Authors: Robert Ryan
The first roar of the exhaust seemed to shake the very earth. Now Williams knew what Rudi had been doing prior to putting his helmet on. Ear plugs. The exhaust note was a deep, low thrum, a thudding, chest-wobbling boom that powered up to an agonising scream as Rudi pressed the throttle and the superchargers pushed air through the carburettors.
The strange odour of the secret fuel drifted across the grounds of the house, and Rudi slowly took the car down the slip road towards the track, blipping the throttle. Like the children of Hamelin they all followed, mesmerised, half running, but too late, he was a disappearing speck by the time they reached the circuit proper. They could hear him, though, the angry note of the engine softening and rising again with each gear change, Rudi working hard through the box. He had what the Germans called
Fingerspitzengefühl—
instinctive feel—and it sounded as if the car was responding to his thoughts.
In an astonishingly short time he reappeared, drifting the back end and correcting out of the hairpin, before aligning himself for the long run up the straight. Williams checked his watch. ‘Two minutes fifteen,’ he said, calculating that meant a lap time of over 80 mph—incredible on such a winding course.
‘I had two eleven,’ said Robert.
‘Christ.’ Williams ran a hand through his hair. ‘What time is the next boat back?’
PARIS, AUGUST 1939
F
OR EVE’S BIRTHDAY
they went to La Pagode, the Japanese cinema and tea house on rue Babylone, and watched
Angels with Dirty Faces,
which made Eve sob, although Robert thought the noble ending a cop out. Afterwards the Gaumont-Pathé newsreel came on of goose-stepping German soldiers and Robert said loudly: ‘Look at them. The pricks.’
A patron behind him hissed at him to be quiet and that he only wished France’s army looked like that. ‘Shut up,’ snarled Robert, ‘or I’ll knock you down and piss in your ear.’
Afterwards they went for drinks at Drouand’s near l’Opera, although Maurice, disliking the smug crowd the fashionable restaurant attracted, was keen to head off to the Sphinx. However, Robert protested that it was Eve’s birthday and a brothel was perhaps the most appropriate of venues. Eve wasn’t sure whether she was disappointed or not, as she had seen the magazine advertisements for the Egyptian splendours of the place and was curious.
Once settled, wine and brandies before them, they sat in silence for a while, lost in their own thoughts. Eve scanned the room, looking for famous faces. Charles Lindbergh was there, with his wife Anne, no doubt back from another tour of Germany and telling anyone who’d listen about its wonderful Air Force.
‘What if it is war?’ asked Maurice finally, swirling the wine in his glass. ‘You think the Maginot line will hold?’
Robert shook his head. Robert was sick of talk of defences, politics, was disgusted by the funeral of Rosemeyer, killed trying to break the Autobahn speed record for the Führer, which was choreographed as if he had been a war hero. He indicated Lindbergh. ‘That man got one thing right. You saw what happened in Spain. They’ll fly right over it.’
‘What will you do?’ asked Eve. ‘If we fight?’
‘Me?’ asked Robert, as if the idea had never occurred to him. ‘Grab some Chablis, head down to Menton and wait until it blows over.’ He lit a cigarette and gave a thin smile. ‘Or see if my old squadron will have me back. What about you, Will?’
‘England. Enlist.’ Firm and unwavering. ‘The French don’t have a war leader.’
‘And England does?’ sneered Maurice.
‘The British are absolutely awful at having a good time.’ He could see Eve nodding enthusiastically. ‘Give them hard times, misery, give them war … they’ll rise to the occasion. You want to fight a war? Over there is where you have to be.’
Despite the implied slur on his country, Robert nodded approvingly. He was beginning to feel a line had to be drawn, even though he was sure that Williams’ mother country was behaving as perfidiously as always, manoeuvring to save its own neck while using France, Belgium and the others as a shield. ‘Eve?’
Williams, mistaking the direction of the question, said forcefully, ‘She’ll come with me.’
He didn’t catch the small, quick, rebellious wink she flashed at Robert.
Jean-Pierre Wimille spent 3 September 1939 getting slowly, inexorably drunk. It was the day he should have raced the Tank at La Baule. He had, however, declined to test the car and let Jean Bugatti do it. Late at night, on roads he thought empty, Jean had swerved to avoid a cyclist and was killed. Wimille’s stubborn indolence had cost the brilliant young man his life. And, he knew, Ettore’s. The old man would never recover from the blow.
Eve spent it at the desk in the bedroom, composing a long letter to the shocked and fragile Bugattis, trying to piece together some consoling thoughts, but mostly failing.
Robert was with his mistress in Nantes, a woman who adored having a sporting hero as a lover, but who at the same time demanded material proof of his devotion. He had travelled to deliver a gold cigarette lighter.
Williams worked at Avenue Montaigne, covering for Robert’s absence, and although buying was the last thing on people’s minds, cars were coming in and out of stock, some being shipped out of the country, others being mothballed until the political temperature fell once more.
Maurice nursed a hangover. The previous night he had spent carousing with friends around rue Blondel near Les Halles marketplace, a model of French inefficiency and bureaucracy, where goods imported from the regions were sold, and then often transported back to the very same district at hugely inflated prices. At night, filled with the calvados-breathing workers in blue salopettes manhandling vast mounds of fruit and vegetables, the Baltard ironwork of the great sheds glowing from the flames of burning crates, the streets around the metal parasols were filled with the kind of sexually licentious establishments that the bourgeois liked to dip a well-scrubbed toe in after the opera or theatre. During the course of a lesbian tableaux in a grubby bar, Maurice had made some excellent contacts in the market trade.
That day, hangover notwithstanding, over cervelat sausages at Balzar, Maurice negotiated to buy a small candle-making business. He also met with some of his friends who ran a small butcher’s. Light and food, he believed, might be two important commodities soon. In the evening he began negotiations with a coat manufacturer and a coal merchant. Warmth, that would be much sought after, too.
Elsewhere, other, more important, people put the wheels of purgatory into slow, grinding, bone-breaking motion. Britain, and then France, declared reluctant war on the country already pounding Poland into submission.
Across in England, over a drink at Jules Bar in Jermyn Street, a friend of Rose Miller’s mother asked if she would like to pursue some interesting work for her country.
FRANCE, SEPTEMBER 1939–JUNE 1940
L
IKE WAITING FOR
test results you know will reveal a terminal disease, the confession of an unfaithful partner, the death of a loved relative, the announcement of war at least came with the blessing of certainty after four years of stomach-churning vertigo as France stared over the abyss and somehow did not fall. Now it had, headlong, and they were all waiting for the impact.
Williams came back from the Bugatti HQ in Paris on the fifth of September; he and Eve clung to each other for the longest time, snuggling and pressing as if trying to fuse into a single organism, as scared as either could ever remember.
That night he cooked a huge slab of lamb, which they devoured hungrily with a bottle of red Loire wine, each speaking in mundanities until they went outside to the dying day and, as twilight faded and the first stars appeared, spoke softly in the darkness, sitting under the big tree at the edge of the garden.
‘You meant what you said that time. About returning to England?’
Williams lit them a cigarette each. ‘I have no alternative.’
A snort. ‘How is Paris?’
‘The theatres have closed. Cafés are busy trying to put up black-out curtains. The Louvre is being emptied. Everything shipped into storage. They’ve killed all the poisonous reptiles in the zoo. Nervous.’
‘I can’t go with you.’
‘Communists are being hounded. As allies of Hitler.’
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘There will be rationing I expect. To conserve stocks.’
‘I can’t go to England with you, Will.’
‘Sirens go off so often everybody ignores them. One day they’ll be for real and the entire population will be out on the streets.’
‘Stay here.’
Williams turned and faced her, waiting for his eyes to adjust fully to the darkness so he could see her face clearly. There was moisture glistening in one eye. Maybe he was only worth a half-cry. She blinked and now both sparkled wetly. ‘I can’t. I’ll be arrested. Interned.’
‘You are assuming we are going to lose. Maurice says—’
‘Maurice?’
‘Maurice says with the British we can hold them.’
‘Come with me.’
‘I can’t. My parents. My dogs.’
‘We’ll take your parents.’
‘Father is too ill to uproot.’
‘You don’t want to go, do you?’
She hesitated, wondering whether to fudge the truth. In the end she blurted out: ‘To England? No. You’ll go off and fight and I’ll be left alone again, just like when you were racing.’
‘You’ll be free.’
‘Better a prisoner in France than free in England.’
‘That’s insane.’
Eve touched his shoulder. ‘Is it? I have friends I can turn to here. Family. Over there? We could hide in France. It’s a big country.’
Williams stood up. ‘I thought about that. Every option. The thing is, we’d have to live with ourselves afterwards.’
‘I’d manage.’
Williams flung his cigarette butt off into the darkness, watched it flare briefly as it bounced along the gravel in the courtyard. He thought about sitting and waiting, perhaps hiding for weeks, months, years while other men fought the war, the just war. It reminded him of those long hours in the pits at Le Mans while others drove the Tanks out on the circuit, itching to be behind the wheel himself. ‘I don’t think I could.’ He pulled Eve to her feet, lifted the hair away from her face and kissed her, feeling the salt of her tears run into his mouth as he did so.
‘You’re really going?’ Robert asked. ‘Definitely?’
They were in the comfortingly ornate Ritz bar, where the very prospect of war, invasion or bombing seemed absolutely absurd. In fact, in this part of Paris it was being treated as, at worst, an inconvenience—as they passed the fashion shops around Place Vendôme they had laughed at the mannequins sporting gas masks, chicly tied with coloured bows rather than ugly coiffure-threatening straps.
Williams nodded.
‘And Eve still isn’t?’
Hammering started from the corner and they both looked around, irritated at the intrusion. ‘Black-out curtains,’ explained the barman. So it was even creeping into these hallowed halls after all.
‘I think,’ continued Williams, ‘I have exhausted everything short of kidnapping.’
Robert raised an eyebrow. ‘Well …’
‘No. Thanks all the same. What about you?’
‘Huh. The Air Ministry … you wouldn’t believe men can be so foolish, Will.’ Robert took a drink of his whisky, pausing to gather his thoughts. ‘You know, I was always so jealous of you.’
‘Me? Jealous of me?’
‘That you had Eve. That you had such skill. That you did it on your own. A chauffeur. That you didn’t need it the way I did. You had a real life … you always reminded me that there was another way. I could never quite reach it.’
Embarrassed, Williams snorted derisively. ‘Listen, perhaps some of that is true. How do you think I felt? You were the great Robert Benoist. Just to be on the same team … don’t get me started. Grown men shouldn’t cry at the Ritz.’
He laughed. ‘Well, the great Robert Benoist wants to say this. He will miss you.’ He kissed Williams noisily on both cheeks. ‘Now fuck off.’
Williams and Eve didn’t say much at the station. Every argument had been rehearsed, every weakness probed, every possibility exhausted, but two intractable people found no compromise. She had bought him, and carefully packed, a new Louis Vuitton trunk, as if to say ‘no hard feelings’. If only that were true.
The whistle blew, there were frantic goodbyes along the platform as the passengers squeezed on to the crowded train. He kissed her, a quick, glancing one this time, as if anything longer would be unbearable.
‘I have to go.’
‘I know.’ But the voice said she didn’t. They were jostled by fellow travellers, eager to be away, as if Hitler was already knocking at the door. Another whistle. Williams stepped down from the train.
‘I won’t go.’
She felt her heart lift, lost in that one moment, knowing she had him back Then her mind quickly spooled ahead, to a pacing, angry Williams, his opportunity lost, the slow corrosion of waiting and inactivity eating into him. She spoke words that were heavy and slow to come. ‘I think you must. It’s too late to stop now.’
He nodded, knowing that she had seen through the gesture for what it was. The train shunted forward a few centimetres and hissed impatiently. ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said. It didn’t seem enough, somehow.
‘You better had.’
Williams stepped on to the train, reached out and brushed a blonde strand from her face. The locomotive jerked once more and his hand was snatched away. She began to walk slowly alongside, trying to hold back the tears that were stinging the corners of her eyes, as he leant forward to touch her cheek once more.
‘Look after Robert. He’s down at the Air Ministry every day demanding a new commission. At his age.’
She stopped, smiled and raised a hand as the train took her man away, heading west with gathering speed, its carriage windows framing a flashing cavalcade of relief, anguish, despair and hope. As the guard’s van creaked by her, she said quietly to herself: ‘And who’s going to look after me?’
As she quickly turned and strode back towards the platform entrance the familiar intense stare came back at her and she froze. Robert.