A Week in Paris

by Hore, Rachel

  In the end she found the doctor who had once smuggled out the letter for her and begged him to help her. He was a slow, careful man who considered her request gravely, then nodded. ‘I will do my best,’ he told her, and she gave him the address of Sainte Cécile’s. Father Paul must have a telephone number, though she didn’t know what it was.

  It was with mixed feelings that she watched the first group of excited internees leave to board the train going west to the coast. It was a proper train with proper carriages, it was said, not those ominous box-cars. Miss Dunne was among them, a spare upright figure in her old-fashioned clothes, her face burnt brown by the baking summer sun, but still looking unmistakably English with her bright, dignified expression and an inelegant pair of sensible shoes. ‘Remember, Kitty,’ she told her, ‘if we don’t see each other again en route, it’s Little Barton where I live. Primrose Cottage. Ask anyone there, they’ll all know it.’

  ‘I’ll find you, Adele. Thank you. And good luck.’

  Sarah, her roommate, had been allowed to leave a couple of months before, returning home to Paris, so Kitty had the room all to herself now. She lay awake that night, worrying about Fay and hoping against hope that her daughter would arrive in time for them to travel home with the other internees.

  The day of departure grew closer, but there was no sign of Fay. ‘I sent your letter,’ the doctor assured her. ‘It seems the telephone system has been down in that part of Paris, so it’s difficult to find out what is happening, but I expect they’ll come. The only other thing you can do is to fetch her yourself.’

  ‘Would they let me do that?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but if you like I’ll help. Come and see me again this afternoon.’

  When she sought him out he was in his office, writing up reports. He put down his pen and his face lit up with a broad smile. ‘There’s a train to Paris in the morning. It’s been arranged. Two of the guards are to go with you.’

  ‘Two? What do they expect me to do? But thank you, Doctor.’ She was indeed relieved.

  ‘And someone at the camp office is to telephone your Father Paul to know to expect you.’

  Again, she thanked him. Once, when she’d consulted him about persistent headaches, she’d told him about Gene, and he’d always remembered that her husband had been a doctor, too, and had been especially kind.

  The return to Paris seemed to pass more swiftly than the awful journey down to Vittel. Kitty shared her compartment with the guards, who ignored her, instead talking and laughing with each other as they played cards for small change. When night fell she slept, wrapped in a coat, trying to block out their snores. When she awoke it was morning and they were arriving in Paris. Today I’ll see my daughter! She was so nervous with excitement she could not eat.

  ‘Gone? Where? When?’ Cold shock coursed through Kitty’s limbs.

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ said Mère Marie-François. ‘When we received the letter from the doctor at Vittel we discussed it at length, and decided that Thérèse should take Fay to you. They left two days ago and should be there by now. Your trains must have passed each other.’ The Reverend Mother clutched the rosary she wore in an unusual sign of distress. The presence of the guards seemed to fill the entrance hall. One asked something in German. The Reverend Mother answered in the same language. The guard looked puzzled, then shrugged and explained the situation to his comrade.

  ‘I’ve told them Fay isn’t here,’ the nun said. ‘They’ll take you back to Vittel. Surely you’ll meet them there.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Kitty said.

  There was a train from Paris that passed through Vittel later that morning. They boarded it, but it was an hour late in leaving and Kitty could hardly keep still for anxiety. When it finally lurched into movement, her relief was palpable. In late afternoon, however, it came to a halt so suddenly that they were almost thrown across the carriage. Kitty’s German guards were on their feet and leaning out of the window, trying to discover what was happening. There were rumours of difficulties further down the line.

  ‘Bomb,’ one of the guards explained to her in English and mimed an explosion. It appeared that an air raid had damaged the track during the night. The train sat there for the rest of the day, waiting for it to be repaired.

  Chapter 32

  Thérèse had never travelled so far before, and certainly not by herself. Not that she was quite alone, she had Fay with her, but that made her doubly nervous because she had such an important task to perform. She was to take Fay on the long train journey from Paris to the spa town of Vittel. She hadn’t even seen Vittel on a map, though she knew it was somewhere beyond the industrial city of Nancy, on the edge of Occupied France and near the borders of Germany and Switzerland. She didn’t want to leave Paris and she dreaded the moment when she would have to say goodbye to Fay, but the Reverend Mother had said she should be the one to do it and so she had to. She’d packed Fay’s little rucksack with her few items of clothing and a book of children’s Bible stories to read on the way and prepared a basket of food. She hoped it would be enough to last them for the journey, though it was a far cry from the generous picnics that she’d been given on outings as a child.

  Fay was in a strange mood, by turns excited and tearful. ‘Aren’t you looking forward to seeing your mother?’ Thérèse asked her as she helped the child on with her cardigan and fitted the rucksack over her shoulders.

  Fay thought a moment and nodded uncertainly, then leaned against Thérèse. The young woman felt her warm arms through the thick cloth of her habit as Fay hugged her tightly and she hugged her back, surprised and not a little moved by the unusually strong rush of affection. Fay had never been a demonstrative child, and since losing both her parents she didn’t always like to be touched. If she wanted reassurance she would clutch her wooden zebra and stroke its smooth striped sides. Zipper was safe in the rucksack, Thérèse had made sure of that.

  Before they left the convent, she sent Fay to the refectory to say goodbye to the other nuns eating breakfast there whilst she went to fill a bottle of water for the journey. She knew it was a wrench for all of them to say goodbye to the little girl and couldn’t have borne to see their tears.

  Father Paul travelled with them on the Métro to the Gare de l’Est, to make sure they boarded the right train, and it was only after they’d waved him goodbye and settled in their compartment that Thérèse noticed Fay’s rucksack was undone. Her clothes were all still inside, but a frantic search revealed that the toy zebra was missing.

  Had Fay unbuckled the bag herself – and if so, when? Was it she who had taken Zipper out and left him somewhere? When had she last had him? Fay was clear that she’d undone the bag to check that he was in there when Thérèse had sent her for a last-minute visit to the lavatory. Then there had been a hurry to leave and she hadn’t rebuckled the bag properly. ‘We’ll find him and send him to you,’ Thérèse said. With luck the toy had been left at the convent rather than falling out on the street.

  For a long while after this disaster, Fay sat opposite Thérèse cast in her own private shadow, her slight figure very upright, a tragic expression on her face as she stared out of the window at a passing view she did not see. She would not speak, and from time to time Thérèse wondered if her eyes were gleaming with tears. If so, the tears did not fall. She ate the bread that Thérèse passed her and sipped the water, and when night fell she consented to lie with her head in Thérèse’s warm lap where she quickly fell asleep.

  She was fretful in the night, and when she woke her face was flushed and her forehead hot to the touch. Her eyes glittered with fever. Thérèse got her to drink a little of the water and after a while she revived.

  When they arrived at Vittel, their train slid past another waiting at the other side of the platform. It was packed full of women, some of the younger ones leaning out of the windows, chattering and calling out to one another. Half a dozen German soldiers were loading a last few items of luggage.

  Anxi
ous to find out what was happening, Thérèse helped Fay with her bag and lifted her down from the train. How light she was, her shoulderblades protruding like wing buds under her thin cardigan. She gripped the child’s hand and hurried her across to the other train. A station guard moved past them, closing the doors.

  ‘Where is this train going, m’sieur? Who are these people?’ Thérèse asked him.

  ‘Les Anglaises et les Americaines,’ he replied, as though it should be obvious to her. ‘Elles rentrent chez elles. They are going home.’

  ‘Home? You mean to England?’

  ‘Yes, to England, America, wherever, I don’t know.’

  ‘Do they go through Paris?’

  ‘Paris? No, they can’t get through that way. South-west, they’ll go. Portugal, I’d say. Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .’ And off he went, returning a dropped hat to a laughing fair-haired girl in a threadbare jacket who was leaning out of a window.

  ‘Madame Kitty Knox, est-elle ici?’ Thérèse asked the fair-haired girl, starting to panic. ‘This is her daughter.’

  ‘Mrs Knox? I know who you mean. Wait a minute.’ The head disappeared from the window and Thérèse heard Kitty’s name repeated in the compartment.

  Down the train the final suitcase had been loaded and the guard was closing the last door.

  The young woman’s head reappeared. ‘She’s not in this carriage,’ she told Thérèse, ‘but she should be somewhere further down. Someone here heard her name read out.’

  Thérèse’s grip on Fay’s hand tightened as they hurried along the train, asking for Kitty. The guard passed them, checking the doors, a flag in his hand.

  ‘Kitty Knox, she is here?’ Thérèse asked a swarthy woman at a window in the next carriage. Again the woman withdrew and another consultation took place before she reappeared. ‘Someone says they might have seen her down at the front,’ she said.

  ‘Excusez-moi?’ The woman’s accent was difficult for Thérèse to follow.

  ‘That way,’ the woman repeated, pointing.

  A whistle blew. ‘Attendez!’ Thérèse cried, hitching up her habit as she pulled Fay along to the next carriage. ‘Kitty,’ she cried, searching the rows of faces behind the glass. The women stared back, puzzled.

  ‘Hey,’ cried the swarthy woman from the previous carriage. Thérèse swung round wildly. ‘The front. Further that way,’ the woman said, pointing again up the train.

  The train gave a sudden judder and the engine let out a great hiss of steam. ‘Kitty!’ Thérèse shouted in great alarm. ‘Attendez, attendez,’ but the guard was too far away to hear.

  ‘Please?’ She lifted Fay up to the woman at the train window.

  ‘Come on, ups-a-daisy,’ the woman sang out and the little girl flew through the air in her arms. For a crazy moment Thérèse wondered if she should get on too, but it was too late, the train was beginning to set off. She ran to a carriage door and managed to open it, but it moved beyond her reach. Further down the platform, a soldier leaped forward to slam it. The train gathered speed, then cleared the end of the platform and was away.

  Thérèse was left standing there alone, gazing after it. Had she done the right thing? The soldiers glanced at her without interest as they passed, ambling off in a relaxed group to the exit, talking and laughing, their duty done for the day.

  She went and sank down on a rickety bench, her heart full of grief and confusion. She’d not said goodbye to Fay, not properly, and now the girl was gone, caught up, swept away. The women would take her to Kitty, she assured herself. Kitty must be on the train. Hadn’t the swarthy woman said so? She, Thérèse, had done the right thing. So why was she visited by this sense of unease like smoke drifting from a smouldering fire? She pondered, and eventually the fire leaped into life as the truth came to her. Kitty would never have got on the train without her daughter, if she could help it. The knowledge surged through her veins like molten lead, heavy, hot, deadening. She sat motionless for a long time, unsure what to do. Then, slowly, she forced herself to stand. Step by reluctant step she made her way out of the station and looked for the entrance to the camp.

  Chapter 33

  1961, Saturday

  ‘And that,’ Nathalie Ramond said, ‘was the last time that I saw you.’

  ‘The last . . .?’ Fay echoed, frowning. She was trying to catch the tail of a memory. A woman’s voice saying ‘Ups-a-daisy,’ then surprise and fear as a strong pair of arms pulled her flying through the air, the ground rushing away beneath her feet. She’d landed in a swaying carriage compartment where there was a crowd of strange faces. Fay closed her eyes, remembering an exotic scent and the sound of female laughter.

  ‘You were on a train going west,’ Mme Ramond’s voice brought her back. ‘All the way back to England, safe with your mother. Or so I believed. Only I was wrong. Your mother wasn’t on the train at all. When I asked at the camp, they searched for her and found she wasn’t there and for a while I was reassured. Then someone in the camp office remembered that she’d gone to Paris to collect you. No one had seen her return. Hearing this, well, you can imagine, I was horrified. I’d had only a split second to think and I thought I’d done the right thing – but I hadn’t, after all. If there had been more time I could have searched the train, but I still should have known that your mother would not have left for England without you. Not unless they’d forced her to.’

  ‘And what if they had – forced her, I mean? You couldn’t know.’

  ‘That is true, yes, but at the time I didn’t think about that. I simply believed the woman who said your mother was on the train. Anyway, the Kommandant’s secretary managed to speak to somebody at the convent, but for a time nobody knew where your mother was.

  ‘I stayed overnight in the town. It wasn’t until the following day that your mother returned. Her train had been held up by bombing damage to the tracks. When I told her what had happened to you, well, of course, you can imagine her distress. She begged and pleaded with the Kommandant to put her on another train so she could follow you, but it seemed this wasn’t possible at short notice. What we didn’t know at the time was that because of the fighting and attacks on railways by the Resistance in Southern and Central France, it was dangerous to travel. If your mother had known that, she’d have been even more worried about you than she was. The Kommandant kept saying there would be a train soon, and trying to reassure her that the other women would look after you, Fay. And after that I didn’t know any more. Your mother was furious with me. She questioned me and questioned me about my decision to put you on that train, and told me I was stupid. Stupid or bad, very hurtful things, but I accepted them. They were my due. I had failed her and, more important, I’d failed you. It didn’t count for her that I’d looked after you for so long. Still, I understood. If you’d been my child and someone else with responsibility for you had failed in that duty, I’d have been angry, too. I offered to stay with her, to travel to find you, but she wouldn’t have it. And after a day or two I was summoned back to the convent. I went to her room to say goodbye, but she would not even open the door. And so, utterly miserable and defeated, I returned to Paris.’

  ‘What did my mother do then?’

  ‘I don’t know. We didn’t hear anything. For us in Paris the climax to the war was not long in coming, and for a while everything was chaos. In the middle of August 1944,’ Mme Ramond went on, ‘as the Allied armies surrounded Paris, a great spirit of resistance began to burn in the city and the Germans found it impossible to keep order. On the twenty-fifth, Général de Gaulle marched in, triumphant. You can imagine the strength of our rejoicing. But there was confusion, too, and recriminations; awful things went on.’

  The woman sighed, as though remembering these things, but then she smiled.

  ‘For me, a whole new life began. One day in early November, I was relieved and delighted to receive a letter from Serge. He’d been able to leave his hiding place, but life was still very hard for him. He had travelled at once to Orléans to l
ook for his family, but found his childhood home boarded up and empty. When he’d questioned the neighbours he learned that his parents and siblings had simply been picked up by the police one summer’s morning in 1942 and taken away. No one had seen them since. He was trying desperately to make enquiries, but the authorities were deluged with such requests and he wasn’t able to find anything out. He’d recently taken a room near the Conservatoire and was back at his old job, playing the piano at the hotel. He asked if he might come to visit me at the convent.’

  ‘And of course you said yes.’

  ‘I did – after asking the Reverend Mother’s permission. The following spring I secured a release from my vows. The other nuns were surprisingly kind and I was very touched by this. And shortly after, Serge and I were married.’

  Mme Ramond’s eyes were soft with love. ‘We have had some wonderful times together, you know, though there has been tragedy too. Serge was devastated to discover that none of his family had survived the war, and he will never recover from that. It might have helped if we’d been able to have children of our own, but we were not blessed in that way. And then this arthritis has meant I haven’t been able to support him in his work as much as I’d like. Still, Serge has had great success with his music, and we have each other. Yes, we have been happy.’

  Fay sensed this to be true. Nathalie Ramond had always been loyal, but she’d also followed her heart. This thought reminded her of the letter her mother had sent warning her against believing the woman. She supposed that Kitty was referring to the young Thérèse’s mistake in putting Fay on the train alone. But Mme Ramond had admitted her mistake and had always rued it. Was her account true? Fay could hardly ask her. It would sound offensive. Instead, when she rose to go, she kissed Nathalie Ramond on both cheeks.