A Week in Paris

by Hore, Rachel

  She watched Adam, trying to absorb everything about him, so that she’d remember how he looked and carry the memory with her. Strands of his fine hair lifted in the breeze from the river, which blew away the ash from his cigarette. He gave her a lazy smile. ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

  ‘That . . . I’ll miss you,’ she said, and at once he moved closer and took her hand, lacing his fingers with hers.

  ‘I’ll miss you, too,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t bear the thought of you going. The week has passed so quickly. We’ve been together such a short time, yet I feel I’ve known you all my life.’

  ‘Oh, Adam, it’s the same for me.’

  He leaned in and kissed her cheek by her ear so that she shivered with desire.

  ‘Where shall we go, what shall we do? Now, I mean. I don’t suppose we have time to go back to mine, do we?’

  She smiled at his hopeful face and glanced at her watch. It was lunchtime nearly, but she wasn’t hungry, not really. She thought about it and finally the loving look she gave him and the way she squeezed his hand told him the answer.

  Chapter 37

  Monday

  Norfolk

  The sun was low in the afternoon sky as Fay walked across the hospital garden towards her mother. It was little more than a week since she’d last been here, but already the weather was warmer, the air alive with the humming of bees. The tulip-like blooms of the magnolia tree were fully open now, and under its soft white canopy Kitty rested on a pillow on the arm of her bench, asleep. Fay pulled up a chair next to her, and Kitty’s eyes fluttered open. She raised her head, sat up smiling and gave Fay her hand.

  ‘Darling, you’re back. I hoped you might come today. Dr Russell said you would be too tired after your journey, but I’m glad he was wrong.’

  ‘I didn’t have very much sleep last night,’ Fay admitted, leaning to kiss her mother’s cheek, ‘but I wanted to come straight away. How are you?’

  ‘Oh, much more my usual self, I think.’ Fay thought her mother did indeed look better. Her eyes were bright, her expression alert, and she’d lost that fuzzy pallor that a stay in hospital can give people. ‘It must be those delicious oranges you brought me.’ Her eyes were full of mischief now.

  ‘If so, they must be magic ones,’ Fay told her and her mother laughed, but it wasn’t yet her old, happy laugh and Fay detected wariness in her manner.

  ‘How was your trip? Did the concerts go well? Tell me about it. You must have had a wonderful time.’

  ‘Wonderful is the word,’ Fay told her. ‘The performances went really well. The sponsors were so generous. We had some marvellous dinners and Paris was . . . well, beautiful. And, oh, I brought you a present.’ She handed over the prettily wrapped parcel and her mother exclaimed over the blue scarf. They talked for a while about the music and how Colin had promised Fay a permanent place in the orchestra following Frank’s departure.

  Finally, it was as though a spell of quietness fell over them. Fay shuffled in her chair and said, ‘I don’t know where to begin. Mummy, you sent me a letter . . .’

  ‘Yes.’ Kitty paused, then said quickly, ‘Perhaps I over-reacted. I’m sorry, Fay, it’s just that when Dr Russell gave me your phone message, I was upset. Thérèse was the last person I thought you’d meet. I’d wanted you to find out . . . everything – but not from her. I was hurt by—’

  ‘You were hurt?’ All Fay’s pent-up frustration burst out. ‘What about me? Why did you never tell me anything yourself?’ Suddenly she was overwhelmed by it all over again. Last time she had sat here, a week ago, she had known almost nothing of her early childhood, had not even suspected that anything her mother had told her about herself had not been true. And now, after these dumbfounding revelations, Kitty was talking about her own shock, her own feelings. Fay turned her face away to hide her misery.

  ‘Don’t,’ Kitty said in a fluttery voice. ‘Oh, please don’t.’

  ‘Mummy . . .’ Fay began, still not looking at her. ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’

  ‘Tell me all about what she told you then,’ Kitty said urgently. ‘I need to know what I have to answer for.’

  Fay met her mother’s eyes now and read so much in them. Pain, yes, but also courage. Most of all there was a strong, steady love, the love that had been there for her all her childhood, when there had just been the two of them, Kitty and Fay, living together in Primrose Cottage, secure and happy. If this cosy picture hadn’t been the whole truth then it was still part of the truth. Kitty had given Fay the life she had now.

  ‘All right,’ Fay said, and she related the story from the beginning, describing how, following the clue in the rucksack, she’d visited the convent and met the current curé, André Blanc.

  When she broke it to her mother that Mère Marie-François was dead, Kitty cried out, ‘Nobody told me! Oh, that’s so sad.’ She had known, however, that Sister Thérèse had left the convent after the war and married Serge and that the couple had gone to America.

  ‘I wrote to the Reverend Mother once, soon after we moved to Primrose Cottage. I felt she should know that you’d been found and that we were all right. And she wrote back and told me. It was a surprise, I can tell you. Who would have thought it? A pair of dark horses. But don’t let me interrupt. Go on, do.’

  So Fay related everything that Mme Ramond had told her, from the time of Kitty’s arrival in Paris and meeting Gene to the terrible scene in the church that had culminated in Gene’s death, and her journey down to Vittel with Fay. Occasionally Kitty corrected some small error of timing or the nuance of a reported conversation, but largely she nodded in agreement as she concentrated on the story. Fay stumbled as she told the most awful part of all, and when she glanced up at her mother, saw that Kitty’s eyes were squeezed shut, her mouth trembling as though she was trying not to cry.

  ‘Then his hiding place was discovered when Hoff felt the shape of the ring beneath his boot, and turned back the carpet to reveal the trap door.’

  Kitty’s eyes flew open. ‘Tell me that again.’

  ‘Why? Is something wrong with what I said?’

  ‘No, nothing. Just tell me exactly what she said about how Obersturmführer Hoff discovered the crypt.’

  Fay repeated what she’d said, how the man had been pacing up and down on the carpet and must have felt beneath his foot the awkward shape of the ring lying in its recess in the flagstone.

  ‘Didn’t Thérèse say . . .?’ Then Kitty stopped. ‘No, it doesn’t matter.’ She looked thoughtful for a moment, then much brighter. She said, ‘Go on.’

  The next bit was worst of all. As Fay repeated in broken phrases what Mme Ramond had told her of how Gene was shot, Kitty stared out across the garden, an exquisite pain etched into her face.

  ‘She said you were taken away and sent to prison, Mummy. And then to an internment camp. She didn’t know all the details, only what she learned from the letters you sent Mère Marie-François.’

  ‘It’s true what she told you,’ Kitty sighed. ‘They took me away from you.’ She described how she’d been questioned by Herr Obersturmführer Hoff but that he’d had to let her go in the end. And how she’d been sent to Vittel and hadn’t been allowed either to leave or felt able to have Fay with her. Hearing her mother say this to her face helped dispel some of the anger and confusion Fay felt. It wasn’t that her mother hadn’t wanted her, it was that she hadn’t been allowed to come home to Fay. And, as Mme Ramond had said, Kitty had refused to put her daughter in danger by having her with her in the internment camp.

  When Fay described how she and Thérèse had travelled down to Vittel and how Thérèse had put her on the train for Lisbon, her mother’s anger was unmistakable.

  ‘I have never forgiven her for that,’ she snapped. ‘The woman was an imbecile.’

  ‘I don’t believe she was. She had to make a difficult decision in a fraction of a moment.’ Fay explained it to her mother as carefully as Nathalie had done to her. How the young nun’s English had n
ot been good enough to understand that the others on the train merely thought Kitty was on it too, rather than knowing for sure that she was. ‘She had no time to look for you properly, the train was about to leave. What would have happened if you had been on it and I was left behind?’

  ‘I simply dread to think,’ her mother said. ‘But I wouldn’t have got on the train without you. She should have known that, the simpleton. She should have made the guard hold the train whilst they found out if I was on board.’

  They were both quiet again, thinking of the might-have-beens.

  ‘I’ve remembered it now,’ Fay whispered. ‘The train journey, I mean.’

  ‘Have you really, darling?’ Her mother appeared troubled. ‘You were never able to tell me anything about what happened. I believed that you’d blocked it out along with everything else.’

  ‘It came to me in a sort of dream the other night, but when I woke I found I did remember bits. At least, I think I did. There was a woman called Cynthia who looked after me. At some point I stayed in a house overlooking the sea. I didn’t feel unhappy exactly in the dream, just very alone. There was a boy who taught me how to hold a violin and draw the bow across the strings. I remember how happy I was when I made it sound.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. How curious – that you became a violinist. You were nearly five in the summer of 1944, and most successful violinists begin that young.’

  ‘I’d forgotten all about it, but now my memory has started to come back. I remember the ship, how gigantic it was. What I don’t remember is what happened after we reached England. I can’t seem to link everything up. There was a man with very bushy eyebrows, I know that much because I was frightened of those eyebrows.’

  ‘I know who he was, Fay!’ her mother cried. ‘He was in the harbourmaster’s office at Southampton – the first person I found in England who remembered seeing you!’

  ‘How did you find me? What happened when you arrived back at Vittel and found that I’d gone?’

  ‘It was an awful shock. Frankly, I wanted to kill Thérèse. She scurried back to Paris. It was the doctor at the camp who helped me. He went to see the camp Kommandant and managed to put me on a train for Portugal the following day. It was the most appalling journey.’

  Kitty paused to collect her thoughts, then went on. ‘The train stopped altogether at Lyon and there wasn’t another one for days because of the fighting. After that there was a hold-up just before the Spanish border. I was the only English person on the train and a German soldier who was checking everyone’s papers insisted mine weren’t in order. I think he had some grudge towards the English. He kept talking about how an English soldier – well, “swine” was the word he used – had “murdered” his brother. I was still on your father’s passport and there was some confusion as to whether I was English or American, and the ghastly man decided to make something of it. So there I was, tearing my hair out in a police cell at this little border town whilst they decided what to do with me. Finally they received instructions from someone further up and let me get on a train. But it was too late to catch you, far too late. By the time I reached Lisbon the Marina was a distant dot on the horizon.’

  ‘How did you find out I was on it?’

  ‘When I arrived at Lisbon I went straight to the British Embassy and besieged them with questions. Eventually they found a Major York, who told me he’d put you on board the boat himself. It had been on its way back from Egypt, he said. After that I didn’t know what to do. He said the Wren he’d put in charge of you was expected to hand you to the local authorities at Southampton. It’s difficult to explain what a muddle everything was. There were so many displaced people trying to get home, he was pulled every which way. He promised to try to get someone to radio the ship about you, but who knows whether this happened and if anything resulted from it.

  ‘I was put on a Swedish cargo ship that was going home via Liverpool. I can remember a week later a fellow passenger pointing out the coast of Cornwall, and feeling I would die of frustration because we weren’t stopping. Liverpool was so sad – the area round the docks had been flattened by bombs. It was a relief though, to be back in England. I took a train to London, then another down to Southampton. Southampton was in a terrible state, too. England seemed a different country to the one I’d left seven years before. Everyone looked so very drab and tired, yet there was this relentless cheerfulness, too. We were winning the war, you see.

  ‘At what remained of Southampton docks I spoke to a great many people before I found your man with the eyebrows. He thought he remembered you, but only in the vaguest way. He had so many such cases to deal with, I think, and one more lost little girl didn’t really register.

  ‘He had a note that some woman had arrived at the office when he wasn’t there and had collected you, but when I made enquiries no one could find any trace of who she was and where you’d been taken. I stayed in a guesthouse in Southampton whilst I searched, and Uncle Pepper’s lawyer wired me some money, but it was a couple of months before the truth emerged.

  ‘I went back to the Harbourmaster’s Office twice in that period to ask further questions, and it was only after the second time that I noticed an untidy row of office buildings near the quay that I hadn’t paid much attention to before. One of them had a battered sign up over the door on which was printed a name I recognized. The company was called something like Silver Stone Cruises, but it’s the proprietor’s name I’m talking about – John Stone.’

  ‘I know that name.’

  ‘He was our Flight Lieutenant Stone, who hid in our apartment in Paris. I remembered then that we’d talked about both coming from Hampshire and he’d told me about his family business. Well, I didn’t know what to expect, but when I went across to see, I found the office open, and I could hardly believe it when there was our John Stone behind the desk working away, surrounded by stacks of paper. He was just the same as I remembered, poor man. His face was awfully scarred and, well, there was something not quite right about his posture. He didn’t recognize me at first and was guarded, but when I told him who I was he was affability itself. We talked a for long time, and I learned that he hadn’t passed his medical exam to return to flying, which had set him back badly. He was most upset to hear about your father, of course, but when I told him I was desperately looking for you, he promised to help. It was marvellous finding somebody who cared and who knew what to do. Such a brick. It turned out he was a local councillor. Eventually he discovered that your case had been muddled with another child’s and that instead of waiting for me in Southampton you’d been sent to an orphanage. The only thing is, they didn’t know which one. Several weeks more went by before there was news.’

  ‘An orphanage,’ Fay said slowly. She had a picture in her mind of a vast Victorian building full of skinny ragged children like something out of a history book. But perhaps it hadn’t been like that.

  ‘The woman from the charity who’d fetched you had thought you were an orphan. There was some plan that you might be adopted. Fay, it was so awful. I might have lost you to another family. I tore off to find you immediately. Blackdyke House, the place was called. It was in Derbyshire. Derbyshire. Miles away. Apparently it had been based in Kent but they’d had to move somewhere safer because of the bombs, you see. The place was probably perfectly well run, but I can remember the shock of seeing it: it looked, well, so bleak, like its name. Matron told me it had been requisitioned from a local industrialist. Not surprising. From the outside the house looked as dreary as a factory.’

  ‘An orphanage,’ Fay whispered again. A fog was clearing in her mind. There had been a vast room filled with the voices of children. She had used to dream about it. Could that have been Blackdyke House?

  ‘The worst thing of all was that you didn’t know me at first. And for a long time, weeks and weeks, you would not speak. When finally you did, you wouldn’t talk about anything that had happened – and then I realized that you must have put it behind you, deliberately, that
you’d locked away all your memories.’

  ‘But what happened next? What about the things you’ve told me about, living in London and the deer?’

  ‘That’s all true, Fay. I rented a house in Richmond at the beginning of 1945 and brought Uncle Pepper’s furniture out of storage to furnish it. I didn’t want to go back to Hampshire, you see, it would have been too sad, and I thought, well, in London, I would be able to find some sort of job with my music.’

  ‘And it was hit by a bomb?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, those horrible Doodlebugs. It must have been one of the last that fell. Fortunately, it happened while we were out one day. We came back to find our house and the one next door completely destroyed. I was in despair after that, as we’d lost practically everything. Then I remembered dear Adele Dunne. She’d always said that I was welcome to go to stay with her in Norfolk, so I thought that perhaps we would for a while, just until we sorted ourselves out. Well, the trouble is, I couldn’t remember where it was she said she lived. I only found it by poring over an old map in the local library until I found a name I recognized. Little Barton, near Norwich. I did recall that the house was Primrose Cottage and so I wrote to her there. And that’s where we ended up. She wanted to move to her parents’ holiday home near the sea, and suggested letting us have Primrose Cottage at a ridiculously low rent.’

  So then had begun the life Fay knew. The life her mother wanted for her: a perfect, tranquil childhood with a perfect tranquil mother. If it hadn’t always been quite perfect, nor her mother quite tranquil, it had been most of the time.

  ‘I tried to make up for everything, Fay, all the bad things that had happened to us. When I realized that you didn’t remember anything from before, I was actually relieved. It gave us the opportunity to start again. I could pretend that you hadn’t ever felt abandoned and afraid. I still had that photograph of your father – I had carried it in my handbag always – but that was all there was left of our previous life.’