The Paris Agent(82)

They brought me two meals a day, sometimes a miserable, watery soup with a few chunks of potato or carrot floating in it, sometimes a boiled potato or even two, almost always with a chunk of stale bread. In the first week I refused the bread, but by the second week my hunger was so intense I could not resist it, even knowing that it would make me ill, and it did. But still, I ate that bread because the bloating and the cramping were worth even a short break from the constant, gnawing hunger.

I dreamed of mattresses and cushions and the soft embrace of my mother’s arms. I dreamed of Noah—simple dreams of watching him smile or sleep or reach toward me, love shining in his eyes. I dreamed of softness, because my entire world had been reduced to hardness, and even more than the pain of stone walls or a wooden bed against my bony body was the monotony and coldness and aloneness of it all.

There was a window in my cell. It was small and high, covered with metal bars to prevent escape, and the glass was filthy and smeared. But through that window, I had a glimpse of sunlight and the spectrum of gray and white in the clouds and the smudgy blue of the sky.

I loved that window because through it, I saw change—night and day, sunshine and rain, even while everything else in that cell remained constant.

I had never learned how to pray—never thought I’d be someone who would want to. But in that prison cell, every single day, I prayed to thank God for that window.

I knew right away that I was no ordinary prisoner. The Germans around me in the prison assumed I did not speak their language, but I did. They used one phrase repeatedly—almost every time they spoke my name.

“Nacht und Nebel.” Night and fog, a special designation of prisoner. Schulte told me they would “disappear me” and I had no doubt that’s what was happening. The sounds of the prison through the day led me to believe it was full and busy, and I knew instinctively that solitary confinement was not a punishment meted out to all prisoners. The endless aloneness was punishment for my role with the SOE.

And endless it seemed. My ribs showed through my skin and I developed pressure sores that would not heal. There was never enough water so I lived in a perpetual thirst. My broken tooth ached and the taste in my mouth left no doubt that it was festering.

How best to make the days of monotony and pain mean something? I asked myself this question day and night. If every human life had value, and I believed that to my core, how could I make those days matter? I couldn’t connect, or help, or create.

All I could do was wait. All I could do was to tell myself that there was dignity in surviving and power in holding onto hope, especially because the enemy wanted nothing more than to leave me hopeless.

C H A P T E R 21

CHARLOTTE

Liverpool, 1970

“I can’t tell if you’ve been avoiding spending time with me or if I’ve been avoiding spending time with you,” Aunt Kathleen says as she hands me a cup of coffee the next morning. She glances across her dining room, to the chair where Mum always sat—the one near the big bay windows. “But either way, we need to get better at catching up. She would want us to do better.”

“I know, Aunt Kathleen,” I say. We’ve spoken on the phone, but this spontaneous visit I’ve made to her home today is the first time we’ve been in the same room for months.

It’s hard for me to sit here with her now, to sip coffee alone, just the two of us, when almost every other time in my life Mum would have been seated at this table too. They’d talk in that unique way they shared, talking so fast they almost spoke over the top of one another. And I’d sit here, the third wheel to their duo, nursing my coffee while I waited for one of them to ask me a question so I had my chance to join into the conversation.

“It’s not the same, is it?” Kathleen asks, still looking at that empty chair. “Nothing is the same since she died. I’ve been divorced twice and both times were very bloody hard, but neither hit me like your mother’s death has.” She offers a wan smile. “Husbands come and go, but sisters are for life. I really thought she’d outlive your dad and we’d end up in side-by-side beds in a nursing home.” I smile sadly at that. I can easily picture the future Aunt Kathleen had imagined for them, though knowing the way those two could talk all night and day, some long-suffering nurse would probably have had them separated before long. “This isn’t just a catch-up, is it? I can see something in your face.”

“You knew my dad before the war.”

Aunt Kathleen picks up her coffee and straightens her spine. She flicks me an irritated glance, then sighs.

“We’re talking about this then, are we?”

“Please. I really need to understand.”

“I’m guessing you didn’t manage to convince your father to forget about his trip down memory lane.”

“He needs to do this, Aunt Kathleen,” I say emphatically. “And to help him, I need to understand what it all means.”

“Gerrie had been besotted with him from the first moment they met. She didn’t want him to enlist in the first place, not even as a flight mechanic. She thought it was too dangerous, but he just would not listen. Do you know he was missing in action in France for over a year?” I nod, as Aunt Kathleen’s gaze hardens a little. “We all told her he was probably dead, but she waited for him. He returned and then his whole family was gone and of course that was terribly sad, but you know how hard she loved him, Charlotte? Day and night, she was there for him when he felt like he had lost everything. And how does he repay her? They’d been talking about marriage. He sat her down and she was convinced he was going to propose then and there and do you know what he does instead?” Her nostrils flare. “He broke up with her. He didn’t really explain at the time. Just said he wasn’t ready to settle down and she should move on with her life.”