Never Leave Me (2 page)

She had been having breakfast with her father when the scout car had sped up Valmy's gravel drive, scattering stones and skidding to a halt before the entrance. Marie, their only remaining maid, had nervously opened the doors to the two occupants of the car, and ushered them into the breakfast room. Lisette had risen to her feet behind her father, her table napkin still in her hand, her throat tight as one of the officers removed his peaked combat cap and tucked it beneath his arm, saying coolly, ‘From ten o'clock this morning, Valmy will be at the disposal of Major Meyer. I trust the Major's presence here will not be an inconvenience, Monsieur le Comte?'

The tendons in her father's neck had tightened as he had said, ‘No, lieutenant. Will Major Meyer be accompanied by his own household staff?'

The lieutenant's eyes skimmed the silver on the breakfast table, the sixteenth-century tapestries adorning the walls, the faded colours of the Aubusson carpet. The major was going to have a very comfortable billet. ‘You have a cook?' he asked peremptorily.

‘No.' When the Germans had first invaded Normandy, thousands of men and women from the towns and villages had been herded away as slave labour, and their cook and her husband had been amongst those who had disappeared and had not been heard of again. Lisette saw the tendons in her father's neck flex once again. ‘My wife does the cooking.'

‘Then she can cook for Major Meyer as well.' The lieutenant's pale blue eyes registered the exquisite lace tablecloth, the embroidered crest on the Comte's table napkin. He knew exactly what kind of Frenchwoman the Comtesse would be. Freezingly elegant, possessing the effortless chic that made German women seem so gauche by comparison. ‘And she can do his washing,' he added, seeing with satisfaction a dull red stain colour the Comte's face and neck.
Verdamt Gott!
If he were being posted here she would do far more than his washing!

His eyes flicked insolently from the Comte to the young girl standing a foot or so behind him. She was eighteen, possibly nineteen, with an air of fragility that begged to be broken. Glossy dark hair fell to her shoulders, dipping provocatively forward towards high, perfect cheekbones. Her mouth was generous, a faint downward curve at the corners giving it a look of vulnerability and sensuality. Her jaw line was pure and there was a tantalising hint of wilfulness about the chin. His eyes moved unhurriedly downwards, noting the full, high breasts, the narrow waist and the arousing curve of her hips beneath the serviceable tweed of her skirt. He felt his sex stir. Major Dieter Meyer would not have far to look for relaxation in his new posting.

Reluctantly he clicked his heels, replacing his cap. ‘Goodbye, Monsieur le Comte,' he said smoothly, aware that the girl was looking at him with undisguised loathing and uncaring of the fact. He found it far more arousing than servile submission.

When the doors had closed behind them Lisette said in a strangled voice, ‘Couldn't we have refused? Couldn't you have protested?'

Her father's long, thin face was sombre. ‘It would have been useless. Major Meyer will just have to be endured, Lisette. There is no other way.'

She swung away from him quickly, loving him too much to want him to see the disappointment in her eyes. There
were
other ways. Paul Gilles'way. Occupation did not have to mean capitulation. But her father thought the risks too great. He had seen what had happened to the innocent when the Germans had discovered members of the Resistance in their midst and he had no desire to see women and children led away and shot because he, Henri de Valmy, had tried to be a hero.

His family was over six hundred years old. A de Valmy had been in Rheims Cathedral when Charles VII had been crowned. De Valmys had fought in the Hundred Years War; English knights under Henry V had deluged the walls of the early castle with arrows from their longbows. The exuberant, flamboyant chateau that a de Valmy, influenced by the architecture of the Italian renaissance, had built in the fifteen hundreds and withstood onslaught time and time again. The Nazis were only the last in a long line of marauders and they, too, would one day be no more. All that was needed for Valmy's survival was endurance. And patience.

Lisette skidded to a halt as the woods petered out and Valmy stood before her, its long, elegant windows catching the sunlight. Her father was wrong. It wasn't enough to simply sit back and wait. The Germans had to be fought and she would fight them in any way that she could. The driveway, flanked by linden trees, terminated in a gravel sweep before huge oak double doors, and a large, black Horch was parked sleekly in front of them. Bile rose in her throat. He had come. Even now he was sitting in one of Valmy's exquisitely proportioned rooms, fouling it with his presence.

Savagely she remounted her bicycle, swinging it away from Valmy and out towards the coast. The clifftop was off limits now, girdled with barbed wire, defiled by pillboxes and monstrous bunkers. She didn't care. She needed solitude and ever since she had been a child the long beach and the windswept cliffs had afforded it.

She bumped the bicycle off the path and on to rough ground thick with marram grass. The sea wind tugged at her hair, whipping it across her face, stinging her cheeks. Little over a hundred yards away a pillbox squatted, ugly and gaunt. A group of soldiers huddled outside it, their backs to the wind. If they saw her, she would be forced to halt. The coast had been out of bounds for over two years. Only when the villagers were rounded up to help with the building of the defences were they allowed access. Lisette continued to cycle defiantly. They were French cliffs, goddamn it. French beaches. If she wanted to go on them she would. Her defiance was defeated by the six-foot high coils of barbed wire that stretched away on either side as far as she could see. With an unladylike epithet, she ground to a halt, flinging her bicycle on to the grass and sitting down beside it, hugging her knees.

Beyond the barbed wire the mined and despoiled land rose undulatingly, culminating in a lip of chalk, the cliffs falling steeply to the sea. Far away to the left were the silver flanks of Pointe du Hoc as it thrust its needle-like rocks out into the grey waters of the Channel and beyond, unseen, the wide estuary of the Vire. To the right the coast curved gently around to Vierville, to St Clair and Ste Honourine. Few people now lived in the hamlets and villages strung out along the coast. The germans had moved them away, ordering them from their homes as they turned the western seaboard of France into a mighty defensive wall.

Lisette stared ferociously at the barbed wire and the giant steel jaws embedded along the beach and primed with mines. Rommel was wasting his time. If the Allies invaded, they would not do so in Normandy, but across the narrow neck of the Channel between Dover and Calais. Her father had explained it all carefully to her, showing on a map how easy it would then be for them to push through northern France into the heart of the Ruhr.

Her eyes clouded. He wanted their defeat as passionately as she, yet he would be appalled if he knew of her involvement with the Resistance. A seabird wheeled over her head, screaming raucously. She watched it bleakly. If he knew of her activities, he would forbid her to leave the chateau. As it was, she was free to come and go as she pleased, and the Germans rarely hindered her. She was Lisette de Valmy, daughter of the local landowner and a regular visitor to the sick and needy in Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts and the neighbouring villages. Her bicycle was a regular sight along the high-hedged lanes and it aroused little comment.

Her hands tightened around her knees. She was lucky. The life expectancy of a courier was not much more than six months and she had been active for eight. Eight long months of deceiving the person she loved most in the world. She sighed, hating the feeling of isolation that it gave, knowing that there was no alternative.

Despite the sunlight, the February wind was raw. Angry caps of surf beat at the cliff face, eroding it as they had done for centuries. Reluctantly she rose to her feet, her fingers stinging with cold as she gripped the handlebars. For the first time in her life she did not want to return home.

Valmy lay between the clifftop and the woods, a small, turretted chateau of grey stone with a slate roof, a tower at its north side and gardens that, in summer, were awash with roses. Perfect and exquisite, the Germans had considered it too small to serve as headquarters for the local garrison. That doubtful privilege had fallen to the Lechevaliers with their big, ugly manor house on the outskirts of Vierville.

She wheeled her bicycle over the large tufts of marram grass and on to the narrow road. The soldiers were still outside the pillbox, squatting down as it they were playing cards. She looked away from them contemptuously. She loathed them. They made her flesh crawl. And now she would be in day-to-day contact with one of them. A strutting, swaggering, heel-clicking major. Hatred coursed through her viens, warming her against the chill wind. She would not speak to him and she would not look at him. In no way would she acknowledge his presence in her home.

She pushed forward on the pedals, letting the bicycle coast down the narrow road. Beech woods shelved away on her right hand side and between the budding branches she could see the tapering spire of Sainte-Marie-des-Ponts'tiny church and the muted grey of village roofs. Since the days of the Conqueror, the village had nestled in its sheltered hollow behind the high bluff of the cliffs, overlooked and protected by Valmy. Now Valmy could protect it no longer. The enemy were not only at the gates, they were in residence.

Her mother was in the front salon, sitting at her delicately carved desk writing a letter. She raised her head when Lisette entered the room, her fine-boned face taut with strain. ‘Have you met him, Maman?' Lisette asked, her heart twisting at the sight of her mother's pale face.

‘Yes.' Her mother put down her pen and Lisette walked across to the fireplace where logs burned in a stone grate. For several moments neither of them spoke. Lisette rested her arm along the marble mantelpiece, staring down into the flames. Already the atmosphere at Valmy had changed. It was as if a cold wind had swept through the rooms, penetrating even the walls.

Her mother abandoned her letter, it was not of importance and her head ached. She rose to her feet, a tall, elegant woman with a long, straight back and narrow hips. Her beauty was bone-deep. It was in the shape of her head and temples and the thin-bridged, faintly aquiline nose, but her silvered hair and cool grey eyes held none of Lisette's vibrancy. She sat down on one of the deep, chintz-covered armchairs near the fireplace, her hands folded lightly in her lap. ‘He's quite young,' she said unemotionally.

Lisette shrugged. She didn't care whether he was young or old. It made no difference to the fact that he existed and was an invader. The logs flared and crackled.

‘What rooms have you given him?'

‘Papa's rooms.'

Lisette's head shot upwards, her eyes shocked.

‘Your father thought them the most suitable,' her mother said tightly, avoiding her eyes, an underlying tremor in her voice.

Lisette's hand clenched on the marble. Her mother rarely gave way to emotion. Self-control was as important to her as good manners. That her cool facade showed signs of crumbling indicated how deep her detestation had been at removing her husband's clothes and possessions from the suite of rooms that had been his and his father's before him, and preparing them for Major Meyer.

‘God, how I wish the Allies would come!' Lisette said passionately, kicking at one of the logs with the toe of her shoe, sending sparks shooting up the chimney.

Her mother gave a quick, darting look towards the door. ‘Be careful,
chérie!
It is no longer safe to say such things!'

At the throb of panic in her mother's voice, Lisette was filled with remorse. She was making things worse for her, not better. She moved across to her, dropping to her knees at the side of her chair, taking hold of her hands.

‘I'm sorry, Maman, I'll try and curb my tongue, but it's hard. I have so much hatred in me that I can hardly breathe.'

The Comtesse regarded her sadly. Her daughter was young, beautiful, well-bred. She should have been ejoying life: attending parties, dances; visiting Paris and the Riviera; receiving the attention of eligible young men. It should have been love that was catching at her heart, not hate. She sighed, wondering how many more years of their lives the war would eat into. Years that, for Lisette, could never be recaptured. ‘Perhaps he will not be with us for long,' she said, but her voice held little conviction.

Lisette stared into the fire, her eyes thoughtful. ‘I wonder why he is here?' she said slowly. ‘I wonder what is so special about him?'

Her mother shrugged a slender shoulder. ‘He is a German. What more do we need to know?'

Lisette did not answer her. Her reply would have only caused distress. She knew that some people would very much like to know why Major Meyer had been posted to Valmy. People like Paul Gilles and his friends. People like herself. It was yet another occasion when her thoughts could not be shared. ‘I'll make some tea,' she said, rising to her feet and wondering how long it would be before she could contrive a meeting with Paul, knowing already what it was that he would wish her to do.

Dinner that evening was unusually quiet. Neither of her parents seemed disposed to talk. It was as if the unseen presence of Major Meyer was weighing tangibly on them. Marie served them
omelette fines herbes
, her heavy face sombre, her mouth pulled into a disapproving line as she set the plates on the table. Henri de Valmy saw her expression and suppressed a sigh of irritation. She had been a young girl in his father's employ when he had been born. She had picked him up when he had fallen, smacked him when necessary, wiped his tears, cuddled and cajoled him and later, as he grew older, treated him with deferential respect. She thought him omnipotent and no doubt believed that he could, if he had wished, have closed his doors single-handed against not only major Meyer but the entire might of the Wehrmacht.