[Fen Churche 02] - Night Train to Paris

by Fliss Chester

  ‘Not our homes as much,’ Simone added softly, following Rose’s eyeline up to the little Impressionist painting on the wall, the one between two of the grand windows that Fen had pointed out to James earlier.

  ‘Simone is right.’ Rose leaned forward and stubbed out the cigarette, replacing it in her hand with a glass of crème de menthe. ‘Those of us of a Christian persuasion got off lightly. But the Jews, oh dear Lord, what those poor people went through.’ Rose knocked back the green liqueur and winced slightly as she swallowed it down. ‘Those Nazi bastards would arrest the families on no charge save that of being Jewish, then commandeer the apartments and strip those homes of their valuables! Strings of pearls, diamonds, paintings, sculptures, furs! Everything was put in boxes and sent back to Germany for the pleasure of who knows who…’ Rose set down the thick glass tumbler rather heavily on the table and Fen noticed a shake to her hand as she poured herself another slug of the mint liqueur. ‘You want some?’ Rose asked and Simone, without being prompted, got up and went towards the kitchen. She returned a moment later with two more glass tumblers.

  ‘Just a little bit then,’ Fen murmured and accepted a shot of the crème de menthe. She was taking in what Rose had just told her, and it shocked her. She had known, of course, that the Nazis had routed out the Jews, and their treatment of that faith had been one of the reasons the Allies had joined the war, but now hearing more about death camps and sequestrations… it was becoming much clearer to her quite what terrible atrocities had been committed here in France.

  ‘So, what did you and Henri do together then, Rose?’ Fen was more curious than ever, a trait of her personality that at times landed her in the soup, but more often than not meant she got to the bottom of what she wanted to know. She posed her question and then leaned back again in her chair, tucking her stockinged feet up under her and, unlike Rose, nursed the eye-watering liquid, taking small sips as the older woman continued.

  ‘Henri Renaud is a well-connected man. And it is always who you know, not what you know, that gets you anywhere in this life. Not that Henri isn’t very clever, for a man, but he was definitely the right person in the right place, at the right time. He was married, you see, to a wonderful woman called Heidi, from Bavaria, but she died and the baby with her, oh, this must have been in ’35 or ’36. Anyway, Heidi had struck up a friendship with the wife of the German ambassador here in Paris and even after her death, Henri maintained a friendship with Otto and Susanne Abetz.’ Rose paused and picked something from her teeth, before changing tack slightly.

  ‘Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m as patriotic as the next eccentric artist, but I trod that fine line between collaborating and surviving.’ Rose looked at her and Fen wondered if she was trying to gauge Fen’s own reaction. She carried on a moment later. ‘You see, I didn’t refuse to paint the portraits of the German officers. Such vain men, the Germans, so interesting to paint.’ Rose lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  ‘Wasn’t that frowned upon?’ Fen wouldn’t have dared asked anyone else, but there had been something about Rose’s telling of the story that invited it.

  ‘Frowned upon?’ Rose pulled a face. ‘Everyone should have access to art, dear girl, we are all equal in the muse’s eyes. And anyway,’ she raised just the one archly plucked eyebrow as she looked at Fen, ‘they paid handsomely and there’s nothing more insufferable than a starving artist.’ She winked. ‘And it got me into their trust.’

  Fen nodded and smiled. Bingo. It was obvious now that all Rose’s talk of treading fine lines was just her cover story. But why she needed one was still a mystery to her. ‘So, you and Henri were both trusted by the Germans… then what happened?’

  Seven

  ‘The Germans found themselves needing an art specialist to value and catalogue the art they were stealing from the Jewish homes and galleries. Abetz recommended Henri for the job, not realising that Henri was as passionately patriotic to France as I was.’

  Rose paused as if taking the time to consider what she’d just said.

  ‘Henri spoke to me of Abetz’s offer to him one night and we came up with a plan. I was to be his assistant and follow him around noting down his evaluation and, more often than not, his valuation of the paintings that the Germans wanted. They saw everything in terms of francs and Reichsmarks; it was heartbreaking.’

  Rose took a moment to collect her thoughts, then continued. ‘I would then come home here and type up my shorthand notes, creating a list of the paintings. In the meantime, they were moved from the apartments to a warehouse.’

  ‘Not just any warehouse,’ Simone nudged Rose.

  Fen wondered if she knew the story so well due to Rose telling it often enough or if it was common knowledge among the Resistance fighters in the area.

  ‘Not just any warehouse, that’s right. The German officers could be cruel beasts and shout at you until spittle came out of their mouths, but they were also a pushover once they trusted you and fundamentally lazy. If you could offer them an easy, collaborative plan, they would more than likely say yes. So, Henri suggested they used his own warehouse space, just to the north of the city, to house the paintings as they awaited transit to Germany or to the auction house.’

  ‘Auction house?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rose stubbed her cigarette out and played with her long rope of pearls again. Fen wondered if it was the artist in her that always had to have her hands occupied in doing something but tried not to let it distract her from what Rose was saying. ‘It seems war is an expensive business and the Nazis decided to sell the paintings they didn’t deem worthy of the Reich. Modern pieces, valuable, to be sure, but what they deemed “degenerate” art. That’s why they brought in Henri, an esteemed dealer of modern and contemporary art as well as an expert in the classics, to tell them what to keep and what to sell, and how to sell it. The trade here was booming throughout the war, with less scrupulous dealers asking no questions regarding the provenance of works.’

  ‘That’s so terrible.’ Fen could imagine the crates of packed-up paintings being shipped away from their rightful owners, or worse, sold to pay for the cruelty that was being visited upon them. It pained her to think of what those families had so recently been through. ‘But you didn’t let them get away with it, did you, Rose?’

  ‘What could I do?’ Rose shrugged, but Fen noticed a twinkle in her eye.

  ‘Rose?’ Fen was on the edge of her seat.

  ‘You’re right.’ The older woman sat forward now and let her long necklace dangle between her knees as she lit another cigarette and spoke animatedly about her plan. ‘I was there, you see, in those apartments. And if I didn’t know whose apartment it was, I would look for clues: unopened letters on a console table, a labelled postal box in the communal hallway, or maybe I just listened to what Henri and the officers said. And when I typed up the list of all the paintings and sculptures, I came up with a code. A cipher, if you will. Not a complex one, but enough to disguise the name of the family whose apartment we’d been in that day and who owned the art.’

  Fen waited, impatient to hear more of the story as Rose took another sip of her drink. ‘Then I hid that coded name into the list, disguised as a transit number or some such. The Germans, so in love with pointless bureaucracy, never even noticed it there.’ She chuckled to herself as she inhaled from her cigarette, then coughed, but laughed again. ‘I even managed to code in where I heard Müller – he was the man in charge, you see – say the art was destined for, like “this one for Hitler himself” or “my wife loves the countryside, she can have that one of the haystack”, you know the sort of thing.’

  Fen felt her jaw drop. ‘So you knew exactly what was stolen, and from whom?’

  ‘And sometimes where it was going.’

  ‘You were a brave woman,’ Simone said approvingly.

  ‘Wasn’t it terribly dangerous? What if you’d been caught?’ Fen asked.

  Rose shrugged. ‘What could they say? I was an assistant. A mere woman, a cler
k just parroting what the men said. To all onlookers, I was helping the Reich. Ha! The thought of it.’ She took a deep inhale from her cigarette in its holder and flicked away the ash. ‘And what would they find? You know what manifests and transport lists look like, they might as well all be in code, they look so like double Dutch anyway. Of course, if I’d been caught at the time actually writing down who the paintings belonged to, while we were there in the apartments, I probably would have been shot.’

  ‘Or sent to Ravensbrück,’ Simone shuddered.

  ‘Yes, so I kept it all up in here,’ Rose tapped her head, ‘until I was alone with my typewriter and cipher and then I came up with these bogus columns of “transportation serial B”, or whatever, and then handed the list over to Henri to mark up which were to be sold or sent to Berlin. That was when the real work happened. Henri had the list rubber-stamped by Müller, then gave it to his warehouse manager, who, under the Germans’ own noses, chalked the codes onto the back of the paintings before they were crated up!’

  ‘That’s so clever, Rose. I still can’t believe some were just sent to auction though. Were many sold?’ Fen was still shocked that local dealers and auctioneers would do such a thing, though she had to admit the proverbial gun to the head was always a persuasive reason.

  ‘Yes, too many. Some of the Jewish families had some beautiful paintings – Matisse, Mohl, Braque, even that Picasso’s daubings. We called it avant garde, the German called it degenerate, but they knew enough to know that they were worth something. So, Henri took my list and marked up which paintings would delight the Führer and which ones could just help line the Reich’s pockets, but knowing full well that I had already snuck my code in. And now the war is over, it’s safe to decipher the names and start tracking down the art. Some of our dear friends are returning to Paris and I can now help them, thank the Lord.’

  ‘You’ve decoded the list, Rose?’ Simone seemed put out that she didn’t know this already.

  ‘No, dear child, I’ll have it back from Henri tomorrow. He saved it from the fires that the Nazis lit as they retreated.’

  Fen toasted her. ‘I’m so impressed, Rose.’

  Rose shrugged the praise away. ‘We all did our bit. You tilled the fields in rain or shine to help feed your countrymen and women, Simone here took potshots at Germans and I… I just typed up a list.’

  Eight

  Fen slept well that night, despite her almost all-day nap earlier. Whether it was the crème de menthe, the exhaustion of last night’s journey or the comfortable bed, she couldn’t tell, but there was a bit of her that was sure it was because she felt, in some way, that she was home. Not home as in Oxford with her parents, or home with Mrs B in the old farmhouse near Midhurst where she’d spent the war, but home in the sense that everything around her was familiar. She had spent hours in this apartment as a girl, either painting alongside Madame Coillard (as she had always called her back then) or playing with her brother as her parents left them to amuse themselves running marbles along the smooth parquet floor while they talked and laughed with their eccentric friend.

  She’d also reread her letter from Kitty and she could almost hear her voice through the words as she sent condolences and local news. Fen missed her friend terribly. Simone seemed nice enough, but Fen would give anything for Kitty to be here now, sharing her room like they did at Mrs B’s, giggling into the night about some fancy man or other, or just companionably going about their work. Still, it was good to know that Kitty, Dilly and Mrs B were safe and well. It all helped to ease the pain of knowing now that her beloved fiancé Arthur was dead.

  By 8.30 a.m. the next morning, Fen was up and dressed and sitting in the studio, a hot cup of mint tea steeping in front of her. She’d been woken by Tipper scratching at her door an hour or so earlier and rather than let him wake the rest of the household up, she’d taken him for a quick run around the tree-lined courtyard in the centre of the building. The early-morning blast of chill air had been good for her and she felt far more alert than she had the night before.

  Now, sitting in the sunlight streaming through the windows, a newspaper caught her eye… the name Sartre – hadn’t Rose mentioned him last night? She picked the paper up from the floor where it had been doing a grand job of protecting the wooden blocks from splashes of white spirit and oil paint. She read the headline properly: ‘France Seen From America, by our special correspondent Jean-Paul Sartre’. She read with interest about the journalist and philosopher tasting Coca-Cola for the first time and meeting President Roosevelt.

  ‘Well, Tipper,’ Fen said, as the little dog padded into the room and nuzzled her outstretched hand, ‘if I do come across this Sartre chap in the bar of the Deux Magots, I shall ask him all about this Coca-Cola drink!’

  She read a few more articles, enjoying the challenge of testing her French and stretching her vocabulary. There had been a rise in Mafia-style gangs, it seemed, according to one article at least, which blamed American films for giving Frenchmen ideas, while there had also been a scandal in the Bois de Boulogne, where a painting had been stashed in the racehorse stables. Paris was certainly more exciting than Midhurst, that was for sure.

  Simone’s bedroom door opened and the young woman crossed the studio to get to the bathroom, which was on the other side of the apartment. Seeing her now in her nightdress and without a scrap of make-up on, Fen realised that the assumption she’d made last night over the dishes about Simone being plain under her lipstick and powder wasn’t entirely correct. Her skin glowed and her poise was as elegant as anyone’s who had spent years at the barre. No, she wasn’t unattractive without make-up, far from it, but her rouge and mascara had emphasised her features, which were actually more delicate and less striking in the clear morning light.

  ‘Good morning, Fenella,’ she spoke and raised a hand in greeting.

  ‘Good morning, Simone,’ Fen replied and went back to reading the newspaper.

  Gradually, the apartment came to life. First, Simone dressed and breakfasted, if you could call just a small cup of coffee breakfast. Fen decided that Mrs B, her old landlady in West Sussex certainly wouldn’t. She had always said that a breakfast wasn’t a breakfast without at least one of the freshly laid brown eggs from the ‘ladies’ on the farm.

  Fen was just thinking about those early-morning stints in the fields when Rose appeared from her bedroom, wafting into the studio with her hair in a bright-pink chenille turban and the rest of her draped in another voluminous velvet housecoat, this one turquoise in colour. A more different landlady to her last, you could not imagine.

  Fen remembered the history of how Rose came to be in this apartment. Her parents had left it to her, their only daughter, after they had died, prematurely and devastatingly for the young woman, of the Spanish flu that had swept through Europe after the end of the Great War. Rose had become a financially independent young woman, and one not inclined to marry, it seemed. The artistic life suited her, and she only took the honorary title of madame on as she got older, as a way to distinguish herself to her pupils and clients.

  A buzz of the doorbell, followed by the scrabbling of Tipper’s claws on the wooden floor and his yapping, announced a visitor.

  ‘That will be your young man, Fen dear.’

  ‘Oh, he’s not—’

  ‘Simone!’ Rose interrupted Fen and called out to her lodger. ‘Be a dear and let the poor man in.’

  ‘I suppose it might not be James,’ Fen looked at the ormolu clock on the console table, it was still only 9 a.m. and remembering how he used to like drinking with the men at the vineyard, she wouldn’t have put it past him to have found a bar rather than a hotel last night.

  The sound of girlish giggles, and a deeper more earnest voice in the hallway, put paid to that idea, though, and, soon enough, the masculine bulk of James appeared in the studio, this time carrying the squirming Tipper in his arms.

  ‘You see, he likes you,’ Simone was still stroking the small dog as it strained against James�
��s muscles. She kissed the pooch’s head and Fen couldn’t help but notice James’s cheeks redden slightly at the attention, even if it was directed at the dog.

  ‘Ahem,’ James coughed as Simone ran her fingers along Tipper’s back, brushing them against James’s chest at the same time. ‘Good morning all,’ he continued as he placed the small dog down and gave it a little shake as its needle-like teeth hung onto his sleeve.

  ‘Tipper!’ Rose snapped and clicked her fingers and the dog obediently let go and shot off around the legs of the easels, upsetting a couple of paintbrushes from the side table between them. ‘Oh, that stupid dog,’ Rose sighed, as if this was a near-daily occurrence.

  Fen stood up to greet James. Before she could cross the room to offer him a friendly handshake, Simone had reached up and given James a kiss on both cheeks. She then waved to the women.

  ‘Ooh la la, I must go. I’m due at the atelier and I’m late. Simone, Simone…’ she tutted to herself and riffled through her stylish little handbag. ‘Key!’ She held her quarry aloft. ‘Not that I need it, you never lock the door, madame!’ She waggled a finger at Rose, who raised her eyes ceiling-ward, letting the accusation glance off her.

  ‘Have a good day,’ James said to her as she left the room and then Fen watched as he followed her into the hallway. She couldn’t catch their conversation, but she heard Simone giggling again. She shrugged her shoulders and sat back down with Rose.

  ‘Beauty is such a transient power, don’t you think?’ Rose asked her, rather rhetorically. ‘And yet such a strong one.’