Winter filtered into spring, fizzing flecks of green in the parks and on the trees. Despite the bitter cold, there had been something safe about the winter, tucked beneath the long thick blanket of the blackout. Now the later evenings and brighter days were like a searchlight illuminating everything and Ada jumped whenever an aeroplane droned above. There were more planes flying overhead, and soldiers on the move along the streets and boulevards, boots, boots. Ada picked up a newspaper almost every day and Monsieur Lafitte brought his wireless into the shop. Madame Lafitte said that she’d seen British tanks near the Belgian border when she went to visit her sister, lumbering monsters that churned up the roads. Her sister said that the British had sent thousands of men, so they were expecting trouble. Ada couldn’t imagine that number. So many young men in uniforms. Who had made them all?
Stanislaus shrugged. ‘What will be, will be,’ he said. ‘We can’t stop it.’ He was back to his old self, relaxed, happy.
But Ada fretted. War marched with hobnail boots, left right, left right. The streets around the Boulevard Barbès filled with refugees, haunted faces in shabby clothing pushing their possessions in a child’s pram. Stanislaus didn’t seem to notice. Nothing worried him. He was a continental, that’s why. Continentals were relaxed. He looked foreign, neat ears close to his skull, short fair hair, his clipped moustache in the centre of his lip, a bit like Hitler, she often thought, though that was the fashion these days. Milky eyes framed by his glasses. He always wore them. She couldn’t imagine his face without them. It must have been such a come-down for him, living like this.
‘For you, madame.’ He pulled a round box from behind his back and presented it to her. She undid the ribbon and pulled out a hat, a lemon straw pillbox with a spotted black veil. ‘Your Easter bonnet.’
It didn’t go with her winter outfits, and the weather wasn’t warm enough yet to put on her summer dress, but Stanislaus had gone out of his way to purchase the hat when goodness knows this kind of raffia was hard to come by now.
She put it on, the veil drawn across her face. A grown-up hat, a woman’s hat. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Shall we, as the French say, faire une promenade?’
Ada giggled. Stanislaus rarely spoke French, at least not with her. It was always English and even so he often got his ‘v’ and ‘w’ muddled, and could never pronounce ‘th’, however many times she tried to show him. Sometimes he was in a good mood, sometimes not. He’d taken to putting the bolster down the middle of the bed, his side, hers.
Two weeks after Easter, Germany invaded Norway, neutral Norway. There was news of resistance and fighting, of British troops sent in to help. Endless blah blah on the wireless about the Maginot Line and what to do if Germany invaded France. Refugees needed to be vetted. Sympathizers would be shot. It was the duty of France to stand up and fight back.
Her neighbours’ faces were pinched and Monsieur and Madame Lafitte looked gaunt and frail. A smell began to permeate the Paris air. It oozed from the pores of women and mouths of screaming babies, from grown men and from the hairs of dogs pissing on the lamp-posts. Ada sniffed it in her nostrils, on her clothes, from Stanislaus as he lay on his side of the bed at night. Ada knew it now, the stale onion of fear.
There was talk of rationing. She wondered whether Stanislaus would change his mind, if she could persuade him to leave. They should go home, find a way to England. Monsieur Lafitte was hinting that it was time he retired, now the work was getting thin, and he didn’t want to start making army uniforms, not at his age. What if she lost her job? What then?
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said one day. ‘A young girl like you. It’s too dangerous. Go home. While you can.’
She thought of where her parents lived, close to the river with its docks and ports, of her younger brothers and sisters, living goodness knows where in the country, of her Mum, thin with worry, and Stanislaus out till late, leaving Ada with nothing to do but gnaw at her anxieties like a fox in a trap.
*
Stanislaus came back one night in May with a bloodied nose and broken lip, his spectacles twisted and crooked on his nose.
‘Pack,’ he said. ‘We have to leave.’
‘What happened?’
He splashed water from the basin on his face. Drops fell onto the table, washed pale and pink. There was blood on the towel he dried himself with.
‘What happened?’ Ada said again. ‘Did someone hit you?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Just pack. Now.’
She moved to dab at his cuts with the cloth but he grabbed her hand and forced it away.
‘Pack,’ he shouted. ‘Now.’
She knew he only raised his voice when he was worried. Perhaps someone had thought he was a German.
‘Are you listening? We must go.’
He took her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and flung it on the bed. She opened it, took out a dress from the cupboard, started to fold it. He snatched it from her, threw it into the case.
‘No time for that.’ He scooped up the rest of her clothes, grabbed her hat and shoved it in, yanked her underwear from the bedpost where it had been drying, tossed it on top and slammed the case shut. ‘Come on.’
He hadn’t packed a thing. She followed him down the stairs, racing, two at a time. She’d trip if she tried to keep up. She held the banister to steady herself. ‘But where—’
‘Shut up,’ he said.
The concierge had gone home for the night, the blind pulled down, her office dark and vacant. They walked out of the building, through the courtyard, into the street, and up to a black car parked nearby, a car she’d never seen before. He lifted the boot, put the suitcase inside and opened the passenger door.
‘Get in.’
She climbed inside, the leather seat chill against her bare legs. Stanislaus pulled at the starter handle until the car chugged to life, climbed in beside her and drove off, the shaded lights throwing narrow triangles on the road in the pitch-black midnight. Her stomach tightened in a ball and her mouth tasted of metal, of fear.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Belgium.’
‘Belgium?’
‘Belgium’s neutral.’ She was right. They thought he was a German. She wanted to say how sorry she was. She couldn’t see him in the dark, but she knew his lips were closed and tight and he was not going to talk to her about it. He was a brave man.
‘Where did you get the car?’
‘I borrowed it.’
Then she remembered. ‘My samples,’ she said. ‘I left my samples. We have to go back.’
‘Forget it.’
‘Please, Stanislaus.’
He laughed, a cruel, mocking ‘Ha, ha’. She had never known him like this.
There was no traffic on the road and they sped through Paris, the unlit streets and suburbs unfolding behind them. Maybe they could go back later, when this crisis had blown over. Madame Breton would keep them for her. That’s what concierges did.
‘Do you know the way?’ Ada said.
‘I’d better.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘Five hours, six. Who knows?’
Six hours was a long time. He was driving fast.
‘Will they catch us?’
‘Who?’
‘Whoever is after you.’
He said nothing. They sat in silence. She closed her eyes. She was tired.