The Collaborator Read Online Free

lying and shifting slightly in little eddies of air. The sky has clouded over, so it has a smudged, bleary look, like window-glass that needs cleaning. It’s a grey, dirty, rather disconsolate day. Frank drops us at the harbour, wishing us luck. We see at once why the streets were empty: all the people are here. There’s already a very long queue of silent, anxious islanders, snaking back from the pier and all along the Esplanade. We go to a desk set up on the pavement, where a flustered woman ticks off our names on a list. She has a pink, mottled face, and disordered hair that she keeps distractedly pushing out of her eyes.
    We join the queue. People are sweating in woollen coats too cumbersome to pack up: they take out their handkerchiefs, wipe the damp from their skin. On this clammy summer day, the winter colours of the coats look sombre, almost funereal. Some people don’t have suitcases, and have tied up their belongings in neat brown-paper parcels. A bus arrives, and children spill down the steps; most of them have labels carefully pinned totheir coats. They have a lost, dazed look in their eyes. Older children officiously clutch at younger brothers and sisters, responsibility weighing on them, clasping at a coat collar or the cuff of a sleeve.
    Millie stares at the children. She frowns. She holds very tight to my hand.
    Blanche is wearing her coral taffeta dress beneath her winter coat. She unbuttons her coat and runs her hand over her skirt, trying to smooth out the creases in the glossy fabric.
    ‘Oh,
no,
Mum,’ she says suddenly.
    Her voice is full of drama; my heart pounds, hurting my chest.
    ‘What is it?’ I say sharply.
    ‘I think I’ve forgotten my Vaseline. My skin will get all chapped.’
    I feel a little cross with her, that she frightened me like that.
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. ‘We’re all sure to have forgotten something.’
    ‘It
does
matter, Mum. It does.’
    We stand there for what seems like a very long time. The queue is orderly, subdued: nobody talks very much. Seagulls scream in the empty air above us, and there are many boats at anchor; you can hear the nervous slap and jostle of water round their hulls. The sun comes briefly out from the cloud, throwing light at everything, then rapidly snatching it back; where the sun isn’t shining on it, the sea looks black and unspeakably cold. I can’t see the boat that will take us to Weymouth—it must be moored out of sight. The only vessel that’s moored to this part of the pier is quite a small boat, not much bigger thanthe fishermen use, tied up where stone steps lead down from the pier to the sea. I wonder vaguely who it belongs to.
    More and more people come, with their coats, their suitcases, their bulging parcels of precious belongings: with the fear that seems to seep like sweat from their pores.
    ‘Will I have my own room at Auntie Iris’s?’ Blanche asks me.
    ‘No, sweetheart. It’ll be a crush. You’ll probably have to sleep in the back bedroom with the boys.’
    ‘Oh,’ she says, digesting this. It isn’t quite what she’d hoped for. ‘Well, I don’t mind. It might be quite fun, really, sharing a room.’
    ‘What does London look like?’ says Millie.
    ‘You’ll love it,’ says Blanche. She relishes being asked this—she loves being the expert on London. ‘The women have beautiful clothes, and the trains go under the ground, and there’s a park with pelicans …’
    I understand Blanche’s yearning for London: sometimes I long for it too, even after all these years away, remembering the thrilling hum of the city, the people so different from island people, so much more vivid and purposeful, the yellow lamplight on smoky streets, the slow brown surge of the Thames. I remember too the sense of possibility—of a world that’s freer, wider, more open than this island. I share her excitement for a moment, allowing myself a spark of hope—that there could be good things about this, in spite of the war.