The Paris Agent(89)

The driver steps out of the car and rushes around to the front passenger side, where he helps a diminutive woman from her seat. She appears to be in her seventies or eighties. She stands awkwardly, leaning on a cane and pressing a hand to her back as if she’s in pain, but even from a distance it is clear that her conversation with the driver is not a happy one. The woman is pointing fiercely toward the back of the cab, and the man is pointing at his watch, and for a minute or two they just squabble like this. But then the man throws his hands into the air and walks to the back of the car. He opens the trunk and pulls out a collection of paper bags of groceries. One by one, he sets the bags down hard on the lawn in front of the house, until he reaches for the final bag, this time spilling some of the items onto the ground as he drops it.

The woman shouts and waves her cane at him as he drives away, then she looks down at the groceries on her lawn and her shoulders droop.

Theo is out of the car before I can even stop him. I leap from my own side and follow him as he rushes toward the mess of groceries on the ground. The woman looks at us warily as we approach, her chin high and her gaze haughty. We’ve not exchanged a single word, but I already know this is not a woman who is comfortable asking for help.

But if we don’t help her, she’s going to have to make a dozen separate trips from the drive to her house, leaning on that cane. I tell myself that we’re not actually meddling, but rather helping a woman in need.

“Sorry. S-sorry,” Theo stammers, as he exposes his palms to the woman and slows his steps as he nears her. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but we were sitting in our car chatting over there and I saw what just happened and wanted to come and offer you some help.”

“I appreciate that, young man, but I’ll be quite fine on my own,” the woman says stiffly. But then she looks down at her cane, and the groceries, and her shoulders slump again. “Actually…”

She unlocks her door and then holds the screen open while we take the bags into her kitchen. There are framed photographs all along her hall table. There’s a black-and-white photo of a young girl, frail and sickly looking, smiling bravely into the camera. Around it, there are photos of two women together through various stages of life. At the back of the table, there’s a photo that is unmistakably the woman we’ve been helping. She’s younger, dressed in a lab coat and standing out front of what I suspect is a hospital. I catch Theo’s eye and nod as subtly as I can manage toward the photos. I watch his shoulders rise and lock somewhere near his ears as he surveys them.

“Thank you,” the woman says. “I recently injured my hip and I’m not yet able to drive. I got into a disagreement with that dreadful taxi driver about the fare.”

“Are you a doctor?” I ask her, pointing to the photo in the frame.

“Yes, I was a doctor. I retired only a few years ago.” She sighs wistfully. “That was a terrible mistake. The human spirit is not designed to stop.”

“Are you Drusilla Miller?” Theo asks. I gasp, and he gives me a panicked look, as if he’d suck the words back in if he could. So much for taking this slow and just “driving past.” The woman’s eyes widen then narrow. Her grip on the cane tightens. I have no doubt she’ll use that thing to drive us from her house if we make one wrong move, so I step toward Theo and slip my hand into his elbow, intending to tug him back toward the door.

“Who are you? Who are you really?” the woman asks sharply.

“My name is Theo Sinclair,” Theo says, but then he pauses and repeats, “Theo. My name is Theo.” Clearly he was hoping that Drusilla Sallow was somehow aware of a lost grandchild and would react with joy at the sound of his name, but her face remains perfectly blank. He clears his throat and pushes his glasses up his nose. “I…the thing is, I…”

“Theo is a postgraduate history student.” I blurt out the lie before I even have a chance to think it through. “He specializes in the SOE.”

Drusilla sighs and gives us a disappointed look.

“I see.”

“We wondered if perhaps you are Jocelyn Miller’s mother,” I say weakly.

“If you are here, young lady, you know the answer to that question,” she says tightly. “What is it you want?”

“Truthfully, I don’t know much about Jocelyn at all, but I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about her,” Theo asks softly. “Who was she? What was she like?”

Drusilla eases herself into an armchair.

“If you’re going to scam your way in here and start dredging up the past—” she points to me with her cane “—you, make me a cup of tea.” She turns the cane toward Theo. “And you. Unpack these groceries. I’ll rest until you’re done, then we’ll talk.”

“You might not have thought of her as strong-willed if you met her—she was sick all of the time as a child and I know she seemed very timid to most, but she had a real knack for getting her own way. I mean, just take her name, for example. I named her Jocelyn after my grandmother and I loved that name, but some terrible child down the street from us in Paris once told her it sounded like his grandfather’s name. She was so stubborn about it, and by the time Jocelyn was eight or nine, everyone else in her life called her Josie,” Drusilla says, chuckling, but then she sighs. “I was the only holdout for most of the rest of her life.”