‘Nous sommes fermes, madame!’ He was a short, balding man of late middle age, with a bristling black moustache and a gruff voice. He was clearly annoyed.
‘Monsieur Vassoir?’
‘Oui, mais—’
‘I hope you speak English. I’m looking for Madame Vassoir. Your wife, perhaps? It’s vital I find her. A matter of life and death.’ His frown deepened. ‘My name’s Charlotte Ladram. I—’
‘My wife does not know you,’ he retorted.
‘No. But I think she knows – knew – my aunt.’
‘Please go away.’ He made to close the door. Desperately, Charlotte thrust her shoulder into the gap.
‘Beatrix Abberley!’ she shouted. ‘My aunt was Beatrix Abberley.’
He pulled back and squinted at her, pushing out his lower lip in a gesture combining pugnacity and deliberation.
‘She sent a letter to a Frenchwoman in June. Arranged to have it sent, I should say, immediately after her death. The Frenchwoman’s name began with V. If your wife was the recipient, then I must speak to her. There was an appeal in the papers here, I know, for Madame V to come forward. But they won’t have explained why it’s so urgent. My niece has been kidnapped and the letter may hold the key to her freedom. To her very life!’
‘What makes you think my wife is this … Madame V?’
‘She sent Beatrix chocolates every Christmas and Easter. She was a friend. Beatrix said so. The label on one of the tins is what brought me here.’
He hesitated a moment longer, then grunted and opened the door sufficiently for Charlotte to enter. As he closed it behind her, the lingering aroma of rich chocolate emerged from the gloom around them. The counters and display cabinets were empty, save for a few of the distinctive green and gold Confiserie Vassoir tins.
‘What has the letter – if there is a letter – to do with your niece’s … enlèvement?’
‘It’s the letter her kidnappers want.’
‘They have said so?’
‘Not exactly. But when I spoke to them—’
‘You have spoken to them?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you know about them?’
‘Nothing – except that they’re Spanish.’
‘Espagnol?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
‘Espagnol,’ he repeated in a disbelieving murmur. ‘Wait here, madame. I will telephone my wife.’ He hurried into the back room. Charlotte heard him dial, then, a moment later, announce himself. ‘Ma chérie? C’est moi. Oui. Au magasin. Écoute bien.’ His speech accelerated beyond Charlotte’s comprehension, though she caught her own name – and Beatrix’s – on several occasions. Vassoir said less – and listened more – as the call proceeded. It drew to a close with expressions such as ‘Oui, oui’ and ‘Immédiatement’. Then he put the telephone down and rejoined her in the shop, frowning solemnly. ‘My wife wants me to take you to her, madame. She is at our home in Suresnes. It is not far. Will you let me drive you there?’
‘She is the Madame V Beatrix wrote to?’
‘Oui.’
‘Then, yes, please take me to her. Straightaway.’
‘My car is parked at the back. Come this way.’
‘One thing, monsieur. When I mentioned Spain, it seemed to make a big difference. Why?’
‘Because my wife is Spanish.’
‘I see.’ Guesswork prompted her to add: ‘What was her maiden name?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Her surname – before you married.’
‘Ah, je comprends.’ For the first time, he smiled. ‘Ortiz. Isabel Ortiz.’
‘And Vicente Ortiz was …’
‘Her father.’
5
THE VASSOIRS LIVED on two floors of a gaunt town house west of the Seine. Charlotte was aware of high ceilings and dark passages, large rooms decorated with a restraint bordering on austerity, but only dimly so. Somehow the surroundings seemed blurred by her thirst for knowledge.
The answer was close now and the minutes remaining before it was revealed to her were harder to bear than the days and weeks that had gone before.
Isabel Vassoir was a slim, elegantly dressed woman in her late fifties with grey hair tied in a bun, immaculately poised between delicacy and frailty. She greeted Charlotte in a drawing room strewn with plants and pictures where an impassive bloodhound dozed before a blazing fire. Marriage to a Frenchman seemed to have erased her Spanish origins completely. There was no breath of the south in her mannered metallic voice. She spoke much better English than her husband and looked at Charlotte with a farther seeing eye. Henri Vassoir left them alone together and Charlotte felt increasingly uncomfortable as she explained how and why she had found her way to Paris. When she concluded by asking if Madame Vassoir still had the letter from Beatrix and if its contents could have provoked Samantha’s abduction, her hostess poured them both a glass of sherry before replying.
‘Yes, Charlotte, the letter – and what came with it – answers all your questions. As what you have told me answers mine. I read the appeal in the newspapers for Madame V to come forward, but they said nothing about abduction or ransom. Even so, you will wonder, why did I not respond? Well, when you have read what Beatrix sent to me, you will understand. I disclose it now only to help you save your niece. Otherwise, I would refuse. Otherwise, it would be safer to keep it hidden.’
‘Why?’
‘First, I must tell you how I came to know Beatrix. She was a good and generous person. She was kind to me and to Henri and to my mother. Too kind, it seems, even to tell us she did not like chocolate.’
‘I don’t recall her ever referring to you.’
‘You would not. She kept her friendship with us secret. Why? Because, she said, her family would not approve. Well, it may have been true, but, since receiving her letter, I know there was another reason. But I must begin at the beginning. I was born in Barcelona in 1929. My father, Vicente Ortiz, was a lorry driver and mechanic. I hardly remember him and what I tell you about him was mostly told to me by my mother. She died eight years ago, here, in this house. According to her, he was too clever for his own good. A kindly uncle with no children of his own had paid for him to be educated, but education only made him discontented with his lot in life. He worked for a furniture manufacturer and was an active member of CNT, the anarchist trades union. When the military rising began in July 1936, he joined the CNT militia and went away to fight. From then on we saw little of him.
‘You must understand I left Spain before my tenth birthday and have never been back since. It is almost as much a foreign country to me as it is to you. I have studied its history because it is the land of my birth and I feel I know it well, but only as a student, not as a patriot, not even as an exile. It was different for my mother. She regarded herself as a Catalan first and last. She remained loyal all her life to the things Franco swept away. She cheered the day he died. She would have danced on his grave if she could. The Civil War never ended for her. It went on burning inside her head. For me it is just a childhood memory of noise and confusion.
‘We lived with my mother’s parents in the Gracia district of the city. My mother worked as a seamstress at the Fabra and Coats factory. My grandmother took in laundry and looked after me and my grandfather. He walked with a stick, trailing one leg. It had been damaged in an accident at the locomotive works where he had been employed in his youth. We were poor, but happy, at least as far as I was concerned. After the rising, the workers took control in Barcelona. The revolution had come. Or so it seemed. Certainly my family believed it. Until the following spring anyway, when it began to disintegrate in squabbling and fighting between factions. Stalinists and Trotskyites and Anarchists all putting their feuds first and the fight against Fascism second. Food started to run short around the same time. Franco’s noose began to tighten round Catalonia’s neck. A cold winter and blanket bombing finished the job.
‘That is how my mother said it was and the history books tell the same story.
When the army rose, the working classes of Barcelona united to defend themselves – and to change society. But they succeeded in neither. Germany and Italy were funding and equipping the Nationalists. To combat them, the Republican government had to seek help from Russia. And Russia’s price was the suppression of revolutionary socialism. The Anarchists were one of the groups they moved against. So, my father ended by fighting for a different cause from the one he had volunteered to defend.
‘I knew nothing of any of this. My recollections of Barcelona are a jumble of hooting cars and waving flags, whining bombs and derelict buildings, food queues and rats and ragged clothes and my hands going blue with the cold of the last winter we spent there. My father came to see us just before Christmas. By then he had been transferred to the remnants of the British Battalion of the International Brigade. I cried all night when he went back to the army. And so did my mother. We never saw him again. News came in March that he had been captured and probably killed during the retreat from Teruel. It was the sort of news a lot of wives and daughters were receiving. The whole Republic was in retreat. And it was not only at the front that people were dying. The Italians began bombing Barcelona in February of 1938. I remember the sheer terror of those raids, of seeing dead bodies lying on the pavement, of witnessing what no nine-year-old girl should ever have to. It was the beginning of the end. But the end was a long time coming. And, meanwhile, a strange thing happened. My mother received a letter. From a woman in England she had never heard of.’
‘From Beatrix?’
‘Yes. From Beatrix. It arrived about two months after the news about my father, although it was only much later that I was told what was in it. Beatrix wrote to say her brother had served with my father and in his last letter to her before dying had asked her to find out whether his old comrade was still alive.
‘Which is exactly what Tristram did ask her to do – in the only one of his letters to Beatrix I’ve read, sent from Tarragona in mid-March 1938.’ Charlotte frowned. ‘But hold on. How did Beatrix know your address?’
‘She said Tristram had told her.’
‘No, no,’ Charlotte objected. ‘He didn’t. It wasn’t mentioned in his letter.’
‘It was in the document accompanying the letter. As you will see.’ Isabel Vassoir smiled. ‘Let me finish my story. Then you will understand how all the pieces fit together. My mother wrote back to Beatrix, telling her my father was almost certainly dead. She expected to hear no more. But Beatrix wrote again, offering her sympathy – and her help, if we needed it. Well, we certainly needed it. Catalonia was cut off from the rest of the Republic by then and slowly being strangled to death. But what could an Englishwoman we had never met do for us? My mother did not reply. She told me later she could not see the point of such correspondence. And I suspect also she did not want to be reminded of my father. So she let the matter drop.
‘In the autumn, my grandfather died, worn out by the struggle for survival. Then, just after Christmas, the Nationalists launched their final offensive against Catalonia. By the middle of January, 1939, they were within reach of Barcelona. The bombing intensified and panic began to spread. Anybody linked with the Republican cause would be in peril of their life under the Fascists. Franco’s ruthlessness was legendary. So, the only thought was how to escape. As the widow of a known Anarchist, my mother had to get away. France had opened its border to refugees and people began streaming north towards it. We joined them, my mother, my grandmother and I, pushing our few belongings in a hand-cart. The journey must have been a torment for them, though for me it was a merciful chaos of trudging along muddy roads, of running for shelter from German fighter planes, of waking in the cart caked with snow while my mother and grandmother strained at the shafts.
‘When we reached France, we were put in a crowded camp with no shelter. It was, in fact, the clearing centre at Le Boulou, but nobody had any idea then where we were or where we were going. After a few days, we were taken to a camp for women and children north of Perpignan, where there was food and shelter, although not enough of either. My grandmother fell ill and there were times when my mother said we should have stayed in Barcelona. She could see no end to the squalor and harshness of life in the camp. Then, in her desperation, she remembered Beatrix’s offer. She wrote a letter to her, asking her to help us in any way she could. She persuaded a Red Cross representative to send it on. She did not know if it would reach Beatrix, of course, nor whether she would respond even if it did.’
‘But it did reach her?’
‘Yes. And she responded, though too late to save my grandmother, who died just before Easter. A few weeks later, Beatrix arrived at the camp and took us away.’
‘Just like that?’
‘For my mother it was a prayer answered, for me like dreaming of paradise and waking to find I was there already. A tall and smartly dressed Englishwoman took my hand and put me in a chauffeur-driven car and, suddenly, after three months of confinement behind barbed-wire fences, we were driving away, through the barrier and down the lanes thick and bright with the leaves and flowers of spring. I cried and laughed and stared and could not believe it was happening. But it was.’
Into Charlotte’s mind came what Uncle Jack had said concerning Beatrix’s whereabouts in the spring of 1939. ‘She’d been to the French Riviera – or it could have been the Swiss Alps – or it could have been both – for a good couple of months.’ She knew now it had been neither. Isabel Vassoir was right. All the pieces were beginning to fit together.
‘How Beatrix arranged our release I do not know. But I imagine the authorities were grateful to anybody who was prepared to take a couple of refugees off their hands and assume responsibility for them. And that is what she did. She rented an apartment for us in Perpignan and bought us food and clothes. She stayed with us for a month while we regained our strength, doing all the cooking and washing until my mother was fit enough to take over. She was our saviour. She was my fairy godmother. She paid for my mother to take French lessons and helped her find work as a seamstress with various drapers in the city. She put us back on our feet and made it possible for us to live again. We owed her everything. It was one of the reasons why I was anxious to learn English at school: so that I could tell her in her own language how grateful I would always be.’
Another beneficiary of Beatrix’s generosity had emerged from her hidden past and sat now smiling faintly at Charlotte across a French drawing room. Beatrix had rescued Vicente Ortiz’s only surviving relatives from the aftermath of a war. She had done what nobody could have expected her to do. And she had done it in secret. ‘Did she tell you about Frank Griffith?’ Charlotte asked after a moment’s thought. ‘Did she tell you how your father sacrificed himself to save Frank?’
‘Yes. And she also told us she did not know where Frank was. She said she had lost touch with him. So, even if my mother wanted to contact him, there was no—’
‘But that wasn’t true!’
‘Exactly. Beatrix helped us, but she also lied to us. Or perhaps I should say she did not trust us with everything she knew. But, then, who did she trust with everything?’
‘Nobody,’ Charlotte replied. ‘But … Why? Why all the secrecy?’
‘When you read what she sent me, Charlotte, you will understand. She gave no hint of its existence during my mother’s life. She remained our friend and advisor. She sent money to pay for my education. When I married Henri, she was generous to him too, putting up some of the capital he needed to open a confiserie in Perpignan. And she helped again later when we moved to Paris. So, you see, we owed her far more than an occasional box of chocolates could repay. But they were all she would accept.’
‘What did she send you?’ Charlotte heard the note of impatience in her voice, but was helpless to restrain it.
‘A document my father had given to her brother. In the accompanying letter, Beatrix said it would be sent to me by a friend in the event of her death. She also implored me not to contact her family. She s
aid she had held the document back for so long because she was afraid it would re-open old wounds for my mother and because she felt sure it was better for us not to know what it contained.’
‘And what did it contain?’
‘See for yourself. The original is in Catalan, but Tristram translated it into English. I will fetch both versions now and let you read the translation. It is time, I think. High time.’
Madame Vassoir rose and walked quietly from the room, patting Charlotte on the shoulder as she passed. The door clicked shut behind her and Charlotte listened intently to the ticking of the clock and the rhythmic snoring of the bloodhound. It would not be long now. A fragment of the damp Paris night – a portion of heavy-curtained solitude – stood alone between her and the truth. When the door re-opened, Beatrix’s last secret would be hers.
6
I AM VICENTE Timoteo Ortiz, a native of Catalonia. Once I would have said I was also a proponent of the ideals of anarcho-syndicalism. But I am no longer sure enough of anything to embrace a political philosophy when the threat of death is close at hand. I am writing this at a small farm near Alfambra, about twenty kilometres north of Teruel, the capital of Lower Aragon. I am billeted here with the other members of a platoon of the British Battalion of the Fifteenth International Brigade. It is early January, 1938, and we expect to be called up any day to participate in the battle for Teruel which is going on to the south of us. I have a presentiment that it will be the last battle of this war for me, the last of too many. Teruel is a cold, sad place. To attempt its capture in the middle of winter is madness. But perhaps its capture is not the objective. Some say the government hopes, by attacking it, to force Franco into an armistice. If so, it hopes in vain. Franco will accept nothing but surrender. And then he will execute those who have surrendered.
Hand In Glove - Retail Page 37