Peach (27 page)

Morosely chewing a mouthful of franks and beans, he stared at his plate. A paper rustled—the sound of a page turning. Noel glanced up. The guy on the next table was young, probably eighteen, and he was absorbed in his book, chewing steadily as he read. The men had only a half hour break and most of them grabbed the chance to relax, reprieved
temporarily from the devastating monotony of the past hours, gossiping about the football game, shouting comments, laughing. But this guy never lifted his eyes. Noel stole a glance at the book.
Physics!
The guy was reading about
physics
. Feeling his gaze the young man looked up.

“Why are you reading that?” The question was out before Noel realised it.

“I’m learning about stress on metal,” he replied, “got a test tonight.”

Noel looked puzzled.

“Night school,” he answered Noel’s unspoken question. “I go right after work, every night of the week. Gonna get myself a better job than this one some day.” He jagged a derisive thumb towards the assembly line. “Don’t wanna end up my days on the crazy-farm, hammering imaginary rivets.” He stood up to leave.

“What do you want to do then?” asked Noel.

The guy tucked the book under his arm, swigged a final mouthful of coffee and headed back to the line as the whistle went. “Gonna be an automotive engineer,” he called out over the racket of hundreds of departing men.

Noel progressed from fitting bolts, to installing steering wheels, crankshafts and windscreens. He had a spell in the paintshop, he learned to weld and, deafened and scarred from burns and cuts caused by his own clumsiness, he worked his way through every job on the assembly line. After the first six months the foreman realised that he could rely on Noel to fit in wherever the pressure was heaviest, but particularly on the welding. After a few months, however, Noel realised that he was getting nowhere, that there was no future for him on the assembly line. He wasn’t going to get promoted, though he had got a rise in pay. He sought out the young guy in the canteen and asked him about night
school. After work he went down there and enrolled. He had a long way to go to become an engineer—his education, such as it was, had stopped at thirteen.

Noel put the same energy he had put into boxing into his studies; he never missed a night. He moved from the hostel where he had remained for its cheapness to a rooming house where he had his own room and could study. He ate sparingly, using the money he had saved from his salary to buy books, and he studied far into the night, rising again at six to make the shift. He was shabby, underfed and overworked. He had no friends—he had neither the time nor need for them. He was a young man with an aim in life.

It took over a year, but he emerged at the end with a High School Diploma. When they congratulated him at the school and wanted to know what he was going to do now that he had his education, he asked them how to get into college. He was not quite sixteen.

It was as though a mist had cleared from Lais’s mind and she looked at them for the first time. Doctors had been summoned, examinations made, tests and X-rays taken. Voice therapists began to work with Lais, re-teaching her everyday words that seemed strangely to have been forgotten. Peach read her stories from old baby books, stringing together words as she would for a child, and Lais eagerly learned to
recognise once-familiar sounds and symbols until after months of work she was able to read and write again.

As she progressed Lais began to pick up her old zest for life, demanding to be taken to the best shops so that she might order pretty clothes, having her hair cut in a fashionable curving shoulder-length bob, applying make-up with the old skill while Peach watched breathlessly from her usual position on the rug at her feet.

Lais simply seemed to accept the wheelchair as a part of her life, never once asking the reason for her paralysed state, and when Amelie worriedly sent her to a psychiatrist, he told her that he was up against a stone wall. Either Lais had forgotten her past, or she simply refused to remember.

On a clear blue Florida morning over breakfast, Lais announced in her new soft, husky voice that she wanted to return to France. “I’m perfectly well now, Maman,” she said as Amelie’s eyes met Gerard’s. “I can’t stay here forever like a child.”

Gerard knew what she meant. At home with them, she was protected, cosseted, made much of. She was the sun at the centre of their world and they revolved around her like attendant planets. Lais wanted her old independence back. “Lais is right, darling,” he said to Amelie, “it’s time she went out into the world again.”

“Then I must go with her,” said Amelie, already planning which liner to take.

“No,” cried Lais sharply. “I want Peach to come with me.”

Peach’s eyes widened with excitement. “France,” she squealed, “terrific!”

“But Lais, you’ll
need
me,” objected Amelie, “I can’t just let the two of you go alone.”

“Let them go,” said Gerard calmly. “Lais is perfectly capable of managing with Peach and Miz to help her.” He
reached across the table and gripped Amelie’s hand reassuringly, “And, besides, I need you here with me.”

The liner
Queen Mary
sailed from New York on a brisk spring morning and Lais grinned up at Peach standing by her chair. “Remember when you were five and I was in charge of you? Now it’s you who’ll be dancing and flirting all night and who will have to send me to bed with my glass of milk and a teddy.”

“You should never arrive at dinner or a party too early,” Lais counselled as Peach hastily flung on her new coral pink taffeta dress with the bows on the shoulders and full, frothy skirt. “You must learn to make an entrance.” Peach brushed her hair firmly, restraining its bronze waves with a pink headband and then, deciding it made her look too young, letting her long glossy hair flow free to her waist. Tall and slim, in flat ballet pumps, she looked like a Giselle escaped from the forest. And also, she thought with a sigh, not a day over her fourteen years.

She shifted impatiently from foot to foot as minutes ticked by and still Lais sat at the dressing table, adding an extra blush to her cheeks, brushing her hair until it fell into a shining blonde bell that swung smoothly as she turned her head. Clipping graceful emerald leaves into her small ears, Lais lifted her arms for Miz to slide the brilliant green silk dress over her head, waiting while Miz hooked the fasteners up the back. The spreading bouffant skirt made her waist look even tinier and emphasised the new curves of her bosom. Fastening the big emerald and diamond pin given to her by Gerard and Amelie as a going away present just where the low bodice curved into her breast, she added a final dab of Guerlaine’s “L’heure bleue.”

“There,” she said, as Peach sighed with relief. “Now we’re ready.”

Peach blushed as pink as her dress, sliding quickly into her seat, as every head in the dining room turned their way. Lais took her place on the captain’s right, flashing her most dazzling smile, and the famous red-haired movie star who sat on his left stared at her coldly. In her low husky voice Lais apologised for their lateness and was instantly forgiven by every man at the table.

It was as though someone had pressed the right button and all Lais’s half-remembered reflexes began to function again. With Peach pushing her wonderfully decorated chair, Lais went to all the cocktail parties, charming everyone with her unselfconscious ease. She didn’t try to pretend that the wheelchair wasn’t there, she simply never made it an issue that she was any different from anyone else. She took part in all the shipboard activities and gleefully won $500 on the wager of how many days, hours and minutes the ship took to reach Cherbourg. She tapped her fingers in time with the swing band playing popular Glenn Miller tunes, smiling as she watched the dancing. And she sat at the bar afterwards, drinking champagne cocktails and flirting outrageously with all the men, her eyes sparkling with a touch of her old wickedness. Peach felt sorry for young Tom Launceton, sitting next to her at dinner, who was so badly smitten with Lais he could barely eat.

“You should try this,” said Peach scooping up chocolate soufflé.

Tom merely sighed, pushing his plate towards her. “Have mine,” he said, “you look as though you need filling out a bit.”

Peach glanced down at her slender figure indignantly. True, her bosoms were small but they were growing and she had hopes for them. She wasn’t such a
stick
, was she? She finished his soufflé, frowning.

“Aren’t you enjoying it?” he asked, removing his eyes from Lais for a second to smile at her.

“Very much,” admitted Peach. “I see you admire my sister,” she added.

“Who doesn’t?”

“I bet you don’t have any sisters,” guessed Peach intuitively.

“Brothers,” Tom said with a grin, “one older—that’s Harry, who’s up at Oxford. And one younger, Archie, who’ll leave Eton next year and go on to Sandhurst.”

“And you?”

“I’m just travelling around before I go up to Cambridge. I’ve been working on a ranch in Colorado and before that I worked in a bank in Hong Kong and on a sheepfarm in Australia. It’s supposed to give you a feeling of real life between school and university.”

Peach was enchanted to hear he lived in an old rosy-brick Queen Anne house called Launceton Hall in a village called Launceton Magna. “I suppose I’m a bit homesick for it,” Tom admitted, “I’ve been away almost a year.”

“It doesn’t sound like the sort of place that will have changed much,” observed Peach comfortingly.

Tom asked her to dance and Peach forgot her self-consciousness as they swung around the parquet floor to the latest show-tunes. Tom told her he was nineteen and was going to read History at Cambridge, but that what he truly wanted was to farm. Launceton Hall had many hundreds of acres and three different farms within its feudal realm, and Tom wanted one day to be in charge of the estates. “No use relying on Harry for that,” he grinned, “Harry’s the talented one. He published his first novel at seventeen and everyone says he’s a genius.” Peach thought the genius didn’t sound like too much fun.

“Shipboard romance?” teased Lais as Peach flung herself exhausted on to the bed.

“Of course not,” she scoffed, “it’s you he’s in love with, Lais, like all of them.”

Two days later, watching the shores of France emerging from the morning mist, Lais said suddenly, “Did the Nazis really blow up the
vieux port
in Marseilles?”

Taken aback, Peach stared at her in surprise. “Yes,” she admitted, “they blew up the whole quarter, street by street. Ten thousand people were evacuated. They said you could see the fleeing rats swimming across the harbour with the German deserters.” Hesitating a moment she added, “Most of the Resistance workers escaped.”

Lais stared at the grey outline of the horizon and Peach waited anxiously for her to say something, afraid to ask any questions.
How much
did Lais remember, she wondered?
And did she remember Ferdi?
But Lais said nothing more.

Lais greeted Oliver, the butler at the Paris house, as though she had known him for years and Peach wondered if she mistook him for Bennet. She approved of her new room in what used to be Monsieur’s downstairs study, admiring the new green and white flowered curtains and the silk bedspread and exclaiming at the special bathroom with the bathtub and the sink at the proper height for her chair. Gerard had seen to it that nothing was forgotten. Lying in the centre of her old bed with its scalloped seashell headboard, watching the firelight flickering in the hearth, turning carved marble nymphs and trailing vine leaves to amber, Lais sighed contentedly. “It’s good to be home,” she said.

Leonie and Jim arrived the next morning and to Peach’s surprise Lais clung to them tearfully.
“But she never cries,”
she whispered, bewildered and upset.

They took Lais for long walks through the Bois, stopping
for lunch beneath the chestnut trees, and they strolled in the Tuileries Gardens. From the terrace you could see the true heart of Paris, the Place de la Concorde and the obelisk, a gift to the city of Paris from Egypt at the Great Exhibition of 1884. The statue of horses, “Les Chevaux de Marly”, stood at the foot of the Champs Elysées and on the western side of the square was the magnificent façade of the Hotel Crillon where the Nazis had once had their headquarters. Lais stared at it for a long time, her face emotionless.

They took the overnight train south, waking to find blue skies and the Alpes Maritimes, still snow-capped, framed in their windows. Peach waited eagerly for the thin blue line of the Mediterranean to appear on the horizon, longing to smell the sea and the jasmine and oleanders. The train wound along the coast and suddenly the Côte d’Azur sparkled before her like a jewel beneath a cloudless sky. “Almost there,” she called excitedly to Lais, but Lais’s eyes were closed, and her face pale as she leaned back against the cushions. If she heard she didn’t answer.

Leonore paced the garden in front of the villa waiting for them to arrive. She wore a tailored grey suit and a crisp blue blouse buttoned to the throat. Her hair was tied back with a dark blue velvet bow and she wore large horn-rimmed glasses. She looked every inch the efficient businesswoman. Taking a blue linen handkerchief from her breast-pocket she wiped her damp palms, telling herself there was no need to feel nervous. She had checked her appearance in the mirror before she left; no one would ever suspect that this efficient woman in her thirties would be capable of a secret passion. No one would suspect how she responded lustfully in a man’s arms.
No one could possibly know about Ferdi
.