Never Leave Me (27 page)

‘The outer shell is still intact,' he said stoically. ‘The grand dining-room can never be rebuilt, of course, but perhaps, in time, the other rooms can be made habitable once more.'

‘Where will you live until they are? Balleroy?'

‘No,' he said. ‘Here.'

Her eyes shot open wide. ‘Here? But you can't! The roof has gone! The floors have gone!'

‘The rooms above the stables are still intact. I shall live there. They are still Valmy.'

His stubborn refusal to be defeated struck a chord deep within her. The rooms were smoke-blackened, scarcely habitable. There was no electricity, no water save that from the pump in the courtyard. For the first time since she knew she was losing the baby, she felt a spark of purpose. ‘We'll
both
live here,' she said fiercely. ‘We'll work on Valmy room by room and we'll make it habitable again.'

He patted her hand. ‘Your mother will not share our enthusiasm, but she is comfortable enough at the Duboscq's, and when the war is over it will be Paris she will want to return to, not Valmy.'

Madame Chamot did everything she could to persuade her to change her mind, but Lisette was adamant. She was returning to Valmy. It was the only possible course open to her.

Old Bleriot visited them, bringing them the news he gleaned from soldiers still busy on the shoreline, ferrying fresh equipment and provisions ashore. At the end of June there were rumours that Cherbourg had been taken by the Americans. Lisette felt her stomach muscles tighten. The fighting had been savage. American casualties were reported to be high.

‘I hope that he's safe, Papa,' she said, as they hauled charred floorboards from what had once been the small breakfast room.

‘Who,
ma chére?'
her father asked, his back aching; his hands cut and scratched.

‘Colonel Dering. The American who came to Valmy.'

‘So do I,' her father said sincerely. Lisette had told him all about the American colonel who had been so kind to her; about Luke Brandon, the Allied pilot who had been shot down and who had died at the hands of the Germans. And she had told him, too, of the way Dieter Meyer had met his death.

For Lisette's sake he felt regret at Meyer's death, but his regret was tinged with relief. There would be no difficult Franco-German marriage now, and, thank God, no need for one. His heart went out to her when she had told him that she had lost the baby, but only because he couldn't bear to see her so pale and wan. There would come a time when she would know that it was for the best. Meanwhile, all he could do was to give her his love and his understanding and pray that before very long, she would again know happiness. A happiness with no complications in its wake.

Misery stifled her. There were days when she felt she could hardly breathe for it. There seemed to be no purpose in life. Nothing to look forward to. Nothing to hope or dream for. The handful of rooms above the stables were made habitable by diligent scouring and whitewashing, but it was obvious that it would be many months, perhaps years, before they could move back into even a corner of the chateau. Her mother quietly announced that she would not be returning at all. She understood and sympathised with her husband's reluctance to forsake Valmy, but she did not share it. When she left the Duboscqs it would be to go to Paris. It was arranged that Henri would visit her there, perhaps even stay for months at a time, but never again would they live as a family at Valmy.

It was assumed that when hostilities ended she, too, would leave Normandy for Paris. She hauled another beam of charred timber from the ruins, dropping it on the cobbles of the courtyard, trying to imagine a new life in Paris, and failing. It was as if misery had robbed her of imagination. She could not think ahead, she could only-live each day as it came finding pleasure in small things: the family of dormice who had made a home in the rubble; the wisteria that defiantly flowered against the smoke-blackened walls; the clean feel of the sea breeze against her face as she walked the headland.

There was no longer any fighting around Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts, but the battle for Normandy was far from over. In hedgerows and roadsides, crude wooden crosses marked the graves of the hastily-buried dead. In the east, the British had still not taken Caen. In the west there were reports of fierce fighting as the Americans struggled to take St Lo. It was still not beyond the realms of possibility that the Allies could be squeezed back into the sea and she gathered every scrap of information that she could about the invasion force's progress.

By the light of an oil lamp, she would sit at her father's side in the evening as he pored over a map of France, shading in the areas he believed to be in Allied hands.

‘The Allies must break out of Normandy and take Paris by the end of the summer,' he said worriedly, a deep frown furrowing his brow. ‘Once the winter weather sets in, high seas will make it difficult for them to continue ferrying in the provisions and equipment they need. And they can't break out of Normandy until Caen is taken.'

Lisette hugged her knees, her thoughts not on Caen but on St Lo. It was there that the Americans were fighting. There, in all probability, that Colonel Dering would be fighting. She hoped that he was safe. If he wasn't she would never know. There was no one who would write and tell her. She stared once more at the map, her eyes bleak. St Lo was the headquarters of General Marcks, a German commander Dieter had admired unstintingly. The tough LXXXIV Infantry Corps was under his command. Though much smaller, it was possible that St Lo would be as difficult to capture as Cherbourg had been.

She asked old Bleriot every day if he had gleaned any further news about troop movements inland, but he could only tell her that fresh troops were still arriving, St Lo had not been taken, and his sciatica was so bad he needed to drink a jar of calvados a day in order to ease the pain.

Greg Dering had to admit that it was a hell of a time to have a woman on the brain. For three weeks he and his men had been continually under heavy fire. Exhausted, mud-spattered and unshaven, they had forded streams, crawled up wooded hillsides and waded through marshy wastelands. They had been raked with machine-gun fire, lobbed with mortar shells and confronted by tanks. They had endured the anguish of the screams of their wounded and had had to leave their dead behind them. The road to St Lo was slippery with their blood, and Greg knew that when it was over he wouldn't want to spend a day longer in France than was absolutely necessary. Which meant that he would have to marry her now, as soon as there was a lull in the fighting, as soon as he could get a pass.

He wiped the sweat from his brow and continued to wriggle on his belly towards the farmhouse full of Germans that was his objective. A French girl! His mother would love it. Daughter of an east coast millionaire, she thought the only culture in the world worth having was French.

Bullets whizzed past him. Heavy bursts of small arms fire continued to pin him and his men down. He had to make a crucial decision. Either to order his men to start crawling towards the rear of the farm buildings and abandon much of the ground they had gained, or charge the farmhouse and risk getting the entire company wiped out in the process.

He shouted across to his second-in-command who was pinned down a short distance away from him, across a narrow dirt road. ‘We're going to get some artillery smoke on that goddamned farmhouse, Major! Then we're going to make a bayonet charge!'

It didn't occur to him that she might refuse him. Failure was a word that was not in his vocabulary. Beneath his easygoing manner was a confidence imbued by wealth and social prestige. His mother had been born into that world. His father had fought and clawed his way there. Greg had inherited characteristics from both of them: the recklessness and gut instint that had prompted his mother to elope with a muscular lifeguard only days before her society wedding was to take place; and the fierce ambition and sheer tenaciousness which had lifted his father from the beaches of California to the presidency of one of its most powerful companies. He had learned early that instinct was a God-given gift to be followed. He was following it now. He was going to charge the farmhouse, and he was going to marry Lisette de Valmy.

As the hot, stifling days of July drew to a close, Lisette was overcome by an increasing restlessness. She tried to sublimate it in hard physical work, but it wouldn't be quenched. When it became unbearable she would walk as near to the beach as troop activity permitted and stare out across the waves. The old Lisette, the pretty teenager in red beret and shabby coat, cycling the Normandy lanes on errands for Paul, had gone for good. There had been an innocence about her then that she knew she would never recapture. And there seemed no place in the life she was now living for the new Lisette. The Lisette who had loved so fiercely and passionately; the Lisette who had grown from childhood to womanhood in the lamplit glow of the small turret room.

She dug her hands deeper into the pockets of her skirt and turned away from the grey surging waves. For the first time in her life they had failed her. They had not soothed and calmed her, they had merely intensified her feelings of frustration.

He was waiting for her when she returned, leaning with casual ease against the gateway that led from the drive to the courtyard, his curly brown hair thick and springy as heather, his smile vivid in his sun-bronzed face.

She stopped short, disbelieving her eyes, and then she began to run towards him, relief at his safety bubbling up inside her.

His heart began to bang against his ribs. She had drawn her hair away from her face, securing it in the nape of her neck with a ribbon. Beneath the dark sweep of her brows her eyes looked even more startlingly violet than ever.

‘Colonel Dering! What a lovely surprise,' she exclaimed, running up to him, her face radiant.

His grin widened, his arms opened, and to her astonishment and his delight, she entered them unhesitatingly.

Shock reverberated through her. She had meant nothing sexual her action. She had simply been pleased to see him and it had seemed quite natural, when he had opened his arms to her, to enter them and hug him welcomingly as she would have done her father. The minute that she had done so she knew that there was a very vast difference between her father and Colonel Dering. She put her hands against his chest, flushed and disconcerted, trying to distance-herself from his hard, disturbing body.

He looked down at her, not smiling any more. His eyes were brown, dark and warm, with tiny flecks of gold near the pupils and an expression that had nothing to do with mere friendship.

‘I missed you,' he said with stark simplicity. ‘I want to marry you.'

She stood in the circle of his arms and she didn't tell him that he was crazy. Nothing seemed crazy any more. Life had ceased to exist by the old rules. War had stripped away conventional behaviour and primitive, urgent responses had become normality.

‘I know nothing about you,' she said, and even as she said it, she knew that it wasn't true. She knew a lot about him. She knew that he was a man who commanded respect from other men. She knew that he was kind. She knew that she was physically drawn to him, that she liked him. And felt safe with him.

He flashed her a dazzling, down-slanting smile. ‘That's easily altered,' he said, not releasing his hold of her. ‘I'm a Californian. I'm twenty-seven. Financially sound. Mentally stable. And I've never been married. Will that do for starters?'

A gurgle of laughter welled up deep inside her. For the first time since Dieter's death she felt warm and loving and alive, and then her laughter faded. She turned away, breaking free of him, her eyes shadowed and full of pain.

‘You don't know anything about me.'

At the tone of her voice a slight frown creased his brow. She had begun to walk towards the ravaged rose gardens and he walked at her side, not touching her, saying, ‘I know I'd have been a fool not to have come back for you. I know everything that I need to know. I know that I don't make mistakes. That this isn't a decision I'm going to regret.'

She stood still, looking up at him, the scent of the roses that had survived the fire thick as smoke in the July sunlight. With passionate fierceness she wanted to touch him again. To purge her restlessness in the comfort of his arms. To feel alive again. She said quietly, ‘The man I loved and was going to marry died only a few weeks ago.'

‘I know,' he said, reaching out for her hands and holding them fast. ‘Luke told me.'

Her eyes flew wide with shock. It had not occurred to her that Luke Brandon had spoken to him about Dieter.

‘I don't expect you to forget the past as if it never existed,' he said gently, ‘but you can't live in it, Lisette. It's gone. It will never return.'

‘But I don't know how to stop loving him!' she cried, unable to contain her anguish any longer. ‘I don't know how to start to love someone else!'

A smile touched the corners of his mouth. ‘Let me show you,' he said, drawing her towards him with strong, firm hands.

She was overcome by a feeling of
déjá vu.
In just such a way had she entered Dieter's arms. Barely knowing him. Trusting her instincts. Capitulating to a primeval sixth sense that overcame reason and rationality.

She looked up into his sun-bronzed face. This time she was in command of herself. There was a choice. She could draw back if she wished. She could continue to live in restless isolation, tormented by the past and unable to envisage a future. Or she could alter her life as surely and as irrevocably as she had on first entering Dieter's arms. The choice was hers. All she had to do was make it.

Laughter lines creased the corners of his eyes and etched his mouth. His brows were thick, many shades darker than the honey-brown tumble of his hair. It was the face of a man with no self-doubt. A handsome face. Confident. Gregarious. Generous.