2

Behind Lise the door shut. It was the small exit door set in huge bolted gates of iron from which the walls of Vesoul, closed prison for women, stretched away, forbiddingly high and angled with arc-lights at every corner and curve. The small door was locked too and the guard had a grille so that he could look through.

He had let Lise out just after six o’clock in the morning, motioning her through without a word of congratulation, not even a ‘Bonne chance’ – Perhaps he had seen too many women come and go and wanted to get back to his newspaper – but, Never mind, thought Lise. She was outside.

It had been cleverly managed; announced for the afternoon, but if she had come out of Vesoul then, there would have been a barricade of cameras and journalists waiting. A crowd probably hostile. ‘La Balafrée released.’ ‘La Balafrée.’

‘Yes, that was my nickname,’ said Lise. ‘La Balafrée. The branded one, gashed for life.’ ‘La Balafrée, Madame Lise’ … ‘Madame Lise gets off after only ten years.’ Lise could imagine the headlines, the talk revived; commuters reading their daily papers in trains, comments from politicians, gossip in cafés and factories, shops: women at home pronouncing over their coffee, ‘Something wrong with our penal service … It’s not justice. Far too soft … only ten years!’ Let them try just one, thought Lise. Would any of them have said ‘Poor woman’?

But she was not poor; she, Lise, now, at thirty-seven, had no surname she wanted to own, no family or old friends to greet her, no possessions except what she had in her suitcase, no money except the few hundred francs she had earned in the workshop; in fact, nothing except hope, but she stepped out into the April morning buoyant with the happiness Father Louis was to see all those years after. She stood on the pavement and took a deep breath.

‘Will you be frightened?’ Marianne Rueff, the Assistante Sociale or Welfare Officer, had asked her. ‘It would be only natural after so many years.’ But Lise was not frightened, only a little giddy, and feeling a stranger, as she had felt when, after the few discreet goodbyes, she had crossed the prison outer courtyard with its trees and lines of parked cars to the gates.

It was the first time she had set foot on that courtyard ground since the day when the great gate had opened to let in the police van, the ‘panier à salade,’ with its load of miserable occupants. She had not noticed the trees then; it had been too difficult getting down from the van because she had been chained to the woman next to her, as they had been chained on the long train journey, two by two like miscreant sheep; Lise’s wrists had been marked for days. It had also been raining, a cold dark afternoon, And I was dark, black dark, with no feeling as if I had been made of wood, wood not iron thankfully, she thought now, because there is a tale, or is it a sentence that someone once said when speaking of a lute, that anything made of wood has an affinity with the Cross.

‘But why did I take three years to find that out?’ Lise had said to Soeur Marie Alcide. ‘It was only after I had done three years that suddenly your white tunics … Why so long?’

‘Well, perhaps you were not ready,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

‘I suppose if it were the same for everybody it would be very dull,’ Lise had said.

‘I think you will find God is never dull,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

‘You are put down as Elizabeth Fanshawe,’ the Directrice had said that first night at Vesoul. To Lise it had sounded almost like another accusation. The Directrice and Sous-Directrice were in ordinary but well-cut suits; they looked not like senior prison officers, but everyday women, except that both had an unmistakable authority; the clerk, writing down particulars as the forms were filled in, was in white, and Lise had caught a glimpse of Madame Chef, the chief wardress, her white uniform gold-starred on the lapel, and over it a dark blue cloak. The new arrivals had gone in to the office one by one. ‘Elizabeth Fanshawe, but you are known as Madame Lise Ambard.’ Mercifully the Directrice did not add ‘La Balafrée’, though that had screamed from the headlines in every newspaper. ‘Quinze ans pour La Balafrée’ ‘La Balafrée condamnée à quinze ans … fifteen years’ ‘La Balafrée’.

‘I am Elizabeth Fanshawe,’ said Lise.

‘Then you are English!’

‘I was English once.’

‘But of course you are English,’ Patrice used often to say. ‘Anyone not a fool should see that.’

‘Most people think I’m an American.’

‘Americans don’t often have that long-legged grace.’ Lise knew she carried herself well. That was from years of Aunt Millicent’s ‘Sit up, Elizabeth. Don’t slouch,’ and I was taller than most French girls, ‘Nor do they often have fine bones like a racehorse,’ said Patrice. ‘Didn’t the English have a king,’ he teased her, ‘Somebody Longshanks?’

‘Edward Longshanks. That’s hardly a compliment.’

‘You don’t need compliments, thank God, chérie. Then there’s your voice. Do you remember how embarrassed I was when I first took you into a restaurant? It carried into every corner, that “county” voice.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s not county. My father was a solicitor.’

‘But of what family! You have “family” stamped all over you.’

‘Well, I don’t know them and they certainly don’t know me …’

‘Next of kin?’ the Sous-Directrice had asked.

‘No one.’ Lise could not, possibly, name Aunt Millicent.

‘There must be; someone has to be notified in case of illness or death.’

‘There is no one.’

‘Then what is to be done in the event …?’

‘Put me in the dustbin …’ but Lise could not say that; she shrugged.

She had told Jacques Jouvin the facts; facts, to her, were the least important; he had had to deduce the rest which was perhaps why, in court, he was so badly defeated.

Jacques – ‘Jacquot’ to them all at the Rue Duchesne – was Maître Jouvin, a well known and eloquent lawyer who, out of kindness, had chosen to defend Lise. ‘But I have hardly any money, Jacquot. It all belonged to Patrice or, rather, Emile.’ Emile, small, pale, greasy-skinned, with his quick currant-black eyes and short-cut hair, lived in the shadow of his splendid brother. ‘But Emile had more power than we thought,’ said Lise. ‘He kept the accounts, which really governed everything.’

‘Rosamonde will have to go,’ Emile had pronounced one day.

‘Go? Go where?’

‘Where they all go,’ said Emile without interest: ‘to a cheaper house if she’s lucky. Maybe the streets …’

The streets were a different world from a ‘house’, and one despised the other. ‘But I started like that,’ said Patrice, ‘sending out my girls,’ but even then he had groomed them carefully. ‘Monsieur always had class,’ Eugenia, the maid in charge of the rooms, said in pride. He showed Lise in fun. ‘Stand against the wall – pretend it’s a doorway or a porch. Lean … look at ease. Pull your stomach in, girl. Light a cigarette. Now show me your leg. Lift it … higher … now show the other one discreetly – you must always be careful of the flics – the police. Now! I’ll be the client. Puff your cigarette so that the glow shows your face. Now follow me. No, don’t move. Follow me with your eyes.’

‘Coming with me?’

‘How much?’ and Patrice laughed again. ‘How much will you charge me, chérie?’ But to Lise it was not fun. To be put out of a house to that …

‘You have had Rosamonde for fifteen years,’ she had protested to Emile.

‘Precisely. Which is why she’s not earning her keep; she’s too old.’

‘Milo! She might end up in the Seine!’ Emile shrugged.

‘If there was no chance of a sou for Rosamonde,’ Lise told Maître Jouvin, ‘what hope will there be for me?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jacques. ‘I don’t care about the fee, but please, Lise, be frank with me,’ and Lise had tried to tell it all, as simply and directly as possible, first for Jacques, later to Soeur Marie Alcide, as one day she would tell it to Marc, ‘when he had to know,’ said Lise.

It seemed an interminable dossier. How absurd, said Lise. ‘It took me two minutes to kill Patrice, two and a half years to compile the reason why, and three days of public time and money for the Court to find me guilty when I had already said I was.’

The dossier – the truth but somehow oddly distorted – had been read out, French fashion, to the assembled Court before the trial began. ‘In England you are tried first for the particular crime before your disreputable past is made known,’ Lise was to explain to Marc.

‘Where did you meet Patrice Ambard?’ That was almost the first question Monsieur le Président had put to her.

‘In a fountain.’ Lise could not say that but it was true.

It had been the night of August the twenty-fourth, 1944, the Liberation of Paris, when the French tanks came roaring down the Avenue d’Orléans, and all bedlam broke loose as the people massed the Avenue, every avenue, the boulevards and streets in a sea of hysteria and joy. Every Place was crowded, the bars were giving free drinks as bells were rung, the deep note of Notre Dame sounding over all.

It was dangerous; bursts of fighting were still going on as snipers shot from the roofs, but every corner was already full of French and Allied troops. They had to protect their prisoners from the crowd who spat at them, kicked and bit, even tried to lynch them. Men climbed ladders to sit on window sills and walls; they sat in trees, as they shouted and sang.

Lise had driven all day, coming up from the coast. ‘I was seconded to the Motor Transport Corps, picked to drive the American General, General Simpson. I can see myself now in my khaki tunic and skirt, green flashes, so proud of my camouflaged Ford with its fluttering flag. I was just twenty.’

‘France,’ Aunt Millicent had said doubtfully when Lise told her in confidence that she might be going there. ‘Will it be safe?’

‘By then it will.’

‘Does it mean Paris?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Lady Moberly used to know of a good pension where they took English people. I wonder if it’s still there.’

‘Aunt, I’m in the Army; there’ll be quarters.’

Lise lived with Aunt Millicent, ‘because I was an orphan. My aunt had hardly been out of our village, Greenhurst,’ and, ‘I don’t like it,’ said Aunt Millicent, but to Lise the thought of Paris was the most exciting of her life, ‘which wouldn’t be difficult,’ she had told Patrice, ‘brought up in a little Sussex village by a maiden aunt, going to a small private boarding-school for girls. We couldn’t afford very much. If it hadn’t been for the war I might have turned into a second Aunt Millicent,’ she had teased Patrice.

‘You! Impossible.’

She had driven into Paris that first night, or tried to drive, but the traffic was jammed; people surged round the cars and trucks; soldiers sat girls on the bonnets; they stood on the mudguards and climbed on the roofs, cheering every army car they saw, waving little French or American flags or Union Jacks.

‘Why were you waving an American flag when you’re English?’ Patrice had asked.

‘I took it off the car.’

Lise had tried to edge along the pavement, the corporal in the seat beside her doing his best to guide her but she could hardly hear him. The General and his A.D.C. were in the back and at last her ‘old boy’ as Lise called him had leaned forward. ‘It’s no good, Liz. See if you can turn into the next side road and stop. We’ll walk, or try and walk.’ After almost an hour, Lise succeeded in that. ‘Lock the car securely and come back in the morning,’ the General ordered. ‘We’ll hope she’ll still be here. Make a note of the street. You can fetch her, then report.’

Lise had failed to report.

As the ‘old boy’ got out of the car with the Captain he had stopped. ‘You know where you’re supposed to be staying, Liz?’

‘Yes Sir.’ In front of the other two she did not call him Simps as she did when they were alone. She gave him the paper with the address.

‘Do you know where this is?’

‘I haven’t been in Paris before.’

‘I see. Well, I shall need Captain Harlan. Corporal …’

‘Yes Sir.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Collins, Sir.’

The General gave him the scrap of paper. ‘Corporal Collins, you will escort Driver Fanshawe to her hostel. Here is the address,’ and, to Lise, ‘You speak French, Liz?’

‘A little.’

‘Enough to ask the way?’

‘I think so.’

‘You will take her straight there?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Sir …’ began Lise.

‘Orders are orders,’ said the old boy.

‘But …’ and it burst out, ‘I have never been in Paris before.’

He stopped, looking down at her – he was so tall he could do that – and as he looked a surge of people were round them; one woman caught Lise, hugged and kissed her then dared to kiss the General. ‘Please,’ beseeched Lise.

‘Very well.’ The eyes below the bushy eyebrows smiled. ‘Let her have a little tour around first, Corporal, but not too long or too late, Liz. Promise.’

Fortunately the crowd swept them apart before Lise could give that promise.

It was ten o’clock. For three hours or more Lise had walked, danced, drunk wine with whom she did not know, in bars and cafés so crowded nobody could sit down. They were giving free drinks. ‘Take them while you can get them, mes gars. It will never happen again.’ At first Corporal Collins had held Lise’s arm in a grip so hard it bruised but, as with the General and A.D.C., they had soon been swept apart – and the Corporal had her scrap of paper. Lise still had the name of the side street where she had left the staff car and its keys were in her pocket; if she could find her way back, she could unlock it and sleep in it; she had been too happy to bother, but now she was getting tired; her feet were aching. It had been a long day and, ‘Excusezmoi, Madame. Est-ce-que vous pouvez me diriger …?’ but a band of young Americans, G.I.s and French girls, exuberant with joy and wine, pulled Lise away and into their ranks. ‘Come on, Polly.’ Why Polly, wondered Lise? Perhaps they called all English girls Polly. ‘You don’t wanna stand there talking that rubbish.’

‘But I want to go home.’

‘No one’s going home tonight. C’mon,’ and soon they were in a chain, dancing and buffeting. They came to a Place where they could swing the girls high; Lise’s cap came off, her hair fell down. Here, fountains were playing; perhaps they had not been turned on since the Occupation and someone had rigged up lights, red, white and blue, playing on the water. People sobbed with joy as they saw them. In a final burst of exhilaration, the young men swung the girls into a fountain.

‘That’s where I first saw you,’ said Patrice. ‘Laughing and splashing, rising from the water like a nymph.’

‘Funny kind of nymph in a khaki uniform.’

‘It didn’t look like khaki – dark. You might have been wrapped in water weeds and your dark hair, wet and streaming. I can still see your wet face and the blue of your eyes …’

All that Lise knew was that the man who helped her out of the fountain was no ordinary person. To begin with he was not in uniform – even Patrice did not dare to wear one to which he was not entitled – and, by his clothes, she thought he must be someone important. He was not as tall as she, but Patrice had ‘presence’, she did not know what else to call it, and charm; he rid Lise of her Americans not only with authority but friendliness – what he said in French she could not then fathom. He was red-haired, something she had not known a Frenchman could be; that, his blue eyes and fair skin were even more difficult to explain when she saw Emile, a ‘frog’ Frenchman if ever there were one. They must have had different fathers – or different mothers, thought a more grown-up Lise, but she never knew which. Patrice and Emile said little about their family though once, ‘It’s the Norman in me,’ Patrice had said of his hair and eyes.

He was far older than she – how much older she did not see until they were indoors under electric lights; He’s at least forty, thought Lise; that to her was a great age then, but it did not seem to bother Patrice. ‘If ever there were a happy hypocrite,’ he said often, ‘I am he. I amuse myself as if I were twenty. Worry? I leave that to Emile and take what I want from life with both hands.’

At the moment it was clear he wanted Lise.

‘Mademoiselle, you are very wet.’ He had an extraordinarily sweet smile. ‘Somehow he always kept that,’ Lise was to tell Maître Jouvin and, for a moment, was not able to go on.

‘You are very wet.’

Dripping from the fountain, Lise had laughed and thrown back her hair.

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Not tonight. Who could mind anything tonight?’

‘I mind that you are probably catching cold. Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’ Lise said it so firmly that he laughed too. ‘But I think that must not continue. You must let me take you to your – but it wouldn’t be a hotel. Where are you staying?’

‘That’s just it; I don’t know. Corporal Collins knew but I have lost Corporal Collins, and my cap …’ She could not stop laughing.

‘You seem singularly carefree, Mademoiselle.’

‘Oh, I am – I am …’ but Lise was beginning to feel dizzy; she swayed and he caught her.

‘I think, besides being wet, you are a little drunk, Mademoiselle.’

‘Well, I haven’t had wine – much – before.’

‘And nothing to eat.’

‘Not all day.’ Now her teeth were chattering.

‘Restaurants are impossible; also, you are wet. I’m sorry I sent my mother out of Paris,’ – Lise was to hear of that fictitious mother again – ‘but our apartment is quite near and dinner is waiting. Let me take you there.’

‘But …’ ‘At least I had the sense to hesitate,’ Lise said afterwards. ‘I have orders.’

‘How can you carry them out?’ That was unanswerable. ‘Don’t be afraid. Patagon will chaperon us.’

‘Who is Patagon?’

‘My macaw – blue and yellow and big and fierce. He will tear me to pieces if I touch you. Come.’

‘You are very kind.’

‘Not at all. It’s not often we entertain Ondine, Patagon and I. Come.’ ‘And I was hooked like any silly fish,’ said Lise.

‘Your age?’ Vesoul’s Directrice had asked.

‘Thirty-one.’

‘Religion?’

‘None.’

The Directrice made no comment. A print of Lise’s index finger was taken. On the form she could read ‘Distinguishing marks,’ but there was no need to ask that question: both the officers’ eyes, trained to take in every detail, had already flickered over her face.

‘I wonder if she was in the Resistance,’ Father Louis was to say long afterwards to Marc when they had first noticed the scar in the Belle Source garden.

‘Would she be as old as that?’ asked Marc.

‘Somewhere near, I should think,’ said Father Louis, and ‘That scar must once have been deep. It has paled now,’ but any emotion, anger, distress, made it redden and stand out again. It was throbbing as Lise had stood before the desk and, ‘Yes, Madame, I have a distinguishing mark, I’m La Balafrée,’ and, with all the insolence she could muster – Lise could be vilely insolent – ‘Would you like me to tell you what we canaille call a scar?’ she had asked, and shot out the obscene word. ‘Oh, I was horrible – horrible,’ she told Soeur Marie Alcide.

They had looked at her without a change of expression; the Directrice simply sounded the bell on her desk and said, ‘Next.’ If only I had known then, Lise thought afterwards, what it is to have pity.

It had been a long afternoon. The Directrice and Sous-Directrice had already seen more than a dozen prisoners, some defiant, some hostile, some stunned with despair, some rude like Lise, all exhausted; a soul-destroying task but Lise had not a thought for the officers then – they seemed not women but ogres. She only knew she was cold to her bones, bruised with tiredness and frightened by the echoing silence, a silence that was unnerving after Sevenet, the Maison d’Arrêt, where she had been kept waiting in two years of suspense before her trial; Sevenet had been bad enough but talking, some independent life, was allowed. At Vesoul it seemed absolute silence was a rule. Oh well! thought Lise. I never want to talk again.

After the supper was eaten in that silence, there were more orders before they were taken to their allotted cells.

‘Empty your handbag. We shall list the contents and give you a receipt. Your watch please.’

On this morning of her release Lise had been given the watch back, but after all these years, would it go? There is no service to wind up prisoners’ watches but – what does it matter? – Lise had thought that first day of prison. If it stops, why bother? Life has stopped too.

‘Your jewellery,’ and the wardress said automatically, ‘You may keep your wedding ring.’

‘I have no wedding ring.’

Aunt Millicent had, of course, believed she had. Patrice, to Lise’s surprise, had gone over to England with her to pay a duty visit to Aunt Millicent. ‘But why?’ Lise asked him afterwards.

‘As a matter of fact there was a possibility of our setting Milo up in London.’

Lise remembered how out of place Patrice had looked in Greenhurst and had been amused to see how quickly Aunt Millicent had fallen under his charm and his power. He had already succeeded in getting Lise released from the Motor Transport Corps. ‘How?’ asked Lise.

‘I have a good many important people in my little hand,’ Patrice had said and laughed.

Aunt Millicent had even given them her Rockingham tea-set as a wedding present. ‘At least we believed it was Rockingham. I believed things then,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide.

‘Where does your charming Patrice live?’ Aunt had asked.

‘I’m afraid in rather an expensive part of Paris, near the Opera, the Rue Duchesne.’ Patrice had been astute enough to buy the house when the war was at its worst. Lise did not tell Aunt Millicent that now she, Lise, lived there too – but at first she had thought it was only an apartment.

It was over a nightclub – at least I thought it was a nightclub. Patrice had a private staircase; the flat was almost aggressively masculine with leather-covered sofas and chairs, colours in reds and brown, but there was an odd smell of scent and always, through the night, the sound of music – and there were the silk dressing-gowns, the exotic blue and yellow of the giant macaw in his cage; only Patrice could ever let Patagon out and seemed to take pleasure in his fierce pecks and beating wings. ‘You must feed him with raw meat but use a pair of tongs,’ warned Patrice. ‘Throw the hood over him when you clean his cage.’

‘I think I had a hood over my head too,’ said Lise.

Aunt Millicent had stopped her allowance. ‘You won’t need anything now,’ Aunt Millicent had said. ‘Monsieur Ambard is obviously rich,’ and, ‘The Fanshawe girl who married that rather outré Frenchman …’ Lise could hear the talk in Greenhurst.

‘An exceedingly charming and well-to-do Frenchman.’ Aunt Millicent, Lise thought, would have defended her but, ‘What am I to do?’ Lise asked in Paris. ‘I must earn my living.’

‘On the contrary, you must live and that is what you are going to do – with me.’

‘But didn’t you guess what kind of man he was?’ asked Jacques.

‘I was as green as a lettuce leaf.’ True, Lise had been driving for two years, but usually with other girls. ‘I had never met anyone who was anyone until I was seconded to drive General Simpson. I was a good driver, but he was fatherly and, in those days, even at twenty, one could be young.’

‘There was one thing that did strike me,’ she told Maître Jouvin, ‘though I didn’t try and understand it then. Patrice looked so well fed – too well fed in a Paris that had been half-starved in those years of the Occupation; some people had gone through the winter living on turnips and a few potatoes, while he had the sleek satisfied look that comes from at least two good meals a day; when I saw that dinner I couldn’t believe my eyes – a whole fillet of beef; I didn’t even know what it was. In my ignorance I had supposed conditions in France were different from England, not that they were worse for most people. If I had stopped to work it out, it would have told me many things – how, for instance, Patrice and Emile got the money to move from the little house on the left bank to the Rue Duchesne – but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t, it was all such a whirlwind.’

Until she met Patrice, Lise had not been to a fashionable restaurant or to any but a provincial theatre, never to opera, never to a nightclub. ‘I didn’t know men chose women’s clothes, dressed you like a model or a doll. Patrice gave me rings, jewellery, furs. I had Coco, a little French bulldog I adored – Patagon was wildly jealous. It was fun and I had never had any fun.’

‘And you were lovers?’

‘Of course,’ but to Soeur Marie Alcide she said, ‘Until Patrice, I had never been kissed on the mouth – or …’ She broke off but it was Lise, not the Sister who blushed. ‘I didn’t know you made love over and over again, not just once in the night but day-time, any time. I thought that was for whores. It didn’t occur to me I was a whore …’

‘Put on that gold lamé dress, chérie,’ said Patrice. ‘I think you must go downstairs tonight.’

‘Downstairs?’

‘You don’t think I live here as a tenant?’

‘You mean that … that club …’

‘Belongs to me, at least to me and Milo – and it isn’t exactly a club, chérie. You said you wanted to earn your living. Well, you are going to be a little more generous than that. You are going to earn mine …’

‘And it dawned on me,’ said Lise.

‘You mean … be like those girls?’ She was white with shock.

‘They are not “those girls”. They are the same as you. Many of them started up here, chérie – just like you.’

Patrice knew how to hurt physically too, without leaving a mark; when Lise refused he had twisted her arms, holding them behind her back, and slapped her face until her ears rang. ‘But it wasn’t that which made me give in,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide. ‘I … I had thought he loved me – of course I didn’t know then what love was – for instance that pride has nothing to do with love and in that first hurt moment I didn’t care what I did – or thought I didn’t.’

‘I had never seen the rooms on the first floor,’ said Lise. ‘I had not even known they were there, a whole line of rooms, opulent and scented, with old Eugenia hobbling up and down.’ ‘Number four, Momone.’ ‘Number seven.’ Eugenia was the mother of Gaston, who kept the entrance and did everything else as well from morning to night. Eugenia spied through keyholes and cackled; she carried tales from spite and always had her hand held out. It was her duty to keep the rooms tidy, smooth each bed with her stick or put on a fresh cover as soon as it was vacant and, ‘Don’t let anyone be too long,’ Patrice would instruct, ‘As I was to instruct,’ said Lise. ‘They’re not here for the night, you know – unless they pay.’

They usually paid. The Rue Duchesne was expensive. ‘Fifty dollars for one go!’ a young American expostulated and, ‘There are cheaper houses round the corner,’ Lise, when she became Madam Manager – Mère Maquerelle – used to say smoothly. ‘Besides, you have chosen Zoë, one of our best girls, so what did you expect?’

‘It was amazing how quickly I learnt,’ said Lise, ‘and soon how well I trained them, considering I was something of a fake myself – a whore who wouldn’t be a whore.’ Then she added, ‘The Rockingham tea-set was a fake too, as I found out when I tried to sell it. They would only take it in the flea-market, where I belonged too.’

‘Not quite,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

‘Quite,’ said Lise firmly. ‘Ma Soeur, you don’t know it all.’

On that first night she had been handed over to a Colonel of the Foreign Legion – ‘Worse than an Arab and quite drunk,’ said Patrice. ‘You may as well go in at the deep end. Now remember …’

Remember! Lise never forgot. The Colonel had had no mercy and finally, leaving him asleep, Lise had escaped, gasping. She had dodged past Eugenia down the back stairs, found a coat in the passage – it had probably been Gaston’s – ran through the kitchen like a mad thing, astonishing the cook Marcelline who, loyal even then, never told a word, and, in the street, ran again. She was sore, dishevelled, blinded by tears and it was raining hard. She had seen a church – it would be empty at this time of night. It had been not only empty but locked and then Lise had seen a light in the presbytery. She crept up and saw, through the window, a priest, white-haired, old, but still up, working, writing at a desk. Timidly she had knocked.

‘But, my child, I can’t let you stay here all night,’ Père Silas had said.

‘Father, please.’ ‘If he had, would it all have been different,’ she asked Soeur Marie Alcide? ‘He hesitated, but it must have been my looks,’ the dress, gold shot with green, brilliant and revealing, the scent Patrice had sprayed her with, her make-up raddled, her hair fallen out of its knot and, ‘I can’t,’ said Père Silas. ‘I have young priests here … and my housekeeper. I’ll find you a taxi while you tidy yourself. Here is an address. I’ll telephone the Sisters and they’ll take you in for tonight. Then come and see me in the morning.’

‘I have no money, Father.’

‘They won’t want money. Here’s enough for the taxi,’ and the good old man had given Lise a ten-franc note. ‘That’s too much.’ ‘Keep it, keep it.’ Then he had put on his cloak, taken his umbrella and gone out into the streets; he came back with a taxi and put her into it. ‘Go to the Sisters for tonight and come back tomorrow morning. Ten o’clock without fail.’

‘Without fail, Father,’ but the address Lise had given the driver was not that of the hostel but the Rue Duchesne. It was only when she was there again that Lise realised she had no bed of her own. I should have slept on the kitchen table.’ Instead she had climbed Patrice’s staircase back to the flat. ‘And for some unfathomable reason I told Patrice about Père Silas.’

‘I’m going back to see him in the morning.’

‘Are you?’

‘Yes, at ten. This is the end, Patrice.’

‘At ten?’ Patrice had made no other comment but, ‘At ten o’clock I was locked in his office,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide and, ‘You’re going to learn from another kind of priest,’ said Patrice.

When it was over he had knocked her on to the floor – she, proud, poised Lise, cowering and bruised. ‘You’ll not be fit to be seen for a good few days,’ said Patrice. ‘But if you like, go and show yourself now to your holy man.’

‘You could have,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

‘I was too – ashamed.’

‘He would have understood.’

‘Would he? No, he couldn’t.’

The Sister studied Lise’s bowed head. ‘Was it because … you liked it?’ asked Soeur Marie Alcide.

The head came up and Lise looked Soeur Marie Alcide in the face. ‘It was ecstasy,’ said Lise.

Patrice had said, ‘Now come up to the flat.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

Upstairs he had wrapped her in one of his own dressing-gowns, the same she had worn the night of the fountain, then given her brandy, and had taken her face between his hands. ‘Poor bruised face. Terrible black eye!’ and, ‘Do you think I like doing things like this?’ he had asked almost virtuously. ‘Like sharing you? But we have to eat, buy clothes, live. Don’t you understand?’ said Patrice and, for once, he had spoken seriously. ‘Don’t you realise I’m good for nothing, only bad for one thing.’

‘And you have no limits.’

‘Fortunately none,’ and he smiled, the smile that always left Lise helpless. She tried to fight him. ‘I hate you.’

‘No, you love me – and I love you, Lise’ – ‘Which no one else had ever really done,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide.

‘Why should he love me? Me, among all those dozens and dozens of girls far more beautiful, amusing, desirable. Why me? Of course, he knew he could trust this poor fool.’

‘Yes, loyalty rates high in that world,’ Soeur Marie Alcide agreed. ‘But I think it was for something more uncommon than that. You always gave, Lise, gave through thick and thin.’

‘Yes, you are right, chérie,’ Patrice had said seriously. ‘You are different from the others, from everyone,’ and, ‘After that,’ said Lise, ‘though I went downstairs every night I didn’t go up to the “rooms”. It was as if I had a label on me – “Monsieur Patrice”; the men kept their distance – except one …’ – and she said, ‘Yes, I had five years of Patrice. Only two without Vivi but …’ She broke off; she could not tell Soeur Marie Alcide, not even her, what else Patrice had said that day.

‘Lise, say after me what I shall say to you.’ He had been even more serious.

‘Say what?’

‘Just, “Chéri” and, “à jamais” – “forever”. Say it.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘But it’s like a children’s pact.’

‘Children have a way of speaking the truth. Say it.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Please chérie.’ No one ever said ‘chérie’ as Patrice could, but Lise had still tried to hold out. ‘Patrice, not now.’

‘Now.’

And, through her ravages and tears, Lise had whispered it: ‘Chéri, à jamais.’

‘Go behind the screen, Fanshawe, undress … put your clothes on the chair … now take a shower.’

‘Madame, I had a bath this morning.’

‘Take a shower. Use the soap.’

Then came what Lise, for all her long sentence, never could get used to – the search, when the prisoner stood naked while her body, her hair, her clothes, her cell were thoroughly gone over. It had to happen, she realised afterwards, and at unexpected times. ‘If there isn’t a search, properly done and often done, there will be trouble,’ Mademoiselle Signoret, Directrice of Le Fouest, twin prison to Vesoul, was to tell her, but now Lise smarted under the indignity.

‘Take your uniform,’ her ‘trousseau’, underclothes of stiff thick woven cotton and, ‘in those days,’ Lise was to tell Marc, ‘we had a long dingy dark dress, a shoulder cape – unmistakably “prison”, and a black head-handkerchief that most of us refused to wear, stuff slippers for indoors, sabots for outside – mine were too wide for my feet and made blisters.’

On the morning of her release Lise’s own clothes had been given back to her packed in the expensive dressing-case that had been one of Patrice’s early gifts, morocco leather with ivory fittings – ‘Ivory suits you better than silver,’ – but dressing in those once familiar clothes had been to Lise like dressing a ghost.

‘On the last day of the trial Lise Ambard, La Balafrée, wore a dark red Chanel suit …’ Marcelline had brought the suit to Sevenet. She had wanted Lise to wear the black and white check, ‘So striking, Madame,’ but Lise was glad now she had refrained; it would have been far too conspicuous for coming out of prison. As it was, she was sure she looked strangely old-fashioned and she had put on weight under the Vesoul régime, so that she had had to pin the skirt band. Her hands too felt stiff in gloves, it was so long since she had worn any. She had left her hat behind. ‘Hardly anyone wears them nowadays,’ Marianne had told her. ‘Use your scarf – it’s a beauty.’ It had been another present from Patrice, long long after the dressing-case, but, ‘After all, you keep my house for me.’

‘Both houses,’ she had flung at him.

Now the scarf looked as over-opulent as the suit looked out of date. Never mind, they’ll find me some clothes, thought Lise. It doesn’t matter what, because I shan’t have to wear lay ones much longer, or hope I shan’t, please God. ‘Please God,’ murmured Lise again and stepped into the road.

Behind her, the big building rose above the street, shut off from it by the walls and the gatehouse. The walls in places were double, as Lise knew, and set with those merciless arc-lights. Who would have believed that she, Lise, could come to view those very walls with something like affection, certainly gratitude. What a paradox! she thought. They are supposed to be unyielding, yet have yielded me so much – though I could not have believed it when I went inside them.

Such a weight of despair hung over the Maison Centrale of Vesoul, despair and fear; the despair could be dispelled, as Lise had found out, but there was reason for the fear. ‘You’ll see, when we come out,’ the other women had told her, ‘few people, very few, will have anything to do with us, no matter what help we are given and never mind what we have done and how we have paid for it.’

The resentment was understandable. There were, of course, the irrécupérables, the unrescuable, who seemed to have evil in their skin, as if the devil had sown the seed that made them bad through and through – but many, Lise was certain, were in prison not because of what they had done, but because of what other people, especially men, had done to them, and some of us, like me, thought Lise, were in prison for their illusions. Well, I have no illusions now. Those first years at Vesoul had cured that, three long years – before I woke up, thought Lise.

Time had passed – but I did not know it; like all the others, for the first three months, Lise had had to be in the Division d’Accueil – what a name for it, ‘Division of Welcome!’ Solitary confinement. ‘Terrible, but necessary,’ Mademoiselle Signoret was to tell her. ‘We have to find out what each newcomer is like – because of the others.’ It was always ‘because of the others’ in prison, in the Rue Duchesne as in the convent, sensible and just, but hard. Hard! At first, determined to stay sane, Lise had made a calendar and crossed off the days – But soon I couldn’t remember if I had crossed one off or not, ‘so I crossed another and perhaps another and soon I thought it was Friday and it was still only Tuesday, or thought it was Tuesday and suddenly it was Friday. If I had gone to Mass as I could have, I should have known the days, but it didn’t occur to me to go to Mass. Why, when I went to those early morning Masses in Paris?’ she asked Soeur Marie Alcide.

Perhaps the worst of the Division d’Accueil was when each prisoner was let out, morning and evening, to take her solitary exercise in a little gravelled courtyard; Lise, of the long legs, who loved to walk, to stride – going round and round like a leopard in a cage. I felt like a leopard or is it a panther that never can be tamed? They were right then, with their walls and locks and keys – I was dangerous.

Yet, even there, in the Division d’Accueil, for Lise there had been her star. ‘The real prison is the night,’ the other women had told her when she was allowed to join them. ‘It’s then, after they turn the key in the lock of your cell at eight o’clock and you are alone in that narrow box until half-past six next morning; a box with an iron bed, a chair and table, a locker that has no lock, a basin and sluice in the corner with the bucket you have filled beside it … yes, it is then, in the night …’ But Lise had not found that.

The cell windows were not barred; they were made of strong frosted unbreakable glass in metal frames, but one pane, too small to get through, of course, had been left clear by some imaginative person – afterwards Lise fathomed it was a suggestion of Mademoiselle Signoret, though Mademoiselle was then only a junior officer at Vesoul – a pane left clear so that Lise could look out, over to the hills, across the shimmer of lights that was the town, near but utterly distant from the inmates of the Maison Centrale.

The high top of the window opened too, the top panes pulled by a cord, but there was no way of getting up to them, unless one pulled the bed under it and set a chair on top, but the vigilante, passing by every few minutes, would have lifted the ‘judas’, the peephole shutter, and seen – yet standing on the chair, Lise was tall enough to look up and out to the sky, and every evening she saw the star. They called it the evening star, Hesperus, Aunt Millicent had told Lise in the garden at home when she was a little girl. In Paris Lise had not seen it until Patrice banished her to the fourth floor, when she would stand, with Coco in her arms, her cheek against his black head, and watch it over the rooftops and chimney-pots of the Rue Duchesne. It seemed to give her life a continuity and in prison, locked in so early, she had seen how, in summer, it appeared as the sun went down; then the evening star would shine in the last green of the sunset, ‘green like a green pearl’ – she had read that, long ago, in a poem. Every evening it was there, steadfast, and, ‘Somehow, like the Magi, miraculously,’ said Lise, ‘I had the wit to follow it.’

‘Shall we come and fetch you?’ Soeur Marie Alcide had asked.

‘I should rather make my own way.’

For this moment, at least, of her release, she could choose and, at that thought, it was as if the humdrum town street opened like a dazzling path in front of Lise, seeming as wide as the whole world. Then she laughed at herself; she had already made her choice, or been chosen, for a very different path, a narrow and difficult one. First, though, there was one thing she had promised herself she would do, only an infinitesimal thing, self-indulgent perhaps but how precious only someone who had been in a Vesoul could know. She could also choose whether she would walk to the station – I should have to ask the way. Well, why not? I am free to speak, actually speak to a stranger, or I could find a bus-stop and go by bus, take my own ticket – or ask in that shop if I could telephone for a taxi, but I have almost forgotten how to use a telephone. Perhaps they would do it for me if I tipped them. I can give a tip, thought Lise, almost with a swagger, and she, Lise, had promised herself one little hour of freedom, just one, before she gave that freedom back again. I shall go to a café and order a cup of coffee, real coffee – not prison coffee – I can buy it – not be given it – and drink it, sitting at a table by myself, alone: a cup of coffee and a croissant – she could almost smell the delicious aroma – real coffee, fresh warm bread. I’ll walk, Lise decided, my case isn’t heavy; by the time I reach the town it will be seven o’clock, more cafés will be open. She had turned to go down the street when she saw Lucette.

A girl was sitting on the old mounting-block beside the prison gates – Vesoul was at least a century old – a disconsolate figure in an ill-fitting and too thin bright green suit, a cheap fibre suitcase at her feet. The whole small body was hunched as Lise had usually seen it, and she recognised the hair, a tangle that would have been fair if it had not been browned with grease – Lise remembered this girl had always been in trouble for not washing. It was a childish face, round with a quivering red mouth and brown eyes wide apart and wide with hurt yet, at the same time, with a curiously innocent wonder.

Of course, thought Lise, I was not the only one to be released today, but why was this girl out so early? Lise knew that she herself was a special case; for most the usual regulations had to be applied.

She could barely remember the girl’s name – Lulu? Lucie? No, it was Lucette, but Lise scarcely knew her. In a prison the size of Vesoul, when one was in another division, worked in a different workroom, paths did not often cross, but in her last two years Lise had heard a little of Lucette’s troubles: slatternliness, careless work, or work left undone. ‘She seems so helpless,’ Marianne had often said.

Lucette had served three years; now in that too-thin jacket and long skirt, she looked a cold, miserable little creature; she must, Lise thought, be at least twenty-one, but some frost seemed to have touched her growing – a cruel frost, thought Lise. Lucette seemed never to have grown and looked too frail and naïve to be abandoned. Abandoned? That was nonsense! The Directrice and the Assistante Sociale, Marianne Rueff, would never have let her go without some prospect of help or shelter and, It’s none of my business, thought Lise.

She decided to leave her and then was suddenly impelled to go back to the gate.

‘Hullo.’

‘Hullo.’ It sounded breathless.

‘It feels … funny, doesn’t it – being out?’ Lise tried to be companionable.

‘Funny?’ The brown eyes were startled.

‘And how did you manage it so early in the morning?’

‘It wasn’t early in the morning; it was yesterday afternoon but I knew, all of us knew, there would be some trick about letting you out. You were in all the newspapers, they said, so I guessed, and yesterday I found a room. I thought if I came early, very early, I might be here when you came out – and I am,’ said Lucette.

‘But hadn’t Mademoiselle Rueff arranged for you? Surely somebody came to fetch you.’

‘They did.’

‘And?’

‘They had a room for me, and a job.’ It was a moment of boasting, then the curious breathlessness came back. ‘I sent them away.’

‘Away? But – why?’

‘Because …’ The brown eyes were raised to Lise. ‘Madame – where are you going?’

It was as if she, Lise, had been suddenly warned. Of what, she wondered afterwards? The implications? How selfish, but all the same she drew back. ‘I have to catch my train.’ It was brusque, businesslike. Then why should Lise feel it was brutal? Still, ‘I must hurry,’ she said. ‘Well – good luck.’

‘Good luck.’ It was spoken into the road as if the road might take the words away, but Lise had turned her back and was walking towards the town.

It was too early for the kind of café where the cups would have been porcelain, the tables set, but the workmen’s cafés and the Café de la Gare of every town opened, Lise knew, early in the morning and workmen gathered at the counters to snatch a cup of coffee, perhaps laced with rum or cognac, or to take a nip of pernod and eat a roll. Lise had often stood with them on her way back from her dawn prowls in Paris; with luck there might be croissants, crisp and fresh, perhaps a table to sit at.

In the first café she came to there was a dog, a poodle, sitting by the counter; every now and again it would beg, its eyes beseeching. It was the first pet dog Lise had seen since … She did not go in but quickly shut the door and found she was trembling.

Leaving Coco had been one of the worst partings – no, perhaps the worst. A small French bulldog worse than human beings? But there were no humans, except Marcelline. Coco’s black toad face had been crinkled with anxiety when she had had to leave him so precipitately – seldom had they left one another. There had been no time to take him up in her arms, that firm small black brindled body, well stuffed, but not fat – though that was a battle because the girls were forever giving him tidbits. His coat had been perpetually scented with their caresses. Coco bore the scent with good humour but Patrice did not. ‘If only they knew how they stink …’

‘“Stink” – with that expensive scent? And the customers like it.’

‘Don’t call them customers – they’re clients; besides, they haven’t had as much of this as I have. Thank God, you don’t use this “perfume” as they call it.’

It was true; she had never wanted her hair or her skin impregnated, no matter how good the scent was, how expensive.

‘You’re a puritan,’ the girls had teased.

‘I don’t compete, that’s all.’

One of the girls, the Russian Magda, had bought Coco a collar at a fabulous price from the Rue Saint Honoré, scarlet kid studded with rhinestones; but, ‘For all the affection, I couldn’t trust him to a girl – their fortunes are too insecure for a dog,’ Lise had said, so she had given him to Marcelline. ‘But Madame, my little room – after this.’

‘He will be happiest with you, Marcelline, and so shall I be – you’re faithful.’

How faithful, perhaps, only Lise knew. From the beginning, instinctively she had loved Marcelline just as instinctively she shrank from Eugenia with her lame leg and red lips and the stale powder in her wrinkles.

Marcelline was always upright, deep bosomed and with rosy but formidable forearms; her sleeves were usually rolled up to leave her capable hands free and she had kept her country freshness. Marcelline wore a high-necked striped blouse and, sometimes, what Eugenia would not have consented to be seen in, a little crochet shawl on her shoulders and, over her skirt, a clean checked apron. The only extravagant thing about Marcelline was her hair which she kept coiffed in such puffs and combs as her mother might have worn in Edwardian days.

All through those months when Lise had been waiting for trial at the Maison d’Arrêt at Sevenet, Marcelline had come each week to visit her and, long before then, in the times when Patrice had been in one of his rages, ‘Raw steak is good for a black eye, Madame,’ and Marcelline had laid on the bloody mess with a gentle hand. ‘One of Monsieur Patrice’s best fillets!’ she had said with satisfaction.

‘Yes, Marcelline, take Coco please,’ and Lise had drawn her rings off her fingers – they didn’t confiscate our jewellery at Sevenet. ‘Take these and sell them; here is a letter to prove I gave them to you. I can’t give you money. What I have must go to Maître Jouvin for his fees.’

‘I don’t want money.’

‘Keeping Coco is expensive.’

‘He’ll have what I have,’ Marcelline had said it gruffly. ‘That’s what he had with you.’

‘That’s all he’ll want.’

Marcelline had taken Coco down to the village near Varennes where her family lived. ‘I won’t stay on at the Rue Duchesne without you, Madame. I haven’t the heart.’ She had asked the Curé to write and tell Lise when Coco died – ‘I never knew till then that Marcelline couldn’t read or write.’ The Cure had written again when Marcelline went herself. ‘She was my best friend in that old world,’ said Lise. ‘Perhaps my only friend,’ but it was only for Coco that Lise had ever let herself weep.

She went quickly on to the next café.

‘The coffee was good! And the croissant. I had forgotten …’ With a sigh of content Lise sipped and dipped the fragrant little crescent in the cup.

Not that the food at Vesoul had been bad. Long ago, at Cadillac, in that grim Maison de Force, as prisons were called then, when a group of kind ladies, roused by the young father, Père Lataste, had volunteered to give the prisoners a treat for Christmas and asked what they would like, the unanimous request had been for a slice of fresh white bread. ‘We were well looked after,’ Lise was glad to admit that. ‘I believe the Directrice tasted a sample of the dinner every day, but it was distributed to our trays on battered enamel plates; an enamel mug’ … so this! thought Lise, the thick white smoothness of the warm cup under her fingers; there was a spoon, a bowl of sugar, as much as she wanted, a napkin, though only of paper. She lifted the cup but, for a moment, instead of drinking, shut her eyes to savour the smell, then opened them – and abruptly put the cup down. Pressed against the window was a face; though the glass was steamy, the waif look was unmistakable; the great brown eyes, the tangled curls – Lucette. ‘Oh no!’ breathed Lise. ‘Please no.’

She sat rigidly at her table, turned to wood again. She must have followed me. Can’t I have this one hour? Lise wanted to cry. It was all I asked. I was enjoying – for the first time for ten years – real joy. She was defiant, but no matter how hard she tried to make herself hard, the wood still had, for her, that living chord which was quickened and said or, rather, commanded: ‘Call her in. Give her a cup of coffee.’

‘If she wants one she can perfectly well come in,’ Lise told Lise, ‘and order it for herself. She must have money. No one leaves prison penniless. This … this creature doesn’t have to hang about as if she were lost.’ Lise dipped her croissant into the coffee and bit into it, but somehow its savour had gone. The face was still pressed against the window.

Why doesn’t she come in?

She doesn’t dare.

Why, she’s the same as I am?

She doesn’t think so.

‘Merde!’ Lise swore aloud and got to her feet.

‘Lucette.’

‘Madame?’ It was evidently more than Lucette had hoped for; the face was illumined.

‘Better come in and have some coffee. It’s chilly standing here.’

Lucette still seemed to need to be ordered. ‘Sit down. Better take off your jacket, you’ll feel the wind when you go out. Coffee? A croissant?’

Lucette did not say ‘Am I intruding?’ She had intruded and was as pleased as a puppy or a child. ‘Thank you, Madame.’

‘Why do you say Madame? You know my name?’

‘Yes, Lise – like a lily.’ The eyes were adoring. ‘I always think of you as a lily,’ the shy words came out, ‘tall and straight and beautiful.’

‘Beautiful! With this scar?’

‘What scar?’ asked Lucette, then, ‘Oh that!’ and dismissed it. Vivi had had no such delicacy when, twelve years ago, she had seen it at once, but of course it had been more marked then.

‘They call you La Balafrée, don’t they?’

‘I know.’

‘Someone did it to you.’

‘I know.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Somebody,’ but Vivi’s eyes were bright and curious as a monkey’s, though a monkey has mournful shallow eyes and can only do what it is taught, or imitate, while Vivi’s were knowing. They were beautiful eyes, grey and long-lashed. Grey eyes are supposed to be soft but Vivi’s were hard – I should have been warned, thought Lise – but the first time I saw them they were dazed, young, milky with what I thought was sleep – until I smelt her. ‘It was Monsieur Patrice, wasn’t it?’ asked Vivi.

‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t,’ Lise told Soeur Marie Alcide. ‘It happened in a quarrel. I had made a friend, a real friend, of a client. Henri was a good man, clean in his way, though he was one of our regulars. He wanted to get me away from the Rue Duchesne. I think he would have married me – I might have been living as a quiet respectable wife in some provincial town. Patrice knew, he always knew everything, and he was jealous as only he could be. He said – unspeakable things,’ Lise shuddered. ‘Men despised Patrice, naturally, and Henri was not going to allow those … those words to be said to me, and in public. There was a bottle of wine on the table; Henri knocked the bottom off and attacked Patrice. I happened to get in the way.’

‘To protect Monsieur Patrice?’

‘I suppose so. Yes.’ Lise lifted her chin. ‘If you love the wrong people it’s still love, isn’t it, no matter what kind of love, and I’m glad I knew it – it makes it easier to understand. Once you have had that appetite, ma Soeur …’

‘Of course, when the gash was new it showed horribly and I was no more use in the Club. Poor Henri! He offered again. I think he felt he had to, but I said “No.” Emile, of course, would have sent me away, but Patrice couldn’t do without me; he didn’t even mind the scar so I became Madame Lise, La Balafrée – and soon was manager. Ostensibly it was Emile but it was really I. Yes, I was equal with characters like Lulu and Madame la Comtesse, who wasn’t a comtesse, of course; we were never pretentious, just a good upper-middle-class brothel. How odd that sounds, but it was true; I think I was the youngest Mère Maquerelle Paris had ever seen, just twenty-three, but I suppose I had an air of authority; that was from Aunt Millicent – she had been a headmistress of a girls’ school; head of Girl Guides. That seems far away from the Rue Duchesne and yet it wasn’t; in a way I was in the same position. Sometimes I wondered if Aunt Millicent had chosen it or if it simply happened, as it happened to me; the broken end of a bottle and I was marked for life, in more ways than one.’

‘I think if it hadn’t been for that scar I wouldn’t have dared to speak to you,’ said Lucette now. ‘It showed someone had once hurt you too, so to me it only makes you more beautiful. You see, to me, you are someone different … somehow pure.’

‘Pure! My dear child! Why do you think I was in prison?’

‘I don’t know – and it makes no difference.’

‘Thank you, Lucette.’ Lise was so oddly touched that for a moment tears stung her eyes, then she shook her head. It was, she told herself, just the emotion of this morning. ‘Drink your coffee,’ she said abruptly.

‘Yes, Madame.’ Lise had never seen a croissant disappear so quickly, and with such noise; then Lucette licked each of her fingers for the last crumb, blew on the remains of the coffee and set the cup down on the table with a bang.

She has forgotten how to use a cup and saucer. That was one of the things Lise herself had been afraid of – in prison we had only mugs. It might betray her. Now Lucette was saying with a smile, the first smile Lise had seen – it altered her whole face almost into beauty – ‘I used to watch you, Madame; of course you never knew, but I did. I used to dream that one day you would speak to me – but I never, never thought I should be sitting with you, invited. Oh, I’m so glad I sent Mademoiselle Marianne’s people away.’

‘That’s what I want to talk to you about,’ said Lise. ‘Lucette, what are you going to do?’

‘What you do,’ said Lucette with child-like faith.

‘Have another croissant,’ said Lise quickly.

‘Please.’

‘And coffee?’

‘Please.’

‘Coffee for two,’ Lise ordered and when it had been brought the croissant disappeared as fast as the other. Then, ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t like to come where I’m going,’ said Lise.

‘I’ll do anything you do,’ said Lucette. ‘I won’t mind anything.’ Lise was silent and, ‘I have been on the streets too,’ offered Lucette.

‘This isn’t the streets.’

‘Then is it … a house? I don’t mind about the fric – the money – or if it’s hard.’

‘It’s not that kind of house.’

‘Then … Madame Lise, where are you going?’

‘Where I shall find just what we have both left,’ said Lise. ‘Walls – or, perhaps, not walls, bounds that I mustn’t cross without leave. Rules I mustn’t break. Times to keep, silence, work, and where I must be obedient, poor.’

‘You mean – another prison?’

‘Not prison, freedom. That’s the paradox. I believe it will be such freedom as I can’t imagine now.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Neither did I, at first.’ Lise looked down at the table as if she could not make up her mind whether to say any more but Lucette was waiting. At last, ‘Lucette, did you see those Sisters who visited us at Vesoul every three months?’ she asked.

‘The nuns in white?’

‘Yes. Did you go in and talk to them?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Lucette promptly. ‘J’ai mangé assez de ce plat là – I have had enough of that. I didn’t want their talk.’

‘As a matter of fact it was generally you who talked, they listened.’

‘So they could tell you to say your prayers … ask Our Lady to help you … ask to see the aumônier … go to the chapel. I expect they gave you little cards and medals, didn’t they?’

‘Perhaps they did to some. They gave much more to me.’

‘What? Holy! Holy! Holy!?’ mocked Lucette, but Lise did not flinch.

‘It is holy, holy, holy. They have given me a chance, opened a way I hadn’t dreamed of, yet I suppose really I had, long ago – that’s why it found an echo in me …’ Lise was thinking still once again of the wood of that lute. ‘It would surprise you, wouldn’t it, Lucette, if I told you that I hope – I pray – that one day I shall be one of them.’

‘You! Une frangine!’ Lucette was aghast.

‘Yes. A nun.’

‘But – you’re too old. They catch you at eighteen.’

‘There are many older than I. Soeur Marie Alcide told me they once had a great-grandmother of eighty … a blameless great-grandmother, so she got there more quickly.’

‘Blameless! But you have been in prison which means …’

‘I committed a crime.’

‘Yes, and long before that you were a putain, weren’t you?’ and ‘It isn’t possible!’ said Lucette.

‘You said yourself it made no difference to you,’ said Lise. ‘Why should you be different from the nuns?’

‘Because they are holy.’ Lucette was inexpressibly shocked. ‘Holy women,’ she used the word differently now.

‘I thought you didn’t believe in holiness.’

‘I don’t, or I do – for other people.’

‘Why not you?’

‘Me?’ Then Lucette was angry. ‘You’re trying to be holy too. You only asked me to have coffee with you because you were sorry for me. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?’

Lise could not deny it and Lucette rose; fishing in her pocket she put four francs on the table.

‘That’s too much,’ said Lise.

‘It will pay for the pity.’ She turned.

‘Lucette, where are you going?’

‘Where I want,’ said Lucette. ‘Goodbye.’

Let her go. God, I have had enough of young girls! Sitting where Lucette had left her, with the empty cups and plates, those pathetic four francs, Lise thought suddenly of Vivi – so different from Lucette. Lise saw Vivi’s piquancy, the firm short little nose, teeth so small and pearly they looked like milk teeth, the pretty mouth with lips that were naturally red. Yet Lise knew they could curl, grow thin and twist almost like a little snake that is ready to strike, and Vivi could strike. Perhaps the whole of Vivi was false: her dimples that were not soft but traps: the glow of the skin looked warm like a ripe apricot and yet was cool, and Vivi’s beautiful eyes might have been made of glass; like glass, they could light with a gleam, a glint that was shrewd. All this Lise knew, had soon known, and yet Vivi could so easily disarm her. Why? Perhaps, Lise thought now, Vivi wasn’t false but simply and naturally herself, as unashamedly shameless as a child. Lise had thought of Lucette as another child, but Lucette could never have been just a child; from the beginning, Lise guessed, she would have been a waif, forlorn and puny. Vivi would never have consented to be a waif; even in the streets, dirty, tattered, hungry, she would have enjoyed herself, kept her cocksure independence, and she must have been beautiful as a little girl, more beautiful still when Lise found her – drunk.

It had been towards five in the Paris morning when it was still not quite light; the debris of the night littered pavements and gutters and dustbins overflowed outside the restaurants, a stale smelly overflow. Cats leapt away as Lise passed, but a rat stayed where it was foraging. A light wind blew through the empty street, Lise felt the coolness on her hot temples and on her cheek where the scar throbbed. She had been on one of the long impatient morning walks in which she escaped from the Rue Duchesne, from the fumes of drink and cigarettes, the close-drawn curtains, over-furnished rooms; from the long pretence of the night, arranging and cajoling upset girls, upset men: from hours of taking insolence or maudlin affection – which was the more disgusting? Every early morning, if she could, Lise escaped when the house at last shook itself free and the girls could go home, or those who lived in, go to bed – alone. Jock, the barman, and Gaston would clean up the last of the ashtrays and glasses, wiping up vomit perhaps, putting bottles in the dustbins. ‘Everything must be clean, washed and in order.’ Lise had insisted on this, including the weary girls – it was Eugenia’s work to see to that. Patrice, drunk or sober, had gone to bed; if he had a ‘chosen one’ he usually took her to the office, only now and then up to the flat.

‘Didn’t you mind?’ asked Soeur Marie Alcide.

‘It seldom lasted more than a night,’ said Lise. ‘There was a room next to Zoë’s where I could take refuge.’ Those of the girls who slept in, had rooms which they shared on the third floor; some went back to their families, taking a taxi or the early metro, others to the apartment of their ‘old man’ whom they kept or helped to keep. By five o’clock usually the house was still. Jock had closed and cleaned the bar; Gaston locked the door before going home with Eugenia; Emile, the last, had put the takings in his safe and gone, himself, to bed – he had to make do with second choice – and Lise was free, to breathe the morning air, fresh as it could be even in the city. She would walk and walk – too far for Coco whom she left snoring in his basket; she walked until it was time, in some church – any church – for the first Mass, when she would slip in at the back and sit in the shadows so that nobody knew she was there.

The trucks had long ago arrived at Les Halles for the market and now there were others; water-trucks to hose the gutters, waste-trucks to clear rubbish and litter, dark blue police vans to pick up human rubbish … and it was then that Lise saw Vivi.

It was in a little Place where, outside the shuttered cafés, no one had bothered to stack the iron chairs, and the zinc-topped tables had already gathered the dew; at one a girl was sitting on a small iron chair, sitting bent over, head and elbows on the table, fast asleep. It was the elbows Lise saw first, young fresh flesh, soft and vulnerable for all their thinness. She saw the hair, bronze chestnut, tumbled over a neck that was white and, again, so young. ‘Perhaps it was that little vulnerable neck that first made me love her,’ said Lise. A girl, little more than a child, asleep over a table.

We were the children of the Maison Dieu, Renée, Pom-Pom, Rico and I – Pom-Pom had to count as a child. A Maison Dieu is where they put the people nobody wants: old people and poor loonies who are out of their minds – and us, not many of us – children only go there for ‘grave reasons’ – I heard the Doctor say that. Renée was hunched from where her step-father broke her back – step-fathers, fathers, they are all the same. Though I was only nine when I came and Renée was fourteen I was taller than she was. Mamaine, who looked after us, said one day someone would take Renée as a servant for nothing, ‘And do a good deed,’ said Mamaine. No one would take me, I was too pretty. I am nearly as pretty as Claudine. Claudine is my sister but nobody knows that. I don’t want them to know.

Sometimes I shrieked in the night and Mamaine came; poor, sleepy Mamaine, and she held me while I sobbed and sobbed. Next day I saw the Doctor or Madame Lachaume the Superintendent but it was no use.

I should have liked to tell it all to the Doctor – I still don’t know why I couldn’t. I should have liked to live with the Doctor and be his little girl – a proper little girl, not like me, like the little girls outside.

All the same, it was nice at the Maison Dieu. I had a bed all in white and a dress, and pinafores with flowers on them and a hairbrush of my own – I hadn’t known my hair could look like silk. I had a toothbrush too – I haven’t had one since – Mamaine used to say my teeth looked like pearls! and I was washed and clean. We had breakfast and goûter in the afternoon, milk and brioche before we went to bed and we had dinner at twelve o’clock. Yes, every day we had a real dinner, soup, meat and vegetables, and on Sundays ice-cream. Maison Dieu means the house of God. I used to think God was very kind to have us to live with him. No one else would.

I pretended Pom-Pom was my little dog. Pom-Pom seemed a little boy in blue overalls, striped socks on his little legs and felt slippers, a little boy, but not his head. There was a secret: Pom-Pom had to be shaved. I was not supposed to know but I knew; the barber from the men’s wing did it and I knew why: Pom-Pom was thirty-four years old.

Rico would have been a little boy but, as Mamaine said, he was not all there. I think he was not there at all. He would sit at the table and draw but not on the paper – in the air; it was as if he saw far beyond the Maison Dieu to the sea and sky and clouds; I think it must have been sunset, Rico had such a light on his face: it was a shame he would not talk or look at us: it wasn’t like living with a boy but with a sunbeam.

Rico did not know who I was but Pom-Pom followed me about and when I talked to him or chirruped like Mamaine’s canary or sang one of my songs, slowly, slowly, because things took a long time to get into Pom-Pom, his big ugly face used to break into a smile.

I have two smiles. I wish I had only one but I know I have two. I used to put my arms round Mamaine’s fat waist and rub my face against her apron and she stroked my hair. ‘Pauvre momone, poor child. She is hungry for love.’

Yes, it felt safe and warm in our attic, yet even then I wanted to get out. We couldn’t be let out, except for our playtime in the courtyard, partly because we were us and partly because of the Stefans. The Stefans were in the men lunatics’ wing with barred windows and iron doors with keys.

I called them Stefans because of Stefan, the Russian. Stefan was young and big and good looking; his hair was gold like Rico’s but not in curls; Stefan’s was cut short and stubby; his blue eyes followed me each time he saw me. Most of the Stefans were never let out, not even in the courtyard – because of the war there were too few guards – but Stefan was a ‘trusty’ and sometimes he was out in the hall. If he was still there when Mamaine took us out, she hustled us past him, but I knew Stefan looked at me.

Every day when it was fine, Mamaine took us down the staircase at one o’clock and through the locked door with its chain, down more stairs into the hall and outside and then we played, at least Pom and I. The old people of the Maison Dieu watched us and talked about us; whenever I think about us, I see those old mouths talking, some without any teeth. I knew what they said about me. It was supposed to be another secret but I knew. The doctor had a photograph of me; it was in the newspapers though I wasn’t supposed to know that, either. ‘Found sleeping on manure heap’ – Madame Lachaume read it out to Mamaine. It wasn’t a manure heap, it was turnips and I had a sack on top. I stole up behind Madame Lachaume and Mamaine to look at the photograph and I didn’t like it; I wasn’t pretty at all. My bruises looked like smudges, my hair not silky; it was caked – I still remember its smell. My dress was an old one of Claudine’s like a big sack; it showed my skin through the rents where Papa tore it. He chased me. At first it was only Claudine, then one day it was me too and it hurt. That’s why I slept on the turnips – I was afraid to come into the house, but sometimes I wanted to.

It was because of Papa that I shrieked; I didn’t want to make a noise but I shrieked higher and higher and it made me so excited I couldn’t stop. I knew my cheeks were red and my eyes so bright they shone, and the whole of me felt light and quick and I had an ache like being hungry, half an ache and half a tingle, and I could have told everybody out flat, ‘Sometimes I want a Papa to chase me.’

There! I was soon small and sweet again. I played with Pom-Pom, sang to Rico, rubbed my head against Mamaine’s apron. Madame Lachaume put my hair back. ‘Poor child. Poor little girl.’

The Doctor asked me questions gently, especially after I was given the doll, but I didn’t tell him about the baby. It wasn’t mine, it was Claudine’s. She screamed and screamed out in the shed where Papa had put her; she rolled on the floor and doubled up. We were so surprised when the baby came out. I wanted to keep the baby and love it, but Claudine said we mustn’t or the police would take it and her, and Papa. In the end it was Papa and me, but I am still sorry about the baby.

Madame Lachaume told me I couldn’t be the Doctor’s little girl, but it seemed there was someone else – Monsieur Grebel. Monsieur Grebel was one of the Governors; he was much richer than the Doctor; he had a beard and a watch-chain, and he was even kinder; he often came up to the attics to see us and he was all of our friend. He patted Pom-Pom on the head and dangled his watch for Rico to catch. He even gave Renée some knitting wool, bright red, and he brought sweets for us all. It was he who gave me the baby doll and was shocked when I had hysterics. I was sorry I couldn’t like it because I loved Monsieur Grebel. He would no more have chased me than Pom would. I used to think Monsieur Grebel was like God.

We were in the courtyard when we heard the people’s voices in Madame Lachaume’s office. We were not supposed to hear them but when they argued their voices grew loud – Mamaine said I had long ears which wasn’t true; they are small and pretty as shells and close to my head but I stood up on the bench to hear better though Pom-Pom tugged at my pinafore; the people were Madame Lachaume, Monsieur l’Abbé who came for the chapel, the Doctor, one or two ladies and Monsieur Grebel.

‘She cannot be with other children.’

‘Evidemment, but she shouldn’t be here.’

‘She should be admitted to a Home.’

‘There would be other children there.’

‘We have to take some risks,’ that was the Doctor and another voice, sneery, like Renée’s, said, ‘May I ask you, Doctor, if you would allow this child to be with your own daughters?’

The Doctor did not answer.

‘In any case, the Homes are packed – all those war orphans,’ said a lady, and then, suddenly, Monsieur Grebel said, ‘I will take her.’

They were so surprised there was a silence and I could feel my heart beating. Then Monsieur l’Abbé spoke. ‘It would be a work of great charity.’

‘Not at all. I want her,’ said Monsieur Grebel – dear Monsieur Grebel.

‘But – would Madame Grebel …?’

‘A woman without children has empty arms. I can vouch for my wife,’ said Monsieur Grebel.

He came up to the attic that evening with Mamaine. ‘Would you like to come and live with me, Vivi?’

‘Would I be a proper girl and go to school?’

‘I think you would.’

‘Would you buy me dresses and a coat with fur on it?’

‘Vivi, Vivi. You think too much about these things,’ said Mamaine.

‘But would you? I should need three or four dresses to be a proper girl.’

‘We’ll ask Madame Grebel to help you choose them. I’m bringing her to see you in the morning.’

I was taken to the grande salle to meet Madame Grebel. I had been so excited I had had no sleep, but I didn’t forget what Mamaine had taught me and I curtseyed to Madame Grebel but she didn’t hold out the arms Monsieur had said were empty; she didn’t even hold out her hand. She looked at me for a long time, then over my head to Monsieur Grebel and she was angry. Why was she angry?

‘Alfred, you didn’t tell me.’

‘Tell you what?’

Her voice was high, as angry people’s are, and she had red patches on her cheeks. She got up from her chair. ‘Now I understand! You didn’t tell me she was beautiful. Too beautiful, Alfred!’ and she turned to go.

I asked in a whisper, ‘Madame Grebel has said “No”?’

Monsieur Grebel nodded, then he went quickly away, and I, Vivi, was left alone in the grande salle.

‘Asleep! Drunk!’ The police van had reached the Place and, as Lise came up, a sergeant lifted the girl’s head and tilted it back; the eyes opened stupefied, dazed, the mouth lolled. ‘Drunk. Put her in.’

‘No.’ The authority in Lise’s voice surprised even her. ‘I was comparatively new to this then,’ and, before the gendarmes could touch the girl, ‘You can’t take her,’ said Lise. ‘She’s one of mine.’

‘Yours? Never.’ Morel, the sergeant, knew Lise well, as did most of the flics. ‘Mère Maquerelle,’ they whispered among themselves.

‘One of yours? Never.’

‘She is.’

‘Then what’s she doing here?’

‘She – ran away. I have been looking for her.’

‘Ran – why?’

Lise shrugged – an acted shrug. ‘Frightened.’

‘She can’t be one of yours. She’s …’ He bent over her and drew back. ‘Whew! She’s filthy.’

‘I told you – she ran away. She has been out two nights …’ but the sergeant was astute.

‘Besides, she’s too young.’

‘The little sister of one of our girls,’ Lise lied glibly. ‘Pauvre p’tite. Of course, we haven’t used her yet.’

‘She has used herself, Madame Lise.’ To Lise’s face they wouldn’t call her La Balafrée. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Why else do you think I’m out this time of the morning?’ That was a point: Lise had always taken care to be invisible on her walks. ‘Why else?’ demanded Lise and, ‘Get me a taxi,’ she ordered. ‘Lift her in. I’ll take her home.’

‘I took Vivi home.’ Why? Lise had asked herself a thousand times. ‘There’s a little church in England,’ she told Soeur Marie Alcide, ‘at Southleigh in Oxfordshire, which has an old old mural painting showing a winged Saint Michael holding the scales of justice. The poor soul awaiting judgement is quailing because the right-hand scale is coming heavily down with its load of sins: but on the left Our Lady is quietly putting her rosary beads in the other scale to make them even. I saw it long ago, but in a way I suppose something like that happened to me.’

‘It happened to me,’ and Lise started to tremble. ‘How did Vivi come to have those beads?’ Lise asked that for the thousandth time. ‘She wouldn’t say. She never said …’

Now, in the café, Lise seemed to hear Soeur Marie Alcide’s firm voice. ‘Put it behind you. That is one of our first rules. You will probably never see Vivi again,’ and, ‘It’s time you caught your train,’ Lise told Lise.

Lise had been taking her ticket when she looked behind her down the line of passengers and, ‘Oh no!’ she could not help saying; there was Lucette struggling with the size of her suitcase, Lucette with her draggled green skirt, thin jacket and tangled hair. ‘Oh no!’ But there was no need to panic. Lucette was too far down the line to hear the name of the town for which Lise asked, And, if I hurry, thought Lise, she won’t know which platform is mine.

Platform Number 9. As she reached the train Lise looked back. A small figure was running, dodging, banging into people with the case, stopping to scan each barrier, but getting nearer. In the press of passengers waiting to pass through the barrier, Lise tried to hide herself behind a large man with a duffle bag on his shoulder. She was safe, hidden, and then the man stepped aside and Lucette saw her. Still, perhaps she hasn’t the right ticket, hoped Lise; perhaps she won’t be allowed through.

Resolute, Lise showed her own ticket, then almost ran herself down the length of the train; at the end she found a corner seat by the far window; she swung her case up on the rack and opened a newspaper she had snatched from a kiosk. There were already three people in the compartment; the other seats were quickly filled and, Lucette would hardly have had time to come as far down the platform as this, thought Lise as the train began to move.

Another anxiety came up: would there be a mention of Vesoul? Of her, La Balafrée? Hastily she scanned the paper. It was a late edition: LES TROIS FRERES CESARO RELACHES PAR LES FELLAGAH – the Cesaro brothers released … held prisoner for forty-seven days … Forty-seven days! Lise almost laughed. TUMULTUOUS WELCOME FOR GENERAL DE GAULLE … SENSATIONAL FLIGHT OF THE CARAVELLE … forty-six minutes from Paris to Dijon …

Nowhere was there a mention – and it would have been a headline: LA BALAFREE RELEASED … LA BALAFREE … MADAME LISE IS OUT …’ The secret seemed to have been well kept. If the guard at Vesoul had looked at her more closely, he might have been tempted to give the news – no one knew from whom, in prison, news could leak – as a precaution, Madame Chef herself had come out to see if any pressmen were on the pavement or hidden in a café before she would let Lise cross the courtyard. TROIS ENFANTS … PERISSENT ASPHYXIES. Three little children dead in a farm fire …

No Balafrée. Lise could sit back, let Patrice’s scarf slip down – she had bound it round her head, hiding the scar. When the news did break, perhaps tomorrow, she would be … Where they’ll never dream, thought Lise.

Lucette came along the corridor. At every compartment, Lise guessed, she had pressed her face against the glass with the same wistful appeal of the café, but Lise had seen the glimmer of green and shrank back behind her neighbour, holding the newspaper high; the brown eyes, though, were thorough and Lise guessed she had been seen but, She won’t dare to come in here, thought Lise.

She had meant at lunchtime to go to the buffet car for a sandwich, one of those crusty French sandwiches with ham, and perhaps a glass of wine. Though it’s so long since I have had one it will probably go to my head – but wine! thought Lise. Now, it was too risky to leave the compartment. What would Lucette do? wondered Lise. Stand in the corridor and wait? What ticket had she taken? Where would she have to get off?

Naissances. Fiançailles. Manages. Deuils – ‘Hatches, Matches, Dispatches,’ Lise could hear Aunt Millicent’s voice. EISENHOWER TELEPHONES TO J. F. DULLES – but Lucette’s face kept coming between Lise and the newspaper.

Unfortunately Lise’s station was also the terminus. All the doors opened but there was such a flood of passengers, so many trucks and trolleys, such meetings with hugs and kisses, luggage, mail-bags, freight thrown out, that Lise was able to slip through the crowd. She ran down the subway, up the other side, reached the barrier, gave up her ticket and, breathless, stopped on the station forecourt to search the line of cars. There, thankfully, was the blue Citroën she had been told to look for, the familiar white habit, black veil of a Sister of Béthanie. Lise ran across the forecourt.

‘Soeur Justine?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am Lise,’ and the names Elizabeth Fanshawe, Liz, Madame Ambard, above all, La Balafrée, dropped away into an abyss of forgetting. Please God, I shall never hear them again – as, ‘Welcome,’ said the young nun with a smile as she leaned across to open the door which Lise had already wrenched open; she threw her case into the back, got in and slammed the door.

There was that perspicacious Dominican look. ‘Is somebody chasing you?’ but Soeur Justine did not say it, only started the car. ‘You are in a hurry,’ she said instead.

‘I couldn’t wait to get here.’ Lise almost said it but she could not enter Béthanie on even the smallest lie and, ‘It’s only that I so badly need to get to Saint Etienne,’ she said.

Soeur Justine did not waste time; she was already feeling her way through the jumble of taxis and cars and people. Lise, crouching low, looked back; as she thought, or dreaded, Lucette had emerged past the barrier on to the forecourt where she was standing, obviously bewildered, the suitcase at her feet. Lise knew her eyes were scanning, searching, but, I won’t, thought Lise. I won’t. I have done it before, idiot that I was …

‘Bring that guttersnipe in here, cette gamine …? Never.’ Lise had thought that was what Patrice would say when he saw Vivi, but he had asked in strange excitement, ‘Have you looked at her? Looked at her face?’

‘No, I suppose I haven’t looked at her,’ said Lise.

‘That face! Those legs! That whole body!’

‘I wasn’t thinking of her as meat – to be fed to your lions.’

Patrice was too excited to listen. ‘Chérie, when she’s cleaned and fed, dressed and trained … My God!’ said Patrice and added, ‘Do your very best with her.’

Lise’s ‘best’ was quite different from Patrice’s, ‘or was meant to be,’ said Lise.

When Vivi was sober, cleaned and disinfected, dressed and fed, Lise tried to coax her into confidence.

‘Surely you have another name?’ Lise asked Vivi. ‘Viviane perhaps?’

‘No, just Vivi.’

‘Vivi what?’

‘Vivi.’

‘What was your father called?’ A visible recoil. ‘Your family – when you were a little girl.’

‘Don’t, don’t.’ It was almost a scream. ‘If you go on, I’ll run away,’ and, ‘Leave her be,’ said Patrice.

We had run away, Suzanne and me, though there was no need to run because no one was going to come after us. ‘Don’t giggle, Vivi, or somebody will suspect,’ said Suzanne, but no one bothered to suspect.

Suzanne was almost the same as me, but older; she might have been Claudine, my sister, only she wasn’t. No one but me knows there was ever a Claudine – it’s one of the things I don’t tell. Suzanne had had a Papa who had chased her, too, and she had been taken away and put into a school. I think she had been to even more schools than I had. They had told us Monsieur Ralph was our last hope. They might have saved their breath. Monsieur Ralph was Superintendent of Le Manoir d’Espérance, though it wasn’t a manor – it was a foyer. Still, he was kind, poor man. ‘If these girls can get back to nature,’ he used to say, ‘they might be cured.’ I think he did not know nature, certainly not Suzanne’s or mine. Poor Monsieur Ralph. He was the first person who had been kind to me since the days of the Maison Dieu.

I often think of the Maison Dieu and the attics where we were kept – hunchback Renée and Rico, Pom-Pom and I – with Mamaine to look after us, and Madame Lachaume and Monsieur Grebel and Stefan. When I ran away with Stefan they came after us and it was a long time till they trusted me enough to let me come to the Manoir d’Espérance and Monsieur Ralph. He was easy to get round; it was hay-making time on the farm; we were all helping with the hay and he gave permission for Suzanne and me to ride back from the far fields on the hay-floats behind the tractors when they went back to the farm. I loved the sweet smell of the hay and the way Suzanne tumbled about in it.

The men were pleased to have two girls with them but they didn’t try any games – they had too much respect for Monsieur Ralph; nor did they know that we had taken their money, poor boys, notes out of their wallets when they left their coats hanging on the fence posts while they pitched up the bales. We, Suzanne and I, got down from the tractor in the farmyard, but not to go back to Monsieur Ralph. We crept out down the lane to the road and hitched a ride to Paris and we were very polite. ‘Giggling is bad policy,’ said Suzanne.

Suzanne knew Paris. She had been born and brought up in the alleys there and she found us a room; it was high up, on the fifth floor of an old house. The landlady, Madame Picou, let us stay even when she found out how young we were, because we did her errands and could be trusted to get her pension for her at the post office when she was too drunk to go herself. We never stole any of that – ‘It would be bad policy,’ Suzanne used to say. Everything with her was ‘bad policy’, ‘good policy’, depending how the wind blew.

Suzanne could sing; she had a voice, sweet, like a little canary in its cage. She sang and I collected the money, because I was pretty. ‘And don’t you ever let them off,’ she told me. ‘Pester them … you can.’ When we had enough, we went to a stall or boîte to eat, then came back and Suzanne sang some more. We worked different districts but always we used to go first and find out where the police station was, then keep as far away from it as we could. We were never picked up. Perhaps Monsieur Ralph was glad to get rid of us.

Sometimes we could buy a dress or some shoes and Suzanne knew a great many Stefans – not wrong in the head as he was, poor Stefan – but soldiers, sailors, anyone. We had a good time and we were together, Suzanne and I. Then, one afternoon, when we were asleep – we had been out all night – Madame Picou shouted up the stairs at us. We had forgotten to buy her bread. It was Suzanne who went for the baguette; she was still half asleep, and she was run over.

Madame Picou was taken to the morgue to look at Suzanne. They couldn’t find me – I had hidden under the cistern in the roof – but I knew Madame Picou had told the police about me and sooner or later they would find me, so I left.

I left just as I was and stayed out in the streets. I don’t remember any more.

‘Let her be Vivi Ambard,’ said Patrice and he teased Lise, ‘All our strays come to be that.’

It was true. Vivi Ambard. Lise Ambard. If only she were my daughter, thought Lise, but I’m still too young for that. If she were my little sister – and she pleaded, ‘Patrice, she’s not for us. I’m going to send her to school.’

Patrice began to laugh. ‘Send her to school. Try, that’s all. Yes, try. She’s been on the streets for two years.’ Then he was serious. ‘You’ll have to get rid of that roughness, teach her some manners – and pride. It’s a miracle she has escaped V.D.’

‘You have found that out already?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Yes, naturally.’ Lise was suddenly bitter – she who was never bitter. ‘I should have known.’

‘Isn’t it my business?’ He came and sat close beside her. ‘Chérie, I think you have brought us a gold mine.’

‘Patrice, she’s only fourteen.’

‘Jail-bait! A good many have a yen for that.’

‘What if I inform?’ Lise had been cold.

‘You won’t,’ said Patrice and Lise knew he was right.

The convent car had left the town and was driving beside a wide river flowing quietly behind its trees; big houses stood in gardens and then gave way to vineyards, little ‘domaines’, the vines carefully espaliered around low thick-walled houses with roofs of rounded tiles. ‘It’s beautiful, our Gironde,’ said Soeur Justine.

‘It is beautiful,’ said Lise, as if she hoped that would distract her.

Soeur Justine glanced at her; the eyes, behind the cheap steel-rimmed spectacles, Lise knew, were taking in the tenseness of the way Lise sat, the way her hands clutched her handbag. ‘I won’t. I will not,’ but soon Lise knew it was no good. ‘Soeur Justine, would you turn round. I didn’t want … but there’s a girl – not a girl though she seems one – a young – woman left at the station. I don’t think she has much money, or anywhere to go,’ said Lise. ‘Could you take her in, just for tonight?’