Charlie was now twenty-seven. He had been surviving on his wits for almost a fifth of his short life. The Parisian counter-culture had flourished. With the help of a member of the gang he was working with, he had acquired papers: a forged British passport for Charles Gilliard. To earn his keep, buy fresh clothes and make some extra cash on the side – at which he had succeeded with surprising facility – he had worked as a fence. There was no legal work to be had. He would have starved but for a stroke of good fortune. He had insinuated his way into a busy network of petty thieves, felons and con artists, ex-police most of them, who had set up a very profitable business selling illegally confiscated goods, mostly art, jewellery and precious stones. He had received a very modest commission for each article he moved on.
And for a stretch of time, Charlie had been more or less at peace with his situation. Among such company, mobsters and jailbirds, no questions were asked. No one expressed even minimum interest in his story. He became a loner, relishing the emptiness, grateful for the obscurity, the facelessness of the midnight city. The isolation helped him come to terms with, or at least cope with, the swell of grief that engulfed him, to comprehend and accept the evolution in his life, the complete change of direction forced upon him by a decision he had taken in a traumatized split second.
He haunted the abandoned city, a metropolis that felt too large for those who inhabited it, the denizens who had remained behind. Anonymity had suited him. Left to his own devices, he had paced the deserted squares at night, sometimes catnapping on benches, possessed by the bruised purple glow emanating from streetlights embalmed in blue paper. He had refused to allow himself to reflect on how he had reached this place, to remind himself that he was a man without a country, with an expunged identity. A shadow among shadows. His footsteps echoed in the empty streets as he grappled to reach reconciliation with the repercussions from all that had befallen him. The smoke from his cigarettes rose into the air. The red buds of scorching light hung heavy with grief, with remorse.
His life had been erased. He had erased it.
He was a deserter. The very word sickened him.
He was not a bad man, had never in the past been dishonest. He’d nicked a few boiled sweets from the corner shop when he was a gauche and impressionable kid, along with others from the village gang, but that was about the sum of his misdemeanours. He’d been looking at a bright future. He’d had a girl … He could no longer summon up her features in any precise detail – even the colour of her eyes was lost to him now. Doris Sprigley. They would have married, Robert and Doris. They would have tied the knot and reared a large family in the Kent countryside close to where they had both been raised. He was fond of children, hated to see any creature harmed, had always wanted kids of his own, a free-spirited, healthy young squad of them. Boys and girls.
Doris Sprigley, a buxom, country beauty, with breasts as round and plump as the apples from his father’s orchard: she would have borne his babes one after another with docility and ease. On their last outing together, days, weeks, before his terrifying foray into Dieppe, they’d done away with each other’s virginity in his father’s modest plantation, the fruiting trees and summer sky witnesses to their fumbling, unrefined love.
‘My gift to you, Lordy,’ she’d whispered in his ear on that late July evening, ‘so you’ll be sure to come back to me.’
He had fully intended to return to Doris. To do right by her. To carry on the family traditions of fruit growing and child-rearing.
Doris would have been informed of his death. By whom? Her parents? His mother? He’d played the scene over and over in his head: Doris standing in her parents’ tidy, cramped living room, bravely taking it in, handkerchief over her mouth, her breasts heaving with shock.
‘We’re so sorry for your loss, Doris, but in time you’ll find someone else.’
How he would have liked to hold her tight, stroke her cheeks, comfort her, the invisible shadow of him begging her to forget him. ‘You’ll find a better bloke, Doris, more deserving of your love.’
She would have wept for her gunner boyfriend in the arms of his mother, consoling each other through their tears. And then what? Mourned him a while before tying the knot with one of the other lads in the village? Gently putting the memories of Robert Lord aside, allowing his image to fade, growing sketchier with every passing season until she’d forgotten him altogether, just as he was losing sight of auburn-haired Doris?
In spite of his situation, for a while he had felt a sense of release. His fear was of a very different nature once he’d absconded, and for weeks on end after he’d fled, he had felt no fear at all. Numb, then washed clean of that shuddering, convulsing terror. He couldn’t die because he was already dead. He could not be found because who would hunt for the charred remains of a man left lifeless, along with hundreds of others, on a beach?
Today his French was almost fluent although, due to his accent, he could not pass himself off as a Frenchman. Neither would he attempt to, even after almost five years in the country. And he preferred to remain British.
Did he miss Britain, good old Blighty, the clogged, foggy streets of London? Or leafy Kent, the ‘Garden of England’, where he had been born and raised? The damage caused by the Blitz he had read about in the newspapers. In 1940, on that first long stretch of bombing, his own rural neighbourhood had suffered a hit. Casualties and deaths. Had his street been flattened? Not during that first raid, but later possibly. He’d read of Londoners taking shelter in the stations of the Underground.
Robert’s kid sister, Sylvia. How old would she be now? Twenty-four? Had she married? Might there be kids? Nieces and nephews whom ‘Charlie’ would never know?
Charlie’s guts began to tighten. His head swirled and beat. He must always steel himself against such memories, such links to his past. He was not a wicked man, but he could never return. A fact. He had come too far. What were the punishments meted out to deserters? Execution? Life imprisonment? Or was his own guilt and shame the heaviest burden of all?
Britain was lost to him now. In any case, his loved ones would have mourned him, laid him to rest, moved on with their lives. His family and lovely Doris. There was no choice but to leave well alone. Let his bereft mother grieve in peace.
Bury the past. They had their lives. He had to make do with the traded-in version of his.
Charlie smelt coffee. He was passing a café. His step faltered. A moment’s indecision before he settled himself at a pavement table. One hand above his shoulder, signalling to the garçon for a double espress’. He stretched out his legs and lifted his face to take comfort from the rays of early spring sunlight. He drew out some loose change and a packet of Gitanes – he had grown accustomed to the local black tobacco, bitter but satisfying. He lit up unsteadily, inhaling deeply. He had shaken himself, given himself the heebie-jeebies recalling Kent, Doris and his dear old mum.
If they could see him now.
The shame. The reprisal.
He picked a shred of tobacco off the tip of his tongue with the index finger and thumb of his left hand and watched the limping arrival of an old grandfather carrying a stuffed, stitched-together satchel. The elderly fellow – a veteran from the Great War? – shuffled between the tables, selling newspapers, coughing and spluttering, racked by chest problems. Charlie scooped up a one-franc piece and beckoned the under-nourished pensioner, handing him the coin. In return he helped himself to a copy of Le Monde. It smelt of fresh print and the promise of an afternoon’s entertainment. He’d go to a picture house, wile away the hours … Too early for a drink … for the jazz clubs.
He needed some solid work, a challenge. It was time to set his thoughts in a new direction. Move on. Leave Paris. But to go where?
During his early days on the run, Charlie had earned a crust by labouring on farms, helping folk with their livestock and crops. He had enjoyed the physical exertion, the outdoor existence, the sweat of hay harvests, collecting corn. It had reminded him of home. The elderly,
those farmers who were too old or infirm to go to war, showed him what needed to be done with gestures and sign language. They asked no questions, only too glad of the extra hands because all the young Frenchmen had been called up to fight. Just as long as he wasn’t a Kraut, they were grateful for his presence. Many of the housewives welcomed him into their homes with warmth, feeding him as handsomely as they could under the circumstances, treating him with the affection awarded to a son. Boiled eggs from hens in the garden. ‘These sell in the capital for ten francs each,’ one rather attractive farmer’s wife had told him, suggesting that he was privileged, being given a special treat. Two or three of the women, the wives, had tended his wounds, washed his torn flesh, sponged down his shock-riddled body. Most demanded no explanations, begged nothing in return. On several occasions he was offered a missing soldier’s room.
Those women were lonely, aching for their own boys or husbands, starved of company, but Charlie always chose to keep his distance, never allowing himself to be drawn into the family environment, the intimacies, preferring to sleep on straw in barns, knowing that his own emotions were open and sore, running like his wounds, and that before too long he would be moving on. From his first days on the run, Paris had always been his goal.
Aside from that, even though his ability to express himself in French back then had been scratchy, he’d dreaded being drilled with too many questions. Being found out for what he was.
A deserter.
He glanced at the date on the front page of the paper: mardi, 27 March 1947. Two years beyond the war. The sun had risen at 06:41 and was due to set at 19:13. The days were getting longer; the war was receding ever further. He turned the pages slowly, glancing at a short article, an analysis of Britain’s recent nationalization of the coal industry. Pages turning, moving towards the back to the arts section where he knew to find the cinema listings. A striking photograph of Simone Signoret drew his eye. She had celebrated her birthday a couple of days earlier, he read. She was twenty-six. One year younger than he had turned a little more than a week ago. The Jolson Story, he had seen that film. And It’s A Wonderful Life. That one had made him homesick – Christmas, and all the anniversaries he forced himself never to remember. Brief Encounter. No, he’d give that one a miss.
The Best Years of Our Lives. He hadn’t seen that picture yet. He rather fancied Teresa Wright and was a staunch fan of William Wyler. He ran his finger down the listings to see where it was playing that afternoon, hoping it would be in colour, recalling that it had picked up some awards at the recent Oscar ceremony.
At that moment, the loud talk of a pair of Yanks caught his attention. He glanced towards the pavement to see a couple of tourists with a raised camera taking snaps willy-nilly as some tourists are prone to do. Quickly, he swung his body away from the street, head down, until they had moved on, then returned to his paper.
He found a cinema in the eleventh arrondissement, a healthy walking distance, not far from the impressive Bastille square. It was a cinema he had never frequented before. Downing in one slug the remains of his strong coffee, he threw twenty centimes onto the table, checked his watch, folded his newspaper, tucked it into his left-hand jacket pocket and headed off along the street, buoyed by the knowledge that he had a convivial plan for his afternoon. Cavities of time, loneliness: these were the hardest challenges for him to overcome, but he feared to make friends, to allow anyone to draw too close to him: they could never be given access to his real self.
The picture house, when Charlie drew near, resembled something out of a Chinese operetta. A very curious piece of architecture indeed. He was twenty minutes ahead of the scheduled start time for the programme. Drawing open the doors, he stepped inside and was hit by the acrid smell of smoke, as though someone had a fire burning in the foyer. A small blonde in the ticket kiosk noticed his arrival. She seemed distressed. Charlie sniffed, closed his eyes and frowned. He turned about him, seeing flames in his mind’s eye. A plane combusting, its Merlin engine sputtering, parts disintegrating, falling out of the sky. The all too familiar terror ran through his veins, tightening his arteries, buzzing in his head, like swarms of angry bees. The flashes, the memories stiffening his spine.
‘You’re on fire!’
‘Peter – Pete, are you hearing me? They’re hammering fire at us. Your tail’s been hit, burning up. Try to land her.’ To the right side of them, another plane had copped it in the fuselage and exploded in flames. A thin white plume of smoke was all that remained as the machine spiralled seawards. And then another. And another.
Pete gripped hard at the controls, muscles taut, as the flames licked their way towards where he was seated, heating his back, disintegrating flesh.
‘Something’s burning!’ Charlie Gilliard’s voice broke the silence in the empty cinema lobby. He was fighting for breath, grappling with the memories that never let him be.
‘All right, don’t get into a state. I dropped my cigarette, singed the carpet. It’s nothing to make a fuss about.’
He took a moment, drew himself back to the present, then stumbled towards the kiosk window.
The cashier lifted her eyes, lilac-blue. She pouted at him with lips as sweet and pink as sugar candy. She smiled, but she was teary-eyed. Close up, she was tantalizingly pretty, if a little on the young side. He watched her for a moment while she fiddled with a roll of tickets. He sniffed again. A whiff of petrol, perhaps. He was reliving the nightmare again.
‘Mister, do you want to see the film,’ she asked, ‘or are you from the fire department? I’ve lost my job in any case. What do you want?’
‘The Best Days of Our Lives.’
‘If you say so. Starts in fifteen minutes. Admission is forty centimes.’ The blonde tore a ticket off her roll and slid it, with chewed fingers, through to him. ‘So far you’ve got the place to yourself. Enjoy the film.’
Charlie lingered for a moment before picking up his ticket. There was something about the girl. He smiled. She’d lifted his spirits.
Paris, November 2015
A woman in calf-length leather boots strode into view, paused, looked about her. She took another step, hesitant, then continued onwards, her black slacks moulded to her figure, a mane of hair bouncing off her chic leather jacket. Tall, striking to look at, hauling too much luggage, she was making her way along an unfamiliar street in a city that was not her own, pausing as she glanced across to the far side of the boulevard. She was trying to find a bar. A casual, friendly kind of joint to hang out in for a couple of hours, somewhere she could get this load off her back and chill. As she approached a crossroads, she slowed. There was a place right alongside her. Flashing lights from within. A tad garish? No, a TV screen. It looked fine, rather inviting.
Kurtiz Ross pushed at the door with her foot, stepped inside the unfamiliar bar-bistro and glanced about, pausing to choose a table, a concealed corner, not too busy. To her surprise, it was more than half empty. Friday night and no more than half a dozen singles and two couples: sleek, casual Parisians, lolling against pillars or lounging against the zinc surfaces, cradling drinks. From overhead speakers Charles Aznavour was crooning ‘La Bohème’. In the centre of the room where the diners, when they arrived, would be served, there were several sets of red plastic banquettes and half a dozen small wooden tables adorned with red and white check tablecloths. Kurtiz was deliberating whether to grab something to eat now or hang on until Oliver turned up after the concert, hopefully in the company of Lizzie.
Lizzie, twenty years old. Lizzie. Please, God, in the company of Lizzie.
Kurtiz’s stomach was bunched into what felt like a snarl of wires that were twisting and tightening. She needed a drink. First, a drink. This was not going to be easy, even without the tiring day of editing behind her, followed by the journey from London on a crowded Eurostar, a Friday evening taxi from the Gare du Nord, which had delivered her with her overnight and camera bags to Place de la Bastille. From there, somewhere to kill an hour or two.
Bef
ore she stepped any further inside, she threw a swift glance upwards, making a mental note of the name of the brasserie flashing in neon outside, L’ARMAGNAC, then down to her watch. Ten to eight. She was too early, way too early. She could have caught a later train or gone to the hotel first. She hadn’t been thinking straight – too keen to cross to this side of Paris, to be close to the concert hall. No matter, she was here now, and with time on her hands, so, yes, she might as well grab a quick snack. Once settled, she’d send Oliver a text to let him know she was now in town and where she was. The remainder of her evening would be about waiting … waiting, sitting it out, and praying to whoever might be out there listening that she would, by the end of the night, be back in the company of her daughter.
It was on occasions such as this that she wished she smoked. Occasions such as this? Surely to God this was a one-off in anybody’s lifetime. Meeting up with your own child again for the first time in more than four years. Four heart-breaking, despairing, dislocated years. Four years and five months almost to the day. Oh, Lizzie, have you any idea of the desolation your absence has caused?
The Lost Girl Page 2