The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (26 page)

‘Just over there, dear,’ a woman replies when asked. It’s obvious now, the sign obvious, the occasional pedestrian going down to the platform obvious. Also obvious is a black Citroën parked near the entrance with two men standing beside it, smoking and watching people pass by. Belted raincoats and trilby hats, but you can’t pretend it is anything other than a uniform. Don’t panic. Keep calm. Breathe deeply and walk slowly but with purpose.

As she approaches they stop a man and demand to see his papers, then order him to open the bag he is carrying.

Walk confidently. Don’t catch their collective eye. Ignore them as you would ignore anything that doesn’t concern you. But they watch her. She can feel their eyes touching her legs and thighs, patting her backside.
Stuff you
, she thinks, and strides past looking the other way, sick with fear.

The
métro
station is a refuge, somewhere the anonymous congregate within the milieu of this strange city that is a simulacrum of the Paris that she knew. There is a poster showing a young man looking out from a dark doorway towards a bright and hopeful horizon. I
F YOU WANT TO GET AHEAD
, it says,
COME TO WORK IN
G
ERMANY
. She waits, her suitcase beside her, for the next train going south to place d’Italie, back the way she has come, back on track, confusion conquered for the moment.

When the train arrives the carriages are packed. She edges in among the passengers and pushes down the car, stepping over
legs and feet, apologising as she goes. Someone offers her his seat – ‘
Je vous en prie, Mam’selle
,’ he says, smiling – and she turns to see that grey-green uniform, those black and silver badges of rank: a German officer, a
Hauptmann
. Should she refuse him or accept? Is the spirit of resistance to shun the occupiers? She knows how to behave in Lussac, or Agen or Toulouse, but here in Paris?

The train swings onto the bridge and rattles across the river. ‘Thank you,’ she says, and sits primly with her knees together and her eyes straight ahead, conscious all the time of his standing over her, watching. No one else looks at her, though. No one cares. Just a girl,
une gonzesse
, being eyed by a
Frisé
. She is safe; for the moment, beneath the appreciative gaze of a German officer and circumscribed by the indifference of the city, she is safe.

The house is in a run-down street near the place d’Italie, an area of narrow, sloping lanes and crowded cottages. The
pavé
glistens with rain. On the corner is a small café and next to it what was once a print shop but is now a shuttered shell, the owners departed, leaving behind nothing more than the ghost of their presence, their name on the shop sign:
Imprimerie Bertrand
. Paris is a city inhabited by ghosts. Ghosts of young men, ghosts of Jews, ghosts of communists and socialists. A poster advertises thousands of francs’ reward for anyone giving information about a wanted ‘terrorist’, but a long strip has been torn out of it so that the face is no longer there. Is
she
a terrorist? Presumably she is. She places her suitcase down on the pavement outside number 45, rings the bell and waits, conscious that people might be watching, conscious that she is exposed there on the street without a decent cover story. What if there is no one at home? What will she do then? But after a while
there is the sound of someone shuffling around inside and a man’s voice calling out, ‘Who is it?’

Alice speaks softly and urgently, leaning towards the door. ‘I’m looking for Béatrice. I’m a friend.’

An old man opens the door a few inches so that he can peer through the crack. He is wearing a blue boiler suit and a black beret. His lips are sunken, as though he has not yet put his teeth in, and wisps of white hair poke out from beneath the beret. In the shadows behind him hovers a woman of similar age. ‘I’ve come from Ricard,’ Alice says. ‘Is Béatrice here?’

‘No, she’s not.’

‘She’s at work?’

The man glances over his shoulder at the woman as though for guidance. ‘She’s gone away.’ He tries to close the door but Alice holds it open.

‘Ricard sent me. Please let me come in.’

‘I said she’s gone away.’

‘You can’t leave me standing here on the pavement. I’ve nowhere else to go.’

As he relents and opens the door further, she seizes the opportunity to push past into the narrow hallway. There’s a smell of drains, the claustrophobic stink of fear and deprivation. Unbidden she goes into the front room, thankful to be off the street and out of the view of strangers. Lace curtains blur the view of the houses opposite. There’s heavy flock wallpaper and a large dresser occupying one entire wall. A holy picture – the sacred heart of Jesus – offers the narrow room its blessing. On the other wall is a framed photograph of Marshal Pétain.

‘You’ve got to leave,’ the man protests, coming after her.

Seeing the weakness of her husband, his wife takes over. ‘You can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous. They came looking for her. We don’t know what she was mixed up in but they are looking for her. They may have followed you. For all we know, they’re watching the house …’

‘No one followed me.’

‘You’ve got to go.’

‘Look, I’ve just come from Toulouse. On the overnight train. I’m exhausted and I need somewhere to rest. Can’t you let me stay one night? Then I’ll be gone and you won’t hear any more from me.’

‘It’s not safe.’

‘Is Béatrice your daughter?’

The woman nods. ‘My daughter, yes.’

‘She’s gone,’ says the man. ‘And now you must leave too. Don’t you understand?’

Alice looks at them, at the implacable faces of rejection. The nightmare has become real: she has nowhere to go. She puts her suitcase down on the floor. ‘Can I sit for a moment?’

The woman sucks her lips and watches her, as though expecting her to pull some kind of trick. ‘Let her sit,’ the man says. ‘Make her some coffee.’

There is a moment of unspoken argument between the couple, a shared look that encompasses a whole lifetime of marital conflict.

‘Only a moment, and then she’s out.’

Once she has gone the man stays watching, like a prison warder, while Alice sits on one of the uncomfortable, overstuffed chairs. She’s faint with tiredness, but she has to think what to do next. The prospect of finding a hotel or a
pension
looms ugly in her mind. Her name would go down in a register. She would have to surrender her papers to the scrutiny of hostile eyes. She would be exposed to the regard of the authorities, as vulnerable as a nocturnal animal caught outside in the daylight. But perhaps she can try and make contact with Yvette directly. Perhaps the solution lies there. Or the address Gabrielle gave her – could she trust that?

‘I’m sorry to make things difficult for you,’ she says to the man.

‘You’re a friend of Béatrice’s, then?’

‘A friend of a friend.’

He nods. Something in his eyes betrays sympathy. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to help, but it’s the wife, see? She gets frightened. It’s the priests, they put all kinds of ideas into her head, about what you should do and what you shouldn’t. Béatrice doesn’t go along with any of that any more than I do. But the wife …’

‘I quite understand.’

‘If it was up to me …’ He looks away, embarrassed, trying to justify his weakness. ‘Used to work on the railways. A union man all my life …’

She thinks of the address that Gabrielle gave her. Could she throw herself on the mercy of strangers? And then she considers the other possibility, the one that stares her in the face. The former railwayman is talking on, about strikes before the war, about how they didn’t stand for no nonsense, about demonstrations and sabotage. ‘We dealt with
les jaunes
as they deserved,’ he is saying. ‘Oh yes, we didn’t take no shit from them.’ And part of her mind is wondering who ‘the yellows’ could be, while the other part recalls the address that she already knows, the reason she is here in Paris, whatever the business with Yvette. Place de l’Estrapade.

Clément.

The woman comes in with the coffee – a filthy concoction of acorns and chicory – and they drink in awkward silence before Alice gets to her feet to leave. Outside it has begun to drizzle, a thin, bitter drizzle as unpleasant as any ersatz coffee.

From place d’Italie she takes the
métro
once more, gets off at place Monge and surfaces at the barracks of the Garde Républicaine. Over one of the gates an inscription exhorts the people to
Travail, Famille, Patrie
where once it was
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
. Against that institutional power she feels as
nothing, just a girl with a suitcase of clothes and a couple of radio crystals. What use is that? She turns up the hill, going by the memory of the street map that she has in her pocket. Always know where you are going. Always move with purpose. Always have a reason for doing what you are doing. But what is her reason now?

In rue Lacépède she pauses, vague with tiredness, puts her suitcase down and looks in a shop window. Is anyone following? That dreadful man Julius Miessen, perhaps. But there is no one in the milky reflection, no figure floating in front of the dusty items behind the glass – pots and pans, a colander, a half-moon chopping knife, things that are used for preparing the food that has all but vanished from the shelves. She glances round for confirmation. The narrow street behind her is empty. Bicycles chained to lamp posts. No cars. No people. She stands for a moment, flexing her shoulders like an athlete, before picking up the suitcase once again and going on up the hill into the place de la Contrescarpe, a small, rain-swept square with two run-down cafés round the edge and in the middle a urinal and a single blighted tree. She chooses one of the cafés – a low-beamed, shadowy place – to sit and eat and think; above all she needs to think.

A waiter brings something that the menu calls onion soup, a brown swill in which a few onion scales float and a flaccid piece of bread lies drowned. She sips the soup and buries her head in a book, trying to ignore the fact that she is the only female customer in the place and that one of the other clients is eyeing her thoughtfully. Tiredness brings with it a dangerous wandering of the mind. She can’t concentrate. She has to concentrate. She is out in the open, with the hawks hovering all around. She needs somewhere to sleep, somewhere to relax for a while, somewhere to summon up the courage that was instilled into her in Scotland and Beaulieu and Bristol; and the only place she can think of is Clément’s.

‘D’you want the
plat du jour
?’

She looks up, startled. The waiter is hovering over her, taking the soup bowl and wiping vaguely at the table. ‘Yes,’ she says hurriedly in case he should suddenly withdraw his offer, ‘yes, please.’

He nods and goes away. She turns a page unread and recalls sailing on the lake at Annecy, remembers the Pelletiers’ house fronting the lake, with a lawn and a landing stage where they kept the skiff moored. And they went sailing. She remembers that – the kick of the wind in the sails, the dash of spray, and laughter, an open, equal laughter. And a sensation somewhere inside her, an organic compulsion quite novel and disturbing, something whose focus was Clément, in shorts and an old torn shirt, with his hand on the tiller of the little dinghy, the boat beating into the wind and the spray flying and both of them laughing.

‘Where shall we go?’ he shouted. ‘America?’

Clément, with whom she would have gone anywhere.

The
plat du jour
arrives. It’s a slab of something rusk-like, swimming in a thin, brown sauce and entitled, with a fine irony,
gâteau de viande à la mode
. With it come thin strips of
rutabaga
. She knows
rutabaga
. A fearful alien in the French cuisine, she knows it from boarding school:
rutabaga
is swede. She eats with distaste, thinking of the food at Plasonne and how different life is here in the city. The occupation has reversed the norms – the city is reduced to penury, the countryside has become a place of riches. Where, in all this poverty, she wonders, do Clément and his sister stand?

Something makes her look up from her food. There’s a disturbance in the square: a black Citroën
traction
has driven in and parked opposite the café. Through the window she can see the white chevrons on the radiator, and behind the windscreen the silhouettes of the occupants. What do they want? What are they watching? Panic seethes below the surface of her composure. What are they doing, watching this place? What if they suddenly come in and start a search? What if there are others
waiting in the side streets and she were to find herself in the midst of a
rafle
? What if …?

‘What are they after?’ she asks the waiter, but the man gives nothing away. Just that Parisian shrug. ‘Who knows?’

Meanwhile the watchers in the car do nothing, merely sit and watch while the desultory life of the café goes on. She forces herself to take a few more mouthfuls before picking up her suitcase and heading for the ladies’ lavatory down in the basement, an odorous place with a single cubicle and a squatting plate in the floor. The door doesn’t lock, but she has no choice and anyway there don’t appear to be any other women among the customers. She places her case on the floor and opens it. In a pocket sewn in the lining are the two crystals, wrapped still in their little bed of cotton wool. Rapidly, with nervous fingers, she assembles her little packet, then drops her knickers and crouches, legs awkwardly spread, to push the thing inside her. There is no hint of that unexpected and delicious thrill she felt the first time: this is like some unpleasant medical procedure, a lumpy, intrusive insertion. Cautiously she straightens up and moves her hips and thighs to make certain that the thing is in place.

What would Benoît say if he knew? Make some ribald joke, probably. Or an offer of help. Suddenly, shut in this squalid cubicle, isolated in the midst of the city, she wishes she could see him again. All would be forgiven. His bewildered and bewildering attentions would be welcome. She’d let him go there if that was what he wanted; anything rather than this.