Katherine had reverted to a guttural Parisian accent. Marie-Christine smiled.
‘You are very good at accents, chérie, but how good are you at being a bargee?’
Katherine smiled. ‘I grew up beside a river. Talking of which, I must wash just a little of my stink away before we both pass out.’
‘Yes, yes, I will boil some water, and then you must wash, and then we will talk again, but only after you have rested. Sleeping under the archway with the clochards is not a restful thing, I would say.’
Katherine washed, no, she scrubbed, knowing she could stay clean for only a while. Soon she would have to become decrepit again.
As she towelled herself dry, and felt fatigue dropping off her, as if her body was a candle and she was melting, she remembered what the old actor on their survival course used to say to them.
‘You need only do a little to suggest that you are an undesirable. A little earth under your nails, sleep in your eyes, hair unwashed, that will be quite enough. You must look pitiable rather than objectionable, as if you would like to wash, but just haven’t the facilities. That way people will hurry away from you, rather than take a closer look. Nothing truly ugly really scares people, you will find, but nothing is more frightening to them than the idea that you might be asking for their sympathy.’
Soon Katherine was fast asleep. Perhaps because of their talk about finding a barge to hide the children and spirit them away down the river, she dreamed of Chevrons, and of David. He was coming towards her, always coming towards her, but she was always backing away from him. However hard she tried to reach out to him it was as if her arms were weighted, and although she put all her strength into willing them towards him, they would not reach him, and all the longing in her heart would not make them. This was terrible because there was David, as real as anything, and he was just as beautiful as ever, but most of all his blue eyes were filled with such a humorous look. As he had always said to her, life was really just a game, and they all knew it was not the winning that mattered, but the taking part. Which of course he did not believe at all, but it made them both laugh, that hearty ‘play the game’ kind of thinking, the pipe-smoking Scoutmaster attitude that they had never believed in.
‘We’re far too beautiful for tweed-suited heroics,’ he would tease Katherine. ‘We are Greeks, not Romans.’
In her dream she couldn’t hear him, but she was laughing, and he was laughing with her. But when she woke up there were tears on her face, tears that marked her freshly scrubbed cheeks, and she left them there, along with the sleep in her eyes, because it was time to become someone else again. Time to find out about the boats that lay about the Seine, some still with the remains of ruined cargo, some empty, their hulls rotting, their paint peeling.
‘You will be taking a boat with us,’ she told the children, a few days later. ‘It will be a great adventure, but you will have to be very quiet, as you have been here. You have to be hidden again, and perhaps there will be rats, and bad smells, but you will try to sleep, and when you wake up you will find that you are far away in the countryside, safe, and with plenty to eat. Until then, you must pretend you are deaf and dumb, you must not move, or make a sound. You must be like little ghosts, not there, but there all the same. Now follow me when I call for you, and not a word or a sound from you. It is tiptoe and silence, tiptoe and silence, all the way.’
Across the courtyard, and into the empty street – they had just those few minutes before the wretched concierge returned. Under the arches where the tramps and the drunks groaned and slept, and then on to the river, and within a minute or two, the river being so close to the old block of flats, there was the barge that Katherine had managed to buy from a vendor along the banks, lying waiting for her. Whether the vessel truly was his or not, the sight of her cash had quickly bought his silence, along with the boat.
Nothing seemed so silent as the Seine that particular dark morning. There was no one about, not a soldier, not a gendarme, not a prostitute, not a bus, no one. It was as if the enemy was sleeping in that morning, as if, despite America having come into the war, despite Hitler’s troubles in Russia, they knew themselves to be safe, safe in the one place that not even Hitler would dare to bomb – Paris.
Soon the city familiar to the two young women was far behind, and the Seine was bearing them along in almost silent conspiracy, only the grumbling of the motor leaking out across the water, only the sight of other vessels making their way back to the capital, to distract their early morning ears and eyes.
The children were asleep in the hold. If they could get them into the countryside, to the remote farmhouse owned by Marie-Christine in the Loire, they would be safe.
‘There are cows and sheep, and chickens too. An old man lives above the stables and he looks after everything for me, but I have not been there for more than three years, not since the war came, but it is so remote, I doubt that any but he has been there either. When we find it, we will be able to eat again, until then we must make what little we have last.’ Marie-Christine looked philosophical, and shrugged her elegant shoulders, pointing down to where the children lay hidden. ‘At least there are no rats down there; they are too intelligent to go where there is so little for them.’
They both knew the truth of this. The barge chugged on. They must make good time before the light became too bright, when they would have to hide in a backwater, and once again wait until the comfort of darkness before continuing their long journey. All too soon they would have to abandon the barge and make their way across the countryside to another river, to a tributary where once again they would have to beg, borrow or steal a vessel. So their journey would continue, not just along the waterways but across short stretches of land, but always in the dark, and away from the towns and the cities where the enemy was concentrated. Thank God that France was so big.
As they travelled the two young women kept conversation to practicalities, because anything else was a waste of energy. They had carefully dressed the children in poor, nondescript clothes, and hats and scarves, so that they looked for all the world as if the little party appeared to be merely two women travelling alone with their brood of children across Occupied – or in their case, largely un-occupied – France.
At last they came to the farmhouse in the clearing. It was near enough midnight, so it was not surprising that there was no one about, nor that no light burned in the flat above the stables, nor that there was no other sign of human life.
Marie-Christine pushed open the unlocked door of the old farmhouse. A hen ran out from under the table, leaving not one egg, but what looked like a dozen or more.
‘Never surely have we seen such a splendid sight?’ Marie-Christine whispered.
The children crept in past her. She shut the door and lit an oil lamp on the side. The farmhouse was dusty, it was dirty, but there were eggs, and soon there would be a pan, and she would find something – oil, something – in which to cook the eggs. In the morning she would find a cow, and all the usual comforts would start to appear, but before she could do any of these things, she felt a pair of arms around her neck, and Katherine was giving her a fierce hug.
‘We did it! We did it! Don’t you realise, we’re here!’
They all joined hands and started to dance around the old stone-flagged kitchen, with its low ceiling and its cobwebs, with its ancient range, and its strange old-fashioned oil lamps of every shape.
After that there was much to do to make everything more comfortable. Hands helped to pile up logs in the fireplace, feet ran to search for matches and oil, for everything and anything that would make their refuge cosier. It was the gayest of sights to see the children’s faces become roseate, lit by the gentle spill from the lamps, and that was all before they smelled the eggs cooking. Katherine found some old potatoes, which she made into tiny chips, and they all wolfed what was put before them, thinking, as they did, one communal thought – nothing would ever taste as good again, surely?
It was n
ot long after cooking the eggs for the children that Marie-Christine found a bottle of wine and, having tucked up the children in the upstairs rooms, knowing that they would fall asleep almost immediately, the two women crept back down and broached this hidden treasure – a rare and beautiful bottle of wine, happily one of many.
Again, never had anything tasted so good, nor felt so warming. So much so that after turning the lamp off to save oil, they sat drinking by the light of the moon well into the small hours before they too fell asleep, Katherine insisting on placing her mattress across the door, because, as she said, old habits die hard and, anyway, she wanted Marie-Christine to sleep until she woke.
What Katherine didn’t say to her was that she would not be staying with her and the children. She would be leaving within a day or two.
She lay staring up at the moon – not a French moon, not an English moon, certainly not a Nazi moon, but everyone’s moon – which was at least a constant in an inconstant world. She closed her eyes and for the next minutes it seemed to her that she was back at Chevrons, and a child again, and then she and David were running through the bluebells that grew under the ancient beech trees on his father’s estate, and he was looking back at her and saying, ‘When I grow up, Katie, I am going to be a hero,’ and seeing the look in his eyes, that glowing blue-eyed look that all heroes must have, she knew she had to be the same. She remembered saying, ‘And so am I, David. I’m going to be a hero like you’ and he was laughing and telling her that girls couldn’t be heroes, they had to be heroines, and then she recalled her challenging reply: ‘That’s what I shall be then – a heroine.’
PART THREE
‘Who says we can take it?’
Chapter Eleven
If Katherine could only dream of Chevrons, to Betty and Trixie the old house was at last becoming a reality.
Their train journey was taking so long, standing all the way, stopping, and changing what seemed like every hour. And being pinched and kicked by more uniformed personnel than Montgomery could command was gruelling, to say the least. As Trixie opined later, it had been a worse experience than any bombing raid.
Trixie looked across at Betty. She was a horrible colour, pale green or, at the very best, a tasteful eau-de-Nil would be a fair description. Of course, after the awful journey, it was hardly surprising if she looked done in.
But that was not all. Betty was pale green for another reason too, which was more worrying to Trixie.
‘I can’t ask anyone to give up their seat for you, because you don’t look pregnant,’ she murmured. ‘Anyway, there are so many foreign soldiers on the train I wouldn’t know how to ask them, truly I wouldn’t.’
‘I’m all right, Trix, really I am.’
‘Of course you are, you’ve never been better. You wouldn’t swap places with anyone else in the whole world, would you?’ She sighed. ‘Would you ever believe that a journey could take so long? I keep thinking when the train finally reaches its destination we’ll find we’re in Hong Kong, and there’ll be a rickshaw ready and waiting to take us up to the old place.’
Betty nodded. Trixie was a real friend, and the truth was that without her she wouldn’t have known which way to turn.
In recent weeks Betty’s life had become a nightmare. Of course, there was no point in moaning, ‘If only I hadn’t gone to London with Mary Mullins, if only I hadn’t sheltered next to a Frenchman in that nightclub she took me to, if only I hadn’t been so frightened …’
Of course, there were so many ‘if onlys’ surrounding her condition at the moment it was a wonder she could go on from one minute to another without collapsing from the weight of her guilt, from the burden of her despair, from the horror of what had happened to her – and the fact that it had happened to so many others was no comfort at all. Very well, this was what did happen in war: people became frightened, people acted out of character, people were not themselves when they were terrified, but her excuses fell on her own deaf ears, and lying awake at night, tussling with such feelings helped nothing, least of all herself.
If there was one thing she would have said would never, ever happen to her, it was that she would get pregnant; and worse, that she would get pregnant, as the old-fashioned saying went, out of wedlock. But she had been so frightened, and, as she thought, so alone, with only the darkness and the rubble, rats running squealing, and the sounds of people somewhere else moaning and screaming. Mary had disappeared under the rubble, leaving Betty and someone else, someone she had never met nor seen, nor ever would again, the other side of all that rubble.
They had gone up to London for the evening. It was not like Mary and Betty to take an evening off, in fact they hadn’t even been to London together before. At the Park, Mary and Betty had been known to be the goody-goodies, always volunteering for extra work, never wanting to sleep when they could be awake and helping, but the ever-increasing workforce at the Park meant that there was less need for even the most enthusiastic to work for more than the statutory seven hours by day, or even by night. So they had gone up to London to have dinner and to dance, to enjoy themselves, but they had only been there a few hours, coming out of the restaurant into the blackout, waving their torches at the pavement, and giggling a little because it was all such an adventure, with the crowds, the singing they could hear coming from somewhere or other – down the Underground, was it? They had been heading for a nightclub when the siren had gone off, and so, together with just about everyone else, they had headed for the Underground, which was conveniently near. But it seemed the Luftwaffe was quicker than they could be, and the crowd panicked. In the mêlée Betty was borne one way and Mary the other, and then the world seemed to explode around her as she and others dashed down some steps into some kind of basement, where they were sheltering when another bomb dropped.
They had clung together, perhaps the only ones alive, who knew? Certainly she had clung to him as she had never clung to anyone in her life before, experiencing the inner ice of terror for the first time. Betty wouldn’t have cared who he was, she had clung to him as if he was her saviour, which he wasn’t. He had been as frightened as she, sweating with fear, scrabbling at the rubble until his hands bled, calling and calling until he had collapsed with exhaustion, crying and clinging to her the way she had started out by clinging to him.
She couldn’t now remember a great deal of what had happened, at least not in sequence, but she did remember that after some hours she had attempted to comfort him, stroking his hair, holding him in her arms as if he was her child.
That they had eventually emerged had been a miracle; that they had made love before that, in some ways was another miracle, because finally she could not deny that she had wanted him, as much as he perhaps had wanted her at that moment, not for anything more than comfort, but to find temporary peace, to expiate the terror, the claustrophobia, to take his mind off everything that he was feeling, the shame of it to be replaced, eventually, by another emotion, a sort of strange peace.
Then, when daylight came and, eventually with it, rescue, it was almost a disappointment for Betty – the sudden shock of other faces, of the brightness of the sun behind them, of their voices, which now seemed too loud – and then to turn and shake hands with someone to whom she had just given herself. It was both a nightmare and dream at one and the same time, the two set neatly side by side. And then for days and weeks to pass before she was forced to face the undeniable fact that she was having a baby, a baby that was the result not of love, but of terror.
There was no question but that she had to tell her superior, no question that she had to make arrangements, and no question that there was only one person to whom she could turn, and that was the now London-based Trixie.
Except it seemed that Trixie was no longer Trixie, that she had grown as grand as her surroundings. Beatrice Smith was what she now was, and yet Betty had to admit that it suited her, except on a long journey such as they were undertaking now, when she somehow became very much her dear old Trixie a
gain.
‘You’ll have to get fixed up.’
Those had been Trixie’s first words to Betty when she had confessed to her situation.
Betty had looked at her calmly and with compassion. ‘Do you know me so little that you would expect me to do something about my condition?’ the look said. ‘No question of that now, Trix – I mean Beatrice. Besides, it is not the sort of thing that a girl like me would do, is it?’
Trixie had the grace to blush. She leaned forward, dropping her voice because there were other people in the tea shop, which was continuing to trade despite its blown-in glass door, and its rubble-filled windows, and its notice that said ‘OPEN FOR WHAT YOU CAN GET’.
‘No, no, not like that, I don’t mean that kind of fixed up. No, I mean you’ll have to get fixed up with somewhere to live, somewhere you can be peaceful and all that.’ She thought for a minute. ‘I’ll get Miss Caro to root out something for you. You can’t stay in London, not now, with the bombs, and needing somewhere to live and whatnot. The air raids will be enough to frighten the poor thing into arriving too early, they will. And you’ll have to be married. We’ll have to get you a ring and make up a story about your husband being taken prisoner in Singapore or North Africa or somewhere, that’s what we’ll have to do. Everyone does, you know. Nothing to be ashamed of, truly it’s not. There are more so-called married women going around with missing husbands at the moment than there are grains of sand on Bognor beach, and that’s the truth.’
Betty sipped at what was little more than a cup of hot water. ‘You don’t have to do all this for me, Trix, really you don’t.’
Trixie put a hot little hand over Betty’s larger cool one. ‘I know I don’t, Betty, but I will and I shall, because you’re the best friend anyone can have, and that’s the truth.’ As Betty looked anywhere except at her, Trixie continued as if the subject was now closed. ‘Do you know, if I wasn’t having the time of my life with Miss O’Brien, the truth is I would leave London myself now, and go bomb dodging with the rest of the population, truly I would. Miss O’Brien tells me the same, but what can she do? As she says, she can’t leave London; she’s got a job to do, same as we all have.’ She sighed, and looked rueful. ‘Just when I have my chance to be a lady, make my way up the ladder, on comes the war, and out comes this job, and I’m back being a ruddy maid again. It’s enough to make you weep. Still, it could be worse.’
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 27