Anne Bennett - The Child Left Behind

‘More than your mother?’

‘I’m not sure what I feel about my mother,’ Finn admitted. ‘I was afraid of her for so long.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘I suppose that I have tried to respect her, but, hand on heart, I can’t say I love her. Biddy Sullivan, I would say, is a hard woman to love.’

‘What a shame,’ Gabrielle said, and then added, ‘Biddy is a strange name. Is it Irish?’

‘I suppose it is,’ Fin said. ‘Her full name isn’t Biddy, of course, it’s Bridget.’

‘Bridgette,’ Gabrielle said. ‘That is like the French name Brigitte, and it is a shame to shorten it to Biddy.’

Finn laughed. ‘It’s lovely the way you say it.’

‘And isn’t it a tragedy for people who never experience love in their lives?’ Gabrielle went on. ‘My father is the same. Somehow, I cannot imagine my mother ever loving him.’

‘From what you say,’ Finn said with a broad grin, ‘I imagine that my mother and your father would suit one another. Maybe we should maroon the two of them on a desert island somewhere.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Gabrielle giggled. ‘Maybe your mother loves your father, though. You said before that he is the only one that she listens to.’

‘That’s right, but I don’t know whether that is love or not. My father is a good man, and one I always tried to please, and yet nothing I did was quite good enough. In a way it is my father’s fault I enlisted.’

‘Did he want you to?’

Finn laughed. ‘Just the opposite. I did it, in a way, to spite him.’

‘Do you regret it?’

‘No,’ Finn said, putting his arms around Gabrielle as they sat on the sofa, ‘though I did think that a soldier’s life is more exciting than it is. I also thought I might get treated more like a man, after being at the beck and call of my father and brothers, only to find that in the army I am at the beck and call of all and sundry. But then I came to St-Omer and I met you, and my life was turned upside down because I love you with everything in me.’

‘I am the same,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Without you my life is worth nothing.’ She lifted her face as she spoke and their eyes locked for a moment, then their lips met in a kiss that left Gabrielle gasping for more.

Since they had made love that one time, their lovemaking had got more daring so that as January gave way to February and then March—coming in like the proverbial lion, gusting through the streets of St-Omer—not only did Finn know every area of Gabrielle’s body, she had began to explore his too. Finn had wanted her to do this and she had begun tentatively and timidly, hardly able to believe that she was actually touching the most private parts of a man.

In the cold light of day afterwards, just the thought of doing so had embarrassed her so much she grew hot with shame. In the heat of passion, though, it was different, and anyway, when she saw how much pleasure she gave Finn, she persevered. Her one desire in life was to please him. They did come dangerously close to making love again a few times, but Finn always made sure they stopped short of it and although this made him as frustrated as hell, he would not go any further.

Gabrielle, however, was still remarkably naïve about how babies were conceived, or how they got out once they were inside a woman, because she had been told nothing. She didn’t have the advantage of girls reared on a farm who might see the animals mating and, later, the birth of the babies, and she had no friend with a confiding married sister or young aunt who could have put her right about things.

She knew the Church had said it was wrong to go with a man until a woman was married, but no one had told her what that actually meant. She had no doubt, though, that they would say what she and Finn was doing was a sin, because the Church semed to see sin in everything enjoyable and she certainly had no intention of telling in the confessional anything she and Finn were doing. How could you explain things like that to a man, even if he was a priest?

She didn’t know either why the bleeding that used to happen every month had stopped. When it had begun two years before and she had thought she was dying, her mother just told her that it was something that happened to women. It wasn’t to be discussed, and certainly not with men, and there was no need to make a fuss about it. She hadn’t been told that it had anything to do with fertility, and so when she didn’t have a monthly show of blood, she didn’t automatically associate it with what she and Finn had been doing.

Neither did Mariette, who knew nothing of her daughter’s nocturnal sojourn with a British soldier. She did know, however, that there had been no bloodied rags in the bucket she had left ready and she said to Gabrielle, ‘Funny that your monthlies should have stopped. Do you feel all right?’

‘Yes,’ Gabrielle said. ‘In fact I have never felt better.’

‘Well, you certainly look all right,’ Mariette said.

And Gabrielle did. She had developed a bloom on her skin that had not been there before because she was thoroughly loved by a man she loved in return. Even her not very observant parents noticed in the end and remarked on it, and many of the customers said the same, while Finn thought she had never looked more beautiful.

‘We’ll leave it for now then,’ her mother said, ‘but if they don’t return then I will ask the doctor to have a look at you. Just as well to be on the safe side.’

However, other matters took precedence. At the end of March, Yvette was fourteen and would be leaving school at Easter. In early April, Aunt Bernadette wrote to Gabrielle, repeating the invitation she had made at Christmas.

‘I don’t really know how I can refuse this time,’ Gabrielle confessed to Finn.

‘When are they arriving?’ Finn asked.

‘After the schools are closed, and that is less than two weeks away.’

‘Darling, I might be gone before then,’ Finn said. ‘The camp is on high alert. Any day we expect orders to move out.’

‘Oh, Finn…’

‘Go on with your uncle and aunt to Paris,’ Finn urged. ‘It might make it easier for you.’

Gabrielle tossed her head impatiently. ‘Nothing will make the loss of you easier.’

Finn put his arm around her and gave her a squeeze. ‘My darling,’ he said, ‘in many ways I wish you and I had not met and fallen in love because it will be harder for us to part. But part we must and our lives must take different paths for some time. When the Army says “March”, then I must march.’

Distressed though Gabrielle was, she knew Finn spoke the truth, and she wished she could hold back time, even for just a little while. Once Finn left St-Omer she would be desperately worried about him. As so many soldiers had already left, he and Christy had been drafted in to help with the wounded again. She was aware that more and more came every day and the hospitals were filled to breaking point.

The talk around the Jobert table at night, and often in the shop too, was of the number of Allied soldiers, and especially British, that had been killed or injured on the battlefield so far, of the disbanded camp, and more and more troops going off to join the carnage being enacted in many areas of France.

Gabrielle never contributed in such discussions. In fact, if she could have done so she would have stopped up her ears so that she didn’t hear such things. She wasn’t stupid, and knew that when Finn left here he would probably soon be in danger, and could well become one of the casualties, but her love was so deep and all consuming that she imagined he could fold it around him like a cloak and it would protect him from any German onslaught.

Bernadette and Raoul arrived in the middle of April, and wished to return the following day. That shook Gabrielle, who thought that she might have another few days’ grace and, despite the risks, she had to see Finn one more time. She communicated this to him in a note that she gave him with his change in the bakery that morning.