by Jan Harvey
His hands were caressing me, moving across my tingling skin making my back arch with pleasure. It was then, right then, I could have said no and I should have said no. I had my chance but I didn’t. I didn’t want him to stop, I wanted everything he was: his mind, body and soul I was greedy for him, jealous of anyone who had ever touched him. He eased into me and the sparks ignited all over me and I was his. I gave my all to him. Everything that was Steve and me was a far away distant thing, Sarah ceased to be, and my life, before Rory, withered and died.
In the corner of the room, Inca moaned and put her nose between her paws with big soulful eyes, as she watched me with abject disapproval.
66
Alec Trevise was thin. He had a mop of sandy hair and a faint Cornish burr. I imagined that, before all this, he skippered a boat around Fowey harbour and brought home fish for his rosie-cheeked wife.
‘Carrick?’ He extended a hand to me. ‘Knew it would be you, fattest person in Paris!’ I smiled, because I was the lightest I’d been in my life. ‘Bloody war,’ he continued. ‘They tried all the ways they could to kill us and now we’re dying of post Liberation starvation.’
‘I brought food.’ I placed my case on the table in the café. ‘Cheese, two slices of bacon, eggs and a fruitcake, made with eggs too I’ll have you know, by my housekeeper. Lewis told me how bad the situation was here.’ I went to click open the latches, but Trevise stopped me.
‘Not here, old man, don’t want to cause a riot.’ I glanced over at the café owner who was watching me suspiciously from behind the bar. ‘Deux bières s’il vous plait, Claude.’ Trevise diverted the man’s attention with a wave of his hand.
‘I saw someone skinning a cat yesterday, a small cat, not enough meat to feed a single child let alone a family.’ My eyes widened in disbelief. ‘There used to be birds in cages everywhere, the French let them sit in windows, très charmant, but it’s been silent for months. No birdsong anywhere.’
‘London is the same,’ I said. ‘Hardships like I could never have imagined. These are dark days.’
He nodded. ‘Still, here we are experiencing Paris. Lewis briefed me, said you had it bad in Italy. Came up through Africa?’
‘Barely touched Africa, sent straight on to Sicily, was fighting hand to hand for the hill villages, but at least we were getting somewhere, well eventually.’
‘Lewis said you and George were badly injured, George’s hip done in.’
I nodded. ‘We were luckier than most; they brought us home. George was assigned a desk, but they let him off, he can’t sit for long and then his company started some engineering lark, so they needed him.’ I cocked my head to one side. ‘So you know George?’
‘Of him,’ replied Trevise, ‘through Henry.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, Henry and I trained together at Roughwood, and before that I knew of him through friends of friends. Over here we became quite close, as one does when one’s arse is permanently on the line.’
‘And what do you know of him?’ I asked.
‘Well, he was caught by the Jerries after a raid. We were all four scattered: north, south etc. Just ran for it. Lost the other two and Henry looked like he’d got away with it as well, but they shot him and dragged him off. If he hadn’t been special ops, they would have polished him off there and then, but they liked to give us the special treatment. Thing is, they had wounded him, so they had to operate before they began to kill him all over again.’ Trevise half smiled. ‘Jerry logic, very efficient but also highly ironic.’
‘So they tortured him?’
‘We don’t know. The next thing is we hear the Yanks are advancing on Paris, then they’re not. We send out a couple of Resistance to make contact with the Americans, but no one hears back from them. You have to have been here to experience the chaos. Jerries moving one way then bedding in. French advancing from the south; snipers taking potluck shots from windows; barricades being built in every street. German High Command was talking about razing the city to the ground, but something or someone stopped them. They bombed a circus, you know. All the animals were running wild all over the Champs-Elysées, lions and the like. Bedlam.’
‘Lions?’
‘Camels, horses. French ate ’em.’
I stared at him as he sipped the warm flat beer.
‘Carnage. And during all of this, Henry is somewhere, supposedly in a building in the eighth arrondisssement, near Gestapo HQ.’
‘What did you find there, when they’d gone? Did anyone know anything about him?’
Trevise shook his head. ‘Not a thing. We interrogated a Jerry who’d worked there, but he was useless, a bloody coward. The Gestapo had long gone by then and our lads still in there were done for.’
‘But no Henry?’
‘No, no sign of him. The Jerries were fanatical record keepers, but they destroyed everything before they scarpered so they couldn’t be incriminated. The Resistance sent word he’d been finished off by firing squad, three of them taken out at first light, shots fired and all that.’
‘So what now?’ I asked.
Trevise swallowed down his beer and threw some coins onto the table.
‘I take you back to my digs and we eat that cheese and bacon.’
Two of the eggs were cracked, in spite of Mrs Hall’s best efforts to protect them by wrapping them in straw and a robust box, the ten hour journey had taken its toll.
Trevise emptied them into the small frying pan, shells and all and began whistling as he cooked them on a blackened old stove. The bacon smelt divine.
We were in a small bedsit apartment on the Rue Galande, a medieval building, painted green, with a set of impossibly narrow stairs leading up to a cramped attic room. A small gable window let in some light, but it was so dirty, it was impossible to see out of it. A low row of grimy panes ran along the back wall and a line of chipped and broken terracotta pots sat on a narrow wall outside, all the plants dead and shrivelled.
‘Home Sweet Home,’ said Trevise cheerfully as he made space for me to sit down on a defeated old armchair.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘In Paris or this flat?’
‘The flat.’
‘Five months, since hostilities finally ceased. Up until that point, a chap could lose his head to a sniper just queuing for bread.’
‘Who was shooting?’ I asked.
‘Everyone who believed in something: Resistance; Communists; Free French Army; Fascists; stranded Jerries, the mad, people with a grievance, you name it. Bullets were far more common than food, still are.’
‘And how long have you been in Paris?’
‘Off and on two years,’ he replied. ‘Arrived with a pair of Russians on one occasion. Absolutely useless.’ Trevise’s face twisted. ‘Caused mayhem. She was a liability and was snapped up immediately, then spilled. Lost our pianist thanks to her blabbing and then the other coward legged it back to Moscow, never to be seen again. Waste of time.’
‘Pianist?’
‘Radio op, bloody good she was too, pretty girl.’
‘What happened if they caught you?’ I asked, not really wanting to know.
‘At first they are soft, they strip you, hang you by your arms until it’s unbearable then they try to crack you. If you give in, like that stupid Ruskie, you get off more lightly, but if you hold out, it’s anything they can think of. Drowning; electric heaters; wire; electrodes, they didn’t hold back. Most of our crew held out, we were trained to withhold for twenty four hours to give our colleagues chance to make a run for it.’
I felt bile rising in my gullet. My head was starting to throb. I focussed on the smell of the bacon to stop myself fading. To this day, I think of Trevise, and that dirty little apartment, when I smell it.
‘Henry?’ I asked weakly as Trevise shared out our meal equally. (I insisted he took all the
bacon, he needed it more than me.) ‘What do you think happened to him?’
‘Our sources inside the Gestapo, who we had tamed by then, said he was operated on immediately. They had a crazy old doctor who would pop in and do repairs with a kind smile, just before he signed you off to be tortured. Bizarre.’
Trevise and I were seated each side of a small table, him perched on the arm of an old chair. He tucked into his eggs, relishing the taste, a trickle of yellow ran from the side of his mouth and he wiped it with a finger, then licked it off. Clearly for him, manners were a thing of the past.
‘We heard he had been tortured having failed to smuggle him an L pill. Things were a mess by then, the Gestapo were very nervous knowing, I’m sure, that their time was up. The Resistance managed to cause them a lot of trouble, but we failed in trying to free prisoners.
‘So what happened?’
‘In late August the FFI got into Avenue Foch and then Rue des Saussaies in the eighth arrondissement. The poor sods they’d tortured had been kept in small dark damp cells, shivering, whimpering, crying for their mothers. I was told it was pitiful. I asked everyone about Henry, but there was no sign. We have no ID, we’re ghosts, they call us The Spooky Boys, you know. It was hugely dangerous. One moment the streets would be filled with people then a volley of shots would send them scattering into doorways and behind pillars and such. FFI men with old pistols and German rifles would start firing at what they thought was the source of the attack.
‘I met an American, an agent who had been in there. He told me there were scratchings all over the walls, the unfortunates sending last messages to relatives and one said, “Life is Beautiful.” Can you imagine that? Life is beautiful. And that made him weep, he told me it was that moment he cracked. He said he walked outside took a deep breath of fresh air and vowed to marry his girlfriend back home in Boston. And he was as tough as they come.’
I rubbed a round clean patch in the window with my handkerchief, and looked out as the light changed across the city. A mellow peach sky was resting above the dark shadows of Notre Dame and the Île de la Cité.
I could just about make out their shapes. It was noticeably warmer than in England and all at once something occurred to me. ‘If Henry was captured on the twelfth of August and operated on, he may just have made it until the Liberation. Surely it is possible that he was still alive.’ I felt a quickening in my heart.
‘Twelfth of August? What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, I should have said this by now, I have met his fiancée, she told us.’
‘Fiancée?’
‘A woman called Cécile Roussell, she–’
‘Cécile Roussell?’ He looked absolutely thrown. He stood up abruptly, dislodging the table as he did so, almost tipping it over. ‘Where is she?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘When did you see her?’ he demanded. It was as if he had been taken over by the devil. ‘When?’ His face was flushed with an angry red.
‘Just before Christmas.’
He paced back and forth in the small space between us. ‘Where? Come on man, answer me!’ he shouted, his fists white-knuckled and I seriously feared he might strike me.
‘At Lapston, Henry’s house.’ I am almost certain that I leaned away from him in case he went for my throat.
‘Bitch,’ he spat the word. ‘Bitch.’
‘What did she do?’ I could feel the heat from his body, the anger.
‘She married me.’
67
I looked into his eyes as we lay side-by-side in his bed, and I realised I was totally in love. Not the vain, desperate love of teenage years, not the expected settle down and get married love of my twenties, this was a full-bodied, ripe, passionate love of the all consuming sort. What terrified me was that I saw it reflected in his eyes. It was a huge burden to carry and my mind was not up to it.
He reached out and pushed a strand of hair back from my face, then touched the end of my nose tenderly.
‘Rory, I…’ The words failed me.
‘It’s best if you don’t think about it all, just let it settle. You might panic and run off and I’ll never see you again, and that I could not bear.’
I lay back, head against the pillow. A house martin swooped past the window and landed on the crossbar of the frame. I could see its beady eyes assessing us and then it was gone on tiny beating wings and I was left thinking of Simon and how he’d caught us.
‘I need to get home,’ I said, almost matter-of-factly. ‘I saw Rory’s expression was laced with disappointment as I kissed him and moved across the bed. He didn’t watch me as I dressed. It was that strange thing when you’ve been intimate with someone, but still feel shy of them seeing you naked.
‘I’ll drive you. I need to pick up Scoot. I told them I’d be there at three.’
He made it sound like dropping me off was only an option because it was convenient, as if I could have walked all that way home. ‘That sounded bad, didn’t it?’ he said immediately. ‘The truth is, I don’t want to take you anywhere, I want to spend the night with you and hold you, I never want to let you go back.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Now you do sound a bit creepy,’ I told him. He returned my smile. ‘I have to go.’
‘I know.’
‘But I will come back,’ I promised.
He left the bed and walked towards me, naked. Dark hairs spread across his chest but his tan ended at his hips, pale skin above the dark hair. I took a deep breath. It was almost too much to bear.
He kissed me once more and I felt a bond so strong it was as if he had coiled it around me like the fingers of the Gorgon holding Jason. All at once, I remembered watching that old part-animated film as a child terrified that Jason was snared and done for.
That was me. I was done for, and I knew it.
68
‘Married? When?’ I asked.
‘Here, in August last year, the bitch. I knew it, I was played.’
‘She actually married you?’
‘Yes, organised a ceremony with a priest in a church near here, then she scarpered, late that night. Couldn’t find her anywhere, bloody priest acted like he couldn’t remember anything the following day.’
‘So it was never consummated.’
‘It was never anything, no record of it; she took the paperwork.’
‘And you haven’t seen her since?’
‘Not a word.’ He tried to run his fist under cold water but the puttering tap struggled to work and it was little more than a trickle.
‘She turned up at Lapston, saying she had been Henry’s fiancée, she wanted to see where he had lived.’ I couldn’t describe the feeling inside me, the insane need to cheer and shout; I was vindicated. Yet, at the same time, I felt I was crushed under the weight of this new intelligence.
‘She barely knew him.’ Trevise was shaking his head. ‘Barely knew him.’
‘But they had met?’
‘Yes, but you know Henry; he was mission first, didn’t let his head be turned, not like me. I was reeled in, I was overwhelmed by her.’
I could feel the darkness at the corners of my mind encroaching; creeping in on me. Images flashed before my eyes. The creamy white skin, the cocktail dresses, the silver feather on its thin chain.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said perplexed. ‘I don’t understand what she was doing.’
‘I do,’ Trevise cut in. ‘I was her meal ticket, I organised for her to leave Paris, made it easy for her, gave her the safe passage she needed. I realise now that if he’d lived, it would have been Henry’s name on her paperwork. Instead she had to resort to me. One of us was always doomed to fall for her in the end.’
‘So you knew she was leaving? She didn’t run away?’
‘We were both going initially, a few days after the wedding. I had all the papers, I’d booked a hote
l for us in Oxford, The Randolph. Lewis sorted it all for me, he even arranged for someone to see us safe through, an escort.’ Trevise looked mortified. ‘I didn’t see it coming.’
‘Didn’t you try to go after her, what stopped you?’ I could feel the anger rising inside me. If Trevise had got his act together, he could have stopped all this, everything.
‘I received some information that day that I simply had to act on.’ He was running a hand through his hair, his eyes tight shut as if he was recalling something painful.
‘So you let her go?’ I was shuddering, the darkness was crushing the sides of my head. In that stark and dreadful moment, I found myself wondering if this “thing” came on when I was angry. How could I be sure? I tried to take a deep breath for I was determined not to let Trevise see this, this unmasculine weakness. I had not been ill for months, just a sharp headache in the temples from time to time, not the blackness, not this.
I realised he was looking at me, so I repeated myself. ‘You let her go?’
‘I was tipped off by someone reliable that one of our boys was still alive. I had to look into it; I was convinced it was Henry.’
69
‘Sarah?’
‘Mum.’
‘I’m so sorry. I… I didn’t mean to say those things.’
I felt that grip of pain, the conflict in my mind between how wounded I felt and not wanting to cause any hurt to my child, a tearing sensation deep inside me. I tightened my grip on the phone. ‘It’s okay, it’s fine,’ I lied.
‘But it’s not,’ she said. ‘I said some things and I–’
‘It’s fine,’ I snapped. ‘Just leave it.’
‘But Dad.’
‘Dad’s fine about it, just forget it, Sarah.’
‘I saw him.’
‘Who?’
For a dreadful moment, I thought she was referring to Rory.
‘Dad. In Oxford. I was there at a seminar and I bumped into him. He’s staying at Grannies.’
I didn’t know what to say.
