The next morning, Fabienne tried on and discarded three outfits, swearing when she realized that was all she’d brought with her; a rendezvous with a handsome man being the last thing she’d thought of when she’d packed. In the end she settled on a playsuit, a vintage Stella design from the 1950s, in faded navy, which she embellished with a red scarf around her neck and red lipstick. Then she set off to meet Melissa and Will at the Hôtel des Invalides.
It had been Melissa’s idea that they meet up; she’d said she wanted someone with expert knowledge to show her around the Marais. Fabienne had admitted that she’d promised her grandmother she’d go to an exhibition at the Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides—a bizarre request, Fabienne had thought at the time, but given Estella was ninety-seven she was prepared to allow for some strangeness—and Melissa had said they’d tag along and could all head off to the Marais afterward.
Les Invalides was a stupendous building, and Will said he’d never been inside, so Fabienne hoped that seeing its magnificence would at least prove worthwhile even if the exhibition did not. She met them out front and Fabienne kissed both Melissa’s cheeks, having lapsed into French ways as she did so easily when in Paris. Then she felt she must do the same with Will. As she leaned toward him, she caught the scent of citrus, amber, and the sea, like a Riviera holiday. “Sorry if this isn’t how you’d imagined spending your day,” she said.
“It’s the perfect way to spend the day,” he said and he smiled at her in a way that made her believe he meant it.
“What’s the exhibition about?” Melissa asked.
“Estella said it was something about the war, which is not a part of her youth that she ever talks about. That’s why, when she insisted I come, I thought I should.” Fabienne consulted the brochure.
“MI9: The Secret Ministry of the Second World War,” she read aloud. “MI9 was formed as an inter-service intelligence section in December 1939 to facilitate escapes of British prisoners of war, and to help those who succeeded in evading capture in enemy occupied territory to return to Britain. It was a lifeline to escapers and evaders in World War II, although its existence was unknown to most outside the military, and its actions saved the lives of thousands of British servicemen. This exhibition honors the French people who worked with MI9 to form escape lines across France, as well as those who helped evaders stay out of enemy hands. It also honors the men of MI9 who worked with the French people to cause immense irritation to the Germans as escapers and evaders slipped through their fingers and returned to active duty to fight once more.”
“That sounds cheery,” Will said.
“You guys should definitely go and do something else,” Fabienne said.
“I’m joking,” he replied, walking on in. “Let’s see what it’s all about.”
Although Fabienne couldn’t understand why her grandmother had insisted she go to the exhibition, it only took half an hour for her and, she thought, for Will and Melissa, to become so engrossed that she felt they’d all be, not glad—that wasn’t the right word to use about something so haunting—but grateful that they’d come.
Fabienne translated some of the plaques for Will and Melissa that were in French, explaining that it was considered a soldier’s duty to escape, that escape tactics were taught to the men before they set off for war, and that escape committees were formed in prisoner-of-war camps to send messages to MI9 and to receive escape supplies and invent escape plans, many of which worked. They marveled at the buttons that hid compasses and the other crazy inventions: air force boots that turned into peasant shoes, blankets with patterns marked on them so they could be cut and stitched into civilian clothes, hacksaws hidden in fountain pens, the first silk map of Colditz Castle where inveterate escapers were sent, a map which helped many men escape the inescapable fortress. But they became sober when they saw a list of those who had died while helping Allied prisoners and downed airmen to flee back to England.
“It says that any MI9 agent caught, or any French man or woman found helping Allied soldiers to escape, was sentenced to death. Or sent to a concentration camp, from which few returned,” Fabienne read. “Whereas the Allied soldiers they assisted were just sent to a POW camp.”
“They were so young,” Melissa murmured, hand resting on a cabinet in which the “Pat” escape line, a passage across France through which escapers and evaders were ferried, was mapped out and the fate of one Andrée Borrel, a twenty-two-year-old Frenchwoman who worked the line, was described.
Fabienne winced, hearing something in her words, a note of extreme empathy, which made her think that Melissa herself must have heard those same words repeated to her over and over again. So young. Too young to die. Which of course she was. As was Andrée Borrel, betrayed, captured, and taken to a concentration camp where she was given a lethal dose of phenol in July 1944, just one month before France was liberated.
“It’s hard to imagine people being so courageous,” Fabienne said and she felt Will come to stand beside her as she spoke. “Helping others for no reward whatsoever, but in the hope of achieving a greater good. I wonder if people like that exist anymore?”
“Doesn’t it make you wonder what you would have done if it’d been you?” he asked. “Whether you’d have just looked after yourself and stayed out of everyone’s way? Or if you’d have done whatever you could, like they did?”
“I’d like to think I’d have done the right thing,” Fabienne said quietly. “But seeing that I’m not even brave enough to take on my grandmother’s business, I guess that’s unlikely.”
“That’s a different kind of bravery,” he said. “That comes from love: love of your grandmother and her legacy. The other kind, the kind they had is…” He stopped, looking for the right word.
“Heroic,” Fabienne finished.
“Yes,” he said. “I don’t think we have many true heroes these days.” He rested his hand on his sister’s shoulder as he spoke.
Fabienne moved away a little, wanting to give them that moment together. She examined a row of photographs, headed: The Heroic Men of MI9. She scanned their faces, most of them younger than her. Then her eyes froze on one particular name underneath a photograph: Alex Montrose.
Her surprise was audible; she tried to turn her gasp into a sneeze. And she suddenly knew why her grandmother had pressed her to come to this exhibition. It was because of Alex Montrose, a name Fabienne hadn’t heard of until three weeks ago. The same name was branded on a piece of paper that she held in her purse, a piece of paper she’d found when she was clearing out some of her father’s things after his funeral.
Estella didn’t know she’d found the paper. But on insisting Fabienne attend the exhibition, Estella must have wanted Fabienne to know something of Alex Montrose. Which meant that, in the few hours she had in Manhattan on Monday before her flight to Sydney, she would go to see her grandmother again. She would ask Mamie about the piece of paper she’d found. Alex Montrose was somehow important in Fabienne’s and Estella’s lives and she must discover why.
It took them the entire Metro ride to throw off the quietude that had settled on them in the museum. But once they exited at Saint-Paul and lost themselves in the narrow streets and beauty of the Marais, they regained their spirits.
Fabienne took them to lunch at the Marché des Enfants Rouges, with its delicious food and handful of rickety tables near the old Carreau du Temple. Then they wandered through two of the hôtels particulier—the Carnavalet and the Salé, stopped for coffee, and strolled through the maze of courtyards of the Village Saint-Paul—once Fabienne had remembered how to find her way in. It was now home to an eclectic assortment of antiques shops, galleries, cafés, vintage treasures, and beautiful objects and Melissa loaded Will down with a growing pile of shopping bags. They finally arrived at what Fabienne had always thought was the area’s pièce de résistance, the Place des Vosges.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” Melissa cried as they turned off the Rue des Tournelles and came upon the square, lined on each side by redbrick and blond-stone apartments and townhouses with blue-black slate roofs, all symmetrical and made more beautiful by the repetition of the facades, the lines, and the elegance. Vaulted arcades of cool stone cast them back in time while the modernist art galleries situated beneath kept them firmly in the present. In the middle was the park, a little enclave of green and statuary, where many Parisians sat on blankets, picnicking.
“It really is.” Fabienne beamed, glad that Melissa liked it too.
Fabienne felt the back of Will’s hand brush hers as he shifted toward her to avoid a pedestrian. He glanced down, but didn’t immediately withdraw his hand. The Fabienne of just two days ago would have moved away so that she didn’t appear to be more interested in him than he might be in her but the Fabienne she was that day left her hand where it was. And the simple act of the back of his hand touching hers felt as sensual as silk on skin.
“Let’s have a picnic!” Melissa said, clapping her hands together like a delighted child and looking pleadingly over at her brother as if she expected him to demur. “I’m not tired. In fact I feel better than I have in a long while. Fabienne’s grandmother is right; Paris is very therapeutic.”
“My grandmother’s house is just around the corner,” Fabienne said. “I’ll go get a blanket and plates and glasses—it’s a champagne evening, don’t you think?”
Will laughed. “Is it ever not a champagne evening in Paris?”
“No.” Fabienne smiled at him. “I’ll stop at the boulangerie on the way back—there’s also a fromagerie on the street we’ve come from—and get some food.”
“Why don’t I get the food?” Will suggested. “I’m sure I can order bread and cheese.”
“God knows what we’re going to end up eating if you get it,” Melissa teased her brother. “Maybe just point to things and don’t speak.”
Melissa hurried off to squeeze into a tight space on one of the benches to wait and to escape Will’s rejoinder. Fabienne pointed Will in the direction of the shops and then dashed off to the nearby Rue de Sévigné to get everything she needed. While she was there, her phone buzzed. The message read: Hey Fab, I need a date for a dinner next Saturday. You up for it? Or are you still not speaking to me? Jasper
She considered ignoring the text. Are you still not speaking to me? It made her sound petty, as if they were having a disagreement that she was causing to drag on when in actual fact she’d made it pretty clear that they were done with. And he’d only shrugged, as if he couldn’t be bothered with the effort of expending emotion on Fabienne, which was a pretty accurate summary of the last couple of years of their relationship. No Jasper, I’m not up for it, she texted back and ignored the next buzz from her phone.
When she returned, she couldn’t find Melissa. Nor Will. She stepped farther into the park, thinking perhaps they’d set themselves up in a picnic spot, but they definitely weren’t there. Her heart sank. Perhaps taking them to a war museum hadn’t been such a good idea.
“Sorry I took so long. Seems everyone else wants bread and cheese too.”
She whirled around and came face to face with Will, who had a baguette and a bag of cheeses in his hands. “I can’t find Melissa,” she said worriedly, his sister’s whereabouts overriding the relief that he hadn’t run off to his hotel.
“She called me,” he said. “Apparently she felt tired and caught a taxi back to the hotel. I told her to wait for me, that I’d take her back, but she said that if I tried to, then she wouldn’t leave and I’d have to put up with her being tired throughout the entire picnic. She’s too stubborn to argue with so I let her go. I think…” he paused, “it might be her not so subtle way of letting me spend time alone with you. Which I hope you don’t mind.”
Fabienne blushed. “Remind me to thank her for meddling.”
Will laughed and slid his hand into hers. “Where shall we sit?”
And Fabienne, smiling so hard it almost hurt, replied, “What about over there?”
They chatted as they ate and Fabienne found out more about him: that his mother had died in her mid-thirties of breast cancer, that Melissa had inherited a rogue gene. That she’d planned to have a preventive mastectomy and hysterectomy when she was thirty but the cancer had caught her years before that.
“That’s awful,” Fabienne said quietly.
“It is,” Will said.
“Are you close to your father then?” Fabienne asked. “I imagine you must be if he was all you had.” In a way, Fabienne had often felt as if her father was all she’d had. Her mother, whose oncology work at her clinic was all-consuming—as it should be, given that lives were at stake—had always been less of a presence in her life than her father had been.
“My father,” Will said, and his voice had changed to a rougher, harder tone, “had other things to amuse himself with. He found solace in women, not his children. Liss and I saw more of our housekeeper than we did of him.”
“No wonder you and Melissa are so close.”
“Liss was twelve when our mother died. I was seventeen. By the time I was twenty-one, our father had bought himself another apartment so he could ‘entertain’ without—what he called—my disapproving stares. He visited us once a week until I told him not to bother. We haven’t seen him for years.”
“That’s so sad,” Fabienne said, catching a glimpse in his eyes of the hurt boy who’d taken on his sister’s care at such a young age and who would be devastated, ripped apart, when she too died.
“Much too sad for a Paris night with beautiful company and the best champagne I’ve ever drunk.” He lifted the bottle and refilled her glass and his.
“Paris evenings really are like none other,” Fabienne said, knowing he wanted to change the subject.
She lay on her back on the picnic rug, unable to fit in any more bread or cheese. Around them, the sky was still light even though it was nine o’clock, the sound of laughter and children playing in the fountain drifted around them like a lullaby, twining with the music that someone nearby had thought to bring with them. The square seemed to hum with the simple joy that radiated from everyone at spending a glorious night outside with family and friends.
Will leaned back on his elbows, shifting a little closer to her. “I should get back and see how Liss is.”
“Of course you should.” Fabienne sat up, brushed off her playsuit and began to put things into the picnic basket. “I hope she won’t be too tired after today.”
She stood up, as did he, and then he leaned toward her, taking the picnic basket from her hand, and setting it down on the ground. The music floating across changed to “The Nearness of You,” a bluesy jazz number that spoke all of her thoughts.
He slipped his arms around her waist and murmured, “Please tell me to stop if you don’t want this.”
At the same time as she registered the thought—don’t stop!—she realized he was kissing her, that one of his hands was on her back, the other tangled in her black hair, and she stepped in as close as she could, wanting more than anything to feel the nearness of Will Ogilvie.