Never Leave Me

by Margaret Pemberton

  On top of the pile of papers was a memo to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Commander-in-Chief, Army Group B. Taking a deep steadying breath she focused the camera, pressed the shutter …

  ‘You idiot,’ he said quietly from behind her. ‘You empty-headed, stupid little idiot.’

  She spun round so suddenly that the papers scattered to the floor. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t speak. He was walking towards her and through her terror she was aware that there was no rage on his face or in his voice. Only deep weariness.

  ‘You cannot really have believed, Lisette, that the door to this room would have been left unlocked and that the sentry would have abandoned his post, just at the precise moment you were about to descend the stairs?’

  She fought for composure, for air. ‘The window grille was left unlocked … I took a chance. As Paul and André took a chance.’

  He halted a mere two yards from her and said, his voice oddly flat, ‘You fell into a trap. As Paul and André fell into a trap.’

  There was no more room for terror. Another emotion had taken its place. An emotion far more terrible. She seemed to shrink visibly before his gaze.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ she whispered, her eyes dilating, her face chalk-white.

  He wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. Instead he said cruelly, ‘You cannot for one moment believe that Gilles and Caldron’s escape was chance. The grille was left unlocked, the window opened purposely so that they would attempt to escape – and be shot whilst doing so.’

  She had thought that she had come to terms with horror, now she knew that it was not so. That it was a bottomless pit whose depths could never be plumbed. She shrank back against the table, sending another flurry of papers showering around her.

  ‘Why?’ she choked. ‘What kind of man are you?’

  He looked at her long and silently and then he sat on the corner of the table, one gleaming booted leg swinging free, the other touching the floor. ‘I did it for you,’ he said abruptly, the lines around his mouth hardening. ‘You were responsible for their deaths, Lisette. You and your stupid, childish attempts to be a heroine for France.’

  She didn’t speak; didn’t move. Silence stretched between them and he knew when it ended that her innocence too would have come to an end.

  ‘Paul Gilles was a local Resistance leader. You were a courier. If Gilles had ever reached Gestapo headquarters in Caen how long do you think it would have been before I was ordered to arrest you?’

  ‘Paul Gilles would never have betrayed me,’ she said, and his heart ached at the brave certainty in her voice.

  ‘Paul Gilles didn’t,’ he said tersely. ‘It was Caldron who betrayed you.’

  He saw her flinch, saw her valiant attempt to mask her feelings and knew that the private battle he had been waging was lost. He would never be able to pretend that she didn’t exist. It was not humanly possible.

  He rose to his feet and stepped towards her, his eyes dark. ‘Listen, Lisette,’ he said in a quick urgent voice, ‘you must, please, make some effort to understand. What I did, I did for you. Gilles and Caldron would have died anyway. They would have died after days, perhaps weeks, of torture. Instead they died quickly and cleanly here at Valmy.’

  ‘Cleanly!’ She recoiled from him, her eyes blazing in her stricken face. ‘My God, cleanly! How can you say the word? You murdered them! You murdered Paul and André and the Englishman! You’re an animal! No different from the SS sadists in Caen! You’re a murdering, filthy Nazi!’

  Rage at the circumstances in which they found themselves, fear for her safety, frustration at her inability to understand, all overcame him. His hand sliced through the air, slapping her across the face with such ferocity that she fell to her knees. ‘Jesus God!’ he shouted, furious with himself for what he had done, furious with her for goading him to it. ‘Why can’t you see sense? Caldron betrayed you and Caldron died! Paul Gilles would far rather have died at Valmy than in a stinking prison cell knowing that he was taking you and perhaps untold others to their deaths!’

  She was sobbing, blinded by her tears, the marks of his fingers rising in scarlet, ugly weals across her cheekbone. ‘And the airman?’ she gasped. ‘Can you justify his death as well?’

  He dropped to his knee in front of her, seizing her shoulders so savagely that she cried out in pain. ‘To hell with the bloody airman!’ he thundered, and as she cried out in protest his mouth came down on hers, hard and powerful and unyielding.

  From the moment he had laid hands on her he had known that there was no going back. His physical desire for her was too great. It was as if he had touched a live switch. The electrical excitement that had spiralled between them from the very first convulsed him. He pressed her beneath him, plundering her mouth, uncaring of her tears and her fists beating on his shoulders. All his life he had had whatever he wanted, and he wanted Lisette. He had been prepared to dismay his family, outrage his friends, defy army regulations, in order to make her his wife. She alone, torn apart by divided loyalties, had thwarted him and she was going to do so no longer.

  He caught hold of her wrists, pinioning them high above her head with one hand as with the other he tore away the deep-drowned purple of her skirt, the creamy beige satin of her slip until he reached the exquisite lace that lay beneath and the soft, sweet velvet of her flesh.

  Desire roared through his veins. He heard her cries, saw the desperation in her eyes, and then, his eyes so dark they were almost black, he crushed her beneath him, parting her thighs viciously, thrusting deep inside her in an agony of relief.

  Chapter Seven

  She was moaning beneath him, her face wet with tears. His breath came in harsh rasps. God in heavens, what had he done? To what depths had he sunk? He eased his weight from her, looking down at her, knowing that she had fought him to the bitter end.

  ‘Lisette?’ He raised his hand to wipe away her tears and she jerked her head to one side, her hair spilling acoss her face, fanning out over the deep-shaded tones of the carpet.

  ‘Lisette,’ he said again, his voice raw with urgency. ‘Lisette, look at me. Listen to me.’

  She was rigid, the long lovely line of her throat taut, her knuckles clenched, her face beaded with sweat, her skin so pale it was almost translucent. He knew he had hurt her. He had taken her as if she were a whore. Taken her with a brutality that sickened him. Blood trickled down her inner thigh. Blood and semen inextricably mixed.

  ‘Let me help you,’ he said, leaning back on one knee, taking hold of her shoulders.

  She gasped aloud, pushing herself away from him, scrambling to her feet. ‘Don’t touch me!’ The pupils of her eyes were widely dilated, utterly opaque, the irises a petrified, pristine grey. ‘Dear God! Don’t touch me! Not now! Not ever!’ She was free of him, running and stumbling to the door.

  He rose unsteadily to his feet. Rape. It was a resort he had never before descended to. The act of men he despised. His face was scratched and bleeding where she had clawed at him with her nails. The top two buttons were ripped from his jacket. They lay on the floor, scattered amongst the reports and memoranda that had fallen from the table. Slowly he bent down and began to pick up the disordered sheets of paper that he had left for her to find. None of them would have been of any interest to the Allies. The memo she had been in the act of photographing was merely to confirm that he would be in Paris from 22nd to the 26th of the month.

  He picked up the camera, wondering who had given it to her. Paul Gilles? Elise? He would take no steps to find out. To pursue the matter would be to bring Lisette’s name to the attention of the Gestapo. For all official purposes the incident had never happened.

  He stared broodingly down at the camera in his hand. And for unofficial purposes? It would be easy enough for him to behave as if nothing had happened. The rape of a Frenchwoman was hardly a crime he need lose sleep over. Yet it hadn’t been the rape of just any Frenchwoman. It had been the rape of the woman who had aroused emotions in him he had never
suspected existed. The woman he had fallen irrevocably in love with. His vow that she would cease to exist for him had been impossible to keep. He might as well have vowed to stop breathing.

  His face grim, his eyes bleak, he set the camera on the table and left the room. He had to see her. Had to speak to her. The nightmare into which they had plummeted had to come to an end.

  She ran up the stairs and along the corridor like a blind thing. She mustn’t think! Mustn’t think! Mustn’t think! She half fell into her room, slamming the door behind her, the back of her hand pressed hard against her mouth to silence her rising screams. She mustn’t think! If she thought she would go mad! she would lose her reason.

  The strength that had sustained her flight failed her. She sank to her knees, sobbing, gasping for breath, crawling towards the bed like a wounded animal. She had fought him! She must think of that and of nothing else. She collapsed against the bed, unable to rise to her feet, her arms stretched out across the coverlet, the tears streaming down her face and neck. She had fought him … fought him … fought him …

  The door opened behind her and she knew that she was lost. Drowning. Beyond all help.

  ‘Go away,’ she choked, lifting her head from her hands, turning her swollen, tear-streaked face to his. ‘Oh dear heaven, go away!’

  His eyes were so dark they were almost black. He had never apologised to anyone, ever, in his life. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and his voice was naked with suffering. ‘Forgive me, Lisette … please.’

  His thick blond hair was tousled. His hard-boned face was white and drawn, scored by livid scratchmarks. The top of his jacket gaped open and she could see the pulse beating in his throat, smell the sweat that had dried on his body as he moved towards her.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she panted hoarsely, shrinking back against the bed. ‘Please, please don’t touch me!’

  ‘I love you,’ he said, and his hands were on her shoulders, drawing her to her feet. ‘I know how much you hate me, Lisette. I know I’ve given you every reason to hate me …’

  A great shudder ran through her body. The waves had closed over her head. There was no further hope. ‘I don’t hate you,’ she whispered. ‘I hate myself,’ and as she raised her eyes to his understanding rocked through him.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, and crushed her towards him. ‘Lisette … my love. Lisette!’

  There was no escape. There never had been. Her arms slid up and around his neck, her mouth parted helplessly beneath his, and as he lowered her once more to the floor beneath him it was with the gentleness of absolute love.

  ‘I won’t hurt you … I promise that I won’t hurt you …’

  Her sweater and skirt lay tangled with his uniform. Lavender and grey. Violet and black. She trembled in his arms, overcome by the beauty of his masculinity: by the smoothness of his skin; the hardness of bone; the lean tautness of rigorously exercised muscle. The touch of his hand as he caressed the curve of her body from her neck to her hip bone rendered her half senseless with pleasure. It was like flying. Like nothing she had ever known.

  He entered her and her heart moved. With all the skill and patience of an accomplished lover he took her slowly, step by step, to a country she had never dreamed of. Her body was like molten gold. It flowed, white-hot, into his. She no longer had any sense of identity, any sense of separate being. She was dissolving, disintegrating, her voice calling his name over and over again.

  The following days and weeks were the strangest, most bitter-sweet of her life. Dieter did not, as he had originally planned, tell the Comte and Comtesse of their affair. Paul Gilles and André Caldron’s deaths made it impossible. Neither his men nor the Comte and Comtesse guessed at their true relationship. He knew that after what had happened, it was better for Lisette that they didn’t.

  They met at night, in the room that had been her grandmother’s. The room overlooking the sea. Always, afterwards, when she remembered their lovemaking, she remembered the distant sound of the sea as it surged up on to the shingles, and the light from an oil lamp glowing softly in the darkness.

  They talked about their different childhoods. He told her of walks with his father in the flower-filled Schoneberger Volkspark, the heavy scent of the pear and apple trees only yards away from the Kurfurstendamm; chocolate cakes at Sacher’s. Iced lemonade at the Hotel Adlon.

  She told him of a sheltered childhood spent at Valmy; of family holidays in St Moritz; of her convent schooling at Neuilly; of the finishing school in Switzerland that she would have gone to if the war had not intervened.

  They talked of books and music. He liked Zola and Kafka and jazz; she Flaubert and Chopin. They talked of anything and everything, but they did not talk of the war. In the lamplit confines of their turret room, the war did not exist.

  They drank the vintage champagne that Dieter would not have dreamed of being without, even on a battlefield, and calvados, the heady cider and apple cognac that her father brewed. He was a man who smiled rarely, but she knew by the expression in his black-lashed eyes when he looked at her, by the touch of his fingers on her flesh, that his happiness was as deep as her own.

  She never tired of looking at him. At the line of his eyebrows, the angle of his jaw, the crisp corn-gold thickness of his hair. She wanted to be with him forever. To share his life. To sleep with him every night and to wake with him every morning. She wanted the war to end. She wanted to know what the future held for them.

  He knew what it held. It held the invasion and he both yearned for it and feared it. Yearned for it because, if the Allies were repulsed, it would be months, perhaps years, before they could launch another such attack. Germany would be able to concentrate her entire strength on throwing back the Russians. Britain would crumble under the horror of the new V1 rockets and Churchill would be forced to sue for peace. There would be a future for them.

  He feared it because if the Allies were not repulsed, if they surged inland, then Germany’s defeat was inevitable. And in that defeat there would be no future at all. Not for him.

  He knew that she didn’t understand that yet. That she believed that when the invasion came, win or lose, they would remain together. He had not the heart to disillusion her. He wanted nothing to darken their fragile, perhaps fleeting, happiness.

  He had a radio in his study at the chateau and every night, before meeting Lisette in the lamplit glow of the turret room, he listened in over earphones to the hundreds of messages that the BBC transmitted after their regular news broadcasts. All were coded. All were in French, Dutch, Danish or Norwegian. Messages to the Underground. Messages that made no sense, except to the people to whom they were directed.

  Night after night he waited for the coded message to the French Resistance that General Canaris believed would signal the invasion of France. Night after night it failed to come. He knew, when it did, there would be no more meetings for them in the turret room above the sea.

  All through April the weather was mild and calm. Ideal weather for the invasion forces. But the Channel remained empty of ships; the horizon clear.

  ‘I’m beginning to think that the Anglo-Americans have lost confidence in their cause, Meyer,’ Rommel said as they examined new anti-tank barriers.

  Dieter said nothing. He was beginning to hope and he was terrified that if he put his hopes into words they would be dashed.

  On April 26th he received a memorandum stating that morale in England was at an all-time low. It was reported that there had been cries of ‘Down with Churchill’and demands for peace. He hoped to God it was true.

  By the beginning of May there was still no signs of the British and Americans and he said to Lisette, ‘They’re not going to come, liebling. They’re going to sue for peace without invading.’

  She shivered in his arms, pressing herself close to the long, hard length of his body, and he knew that she could not share his relief. Without an invasion, France would not be free. His arms tightened around her. She wanted the impossible. A German defeat that wo
uld not take him from her.

  ‘I’m sorry, liebling,’ he said, knowing how much she hated all references to the things that divided them. ‘But we must talk of it. If I am wrong, and if the Allies do invade, then it will be impossible for you and your parents to remain at Valmy.’

  Her head had been resting on his chest. She sat up suddenly, her hair spilling over her shoulders and naked breasts. ‘Leave Valmy?’ Her eyes were incredulous.

  He raised himself up on one elbow in the large bed. ‘If there is an invasion and it takes place here, then you cannot possibly remain. The whole of Normandy will be a battlefield.’

  ‘You will remain.’

  ‘I’m a soldier,’ he said gently, reaching out and cupping her cheek.

  Her eyes were dark in the paleness of her face. ‘And the villagers? Will they be given a chance to leave?’

  ‘They will be ordered to leave,’ he said, drawing her down once more against him. ‘Civilians are nothing but a hazard in battle conditions.’

  They lay silent, each with their own thoughts, each knowing that those thoughts could not be expressed. To express them would be to face each other across the great abyss of their divided loyalties.

  ‘We should make arrangements,’ he said at last, stroking her hair. ‘Do you have any relatives, any friends that you could go to?’

  ‘My father’s brother lives in Paris.’

  ‘Then that is where you should go.’

  She twisted once more to look at him. ‘Now? So soon?’

  A muscle flexed at the corner of his jaw. He didn’t want her to go. Once she went away there was no telling when, or if, they would be reunited. But she couldn’t stay at Valmy. Not if the Allies invaded. It would be too dangerous. His arms tightened around her.

  ‘It would be for the best,’ he said quietly. ‘In case I am wrong and they do still come.’

  In the distance the waves could be heard ebbing and surging along the deserted coastline.