A Week in Paris

by Hore, Rachel

  ‘But how could there be a mistake on my passport about something like that?’ Fay stared down at the document.

  ‘The war caused many confusions, large and little. It is possible that your mother believed . . .’ She broke off. ‘Fay, do you trust me?’ Mme Ramond’s eyes meeting hers were calm and strong.

  ‘I . . . don’t know. I suppose so.’ There was something about Mme Ramond’s account that convinced her. How her parents met and fell in love sounded so wonderful that she wanted to believe it. She recalled the mention of the photograph of her father, now in her mother’s bedroom at home, so happy on his honeymoon in the South of France. Everything rang true. But if Mme Ramond was telling the truth, that made her mother dishonest and she didn’t like to think about that. And yet . . . if her mother was hiding secrets maybe it was for a good reason.

  ‘I do trust you, yes,’ she said simply.

  Mme Ramond nodded, satisfied. ‘Wait here a moment,’ she said. ‘I have something for you.’ And she left the room with her stick and her slow, painful walk. She was gone some time, and as she waited Fay glanced around the room. Her eyes fell on one of the photographs. Serge – hadn’t Mme Ramond said that her husband was called Serge . . .?

  ‘Do you remember this?’ Mme Ramond had reappeared, cradling something in her free arm. She held it out and Fay saw with a stir of interest that it was a carved wooden animal.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, taking it from her. The animal was a zebra, about six inches long from nose to tail, fashioned out of plain brown wood painted with narrow black stripes. She knew it from somewhere, but she couldn’t place where. As she nursed it in both hands, she found herself stroking the cool smoothness of its polished surfaces, examining its dear black nose, noting the empty indents for eyes. The eyes. Suddenly she remembered something. The zebra hadn’t always been blind – there had been something in those holes once, tiny black beads. And then a picture rose in her mind. A child’s chubby hand – her hand – walking the zebra along a white-painted sill, the ghost of a child’s face – her face – reflected in the glass of the window.

  ‘You do remember it, don’t you?’ Mme Ramond sat down beside Fay on the sofa, her eyes shining in her tired face.

  ‘I think I remember something.’ Fay looked down at the zebra and it was as though somewhere inside herself the child she had once been came to life and gave a small sigh of relief. ‘It was mine, wasn’t it,’ she said.

  Mme Ramond gave a chuckle. ‘It certainly was, yes. A neighbour of your parents, an old man, gave it to you when you were two and you would not be parted from it. The fuss when, in the rush, it got left behind.’

  ‘The rush?’

  ‘When you finally left Paris. But I get ahead of myself. It’s important that I tell events in order or you will not understand.’

  ‘You must tell me everything. Everything,’ Fay begged. She felt somehow stronger, more convinced of the truth of Mme Ramond’s story now she held the zebra. As she studied the small worn animal again, it came to her how when she’d found the child’s rucksack in her mother’s trunk and had looked inside, it was the zebra that she’d hoped to find. How did Mme Ramond come to have it? There were so many questions she wanted to ask, but it seemed she must be patient.

  Mme Ramond glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was half-past three. ‘Some refreshment perhaps?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t we have tea.’ Fay offered to help, and accompanied her into a narrow galley kitchen to carry a tray for her. After they’d sat down again, Mme Ramond poured glasses of honey-coloured tea which she served with slices of lemon and offered Fay delicate biscuits with an aroma of almond. She bit into one and the buttery crumb melted in her mouth. Again, she glanced at the photograph of Serge Ramond and wondered whether to say anything, but Mme Ramond’s expression put her off. She obviously intended to tell her story in her own way.

  ‘When war was declared,’ Nathalie Ramond went on, as though she’d never left off, ‘Parisians were in a state of shock. Danzig, some asked. Why should millions of Frenchmen die for somewhere as irrelevant to them as Danzig? I remember going out to buy bread and seeing a group of people crowded round a big notice pasted next to the boulangerie. Parents must take their children out of Paris, it said. People grumbled and obeyed, but weeks passed and nothing happened, no bombs, no fighting. The army was kicking its heels, and after a while the families all came home again. The weeks turned to months, still nothing. You English called these months the Phoney War. Our phrase for it was la drôle de guerre. So, Hitler dared not attack us, that was just as we’d thought. We relaxed a bit. Maybe the whole thing would blow over.’

  September 1939

  Kitty watched her husband, who was sitting on her hospital bed cradling their newborn daughter, an expression of wonder on his face. She was exhausted from the long birth, which Dr Poulon had refused to allow Gene to attend as he’d ‘get in the way’, forcing him instead to pace in agitation outside the closed door of the labour room. Now, the hours of pain and fear were over, and despite bits of her feeling not at all right she was drowsy and happy.

  ‘I cannot believe how tiny she is,’ Gene said, measuring his meaty forefinger against the child’s starfish hand, and laughing when she gripped it. ‘I feel like King Kong holding Fay Wray in the movie. Fay – there’s a pretty name. Fay Knox, how about that, Kitty?’

  ‘Fay,’ Kitty repeated, liking the sound. ‘It’s a delicate name, isn’t it? Makes me think of the French for fairy – fée.’ Her husband was right. It did suit this waif of a child with her huge navy eyes, as yet unfocused. They had been going to call her Elizabeth after the mother Kitty could not remember, and Kitty didn’t want to go back on that. ‘Fay Elizabeth,’ she said, wanting to please Eugene.

  Fay Elizabeth she was christened. The nuns hadn’t heard of King Kong and were doubtful about fairies. When Kitty took the baby to see them, they told her that Fay was close to foi, meaning ‘faith’ in French. ‘Elizabeth is a Godly name, too. Saint Elizabeth was the mother of Saint John the Baptist,’ Mère Marie-François informed Kitty, cradling the child, clearly delighted by her. She made the sign of the cross on the baby’s forehead. ‘Dieu te bénisse, Fay Elizabeth,’ she murmured before passing the child to Sister Thérèse, who seemed so enchanted by her that the Reverend Mother was quite curt when she directed the girl to return her to Kitty.

  A new way of life was gradually established. For the first two weeks Gene hired a maternity nurse to help his wife, a French girl with the face of a Madonna, who imparted an air of calm and order to proceedings that Kitty herself did not feel. The baby was fretful and did not feed easily, and Kitty worried that she was doing everything wrong. Never did she feel the lack of her own mother as now, when she most needed advice and reassurance. The French nurse seemed to manage everything so beautifully when she was there, but in a way that made Kitty feel inferior next to her. Also, she tried to pull rank with Jeanette and upset her, so in the end everybody was glad when her contract came to an end.

  After that they managed with Jeanette coming in more often, and by constant use of the local laundry, but Kitty still had to deal with buckets of stinking nappies around the flat, and the tough old bird of a concierge complained if she left the pram in the lobby downstairs. Kitty enjoyed the attention when she took the infant out in it though. Even the baby clothes in Paris were chic, and she loved to dress Fay in stylish matinée jackets and frilly bonnets. If she left the pram outside the butcher’s while she nipped in for a bit of steak, ten to one she’d come out to find some black-clad widow had stopped, her worn face softening, to cluck over the baby. And Fay was, though Kitty said it herself, an exceptionally engaging-looking child with her shock of dark hair, wide, long-fringed eyes, button mouth and clear skin.

  But even in this cotton-wool babyland, Kitty could not but be aware of the charged atmosphere, as sandbags were piled outside shops and at the bottom of monuments, and people’s faces turned anxiously to the sky any time a plane flew overhead. At night the c
ity was blacked out completely, which put an end to the nightclubs. As Gene’s friend Jack complained, it was almost worse waiting for something to happen than for it to happen, and it was a while before some sort of normality established itself, though the peace was disturbed occasionally by an air-raid drill. The theatres and cinemas were open, people still gossiped about who was having an affair with whom, and magazines still featured the latest haute couture.

  Some things were different. There were faces missing from their circle of friends. Few English people remained, Miss Dunne notably being one. Though the US was not at war with Germany, many Americans had been worried enough by the prospect of invasion or bombardment to flee to the South of France or to neutral Switzerland, or had been summoned home altogether by their families. After several anxious letters from Uncle Pepper, Kitty wrote finally to tell him that since nothing untoward was happening she and Gene had decided she should stay where she was. After all, with talk of German U-boats lurking in the Channel, it might be more dangerous to attempt to sail home.

  Late in November, when Fay was nearly two months old and had started to smile, Kitty returned to Monsieur Deschamps for her first piano lesson for four months. She was nervous, having left Fay with Jeanette, though the French cleaner had successfully raised four of her own children, so Kitty really had no need to worry. She’d done little practice and had consequently fallen behind, and she was nervous of her teacher’s reduced expectations of her now that she was a young mother.

  In the event, though she arrived late, he was very kindly and indulgent, but she left afterwards feeling the lesson had been a disaster. Her fingers had been clumsy, her mind skittering away from the black dots of music dancing on the page before her. When she emerged from his room she was close to tears, angry tears that she hadn’t done better. She berated herself all the way home and after that day forced herself to practise every time she had a few minutes to herself. Baby Fay quickly learned to sleep through her playing, but she couldn’t sleep all the time and Kitty knew it was wrong to wish she did.

  ‘It’s very soon,’ Gene said, trying to soothe his wife. ‘Don’t expect so much of yourself.’

  ‘But I’ll lose everything I worked for,’ she wailed. ‘Don’t you see?’

  For the next lesson she arrived at Monsieur Deschamps’ apartment block in time to meet Serge coming out of the lift. She hadn’t seen him for months. He’d changed, she saw that straight away. Part of the change was physical – he’d filled out a little, stood taller – but it was also that his air was more confident, and despite the wartime privations he’d managed to acquire a better-fitting suit. They exchanged greetings and she suggested they meet properly at some point. She hesitated to invite him to the apartment because it had become taken over by baby things, and so they agreed to meet the next day at the café by the Conservatoire that they’d frequented before. It was under new ownership, Serge told her, the previous people having left Paris in a hurry when war was declared.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind if I bring Fay,’ she volunteered, as she entered the lift.

  ‘Pas du tout,’ he replied through the diamond-shaped bars, and she smiled down at his uplifted face as the lift jerked on its way. The lesson went better that day, thank heavens, and she returned home feeling more hopeful.

  The new owners were serving a reduced menu, but otherwise all seemed as usual when Fay entered the café the following day, though it struck her that there were fewer students eating at the tables or chatting and laughing at the bar.

  She was surprised at how tender Serge was towards Fay. As she sat with the child on her lap, he exchanged smiles and chuckles with her. ‘I remember my little sister when she was a baby,’ he told her. ‘She used to love sitting on my knee to bash at the piano. I think maybe this one will be a musician.’ He carried a recent photograph of his little sister with him, a laughing fourteen-year-old with Serge’s dark colouring. She was, he said, six years younger than he was, but they were very close and she wrote to him every week. ‘So, Fay, are you a musical baby?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m training her to fall asleep when I play Brahms’s lullaby,’ Kitty said. ‘Does that count?’

  They talked about the music each was playing for Monsieur Deschamps, and Serge explained how the Conservatoire was continuing most of its classes, though many of the pupils and some of the teachers had left when war was declared. An air of uncertainty blew through its corridors these days, he said.

  Serge himself, she discovered with not a little envy, had been doing very well in the four months since she’d seen him. She already knew he’d won a First Prize in Piano at the Conservatoire in July. Now he was actually due to play in a concert for young musicians in two Sundays’ time and was practising hard for it, and for a national competition Monsieur Deschamps had entered him for, to take place after Christmas. He’d been earning some money in the meantime playing two evenings a week at a grand hotel near Place de la Concorde. ‘If I win the competition,’ he said, passion in his eyes, ‘I might not have to do that for long. The job is easy, but demeaning. Play this, play that, do I know some foolish American song or other. Pah! Je me prostitue,’ he said with a look of ferocious disdain. ‘But we all have to eat. And at least I am still in Paris.’ The implication was clear. He had so far escaped being called up for the army.

  It would be hard to imagine his long-fingered musician’s hands around the body of a rifle, Kitty thought. She couldn’t picture Serge, who poured his soul into his music, marching to orders or running for his life through a shower of bullets. But despite his sensitivity he was tough; he had stamina and the determination to succeed. Perhaps she was wrong to worry about him. She breathed a guilty little prayer of thanks that America wasn’t in the war and that Gene was safely in the hospital. Although she was English, she and Fay were on his passport and therefore in the eyes of the authorities they were Americans, so they were all right, too. Gene had told her though, that at the least sign of trouble he would send her home to Uncle Pepper with their daughter, if he could. They didn’t talk of the U-boats.

  Christmas came and went. Serge did win the competition, although the prize bursary was not enough to save him from having to ‘prostitute’ his talents, as he called it. It did, however, bring other opportunities. One freezing February morning, Serge’s eyes lit up when he emerged from his lesson to find Kitty sitting on a chair in Monsieur Deschamps’ cramped hallway.

  ‘Look, I must show you,’ he said, with one of his ironic smiles. He withdrew an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and extracted from it a formal notecard, which he gave her to examine. Mrs Donald van Haren was embossed at the top in elaborate silver italics. ‘She wishes me to play at one of her salons,’ he said. ‘What do you think of that?’ Despite his studied nonchalance, she sensed his excitement.

  ‘It sounds a marvellous opportunity,’ Kitty said, wondering who exactly Mrs van Haren might be.

  The lanky figure of Monsieur Deschamps appeared in the doorway to the drawing room. ‘Our young friend here has made something of a conquest, it seems,’ he said, stroking his moustache.

  ‘She heard me play the Rachmaninoff at the Conservatoire, Kitty. She loves Rachmaninoff, she says here.’

  ‘Will you go?’

  ‘Will he go? Of course he will go,’ Monsieur Deschamps said with conviction. ‘Serge has to begin to make his name.’

  Serge described it all to her later, the mansion in the eighth arrondissement with the elegant cars parked in the forecourt, the high-ceilinged drawing room hung with blue velvet curtains and furnished in gilt and white. Mrs van Haren herself turned out to be a tall, attractive Frenchwoman married to an American businessman. She was in her thirties with glorious chestnut-coloured hair and large round green eyes that made her appear constantly surprised. ‘The American Ambassador himself congratulated me on my playing,’ Serge told Kitty, ‘and there were writers and politicians present.’ Rich old ladies had purred over him, and an old military gentleman with a moustach
e like Marshal Pétain and a row of medals on his chest had wrung his hand.

  But what pleased Serge more than being lionized was that in the post the following day he received a generous cheque from Mrs van Haren ‘in honour of his performance’, together with an invitation to play at one of her cocktail parties the following week.

  Serge Ramond, it seemed, was on his way in society. But so much would depend on the international situation. As the air grew milder and the trees came into blossom, the mood in Paris was hopeful. All right, they might technically be at war, but there was little evidence of hostilities and life continued much as usual. Kitty read a review Jack had written of Josephine Baker and Maurice Chevalier’s new show on the Champs-Élysées. Gene talked of their little family going to Avignon for a holiday at Easter. The important thing, Kitty decided, was to focus on the here and now, to let the future look after itself.

  In March, a few short weeks later, the future arrived with alarming seriousness. Gene and Kitty first heard the BBC news on the wireless. Hitler’s forces had invaded Norway. La drôle de guerre was over. Outside the post office down the street more posters appeared, mobilizing troops. The war had finally begun.

  On 10 April came the news that the Germans had taken Norway. Nazi troops marched into Denmark. Not long after, it was Holland’s turn, then Luxembourg, all falling to the enemy like a row of dominoes. Meanwhile, Parisians reacted in horror to the revelation that Nazi Panzer divisions were forging their way through the Ardennes Forest in France near the Belgian border. The rumours were that the French defending forces were shambolic. It was horrifying! The famous Maginot Line that had cost so much and was supposedly unbreachable had proved no use to France at all. The enemy had simply gone round it.

  Belgium was the next to fall. And soon the French and British armies were in swift retreat under the huge might of the German onslaught, falling back through the oft-contested landmarks with their ghosts of the dead of battles past. Ypres, Mons, Waterloo. Steps in an old nightmare.