Never Leave Me (16 page)

She was rigid, the long lovely line of her throat taut, her knuckles clenched, her face beaded with sweat, her skin so pale it was almost translucent. He knew he had hurt her. He had taken her as if she were a whore. Taken her with a brutality that sickened him. Blood trickled down her inner thigh. Blood and semen inextricably mixed.

‘Let me help you,' he said, leaning back on one knee, taking hold of her shoulders.

She gasped aloud, pushing herself away from him, scrambling to her feet.
‘Don't touch me!'
The pupils of her eyes were widely dilated, utterly opaque, the irises a petrified, pristine grey.
‘Dear God! Don't touch me! Not now! Not ever!'
She was free of him, running and stumbling to the door.

He rose unsteadily to his feet. Rape. It was a resort he had never before descended to. The act of men he despised. His face was scratched and bleeding where she had clawed at him with her nails. The top two buttons were ripped from his jacket. They lay on the floor, scattered amongst the reports and memoranda that had fallen from the table. Slowly he bent down and began to pick up the disordered sheets of paper that he had left for her to find. None of them would have been of any interest to the Allies. The memo she had been in the act of photographing was merely to confirm that he would be in Paris from 22nd to the 26th of the month.

He picked up the camera, wondering who had given it to her. Paul Gilles? Elise? He would take no steps to find out. To pursue the matter would be to bring Lisette's name to the attention of the Gestapo. For all official purposes the incident had never happened.

He stared broodingly down at the camera in his hand. And for unofficial purposes? It would be easy enough for him to behave as if nothing had happened. The rape of a Frenchwoman was hardly a crime he need lose sleep over. Yet it hadn't been the rape of just any Frenchwoman. It had been the rape of the woman who had aroused emotions in him he had never suspected existed. The woman he had fallen irrevocably in love with. His vow that she would cease to exist for him had been impossible to keep. He might as well have vowed to stop breathing.

His face grim, his eyes bleak, he set the camera on the table and left the room. He had to see her. Had to speak to her. The nightmare into which they had plummeted had to come to an end.

She ran up the stairs and along the corridor like a blind thing. She mustn't think! Mustn't think! Mustn't think! She half fell into her room, slamming the door behind her, the back of her hand pressed hard against her mouth to silence her rising screams. She mustn't think! If she thought she would go mad! she would lose her reason.

The strength that had sustained her flight failed her. She sank to her knees, sobbing, gasping for breath, crawling towards the bed like a wounded animal. She had fought him! She must think of that and of nothing else. She collapsed against the bed, unable to rise to her feet, her arms stretched out across the coverlet, the tears streaming down her face and neck. She had fought him … fought him … fought him …

The door opened behind her and she knew that she was lost. Drowning. Beyond all help.

‘Go away,' she choked, lifting her head from her hands, turning her swollen, tear-streaked face to his. ‘Oh dear heaven, go away!'

His eyes were so dark they were almost black. He had never apologised to anyone, ever, in his life. ‘I'm sorry,' he said, and his voice was naked with suffering. ‘Forgive me, Lisette … please.'

His thick blond hair was tousled. His hard-boned face was white and drawn, scored by livid scratchmarks. The top of his jacket gaped open and she could see the pulse beating in his throat, smell the sweat that had dried on his body as he moved towards her.

‘Don't touch me,' she panted hoarsely, shrinking back against the bed. ‘Please, please don't touch me!'

‘I love you,' he said, and his hands were on her shoulders, drawing her to her feet. ‘I know how much you hate me, Lisette. I know I've given you every reason to hate me …'

A great shudder ran through her body. The waves had closed over her head. There was no further hope. ‘I don't hate you,' she whispered. ‘I hate myself,' and as she raised her eyes to his understanding rocked through him.

‘Oh God,' he said, and crushed her towards him. ‘Lisette … my love.
Lisette!'

There was no escape. There never had been. Her arms slid up and around his neck, her mouth parted helplessly beneath his, and as he lowered her once more to the floor beneath him it was with the gentleness of absolute love.

‘I won't hurt you … I promise that I won't hurt you …'

Her sweater and skirt lay tangled with his uniform. Lavender and grey. Violet and black. She trembled in his arms, overcome by the beauty of his masculinity: by the smoothness of his skin; the hardness of bone; the lean tautness of rigorously exercised muscle. The touch of his hand as he caressed the curve of her body from her neck to her hip bone rendered her half senseless with pleasure. It was like flying. Like nothing she had ever known.

He entered her and her heart moved. With all the skill and patience of an accomplished lover he took her slowly, step by step, to a country she had never dreamed of. Her body was like molten gold. It flowed, white-hot, into his. She no longer had any sense of identity, any sense of separate being. She was dissolving, disintegrating, her voice calling his name over and over again.

The following days and weeks were the strangest, most bitter-sweet of her life. Dieter did not, as he had originally planned, tell the Comte and Comtesse of their affair. Paul Gilles and André Caldron's deaths made it impossible. Neither his men nor the Comte and Comtesse guessed at their true relationship. He knew that after what had happened, it was better for Lisette that they didn't.

They met at night, in the room that had been her grandmother's. The room overlooking the sea. Always, afterwards, when she remembered their lovemaking, she remembered the distant sound of the sea as it surged up on to the shingles, and the light from an oil lamp glowing softly in the darkness.

They talked about their different childhoods. He told her of walks with his father in the flower-filled Schoneberger Volkspark, the heavy scent of the pear and apple trees only yards away from the Kurfurstendamm; chocolate cakes at Sacher's. Iced lemonade at the Hotel Adlon.

She told him of a sheltered childhood spent at Valmy; of family holidays in St Moritz; of her convent schooling at Neuilly; of the finishing school in Switzerland that she would have gone to if the war had not intervened.

They talked of books and music. He liked Zola and Kafka and jazz; she Flaubert and Chopin. They talked of anything and everything, but they did not talk of the war. In the lamplit confines of their turret room, the war did not exist.

They drank the vintage champagne that Dieter would not have dreamed of being without, even on a battlefield, and calvados, the heady cider and apple cognac that her father brewed. He was a man who smiled rarely, but she knew by the expression in his black-lashed eyes when he looked at her, by the touch of his fingers on her flesh, that his happiness was as deep as her own.

She never tired of looking at him. At the line of his eyebrows, the angle of his jaw, the crisp corn-gold thickness of his hair. She wanted to be with him forever. To share his life. To sleep with him every night and to wake with him every morning. She wanted the war to end. She wanted to know what the future held for them.

He knew what it held. It held the invasion and he both yearned for it and feared it. Yearned for it because, if the Allies were repulsed, it would be months, perhaps years, before they could launch another such attack. Germany would be able to concentrate her entire strength on throwing back the Russians. Britain would crumble under the horror of the new V1 rockets and Churchill would be forced to sue for peace. There would be a future for them.

He feared it because if the Allies were not repulsed, if they surged inland, then Germany's defeat was inevitable. And in that defeat there would be no future at all. Not for him.

He knew that she didn't understand that yet. That she believed that when the invasion came, win or lose, they would remain together. He had not the heart to disillusion her. He wanted nothing to darken their fragile, perhaps fleeting, happiness.

He had a radio in his study at the chateau and every night, before meeting Lisette in the lamplit glow of the turret room, he listened in over earphones to the hundreds of messages that the BBC transmitted after their regular news broadcasts. All were coded. All were in French, Dutch, Danish or Norwegian. Messages to the Underground. Messages that made no sense, except to the people to whom they were directed.

Night after night he waited for the coded message to the French Resistance that General Canaris believed would signal the invasion of France. Night after night it failed to come. He knew, when it did, there would be no more meetings for them in the turret room above the sea.

All through April the weather was mild and calm. Ideal weather for the invasion forces. But the Channel remained empty of ships; the horizon clear.

‘I'm beginning to think that the Anglo-Americans have lost confidence in their cause, Meyer,' Rommel said as they examined new anti-tank barriers.

Dieter said nothing. He was beginning to hope and he was terrified that if he put his hopes into words they would be dashed.

On April 26th he received a memorandum stating that morale in England was at an all-time low. It was reported that there had been cries of ‘Down with Churchill'and demands for peace. He hoped to God it was true.

By the beginning of May there was still no signs of the British and Americans and he said to Lisette, ‘They're not going to come,
liebling.
They're going to sue for peace without invading.'

She shivered in his arms, pressing herself close to the long, hard length of his body, and he knew that she could not share his relief. Without an invasion, France would not be free. His arms tightened around her. She wanted the impossible. A German defeat that would not take him from her.

‘I'm sorry,
liebling
,' he said, knowing how much she hated all references to the things that divided them. ‘But we must talk of it. If I am wrong, and if the Allies do invade, then it will be impossible for you and your parents to remain at Valmy.'

Her head had been resting on his chest. She sat up suddenly, her hair spilling over her shoulders and naked breasts. ‘Leave Valmy?' Her eyes were incredulous.

He raised himself up on one elbow in the large bed. ‘If there is an invasion and it takes place here, then you cannot possibly remain. The whole of Normandy will be a battlefield.'

‘You will remain.'

‘I'm a soldier,' he said gently, reaching out and cupping her cheek.

Her eyes were dark in the paleness of her face. ‘And the villagers? Will they be given a chance to leave?'

‘They will be ordered to leave,' he said, drawing her down once more against him. ‘Civilians are nothing but a hazard in battle conditions.'

They lay silent, each with their own thoughts, each knowing that those thoughts could not be expressed. To express them would be to face each other across the great abyss of their divided loyalties.

‘We should make arrangements,' he said at last, stroking her hair. ‘Do you have any relatives, any friends that you could go to?'

‘My father's brother lives in Paris.'

‘Then that is where you should go.'

She twisted once more to look at him. ‘Now? So soon?'

A muscle flexed at the corner of his jaw. He didn't want her to go. Once she went away there was no telling when, or if, they would be reunited. But she couldn't stay at Valmy. Not if the Allies invaded. It would be too dangerous. His arms tightened around her.

‘It would be for the best,' he said quietly. ‘In case I am wrong and they do still come.'

In the distance the waves could be heard ebbing and surging along the deserted coastline.

‘Will we have any warning?' she asked curiously. ‘Will we know beforehand?'

He thought of the message to be transmitted to the Resistance. ‘No,' he said, vowing that when the war was over he would never lie to her again. ‘There will be no warning.'

They lay in the lamplit darkness, arms entwined, and he thought once again of Rommel's words. ‘The Anglo-Americans have lost confidence in their cause.' If they had, how long would it be before they knew for sure? How long before they sued for peace? Before a semblance of normality returned to the world? He wanted all the things he had previously derided as bourgeois: marriage, children. And he wanted them in a world that was at peace.

She saw his eyes darken; saw the familiar white lines of tension etch the corners of his mouth. ‘What is it?' she asked, loving him so much that it was a physical pain. ‘What are you thinking about, Dieter?'

‘About you. About us.'

‘Then be happy, not unhappy,' she said, and rolling over in one swift movement she pressed her naked body against his, lifting her arms around his neck, kissing away the lines of strain.

Their bodies were their refuge. In their lovemaking there were no divisions. No yawning gulf stretching between them that could not be crossed. There was only happiness and delight and unity. ‘I love you,' he said hoarsely, folding his arms around her, twisting her beneath him. ‘Never forget it, Lisette. No matter what happens. Never forget …'

More intelligence reports came, stating that the British were demanding Churchill's resignation and their government's surrender. He wondered how accurate they were. All the British he had ever met had been mulish and pig-headed. He couldn't imagine any of them surrendering, no matter how lost their cause. And thanks to Germany's folly in attacking Russia, their cause was no longer lost. Germany had over-reached herself. She had not enough men, enough planes, to fight a war on two fronts. He knew damn well what he would do if he were Churchill. He would attack now; in the under-belly that was Normandy; and he knew, with terrible foreboding, that if he did so, he would, within weeks, be in the heart of the Fatherland.