That decided him. Twenty minutes later, he had left Dijon behind and was on the road south. Traffic was almost non-existent and he was emboldened to try the main D-route again.
It was another mistake. About thirty miles south of Dijon the Citroën rounded a corner and almost ran straight into a French military checkpoint. Soldiers with slung rifles stood moodily alongside gendarmes with holstered pistols. At least no Germans seemed to be around.
He had no option other than to stop. As a tense-looking officer approached his window, pistol now unholstered, James remembered the night he’d bluffed his way into Girton to see Diana. This was a somewhat more challenging situation and he decided to take the initiative from the start.
‘Monsieur—’ the man began, but James cut him off.
‘How dare you interfere with me! I’m the British Consul in Lyon and I’m on my way back from a reconnaissance trip to the North. I’ve had enough trouble with you lot already. Bloody well look at this!’
He had taken off the flying boot from his injured leg because it was pressing increasingly painfully on the bullet wound. He opened his door to reveal the bloodied bandages.
‘You trigger-happy bastards hit me taking wild pot-shots at a German patrol. I could have been killed! My government’s already made a formal complaint to the French Ambassador in London, and if you don’t let me through without any more nonsense there’ll be another one. What’s your name and rank?’
He was hurriedly waved through and took the first side turning he came to.
He stayed away from the D-roads after that.
About 100 miles north of the Mediterranean, James steered the car into a quiet wooded lane and took out a battered map of France from the Citroën’s glove-box. He studied it closely. He needed to work out how much further he could get with his dwindling supply of petrol. Luck and bluff had got him this far, but he was urgently in need of false papers and proper clothes, plus a shave and a haircut.
Nice, he regretfully decided after some mental arithmetic, was beyond reach. But there was a better option for the time being, and considerably closer to hand.
Marseilles: a city that was pretty much a law unto itself.
He pulled the last remaining jerry can from the back seat and carried it round to the car’s filler cap. As the petrol gurgled into the Citroën’s tank, James shaped his plan.
When he got to Marseilles, he drove directly to the docks.
‘Why the docks, James?’
He smiled. ‘I had an East End upbringing, remember? The docks were where people went to buy things they couldn’t get hold of above board. Everyone knew that.
‘All big ports are the same, right around the world. A man goes down to the docks, finds a rough old bar, slips the bartender a couple of big ones and tells him what he’s after. The barman makes a call and fifteen minutes later you’re doing business with his friends. Nobody gives a shit who you are, what you’ve done, or what you’re running from. If I’d been German, they wouldn’t have turned a hair. Money talks in those places. Always has, always will.’
‘And what did you want to buy in Marseilles?’
He looked surprised. ‘Papers, of course. A new identity. It didn’t come cheap, either, but at least I wasn’t short of the readies. I stayed in a sailors’ doss-house on the waterfront and within forty-eight hours I had a new me and a whole new cover story. I was a Portuguese English teacher with a very bad sense of timing. I’d sailed to Marseilles from Lisbon just as it was all going pear-shaped for France, and now I was stranded, waiting for a ship home. I chose Portugal because no one speaks the language and I could talk gibberish with confidence. Also, Portugal was neutral, which made things a lot easier.
‘In fact, I had quite an international war, Diana. I was always neutral, though – Portuguese, Swiss, Swedish. The most expensive papers of all made me American, until Pearl Harbor, of course. That was both unexpected and annoying. For me, I mean, not just the Americans. That particular identity had cost me a small fortune and it was meant to be good for at least five years. Then overnight the USA declared war on Japan and Germany and I was up the spout. I must say, I gave a little cheer when the Yanks dropped their bomb on Hiroshima.’
Diana’s earlier sense of unreality was returning. He was describing a way of life she could barely imagine. She looked at him afresh. His light-grey linen suit, she realised for the first time, was exquisitely tailored. His shoes were probably handmade by the look of them, and he wore a slim gold watch on his wrist. He was obviously well-off, probably even rich. The subservience of the hotel staff made that pretty obvious.
He noticed her scrutiny. ‘What? What are you thinking?’
‘To be honest, James, I’m not sure what I think. One moment the fact that I’m sitting here talking to you seems the most natural, normal thing in all the world, and the next I think I’m going off my head. At times during lunch I felt almost dizzy with happiness to be with you again, and at others I’ve been so angry I wanted to hit you.’
‘You’ve every right to be furious. I just hope that when you think over everything I’ve told you, you’ll understand and forgive me, Diana. But you are pleased to see me?’
‘I just said so, didn’t I? And what about you? What’s this like for you? You seem to have taken it all rather in your stride.’
He sighed. ‘Well, I never thought you were dead, did I? It was a shock to see you again, but nothing like as big a one as you must have had.’ Tentatively, he reached out and took her hand. She began to withdraw it but he held on more firmly.
‘No. Don’t pull away, Diana, please. Just let me hold your hand while I answer your question.’
She relaxed slightly. It was incredible to feel his touch again. ‘All right . . . Go on.’
‘The truth is, I can hardly take my eyes off you. I never thought I’d see you again; I believed I’d lost you forever. But to be with you like this, to hear your voice . . . even when it’s angry with me . . . it feels almost as if the last eleven years never happened.’
They looked at each other for a long moment in silence before she slowly slid her hand free.
‘I’m sorry.’ She stood up. ‘I’m finding all of this extremely hard to take in.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I really must go.’
‘Of course.’ He rose to his feet. ‘But when can we meet again? I’ve been talking non-stop about myself, I’ve hardly asked you a thing. There’s so much I need to know – about Stella, about Dougal . . .’
‘Douglas.’
‘Of course, Douglas . . . why you’re all living here in Nice. Heaps of things.’
Diana hesitated. ‘I’m not sure we should meet again.’
His mouth dropped open. ‘What? You’re joking! Of course we have to meet again, Diana! We have a daughter I’ve only just found out about. I want to see her. We have over ten years catching up to do too – we’ve barely started. I have a house here in Nice; I want you to see it. And I suppose at some point I’m going to have to meet your husband, don’t you think?’
Diana was horrified. ‘Oh, no, no! I can’t even think about that now, James. He’d be appalled at this. I don’t even know how I’m going to tell him.’
James put the back of his hand gently on her cheek. This time she did not try to withdraw from him.
‘All right, all right Diana, I completely understand. You’ve had one heck of a shock today, I can see that. I realise I need to give you time to adjust. But we must see each other. Look . . .’ He pulled a leather-bound notebook from an inside pocket and slid out a gold pen from the spine. ‘Let me give you my telephone number, and my address.’ He scribbled for a few moments before tearing out the page and handing it to her. ‘Give yourself a day or so to take all this in and then call me. If I’m not in, a woman called Roberta will answer. Leave a message with her.’
She stared at him. ‘Is Roberta your wife?’
He threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Roberta is my sixty-nine-year-old housekeeper and she�
��s the size of a Dutch barn.’ He stopped laughing, and looked at her. ‘I’m not married, Diana. Well . . . I suppose I am, come to think of it.
‘I’m married to you, aren’t I?’
46
Oliver Arnold climbed the stairs to the converted attic in the Dower House and tapped on the door of his wife’s studio. She discouraged him from visiting her there while she was working, but after wrestling with his thoughts for the best part of an hour after breakfast, he had been compelled to rise from his deckchair in the garden – it was the sunniest June anyone could remember – and climb the four flights of stairs.
‘Gwen? Gwen, can I come in, please? I need to talk to you about something.’
He heard her mutter of annoyance, followed by the clink of brushes being dropped into a jar. A few moments later, the door opened and his wife stood before him.
She was in her mid-fifties now, slimmer than ever. She had never regained the weight that she lost in the year after their son’s death. Both Gwen and Oliver had recently been greatly amused to hear a diner at a nearby restaurant table whisper to her companion: ‘Look over there.’ The woman had nodded surreptitiously in their direction. ‘Isn’t that Wallis Simpson?’
She looked at him now with undisguised irritation. ‘What is it, Oliver? Couldn’t it have waited until lunch?’
‘Perhaps. Look, I’m probably being silly, but I have to talk to you, Gwen.’
Her face softened. ‘You do look worried, I must say. . . . Come in then.’
He wondered how long it had been since he last crossed this threshold. Years, probably. Her portrait of their son was still unfinished, propped on an old easel. He stared at it as he sank down on a battered sofa under the attic window.
‘You should finish that one day, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s the best thing you’ve ever done.’
He was not flattering her. Gwen had perfectly captured John’s insouciant good humour. He smiled at them from the canvas, blue eyes slightly hooded as if he were reflecting on a private joke. His blond hair was combed back from his brow, darkened by oil, Brylcreem, probably. He looked terribly young, the RAF jacket he had slung over one shoulder a seeming joke. Boys like him weren’t old enough to be allowed to fly aeroplanes.
The painting petered out just below the fifth button on his pale-blue cotton uniform shirt, Gwen’s brushstrokes giving way to a few vague charcoal and pencil outlines. If completed, it would be a full-length portrait.
‘Actually, I’ve been thinking . . . I’m not sure I should do any more with it,’ Gwen said as she settled beside her husband. ‘He was unfinished, wasn’t he? Perhaps that’s how the painting should stay. Unfinished. Like our boy.’
He considered. ‘Yes . . . yes, I must say, I’ve never thought about it like that. I think you may be right.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m going to seize the moment, Gwen. Please say we can hang it in the hall – you know, the empty place we’ve spoken about.’
She hadn’t taken her eyes off the painting.
‘Do you know, I think it really might be time, Oliver. I really do. I believe that I’m ready, at last. Maybe I have been for a while, and didn’t know it. He mustn’t stay up here hidden away any longer.’ She squeezed his hand in return, ‘We’ll hang it tomorrow, just as it is. And all because you came up here this morning. Thank you.’
She turned to face him. ‘Now, what’s troubling you, my dear?’
Diana made it to the villa just in time. As her taxi disappeared back down the drive she fumbled with the front-door key, trembling fingers making her clumsy. At last she had the door open and ran across the hall to the little washroom on the other side. She lifted the toilet lid, dropped to her knees, and was violently sick.
‘I must say I’m surprised that the Negresco’s the guilty party,’ Douglas said as he came into their bedroom, holding a damp facecloth wrapped around crushed ice. ‘Did your fish taste peculiar? You should have sent it back.’
‘Mmm.’ Diana closed her eyes as her husband placed the cold compress on her forehead. ‘Thank you, darling . . . no, the food was fine, Douglas. It must have been the sun. We were sitting outside on the terrace for an awfully long time and I’d forgotten to bring my hat.’
‘Yes, well, we’re not far from the solstice now,’ he told her, sitting companionably on the edge of the bed. ‘Just a few weeks to go. No wonder you got back home with a thumping headache.’
‘Migraine, more like. But it’s definitely going now.’
‘Good.’ He put his hand behind her shoulders and helped her into a sitting position, plumping up the pillows behind her. ‘I’ll heat up some of that chicken soup Sophia made yesterday. I think there’s still some in the fridge.’ Sophia was their Italian maid who occasionally, but always grumpily, cooked for them, before tramping back to St Paul and the tiny apartment in the medieval walls where she and her parents lived.
‘Anyway, if you’re feeling a bit better, tell me more about this chap you had lunch with,’ Douglas went on. ‘He sounds a most interesting fellow.’
Diana looked directly at her husband. She’d been watching him covertly since he entered the room. She couldn’t help comparing him to James; they were so unalike, she reflected, that they could almost be two quite different species of man.
Like James, Douglas wore an expensive suit but the sheer bagginess of his body defeated the finest tailoring, rendering the cut more or less shapeless. In any case, Douglas had put on weight since coming to France and his jacket could no longer be buttoned without looking uncomfortably tight under the arms.
The waistband of his trousers was under strain too, and heavy jowls were beginning to flow over the collar of his shirt. His fair skin meant he tried to keep out of the sun but nevertheless, his freckles had become more noticeable in recent weeks, and his wispy reddish hair had gone a shade paler.
Diana felt ashamed of noticing these things and, worse, contrasting them unfavourably to the man with whom she had spent the day. She reminded herself how kind and generous Douglas had been to her and Stella.
But for the first time in their marriage, it suddenly mattered to her that she had never found her husband in any way physically attractive. She began to feel a long-denied restlessness awaken, and with it a tingle of anxiety. Or was it excitement?
Earlier, she had lain stricken with the worst migraine she’d had in years, trying to decide what to tell Douglas. Part of her wanted to unburden herself of the entire thing, starting with that April morning in the market when she had first heard James’s voice. But when she struggled to find and rehearse the words, her resolve crumbled.
‘He sounded like my first husband . . . James . . . I simply had to go back and find him; you can see that, darling, can’t you? Those papers Daddy sent me weren’t what I told you they were; they were the official RAF report into James’s death . . . I had to read them eventually . . . but I didn’t believe they proved he was dead, I can’t say why . . . I’m sorry, darling, but I just knew he was alive and I had to find him again.’
She had squirmed. She would sound needy and desperate and secretive and . . . something else.
Disloyal.
Even worse would be the questions Douglas was certain to ask her.
‘What is he doing here?’
‘What does he look like now?’
‘Will you see him again?’
‘Do you still love him?’
It couldn’t be borne. Not yet, not now. She needed time to reflect on the impossible thing that had just happened. Absorb it, and decide what it meant. She must find a middle way with Douglas for the time being; an abridged, acceptable account she could give him, that later perhaps could be expanded and corrected. She promised herself that in time she would tell him everything.
But now, with her husband sitting unsuspectingly on their bed beside her, Diana censored and skimmed and lied.
‘He’s called Peter. He was a friend of my brother – they were at Cranwell together, and in the same squadron during the war
. They both flew sorties over Dunkirk.’
‘I see,’ Douglas said. ‘It was just after Dunkirk that your first husband was shot down, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes . . . Anyway, I was in the flower-market as usual this morning, at Armand’s café, and this chap got out of a taxi more or less in front of me. I thought I recognised him but I wasn’t sure . . . He knew me though, right away. He came straight over to my table. He shook my hand, said he remembered me from his and John’s passing-out parade at Cranwell, and from a squadron Christmas party. Apparently we danced together a couple of times.’
She paused to readjust the cold cloth on her brow. Douglas nodded slowly.
‘My. What a coincidence. And, naturally, he’d have known James.’
She’d been expecting him to make these connections, but not quite so quickly. Douglas was being unusually beady.
‘Yes, of course . . . but they weren’t especial friends, and Peter wasn’t one of the chaps who saw James shot down. But they were both in the air over France that day. He – Peter – told me that he nearly bought it himself; their squadron was horribly outnumbered,’ he said.
‘Did this Peter know James well?’
‘No, I just told you they weren’t particularly friendly. I certainly don’t recall James ever mentioning him.’
‘No? Well . . . what did you talk about over lunch?’
Diana breathed a little easier. They were on safer ground now.
‘Oh, all sorts. About the war, about my brother . . . what I’m doing down here, and him too. He’s something to do with exporting wine from Provence to London.’
Douglas looked interested. ‘Really? I’ve been dabbling in that a little myself recently, did I mention that? What’s his full name? I might have come across him.’
Damn.
‘D’you know, I simply can’t remember. I think he only mentioned it once, at the café. Dodgson . . . Dobson . . . something like that.’
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