by Simon Mawer
‘Of course I do.’
Sir Charles smiled. ‘That’s settled then. I’m sure Colonel Buckmaster can fill you in on the operational details but I’m afraid I really have to dash.’ He stood up. ‘It has been most pleasurable talking with you, Miss Sutro. I would wish you the best of luck in your mission, but I gather that is not considered quite the form in F Section, is that right?’
‘Merde alors,’ she said. ‘That’s what we say.’
Sir Charles considered the matter. ‘Best not translated, eh?’ He held out his hand. ‘Merde alors, then. How about that?’ He made it rhyme with turd, which seemed appropriate.
II
The holding centre was red brick, Georgian, rather elegant – like a country hotel, someone remarked. There were worn sofas and battered armchairs and a bar that always seemed to be open. Poor weather during the previous two moon periods had created a backlog of agents waiting to leave. Emile was one of them, propping up the bar and pontificating about meteorology and the cause of fog. ‘Temperature inversion,’ he was explaining to anyone who would listen. ‘All to do with the adiabatic lapse rate.’
People avoided his eye lest they be drawn into the lecture but Marian couldn’t escape. ‘So you made it, did you?’ he called when he caught sight of her across the room. ‘You survived the rigours of Beaulieu.’
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
‘Headstrong, that’s what I thought.’
She poured herself a Dubonnet. There was ice in a bucket, but no lemon. ‘Is headstrong bad?’
‘Headstrong’s got to be moderated with intelligence,’ he said.
A record was playing, a bittersweet thing by Mireille and Jean Sablon. ‘Puisque vous partez en voyage’, it was called. A couple on a railway platform discussing the pains of departure, which seemed fitting.
‘What about Yvette?’ she asked. ‘Do you know what happened to her?’
‘Ah, Mrs Coombes. The redoubtable Mrs Coombes who wanted to kill Germans. Well, don’t tell anyone, but I’ve heard that she’s already got her opportunity. They needed someone in a hurry and they’ve thrown her to the wolves.’
‘She’s already gone? Where?’
He sipped his whisky and glanced round as though people might be eavesdropping. ‘I’ve heard it was Paris. They must have been out of their minds putting her in the field in the first place – but Paris!’
‘She’ll be all right,’ Marian said. ‘She’s tougher than you think.’
‘She’s a little girl in a man’s world, that’s what she is.’
‘And me? What am I?’
Before he had an opportunity to answer, Benoît appeared. He didn’t want a drink. He was smoking and his expression was low and glum, which made him look like a spoiled child. He tried to draw Marian away. ‘Can I talk?’
‘That’s all we do round here,’ said Emile. ‘Talk, talk, talk. What about some action, eh? I’ve no idea when the hell I’m going. What was it that von Clausewitz said about war? Fog and moonshine. We’ve got the one and they tell us the other.’
Marian and Benoît found refuge in another room, a lounge where people went if they wanted a bit of peace and quiet. ‘Why are you looking so boot-faced?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean, “boot-faced”? Face like a boot? You mean I am not beautiful enough for you? You want one of your smarmy English men who really prefer boys to girls?’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s just an English expression.’ She wished that he would not do this, that they could step back from one another and just be friends.
‘An English expression. Hah!’ He pretended to laugh. ‘Is it an English expression to ask me to screw you?’ He used the word baiser with its strange vagaries: to kiss or to screw. ‘In fact, you practically beg me to screw you. And then you more or less tell me to piss off.’ He said that in English – peece off! – which only made it worse because it made her laugh, and her laughter precipitated a row, an absurd and meaningless conflict, mere frustration boiling over into anger.
‘You just play with me,’ he shouted. ‘You want this and then you don’t want it. What am I meant to think?’
‘I thought you understood.’
‘Understood? I understand all right. You’re nothing but a fucking cock-teaser!’
Someone put his head round the door, looking startled. It was one of the conducting officers. ‘What the devil’s going on?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ Benoît said. Rien. So much more expressive than the English word, which seemed so elaborate, so full of import. Rien! A nasal expectoration, like clearing your throat. Marian took the opportunity to escape to her room, and when he knocked at the door a few minutes later she didn’t even tell him to go away. She just ignored him.
III
TRAPEZE was the code name for the operation. Everything had a code name, even the task of dropping them into a field somewhere in France; even they themselves had code names particular to this operation: she was FLORIST and Benoît was MILKMAN. Like that childhood game she used to play: Happy Families. The next morning there was the name TRAPEZE on the noticeboard outside the office, scheduled above all the others despite the crowding of the last few weeks.
‘What’s so special about Florist and Milkman?’ Emile complained, but she shrugged him aside. In the briefing room a pallid flight lieutenant pointed to a map of France and talked to them about the weather, and explained that if the fog lifted they would be going late that afternoon. ‘Of course we can’t be sure of conditions over the dropping zone.’ The dropping zone seemed an abstract concept, a place in a different world so distant as to seem beyond belief.
Benoît took her arm as they were leaving the briefing.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ he said. ‘I was a pig.’
She shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. Forget all about it.’
‘You don’t mean that, do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
Throughout the morning there was excitement, anticipation, the curious, heart-threatening flutter of anxiety that she could relate only to trivial things – the preparation for an exam or a school hockey match or going on stage. She went to the lavatory twice, her bowels as loose as blancmange. At midday they were given a large lunch that they couldn’t eat, with real coffee afterwards.
‘Like condemned men having their last meal,’ Benoît said.
She snapped at him – ‘don’t be so negative’ – and immediately regretted it because he had meant it as a joke. Gallows humour was allowed. It was good, even. Génial.
They spent the afternoon checking their kit, going over the maps of the dropping zone and rehearsing their cover stories. Then, after tea, mugs of hot, sweet tea, they were driven to the airfield in a limousine with white-walled tyres, the kind of thing King Farouk might have driven around in. They were privileged and they were pariahs, treated like nobility but kept away from ordinary human intercourse: on the far side of the airfield there was even a special section made available for them, a cluster of farm buildings which was strictly off limits to ordinary personnel. It was bitterly cold and the remains of the fog skulked around the outhouses, but there was a blur of white light in the sky overhead and a faint wash of blue breaking through. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ someone said as they went into the final briefing. The same flight lieutenant explained about the flight and the weather and probable conditions over the dropping zone. ‘Of course we can’t be certain how things will pan out, but the local fog is lifting. Over the DZ’ – the officer shrugged – ‘who knows?’
Benoît leaned across and whispered in her ear. ‘You scared?’
‘Of course I’m not.’
He grinned infuriatingly. ‘You are, though.’
They were led across the farmyard into what looked like a wooden barn. A stove burned in one corner creating a thick fug of heat. Miss Atkins had come up from London and she greeted them with that oblique smile, as though she knew everything that was going to happen but wasn’t allowed to let t
hem know. She gave Marian a money belt stashed with francs – ‘For Roland,’ she said – and then went through her pockets and her handbag in a final search for those things that she might be taking over into the next world that could betray her recent presence in this one. For a moment she held the key ring in her hand, peering at the keys, on the lookout for the giveaway, a British maker’s name, perhaps. They passed her scrutiny. ‘Is everything all right, my dear?’ she asked, and Marian replied that yes, things were OK, of course they were.
‘You look pale.’
‘It’s the damned English weather.’
She smiled reassuringly. ‘There’s this for you,’ she said, handing Marian a powder compact. It was gold, gleaming slyly in the light from the bare bulbs. ‘Just a small token of our appreciation.’
Marian sprung the lid open to disclose the little bed of scented powder, and a mirror from which Anne-Marie Laroche’s eyes looked back at her with an expression of faint puzzlement. She thought of grave goods she had seen in the British Museum, the fragile and pointless trinkets that accompanied a pharaoh into the afterlife. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said, not knowing how to react, as one never knew with presents. ‘I don’t really know what to say.’
‘You don’t have to say anything. Take it as thanks for what you are doing.’
How kind. That was what Papa always said when given a present. How kind. Even when he didn’t want the thing.
‘And there’s this,’ Atkins added as though it was an afterthought. She held out her hand. In the palm lay a small oval capsule covered in brown rubber. It looked like a dried bean. ‘Just in case.’
The L pill.
‘Of course.’ Marian took the thing from her and slipped it into a pocket almost apologetically. Cyanide, they said. You crushed it between your teeth and swallowed. It would only take a few seconds. Swallow it whole and it would go through you and come out the other end. So they said.
Then the two of them climbed into parachute suits and zipped useful things into various pockets and checked their personal suitcases. There was nervous banter as last cigarettes were smoked. An airman bent down to strap up Marian’s ankles. She was jumping in her town shoes and would need the support on landing. ‘The last thing you’d want is a sprained ankle,’ he said.
‘The last thing I want is my parachute not to open,’ she replied, and the airman laughed.
Benoît was ready, looking like the Michelin man in all his gear. She tucked her hair up into her helmet and they said their goodbyes. ‘Merde!’ they said. ‘Merde alors!’ as though invoking the worst would naturally bring with it the best. Like actors about to go on stage: break a leg!
Outside, out of the fug of the barn it was damp and cold. The car drove them around the airfield to where their aircraft stood waiting on the concrete apron, a dark silhouette in the fading light, like the giant Roc that carried Sinbad the Sailor. They hobbled towards it, weighed down by their parachutes as Sinbad was weighed down by the Old Man of the Sea who sat on his shoulders and wouldn’t let go.
The aircrew were waiting in the dusk to shake hands and assure them that everything would be all right. ‘Nothing more than a milk run, really,’ the captain said. He looked no older than Benoît. An airman standing at the steps to the aircraft offered to help. ‘Come on, sir, I’ll give you a hand up.’ And then: ‘Oh blimey, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you was a lady, ma’am.’ But he shoved her up just the same, with just the same lack of ceremony.
The inside of the fuselage was a narrow space of ribs and stretchers, like the hold of a boat. There was an unidentifiable smell that seemed to be a mingling of rubber and metal. Another airman was there already, organising packages. Benoît reached across and squeezed her hand, as though she might be frightened, as though the whole thing, the prospect of never seeing England again, never seeing her parents again, never being able to recapture this life of Marian Sutro again, might scare her. She grinned back at him and wondered why she felt no fear. What they were about to do defied all logic, all common sense, and yet she felt only a great rush of excitement.
Outside their metal cocoon there was a sequence of loud explosions and the engines began to roar. The noise was deafening, so loud that it was difficult to think. Perhaps it was better like that. With a jerk the machine moved forward.
France
I
It’s the dream. The falling dream, the flying dream, the dark hole down which she plunges or floats, watching the world go past her sometimes slowly, sometimes too fast to see clearly. This time it’s cold and she gasps with the shock and cries out in her sleep. This time it’s fast and the world cartwheels round her, giving a glimpse of trees and a slanting, sly shine of water. This time there’s the dull black of the earth and the luminous black sky, and the moon swirling round her. Then the crack of her parachute overhead like the sound of a sail filling with sudden wind and the boat keeling over and somewhere someone laughing with the pure pleasure of it. A terrifying, exhilarating ride. She swings in the wind for a moment. Ahead of her the black bulk of the aircraft roars on, shedding another parachute, Benoît’s, the canopy opening out and floating like a great white jellyfish in the flood of night. And then the ground, which for a moment has been something remote and theoretical, comes up to hit her and she is rolling in the earth and grass and being dragged by the billowing silk until she does what they were taught to do at Ringway, pull on the rigging lines to empty the air and collapse the canopy into something manageable, a great bundle of silk sheet.
*
Silence, the muttering silence of night-time, full of strange whisperings. The aircraft is a distant thing now, a crucifix turning against the moon and tilting in salute before the sound recedes and is gone for good. She is alone. Where has Benoît come down? It’s like scattering seed, some falling on stony ground and some among thorns. Where is he?
Far away, a dog barks. After months in which she has been watched and pandered to, led and cajoled, bullied and pacified, treated like a lady and like a schoolgirl, she is alone with this muddy field, this slant of woodland on a hillside across the valley, this cold air and cold moon and fragments of cloud. There is the smell of crushed grass and ordure and a whisper of water nearby. France.
How will anything, ever again, be as exciting as this?
With her parachute in her arms she hurries to the edge of the field, to the illusion of safety provided by the shadow of a hedgerow, to search for somewhere to hide the chute. Where, she wonders still, is Benoît? Where, come to that, is the reception committee? She removes her helmet, shakes her hair out and sits to unbind her ankles. Her town shoes now seem ridiculous in the middle of this muddy field in the middle of the night.
Where is Benoît?
Somewhere from the darkness comes the sound of voices. In the pale, monochrome moonlight shadows seem transformed into objects and objects into mere shadows. But the sound of voices is something different, a patter of whispers on the night, a laugh, an exclamation.
Training takes over, the natural caution that has been drummed into her. She pulls her pistol from her jumpsuit and holds it at the ready. Stories did the rounds during training of people being dropped into the hands of waiting Germans and carted away to a prison cell before they even had time to speak a word of French. A cautious agent is a live agent, that’s what they said, time and again. Watch, wait, listen. Think before acting. Pause to consider. ‘Wonder, don’t blunder,’ that was how one of the instructors put it.
Two shadows emerge from the backdrop of dark.
‘Par là,’ a voice says. ‘Il est descendu par là.’
It takes a finite time, a measurable moment of absurd uncertainty, for her to realise that they are speaking French. Still holding the pistol at the ready, she stands out from the shadows. ‘Bonsoir, Messieurs,’ she says.
One of them exclaims, almost in fright: ‘Ah!’ while the other flashes a torch in her face. ‘Alice? Vous êtes Alice?’
‘Bien sûr. Qui d’autre?’ She sense
s heavy figures behind the light and feels a tough hand grab hers. ‘Bienvenue en France, Mam’selle,’ the man says. And then he kisses her – rough, unshaven cheeks – on both cheeks; and ridiculously – there is no preparation in the training for this – she finds herself in tears.
II
They walk through the night, along paths and over hills, it seems interminably. Like one of the night exercises at Meoble, even to the French being spoken by these shadows who walk with her. Except she knows now that the dream has become real.
‘Here we are,’ one of them says. The building is nothing more than a block of shadow against the hillside, with the smell of animals around it and a dog barking somewhere in the back. And then a slice of shadow opens and a yellow light streams out and a woman is silhouetted in the stream of light. ‘Come in,’ she says, ‘come in, come in.’
They crowd into the front room of the farmhouse, five men in blue overalls suddenly discovered from the darkness.
‘This is Alice.’
ALICE. From mere theory – a field name, a nom de guerre, almost a joke – it has become hers. ‘Alice!’ the farmer’s wife exclaims, and clucks and fusses around her like a hen with a chick. Later Benoît appears, looking like a prisoner being brought in from hiding, glum and bad-tempered because they had found him hanging in a tree by his rigging lines and had to spend almost an hour getting him down. ‘It seems such a farce,’ he mutters to her. ‘As though I was some kind of string puppet.’
‘But it’s not your fault,’ she points out.
‘It seems that it is. There’s no dignity to it.’
‘This is César,’ one of the men says. Benoît scowls at the sound of his field name and in his scowl she sees what is so often obscured, that he is little more than a child, a boy who finds older people tiresome and younger people tedious. Someone claps him on the back and asks what the matter is, which only increases his displeasure at the whole thing. Outside the building there is the noise of men coming and going. ‘The containers,’ someone announces, coming breathless into the house. ‘We got the lot.’
