‘The Excitements’ Chapters 13-18

“You’ve got a new concierge,” Penny observed. “What happened to Madame Declerc?”

“Ah yes,” said Uncle Godfrey. “The Declercs have rather gone up in the world since you saw them last. Well, they’ve definitely gone up in the building. They came into an inheritance—an obscure uncle from Bordeaux who died in ’43 or thereabouts. It was the best sort of inheritance, since apparently they didn’t know the uncle well enough to miss him—and after the war they used the money to buy apartment four.”

So it was them.

“From the Samuels?” Josephine asked. It was the first time she had said that name out loud in years.

“I don’t think the Samuels ever owned it,” said Uncle Godfrey, unaware of what that utterance had cost her.

“Have you heard anything about them?” Penny wanted to know too. “The Samuels? Anything at all? Did they get out of Paris before the occupation?”

Godfrey and Claudine shared a glance.

“Perhaps you should talk to the Declercs,” said Claudine. “We’ve invited Madame Declerc and Gilbert for supper. We know how friendly you girls were with Gilbert when you came to stay here before the war and his mother remembers you both very fondly.”

“She used to chase me with a broom,” said Penny. “You’ll find she’s quite different these days.”

MADAME DECLERC, THE former concierge, was indeed very different from the brusque country woman the sisters remembered. Though she had only to walk across the courtyard and up the stairs to Claudine and Godfrey’s apartment, she put on a purple velvet opera cape for the trip. Gone was the filthy apron she used to have wrapped around her waist at all times. Now she was dressed in the very finest garb the best department stores of Paris had to offer. When Godfrey went to take her cloak, she let it drop from her shoulders in a manner that reminded Josephine of a film star arriving at a Hollywood premiere.

Madame Declerc’s voice had changed too. The gravelly snarl that spoke of too many cigarettes and not enough kindness had been replaced by an accent that would not have sounded out of place in the dining room of any of the city’s grandest hotels. There was no trace of the Breton farmer’s widow at all.

Gilbert arrived half an hour later. He was studying to be a lawyer now, just as he’d always hoped.

There is, of course, an enormous difference between a boy of fifteen and a man of twenty-two. Gilbert had grown into the big hands and feet Josephine remembered as being so enormous that he sometimes looked as though he’d trip over himself. His face also seemed to have caught up with his nose, which must have been a relief. His jaw was more square. His eyebrows were heavier. Somehow they made his brown eyes seem more intense. He greeted the sisters with “bises” and Josephine thought she saw Penny bat her eyelashes at him.

Over an aperitif, the sisters and Gilbert and Claudine and Godfrey listened politely as Madame Declerc talked about her busy day. She’d been to lunch on the Left Bank with her friend Madame Richard. Had they met Madame Richard? Her husband was a doctor. They’d both eaten sole meunière. It wasn’t the best since, thanks to the war, many Parisian establishments were still short of a well-trained chef or two but ...

It seemed like a very long time before Josephine was able to ask the question she was burning to ask.

“Where are the Samuel family now? What happened to August? And Lily?”

At the mention of their names, it was as though a needle had scratched across a gramophone record. There was no pretending that everything was “toujours gai” now. Madame Declerc closed her eyes and her heavily bejewelled right hand fluttered to rest over her heart.

“Of course you want to know about your friends,” she said. “But I cannot be the one to tell it!”

When she clutched Gilbert’s forearm and entreated him to tell the story instead, Josephine already knew this was not going to be a tale with a happy ending. It couldn’t be. Gilbert looked stricken.

“Please go ahead, Gilbert,” Godfrey encouraged him. With his eyes on the tablecloth, Gilbert began.

Illustration by Agata Nowicka

Chapter Sixteen

“As soon as the Germans crossed the Maginot Line, we knew we needed to be ready for them to take Paris. August and his father already understood what it was like to live under the Nazis and they wasted no time in preparing for the worst. August and I were too young to join the army but when Paris was occupied August did not have to persuade me that I should join him and his father in small acts of resistance, though I know Maman was not keen ...”

“Not keen to see my son executed on a street corner, you understand. The Germans were ruthless. I supported what August and his father were doing with all my heart.”

“Of course, Maman. Of course,” Gilbert said. Madame Declerc clucked like a hen.

“To begin with, August and I were tasked with delivering anti-German leaflets across the city. It was easy for me to get by the German soldiers with those leaflets in my school bag.”

“I was so scared,” Madame Declerc interrupted. “If he had been caught.

Claudine, can you imagine?”

“I didn’t have the looks to draw much attention. Well, you girls know that.”

Penny protested politely.

“Only once, a soldier asked to search my bag. Having checked my papers, he noticed I had a gramophone record. He confiscated it of course but I didn’t care. He was so pleased with his new treasure that he entirely overlooked the notes I was carrying, which outlined details of a meeting that very night.

“August had it harder. It was obvious from his accent that he wasn’t native French and he got stopped all the time. I warned him the attention he drew made him a danger to himself and the rest of us, but he was so angry at the occupation and so determined to draw Nazi blood ... It was very hard to reason with him and convince him of the need for discretion; that it wasn’t only his safety at stake, but that of his whole family and the rest of us too.”

Madame Declerc nodded along.

“In the winter of 1941, we were plotting to blow up a police station. We were in contact with the British and we had explosives and grenades and rifles hidden in various places all over the city. As well as the weapons, we had false papers and identity cards, cash, and other valuables that might be needed in the event we had to leave in a hurry. Everything was going to plan.

“But on the day of the attack, I woke up hardly able to move with a fever. I could only lay in bed raging while August and Monsieur Samuel went to the cell’s appointed meeting place. I wanted to be there so much. We had planned the biggest attack the city had ever seen. It was going to be spectacular. But when the cell members got to the rendezvous, it was to discover that the police had already been tipped off. They were arrested and taken away.”

“And?” Josephine clung to the hope of a plot twist.

Madame Declerc looked at Josephine as though she thought she was simple-minded. “Why, they were executed, of course.”

AS THE WORDS landed, all Josephine could hear was her own blood in her head. The voices in the room seemed underwater.

“I just thank my lucky stars Gilbert was unwell that day and wasn’t there when the Carlingue arrived,” Madame Declerc kept talking.

“I’ve never forgiven myself for not being with them,” Gilbert said. “You were saved by God,” his mother told him.

“God was not on duty that day. Or on any other day that year.”

Madame Declerc picked up the story. “Madame Samuel was insane with grief. For six months, I looked after her as though she were my child. She could not leave the apartment. She could barely get out of bed. She could not feed and care for herself or for Lily. I did everything I could. With her husband gone, Madame Samuel had no money so I shared what we had—me and Gilbert. The only good thing was that Monsieur Samuel and August had not been carrying their real identification papers so the police did not come to the apartment, because surely the Carlingue would have executed Madame Samuel too, to make her an example.”

“We should have moved them out of Paris right away,” said Gilbert.

“How could we? You were ill. Madame Samuel was sick and half-mad with sadness. And Lily was so young. We could not have done it without attracting attention. The safest place for them to stay was here.”

“Until it wasn’t.”

“There were so many collaborators,” Madame Declerc suddenly burst out. “You never knew who you could trust. People were denouncing their neighbours for a loaf of bread. Desperation turned decent citizens into animals. You know that, Claudine.”

She turned to the sisters’ godmother for corroboration.

“After her husband and August were taken, I told Madame Samuel to change her name and tell anyone who asked she was a Catholic. I even took her with me to church, so that she would know what to say if anyone asked if she went to mass. Madame Samuel was a beautiful woman. She was educated but not at all snobbish. She treated even me, a lowly concierge, as her equal. But there were people who were envious of her elegance and class; people who wanted to take her down a peg a two. People who would have turned her in ... I tried to help her.” Madame Declerc gasped for breath.

“What happened?” Josephine cried. “What happened to Madame Samuel and Lily?”

She listened in horror as Gilbert told them about the night of the 16th July 1942, when Madame Samuel and Lily were dragged from the building, rounded up and corralled with more than 13,000 other Parisian Jews, including 4,000 children, at the city’s Vélodrome D’Hiver—the “Vél D’Hiv.” They were held there, without food or proper shelter and not even a single lavatory between them, until such time as they could be transferred to the internment camps at Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande. Thence to Auschwitz ...

Chapter Seventeen

After that, dinner was abandoned. Josephine wanted to go back to England as soon as she possibly could but the following day she could hardly stand. The shock had taken the legs out from under her. Claudine insisted Josephine stay in bed then called a doctor, who prescribed at least a week of rest before she even thought about taking the boat-train home.

“You can’t travel in this state,” Penny agreed. “You’ll be better off here, surrounded by people who love you. Let us look after you while you come to terms with the news.”

Penny wasn’t being entirely selfless. Josephine’s intuition from Penny’s letters that her little sister needed her company in France wasn’t wrong. Penny wanted Josephine with her because she really had to spend some time pretending that the war had never happened and everything was fine and dandy again, like it had felt back in the summer of ’39 when they were still young and naive. She was desperate for a break from all too much reality.

The months before she and Josephine met up in France had been challenging. In January, Penny had found herself sitting in the gallery at a war trial in Hamburg, hearing one of the displaced people she hoped to help—Marguerite, a Jewish woman not so very much older than she was—give evidence against a concentration camp guard.

Penny had promised she would be there so that Marguerite could look up from the witness stand and see a friendly face whenever she needed to, but it was a harrowing experience. Penny was no stranger to stories of terrible violence, thanks to her own wartime experiences, but Marguerite’s testimony somehow got straight to her heart. She could not even begin to imagine what it must have taken for Marguerite to describe the casual cruelty with which the guard in the dock—a woman who looked like any suburban housewife you might have passed on any German street in 1939—meted out the beatings that had left Marguerite blind in her left eye. The same woman had beaten Marguerite’s sister to death and laughed as she did it. And yet Marguerite delivered her testimony with such grace and such dignity, her voice steady and clear. Penny was left in awe of her bravery.

As the former guard heard her sentence with blank incomprehension—“But I was only following orders!”—Penny at least hoped that when she got back to work she would be able to make sure that Marguerite and her children, who had miraculously escaped the camps thanks to the kindness of a neighbour who passed the children off as her own pure German brood, might at last have a home of their own where they could start to feel safe again. Now they were staying in a boarding house where they shared a bathroom that had no lock on the door with twenty other displaced people. An old man had exposed himself to Marguerite’s seven-year-old daughter while she was cleaning her teeth.

Returning to the office, Penny was determined to do something to help but her boss told her flatly that there was no money to find Marguerite a new home. The boarding house Marguerite hated so much was a good deal better than many other billets in the city. Penny mentioned the flashing incident, in the hope that it would underline the urgency with which Marguerite needed to be moved somewhere better.

“They’ll just have to go to the bathroom as a family,” was the solution. “And put something heavy against the door when they’re in there.”

It wasn’t good enough but Penny could do nothing more about it, though she tried on a regular basis. She understood that her boss’s hands were tied. There were many hundreds of similar cases in Hamburg alone. But Penny was exhausted from the constant disappointment. She’d been avoiding Marguerite for a couple of weeks now and resolved not to think about her and her children while she was in Paris.

OF COURSE, JOSEPHINE was not going to be the companion Penny so needed for the rest of the trip—Penny was surprised at how badly Josephine was taking the news about the Samuel family. They’d known them for just a few weeks after all. Instead, she found herself asking Gilbert if he would accompany her to a museum or to the pictures. He was only too happy to oblige.

Gilbert was nicer than Penny remembered; less pretentious and more fun. He laughed at the earnestness of the young man who had given her that book of poems by Baudelaire, carefully annotated to impress. Now that he was studying to be a lawyer—thanks to his inheritance from the mysterious uncle in Bordeaux—he seemed a good deal less chippy to boot.

Penny found she enjoyed spending time with Gilbert. He made her laugh at a time when she needed to laugh very badly. It seemed, after that awful first night over dinner, that they had both made the decision not to talk about their war years. Though Penny would have liked to have heard more about Gilbert’s adventures in the Resistance, she understood more than he could ever know why he wanted to close the door on the last few years and live entirely in the present. She felt exactly the same way. They could do nothing about the past; its humiliations and pain, or about those times when they had fallen short of what the long fight required of them while others went on to make the ultimate sacrifice. Right then the weather in Paris was beautiful and there was fun to be had.

It was inevitable, she supposed, that they picked up where they had left off when they were love-struck teens. She didn’t stop him from using his tongue when he kissed her now. They went to bed together while Madame Declerc was on her shopping excursions. That happened most days.

One afternoon, while Gilbert slept off his exertions, Penny tiptoed to the bathroom of the Declercs’ apartment—the apartment that used to belong to the Samuel family—and found herself rolling back the fancy new rug that covered the bare wooden floor. She couldn’t resist. It was here, wasn’t it, the secret hiding place? But while Penny was on her hands and knees, trying to find the loose board, she heard a key in the front door of the apartment and had to abandon her mission and sprint back to the bedroom to wake Gilbert before his mother caught them in flagrante.

ON THE MORNING of the sisters’ departure from Paris, Penny told Josephine she wanted to take one last spin around the shops, to find gifts for the girls in her office back in Germany, where luxury was still in very short supply. Josephine declined to join her, so Penny found herself alone in Galeries Lafayette, which seemed remarkably unchanged since the last time she’d been there, shopping for Josephine’s seventeenth birthday present with her pocket money; accidentally stealing the bracelet with the green glass stones that Josephine still occasionally wore. In fact, Penny thought the woman on the counter might even have been the exact same one who served her all those years ago.

The woman’s mean little eyes lit up as Penny approached and asked, in impeccable French that was greatly improved for having spent time with Gilbert, if she might see a couple of items.

“Bien sûr.”

Penny talked all the while she tried the pieces on. It was easy to make small talk. Penny was good at that. Soon they were talking about the sales assistant’s son, who had been in the Resistance (of course he had), and how she was hoping to move out to the countryside and live with her sister on a farm. She was tired of having to work so hard, only to go home to a tiny apartment that was all but falling down.

“After such a terrible few years, you deserve a little happiness,” Penny agreed. The sales assistant’s eyes glistened with gratitude.

“What an understanding young woman you are,” she said.

Had there not been a counter between them, Penny was sure the sales assistant would have tried to hug her. Instead, she reached across and squeezed Penny’s hand. She described her sister’s farm in more detail as Penny pulled her short white gloves back on. Penny nodded along. She knew how to look interested in talk about sheep and cows.

“I am sorry we couldn’t find something you liked today,” the sales assistant said as she and Penny concluded their encounter.

“That’s alright,” said Penny brightly. “I’m sure I’ll be back. Good luck on that farm!”

Penny wished the doorman a “très bonne journée” as he waved her out into the street.

Walking back towards the Métro, Penny felt shaky but ecstatic. She had pulled it off. She had actually pulled it off! It wouldn’t be until closing that the sales assistant noticed she was a ring short, by which time she would have served several customers. She would never suspect that the kind and beautiful young woman who had shown such interest in her hopes and dreams could possibly have been a thief.

ON THE TRAIN back to Hamburg later that day, Penny examined her haul. The ring she’d stolen was set with a very small stone, barely a chip and definitely not a real diamond. It was not worth much, but it was worth enough to enable Marguerite and her children to move out of the boarding house into a place of their own for a while. Arriving in Germany, Penny went straight from the station to a pawnbroker. By the time she had finished telling the owner of the shop about her broken engagement—a most convincing cover story—he had raised the amount he first offered her by twenty-five per cent.

“Such a fool, your fiancé,” he said, holding her hand a little too tightly. Marguerite cried when Penny handed her the money the following day. “But where is this from?” she asked.

“It’s an emergency grant,” Penny lied. “I have authority to give it to you but you must not mention it to anyone else because I might not be able to help them in the same way. It’s a one-off. It will not happen again.”

That’s right, Penny promised herself. It would not happen again.

FROM GERMANY THAT autumn, Penny sent Gilbert Declerc several jaunty letters. At first, Gilbert matched every one but it wasn’t very long before their correspondence fizzled out, ending on a last pompous letter from Gilbert that made Penny furious with herself for having ever gone to bed with him. She thought she’d been doing him a favour!

Ma chère Penny,

How slowly time passes when you are not here. I miss you very much. At the end of the day, however, I cannot make a promise to you in the way you deserve. I must ask you to move on from me and look for a man who can bring you the life you have always wanted: marriage, a home, and children. You will always have a special place in my heart.

Your ever affectionate,

Gilbert

Chapter Eighteen

Paris, 2022

Breakfast on the morning of the sisters’ inauguration to the Légion d’honneur was a fraught affair. Though the hotel restaurant had laid on the buffet of dreams, Archie could not enjoy it. While he waited for his great-aunts and Arlene to come downstairs, he chucked back a double espresso and ate a perfect buttery croissant in two bites, not tasting a thing. The moment they walked into the dining room, he hurried his great-aunts straight to the buffet and set about preparing plates for both.

“What kind of eggs do you want, Auntie Penny? Eggs? Penny? Eggs? What kind?”

“My hearing aid is working this morning,” Penny said. “But I will need more than two seconds to decide whether I want scrambled or fried.”

“Someone should invent an app for that,” said Josephine. “To tell you exactly what you fancy to eat. Wouldn’t that be gai?”

“Oh very,” Penny agreed. “What do I want for breakfast today, Thingy?” she pretended to speak into a phone.

“It’s Siri,” said Archie, through gritted teeth.

When they were finally at the table, Archie watched the sisters impatiently, constantly checking his watch. At 8:15, he suggested, while Josephine still had most of a pain au chocolat left on her plate, that it might be time for the ladies to go upstairs and change.

When they came back downstairs half an hour later, he inspected them both as though he were a senior naval officer and they his hopeless ratings. He pinned their medals on, then re-pinned them, then realised he had mixed them up and given Josephine Penny’s Italy Star while Penny was wearing Josephine’s Defence Medal. He made sure each sister was wearing the correct gongs then decided they looked a little wonky and had to start all over again.

“Should we be wearing our medals on the other side today?” Josephine asked, quite innocently. “So our new medals can be pinned on the left?”

That sent Archie into a total panic. “Should medals be worn on the right or the left here in France? I have no idea!”

“It’s going to be fine,” Arlene assured him. “Someone at the event will let us know.”

“Will you just make sure both my aunts have spent a penny before we get into the taxi?” Archie asked her. “Two pennies,” he added as an afterthought.

BY THE TIME they arrived at the Mairie in the 7th arrondissement, where the special inauguration was to take place, the people who were to be honoured that morning were already beginning to assemble in the courtyard. Having checked the sisters’ medal placements against those of the other decorated ex–service people present, Archie allowed himself to think that from now on everything would be plain sailing. They were all present and correct. There was a good half hour before the ceremony started. Then Archie heard the all too familiar sound of a boatswain’s whistle ...

“A bosun’s whistle? Who on earth?” asked Josephine when the sound reached her hearing aids.

“Oh no.” Arlene closed her eyes tightly. “No. It can’t be.”

Arlene did not need to turn around to know exactly who was piping the “stand still” in their direction.

Proceeding across the courtyard in a wheelchair pushed by a very harassed looking young woman in a smart carer’s uniform was former Third Officer WRNS Davina Mackenzie. She was dressed in a neat navy-blue skirt suit (which Josephine eyed enviously, having been persuaded by Arlene to buy a floral dress that really wasn’t her style) and an extravagant feather-bedecked tricorn hat, in a nod to her wartime career and her proud naval heritage. She wore her own war medals on the left side of her jacket and her late father and grandfather’s service medals on the right.

“She looks like a North Korean general,” said Penny.

In Davina Mackenzie’s wake came another wheeled veteran, pushed by a novice nun in a plain grey habit. It was Sister Eugenia. The Prinz Eugen.

“Mrs. Mackenzie! Sister Eugenia!” Archie at least managed to respond to the arrival of Josephine’s nemesis and her sidekick with something other than obvious horror. “How lovely to see you both and what a shock ... I mean, a surprise.”

“It certainly is,” said Davina. “Sister Eugenia and I are to be added to the illustrious roll of the Chevaliers de la Légion d’honneur.” She pronounced the words with an extravagant Franglais accent that made several francophones in the vicinity wince.

“Well, isn’t that a coincidence,” said Archie.

Josephine’s smile stretched into a tight straight line. “What lovely news.”

“Yes,” said Davina. “As the granddaughter of an admiral, I only wish my late grandfather could be here to see it.”

“You’re here for the same reason, ladies?” asked Sister Eugenia.

“We are,” said Josephine. “I drew maps for the D-Day landings in my final posting at Whitehall.”

“How exciting,” said Sister Eugenia. “I’ve been nominated for my role in intercepting the signals from the Bismarck.”

“The Bismarck? You were in the Y Service in ’41?” Josephine asked. “I didn’t think you were that old.”

“Arlene,” Davina Mackenzie interrupted the competitive swapping of war records. “I thought it was you. I recognise that horrible jacket.”

Arlene pulled her favourite jacket—a bright orange number that she had thought just perfect for the occasion—a little tighter around her.

“But what are you doing here with these old dears? I thought you emigrated to Jamaica after you left me in the lurch. Do you mean to tell me you’re back in England and working as a carer again? Why didn’t you let me know? I would have had you back. Despite everything.”

At her interview, Archie had warned Arlene that she must never, ever admit to having once worked for Davina Mackenzie. He felt sure Josephine would refuse to have her in the house in case she was a double agent. Arlene had assured him she was so traumatised by the experience, she would only reveal that she’d spent time with Mrs. Mackenzie under torture. And this was torture. Arlene suddenly deeply regretted having spun the “moving to Jamaica” line.

“We don’t have carers,” said Penny, before Arlene could stutter an excuse. “Arlene is here as our guest.”

“Your guest?” Davina seemed unconvinced. “I see.”

Archie tried to rescue the situation by quickly changing the subject. “And how have you been enjoying Paris, Mrs. Mackenzie?”

“Terrible food,” she responded. “The French will insist on serving everything half-cooked and smothered with unnecessary sauces. The beef we had last night was practically mooing.”

Archie nodded sympathetically.

“I rather like my meat rare,” said Sister Eugenia. “I know it isn’t very Christian of me to say so, but there are definitely moments when I wish the sisters in the convent kitchen were a little less concerned with salmonella and a little more concerned with preserving the flavour of God’s alimentary gifts.”

Archie nodded again. Having spent so much of his young life in the company of Josephine and Penny, Archie was skilled at giving absolutely everyone the impression he agreed with them whole-heartedly even if that meant taking two opposing positions within the space of half a minute.

“Where are you staying, Archie?” Sister Eugenia asked in her amiable way.

“The Maritime.”

“How extravagant,” Davina snapped.

“But very lovely,” said Josephine. “We are so lucky to have a great-nephew like Archie. He organises such wonderful excitements. We ’re fortunate that he’s even interested in our war years, which are in the quite distant past now.”

“It’s nice to meet a young man who is interested in the history of his country. Arlene barely knew anything at all about Great Britain when I took her on.”

Why would she? everyone else wondered. Arlene was born and raised in South Africa.

On the steps of the Mairie, a young woman with a large clipboard was trying to attract the attention of the crowd. Seeing that she was failing, Davina took out her boatswain’s whistle and blew the “Word to be passed,” the traditional British naval command for silence. It certainly focussed everyone’s attention, if in the wrong direction.

Archie blushed on Davina’s behalf. There were times when he was almost grateful that most people assumed someone as old as Davina Mackenzie must have lost her marbles.

THE YOUNG WOMAN with the clipboard ushered that morning’s honorees and their guests inside the building. Having made sure that the sisters and Davina and Sister Eugenia were safely settled in the front row of seats in the grand reception room, Archie and Arlene found their places in the audience.

Fortunately there was an aisle between Josephine and Davina. It was such a shame they couldn’t talk about their war years without getting competitive. They had a great deal in common, having both spent time in the Western Approaches plotting rooms—Davina in Liverpool and Josephine in Plymouth—translating radar signals into visual representations of shipping movements on vast maps of the Atlantic Ocean. “Like a giant game of battleships,” was how Josephine had described it to Archie when he was a child, though of course it was much more complicated than that. Archie would have loved to hear more about Davina’s experiences during the Battle of the Atlantic. He didn’t dare ask in front of Josephine.

Finally in his own seat, Archie took a moment to regroup. He’d got his great-aunts to the ceremony and so far nobody had come to any harm. He felt his shoulders loosen as he looked around the elegant reception room. A large portrait of the President of the Republique hung over the desk on the stage. There was also a bust of Marianne, symbol of the Republique, in her Smurf-style liberty cap. A small Union Flag was dwarfed by the European flag and a Tricolore as big as a bed sheet, but flowers had been placed in every alcove and the man to Archie’s left suggested that the roses were meant to represent England while the lilies represented France.

THE CEREMONY WAS supposed to start at ten o’clock but it wasn’t until ten past that the functionary who was to oversee proceedings swept into the room wearing a tricolore sash and a gigantic medallion to signify his lauded position. Everyone stood for “La Marseillaise.” Josephine and Penny sang along. As did Archie. His great-aunts had taught him the words when he was a child. It was one of the ways they passed long car journeys, singing national anthems. Archie knew the words to a great many and “La Marseillaise” was one of his favourites (after Poland’s magnificently stirring “Mazurek Dąbrowskiego”—“Poland Is Not Yet Lost”). As the chief functionary stepped up to the lectern, a lesser functionary stepped forward with a sheaf of papers and handed them over. Tightly typed papers. Dozens of them. The chief functionary began to address his audience.

“To the glory of La Republique ...”

Archie hoped that his great-aunts would make it through the speech without needing to spend another penny.

From THE EXCITEMENTS by CJ Wray. Copyright © 2024 by C J Wray. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.