The House of Flowers

by Charlotte Bingham

  The weight of undiscovered treachery always stopped Jack in his tracks. He was about to authorise the mission of two young agents on two particularly difficult dodges, and if the caochán was still active, as he was sure it was, then they were in danger of being betrayed before their feet even touched French soil. As his sixth sense once again kicked in, he turned on his heel, found a taxi and urged it back along up to Baker Street as quickly as it was possible for it to go.

  He was too late to abort Billy’s mission. The young man had been dropped into France the night before and was now to all intents and purposes lost to them until he had fulfilled his allotted task. He managed, however, to stop Poppy from being despatched at the eleventh hour, much to Anthony’s astonishment and Poppy’s utter dismay.

  ‘You’re only postponed,’ Anthony told her, after he had summoned her to his office late that same afternoon. ‘The Colonel’s convinced you might have already been betrayed and doesn’t want to risk you. We’re going back to the drawing board on this one, and if the target is still in place when we’ve done the redesign then we’ll recommission. But since this is a major one, you’ll have to be held in reserve – which might mean cooling your heels a bit for the next few days.’

  Poppy dutifully accepted her fate, while inwardly boiling. She had just got herself to exactly the right stage of mental and physical preparation for her drop, like a racehorse after its last gallop prior to a race. But now she was going to have to go off the boil, only to work herself back up into the right state of edginess and fervour needed to fuel this sort of work when required to do so. So to let off a bit of steam she went down to the shooting range that had been set up in the basement of the great house and fired off twenty-four rounds with her pistol. All of them scored bulls.

  Billy knew everything about the region, everything about the people, and everything about the family of which he was to be a part. He had known all that well in advance of his leaving, but now he was actually here – in France – everything he had learned had to be put into a different perspective. A foreign countryside looked very different in reality as opposed to on the page, as Billy soon discovered. Maps were flat and neat; the countryside was sprawling, alien and untidy. Languages might come easily to the tongue, but when people spoke to you not only in their regional dialect but also, as most French people were prone to do, at great speed, it wasn’t always as easy to understand as it had seemed in the classrooms or round the breakfast table at Eden Park. Then there was the reality of the war itself. Billy, having survived air raids, having been to London and seen the damage, and having devoured every bit of information he could about the war from the newspapers, thought he was not only well informed but a bit of an expert when it came to what was happening, where and to whom. But nothing could have prepared him for the actual sight and the sound of war.

  The small town of Nantelle to which he had been sent had suffered extensive and brutal damage in the previous world war, having been all but razed to the ground. Painstakingly it had been rebuilt, not fully but satisfactorily enough for trading to be resumed by the mid-nineteen twenties and farming to be re-established after that, agriculture having been hit hardest of all due to the rape of the land by the big guns and the non-stop trench warfare. The people too had suffered personally at the hands of the Germans, the women having been raped and many of the men murdered for allegedly passing on information to the enemy, so it was neither a happy nor a particularly welcoming place in which Billy now found himself. The Goncourt family was a large, argumentative and truculent brood, a clutch of eight headed by a father who barely spoke a word to anyone and a mother who used the back of her hand like a fly swat on any child that got in her path regardless of their age or sex. The children were five boys and three girls. The boys had all been too young to fight when war had first broken out, but were now plenty old enough to work on the vast, depressing farm whose buildings looked as if they had been put up in the Dark Ages and left untouched since, and whose semi-cultivated land seemed to stretch into the next province. The three girls were all still at school, none of them pretty and all of them rude and unpleasant to all and sundry as long as they were out of sight of their mother. As soon as Maman came near, however, they turned into little Sisters of Mercy, perfect angels who would do anything for anybody, polite and concerned, quiet and demure. Their abrupt change of manner, however, did not seem to save them from their mother’s constant scolding or slapping, which they put up with like the pretend saints they were.

  They did not know what to make of Billy, since Billy was an idiot. Only Jacques, the father, knew who Billy really was and what he was doing here, something he would never reveal to his family even if it had been permitted, being a man of such great suspicion and privacy that he fully believed at least two if not three of his own children were capable of being collaborators. Maurice Goncourt was an old contact of Jack Ward himself, Jack’s own father having stayed with the Goncourts for several years running when he had taken to holidaying in that part of France, a habit Jack himself had continued until as a sensitive young man he grew appalled and tired of the noisy children being so readily spawned in the great farmhouse of Nantelle and decided to take his holidays elsewhere.

  But Maurice and he had always kept in touch, because Jack knew how much his father had liked the taciturn Breton. He also knew Maurice was a man to be trusted, not only because of his very distinguished record in the previous war – a history to which he simply never referred – but because his heart and sympathies lay immutably with la belle France and her fight for survival under German occupation. That was why Jack had so carefully handpicked the place where Billy was to be sent, and why Maurice and Maurice alone had been informed of the reason both for Billy’s visit and for his apparent state of mental simplicity.

  The idea had come to Jack not long after the Christmas pantomime where Billy had given such a memorable performance as the village simpleton. He couldn’t actually put hand on heart and say the notion occurred to him as swiftly as Archimedes had been struck by the principle that came to be named after him, but he did always like to think that the idea was sown the evening he sat chuckling away at Billy’s wonderfully funny performance.

  Then, when Anthony and he had been trying to think up a dodge that would help them gain information about the German defences preparatory to the D-day landing already pencilled in for June of that year, Jack was for no apparent reason suddenly put in mind of Billy’s performance as the Simpleton.

  ‘The one person who has the entrée practically everywhere,’ Jack had explained in the ultra-slow, over-cautious manner he adopted when considering or discussing matters of great importance. ‘The Simpleton. The Village Idiot, as he’s so unkindly called. Because he has a childlike behaviour pattern, and because he can’t seem to communicate with anyone properly, people tend to disregard him completely. They say anything they feel like in front of him, indiscretions, lies, secrets, anything you like. He can go almost anywhere, as well, following along like a child again, enjoying just being with people, trying to make them laugh, sometimes making a damned nuisance of himself but rarely ever being sent packing or punished for it.’

  ‘Unless he runs foul of the village bullies, of course,’ Anthony remarked. ‘Terrible things used to happen to the poor lad in our village when I was a kid, just to amuse the bully boys.’

  ‘There is that risk, granted, but when you hear what I have to say I think you’ll agree it’s a risk worth taking. Besides, the person who is going to be exposed to it is very good at looking after himself.’

  Jack had then laid down his plan. Billy should be dropped into France to a designated family that would adopt him as the child of relatives who had been killed in the war. Billy would play the Simpleton, right from the moment he left the aeroplane to the moment he came home, trying to work his way into places where no one else could go, where he might be able to gather information that no one else could get.

  Anthony was intrigued by the notion
, then appalled when he realised what danger it would put Billy in. Jack contradicted him, saying that if Billy played his part right – which Jack was absolutely sure he would, because they had seen him do it – no one would pay him any attention, particularly the Germans who would be so busy looking out for what they considered to be bona fide Underground fighters that they would quite overlook one who was actually attaching himself to them.

  Jack was so persuasive that he soon won Anthony over to his side. Not that it would have mattered had he not, because Jack was already so determined on his dodge that he would have commissioned Billy anyway, with or without Anthony’s agreement. But it was better that Anthony should agree since, as Jack well knew, the major was very fond of the young man. Should anything happen to Billy on a mission such as this with which Anthony had not concurred, Jack knew he would have an awful lot to answer for.

  So it was that Billy found himself on the streets of the small town on Nantelle, acting the Simpleton. The first week was a nightmare because he had to be escorted into town by the two youngest Goncourt boys, ill-mannered youths who as soon as they arrived in the town square at once set about organising the dunking of their idiot cousin in the fountain that stood in traditional pride of place in the centre of the square. Other kids with nothing better to do joined in the fun and games, an initiation ceremony that Billy was forced to endure daily for over a week until the bullies bored of it and returned to more productive pastimes, such as trying to steal some of the little produce that was in the shops or breaking the windows of anyone suspected of collaborating with the enemy.

  The latter activity could only take place at certain times of day when the occupying soldiers were off at their work, which as Billy soon learned from listening was the installation of new defences along the seaboard against the rumoured landings as well as the reinforcement of the existing ones. After a few days Billy began to make his presence felt in front of the German soldiers as they assembled in the square prior to being trucked off to work on the coastline twelve miles north of the village. As they paraded in the morning, Billy would parade as well, mimicking the soldiers’ drill in his Simpleton way, with a broom as his rifle. At first some of the soldiers had been ready to take offence until the more affable of their number pointed out what a card the boy was, and how comic were his little manoeuvres. So successful was Billy’s daily cabaret that it was only a matter of days before the Germans made him perform for them while they were waiting for their trucks.

  Billy was only too delighted to obey, grinning daftly and talking absolute gibberish as he marched up and down with his broom, shouldering arms, presenting arms, standing to attention, standing at ease, shouting unintelligible orders all the while and even finally daring to goose-step in front of the enemy, a move he made sure always ended with a crashing pratfall in a puddle whenever possible. The soldiers would roar with laughter, applaud, and even reward him with sweets, prizes that Billy was careful to dole out immediately to the bully boys who were now his chums, so completely in thrall were they to his wonderfully funny routines.

  But Billy knew perfectly well that if he made the slightest mistake, if he once slipped up, the game would be over. Someone in this odd, ill-tempered village would be bound to report him in return for a small sum of money and that would be that. That would be the end of his mission. Not for one moment did it occur to Billy that it would be the end of him – that was the last thought in his head. All he thought about was succeeding at what he had been set to do, and on top of that perhaps even doing something that he was not expected to do.

  He did have one long stop, however, a safety net that both the Colonel and Major Folkestone insisted upon, and that was the contact numbers for Rolande and Yves, both of whom so far had miraculously survived the whole occupation while remaining fully employed in the Resistance. If he ran into any real trouble that did not end in an arrest, Billy was ordered to make contact with one or both, and they would see to his safety. At the back of his mind Billy was glad of that, for while he had no worries as to how he would behave in action or concerns as to what might happen to him if things went wrong, he still would prefer to get home in one piece, for Marjorie’s sake more than for his own of course.

  But so far so good. By the end of his third week in residence, Billy had been not only accepted by the youth of Nantelle but adopted by the Germans, who now treated him like a mascot. At first, when Billy realised what was happening, he worried that his new friends in the little town might see him as some sort of collaborator. But because his character as the Simpleton was so sweet and harmless, and because he was so innocently funny, everyone seemed to accept the fact that a young man without the benefit of proper mental faculties wouldn’t know left from right, let alone German from Frenchman. So while they would have seriously beaten up any one of their own number who was befriended by the hated foe, they excused Billy by reason of his simplicity.

  Billy now marched with the Germans up and down the road, escorted them to their trucks, and was there waiting for their return in the evening to escort them back to their billets. A week later his greatest admirer, a corpulent corporal named Otto, suddenly pulled him up into the back of his truck and allowed him to travel with them all the way to the coast. He was not, of course, allowed any further than that; he had to remain in or around the truck all day and keep himself amused while the engineers went to work. For the first few days Billy never strayed from his post, sitting by the wheel of the truck and eating the food the soldiers shared with him when they stopped for their breaks. In return, he would do funny walks, sing nonsense songs, or perform appalling gymnastics, falling all over the place until he had all the soldiers falling over as well.

  At the beginning of the next week, in all ‘innocence’ he followed his favourite corporal – albeit at a distance – to the defence works. A sentry spotted him and raised his rifle, sighting the barrel straight at his head. Billy immediately responded by trying to stand on his head and falling in a heap, buying enough time for Corporal Otto to explain his presence. The corporal then hurried back to him and tried to shoo him back to the truck. Billy copied him, shooing him in return back to the gate, and the mutual shooing continued for a good few minutes until Billy had not only his friends in hysterics as usual, but also – he noted with inner satisfaction – the sentry too, who had put down his rifle to mop his eyes with his handkerchief.

  The following day the sentry waved the corporal’s puppy dog through, an act that Billy rewarded by doing his best backward walk, while doing his best to look to the front by turning his head as far round as he could. By the time he arrived on a clifftop bristling with machine-gun dugouts, gun posts, mortar batteries and radar equipment, he had won a whole host of new admirers from regular soldiers he passed en route.

  By the next week Billy was an established feature of life on the clifftop, so much so that he thought he would be ill for a couple of days to see whether or not they missed him enough to drop their guard altogether.

  He lay at home feigning a terrible pain in his head, a performance that won only laughter from his so-called cousins, although Madame Goncourt showed her true nature by nursing him and caring for him as if he was one of her own. While he lay in bed he thought a lot about the soldiers he was duping, and now that he was away from them he felt a sudden terrible pang of guilt. While he knew they were using him in a way for their own entertainment, not one of them had been unkind to him, jeered at him, or done anything deliberately to hurt him. They had laughed at him, yes, but then Billy had been inviting them to do just that. But they had also fed him, watered him, allowed him to sleep peacefully when he wanted to, and lent him a coat to wear in the evening when it turned cold one day when they were late home. More than that, he had seen in many pairs of young eyes, eyes not much older than his, a look that he understood because he knew he had worn the very same expression himself all those years ago at the Dump, that terrible school where he had been abandoned before he was rescued by Marjorie’s l
ove. The eyes he saw had that same look of loneliness and of fear, except the fear they showed was not just at being in some place totally alien to them, but fear that they might not survive the next episode in their young lives, the invasion of France by the mighty Allied forces that would almost certainly end the war, at the cost of many thousands of German lives.

  Before he went to sleep, he prayed with all his might that what he was doing might help to bring a quicker end to the hostilities that were decimating the youth of Europe.

  On his return he was treated like the prodigal son, given special treats by his soldier friends, of chocolate and cake, cigarettes and biscuits, while those who could speak a little French tried to find out what had been the matter. Billy of course could not answer them sensibly, so instead he pantomimed a terrible pain in his head that made him spin and tumble, play-acting the frightful affliction that had made him writhe and faint, until his large audience’s good humour was restored. Even the stern-faced officers who at first had tried to get rid of this new nuisance had been won over, and at lunchtimes he was now often required to go and do his famous gymnastic show for the cadre of top brass who, although they took their specially cooked meals in a fairly luxuriously equipped hut, were all too obviously bored with the works that were being carried out and only too happy to be entertained by some chump from the local village.

  By the end of his third week on the clifftops, Billy had the run of them, an apparent freedom to go wheresoever he chose. He could hardly believe his good fortune and wondered at the brilliance of the Colonel in concocting such a plan. Sometimes he was stopped when faced by a soldier who had no idea who he was, but there was always someone close at hand to explain, and as soon as Billy turned up the gibberish act an extra notch, he had any putative enemy quickly won over.