The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

by Simon Mawer

  ‘There is no need to return to your unit. If you decide to continue, your things will be collected on your behalf and your colleagues informed of your posting to another job. I must emphasise that no one must be told anything. No cousins, no aunts and uncles, no boyfriends. Do you have a boyfriend?’

  She glanced down at her hands, lying passively in her lap. Did Clément qualify? When does a childhood crush metamorphose into an adult relationship? ‘There was someone in France. We used to write, but since the invasion …’

  ‘Well, that’s a good thing. You must, I’m afraid, break all such connections. No explanation, no farewell. Your brother – I gather he is in a reserved occupation …’

  ‘Ned? He’s a scientist. Physics.’

  ‘He must know nothing, absolutely nothing. When the call comes, you will simply follow our instructions and make your way to the Student Assessment Board. You will be there for four days, during which you will undergo various tests to see how you measure up to the kind of person we are looking for.’

  ‘It sounds like an execution. You will be taken from this court to a place of execution and there you will be hanged by the neck—’

  ‘This is not a matter for jest, Marian,’ he said. ‘It is deadly serious.’

  She smiled at him. She had a winning smile, she knew that. Her father told her as much. ‘I’m not sure that I am jesting, Mr Potter.’

  She walked out of the building, past the sandbags and the sentries, into the bright light of Northumberland Avenue. Did anyone take notice of her? She wanted them to. She wanted to seem extraordinary in the eyes of the anonymous passers-by – brilliant, adventurous, brave. She was going to France. However they organised these matters – would she go ashore by boat? or walk over the border from Switzerland? or land in a light aircraft? – somehow she was going to France. She crossed the street to the embankment to look at the river. The tide was out and sea birds picked over the mud – gulls laughing and crying. She wanted to laugh and cry with them – with joy and a breathtaking kind of fear. Trains rattled across the bridge overhead. People emerged from the shadows of the Tube station, blinking in the sunlight as she was blinking in the sunlight of her new life. Perhaps the next river she would see would be the Seine. How remarkable! Marian Sutro, living under some assumed name – Colette, she fancied – might soon be standing on the bank of the Seine beside the Pont Neuf and looking across the water, past l’Île de la Cité to the Louvre on the far side. All around her the people of the city would be wondering when and if the British were coming to rescue them from their misery, when in fact they would already be there, in her own small presence.

  III

  ‘We appreciate very much your volunteering,’ the tall man said. He was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant colonel, and apparently he was in charge. Through the window behind him she could see the trees in the centre of the square. The faint sound of traffic came through the glass. The place was called Orchard Court, and it was unclear whether it was a flat or a suite of offices. Rather it seemed a strange hybrid between the two: through an open door you might glimpse a bedroom with a made-up bed, or a bathroom with black and white tiles and an onyx bidet, and yet other rooms were clearly offices, with dull ministry desks and chairs and gunmetal filing cabinets.

  Buckmaster, the man called himself. It was obviously a nom de guerre. No one could really be called Buckmaster. It smacked of a John Buchan thriller. Mr Standfast. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of writing to your father myself,’ he said, ‘your being so young, and so on. I tried to reassure him that we’ll look after you as best we can but I doubt it’ll pull the wool over his eyes. I mean, he must know this kind of work can be perilous.’

  He nodded, gloomily. You could sense the word being repeated in his mind. Perilous. It had a quaint, Old English sound to it. Castle Perilous. His nom de guerre seemed more dynamic than the man himself: he was balding and had a receding chin and feminine lips. Somehow he didn’t inspire confidence.

  ‘May I know what this organisation is really called?’ Marian asked.

  He looked discomfited. ‘Actually, we don’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Marian said, ‘but I thought I ought to know.’

  ‘No, don’t apologise. It’s quite understandable. But we prefer it like that. The less we know of each other the better.’ He smiled at her. ‘Of course, we know rather a lot about you, but then we need to, don’t we? Whereas you don’t need to know much about us. The need-to-know principle, d’you see?’

  Did she see? Not really. It seemed ridiculous to have a name and then keep it secret.

  ‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Now that we’ve met I think it’s time to pass you on to Miss Atkins.’

  Miss Atkins was an elegant woman with a faintly supercilious expression. She invited Marian to sit down and offered her tea and biscuits and examined her with an air of detached curiosity, as though considering her for the post of scullery maid or something. If the tall colonel was the king of this particular world, then this woman was clearly the queen. ‘You are very young,’ she observed. ‘Quite one of the youngest recruits we have ever had.’ There was something unnatural about her voice, something strained and false, as though the carefully enunciated syllables were not naturally hers but had been learned for the occasion. ‘People on the Student Assessment Board were of the opinion that you are too immature for what we are proposing. However, Colonel Buckmaster and I have decided to override their judgement and recommend you for training. So we will watch your progress with close interest.’

  ‘You make it sound like school.’

  ‘It is like school. And you have a great deal to learn.’

  ‘When does it begin?’

  ‘Immediately. The first thing is your position as a WAAF. We like our people to have commissions. It gives them more status in France. We will have you gazetted immediately as acting Section Officer.’

  ‘An officer!’

  ‘Exactly. However, for various reasons that I won’t go into, we like all our girls to join the FANY.’

  ‘The Fanny? What on earth is the Fanny?’

  ‘The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. You’ll have the rank of Ensign and of course the uniform—’

  ‘But I’m in the WAAF. You just said I would be made an officer.’

  Atkins tapped her finger on the desk as though to bring the meeting to order. ‘That is merely an honorary rank. It brings with it a salary that will be paid to you as appropriate, and a certain status when you are in the field. But while you are with us, you will be a FANY. It is the way we do things. Do I make myself clear? You must get kitted out with the uniform immediately.’ She paused, considering the girl in front of her. ‘It is my duty to remind you that everything that happens from now on, in fact everything that has already happened since your first meeting with Mr Potter, comes under the Official Secrets Act. You do understand this, don’t you? Your training, for example. Where you go and what you see and what you do when you get there. Everything. I know you’ve been doing secret work in the WAAF, but this is not quite the same thing. The secrets of the Filter Room are clearly circumscribed, but none of our work is defined in that way. From now on it is not that your work is secret; your whole life is secret. This obliges you to make judgements all the time. You must learn to say enough to allay people’s curiosity without ever saying anything that awakens it. Do you see what I mean? You have to appear to be dull and uninteresting. It is a particular skill.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll manage.’

  ‘I suggest you tell people that you are doing preliminary training for liaison duties, with the aim of being sent abroad. Algeria is the obvious place, given your command of French. You may hint at this, but you need not say it explicitly. We like our people to learn to talk pleasantly and say nothing. You may begin to practise it now. And I must warn you that people will be reporting back to me, telling me how good you are with that kind of thing. They will be watching you all the time to see how you com
port yourself. Am I making myself clear? Not everyone possesses the qualities we seek, and many fail during training. You must understand that failure is not a personal discredit; it is merely a sign that you do not quite have the qualities that we are seeking. We are looking for very particular gifts, Marian, very particular gifts indeed.’

  Particular gifts seemed like particular friendships, those relationships that hovered on the boundaries of sin and awoke fear in the nuns’ minds. ‘In fact,’ Miss Atkins added, with an expression of faint disapproval, ‘some of the qualities we are looking for may not be entirely admirable ones.’

  IV

  The hotel they found for her was in a narrow cul-de-sac tucked away behind Regent Street. Many of the guests appeared to be regulars and the hall porter seemed to know most of them by name. ‘Good evening, Miss,’ he greeted her as she went through the revolving door. ‘I do hope you have a pleasant stay here.’ And his expression suggested that, despite all the warnings about secrecy, he was well aware of exactly what this young woman with her shabby suitcase and her plain grey suit was all about.

  She went up to her room, hung her clothes in the wardrobe and threw her new uniform onto the bed. It was an ugly creation in khaki barathea. F.A.N.Y., it said on the shoulder flashes. A ridiculous name, enough to make you blush. The uniform lay there lifeless on the bed, a corpse dragged into her life, something she would have to explain away when she next went home. It seemed daft. She was already in the WAAF and, for goodness’ sake, they also insisted that she be part of this peculiar corps with the embarrassing acronym. Whoever they were – the Inter Services Research Bureau, as they called themselves – they appeared to be able to do precisely what they pleased.

  She looked round the room indecisively. What should she do? It was far too early to go to Ned’s. She’d rung him and told him she was at a loose end in London and he’d invited her to dinner. She’d have to explain why she was in London, which might be a bit awkward. Explain nothing, they’d told her.

  They. She had no other word for them, the strange Colonel Buckmaster and the impassive Miss Atkins and their various minions. Perhaps they were watching at this very moment to see how she behaved. The idea amused and frightened her. She contemplated the stuffy room with its ornate wardrobe and overstuffed armchair and expansive bed. Concealed microphones? Hidden cameras? She stood in front of the mirror on the wardrobe door and examined herself. What would they see? Marian Sutro or Marianne Sutrô? Where did the stress and the accent lie? And what was now going to happen to this curious, hybrid being?

  Standing before the mirror she undressed, tossing her clothes onto the bed and transforming herself from the confident young adult whom others might see into the timid child whom she alone knew, jejune, pallid, with awkward limbs and hips and small, pointed but pointless breasts. What to do with this creature who had never known a man, never stayed in a hotel alone before, never even been into a bar by herself? And yet here she was, on her own in the grey, battered city, about to begin some kind of training to prepare her for France. Was anything more unlikely?

  She opened the wardrobe door and swept the young Marian aside. Taking out her cocktail dress, she held it against her. It had an elegance that you could no longer find in London; or maybe could never have found in London even before the war because she had bought it in Geneva from a couturier who always got the latest things direct from Paris. She had carefully nurtured it through the family’s precipitate escape from Switzerland through France, and then through the tiresome months of exile in England. Only once had she worn it, at a dance to which one of the officers at Stanmore had taken her. He’d told her how fond he was of her, and ended up attempting to take the dress off in the back seat of his car. The dress would be entirely wasted on Ned, of course; but at least there would be no repetition of that particular embarrassment.

  She washed and dressed and put her hair up – Clément always told her that she looked older like that. Then she did her make-up – still unfamiliar, still quite daring – took her coat and made her way cautiously downstairs. The bar was a place of smoke and noise and the male shout of laughter, the loud braying sound of the Englishman in his element. One or two men glanced at her as she pushed past and found a corner seat, but most ignored her. These days a woman alone in a bar was no longer a matter of note. She nursed a gin and tonic and watched. Men outnumbered the women by three or four to one. They were officers, all of them. But now, apparently, she was also an officer, and a FANY as well. Goodness knows what that meant in the complex world of British protocol.

  ‘May I sit beside you?’

  She looked round. Everyone else in the bar seemed to have beer or gin, but he had a glass of red wine in his right hand and a stool in the other, and the accent was unmistakably French. A lighted cigarette bobbed up and down between his lips. ‘You are alone and you are the most beautiful lady here, I think …’

  She shrugged and looked away towards the door, as though she was expecting someone. The Frenchman sat. He was young, no older than she was, and good-looking enough, with a casual, nervy manner, the kind of boy she recognised from Grenoble when she and her cousin had gone out in the evening, giggling and whispering to each other in the cafés, pretending they were older than they really were.

  ‘You wish to smoke?’ He offered a cigarette from a battered pack. It wasn’t a Senior Service, or anything like that. It was a caporal. She shook her head. He shrugged. ‘My name is Benoît. May I know yours?’

  She was uncertain how to answer. Anyway, if she were to give her name, what would it be? Was she Marian or Marianne? The question was a delicate one. People were pushing all round them, and somehow she seemed united with this unknown French boy. Where had he come from? Why was he here? What was his place in this loud, ruined, irrepressible city? Someone shoved against her, apologised, then blundered on into the crush. And she wondered whether this Frenchman had been sent to trap her into giving something away.

  ‘I’m Anne-Marie,’ she said, on a whim.

  ‘Ah, Anne-Marie. It is a beautiful name.’

  ‘It’s a name. Just a name.’

  He sipped his wine and made a face. ‘Pourquoi toutes ces gonzesses anglaises sont glaciales?’ he asked himself.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You understand French?’

  She hesitated on the edge of confession. ‘Glacial, I understood glacial. What exactly is glacial?’

  He grimaced. ‘The English summer is glacial. L’été glacial, that is what I say. My English is so-and-so. Look, you are here alone. I am here alone. We talk, maybe? Have a drink together? It is a good idea, isn’t it? I tell my life story.’

  Marian considered. She liked the idea of being glacial. It gave her some kind of reassurance against the possibility of being thought a tart. Or a fanny, for God’s sake. She tried not to giggle. ‘There isn’t time for your whole life story. I have to meet someone for dinner. You can tell me what you are doing in London.’

  He drew on his cigarette. ‘I escape from France.’

  ‘You escaped? How remarkable. Did you swim?’

  He laughed. His laugh was appealing. His manner was arrogant, an insufferable arrogance, but his laugh was a young boy’s. ‘In January it is not so good for swimming. I am in Paris and so I go south – over les Pyrénées to Spain. With a friend. We climb through the snow, and then when we get over the border they put us in prison.’ He made a disparaging face. ‘This is not so good. But then they let us out because we make so much trouble. So we get to Algérie, and here we are.’ He smiled, as though it was a brilliant trick pulled off in front of an audience, an escape worthy of the great Houdini. ‘And now I return to fight the Frisés.’

  ‘Where is your friend?’

  ‘My friend?’

  ‘You said you were with your friend.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ He waved a vague hand. ‘He finds someone for dancing this evening and I leave him go. Do you wish to dance? We can go find him.’

  ‘I’m af
raid not. I have to meet my brother for dinner.’

  ‘Your brother? You’ave no boyfriend?’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you whether I have a boyfriend or not.’

  The boy nodded, his face wreathed in the pungent smoke from his caporal. ‘You’ave no boyfriend. If you like, I can be your boyfriend.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be appropriate.’

  ‘Appropriate?’

  ‘It would not be a good idea.’

  He looked glum, like a disappointed child. Surely his story of escape from France was pure fantasy. And yet he was here, a French boy in the noisy heart of the city, among the uniforms of a dozen nations. He must have got here somehow.

  ‘Look,’ he said, putting his cigarette down on the edge of the table. ‘I play you a game, right? If I win, you come with me dancing. If I lose, you go and see your brother.’

  ‘I have to see my brother whether I win or lose.’

  ‘It is a very simple game.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of matches. ‘I show you.’

  ‘I really don’t want—’

  ‘I show you all the same.’ He began to lay out the matches in rows on the table between them – a row of three, a row of four and a row of five. ‘Now you take as many as you like from any row. Then it is my chance. I take from one row like you do. Then it is your turn again, and so on. The person who has the last piece to take is loser.’

  She shrugged and tried to look indifferent. ‘But I’m not playing for anything. I mean, if I lose that doesn’t mean to say that you’re taking me dancing.’

  He looked at her with a faint and infuriating smile. ‘We see. You go first.’