Thankfully Catherine – or Caro as Margaux and Christian call her – comes to find Margaux before the shivering takes her over and she plummets back into the past that she cannot believe is really over.
‘Chérie!’ Caro cries, rushing over, huddling close to her the same way they had crowded together on the bunk for eight long months – although there had been three of them then. ‘Chérie,’ she says again, this time in a whisper. And then she holds Margaux despite the fact that Caro’s head is bald too, her body similarly lacking anything besides skin and bone and bruises, despite the fact that Caro shivers at night too.
Margaux remembers the laughing woman she had met in Paris who used to always speak of flowers and she hopes that Caro will one day describe a lily-of-the-valley to her again: how small and fragile and white it is. Not because it will make Margaux feel better, but because it will mean that Caro is better. If Caro gets better, then perhaps Margaux will also.
‘I’m sorry,’ Margaux says, as the shaking lessens.
‘I didn’t keep down any of my lunch today,’ Caro says in response and Margaux understands what she is saying: that she too has failed at being normal.
The shivering stops at last.
‘We will build a pyre in the garden, on the clifftop,’ Caro says in the most solemn of voices. ‘We’ll burn everything.’
Margaux nods and follows her out to the clifftop overlooking the Chausey archipelago, where islands scar the surface of the ocean and the sky is bruised by livid clouds.
They gather wood, so much wood, and they strike a match to it. Flames leap hungrily upwards.
They cannot burn anything physical from Ravensbrück because they left behind them in Switzerland what little they had. Instead, they place their memories onto the fire – everyone tells them, insistently, that they must forget, that their story is too weighted down with pain to be held within the fine contours of language. But memories are as insistent as the lice at Ravensbrück: puncturing the skin, burrowing in, emerging with renewed vigour at every attempt to fight them off.
So the pyre is the means by which they will reduce the past year to ashes. Onto the fire go the peacocks, the red flowers, Block 10, the Bunker, the canisters of Zyklon B, the Kinderzimmer, the children playing the game of gas chamber selection, the sound of a shovel striking a skull.
They throw on the pre-dawn roll calls, and death by appell – the slow freezing to death of bodies during the long winter roll calls – and la chasse – the daily hunt down the Lagerstrasse for anyone offensive – which was everyone – to satisfy the target set by the Nazis of two thousand dead each month.
They add to the flames the ferocious jostle each morning for the very few latrines, and the smell of those latrines – fetid and overpowering at first, then hardly discernible amid so much that was rank.
They throw on the ash and odour of scorched flesh billowing from the crematorium, their hunger – not even hunger, the craven emptiness – their hunched shoulders, the need to be small, tiny, invisible.
They stoke the fire still more with the terrible understanding that nobody knew Ravensbrück existed, that they really had been as lost and invisible as Camp Commandant Suhren had said.
Catherine and Margaux hold hands, their two bald heads like pagan moons attesting to their lack of faith and trust and hopes and dreams. They cast the wishes they once had onto the pyre.
The fire spits, not yet sated.
The first person they give to the flames is Skye. The smoke rises immediately, taking off, letting her fly up and up to the place that was always her home.
Nicholas is next. What he did to Skye goes on the fire too, followed by Skye’s broken heart.
On goes O’Farrell, and the baby he never had a chance to be a father to.
They pause when they get to Liberty. Does she deserve to be swallowed at last by fire? Or should her reckoning be to have no epilogue, but to forever bear the soul-breaking burden of what she did?
They turn from the fire, which like them, will forever remain unsatisfied.
PART TEN
Skye
A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment.
– Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
Twenty-Eight
ENGLAND, MARCH 1944
Over the long stretch of months into 1944, as more aeroplanes were built and mustered for an invasion of Europe, for Skye there was only one thing: flying. But so much flying meant so much time alone, time for her to recall the strict politeness, or even boredom, on Nicholas’s face when she’d poured out her heart to him. His silence had been the worst thing of all.
Each morning, she put on a shirt under her flight overalls, then her scarf, then a coat buttoned up to the neck, trying to replace the skin Nicholas had peeled away with his disinterest. She piled blankets on her bed at night and woke up stifling, but at least she wasn’t so monstrously exposed. When she flew, she wished for an enveloping canopy of lenticular cloud to surround her, but the skies were blue and clear.
Nicholas did exactly what she’d asked him to: kept as far away from her as he possibly could, probably to save both himself and her from any more embarrassment. But she carried with her the everlasting wound of his indifference.
Until one day in March 1944 when Pauline told her she’d been asked to report to a War Ministry building on Portman Square in London.
‘What for?’ Skye asked despairingly. ‘What have I done now?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pauline said, concern apparent in her frown. ‘I’ve done my best to find out but nobody’s talking. Try not to worry. Surely you know by now that I won’t let anything happen to you.’
Skye managed a small smile. She supposed she did know that. But it didn’t make her feel any better as she caught the train to London and the Tube to Marble Arch and walked to a columned mansion house on Portman Square, apprehension coating her nerves like high altitude frost.
She was promptly whisked down a hallway, past rooms with closed doors, and then behind another closed door, where she found Air Marshal Wylde, of all people, waiting for her.
‘Captain Penrose,’ he said, nodding at her. ‘Please take a seat.’
Skye did so without a word. She had none at her disposal.
‘Tea? Coffee?’ Wylde asked.
‘Tea, please,’ she managed.
They waited, both silent, for the tea to be made and poured and for the woman to leave.
At last Wylde seated himself too, but instead of speaking, he studied her. She did the same to him, noting that he had a severe face, not unattractively so for someone who must be close to fifty, but as if it would be a challenge for him to relax his countenance into affability. His hair was silvered and his bearing authoritative, but when he had sat down, he’d moved with an agility Skye remembered from when he had danced with her mother.
‘It’s come to the attention of certain people,’ he said at last, sipping his tea and then leaning back, eyes still on her, ‘that you could easily pass for a Frenchwoman. You speak fluent French, your gestures are French, and you lived in the country for years. You also have a cool head in times of trouble. Of course,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘I already knew all of that, but now it’s been pointed out to others. Thus, here we are.’
‘What on earth has my latent Frenchness to do with anything?’ Skye asked, bewildered.
Wylde’s smile was sudden and warm, but quickly erased by melancholy. ‘You are so very like her. You probably don’t know that – there isn’t anyone left to tell you. Except me.’
‘You mean my mother,’ Skye said, voice a whisper.
‘Yes. Vanessa Penrose. With whom I had the misfortune of having a similar conversation about twenty-five years ago.’
Fortune-telling, feather-and-black-silk-nightgown–wearing Vanessa Penrose in a room like this? Skye shook her head. If she had never seen her mother dancing
with this man, she wouldn’t believe any of it.
‘I don’t suppose you have any whiskey to go with the tea, do you?’ she asked hopefully. ‘I’m not sure where this conversation is going, but something tells me that tea won’t have quite the kick I’ll need.’
Wylde actually laughed. ‘I’m sure I can find something to trick up your cup.’ He moved to a sideboard and held up a bottle of Scotch. ‘Will this do?’
Skye nodded. He poured a decent slug into her cup and she swallowed rather than sipped. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘You must be aware, especially after our last conversation, that the War Office organises clandestine operations into France.’
‘What does that have to do with me, or my mother?’
Wylde sighed. ‘Vanessa was far too good at dissimulation. Or perhaps she really did become just a mother and a fortune-teller.’
‘Just?’ Skye snapped.
‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’ Wylde poured himself a Scotch, neat. ‘If you’d known your mother during the Great War, you might understand why I find it so hard to imagine her as content to parent two small children and predict futures for narrow-minded Cornish villagers.’
‘And what did my mother do during the Great War that was so very impressive?’
‘She began her working life as a typist in the Intelligence Office. But Vanessa was always the kind of woman who attracted notice and it soon became apparent that she was smarter than most, that she spoke fluent French and could handle herself well. My …’ He hesitated for the first time since Skye had entered the room. ‘My brother and I were intelligence officers. He felt she might be more useful to the war effort in a capacity other than typist.’
‘Is intelligence officer a euphemism for spy?’ Skye asked, wondering if she’d drunk too much Scotch.
‘In a way. And everything I’m telling you is still classified as most secret. Which means you cannot repeat it.’ He sipped his Scotch and added, ‘I suppose a lot of things would still be secret if there hadn’t been another war.’
‘You’re not suggesting that my mother …’ Skye stopped. It was preposterous. Yes, Vanessa had always been elusive about Skye and Liberty’s father, but that was the way of the world. It was utterly shameful in the eyes of almost everyone that Vanessa had borne two children out of wedlock; no one then expected her to broadcast the details of the swine who’d seduced her and abandoned her. Except that Skye had never quite believed that version of whispered events. Why would her mother have gone back to the so-called swine; why would she have taken the risk of falling pregnant again? Now Wylde was suggesting that the omissions and the mysteries ran far deeper.
‘Your mother did some work in France for the Intelligence Office during the Great War, Skye. My brother, as well as teaching her to fly, was her liaison officer, and Vanessa worked with my sister, who lived in France. They were the golden threesome: the two women in France sent information to my brother in London, who passed it on to the War Office to make sure our military tactics were based on more than hearsay.’
Skye wanted to drink the Scotch straight from the bottle. How was this possible? She shivered, trying to recall anything of her childhood, any conversation with her mother, that would indicate it was true.
‘Are you sure you want to hear the rest?’ Wylde asked, rather gently.
‘No. But I think I have to. You should probably take the Scotch away though or I might soon be too drunk to listen.’
He allowed himself a smile as he put the bottle out of her reach. ‘The thing of it is, Skye … you are, in fact, my niece.’
Niece. Which meant … ‘Your brother?’
He nodded. ‘Sebastian was married. It was an arrangement, I suppose, the way things were done between families like ours. Select a woman with the right background and make a promise when the children are young, a promise that ends in marriage. Being the second son, such decisions weren’t foisted upon me. But if I’d been the eldest and they had been …’
His last words were wistful and Skye’s stomach contracted. She knew the sound of a person who loved someone they couldn’t have.
‘You were in love with your brother’s wife,’ she said. ‘And then he took up with my mother. While he was married, I assume. How you must have hated my mother.’
Wylde didn’t hold back. ‘I did. I didn’t care that she was helping to save our country; she was also ruining a marriage. A marriage that was, I now see, already ruined by bringing together two unsuitable people, and made worse by Marie – Sebastian’s wife – proving to be barren. There wasn’t even the distraction of children.’
‘Except for those your brother had with my mother. Two more reasons to hate her.’
‘Yes.’
Skye tried to picture this other version of her mother: in love with a married man; not scrupling to think of his wife, or to remove herself from temptation; throwing herself headlong into an affair that had resulted in Skye and Liberty. How history repeated itself. Here was Skye, in love with a man who had promised to marry another. But Skye hadn’t done what her mother had; Skye had acceded to temptation only in her mind. Maybe living with the kind of danger her mother had lived with made one take whatever one could from life – what would be the point of dying if one had never loved?
Skye shut her eyes for a moment, before refocusing on Wylde. ‘You never looked as though you hated my mother when you came to our house in Cornwall. What happened to your sister? And your brother?’
‘My brother,’ he said, and she could feel the weight of the word on his tongue. ‘Vanessa and Sophie, my sister, went missing. It was thought they’d been captured. Sebastian flew his own aeroplane into France to find them. I didn’t know at the time, but Vanessa had already given birth to you and was pregnant again with your sister. Whenever she was away in France, you were cared for by a nurse Sebastian had employed.’
So Sophie really was Skye’s aunt. But … ‘Your brother died on the way, didn’t he,’ Skye said, knowing that was how it must have happened. Everyone involved with her died in the great blue sky.
‘He did. At least, he vanished. The weather was filthy. He most likely got lost in the cloud and was shot down somewhere. The day after he disappeared …’
Wylde stopped, and Skye sensed that he was capable of deep emotion, and he was feeling it in that very instant.
‘Your mother and Sophie reported in,’ he went on. ‘They were fine. The nearest wireless transmitter had been blown up and they’d had no way of communicating with us. Sebastian needn’t have gone after them. I imagine he would have waited a few more days if he hadn’t known that Vanessa was …’
‘Pregnant again with his child,’ Skye finished for him. ‘How you must hate us too, his children, for costing him his life.’
‘I did hate you both, just as I once hated Vanessa – but hate doesn’t get you anywhere, does it?’ He sighed. ‘After the war, Sophie stayed on in France. She’d been very close to your mother, as close as sisters, and didn’t blame her at all for what had happened. She told me that Sebastian was his own man and made his own decisions, that he was the one to blame, not Vanessa.’
‘And she promised my mother to look after me and Liberty if anything happened.’
‘Quite right. After spending several years being angry at Vanessa, I went to stay with Sophie in France for a week or two. She neglected to tell me that Vanessa and her children – you and your sister – would be there also. I was furious at first. But then I realised Vanessa was one of the only people I could speak to about my brother – she’d known him properly. So after that I went to see her occasionally, to remember. I should have done more for you and your sister though. You’re my nieces, for Christ’s sake.’
He touched Skye’s arm, then withdrew his hand uncertainly. In that gesture, she understood that she now had another family besides the women at Hamble. It almost made her smile.
But there was, still, the most important question, which lay all around them unanswered.
‘Why are you telling me this now?’
He stood, moving away, and spoke with his back to her. ‘It’s thought you could help the war effort the same way your mother did. I’m not at all sure that I shouldn’t try to dissuade you. But we need more women. It’s getting harder and harder to send men over; they’re too conspicuous. Most French men have either been prisoners of war since 1940 or have been sent to Germany on forced labour programs. Women attract far less suspicion. It’s just damned hard to find ones who speak French well enough, and who seem French enough not to give themselves away within five minutes of being over there. We’ve had to take on a couple whose trainers raised doubts about their emotional control but, as their Frenchness was beyond doubt and we can’t lose this bloody war …’ His sigh expressed his frustration. ‘Well, nobody could afford not to use them.’
He turned to face her, his expression troubled. ‘I have no doubts about your self-possession; you’ve more than proved yourself in the ATA. If you agreed to all this, you would join the Special Operations Executive, or SOE as it’s known. Duties generally involve sabotage, working with Resistance circuits, and gathering and passing on information between those Resistance circuits and HQ in London. The agents are flown into France on full moon nights by Lysanders, whose pilots are based at Tempsford, where you arrived by accident eighteen months ago. I’m responsible for all the Special Duties squadrons in the RAF, of which that is one.’
Nicholas. Her breath stopped, her heart clenched like a fist. Nicholas flew spies into France. If something went wrong with his plane and he was captured by the Nazis … She shuddered.
‘You look as if you need more Scotch,’ Wylde said. ‘I didn’t mean to shock you quite so much. You can certainly refuse.’
‘It’s not that.’ She shook her head and, unbelievably, the words came out. ‘Nicholas Crawford is …’ The man I love. She caught herself just in time. ‘A good friend. I had no idea he was in so much danger.’
‘Ah.’ Wylde took up the bottle and poured her the healthiest slug yet. ‘I didn’t know that.’
The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020) Page 30