Half in Shadow: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY GEMMA LIVIERO

  In a Field of Blue

  The Road Beyond Ruin

  Broken Angels

  Pastel Orphans

  Marek

  Lilah

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Gemma Liviero

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542026963

  ISBN-10: 1542026962

  Cover design by Kathleen Lynch/Black Kat Design

  CONTENTS

  LONDON

  PROLOGUE

  LOUVAIN, BELGIUM

  1. BROKEN TREATY

  2. THE PURGE

  LONDON

  3. TELEGRAM

  4. MOURNING

  5. A RECKONING

  6. TO THE FRONT

  BRUSSELS

  7. HOTEL MÉTROPOLE

  8. CIRCUMSTANCES

  9. THE WALK HOME

  10. THE GIFT

  11. POLICING

  12. THE NEWSPAPER

  FLANDERS

  13. DARKNESS

  BRUSSELS

  14. THE HOTEL ROOM

  15. LOST

  16. DISTRACTIONS

  17. FOUND

  18. THE MISSION

  19. WAITING

  20. THE SURPRISE

  21. CAUGHT

  22. ANGELS IN THE DARK

  23. THE PROMISE

  24. BACK INTO THE LIVING

  25. GOODBYE

  26. FATE AND FEELINGS

  27. WORD OF FRANZ

  28. NEWS OF ANJA

  29. AN END

  30. A FLAME IN THE WIND

  31. MURDER IN PLAIN SIGHT

  32. TIME TO LEAVE

  33. YVES’S BIRTHDAY

  34. FALLING

  35. DANGEROUS LIAISONS

  36. BOUND

  37. A SOLDIER RETURNS

  38. THE BELGIAN

  39. ON THE RUN

  40. CHOICES

  41. LIFE OR DEATH

  42. THE BORDER

  43. INTO THE DARK

  44. THE DAY OF THE END

  45. THE FUTURE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LONDON

  1938

  PROLOGUE

  ELEANOR

  My father was executed for the crime of desertion. This is declared in a letter from the War Office and confirmed by an office bearer at the bottom, unapologetic and seemingly supportive with a signature that is bold and decisive, and overbearingly underlined. This record that my mother keeps in a box in her bottom drawer, hidden beneath other papers, is one of the few links I have to Arthur Shine.

  This year I turned twenty-three. I was six years old when I first learned his name. The gulf between those two events had been sparsely filled with assumptions about my absent father. The answers my mother gave me were vague and short, but as children, and sometimes as adults, we accept the simple explanations we hear from those we trust. Though there were things unsaid that suggested my father wasn’t welcome in our house, even in death.

  There are no photographs of Arthur on display. I have been to the houses of others who lost their fathers, brothers, and sons in the Great War and all of them were enshrined in some way: in display cases, on mantelshelves, enlarged and featured in entranceways, sometimes with medals, certificates, and war memorabilia. A helmet, a final letter framed, a woollen coat lovingly preserved, a spoil from battle, or bottled foreign soil.

  From what I gleaned, my father’s desertion had led to the death and massacre of many of his own men in France, in the autumn of 1915. The description I have of his crime and service is lacking, along with other details of his life that might allow one to draw their own conclusions or understanding. One crime in isolation seems a most extraordinary, if not terrible, thing. But what of the pieces that make up the whole? What of the life that came before?

  What happened to his parents? I asked many years earlier when my mother, Harriet, was tending the rose beds that lined the sunny terrace, her golden strands of hair, in amongst the white, shining brilliantly in the sun.

  Whose? she asked.

  My father’s.

  She stopped digging and turned to look up at me, eyebrows raised, seemingly stunned by the question at first.

  I never knew them, she said, her expression then fixed and pleasant, and paper thin: a veneer to hide a pain I had not considered until then. Though her life began with wealth and privilege, the latter years had not been as kind to my mother.

  They died before I met your father, she said, turning back to the blooms and clipping needlessly at foliage that had already been trimmed.

  I know that already, Mum, I said.

  He comes from a line of miners, an only child.

  She paused.

  There isn’t really much else, she said, ending further intrusion to a period of her life she had closed the door to.

  I was fourteen at the time, and it wasn’t that I particularly wanted to know at all; it was that others had started to ask me about my missing parent: curious adults, teachers, friends, always about fathers, where they were born. The titles of men seemed more significant to some.

  The rest of the conversation I’ve forgotten because, like everything with my mother, any further querying would not have led me far. However, I do remember her gloves blackened with soil as she then proceeded to dig with her trowel more fiercely, and realising that I had driven her to memories she had no desire to revisit.

  Halfway through the war, my mother’s comfortable circumstances left her when my grandfather’s British textiles were no longer productive or competitive with those from American businesses and his country residence had to be sold. The allowance my mother had been receiving from her father’s money dwindled to the point where she was forced to apply for a war pension, only to be rejected. Widows of deserters did not receive the same benefits as others who had served. And by the time this pension rule was reversed, my mother was too ashamed to then make a claim. That much I had learned about Arthur and our situation by the time she died, as well as from other comments that would float about a room when her distant relatives were visiting, as if such words were insignificant, or as if I were considered too much of a dullard to absorb their true meanings. Lucky she has her mother’s lineage . . . Poor Harriet, having to carry such baggage . . .

  At the funeral earlier today, I read out the eulogy I had spent days preparing. Mum was a good woman who ultimately carved her own way in tumultuous times, who created a home for her only child, and who had nursed each of her parents in their final months of illness. She rarely missed a Sunday service, was particularly kind to children, and loved me. I could say all these things from my heart, and I loved her, too. I just couldn’t tell you what she thought about things, what her hopes were, or whether she was ever truly content.

  “Come and stay sometime,” said my mother’s cousin, who fared better in postwar industry. But they are only words that people say to allow them to escape present company.

  “Your mother sounds like she was a lovely woman,” said a dark-headed stranger with a French accent and a walking stick. I had seen him there at the back of the church in a light-grey suit that matched the silver streaks just above his ears. He was tall and smiled the whole time I spoke, which caused me to falter distractedly at one point. At the end of the service, as people milled about with sandwiches and tea, he approached me.

  “I am very sorry about your mother. I never knew her, but it was a great honour to serve with your father during the war,” he said, handing me a calling card and a small package wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. “Please feel free to contact me, but only when you’re ready, and if you wish to of course.”

  It was the first time I had heard something good about my father, and with so many questions I wasn’t sure where to start. But before I had a chance to ask him, I was interrupted by others stopping to wish me well, and by the time they departed, the stranger had disappeared.

  After the service, attended by Harriet’s acquaintances and relatives I barely know, I am relieved to be home. I grieve properly, noisily, after being so busy with the arrangements and various duties that surround a death. I hold a photo of my mother as a young woman, lamenting the short time we’d had together and how little I know about her early life.

  Outside, her garden is coming alive in spring, a burst of lime-green buds and a bickering pair of wrens, the heads of her fruit trees tilting eagerly toward the sun. I can see her there, too, if I shut my eyes. Without a doubt I will miss her.

  I stare at the calling card, with a name I don’t recognise, rolling it between my fingers idly while I try to remember if Mum ever mentioned him. Then I open the package to discover photographs of my father in civilian clothes, letters, and photographs of other people and places I have never heard of. I am temporarily transfixed by the handsome dark-haired man that I am connected to by birth, having never seen his image so clearly before. Th
ere is only one small photograph my mother had kept in a bureau, taken so poorly that most of Arthur’s features can’t be distinguished.

  I sift through the items several times and gain a sense of the history I’d been shielded from. I feel sad, angry, happy, and finally a sense of belonging, a second coming-of-age, as if, through these puzzle pieces, I am finally put together. I see my father for the first time, and also myself in the hard lines of his jaw, the tightly clenched mouth with its sense of determination.

  Then with a shaky hand, I open the letter personally addressed to me, and tears fall as I read the words, as I try not to judge my deceivers, as I find out my story has been based around a lie.

  LOUVAIN, BELGIUM

  AUGUST 1914

  1. BROKEN TREATY

  Yves is dead and Gisela has turned to stone. She has a photo in her hand that she isn’t looking at. Instead she stares at the face of the baroque clock. It ticks louder since Yves has died, demanding attention in the house that is now filled with whispers. Sounds have died with Yves: doors slamming, running steps, minor pointless words and arguments, the bustle of a thirteen-year-old boy and a frustrated mother.

  Josephine has prepared the eggs. She is the first to sit down at the table. She peels away pieces of cracked shell, dips a teaspoon into the yolk, and rubs the back of the scoop in a patch of sprinkled salt. She watches her mother stand up from the armchair and walk to the table mechanically. Her father enters the room and does the same, his black suspenders drooping at the sides of his trousers. The tears Josephine has swallowed have formed a glutinous lump in the back of her throat, constructing a barricade against the food.

  It is different in the house, as if they are too small for it, the house vast, rooms empty, people scattered. The walls now papered with tragedy, the outlook from every window bleak, and the air thick with disbelief.

  Where is Eugène? No one asks. Though it was always asked before the previous week. He was hard to tie down, in and out of the house at all hours. Now they know he is a fixture in his bedroom, angry and plotting, and talking to himself, cursing the Boche.

  Yves had run. Why did he run? Josephine tries to remember the moments before he did: firecrackers, shouts, screams, her hand shading her eyes at the sight of a giant balloon in the sky. When she’d looked down, he was lying still on the road, a tiny, dark hole growing larger on his back. He was gone, head turned on its side, eyes open, one arm curled around the top of his head. His small body in the position he would lie in bed. It was a stray bullet, said the men with pointed hats, without regret. They had to be careful. There were franc-tireurs around every corner.

  Yves had stopped holding Josephine’s hand. She missed his soft, hot, sometimes sticky grip. He had been at the age of wanting to stand on his own two feet, his toe on the first step toward manhood. Still wary of it: much hesitation, such a long way to climb. In the days before his death, he would reach for her hand when he wasn’t thinking, then draw it back again when he became aware. He infuriated her but fascinated her also: clever, funny, serious, and angry in the space of a day.

  We have to keep going, Gisela, Maurice said. The night before, Josephine had heard her parents talking in the bedroom below hers, catching only snatches of their conversation.

  What about Josephine? said her mother. Like Yves, she may never get the chance . . .

  Chance of what? Josephine wondered. Of love, most likely, of marriage, of children: her mother losing hope for a normal life for her family under occupation.

  On Josephine’s birthday at the beginning of the year, Gisela had leaned forward with a damp cloth to wipe a stain from her daughter’s blouse.

  You are a new woman today, she said.

  I was a new woman yesterday also, said Josephine.

  You have a smart mouth sometimes, but it is no good for an unmarried girl of your age. Think before you speak; then maybe you will find a husband.

  Happy birthday, Mouse! Xavier said to stop Josephine from responding, to prevent a quarrel.

  Maman says I am an old maid.

  Twenty-three? He scoffed. She doesn’t mean a lot of what she says. She is goading you into marriage. You are still young. You are still of childbearing age.

  Josephine pulled a face. Now you sound like Maman.

  Xavier laughed softly.

  He had been joking of course. He has always been the one who understands.

  Xavier is a parent’s gift. He had trained to be a doctor and is now a priest, living and tutoring at the university. He is the oldest of four, then Eugène, then Josephine, then Yves, who was a mistake, a timing error as Gisela had called his conception, because she always says exactly what is on her mind. Not like her father, whose thoughts are often directed into his coffee cup initially, and any words then distributed with care.

  Her parents get up from the table and back to what they were doing before. Yves is gone, and it seems he has taken them as well.

  Josephine sinks beneath the bedcovers and listens to the darkness. Hobnailed boots scrape the cobbles, trolleys clatter, horses trot, and cannonade rumbles low in the distance. Voices somewhere, conversations in German, raised and joyful. They have won this round. A single shot sounds from somewhere in the town, and Josephine flinches. The smell of scorched earth and sweat catches on the breeze and contaminates her room.

  Carry on! said the invaders. A few people were killed, and things can continue the same. Though much has changed. People aren’t stupid. Posters are placed on public buildings, demanding order and threatening execution if there is any attempt to resist, even word of it. Rumour has it that women are being raped in villages, children killed. Rumours are like clay, they are told, and shaped by the people who tell them. Get on with your day. There is nothing to see here, they say.

  Yves’s bed lies abandoned under shifting moonlight. She stares at his sheets, imagines a shape there. She had crept over to his bed earlier to lay her cheek against his pillow so she could keep him with her during the day.

  Why did you let go of his hand, Josephine? The first question asked by Eugène.

  She puts her head under the pillow, on a patch of tears that have not yet dried, to smother the whimpers of her mother and the pacifying words of her father below. Also beneath her in another bedroom, Eugène paces the floor, drops something heavy, curses at whatever it is.

  She has stepped through what happened over and over, and still there is no answer to Eugène’s question.

  Josephine had woken up, watched the light inch toward Yves’s head to catch the lighter strands of his hair and spin them into gold. He raised his head to view her, hair kneaded into knots on the side he slept on.

  “Did you hear the bombs?” she asked.

  “No.”

  He rubbed his fists into eyes that were stuck with sleep.

  She checked that Papa’s old camera was still on the floor beside the bed, that Eugène hadn’t squirrelled it away during the night, since they shared the use of it. Maurice had promised to purchase one of the newer ones, lighter to carry, for Josephine’s personal and business use, now that her interest in her photography had begun to outgrow her mother’s scepticism about her daughter’s career choice.

  “Yves,” Josephine said. “You snore like Eugène, but worse. More like a grunting hog.”

  He broke into a smile, poked out his tongue. She jumped up, then straddled him and tickled him until he screamed, and below them Eugène threw something at the ceiling, woken up like an angry bear, often sleeping late. It was not unusual for him to be awake for much of the night, painting or drawing or pacing with insomnia. It was the reason Yves had moved to her attic room. Eugène was difficult to live with sometimes.

  Highly strung, Maurice would say about their middle son. Sensitive, Gisela would counter.

  Yves had been small for his age, most in his class a head taller. He never ran with the other boys down to the creek. He would come straight home, and Gisela would put his head over steam.

  “He has my lungs unfortunately,” said Gisela, looking at him, brows together.

  Josephine dressed and followed the smell of burnt sugar and butter down to the kitchen.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  Josephine refused to provide answers her mother already knew. She knew, for instance, that she had to call twice for Yves. That he had likely moved to the desk in their bedroom to continue painting his miniature wooden fleet of ships.