‘I like to shop in Regent Street,’ she told him, ‘so I always jump at making flights to London. Have you been there?’
If she kept talking about London, if she made him think she was a frivolous spendthrift like her sister, it might not occur to him to mention Spain.
‘Many years ago I studied in London,’ he said. ‘But tell me, Fräulein, do you ever fly to Spain?’
Her eyes widened theatrically and she shuddered. ‘Far too dangerous, Herr Müller.’
She needed a drink.
‘Where are you flying this week, Romaine?’ Horst Baumeister asked on her other side, his hand lying close to hers on the table. She couldn’t tell whether it was meant to be protective or aggressive. She glanced across at Roland opposite. He was talking to Florence but his eyes could not stay away from the Germans.
Romy shrugged. ‘I never know where I’ll be flying until I get to the airfield.’
‘Which airfield do you fly out of?’ Herr Müller pressed her.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I am interested in you. You are a rarity, an exotic aviatrix. We don’t have many in Germany.’ He smiled and something about it scared Romy, his teeth too white and flawless to be his own. He raised his silver-tipped eyebrows and waited for the name of the airfield.
She had no intention of laying a trail to Léo Martel.
‘I’ve never flown to Germany either. Where would you recommend for a first visit if ever I do, Herr Müller?’
‘Berlin.’ He took the bait with enthusiasm. ‘You must come to Berlin. The Führer, with his architect Albert Speer, is transforming it into Europe’s finest city.’ He stretched his lips across his gleaming white teeth in what Romy assumed was a smile. ‘You would be my special guest.’
It felt like a threat, but she must be imagining it. He could know nothing. To her surprise it was her sister who came to her rescue. Florence leaned forward across the table, offering the merest flash of creamy cleavage. ‘Do tell us, Herr Müller, what Herr Hitler’s plans are.’ She added with an artless tilt of her head. ‘For Berlin I mean, of course. What are his plans for Berlin?’
‘To expand.’
‘To expand where?’
‘The people of Germany need more Lebensraum.’
Lebensraum. Space to live.
No one mentioned Sudetenland. No one mentioned Czechoslovakia. Or the fact that if Hitler ordered his army into that part of Czechoslovakia, France was treaty-bound to go to war to defend it. Instead Müller lifted Romy’s hand to his lips and repeated, ‘You must come to Berlin. I insist.’
Horst Baumeister balanced her hand on his. Only lightly. But even so, his strong fingers looped around hers and she could feel the pressure of them. She was on the dance floor with him again. Better than being seated next to Müller, who had all the charm of a crocodile. She had not yet worked out what that man’s interest in her was.
As Horst spun her across the dance floor, it occurred to Romy that if neither Daladier nor the British Prime Minister Chamberlain could keep German troops out of Sudetenland, Horst Baumeister would have to don a grey uniform and pick up a rifle. She looked up at his lean handsome face and tried to imagine it. She couldn’t. He was too sane, too interested in the inner workings of a Gipsy Moth engine. Only mad men went to war.
She wondered if he’d ever seen a dead body.
‘Seeing a ghost?’ he murmured.
She looked away and withdrew her hands. She’d had enough of tonight. She walked off the dance floor straight to the exit door.
‘I’m sorry,’ Horst said behind her. ‘I didn’t mean to cause you upset.’
‘You didn’t. I’m not used to this kind of evening and it . . .’ she gave a small grimace, ‘defeats me.’
He laughed outright. ‘This from the woman who flies in an open cockpit, a bundle of glue and matchsticks and flimsy fabric through a storm. Don’t let a nightclub chase you away.’
The noise of the club rushed at Romy. She looked back at the table where her sister was seated with Roland and Müller, deep in conversation, heads together.
‘What exactly does Herr Müller do?’ she asked.
Horst’s tone was suddenly more formal. ‘He is leading a mission to negotiate with the French government over plans that will ensure the continuation of peace between our two nations.’
‘And you? What do you do?’
‘I am part of that mission.’
‘I hope you succeed.’
The prospect of failure was too terrible to contemplate. It thinned the air around them.
‘Goodnight, Horst.’ Romy held out her hand. ‘It has been interesting.’
He shook her hand but did not release it. He drew her fractionally closer, leaning his head nearer hers. He smelled fresh and clean, as if the fog of cigarette smoke could find no hold on him.
‘Have dinner with me tomorrow night?’ he asked.
She didn’t blink. Didn’t spit in the face of the person who was part of the Nazi regime bombing the hell out of Spain.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because I want to know more about you.’
‘I’m busy tomorrow,’ she said softly.
‘The weekend then?’
‘I always take my niece to the park on a Sunday.’
‘So Saturday?’
Her head flicked a brief nod. ‘Saturday.’
He smiled at her. ‘I’ll pick you up at seven at your—’
‘No. I’ll meet you. At Le Chat Noir restaurant in rue des Dames. Saturday evening.’
She reclaimed her hand. The blue of his eyes had darkened but she didn’t know him well enough to tell whether it was pleasure or annoyance.
‘Let me take you safely home,’ he offered.
‘Thank you, but no. Go back to the table and give my sister my apologies. She will be annoyed.’
She opened the door and walked out. When she glanced back through the glass panel, he was still watching her.
Paris breathed on her. Its night scents a mix of tobacco, bad sewers and the city’s loneliness. Romy inhaled a lungful of it to rid her of the stink of German complacency that was clogging her nostrils and turned sharply into a cobbled alleyway that was wreathed in darkness. At the far end of it a bar spilled a triangle of light on to the cobbles even at this late hour.
She could hear voices within. A Parisian will seek out his glass of wine day or night, as surely as the earth keeps turning. In her hand lay her coat that she had scooped up from the kiosk just inside the nightclub’s entrance, and for a moment she paused, aware of the thinness of the material between her fingers.
Alone in the blackness, squeezed between the sleeping houses, she sloughed off her fancy couture gown and dropped it to the ground, a navy skin that crushed her too tight. She stepped out of her dainty navy shoes and slid her bare arms into her coat. She wrapped it around her and buttoned it for decency. She walked away from the navy blue reminder of her sister and into the bar.
There was always a twenty-franc note tucked into her underwear. For emergencies. She knew herself too well.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A note came for Romy before dawn. Delivered by the lame kid who hung around the DeFosse airfield, doing odd jobs and washing down the Gipsy’s wheels whenever he got the chance.
The note was brief. Three words in Martel’s strong disciplined hand. No flights today.
That was it. No explanation. No details. Romy’s first instinct was to head out to the airfield anyway to see what had gone wrong, but she thought better of it. The note meant Martel didn’t want her there. Otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered sending the boy over with it. So what was going on?
What had gone wrong?
It could be trouble with the aircraft, an engine requiring a replacement part. Or a bad weather report down south. Or some kind of problem with the airfield itself. An accident? That happened sometimes, and when it did, the runway needed attention. Romy’s mind was racing through the possible causes of the delay and ea
ch one added more fuel to the fire of her concern.
As soon as it was light she stripped off her flying gear, pulled on her blue dungarees and a cardigan and slunk downstairs to the bar on the corner of her street, which was just blinking into life. She sat at one of the pavement tables still in deep shadow, sipped scalding black coffee and thought about the two Germans last night.
‘Maman, did Papa speak German?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Are you sure? Didn’t he work with them?’
‘Of course I’m sure. You think I didn’t know him?’ One elegant eyebrow lifted quizzically. ‘Why do you ask, Romaine?’
‘I remember hearing German spoken in his study one day, but can’t recall whether it was Papa or someone else.’
‘It must have been someone else,’ her mother said dismissively. Matter closed.
They were strolling through her mother’s garden, a place as rigid and carefully designed as a patchwork quilt. It was all miniature box hedges, cropped lavender ridges and amber paths that inserted grit into Romy’s sandals as though testing her spartan spirit. The sun beat down, turning bare skin pink, but her mother revelled in it, as boneless as a cat in its heat.
Each time Romy entered her mother’s house, a small, vital part of her died. It was the overflow of guilt; it dripped like acid inside her every time she looked at her mother. Every time she heard her voice. Every time she could not withdraw her gaze from the deepening of the soft wrinkles that had stolen on to her face in the eight years since the violence in the study.
Adelle Duchamps still wore black. Her dresses were all black as death, black as the grave, black as the sin that was committed. Beautifully cut, stylishly designed. But black. After the trial of Karim Abed she had moved to this oak-shaded villa in Chantilly, far too large for her, but it was as if she had something to say, a statement to make by choosing this house for herself. I may have lost my powerful husband from my side but I am still someone to be reckoned with. Do not write me off.
Romy didn’t write her off. That’s why she steered clear of her. She did not put it past her mother one day to work out exactly what had happened. The thought sent cold shivers down her spine.
‘How are you, Romaine?’
‘I’m well.’
Her mother’s cool blue-eyed glance, identical to her other daughter’s, slid over Romy. ‘You don’t look well. You look . . .’ she paused and swallowed awkwardly, as though pushing aside a harsh word that lay on the tip of her tongue. ‘You look tired. Do you ever sleep?’
Romy laughed, making light of it. ‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Are you still risking your neck in those . . .’ she drifted a hand skywards, ‘machines?’
‘Yes, I’m still flying. But not today. I’ve come here to see you instead, Maman.’ As she spoke, she slid her hand through her mother’s arm and the sudden physical closeness made her mother’s step falter for a brief moment, but she recovered quickly. She patted Romy’s hand with her own, stiffly, uncomfortably. Romy could feel her mother’s desire to bridge the yawning chasm between them but also could sense her bewilderment as to how to go about it.
For a full minute they walked in silence, attached to each other by the slender thread of Romy’s arm as they watched a flock of starlings take flight from one of the oak trees, their wings glittering like shattered glass against the fierce blue of the sky.
‘Romaine, I realise that your father’s death hit you hard. I understand why you have gone crazy . . .’
Romy’s cheeks flamed.
‘Why have you asked me here today, Maman?’
‘Because I have something to give you.’
‘There’s no need to give me anything.’
She had rejected outright the inheritance from her father. She could take nothing from the man she’d killed. Or from the mother she’d robbed of her husband.
Adelle Duchamps steered them both down a gravel pathway that had been freshly raked and jerked her head in the direction of the French windows that stood open into the salon.
‘Come,’ she said.
‘It is time to pull yourself together, Romaine. Time to stop thinking only of yourself.’
Only of yourself.
Romy thought of young Samir Abed with his schoolbooks on his shoulder. Of the manila envelope propped up in Aya Abed’s living room each month. She imagined the pilots strapped into the planes that she had flown south to Spain.
Only of yourself.
‘Yes, Maman.’
Only then did she look more closely at her mother’s face, putting her own nerves and irritations aside. She saw the way the skin was taut over her cheekbones, something knotted tight beneath it. Her mother wore her tinted fair hair in a tapered shingle, so shapely that it made her look younger and more carefree than her fifty-four years. But her eyes were not carefree. Her eyes were frightened.
‘What is it, Maman?’ Romy asked gently.
They were seated at a low marquetry table in the salon where coffee and lemon madeleines had been laid out by the maid. Romy had no appetite for sponge cakes.
‘What is the matter, Maman?’
‘I want you to have this.’
From a delicate Louis Quatorze bureau with gilded legs her mother removed a small casket. No larger than a cigar box. It was made of vivid emerald malachite that seemed to glow from within. She placed it on Romy’s lap. Romy didn’t touch it.
‘Do you recognise the box, Romaine?’
She nodded. How could she not?
‘It used to sit on the windowsill in your Papa’s study.’
‘I know.’
‘I want you to have it.’
‘I don’t want it.’
‘I want you to have it,’ she said again. ‘I want you to understand that your father loved you.’
‘And you, Maman? Can you still love me?’
Her mother sighed. ‘Whatever happened that day is best left in the past, Romaine. You are my daughter and always will be.’
‘I don’t want the box.’ Romy tucked her hands behind her back but she caught the sudden flash of sadness in her mother’s eyes. So she reached for the box. Flipped open its lid. Inside lay her father’s gold pocket watch, just the sight of it wrenched something loose inside her. It was an eighteen-carat gold full-hunter by Patek Philippe and its soft heartbeat tick stopped Romy’s breath.
She closed the lid on it, put the box to one side of her seat and rose to her feet. She gripped her mother’s arms, bird bones under the black tulle sleeves. When had she grown so thin?
‘What is this about, Maman? What are you so worried about?’
Romy thought she would reply, You. I am worried about you. But that’s not what her mother said.
‘I am worried about your sister.’
‘Florence?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why Florence?’
Her mother broke free, walked across the room and stood with her poker-straight back towards her daughter. She remained like that for a long moment, and when she finally did turn, her eyes were full of tears.
‘She needs help,’ she whispered.
‘Florence needs help?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ Romy felt a sharp stab of panic. ‘What’s the matter with her?’
‘Can’t you see that something is wrong?’
‘No, Maman, I was with her last night and she was her usual charming, glamorous self.’
‘Then you weren’t looking.’
You weren’t looking.
It was true.
She wasn’t looking. She’d only had eyes for the Germans.
Romy raced all the way back to Chantilly station, the pavement warm beneath her feet, the lime trees casting welcome pools of shade. On the train, as it rattled its way back to the centre of Paris, she closed her eyes and ran through every minute of the previous evening. She unpicked each single stitch of last night’s tapestry of gaiety and music, with its gleaming diamonds and its laughter so sharp it c
ould cut right through you. But this time she stripped Horst Baumeister and Herr Müller out of the picture.
She focused on Florence. On her sister’s eyes. On the exact shade and shape of them. On her ever-ready smile. On the softness of her lips. On a tiny line of tension in one corner of them, almost nothing. On the graceful swanlike line of her neck and shoulders. There had been no drooping. No rigidity. Nothing. Nothing in her laughter and the languid gestures of her hands to suggest anything but complete enjoyment of the evening and the company.
There was nothing wrong. Her mother was imagining it.
Her mother had insisted that something was wrong because Florence had changed.
‘In what way?’ Romy had asked.
‘Her manner is different. She has become secretive. Withdrawn. Cut off.’
Was that true? No. Romy couldn’t see it. But then she had to ask herself how well she knew her twin sister these days and the answer came back quickly. Not well. Not now. Not for the last eight years.
‘Madame is not at home, Mademoiselle Romaine.’
Romy stared at the pale young face of Yvette, her sister’s maid, who relished exercising her small sliver of power over visitors. She started to close the door.
‘When will my sister be back?’ Romy pressed her.
‘Madame didn’t say.’
‘Is Chloé home?’
‘No. She is out for a walk with her nanny.’
That was it. The door continued to close.
‘Yvette, I would like to make a telephone call.’
‘Yes, Mademoiselle Romaine.’
‘Don’t worry, it will be brief.’
The maid looked uneasy about agreeing to it, as if she thought Romy might pocket the silver, but she had little choice but to allow her employer’s sister into the apartment and to withdraw discreetly from the room. The moment the salon door clicked shut, Romy dialled the number of the DeFosse airfield. Léo Martel answered immediately, his voice tense.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘Though it’s hot as hell here today. That’s a Parisian summer for you, same as usual. No wind at all. But they say it will rain tonight, thank God.’
‘Good. I’ll take an umbrella if I go out.’
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