A Week in Paris (16 page)

To Kitty, life was perfect, as long as one didn’t read the papers, but soon there was no avoiding the news. It was all that their friends, many of them Americans, talked about, and was the main topic of conversation in the shops. Hitler was deliberately stirring up trouble in the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia, his obvious intention being to snatch it for Germany. If this happened, France was obliged by treaty to go to the Czech government’s aid, but as the French Prime Minister expressed it, was it better to sacrifice several million Frenchmen in battle against Germany’s horrifyingly great military strength or to break the treaty and thereby give up influence in Central Europe?

Britain’s Neville Chamberlain was also keen to avoid war, and when France and Britain gave in to Hitler’s demands at the Munich Conference in September 1938, the relief of Parisians was palpable. There would be no repeat of the carnage of the Great War. Lovers would not be parted, families would not be left fatherless, mothers would not lose their sons. Not a few, however, felt uncomfortable, watching from afar as Czechoslovakia was carved up.

Milly, particularly, was outraged. ‘Have you read what Saint-Exupéry says in here?’ she asked Kitty and Gene one late autumn evening, opening a copy of
Paris-Soir
at the table. Winter was closing in and they’d been forced to retreat inside their favourite restaurant on the Boulevard St-Germain, with its rough wooden furniture and warm country-kitchen atmosphere.

‘Are they continuing that ridiculous subscription to thank Mr Chamberlain by buying him a property to fish trout?’ Jack said. ‘“Angel of peace” indeed.’

‘Shh. Listen, you’ll like this.’ Milly read in French from the article by the airman-novelist Saint-Exupéry. ‘“When peace was threatened, we discovered the shame of war. When war seemed averted, we discovered the shame of peace.” There, he’s nailed it,’ she said, glaring at them over the top of the paper. ‘Moral failure all round.’

‘But we don’t want war, do we?’ Kitty said, shooting an anxious glance at Gene, who rarely expressed a political opinion. If France went to war, what would happen to her and Gene? Where would they go?

Gene’s hand closed over Kitty’s to comfort her. ‘No, of course we don’t.’

‘There’s a chance it’ll come all the same,’ was Milly’s warning. ‘What will France and Britain do if Hitler turns his attentions to Poland?’

One morning not long afterwards, Kitty awoke early and had to dash for the bathroom to be sick. She put it down to a bad shellfish, but Gene pointed out that she’d been feeling odd before eating the dish in question. When it happened again the following morning, he acted on his suspicions and arranged for her to see his colleague at the hospital.

Dr Poulon examined her carefully and smiled at her nervousness. ‘There is nothing to worry about. You are in good health and I cannot think you will have any problems.’ Kitty was to have a baby.

She told Gene when he came home that evening, and he whooped with joy, picked her up and swung her round, kissing her still flat stomach repeatedly until, helpless with laughter, she begged him to stop.

‘I’ll be too heavy for that nonsense soon anyway,’ she puffed, smoothing down her skirt. His response was to draw her down onto the sofa and to kiss her thoroughly. She’d never known him so ecstatic and this made her happy, too.

It took her some time to become used to the changes in her body and the idea of the little creature that was growing, imperceptibly, inside her. Because they’d agreed about having children they had never even discussed taking any precautions during love-making. Month after month had passed without consequence, but Kitty hadn’t worried. It would happen, Gene assured her, and now it had.

They didn’t tell anyone else at first, and passed the days with a quiet joy, complicit in their secret. After his first unruly burst of excitement, Gene began to treat her carefully, giving constant advice about what she should eat and not eat, and curbing late nights. Kitty was at first touched by this, not least because she felt very tired anyway, but as time passed and she recovered some of her old energy, his solicitude was sometimes annoying. They even had what for them constituted an argument – they who had never argued – when one night they went to a club and Kitty insisted on getting up and dancing with Jack to a particularly lively number. After a minute or two she couldn’t bear the miserable look on her husband’s face and sat down again. Later they made up, clinging to one another on the dance floor for a dreamy slow number.

After three months they judged the pregnancy to be established and began to tell people. When she broke the news to Monsieur Deschamps, he was effusive in his congratulations, but after that she had the feeling that something had changed. He no longer drove her as hard as he once had, and kept asking anxiously whether he was tiring her. Being pregnant, she learned, meant the world wrapped a woman in a cocoon. There seemed to be a general assumption that her brain had softened along with the lines of her body, and even the bustling French midwife at the American Hospital called her ‘
petite maman
’, as though she had a label, not a name.

Still, everybody’s looking after me marvellously
, she was able to write to Uncle Pepper in February 1939.
And I’m able to continue my lessons much as usual
. What she didn’t put into the letter was any mention of the increasingly dangerous international situation. Although Parisians talked about it endlessly, somehow they carried on under the cosy assumption that France wouldn’t be affected. Kitty and Gene and their friends couldn’t see how this would be so, though Kitty tried not to dwell on it.

Then at the end of March came the news that Milly had predicted. Hitler issued a demand that Poland return the city of Danzig to Germany, together with the ‘corridor’ of land that since 1919 had divided East Prussia from the rest of Germany. In so doing, he was swinging the final axe strokes to the Versailles Treaty, which had imposed so much humiliation on Germany after her defeat in the Great War. Now, with Chamberlain finally promising war if the Führer invaded Poland, France had no choice but to stand beside her British ally.

Kitty faced the birth of her baby with an increasing sense of anxiety. Should she return to England, to an English lying-in hospital and the relative safety of life with Uncle Pepper? Or should she stay with her husband? Gene’s work was in Paris and she knew he didn’t want to leave. And she felt she’d be only half a person without him.

‘Even if there is a war,’ she heard a man in the queue at the grocer’s say, ‘we have the Maginot Line. Hitler can’t touch us.’ This huge system of bunkers with all their complex fortifications ran for nearly 200 kilometres along France’s eastern frontier with Germany. What the man didn’t mention was its Achilles heel – that it stopped short at Belgium. Still, Gene reasoned when they had dinner with Milly and Jack the same evening, if war broke out, Belgium would stay neutral, so Hitler’s troops wouldn’t come by that way. Surely France was safe?

And so on 1 September 1939, when Hitler ignored the Allies and marched into Poland, Kitty was still in Paris, waiting for the imminent arrival of her baby.

1961

‘I’m sure you have often been told,
chérie
,’ Mme Ramond said to Fay, ‘that you were born on the exact day that France and Britain declared war on Germany?’

‘The third of September 1939. I’m tired of hearing it,’ Fay sighed. ‘What I didn’t know was that it was here in Paris.’ Surely it would say on her birth certificate, though she didn’t remember ever noticing. It was her mother who had applied for her first five-year passport when Fay had come to Paris as a schoolgirl. She brought its replacement out of her bag now and studied it, then regarded her hostess with a doubtful look.

‘Something is wrong?’ the woman asked in a soft voice. ‘Let me see.’

‘It says London – that I was born in London. Look.’ Fay’s voice cracked with distress. She passed Mme Ramond the document.

The woman read the entry and exclaimed. ‘That is strange, I agree,’ she said. She was thoughtful as she handed the passport back to Fay. ‘I assure you though, that you were born in Paris. It was in the American Hospital. Your father insisted that it should be there. One of his colleagues was called out of bed specially.’

‘But how could there be a mistake on my passport about something like that?’ Fay stared down at the document.

‘The war caused many confusions, large and little. It is possible that your mother believed . . .’ She broke off. ‘Fay, do you trust me?’ Mme Ramond’s eyes meeting hers were calm and strong.

‘I . . . don’t know. I suppose so.’ There was something about Mme Ramond’s account that convinced her. How her parents met and fell in love sounded so wonderful that she wanted to believe it. She recalled the mention of the photograph of her father, now in her mother’s bedroom at home, so happy on his honeymoon in the South of France. Everything rang true. But if Mme Ramond was telling the truth, that made her mother dishonest and she didn’t like to think about that. And yet . . . if her mother was hiding secrets maybe it was for a good reason.

‘I do trust you, yes,’ she said simply.

Mme Ramond nodded, satisfied. ‘Wait here a moment,’ she said. ‘I have something for you.’ And she left the room with her stick and her slow, painful walk. She was gone some time, and as she waited Fay glanced around the room. Her eyes fell on one of the photographs. Serge – hadn’t Mme Ramond said that her husband was called Serge . . .?

‘Do you remember this?’ Mme Ramond had reappeared, cradling something in her free arm. She held it out and Fay saw with a stir of interest that it was a carved wooden animal.

‘Oh,’ she said, taking it from her. The animal was a zebra, about six inches long from nose to tail, fashioned out of plain brown wood painted with narrow black stripes. She knew it from somewhere, but she couldn’t place where. As she nursed it in both hands, she found herself stroking the cool smoothness of its polished surfaces, examining its dear black nose, noting the empty indents for eyes.
The eyes
. Suddenly she remembered something. The zebra hadn’t always been blind – there had been something in those holes once, tiny black beads. And then a picture rose in her mind. A child’s chubby hand – her hand – walking the zebra along a white-painted sill, the ghost of a child’s face – her face – reflected in the glass of the window.

‘You do remember it, don’t you?’ Mme Ramond sat down beside Fay on the sofa, her eyes shining in her tired face.

‘I think I remember something.’ Fay looked down at the zebra and it was as though somewhere inside herself the child she had once been came to life and gave a small sigh of relief. ‘It was mine, wasn’t it,’ she said.

Mme Ramond gave a chuckle. ‘It certainly was, yes. A neighbour of your parents, an old man, gave it to you when you were two and you would not be parted from it. The fuss when, in the rush, it got left behind.’

‘The rush?’

‘When you finally left Paris. But I get ahead of myself. It’s important that I tell events in order or you will not understand.’

‘You must tell me everything. Everything,’ Fay begged. She felt somehow stronger, more convinced of the truth of Mme Ramond’s story now she held the zebra. As she studied the small worn animal again, it came to her how when she’d found the child’s rucksack in her mother’s trunk and had looked inside, it was the zebra that she’d hoped to find. How did Mme Ramond come to have it? There were so many questions she wanted to ask, but it seemed she must be patient.

Mme Ramond glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was half-past three. ‘Some refreshment perhaps?’ she asked. ‘Why don’t we have tea.’ Fay offered to help, and accompanied her into a narrow galley kitchen to carry a tray for her. After they’d sat down again, Mme Ramond poured glasses of honey-coloured tea which she served with slices of lemon and offered Fay delicate biscuits with an aroma of almond. She bit into one and the buttery crumb melted in her mouth. Again, she glanced at the photograph of Serge Ramond and wondered whether to say anything, but Mme Ramond’s expression put her off. She obviously intended to tell her story in her own way.

‘When war was declared,’ Nathalie Ramond went on, as though she’d never left off, ‘Parisians were in a state of shock. Danzig, some asked. Why should millions of Frenchmen die for somewhere as irrelevant to them as Danzig? I remember going out to buy bread and seeing a group of people crowded round a big notice pasted next to the
boulangerie
. Parents must take their children out of Paris, it said. People grumbled and obeyed, but weeks passed and nothing happened, no bombs, no fighting. The army was kicking its heels, and after a while the families all came home again. The weeks turned to months, still nothing. You English called these months the Phoney War. Our phrase for it was
la drôle de guerre
. So, Hitler dared not attack us, that was just as we’d thought. We relaxed a bit. Maybe the whole thing would blow over.’

September 1939

Kitty watched her husband, who was sitting on her hospital bed cradling their newborn daughter, an expression of wonder on his face. She was exhausted from the long birth, which Dr Poulon had refused to allow Gene to attend as he’d ‘get in the way’, forcing him instead to pace in agitation outside the closed door of the labour room. Now, the hours of pain and fear were over, and despite bits of her feeling not at all right she was drowsy and happy.

‘I cannot believe how tiny she is,’ Gene said, measuring his meaty forefinger against the child’s starfish hand, and laughing when she gripped it. ‘I feel like King Kong holding Fay Wray in the movie. Fay – there’s a pretty name. Fay Knox, how about that, Kitty?’

‘Fay,’ Kitty repeated, liking the sound. ‘It’s a delicate name, isn’t it? Makes me think of the French for fairy –
fée
.’ Her husband was right. It did suit this waif of a child with her huge navy eyes, as yet unfocused. They had been going to call her Elizabeth after the mother Kitty could not remember, and Kitty didn’t want to go back on that. ‘Fay Elizabeth,’ she said, wanting to please Eugene.