The Heart of the Ritz

by Luke Devenish

  He reacted to the name.

  ‘She’s the Comtesse Ducru-Batailley,’ said Polly, ‘perhaps you’ve served her here?’

  ‘No,’ said Tommy, emphatic.

  ‘Oh.’

  Whatever composure he had gained now evaporated. ‘Your new clothes are not a mistake,’ he said.

  This didn’t much sound like a compliment either and Polly was again grateful for her recent resolve not to let male disregard upset her. It made dealing with awkward situations like this far easier. ‘You mustn’t be put off by people with titles,’ she offered him. ‘My guardian has her faults but she’s really very nice.’

  ‘That will be all, Mademoiselle.’ He spun around so quickly he nearly lost the Brandy Alexander glass.

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  He faced her again.

  ‘What do you think about everything that’s going on?’

  ‘Going on?’

  ‘The war,’ said Polly.

  He looked taken aback that she should ask him such a thing, and Polly resigned herself to another non-answer. ‘No one here seems to take it seriously,’ she complained. ‘Or at least they don’t take me seriously when I raise the subject. I wondered if it was because I’m only sixteen, and if maybe you receive the same treatment at seventeen?’

  He looked at her blankly for a moment, then seemed to weigh her up, as if he wanted to tell her something that was important to him. ‘When I talk about the war, people do not ignore me or patronise me – but perhaps this is because I only talk about it with people who understand what this war means.’

  Polly sighed. ‘I don’t seem to know anyone like that.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tommy, ‘now you know me.’

  The simplicity of that statement made her insides feel fluttery. ‘Do you think we will be safe here?’

  He paused, and then, lowering his voice as if he feared being overheard, he said, ‘We will not be safe anywhere. Some Parisians think they are living in the clouds, but when the Germans come the shock will be terrible.’

  Polly considered this for a moment. ‘And they will come?’

  ‘Of course. The Germans hate the French too much not to.’

  ‘But what about the French Army? Won’t they hold the Germans back?’

  ‘What about the Maginot Line?’ Tommy countered. ‘The Luftwaffe bombed it while the Wehrmacht came through the Ardennes.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Polly found herself stumbling. The blitzkrieg attack on the concrete forts after the fall of Luxembourg had been very shocking, as had the folly of thinking the Ardennes Forest was ‘impregnable’. Once the news had broken of both catastrophes, the French Government had still continued to reassure people there was no cause for despair.

  ‘I saw some of the newest army recruits being marched down the Champs-Élysées,’ he continued. ‘They didn’t have enough boots for them all. Some of them were wearing their carpet slippers.’

  Polly let his sobering words sit with her for another moment. She would definitely make the effort to visit the French Red Cross office later, she decided. ‘Thank you, Tommy,’ she said, ‘for being so honest with me. I never hear such things from anyone else.’

  ‘If people are not being honest with you, it is because you are a girl, not because you are sixteen,’ he told her.

  She frowned, not appreciating that insight at all, even though she knew it was likely true.

  Tommy returned to the bar and Polly returned to staring into space. She was conscious of him moving about in her periphery, visiting other patrons, picking up spent glasses. The unwelcome fluttery feeling in her stomach continued and made her feel slightly breathless. After another minute of it, Polly got up from the Cole Porter chair.

  ‘Adieu, Guy,’ she said cheerily, as she passed by the bar.

  ‘Thanks for helping me break the lad in, chérie. He needs proper working on his nerves.’

  ‘Tommy?’

  ‘Ah, very good,’ said Guy, knowingly. ‘You’re at first names already.’

  Polly wondered if she’d got Tommy into trouble somehow. ‘He was very polite. And friendly.’

  ‘He’s a gormless lump who stands for everything that’s wrong with the world these days,’ said Guy, crushingly.

  Polly felt very aware that Tommy, who was taking a drink to someone at the other side of the room, was at risk of hearing these words. ‘That seems a little unkind,’ she told Guy.

  Guy shrugged. ‘We can’t get the staff anymore, chérie. We’ve been reduced to recruiting from high schools.’

  ‘He was really very polite,’ Polly reiterated.

  She saw Tommy trying not to seem like he was craning his ear to listen to them.

  ‘He’ll turn out in the end, I suppose,’ said Guy.

  ‘Of course, he will,’ said Polly, ‘under your good training.’

  She was just making to leave again when Guy added: ‘He give you that line about him being the “nephew”?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Polly.

  Guy rolled his eyes. ‘Please don’t be the one little fool who believes it.’

  Polly was shocked. ‘What do you mean?’

  For once, the barman chose discretion. ‘You’re the one for the “observations”, chérie, I’m sure you’ll work it out in good time.’

  Feeling suddenly disheartened, although she couldn’t have said why, Polly was almost reluctant to look in Tommy’s direction again as she departed the Cambon bar. Yet as she stepped through the threshold to return to the lobby, she found herself unable to stop from giving him another glance.

  Tommy caught her eye from where he was in the act of delivering a drink, and gave her his head toss again, not as a greeting but goodbye. This time she didn’t return it, less certain of him. Tommy held her gaze for barely a moment before he looked away. Yet it was more than long enough for Polly, who had come to know she had reason to put stead by her intuition, to be left feeling sure of something.

  Just like her, and just like her guardians, Tommy was keeping something secret from the world.

  * * *

  It was a lovely afternoon to go walking and was made even lovelier for Polly by the fortifying knowledge of what remained hidden in the Hermès bag. It was empowering. The Paris streets, pulsing with people before war was declared ten months earlier, had become gradually denuded of men. Those not called up for the military were either too young, too old, too crippled and sick, or in some other way deemed useless. Everywhere Polly looked there were always women, and being Parisiennes, they were as spectacularly turned out as they ever were, and perhaps even more so. Given there were so few men about to impress, this left only the most exacting fashion critics to dress for: other women. To stroll along any of the Haussmann boulevards was to participate in a sumptuous, unending, open air fashion parade. Polly knew she was being found badly wanting by the many pairs of female eyes that judged her. And yet, the Modèle 1935 in her handbag made something as shallow as looks seem completely irrelevant.

  Perhaps twenty metres ahead of where she was walking in the direction of the 8th arrondissement French Red Cross office, Polly saw a flash of blond hair – quite possibly German blond that was ‘sort of’ Hungarian. She walked on her toes to see better.

  Weaving his way through the pedestrians, the blond was a good head taller than most, and hatless in the sun, which was why she had spotted him. It was surely Tommy. Keeping up with his pace, although she was some way behind him, Polly found that she liked the way he moved, Tommy being lithe in his gait and quite purposeful. He looked very different out of his Ritz uniform.

  The afternoon air was warm, but Tommy had on a well-worn, black leather flyer’s jacket, like an antique from the 1914 War. It was belted at the waist and too big for him, but his shoulders were broad, and he could carry it. Tommy’s trousers were a pair of thin, baggy tweeds, easily two decades old as well, and yet they went with the jacket perfectly. On his feet he wore canvas tennis shoes in a grubby off-white. His hair captive to the breeze, Tommy�
�s hand kept scraping it back from his forehead.

  If Polly hadn’t been additionally fortified by her resolve to be impervious to male disregard, she might have said he looked marvellous. She had never met a boy – who was almost a man – who had such an effortlessly casual style to him. He may be sort of Hungarian, Polly thought to herself, but in what he wears, and wears so well, he could only be Parisian.

  Up ahead, Tommy veered onto the street itself, where he dodged past oncoming cars and made it to the other side. He then continued in a new direction, heading south towards the Seine. Polly stopped on her side of the street in surprise, watching him go. It was almost as if he’d known she’d been somewhere behind him, watching. Then, in a move that surprised her more, Polly dashed into the traffic herself, to a clamour of horns, and started following Tommy properly.

  * * *

  Within a moment she had lost him. Baffled at herself for taking such an uncharacteristic action – darting into traffic after someone she’d spoken to precisely once – Polly pretended her course had been this one all along, and that Tommy had nothing to do with her taking an unorthodox route to get to the French Red Cross office. She found herself on the narrow rue Saint-Florentin, which took her to where the rue de Rivoli met the Place de la Concorde and the huge stretch of manicured green that was the start of the Tuileries Gardens on the other side. That was when she saw Tommy again, now entering the park. He showed no awareness of her as he made his way under the trees.

  Polly felt her heart race, whether from exertion or frustration at being forced to wait at the busy rue de Rivoli for the crossing signal, she couldn’t have said. She lost sight of Tommy again but told herself she didn’t care. She knew he was now in the Tuileries somewhere, but it was only as the signal came and she dashed across the road to enter by the gate that it occurred to her she had no idea what she’d say if she came face to face with him. This caused her to slow down. Polly entered the gate at a leisured pace and declared to herself that she had come to view the extensive array of statuary.

  A meandering walk through the gardens revealed how many statues the Tuileries actually contained; in every direction, down every gravel path, there were more and more. She visited Theseus and the Minotaur, then the monument to Waldeck-Rousseau, and then the statue of Laocoön and his sons before it occurred to her that all these statues were male nudes. A blush came to her then that her private thoughts had been translated into a too-revealing selection of art.

  Determined to view some female nudes to counter this, Polly was in the act of looking about for a figure to intrigue her when she spotted Tommy in the distance. The sun struck his hair anew as Tommy seemed mesmerised by a sculpture of a man in great anguish, pressing his face to the palm of his hand. The sight of such pain, and Tommy standing beneath it gazing upwards in deep contemplation, was very moving to Polly.

  Then Tommy walked away.

  Polly decided not to pursue him; it now seemed unforgivable that she had observed him in such a moment at all. She let herself lose sight of him as he went under the trees, but then felt drawn to the statue that had captivated him.

  The statue was, she discovered, a representation of Cain from the Book of Genesis. The lesson of Cain had seemed as much of a tragedy for him as it was for his brother; Cain was marked by his crime, cursed to wander, unloved and alone. Polly had been the only one in her Sunday School class who had felt this. Even the teacher had mocked her for it.

  When Polly looked from the statue to the plinth she saw a note.

  Folded up very small, it had been squeezed into a gap in the masonry, at the point where the plinth met the ground. Polly blinked at the sight of it, innocuously placed, where it might be seen by anyone, and yet was unlikely to be seen by anyone at all.

  Instinctively, she knew it had been placed there by Tommy; he’d known she had followed him and he wanted her to know. The note was for her.

  Polly prised it out with her fingers, which wasn’t easy because it was jammed in tight. Once removed, it was revealed as an ordinary scrap of thin notepaper, but the sight of Tommy’s handwriting – messy and rushed – seemed thrilling for being so male.

  Polly smoothed the thin paper and began reading what Tommy had written to her.

  Beloved Grand-mère

  You mustn’t worry for me, I am safe. Madame has kept her word and taken good care of me. She has been clever in how she’s solved it. I do not need school, so please don’t fret anymore about that; life is my school now. I promise I will learn from whatever is ahead and become as good as I can in everything. You know me, I am determined to do good in this world, and I will not leave it until it has become a better place. You will never be less than proud of me, I promise that too. I am listening to my grand-mère’s good sense, however, and trying not to take risks. When things go bad, as we fear they will, I will take none at all – I swear it. I will leave all my messages to you here, one every week, for as long as I can. I love you very much – you and Papa. Tell Papa this.

  Your grandson,

  Tommy

  Polly folded the letter and returned it to the gap in the stone, feeling painfully ashamed that she ever could have thought herself the recipient. Tommy led a life of his own – a complicated life, where such communications were necessary – and she had made herself privy to it through underhand means that spoke of a lapse of character. She, who had longed to do good in the world, had proven inadequate to such an ideal. It was with humiliation that Polly compared herself to Tommy, who had expressed the same longing, and yet was so better suited to actually achieving something. Tommy, Polly knew, would never have done what she had just done.

  He would never have abandoned a resolve so easily either.

  * * *

  On her way to the French Red Cross again, Polly noticed there were many more cars speeding in the capital today. Drivers seemed to be taking great risks in turning corners, as much with themselves as with the pedestrians who leapt back from near-death moments. Halted at a crossing, Polly looked up the Champs-Élysées towards the Arc de Triomphe in the distance when she heard the shattering impact of a car crash, followed by an unceasing horn and a great deal of shouting. She couldn’t see what had happened but she knew it couldn’t be good. Unnerved, she made the decision to abandon her Red Cross visit until tomorrow and walk back to the Ritz.

  Heading in the reverse direction, she was struck now by the sight of people running in every which way. People were panicking. Something was happening, somewhere unseen. Polly started walking faster, infected by a fear which no one was naming.

  Stepping up to a curb at the rue du Colisée, she tripped and fell, landing badly on her knee and tearing her stocking. There was blood on her skin.

  People continued rushing past and no one helped her. Polly tried to get up but realised she had lost the Hermés bag. She saw it lying on the pavement just as a woman’s foot kicked it into the road.

  ‘My bag!’

  She tried to get up again, but the rush of people was too great.

  ‘Please, someone get my bag!’

  A man trod on her hand. Another woman gave her shin a sharp kick. There were no apologies. No one could even see her. They were all looking up in fear. She could hear the sound of a loudspeaker nearing, horribly abrasive, but as to what was being announced she couldn’t tell in her distress and embarrassment.

  From among the faces blind to her difficulty, she saw the one face that was not. A shock of blond hair was scraped back from a forehead by a broad, long-fingered hand.

  ‘Tommy!’

  He was on the other side of the road. He looked scared for her.

  He made to dash out into the traffic, just as a car swept around the corner from the Champs-Élysées, going too fast.

  It nearly collected him. Tommy disappeared among the faces again.

  The green Hermès bag had been crushed under the car’s wheels.

  Broad hands were at her shoulders and Tommy was suddenly above her.

  ‘We�
��ve got to get you to your feet.’

  Tommy managed to help right her again and Polly somehow stayed standing. Her knee throbbed badly. Tommy wouldn’t let go of her hand.

  She stared in anguish at the road. ‘I lost my bag.’

  He seemed to implicitly understand what it meant to her.

  ‘Wait a moment.’

  She watched with a knot in her stomach as Tommy took a moment to gauge the oncoming traffic. Then he ran out and snatched up the bag from the road, mere feet ahead of the next vehicle, before dashing back to where she was.

  She took the bag from him gratefully.

  ‘Is anything broken?’ he asked, panting.

  The catch had come open, but she had no intention of looking inside to examine the gun while he was there. ‘Nothing important, I’m sure. Thank you, so much.’

  He seemed to accept this.

  ‘The streets are a nightmare today,’ said Polly, ‘what is happening?’

  He didn’t answer. ‘We’ve got to get you back to the hotel.’ He was scared for her still.

  He helped Polly to walk. She was limping with the pain.

  Several times, as they made their way back, Polly looked to her side to see Tommy’s face. He was determined, his mouth set in a grim line.

  In the clamour and fear, Polly felt ridiculous at being so pleased to see the front side of him. She had wanted to know what he was wearing beneath his flyer’s jacket and she had been rewarded. Tommy wore a white cotton undershirt, rather tight, and not as clean as it might be, yet it was a perfectly in-keeping fashion choice.

  The image of him burned into her mind, sustaining her when she wasn’t casting more sideways looks at him through the tumult around them. She now felt triply ashamed that she’d ever followed him to the Tuileries.

  When they neared the Place Vendôme, their progress difficult through the surging crowd, they encountered a French military vehicle to which a loudspeaker was fixed at the roof.