by Scott, Manda
The stairs leading down from her room are oak and in good repair while across the yard, a barn is still half stacked with last year’s hay, and she is prepared to bet that no arms are hidden under it, bulking out the mass; if this is one of his safe houses, the Patron is not going to risk its being destroyed in reprisals.
Down the stairs, she heads round a corner and finds the Fayette brothers kicking a wooden ball around a yard, waiting for her without seeming to.
The two youngest run from her, screaming.
‘Maman! Maman!’
‘The English is awake!’
Daniel Fayette stands his ground, one foot up on the ball. In daylight, he looks several years older, and more tired than he did last night in the dark. She revises his age upwards to perhaps twenty-five, the age Alexandre would have been had he lived. He lights her a cigarette, passes it over, nods at the door from beyond which the high voices of his brothers are audible. ‘They wouldn’t speak of you if there was danger, I swear.’
This one, too, I will not give if I can help it: him and JJ Crotteau, who was kind to me when I landed. Nor the children. Definitely not the children.
She says, ‘Where is the Patron?’
All Daniel’s signals are made with his head. The flop of hair across his brow adds emphasis now, as he nods to the north, in the direction of the barn and the road beyond. ‘Gone to fetch the car. You’re to go to the house. My mother is waiting. She will like you, but she is also afraid that you will cause the Boche to come.’
‘I will leave soon. I don’t want to be a danger to anyone else.’
From behind, a new voice says, ‘You can’t help being that, Mademoiselle Sophie. But you are welcome in any case.’ She turns and finds that the door has swung silently on its hinges and Madame Fayette is standing in the opening.
Daniel’s mother is a more handsome version of her sons, a big-boned, well-built woman with greying hair and practical hands. Her skin is fresh and clear and youthful.
She steps back, draws them in with a gesture, takes Sophie by the arm and ushers her through to a back door.
‘You will need to attend to your ablutions, yes? There’s an outhouse beyond the back door. A towel awaits you, and a washbasin. The water is not too cold. After, we have bread for you, and cheese and milk.’
This is heaven. The water is bracing, but after last night, and her waking, it is what she needs. The soap is home-made, and scented with lavender again. It is the smell of this place, beneath everything, the sharp-sweet glory of a summer evening. She washes her face and wets her hair back from her brow. It has a natural curl and she had it cut in London into the kind of head-framing bob that her mother used to favour in the decades between the wars. There is no mirror, but Madame Fayette nods at her as she returns, and Sophie trusts her enough to take it that she looks presentable.
At the table, the bread is soft, white and smells of honey, sweeter than chocolate, richer. She closes her eyes and chews in a kind of pained ecstasy.
‘You don’t like it?’
‘I love it. I am just sorry that it has taken a war to bring me to this.’
Madame Fayette continues to empty her pantry and soon there is not only cheese; there is also butter, more on one plate than she has seen in her whole time in Britain, and a kind of quince jelly, which is sharp, not sweet, and an endless supply of unrationed milk.
A farm dog lies at her feet, sleek and well fed. Sophie is wary of dogs, but this one rests its chin on her foot and she finds herself sneaking it a thumb-sized piece of cheese. In itself, this is remarkable.
After a while, when she can eat no more, Madame Fayette comes to stand at the table.
‘You are Parisian?’ And at her nod: ‘Is it bad there, in the city?’
How can I tell you how bad it is? ‘Dead crows sell for ten francs on the black market and women claw each other’s eyes to get them. I haven’t seen a dog on the streets for three years. For a while, people who had kept them wouldn’t eat the sausages. Now, anyone will eat anything and not care whose friend it was. And sugar …’ She lifts the knife from the honeycomb, watches the bubbles of liquid gold run off. ‘We carry sugar in matchboxes and it tastes of cardboard. I have seen a man killed because he had found half a kilo in the back of his cupboard, and made the mistake of telling his neighbour.’
Madame Fayette has produced a bowl and begun to bake. She wipes her hands on her pinafore. ‘We shame ourselves.’
‘And when we have the chance to overturn that shame, we will blame it all on the Boche.’
She could stay here for days, talking quietly of things that matter, but she hears a car – an actual car, not a Gazo – and her heart is an axe in her chest. In Paris, only the Boche have petrol. If Kramme comes here … Rising, she says, ‘I could go out the back …?’
‘Be calm. He is safe. Physicians are allowed to use petrol. Also the veterinarians, the engineers – some of them – the blacksmiths.’
He. Madame Fayette gives the word a little emphasis, as one might to the president, or a bishop. She might say more but the car brakes hard and its door is flung open and the rust-haired Englishman-pretending-to-be-Belgian is there, giving Madame Fayette a kiss on the cheek, throwing something small and rich to Philippe, who has followed him in, or perhaps Simon – she can’t tell them apart yet – and then he is leaning on the table, staring at the remains of her breakfast as if her inadequacies are laid out in the crumbs on her plate.
‘What speed’s your Morse?’
It’s like walking into a brick wall, the assault of his words. She says, ‘Fifteen.’ Today, because it’s easier, she looks past him as he looked past her in the night.
‘Words? Or characters?’
‘Fifteen words per minute.’ Actually, she can do more than this, but fifteen was the threshold above which people seemed to be pulled out of training and sent off to be W/T operators and that was never part of her plan.
If asked, she would have said that spending all day alone in a room tapping out messages that the Boche read as ‘I am here, come and get me’ never struck her as a useful way to spend her war.
She doesn’t plan to do it now, either. He bites his lip, thinks, nods.
‘We need to get you proper papers, which means we need to take your picture. You can send to London while they’re developing it.’
She remembers the soft young man in Scotland, all his careful work. ‘What’s wrong with the ones I brought from England?’
‘They’re out of date. They’re printed on the blue paper when it should be green and you’re looking forwards when they want you looking sideways. Also, it uses rivets instead of staples. They’ve all changed since the start of the month. I told London. I tell them everything.’ He nods at the door and the car beyond. ‘Get in.’
By local standards, the commune of Saint-Cybard is a good-sized metropolis, perhaps half the size of Dijon. The Jura mountains hug it close, blocking the route to the Swiss border, but on a clear day, if Daniel is to be believed, you can see Geneva to the south east, Mâcon to the south west and Dijon to the north, all from the forested heights above the town; certainly, you can see south to the Alps.
On this less-than-clear day, all Sophie can see as the Patron drives her down the main street is the smoke from the chimneys of the Peugeot factory at one end of town and the steam from the station at the other.
The mayor’s office has been obliterated in one of the RAF’s three unsuccessful attempts to destroy the factory. The town and surrounding area are served now from what may once have been a prosecutor’s office, in a plain, whitewashed building with permanently shuttered windows.
In here, on the second of the three floors, she meets Raymond Vivier, father to René of the wild, straggling hair. Here, in an office that smells of printer’s ink and stale sweat, he labours to create the permits, passes and letters of introduction that keep civic life flowing, even in war. He also makes the identity papers required by the occupying forces: he is photographer, typese
tter and printer, all in one.
‘Look to your left, Mademoiselle, if you please?’ She looks left. The wall is in need of paint, and perhaps some decoration other than a framed image of the Führer.
Snap-click. The sound is the same as it was in Scotland, two months and half a lifetime ago. A stab of nostalgia surprises her, catching at her breath. ‘And to the front? Thank you.’ Snap-click. ‘You are beautiful. The Boche will be dazzled by your eyes.’
‘Thank you.’ Raymond Vivier is charming, but she knows she is not beautiful, only that men who cannot see into her soul may sometimes think so.
The same could not be said for Raymond. He is unfortunately made, with narrow shoulders and wide hips in a way that reminds Sophie of an inverted parsnip. After a winter in England, the only vegetable she can bring to mind is the parsnip. She tries to think of something more appealing. He has blondish hair, cut short and smooth so that he looks vaguely Aryan.
This, too, is an insult of magnificent proportions. If she is not careful, she will think of Kramme and that would be a disaster. She has a superstition that says if she does not think of him, he will not find her; she will not be required to give up anything or anyone.
Here is the truth. I am Sophie Destivelle. I am here because the English sent me. I do not have the date of the invasion, but I can get it if you let me live, and these men and women who think I am here to help them.
I am Sophie Destivelle. I am a nurse. I will act like a nurse. If revealed to be something else, I will act like a Résistante. Nobody will know I am not. Perhaps not even you.
Raymond is wearing clogs. They scuff-click on the floor as he hauls his camera through a rear door into the guts of the building. ‘If you can wait ten minutes, I shall have everything in order.’ He says it like a question, when really, what else can she do but wait? The Patron didn’t even come down the street with her, but dropped her on the outskirts of the town with directions to the office and instructions not to bother him until or unless he sent for her. She knows nobody in this place and without a valid identity card, she’s a walking invitation to arrest. Even sitting here, she is a danger to them. It’s churlish to complain.
There are two desks in this room, set at right angles along adjacent walls, and four chairs, two against each of the remaining walls. She sits in one. There is nothing to read, nothing to do. When she hears the tread of leather shoes on the stairs outside, a part of her welcomes the distraction while the rest wants to run and hide.
There is nowhere to go. She smoothes her dress, picks at a fray on the cuff of her coat as if it matters more than passing visitors. She has nothing incriminating on her person: no maps, no knife; her scarf is perfectly plain; it does not have worked-out codes printed on it. She is unarmed, but her shoes have steel in the toecaps and she has practised many times the kick that will disable a man. If she is fast enough, she can hit perhaps two before they reach her. She is as sure as she can be that there is only one. She examines her nails, bites at one, languidly, as the door opens.
‘JJ!’
All to waste, her dissimulation. The man who stands in the doorway, his bull head cocked to one side, is her new friend, perhaps her only friend in this place: Jean-Jacques Crotteau. There is nothing of the parsnip about JJ, or the Aryan. Seen in daylight, he is built like an ox, with forearms broad as hams. His nose is vast, a crag worthy of a mountain name, and his eyes are sad.
For all that, he grins at her, much as he did in the night. ‘Raymond here?’
‘Developing a film.’ The darkroom is through the door to the back. She saw it when he went out, and in any case, she recognizes the smell of developer.
‘And the Patron?’
She shrugs. ‘Working?’
‘Shit.’ He bites on his lip. ‘Madame Andreu is having her babies. The wife of the Milice.’
‘The Milice?’ she says. And then: ‘Babies? More than one?’
‘Twins. The Patron listened to her three days ago.’ JJ mimes the stethoscope, the careful patterning across a gravid abdomen. He has remarkable delicacy for one so big. ‘He told her there were two and it is true. She is stuck.’ He says it as if she were a foaling mare, or a cow; faintly soiled and biologically redundant.
She says, ‘The Patron dropped me at the head of the main street and went on. He is a doctor. I assumed he was going on his rounds.’
‘He was meant to call in on her.’ JJ says this as if the miraculous Madame Andreu had held her two infants inside, especially to await the Patron’s arrival.
Sophie is still digesting the start of this conversation. ‘The Milice,’ she says. ‘You mean her husband is chief of the Milice?’
There are the Boche, who are filth, but have some reason for being so: they lost a war and now a madman is telling them they are the master race. There is no excuse for the Milice: Frenchmen who collaborate out of choice, with enthusiasm. They deserve to die in great numbers, like rats in a barn.
JJ’s grimace says all that, and more. ‘Andreu was the prison governor and now he is captain of sixty armed men, half of whom used to be his inmates. The other half were the guards. The thing they all have in common is that they love the Boche.’
‘And the Patron is his doctor?’ Truly, of all the madness she has met since she dropped from the sky …
‘Who else? They think he is as much of a collaborator as they are; this is why he is safe. We have to find him.’
Past the roped muscles, JJ is not altogether easy to read, but Sophie knows the scent of dread, the flexing fingers. In her experience, grown men who would face torture unbowed fall to pieces at the sight of a woman’s broken waters.
She says, ‘I am trained as a nurse. I have delivered babies. Not twins’ – the surging hope on his face crashes – ‘but unless she is bleeding, I will keep mother and children alive while you find the Patron, I swear it.’
‘What will we tell Andreu? He’s never seen you before.’
‘Tell him that I am Sophie Destivelle, second cousin to the Patron, and that I have come recently from Paris. My parents are dead. I have my full certificates. See?’ She has them with her, and if not wholly genuine, they are perfect facsimiles of the papers she brought when she ran; only her name has changed. They are not out of date. Before she left, Captain Vaughan-Thomas told her that there was now a Sophie Destivelle on the records in Paris, should the Boche choose to check. In this moment, she chooses to believe that he can manage this much magic.
In this moment also, Raymond Vivier returns with her papers. By a miracle, they do not smell of developer, nor do they look newly printed. He has some means of ageing them, even before he has handed them over.
He says, ‘Keep them in your shoe for a while, when nobody is about. You will walk with a limp, but it’s the fastest way to make them look old.’ He notices JJ. ‘What?’
‘Andreu’s wife is in labour.’
‘Merde.’ A hiss, more than a word. ‘The Patron?’
‘Not here.’ JJ looks around, out of the window, through the open door to Vivier’s office. ‘We need someone to—’
Sophie is standing with her hands on her hips, and if these two men don’t recognize this look, they haven’t lived around enough women. ‘I am a nurse. I have delivered six infants alone, two boys and four girls, the last of whom was the daughter of the second favourite mistress of Hauptsturmführer Dunst of eighty-four Avenue Foch in Paris. You will have heard of it?’
Everyone has heard of Avenue Foch. Whatever Kramme does to his victims in Saint-Cybard, he did more carefully, over longer periods, in Foch, and with spectacular results. The entirety of the Prosper network went down in ’43, thanks to Avenue Foch. The Firm will never be the same again.
The two men of the Troubadour network regard her, considering. In silence, they make their decision.
‘Come.’ JJ flings back the door with a force that makes the hinges shake. ‘I’ll take you there, and then go and find the Patron.’
Raymond wrestles into an overcoat tha
t is at least two sizes too big. ‘René is running errands for the priest. He has a bicycle. I’ll send him to you. Anything you need, he’ll get it.’
The house of Captain Andreu, formerly of the local gaol, now of the Saint-Cybard Milice, is less than five hundred metres from the office of Raymond Vivier. It is a large place, of classical proportions, with shockingly tall windows that seem, so far, to have escaped bomb damage.
The garden is pretty in an overly tended way, weeded clear of any possible growth. Pearl-blossomed peach trees are trained along walls in perfectly parallel lines. A black-and-white cat – an actual, live, uneaten cat; quite sleek, actually – strolls down the central path, pausing to stare at Sophie as she is ushered past.
Madame Andreu is installed in a downstairs drawing room from which the furniture has been cleared or dust-sheeted. Her eyes are visible over the sheets: nothing else. Her bed is a lumpen monstrosity hand-carved from dark, tropical wood. The lighting is poor, except near the window.
‘Bring the bed over here. We need daylight.’ Like statues, they glare at her, the big, armed men who cluster here, but, together, four of them pick up the bed and bring it to lie alongside the south-facing window.
Afterwards, one by one, they trot off into the depths of the house and retrieve hot water and newly laundered linen sheets to order. One of them opens a window to let out the stuffy air. Another turns up the heating. Sophie hasn’t been in a heated house with hot water on tap since 1940. It is a revelation.
And so to Madame Andreu, visible now in the soft, southern light. She is younger than her husband’s reputation might suggest, a brown field mouse with translucent skin and blue-veined hands, closer to twenty than thirty. The mound of her pregnancy is barely visible above the bedclothes. If she has twins, she has hidden them in the hollows of her bones, in the nooks and crannies of her little, angular pelvis. Her labours have ceased for now: she is sweating profusely, but not straining. The only real testament to childbirth is the pile of red, stinking linens and towels screwed up at the foot of the bed.
