The September Garden (23 page)

She glanced up the stairway, and put the letter deep into her coat pocket.

‘Mother,’ she called, her voice breaking. ‘Mother, are you awake? I’m home.’

‘It’s good to see St Paul’s still standing,’ she told Henri as they walked together across Waterloo Bridge. She stopped for a minute to take in the sweep of the river, curving past the Houses of Parliament and the ruins of St Thomas’s Hospital on the opposite bank, under the bridge and round the bend to the City. She breathed in the whiff of exhaust fumes from the buses and cars rattling past her north to Covent Garden. ‘The most perfect view of London,’ she said.

Henri took her hand. ‘Some say, the most romantic view of London,’ he replied. And then, ‘Oh, you’re still wearing that damn thing!’

Sylvie laughed, pulled her hand away from his and touched her fingertips onto the modest diamond of her engagement ring. ‘He
did
propose rather reluctantly, as well you know.’

‘And yet here you are, still waiting for him,’ Henri snapped. ‘You might as well be engaged to a dead man.’

Sylvie looked at Henri sharply. She hadn’t seen him for a good six months, but that was how it was. War work kept everyone apart. He was always there for her, trying too hard, she conceded. But now, in that instance, she’d had enough.

‘Henri, thank you for picking me up from the station,’ she announced, ‘but I really have to go now.’

‘Oh, come on, Sylvie.’

‘No, it’s getting pretty tiresome. You and me. Pretty tiresome.’ Sylvie stalked off, heading north over the bridge.

‘But we’re going to go to the 400. I’ve booked a table.’

‘Go on your own, there’ll be plenty of girls there who I’m sure would like to share your champagne.’

‘But it’s your first night back in the city. We have to celebrate.’

‘Don’t feel like celebrating.’ She was out of breath now, her suitcase weighed a ton. She’d not had to carry it since she left the headquarters in Berkshire. One of the officers there who was keen on her carried it out to her taxi; the porter at the railway station loaded it onto the train. Another unloaded it at Waterloo. And then Henri had taken care of it for her, eager as always, overwhelmed, as always, to see her. Dear Henri, she thought as she heard him hurrying behind her, how he took care of everything.

She’d grown bored of Berkshire and had requested her old job back. A year in the sticks was enough for her. She’d given her tenant at the mews notice, was pleased it was all still standing after that really heavy raid last summer, and couldn’t wait to get back into the swing of parties and nightlife. The London crowd were more jolly, more daring, more up for anything, she decided. It was time to get back into the fray.

A bus rumbled past her, slowing to stop for the lights at the junction with the Aldwych. She quickened her step and, as it pulled up, she hopped on board, leaving Henri pacing after it along the pavement, his disgruntled face red with exasperation. She stood on the backplate as the bus swung round the corner, her suitcase at her feet, and lifted her hand in wry apology.

Sylvie was impatient to be home, but the bus crawled along through the traffic. She had to change buses at Holborn to go west and it was eight o’clock before she stepped onto the cobblestones of her mews. The evening shadows were dark, the blackout heavy. But all at once, she felt at home as her heels rang on the stones. Her own little mews was intact, just a couple of windows boarded up next door. She smiled softly, humming to herself, and it took a while for her to realise that the pinprick of red light she saw ahead of her was the glow of a cigarette.

She wondered, who could be there to welcome her? It could be any of the fellows from the office. They were expecting her back today, after all, and were all very much looking forward to it. It was just like any of them to be there to greet her.

Her suitcase slipped from her hand, landed with a thud and tipped over into a puddle on the cobbles. She felt pinned, like a butterfly in a case, her arms stretching out to her sides as she tilted her head and cried, ‘Alex?’

He stepped out of the shadows and ground the cigarette under his heel.

‘Sylvie? Is it you?’

She ran, giggling with shock. ‘Of course it’s me. Of course it is.’

She expected his arms to open to her, but he stood rigid as she went to him, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘But is it you, Alex?’ she asked, half joking.

Opening her front door, she ushered him in and up the stairs. She hurried from window to window in her living room to make sure the blackout was down before she could switch on a lamp and see for herself.

‘Poo,’ she said. ‘Smells a bit musty. You’ll have to forgive this, I haven’t lived here for a year.’

He stood by her empty hearth, his cheekbones angled and tanned. His temples were flecked like a badger, a streak of grey swept back through the dark hair over his forehead. His eyes were still that same burning blue.

‘You’ve lost weight, my dear,’ she said.

Alex looked around. ‘Not been here for a year? So where’s the baby? Where is …? I don’t even know. Boy or girl? No one has told me. You haven’t told me. I don’t even know.’ He was bewildered.

‘Let me fix you a drink. See if my tenants have left anything by way of spirit or wine … Ah, yes.’ She opened the kitchen cupboard. ‘A syrupy bit of port. Do you fancy it? Oh Christ, that’s never the siren?’

Alex stood by the window and peered round the blackout as a muffled whining resounded outside. ‘It’s at least three miles away. I thinking they’re stonking the East End.’

‘No need to worry, then,’ said Sylvie. ‘Marvellous isn’t it? My first night back in town and I’m grounded.’

He turned to her, his eyes blazing. ‘Stop your nattering, Sylvie, and tell me. Where the hell is our child?’

‘Alex,’ she retorted, her hands on her hips, suddenly ferocious. ‘And where the
hell
have you
been
?’

Sylvie poured another round of port and lemon as they sat cross-legged under the kitchen table.

‘There’s the cellar,’ she told him. ‘But I’d rather not.’

‘Me neither. And we’re perfectly safe.’ He reached up and knocked the underside of the table. ‘Good solid English oak.’

‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t let you know,’ she said quietly. ‘Seems I have had these
women’s
problems for years, the doctor said. It was, as old wives would have it, a phantom pregnancy.’

Alex rubbed his fingertip obsessively on the rim of his glass. ‘So there was never …? Never a …? And you are quite well?

‘Never felt better,’ she smiled. ‘Although you don’t look so good. It’s a shock, isn’t it? All this time, you thought …’

He knocked back his drink and winced.

‘All this time …’

‘And that is quite a suntan you have, Alex. Are you going to tell me about it?’

His smile was crooked on his face. ‘I want to tell you how wonderful your fellow countrymen are. Absolute unfaltering heroes. I would not be sitting here under this excuse for an air raid shelter,’ he laughed wearily, ‘if it was not for
le pêcheur
, code name
Esprit Fort
.’

Sylvie sipped her port as a crump of bombs landed a mile away and smiled at Alex. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘The curtains didn’t move. That means its incendiary and a long way off. If the curtains suck inwards, and the windows rattle, then we’re in for some trouble.’

‘I was in trouble,’ he said, ‘almost as soon as I shuffled onto that damnable beach.’

It was a perfect night. Many months of planning to reach this stage. A deep, black night, he told her, with a huge starless sky. Everything was going according to plan. Samples of sand collected, the reach of the waves, the pull of the tides monitored and recorded. It took hours. A survey of the dunes was taken as he lay on his stomach and peered through binoculars in the dark of a Normandy night and dictated measurements to his corporal.

‘Remember, Sylvie, I have a degree in geology. And this is what it leads me to.’

The sentries, he said, dug into the sand, warned him that they’d heard a German patrol on the beach road.

‘“Back off”, I gave the order,’ Alex said. ‘“Day trip’s over.”’

As he turned to shuffle back to the encroaching waves, he felt a muscle pull hard in his thigh, a flash of pain that paralysed him, so intense he couldn’t breathe. His leg, stiffening, useless. He’d been lying so long in cold, wet sand that his muscles had clenched in protest, pretty much disabling him.

‘Sir,’ whispered his corporal. ‘Ready to go. Awaiting orders.’

‘Carry on,’ he said, his teeth gritted in agony. He ordered his men to leave, to struggle along the lines of rope through the waves to the waiting boat, out there in the rocking darkness. He thrust his bag of equipment at the corporal and watched his astonished, mute face recede into the night.

‘I kept my head down. The patrol passed by, oblivious, leaving me with some pretty foul jokes in German. I hadn’t reckoned on the cold, and I knew I had to move soon. Any rate, by then, the dawn was breaking. I managed to crawl up the beach and hid in a fold of the dunes.’

‘Which beach?’ asked Sylvie.

Where the Seine estuary feeds out, he told her, at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula.

‘I know it.’ She smiled at Alex, feeling a soup of emotion swell inside her. Her months of worry and resentment had faded, and her old desire, her old longing for Alex resumed.

He had to wait for nightfall again, and in the darkness turned his face north and hurried along the coast, ducking through hedgerows and skirting the fields. He followed the streams, kept close to wherever there was water, always the lowest point.

‘Your leg?’ she asked.

‘Right as rain.’ He slapped his thigh. ‘But I could not have my men waiting on that beach for it to get better. Even for five more minutes. I could not jeopardise them.’

And this, he told her, was how he met
le pêcheur
. Word had been radioed through via Special Operations, via intelligence, to the cell, and the man intercepted him, let him rest in a safe house, kept him away from Montfleur where there was a high concentration of Germans. ‘Bit of a headquarters there, I understand,’ said Alex.

‘The village,’ breathed Sylvie. ‘My village. How is the place? Oh, but I think I know who the fisherman is. Mother once mentioned that our maid Adele had a sweetheart, Jean Ricard, who fished out of Montfleur harbour. She told me that in her last ever letter. Before the first Christmas of the war.’ Her voice cracked. ‘How is she, did
le pêcheur
say?’

‘I have no idea. He barely spoke to me. That’s the rules. The least we know about each other the better. If indeed it’s the man you are thinking of.’

Sylvie breathed out long and hard, shuddered. ‘I can’t
believe you were there, so close to my home. It seems absolutely incredible. And here you are.’ Her smile broke as tears watered her eyes. She sipped the last of her port and glanced at her empty glass.

Alex told her how the fisherman gave him food and water, and false papers. He was to become a French peasant and travel, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, south-west, heading for Brittany and the Vendée, down the lines, all the way to the Pyrenees.

‘I stayed in various farms in isolated hamlets, in bastides, in gîtes, sleeping next to cattle, in barn lofts, in bales of straw. The risks these people took were humbling. I was speechless with fatigue some days, with reverence on others. Way down in Gascony, with the mountains on the horizon, I remember the aged couple who insisted on giving up their bed for me. This peasant farmer and his wife, all bandy legs and deeply lined, tanned faces, were happy to die, they told me, as long as
l’anglais
made it across the border safely.’

‘And then into Spain?’

It was another long, arduous journey, he said, through mountain passes, and long, hot, dusty roads, but eminently safer. Olive groves became his bedrooms, and wine cellars, too, he smiled. The organisation was stupendously efficient. Finally, he said, Gibraltar, and the dubious delights of a debrief and a bunk on the ship of His Majesty’s Navy.

Alex stopped, exhausted. The all-clear had sounded, and yet Sylvie did not feel like moving out from under the table. Here, she felt safer than she had in a long long time, now that Alex was back.

He glanced at her hand. ‘I see we’re still engaged.’

‘We are,’ she said, brightly. ‘I told myself I’d wait for you.’

Alex shuffled out from under the table and stretched hard. ‘Let’s sit down in the armchairs,’ he said. ‘God, it must be the middle of the night.’

‘I was hoping,’ said Sylvie, following him into the living room, ‘you were going to say “let’s go to bed”.’

She saw that his face was tired and pale, but that his eyes were bright and guarded.

‘I think we’d better talk,’ he said.

‘Oh no, not that.’ Sylvie almost laughed. ‘Not that old chestnut.’

She gazed at him in the dim light of the lamp and waited.

‘It’s very delicate,’ he said, courteously.

‘You’re telling me!’ she snapped.

‘We got engaged because we thought you were expecting a baby.’

‘And now?’

‘Now,’ he sighed. ‘Now, everything is different. Except one thing.’

Sylvie waited again, her heart hammering. He said one word that broke her world apart: ‘Nell.’

She wanted to laugh it off, to try to pretend how much she didn’t care, but her cousin sat like a ghost in the room. Over there, in the corner. ‘All this time, through your great escape across France and Spain, you thought I had had our baby, and yet, you still thought of her.’

‘I thought of you both, constantly,’ he replied. He coughed to hide a sob in his voice. ‘But Nell—’

‘Oh, don’t give me that pathetic noise,’ Sylvie snapped. ‘So you came here, to check me out first. I bet you’re over the moon, aren’t you? No more need to look after Sylvie. Aren’t you the lucky one? Well, I have no idea where she is,
if that’s what you’re wondering. She’s disappeared on us. Went a bit funny about a year ago. Around the time you left, actually. But then, I suppose that wasn’t surprising in the circumstances, when she heard my news. Stayed at her father’s for a good while, went home briefly to Lednor, so Auntie Moll tells me, then went into nursing. And don’t ask me where, because I have absolutely no idea.’