The Diamond Waterfall

by Pamela Haines

  When he left her on the step, very late, she hurried upstairs to Diana’s room, hoping she was in, wanting to sit on the end of the bed and talk about getting married.

  Yes or no? To be or not to be?

  But Diana was sitting, fully dressed, on her bed, her face puffy with weeping.

  “Diana, love—”

  “My brother Peter—his ship … he’s dead. Mummy and Daddy heard this afternoon, they rang, it was terrible, they rang and Mummy was crying— I’m going home first thing tomorrow, we want to be together, I’m the only one who can get home.” The tears started again.

  Willow had her arms around her. It was a long while before she could be calmed. In bed at last, she sobbed desperately, “I can’t cope. Willow, help me, and make it morning soon. Willow, I can’t bear it. You see, I only know about being happy.”

  25

  The German officer was reading the menu when Teddy first noticed him. Her drink was almost finished, she was about to pay and get out. She glanced at her watch. Her Resistance contact, whom she’d arranged to meet here, plainly wasn’t going to turn up. And that meant worry—although he could simply have been delayed, he could also have been arrested, or rounded up in a street rafle, to be sent to Germany for forced labor. The train bringing him to Paris might have been bombed by the Allies. All those possibilities, and useless to tell oneself not to worry. I shall go back to the apartment and telephone. Try to keep the fear out of my voice. He wasn’t there.

  Half-past midday. In half an hour drinking time would be over until six this evening. Less drink available was said to have lowered the figures for death from alcohol. Maybe—but the Germans had taken the wine, four million liters by one reckoning. It did not endear the occupiers to the occupied.

  She was sitting inside the glass veranda. Outside a pale December sun shone. The German officer was examining something on his cuff. He looked up, and for a second, jolt of her heart, she thought—Gib. The smooth freckled face, something about the cheekbones. Their eyes met. She veiled hers with boredom, but it was too late.

  “Allow me,” he said. He stood beside her, bringing his high-peaked cap and his newspaper over with him. “This chair isn’t taken?”

  “I was just leaving. I called the waiter—”

  “Please don’t,” he said in excellent French. “You see, I noticed you earlier. I think you were expecting someone?”

  “Perhaps. Men are all the same, not to be relied on.” She reached for her bag. The waiter was hovering. “I must go. I’ll pay and—”

  “No, no. Please take a drink with me. What was it you had? Cinzano?”

  A guitarist in the cafe began to play, singing along with his instrument in a high melancholy voice.

  “You have to be somewhere? If he had come, you would be with him now, so you have the time, I think?”

  It was not Gib, just an uncanny look of him. And that was the end of the matter. It was something I shouldn’t have so much as noticed. I am not meant to have a heart now. I am not really meant to have feelings at all. It’s safer not, unless they are feelings of hate, the better to spur my loyalty.

  I am an SOE agent Special Operations Executive. F for French section. Code name: Lucienne. My cover name is Monique Liebert and I am the Belgian widow of a French businessman from Peronne (where all records were destroyed). To supplement my small income I sell cosmetics made from ersatz ingredients, and travel about France with my samples. This is the cover for my work as a courier. I have a second identity, if needed, as a supply schoolteacher. Nothing and nobody can shake my story.

  She said, “Why shouldn’t it be a work colleague I’m meeting?”

  “Oh, by the way you looked at your watch, then over at the clock. A little tremor of anxiety.”

  I’m not meant to be glamorous, she thought. I’m not meant to look like someone who meets lovers in cafes. These sensible dark-rimmed spectacles I wear, the gray I’ve allowed to grow at my temples. My straight hair permed, so that my looks are quite altered. I do not attract, nor am I attracted.

  To change the topic from this mythical lover, she said, “You speak French very well. It’s a pleasure …”

  “My grandmother was French—although I must admit I scarcely knew her. But my mother spoke the language perfectly. We often holidayed in France. I am Austrian. I expect you recognized the accent.”

  Their vermouths arrived. She wondered how quickly she could drink hers, and leave. If her contact were to arrive now.

  “I’m very fortunate, to be sitting here in Paris. Paris is so beautiful. Before my wife—before she left me, I was able to send her so many gifts from Paris.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry? That I buy such lovely things?”

  “That your wife left you.” She regretted at once saying it.

  He remarked, “You said just now, ‘Men … are not to be relied on.’ Well, I had wanted to say, women. Yes, she left me. She—met someone while I was at the Russian Front. We have a little daughter of eight. Lore.”

  The guitarist played and sang now one of the medieval airs from the film Les Visiteurs du Soir. Occasionally she cast an eye to the door.

  “I haven’t wanted to be in the army, really, or in the war at all. I would like to be a singer. It’s—my life. I—”

  “What do you sing?” She felt now on safe ground.

  “Lieder. Schubert, Schumann, Loewe. Some oratorio. But lieder is where I’m happiest.”

  She had a sudden image of him, in plain clothes, singing, no doubt beautifully. An ordinary man. We shouldn’t be at war with such persons. She clasped her glass tightly, then let it go, afraid it would snap. She saw his eyes on her hand, on her wedding ring.

  “You’re married, you’ll—”

  “A widow.”

  With gentle pressing she told him a little about herself. Her so-well-rehearsed cover story … Yes, grown-up children. Two daughters. One in French Canada, one in Provence. She worked, yes. She dealt in cosmetics.

  “So you see, it’s a simple life.” Her drink was almost finished.

  “You’ll take another?”

  “No, I do have to go. But it’s been interesting, and I wish you well with the singing.”

  He hesitated. “I know I’m very hopeful, but I’d like you to hear. I sing … this is not a common pick-up. I’d like to talk to you. It …”

  “I have to go out of Paris. My work.”

  “When? Immediately?”

  “Soon.”

  “Your address, madame? Perhaps—we … What I should like is to take you to a meal. The Claridge perhaps? Or the Fete Foraine. We can … something that would be a treat …”

  “I can’t,” she said. “No, truly, thank you. The … man who didn’t turn up. That one, he gets insane with jealousy. I kept worrying just now that he was going to come in and make a scene.”

  When she left, she saw that he was hurt, and puzzled. She wondered, Will he come after me? But to the last his manners were courteous, he made no move to follow her, and she knew he would not. That would be the end of that. Such people are not meant to be charming, courteous, kind, sympathetic. For those few minutes she had been with someone who in any other circumstances she would have liked, but because of the war she couldn’t.

  And now, she must find out what had happened to her contact. Although it did not show, by the time she reached her apartment she was shaking with fright, damp with fear—as always.

  When had it begun, this fear? Certainly it had been with her all her time in France, it was a familiar. She slept with it (cat mewing, a shout in the darkness, feet on the stairs, a gunshot), woke with it. It followed her around Paris, and further. At railway stations, as she got on or got off trains. She could not remember how it had been to live without it.

  But it had been another emotion that had brought her to France in the first place. Anger, simple anger. After the Café de Paris, all through that spring and summer of 1941, the anger had burned in her, so that she would r
ealize suddenly, I hate. I hate them for what they have done … for what they may be doing somewhere that we don’t yet know of. In the evenings, after a day of unremitting hard work, she would find herself alone in the flat, precious brandy and water beside her, tiredness draining out of her and, in its place—rage. Rage with no shape. Formless, but directed toward the enemy.

  Then eighteen months later, she had dined and danced with that colonel.

  To the outside world she was Ensign Theodora Nicolson, First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. A lady in well-cut uniform and silk stockings (no making do with cotton lisle or rayon).

  In those days, training to be an agent, she had not been frightened. Anger still, but no fear. Not yet. It wasn’t there through all the unexpectedly tough physical training, or the tests of enterprise. Wasn’t there when she learned to shoot. The shooting was good for the anger. Nor when she learned tricks (oh, may I never have to use them) of silent killing.

  Perhaps it was the company she kept. She had found it easy to be friends —she had been the oldest of the women, on her mettle to see how well she could do. She had been confidante, “aunt,” mentor, and they shared a sense of purpose. The dangers to come were for all of them. Loneliness came later.

  Perhaps the fear began, yes, certainly it had, with that first mock-Gestapo interrogation, in the middle of the night. Such a necessary part of the training, such an important test. Little point if it had not been thorough, and convincing, and tough. But for a few terrible moments she had found herself believing it was real. These people whom she already knew, playacting to such effect. She had felt she was fighting for her life, rather than for the right to come over here, and possibly lose it. She had not done well in that test. Her cover story, which for days she had soaked herself in, had been exposed in three weak areas. But it appeared she had done well enough. If the real thing should happen—perhaps she would be all right.

  But from then on, fear had stalked her, growing rapidly worse after the landing from the Lysander plane, and the first days of living a lie in an occupied country. Her fear, after all, was not unfounded. One slip was enough, and God knew, easily enough made even by the experienced. She herself, her fourth week, tired after an endless railway journey, checking in at a hotel in Nantes, what did she do but write on the reception slip T. E. Nicolson. The pen hardly put down before, sick with fear, the realization, she had said hurriedly, easily, “Oh, give me that back, I promised my children I wouldn’t spell it that way.” Scratching out the offending word, writing boldly “Monique Liebert.”

  The strangeness of living in Paris—where everything was at once familiar and yet not. Occasionally perhaps, sitting in a cafe at a pavement table, looking out onto perhaps the Champs-Elysées, it was possible in the autumn sunshine to think oneself back again. But then … the swastika flags, the signposts in German directing the Wehrmacht north, south, east, west. And, biggest change of all, everywhere, gray-green blot on the landscape, the Germans themselves.

  Bicycles—the streets were full of them. Gone with the petrol famine, the hooting taxis: the only cabs now, apart from horse-drawn ones, were vélo taxis, rickshaws almost, except it was not a coolie but a cyclist providing the power. Official German motors aside, there were only the odd-looking voitures à gazogène, fueled by a natural gas cylinder at the rear and needing to stop frequently for refills. Buses, which ran only when the Métro didn’t, were cumbersome with this device. She didn’t bicycle herself here, but used her feet or the Métro. But when her courier work took her into the countryside she would ride one.

  It was a Paris of queues—for clothes, films, making a claim, petitioning, but above all, for food.

  Soon after their arrival in 1940 the Germans had quietly removed all the good things of France—the butter, the pastry, the steaks, the wine. “Ils nous prennent tous,” the cry had gone up. Now, at the end of 1943, they were still taking everything, but more of it. When she had seen part of the Tuileries dug up, with carrots and beans growing, she wasn’t surprised. (Visiting Willow, had she not seen the beautiful grass of Harrogate Stray turned to potatoes?) It was the hungry, the undernourished, look of so many that appalled her. Thin children—that she could not bear.

  To think in England I ever bothered about curried rabbit, fussed over our shortages. We were never truly in want. But here it would seem that everything was made of, or had in it, turnips.

  Food, food, food, it was an obsession. The first page, often the only page to be read of the Vichy-controlled newspapers (“Any copies left of The Liar?” she had heard in her newsagent’s), would be the one listing the latest allowances—what each food ticket was worth.

  The black market flourished. How not? And who was not of it? Certainly everyone knew someone, who knew someone. And the only good meals she herself had eaten had been either in those restaurants that didn’t take tickets, charged a lot of money, and fed one very well indeed, or in the homes of Resistance colleagues who knew where and how. It was all as it was, and that was that. She was reminded often of the saying “A standing prick has no conscience.” Nor, she thought now, has an empty belly.

  She felt part of this Paris. It had been her home. Now, she was more French even than when she’d lived here. Before leaving England every possible trace of her own country had had to be removed. French trivia to replace the English trivia in her handbag. An array of beautifully forged papers and permits. A full set of food tickets, clothing tickets (a death pill too—but she would not think of that). Clothes with French labels sewn in, shoes carefully without that telltale 5 for size.

  Although she wasn’t living now anywhere near her previous home, she must not, dare not, go near it. It might be that her old concierge was sympathetic and a gaulliste—and it might not. And Blanche, her maid? Who knew? It was not safe to find out. But how tempting once when she was only two blocks away just to look in. And then the orphanage—the greatest temptation of all. But, no risks. Training, hadn’t they been told again and again that no one, however well known, however intimately known (those I have been to bed with?), no one is to be trusted. And that, she thought sadly, would have to mean Henri—if ever by some wonderful, wonderful chance he were to be seen walking about Paris.

  Indeed, one of her frights in the last month had been a possible sighting of Ferdy in the Colisée—all among the zazous and the black marketeers. The more she thought of it afterward, the more she was certain it had been Ferdy. And why not? Agreed, he had used to live in Liège, yet wasn’t he often in Paris? But she had been walking past, he had been reading a newspaper. She had not lingered to find out.

  People she knew in Paris—there was always this fear of seeing them. The fright on Monday of last week when she had seen a rather odd, gossipy woman, Céline Gauchet, a friend of Aimée’s, whom she’d met a few times in 1939. “Greetings! Surely it’s …” Cutting her, “refrigerating” her, as Saint had used to say in the twenties. “You have made a mistake, madame.” The puzzled but genuine apology.

  Back in her apartment again, she picked up the phone. “Lucienne here. The person I should have met. He didn’t … I thought of coming over?”

  The voice answered, “Don’t come this evening. It’s not convenient. No one will be in.”

  She hung up, satisfied. She hadn’t heard the dreaded formula, telling her that the Gestapo had been, or were, there: “Yes, do come, we’ve visitors here, you’re expected.” A child’s form of code, playing contrary. But it made for safety. So far it had worked.

  As well as a second cover story, she had another address in Neuilly which she had told to no one, and to which she could escape if in danger. She had been in her present apartment for about six weeks. It was in a street not far from the Gare de l’Est. Her balcony was patched up, the wrought iron broken. The family on the floor below, with a much larger balcony, had until recently been keeping hens on theirs. Anything to help with food.

  It was already a home of sorts to her. The stairs, with their inescapable smell of stale alcohol, old
polish, bleach, herbal tobacco. Two other apartments, also small, were on the same floor as hers and had in them a commercial traveler and an engineer, both of whom were either bachelors or living singly. She saw them very little, hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words with either. The Chevillons, the henkeepers of the floor below, were a different matter. Although she had naturally to be careful whom she got to know, it would have been difficult to ignore this family.

  The husband, an industrial chemist, was a prisoner of war in Germany. His wife, Jeanne, looked after the three children as well as her mother-in-law, old Granny Chevillon, with her pebble glasses, her down-at-heel shoes, and her heavy body. She seemed to clump up and down stairs most of the day— either sitting with the concierge, or going out to queue for Jeanne. Or visiting Teddy. She loved to talk.

  Xavier, the eldest boy, was a zazou. This statement made by more or less rebellious adolescents was illustrated by outrageous clothes (wide shoulders on huge jackets, greased hair worn long, dark glasses, exaggeratedly tight trousers, and a general air of being out to shock). Teddy could understand it so well. It could not be easy being seventeen in these times. All around, the inevitable compromises made by many of their elders, compromises which often slipped over into collaboration. Sometimes she would think with dread of how it would be after the war. Those who had nothing to be proud of, or worse, something of which to be truly ashamed, would have to pay for it. And all would have to live together.

  Xavier was on bad terms with Gabrielle, his sixteen-year-old sister: a tall, round-cheeked, striking brunette who looked already completely grown up. The youngest, Daniel, was the one Teddy saw the most of. He was nine, an afterthought perhaps—the baby of the family. He played ball near the concierge’s room and in the doorway and generally made a nuisance of himself. Mme. Dastien, the concierge, whose husband had died just before Teddy came, suffered from nervous headaches and would shout at him. Another time he might be found teasing the German soldiers, the frises, bursting paper bags behind them. No wonder Jeanne Chevillon looked careworn.