Paris, January 1940
GERMANS INVADE AND BOMB POLAND BRITAIN MOBILISES
Daily Mirror, September 1st, 1939
Elinor De Witt – she had resumed using her former surname – entered the tall building, stopping in the entrance hall to collect her mail from a heavy carved oak table before making her way up a curved staircase to her rooms on the second floor. Throwing her leather document case and an armful of books onto a chaise, she looked at the letter – the latest missive from her mother in London. Without taking off her coat, she leant against the window frame and stared down onto the courtyard at the rear of the building. Bracing herself for what she knew would be another plea from her mother, she slipped her finger underneath the flap and tore open the envelope.
Dearest Linni,
I won’t beat about the bush, but I think it’s time for you to come home to London. The newspapers are saying that Herr Hitler has his eye on France, and Paris will be occupied before the end of summer. We know you’ve done so very well since university (not many women can boast two degrees from two countries) and we understand that you love your work there, but your grandmother and I think it’s time. She’s becoming quite infirm and I fear you might not see her before she goes – I don’t need to tell you she’s getting on. Both Ceci and I miss you and worry about you.
They’re calling it the ‘Bore’ war over here because it’s quite boring and nothing much has happened since last September. The sirens go off but mostly they’re just for practise, so we will know what to do when London is under attack. Sometimes people just ignore them. Mind you, there have been a number of bombs dropped by the Germans, so we three have made the cellar comfortable enough, just in case we must descend the stairs for safety. Nana finds going down that rickety staircase very hard. I can imagine us just getting her settled when the ‘all clear’ is sounded and we then have to get her back up the stairs again. To be honest, dear Linni, I’m not so young myself now, and could do with you at home to help out.
Ceci is still working at the library, for which I am filled with gratitude. I don’t know if I ever thanked you for suggesting librarianship during your last visit home. Poor Ceci does not have any friends to speak of who might have made the necessary introductions to a nice young man. I confess, I sometimes think it would be awfully fortuitous if she met a widower, though she isn’t the best with children. Nana keeps asking if she’ll ever have great-grandchildren (she forgets she asked the same question the day before). Her mind is wandering, and not only do I have to remind her that Grandpa has passed on now, but that neither of you are in the first flush of youth any more, so we’re not likely to see babies in this house.
Elinor closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead and sighed. ‘Poor Ceci? Poor Ceci? Ceci’s in sweet clover, if you ask me, with Nana and Mama at her beck and call as soon as she walks into the house.’ She opened her eyes and went on reading the letter, which continued to press the issue of her possible return.
Linni, we both know only too well how war goes and we know the depth of solace to be found when family are together. We are worried about you, and we three feel quite at sea without our fourth White lady in the house. Please come home. I am sure you could secure a teaching position or perhaps even something with the government. I’ve heard they need translators due to the war, and there’s no doubt your references are most excellent.
Elinor put the letter to one side and leant back in her chair. She was now almost thirty-six years of age. As Miss Doncaster predicted, she was indeed a spinster, yet unlike her sister, she had made that choice – though she suspected Ceci liked the idea of marriage more than the reality of a union and what might be demanded of her. As far as Elinor was concerned, a lover was a far less troublesome prospect than a husband, though Alex Blake had become something of a problem. He wanted more than Elinor was prepared to offer, which amounted to her freedom to do what she wanted, when she wanted. Alex was honest about his desire for marriage, for her to return to New York with him as the wife of an international man of commerce with political aspirations. But a diamond ring held no fascination for Elinor. In her world diamonds had been a necessary currency of survival in wartime. Alex wanted a hostess of note who could converse with ease when they were entertaining ambassadors or important men from overseas and their wives. In return she would have servants to attend to her every need or desire and money to spend on whatever she wanted, when she wanted. She would be a woman of substance, a feature of the society pages. The thought of it all exhausted Elinor, yet the more she refused, the more Alex pressed her. He was a man used to winning, after all.
Alex had been fun at first, another expat in Paris. He was handsome, well dressed, athletic in the way that Americans seemed fitter than anyone else. He had been light of character, with no questions asked so no answers given. He had spoilt her, but she had been able to keep her work and private life separate; one had nothing to do with the other. Now she had tired of Alex. She had even tired of flowers delivered every Friday. She lifted Charlotte’s letter again.
Please come home.
Perhaps her mother was right. Yes, perhaps it was time. She looked around the modest but comfortable flat, her home for some five years now. It had been a little beyond her budget, yet in a good area, when she had first viewed it following receipt of notice to leave her previous rooms because the owner was selling the property. But she had been careful with her money, never profligate, and having a pleasing place to live had become more important to her than a visit to a seamstress – and to help her out, there was the money from her grandfather that had been held in trust until she was twenty-one. That had been a surprise – the gift of a bank account with a tidy sum to see her on her way. Even after paying for her education, the lion’s share was still in that account, squirreled away and building interest.
Elinor finished marking assignment papers in preparation for the following morning’s classes. Taking a deep breath, she lifted a sheet of good stationery from her desk drawer, took up her fountain pen and began to write to her mother. Yes, she would indeed return to England, though it would take some two months; she was required to provide sufficient notice to the school and would therefore be expected to remain in her post until the Easter holiday. She would try to arrive in London by Good Friday.
Elinor knew Alex would be shocked when he heard her news, but it could not be helped, though his ego would be bruised because he had not ended the courtship first. Alex liked to be first, though she doubted he would pursue her to London in a bid to press her to continue seeing him. And perhaps her mother was right; she could get a good job in London. Sophie Wallace might know of something. Sophie – now Sophie Hunt; she had married after all – was a lecturer in mathematics at Bedford College, a women’s seat of learning that was part of the University of London, so she could alert Elinor to any academic positions open, especially given the number of men going off to war. That was always when women were needed most; when men went to war. Thank goodness her old friend had decided not to pursue the nursing profession after all, though in her last letter she had said something about doing special war work. Elinor couldn’t imagine Sophie engaged in war work. In her experience, war work was an exercise in brutality, and Sophie had too soft a heart.
As Elinor slipped the letter into an envelope, addressing it to her mother, she could not help wondering how it would be to live in London once more. Thoughts of Sophie and her work – whatever it was – inspired another memory to come to mind, one she had pondered at the time of the event, but was diminished by her mother’s insistence that she had been quite mistaken.
In a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, held in secret after the 1918 Armistice, Charlotte, Cecily and Elinor, along with other members of La Dame Blanche network, had been summoned to an audience with the king where they would be awarded a medal in recognition of their service. The resistance work of La Dame Blanche had been financed by Britain, and Britain was indeed grateful.
The day passed in a blur, and at the time the medal had not meant very much to Elinor, given what she had done to earn the thing. However, she was taken aback when a woman who looked very much like Isabelle, accompanied by a man in uniform, entered via another door on the opposite side of the ballroom – which was the largest room Elinor had ever imagined. The Whites – the name De Witt had been jettisoned into the past so they would not be mistaken for alien spies in London when they arrived in 1917 – were clustered together and had not seen other medal recipients enter or depart, a move they assumed was to protect identities. Charlotte and Cecily whispered together as Elinor kept her eyes on the king, the man in uniform and the woman. Did Elinor imagine the woman’s smile, the nod of acknowledgement? She nudged her mother and sister, who both admonished her with sharp looks as if she were a young child misbehaving in church. Elinor crept forward a few steps, so she might hear when the woman she thought resembled Isabelle spoke to the king. She watched another man in uniform beckon the woman to approach the monarch.
The uniformed man announced her name, which seemed to echo in Elinor’s direction. Clare Fields. And when the woman curtsied and replied to the king’s greeting, it was clear she was British.
‘Linni, come back here,’ said Charlotte, sotto voce through clenched teeth as she grabbed the top of Elinor’s arm and pulled her into line. ‘You know better!’
‘I think that’s Isabelle,’ said Elinor.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Cecily, her voice low.
Then the woman was no longer there. Now, in Paris, decades later, Elinor could see everything about that day in her mind’s eye. It might have been yesterday. There was the uniformed man who beckoned them to approach the king, who expressed gratitude for their service before the pinning on of medals. Charlotte and Cecily curtsied to the king, and she forgot to do the same because she had turned her head in case Clare Fields stepped back into the room. Her mother had grabbed her arm once more and almost pulled her to her knees in deference to the monarch.
She wondered about Clare Fields, and if indeed she had made an error due to nervousness about the occasion. But was she at all anxious on the day? She remembered being a bit bored by it all, and there was of course the argument with her mother when they left the palace.
‘I cannot believe I was so humiliated by a daughter of mine in front of the king himself.’ Charlotte pressed a handkerchief to her brow.
‘Why?’
‘Because, idiot,’ said Cecily, ‘we practised the curtsy a million times so we all did it together, and then you forgot because you were gawping around looking at other people instead of concentrating on what you were supposed to be doing.’
‘But I did curtsy!’ protested Elinor. ‘I was only a little bit late, not even a second. I was looking for that lady – I’m sure it was Isabelle.’
‘I saw her – she had short black hair, so I know it wasn’t Isabelle,’ said Cecily. ‘Anyway, Isabelle was Belgian.’
‘We don’t know that, do we? She always spoke in French.’
‘Girls! Our work was recognised by no less than the king! Now, let us forget Linni’s faux pas and go for a nice tea. It’s a lovely afternoon, the war is over. We never expected to see this day, yet here we are safe and well here in London, and your father would be so proud of us because we served two countries. Now it’s time to celebrate and forget. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, Mama,’ the sisters replied in unison.
As she made tea in her Paris flat, Elinor De Witt, a woman who spoke five languages, who had earned two degrees, landed a good job and attracted a lover who bored her, wondered if her adolescent self was indeed wrong about Clare Fields. It had been a heady day, a strange event, and perhaps there were a few butterflies in her stomach after all, so it was possible she had been mistaken. She cut a slice of lemon into the tea and stirred it together with half a teaspoon of honey. Elinor had done her best not to think of Isabelle over the years, and now she wondered if she had survived the war. And if so, and by whatever name, had she suffered nightmares about what happened in Belgium during that terrible time of want and death? If still alive, she would be in her mid-to-late forties.
Elinor wondered if Isabelle had ever struggled to balance herself when the war was over. Would she have been happy if consigned to live an ordinary life? Elinor remembered a feeling she had experienced the previous summer, when she joined Alex on his yacht in Cannes. Though the sojourn started well in calm seas, inclement weather soon closed in, and they had sailed through a storm for what seemed like hours before emerging into steady waters once again. When they came ashore, she struggled to find purchase on land, as if any equilibrium had deserted her and she had lost the sense of where to put her feet. It was a strange feeling, and she thought, then, as she reached for a guardrail to steady herself, that it was how she had felt after they escaped Belgium in fear for their lives, yet just days later were living a quiet life in London. The setting of her feet on solid ground was almost harder to bear than the storm.