A Week in Paris (24 page)

‘After the relief at the quietness of the Occupation we were fearful, that summer of 1940,’ she continued. ‘Above all, we felt a great sense of sorrow and shame. How could it be, we asked ourselves, that France had been so swiftly and completely defeated? This was the talk, everywhere you went. It was a strange and awful time.’

Under the terms of the official French surrender signed at Compiègne on 22 June 1940, France was carved into four zones. The northern coast around Calais was to be administered by the Nazi authorities from Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine in the east was absorbed into Germany, the greater part of France including Paris and down to Bordeaux in the west was to be Occupied territory, and the southern rump designated ‘Free’ France, able to manage its own affairs from the spa town of Vichy, but under the close scrutiny of the Nazis. The long border that divided Free and Occupied France was vigorously policed by Germany, expensive passes being required to travel between the two jurisdictions.

In Occupied Paris, the power of the victor was felt immediately. Hitler himself paid a short but symbolic visit to the city the day after the Armistice. Citizens suffered a curfew – from dark till dawn they were not permitted outside. Since cars were banned for ordinary citizens there was little traffic; instead, armed soldiers patrolled the streets. British nationals were required to register their presence and found themselves required daily to report their whereabouts at a nearby Kommandantur office, a nuisance Kitty was spared by virtue of being married to an American.

Nothing, though, could save her from terrible fears for her homeland. The newspapers, now in German hands, were filled with demoralizing stories indicating that Britain was about to be crushed beneath the jackboot. As Kitty pushed Fay’s pram through streets hung with Nazi flags, she found it impossible to ignore the propaganda posters everywhere. There was one she particularly loathed, of Churchill depicted as a murderous octopus devouring a screaming victim.

Outside Paris was a German airbase, and at nights she lay sleepless with anxiety, listening to the roar of planes on their way to bomb England. Never had she felt such an attachment to her home country as now, when she was an exile and Britain was in danger.

Eugene did his best to comfort her. Together they’d sit close to the wireless to listen to the BBC of an evening, the sound turned down low in case someone heard and reported them to the authorities.

Sometimes Kitty reflected how life in Paris had narrowed right down to herself, baby Fay, and Eugene – when he was home, for the nightly curfew meant that if he was on a late or an early shift he slept at the hospital, leaving her to spend a lonely evening. In September, a harsh rationing system was announced, and each morning she’d have to set out with Fay on a challenging search for food, joining the eternal queues at the shops, alert to rumours of where fresh milk might be bought for Fay, or eggs or green vegetables or fresh meat – simple fare that she’d always taken for granted. Attempts to beg for extras were sometimes met with kindness, but some Parisians were afraid of being seen to consort with foreigners.

Over the summer, those who had fled Paris before the Occupation, including the Knoxes’ concierge, started to return, and the pressure on already short supplies began to get serious. At the same time, other people would simply vanish. One morning Kitty stood in the queue at the fruit stall eyeing the runtish apples on display and wondering if their allowance would stretch to a couple in addition to a few plums, when it occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the Austrian couple recently. This pair of middle-aged women were memorable because they were always together, and because of their distinctive appearance. The elegant taller one wore a mannish hat on her short greying hair, a boiled wool skirt and jacket, whereas her companion was petite and darkly mercurial. Kitty had been used to seeing them most mornings. Occasionally they would stop to admire Fay. It was the man next door, Monsieur Klein, who told her they were Austrian, for he knew them from the library. For a week or two after they had disappeared she looked for them and worried, but even Monsieur Klein didn’t know where they lived and she had no idea how to find out what had happened to them.

She saw quite a bit of Milly and Jack, and of a young Frenchwoman who looked after a little girl named Joséphine, the same age as Fay, whom she first met one afternoon at the park near the apartment. This young woman’s name was Lili Lambert, and Kitty liked her the instant she set eyes on her, sitting on a bench feeding crumbs to the sparrows, the round-eyed child on her lap pointing at the birds and squealing with delight. Lili was a couple of years older than Kitty and rather like a sparrow herself – being small-boned, with a pert, pointed face and quick black eyes. She was alone in Paris, her husband Jean-Pierre having been called up to the front, as she told Kitty early in their friendship. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the last days of May and despatched to Germany. She’d heard from the Red Cross that he had been sent to work in an arms factory on the Ruhr. Recently she had received a letter from him. She took it out of her bag now. It had been folded and refolded many times. Lili did not offer to read it to Kitty, nor did Kitty ask. But Lili held it tightly as though it were a talisman that connected her to Jean-Pierre.

‘All I can do is wait,’ she told Kitty. ‘Wait and hope that the war will end soon and that Jean-Pierre will come home safely. Meantime at least I have work and somewhere pleasant to live.’ The child, Joséphine, belonged to a French business couple, and Lili had moved in with them to save paying rent on the rooms she’d shared with Jean-Pierre. Kitty took to coming to the park when she could if the afternoon was fine, and quite often she’d meet Lili. They mostly spoke about the children and their own upbringings – Lili’s family lived near Nice – but they had another interest in common, which was music. Lili had first come to Paris to try her luck as a singer and had scraped a living by it. Most of the nightclubs were closed now, and anyway, Jean-Pierre, a bank clerk, wouldn’t have liked his wife to return to that kind of life, so the job she had now was better, she told Kitty. Still, Kitty enjoyed hearing her stories about the rackety life of the clubs and Lili even taught her a song or two. She had a light, expressive voice and rolled her Rs as she sang. Despite her troubles Lili was by nature a cheerful girl and their times together were full of laughter whilst the babies crawled on the grass if it was dry or slept in their prams in the autumn sunshine.

One afternoon, two Wehrmacht soldiers came into the park, taking the air maybe, or keeping an eye out for signs of trouble, and the women fell silent as the men passed, averting their eyes until they’d gone. Her fear of them accompanied Kitty all the way home, and when she carried a sleeping Fay out of the lift she felt that terror still. She jumped therefore when a door opened and Monsieur Klein came out, several books under his arm. He caught her alarm.

‘Oh, it’s only you, madame, I’m sorry,’ he said, picking up a book he’d dropped. ‘One can’t be sure these days . . .’ He trailed off.

‘Are you all right, monsieur?’ she asked him and when he said he was, she asked politely whether he was going to the library.

‘Not exactly,’ he said, and paused. ‘When I visited last week they told me they had no record of my name and that I wasn’t to come any more.’

Kitty studied him with surprise. ‘But you go there every day! How can they say that?’

‘I don’t know. It was the usual woman on the desk, but she wouldn’t even look at me. However . . .’ His expression brightened. ‘I have a good friend who will borrow books on my behalf. I am returning these to him now. Good day.’ He touched the black hat he always wore as he passed by and entered the lift.

‘That’s how it is for Jews all the time now, Kitty,’ Eugene explained to her that evening when she recounted the conversation.

‘I didn’t know Monsieur Klein was Jewish,’ she said, surprised. ‘He doesn’t look it. How do they find out?’

‘It could be in the records somewhere or maybe it’s just his name.’ He sighed. ‘Or more likely, somebody dropped a word in an official ear. It’s happening all around us now.’

‘But he’s a harmless old man, Gene, anyone can see that.’

‘Perhaps the lady at the library took a dislike to him. These days there doesn’t have to be a reason.’

‘It’s so unfair. I know, nothing’s fair any more. But it’s not enough now to keep one’s head down and try not to cause any trouble.’

‘It’s still the safest way,’ he pointed out, coming to put his arm round her. He looked down at her with concern. ‘It’s important that you behave very carefully. Think about Fay.’

‘Fay and I will be all right,’ she said. Nothing would happen to them, she told herself. The soldiers strolling through the park today had touched their caps politely to Lili and Kitty and smiled at the children. They were far from the raping, pillaging vandals that everyone had feared. Not that this stopped Kitty from hating them.

Eugene was having a rare night off. He looked scruffy and exhausted, she thought, noticing the furrows that had appeared on his brow.

‘They expect too much of you,’ she told him.

‘It’s hard doing our work properly when our every step is observed.’

She knew that the pressures at the hospital were considerable. Although the Germans had to respect the work of the institution, they monitored its activities carefully, especially in respect of any Allied servicemen who were treated there. These patients were supposed to be transferred into German hands once they were better, but she knew that this wasn’t always the case. Back in July she’d asked after the injured Welshman she’d seen Eugene with on the day she and Fay had returned to Paris and gone to find him at the hospital.

‘According to official records, he died,’ was all that Gene would tell her, and when she asked him if that was really what had happened, he replied, ‘Don’t ask me any more. It’s better that you don’t know. Too many people’s safety depends on it.’

‘I’m worried about you, Gene,’ she said now. ‘You need looking after.’

He hadn’t visited a barber for some time, so after supper she made him sit on a kitchen chair while she cut his hair. She worked carefully, feeling the warmth of his head beneath her hands and loving the familiar oily fragrance of his hair as she snipped until the floor around was covered in small bright curls. ‘There you are, my shorn lamb,’ she said finally, handing him a mirror.

‘Wonderful,’ he said, beaming at his reflection. ‘I would have had to pay the barber.’

‘A tip would be acceptable,’ Kitty said, trimming one last stray lock. She put down comb and scissors, and as she lifted the towel from his shoulders, he caught her hands and swung her round so that she landed in his lap, laughing. He rubbed his nose against hers and kissed it.

‘How much are you asking?’

‘Only everything,’ was her reply.

‘Already yours,’ he said simply and with such heart she felt the truth of it. She had his love, had borne his child and they would endure this together. So many were worse off than they were, she thought as he kissed her again, this time long and deeply. But she still worried about him.

‘Oh, Gene,’ she whispered when they broke apart. ‘I don’t know what you’re involved in at the hospital, but take care, my love, won’t you? Take care.’

Kitty came to sense more strongly the fear that pervaded the city when she visited Jack and Milly. The couple lived in rooms in a shambolic building above shops in a street leading off the Boulevard St-Germain. They’d decorated the place themselves and furnished it with interesting odds and ends that they’d collected over the five years or so they’d been together in Paris. No one could call the result fashionable, but it suited the sort of people they were. Since they both worked from home, two desks took up one wall of the living room where they’d sit together, the room hazy with smoke, Jack quietly writing in a foolscap notebook and Milly bashing away on a typewriter, stopping occasionally to curse and vigorously rub at some error or snatch up the ringing phone and speak loudly into it. How Jack put up with this disturbance, Kitty never knew, for he was always complaining about the lack of peace and quiet, then they’d argue and Milly would fly off the handle and tell him to go someplace else if he didn’t like it. Recently it had become common for Kitty to catch sight of him in the café on the corner of the street, his hat pushed back on his head, his notebook and a cup of coffee on the table in front of him as he smoked and watched the world from the window.

One afternoon at the end of September when Kitty called by it was to find Milly and Jack in a gloomy mood, having received the news that the office of an underground newspaper Milly had started writing for had been raided and the publisher, a close friend of theirs, taken into custody.

‘Do they know about you?’ she asked Milly anxiously.

Milly made an impatient noise. She was like a caged animal today, pacing the room, smoking and brooding, whilst Kitty watched and Fay stood by Jack’s chair, pulling at his jacket, puzzled that he didn’t want to play swinging games with her today.

‘She published under a pen name, thank God,’ Jack put in. ‘Unless they get her real name out of La Tour,’ he added glumly.

‘He won’t tell ’em anything he doesn’t have to,’ Milly said, squashing her cigarette into an already overloaded ashtray. She paused for a second, as the implication of what she’d said struck home with all of them. Suppose he had no choice about talking. ‘Oh, the poor, poor man,’ she burst out. ‘Do you think—’

‘He’s gotten the best legal help, Milly,’ Jack broke in. ‘La Tour’s attorney is married to a German girl. It’s proved useful recently.’

‘It might not work this time,’ Milly muttered, picking at a nail. ‘Not after he printed that cartoon of von Stülpnagel. I can’t bear it. There must be something we can do to help.’

‘Well, there isn’t, Milly.’ Jack handed Fay back to her mother and went to put his arms round his girlfriend. She looked up him and smiled sadly. ‘It’s no good, sweetheart,’ Jack said. ‘You’ll put yourself in danger and I can’t live without you.’ He stood with his arms tight around her, swaying to soothe her.