by Lily Graham
Freddy reached out for her. ‘Oh, love. I’m so sorry.’
She nodded, took a shaky breath, then wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘It also makes a lot of this worth it too, you know, because in a way I have found her again. Madame Joubert gave me these letters she wrote her, too – and while some of it is a bit hard to digest, and there’s a part of me that knows if I had never come here, I could have been spared the truth about where I come from – I might never have known her at all. And that sort of makes all of this worth it in the end.’
When she got home later that night she found Dupont sitting in the living room, a bottle of pale yellow coloured liquor before him, as he sat staring at the baby book.
Valerie bit her lip as she walked in. He looked up, and nodded at her in greeting. ‘Come, sit,’ he said. ‘Can I pour you a glass of pastis?’
‘Pastis?’
‘It’s made from aniseed. It’s very good, from Provence.’
She nodded. ‘All right.’
She sipped the liquor, and pulled a face. It tasted like liquorice.
The baby book was lying open next to him, but he didn’t bring it up. He asked her about her evening, and how Freddy was. She realised that he felt bad for how he’d snapped, but he wasn’t going to open up to her about the book. She knew that she was going to have to be the one who did it.
‘She loved the baby very much,’ she said, indicating the book.
Dupont’s eyes grew dark, and he closed it suddenly, standing up. ‘I think it’s time for me to go to bed.’
‘No, wait, M’sieur. I’m sorry.’
He closed his eyes. ‘I don’t want to talk about this. Please, excuse me.’
‘No.’
He turned to look at her, surprise on his lined face. His cotton-wool hair stuck up from where he’d been sitting against the sofa.
‘No?’
She took a deep, steadying breath, and stood up as well. ‘No, we have to talk about this.’
He blinked at her – perhaps at the audacity of her ordering him about in his own house. He was on the verge of saying so when she held up a hand. Then she reached inside her handbag and took out the photograph of her mother that she’d put in there that morning, the one from her suitcase, which she’d had since she was a little girl. Her hands shook as she passed it to him.
He stared at it for some time in confusion. Then he looked up at her, and seemed to stagger.
She caught his arm, steadying him.
He held out a hand to the wall, and said faintly, ‘Where did you get this?’
His eyes were fierce, and so very blue.
Valerie’s heart was thundering so loud in her ears she was afraid he could hear it.
She swallowed, and told him truthfully, ‘I have always had it, since I was a baby. It was the only picture I have ever had of my mother.’
She had to help him sit down when his knees gave way.
‘Y-you are – you are…’ It was as if he wouldn’t dare say it aloud.
‘I am Valerie Dupont.’
Dupont stared at her in shock. ‘Valerie,’ he said, then said it again. ‘Valerie.’ And his face crumpled, and the old man began to sob in a way that broke Valerie’s heart.
He let her touch his back, and she sat in mortified silence as his shoulders shook, the tears unable to stop coursing down his old, worn cheeks.
After a while, when he had at last gathered his composure, she poured him another glass of pastis not realising that the reason she couldn’t see him properly to hand it over was because tears were slipping down her own face.
‘How is this even possible?’ he breathed, after some time.
So she explained, about everything. It was a long story, but to her surprise when she mentioned the advertisement he actually laughed, looking up at her through red-rimmed eyes. ‘So you lied about that paper to make sure I hired you,’ he snorted, shaking his head. ‘It worked too.’
She grinned as she nodded. Her hands shook as she took a sip of the pastis she had poured herself, then put it quickly back down on the table as she remembered that she probably shouldn’t be drinking. ‘You aren’t angry?’
He looked up at her in surprise. ‘Angry, with you?’
Another tear fell from his eye, and his chin wobbled. He picked up his glass, though it just shook in his hands. ‘My dear, the only one here who has any right to be angry is you.’
All her secrets came pouring out then. Everything Madame Joubert had told her. Everything she had since managed to find out. Dupont was outraged that Madame Joubert had kept this from him. ‘When I see her – I am going to give her hell.’
‘Don’t, I think she has had enough…’
He wiped his nose, lit a cigarette and nodded, the fight seeming to evaporate just as suddenly from him. ‘In that you may be right.’
She made them tea – and the scones he’d bought earlier, which he, in a very un-Dupont-like way, declared were delicious. Halfway through his second bite she could see that he had begun to weep again. She came to sit next to him, and held his hand. To her surprise he held on tightly to hers, then shook his head. ‘I am an old man, chérie, but you have made me very happy today. I never imagined… this. That I would get to meet you, to discover that the young girl I had come to think of a little like a daughter, was in fact… you. I would have thought that I suddenly believed in fairy tales and second chances, and I have never been accused of either’ – he squeezed her hand, and sniffed – ‘till now.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Dupont and Valerie walked to the Jardin des Tuileries, and sat at a restaurant overlooking the winter garden.
They had been slightly awkward with each other that morning at breakfast, being overly polite after the emotions that had come pouring out the night before. But soon after the first cup of coffee, and the decision – the first in decades – to close the Gribouiller on a Saturday was made, they decided to get out, to walk and to talk.
There was so much he wanted to know. ‘What was your house like – was it a house?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘It was a terraced house, in north London. Standard issue, two up two down.’
‘What is this “standard issue”?’ he asked. So she had to explain English housing, and suburban living in general.
‘C’est fou,’ he exclaimed. Then: ‘Go on.’
So she did. She told him about Amélie. And her uncle, John, who had been like a father to her. He had taught her how to ride a bike. Encouraged her love of reading…
At this Dupont scoffed and said categorically that this must have been in her blood, what with the bookshop, and she admitted that there was a good chance of that.
When they were sitting down at the restaurant, though, she opened up her bag and took out the old copy of The Secret Garden that she had brought with her from England.
Dupont’s eyes widened when she passed it to him. His fingers touched the faint G stamped on the endpaper. He tapped it, shaking his head, his eyes watering slightly. ‘For Gribouiller,’ he said, and there were tears in her eyes too at the discovery.
‘I put it in the suitcase… that day,’ said Dupont, referring to the day when Amélie had come to take her away to England.
Valerie stared at it.
‘I wanted you to have something of hers, something to treasure, along with the photograph.’
She closed her eyes, taking a steadying breath. ‘I did. All this time. But it was only the other day – when we were in the shop, when you told me that it had been her favourite book – that I realised that it had come from here.’
‘She would have been so happy that you loved it as she did.’
As the sun began to wane, and they walked back along the river, he told her how despite her fears, having a baby was the joy of Mireille’s young life.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
1942
All her fears of giving birth, and of how people would react on the streets to the news that she had a baby by a German officer, me
lted away during those twilight weeks that followed Valerie’s birth. The apartment became a cocoon where only they existed.
Mireille and the baby.
Mattaus was there as often as he could get away from his work at the hospital, and her father came up often in the day, but for the most part it was the two of them in their little world, which had grown smaller, yet somehow richer.
She named the baby Valerie after her mother, who had died when she was nine from pneumonia. Yet somehow, stamped on her face, were her mother’s lips, her ears, her nose.
She stared in wonder at her for hours. The fat little arms and chubby legs, the small squidgy feet that sat perfectly in the palms of her hands, like pearls.
Even her father fell under Valerie’s spell. The wedge that had existed between them since he’d come home from jail, only to find that Mattaus had become more than just the bodyguard he’d hoped for, seemed to melt away too, as he held his granddaughter for the first time. When the child first appeared to smile, he swore it was just for him, even though Mireille hadn’t the heart to tell him it was too early, and it was probably wind.
Soon Mireille’s life revolved around a comfortable routine. She slept when Valerie slept, and she was proud to identify every cry – wet, thirsty, windy, hungry, tired, bored. The last one had taken a while for her to figure out, but when she took the baby to another, less frequented room and she saw how her daughter’s eyes stared almost in wonder at the patterned wallpaper behind her, and the tears finally stopped, she realised that the time to go outside had arrived.
She was nervous as she put Valerie into the perambulator that Mattaus had brought home one evening, shortly after Valerie’s birth. The device, or at least its predecessor, had been the cause of one of their first serious arguments. It was the latest model, shiny and new. It was obvious to anyone looking at it what type of person would be able to afford it in times like these – someone who had no doubt collaborated a bit more with the Germans than was approved of. Mattaus had stood firm, despite her protests; he wanted his child to have it. What did it matter what other people thought?
‘Nothing,’ Mireille had snapped. ‘It’s what they do with those thoughts that matters. I’ve seen some women shove and kick those children.’ Her voice broke as she remembered the woman who had lost her baby when a mob had turned on her after the student riots. It was her greatest fear.
‘They would never do that in front of me,’ he said.
She looked at him in disbelief. ‘And you can be sure to be around every moment to prevent it?’
His silence meant that she had struck a nerve. After some time, with less heat, he replied, ‘Why do people have to be so cruel?’
Mireille sighed. It pained her how much she understood it, how part of her still twisted in shame, even though she knew that Mattaus wasn’t the enemy, wasn’t like the others. ‘For them it’s a badge – their integrity, it’s the only thing they have left. They polish it, like a stone, and throw it at others at will.’
Mattaus didn’t speak about it with her again after that. But when he came home later that evening, the shiny new perambulator was gone, and in its place was an old, slightly rusted pram, dating from before the war. She kissed his cheek in gratitude. It was perfect.
But that was then.
She hadn’t worked up the courage to actually use it, till now.
She drew in a deep breath as she pushed the pram away from the back door and started down the street, a small blossom of fear constricting her throat. She was waiting… waiting for someone she knew to walk past and spit on her, to call her names. To shake the pram. But, blessedly, the street was quiet, with very few people milling about. With the new rations imposed, she realised most people were conserving as much energy as they could.
She breathed a sigh of relief when they entered a park that ran along the Seine, and for a short while, in the streets of Paris, she was like any other young mother.
After that first day, it became their habit every day to visit the park. Mireille showed Valerie the ducks swimming in the river. Before the war, people would be throwing stale bread out to feed them, but those days were gone. You could still feed yourself on stale bread.
As she pushed the pram, she could, for a moment, though, imagine that they were no longer at war, no longer going through the Occupation.
Back at the bookshop, it was another matter entirely. Despite the Germans’ best efforts to show that their Occupation was business as usual, and how well they were doing in the war, the truth was coming out in dark, dangerous whispers. The allies were a threat they couldn’t suppress.
In secret, Vincent tuned in to an old transistor radio, listening to an illegal broadcast from the resistance. The man that Clotilde had mentioned, Charles de Gaulle, spoke of a recent uprising. They were told to keep going, to keep resisting. ‘The time will come for us,’ he promised.
Mattaus was unhappy when he found out that they were listening to the radio. He worried that if any of the neighbours turned them in they could pay for it with their lives.
Vincent was furious at the warning. To him, this proved once and for all that the man was a Nazi in his soul.
‘It’s the only protection we have – the illusion that I am who I say I am,’ Mattaus attempted to explain. ‘Anything else means that this will all come down like a stack of cards.’
Vincent sniffed. ‘Are you sure that it is just an illusion?’
Chapter Thirty
The uprising of the students who had marched against the Germans made headlines worldwide. But all too soon, after the leaders of the illegal protest were arrested, the rumours began. Mattaus came home with a grim set to his mouth. ‘They are talking about making an example of them.’
Mireille looked up from where she was wiping spittle from the baby’s mouth. ‘You mean they will be sent to jail?’
‘For now.’
She frowned. ‘Surely they won’t kill them just for a protest march?’
Mattaus looked at her in disbelief. ‘Every day here people get shot for less.’
It was true. Times had got even tougher. And with winter fast approaching, along with Valerie’s first birthday the following spring, the feeling on the streets of Paris was ever more grim. The Germans, it seemed, had stopped pretending to play nice.
Early at the start of the next year, the five student protesters were shot, execution style. When Vincent tuned in to the radio that night to hear, Mireille sneaked into his room. ‘He won’t be happy,’ he warned.
But Mireille shrugged. ‘I need to know what they are planning…’ She cradled Valerie to her chest; she’d finally gone to sleep. ‘I need to know that there is some future that my child can look forward to – an end to this never-ending war.’
The one thing that had improved over the past year was that, as Mattaus had predicted, they had seen less and less of Valter Kroeling. With his new promotion he hardly had the opportunity to come to the bookshop these days. A dour-faced man appointed with a thin salt and pepper moustache now came to inspect their stock and orders, and to ensure that they were not selling or distributing any banned books or material. Henrik Winkler did the task efficiently and left just as promptly.
After the uprising by the student protestors, the resistance had grown, and one of the women from Clotilde’s old network, Thérèse Castelle, began to make contact with Mireille again when she noticed that Valter Kroeling was no longer at the bookshop as often. Mireille sensed that the woman, with her mouse-coloured hair and red scarf, who popped into the shop regularly, was attempting to see where Mireille’s loyalties lay: with her German lover – no one had been told about their marriage, which would have been frowned upon by both the French and German authorities – or her own people.
Mireille suspected that Clotilde had told them of what she had done. She was passed a note one day by Thérèse, and when she opened it, she read: Find out if it’s true. Is the Fanatic coming to visit? If so, when? We need to prepare.
; Mireille burnt the note, her heart jackhammering in her chest. The Fanatic, she knew, meant the Führer – Hitler himself. He’d come for a day at the start of the Occupation, a victors’ march through the streets of Paris, and there were many who wished that they had known where he was going to march, as they could have staged a shooting. It had been kept a secret then. But now, if he was coming back…
Mireille didn’t know how the woman thought she could find out such a thing. But a few days later, the same woman came past and left another note, and she understood. K is overseeing the event. If he says anything, let us know.
It was part of Kroeling’s new role, she realised. It made sense, she supposed: he was high up in the Nazi propaganda machine, and would no doubt know when Hitler was planning on coming, and when – and would be covering it for his magazine.
Which meant that she would need to ensure that he came to the shop himself – instead of Henrik Winkler. In order to do that she would need to draw him in.
He came a week later. His watery eyes were alight. ‘Where is the table, Mademoiselle?’
‘What table?’ she asked, feigning innocence.
The muscle in his cheek flexed. ‘The one in which we display our communications, as you well know. Our agreement was that it would remain here in the shop. It is the only reason you have been allowed to keep this… business,’ he said, his eyes falling on the half-empty shelves. Vincent made to get out of his chair, but she shook her head at him, and he sat back down, Valerie cradled on his lap.
Kroeling’s eye fell on the baby, and he snorted. ‘Look how tenderly he cradles that German brat. We should take a photograph and show it to the Führer, the success of the Occupation – the German and French living so peacefully and happily together… the new generation dawning…’
Vincent’s face went red with anger. But Mireille seized the opportunity. ‘Does someone of your stature ever get the chance to speak to him? I wouldn’t have thought so,’ she needled.
