He paused, and she knew he didn’t want to hurt her by saying it aloud, just as he’d held back from saying it last night.
“And my grandmother is her sister, Liberty,” Kat finished bleakly. “They own houses side by side, after all.”
She stared out the window, at the dreariness of the motorway and the cars. “What happened to the real Margaux then?” she said. “You told me her boss, Vera Atkins, interviewed Margaux Jourdan after the war, so did she disappear after that or before? And if it was before, wouldn’t Vera Atkins have noticed she was talking to a different woman? It’s a long bow to draw that this other Margaux in Cornwall is Skye Penrose just because she said something about clouds.”
Or that my grandmother is Liberty Penrose just because she was pregnant with a baby at the right time. But Kat knew that the bow in that case was about the right length.
“There’s something else,” Elliott said. “It’s the pocket watch. I think that watch once belonged to a man named Nicholas Crawford. I have a description of it, and the one on Margaux’s mantelpiece seems, from the quick glance I had of it, to be the same. I mentioned Nicholas Crawford earlier—he and Skye Penrose were . . . very good friends. Such good friends that it’s entirely possible she might have his pocket watch.”
“But why would sisters be so estranged?” Kat asked. “Why would this Margaux seem so indifferent to a photograph of my grandmother, a woman you’re saying is her sister, Liberty?”
Elliott rubbed his jaw. “I’ve dragged you into this mess and all I have are more questions than answers. I don’t suppose asking your grandmother if she’s Liberty Penrose is a very sensible idea?”
“Does it make me a complete coward if I say that I don’t want to? My grandmother is more than ninety years old. Sudden revelations over the phone are all very well for the stout-hearted but . . .” Kat shook her head. “I’ll ask her when I’m back in Australia and I can be there for her, especially if it unearths memories of somewhere like Ravensbrück.”
“I understand. I have a grandfather I’m very fond of and I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable asking him those kinds of questions over the phone either. Let me think about what to do next. I’ll look back over everything I’ve gathered so far and see if I’ve missed something.”
For the rest of the drive, Kat felt something turning over in her mind; something that had been bothering her since the day before when they’d first met Margaux. She couldn’t say what it was, just that she felt as if something obvious had been shown to her and she hadn’t been paying sufficient attention. But no answer revealed itself.
* * *
When they reached the outskirts of London, Elliott asked, “Do you need to get back to the hotel? I have a standing arrangement to have lunch with my mother most Sundays, and Juliette, my daughter, comes too. We’ve missed lunch but I have to pick Juliette up from my mother’s—she stays with me on Sunday nights. But I can drop you back to your hotel first if you’d prefer.”
“I don’t mind,” Kat said truthfully. She had nothing else to do in a hotel room by herself except fret over her grandmother.
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 driving 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 Pink and Beyoncé, but now it seems I must progress to reality television.”
Kat laughed. “I’d give anything to be listening to Pink 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 parlor, which was all paneled 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 roller coaster 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 artifacts 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 inquiry 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 colorful 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, emphasizing 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, digging 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 airplanes, 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 whom 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 ca
n 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-centered 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.”
The Paris Secret Page 29