“I just need a moment,” he says abruptly, and he’s already turning toward the carpark. I start to follow him, but I can’t escape the feeling that we got Theo in trouble somehow, and I want to make sure he’s okay too.
“I just need to speak with Theo,” I blurt. “I’ll catch up.”
“Good.” Dad raises his hand in acknowledgment without turning around. “I’ll see you at the car.” But after a few steps he turns back to me. His expression is carefully neutral as he adds, “Thank him for me, please, Charlotte.”
“I will,” I call.
I am completely, hopelessly confused. What on earth just happened?
I return to the park bench beneath the tree and watch the man with the lawn mower finish his job—but the minute the engine switches off, sounds of distant shouting echo down from upstairs in the history building. My gut twists uncomfortably as I look up and locate Professor Read’s open window and those gauze curtains waving in the breeze. I can’t make out any of the words, but Read sounds furious.
When Theo finally comes down the front steps a few minutes later, he looks even more frazzled than he did when we arrived. His footsteps slow as he approaches me.
“Well, that was odd,” I offer uncertainly. He forces a smile.
“Indeed. I suppose it would all seem very odd.”
“I hope we didn’t get you into trouble.”
Theo sighs and takes a seat beside me.
“Charlotte, the miserable truth is that I am more than capable of doing that all on my own. Is your father okay?”
“He seems so upset. I don’t understand why the professor was laboring the point about how and where the agents were traveling that day. What difference does it even make in the scheme of things?”
“Ah. I suppose I can at least shed some light on that for you. Years ago, I sat in on an interview with an American POW who met Fleur on a prison transport a few months before she died. He told us that she was arrested after traveling in a car through Salon-La-Tour. At the time, Read assumed that the American had the details mixed up because car travel was banned in that part of France after D-day in an effort by the Germans to slow the resistance down, and it seemed so unlikely that three agents would ignore that. Read was probably trying make sense of that now that he finally has access to someone who was there.”
“Oh,” I said. I look at him curiously. “But…how did you know Fleur hurt her ankle?”
“Lucky guess.” Theo shrugs, looking away, but he’s not a great liar and he looks guilty as hell.
“Right…”
“It’s clear your dad just wants to talk to Remy so maybe once he has some closure there, he’ll be ready to talk to Harry some more.”
“It’s very difficult for me to imagine my father working as some kind of covert agent twenty-odd years ago,” I confess. “Until a few weeks ago, I thought he was an army mechanic and I assumed he’d been based here in Britain the whole time. I found that hard enough to imagine, let alone him driving illicit vehicles through occupied France.”
“It took me two years to complete my Master’s with Professor Read,” Theo says. “For much of that time it was my job to interview men like your father. You do a job like that for long enough and you come to realize that whoever someone is during war years, there is no guarantee that they will be the same in peacetime. Some of these men and women were completely broken by their experiences, but others came back from the war and drew a line under it…declared themselves entirely new people. Maybe at first they were trying to pretend they’d never seen and done the horrific things they had to do to survive, but sometimes they live the lie so long and so well they really do become someone different. You can’t blame your dad for doing what he had to in moving on from the war, especially given his memory was disrupted in that accident too. And you really shouldn’t blame yourself for struggling to picture him as whoever he was before.”
“Thank you,” I say softly. “And you? Are you okay?”
Theo smiles.
“I’m fine. The conversation I just had with Harry, as awful as it was, was several years overdue.”
My father is silent as we drive home. I try to make small talk but he answers me in grunts and shrugs.
“That’s strange about the letters never arriving…” I offer.
“It is,” Dad says grimly.
“Do you know what might have happened there?” He shrugs noncommittally. “No theories at all?”
“I don’t want to speak about this right now, Charlotte,” he says. Dad isn’t the kind to snap—but his tone is sharper than I’m used to, and I recoil in surprise. He looks at me, frustrated, then his expression suddenly softens. “I just need to think, okay? We can talk about it later.”
“Okay, Dad,” I say.
He retires to his room right after dinner, taking Wrigley with him. There is no light coming from under the door when the phone rings just after eight. It’s my brother Archie, just as I suspected it would be. He’s working for the World Bank in London, having been headhunted to some brilliant economics gig right after graduation. He often calls from the office when he’s working late. Miser that he is, Archie doesn’t like to pay for expensive long-distance calls on his own pence.
“How’s Dad doing?” Archie asks me.
“Sometimes lately he’s seemed a bit better but…” I break off, then ask, “Arch, did you know Dad was in the SOE during the war?”
“Huh? No, he was a mechanic.”
“He was a flight engineer for the RAF and eventually joined the SOE.”
Archie bursts out laughing.
“Lottie,” he says, chuckling. “I don’t know where you’re getting this from, but there’s no way that’s true.”
“It is, Arch,” I protest. “Dad told me himself.”
“You’re trying to tell me Dad was a spy. Our dad.”
“I know it seems unlikely. But yes, he says he went on secret missions to France.”
“Bloody hell,” my brother says. “Then why is this the first we’re hearing of it?”
“He said Mum didn’t like him to look back on those days.”
“It’ll be an ex-girlfriend,” Archie says immediately.
“Archie.”
“Seriously, Lottie. Mum was always so jealous. Was this before they were married?”
“Yes but I think they were already dating then.”
We both ponder this in silence for a moment, then Archie says, “He cheated on her.”
“He wouldn’t!”
“Maybe he had an affair while he was off in France doing whatever secret things spies did in those days. No wonder Mum spent the rest of their marriage blowing her top if Dad even glanced at another woman.”
“Don’t say that,” I hiss. “Dad is loyal to a fault. I bet Mum didn’t want him thinking about the war because it was hard on the both of them. Dad said he was stuck in France for a year and she had no idea what had become of him for the whole time. That can’t have been easy.”
“Maybe,” Archie says, but he sounds unconvinced. We were born only eleven months apart, which means we’ve been squabbling and fighting for pretty much our entire lives, so I recognize that burning emotion in my chest as defensiveness. If I don’t change the subject now, we’ll end up shouting at one another.