Wild Lavender (60 page)

I was reeling too much from the revelation that Camille had denounced me to take in his question. She must have done it to protect herself—or her daughter. Perhaps she had thought that I would denounce her first?

I looked back to Monsieur Villeret. He pulled a box out of a cupboard and placed it on his desk with the gravity of a funeral director arranging an urn.

‘When André was arrested, I went through his father’s files to gather support of his innocence,’ he said. ‘I came across some old correspondence between Monsieur Blanchard and Camille Casal. She was blackmailing him.’

The room went out of focus. I had no idea that Camille had ever known André’s father. ‘Blackmailing him? When?’

‘1936.’

That was the year André had turned thirty; the year we were supposed to get married.

‘She wanted money?’

Monsieur Villeret shook his head. ‘She wanted to ruin your happiness. She wanted Monsieur Blanchard to refuse to let André marry you.’

I thought the suggestion was ludicrous. Even if Camille had been that malevolent, I couldn’t see how she could have had any power over Monsieur Blanchard. Contrary to his wife’s prediction that he would outlive us all, he had succumbed to dementia soon after retiring and now lived under a nurse’s care. But back in 1936 he had been arrogant and cocky. Even someone as manipulative with men as Camille wouldn’t have been able to fool him.

‘Why would somebody with Camille’s fame and beauty want to hurt me?’ I asked. But as soon as the question left my mouth the truth of what Monsieur Villeret was implying hit me. I remembered Camille’s reaction to
André’s proposal to me in Cannes. And no one had been able to explain Monsieur Blanchard’s sudden change of heart when he had already agreed to let André marry me.

‘It was spite that made her do it,’ said Monsieur Villeret. ‘The workings of a jealous mind. There was a skeleton in the Blanchard family closet. She found out about it from someone high up in the military and she decided to use it against you.’

My eyes did not leave Monsieur Villeret’s face.

‘Laurent Blanchard did not die a hero at Verdun,’ he said. ‘That was a cover-up by the government in light of the Blanchard family’s importance to France. Laurent Blanchard incited his men to mutiny. He was shot fleeing the battle by another officer.’

My breath caught in my throat. ‘He was shot for treason?’

‘He was shot without a trial,’ Monsieur Villeret said. ‘And what he did was covered up.’

I stood up from my chair, my legs unsteady beneath me, and stumbled to the window. Out on the street some American soldiers were supervising the clearing of a burnt-out building. Ropes had been tied around the frame and the soldiers were pulling on it. Camille had destroyed my happiness with André because she was jealous?

Through the haze of confusion in my mind, I heard Monsieur Villeret ask, ‘Do you think that I should tell André?’

Onlookers gathered on the street to watch the Americans pull down the unstable building. At first it seemed as if the wood would not budge. But after a few minutes of determined tugging, the frame collapsed. The crowd cheered.

I turned to Monsieur Villeret, barely able to see him through my tears. If he told André about Camille, he would have to tell him about Laurent. I remembered the picture of the man with the soulful eyes in Madame Blanchard’s parlour. I suspected that Laurent had not betrayed his countrymen, rather he had been like many of the young officers my father had described: intelligent men who could
not see the point of sending thousands of soldiers to slaughter just because some general ordered it. But none of us would ever know that for sure. The accusation of treason and cowardice would stain Laurent if the true circumstances of his death were ever revealed.

I thought of that cold morning in Neuilly, when André and I were broken apart for all time. What was the use of him knowing now? What good could come of it? I thought of Princesse de Letellier and André’s daughters, of Madame Blanchard and Veronique. André and I should have put our own happiness first all those years ago. It was too late to do that now. There were too many people to hurt. Part of me would love André for ever, and he might still love me, but I belonged with Roger.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We must never tell him.’

I took a package of clean clothes, linen, soap and food to Fresnes prison for André. He was brought out to me in prison garb with chains around his ankles. I was startled by his haggard appearance.

‘Simone!’ he said, his face brightening. ‘They let you out? Are you all right?’

I felt as if my own smile was forced. All that Monsieur Villeret had told me was weighing on my mind. I asked the guard if I could speak to André alone. Glancing at the Cross of Lorraine on my lapel, he nodded and left.

‘You won’t be tried, André. You will be released as soon as your lawyer can get the paperwork through.’

André gave a sigh of relief, and pressed his fingers to the grille of the window that separated us. I couldn’t bring myself to lift my hand to touch his. In front of me was a man I had loved with my whole heart. I would never do anything to hurt him or his wife and children.

‘Simone? What is it?’

‘I had better tell your wife that you will released,’ I said. ‘She must be worried. Do you have a message for her?’

André bowed his head. I sensed something shifting between us. Like two tectonic plates realigning themselves into more stable positions. He looked up again and our eyes met. ‘Only that…I love her and the girls,’ he said.

We both smiled.

‘And you, Simone,’ he asked. ‘What is your plan now?’

‘To go south to my family and wait for Roger.’

André frowned at the mention of Roger’s name, but it was with concern this time rather than jealousy. ‘Monsieur Villeret has been trying to track Roger Delpierre down. It was true that he was the contact for your song at the Adriana, but he was captured before he could get back to London. He was sent to a concentration camp. No one knows where he is now.’

My heart plunged. Surely that wasn’t possible? I couldn’t lose Roger twice.

‘No,’ I said, clenching my hands.

André brought his face close to the grille. ‘You love him, don’t you, Simone?’

I nodded, pushing away my tears with the heel of my palm. ‘He wanted to come back for me after the war.’

‘Simone, don’t cry,’ André said, ‘As soon as I am out of here, I will help you any way I can.’

On my way to the prison exit, the guard accompanying me asked if I could wait in the corridor for a moment. He disappeared into an office and I leaned against the wall. There were some men sitting on benches, their faces bloodied and bruised. I strolled to the window and looked out. A group of women were in the exercise yard. I was only one floor up and could see their faces clearly. None of them were in prison uniforms; they wore civilian clothes and looked ruffled and dirty. But they were not working-class women; they had the tailored dresses and high heels of
Tout-Paris
. Some had shaved heads.

My eye fell to a blonde woman standing in the corner of the yard, smoking. Her hard blue eyes were remote from the fear and chaos around her. I inched closer to the window. Without make-up Camille’s face looked haggard and old. I remembered her gliding onto the stage at the Casino de Paris and eyeing the audience, majestic in her skin-tight dress, her cape slipping to the floor. I had once been mesmerised by her beauty but the rot on the inside was starting to show through now. I remembered the cool mockery in Camille’s eyes when she looked out at an audience and realised why she had never suffered stage fright—every toss of her head and flutter of her eyelashes had been practised to military precision. Camille never gave anything of herself, just as any friendship she had shown me had no substance or truth to it. She had done the worst thing she could have to hurt me. But I was at fault too. There was a saying in Provence: ‘Those foolish enough to keep a snake as a companion will get bitten sooner or later.’

Camille looked up and our eyes met. She watched me without a trace of hesitation or fear. I understood then that she knew that I had found out what she had done, and she didn’t care.

‘Who are you looking at?’ the guard asked, coming out of the office. He glanced over my shoulder and gave a scoff. ‘Camille Casal? Your old rival? She doesn’t look so glamorous now, does she?’

‘She was never my rival,’ I said, remembering what Monsieur Etienne had always told me. ‘I was the better singer and dancer.’

‘And prettier too,’ the guard said, guiding me away from the window and down the corridor. ‘Camille Casal is a cold bitch. I was there for her interrogation. Did you know that she once had a baby? She left it in a convent and never went back.’

I stopped and looked at the guard. He had rosy cheeks and a rotund stomach, the signs of a happily married man. ‘Where is the girl now?’ I asked him. ‘She is a young woman.’

He shook his head. ‘She never grew up. The girl died of a fever when she was five years old. Camille Casal was already a star then but she wouldn’t give a centime towards medicine for the child. She is buried in a pauper’s grave.’

The guard let me out of the prison gate and into the sunshine. I stood on the pavement for a long time, trying to take in all that I had learnt that morning. I ran over in my mind the things Camille had said to me over the years about supporting her child. None of it had been true. The image of Camille’s face staring at me from the exercise yard burned into my mind. She had been shameless until the end. She had used me to get back on the Paris stage with ‘
Les Femmes
’, knowing that she had destroyed my happiness with André. No wonder she never bothered to mention him.

A lump formed in my throat and I began to choke. I slipped down to sit on the cobblestones and covered my eyes. I wanted to go back and spit in Camille’s face, to tear at her arrogant flesh with my nails. For minutes, I could not imagine standing up again for fear that I might kill her, but something tingled in my heart and the rage passed. If I confronted Camille now, what would change? She had ruined my past but I wouldn’t let her touch my future.

Slowly my head cleared and my heartbeat returned to normal. I stood up and straightened my coat. I would cover Camille over as a dog covers over its dirt. I was done with her. I had no intention of attending her trial; there was nothing I could do to condemn Camille any more than her actions had already done. What I had to think about now was the future, and that future was Roger and my family at the farm.

I
wrote to General de Gaulle to see if anything could be done through his office to trace Roger. I gave Madame Goux instructions to make enquiries through the Red Cross on my behalf about him, as well as Monsieur Etienne and Joseph, while I tried to find out everything I could through network contacts. Von Loringhoven had refused to give confirmation that Odette and Petite Simone had actually left the country, and the best I could hope for was that Odette would write to me. Monsieur Dargent came to my apartment each day to help with my search. The underground newspapers were now openly published and it was in one of these that I first saw a grainy picture of skeletal bodies being bulldozed into mass graves in what were now being termed ‘death camps’.

‘Have faith, Simone,’ Monsieur Dargent told me. ‘No matter what it takes, we will find them.’

Besides searching for information about Roger and my friends, I yearned to see my family. I had not had any contact with them since I had last left them for Paris, and after all the hardships we had lived through, my family, Madame Ibert and the Meyers were the people with whom I most wanted to celebrate the end of the war. In order to hinder the Germans and assist the Allied invasion, the
maquis
had blown up bridges, dug out railway tracks and cut telephone lines. As a result, it was almost impossible to make contact with people in the south. But as soon as the barest train service was reestablished,
I was on it. I held out hope that maybe Roger had returned to France via the south and gone straight to the farm.

I reached Carpentras in three days and from there took a motor truck. The driver, who was from Sault, told me that the Milice and the retreating German army had been vicious in the last days of the war. Nearly fifty Resistants from Sault alone had been sent to concentration camps. I thought of Roger again and shivered.

The driver let me off a mile from the farm. It was early autumn and the countryside was peaceful after the chaos of Paris. I remembered how happy my family had been when Roger and I announced our intention to marry, and how it had lifted our spirits in the darkest of times. I tried to recreate that feeling of hope as I walked by fields of wheat and lavender that should have been cut months ago. I imagined how life would be at the farm once Roger and I were married. I saw myself tending a beautiful garden of roses and wildflowers in pots; little children running around the feet of my mother and Aunt Yvette while they cooked lunch in the kitchen; and Bernard and Roger standing side by side, surveying lush fields of purple.

In the last half kilometre before the farm, I became so elated at the thought of seeing my family again that I broke into a run. I caught a glimpse of my aunt’s house through the trees. There was no one in the yard or the fields. No drift of smoke from the chimney. I turned the bend in the road and the house came into full view. I stopped in my tracks, my legs almost giving way beneath me.

‘No!’

The lower part of the house was intact but the top floor was a desolate shell. Black burn marks scarred the holes where the windows had been. I turned to the empty space next to it, where my father’s house should have stood. There was nothing left except a mountain of blackened stones.

‘
Maman!
’ I screamed. ‘
Maman! Aunt Yvette! Bernard!
’

My voice rang off the trees, echoing like a gunshot in the air. But there was no answer.

I bolted towards the ruins of the house, my heart thumping in my chest. ‘Minot! Madame Ibert!’ I called. I struggled to think over the ringing in my ears. That the Germans or the Milice had done the damage I had no doubt. But where was everybody? I tried not to believe the worst. It was possible they had fled before this had happened.

I tried the door of the house. It was stuck. I shouldered and kicked it until it gave way and creaked open. The kitchen was undamaged and stood like a surrealist painting against the ruin of the rest of the building. The table was set for six people. Would they have set the table if they were preparing to flee? I pushed open the door to the storeroom. It was stocked with preserved food, cans and bags of grain. If the Germans had been here, wouldn’t they have ransacked it? Possible scenarios jumbled together in my mind. I opened the shutters and stared outside. Could a fire have started in my father’s house and somehow spread to the top floor of Aunt Yvette’s? Would that explain the damage? I turned the problem over in my mind. Something moved in the grass. There was a flash of fur. I stared at the green blades, trying to discern what it was. A rabbit? Two eyes blinked at me. No, not a rabbit. A cat.

I rushed outside and scooped Kira into my arms. I could feel her breast bone protruding through her matted fur and she was covered in thorns. She meowed feebly, revealing broken incisor teeth. I nursed her against my chest and carried her into the house. I recalled that I had seen bottles of anchovies in the storeroom, so I lowered her onto the table and mashed up the contents of one jar on a plate. I would get her water as soon as I had checked that the well had not been poisoned.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked, stroking her head gently with my finger.

An unsettling thought rose in my mind. If my family had been given enough warning to flee the Germans, why had
they left Kira behind? Perhaps she had been hiding and they couldn’t find her? But I could not believe that. She was a house cat and barely left my mother’s side. I stood in the doorway and called out the names of the dogs and Chérie. But, as I had thought, Kira was alone.

I sank into a chair. It would take me an hour to walk to the village, but there was nothing else to be done. Perhaps my family was there. I watched Kira lapping up the anchovies, crouched on her bowed legs. She was eighteen, ancient for a cat. I wondered how she had survived with no one to feed her.

‘Hello!’ a man’s voice shouted. I ran to the window to see the grizzled figure of Jean Grimaud coming up the road. Another idea flashed into my mind. Maybe everyone had fled to join the
maquis
. But what had they done with Madame Meyer?

‘Jean!’ I called out, running into the yard.

‘I was in Carpentras,’ he said, grimacing. ‘I heard that you were making your way here.’

‘Where are they?’ I asked.

Jean swallowed and looked at his hands. And then I knew. The truth was all around me, yet I had refused to see it. I felt as though somebody had struck me in the heart with a pickaxe. I crouched on the ground. I wanted to sink into that chalky earth, to slip under it like a corpse, so I wouldn’t have to face the terrible thing that Jean was going to tell me.

Jean squatted down next to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, tears welling in his eyes.

Poor Jean Grimaud. Twice in his life he’d had to bring me bad news.

‘What happened?’

Jean put his arm around my shoulders. ‘They found the grenades Bernard was keeping for us from an Allied drop,’ he said. ‘There were three of us heading for the farm when we saw that the Germans were here. We hid in the trees. There was nothing we could do to save them. We were outnumbered.’

I choked on my tears. ‘Where were they taken?’

‘They were killed here.’

I pressed my face against his arm. ‘All of them?’

Jean squeezed me tighter. I looked up at him and he nodded.

‘You should be proud of them, Simone,’ he said. ‘They died like saints. They knelt down and held each other’s hands. Then the Germans shot them.’

Maman!
The blood rushed to my ears. I clutched my fists against my head. Despite the danger I had put them in, I never once thought that harm would come to my family or friends. While the battle for Paris raged, I had been comforted by the fact that they lived in a remote part of the country. I barely heard Jean when he told me that the first German soldier ordered to perform the execution couldn’t bring himself to shoot Madame Meyer, so his commander shot him and performed the execution himself. I was too shocked to take in anything else.

‘I will walk with you to the village,’ said Jean. ‘You can stay with Odile. She has your dogs and one of your cats. We couldn’t find the other one.’

‘No,’ I said, wiping at my dusty, tear-streaked face. ‘She waited for me here.’

I did not return with Jean to the village. I told him I wanted to spend the night in my aunt’s kitchen. He didn’t argue, he only said that he would return the following day. Before Jean left, I asked him to show me where they had shot my family, Minot and his mother, and Madame Ibert. He pointed to a spot near the distillery door. In the dappled afternoon light I couldn’t see any marks in the wood, the way people said there were holes in the trees of the Bois de Boulogne.

‘They shot them from behind,’ Jean explained. ‘In the back of the neck.’

He left me with kisses on both cheeks but I barely felt them. I sat down on a stone looking at the spot where my family and friends had died. Kira rubbed against my legs before settling down next to me. It was hard to imagine any violence had taken place here. When the sun began to disappear, a breeze rustled the trees and everything was peaceful. I remembered the first lavender harvest. I heard my father singing, saw my mother wipe the sweat from her face with the back of her hand, Aunt Yvette pulling down her sleeves against the harsh sun.

Someone laughed and I turned around before I realised that the sound was in my head. Minot was clinking his champagne glass against mine after my first performance at the Adriana. ‘
Congratulations on a superb show
.’ I thought of his mother, patting Kira while she waited for her train from Paris to depart. Then Madame Ibert loomed up before me, shovelling sand in the attic.

I couldn’t believe that it was all over, that I would never see those beloved faces again. When the sun finally disappeared and night fell, the numbness gave way to the full brunt of grief. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’ I wept into the silent blackness.

Jean had told me that the villagers had buried my family and friends in the churchyard, but when dawn rose the next day I realised that it would be a while before I could bring myself to visit their graves. I was stuck in a dream, sandwiched between a reality I did not want to face and the happy memories of life at the farm. I had no intention of returning to Paris.

There were vegetables in the garden and the water in the well was good. I cleaned out the kitchen and set up a bedroom in the front room, even though there was a gaping hole in the roof. I scrubbed the floors and the walls with lavender water, struggling to eradicate the stink of smoke. I busied myself tending to Kira and I fed her eggs, anchovies,
sardines and tinned meat, hoping to fatten her up again. But one day she stopped eating. When I awoke the following morning, she wasn’t asleep next to me. I searched the house and the yard. It was not like her to wander further than that, but I could not find her anywhere. I ran out into the fields, terrified that an eagle had taken her as easy prey. I walked to the lavender fields and saw her lying on her side. She was panting. When I looked into her eyes, I knew she would not last the morning.

‘Thank you, my friend,’ I whispered, lying down next to her and stroking her fur. ‘You waited for me, didn’t you? You did not want me to have to discover what had happened here all alone.’

Kira stretched out her paw and touched my chin, as she had liked to do every morning.

I buried Kira near the graves of Olly, Chocolat and Bonbon. All my life people had laughed at me for my attachment to my pets, but having lived through a war, I had come to prefer animals to people.

In the afternoon, I walked to the village. Jean was talking with Odile and Jules Fournier near the fountain. Odile saw me coming first and ran towards me. My throat was so thick with tears I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders. Odile was a small woman, much shorter than me, and yet I felt the strength in her grasp. She was holding me up; grief had drained me.

‘I have your animals here,’ she said. ‘Would you like to see them?’

Bruno, Princesse, Charlot and Chérie were sunning themselves in the courtyard of the bar like movie stars on the Riviera. They jumped up as soon as they saw me and vied for my attention. I patted, rubbed and stroked them all, although I couldn’t stop thinking of Kira.

‘I have grown attached to them,’ said Odile. ‘They are good company.’

‘Can you mind them just a bit longer?’ I asked her, picking up Chérie. I felt barely capable of looking after myself let alone the animals.

Odile patted Chérie and stroked my cheek. ‘Come and get them whenever you are ready.’

She told me to sit at a table and she brought me a glass of
pastis
, although in my village it wasn’t a woman’s drink. It was strong and took the edge off the throb in my heart. Jean came in with Jules. I was grateful that no one expected me to talk. I listened to them chat about the change in season and the new crops. None of us wanted to discuss the war, but it was impossible to avoid it. It had changed everything. I wasn’t the only person to have suffered. Ten families in our tiny village had lost a father, a son or a daughter.

‘At least there were no collaborators here as there are in other villages,’ said Jean with pride. ‘We all fought as one.’

‘The collaborators are being let off easily,’ scoffed Jules. ‘Even Pétain has had his death sentence commuted to life.’

‘It depends how much money you have,’ said Odile, rubbing her fingers together. ‘If you are rich and famous or are needed in some way, you will be pardoned. Watch out if you are poor though. You will be shot as “an example to others”.’

‘No,’ said Monsieur Poulet from the bar. ‘De Gaulle has turned the whole of France into a nation of Resistants. It is the image he gives to the world so he can hold his head high when he stands with the other Allied leaders.’

De Gaulle, I thought bitterly, remembering the way I had idolised him. No hero is ever perfect.

That first afternoon broke my isolation. After that, I walked to the village each morning to send telegrams from the post office to Paris and Marseilles and letters to London. I was trying every link I could to find out what had happened to Roger. Each day I ate lunch with Odile before heading home. It was through her that I learned that the fashion designer Coco Chanel had not been
charged with collaboration, even though she and her German lover had tried to influence Churchill to make a peace deal with Hitler. Perhaps if my family had not been killed, I would not have felt so bitter towards people like her. Her collaboration had not made her a happier woman, just a richer one. But why should my family have died trying to save the country when so many self-seekers were left unpunished?