War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  He let go of her, turned away, and reached for his cigarettes.

  Evangeline watched him out of the corner of her eye. Something in his attitude made her uncomfortable. Was he upset, thinking she meant she had been pregnant with Richard’s baby? That must be it. “It was your baby,” she said, testing the waters.

  Laurent smiled grimly and struck a match. “And I hear Germans have this theory, mulattoes are like mules—can’t reproduce their own kind.”

  “They’ve never been to New Orleans then. In Sussex they think I came up to London to see a doctor about why I haven’t had a child.”

  “Thank heaven you haven’t. Back home the girls used to get an old colored woman named Mama La Bas to fix it so’s they didn’t have a baby.”

  Evangeline took a deep breath. “Let’s not talk about it anymore. Tell me what it’s like in Paris now. The French must be relieved that the British army’s there to protect the border.”

  Laurent plumped their pillows, settled back, and pulled Evangeline to him. He rested his chin on top of her head and she didn’t see the shadow pass over his face. “Paris? You never saw so many desperate folks with nowhere to go. The Germans are coming fast—only thing travelling faster than the Germans are rumors about what they’ve done in Poland and other places. Maginot Line never meant a damn thing. Invasion’s almost official. People expect Petain will negotiate an armistice. Everyone’s so scared you can smell it. Men who aren’t in the army have disappeared into the countryside. But for the moment,” he shrugged, “there’s coffee to drink, and the women still dress up and wear pretty hats and smell good. The clubs and casinos and the Folies are full every night. Folks drink champagne and dance and try to act like what’s comin’, ain’t comin’.”

  “Can’t you leave, come to England?”

  “It’s OK for me. America’s not at war with Germany. Because I’m not afraid to stay in Paris I get work most nights. Even with the Germans coming. Josephine Baker and the Revue Negre were a smash. The French love jazz and blues and swing and what they call ‘exotic dancing,’ all that shakin’ and high steppin’ and stuff from the Treme. I’ve played on records and people buy a lot of those, so I make enough to live on. Like I told you, the Fontaine business is practically finished down in Marseille, and I heard Andre and Philippe are struggling to hold things together in New Orleans since your father died. They write every now and then, asking how I am. They ever say anything to you about, you know, that night?”

  “Nobody can understand why I ran off with Richard. Andre’s the only one who keeps in touch. He says no one’s ever going to forget the scandal I caused. No girl from a decent family is allowed to even dance with him now. He told me Daddy wanted to have my marriage annulled immediately, but Mama persuaded him that would disgrace the family even more, especially if I had a baby. If I ever set foot in Louisiana again I’ll be arrested for shooting Maurice. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to go back, ever.” Evangeline ran her hand down the livid scars on his back.

  He winced, slid down until he was lying flat, then pulled her on top of him. “You’re a dangerous woman with a gun, sugar, but you got some sweet ways. Come on, now…”

  Afterward they shared a cigarette in their old companionable way. Reassured, she tried another tack. “Why can’t you stay here? Not go back to Paris. It’s dangerous. Or maybe we could run away someplace else, not England or France. At least we’d be together.”

  Laurent drew deep on the cigarette and passed it back to her. “Dangerous everywhere—back home, France, here, with the Germans coming, unless the English can hold them off. Which they can’t. I can’t afford to leave Paris right now. Between the records and playing at the club, I can live. I just have to be careful, don’t want to get on the wrong side of the Germans. They don’t like colored people. Or come to that, anybody who isn’t German. In Paris I mostly say I’m North African, but I got two passports for when the Germans come.”

  “How do you get back and forth to France at a time like this?”

  “I’m pals with some Frenchmen who used to come to the club in Paris. They’ve set up a headquarters in London, at the top of a pub—the Free French, they call themselves. As a musician and an American I can go back and forth pretty easily, so I have a job as their courier. Pays well.”

  “Oh, Laurent, couldn’t they let me do that too? I’m American and—”

  “No!”

  Evangeline’s face crumpled.

  “But I’ll come back to England to see you every chance I get. You know I will,” Laurent said.

  “I know. But it seems so unfair, we’ve both come all this way to be together, only we can’t because of the damn Germans.”

  After a moment Laurent put his arms around her again. “I know, darlin’, I know,” he said, chin resting on top of her head. “Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

  The patch of sunshine crept across the carpet and disappeared as the day passed, while they made love and avoided any talk of their old home or their future one.

  When they dressed late in the afternoon Evangeline noticed Laurent’s socks had holes and his shirt was frayed at the collar and cuffs. At dusk they went out and walked side by side through the streets. They drank coffee at the Italian café, self-conscious and nervous to be sitting side by side, but no one even glanced at them. They wandered through the blacked-out streets, then saw a poster for the new American film Gone with the Wind and joined the queue. Afterward they walked back to the hotel through the balmy night, holding hands. “I’m glad we’re not in Atlanta,” said Laurent, tightening his hold.

  “Me too,” said Evangeline and burst into tears.

  They made love again, then sprawled tangled in the sheets afterward. Evangeline’s slender leg was draped over Laurent’s as they shared a tooth mug of cognac and a bar of chocolate Laurent had brought. Laurent rolled some cigarettes he said the musicians all smoked in Paris, made from Indian hemp. Feeling mellow, they dozed, and this time Evangeline, wrapped in Laurent’s arms, dreamed of nothing.

  From below in the darkness of blacked-out Soho the sound of late revelers and a clatter of dishes in a restaurant woke them in the early hours. “Time to get to the pub,” Laurent said, yawning. “French boys will be expecting me. I got work to do. But first I brought you some presents.” Without drawing the blackout curtains he got up, his spare body silhouetted against the dimming window. He handed a flat parcel and two bags to Evangeline.

  She opened the bags first. “What is it?” She felt inside. Sniffed. Tasted. Something stung her tongue. “Oh, Laurent, dried hot peppers! How delicious! English food is so bland I can hardly swallow it.” She plunged a hand into the other bag and exclaimed, “Rice!” She hadn’t tasted rice in ages. “Where did you get this?”

  “Algerian friend in Paris. She’s, uh, married to one of the fellows in the band, cooks for us all, they use hot peppers in Algeria like we do back home, make a sauce they put on everything. Now before you open the big one I’ve got something new I want to play you.”

  “Oh, good!” Evangeline tossed back her hair, propped herself up, and hugged the sheet around her.

  He winked at her. “‘Evangeline’s Blues,’ I call it.” Sitting naked on the side of the bed, Laurent ran through some scales, then slid into a slow rhythm, the saxophone soft at first, just touching the notes, enjoying each one before letting it go and sliding into the next, bolder now, the power and the sadness and the sweetness of the music taking hold, until the sound filled the room, and the scattered clothes, the curtains, the dirty window, the faded armchair, the stained wallpaper, the day of lovemaking were all part of it. Evangeline smiled sadly when the last notes faded in the darkness like the feel of a lover’s farewell kiss. She wished she and Laurent could stay forever in this room where no one knew or cared about them.

  Laurent drew the blackout curtains and switched on the cheap bedside lamp. “Open the other present.”

  She tore off layers of brown paper. “Oh, Laurent! Your records!
Thank goodness Penelope didn’t take the gramophone when she moved into the flat! Now I can listen to you every night and imagine you there beside me. You sound better than Glenn Miller!” she exclaimed.

  “Wish he thought so too,” he said, pleased. “I’d give anything to play in his band. Back home, people buy his records, see my name on the cover. They would know I hadn’t vanished without a trace.”

  Evangeline threw caution to the winds. “Oh, Laurent, please take me with you! The French don’t care who we are. Or we can go to some other country—Sweden or…or…I don’t care, there must be someplace. I don’t feel alive without you and I just wait and wait. I’m so tired of waiting!”

  He sighed. “You’re safer here, honey, like I told you. It’s not just about us, it’s about the Germans and the war. It’s getting worse and worse, everywhere. When the war is over we can worry about it. Right now I’ve got all I can do to stay in one piece, play some music, make a livin’. You’ve got to be patient. Wait for me where you are. Stay with your husband for the time bein’.”

  11.

  Crowmarsh Priors,

  October 1940

  With France under Nazi control and the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk in bloody disarray, the Germans settled in across the channel and launched the Blitz in preparation for the invasion of England.

  A month later the bombing seemed to have been going on forever. Every day wave after wave of German planes and their escorts thundered across the channel, darkening the sky over Sussex, then heading north. On their tails black swastikas flashed insolently in the last rays of autumn sunshine.

  Sheep grazing on the downs ran in panic, their bleating drowned by the drone of engines. A moment later RAF Spitfires appeared, but the endless German column banked and continued relentlessly toward its targets. Ack-ack fire erupted in the distance. Over Croydon a Spitfire spiraled down from the sky, black smoke billowing behind it.

  Albert Hawthorne, hoeing cabbages behind his cottage, looked up, shook his fist, and cursed.

  Nell hurried their eight-year-old daughter, Margaret Rose, into the Anderson shelter at the end of the garden and shouted for him to join them. Instead Albert dropped the hoe and wheeled out his bicycle: he was in the Home Guard now. Apron fluttering, she ran after him with his gas mask, muttering that it was all very well for the government with their Home Guard posters, but were the unarmed Home Guard supposed to hoe the Germans to death if they parachuted into the village? She hoped he’d remember he had a wife and a daughter in the shelter and she’d taken the bus and queued for hours in Hurst Green to get sausages for tea, so mind he got home safe to eat them. He pedalled off, marvelling at women’s priorities.

  He almost collided with Alice Osbourne, now the local air raid warden, who came running out of the church gate still in her flowered pinny. Tucking up her skirt, she leaped onto her bicycle blowing an air raid whistle. Her gas mask swung from the handlebars as she rode off shouting “air raid” sternly at five little boys kicking a football about on the green. They scattered and ran for home.

  Alice pedalled hard through the village, making sure no other children were out. There had been so many alarms since the Blitz began that now they no longer took them seriously; air raid alarms were like a new game. When the bombing had begun she and Oliver had devised an air raid signal “ring three times, pause, ring three times, pause” using the St. Gabriel’s bell, because they didn’t have a siren. Now the War Office had ordered that church bells were only to be rung to signal the invasion had begun. Oliver said it was a sad turn of events. The government had installed a siren in the parish hall, but it was temperamental and didn’t always go off.

  The knowledge that the Germans were only twenty-five miles away across the channel terrified Alice. It was rumored that bodies in Nazi uniforms had washed up on the coast and that agents provocateurs had infiltrated England and were everywhere. They must try to hold off the invasion, but many people said it was only a matter of time. People were to stay alert and report anyone who behaved suspiciously to the authorities. Alice had taken to calling in at Glebe House to hear the BBC news on Lady Marchmont’s wireless each evening—it worked better than the little one at the Osbournes’ cottage, and as a warden she needed to keep up with what was happening. Also, it was an excuse to put off going home to her mother. Frances Falconleigh, who had surprised everyone who knew her by joining the Land Army with the young housemaid Elsie, usually returned home on her bicycle at dusk. Frances or Mrs. Gifford drew the blackout curtains, then all five women huddled round the wireless in the morning room.

  They heard Churchill’s ringing speech that England would “fight them on the beaches but never, never surrender.” It made them feel oddly heartened. Then weeks later Frances confided her father had told her that Churchill ended the speech with an aside that they’d be fighting on the beaches with empty bottles because empty bottles were all the resources they’d got. It sounded, she added, as if Britain couldn’t hold out much longer: the French army had been much larger than England’s but it hadn’t stopped the Germans overrunning Paris or the French government surrendering.

  At this, Alice had closed her eyes in prayer.

  Frances had regarded her with disgust. “I wish I had a gun!” she said fiercely. “If they invade I’d be sure to take a couple of Germans with me.” Alice stopped praying and stared at her. She had never heard a girl talk that defiant way.

  And how could one person fight the Germans? Alice wondered if she would be afraid to die when the time came, and if she would be brave enough to “take a couple with her,” as everyone had begun to say you must. Perhaps Frances was right, and they did need guns. Guns! “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” she muttered, which took her mind off shooting Germans and helped her concentrate instead on the people for whom she was responsible.

  The new party of Land Army recruits were digging potatoes and picking the last of the apples at the de Balforts’ home farm. They worked until dusk, when they caught a bus back to their hostel. Elsie Pigeon could be relied on to get them into the home farm shelter with their gas masks. Although she was the youngest of her group, Elsie was good at bossing people about. Frances was away; she had a day’s leave and had gone up to London to see her father.

  The air raid siren kept up its piercing wail. It wasn’t much comfort to know it had also summoned the Home Guard, which consisted of Oliver, Albert Hawthorne, Hugo de Balfort, the publican’s elderly father and uncle, Ted and George Smith, and several farmers’ sons in their teens who were due to enlist. They had drilled with broomsticks until Hugo donated Gracecourt’s stock of old hunting rifles. Alice wouldn’t give two pence for the Home Guard’s chances when the Germans came. The enemy had managed to spread the word that anyone resisting the invasion would be regarded as a traitor and executed immediately.

  Puffing now, Alice halted to peer into Lady Marchmont’s garden. Except for the lavender bushes and the flagstone walk, it had been dug over for a “Dig for Victory” garden. Mrs. Gifford, in her white apron and cap, was following the old lady down the walk to their Anderson shelter, laden with their gas masks, rugs, and a Thermos of tea. Lady Marchmont couldn’t move very fast with her cane, but she was nearly there. Alice waved to her and sped by Penelope Fairfax’s house.

  Evangeline would have Tanni, Johnny, and the three bombed-out evacuee children who had recently been billeted with her down in the musty wine vault where Richard’s father had stored his claret and port—Alice and Richard had played “dungeons” there on rainy days. It made a splendid bomb shelter, though—unless the house took a direct hit and buried Evangeline once and for all, which would serve her right. Alice stifled that thought at once on account of Tanni and the children, but she couldn’t help thinking of Richard.

  Richard and his convoy were in danger somewhere out on the gray Atlantic. In the village hall she had hung a lurid poster—IT ALL DEPENDS ON YOU—to drive home the message that everyone needed to grow food and make
do and mend and help the war effort by being as self-sufficient as possible so the country didn’t depend on supplies that had to be protected by convoys. The poster showed one such ship, HMS Gloworm, sinking in flames after a battle with a German destroyer in April. Every day Alice prayed for all British ships at sea and those who sailed in them—she tried not to be too specific about Richard.

  Now she was panting on up the hill toward home and her mother, who got into a frightful state each time the Germans flew over, even though, so far, they had saved their bombs for the cities.

  It was twilight by the time she reached the ugly Edwardian cottage, another ominously clear evening, making it easy for German pilots to navigate and good for bombing. The moon was rising over the horizon. To the north, the sky over London was full of silver barrage balloons. Ominously it glowed orange and flashed with searchlights and explosions. Alice parked her bicycle and scanned the countryside with her binoculars, looking for any signs of light that might act as a signal for German pilots—a carelessly drawn blackout curtain, a forgotten autumnal bonfire still smoldering, an absentminded torch user or some idiot who had turned on his car’s headlamps. Even Sister Tucker, the nurse, was allowed only a tiny pinprick of a light on her bicycle, and she preferred to do without it, maintaining that her eyes were better in the dark.

  She peered into the ground-floor windows behind the overgrown hydrangea bushes and saw with irritation that the blackout curtains had not been drawn. She had warned her mother several times that if she forgot and put the light on they’d be arrested for helping the enemy. She hurried inside, hoping her mother had already gone down to the cellar and lit the lantern they kept there. Their shelter was the old coal store.

  Inside, the dark passageway smelled of boiled turnips. “Mummy?”

  “Alice? Where have you been? You know how anxious I get when you’re off gallivanting. I heard the airplanes, then I heard the siren. I didn’t know what to think! They keep talking on the wireless about poison gas.” The sofa rustled as Mrs. Osbourne sat up, querulous, hands clutching at the plaid rug with which she covered herself when she had a nap. Mrs. Osbourne was only fifty-five, but thanks to ill health, real and imagined, she seemed much older. “When your father was alive—” she began.