Autumn Leaves

by Tessa Lunney

  When I met Maisie last year by accident in the street, her high hair and purposeful stride unmistakable even out of uniform, the world was suddenly sunnier. The world was safer; whenever it looked like I might get lost in cocktails, lovers, and spy work, she led me back to myself. She saw me, she knew me almost as well as Tom did, and I needed her. I hadn’t called her as I had been hiding. Now I felt I would fade away if she didn’t turn up soon.

  “Katie King!” Her enthusiastic wave, her flash-bulb smile: my Maisie. I pushed past the polite tea-sippers to get to her as quickly as possible, throwing myself into her strong arms and hugging her until she squeaked.

  “There’s only one person in the world who calls me Katie King.”

  “I came as soon as I got that telegram, though to be honest, it wasn’t that hard to leave the household accounts. When did you get back to Paris?”

  “A week ago. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long—”

  “Pfft, don’t be silly,” she said, as we walked arm in arm back to our table. “You had to find your Kiki-legs, you know, like sea-legs, only for Paris.”

  “I was called Katherine for a year. The first few times I didn’t even respond, I didn’t know who they were talking to. But Kiki doesn’t fit Australia. It’s too…”

  “French. Which is why you’re always Katie King to me.”

  She smiled, a real smile of love and joy. When I first met her, she’d had little freckles all over her nose, but they had disappeared after the first winter in the hospital tents and had never returned. She squeezed my hand, but when I returned the squeeze it turned into another hug across the table. Although I embraced her with all my might, I was so slight compared to her that I felt like a child hugging an adult. I could feel the muscles in her shoulders and back flex, whereas my strength was simply desperation. She was taller than me, even accounting for her usual bouncing hair, which today was tucked securely away. She pulled back from the hug and smoothed my messy bob. She was wearing a sheer cream blouse and a tight brown skirt, a palette which looked subtle, sophisticated, and very Parisian.

  “You’re even stronger than when I left, Maisie.”

  “I’m back on the wards.”

  “What, they’re paying you?”

  “Nope, I’m still married.”

  “You’re not working for free? Oh, Maisie…”

  “It’s just so boring being a housewife! I can’t do it. I’ve told Ray, I’d rather lance a boil than spend more than five minutes choosing curtains. You know, the upholsterer came in with six books of samples and a packed lunch? He expected to be in apartment all morning. He was shocked when I sent him off with an order in under ten minutes. It would have been five but he insisted on a cup of tea.”

  My face hurt with grinning. “And what else, Maisie? What else?”

  She winked. “Chocolate first. Here, I’ll order.”

  “Your French has improved then.”

  “It’s had to, working on the wards. Even in the American Hospital.” She ordered us pots of chocolate and the famous hazelnut Mont Blanc pastries.

  “Now, Katie, tell me all about your mother. I can see your sorrowful business isn’t finished. You wear your sadness like a skin disease.”

  “Charming.”

  “It isn’t.”

  I laid out the year as a story, from the moment I stepped off at Woolloomooloo to the moment I reunited with Bertie, the gilded mirrors and the smell of hot chocolate lending a fairy tale quality to my words. She listened as a friend, as a nurse, as one who knows the action of grief. She didn’t interrupt, her strong hands cutting the pastries into tiny slices. As I spoke, I felt the Sydney summer, when the humidity sat on the streets like a drunk and I was sunk in darkness. I felt how the colder southerly winds brought the sounds from the harbor and the street and let me breathe. I saw how I was jolted out of my slump by my aunt, a shock that would have broken me if it had come too soon, but instead came at just the right time to set me in motion.

  “You’re stronger than when you left, Katie. Stronger, perhaps, than you realize.”

  “It’s my only hope.” I rolled the chocolate round my mouth, sip by tiny sip, it was so rich and sweet. The pastries were now only crumbs. “How did you cope, Maisie?”

  “With what? My mother’s death? I only ever knew various nuns and matrons.”

  “I thought…”

  “It’s the life of a mission kid.” She shrugged. “I never knew my mother. I wasn’t that lucky.”

  She returned the squeeze of my hand.

  “It’s why…” She exhaled with force. “It’s why it’s so complicated… my grief when I lost the baby.” She couldn’t stop her tears then, dabbing at her eyes as though to push the tears back in.

  “I didn’t want to get pregnant. Ray expects a nanny, he wants to send his children to boarding school. But I can’t, I just can’t hand over my children to some officious bitter matron, who enforces prayers at bedtime and whacks your palm if you ask for more dinner.”

  “Oh, her… I know that matron.”

  “You see? Until I win that fight: no kids. But the pregnancy just happened, in the way they do, and I loved the little thing as soon as I knew it existed, imagining it blue-eyed like Ray or brown-eyed like me… This was my family, here, I could set things right. I could be grounded in the world in the way I always should have been, so when I woke up with vice-like pain and blood on the sheets…”

  “Maisie, Maisie…”

  “He didn’t understand, he just said we’ll have another, we’ll try again—which I know, of course, as a nurse, pregnancies fail all the time—but he couldn’t possibly understand that this blood is history, it releases ghosts…” She put her face in her hands.

  “This place is too polite for what we need to say now, Maisie.”

  She sniffed, blinked, wiped her eyes on the napkin and her nose on the back of her hand.

  “You know all the bohemian cafés, Katie. Take me somewhere where my tears can turn to laughter.”

  19

  “angel child”

  We leaned over the balustrade of the Pont Neuf, Sainte Chapelle behind us, tourists all around us, the silver surface of the Seine below us as it shivered in the breeze.

  “Katie, I know you know what I mean, you have to… if we close all the doors to grief, life is bright and happy, a little thin, but nonetheless our days are mostly fine. But one breath of despair blows all the other doors open, and all the windows, it blows cold and dark through every moment…”

  She stared at the river like it was a magic mirror.

  “You thought of the war.”

  “How could I not? Though I don’t think I’d thought about it much since I took off my uniform.”

  “Maybe because you never took off your uniform, Maisie.”

  “Neither have you.”

  “The stitches have dissolved and now it’s my skin.”

  “And I’m still nursing, still in France… I couldn’t even bury this babe, it was too small. Oh, Katie, there was so much blood… I couldn’t help but think of all the other unburied, the bits and pieces we’d put in the furnace until the back of the field hospital smelt like the devil’s barbeque. I couldn’t help but think of all those mothers and how they might have cherished Tommy’s right finger, or Freddy’s half-rotten left foot, anything, just to have a piece of their baby again. Not that I ever thought of that at the time—the best place for a gangrenous limb is the fire—but after the miscarriage, the dreams of blood returned.”

  “So much blood.”

  “And much too often.” She accepted a cigarette from me and blew the smoke over the water under the overcast sky, gray on gray on gray. “And I thought of afterwards too, you know, the flu pandemic.”

  “The tears after the celebration.”

  “How could we have survived the carnage only to suffocate in our beds? I was busier than during the war, here in Paris, working all hours with beds full of teenage girls before their first sweetheart, widowed women
leaving orphaned children, crippled boys who were their mother’s joy… it was like the gas wards, except this time we couldn’t tell them that they were heroes, that it was for the nation. It was for no reason at all, it was just senseless and unstoppable.”

  She flicked her cigarette butt in a long arc into the water, and pulled up the collar of her dark brown coat.

  “It was more than a year for me,” I said. Traffic honked and grunted behind us. “I nursed on the ship home and was immediately pushed into Sydney Hospital, as my mother was on the board. I didn’t see an unmasked face until I escaped to my father’s property for Christmas 1919. Happy times.”

  “Exactly. Who would remember that year if they didn’t have to?”

  * * *

  We walked through the Jardin du Luxembourg arm in arm, as much to keep out the wind as to make our chat intimate.

  “Sometimes I don’t think Paris knows what a park is supposed to be,” said Maisie. “All this grass, some flowers, and a great big palace in the middle. There are never enough trees, or nooks, no groves to get lost in, no corners to hide in. The English don’t have much style but they do know a good park.”

  “That’s because everything in England is a park, if it’s owned by someone. It’s only a forest if it’s got too wild.”

  “If I want a forest here, I could always go to the Bois de Bolougne, I suppose, but even there the trees are so… polite.” She was surprised by my laughter. “You know what I mean! Ray has no understanding that a tree should look like an octopus, or a hawk, or a thin man or a set of veins. To him all trees are neat like Christmas.”

  Red and brown leaves blew around us, birds pecked at infinitesimal specks on the paths.

  “Anyway, this miscarriage—this is where the story gets interesting. So, I didn’t go to my hospital, we just ended up at the local, with a midwife I nicknamed Harem Scarem. Not because she was whiskery and severe; I’m not cruel. No, she earned her nickname when she barked, ‘One less mulatto baby is one more reason to thank God.’ If I hadn’t been so weak, I would have slapped her.”

  “I’d be next. I may still.”

  “She knew this too and was enjoying herself. ‘Does the father even know? Do you even know the father?’ Her teeth were yellow.”

  “Yellow teeth? Unforgivable.”

  “Ray came in as she said that and chastised her so loudly it brought in the other nurses, who then fetched a doctor. It turns out the doctor knew Ray, they’d served together and hadn’t seen each other since some hellhole or other. Verdun, I think. Anyway, Sister Scarum got put on bedpan duty by the matron, for a month, and shuffled away to pour her vitriol out with the sewage.”

  I laughed, small and sarcastic, and pulled Maisie closer as the wind sent its long cold fingers into our clothing. Maisie pushed back an escaping hair.

  “So, while I’m lying there, pale and desperate to leave, the doctor introduced Ray to a third man, who was also with them in Verdun. The man blanched as soon as he saw Ray and ran away. Ray, who’s as soft as uncooked meringue, ran after the man to apologize and reassure him.”

  “Leaving you alone?”

  “The doctor had to examine me, prod my belly, check my stitches.”

  “Brutal.”

  “Medieval. Anyway, who do you think this man was? It was Michel!”

  I took my cue. “Who is Michel?”

  “Who is Michel indeed! This is where the story goes from interesting to very interesting. Michel is the reason Ray was being blackmailed.”

  “Blackmailed by whom?”

  “Blackmailed by Edward Hausmann.”

  I stopped abruptly. Maisie had raised her eyebrow just slightly, her expression a kind of furious amusement. She remembered exactly who Hausmann was and now probably knew more about him than I did. I cursed strongly enough that even a passing sailor looked startled.

  “I know, Katie King. The man behind your last mission.”

  The sky seemed to sink lower. “You have to tell me more.”

  “Then let’s find a café, Katie, I’m freezing.”

  20

  “i wish i could shimmy like my sister kate”

  We moved past all the terrasse tables outside the Closerie des Lilas, full of cackling bohemians and ogling tourists, to a little red booth inside. The café chatter reminded me of my final telephone conversation with Fox last year. He had insinuated that Hausmann had Ray Chevallier in his sights, something about cabaret and “Monsieur Chevallier’s weakness for the dark and exotic.” Fox was too infuriating; I had put it out of my mind. I wish that I had understood his words not as a tease, but as a warning.

  The air in the café was stuffy with exhaled breath and the booth was slightly sticky. All I wanted to do was smoke in the low light, but Maisie insisted we order chips and beer. She would have kicked off her shoes too if we hadn’t been in public. She licked the beer foam from her lips.

  “Katie King, how can cold beer be so warming?”

  “Tell me about Michel, Maisie.”

  “This is a story.” Maisie stretched her legs. “At the hospital, Michel went with Ray, blubbering and wailing, his apology composed of excuses. He hated Hausmann too, but he was scared of him and couldn’t take the fear any longer. Over thin coffee in a disgusting café behind the hospital, he told us everything.

  “The story starts in the war. In the hell that was Verdun, Ray went a bit mad. ‘Crazy Ray,’ they called him. Recklessly brave and couldn’t stop talking. After one raid he came back with half a dozen POWs and babbled at them all the way back to their lines. He told them all sorts of confidential details including, Ray says, where they kept their stores of munitions. The next day Ray woke up in a puddle, only to find out that one of the prisoners had escaped and the munitions dump had been bombed, killing two hundred men. This man, Michel, was the escaped prisoner.”

  “He’s German?”

  “He’s from Alsace; French father, German mother. He joined the German Army in 1914 then defected to the French Army in 1917. Anyway, after Michel escaped, he ran straight to his superiors across the German lines and repeated everything that Ray had babbled. The Germans wrote everything down, as Germans are wont to do, including Ray’s name. Signed, stamped, the whole lot.

  “I found Ray asleep at the dining table with a little note clutched in his hand. I recognized the name Hausmann and I made Ray tell me everything. The note was delivered by Michel and said that Hausmann had these documents.”

  “What did Hausmann want?”

  “Money. What else? Loads of money, all the money from Ray’s family estate in Senegal. If Ray didn’t cooperate, Hausmann would use the evidence to say that Ray was a traitor, a double agent for the Germans, that he had murdered his fellow soldiers. All nonsense, of course, but when it comes to one’s war service, well, mud sticks.”

  “Especially trench mud. How much have you paid so far?”

  “Nothing. Between us, we’ve done a magnificent job of stalling. We said the cocoa estate was on the verge of bankruptcy. Then we said it all belonged to Ray’s elder brother, that we had to consult lawyers, that French lawyers took forever, et cetera et cetera. Our final promise was that we were getting the money, we just needed to offload a particular shipment of cocoa. That was in March.”

  “And Michel?”

  “Hausmann was blackmailing Michel as well. Michel’s French now, he has a French wife, a French war service record, and a job in a French hospital, but the only place he truly lives is in fear. Michel doesn’t want anyone to know he fought for the Germans, that he even spied for the Germans! When he saw Ray, he assumed Ray would recognize him. He panicked and, over coffee, unraveled. He doesn’t want to be a courier, he just wants to live a quiet life with his seamstress wife, in the country somewhere, with his own little vegetable garden… sweet, I suppose.”

  “Were you at the meeting? Weren’t you in hospital?”

  “I wasn’t going to stay in that building one moment longer. I went to that café, I almost started ble
eding again and was laid up in bed for weeks. I got so bored that Ray bought a radio, so I could lie on the couch and listen to the news.

  “Anyway, once Michel had confessed, then we had something to work with. We took him out to a little plot in the country, and after that Michel agreed to steal the evidence for us, to be paid exactly the cost of that little plot. It was expensive but cost us much less than Hausmann would have. Hausmann tried to keep blackmailing us, he even contacted Ray himself as, of course, he couldn’t find his go-between. He turned up at our house and left in a lather when we told him we’d burnt the documents.”

  “Had you burnt them?”

  “Abso-bloody-lutely. But knowing the German Army, there’ll be copies.”

  This didn’t sound at all like the type of blackmail Fox had mentioned.

  “So, the blackmail had nothing to do with you? Or Ray’s past in Senegal?”

  “No. Why would it?”

  I shrugged, hoping the smoke in the café would mask my confusion.

  “Hausmann doesn’t like me, of course,” she said. “He called me ‘colored’ and ‘coolie’ before Ray threw him out of our apartment. But he didn’t threaten me.”

  She took my packet of cigarettes and pushed the plate of chips toward me.

  “Katie King, what do you know?”

  I didn’t want to tell her, but between her frown and my hunger, I couldn’t resist. I took three chips, licking the salt from my lips as I contemplated how to say what I barely knew.

  “Fox mentioned something last year. He knew that Hausmann was going to target Ray. I thought… well, I thought Fox was just winding me up. Apparently not.”

  “You’re working for Fox again?”

  “I work for him whether I like it or not. It feels like blackmail, not employment.”