All the Ways We Said Goodbye

by Beatriz Williams

  Aurélie clutched the bit of paper. Maybe it was her imagination, but she could smell her mother’s perfume, the scent made just for her by the house of Caron. “I hadn’t thought that you and my mother were on writing terms.”

  “They say war makes strange bedfellows.” Her father made an expansive gesture with one tweed-clad arm. “Just because I can’t live with your mother doesn’t mean I don’t have the greatest admiration for her abilities. Why do you think I let her have charge of you?”

  “Because I wasn’t a son.”

  She’d never said it, never even allowed herself to think it, but there it was. Her mother, her despised mother, had wanted her. Her father hadn’t.

  Her father clasped his hands behind his back, looking distinctly uncomfortable. “A girl needs her mother.”

  “A mother who isn’t received because her husband won’t live with her? They shunned me in the Faubourg. They treated me like a mongrel. If you had been there—” Years of hurt came pouring out. Her father never thought of her, not then, not now. She was crushing the precious message in her hand. Aurélie forced herself to relax her fingers, before she smudged the writing beyond repair. “If you admired my mother so much, why couldn’t you bring yourself to live with her?”

  “Your mother was the one who left me,” her father snapped.

  That wasn’t quite how Aurélie remembered it. She remembered the fights about everything, about her mother’s friends, her dress, her lack of refinement. And her mother fighting back with complaints about her father’s mistresses, his gambling, his horses. She would, her father had told her, in the ultimate insult, have understood if she were French. And, somehow, they had been left alone in the great house in the Faubourg. Her father’s brushes and shaving soap had disappeared from his dressing room, along with the valet who had let Aurélie build houses out of her father’s used playing cards and sniff all the mysterious lotions in his dressing case. He had gone on an extended trip, and the next thing Aurélie knew the house had been shut up around them and she and her mother had, like refugees, taken up residence in the Ritz, where her mother’s Americanness wasn’t quite so foreign.

  “That was all a long time ago,” said her father, as if it could be dismissed so easily as that. “Your mother and I understand each other. May I have the message?”

  “Will you tell me what’s in it?” Aurélie asked.

  “Nothing you need to know.”

  Just as she hadn’t needed to know all those years ago. Go back to the nursery, they had told her. This is no matter for little girls. But it was. It was her life, her country, her concern.

  “I could be a help to you,” Aurélie said. “I want to be a help to you.”

  Her father put a hand on her shoulder. It was the sort of gesture that would once have made her wiggle like a puppy wagging its tail. “You are a help to me,” he said. “Your work in the village—it keeps the little major in a stew. And as long as he’s looking the wrong way . . . the real work can go on.”

  “That’s all I’ve been? A distraction?” She wondered what it was he had done on Christmas Eve, that he had needed to chivy her down to the village, a decoy. She had thought it was because she was his daughter, the lady of the house, carrying on in the fine tradition of the ladies of Courcelles. Because these were her people, too. But, no. She was just a distraction. A pawn.

  “Not just a distraction,” said her father, plucking the note from her limp hand. “An excellent distraction. Your friend was the only one with brains enough to have noticed what we’re doing, but you’ve kept him in such a froth, he scarcely remembers his own name.”

  He smiled at her approvingly, but Aurélie didn’t feel the warmth of it. Her chest felt tight, as though she’d received a blow.

  “We?” she echoed. “What we’re doing?”

  “Don’t ask me more,” said her father, as though she were six again and begging for sweets. “The less you know, the safer it is.”

  Safer for whom?

  Aurélie watched her father go, wondering just what it would take to make him trust her—and if he had ever viewed her as truly his own.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Daisy

  Jardin des Tuileries

  Paris, France

  July 1942

  Madeleine bestrode her horse calmly, but Olivier wouldn’t sit still. He kept turning and pointing as the carousel went around, laughing and straining and almost falling off. Daisy, her nerves shredded, kept starting forward from the bench, but Legrand stopped her.

  “You have to trust them,” he said. “You have to let them make mistakes.”

  “Easy to say when they’re not your own.”

  Legrand removed his hand from her elbow and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “That’s true.”

  “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”

  He twiddled his thumbs for a moment, staring at the carousel as it revolved endlessly before them. The delighted screams of children. Mere yards away, the German staff cars rolled up and down rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde, ferrying the enemy from café to office to luxury hotel, but here in the Tuileries, in front of the ancient carousel, you could almost pretend that Paris was as it had always been, that the occupation was just a terrible dream. That you were just sitting here on this bench to watch your children play, and that the man beside you was not some agent for the Resistance that you met by arrangement, but your lover, your husband, the father of these children you watched together.

  “My parents left me to my own devices, more or less,” said Legrand. “They were both artists.”

  “Yes, I remember. Your father was a writer, and your mother a painter.”

  “Yes. Well. They were devoted firstly to their creative passions and secondly to each other. Children came a rather distant third.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. We knew they loved us, and we had each other. I learned how to fend for myself, how to get myself out of scrapes. And I never had to strain against the straitjacket of parental expectations, or whatever you want to call it. They allowed us to become pretty much whatever we pleased.”

  As he spoke, Daisy stared at his latticed fingers, and the gold of the signet ring that glimmered dully between them. The two swans, necks entwined. She thought of her own childhood within the walls of the Ritz, which had sometimes felt like a playground—if a decidedly adult playground—and other times like a prison.

  “Then you were fortunate,” she said. “I grew up always in the shadow of my grandmother. And my mother, who had all my grandmother’s love, so that Grandmère never really forgave me for living when my maman had not. The Demoiselle de Courcelles, the last in a long line of heroic women, whom I could never hope to equal.”

  “No, that’s true. You aren’t their equal.”

  Daisy looked away.

  “You’re not your mother or your grandmother, or any of these ancestors who lived before you. You’re yourself.” Legrand straightened and put his hand on his leg, so that his pinky finger nearly touched the side of her thigh. “You’re Daisy, astonishing and irreplaceable. A formidable woman.”

  He said the word exactly as a Frenchman might, formidable, with exactly a Frenchman’s meaning. Daisy blinked her eyes several times.

  “What have I done that’s so astonishing?” she said. “I’ve delivered a few papers. I’ve slept with my husband in order to get some information from him. Hardly the actions of a formidable woman.”

  “No? Whereas I sat in my room last night and forged a few papers and drank myself to sleep. Of the two of us, you are much the more heroic.”

  “I felt like a whore.”

  “You’re not a whore.”

  “I said I felt like one. I hated him the whole time.”

  “He didn’t hurt you, did he? Force you?”

  There was a new, terrible note in Legrand’s voice as he said this, and it thawed her a little, although it also showed he hadn’t really understood
her meaning at all. Daisy looked at the narrow seam of bench between her left leg, which was covered decorously by a floral dress, and Legrand’s right leg, much thicker and covered in trousers of light wool. “Of course not,” she said. “He didn’t need to. I just lay back and let him do what he wanted. Just as I was supposed to do.”

  He leaned forward again, arms on legs, staring at the carousel. Daisy thought she heard a groan from the back of his throat, but she might have been mistaken. It might have been the wind in the trees, or some ancient gear in the carousel.

  “Anyway, it wasn’t all in vain,” she said.

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “Of course not. He was drunk, and I got him to talk a little. He’s keeping something in his safe.”

  “Keeping what?”

  She shrugged. “He wouldn’t say, and I didn’t think it prudent to press him. But it’s something to do with his project at work.”

  “The roundup.”

  “So we must assume. It fits, anyway.”

  Legrand was wearing his favorite hat, a newsboy’s cap, which Daisy always thought looked a little bit too English, not the kind of hat a Frenchman would wear. She’d warned him, but he always said he liked the cap too much to give it up. It was comfortable, he said. Now he took the brim between his thumb and forefinger and worried it up and down, as if it weren’t comfortable at all. “What kind of safe?” he asked. “Does it have a key?”

  “No, it’s a combination lock. I don’t know the numbers.”

  “But that’s no trouble at all. I can crack it, if you can get me inside.”

  “Inside the apartment, you mean? My apartment?”

  “Yes.” Legrand paused. “It’s going to be tricky, though, sneaking in during the day. Especially if the children are there. How late does Pierre work?”

  Daisy linked her hands neatly in her lap. She wasn’t wearing gloves, because of the heat, and her finger joints were pale and tense. The smell of pipe tobacco drifted from the clothes of the man beside her. Around and around the carousel went. Her children passed by in flashes, in a blur, out of focus. Her mouth was dry. She had been anticipating this moment. She had been anticipating this question of timing and logistics, ever since Pierre had mentioned the safe, and also something else, as he had lifted himself off her last night and straightened his trousers and shirt: another piece of interesting information that had made her heart stop for a second or two. Now she found she couldn’t quite put the words together to answer Legrand’s perfectly reasonable query.

  After a moment, Legrand straightened and looked at her. She felt his blue gaze on her cheek. “Daisy?” he said.

  She replied, in as normal a tone as she could manage, “Actually, there’s no trouble to do this at night. Pierre leaves for Vichy this afternoon. He’ll be there until Friday. I could have the children stay with Grandmère, so they don’t talk.”

  There was a brief silence before he answered. “That would serve.”

  “Shall we say tonight, then?”

  He started to answer her, but in the next second he bolted from the bench. Daisy jumped to her feet and watched in confusion as he leapt toward the carousel, arms outstretched, and scooped something from the air that turned out to be Olivier. He set the boy down on his little lean legs atop the dusty ground. Daisy made a cry of distress and rushed to take her son in her arms.

  “Just in the nick,” Legrand muttered in English, but he was smiling.

  The carousel slowed and stopped, and Madeleine jumped off in tearful distress. “I tried to stop him!”

  “It’s all right, darling. Monsieur Legrand caught him in time.”

  “It’s just the kind of trouble I used to get into, when I was a boy,” said Legrand. He looked at Daisy and winked. “The bane of my mother’s nerves, I was.”

  Daisy buried her nose in Olivier’s hair and inhaled his sweet, little-boy scent. But he was already pulling away, wanting to run down the gravel toward some new mischief. Daisy got to her feet and went after him, glad for the distraction. Otherwise she would have agonized over the way her son had narrowly escaped disaster at the exact instant she had invited Legrand to visit her apartment, knowing her husband would be away.

  Legrand returned to the bookshop and Daisy continued to the Ritz, where she and the children were to have lunch with Grandmère in her suite. By the time she got the children through the rue Cambon entrance (they still couldn’t quite understand why they weren’t allowed to enter through the front and chose this instance to complain about it) and then up the stairs and down the various corridors, the waiters had already delivered the meal under shining silver domes. Grandmère sat at the dining table, drinking her wine and laughing with a companion, who rose and straightened his jacket as a hot, frazzled Daisy bustled the children into the room.

  “Madame Villon,” he said politely, but he was looking at Madeleine and Olivier, who spilled across the carpet toward their great-grandmother.

  “Lieutenant colonel!”

  Max von Sternburg wasn’t wearing his uniform, because German officers weren’t supposed to do so on the civilian side of the Ritz. Still he managed to look impressive in his double-breasted suit and gleaming silver-gold hair, his stern features and the shiny, rippling scar that disfigured the side of his face. He waited for the children to tumble past before he stepped toward Daisy and took her hand.

  “It’s a great pleasure to see you again,” he said gravely.

  “Is it? You don’t look especially pleased.”

  That made him smile a little, at least from one side of his mouth. “But I assure you, I have looked forward to seeing you again for some weeks. Since that enchanting dinner party in May, in fact, I have thought of little else.”

  He held on to her hand as he said this and led her forward to the dining table, where Grandmère embraced the children and brushed the Tuileries dust from their clothes. She looked up as Max settled Daisy into a chair, and her eyebrows shot skyward in no small bemusement.

  “Enchanting? I’m afraid your memory must be showing its age,” said Daisy.

  Grandmère, who had just lifted her wineglass to her lips, sputtered into the Bordeaux.

  “Perhaps I misspoke a little,” replied Von Sternburg. “It was not the party itself that was enchanting, but its hostess.”

  Now Grandmère recovered herself and sat back in her chair, revolving the wine in its glass. She looked from Daisy to Von Sternburg, who circled the table, pulling out chairs for Madeleine and Olivier, whom he seated with the same grave courtesy he showed their mother. “I’m sorry I missed all the fun,” Grandmère said.

  “There wasn’t any fun, don’t worry,” said Daisy. “I spilled my wine, and Pierre . . .” She was going to say that Pierre had insulted her in front of all the guests, but she remembered the children just in time and checked herself.

  “And Monsieur Villon did his best to entertain his friends,” Von Sternburg finished for her. “May I offer you wine, madame?”

  Daisy pushed her wineglass forward a few centimeters. “Please. I’ll do my best not to spill it.”

  Again Grandmère started and looked back and forth between them, but Von Sternburg seemed not to notice anything out of the ordinary. He returned to his seat and politely answered some question Olivier posed to him. Grandmère, recovering her composure, drank some more wine and said to Daisy, “I’m sorry to have surprised you with our guest. Herr von Sternburg found me in the lobby this morning and reminded me of a previous acquaintance.”

  “A previous acquaintance?”

  “I used to visit your grandmother’s salon here, before the war,” said Von Sternburg. “The previous war, I mean. Of course, that was in her old suite. Not the war, of course, but the salon.”

  “And I told him that I remember him well,” said Grandmère.

  “Which was not true at all,” Von Sternburg said, “but terribly polite of her. I didn’t speak much, I must admit. I was only there to observe.”

  “Observe what, I wonder?
”

  Von Sternburg shrugged. “I was a young man in Paris at an interesting time. There was so much to fascinate me. But then my sister died, and I returned home to Germany. I doubt anyone noticed my absence.”

  “And now here you are,” said Daisy. “Returned in triumph. The great Teutonic conqueror. It must be so satisfying for you.”

  “Immensely satisfying, but not—I suspect—for the reasons you think.” He was looking at Madeleine as he said this, frowning a little. He twiddled the stem of his wineglass between his thumb and forefinger and said, “I have a little confession to make.”

  “Oh?” said Grandmère. “The interesting kind, I hope.”

  He turned to her and smiled, but it was not an especially happy smile. “Interesting to me, at least. Did you know I was billeted at the Château de Courcelles at the beginning of the last war?”

  Daisy made a little gasp. Grandmère narrowed her eyes.

  “I don’t believe I did. You must have known my daughter, then.”

  “I knew her well. Who could not admire the fine spirit of the Demoiselle de Courcelles?”

  “Who, indeed?” Grandmère said softly. She tilted her head. “I certainly hope you were not still there during the terrible fire.”

  “A night I have spent years trying to forget.”

  “How dreadful. But surely this is not how you acquired that unfortunate cicatrice?” Grandmère motioned to the side of her own face.

  “It is.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. You must have been very badly injured. Such wounds are dangerous, I understand, and difficult to heal.”

  He shrugged. “At first, the doctors thought I might not live. I wanted very much to survive, however, and proved them wrong. But I learned there are scars one bears on the inside rather than the outside, and sometimes these are the most painful of all. The slowest to heal, at any rate.”

  Von Sternburg was not smiling now. He hadn’t touched his wine, either, at least since Daisy had entered the room. Just washed it around the sides of his glass. Madeleine and Olivier, utterly awed by his presence, sat on either side of Daisy and ate their sandwiches quietly, round eyed, watching the volleys back and forth as one might watch a tennis match.