Sweet Songbird

by Sweet Songbird (retail) (epub)

  ‘We do.’ It was all that Kitty could do to control her shaking voice. ‘The little girl – Poppy?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘And the little boy? Is it – Michael?’

  The girl nodded. ‘Mick they call ’im.’

  Kitty thought for a moment that she might faint. Relief and terror fought within her – relief that, through it all, she had been right, Lottie was with Michael in Paris – and terror that after coming so close something still might prevent her from finding her son.

  Jem slid a light supporting arm about her waist. ‘Where are they now?’ he asked, quietly.

  It seemed an age before the girl answered. ‘I dunno,’ she said.

  Kitty caught a shocked breath. ‘But – surely! Please! You must know! I’ll pay you! Anything you want!’

  The girl shook her head, the mercenary regret in her eyes obviously and shatteringly genuine.

  ‘What happened?’ Jem asked.

  She shrugged. ‘They stayed ’ere for a bit. It was all right at first, though the kids was a nuisance. It’s difficult ’avin’ nippers about when yer tryin’ ter earn a decent livin’ – fellers don’t like knowin’ there’s kids in the place. But then she got sick.’

  ‘Lottie?’

  ‘Yeah – well – I wasn’t ’avin’ that, was I?’ The lovely face was the very picture of injured innocence. ‘I mean – I could ’a’ caught somethin’, couldn’t I? An’ I’ve got a livin’ to earn. Gotta be careful, you know? An’ what with ’er gettin’ so thin an’ all – she looked a bleedin’ bag o’ bones. Wasn’t bringin’ in a sou. An’ I mean ­– I’m not a bleedin’ charitable institution, am I?’

  ‘You threw her out,’ Kitty said.

  ‘Yeah – well, I ’ad to, didn’t I? Like I said, I got meself ter think about. Be sure no other bugger does—’

  ‘When?’ Kitty asked.

  The girl considered. ‘Oh, I dunno – two, three weeks ago – somethin’ like that. Just after the bleedin’ pickle-stickers arrived.’

  ‘Pickle-stickers?’

  ‘The Germans,’ Jem supplied. His eyes on her face were full of sympathy.

  She tightened her jaw. In her head, furiously, beat the knowledge that Michael had been here – here in this very apartment – whilst she had been hunting on the other side of the city. The thought almost physically nauseated her. ‘Have you no idea where she went?’

  ‘Nope.’ The girl made a brief, sour grimace that might have been a smile. ‘We didn’t exactly part the best o’ friends. She didn’t leave no forwardin’ address.’

  ‘Did she have any money?’

  Lily shook her head, and rightly interpreting Kitty’s look of bleak anger lifted her shoulders in a shrug. ‘Ain’t my fault, is it?’

  ‘You threw her out, sick, with two children to care for and no money?’

  ‘Seems like it, don’t it?’

  Appalled, Kitty recognized in the girl’s attitude not bravado but an injured certainty that she was in the right, an absolute lack of anything of regret or conscience.

  Jem took her arm. His face was shadowed with disgust. ‘Come on, Kit. We’ll get nothing else here.’

  She pulled away from him, still facing the girl. ‘The little boy – Michael – was he all right?’

  Lily eyed her curiously. ‘Last time I saw ’im – yeah, ’e was fine.’

  ‘If you hear or see anything of them – anything! – will you come to me?’ Kitty was hastily scribbling her address on a corner of the sketch. She tore if off and handed it to the girl. ‘If you help us find them I promise I’ll make it worth your while.’

  ‘’Ow much?’

  Kitty did not hesitate. ‘Fifteen hundred francs.’

  The girl whistled between her teeth. ‘You really want ’em, don’t you?’

  ‘Just one more thing. If you do see Lottie – I don’t want her to know. I want to – to surprise her.’

  The girl smiled, craftily. ‘That’s all right by me.’

  Blindly and with no farewell Kitty turned and pushed her way back through the beaded curtain to the front door.

  * * *

  This time the disappointment was crushing; for now there were no more straws, no more flimsy hopes to cling to. Yet she would not, could not, give up. Michael was here, in the beleaguered city, in the charge of a sick and penniless woman; and though she knew that her chances of finding him had surely plummeted to nothing, doggedly and despite Jem’s fiercely worried warnings she walked the blighted streets, ignoring the dangers. She visited the overcrowded convents where scores of lost and homeless children had found refuge, she loitered outside schools, hunted through the all but empty market places, but all, of course, to no avail. As she walked the unnaturally quiet streets she found herself scanning the faces that passed her. The cry of a child would set her heart racing, her eyes searching for that one small gypsy-dark head.

  The weather now had broken at last, and broken with a vengeance. In the place of the blazing heat a chill cold had enveloped the hard-pressed city, unseasonally early. Time trickled on, and the strange, nervous strain of inaction and ever-present threat strung tempers to breaking point once again. Acting too late, in mid-October the government at last rationed meat – but by now supplies were so low that only a hundred grammes a week could be allowed. Jem, Kitty and the little Louise ate frugally of the supplies Kitty had laid in, supplementing them wherever possible with food bought from outside. When Kitty was not engaged on her obstinate and hopeless search for the child, she and Louise stood in endless queues in the damp, bone-chilling cold while Jem, in a remarkably short time, became adept at being the first to track down a black market source for meat, or fish, for fresh vegetables or even, on one memorable occasion, for fresh milk, which few people in Paris had tasted since the siege had begun. In the way of such things, despite disaster and extraordinary circumstance, life assumed a pattern that oddly parodied normality; by day the simple necessities of existence took up most of their combined time and effort, in the evening, after Louise had left to join her own family – usually with some small supplement for their store cupboard – Jem and Kitty, in a happy echo of those peaceful times at La Source, would sit before the meagre fire in Kitty’s apartment and play cards, or talk, sipping the wine of which there still seemed to be an unending supply – indeed, it was as Jem had predicted the only thing in the city of which there was no shortage.

  Often Jem would sketch as they talked and, over her laughing protests, his thick pad soon became filled with a succession of pictures of Kitty – curled into an armchair, huddled against the cold, laughing, frowning, talking, staring pensively into the flames of the small, precious fire. The life of Paris too, despite the exigencies of a besieged city – the shortages, the barricades, the lack of freedom, the tensely quiet streets – paralleled their own and had achieved a strange sense of normalcy. Some of the theatres had re-opened. The cafes were full again. The smarter restaurants even still managed to produce passable meals and varied menus – though it did not pay for the squeamish to enquire too far into the ingredients of the more exotic dishes. As always it was the poor who suffered most as prices soared and winter closed in. Beyond the ring of defending forts smoke from the enemy campfires rose, whilst within the walls the strange combination of stress and tedium was disturbed only by the usual wild rumours that everyone had on the highest authority. The Prussians were about to shell the city. A French army was advancing from the south – the north – the east – the west. The Reds were planning open revolution.

  Beneath the surface disaffection and dissatisfaction with the ‘popular’ government that had been swept to power in the coup of less than two months before was growing. Resentment in the working areas at the comparative affluence of the better-off flickered like a small, angry fire in undergrowth tinder-dry and ready to flare. At the end of October the boredom and frustration felt by the besieged forces were personified by an idiotic attack upon the village of Le Bourget. The attack �
�� on an indefensible and strategically useless hamlet occupied a little shakily by the Prussian army under the French guns of the Forts de l‘Est and Aubervilliers – was ordered by a brigadier so ambitious to achieve personal glory and advancement – and to ease the crushing boredom of inaction – that he did not bother to inform the government of his intended action. The result was disaster; an early, comparatively easy victory turning to punitive and ignominious defeat. From their eyrie above the city Kitty and Jem watched the distant flicker of flame, the rise of smoke, listened to the echo of cannon and rifle fire. As reports of the atrocious casualties sustained by the French reached the city, fury at the waste and incompetence blazed and, once again, in one of those troubled and bewildering swings so characteristic of Parisian politics rebellion flared and the chanting mobs were on the streets again.

  ‘For heaven’s sake!’ Kitty said to Jem, helplessly, ‘I just don’t believe it! They’re all on the same side, aren’t they? I mean – the Germans are at the very gates of the city – and still they fight amongst themselves?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll never understand it.’

  ‘Change is never easy to understand.’ Jem was on his knees by the fireplace, feeding into the flickering flames slithers of a precious packing case that he had – Kitty had not enquired too deeply how – acquired for fuel. ‘The politics of the world are close to upheaval, Kitty – and the roots of that upheaval are right here in Paris. The working people here have learned their lessons in a hard school. They have learned not to trust their masters. They have learned – a little – their own strength, and that is the most dangerous of all. And in Paris itself they have learned that if you rule the streets you rule the city, and if you take the city you take the country.’ He sat back on his heels, rubbing his dirty hands thoughtfully together. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘there will be a revolution somewhere that will change the balance of the world.’

  She looked at him, surprised at his unusual solemnity. ‘Here. Now?’

  He shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t think so, though they might try. But it’s too early. There are no real leaders. And perhaps, too, a nation that has experienced the trauma of one bloodbath in the name of equality and freedom is reluctant, underneath it all, to instigate another.’

  ‘What is going to happen then? Now, I mean?’

  He pulled a funny, rueful face. ‘My dear girl, if I knew that then I’d make a fortune as a clairvoyant!’

  What did happen was that another chanting, screaming mob marched yet again on the seat of government, the Hôtel de Ville, and – after charge and counter-charge, threat and counter-threat, betrayal and counter-betrayal – there was yet another mob-inspired change of government. On Tuesday 1 November Paris woke up on a dismal, streaming morning to another day of siege and privation and a new set of masters. On the same day the grim news – several times vehemently and officially denied over the past few days – was confirmed that Metz had been starved into submission, another French army was captured and more Prussian troops were free to join those encamped in comfort about Paris. It was on that day that Jem announced his entirely unexpected decision to serve with the American Ambulance, the field hospital that had been, with strange foresight, purchased lock, stock and barrel and kept in the city by a rich and philanthropic American after its showing at the Paris Exhibition. Its reputation was fabled: it was said that half the ranks and most of the officers of the defending forces carried into battle cards to the effect that, if wounded, they would be happier surrendered to the ministrations of the American Ambulance than of some other rather less efficient medical establishment.

  ‘But—’ Kitty, unexpectedly, found herself shamingly piqued that he should consider doing such a thing. The Ambulance would take his time, would be bound to distract him from – from what? From her. The plangent voice of honesty, long ignored in the matter of her relationship with Jem, suddenly refused to quiet. ‘But won’t it be awfully dangerous?’ she asked, a little lamely; not at all what she had started to say.

  He shook his head. There was a new lightness in his step, a new purpose in his boyish voice. Fiercely, and she had to admit thoroughly unreasonably, she found she resented it. ‘It’s only dangerous if there’s a real battle. And the way things stand at the moment that doesn’t seem very likely.’

  Irritated, she did not miss the tinge of dissatisfaction at that state of affairs. ‘Well don’t sound so put out about that,’ she snapped. ‘You’d rather get yourself killed?’ Her voice was irrationally tart. She flushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, unsuccessfully attempting a smile. ‘Siege nerves.’

  He looked at her for a long moment, and once again, as so often despite his apparent openness and charm, the strange shadow of reserve that she found herself so frequently and usually successfully having to ignore lay between them.

  The days that followed were days of bitter cold, of a noticeable diminution of supplies of all kinds, of communal depression and of the beginnings of a new fear. In the first week in November smallpox claimed 500 lives in the city. Other diseases too had begun to attack the weakened population. Food was running out; the meat ration – when it could be obtained at all – was reduced by half. Prices had become outrageous. Kitty, as with others rather better-off than their fellows, still managed not to deplete her emergency store too severely: the way things were going, who knew how vital those provisions might eventually become? And, always and without let, the thought of Michael – increasingly of Lottie, Poppy and Michael – haunted her. Where were they? How were they surviving? Were they even still alive? Smallpox. Typhoid. Pneumonia. Starvation.

  On Christmas Day Michael would be three years old.

  Jem’s duties with the Ambulance turned out in fact not to be too demanding, and she still saw him frequently. In mid-November, as belated news reached the city of an isolated victory for French arms west of Orléans, just seventy miles from the beleaguered capital, and the weary population defiantly found the energy to celebrate, Kitty, determinedly, bought her first skilfully butchered and prepared cat and they ate more satisfyingly than they had for weeks.

  ‘I can’t help hating the thought of it,’ she admitted ruefully to Jem. ‘Though why pretending it’s lamb should have made it easier to cook and eat I really don’t know! What’s the difference, for heaven’s sake, between a poor little dead lamb and a cat! Still, I must say that somehow – I don’t know why – I just don’t ever see myself being able to eat dog, no matter how hungry I get.’

  He grinned, and quite suddenly she noticed how thin his face had become. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder about her own looks. Her fingers strayed to her face, sensed the drawn skin, the sharp line of bone. ‘I’m sorry—?’

  ‘I said, “You English!” You and your dogs! You treat them better than you treat your—’ He stopped, the teasing laughter leaving his face.

  She looked down at her plate, eyes blurring.

  ‘Kitty! – Oh, damn it! – Kitty – I’m sorry—’ He was beside her in a moment, his arm about her shoulders.

  She shook her head. ‘It’s all right. It’s just—’

  ‘God, when will I ever learn to keep my big mouth shut! Of all the stupid, insensitive—’

  ‘No.’ In a perfectly natural gesture of affection she leaned her head against his shoulder, lifted her hand to stroke his face. ‘No, you aren’t—’

  She sensed the change in him, the stiffening, the drawing away. She lifted her head, hurt in her eyes. ‘Jem?’

  He stood up, dropped a quick, brotherly kiss onto the top of her head and stepped back. ‘I have to go. I’m on duty at eight.’

  She had to face it. And, huddled miserably in bed that night, cold to the bone, shivering, alone, she finally did. In the past weeks her feelings for Jem, slowly, almost imperceptibly, had changed. Until that moment this afternoon she had not herself suspected the extent of that change: in face of his adamant refusal to acknowledge it had not, perhaps, wanted to admit to it. But it was there, and she cou
ld no longer ignore it. Over these past few weeks of close contact with Jem had grown a longing for more than his friendship, more than the easy camaraderie that they had shared for so many years. She closed her eyes, tried to think honestly. She was lonely, and she was frightened. Out there in the darkness lurked, horribly, the permanent threat of violence; of bombardment, of attack, of God knew what nightmares. Somewhere in the city her small son starved – might indeed already be dead. The anguish of that was a constant in her life. She knew the danger of those pressures, understood the influence they may well have had on her feelings for Jem. But she knew also, very certainly, that although they may, like the warmth of a hothouse, have forced the swifter growth of something that under normal circumstances might have taken more time, in no way were they the root cause of her feelings. She wanted Jem, wanted him beside her; thin, warm body, thin strong hands, thin dearly loved face—

  But he did not want her.

  There was no denying it now, in the honesty of the bleak, dark small hours of a November morning. Incident after incident, stubbornly ignored, proved it – a hand withdrawn, a touch deflected, that infuriating, light, friendly kiss. Always the gentle, considerate withdrawal from her.

  She turned restlessly, stared into darkness, the tears ice-cold on her cheeks before they ever reached the pillow.

  (ii)

  When Jem arrived the next day she found herself looking at him with new eyes. Always slight, he was now downright thin, though that in her eyes in no way detracted from his physical attraction. The privations of the past few weeks had in fact produced a wiry toughness which had never been in evidence before. The boyish looks, enhanced as they were by the thatch of invariably untidy hair were, she knew, deceptive. The wide, sensitive mouth, that still smiled so readily, had yet firmed and hardened since those first days she had known him in London, when they had danced in the Cremorne Gardens on the night of Luke Peveral’s birthday. Covertly now she watched him as, like a brigand with his loot, he displayed the results of his latest foray.