Perfectly Ordinary People(38)

Dad was usually very direct, but we were suddenly having this really strange conversation. It was like he was talking in riddles and leaving it to me to decode what he was saying. So I asked him outright if he thought that I should try to leave and, again, he shocked me, because for the first time in my life, he didn’t have an opinion about what I should do. He said, ‘You’re a grown woman now, and these are exceptional circumstances,’ or something like that. And he said I should do whatever I thought was safest, because he didn’t have any answers anymore.

Was he maybe in shock from his interrogation?

Yes, I think that was part of it. And I think he was also realising that he didn’t have answers anymore. He probably suspected already that the Germans were going to come back for him—

Because he’d fought in the First World War?

Yes. So he was starting to understand that even if I stayed, he might not be there to protect me and that he couldn’t protect me even if he was still there. I think he maybe regretted not letting me go to London.

It does seem like he wanted you to leave.

No, that would be overstating it. It’s more like he said that he no longer knew what was best. He no longer trusted his instincts over mine.

Were you still in touch with Ethel, by then? Was she still begging you to join her?

No. There had been no post since the invasion. I think it started up again a bit later on, but by then they were censoring everything anyway, so a love letter from Ethel would have been a dangerous thing to receive.

What did you decide to do?

Well, I decided to leave, didn’t I? But not yet, not at that moment. Because I could never have done it alone. I would have been far too scared. On top of the fact that it was so dangerous to try to leave – if they caught you, I was pretty sure they’d shoot you – but as a woman, in a country full of male soldiers, well, I felt very vulnerable as well. What had happened to Pierre’s mother could happen to anyone.

So did you leave with Pierre?

Ah, now you’re trying to jump ahead!

And you really are starting to get into telling your story, aren’t you?

Well, this is the exciting bit. We’re about to come to my moment of glory.

So, go on. Tell me about your moment of glory!

Well, that night, I fed the baby and took him to bed with me again. It wasn’t even dark yet, and I didn’t think that I would be able to sleep because I was far too upset about Pierre. But I hoped that, snuggled up against the baby, I might at least be able to doze.

I’d just switched the light out when I heard a knock on the front door. It was after curfew, so that was pretty scary to start with. Then I heard the door open, followed by a sob from my mother – more of a gasp, really. And then, straight off, with no resistance whatsoever, she said, ‘You’ve come for the baby, haven’t you? He’s in there. We only took him in because we didn’t know what else to do with him. We found him on the street.’

I hated her in that instant because she hadn’t given me any time to think what to do. I considered climbing out the window, but with a baby in tow, that was almost impossible. We were on the second floor, after all. But while I was still looking out at the drop below, I heard a familiar voice say, ‘Baby? What baby?’ and that set Mum off on a different track, telling my father, ‘God, they’ve come for you, Bernard – they’re here for you.’

I heard Dad tell her pretty sharply to ‘shut it’, and then the voice – and now I was certain, it was Matias’s voice – said, ‘No, I just came to have a word with Genevieve, if that’s all right?’

I pulled on my dressing gown and opened the door, and there he was, in his policeman’s uniform, terrifying the wits out of my poor mother, who was still crying and muttering something unintelligible about what could they possibly want with me.

So I told her that he was a friend, and to my parents’ surprise, dragged him into my bedroom and shut the door.

I remember he looked down at my breasts, and for a minute I thought I wasn’t sufficiently covered or something, but then I followed his gaze and realised I had the baby in my arms.

‘A baby!’ he said. ‘You have a baby!’

I told him it was a long story and that he wasn’t mine.

But Matias was looking weird: sort of shocked and hopeful at the same time. ‘But that’s perfect,’ he said. ‘A baby is absolutely perfect.’

Perfect for what?

Well, Matias had worked out a plan to get Pierre out. He was incredibly worried about him, though ‘worried’ isn’t really the right word. I’m not sure there is a word to describe that level of anxiety. His voice went all wobbly and I could see tears welling up as he explained just how precarious Pierre’s situation was. The Germans were holding him in a crowded cell, he said, and they were torturing them all to make them give the names of other homosexuals they knew, but so far Pierre had held out. Some of the others were already dead. Others had been shipped out to Schirmeck, where he thought they’d almost certainly die too. Pierre was in a bad way, he said, and it was our last chance to get him out. He said that if he caved in and gave them a single name then he’d be done for.

He explained how a woman had come in two days earlier – how she’d screamed and shouted at the Germans about the fact that they were holding her husband. The soldiers in charge had been so embarrassed by all the fuss that they’d simply released him. They’d arrested her husband by mistake, he said. In their haste they’d been making a lot of those sorts of mistakes.