“I’m sorry to bother you,” Edouard said as the door swung open. He stood there, not inside the greenhouse but not out of it either, as if he needed to speak with her but didn’t relish the task. “I just . . . I wanted to thank you.”
For one alarming moment, she was sure he somehow knew what had happened at Camp des Milles. She looked down to her book again, the hard black-and-white pages against the soft fur of her Schiaparelli bracelet. She couldn’t say why she’d worn it today. She’d seen it there in her jewelry box, next to the diamond brooch.
“I have your papers,” she said, the thought inadvertently finding voice. The papers were still in the pocket of her gray trench coat. They wouldn’t help him get an American visa, and even with them he couldn’t get a French exit visa, but they might help keep him from being arrested and thrown in a camp again before they could get him out of France.
“My real papers?” Behind the question, perhaps an accusation—it wouldn’t help him to think false papers were real. “No, they can’t be. My real papers are at Camp des Milles.”
She turned again to the book, letter after letter collecting into sentences, paragraphs, pages, a story that wasn’t real but that did reveal a truth. “I . . . The camp commandant gave them to me.”
“He just gave them to you?”
“I did ask nicely,” she said, trying for her best innocent smile, although she didn’t feel innocent. Robe Heir. Bobby. The smell of him was still everywhere, despite the bath T had drawn for her yesterday and another she’d taken just that morning. It was on her hands and in her hair, in her nose and mouth, on the knees she’d crossed so enticingly in her silk stockings, and between her legs.
She looked out through the glass walls of the greenhouse to the outside, the bare branches of the climbing roses. When had the last of the leaves fallen?
“Vile men like him will do the most extraordinary things sometimes when they’re sweet on a girl,” she said.
Edouard studied her for a long moment, as if he could see that the papers were indeed real and what she might have done to get them.
She wished she had Dagobert with her, but he had been so happy to go out with the children.
“Well,” he said, “it appears I can’t leave under my real name, even with good forgeries. Vichy isn’t going to let an escapee go so easily.”
“The release is there too,” she insisted, her sudden anger as thorny as the rose vines. “You don’t have to worry that you’re putting anyone here at risk by staying with us. I . . . I’ll bring them to you when I come back in.” Needing to have him leave before he did understand. “I . . . I’m just reading.”
“Oh course,” he said, an edge in his tone that she thought must be in his eyes and in the set of his square jaw, that single mole, but she stared down at her book, unable to meet his gaze.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” he said.
“It’s no bother,” she said, still staring down at the letters on the page, black against white.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll leave you to your book, then.”
Still he stood there. She could feel his gaze on her as she pretended to read.
Finally the light changed as he stepped back from the doorway, and the greenhouse door clicked quietly closed. The whole time, he hadn’t even stepped inside.
Monday, November 4, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Such a strange thing, to have walls around him and a door that closed, a fireplace to warm him, and food enough, eaten while sitting in a real chair at a real table with china and silverware and wine in a crystal glass rather than squatting at his straw mat on the concrete floor to sip gruel from a metal mug. That’s what Edouard was thinking about—trying to compose in his head a letter to Luki describing this villa—when Nanée appeared at his bedroom door.
“Your papers,” she said, holding them out as if they were indisputably real.
He hurried to stand, awkward as he saw her register the carefully made bed in the bare room. He had nothing anymore. Even the clothes he wore belonged to someone else. Rose, the maid, had been charged with burning his own clothes and the vermin that came in with him. She’d done it while he bathed last night. She’d spent a good hour combing lice from his hair too—him holding back the tears that threatened at the simple touch of her fingertips on his scalp. Today, Jacqueline was in town to get him new clothes that would fit. The kindness here was almost unbearable.