The Designer by Marius Gabriel
One
Copper had only been married for eighteen months and did not consider herself an expert on marital relationships. But she fancied she knew when a marriage was in trouble. And she was pretty sure her own was.
As she listened to her husband interview the French partisan, she reflected on the advice she’d gleaned from the women’s magazines that were, in the absence of a mother or available friends, her source of wisdom. She didn’t ‘nag, pester or complain’. She certainly didn’t ‘constantly demand new dresses’, yet she successfully avoided ‘looking slovenly and unkempt’. As for not dishing up ‘unappetising meals, served on unclean crockery and stained linen’, she did her best, given the constraints of wartime Paris.
But refraining from all those sins didn’t mean she knew where her husband had been until two a.m. that morning, or whose lipstick was smeared on his uniform collar, or why he had taken to treating her like part of the furniture.
‘Is there anything to eat?’ Amory Heathcote asked, tossing her a sheet of scribbles. As his assistant, it was her job to type up his shorthand notes so they could be sent back to the States by the news service. As his wife, she also provided a moveable household, surrounding Amory with comforts, catering to his needs and insulating him from life’s discomforts as far as possible.
‘There’s wine, bread and cheese.’
Her husband looked displeased. ‘Nothing else?’
‘I’ll ask the landlady.’ The citizens of newly liberated Paris were touchingly generous with gifts to Americans, but since the French themselves were half-starved, provisions were not easy to come by.
She went to see the landlady and returned with a prize of half a French sausage and four boiled eggs. Amory and Francois Giroux were smoking on the tiny terrace overlooking the rue de Rivoli, which still bore scars from the street battles of the recent Paris uprising. They were watching an American patrol of four soldiers flirting with a group of French girls, whose laughter floated up from the street.
‘You know what we call your GIs?’ Giroux said. ‘We call them chewing-gum soldiers.’
‘That doesn’t sound very grateful,’ Copper said.
Giroux scowled at the scene below. ‘They swagger around Paris, handing out candy bars. We’re not children.’
‘They’re just trying to be kind.’
‘I am a Frenchman and a communist, Madame. I prefer to be under nobody’s boot, German or American.’
‘I wonder if you’ll ever forgive us for liberating you?’ Copper said. French pride, after years of humiliation and misery under the Nazi Occupation, was like a hedgehog: prickly on the outside and sensitive underneath.
‘Our streets used to be full of field grey. Now they are full of khaki.’ Giroux had been regaling them for the past hour with stories – some taller than others – of the heroic part he had played in the Liberation of Paris. Sensing that their interest in him was waning, he said, ‘Maybe you would like to see something remarkable this afternoon?’
‘Remarkable in what way?’ Amory asked.
Giroux pinched out the Camel he’d been smoking. ‘The collaborators think they can hide from us, but we know where they are. We find the traitors, one by one, and we deliver justice.’
‘The épuration sauvage?’
‘That’s what we call it. We will punish someone today.’
Amory pricked up his ears. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see that. We’ll wait for Fritchley-Bound. He’ll want to come along.’ He turned to Copper. ‘Where is he?’
‘Where do you think?’ she replied.
With the Liberation of the city from the Germans, an almighty party had started, and George Fritchley-Bound, otherwise known as the Frightful Bounder, had never been able to resist a party. He was a British journalist who had attached himself to them some weeks earlier. An Old Etonian, he was more or less constantly drunk, but they had grown fond of him.
The Frightful Bounder had yet to return by the time the meal was laid out, so they started without him. The bread was stonier than the saucisson, and the wine was stonier than that, but they were all hungry.
‘Who is this traitor?’ Amory asked Giroux.
Giroux sawed at the saucisson with his clasp knife. ‘Someone who did great harm to France,’ he replied grimly. ‘You will see.’
‘Will they kill him?’
‘Maybe.’
Copper winced. They had already seen so many horrors left by the Allied invasion – a vast wave of men and machinery rolling across Europe towards Berlin. Paris was still bobbing in its wake.
Amory was seemingly unmoved by the horribly maimed, the newly dead. But then, Amory was a war correspondent, hardened to such things. And, though she loved him, he was the coldest man she knew.
Five minutes later, the Frightful Bounder arrived. However, his reappearance was more in body than in spirit, as he was carried in, dead drunk, by two GIs.
‘Nice guy for a Limey,’ one of them panted (Fritchley-Bound was a large man, and there were several flights of stairs up to the apartment). ‘But he doesn’t know when to quit. Where d’you want him?’
They took Fritchley-Bound from his drinking companions and dumped him on his bed. From past experience, Copper turned him on his side and put a chamber pot where he could reach it. Unexpectedly, Fritchley-Bound opened one bloodshot eye and peered at them. ‘Have I disgraced myself?’