Never Leave Me

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘He’ll stop you,’ her husband warned. ‘He won’t allow you to flout his orders.’

  Heloise de Valmy said nothing. She picked up her prayer-book, the fine, aristocratic bone structure of her face ageless. He regarded her with aching tenderness. She never ceased to amaze him. She hated turmoil and discord and retreated from it whenever possible, yet now, because her own code of conduct demanded it, she was going to deliberately arouse and face Meyer’s wrath.

  ‘I haven’t told you that I love you for a long time,’ he said, walking across to her and kissing her gently on her temple. ‘But I do, my dear. With all my heart.’

  A slight flush touched her cheekbones. ‘Thank you, Henri,’ she said and then, as he stepped with her towards the door, ‘No, Henri, don’t come with me. This is something I wish to do alone.’

  She paused at the head of the stairs, suppressing a slight tremble, and then descended, her outward composure flawless.

  Dieter had known very well what she would try to do. In her own way she was as spirited and as wilful as her daughter. As she crossed the hall he opened the door of the grand dining-room, his shadow falling across her. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘To André Caldron’s funeral.’ Her flute-clear voice was icily chill. There had been a time when she had warmed towards him. Invited him to dine with them. Imagined that here at last was a German who was different. A German who was not a Nazi. She had been wrong.

  Dieter regarded her with a mixture of admiration and irritation. She had an amazing figure for a woman of fifty. Looking at her he knew very well the kind of woman Lisette would become. At the thought of Lisette pain flared behind his eyes. He said brusquely, ‘I gave orders that no one from Valmy was to attend.’

  She had been standing looking straight ahead, not deigning to glance in his direction. Now she turned and her blue-grey eyes held his steadily. ‘I am aware of your orders, Major Meyer.’

  ‘And you refuse to obey them?’

  ‘If you wish to prevent me from attending the funeral of the man you shot dead, then you will have to do so physically.’

  Dieter sighed. He wondered what she would say if he told her that the man whose funeral she wished to attend had cravenly named her daughter as a member of the Resistance. ‘Very well,’ he said tightly, ‘I’ll see to it that a car is brought round for you.’

  The skin tightened across the high perfection of her cheekbones. ‘You can’t imagine that I would arrive at the funeral of one of your victims in a German staff car, Major Meyer. I would rather crawl there on my hands and knees!’ and she walked quickly away from him, her exquisitely coutured back rigid, her high heels tapping on the stone flags.

  He returned to the report he was trying to finish but his concentration had deserted him. He could think only of Lisette. With nerves stretched to breaking point, he slammed out of the chateau, striding around to the stables where his Horch was garaged, ordering his chauffeur to drive him to Vierville.

  The defences were still not satisfactory. They needed more concrete; more steel; more swivelling cupolas for the bunkers and blockhouses in order that the arc of fire from their guns would not be restricted.

  Lisette’s face rose up before him and he groaned, wondering how long it would be before his terrible need of her abated. He needed another woman. He needed lots of women. He had a weekend leave due to him. As the Horch sped through the deep-hedged lanes he determined to go to Paris. The prospect did not elate him. He didn’t want the sophisticated, experienced women who had made previous leaves so relaxing. He wanted Lisette.

  Her face burned at the back of his mind. He remembered the way her heart throbbed beneath his moving hand. The low laugh that caught in her throat. The soft sensuality of her mouth. Then he remembered the passion of her hate and deep, simmering rage for its cause consumed him. The Englishman had been nothing to either of them. She, herself, had been responsible for Paul Gilles’ death. If she had not so foolishly involved herself with the Resistance there would have been no need for him to have been silenced.

  He had yet to tell her that he knew of her Resistance activities. It was a confrontation that he dreaded. He had seen her only once since the shooting. It was she who had asked to see him and he had thought at first that she had come to him to be reconciled. She hadn’t. She had come to tell him that Paul Gilles was to be buried at Valmy.

  ‘Shouldn’t that be a request?’ he had snapped when his first flare of shock had subsided. She had remained frigidly silent, her eyes darkly ringed, her face deathly pale. He wondered if she had lost as much sleep as he, and hoped savagely that she had.

  ‘Why the devil should Gilles be buried at Valmy?’

  ‘He had no family of his own. He died at Valmy. It is fitting that he should be buried at Valmy.’ Every line of her body had been taut with tension, her voice as tight as a coiled spring.

  She had been wearing a dress he had never seen before: a narrow sheaf of black wool crepe with long sleeves and a high neck, its stark simplicity unadorned. Her hair had been drawn back away from her face, tied in the nape of her neck with a velvet ribbon. She had looked incredibly beautiful. The breath had caught in his throat and for a second he had not trusted himself to speak, then he had said tersely, ‘Is there consecrated ground at Valmy?’

  ‘Yes, there used to be a small chapel near the gatehouse. De Valmy’s have always been buried on de Valmy land.’

  ‘And now Paul Gilles is to join them?’

  She had flinched at the savagery in his voice and then had said steadily, ‘Yes.’

  He had been unable to bear her nearness any longer. ‘Then bury him at Valmy!’ he had said explosively, marching from the room, rage and frustration and jealousy warring deep within him.

  The priest had come from Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts and Paul Gilles had been buried in the de Valmy family churchyard.

  The day after the funeral he had told his chauffeur to stop at the gatehouse and, driven by a devil he couldn’t name, had walked over to the grave. Flowers had been freshly planted. Blue grape hyacinths and mauve honesty and sharply yellow forsythia. The tumbledown walls of the chapel were covered in wisteria and clematis and wild rose bushes, and he knew that in summer the air in the little churchyard would be heavy with fragrance. It was so quiet that he had heard the distant roar of the sea and the birds calling to one another in the nearby beech woods. This was where, one day, Lisette would lie. Lisette and her children, and her children’s children. He had turned abruptly on his heel, striding back to his car. He had to stop thinking about her. Whatever had happened in the last few days was over. Finished. He had suffered from temporary insanity and now he was well again.

  The Horch slid to a halt on the clifftops of Vierville. He stepped from the car on to damp grass and stared out over the sea. The English Channel. The moat that had protected England for over nine hundred years. The wind blew in from the west, bitingly cold, hurling the waves over the shingle. He tried to think of the task in hand: the coastal defences; the Atlantic Wall; but he could only fume at his inability to banish her from his thoughts as he had so many other women before her. At thirty-two, hardened and sophisticated, he had experienced the coup de foudre, the thunderclap of unreasoning, instant infatuation, and he could not free himself from it. His eyes narrowed. He didn’t tolerate weakness in others and he would be damned if he would tolerate it in himself. From now on she would cease to exist.

  Lisette put the tin of powdered milk at the far back of the store cupboard in the pantry, behind tins of other dried foods. It looked less conspicuous there than hidden in the drawers of her dressing table. She knew that with Elise’s departure her father had assumed that all attempts to infiltrate the grand dining-room had been abandoned and she did not disillusion him. Whatever needed doing, she would do alone.

  Her leg had begun to heal and Dr Auge no longer came to the chateau. She mended her bicycle herself, hammering out the mangled frame, soldering new spokes to the wheels. It was Marc
h now and tulips and freesias bloomed in sheltered corners of the garden. She had pruned the roses, cutting out diseased and frost-damaged wood, working until dusk. It was easier not to think when she was tired, and to think was to open herself to such terrible emotions that it was as if she were being rent apart.

  She rarely saw him and when she did, she saw also Paul and André, their hands bound behind their backs, lying in crumpled, blood-stained heaps. He went to Paris on leave; to Rommel’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon; on inspection trips. But whenever he was away the security remained as tight as ever. Sentries were now at Valmy’s gates. No one could enter or leave without running their gauntlet. It was like living in a prison.

  She cycled twice to Bayeux, and both times knew that she had been followed. She did not go to the Bar Candide. She lingered over an anisette at a street café before cycling the long, weary way home. Elise had been right. Dieter had been suspicious and still was. He was waiting for her to expose other members of the Maquis. André and Paul’s deaths had not been enough. She felt ill with the need for revenge. It was as if her very soul needed purging.

  By the time she had reached Sainte-Marie her leg hurt so much that she had to fight back tears of pain. It had been a wasted journey. She toiled up the hill through the beech woods wondering when she could again attempt it. She had to let Elise’s contact at the Bar Candide know what it was that she intended to do. She was too exhausted to brave the snide looks and glances of loitering soldiers by wheeling her bicycle round to its accustomed place in the stables. She leaned it against the outside wall of the kitchen and hauled herself through Valmy’s deserted lower rooms and to her bedroom.

  It was five o’clock in the afternoon. Her mother would be resting; her father taking his usual walk; Marie had said that she was going to visit Madame Chamot who had been ill with bronchitis. Weary with defeat, she crawled into bed fully dressed, and closed her eyes. She would not try to make the trip again. Not until she had completed her self-appointed mission and the camera was full of vital film waiting for development. Sleep tugged at her conscious mind. She was hazy and floating, forgetting the hate that she clung to for survival every waking moment of every day. His face swam into her mind, strong and caring. She felt again the curious rapport; the feeling of being completely at one with another human being. ‘I love you,’ he had said. ‘Love you … love you …’ She could see him, taste him, smell him.

  Footsteps rasped on the cobbles of the courtyard below her window. ‘Are you leaving for Caen immediately, Major?’ Lieutenant Halder asked, his voice slicing through the still air of late afternoon.

  Her eyelids flew open and there was sweat on her brow. She had been dreaming. She had believed that the horror had never happened; that he had walked out of her room after kissing and holding her, and there had been no search in the village; no airman to be found and captured.

  ‘Yes. There have been more arrests. The local Maquis seem to be primed to an invasion on this part of the coast. I want to hear for myself what they have to say.’

  Her breath came fast and shallow. Her German was not good, but the question had been unmistakeable. ‘And the airman we captured in the village, sir?’

  ‘As you might expect, he knew nothing at all about local activities. He was shot two days ago.’ His voice was crisp, matter of fact. The voice of a stranger and an enemy.

  The lieutenant spoke again but she could no longer hear what it was he was saying. Their footsteps faded, and she gazed up at the ceiling, rigid with pain.

  Shot. As Paul and André had been shot. She wondered if the Englishman, too, had been shot in the back. A great shudder ran through her body. She had given herself to Dieter Meyer mentally and physically and even now, when sleep robbed her of the safeguards that sustained her, at some deep, primeval level that she was powerless to control, she was still his. Bile rose up in her throat and she swung her legs off the bed, fighting down wave after wave of nausea and self-loathing.

  He was going to Caen. Now. Immediately. He would be away for at least two hours. Possibly longer. If she was ever going to take the risk of storming the grand dining-room now, surely, was the time to do it.

  But how? The question had racked her every hour of every day since Elise had left. The only person who could give her help was the unknown Jean-Jacques and she had been unable to make contact with him. She had to have a key and only Dieter had a key. There were no duplicates. Not even for the sentries. Her head ached and she pressed her fingers to her throbbing temples. If she had become his lover there would have been opportunities for her to have removed the key from his possession. He would have taken off his jacket, his breeches. The blood pounded behind her eyes and she sprang to her feet with an inarticulate cry, thrusting the image away from her. She had not become his lover. She would never become his lover. Never, never, never!

  A car engine revved into life and she stood, waiting until it faded into the distance. He had gone. She waited for a feeling of exultation but it did not come. There was only cold and pain and a desolation so terrible that she knew it was destroying her.

  She turned away from the bed, knowing that sleep was an impossibility. If she closed her eyes she would see the crumpled bodies of Paul and André; the face of the airman as he had looked up at her seconds before he was dragged away to his death in Caen. And Dieter’s eyes, hot and urgent, as he pleaded with her to forget them; to forget that it had ever happened.

  She walked decisively out of the room. She would prepare tea. She would walk around the outside of the chateau and check again that all the grilles barring the grand dining-room windows were locked. They had been left unlocked once. It was not beyond the realms of possibility that they would be accidentally left unlocked again. She remembered the expression in the Lieutenant’s eyes when he had realised how Paul and André had made their escape. He had been stunned at the carelessness that had made so vital a room insecure. Such carelessness would not be allowed to happen again. Her sortie would be a waste of time. The grilles would be locked and her movements watched, but she had to do something. She had to keep busy, keep moving.

  As she approached the head of the stairs she saw that the hall was still and silent, the young sentry on duty standing impassive-faced. She looked down at him with hatred. He had no right to be in her home. To be fouling it with his presence. As she watched him from the shadows at the top of the stairs he shifted his stance, glancing down at his watch. Her pulse quickened. He was bored and his commanding officer was well on his way to Caen. Perhaps…perhaps…

  ‘Please God, let him desert his post,’ she prayed silently. ‘Please, please.’

  The sentry looked once more at his watch and then, with a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders, strolled away from the grand dining-room towards the front door. She saw him remove a packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket and then he swung Valmy’s great oak door open wide and stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight.

  Her breath was so tight in her throat that she could hardly breathe. If he remained in the open doorway she would be unable to do anything. She saw him pause, look right and left, and then step briskly away in search of a less conspicuous spot in which to enjoy his illicit smoke.

  The door was unguarded. But it was still locked. Her heart began to hammer fast and light. If Elise had been there, Elise could have taken advantage of the situation. Elise could have picked the lock; could have gained entry to the room. She began to hurry down the stairs, her legs trembling, her hands filmed with perspiration. There had been one act of carelessness. The window grille had been left unlocked. If the door should be unlocked too …

  ‘Please,’ she prayed feverishly. ‘Oh please, God, let it be unlocked! Let this be my chance!’

  There wasn’t a sound in the empty entrance hall. It was as if Valmy had been deserted, abandoned. If only the ornate doorknobs on the carved double doors opened to her touch …

  She ran fleet-footedly across the hall, grasping hold of them, prayin
g as she had never prayed before in her life. With eyes closed, she turned and pulled and with old, familiar ease, they opened wide. She gasped and half fell, the blood drumming in her ears and behind her eyes. The miracle had happened! She had been given her chance! The camera. She had to have the camera!

  She spun on her heels, hurtling down the corridor towards the kitchen. The sentry would not be long. He would smoke one cigarette, perhaps two, and then he would return. She half fell against the kitchen door. Five minutes. She had perhaps five minutes in which to retrieve the camera, return to the room and photograph whatever documents she could find. She scrabbled for the door handle, yanking it open, racing across the room to the cupboards.

  Her fingers slid and slipped over tins of chicory, tins of carrots. Dear God! Why couldn’t she move faster? She grabbed the tin of dried milk, pushing the lid off, granules of dried milk spilling to the floor as she extricated the camera. She clutched it tightly to her chest. How long had she taken? Sixty seconds? Two minutes? As if the hounds of hell were at her heels, she leapt once more for the door, running full pelt down the corridor. Time! All she needed was time!

  The grand dining-room doors still stood open. The hall was still deserted. She gave a strangled sob. Just a few more minutes! Only a few more minutes! She darted into the room, her hands trembling violently as she closed the doors behind her. She had to be calm! She had to work swiftly and efficiently. There was a map of the coastline on one wall. A blotter on the table, an ink stand, a tidy pile of paperwork beside it. At least she wasn’t faced with such an array of documents that she had to spend time judging which were of vital importance and which were not.

  She hurried round the corner of the long, polished table. The papers were in meticulous order and would have to be found in meticulous order after she had left the room. She could not allow carelessness now to defeat her chance of success. She was going to win. She was going to serve her country; help the Allies; render worthless all Dieter Meyer’s carefully laid plans.