The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “The world turned its back on us the moment we were born, Skye. That’s what it does to illegitimate children.” Liberty spoke serenely, one arm crossed over her body to support the other arm that moved her cigarette in and out of her mouth. “All she gave us were things that made the world turn its back on us even more. Flying lessons. Fortune-telling—”

  “She gave us the courage to do anything.” Skye interrupted her sister.

  “She gave us the burden of disreputability.”

  It was Skye’s turn to laugh, as if Liberty were just fooling around. “Well, I wouldn’t change any of it.”

  “I would. Our childhoods, while parallel, were nothing alike.”

  “They were exactly the same,” Skye said, temper flaring. “I have to go. I have work to do.”

  That afternoon, as she flew through a sky the color of the Cornish sea—a deep, fathomless blue—one thought whirled through Skye’s head like a blizzard: she and Liberty told two such different versions of the same story. Whose was right? Perhaps Liberty was just trying to take away the one thing they shared beyond their surname—their history. But if they didn’t even have a past, then what would tether them together now and in the future?

  Don’t think about it, she told herself. Liberty’s childish kicking had simply been replaced by exasperating behavior designed to goad the other party into lashing out. And as usual, Skye had managed to do something she regretted: storm off. There was no point dwelling on it. The next time she saw her sister, Liberty was sure to have moved on to some other provocation.

  * * *

  Thankfully for Skye’s jumbled emotions, she didn’t see O’Farrell, Nicholas or Margaux for quite some time. It meant she was able to put off discovering whether what she felt for Nicholas was written all over her face, no doubt mortifying him, Margaux and most especially herself.

  Then, unbelievably, Liberty wrote to Skye to tell her that she’d met O’Farrell and, when he’d discovered she was Skye’s sister, he’d invited her to join them in London. She added a postscript that Skye didn’t trust: He’s exceptionally charming!

  So it transpired that Liberty met Skye and Rose at Southampton station and caught the train with them to London. Joan was now training to fly four-engine bombers and couldn’t join them. At the Dorchester, O’Farrell and Richie met them in the lobby with eager smiles.

  Richie kissed Rose’s cheek and, blushing endearingly, gave her the key to their room so she could freshen up and stow her overnight bag there.

  O’Farrell, of course, didn’t blush or prevaricate; he took Skye’s bag from her, and Liberty’s too, and led the way upstairs to their rooms.

  Liberty took one look at her cramped single, and at Skye and O’Farrell’s much larger and more luxurious accommodations, sniffed and said, “I thought I’d be able to spend time with my sister this weekend.”

  O’Farrell’s face contorted.

  “We’ll have plenty of time to chat over dinner,” Skye said to Liberty.

  But Liberty wasn’t to be thwarted. “What if the Germans bomb us?” she said, eyes round with fear or mischief—Skye couldn’t be sure which. Liberty took her bag from O’Farrell and deposited it on the double bed in Skye’s room. “I think I’d best stay here with Skye.”

  She smiled beseechingly at O’Farrell who, realizing he had no choice other than to forcibly remove her from the room, took his own bag to the single next door.

  “Thank you for ruining my evening,” Skye said to her sister as soon as O’Farrell had gone.

  “You don’t look all that upset,” Liberty observed. “Perhaps I’ve saved your evening?” With that, she flounced out of the room.

  O’Farrell came back and enveloped Skye in a hug, his lips lingering on hers. “We can come up early, before Liberty,” he said. “Maybe we’ll have time—”

  “Skye!” Liberty’s voice screeched down the hall like an air-raid siren. “The others are waiting downstairs.”

  “Is she always like this?” O’Farrell asked. “I thought I was doing something nice by inviting her.”

  “Yes,” Skye said grimly. “She is always like this.” And only just managed to refrain from adding that “nice” and “Liberty” were two words that didn’t really go together.

  * * *

  Nicholas, having succeeded in irritating both himself and Margaux with the constant drumming of his fingers on her chair back, took himself to the bar to order drinks. While he waited, he surveyed the room. Rose was snuggled into Richie’s side on one of the settees, and Nicholas felt himself grow cold and very still at the thought that Skye might soon be doing the same with O’Farrell.

  In the mirror behind the bar, he caught sight of his reflection: another man in uniform, so like every other man at the hotel. Yet Skye had called him handsome. Once. At no other time had she spoken of the way he looked, of the physical. But when they’d danced at the airfield, and swum together at Hamble, he’d felt something so intensely physical that it was as if the magnetic charge of an aurora—that startling and magical collision of particles—had fallen from the sky, lighting the water between them so vividly that its energy clung to him still.

  And she wasn’t even in the room. She didn’t need to be. Just thinking of her in that swimsuit was more than he should allow himself to recall.

  He leaned an elbow on the bar and rubbed his forehead. But she was inerasable. His eyes strayed toward the elevators, and when finally she emerged with O’Farrell and Liberty, he couldn’t stop the smile that lifted onto his face.

  Margaux caught him, and smirked. He rearranged his expression into blankness, but found himself wanting to punch the air and whoop when Skye came over to his side.

  “What can I get you?” he asked. “More whiskey?” His wry smile prompted one of her own.

  “I had a headache for three days after our misadventure with your whiskey flask,” she said. “I should stick to water.”

  Liberty’s voice, close by and loudly relating something to O’Farrell, made Skye frown.

  “If I get you water, you won’t be living up to your reputation,” Nicholas said very seriously, trying to distract her from her sister. “The story passed around by the pilots is that your friend Rose is the practical one, Joan is the delightful one, Pauline is the terrifying one, and you’re either the,” he paused as if flicking through a list, “the mysterious one, the fun one or the wild one.”

  She was laughing now, the force of it like a mountain wave of air almost lifting him from the ground.

  More bodies crowded around the bar and he moved aside to let them in. As far as he was concerned, he’d happily stand there all night, never placing an order for drinks, because then he wouldn’t have to move away from her and she wouldn’t return to O’Farrell.

  He was standing much closer to her now, her smile all he could see, and he wanted, suddenly, to slip his finger into the collar of her shirt, to undo the top button. To touch the skin of her throat.

  He turned his head away. He needed Margaux. He needed to reinstate the barrier between him and Skye; he’d let things go too far and now his thoughts were running down what could only ever be a dead end.

  As Skye responded to his jest by saying, “You know my wildness is limited to illicit swimming,” Margaux thankfully arrived, her dispassionate expression thrusting him back into his role.

  Liberty’s voice again pierced the conversation. “How about one of those drinks you bought for me at the pub the other night,” she said airily to O’Farrell. “What was it called? Started with an ‘n.’”

  “Negroni,” O’Farrell replied.

  “Yes, our dear friend O’Farrell has been as busy as ever, entertaining young ladies in public bars,” Margaux said coolly.

  Nicholas stared at Margaux. Why was she telling Skye that?

  He saw Skye shiver as she caught the glance that passed between him and Margaux, most likely seeing how formidable it was—the weight of all their secrets contained within it—but not what it meant. He didn’t
even know what he wanted to convey to Margaux; he’d kill O’Farrell if he broke Skye’s heart by taking WAAFs out on the sly, but he also knew he had no right to interfere in Skye’s life.

  Now Liberty was whispering in O’Farrell’s ear and if Skye turned her body a little to the right, she’d be able to see it too. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

  He passed O’Farrell, who had stopped at the bar to get Liberty’s drink. When he reached Liberty, he took her arm and drew her away. She wore the same expression as when she was nine years old and kicking Skye under the breakfast table.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Flirting,” she said with a laugh. “I told Skye that was what my job entailed. So she shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Don’t mess it all up.”

  “Which part?” She eyed him over her cigarette and for the first time ever he wished he had a crab to put in the back of her shirt.

  “I don’t think Skye’s especially interested in O’Farrell,” Liberty added, eyeing him the same way Margaux had just done.

  “Talk to her, Liberty,” he said.

  “You know I can’t.”

  And that was the trouble: none of them could tell Skye anything.

  * * *

  “O’Farrell’s been as excited about this weekend as a trainee pilot taking his first flight,” Margaux observed to Skye after Nicholas had left.

  Skye’s hand clattered against a glass on the bar. Although her experience with men was limited, she knew what to expect and that O’Farrell was probably good enough at it to make her feel something. But that didn’t help to ease whatever it was she felt in the pit of her stomach. Nor did it help to answer the question that was ringing persistently in her ears: did she really want to sleep with O’Farrell, and, if she didn’t, shouldn’t she let him know?

  “Perhaps I’ll have a whiskey after all,” she said. But the drink only made her feel more detached from what was happening, rather than offering up a solution.

  Soon it was time to walk to the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. They arrived in time for the newsreel. The audience cheered at the good news, of which there wasn’t much, and became silent at the bad, of which there was rather a lot.

  Liberty chattered relentlessly to O’Farrell. Margaux smoked. Nicholas said nothing. The whiskey in Skye’s stomach churned.

  Given the difficulties of communicating with a pilot on another base whom she hadn’t seen for two months, Skye didn’t know a lot about what O’Farrell had arranged for the evening and she certainly had no idea what movie was playing. When it began, she was distracted with lighting a cigarette from a pack Nicholas had passed to her, but her eyes flew to him when he said in a strange and compressed voice, “Skye.”

  A blond head in an airplane appeared on the screen, and the words They Flew Alone scrolled across it in ominous white. Amy Johnson’s face—or rather the face of the actress playing her—was all Skye could see. Amy Johnson, the first female pilot to fly from England to Australia, beating the record set by a man. Amy Johnson, whose triumphs in the air had spurred Skye’s mother to fly to her death. Amy Johnson, who had died herself in 1941 after joining the ATA.

  On the screen, she was still alive. Her ATA overalls were uncomfortably familiar—like the ones Skye wore each day—and the actress had Amy’s mannerisms just about right.

  The airplane took off, clouds descended. Then the blindness Skye knew all too well: the blindness of bad weather. The feeling of not knowing if you had flown right out of the atmosphere and into somewhere so foreign and so far away it seemed impossible that you would ever return. Amy’s face: fearful, disbelieving that this could happen to her when she was so experienced. And the sudden and acute sweep of understanding that this was all there was: a woman alone in a plane in the clouds and that life had meant nothing at all.

  “Are you all right?” Nicholas asked in an urgent whisper, and Skye realized that her breathing was terribly, audibly fast, her cigarette had burned down almost to her fingers and white ash was falling around her like teardrops.

  “Excuse me.” She jumped up, hurrying for the exit, not even stopping to see if Liberty was similarly distressed. She knew only that she had to get away before she started to cry in the way she’d only ever cried once before—on the day she found out her mother had died after her plane had entered that same cloud-filled void.

  She had never cried like that again because Liberty had caught her sobbing on her bed in Paris and, in one of the rare tender moments they’d shared, had begun wailing herself. “No, Skye,” Liberty had howled. “You can’t cry.” She was inconsolable for hours, repeating those three words in the tiniest of whispers—you can’t cry—as if it were Skye crying that made their mother’s death a terrible and acutely felt thing.

  Skye had swallowed her sobs, wiped her eyes and held her sister, an orphan at age thirteen.

  Now, a decade’s worth of tears burst from her like a tempest the moment she made it out into Leicester Square. The reality of how vulnerable to death she was—and Rose was, and Joan, and Nicholas, and O’Farrell too—hit her. It could be any of their faces on that cinema screen.

  But what a terrible place to be while in the midst of the worst kind of emotional storm. Service men and women swarmed around her as she wept, some of the men good-naturedly calling out that they’d buy her a drink before realizing that her face was soaked and hurrying away before they caught whatever grief had infected her. It was in that bewildering swirl of people and noise that someone took her arm and led her toward a wall, out of the hubbub.

  She heard Nicholas say, “O’Farrell’s coming and I know you’ll prefer him helping you, but I just had to make sure—not that you’re all right because I know you’re not—but whether there’s something I can do?”

  O’Farrell’s distinctly displeased voice broke in. “What did you do to her?”

  Skye shook her head, meaning to indicate that nothing was Nicholas’s fault, but Nicholas interpreted it as an answer to his question. He kicked at the ground with the toe of his boot and said, “I’m going inside.”

  “He didn’t do anything,” Skye said to O’Farrell, swiping at her cheeks as Nicholas left. “My mother . . . died in a plane crash. Like Amy Johnson.”

  O’Farrell didn’t bother to ask her a single thing about her mother. Instead he said, “I know I already asked you this, but what is the story with you and Crawford?”

  “The story,” she said evenly and honestly, “is that I haven’t had a mother since I was fourteen. I try not to think about that very often. Because it hurts like lying down on a runway and letting a squadron of Spitfires run over you. Nicholas knew my mother. And he knew how the movie might make me feel.”

  She expected he would leave it at that and they would go back inside, even though she didn’t want to, and she would shut her eyes through the rest of the movie.

  But he kept on. “I didn’t know. But of course your friend did.”

  She blinked away her tears and shot the words at him. “This is the first time you’ve shown any interest in me beyond kissing. If you wanted to know about my past, all you had to do was ask.”

  “I told you I only wanted something casual,” he said belligerently. “But that doesn’t mean I want someone who kisses my boss in an alley right before she sleeps with me.”

  Don’t cry, Skye told herself. Not in front of O’Farrell.

  She remembered what Liberty had said about drinking negronis with O’Farrell, and what Margaux had murmured about the smiles he gave away so freely to every WAAF. O’Farrell wanted something casual for himself but resented Skye seeking comfort from a friend.

  She knew then that she didn’t want to be just another woman to smile at, another woman to share a drink with, another woman to bed. She wanted someone for whom she was the sea and the sky and the entire universe as well.

  “You should find somebody else to be casual with,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  She walked bac
k into the theater and sat at the back, away from the group. She saw O’Farrell return too and take a seat next to Liberty—who didn’t seem at all distressed by the movie—and saw her sister lean into him. Skye closed her eyes. She knew exactly what was about to happen.

  Twenty-Two

  At the Embassy Club after the movie, Skye found a table in a dark corner where she could sit and smoke and drink and restore her equanimity. She didn’t want to put a dampener on the party, didn’t want to be annoyed at O’Farrell, just wanted to pretend that she wasn’t sad, and that outside the club’s doors everything was brightly lit and intact and so too was her heart. She tried to smile, but couldn’t feel the happiness implied by the gesture, couldn’t help wondering how one could dance and laugh and drink when the world was at war. And was it wrong to do so?

  She seemed to be the only person who had such thoughts. On the dance floor, Liberty was twirling around with a drink in hand, spilling most of it on O’Farrell. Rose and Richie were locked in an embrace that could end in only one way; and even Margaux was smiling at Nicholas as they danced, not closely like Liberty and O’Farrell, but with something more of a shared understanding. Perhaps that was what happened to love once comfort set in: it quieted to a less explosive but more reliable intimacy. How Skye wanted both: the explosion, and the sweet quietness that followed.

  A short time later, Margaux joined her. “Do you miss France?” Margaux asked abruptly, and in French, as she lit her usual Gauloise.

  Skye considered her answer and then replied in the same language. “In some ways, yes. Although it’s probably not simply France I miss, but the freedom. The lack of war. Which I wouldn’t find if I was to return there now. And you? When did you come to England?”

  “I was sent to boarding school in London when I was thirteen. My parents wanted me to speak English equally as well as French. They had some idea of what the world was coming to.”