Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘You are very kind, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he said. ‘I will send my paintings to the house in Pays de Sault in advance. I don’t want the Krauts getting their hands on them.’

  I smiled, imagining the walls of our twin farmhouses decorated with paintings by Picasso and Dali. Poor Minot, I thought, I hope he doesn’t expect to be staying in a château with marble bathrooms. Maurice Chevalier and Joséphine Baker had country retreats, as did many wealthy French people. I had always thought it was something I would buy with André when we married. Such houses had been done up over the years and were no longer the ramshackle structures they had been when I was growing up. But Pays de Sault was still wild country and my family liked simplicity. Our houses were more rustic than chic.

  ‘Make sure the paintings are packed in crates,’ I told him. ‘You don’t want them to warp in the heat.’

  Minot’s cooperation gave me some peace of mind. I questioned myself every day as to whether my impulse was an over-reaction. How embarrassing if, after all this preparation, nothing happened. But how much worse if it did and we were unprepared. There was no hint of concern in the faces of the people who came to my music hall and nightclub appearances. Paris was shining more brightly than ever, with spectacular operas, plays, fashion shows and parties. The Polish ambassador hosted an elegant ball on the same night Odette went into labour and gave birth to a girl. The German ambassador was invited to the ball and we danced waltzes and mazurkas and finished the evening watching fireworks spinning into the sky. Wasn’t that a sign that all was well?

  As it turned out, the only mistake I had made was to panic one year too early. Two months after the ball, Germany invaded Poland. When the Franco–British ultimatum to Hitler expired, the French army was mobilised. People walked around the streets in a state of disbelief. Could this be real? Were we really at war against the Third Reich?

  Minot and his mother moved in with me in case we found ourselves having to leave Paris in the middle of the night. Elsa Maxwell sent invitations to a party that, instead of an RSVP date, was inscribed with ICNW: In Case No War. It felt impossible to plan anything.

  ‘How can I go on vacation?’ my secretary moaned. ‘My husband might be called up to join his regiment.’

  But month after month dragged by before anything happened. The newspapers called this time the drôle de guerre, the phony war.

  One Thursday afternoon, after the weekly air-raid drill, I met Camille at a café near the Ritz. Minot had organised for me to do a series of tours along the Maginot line to entertain the soldiers who were restless with boredom in their bunkers. I wanted to catch up with Camille in case she had left the city when I returned. The mannequins in the boutique windows in the Place Vendôme wore gas masks with ribbons tied at the neck. It was a joke, but the thought that we were preparing to face an enemy capable of dropping mustard gas on civilians did nothing to comfort me.

  In the café, the chocolates and cakes had been moulded into the shape of bombs. ‘It is good to see that not everyone has lost their sense of humour,’ Camille said, opening her purse to pay the waiter as soon as he brought our drinks. That was the system in Paris now: the servers no longer waited for the saucers to accumulate; you had to pay for each drink as it was delivered in case the sirens went off and everyone rushed to the shelter.

  ‘The city seems strange without children,’ I said. ‘The Jardin du Luxembourg is a ghost town without them. They are evacuating more today.’

  ‘They should have sent the brats away a long time ago,’ said Camille. ‘I am enjoying the peace.’

  It was an odd thing for a mother to say.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked her. ‘What is your plan?’

  ‘Well, the house in the Dordogne is there if I need it. But otherwise I plan to keep my room at the Ritz.’

  ‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘Imagine what the German soldiers could do to you if they storm the city?’

  Camille raised her eyebrows. ‘I’ve done nothing to them so why should they do anything to me? Besides, according to Comtesse de Portes, the French will be organising a welcoming committee.’

  My skin turned cold. Comtesse Hélène de Portes was the mistress of Paul Reynauld, who had just replaced Daladier as the premier of France. She was known for her extreme right-wing views. Did Reynauld now share them?

  ‘Camille,’ I whispered, ‘tell me that you are joking.’

  ‘French or German, what does it matter?’ muttered Camille, lighting a cigarette. ‘As long as Paris remains Paris.’

  I was taken aback by her nonchalant tone. Who had Camille been talking to in order to come up with that view? I inspected her more closely. Her face was pale and there were the beginnings of bags under her eyes. I had heard that she was having money troubles and there were rumours of lawsuits from debtors. Perhaps those things were weighing more heavily on her mind than the looming war.

  ‘Haven’t you heard what the Nazis are doing to the Jews?’ I asked.

  Camille’s head snapped up and she looked me in the eye. ‘You’re not Jewish. When are you going to watch out for yourself?’

  I flinched at the blasé way she said it. Some of the best people we had worked with over the years had been Jewish. Did she have no feelings for them? I remembered how, when I first met her and saw how she treated men, I had thought she was motivated purely by self-interest. Then I had found out about her daughter. But her comment about the Jews was ignorant and cruel. That wasn’t the Camille I had come to know while working with her on ‘Les Femmes’. Or was it?

  I found myself unable to tell. When we parted from our rendezvous, I was left with the uneasy impression that I didn’t know the real Camille Casal at all.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I returned to my apartment to find a mound of sand heaped on the sidewalk in front of the building. A cat was digging into it, delighted to have found soft matter in which to do her business.

  ‘What is the sand for?’ I asked Madame Goux, the concierge.

  She threw up her hands. ‘An order from the city administrators. We are supposed to spread it out in the attic.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To prevent fires from travelling from the roof to the lower floors. But I can’t be expected to walk up and down seven flights of stairs with buckets of sand.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I will help. And I am sure the others will too.’

  I would have offered Paulette’s assistance but she had already returned to her village in the west of France.

  Madame Goux scoffed at me. ‘I mean, I am not doing it at all. It’s not in my job description.’

  ‘I’m sure the Germans will be very respectful of your job description when they drop a bomb on the building,’ I said, before turning and walking up the stairs.

  To my disappointment, the other people in the building weren’t any more willing to help than the concierge. ‘What a useless thing to do,’ said the man on the floor above me. ‘The Boche aren’t going to make it any further than the border before we push them back. The Ardennes forest is impenetrable.’

  Only the neighbour who lived below me, a violinist by the name of Madame Ibert, agreed to help. We covered our hair with scarves and for the next two hours lugged pails of sand to the roof. Each time we passed Madame Goux she shook her head and let out a pfsst! She wasn’t the only one who refused to do as the administrators had asked. The piles of sand outside the other buildings on our street lay untouched, and some of the children who hadn’t been evacuated were busy tunnelling toy trucks through them.

  ‘I feel sorry for the blisters you will get on your hands,’ I told Madame Ibert, watching her spread out the sand with a broom. She was about ten years older than me, skinny as a bird, with brown wavy hair and cobalt blue eyes.

  She straightened up and gave me a rueful smile. ‘It is a small price to pay for France.’

  ‘There are fourteen people in this building and hundreds of people in our street,’ I said. ‘And we are the only two prepared t
o fight.’

  When I closed my eyes that night, I worried that the ratio might be true of the whole of Paris. Even with the war on our doorstep, we seemed to lack the energy to take it seriously. I thought of André. His father had retired and André was now head of the family business. I wondered if he was going to fight or do something to contribute to the war. He spoke German as well as a native and knew how to drive a car and fly a plane.

  It had been months since I had last seen him and I was surprised to find that I no longer felt the crushing hurt I once had over him. I could even see myself talking to him without going to pieces. I considered the drastic change in my feelings and wondered what had precipitated it. Perhaps now that war was coming, I knew we were facing something much bigger than the end of our love affair.

  The following morning, I had no qualms about calling André at his office to find out what he was intending to do. But his secretary informed me that the Blanchard family, along with the heads of their companies and their families, had moved to Switzerland a month ago. I was disappointed with André’s choice, but given that some of the Blanchard businesses were vital to the French economy, it had probably been the right thing to do.

  A few weeks later, Minot and I put his mother and Kira on a train to the south. We were sending them ahead of us in case we needed more space in the car. Bernard was going to pick them up in Carpentras and take them to the farm. As it turned out, we had acted just in time.

  In early May 1940, the German army attacked Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Despite the efforts to bomb bridges ahead of the enemy, one by one those nations fell. If anyone in Paris had been living in denial about the reality of war, they now saw the evidence of it day after day on the streets. Thousands of refugees poured into the city from the north. I stood on the Boulevard Saint Michel and watched them pass by: a stream of cars, horse-drawn carts and bicycles whose occupants looked shell-shocked, weary, tearful. There was one car driven by a heavily pregnant woman with an old woman in the passenger seat and four young children and a cat in the back.

  I rushed back home and gathered the tins and packaged food I had been storing. On my way down the stairs I met Madame Ibert coming out of her apartment. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Taking food to the refugees,’ I told her.

  ‘Wait!’ she said, putting her key back into her door. ‘I will come with you.’

  We drove to the Jardin du Luxembourg, where many of the refugees had stopped to rest or to graze their horses, and handed out the food items to women with children. Some of them recognised me and asked me to autograph their aprons and handkerchiefs. It was a moment of normality in the midst of chaos. Madame Ibert and I returned home after dark. I was so exhausted that I didn’t take my clothes off before I fell into bed.

  The following morning I tried to telephone Odette but couldn’t get through. I clutched the picture she had sent me of pretty Petite Simone and tried to think what I should do. Finally, I ran to Monsieur Etienne’s office. When I found it closed I continued on to his apartment. He was at home, packing his bags.

  ‘We are going to stay with Joseph’s family in Bordeaux,’ he said.

  I was relieved they had decided to get out of the city, but Bordeaux was still France. I would have been happier if they were getting out of Europe entirely. I helped Monsieur Etienne pack his papers and some photographs into boxes, my heart cramping in my chest as I remembered the first day I had come to Paris. It was almost laughable to think that I had been so intimidated by the man I now thought of as a dear friend. I wondered what was going to become of us. Would we ever see each other again?

  ‘Good luck, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ Monsieur Etienne said, kissing my cheeks. He always seemed so strong, so self-assured, but today I detected a tremble in his hand, a fragility that showed in his eyes.

  ‘Won’t you ever call me Simone?’ I asked him, my voice choking up.

  ‘No,’ he said, smiling through his own tears. ‘Besides, now I would only get you confused with my grand-niece.’

  I returned home to find Minot in a panic. ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he cried, ‘we must leave now.’ He explained that a German parachutist had been seen landing on the Champs élysées.

  I rang a friend at Le Figaro to see if he could confirm the story. ‘It was a falling observation balloon,’ he told me. ‘But we are getting reports of Germans dropping from the skies dressed as priests, nuns and chorus girls. Last night somebody called to say that a whole ballet troupe had descended.’

  ‘So Paris is calm in the face of a crisis?’ I said. Despite the situation, we somehow managed to laugh.

  ‘Are you joking, Mademoiselle Fleurier?’ he responded. ‘The authorities cannot get the people of Paris to cooperate. They are acting as if the war is some sort of inconvenience, like a blackout or a strike. The city sounds air sirens to warn them and instead of running to their cellars they rush to their windows to see what is going on.’

  ‘I am thinking of leaving Paris. Am I being neurotic?’ I asked him.

  There was a pause. A man shouted something in the background and I heard a buzz burst out in the newsroom. The reporter came back on the line. ‘Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he said, his voice shrill. ‘We’ve just got news through. The Germans have broken through the Ardennes frontier.’

  The news would take several more days to be digested by the population, but it was a disaster as far as the defence of France was concerned. The Ardennes frontier was not impenetrable after all: Hitler’s panzer tank divisions had ploughed through it with ease. Unless our forces could cut them off, there was little now standing between them and a major invasion of France.

  I knocked on Madame Ibert’s door. ‘My friend and I are leaving Paris tomorrow. Do you want to come with us?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, clutching my hands. ‘I have no family to go to.’

  The car I had bought for the trip was a Peugeot. I had deliberately selected a middle of the range model in case we needed parts on the road. It was also the kind of family car that wouldn’t attract attention. My planning had been sound up to then, but when Minot and I went to collect the car from the parking garage we discovered that the petrol in the tank had been siphoned off and the reserve containers I had stored in the boot had been stolen.

  ‘Merde!’ I cursed. ‘I should have kept the containers in the apartment. But I was so terrified of a fire!’

  ‘What will we do now?’ asked Minot. ‘Petrol is harder to come by than truffles.’

  Minot, Madame Ibert and I spent the next week and a half on clandestine trips to buy fuel wherever we could. Petrol had been rationed during the ‘phony war’ and now it was very difficult to get hold of, no matter how much you were willing to pay. Everyone was holding on to a supply in case they needed it to escape. We each never returned with more than a couple of severely overpriced champagne bottles of the stuff.

  ‘This is going to take too long,’ muttered Minot, watching me funnel that day’s collection into a storage tank in the bathroom.

  The atmosphere in Paris was a combination of calm and terror. While some were seeing Germans dropping from the skies or lurking in the sewers, there were just as many people in restaurants enjoying oysters and vintage wines. Although I had no singing commitments, Maurice Chevalier and Joséphine Baker were still performing at the Casino de Paris and the cinemas were showing the latest hit films: Ninotchka with Greta Garbo, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  A few days after we discovered our petrol had been stolen, the summer sky was thick with smoke.

  ‘What could it be?’ I asked Minot. ‘A smoke screen to protect us from air raids?’

  Madame Ibert, returning from the Conservatoire de Paris where she gave lessons, set the record straight. ‘They are burning the oil reserves so they don’t fall into the hands of the enemy.’

  There were smaller fires too; I saw them when I walked past the Foreign Ministry on my way to Gare de Lyon on one of my petrol-seeking missions. The ministers
and their aides were burning sensitive documents. As I was passing the Hôtel de Ville, a half-ashed document fluttered on a drift of air and landed at my feet. In the corner were the words ‘Top Secret’.

  While most of the occupants of the apartments in my arrondissement had fled, the working-class suburbs were full of people. When I went to buy petrol from a baker in Belleville, I was shocked to see so many children playing on the streets. Housewives were hanging out washing and commenting on how this summer seemed the hottest ever. Hadn’t they noticed that the public buses were disappearing from the streets, used to move government offices out of Paris? Tout-Paris and the city’s leaders were deserting their posts, leaving the ordinary people to fight the war they should have prevented.

  ‘They are calling up the German nationals today,’ reported Madame Ibert when I returned to the apartment to add my meagre acquisition to the tank. ‘They are putting them in holding camps.’

  ‘How stupid!’ I said, sinking into the nearest chair. ‘Many of those people are Jews who escaped here from Germany or people who opposed the Nazis. If they are trapped in holding camps and we are invaded, it will be like offering them up for sacrifice.’

  ‘Like sheep in a pen,’ said Madame Ibert, shaking her head.

  ‘Do you really think Jews will be persecuted here the way they have been in Germany?’ asked Minot, placing a glass of water on the table next to me. I noticed that he was wearing Paulette’s apron but I was too tired to tease him about it.

  ‘It worries me that so many French Jews think that what happened in Germany couldn’t happen here,’ Madame Ibert said. ‘They think that they can simply change their names and paperwork and no one will tell the authorities.’

  Renoir’s story about the German youths making an old Jewish woman lick the pavement had stayed with me all these years. I sensed Madame Ibert was right. Hadn’t those boys and the old lady once been neighbours too?

  The following day, Minot and I assessed our supplies. We had enough petrol to make the trip to Pays de Sault only if we had a free run to the south, which wasn’t likely considering the congested traffic of refugees on the road. We needed at least another two reserve cans.