by Alex Gerlis
The older man now had both of his hands against the back of her thighs, very slowly moving them to the inside of her legs and upwards. She could feel his breath, hot and damp against the back of her neck. Behind the young man, she could see the woman, who was beginning to look agitated.
If he moves his hands any higher up, I’m telling her the code-word. This is impossible.
The gloved hands lingered at the very top of her thighs. The younger man was now standing directly against her, their bodies touching. His face was so close to hers that it was impossible for her to focus properly on him. She could feel the shape of his body.
‘Don’t tell her,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t want you to tell her the code-word. I am enjoying this.’ He stepped back an inch or two to allow enough space for his ice cold hands to run up and down the front of her body, his sharp fingernails scratching her.
‘The code-word?’ The woman had moved to the rear of the room, as if she didn’t want to see too much of what was going on. Her voice appeared to be shaking.
The younger man smiled and shook his head. ‘Don’t tell her,’ he whispered again.
She said nothing.
His hands were now cupping her breasts. She was close to breaking point.
‘Even ...’ she started to speak.
‘Even what?’ said the woman.
She hesitated. Even the Germans don’t behave like this was what she had been about to say.
‘Even ... if this goes on for another day, I won’t say anything.’
The older man had now placed his gloved hands round her neck. At first, the touch was very light and he was almost stroking her. But very slowly, the grip tightened. At the same time, the younger man had taken her nipples between his bony fingers; playing with them at first and then pinching them hard. She could feel the tears streaming down her cheeks.
It is perfectly possible to withstand physical torture, they had told her.
You will be amazed at how much pain the human body can withstand.
The important thing to remember is that it is not in their interests to harm you. You will be of no use to them then.
She wasn’t so sure, but it was at this point that she realised: the British would surely not expect someone like me to be able to withstand all this? If it goes on any longer then they will surely start to get suspicious. They will wonder how I was able to withstand all this.
‘Ploughshares!’ she spat the word out and at the same time drove her knee sharply into the younger man’s groin. He crumpled to floor in agony, while the older man tightened his grip on her neck, so that he was almost choking her.
‘Stop!’ the woman cried out. ‘It’s over. Go now.’
The older man reluctantly released his grip.
The younger man slowly hauled himself up, one hand clutching his groin.
She had moved a few paces away from him now, but he lashed out at her with his fist, which she just managed to avoid.
‘I said, stop!’ shouted the woman. ‘Enough,’ she said to the men. ‘You can leave now.’
The younger one in front of her looked disappointed. The older one allowed his hands to move down from her neck and brush against her breasts, holding them there for a moment.
‘I said, that’s enough. Go!’ The woman sounded angry.
As the men left the room, she turned to Nathalie, avoiding looking at her directly. She looked shaken.
‘We did not expect you to last that long. You did well. Get dressed now.’
Once she was dressed the man in the beret came into the room to put the blindfold back on.
She reckoned that having held out so well in the interrogations was the reason she was being allowed home for Christmas.
ooo000ooo
She had been dropped off at the flat in the early afternoon of Christmas Eve. Owen, she had been told, would be home by four.
It was a strange sensation, arriving home at a place that she had never truly regarded as such. The flat was still and cold, if anything it felt colder inside than out. She walked around the empty rooms, not even bothering to put the lights on. She glanced at the noisy kitchen clock. Ten to two. Another two hours before he’s home. And that sensation again, the unaccountable feeling of actually looking forward to seeing Owen that had taken her by shock when she first felt it and which surprised and disconcerted her now.
In the lounge she picked up their wedding photo from a shelf. When she’d first seen it she thought they looked like two strangers, randomly placed next to each other. Owen seemed to be standing in the light, his face beaming proudly. She was very slightly in the shadow and just that bit further away from him than you would expect.
In the photograph he looked little more than a teenager, young even for his years. But next to the wedding photograph was one that she hadn’t seen before, taken in Hyde Park as the leaves of autumn swirled around them. A passing Canadian officer had obligingly taken the picture and there they were: faces pressed together, both smiling, both in the light. No longer strangers
Is it me who has changed – or him?
She carried on walking around the flat.
Just visiting, she thought. Just passing through. Always, just passing through.
The place was meticulous, as she would have expected. Owen was always tidier than her. In the bedroom she noticed her slippers neatly arranged at the foot of the bed. She kicked off her shoes, the sound of them clattering against the skirting board echoing through the flat. Still wearing her coat, she slumped into an armchair.
It was only then that she realised quite how exhausted she was. The past two months had taken her by surprise. As it was she had been busy enough with the quantity of information that Owen was bringing home. He thought he was being careful: arriving home that much earlier and then sitting at the table with his maps and charts while she cooked dinner. It was so easy to come behind him, kiss him on the neck, playfully cover his eyes with her hands and look at the chart. You could learn a lot that way. Occasionally he would ask her help with a word or phrase, never telling her what it was to do with, but she would look at it with far more attention than it needed so that she could take in as much information as possible. It might just be the odd word, but it all counted and the messages that she was getting back from that horrible little Belgian told her that the people in Paris were delighted.
And then in November Owen had come home to say that Captain Archibald wanted her to meet a lady. So the three of them went to a hotel behind Marylebone High Street where they were joined by a lady who spoke fluent French, but was not French. She had never worked out where she came from.
They were sat in a small annexe of the lounge, out of earshot of anyone else. The lady introduced herself as Nicole and gestured for Nathalie to join her on her sofa.
‘We think that you can be of help to us,’ the lady had said. ‘Would you be willing to help in the cause of the liberation of France by returning there? It would not be without danger.’
Nathalie looked towards Owen, who smiled and nodded his head. She remembered that he looked terrified.
The woman continued to speak very fast and very softly in an educated accent. ‘Because of the nature of his work, your husband is aware of our interest. It is important that he knows what is going on, to an extent. You would have his support, but it has to be your decision. We would train you and then you would be flown to France. You would work with your countrymen out there.
‘If you indicate your agreement now, Nathalie, then we will proceed. If not, then this meeting has never taken place. But we do need to know now.’
And that was that. Would she be interested? She had looked towards Owen, who appeared overwhelmed. She asked him what he thought and he said nothing, but nodded weakly.
Just a week later she was somewhere in Lincolnshire. She actually had no idea precisely where she was and couldn’t even be sure that it was Lincolnshire. She had feigned sleep as they drove up the Great North Road and after some three hours noticed th
e dark mass of a cathedral rising high in the distance, after which the car headed east. Not long after that a coach passed them going in the other direction with ‘Lincoln’ on its destination board. At that point Nicole had drawn the curtains in the back of the car (‘so you can get some rest’) and they arrived at the destination an hour later. From the position of the moon and the stars, she could tell that they had continued north east, so she was assuming she was still in Lincolnshire. The Germans had made her study enough of those wretched maps of the United Kingdom for her to have a reasonable sense of where she was.
Apart from the instructors, she was the only one in the isolated farmhouse. The house was set at the bottom of a large hill and surrounded by woods. It was quiet, apart from the constant drone of planes, especially at night. From what she could make out, they were mostly bombers – Lancasters as far as she could tell, dozens of them at a time, flying low and south.
The only other company in the area appeared to be starlings. Thousands of them. During the day they would gather in a dark mass in the trees, staring down at her as if they alone knew the truth. At dusk they would fly around silently, but if anything disturbed them then the sound would be deafening.
The dining room in the farmhouse had been converted into a classroom, with a blackboard on top of a large pine dresser. Upstairs there were three bedrooms. In a cupboard in the bathroom she had found newspaper lining the shelves where the sheets and towels were kept. They were copies of the Lincolnshire Echo from December 1942. She could not be sure if they had been left there deliberately to confuse her, or they were an oversight. If it was the latter, it was a bad mistake.
Nicole slept in one of the bedrooms and one of the other instructors, who always wore a beret and never a coat, in the other. His name was Claude. As far as she could tell, the other instructors who would turn up for a day or two at a time would sleep downstairs. There would always be at least two of them there.
The training divided into three main parts. Firstly, there was instruction on how to use the radio transmitter. She knew she would be hopeless at that, but she could hardly tell them that the Abwehr had so despaired of her inability to use the transmitter and master codes that they had lumbered her with that ghastly Belgian. This time the instructors were more patient and she made some progress.
Then there was the explosives training. Considering that she had trouble lighting the gas on their cooker in London, Nathalie surprised herself at how she was able to cope with the explosives. What she was meant to do with them once in France was another matter. She could hardly blow up a railway track. She also had weapons training. The American Sten Mark 3 was one she seemed to excel at and she got used to carrying the Webley revolver all the time.
The final part of her training was the hardest. Going over her cover story again and again. Knowing everything about her new self. How to conceal her true identity. What to do if captured (hold out for as long as you can, but at least twenty-four hours — that will give your comrades a chance to escape). How to arrange a rendezvous (in as busy a place as possible). What to do if the person you are meeting is not there (keep walking at the same pace, don’t come back to the same place). And so on. It was all rather familiar. This was the only time when she felt truly compromised. She needed to have every sense primed to ensure that she let nothing slip. I’ve never had any training like this before, she had to keep reminding herself. I must make deliberate mistakes. I am an innocent nurse who had just been recruited to the SOE.
She must have dozed off, because she was woken with a start by the call of ‘darling’ as the front door of the flat opened.
Owen walked into the lounge, carrying a large box which he put on the table before rushing over to her.
Normally so talkative and enthusiastic, Owen said very little that long Christmas weekend. He seemed to be happy just to have her with him. They didn’t leave the flat at all on the Saturday, Sunday or the Monday. It was cold and wet and they both seemed to be happy to stay in, dozing in their armchairs and listening to the gramophone. The box he had brought in with him was a hamper courtesy of Captain Archibald and contained enough food and drink to keep them replete as well as banish all thoughts of rationing from their mind. Their neighbour, Roger, could be heard in the flat next door. He was a civil servant who had invited them round the previous Christmas, but neither she nor Owen felt obliged to return the invitation. Apart from him, the rest of the house appeared to be empty for most of the weekend.
Nathalie found she was catching up on lost sleep; invariably she would awake to find Owen staring at her, as if he’d been checking she was still breathing. And when she did emerge from her slumber, she’d smile at him and then he would come over and sit on the side of her armchair and stroke her hair, or cup her chin in his hand and pull her head towards his.
Owen never asked, not once, about where she had been or what she had been through. She assumed he must know something, but she had to resist the temptation to tell him.
He ought to know.
He ought to know, she thought, why she had recoiled when they were making love the first night she was back and he ran his fingers through her hair as he liked to do and as she liked him to do. But now it reminded her of the young man in the interrogation, running his cold hands through her hair. After they’d made love that night he was stroking her breasts when he suddenly stopped. He’d noticed that her nipples were reddened and slightly bruised.
I’ll tell him. Then he’ll realise.
But in the end she told an unconvincing tale about getting trapped as she climbed over a gate and no more was said about it.
He ought to know why she wanted to sleep with the bedside light on. She could not fall asleep otherwise, fearing she was still blindfolded.
The weather turned mild on the Tuesday, the day before she was due to return. In the afternoon they went for a long walk, both lost in their thoughts. Owen was as withdrawn as he had been throughout Christmas. It was so uncharacteristic, she thought. Normally he was bursting with enthusiasm and had so much to tell her. Now he seemed happy just to be with her and with little to say. She was exhausted: the journey that Georg Lange had told her she had irreversibly set out on would continue. She would give anything for it to stop.
They must have walked for hours because it had turned dark without either of them noticing; the city in blackout. They were in a small road in Chelsea, a single light above a shop which, despite the blackout, was throwing out a surprising amount of light around the dark buildings, picking out windows and doorways, bricks glistening. The light caught the shape of a tall dog sitting silently at the kerb. Its dark eyes reflected the light and its head turned slowly, watching them as they walked towards a pub they had spotted at the end of the road.
The inside of the pub was dim, bathed in a yellow light and silent. A cloud of brown tobacco smoke hung just under the ceiling. Two old men were sitting alone at either end of the bar, looking suspiciously at them and at each other. The benches around the sides of the small room were occupied by half a dozen people sat on their own, all occupied in their thoughts. The only noise came from a table which an army corporal shared with two women: both noticeably older than him and wearing too much cheap make-up.
‘You’re just trying to get us drunk, aren’t you?’ one of them admonished, as she knocked back another glass of what appeared to be gin.
At the next table sat an old lady, her large handbag onit. She was swirling around the contents of her drink, an improbably short cigarette unlit in her mouth.
Owen and Nathalie sat at the only other table, which was so rocky that they had to hold on to the top to keep it still. Despite this, their drinks still slopped onto the surface.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said to her.
‘Sorry about what?’
‘This place. Not very grand.’
‘It’s fine, Owen. Don’t worry. I quite like it actually.’
‘Like it! I thought you hated this kind of thing?’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘Pubs, English way of life – that kind of thing.’
She smiled, pulling little rivers out of the pool of beer that had spilled on their table. ‘Maybe I’m beginning to get to like English things then.’
He leaned over, taking both of her hands in his.
‘And does that include me?’
She leaned towards him and kissed him, to the raucous cheers of the table next to them.
ooo000ooo
Lincolnshire, January 1944
She was back in a ditch in Lincolnshire, covered in leaves, waiting for the dog to find her so that she could get back to the cold house and have a bath.
It was the end of January, the ground was frozen solid and the moon bright. Tonight they had given her a large, weighted knapsack that she had to carry across the fields and the ditches. She had to set up the transmitter and send a brief message and wait for the reply. She then had to scale a wall that was more than six foot high and break into a locked shed before laying explosives under a bridge over an icy stream.
She had done all that and then found somewhere to hide, all as instructed. She knew that as long as it took at least ten minutes for them to find her after she had left the bridge then she would have passed. More than twenty minutes had already passed when a large hand reached down into the ditch and hauled her up. Claude, the man with the beret, patted her on the shoulder.
‘You are ready,’ was all he said. There was still no warmth in his voice or his manner.
The woman was standing behind him. ‘Très bien.’
She had expected a bit more ceremony, a bit more elation but perhaps they were exhausted as she was.
Back at the farmhouse the bath water was only lukewarm and the bed felt cold. In a matters of weeks maybe, she could be back in France. She had expected to return in very different circumstances.
