Never Leave Me (6 page)

‘Yes, sir. She spoke to two old women but only briefly and her eyes were on Gilles. As soon as the women left the café, Gilles came over and sat at her table.'

‘For how long?'

‘Thirty-seven minutes, sir.'

Dieter frowned. It could have been a lovers'tryst but he doubted it. He couldn't quite see the aristocratic Lisette de Valmy pursuing an alliance with a gangling schoolmaster.

He dismissed the private, still deep in thought. He had made the unpleasant trip to Gestapo headquarters at Caen and had discovered that the Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts schoolmaster was high on the list of suspected members of the local Resistance cell. And Lisette de Valmy had cycled purposefully from Valmy to meet him for an intense conversation the moment he had been released from forced labour at Vierville. He sat down at the large Beidermeier desk, tapping a silver pen thoughtfully on its surface.

Lisette de Valmy's home had not appeared on any of the lists of known or suspected members of the Resistance, yet she had a bicycle and spent long hours visiting villagers both in Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts and the surrounding countryside. The local patrols probably took very little interest in her comings and goings. It was all highly suspicious and his jawline hardened. He hoped passionately that his instincts, always acute, were this time playing him false.

‘You mean that he is having
dinner
with us?' Lisette asked her father, aghast. ‘You can't mean it! You can't expect us to sit down and
eat
with him!'

‘He's here and we must make the best of it,' her father said patiently. ‘So far, he has treated us with respect and we can do no less than follow suit.'

Lisette tried to speak and couldn't. Her throat was choked with distaste and panic and something else. Something too dark and fearful to even acknowledge.

‘I can't,' she whispered at last. ‘I would feel like dirt. Like a collaborator.'

Her father put his arm around her shoulders. ‘You have no need to, my love. It will give us an even better opportunity of convincing the Major that your mother's health is fragile and that extra help in the chateau is a necessity.'

‘He won't believe you,' she said, her voice low and choked. ‘I told Paul that he would not believe us, but he hasn't met him. He doesn't understand.'

‘Of course he will believe us.' her father said serenely. ‘It is virtually the truth, so why should he disbelieve us?'

She remembered the way Major Meyer's eyes had held hers across the silk-draped bed. ‘Because he is a man who will never be taken in by falsity,' she said, turning away from him as a flash of fear rippled down her spine.

Out of the habit of a lifetime she changed for dinner but did not go down to join them. The pretence that he was a guest and not a ruthless, despotic invader would have been more than she could endure. She paced her bedroom restlessly, staring repeatedly out of the window towards the inky blackness of the Channel. If only the English would cross it! If only ships and planes and battalion after battalion of soldiers would bridge the narrow sea separating France from England! She pressed her fingertips against the icy coldness of the window pane. Such a narrow stretch of water and yet Hitler had not been able to breach it. England still remained unconquered and free. Her heart caught at the word. One day France, too, would be free.

She turned away from the window, clasping her hands tightly, wondering if her father had already broached the subject of an additional member of household staff to Major Meyer. Would he give permission? And if he did so, would he permit her father to engage someone personally? Anxiety gnawed at her. Whatever else Major Meyer was, he was not a fool. She could quite well imagine him agreeing smoothly to her father's suggestion that a cook be obtained and then, as her father thought the battle won, continuing in the hard, dark voice that sent shivers down her spine, that he himself would employ a suitable woman, thereby defeating the whole object of the exercise.

‘Damn him,' she whispered fiercely beneath her breath. He would know exactly what it was her father was trying to do and it would, no doubt, afford him cynical amusement.

The hands on her small ormolu and porcelain clock stood at nine-fifteen. Surely by now the major would have left the breakfast-room where all meals were now taken? Enduring his presence at dinner must have been agonizing for her fastidious, well-bred mother. Unable to stand the suspense any longer, she opened her bedroom door and walked quickly along the landing and down the winding stone stairs that led to the hall.

The door of the breakfast-room was ajar, the room empty. With a sigh of relief she crossed the hall and entered the main salon. For a moment shock held her motionless. The high-ceilinged room glowed in the light of the log fire and the oil lamps that her mother favoured. Her father was standing at ease in front of the fire, a pipe cupped in the palm of one hand, the other thrust deep into his trouser pocket as he said genially, ‘Lisette is the skier in the family. We have spent many vacations at Gstaad.' He paused, looking up at her, his eyes meeting her shocked ones with sudden, crippling embarrassment.

Major Meyer was sitting in the high-winged leather chair to the left of the fireplace, a glass of cognac in his hand, the top buttons of his tunic undone, a relaxed expression on his normally granite-hard features.

For a moment there was a strained, taut silence with only the Major continuing to look at ease, and then her father said awkwardly, ‘Come in,
ma chère.
I was just telling the major what an excellent skier you are.'

She sucked in a deep, steadying breath and moved forward. They needed the Major's permission to bring a stranger to Valmy. A stranger who would defeat whatever end he was working towards. She sat down, straight-backed, at her mother's side, her cool outward composure revealing none of her inner turmoil.

Dieter's eyes flicked across to her and then back, once again, to her father. He had been both relieved and disappointed that she had not joined them for dinner. He had known, of course, why she had not done so. Her father's urbane explanation that she had a headache would not have deceived a twelve-year-old. She had been unable to face sitting down to eat with the invader of her home and country. He hadn't blamed her in the slightest. If he had been in her position, he would have reacted in much the same way; possibly worse.

Conversation at dinner had been, at first, stilted. The Comte had done his best to pretend that he was a voluntary host with an invited guest but the Comtesse had been unable to join him in the charade. Good breeding had determined that she be polite, but it was an icy politeness that would have frozen anyone less assured than himself. The assurance did not come from the power he wielded it came from the inborn knowledge that, socially, their worlds and background were very little removed.

His family were Prussian aristocrats, a great landowning Junker family in the traditional mould. The first world war had altered their way of life but had not destroyed it. His family home had been a moated castle on the outskirts of Weimar, feudal, magnificent and unbearably cold and unsanitary. His childhood summers had been spent there, but his mother seldom moved from her lavish and comfortable apartment on the fashionable Unter den Linden. By the time Dieter was nine, he was an assured and sophisticated Berliner.

Family tradition destined the eldest son for a military education but Dieter's father, shamed by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, appalled by the great inflation of 1923 that had made so many fortunes worthless, broke with tradition and instead of sending Dieter to a military academy, sent him instead to the most expensive and exclusive boarding school in Europe. Le Rosey, Switzerland, where his schoolmates'blood was as royal as the Wittelsbach blood that ran in the distaff side of his family. Le Rosey had insured that no one, least of all a mere Comte and Comtesse, could make him feel their social inferior.

Though for political reasons Dieter no longer sported the aristocratic ‘von'before his surname, it had taken the Comte only seconds to realise that his unwelcome guest was his social equal. The knowledge eased him. The Major paraded none of the usual Nazi pretentions. He was a man who, in another place, another time, he would have liked greatly. In discovering that the Major shared his passion for polo and had played on the most prestigious circuit in Germany, he had forgotten that the man was his enemy. Only the shock and accusation in his daughter's eyes brought him back to reality.

‘Major Meyer skied at Gstaad regularly before the war,' he finished lamely as Lisette sat still and silent, her face a polite, frozen mask. ‘He used to stay at the Steigenberger.'

Lisette winced. The Steigenberger, Gstaad's most luxurious hotel, standing in chocolate-box grandeur on the south-facing slopes, had been the setting for several childhood holidays. The knowledge that Major Meyer had also frequented it tarnished her many happy memories. Her father's eyes were pleading. He needed her co-operation. Perhaps he had not yet gained Major Meyer's permission to engage Marie's ‘niece'as cook.

She turned her head slowly towards the Major, her heart beating fast and furious. ‘How nice,' she said politely, but the words did not come out cool and indifferent as she had intended. Her voice seemed to be filled with smoke and there was an underlying throb to it that would not be stifled.

He had resolved not to take the slightest notice of her. She was too disturbing. Too innocently provocative. A pine log fell and splintered, sending a flurry of sparks up the great chimney, filling the room with pungent scent. Her remark scarcely warranted a comment. With an imperceptible shrug of his shoulders he turned to her, about to make some meaningless rejoinder. His eyes met hers and desire sliced through him so naked and primeval that it almost robbed him of breath.

Her hair fell in one long smooth wave to her shoulders, pushed away from her face on one side with an ivory comb. Her eyes were violet dark in the pale perfection of her face, thick-lashed pools that drew him down and down, robbing him of logic and common sense. The high-necked sweater and country tweed skirt that she habitually wore had been, discarded. Her dress was of rose-red wool, the neckline deeply, cowled, the skirt clinging gently to her hips and flaring out around her knees. Her hands were clasped in her lap, the beautiful almond-shaped nails unpolished. Her legs were crossed lightly at the ankles, long and slender, bereft of stockings despite the chill draughts that lurked in every corner of the chateau. He remembered the heavy stockings she wore in the daytime and knew with what contempt she would refuse silk ones if he were to offer them. Just as she would reject with contempt anything that he offered her.

‘The proprietors are family friends,' he said, the tight control he was exercising over himself making his voice harsh.

The room seemed to have closed in on her. She knew the proprietors well. They were not the kind of people to entertain Nazi sympathies, yet it was not the shock that her family and Major Meyer should have acquaintances in common that was making her feel so faint. It was something else. The same, nameless emotion that overcame her whenever she was in his presence.

She had hated before, but never with a passion that made her feel physically weak. She had hated the Germans when two thirds of the villagers of Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts had been marched off as forced labour. And she had hated them when she had known that they were to defile Valmy. But it had been a cold, murderous hatred. A hatred that she was in command of. She was in command of nothing when Major Meyer looked at her with his hard grey eyes, his body as lean and lithe as that of a panther about to spring on its prey.

She tried to speak again, but the words would not come. Her father and mother had receded into a hazy distance and she was conscious only of Major Meyer; of blond hair gleaming like dull gold in the firelight; of the abrasive, masculine lines of his face. Of broad shoulders and the lightning of flashes on his collar; of strong well-shaped hands as they nursed his cognac. Of the sense of power under restraint. His masculinity overwhelmed her and suddenly she understood. In a moment of clarity so agonising that she cried out loud she knew what the emotion was that confounded her whenever she was in his presence. It was not hatred. It was physical desire.

‘Lisette, are you ill?' Her father was stepping towards her anxiously.

She rose to her feet, fighting for air, her face deathly pale. ‘No … Please … Excuse me…' Shaking violently she fended away her father's arm, knowing only that she must escape from the room. Escape from Major Meyer's presence. Escape from a truth too monstrous to live with.

He fought the almost overwhelming instinct to leap to his feet and stride after her. His powerful shoulder and arm muscles clenched as he remained where he was, the glass of cognac in one hand, the other still clasping the ankle of a booted foot as it rested with apparent ease across the knee of his other leg.

The Comtesse had been busy with her embroidery. At her daughter's strangled cry the work had fallen from her hands and now her eyes met her husband's in alarm.

The Comte gave her the merest frown, intimating that she behave as if nothing untoward had happened and said, with an underlying note of strain in his voice, ‘My daughter's headache is obviously still troubling her, Major Meyer. Please forgive her abrupt departure.'

Dieter nodded, barely trusting himself to speak. Waves of shock still reverberated through him. It was as though he had touched a live switch. He had to tighten his hold on his ankle in order to prevent his hand from trembling.

‘I have some aspirin in my room,' he said, controlling his voice with care, appalled at the intensity of the sexual desire that had swamped and almost submerged him.

‘Thank you, Major Meyer,' the Comtesse said, rising to her feet, the skin taut across her finely sculpted cheekbones, ‘but I have a supply myself. Perhaps you would excuse me while I find them and take them to Lisette?'