Chapter Thirty-Four #2
Mathilde was deeply touched but she knew it was time to move on.
She would go to Paris one last time and wait for Jacques, then decide what to do with the rest of her life.
At the beginning of September, when Japan had surrendered and the war had finally ended, she packed her bags, said goodbye to the Piquemals and made her way to Avignon station.
‘Mathilde? Is that you?’
And she turned to see a young woman, holding a small child by the hand.
She had the dizzying sense of time spooling backwards; it was Pierre’s widow, Renée, calling her just as she had almost five years before and from pretty much the same spot.
Mathilde shook her head, wondering whether she were hallucinating, and looked again.
But now Renée was running towards her, and the child turned out not to be Louis but a little girl with brown curls and a mischievous face.
They embraced, laughing and crying at the coincidence, which seemed so much more meaningful than sheer chance. ‘Though I’m Marie now,’ Mathilde told Renée. ‘Marie Garnier – I’ve gone back to my maiden name.’
‘And Jacques?’ Renée asked. ‘Have you heard any news?’
‘Nothing,’ Mathilde replied. ‘I’m going to Paris to find out. Now the war’s over, I should be able to trace him one way or another.’
It turned out that Renée and her daughter Violette were heading for Geneva, where Louis was waiting for them, so she and Mathilde would be travelling together for some of the journey.
They sat on their suitcases in a secluded corner of the corridor and Mathilde let Renée talk in a whisper, Violette dozing on her lap.
After escaping from the police station, she and Louis had run to the nearby house of a friend of Pierre’s.
He’d hidden them in the attic for a week until the heat had died down, then smuggled them in the back of a lorry to Lyon, from where they’d made their way to Paris by way of a goods train and found Jacques.
‘So he was still alive then?’ Mathilde asked. ‘The Nazis told me he was dead and I was certain I’d sent you straight into danger.’
‘Oh yes,’ Renée said. ‘He hid us in that little room at the back of his shop for over a week. His mother had recently died, did you know?’
‘I thought she must have done,’ Mathilde replied. ‘She was very sick when I left – that’s why he couldn’t come with me.’
‘Well, his contacts in the network arranged false papers for us, so we went to Geneva and then on to Switzerland, where we’ve lived ever since.
’ Renée hesitated. ‘I’ve married again, Mathilde – Marie, I mean.
He’s a good man, a Jew, and he loves my children like his own. I hope Pierre would understand.’
‘I’m sure he would,’ Mathilde replied. ‘He always wanted the best for you and Louis.’
‘We can’t ever return to France,’ Renée went on. ‘It’s not safe for Raph?el in this country, even now. I just came back with Violette to say goodbye to my cousins. Now, tell me about yourself.’
‘Oh, there’s not much to report,’ Mathilde said. ‘I went to jail for a while, found work in another vineyard in Provence when I got out and then spent some time in the Vercors. And now here I am, living one day at a time.’
Renée didn’t ask her to elaborate and for that, Mathilde was grateful. As the train pulled into Lyon, where she and Violette were to change trains, Renée scribbled her address on a piece of paper and pressed it into Mathilde’s hand. ‘When you’re settled, write and tell me how you are.’
Mathilde couldn’t imagine being settled ever again, but she promised Renée she would, hugging her and Violette as though she’d never let go.
Several hours later, she arrived in Paris, and the day after that, she began her lonely vigil on the steps of Sacré-C?ur.
She waited there until dusk was falling over the city and she had no alternative but to leave, when an American soldier – she’d come across lots of them in the city by then – hailed her by name, and showed her a photograph of herself and Jacques on their wedding day.
It turned out this man had been one of the US troops liberating the concentration camps in Germany.
He’d met Jacques in Dachau six months before, shortly before his death from exhaustion and malnutrition, having marched with hundreds of other prisoners from Auschwitz in Poland.
Realising that Mathilde might come to Sacré-C?ur in the hopes of meeting him, Jacques had given this American – Jim Talbot was his name – a letter and the photograph, to pass on to anyone who might be in Paris on 3 September and would be able to deliver them to his wife.
He must have known by then that he wouldn’t make it home.
As it happened, Sergeant Talbot was in Paris himself on that date, starting two weeks’ leave before returning to Philadelphia.
Jacques’ letter was heart-rending and beautiful in equal measure.
He told her that their marriage had been the greatest joy of his life and that he wanted to think of her having children, if not with me, then with some other lucky man.
It was as though he’d predicted everything that had happened.
Have no regrets, he’d ended the letter. I will always be a part of you, as you are of me.
Mathilde wept over that letter in private until she had no tears left.
In public, she spent every day exploring Paris with Jim Talbot, who was falling in love with her.
In fact, he’d fallen in love with her at first sight, he said, when he brought out a diamond ring and dropped to one knee on the beautiful Pont Alexandre.
Marrying a man she’d known for two weeks was a leap into the unknown, but it took Mathilde only seconds to accept Jim’s proposal.
She didn’t want to live in France anymore; the country held too many painful memories.
She wanted to start afresh in a place where nobody knew who she was or could guess the things she had done.
And so, days later, she became Mrs Jim Talbot, stepped on to the boat in Le Havre that would take the newly-weds to New York, and said goodbye to Mathilde Duval and the life she had known for ever.