by Simon Mawer
After the film they walked home, their shaded torch casting a feeble light on the pavement at their feet. The clouds had cleared to discover a curved, white nail paring of moon hanging low over the roofs. The moon ruled their lives. It kept them here and it told them when they might go. It held them in safety or plunged them into danger. The idea seemed impossibly romantic and at the same time rather sinister, as though, as astrologists claimed, the movement of the celestial spheres determined what happened in the sublunary world. ‘Minions of the moon,’ she said. ‘That’s what they’ve trained us to be.’
Benoît didn’t understand, either the source of the quotation or its meaning; but she felt her new life as an unfolding drama in which she knew there would be betrayal and hatred without yet knowing the precise dynamics of the plot, the motives and the denouements. Would she tell him about Paris? Knowledge was a burden. Should she lighten the burden by explaining about Clément, and the man called Fawley and the Russian bear Kowarski?
‘What are you afraid of, Marianne?’ Benoît asked. ‘Is it what we’re doing, going to France, all of that? I tell you, there’s no need to be frightened! You’ll see when you get there. It’s just … France. Occupied by people we hate. When you are there, what you feel more than fear is anger.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s not that.’
‘What is it, then? I think,’ he said, and hesitated. ‘I think you have another man.’
‘Another man?’ She laughed. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘There was—’
‘Ah, you see,’ he said as though with sudden understanding, ‘my little Marianne is pining for a loved one—’
‘Don’t be silly. There was a flight lieutenant on the staff at Stanmore. We went out together a couple of times, to the theatre in London and then to a dance. Nothing more. He was posted away. And before the war there was someone in France. He was older than me. I suppose it was a schoolgirl crush, really … but he felt the same about me. I still think of him sometimes.’ She looked at Benoît. ‘That’s it. The story of my love life.’
‘And where is this older man now?’
She knew about confession, how you could pour out your guilt and see it washed away. Confession, contrition, absolution, things that the nuns had taught. ‘Somewhere in France, I suppose. We lost touch when the war came.’
‘So you are free to do as you choose …’
‘Of course I am. It’s just that I don’t really understand myself.’
‘Why should you understand? That is typical of you English. You spend all your time trying to understand yourselves and not enough time getting on with life. That is why so many English girls are frigid.’
‘How many have you tried?’
His laughter saved the moment. ‘Absurd,’ he said. ‘You are absurd.’
At home, they let themselves in quietly so as not to disturb anyone. Outside her bedroom she allowed him to kiss her; but she put her hand on his chest when he made a move to come in. ‘You must let me think,’ she said.
‘Not about yourself still?’
‘No, about you.’
The next morning they went for a walk along the river. The introspection of the previous evening was dispelled by sun and wind. Willows blew lightly in the breeze beneath a sky of ragged cloud and fitful sun. They held hands, and as they walked sometimes they came close together so their bodies touched. She told him a story that sounded so English – about three young sisters and a couple of Oxford clerics who, one summer’s day eighty years ago, had rowed up the river here telling stories. Perhaps her own field name brought it to mind. ‘This is where it happened,’ she said. ‘On the river right here.’
‘What happened?’
‘Alice in Wonderland, of course. Charles Dodgson was his real name but he called himself Lewis Carroll for the books.’
‘Even he had a field name.’
It was the kind of joke that she could share with no one else. There were so many things that she could share with no one else. Conversations round the table over breakfast had been a careful obstacle course, as difficult as any interrogation at Beaulieu. ‘But what are you going to do in Algiers?’ Maman had asked. ‘And what’s all this about nursing? I really don’t understand.’
‘It’s all very vague, Maman,’ she had replied. ‘I don’t think they know themselves.’
‘And you, Benoît. What are you going to do?’
‘I expect they will put me behind a desk and make me sharpen pencils. French pencils, of course.’
Afterwards they laughed at their careful evasions of the truth, but still she couldn’t tell him the one thing that mattered, the question of Paris and Clément.
By lunchtime they reached a pub beside a weir. She felt hot from the walk, sweat staining her underarms, her body strangely vulnerable in her thin cotton dress. They carried their beer and sandwiches to an empty table outside by the edge of the weir where the sunlight was smudged by spray. Nearby were a couple of RAF pilots and a girl with buck teeth and a loud, braying laugh. Weeping willows made a backdrop that was as iridescent as an Impressionist painting, and even the bucktoothed girl looked beautiful.
‘Benoît,’ she said, and then hesitated, knowing what she wanted to say but not finding the words, or the nerve.
‘Tell me.’
In the water there were trout beneath the surface, hanging in the flow and swinging their tails against the current. That was what an agent had to be, one of the instructors at Beaulieu had said: a fish in water, entirely at home. But at Meoble Lodge they had learned how to catch trout by placing their hands in the icy stream beneath the animals and then flipping them, helpless, out onto the bank.
‘I don’t know quite how to say it …’
‘You have to decide,’ he said.
She looked up at him. ‘I’m a virgin,’ she said. Vierge. The word seemed ridiculous. La Vierge Marie. A plaster statue in blue and white, with stars round its head and a crescent moon at its feet. If Benoît had so much as smiled she wouldn’t have continued. If there had been a glimmer of amusement in his expression, she would have told him to go to hell. But he didn’t. He just watched her as though she were telling him something of solemn importance, as though he were a priest listening to her confession. But this confession was taking place across a wooden table by the side of the weir, across two glasses of beer and a plate of corned-beef sandwiches.
‘I don’t want to go to France a virgin,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
XIII
She waited until everything was still, her parents in bed and all the lights out. Then she got out of bed and opened the door to her room and crept down the corridor to the spare room. They’d even been taught this at Beaulieu – how to move through a building soundlessly, how to open doors without any noise, how to be unseen and unheard.
She opened the door and stepped inside into darkness. ‘Are you there?’ she whispered.
‘Of course I’m here.’
She crossed the room by feel alone, her naked feet sensing the floorboards and the carpet before accepting any of her weight. At the side of the bed she lifted her nightdress over her head and dropped it on the floor, then felt down to find the edge of the bed and slip in beside him.
She lay quite still, on her back, feeling his presence beside her, a warmth within inches of her body. ‘Ma p’tite Marianne,’ he said, but she put her finger on his lips and shushed him to silence.
‘Not Marian,’ she whispered. She didn’t want any recognition of who either of them might be. She wanted this to happen not to her but to someone else. To Alice Thurrock with her spectacles and her blunt, practical manner. To Anne-Marie Laroche. To anyone except Marian Sutro.
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘My Alice.’ There was the hesitant touch of his hand on her breast. It moved down to her belly, paused at her navel and ran like an errant drop of warm water into the rough hair. The contact brought a shock, like a pulse of electricity coursing upwards th
rough the basin of her body. She lay there while he stroked her, softly and methodically.
‘Ma belle,’ he whispered. ‘Ma fleur. Do you like that? Is it all right?’
‘Yes, it’s all right. Like that.’ And it was, in its way. Pleasurable despite the shame, the small stroking of the quick of her, as though he had found a deep root of her nervous system and was bringing it to life. But there was no giving on her part. Wasn’t that supposed to happen, a mutual exchange of delight, a giving and receiving at the same time? Yet she felt that she had nothing to give him, no wish to hold him, to have anything to do with the alien fact of him there in the darkness beside her. Maybe it could continue like this, anodyne and indifferent. But then he moved onto her, his invisible weight bearing her down into the mattress, his thighs pushing her legs apart, his belly against hers. Something dull and blind, like a nocturnal animal, nuzzled at her. She gave a cry that might have been pain, might have been rapture; and then she was full of him, fuller than she had ever imagined possible, gorged with him. He made a sound, a small note of surprise, pushing into her as though trying to discover her depths, the movement going on and on, insistent and intrusive; and then just as suddenly he slipped out of her and his penis lay between their two bellies, convulsing like a dying animal spreading its lifeblood.
He rolled off her and away. She felt the wetness under her hand, something glutinous that she had drawn out of him. There was a smell, of earth mould and mushrooms, quite distinctive. ‘A handkerchief,’ she whispered, groping in the dark at the bedside table.
‘Shall I put the light on?’
‘No!’ She rolled out of bed and felt for her nightdress on the floor. Had she bled? That was part of it, wasn’t it? Blood and pain. What the hell would her mother say, finding the sheets stained, with blood or sperm or both? ‘I must go.’
‘Wait. Wait, ma p’tite. Don’t be in a rush. You were so beautiful.’
Was she? What did beauty have to do with it? She was Marian Sutro, no longer a virgin. She pulled the nightdress over her head. The shame, kept at bay until now, came flooding in. She left the room in the same manner as she found it, feeling her way in the darkness down the corridor, but this time going to the bathroom. With the door safely closed behind her she could turn on the lights and see herself as she was, the lean form of an adolescent girl, the pale curve of her abdomen dimpled with her belly button, and below it the flock of hair clotted with his sperm. There seemed to be no blood, but she felt sore. The taps shuddered as she drew water. Would the noise wake her parents? She washed and towelled herself dry, then returned to her room and the cool, clean sheets. Was she now a woman? But the difference was only physical: nothing had changed in her mind. The experiment, if that is what it had been, was a failure. She fell asleep, thinking not of Benoît but of Clément Pelletier, and two lumps of stone crashing together in her hands.
At breakfast the next morning she hardly looked at him. Perhaps her mother would think they had quarrelled; her father would not even notice. ‘We must get back to London,’ she told her parents.
‘So soon?’
‘I told you it was only for the weekend. We could be leaving any day now.’
‘For Algiers?’
‘Probably, Mother. I’ve told you, we can’t be sure, and anyway it’s all very hush-hush.’
On the train they sat apart, a clear two inches of space between them. Benoît looked hurt and puzzled. ‘What have I done wrong, mon chaton?’ he asked.
Nothing, she insisted, nothing at all. But she rejected his attempts to take her hand and re-establish even a faint image of their intimacy of the night before. And she didn’t know why – that was the problem. She found his presence beside her on the train an intrusion greater than anything that may have happened between them. ‘And please don’t call me mon chaton,’ she said. ‘I don’t like it.’
‘Minou, then. I’ll call you Minou.’
She turned away from him and looked out of the window, wondering at her own caprice that seemed something beyond her conscious control, a childish manner that had somehow survived her becoming a woman.
At Paddington they took a cab to Portman Square. The door to Orchard Court was opened to them and Parks the butler was inclining his head and ushering them into the world that they had, for a few days, escaped.
First Moon
I
Colonel Buckmaster had a guest. Sir Charles, he was called. He was tall and elegant and polished to a shining smoothness. ‘Sir Charles is CD,’ the Colonel attempted by way of explanation.
‘Seedy?’
The man in question smiled, confident that the description didn’t remotely fit. ‘It’s not the most flattering acronym, is it? I’m actually the executive head of this organisation. Anyway, it’s a delight to meet you, Miss Sutro. I might say that your name has been mentioned in the highest circles. The very highest.’
‘Delight’ confused her; ‘the highest circles’ confused her. She’d worked it all out in the train – she would resign. Her private life was being dragged into this whole mess. People had poked around in her past and read her letters and spoken to others about what there was or wasn’t between her and Clément, and she wasn’t having any more of it. They could send her to the cooler for however long they liked but she didn’t care. She’d resign. And now she was being greeted with delight and talked of in circles that floated like haloes high above the head of a person even as exalted as Sir Charles.
‘Someone has been trying to poach you,’ Buckmaster said abruptly.
A look of pain passed across Sir Charles’s features. ‘Please, Maurice.’ He had the quiet, self-assured manner of a man who possesses all the privileges of life. She recognised it from people she had met in Geneva, British diplomats who had come to the house, men who believed that whatever might befall the world, their place high up the pyramid was guaranteed. ‘A sister organisation would like our help in something,’ he explained. ‘Sometimes their way of going about things is a little high-handed.’
‘It’s damned inconsiderate of them,’ Buckmaster said. His hands were behind his back, slotted together as though he were on parade but standing at ease. One hand flapped at the other as though beating time to some unknown and unexpressed tune. ‘But exactly what we’ve come to expect.’
Sir Charles reached into his jacket and took out a cigarette case. ‘D’you smoke?’
She took the proffered cigarette and leaned forward to accept a light from a gold lighter. ‘I feel like the pig in the middle,’ she told him, but actually it was worse than that – this was a new variant, one that had elements of Kriegspiel in it. The wretched victim, the one standing bemused between the two players, was blindfold.
‘I’m sure you do. The trouble is, the secret world is a crowded place and occasionally we tread on each other’s toes. They want things from us; we want things from them. Quid pro quo, so to speak. I couldn’t possibly say more than that, except to make it clear that you remain responsible to this organisation.’
‘So do we go ahead with whatever they have suggested?’ We and they. Her choice of words was deliberate. She and the Colonel together, and Miss Atkins and all the other staff of F Section. All of us together, against them. With Sir Charles Whoever-he-was smiling benignly down on them from the highest circles.
‘We have agreed that you should do whatever our friends have in mind. As long as it does not compromise your mission with us.’
Buckmaster said, ‘A typical bureaucratic fudge, if I may be allowed to voice an opinion. The plan is to drop you in the southwest of France in the next couple of days. It’s far too late to divert you to another circuit, and WORDSMITH has been crying out for assistance for months. But you may have to make a trip to Paris to attend to this matter.’
‘So I gather.’
‘Paris is a dangerous city.’
‘Of course it’s dangerous. I know it’s dangerous.’
‘Above all, your loyalty must be to your colleagues in the field. That is
how I see it. Nothing you have to do should put them at risk. In Paris you will be in the ambit of one of our most important circuits.’ He looked at her with those cold eyes. ‘Have you heard of PROSPER?’
She looked from one to the other. PROSPER was a name to conjure with, a thing of whispered rumour, the largest circuit in France, with subgroups spread all across the north from Lille to Brest. Francis Suttill was the organiser, the great hero, Buckmaster’s golden boy. You weren’t meant to know these things, but you did. The insidious penetration of rumour and gossip. ‘I’ve heard something.’
‘Well, you are to expect no assistance from any member of PROSPER, do you understand that? Once in Paris you will be on your own.’
‘I’m sure Miss Sutro will be able to carry out her mission with the utmost facility.’ Sir Charles drew on his cigarette and smiled encouragingly. ‘I gather that the plan is to exfiltrate – I believe that is the term we use these days – a certain person. For that, of course, you will need assistance.’
‘Gilbert is our movements man for the Paris area,’ Buckmaster said. He attempted to pronounce the name in the French manner but it came out as Jill Bear. Sister of Rupert Bear, Marian thought. Cousin of Teddy. For a moment laughter, hysterical, forbidden, bubbled up inside her. Like giggling in chapel. She coughed and looked away and thought of Benoît, how he would have delighted in her discomfiture.
‘Gilbert should be able to set something up,’ Buckmaster was saying. ‘And these Lysander chaps – quite brilliant. Regular as clockwork, never a hitch.’ He made it sound like an airline service: Croydon to Le Bourget every weekday. ‘This operation is of the utmost importance to us. Nothing you do should compromise their work, do you understand that?’
