for them tugged at her heart, as powerful and as constant as the current of the river.
And she longed for someone else, too. The young man she’d known for just a few brief days, whom Claire and Vivi knew as ‘Fréd’, who had held her and kissed her, in the fleeting, precious moments she’d spent alone with him before he’d left on his dangerous journey back to England. And then he had whispered his real name in her ear so that she’d know who this man truly was: this man who loved her.
She sat beneath the sheltering arms of the willow tree as dusk fell, bringing with it a faint breeze from the river. She lifted the weight of her hair away from her neck and allowed the evening air to cool it. The images of the faces she held most dear, coupled with the reassuring solidity of the tree’s trunk at her back, reminded her that there were some things that the war couldn’t ever destroy.
What she had felt that afternoon in the atelier was what the occupying forces wanted her to feel: defeat. If she gave in to it then she would have lost and they would have won. But now she knew she could always come back here, to this place which was the nearest thing to her true home that she could find in the city, amongst the hard-paved streets and the tall buildings that shut out the sky. She could come here and be with those she loved, joined to them by the ribbons of water that met, at last, in the ocean beyond. And those vital lines of connection would give her back her sense of what really mattered. They would make her feel part of a larger whole. And she knew that they would keep her from being defeated.
Claire had been delivering a message to a tobacconist’s shop just off the Place Chopin and was walking home, swinging her attaché case which felt a good deal lighter now that it merely contained the sheets of music for her ‘singing lesson’ which had camouflaged a sealed brown envelope. Not that the envelope had weighed anything at all, really, but she always felt a load slip from her shoulders once a delivery had been successfully completed, allowing her to return home buoyed up by a sense of relief.
It was pleasant to be out, after the oppressive heat of the day. The evening was still warm and she couldn’t bear the thought of a hot, stuffy Métro ride, no doubt preceded by a long wait on a dirty platform, so she decided to cross the Pont d’Iéna, facing the imposing bulk of the Eiffel Tower, and walk back along the river. As dusk fell, it promised a faint hint of coolness and she looked forward to feeling the gentle river breeze on her hot cheeks.
As she walked along, she was surprised by the stream of buses and police trucks that overtook her. One of the buses stopped at a junction before turning on to the bridge, and as it did so she caught a glimpse of frightened-looking faces behind the windows. A child turned to look at her from the rear window as the bus drove on and his eyes were large and dark in the paleness of his face.
She came to a place where queuing vehicles formed a wall outside the winter velodrome. A road-block had been set up to prevent people from walking or cycling past. Soldiers stood at the barrier, checking the papers of passers-by and Claire felt a pang of fear grip her guts. But she knew that if she were to turn and walk away she would draw attention to herself. She had nothing to hide, she reminded herself; her papers were in order and she had a valid-sounding excuse for being out. So she resisted the impulse to run and stood in the short line at the barrier, waiting her turn. The wall of buses and trucks crept forwards in stops and starts, directed by French policemen. She couldn’t see what was happening on the other side, but it seemed as if they were disgorging their passengers at the entrance of the cycling arena before driving off again.
The soldiers who were checking papers waved the couple in front of her through, but as they attempted to make their way towards the velodrome, an officer, wearing the black uniform of the Gestapo, stepped out between the buses and shouted at them