The House of Flowers

by Charlotte Bingham

  It had been the idea of his contact in Marseille that he should travel disguised as a plumber.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you know nothing about plumbing!’ the man had assured him. ‘My brotherin-law is a real plumber and he knows less than I! Just stick a few pipes together – unblock the odd drain – change the washer on a tap – but above all stink! All plumbers stink, which is why no one wants to go near them! Since very few people want to know more about the plumbing than whether it can be mended they will leave you alone! Voyezvous? They want a plumber, sure! But they do not want to know what he does or how he does it! They just want him to plumb and go – comprenez? That is why it is always so safe to be a plumber, because plumbers – pooh! You will have no friends, but you will also have no trouble!’

  So far his friend had proved to be right. Thanks to the ever present smell of plumbing that hung about the clothes borrowed from his contact’s brother-in-law, everyone gave Eugene a very wide berth, including the Germans he encountered before and on reaching Paris.

  Having found the Rue de Rivoli, Eugene now checked the exact address he had in his hand. The famous fashion house of Blès had finally been closed down by order of Goebbels, owing to Madame’s habit of opening her doors to anyone and everyone unsympathetic to or on the run from the Nazis. Following the fall of France, when Goebbels had actually called at her salon in the hope of socialising with the celebrated couturier, she had sent him away with a flea in his ear, something to which the propaganda minister had not taken kindly. The following afternoon Madame had hoisted the Tricolour outside her Maison, at which point it was immediately closed down by the Germans, although for some reason – perhaps out of respect for her great artistry – they did not actually imprison Madame herself. The result was that Madame Blès immediately set up new escape routes and help lines for any enemy of the Third Reich who might be passing through the occupied capital of France.

  Thanks to his most convincing disguise and ever present odour, Eugene was ignored by the two Nazi soldiers on patrol in the street outside Madame’s house, leaving him free to ring the old bell on the equally old door.

  ‘Enter!’ a man’s voice commanded from within in impeccable French. ‘And close the door behind you!’

  Eugene found himself in semi-darkness in the hallway, able only vaguely to make out the figure standing in the doorway to one side.

  ‘My God,’ the man drawled. ‘That is a really frightful smell.’

  ‘Forgive me, monsieur,’ Eugene answered, the humble plumber relaying the message he had been instructed to give. ‘But I understand you requested a plumber. For the kitchen, I believe. There is a blockage under the sink.’

  ‘Ah,’ the man replied, with a nod, standing to one side. ‘The plumber. Of course.’

  As Eugene passed him he could see the man was both handsome and extemely elegant, dressed perfectly from head to toe and sensibly holding a canary yellow silk handkerchief to his nose as he indicated which way Eugene was to proceed, along the corridor to a room at the back of the house, well away from the front door. Eugene found himself in the ante-room of the kitchens, a small apartment with shutters at the windows, furnished with a plain wooden table and chairs set in the middle of the room, where an extremely elegant woman sat drinking black coffee.

  ‘Ah, mon dieu! But what a truly terrible stink!’ she cried, in an equally elegant voice, before leaning forward to stare at Eugene. ‘Eugene?’ she said. ‘No! No! I can’t believe it! You? Enfin!’ She roared with laughter. ‘You rascal! You came here just to stink me out, no?’

  They embraced, laughing.

  ‘Pooh! But I have more courage than you, Harvey!’ she said to her companion. ‘To embrace such a mauvais! Even so, you had best take him away and allow him to bath and change. Get him some fresh clothes, for God’s sake. It doesn’t matter whose. Yours! Anyone’s! Just get him out of those frightful garments!’

  ‘Ah, madame – no,’ Eugene sighed. ‘Not yet, anyway. The Germans have seen me come in so they will wish to see me go out again.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ Madame agreed. ‘I just do not know how long we can put up with this smell. This is Harvey Constable, by the way,’ she added, waving a beautifully manicured hand in the direction of the elegant gentleman who had shown Eugene in. ‘He comes in and out by the back door and no one says anything. They are far too nervous I might fly the Tricolour out of the window again and arouse more local feeling, which is intense as it is. To occupy Paris is worse than to conquer it, as they are finding out. Only the prostitutes and the nightclub owners are sympathetic to the Germans – the concierges are running rings around them, but then the concierges run rings round everyone, n’est-ce pas?’

  She went on to describe relevant moments of insurrection by the locals, the courage of her own concierge, and the hatred she felt for the women of easy virtue who were busy fraternising with the occupying forces. Eugene listened to her attentively, laughed at the right moments, but finally indicated that it was time for him to go. Madame agreed, telling him the procedure whereby he might return in safety later that evening.

  Under cover of darkness and at the agreed time, Eugene emerged from his given hidey-hole and slipped up the back stairs of Madame’s mansion, where he was finally able to bath himself thoroughly, removing all traces of his malodorous former self before changing into fresh clean clothes, albeit those of a railway worker.

  When he emerged from his room, he found himself in the company of another railway worker.

  ‘Are you travelling with me as well?’ he asked the transformed Harvey. ‘Won’t it be a bit rough for someone like you?’

  ‘I have been summoned back to England,’ Harvey replied. ‘And don’t worry – I can cut the mustard. In spite of my usual appearance I was not brought up by nannies and maids, I do assure you, nor educated at Eton. My mother brought me up herself, I sewed and cleaned in her workrooms as a nipper. So please don’t worry about me, my friend. I can look after myself.’

  ‘Any particular reason for your sudden return to England? Old boy?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harvey replied. ‘Not that it’s any business of yours. I’m going back to see an old friend of mine who needs my help.’

  ‘That so?’ Eugene persisted. ‘Well, well.’

  ‘You might know him as it happens,’ Harvey continued, with a tight little smile. ‘Jack Ward?’

  Eugene frowned then shrugged. The Colonel was the last person he would have guessed to have called the dapper and elegant Harvey Constable back to England.

  Madame Blès sent them on their way – after a delicious dinner of homemade fish soup, beef casserole and apple tart – with knapsacks containing small bottles of brandy, tartines, and some pieces of garlic.

  ‘Chew on those once you get outside,’ she advised. ‘The more French you smell the better. And may God speed you, and let you reach England before that bastard Hitler.’

  As he took his first step on what he hoped would be the last leg of his long journey home, as always Eugene felt in his pocket to rub Kate’s lucky stone. For a split second he could have sworn he heard her voice and that wonderful laugh of hers, the one that thrilled him and drove him mad with love. It was only for a moment, but the sound of it inspired him and gave him the necessary spring in his step to help him cover those last long miles towards the French coastline.

  Naturally they conversed in French from the moment they left Madame. Eugene was immediately taken with Harvey’s assumed singsong country accent, which he gathered was typical of certain regions around Brittany.

  ‘Yours,’ Harvey said after listening to Eugene speak, ‘yours definitely belongs behind a bar in the roughest part of Marseille.’

  ‘Good.’ Eugene laughed. ‘Seeing that’s where my papers claim I’m from.’

  ‘It might not be important to any German who stopped us in the street,’ Harvey commented. ‘But it would certainly be significant to any Nazi sympathiser on the lookout for bounty money. The price of turning in blo
kes such as us has gone sky high.’

  ‘I’m not sure I quite like all the French at this moment,’ Eugene remarked, lighting a smoke.

  ‘I’m quite sure I don’t like some of the French,’ Harvey replied, taking a cigarette out for himself. ‘I’m also quite sure I like an awful lot more.’

  ‘Papers, please!’

  Yet again they were stopped for a routine check, and yet again they were sent quickly on their way as soon as the guards had taken a peremptory look at their beautifully forged documents.

  ‘Funny thing about smell,’ Eugene mused as they took a zigzag route out of the city, making first for the outlying suburban districts and thence the open countryside beyond. ‘I happen to think that there is safety in smell, and always have done. People don’t seem to see through smell the way they see through disguises, through what they suspect are iffy signatures, or phoney accents. It’s a most emotive thing, smell – more perhaps than any other of our senses if you think about it.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Harvey agreed. ‘I can’t stand the smell of marigolds, or geraniums, but I couldn’t tell you why.’

  ‘I can’t stand the smell of petrol, and I know exactly why. It reminds me of my father taking me back to my terrible prep school in England. The smell of petrol reminds me of being parted from my horses and dogs in Ireland, and my parents of course – but them a bit less since it was their idea to send me to the wretched school in the first place.’

  ‘I hardly went to school,’ Harvey returned, his voice taking on a tone of some satisfaction. ‘Just enough, but not too much – like the vermouth in a good dry martini. Oh, God – how I wish I hadn’t said that.’

  ‘How I too wish you hadn’t, pal.’

  They walked on through the night, keeping near the railroads on which they were meant to be working, until dawn granted them sight of their first green fields.

  ‘Danger’s quite exciting, though, don’t you think?’ Harvey wondered, stopping to drink in the view before them. ‘I quite enjoy all this – and of course you enjoy it a whole lot more if you hate the Nazis. My mother clothed a lot of Fascist women, as it happens. She fitted them out in their glad rags, which is indirectly how I came to be brought into the Service. She listened to their conversations while she was fitting them, to everything they had to say, and passed it on to me to pass on to a certain gentleman who lived in a certain block of flats in Victoria. Finally I came to meet Madame Blès, again through my mother. They’d started out in the same cutting room as young girls, crossed the Channel several times in pursuit of their careers, and in doing so grew to loathe the international Nazi set as much as we all did, and still do – bad cess to them all. Quite satisfactory when you think about it.’

  Before moving off on what they hoped really was the very last leg of their journey, they ate their last tartines and drank the last of their brandy. Eugene looked towards the horizon and took a deep breath.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in deep satisfaction. ‘I was right, Harvey. Take a good deep breath. You can smell the sea.’

  ‘You trust people too easily, Lily,’ Scott said crossly as they left a small, dimly lit café on the outskirts of the tiny village of Gesore some ten miles inland from St-Valery where they had just made initial contact with the man who was supposed to be the first in a line of Free French who had promised to help them find the necessary locations for a small but all important number of radio transmitters, apparently all ready assembled and waiting to be collected. ‘You use your charms, and when they fall for them – which the French are bound to do—’

  ‘Thank you,’ Lily said tartly. ‘Compliments always welcome.’

  ‘You think that’s fine – you can trust them, because they can’t take their eyes off your – off your assets.’

  Lily eyed him from under her plain French beret, said nothing and went on walking down the road that finally led back to the small pension where they were staying, ostensibly as a newly-wed couple up from the country on honeymoon. Lily was finding it as hard as Scott to share not only the same roof but also the same bedroom, but for different reasons. While Scott found Lily nothing but a quite specific pain in the neck with her openly flirtatious manner and her deliberate emphasis on her sexuality, which Scott was convinced would and could only finally get them into deep waters, Lily was finding Scott oddly attractive – oddly because he was one of the few men she had met who seemed totally immune to her charms. She knew of course that he had just got married and no doubt sworn his undying love to Poppy, a choice Lily found strange since she had always thought Poppy both reserved and more than what Lily considered a little eccentric in her manner and her attitudes. Why the dashing, debonair, and undoubtedly courageous Scott should have thrown his cap into her particular ring Lily could not imagine, since to her way of thinking women who did not exude their sexual persona had to be by rote rather dull. For the life of her she could not imagine Poppy in bed with Scott, let alone being inventive enough between the sheets to keep Scott’s interest alive – at least not for very long. Even though what they were actually on was a highly dangerous mission rather than a quiet and private little honeymoon, Lily had fondly imagined that once they had been flown out of England and dropped into France things would change. Thrown together in a highly dangerous situation, the adrenalin would rush, and past associations – however recent or serious – would be set to one side while they concentrated on doing their work and, most important, on surviving. And to Lily the best way of guaranteeing one’s safety would seem to be to have a strong, handsome and courageous man, while not necessarily in your bed, at least in your pocket.

  Sadly, so far the only signs of interest in Lily shown by Scott had been the very opposite of what she had hoped. Ever since they had arrived he had done nothing but criticise and order her about. The ordering about Lily did not object to so much since she found it rather exciting, but the constant criticism of her attitudes and behaviour was beginning to irk her. She had flirted quite deliberately with the somewhat coarse but really quite handsome young Frenchman who was their contact, less to arouse the Frenchman’s passions than in the hope of igniting some sort of jealous flame in the heart of her companion. But it seemed she had failed, since the moment they were out of earshot of the café Lily found herself the target for yet more of Scott’s somewhat acid criticism.

  ‘You’re behaving as though this is some sort of holiday,’ Scott snapped when he had caught up with her.

  ‘Isn’t that how we’re meant to be behaving? Or would you rather I started behaving like a spy?’

  ‘You are meant to be behaving as if we have just got married. And girls who have just got married do not go round flirting with every bloody Frenchman they meet.’

  ‘Language.’

  ‘So just try and behave.’

  ‘The girl I’m pretending to be likes to flirt,’ Lily said with a sideways look and smiled at the handsome man striding alongside her. ‘That’s how I’ve decided to play her.’

  ‘You’re not in a play, Lily. You’re in a war. This is a war you’re in – we’re both in – so perhaps rather than thinking of it as some sort of light comedy—’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a comedy,’ Lily retorted, dropping her voice as they arrived at their pension. ‘Of course it isn’t a comedy. It’s a drama. A huge drama. I don’t see the harm in thinking of it as that.’

  ‘If you’ll perhaps let me finish? I would rather you dealt with it as a hard reality, rather than play-acting. In my estimation—’

  ‘Look—’

  ‘In my estimation it would be safer all round if you came to your senses. I certainly don’t want to be taken out because of your determination to play-act.’

  ‘You won’t be,’ Lily assured him. ‘I may have a fondness for play-acting as you call it, but I certainly don’t have a death wish.’

  Scott gave her one last glare, then knocked on the rough wooden door that was closed against all comers at this time of night.

  A peephole slid ope
n, an eye regarded them from the other side and then the door was silently unbolted.

  ‘My dears.’ Madame Daumier sighed sentimentally as she carefully rebolted her front door. ‘I was becoming concerned for my little lovebirds. Ah.’ She pinched and squeezed Lily’s cheek, hard enough to make Lily’s eyes water, then winked at Scott. ‘It is so late, I was afraid for you. There was a convoy through the town only half an hour ago and of course you are well after the curfew.’

  ‘It seems no one pays much attention to the curfew at the moment, madame,’ Scott replied. ‘There are cafés and bars open all over the place.’

  ‘Not for long, monsieur. My husband tells me we shall have troops garrisoned here maybe this week – certainly next. All this coast here – well. I have never seen such activity. Maybe the invasion, yes? Although may the Lord forbid it – but every day more troops, more guns, more everything. Not really an ideal place for your honeymoon, perhaps?’

  Scott wasn’t quite sure how to read the look he was getting from his landlady. He wondered if she already suspected that a couple such as Lily and he would hardly choose this tiny village outside Trouville on the Normandy coast as the ideal place for their honeymoon unless they had perhaps some other reason. Or had she already detected flaws in what they both hoped were their perfect accents? Scott was confident that because of his family background he could pass as a Frenchman, but privately he had worried about Lily, even though he had been assured by Jack Ward and Anthony Folkestone that she too had the right credentials to pass as an authentic Frenchwoman. Not that he could fault her accent for a moment; to his very well tuned ear it sounded as if she spoke perfect French, fitting the region she avowed she was from both by her accent and her use of argot. Neither could he fault her manner. Lily seemed to have adopted an entirely new character to fit her assumed identity, even though the character she had chosen to play was not one Scott would have sanctioned had he known about it in advance.