Louise Mangos - Her Husband’s Secrets

The other flowerbeds have now been cleared and freshly turned. The evidence of our hard work is strewn across the field on the far side of the courtyard like a freshly knitted quilt. Straight dark rows of rich earth shaped into corduroy furrows are ready for planting. A corrugated canvas prepared for some colour, after the slumbering weight of the winter has passed.

‘Your days of labour outdoors are not so many now. When the clearing is finished, we find you new work,’ she says.

I don’t need to be reminded I will soon be without the distraction of cultivation. Most of us who work in the garden will be assigned alternative jobs for the winter months. Only a few will be kept on to work in the greenhouses. It saddens me to think I will have to work indoors.

‘Do you know yet what your job will be? Or do you let them put you in the laundry?’ she asks as I shrug again. ‘You can choose, you know. You do not need to keep silent. You cannot close yourself off, cannot forever be so angry with everyone. It is not our fault that you are here. You can make your life easier.’

‘You sound like the shrink,’ I say not unkindly, and she’s surprised to hear me speak, always expects silence, unless I have a teacher’s book in front of me. ‘Are you looking for something?’

‘I want to find out whether you will think about working in one of the more creative work stations.’

‘Jobs? I’m not bothered. We all get the same wage. I guess I’ll let you lot decide.’

Müller turns back to my drawings. ‘But you could use your skills, perhaps even enjoy what you do,’ she says, and I snort.

‘May I?’ she asks, and waits for a tilt of my head before sifting through my sketches, devoting time to a few that interest her, while I think about what she has said about the job assignment.

Most of the women here used to fight for work that paid the best rates. Now everyone gets paid the same. It’s not much, but at least there’s less of a dispute.

Fatima and Dolores work in the pottery studio in the west wing. They have turned some beautiful pots. It’s hard to believe that these angry, volatile women create pieces decorated with such delicately fashioned and carefully glazed porcelain petals and leaves. When I first came here, I visited the studio, admiring the rows of pots waiting to be fired in the kiln. But I snapped up the job I was offered in the garden to be outside in the fresh air. The regimental attention to detail of planting seeds, row upon row, helped to settle my mind. Nurturing a new generation of plant life, watching things grow. I forgot that by autumn everything would be dead.

We grow things for the community. Our goods are either used in the prison kitchen, or taken to local markets. And there’s a shop inside the prison gates where locals come from the surrounding villages to buy our organically grown produce.

By Müller’s reckoning I may automatically be assigned a job in the laundry for the winter, but I can see something ticking away in her mind, and I begin to think this is not the first time she has looked at my art. The more creative jobs of weaving and mandala design nevertheless incite a feeling of monotony in my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that everyone has a job, but I’ll let them decide where to put me.

I look at JP’s picture on the wall. My personal little icon. Something to worship. God, I miss him so much. I wonder if JP has inherited some of my artistic leanings. At this stage in his stick-man art, it’s hard to tell. By his age I was drawing ponies at the kitchen table from morning until night.

Müller puts her hand on top of the pile of sketches.

‘These are really good, Frau Smithers. It is pleasing to see you use your creativity.’

There she is again, going on about my creativity. But I nevertheless lap up her compliment, knowing it’s a rarity between guards and inmates, and I award her the slip of a smile. She turns to leave.

‘Take raincoat off heater. Es schmilzt ,’ she says gruffly, and I listen to her footsteps retreat down the corridor.

I glance at the pile of drawings and consider that they are hardly my best work. When I run out of reading material, it’s the drawing that keeps me occupied. I have to fill my free time with something. To stop the chimera of bitter revenge raising its ugly head. The demons of injustice are still present, and it will be a while before I manage to exorcise them all. Probably not until the day I leave this place.

I sit at the desk and tear another sheet of A4 from my pad. It’s not great quality paper, but at least I have something to draw on. I put in an order for some paper a while ago from an art shop in Lausanne, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Pencil poised, I breathe deeply, relishing the smell of melting plastic on the radiator behind me, and prepare to create another illusion.

* * *

Seven years ago

My beach in Greece could wait. The wistfulness of saying farewell to those leaving for the summer, and the uncomfortable feeling that I was getting myself into something I couldn’t handle, lessened each day. Anne’s wise advice ignored, I was a bona fide love-struck teenager.

I didn’t confront Matt with the story Anne and Terri had told me about Leila, not then, but kept it to myself. Instead I turned his unspoken confession into my own goal of healing his supposedly broken heart, without pressuring him into any kind of a relationship. I had no intention of tainting our courtship with questions about past girlfriends, painting myself as the jealous successor. If he considered his association with Leila unfinished, then I would wait for him to divulge it to me in his own time, would expect him to offer his honourable confession. But if he remained silent about her, then in my mind his liaison with her was over, finished. I was his new horizon. Ignore a smug cat for long enough and it will eventually crawl into your lap.

And the other rumour? I put it down to jealousy. Others will often find fault with someone they wish they could be like.

One day when the snow had melted, Matt and I hiked through the forest to a viewpoint known as the Eagles’ Nest, high above the Rhône Valley. Perched on a boulder, we admired the view across to the French ski resorts. The cliff dropped a thousand metres vertically, a stone’s throw from where we sat. Through the haze, Matt pointed out a village below us in the distance on the grey smudge of Lac Léman, and told me it would soon be time to put his boat back in the water.

‘You fascinate me, Lucille. Most girls I meet want something more. They’re always working a game to get a part of me, but you’re so free and easy. You weren’t looking for anything when you turned up on my mountain, and you haven’t expected anything of me. I appreciate that.’

‘I’ve enjoyed our time together so far,’ I offered timidly.

I knew by not defining our relationship, he was under no pressure to categorise it himself. ‘And maybe I’m happy to stick around. I have no plans, no obligations.’

‘That’s it, I think. The no obligation bit. It makes me want you to stick around.’

Matt put his arm tightly around my waist. I was impressed with his honesty. He surely wasn’t hiding anything.

‘Anne is letting me stay on her sofa while I look for work. She’s now renting a place of her own.’

I winced inside with the memory of my conversation with Terri and Anne.

Matt and I leaned in to each other, enjoying the view. He took off his shirt in the unexpected warmth, the sun shining on the niche where we sat on the rocks, our bodies protected from the wind by the granite at our backs.

‘You must let me draw you one day. You have perfect muscle form for the artist’s eye. I could do you in pastel, charcoal, even acrylic.’