A rather handsome man stepped forward, toward Kat. He had dark hair and incredibly dark brown eyes, a color she didn’t come across too often, if at all. Her scientist’s mind wondered how that intensity of color might hold over a life span; in a fabric, it would certainly fade. His smile was especially prepossessing and in the dim lighting of the bar it was impossible to tell how old he was. Anywhere from mid-thirties to forties, she thought. She was suddenly very glad of her Dior.
“Kat?” he asked.
“Elliott?” she said, and he nodded.
She shook his proffered hand and followed him to two empty stools at the bar.
“What can I get you to drink?” he asked. “If you’ve been to London often you’ve probably been here before, but they’re very good at cocktails.”
He passed her what looked like a book and she was gratified that he imagined she might be the kind of woman who often found herself in the bar at the Savoy Hotel.
She opened the menu and laughed delightedly when Coco Chanel and an elegant bouquet of camellias leapt up off the page, as if Kat were perusing a children’s pop-up book rather than a cocktail menu. On the next page, Ernest Hemingway’s head burst forth. “It’s fabulous,” she said, looking up at Elliott.
He grinned. “I think I come here just for the menu.”
“You realize it’s going to take me forever to choose a drink?” she said, turning to the next page.
“Take your time.” He sounded as if he meant it. As if here, in this luxurious bar, hours were inconsequential.
And Kat remembered she had nowhere she needed to be, no obligations at all except to enjoy herself. She settled in to select a drink. Normally, she’d have a gin and tonic, but the classic cocktails caught her eye and she remembered that, long ago, before marriage and children and divorce and work, her grandmother had sometimes made her a negroni on summer nights when she was on a break from university.
“I’ll have a negroni,” she said at last.
Elliott ordered negronis for them both, then asked her, “Are you over here for work? You’re a fashion conservator, right? How’d you get into that?”
“The long way around,” she said, reaching for the drink the barman placed in front of her. “I originally studied medicine—I always loved science. I was, in fact, the nerdy math and science whiz at a time when girls who were into math and science were called freaks. Well,” she amended with a smile, “a freak was probably the nicest thing I was called. But I quickly realized I’d be a terrible doctor—too soft, my . . .” She paused. She’d been about to say, my ex-husband said, but didn’t want the shadow of Paul to darken the conversation.
“My friend said I was too soft,” she said instead. “I sidestepped into a science degree, discovered I enjoyed materials science and, most especially, textiles science. When I finished the science degree, I sidestepped again into a Master of Conservation at the Sorbonne in Paris. I love fashion history and I’ve been lucky to be able to mix that interest with science.”
“That definitely makes you the most interesting person I’ve spoken to all day, if not for months,” Elliott said.
She laughed. “I’m sure authors must meet much more interesting people than me.”
“Modest, as well as smart and beautiful. A rare combination.” He smiled at her.
Kat knew she was blushing. He sounded sincere, not as if it were a well-practiced line, but surely it must be. Most people heard the words “textiles scientist” or “conservation” and thought her job dusty and dull rather than worthy of interest. “Hardly,” she managed to say. And then, with negroni courage, “Is flattering your interview subjects the way you ordinarily extract information from them?”
It was his turn to laugh. “I was being honest. You are all of those things. And given that my usual interview subjects are over eighty years old, all I need to do to get information from them is profess to enjoy overbrewed tea and let them talk about their Highland terriers’ ailments. I rarely comment on anyone’s appearance because I’ve learned that you can never form a true picture of a person based on what they look like. I’ve interviewed women who look too frail even to pick up a toddler, only to discover that they withstood torture from the Gestapo for weeks on end.” He paused. “But you’re a busy woman and you’ve taken the time to meet me. I’ll move on to business.”
He opened a notebook and Kat was fleetingly disappointed. It had been a long time since she’d been called beautiful by anyone except her grandmother or her children and she rather liked it. But his comments about the Gestapo, and torture, made her shiver.
“You must hear some terrible things,” she said quietly.
“Enough to make me very glad I’m alive now, rather than then.”
Kat nodded in agreement.
“You said in your email that your grandmother was born in Lyon,” he continued. “Which means that, even though I know you’re skeptical, it’s becoming more likely that she is the woman I’m looking for. She has the right birthdate, birthplace and name. But she won’t tell you much about her life during the war, except that she was in England?”
“She said she doesn’t remember anything other than packing parachutes.” Kat fidgeted with her almost empty glass, not wanting to tell him about her grandmother’s silences, omissions and that terrible, unsettling fear.
“Packing parachutes,” Elliott repeated. “Which would mean she worked for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force—the same organization my Margaux was commissioned into as cover for her real work as a spy for SOE.”
Kat frowned, and Elliott mistook it for confusion.
“I know there are a lot of acronyms,” he said. “WAAF; that’s the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. It wasn’t a secret department; lots of women worked for it. SOE—that’s the Special Operations Executive, the organization nobody knew about. It sent agents into France to work with the Resistance, sabotage strategic targets—”
Kat interrupted. “Why is finding Margaux Jourdan important for your book?”
Elliott swallowed more negroni. “Margaux Jourdan isn’t the subject of my book, but she knew two of the women who are, which is why I’d like to speak to her. I’m researching three women from the same family: Vanessa Penrose, and her daughters, Liberty and Skye. Each worked in intelligence during their respective world wars. One family with three women over two generations who worked as spies.”
Even Kat, whose interests were more scientific and less literary, could tell it would be a fascinating book. “I’ve never heard of them,” she said. “And despite not knowing what she did during the war, I know a lot about my grandmother.” She pressed on, despite her subconscious reminding her of all the mysteries and unknowns her grandmother had thrown up lately. “She was also my mother, you see; she looked after me from the time I was just a week old. Margaux took me on because my mother . . .” Kat tried to think how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t invite questions. “My mother couldn’t care for me.”
“I’m sorry,” Elliott said. “You must think I’m prying, but as time goes on and so few people from the 1940s are still here, research becomes harder and harder. I have to use whatever or whoever is willing to help. I really am grateful for your time, even if it comes to nothing.”
“Well, at least you’ve reminded me how much I used to like negronis,” Kat said, smiling a little.
“Speaking of which, I’ll get us another.”
She shook her head. “I’m a bit too out of practice for that. I definitely cannot have two negronis on an empty stomach.”
Elliott glanced around the bar, and pointed to one of the alcoves, which was now empty. “If you claim that for us, I’ll get them to bring us some food and then you can have another drink.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Kat protested, horrified that he might have thought she was angling for an invitation to dinner.
“I’d like to.”
“All right,” she said, somewhat doubtfully.
As she made hersel
f comfortable on the sofa and waited for him to join her, she realized the negroni had reached her head. Despite the gentle probing about her grandmother, she was feeling delightfully carefree for once; perhaps too carefree if she’d just agreed to spend another hour or so with a man who was certainly more good-looking than anyone she’d spoken to in ages.
Elliott returned with a smile and two more negronis. “Do you mind if I show you some photos?” he asked, opening a satchel.
“It’s the least I can do in return for the drinks.”
He passed her a couple of blurry black-and-white pictures. “This,” he said, pointing to one, “is Margaux Jourdan. Any resemblance to your Margaux? I know seventy years have passed and the quality is poor but . . .”
Kat examined the photograph closely. In the low light of the bar, she could make out a dark-haired, unsmiling woman in a uniform, cigarette gripped tightly in her hand.
“This woman was, what, in her twenties?” she said. “My grandmother is ninety-four. Her cheeks are wrinkled; this woman’s are smooth. Even if the quality was any good, I’m not sure I’d be able to see Margaux in her. Because it’s black-and-white, I can’t even tell what her eye color is. All I can say is that she’s about the right size: petite. And it seems like her hair is dark; so was Margaux’s. So I guess this looks as much like my grandmother as any other petite, dark-haired woman from that time.”
Elliott sighed. “I know. It’s like trying to see a pearl through an oyster shell.”
“You said you’ve met frail women who don’t look as if they could ever have done anything extraordinary,” Kat went on. “But my grandmother has very little interest in the world. She definitely wasn’t a spy.”
Elliott didn’t try to contradict her. Instead, he took out another photograph. “There are no pictures of Vanessa Penrose. She was taught to fly by an intelligence officer who then set her up in France with his sister during the so-called Great War. The two women sent information about German activities back to the Intelligence Office in London. But this is Liberty Penrose, her daughter. She worked for SOE, just like Margaux Jourdan.”
Elliott handed Kat a photograph of a dark-haired woman standing in a group, each face too small to see the features properly. “And this”—he passed Kat a much folded and faded copy of a page from a newspaper—“is Skye Penrose.”
A waiter arrived with the food. Kat examined the second picture too; it showed a woman stepping out of a plane, her hand in her hair.
Elliott leaned back in the sofa, negroni glass held in his fingertips. “Liberty worked on the sabotage side of things for SOE. By all accounts, despite her superiors commenting on her emotional volatility, she was very effective at her work. And Skye gathered information that helped bring about the relatively peaceful fall of Paris to the Allies in August 1944. Before that, she was one of only a handful of women who flew planes for the Air Transport Auxiliary. Not in combat; she ferried them around England to air bases and maintenance units.”
Kat felt affinity bind her to the woman Elliott was speaking of. “That must have been very unusual for a woman back then,” she said.
“It was. By the end of the war, only around one hundred and fifty women worked for the ATA, compared to thirteen hundred men. Probably the same gender split as in a university science class in the nineties.”
She found herself smiling at him again. “Well,” she said, trying to hide her pleasure at his intuition under cover of selecting some food from the delicious morsels before them, “how else can I convince you that my grandmother isn’t the woman you want?”
“Why don’t you want it to be her?” he asked, studying her face as if he wanted to read her, to see what was inside her.
She shivered a little because nobody had looked at her that way for years. She shrugged. Sipped her drink. Ate an oyster as prevarication. Decided to give Elliott some of the truth, but not all of it, yet. “My grandmother is one of the most precious people in the world to me,” she said quietly. “You’re telling me I know nothing about her. That’s . . .” She searched for the right word. “Frightening. It means she shut me out. Or that she lied to me. I’m not fond of liars.”
An understatement, but she wasn’t about to tell him the details of her divorce.
“I can’t fault you for that,” he said softly. “But I also know this is a book that needs to be written and I want to write it. So few people know what these women did. Partly because women rarely speak of their achievements, and partly because they grew up in an environment of ‘stiff upper lip’ and ‘get on with it.’ The fact that three female spies came from the same family is extraordinary, but for people like the Penroses—and Margaux Jourdan, whoever she is—the terrible things they saw and perhaps had to do mean they’re even less likely to speak of them. They helped give us the freedoms we have today, Kat. So someone has to speak of the heroic things they did. I’d like to do it.”
He was certainly beguiling. And right. Without these women, who knew how the world might have ended up? Kat felt some of her resistance begin to dissolve. She nodded. “What else do you want to know?”
“What about your grandfather?” Elliott asked. “What do you know about him?”
“Not a lot,” Kat said, understanding for certain now that her family tree was as full of holes as a pair of 1980s jeans. “He was an American named O’Farrell. A pilot. He and Margaux weren’t married and you know what a scandal it was to be an unwed mother at the time. I’m sure it’s why she doesn’t talk about that part of her life.”
“I didn’t know that Margaux Jourdan and O’Farrell were lovers,” he said, as if he’d heard the name O’Farrell before.
He riffled through his satchel and produced another photograph. It showed a man and a woman dancing closely together in a way that suggested they were more than foxtrot partners. It was difficult to tell whether it was the same woman as in the other photograph, but when Kat flipped it over she saw perfectly formed cursive handwriting declaring that the people in the photograph were Margaux Jourdan and the man without a first name, O’Farrell.
“I guess that kind of evidence is a little hard to refute,” Kat said slowly, all the while thinking, Don’t turn into a stranger, please, Margaux. I couldn’t bear it.
“It is,” Elliott said quietly, as if proving the point he’d been trying to make since he’d first spoken to her on the phone wasn’t really such a big deal. “Do you mind me asking when your mother was born?”
“Third of January 1945.”
“This photograph of O’Farrell and Margaux was taken in late March 1944.”
“About nine months prior.”
“Yes.”
Like buttons slipping into buttonholes, Kat could see the pieces of Elliott’s puzzle were fitting together. It made her admit aloud the absolute truth. “I didn’t want any of this to be true because when I spoke to my grandmother about it she sounded so afraid.”
The words sounded stark against the buzz of conviviality in the bar.
“I really am sorry if I’ve stirred things up,” Elliott said.
It wasn’t a platitude. Kat could tell by the way he looked directly at her, eyes gentle on her face, that he meant it.
His phone buzzed, making them both jump. He glanced at it as if he planned to ignore it, then said, “Sorry again; it’s my daughter. I have to get it. Hey . . .”
He winced and pulled the phone away from his ear and even Kat could hear the wailing sounding from it. Elliott rolled his eyes at her and she understood that, whatever was going on, it wasn’t to be taken too seriously.
“You’re deafening me and the other person here,” he said, and the wailing diminished. “You’re supposed to be staying with your mother tonight.” A pause. “Fine. I’ll help you. Let me pick you up in a bit . . . You’re already in a cab? Brilliant. Well, I’ll just leave what I’m doing and come home and meet you, shall I?” Another pause. “No, it’s fine. I’m sure Kat will understand. See you soon.”
Elliott put the phone down. “For the millionth time tonight, I’m sorry. I have a fourteen-year-old daughter, which is a bit like having a moody royal living in your house. Everything is about her, and everything is a catastrophe, no matter how many times I tell her about actual catastrophes from the past. Tonight’s drama is a history assignment that’s due tomorrow. I should tell her I’m not going to help her with it. Instead, I’ll probably point her in the direction of the right research sources and proofread it for her, and hope that by not actually writing it for her I’ve found the right balance between spoiling and neglect. Although she’ll see it as neglect and I’ll see it as spoiling. Also,” he added, “she hasn’t been getting along well with her mother of late. I suspect something’s happened and that’s the real reason she’s already in a cab to my place.” He hesitated. “We didn’t get to finish our conversation. I don’t suppose you’re free tomorrow night?”
“I am.” The words were out before Kat had time to think.
“I’m going to a party where I’ve planned to spend the evening in a corner catching up with a couple of friends who are over from France. Would you like to come with me? It might be fun.”
A party? With Elliott’s friends? It was Kat’s turn to hesitate.
“We can finish this another time,” she said. “You’d rather see your friends, not listen to me telling you nothing useful for your book.”
“I’d love you to come. My friends, Josh and D’Arcy, are great people but they’re also very . . .” He stopped and thought. “Overwhelming. It would be nice to have company. And not just that—it would be nice to see you again.”
At his last words, a warmth Kat hadn’t felt for a long time pulsed inside her. “All right,” she said. “I’m staying at the Sofitel. What time . . .”
“I’ll pick you up at eight. See you then.”
Kat watched him walk into the lobby, where a group of women stopped him. He smiled at them restrainedly, not the way he’d smiled at Kat, while the women summoned a receptionist and arranged themselves around Elliott with beams on their faces. They giggled instructions at the receptionist, who took photos of them on five different phones. Elliott continued to smile politely throughout and finished by scribbling something on a piece of paper for each of them—even the receptionist. Finally, with a wave and a collective sigh from the women, he was gone.
The Paris Secret Page 12
