by Simon Mawer
‘Of course I’ve heard of the Ashes.’
‘Who would fight for ashes? Only the English.’
He was based at a place called Swordland, on the other side of the loch. Swordland seemed magical and fantastic, like something to do with the Knights of the Round Table. ‘How strange that we should meet like this,’ she said. But was it strange? So much seemed strange nowadays that all concepts of strangeness were distorted. Only a couple of weeks ago she had been a bored WAAF working shifts in the Filter Room at Bentley Priory amid the smoke from cigarettes and the smell from armpits. And now she was here in this remote landscape, with the vague promise of France ahead of her and a whole collection of skills that she would never have imagined acquiring. She knew how to kill a man with a blow to the neck and how to derail a train with a few pounds of explosive; she could signal with Morse and fire a Thomson sub-machine gun. She could move silently at night and penetrate barbed-wire fencing noiselessly and cross a river by pulling herself along a single rope. How was anything strange beside that?
‘Perhaps we can get together when we have leave?’ he suggested.
‘Perhaps.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Oxford.’
He looked disappointed. It was his disappointment that encouraged her. ‘Are you in London?’
‘Of course. They put me up in a hotel.’
She was about to ask other questions – where was he from? where was his family? how did he make it to Britain? all that kind of thing – when the captain looked round from the front of the group. ‘What’s all this talk? Where the hell has security gone? Bérard, you come up here with me, please.’
She laughed. ‘Do as you are told.’
Benoît made a face, and hurried ahead to join the captain. ‘Oxford trente-deux quatre-vingt-neuf,’ she called out to his back. He glanced round and smiled. His smile was appealing, the smile of the little boy playing at being a soldier.
*
Down at the lodge, Marian and Yvette were ordered into the lounge like recalcitrant children, while the captain and Lieutenant Redmond conferred on the lawn. Marian stood back from the window so that she could see without herself being seen. There was much gesticulating and frowning.
‘They’re treating us like infants,’ Marian said. ‘I’ll walk out. They can’t stop me. I’ll simply go home, and they can stuff their plans.’
Yvette sniffed. ‘They’ll throw me out.’
‘Don’t be daft. It’s me they’re after.’
‘They think I’m no good.’
‘Stop saying that. They’re idiots. They take themselves so bloody seriously. And they make as many mistakes as anyone else. I mean, they’re not especially clever or anything, they just think they are.’
‘They’re the ones in charge, though.’
The two officers disappeared from view. Now there were only the students from Swordland sitting on the grass in front of the house, six anonymous, khaki-clad men, with a heap of rucksacks and a pile of ugly-looking weapons; and that boy called Benoît who had seemed amused and self-contained, and accepting of her in a strangely familiar way, as though they had known each other much more than that chance acquaintance in a bar.
‘I want to go to France,’ Yvette said. ‘That’s all I want to do.’
‘You’ll go to France. I’m sure you’ll go to France.’
Now the Swordland group was gathering up its kit. They must have been given orders that they were about to depart. She could see Benoît bending to lift his pack and sling it over his shoulder. Perhaps she should stride carelessly out and bid them goodbye and show everyone that she thought the whole incident the most colossal joke. That would put the cat among the pigeons. And then the door to the sitting room opened and there was the earnest Lieutenant Redmond summoning them into his office, exactly like the Mother Superior summoning her to the study for one of those humiliating lectures.
‘What the hell were you two playing at?’ he demanded. He sat at his desk leaving the two women standing in front of him.
‘Soldiers,’ Marian replied.
The lieutenant frowned. ‘It’s not a joke, Sutro. It was an appalling breach of security, and bloody foolish to boot. Surprising them like that. Jumping up like a pair of schoolgirls and … what was it you shouted?’
‘Bang bang, you’re dead.’
‘Bang. Bang. You’re dead.’ He said the words slowly, savouring them. ‘Whatever you may think, this is not Cowboys and Indians, Sutro. Haven’t you any idea of what danger you were in? They might have shot you.’
‘Shot us? You mean they run around the country shooting innocent civilians at random? We might actually have been what we said we were – a couple of secretaries up from Edinburgh for the weekend. And I thought we did pretty well with our cover story, considering.’
He humphed. Like an old colonel, she thought. Humph. Perhaps that was his name – Humphrey Redmond.
‘You seem to treat this whole thing as a game, Sutro. This course, the organisation, everything.’
‘No, I don’t. That’s simply not true.’
‘You’re always making fly comments. You’re always criticising. You seem to think you know everything. I’m damned if I’m going to have security breached and reports made all because of a hoity-toity girl with an aggravating smile and an insolent manner.’
Her eyes smarted. ‘That’s unfair.’
‘This is nothing to do with being fair. It’s to do with trying to train people to fight. Whether you like it or not, this is a military establishment and in military establishments officers don’t like being made to look fools. The captain was bloody furious, you realise that, don’t you? You even called him a policeman!’
‘I was only being consistent with my cover story. Dizzy secretary. Look, this is a bit of a nonsense if all we’re talking about is hurt feelings.’
‘And then you referred to him as “any Tom, Dick or Harry”.’
‘Well, which one is he?’
The lieutenant’s expression faltered. For a moment it wasn’t clear whether he was about to rage or laugh. ‘He’s two of them, actually.’
‘Two of them?’
‘Captain Thomas Harry.’
Incipient tears had metamorphosed into incipient laughter. She nodded thoughtfully, and tried to avoid the man’s eye. There was something there, she realised now, some little spark of anarchy in his look, and a small pulse of sexual sympathy that passed between them. ‘He’s a bit of the other one, too,’ she said.
Two days later, Yvette was told that she was being posted away. She should pack her bags and be prepared to leave first thing the next morning.
‘I’ve failed,’ Yvette said. ‘I told you so.’ Her face was drawn in tragedy. She suddenly seemed old, small and wizened, like someone who had suffered a bereavement: the downturned mouth, the clenched muscles in her cheeks, the dry and staring eyes. ‘That silly business on the mountain did it. It’s your fault.’
‘Of course it isn’t. They’d have thrown me out as well if that had been anything to do with it. Anyway, Redmond saw the funny side. And you’re not being thrown out. You’re being posted to another training place. You said so yourself.’
‘That’s just their way of trying to soften the blow.’
‘Where did they say?’
‘Thame Park, or somewhere. Where the hell is that?’
‘Thame? Near Oxford. Perhaps we can meet up when they give us leave.’
Yvette shrugged. ‘Who knows? I think they will send me home. I think I’m no good. I bet Thame is – what do they call it? The cooler.’
Emile came over with a glass of whisky in his hand and a smug smile on his face. ‘You can go away for a start,’ Marian told him, but he stood there, immune to animosity.
‘They say they are sending me to Thame Park,’ Yvette said. ‘What is Thame Park? Is it where they hide the people who are no good? You said there was somewhere for that. The cooler, you called it.’
He knew, of
course. He had all sorts of gen about the Organisation. He knew names and acronyms and code names. ‘Thame Park’s not the cooler. Thame Park’s STS 52.’
‘STS 52. What the hell is that?’
‘It’s the wireless telegraphy school. They’re going to make a pianist of you.’
‘Une pianiste?’
‘Wireless operator,’ he said impatiently. ‘Don’t you know the lingo yet?’
Marian was on her own now. It was a strange feeling, being the only woman among eight men. It gave her power – she knew instinctively the power of women over men – but also vulnerability, as though with Yvette gone she was now exposed as the next victim in line. But she would not fail. That she knew. The course was at one and the same time a training and an examination, and she would not be found wanting.
Dear Ned,
There is a rumour that we will have leave when this is all over. Perhaps I can come and see you? Maybe even stay with you, if that wouldn’t be getting in the way. Have you been to see the parents? I know how busy you are but you must make an effort and find the time.
On one of our few free days I went hillwalking with a friend. It was a rare sunny day, with the view from the top of miles and miles of deserted hills. And the islands. The Hebrides, that always makes me think of wind and rain. Is it in the name? It sounds breezy and cool, doesn’t it? Hebrides. Say it over to yourself. I know you don’t like words. Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful. When it is sunny like it was that day the place is as beautiful as anywhere in the world, but too often it is raining. And it also has the dreaded midge. These ought to be bottled and dropped on German cities by the RAF. The war would be over in a few days, although the Allies would probably stand accused of violating the Geneva Convention.
England
I
‘What’s that uniform?’ her father asked as she came in the front door.
She shrugged, dumping her suitcase on the floor and accepting his kisses. ‘I’ve been transferred to the FANY.’
‘What on earth is that?’
‘First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. It’s like an army corps for gay young things with nothing better to do with themselves. That’s what people say. As many titles in the FANY as in Debrett’s.’
‘Are you going to be a nurse? I thought you said—’
‘They don’t only do nursing, they do all sorts of things.’
‘All sorts of things? Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘It’s best not to ask, Daddy.’
‘So how was the course?’
‘Lots of hard work.’
Her mother came out of the kitchen and gave a little cry of happiness and surprise. ‘You’re looking very thin, darling.’
‘I’m not thin, Maman. I’m fit.’
‘And that uniform really doesn’t suit you.’
‘She says she’s transferred to a nursing outfit,’ her father said.
‘Nursing? That’s useful, I suppose. How was Scotland? What happens next? Where are you off to now?’
She wanted to tell them. She wanted to shock them with the truth: Parachute School, she wanted to say. And then B School, whatever that meant, and then into the field. But instead she shrugged the question away. ‘More training, somewhere else. I don’t really know. They don’t tell you much.’
‘Quite right,’ he said approvingly, as one who understood such things.
‘Oh, and there’s a letter for you from Ned,’ her mother said. ‘You’re very privileged: he hardly ever writes to us.’
She didn’t open the envelope until she was in the privacy of her room. The letter was written – Ned’s familiar scrawl – on the back of some Ministry of Supply pro forma, as though he had grabbed the first piece of paper that had come to hand. He said very little, of course. There was the usual greeting and a hope that all went well with her course, and then ‘here’s what I told you about …’ and an address, a Paris address in the place de l’Estrapade in the fifth arrondissement. Numéro 2, appartement G. And the name, Clément.
‘What does Ned say?’ the parents asked when she came down for dinner.
She shrugged the question away. ‘Not much. Typical Ned. Have you seen him recently?’
They hadn’t. He didn’t really keep in touch. She waited for the conversation to drift on to other things – family, friends, the trials of wartime – before she asked her question. ‘The Pelletier family. What happened to them, do you know?’ She said it carelessly, as though it wasn’t important whether they knew or not. But her father did know, of course. Gustave Pelletier had been in the French foreign office, on secondment to some department of the League. Shortly before the outbreak of war he’d been posted back to Quai d’Orsay to work under Bonnet, but he hadn’t got on with his boss and was sent abroad again. ‘An ambassador in North Africa, or something. Then he resigned and joined the Free French, that’s what I’ve heard. Threw his lot in with Darlan, which wasn’t such a good idea. I think he’s in Algiers now. Maybe you’ll meet him …’
‘Clément used to write to you, didn’t he?’ her mother asked. ‘I think he was soft on you.’
Marian blushed and cursed herself for it. ‘He wrote occasionally. It’s strange how Ned and he got on so well. They seemed such different types.’
‘The attraction of opposites,’ her mother suggested. ‘And then they had their studies in common, didn’t they?’
‘Their research, yes.’
‘All that atomic stuff. I didn’t understand a word.’ And then the conversation moved away, to other matters, other people, that world they had inhabited in Geneva, an international world that seemed so remote now when everything was narrow and focused and British.
The remaining days of Marian’s leave seemed to drag by, sluggards compared with the frenetic sprinters of those six weeks in Scotland. The tedious domestic life of rations and queues at the grocer’s and reading the newspapers and worrying about matters that were beyond her ken and beyond her power to influence. She had no friends in Oxford. The university city – introverted, supercilious, enmeshed in its own concerns – was no more than a temporary refuge for the Sutro family.
One evening the phone rang when they were in the sitting room reading. Her mother was deep in some turgid French novel that she had borrowed from the Taylorian. Her father was doing The Times crossword, agonising over a single clue: Forges prose, 9. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said, and went through to the hall before either of them could move from their chairs. She even closed the door before lifting the receiver.
‘Anne-Marie?’ a voice asked. ‘C’est toi?’
It was Benoît. Benoît Bérard. She even remembered his surname. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said, and immediately regretted it. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing. I was so bored, so I gave you un coup de bigo to see if you were at home.’
‘What’s that? Un coup de bigo?’
‘A telephone call. Le bigophone. You don’t know bigophone?’
She could hear his laughter on the other end of the line. ‘You make things up,’ she accused him. ‘It’s a load of nonsense.’
‘Bigo is not nonsense, it is real. Doesn’t the cream of Geneva society say bigo? “I give you a tinkle,” that’s what the Anglo-Saxons say. So tell me, what you are doing at home. Have they sacked you from the Organisation?’
‘Not yet.’ And she suddenly understood that this boy was the only person she could talk to openly about what she did, that this telephone conversation, subdued so that nothing could be overheard, was a kind of lifeline, almost a confessional. ‘I’m going to Parachute School on Monday. Can you believe that? Jumping out of aircraft.’
‘They were going to send me there a week ago. And then there was a change of plan. There’s always a change of plan. They’re probably trying to work out a change of plan to get themselves out of the war.’ He broke into his accented English: ‘Ay say old cheps, ay’m afra
id there is a change of plen. We are not, ah, fightin’ ‘itler any more, we are, er, fightin’ Stalin.’
She laughed. ‘And what are you doing now?’
‘I’m on another of their shitty courses. How to put explosives into dead rats or something. All I want to do is go home, and all they do is send me on courses.’
‘Maybe …’ she said.
‘Maybe what?’
‘Maybe we can see each other.’
‘But there is no time. Perhaps in London.’
‘Perhaps.’
And then the call was over and the receiver was dead in her hand and she felt abandoned.
That night she dreamed. It was a repeat of a childhood dream, the falling dream, now fast, now slow, like Alice down the rabbit hole. People watched her as she fell. She knew them all but she didn’t recognise them, that was the strange thing. Except her parents. They were there among the audience. And the French boy, Benoît. He was laughing at her.
On Sunday she accompanied her mother to Mass at St Aloysius on the Woodstock Road. The church was full, as though Catholics had multiplied in the war years.
The sun shall not burn thee by day, the choir sang, neither the moon by night.
Maman prayed long and hard after the blessing, and when she finally stood up to leave there were tears in her eyes. ‘I prayed that you will be safe,’ she said as they left. ‘Wherever you are going.’
II
Parachute School passed in a blur of sensation. They learned how to fall from a ten-foot wall, they shot down slides and swung in harnesses from a gantry inside a hangar, they crunched to the ground on mattresses and coconut matting, they ascended in a tethered balloon and dropped to earth from five hundred feet. There was the same exhilaration you found in skiing – the same thrill of surrender to gravity, the same heart-stopping breathlessness that gave, for a moment, a glimpse of dying. At the end of the week they climbed, bound up in parachute harnesses, into an aged Whitley bomber and flew over Tatton Park where they lined up inside the fuselage to plunge out into empty space. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ the dispatcher called, urging them on like a trainer urging athletes to run faster, jump higher, throw longer. And she plunged out into the air and the wind hit her face and snatched her breath away and the falling dream became reality, people on the ground looking up at her and a disembodied voice calling to her to keep her feet together and flex her knees, before the ground came up and threw her in a crumpled mass into the grass.
