by Rachel Rhys
Luckily Ruth asks her instead about her own work during the war and Eve cheers up enormously talking about her days with the Women’s Voluntary Service, helping to distribute donated second-hand furniture to people whose houses had been bombed out.
‘It was so nice to feel useful for a change,’ she says, glad of the chance to reminisce; Clifford declared all talk about the war to be ‘morbid’. Eve is too ashamed to admit now that those war years, working alongside other women, spending long hours and even days away from home, were the happiest of her life.
While they’ve been talking, the two young men and the sulky-looking woman at the table behind have been engaged in an increasingly heated debate. Now there comes an eruption of noise. Eve turns around to see the younger man on his feet, his face stained red to match the large glass of wine he is waving around in his right hand.
‘Who made you the bloody paragon of all moral virtues?’ he says to the man with the green eyes, and Eve notices how unsteady he is on his feet. ‘You can’t tell me how to behave. You’re not him. No matter how much you might want to imagine you are.’
‘Oh, sit down, Duncan, you’re being too tiresome for words,’ says the young blonde woman, although her voice sounds brighter, as if in gleeful anticipation of a scene.
‘That’s right. Side with him. You always do. I don’t know why you aren’t marrying him instead of me. Oh, I forgot, he didn’t ask you. He asked someone else. Only we’re not allowed to talk about that, are we?’
Now the bigger man is getting to his feet, throwing his napkin down on the table. He also looks none too steady. He has his back to Eve, so she cannot see his expression, but she notes the way his shoulders are tensed, and his hand is clenched into a fist by his side.
‘Just fuck off, why don’t you?’ he says.
A gasp goes around the carriage.
‘Now, look here—’ begins a diner at the far end, half rising from his seat.
But the man is turning and lurching his way back through the dining car, carrying his Scotch with him. As he passes Eve, their eyes meet briefly and he seems to hesitate, and Eve has the strangest notion that he is about to apologize to her. But then the moment passes, and he has gone through the door at the end that leads to the sleeping compartments.
‘Well!’ Ruth’s blue eyes are bright with amusement. ‘I have to say, this is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for from the French Riviera. Theatrics. Bad behaviour. All we need now is an actual fight. Or better yet, a duel.’
‘I will attempt to oblige,’ says her husband. ‘Although I can’t promise to win. My reflexes are not what they were.’
Eve laughs along with them. But later, when she is alone in her compartment, the doubts start to creep in. Clifford had been right when he’d told Mr Wilkes that she had led a sheltered life. Though war broadened her outlook, she is still unsure how to respond to people like that group on the next table. Should she have been appalled by their rudeness, as she is sure Clifford would have been? Or laughed it off, like Ruth? Or just taken it in her stride so that the words ran off her like water off oilskin?
She closes her eyes and the rhythm of the train becomes her mother’s voice in her head. You can’t do that, it tells her. And again: You can’t do that. You can’t do that.
4
1 June 1948
SHE REGISTERS THE change even before she opens her eyes. A shift in the quality of the light creeping around the blind of the tiny window, a fresh feel to the air.
Raising herself on to her elbow, she opens the blind and – oh. Sunrise is bursting like a firework across the sky, painting the world in stripes of orange and purple and pink. Eve feels her spirits rise again, last night’s doubts all but forgotten in the thrill of this exotic new dawn. Though she cannot see the sea, still she fancies she can sense it, wide and open, the surface rippled with breezes blown in from Africa.
‘Presque Marseille, Madame,’ says the steward, coming in with tea and toast and jam.
She had said goodbye to the Colletts the night before, but nevertheless Eve feels bereft when the train stops to disgorge its passengers. She had so warmed to the couple that she feels a peculiar sense of loss for herself and sadness for them, that their mission is such an unhappy one.
Eve never visited Archie’s grave. By the time the war was over he had already been dead five years and the Eve who’d held his hand and dreamed of a happier future was also gone. The two of them belonged to a different world from the one in which Eve found herself once the bombings had stopped and that sense of living a speeded-up life died away, and the job of clearing up and sobering up began, and it gradually dawned on her that this might perhaps be all that there was, that her life might start folding in on itself until it was small enough to fit once again into her little back bedroom in her mother’s house.
Her spirits begin to rise when the train passes through the sleepy village of Cassis, the early morning sun setting the bougainvillea around the station ablaze. She gasps out loud at the sight of the Mediterranean sea, its glass-like surface broken by the occasional languid wave.
By mid-morning, when the train passes over the breathtaking Viaduc d’Anthéor, the world falling away steeply on both sides until it seems as if the carriage in which she is sitting has taken wing and is flying through the Riviera sky, her heart is soaring. How could it not be when the sun is so bright, the colours so clear, the sea sequinned with gold, as if the world has been repainted overnight.
The steward knocks. ‘Cannes, le prochain.’ He has olive skin and a scar on his forehead in the shape of a smile. Eve doesn’t wonder too much about the scar. They are most of them scarred now in one way or another.
Now that the moment has come to get off the train, she finds herself seized by nerves. What does she know, after all, about the situation she is walking into?
Standing on the platform, her misgivings only increase as she looks first one way, then another, in search of the promised welcome party. But though there is plenty of activity with passengers stepping down from the train, hands already raised in greeting, there is no sign reading ‘Madame Forrester’, no po-faced French clerk dispatched to meet her.
Anxiety builds, and she clutches tight to the handbag that contains her emergency money.
To her horror, she feels tears burning at the back of her eyes. Pressing her lips together, she tries not to cry, turning her gaze inside the train to spare herself the sight of the fast-emptying platform.
And finds herself staring into a pair of startlingly green eyes. The man from the dining car, the one who had gone thundering past her the night before, is sitting on the other side of the window nearest to her, and she is at first mortified then furious to see a small smile playing around his mouth.
So he finds her distress amusing? He thinks it funny to see her standing lost on a now-deserted platform, her suitcase, having been brought to her by a beaming steward, abandoned by her feet?
All the doors are closed and the train jolts back into life with a short blast on the guard’s whistle. The man in the carriage raises his hand and makes a discreet pointing gesture at something behind her. Eve looks away. When she glances back again, he repeats the gesture, one black eyebrow raised.
Next to him, the blonde woman from the dining car stares through Eve as if she isn’t even there.
The train is now pulling away. And not a moment too soon, for her eyes are starting to blur. Only when she can barely see the back of the last carriage growing smaller in the distance does she finally look behind her where the man had been pointing. And there, hurrying towards her, holding a piece of paper on which is written ‘Mme Forrester’ in careful curly writing, is a woman with the reddest face Eve has ever seen.
‘Oh, Madame. I am so sorry. Désolée, désolée.’ The woman is breathing so heavily that Eve struggles to understand her heavily accented English. ‘The car— The road—’ There is a complicated story about a lorry blocking traffic that Eve gives up trying to follow.
‘I am Marie Gaillard,’ the woman says at last, summoning a porter as if from thin air to carry Eve’s luggage. ‘I will take you to your hotel for you to rest and later I will take you to see my husband. Please do not tell him how I leave you standing here. Bernard, he will not be happy with me. He will say to me, Marie, didn’t I tell you that you are always late so you must leave the house every time half an hour early so that you might have a chance of arriving on time.’
She pronounces it eh-rly.
‘It is perfectly all right,’ Eve says. ‘You are hardly late at all.’
She is taken aback when they arrive at the car, a small orange vehicle that to Eve resembles nothing so much as a tin can on wheels, to discover that Marie is to drive her to the hotel herself. She glances covertly at her from the passenger seat.
Now that the redness has faded, Eve can see that her chauffeur is in her late forties with a broad, flat face brought to life by lively grey eyes, and a mass of hair of an indeterminate hue that is haphazardly piled on top of her head. She is wearing ill-fitting trousers, which surprises Eve, who had the impression that French women wafted around always in a cloud of perfume and silk.
The little car shoots out into traffic, narrowly missing a motorbike being driven by a man in uniform, who raises a fist and says something into the air as they pass.
‘You must be careful here in Cannes. Most of the people have no idea how to drive.’
Eve darts a look to see if Marie is having a joke at her own expense, but her expression is one of sorrow at her countrymen’s failings on the road.
Ahead there is a queue of cars. Marie makes a noise in the back of her mouth and suddenly wrenches the wheel to the right so they swing across the oncoming traffic and into a side road.
‘Ha!’ She smiles in triumph when she finds the road semi-deserted. The tin-can car makes a series of zigs and zags and Eve clutches her seat to steady herself. They pass a butcher’s shop with a line of people stretching down the street.
‘Everyone is hungry still,’ says Marie. ‘Never enough meat. Never enough bread. All the time they make the daily ration smaller. See?’ She points to a man with cheeks so sunken they must surely meet inside his mouth, sitting on a newspaper in a doorway and staring blankly ahead.
Finally, they pull on to the coastal road, fringed on the right by sparsely planted palm trees swaying in the breeze, and beyond them a drop down to the wide sandy beach scattered with deckchairs even at this time of year, and beyond that, the vastness of the sea itself.
They screech to a halt in front of a grand white building with black-topped turrets at each end. It is at least seven storeys high, with row upon row of large windows, each framed by its own little balcony, and its gleaming facade dazzles against the blue of the sky.
A little bubble of happiness bursts inside Eve, obliterating Clifford’s voice in her head warning, Where’s the catch? What will they expect from you in exchange for this?
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she says to Marie Gaillard.
The Frenchwoman shrugs, for once unsmiling. Eve wonders if she has said the wrong thing.
Inside the grand lobby with its polished black and white floor, Marie has a brief exchange with the receptionist. Though Eve had boasted of her knowledge of French to Clifford and Mr Wilkes, she now discovers to her chagrin she has forgotten almost everything she learned at school and finds the conversation difficult to follow. Instead she focuses on the receptionist’s neat grey beard, and the purple mark his spectacles have made in the skin on the bridge of his nose.
Over the previous week, Clifford had been seeking to give her an intensive course in current affairs, and in particular the affairs of this region, reminding her that while northern France had been under German occupation, the south was nominally self-governing, the Riviera itself maintaining an uneasy co-existence with first the Italian fascists and later the Nazis. ‘Just a few years ago, these people were our enemies,’ he told her. ‘Every time you meet someone you must ask yourself what they were doing during the war, who they were greasing up to.’
Eve looks at the man’s fleshy fingers, closed now around the nib of the pen with which he is writing her name in the hotel register, and wonders whose hands they have shaken in the past.
While a bellboy is gathering up Eve’s solitary suitcase, Marie turns to her. Her smile is back but there is a sudden wariness, and she looks as if she can’t wait to get away.
‘I will leave you here to rest, but will return at four o’clock if that suits you.’
On her way up in the lift, Eve tries to work out whether she said something that could account for the French woman’s sudden change of mood. But her misgivings are forgotten when they arrive on the fifth floor and the bellboy unlocks the door of a room halfway along the corridor, strides over to the full-length windows to throw open the shutters, and whoosh! Eve’s senses are flooded by the light that falls hot and white across the room, the harsh call of the seagulls competing with the roar of the traffic below, the strip of brilliant sky, the glimpse of something glittering beneath it, the smell of salt and freshness and that intangible thing she can’t put her finger on, only knows is as far away from the smell of her suburban English street as it is possible to get.
I am here, she thinks. I am really here.
Only after the bellboy has left, pocketing the coin that Clifford set aside early the previous morning for just this purpose – Goodness knows how much you’ d hand over left to your own devices – does Eve take a proper look around the room. The bed with its pale blue and pink striped counterpane and tall, carved wooden headboard, the walnut side table and chest of drawers. The height of it. The light.
She walks to the windows and steps out on to the balcony, where only the daintiest of wrought-iron railings stand between her and a steep drop down into the street below. Directly ahead of her, the Mediterranean sea sparkles as if lit by thousands of tiny lights. There is a pier to her left, stretching a long wooden finger out into the water.
She ought to rest after the long journey, but she knows she could not sleep. Instead she unpacks her case, withdrawing items of clothing that already smell of a different life. In the full glare of the sun, her best skirt, a bottle-green linen affair which just yesterday seemed so sophisticated, now appears drab and uninspiring; the swimming costume she had crammed in at the last minute hopelessly middle-aged.
She flops backwards on to the bed, crushing her yellow silk blouse underneath her. The sun throws a slanting shaft of light through the open windows over the bed, warming her face. She closes her eyes so that her lids glow orange and feels her muscles unclenching, her skin expanding.
Suddenly it no longer seems so important to know why she is here. It is sufficient that she is here. Alone.
At five minutes to four she heads back down to the lobby. She has had a bath in the small but sumptuous en-suite bathroom and is now dressed in the best skirt, with the crumpled silk blouse. She has on stockings and the clumpy leather shoes Clifford told her would be ‘a good investment’ but always make her feel, as she puts them on, like a shire horse being shod.
Marie is standing by the lobby exit. Her eyes light up when she sees Eve approaching.
‘You see,’ she tells her, ‘I have left the house half an hour early, like Bernard tells me. Et voilà!’
She puts a hand under Eve’s elbow and steers her so rapidly through the door that Eve does not even have time to give her room key to the receptionist.
The little orange car is outside, parked so far from the kerb that the cars coming up behind have to swing out to avoid it.
‘Now we will see Bernard,’ says Marie, beaming, all trace of her earlier prickliness so thoroughly eradicated that Eve wonders if it was ever there at all.
‘Did you know Guy Lester, Marie?’ she asks her guide as they negotiate a series of narrow back streets.
‘Oh yes. Of course. Everybody knew Mr Lester.’
‘And was he a nice man?’
Ho
w prissy she sounds. How much like her mother. As if people must be either nice or not nice. As if it is not possible to be nice on one day and on the next to walk down the street wishing ill on random strangers.
‘Mr Lester? He was very charming. And so handsome.’
Marie turns to Eve, her eyes wide, and Eve regrets having asked the question as the car begins to veer to the left.
Finally they arrive outside an old building that must once have been grand, although now the paint is peeling and there are pits and holes in the bisque-coloured facade, which might be from age or disrepair or from mortar and bullets. Eve would really rather not know which.
Inside the high-ceilinged hallway, they squeeze into a small lift with a wrought-iron cage around it. Marie presses the brass button for the fifth floor. Nothing. She mutters something in French that Eve doesn’t understand, but can quite easily guess, and presses again. Still nothing.
‘I am sorry,’ she says, shrugging. ‘This happens from time to time. We walk.’
By the fourth floor, Eve’s calf muscles are protesting and she is uncomfortably aware of her blouse sticking to her back. She is breathing so heavily that she doesn’t register the click-clacking noise of approaching heels on the narrow stone steps until a woman rounds the bend in the stairs and they all but collide.
‘Oh, excuse me!’ Despite their recent acquaintance, Eve can tell that Marie is flustered by the encounter, the skin on her neck staining pink.
‘Madame Lester. Please allow me to—’
‘Not now, Marie. I am in a hurry.’
The woman pushes past with as much haste as her four-inch heels and tight-fitting black skirt will allow. Her hair is the honey colour of oak boards, and even in the dim light of the stairwell it shines as if polished. She smells of flowers indecently in bloom. But her amber eyes, alighting briefly on Eve as she passes, are watery and pink-rimmed.
