“You have to trust them,” he said. “You have to let them make mistakes.”
“Easy to say when they’re not your own.”
Legrand removed his hand from her elbow and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “That’s true.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
He twiddled his thumbs for a moment, staring at the carousel as it revolved endlessly before them. The delighted screams of children. Mere yards away, the German staff cars rolled up and down rue de Rivoli, across the Place de la Concorde, ferrying the enemy from café to office to luxury hotel, but here in the Tuileries, in front of the ancient carousel, you could almost pretend that Paris was as it had always been, that the occupation was just a terrible dream. That you were just sitting here on this bench to watch your children play, and that the man beside you was not some agent for the Resistance that you met by arrangement, but your lover, your husband, the father of these children you watched together.
“My parents left me to my own devices, more or less,” said Legrand. “They were both artists.”
“Yes, I remember. Your father was a writer, and your mother a painter.”
“Yes. Well. They were devoted firstly to their creative passions and secondly to each other. Children came a rather distant third.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We knew they loved us, and we had each other. I learned how to fend for myself, how to get myself out of scrapes. And I never had to strain against the straitjacket of parental expectations, or whatever you want to call it. They allowed us to become pretty much whatever we pleased.”
As he spoke, Daisy stared at his latticed fingers, and the gold of the signet ring that glimmered dully between them. The two swans, necks entwined. She thought of her own childhood within the walls of the Ritz, which had sometimes felt like a playground—if a decidedly adult playground—and other times like a prison.
“Then you were fortunate,” she said. “I grew up always in the shadow of my grandmother. And my mother, who had all my grandmother’s love, so that Grandmère never really forgave me for living when my maman had not. The Demoiselle de Courcelles, the last in a long line of heroic women, whom I could never hope to equal.”
“No, that’s true. You aren’t their equal.”
Daisy looked away.
“You’re not your mother or your grandmother, or any of these ancestors who lived before you. You’re yourself.” Legrand straightened and put his hand on his leg, so that his pinky finger nearly touched the side of her thigh. “You’re Daisy, astonishing and irreplaceable. A formidable woman.”
He said the word exactly as a Frenchman might, formidable, with exactly a Frenchman’s meaning. Daisy blinked her eyes several times.
“What have I done that’s so astonishing?” she said. “I’ve delivered a few papers. I’ve slept with my husband in order to get some information from him. Hardly the actions of a formidable woman.”
“No? Whereas I sat in my room last night and forged a few papers and drank myself to sleep. Of the two of us, you are much the more heroic.”
“I felt like a whore.”
“You’re not a whore.”
“I said I felt like one. I hated him the whole time.”
“He didn’t hurt you, did he? Force you?”
There was a new, terrible note in Legrand’s voice as he said this, and it thawed her a little, although it also showed he hadn’t really understood her meaning at all. Daisy looked at the narrow seam of bench between her left leg, which was covered decorously by a floral dress, and Legrand’s right leg, much thicker and covered in trousers of light wool. “Of course not,” she said. “He didn’t need to. I just lay back and let him do what he wanted. Just as I was supposed to do.”
He leaned forward again, arms on legs, staring at the carousel. Daisy thought she heard a groan from the back of his throat, but she might have been mistaken. It might have been the wind in the trees, or some ancient gear in the carousel.
“Anyway, it wasn’t all in vain,” she said.
“Wasn’t it?”
“Of course not. He was drunk, and I got him to talk a little. He’s keeping something in his safe.”
“Keeping what?”
She shrugged. “He wouldn’t say, and I didn’t think it prudent to press him. But it’s something to do with his project at work.”
“The roundup.”
“So we must assume. It fits, anyway.”
Legrand was wearing his favorite hat, a newsboy’s cap, which Daisy always thought looked a little bit too English, not the kind of hat a Frenchman would wear. She’d warned him, but he always said he liked the cap too much to give it up. It was comfortable, he said. Now he took the brim between his thumb and forefinger and worried it up and down, as if it weren’t comfortable at all. “What kind of safe?” he asked. “Does it have a key?”
“No, it’s a combination lock. I don’t know the numbers.”
“But that’s no trouble at all. I can crack it, if you can get me inside.”
“Inside the apartment, you mean? My apartment?”
“Yes.” Legrand paused. “It’s going to be tricky, though, sneaking in during the day. Especially if the children are there. How late does Pierre work?”
Daisy linked her hands neatly in her lap. She wasn’t wearing gloves, because of the heat, and her finger joints were pale and tense. The smell of pipe tobacco drifted from the clothes of the man beside her. Around and around the carousel went. Her children passed by in flashes, in a blur, out of focus. Her mouth was dry. She had been anticipating this moment. She had been anticipating this question of timing and logistics, ever since Pierre had mentioned the safe, and also something else, as he had lifted himself off her last night and straightened his trousers and shirt: another piece of interesting information that had made her heart stop for a second or two. Now she found she couldn’t quite put the words together to answer Legrand’s perfectly reasonable query.
After a moment, Legrand straightened and looked at her. She felt his blue gaze on her cheek. “Daisy?” he said.
She replied, in as normal a tone as she could manage, “Actually, there’s no trouble to do this at night. Pierre leaves for Vichy this afternoon. He’ll be there until Friday. I could have the children stay with Grandmère, so they don’t talk.”
There was a brief silence before he answered. “That would serve.”
“Shall we say tonight, then?”
He started to answer her, but in the next second he bolted from the bench. Daisy jumped to her feet and watched in confusion as he leapt toward the carousel, arms outstretched, and scooped something from the air that turned out to be Olivier. He set the boy down on his little lean legs atop the dusty ground. Daisy made a cry of distress and rushed to take her son in her arms.
“Just in the nick,” Legrand muttered in English, but he was smiling.
The carousel slowed and stopped, and Madeleine jumped off in tearful distress. “I tried to stop him!”
“It’s all right, darling. Monsieur Legrand caught him in time.”