I was summoned by the Chief of Intelligence and asked if I was prepared to undertake a special operation involving an almost immediate return to France. I say “asked” because this was technically true. This kind of job was never thrust on anybody and people like me were given the doubtful privilege of volunteering for duties coming under the heading of “special operations”. I had absolutely no appetite for glory. I hated Fascism and I believe I was prepared to do as much as the next man to win the war, but I wanted to do it in company, as a member of a Lancaster crew or a cog in a technical ground unit. I wanted most desperately to survive. For the first time in my life my thoughts were tidily arranged and my personal future was predictable. I wasn’t looking for medals or kudos and there was nothing awaiting me in Nazi-occupied Europe but the loss of everything I had won back from life during my former gamble.
The Chief was very comfortably seated behind a large map of north-western France that took in all of Brittany and parts of Anjou, Maine and Lower Normandy. He was a comfortable-looking man, a pre-war turf celebrity with the kind of assurance that comes from inherited wealth and the civilian rank of County Lieutenant. I admired him without being able to like him. His confidence was derived not so much from his present Air Force rank and social status as from his attitude to the war as a whole, as though it was a foxhunt that had worked itself into a tedious muddle and needed to be sorted out by an expert.
We talked a little about my Service record and at his request we conversed in French. His French was very bad, far worse than he knew, but he spoke it with so much assurance that I was half-convinced that it was I who had learned it at a crammer’s in the nineteen-twenties. It soon leaked out that he wanted me to contribute towards the temporary isolation of a section of French railway lines that would be used by Germans reinforcing the north-western sector of the Atlantic Wall. It was my first clue as to where invasion was likely to strike.
The next thing that emerged was the fact that my name had been put forward for this particular job by Raoul de Royden, who had left the Paris area after our flight and had been engaged in the backbreaking task of co-ordinating the various Resistance groups in the area under survey. The Chief told me something of what was intended in the way of aerial bombardment and said it would aim at cutting railways, blocking tunnels and isolating the combat areas. He didn’t actually say that there was going to be an invasion here but he might just as well have admitted it.
“The idea is to isolate this area for at least seventy-two hours,” he said. “I don’t know why, it’s not my concern, but I imagine there’s some kind of feint or raid on, a largish one, I should say!” He pointed out the course of rivers and railways and told me where the heavy Lancaster raids would occur, mostly against bridges over rail cuttings and waterways. Then he came to the point without wasting time on ascertaining whether or not I was willing to volunteer for special duties a second time.
“This chap de Royden seems to be highly thought of at De Gaulle’s H.Q.” he said. “We had a signal yesterday with your name on it. It seems that this chap is in a spot and wants a British liaison officer that he can rely on. Before we go into details what kind of feller is he?”
He might have been asking my advice on the employment of a beater at a grouse shoot.
“He’s the toughest egg they’ve got in the field,” I said, “and one hundred per cent reliable! He was educated over here. At Marlborough!”
“Really?” He was obviously very relieved to hear this and promoted Raoul de Royden from porter at the Gare du Nord to reserve in the county cricket team. He then came as near to animation as was possible with a man of his antecedents. “Tell me about him! Tell me how he came to get caught up in this cloak-and-dagger circus!”
I told him what little I knew of Raoul de Royden and mentioned that he was a cousin of my wife’s first husband. I could see he knew all about Diana and me. He was even worse at concealing what he knew than he was at expressing himself in French and it occurred to me that he was a classic example of British Service snobbery at its worst. He possessed certain qualifications for his job but he would have got it anyway and within days of joining the staff.
He said, in his best old-boy voice:
“I see! Well now, this chap de Royden has to pull out. Seems he has other things to do! A strike has been laid on that is supposed to synchronise with ours. There’s a locomotive repair depot here”—he pointed to a small town called Ghislaine St. Père, just south of the Loire—“and the Resistance people intend to wreck the breakdown train before it can get here,” and he indicated a tunnel linking two main lines from the south. “Our fellers will soak that place on a certain date—you’ll get the date later of course—but the whole damn thing will be useless unless the French blitz that repair train soon after it sets out. It’ll start within minutes of the attack on the tunnel. This likely chap, de Royden, has sent a demand through that he must have a British officer to take his place at once and he specifically asked for you. I imagine it saves him the trouble of getting to know a complete stranger.”
He did not mean to sound unflattering, it was just his way of stating a hunch. I said, reluctantly:
“Suppose I went over, would I get my local briefing from de Royden personally?”
He had obviously not considered this and said he would find out from “someone on a rather higher level”. Then, but archly, he reverted to Service slang.
“That’s the griff, Leigh old man! You’ll get all bumff later on but this is all I’m authorised to tell you now. Point is, I’m not ordering you to take it on, it’s not exactly a piece of cake, is it?”
It wasn’t a piece of cake. It was a sour lump of dough and my stomach confirmed the fact. I could guess what had prompted Raoul to send the S.O.S. over the crowded wire. By now he had probably despaired of playing referee to about half-a-dozen rival partisan groups and had realised that, in his absence from the scene, the only possible solution would be the appointment of an official British agent under whom the enthusiastic locals might be persuaded to forget their countless personal jealousies and mutual mistrust. The job itself did not look too difficult but the chances of making a getaway after it was accomplished were vague.
“Do I have to make a decision now, sir, or do I get a chance to think it over?”
He looked at me as though he was the head prefect and I was a grubby third-former asking for permission to cut games.
“I’m afraid you have to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ now,” he said, bleakly. “Dammit man, we are rather heavily engaged, what with one thing and another!” Then, self-consciously, he softened a little and added: “After all, strictly speaking this isn’t my show you know, its an S.O.E. pidgin! Maybe you’d care to take it up with them!”
“No sir, it’s not the job I’m querying. If Raoul de Roydon set it up, then it has a good chance of succeeding. It’s a personal matter. Could you give me fifteen minutes?”
He smiled and became almost human.
“Why naturally. Dammit, not all that panic, is there?” and we both stood up.
I went out into what had once been the walled garden of a great country house. The May sunshine wavered on the lichened blocks and there was that most evocative of early summer scents, the smell of wallflowers. I sat down on a piece of stone near the sundial and looked across the wilderness of neglected garden to the huddle of grey buildings that had been coachhouses and were now doing duty as a carrier-pigeon centre. Birds were strutting on the weedy lawn and I envied them their ignorance of the part they would be expected to play in the coming offensive. I told myself that I ought to have expected something like this, that I had been drugged since Diana and I had homed on Sennacharib, that there was no reason at all to suppose the British military machine would consider me immune from further risks simply because I had solved my personal problems. Evidently they had yet to solve theirs and I was being asked to assist. A good many men who were well satisfied with their lives right now would be asked to face death or
mutilation before the summer was much advanced.
I could refuse of course but it was not solely the look in the Air Commodore’s eye that I feared. That wouldn’t last anyway. He would soon find some other mug and forget all about me, my name as well as the proposition he was putting to me. What nagged at me was my responsibility toward Raoul de Royden and the rag-tag-and-bobtail he led. Raoul was a dedicated man, dedicated in the way that I had been dedicated, and to a dream. It was a different dream perhaps—but was it? Diana said we were at war in defence of the right to walk freely at Sennacharib, whereas Raoul was fighting for the nation that had shamed him and sold his generation to a pack of thugs for an unspecified number of francs. It amounted to the same thing, the free determination of an individual to use or to waste his life as he chose, and I wondered what Diana’s advice would be if she was able to look at the matter objectively. Could she do this? Could she help me if I ignored the look in the Air Commodore’s eye and stalled for time to go home and discuss it with her?
I turned my back on the prospect. I had enough pride to want to work this one out alone. How much did I owe Raoul de Royden? How much did I owe the Allied cause? How much did Britain or the British owe me? If it had not been for de Royden, Diana and I would not have come together again, never at least in the sense that we were together at this moment. And if the Allies had not stood up to the Nazis in 1940 Sennacharib would have ceased to exist, for me or anyone else, of that I was certain. For me, Sennacharib was the nation. It was the part of Britain, named on the map, and the Britain that was not marked on any map. It was the cluster of thatched cottages and hedged fields and the rash of suburban estates on the edge of the industrial cities. It was Cobden and Doctor Johnson and Cromwell and Chaucer; it was Wilberforce and Shaftesbury and the Tolpuddle Martyrs; it was Tennyson’s Idylls of a King and it was the Song of the Shirt and Dickens’ London; it was the Union Jack and the Mother of Parliaments. I owed it a damned sight more than it owed me or could ever owe me, notwithstanding loyalty to Diana’s lovely body and the music of her laughter in the morning.
I took my hands out of my pockets, straightened my tie and went to knock on the Air Commodore’s door.
They sent me on a forty-eight that same evening, with a promise that I should get my initial briefing and despatch date the following Monday afternoon. For this, they said, I would have to go over to S.O.E. Headquarters in Baker Street. There was an inter-service background to my particular job and S.O.E. were the boys with the latest “gen.”
Diana guessed what had happened the moment I entered the room and when I told her the details she was silent for a long moment. Then she said:
“Don’t let’s discuss it here, Jan, let’s go up to the paddock beyond the larch wood. I must have time to get used to this.”
“There isn’t any time,” I said, “I’m already committed, Di!”
“I know but I’ve got to adapt myself to it, so let’s get out of here and go up to Foxhayes.”
We went out and down the slope to the river, then over the wooden footbridge and up the nearside of the Heronslea coverts to Big Oak Paddock. The primroses were gone and the foxgloves were budding. For wildflowers it was an in-between season. There was only campion in the hedges and on the edge of the wood a thin mist of bluebells. We walked a mile or more without exchanging a word and then, as we were crossing Big Oak, she said:
“I’m glad in a way, Jan, there had to be a readjustment. We might as well get it over with right now!”
“What kind of readjustment? Damn it, we’ve been happier than I ever dreamed possible! You have, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but there’s a flaw, Jan. In one way I’ve succeeded better than I hoped but in another I’m still a bloody failure!”
I stopped and pulled her round so that she faced me.
“Don’t say that! Don’t ever say it! You’ve been wonderful in every way and I’m more in love with you now than I ever was!”
She looked at me steadily and there were tears in her eyes. Diana was sparing with tears and whenever I saw them I was frightened.
“What is it, Di?”
“I can’t give you any more children, Jan. Never, you understand?”
I was shocked by the despair in her face and voice. I took her hand and led her to the broken stretch of fence opposite the buzzards’ oak. She sat down, her hands in her lap.
“It’s true, Jan, I’ve been everywhere, to everyone and its unanimous. They all say the same thing!”
“Who have you been seeing? When? And why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
She lifted her shoulder. “Does it matter? I went to the best. The last was Foster-Hayne, in Welbeck Street. He’s supposed to be the best in Europe. I’ve been up to town four times when you were away. I kept hoping that one of them would come up with something new and I could hope. If that had happened I should have told you at once. You believe that, I suppose?”
It was in character when I thought about it, this desperately secret search for reassurance. There had always been secretiveness in her way of doing things, a passion to solve the really big problems alone and come up with the answer when she was ready and not a moment before. I took a deep breath and came to terms with it at once. Perhaps I could never convince her that children were not important. They might have been once and they might have been still had it not been for Yvonne but now their importance was insignificant. All that mattered to me was that we would continue as we were, the complement of one another physically, spiritually and emotionally. Nothing else mattered at all. She forestalled my attempt to explain this yet again.
“You’d better hear the whole truth now Jan. Then we’ll talk about your going to France again!”
“Talk yourself out Di,” I said, trying not to sound as exasperated as I felt, “then I’ll have my say and you’re going to listen to it and think about it!”
“It was the child I got rid of just before you came to the villa. I told you Raoul arranged it but he didn’t, I lied to you then and I never thanked you for not bullying the facts out of me. Most men would have tried, you know!”
“What about Rance’s child?”
“I took a chance, a big one as it turned out, and this is the pay-off. I suppose the sane thing would have been to have asked Raoul to find me somewhere reliable but I didn’t. The only thing that seemed to matter then was to start afresh and how was that possible with his child in my womb? I wasn’t even sure when you would arrive and there was no time to be choosey. I just went ahead and as I say, this is the pay-off!”
Things began to fall into place, little things that had passed half-noticed at the time. I remembered her elation last Christmas when she thought she was pregnant and what had seemed to me her unreasonably bitter disappointment when she had learned that she was not. I remembered too odd trunk calls and a couple of trips to town and one or two long silences between us when her manner had suggested that she was preoccupied with a part of her life still hidden from me. I had never probed and never wanted to know more than she wanted to tell me but this was not due to consideration on my part but a kind of fear that whatever emerged would cloud the present. I wasn’t even curious, I felt that I knew the real Diana and I wasn’t interested in the wild, pacemaking creature of the period between past and present. I said, in reply:
“I don’t seem able to convince you about the unimportance of children so well accept that it’s terribly important to you. What concerns me vitally is your health and your peace of mind, so tell me all you have to tell me about both. I’m sure it isn’t as serious as you make it out to be and anyway, it was wrong of you to keep it to yourself this long!”
“I don’t know how much you know about these things,” she said guardedly. “Men seem to spend a lot of time laughing at sex but most of them are incredibly ignorant about it. It’s a miracle you never guessed anyway.”
“Women who don’t have children but want them as much as you usually go to specialists and have an operation. I know that m
uch,” I said, “I’m not seven or eight any longer!”
“Oh yes you are, Jan,” she said gently, “in most ways you are and certainly in this field. Not that I’d want you different, except that it’s difficult to make a child grasp the essentials of this issue! I underwent a clumsy abortion Jan! Not only the neck of the womb was torn but the womb itself. It’s not uncommon in those kind of circumstances. Maybe I left it too late, I don’t know. Anyway, it happened, about six weeks before you arrived in France.”
I tried to remember how she had looked when she surprised me asleep in Rance’s villa but I could only recollect that she was no longer pregnant and had seemed so much more alert and vital than when she had sat beside me in the jeep after Alison’s funeral. There had been fear in her eyes certainly, but that, having regard to the tension and Rance coming, was not surprising.
“When did you first know about this?” I demanded. “Did you know when we were married?”
“No, not until after the miscarriage in January. If I had known before I hope to God I should have had the guts to tell you but I doubt it, knowing me.”
“Stop being tragic and stick to the facts,” I said. It was clear that she was very much upset but I could see no profit in guilt. We had shared enough guilt to last us both a lifetime.
“The facts are very simple Jan,” she said. “Four specialists have had a good look at me and only one, Foster-Hayne, recommends a Trachelorrhaphy.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a repair to the womb. I could give you more details but they wouldn’t mean very much to you.”
“We can go into all that later,” I said. “Is it a reasonably simple operation or is it dangerous and complicated?”
“It’s very straightforward.”
“Well why not have it, not now but after the war when I can be here all the time?”
Diana Page 62
