London House, page 29
I sank into the soft leather as the search and the day drained away. “Nothing in the SOE files indicates they ever got a clue to her whereabouts. Her letters to Margaret imply she buried secrets within them . . . I’m sorry, Dad. We don’t know her as well as Margaret did. We can’t follow the clues. We’ve probably missed most of them.”
Dad pushed off his couch and joined me on mine. He sat close, angled toward me, his knee touching mine.
“Don’t be. Please. This is enough.”
“It’s not. I can’t give you the ending. I can’t make this right . . . You asked me to quit . . .”
He held my gaze within his own. “None of this . . . How we got here was never your fault or your responsibility.” He pulled me close. “You’ve carried so much.”
I squeezed my eyes shut.
“Believe it or not, I know how you feel.”
A small gargled laugh escaped. That I could believe.
“What hurts now is knowing I could have lifted that from you. If I’d been paying attention. That’s on me. So much of where we are is on me, Little One.”
Little One. My nickname from when I was very small—smaller and younger than when Amelia died, younger even than when I learned I’d been named after an aunt who died of polio at age seven. It was his name for me, back at our very beginning.
Our conversation soon wound down. Dad sensed my exhaustion and headed to the apartment’s far bedroom. He had generously left the master for me.
As I passed the second bedroom, I tapped on the door to say good night to Mat. He didn’t answer, but the door was cracked so I pushed it another few inches to peek inside.
Propped against pillows, laptop tipping onto the blanket, he was fast asleep. I crossed the room, lifted his laptop onto the dresser, and covered him with the throw blanket draped across the bed’s corner.
All that done, I couldn’t help doing one thing more. I leaned over and kissed his forehead. His hair came to a small widow’s peak at the center. “Sleep well,” I whispered.
I turned back at the door, partly to make sure I hadn’t woken him and partly just to see him again. Somehow, in a short amount of time, he had become deeply important to me.
Or maybe I was remembering he always had been.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.”
Mat met me at the doorway to the kitchen with a cup of coffee. He was fully dressed and inordinately chipper for seven o’clock in the morning.
“How long have you been awake?” I reached for the cup he stretched my direction.
“A couple hours. How’d you sleep?”
“Surprisingly well.” I blinked, aware of our close proximity. We hovered together in the narrow doorway. “I came in and covered you with a blanket last night. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” He mussed his hair with his free hand. The scar on his chin flashed in the morning light. “Thank you. I never woke till five.”
I tapped his scar. The gesture felt warm and intimate. I pulled back, again unsure if I’d overstepped and assumed. “Did you ever win?”
“Of course.” His hand grazed over mine as he reached to trace the scar himself. “After Luke gave me this, they were scared not to let me win sometimes.” His hand moved from his chin to my shoulder. His eyes morphed from the delight of feisty memories to tender concern. “Speaking of falling, how’s this shoulder today? The day after the day after is always the worst.”
“Not bad. Slightly sore.” The accident felt like a lifetime ago rather than two days. Those two days had changed everything.
I turned into the kitchen when something in our conversation nudged me. Spinning back, I bumped into him, a bit of coffee splashing on both of us. “What did you call me? Just now, when you handed me the coffee?”
“Sleeping Beauty?” Mat replied. He stared at me, first in question, then in wonder. “Sleeping Beauty.” He repeated the name as if it danced between us, just out of reach, out of memory.
“Sleeping Beauty.” I gave the name conviction, grounding it for us both. “Briar Rose . . . She picked her own nickname. When you said that last night about yours, it was like a trail I couldn’t follow. You picked your own nickname, just like C. S. Lewis, and just like Caro—Rose Tremaine. Caro even said she might do that. She wrote it.” I held my hand out to him in a wait here gesture, set my coffee on the counter, and ran for my phone and notebook.
Racing back to the kitchen, I leafed through the notebook. “She said she was glad about Margo Moo simply coming into being, but that . . . Here! Nanette Bellefeuille.”
I found the November 14, 1932, notes. “Claire insisted on role play for French lessons. Caro picked Nanette Bellefeuille, after her doll, and Margaret picked Bebe Dupont.”
I leaned against the counter. “It was all there. In the letters. The report noted it as well. Her papers were rolled.” I leafed through the notebook’s pages so fast, I tore the edge off one. “September 5, 1939, she wrote about rolling papers into the support panels of bras, like Martine used to hold up the Lobster Dress. Then again . . . papers . . . papers . . . There’s something else.”
I paged through my notes, knowing that Caro had left another clue. She had written something in a letter that had made little narrative sense, something about papers and identities.
“Here.” I nudged close into Mat to share the page. “She wrote about that man in London who carried two sets of identity cards so that when arrested his real identity couldn’t be found—he could remain anonymous. The story makes no sense until you see she was leaving her trail of bread crumbs . . . Every story had significance.”
“So she—what?—destroyed the Rose papers as soon as she got in trouble in Paris? Then pulled the string and released the Nanette ones?”
“If she was in real danger, yes.”
“But Arnim knew her real name, and it doesn’t explain why he was shot.”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. Mat was right. “But she is Nanette.”
I waited. My last sentence was not a question, but I needed Mat’s agreement. It was beyond clear, yet . . . I still needed him on board.
He dropped his eyes back to my notebook, brows furrowed in concentration. “Brunel shoots Arnim, point-blank range, execution style, and then shoots Caro and takes her into custody. If she didn’t die from that wound, whatever happened to her next was probably horrible.”
He accepted Caro was Nanette. I looped an arm around him in a half hug and, without thinking, planted a quick kiss at the corner of his mouth.
“We can find her, right? You said the Germans kept meticulous records. What would Brunel do? Question her? Torture her? Send her to a concentration camp?”
“All of the above, if not immediately execute her.” Mat pushed away from the doorjamb. “I need my computer.”
I followed him as far as the living room. Dad sat on one of the couches reading.
“We found her.” There was no stopping my tears this time. “She really did leave every clue necessary, if one knew her well enough.” I stopped short. “And knew they needed to look.”
Mat returned, dropped on the couch across from Dad, and started typing. “The Arolsen Archives are the most comprehensive. If she went to any German camp under the name Nanette Bellefeuille, we have a good chance of getting a hit. The report said she was from Paris, right? Not another village?”
I found my picture of the police report on my phone. “Yes. Paris.”
“I bet she’d kept her lies to a minimum . . . fake name, fake city, but real birthdate.” He was talking to himself rather than to us. “Done.”
He shut his computer. His elation lasted an instant and ended in a groan. Flipping his laptop open again, he continued. “I’m not thinking. They have the most complete records, but not the fastest.”
“Who is faster?” Dad asked.
“The US National Archives . . . Name . . . City . . . Birthdate . . . Enter.” He stared at his screen a few seconds then looked up. “One record found.”
“Only one?” I dropped next to him. “It’s her. It has to be. Can you open it?”
“There’s the rub.” Mat grimaced. “Arolsen will give us the most complete information, but it can take four to ten months. We can instantly see a match in the US National Archives, but it still takes a couple months to get the file . . . Unless . . .”
“Unless?” I drew the word long to prompt him.
“I’ve made friends with a tech guy at the Archives over the years. He may just . . .”
Mat started typing again. This time I didn’t interrupt.
After a few minutes he closed his laptop and looked between Dad and me. We simply stared back.
“Now we wait.” He nodded to each of us. We still sat staring. “We found her. You both get that, right? We don’t know the details yet, but by getting that hit, we know she was a victim of Nazi persecution, not a traitor and not a defector. If you had any doubts, sir, banish them.”
“No.” Dad burst out into a laugh. It rushed out of him like a valve released of pressure. “I don’t have any doubts at all.”
“You should open an official inquiry in Britain,” Mat continued. “Your aunt was a hero, and when you look at the SOE memorials in London, the Violette Szabo memorial or the one in Westminster Abbey, you should know she was a vital part of that. Her name not only needs to be recorded but added to the SOE memorial here in Valençay. She lost her life here, regardless of where she was actually killed.”
My dad pressed his fingers to his mouth and nodded. “Not in my wildest dreams.”
Thirty-Seven
Mat left us to shower and dress. I sensed he was trying to give us time, but I had no idea what to do with the gift. I looked around the living room feeling lost. I had nothing to research, no lead to chase, and still no understanding of how it could or would change life today. I couldn’t tell my grandmother. I couldn’t ease her pain. I couldn’t brighten my father’s childhood. I couldn’t refashion my own. Yet, despite all the couldn’ts, an odd elation gripped me.
I studied my dad, standing feet from me staring out the windows toward the Eiffel Tower. I suspected he wasn’t seeing anything beyond his past either.
“Why don’t I go find a café and get some pastries?”
He turned with a befuddled expression, as if trying to wind his way through a maze. He considered me and I wondered if he’d heard my question.
“Ah . . . I should come with you.”
I swung my head, already halfway to the front door. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”
I needed out. I needed to breathe. I needed . . . I wasn’t sure what I needed. I simply felt like the most meaningful thing I’d done had taken a prolonged intermission—and left me in a hyped-up interlude. What was I to do? Where was I to go? What came next? I had all these questions, but we were stalled right on the brink of answering them.
I wandered out into a quiet morning street and inhaled the deepest, most freeing breath I’d taken in years. It filled me all the way to my stomach and with it came scents of flowers, chocolate, yeast, sugar, coffee, and petrol.
Paris, like me, wasn’t fully awake yet. It felt as if she was in that intermission between the busy night and the frenetic day with endless possibilities ahead of her. Few pedestrians traveled the broad stone sidewalks. White pillowy clouds rested above like cotton balls thrown onto a blue canvas.
I wandered down rue Bonaparte toward the Seine again and stopped at a corner café. The display case housed a typically Parisian, decadent pastry selection. After choosing a couple croissants, three éclairs, two canelés, four financiers, and a dozen macarons I should have resisted—along with three café au laits—I headed back to the apartment.
Dad wasn’t in the living room upon my return. I caught sight of his profile in the small library and thought he’d retreated there to read. I placed the pastry box in the kitchen, transferred the coffees to proper café bowls, and headed to deliver his.
Dad and Mat, sitting close and talking, was such an unexpected sight, I stopped short by the door.
Dad glanced my direction, nodded to Mat, then pushed himself out of the brown leather chair. “I called your mom. She’ll be here around noon . . . I’ll let you two talk.”
As he passed me in the doorway, I handed him his coffee.
“Thank you.”
“Mom? What’s going on?” I joined Mat. “I was gone for twenty minutes.”
“He read my article, called her, then basically gave me an interview. He added a lot of good stuff, Caroline. Would you like to read the first draft?”
“It’s written?”
“I’m submitting it tomorrow. I told you that.”
Mat’s words were slow and measured. He wasn’t asking permission or a question, but I sensed he wanted my support. He needed me on board and I accepted—even embraced—that he needed me just as much.
“Yes.” I lowered myself into the chair my father had vacated. “I do.”
I handed him his coffee and he handed me his laptop. I sat and read, not an article, but a story. The story of a lie, pain, and a family; a story of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and loss; a story of heroism, resilience, hope, and truth.
Throughout it all, Mat sat silent. I cried.
“He said those things?” There were quotes from my father about his solitary and shadowed childhood, the pain of losing Amelia, even his “dark night of the soul.” There were also comments about me, how proud he was, how grateful, and how he felt—three generations later—that I’d brought light back into his world.
“It’s different from what you expected?” At my nod, Mat sat back. “Caro taught me a few things these last few days. While so much is perspective, it’s not ultimate truth. In many ways, I’ve been doing history a disservice by claiming it is. She was right about Lewis and his BBC talk. Some truths, some absolutes, are above perception. I hope that comes across.”
“Powerfully. It’s what makes what we went through, what we fashioned for ourselves, all the more real and painful. No one got out of their own way to see what was rather than what they perceived it to be.”
“Will you comment?” My nod inspired a bright smile. “Then, if we get the file, I’ll add it to the end . . . The National Archives guy texted me. He’ll try to get it to us today.”
“It’s the middle of the night there.”
“Yeah, I woke him up. Who doesn’t put their phone on Do Not Disturb at night?”
Thirty-Eight
Mom arrived with lunch.
“I stopped at one of my favorite places, Pontochoux on rue du Pont aux Choux.” She set down the bags. “It’s a wonderful Japanese spot. Do you like Japanese curry, Mat?”
While he answered, she kissed me on the cheek then darted over to Dad to do the same. Her nervous energy bounced her between us like a pinball.
“Then after lunch let’s go to Maison Schiaparelli. Don’t you think that’s fitting?” she chirped.
“Didn’t it close in 1954?”
Mat shook his head and I remembered that was where he made his initial connection between his research subject and my aunt.
Mom replied, “It reopened in 2012 at the same address Schiaparelli left it, 21 place Vendôme. We can wander the boutique and imagine what it was like in Caro’s day. It’ll be fun.”
And it was.
When the doorman opened the door, I felt like Cinderella—in her scullery clothes—trespassing at a royal ball. The gap between Schiaparelli’s haute couture and my world felt vast. But the feeling only lasted as long as my walk to the small anteroom at the back of the salon.
On my way there, I sensed that the grandeur of the place swept over us all. Schiap’s black-and-white knit sweater with its iconic bow rested front and center. The design that started an empire. Fantastical handbags, hair combs, and accessories filled every shelf and display case. And the dresses . . . color upon color. Embroidery, glass beading, extraordinary stitching. Everything was more splendid than I could dream and pricier than I could imagine.
“Wow,” I whispered to my mom. “Was it always like this?”
“Always. Schiaparelli was the avant-garde designer of the day, of the world. This is Paris.”
My aunt was part of this.
My yearning to find her in all this directed my gaze past the decadence on display to the history on the walls. Pictures from today—Cate Blanchett, Ella Balinska, Joan Smalls, Emilia Clarke, Michelle Obama . . . all dressed in gorgeous couture gowns—were displayed near the front. But as I walked back in the salon, I also walked back through time.
Pictures transported me to the fifties, the forties, the thirties. Wallis Simpson, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, and Marlene Dietrich—all as Caro described—adorned an entire wall of the small back anteroom.
There was Wallis Simpson in the Lobster Dress, not at a showing, but at a fitting with young women surrounding her, displaying other dresses while their coworkers measured and served her. There was another of a mannequin—I’d read that’s what they called models in the ’30s—wearing the Tears Dress, and another displaying what must have been the ephemeral Butterfly Dress Margaret couldn’t bring herself to wear. Caro had been right. The Butterfly Dress became one of Schiaparelli’s most famous creations.
There were also pictures of openings and parties. There was one with young women in ice cream cone hats—the opening of the Circus collection. Caro had written about that night as well. I looked closely and felt certain I spotted her in the foreground of one of the black-and-white photographs.
I was probably only seeing what I wanted to see, but then again . . .
“Dad . . . Mat . . . Mom . . . ,” I whisper-called to each of them. There were so few people in the boutique, each heard me, turned, and hurried my direction.
“Do you think that’s her?” I pointed to a young woman with short dark hair, dressed in a black calf-length dress, like all the others, with a cone hat on her head. A radiant smile brightened her eyes.
