The Secret Agent

by Elisabeth Hobbes

  ‘To bed?’ Sylvie wrinkled her brow and glanced around, not sure whether she was expected to curl up in the armchair.

  Carmichael gave Sylvie one of his rare smiles. ‘Your room is in the north wing, I believe.’

  Sylvie looked around the room once more, this time with curiosity. Carmichael pulled back the thick velvet curtains and Sylvie looked out onto the familiar front lawn with the ornamental fountain and low box hedges. Despite her aching body and extreme weariness, she laughed. She hadn’t even left the stately home that had been taken over by SOE for training. Her bedroom was almost directly overhead, two floors up. She drained the last of the cocoa and stood. Her legs felt more solid now. As she made her way to the door, Carmichael called after her.

  ‘There is one delicate matter of your interrogation I would like to clear up before we proceed any further, Miss Crichton. You were in a relationship before you joined us. Is there any likelihood you are really pregnant?’

  Sylvie gave him a brittle smile. The term relationship lent far too much dignity to the pitiful affair she had walked away from. Nevertheless, it was a fair question. Some of the other recruits she was training with had left husbands and children to do their part in the war effort. That was acceptable, but no department would knowingly send an expectant mother into occupied lands. Enough time had elapsed since she had left Dennis’s bed for the final time for her to be completely sure.

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  She left without waiting for an acknowledgement and made her way to her room. The corridors were empty, which she was glad of. Everyone else would be engaged in training of one sort or another somewhere in the grounds or house. She didn’t have any urge to discuss what she had gone through, but wasn’t sure she would be able to hide that something had happened.

  Her room had been left in a state of disarray when she had been taken. The bedclothes had been trailed across the rug as they’d tangled between her feet. She dimly remembered grasping for a vase containing dog daisies and trying to dash it across one of her attacker’s heads. Water had gone everywhere. Now everything was as neat as it always was, and her bed had been made.

  Sylvie slumped onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. She had done well, surely? She had not given in, even when threatened with violation or burning. She wrinkled her nose, knowing it would be a long time before she was able to smell a cigarette without imagining singed flesh. Wearing the nightgown that carried the lingering smell of the interrogation room any longer was unbearable. She stripped it off and threw it into the corner of the room, resolving to buy pyjamas to wear from now on, and clambered into bed naked. The mattress was lumpy and had seen better days, but Sylvie was asleep within minutes of pulling the covers over her head.

  Chapter Two

  Two weeks after her fake interrogation, Sylvie sat in the SOE’s flat in Baker Street to finally learn where she was to be sent. She had been interviewed in this same room when she first applied to join SOE, back before she had really understood what it entailed.

  No one had given her a grade for her performance in the interrogation room, but she got the impression that she had done well. Not all the women had proven to be as resilient to the threat of torture and had surrendered information. Those who had not succeeded had been taken from the training house without a chance to say farewell. Sylvie had no idea where they were now.

  Two people sat on the opposite side of the desk to Sylvie. Vera Atkins, who was the personal assistant of Major Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s French operation, and Major Swift, better known to Sylvie as Uncle Max.

  ‘Why do you want to go to France, Sylvia?’ Uncle Max asked.

  ‘Sylvie,’ Sylvie corrected automatically.

  Her father had insisted on changing her name to the more English-sounding Sylvia when he had brought her from France to England as a child. She still bristled on hearing it. Maybe more so now she was being asked to justify why she wanted to serve in France.

  ‘Why do you want to go to France, Sylvie?’ Uncle Max asked.

  He looked over the top of his spectacles. His hooded eyes and beaked nose made Sylvie feel like a mouse being scrutinised by a hawk. She held his gaze. If she couldn’t even hold her nerve when speaking to the man she had known for almost a decade, she wouldn’t do very well under interrogation.

  Sylvie smoothed the khaki serge skirt of her FANY uniform. Recruitment into the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry corps was the starting point for all female candidates for SOE. She had answered all these questions when she applied, but now she was reaching the end of her training and her superiors were sizing her up for a role. She could work as a wireless operator, in encryption, drive cars, work as a personal assistant. All important roles, but all behind the lines. Even now she might be deemed inadequate and shunted into a desk role, receiving ‘skeds’ – the scheduled messages from agents abroad – or translating codes to be sent back.

  ‘France is my home and I have not been there for her.’

  ‘England is your home too, Miss Crichton,’ Miss Atkins said. ‘There are many roles in which you could serve France and Britain without leaving these shores and putting yourself in danger.’

  Sylvie drummed her fingers on the arm of the chair. The surname was a minor irritation, but here it was again. This was a new line of questioning, however.

  ‘Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have never felt like England is my home.’

  Uncle Max raised his eyebrows. He was not a real uncle, but he had served with Sylvie’s father in the trenches during the Great War. He might even have been nursed by Sylvie’s mother in the Normandy field hospital where Angelique Duchene and Arthur Crichton had met. Before the war Uncle Max had visited the house in Scarborough frequently, and once Sylvie was deemed old enough (and English enough) to join the adults, they lunched together. Uncle Max had always been kind to her, and she had a sense that she was being ungracious.

  ‘Not everyone made me feel like a stranger,’ she admitted, giving him a gentle smile to show she counted him in that number. Uncle Max acknowledged the compliment with a silent nod of the head.

  ‘I heard General De Gaulle speak on the radio in June 1940. He called on all French citizens to contact him and fight to free our country. I didn’t answer that call. I thought I had no skills. Now I know I do,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘If you had believed your skills were useful, would you have responded?’ Miss Atkins asked.

  ‘I…’ She straightened her posture. ‘Honestly, I’m not sure. I was younger. I was studying. I’m wasted in England when I speak French fluently and could be of use in France.’

  ‘No other reason?’ Uncle Max asked.

  Running away from a failed relationship. Not wanting to live with a stepmother. Not very admirable reasons.

  ‘What would you answer if I asked you why you wanted to defend your homeland?’ she asked Uncle Max. ‘I detest what has happened to my country. I was born there. I wish I had never been forced to leave. Now my father is dead, there is nothing to keep me in England. If I can do anything in the slightest to hasten Hitler’s overthrow, I will not hesitate.’

  The corner of Uncle Max’s eye twitched. Sylvie suspected he would rather be in France than stuck behind a desk, training agents to send to places he could not go himself. Sylvie stopped and brushed her hair back from her forehead. The outburst was out of character. She had worked so hard for years to conceal the emotions that her father had termed ‘un-English’, that to have them burst through was unsettling.

  The two interviewers exchanged a glance.

  ‘You were right,’ Uncle Max murmured to Miss Atkins.

  Sylvie bristled. Here she was, sat in the room alongside them, being referred to as if she was absent.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘tell me what exactly Miss Atkins was right about and I will confirm it myself.’

  ‘I told Major Swift that you notice people,’ Miss Atkins said. ‘You size them up.’

  Her voice was low and soothi
ng. Even though Sylvie knew on an intellectual level that she was being placated, the tone was motherly enough that it tugged a little at her heart. She thought she had got over the longing for a mother and the long-buried yearning to be nurtured and comforted took her by surprise.

  ‘I may as well observe,’ she said, shrugging in an offhand manner to disguise the unwanted emotions. ‘I’ve been excluded enough times, and it gives me something to do to pass the time.’

  Miss Atkins scribbled something on the pad in front of her. ‘The role we have in mind for you would require a particular set of skills and attributes, Miss Crichton. One that you might be alone in possessing. You began training as a dancer before your father brought you to England, is that correct?’

  Sylvie permitted herself a smile. She’d travelled with her mother, Angelique, from birth, and had begun her stage career aged thirteen when puberty had hit with a hard fist and reshaped her body so dramatically that she could easily pass for seventeen. Her developed figure and precocious manner had been a source of concern for Sylvie’s father and his English wife when they brought Sylvie to live with them after Angelique’s passing.

  ‘I didn’t exactly train,’ she admitted. ‘Not with a teacher, but I was dancing from almost as early as I could walk. I danced in the chorus of the show with my mother before her death. It was all I wanted to do. Father let me take ballet lessons when I came to England. What do you have in mind for me?’ she asked. ‘I hardly imagine you are planning to install me in the Paris Opera House, are you?’

  ‘I’m afraid our reach does not extend that far,’ Uncle Max said.

  He chuckled in what seemed to Sylvie to be a rather patronising manner. She tried not to bristle openly, knowing that Uncle Max would have a great degree of influence over when, where, and if at all she was used as an agent.

  ‘I’d be happy to demonstrate my credentials. Would you like me to audition for you?’

  She sat back and waited for Uncle Max to elaborate.

  ‘We won’t ask you to demonstrate your proficiency on the stage – we’ve already observed the way you move. The question is whether you think it would be possible for you to take instruction from a choreographer in French?’

  Sylvie permitted herself to laugh out loud at this.

  ‘Uncle Max,’ she said. ‘Any ballerina in England is able to take direction in French. From pliés to jetés, the language of dance is in French.’

  ‘In that case, I see no issue with assigning you on that basis,’ Max said. ‘There is a nightclub in a particular city – never mind the name at this point. You will find out if it becomes necessary for you to learn it. This club has lost a number of dancers and our network operator in the city has told us they are currently looking for a young woman who is capable of performing. The proprietor is a loyal supporter of our campaigns. If you were to work there, it would raise no questions.’

  ‘A club,’ Sylvie remarked. Not a theatre or ballet troupe. Her mind filled with music and she could almost feel the heat of spotlights, smell the cigarette smoke and liquor on the clientele’s breath. A dozen different perfumes mingling together. Sultry female voices crooning songs of love and deceit in her ears. Dieu, how she missed it. How she missed her mother and the smell of powder and paints. The longing and homesickness were almost physical in their intensity.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Crichton? I think we lost you for a moment,’ Miss Atkins asked.

  Sylvie shook herself out of the reverie and smiled widely at them both.

  ‘I’ll do it. I want to go home. See France again, even if it will be the last time. No one knows what the outcome of the war will be. Whatever is necessary, there is no one better positioned than me.’

  ‘Whatever is necessary,’ Max mused. He exchanged a glance with Miss Atkins. ‘Whatever it takes might be another matter completely.’

  Somewhere over France

  The interrogation and interview played themselves over and over like a Pathé showreel in Sylvie’s head. It served as a useful distraction against the upcoming events of the next quarter of an hour.

  What was about to happen was landing in occupied France on a (hopefully – unless they were shot down) unwatched field, to be met (hopefully – unless they had been discovered and arrested) by agents working for the local network who would assist Sylvie in beginning her onward journey to Nantes and the Librarian network Sylvie would become a part of. So many uncertainties.

  The message had been sent out over the BBC radio broadcast earlier that day: ‘An umbrella and a parasol are for sale in Rue Candide.’ The code that one male and one female agent were to be arriving inland near Bordeaux. Being referred to as a parasol made Sylvie want to giggle, the image was so absurd. The man who sat alongside Sylvie didn’t look much like an umbrella for that matter.

  It was a balmy evening, and the moon was full as the Lockheed Hudson flew across the Bay of Biscay, though a bank of low clouds gathering ahead threatened to make landing tricky. The drops were always made on the nights of a full moon to enable pilots to fly low without lights. Shadows illuminating the faces of passengers and crew made for an unsettling experience.

  ‘At least the cover will help mask us from German searchlights,’ the pilot reassured Sylvie and her travelling companion. ‘I’ve made this drop twice now, and aside from a couple of tricky streams running across the fields, it makes for a perfect landing strip.’

  ‘At least we’re not jumping.’ The man beside Sylvie gave her a patronising smile. ‘Wouldn’t want to be ruffling your hair now, would you?’

  Sylvie rolled her eyes. ‘At least that is a problem I have to consider,’ she replied sweetly and a little unfairly. The agent was reasonably young – no more than thirty – but had a very receding hairline. His cheeks reddened and his fingers twitched as if he was about to check his thinning locks were still there. Sylvie hid a smile.

  ‘Why aren’t we jumping?’ Sylvie asked the navigator. ‘I was told that was the original plan.’

  ‘We need to make a collection,’ he replied. He jerked his thumb at a consignment of wooden crates held in place with a cargo net. ‘Saves having to send those down on ’chutes as well.’

  Sylvie nodded. She had hated parachute training, which had taken place at an airbase outside Manchester, and was relieved that she was unlikely to risk twisting an ankle or worse. Her mission would be over before it started if she was unable to dance.

  ‘The coast is coming up now,’ the pilot said.

  Sylvie peered through the window, cupping her hands around her eyes to try to get a better look at the long, straight coastline with the unending dunes. Of course, there was barely anything visible. The plane had taken a circular route, arriving from an unconventional direction, to avoid the German gun turrets that defended the coast against Allied attacks.

  Home. Sylvie swallowed down the emotions that filled her belly.

  The pilot banked the plane sharply.

  ‘Are you all ready?’ he asked. ‘I need you off as soon as we land and reload. A reception committee should be waiting for you. No red carpets or china tea, I’m afraid.’

  The man grunted and Sylvie laughed dutifully.

  ‘We want to be gone within ten minutes. We have to unload and collect a return passenger.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Sylvie asked.

  ‘We don’t get told details. We just arrive, drop and pick up,’ the engineer said. ‘Waste of a good plane, if you ask me.’

  The pilot nodded in agreement. ‘This girl has better things to do with her time.’

  Sylvie detected a note of hostility. She’d been warned about that. The use of planes had been restricted since the RAF protested that landing in France was putting their men at risk and a waste of fighting machines.

  ‘We’ll be quick,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘Quicker than you can get your knickers up and down,’ the balding man joked.

  Sylvie eyed him coldly. ‘Which is still not as quick as you could do the deed.’

&nbs
p; She smiled to imply it was meant to be a joke, causing the pilot to snigger. The bald man began to fuss with his shoe. Sylvie sat back, wondering if she had been foolish to rise to his jibes. She had no idea where he would be going once they landed, and as far as she knew, they may have to work together.

  The plane was met almost as soon as the wheels down. The seemingly empty field came alive as shadows rose out of the surrounding forest. Three separate groups of men appeared. They were obviously well practised. The first began unloading the crates from the plane. The second group ushered Sylvie and her companion away quickly through the damp undergrowth and into the safety of tree cover. She had a brief moment to look behind and spot the third group helping a limping figure onto the steps of the plane.

  Sylvie had been briefed on what would happen next, but it still happened in a rush, her head whirling. She and the other agent were hurried through the forest on foot. It was hard to move quickly through the tangle of roots and bushes that clutched at them while holding their bags. Before long, Sylvie was hot and breathless. From the direction they had left, the distant sound of gunfire punctured the night. Sylvie’s instinct was to freeze and huddle down in the undergrowth, but one of her guides urged her on.

  ‘Not our affair. Keep going.’

  When they eventually reached a rutted track they were ushered onto a flatbed truck and nestled among various pieces of what Sylvie thought might be farm machinery. By the time the German sirens were screaming through the night, a tarpaulin had been placed over the top and they were making a jolting journey from the landing site into occupied France.

  Chapter Three

  Rural France

  After, perhaps, half an hour, the truck jerked to a stop, and the tarpaulin was removed. Sylvie and her companion were ushered into a farmhouse and taken through the kitchen, straight into an upstairs bedroom. The room smelt of cigarettes and sweat. The scent was markedly different to English tobacco, the pungent, thick aroma reminding Sylvie of her childhood.