Jamie sipped his tea. ‘Do you think it’s possible that she had a good motive for breaking a Nazi out of the hospital?’
‘I think there might just be more to the story than first meets the eye. At one time, Vivienne must have been a good person. She went through the rigorous training of becoming an SOE operative to help with the war effort. Surely they would have known if something wasn’t right? They would have tested her on every level.’
‘You’re forgetting the power of love,’ reminded Jean wistfully. ‘That can make even rational people do crazy things.’
‘I know how it all looks, and what everyone believes,’ continued Sophie, ‘but I keep coming back to her trip up to London in 1944 – and if she was there on war business – and asking myself: why would she do that if she was planning on becoming a traitor? It’s all so intriguing.’
‘Well,’ said Jean, getting up and collecting all the dishes, ‘I just hope it doesn’t all end in tears. What if you find out she was involved in Nazi atrocities? She could have killed people, who knows? I just hope for your sake, Sophie, continuing looking for answers here doesn’t end up making the whole sorry tale even worse.’
‘So, what now?’ asked Jamie, genuinely interested.
‘I think I need to go to Paris. There may be more war records and information about the Resistance, and I need to be where Vivienne was. Also, there is a chance some of Marcus Vonstein’s relatives live there.’
Jean looked up from the suds she was amassing in her washing-up bowl. ‘Please be careful with them. If their grandfather was a Nazi…’
Sophie felt exasperated. ‘I doubt they are too. And anyway, I am not Vivienne, Auntie Jean. This is a completely different time.’
‘But the past has a way of repeating itself,’ Jean stated solemnly. ‘I would just hate for you to get hurt.’
Jamie smiled. ‘Mum, you are the voice of gloom and doom.’ He gripped Sophie’s hand. ‘I think you should go, even if it turns out everything is what it originally seems. If fate went to all this trouble to open this door, you should at least walk through it.’
Sophie nodded, grateful for his support. She thought about Emily, and how visiting her grave brought her so much solace. Maybe finding Vivienne’s would do the same for this unfinished story somehow, and at least Great-Uncle Tom would know where his sister was buried.
But she also couldn’t help feeling there was something larger for her waiting on the other side of this story, as if this were a bigger part of her own destiny too.
17
1943
For four weeks, Vivi’s life continued to fall into a comfortable rhythm. Each week she explored the city, read to children, carried documents and delivered messages. Three times a week she successfully communicated intelligence back and forth between France and SOE in England.
Vivi was ever meticulous about her procedure, never leaving the antenna outside to be detected and shutting down her wireless after fifteen minutes so there was less chance of the enemy detecting her broadcasts. She also took alternative routes whenever she visited her Resistance cell, which she would do twice a week to communicate instructions from London and receive any of their new requests in return.
As the days of the war forged ahead, Vivi wondered how long she would be in France, but that question was settled faster for her than she’d expected.
The last time she would stay under the Renoirs’ roof was on a bleak night. Paris had been enduring an onslaught of a bombing campaign from the Allied forces, and it was on the third of those nights that the air-raid siren had sounded right in the middle of her broadcast. She cut it short to get to the shelter, when a substantial bomb came down near to the house, shaking the residence and throwing her to the floor. The walls of her bedroom crumbled in around her, and dirt and debris covered her bed and the wireless.
Her ears rang with the noise, and when the brick dust cleared, she heard someone screaming from somewhere else in the house and recognised it was Yvette. Her first instinct was to find her. Jumping to her feet, she raced through the building calling to her, ‘Yvette, where are you? Yvette!’
Monsieur and Madame Renoir were out visiting family and had planned to stay the night so as not to have to rush back