by Hore, Rachel
Kitty was concerned. ‘I must visit again soon. I never seem to have time, though if you asked me, I couldn’t say what I’ve been busy doing. This morning I queued at the butcher, then again at the baker’s and came back with almost nothing. If something needs fixing I end up asking a neighbour or doing it myself as Eugene’s often not here, though it’s been easier since they’ve relaxed the curfew, and when he is at home the poor man’s too tired to deal with broken saucepan handles.’
‘Everybody’s exhausted,’ Miss Dunne sighed, rubbing her feet with the towel. ‘Simply finding the strength to stay alive is tiring.’
‘Gene’s worried that the Germans intend to close the hospital, which would be dreadful. Not that he tells me much. I think he wants to protect me, but I don’t need protecting. I’d rather know things. Then I can prepare.’
Miss Dunne regarded Kitty with a sympathetic expression. ‘It must be hard for you, dear.’ She nodded towards the piano. ‘Do you ever play now? I suppose you don’t have time.’
‘Not often, no.’ All that belonged to another life, a life that was closed to her now. She thought longingly sometimes of her lessons with Monsieur Deschamps. She’d visited his apartment before Christmas, wondering if he’d returned, thinking perhaps foolishly that she could at least have the occasional lesson with him, but there had been no answer when she knocked. No one was at home next door either, so she’d been unable to find out if he was back. Serge might know, but she hadn’t seen him for some while. She must write to him at the Conservatoire. Something else she hadn’t had time to do.
‘I saw that dark-haired young man from your wedding,’ Miss Dunne said suddenly, as though she could read Kitty’s thoughts. ‘The boy pianist. Just by accident, in the street.’
‘Serge, you mean? Did you speak to him?’ Kitty asked, immediately interested. ‘How was he?’
‘I tried to speak to him, but he behaved very oddly. At first I thought that he hadn’t recognized me. After all, we had only met on that one occasion, but then I realized he did know me but didn’t want to be seen with me. He kept glancing about anxiously so I took pity on him and walked on.’
‘I hope he’s not in any kind of trouble,’ Kitty said, frowning.
‘That’s what I wondered,’ Miss Dunne said. ‘He had just come out of a rather grand-looking apartment block in the Faubourg St-Honoré. Near that big hotel the Germans have turned into offices – perhaps you know it? I expect it was being near that which made him nervous.’
Speaking to an Englishwoman with the Gestapo about would be seen as dangerous. Kitty thought Miss Dunne was right, that must be the reason.
That evening she wrote a note to Serge, asking if he’d heard from Monsieur Deschamps, and suggesting that they meet. She sent it to the Conservatoire but received no answer, which was worrying. Perhaps Serge was in difficulties of some sort.
One darkening February afternoon, Kitty and Fay returned home from meeting Lili and Joséphine, but when she eased her key into the lock she was surprised when the door opened a few inches and through the gap she saw Eugene place a finger to his lips.
‘Papa’!’ Fay cried and stretched her arms towards her father. ‘Papa!’
‘Come in quickly.’ He took hold of Fay and pulled Kitty inside. She was surprised to find the apartment unlit. By a glimmer of light from the window she saw someone rising, with some difficulty, from the chair by the piano. It was the tall, spare figure of a man.
‘I must apologize for interrupting—’ the stranger started to say. It was an educated English voice with a soft burr. Then Eugene cut in.
‘Kitty, may I introduce Flight Lieutenant John Stone. John, my wife Kitty and our daughter Fay.’ A British RAF officer! There was something in Eugene’s voice that warned Kitty not to react. The air had a dangerous taste of metal, like on an icy day.
‘Flight Lieutenant.’ Kitty could hardly see the man’s face, but she shook the outstretched hand and found it reassuring in its warmth and firmness.
‘Please call me John,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry to intrude on you like this.’
‘No more apologizing, please, John,’ Eugene said. ‘It is I who should be sorry. Kitty, John may have to rest up here a couple days. I know I should have asked you first, but there wasn’t the chance.’
‘I see,’ she said, slowly unbuttoning her coat. To avoid thinking about her fear, she started to worry what she could give John Stone for supper. There were two gristly chops waiting in the kitchen, the only meat she’d been able to buy for some days. Perhaps she could eke them out with the last of the bacon fat. At least there was a tin of beans left, and . . .
‘Where will he sleep?’ she asked.
‘On the couch, do you reckon?’ Eugene said. He was cuddling Fay close, but he laid his free hand on Kitty’s shoulder to comfort her. ‘It’ll be fine. Our plan went wrong, that’s all. The place he was supposed to go to didn’t work out.’
‘I’m sure I won’t be here long,’ Stone added.
Kitty nodded. What plan? What place? She was hardly able to think straight. To hide her troubled feelings she went to draw the blackout curtains across the windows. When she switched on the table lamp and saw their visitor in its weak light she gave a sharp intake of breath. The man must once have been handsome in a fair-haired, sturdy English fashion, but now the left side of his face and neck was livid, the skin puckered and the eyelid drooping. He returned her searching gaze though, without flinching.
‘Apologies for my appearance, but I assure you it looks worse than it is.’ His voice was gentle. ‘I didn’t bale out quickly enough – thought I could save the plane. Stupid, really.’
‘When?’ she managed to ask.
‘Six weeks ago. We were on a bombing raid over Normandy. An old farmer who’d seen our plane catch fire came out searching for us. He and his wife picked me out of a hedge, carried me home somehow and sent for a local doctor, who patched me up the best he could before handing me over to these chaps.’ He indicated Eugene.
‘How did he get to you?’ Kitty asked her husband. It was so bewildering.
‘It’s best you don’t know,’ Eugene said. ‘He reached us, that’s the important thing. But now he’s better we were trying to get him home.’
Kitty sat down on the sofa, her mind finally beginning to work. Had Mme Legrand on the desk downstairs seen Stone? There was no thinking what might happen to them all if he were discovered. How could Gene do this to them? Did he not think of little Fay? Fay, in danger. The thought was too much
‘Well,’ she said, getting up. To her horror she was trembling. ‘I’d better see what there is for supper.’ And she fled to the kitchen.
It was there Eugene found her a moment later staring down unseeing at the plate of bloody chops. He put his arms round her and held her close. She looked up at him blankly, unsure whether to berate him or weep.
‘I’m real sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I think you know how I’m involved. There’s a few of us at the hospital, I won’t tell you their names, but we don’t like to hand these guys over to the Germans, so when they’re well enough we try to get them out. It was my task today to take John to a safe house in Montparnasse, but when we arrived we found someone had gotten there ahead of us. The lock was bust and we daren’t risk going in. I couldn’t think what else to do with him except come here. No one saw us, Kitty, I’d swear on it. Even Madame Legrand wasn’t at her desk.’
‘You can’t be certain you weren’t seen,’ she said. ‘Gene, it’s not me I’m worried about, it’s Fay.’ In all honesty she was frightened for all of them.
Now she was getting used to what had happened, part of her was proud of her husband. She felt a kind of relief, too, that Gene had explained things better. So much made sense now. Gene’s preoccupied manner, the continual feeling he was hiding something from her. She had known about the young Welshman but hadn’t realized that he was helping other Allied servicemen, too.
‘For God’s sake keep all this quiet, Kitty.’
‘You don’t need to say that. I’m not stupid.’
‘I didn’t mean that.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘I don’t know why I said it. Now I’d better go rescue Stone from Fay. She seems to have taken a shine to his shoelaces. He’s a great guy, you know. He won’t be any trouble.’
Just then came a pattering of small feet and a cry of ‘Mama!’ and Fay ran into the kitchen, her arms held out. Kitty swung her up, held her close and kissed her, taking comfort in her sweet-sour infant smell. She closed her eyes and for a moment knew an intense joy. Here were the people she loved most in the world, her husband and her child. Let no one try to take them from me, she sent out a silent pleading.
Flight Lieutenant Stone hid in their apartment for two nights. Once, Kitty awoke, hearing him shout out something in English, and for a minute or two lay rigid with anxiety, thinking someone had broken in. Then she realized that he was simply dreaming. She hoped no one else in the building had heard him.
In the daytime Gene went to work as usual, so Kitty was left with Stone, and the unenviable task of stretching the rations to feed the extra mouth. When she went outside she was more wary than usual. Once, in the newsagent where she was buying some envelopes, a German officer came in for cigarettes. Fay, trotting off across the shop, bumped into him, bounced back and sat down squarely on her bottom, looking up at him in astonishment. Full of apologies, Kitty rushed across, but the man only laughed. ‘Careful, Liebchen,’ he said. He bent and took Fay up into his arms, his expression tender.
The little girl turned rigid with fear, and sensing this, the man hastily handed her back to Kitty.
He touched his cap. ‘I have a daughter like her,’ he said in heavily accented English and Kitty realized that she’d somehow given her nationality away. She tensed, waiting for him to ask for her papers, but he merely nodded courteously, paid for his cigarettes and left.
‘Madame!’ the woman behind the counter called to her as she went out, and she remembered she’d not paid for the envelopes. She fumbled with her purse and dropped coins that clinked and danced across the counter.
She came to like John Stone very much in the short time he was with them. He was thirty-one, an experienced pilot who’d flown many missions without mishap before this one. His co-pilot, she learned, had not survived the parachute drop and Stone could not speak of him without distress, so Kitty avoided the subject. It was easier not to talk of the war at all, she found, so they spoke of more cheerful things, of places they both knew in Hampshire. Stone was a director of the family’s shipping line, running cruise ships out of Southampton. He loved ships and the sea, but the war had cut business dead and the vessels had been commandeered for troop transport. He’d always wanted to fly, so he’d chosen the RAF above the Navy, and Kitty sensed that he fed off the danger of the bombing raids. He’d been frustrated by the long weeks in hospital, and now he was restless, keen to start the perilous journey home to England and to get back in the air.
In private Kitty wondered whether he’d be allowed to fly again. His eye, miraculously, was undamaged, but he didn’t hear her sometimes when she spoke and his left arm would twitch involuntarily.
Despite her affection for him, she was glad when he was gone. It happened one midnight. Eugene went ahead down the stairs to see if the way was clear. Kitty thrust a packet of food into Stone’s hand, as he whispered farewell.
‘Has he far to go tonight?’ she asked Gene when he returned.
‘No,’ was all Gene told her. ‘And it’s no good asking me what next. I haven’t been told.’ The less we know, the less we can tell. That was the unspoken message. But she could hear the relief in his voice. She was glad that they’d helped Stone. She asked Gene to find out whether he’d made it home, but time passed and there was no news. All she could do was to carry him in her thoughts. She remembered how Mère Marie-François always said that this was a kind of prayer.
There were plenty of other people to worry about. One rainy February lunchtime, when Kitty returned home from shopping, she found Sister Thérèse waiting for her in the foyer. The concierge must have felt honoured to have a nun visiting, for she had found her a chair, and by the clattering sounds from her room had gone to fetch her refreshment. All this was quite unlike her usual peremptory behaviour.
‘Oh, Kitty, Dieu merci,’ Sister Thérèse said, rising to her feet with an air of distress. ‘I came at once. It’s Mademoiselle Dunne. She’s been taken.’
‘Taken, where?’
It seemed that two French policemen had arrived at the convent at breakfast-time that morning, asking to see Miss Dunne. They were respectful and ill-at-ease, apologizing profusely to Mère Marie-François for disturbing the community. When Miss Dunne came to the door, the policemen told her to pack a few things and to accompany them to the local police station. She protested and assured them that her papers were in order, but they quietly insisted. Thérèse had gone up to help her pack.
‘We didn’t know what was happening,’ the nun said. ‘“Don’t worry,” Miss Dunne told me, “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding,” but she hasn’t come back, Kitty, and we do not know what to do. Père Paul went down to the police station to find out, but so many other people were waiting there with the same questions and the police would tell him nothing useful, so he came home. The Reverend Mother thought you should hear of it at once and that maybe Monsieur Knox could discover what is going on.’
‘I will telephone him right away,’ Kitty said, as the concierge came out of her room bearing a glass of water and a small round bun on a plate for Thérèse. ‘Perhaps someone at the Embassy can find out.’ The concierge put through the call to the hospital and to her surprise Kitty was able to speak to Gene almost immediately. He promised to do his best. By this time Fay was becoming fretful, hungry for her lunch, so Kitty invited Thérèse upstairs, but she declined.
‘My thanks to both of you,’ she said, returning her plate and glass to the concierge, ‘but I must hurry to Mademoiselle Dunne’s place of work. They’ll be wondering why she hasn’t arrived this morning.’
‘You don’t want me to go?’ Kitty asked, seeing how upset Thérèse was, but the girl insisted that she would be all right.
Gene arrived back that evening with bad news. His contact at the US Embassy hadn’t needed to make enquiries as the networks were abuzz with the news. It appeared that dozens of foreign nationals, predominantly British women, had been rounded up that day. No one knew as yet what was being done with them.
‘You don’t think they’ll come for me, Gene?’ Kitty thought to ask. Gene didn’t think they would because as his wife she was protected by his American citizenship.
Two weeks of worrying passed, during which Gene and Kitty heard conflicting rumours. Finally a postcard arrived from Adele. It gave little information, but Kitty rejoiced in the mere fact of it: Perfectly safe and in good health, it said. Don’t worry about me, but please write. Across the message in heavy black type was stamped the name: Frontstalag 142. As Kitty remarked, Adele’s bland message amounted to no information at all, but it was reassuring all the same. Frontstalag 142 was an internment camp not, to Kitty and Gene’s relief, in Germany but near a French town called Besançon, which Kitty later found on a map to be near the Jura Mountains, close to the border with Switzerland.
Gene passed her back the card, thoughtfully. ‘At least we know where she is and that she’s alive,’ he said.
‘But it’s not fair that she should be locked up, Gene. She’s a harmless middle-aged lady, who was merely being useful.’
‘To Germany she’s an enemy alien and there is no doubt where her loyalties lie, Kitty. Try not to worry too much, there’s no reason for them to ill-treat her.’ But he did not smile and there was something uncertain in his tone.
Kitty visited the convent with the news and the nuns were glad to hear that their dear Mademoiselle Dunne was safe. She helped Thérèse pack up a few more of Adele’s clothes to send to the camp. Under her bed Kitty found se
veral of the woman’s sketchbooks. She turned the pages to examine the array of arresting portraits of the refugees whom Miss Dunne had helped, faces etched with pain or sorrow or bewilderment, moving and powerful. One of the pads was new, and Kitty slipped it in amongst the clothes for posting, along with some pencils she discovered in a drawer. The rest of Adele’s things the nuns promised to look after for her. It was all anybody could do.
It was several weeks before a note of thanks for the clothes arrived, though the sketchbook and pencils were not mentioned. Some time after that, a cheerful postcard came to say that the internees had been moved to better premises at Vittel, some miles further north, and that conditions were very good there. But after that, for a long while, there was no news at all.
Nathalie Ramond had been speaking for some time but now her soft voice fell silent, and she leaned back in her chair, her eyes closed. From the way she massaged her gnarled hands, Fay sensed the woman was in some pain.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said then, her eyes fluttering open. ‘I have somehow lost my thread.’
‘You were telling me about Miss Dunne,’ Fay prompted. ‘I knew her when I was a child. I had no idea that she’d been through so much.’ Fay recalled her as a benevolent aunt-like figure in old-fashioned tweeds and had never given a thought to what lay behind the appearance. The story was astonishing.
‘You know Miss Dunne?’ Mme Ramond’s face lit up.
‘She lived near us in Norfolk. I’m afraid she died when I was nine or ten.’
Mme Ramond looked sad. ‘Ah, but I should have liked to have met her again. You know, the war would not have been won without the Miss Dunnes. I don’t mean the fighting with tanks and bombs, but the war of hearts and minds. She had a natural instinct for what was right and good, and always lived by it. For most of us life is more confusing and sometimes we mistake the way.’
The bitterness in Mme Ramond’s tone both puzzled and alarmed Fay. Not for the first time, she perceived that some unimaginable darkness swirled beneath the woman’s narrative. Was it the same darkness that lay behind her mother’s distress? The worst was yet to come in this story, she knew, but she had to find out what it was.