by Janet Tanner
‘I couldn’t finish what I had to say in front of Guy,’ he said. ‘We don’t want him repeating conversations.’
‘I hope he doesn’t mention that I was coming to your room,’ she said. Nervousness and something else – the sudden overwhelming awareness of him – made her tone sharp.
‘Is he likely to?’
‘You’re his tutor. What do you think?’
‘I think you had better have an excuse ready, just in case. And I’ll be as brief as I can. I need to get a message to someone in Périgueux who is working for me and it’s urgent – too urgent to leave it in our usual letterbox.’
Kathryn knew he was referring to the series of hiding places in dry-stone walls and hollow tree stumps where agents of the Resistance hid messages if they needed to pass on information. She bit her lip, desperately trying to think of an excuse to make the journey to Périgueux.
‘What would I tell Charles?’
‘Do you have to tell him anything? You two don’t talk much, do you?’
‘I’d need to take the car. He’d certainly wonder why.’
‘All right – Plan B. I’ll provide the excuse if you can provide the car. You can say I need to pick up some more books to help me with Guy’s education from a friend there. Drive me in and I’ll deliver the message myself.’
‘You have got this well worked out, haven’t you?’ she said drily.
‘That’s my job – the reason I’m here. Well, what about it?’
She thought for a moment.
‘All right, we’ll try it. Who do you have to contact?’
‘I’ll tell you that when we get there. But we’d better make an early start. I shall need to be in Périgueux by ten-thirty at the latest.’
‘That shouldn’t be a problem. Charles is working long hours.’
‘I’ll leave the arrangments to you then.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘What the devil do you want to go to Périgueux for?’ Charles exploded when she broached the subject.
‘I told you – Paul has some materials at a friend’s house there that he wants for Guy. Why do you have to question everything I want to do?’
‘It sounds like a waste of petrol to me – joy-riding all that way.’
‘Don’t be so mean-minded, Charles. Surely Guy’s education is important enough to justify a little drop of petrol? Anyway, you can always get more from your friend General von Rheinhardt, I expect,’ she added tartly.
‘Von Rheinhardt is not my friend. But I’ve no intention of going over all that again.’
‘Well, can I have the car or can’t I?’
‘I suppose so.’ Charles sighed wearily. He hated this constant bickering. ‘Just as long as you’re sure that’s the reason you’re going.’
Her blood ran cold. ‘ What do you mean by that?’
‘Nothing. But you’re too friendly with this Paul for my liking.’
His eyes were dark, not with suspicion so much as jealousy. Christian! Kathryn thought. What has he been saying? Aloud she said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He’s Guy’s tutor and an old friend, that’s all.’
‘I hope so,’ Charles said tiredly. ‘ I certainly hope so.’
They started out early, Kathryn driving Charles’ Hispano. Spring had begun to turn the valley green, the first faint shoots spiking the trees and hedgerows, but the previous night there had been a frost which made everything sparkle in the first rose-pink rays of the morning sun.
Kathryn, who had always enjoyed being allowed to drive the Hispano, made the most of the opportunity which was, these days, all too rare, and the miles disappeared swiftly beneath its wheels.
Like so many old French towns Périgueux was dominated by its cathedral, a huge white Byzantine building crowning the hill. In happier times Kathryn had enjoyed visiting it, parking in the tree-lined boulevard and walking through the old town where the brownish-red roofs were dwarfed by the majesty of the cathedral with its dozen elegant minarets, five shimmering domes and a four-storey bell tower topped by a conical stone spire on a lantern of slender pillars. Today however she scarcely noticed it. Her mind was elsewhere.
‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked Paul.
‘Puy St-Front. You know it?’ He was sitting, remarkably relaxed, in the passenger seat, enjoying the comfort of the soft leather.
‘Yes. But you’ll have to direct me when we get there.’
‘I will, don’t worry.’
In spite of the war the streets were busy. Kathryn was forced to concentrate on negotiating the traffic and pedestrians.
‘Turn left. Here. Stop where you like. I have to pay a visit to the doctor’s.’
He opened the passenger door and got out, walking along the narrow street, his rather worn brown suit with a shirt buttoned to the neck French-style blending perfectly with the surroundings.
As she waited Kathryn found herself wondering about him again. He had come into her life and turned it upside down, made her question all her fine principles, insinuated himself under her roof – and yet she knew so little about him. Perhaps it was safest that way but she couldn’t help being curious – and suspecting that under any circumstances he would still be a very private person. The air of mystery was not only attractive but also strangely disconcerting.
After a while Kathryn began to be concerned. Paul had been gone a very long time. A Vichy police car turned into the narrow street and her heart leaped into her mouth. Supposing they stopped and asked what she was doing here – what would she say? To her relief it did not stop but cruised by.
Just when she thought he never would, Paul reappeared, coming out of the peeling brown-painted door with its tarnished brass plate.
‘Where have you been?’ she hissed at him as he slid into the passenger seat beside her. ‘ I wondered what ever had happened to you!’
‘I told you – I had to visit the doctor. One has to wait one’s turn.’ His unruffled manner, when she had been so worried, annoyed her.
‘That’s all very well, but I thought I was going to be questioned by Vichy police.’
‘You weren’t, were you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s all right then, isn’t it?’
She pursed her lips angrily. It was impossible to argue with him and not very prudent either here in the middle of a busy street. She started the engine.
‘Hang on,’ he said in English. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Home, of course.’
‘Don’t you think perhaps we should visit a bookshop first and buy some books? It will look a little strange if we arrive back without any, since that was our excuse for coming.’
‘I imagined you had some. You seem to think of everything,’ she snapped, annoyed at her own lack of thought.
He ignored the jibe and his continued determination not to be ruffled annoyed her still further. She knocked the car out of gear.
‘What do you want to do about it then?’
‘Drive on,’ he said, ‘but slowly. Stop at the first bookshop you see.’
‘Which way?’
‘I thought you said you knew the place. All right, turn left here, then right … slow down, can’t you! Here … stop!’
She did as he said, seething inwardly and trying not to show it. His sharp eyes had noted a second-hand bookshop; he got out and disappeared inside. A few minutes later he was back with an armful of battered volumes.
‘That should do the trick.’ He deposited them on the rear seat. ‘All right, we’ll go home now.’
‘I wish you’d stop treating me like a chauffeur,’ she snapped.
She drove in silence until they were outside the town and heading back towards Savigny. Her knuckles gripping the steering wheel were white, her neck and shoulders a hard line of anger and tension. Out in the country, miles from anywhere, he touched her arm lightly.
‘Stop a minute, Kathryn.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do as I say for once without asking questions.�
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Still fuming she pulled into the side of the road. The sun had melted the frost from the hedgerows now and the green shoots were clearly visible.
‘Well?’
‘Kathryn, would you rather I left the château?’
‘Sometimes I wish to God you’d never come.’
‘That’s neither here nor there though, is it?’ He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one without offering the packet to her. ‘I thought you’d be able to cope with me being there but now I’m not so sure. You seem very … strung up. That’s a dangerous thing to be.’
Hot colour suffused her face and neck. Little as she wanted him there she wanted even less to be judged and found wanting.
‘I just wish I knew a little more of what was going on,’ she said.
‘I’ve been keeping you in the dark for your own safety.’
‘That’s not what you said in the beginning. Then you were full of all kinds of things you wanted me to do.’
‘That was before I decided to go ahead with asking you if I could use the château as a base. You’ve provided me with a good cover, which is probably just about the most important thing you could do. But for all our sakes the less you know about what I’m doing the better. It’s dangerous to have too many agents under one roof. As things are, if I was captured you could plead ignorance. My cover story will hold up, I assured you of that. If you stuck to it no one would have any reason to disbelieve you.’
‘Unless you were to betray me.’
‘I wouldn’t that.’
‘Brave words. But I’ve heard how the Gestapo persuade people to talk, putting out their eyes with a naked flame, cutting off their genitals. How would you hold out against that sort of torture?’
‘They wouldn’t take me alive. I have a cyanide capsule in my cuff link.’
And still he said it with that infuriating calm, talking about killing himself with deadly poison in the same casually conversational manner he might use to discuss a trip on a cross-channel ferry. She looked at him sharply.
‘Who are you?’
‘You know better than to ask me that.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean your real name. I know you won’t tell me that. No, what I actually mean is – why are you doing this? Why you putting your life on the line in this way?’
‘I have my reasons.’
‘Which are?’
He opened the car window and flicked out the cigarette end.
‘Let’s just say that I do understand your concern for your family – espedally for your son. If the Nazis did something terrible to him how would you feel – besides being devastated, of course? Wouldn’t you want revenge? You wouldn’t care about yourself then, would you? All that would matter would be doing all you could to help drive the bastards back into the sewers where they belong and screw the manhole covers down so tight they could never get out to wreak that kind of terror and destruction ever again.’
His hands were balled now in his lap, his voice, though quiet, held such undercurrents of anguish that the last remnants of her anger died, replaced by dawning horror.
‘You mean …?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he said roughly. ‘ But I understand those feelings only too well.’
For a moment she could not speak. She only knew that suddenly she was seeing him in a totally different light.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘ Please tell me … what happened.’
‘I said I don’t want to talk about it. Suffice it to say that when this damned war started I had a wife and daughter. Now … well, I haven’t.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again, knowing it was totally inadequate. She reached out and covered his hand with her own, the only way she could begin to express the emotions that were flooding through her – regret at having misjudged him, shame for her self-centred reactions and an empathy so profound it was as if she herself had already lost those dearest to her. For a few moments they sat without moving, locked together by a common bond, nothing physical now, in spice of the contact of their hands, more a meeting of two souls offering and receiving comfort.
Paul was the first to move. He turned his hand over, squeezed her fingers lightly, then placed her hand on the steering wheel.
‘I think perhaps we ought to go back to Savigny now,’ he said.
Two nights later Paul came to her suite as she was getting ready to go down for dinner.
‘Charles isn’t here, is he?’ he said softly when she opened the door.
‘No – he’s gone on down to discuss business with his father.’
‘I thought I heard him going downstairs and I wanted to speak to you. I have to go out tonight.’
‘Now?’
‘No – later. After dinner. If it looks like being a long session I’ll excuse myself by saying I have some work to prepare. But if there should be any questions asked I’d be grateful if you’d cover for me.’
‘Yes, of course.’
She knew better than to ask why he had to go out, what he planned to do. But when he had gone again she looked out of the window. It was dark already but a clear night, the stars shining in the velvet blackness and a moon making the beginnings of a frost shimmer on the bushes. A perfect night for some kind of resistance operation. A perfect night to die.
Kathryn didn’t know why she should have heard those words so clearly in her mind. She only knew that a shiver ran through her and a feeling of dread began to close in. But this time, she knew, her fear was not so much for herself, for the family, or even for Guy. It was all for the man who called himself Paul Curtis.
A few minutes before half past eleven Paul quietly closed the door of his room behind him and crept along the passage and down the stairs. The château was dark and silent but for the occasional settling of a timber and he blessed the luck that had sent the family early to bed this evening. Not that it was only luck, of course – they were all tired from the long hours they were working – but he had not wanted to trust to that. He had made sure his window was unlatched – the creaking of the heavy catch would have been a dreadful giveaway on such a cold, crisp night – and tested again the heavy creeper covering the wall outside which he had checked out as a possible escape route the first night he had been in the room. He did not relish the prospect of having to descend that way unless it was absolutely imperative. It might take his weight, but then again it might not. But at least tonight he had been spared having to find out. When the house was quiet he had changed into a black roll-neck sweater and a pair of dark corduroy trousers and rubbed charcoal over his face before checking the pockets of his jacket to make sure his torch, gun, and a hip flask filled with brandy were there. Now, carrying his shoes in his hand, he made his way out of the château by the back door.
The air was still and crisp and moonlight illuminated the garden, making it easy to find his way across the central courtyard to the outbuilding where his bicycle was stored. It was, he thought, a perfect night for flying. He had been almost certain, even before he had tuned in to the BBC that evening, that the operation would be on and the coded message which he and he alone understood had confirmed it. ‘ Le bébé s’appelle Jacques’ might sound like incomprehensible rubbish but to Paul it made perfect sense. Tonight a Lysander would be leaving England with his fully trained radio operator and a demolition expert to join his team. He must be there to meet it.
Adrenaline surged through his veins and he pedalled faster than he needed to, watching the dark sky for any arcing headlights that might warn of a ponce patrol and listening for the sound of engines. All was quiet. Again he ran over the details of the operation in his mind, details he had planned and set in motion by his visit to the doctor’s surgery in Périgueux two days earlier. His men were briefed and ready – Albert, a fanner who owned a pickup truck that was to be used to ferry the two new arrivals to their safe houses, Jean Lussac, the stationmaster, who hated to be left out of anything and two local lads whom Albert had vouched for to act as lookouts. They
had only had to listen to the BBC as he had done to know that tonight was the night. Just as long as they had heard it, he thought wryly. He didn’t much fancy having to meet the Lysander all by himself with no way of transporting the new agents. But at least they would be put down in comparative comfort, not dropped by parachute into a ploughed field as he had been when he had first come to France.
As he approached the field selected as a landing ground Paul saw the pick-up truck parked, as planned, in a gateway, and felt a surge of relief. Albert, at least, had heard the message and presumably would have passed it on. Paul dismounted, laying his bicycle against the hedge, and approached the van.
‘You’re here, then.’
‘Yes, but Jean won’t be able to make it. He’s caught flu.’
‘Never mind. We’ll manage without him. It’s a perfect night. The pilot shouldn’t have any trouble following the landmarks if he’s done his homework properly. They’ll be on time. I should think.’
‘As long as they can keep out of the way of the flak.’
Albert was a dour man, though a reliable one, who hated the Boche with a fervour that had stirred him out of his mundane existence into active resistance. At the moment his mouth was full of bread and cold sausage so that his words came out thickly.
Paul flicked his lighter and checked his watch.
‘Let’s get the landing site marked out. You can finish your supper while we’re waiting.’
Albert packed the remains of his bread and sausage into one pocket of his coat and a flask of coffee into the other. He and the two village lads, who had climbed into the truck with him whilst they waited, joined Paul and together they crossed the fields to the one they had chosen for the landing strip. Bounded on three sides by hedges, with a line of trees at its far end, it was reasonably flat but low enough for the flares to be invisible from any direction except overhead. Paul and Albert set out the lamps that Albert had brought in his truck in the shape of an ‘L’, whilst the two lads took up positions from which they could keep a good lookout. There was nothing to do now but wait.
They talked little, Albert stoically finishing his sausage and Paul taking a few swigs of stomach-warming brandy. Paul checked his watch again – a few minutes after midnight. The tension of waiting prickled over his skin. Somehow it was almost impossible to imagine the plane ever arriving. If it did not he would have to risk another direct contact with London, he supposed, but he did not like using his radio more than he could help. He was not fast enough at it and every minute spent transmitting was another minute when he might be detected. He didn’t care much for himself but he did care about the danger to which it would expose his circuit and most especially the danger to the de Savignys – and Kathryn. With an effort he pushed the thought aside. No point worrying about it yet – worry about it tomorrow when he knew for certain something had gone wrong with the drop.
