He kept to the country lanes and steered a zig-zag route around Paris before turning due south to Orléans. Garages were now completely out of petrol but the canny farmers had kept their
own supplies back. If most grocery shops were now empty, farms were replete with cheese, bread, milk and wine. Their prices were outrageous but for those who had the money, it was possible, for
now, to keep a well-stocked larder and one’s car on the road.
James bought enough food and drink to last several days, and filled his car’s tank to the brim. He acquired a number of ten-gallon jerry cans of petrol too, and stacked them on the back
seat of the car. He felt increasingly confident that he could make it all the way down to the Mediterranean coast under his own steam.
He skirted Orléans and decided to take a chance on the main D-route to Bourges.
It was a mistake.
The road was crowded with French soldiers milling about, most of them without weapons. They didn’t seem to have any orders; James decided that most were simply trying to get home. They
looked utterly crushed and defeated. He was reminded of newsreel footage of the British at Dunkirk.
There had been a couple of half-hearted attempts to commandeer the Citroën as he drove slowly through the crowd, but the soldiers had backed away when he produced his gun.
The going got easier for a few miles but after he passed through an apparently deserted village, the road ahead was blocked by a multitude: hundreds and hundreds of civilians, carrying suitcases
or pushing carts piled high with possessions. They stared at him dully as he picked his way through them, occasionally sounding his horn. Some of them looked so old or unwell he didn’t think
they’d see the day out. From time to time he saw a body left behind on the verge, like a piece of rubbish.
James paused. ‘It did make me wonder, Diana – you know, about what it would have been like if the Germans had invaded England.’
Diana, who had been listening intently, sat up straight. ‘We would have gone berserk,’ she said simply. ‘Almost as soon as France fell, the British organised themselves into
official resistance groups, the Local Defence something-or-other. Anyway, later they were called the Home Guard. It was all pretty amateurish to begin with, but they were deadly serious and
everyone wanted to be a part of it. Daddy had to queue for hours to join.
‘I honestly believe we’d have done just about anything we could think of to fight the Germans if they’d invaded. When Churchill made that speech about fighting on and on and
never surrendering, he spoke for an awful lot of people. He certainly spoke for me.’
‘Hmm.’ James drained his glass and beckoned to the hovering waiter for another. ‘I’m not so sure. Total defeat – you don’t know what it’s like unless
you’ve seen it. People might have just given up. It was an absolute breakdown here, I’m telling you. I’ve never seen anything like it. It felt as if the world had ended. Looked
like it, too. All those people, just walking and walking. It was like something out of the Bible.’
‘You’re quite wrong, James,’ Diana said. ‘Not about what you saw in France, I mean, but about how we might have responded to an invasion at home. But as I said, I
don’t want to argue with you. Go on.’
Eventually he tired of driving at a snail’s pace through the endless lines of refugees, and cut across country towards Dijon. A farmer along the way told him that south
of Dijon, life was going on more normally. James calculated that if he could reach the town that dominated Central France, he could ditch the doctor’s car and take the train the rest of the
way to the coast.
He reached Dijon after eight hours of cross-country driving and went straight to the railway station.
His heart sank as he approached it. At least half a dozen
gendarmes
guarded the entrance to the station, flanked by German soldiers toting sub-machine guns. All travellers’ papers
were being checked and a little huddle of people had been weeded out and stood miserably to one side. As James watched, they were bundled into a police van and driven off.
That decided him. Twenty minutes later, he had left Dijon behind and was on the road south. Traffic was almost non-existent and he was emboldened to try the main D-route again.
It was another mistake. About thirty miles south of Dijon the Citroën rounded a corner and almost ran straight into a French military checkpoint. Soldiers with slung rifles stood moodily
alongside
gendarmes
with holstered pistols. At least no Germans seemed to be around.
He had no option other than to stop. As a tense-looking officer approached his window, pistol now unholstered, James remembered the night he’d bluffed his way into Girton to see Diana.
This was a somewhat more challenging situation and he decided to take the initiative from the start.
‘
Monsieur
—’ the man began, but James cut him off.
‘How
dare
you interfere with me! I’m the British Consul in Lyon and I’m on my way back from a reconnaissance trip to the North. I’ve had enough trouble with you
lot already. Bloody well look at this!’
He had taken off the flying boot from his injured leg because it was pressing increasingly painfully on the bullet wound. He opened his door to reveal the bloodied bandages.
‘You trigger-happy bastards hit me taking wild pot-shots at a German patrol. I could have been killed! My government’s already made a formal complaint to the French Ambassador in
London, and if you don’t let me through without any more nonsense there’ll be another one. What’s your name and rank?’
He was hurriedly waved through and took the first side turning he came to.
He stayed away from the D-roads after that.
About 100 miles north of the Mediterranean, James steered the car into a quiet wooded lane and took out a battered map of France from the Citroën’s glove-box. He studied it closely.
He needed to work out how much further he could get with his dwindling supply of petrol. Luck and bluff had got him this far, but he was urgently in need of false papers and proper clothes, plus a
shave and a haircut.
Nice, he regretfully decided after some mental arithmetic, was beyond reach. But there was a better option for the time being, and considerably closer to hand.
Marseilles: a city that was pretty much a law unto itself.
He pulled the last remaining jerry can from the back seat and carried it round to the car’s filler cap. As the petrol gurgled into the Citroën’s tank, James shaped his plan.
When he got to Marseilles, he drove directly to the docks.
‘Why the docks, James?’
He smiled. ‘I had an East End upbringing, remember? The docks were where people went to buy things they couldn’t get hold of above board. Everyone knew that.
‘All big ports are the same, right around the world. A man goes down to the docks, finds a rough old bar, slips the bartender a couple of big ones and tells him what he’s after. The
barman makes a call and fifteen minutes later you’re doing business with his friends. Nobody gives a shit who you are, what you’ve done, or what you’re running from. If I’d
been German, they wouldn’t have turned a hair. Money talks in those places. Always has, always will.’
‘And what did you want to buy in Marseilles?’
He looked surprised. ‘Papers, of course. A new identity. It didn’t come cheap, either, but at least I wasn’t short of the readies. I stayed in a sailors’ doss-house on
the waterfront and within forty-eight hours I had a new me and a whole new cover story. I was a Portuguese English teacher with a very bad sense of timing. I’d sailed to Marseilles from
Lisbon just as it was all going pear-shaped for France, and now I was stranded, waiting for a ship home. I chose Portugal because no one speaks the language and I could talk gibberish with
confidence. Also, Portugal was neutral, which made things a lot easier.
‘In fact, I had quite an international war, Diana. I was always neutral, though – Portuguese, Swiss, Swedish. The most expensive papers of all made me American, until Pearl Harbor,
of course. That was both unexpected and annoying. For me, I mean, not just the Americans. That particular identity had cost me a small fortune and it was meant to be good for at least five years.
Then overnight the USA declared war on Japan and Germany and I was up the spout. I must say, I gave a little cheer when the Yanks dropped their bomb on Hiroshima.’
Diana’s earlier sense of unreality was returning. He was describing a way of life she could barely imagine. She looked at him afresh. His light-grey linen suit, she realised for the first
time, was exquisitely tailored. His shoes were probably handmade by the look of them, and he wore a slim gold watch on his wrist. He was obviously well-off, probably even rich. The subservience of
the hotel staff made that pretty obvious.
He noticed her scrutiny. ‘What? What are you thinking?’
‘To be honest, James, I’m not sure what I think. One moment the fact that I’m sitting here talking to you seems the most natural, normal thing in all the world, and the next I
think I’m going off my head. At times during lunch I felt almost dizzy with happiness to be with you again, and at others I’ve been so angry I wanted to hit you.’
‘You’ve every right to be furious. I just hope that when you think over everything I’ve told you, you’ll understand and forgive me, Diana. But you
are
pleased to
see me?’
‘I just said so, didn’t I? And what about you? What’s this like for you? You seem to have taken it all rather in your stride.’
He sighed. ‘Well, I never thought you were dead, did I? It was a shock to see you again, but nothing like as big a one as you must have had.’ Tentatively, he reached out and took her
hand. She began to withdraw it but he held on more firmly.
‘No. Don’t pull away, Diana, please. Just let me hold your hand while I answer your question.’
She relaxed slightly. It was incredible to feel his touch again. ‘All right . . . Go on.’
‘The truth is, I can hardly take my eyes off you. I never thought I’d see you again; I believed I’d lost you forever. But to be with you like this, to hear your voice . . .
even when it’s angry with me . . . it feels almost as if the last eleven years never happened.’
They looked at each other for a long moment in silence before she slowly slid her hand free.
‘I’m sorry.’ She stood up. ‘I’m finding all of this extremely hard to take in.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I really must go.’
‘Of course.’ He rose to his feet. ‘But when can we meet again? I’ve been talking non-stop about myself, I’ve hardly asked you a thing. There’s so much I need
to know – about Stella, about Dougal . . .’
‘Douglas.’
‘Of course, Douglas . . . why you’re all living here in Nice. Heaps of things.’
Diana hesitated. ‘I’m not sure we should meet again.’
His mouth dropped open. ‘
What?
You’re joking! Of course we have to meet again, Diana! We have a daughter I’ve only just found out about. I want to see her. We have
over ten years catching up to do too – we’ve barely started. I have a house here in Nice; I want you to see it. And I suppose at some point I’m going to have to meet your husband,
don’t you think?’
Diana was horrified. ‘Oh, no, no! I can’t even think about that now, James. He’d be
appalled
at this. I don’t even know how I’m going to tell
him.’
James put the back of his hand gently on her cheek. This time she did not try to withdraw from him.
‘All right, all right Diana, I completely understand. You’ve had one heck of a shock today, I can see that. I realise I need to give you time to adjust. But we
must
see each
other. Look . . .’ He pulled a leather-bound notebook from an inside pocket and slid out a gold pen from the spine. ‘Let me give you my telephone number, and my address.’ He
scribbled for a few moments before tearing out the page and handing it to her. ‘Give yourself a day or so to take all this in and then call me. If I’m not in, a woman called Roberta
will answer. Leave a message with her.’
She stared at him. ‘Is Roberta your wife?’
He threw back his head and roared with laughter. ‘Roberta is my sixty-nine-year-old housekeeper and she’s the size of a Dutch barn.’ He stopped laughing, and looked at her.
‘I’m not married, Diana. Well . . . I suppose I am, come to think of it.
‘I’m married to you, aren’t I?’
Oliver Arnold climbed the stairs to the converted attic in the Dower House and tapped on the door of his wife’s studio. She discouraged him from visiting her there while
she was working, but after wrestling with his thoughts for the best part of an hour after breakfast, he had been compelled to rise from his deckchair in the garden – it was the sunniest June
anyone could remember – and climb the four flights of stairs.
‘Gwen? Gwen, can I come in, please? I need to talk to you about something.’
He heard her mutter of annoyance, followed by the clink of brushes being dropped into a jar. A few moments later, the door opened and his wife stood before him.
She was in her mid-fifties now, slimmer than ever. She had never regained the weight that she lost in the year after their son’s death. Both Gwen and Oliver had recently been greatly
amused to hear a diner at a nearby restaurant table whisper to her companion: ‘Look over there.’ The woman had nodded surreptitiously in their direction. ‘Isn’t that Wallis
Simpson?’
She looked at him now with undisguised irritation. ‘What is it, Oliver? Couldn’t it have waited until lunch?’
‘Perhaps. Look, I’m probably being silly, but I have to talk to you, Gwen.’
Her face softened. ‘You do look worried, I must say. . . . Come in then.’
He wondered how long it had been since he last crossed this threshold. Years, probably. Her portrait of their son was still unfinished, propped on an old easel. He stared at it as he sank down
on a battered sofa under the attic window.
‘You should finish that one day, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s the best thing you’ve ever done.’
He was not flattering her. Gwen had perfectly captured John’s insouciant good humour. He smiled at them from the canvas, blue eyes slightly hooded as if he were reflecting on a private
joke. His blond hair was combed back from his brow, darkened by oil, Brylcreem, probably. He looked terribly young, the RAF jacket he had slung over one shoulder a seeming joke. Boys like him
weren’t old enough to be allowed to fly aeroplanes.