‘Darling!’ said Ambrosine as Meg and Justin approached. Meg had a huge bunch of flowers bought from a greengrocer whom they’d caught opening up and Justin held an equivalently large box of chocolates that he’d bought on the ferry. ‘How very kind of you to come!’
‘We’re rather grubby from the ferry,’ said Meg, putting down the flowers and kissing her friend’s cheek.
In spite of her expansive manner, Ambrosine looked small and frail in the hospital bed and Meg felt a sudden rush of emotion to see her there. A broken hip was serious and while Ambrosine would probably recover, she realised, she was still elderly and couldn’t last forever. The thought of losing her was heartbreaking.
‘I’ll find someone to get me a vase for these,’ said Justin from the door, obviously wanting to leave Meg and Ambrosine alone to talk.
‘No! Come back, Justin dear,’ said Ambrosine. ‘I want to talk to Meg but I think you should hear what I’ve got to say too.’ She regarded Meg, who had pulled up a chair. ‘I’ve always thought that you two should be together, so he may as well know now things he’ll find out later.’
Meg blushed. ‘Anything you told me in confidence would always stay a secret.’
Ambrosine made a dismissive gesture. ‘I’m too old for secrets now, which is why I asked you to come. It’s all part of history, and history shouldn’t be forgotten, or it will die with its participants.’ She gestured to Justin. ‘Get a chair, dear boy, and listen. Oh, maybe open the chocolates first. I think I could manage a coffee cream.’
Once the box was open and Ambrosine had fortified herself with a couple of soft centres, she began to talk.
‘I haven’t always lived in England, you know. I was in France during the war, married to a Frenchman who turned out to be very unpleasant. Of course I just had to put up with his nastiness – there was no choice – but I did lead as separate a life as I could. But when the country was invaded, my husband became a collaborator, and it all became a little more complicated.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Meg, shocked by what Ambrosine must have been through.
‘I had to entertain German officers in my house. Be pleasant to them. Although to be fair, not all of them were unpleasant.’ Ambrosine sighed wistfully, as if remembering something.
‘Can I ask what your husband’s name was?’ said Justin.
‘He was a count. Guillaume Fauré-Dubois,’ said Ambrosine. ‘He was a rat, but of course I didn’t find that out until after I’d married him.’
Something in Justin’s expression told Meg that this name meant something to him. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Because I had my own circle of friends before the war, when it started, it turned out I knew several people in the Resistance.’ She paused. ‘Eventually – it took a long time for them to trust me; Guillaume was a factory owner who made concrete for the Germans – eventually they turned to me to help.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Meg when Ambrosine had sipped some water and eaten another chocolate.
Ambrosine took a breath as if about to explain something a bit complicated. ‘Have you heard of the SOE?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Meg.
‘Weren’t they people dropped into France to act as spies and to help the Resistance?’ said Justin.
‘More or less. What many of them did was to radio any information about the Germans they could discover back to London. Their radios made them terribly vulnerable. The Germans could find out where they were within about half an hour. Having a radio was dangerous.’ Ambrosine stopped speaking, lost in the past for a moment.
Meg cleared her throat, thinking about Ambrosine’s enormous courage.
‘We lived in a very large house in Nantes. There were attics, cellars, servants’ quarters – although very few servants. There was a lot of space. But because we allowed the larger rooms to be used for meetings for the Germans, and gave dinner parties for them, and generally were terribly nice to them’ – she gave a little laugh – ‘they didn’t search the house!’
‘I can’t imagine how awful it must have been, living in occupied France,’ said Meg.
‘Indeed. But I was able to hide a number of British people, men and women, who needed to lie low. I kept their radios down behind the back fascia of the house and I hid British spies wherever there was space. My difficulty was that I had to keep them hidden from my husband, too. He was very unlikely to visit the attics or the cellars or the outbuildings, but it was still a risk.’
Ambrosine turned to Justin suddenly. ‘One of the spies – the man in charge – was your grandfather, Justin. I don’t suppose you knew that because we were trained to keep silent about our goings-on.’
‘But you managed to keep your husband away from where you were hiding radios and people?’ Meg asked.
‘For a while, yes,’ said Ambrosine, ‘but he found out eventually. It was inevitable. Once I realised he knew, I was scooped up by the last lot of SOE types to travel back to England. I spent the rest of the war working in a canteen, staying with an old school friend.
‘Luckily, I had a little money of my own and then, after I heard that Guillaume had been killed, I gotmarried again. Sadly, he didn’t live very long. And then, a while later, when my money had pretty much run out, your grandfather, Teddy, who turned out to be one of the chaps I’d helped escape, got in touch with me asking if I wanted a home in Nightingale Woods. I didn’t really know him, the chaps were never with us for very long and I don’t know how he came to find me, but I visited Nightingale Woods, it was all very pleasant, and I accepted gratefully.’ She folded her hands, indicating her tale was over.
‘That’s an amazing story, Ambrosine,’ said Meg. ‘Thank you so much for telling us.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s time these things were more generally known, I think. When I had my accident, I realised that the things I’d done in the war would die with me. I wanted to tell someone and I thought you were the perfect person.’ She paused. ‘You love Nightingale Woods as much as I do and it seemed fitting.’
