“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said truthfully, “but now that I do, I don’t think I’m ideal material for that kind of job. I can’t see myself as a cloak and dagger man, sir!”
The Group-Captain turned to de Royden.
“How is his French?” he demanded, and when the Frenchman replied: “Good; unexpectedly so!” he grunted, as though disappointed by the reply.
I was curious about the De Gaullist’s rancour. Now that I had spotted it, his disapproval of my proposed enrolment was apparent in every word he uttered.
“How do you feel about it, Captain?” I asked him.
He seemed to look at me for the first time. His keen, ice-blue eyes travelled from the top of my head to my shoes and back again. Then, pursing his lips slightly, he said:
“Not ideal, as you say. You are too tall for one thing, but you could pass as a French Canadian, from Montreal possibly, and you might resist torture for the requisite four hours providing your convictions were at stake. You would find it hard, however, to shake a man’s hand, bring your knee into his groin and then stick a knife in him. I doubt if training could achieve it!”
“I doubt it as much as you, Captain!” I said, but against the rising tide of my dislike of the man I could not help being struck by his obvious efficiency. The Englishwoman from whom I had learned French was the wife of a professor from Montreal.
“This ‘ironing out of difficulties’ you mentioned, would it entail cold-blooded murder?”
“It might. Who knows?”
“Of Yves de Royden?”
The De Gaullist raised both shoulders and composed his features into an expression of boredom.
Group-Captain Stevens had had enough. He was not playing M.I.5, any more, he was miles out of his depth. I could see that he not only shared my dislike of the Captain but extended it to all Continentals, exclusive of “good” Germans.
“Why can’t I give the man the letter and be done with it?” he said, grumpily.
The Frenchman lifted his hands. It was a gesture of renunciation. Stevens flushed and poked around his wire tray until he found a single sheet of foolscap folded in three. He opened it and glanced at it like a tired schoolmaster marking a fourth-form essay. Then, with a faint sigh, he passed it across the desk to me. I recognised Diana’s handwriting.
How much control do we have over our loyalties? A single glance at the sailing, fishing-line loop in the “J” of “Jan Dear” blotted out the present, effaced Stevens and the Frenchman and all but banished the ache of Alison’s death. It not only conjured up my own youth but the youth of the entire world, when life was as full of promise as an unwrapped Easter Egg and I used to lie in wait for the postman as he pottered along Whinmouth Quay and stood fumbling outside the door of my Uncle Luke’s second-hand furniture mart with letters from Diana. They always arrived in longish blue envelopes, edged with a thin line of gilt and they were scented, not with perfume but the curiously musty smell of school that always seemed to me to combine the smells of chalk-dust, blotting paper and fine summer dust. The first glimpse of the greeting choked me, and as I struggled to master my emotion I heard the voice of the unpredictable French officer addressing me across the years:
“Perhaps, m’sieur, you would prefer to read it in private. Important decisions should be made in private, preferably in the open!”
I was immensely grateful to him and got up and left them, turning my head away as I passed into the narrow corridor and down the wooden steps on to the tarmac. Far across the field a Wellington was warming up and an airman, driving his petrol-wagon like a chariot, was whistling “Pass the Ammunition”. I went out of the wind and sat down on a concrete armadillo, the single sheet of paper fluttering in my hand.
“Jan Dear,” it ran, “Raoul will be giving you this. Don’t be put off by Raoul. He’s our sort but something happened to him when Yves and the rest of the family went over to the Doones. He’s terrifyingly professional and one can’t really expect him to understand why I need you and must have you if I’m to do what they want me to do. So I told him about ‘us’ and Sennacharib, I had to if I was to begin to convince him and in a way I think I did. Anyway he gave in and I don’t think you’ll disappoint him. You always came before and I know you’ll come again. I don’t deserve this loyalty but Sennacharib does and, after all, that’s what the war is about, isn’t it, Jan? Isn’t it, Jan, dear? My love to you, Jan, as always, the same love that has such long roots. Diana.”
That was all, and through it ran a note that was as familiar to me as the English landscape and the air I breathed. Yet there was present an unfamiliar strain, a kind of hysteria that had no place in Diana. I had not expected anything specific from her. In all her life she had never paused long enough to set down a logical sequence of thoughts, the way a woman might when making a shopping-list. There was no mention of our child and no hint presupposing I might, at long last, have formed a new attachment. The sheer, animal wildness in the woman had always rushed down on me like this and swept me along like an old leaf in a gale. Always the force of her personality had been violent enough to sweep me along until it spent itself and it disappeared over the hill, leaving me breathless, bewildered and alone once more. I knew as I read this deliberate mixture of nostalgic appeal and demented demand that the same thing would happen again, that if I allowed myself to be caught up in this whirlwind I would be blown half across a continent at war and then rolled into some desolate corner and forgotten, perhaps for weeks or months, but more probably for years. Yet this time there was a difference. The appeal, direct as it was, was not aimed at the heart directly but fired from behind a smokescreen of patriotism and I sensed that it was false patriotism because Diana had never cared two straws about democracy, or any kind of freedom but the freedoms she demanded for herself. “That’s what the war is about, isn’t it, Jan?” was hypocrisy. It was not an appeal to a fellow-champion of individual liberty but Diana’s way of asking me to extricate her from a new kind of emotional maze into which she had wandered. Sennacharib, the symbol of our freedom, was her bait.
I read the letter again and again, looking and hoping for a more honest plea, for an interpretation that might have helped to convince me that two years in Occupied Europe had matured or disciplined her but there was no evidence of this. It was not the letter of a woman faced with a tragic crisis calling on her mate but the demand of a venturesome spirit who has dared just too much and squeals for a lifeline. If the first reading amazed me, the second reading amused me, for the light it shed upon Captain de Royden’s frigidity. I could imagine Diana pouring out her tale to this competent, hardbitten man. I could almost hear her saying: “But, Raoul, dear, I’ll be perfectly reliable if you get Jan! Jan and I always did everything together! Jan’s wonderful! Get Jan and we’ll work as a team!” and I could visualise de Royden’s incredulity that a woman caught up in his kind of business could remain so naïve and still persuade herself that her fight against the Nazi war was a game of hide-and-seek in Heronslea woods on a summer’s afternoon. Then, as I thought this, I realised that to Diana this was exactly what it was and that he, de Royden, knew this but accepted it, like all the other risks he faced. In the old days Diana’s delight had been to tilt at authority, any sort of authority, a day-by-day campaign to out-wit schoolmistresses, governesses, parents, bye-laws and Acts of Parliament, and it was from this challenge that she drew her vitality. She must have welcomed the war as the greatest challenge of the century. As I thought about this, I understood de Royden’s shrugging dismissal of her activities … “Paris was full of amateurs at that time,” and it seemed to me that what had probably happened was this; by early 1941, France had absorbed the shock of its defeat and real resistance fighters like Raoul de Royden had begun to emerge, discarding amateurs and forming a hard core of partisans dedicated to the task of salvaging French honour. Diana was useful and had easy access to the enemy’s citadel, so Raoul and his colleagues had enrolled her and flattered themselves, poor fools, that the
y would make something of her, that she could be taught to submerge her individualism in the movement, the cause, the crusade. Then, as always with Diana’s mentors, they had broken their teeth on her but rather than give up they had listened when she cried out for me. They had humoured her, fancying perhaps that they knew all there was to know about a spoiled, wayward girl who had been given her own way in every single respect since she was a rich man’s child at Heronslea. Yet how much did they really know of her? How much compared with me, who had served so brutal an apprenticeship?
I folded the note and went back into headquarters. When I re-entered the office Raoul de Royden was standing by the window, his slender hands clasped behind his back. The Group-Captain, for want of something better to do, was fiddling about with a station timetable spread out on his desk. They both looked at me expectantly when I handed de Royden the letter. It was the only letter I had ever received from Diana that I had let out of my possession.
“No dice!” I said and was not much surprised by de Royden’s look of relief.
Group-Captain Stevens relaxed, becoming his old bumbling self in an instant. It was clear that he had regarded the entire episode as blush-making nonsense, dredged from the pages of a second-rate thriller. This was not the British way of making war. In mind and temperament he was only one page on from the charge of lancers at Omdurman and the thin red line at the Alma and Waterloo.
“I can’t say I blame you, Leigh,” he said, heartily. “Dammit, if you happen to have the stomach for that kind of thing we’ve got our own circus, haven’t we? I daresay Buckmaster might employ you!”
He shook hands and acknowledged the Frenchman’s half-salute with a nod. Clearly he wanted to be rid of us both.
“I’ll keep my eyes open, Leigh,” he said by way of dismissal. “Command ought to find some use for you. Never heard a fellow rattle off French like you do!” He said it as though the ability to converse in a foreign language was something slightly shameful, like a talent for seducing married women.
de Royden and I went out on to the tarmac and across to his jeep parked outside the mess. When we were on the point of parting he said, stiffly: “Any message?”
I pondered, wondering if I was under an obligation to explain the reasons why I had rejected his invitation. There were a number of contributory reasons of which the subtle influence of Alison, now beginning to make itself felt, was one, but the basic reason had nothing to do with Alison or with the process of growing up after years of emotional stalemate. It had instead to do with a sense of justice involving her husband, Yves de Royden, for I realised that in a sense Diana had tried to serve him as she had served me, ruthlessly and with a callousness that was almost obscene. Well knowing what acceptance might involve she had not hesitated to invite me on to a stage where I would be ordered to kill him, and kill him treacherously. I had too much sympathy for him to want to kill him, too much indeed to bear him any malice, or regard him as an enemy. For a moment I considered trying to explain this to de Royden, then I realised that he must know it without my telling him.
“No, Captain,” I said, saluting him, “no message. Just ‘no dice’!”
He started the jeep and roared away towards the main gate and I went looking for the padre. I had to make arrangements for Alison’s funeral.
Chapter Two
THE COASTAL town near the camp might have possessed a limited charm in Dickens’ time but it had very little now. It was a marriage between a bungalow town of the “twenties” and a mid-Victorian Spa. Painted shanties and redbrick villas grew like a pink and green rash along the battered esplanade and most of their pre-war occupants had gone elsewhere. Those who remained flitted about the rusting coastal defences and in and around the bomb sites as though the war had no more to do with them than the scare that had prompted the building of the half-ruined Martello tower on the foreland. It was not the kind of town one would wish to remember and when I saw its cemetery, the tidiest area for miles around, I changed my mind about using it. I thought of taking Alison back to Whinmouth and burying her on the western edge of Sennacharib but I soon dismissed the idea. She had never visited Devon and the shadow of Diana and Sennacharib had come between her and fulfilment. I settled for a tiny churchyard behind the Downs, where the chalk road crossed the valley, climbed the next fold and lost itself in birchwoods.
My experiences as a small-town reporter had prejudiced me against public funerals. Alison had served in the A.T.S. and the local Commandant rang my camp and suggested a quasi-military funeral. She seemed to think I ought to welcome the idea and was hurt when I turned her down. In the end I went out there alone and the service at the graveside was conducted by the local rector, attended by his sexton.
It was a mild, windless day and up here the countryside looked battered but friendly. The sky was clear over the chalk hills and the woods were blue black on the horizon. Around us was a kind of patient emptiness that suited the occasion.
When it was over the rector and the sexton went home and I entered the little church to sit for a while. It was a fourteenth-century building, not much restored, and I passed down the central aisle and sat in a front pew, trying to think about Alison a little. I found I was unable to do this. My eye kept roving to the scroll-work on the reredos screen and comparing it with the reredos carved by Drake’s seamen in the Shepherd shey parish church at home. I found myself wondering what kind of men would sail round the world and come home reinforced in their belief in Providence and if any such men existed today. I thought then of Raoul de Royden with his aura of vicious despair and wondered if his religious beliefs had survived the two years of reprisal and counter-reprisal in the Underground Movement, or if he had any religious beliefs to begin with. I thought I ought to feel sad and desperately lonely but I didn’t, just depressed and indecisive. While I was musing, I heard, almost without hearing, a single footfall on the stone slabs at the far end of the church and then the faint protest of a pew bench as somebody sat on it The interruption braced me and enabled me to focus my mind on Alison again and I went searching back over our brief period together, looking and looking for a memory that could hold its own with my first love. There was none but I decided that this was neither my fault nor Alison’s. How the hell could two people build a relationship when each was chivvied about from camp to camp, their minds occupied by scores of minor irritations, food shortages, cigarette shortages, black-out precautions, button-cleaning, syrens and overdue trains? Since September, ’39, the whole vista of private life seemed to have acquired a grey, prison-like aspect Colours had faded and such laughter as remained had taken refuge in the clichés of the parade ground.
I sat on, watching my peace of mind drift over the horizon and I began to wonder whether I was developing into the kind of man who makes a kind of hoard of his troubles and disappointments. Self-pity is like alcohol, creating its own appetite and the loss of Alison, following the cul-de-sac traipse of my courtship of Diana, began to seem inevitable, a thread of personal destiny that was never meant to lead anywhere but into a desert. A discreet cough remind ed me that I was not alone. I got up and walked down the aisle towards the porch. When I was within a few steps of the door I saw a woman in a coloured headscarf rise from the rearmost pew and step forward to intercept me. The woman was Diana.
I don’t know why I wasn’t astounded. I should have been, for nothing whatever in the conversation I had had with de Royden had led me to suppose that Diana had accompanied him to England. He had spoken of her as if she was still living with her husband in Paris, or on one of their country places in the south-west. I knew enough of the Underground Movements in Europe to be aware of the coming and going of prominent agents, but if I had thought about it at all I should have dismissed her journey here as an impossibility. In wartime all civilians, even civilians linked with partisans, do not come and go between enemy countries like tourists. They stay put, whether they like it or not, and even women as egocentric as Diana are subject to restrictions imposed upon a
ll conquered peoples. Yet, as I say, I was not very surprised and perhaps this was because, for some time now, I had been living in a bad dream where the improbable is the norm. She advanced, smiling a little tremulously and tilted her chin. The gesture had in it a faintest suggestion of defiance and it was this rather than anything else about her that accomplished recognition.
“Hallo, Jan,” she said, very quietly.
Outwardly she was changed far more than I could have imagined. I knew her age to the day. She was four months short of twenty-nine and when I had last seen her, close on two years ago, she had looked as taut and fit as when she rode across Heronslea paddocks on her spirited gelding, Sioux. Now there was a curious heaviness about her that slowed her down and hinted at the approach of middle-age. Maturity, a curiously accelerated maturity, showed clearly in her face. Her blue eyes, once so bold and impudent, were veiled and uncertain, as though they had forgotten how to chase the laughter that had always lurked at the corners of her wide mouth. There was no laughter there now although the mouth had not grown up with the rest of her features but retained its girlishness, childishness almost, yet seemed pathetically anxious to adapt itself to the rest of the features. Her hair was unchanged too, the same thick, heavy curls that always seemed to possess an individual life of their own and to wage cheerful guerilla war against any covering Diana clamped on her head. Now they were pushing against the folds of the scarf and spilling down behind the ears and a shaft of sunlight crossing the church porch lingered for a moment about her shoulders so that I saw the lustre that had impressed me the first moment I set eyes on her in Heronslea larchwood.
I looked at her for a long moment without speaking and the peace I had tried so hard to find settled on her like a butterfly, just out of reach. The hate and frustration and boredom and desolation ebbed from me and I knew at once that nothing had changed and that nothing essential ever would change.
Diana Page 44
