They made good time, even if the route was a meandering one, requiring them to constantly retrace their steps to avoid destroyed bridges and wreckage on the roads, and to wait for columns of American and British troops to pass by. It gave them time to catch up. Philippe had been found alive, just, in a camp north of Paris. Marshall too had somehow survived, making it out of the house with three bullet wounds by crawling through the attics of his neighbors. Garrow did not dwell on the losses.
At last they were in the outskirts of the city, then in the suburbs, and before she was ready for it, on Nancy’s own street. Now Garrow was bringing the car to a halt opposite her home. He let her and Denden out, told them he had paperwork to deal with and would be back in an hour, then drove away. Having exchanged the briefest of greetings with the fishmonger and his wife and a couple of other curious neighbors, Nancy approached her old home. The garden was overgrown, and the door was locked.
“Shall I pick it?” Denden asked, watching her.
She shook her head and dug her fingers into the dry soil of the pot holding a fading bay tree at the top of the steps. She fitted it into the lock. Turned it. Pushed open the door and walked inside. Denden followed her.
The air smelled stale.
Denden gasped. “I’m sorry, Nancy.”
It was a shell. Whoever had lived in it after she’d left had stripped everything on their way out: the pictures and books Henri had chosen with such care, even Nancy’s fancy coffee table. She could imagine it now, tied to the roof of some German officer’s car, abandoned on the road somewhere between here and the Swiss border. What they couldn’t take, they’d trashed. Rubbish and waste was piled in the corners, rotting food stank up the kitchen. Upstairs they found only empty rooms, the curtains torn down, and someone had tried to start a fire at the top of the stairs.
“Bastards,” Denden said.
Nancy felt nothing. Now Henri was dead, it was just a set of walls.
Someone knocked at the front door and they went down together. Maybe Garrow had realized she wouldn’t want so long to sit in this wreck of a place where she had once been so happy. She opened the door. It was not Garrow.
“Claudette!”
“Madame!” She was flushed and panting. “Your neighbors told me you had come home.”
As soon as Denden realized it was someone she knew, he went and sat on the stairs, his face as somber and still as she had ever seen it.
Nancy’s maid had aged ten years in less than eighteen months. With a deep pang she noticed the scarf around Claudette’s head. Someone must have accused her of having an affair with a German, of collaborating, and they’d punished her for it. Nancy had seen it happening in one of the towns they had passed through on their way here, women stripped to their underwear in the square, their heads shaved while the crowd jeered. She’d seen Milice hanging from the lampposts in another, cardboard signs saying TRAITOR around their necks, and wondered how many of the men and women passing by had done a little light collaborating of their own. Enough. The Germans were gone. But things happen in war.
“Come in, Claudette.” The maid hesitated on the step. “Claudette, I know Henri is dead, so if you are worried about telling me that, there’s no need.”
Claudette’s shoulders dropped a little. “I didn’t know if you had heard… I… I don’t want to come in, Madame. But I had to tell you something. Before anyone else did. A man from the Gestapo came to my mother’s house, two, three days after you left.”
Nancy leaned against the door frame, folded her arms. “A tall man? Mid-forties with blond hair? Liked to talk about his education in England?”
Claudette nodded.
“His name is Böhm, I know him. What happened?”
Claudette couldn’t look at her. She stared at her worn shoes and spoke quickly. “He wanted to know about you, Madame. Wanted to know everything about you. I couldn’t tell him anything about your friends who came to the house, but he didn’t seem to want to know about that. He wanted to know about you, so I… I told him everything I could remember, everything I had heard. About how your father left and you disliked your mother, and how you ran away, and your favorite books and bars and everything else I could think of.” She sniffed and knocked away her tears with the back of her hand. “I was so scared, and for my mother and my little brother too.”
Nancy took a long, slow breath. So he had learned all of that from her clever little maid. None of it from Henri.
“I am so sorry, Madame.”
Nancy could feel the back of her eyes growing hot. That image which had so hurt her, of Henri telling Böhm all her secrets, had been a lie. Henri had endured, and said nothing. Böhm had got everything he had just by frightening this young girl. She felt a deep fierce pulse of pride in her husband.
“I understand, Claudette.”
She couldn’t say any more right now, and started to shut the door, but Claudette put her hand against the panel of stained glass, stopping her.
“I have something for you.”
Nancy waited impatiently while Claudette rummaged in her handbag.
“Monsieur Fiocca sent it to my mother’s address in Saint-Julien. We kept it in the hope you would come home safely.”
An envelope, addressed to Nancy Fiocca in Henri’s handwriting.
Nancy stared at it, trembling between Claudette’s fingers. She managed to take it from her and with a whispered thank you, finally closed the door. She went and sat by Denden on the stairs, and when she couldn’t manage to open the envelope, he took it from her, broke the seal, took out and handed the single folded sheet back to her in silence.
Dear Nancy,
They granted me a letter, hopefully it finds you and finds you well. I don’t have much time before they take me, so I must be brief. How to sum up our life together? I could tell you I love you. And I do. I could tell you every second with you was worth a thousand years in this place. And it was. But you’ve always been a woman of action, so I’ll just tell you what I did. Nan, they offered me a last meal, and I requested one thing, a glass of 1928 Krug. Böhm has just brought it to me himself. I toast your health with it, my darling girl.
I am not afraid. Your happiness is what I most desire in this world, your name will be the last word I speak.
All my love, always, Henri
For the second time since she had come to France she cried, sobbed until her ribs ached, but this time Denden had his arm around her, and held her tight until the worst of it was over.
When Garrow returned, they were still sitting together on the stairs like children waiting for a parent to come home. Nancy got to her feet, put the letter carefully in her pocket and opened the door for him.
Garrow glanced inside and made a face. “Damn. Sorry you didn’t get a better homecoming, old girl.”
Behind her Denden stood up too and picked up their packs from the hall.
“It’s just a house, Garrow,” Nancy said. “I shall sell it. Go back to Paris. Go to all the bars with Denden and René for a while. I don’t think I could face living here any more anyway.”
“We’ll keep you entertained,” Denden said, coming past her onto the step.
Garrow thrust his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “It’s not pretty, Nancy, but do you want to have a look around the town? As I have the car? Then I can drive you both back to your boys in the morning. You know every village in the Auvergne will want to throw you a party. They’ll need to see you there.”
She glanced at Denden and he nodded.
Nancy joined them on the step, shutting the door behind her. She could do that. Take a longer farewell, see her men settled back into civilian life.
“And after that I can probably get you both jobs in Paris, if you’d like it,” Garrow went on. “Something dull at the embassy shoving paper about, but God knows there’s going to be a lot to do, sorting out this mess.”
“It’ll make a change from the circus,” Denden said dryly. “Count me in, Garrow, if it pays well enough to keep me in brandy.”
They walked back to the car. Denden slid into the back seat and Garrow opened the door for her, a sudden return to some sort of pre war gallantry, and they began a slow journey through the scarred city.
The cathedral looked as if it had escaped the worst, high above the bombed-out harbor, still keeping watch, full of the prayers of the fishermen and their wives. On the water one or two of their little boats were picking their way through the wreckage of larger vessels, off to gather in the nets as the daylight drained from the great expanse of the sky.
Sorting out this mess would take a generation, Nancy thought, leaning out of the window as Garrow drove steadily on, her chin in her hand. Now began the slow, painful work of rebuilding, of creating a solid foundation of remembrance, and of forgetting. The hellish business of rewriting the laws, reestablishing the norms, rebuilding the goodwill, the respect and charity which shore up peace. It would be dull work and full of compromise, nothing like the horror and excitement of her life in the Auvergne.
Garrow shifted gears and the car purred as he turned up the road on the edge of the Old Quarter. On one of the heaps of spoil, an old lady and a little girl were collecting the bricks which had not been shattered into a rusty wheelbarrow, which they could use to rebuild. At the bottom of the heap were neat stacks of those already rescued.
“Garrow, stop the car will you?”
He did, and she climbed out.
“What are we doing, Nancy?”
She shielded her eyes from the evening sun and pointed at the two figures at work.
“I want to help them.”
She began to clamber up the heap of rubble.
Garrow twisted round to Denden in the back seat. “Now what do we do?”
Denden was watching her, silhouetted against the hazy blue sky as she greeted the old woman and the child, then stooped to gather up the bricks.
Denden got out of the car with a sigh, and Garrow killed the engine and did the same. Denden squinted into the sun, then reached into his top pocket for a pair of sunglasses. He put them on before he replied. “You know what we do now. We follow her, of course.”
They walked up the slope to join her.