‘I wish there was time to visit Therese and your granddaughter,’ Claire said.
‘There will be plenty of time when this nonsense about Alain being a traitor is cleared up.’
‘Then we will visit as we had planned, with Aimée.’ Claire had every intention of jumping down from the window. Instead, she slumped back. ‘You must think I am a terrible mother to leave my child in England with my sister while I travel halfway across Europe looking for Alain.’
Édith went to her and, holding Claire’s face in her hands, said, ‘I think no such thing. You must do what you have to do, child.’ Claire hung her head. ‘Look at me?’ Édith said. And when Claire looked up at her old friend, she said, ‘You will find Alain. You found him once before - and that was in the middle of a war - you will find him again.
‘Come now,’ she said, helping Claire down from the windowsill. ‘Get washed and dressed and come down for breakfast. André will soon be here with your passport and papers. I should like us to have eaten and cleared away before he arrives.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Wearing Édith’s brown walking shoes, a dark brown and gold flecked two-piece beneath a bottle-green belted coat, and sandy coloured scarf and beret - a mismatch of colours that Claire would never wear - she climbed into Pierre and André’s friend Bernard’s Renault pick-up truck. She was grateful for the old coat. Unlike Pierre’s warm motorcar there was no heater in the truck.
The journey from Orléans to Paris was less comfortable than the drive from Gisoir to Orléans had been. Not only because Pierre’s car was new, warm, and had soft seats, but because Pierre thought it best that Bernard stuck to the country roads that he normally took when he delivered produce to the market towns. Many of the narrow roads were in disrepair and Claire felt every bump and pothole the truck drove over.
Bernard was a man of few words. Claire tried to engage him in conversation several times, but a grunt and a nod, or a tobacco-stained toothy grin were as much as she got out of him.
‘Smoke?’ he said, taking a roll-up of brown paper from an old dented tobacco tin.
‘No, thank you.’ Claire was about to say I don’t mind if you smoke when he put the torpedo-shaped cigarette in his mouth and flicked open the lid of a battered old American lighter.
‘GI gave to me this lighter.’ Bernard lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply. ‘Very good,’ he said, loudly, enunciating every syllable. Suddenly he began to cough. ‘Argh!’ he shouted, took his hand off the steering wheel, made a ball of his fist and beat his chest.
As the truck weaved its way along the road, bumping the grass verge several times. Claire looked at the handbrake, ready to pull it on if necessary. ‘Yes,’ he gasped, when he had finished coughing, ‘it is very good.’
Within seconds the cab was filled with smoke, so when Bernard said he was hungry and suggested they stopped for lunch at a small café he knew, Claire agreed. She had smelled some strong French cigarettes in the war - Mitch had occasionally smoked Gitanes and Gauloises - but never in all the years she had lived in France had she smelled anything as pungent as the cigarette Bernard smoked.
He swung the truck off the road onto a patch of waste ground, bringing it to a halt in front of a small roadside café. ‘Very good,’ he said, miming putting food in his mouth.
She smiled. To Bernard everything he said to her he said loudly and finished with Very good. Perhaps it was because he knew she was English. ‘I am feeling peckish, but not hungry,’ Claire said, in perfect French.
Bernard replied, ‘Very good,’ and led the way along a narrow path of loose gravel to the shabby café with grey threadbare curtains at its two filthy windows. As he opened the door and stood aside to let Claire enter, a combination of cigarette smoke and burnt cooking oil filled her nostrils. She had swapped one smoke-filled space for another.
Bernard swaggered into the small café to jokes and leg-pulling because he had a female passenger with him. He put up his hands, ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, puffing out his chest. He was secretly enjoying the attention, Claire thought. ‘This is my good friend André Belland’s cousin, so mind your manners.’
‘Then welcome,’ said one man, ‘A good man, André Belland,’ said another. ‘The best! Give my regards to Madame Édith when you next see her,’ another said, pulling out a chair for Claire to sit down.
Bernard nodded that he would sit in the chair opposite her. ‘But first I shall order lunch.’ Claire glanced along the table: there was no menu. She looked at the other tables in the prefabricated cabin. No menus on them either. But above the gas stove where the cook was frying steak was a blackboard. She read down the list of dishes. Soup of the day, some sort of steak, which Claire thought must be a local dish, pork chop and fillet of fish. She was just about to tell Bernard that she would like soup when he returned and sat down.
‘It will not be long,’ he said, grinning. ‘The steak here is…’ He put his fingers to his mouth and blew a kiss into the air, making a smacking noise with his lips, ‘very good.’
‘Steak?’ Claire said, ‘delicious. Thank you, Bernard.’
The steak was indeed delicious. And, thank goodness, not too filling.
During the last part of the journey Bernard smiled at her every now and then but he was
