It was a long night, punctuated by Alex’s nightmares, nightmares which told Estella that, whatever he’d done, whatever had happened to him in his past, he paid for it every day. That he cared deeply, too deeply, which was perhaps why he seemed so careless on the surface. Because Alex was good. He’d been more than good to Lena: solicitous, concerned, wanting to grant Lena the gift of a sister in an attempt to show her that love did exist.
For Alex to have been as careful as he’d been with someone as broken as Lena made him worthy of a great deal more admiration than Estella had ever spared him. So every time he murmured something in his sleep, she drifted over to the piano and played a song, quietly, gently, hoping the music would lull him back into peace and it worked, mostly.
Around midnight, when she was sitting at the piano, forehead propped on her hand, the things from her mother’s box resting in her lap, crying a little for Lena, for her mother, for Alex too, she realized, she heard him say her name.
“Estella?”
“I’m here,” she said, slipping back over to the bed and lying down next to him. In the dark, his eyes were open and she studied his face. “You were dreaming again,” she said, the papers in her hands crackling.
“Bad habit of mine,” he said mirthlessly. “What’s that?”
She explained what she and Lena had found—everything except the photograph she’d ripped to pieces—and held up the manuscript page that she and Lena hadn’t had time to look at. “It’s from Evelyn Nesbit’s memoir. But it’s not in the copy Lena gave me. It’s very intimate—I mean, I know the whole memoir is intimate—but this page isn’t salacious; it’s gentle, about her and John and their love. It even mentions the Rue de Sévigné as their sanctuary. And…” she stopped, unsure if she was reading more into it than was really there.
“Go on,” Alex said.
“It mentions a gift from John that she couldn’t keep. A gift she had to give away and that it broke her heart.”
“Your mother.”
“I think so. Perhaps that’s why this page isn’t in the published version. Sadism and murder aren’t too sensational but giving away an illegitimate child is.”
“When was Evelyn’s memoir published?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know. But the date on this manuscript page is 1916.”
“The year before you were born,” he said slowly. “Is that a coincidence? Does the writing of the memoir have anything to do with you and Lena?”
Estella frowned. “It’s hard to see how.”
Alex rubbed a hand over his face as if he was tired.
Estella moved to sit up. “Sorry, I should let you sleep.”
“Stay,” Alex said. “I was just thinking.” He paused, as if turning something over in his mind. “Lena said Harry had the Gramercy Park house built in 1917. That was the year you were born. Which means he must have seen the Paris house before 1917. Did he find out about it from Evelyn’s memoir?”
“But this page isn’t in the published book. So that can’t be it. And it says here that neither Evelyn nor John used the house after 1902 when she had my mother. So it was empty for years.” She closed her eyes. Talking about Harry made her remember what Lena had told her about the things he’d done. She shivered. “Monsters,” she said. “Why is the world giving way to monsters? Harry Thaw. Hitler.” More pictures scrolled behind her closed lids: Huette starving, her mother’s empty apartment, the police marching the Jewish men out of the Marais. Her eyes snapped open.
“Tell me something funny,” she said suddenly. “There must be something you’ve seen or done that’s made you laugh. Isn’t there?”
He didn’t reply immediately and Estella worried that he’d misunderstood, that he thought she was trying to make light of the last two days. But it was the opposite. She couldn’t fully comprehend everything that had happened without knowing its counterweight, without remembering that there were other emotions one could feel besides grief and anger.
“Something funny,” he repeated, considering. “How about this? A British soldier who escaped from one of the camps wrote in his report about two fellow prisoners. One of them had been there for almost a year; he had a photo of his wife stuck to the wall above his bed. The other man arrived one night and was given the bunk below. The first thing he did, in the dark, was to stick a photo of his wife to the wall too. When they woke up in the morning, they realized that they each had the same picture. That their wives were one and the same. That she must have got tired of waiting for the first man to come home so she’d married the second. What are the chances that they would have both gone to the same camp, been allocated to the same set of bunks? Fate has the best hand in this game called life, don’t you think?”
“That wasn’t funny,” she insisted, shaking her head. “Oh God, it’s so awful it’s like the worst kind of bad joke where you keep waiting for the punch line.” She gave a wry smile. “What are the chances? Maybe the same as the chances of me bumping into you and Lena in Manhattan.”
“One of fate’s better games,” he said cryptically and she didn’t know if he was being sarcastic or not.
He rolled onto his side a little, probably so that he didn’t have to turn his head all the time to see her. Estella watched him breathe, watched him wait out the spinning that must still be in his head.
“All right?” she asked.
“Getting there.”
“Well,” she said, “since your funny story didn’t exactly lift my mood, maybe you can tell me what makes you feel good about what you do.”
“Every time an airman gets to the embassy in Spain, every time we get intelligence from a prison camp about a nearby airfield or other potential bombing targets or Nazi activity, every time a man escapes a prison camp even if only for a day, it makes me feel good,” he said. “Victory in battle isn’t one glorious fight. It’s a million tiny wins, wins that nobody notices. But every man we get out of a prison camp, or who evades capture after his plane goes down, is a man we can send back in to fight. Every minute the Germans spend searching prisoner-of-war camps for tunnel spoil or escape equipment, or reading letters to find codes is a minute they’re distracted from the main game. Every piece of intelligence we receive from prisoners about a strategic railway junction or munitions plant is another target the bombers can zero in on with accuracy.”
She studied his face. Even in sickness it was resolute. “But nobody knows what you’re doing. And the people you’re saving, you don’t know them. How do you put your life on the line for strangers who never thank you?”
“It’s not for strangers,” he said quietly. “It’s for every one of those Jewish men we saw being marched off to Drancy. It’s for every courier or passeur who’s been betrayed to the Germans and tortured before being killed. It’s for every one of the one hundred people the Germans shot in reprisal killings because they caught one person scratching a V for victory onto a wall. I know all of those people, Estella, and so do you. They’re the people who gave their life for nothing unless I make it mean something. Like you should make Lena’s mean something.”
She stared at the ceiling. “How?” she whispered, so ashamed for ever having doubted his intentions.
“You’ll find a way.”
This time, she rolled over to face him. His dark eyes glinted at her in the blackness of the room. She felt again what she’d felt at the piano, that the sensation of being near him was more unsettling than flying over the ocean, that it left her lunging forward and back at the same time, wanting to be close to him but also wanting to pull away because whatever lay in the space between them was so powerful that, once she dove into it, there would be no recovery.
He turned his head to stare at the ceiling. “You can leave me now,” he said gruffly and it was like a slap in the face.
“Peter said to ignore you until you could stand,” she said weakly, knowing she’d somehow lost the power she’d had.
“I don’t need a nurse anymore.”
A nurse. That was how he thought of her. She rolled off the bed.
When she reached the door, she heard his voice.
“If anything happens, go find Peter at this bar.” He gave her an address.
“What do you mean, if anything happens?”
“Goodnight Estella.”
He closed his eyes, shutting her out. And Estella knew that she was the only one who felt it, that he had no interest whatsoever in moving any closer to her, of seeing what might happen if they were to touch.
Estella didn’t sleep. Instead she lay awake and thought about Alex: the night she’d arrived at the theater and he’d been standing in the middle of a group of admiring women, so debonair that he barely had to raise a smile to get any of them to look at him. The man who’d followed her out into the street to give her a jacket so she wouldn’t be cold, who’d gone with her to help Monsieur Aumont. The man who’d tried to find Lena a family, who’d gone back for Lena’s body and whispered the most beautiful poetry over it. The man who’d never once laid a hand on Estella in any compromising way, the man who frustrated her and made her laugh, who made her feel more emotions in the space of five minutes than she’d ever felt in a lifetime. The man who’d tried to save his mother despite the personal cost, the man who was trying to save a nation without regard for himself.
My God, she thought, one hundred times or more that night: I’m in love with Alex. I’m so in love with Alex I can’t see straight.
That he didn’t love her was so perfectly clear she had to close her eyes rather than look at the fact. He wanted rid of her, done of her, had wanted her only to help Lena and she’d failed at that. Yet…he remembered that night in Paris, the night she’d first met him, with talismanic reverence. As if it stood for something more than two strangers exchanging a map of a prison camp.
By five in the morning, as the sun was stretching its lazy rays into the sky, Estella could no longer stand it. She didn’t know what she planned to do: make a declaration, ask him to clarify his feelings, or whether she just wanted to see his face but she stood up and walked down the hallway to his room. She’d heard piano music playing intermittently through the night, which meant he was at least able to stand. But there’d been silence for the last hour at least.
She tapped lightly at the door. “Alex?” He didn’t answer so she stepped inside.
The bed was empty. The piano stool was empty. The room was empty. His bag was still there; perhaps he was in the kitchen. She sniffed the air for food or coffee, remembering he hadn’t eaten in more than a day, but she couldn’t smell anything.
He wasn’t in the kitchen. Nor the garden. Nor on the roof. Wasn’t in the house at all. She could feel his absence just as she felt his presence, she now realized, acutely. She waited for an hour but he didn’t return. Then she hurried upstairs. Dressed. Walked down to Rue Pigalle to the address Alex had given her and saw Peter polishing glasses. She almost turned away. The last time she’d spoken to Peter, he’d said she was to blame for Lena dying. She didn’t know if she had the strength right now to withstand any more of his bitter truths. But she remembered Alex and that was enough to make her walk over to a chair and sit down. Soon Peter came over to take her order.
“Where is he?” she murmured.
“I told you not to let him out of your sight,” he snapped. He lowered his voice. “He’s gone?”
Estella nodded. “A bloody Mary please.” Then, quietly, “I think he may have gotten tired of me,” she admitted. She’d talked so much about her own problems, rather than about his vastly more significant ones.
Peter leaned down and winked lasciviously. “Alley’s fine with me, love.”
Estella found herself being shoved into an alley, wondering what the hell Peter was up to. When they got there, he began to bark at her again. “Tired of you? You’re the only woman he’s ever asked me to look after. You’re the only woman he assiduously avoids speaking about. And that tells me two things—that he cares about you too damn much, and that makes you fucking dangerous.”
Estella’s mouth wouldn’t work. She stared at Peter as if she hadn’t been speaking French her whole life, as if she couldn’t understand him. “What?” she managed in the end.
“And you’re so fucking dumb you can’t even see it.”
She felt her hand lift to deflect Peter’s aggression, a futile gesture but it was all she was capable of in that moment. She couldn’t quite piece Peter’s words together into any kind of sense. “Is Alex all right?” she asked, because that was the most important question. Had he gone of his own accord?
“You’d better hope he’s all right.” Peter smacked his hand against the wall. “Forget it. He wants me to get you out, I’ll get you out. Stay out of trouble today and I’ll fetch you tonight and get you out of this goddamned country and far away.” Peter stalked back into the bar.
At the same time, two Wehrmacht officers with snuffling bulldogs turned into the alley and Estella could do nothing other than stride off as fast as she could, using her body’s muscle memory to find her way. Her vision was blurred and her ears buzzed with Peter’s words: he cares about you too damn much.
Why? Because she was Lena’s sister and he felt he owed it to Lena to protect her? But, even as she had the thought, she knew that wasn’t it.
Now she could clearly see everything she’d missed before: the fact that he’d only danced with Lena in the first place because he thought she was Estella. Standing shoulder to shoulder with him before the window of a flying boat, staring out at the blue sky. Sitting beside him on a piano stool in a jazz club laughing, and then longing. Lying next to him on a bed when he was unwell and him never once touching her, never once betraying anything of the reputation that went before him, always treating her with carefulness and restraint. She had thought it was because he barely tolerated her but that wasn’t it: it was almost as if he couldn’t bear to touch her because he was afraid of what might follow.
As she walked up the stairs of the house in the Marais, she no longer felt it settle over her like a gloomy day. It suddenly seemed bereft, as if it was missing the one thing that brought it to life: a pair of lovers.
Estella opened the door to Alex’s room and she lay down on the bed, on the side where he had slept, a flood of want and yearning sweeping over her. His pillow carried the scent of him and as she rested her cheek against it, she knew that if what she felt wasn’t love, then love must be so acute it couldn’t be survived. Because what she felt right now was agony.