by Simon Mawer
‘Not for generations. Not even for the Nazis.’
‘Anyway, there’s a price on your head. Five hundred thousand francs. Pretty cheap, I’d say.’ He looks at Clément, his eyes flicking down to take in their held hands. ‘Where’s the second passenger? You said there would be two. Wasn’t the other one from CINÉASTE?’
‘She’s not coming.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I told you I had my doubts about her.’
‘And this is Monsieur Mechanic, I presume. Have you ever flown before?’
‘Never.’
‘Don’t eat too much beforehand.’
‘Eat too much? You mean we get dinner?’
‘All part of the service.’ He turns back to Alice. ‘Looks like you got out just in time. Maybe you should leave tonight as well, go back in the other seat.’
‘She’s going to,’ Clément says.
She shrugs and looks out of the window at the fields of France. A price on her head. Five hundred thousand francs. What was that? Two thousand pounds? More. A fortune. Enough to buy a mansion. And a car.
Gilbert asks, ‘Is that right?’
She would be back in England tomorrow morning. She could spend Christmas at home, and then maybe return to France in the spring, return to the South-west, to WORDSMITH and to Benoît. ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘yes, I am.’
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Sensible choice.’
The train draws into a station. Veretz-Montlouis, the signboard announces. ‘We’re the next stop,’ Gilbert tells them. ‘A couple of minutes.’
Clément puts his arm round her. ‘Nearly there, Squirrel.’
Gilbert watches them thoughtfully. Outside on the platform a whistle blows. Did anyone get on or off? This quiet corner of rural France seems a universe away from Paris, no one visible on the platform, no crowds, no fear. The train moves on with great asthmatic breaths as though taking in fresh air for the first time in weeks. Away to the right, through their pale reflections in the windows, are the flat fields of the flood plain between the Loire and the Cher, brushed with light from a setting sun. The sky is a luminous blue like the blue of a stained-glass window. Poplars stand like plumes in the drift of sunlight.
IV
At Azay-sur-Cher station the bicycles are waiting, four of them in a shed behind the station house as Gilbert said they would be. He wheels the spare one beside him as they ride – ‘We’ll need it for the incoming passengers’ – and that is the first time Alice thinks of the other side of the operation, that someone will be coming in, maybe people she knows from training, people from a world only a couple of hours away by light aircraft, a world where you don’t glance over your shoulder for people following, where you don’t have to guard what you say, where fear isn’t an endemic disease that eats away at mind and body. Where you don’t have five hundred thousand francs on your head and aren’t being sought for murder.
They cycle off into the gathering dusk, over a level crossing and through the fields. Some of the land is arable, some has been left for grazing. There are patches of woodland, poplars planted as windbreaks, willows along the rim of a canal. Through the trees to the east the moon is rising, a bone-white globe replacing the dying sunlight with a different kind of illumination, a flat monochrome. The sun shall not burn thee by day, she thinks, neither the moon by night. It is almost a prayer but not quite a prayer for she doesn’t believe in prayer, doesn’t believe in God, believes only in the power of evil and the fragile battle of men and women against it.
After a couple of kilometres they turn off onto a farm track and bump over ruts and potholes out into the fields. Gilbert brings them to a halt near a small copse. Beyond the trees a field stretches away to the east, a rough meadow as flat as a billiard table. ‘It looks all right,’ he says. ‘We had to call one op off a few months ago when we found that the farmer had put cows out to graze, but things look OK this evening. The only worry tonight is fog. Fingers crossed.’
On one side of the field is an ancient barn. There’s some hay in a corner, a rusted old harrow and some other nameless bits of farm equipment lying around, an ancient leather harness hanging on a hook. Gilbert seems to know his way around, almost as though he is at home. From a bundle of fence posts he selects three stakes about four feet long, each with an end sharpened to a point. ‘Let’s go and set things up.’
There is still enough light to see by as they walk out into the field. A hundred yards out he stands for a moment with his finger up in the air, like a water diviner detecting things that are outside the range of normal human sensibility. Then solemnly he plants one stake in the ground and sets off into the distance, marching with wide steps as though performing some arcane, hieratic ritual. By the time he comes to a halt and plants the second stake they can only see him as a vague shadow; he paces rightwards, plants the third stake and returns to them with the satisfied air of a job well done. ‘Now all we can do is wait.’
Back in the barn they make themselves as comfortable as possible, unwrapping the food they have brought and sipping ersatz coffee from thermos flasks. There is desultory talk, underpinned with the tension of what might or might not happen. Gilbert briefs them. In the aircraft they’ll find parachutes left by the incomers. He explains how to buckle up. There will be two flying helmets already plugged into the intercom. They’ll have to put them on to be able to talk to the pilot. The on–off switch is on the front of the oxygen mask.
‘Oxygen?’
‘You won’t need it but that’s where the intercom switch is. More likely you’ll need the sick bag – the Lizzies fly at eight thousand at the most and it might be a bumpy ride.’
After they’ve been over and over the procedures two or three times, the men turn to talk of the war, what is happening in Russia, in Italy, in the Far East, how the conflict is progressing and how it might go. Alice clutches Clément’s arm and ignores Gilbert’s glance of curiosity and answers only in monosyllables when addressed. Orion the hunter drags a whole panoply of constellations across the sky and behind it the moon climbs, flooding milk across the fields. She remembers waiting for the parachutage, how boredom merged into a strange state of contemplation in which even the cold became something exterior, something that couldn’t hurt you. Clément kisses her in the ear, a startling sound in the silence of the night. ‘Soon we’ll be in England,’ he whispers, and she thinks of England, dull, drab England, and wonders what will happen. She pictures him in an untidy divorce after the war, and then the two of them setting up home together as husband and wife in some other country. Canada, maybe, where the man called von Halban has already gone and where they speak French as well as English.
And Benoît? Two men, both of whom she loves, or thinks she loves, or maybe loves. They occupy different parts of her life, as though she were two people, her personality split by war, the one unknown to the other. But that isn’t difficult. She was trained to keep secrets.
‘One day we’ll look back at this and laugh,’ Clément says, but she can’t see the joke, or even imagine there is the possibility of one.
At midnight Gilbert gets to his feet and stretches. ‘Let’s get ready.’ He opens his case and takes out four torches, testing each one in turn and issuing instructions like a commander ordering his troops into action. She follows him out into the moonlight. Underfoot the ground is hard with frost. Luminous scarves of mist are wrapped around the trees along the edge of the field and a bank of fog lies over to their right where the river runs. Gilbert is worrying about fog. Fog can ruin a pick-up in the best weather. A completely clear night may become impossible in a matter of minutes – all it takes is for the air temperature to fall below the dew point. ‘One minute it’s totally clear; the next you’re completely invisible.’
But they aren’t invisible. They are ghostly shadows moving quietly across the pale countryside, wraiths in the darkness. They walk down to the two furthest stakes and tie the torches in place, then come back to where Clément is waiting with the suitcases
. There is something absurd about his appearance, a man in a dark coat standing beside his luggage in the middle of a deserted field, like a passenger translated from a railway platform. He needs a bowler hat, un melon, to complete the image.
‘And now we wait,’ Gilbert says.
V
They wait. Figures in a monochrome landscape, buffeted by a faint breeze, staring at the stars, painted by the moon. Cold seeps into them. Clément puts his arm round Marian and holds her close. There are the sounds of night, the mutterings and scurryings, the distant barking of a dog, the whispering of the breeze as it passes across their ears, and underneath everything a murmur that might be the sound of the nearby river. And then something else comes on the air, a rumour of things to come. She hears it first. Perhaps her younger ears are more sensitive.
‘There!’
‘What?’
‘Shh!’
It dies away. Did she imagine it? The frustration of seeing something that others cannot see, a bird scurrying amid foliage, camouflaged against predators. That day with Yvette on a hillside in Scotland.
‘There!’
‘Where?’
‘Over there. Look!’ A grouse or something, slinking through the heather, abjuring flight for being so treacherous – if you flew they shot you down. Safer to walk. The next thing they had seen or heard was the group of students from Swordland, with Benoît …
‘There it is again!’ The sound returns with greater certainty, a muttering on the night becoming a grumble, a hint of a roar.
‘Yes!’ says Gilbert. And now there is no doubt – an aero engine, the sound rising and falling on the breeze and then settling, louder, to a steady drumbeat. They strain to see something as the noise grows. Gilbert points his torch into the night sky, flashing the letter ‘M’. And the answer comes back, a small star blinking in the blackness.
‘That’s it!’
Alice turns the first lamp on and sets off to the other lights, stumbling on the hard, uneven ground, a child again, running through the moonlight. She reaches the second light and snaps the torch on, then crosses to the third. Above her the aero engine drums on the darkness. As she hurries back to where the men are waiting she can see the Lysander moving against the night, a black cloth sweeping away the dust of stars. It turns towards them, hanging from its wings like a raptor stooping to its prey, tilting in the flow of air, the engine note rising and falling as the pilot jazzes the throttle. The shape grows larger and larger. For a moment landing lights come on, eyes staring out of the wheel spats, as brilliant as spotlights in a theatre so that down on the gorund they seem exposed to view like figures on a stage. Then the thing flies past them, the wheels hit, the aircraft bounces, hits again, rumbles down the flarepath, throttling back and going beyond the second lamp but turning as predicted, turning to the right and coming inside the third lamp, coming back to them where they wait, stunned by the din, beside the first.
‘What a bloody racket!’ she yells against the sound.
The slipstream hits them as the aircraft turns once more and points into wind, its left wing hanging over the first lamp, the pilot waving from the cockpit. Gilbert runs up to talk to him. In the rear of the cockpit two figures are moving. The hatch slides back and someone calls above the engine noise, ‘Is this Le Bourget?’ He heaves his leg over the edge of the cockpit, finds the first rung of the ladder and in a moment he’s on the ground and his colleague is handing suitcases down to him.
‘Everything OK?’ he yells over his shoulder. ‘Had a bloody good flight. Piece of cake, really. I’m David. Goodness, a female!’
‘I’m Alice.’
‘You flying out?’
‘Two of us.’
Clément shakes hands with him. She can see his expression in the half-light – astonishment. Like a child before a Christmas tree.
‘Part of the firm?’
‘He’s not.’
‘A bigwig then.’
They pass Clément’s case up and then wait while the second passenger climbs down, an older man with a ragged moustache and stubble on his chin. He looks like a bandit. Maybe he is a bandit. Gilbert is shouting from beside the nose of the aircraft, his words picked up by the slipstream and thrown back at them in disorder. ‘Get … move …! No … time … waste!’
She turns to Clément. ‘YOU GO FIRST!’ she yells. That song runs through her mind: Puisque vous partez en voyage/Puisque nous nous quittons ce soir. Obediently he climbs the ladder up the side of the aircraft and clambers into the cockpit. She follows him up, watches while he settles himself into the seat, helps him buckle the parachute harness.
Then she points down to the ground. ‘MY CASE!’
He nods and says something, his words snatched away by the slipstream. She looks round at the field, pallid in the moonlight, like mortified flesh. And the roaring of the engine ahead of her, battering her with a gale. Gilbert is there below the cockpit, looking up. ‘Hurry up!’ he mouths.
She recalls how time slowed when she shot the men in Belleville. The plasticity of time, the relativity of time, the whole world going slow then, but fast now – the engine roaring, the propeller a blurred disc bisected by a sword of moonlight, the stars rampaging across the sky – and this great stillness inside her. The men on the ground look up at her curiously, their faces white thumbprints of surprise.
She climbs down the ladder and jumps to the ground. From the glasshouse of the cockpit Clément looks down, his face obscured by the oxygen mask, his eyes staring at her. Hard to read the expression in his eyes. Nothing more than globes of jelly and gristle. She shakes her head.
‘GO!’ she yells into the slipstream from the propeller. And gestures downwind with her hand. ‘GO! GO! GO!’
Gilbert runs back from the aircraft. The pilot gives the thumbs-up. The engine gains noise, roaring and raging at the night, straining for a moment against the brakes before lurching forward, bumping, flexing, gathering speed, with Clément staring down from the cockpit, his face no more than a smudge of shadow. Then he has gone and abruptly the Lysander is in the air, climbing up on spread wings, a bat shape against the dark, rising, turning, swinging through the stars and leaving Alice standing in the backwash from the aircraft, her hair blowing in the wind, her coat flapping round her. And she’s in tears, fucking bloody silly girlish tears, while Gilbert shouts in her face, his calm insouciance gone for once, dashed away by the aeroplane’s slipstream. ‘What the hell are you playing at? This isn’t a bloody game!’
‘I’m not playing a game.’
He grabs her arm. ‘Paris is lethal. I told you. You’re blown, burned, finished. There’s a price on your head.’
‘But I’m not going back to Paris.’
‘Where then?
She feels in control again now, decision made, as the sound of the Lysander fades into the minutiae of the night. ‘South. I can take the train at Vierzon. My cover is good and I’m safe in the south. I’ve still got things to do. My mission isn’t over yet.’ Mission. The word has an almost religious flavour to it. Sent from the sky to work among the people. But Gilbert stands in front of her, almost as though he is going to prevent her from leaving the field, while the other two look on in bewilderment, like children watching adults quarrel.
‘It’s all right,’ she insists. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t think you’ve any idea. You’re just another of Buckmaster’s amateurs, playing around in a world you don’t understand.’
‘I’ve done all right so far.’
‘Hey,’ one of the men calls. ‘Aren’t we going to get a move on? We can’t stand around here arguing.’
Suddenly it’s cold. She needs to move, to get things going again, to be away from here and back in Toulouse, back in Lussac, arguing with le Patron, laughing with Benoît, being where, for the first time for years, she feels at home. She pushes past Gilbert to pull the nearest stake out of the ground and retrieve the torch. ‘We need to clear up, don’t we? Let’s g
o.’
‘Who was he?’ Gilbert calls after her as she sets off to fetch the other torches. ‘Mechanic, I mean. Who was he?’
She turns. ‘An old friend. Maybe I’ll tell you when it’s all over.’
Vierzon
She’s alone. She’s sitting in a corner of a compartment with two other passengers but she’s alone. She tries to keep awake by watching the countryside pass by, the alluvial flats of the Cher, the vasty fields of France; but tiredness creeps up on her like a thief and steals away her waking. She sleeps, hearing the roar of an aero engine in her ears, then comes to with a start. Her fellow passengers have turned to reading. She watches the trees and fields pass. There are clusters of mistletoe among the bare branches. There was mistletoe in the cemetery, mistletoe overhead when she met Yvette. The druids’ plant. The plant that killed the Norse god Baldur. Kisses at Christmas time, a kiss stolen from Clément. She dozes, dreams, sees herself running in the darkness, feels Clément’s body against her.
What will all that mean in the future? How much do such things last? Will they meet again as mere friends, or will there still be this breathless desire? The future seems an uncertain thing, compromised by the present, by the war, by her own strange life here in the dull and battered country that France has become. The future is irrelevant. What is relevant is this train jogging through the French countryside, and the creep of exhaustion.
Clément will be in England by now. How will they deal with him? The man called Fawley with the owl glasses. Kowarski the Russian bear. And Ned, who will presumably be called on to debrief him as he debriefed Kowarski in 1940; Ned whose role in this whole thing is as enigmatic as the physics they all study, a world of uncertainty that yet yields certainty – a bomb that will blow the world to pieces.
Meanwhile the others – Gilbert, and the man called David, and the other agent who looked like a bandit – will be on the train from Tours to Paris, to the Gare d’Austerlitz where there are posters giving her description and a reward for her capture. Five hundred thousand francs.
