The Postmistress of Paris(95)

“Whatever do you think I’m doing?” Nanée protested. T was not someone who needed to know.

T gave her a look. “You’re taking a German refugee wanted by the Gestapo illegally across half of France, if not across the border.”

Nanée closed the door behind her.

“So you do mean to leave France with him then?” T said.

Nanée considered her friend, so much smaller than she was, and somehow so much more accomplished. A wife. A mother. A woman of substance on whom Danny relied.

“You should,” T said. “You should go with Edouard. Take a chance for once in your life. Don’t use the excuse of needing to stay to help Varian. Varian’s days here are numbered.”

Edouard’s voice drifted in from the room next door. He was tucking Luki in, reading from the letters he’d written her, as he did every night. Always funny bits. Light bits. Nanée wondered if that was all he’d written, or only what he now chose to read.

“You’d have me leave France for a man I barely know?” she said with a lightness she didn’t feel. Edouard had been at Villa Air-Bel for barely a month.

“All the work we do here will end soon, whether you stay or you go.”

Would it? Or when Varian left, would Danny take charge and carry on? Nanée closed her eyes, listening to Edouard’s voice, wondering if he would come to her again tonight, if he would whisper her name and make love to her before slipping back to his own room lest Luki wake and find him missing.

“I don’t think it would be good for Luki,” she said.

“For you to go, or for you to stay here? I ought to have pushed you to get to know him better in Paris.”

“He was leaving that day for Sanary-sur-Mer.”

“You might have written him letters, like Danny and me. And Sanary-sur-Mer isn’t that far for a girl who flies airplanes.”

If Edouard had sent that bread-and-butter note she’d found on his desk in Sanary, she would have written him back. Why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t she written first? How could they know anything about each other, really, in the few weeks they’d had together? Could she take him back to a world where she would be forever judged for not being the kind of woman she couldn’t stand to be, where everyone she knew would assume he was a penniless refugee who loved not her but her wealth? And once she left France, she would not be allowed to return.

“After the war, Edouard will not want the memory of his wife that he sees in me now.”

“You might let him decide that.”

“Luki—”

“Luki already thinks of you as her mother.”

“And yet I am not.”

T smiled gently. “And yet you’re saying goodbye here. You’re fixing this home in your memory.”

Nanée wanted to object, to say she hadn’t been doing exactly that, saying goodbye to the zinc tub and the little chair in the greenhouse where she liked to read, the clock on the mantel that refused to recognize the passage of time, the pond they’d rescued from ruin, and the view from the belvedere to the sea, the trees so often hung with art.

“In case,” she admitted. “In case I decide to go . . .” Not home. This villa was more home than anywhere she had ever lived, their makeshift family more family to her than anyone back in Evanston. “In case I decide to go back.”

T wiped away a tear. “How will I bear it here without you? I know you should go. I want you to. But I want you to stay too. Selfishly, I want you to stay. I ask myself, Who could get away with all you get away with? Who will manage the money exchanges? Who will glide through the Marseille streets to deliver messages? But in my heart, it’s, Who will light the fire every night and start us singing? Never mind that you can’t carry a tune. Who will make Danny laugh?”

“I can too carry a tune.”

“You can’t, but I love the way you sing anyway. We all love the way you sing.” T smoothed the suit still in her hands. “I can let you go, but I can’t lose you. And this is . . . You might . . . You’ll need to appear as convincing as you possibly can. A woman of substance. A woman no one would—”

“I don’t have any stockings.”

“Nan, nobody has stockings anymore.”

“That suit would hardly be appropriate for hiking over the Pyrenees.” Again with a lightness she didn’t feel.

“It’s not Aero-Chanel, I’ll give you that. But you’ve never been one for dressing appropriately. You just like to pretend you are.”

How comfortable she’d felt in that Chanel dress and flight jacket, even at the Surrealist exposition that had so discomfited her. And of course T was right. The skirts Nanée wore to deliver messages in the Panier were not appropriate for a wealthy American woman traveling first class. Her trousers, elegant enough, would draw the wrong kind of attention. And she was too big to borrow anything of T’s, too small for Jacqueline’s.

She walked away from the damn suit in T’s lap, to the window. It was dark outside and light in the bedroom, so that the windowglass reflected a dim version of her own face back at her. “I didn’t even free him,” she said.

“Edouard?” T’s voice turning toward her. “But you had no way to know he wasn’t at that camp.”