Page 6 of The Resistance Book Club

She admired the breathtaking shapes and colours of couture designs, the way the fabrics draped just right. For all that high fashion was exclusive and expensive, it was an art form too, an extraordinary expression of creativity. With Lucy’s love of reading and writing, too, it was no wonder that she’d eventually ended up working atGlitzmagazine.

There was an irresistible glamour to busy city life; the bright lights, the shop windows, the restaurants and theatres, the thousands of people who were always going somewhere. Once her father had decided to settle in London, Lucy had found her home there too. She had her job, she had her friends, she had her routines; the park she liked to jog round, the cafés she liked to have lunch at, the art galleries she loved to visit.

She simply couldn’t give up everything she’d built up in London, and turn down an amazing promotion, to live in a small fishing village on the Normandy coast.

Trailing her hand along the shelves, she made her way back to the front of the shop, feeling the spines of the books under her fingertips. The sensation made her feel close to Mémé. Touching something that she had once held.

Then, she heard music.

Lucy blinked, as if she was waking up. She’d been in a dream in the shop, and now, as she looked out through the window, she saw that evening was falling. A party was in full swing at Jojo’s, the bar across the road.

She needed to discover Mémé’s secret from the past, and she had to do it quickly, before she sold the bookshop. Now, it looked as if half the village was at Jojo’s; there had to be at least a couple of people there who might know something that would help her. Lucy grabbed the handle of her suitcase and headed out into the street.

FOUR

MARGOT

Cordeval, Autumn 1941

Margot had got up early to stand in the queue outside the bakery, watching golden and orange leaves dance in circles along the cobbled street. Now she was back home, her face pink from the cold, salty wind from the sea, with a small brioche.

She ate half of it at her kitchen table with a scrape of jam, and would save the rest for lunchtime. She had her now-usual cup of chicory coffee – the real thing was so hard to find – and closed her eyes as the steam melted against her face, remembering for a moment what life had been like, before the Germans had invaded.

After breakfast, she came downstairs to the bookshop to sweep the varnished wooden floor and polish the brass till. Once the shop was tidy, she unlocked the front door and turned the sign toOuvert– Open.

Her first customer was Elodie Masson, one of the village’s schoolteachers, who had come by for some pencils and a Babar the Elephant storybook to give as a prize. Then a small deliveryof books arrived, the paper thin, the cover design very plain; the publishers were making so many cutbacks because everything was in such short supply.

The books weren’t pretty, but they still contained stories that wanted to be told. It saddened her, though, that the only books the publishers could send her were ones that passed muster with the country’s narrow-minded occupiers.

She began tidying the shelves of gardening books. A few had sold today; although they weren’t too pinched for food in the countryside, it paid to be wise and people were growing their own. She’d heard stories of Nazis commandeering crops, and sending the produce back to Germany. What were the people of France supposed to feed themselves on? Fresh air?

She went back behind the counter and, after a quick glance into the street, checked through the newspapers and string she’d hoarded on the shelves underneath. Each sheet of newspaper and each piece of string would wrap a banned book. It was an enormous risk, but there wasn’t any choice. She could either do something or live with her guilt at doing nothing at all.

When she’d come back to Cordeval from Rouen after her husband’s death, Margot had felt as if her world had fallen to pieces. She’d lost her father when she was a child, and her mother had died not long before her wedding. Serge had been her world, and suddenly she was without him.

But with her friends around her, she’d found hope. She used to work as a secretary for a book distributor in Rouen. When she’d typed up letters to send out to bookshops across France, she’d loved to imagine owning her own shop.

And so, with the help of her friends and her Aunt Sandrine, she’d opened her own bookshop in Cordeval. What else could she have called it other than Les Pages d’Espoir – Pages of Hope? Hope was all she’d had left back then.

Hope was hard to come by in these times, but Margot clungon. She’d never planned to run a bookshop during a war. She’d never imagined she’d have to criss-cross tape across the wide windows and obscure her displays, to stop the glass flying if a bomb dropped. She couldn’t give up, even though she was barely selling enough books to make ends meet. People were struggling to get by, and the books she stocked were costing more and more, despite the paper getting thinner and the print smaller. But every time Elodie came to buy books, she reminded Margot how important it was that she kept the shop going. Everyone needed books, no matter how old they were, no matter if they wanted to find something out or be transported by a story.

Occasionally, German soldiers came into the shop, and she tried her best to be polite to them. She didn’t like accepting their money or their custom, but if she banned them the life she’d carefully rebuilt after Serge’s death would be torn from her. Margot had wondered if she should start stocking German-language books, just to make more sales, but she decided she had to draw a line at that.

Aunt Sandrine polished the shop’s shelves once a week with beeswax, and they shone. There were novels and histories, works of philosophy, guides for fishing, maps for tourists, but of course nothing on display was on theListe Otto. What she kept in the cellar was a secret for her and the rest of the Resistance Book Club.

It was satisfying to quietly resist the occupation by leaving banned books around the village, wrapped in old newspaper. It didn’t seem that the Germans had noticed them yet; no doubt they were too busy trying to find Chevalier to be bothered by them.

Margot’s supply wasn’t huge, consisting only of what she’d had in her storeroom before the first list was issued. More books were added to theListe Ottoall the time, so there were bookssitting innocently on her shelves right now that, within a week or a month, could be banned too.

The ink inside the bottles on her stationery display started to tremble, and then she felt a vibration through her feet from the shop’s polished wooden floor.

Finally she heard it. A distant roar, getting louder and louder by the moment.

Margot’s heart was in her throat. For a moment, her breath caught at the fear that Allied planes were passing overhead, even though it was broad daylight. But no, the roar sounded as if it was coming up from the depths of the earth.

Through the stained-glass panels in the shop’s window, she saw Beatrice, running in the street. She threw open the door of the shop and told Margot breathlessly, ‘The SS are here! They’re looking for Chevalier!’

Margot looped one arm round Beatrice’s and drew her into the shop as she put her finger to her lips. What if the Nazis tore the village apart trying to find this man?