The Lavender Keeper (9 page)

‘Are you fanatically tidy?’

‘No. I cope just fine with my own mess.’

‘So you’re messy?’

‘Not at all. I am living in rental accommodation. I can’t afford to be messy in case the Railways do a check.’

‘That’s your friend’s flat, isn’t it?’

She was surprised. ‘Yes, Harriet Lonsdale.’

He nodded as if he already knew. He shifted into Italian. ‘Tell me about your parents.’

‘Your accent is terrible,’ she said to him in the same language.

He laughed. It changed his whole demeanour. ‘I know. That’s why I couldn’t possibly be a spy.’ And then his gaze narrowed. She felt speared.

His words floated in her mind. Then they seemed to settle, resound more clearly.
Spy?
What?

‘You’re recruiting me to spy?’

‘How does that make you feel?’ he asked, switching back to French.

‘Nervous.’

‘That’s good. If you’d said excited or happy, I’d have worried. How would you feel about returning to France?’

She sat back in her chair, speechless.

Jepson sat forward and switched to English. ‘I know that you’ve been slowly building a life for yourself here. In fact, I know a great deal about you, Lisette. You work at the Lyons Corner House and you volunteer one evening a week at the French Canteen. Why?’

‘I get a very good free meal at the end of it,’ she said. ‘A proper French meal.’

‘No doubt you can practise your French too. That’s smart. Your father was German, wounded in action, and moved to France in 1918, where he met and married your half-French, half-English mother when they were both twenty. They settled in Lille, where you were born two years after the end of the Great War. Your family name is Foerstner but your parents adopted Forestier for convenience – being German wasn’t terribly popular in 1918.’

She was sorry that he’d noticed her eyes mist.

‘Forgive me. I don’t mean to upset you.’

‘It’s all right. My father always said he felt more French than German.’

‘Did he hate his own people?’

She looked up, stung. ‘He was not a coward, Captain Jepson.’

‘I didn’t say he was; but I gather others did.’

‘My father was an academic, a wise, gentle man. He hated that Germany started a war that killed so many of its fine young men. He was fourteen when it began, and he was injured at seventeen on the first day of his active service. He lost a hand – but I’m sure you know that too.’

Jepson nodded.

‘He regretted that he could never pick me up easily as a newborn, could never hold my mother’s face with two hands. He had to learn to write again, left-handed. But because he was sent home so early, he was called a coward. He began to hate Germany for that, and for killing his friends. His three best friends all died in the trenches.’ She hadn’t realised a tear had escaped, and she quickly wiped it away.

Jepson continued. ‘Your parents moved with you to Strasbourg when you were three, after your mother became
depressed over the death of your infant brother to the Spanish Flu pandemic after the war. Your father took a position at the university. I’m glad to note that your mother’s health improved, although she had no further children and you became the adored only child.’

Lisette listened to him rattle off her life, not sure whether she was angry or shocked by how easily her history could be pared down to facts. She could feel her heart thumping at her chest in protest – like a child drumming its fists uselessly. She was digging her nails into her palms, wishing it would stop, and yet knowing he wasn’t deliberately punishing her. She forced herself to relax and listen.

‘Your paternal grandmother was German and your paternal grandfather French?’

She nodded, astonished at his wealth of information.

‘Your mother worked as a private secretary to a banker in Strasbourg, Monsieur Eichel, who was a great friend and helped you to organise their affairs upon their death. Your maternal grandparents – your only surviving relatives – are living in Hampshire – Farnborough, to be exact – and your grandmother is French while your grandfather is British. No wonder language is your thing.’ He smiled kindly at her stricken expression. ‘It’s our job to know these things. Your parents were nervous about what was happening in Europe and decided to come to Britain in 1937. While they finalised the purchase of a house in Sussex, you were packed off to England early and deposited at Roedean to finish off your schooling.’

She looked down again, not wanting him to say it, but knowing he would.

‘Your mother and father died in a car crash the night before
they were due to move permanently to England. That must have been very hard for you, although I note that you aced your final exams nonetheless.’

‘I was eighteen,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t give up, so I learnt how to get on.’

Jepson sat back and regarded her. ‘You’ve got money. Why do you live so frugally?’

She flashed him an angry glance. ‘I don’t want my parents’ money. I’m happy to make my own way.’

‘You want to be a normal twenty-three-year-old?’

‘I suppose,’ she said, glad her voice was steady. He’d reopened a wound she’d worked so hard to heal. ‘There would be nothing normal about someone my age living in a big, draughty old house with nothing to do behind blacked-out windows.’

‘Do you find London dangerous?’

‘Yes.’

‘I gather Harriet Lonsdale was killed in one of the air raids.’

Lisette took a deep breath.
Please don’t ask me more
, she begged inside.
Everyone I love dies young. I’m a curse
. ‘Yes.’

‘You were close to her?’

Jepson had no intention of leaving any aspect of her life untouched. But she wanted this role he was offering – whatever it was – more than she could believe. It would change her life, give her reason to – Lisette wasn’t sure what the word was that she searched for – breathe, perhaps. Right now it felt as though she was moving through life stifled. Captain Jepson was waiting. ‘I was close to Harriet. She befriended me when I first came to London – she was kind, very funny, full of …’ She shook her head, remembering first Harriet’s gust of a laugh that was so indicative of the generous personality behind it. She preferred to remember Harriet with gleaming
blonde hair and those blue eyes full of life and mischief, rather than how she last saw her. ‘Full of dreams,’ she finished.

‘I know this may be painful for you to recall, but you missed being killed by that same event by moments, didn’t you?’

Lisette permitted the banished memory back into her conscious thought. It was the last day she remembered ever being happy. The war then, when Harriet was alive, had seemed like something that was happening to others. Meanwhile they were full of plans for the future; Harriet wanted to make use of Lisette’s languages, desperate to move away from her boring desk job as a typist in the city, and had suggested they set up a travel company together. ‘Guided tours of the Continent, Lissy,’ she’d said, eyes shining at the thought of it. ‘Imagine that! Travellers won’t be able to resist.’ Harriet had seen a little of Europe, and the trips to France and Switzerland had whet her appetite to see the rest of the world.

‘We’ll marry disgustingly wealthy Europeans. I’ll marry a baron – I think Baroness Harriett has a nice ring to it – while you must marry a count because “Countess Lisette” just slips so easily off the tongue,’ she’d said, laughing as Lisette rolled her eyes. Harriet was lying on a slab in the hospital morgue two days later. Lisette had been required to formally identify her. By then Harriet’s body had been cleansed of all the blood and dirt, and her face, mercifully unharmed – save a tiny bruise near one eyebrow – looked peaceful. But no longer smiling.

Lisette cleared her throat. ‘I was meeting Harriet after work. We planned to meet in the forecourt of the station. She arrived early, just as it was hit by a German bomber. I … She was alive when I found her.’ It all came rushing back now. Even the tangy, metallic smell of Harriet’s blood assaulted her. She refused to remember what it felt like to cradle Harriet’s
head in her lap. It had taken Lisette months to lock that memory away. She no longer suffered the constant nightmare of feeling useless as her friend slipped away from life. Instead, she’d taught herself to become a bystander; an observer of Harriet’s death but not the grief-stricken friend whose hands were stained with her blood, whose tears mixed with the grime of the bombing, or the person who heard Harriet’s last words.

‘Tell Mum and Dad I’m sorry, Lissy.’ Lisette could recall every word, every grimace, every nuance of those minutes before her friend fell slack in her arms. Harriet had said, ‘They always liked me to be early for an appointment but for once in my life I shouldn’t have been. Then I wouldn’t be dying.’

Lisette had lied. ‘You’re not dying, Hat, you’re injured, and we have to get you to the hospital at Whitechapel. Can you hear the ambulance? They’re coming for you.’

‘And for once all the noise and activity can be about me,’ Harriet had said, reaching up a bloodied hand to stroke Lisette’s chin.

It was not meant with any malice. As much as Lisette railed against the constant refrain that she was the pretty one, the intelligent one, the one who would go places and leave a mark on the world, her best friend wouldn’t give up. It had made Lisette shrink even further in social situations, but men still sought her out, still asked her to dance before Harriet.

Harriet had turned her normally bright-blue gaze on Lisette then. ‘You’re a good liar – you always were.’

‘Don’t talk,’ Lisette had said, anguished by the blood she could feel soaking into her dress. The ambulance was certainly not coming for Harriet.

‘Take my mind from here, Lissy,’ Harriet had begged. ‘You’re so good at storytelling.’

‘All right. Let’s imagine ourselves in a vineyard in France.’

‘No, a lavender field. We made a promise we’d go see the lavender one summer, didn’t we?’

‘We did. Can you smell the lavender?’

‘I’m trying to.’

‘Think of it swaying around at knee height while you stand in the middle of it. What can you hear?’

‘Birds,’ Harriet answered. ‘The drone of bees.’

‘Good. I can too. Think now. What can you smell?’

‘That fresh fragrance of lavender when I rub it between my fingers.’

‘Go on.’

‘Summer. I’m smelling dry earth.’

Lisette looked up as one of the ambulance men finally arrived. Bending over, he examined her friend. He shook his head sadly. ‘Won’t be long now,’ he whispered, and that perhaps had been the worst moment of all – to have a kindly stranger confirm that Harriet was not long for this life.

Harriet was one more loved person Lisette couldn’t protect, couldn’t hang onto, and who would leave her grieving once more, painfully alone. When Harriet closed her eyes, Lisette motioned to the ambulance man to tend to the next victim. She didn’t want him to share Harriet’s death; didn’t want to feel his comforting hand on her shoulder, didn’t want to hear any soft words to ease her sorrows. Those gestures were all hollow and meaningless – she’d been through loss before, and nothing worked. Nothing! Only time healed.

‘Miss Forester?’ Jepson prompted.

‘Sorry.’

‘How do you feel about what happened that day?’

She glared at him. How was she supposed to summarise
that? ‘I feel angry, Mr Jepson. I feel bitter. It was such a hopeless waste of innocent life. But then so was the loss of my parents. These are emotions I’m familiar with; I’ve had to learn to hide them, because no one else needs to share this pain. Everyone has their own burdens. Harriet was the only person who died at the scene of the bombing that day. Why?’

‘You could send yourself mad thinking like that,’ Jepson cautioned.

‘Exactly. Which is precisely why I don’t. I prefer to deny myself the opportunity to think about it.’

‘I’ve heard similar sentiments from war veterans. It’s the only way they’ve found to protect themselves from the relentless pain.’ He continued, ‘Despite what you’ve seen and experienced, I’m surprised you still take the same route home, still meet people near Victoria Station …’

Lisette shrugged, grateful that he understood why she felt the way she did. ‘Lightning never strikes twice.’

‘Is the threat of potential death exciting for you?’ he probed.

She’d never really considered this before. ‘Not exciting, no.’

‘But you clearly don’t shy away from the possibility. Is that your way of coping with your parents’ deaths, Harriet’s senseless loss of life?’

‘It’s happening on both sides of the Channel, Captain Jepson. Germans, French, Poles, Russians … they’re all dying, all young, all with lost dreams. It’s not just the British.’

‘Indeed,’ he said softly.

‘I’m not scared of death, if that’s what you mean.’

‘What are you scared of, Lisette?’

‘Of being ordinary,’ she answered.

‘Oh, let me assure you that there is nothing ordinary about you.’

She looked down.

‘You’re not vain, but you have looks that most women would kill for. That makes you uncomfortable, but, Miss Forester, good looks are an asset. You simply have to know how and when to use them.’

‘That sounds very cynical,’ she said.

‘Why? You have a gift for language and you also have the gift of being beautiful. Nothing to be embarrassed about. In wartime, they’re both valuable. And yet you do plenty to disguise those looks.’

‘These are not the times—’

‘These are the very times for swagger. A bomb could drop at any time. Life is short. People are behaving recklessly, living and playing hard, because their days could be numbered. But not you. You, who have the capacity to live a wealthy life, instead work in tearooms serving people. You, with your looks and slim figure, wear loose-fitting, colourless clothes that deliberately draw little attention. And you, who could afford to live safely in a rural area, choose to live in the most dangerous place in the world at the moment … in London, at its very heart, where Hitler is directing his most ferocious wrath.’

‘I don’t want to be a coward.’

‘No chance of that, I suspect.’ Jepson gave a soft sigh. ‘You possess all the qualities I’m looking for to be one of our special agents in France.’