The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

by Simon Mawer

  She leads the way through to the kitchen. The old mother is already seated by the kitchen range knitting a tube of brown wool. ‘Socks for the men in Germany,’ Gabrielle explains. ‘Isn’t that right, Maman? Socks for the prisoners.’ Her voice gets louder when she speaks to her mother, drops back to normal to speak to Alice. ‘There’s only the two of us, you see. Maybe Gaillard explained? Goodness, it’s wonderful to have you here at last. All the way from London!’

  ‘How did you know? Gaillard said—’

  ‘Oh, Gaillard. He thinks I’m a fool. We heard the plane last night. It’s obvious, isn’t it? You can work out the connection. But don’t worry. I’ll be very discreet. What are you called? I mean, who are you here? Not your real name, of course not. For us you’ll be Alice anyway, but just so I know.’

  ‘Anne-Marie Laroche.’

  ‘Anne-Marie. What a lovely name! I have a cousin called Anne-Marie.’ Gabrielle chatters on aimlessly, as though there is no war and no worries. ‘How long are you staying? It doesn’t matter to me. You can stay as long as you like. We’ll have fun together, won’t we?’

  Fun?

  ‘I’ll say you’re my cousin, what do you think about that? No, I suppose that wouldn’t fit in with your cover story, would it? An old friend, then. Where did we meet? In Paris? I was in Paris for a year, living with a family and looking after the children. Les Invalides. You should have seen the house. He was a surgeon and she was, well, terribly chic, which meant that she really didn’t want to be bothered with kids. We could say we met in the Luxembourg Gardens, how about that? I used to go there with the children so it’d all fit in. Or the Champs de Mars. Wherever you like.’

  ‘I’m not sure …’

  ‘Where did you stay in Paris?’

  Paris. The name seems like a threat.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘In your cover story, silly.’

  ‘Oh.’ She casts around for what to say, thinking of Clément. ‘In the fifth, I suppose.’

  ‘There you are, that’s perfect. We met there in the gardens and got talking and became friends, how about that?’

  She’s being organised and she doesn’t like it; this woman trying to embroider her cover story and stepping into areas that are off the map, where she shouldn’t stray. ‘I think I’d better wait until the boss arrives.’

  ‘Just as you please. If that’s what you want I’ll leave you alone. Whatever you want. You’re the one who matters here, not me. I’m only a pawn, but you’re the queen.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m not being silly. It’s true, isn’t it? They’ve all been waiting for you for weeks, and now you’ve come.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I’m not stupid, am I? People think I’m stupid, but I’m not.’

  V

  Le Patron comes the next day. That is how everyone refers to him. Le Patron, the Boss. Never by his field name. He arrives by bicycle and Alice listens to his heavy footsteps climbing the stairs towards her room and tries to picture him before he appears. It’s like trying to imagine an announcer on the wireless from the voice, and when the door opens he is nothing like she expected. He’s a short, nervous, sour-looking man with a toothbrush moustache, but a toothbrush that has been used for many months and become ragged and unkempt. She was expecting something better, but quite what she can’t say. Younger-looking, of course. Tall, if only as tall as she is. Maybe even handsome in a raffish kind of way but she knew that that idea came from the films, which was hardly a mature way of thinking. Yet not quite this inconsequential, anxious man, the kind her father would refer to disparagingly as a travelling salesman type. Travelling in ladies’ underwear. That was one of his more risqué jokes.

  ‘Welcome to WORDSMITH,’ le Patron says, looking her up and down. He laughs at something unsaid and fiddles open a packet of Gitanes. His hands are curiously effeminate, with narrow, tobacco-stained fingers and nails bitten to the quick. ‘You don’t smoke, do you?’

  ‘Not really …’

  ‘Good. Keep it that way, at least in public. Women don’t get a cigarette ration. You’d stick out like a sore thumb.’

  His face is worn with tiredness and worry. She recognises the look from the days of the bombing in London, the expressions on the faces of the rescue workers, the men who tunnelled into the rubble to pull corpses out, the women who drove the ambulances through the wrecked streets, the people who were up all day and all night and lived constantly in the shadow of death.

  ‘Was the drop OK? I hear it went well. At least you and César got here in one piece.’

  ‘It went fine.’

  ‘Couldn’t do it myself. Jump, I mean.’ He laughs, as though being scared of parachuting is a sign of strength rather than a weakness. ‘Depending on the equipment like that. Depending on some bloody fool to pack the chute properly. Depending on the pilot not to drop you too low. Darn sight safer by boat. That’s how I came, by boat from Gib. So long ago I’ve almost forgotten. We landed near Narbonne.’

  He walks towards the window, smoking and staring sightlessly through the glass. Maybe he’s remembering, or maybe he’s checking for an escape route. Alice has already worked it out. You lift the window – she has established that the sash is working – and climb down onto the kitchen roof immediately below. From there you can jump down into the back garden. Then there would be an eight-foot wall to negotiate before reaching the alleyway that runs down the back of the gardens. She could manage the jump easily enough, and the eight-foot wall – the assault course at Meoble Lodge and the parachute school at Ringway saw to that. Physical confidence, that was what they tried to instil, and succeeded sometimes. It was the other kind of confidence that was more difficult.

  ‘I’ve brought the money,’ she tells him. ‘I’d rather hand it over straight away if you don’t mind. It makes me feel like a bank robber.’

  ‘Of course.’ She turns away from his gaze in order to pull up her shirt and undo the money belt. The notes are counted out in piles on the table, five hundred thousand francs in all. Two thousand five hundred pounds. More money than she has ever seen in her life. Some of it is stashed away in the pockets of his overcoat, and some in a suitcase he has brought. ‘You’d better keep some. You’ll need it to pay people.’

  ‘Don’t we have to keep accounts of some kind?’

  He laughs derisively. ‘You must be joking. Write nothing down, didn’t they tell you that? No names, no addresses, nothing. Now, let’s have a look at your papers. Let’s see what London has given you.’

  He flicks through the documents expertly, like a poker player assessing his hand, frowning slightly as though to mislead his opponent into thinking that he’s not got good cards. She asks, anxiously, ‘They’re all right, aren’t they?’

  ‘The ration cards are OK but the identity card is no good. Oh, it looks all right, almost the real thing, but they’ve got you as having been in Paris yet there’s no record of your having crossed the demarcation line. So you’re living here illegally.’ He laughs, and then his laughter breaks into a deep, raucous cough that shakes his body. She almost tells him. I’ll have to go back to Paris some time soon. But she doesn’t.

  ‘I’ll sort it out,’ he says. ‘You know the best source of documents? The bloody issuing office itself. I know someone in the commune who’ll get the real thing for you. All you need to do is provide some photos. Have you got photos?’

  She has. London provided them, just in case.

  ‘We’ll get you more than one identity. You can be different people in different parts of the circuit. The danger is if you travel with more than one set of cards at a time. You’ve got to be careful of that. One good ID card is all right. Two good cards is a ticket to the Gestapo. In the meantime you lie low.’

  ‘And do nothing?’

  ‘Much of our job is doing nothing. The rest of it is running around like a scalded bloody cat. It’ll be a couple of days.’

  ‘I could use the o
riginal for the moment, couldn’t I?’

  ‘Look, I’m alive, right? I’ve been out here eighteen months and I’m still going. It’s a record. And you know why?’ He laughs, that racking laugh. ‘Because I’m bloody careful, that’s why. Because I never trust anyone I don’t know and only a third of those I do. Because I don’t allow written messages and post boxes. Because I don’t make meetings with people I don’t know. Because people don’t know where I live or where I go. Because I have genuine papers and a genuine reason to be wherever I am. Because, Mademoiselle Alice, I’m bloody careful. And making do with a second-rate ID card is not being bloody careful. And if you get caught they’ll be on to me in a trice. See what I mean?’ He’s looking at her aggressively, his small eyes narrowed. He’s challenging her to argue and preparing to shout if she does.

  ‘What about your accent?’

  ‘My accent?’

  She shrugs. ‘Well, you don’t sound French, do you? I mean, I can tell you’re not French by your accent. And you don’t get the syntax right. Doesn’t that rather give you away?’

  He glares at her, his narrow eyes narrowing, and for a moment it is unclear whether he is going to explode with anger or turn the matter into a joke. Then he draws on his cigarette and laughs through the smoke. ‘Because I’m not bloody French, am I? I’m Belgian. That’s my cover. Belgian, Flemish, came here from Ghent in 1940 and found myself a job working for the local council. Agricultural inspector, and a bit of black-market stuff on the side. That’s how I get away with it. So don’t you think you’re so bloody clever that you can put me down with your lycée French and your airs and graces. You listen to someone who’s been around a bit.’

  She smarts beneath his invective. She thinks of Buckmaster and the man called Sir Charles and how they treated her like someone of importance, and here’s this man speaking to her as though she’s a skivvy. The temptation to tell him is there, in the forefront of her mind. The temptation to say that she may be a woman but she’s been chosen for something special, something more important than he could ever imagine. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just—’

  ‘I don’t care what it’s just. You’re here to do a job of work and I’m here to tell you what to do, is that clear? I’ve managed to survive here for almost as many months as you have hours, just you remember that. Jesus Christ, how old are you? You look about eighteen and act sixteen. Who in God’s name recruited you, and why?’

  Tears start to her eyes unbidden. ‘Maybe,’ she says quietly, ‘maybe they recruited me because I am French.’

  That seems to shut him up, for a moment at least. Then he laughs and then he shakes his head and lights another cigarette. ‘I’m tired. I’m sorry, but I’m tired. I asked them for a man, that’s all. Someone who might be able to take some of the strain. And all they’ve done is send me a girl. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘I don’t think of it as a fault. It’s a benefit. Men are suspect, aren’t they? Either they’ve evaded forced labour or they’re in the black market, or something. Anyway, they’re suspect. But a girl can get away with almost anything. And I passed the A School training all right – the assault course, the weapons training, the unarmed combat, all of that stuff. There were no concessions. I can do anything a man can do.’

  He watches her through cigarette smoke. ‘And a few other things besides, I don’t doubt. Do you really know what you’ve got yourself into, I wonder?’

  ‘Of course I do. That’s half the training. They warned me right from the start.’

  He laughs. ‘Who was it recruited you? A friend of a friend of Daddy’s, was it?’

  ‘It was nothing to do with my father. They sent me a letter out of the blue, asking me to an interview in London. I suppose it was my French. I was in the WAAF at the time, at Bentley Priory.’

  ‘What the hell’s Bentley Priory?’

  ‘Fighter Command Headquarters.’

  He laughs that racking, smoke-filled laugh. ‘Bloody typical, isn’t it? The Germans would put themselves in a castle and have done with it. But we find ourselves a priory. Full of old women, I imagine. Anyway, get your things together and I’ll show you where you’ll be staying. It’s a farm out in the country. I hope you can ride a bike. You’re bloody well going to need to.’

  VI

  Plasonne. It’s the name of the farm itself as well as the surrounding area, a small, secluded valley in the hills above the town of Lussac. The farmhouse is set into the side of the slope with the front door looking across the valley. There’s a muddy yard between the house and a large and decrepit barn. Chickens pick their way through the yard in search of seeds, warbling gently to themselves. From the end of a long chain, a dog, named Xavier but always known as Clebs, barks at strangers.

  ‘You’ll be all right here,’ le Patron assured her as he showed her the place. ‘It’s tucked out of the way and yet it’s only a half-hour’s bike ride to Lussac. And the people are good. They’ll not let us down. Of course,’ he added, ‘I’ve told them you’re from Paris. Even if they don’t really believe it, you’ll keep up the pretence.’

  Of course. Her whole life is a pretence. Lies are the currency of what she does and is. Deceit is the capital she has stored up against discovery. Anne-Marie Laroche, student, born 18 September 1918 Geneva, daughter of Auguste Laroche and Émilie Grenier, both deceased.

  Living on the farm and being lied to are the farmer and his wife, Albert and Sophie, and their son Ernest, who is simple. Simple, but not exactly stupid because he has a kind of cunning, the intelligence of an animal who has lived in these hills and woods for all his life and knows them as a fox knows his surroundings. His moral life is bereft of complexity: he knows what is good and what is bad and between those poles there is nothing of any importance. Fortunately Alice is good. He looks at her across the table in the narrow dining room of the farmhouse and grins, and says her name, ‘Anne-Marie’, as though it is a source of wonder.

  Albert and Sophie’s other son is in Germany working in some factory or other. Every two weeks they receive a letter from him – a few lines written on a standard form: My dear parents, I am quite well, thank you. We work hard but are well treated. I hope all is well with you on the farm. Give my regards to Ernest. Your affectionate son, Hugues. That kind of thing. Ernest shows Alice one of these missives, pointing to his own name which, despite his not being able to read, he can recognise well enough. ‘Ernest,’ he says emphatically, in case she has not understood. Ironically the very quality that seemed to make Ernest useless as a farmer’s son – his mental deficiency – has actually ensured his usefulness: because of this deficiency he will never be called up under the Service du Travail Obligatoire and is therefore free to help his father on the farm.

  Albert is a taciturn man with a dry sense of humour. At times he seems to regard the occupation as nothing more than an ironical manifestation of the absurdity of nature, like a random storm that has destroyed a standing crop in his fields, or a disease that swept through his small herd of dairy cattle and carried them away. His wife Sophie is different. Warm and placid, she quickly becomes a surrogate mother to Alice. In Alice’s mind the name Sophie is associated with softness. Of course she knows that its origins lie in the Greek word for wisdom, and softness is merely an association of sounds that only works in English, not French, but Sophie embodies this assonance, being big-breasted and maternal. She has never been outside her pays, her region, but Albert has travelled. Like many men of his generation it was war that widened his horizons, showed him for the first time that he was a citizen of what until then had been little more than a vague idea: La République Française. Serving as a poilu on the Verdun front, surviving two years in the trenches, taught him that his country is France and his country’s enemy is Germany. He refers to the Germans as les Frisés or Fritz, the terms he and his comrades used during the First War, or sometimes les doryphores. Doryphores are beetles, agricultural pests that have swept away crops as the occupying forces sweep away farm produce to feed themsel
ves. On public buildings in the towns and villages there are posters warning farmers about doryphores. Eliminate these pests! is the exhortation. People still derive a certain amusement from it even though the joke is old.

  Alice’s room is upstairs under the eaves of the farmhouse. There is a low window from which she could get down onto the roof of the dairy at the back of the building. From there it would be possible to jump to the ground, go through a fence and climb the sloping meadow that lies behind the buildings. Within a few seconds she could reach the woods that cloak the hill. It seems impossible that this small world of farm and fields and forests might ever be invaded, but still she has prospected the escape route just as they taught her.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Sophie tells her when she offers to help around the house. ‘You have enough work.’

  What do they imagine she is up to? They ask her no questions, yet she tells them lies: she is Anne-Marie Laroche, a student of literature recently come from Paris. Her only family is a brother in Algiers. She spent some of her childhood in Switzerland and some in the Haute-Savoie. She is twenty-five years old. This is what she tells them when she tells them anything. What they think is another matter.

  Living this bucolic life, she becomes something of a country girl. She pins her hair up anyhow. She wears no make-up. She leaves her legs and her underarms unshaven. She wears no perfume. Some perverse part of her likes the smell that she acquires: the russet, autumnal scent of sweat. Most mornings she wakes as early as her hosts, snatches a quick breakfast and gets on her bike for the journey to Lussac. It’s a half-hour ride through the dark countryside, with the cold wind bruising her face and the tyres threatening to skid on the bends. When she arrives in the town she leaves the bicycle with Gabrielle Mercey, then hurries to the main square to catch the bus. To get on and find an empty seat she has to battle – elbows and knees – with women carrying baskets and men carrying briefcases, and when finally she is seated she buries her head in her book and hopes that no one will talk to her. She still finds it hard to believe that she does not have the words British agent branded across her forehead. When a gendarme gets on and pushes through the crowd of standing passengers checking everyone’s papers, she can’t believe that he isn’t stupid and the fact of her deception obvious.