The Postmistress of Paris(84)
His other hand slid down, touching her rear, not erotically but only to steady himself as he painted.
Rear. What a prudish way to think of it.
Mon derrière. The word masculine despite her own derrière being distinctly female. Not bare. The robe pooled around it. Her arms together over her bare breasts.
Ma poitrine. My chest. Even the French saw that one as feminine.
Another shiver ran through her. How disappointed her father would be that, just like her mother, she’d fallen for a refugee without a penny to his name.
“Are you cold?” he whispered. “I’ll be quick.”
He was already painting the same thing on her right side, the same even swirls to make a second fleur-de-lis—the symbol of French royalty and Catholic saints, of the Virgin Mary.
The Lady Mary, Luki called her.
“I’m almost done.”
The palette and brush set on a cloth on a tray on her dresser. Edouard at his camera on the other side of the bed. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She sat as straight as she could, squaring her bare shoulders. She turned her head to the left, so that her face would appear to him in profile, not all the way but enough so that he could see her jawline, the hint of her lips and nose and eyes. Her left side, which was her best side, although she didn’t suppose anyone else would see any difference.
“Perfect.”
The hush of his voice a reminder of all the others sleeping in this big old house, their borrowed family.
The whisper of the shutter. One shot. A second. A third.
“Thank you. That will do it.”
She smiled a little.
The whisper of the shutter again.
“I thought you were done.”
“I couldn’t resist that expression.”
“You told me to keep a neutral expression.”
“Even I, sometimes, am wrong.”
She felt his hand on her back again, then a cloth wiping the paint off before it could dry.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice so low she might be imagining it. “Do you know that? Do you know how beautiful you are?”
She turned to him, inhaling the wet paint smell that was him, and that was her now too.
Sunday, December 1, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Nanée was lying in bed—Edouard returned to his room in case Luki looked for him in the middle of the night but Nanée still naked under the sheets, lingering in the memory of their bodies together, belonging—when she heard something. The click of the villa’s front door opening? At this hour?
She threw on her robe and grabbed her Webley from the top shelf of her armoire.
They did sometimes have late-night visitors. Nanée had once returned well after midnight to find the dining-room door closed, and British voices, then Varian emerging, as startled by her as she was by him. He’d nodded acknowledgment and asked her to muster up something to eat, then received the wine and a sausage of dubious origin through a door opened only wide enough for her to hand him the chipped wooden tray—protecting her, she realized only later, from the dangerous knowledge of having as “guests” British soldiers trying to escape France.
Now, she slipped quietly out to the library. Varian’s voice, in a low murmur, rose from the entryway at the bottom of the stairs. “Roundups?” He stood just inside the front door with Captain Dubois, their friend in the Marseille police, who’d brought news just that morning that Bill Freier had been caught with the false identity papers he was forging for Edouard in his possession.
“Roundups,” Dubois confirmed. “Because Pétain is coming. We’re to conduct roundups to clear the streets of any possible trouble. They’ll begin at dawn.”
Monday, December 2, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard watched Luki at the soapstone sink with Aube and Peterkin, T placing the jug of milk in the sink and pulling three cups from the open shelves. None of them saw him. He raised his Leica and focused his lens on Luki accepting the cup of fresh milk from T and holding it, letting its warmth seep into her little fingers. She was five now, and in the year they’d been apart, she’d somehow lost so much of what had been Elza in her. She had her own eyes, her own mouth and jaw and gap-toothed smile. Even the square width of her bony shoulders was different from Elza’s finer bones. It was as if he were losing Elza again. Or perhaps finally beginning to let go.
He took the shot.
They all four turned at the whisper of the shutter. He shot again, the four of them at the sink. The children drinking milk as if life were normal. Family.
“Papa,” Luki said, “Madame LaVache has so much milk that we had to bring the jug in before it got too heavy. But we get to go back out and milk her some more. And we saw an eagle who wears boots.”
“A booted eagle,” T explained. “He must have a nest nearby.”
Luki grinned, that loose tooth even more so. “Dagobert barked and barked at him!”
Monday, December 2, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Where the devil are Danny and Lena?” Varian asked Nanée. They were working in the warmth of the library’s porcelain stove, Nanée trying to fill Lena’s role while Gussie did what Gussie did. Varian was cranky, snapping about the particularly vile batch of ersatz coffee, Edouard’s photo-taking, and her own inability to take dictation, a skill she had never claimed, and her lack of knowledge about how much money the CAS had on hand, information she wasn’t privy to even though she’d just contributed another $2,000 on top of the $5,000 in September. They had for weeks now brought everything incriminating at the CAS office back to the chateau at night, but on Dubois’s warning about the roundups, Varian sent Danny on the first trolley to close the office and bring Lena back with him. Here, they were far enough away from the city center that they would be caught only in the most widely cast of nets.