A Week in Paris (25 page)

‘Oh, Jack,’ Milly mumbled in a strange, hiccuping voice. Kitty was shocked. She’d never seen Milly cry before, but now Milly was weeping freely, with great hoarse sobs that wrenched at Kitty’s heart.

She could think of nothing to say. It was a glimpse into a world she knew little about and didn’t want to know. She almost wished she hadn’t come today, but they were her friends; she cared about them. ‘Stay safe,’ her husband had told her, but it wasn’t that easy.

The publisher La Tour remained in prison for two weeks, then was suddenly and miraculously released. When Kitty next visited, Milly was jubilant, but explained that there was no point in him even trying to resume his underground activities. All his printing equipment had been seized and he was aware of being watched. None of this would stop Milly from writing, but how would anyone read what she wrote?

There was so much to write about as the forces of Occupation tightened their grip. In September, Jews, Africans and Algerians who had originally fled the city were barred from returning to their homes, and their property was confiscated. The Knoxes awoke one day to find that the shutters of the Jewish jeweller opposite had been daubed with obscenities during the night. Eugene would come home from the hospital with stories of German interference in the operations of the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps who tended to the wounded of any nationality. By the end of September, the Corps had been forced out of service.

The winter of 1940–41 was the cruellest Kitty had ever known. The new year brought heavy snow that turned to ice, making it treacherous to go out. Every day was a remorseless struggle to find food, for the weather brought the fragile supply chains to a standstill and even vegetables were scarce for they could not be dug out of the frozen ground. The sign
Nothing left to sell
was a not unusual sight to see in shop windows by midday.

A rare bright spot was a parcel sent for Christmas by Gene’s mother in America, but which didn’t reach them until January. An excited Kitty unwrapped chocolate, tins of meat and packets of dried fruit with wonder, her stomach growling with hunger at the thought of eating these treats. There were baby clothes for Fay, too, which were beautiful, but sadly too small, so she gave them to a woman with a baby girl downstairs, who received them with amazed delight. Kitty and Gene gave some chocolate to Monsieur Zipper, and invited Jack and Milly round for a feast, so all too quickly everything was gone.

One freezing morning when she braved the weather to shop, it was to find the bread at the baker’s stale and a tired grey colour, and the only vegetables on the market stall were rotting turnips, presumably scavenged leftovers from a previous season. Worse, there was no milk to be found anywhere, and Kitty was panic-stricken about what to give Fay. She was overwhelmed with gratitude therefore, when later that morning she answered a tap at the door to find waiting outside the tall square figure of Adele Dunne, the Englishwoman she’d met at the convent. Miss Dunne was enveloped in a coat that looked as if it had been made out of an army blanket and a floppy felt hat with snow dripping off it.

‘Surprise!’ She held out two tins of condensed milk in her gloved hands, smiling like a naughty schoolgirl.

‘Adele, you lifesaver. We’re desperate!’ Kitty cried, taking them from her and ushering her inside.

‘I do hope I’m not intruding. The tins were a personal gift to me from a friend, and I immediately thought them a good excuse to see how you were in this dreadful weather.’ Miss Dunne’s comforting English tones brought to mind school pinafores and cycling on winding country lanes. Never had Kitty been so glad to see her.

‘We’re down to our last tin,’ she told Miss Dunne. ‘It’s simply impossible to find any in the shops. Look, Fay – milk.’

Fay toddled across and clutched at her mother’s skirt. The child was swathed in jumpers and her face was tired and pinched. She withdrew her thumb from her mouth and stared up at this strangely dressed figure with curiosity.

‘Hello, Fay, dear, I don’t expect you’ll remember me. My, you are growing up fast.’ Adele Dunne smiled down at the child as she unpinned her hat, then extricated herself from her coat and soaked brogues. Fay stared with solemn eyes at the woman’s much-darned stockings. Miss Dunne sank onto the sofa with a sigh of relief. She looked reassuringly the same as ever, Kitty thought. Perhaps her broad face was a little worn, but her cheeks were rosy from the cold air and her eyes were bright and interested.

Kitty fetched a towel for Miss Dunne’s wet feet and made what passed for tea, using a little precious milk. The apartment was freezing, but there was nothing to be done about that. Fuel had to be saved for the evenings when the temperature plummeted.

‘What’s your news? I expect you’re kept very busy,’ Kitty said, settling Fay in her lap with a cup of the watered-down milk. The little girl drank it down, her wide eyes fixed dreamily on the visitor.

‘Oh yes, we’re certainly that. There are so many who need help.’ Miss Dunne talked of the church where she worked, which tried to aid any who came within its doors regardless of religion or race. The tide of refugees flowing into the city had dribbled to a halt with the Occupation, but there were plenty already here who needed help: families from Belgium, French-speakers expelled from their homes in Alsace-Lorraine, children who’d lost parents, parents who’d lost children, widows too old or ill or poor to join the daily scavenge for food.

‘The Red Cross do their best,’ she explained, ‘but the rules are so pettifogging. Why can’t the Germans make up their minds?’ She complained about having to trek every day to report to the authorities. ‘Such a waste of everyone’s time. They know full well where I am and what I’m doing.’

More serious were the games the Nazis played with rations. ‘One moment we’re allowed extra for our nursing mothers, the next we’re not.’ Then there was the constant harassment. ‘Last week they threatened to close us down completely. Harbouring enemy aliens, they said. Enemy aliens my foot, I told them! They’re frightened, half-starved wretches.’ Now Miss Dunne had started to talk, she couldn’t stop. It was as though she needed to unburden herself. ‘Last week, half a dozen Gestapo arrived out of the ether. They turned everything upside down, searching for goodness knows what. The place was in uproar. Anyone without the right papers they simply bundled into a van, including a mother with a young baby, Kitty – and there was nothing we could do to stop them.’ Miss Dunne’s face was a picture of distress. ‘And it’s so difficult to find out what happens to people.’ It wasn’t just this woman who had vanished, either. ‘Someone might turn up every day for a while then simply disappear. We do our best to make enquiries. Sometimes I can’t bear to find out. Such stories, such awful stories . . .’ She drifted to a halt and sipped gratefully at her tea. ‘Oh, it is nice to see you, dear.’

‘Are you still living at the convent?’ Kitty asked, cradling the now sleeping child. She knew from visiting the nuns in August that Miss Dunne had moved back there. The French family she’d been lodging with before had needed to make room for some elderly relatives and regretfully turned her out.

‘Such good people, the nuns. They didn’t want payment except for food, you know,’ she told Kitty, ‘but I insisted. That poor Belgian girl Marthe can’t pay a thing.’ The refugee family was still in residence, the mother doing her bit by helping Sister Thérèse with the cooking and cleaning. The children attended the church school. ‘There’s quite a ragbag of other people, too,’ she said, ‘but we all muddle along. Mère Marie-François has been in bed with bronchitis. All those hours spent kneeling in that cold church, if you ask me.’ Miss Dunne’s attitude to religion was brisk and practical. ‘She’s past the worst now though.’

Kitty was concerned. ‘I must visit again soon. I never seem to have time, though if you asked me, I couldn’t say what I’ve been busy doing. This morning I queued at the butcher, then again at the baker’s and came back with almost nothing. If something needs fixing I end up asking a neighbour or doing it myself as Eugene’s often not here, though it’s been easier since they’ve relaxed the curfew, and when he is at home the poor man’s too tired to deal with broken saucepan handles.’

‘Everybody’s exhausted,’ Miss Dunne sighed, rubbing her feet with the towel. ‘Simply finding the strength to stay alive is tiring.’

‘Gene’s worried that the Germans intend to close the hospital, which would be dreadful. Not that he tells me much. I think he wants to protect me, but I don’t need protecting. I’d rather know things. Then I can prepare.’

Miss Dunne regarded Kitty with a sympathetic expression. ‘It must be hard for you, dear.’ She nodded towards the piano. ‘Do you ever play now? I suppose you don’t have time.’

‘Not often, no.’ All that belonged to another life, a life that was closed to her now. She thought longingly sometimes of her lessons with Monsieur Deschamps. She’d visited his apartment before Christmas, wondering if he’d returned, thinking perhaps foolishly that she could at least have the occasional lesson with him, but there had been no answer when she knocked. No one was at home next door either, so she’d been unable to find out if he was back. Serge might know, but she hadn’t seen him for some while. She must write to him at the Conservatoire. Something else she hadn’t had time to do.

‘I saw that dark-haired young man from your wedding,’ Miss Dunne said suddenly, as though she could read Kitty’s thoughts. ‘The boy pianist. Just by accident, in the street.’

‘Serge, you mean? Did you speak to him?’ Kitty asked, immediately interested. ‘How was he?’

‘I tried to speak to him, but he behaved very oddly. At first I thought that he hadn’t recognized me. After all, we had only met on that one occasion, but then I realized he did know me but didn’t want to be seen with me. He kept glancing about anxiously so I took pity on him and walked on.’

‘I hope he’s not in any kind of trouble,’ Kitty said, frowning.

‘That’s what I wondered,’ Miss Dunne said. ‘He had just come out of a rather grand-looking apartment block in the Faubourg St-Honoré. Near that big hotel the Germans have turned into offices – perhaps you know it? I expect it was being near that which made him nervous.’

Speaking to an Englishwoman with the Gestapo about would be seen as dangerous. Kitty thought Miss Dunne was right, that must be the reason.

That evening she wrote a note to Serge, asking if he’d heard from Monsieur Deschamps, and suggesting that they meet. She sent it to the Conservatoire but received no answer, which was worrying. Perhaps Serge was in difficulties of some sort.

One darkening February afternoon, Kitty and Fay returned home from meeting Lili and Joséphine, but when she eased her key into the lock she was surprised when the door opened a few inches and through the gap she saw Eugene place a finger to his lips.

‘Papa’!’ Fay cried and stretched her arms towards her father. ‘Papa!’

‘Come in quickly.’ He took hold of Fay and pulled Kitty inside. She was surprised to find the apartment unlit. By a glimmer of light from the window she saw someone rising, with some difficulty, from the chair by the piano. It was the tall, spare figure of a man.

‘I must apologize for interrupting—’ the stranger started to say. It was an educated English voice with a soft burr. Then Eugene cut in.

‘Kitty, may I introduce Flight Lieutenant John Stone. John, my wife Kitty and our daughter Fay.’ A British RAF officer! There was something in Eugene’s voice that warned Kitty not to react. The air had a dangerous taste of metal, like on an icy day.

‘Flight Lieutenant.’ Kitty could hardly see the man’s face, but she shook the outstretched hand and found it reassuring in its warmth and firmness.

‘Please call me John,’ he said. ‘I’m very sorry to intrude on you like this.’

‘No more apologizing, please, John,’ Eugene said. ‘It is I who should be sorry. Kitty, John may have to rest up here a couple days. I know I should have asked you first, but there wasn’t the chance.’

‘I see,’ she said, slowly unbuttoning her coat. To avoid thinking about her fear, she started to worry what she could give John Stone for supper. There were two gristly chops waiting in the kitchen, the only meat she’d been able to buy for some days. Perhaps she could eke them out with the last of the bacon fat. At least there was a tin of beans left, and . . .

‘Where will he sleep?’ she asked.

‘On the couch, do you reckon?’ Eugene said. He was cuddling Fay close, but he laid his free hand on Kitty’s shoulder to comfort her. ‘It’ll be fine. Our plan went wrong, that’s all. The place he was supposed to go to didn’t work out.’

‘I’m sure I won’t be here long,’ Stone added.

Kitty nodded. What plan? What place? She was hardly able to think straight. To hide her troubled feelings she went to draw the blackout curtains across the windows. When she switched on the table lamp and saw their visitor in its weak light she gave a sharp intake of breath. The man must once have been handsome in a fair-haired, sturdy English fashion, but now the left side of his face and neck was livid, the skin puckered and the eyelid drooping. He returned her searching gaze though, without flinching.

‘Apologies for my appearance, but I assure you it looks worse than it is.’ His voice was gentle. ‘I didn’t bale out quickly enough – thought I could save the plane. Stupid, really.’

‘When?’ she managed to ask.

‘Six weeks ago. We were on a bombing raid over Normandy. An old farmer who’d seen our plane catch fire came out searching for us. He and his wife picked me out of a hedge, carried me home somehow and sent for a local doctor, who patched me up the best he could before handing me over to these chaps.’ He indicated Eugene.

‘How did he get to you?’ Kitty asked her husband. It was so bewildering.

‘It’s best you don’t know,’ Eugene said. ‘He reached us, that’s the important thing. But now he’s better we were trying to get him home.’

Kitty sat down on the sofa, her mind finally beginning to work. Had Mme Legrand on the desk downstairs seen Stone? There was no thinking what might happen to them all if he were discovered. How could Gene do this to them? Did he not think of little Fay? Fay, in danger. The thought was too much