The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Merci, Mam’selle,’ he says as he hands the identity card back. His eyes flick down to the topmost button of her dress and the small shadow of cleavage that lies couched there. Being a woman has this advantage, that officials look at things that are clearly not false while ignoring the possibilities for deception that may lie elsewhere. She smiles up at him. She has learned this smile. It is cool and distant, a demonstration of politeness that excludes the possibility of any further conversation. It is also false.

  The bus takes her to one of the neighbouring towns where she has messages to deliver and information to receive and pass back to le Patron. Messages to le Patron will often go from him to the circuit’s wireless operator, their pianist, another woman known only by her field name: Georgette. Alice hardly ever sees her. Georgette lives in a shadowy world, moving between safe houses in various villages, where, in attics and barns and back rooms, she crouches over her silks, enciphering and deciphering; or over her wireless set, tapping out messages for London in the strange insect language of Morse; or listening in her headphones for the staccato buzzing in the ether that comes – the idea seems almost beyond imagining – from the key of a FANY RT operator sitting in a room with twenty similar FANYs in yet another country house in southern England, this one in the village of Grendon Underwood, some twenty miles from Oxford. Even le Patron does not always know where Georgette carries out her task. The less you know the better, is his watchword. ‘That’s why we’re still here,’ he explained on his first meeting with Alice.

  The reach of the réseau WORDSMITH is wide, covering much of the south-west of the country and overlapping in places with other circuits, other resistance groups. The limits of each circuit’s territory is vague and often unknown, even to the organisers. If Alice is going further afield, south to Toulouse perhaps, or north to Limoges, the bus takes her to the nearest railway station where she can catch the train. Here there is a further hurdle to surmount, for the stations are picketed by the French Milice or the German military, and the scrutiny of papers is more thorough than any cursory examination on the buses.

  ‘S’il vous plaît, Madame,’ a German officer says, holding out his hand.

  She gives him her papers and waits. How would she behave if she were entirely innocent? That is the trick you must discover. What would Anne-Marie Laroche do? She would stare over the officer’s shoulder, breathing in sharply and then expelling air in a small explosion of impatience. ‘The train is coming,’ she points out. ‘I don’t want to miss it.’

  The man is indifferent to her anxiety. He indicates the trestle table beside him. ‘The suitcase, please.’ Others are walking past unchallenged, black marketeers with suitcases full of illicit farm produce being allowed to go while she is opening her suitcase for this young man to go through her spare dress and nightclothes and underwear, her wash things and her few pieces of make-up. For a moment his hands linger over a pair of her knickers. He glances up at her thoughtfully, then folds them and puts them back. ‘I am only doing my duty, Madame. Thank you for your cooperation.’

  ‘I hope it made you happy,’ she says, and immediately regrets the comment as one sentence too many, one step too far. But he takes no notice and merely turns to the next passenger in the line, leaving Anne-Marie Laroche to continue to the train where she might find a seat if she is lucky, or might be offered a seat if luckier, or, because of the hold-up at the poste de contrôle, will in all probability spend the next four hours in the corridor sitting uncomfortably on her suitcase.

  Where is she going? To Limoges, where there are three Allied airmen who are being fed through the escape line towards the Pyrenees and the Spanish border; to Auch to pass on a message from le Patron to his lieutenant in the town; to Condom to see about a problem with one of the French resisters who has been arrested for black marketeering; to Montauban, to arrange for a parachutage, her first, which is planned for the next moon period. The possibilities are endless. All the detail of a complex, disjointed, secretive organisation, united in little more than the conviction that salvation will come in the form of an Allied invasion, after which the fragile unity of resistance can crumble away and everyone can get on with being a republican or a royalist or a communist or a socialist.

  Benoît she sees occasionally, when she is in his sector. They meet with that strange familiarity that is born of things she cannot deny because they have happened, and what has happened is irrevocable and irredeemable. The fact is there, in the past. And it throws its shadow forward even into the world of Anne-Marie Laroche. ‘Mon p’tit chat,’ he says, ‘I miss you.’ Mon petit chat, my kitten. There are things about him that she misses too, but not that. His laughter and his companionship she craves; the feeling that with him she is somehow safe. What an absurd thought. If anyone thinks he is safe in this shadow world, that is the moment when he begins to run the greatest risk.

  Clément?

  Clément is there, like a shadow following her in the dark, always there, his footsteps matching her own, his figure indistinct and elusive. When it’s light he’s nowhere to be seen. But she knows that sometime soon she will get the call to Paris.

  Second Moon

  I

  The men smoke caporal cigarettes and drink piquette, a thin, sour apology for wine. A paraffin lamp adds its unctuous smell to the dark scent of tobacco smoke. Alice knows the men by sight but not by name. They are Gaillard’s men, blunt and cautious farmers who know the land and have worked it, and have the ingrained suspicion that what might seem promising will work out badly in the end.

  Between them on the farmhouse table is a map, her map, the map that she has marked. Gaillard puts his finger down where there’s a tiny cluster of houses and a track leading off into the fields. ‘We meet Marcel’s group at the Bonnard place. We’ll have to use a cart to get the stuff to the nearest road. It’s not ideal but it won’t attract attention.’

  ‘Why there?’ one of them asks. ‘It’s bloody miles away.’

  ‘It’s safe. Alice says it’s safe. The Milice has never been seen round there, let alone les Chleuhs. And there’s the reservoir above Dompierre. That gives the pilot something to steer by.’

  ‘Water is the best landmark,’ she explains, wanting to convince them. ‘A lake or a large river. Water shines in the moonlight. And the shape, the pilot knows the shape exactly, from maps and photographs.’ This is her first parachutage, and it’s impossible to underestimate the value of a successful drop. A parachutage is the mark of recognition, the assurance of help, the manifestation of a deity that lives out of sight beyond the horizon but who may care for His children there in the benighted world of occupied France.

  The men grunt, unconvinced; but still the plans are laid – who’ll carry the lights, where they’ll stand, how the wind is blowing and where containers are likely to come down, how they’ll be disposed of once they have been emptied.

  ‘Let’s hope it goes well this time,’ one of the men says. The others mutter agreement.

  ‘Five days, we’ve got to allow five days,’ she warns them. ‘Things can go wrong.’

  ‘Something always seems to.’

  ‘Why can’t they get it right?’ another complains. ‘Don’t they know what it’s like here?’

  Alice watches these men with a mixture of incomprehension and admiration. It seems absurd that she should be telling them what to do. She wants to help them; sometimes she feels almost maternal about them. They need her comfort and her succour but there have been too many postponements and too many failures in the past. The month before she arrived an aircraft circled the carefully arranged dropping zone for half an hour while they flashed the code letter up into the sky. Maybe the pilot never saw it, or maybe it was off course, looking for a different reception committee with a different code. Whatever the reason, eventually it turned away and vanished into the night. Gaillard has given her the sorry history. On another occasion a thin ground mist appeared like a malevolent ghost to shield the dropping zone. And further south n
ear Albi there was an incident when the pilot dropped too high and the containers drifted away on the wind (maybe the wind had kept him high, maybe he was nervous about descending to the approved five hundred feet) and only half had ever been recovered. Some of the missing equipment – Sten guns, pistols – had turned up in the hands of the Milice a few days later, so the story went. That put paid to that dropping zone, so that now they were on this new one, near the Dompierre reservoir, chosen by Alice, with Marcel and his men in attendance. Marcel is a communist, that’s what Alice thinks. A communist who pretends he is a socialist. He has gathered a group of disaffected youth around him, kids who have evaded the Service du Travail Obligatoire and have taken to the hills. There are also a couple of Spaniards, veterans of the civil war, and a deserter or two from the French army. But such a motley collection of resisters is not unusual. Gaillard’s group is a mixture of monarchists and republicans, liberals and socialists and self-styled Gaullists, an almost farcical embodiment of the political problems of the country.

  ‘It’ll happen,’ she reassures them, remembering the crew that brought her and Benoît a month ago, their nonchalance, their casual confidence. ‘This time it’ll happen.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ says Gaillard.

  They go out into the gathering dusk and climb into Gaillard’s Citroën van. It’s another gazogène, the charcoal fire already humming with heat. Smoke rises, steam rises. Alice sits in the cab beside the driver while the others climb into the back. There are complaints about the dirt, about the cold, jokes about how Alice gets the best treatment as long as Gaillard is allowed to put his hand on her thigh. She sits against the door as far away from him as possible, precisely to avoid this possibility, while he looks at her sideways through cigarette smoke, smiling. Saturnine, she thinks, pulling her canadienne tight about her throat. Denied a view of the opening of her blouse, his eyes slide down to her knees. ‘You’ll be cold.’

  ‘I’ve got thick stockings. And a blanket.’

  ‘Still. A woman’s legs.’ He says the words thoughtfully, licking his lips – les jambes. ‘I’ll rub them for you if you like.’

  Once she would have felt prim and vulnerable, unable to deal with his lechery. But not now. ‘Oh, shut your face.’

  He laughs. The truck climbs upwards through the darkness, the engine straining against the slope and its faint headlights showing no more than a vague suggestion of the verge, the dry hedges, the rough tarmac of a road that soon surrenders to gravel. The moon is rising behind the trees, casting the cold light of reason on the landscape. ‘At least there’s no cloud,’ she says. ‘At least it’s a clear night.’

  Gaillard grunts.

  Marcel’s men are waiting for them at the cluster of three houses where the Bonnard family live. They’ve congregated in the farmyard like itinerant workers looking for a job, stamping their feet and coughing cigarette smoke. There is the sullen gleam of weapons. A pair of oxen sigh steam in the cold air. Overhead a display of stars has grown like crystals of frost, Orion tilted like a windmill, Cassiopeia like the letter W scrawled across the sky. By coincidence that is the very letter that she will flash up into the night sky to bring the aircraft in. Dot-dash-dash. An omen or a cosmic breach of security? Do the constellations care about what goes on in this cold, sublunary world? Ned would say no, of course. The universe is indifferent.

  After a brief exchange of orders the men disperse into the half-light, knowing their places, knowing how to gather this improbable harvest. Alice walks with Gaillard, trying to avoid contact with him. Despite her efforts, at one point he grabs her by the elbow to help her over a fence and across a ditch; later he succeeds in putting his arm round her. ‘Ma petite Alice,’ he says. ‘You’re a tough little kid, aren’t you?’ Petite môme, he says. It’s hardly flattering.

  ‘I’m a British officer. I’m not a kid.’

  He laughs. ‘Only a joke. Can’t officers take a joke?’

  They blunder through the dark for half an hour before they reach the place. There’s a thinning-out of the trees, an open stretch of grassland cropped close by sheep. In the distance is the high ground of the massif, matt-black mountains against the luminous black of the sky. A faint breeze comes cold from the east but it is nothing to put the drop at risk. Everything should be all right. Gaillard goes off to tell the men where to stand with their torches, three of them in a line in the direction of the wind, with Mam’selle Alice standing at right angles, facing the aircraft as it comes towards them, if it comes towards them, if the whole enterprise comes to a happy conclusion. Others are detailed to stand guard. They are the ones with the weapons – a couple of Sten guns from the last parachutage, and four rifles dating from the last war and stolen from a French army barracks.

  And then there is nothing more to do than wait. Alice sits against a hillock, wrapped in a blanket, harassed by cold. Gaillard is smoking. She can see the glow of his cigarette in the shadows. At Meoble they warned you not to do that, not to smoke out in the open. It’s like a beacon. But when she mentions it to Gaillard, he merely laughs.

  Time passes. The constellations wheel overhead, a vast and implacable chronometer with the moon climbing blindly towards its apex. Alice wonders. She wonders about Ned, she wonders about Clément and Benoît, she wonders about Anne-Marie Laroche and Marian Sutro, about the past and the future. Her pistol – a Browning automatic that she only takes on operations like this – is pressed into her side like an accusing finger. Can she be bothered to move to make herself more comfortable? To move is to feel cold. This must be how Antarctic explorers die, keeping still to conserve their heat. Maybe Scott himself, the quintessential British hero, sat still like this, willing his own little envelope of warm air not to dissolve away into the icy night. She looks up into the stars and for a moment, a fraction of a moment, she feels the depth of space, the void, that aching absence. What is the temperature of outer space, up there between the stars? Surely Ned knows things like that, Ned with his wayward and persistent mind, Ned with his brilliance and his anxieties.

  She listens. There are night sounds all around her: the hush of the wind among the nearest trees, an owl’s hoot and the brief scurry of some mammal through the undergrowth, the whisper of cold and decay. And then there is another sound on the air, something muttered and distant, a rumour of war. She stiffens, moves her legs, feels the shock of cold.

  ‘There.’

  Gaillard is another shadow, crouched against the hedge. ‘What?’

  ‘Listen.’

  The noise waxes and wanes, nothing more than a murmur rising and falling on the night, like a sea lapping on some distant shore.

  ‘There it is,’ she says, struggling to her feet. ‘Come on!’

  Gaillard follows, calling to the men. There’s a sudden urgent bustle, shadowy figures coming out of the shadows, shouting to each other and in their turn being ordered to be quiet.

  ‘In line!’ Gaillard calls. ‘In a fucking line, fifty metres apart like I told you. Christ, it’s worse than herding sheep. At least sheep have got brains.’

  The sound is nearer now, the drumbeat of aero engines, somewhere out there to the north, somewhere in the dark, too small to be seen against the stars.

  ‘Turn the fucking lights on!’

  The men are holding bicycle lamps, mere pinpricks against the black of the earth. Alice stamps her feet and blows on her fingers, fiddling with the switch of her torch. She points the thing in the vague direction of the sound, in what she hopes is the direction, fishing for the thing, dangling the bait of and again until her fingers begin to hurt with the effort of turning the switch on and off.

  A shout comes from someone in the shadows at the edge of the meadow: ‘There it is!’ But she can’t see the machine, just hear the engines rising and falling as the plane circles, imagine the propellers clawing at the air, dragging the great beast round.

  W for WORDSMITH, perhaps.

  ‘There!’

  And now she sees it, a shape running against
the stars, a black cross tilting and turning, coming nearer like a great bird, overbearing and overweening, the engines sounding louder and louder, roaring at them down there on the ground. She finds herself waving ridiculously, in the hope that up there in the aircraft they can see this figure below them. There are tears in her eyes and a stinging in her nose, tears of joy that these unknown men, seven of them, have flown all across France to make this strange rendezvous, them up there and still attached somehow to England, and the reception committee down here, two distant worlds coming into brief and tenuous contact out here on a desolate hillside above Dompierre. The aircraft thunders over them at a thousand feet or so, and turns and circles towards the south, banking against the stars and momentarily blotting out the moon. And then it is back, confronting them, moonlight glinting on its cockpit canopy, the wings adjusting their grip on the air as it feels its way down to five hundred feet. She wants to embrace it, or have it embrace her. She wants to have its power inhabit her body. She wants it more intensely than she has ever wanted anything, from her father’s approval to her mother’s love, to the craving she once felt for Clément. It is an experience, sliding overhead as loud as a train, a thundering, magnificent call of defiance greater than any childish longing. And the parachutes appear, sudden celestial globes emerging from it like eggs from the belly of a great fish, eggs that float in a stream on the tide of night, settling towards the earth where they might hatch out their offspring.

  ‘Over there!’

  ‘Look out!’

  One of the containers lands a few yards away, a cylinder about six feet long. Another thumps into the ground fifty yards further on, the parachute canopy settling over it like a ballerina’s skirt in a plié. Men are running after the containers, lugging them to the edge of the field where the ox cart waits. All is motion in the cold moonlight: shadows flitting back and forth, the aircraft climbing away from the drop, engines bellowing as it climbs and turns back for a second run.