétain, in one of his posters…’
Luc let me go on about the face-to-face I had with Charlotte in the square, how even for Charlotte her attitude was very sharp toward Mama and me. The war had changed us all in some way, but Charlotte looked haggard, older than she should. Alone.
‘Makes me sad,’ I said. ‘Thinking of my sister. What she’s become.’ I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to spend what precious time I had with Luc talking about sad things, and switched the subject. ‘And then there was the call for catchflies from Le Combat.’
‘What?’ he said, and I told him the story. ‘That’s incredible! The paper could have called for anyone, résistants who mark cities with the Cross of Lorraine… or the V for Victoire. You, the Catchfly, caught their attention.’
Attention. I smiled slightly with this word, before telling him about Mme Dubois and the rosewater.
He brushed a lock of hair from my eyes. ‘She doesn’t know the truth about you.’
‘I know. Doesn’t make it any easier, people thinking I’m a collaborator.’
‘And what about Pauline?’ he said. ‘How is she?’
I played with the heart pendant he’d given me as I thought about Mama’s disposition—which had no doubt changed since I left for the convent. ‘I think the state of her and Papa’s relationship—Charlotte’s too—is taking a toll on her. I can see it in her eyes when she looks at me; sometimes her mind seems very far away and foggy. I could be Hitler himself and she wouldn’t know it.’
‘What about you?’ I said. ‘How are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Every few days you sleep somewhere else. God knows what kind of near misses you’ve had, especially with the Milice working with the Gestapo. You must feel drained.’
Luc fell to his back and expelled all the air from his lungs. ‘You never hear of it,’ he said, ‘the exhaustion. But it’s there. Inside all of us.’ He patted my leg. ‘In you, too.’
We lay for many minutes thinking quiet thoughts, the stars sparkling, with the light buzz of field bugs moving about in the grass. We shared swigs of whisky from his flask, our bare feet