As they’d sat in the waiting room earlier, James had offered to pay for her to upgrade too, but she had refused. Fen wasn’t embarrassed at her inability to afford first class herself, or indeed too proud to accept help when it was truly needed, but she didn’t feel that it was proper at all for her to accept James’s very generous offer. They were only friends after all, and nothing more than that.
‘All done?’ James asked as Fen walked up to him by the waiting-room door.
‘All done. It feels strange in a way to be leaving France. So much has happened since I set out from Mrs B’s farmhouse in September…’ Fen trailed off, and James gently put a hand on her shoulder. She had met him in Burgundy when she’d been trying to discover what had happened to her fiancé Arthur Melville-Hare, only to realise that he and James had been good friends.
Theirs was a partnership forged as they both worked as secret agents for the Special Operations Executive, a top-secret part of the British war effort. After finding out about Arthur’s death, Fen and James had found a certain comfort in each other’s company and she was pleased at least that he was coming back to England, too. Much like her, he had lost loved ones in the war and had more recently been used by a gold-digging young Parisienne intent on becoming his wife. England – home – would hopefully be a salve for the wounds the last few weeks, let alone the war years, had inflicted on them.
‘Come on, let’s get some lunch and you can tell me all about the formidable Mrs B…’ James patted down his jacket pockets, checking he had his wallet with him.
Fen looked up at him, his blue eyes so different to Arthur’s, yet more often than not possessed of a very similar twinkle.
‘Formidable… she’d like that.’ Fen laughed, thinking of her former landlady as she secured her headscarf under her chin. ‘Though don’t you dare tell her I said so!’
The café they found just round the corner from the French Line offices in Paris’s Opera district was offering a set-menu lunch and Fen allowed James to order a steaming crockpot of hunter’s chicken for the both of them. Paris hadn’t suffered as much in the way of food shortages as the rest of France, or indeed England, as it had been home, for most of the war, to the occupying German army. The Nazis had overrun the streets of Paris, but their presence had done nothing to influence the food in the bistros and cafés, which was still as succulently and deliciously French as always.
Fen tucked into the chicken chasseur with gusto and didn’t put up too much resistance as James ordered a carafe of good red wine to go with it.
‘We need something to toast Paris with,’ he justified himself to her. ‘Here’s to the City of Lights, even if it was home to murderers and thieves.’
‘Oh, James,’ Fen shook her head. ‘I don’t think we can blame dear old Paris for her inhabitants. But here’s to new adventures.’
As they clinked glasses, the sun came out from behind a dark grey cloud and illuminated their table.
‘New adventures indeed,’ James repeated and held her gaze as he took a sip of wine. The cloud moved and the sunlight faded. James put his glass down and picked up his knife and fork.
Fen took a sip from her own glass. New adventures… Then tucked into the casserole again.
2
‘Come on, slowcoach,’ James called out to Fen, who was still waiting for her sturdy old brown leather suitcase to be taken off the bus. It was the day after they’d booked their passage in the smart French Line offices in Paris and now, after a trip that had started before dawn that morning, they had arrived in Le Havre, the port from where the ship would be sailing.
‘It’s not me who’s being the slowcoach,’ Fen half said, half whispered, hoping the driver of the old charabanc wasn’t in earshot. He had driven them carefully and sedately to the coast from the cathedral city of Rouen, which was as far as the train from Paris could take them before the line had become too damaged. Fen had felt, or indeed endured, each bump and pothole in the road through the barely padded metal springs in her seat.
The copy of The Count of Monte Cristo that she’d picked up from one of the second-hand booksellers by the Seine in Paris had lurched and juddered in front of her eyes, so much so that she had had to rest it on her lap and lay her hands on top of it, closing her eyes until she’d got over the bout of motion sickness. James, sitting alongside her, had mumbled that a bit of speed could sometimes be a good thing, skimming the wheels over bumps and lumps rather than ponderously hitting each and every one.
Fen had nodded and clutched her book to her with one hand and held onto the metal bar at the top of the seat in front of her with the other to brace herself against the rocky ride. The Nazis had a lot to answer for in this neck of the woods, though Fen had to admit to herself as she’d bounced along that failing to maintain, and indeed purposefully destroying, some of the main roads to the ports was one of their lesser crimes.
James was now eager to find a café for lunch but Fen was inclined to send him on his way alone as her stomach was so churned from the journey that she wasn’t sure she could cope with anything to eat quite yet. Plus, her suitcase was still very much jammed at the back of the luggage compartment beneath
