The Girl Who Dreamed of Paris

by Natalie Meg Evans

  ‘The owners, Henriette. Be civil to them – you might get on their dinner-party list.’

  Putting Noëlle on the train, passing up her little suitcase, checking she still had the address label around her neck should Henriette’s memory indeed fail, Coralie felt eviscerating pain. ‘You have that letter for Tante Tilly?’

  ‘Yes, Maman. Why aren’t you coming?’

  ‘It’s a holiday, just for you.’ The letter read, Please take care of her and tell her every day that she is all the world to me.

  She left as the train pulled out, and strode home, bellowing like a cow whose calf has been ripped away, heedless of glances and even the occasional snicker. In her flat, she cast herself on to the sofa and beat the cushions until her fists burned. By linking up with Una’s people at the American Hospital, taking Pilot Officer Bidcroft to a railway station and handing him over to a Resistance courier, she had crossed a line. She was part of something big, yet utterly alone. At least now she could give herself up to danger without putting her daughter at risk. Now she must wait and see what more the Resistance wanted of her.

  *

  Nothing, it seemed. October arrived, the days merging one into the other. Then, around the middle of the month Coralie was closing for the evening, reaching into the window to pick up the last sunflower stalk, when she became aware of eyes watching her. Her stomach flipped but she opened the salon door with a show of confidence. ‘May I help you?’

  The visitor was a trim woman in a well-made suit. A good-quality hat, which had probably been bought as war broke out, covered her greying hair. ‘Mademoiselle de Lirac? Do you not remember me?’

  The voice was the key. ‘Mademoiselle Deveau!’ Coralie embraced her former tutor, squeezing a little too hard because nineteen days without human contact felt like a lifetime. ‘How lovely to see you. Have you come to buy a hat?’

  ‘May we talk privately?’

  In the workroom, Coralie learned that the American Hospital had passed her details to a Resistance circuit of which Mademoiselle Deveau was a member. Realising that she already knew the person being recommended, Mademoiselle Deveau had made more enquiries and had walked past La Passerinette a few times. ‘To see who comes and goes.’

  She was a member of the circuit known as Fortitude, she explained. ‘Now that Paule has gone, we need somebody to act as a courier for military intelligence and to operate a safe house. I hardly need add, that person must be loyal, intelligent and brave. If you are not that person, please say so now.’

  Coralie considered her answer. ‘You know that I had an affaire with Dietrich von Elbing, and that I serve more German than French women in my shop. Some would say I’m a collabo.’

  ‘They might indeed.’ Louise Deveau gave an inscrutable smile. ‘But I see that as an advantage. You speak German, and you stand over the heads of German women every day. Scraps of information from enemy lips can be sent to the Free French government in London. Every word is as good as a bullet. And should you ever renew your love affair . . . all the better.’

  ‘Dietrich is back in Germany. I reckon we’ll get back together the day Adolf Hitler joins the Red Army.’

  Louise Deveau made a gesture very like Una’s ‘Okay, okay’ hand wave. ‘Come to me at rue de l’Odéon when you’ve thought about it. I don’t need to tell you that it’s lonely work. You can trust nobody and confide in nobody.’

  ‘I don’t need to think. I made up my mind in July when friends of mine were deported. I can’t help them, but I can act in their name.’

  Mademoiselle Deveau nodded. ‘Your codename will be “Cosette”. You will not see me after today. Another agent, Moineau, will contact you from now on. Should you be arrested, you are on your own, though I will expect you to name me –’

  ‘I wouldn’t!’

  ‘– as I will name you under duress. It is why you will never know the identities of more than two operatives. We are spokes in a wheel. A couple of spokes can be smashed, the wheel still turns.’ She rose. ‘Guten Abend, Fräulein de Lirac.’

  Within a couple of weeks, Coralie-Cosette was picking up handwritten intelligence dockets from a butcher’s shop in rue Mouffetard. As the shop opened each morning, she’d buy a piece of meat, then cycle to a private address on avenue Foch, her secrets concealed in the false bottom of a La Passerinette hatbox in the basket of her bicycle. She’d toot her klaxon at German soldiers having their breakfast, singing under her breath, ‘Ça ira.’

  It’s all going on. It’ll be fine.

  *

  In November 1942, in response to Allied advances in North Africa and the relentless bombing of Italy, the German Army occupied the whole of France. The Vichy government, unable either to respond or resist, was exposed as a toothless regime. There was no longer a ‘Free Zone’, no demarcation line to cross. For Coralie, in island-Paris, the impact was minimal. Of course, life grew harder, but it had been doing that for three years. German soldiers seemed edgier, more likely to shout and point guns at civilians. But ladies still wanted hats.

  A card came from Geneva: ‘Merci pour le cadeau de Noël.’ Thank you for the Christmas present. A few days later, there was a letter from Una. She was being kept at Vittel in the Vosges mountains, she wrote, and could send and receive letters through the Red Cross. ‘Write reams, and send books, magazines, anything.’

  Coralie did so, and food parcels, warm underwear and a brand new hat in a La Passerinette box. She suspected that the last gift had never reached her friend, as Una failed to mention it in her following letter. That was when Arkady lost hope of her imminent return. He was now in the Auvergne, perhaps with Ramon. Certainly with the Resistance.

  The winter of 1942–3 came like a malignant houseguest, reaching into every corner. Into bones and lungs. Coralie worked doggedly at La Passerinette to blot out that bleak, childless Christmas. She’d often sleep in her workroom because it was easier to heat than the flat on impasse de Cordoba.

  ‘Alone’ seeped into her soul. Even the Resistance didn’t want her, it seemed. Mademoiselle Deveau’s pledge that she’d be contacted by another agent had come to nothing.

  In January 1943, she received delayed Christmas letters from Geneva, from Noëlle and Ottilia, and cried until she was in danger of washing away the words with tears.

  All through that dark season, she gave what work she could to the Ginsler grandparents, but winter hit them hard and the old man died in the middle of January. His wife struggled on, often forgetting who Coralie was or that her family had gone. Coralie kept her fed, paid for her fuel and visited every other day. The old lady called her Amélie, and would snatch her hands to stop her leaving.

  February threw out one bitter night too many. Arriving at rue Charlot, wheeling her bicycle because of the snow, Coralie found neighbours in a solemn huddle outside the shop, a light on upstairs.

  Coralie begged an Almighty she no longer believed in for something – anything – to prove that life was more than a succession of heartrending failures.

  The Almighty obliged.

  Coralie was cycling to the salon when a man brought his bicycle alongside her. His black Dutch-boy cap was pulled down against the wind, a scarf knotted under his chin. All she saw were red-veined cheeks and a bit of unprepossessing earlobe. Thinking he was after a view of her pedalling thighs, she told him to buzz off.

  ‘I’m Moineau, idiot.’

  ‘You are? Sorry!’ This was her Resistance contact? Somehow, she’d imagined a looker like Robert Donat in The 39 Steps, complete with quizzical moustache. What a let-down. Moineau cycled beside her long enough to warn her to prepare for a ‘big parcel’ that would be delivered to her home.

  He slipped a booklet into her coat pocket. ‘Rations for Jean-Pierre Vavin, a retired bank clerk in his sixties.’

  She understood. Somebody would be needing her hospitality and to feed him she’d draw rations for this fictitiou
s Jean-Pierre, whom she could probably pass off as her father.

  ‘Where shall I bring the parcel?’ Moineau asked.

  She gave him the address on impasse de Cordoba. ‘When’s he arriving?’

  ‘It’s a parcel. We don’t say “he”.’

  ‘Sorry. First time.’

  ‘Just get queuing, then wait till dark, all right?’

  She did as he said, spending hours in line for food, only reaching La Passerinette by late afternoon.

  As evening fell, her heart rate increased. Her first evader might already be on his way. She’d better close the shop and get home. Wheeling her bicycle on to boulevard de la Madeleine, she was hitching up her coat skirts when a shout made her turn. A man in German uniform was crossing the boulevard three or four shop widths away, holding up his hand to stop the traffic.

  Dietrich.

  She sped away, cycling on the pavement as far as place de la Madeleine. Pedalling blindly into the stream of traffic earned her a fanfare of honks from impatient drivers. Usually, the cycle ride home from Madeleine took her twelve minutes. This time, she did it in six.

  *

  Moineau delivered half an hour before curfew. Answering his four-beat knock, she opened her door to find the pavement ­glittering with hoarfrost. She coughed three times; the all-clear.

  Instantly, two dark figures peeled out of a doorway a little distance up the alley. One carried a suitcase and seemed to be wearing white gloves. Once inside, both men made a beeline for the electric fire. She had onion soup ready.

  Moineau ate his standing up, anxious to get away before curfew fell. After giving Coralie instructions for the next stage, he took spirit bottles from each of his coat pockets. ‘One to help the evening go with a swing, hey, Cosette? Take the other with you when you hand this gentleman on.’

  Her ‘parcel’ was Jan Brommersma, a journalist from Rotterdam found guilty of editing an anti-German newspaper. In English, their shared language, Brommersma told Coralie that he’d been on his way to execution, but one of the soldiers guarding the prison van had been caught short. Desperate to relieve himself against the van’s wheel, the soldier had left the rear door open.

  ‘His relief is short-lived, I am thinking.’

  Jan carried marks of beatings and cigarette burns to his face and neck and Coralie could not bear at first to look at his hands. He hadn’t been wearing white gloves; each finger-end was wrapped in scraps of linen, through which blood had soaked and dried.

  When he told her his exposed nail-beds were getting infected, she overcame her squeamishness and bathed his hands in warm salt-water, tearing new bandages from one of her own sheets.

  They drank a tot of the aquavit Moineau had provided, but Coralie advised restraint. Tomorrow was the hand-over, the most dangerous stage of an evader’s journey. After cooking him the heartiest meal that ration books could furnish – rabbit pie, macaroni and lima beans – she suggested they turn in.

  ‘You take my bed,’ she said, realising quickly that his feet would hang over the end. After elongating the bed with two suitcases, she lay down on the sofa. Sleep was impossible. She’d run away from Dietrich, left him calling her name in the street. Why was he back and what did he want?

  Once Jan had fallen asleep, his snores competed with the freight trains coming in and out of Gare Saint-Lazare. Coralie got up and, wrapped in blankets, cut out a pair of gloves from black felt, large enough to cover a Dutchman’s hands. Her needle paused only when Jan began a harrowing dialogue in his sleep, taking her into his nightmare.

  Jan Brommersma had been courteous from the first, appreciative of the risk she was taking but, even so, she felt uncomfortable to be sharing such a tiny space with a male stranger. One front door opening on to a dead-end was also far from ideal. She needed better accommodation.

  *

  Over a breakfast of the previous night’s leftovers, Jan tried on his new gloves with a child’s pleasure, and asked her how she came to speak such excellent English.

  She lied, by habit. ‘From a boyfriend, before the war. He was an artist who came to Paris to rent a table at a Montparnasse café and sit in the shadow of Matisse and Picasso. He liked to paint me, and he’d talk.’

  Jan, in his turn, told her the unadulterated truth of the devastation of Rotterdam by German bombers, and also of the destruction of British towns and cities. He gave enough detail for her to guess that there must be a trade in intelligence across the North Sea, probably between the English east coast and Dutch ports, like Antwerp. He told her that Londoners had christened the nightly pounding of their city ‘the Blitz’.

  ‘I met an RAF flier,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘I think he flew Fairey Battles.’

  ‘Poor damn boy.’ Jan Brommersma held his coffee cup between his palms like a child. ‘I, too, met a pilot, after the fall of France. He had crashed and my wife and I got him to the coast, on to a fishing boat. He hated those Battle aircraft, called them “lousy crates”. You understand “crate”?’

  Only too well.

  ‘He said they were too slow to outfly the enemy.’ Seeing her face freeze, he said quickly, ‘Hey, some blokes are always lucky, like me. Your pilot has been retrained maybe for Lancasters or Blenheims.’

  She chose two in the afternoon for them to leave, the hour when shops reopened after lunch and people were hurrying back to work, or joining queues in the hope that a short break had magically refilled the shelves. Walking ahead, her trench coat buttoned against the cold, a pink feather in her hat, she kept to the middle of the pavement so Jan never lost sight of her. If he was stopped, she would pause to retie her shoelaces, dawdling until he was waved on. If it looked all over for him, she’d walk on. And tit-for-tat, she emphasised. No heroics. They were dead meat if they were caught, but the Resistance must go on, the wheel must keep turning.

  Their destination was the Île de la Cité, the smaller of the two Seine islands that were the foundation stones of Paris. Knowing how hard it was for Jan’s tortured fingers to grip a suitcase, she’d decided in advance to take a bus the length of rue de Rivoli. She’d given him change and coached him on how to pay the fare.

  She could hear him, breathing heavily through the scarf he’d tied around his lower face to hide the burns. Lucky it was February, she thought, everyone similarly huddled. The wait at the bus stop flayed her nerves, and when a gazogène-guzzler drew up, she stumbled on board. A man laughed at her pink feather, asking where the rest of the flamingo had gone.

  Coralie made a playful reply, and Jan was able to find a seat without anyone looking at his face. Still, Coralie spent the short journey convinced that, any moment, the bus would be flagged down and a quartet of Gestapo would order everybody out.

  After alighting at the Saint-Paul Métro, she led the way down steep stone steps to quai d’Anjou. Hands in pockets, she strolled along the wharf, stopping just short of pont Marie. There she stared over the water, as if entranced by its colour of silvered teak when in fact she was reading the nameplates of the barges. Be at your mooring, Thalassa.

  Yes, there she was, a rusted tub, her engine grinding out diesel exhaust. Coralie bent to smooth the ankle socks she wore over her woollen stockings. Left first, then right, as she’d demonstrated to Jan Brommersma. A hearty cackle came from above.

  ‘Parcel for me, michou?’

  Coralie glared up at Thalassa’s deck and hissed, ‘Quiet!’ An old woman, bare-armed and bare-legged in defiance of the cold, beamed down through ill-spaced teeth. She wore a straw hat a scarecrow would have handed back.

  ‘That him?’ The old woman pointed towards Jan, who was hesitating under the bridge. ‘Have him throw his bag up first. Last lot were so nervous they nearly left a wireless set behind on the quay. Brought me my medicine, michou?’

  Last night, Moineau had said, ‘The old bird can’t steer the damn boat without a proper drink.’

  Cor
alie tossed a bottle of aquavit over the gunwale and the boatwoman caught it expertly. Two minutes later, Coralie was on pont Marie, again staring at the river. As the chug of an engine became a thick purr and angled wavelets broke against the bridge’s feet, she allowed herself to breathe. ‘He’s away! I’m a proper résistante now.’

  And she was free to go back to work. At La Passerinette she found a note on the mat.

  I must speak with you. Meet me at the café where we last had coffee with Teddy. I will be there at six. D.

  The mention of Teddy felt so heartless that she tore the page up without reading it twice. After all, the job of a résistante was to resist.

  Part Five

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  It wasn’t so much a fresh mood sweeping Paris as the days lengthened – people were still hungry, angry and frightened – as a new game, called Bait the Occupiers. Make fools of them, but never let them know it. It was a very feminine game, and Coralie joined in. As La Passerinette still enjoyed favour among German officers’ wives, the scope for furtive sabotage was endless.

  It boiled down to shape and proportions. The couture collections at the end of February took the previous year’s silhouette to a new extreme and, as ever, hats reflected the trend. Coralie came up with voluminous shapes to balance bold shoulders, narrow waists and puffed skirts. The new style suited chic Frenchwomen, but not broad German frames.

  March 1943 arrived with peevish skies sneezing sleet which rattled against the salon windows and kept clients at home. One morning, fitting a hat to the head of Frau Pfendt, whose husband’s staff car waited at the kerb, Coralie thought unenthusiastically about her journey home at the day’s end. No longer the twelve-minute sprint to impasse de Cordoba. For good or ill, she’d moved her belongings back to rue de Seine. Una had paid the rent up to the end of March this year, so it made sense to occupy it or it would be lost to them. And Una needed somewhere to come home to. Coralie firmly believed that, one day soon, her friend would stroll into La Passerinette, saying, ‘Well, that’s what I call a waste of a winter.’