Chapter 13

The bar was noisy and boisterous, and mostly, Fen noticed, full of men. James led Simone and Fen through the fug of cigarette smoke and Fen wondered if it was the smoke or the language that turned the air a certain shade of blue. Simone seemed unfazed and walked tall, and Fen guessed that she was just pretending not to notice the eyes of the men follow her as she gently nudged them out of the way.

‘Here,’ James pointed at a booth-style table, where two men were already sitting.

Fen furrowed her brow as she felt something wet against her leg but accepted the slurred apology of the drunk man with a tilted glass who had filled the space she’d left in her wake as she’d followed her friends through the bar. She wasn’t sure if the two men sitting at the table looked any more salubrious than the other chaps in this bar. Not that it would take much to be so, she thought to herself as she smiled at them and let James introduce them all.

‘Fen, this is Gervais Arnault and his brother Antoine—’

‘Or should that be the other way around?’ the taller of the two men, who was wearing a grubby cloth cap, said in mock indignation before James could complete the introductions. ‘I am the elder Arnault brother.’

‘And the uglier,’ countered the shorter, fatter brother, who did, to his credit, have the more handsome face, even if it was slightly smudged and dirtied with what looked like engine oil and grease. His blue denim dungarees were similarly dirtied, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows to reveal arms covered in tattoos, those also obscured by streaks of grease.

The brothers play-fought while Fen and Simone slid into the banquette seating opposite them. James took drinks orders and left Simone to finish off the introductions.

‘Fenella, you must ignore the children over there,’ she winked at the men, who both threw their arms up in mock disgust at being so tarnished.

‘We are both old enough to be your father, young Simone.’

‘And bald enough,’ she answered back, tartly, before laughing at poor Antoine, who now rubbed his pate and jammed his cloth cap back over his bald spot.

‘It’s OK for you,’ he said back to her, ‘you are young and beautiful and can make a living doing fancy things, whereas I am stuck in the warehouse all day—’

‘Getting balder and balder!’ laughed his brother Gervais.

Fen was slightly bemused by this buffoonish pair, yet her natural curiosity took over and she asked them about themselves.

‘I have a fleet of lorries,’ Gervais announced proudly, ramming his thumbs under the straps of his dungarees and pushing his chest out.

Simone laughed and shook her head. ‘A fleet? Is that what we’re calling it now?’

Antoine interrupted and introduced himself in similarly flattering terms. ‘And I am the boss of a large team of workers.’

‘You’re both liars,’ Simone wagged her finger at them. ‘But I shall forgive you as I know you’re only doing it to impress a pretty stranger.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Fen felt a bit flustered. ‘Please don’t exaggerate anything on my account.’

‘Antoine works in a warehouse in the north of the city and Gervais is a lorry driver—’

‘And mechanic!’ the plump Gervais chipped in.

‘And a mechanic,’ Simone added to appease him. ‘So I assume you two met Captain Lancaster last night?’

‘We did,’ Antoine replied, beating his brother to it. ‘And we shared a good few drinks with him.’

‘You mean you fleeced him for a few drinks?’ Simone asked, a note of disapproval in her voice, but a smile playing across her lips.

Fen thought this all rather amusing; a young slip of a girl telling off two burly much older men. But the two men seemed to take it all in their stride and laughed at her joke. Perhaps she proved herself during the war, Fen thought, made herself their equal?

Just then, James came back to the table and set down a round of beers for him and the men and a glass of wine each for Fen and Simone.

‘To our British friends and allies,’ Antoine led the toast once James was seated, having found a chair to bring to the head of the table.

‘To friends and allies!’ They all chinked their glasses and finished the toast with a few ‘saluts’ to each other too.

As James talked cars with the Arnault brothers, Fen asked Simone how she knew the two men.

‘They are just local characters. I’m not surprised James bumped into them last night. They could probably sense the very moment when his wallet opened…’ she raised her eyebrows and then laughed when Fen did. ‘I think they mean no harm though.’

Fen nodded. ‘Did you grow up around here then, on the Left Bank, I mean?’ She asked her, wondering how their paths might have crossed.

‘No, no. I was raised in the north of the city. But Antoine and Gervais are pretty friendly to all the new faces round here.’

‘Especially a pretty one, no doubt,’ Fen said and took a sip of her wine. It was only when she put her glass down did she realise that Simone was looking at her.

‘As you yourself have just found out. Tsch, really, Fenella, you are very pretty too. I assume that’s why Captain Lancaster is here with you, non?’

‘Oh, no.’ Fen could feel the blush rising in her cheeks. ‘It’s not like that between us at all. No, no. We’re just chums. Sort of thrown together.’

Simone grinned, then seemed to check herself and brought her lips back into a much sexier pout. ‘That’s good. So you won’t mind if I, well, if we…’

‘Oh no, absolutely. Crack on.’ Fen hid herself in her glass of wine again and wondered why everyone seemed to think she and James Lancaster were a couple. Nothing could be further from the truth. All that muscle and slightly unshaven look did nothing for her. But that combination was obviously like nectar to Simone, who turned away from Fen almost as soon as she’d received ‘permission’ and commandeered James’s attention away from talking about cam belts and air-cooled engines.

Fen knew when she was dismissed and instead struck up a conversation with the brothers. ‘So, what did you both do in the war?’ It wasn’t the most original of conversation starters, but a fairly ubiquitous one, she’d realised over the last few months.

‘Ah, this and that,’ Antoine said, smiling slightly as he did so.

‘I kept France moving,’ Gervais puffed out his chest again, ‘single-handedly fixing the French army’s vehicles.’

‘As long as those vehicles were never any further than 200 yards from your garage, brother!’ laughed Antoine.

‘Hey! So what if I have flat feet and cannot fight,’ Gervais looked like he might have taken offence as his brother’s slur, but then laughed. ‘But I could drive and I drove all sorts of things to freedom.’ He tapped his finger against his nose and winked at Fen.

‘How interesting,’ she replied, ‘do tell?’

‘Well, it’s not a well-known fact that the Louvre needed its paintings moving around—’

‘Oh yes,’ Fen interrupted, ‘to Montauban and Chambord…’ She was cut off by Antoine’s laughter.

‘You see, brother,’ he said, jabbing Gervais in the shoulder, ‘everyone knows about that. You would have made a useless Resistance agent, your secrets are so well known!’ He chuckled again and took a long slurp from his beer.

‘It’s not my fault Monsieur Renaud told me it was a secret.’ Gervais shrugged his shoulders, but Fen could see he looked a little crestfallen.

‘You’re friends with Henri Renaud?’ she asked, directly to Gervais, to try and build up his ego a little again.

‘Yes, of course. I know you wouldn’t think it, as we are, how would you say…from different sides of the track,’ he laughed. ‘But we are good friends.’

Fen’s ego fluffing had worked. Gervais all of a sudden looked very pleased with himself.

‘And did you work with him throughout the war?’ she asked, innocently enough.

‘Yes, I did. I drove the lorries that took art everywhere, to the galleries, from the galleries, to the auctioneer, to the warehouse, from the Jews’ apartments…’

Fen suddenly got a shiver down her spine and remembered that not all of Henri Renaud’s war work had been on behalf of the French Resistance.

Antoine must have picked up on her sudden change of countenance and interceded on his brother’s behalf. ‘We were not all lucky enough to have the ability to stand up to the oppressors,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Sometimes you just had to get by. It was an honour for us to work with a man like Monsieur Renaud, though, the war at least gave us that. Gervais would drive the lorries and I worked – I still do – in his warehouse. There were times we had to kowtow to the Nazis, but in the end, I think we did the best we could, to do the best we could.’

‘Amen to that,’ James added and they all clinked glasses again.

Simone, who had been leaning in very close to James, turned her attention back towards Fen and changed the subject. ‘Fenella, why don’t you come and visit me tomorrow, at the atelier. It would be fun, no?’

‘Oh, rather! Thank you. What a treat.’

From that moment onwards, the talk that evening kept to the lighter side of life, albeit each person’s stories were tinged with the scent of the war. It had been such a large part of everyone around that table’s lives, whether they’d fought, spied, dug the fields or kept the engines ticking over, that it was hard to ignore it. One person’s laughter, however, became infectious and by the time the barkeep called for last orders, they were all flushed with the warmth that good humour and good drinks bring to the table.