by Lily Graham
He got up, and she could hear him busy himself in the small downstairs kitchen where they kept a few mugs and a kettle.
After some time he came back with two mugs and a saucer full of rather boring-looking biscuits. Not his usual style of large chocolate-chip cookies.
He put the mugs down on the bistro table, then cleared his throat.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, looking at the milky brown liquid.
He gave a deep sigh. ‘It’s that swill… you know, that horrible muck you like.’
She frowned in confusion, and then realisation dawned as she picked up the mug and gave it a sniff. ‘M’sieur Dupont!’ she exclaimed. ‘Is this tea?’
He shrugged. ‘Oui. Don’t make a fuss.’
She looked at it, then at him, in utter confusion.
Dupont had theories about tea. Mostly that it was awful, and that it stank, and he wouldn’t keep any in the house. The only place that had been safe for her to drink a cup was in her bedroom.
She looked at the biscuits, then shook her head in amazement. They were Rich Tea biscuits: about as English as brollies and Marmite, and certainly not the sort of thing he’d ever buy himself. He must have gone to a special shop to buy these things for her. Though she couldn’t imagine where they sold such things. He’d done it for her, because he had noticed that she looked sad, lost.
Dupont.
Tears pricked her eyes. She was touched more than she could say. But she knew he wouldn’t appreciate a show, so she said, ‘Thanks very much.’ Then she took a bite of a biscuit and rallied, gave a deep sniff. ‘M’sieur,’ she said, as he turned to shuffle back to his desk with a grunt. ‘You see that even the cat has given up on you because of your terrible taste in literature… honestly, to call Colette drivel… he is a French cat, after all.’
There was a small snort of amusement from Dupont, before he started grumbling, and saying that the closer we got to Christmas, people started to lose their minds, even mangy tail-less cats.
‘He went to Madame Harvey for that tea – you know, the English woman who runs that little tea shop in the Rue des Arbres,’ said a small, elfin-faced boy with dirty blond hair and thick lashes, some time later. ‘I followed him.’
It was Henri, a young boy of around eleven or twelve, who sometimes earned a few francs from Dupont for doing odd jobs around the bookshop. His parents had fallen on hard times, and between Dupont and Madame Joubert they often found piecework for Henri, mainly to ensure that there was some food in his belly. He was a good sort, always ready to lend a hand, and Valerie had seen that he was interested in reading, so she set aside a few books for him every week, adventure stories mainly, that she thought he might like.
‘Really?’
‘Oui,’ he said, his face splitting apart into an amused grin. His eyes were wide with significance. ‘He got the biscuits there too – I think she gave them to him from her own pantry.’
Valerie was touched. As she watched Henri get to work on washing the glass of the front door, his hands wringing a rag full of the soapy water, she picked up the tea her grandfather had made, and though it was absolutely terrible – weak, and devoid of sugar – she enjoyed every last sip.
As the afternoon wore on, Valerie realised that she wasn’t ready to find out how she was conceived, who her father was. She knew that she should just get it over with, go and see Madame Joubert, and put things right between them, but she just couldn’t. She sent Henri over with a note, saying that she would need to reschedule.
She was startled when she heard the phone ring. It was Freddy. The line was bad, tinny.
‘Haven’t got long, love, but I just wanted to hear your voice.’
She grinned. ‘Thanks. How’s it going there?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s bloody miserable. Can’t say much, walls have ears and all of that… but it’s bleak here. I spoke to some of the people who got through the wall, their lives…’ There was a pause and she could picture him talking a drag of a cigarette, rubbing his eyes. He was always like this when he was on a story – it was all-consuming. ‘It’s like the world has gone mad, sometimes.’
He was right. The latest news about the Cuban missile crisis was shocking enough. People were coming into the shop with all kinds of fears, some preparing for the end of days, wanting manuals about ‘living off the grid’ and ‘surviving the apocalypse’.
They even had a section for people who were building bomb shelters in their homes.
Some days it was funny, but it wasn’t really, not when you stopped to think about it. What if there really was a nuclear war?
‘Just be careful, Freddy.’
‘Always,’ he said, then took another drag of his cigarette. ‘Chat later, love, one of the guys has arrived now for an interview – got to run.’
And he was off.
She sighed, put the phone back in the cradle, and picked up the bookshop cat, giving him a hug.
‘That boy of yours okay?’ asked Dupont. He was coming into the shop with a fillet of fish. It was a Friday and, Cuban missile crisis or not, the man would cook his fish.
She nodded, her face sinking back into its glum lines.
He stared at her for some time, seeming to make up his mind about something. Eventually, he said, ‘Would you like to watch a film?’
She looked up. ‘A film?’
‘There is an old cinema around the corner. They are playing Gone with the Wind, again, and I thought if you wanted… we could go?’
He wanted to watch a film with her?
She grinned. ‘That sounds great.’
He nodded. ‘Bon.’ Giving her a rare smile.
Later that evening they sat on old velvet seats eating popcorn and drinking wine out of short glasses, and watching Scarlett fall in love with Rhett. She laughed more at Dupont’s deep rumbling laughter than she did the story, and it was the first time in ages that she had felt that maybe things might just be all right.
After she had got ready for bed, hearing the night-time sounds of Dupont – his clicking ankle as he made his way up the stairs, putting the cat out – she slipped under the sheets and leant her head against the peeling wallpaper. She had to tell him who she really was. She knew that. But then she thought back on the day, a day that had started off badly, with her feeling dispirited and worried about Freddy, the threat of war, the past, and how each time she’d sunk into those black moods, Dupont had been there to cheer her up. She felt tears prick her eyes as she realised just how much she had come to care for him, and how hard it would be if he turned her away now. ‘Oh, Amélie,’ she whispered, ‘maybe you were right – maybe I was just asking for trouble, with this.’
In the morning, Madame Joubert came by, bringing fresh croissants from the bakery and a bouquet of sweet-smelling irises.
When Dupont was occupied making coffee, Madame Joubert turned to her, and Valerie looked down at her feet. ‘I know what you are going to say.’
‘No, you don’t. You know what you think I am going to say – that’s different. Come tonight, we can go out for dinner.’
Valerie agreed; this time she knew there was no getting out of it.
She met Madame Joubert at Les Deux Magots, the famous cafe that had once been the haunt of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and a host of other famous writers and artists. She could picture them sitting there, arguing and laughing in the rose-coloured sunshine, writing their masterpieces and falling in love with the city.
But then just as easily, seeing Madame Joubert – her open face sad, her curls looking unusually flat, as she sipped a glass of port waiting for Valerie at the back – she could also picture the cafe twenty years before, under the veil of the Occupation, see how the French had been turned into spectators in their own cities. Watching as the Germans fed themselves on their wine, their food and their way of life.
She took a seat next to Madame Joubert, who smiled at her. ‘I’m glad you came, chérie. I thought this would be a nice p
lace to come. Touristy, yes, but we mustn’t forget what makes Paris Paris, non? It’s what we fought for, in the end.’
Valerie nodded. When the waiter came past, a young man with a thin smile, slicked-back hair and dark eyes, she ordered a whisky, deciding that for what Madame Joubert was about to tell her, she was going to need something strong to drink.
At first they spoke of the bookshop, and Freddy. Madame Joubert was glad that it had finally worked out for them, though saddened to hear that he was in West Berlin. ‘That sounds dangerous,’ she said. Valerie nodded. No more dangerous than what Madame Joubert and M’sieur Dupont had lived through, though – at least they were no longer at war.
Valerie took a sip of her whisky, and they ran out of casual topics and things to fill the silence, to delay what she had come here to learn. She took a deep breath, her chest rising up and down, and blurted out, ‘She was raped, yes? My mother?’
Madame Joubert choked on her port, and started to cough. She raised a blue-and-white checked napkin to dab the red juices that ran all along her chin, her eyes watering.
Valerie stared at her for some time, before remembering her manners. ‘C-can I get you some water?’
Madame Joubert shook her head. ‘It went down the wrong way.’ Her voice was raspy and she took a breath, but she stared at Valerie for a long while before she said, at last, ‘Your mother wasn’t raped.’
‘She wasn’t?’
Madame Joubert shook her head.
Valerie breathed out in relief; it had been one of her fears. She hadn’t realised how much it had been eating at her. But as she sat in the crowded cafe, and realised what the alternative meant – that her mother had chosen to sleep with a Nazi – she didn’t know if in the end that was somehow worse.
Chapter Twenty
1940
Mattaus Fredericks came home to darkness. The apartment had not a shred of light on, despite the early evening hour.
‘Mademoiselle,’ he called. For a long while there was nothing, not a sound to stir the dark winter’s night, just the wind that rattled the windows and sneaked in through the gaps in the doors. He felt a momentary dart of unease. Had Kroeling come back to finish what he’d started? His mind pictured the worst, and he began to imagine discovering Mireille’s body, left broken and abused. But then there was the small sound of her shuffling feet, and she appeared at the door to the kitchen like a mouse.
He breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Are you quite all right? Everything is dark.’
She nodded. ‘I – I’m quite well, thank you. I have left some dinner for you.’
He could tell that she was far from well. She looked terrified. It made the muscle in his jaw tense. When had that happened? He had only ever wanted to help people, to be a doctor, not the sort of man that young women feared. Not that he could blame her, after all that she had been through in the past forty-eight hours. He could see the bruises Valter Kroeling had left behind on her neck, and along the tops of her arms, purple and painful, no doubt.
He looked away. ‘I do not expect you to share your food with me.’
Mireille nodded. ‘It’s fine. I am used to cooking for two. It’s nothing much, just a baked potato and beans. It’s on the table.’
As she turned to leave, he stopped her, touching her shoulder lightly, and she gasped in fear. Her blue eyes were like a startled rabbit’s.
He raised his palms, his eyes wary. ‘Sorry. I wanted to know – why was everything in the dark? I was told also that you did not open the shop today. Why not?’
She hesitated, deciding on whether or not she should tell him about the Frenchman who had lurked outside the shop all day, the one with venom in his eyes every time he looked at her, and when he spat at her feet.
‘How did you know that I did not open the shop?’
He sucked his bottom lip for a moment, then looked away. ‘I sent someone to look out for you – to keep watch, in case Kroeling comes back. The man will ensure that I get here in time.’
‘Th-thank you.’
It was the second occasion in such a short passage of time that she’d found herself taken aback by his kindness.
When he put on the light in the kitchen and asked her if she would join him, she felt that she owed him that at least.
She took a seat opposite him. He poured them both a glass of wine, and then looked at her face for longer than she would have preferred. ‘I have some ointment that you can put on that,’ he said, pointing to a thin wound above her eye where Kroeling had hit her.
She nodded, and watched him eat. After a while her heart rate began to slow, and she felt, for the first time since Kroeling’s attack, something close to calm.
There was something about the ordinary sounds of cutlery on a plate that made life feel, for a moment, normal.
She sipped her wine, and wondered at how it had come to this.
It turned out that the man Mattaus Fredericks had hired to keep watch over her in case Kroeling returned was the oily-haired Frenchman who had spat at her feet. She supposed he came cheap, and she supposed, as well, that this was why the man had sworn at her as he had. Currying favour with the Germans, particularly when you were a woman, was not looked upon in a soft light, especially by those who were hardest hit, like the poor or the old. Mireille wouldn’t waste her breath trying to explain that it wasn’t by choice; she knew that someone like him would never understand anyway. He was the sort of man who believed, perhaps, that what you wore or how pretty your face was meant that you were in some way ‘asking for it’. The truth was it was none of his business: she knew that she was no traitor – which should have been enough for anyone else.
The trouble was that he wasn’t the only one who began whispering about her. The neighbours didn’t take the news well that a Nazi officer was living alone with an unwed young girl, while her father was in jail.
There were some who started calling her names in the street. ‘Putain, slut,’ hissed an old woman who came into the bookshop especially one morning that week. ‘Filthy whore,’ said a girl who used to go to school with her. Mireille sat shaking in her chair afterwards; even when she’d attempted to explain, her friend hadn’t wanted to hear it. But it was different for her – she had three sisters and a mother, unlike Mireille, who was all alone.
The worst of that week was still to come, however, in the form of Valter Kroeling himself. Mireille was dusting the shelves, many of which were now emptier than they’d ever been, the stock old, as few people were buying books apart from the Nazis, when she looked up and her heart started to thud in sudden fear. He was walking towards her, his pale blue eyes gleaming with something like hatred, and triumph.
Mireille’s knees turned to jelly, and if she hadn’t been holding on to the shelf she would probably have sunk to the floor. She battled to get air into her lungs. The night that he’d come at her was strong in her mind – the pain, the terror – and she felt sure that if no one else were in the shop she would have begun screaming. She looked away, tried to calm her breathing, grateful beyond belief that she wasn’t alone this time.
Kroeling strolled inside the shop, a sneer on his face as he took in the changes that she had made to the store in the past few days. To take her mind off her troubles and fears, she had attempted to return the store to its original set-up, apart from a small but thoroughly reviled area where there was still a table piled with the hated pamphlets that the Nazis distributed, telling the Parisians their new rules, the new sets of indignities under which they were forced to live.
As he got closer, she found her courage and squared her shoulders, setting her jaw. If he attacked her this time, in front of her customers, she would go down fighting, even if it killed her or him.
But he stopped just inches from her face. His hands hung loosely at his sides. His eyes glittered with scorn. ‘I see your doctor has moved in now, so that’s how it is, eh? You were holding out for a captain?’ He gave a fake laugh, and Mireille felt nauseated – she could
see on the side of his head the bruises from where her father had hit him with the chair. She hoped it still hurt.
She sneered. ‘That’s right.’
He made a small sound, his tongue between his teeth, like a hiss. Then he shrugged, feigning an air of nonchalance. ‘But he’s nothing special. Just a lowly doctor – it’s not a proper rank. He has no real authority, despite the way he acts.’ He came forward and grinned, right in her face. ‘If I had known that you ached for someone more powerful, you should have said. I’m due a promotion soon, if that’s what matters to you,’ he leered, his eyes roaming her body.
‘It doesn’t, I can assure you. Get out, you have no business here any more,’ she hissed.
They were drawing a crowd of spectators and Valter Kroeling seemed to be enjoying that. ‘What?’ he asked, as a few older women backed away from a small discount section of cheap paperbacks.
Then he turned back to Mireille and laughed in her face. ‘I get it now – you don’t like being called a whore. You like to be courted first, is that it?’ he said, his eyes glittering, licking his sharp, thin teeth with his tongue. ‘Shall I buy a little book first, like Herr Doctor, and then you’ll let me into your drawers? Is that the price it takes?’
She looked away. ‘You’re disgusting.’
He pressed his face up to hers. ‘No, you are. I thought at least you were pure, that you were a proud little French girl, putting up with these nasty Germans,’ he snorted, ‘but you are just like all these other French whores, parting your legs for the highest bidder.’ Then he turned and marched out of the shop, saying over his shoulder, ‘And you’d better put out more pamphlets – I’ll be back tomorrow to check. It’s the only reason we’ve still let you keep this shop.’
Somehow she managed not to throw something at the back of his head.
Later that night, bone tired from lying awake tossing and turning and worrying about Kroeling’s threat, she heard a noise coming from the back of the apartment by the stairs. It sounded like scratching.