‘I hoped you would be here. I wanted to find you. To make you suffer. I wanted to make you feel the laceration of the soul that I endured and still endure every day.’
She gaped at his blasé brutality. ‘You had your revenge at the Lutetia.’
‘You believe so?’ Like German officers of all branches of the army, he wore the Schirmmütze, the cap whose exaggeratedly high peak changed the proportions of the face. Rain slewed off its waterproof visor, darkening the stiff collar of his jacket, the ribbon of the swallow-tailed cross around his neck and the Iron Cross on his breast. He allowed her to pull him into the lobby and they stood facing each other at the foot of the stairs, a puddle forming around their feet.
‘I believe it!’ Coralie didn’t trouble to keep her voice down. She hadn’t seen her shopkeeper neighbours for months. They’d never reopened after the defeat of France, so she let her anger ring. ‘I was in your power and had no idea if I would see –’ her voice shook ‘– see my child again. I know I did a dreadful thing in taking that letter but you put me through the wringer and humiliated me. What else do you need to prove?’ She pushed past him and climbed the stairs, pulling the headscarf off her hat because it was dripping down her neck. She heard the front door slam and thought, Good riddance.
He caught up with her at the turn of the stairs. ‘What more to prove? I will tell you, Coralie, and you will hear me out.’
She strode on, unbuttoning her coat as she went, but she left the door to the flat ajar. She sensed it would be futile to shut him out. He might kick his way in again.
Throwing her dripping coat into the bath, putting her hat on the hallstand along with her keys, she went into the lounge. Noëlle was spinning in the middle of the floor, arms wide, squealing, ‘Papa, Papa!’
Sprawled in an armchair, beret pulled down to one side, the neck of his sweater pulled up over his mouth, was Ramon. A glance behind revealed Dietrich putting his hat next to hers on the stand, removing his leather gloves. She hissed, ‘Perfect timing!’
‘Papa got bad tooth,’ Noëlle chanted, still spinning.
Ramon got up, cradling his jaw. Dietrich came in. What could a soaking wet German officer and an anarchist with toothache say to each other? Nothing, it transpired.
‘Ramon, come to the kitchen,’ Coralie said tersely. ‘Stay here, sweetheart,’ to Noëlle. ‘Play with your bricks. Herr von Elbing, please make yourself at home. I won’t be a moment.’
The kitchen was just big enough for her and Ramon to get inside and close the door. He smelt of wet wool, of some sweet, female scent. ‘Couldn’t you have taken off your outdoor things before you sat down?’
‘I’m soaked to the skin. I got your note.’ Ramon pulled crumpled paper from his trouser pocket. ‘“Black Roses have the sharpest thorns and get everywhere.” I suppose the “gardening advice” is to tell me that Julie has left me for Serge Martel?’ He gave a humourless laugh. ‘I did notice.’
‘So you’ve been living with my Julie?’ Seeing the answer in his eyes, she slapped him hard. And then remembered he had toothache. ‘Sorry.’
‘Yes, it’s true, but it’s over. Julie went to Martel last night, bags packed, even though I warned her what he was. I told her, “He’s a Gestapo lapdog,” but she laughed in my face. Her parting words, “You next, Bolshevist.”’
‘That’s awful.’
‘I know. I kept telling her, “I’m an anarchist. I am beyond factional politics.”’ Ramon pulled his jersey down. He looked drawn, but there was no sign of a swollen gum. ‘Stupid girl. Greedy, stupid girl.’
Coralie’s resentment boiled up again. ‘“Oh, Julie, I can’t live without you.” Did you have her here, in my house, with my baby asleep in bed?’
‘What do you think I am?’
‘A cheat. A liar, even to yourself. If you didn’t have toothache, I’d punch your jaw.’ She poked his cheek. ‘You don’t even have toothache, do you?’
‘It was all I could think of when Noëlle told me that Maman was coming upstairs with a German who calls her an otter and materialises desserts from café kitchens by magic. “Make yourself at home, Herr von Elbing,”’ Ramon mocked. ‘You have questions to answer too.’
‘Go to hell— Oh, God!’
She’d assumed he was scratching his armpit until he produced a revolver with a short black barrel. Its brass plating was worn, as was its grip. All firearms were to have been handed in to the authorities weeks ago and the penalty for being caught with one was death. She mouthed, ‘Take it away!’
He swung open the cylinder to show her six empty chambers. ‘My father’s infantry sidearm, from the last war.’ He returned it to the webbing holster under his jacket. ‘Shall I try it out on your German? Show him how we French fight back?’
‘Yes, do that, because I really want a corpse in my sitting room. It would be the perfect end to the day.’
He grinned. ‘Sarcasm is wasted on anarchists – we have already shifted our moral boundaries. Anyway, I’ll say what I came to say. This is goodbye, Coralie. I’m calling on Henriette, then leaving.’
‘Without a proper coat?’ She didn’t believe him. Didn’t want to. For all her grievances, having him nearby was a comfort.
‘I’ll steal one of Tattie’s.’ His childhood name for Henriette. He pulled her into a hard embrace, his moustache like wire on her cheek. ‘Be careful, my wife. Life isn’t a game, it’s a dirty pool full of circling insects all trying to survive. Now there is a new little predator in the pond.’
‘You mean Martel?’
‘I mean Julie.’
‘What’s she got against me? I was good to her.’
‘We don’t always like those who are kindest to us. And,’ he whispered against the lobe of her ear, ‘women don’t like hearing other women’s names called out in the heat of passion. I am too careless sometimes.’
She pushed him away. Hopeless, incorrigible. When he died, they’d probably find he’d smuggled a harlot into his coffin. ‘How will you live?’
‘I’ll get over the demarcation line where security is weak and head into the wilds, link up with men like me. If you need me, go to my sister. And, Coralie? Keep an eye on Henriette. She’s not what she was.’
‘That’s no bad thing.’ Coralie opened the drawer where she kept tablemats and, at the bottom, emergency currency. She took out all there was, wondering how much she could spare. For all his talk of joining up with ‘men like him’, she couldn’t believe it was so simple. Wherever he went, he’d need food and lodgings. And luck: the moment he made contact with an underground network, he’d be a marked man. In the end, she gave him all she had. ‘Happy birthday.’
He gaped. ‘So it is! I’m thirty-seven. Dear God.’ With a nod of thanks, he pocketed the notes. ‘Promise you’ll check up on Henriette? Prison ripped the veneer off her. They put her in with drunkards and prostitutes, and during questioning, they forced her head under freezing water until she blacked out. They only let her out because they knew she would die if they kept her longer. Her lungs. . .’
Coralie put a finger to her lips. The sitting-room door had just opened and closed. A moment later, the door to the flat clicked shut.
‘Thank God,’ she said, in her normal voice. ‘He’s Dietrich von Elbing and once, long ago, he half loved me but now he hates me.’ She laughed shakily. ‘We all seem to hate each other, these days!’
Ramon stroked her cheek. ‘I am glad you are not keeping a pet German on a lead. Though,’ he frowned, ‘people speak of lines of uniforms outside your shop.’
‘I’m selling hats, to survive.’
‘Come the Apocalypse, people will remember the selling, not the hats. Got any proper food? I’ll go when I’m sure that bastard’s left the street.’
He consumed the last of her olives and a heel of cheese, and downed red wine from an open bottle. Then he put his hands either side of her
face, kissed her and said, ‘I mean what I say. If ever you see Julie Fourcade, walk in the other direction.’
‘Wait.’ Coralie fetched a tin of medicines from the cupboard, dribbled clove oil into her palm and slapped it over Ramon’s jaw.
‘Now I smell!’
‘Exactly, and if you bump into Dietrich, he might believe you have a bad tooth.’
Ramon kissed her again. ‘Now you are beginning to think like a man! Tell Noëlle goodbye for me.’
*
Coralie wiped off the kiss, then washed the pungent oil from her fingers. The flat was silent. Noëlle often fell asleep mid-afternoon. If so, she’d catch forty winks herself. Heaven help her, she needed it after the day she’d had. When she entered the lounge and saw Dietrich at the dining-table, skimming a newspaper she’d bought a couple of days ago, she was baffled. He’d left, hadn’t he?
He looked up. ‘What is it?
‘Where’s Noëlle?’
He looked towards the sofa, then at her. ‘She went to find you. You were shut away rather a long time with your visitor.’
‘Husband.’ The correction was automatic. Coralie was already out of the room, calling, ‘Noëlle?’ She checked the bathroom, both bedrooms, then the kitchen in case the child had somehow doubled back. They often played hide-and-seek, and there were not many hiding-places. Returning to the lounge, she checked behind the sofa, even under the table and behind the curtains.
Dietrich, meanwhile, folded the newspaper. ‘Not here?’
‘No.’ A dreadful apprehension grabbed her. ‘I heard the door go. I thought it was you – oh, God.’
Dietrich followed her into the hall where he reached for his cap and gloves, and the house keys – the speed of his movements suggesting his own automatic responses. ‘Put your coat on. She cannot have gone far in the rain.’
‘So why isn’t she back?’
But he was already on his way out. She followed, calling after him, ‘This is your fault. Kicking my doors in? The locksmith only had materials for downstairs, so the top one doesn’t lock properly and Noëlle is just tall enough to open it. If anything’s happened it’s—’
‘My fault. All right, but I slammed the front door when I came in and your husband will surely not have let her out as he left?’
All true, but where was she? Coralie tried to see over Dietrich’s head, hating him for being just tall enough to block her view of the downstairs lobby.
No sign of Noëlle. ‘Can she have got into the shop?’ Dietrich asked. There was a service door off the lobby and he pushed it. Solid, padlocked. Impossible for a child to get through.
‘She must be upstairs still,’ Dietrich said.
‘But I heard the flat door open and close.’
‘Leaving her on which side of the door?’
But Coralie didn’t know, and was thinking only of wasted time. She ran out into the rain, calling her daughter’s name left and right. She went to Teddy’s door, because Noëlle might have tried to find him in his shop. But the shop was locked, the shutters down. She crossed the road to the pâtisserie where they used to go every Saturday to choose a tart or a cake. Thrusting open the door, she called wildly, ‘Have you seen my little girl? Anybody? Small, dark—’
Dietrich caught up with her. ‘If you wish I will order everybody living in the street to search. Everybody out of their houses in the rain, to search, on pain of arrest. Shall I do it?’
He meant it, too. Have him act like the enemy, even for Noëlle? ‘No, just help me look.’ Back on the pavement, she turned round and round, willing Noëlle to appear through the blur. Her hair was streaming, her clothes too.
‘If Ramon had found her on the stairs, would he have taken her away with him?’
‘No.’ Ramon, for all his flaws, was not a man knowingly to inflict pain. ‘He would have put her back inside the flat. It’s Martel,’ she moaned. ‘He’s got her.’
‘How would Martel have got inside your house?’
‘I don’t know! But he threatened to sell Noëlle, pass her around filthy men until she died. My girl.’ Her guts twisted and she bent forward to control the pain. ‘Please,’ she murmured through desiccated lips. ‘Please.’ A flash of memory: in a field in England, she’d demanded of a Romany, ‘Read my love-line.’
And the woman had said, ‘It is unclear. It is severed. I see children. You will kill.’
Now I understand. She gripped Dietrich, her nails penetrating to the flesh under the sturdy cloth of his jacket. ‘Why my child, why not me?’ She saw a matching pain in his eyes, but this time it didn’t frighten her. It was like reading her own emotions in large script.
‘Why your child?’ He spoke in German, slowly. ‘Why my child, Coralie?’
She struck him with her fists because otherwise the scream inside her would rip through tissue and bone. ‘I can’t bear it. I want to die.’
‘So, perhaps you do understand. Come.’ He led her across the road, back to the flat, using the keys he’d taken from the hallstand. ‘She must be indoors. Nothing else makes sense.’ In the flat, he said, ‘You search this side of the hall,’ he indicated the kitchen, ‘I will search the other. Open everything. Everything.’
In the bathroom there was an airing cupboard fitted into a corner, so poky that Coralie had to roll her towels to fit them on the shelves. She opened the door without hope and saw, in the gap between the floor and the bottom shelf, a small form. Head at an angle, knees drawn up. Coralie sank down and reached in. Noëlle came out in the same shape, as if she’d been set in a mould. Coralie carried her to the lounge where she found Dietrich pulling items from a sideboard.
He came over and pressed his knuckle into the hollow under the child’s ear. ‘She’s all right.’
Voice thick with sleep, Noëlle murmured, ‘Found you, Maman.’
*
He put a glass in her hand. ‘Calvados. I found it in your sideboard.’
It was left over from Christmas. Coralie sat up and raised it to her lips.
‘Are you all right now?’
‘Mostly. I can’t believe how I panicked.’ Her right ankle was throbbing because running up and down the street had strained already weakened ligaments. She hadn’t known fatigue like this since giving birth.
Dietrich had lit a fire – the first in the grate since she’d attempted to burn Ottilia’s documents, but no warmth reached her. He fetched a blanket and wrapped it around her, sitting down beside her. ‘Are you able to talk?’
‘Won’t they expect you back at work?’
‘No. I don’t report to anybody in that building. But we are here, and unlikely to be interrupted unless your child wakes.’ They glanced at Noëlle, curled like a dormouse on a quilt in front of the fire. ‘Or your husband drops in again.’
‘He won’t, but I’m in no mood for chat.’
‘“Chat” is not what I have in mind. I have been waiting to tell you of my life after Paris. I had not the strength the other night, but now feels right.’
She took a slug of Calvados; Normandy apples with the innocence fermented out of them. ‘All right. Speak.’
He told her that the letter she’d concealed had been his son’s last cry for help. ‘Waldo was begging for release from military training and he must have thought I had turned my back. My poor boy. He was desperate. When I left you at the Expo, it was because I had received a telegram, stating that Waldo had collapsed.’
‘That’s why you went so abruptly.’
He signalled to her to be quiet. ‘Once, you asked me to listen while you recited something deeply painful. I ask the same of you now. The telegram mentioned an accident, though nothing of how serious it was. I raced by taxi to Gare de l’Est, got on a train that was just about to pull out, and by the early hours, I was over the German border. Nobody could have travelled faster. Even so, I was too late. Waldo was dead even bef
ore I left Paris.’
‘What happened?’
Dietrich got up, walked to the window. ‘His heart failed.’
‘That only happens to old men.’
‘It happened. The afternoon he died, the afternoon you and I went together to the Expo, he ran in the heat. He should not have run at all, the oxygen supply to his blood was insufficient. It was a boiling day and each boy carried ten kilograms on his back – considered top weight. Waldo doubled it, because he wanted to prove himself a man. Twenty kilograms. Do you know how much that is?’
She thought of Donal, staggering under the weight of laundry baskets, wheezing, ‘These weigh a ton!’ Twenty kilos . . . She bought flour in two-kilo sacks. Ten of those.
‘I tried it.’ Dietrich turned to face her, firelight flickers stripping the years from him. ‘I drove to a lake near my family home, to see how far I could run round its perimeter with twenty kilos on my back. Forty years old, that gave me some excuse, but I was near to collapse before I was a quarter of the way round. I could not have done what Waldo did.’
‘You think he put that weight on his back, knowing it would kill him?’
‘I admire my son—’ He stopped and fixed Coralie with a reproach she could not sustain.
‘Dietrich, I didn’t kill Waldo.’
‘No? That letter needed to reach me.’
Shame had nowhere to hide in her face. She looked away, saying, ‘Brownlow dropped it on purpose. He set me up.’ When Dietrich made no response, she nodded in bitter acceptance. ‘I can’t pin it on Brownlow, can I? I opened it because I wanted to know who was writing so often, who might take you away from me.’ She wanted to express her sorrow, but knew he must have heard trite condolences too often. She waited. Waited for words of forgiveness. Waited until she wondered if he’d even heard her.
At last Dietrich spoke. ‘I admire my son for choosing such a courageous and defiant—’ He stopped. Breathed deeply. ‘Such a defiant—’ A muscular spasm gripped him, pulling the line of his chest and shoulders out of shape.
She ran to him, grasping a hand that shook convulsively. Was it his heart too? Was he having a seizure? ‘Dietrich?’
The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris Page 30