A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [143]
‘No, because Mama sent me away. She couldn’t come with me, she had to sell what little we ’ad to pay for me to go. She said she would come for me as soon as the war was over.’
‘Did she come?’
Yvette shook her head. ‘The Nazis took her and she died on the train journey to Poland. They say there were so many people in each carriage that many could not breathe. It was bitterly cold too, and they ’ad no food or drink.’
Because of their plight Fifi could actually feel what it must have been like for Yvette’s mother, whereas before this would have been just another horrible story that she could imagine, but without really grasping its stark reality. Mere words could not convey her horror and disgust that anyone could do such a thing to another human being, or how appalling it must have been for Yvette to discover her mother died in such a way. It was dark now and she couldn’t see the Frenchwoman’s face but she knew she was crying. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what else to say. It’s just too terrible.’
‘Maybe it was better that she died there, before she see the camp,’ Yvette said in a choked voice. ‘She was at least with people she knew. I stay after the war is over, waiting for news, then when the Red Cross find her name on a list, I come here.’
Fifi thought of her own mother then. She could see her waiting outside the infant school gates with Patty, Peter and Robin sitting at both ends of the pram. Her mother would open her arms wide for Fifi to run to them, and she’d scoop her up and kiss her. How strange it was that such a lovely image should come into her mind now, when in the past she had chosen to remember only slights, arguments and all the negatives! Just a couple of days ago she was blaming all her misfortune on her family, and she felt ashamed of that now. She thought that if she ever got out of here she would make a determined effort to see all the good in her life, and forget the rest.
She remained silent for some time, holding Yvette in her arms, hoping that the warmth of her body would comfort her. But questions kept bobbing into her head; there was just so much more she needed to know about her friend.
‘But what was it like for you during the war years? You must have been just a young girl?’ she asked eventually.
‘I was eighteen when it ended,’ Yvette said with a catch in her voice. ‘But I was not like a young girl any more. I think it would ’ave been better to die in the train with Mama.’
‘Why? Weren’t the people you were sent to kind to you?’
‘Kind! They see me as just a young Jewish girl who can be sold to anyone with a few francs. You ask why I am not married. Fifi, I would sooner die than ever ’ave a man touch me again.’
Chapter sixteen
The air in the office of Trueman Enterprises was thick with cigar smoke. Jack Trueman was sitting back in a big leather swivel chair, a glass of whisky in one hand, gesticulating at Del and Martin with his cigar.
‘I want you up in Nottingham pronto,’ he said, his tone one of a man well used to giving an order and having it obeyed immediately. ‘That slag is out of order, and you are to stay there until he knows it.’
Jack Trueman was close on sixty but he kept in shape by working out in a gym and swimming fifty lengths of his swimming pool each morning, so he looked far younger. Over six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a craggy face, he had never been considered a handsome man, but age had given him distinction. His dark hair had turned silver and he wore his handmade Savile Row three-piece grey suit and gold watch with the air of a man born to money. It was only his cockney accent that gave away his true origins, and the lack of warmth in his dark eyes warned people he was a human shark.
Anyone who had seen his mock Tudor mansion in Essex would be surprised he didn’t run his large empire from a prestigious office suite in Mayfair. But the two small cluttered rooms above a bookshop in St Anne’s Court in Soho, where he’d started from some forty years earlier, suited him just fine. He owned the building and ran the Mandrake