Although they didn’t leave until well past ten o’clock, Ruby was hopeful they might arrive in Paris by midnight; even taking a southerly route through Chartres, which kept them well clear of recent fighting, it should only have taken two hours at most to cover the seventy-odd miles between Senonches and the outskirts of Paris.
But she’d forgotten about the condition of the roads, which were so perilously potholed that it was suicidal to drive more than thirty miles an hour, and she also hadn’t reckoned on their driver getting lost within minutes of their leaving the hospital.
At one o’clock, still twenty miles south of the city—or so she estimated, for the map in the Michelin guide that Mr. Dunleavy had given her was difficult to read in poor light—the driver announced he was too tired to drive any farther, and pulled abruptly to the side of the road. Dan alternated between pleas and threats, but it was no good.
“I haven’t slept in three days, sir, and if we go any farther we’ll end up in the ditch, or worse. Give me until dawn, and then we’ll be on our way again.”
The driver—his name was Tony, Ruby had learned, and he came from Jersey City—stretched out on the ground beside the jeep and fell asleep instantly, as did Dan, for all his complaining. Frank had nodded off ages ago, and hadn’t woken when they’d pulled over, so Ruby decided to leave him be. She felt exposed sitting in the open jeep, so she sat on the ground and leaned against one of the back tires. It was a warm night, luckily, and she’d slept in worse places. At least no one was aiming bombs at her tonight.
She would look at the stars for a few minutes, she told herself, and hope that Bennett, wherever he was, might be doing the same. One day, when she saw him next, she would ask him.
She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and opened them to the thin, pale light of early dawn. Tony was stomping around, trying to wake himself up, and Dan and Frank were yawning and stretching wearily.
“How long, do you think, until we get to Paris?” she asked Tony.
“We passed a sign not long before we stopped last night. Said thirty kilometers to Paris. What’s that—about twenty miles?”
“Sounds about right,” Dan agreed.
They passed through the Porte d’Orléans at seven o’clock on the morning of August 26. The streets were quiet and eerily peaceful, despite the irregular noise of shellfire in the distance, and still littered with wilting flowers and abandoned tricolor rosettes and flags. Every so often they had to edge past the remains of barricades, most no more than piles of rubble, broken timber, and scavenged gates and railings.
“If only I’d scared up a driver a day earlier,” Dan fretted, another variation on the same theme that had been consuming him since their departure from the 128th. “Everyone else will have filed their stories already, and I’m left out in the cold. Mitchell will have my guts for garters.”
“You were never going to break the story,” she told him for perhaps the twentieth time. “Remember that you work for a weekly. No matter how fast you file it, whatever you write will be a week behind the dailies. So why don’t you stop worrying and start taking notes? There’s plenty of material for stories here.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, come on. I shouldn’t have to tell you this. Just start with what you see and go from there.”
He fished around for suggestions for the rest of their journey, but she steadfastly refused to offer any ideas. And she had plenty of ideas for stories, beginning with her firsthand observations of Parisians and their city.
Outwardly, the city seemed to be in better shape than London. An air of shabby neglect clung to the buildings they passed, though the grandeur she’d hoped to see, especially once they reached the central neighborhoods, was still present. The city’s boulevards continued wide and straight, its buildings remained pictures of refined elegance, and its cathedrals and churches endured in all their ancient glory.
The suffering of France was written, instead, on the drawn and haggard faces of her people, not one of whom failed to stop and wave and call out blessings to Ruby and her friends as they continued north through the city.
“I’m going to the Hôtel Scribe,” Dan announced as they approached the Seine. “Most of the press pack is staying there.”
“Then we’ll try to get rooms, too.”
“They’ve all been booked up by the big papers and wire services. But you can probably find something nearby.”
The Scribe was a fitting name for a place crammed from cellar to attic with journalists tapping away on typewriters, fighting over its too-few telephones, and arguing with the censors who’d set up shop and were tasked with inspecting every outgoing story. Anyone who wasn’t busy writing, chasing down leads, or harassing press officers had congregated in the bar that adjoined the lobby, and the loudest of them all was Ernest Hemingway.
He and his acolytes had taken over most of the tables, and though it was not quite nine in the morning, they were working their way through what looked like a bottle of brandy. The great man himself was impossible to miss, his large frame clothed in sweat-stained khaki, his voice drowning out everyone else’s as he described, likely not for the first time, how he had personally liberated the Hôtel Ritz the day before.
After a long wait to see the concierge, she discovered that Dan had been correct: the hotel was fully booked.
“May I suggest that Madame try one of the establishments on the rue Daunou? They are rather modest, I’m afraid, but they may have rooms available. And you are of course most welcome to make use of our facilities for your work.”
The first two hotels she and Frank tried were full, but they found a pair of rooms at the third, which unfortunately had no lift and only one bath per floor.
“You go first, Ruby,” Frank kindly offered. “I know you’ve been wanting a proper bath for days now.”
“That’s really nice of you. I promise not to use up all the hot water.”
AS RUBY WAITED for her hair to dry, she worked her notes into a short piece on entering Paris at dawn. Frank had knocked on her door earlier to announce he was taking a nap, and not wanting to bother him, she decided to head back to the Hôtel Scribe and brave the lineup for the censors. Once she received approval for the piece, she could send it back to PW via air courier, so that even if Frank’s photos were delayed they might marry her piece with something from one of the agencies.
The Scribe’s lobby was, if possible, even more crowded than it had been earlier in the day, and as she stood in line for the censors she was pushed and jostled so many times she felt ready to scream at the next rough-mannered man who barged past her.
Just then, a careless elbow knocked her off balance and sent her reeling into a passerby. Her story, which she’d typed out so carefully, was immediately lost beneath a stampede of passing feet.
Rather than continue on his way, the man she’d bumped into crouched down and helped her gather up the scattered pages. He was older than most of the other journalists, in his midfifties at least, with auburn hair that had faded to white at his temples.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Thanks for your help,” she said. “Ruby Sutton. With Picture Weekly.”
He shook her outstretched hand. “Sam Howard. With the Liverpool Herald.”
“John Ellis’s paper. I met him—oh, it was back at the end of 1940, I think. November, perhaps? I went up to Liverpool to write about the Durning Road disaster, and he was kind enough to help.”
“Hold on,” Mr. Howard said, his face brightening with recognition. “You work for Kaz. Sorry—I ought to have made the connection right away. I knew him years ago, when he was just starting out, and I’ve bumped into him a few times since. How is he?”
“He’s well,” she said. “Have you been at the Herald for a while?”
“Going on twenty years. My wife is English, so I wanted a job that kept me on this side of the pond. We lived in France for most of that time, but came back to London in the fall of ’39. Thought it would be safer. Then the Blitz began, and we felt like we’d gone from the frying pan into the fire.”
“But you all . . . ?” she asked tentatively, bracing herself for the inevitable story of loss and woe.
“We all survived. Nothing more than broken windows. And you? How long have you been at PW?”
“Since the summer of 1940. I was bombed out that December, but I’ve lived with friends ever since. Compared to some, I’ve been very lucky. Do you think you’ll come back to France to live?”
“One day. Ellie is desperate to return, but this war isn’t won yet, and I won’t risk her safety, or that of the children. Never mind that they consider themselves all but grown. The eldest joined the ATS as soon as she was able, and spends her weekends stripping back lorry engines.”
“Are you staying here?” she asked.
“No. I’m across the road at the Grand. And you?”
“At a little place on rue Daunou. A better match for our budget at PW.”
“Next!” called the censor, and looking ahead, Ruby realized she was at the front of the line.
“I guess that’s me,” she said.
“It was good to meet you, Miss Sutton. Give my best to Kaz when you get home. And keep your head down. Paris has been liberated, but not everyone is happy about it. Be careful whenever you’re out and about—promise me?”
“I promise. Goodbye, Mr. Howard. And good luck.”
Dispatches from London
by Miss Ruby Sutton
August 26, 1944
. . . Compared to London, Paris looks as if it needs little more than a good scrub and a few coats of fresh paint to bring it back to life. I speak of the city itself, its buildings and squares and wide-open boulevards. Its people are in far worse shape, and I cannot begin to imagine how long it will take for them to recover from four years of Nazi oppression and terror . . .
BY ONE O’CLOCK that same afternoon, Ruby and Frank were in place on the Champs-Élysées for the anticipated victory parade. It had proved impossible to reach the front of the crowd, which stretched to ten people deep where they were standing, but the spot they had chosen, half a mile from the Place de la Concorde, boasted a clear view of the avenue as it rose toward the Arc de Triomphe in the west, and by standing on the very tips of her toes and craning her neck, Ruby was able to watch the parade of dignitaries and Allied military might for nearly the entire distance.
Charles de Gaulle himself had just marched past, his height and regal bearing making him impossible to miss, and Ruby, not wishing to forget even the smallest detail, had ducked her head to scribble in her notebook.
Without any warning, strong hands grasped her arms and swung her around. “Ruby,” a voice whispered in her ear, and the man pulled away just far enough that she might see his face. It was all but obscured by a scruffy mustache and beard, but wonderfully familiar all the same. Bennett.
He kissed her fiercely, one hand grasping the back of her head, only pulling away when the people around them began to stamp and clap and cheer. “Your room number at the hotel—which is it?” he whispered in her ear.
“Thirty-two.”
“I’ll be there at nine tonight.”
He vanished into the crowd before she could say anything, and she was left to stand among strangers, mute from shock, and try and make sense of what had just happened.
Bennett was alive. He was alive and unharmed, and she would see him again in a few hours.
A frantic voice brought her back to earth. “Are you all right? Say something—did that fellow hurt you?”
“No, Frank. Just a bit of high spirits. That’s all.”
“Gave me a fright, he did, when I saw how he was manhandling you. I tried to get to you in time, but there were half a dozen people between him and me. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m fine. Honestly I am. Besides, I doubt it’s the last kiss I’ll get from a stranger today.”
She was right. Their uniforms made them the center of unfettered and crazily exuberant displays of affection from Parisians, whose expressions seemed to indicate that they, too, were perplexed by their compulsion to greet perfect strangers with such a disconcerting lack of decorum. Yet it didn’t stop them from hugging and kissing and dancing down the streets with anyone and everyone they encountered in an Allied uniform.
Moving away from the crowds that flanked the Champs-Élysées, Ruby and Frank walked north, in what she hoped was the general direction of their hotel. Away from the parade route, the streets were far less crowded, less noisy, and altogether less overwhelming.
Ruby smiled until her face ached, accepted the many flowers that were pressed into her hands, and tried unsuccessfully to unearth someone who spoke English and might be able to tell her what the last few weeks had been like. But the people she approached couldn’t understand her questions, or perhaps they simply didn’t want to talk about serious things on such a day.
They walked and walked, and Ruby filled her notebook with observations of the people they encountered. The sun was beginning to set; she checked her wristwatch and realized it was almost seven o’clock.
“Do you want to find somewhere to eat?” she called to Frank, who was trying to extricate himself from the embrace of a large and extremely affectionate nun.
“Yes, please!” he shouted, and she grabbed his arm and pulled him away and down the nearest quiet street. It had no shortage of cafés and restaurants; the problem, though, was that most were closed.
They were standing before one such establishment, trying to summon up the strength to continue along, when its front door burst open and they were confronted by a young man in an apron, his face wreathed in smiles.
“Vous êtes américains? Anglais?”
“Oui,” Ruby said, and then she produced the only useful French phrase that she knew: “Est-ce que vous parlez anglais?”
“Yes, yes—but of course we speak English for our American friends! Please come in and allow us to feed you. It is our pleasure. Please come in.”
It quickly became apparent, since they were the only people in the dining room, that the staff had opened the restaurant especially for Ruby and Frank; and it was also evident that they were being treated to the best the chef and his staff could provide.
After the first bite of bread, fresh-baked and spread with real butter, Ruby knew she’d be dreaming of this meal for years to come. Roast chicken and new potatoes and green beans followed, and then they were served a cake studded with fresh apricots, and by the time they emerged from the restaurant, buoyed by the embraces and gratitude of the staff, she felt as if she were floating on air.
The walk back helped to clear her head and calm her nerves, and once they reached the hotel, a few minutes before nine, Ruby felt she might, just might, be able to get through the next hour or so without bursting into tears at the sight of Bennett, or otherwise embarrassing them both.
“I’m off to bed,” Frank said as they collected their keys from the concierge. “How about you? Planning on a visit to the bar at the Scribe?”
“Not tonight, I think,” she said, and followed him up the stairs. “Good night, Frank.”
She waited until he’d gone into his room and she was alone in the hall. Waited until she could hear past the drumming heartbeat that filled her ears. And then, only then, did she open her door and slip inside.