The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “Are your parents still in France?”

  Margaux shook her head. “They were working with the Resistance. They haven’t been seen or heard from for almost a year. My two brothers also.”

  “I’m sorry.” Skye reached for Margaux’s hand but only touched it lightly as she wasn’t sure how Margaux would respond. “They must be very brave people.”

  “It’s not bravery,” Margaux said tersely. “It’s necessity. Nobody wants France’s heart to be invaded in the same way her cities have been.”

  Skye heard in Margaux’s sharpness the shadow of anger and grief and impotence. They were all doing whatever they could here in England, but it must look like nothing to those in France. Besides the fighters and the bombers that went out every night to Germany, where was their Resistance?

  Margaux signaled to the waiter for more champagne. “Why is O’Farrell dancing with your sister?”

  Skye gave a short laugh. “You know, they should make you an interrogator. You’re rather good at getting right to the point.”

  Margaux’s answering smile was odd. “Nobody here ever asks anything that matters. Everyone’s too busy avoiding the subject and any kind of emotion. It’s a wonder you don’t all explode from the pressure.”

  “Perhaps that would be a good way to frighten off Hitler,” Skye said. “Have everyone in England simultaneously detonate their stiff upper lips. It might create a blast big enough to reach all the way to Germany.”

  She began to laugh at the ridiculous image of the stoic British people putting their pent-up emotions and the things nobody talked of to good use, creating a bomb so powerful it might defeat the Nazis. Margaux laughed too, and soon, whether because of the champagne or their own pent-up emotions, they were both laughing so hard they couldn’t speak.

  Nicholas approached them, looked from one to the other, and then over his shoulder at Liberty. “This isn’t exactly how I thought I’d find you,” he said.

  Behind him, Skye could see that Liberty was attempting to kiss O’Farrell, who was halfheartedly discouraging her. He glanced over to where Skye sat as if even he knew it would be poor form to kiss the sister of the woman he’d planned to spend that same night with. Skye felt irritation more than hurt, and at Liberty rather than O’Farrell.

  “Why don’t you dance with Skye?” Margaux said to Nicholas.

  The look Nicholas flashed Margaux—a kind of appalled shock that one might feel if asked to dance with a hideous monster—punched Skye in the gut. She stood up, hand pressed to her chest, pushing the pain back inside where no one could see it.

  As she hurried away, she stumbled into Liberty, who had broken away from O’Farrell and whose face was as green as the grass of England. Skye took her sister’s arm and felt her deadweight sag against her. They needed a bathroom.

  Once there, Liberty managed to deposit her negronis into the basin, which was better than the floor. Then Skye found herself doing something she’d seen other women do for their friends, women who’d had too much grief to keep inside them and who were emptying it out into the toilets of a nightclub. She gathered up the strands of Liberty’s dark hair and held them out of the way while her sister heaved over the basin.

  She rubbed Liberty’s back and whispered, “What are you doing? What are we both doing?”

  Liberty didn’t respond.

  Skye passed her a napkin to wipe her mouth and told her to splash water on her face. Then she bore almost all her sister’s weight as she took Liberty to their room.

  Once there, she deposited Liberty on the bed, poured her a glass of water and found a wastepaper bin that Liberty would put to good use during the night ahead. Finally, Skye lay on her back beside her sister, hands folded on her stomach, and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  She felt Liberty roll over to face her, saw that her sister’s eyes were still open, that she hadn’t yet passed out. She reached out for Liberty’s hand, just like those nights in Paris after their mother had died when they’d shared a bed and found solace in the simple act of lying next to one another.

  “Isn’t this better than being with O’Farrell?” Liberty mumbled.

  Hot tears trickled over Skye’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said, squeezing Liberty’s hand. “Yes, it is.”

  * * *

  Not long after Rose and Skye returned to Hamble, Joan made a surprise visit to the cottage. After they’d engulfed her in hugs, the three of them sat squashed together on the front step enjoying the late-afternoon warmth. Joan produced a bottle of sherry, which was the only vaguely celebratory substance she’d been able to find in the whole country.

  As Joan poured out three glasses, Skye asked, “What are we celebrating?”

  Joan beamed and rested her head on Skye’s shoulder. “First I have to thank you for making it possible. As of today,” she raised her glass, “I’m officially an instructor for Class V planes!”

  “Oh, my goodness!” Rose exclaimed.

  “An instructor,” Skye repeated with equal amazement.

  All three forgot their sherry and laughed and hugged and cried. Because the unthinkable had happened. After Skye’s conversion course for Class V planes, a handful of other women had been allowed to do the same. And now this: a woman would be instructing both men and women in how to fly the largest planes in the RAF. It was akin to a miracle.

  Nobody was able to say anything coherent for quite some time, until Joan added, voice low, “It’s better this way. I’m too full of things I can’t talk about. Being an instructor will mean not having to . . .”

  Farewell so many friends to that place somewhere over the rainbow. Skye heard her own shaky inhalation, and Rose’s too.

  “I sometimes talk to Richie about those things,” Rose said quietly. “I know I used to say talking won’t bring them back, which is still true, but I’ve discovered that being listened to brings me back from that place where there are too many clouds.”

  I was so scared, Skye had said to Nicholas. I know, he’d replied, bringing her out of her own leaden sky. Except Nicholas had Margaux to do that for him. He didn’t need Skye.

  Then Rose blushed, which she never did, and said, “I have something to celebrate too.”

  Rose’s discomposure brought Skye out of her reverie. “What on earth is it?” she asked.

  “Richie asked me to marry him and I said yes.” Rose ducked her chin, unable to meet her friends’ eyes.

  “Marriage!” Joan exclaimed. “I thought you were wedded to diversions? Who’d have thought you’d be the one getting engaged . . .”

  “And you’d be the one instructing men to fly Halifaxes,” Rose finished. “War changes everything.”

  “It does,” Skye said feelingly. “But this time for the better. Congratulations.”

  She kissed Rose’s cheek, her eyes wet with tears, but glad she could get away with it in this instance. Rose’s joy in love was as blindingly painful as staring at an eclipse. And Skye knew that love should be that easy, should create such radiance. Love certainly wasn’t one person looking at another the way Nicholas had looked at her at the Embassy Club after Margaux had told him to dance with Skye. She withdrew her scarf from her neck and tied it over her hair, screening her face.

  “Now we just need Skye to get what she most wants,” Joan said.

  Skye froze. Nobody could know what she felt for Nicholas. It was unforgivable for her to be in love with a man who was promised to another woman.

  “I have what I want,” she said, too sharply. “Flying. That’s all I need.”

  Joan sighed. “War changes everything except Skye,” she said, and Skye realized that Joan hadn’t guessed anything of her feelings but was simply trying to find the romance in the situation.

  Skye shifted closer to Joan and put her arm around her. “But it means you’ll be leaving us,” she said, and even she could hear her voice wobble.

  “I will,” Joan said, a smile on her face and tears in her eyes reflecting that this mo
ment was both joy and sorrow, bittersweet.

  “Remember the furs?” Skye said quietly. “From that first winter?”

  Joan nodded. “I remember the furs.”

  “And the cashmere,” Rose added. “We were like flying princesses.”

  “If princesses wore overalls,” Skye said.

  They all started to laugh at the same time, knowing they were far from being princesses, but that the richness of their friendship was worth more than a kingdom.

  * * *

  Summer turned to fall and there were more and more planes to deliver. They were so busy that Skye was surprised to hear her name and Rose’s called over the tannoy at Hamble one morning, directing them to Pauline’s office rather than to the hatch to get the delivery chits. There, they found Joan, who’d been recalled for what Pauline told them was a special operation. She handed Joan and Rose a chit to deliver Mosquitos to a nearby RAF base.

  “Stay there for lunch,” she told them. “You only have this one job today. Take as long as you need at the base.”

  “Why?” Rose asked, which was exactly what Skye was wondering. There was never time for lunch.

  “I’ve chosen you both for this job because of your looks and manners,” Pauline said, answering the question obliquely. “You have time to touch up your makeup before you leave. Efficient and pretty, please,” she finished.

  Joan and Rose hurried out, Rose looking bemused and Joan looking thrilled at being given express permission to beautify herself for the job.

  Skye turned to Pauline. “I can see why you didn’t choose me.”

  “If it were for looks alone, you’d be going with them. But I have another job that requires aptitude rather than manners.”

  “So I’m to take that one?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “What exactly are Rose and Joan doing?” Skye asked, unable to keep the suspicion from her voice.

  Pauline sighed. “Politicking,” she said. “The squadron they’re delivering the Mosquitos to has lost most of its men. As soon as new men join, they lose them too. Their CO asked if the ATA women could do something to boost morale. I wasn’t sure your principles would allow you to provide the required bucking up.”

  Skye felt something surge through her: she wasn’t sure if it was anger, despair, or if she was going to be sick. She’d thought Joan’s new position as an instructor of the very largest planes meant that all the barriers between the men and the women had fallen. That they were being judged on talent alone now, not on whether they wore a skirt. But no; as well as flying every single plane in the RAF, often with very little training, and in all weather and without instruments, the women must also pretty themselves up to console the men. She was going to be sick.

  As soon as she’d had the thought, she wanted to slap her own face. She was an awful person to begrudge the pilots who were fighting the war something that might make it a little easier to get back into an airplane tomorrow and face the prospect of death.

  “Why?” she asked bleakly. She wasn’t even sure what she was asking: why can’t I be the same as everybody else, happy to flutter my lashes for the greater good; or, why does nothing ever change?

  “Because it will buy us another month or two of simply getting on with the job,” Pauline said. “It’s my job to do whatever I can to make that happen. Yours is to deliver a Beaufighter to a squadron in the north. You don’t have to smile. You just have to do a tight turn onto the airfield and take it down slowly. Make it spectacular, and easy.”

  Skye nodded, even though she knew there was more to it than what Pauline was saying. She took the delivery chit, found the Beaufighter and then she flew north, thinking only about roads and railways and landmarks and clouds—the substance of her days.

  Once she’d found the base, she eased off the throttle and entered the circuit over the runway with a perfectly executed sharp turn, just as Pauline had requested.

  There were no other planes flying there that day, and the pilots were sitting in a dejected clump close to the runway. Pauline had asked her to bring it in slow, so she dropped into a stall turn, coming in low over the men’s heads, let down the flaps and the wheels and deposited the plane onto the ground as delicately as a butterfly.

  As the roof was slid back and someone reached down to undo her straps, she heard a voice say, “Bringing in an ace test pilot to show us how to handle a Beaufighter isn’t going to convince us to fly those beasts again.”

  “No, but she might,” another voice said as Skye jumped to the ground.

  All heads turned her way. It was something she was too used to now to be bothered by, but this was different. Two men were facing off over something. One was a squadron leader and another was the station commander. The station commander was smiling; the squadron leader speechless.

  “I expect there won’t be any problems flying Beaufighters now,” the station commander said to the squadron leader. And to Skye, “Thank you, my dear.”

  My dear. If she was in the RAF, he’d never be able to call her that.

  “Thank you for what?” she asked.

  It took one of the engineers to tell her. Beaufighters, with their propensity to stall and their unpredictable behavior in tight turns, were notoriously difficult to handle. This particular squadron had found them so difficult that they’d refused to fly them. So Skye had been called in to show them that even a woman could manage it.

  Even a woman.

  Every one of her worst experiences at the ATA scudded across her vision: the test flight she’d had to undergo to prove she could fly, despite her logbooks; the medical examiner asking her to remove her clothes; the freezing flights to Scotland in open cockpit planes; the ten circuits she’d had to do in her Halifax just because she was a woman. For a moment, she hated flying, and never wanted to do it again.

  She asked for directions to the bathroom. Once there, she stared at herself in the mirror, hands gripping the sides of the basin.

  Why was she still fighting it? Nobody would ever look at her and see a pilot. They would see long hair, red lips and a skirt. And there were too many other things to fight right now. Her feelings for Nicholas. Her sister’s continual attempts to push her away.

  So she said nothing to Pauline when she returned to Hamble. The next morning, she didn’t bother to pin up her hair so it sat at regulation length; she let it fall in long waves down her back. She just shrugged when a new engineer asked her where the real pilot was hiding when he slid back the roof of her plane. She went to a party with Rose and kept herself busy with eager pilots. It was so much easier to be what everyone wanted her to be: just a woman.

  It went on like that for a few weeks until there was another night of movies and dancing at RAF Tangmere. As Skye walked into the sports hangar with Rose, a group of pilots charged like throttled-up Spitfires toward her.

  “What are you doing?” Rose asked her.

  “Enjoying myself,” Skye said, unsmiling.

  “Are you?” Rose snapped.

  “Of course,” Skye said, and quiescently accepted the hand of a pilot who led her onto the dance floor.

  Nearby, Liberty and O’Farrell were dancing together. The way Liberty wriggled her body into his and kissed him insistently left nobody in any doubt that they were sleeping together.

  Was her sister happy? Skye tried to examine Liberty’s face as she swung around every three beats, but she was as hard to interpret as British weather was to forecast. The only thing Skye could be certain of was that Liberty either hadn’t noticed her, or was doing her best to ignore her.

  While Skye was dancing with perhaps the dozenth pilot, she saw Nicholas and Margaux enter the hangar. At the same moment, Skye realized that her mouth was being claimed in a kiss that tasted like surrender, and that she didn’t even know the name of the man she was dancing with. Her head spun on a merry-go-round of champagne.

  “Excuse me,” she said, pulling back, but he didn’t let go. So she continued to dance with him, held too tightly, becaus
e she couldn’t recall how to escape.

  That was the moment Liberty chose to look over at her. Their eyes clung together before Liberty turned back to O’Farrell.

  When the music stopped, Skye was able to get away. She hovered at the side of the room near Liberty, hoping her sister might exit the dance floor too. And she did, nudging O’Farrell over to the bar and walking over to see Skye alone.

  “I thought I’d come and stay a couple of nights with you next week,” Liberty said by way of greeting.

  Skye waited for the punchline. It didn’t come. She said, “Why?” when she should have said, That sounds great.

  “Why not?” Liberty said as she lit one of her black Sobranies.

  “I’ll make up the bed in the attic.”

  “I’ll be just like Cinderella: relegated to the attic while my ugly sister has a room all of her own.”

  “I’m not giving up my room for you, Liberty,” Skye said, suddenly so tired of these pitching and yawing conversations.

  “Just your men,” Liberty said, indicating O’Farrell. “Do you want him back?”

  “I don’t care about O’Farrell.” As she spoke, Skye found her eyes drawn to Nicholas.

  Liberty grinned. “I thought so.”

  Skye walked out of the hangar, knowing she’d just revealed too much to her sister. She didn’t want to wait around to see what Liberty would do with the knowledge.

  Twenty-Three

  The anniversary of her mother’s death the following week made Skye feel the same way it always did—as if she were falling off the earth, tumbling into a storm of sadness. She was thankful for only one thing—that she had the day off, because nothing hurt more than being in the sky on the day her mother had died.

  But an empty day was so hard to fill with anything other than images of Vanessa Penrose: making porridge at the old stove in the kitchen, soothing Nicholas’s blistered hands with aloe vera, giving Skye her old flying goggles as a parting gift before she left her daughters in Paris. Eventually, Skye closed her eyes in an attempt to stop the slideshow and sat on her porch and smoked.