Not long after, Elliott parked the car outside a home in Hampstead. They both climbed out, glad to stretch.
The door opened when they were halfway up the path and a woman appeared, beaming. ‘Elliott, darling.’ She embraced Elliott with warmth and affection.
‘Hi, Mum.’ Elliott turned to Kat. ‘This is Katarina Jourdan, but I think you can call her Kat.’
Before Kat could hold out her hand, the woman swept her into an embrace too. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you. Please call me Aimée.’
Kat smiled. ‘I hope you don’t mind me coming along.’
‘Of course not. I have far too much cake inside and I need someone to help me eat it.’
As they entered the house, Elliott asked his mother, ‘How’s your hand?’
‘Almost there. Only another week of this blasted thing.’ Aimée pointed to a cast poking out from under her sleeve. ‘I broke my wrist,’ she said to Kat. ‘A silly fall. I’ve had to do everything with my left hand and it’s sending me mad. I can’t wait to get back to being right-handed.’
Something flashed in Kat’s mind again and she almost saw it this time, except a teenage girl stepped in front of her and stared.
‘This is my darling granddaughter, Juliette,’ Aimée said.
Juliette rolled her eyes and Kat couldn’t help smiling.
The girl flung herself at her father. ‘Dad! You’ve been ages. I had to have lunch without you.’
‘Yes, it’s been a trial of Tudor-ish proportions,’ Aimée said mock seriously. ‘Someone’s ready to lose their head after having to make it through lunch without Elliott there to interpret Juliette’s various facial antics and monosyllables.’
Elliott laughed and Juliette glared. ‘So, you’ve been pleasant company then,’ he said to his daughter, kissing her cheek, and Kat saw Juliette’s mouth twitch at her father’s joke then quickly straighten before anyone could see.
‘Yes, I must brush up on my knowledge of The X Factor,’ Aimée said. ‘After your last visit, I’ve been listening to nothing but P!nk and Beyoncé, but now it seems I must progress to reality television.’
Kat laughed. ‘I’d give anything to be listening to P!nk instead of The Wiggles,’ she said. ‘I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old.’
‘How delightful.’ Aimée beamed again as if she didn’t have the slightest problem with her son dating – was that even the right word to describe their relationship? – a woman with two very young children. ‘You must show me a picture of them.’
With that, Kat was swept into the parlour, which was all panelled wood walls and antique sideboards and delicious Louis XV settees, and a cup of tea – herbal and delicate rather than muddy and awful – was placed before her. She exchanged more pleasantries with Aimée while Juliette regaled Elliott with a story that involved a lot of expressive arm waving and a rollercoaster of vocal expression.
‘She should definitely be an actress,’ Aimée said, glancing at her granddaughter.
Juliette’s eyes rolled so wildly that Kat wondered if they might fall out. ‘The last thing I want to be is an actress,’ she said scornfully. ‘I want to be able to eat.’
‘Kat has degrees in science and medicine, and another in conservation,’ Elliott said to his daughter. ‘You should chat to her about science careers. Then you might be able to put something more specific in your careers assignment than you want to do “something science-y”.’
‘Conservation?’ Juliette’s expressive eyes widened. ‘Does that mean you get to touch mummies?’
‘Only their clothes,’ Kat said. ‘I’m a fashion conservator, so my expertise in Egyptian artefacts is limited. But I’m very happy to chat to you if you want to.’
Juliette shrugged, the moment of interest gone, and her fourteen-year-old aloofness reasserted itself.
Aimée stood up. ‘Juliette, give me a hand to bring out the cake.’
‘I’ll do it, Mum,’ Elliott said.
His mother batted him away. ‘You have children so they can wait on you,’ she said. ‘Talk to Kat. Juliette can help me.’
Aimée reached for the teapot with her right hand, then stopped herself and switched to the left. And the thing that had been eluding Kat finally sharpened into focus.
As Juliette and Aimée walked into the kitchen, Kat spoke. ‘Right-handed,’ she said slowly. ‘Margaux Jourdan is right-handed.’
Elliott shook his head, clearly puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Your mother,’ Kat said, trying to explain, ‘she went to pick up the teapot with her right hand. Most people are right-handed. But Margaux – Cornwall Margaux that is, not my Margaux – smoked all of her cigarettes with her left hand. In the photograph you showed me of Skye Penrose, she’s brushing her hair back from her face with her left hand. If she were right-handed, the natural instinct would be to use her right hand. And in the photograph you showed me of Margaux Jourdan in 1944, she’s smoking a cigarette with her right hand.’
‘I left the folder in the car,’ Elliott said, anticipation in his voice. He paused, as if thinking. ‘You’ve just made me remember something else. In all the oral histories where Margaux is mentioned, everyone talks about her refusal to smoke anything other than Gauloises. They were a symbol of patriotism for the French people during the war. Whereas Rose, Skye Penrose’s friend, said that Skye preferred Gitanes even though they were hard to come by in England. The woman we spoke to today …’
‘Smoked Gitanes,’ Kat finished. More evidence that the woman they’d spoken to that morning in Cornwall might once have been called Skye.
‘I’ll have to see what other photographs I have of Skye Penrose. Perhaps they’ll confirm that she was left-handed. But what about your grandmother? Is she right-handed? Or left?’
‘She’s always used both,’ Kat said. ‘We used to laugh about it: she sews right-handed, writes with both, but eats the left-handed way with her fork in her right hand and her knife in the left.’ Then she added hopefully, ‘So maybe my grandmother really is Margaux Jourdan and not Liberty Penrose. Maybe she did have a love affair with O’Farrell, even if nobody can recall it.’
‘You know,’ Elliott said, reaching for her hand, ‘it doesn’t matter what your grandmother’s name was. None of it changes the fact that she raised you and loved you and that you love her. She’s still the same person.’
Kat tried to blink her tears into submission. Elliott was right. Her grandmother was still the wonderful person she adored, even if her past was a story she’d never told Kat.
As Elliott stroked away a tear that had escaped, Kat felt her heart squeeze at the way he put her feelings ahead of delving into this new line of enquiry for his book. Without thinking, she said, ‘I’m going to miss you when the mystery is solved.’
He kissed her, so softly, so exquisitely. And Kat felt something shift. It was as if the knowledge had dropped over both of them that they hadn’t talked about their end, but it was coming.
Elliott touched his forehead to hers. ‘Kat,’ he said, ‘I need to show you something. Something I should have shown you before now.’ He stood up. ‘Let me arrange for my mum to have Juliette for a bit longer.’
He disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Kat to wonder what on earth he meant.
Twenty-Six
The drive to wherever they were going was awkward. Was there a word for the anticipation of bad news? Elliott would know. But she didn’t want to ask him, not when he looked so serious.
They drew up outside an aged care facility.
‘Why are we here?’ Kat asked at last, unable to bear the silence.
‘I need to show you something.’
It was what he’d said to her at his mother’s house, but it told her nothing. At least he took her hand, for which she was grateful.
At the front desk, the nurse smiled at Elliott. ‘He’s in his room,’ she said. ‘He’d had enough of the noise in the sunroom.’
‘Thanks.’
Elliott led the way down a clean and
sunny corridor lined with colourful paintings and dozens of snapshots of children and dogs and family groups, and black-and-white pictures of brides and grooms. Everything was bright and cheery, but Kat could somehow sense sadness.
He pushed open a door and said, ‘Hi, Grandpa,’ to a man in a chair.
The man looked at him blankly.
‘I brought you some cake.’ Elliott held out a container, which Kat hadn’t even noticed he was carrying. He handed it to his grandfather, along with a fork. The man smiled as if it were the best thing he’d seen in a year.
Kat ached that he hadn’t had that same look on his face when he’d seen Elliott.
‘I’ll put the telly on for you,’ Elliott said and his grandfather nodded.
While his grandfather ate cake and the television roared applause for teams of footballers, Elliott indicated to Kat that she should sit in one of the other armchairs.
He sat beside her and said, ‘This is Nicholas Crawford, my grandfather. He has dementia. He’s had it for quite a few years now.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said softly.
‘I’ve been looking for Skye and Liberty Penrose, and Margaux Jourdan, for selfish reasons too,’ he continued. ‘I’m hoping to find Skye Penrose in particular, for my grandfather.’
‘Why?’
‘My grandfather and Skye were in love during the war. Really in love,’ Elliott said, emphasising that last word as if he were expert in the emotion. ‘The once-in-a-lifetime, cinematic-type love that you don’t think exists until you see a couple like Josh and D’Arcy. But Skye was captured during the war and she vanished. And my grandfather, Nicholas Crawford, had a child with someone else.’
‘Then he obviously wasn’t as in love with Skye Penrose as you think,’ Kat said, anger building in her as she began to understand that Elliott had lied to her. It was the one thing she never wanted a man to do to her again.
‘I’m not explaining this very well.’ Elliott ran his hand through his hair, awkward for the first time ever, as if he could see not just her anger, but her hurt and her disappointment too. He tried to take her hand but she pretended she needed it to smooth the collar of her dress.
‘When I was young,’ he went on quickly, ‘just a little kid, Grandpa would take me out every Sunday. We spent the mornings together, often at the seaside, fossicking in the sand, collecting shells, searching for crabs. We also went to air shows and Grandpa would tell me what it was like to fly. One day when we were watching an air show, the sky filled suddenly with old aeroplanes, ones that were used during the war. And Grandpa looked so sad I thought I must have stepped on his toes. I couldn’t think of any other reason, back then, for anyone to look so sad other than physical pain.’
Elliott’s grandfather interrupted. ‘You don’t have any cake,’ he said to Kat. Then, to Elliott, ‘Let me hug you.’
Kat saw Elliott’s eyes shine and understood that, in the one sentence, his grandfather had returned.
But no sooner had Elliott stood up to embrace his grandfather than Nicholas Crawford said to Kat again, ‘You don’t have any cake.’
Elliott hugged his grandfather anyway, despite the fact that he had vanished. Then he sat by Nicholas’s side while he picked up his story.
‘When I asked him why he was sad, he told me about a woman called Skye who he’d loved more than he’d ever thought it was possible to love anyone. That she’d flown planes too, but she’d died during the war. After that, every time we went out together he’d tell me something else about Skye. That she was the best swimmer he’d ever seen. That she could cartwheel like a falling star. One day, when I was older, around twelve, I asked him how she’d died. He told me about the war. That SOE believed Skye had been caught by the Germans, but nobody knew if she was killed when she was captured or if she was sent to one of the camps. Nicholas spent years searching for her. Eventually he came to believe that Skye was dead, because if she were alive she would have come to find him. They’d promised themselves to one another. He cried then. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see your grandfather cry.’
Elliott stopped talking and Kat felt her throat tighten with sorrow despite her disinclination to be drawn in by the story. Yes, she could imagine exactly what that might be like. Her grandmother had cried in front of her only that one time and it had almost broken Kat’s heart to witness it.
‘As I got older I spent less time with him,’ Elliott continued slowly, as if managing the emotion behind his words. ‘I didn’t visit him every Sunday because I was busy and more interested in my mates. I forgot all about Skye. When Grandpa started to show signs of dementia, I tried to see him as much as I could, but it wasn’t until he moved in here and we spent a weekend clearing out his house, going through his things and deciding what to keep and what to throw away – God, how does anyone ever decide which pieces of a life to throw away, especially a life you can see slipping away before your eyes? – that I found something. It was like a diary he’d written about the war. And I suddenly understood that what he’d felt for Skye was that rarest of all things: true love. And I wondered if perhaps he was wrong, if maybe Skye hadn’t died, if there was any chance at all that she might be alive. I’d done enough research by then to know how many people disappeared after the war and were thought dead but were later found alive.’
He paused, eyes fixed on his grandfather’s face. Even Kat could see his eyes held in them another kind of true love.
‘You can see what he’s like,’ Elliott went on. ‘A body without a mind. But sometimes he has flashes of lucidity. It’s not that I ever thought finding Skye would heal him, but if he was to see her and remember her for even five seconds, wouldn’t it be worth it? Doesn’t a man like him, who has so little happiness, deserve five seconds of it?’
Kat felt her eyes spill over, tears running down her cheeks. How could anyone not be moved by what Elliott had said?
But there was also the knowledge that everything he’d done had been for his own reasons. His personal crusade to find a woman called Skye Penrose in the scant hope that his grandfather, a man with clearly advanced dementia, might remember her. On the one hand it made Elliott a sweet and loving grandson. But it also made Elliott a man who had seen how much Kat was hurting from the revelations of the past few days and who had still lied about his reasons. She’d told him from the start how much she couldn’t stand to be lied to. So why hadn’t he just told her the truth from the outset?
She knew the answer to that: because gathering information for a book celebrating brave and courageous women had seemed important and essential. Now his motives seemed self-centred and insensitive.
You hurt me, she wanted to say. Instead she stood up, swiping more tears from her face. ‘I’m going to catch a cab back to the hotel.’
‘I didn’t mean to lie to you, Kat,’ he said, standing up too. ‘I didn’t know that this – us – would happen.’
I didn’t mean for any of this to happen: that was what Paul had said to her when she’d asked him for a divorce. She was, yet again, an unintended consequence of a man’s thoughtlessness. The worst part was that she’d thought Elliott was different; honourable. But perhaps he wasn’t.
‘Have you actually written any of this book you told me you were writing?’ she asked. ‘And do not lie to me again.’
‘No,’ he admitted.
Kat walked out.
She’d reached the footpath when Elliott caught up to her. She spun around, prepared to let fly with exactly what she thought of him right now when, rather than offering more excuses, he pushed something into her hand – an old book, its cover dog-eared, its binding split.
‘Will you read this?’ he said. ‘I know there’s nothing I can say right now. I’ve hurt you so much and I’m so, so sorry. But if you read this – the diary my grandfather wrote about him and Skye and the war – then you might understand.’
‘I will never understand why you did this, Elliott,’ she said. Then she walked away.
PART NI
NE
Margaux
Will they ever know how I died? A dress riddled with bullet holes, stained with blood, one more name crossed off the camp list: that is how we learned the fate of the others who disappeared into the night.
– Geneviève de Gaulle
Twenty-Seven
GRANVILLE, FRANCE, JULY 1945
The Dior family home – Villa Les Rhumbs – is pink and grey. The gardens are pink and grey too, matching the house like a debutante and her partner. Blooms of pink hydrangea, the silvery leaves of lavender, the delicate pearl-grey of snow-in-summer flourish beside the external walls of the house, which are blush pink – the colour of the sun’s first morning kiss upon the sky. But the grey is – as grey can only ever be now – brutal, the colour of hunger and loss, the echoes of screams trapped in its spectra.
The sea laps timidly at the edges of the cliff below the house. Yesterday – Margaux’s first at Les Rhumbs – it was, thankfully, blue. Today it is grey and she has to avert her eyes.
Then grey dusk reaches down from the sky and stains the air all around, so Margaux sits, shivering, on the floor in the baby’s room, wishing she too could release everything in a violent paroxysm of infantile screaming. The mirror on the wall hurls her reflection back at her: skin eaten away by lice and draping strangely over her bones with no layer of fat beneath. She is all angles and protrusions, as meanly shaped as a truncheon. Her head is shaven; only a scrape of dark brown covers her round and startling baldness. Her legs are so bruised from scurvy that they are coloured purple and her eyes bear the haemorrhages of that same disease.
On the way to Les Rhumbs, people turned from her as they would a monster. She is inhuman; it is impossible to imagine she might ever have been loved.
Only Catherine Dior understands, because she feels the same. Her brother Christian, is kind too, kinder than Margaux could ever have imagined a man might be when faced with two such as she and Catherine have become.
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