Survivor by Lesley Pearse
Lisette kept telling him that he must stop trying to marry the girl off to a ‘toff’; she thought Mariette needed a man similar to Etienne to make her happy. But Mariette was his god-daughter, and he couldn’t help but want the best for her.
‘Come on now, a group picture,’ the photographer said, arranging Mariette in the centre with Rose and Lisette either side of her, and beckoning to Noah.
‘Take one of the three most beautiful girls in London first,’ Noah said as he got up.
Rose was wearing a fabulous pink evening dress, and Lisette was as elegant as only a Frenchwoman could look in black lace.
‘Aren’t I the lucky one taking you three beauties to the Café de Paris!’
16
The air-raid siren sounded just as Noah was paying off the taxi at the Café de Paris by Piccadilly Circus. It was chilly, and both Mariette and Rose wrapped their fur stoles more tightly around their shoulders before hurrying to the door of the club. When dance halls and nightclubs were closed down at the start of the war, the Café de Paris had remained open because it was underground and considered safer than any shelter. It had a long and illustrious history, attracting the rich and glamorous ever since the Prince of Wales had announced that it was his favourite nightclub. Rose, Noah and Lisette had all been here before the war, but tonight they were just as excited as Mariette because they wanted to see the resident band, Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and his West Indian Orchestra.
A long staircase led down to the first of several galleries, each table lit with a small lamp. Mariette was bowled over by the decor of the club as it was reminiscent of the ballroom of the White Star liner Titanic, with lots of gold leaf and beautiful chandeliers.
Peter and his friend Edwin were at the table waiting for them, looking very dashing in their uniforms. Mariette was pleasantly surprised that Edwin was every bit as handsome as Rose claimed. He had a rugged face with a square chin, brown hair and soft brown eyes. She liked his smile; it was slightly bashful, reflecting the fact that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be fixed up with Rose’s relative. But even if he was reluctant, he didn’t show it. He jumped up to shake her hand and then led her to the chair next to him.
Their table was on the lowest gallery, looking down on to the stage and the dance floor. At present there was a quartet playing, and the leader was singing ‘Stormy Weather’. Mariette was so busy looking at all the beautifully dressed women, their partners either in evening dress or uniform, that she didn’t even notice the waiter pouring them all champagne and Noah proposing a toast, until Edwin nudged her arm.
‘To our beautiful Mariette on her twenty-first,’ Noah said as he raised his glass. ‘I wish Belle and Etienne could have been with us tonight, they would be so proud of you. But let’s drink to a happy birthday and to absent friends!’
‘Happy birthday and to absent friends,’ everyone chorused.
‘You must feel a little sad to be so far from home on your birthday,’ Edwin said to her after the toast.
She was touched that he should be so sensitive. ‘Yes, I was rather homesick this morning when I got up, my mother always made such a fuss on our birthdays. My elder brother has just been called up, which leaves only the younger one, Noel, for Mum to run around after.’
‘Do they hear in New Zealand just how bad the Blitz is? Or do the newspapers there focus more on the North African campaign and the Japanese?’
‘They never comment, but I’m quite sure that my dad is very well informed about all the action, all over the world. But then, they’d know better than most New Zealanders what war is really like as my father was in the French Army in the last war. And my mother drove ambulances in France.’
‘From what Peter tells me, you’ve got the same spirit. You help out in the East End, I believe?’
‘I got into it by accident really. I was caught up in one of the first bombing raids there. Once I’d got to know people and had seen the problems they face, I sort of had to help. They have had such a hammering there. But I don’t need to lecture you about that!’
He smiled at her, his blue eyes as warm as a summer sky. ‘We tend to concentrate only on shooting the enemy down and getting ourselves home unscathed. We don’t see the suffering that bombs cause to civilians, at least not in the way you do.’
She was touched by his lack of ego, loved his deep voice, and she felt a little shiver down her spine. Maybe she would want to see this man again after tonight.
The meal was disappointing – the steak was small and tough, and the vegetables were overcooked – but this was how it was now in almost every restaurant, and no one commented on it. But the champagne and the wine that followed were good, and it was lovely to be surrounded by people having a good time.
Mariette was taken with Edwin; he was funny, chatty, but didn’t try too hard. He wanted to know about New Zealand, and said he’d even given some thought to emigrating there when the war ended. ‘If it ever ends,’ he said ruefully. ‘I love sea fishing and sailing, I want to live in a country with space.’
‘There’s plenty of that,’ she laughed. ‘And more sheep than people!’
‘What do you think of him?’ Rose whispered later, when Edwin and Peter had gone to the men’s room.
‘He’s very nice,’ Mariette admitted.
‘Does that mean you’ll want to see him again?’
Mariette laughed. ‘Let’s see what tonight brings first.’
The meal was finished by nine, and the waiter cleared the table except for their drinks. ‘Snakehips’ Johnson was due on now, and Mariette and Rose could hardly wait to see the handsome young singer from Guyana who had got his nickname because of his smooth moves and undulating hips.
They were not disappointed. Ken Johnson was even better looking in the flesh than in the pictures they’d seen, and his West Indian Orchestra played swing music that made them all leave their table to go down on to the dance floor.
‘We won’t be able to move on this tiny dance floor after ten,’ Edwin told her as they danced. ‘That’s when most people arrive. But one good thing will be that I can hold you tighter.’
Mariette smiled. She would be glad to be held close by him. But she was aware that more people arriving would mean long queues in the powder room, so she excused herself to go there now.
She paused to look back just before she went through the powder-room door. ‘Snakehips’ was singing the hit song ‘Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, How You Can Love’. The words made her feel a little guilty that she was having such a good time with another man, but she quashed that thought and reminded herself that this was a family party, not a date.
Lisette and Noah were doing a quickstep, but Rose and Peter were just shuffling from side to side, their arms wound tightly around each other. Edwin was standing by the dance floor just watching and smoking a cigarette. She had half expected him to find another partner the minute she’d gone, and it was nice that he hadn’t.
She was putting on some fresh lipstick when she heard the almighty crash of a bomb. It sounded as if it had hurtled down through the building, smashing everything in its path. The shock made her drop her lipstick, and then the screaming began.
Opening the door, the sight that met her eyes was so terrible that she screamed too. The bomb had come down from above the stage, and she thought ‘Snakehips’ and the other band members were dead. They were on the floor, their white dress shirts already red with blood.
The lights were flickering but she saw, to her horror, that a woman sitting by the dance floor had been decapitated.
Then the lights went out completely.
In that second or two while the lights flickered she hadn’t been able to see any of her party because the dance floor was so packed with people who had either fallen or were trying to get away. But as she stood there, rigid with shock in the darkness, a second bomb came roaring down.
There was enough illumination from the flash of the bomb and some candles on the tables further back in the club to see that no on
Mariette instinctively stepped back rather than moving forward, towards the carnage. She’d learned enough from bombing in the East End to know the whole building could come down. She was under the gallery, where, just a short while ago, they’d been sitting at a table eating dinner. There were another two galleries above it, then the long staircase leading up to the street. She knew that in a matter of minutes men with torches would appear, and then it would be possible to see who was dead or seriously injured. But unless Noah, Lisette, Peter, Rose and Edwin had left the dance floor while she was in the powder room and returned to their table, she feared they were in that tangled mass of bodies she’d glimpsed before the lights went out.
Looking up, she could see stars twinkling through the hole in the roof made by the bomb. Then she saw bobbing lights, from high up, and heard shouted instructions, ambulance sirens too. And it was only then, when she knew help was at hand, that she began to cry.
More light shone from torches and lanterns up at street level, and a commanding male voice called out. ‘Will everyone who is unhurt please make their way up the staircase to the street,’ he yelled. ‘There are people there waiting to take your names. Do not try to find your friends and family now, you will just make it harder for the rescue team to help those who are injured.’
Mariette couldn’t bring herself to move. Her head said she must, but her eyes were on the tangled heap of people on the dance floor. The light was too poor to identify anyone, but she strained her eyes for a glimpse of Rose’s pink dress or Peter’s blue uniform. That she couldn’t see either gave her a little hope, but she knew Lisette’s black dress and Noah’s evening clothes would only blend in with all the others there.
How many people were dead?
A hand on her arm startled her. It was a rescue worker in a tin hat, carrying a torch. ‘Come with me, miss, there’s people up the top who’ll take care of you.’
‘I was in the powder room when it happened,’ she sobbed out. ‘It’s my twenty-first and I left them all dancing. I don’t know if they are amongst those …’ She pointed to the dance floor.
‘They may not have been,’ he said gently. ‘Let’s get you upstairs, you might find them there.’
Taking her arm firmly, he led her to the staircase and then up the stairs. She stopped at the first landing to look back down. There was more light now, and she could see that rescue workers, police and ambulance men were moving around the bodies on the dance floor, checking for life. Two women were tearing strips off the bottom of their dresses for bandages. She saw them helping a woman in a red and white dress to sit up, but then realized it was a white dress and the red was her blood.
Then she saw Rose, her pink dress unmistakable, with one arm flung across her face, legs twisted as if she’d been tossed into the air and then dropped. ‘That’s one of my friends,’ she sobbed out to the rescue worker. ‘The one in the pink dress. Her mother and father and her boyfriend must be there too. Will you check?’
‘I will after I’ve got you upstairs,’ he said. ‘Come along, miss, this is no place for you.’
There were so many people like her being shepherded up the stairs. All in a state of shock, moving slowly, the way she’d seen so many people do in the aftermath of other air raids. She could hear crying all around her, people pleading for help in finding someone. And there were injured people too, with cuts on their heads and faces, stumbling with the effort of climbing up one side of the stairs, as rescue people with stretchers went down the other side.
Finally, she reached street level and the club’s foyer, where a female rescue worker in a siren suit took her name and asked about the rest of the group she was with: their names, ages, clothing and anything else which would help to identify them.
Mariette managed to give her the information. ‘I saw Rose on the dance floor, so I think they are all together,’ she added, breaking into fresh tears. ‘And there was Edwin Atkins too. He’s in an RAF uniform, about five foot ten, brown hair, age twenty-six.’
‘That’s a great help, Miss Carrera,’ the woman said. ‘I can see you are shivering, so I’ll get someone to give you a blanket and take you nearby for a cup of tea. You can wait for news of your friends there.’
With an army blanket around her bare shoulders, Mariette was led with some other people, all as deeply shocked as she was, out of the club, along the street and down some steps to a basement room. There were forty or so people in there already, some sitting crying, others pacing the floor. She could tell those who had come from the Café de Paris as they were all in evening dress. There were other people too, in ordinary day clothes, who had clearly come in here when the air-raid warning went off a couple of hours earlier.
A big woman in a WVS uniform was manning a tea trolley, but to Mariette none of it seemed real. She felt she should be the person behind the tea trolley handing out cups of tea because that was the role she was used to. She had never expected to be the one receiving sympathy, being asked if she was warm enough and other such solicitous questions.
She took a cup of tea, but she was shaking so much that one of the helpers took it from her and led her to a seat, putting the cup on the one next to her and then wrapping the blanket more firmly around her shoulders.
Most of the other people couldn’t stop talking in loud voices about what had happened. Someone said it was as well the bombs came so early; if they’d been dropped after ten, when the club was at its busiest, it would have been much worse. She gathered that most of these survivors had been on the upper galleries. Some, like Mariette, had friends or relatives who had gone down to the dance floor and were still unaccounted for, but the vast majority hadn’t lost anyone, they were just here until they got some transport home.
It made her feel sick to hear them raking over the details, describing the band members who were hit, and the woman who was decapitated.
‘My husband and I were dancing five minutes before the bomb went off,’ one woman kept repeating. She was wearing a mink stole, and diamonds sparkled at her throat. ‘My husband said he didn’t like the crush down there. To think I was cross with him!’
Mariette remembered that she’d left her evening bag and stole on her chair. She had no money and no keys to get into the house. She was freezing, despite the blanket, and could feel the concrete floor turning her feet in flimsy evening shoes to blocks of ice.
Then, just as she was thinking she’d been forgotten, Edwin came through the door. His left arm was in a sling, his evening suit was flecked with plaster and dust, and he had a bad cut on his cheek. But he was alive.
Mariette rushed to him. ‘Thank heavens you are safe. But what about the others?’
He put his good arm around her and held her close. ‘All gone, I’m afraid, Mari,’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘I just identified them.’
Mariette had heard people in her position say that they couldn’t take it in, that they thought there must be a mistake, and now she could identify with them. How on earth could people who meant so much to her be snatched away from her in such a terrible way?
Edwin took charge. ‘When the all-clear sounds, I’m going to take you home, Mari. I believe Rose has a brother, we will have to contact him.’
‘He’s called Jean-Philippe, but I’ve only met him a couple of times,’ she said. ‘He’s in the navy. But I haven’t got any keys for the house or anything,’ she blurted out, and began crying even harder.
‘I’ve got the keys. The police took them from Mr Baylis’s pocket,’ he said. ‘This is the worst possible thing you will ever go through, Mari. But I’m going to help you. Now, sit down and let’s talk about you. Have you got any other relatives here? Any friends who will rally round?’
It was after three in the morning before they got back to St John’s Wood. Mariett
If not for her birthday, they would be safe in bed now. But now Rose would never have her wedding, and the house would never have Noah and Lisette’s grandchildren running up and down the stairs. Only a couple of days ago, Noah had said they would go to New Zealand when the war was over. But that could never happen now.
‘I think you should call your parents straight away,’ Edwin suggested. ‘It will already be afternoon in New Zealand.’
‘They haven’t got a telephone,’ she said. ‘When they ring me, it’s from Aunt Peggy’s bakery.’
‘Then you must call them there. Would you like me to do it for you?’
He poured them both a brandy while she found the number in the family address book. Then he poked the fire, which had been left banked up, and coaxed it back into flames. He made her sit down by it, and dialled the operator.
‘It’ll take a little time, I expect,’ he said, putting his hand over the receiver so the operator couldn’t hear. ‘Now, drink that brandy. It’s good for shock. What’s your aunt’s surname?’
‘Reid,’ she said brokenly, imagining fat, jolly Aunt Peggy waddling to the phone and shouting down it the way she always did. ‘She’s not a real aunt, just Mum’s friend really.’
He nodded, and then spoke. ‘Is that Mrs Reid? Peggy Reid?’
Mariette could hear a woman’s voice asking who he was. She got up and took the receiver. ‘Aunt Peggy, it’s me, Mari. Something terrible has happened. Could you get Mum, Papa or Mog?’