so I want you to have my bicycle. It will be of use to you – and none to me, where I am going. Best wishes, your neighbour Henri Taubman.
Recalling the yellow star pinned to his coat, she fervently hoped that he was making his escape, rather than being sent to one of those camps in the suburbs.
A sense of profound unease spread through the city from one quarter to the next and spilled over into a demonstration one day when the Communist women of the Rue Daguerre took to the streets to protest against the now severe shortage of food outside warehouses that were filled with food for soldiers on the German front. Shots were fired, arrests were made and, Mireille heard on the grapevine, the instigators were sent to those same camps. They did not return. Against this backdrop the girls often lay in their beds listening to the thuds and cracks of explosions as the Allied bombing raids continued sporadically. And the Germans clamped down harder than ever with road blocks, barriers at the Métro stations that remained open, arrests and shootings to keep the local population in check.
Mireille’s missions for the underground network felt even more dangerous but, at the same time, even more vital. Visiting the dyer one day to collect some bolts of silk, he handed her a small packet for Vivienne, wrapped in brown paper, and then gave her a set of instructions of her own for that evening. She was to meet a man on the north side of the city and accompany him safely to the Arnauds’ house in the Marais, avoiding using the main Métro stations where the Germans were doing frequent spot-checks.
And so it was that she sat at a table at a café on a sloping, cobbled Montmartre street and sipped on her cup of ersatz coffee as she waited for her next ‘visitor’ to turn up. She was expecting a shabbily dressed refugee, perhaps, or another foreigner whose grasp of French was tenuous at best, so she was surprised when a young Frenchman slipped into the chair across from hers. He pulled a blue and white spotted handkerchief out of his pocket – the sign that she’d been told to watch for – and blew his nose; then he asked whether ‘Cousin Cosette’ was well, using the code word she’d been told to listen for.
‘Her leg is much better these days, thanks for asking,’ she replied, repeating the confirmation code that the dyer had given her. She downed the dregs of her coffee, making a face at the bitter tincture of roasted chicory and dandelion roots, then got to her feet and the young man followed her out into the street.
As they walked down the hill, she slipped him the false papers she’d been given for him and he tucked them into his pocket without looking at them. She took him to the Métro station at Abbesses and they stood on the semi-deserted platform waiting for a train. Cocooned underground and under cover of the noises of the railway, she felt able to talk to her charge a little more freely than usual, as long as they kept their voices low. The clatter of distant trains, the dripping of water and the sound of other passengers’ footsteps echoing off the tunnel walls, muffled their conversation.
His eyes, which were almost as dark as her own, held a gleam of determination in their depths, and the day’s growth of stubble etched on his chin helped to define its strength. His black hair sprung back from his forehead with a vitality which was mirrored in the confident spring of his step and the interest with which he watched her face as she talked. They didn’t exchange names – they both knew the dangers involved – but she recognised his accent as being from the far south of the country with the twang of a native of Provence or the Languedoc. He told her that he’d grown up near Montpellier, the eldest in a sprawling family of sisters and brothers, and that he’d signed up in 1939. He was one of the lucky ones in the French army who had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and he’d joined the Free French in England, continuing the fight under the command of General De Gaulle.
Mireille nodded. She’d heard from the dyer that sometimes messages were broadcast from England by the exiled General, rallying the troops that were left to him and trying to raise