The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  She paused, took a deep breath and pointed to the photos laid out at one end of the table. “What are they?”

  “Something I was thinking about while I made dinner,” Elliott said.

  Kat followed him back to the table, where he gestured to a picture. “This is the one I showed you already, of Margaux Jourdan dancing with O’Farrell. And this,” he passed her a different image, “is another taken that same night, of Liberty Penrose dancing with O’Farrell. One of the things I’ve been trying to work out is whether Liberty was at Ravensbrück too. On her last mission into France for SOE, she went missing. In Vera Atkins’s interviews with Ravensbrück prisoners, Liberty Penrose’s name is mentioned by a couple of women. The British were kept quarantined and separate so Liberty wouldn’t have had much contact with others. But when Vera asked Margaux if either of the Penrose sisters were at the camp, Margaux said no. That they were both killed in France on the night Margaux was taken. But that doesn’t make sense. Liberty wasn’t working with Margaux, and she went missing at least a month before Margaux did.”

  “I imagine being at Ravensbrück would make anyone’s mind a little hazy on the details.” Kat examined the picture of the smiling woman and saw that her body was pressed against O’Farrell’s in a manner that suggested a definite intimacy.

  “One of the women I spoke to can recall with absolute clarity what she saw at Ravensbrück,” Elliott said, leaning against the sideboard, hand rubbing his jaw as if he were thinking something through. “And she mentioned Liberty Penrose. That might be important to us because Liberty’s mission to France would have been her last, even if she hadn’t been captured: she was pregnant. Vera Atkins’s records show that she told Vera the father was a pilot.”

  Elliott picked up the photograph of Liberty and O’Farrell. “After you and I spoke at the Savoy, I went back to a memoir written by an ATA pilot, Rosemary Rees, who was friends with Skye Penrose. She talks briefly about O’Farrell throwing Skye over for her sister. Rosemary’s somewhat brutal about Liberty; she says Liberty flaunted her relationship with O’Farrell more openly than was the custom back then, leaving no one in any doubt that it was sexual. And she says nothing about a relationship between O’Farrell and Margaux Jourdan.”

  Elliott paused before he reached the conclusion his words were hurtling toward.

  Kat felt herself being drawn in to the picture of Liberty. Blurred and faded as it was, Liberty’s face looked vaguely familiar. And Kat had always been told that her grandfather was an American pilot called O’Farrell.

  “You’re going to tell me it’s possible Liberty could have had a baby in January 1945, aren’t you?” Kat said. “That it was actually Liberty and her child who were rescued by the Red Cross, and Liberty took another woman’s name.”

  She couldn’t make herself say the rest: That my grandmother might be a woman called Liberty Penrose.

  Twenty-Five

  Which was the worst outcome: that her grandmother was Margaux Jourdan and she’d omitted to ever mention that she’d once been a spy who was imprisoned in a concentration camp? Or that she had never been Margaux Jourdan at all?

  Kat desperately wanted the first of those statements to be true now in a way she never had when Elliott had first proposed it to her. Somehow, in seeking to prove that her grandmother was a different Margaux to the one Elliott was looking for, Kat might now have uncovered a far greater deception.

  She braced herself against the table and felt Elliott’s hand on her back, offering solace. But solace was unattainable.

  “We should find out if the Margaux next door has children,” Kat said forlornly. “If she does, then she could be Liberty.”

  “Come here.” Elliott wound his arms around her and she buried her face in his shoulder, trying not to cry.

  “We can ask her tomorrow if she has children,” Elliott said, thumb stroking Kat’s cheek. “But I didn’t see any photos of children in the house.”

  And nor had she. Most people had pictures of their kids on prominent display.

  Kat drew back a little, enough that she could speak but not enough to leave the circle of Elliott’s arms. “What about Skye Penrose?” she said, searching for both a distraction and further information that might lead them down another path. “You said she went missing too, so what happened to her?”

  “That’s the biggest mystery of all. Nobody recalls a woman called Skye Penrose at Ravensbrück.”

  Of course. More questions without answers. She tried one final path. “How does any of this have anything to do with the dresses upstairs? The House of Dior and concentration camps are as opposite as heaven and hell.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Elliott said. “When you’re researching, everything you read goes into your head but if you don’t think it’s relevant to what you’re doing, sometimes it takes a while for you to make a connection. I’m almost sure I came across the name Catherine Dior in the list of Ravensbrück prisoners. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but I’m wondering now if . . .”

  “Catherine Dior was Christian Dior’s sister. That I do know.”

  “Well, maybe that’s our connection. I can look through my papers in London and see what I have. Or do a quick Google now if you want.”

  Kat shook her head. “I feel like my brain is about to explode right now.”

  Elliott touched a gentle hand under her chin and kissed her. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  It was a good idea, she realized, as they picked their way down to the sand in the moonlight. A breeze was blowing, not too strongly, but enough to whisk away some of the worry and the fear that had lodged in her stomach.

  They walked hand in hand for a while, not really speaking other than to comment on something that caught their eyes: the gentle dance of the waves, the opening of what looked like a cave in the cliff face, a bird racing home for the night.

  The sea air cleared Kat’s muddled head somewhat, enough to make her ask one of the questions that was nagging at her. “Is it really possible to become someone else? You certainly couldn’t do it these days.”

  “I think it might have been possible then. The end of the war was chaos. There were two million Allied prisoners returning from POW camps, and processing and thoroughly interrogating them was the priority. There’s a story that just one debriefing used nine pounds of paper. Imagine if, in the middle of that, a woman appeared without any papers and said she’d worked for a secret British organization that nobody knew about. Remember that hardly anyone knew the British were using women as spies. The U.S. Army picked up one of the SOE women who’d escaped from Ravensbrück and they wrote in a memo that she was unbalanced and must be impersonating somebody. Luckily Vera Atkins saw that memo and knew it was one of her women.”

  Elliott stopped walking and faced the ocean. “But what if there was another memo Vera didn’t see? What if another woman turned up with a story that a different army unit thought was ‘unbalanced’? The camp commandant at Ravensbrück went on record as saying that no British women were at his camp. What’s an Allied officer supposed to think if a woman like Liberty appears, claiming to have been sent to France, to have been at Ravensbrück, and to be British? Maybe it was easier to pretend to be French. Some of the SOE women used their French code names at Ravensbrück. They were used to pretending to be someone else. Their lives depended on it.”

  A wave crashed noisily near their feet and clouds robed the moon, stealing all the light, as if the night were grieving for the women Elliott spoke about too. “At least one of the women was misidentified for some time,” he continued. “Sonia Olschanesky, who died at Natzweiler concentration camp, was for a long time thought to have been another agent, Nora Inayat Khan. Quite a few survivors looked at Vera’s photos of Nora and confirmed that Nora had been at Natzweiler, and that she had died there. But it turned out to be Sonia, not Nora. Much later, Vera discovered that Nora was shot at Dachau in 1944.”

  Kat closed her eyes. So many concentration camps.
So many women who’d lost their lives trying to end a war. And so much confusion over who they were, and the part they played in the defeat of the Nazis in 1945.

  “Okay. So maybe it was possible.” Kat opened her eyes and stood beside Elliott as the full moon reappeared, gently lighting both their faces and the sea. “But why keep up the deception once everything had settled down?” Now she was searching, not just for a way to disprove the hypothesis that Liberty Penrose was her grandmother, but also to understand: not just what these women had done, but why they had done it.

  “Some of the Frenchwomen tried to speak of and write about what had happened to them at Ravensbrück,” he said. “But publishers told them nobody was interested in reliving those miseries, that everyone wanted to move on. To forget. Relatives accused them of making up stories, insisting such things couldn’t possibly have happened. I’ll never forget reading about an American diplomat who visited the women when they returned to France; he wrote that they were ‘a convoy of martyrs, frightfully mutilated, skeleton-like—a terrifying spectacle.’ So the women held on to everything that had happened to them, either because nobody wanted to hear it, or because it was too terrible to say aloud.”

  The empathy in Elliott’s voice caused tears to fill Kat’s eyes again. He cared about these women he’d never met; he felt for their silence, their trapped and unspoken horrors.

  “Imagine discovering, after you’d returned from such a place,” he went on, “that the Allies had decreed in 1944 that no camps should be liberated because it would mean too much confusion, too many displaced people who would get in the way of winning the war. Imagine discovering that you could have been rescued earlier except you were considered to be an inconvenience.”

  Elliott drew Kat toward him, the back of her body anchored against the front of his, his arms around her waist. She leaned her head back against his chest as he spoke again.

  “And imagine trying to reconcile living for months in a concentration camp—being tortured, starved, beaten—with what came after the war,” he said. “The government propaganda insisting that women must return to the home and cook roast dinners for their men. That they need only be decorative. Then the New Look. It must have seemed unreal. Imagine trying to fit back into that world.”

  Kat understood what he meant. Christian Dior’s New Look—those feminine dresses, the punishing corsetry—was her metier. She remembered telling Annabel about the women whose twenty-inch waists had been a grim result of rationing throughout the war. What of those women who hadn’t had the luxury of rationing; who’d been at the mercy of a camp commandant, and given the kind of food nobody would contemplate eating today?

  She and Elliott turned to one another at the same time, not just embracing but holding on, their bodies so close that Kat could feel his heart beating against her chest, could feel something so deep and profound pass between them that it both awed and frightened her. She reached up and kissed him, hoping he wouldn’t think she was forgetting the women they were speaking of; she could never do that. But right now she needed to remember that, as well as hate and pain and despair, other things existed in the world.

  He seemed to understand, because he gathered her in, hands gripping her back, mouth moving against hers as if this moment was all there was. As if history and the past did not, for now, exist.

  They returned to the house with the intensity of their embrace on the beach still blazing between them and they didn’t even reach the stairs before Kat’s dress had dropped into a pool of red silk on the floor, with Elliott’s clothes beside. They made it as far as the window seat before Elliott sat down, drawing her onto his lap, and she braced one hand against the window as she made love to him with a passion she’d never felt before.

  * * *

  Kat woke the next morning with her head on Elliott’s chest. Diamond light, almost colorless, a brilliant silvery-white, spilled through the window. The clock on the bedside table, which she’d wound the night before, told her it was nine in the morning. Nine? She never slept in until nine. And she’d never slept on anyone the way she must have slept on Elliott if the location of her head was anything to go by.

  She felt a hand stroke her hair and realized that he was awake too; that he hadn’t been moving because he hadn’t wanted to disturb her.

  “Sorry,” she said, about to roll away.

  “Stay,” he murmured. “Just where you are. It’s nice.”

  And it was. So nice to lie in a quiet house beside a man who caressed her back with one hand and her hair with the other. But they had somewhere to be. “Aren’t we due to see Margaux at ten?” she asked.

  “We are,” he said reluctantly.

  They climbed out of bed, and Kat pulled on another of her grandmother’s delectable dresses: the Zelie cocktail dress from 1954. It was plain enough for daytime, its collared neckline and the six buttons on the bodice mimicking a jacket. The waist was typically accentuated, before the silk fell into a simple flared skirt. Kat wanted something that would give her the courage to ask the woman next door the questions she was too afraid to ask her grandmother.

  But Margaux, relaxing in a chair with a cigarette and a cup of tea, the blue and white Gitanes packet balanced on the arm, pounced first.

  “You said yesterday that your grandmother has my name. Isn’t that a crime?” she said, hardly waiting for Kat to sit down.

  Kat froze. What if it was? What if her grandmother really was, as Elliott had hinted last night, Liberty Penrose, and she had stolen this woman’s name? Kat had no idea what to say.

  “Should we go to the police?” Elliott asked, and the way he asked it made Kat understand that he knew Margaux would refuse.

  “No need for that,” the woman said. “Your grandmother wanted to be someone else after the war. I sympathize. Do you have a photograph of her?”

  Kat scrolled through her phone and found a picture of her grandmother holding her two great-grandchildren.

  Margaux gave it a glance, nothing more. “I’ve never been to Australia. Never likely to. I suppose that’s why.”

  “Why what?” Kat asked.

  “I’m old,” Margaux said, answering a different question. “Too old to go flying around in planes anymore.”

  Elliott stared at her. “Anymore? You’ve flown a lot then?”

  Margaux stared back like an owl, unblinking, marking its prey. “No more or less than most people my age. I have been on holidays, you know.”

  This time it was Elliott who pounced. “You were friends with Skye and Liberty Penrose.”

  There was the smallest of pauses, but Kat noticed it and she was sure Elliott had too. Margaux squished her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray.

  “I knew them,” she said.

  “You knew them well, I understand,” Elliott continued. “Rosemary du Cros, formerly ATA pilot Rosemary Rees, wrote in her memoir that she often went out with a group that included an English pilot, Richie Jenkins, two American pilots called O’Farrell and Nicholas Crawford, and Skye and Liberty Penrose.”

  Kat sat forward in her chair. Margaux’s demeanor had changed; she was prickling with . . . what? Definitely alertness. Fear too? Curiosity?

  Margaux shrugged. “What if we did? They’re all dead.”

  “Nicholas Crawford isn’t dead,” Elliott said.

  “So, two of us survived. But we haven’t kept in touch. Like passing clouds: fair-weather friends brought together by storms and circumstance. Now, it’s high time you two left. I have work to do. A tourist attraction like these gardens doesn’t run itself.”

  “But you haven’t answered any of our questions,” Kat said, her frustration ringing through the room. “You told us yesterday that you’d worked for SOE. But who are you, really?”

  “Have you asked your grandmother that question?” was Margaux’s well-aimed counterstroke.

  How can I do that? Kat thought desperately. How can I hurt the person I love most in the world? Yet she’d been happy to ask the question of
the woman sitting opposite her. To dig into the sediment of painful things long buried because of her own selfish curiosity. How many people was she hurting? Herself, her grandmother, this woman too.

  Then Elliott said, “Can I take a look at this?” He picked up a gold pocket watch that sat on the mantel above the fireplace.

  “No, you cannot,” Margaux snapped, snatching it from him. “It’s time for you to leave.” She shooed them out of the house.

  Neither Kat nor Elliott spoke on the way back to the cottage. She was lost, and she supposed Elliott was too, in a skein of thoughts that unraveled into too many loose threads.

  Back at the cottage, Kat packed the blue dress, whose twin she had at the museum in Sydney, into a box lined with acid-free paper. Then she and Elliott collected their things and began to drive back toward civilization.

  Not long after they left, Elliott said slowly, “She talked about flying. About clouds. As if she knew them better than most.”

  Kat tried to remember that part of the conversation. “I’m not following.”

  “Skye Penrose was a pilot. A pilot would know about flying and clouds.”

  “You’re not . . .” Kat groped for what Elliott was trying to say. “You’re not trying to suggest that the Margaux we’ve just spoken to is really Skye Penrose? I mean, did she really say enough to make her a pilot? Aren’t clouds often used as a metaphor? I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . See, even a scientist like me remembers that.”

  Elliott sighed. “You think I should stick to nonfiction, rather than trying to make up stories where there are none?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Yesterday we thought one of them was lying. Now you’re saying . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “What if they both are?” he mused. Then he added, “I don’t think lying is the right word. Like I said last night, maybe what happened to your grandmother and the woman we saw today was so awful that, afterward, neither of them wanted to be who they were anymore. It’s possible that Cornwall Margaux is Skye Penrose and . . .”