A Week in Paris

by Hore, Rachel

  She saw quite a bit of Milly and Jack, and of a young Frenchwoman who looked after a little girl named Joséphine, the same age as Fay, whom she first met one afternoon at the park near the apartment. This young woman’s name was Lili Lambert, and Kitty liked her the instant she set eyes on her, sitting on a bench feeding crumbs to the sparrows, the round-eyed child on her lap pointing at the birds and squealing with delight. Lili was a couple of years older than Kitty and rather like a sparrow herself – being small-boned, with a pert, pointed face and quick black eyes. She was alone in Paris, her husband Jean-Pierre having been called up to the front, as she told Kitty early in their friendship. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the last days of May and despatched to Germany. She’d heard from the Red Cross that he had been sent to work in an arms factory on the Ruhr. Recently she had received a letter from him. She took it out of her bag now. It had been folded and refolded many times. Lili did not offer to read it to Kitty, nor did Kitty ask. But Lili held it tightly as though it were a talisman that connected her to Jean-Pierre.

  ‘All I can do is wait,’ she told Kitty. ‘Wait and hope that the war will end soon and that Jean-Pierre will come home safely. Meantime at least I have work and somewhere pleasant to live.’ The child, Joséphine, belonged to a French business couple, and Lili had moved in with them to save paying rent on the rooms she’d shared with Jean-Pierre. Kitty took to coming to the park when she could if the afternoon was fine, and quite often she’d meet Lili. They mostly spoke about the children and their own upbringings – Lili’s family lived near Nice – but they had another interest in common, which was music. Lili had first come to Paris to try her luck as a singer and had scraped a living by it. Most of the nightclubs were closed now, and anyway, Jean-Pierre, a bank clerk, wouldn’t have liked his wife to return to that kind of life, so the job she had now was better, she told Kitty. Still, Kitty enjoyed hearing her stories about the rackety life of the clubs and Lili even taught her a song or two. She had a light, expressive voice and rolled her Rs as she sang. Despite her troubles Lili was by nature a cheerful girl and their times together were full of laughter whilst the babies crawled on the grass if it was dry or slept in their prams in the autumn sunshine.

  One afternoon, two Wehrmacht soldiers came into the park, taking the air maybe, or keeping an eye out for signs of trouble, and the women fell silent as the men passed, averting their eyes until they’d gone. Her fear of them accompanied Kitty all the way home, and when she carried a sleeping Fay out of the lift she felt that terror still. She jumped therefore when a door opened and Monsieur Klein came out, several books under his arm. He caught her alarm.

  ‘Oh, it’s only you, madame, I’m sorry,’ he said, picking up a book he’d dropped. ‘One can’t be sure these days . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘Are you all right, monsieur?’ she asked him and when he said he was, she asked politely whether he was going to the library.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said, and paused. ‘When I visited last week they told me they had no record of my name and that I wasn’t to come any more.’

  Kitty studied him with surprise. ‘But you go there every day! How can they say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was the usual woman on the desk, but she wouldn’t even look at me. However . . .’ His expression brightened. ‘I have a good friend who will borrow books on my behalf. I am returning these to him now. Good day.’ He touched the black hat he always wore as he passed by and entered the lift.

  ‘That’s how it is for Jews all the time now, Kitty,’ Eugene explained to her that evening when she recounted the conversation.

  ‘I didn’t know Monsieur Klein was Jewish,’ she said, surprised. ‘He doesn’t look it. How do they find out?’

  ‘It could be in the records somewhere or maybe it’s just his name.’ He sighed. ‘Or more likely, somebody dropped a word in an official ear. It’s happening all around us now.’

  ‘But he’s a harmless old man, Gene, anyone can see that.’

  ‘Perhaps the lady at the library took a dislike to him. These days there doesn’t have to be a reason.’

  ‘It’s so unfair. I know, nothing’s fair any more. But it’s not enough now to keep one’s head down and try not to cause any trouble.’

  ‘It’s still the safest way,’ he pointed out, coming to put his arm round her. He looked down at her with concern. ‘It’s important that you behave very carefully. Think about Fay.’

  ‘Fay and I will be all right,’ she said. Nothing would happen to them, she told herself. The soldiers strolling through the park today had touched their caps politely to Lili and Kitty and smiled at the children. They were far from the raping, pillaging vandals that everyone had feared. Not that this stopped Kitty from hating them.

  Eugene was having a rare night off. He looked scruffy and exhausted, she thought, noticing the furrows that had appeared on his brow.

  ‘They expect too much of you,’ she told him.

  ‘It’s hard doing our work properly when our every step is observed.’

  She knew that the pressures at the hospital were considerable. Although the Germans had to respect the work of the institution, they monitored its activities carefully, especially in respect of any Allied servicemen who were treated there. These patients were supposed to be transferred into German hands once they were better, but she knew that this wasn’t always the case. Back in July she’d asked after the injured Welshman she’d seen Eugene with on the day she and Fay had returned to Paris and gone to find him at the hospital.

  ‘According to official records, he died,’ was all that Gene would tell her, and when she asked him if that was really what had happened, he replied, ‘Don’t ask me any more. It’s better that you don’t know. Too many people’s safety depends on it.’

  ‘I’m worried about you, Gene,’ she said now. ‘You need looking after.’

  He hadn’t visited a barber for some time, so after supper she made him sit on a kitchen chair while she cut his hair. She worked carefully, feeling the warmth of his head beneath her hands and loving the familiar oily fragrance of his hair as she snipped until the floor around was covered in small bright curls. ‘There you are, my shorn lamb,’ she said finally, handing him a mirror.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he said, beaming at his reflection. ‘I would have had to pay the barber.’

  ‘A tip would be acceptable,’ Kitty said, trimming one last stray lock. She put down comb and scissors, and as she lifted the towel from his shoulders, he caught her hands and swung her round so that she landed in his lap, laughing. He rubbed his nose against hers and kissed it.

  ‘How much are you asking?’

  ‘Only everything,’ was her reply.

  ‘Already yours,’ he said simply and with such heart she felt the truth of it. She had his love, had borne his child and they would endure this together. So many were worse off than they were, she thought as he kissed her again, this time long and deeply. But she still worried about him.

  ‘Oh, Gene,’ she whispered when they broke apart. ‘I don’t know what you’re involved in at the hospital, but take care, my love, won’t you? Take care.’

  Kitty came to sense more strongly the fear that pervaded the city when she visited Jack and Milly. The couple lived in rooms in a shambolic building above shops in a street leading off the Boulevard St-Germain. They’d decorated the place themselves and furnished it with interesting odds and ends that they’d collected over the five years or so they’d been together in Paris. No one could call the result fashionable, but it suited the sort of people they were. Since they both worked from home, two desks took up one wall of the living room where they’d sit together, the room hazy with smoke, Jack quietly writing in a foolscap notebook and Milly bashing away on a typewriter, stopping occasionally to curse and vigorously rub at some error or snatch up the ringing phone and speak loudly into it. How Jack put up with this disturbance, Kitty never knew, for he was always complaining about the lack of peace and quiet, then th
ey’d argue and Milly would fly off the handle and tell him to go someplace else if he didn’t like it. Recently it had become common for Kitty to catch sight of him in the café on the corner of the street, his hat pushed back on his head, his notebook and a cup of coffee on the table in front of him as he smoked and watched the world from the window.

  One afternoon at the end of September when Kitty called by it was to find Milly and Jack in a gloomy mood, having received the news that the office of an underground newspaper Milly had started writing for had been raided and the publisher, a close friend of theirs, taken into custody.

  ‘Do they know about you?’ she asked Milly anxiously.

  Milly made an impatient noise. She was like a caged animal today, pacing the room, smoking and brooding, whilst Kitty watched and Fay stood by Jack’s chair, pulling at his jacket, puzzled that he didn’t want to play swinging games with her today.

  ‘She published under a pen name, thank God,’ Jack put in. ‘Unless they get her real name out of La Tour,’ he added glumly.

  ‘He won’t tell ’em anything he doesn’t have to,’ Milly said, squashing her cigarette into an already overloaded ashtray. She paused for a second, as the implication of what she’d said struck home with all of them. Suppose he had no choice about talking. ‘Oh, the poor, poor man,’ she burst out. ‘Do you think—’

  ‘He’s gotten the best legal help, Milly,’ Jack broke in. ‘La Tour’s attorney is married to a German girl. It’s proved useful recently.’

  ‘It might not work this time,’ Milly muttered, picking at a nail. ‘Not after he printed that cartoon of von Stülpnagel. I can’t bear it. There must be something we can do to help.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t, Milly.’ Jack handed Fay back to her mother and went to put his arms round his girlfriend. She looked up him and smiled sadly. ‘It’s no good, sweetheart,’ Jack said. ‘You’ll put yourself in danger and I can’t live without you.’ He stood with his arms tight around her, swaying to soothe her.

  ‘Oh, Jack,’ Milly mumbled in a strange, hiccuping voice. Kitty was shocked. She’d never seen Milly cry before, but now Milly was weeping freely, with great hoarse sobs that wrenched at Kitty’s heart.

  She could think of nothing to say. It was a glimpse into a world she knew little about and didn’t want to know. She almost wished she hadn’t come today, but they were her friends; she cared about them. ‘Stay safe,’ her husband had told her, but it wasn’t that easy.

  The publisher La Tour remained in prison for two weeks, then was suddenly and miraculously released. When Kitty next visited, Milly was jubilant, but explained that there was no point in him even trying to resume his underground activities. All his printing equipment had been seized and he was aware of being watched. None of this would stop Milly from writing, but how would anyone read what she wrote?

  There was so much to write about as the forces of Occupation tightened their grip. In September, Jews, Africans and Algerians who had originally fled the city were barred from returning to their homes, and their property was confiscated. The Knoxes awoke one day to find that the shutters of the Jewish jeweller opposite had been daubed with obscenities during the night. Eugene would come home from the hospital with stories of German interference in the operations of the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps who tended to the wounded of any nationality. By the end of September, the Corps had been forced out of service.

  Chapter 19

  The winter of 1940–41 was the cruellest Kitty had ever known. The new year brought heavy snow that turned to ice, making it treacherous to go out. Every day was a remorseless struggle to find food, for the weather brought the fragile supply chains to a standstill and even vegetables were scarce for they could not be dug out of the frozen ground. The sign Nothing left to sell was a not unusual sight to see in shop windows by midday.

  A rare bright spot was a parcel sent for Christmas by Gene’s mother in America, but which didn’t reach them until January. An excited Kitty unwrapped chocolate, tins of meat and packets of dried fruit with wonder, her stomach growling with hunger at the thought of eating these treats. There were baby clothes for Fay, too, which were beautiful, but sadly too small, so she gave them to a woman with a baby girl downstairs, who received them with amazed delight. Kitty and Gene gave some chocolate to Monsieur Zipper, and invited Jack and Milly round for a feast, so all too quickly everything was gone.

  One freezing morning when she braved the weather to shop, it was to find the bread at the baker’s stale and a tired grey colour, and the only vegetables on the market stall were rotting turnips, presumably scavenged leftovers from a previous season. Worse, there was no milk to be found anywhere, and Kitty was panic-stricken about what to give Fay. She was overwhelmed with gratitude therefore, when later that morning she answered a tap at the door to find waiting outside the tall square figure of Adele Dunne, the Englishwoman she’d met at the convent. Miss Dunne was enveloped in a coat that looked as if it had been made out of an army blanket and a floppy felt hat with snow dripping off it.

  ‘Surprise!’ She held out two tins of condensed milk in her gloved hands, smiling like a naughty schoolgirl.

  ‘Adele, you lifesaver. We’re desperate!’ Kitty cried, taking them from her and ushering her inside.

  ‘I do hope I’m not intruding. The tins were a personal gift to me from a friend, and I immediately thought them a good excuse to see how you were in this dreadful weather.’ Miss Dunne’s comforting English tones brought to mind school pinafores and cycling on winding country lanes. Never had Kitty been so glad to see her.

  ‘We’re down to our last tin,’ she told Miss Dunne. ‘It’s simply impossible to find any in the shops. Look, Fay – milk.’

  Fay toddled across and clutched at her mother’s skirt. The child was swathed in jumpers and her face was tired and pinched. She withdrew her thumb from her mouth and stared up at this strangely dressed figure with curiosity.

  ‘Hello, Fay, dear, I don’t expect you’ll remember me. My, you are growing up fast.’ Adele Dunne smiled down at the child as she unpinned her hat, then extricated herself from her coat and soaked brogues. Fay stared with solemn eyes at the woman’s much-darned stockings. Miss Dunne sank onto the sofa with a sigh of relief. She looked reassuringly the same as ever, Kitty thought. Perhaps her broad face was a little worn, but her cheeks were rosy from the cold air and her eyes were bright and interested.

  Kitty fetched a towel for Miss Dunne’s wet feet and made what passed for tea, using a little precious milk. The apartment was freezing, but there was nothing to be done about that. Fuel had to be saved for the evenings when the temperature plummeted.

  ‘What’s your news? I expect you’re kept very busy,’ Kitty said, settling Fay in her lap with a cup of the watered-down milk. The little girl drank it down, her wide eyes fixed dreamily on the visitor.

  ‘Oh yes, we’re certainly that. There are so many who need help.’ Miss Dunne talked of the church where she worked, which tried to aid any who came within its doors regardless of religion or race. The tide of refugees flowing into the city had dribbled to a halt with the Occupation, but there were plenty already here who needed help: families from Belgium, French-speakers expelled from their homes in Alsace-Lorraine, children who’d lost parents, parents who’d lost children, widows too old or ill or poor to join the daily scavenge for food.

  ‘The Red Cross do their best,’ she explained, ‘but the rules are so pettifogging. Why can’t the Germans make up their minds?’ She complained about having to trek every day to report to the authorities. ‘Such a waste of everyone’s time. They know full well where I am and what I’m doing.’

  More serious were the games the Nazis played with rations. ‘One moment we’re allowed extra for our nursing mothers, the next we’re not.’ Then there was the constant harassment. ‘Last week they threatened to close us down completely. Harbouring enemy aliens, they said. Enemy aliens my foot, I told them! They’re frightened, half-starved wretches.’ Now Miss Dunne h
ad started to talk, she couldn’t stop. It was as though she needed to unburden herself. ‘Last week, half a dozen Gestapo arrived out of the ether. They turned everything upside down, searching for goodness knows what. The place was in uproar. Anyone without the right papers they simply bundled into a van, including a mother with a young baby, Kitty – and there was nothing we could do to stop them.’ Miss Dunne’s face was a picture of distress. ‘And it’s so difficult to find out what happens to people.’ It wasn’t just this woman who had vanished, either. ‘Someone might turn up every day for a while then simply disappear. We do our best to make enquiries. Sometimes I can’t bear to find out. Such stories, such awful stories . . .’ She drifted to a halt and sipped gratefully at her tea. ‘Oh, it is nice to see you, dear.’

  ‘Are you still living at the convent?’ Kitty asked, cradling the now sleeping child. She knew from visiting the nuns in August that Miss Dunne had moved back there. The French family she’d been lodging with before had needed to make room for some elderly relatives and regretfully turned her out.

  ‘Such good people, the nuns. They didn’t want payment except for food, you know,’ she told Kitty, ‘but I insisted. That poor Belgian girl Marthe can’t pay a thing.’ The refugee family was still in residence, the mother doing her bit by helping Sister Thérèse with the cooking and cleaning. The children attended the church school. ‘There’s quite a ragbag of other people, too,’ she said, ‘but we all muddle along. Mère Marie-François has been in bed with bronchitis. All those hours spent kneeling in that cold church, if you ask me.’ Miss Dunne’s attitude to religion was brisk and practical. ‘She’s past the worst now though.’