“You said you l-loved it.”
“I love it and I hate it. Le Havre, Paris. I love their baguettes and their hats, but merde, the people have no idea what is happening in the north. None at all.” That mobile face was still for an instant. “Lille is overrun by beasts, and here they sniff if you want a brandy and a smoke to get through a pisser of a day.”
“Lili,” Eve asked impulsively. “Are you ever afraid?”
Lili turned, rain dripping off the edge of her umbrella in a silver curtain between her and Eve. “Yes, just like everybody else. But only after the danger is done—before that, fear is an indulgence.” She slid her hand through Eve’s elbow. “Welcome to the Alice Network.”
CHAPTER 7
CHARLIE
May 1947
Summertime, almost exactly ten years ago. I’d been nine and Rose eleven when our families went on a drive through Provence . . . and ended up leaving us at a roadside café for nearly six hours.
An accident, of course. Two cars, one with the adults and one trundling behind with the children and the nanny. A stop at a café overlooking a vineyard of budding grapes, our parents looking for lavatories and postcards, Rose and me following the smell of fresh-baked bread to the kitchen, our brothers roughhousing . . . and somehow when everyone loaded back up, the nanny thought we’d climbed into the car with our parents and our parents thought we were with the nanny, and everyone drove off without us.
It was the only time I’d ever seen Rose scared, and I couldn’t understand it. We weren’t in any danger; the plump and motherly Proven?al cook had made a great fuss over us once she discovered what had happened. “Don’t worry, mademoiselles! It won’t be twenty minutes before your mothers are back.” Soon we were settled at a table of our own under a striped awning overlooking the vineyard, with glasses of cold lemonade and thick sandwiches of goat cheese and prosciutto.
“They’ll be back soon,” I said, munching. As far as I was concerned, this was much better than sitting hot and cramped in the Renault’s backseat, getting admonished by the nanny and pinched by our brothers.
But Rose just stared down the road, not smiling. “Maybe they won’t come back,” she said. “My mother doesn’t like me.”
“Yes, she does.”
“Not now I’m getting, you know. Older.” Rose looked down at herself. Even at eleven she was starting to sprout a bust. “Maman doesn’t like it. She feels old.”
“Because you’re going to grow up even prettier than her. I won’t grow up pretty enough for mine.” I sighed, but the gloom didn’t last long. The day was too beautiful, and the smiling cook had just laid down a plate of piping-hot madeleines.
“Why is it always about being pretty with us?” Rose exclaimed, still glaring over the stunning view of vines and sky.
“Don’t you like being pretty? I wish I were.”
“Well, of course I like it. But when people meet our brothers, they don’t just comment on their looks, they ask, ‘How do you do in school?’ or ‘Do you play football?’ No one ever does that with us.”
“Girls don’t play football.”
“You know what I mean.” Rose looked stormy. “Our parents would never have left the boys behind. Boys always come first.”
“So?” That was just the way things were, not something to resent or even think about very much. My parents laughed indulgently whenever James pulled my hair, or dunked me in the stream until I was crying. Boys got to do whatever they wanted, and girls got to sit around looking pretty. I wasn’t very pretty, but my parents still seemed to have lofty plans for me: white gloves, a proper school, and becoming a Lovely Bride someday. Maman had already told me that if I was lucky, I’d be engaged by the time I was twenty, just like her.
Rose sat twisting the end of her blond braid. “I don’t want to just be pretty when I grow up. I want to do something different. Write a book. Swim the Channel. Go on safari and shoot a lion—”
“Or just stay here forever.” The smells of wild lavender and rosemary on the summer breeze, the warmth of the sun overhead, the sound of happy French babble from other diners, the goat cheese and crusty bread delicious on my tongue—this little café seemed just like heaven as far as I was concerned.
“We’re not staying here forever!” Rose looked worried again. “Don’t say that.”
“I was just joking. You don’t really think they’d leave us here, do you?”
“No.” I could see her trying to be rational, the big girl of eleven who knew so much more than me. But then she whispered, as if she couldn’t help it, “What if they don’t come back?”
I think I realized then why Rose was such a friend to me. She was two years older, she could have brushed me off as a little pest, yet she always welcomed my tagging along. Sitting in that heavenly café, I saw it: her brothers had their own games, her mother resented her just a little, her father was always working. Except for these summers when I came to visit and became her loyal shadow, she was lonely.
I was only nine. I couldn’t put any of this into words, or even understand it as well as I did later. But I had some muddled idea, seeing her fight the fear that her parents wouldn’t bother coming back for her, and I squeezed her hand. “Even if they don’t come back, I’m here,” I’d said. “I won’t leave you.”
Miss?”
I blinked, coming back from summer of ’37 to May of ’47. Memory had dragged me down so strongly, it was a shock to look over and see Finn’s dark eyes and tousled hair instead of eleven-year-old Rose’s blond plait and baby blues.
“We’ve arrived,” he said. “This is the address you gave me.”
I shivered. The car had stopped. I looked out at the gravel drive leading up to the rambling house where I’d spent every summer of my life up until Germany invaded France: my aunt and uncle’s house outside Rouen. Yet somehow I was still seeing that café in Provence where two little girls had spent nearly six hours before their parents realized the mistake at the next stop three hours down the road, turned around, and raced back. Those six hours were magic: Rose and I stuffed with goat cheese and madeleines, playing tag among the grapevines, bundling into aprons to help the friendly cook wash the mugs, feeling very grown-up when she allowed us a small glass of watered-down rosé apiece. Sleepily watching the sun come down over the vineyard, heads on each other’s shoulders. Feeling a little disappointed to leave, once our frantically worried parents arrived with breathless hugs and apologies. The best day Rose and I ever had. The best day of my life, really, because of the simplest equation in the world: Rose plus me equaled happiness.
I won’t leave you, I’d promised. But I had, and now she was gone.