by Simon Mawer
‘As you wish.’ His French seems good, his manner quiet and courteous. He follows her to the platform and waits beside her as the train draws in. ‘Are you going to Montparnasse station?’
‘No.’
He glances down. ‘The suitcase has become an emblem of our times, hasn’t it? So many people have their lives in a suitcase. Regrettably.’
She shrugs, ignoring his question and praying for the train to come. When it draws in the officer follows her into the car and finds a seat opposite. He has a faint smile on his lips, as though he knows her secret. ‘Let me guess …’ he says. The train moves away from the platform. Other passengers look away. ‘… You are not going to the railway station, so you are not travelling. So you are visiting. That’s right! You are visiting your aged aunt who lives all by herself in Montparnasse.’
It’s about one minute between stations, on average. She has six stops. Allow time for people to get on and off, what does that make it? She tries to do the mathematics in her head while the smiling officer attempts to guess the reason for her journey.
‘Or perhaps your boyfriend. You are travelling to see your boyfriend who is one of those left bank intellectuals of whom your family disapproves. A poet, maybe. Or a philosopher.’
‘Leave her alone,’ a woman says.
‘I’m sorry, Madame?’
‘I said, leave her alone.’ The speaker is a dowdy, middle-aged woman in grey. Her face is grey, her manner is grey but she is the one who is willing to speak out in defence of a young girl. ‘Politeness is politeness, whatever uniform you are wearing.’
The major seems nonplussed. ‘I’m sorry.’ He inclines his head towards the woman and, across the car, towards Alice. ‘I apologise if I have offended you. I only wanted to make polite conversation.’
‘Politeness is not trying to make conversation with strangers what want to be left alone,’ the woman observes, nodding as though to emphasise her point. Alice smiles thankfully in her direction. Embarrassed, the major looks at other things, the passengers crowding on at the stops, the notices posted above the seats, the blackness beyond the windows.
As the train slows for Saint-Michel, Alice gets up and moves to the door. The major follows, standing mere inches from her, waiting for the car to stop and the doors to open. When she steps down, so does he. She walks on, trying to ignore his presence but there is a crowd building up at the foot of the stairs and the officer catches up with her. They edge forwards. Something is blocking the exit above, slowing the crowd. Rafle, someone says. The word goes round. Rafle. Round-up. At the top of the stairs there is daylight visible, and she can see uniforms, people pushing and shoving, the general disturbance of men and women looking for their papers, opening their bags. A German voice calls out something in French. People mutter and curse. She grips the suitcase. Perhaps she can dump it. Perhaps she can turn back round and wait for the next train. The crowd presses round her. Panic rises, a tide of sweat and heartbeat, a strange ringing in her ears.
‘Please,’ says the major at her shoulder. ‘We cannot wait for this nonsense. Allow me to help you, Mam’selle.’ His hand is on hers, easing the suitcase from her grasp.
She lets the thing go, surrenders the bomb that could kill her in an instant. Panic tells her to let him go, to turn round and try to escape through the station. She’d be away before he gets to look inside the case. She’d be free and away. But panic is the worst advisor. Panic can kill. She follows him upwards, pushing up the stairs in his wake. Someone in the crowd calls out, ‘Fucking tart.’
She reaches the top. German soldiers and French police are going through papers, going through pockets, going through bags. Maybe they are looking for somebody, or maybe it’s no more than one of those random events, the nagging inconvenience of occupation. The major is talking to one of the soldiers. ‘I can vouch for the Fraülein,’ he says. ‘She’s with me.’ The soldier turns and beckons her through. She goes past the barrage and onto the sanctuary of the pavement where the fresh air is cool on her face. Corralled to one side is a group of men and women wearing the yellow star. Beyond, two lorries are parked with people being pushed on board. But no one is interested in her. The panic subsides, leaving a debris of racing pulse and weak knees and sweat.
The major hands her the suitcase. ‘I’m afraid I have an appointment. Otherwise I would accompany you.’
She takes the thing from him. ‘That’s all right. It’s not very heavy.’
‘But you don’t look well. Rather pale.’
‘It was all those people …’
‘Perhaps …’ Perhaps what? He’s a good-looking man, a thoughtful-looking man, a man who would make someone a good lover, a good husband, a good father. ‘Perhaps a coffee? I have a few minutes.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t.’
‘Or maybe we could meet up for a drink later?’
‘I have a boyfriend, you see.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting anything—’
‘People would misunderstand, wouldn’t they?’
He nods, looking crestfallen. ‘I suppose they would.’
She attempts a smile and turns and walks away, past the entrance to the métro, past the people trickling through the barrage. All the time she knows that his eyes are on her.
The suitcase takes on a personality of its own. It lies there in her room, hidden under the bed, waiting. She knows it is there, Marie knows it is there – impossible to disguise the fact of it as she stood at the door of the apartment waiting to be let in. Clément will have to be told it is there. A suitcase. She doesn’t know exactly what to do with it, or exactly what to do with Clément. She doesn’t know what to do at all. All she knows are the abstract facts – she has to arrange a pick-up; she has to get Yvette back to England; she has to persuade Clément that he should do the same.
VII
‘A Wehrmacht officer tried to chat me up on the métro,’ she tells him.
‘I’m not surprised. I’d try and chat you up on the métro.’
‘You’re married.’
‘I expect he was.’
She laughs. She doesn’t want to feel at ease like this. She wants to feel anxiety, caution, the wariness that has been drummed into her. But she feels only an absurd and childlike happiness in his presence. And safe – she feels safe. The most dangerous illusion of all.
As promised, he has got tickets for something, a play at the Théâtre de la Cité. It starts early – performances always start early these days, so you can get home before the curfew – and they can easily walk. Does she want to do that?
‘I really want to know if you managed to read the letter.’
He shrugs, as though the matter is of little consequence. ‘Yes, I did. I went to the workshops in the basement of the Collège and borrowed a file. In order to adjust a key that didn’t quite fit, that was my story. The difficulty was persuading the technician that I could manage without his help. And then I had to make up some damn fool excuse to borrow a microscope from the biology lab.’
‘And the letter?’
‘It’s not that easy to keep track of a full stop. I was frightened I’d sneeze or something.’ He’s teasing her. As he always has. Mockery that is like a secret caress, disturbing and thrilling at the same time.
‘But you succeeded?’
‘Yes, I did. Very ingenious. Some kind of photographic reduction process …’
‘Never mind all that. What did it say?’
‘It was most flattering. Flattery from Professor Chadwick is a rare commodity. He was interned in Germany during the last war, did you know that? He knows Germany and German science like the back of his hand. A dangerous enemy. Churchill blusters and calls them the Hun, but Chadwick knows them. The question is, do I fall for his flattery?’
‘It’s not flattery, Clément. For God’s sake, they want you.’
‘But who is it who wants me, and what for?’ He laughs and glances at his watch. ‘If we don’t get a move on we’ll be late for the theatre.�
�
They go out, strolling arm in arm and keeping step with each other as though they are practised at walking together. Her initial fears dissolve in the sunlight of the evening. The city has managed to work some magic at last and deliver a fair imitation of its old self, the Paris before the war. The plane trees in the boulevard Saint-Michel are shedding leaves of gold and red as though nothing has happened out of the ordinary and there has been no war, no invasion, no occupation. Near the Lycée Saint-Louis they pass a café where students congregate, young men with long hair, girls with short skirts and brightly coloured stockings. One of the boys calls out, ‘Bonsoir prof!’ and gives him a thumbs-up. Another voice exclaims, ‘Quelle bonne gonzesse.’ Laughter follows them down the street.
‘Zazous,’ Clément says. ‘The police round them up and cut their hair. Throw them in jail sometimes. The authorities understand how to deal with political dissent. That’s easy. But these kids aren’t political and that confuses them.’
At the river she pauses and looks. This is where she strolled with him that spring day in 1939 with Ned and her father. The strange contingency of events strikes her: how distant this place is from that summer afternoon. Within the rigid matrix of three dimensions it appears to be the same: there is the Pont Saint-Michel; there the buttresses and towers of Notre Dame, painted gold in the setting sun; ahead the steep roofs of the Palais de Justice. But it is a different place entirely when the fourth dimension of time is sprung from its shackles. The naive girl in a bright summer frock is there no longer. She no longer walks along the quai holding his hand and trying not to skip like a child. She no longer blushes at his compliments. She is a woman now, dressed in grey like the city itself, half a decade and a whole world away. And now she knows that the man beside her was, on that distant summer day, edging his way through the intricacies of nuclear physics towards the possibility of an atomic bomb.
She asks, ‘Why didn’t you leave France in 1940 when the others did, Clément?’
He doesn’t answer immediately, as though surprised by the question. ‘I thought I ought to see things through,’ he says eventually. ‘This is where I belong. Not like Kowarski or von Halban. Not like you. France is all that I have, for better or worse.’
‘I love France too.’
‘It’s nothing to do with love. More mundane than that. More like habit. And something else, a sense of honour, perhaps. Does that sound very pompous?’
‘Rather.’
‘Obligation. Try that. I’m not proud of what’s happened. Almost no one is. But I feel I can’t shrug off responsibility.’
‘And running away to England would be doing that?’
‘Perhaps it would.’
‘Or maybe it would be shouldering responsibility.’
He laughs. ‘You always were a determined arguer, even when you didn’t know what you were talking about.’
They cross the bridge and walk past the Palais de Justice. Swastika banners hang down the front of the building, the colours of sealing wax and boot polish. German soldiers mount guard, apparently indifferent to anyone who passes by; yet still she feels vulnerable, a mouse crossing a field with the hawks hovering overhead. It’s a relief to gain the right bank of the river and find Parisians in the place du Châtelet, crowds in the cafés, a scattering of theatregoers around the entrance of the theatre, even though there are some grey-green uniforms among the people shuffling in through the doors to the foyer. Posters announce the play – Les Mouches. The playwright is the latest sensation in the literary world of the city, a teacher of philosophy who has one novel and a collection of short stories to his name. ‘The novel’s called La Nausée,’ Clément tells her, and she laughs. ‘Nausea? Why stop at mere nausea? Why not “vomit”?’ But the idea doesn’t seem very funny, and neither does the play, which turns out to be a reworking of the myth of Orestes and Electra, an astringent mix of ritual and violence in which the protagonist demonstrates his freedom from the gods by committing murder, and the Furies buzz around the cast like flies around a pile of excrement. The strange dynamic of the piece finds echoes in the half-empty streets of the city, in the sudden raids and the meaningless arrests, in the collusion of the inhabitants and the defiance of a few misfits. ‘Pardonneznous de vivre alors que vous êtes morts,’ the chorus repeats, and there’s an outcry of approval from some people in the half-empty auditorium. Forgive us for being alive when you are dead.
They get back to the flat by nine, having argued about the play on the way back. It was about the occupation and the resistance. It wasn’t. It showed how the French people should strive towards the condition of freedom. It showed only how violence could be seen to be heroic. ‘And the sets!’ she cries, amid laughter. ‘And those ridiculous masks!’
Marie has left food for them in the kitchen. They are like students in a shared flat, living on short commons and from hand to mouth. Only the wine remains of high quality. He raises his glass to her, but exactly what he is drinking to isn’t clear. A stray hair has come adrift from her chignon and he reaches across to push it behind her ear. She recognises the gesture, feels it in a way she cannot control – more fundamental than a mere emotion, something organic welling up inside her that manifests itself only in trivial things – a quickening of the heart, a flush at the neck, a deepening of her breathing. ‘So where do we go from here, Squirrel?’ he asks.
‘We go nowhere, Clément. I didn’t come here to be your mistress. I’m here for one thing only, to get you back to England. All you have to do is make your choice. Can’t we at least agree that that is what the damned play was all about? Making a choice?’
He laughs and turns to his food. ‘You don’t let up, do you? You ought to become a lawyer when this whole mess is over. You’d never let the witness off the hook.’
‘I’ve got a job to do. It’s as simple as that. I need to know.’
He pauses, as though trying to construct some kind of answer. ‘There’s a story going round the lab,’ he says eventually. ‘A rumour really, but that’s all we live on these days – rumour and speculation. It’s about Bohr. You know Bohr? I used to talk about him a lot. Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, the most important man since Einstein.’
Of course she remembers. Bohr was everything that Clément admired – the patient genius who proposed startling ideas while all around were scratching their heads and not knowing what to do, the man who started revolutions and gave a fatherly hand to his followers who struggled in his wake. If I could be any other person than myself, he once confessed, I would be Niels Bohr. The idea seemed absurd. How could one wish to be a person that one was not? And yet here she is, Anne-Marie Laroche; a person whom she is not.
‘Ever since the outbreak of war Bohr has been there in Copenhagen like Fred is here in Paris, living quietly and getting on with his own research despite the occupation. But at the end of last month he disappeared from his home and reappeared in Sweden. And now there’s a rumour that he’s gone to England. Bohr’s an outspoken pacifist. He could easily have stayed in Sweden and appealed to the nations of the world to come together in peace and harmony, and yet apparently he has gone to England.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘They seem to be collecting physicists. Consider who they’ve already got: Chadwick, of course and Cockcroft, and a few lesser types like Oliphant and Feather. But above all there are the Jews who escaped before the war.’ He counts them off on his fingers. ‘Frisch, Szilárd, Peierls, Franz Simon, a dozen others. And then there’s Perrin, von Halban and Kowarski from the Collège. Fermi is already in the US and so is Bruno Pontecorvo, who worked here under Fred a few years ago, and Teller and some others. And now they’ve got Bohr.’ He looks at her. ‘If you see most of the grand masters in the world getting together, you’ve got a pretty good idea there’s about to be a game of chess.’
‘Kriegspiel, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps literally.’ He toys with his food for a while. ‘Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?’
Is this the moment to tell him? She hesitates no more than an instant. ‘Yes, I do, Clément. I know exactly what’s going on. Ned told me.’
His expression barely falters. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said it was obvious, that most of the relevant information was published before the war and that anyone could work it out.’ She feels the need to defend her brother, as though by telling her he might have been guilty of some heinous crime. ‘I blackmailed him into telling me, really. I took advantage of his position, accused him of putting his work before his family, that kind of thing. I even accused him of being a coward, which was unfair considering how hard he’s been trying to give up his research and get into the army.’
‘And he told you what?’
‘He never said it directly. He only explained how it might be possible. To make a bomb.’
There is a great stillness. Only the bare, functional kitchen around them, the tiled range, the sinks, the draining boards and windows now draped with blackout curtains. The voltage of the electricity supply is low and the light bulbs glow like dull anger.
‘He told you that?’
‘They might be, he said they might be. Making an atomic bomb. He told me that all the necessary information had been published shortly before the outbreak of war, that you could work it out from that if you bothered to read the papers.’
He looks around as though searching for a way out. But they are in an impasse. ‘Is Ned involved? Directly, I mean. Is he working on this?’
‘Not directly, no. I don’t believe so, at any rate.’ For a moment she hesitates, looking at him for some kind of reassurance. ‘Is it a possibility, Clément?’
He nods. ‘Oh, yes, it’s possible. Most certainly, it’s possible.’ He gets up and walks over to the window, draws the blackout curtain aside and peers into the courtyard of the building, as though perhaps there are people out there looking up at them.
