The Storyteller of Casablanca (80)

Zoe – 2010

Alia brings us a tray of tea and then tactfully retires, leaving the two of us alone in the drawing room. From the folds of her shawl, Josie produces a little paper bag. ‘I made you some ghoribas – thought you might enjoy them.’

‘Kenza’s recipe?’ I ask.

‘But of course.’

‘I wanted to show you this.’ Fully aware that I’m playing for time, I slide the section of an obituary photocopied from a newspaper across the table. The words are accompanied by a grainy photograph of a slender woman with cropped hair and sparkling brown eyes.

During her time in North Africa, Josephine Baker worked tirelessly to support the French Resistance movement, carrying messages written in invisible ink on sheets of music back and forth between Morocco and Portugal. Her efforts provided invaluable information about conditions on the ground to the Free French under General de Gaulle and helped with the co-ordination of resistance activities in the run-up to the American invasion in 1942, which established an Allied bridgehead into Europe.

In 1943, de Gaulle himself arrived in French Morocco. Ms Baker performed at a gala in Algiers to raise funds for the cause of French liberation. The day before the show, she had planned a grand finale: she commissioned nuns in a local convent to sew a vast French flag emblazoned with the symbol of resistance – the Cross of Lorraine. Ms Baker graced the stage in a simple white gown, singing before an audience of the great and the good, including General de Gaulle and his wife. At the end of the evening, she delivered a rousing rendition of ‘La Marseillaise’ as the 18-foot-high flag descended from the ceiling above her. The crowd roared their applause.

During the remaining years of the war, she travelled around North Africa and Italy performing for the Allied troops and helping to raise more than three million francs for the Free French. She was made a sublieutenant by the Women’s Auxiliary wing of the French air force, was awarded the Medal of Resistance and the Croix de Guerre, and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by de Gaulle.

Despite lengthy struggles with poor health, in the decades that followed the war Josephine Baker continued to perform and became a prominent activist in the civil rights movement. Desperate for a family, but unable to have children due to her health problems, she adopted twelve children from a wide range of ethnicities and backgrounds, whom she nicknamed her ‘Rainbow Tribe’.

Ms Baker died in Paris on 12th April, 1975, aged 68. She had performed on stage just four days earlier, to glowing reviews, at a gala to celebrate her 50 years in showbusiness.

Josie passes it back to me with a smile. ‘She really was something special. Just being in her company made you feel as if your life had been sprinkled with a little stardust. I’m so glad I have her autograph in my keeping again.’

She falls quiet then and the room is filled with her unspoken question as she waits. The silence is loud in my ears. It’s my turn to talk. But I can’t find the words, knowing that once I begin there will be no going back.

At last I say, ‘There’s something I want to show you. Would you come upstairs? To the room that used to be yours?’

‘Help me up.’ I take her hand and help her get to her feet and then together we climb the stairs to the attic.

She hesitates for a moment at the door. ‘So many years.’ She smiles at me. ‘And yet it feels like yesterday.’

I push open the door and she steps over the threshold into her old bedroom.

Grace’s room.

She stands in silence, taking it all in – the toys and books, the jack-in-the-box and the pink rabbit, the mobile with its silver moon and stars, the bed with my handmade quilt spread out on it, the baby sling hanging from the back of a chair: everything any parents would want to give their baby girl.

But here’s the truth, and it’s time for me to face it at last: Tom and I no longer have a baby girl.

This empty room, filled with the things I’ve bought, has been my way of coping with the impossibility of carrying on, pretending that the unbearable hasn’t happened in order to be able to bear it. I’ve been living two lives: the real one in which I am a lonely expat wife trying to establish a new home in Casablanca and struggling with a failing marriage; and the one in my head, in which Grace is still with me and I spend my days by her side, caring for her.

Josie sits down on the bed in the empty room and picks up a corner of the quilt. ‘This is beautiful,’ she says. She runs her fingers over the triangles cut from Grace’s dresses and romper suits, set in their border of intricate Berber crewel work. The thirteen on-point blocks, each one depicting its own Tree of Life, represent the thirteen precious months that she was with us: there’s one made from scraps of her tiny, newborn Babygros and the brushed cotton blanket I wrapped her in to bring her home from the hospital on the day she was born; there are trees made from the colourful, cheerfully printed clothes she wore at three months, then six months – the little smocked dresses and cosy pyjamas printed with flowers and animals and sailing boats; there are triangles cut from the onesie she was wearing the day she began to crawl; and there’s a whole tree made from the dress she wore for her first birthday party, embroidered with buttercups and bumblebees.

These are the trees of Grace’s life. Just enough to make a quilt for a baby’s bed.

‘Would you like to tell me about it?’ Josie asks softly.