The French Promise Read Online Free

before she’d inhaled its scent, her lips dangerously close to its velvet promise. It transported herto Saignon in Provence and its orchard groves of stone fruit that had spread for acres around their village.
    To eat the apricot would be more damaging than to resist it … Rachel could imagine what its taste would do for her yearning, how it might break her resolve to survive, how it would curdle in her belly at the thought that she was enjoying too many privileges.
    ‘No, thank you, Hans-Rudolf.You keep it,’ she’d said quietly, putting it back into his hands.
    ‘I cannot,’ he’d said casually. ‘Not now. Mama says we mustn’t touch anything a prisoner touches,’ he’d added in his childlike innocence.
    ‘But what about the piano? I touch that,’ she’d countered.
    ‘The piano is wiped down with stuff from a bottle,’ he’d said matter-of-factly, opening his book of music. She’d had to look away forfear of weeping.
     
    Rachel’s baldness had frightened the younger ones and apparently disgusted the eldest, Ingebrigitt, so she’d been permitted to grow her hair. Ingebrigitt had also demanded her mother provide their piano teacher with a scarf to hideRachel’s ugly head, and the silken, plain red square she was given, after so long without anything of her own, might as well have been an Hermèsscarf. Even so, she wanted to refuse it but daren’t. Ingebrigitt had wrapped it around Rachel’s head.
    ‘There,’ she said, impressed. ‘Now I can look at you without feeling uncomfortable.’
    Heidetraut, the youngest, also found Rachel’s skeletal appearance daunting and didn’t want to sit next to her at the piano. Her mother saw to it that Rachel was given an extra slice of bread – withoutsawdust – and some cheese daily before lessons, which she insisted Rachel eat in front of her. It had taken many days to acclimatise her belly to the cheese and real bread. Her scarce, monotonous diet of mostly hot water and potato skins meant her system was shocked by the arrival of richer food to digest. The commander’s wife, Hedwig, insisted a soft job be found at ‘Canada’ for Rachel when shewas not teaching her children. Canada was so-called because it was the ‘place of plenty’ at Auschwitz, where all the stores were kept and where the black market flourished. Anything from a pair of boots to a new shawl could be had for a price. The madwoman Ruth had learnt early how to use the most popular female currency to acquire items but Rachel preferred to go without.
    But now, suddenly, shehad privilege. And it sickened her, particularly how easily she had embraced the warmth of the fire in the music room, the soft piano stool to sit on, the sip of fresh water in a real glass left for her … and, above all, the food. Then there was the scarf, of course, which Frau Hoss sought permission for her to wear all the time.
    ‘It makes it easier for Rachel to be found, my dear,’ she’d saidto her husband one day when he’d frowned at Rachel’s privileged appearance.
    Rachel gained some weight, could now feel hair sprouting, had clean skin and scrubbed nails. She smelt better and her eyes were clearer, according to Albert, who stole conversations with her at Canada when she sorted possessions from the suitcases of the new arrivals off the trains.
    The children were superiorin attitude but not deliberately unkind; Frau Hoss was remote with her but that was to be expected. Hedwig had a softer side and clearly loved her children. Rachel could tell that the deluded woman had little, if any, idea of the horror going on outside her walls. She’d once overheard Hedwig describing the villa, surrounded by gardens, high walls and green fields stretching beyond, as a ‘paradise’.
    Even so, Rachel’s life had taken a slight turn for the better and she sometimes caught herself daydreaming that she might find Sarah a role in the household too.
    But the arrival of a new, keen member of the Gestapo changed everything.