The Heart of the Ritz

by Luke Devenish

  Metzingen staggered forward. ‘You dare compare me to that dead Jew?’

  Polly saw Tommy’s unbreakable pride. ‘I am his son,’ he whispered.

  Metzingen’s fingers pressed upon the trigger.

  ‘Herr Oberstleutnant!’ Polly shouted at him.

  The pistol swung from Tommy to her.

  ‘Fräulein Hartford?’

  ‘If you let Tommy live, I will give you something.’

  Outside, people flung their windows open and rushed to their balconies. From sidewalks, boulevards, barricades and rooftops, the whole city began to sing along with the radios, joyous and alive.

  Metzingen had trouble focusing on her. ‘Fräulein Polly . . . Jürgen was so fond of you . . .’

  Polly watched Zita creep nearer, clutching at a metal object in her hand. In the madness of the moment, Polly saw without comprehending that Zita had done something disfiguring to herself. She was bleeding.

  Polly opened her Hermès handbag. ‘I have something for you, Herr Oberstleutnant, if you want it. And I think that you will want it. It is something you’ll very much like – but only if you spare Tommy for it.’

  Metzingen’s eyes had no white to them, blood red. ‘You think you can negotiate with me, meine Dame?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Polly. ‘Reichsmarschall Göring negotiated with anyone – and he had so many jewels . . .’

  Metzingen’s bone dry tongue licked at his bottom lip.

  ‘He had bowls of jewels,’ Polly whispered. ‘So many he lost count. He had all the jewels in Paris it must have seemed like to you.’ Polly’s look was all sympathy. ‘How galling that would have been. How very unfair. You are such a better man than he ever was. You deserved what he had . . .’

  His mouth was gaping, mesmerised by her.

  Polly took out a little jar of face cream, always kept safe in her handbag. ‘Where were your jewels, Herr Metzingen?’ she wondered. ‘What did the greedy Reichsmarschall leave you in the bottom of the trough?’

  ‘Nothing . . .’ rasped Metzingen. ‘Nothing at all. What I have is so pitiful . . .’

  Polly opened Lana Mae’s jar. ‘Why not get something nice now?’ she suggested. She tipped the contents into her palm. In the scented crème a sapphire sparkled, blue like the evening star.

  Metzingen reached for it.

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Polly snapped her hand back. ‘Let Tommy live.’

  The German swung the pistol at Tommy’s shirt. ‘He’s a kike.’

  The weapon exploded as Tommy lunged at him – at the very moment a second weapon flashed in Zita’s hand: the Modèle 1935. A spray of viscera spattered her face, before Metzingen fell forward.

  ‘Liebchen?’

  She shot him again.

  Zita kept pulling the trigger and firing until the final breath spluttered from her lover’s lungs.

  She smiled at Polly. ‘I couldn’t let them have him, puss . . .’

  Polly only saw now what Zita had done to herself. She had sheared off her famous curls in great hunks, leaving her scalp red raw.

  ‘Oh, Tommy . . .’ Polly stammered, staring at the ruins of the film star.

  He was shielding her from harm, having snatched Jürgen’s gun. ‘It’s all right – it’s all right now, Pol.’ He pointed into the built-in. ‘Look. There’s the flag . . .’

  Outside in the Place Vendôme, and everywhere on the radios, ‘La Marseillaise’ reached its end. It was answered by the peal of cathedral bells.

  The Free French Army was here.

  Tommy let the gun slip to the floor as he crumpled beside it.

  Polly screamed. ‘Tommy!’

  His fingers clutched uselessly. A dark red stain ran across his shirt. ‘I should have dodged that one, Pol . . .’

  Polly clung to him. ‘Tommy, no – not like this – not today.’

  Zita had the Modèle 1935 in her fingers, returning to the bathroom she’d come from.

  ‘Help him,’ Polly cried after her. ‘Help him, Zita, please . . .’

  ‘You’ll be fine, puss,’ she threw over her shoulder, ‘he’s gonna ask you to marry him . . .’ She was already closing the door.

  Polly pressed her hands to the bullet wound in Tommy’s abdomen, trying to stop the flow. Tommy’s blood pooled on the carpet around them.

  ‘Oh God. Oh God, no . . .’ she sobbed.

  ‘You heard her, Pol, don’t worry,’ said Tommy. ‘And I am gonna ask you to marry me.’

  But his eyes were already closing as the gunshot rang from the bathroom.

  Suddenly Polly was pressing her lips to his with such hunger his eyes opened again. It was too late to go back, too late to pretend, and the two of them kissed as naturally as if it had happened between them hundreds of times – and in each of their minds it long had. Tommy’s lips were soft and warm. His breath was sweet on her cheek. His long arms encircled her, and when the kiss ended, they were both left breathless with the rush of it.

  Polly didn’t let him go.

  EPILOGUE

  14 July 1962

  An eager young woman gliding into Tommy’s orbit only to monopolise him was a spectacle Polly had grown used to. It was a testament to the great bond between Polly and her husband that she never felt jealous when witnessing it. Tommy was not one to stray and Polly knew the cause of the phenomenon anyway: his hair. As startling upon his head at age thirty-nine as it had ever been when he was a teenager, Tommy’s neon bright thatch mesmerised women just as Polly had been mesmerised by it so long ago. Yet this evening’s young monopolist was different – or rather, Tommy was. As Polly looked at them from across the Consulate’s reception room, the young woman wore the same expression as all those before her: an enraptured gaze, awestruck even, punctuated by nods and preening. The difference now was that Tommy was mirroring it. He was as enthralled by his companion as she was by him.

  Puzzled by this, Polly ended her own conversation with what she hoped was not unseemly haste and made her way through the throng of Australian notables. Then it was she who was struck. Tommy and the girl had been speaking in French but when Polly neared, Tommy called out in English.

  ‘Pol – this is incredible – I want you to meet someone.’

  The young woman’s smile beamed from Tommy’s face to hers, guileless. She was no would-be seductress, Polly saw. ‘Madame Comtesse,’ she began, also in English, ‘it is such a very great honour . . .’

  But the words had already fallen away for Polly, unable at that moment to process anything other than the young woman’s scarf. ‘That’s so beautiful.’

  The young woman’s fingers brushed at the silk at her throat.

  ‘It’s Hermès, isn’t it?’

  The scarf was patterned with horses. The girl’s eyes glistened. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘Polly,’ Tommy began again.

  But she couldn’t move past it. ‘I know that pattern, it’s a very old one, isn’t it, from long before the war? I once knew someone who wore a scarf just like that.’ She shook her head as old memories came back. ‘I could never forget how lovely it looked upon her – just as it looks upon you.’

  ‘Was it Alexandrine?’

  Polly stared at her, dumbfounded. How long had it been since she had heard anyone say that name out loud?

  Tommy wound his arm around Polly’s waist, and she automatically wound hers around his, fingers finding the ridge of his old bullet scar. ‘Polly,’ he said again, softer now, ‘please let me introduce you.’

  Yet she was still too caught in the moment. ‘But how could you possibly know that name, Mademoiselle?’

  Tommy shook his head, shrugging at the young woman.

  ‘Because she gave it to my grandmother Alma, Madame,’ the young woman told her, ‘and my grandmother gave it to me.’

  Words fled Polly. ‘I – what?’

  Tommy turned her face towards him so that she would listen. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘this is Vidette Carpenter.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said Polly, presenting her diplomat�
�s hand.

  ‘Before I came to live here in Sydney I was Vidette Benoir,’ the young woman said, taking Polly’s palm.

  The name meant nothing. ‘I don’t understand,’ Polly started.

  ‘It’s incredible,’ said Vidette. ‘Such a coincidence. I’m a journalist, you see, I write the social pages for The Australian Women’s Weekly. I only accepted tonight’s invitation because I had nothing else on.’

  Polly had to laugh at that.

  ‘Just listen,’ said Tommy.

  Vidette continued. ‘You’ll think it sounds silly, Madame, but I recognised the Comte’s hair. I couldn’t take my eyes from it. And when I was properly introduced to him, there was something about his face that struck a chord with me, too, although I couldn’t quite name it.’

  As if further proof of her French origins was needed, Vidette displayed an inherent flirtatiousness. ‘He’s very handsome, of course, but not in a movie star way; he’s too French for that.’

  Polly looked at her husband with one eyebrow raised.

  ‘And like so many Parisian men of his class, he is exquisitely if somewhat personally dressed. His style is his own –’

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ said Polly, feeling a swell of impatience. ‘You mentioned Alexandrine?’

  The young woman remembered herself, and to Polly’s surprise her eyes welled with tears. She fanned at her face. ‘I had thought I was doing fine in holding these off . . .’

  Polly was concerned. ‘What is it?’

  Tommy was about to tell her but Vidette stayed his words. ‘The previous Comtesse was a very great woman – she sacrificed herself. And your husband is a very great man. He saved me, Madame, on the night of the Marais round-up, when I was only five years old . . .’

  Then the floodgates opened.

  All three of them found themselves clutching each other and crying, there in the middle of the French Consulate; tears that were both happy and sad.

  * * *

  Polly told herself she didn’t believe in fate, having long decried horoscopes and the like, and yet sometimes – at near-magical moments like tonight – she would hear the long-stilled voices of the Girls, who had each believed in fate so utterly, calling her a fool. Tonight, it felt as if she was watching herself from a great distance, perched in heaven, perhaps, accompanied by her guardians’ wry ghosts. She watched on as Polly-on-earth went through the motions, waiting for where fate would deliver her.

  Polly observed herself tell Vidette the old stories. They rolled off so easily, told at functions wherever she and Tommy travelled in the world. The stories started with the Liberation, of course, and then moved to the years afterwards, when all the deeds of the Resistance had come out. Polly and Tommy had been awarded the Croix de Guerre by President de Gaulle. That had led to a friendship with the great man, a meeting of hearts and minds. From there, in the startling speed with which things seemed to happen in the post-war reconstruction, the now Comte and Comtesse Ducru-Batailley had joined the French delegation at the United Nations. They had no children – by choice, not misfortune – because they were devoted to their work. Yet they had many children in their lives; disadvantaged children mentored and supported through the Ducru-Batailley charitable foundation. When in Paris, Polly and Tommy still lived at the Hôtel Ritz, their only home. They had a deep and lasting emotional connection to the famous establishment.

  The evening drew on. The Consular function began winding down and Polly and Tommy were eager to bring Vidette to their suite at the Hilton so that stories might go on being told into the small hours. For Polly the sensation remained that something greater was at play, that the coincidence of meeting Vidette wasn’t chance but the machinations of destiny.

  At the Hilton suite, more champagne and yet more tales; the indulgence of nostalgia. Now came the story of Polly the orphan who was sent off to France and her aunt, the great Australian soprano, Marjorie Tighe. Then Polly being “given” to her aunt’s three friends: Alexandrine, whose terrible end as a Holocaust victim was well known in France, if not in the wider world; Lana Mae, lately immortalised by Hollywood in The American Angel, even if they got the details wrong; and Zita, the symbol of insouciant defiance thanks to the Resistance messages in her films – and whose troubling death was swept under the carpet by her fans.

  So many other people from that time to talk about – what had happened to them? Blind Odile had become a rabble rouser for the French Communist Party. Odile’s beloved Anaïs, the girl scout who helped save Vidette, and whom she never saw again, now a journalist herself in the sphere of French politics. The loathsome Gendarme Tessier who went out in his civilian clothes to buy the first issue of Libération, only to be seen reading it by a fleeing SS officer who shot him dead on the street.

  Then, right at the end of the evening, fate showed its hand.

  Polly brought out the medals awarded in the earlier war to her Aunt Marjorie. She travels with them everywhere, Polly tells Vidette, these medals more important to her than the medals she won of her own. Vidette was honoured to hold them, but as she takes the case from Polly’s hands a ghastly thing happens: she drops it. Right there on the floor. Vidette could just die at her clumsiness and blames the champagne. Yet as she is about to descend into shamefaced apologies, she is struck dumb by the look on Polly’s face. Then she sees what has caused it. The medal case, upon hitting the hard floor, has fallen in such a way that the satin insert has dislodged, exposing something long been hidden behind it.

  A letter from Marjorie to Polly – a letter never received.

  A remarkable confession comes from Tommy then, but Polly only half hears it; a story about something Alexandrine had told him to reveal to Polly on the night of the round up; something Tommy never did because Alexandrine said Polly would be devastated by it. And so, he’d forgotten. Another spark of memory comes to Polly now that Lana Mae once revealed something similarly cryptic – and then comes Polly’s realisation that nothing stays forgotten just because we say it is.

  The letter was determined to reveal itself – or rather, Marjorie was, through her lost words.

  Tommy and Vidette don’t read what is there and nor do they ask to. It is private. But as Tommy leads Vidette to the door, thanking her for her company and bidding her adieu, Vidette can tell that what has been written in the letter moves the Comtesse profoundly.

  Vidette is glad beyond words that she has played a small part in uncovering it.

  1 December 1939

  My treasured Polly,

  So many drafts I have started, then abandoned, of this letter – so many by now I’ve lost count. This letter, Polly, more than any other I’ve written to you, means everything.

  There’s a war going on. It hasn’t come to France yet, but it will, and soon. The timing, as my great friends might say, is lousy. I’ve got a death sentence hanging on top of me. I wish I didn’t. Not only because it means I’ll be robbed of seeing what you, the niece I so love, will grow up to become, but because I will have no chance to have sway upon this new conflict. I’m a woman. I can’t fight in men’s wars, at least not in the way men do, but I know I can do what I can to lessen its worst, however minutely, in places that men overlook. That’s what I did in the last war. That’s what I’d have done in this – if not for my heart. It’s let me down badly. But you haven’t.

  So many times, in these weeks since the doctors gave me the news, I’ve thought of you, Polly, so far away in Australia. I’ve read and re-read your letters and seen in them a reflection of myself. It’s uncanny. We’re so very alike. We don’t much resemble each other physically, but beneath our skins, in our beating hearts, we’re the same.

  I know you wish to do something good with your life. Not for you, I suspect, is domesticity’s comfort – you want something much more. So did I. Sometimes at night I’ve laid awake fearing this war will rob you of the future’s possibility. My fear of what might come – not for me, but for you – has made my usual optimism ring hollow. I know that it has, and I
know that you’ve felt it, even if neither of us have yet had the courage to say so in what we’ve written to each other. But I know you’ve got courage – far more than me. You just haven’t harnessed it yet. When you do, it will be the making of you.

  Whatever war brings, whatever it throws at you, face it front on. As bad as things might get there will still be a need for decency – and loyalty, and friends. I’m ‘giving’ you some friends in my legacy. Three of them to start off with, marvellous girls: Alexandrine, Lana Mae and Zita. You’ll know their names already for I’ve written of them often.

  My hope is to bring you to Paris someday – with your father’s permission – and sooner rather than later. I doubt he’ll object much. He adores you but he’s so luckless with money. I shall bring you to the Hôtel Ritz. I have paid for a thousand and one nights’ accommodation for you – a standing arrangement that begins whenever you might arrive. When you get there, however, you must remember to look past the surface. It’s a trap. Madame Mimi, the Ritz hotelier, once told me there’s two types of guests who stay there: there are those for whom the Ritz is entirely surface – and there are those who can’t see the surface for the heart. Which one will you be? I think I know already.

  If I die before I can bring you to the Ritz, then the Girls will make it happen for me. Trust them. We are all of us peas in a pod.

  Don’t let this war stop you. Do the very opposite, Polly, let it help you become. Never feel hampered by your youth or your gender in the face of its horror – be empowered by these things you can’t change and instead exploit them. They’re both so very precious. Find a way to fight for what matters the most, and keep on fighting, until those things are in sight again.

  And don’t be blinkered to love.

  Too often when purpose grips us we lose sight of why we need purpose at all. It’s there to nourish the good things life throws at us – and this includes love. Nourish doesn’t mean shut out. It means remembering that goals aren’t single but several.