Page 6 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

5

You’re a Go-Between

Rabat, 1929

One drawback of Edouard’s brooding Heathcliff personality is that he’s less sociable than me. He retires to his bureau after dinner and people come to see him, but it’s for work, not pleasure. I’m left to float around our villa, gramophone on low, dancing alone, worried I might forget how to waltz. The piano tempts me, but Edouard asked me to use the dampener if he had people over, and a tamped-down sonata is like an unlit candle.

“Why don’t you meet them at your office during the day?” I ask him one night when he comes to my room, bemoaning his meetings for having kept him away when he could have been here in my bed, kissing my neck.

And it’s there in my bed that he gives me an introduction to intelligence work.

“Because there’s a chain,” he says. “You need someone at the top, which is me.” He draws me beneath him and I laugh.

“What am I, the larbin at the bottom?”

He kisses me again. “You might be under me, but you’re not an underling. You’re a go-between.”

“I don’t know if that’s innuendo or explanation,” I say, still laughing.

“We could make it the first”—his hand slips between us—“but I meant the latter. Do you really want to know, or is this your way of trying to seduce me?”

“I don’t think I need to try very hard at that. But you know what I’m like when my curiosity is piqued.”

Edouard groans. “If quenching your curiosity will get us back to your neck, then I’ll tell you that the go-betweens are the ones who come here at night. I’m known in Rabat, so if they come and see me during the day, it’s obvious they’re passing on information. They find out things and bring them to me. Like you found out something from that mother. She can’t come to my office. So I need go-betweens. Cultivating them is the biggest part of my job. But now that I have one in my bed…” His lips are no longer on my neck but everywhere else. “I don’t intend to talk about my job anymore.”

—

I take advantage of Edouard’s good mood to persuade him to go dancing the following night at the French Club, where all the expatriates gather.

I slip into a cream and gold crushed-velvet Vionnet gown that I adore. It’s so contoured that this is probably the last chance I’ll have to wear it until after the baby is born, and I twirl for Edouard when he comes into my room.

He frowns. “Isn’t that dress just for me?”

I press a kiss onto his lips. “This is definitely not a house dress.”

His frown disarranges his entire face.

“You don’t really want me to change?” I hate the tentativeness in my voice, as if I’m actually considering complying.

He points to his watch. “You’ve taken too long already. We’re meeting your friends at eight. Although, how you can have friends when you’ve only been here a few months, I’ll never know.”

“I talk to people, for a start,” I tease, trying to cheer him up. “Why don’t we walk through the medina ? It’ll be romantic.”

“ La curiosité est un vilain défaut .” The curiosity that only last night Edouard had enjoyed has suddenly become my fatal flaw. As if to drive the point home, he continues, “You only go to the medina after nightfall if you want to be robbed. There’s a reason they lock the gates of the city each night. We aren’t…”

In France . I mouth the words he says most days. Before tonight, I’d have grabbed his hands and cried, But that’s exactly why we should explore! We don’t know how long this will last.

Meaning, how long we’ll be in Morocco . But now an uncomfortable doubt writhes in my stomach.

I rediscover my smile when we enter the club. The group of officers and wives I’ve made friends with in that way you do when you’re all far from home—swiftly and intimately—calls out, “Marie-Madeleine!”

Rather than join us, Edouard says, “There’s someone I need to speak to.” Then he’s gone and my hand is empty.

I sit beside Marguerite, who, along with her husband, Maurice, has become my closest friend. They’re both divinely beautiful, overflowing with high spirits, and have taken me under their wing. She’s a princess and he’s the duke of Magenta, as well as an officer in the air force and a flying ace. I’ve gone with her to watch his aerobatics displays and been spellbound by the extraordinariness of flight.

“My husband is trying to persuade someone to be his navigator for the Morocco Car Rally,” Marguerite tells me. “But I don’t think many people besides me enjoy having their bones rattled into dust on the twelve-hour return trip from Casablanca to Marrakech.” She gestures to her stomach, which is the rounded ball of a near-full-term pregnancy. “Even I’m not daredevil enough to want to give birth out in the desert, which is a more certain outcome from all that jolting than him coming first.”

Maurice laughs. “Now you’ve set the challenge.”

“What does the navigator do?” I ask.

“Tries to keep everyone alive and heading in the right direction.” Marguerite smiles.

“I’ll do it,” I say as something sparks inside me that’s been tamped down by long nights at home and silly squabbles with Edouard. “I’ve been driving since I was fourteen. My mother has a property on the Riviera, and after my father…”

I try to say it as unemotionally as I can, but my words still hitch. “After my father died and we came back to France, I’d drive the truck to take hay to the animals. I know most women don’t drive, but I’m a good driver and…” I grin. “That sounds like an adventure.”

The duke lifts his glass. “To adventure. And to us coming in first.”

“I don’t care how pregnant I am.” Marguerite holds up her glass, too. “I’ll be at the finish line in Casablanca cheering you on.”

We clink glasses exuberantly because—this is life. The fast riff of a saxophone as you find a kindred spirit in a Moroccan nightclub. The gin tickling your tongue like anticipation as you discover the next trail to blaze.

Maybe I can eavesdrop for Edouard in Casablanca, too.

My feet start moving to the music, my shoulders as well. I look around for Edouard but can’t see him.

“Dance with Maurice,” Marguerite says. “I’m too big to move.”

The duke kisses his wife, trails his fingertips over her stomach, offers me his hand, and we have so much fun dancing to a Spanish pasodoble that we continue on to the next song—nobody here thinks it’s improper if you dance with someone other than your husband. In fact, it’s almost encouraged.

Stops us all from getting bored , Marguerite had said to me once with a devilish wink. Then she confessed that she didn’t think she could ever be bored of Maurice, even if they were married for a thousand years. I’d been smitten by the romance of it, determined to be the one saying those words to the next new bride in Morocco.

When we return to the group, I ask Maurice to tell me how it feels to fly upside down, and soon all the officers of the Armée de l’air are good-naturedly competing with one another for the right to take me up in a plane, when I feel a grip on my arm, just like when I’d wanted to buy soap.

“We’re leaving.”

My eyes search the room for the source of Edouard’s anger even as the voice in my head whispers, He’s mad at you .

“We haven’t danced yet,” I say, thinking I can cajole him back into being the dashing man who’d gone down on one knee on a dance floor in Paris after only a few weeks. “This is a dancing dress, remember?”

“You didn’t wear that dress for me.” He tugs me to my feet and steers me across the room in front of everyone. They all stare—even the Arab waiters, who never make eye contact with the French.

“Drunk,” I hear someone whisper, and I flush. I’ve had one glass of gin.

In the car, he doesn’t let go of my arm. I’m speechless, have no context for what just happened. I know what flirting is, and it’s not what I was doing. I adore dancing. And laughter. And friends. What an idiot I was. If he can barely tolerate my dancing, he won’t agree to my going to Casablanca, much less navigating in a car rally.

When the front door closes behind us, Edouard barks, “What do you do in the afternoons?”

“I go to Marguerite’s!” I cry. “She can’t walk around the city now, and she’s bored. Maurice sometimes joins us and I talk to him about flying, the same way I talk to Marguerite about dresses—”

He cuts me off. “That’s the problem. You’re too open. You wear your emotions like a bright red dress. Too obviously, and like something most men will want to remove.”

My mind grapples with the metaphor. How can anyone be too open? Or too happy? Or too in love?

I touch his cheek and tell him the one truth that should matter the most. “I love you. Like Marguerite loves Maurice, and like he loves her. We married fast and sometimes we surprise each other, but if I could spend every afternoon with you, I would. If I could dance with you every night, I would—”

This time, he cuts me off with a kiss and I’m so glad I almost weep. Everything will be all right.

—

Later, when Edouard’s asleep, I climb out of bed and cross to the windows. From the streets below, a snake charmer’s flute plays, a siren call for hips that like to move, for souls that like to quest. That’s when I decide.

Marriages require compromise. So I’ll forget what happened at the club—unless it happens again. But for better or for worse, I’m going to be in that car rally.