At this Dottie merely raised an eyebrow and smiled. It amused her when Maude swore because she tried really hard not to, whereas Dottie loved a good burst of profanity when the need arose.
‘You know what being in this shuttle makes me think of?’
Maude ceased rustling and asked, ‘No, amaze me.’
‘A big silver suppository shooting up someone’s ar…’
‘Gran, stop. Honestly where does your head go sometimes? Here, have some chocolate, anything to shut you up.’ Maude was laughing as she passed Dottie a bar of Dairy Milk.
‘Okay, then it’s a silver bullet. Does that sound better?’ Dottie began making rustling noises of her own as Maude cracked the seal on a bottle of water.
‘Much.’
After two chunks of chocolate, the silence was broken by a question about her bête noire. ‘So, has he forgiven you then… for almost standing him up?’
Maude huffed. ‘Just about, but Lachlan can take sulking to the next level when he wants and last night was no exception. I was dead to the world when he rang and to be honest, I probably could have stayed asleep there all night. I’m sure that bedroom drugs me, or was it you? I seem to remember you made me a cup of tea before I went upstairs, and I wouldn’t put it past you.’
At this Dottie smiled and winked. But seeing as they were trapped in the silver bullet, she thought it might be a good time to have a subtle word in her granddaughter’s ear. ‘Well, my darling, it’s little things like sulking that one hopes to tame, that turn into mammoth issues once the honeymoon is over. And I speak from experience, as you know.’
‘Mmm, well I have no intention of becoming Lachlan’s therapist or life coach and for the record, grandmother dearest, for the foreseeable future I have no intention of going on honeymoon.’
Dottie shrugged. ‘So you keep saying but from where I’m sitting I suspect your fiancé has life all mapped out for you, which is why he kicked up a fuss about this trip. So mark my words, learn from my mistakes, otherwise my suffering will have been for nothing.’
This time Maude really did roll her eyes so far back they nearly disappeared inside her head. ‘Well actually, Gran, seeing as you have never actually told me of this deep suffering you endured on my behalf, I have no way of avoiding it, do I?’
‘You do know. I was married four times; to a man I hardly knew, then to one who was taken away too soon, a useless drunk and finally to a cheat. There, what more do you need to know?’
Maude swivelled in her seat and after a sip of warmish water, gave her gran an incredulous look. ‘Seriously, you expect me to base my future on one sentence that you’ve repeated verbatim all my life? Sorry, Gran, but if you expect me to take your advice then you’ll have to give me more than that.’
Dottie could feel Maude’s eyes boring holes. This trip was an opportunity to relive the memories and a life she’d locked away so maybe, with thirty minutes or so left before they arrived at the Eurostar Terminal, it was time to fill in the gaps she’d purposely left blank for years.
‘Okay then, so what do you want to know?’
Maude looked a bit taken aback by this and sat straighter in her seat. ‘What they were like, where you met, what went wrong, why you tried marriage out four times and then gave up… whatever you want to tell me really.’
A dramatic sigh preceded Dottie’s mild capitulation. ‘All right, if you insist. And anyway, I’d rather talk about them now, than when we’re in France. They’re part of afterwards, Post-War Me. Or perhaps Wartime Me played a hand in what happened when I went home, back to England. Mmm, that’s quite an interesting way of looking at it.’
‘Gran, focus. Just start with Roberto, your first husband, the one who took the photo of you that’s in the parlour at home. You said he was a war reporter, that’s all I know.’
Dottie was startled by Maude’s interruption, lost already in her memories. ‘Oh yes, Roberto. He was a nice man, ambitious and I bear no serious grudge against him at all. It was a shame really that we parted company, but I believe in fate and it had other ideas for us.’
Maude tutted loudly. ‘Gran, the beginning…’
‘Oh yes, sorry, darling, I do tend to wander, don’t I? Right, I shall do my best to focus so in the words of your Uncle Konki, are you sitting comfortably?’ A nod from Maude. ‘Then I shall begin.’
Dottie never thought she would see Roberto again after the war, in fact she hadn’t thought about him at all since the day he took the photo of her. He was such a colourful character though, a free spirit who went where the wind or his next hitch took him. Roberto was impetuous and principled, and after escaping political repression in Hungary had made his way to Paris and enrolled at college where he studied photography. The Nazi invasion provided fascinating subject matter, but it was too dangerous to stay in the city, so he fled again, south.
Avoiding forced labour, he hooked up with the resistance movement that was quickly gaining momentum. He fitted in well with the communists, aristocrats, students, farmers, academics, liberals, and anarchists of the Maquis. Roberto flowed with the tide, moving amongst the units, gathering images of the fighters who lived in the hills and mountains, risking his life to get close to life or death, seeing the battle through the lens of a camera. His photographs appeared in subversive publications, read by the more passive resisters but his images appealed, he had an eye, and he was brave.
When pressure began to mount on the Nazis, the Allies closing in, Roberto made his way north, towards the beleaguered coastal towns along the Atlantic Wall. Along the route he joined with the Historian Network and it was here he met a young woman he knew only as Yvette. Roberto was only with them for two days before moving on, but had promised that once all the madness was over, if he was ever in London, he would look her up.
Roberto remained in France for a while, moving back to Paris where his photographs were in huge demand. Following the Armistice and the wild celebrations on VE Day, national fervour whipped up another wave for him to ride but once it hit the shore, he needed a new challenge and, on a whim, he headed for London. Here his reputation and portfolio secured him a job on Fleet Street. It was twelve months before he thought of looking Yvette up and all he had to go on was that her parents lived in Hackney and their shop was on the high street, named after one of the most famous places in the world, Broadway.
When Dottie alighted the number nine bus that evening, after a long day in the stuffy offices at Whitehall she had no idea who would be waiting for her. She found Roberto eating pie, surrounded by locals who wanted to know all about his daring adventures in France. In her mum and grandmother’s case, the big question was how this dark-haired, swarthy young man with the film star eyes and curious accent knew their Dottie, and why did he call her Yvette?
Maude hadn’t taken her eyes off Dottie the whole time and surprisingly hadn’t interrupted either. ‘So, there you go, that’s how I met him. His main objective was to deliver the photo he’d taken of me. He’d had it printed and put in a frame, the one at home.’
Maude sounded eager. ‘But what happened next, did you fall in love straight away? I’ve seen photos of him on your wedding day and he is very dishy.’
