The Girl from Vichy

by Andie Newton

  ‘What else do you have in there,’ he said, looking from a distance. ‘I don’t like pork, or vanilla oil,’ he said, and I turned, tucking the oil into the bottom of the tin. I was willing to give him my body to touch, but by God he wasn’t getting the vanilla oil.

  ‘I wasn’t sure what to pack.’

  Gérard laughed. ‘You don’t think I asked you here for lunch, do you?’ He closed his window drapes and I glanced over the things in his office, searching for that damn cigar box, the light dimming. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie.

  This was the Gérard I had come to know. ‘I suppose I knew you’d have other plans.’ I put the tin on top of the commode and fanned my neck with my hand, finally able to think of the cool grass and lying in the sun.

  Be yourself. I smiled. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  He pulled a silver flask from his desk and unscrewed the top, his eyes dancing over my body. ‘You look—’

  ‘Good? After spending time at a convent?’

  ‘I was going to say something else.’ A smirk teased his lips as he took a swig from the flask.

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I knew you’d be back.’ I was ready for him to call me a quitter, say something about how I had never lasted long doing much of anything at all, but instead he twirled his finger around his office and smiled. ‘I’ve been promoted—I’m very important.’ He wiped his wetted lips with the fat of his thumb.

  I leaned back on the commode, both hands bracing the top, checking to see if it lifted like a chest, but it felt very attached. ‘Well, you know how I like to change my mind.’

  ‘Like most women.’ He took another swig before walking toward me and every muscle in my body tensed.

  ‘Gérard, I—’

  He pulled my head back by the hair. ‘Yes?’ He planted his lips on mine, and I smelled the liquor in his mouth coming from his nose. Even after weeks of being at a convent I couldn’t have enjoyed his kiss, but I resisted the urge to pull away, my hands searching the top of the commode as he groped me with his free hand. Then to my relief, I saw a cigar box on a bookcase a few paces away, and closed my eyes, waiting for him to finish.

  He panted for breath when he pulled away, and I boldly slipped out from under his compressing arms with his fingers still in my hair.

  ‘Is that how you greet all women? Or just me?’

  ‘Just you.’ He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  I rested my backside against the bookcase and tried to look as relaxed as I could. Gérard had been known to sense fear. I stretched my arms out, my fingers walking up the cigar box.

  ‘Just so we’re clear, I’m not marrying anyone right now,’ I said.

  ‘Because you’ll run away again?’

  I paused to think of a reason he’d believe, something only a selfish man like Gérard would understand. ‘There’s too much going on with the war, truthfully. I could never have the reception I want. Not with the rations getting more restrictive. We’d have to get everything from the black market, and I don’t want anything black at my wedding.’

  Gérard reached for the box, laying his heavy hand right on top. ‘You would only think about yourself.’

  I pulled the box out from under his hand and opened it, offering him one of many cigars tucked inside. Gérard slammed the lid down.

  ‘Tell me, why’d it have to be nunnery?’

  ‘The nunnery, as you call it, gave me time to think. When I get married, it will be because I want to get married. Can’t go to my father and expect it to be done.’

  He held my hand, a light squeeze clenching tighter and tighter. ‘Your father will see to it you fulfil our agreement.’

  ‘My father thinks he arranged a marriage to the man you used to be—the one who bought wine for his family’s spa, someone who said please and thank you and came from a good family. The one who saved a soldier from dying in the mud.’

  Gérard swallowed, his face looking very hard. ‘It was the Phoney War, Adèle. We were all in the mud. Not a single battle.’

  ‘The Battle of Sedan wasn’t part of the Phoney War, Gérard, and I know it was very bloody. You changed when you came home. You’re not the man you were, or the boy I remember from all those years ago.’

  He tossed my hand to the side. ‘Women know nothing about this war. Phoney or otherwise.’

  I looked at him squarely. ‘One thing I’d bet my life on.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘If it weren’t for the crafty ways of your uncle, you would’ve been on a train with the rest of the army headed to a German munitions factory after the armistice.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Who told you that?’

  I wasn’t sure if he knew Mme Dubois, but if I mentioned her name I was positive he’d seek her out and punish her. ‘Does it matter?’

  He touched the lapel of his expensive-looking black suit. ‘It’s not a secret, Adèle. I take opportunities when I can.’

  I shrugged one shoulder. ‘Hmm.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, shrugging his shoulder back.

  ‘If you want me to marry you, you’ll have to woo me like any man would.’

  He swept my hair back with his hand and then curled a lock of it around his finger, pulling ever so subtly. ‘You won’t last.’

  ‘You think I’ll want to marry you sooner?’

  He let go of my hair after a quick jerk. ‘With the finer things in life becoming scarcer by the day…’ A chauvinistic laugh matched the look on his face. ‘Seriously, Adèle, who else can get champagne and black caviar when there are food riots in Clermont-Ferrand?’

  He opened his desk drawer to show me the Moët & Chandon bottle he had stashed next to a round tin with Russian writing on it. I reached for them, but he shut the drawer before my fingers had a chance to grace the labels.

  ‘Russian caviar? Where did you get that from?’

  ‘I have friends in the Reich, and the black market.’

  ‘Mmm.’ I looked at my nails, rubbing them together. ‘I told you I didn’t want anything black at my reception.’

  ‘The war may drag on for years. Soon enough you’ll be begging me to keep your bed warm and your family from scraping the bottom. The old vineyards in the Vichy hills won’t be around much longer—there’s no water—unless Albert can make water from wine. Everyone knows those hill grapes are inferior to the vineyards in Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule.’ He laughed. ‘But who knows, perhaps by the end of it I’ll have my eye on someone else.’

  ‘Is that a bet, Gérard Baudoin?’ I folded my arms, holding my tongue—Papa’s wine was inferior to no one’s. ‘I never thought of you as a gambling man.’

  He took me by the hair, pulling my head back, and we locked eyes. ‘Maybe I should take you right now,’ he said, ‘right here in my office.’

  I swatted at him. ‘You know I’m not that kind of woman,’ I said, glaring, and he laughed deep from his throat, and it was then I realized that was what he loved the most. The chase.

  He smelled me first, nuzzling his face against my neck, kissing me softly, then his knee pried my legs apart, and his hand slid between my legs. I shot up, locking my knees together and books tumbled from the bookcase onto the ground, flopping on top of each other.

  The door flew open. ‘Did you call me, sir?’

  His secretary filled every space of the open door, holding her notepad.

  ‘Get out of here!’ Gérard yelled at her, and while his head was turned, I hooked my finger on the corner of the cigar box and tipped it over. Cigars tumbled out of it and rolled on the floor. I dove to reach the box, but he beat me to it, grabbing my wrist, squeezing tightly, my whole arm shaking. ‘Look what you did!’

  The head of the police walked back in, and Gérard stood up with a fine jolt. I glanced at the box and read the three numbers off the back before standing up to straighten my dress.

  ‘Emergency meeting, down the corridor,’ he said. ‘Now.’

  Gérard snatched the box off the floor and left wi
th it tucked under his arm. I straightened up, smoothing my dress flat and fixing my hair. ‘He’s very strong,’ I said to his secretary. I reached for the lunch tin and hooked it on my arm.

  ‘As I saw,’ she said.

  I walked out of the Hotel du Parc with my head high, past the processing desk, and out the front doors with the soldiers standing guard, only to race down the street and stop at the flower cart where Marguerite told me to deliver messages. A woman with grey hair tucked under a tattered head wrap sat on a stool counting coins.

  ‘A single daisy,’ I said.

  The woman’s eyes glowed. ‘Just one?’

  ‘Yes, yes… One.’

  She slipped me a scrap of paper, and I winced, trying to remember the right code to say I was ready to meet, but then thought any code would work—she’ll know to come find me. I walked away chanting to myself, ‘Nineteen. Twenty-five. Thirty-two.’

  14

  Monsieur Morisset stood in front of his house waiting for me to return the car, tapping his foot, arms folded. He asked how often I was going to borrow it, and when I told him daily, he started counting the bottles of wine Papa had brought over. ‘I’ll have words with Albert,’ he said.

  I wanted to remind him about all that our family had done for his over the years, of the field work Papa gave his sons even though we had enough hands to do it ourselves. ‘What about the candied grapes? Those dried ones your mama used to put up.’

  ‘I’ll bring some tomorrow.’

  He nodded, uncorking one of the bottles with an opener he pulled from his pocket. ‘Yes,’ he said, sniffing the wine. ‘Do that.’

  I started up the hill to Papa’s vineyard on my bicycle, the smell of rosewater in my hair turning my stomach as much as the pasty after-kiss Gérard left on my lips. A sharp rock popped my tyre, and the air hissed like a snake from the hole—nearly knocking me off my seat. I growled many words—words I should’ve been ashamed to say, but felt better saying.

  Mama took one look at me standing in her doorway and bolted from her chair, cigarette burning between two fingers. ‘You saw Gérard?’ she said, and a violent shiver waved over my body, thinking of Gérard’s hands moving up my leg. ‘You were successful?’

  I nodded, and she exhaled the breath she was holding.

  ‘I was worried, thinking about you all morning,’ she said. ‘But you did what you had to do, when you had to do it.’ She kissed my cheeks. ‘I’m proud of you. Now, you need a drink. Something stiff to celebrate.’ She snubbed her cigarette out and flicked her chin at the root cellar door.

  ‘Is…’ I said, looking around the chateau. ‘Is Luc here? I mean…’ I closed my eyes briefly. ‘Will he be joining us for supper?’ I placed my hand on the vanilla oil.

  ‘The doors are closed,’ Mama said. ‘You remember what I said about the doors?’

  ‘Oh.’ I fought hard to hide my disappointment from Mama. I set the vanilla oil on the counter. ‘What did you say about a drink?’

  ‘Come on,’ Mama said. ‘I have just the thing.’

  I followed Mama downstairs into the root cellar and toward the back where it smelled like the bottom of one of Papa’s wine barrels. The walls were made of dirt and boulder, bugs making their homes in the cracks. Mama lit a fat candlestick and stuck it in between the boulders like a torch. She pointed to a wine rack about knee high and smiled before grabbing one of the wine bottles.

  ‘Your father doesn’t know I have these. They’re worth a fortune.’ She held up the bottle, pointing to its embossed label. ‘This bottle alone is worth more francs than I gave you the day you left for the convent.’ A smile spread on her face, and her eyes glossed in the dim light. ‘His best pinot. Just as well we use it to celebrate your bold move today. If only all the Résistance could celebrate this well.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re happier about hiding the wine from Papa.’

  ‘Humph!’ Mama took a corkscrew from her apron pocket and opened the bottle. ‘Just take a drink, Adèle.’ Mama handed me the bottle, and we took turns taking swigs from it. ‘What happened today,’ she said, glancing up, ‘with him?’

  I licked the wine from my lips, the faint taste of Gérard still in my mouth. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ I snagged a cigarette from her pocket, lighting it using one of the candles in the wall, and filled my mouth with smoke. ‘Other than to tell you he’s forgiven me. The marriage will wait, however, thank God. He’s courting me.’

  ‘That is good news,’ she said. ‘But be careful. I don’t trust him. Not for one minute.’

  I rubbed my arms for warmth in the cool cellar. Mama had jars filled with everything from rhubarb to carrots, all stacked nicely on wooden shelves. The canned meat she kept in dirt divots carved into the wall. The secret to surviving war was to prepare for it, she had told me.

  ‘Don’t let anyone know about your food cache, Mama. They’d come to steal, I know it.’

  ‘Over my dead body.’

  Next to the shelves was a brass-buckled chest. Charlotte’s name had been painted on the top in childlike writing. ‘What’s this?’

  Mama waved me off as she drank more wine from the bottle, but I opened it anyway. Inside were hundreds of metal paint tubes, bound by string according to colour—the remnants of Charlotte’s premarital dreams of becoming an artist. I ran my hands over them, counting the different shades and hues. ‘There’s so many tubes. Why are there so many?’

  Mama scoffed. ‘She’s married, remember. She doesn’t paint anymore, or do much of anything if it isn’t for that husband of hers.’

  I stopped counting when I realized I couldn’t count them all in one sitting. ‘There’s enough paint to cover every wall in the city!’

  Mama peered into the chest, her lips wet with red wine. ‘Waste. All of it.’

  Hidden behind the narrow end of the chest, covered in a thick layer of cobwebs, were several canvases that had been slashed right down the middle with a very sharp knife. ‘And what about the canvases?’

  Mama flipped through them, checking to see if all the canvases had suffered the same dismal fate. ‘They’re all ruined. Shame. I suddenly had an idea we should paint a portrait of Pétain with one of his prostitutes and hang it at the Hotel du Parc!’

  ‘There’s not a canvas big enough for faces that hideous.’

  Mama caught herself from gagging. ‘I can imagine. Fraud of a man, touting family values while sleeping his way across the country.’

  I flipped through the canvases myself. Sure enough, every single one had been ruined. ‘Why would Charlotte destroy these?’

  ‘It does seem vicious, doesn’t it?’

  Charlotte had always taken great care of her painting supplies, guarding them as if they were gold, so it didn’t surprise me she had stored the paints in the darkest corner of the root cellar for safekeeping. However, the fate of the canvases had been a shock, destroying them the way she did.

  ‘You remember, after she wed she took all her works off our walls, including that one of the Allier River, the promenade landscape she was so fond of. She says it’s hanging in her new apartment, but I have no idea since she never invites me over—have you been there?’

  ‘I haven’t seen it either. She’s been very private since her marriage.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Mama nodded as if she wasn’t surprised. ‘What she did with the rest of her works I can only guess. By the looks of the canvases, I’m sure they didn’t survive.’

  The paint’s shiny, silver tubes glinted in the soft candlelight. In an odd way I felt as if I was intruding on their resting place, as if the lid was supposed to stay closed forever, and yet there I was, submersed in an intrusive curiosity. I lowered the chest’s lid slowly, the hinges creaking.

  ‘It’s all very sad.’

  ‘What is?’

  I wiped the dust off the letters that made up Charlotte’s name. ‘Charlotte’s dreams. Forgotten as much as this chest, the paints.’

  Mama stood silent, looking at the chest with Charlotte’s n
ame written below the slashed canvases like an epitaph. A tear welled in one eye, and she sniffed it away. ‘I can only guide my children. I can’t make you do something you won’t—’ She hung her head down. ‘Sometimes I feel I can speak for you. But other times, I know I can’t.’

  I assumed Mama was referring to the cadre of moments she tried to talk Charlotte out of getting married. Although Charlotte married her husband for love, the timing of her union was suspect, just after the armistice when Papa declared himself a staunch Pétainist, and her husband became a Vichy diplomat. Mama always said the path of Pétain was a dead one, and she had no plans to follow a dead man.

  ‘Is that why you didn’t tell me about Charlotte’s baby?’

  Mama winced hard. I hadn’t forgotten she asked me to see Charlotte first thing when I came back to Vichy.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Adèle. I am. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. It was a private funeral. Just her and her husband is what she told me. I’m still heartbroken about it, too heartbroken to say it out loud.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Did she—has she—taken you there? To the grave?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t been.’

  Mama nodded. ‘She hasn’t taken anyone as far as I know. I faced many things as a nurse in the 1914 war, but nothing—nothing—has been as hard as watching your family crumble into dust.’

  I was stunned to hear Mama mention her time as a nurse; she rarely brought it up. Part of me didn’t want to push the subject, but as more quiet seconds passed with her looking at the ground, the courage to broach the subject built inside of me.

  ‘Mama, tell me about the lighter. Your time as a nurse. Elizabeth—Mother Superior.’

  Mama sighed heavily, sitting down in a wood chair and slumping forward. ‘There were three of us. Different war, but the same enemy—ruthless.’ She paused, swallowing dryly, pulling the cloisonné lighter from her pocket and rubbing the inscription on the back before slipping it back in. ‘Let’s just say I understand why Elizabeth joined the Order after the war.’