The Daisy Club

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘We must go back to the fight.’

  He stood up, and they both quickly dressed.

  ‘You must not be seen too much with me, because of retaliation,’ he told her, taking both her hands and kissing them in a particularly Gallic manner.

  ‘Hang on, no need to kiss my hand, I’m not a married woman!’ Laura joked.

  ‘It is time to be serious, mon ange.’ As much as they both disliked being serious, Friquet most particularly, it was very important that Laura knew the dangers into which she could run. ‘Listen, please. If you are seen about with me too much, it is not the Boche that will get you, it is the Maquis. They are very badly organised, or else, ask yourself, why would they be using me? No, you must not be seen with me too often. Now I think of it, we must not be seen together in the towns at all. We can meet here in this little seaside inn, because the landlord downstairs is a cousin of my married uncle, and he would rather take his own life than give us away, but nowhere else. You understand? As I am posing as a pro-Vichy newspaperman I, too, am in danger of what you English call ‘friendly fire’, but it is easier for me, because I speak the same language, whereas you, my dearest little Englishwoman, while speaking impeccable French, nevertheless do not speak the language of the Communists, or the Maquis.’

  ‘I could learn, you could teach me.’

  Friquet laughed heartily at this.

  ‘No, Laura, you could not even begin to learn it.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because, prettiest of creatures, because there are too many bad words!’

  He left her, and Laura watched him go down the path that led to the coast with feelings of both delight and regret. Delight that they had made love so beautifully, more beautifully than she thought could have been possible, and regret that he had to go.

  She lay back on the bed in the little whitewashed bedroom, and thought of what lay ahead. She knew she must stay in France for the moment, that she was more useful here than she had been driving about London with a canteen, or down the Underground. Very well, she had come to France not just to set up lines of communication across the vast French countryside, but also to find her father and Dora. Where were they?

  She had wondered that so often that it had become painful. Wondered it over and over again. Where were they? Why had they not come back? Why had they not fled to Portugal as so many caught in France had done? Why had they not taken a boat from the South of France as, again, so many of the English had done, packing their few jewels into a small suitcase, leaving the Nazis to take over their villas, their paintings, their silver and gold?

  And yet, if she knew that she could find out what had happened to them. If she had already found them, too, would she really have volunteered when she had heard that a few French-speaking FANYs were needed to go to France? She doubted it. No, she knew she would not. She had come to France to find her father in order to prove to him that, little though he might love her, she loved him, and was willing to risk her life to find him. That was how deeply she felt about him, and her country, too.

  She looked at her watch. She was due to meet a Madame Bonnet at a certain point in a village some few miles away.

  She rolled the name around her tongue, saying it out aloud, as she did so, ‘Madame Bonnet?’

  She imagined her, a goodly woman, a rollicking good sort, all black bombazine and woollen headscarves. She yawned nervously. In half an hour she would go downstairs, and, slipping out of the back door, take a bicycle and a torch and start out on her journey. It would take her some time, but Madame Bonnet could not be met until midnight. Laura’s contact had told her this.

  Even as the village clock was striking the midnight hour Laura, pushing her bike – which happily did not squeak – found the street where she was to meet Madame Bonnet. She had a watertight story, thank God. Madame Bonnet was an aunt. She wanted to see Laura to put in order certain family matters, a little business of a will, something that the rest of the family must not find out, something that only Laura and she could settle, hence the lateness of the hour, because with so many Bonnets in that particular village, they did not want tongues to start wagging.

  It was a good story, and Laura was happy with it until, after some time waiting, and waiting, clinging to her bicycle as to a lifeboat, she realised that the woman who had to be waiting for her, the woman going under the name of ‘Madame Bonnet’, was the tart saying goodnight to a German officer, who then drove off in a staff car, with a perhaps understandably happy smile on his face.

  ‘Madame Bonnet? I think you are expecting me – Marie Bonnet?’

  The woman smiled, which Laura thought, fleetingly, was not a good idea. Her teeth were more than a little alarming.

  ‘Come in, my dear.’

  Laura walked up into a room lit only by red light. As she sat down she realised that this must be why places of vice were always called ‘red-light districts’. How stupid! How stupid that she had never realised it before! She also realised that the lighting must make things easier, after all, not every man could, or did, look like Friquet.

  ‘Where is your message, Mademoiselle?’

  Laura produced it.

  Madame Bonnet, if it was indeed she, read it briefly, and then with a look of unveiled contempt gave it back to Laura.

  ‘My dear, this is of no use. It tells me nothing. Who gave you this?’

  Laura was in no state to feel calm. She was in the upstairs room of a tiny village, which, if she did but know it, might well be stuffed with the Boche. Now was therefore not the time to look as scared as she felt.

  ‘My apologies, Madame,’ she said, at pains to at least seem polite. ‘But I was given this message in good faith.’

  As she spoke Laura’s eyes were trying to take in, not the undoubted outlines and curves of her hostess, but the rest of the room. There was something about it that was not right. She had always understood that tarts’ rooms were stuffed with dolls, and that kind of thing, but there was nothing like that here. With the single exception of the red light bulb in the rather provincial standard lamp, it was more the room of a respectable woman, right down to a reproduction painting of Monet’s garden.

  It was then that she heard the sound of boots coming up the stairs, and if she had not known that she had her little pill in her pocket, she might have screamed or fainted. As it was she said to Madame Bonnet, ‘Are you expecting a guest, Madame, because if so I must surely leave?’

  Before the tart had time to reply, Friquet came into the room. He recoiled dramatically the moment he saw Laura.

  ‘Oh! Nom d’un nom!’ he said, and then looked at Madame.

  ‘I thought you said we would be alone!’ He turned to Laura, and something in his eyes told her to react to his words. ‘My darling! I am so sorry, but it has been so long – and you know, because you are so religious and deny me everything until our wedding, I have needs, masculine needs!’

  Laura picked up how the scene should play immediately, and without more ado, she slapped Friquet hard across his face, and as she did so his expression was marvellously amazed. He put up a hand with undisguised shock to where she had hit him.

  ‘I knew I would catch you out! One day I knew I would catch you. Thought you were being so clever, didn’t you?’

  She caught up her handbag, and marched past them both, and down the stairs to her bicycle. She hopped aboard it, and without looking back, she cycled her hardest out of the village.

  Inside the room Friquet tried to look remorseful, and failed. He shrugged his shoulders instead.

  ‘You know how it is with young girls,’ he said. ‘They don’t understand men, they don’t understand our needs.’

  The tart, for such she was, also shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘If you want to go ahead, it is double at this time of night.’

  Friquet shook his head, but handed her a wad of money.

  ‘I am sorry if you have been embarrassed, Madame,’ he said, with great courtesy. ‘It is just that – th
e mood is not quite right.’

  She laughed a short, vulgar, ear-splitting laugh, and as Friquet ran down the stairs and out into the street, and wrenched his car door open before speeding away, he nevertheless had time to think that hell was surely filled with such sounds, thousands of such sounds. Nowhere else could produce something so hideous, falsely frantic, and at the same time, full of evil intent.

  Laura arrived back at the inn first, and having hidden her bicycle in the usual wood pile, she bolted up the stairs, and poured herself a brandy. What was up? Where was Friquet? He would know what was happening.

  Half an hour later, having carefully taken a very different route, Friquet, too, arrived back, and followed Laura’s route up the stairs and straight to the brandy bottle.

  ‘What a lash-up!’ Laura exclaimed. ‘What happened?’

  Friquet couldn’t speak for a moment, nor could he tell her exactly how close she had been to being arrested by the Gestapo.

  ‘There’s been a clean-up, as well as what you call a lash-up,’ he said, starting to laugh. ‘The whole neighbourhood is crawling with the Boche. I got wind of it, from someone on the paper.’ Friquet was improvising. ‘What happened was that the real Madame Bonnet was arrested, thanks to the tart saying she was helping the Maquis. The tart was given orders to take your message, and to say it was false, so that she could detain you for a while. And then. Well, never mind. The truth is that it was, as you would say, “a narrow squeak”.’ He looked serious. ‘That must not happen again.’ He sat down quite suddenly, and stared ahead. The truth was that having Laura in tow was really quite a liability. He ought to send her on her way. He looked across at her. But he couldn’t. He was like someone in a Greek fable, he had been trapped, enchained by love, and he a free spirit, enfin!

  ‘I am a liability, aren’t I?’ Laura stated, reading his unspoken thoughts most precisely. ‘I should go back to England, but I can’t. The truth is, I want to stay and help, but not if it is going to endanger you.’

  ‘My family’s chateau is the perfect place to hide, you know that. It is more perfect than you can imagine.’

  ‘I don’t want to hide alone in a chateau. It would be cowardly. I can do that in England, if I want.’

  ‘What do you want to do, therefore?’

  ‘I can stay here, surely? If your uncle downstairs, or whatever he is, is trustworthy, and no one that he does not know comes here, this place is safe. Not many people pass by, and there is the sea. I can pretend to myself that I can see England.’

  Laura was playing for time. She did not yet know how much she could trust Friquet. She must trust him, of course (what else could she do?), but she was still English, she was still alone, and she knew, instinctively, that if there was water, she could escape more easily. Once trapped in a lonely country house, there would be no way out. By the sea, on the other hand, there was always – well, there was always a boat, water, rocks, some feeling that you could get away.

  ‘Very well, my dearest Laura. You may remain here, but you must only venture out for a walk to the shore when it is dark, never during the day. You are too pretty not to be remarked upon, even in your delightfully provincial clothes. Now, I must go. We will not see each other for a few days.’

  Laura listened to him retreating back down the stairs, and as she did so she wondered whether her so-called feminine instinct was right. Was Friquet what he seemed to be, or was he, in reality, yet another double agent with a brilliant cover?

  She was left alone in the inn, eating alone, sleeping alone, and wondering what to do next, for a few days. Once or twice she saw a lone fisherman coming in with a catch, and once, at night, she thought she saw torches flashing, but other than that, not wanting to make use of her radio, for obvious reasons, there was nothing she could do, but wait, and wait, hoping that something would occur to move her on, that someone whom she could trust would suddenly appear.

  ‘Friquet!’

  She fairly danced off the bed as he came into the room.

  He pushed her away from him.

  ‘You must go, my darling. No time to say more. There’s a boat waiting, it will slip you round the rocks out there, and then take you as far as the opposite coast. You will be all right. They are very good, these people, they do it all the time. How, I don’t know.’ Friquet was packing up her things, and stuffing them into her shoulder bag. ‘Va! Va vite! No time to waste, they are after you.’

  Laura could not stop to question him, how could she? She snatched at the bag he handed her, and fairly fell down the stairs after him.

  ‘Va! Va vite!’

  As she ran after him, and down to the beach, and he flung her into a boat, and then helped a couple of very small but obviously very strong fishermen push it, Friquet wondered at the bad luck of it all. Poor Laura, she must never find out, must never know, that the people who would be after her, sooner rather than later, were not the Nazis, not the Gestapo, but the Maquis.

  It was the surname that had done it. Hambleton. Arthur Hambleton. Laura had asked Friquet if he knew of this man, her father, if he knew of his whereabouts, and that of his wife. Well, his wife was long gone, but the father, it seemed, had been a double agent, and was also gone, but this Laura was not to know, ever.

  ‘Good luck, my darling,’ he murmured, as the boat finally left the shore, and Laura sat shivering at the back of it. ‘Au revoir – and let us pray to the good Lord that you return to me, when all this foolishness is over.’

  He turned to go up the beach, but seeing torches above him, he thought better of it, and hid among the rocks until daylight, by which time whoever it was had gone. He walked up to the old inn, breakfast in mind – coffee, croissants – only to find the woman of the place weeping. Her husband had been arrested.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Friquet told her with his usual assumed nonchalance, ‘I will get him out.’

  ‘How? How can you?’

  ‘Simple. I will tell the officer in charge that I will write about him in my newspaper. It always works!’

  She stopped crying and served him breakfast, just as Laura arrived back in England after a journey which had seemed so fantastic as to be unreal. The brilliance of the men who had finally taken her on board, their ability to dodge not just shipping lanes, but landmines, was so inspiring that Laura felt ashamed that she had ever felt afraid. What had she ever achieved trying to lay down lines in France, that compared to that kind of brilliance?

  ‘God bless England, and you!’ she told them.

  They smiled. It was nothing. They did it all the time.

  ‘First time was Dunkirk, that was a bit of a baptism, but now . . .’ They shrugged. ‘It’s the boat, you know, such a good old girl, really she is.’

  Laura patted her keel. A converted pleasure boat, she had, it seemed, since Dunkirk, made the journey across the Channel under cover of darkness more times than they could tell her.

  ‘It’s her shape, see,’ one of the boatmen said. ‘Even if they see her, they have no idea what she’s doing, or why, so they leave her alone. Simple, really. Go about in the unusual and people steer clear of you, that’s what my old father used to say!’

  It took longer to get to London by train than it had to cross the Channel, but at last she found herself outside the Daisy Club flat, putting her key in the latch. She had made soup for Daisy here, the last time – was it the last time? She could hardly remember. At any rate she remembered very well making that soup, and how Daisy had pulled a face at it. Now she would give anything for some of it, for any soup. She almost fell into the flat, and then shut the door.

  She flicked her lighter just to see something, and then, the blackout curtains being drawn, she lit a candle, and automatically turned to the visitors’ book that Daisy still insisted, just like the old days at Twistleton Court, everyone must sign. She opened the book, and then looked round for a pen. No pen. She closed it again. No ink, no pen, no loo paper, no nothing. Suddenly France seemed to be the land of luxury, and she sighed for i
t, while at the same time feeling indignant. She would give anything for some food such as Friquet would now be eating at the inn. But this was England, and she must fight on.

  Before she went to sleep she found herself praying for the boatmen, for the innkeeper, but most of all for her darling Friquet. He had got her out in time, before the Gestapo came for her. How could she ever repay him?

  The men who finally unearthed young Johnny from the rubble and put him on a stretcher spoke to him in cheerful cockney tones, and they were careful not to move him until they were quite sure that it was safe. Then they carried him to the Red Cross centre and he was put on two chairs pushed together, while a kind lady washed his face and hands, and tried to brush his clothes.

  As she washed him and brushed him the lady talked to him about what his name was, and what his mother’s name was, and Johnny, still clutching his toy, tried to tell her, and he did but it was difficult for him to talk because he hurt so much.

  ‘I were under the table,’ he told the lady after a while. ‘Where’s me mum? She was by me, she was making tea.’

  ‘Is there someone who can come and collect you? Who we tell that you are all right?’

  Johnny thought for a few minutes, and the lady waited. Eventually it came to him.

  He had a brother called Alec, and he had two others, two other older brothers, too. They were away, in a place called . . . He stopped, frowning. He could not remember what the place was called. It was called something like a whistle. He stared up at the lady, trying hard to explain, but she kept repeating everything that he had said, which made him forget what he was trying to say next. Yes, he had brothers, and his brothers were all in a big house, and it had a hall, and they all worked on a farm, and there was a gent called Branscombe, and he was very kind, and looked after Johnny.