The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020)

by Lester, Natasha

  O’Farrell looked at him incredulously. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Maybe I’m wrong. But if it won’t fly level, that’s what you need to do.’

  From the trees at the far end of the field came the sound of gunshots. The Maquis guarding the perimeter had obviously run into trouble, and the trouble was, most likely, headed their way.

  ‘Back on the planes!’ Nicholas shouted.

  He grabbed Margaux’s arm, made sure that O’Farrell had Luc and was racing for the Lizzies too, and then propelled the other waiting passengers towards the crippled plane – the plane he didn’t know he would be able to get off the ground.

  He, Margaux and O’Farrell reached the Lizzies, but Luc was too slow. An explosion of machine-gun fire threw bright spots of red into the air, like a handful of rubies, and Luc fell to the ground.

  ‘Fuck.’ There was no way Luc could have survived those shots. ‘You have to leave him,’ Nicholas called to O’Farrell.

  He pushed down the nausea rising in his throat at the thought of leaving Luc behind but it was Nicholas’s job as wing commander to get as many people as he could out of there alive, without worrying about the fate of dead bodies. He wanted to punch the plane because Luc deserved more than that, but Margaux and O’Farrell and the other passengers deserved to live too and he couldn’t justify putting all of their lives at risk for the sake of a corpse, even if the man who had once inhabited the corpse had been his friend.

  Nicholas shoved his passengers into the plane, climbed in too and throttled up, cursing. ‘Come on, you bastard, fly!’ The plane bounced out of the rut, following orders, taking off steeply.

  He heard the sound of machine-gun fire chasing him into the sky and he pushed the Lizzie almost to its limits, but not to the very edge because he still didn’t know the extent of the damage. Nicholas knew O’Farrell would follow his lead so he needed to judge not only what his plane was capable of but O’Farrell’s too.

  He circled to the right to make sure he could see O’Farrell. When he did, he felt a lungful of air escape but it was still too early to relax.

  He didn’t say a word to anyone while he tested his plane. Just as he’d suspected, the Lysander wouldn’t fly level. It would climb beautifully, but there was a point at which it got too damn cold and he had to throttle back, sinking to the lowest point he could risk before he let the plane climb once more. They would fly all the way to England like some kind of ludicrous rollercoaster in a dangerous carnival whose particular amusements were flak and enemy planes.

  When he was sure that he had within his control every risk he could manage, he spoke to Margaux through the intercom. ‘Hey.’

  Her response was similarly brief: ‘Not now.’

  So he didn’t say anything else and neither did the passengers, who, he imagined, were all white-knuckled and incredulous at the way he was flying.

  Pushing the throttle forward the whole time exhausted his arms and, only halfway to Tangmere, they were shaking so badly he had to use his knees. The stick scraped away his skin through his suit, but the pain gave him something to feel other than shock. He finally touched down at Tangmere, inelegantly but grateful that the blood cart wasn’t required.

  His ground crew rushed over, concern plain on their faces as they unstrapped him. The passengers climbed out and one of them, a man about Nicholas’s age, fell to the ground and kissed it as passionately as if it were his lover.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ he said in a noticeably American accent. ‘I’ve been hiding for a month since my plane went down and didn’t think I’d ever get out.’

  Nicholas understood that the man was a pilot too, with the US Air Force, and that he must have been harboured in safe houses after being shot down. They’d exchanged one SOE agent for one American pilot, and three others. Was it worth it?

  Nicholas ran a hand through his hair in frustration, then turned to look at what the ground crew were pointing out. The undercarriage of the tail had been pushed right up inside his plane like a bone breaking through skin. It was a miracle he’d flown anywhere.

  Margaux stepped in beside him and he turned to her, but she shook her head and he knew they would never speak of Luc’s death. If she did, then how would she ever do the work she had set herself to do?

  ‘One of them,’ she murmured, eyes fixed on the passengers they’d brought with them, ‘is Jean Moulin, head of the Resistance, De Gaulle’s right-hand man. You didn’t hear it from me, of course. But yes, it was worth it.’

  The hardness on Margaux’s face had returned, but harder still. A dead lover, and dead parents and brothers, and a murdered country making it impossible, he knew, for her to be anything other than closed off. He took her hand in his and felt her squeeze it, hard, not to give comfort but to take it for once.

  She released his hand as O’Farrell came to stand beside them, face white.

  Nicholas took out three cigarettes and lit them, passing one to Margaux and one to O’Farrell, and the three of them stood leaning against the broken plane, none of them speaking. All of them, Nicholas thought, seeing the splash of red against the black-gold sky, Luc falling onto his face in a field in France.

  He stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I won’t be able to sleep.’

  ‘I won’t either,’ Margaux said.

  ‘Nor me.’ O’Farrell began to pace. ‘Let’s go see Skye.’

  ‘It’s four in the morning,’ Margaux said incredulously.

  ‘She always used to be up at dawn,’ Nicholas said without thinking.

  ‘We’ll be there after dawn,’ O’Farrell said, as if it were perfectly reasonable to visit someone not long after sun-up. ‘I’ll take champagne.’

  ‘And Gitanes,’ Margaux added.

  ‘And oranges,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘And silk stockings and perfume.’ O’Farrell brightened as he said it.

  They did have all those things, incredible spoils from previous ops so far into the South of France that they’d had to overnight at Algiers. And every reception crew in France – besides tonight’s – sent them back to England with champagne and cheese and Chanel perfume.

  ‘I’ll swing it,’ Nicholas said, knowing that after the debrief, they were supposed to eat and sleep, not go for drives. But he’d find a car and some fuel at the airbase and he’d get permission for them all to disappear for a few hours to settle their nerves.

  Margaux shrugged. ‘Then let’s go visit Skye.’

  So O’Farrell collected the fripperies, Margaux the cigarettes, and Nicholas the oranges, and told O’Farrell to bring his swimming trunks – if he had any – and packed his own, thinking that O’Farrell was right: the only thing Nicholas wanted right now was to see Skye. To hold her. But of course O’Farrell would be the one holding her, not him.

  Seventeen

  Skye woke with the sun, threw on her swimsuit and walked through the village of Hamble, whose ordinary inhabitants – yachtsmen, rather than the staff of a frontline airfield – were not yet awake. Only Clarke’s, the baker on the High Street, showed signs of movement: the smell of fresh bread was intoxicating.

  It was almost possible to believe that here, with water all around – the river on one side and the Solent on the other – in a town adorned with the white sails of grounded boats and trellised porches and salt-scented breezes, she was having a holiday; that Hitler had been captured, or the war had never happened. Until she turned her eyes to the omnipresent glint of the silver barrage balloons jostling for space in the Southampton Defence Corridor; so many it seemed as if they were holding England up and, should one burst, the entire country would sink into the sea.

  She stepped through the not-so-secret opening in the barbed wire fortifications and sank straight into the water, the shock of cold waking her up properly. She stroked out from the shore, then floated on her back, staring up at the sky, her second home, no matter that, lately, the planes she took up there seemed determined to toss her back down to the ground. The starboard engine failing yesterday had bee
n almost comical in the end – once she’d got the damn thing on the ground and herself out unhurt. She smiled ruefully as she imagined what O’Farrell’s face might have looked like if he had come up with her and put his life in the hands of a female pilot flying a gargantuan bomber with a broken engine.

  O’Farrell. He’d been pleased to see her yesterday and that was nice. Nice. Such a bland word. What was nice about the ocean, or about the sky? Nothing. They were either wild or magnificent with nothing in-between. But nice was safe. Nice didn’t come hand-in-hand with the kind of discomposure she’d felt yesterday when her eyes had circled, in a fixed orbit, around Nicholas. Talking to him the night they’d had dinner had been like glimpsing a shape far out to sea behind a curtain of mist and rain. Skye knew she should turn her back and walk away before she understood whatever it was about Nicholas that lay just out of sight.

  She hit the water with her hands and rolled over, closing her eyes, kicking her legs, letting the water engulf her. Only when her lungs burned did she shoot back up to the surface. Then she left the water, dried herself off and returned to the cottage. She was hungry now and happy to concentrate on that mundane sensation, something easily solved with toast and a hot cup of tea.

  Rose was still asleep and Joan had gone to London the previous night to see her latest beau, so Skye didn’t bother to bathe and change. Instead she gave Rose’s cat a pat on the head, took out the teapot and was spooning in precious leaves when she heard a knock on the door. Expecting Mrs Chambers from the Bugle gifting them some extra food, she froze when she saw O’Farrell, Nicholas, Margaux and another pilot, the one Rose had been goggle-eyed about, on the doorstep.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, hardly aware, in her surprise, of what she was saying. ‘Is it even seven o’clock?’

  O’Farrell looked uncharacteristically abashed. ‘We were too edgy to sleep. We brought champagne.’ He handed her a bottle.

  ‘I’m not exactly dressed for a champagne breakfast,’ she said.

  Which was something of an understatement. Her swimming costume was a black Lastex halter-neck with a white tiger crawling over her belly and hip. She’d brought it with her from France, never expecting to be wearing it and nothing else when she opened her door to a coterie of pilots.

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ O’Farrell said, grinning.

  She looked past him to the others and caught Nicholas, his eyes tracing the outline of the tiger down her chest and across her stomach, resting for a moment on the bare skin at the top of her leg. Skye’s hand found the doorframe and closed tightly around it.

  The next instant his eyes flicked away, brushing like feathers past hers. He flushed when he understood she’d noticed, and the colour of his cheeks matched exactly the colour of everything he’d lit up inside her. She shivered.

  ‘Here’s some more oranges,’ he said quickly, holding up a bag to shield his face.

  O’Farrell started talking but Skye hadn’t a clue what he was saying, just that his words were coming out fast and his hands were jumpy. Even Margaux seemed tightly strung, the cigarette barely leaving her mouth for the exhale before returning relentlessly for the next inhale. Skye knew the feeling of coming down after a day of flying and not being able to switch off, of lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, sleep a stranger. So she stepped aside to let them in.

  She led the way into the kitchen and tipped the bag of oranges onto the countertop. Nicholas pushed several boxes of Gitanes her way and Skye knew he must have been in France again. He wouldn’t look at her.

  Behind Nicholas, O’Farrell exclaimed in bemusement over the tiny cottage, where the bath was in the kitchen with a lid on top to convert it into a table. Everyone began to move chairs around and, somehow, they all squeezed in.

  While Skye juiced the oranges, Nicholas cooked the eggs they’d brought with them.

  ‘You cook?’ she asked, and he nodded and smiled at her for the first time and she couldn’t help smiling back.

  O’Farrell toasted bread, badly judging by the smell of scorching, and the other pilot, Richie, laid the table. Rose appeared, yawning, and made tea, and Margaux leaned against the counter, smoking and watching them all.

  O’Farrell touched a hand to Skye’s back. ‘I wanted to see you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad you came.’

  And she was. How much better to be thinking of breakfast and orange juice rather than the sensation of almost falling out of the sky yesterday.

  ‘I would have arrived a lot earlier if I’d known you were wearing that,’ he said with a grin, his golden hair as sunny and shining as hope, his finger caressing the bare skin at the top of her back.

  Skye laughed. ‘Take those for me.’ She passed him two glasses of juice and he carried them to the table.

  ‘Champagne in yours?’ he queried, holding up the bottle.

  Skye shook her head. ‘I’m not spoiling my juice with champagne.’

  O’Farrell frowned and glanced at Nicholas, who was suddenly very busy with the eggs. And she understood that O’Farrell had brought the champagne and Nicholas the oranges.

  ‘I’ll have some after my juice,’ she said gently, sitting beside O’Farrell and he dropped his arm onto the back of her chair.

  Margaux took a cup of tea and sat down, Nicholas too. Margaux refused the eggs. ‘I don’t think I can stomach any food.’

  Skye caught the look that passed between Margaux and Nicholas; one of sympathy, she thought, and understanding.

  ‘Hard night?’ she asked and Margaux nodded.

  Skye didn’t ask any more because she knew someone must have died and that’s why they were keyed up. She stood and opened one of the high cupboards, reaching right into the back for a coffret of Cazenave chocolates she’d hidden there for just such an occasion. Margaux would be the only one who’d know what they were, and Skye thought she might appreciate them. She placed the box on the table in front of the Frenchwoman and sat back down.

  Margaux stared at the chocolates for a long moment before meeting Skye’s eye. ‘You really are as nice as everybody says,’ she told her. Then, before Skye could work out whether that was complimentary or not, Margaux added, ‘Thank you.’

  This time, Skye couldn’t interpret the look that passed from Nicholas to Margaux – a warning perhaps. Margaux selected a chocolate, bit into it, and the tension in the room from whatever had happened overnight eased back like the tide.

  They talked about O’Farrell, who’d grown up in Chicago before he went to Harvard, and had never wanted to be caged in an office in a skyscraper, he said, so he became a pilot, taking flying boats into the air for Pan Am before coming to England to help out with the war. He didn’t divulge what Nicholas had told Skye: that he’d come while the Neutrality Act was still in place, risking imprisonment.

  ‘You could have stayed in America,’ Skye said, not wanting to break a confidence but also wanting to let him know that she respected what he’d done. ‘It would have been safer.’

  O’Farrell reached into his pocket for a Lucky Strike, lit it and inhaled before answering. ‘But that’d be like looking over the fence at a bully terrorising a child and walking away because it’s happening in somebody else’s yard.’

  Skye leaned over and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, flushing, and trying to refill everyone’s still full champagne glasses to cover the collapse of his worldly facade.

  ‘So we’ve established that O’Farrell’s a hero,’ Margaux said drily. ‘What about our wing commander? What was he like as a boy?’

  It was Skye’s turn to inhale smoke before answering. Is this the girl? a mean woman had once asked, as if Skye were worse than the smell of rotting fish skeletons on the pier. This is Skye, Nicholas had replied, not allowing his aunt to demean his new friend.

  ‘He was loyal,’ she said as one memory dissolved into another. Nicholas telling her he couldn’t swim, and then pulling himself hand over hand along the rope bridge even while the skin was ri
pped from his palms. ‘And very brave.’

  She dared to look up then and caught Nicholas’s eye. His face was as red as O’Farrell’s had been a moment before, but Nicholas didn’t shield himself by pretending to refill glasses. He let the moment sit, leaving himself unguarded and exposed to the likely ribbing of O’Farrell and Richie. But nobody scoffed or jeered; they nodded instead, as if they knew Skye had told the absolute truth.

  ‘Then he hasn’t changed,’ Margaux said, smiling at him; one of those infrequent lapses into warmth that she seemed occasionally capable of.

  Skye jumped up and began to clear away the plates. As she ran water over them, she felt Nicholas slip in next to her and, under the pretext of passing her the teacups to wash, he murmured, ‘Thanks.’

  Before she could reply, he said, ‘Are we going for a swim? And if you still have more swimming costumes than clothes, would you mind lending Margaux one? You and she look as if you’re about the same size.’

  ‘Of course.’ Skye turned off the tap.

  ‘Swimming?’ said O’Farrell. ‘I thought you were joking. No one’s allowed to swim.’

  ‘Even if the beaches are all closed, you don’t visit Skye in a house by the sea and not bring your trunks,’ Nicholas said. ‘I know the night she outran the Me 110 it looked as if her natural habitat is the sky, but it’s really the water. And it’s the perfect day for it.’

  It was. It had turned into a beautiful summer’s day, too precious to waste.

  ‘You go on ahead, Skye,’ Rose said as Nicholas left to get changed. ‘You’re ready; there’s no need for you to wait.’

  Skye looked distractedly around the room. ‘I just need to find my cover-up.’

  ‘Cover-up?’ Nicholas repeated, reappearing in his trunks. ‘Skye Penrose doesn’t mess around with cover-ups – unless she’s a completely different person to the girl I used to know. Besides, we’re about ten steps from the water.’

  Quick as a fish, Skye ducked past him and out the door. ‘What are you waiting for then?’ And she ran, laughing, down School Lane to the sand, but he overtook her near the water.