A Week in Paris (26 page)

‘Well,’ she said, getting up. To her horror she was trembling. ‘I’d better see what there is for supper.’ And she fled to the kitchen.

It was there Eugene found her a moment later staring down unseeing at the plate of bloody chops. He put his arms round her and held her close. She looked up at him blankly, unsure whether to berate him or weep.

‘I’m real sorry,’ he murmured. ‘I think you know how I’m involved. There’s a few of us at the hospital, I won’t tell you their names, but we don’t like to hand these guys over to the Germans, so when they’re well enough we try to get them out. It was my task today to take John to a safe house in Montparnasse, but when we arrived we found someone had gotten there ahead of us. The lock was bust and we daren’t risk going in. I couldn’t think what else to do with him except come here. No one saw us, Kitty, I’d swear on it. Even Madame Legrand wasn’t at her desk.’

‘You can’t be certain you weren’t seen,’ she said. ‘Gene, it’s not me I’m worried about, it’s Fay.’ In all honesty she was frightened for all of them.

Now she was getting used to what had happened, part of her was proud of her husband. She felt a kind of relief, too, that Gene had explained things better. So much made sense now. Gene’s preoccupied manner, the continual feeling he was hiding something from her. She had known about the young Welshman but hadn’t realized that he was helping other Allied servicemen, too.

‘For God’s sake keep all this quiet, Kitty.’

‘You don’t need to say that. I’m not stupid.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘I don’t know why I said it. Now I’d better go rescue Stone from Fay. She seems to have taken a shine to his shoelaces. He’s a great guy, you know. He won’t be any trouble.’

Just then came a pattering of small feet and a cry of ‘Mama!’ and Fay ran into the kitchen, her arms held out. Kitty swung her up, held her close and kissed her, taking comfort in her sweet-sour infant smell. She closed her eyes and for a moment knew an intense joy. Here were the people she loved most in the world, her husband and her child.
Let no one try to take them from me
, she sent out a silent pleading.

Flight Lieutenant Stone hid in their apartment for two nights. Once, Kitty awoke, hearing him shout out something in English, and for a minute or two lay rigid with anxiety, thinking someone had broken in. Then she realized that he was simply dreaming. She hoped no one else in the building had heard him.

In the daytime Gene went to work as usual, so Kitty was left with Stone, and the unenviable task of stretching the rations to feed the extra mouth. When she went outside she was more wary than usual. Once, in the newsagent where she was buying some envelopes, a German officer came in for cigarettes. Fay, trotting off across the shop, bumped into him, bounced back and sat down squarely on her bottom, looking up at him in astonishment. Full of apologies, Kitty rushed across, but the man only laughed. ‘Careful,
Liebchen
,’ he said. He bent and took Fay up into his arms, his expression tender.

The little girl turned rigid with fear, and sensing this, the man hastily handed her back to Kitty.

He touched his cap. ‘I have a daughter like her,’ he said in heavily accented English and Kitty realized that she’d somehow given her nationality away. She tensed, waiting for him to ask for her papers, but he merely nodded courteously, paid for his cigarettes and left.

‘Madame!’ the woman behind the counter called to her as she went out, and she remembered she’d not paid for the envelopes. She fumbled with her purse and dropped coins that clinked and danced across the counter.

She came to like John Stone very much in the short time he was with them. He was thirty-one, an experienced pilot who’d flown many missions without mishap before this one. His co-pilot, she learned, had not survived the parachute drop and Stone could not speak of him without distress, so Kitty avoided the subject. It was easier not to talk of the war at all, she found, so they spoke of more cheerful things, of places they both knew in Hampshire. Stone was a director of the family’s shipping line, running cruise ships out of Southampton. He loved ships and the sea, but the war had cut business dead and the vessels had been commandeered for troop transport. He’d always wanted to fly, so he’d chosen the RAF above the Navy, and Kitty sensed that he fed off the danger of the bombing raids. He’d been frustrated by the long weeks in hospital, and now he was restless, keen to start the perilous journey home to England and to get back in the air.

In private Kitty wondered whether he’d be allowed to fly again. His eye, miraculously, was undamaged, but he didn’t hear her sometimes when she spoke and his left arm would twitch involuntarily.

Despite her affection for him, she was glad when he was gone. It happened one midnight. Eugene went ahead down the stairs to see if the way was clear. Kitty thrust a packet of food into Stone’s hand, as he whispered farewell.

‘Has he far to go tonight?’ she asked Gene when he returned.

‘No,’ was all Gene told her. ‘And it’s no good asking me what next. I haven’t been told.’
The less we know, the less we can tell
. That was the unspoken message. But she could hear the relief in his voice. She was glad that they’d helped Stone. She asked Gene to find out whether he’d made it home, but time passed and there was no news. All she could do was to carry him in her thoughts. She remembered how Mère Marie-François always said that this was a kind of prayer.

There were plenty of other people to worry about. One rainy February lunchtime, when Kitty returned home from shopping, she found Sister Thérèse waiting for her in the foyer. The concierge must have felt honoured to have a nun visiting, for she had found her a chair, and by the clattering sounds from her room had gone to fetch her refreshment. All this was quite unlike her usual peremptory behaviour.

‘Oh, Kitty,
Dieu merci,’
Sister Thérèse said, rising to her feet with an air of distress. ‘I came at once. It’s Mademoiselle Dunne. She’s been taken.’

‘Taken, where?’

It seemed that two French policemen had arrived at the convent at breakfast-time that morning, asking to see Miss Dunne. They were respectful and ill-at-ease, apologizing profusely to Mère Marie-François for disturbing the community. When Miss Dunne came to the door, the policemen told her to pack a few things and to accompany them to the local police station. She protested and assured them that her papers were in order, but they quietly insisted. Thérèse had gone up to help her pack.

‘We didn’t know what was happening,’ the nun said. ‘“Don’t worry,” Miss Dunne told me, “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding,” but she hasn’t come back, Kitty, and we do not know what to do. Père Paul went down to the police station to find out, but so many other people were waiting there with the same questions and the police would tell him nothing useful, so he came home. The Reverend Mother thought you should hear of it at once and that maybe Monsieur Knox could discover what is going on.’

‘I will telephone him right away,’ Kitty said, as the concierge came out of her room bearing a glass of water and a small round bun on a plate for Thérèse. ‘Perhaps someone at the Embassy can find out.’ The concierge put through the call to the hospital and to her surprise Kitty was able to speak to Gene almost immediately. He promised to do his best. By this time Fay was becoming fretful, hungry for her lunch, so Kitty invited Thérèse upstairs, but she declined.

‘My thanks to both of you,’ she said, returning her plate and glass to the concierge, ‘but I must hurry to Mademoiselle Dunne’s place of work. They’ll be wondering why she hasn’t arrived this morning.’

‘You don’t want me to go?’ Kitty asked, seeing how upset Thérèse was, but the girl insisted that she would be all right.

Gene arrived back that evening with bad news. His contact at the US Embassy hadn’t needed to make enquiries as the networks were abuzz with the news. It appeared that dozens of foreign nationals, predominantly British women, had been rounded up that day. No one knew as yet what was being done with them.

‘You don’t think they’ll come for me, Gene?’ Kitty thought to ask. Gene didn’t think they would because as his wife she was protected by his American citizenship.

Two weeks of worrying passed, during which Gene and Kitty heard conflicting rumours. Finally a postcard arrived from Adele. It gave little information, but Kitty rejoiced in the mere fact of it:
Perfectly safe and in good health
, it said.
Don’t worry about me, but please write
. Across the message in heavy black type was stamped the name:
Frontstalag 142
. As Kitty remarked, Adele’s bland message amounted to no information at all, but it was reassuring all the same. Frontstalag 142 was an internment camp not, to Kitty and Gene’s relief, in Germany but near a French town called Besançon, which Kitty later found on a map to be near the Jura Mountains, close to the border with Switzerland.

Gene passed her back the card, thoughtfully. ‘At least we know where she is and that she’s alive,’ he said.

‘But it’s not fair that she should be locked up, Gene. She’s a harmless middle-aged lady, who was merely being useful.’

‘To Germany she’s an enemy alien and there is no doubt where her loyalties lie, Kitty. Try not to worry too much, there’s no reason for them to ill-treat her.’ But he did not smile and there was something uncertain in his tone.

Kitty visited the convent with the news and the nuns were glad to hear that their dear Mademoiselle Dunne was safe. She helped Thérèse pack up a few more of Adele’s clothes to send to the camp. Under her bed Kitty found several of the woman’s sketchbooks. She turned the pages to examine the array of arresting portraits of the refugees whom Miss Dunne had helped, faces etched with pain or sorrow or bewilderment, moving and powerful. One of the pads was new, and Kitty slipped it in amongst the clothes for posting, along with some pencils she discovered in a drawer. The rest of Adele’s things the nuns promised to look after for her. It was all anybody could do.

It was several weeks before a note of thanks for the clothes arrived, though the sketchbook and pencils were not mentioned. Some time after that, a cheerful postcard came to say that the internees had been moved to better premises at Vittel, some miles further north, and that conditions were very good there. But after that, for a long while, there was no news at all.

Nathalie Ramond had been speaking for some time but now her soft voice fell silent, and she leaned back in her chair, her eyes closed. From the way she massaged her gnarled hands, Fay sensed the woman was in some pain.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said then, her eyes fluttering open. ‘I have somehow lost my thread.’

‘You were telling me about Miss Dunne,’ Fay prompted. ‘I knew her when I was a child. I had no idea that she’d been through so much.’ Fay recalled her as a benevolent aunt-like figure in old-fashioned tweeds and had never given a thought to what lay behind the appearance. The story was astonishing.

‘You know Miss Dunne?’ Mme Ramond’s face lit up.

‘She lived near us in Norfolk. I’m afraid she died when I was nine or ten.’

Mme Ramond looked sad. ‘Ah, but I should have liked to have met her again. You know, the war would not have been won without the Miss Dunnes. I don’t mean the fighting with tanks and bombs, but the war of hearts and minds. She had a natural instinct for what was right and good, and always lived by it. For most of us life is more confusing and sometimes we mistake the way.’

The bitterness in Mme Ramond’s tone both puzzled and alarmed Fay. Not for the first time, she perceived that some unimaginable darkness swirled beneath the woman’s narrative. Was it the same darkness that lay behind her mother’s distress? The worst was yet to come in this story, she knew, but she had to find out what it was.

‘Shall I continue?’ Now Mme Ramond was studying her with an expression of great tenderness, and the tenderness gave Fay hope.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said.

‘It’s difficult to decide where to start next . . . but ah, I think I see.’

1941

The winter snows melted in the pale spring sunshine, but life in Paris grew even harder. Rations remained strict and it wasn’t always possible to buy fresh vegetables, meat or milk. Kitty worried each night over what to feed the family the following day. Once or twice they were blessed by donations from Gene’s wealthy American patients or ate meagre meals in cafés or restaurants. They were luckier than most. But it wasn’t just the food, it was the growing sense of threat. From what they heard on the BBC, and news circulated by their Embassy, Paris’s American community grew more certain that their country would be brought into the war. America was helping Britain in all the ways a non-combatant could, sending supplies and even surplus American destroyers. In response, a German U-boat sank an American merchant ship off Brazil, and the US Embassy in Paris was pressurized by the Nazi authorities into closing, though for a long time it resisted, determined to serve those American citizens who remained in Paris in the face of all advice to leave.

Now, if challenged for her papers by a German soldier, Kitty heard the words ‘Your husband is American,’ pronounced with an icy politeness. The message was clear. Americans were no longer welcome in Paris.

‘I’ve been trying to talk Milly into going home,’ Jack said gloomily one evening, when they all met in a restaurant in a back street near Kitty and Gene’s apartment. Kitty’s friend Lili, nanny of little Joséphine, had come to babysit Fay whilst Joséphine’s family were away for a few days. ‘There’s nothing for us here. We should have gone months ago.’

‘So many of our friends have left,’ Milly sighed. ‘There’s you two, of course, and Miss Beach at the bookshop – she’ll never go, insists Paris is home. And it’s more and more difficult getting anything I write published.’ Since the La Tour affair, Milly had become a person of interest to the authorities. Once or twice she’d been summoned to a police station to have her papers checked, and recently, she’d been interviewed by a Gestapo officer concerning her purpose in Paris. He’d asked her repeatedly whether she knew the identity of ‘Odette’, the pen name under which she’d published several articles for La Tour. In these circumstances it would have been foolish to do anything further to draw attention to herself. ‘I feel like a prisoner here,’ she had confessed to Kitty a few days after that incident. She had sounded bitterly unhappy.