The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

by Simon Mawer

  She sips her wine and tastes what he suggests she should find there – a hint of cigar, a touch of chocolate, a suggestion of cedar wood – looking at this man beside her whom she knows but doesn’t know. ‘It almost seems to have happened to other people.’

  ‘Yet it was only a few years ago. Six.’

  ‘Five. You’d come down from Paris and I was back home for the holidays …’ She catches his glance and holds it deliberately. ‘I’d never been kissed before.’

  ‘I hardly dared touch you. In case I frightened you.’

  ‘I was only sixteen, Clément. The first time I’d been kissed like that. And embarrassed. God, how I was embarrassed!’

  ‘You seemed older.’ Suddenly, disarmingly, he grins. ‘You felt older.’

  She shakes her head, remembering how they climbed down and sat against the wall. He was kissing her and she had closed her eyes because that was what you did, that was what girls said when they discussed it – you close your eyes and let yourself go – and his hand was on her knee and she put her own hand over his. The ambiguity of gesture. Actions as equivocal as words. His hand, her hand, their two hands moved upwards inside her shorts where no one had ever touched her except perhaps a doctor or her mother, where the hair blossomed and, to her intense shame, her flesh protruded like an insolent and vulgar pout. She felt embarrassed and ecstatic at one and the same time, wondering what he might do and what she wanted, neither of which seemed clear. ‘I thought … God knows what I thought,’ she says. Unexpectedly she is almost in tears, mourning a distant child whom she vaguely remembers and hardly understands; and a man she loved. ‘I thought you’d marry me. I thought I’d get pregnant. I thought you were the most wonderful thing in creation and I was the most despicable. You said – do you remember what you said to me? – one day, you said, one day I will love you properly.’

  He watches her now. There is a strange vulnerability to his expression, as though something has been stripped away leaving the younger man exposed beneath. ‘I adored you,’ he says.

  ‘You went back to Paris—’

  ‘—you disappeared back to school in England—’

  ‘You wrote me those letters. They were the things that kept me alive in that awful place. The bloody nuns used to read them, did you know that? Worse than censorship. Sister Benedict was the French teacher and she hated me because I spoke the language properly and she didn’t. She had this dreadful English accent – if you can’t hear the language, how on earth can you teach it? Anyway, I’d told them you were my uncle and at first they believed me—’

  ‘You stopped writing.’

  She shakes her head. ‘That’s the point. I didn’t stop, but I thought you had. You see …’ And suddenly she is that child again, teeming with desire and indignation, her eyes smarting. ‘Can you believe it, they confiscated your letters? They became suspicious about Oncle Clément and they confiscated your letters without telling me and I thought you’d given me up.’ The moment of anguish has become real again, the child trapped in boarding school with no means of contacting the outside world. ‘I was desperate, Clément. I wrote asking what had happened, begging you to write, pleading with you. I suppose the nuns simply didn’t post them.’

  ‘How very English.’

  ‘How very Catholic. They contacted my parents to find out if you really were my uncle. Maybe it was something I wrote. Did they open my own letters? I’ve no idea. I begged you to write, and hated myself for doing so. I wrote things I shouldn’t have. Maybe they read those too …’ She looks at him, tears battling with laughter. He reaches out and takes her hand and she feels that stirring within her, something undermining, as though the ground beneath her feet has shifted. ‘But by then the invasion happened and suddenly you were entirely cut off anyway, with no hope of contact. It’s a whole world ago and here I am getting all excited about it.’ Carefully, as though it might break, she withdraws her hand from his. ‘And now you’re married, and a father. What’s Augustine like? Tell me about her.’

  ‘You were shocked, weren’t you? To discover that I’ve got married.’

  ‘It was a surprise.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m the marrying type?’

  ‘That it could happen without my knowing. Without any of us knowing.’

  ‘Word doesn’t get round these days.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Augustine’s pretty and wifely and doesn’t bother her head with tiresome things like science or scientists. Devoted to her child, like any mother, I suppose.’ He smiles. She can’t read his expression. Maybe she never was able to. ‘Both our families approve. Which is quite surprising, really.’

  ‘Why surprising?’

  ‘Because she’s a Jew.’

  The word juive detonates in the close room, scattering her thoughts like debris. ‘Is that why she left Paris?’

  He nods. ‘She went after the Vél’ d’Hiv rafle. You know about that, don’t you? Augustine wasn’t affected by the round-up, of course. She was married to me, and anyway it was the foreign Jews they were after. But we thought it would be best for her and the baby to leave the occupied zone, and the obvious thing was to go to Annecy.’

  ‘And she’s safe now?’

  He shrugs. ‘Now the Italians have gone things have changed, but for the moment she’s all right.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It must be terrible to be separated like that.’

  He mulls over her question, holding his glass by the stem and swirling the wine so that he can see the colour against the candle flame. When he answers it is carefully, as though he has measured his words. ‘Things weren’t altogether happy between us. I’m very fond of her, of course. But as with so many matters, the full story is complicated and appears different depending on how you look at it.’

  ‘Like those particles you used to talk about.’

  ‘You remember that, do you? If you know a particle’s momentum, you cannot know its position.’

  ‘And what is your position?’

  He makes a wry face. ‘Or my momentum? Which?’

  She looks at him, sensing the danger that lies in shared laughter. Laughter drew them together five years ago, across the gulf of age and education. ‘Your momentum was always your research.’

  ‘At the cost of my marriage?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  He shrugs. ‘The work goes on. With the Germans looking over our shoulders, of course. At the beginning they put Wolfgang Gentner in to supervise what we were doing. He was one of Fred’s graduate students before the war, so one of us really. Thanks to him we got the cyclotron going. Did I ever tell you about the cyclotron?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Fred’s pride and joy. The Germans wanted to ship it off to Heidelberg but Gentner insisted that it stay here in Paris. Gentner was posted back to Germany and now we’ve got Riezler. He’s a good man too.’ He shrugs again, that damned Gallic shrug. ‘They protect us, Marian. The Germans themselves protect us. They revere Fred and he charms the pants off them and we’re all allowed to get on with our work.’

  ‘That sounds like collaboration.’

  ‘It’s accommodation. It’s what all Frenchmen do, one way or another. Keeping quiet. Turning a blind eye.’

  ‘And that’s your contribution to the liberation of France? Obscure research and a bit of Gallic charm? What’ll you say when Rachel asks, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” “Oh, I charmed the enemy and they left me alone.”’

  ‘I’ve not heard you being sarcastic before. It doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘There’s quite a lot that doesn’t suit me these days, but at least I know which side I’m on. You’re supping with the devil, Clément – you need a very long spoon. The others in your lab escaped to England, didn’t they?’

  He frowned. ‘You know about that?’

  She answered without thinking: ‘Ned told me.’

  Clément raised his eyebrows. ‘Ned told you, did he? Dear old
Ned. I’ll bet he’s feeling smug, tucked up in his nice safe laboratory in England, isn’t he? When did he tell you, I wonder? Before you left England for Switzerland?’ He considers her, head slightly tilted to one side as though trying to get the measure of her. ‘What are you really doing here, Marian?’

  ‘Doing here? I told you, I’ve come to see this friend.’

  ‘Ah, the mysterious friend. But whose friend is she? Is she Marian Sutro’s friend? Or is she Anne-Marie Laroche’s?’

  There is a sudden stillness in the chilly room. An old portrait, pretending to be some bewigged and waistcoated ancestor, looks down on them with an expression that suggests he would have understood such things as noms de plume and noms de guerre. Maybe that was how he escaped the Revolution and the Terror.

  ‘You’ve been going through my handbag.’

  He shrugs once more, as though going through someone’s handbag is the most natural thing in the world, which perhaps it is in this city of fear and suspicion. ‘Marie wondered if you had a ration card, so I went to look. You were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you. I told her that you didn’t, which is true in a sense, because the only card I found belonged to a certain Anne-Marie Laroche. The same Anne-Marie Laroche who owns the identity card with your picture in it.’

  How do you judge your response? How do you balance surprise with mild outrage and make your response convincing? There was no ready formula, nothing the schools could teach you, neither the A School with its assault course and unarmed combat, nor the B School with its clever deceptions and fake interrogations. None of those lessons can help you when you are exposed like this with an old friend who might have been your lover, and you’ve let your guard down and you have no idea how he feels or where his loyalties lie. She tries to meld indignation with self-righteousness. It’s a difficult trick but one that she remembers from school, when caught out breaching one of the arcane rules that governed the convent. ‘That’s awful! Going through someone’s things like a policeman. I was going to mention it when the moment arose. A friend got me the card. I was Marian Sutro when I came from Switzerland but a friend organised another card for me to make it easier. Because the name might seem Jewish, if you want to know. Thousands of people do that kind of thing for one reason or another. Half the country is illegal now, you know that as well as I do.’

  Clément considers this idea thoughtfully, and finds it wanting. ‘You’ve come from London, haven’t you, Squirrel?’ he says. ‘How did you get here, I wonder? By plane, I expect. Did you land in a field somewhere, or did my brave Squirrel descend from the air by parachute?’ He smiles, an adult humouring a child. ‘The daring young girl on the flying trapeze.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. And don’t call me Squirrel.’

  ‘Well, I can’t really call you Marian, can I? What about Anne-Marie?’

  Carefully – at least her hand is steady – she picks up her wine glass and sips. Can she trust him? Trust no one, they told her at Beaulieu, not even your best friend. But this is Clément, for God’s sake – Clément, whom she loved with all the passion of a young girl; Clément, whose letters she waited for with breath held; Clément, the man for whom she first felt that strange emotion that can undermine a whole personality like a river eating away at the foundations of a building, or an earthquake shattering them: sexual desire.

  ‘Yes,’ she says as though admitting something shameful. ‘I’ve come from London.’

  She’s at his mercy now. No cover, no bodyguard of lies. Naked and helpless, with him watching her carefully, like an interrogator who is able at his job, enticing the betrayal of secrets rather than trying to extract them by force. She recalls all the warnings and the play-acting that they did at Beaulieu, how different interrogators might behave, how to stand the glare of lights and the shouting and having your head plunged under water until you were gasping for life. But also the other technique, the quiet, insidious one which, drawing you into a world of compliance and sympathy, makes you share confidences and secrets with the interrogator whom you come, so the story goes, almost to love. But they never taught her how to deal with this.

  ‘So why have you turned up here? Surely not just for old times’ sake.’

  It’s like that game they played, the blind chess. Kriegspiel. Only now the barrier between the two players has come down and he can see her board with all its pieces. ‘They want you in England, Clément.’

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘People that matter. Ned, of course. But more important than that, Professor Chadwick, Dr Kowarski—’

  ‘Lev?’

  ‘He says that the future of the French effort depends on it.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Kowarski himself.’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘In Cambridge. Von Halban has gone to Canada and Kowarski is on his own in Cambridge. And he needs you to keep his group going. Otherwise …’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  ‘The Americans will be the only players in the game. That’s what he told me.’

  He shakes his head in denial or disbelief, it isn’t clear which, as though in the course of an experiment he has been faced with some startling observation that goes against all that he has come to expect. The splitting of an atom, maybe. ‘And what’s your own role in all this, Marian? Are you the bait?’

  ‘What on earth do you mean by that? I’m nothing more than the messenger.’

  ‘A particularly attractive one.’

  ‘Are you suggesting—’

  ‘What do these people, whoever they are, actually know about us, Marian? I mean us two.’

  She reddens, thinking of Fawley and the avuncular Peters, wondering herself how much they understood. ‘They know we were friends.’

  ‘That’s a very careful use of the past tense.’

  ‘We haven’t seen each other for ages, Clément. Four years. Things have changed. For God’s sake, you’re married. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘It’s something, certainly. But if you’d kept writing, if this bloody war hadn’t broken out—’

  She shakes her head, as though trying to shake his words out of her ears. ‘Clément, you’ve been drinking, I’ve been drinking. We mustn’t say anything we’ll regret in the morning.’

  ‘Are you right? Maybe we should say the things now that we’ll regret later. Maybe that’s the only way we’ll be honest with one another. I’ll start. Six years ago I fell in love with my friend’s younger sister. She was far too young for me, but that doesn’t change the fact. She seemed to feel the same for me, indeed on one occasion we came within a whisper of becoming lovers. And now she suddenly appears in front of me, matured into a rather frightening young woman, and do you know what?’

  ‘I don’t want to hear.’

  ‘I find we still laugh at the same things.’

  ‘I told you. We mustn’t say anything we’ll regret in the morning.’

  ‘But how can we tell we’ll regret them until we’ve said them?’ He makes a wry face. ‘That sounds like one of the more abstruse aspects of physics. Schrödinger’s Cat, neither dead nor alive until—’

  ‘You open the box.’

  ‘You remember.’

  ‘Of course I remember. But that’s not why I’m here.’ And as though to show how true that is she opens her handbag, takes out the key ring, unclips the Lapreche key and hands it to him.

  He examines it curiously. ‘The key to your heart?’

  ‘The key to my presence here. There’s a letter to you from Professor Chadwick himself. I’m told that makes it important.’ She explains the trick, how he can open up a minuscule compartment and take out a microdot. It sounds like a parlour game. ‘You’ll need a microscope to read it. I presume you can find one easily enough.’

  He holds the key exactly as she did, between thumb and forefinger, as though it is something delicate and precious. ‘How very ingenious. It goes with the devious Anglo-Saxon mind. I’ll read it with interest.’ Then he laughs sudd
enly, and shakes his head in disbelief. ‘Do you remember that game we used to play with Ned? Throwing a ball over your head and you trying to catch it?’

  ‘Pig-in-the-middle.’

  ‘We called it “collapsing the wave function”.’

  ‘I didn’t understand what you were talking about.’

  ‘Neither did we.’ Still holding up the key and looking at her with that half amused, half puzzled expression he asks, ‘Who’s pig in the middle now, I wonder?’

  There is no answer to that, really. It’s uncertain, like one of his particles.

  She lies in bed, awake. She can hear him moving around the flat: the closing of a door, the running of water, a booming in the ancient plumbing.

  She remembers. The breathless excitement of returning home for the holidays, hoping that he would be back from Paris as he had promised in his letters. But all they had were a few snatched moments, fragments of time alone when the families were together, mere minutes when she could say things to him that were otherwise unutterable. ‘A quantum particle can be in two places at once,’ he explained, and she laughed at the stupidity of it all. ‘I can be in two places at once,’ she retorted. ‘I can be in the dormitory at school lying alone in my bed, and I can be in your arms at the same time.’

  ‘He’s only leading you on,’ one of her school friends said when she told her about him. She knew that the friend was right but she also knew that she was wrong: it was possible to hold two contradictory ideas at one and the same time just as it was possible, so Clément claimed, for a particle to be in two contradictory states at the same moment. A wave and a particle both at the same time, something like that. She called her own condition Marian’s Law of Superposition, and delighted at the idea of sharing it with him.

  What collapses the wave function is discovery.

  She listens to him walking along the corridor and pausing for a moment outside her door. Then he moves on, and she can hear the door to his own bedroom open and close and there are no further sounds within the apartment other than the shifts and creaking that a building makes as it cools in the night. But there are noises from outside – a car roaring down a nearby street; someone running along the road outside; a door slamming and someone shouting; and late at night she wakes from the fog of sleep to what she thinks must be distant gunfire.