The Alice Network

by Kate Quinn

  Map

  Dedication

  To my mother

  The first reader, the first critic, the first fan

  This is for you

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Part I Chapter 1: Charlie

  Chapter 2: Eve

  Chapter 3: Charlie

  Chapter 4: Eve

  Part II Chapter 5: Charlie

  Chapter 6: Eve

  Chapter 7: Charlie

  Chapter 8: Eve

  Chapter 9: Charlie

  Chapter 10: Eve

  Chapter 11: Charlie

  Chapter 12: Eve

  Chapter 13: Charlie

  Chapter 14: Eve

  Chapter 15: Charlie

  Chapter 16: Eve

  Part III Chapter 17: Charlie

  Chapter 18: Eve

  Chapter 19: Charlie

  Chapter 20: Eve

  Chapter 21: Charlie

  Chapter 22: Eve

  Chapter 23: Charlie

  Chapter 24: Eve

  Chapter 25: Charlie

  Chapter 26: Eve

  Chapter 27: Charlie

  Chapter 28: Eve

  Chapter 29: Charlie

  Chapter 30: Eve

  Chapter 31: Charlie

  Part IV Chapter 32: Eve

  Chapter 33: Charlie

  Chapter 34: Eve

  Chapter 35: Charlie

  Chapter 36: Eve

  Chapter 37: Charlie

  Chapter 38: Eve

  Chapter 39: Charlie

  Chapter 40: Eve

  Chapter 41: Charlie

  Chapter 42: Eve

  Chapter 43: Charlie

  Chapter 44: Eve

  Chapter 45: Charlie

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .* About the author

  About the book

  Read on

  Praise

  Also by Kate Quinn

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  CHARLIE

  May 1947

  Southampton

  The first person I met in England was a hallucination. I brought her with me, onboard the serene ocean liner that had carried my numb, grief-haunted self from New York to Southampton.

  I was sitting opposite my mother at a wicker table among the potted palms in the Dolphin Hotel, trying to ignore what my eyes were telling me. The blond girl by the front desk wasn’t who I thought she was. I knew she wasn’t who I thought she was. She was just an English girl waiting beside her family’s luggage, someone I’d never seen before—but that didn’t stop my mind from telling me she was someone else. I averted my eyes, looking instead at the three English boys at the next table, who were busy trying to get out of tipping their waitress. “Five percent tip or ten?” a boy in a university tie was saying, waving the bill, and his friends laughed. “I only tip if they’re pretty. She had skinny legs . . .”

  I glowered at them, but my mother was oblivious. “So cold and wet for May, mon Dieu!” She unfolded her napkin: a feminine flurry of lavender-scented skirts among the heaps of our baggage. Quite a contrast to me, all rumpled and cross. “Put your shoulders back, chérie.” She’d lived in New York since she married my father, but she still sprinkled her phrases with French. “Do stop slouching.”

  “I can’t slouch in this getup.” I was crammed into a waist cincher like a band of iron, not that I needed one because I was built like a twig, but my froth of skirts wouldn’t hang right without it, so band of iron it was. That Dior, may he and his New Look rot in hell. My mother always dressed right at the crest of any new fashion, and she was built for the latest styles: tall, tiny waisted, voluptuously curved, a confection in her full-skirted traveling suit. I had a frilly traveling suit too, but I was drowning in all that fabric. Nineteen forty-seven was hell for little bony girls like me who couldn’t wear the New Look. Then again, 1947 was hell for any girl who would rather work calculus problems than read Vogue, any girl who would rather listen to Edith Piaf than Artie Shaw, and any girl with an empty ring finger but a rounding belly.

  I, Charlie St. Clair, was officially three for three. That was the other reason my mother wanted me in a waist cincher. I was only three months gone, but she wasn’t taking any chances that my shape might announce what a whore she’d brought into the world.

  I stole a glance across the hotel court. The blond girl was still there, and my mind was still trying to tell me she was someone she wasn’t. I looked away again with a hard blink as our waitress approached with a smile. “Will you be staying for the full tea, madam?” She did have bony legs, and as she bustled away with our order, the boys at the next table were still complaining about leaving her a tip. “Five shillings each for tea. Just leave a tuppence . . .”

  Our tea arrived soon in a clatter of flowered china. My mother smiled her thanks. “More milk, please. C’est bon!” Though it wasn’t all that bon, really. Hard little scones and dry tea sandwiches and no sugar; there was still rationing in England even though V-E Day had been two years ago, and the menu of even a sumptuous hotel still showed the ration-set price of no more than five shillings per diner. The hangover of war was still visible here in a way you didn’t see in New York. There were still soldiers in uniforms drifting through the hotel court, flirting with the maids, and an hour ago when I’d disembarked the ocean liner, I’d noticed the shelled look of the houses on the wharf, like gaping teeth in a pretty smile. My first look at England, and from dockside wharf to hotel court it all looked gray and exhausted from the war, still shocked to the bone. Just like me.

  I reached into the pocket of my heather gray jacket, touching the piece of paper that had lived there for the past month whether I was in a traveling suit or pajamas, but I didn’t know what to do with it. What could I do with it? I didn’t know, but it still seemed heavier than the baby I was carrying. I couldn’t feel that at all, or manage to have a single clear emotion about it. I wasn’t sick in the mornings, or craving split pea soup with peanut butter, or feeling any of the other things you were supposed to feel when you were knocked up. I was just numb. I couldn’t believe in this baby, because it had changed nothing. Only my whole life.

  The boys rose from the next table, tossing a few pennies down. I could see the waitress coming back with milk, walking as if her feet hurt, and I looked up at the three English boys as they turned away. “Excuse me,” I said, and waited until they turned back. “Five shillings each for tea—a bill of fifteen shillings gives a total five percent tip of ninepence. Ten percent tip would be a shilling and sixpence.”

  They looked startled. I was used to that look. No one thought girls could do figures at all, much less in their heads, even easy figures like this. But I’d been a math major at Bennington—numbers made sense to me; they were orderly and rational and easy to figure out, unlike people—and there wasn’t a bill anywhere I couldn’t tot up faster than an adding machine could do it for me. “Ninepence, or one and six,” I repeated wearily for the staring boys. “Be gentlemen. Leave the one and six.”

  “Charlotte,” my mother hissed as the boys left with sour looks. “That was very impolite.”

  “Why? I said ‘Excuse me.’”

  “Not everyone tips. And you should not have inserted yourself that way. No one likes pushy girls.”

  Or girls who major in math, or girls who get knocked up, or— But I let the words go unspoken, too tired to fight. We’d been six days crossing the Atlantic in a single stateroom, longer than expected because of rough seas, and those six days had passed in a series of te
nse squabbles lapsing into even more uncomfortable civility. Everything underlain by my shame-filled silences, her incandescent silent rage. It was why we’d seized the opportunity to get off the boat for a single night—if we didn’t get out of that close-confined stateroom, we were going to fly at each other.

  “Your mother’s always ready to fly at someone.” My French cousin Rose had said that years ago, when Maman had subjected us to a ten-minute tirade for listening to Edith Piaf. That’s not music for little girls, it’s indecent!

  Well, I’d done something a lot more indecent now than listen to French jazz. All I could do was turn my emotions away until I stopped feeling them, fend people off with a sharp-jutted chin tilted at an angle that said, I don’t care. It worked well enough on rude boys who didn’t tip their waitress, but my mother could get behind that shell anytime she liked.

  She was chattering away now, complaining about our passage. “—knew we should have taken the later boat. That would have brought us direct to Calais without this silly roundabout stop in England.”

  I remained silent. One night in Southampton and then tomorrow straight on to Calais, where a train would take us to Switzerland. There was a clinic in Vevey where my mother had scheduled me for a certain discreet appointment. Be grateful, Charlie, I told myself for the thousandth time. She didn’t have to come with you at all. I could have been packed off to Switzerland with my father’s secretary or some other indifferent paid handler. My mother didn’t have to miss her usual vacation in Palm Beach just to bring me to my appointment herself. She’s here with you. She’s trying. I could appreciate that even in my stew of fogged, angry shame. It wasn’t as if she was wrong to be so furious with me, to think I was a troublemaking slut. That’s what girls were, if they got themselves in the fix I was in. I’d better get used to the label.

  Maman was still talking, determinedly cheerful. “I thought we’d go to Paris after your Appointment.” Every time she said it, I heard the capital letter. “Get you some proper clothes, ma p’tite. Do something with your hair.”

  What she was really saying was, You’ll come back to school in the fall with a chic new look, and no one will know about your Little Problem. “I really don’t see that equation balancing out, Maman.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  I sighed. “One college sophomore minus one small encumbrance, divided by six months’ passage of time, multiplied by ten Paris frocks and a new haircut will not magically equal one restored reputation.”

  “Life is not a math problem, Charlotte.”

  If it was, I’d have been a lot better at it. I’d often wished I could work out people as easily as I did arithmetic: simply break them down to their common denominators and solve. Numbers didn’t lie; there was always an answer, and the answer was either right or it was wrong. Simple. But nothing in life was simple, and there was no answer here to solve for. There was just the mess that was Charlie St. Clair, sitting at a table with her mother, with whom she had no common denominators.

  Maman sipped her weak tea, smiling bright, hating me. “I shall inquire as to whether our rooms are ready. Don’t slouch! And do keep your case close by; you’ve got your grandmother’s pearls in there.”

  She floated off toward the long marble counter and the bustling clerks, and I reached for my traveling case—square and battered; there had been no time to order me smart new luggage. I had half a pack of Gauloises tucked under the flat box with my pearls (only my mother would insist I pack pearls for a Swiss clinic). I’d happily leave the baggage and the pearls to get stolen if I could just step outside for a good smoke. My cousin Rose and I tried our first cigarette at the respective ages of thirteen and eleven, snitching a pack from my older brother and disappearing up a tree to try some grown-up vice. “Do I look like Bette Davis?” Rose had asked, trying to exhale smoke through her nose. I nearly fell out of the tree, laughing and coughing together after my single puff, and she stuck her tongue out at me. “Silly Charlie!” Rose was the only one to call me Charlie instead of Charlotte, giving it a soft French lilt. Shar-lee, emphasis on both syllables.

  It was Rose, of course, who I saw gazing at me across the hotel court now. And it wasn’t Rose, it was just an English girl slouching beside a pile of luggage, but my brain stubbornly told me I was seeing my cousin: thirteen, blond, peach pretty. That was how old she’d been the last summer I saw her, sitting in that tree with her first cigarette.

  She’d be older by now, twenty-one to my nineteen . . .

  If she was still alive.

  “Rose,” I whispered, knowing I should look away, but not doing it. “Oh, Rose.”

  In my imagination, she gave an impish smile and a toss of her chin to the street outside. Go.

  “Go where?” I said aloud. But I already knew. I thrust my hand into my pocket and felt the scrap of paper I’d been carrying for a month. It had been stiff and crinkly, but time had worn it soft and pliable. That piece of paper bore an address. I could—

  Don’t be stupid. My conscience had a sharp, condemning voice that stung like a paper cut. You know you’re not going anywhere but upstairs. There was a hotel room waiting for me with crisp sheets, a room I wouldn’t have to share with my mother’s brittle fury. A balcony where I could smoke in peace. Another boat to catch tomorrow, and then the Appointment, as my parents euphemistically referred to it. The Appointment, which would take care of my Little Problem, and then things would be All Right.

  Or I could admit that nothing was All Right, and nothing would be All Right. And I could just go, right now, down the path that started here in England.

  You planned for this, Rose whispered. You know you did. And I had. Even in my passive, blunted misery of the last few weeks, I’d pushed for the boat that would take my mother and me the roundabout way through England, not the later passage that would have borne us right to France. I’d pushed for it without letting myself think about why I was pushing for it: because I had an English address in my pocket, and now, without an ocean in the way, all I lacked was the guts to go there.

  The unknown English girl who wasn’t Rose had gone now, headed for the hotel stairs behind a bellboy laden with luggage. I looked at the empty place where Rose had been. I touched the scrap of paper in my pocket. Little jagged pieces of feeling poked me through my numbness. Fear? Hope? Resolve?

  One scribbled address plus one dash of resolve multiplied to the power of ten. Work the equation, Charlie.

  Break it down.

  Solve for X.

  Now or never.

  I took a deep breath. I pulled out the scrap of paper, and with it came a crumpled pound note. Recklessly, I slapped it down on the table next to mine where the braying boys had left their measly tip, and I walked out of the hotel court clutching my traveling case and my French cigarettes. Straight out through the wide doors of the hotel, where I asked the doorman, “Excuse me, but can you direct me to the train station?”

  Not the wisest idea I’ve ever had: strange city, girl on her own. I’d spent the last few weeks in such a daze from my endless bad luck—the Little Problem, the screaming in French from my mother, the icy silence from my father—I’d been willing to go anywhere I was led. Straight off a cliff I’d march, blank and obedient, and not wonder or care why I was falling till I was halfway down. I’d been halfway down the hole my life had become, turning endlessly in the air. But now I’d grabbed a handhold.

  Granted, it was a handhold in the shape of a hallucination, a vision I’d been seeing on and off for months as my mind insisted on painting Rose’s face on every blond girl who passed me by. It had frightened me badly the first time, not because I thought Rose was a ghost, but because I thought I was going crazy. Maybe I was crazy, but I wasn’t seeing ghosts. Because no matter what my parents said, I didn’t entirely believe Rose was dead.

  I held on to that hope as I hurried down the street toward the train station on the high cork soles of my impractical shoes (“always high heels for a girl as short as you, ma
chère, or you’ll never look like anything but a little girl”). I pushed through the crowds, the rough, swaggering laborers headed toward the docks, the smartly dressed shopgirls, the soldiers lingering on street corners. I hurried until I was short of breath, and I let that hope bloom, rising through me with a pain that made my eyes burn.

  Go back, the sharp voice of conscience scolded. You can still go back. Back to a hotel room, to my mother making all the decisions, to my insulating cotton-wool fog. But I kept hurrying. I heard the hoot of a train, took in the smell of cinders and billows of steam. Southampton Terminus. Hordes of passengers were disembarking, men in fedoras, children red faced and fretful, women lifting crumpled newspapers over their waved hair to protect it from the faint drizzle. When had it started to drizzle? I could feel my dark hair flattening under the brim of the green hat my mother had chosen for me, the one that made me look like a leprechaun. I pushed on, running into the station.

  A train conductor was crying out something. A departure in ten more minutes, direct to London.

  I looked again at the piece of paper clenched in my hand. 10 Hampson Street, Pimlico, London. Evelyn Gardiner.

  Whoever the hell that was.

  My mother would already be looking for me at the Dolphin, launching imperious monologues at the hotel clerks. But I didn’t really care. I was just seventy-five miles from 10 Hampson Street, Pimlico, London, and there was a train standing right in front of me.

  “Five minutes!” the conductor bawled. Passengers scurried aboard, hoisting their luggage.

  If you don’t go now, you never will, I thought.

  So I bought a ticket and climbed onto the train, and just like that I was gone into the smoke.

  As afternoon dropped toward evening, the train car turned cold. I shrugged into my old black raincoat for warmth, sharing my compartment with a gray-haired woman and her three sniffling grandchildren. The grandmother gave my ringless, glove-less hand a disapproving glance, as if wanting to know what kind of girl was traveling to London on her own. Surely girls traveled on trains all the time, given wartime necessities—but she clearly didn’t approve of me.