The Paris Agent(23)
I could have handled the stress of the nursing, but the guilt weighed on me, even though, as far as I could tell, Noah and I had done everything right. Even so, I dragged myself home each night on curfew to crawl into bed beside Noah to weep.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered thickly one night.
“None of this is our fault,” I whispered back, between sobs. “It doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“We’ll make sense of it,” he choked, rubbing soothing circles along my back. “We can’t fix it, but…we’ll figure out what went wrong. I promise.”
A week after the incident, I was exhausted in a way I’d never experienced before—physically drained by my efforts to help the injured, emotionally drained from standing, virtually powerless, among so much suffering. There were funerals every day and when I wasn’t needed at the hospital, I tried to attend as many as I could. None of the mourners would ever know who I really was, but it felt important to me that someone from the SOE attended those funerals. Our agency was ultimately responsible for every lost life, even if we still had no idea why the bombers had targeted the wrong area.
The immediate crisis was finally passing, but there was no time to rest and recuperate because I had to return to my “job” with the Travers family. As tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep the night before my return to child-minding, and beside me, Noah was tossing and turning too. I knew he was still awake—his breathing was shallow, but we’d been lying in silence for hours, and he startled me when he said suddenly, “You know all about my family, so you know why this is so personal for me.”
“Yes,” I whispered, after a stunned pause. Over that difficult week, we had not mentioned it once directly, but I’d been thinking about his parents…his brothers. I’d been thinking about that fraught trip from Paris to London via the escape line in 1941, and the way he kept talking about seeing his family again with such longing in his voice. I remembered the shock of the heartbroken letter he sent me a week after our return.
They are gone, Josie. It’s all gone—even the house, even their things. I left and they were fine and it didn’t occur to me for a minute that might change while I was away. My family was my whole world, and I have nothing at all left of them.
“I know next to nothing about your family, you know,” he said. “Only that your mother lived in Paris until just before the invasion, and now she lives in London. Why don’t you ever talk about her?”
“We’re not supposed to talk about—”
“Josie,” he interrupted me, his tone almost as sharp as I’d ever heard it. “You already knew everything about me when you arrived here. If you don’t want to talk to me about your family, you don’t have to, but at least be honest about it.”
“It’s just me and Maman. And it’s not that I don’t want to tell you about her,” I whispered. “We were once close, but that’s changed in the last few years, and we parted on bad terms the morning before I came here.”
Over the course of the awful week since the bombing, I’d wished so fervently that she was there with me in France—a calm, skilled physician like Maman was just what we needed, not someone like me, a woman who took a nursing job once-upon-a-time because that’s all that she could find and the war had disrupted her plans to train as a translator. But now, lying in the dark beside Noah, I pictured my mother’s face and despite everything, a wave of homesickness crashed through me.
“My relationship with Maman is complicated,” I said. “That’s all. It’s just so complicated.”
“Every relationship is complicated. Even ours.”
“Ours is simple,” I protested and Noah chuckled.
“Sure it is, if you consider a relationship between two-friends-now-spies-pretending-to-be-spouses to be simple.”
“She calls me Jocelyn,” I blurted.
“Isn’t that your name?” he said, laughing in surprise.
“Yes! But when I was small—maybe five or six—there was this terrible child a few apartments down from us who used to tease me because his grandfather’s name was Joscelin. I discovered that in France Joscelin was historically a male name, so I decided that since France was to be our home, I’d have to be known as Josie. Everyone else in my life—my doctors, my nannies, the few friends I managed to make—just quietly agreed and started calling me Josie. Not Maman. To this day, I am Jocelyn to her.”
“Jocelyn is a beautiful name.”
“The name isn’t the point,” I said, sighing. “It’s her stubbornness! But…I miss her. I love her so much and I just want her to be proud of me.”
“She will be,” Noah whispered back. “One day, she’ll understand.”
“Here am I complaining to you about my complicated relationship with my mother when you lost your entire family three years ago,” I said, turning to face him at last.
“I asked, remember? I want—” He broke off suddenly. His voice was little more than a whisper when he admitted, “All I can think about these days is how short life is. We are here in such danger and every minute of the day I’m conscious that anything could happen. I just feel like we have to make the most of every minute we share. Even this week, when everything feels so out of control, just having you here beside me gives me hope for the future.”