Peach (17 page)

He held her so tightly she felt she would break. “That’s love,” he murmured in her ear. “I promise you, darling, that’s love.”

Amelie had been on the road for what seemed like a year, though in fact it was only ten days. She had taken the northerly route across Spain through Salamanca and Valladolid to Bilbao and San Sebastian, heading for the French border at Hendaye, where Jim’s contacts had informed them it would be easier to cross. They had decided it would be better if she pretended she were
returning
to France after spending a few days in Spain. Her French papers, obtained with a large sum of money in a mere two days, bore the
authentic stamp of the French wartime government official at Bordeaux and gave her permission to leave France for a period of ten days to visit her sick mother in Spain. And they were stamped with the date she had supposedly left France at another border town. They bore her name as a citizen of France, and the address of their Paris house on the Ile St Louis. There was no fuss at the Spanish side of the border. The Spanish officials had swung open their barriers, wishing her good luck and shaking their heads at her foolishness in returning to France. She had driven slowly forward to the yellow demarcation line and the frightening folds of barbed wire. German soldiers, rifles at the ready, commanded her to halt and obediently Amelie switched off the engine and waited. Ordering her roughly out of the car, they marched her to the command post where a fat sergeant, jowls wobbling over his tight collar, looked her up and down before inspecting her papers. Bidding her wait, he left her standing while he walked slowly to the car and inspected it. Amelie watched nervously through the window as the sergeant ran a plump banana-fingered hand across the bonnet, opening up the doors to peer inside and inspecting the trunk. There was only her one small suitcase and the bag with the dress in it for Peach. Picking it up he peered inside, glancing back at the concrete command post and then, still clutching the bag, he walked towards them.

“These things,” he said laying the bag on the scrubbed pine table between them. “They are new. Where did you buy them?” Thank God the label on the bag said only “Modas de Crianças” without any address or the name of the city; her papers didn’t give permission to visit Portugal. Taking a chance he didn’t speak Portuguese, Amelie lied firmly, “In Bilbao, where I went to see my ailing mother.”

His small piggy eyes, half hidden in folds of smooth pink
flesh, examined her for a moment, then he said, “You are a Spaniard then?”

“French. My mother has lived in Spain for many years. She prefers the climate.” Amelie felt the sweat trickling between her breasts as he peered at her in silence and for the first time she realised the enormity of what she had done. She was in occupied France and this was the enemy!

“And these things,” opening the bag he poked at the dress and Jim’s doll. “Who are these for?”

“My daughter,” she replied quietly. “She’ll be waiting for me, at home.”

Thrusting the things back in the bag, the sergeant pushed it across the table. With a flourish he stamped her papers and handed them to her. “I have children of my own,” his piggy eyes almost disappeared as he smiled. “I haven’t seen them in almost a year.”

“That’s too long,” said Amelie politely, “they will miss you.”

He walked with her to the car and nervously she wondered why. He had stamped her papers, couldn’t she just drive on?

“The car,” he said, resting a hand on the dusty blue leather seat, “it’s a de Courmont. The same name as you.” Amelie’s heart skipped a beat. De Courmont was an important name in France. With Gerard in a prison camp they might want his wife too.

“A coincidence,” she laughed, settling herself in the seat, “worse luck! Take care of those children of yours.” She waved as the car rolled smoothly forward. The sergeant stepped back, snapping to attention in the Nazi salute. She had seen it before of course in Lisbon, but somehow, here on French soil, it made Amelie’s blood run cold.

It was late afternoon and the light was already fading but she pushed on to Biarritz, where knots of young German
soldiers paraded along the promenade buying picture postcards to send to their families. A group of them, young and blond, in shorts and vests, performed supervised exercises on the beach, then waded laughing into the cold ocean.

Amelie decided to drive further up the coast, stopping finally at a delightful little fishing village where brightly coloured houses curved around a small bay and the tiny café on the harbour let rooms. She spent her first night in France curled up alone and sleepless in a big brass bed while the moonlight played across the pounding Atlantic outside her window. I’m almost there, she reassured herself as dawn broke and she finally fell asleep, I’m almost there.

It was noon when she awoke and, dressing hurriedly, she drank the cup of bitter imitation coffee whose only merit was that it was hot and milky. She dunked a piece of fresh crusty bread into it for her breakfast, and then she was on the road again.

Amelie didn’t know why it should have surprised her to find Germans in every village and hamlet that she passed. Their presence was total and she noticed that the French were scrupulously polite to them without offering any extra warmth. In no village shop did she see the time of day passed with a German soldier, and in no bar or café were they treated with anything more than cold politeness.

Amelie pushed on through Dax, stopping overnight in remote villages and negotiating the various command posts nervously. At Carcassonne she found she was running out of her precious petrol coupons. The petrol station attendant told her to apply for more at the Kommandatur which turned out to be the old town hall. The queue of people inside was endless and, too tired to wait, Amelie sought a café and sipped a
citron pressé
in the shade of plane trees. Half a dozen old men argued over a game of
boules
in the
square and a young girl cycled home from work, a lunchtime baguette in her basket. It could have been any peacetime scene in a small French town but for the swastika flying over the town hall and the uniformed Germans, some little more than boys, strolling through the quiet square.

Amelie suddenly remembered Jim’s trick with the car. Hurrying to the post office, she checked the telephone listings for a de Courmont agency. She was in luck, there was one at Narbonne and if her luck held she would just have enough petrol to make it there.

At Narbonne the manager promised her the petrol coupons, though it would take him a few days. His house and hospitality were at her disposal. Pleasant though he was, Amelie couldn’t face the prospect of making small talk with him and Madame. She preferred her solitude and her thoughts.

At last, stocked with petrol, she was on the road again. It was at Nîmes that the car refused to start. “Damn, oh damn,” cried Amelie, furiously kicking at the tyre.

The mechanic at the garage just pursed his lips and said with a shrug, “Madame, there are no parts. It could take months to replace the cylinder head.”

The railway station at Nîmes was crowded with German troops. Long trains full of them snaked endlessly through while civilian passengers waited patiently, hoping that their train would be next. Amelie sat on her suitcase all day, not daring to leave in case the train came. A fractious baby screamed in the heat as its tired young mother tried desperately to soothe him and an old woman dressed in peasant black sat stoically beside her wicker basket, knitting. The station closed at dusk but Amelie was there again the next morning at dawn, this time with a slab of bread and cheese and a bottle of water to sustain her. At three o’clock on the third day the train came and Amelie elbowed her way into a
carriage, only to give up her hard-won seat to a desperate young woman clutching a pale, listless child. Amelie sat on her case in the corridor, staring out of the window at the flat landscape inching by, wondering when she would ever reach Cap Ferrat and Peach.

Walking up from the beach after their evening swim, Leonie and Peach noticed Lais strolling hand in hand with a young man along the chalky path that ran around the headland. Shading her eyes Leonie stared at their distant figures with a feeling of
déjà vu
. The tall blond young man reminded her of her first love, Rupert von Hollensmark. So many years ago they had walked just like that, young and in love around the Pointe St Hospice. They had dabbled their feet in the cool water of the rock pools, they’d kissed with the wind in their hair and he’d made love to her in the shadow of the sea grasses with the flickering sun warm on their naked bodies.

It had been Rupert who had first brought her here to the old inn on the Cap. The room that was now her bedroom had been theirs, filled with a big white bed where, with the shutters closed against the afternoon heat and with the windows open wide at night to the sound of the sea and the moonlight spilling across their warm naked bodies, they had loved each other and planned their future. But, yielding to family pressure, Rupert had returned to Germany, taking his love and his promises for their future with him. Leonie
had never seen him again. The pain of her abandonment cut through her once more, the waiting and hoping, and the gradual realisation that Rupert was never coming back.

With an effort Leonie gathered her fractured dreams together.

“Who is that young man?” she asked Peach, who was skipping along at her side.

“That’s Ferdi. I think Lais is in love with him, Grand-mère.”

Leonie smiled at her. Peach was growing up. “And what do you know about being in love?” she teased.

“I know you sigh a lot and go around with a funny look in your eyes,” Peach said, “and you look like you have a little light glowing inside you. At least Lais does.”

So Lais was in love! With a pang Leonie realized that Ferdi must be German too. Oh Lais! She had done it again! Was she destined always to find the wrong man?

“Grand-mère,” said Peach, holding out her hand to help Leonie up the steps from the beach, “I love you and Jim, and I love Maman and Papa and my sisters. So why don’t I look the way Lais does?”

“It’s different,” explained Leonie, “when a man and a woman choose each other to love, it’s a very
special
sort of love. It’s something that can’t ever be explained to you, but you’ll know when it happens. You can’t mistake it.”

Peach scooped up the little brown kitten, Ziggie, kissing her. “I love you, Ziggie,” she murmured into its soft fur. The kitten struggled, wanting to be free to run, leaping suddenly and leaving a thin red scratch along her arm. “Ow,” winced Peach, rubbing the scratch. “If Ziggie really loved me, she wouldn’t do that!”

“Peach,” laughed Leonie, “you have a lot to learn about love.”

*  *  *

Ferdi couldn’t take his eyes from Lais, he wanted to drink in the fleeting expressions that crossed her vivid face and to be absorbed into the blueness of her eyes. When he was away from her, her face floated like a talisman in the back of his mind. He drove the long distance between Reims and the Riviera every weekend so that they had two days and two nights together, but it wasn’t enough. He needed her all the time. He needed to touch her. He needed to kiss her, even just gentle kisses dropped on her wind-blown hair that smelled of sunshine and flowers. It was more than just a physical attraction, he’d known that immediately, the first time he saw her. Lais’s fragile vulnerability had shown through the courageous façade, the brittle blonde woman with the smiling red mouth had seemed to him just a sad girl searching desperately for answers to questions she couldn’t formulate.

Lais stopped and slid her arms around him, resting her head against his chest. The fear was gone from her eyes. She knew who she was now.

“I love you,” she said, gripping him fiercely, “oh I love you, Ferdi von Schönberg.”

“I thought you weren’t sure—you didn’t know if you could feel love,” he teased.

“That was then,” she murmured, kissing his chest where the shirt was unbuttoned, “a long time ago.”

It had been just three months since that night in the bar when she’d looked into his eyes. “Do you remember me?” he’d asked. Now she would never forget.

Ferdi’s hands gripped her shoulders as he said, “I want you to marry me, Lais. I want you to be my wife.”

They both knew that it was forbidden for a German officer to marry a foreign woman and she sighed, saying nothing.

“I want you to know how I feel about you. You are in my life for ever, we belong together. One day all this will be over. The world will be at peace again. Will you marry me then, Lais?”

His face was so serious, his eyes anxious, afraid that because he was unable to marry her now, that because he was a German—
the enemy
—she would refuse.

“I’ll marry you, Ferdi,” she said simply, “whenever you say.” An impish smile flitted across her face; she could never be serious for long. “All you have to do is ask!”

“Grand-mère, Grand-mère! Where are you?” Lais ran through the villa peeking into rooms as she passed. “Oh, hello Peach, where’s Grand-mère? There’s someone here I want you to meet.”