The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  Curious, she got close enough to see if any talent was on display. To her great surprise, one of the boys – and they were boys – whose face was quite sensitive and startlingly handsome, was making something light and dreamlike of the wintry grey quay with the Eiffel in the background outlined in snow, not as subject but as a signature in the form of Chinese calligraphy. He caught her in momentary admiration of his work and he blushed. Eleanor apologised for intruding. In reasonably fluent French, he replied he was not much good but hoped one day he might be. Against every instinct, she immediately recognised him no longer as an occupier but a human being, a fellow artist at that.

  She had steeled herself against such encounters: no eye contact, no discussion. They were there, she couldn’t avoid them, but she’d have nothing to do with the army that had killed Claude and taken over the city she loved, her home. But here it was, she couldn’t help it. She also couldn’t help discovering they could be human. She wished him all the best with his work, excusing her lapse on Christian charity. As she walked away, she looked back, not at the painting but at him. Christian charity, my fat aunt, she scolded herself the instant she realised what she was doing. She’d admit to desire for the male lovers in her novels, and Claude, whom she desired most of all. But they were imagined or dead, like Claude, while here she was lusting after one in the flesh – and worse, a mere youth, and even worse than that, a Boche. She hurried towards the metro, almost forgetting to buy the flowers she needed.

  The choice was limited – delicate snowdrops, some flowering quince, winterberry and Christmas roses – but given the early winter, any colour was welcome. Besides, flowers seemed to be the only things in relatively good supply.

  Eleanor remarked on this to the flower seller.

  ‘The Boches don’t go for flowers,’ the woman replied, matter-of-fact, which nicely fed Eleanor’s attempt at working up a temper against the Germans. Really, she was seeking an antidote to her addling urges.

  AUVERS-SUR-OISE, VAL D’OISE

  Late morning, Sunday, 7th December 1941

  Eleanor’s journey out to the little village beyond the north-western edge of the city took twice as long as usual, for no apparent reason. As she walked through the narrow streets to the Church of Our Lady, the clouds dissolved and the sun appeared, thin and pale. Usually, the graveyard was busy with the curious and the reverential visiting the famous artist buried here but today the place was strangely empty, except for two small children, a boy and a girl, about three and four years old, playing among the headstones. Their laughter was infectious and Eleanor smiled as she watched them for a moment or two before she continued along the path to Claude’s grave.

  As she approached, she came to a sudden stop. In a vase on his grave was a generous bunch of fresh cyclamen. Eleanor was surprised. Claude’s family usually came in the afternoons. She did not relish a possible encounter. Then she saw a woman standing in contemplation nearby, not one of the family but vaguely familiar. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, was hatless, her hair brown and lustrous, and she had a simple face, not pretty but kind, and now a study in sadness. The children ran up to her – ‘Maman, maman,’ a race to be in her embrace – and the woman’s sadness fled. She laughed and held them, and they laughed.

  Eleanor caught her breath as she realised who this woman was. She looked away, as if intent on a grave in another direction. When she looked back, she saw the girl slip from her mother’s grasp and kiss Claude’s headstone and the boy did that too, if awkwardly. He had to stand on his toes to reach the spot where his sister had kissed.

  *

  In June of the previous year, the whole country had been grief-stricken for the soldiers who had fallen beneath the Nazi blitzkrieg. Thousands and thousands of them. It infuriated her that the British still thought the French forces hadn’t put up a fight. To those old enough to remember, it had been as bad as 1915, when the church bells never stopped tolling. Claude was killed at the battle on the river Aisne, where the French had outfought the German panzer divisions, a victory now forgotten in the awful malaise of defeat and occupation. His had been a heroic death, a shining light, although hardly so to the three women in his life, especially when two of the three had believed that she was unique.

  A widow inviting her husband’s mistress to his funeral wasn’t unusual, but to encounter another mistress, known to the widow but not to each other, was highly charged, even for France.

  Until the burial in the graveyard of the family church, Claude Fournier’s wife and his mistresses all played their roles with dignity. As did his three children, the eldest now eighteen, none of whom Eleanor had met or had ever given much thought to. She couldn’t help seeing Claude in each of them – eyes on the girl, mouth on the eldest boy, ears and nose on the middle child, another boy – enough to upset her composure as each brushed their cheek to hers.

  The widow, who was older than Eleanor, had not gone that far, just the touch of gloved fingers passing for a handshake. Eleanor had been determined not to avert her gaze; it was time they looked each other in the eye, wife and mistress. If not now, never. The widow had looked right back at her. Their veiled eyes met and glistened. Shared grief or resentment or even triumph on the part of the widow, Eleanor hadn’t been able to tell – and really, did it matter? Madame Fournier was the widow and had Claude’s children. Eleanor had no title or children, just memories. What mattered more to Eleanor was the other woman, but her determination to see the face of this surprising presence, let alone her eyes, was thwarted by the woman’s hasty departure before Claude was even lowered into his grave. Had she quailed at being received by the widow? Or was it the shock of discovering she had been but one in a ménage à quatre? Whatever the answer, in fleeing, this third woman had left a gap in a circle of reconciliation, superficial as it may be, and never to be joined.

  *

  In the graveyard, Eleanor retreated, winded. She was the intruder, she felt. She realised who was unique and who was not – at least, in her misery that’s the way she was thinking. The reasons she conjured up for the difference were unflattering to her. No wonder this woman had left Claude’s funeral. She’d had his two babes at home awaiting her embrace.

  ‘Oh God,’ Eleanor said out loud. How this stabbed at her. Yes, Claude had asked her more than once if she’d wanted a child, but it had never occurred to her that he had been asking for himself. He had three children already. Yes, before Claude, she’d had that miscarriage to a French louse and that had been painful and sad, but then her second book had catapulted her into the ranks of real popularity, and soon after she’d met Claude. What more had she wanted? Her brothers and sisters had produced grandchildren enough for her parents, and she delighted in each of them when visiting or when they visited her, but she’d not felt the call of motherhood herself. She and Claude dined regularly, he made love to her, sometimes luncheon on Saturdays, the theatre and the opera now and then because his wife didn’t go for it, and after she’d become a pal of Sylvia, he came with her to the soirées. Had he offered her a gift, the gift of motherhood, which she had rejected? Now here they were, these two children that might have been hers.

  Did she really mean that? She didn’t know what she thought.

  She fled the church and went straight back to the railway station, just managing to catch the train as it returned to the Gare du Nord. She would be on time for lunch at the apartment of her pal Madeleine. At least she might get drunk.

  ‘Well, dear,’ said Madeleine, once Eleanor explained her mood, ‘you’ve been well and truly out-mistressed, haven’t you? No wonder you’re angry.’

  ‘I’m not angry,’ Eleanor protested. ‘I’m heartbroken.’

  ‘Of course you’re angry,’ Madeleine said. ‘You’ve been angry since the funeral.’

  Eleanor thought she’d been in grief, but like a djinn’s curse, once out, what Madeleine had said couldn’t be unsaid.

  ‘I’m surprised you of all people hadn’t wondered,’ she continued. ‘I m
ean, if a man can have one mistress, why not two? One with children, one without.’

  The answer to that was simple. Writers never placed their real lives under the microscope reserved for their fictional characters. They thought they did, but what they looked at and what they saw was rather like the wicked witch with her ‘mirror, mirror on the wall’. And Eleanor was nothing if not vain, a quality she shared not only with Madeleine but with Aphrodite, whose symbol, after all, was the looking glass. Eleanor felt no shame in her goddess, even if it did lead to some blind spots.

  Madeleine, whom she’d known since their days driving Red Cross ambulances at the battle of Saint-Mihiel during the Great War, ran an irregular sort of salon with her mouse of a husband, a librarian. He was a royalist, which was of little consequence compared to the fact that he was rich and a count of the pre-Napoleonic kind, giving Madeleine a certain cachet when shopping. Eleanor always enjoyed these Sunday gatherings because she was Madeleine’s only real writer and her opinions, in the manner of the French, were listened to with respect. Political representation, though, had fallen off: the Catholic right had decamped to Vichy and the Free French to London, leaving only a couple of royalist pals of the mouse, who despised the reactionaries that were now infesting the soirées hosted by the German ambassador. As for the left, since Hitler had turned on their chief sponsor, the Soviets, they were carrying on their intellectual and literary pursuits as if the unpleasantness around them was merely a change in the weather. Eleanor, as an American, officially a neutral, felt she was hardly different, another flame to the fire of her current discontents.

  Sunday luncheons were a rare pleasure now. You could only do it if your guests shared some of their ration tickets, though Madeleine’s mouse had close family connections in Bordeaux. Even then, Madeleine’s cassoulet wasn’t able to run to any duck, not even a stringy chicken. She’d made do with beans, some root vegetables and some sausage, but since Madeleine could make stones taste delicious, Eleanor had no trouble asking for seconds. The supply of good Bordeaux helped, which was just what she needed to dull the pain in her heart and the fury in her blood. The talk was all about what one could or couldn’t buy, and where one might buy it on the black market, and how disgusting black marketeers were, and how one should as a principle boycott them.

  ‘Not while I’ve got a face and my last franc,’ Eleanor muttered, her only contribution to this conversation she was finding tedious.

  Then someone said, ‘But my, aren’t some of the Boches incredibly handsome?’ This caused a great philosophical quarrel that animated even the mouse, whose patriotism was offended. Eleanor stayed out of it. Had she not had a civilised encounter with one of the handsome occupiers that morning, exposing her desire all too clearly, the more unsettling because he was so young? She took another glass of wine and sank back into the sofa to indulge her grievances. At least she forgot about the Nazi security officer.

  RUE DE MONTFAUCON, SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS, PARIS VI

  4.30am, Monday, 8th December 1941

  Eleanor slept fitfully. At some time during the night, she thought she heard a baby crying. In those mysterious moments between sleep and waking, she was sure of it, yet the instant she was awake, she heard only silence. It was not the sort of dark silence that would frighten a child, for while she heard no echo of what had drawn her out of the depths of sleep, this silence was so sharp and intensely bright, her skin tingled and her mind buzzed with curiosity. She lay in wonder, but as the dark quickly became cold and unfriendly, wonder was overwhelmed by remembering what had happened at Claude’s grave, clearly the cruel genesis of this vivid and unsettling dream.

  In the distance, she heard what sounded like a shot. You could hear the footfall of an ant it was so quiet at night since the Germans came, but better an ant than gunfire. If it was someone taking a pot-shot at a German, they would take hostages and murder them. She switched on the lamp and read until she dozed, but she didn’t really sleep properly so was easily disturbed by the loud knocking on her door.

  She could hear the urgent voice of her concierge through the racket, ‘Madame, madame.’

  When she opened the door, he and his wife both fell through as if fleeing a visit from the police, or worse, the Gestapo.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’ Mr Teixeira said in his Portuguese-accented French.

  ‘I heard it first,’ his wife interrupted and pushed him aside. ‘You were asleep. Let me tell her.’

  As they bickered, Eleanor noticed the clock. Four-thirty am.

  ‘Japan has attacked America at Pearl Harbor,’ Mrs Teixeira reported. ‘A big attack – the American fleet is destroyed.’

  ‘At last!’ Eleanor cried out in English. This wasn’t how she’d thought it might start, except she’d hoped it would – how else could the Nazis be defeated? Then she remembered her youngest brother, Will, the family pet. He was an officer in the army, stationed where she did not know. Her nephew Tom had gone into the marines last year, and she thought of all the mothers and their sons, and she was ashamed by her elation. But elated she was. She’d been as if in the grip of a boa constrictor that was just taking its time to squeeze the life out of her and now, suddenly, it had released her.

  12 RUE DE L’ODÉON, PARIS VI

  Around 5am, Monday, 8th December 1941

  ‘I’m getting out,’ Eleanor said to Sylvia after abruptly waking her. Daylight was still hours away, although the clocks, on Berlin time thanks to the occupiers, didn’t think so.

  ‘The curfew,’ Sylvia murmured sleepily.

  Before the curfew was lifted, Eleanor had left home with the Teixeiras, who were going to early Mass at Saint Germain de Prés for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and if the occupiers along the boulevard objected to them breaking the curfew, Mrs Teixeira was quite prepared to direct them to the Blessed Virgin herself. Eleanor had au-revoired them downstairs and then slipped around the deserted back streets, encountering only the carts going to and from the market, the horses’ droppings steaming on the cold stones behind them like tiny exploding bombs. The market had just opened, though God knows why, she thought – they only had rutabaga to sell.

  Ever since she’d seen how swiftly and without warning the Germans had swooped on the Canadian and British women, Eleanor had kept a valise packed with cosmetics, underwear, socks and woollens. She did not want to be caught unprepared. Now that the unoccupied zone rather than an internment camp was her immediate destination, she really only needed to get money, lots of it, and a passeur who would take her across the demarcation line for a fee. She’d heard figures from 50 francs a head to 500. Some even did it for free. Her anger and sadness had lifted, as had the listless apathy about her life, which showed all too clearly the self-indulgent rut she’d been in. She felt young again and excited by the prospect of flight.

  ‘But the United States isn’t at war with Germany,’ Sylvia said to her.

  In Eleanor’s opinion that was a matter of days. She had no time to lose and neither did Sylvia. The Germans hadn’t been handing out passes to foreigners to cross into Vichy since October. They certainly wouldn’t be handing out any now, especially to Americans. She bubbled to Sylvia about having received the names of two possible passeurs from her concierge, behaving as if they would be leaving before the day was out.

  ‘I can’t go,’ Sylvia said, bringing Eleanor down to earth. ‘You know that.’

  ‘You’ll be interned in a camp!’ Eleanor exclaimed. ‘What good can you do there? We can do war work at home.’ She had no idea what war work she’d do; she imagined it would be useful, whatever it was. ‘We speak French like a native, after all,’ she said. ‘Soldiers and sailors need books. Besides,’ she added with flourish, but really she was babbling, ‘growing up with three brothers, I can shoot a rifle and a pistol.’ Yet none of this mattered. The pull of country and family at war was all that mattered. What was keeping her here? While she wasn’t ready to admit it, her upsetting discovery at Claude’s grave had loosened what sh
e’d thought was the tie that bound her to stay for the duration. Before, it seemed dishonourable for her to leave. Now it was her path of honour.

  Sylvia said she’d talk to Adrienne, so they arranged to meet again at one o’clock.

  ‘Pack a bag,’ Eleanor cautioned and added a checklist of essentials.

  ‘In one suitcase?’ Sylvia said, incredulous, but Eleanor said firmly, ‘Darling, if I can, you can.’

  MONTPARNASSE, PARIS XIV AND XV

  Around 8.30am, Monday, 8th December 1941

  Eleanor walked up to the Saint Germain metro and caught a train to Montparnasse. She found the place, an electrician’s shop near the railway station. To the enquiry from a red-faced woman at the counter, she replied that no, she didn’t have anything to repair, she wanted to get into Vichy as soon as possible, which was clearly the wrong answer, because the red-faced woman said the shop was closed.

  ‘The door’s open. The sign says “Open”,’ Eleanor countered.

  ‘You shouldn’t blurt out what you just asked,’ the woman relented. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  Eleanor apologised for not sticking to the niceties, but she didn’t have time; if she didn’t get cracking, she might end up in a German internment camp.

  The red-faced woman sniffed. ‘Couldn’t be worse than the one we’re in now,’ she said. ‘But things are too hot at the moment.’ Everyone already knew about Pearl Harbor, and if this wasn’t making the Boches nervous, too many Jews were trying to get out, and what with the Wehrmacht canteen having been shot up, the shits were shooting first, no questions asked, and they were everywhere.