Read Online The Race for Paris by Meg Waite Clayton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Meg Waite Clayton
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scoop her up and take her to a safer world, one where daughters married in their mother’s white silk dresses and fathers, rather than twin brothers, gave them away.
Dinner at Trefoil Hall that evening was served in a vast dining hall flanked at each end by cavernous fireplaces, their mantels of gray-white stone carved with lions and leaves and frippery, and with crests carved of onyx and some other stone Liv didn’t recognize, something a deep, rich red. It had been all she could do to get out of the bath she’d had before dinner, but now she and Charles and Fletcher sat alone at one end of a table meant to seat thirty, Larkins serving crisply roasted duck with rosemary new potatoes and carrots and peas Serle had prepared from the estate’s victory garden. The wine was a wonderful Bordeaux that had been aging in the cellar sincelong before the start of the war, Fletcher assured them, but still Liv felt the guilt of drinking it, the sense that it was somehow inappropriate to enjoy this wine in the relative safety of England when Hitler might be drinking the same wine while his soldiers trampled the vineyard where it was made.
Fletcher suggested someone ought to do a story about what girls like those living at Trefoil were enduring. They saw their mothers only on Sundays, when special coaches brought them out. Liv felt the tug of that, the sympathy for these evacuee girls pulling against her need to get to the front.
“That girl Ella,” she said to Fletcher. “Her mother . . . ?”
“The other mums are kind to her,” he said. “She has an aunt who comes when she can as well, and her sister, until a few weeks ago, but now her sister is in France with a nursing unit. Her mother was killed in the Bethnal Green tube shelter last year. Someone stumbled as they entered the shelter, and the crowd pushed on, and in the end more than a hundred people were trampled to death, I’m afraid.”
“One hundred and seventy-three,” Charles said.
“But that’s impossible,” Liv said. “We’d have heard about something like that.”
“It was kept from the newspapers,” Fletcher said. “The location. The magnitude of the disaster.”
Charles nodded. “March eighth.”
Liv stared for a surprised moment at the carve of lines around her husband’s eyes, at the grooves between his nose and mouth. He knew the exact date, the exact number of the dead. He knew what was printed, and he knew what was too awful to print.
“And Ella’s father?” she asked.
Fletcher said, “Somewhere in France.”
Liv looked down at her meal, no appetite left as she listenedto Charles and Fletcher recount the time they’d spent in Poland the way men who never shared much with anyone liked to retread their common ground. Charles said to Liv, “I’m not sure Fletcher and I would have stayed if Julien Bryan hadn’t showed up with his Leica in one hand and his Bell & Howell movie camera in the other just as everyone else was leaving. But Fletcher here couldn’t bear to let an American take the show away from him.”
Fletcher took a studied sip of his Bordeaux and said he was glad to see the American censorship rules loosening. “So now you show your dead but you airbrush the poor sods’ faces so their mums won’t recognize them?”
From the first full-page, full-bleed shot that had run in the American papers—George Strock’s three dead Americans on the sand at Buna Beach—there were no faces on the American dead. They were shown facedown, like two of the three in Strock’s shot, or with faces hidden or turned away from the camera or cropped out or blackened in or obscured by shadows. Liv hadn’t thought about it in the negative; she’d thought, My God , how can these photos be so moving? They don’t even show the faces.
Fletcher said, “Even the dead you half show are the few dead, casualties from an otherwise successful outing in the park.”
Charles said, “But, Fletcher, imagine if your own mother—”
“My mum
Dinner at Trefoil Hall that evening was served in a vast dining hall flanked at each end by cavernous fireplaces, their mantels of gray-white stone carved with lions and leaves and frippery, and with crests carved of onyx and some other stone Liv didn’t recognize, something a deep, rich red. It had been all she could do to get out of the bath she’d had before dinner, but now she and Charles and Fletcher sat alone at one end of a table meant to seat thirty, Larkins serving crisply roasted duck with rosemary new potatoes and carrots and peas Serle had prepared from the estate’s victory garden. The wine was a wonderful Bordeaux that had been aging in the cellar sincelong before the start of the war, Fletcher assured them, but still Liv felt the guilt of drinking it, the sense that it was somehow inappropriate to enjoy this wine in the relative safety of England when Hitler might be drinking the same wine while his soldiers trampled the vineyard where it was made.
Fletcher suggested someone ought to do a story about what girls like those living at Trefoil were enduring. They saw their mothers only on Sundays, when special coaches brought them out. Liv felt the tug of that, the sympathy for these evacuee girls pulling against her need to get to the front.
“That girl Ella,” she said to Fletcher. “Her mother . . . ?”
“The other mums are kind to her,” he said. “She has an aunt who comes when she can as well, and her sister, until a few weeks ago, but now her sister is in France with a nursing unit. Her mother was killed in the Bethnal Green tube shelter last year. Someone stumbled as they entered the shelter, and the crowd pushed on, and in the end more than a hundred people were trampled to death, I’m afraid.”
“One hundred and seventy-three,” Charles said.
“But that’s impossible,” Liv said. “We’d have heard about something like that.”
“It was kept from the newspapers,” Fletcher said. “The location. The magnitude of the disaster.”
Charles nodded. “March eighth.”
Liv stared for a surprised moment at the carve of lines around her husband’s eyes, at the grooves between his nose and mouth. He knew the exact date, the exact number of the dead. He knew what was printed, and he knew what was too awful to print.
“And Ella’s father?” she asked.
Fletcher said, “Somewhere in France.”
Liv looked down at her meal, no appetite left as she listenedto Charles and Fletcher recount the time they’d spent in Poland the way men who never shared much with anyone liked to retread their common ground. Charles said to Liv, “I’m not sure Fletcher and I would have stayed if Julien Bryan hadn’t showed up with his Leica in one hand and his Bell & Howell movie camera in the other just as everyone else was leaving. But Fletcher here couldn’t bear to let an American take the show away from him.”
Fletcher took a studied sip of his Bordeaux and said he was glad to see the American censorship rules loosening. “So now you show your dead but you airbrush the poor sods’ faces so their mums won’t recognize them?”
From the first full-page, full-bleed shot that had run in the American papers—George Strock’s three dead Americans on the sand at Buna Beach—there were no faces on the American dead. They were shown facedown, like two of the three in Strock’s shot, or with faces hidden or turned away from the camera or cropped out or blackened in or obscured by shadows. Liv hadn’t thought about it in the negative; she’d thought, My God , how can these photos be so moving? They don’t even show the faces.
Fletcher said, “Even the dead you half show are the few dead, casualties from an otherwise successful outing in the park.”
Charles said, “But, Fletcher, imagine if your own mother—”
“My mum
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