The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

by Simon Mawer

  She makes herself look him in the eye. ‘They had me cornered in a cul-de-sac in Belleville. So I shot them. I’m a murderer, Clément. They’ve turned me into a murderer.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘And that man was there, the man who followed me before. I saw him there. Julius Miessen he’s called.’

  ‘Well, he’s not following you now.’ He reaches out and pulls her against him. She feels the sting of tears. He bends and kisses her cheek and her eyes, and then her mouth. She tries to pull away. ‘The radio,’ she insists. ‘We must listen to the radio.’

  ‘Don’t you ever give up?’

  ‘I can’t give up,’ she replies. ‘Don’t you understand? If I give up, I’m dead.’

  They sit in the salon with the wireless on, tuned through the roar of jamming to Radio Londres. The drumbeat of the letter V plays out into the room. And then the announcer’s voice: ‘Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français. First we have some messages for our friends.’

  They wait as the messages are read out, the sentences of nonsense, sometimes poetic, often merely banal. The voice is calm, like a parent reciting a poem to a child, oblivious to the noise all around:

  ‘Grand-mère a cueilli de belles fleurs … La pluie tombe sur la plaine … Jean veut venir chercher ses cadeaux … Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau … Le garagiste a les mains pleines de graisse …’

  ‘That’s it,’ she cries. ‘The garage man has greasy hands. That’s the one.’ The mess of emotion that she feels becomes, for a moment, something physical. Nausea, bile bubbling up inside her throat. ‘We’re going. The pick-up is on. The trouble is …’

  What is the trouble? The trouble is that she feels sick, that the voices are still whispering to her, like a tune going round and round in her head, something that you can’t get rid of.

  ‘The trouble is, they’ll be watching for me. The whole of bloody Paris will be looking for me now. They know I’ve organised a pick-up and they’ve got my description. Yvette will have told them everything. I’m blown wide open, Clément.’ Brûlée is the word. So much better than the English because that is what she feels – burned, scorched. ‘I’m a danger to everyone.’ She attempts a smile. ‘Radioactive.’

  Clément shrugs. ‘I’m used to that. All you have to do with something that is radioactive is keep it in a lead-lined container. Where do we have to go tomorrow? You’ve not told me anything yet.’

  ‘We’ve got to catch the Bordeaux train.’

  ‘From Austerlitz? That’s easy.’ He smiles, that infuriating smile that he always uses when he is about to prove you wrong or foolish, the smile she loathed and loved at the same time. ‘We catch the train further down the line, at Ivry. We’ll use the laboratory van. The Collège has certain privileges and one of them is the van – it runs pretty often between the Collège itself and the lab at Ivry. Tomorrow it’ll be going to Ivry. Does it all the time.’ He takes her hand and draws her towards him. ‘Now you need some rest. More than anything, you need to sleep.’

  Third Moon

  I

  She dreams. Not the falling dream this time but a running dream, running through alleys, running from people, killing people who won’t lie down and die but speak to her in voices she doesn’t understand. Sometimes her parents are there, sometimes Ned, once there’s Benoît. The alleyways have no end, no way out, all ways blocked. An impasse. And then there’s another part of the dream that is more dangerous still, a part where she’s lying naked, on the borderline between want and need, and Clément’s shadow is over her, exploring the inner workings of her body, touching her in places where the machinery seems broken or defective. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he tells her, but she knows otherwise.

  She wakes to his presence in the darkness beside her, the corrugations of his spine against her belly and her breasts. The voices, if there were voices, have ceased. She slides away from him, slips out of bed and crosses the cold floor to find Madeleine’s dressing gown. The air in the apartment has the dead hand of winter about it. The lavatory seat is cold. Warm vapour rises around her as she pisses.

  Memories come slowly, unpicked from her dreams: Yvette at the tomb of Balzac. The running, the shooting, two men dying. And Clément bringing her comfort of a kind. First Benoît, now Clément. Is it fear that has made her like this?

  She returns to the bedroom, feeling her way through the darkness. He is sleeping still. She crosses to the window and pulls back the blackout curtains. The moon, a gibbous moon, a hunchbacked moon, is setting. There is the faint flush of dawn to the east but the sky is still dark and if she cranes upwards the stars are visible. She feels the snatch of fear and excitement, a compound emotion like that of sex.

  There is movement in the bed behind her. ‘What time is it?’

  She lets the curtain fall back. ‘Time to get up. Marie will be here soon.’

  II

  ‘I’m leaving today,’ she explains. ‘Going back to the South-west.’

  The maid nods, tight-lipped, serving them coffee and a few slices of bread with a thin scrape of something that may be margarine. ‘I expect it’s better that way.’ She has to leave before lunch to see to her mother. ‘I’ll be back this evening to prepare your dinner, Monsieur Clément,’ she says, but by the evening all she will find will be a letter from him explaining that he too has left, and where there is money for her, and what to say if anyone asks.

  Monsieur Clément has gone to the country for a while. He left no forwarding address.

  ‘She’ll assume we’ve gone off together,’ Marian says.

  ‘Of course she will.’

  ‘And she’ll tell Madeleine, who’ll tell Augustine.’

  He shrugs, that Gallic shrug.

  With Marie gone there are things to do, clothes to pack – borrowed for the duration from Madeleine – food to prepare for the evening meal, a thermos flask of coffee to make. She explains the plan, what train they will take, where they will get off, how the whole operation will go. Clément writes a letter to Madeleine, something anodyne, exhortations to look after les canards if she can and he’ll be in touch as soon as possible. And one for Augustine, to be forwarded if possible. We’ll have to sort things out after the war, he writes, but after the war seems an impossible concept, something dreamed up by a theoretical physicist, a place and time where anything might be possible, or nothing.

  Marian watches him seal the envelope and address it, feeling a curious detachment from what is happening. Nothing around her seems real. The mouldering apartment, Clément, her own presence there, the memories of what happened that night and the day before. She might be enacting a cover story, playing the part with care, getting the lines perfect, but knowing all the time that the whole thing is a careful construct, a lie she is forced to play.

  The midday news announces an early curfew. There is talk of security, of terrorists in the city, of the scurrilous and underhand methods of the Anglo-Saxons, of the murder of two officers of the German police in cold blood. They eat a frugal lunch, not saying much, like a married couple who have been so long together that they have exhausted all the possibilities.

  ‘What’s the matter, Squirrel?’ he asks, but she only shakes her head. Nothing’s the matter that can be explained in a few words, and each phrase she wants to utter seems to contradict the one that came before: she loves him and she doesn’t love him; she wants to escape with him and she wants to stay here; her loyalty is to no one but herself and her loyalty is to WORDSMITH. She is a woman who is free and pure; she is a woman polluted. She’s a soldier fighting in the front line; she’s a murderer. And where does Benoît come into this knot of paradox? She wants Benoît for his normality, for his lack of guile, precisely for his lack of ambiguity.

  Afterwards they leave the apartment together, wearing warm coats and hats against the cold and carrying suitcases, like any number of people leaving their homes these days, leaving the city, going into exile, going to the East, vanishing off the face of the ea
rth. She pulls the brim of her hat down to try and hide her face. Are people looking for her? She feels curiously indifferent to whether they are or not, as though it is all happening to someone else, the other person in her life, the girl called Alice who knows what to do and how to do it – the girl who has shot down two pursuers in cold blood, who can summon riches from the sky and communicate with the gods.

  III

  The service entrance of the Collège de France is only five hundred metres away on rue Saint-Jacques, guarded by wrought-iron gates that open as soon as the gatekeeper recognises Clément. The van is waiting, a brown and lumpish Citroën TUB sitting behind the neoclassical buildings of the Collège like a turd at the backside of an elegant old lady. There are others travelling, a technician who will drive and a woman who is going out to the laboratory to pick up some samples.

  ‘Laurence is an old family friend,’ Clément explains as they climb aboard. ‘We’re going away for the weekend.’

  The woman looks askance. ‘How’s Augustine?’ she asks pointedly.

  ‘She’s fine, the baby’s fine, everyone’s fine.’

  ‘They’re in the Savoie, aren’t they?’

  ‘Annecy, yes.’

  ‘Give them my love when you’re next in touch.’

  Equipment is loaded into the van after them, instruments for the Ivry lab, some lead-lined containers that hold radioactive isotopes. Clément and the woman talk, of dysprosium and lanthanum, of cross-sections and neutron capture, while Alice sits beside them and feels herself an intruder in a foreign world.

  ‘Did you hear about the shooting in Belleville?’ the technician asks over his shoulder as he drives. ‘It was on the news.’

  They’ve heard something. Apparently they’ve arrested someone. The chemist believes they’re also looking for a woman. At least, that’s the story going round.

  ‘Communists, I expect,’ the technician says. ‘Don’t these bloody people realise that there’ll be reprisals? More innocent deaths, and all for what?’

  Alice tries to display indifference to the news. From the back of the van she can see little of the journey. There is no traffic beyond the morning rush of bicycles, no roadblocks beyond a moment at the Porte de Choisy when they have to slow as a gendarme flags them down. At the last moment the man appears to recognise the van and waves them on. Within half an hour of leaving the Collège, the van has drawn to a halt outside the station of Ivry-sur-Seine.

  It is a morning of brisk breeze and ragged cloud, the southern outskirts of Paris rinsed by the recent rain, littered with leaves and buffed up to a shine by the wind so that one might almost ignore the drab acres of cheap housing and shoddy factories, the wasteland of railway sidings and warehouses.

  ‘Have a good weekend,’ the chemist says as they get down. She is not smiling.

  ‘I’ll bring you a surprise,’ Clément promises her. ‘Some foie gras.’

  ‘Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.’

  On the platform a bedraggled collection of people wait for the train. They carry bags and suitcases and have the hungry look of hunter-gatherers in their eyes: Paris is a starveling – the countryside where they are headed is the land of plenty. Alice and Clément stand aloof, huddled against the wind and talking of little, as though none of this really matters. They are just a couple on a suburban station with a plan for the weekend that involves betrayal and deceit.

  The Bordeaux train draws in from the Gare d’Austerlitz half an hour late and already packed. Even in the first-class carriages it is only possible to find two seats together by begging people to move. There is grumbling and complaint but eventually they are settled, wrapped up in each other’s company, apparently oblivious to their fellow travellers. Clément puts his arm around her. She feels his warmth, a warmth that she has always guessed at but knows now as something intimate, an aura given off to her directly from skin to skin, a fluid like that which courses dangerously inside her. ‘If only …’ she says, but she never finishes the sentence and when he asks she only shakes her head. ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

  If only we were really going away for the weekend. If only this journey would never end. If only there were no such thing as choice.

  At Étampes, police get on board and walk down the corridors, stepping over people and suitcases, demanding papers and asking questions. An officer stands at the door of the compartment and calls for all identity cards. There is the dutiful pause while people rifle through handbags, search through pockets. Alice takes out the card marked Laurence Aimée Follette and hands it over, then reaches up and kisses Clément. Insouciance, carelessness, indifference in the face of daily inconvenience. The policeman glances at her photo, glances at her face, and hands the document back. With great sighs the train traipses on into the flat farmland of La Beauce, where the fields are brushed green with sprouting winter wheat and the sky is a cool autumnal blue.

  In the outskirts of Orléans they slow. There was a bombing raid a few nights earlier and the marshalling yards of Fleury-les-Aubrais are wrecked, wagons thrown about, buildings still smoking, rails twisted here and there as though knotted by some bad-tempered child. In silence people stare out of the window at these signs of what is to come, while the carriages stutter and jolt over the single track that has been put back in commission. At the station itself doors slam, people come and go, heavy boots clumping along the corridors, Germans this time, shoving their way down the carriages.

  ‘Why are you travelling to Libourne?’ they ask.

  Clément glances at Laurence and gives her a kiss. ‘We’re having a few days away.’

  The German looks at her and then at her papers. ‘You’re a long way from home.’ He speaks good French. There is something disturbing about that: no barrier of incomprehension behind which you might hide.

  ‘I’ve come to see Clément. I’ve missed him. And in Paris, you know, there’s his family around.’ She looks the German dead in the eye and gives a little smile. ‘It’s natural, isn’t it, wanting to be on our own?’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  She clings to his arm, silly, infatuated, doing dangerous things with an older man. ‘From years ago, in Annecy. Our parents knew each other. We used to spend holidays together.’

  The man thinks a moment, says, ‘Wait,’ and goes off with their documents. Alice doesn’t move. Time slows, indicated only by the thin trickle of sweat from her armpits. She thinks of Ned. Gravitational time dilation, that is a phrase he used. He tried to explain it to her and only got annoyed when she likened it to how time speeded up when you were enjoying yourself. ‘That’s subjective!’ he cried in exasperation. ‘Nothing more than an impression. What I’m talking about is a real difference caused by being in a different gravitational field.’ Is she now in a different gravitational field? Time seems slowed to the point where this moment in this crowded compartment with her hand gripped in Clément’s appears eternal.

  ‘What can they be doing?’ she whispers.

  ‘Looking at lists, I expect. Names. Nothing more.’ He seems remarkably cool. Maybe he is better suited to the clandestine life than she.

  The soldier returns, sliding open the door to the compartment with a crash. ‘All right,’ he says, passing the documents back. At the same moment, with a peremptory jolt that is like time itself changing gear, the train moves forward, on through the city of Orléans itself, the city of the Maid, la Pucelle, St Joan of Arc. And then they are past the buildings and into the bare fields of the flood plain with the line of the river visible as a distant fringe of willows. She dozes, her head against Clément’s shoulder, his arm round her. She recalls the dreams she had as a girl, wanting only this – to be alone with Clément. And now she feels nothing but a strange detachment, a sense of the remoteness of things, as though she were somewhere else, watching their two figures from a distance.

  Beaugency, Blois, Amboise. The train rumbles across the river on a stone bridge and edges its way through the drab suburbs of Tours, past factories
and marshalling yards, rattling over points, lurching sideways so that passengers, standing to get their cases down, are thrown against one another.

  Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, Saint Peter of the Bodies, a name that emerged, presumably, from the charnel house of Catholic guilt and damnation. They stand up to retrieve their suitcases, step over feet, shuffle down the corridor to the end of the carriage. Clément climbs down onto the platform and takes the suitcases from her, then helps her down. The guard blows his whistle and the train draws away, leaving a scattering of passengers on the platform like the debris left behind by an ebbing tide.

  And Gilbert.

  He has got down from a carriage further up the train. He is carrying a briefcase, looking like a travelling salesman bound for a meeting with a client. Without so much as a glance at them he turns and walks away towards the concourse and the ticket office. They queue behind him, and once they have bought their tickets, follow him to the platform. There is no one around, no one taking the slow train to Vierzon, no one to notice them on this late autumn afternoon with the sun casting long shadows and the wind cold on their faces. When the train appears they climb into the same compartment, talking idly as though they are strangers who have been thrown together by chance. But once the door has closed Gilbert changes. ‘I missed you at Austerlitz.’ His tone carries a hint of accusation.

  ‘We got on at Ivry. We thought it might be easier.’

  ‘A good thing too. The place was crawling with police. There were posters all over the station, with a description that fits you well enough.’

  ‘Posters!’

  He nods. ‘And your names. Marian Sutro, is that right? Also known as Alice, also known as Anne-Marie. They call you a Jew. Are you Jewish?’