Last Twilight in Paris, page 1
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“Historical fiction at its finest! Last Twilight in Paris was impossible to put down, impeccably researched, and one of the most engaging books I’ve read this year.”
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“A fast paced story full of heart, hope, twists and turns, betrayal and love that will have you hooked from the first page!”
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“An irresistible blend of romance, espionage, and bravery. The story pulls you in from page one, delivering pulse-pounding suspense and heart-wrenching emotion.”
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“Last Twilight in Paris describes motherhood in a way that only a mother with grown children can. I felt so seen and so understood.”
—Katie Wascisin Hathaway, @simplefairy_book_magic
“Another gem by Pam Jenoff! The beauty of Jenoff’s historical fiction is that we learn pieces of history through her books.”
—Andrea Peskind Katz, Great Thoughts Great Readers Facebook group
“A beautifully written story that sheds light on a lesser known part of WWII history. Fascinating and heartbreaking.”
—Becky, @beckybingbooks
“This book is a must read. You will be rooting for the characters as this fast paced book takes you on an incredible and historical journey.”
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“It blends romance, mystery and suspense against the background of a war that never fails to create high emotions in the reader.”
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“Jenoff was able to take one of the most devastating times in history and tell a beautiful story! This is a story of heartbreak, loyalty, love, mystery and hope.”
—Jenna Weaver, @book_loverrr99
Also by Pam Jenoff
The Kommandant’s Girl
The Diplomat’s Wife
The Ambassador’s Daughter
The Winter Guest
The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach
The Orphan’s Tale
The Lost Girls of Paris
The Woman with the Blue Star
Code Name Sapphire
Last Twilight in Paris
Pam Jenoff
Note to Readers
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780778307983
For my family. For always.
Table of Contents
Prologue
1. Louise
2. Helaine
3. Louise
4. Helaine
5. Louise
6. Helaine
7. Louise
8. Helaine
9. Louise
10. Helaine
11. Louise
12. Helaine
13. Louise
14. Helaine
15. Louise
16. Helaine
17. Louise
18. Helaine
19. Louise
20. Helaine
21. Louise
22. Helaine
23. Louise
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
Helaine
Paris, 1943
Darkness.
Helaine stumbled forward, unable to see through the black void that surrounded her. She could feel the shoulders of the others jostling on either side. The smell of unwashed bodies rose, mingling with Helaine’s own. Her hand brushed against a rough wall, scraping her knuckles. Someone ahead tripped and yelped.
Hours earlier, when Helaine had been brought from her underground cell at the police station into the adjacent holding area, she was surprised to see other women waiting. She had not encountered anyone since her arrest. She had studied the women, who looked to be from all walks of life, trying to discern some commonality among their varied ages and classes that had caused them to be here. There was only one: they were Jews. The yellow star they wore, whether soiled and crudely sewn onto a worn, secondhand dress or pressed crisply against the latest Parisian finery, was identical—and it made them all the same.
They had stood in the bare holding area, not daring to speak. Helaine was certain that her arrest had been some sort of mistake. She had done nothing wrong. They had to free her. But even as she thought this, she knew that the old world of being a French citizen with rights was long gone.
An hour passed, then two. There was nowhere to sit, and a few people dropped to the floor. An elderly woman dozed against the wall, mouth agape. Except for the slight rise and fall of her chest, she might have been dead. Hunger gnawed at Helaine and she wished that she still had the baked goods she purchased at the market just before she was taken. The meager breads, which had seemed so pathetic days earlier, now would have been a feast. But her belongings had been confiscated upon arrest.
Helaine looked upward through the thin slit of window near the ceiling. They were still in Paris. The sour smell from the city street and the sounds of cars and footsteps despite the curfew were familiar, if not comforting. How long they would stay here, she did not know. Helaine was torn. She did not want to remain in this empty room forever. Yet she also dreaded leaving, for wherever they were going would surely be worse.
Finally, the door had opened. “Sortir!” a voice ordered them out in French, reminding Helaine that the policemen, who had brought them here and who were keeping them captive, were not Germans, but their own people.
Helaine had filed into the dimly lit corridor with the others. They exited the police station and stepped outside onto the pavement. At the sight of the familiar buildings and the street leading away from the station, Helaine momentarily considered fleeing. She had no idea, though, where she would go. She imagined running to her childhood home, debated whether her estranged mother would take her in or turn her away. But the women were heavily guarded and there was no real possibility of escape. Instead, Helaine breathed the fresh air in great gulps, sensing that she might not be in the open again for quite some time.
The women were herded up a ramp toward an awaiting truck. Helaine recoiled. They were being placed in the back part of the vehicle where goods should have been carried, not people. Helaine wanted to protest but did not dare. Smells of stale grain and rotting meat, the truck’s previous cargo, assaulted her nose, mixing with her own stench in the warm air. It had been three days since she had bathed or changed and her dress was wrinkled and filthy, her once-luminous black curls dull and matted against her head.
When the women were all inside the truck, the back hatch shut with an ominous click. “Where are they taking us?” someone whispered. Silence. No one knew and they were all too afraid to venture a guess. They had heard the stories of the trains headed east to awful places from which no one ever returned. Helaine wondered how long the journey would be.
As they bumped along the Paris streets, Helaine’s bones, already sore from sleeping on the hard prison cell floor, cried out in pain. Her mouth was dry and her stomach empty. She wanted water and a meal, a hot bath. She wanted home.
If home was a place that even existed anymore. Helaine’s husband, Gabriel, was missing in Germany, his fate unknown. She had scarcely spoken with her parents since before the war. And Helaine herself had been taken without notice. Nobody knew that she had been arrested or had any idea where she had gone. It was as if she simply no longer existed.
To distract herself, Helaine tried to picture the route they were taking outside the windowless truck, down the boulevards she had just days earlier walked freely, past the cafés and shops. The familiar locations should have been some small comfort. But this might well be the last time she ever came this way, Helaine realized, and the thought only worsened her despair.
Several minutes later, the truck stopped with a screech. They were at a train station, Helaine guessed. The back hatch to the truck opened and the women peered out into pitch blackness. “Raus!” a voice commanded. That they were under the watch of Germans now seemed to confirm Helaine’s worst fears about where they were headed. “Schnell!” Someone let out a cry, a mix of the anguish and uncertainty they all felt.
The women clambered from the truck and Helaine stumbled, banging her knee and yelping. “Quiet,” a woman’s voice beside her cautioned fearfully. A hand reached out and helped her down the ramp with an unexpectedly gentle touch.
Outside the truck it was the tiniest bit lighter and Helaine was just able to make out some sort of loading dock. The group moved forward into a large building.
Now Helaine found herself in complete darkness once more. This was how she had come to be in an unfamiliar building, shuffling forward blindly with a group of women she did not know, uncertain of where they were going or the fate that might befall them. She could see nothing, only feel the fear and confusion in the air around her. They seemed to be in some sort of corridor, pressed even more closely together than they had be en. Helaine put her hand on the shoulder of the woman in front of her, trying hard not to fall again.
They were herded roughly through a doorway, into a room that was also unlit. No one moved or spoke. Helaine had heard rumors of mass executions, groups of people gassed or simply shot. The Germans might do that to them now. Her skin prickled. She thought of those she loved most, Gabriel and, despite everything that had happened, her parents. Helaine wanted their faces, not fear, to be her final thought.
Bright lights turned on suddenly, illuminating the space around them. “Mon Dieu!” someone behind her exclaimed softly. Helaine blinked her eyes, scarcely daring to believe what she saw. They were not in a camp or a prison at all. Instead, they were standing in the main showroom of what had once been one of the grandest department stores in Paris.
1
Louise
Henley-on-Thames, 1953
The fog is rolling in low across the Thames as I shutter the secondhand shop on Bell Street for the night, the mist weaving its way, tentacle-like, into the alley where my bicycle leans against the side of the gray brick building. The sudden gloom seems to signal a change, the start of something ominous. I draw my woolen scarf closer around my neck against the brisk September air, then climb onto the rickety shopper and begin to pedal home.
I navigate through the town center, then left on Hart Street and toward the base of Henley Bridge, welcoming the stillness. There’s no one out at this late hour to require a greeting or stare at me oddly. When I moved here seven years ago after marrying Joe, the bucolic Oxfordshire town had at first seemed like a haven, a welcome refuge from my mum’s dismal flat in South London. Only later would I realize how small the town actually was, how stifling it would become.
Ten minutes later, I reach home. Our low, two-story house on the outskirts of town at the end of Wargrave Road is identical to the half-dozen others in the row, gray brick with a tiny front yard just large enough for a single rosebush each. It is situated in one of the new housing developments that had been erected hastily after the war. The site had formerly been a crater where a bomb had fallen, and I sometimes breathe deeply and imagine that I can still smell the gunpowder.
Though the house appears well-kept from a distance, closer I can see the little faults, even in the near darkness, the cracks at the foundation, a bit of trim around the window that is beginning to fall. I glance at the coal bin and make a mental note to ask Joe to fill it, in the morning of course. He will be on his third brandy or perhaps fourth, so he won’t remember if I mention it now.
Inside, the house is still. Joe is asleep in his chair, reliving the battles he fought, as he does every night. His newsboy cap sits on the table and he is still wearing his white dress shirt from his long day at the accountancy firm, sleeves rolled. Joe’s auburn hair remains military-short, though his face is a bit fuller now with age. I lift the tilted glass gently from his hand and stub out the cigarette, a Player’s Medium, in the ashtray. Though I worry about him drinking too much, I don’t begrudge him the temporary escape liquor provides. At least he drinks at home, bottles purchased from the off-license, rather than getting pissed at The Old Bell or one of the other pubs like some men in town do, staying until closing or even later for a lock-in and stumbling home at all hours, embarrassing their wives.
I touch his cheek, then nudge him gently. “Go up to bed, dear.” Joe rousts himself, mumbling unintelligibly before shuffling off. I watch with a pang of sadness as he retreats.
Joe had served in the British army during the war and had spent more than four years on the ground in active combat. Lucky, some call him, because he was never captured or even wounded. I can see the scars brought on by living under that kind of strain, though, watching friend after friend killed, never knowing if each day would be his last. Neither Joe nor I had ever talked in detail about what either of us had done during the war. It lies silent and unspoken between us, a dark divide.
My mind reels back to the other day when the children had been playing hospital. They were using an old gauze bandage, wrapping it around a doll. Seeing this, Joe, usually so even-tempered, had become distraught. “You’re wasting medical supplies!” he cried. “Don’t you know that some people don’t have enough of those?” His eyes had been wide with horror as he surely remembered men bleeding out when there hadn’t been bandages to save them.
I had taken his arm. “It’s okay. That’s just an old scrap of cloth. It really can’t be used for anything else.”
His eyes seemed to clear then. “Yes, of course. Sorry.” He retreated, his old calm returning. But I could see in that moment the deep places where he hid his anger and pain.
Eight years have passed since the war ended and Joe came home, far longer than he was over there. Time to get on with it, stiff-lipped English folk seem to say. And Joe has gotten on with it, putting his bravest face on to mask the pain. He goes to work and keeps the garden neat and pays the bills, everything that a good husband and father is supposed to do. Only I’m close enough to see the scars that will never fully heal, and I wish there was more I could do to help him.
I walk to the kitchen and pick up an empty packet of crisps from the counter, left there by one of the children, no doubt. I consider being annoyed and then decide it isn’t worth the trouble. I move around, cleaning and straightening. It is late and I’m exhausted; tidying up might have waited until morning. But my own childhood had been a never-ending stream of empty beer bottles and unkempt rooms, and I don’t want that for my family. I simply cannot rest unless things are in order.
When I have set the kitchen to rights, I walk into the living room and sit down by the low table to work on the jigsaw puzzle that Joe gave me for Christmas, depicting a lovely image of the Welsh countryside in summer. I pick up a piece and study the jagged, half-done puzzle, finding a spot and trying it. The piece snaps satisfyingly into place. That is the thing I love most about puzzles. Something that moments earlier had made no sense at all now fits. I reach for another piece. I should go to sleep, I know. But these few minutes of solitude are worth more.
Five minutes later, I tear myself away from the puzzle and start upstairs. In the nursery (a fancy word for the children’s shared room, which is just large enough for two single beds), the twins, Ewen and Phaedra, are sleeping soundly. I pick up a Beano comic from the floor and place it on the nightstand. Winnie-the-Pooh lies open, spine up, and I regret not making it back to read to them before bedtime. I normally only work when the children are at school, wanting to be home for them in the afternoons and evenings. Joe doesn’t mind my helping at the shop, as long as it doesn’t interfere with taking care of the house and children. But Midge had asked a favor, something came up and she was called away suddenly. Could I stay and close up and straighten things for the night? So I’d left dinner and Joe agreed to put the children to bed. At first, I’d worried whether he could manage it. But despite his demons, Joe is good at being there when I need him to be. I stayed longer than I had planned to after closing the shop, getting lost as I so often did when sorting through the objects and imagining the stories behind them.
I adjust the children’s bedclothes to ward off the persistent cold of the second floor, then remove the hot water bottles, which have gone tepid. Downstairs is warm enough from the stove, but upstairs the electric fire does little to stave off the chill. I pause, studying their faces lovingly. Born after the war, Ewen and Phaedra sleep with the peaceful minds of ones who have never been woken and hurried to bomb shelters for nights on end. For me, doing without has always been a kind of default state, first from my poor childhood and later the Depression and then the war. But despite the shortages and rationing that carried into the postwar years and are only just now ending, my children have no memory of a time of worry or doing without, and for that I am grateful. I kiss them each on the forehead and then tiptoe from the room and down the hall.
I slip into bed beside Joe and move close to him for warmth, leaning my forehead against the wide expanse of his back as I often do for comfort. I had met Joe in a London dance hall before the war. He was a college student and a rower, tall and confident. I was never quite sure what he saw in me, a girl who worked in one of the shops with no higher education or family background. But we had a connection and made each other laugh. We went for drinks and to the movies in Leicester Square and talked of a future together after he graduated.
