“You need a shave,” she said, tiptoeing closer to drink in the elegance of his profile unobserved. The corners of his mouth turned up; he was in a very good mood.
“Later. Tell me your news. All the latest from the house,” he said.
She considered.
“Pauline has finished her trousseau.”
“Poor girl. Now she will have to marry the country bumpkin.”
“And the mother-in-law will turn up her nose at her silk stockings and make her wear sabots.”
“And milk the goats. And?”
“Renée is talking about buying this house. She says she has to pay her dues.”
“Renée pays her dues to everyone. Police, the Germans, any authority. But in her business, the most important one is the emperor of Marseilles,” he said.
“Who’s that?”
“Carbone. King of the thieves.”
“She tried him, to help Otto. But he could do nothing. So perhaps he’s not even a prince, not even a knight.”
“You little cynic.”
Ilse always spoke of her father to François in a very practical way. Such questions kept alive the myth that something could be done while placing him in a separate world, one for which François was responsible and she therefore was not. Whenever her imagination leapt to Otto and what could be happening to him, she suppressed it.
“Read my hand,” she said.
“No. You do me first.”
“Which one? Future or past?”
“Both.”
He held up his hands. She drew up the chair and took the right hand, becoming no wiser, pretending to scrutinise it properly while she absorbed the way his chest rose and fell, the whole relaxed air he had. She turned his warm fingers over, looked at the little creases below the fingers, studied the nails. Every millimetre of him was beautifully made.
“I see—a great success. An award—no, a medal. A prize.”
“Aha! At fourteen I was the junior table tennis champion of Warsaw.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What happened?”
“I was unbeatable. Until I was beaten. By a boy two years younger, but six inches taller.”
“A monster. Was it your finest moment?”
“No.”
“What was?”
“Definitely—this,” he said. He was deeply relaxed, his eyes closed, as though at any moment he might go to sleep.
“Right,” she said. “I’m looking—I see—ten children.”
“Impossible. You’re losing your powers. Let me do you. Past or future?”
“Future.”
He sat up and took her left hand and studied the palm. She moved to sit beside him, bouncing him a couple of centimetres along the bed. In a wave, she smelt the strong scent of gardenias, which La Petite Louise loved so much. He had spent time in somebody’s bed. Of course he had. No wonder he was so relaxed. Ilse opened and then closed her mouth. There was nothing she could say. His beautiful mouth went on smiling at her. She hated him.
“I see much walking, Mademoiselle. Serving your country. High mountains and deep seas. Oh, look at this. A tall dark stranger. Or is that me?”
Ilse snatched her hand back.
“No, because you’re a gangster,” she heard herself say.
“You’re a bandit. You should know. One bandit recognises another.”
He toppled back again and crossed his ankles. She closed her eyes in silent, blind rage. A match rasped. She smelt the smell of extreme luxury, an English Player’s Navy Cut.
“Want one, little one?”
Rage went away. Her mouth hurt and some sad scratchy place behind her eyes. She leant forward, took the cigarette, inhaling as hard as she could until it overwhelmed every other sensation, every other smell. And then she held out her hand.
“Tell me about that tall dark stranger,” she said, and when he bent forward in mock scrutiny of her hand, she stared at his long lashes. He brought his head up suddenly, meeting her gaze unexpectedly. Always, this was a kind of little shock.
“Two strangers. A professor and his wife.” He waxed cynical, stressing the first word. “They made a mistake. Stayed too long. They thought they were safe and could leave at any time.”
“Why?”
“Lithuanian passports. Very good ones from the consul at Aix, a Frenchman. No longer recognised by Spain. Things change. People are getting stranded.”
“What do you want me to do?”
She knew. It was much safer for a girl to take them.
“Something I forgot to give you,” he said. “I’ve been carrying it around for weeks.” From his pocket, he drew the photograph of her parents, a little crumpled, and carefully smoothed it out.
This time, because she would be gone for so much longer, she was forced to tell Renée something about what was going on.
“I could kill that great Polish streak of trouble,” Renée said. “What right does François have to get a child mixed up in such things? I knew you were up to something. I’m not a fool.”
“I won’t be long. Just a few days.”
She sighed heavily. Eyes cast down, Ilse waited, studying the cracks in the linoleum floor. “Please,” she said, “don’t treat me like a child.”
Renée reached forward and took her hands, held them between hers. “You are a child. You are so much your father’s child,” she said. “I honour it in you.” Her warm hands managed to convey some feeling of entreaty. “Be careful. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose me either.” They both laughed.
“If I was your mother, I wouldn’t let you go. I would never, never let you out of my sight,” Renée said. Ilse sighed, turning away and wishing she would not come out with sentimental assertions that, being untrue, did nobody any good and somehow demeaned them both.
She met them in a house in Aix-en-Provence behind the Cours Mirabeau in a warren of tiny streets and alleyways. It was uneasily close to the Roy René, a hotel crammed full of German officers. The “professor” was white-haired and eminent-looking. He listened very attentively as Ilse explained that they could get out of France without exit visas. She could take them from the outskirts of Marseilles to somewhere near the Spanish border town of Banyuls. A guide, who knew the route across, would take them on.
“I don’t know how to thank you enough,” he said. He had a very deep, fruity voice. His French was good, but he would never pass for a native.
“My wife will want to thank you herself. Please wait a moment.”
“I don’t need thanks—”
He had already gone to the door, was calling “Gretli!” softly. His elegant wife, perhaps thirty years his junior, made Ilse feel like a grubby child. Her lovely legs in high heels brought to mind a Parisienne on the boulevards with her tiny dog.
“Mademoiselle, you are very brave and very kind,” she said.
She had the unmistakable twang of a Swiss. When she smiled, her eyes slanted up like those of a cat. Ilse could not stop staring at her perfect features, which were unnaturally even in a face that was just a touch too broad.
Fuelled by gazogène,79 the bus wound around the loopy coast roads in a series of shuddering starts, depending on whether the gas was firing or, as generally was the case, not. Fortunately the bus was half empty. The professor’s wife was conspicuous in a very elegant tweed suit and matching coat, lined with fur. She held her husband’s hand and whispered things. She had some intensely female quality, which was beauty, of course, but not only that. It was some other thing, a mixture of innocence and knowledge. Ilse decided that she was aware of her incongruity beside such a man and gloried in it. It was a kind of provocation.
On steep roads, the bus kept breaking down. After the fourth halt it emptied out, leaving Ilse and her passengers on their own.
“The Portuguese have stopped giving transit visas on Chinese, Siamese and Belgian Congo visas. They already have lots of stranded refugees, so be very careful onc
e you’re across. Don’t be conspicuous.”
They could not help being that. She decided not to tell them that one of their people had been picked up on the train to Barcelona; another on the train to Madrid. François had told her, not Raymond, who had a soft spot for her and did not want her to worry.
The professor listened to all these hints attentively. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
He blinked faint disbelief. “Where are your parents, my dear?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they in France?”
She shrugged. She was supposed to tell them nothing: not where she lived nor how old she was, nothing beyond the name they had been given for her: Marguérite. She felt tempted to talk to him. His eyes were so very intelligent.
The driver raked the ash and cinders out of the cooker on the back of the bus, scraped out the tar and started rebuilding the fire from the stack of charcoal in the trailer the bus towed behind it. It was going to take a long time before the fire got going.
“Were your parents in Paris?”
She shook her head.
“My wife would have liked to stay there. Altogether, she loves to be in France. Alas, Paris has become exactly like Germany, Jews excluded everywhere—” His wife nudged his arm. A passenger was climbing back up onto the bus, stamping his feet to keep warm. The temperature was dropping all the time. Night fell. It took a further hour for the cooker to produce enough power to start the bus. Still, it laboured and strained to get over the hill. The passengers were to follow on foot until they reached a level or downhill stretch. Gretli, walking with delicacy on her high heels, would never get over the mountains with that footwear. Ilse could not imagine how they would cope. She was lagging behind already.
“So your mother, what is she like?”
Even while it gave her a sharp pang, Ilse marvelled that he should pick up the conversation so precisely.
“Brilliant. Brave. I’m not at all like her.”
“I can see that,” he said, and his smile put her back into another moment, one that belonged rather to Albert.
“And your father?”
“You know,” she said, “we’re not supposed to speak of the past.”
“Then let us talk of the future. You tell me what you will become. That is the important thing, not being, but becoming.”
She could not think what to say to this.
“What would you like to be?”
The thought truly worried her.
“I’m on my own,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“So what remains?” He seemed to be saying it to himself.
“I don’t think there is anything, I mean, anything to hold on to, not anymore,” she said.
“Es bleibt uns vielleicht irgend ein Baum an dem Abhang, daϐ wir ihn täglich wiedersähen,”80 he said. She stopped dead. Now it was as if Albert was standing there beside her.
“Is it Rilke?”
“Oh, you are a wise child.”
“Wer jetzt kein Haus hat—” She recited it.
“Wonderful,” he said. “Did you learn that at school?”
She shook her head. “A friend taught me those poems. He went the same way you’re going. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He’s fine. We’ll hear for sure when he gets to America,” she said. She would have liked to hear more of his poem, but his interest in her was waning, his attention turned away, as he waited for his pretty wife to catch up with him. Madame scolded him a little for not waiting and he soothed and stroked her, and Ilse hurried away from her sharpness and from the too-soothing tone in his voice, and went at full pelt to the top of the hill. The professor was not a friend. Friendships like this were an illusion.
Very cold now, they waited for the bus to catch up. When the professor ambled away, his wife came very close to Ilse and spoke in an intimate voice. “Can you give him a message?”
Ilse was puzzled. “Your husband’s over there.” She pointed out where he was.
“François. Tell him that it was worth it,” the woman said, with her perfect smile. “Tell him I won’t forget. I will never forget, those exact words.”
Ilse could not find a single word to say.
“Will you remember, my dear girl? It’s very important.” She smiled again. She was so used to charming everyone that perhaps she did not notice when it did not work. Ilse nodded several times. They heard the bus approaching, labouring up the hill. At the summit, it stopped. The professor returned and they got in, went to the very back row, the three of them occupying the central part. Soon, the few remaining passengers fell into tired huddles of sleep. In the morning, with a bleary look Ilse watched the professor’s wife open her eyes and spring immediately into beauty, watched her put on her lipstick and face and, last of all, take a little cut-glass bottle from her bag and spray her wrists and neck with perfume. An intense smell of gardenias wafted across.
The call came three weeks after she had delivered the Swiss couple. It was pitch-black outside the farmhouse, which lay many kilometres from the nearest village. Nevertheless, one of François’s cheminots81 from Marseilles stood armed at the window, keeping a lookout. Others whom she did not know, from farther down the coast, surrounded the farm. These young men had dark, watchful faces. He did not want her to know about their activities and she did not try to find out. These days, it was almost impossible to have a conversation with him. He was perpetually anguished over the news from Poland, over his own powerlessness to change anything. She was there because they needed a woman. A body to wear a nurse’s uniform, that was all she was. She had specifically asked for work that would help the fight, something real that would make a difference to the war.
Ilse slipped quietly into the other room. Through the partly opened door, she could see the young Englishman tip-tapping out his code in Morse, frowning with concentration, one hand steadying the other in the sling. There was a piece of paper in front of him. German troop movements perhaps, or locations of ammunition dumps. It was better not to know. He had broken his right arm, the one he was now using, getting out of a prison in the Dordogne and had made his way south. They had not managed to find a trustworthy doctor to set it. He winced from time to time as it jarred on the key. She knew that he had to stop soon, or else the Germans would get a fix on the signal. She closed the door very quietly, so nobody would disturb him.
When he opened the door and came out of the room, Ilse went in past him, thinking to help him carry the heavy wireless transmitter. She had nothing; the others were all carrying their Sten guns. She knelt before it, taking care not to sully or tear the nurse’s uniform she wore, which was too small. The case needed both hands to shift. Made of steel, it was the size of a small suitcase. She heaved. She could barely lift it off the ground.
“May I?”
The Englishman was standing behind her. He leant over and easily swung the heavy box into the air with his one good hand. Soft brown eyes met hers. He was both tall and broad, with a big, good-humoured face and a very gentle manner that seemed slightly at odds with his robust appearance.
“Comment t’appelles-tu?”82
“Violaine,” she said. She already knew that his name was Arnaud. He waited, politely, at the door for her to go out first. They walked across the field.
The night was very clear and cold. She was shivering. They had obtained a nurse’s uniform for her, but not the cape to wear over it. The ambulance from the asylum was parked beside a ditch. Three men stood beside it. Two of the men put the Englishman in a straitjacket, rotating him. Who would want to interrogate a madman? It must have hurt when they tightened it round him, pulling the broken arm across his body, but he did not complain. They put a bandage over his head. She steadied him, getting in. One man rode ahead on a bike; two were in the front of the ambulance. It jerked from side to side, seesawing over the ruts and onto the road. They made their way by moonlight. Ilse held on tight. The young ma
n lay very still. They were fortunate. So far there had been no roadblocks to test the subterfuge.
She could see the back of François’s head through the glass. He did not once look round. Despair filled her, that he needed her only occasionally for missions such as this; that he did not even like her. He was so contradictory, first using her, then wanting to minimise the risk. Then her mind leapt on to other familiar worries: that she should have fled to Spain, that she had made a mistake, staying in France. In one sense she had stopped caring about what she actually did, day to day, providing she was of some use. In another sense she never stopped worrying. Stop thinking, she told herself sternly. It was impossible.
There came a low murmuring. “Mademoiselle l’infirmière,”83 the young man was saying in a weak voice. He sounded unwell. Working against the motion of the ambulance, Ilse made her way over and knelt beside him, steadying herself against the stretcher. He spoke so quietly that she could not hear.
“What is the matter?”
He whispered something. She put her face down close, to hear better. Up came his head. Utterly taken by surprise, she did not move away. His lips were very soft and warm. It was very odd, to be kissing a man. But it was not unpleasant. She pulled away and looked at him. A wonderful smile spread across his face. He had two deep dimples.
“This medicine is the best one for me, nurse,” he said. “But I need much more. I can’t put my arms round you, can I?”
She shook her head.
“But you can put your arms round me.”
He was looking at her with a very hopeful expression. She put her hands round his head and, holding it still against the jolting, dropped her mouth towards his. Just before her lips touched his, she pulled away. He groaned.
“I don’t know how to kiss,” she said.
“Let’s try.”
Their noses bumped painfully. Was he laughing at her? No. She moved her head round a little, concentrated. This was rather better. It was not the excitement of standing next to François; it was another feeling altogether. She came up for air.
“This time, breathe through your nose,” he said.
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