Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Crikey,’ laughed the operator afterwards, when we were tugging on our clothes, ‘I’m standing here naked with Simone Fleurier. None of my mates will believe it.’

  I arrived back in Pays de Sault when the wild lavender was blooming along the road and through the crevices in the rock faces. It filled the air with its sweet, uplifting scent. The road was dusty and Kira’s cage was heavy under my arm. I rested every so often, sitting down on my small suitcase and swiping at my neck with a handkerchief. Two kilometres from the farm I realised that I wasn’t going to make it if I had to carry Kira the rest of the way.

  ‘You are going to have to walk, my friend,’ I said, slipping her out of the cage and leaving it behind a rock.’

  I expected her to sit on her rump and refuse to move. But she only gave a ‘murr’ and scampered along beside me.

  ‘If I had known you could be so cooperative,’ I said, ‘I would have discarded the cage long ago.’

  We were passing the Rucarts’ old farm when I heard a vehicle rattle up behind us. I turned to see Minot waving from the driver’s seat of the Peugeot. ‘Bonjour,’ he smiled, pushing open the door for me to get inside.

  I put Kira on the seat and tossed my suitcase in the back. Minot was wearing rough cotton trousers and a checked shirt with sweat patches under the armpits. It was hard to believe he had once been the suave artistic director at the Adriana. But then, in my grimy dress and scuffed shoes, I wasn’t exactly the Le Chat soap girl any more either.

  ‘Is Roger at the farm?’ I asked. I hadn’t seen him for months as he had been busy getting people over the Pyrenees. I secretly hoped that in moving south I would be with him more often.

  Minot shook his head. ‘He is coming tomorrow with two agents he is taking to the maquis.’

  The maquis were farmers who had taken to the hills to fight the Vichy gendarmes and the Germans. They performed acts of sabotage and attacked strategic posts. They were being armed by both de Gaulle and Churchill—who seemed to have had some kind of falling out—in night-time drops. Their numbers had been greatly increased the previous month, when the Germans had tried to force Frenchmen to go to Germany to work in munition factories and on farms. Tens of thousands of young men had escaped to the hills to swell the numbers of those willing to fight.

  ‘I am worried about you and your mother,’ I said. I told Minot what had been happening in Paris. ‘The Vichy government is even more anti-Semitic than the Germans. It might be time for you to leave.’

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t leave my mother. She is too old to even get on a ship. If worst comes to worst, we will have to hide her. I’ll take to the hills and fight with the others.’

  I thought about how Minot and I had once been and how we were now. There was a time when I had thought being a star and being rich was everything. Not any more.

  ‘I am proud of you,’ I told him.

  ‘You should be proud of your village,’ he said. ‘They suspect that my mother and I are Jews, but not one of them has denounced us. Not even the mayor.’

  When we arrived at the house, the dogs were sleeping in the garden. My mother and aunt were laying the table for lunch. I noticed the sprigs of cypress and bulbs of garlic hung around the door—the Provençal charm for protection. Bernard was seated at the table, talking to Madame Meyer. I hugged my mother and aunt. They were both much thinner than the last time I had seen them although in the countryside there seemed to be plenty of food to go around. My eye fell to the five extra plates on the table.

  ‘I thought Roger and the others weren’t coming until tomorrow?’ I said.

  Bernard’s expression turned grave. He reached for the broom by the stove and made three knocks on the ceiling with it. Instantly I heard the scurrying of feet. I had thought the previous group of soldiers had already been taken to Marseilles to wait in the house there. Then I realised that the footsteps were light.

  The children stopped in the doorway when they saw me: two redheaded girls of about seven and nine, and three boys of around the same ages. I was taken aback by the combination of their innocent faces and the terror in their eyes.

  ‘I found them when I was settling the men in Marseilles,’ Bernard said.

  ‘Their parents were taken away,’ Aunt Yvette whispered. ‘A woman in the house next door to Aunt Augustine’s hid them.’

  ‘Come to the table,’ my mother said to the children, stretching out her arm. ‘This is Simone.’

  As the children inched forward, she introduced them by name: Micheline, Lucie, Richard, Claude, Jean. Their eyes were globes in their heads. It pained me to see children scarred by mistrust. I called Kira over and picked her up so they could pat her.

  ‘What is her name?’ Claude, the youngest, asked.

  ‘Kira,’ I said. ‘She is Russian.’

  ‘She looks like Chérie,’ Lucie told me. ‘Chérie sleeps on my bed.’

  The children patted Kira and scratched her chin, but their hands were trembling so much I wondered if they could feel anything at all. Anything, that was, except the cold, sharp sensation of fear.

  After lunch, the children returned upstairs to play. I thought it strange that they couldn’t play out in the open. The farm was miles from anywhere.

  ‘The activities of the maquis mean that the gendarmes come by regularly to check that the people in the village and on the farms aren’t hiding stashes of weapons or wounded men,’ Bernard explained. ‘I would keep the children here but I’m not sure how long they will be safe. I am hoping Roger will offer a solution.’

  Roger arrived the next evening with a weapons trainer and a female radio operator who looked no more than twenty. They had been parachuted into France the previous night. After dinner, we sent the trainer and operator to their rooms for a good night’s rest in a bed, and Roger and I went outside to talk. He was still as handsome as the last time I had seen him, in Paris, but there were circles under his eyes and the lines on his forehead had deepened.

  ‘You need a rest,’ I said.

  ‘So do you,’ he replied, grasping my wrist and examining it. ‘Look how thin you’ve become.’

  I told him about the children Bernard had hidden upstairs in the house.

  ‘I know,’ said Roger, looking up at the moonlit sky. ‘He told me about them in Marseilles.’

  ‘Can we get them out?’

  Roger leaned against the side of the house. ‘We’ve been sending Jewish refugees along the line for some time now. But those children will never make it across the Pyrenees with only a guide.’ He fell silent for a moment, turning the question over in his mind. ‘There’s a ship coming for the men in Marseilles in a few days’ time,’ he said. ‘It will be dangerous, but it’s the only way I can see that we can get those children out of the country.’ He turned to me and his breath brushed across my cheek. ‘I’ll be going with them, Simone. I have to leave France.’

  My heart dropped to my feet. He was leaving.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been compromised by a double agent and I must break with the network so I don’t lead him to any more people.’

  Cold gripped my insides. How could I be so selfish? If Roger had been compromised then he was in grave danger. He had no choice but to leave. For a moment I considered asking if I could go with him, but I shook myself back to where I was. France needed me, and my family and friends had put themselves at risk at my persuasion. I had to stay in the country no matter what my personal feelings were.

  ‘I’ll miss you, Simone,’ Roger said, reaching out and running his hand through my hair.

  I turned away so that he would not see the tears glistening on my cheeks.

  At dawn the following morning, Roger and I took the two agents to the local maquis whom they would be working with.

  When we arrived at the camp, the first people I saw were Jean Grimaud, my father’s friend, and Jules Fournier, the brother-in-law of the mayor. It was only by their posture and eyes that I recognised them; both men had grown
woolly beards and their clothes were mud-splattered and covered in pine needles. Their life of sleeping rough wherever they could had made them haggard, but the men greeted us in good spirits and invited us to share in their meal of wild mushroom omelettes. Roger and I declined; we knew that food was hard for the maquis to come by and that their wives and daughters took risks in bringing it to them.

  While they were serving the meal, a young man with dark pools for eyes delivered a message to Jean from a neighbouring maquis. The boy looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember how I knew him. He noticed my puzzled expression and smiled.

  ‘Ah, it is you!’ he said, in an accent that wasn’t French. ‘I have never forgotten your kindness to me.’ He reached into his jacket and pulled out a sachet of lavender, grubby and withered with age and handling. ‘It has been my good luck charm all these years.’

  And then I realised who he was. Goya, the young boy who had come with his family the first year we had harvested lavender. He told me that his real name was Juan and we spoke briefly about our lives in the years since we had last seen each other. ‘My mother always joked that you were not a girl made for farm work,’ he said. ‘And look—her prediction was true.’

  We stayed with the maquis most of the day. Roger exchanged information and the agents discussed strategies for weapons drops and contact with the Allies. I watched the operator set up her radio. Roger had told me that each operator had a special code to pass on to Britain to indicate if a message they were relaying was false. The operator would need it if she ever found a German gun pressed to the back of her head.

  She probably has a lover and a family back home too, I thought, watching the set determination with which the young woman went about her task. If she was so strongminded then I must be that way also.

  In the late afternoon, Roger and I wished the radio operator and the weapons instructor good luck and said farewell to the maquisards. We reached the edge of my family’s fields just as the sun was setting. The plants were lavandin now, the commercial hybrid, but Bernard had left a patch of wild lavender in the field closest to the house out of respect for my father. The soft light shimmered on the tips of the plants. My sadness at Roger’s impending departure pierced my heart like a sharp stone.

  ‘Shall we sit here for a while?’ Roger asked.

  I nodded and we sat down together on a boulder that was still warm from the sun. We were both long-limbed and our legs sprawled out before us in the chalky dust.

  ‘That was your code name in the network,’ Roger said. ‘Wild Lavender.’

  ‘I didn’t know I had a code name. I never used it.’

  He smiled. ‘Well, that’s how I always thought of you: tenacious and stubborn but also rather sweet.’

  I was about to tell him I didn’t like that description much when he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘When this war is over, Simone, can I come back for you?’

  His grip was gentle but energy flowed from it like a torch. I remembered how he had held me the night we danced the tango and drew closer. ‘I don’t even know if Roger is your real name,’ I said, tracing his widow’s peak with my finger.

  Roger slipped his arm around me. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘Roger is every bit as English as it is French. But my last name is Clifton not Delpierre.’

  He exaggerated the roll of r’s in his code name so much that it made me laugh. I pressed my cheek to his. The sun was still there in the heat of his skin. I breathed in his wonderful scent, like the smell of thyme simmering over the fire.

  ‘And when I come back for you, Simone, will you marry me?’

  My heart skipped a beat. Was this real or a dream? ‘Yes,’ I said, surprised at how quickly I had accepted. I didn’t need to think about it. It felt natural to be with Roger, as if we were two pieces of a puzzle that fitted together.

  Roger brushed his hand down my back. When he touched me I realised how the war had worn out my body, how tired and heavy I felt. But with each caress my skin tingled to life.

  ‘Who would have thought it?’ Roger said, laughing. ‘France’s biggest star and a boring lawyer from Tasmania. Only the war could have brought such an unlikely couple together.’

  I remembered the way he had danced the tango and sung in Spanish. ‘You are anything but boring,’ I said. ‘Besides, you are a hero. And I pray that this war won’t last for ever.’

  ‘Well, we have to believe that it won’t now we are getting married,’ Roger said, kissing me. The softness of his lips was divine. Kissing him was like pressing my lips to a peach. I could have lost myself in his kisses for ever but I broke away for a moment to ask, ‘Where shall we live? In London or Paris? Or are you intending to take me to Tasmania?’

  ‘We can go to Tasmania for our honeymoon. But when we are married I want to live here.’

  I sat back and looked at him. ‘In Provence? Or do you mean France?’

  ‘Here on the farm,’ Roger said, surveying the sky. ‘It’s so beautiful, I can’t imagine why anybody would want to live anywhere else. I’d be happy growing lavender alongside your family and raising our children here. Law seems such a pathetic thing to practise after all I’ve seen. Law relies on order. All I’ve seen is chaos.’

  I loved Pays de Sault and my family too, but I had never imagined living here again. ‘I am not very suited to farming,’ I said. ‘I’m hopeless at it.’

  ‘Who said you needed to do any farming?’ he asked. ‘You’re a performer. If you want to go to Paris or Marseilles, I’ll fly you there.’

  Tears pricked my eyes. The dream was so beautiful that I couldn’t bring myself even to imagine being that happy. I was afraid that if I did, the happiness would be snatched away, as had happened with André.

  Roger brought his lips to mine and kissed me again. I pressed myself against him and he tugged me down onto the chalky earth. ‘Don’t put up barriers to happiness, Simone,’ he said, stroking my face. ‘After getting through this, I’m sure we can do anything.’

  Roger’s hand glided to the opening of my shirt and curved over my breasts. I closed my eyes, quivering with desire.

  ‘Tenacious, stubborn but very sweet,’ he whispered.

  At dawn the following morning, I slipped out of Roger’s embrace, pulled on my clothes and ran across the yard to my aunt’s house. My mother was in the kitchen, laying out plates for breakfast when I burst in the door. She jumped back a step, sending knives and forks clattering to the floor.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. With the tension of the circumstances, it wasn’t considerate to surprise people. But my mother wasn’t annoyed.

  ‘Roger asked me to marry him,’ I said. ‘He has promised to come back for me after the war.’

  My mother smiled but did not respond. She kept her eyes on me.

  I stepped towards her. ‘Do you think it is all right to promise something like that while there is a war on?’ I asked. ‘He has to go back to London. We may never see each other again.’

  My mother put down the plate she was holding and took my hands. ‘We are still alive, Simone. We must act as though we are living. Promise to marry him. He loves you.’

  I threw my arms around her and hugged her harder than I had in years. My mother was petite in stature but strong. I could feel the hardness of her bones moving under her muscles. She pushed me back for a moment and looked into my eyes. ‘But is that what is really frightening you—the war?’ she asked. ‘Or is it something else?’

  Under her gaze, I felt fourteen years old again. I didn’t need to tell her what was in my heart.

  ‘André?’ she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  I nodded. The way I had felt about him when I saw him in Lyon had stayed with me. Although he was married with children, and both of us were dedicated to the cause, there had been a sense of unfinished business between us. Could I honestly give my whole heart to Roger if I still felt that?

  My mother’s eyes softened and she kissed the top of my head. ‘I have seen you and Roger together,’ she said. ‘You have fal
len in love under a trial of fire. What you have between you is strong. That man will never desert you. He might be leaving for now but if he promises to come back for you, he will.’

  ‘What if his family doesn’t approve of me?’ It was unlikely that Roger’s family was as elite as the Blanchards, but if his uncle was friends with Churchill then they were clearly people of standing in society.

  My mother shook her head. ‘I am sure they would be proud to know that Roger wants to marry someone so brave and honourable. If your father could see the woman you have become, he would tell you exactly the same thing. The gifts you have, you inherited from him.’

  Aunt Yvette’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. We both turned to see her come into the kitchen, tying a scarf over her angel hair. She stopped short when she spotted us, her face twisting into a puzzled expression.

  ‘Roger and Simone are getting married,’ my mother told her. ‘He is coming back for her after the war.’

  Aunt Yvette’s face relaxed into a broad grin.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The morning Roger and I announced our engagement, we all sat down to the happiest breakfast we had enjoyed in years. Even the children in our care seemed in better spirits than they had the day before. My mother rested her hand on Roger’s arm as lovingly as if he were her own son. I told myself that the next time my mother and I had some time alone, I was going to ask her about my grandparents and if it was true that her mother was an Italian. I wanted to be as proud of my ancestors as I was of this gathering of family, friends and guests. Aunt Yvette and Bernard pulled out every childhood story they could think of to embarrass me in front of Roger, including telling him that my nickname used to be ‘the flamingo’ because of my long legs. But I didn’t mind. I was content to know that, despite the situation we were in, we could be cheered just by imagining a better future.

  I had one last task in Paris before I moved south permanently. Roger had a code that he needed delivered to a network member. I had memorised it so that if I was searched it wouldn’t be found. The plan was for me to stay overnight in Paris, then to catch the first train back south. Roger and I would have one more night at the farm together before he had to leave France.