Never Leave Me

by Margaret Pemberton

  It was assumed that when hostilities ended she, too, would leave Normandy for Paris. She hauled another beam of charred timber from the ruins, dropping it on the cobbles of the courtyard, trying to imagine a new life in Paris, and failing. It was as if misery had robbed her of imagination. She could not think ahead, she could only-live each day as it came finding pleasure in small things: the family of dormice who had made a home in the rubble; the wisteria that defiantly flowered against the smoke-blackened walls; the clean feel of the sea breeze against her face as she walked the headland.

  There was no longer any fighting around Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts, but the battle for Normandy was far from over. In hedgerows and roadsides, crude wooden crosses marked the graves of the hastily-buried dead. In the east, the British had still not taken Caen. In the west there were reports of fierce fighting as the Americans struggled to take St Lo. It was still not beyond the realms of possibility that the Allies could be squeezed back into the sea and she gathered every scrap of information that she could about the invasion force’s progress.

  By the light of an oil lamp, she would sit at her father’s side in the evening as he pored over a map of France, shading in the areas he believed to be in Allied hands.

  ‘The Allies must break out of Normandy and take Paris by the end of the summer,’ he said worriedly, a deep frown furrowing his brow. ‘Once the winter weather sets in, high seas will make it difficult for them to continue ferrying in the provisions and equipment they need. And they can’t break out of Normandy until Caen is taken.’

  Lisette hugged her knees, her thoughts not on Caen but on St Lo. It was there that the Americans were fighting. There, in all probability, that Colonel Dering would be fighting. She hoped that he was safe. If he wasn’t she would never know. There was no one who would write and tell her. She stared once more at the map, her eyes bleak. St Lo was the headquarters of General Marcks, a German commander Dieter had admired unstintingly. The tough LXXXIV Infantry Corps was under his command. Though much smaller, it was possible that St Lo would be as difficult to capture as Cherbourg had been.

  She asked old Bleriot every day if he had gleaned any further news about troop movements inland, but he could only tell her that fresh troops were still arriving, St Lo had not been taken, and his sciatica was so bad he needed to drink a jar of calvados a day in order to ease the pain.

  Greg Dering had to admit that it was a hell of a time to have a woman on the brain. For three weeks he and his men had been continually under heavy fire. Exhausted, mud-spattered and unshaven, they had forded streams, crawled up wooded hillsides and waded through marshy wastelands. They had been raked with machine-gun fire, lobbed with mortar shells and confronted by tanks. They had endured the anguish of the screams of their wounded and had had to leave their dead behind them. The road to St Lo was slippery with their blood, and Greg knew that when it was over he wouldn’t want to spend a day longer in France than was absolutely necessary. Which meant that he would have to marry her now, as soon as there was a lull in the fighting, as soon as he could get a pass.

  He wiped the sweat from his brow and continued to wriggle on his belly towards the farmhouse full of Germans that was his objective. A French girl! His mother would love it. Daughter of an east coast millionaire, she thought the only culture in the world worth having was French.

  Bullets whizzed past him. Heavy bursts of small arms fire continued to pin him and his men down. He had to make a crucial decision. Either to order his men to start crawling towards the rear of the farm buildings and abandon much of the ground they had gained, or charge the farmhouse and risk getting the entire company wiped out in the process.

  He shouted across to his second-in-command who was pinned down a short distance away from him, across a narrow dirt road. ‘We’re going to get some artillery smoke on that goddamned farmhouse, Major! Then we’re going to make a bayonet charge!’

  It didn’t occur to him that she might refuse him. Failure was a word that was not in his vocabulary. Beneath his easygoing manner was a confidence imbued by wealth and social prestige. His mother had been born into that world. His father had fought and clawed his way there. Greg had inherited characteristics from both of them: the recklessness and gut instint that had prompted his mother to elope with a muscular lifeguard only days before her society wedding was to take place; and the fierce ambition and sheer tenaciousness which had lifted his father from the beaches of California to the presidency of one of its most powerful companies. He had learned early that instinct was a God-given gift to be followed. He was following it now. He was going to charge the farmhouse, and he was going to marry Lisette de Valmy.

  As the hot, stifling days of July drew to a close, Lisette was overcome by an increasing restlessness. She tried to sublimate it in hard physical work, but it wouldn’t be quenched. When it became unbearable she would walk as near to the beach as troop activity permitted and stare out across the waves. The old Lisette, the pretty teenager in red beret and shabby coat, cycling the Normandy lanes on errands for Paul, had gone for good. There had been an innocence about her then that she knew she would never recapture. And there seemed no place in the life she was now living for the new Lisette. The Lisette who had loved so fiercely and passionately; the Lisette who had grown from childhood to womanhood in the lamplit glow of the small turret room.

  She dug her hands deeper into the pockets of her skirt and turned away from the grey surging waves. For the first time in her life they had failed her. They had not soothed and calmed her, they had merely intensified her feelings of frustration.

  He was waiting for her when she returned, leaning with casual ease against the gateway that led from the drive to the courtyard, his curly brown hair thick and springy as heather, his smile vivid in his sun-bronzed face.

  She stopped short, disbelieving her eyes, and then she began to run towards him, relief at his safety bubbling up inside her.

  His heart began to bang against his ribs. She had drawn her hair away from her face, securing it in the nape of her neck with a ribbon. Beneath the dark sweep of her brows her eyes looked even more startlingly violet than ever.

  ‘Colonel Dering! What a lovely surprise,’ she exclaimed, running up to him, her face radiant.

  His grin widened, his arms opened, and to her astonishment and his delight, she entered them unhesitatingly.

  Shock reverberated through her. She had meant nothing sexual her action. She had simply been pleased to see him and it had seemed quite natural, when he had opened his arms to her, to enter them and hug him welcomingly as she would have done her father. The minute that she had done so she knew that there was a very vast difference between her father and Colonel Dering. She put her hands against his chest, flushed and disconcerted, trying to distance-herself from his hard, disturbing body.

  He looked down at her, not smiling any more. His eyes were brown, dark and warm, with tiny flecks of gold near the pupils and an expression that had nothing to do with mere friendship.

  ‘I missed you,’ he said with stark simplicity. ‘I want to marry you.’

  She stood in the circle of his arms and she didn’t tell him that he was crazy. Nothing seemed crazy any more. Life had ceased to exist by the old rules. War had stripped away conventional behaviour and primitive, urgent responses had become normality.

  ‘I know nothing about you,’ she said, and even as she said it, she knew that it wasn’t true. She knew a lot about him. She knew that he was a man who commanded respect from other men. She knew that he was kind. She knew that she was physically drawn to him, that she liked him. And felt safe with him.

  He flashed her a dazzling, down-slanting smile. ‘That’s easily altered,’ he said, not releasing his hold of her. ‘I’m a Californian. I’m twenty-seven. Financially sound. Mentally stable. And I’ve never been married. Will that do for starters?’

  A gurgle of laughter welled up deep inside her. For the first time since Dieter’s death she felt warm and loving and alive, and then
her laughter faded. She turned away, breaking free of him, her eyes shadowed and full of pain.

  ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

  At the tone of her voice a slight frown creased his brow. She had begun to walk towards the ravaged rose gardens and he walked at her side, not touching her, saying, ‘I know I’d have been a fool not to have come back for you. I know everything that I need to know. I know that I don’t make mistakes. That this isn’t a decision I’m going to regret.’

  She stood still, looking up at him, the scent of the roses that had survived the fire thick as smoke in the July sunlight. With passionate fierceness she wanted to touch him again. To purge her restlessness in the comfort of his arms. To feel alive again. She said quietly, ‘The man I loved and was going to marry died only a few weeks ago.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, reaching out for her hands and holding them fast. ‘Luke told me.’

  Her eyes flew wide with shock. It had not occurred to her that Luke Brandon had spoken to him about Dieter.

  ‘I don’t expect you to forget the past as if it never existed,’ he said gently, ‘but you can’t live in it, Lisette. It’s gone. It will never return.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to stop loving him!’ she cried, unable to contain her anguish any longer. ‘I don’t know how to start to love someone else!’

  A smile touched the corners of his mouth. ‘Let me show you,’ he said, drawing her towards him with strong, firm hands.

  She was overcome by a feeling of déjá vu. In just such a way had she entered Dieter’s arms. Barely knowing him. Trusting her instincts. Capitulating to a primeval sixth sense that overcame reason and rationality.

  She looked up into his sun-bronzed face. This time she was in command of herself. There was a choice. She could draw back if she wished. She could continue to live in restless isolation, tormented by the past and unable to envisage a future. Or she could alter her life as surely and as irrevocably as she had on first entering Dieter’s arms. The choice was hers. All she had to do was make it.

  Laughter lines creased the corners of his eyes and etched his mouth. His brows were thick, many shades darker than the honey-brown tumble of his hair. It was the face of a man with no self-doubt. A handsome face. Confident. Gregarious. Generous.

  He held her securely, sliding one hand up the length of her spine, and into her hair, cradling the nape of her neck, raising her face to his. She shivered, an impulse of sensuality flaring through her as slowly, purposefully, he lowered his head to hers.

  There was one flash of doubt, a surge of guilt that nearly overwhelmed her, and then her body yielded against the hard sureness of his, her arms went up and around his neck, and her mouth parted willingly beneath his, warm and sweet.

  He was shocked at the fierceness of his response to her. He wanted to feel her flesh naked against him: the upthrust of her nipples in the palms of his hands, her hips grinding in passionate movement against his. The rose garden was deserted. All he had to do was ease her down beneath him, to unbutton her blouse, push her skirt high … He knew if he did she would be lost to him forever. He had sensed her momentary doubt. She still loved Brandon. She had told him so when she had told him she needed time to learn to love someone else. If he went too far, too fast, too clumsily, he would frighten her away forever. She wasn’t hungry for him yet as he was for her. He raised his head from hers, his eyes gleaming. She would be though, given time. She would learn to love him under the very best possible conditions. As his wife.

  ‘In forty-eight hours I shall be leaving Normandy and moving towards Paris,’ he said, still holding her close. ‘I want you to marry me before I go.’

  The soft curve of her brows rose in disbelief and then her lips curved into a smile. ‘That isn’t possible. In France, weddings take time. There has to be a civil ceremony as well. Permission has to be granted. Banns have to be called …’

  He hooked a finger under her chin, tilting the exquisite triangle of her face towards his. ‘I’ve already taken the liberty of obtaining permission, and Sainte-Marie’s mayor is only top happy for the civil ceremony to take place without delay. The priest was very understanding about the banns. He’s waiting to speak to you now. He’s with your father, marking in the new lines of Allied control on a map of France.’

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ Beneath the thick sweep of her lashes her eyes were incredulous.

  He grinned. ‘You’d better,’ he said, circling her waist with his arm, beginning to lead her back towards the courtyard and the stables. ‘Father Laffort is expecting to speak to a blushing bride-to-be.’

  ‘But how could you possibly have known that I would say yes?’ she asked, full of laughter. ‘You hadn’t even asked me!’

  He took her shoulders, swinging her round to face him. ‘I’m asking you now,’ he said. ‘Will you marry me?’

  As if to compensate for the flowers that had burned and died, those that had survived had bloomed with ferocious splendour. Their scent hung heavy in the afternoon sunlight. Bees droned slumberously. In the far distance she could hear the faint surge of the sea. Time spun out in a long, fragile moment.

  She lifted her face to his, the dark fall of her hair shimmering glossily.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, dizzy with recklessness as he exuberantly circled her waist with his hands, lifting her off her feet and swinging her round with a whoop of triumph.

  When they walked into Henri de Valmy’s makeshift sitting room above the stable, he stared at them in astonishment. Lisette’s hand was held firmly in the American’s, her eyes warm with an expression of happiness he had thought he would never see there again.

  ‘I’m going to marry Colonel Dering, Papa.’

  Henri rose dazedly to his feet, leaving Father Laffort still sitting at the table with its large-scale map of France. ‘So he told me when he arrived, ma chére. But I must confess that I thought he had made a mistake …’

  The tall, toughly built American at his daughter’s side grinned. ‘It’s not a mistake, sir. With your permission we’d like to be married now, before I move on towards Paris.’

  ‘But the paperwork …’ Henri protested faintly.

  ‘I have my birth certificate, my medical card and my permission to marry from my commanding officer,’ Greg said, taking a wallet out of the inner pocket of his combat jacket. ‘Father Laffort has no objections. He’s happy to marry us right away if that is agreeable to you, sir.’

  Henri turned to Lisette. ‘Is that what you want, ma chére? Are you sure?’

  She stepped towards him and took his hands. ‘Yes, Papa, I’m sure.’

  Henri lowered his voice discreetly. ‘And does the Colonel know about …’ he cleared his throat, leaving Dieter’s name unspoken. Father Laffort’s ears were sharp.

  She nodded, ‘Yes, Luke told him.’

  Some of Henri’s tension eased. If the American knew about Dieter Meyer then there was nothing more to be said. If she wanted to marry him he would not stand in her way. Better an American for a son-in-law than a German.

  The wedding took place three hours later in Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts’ tiny Norman church. Roses from Valmy, pale flushed. Ophelias and milk-white Gloire de Dijons massed the small stone window-sills and crowded the foot of the altar.

  There were only eight people present: the Mayor; Father Laffort, small and spry and enjoying the celebratory nature of his task after the grimness of the burials that had taken place; Madame Chamot, who had insisted that their few brief hours together after the wedding should be spent in the privacy of her cottage, while she absented herself on a visit to Madame Pichon; Old Bleriot, washed and shaved and ramrod straight in a shiny pin-striped suit; Major Harris, who was acting as best man; Henri; and the bride and groom.

  Her dress was one that Madame Chamot had worn thirty years ago at a garden party in Deauville. It was of cream lace, high at the throat, the sleeves extending in delicate points over the back of her hands, the long skirt cascading gently to the floor. She had swept
her hair high, coiling it on the top of her head, delicate tendrils curling at her temples and in the nape of her neck. A wisp of veiling, purloined from one of Madame Chamot’s summer hats, was held in place by a full-blown rose.

  Greg’s battle-stained uniform had been exchanged for one that was spanking clean and freshly pressed, a feat which had been harder to achieve than all Lisette’s bridal finery. His confidence and easy manner had relaxed even Henri. When he thought of the anguish of the last few months, it was a marriage he could view with nothing but relief.

  As dusk fell and candles flared, they sang Lisette’s favourite hymn and then Father Laffort stood before them. ‘Lisette and Gregory,’ he intoned, speaking slowly so that the American would understand. ‘You have come together in this church so that the Lord may seal and strengthen your love in the presence of the church’s minister and this community.’

  The community, represented by old Bleriot and Madame Chamot, straightened their backs and stood stiffly in the ancient pews.

  ‘Christ abundantly blesses this love. He has already consecrated you in baptism and now he enriches and strengthens you by special sacrament so that you may assume the duties of marriage in mutual and lasting fidelity.’

  Lisette’s throat tightened. She had believed that she would stand and hear these words with Dieter. For a second a vision of what might have been swam before her eyes. Her fingers tightened on her posy of roses. She wasn’t marrying Dieter. Dieter was dead. She was marrying Greg Dering. Tough, laughing-eyed, generous-hearted. She was marrying him and she was going to make him happy.

  ‘And so, in the presence of the church, I ask you to state your intentions,’ Father Laffort said solemnly.

  Greg looked down at her, and at the understanding and reassuring expression in his eyes she wondered if he had known what she was thinking. She smiled up at him, wanting to ease his concern, and then Father Laffort was saying, ‘Lisette and Gregory, I shall now ask you freely to undertake the obligations of marriage, and to state that there is no legal impediment to your marriage. Are you ready to do this and, without reservation, to give yourselves to each other in marriage?’