by James Philip
The women stepped closer, standing at arms’ length.
Looking one to the other.
“We called him Raymond Dermot,” Aurélie said, smiling proudly, speaking a little timidly, lowering her eyes. “Raymond for Rene’s father, Dermot for our good friend Captain O’Reilly, the British officer who risked everything to rescue the fleet at Villefranche.”
Jacqueline had no idea what to say.
“You look well, sister,” Aurélie ventured.
“So, do you, Lilou…”
Aurélie smiled, giggled involuntarily. Her sister had not called her that since she was a clumsy gauche teenager. Both women were staring down at the baby.
“Would you like to hold your nephew, Jacqui?” Aurélie asked, shyly as if expecting a rebuff. Before the war they had always been Jacqui and Lilou, sisterly diminutives of their given names within their Second War-scattered, dysfunctional family.
Perhaps, to both siblings’ surprise, in a moment Jacqueline, feeling a little awkward, was rocking the infant in her arms. Notwithstanding she was terrified of dropping the little mite, she gazed down into the boy’s wide, curious eyes. Never, ever having regarded herself as being remotely the maternal type, there was suddenly a lump in her throat and her eyes were suddenly moist.
“You better take him back,” she sniffed, sobbed. “I don’t know what…”
Aurélie gently eased her son from her arms.
Presently, the women drifted out onto the balcony.
“Is it wise for you to be seen with me, Lilou?” The elder sister queried as they settled in sun-bleached wicker chairs which had been newly-made in the 1920s or 1930s.
Aurélie seemed to be preoccupied with her son.
“I asked if I could write to you when I started work at Harwell, in England,” Jacqueline continued. “I suppose I am on a kind of parole. The English were, are, very kind to me. It is as if they understand the way things were in the Auvergne better than I ever did. But I was told that it was up to the ‘French side’ to ‘open channels of communication’, so, I did not ask again.”
Once ‘Le Monde’ had restarted publishing last autumn, keeping up to date with what was going on in France and with her little sister’s life, had been easy enough. Photographs of Admiral Leguay and his beautiful young, increasingly heavily pregnant wife, both heroes of the ‘miracle of Villefranche’ seemed to be regular features, and their ‘love affair’ recounted in fairy tale terms now well known to all literate survivors of the ‘national catastrophe’.
“I saw,” Jacqueline blurted, tears trickling down her face, “I took part in terrible, terrible things, Lilou.”
Her sister said nothing for one, two, three seconds.
“We all did, Jacqui,” she said. “From President Boissieu down, we all did bad things. Things that we are ashamed of now. Things we could never have thought to do before the war. The British are right; when a country is defeated, broken like France was, there are no saints, only martyrs and as Mrs Thatcher says: ‘There is no time to waste with recriminations and witch hunts; because there is far too much work to be done!’”
Jacqueline shook her head.
“So, what? There is no justice for all those who suffered…”
“Jacqui,” Aurélie interrupted, an unfamiliar hard, cutting edge to her voice. “The only thing that is different about your crimes and my crimes, or those of tens of thousands of our fellow countrymen and women, is that the English have placed a report of your ‘experiences’ in the Auvergne in the hands of the Sixth Republique, and my husband has asked for, and received, Alain de Boissieu’s personal word of honour that the report will never, even if it ever sees the light of day in France, be acknowledged by his government.”
“You have done this for me?”
“No, Alain has done it for Rene and me, and to strengthen his grip on power. That is the way of the world. Besides, as I said, none of us is without sin. For example, the President fled Boulogne on a British destroyer in disguise in 1965, and only identified himself when he was safely ashore in England. The Prime Minister of the Republique, Monsieur Maurice Schumann fled at around the same time. Rene is ashamed of some of the things he did when the Navy was all that stood between Toulon, Marseilles and anarchy after the October War.” She shrugged, sighed and viewed her baby son’s face, guessing that he was about to start getting restive. “I prostituted myself to get onto the ships of the Villefranche Fleet. The pimps on the ships bartered for me and I ended up on the Jean Bart almost by accident, just before Rene took command. The first or second week he was on board he passed me in a passageway – I had a black eye, two guys had used me badly the night before, you see – and turned around. He asked: ‘Who did this to you?’ I was afraid of reprisals but there was something about him that made me trust him. The next day my pimp, and a couple of others were thrown over the side of the ship, and after that, the women and children on the ship, and in the rest of the fleet, knew that they were safe. A few days afterwards, I went to thank him. He was a little embarrassed, I think. He asked to know what I’d been before the war; everybody was being asked but I didn’t know that at the time – to find out who was good at what, it was so that he could fill all the jobs that needed doing on the ship – and I said I had been a teacher. That was how I became la secrétaire de mon amiral.”
My admiral’s secretary…
“And,” Aurélie added fondly, wistfully, “the first time Rene ever laid a hand on me was when he dived on top of me to protect me with his body. That was the night the Front Internationale attempted to seize the fleet.”
Jacqueline had taken Le Monde’s six-month-old account of the ‘liberation of the fleet’ with something of a pinch of salt.
“I thought all that hyperbole about the Admiral being too badly wounded to parley with the English navy was propaganda?” She confessed.
Her sister smiled.
“No, the only working radio on the Jean Bart was on the bridge a hundred and fifty metres and six or seven decks above where Rene was recovering from his wounds. Nobody knew what to do, so, I was the one who talked to Dermot.”
“Dermot was the captain of the English destroyers?”
“Captain O’Reilly, yes.”
“And since then you’ve met Generals and Prime Ministers and Presidents, Lilou,” Jacqueline remarked. “Cinderella got to go to the ball, after all!”
“It feels like that some days…”
“Despite your wicked sister.”
Aurélie frowned.
“When Madame Thatcher came to Troyes in February for the anniversary memorial service for her poor husband, she made a speech about reconciliation and the burying of old differences. In England, in the months after the October War she was the Minister of Supply; every day that first winter she had to decide who lived and who starved, who got medicines and who died. She said it was the most horrible time of her whole life and it haunts her even now; but two-thirds of her people survived that first winter, and her country did not fall apart. Nobody in France in the winter of 1962-63 was strong enough, or brave enough to make those decisions and because of that, twenty millions of us may have died, not in the war but in the anarchy.”
Jacqueline met her sibling’s gaze.
“If we are not united,” Aurélie declared, “we have nothing. There are too few of us left to carry on fighting between ourselves.”
Raymond began to cry, then squall.
“He is hungry.”
The sisters went inside and Aurélie put her son to her breast, Jacqueline watching with conflicted, oddly mellow emotions.
“He is well?” She inquired softly.
“Yes. Thankfully, most babies are, now that we have got some of the hospitals working again. There is to be a national radiological task force, based on the British model; it is being set up to collect statistics and to study the long-term effects of the war. The main problems seem to be areas where fallout was worst in the fortnight after the day of the war in 1962. The Britis
h have made available all their statistics on infant mortality, post-natal birth defects and so forth but everybody agrees it is too early to postulate longer-term outcomes. But you’d know more about all this radiological stuff than me.”
“Not really. It was never really my field: I was always more involved with the big bang side of our pre-war bomb project. I’m sorry, my colleagues in England have forbidden me to talk about my work at Harwell…”
Aurélie grimaced: “There is no French bomb program. Rene says that even if we had the resources, which we don’t, politically, it would be impossible to restart the work you were involved in before the war. The people would not tolerate it. In any case, we have no overseas colonies anymore, so where would we test the awful things?” Aurélie gently moved her son to her left breast. “So, perhaps, we have learned something from our mistakes, after all!”
Despite her half-sister’s assurances that this reunion was anything other than a huge risk for her, and politically, her husband, Jacqueline realised that there were limits to what could be done to rehabilitate her.
“I promised Rene that I would meet him at the residence in the city later this afternoon,” Aurélie explained apologetically, after the sisters had enjoyed a light lunch and glasses of fragrant, very young wine, the first post-war vintage of the vineyards of Provence. “A delegation of American Senators and Congressmen are starting a ‘fact finding’ mission to the South; we’re holding a grand reception for them.”
“My sister the society hostess!”
Aurélie blushed.
“It all seems very strange sometimes,” she admitted.
“When will I see you again?” Jacqueline asked.
“I don’t know. Sooner or later, it will become known that we have met, and that you are working for the British. It will depend how people react to this news.”
The older sister nodded.
“You took a big risk meeting me at all,” she murmured. “And, so did Admiral Leguay. Please thank him. His compassion,” she shrugged, “makes me feel ashamed…”
Jacqueline sobbed and it was a little while before she worked out her sister had laid her baby son on his back on a nearby rug, where he was happily kicking his legs, and hugged her, held her as her chest heaved and her thoughts fell, one over another, into the lingering darkness of her anguished soul.
“We will not be separated again, sister,” Aurélie promised. “I will write to you from now on, and you may write to me.” She hesitated. “I am sorry, telephones are still a problem,” she added, “one never knows who is listening in.”
“No, of course not.”
Calmer, the women prepared to part.
“May I hold Raymond again, just for a moment please?”
Jacqueline rocked, cuddled the infant, kissed the top of his head and was rewarded by a gurgle of pleasure from her nephew.
After an exchange of tearful kisses and then Aurélie was gone.
An hour later Jacqueline was being driven away from the Hotel de Var, and back to her new life in England.
Chapter 18
Thursday 16th May 1968
Mar-a-Lago, Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach, Florida
The 120-plus room Mar-a-Lago mansion had been commissioned and built by the socialite and Postum Cereal Company owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post – probably the richest woman in America at the time – between 1924 and 1927 on an estate which occupied the entire width of Palm Beach. Commanding views across the Floridian Intracoastal Waterway, which was rather more quaintly called ‘Lake Worth’ at the time, to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, forty years later it remained one of the largest mansions, with a floor area in excess of sixty-thousand square-feet, in the State.
Marjorie herself, had been seriously injured in the Empire State bombing on New Year’s Eve 1965, and died some days later after emergency surgery at one of the overwhelmed casualty-clearing stations set up to handle the thousands of burned, blinded and maimed survivors of the atrocity. Nobody had known what had happened to her or her companions for several months after the outrage, until she had been identified by dental records from the photographs and x-rays taken at the communal morgues and improvised ice-house, ‘body stores’ set up to put names to the dead, the majority of whom were horribly disfigured or in various states of decomposition by the time the authorities got past the immediate crisis and started worrying again, about ‘minor’ matters like the names of the victims.
By then much of the great lady’s fortune, estimated to be in excess of a billion dollars had already largely dissipated. A philanthropist and art collector on the same scale as the Rockefellers, art works from her collections now graced the walls, and filled the secure repositories of a dozen galleries in New England and Washington DC, and since 1966 most of her properties had been sold off. Two of her three daughters had died between October 1962 and the outbreak of the Civil War, one of War Plague, the other in an air crash, leaving only her youngest daughter, the then forty-two-year-old Nedenia Marjorie Hutton, who had just divorced her husband of nearly eighteen years, Colgate-Palmolive heir Stanley M. Rumbough Jr., to inherit that remaining part of her estate not previously gifted, like most of the art works, to museums and good causes.
‘Nedenia’, who was better known to the public as the Hollywood actress Dina Merrill, whom nowadays was married – following a very well-publicised celebrity romance - to rugged leading man Cliff Robertson in one of the few surviving silver screen ‘dream unions’, had had no use for, or desire to take on, the exorbitant cost of the upkeep of Mar-a-Lago, which apparently, she had always loathed and had happily let the Betancourt Foundation take it off her hands for slightly less than two-and-a-half million dollars in late 1966.
In her lifetime, Marjorie Merriweather Post had often spoken of bequeathing the Mar-a-Lago estate to the nation, supposedly for employment as a ‘Winter White House’ or a national ‘meeting place’ but when Dina Merrill’s lawyers had reminded the current occupants of the White House of Marjorie’s wishes, nobody had wanted to know. To the President, a proud Californian, Florida was just a place that crooks and Cubans lived, and Southern Democrats went for sleazy holidays in expensive slop houses run by the mob.
Presently, forty-one of the mansion’s bedrooms were mothballed, likewise many of the function rooms and there was no water in any of the pools. The whole place was being run by a reduced staff of about fifteen people, its external fabric being carefully maintained but that apart, Mar-a-Largo was a pale shadow of its twenties and thirties glory.
Gretchen Betancourt-Brenckmann did not understand, or actually care, why her father had added Mar-a-Lago to his huge property portfolio, simply assuming that whatever his thinking, sentimentality or vanity would have had absolutely nothing to do with the decision. If either had been a guiding trait in her father’s character, he would never have supported Walter Brenckmann’s campaign. Even though he regarded the former Ambassador as a close personal friend, Daddy would never have allowed her father-in-law – perhaps, the most profoundly decent man she had met in her entire life, although both junior and her own darling husband, Dan, ran him very close – to put himself through the grief of running for high office. If only, because he would have known that sooner or later those bastards around the President were going to cut up rough.
Hence the family-campaign get together.
Lately, Gretchen had been spending most of her time getting to know the 4th Congressional District of Massachusetts – like the back of her hand – while her father-in-law had been in California, which was likely to be the make or break of the Democrat primaries next month, assuming George McGovern did as badly as people were predicting in Florida.
However, right now, Joanne Brenckmann was incensed.
Although that happened occasionally, she hardly ever let it show. She would not have let it show today unless she had been surrounded by her family and most trusted staffers.
Not only had she just discovered, as had the nation courtesy of a ser
ies of leaks by Administration toadies on the Hill, that the US Navy cut short her eldest son’s posting to the United Kingdom – a posting extended, time and again at the request of the British Royal Navy – stripping him of his temporary rank of Commander, reducing him to the two-and-a-half rings to his substantive grade of Lieutenant Commander and assigning him to a Veterans Administration ‘liaison role’ at the Pentagon. She was not in any way mollified by reports that the Chief of Naval Operations had intervened to quash any question that junior’s recall had been on disciplinary grounds; not least because it was clear that the White House was still drip-feeding unconscionable tittle-tattle to the effect that Junior might have leaked confidential information to the Democrats on the Hill.
The Navy had tried to treat her son the way it did people who ran their ships onto the rocks, or who was caught in bed with one of his subordinate’s daughters!
The latest lies were beyond forgiveness!
Gretchen was upset too; just not for the same reasons as her saintly mother-in-law. She was upset, and a little numbed to realise that Richard Nixon and his creatures were so afraid of the man who had been her candidate for President of the United States of America until the morning after the New Hampshire false start, that they were going after him with everything they had over three months before the Democrat National Convention met in Memphis, Tennessee at the end of August!
“Why aren’t you angrier about this, Walter?” Joanne Brenckmann hissed lowly at her husband, realising that his glacial calm was barely ruffled by the revelations.
They had known that Junior was being recalled to DC.
He had not said anything about it and until the last few days, nobody else had either. Or rather, nobody in Washington wanted to talk about it. Thus far, the most galling aspect of the affair was that they had had to hear about what might be going on not from the Navy Department; but from contacts close to the Prime Minister in England. Given that at the time of that recall Walter junior was nominally, at least, under the command of the C-in-C Joint Nuclear Strike Force, presently a British flag officer based at Faslane on the Clyde, his release should have been ‘requested’ through normal channels, not summarily ‘notified’, posthumously, to that officer.