I know my dad wouldn’t betray his country, but I’ve been too outraged by the very suggestion of it to think it through as logically as Theo has.
“Thank you,” I say, exhaling with relief. “Yes. That’s right.”
“What’s your plan now? Will you just wait and see if your dad decides he wants to talk about it some more?”
“Actually, no,” I say. “Dad set out to thank the agent who saved his life, remember? He was content to just lay flowers on Remy’s grave if he’d died.”
“You want to keep going.”
“I know Fleur died in the war, but I figure there’s probably a grave or memorial somewhere and I want to try to find it. Maybe even a living relative. Remember Dad said he’d be content just to make sure Remy’s family knew what he had done? Perhaps the same will apply to Fleur. I know we’re back to square one, but I just don’t know what else to do. This obviously means so much to Dad and I feel like I’ve let him down somehow.”
“Charlotte,” Theo says thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you’re free to meet for lunch?”
Theo and I meet at a small pub just a few blocks from the house I share with Dad. Today, he has a smudged thumbprint on the lens of his glasses, and I can’t stop wondering if it’s obstructing his vision. One errant wave in his hair has formed a curl that sits at a wild angle away from his forehead. But his eyes are always so soft and kind, and I’ll be eternally grateful to Theo for his support over the past week.
“I love being a teacher,” I tell him. We’ve ordered our meals and we’re sitting at the bar as we wait. “But summer break is great, isn’t it?”
“I don’t disagree with you there,” Theo says, knocking his glass of beer gently against mine before he asks, “Why did you go into teaching?”
“Mum was a teacher and I always felt drawn to it,” I say, my gaze dropping momentarily, before I clear my throat and ask, “And you? Why did you choose this career?”
“I loved the idea of becoming knowledgeable about history so that I could help people piece together their own family stories, just as I do with the family history group at the church. But I also have to earn a living, and trying to get the next generation excited about history is a great thing too.”
“That’s noble,” I say. Theo shrugs awkwardly.
“What we read about in reference texts is the equivalent of viewing the events of the past from a thousand-foot view. When you narrow your focus down to individuals you realize that what makes these lofty events world-changing is that they change a whole lot of individual lives, and through that, they change the future. Just look at your father. If this agent hadn’t saved your father’s life at Salon-La-Tour in 1945, you wouldn’t exist. Professors speak of history at university in generalist, abstract terms, but when you break it down, it really couldn’t be more personal.”
“So history has been a lifelong passion for you?” I ask him. He hesitates for just a moment.
“My degree says I studied ‘modern history,’ but my passion is narrower than that. My birth parents died in the war and I never had the chance to know them. My fascination stems from there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve made peace with the fact that I’ll never understand who I might have been if things had worked out differently, but it took me a very long time to reach that place. I remember what it felt like to know that there were questions about my past I could never resolve. I love the idea of helping others to avoid the torment of working through that. That’s probably why I want so badly to help your father.”
The waitress places our food on the bar and Theo flashes me a smile.
“Bon appétit,” he says.
I get halfway through my bacon sandwich before I pause to ask, “Do you think I’m right? Do you think Dad might feel better if we find a way for him to honor Fleur somehow?”
“I’m not sure you should ask me for advice on this, Charlotte, given my efforts so far have only made everything worse,” Noah says wryly. “Perhaps we can make some inquiries and if we find out something of her then we could let your father know?”
“That’s not a bad idea. But we really are back to the drawing board.”
“Looking for a female agent might be easier than looking for a male agent,” Theo muses. “There weren’t nearly as many, for a start.”
“How many were there?”
“There were hundreds of men but maybe only a few dozen women. There were media reports about some of the women of the SOE in the first few years after the war ended. There were even some biographical films, you might recall.”
“Yes, I watched a few of those films at school,” I murmur. “That’s probably why I assumed this would be easy. It’s such a contradiction that those films were made and readily available to the public, yet decades later, there’s still such strict secrecy around other facets of the SOE.”
“It was a hugely controversial program and I can see why. When it all boils down, women with no combat experience to speak of were dropped behind enemy lines. At best, they had a few months of intensive training. Many had even less than that. They were treated very harshly if they were captured, and I suspect that many died in terrible circumstances. It makes sense to me that the families of the wives and mothers and daughters who never came home would want their heroism to be known…that some might contact newspapers or work with filmmakers whether the government wanted them to or not. If you like, I can search through the microfiche at the university library to see if I could find some of those newspaper articles. Perhaps we’ll get lucky, and this ‘Fleur’ might belong to one of those families who spoke to the press early on.”
“Genius!” I exclaim. “Thank you. And do you think perhaps we should try Professor Read again?” Theo’s face falls, and I hastily explain, “I just meant because he did manage to help us find Remy. And quickly, too.”
“Yes, he did rather,” Theo murmurs. He looks down at his plate, sighs, then looks back to me. “Charlotte, Harry is quite upset with me so I suggest you contact him yourself this time. Mrs. White will probably let you through now that she knows you, but you should leave me out of it—for your own benefit.”
“Oh, yes,” I mumble, wincing. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest… I can call the office on my own.”
“Don’t apologize.” Theo smiles sadly. “I made an error of judgment, and Professor Read caught me out in it. Don’t hold that against him, please. He has every right to be angry with me.”
I want desperately to ask him for the details, but that feels like invading his privacy, and so I leave it there. But as we part that day, he reminds me that he’ll go searching for those news articles, and we agree to meet again for coffee the following afternoon.
“Tell me you have good news,” I greet Theo when I open the front door the next day. “I called the university six times today. Six! The phone is just ringing out. The same thing happened last week when I called, but at least then, Mrs. White finally answered after lunch. No such luck today.”