The Hills and the Valley

by Janet Tanner

  At last Yvette swung the truck off the road and into a deeply rutted track. Some yards further on and it petered out altogether. She coaxed the truck into bottom gear and crept slowly over the rough ground and into the shelter of a thick copse of bushes.

  ‘Is this it?’ Huw asked.

  ‘Oui. I think so. If I am wrong there will be no plane for you tonight!’

  ‘I certainly hope you’re not wrong!’

  ‘Per’aps I’ope I am!’ she said drily.

  She killed the engine and the lights and Huw turned to her. By the light of the moon he could see she was half-smiling but it was a sad smile. A strand of hair had escaped from the headscarf, lying across her forehead and brushing the corner of her eye. He reached out and tucked it back beneath her scarf, then kissed her. He felt the warm generous response of her mouth then she pulled away with a sharp determined movement.

  ‘It is time for us to go.’

  He nodded, regretful suddenly. Another time, another place, who knew what might have been between them? Except of course that wherever he went, whatever he did, there would always be Barbara …

  ‘Thank you, Yvette, for everything,’ he said and kissed her once more. Then he opened the door of the truck and jumped down.

  Twigs and brambles tore at his coat and trousers as they made a way for themselves out of the bushes which effectively concealed the truck. Yvette led the way along the hedge to a corner of a field. She had obviously been here before to reconnoitre, Huw thought, yet she had not mentioned it to him.

  A dark figure emerged from the shadow of the hedge, a torch snapped on, its light going right into his eyes and momentarily blinding him. Someone spoke in French and Yvette answered; the words, hurried and heavily accented, meant nothing to Huw. He stood and waited. The torch snapped off and as his eyes adjusted he saw that the agent was slightly built and bespectacled, looking oddly more like an insurance clerk than a Resistance fighter.

  The agent spoke again, rapid French in a low voice, and half a dozen more men materialised from the bushes. Two were armed with Sten guns – guards to watch the approaches to the field and prevent interference, Huw guessed – whilst the others would be the flarepath team. Watches were checked. There was still half an hour to go before the Lysander was due. Yvette left them to return to the truck; soon she was back with two flasks of coffee which they shared by passing the plastic beakers from hand to hand.

  The minutes ticked slowly by. The tension now was unbearable. Two of the flarepath team began a noisy argument and the agent intervened to silence them.

  ‘Do you want to let every Boche within a hundred kilometres know we’re here?’ he snarled and though his French was rapid Huw had no difficulty in catching his meaning.

  In spite of her raincoat Yvette was shivering, maybe from cold, maybe from the nerves she was controlling so well. Huw put an arm around her, drawing her into the shelter of his own coat and sharing with her the last of his cigarettes. The flarepath team occupied themselves by tying three of their torches to stout sticks. After what seemed an eternity the agent looked at his watch and signalled that it was time to move. The two men with Sten guns left silently to take up their posts, the flarepath team made their way into the open field. Huw watched from the shelter of the hedge as they staked out the makeshift runway under the eagle eye of the agent, setting the sticks with the torches attached to form an inverted ‘L’ shape. The agent came back to speak to Huw in English.

  ‘We may have trouble. The rain today was bad. There is much mud.’

  Huw’s heart sank. Landing and take off on a miniature flarepath in a bumpy field would be difficult enough; if it was muddy, too, the agent was not exaggerating to say he anticipated difficulties.

  They stood huddled together watching the sky for the approaching Lysander and periodically checking their watches. It was late. Could it have run into trouble? Huw reckoned that with the weather as bad as it had been it was unlikely many aircraft would be flying that night for any planned bombing raids would certainly have been cancelled. It was always possible his pick-up had been cancelled, too, and the message had not got through. Or perhaps it had set out only to encounter heavy cloud or fog further north and had lost itself somewhere over the French countryside. His heart was beating a tattoo and the palms of his hands were sticky with sweat. How long would they wait before abandoning the exercise? He did not know.

  Then, just when he had almost given up hope, he heard the faint drone in the quiet of the night and looking up managed to pick out a dark shape against the fitful banks of cloud with only its dark blue wing tips occasionally showing in the moonlight.

  At the first faint sound of the plane the agent had left them to hurry back to his position by the first of the lamps. As the Lysander circled overhead his torch flashed a quick pre-arranged signal, dash-dot-dash. Immediately the circling plane responded the three lamps flared to life on their sticks and the flarepath team retreated.

  Once, twice more, the Lysander circled, each time going through a complete approach and overshoot procedure, raising and lowering wheels and flaps, then it came in. From his position under the hedge Huw could only admire the expertise of the pilot as he landed neatly at almost exactly the right spot on the flarepath and taxied along. Just beyond the end of the flarepath the Lysander stopped, seeming to dip slightly, began to turn and stopped again. The roof slid back and as they started across the field towards it two passengers emerged and packages were unloaded and swiftly passed to one of the flarepath team.

  As he reached the Lysander, however, Huw realised something was wrong. No pilot would stop at that crazy angle. The cockpit opened and the pilot shouted to him: ‘I’m bloody well stuck! Can’t move! What is this, a bloody quagmire?’

  Huw went to the front of the Lysander and his feet sank into mire. As the pilot had suspected the wheels of the aircraft had dug deep into soft mud. Huw swore. Surely the flarepath team could have set the runway further back? They were buzzing around now like angry hornets, shouting at one another, blaming one another. The pilot jumped down and he and Huw began digging away the mud from the wheels with their hands.

  ‘Here – try this.’ Huw had not heard Yvette approach, now she stood beside them holding out a spade.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said softly, took the spade and began to dig. The pilot re-entered the cockpit, the Frenchmen and the two passengers who had disembarked from the Lysander went to the rear and pushed with all their might as he revved the engine. But for all their efforts the Lysander refused to budge by so much as an inch. For long minutes they sweated and fretted to no avail and again Huw began to despair of ever getting away. If they could not move the Lysander there would be nothing for it but to set it on fire. Then he and the pilot would have to go on the run together. It was not an inviting prospect.

  The agent turned to Yvette, who was standing helplessly by.

  ‘Fetch your truck. Give him a tow,’ he said in French.

  ‘Oui.’ Yvette ran back across the field, her boots squelching in the soft ground.

  A few minutes more and she was back bumping towards them. A tow rope was produced from the rear of the truck and with hands now numbed from cold and caked with mud the men began attaching it.

  ‘Hurry it up, can’t you?’ the pilot shouted. He had already been on the ground for longer than he cared to be.

  At last the rope was attached. Yvette had left the engine running and as she put her foot hard down on the accelerator the men once more put their weight behind the plane. And it was moving. Slowly, very slowly, but moving – back towards firmer ground.

  Absorbed as they were none of them noticed the approach of the German patrol. The hard-pressed engines of the Lysander and the truck drowned the sound of engines out on the lane. Their first warning was the sharp crack of shots and they turned, horrified, to see the lights rounding the wood at the entrance to the field. More shots followed; the quick fire rat-tat-tat of the guard’s Sten and the answering fire from the German
patrol, and the field was suddenly illuminated by a fierce blue searchlight.

  Huw swore. ‘Allez – vite!’ the agent shouted at him.

  He half turned, then remembered Yvette. This was going to turn into a massacre. He couldn’t leave her. He raced to the cab of the truck and dragged the door open. ‘Come with me – come on!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool!’ she yelled above the noise of the engine. ‘Get out while you can!’

  Her foot was hard on the accelerator, truck and plane were moving faster now on the firm ground. She reached out with her left hand and pushed him away. At the same moment the agent grabbed his arm. Caught off balance he stumbled.

  ‘She has to move the truck,’ the agent shouted, ‘or you cannot take off.’

  One man was slashing at the towrope with a knife while another covered him with fire from a Sten. It gave and the truck shot forward across the field. The agent was pushing him towards the moving plane. The German guns blazed again, hitting the truck. As he scrambled up the little ladder to the rear cockpit Huw saw it race forward, then career wildly. In that instant he knew he could do no more for Yvette. Someone inside the Lysander had hold of him, pulling him inside. He felt it gathering speed. For a moment he hung on crazily, sucked backwards by the slipstream. Then he fell into the plane. Shots were cannoning into the fuselage but they were just a part of the general mêlée and he hardly heard them. Then the bumping of wheels on uneven ground ceased and he realised they were airborn.

  ‘Christ, that was a close one!’ an English voice said and he turned to see a man hanging onto the luggage shelf where the machine gun mounting had been removed. He was wearing a dark rollneck sweater and jacket; Huw recognised him as one of the flarepath team – one who had kept silent while the others had argued volubly.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Never you mind,’ came the reply.

  With half his mind Huw registered that he must be an agent who had used the flarepath team as cover to get to the pick-up. But for the moment it was the least of his concerns. All he could think of was the close brush he had had with death – and of Yvette who had undoubtedly given her own life to ensure the safe takeoff of the Lysander.

  The other man calmly slid back the rear cockpit roof and Huw sank into the little seat facing aft. Below them in the muddy field the guns still made bright patterns in the dark beyond the glare of the searchlights. They would be dead soon, all of the men who had helped him – if they were not already. Yvette probably lay dead in the bullet-riddled cab of the truck. And what of her father and Raoul? The Germans would undoubtedly trace the truck to the farm and they too would be taken.

  He sat in silence, feeling sick, as the Lysander turned for England. He was going home. God alone knew what would happen to them. How the hell could he ever justify to himself the knowledge that he had regained his freedom at their expense? He should have left months ago and taken his chances on being captured. If he had Yvette would be sleeping safely in her bed now.

  Or would she? Would she have found some other way to fight back at the hated Boche? He did not know. And now it was much too late to make any difference.

  Wearily, Huw sank back onto the seat as the Lysander made its way home over the French coast.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘Appeal for Nurses. Extra Staff Urgently Needed.’

  The advertisement took up almost a quarter of one of the reduced size sheets on which the Mercury had been printed since a shortage of paper had been declared back in the summer. Barbara read and re-read it. Then she took out her diary, noted down a name and telephone number and carefully refolded the paper. If there was one thing Sir Richard Spindler hated it was having his newspaper left in a mess. Barbara was not at all sure he ever read it – she had never seen him with his nose in anything but The Times. But that was beside the point. Newspapers must not be left turned inside out or with pages in the wrong order, the way they had always seemed to be at Valley View, or Sir Richard would express his annoyance in no uncertain terms.

  In spite of having lived under the same roof with him for almost three months now, Barbara was still more than a little afraid of her father-in-law. His bluff manner could so easily change to bluster and he would roar his displeasure in tones that could be heard from one end of the house to the other. One could never be quite sure of him from one minute to the next. And since he did not suffer fools gladly it was very easy to feel a little like a naughty schoolchild in the presence of a strict headmaster – not an emotion which did anything to help her perpetual feeling of being simply a visitor in the house which was now her home.

  If things had been right between her and Marcus she might have been better able to accept it, she thought, but they were not. Little had changed since the night when he had taken her by force and she was beginning to wonder if it ever would. Marcus was a stranger, not at all the man she thought she had married. Sometimes, it was true, he was his old charming self and she wondered if the other dark side of his nature existed only in her imagination, no more than an extension of the depressions which were understandable in a man who had suffered so much. But there was no way she could imagine the absence of intimacy. Mostly he came to bed very late after long sessions closeted with his father in the study and she knew from the way he climbed stealthily into bed that he thought she was asleep and had no intention of waking her. Once or twice she had tried to rouse him but he put her away with the same excuses – she was tired, he was tired, it was late – so that she withdrew, hurt and bewildered, to lie stiffly on her own side of the bed, isolated from him by six inches of cold sheet and the terrible barrier his unwillingness had erected.

  Only when he was angry did he seem able to make love to her. Sometimes it seemed he picked a quarrel purposely, goading, needling, until she reacted, then turning on her and blaming her. Then and only then would he take her, but in no way could the act be described as making love, and far from satisfying her it left her more bewildered than ever, her body sore from the violence of his assault, her whole being crying out for tenderness.

  He was drinking more than ever, too, but when she mentioned it to him he lost his temper.

  ‘I can have a drink if I want to, surely?’

  ‘Of course you can. But it’s not just one drink is it? It’s not good for you to have so much.’

  ‘How do you know what’s good for me? At least when I’ve had a drink I can forget for a little while.’

  That, of course, was the crux of the matter. He was still suffering from the trauma of his experiences in France, she realised, and she tried to be patient with him because of it. But time was passing and he seemed to be getting worse instead of better – or was it just that he was less able to hide his feelings? He had certainly hidden them well enough when he was courting her; now she saw his black moods, his depressions, his periods of silence and his torments, and try as she might she was powerless to do anything to help. He suffered nightmares, she knew. Sometimes, he would cry out and thresh about in his sleep and when she put her arms around him he would sob against her breast like a child. But she guessed those same nightmares also haunted him when he was awake.

  At times she longed to talk to someone about the problem but there was no one to turn to. She was too proud to take it to Amy, who might have had some sensible advice to offer, since she was reluctant to admit that her mother had been right in her reservations about the early marriage.

  Once she did try to raise the subject with Lady Erica. Marcus had been drinking heavily and when he and Sir Richard had left them to go into the study she closed the door and turned to her mother-in-law.

  ‘I’m very worried about Marcus.’

  Erica surveyed her serenely over her coffee cup. ‘Oh? Why, dear?’

  ‘He has such terrible moods. He drinks too much. And I just can’t seem to get through to him.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ But Erica did not look in the least worried. ‘I expect he’ll get over it. He’s still suffer
ing over what happened to him, poor darling.’

  ‘But surely we ought to try to help him,’ Barbara persisted. ‘I’m sure it’s getting worse. He didn’t seem at all like this before we were married.’

  ‘That’s because he was on his best behaviour, I expect. He doesn’t seem very different to me. Don’t worry about it. Time is a great healer they say and I’m sure it will prove to be just that in Marcus’s case. After all, he has his work to think about and he has you. I’m sure that’s all he needs to come to terms with what happened.’

  Barbara turned away helplessly. How could she tell his mother that she thought he hated his work and that she could be no comfort at all. She could not bring herself to tell the truth about their sterile relationship. It was too private. And even if she did she thought Lady Erica would remain unmoved. Nothing seemed to touch or disturb her, no emotion ever rippled the surface of her serenity. Barbara had a vision of her countering any confidence with her unruffled smile: ‘Oh yes, dear, Richard is just the same. It’s nothing to worry about. You mustn’t let it upset you …’

  I don’t believe she’s all there, Barbara thought in irritation, as Erica reached for her embroidery and began stitching a delicate butterfly as if nothing else was of any importance.

  Barbara continued to suffer in silence, wondering sometimes why Marcus had asked her to marry him at all. Then he had seemed to want her. Now he did not. On more than one occasion she cried herself to sleep waiting for him to come to their loveless marriage bed and wondered what she could do to improve matters.

  One evening Marcus’s bad temper had caused a major upset with his father. Throughout dinner he had been quiet and withdrawn eating little and drinking a good deal. When the meal was finished Sir Richard lit a cigar and stood up.