56 
“journey’s end”
“Kiki, darling, how wonderful of you to see us off.” Bertie kissed me on both cheeks. We stood just at the main entrance to Gare du Nord, the stone arches behind us, traffic swarming in front of us. Rain spat in fits and starts.
“In all that matching red, you’re like my own personal firecracker.”
“You seem to have missed her overnight bag there, Bertie.” Tom pointed out my little suitcase.
“You’re joining us?”
“Don’t sound too disappointed,” I said, “I might think you mean it.”
“I’m not disappointed! This is a treat.” Bertie linked one arm through mine and another through Tom’s. “I always hate leaving Paris, but if the best part of Paris comes with me, what more can I ask for?”
“An explanation, maybe?”
We walked through the doors like we were in a movie, people parting for us, the marble floor rolling out in front of us. But it felt like a false note of cheer, my head still ached with dehydration and my toes were cold from where the rain had seeped in. The vaulting arches of the station, so welcoming when I arrived from London, seemed like a giant cage.
“You are the question and the answer, Kiki darling. Although I’m happy to hear an explanation, if there is one.”
I didn’t know where to begin. I felt a strong impulse to buy cigarettes, newspapers, postcards, bags of lollies, croissants in napkins, to grab as much Paris as I could before I boarded.
“What have I missed?” asked Bertie.
Tom scoffed. “Button can fill you in on all the colors of Fox’s perfidy.”
The Blue Train clanked along, out of Paris and into the countryside I’d been looking at, in reality and in memory, since early 1915 when I was first sent to France. It seemed fitting that this would be the backdrop to my story, the trenches now full of birds’ nests and poppies, rusting tanks coupled with farm equipment, temporary markets next to the temporary graves. Bertie listened closely to the tale of Russell and the diary, read the telegram and for once didn’t interject with witty quips. The blue velvet seats of our private compartment made his skin look ghostly pale. I could only have looked the same.
“So, you’re coming to London to collect the diary from Fox?” Bertie frowned.
“I told her she shouldn’t,” said Tom. “She could just write to Russell, now that she has his address. She can just call Fox.”
“And have him read out my mother’s diary over the telephone?”
“No, insist he sends it to you, in Paris,” said Tom.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“Why not?” asked Bertie.
“Yes seriously, Button, why can’t it work like that?”
The windows showed farmland, gray and brown and black in the autumn, crows flying overhead. I could almost hear the guns again.
“The telegram… is a summons. He isn’t just telling me that he has what I want, what I desperately need. He’s telling me that I have to jump when he clicks, that if I want to hold onto this precious thing, I have to follow his instructions.”
“How do you know this?” asked Bertie.
“From the war.”
“It’s not the war now,” said Tom.
“This is what he would do when I worked under him as a nurse. Always giving with one hand and taking with the other. Then, his methods were cruder. If I wanted to eat, or sleep, once or twice even to live, then I had to carry out the mission. He…” Memories rose from the sodden fields outside the window, I had to voice them.
“He kept me working on the wards until I passed out, overpowering Matron by saying he needed me specifically in this or that operation, which were always when I was not on shift. At first I begged to be released, but then I learnt to stop begging and push through until I could no longer. I think once or twice I even held my breath to bring on a faint, just so I could be sent to my tent. Then he changed tactic, seeing me in the mess tent line and sending me off on some immediate, urgent mission. I began hiding biscuits in my pockets and my coat, I kept a store of bread and cheese and fresh water by two different gates, so when I headed out by bicycle after dark, I could still get a bite to eat. The boys started calling me Gretel as I trailed biscuit crumbs through the wards.
“But it was when he would leave me, after a completed mission, to make my own way back to the hospital, that were the most dangerous. One time… these fields remind me… after Passchendaele, after I had sent you home, Tom, he left me wounded in the snow.
“We weren’t far from the front. An agent had messed up, he had been found out and beaten. He had crawled over no-man’s-land back to our line with some scraps of information. He was badly wounded but, in a little alcove in a flooded trench, I patched him up. Then a shell exploded nearby, it killed him and left me with cuts all over my legs and arms. I sent the signal—‘collect me’—but no one came. I had the intel and I couldn’t walk properly. I sent the signal again, waited another hour, and still no one. What could I do? If I stayed in the flooded trench I would freeze to death; I could feel the burn of frostbite already beginning. I knew I didn’t have long before I was in trouble.
“So I walked, limping for hours back to the casualty clearing station. Fox let me reveal my sorry state to everyone before he drove me to a hotel in town. Then he made me rest for three days, with cream and eggs and butter and other impossible treats brought to my room. He even sent Maisie in to take care of me as I lay back on the soft pillows.
“Fox claimed he never got the signal. But how could he have failed to get it, when he was expecting it? Stranger things have happened, of course, and I’ll never really know… but I think it was punishment, for getting you help, Tom, followed by remorse when I turned up injured. I would have been permanently scarred without those days in the hotel, but I wouldn’t have needed those days if he had been more professional, if he had searched for me when I failed to return.
“After that he became more subtle. He didn’t need to threaten my life, he just had to intimate that my life was his for the taking. Which it was, until I left in 1918. That’s how I know this is a summons. It’s an old game and one I know well. Here is your life, he says, come and save it.”
The sky darkened until it seemed indivisible from the fields, the endless gray disturbed only by a crow crying its loneliness, a rabbit running in fear, a tractor as it coughed its last. I stared out the window until the last light died and all I was left with was my reflection in the glass. I saw Bertie and Tom watching me, Bertie with pity, Tom with fury, both with love.
“I have to go to London. I have to play the game to the end.”
“And you’re near the end, yes?” asked Tom.
“I have a feeling this is just the beginning.”