Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  Madeleine had taken the news in her stride—’flu was ’flu and a temperature of 101 needed watching.

  But she didn’t know what I knew. Not yet.

  The music increased in tempo then, and one or two individuals in front of us began to nod their heads in time to the rhythm. Then it got too fast for anyone’s neck muscles and, in a swooping climax, it ended.

  We all applauded rapturously, and one or two whistled.

  Miss Hess—who hadn’t yet been made a dame, as she would be later—sipped some water from a glass on the piano. I remember that although it was May, and sunny, it was cold in the shade and she was wearing a fur coat that day—there was no heating in the National Gallery. As she prepared for her next piece, she blew on her fingers. Everyone laughed.

  With her eyes closed, and a slight swaying of her upper body, she started to play her last offering of the day, the one that had quickly become everyone’s favourite: “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

  I closed my eyes and let the lovely notes wash over me, clean and pure, the perfect antidote to what was going to happen later in the day. A succession of clear sounds, each one distinct, followed one another in what seemed an inevitable pattern, like water falling over rock.

  I leaned against Madeleine and she leaned against me. Field Marshal Rommel was quoted in the papers that day as saying he didn’t think an invasion in the north of France could work. Was he trying to put us off? Was he worried that it could work all too well? Did he know what he was talking about?

  The music came to an end. The applause was, as always, enthusiastic, grateful but not overlong: people had jobs or families to go back to. There was a war on.

  Madeleine and I joined the crowd spilling out into Trafalgar Square. Nothing much was said on the way down the steps—the soothing effect of the music still lingered.

  As we emerged into the square—clear skies but for the barrage balloons over Whitehall—I took Madeleine’s arm.

  “Where are we going?” she said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Northumberland Avenue. Let’s walk down there to the river.”

  She stopped and looked at me. “No lunch? We could have the table I booked for me and my mother at—”

  “Not just yet, no. We need to talk where we can’t be overheard.”

  I led the way across the road at the traffic lights.

  She struggled to keep up. “I don’t know much about music, but that concert…There were two pieces by Bach, one by Brahms, one by Schubert, and one by Chopin. Am I right?”

  “Yes. Well done.”

  “But…isn’t that weird? I mean, don’t you think it’s odd?”

  “All but one being Germans, you mean?”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

  I looked down at her. “We’re fighting the Nazis. Those composers have been dead for years and most of the great music is German anyway.”

  “But even so…to me it was weird.”

  “I’m sorry if you didn’t enjoy it.”

  “Oh, I loved it. I wish I’d been before; I wish I could go again. What was that first piece, the one that wasn’t by a German?”

  “One of Chopin’s nocturnes.”

  She began to hum it.

  We reached the Embankment and crossed to the riverside. Here we had a good view up and down the Thames. Plenty of barrage balloons here too.

  We turned left, towards Waterloo Bridge and St. Paul’s—standing there, defiant, so far unbombed. The pavement was wide here and we could talk safely without being overheard.

  I stopped, leaned on the stone parapet and looked out at the water. The tide was quite high, the water a sludgy yellow.

  Madeleine stood alongside me.

  I took a gulp of river air. “Do you feel all right? Quite recovered from earlier? You and your mother would have made a fine picture at lunch—both ill.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m okay now, thanks. Don’t fret. It was nothing.”

  I paused and took a deep breath. “You’re leaving tomorrow night,” I said. “There’s a full moon and the weather forecast is good.”

  She let out a brief cry. “At last. I won’t see my mother but…At last.” She put her arm in mine and squeezed. “Something’s just snapped inside me. My heart is pumping, as if it has suddenly changed gear.” She swallowed. “Do hearts have gears?” She laughed. “I don’t suppose they do.” She kissed the shoulder of my jacket. “And where am I going?”

  “Le Gâvre,” I said. “That’s north of Nantes and inland from St. Nazaire. You’ll be dropped near the Fôret du Gâvre.”

  She nodded. “To do what?”

  “Let’s walk,” I said, leading the way. I put my arm in hers; that would keep people away, I thought.

  “There’s good news, Madeleine, and not-so-good news.”

  She said nothing but kept looking forward.

  I tried to sound both matter-of-fact and reassuring, though whether I succeeded I still don’t know. “Over the past few weeks, we think that some of our circuits in France have been penetrated by the Gestapo—”

  “But that’s—”

  “Hold on. Hold on. In fact, we no longer think some circuits have been penetrated, we know they have. As a result, we’ve had to change tactics and box clever. Without letting on that we know the circuits have been infiltrated, we have been feeding the Germans false information about the whereabouts of the invasion.”

  “Double bluff.” She looked up at me, searching my face for news. Her eyes grew rounder.

  “Something like that. But our problem is, we don’t know if they have been taken in. And this is where your mission counts—and counts big-time. You are going to be dropped at Le Gâvre with a transmitter and a bicycle.”

  I said nothing for a moment, letting her take in the information.

  Her face, her lovely face, puckered into a frown. “I understand but…but how do you know whether my circuit hasn’t also been penetrated?”

  Spot on. Trust Madeleine.

  I stopped and looked down at her. “That’s the…that’s the bit of news that’s not…not so good.” It was my turn to swallow, hard. “You won’t be met, Madeleine. No one knows you’re coming.”

  We drifted back over to the parapet and looked out again at the river.

  A military band was marching down the Embankment. A few people were following it, but the noise of the instruments meant we couldn’t be overheard.

  “This afternoon you are going to be given your fake ID papers—you will be a repairer of antiquarian books—and the name of the circuit you are meant to join, and all their details, about who’s who, who is in command, where he lives, what the passwords are, and so on. But your mission involves two aspects. First, we need evidence of military activity in the Nantes–St. Nazaire area—Nantes, Challans, Aizenay. I can’t tell you where the invasion is going to be, because I don’t know, I still don’t know, but it won’t be in Nantes. However, in our false messages to the Gestapo, via the circuits they have penetrated, Nantes is a location we have highlighted as one of two possibilities. We need to know from you what the status of the military build-up there is—are the Germans moving forces into the area, are they moving forces out of the area, or are things static? Have they been misled by our misinformation?”

  I turned to watch the band go by. Several buses were caught up behind it, and some lorries.

  “You might be able to decide this for yourself, but it’s possible that you will need the help of the local circuit. And that’s the second part of your mission. To find the people in the circuit and observe them before contacting them. The coded message that we sent out via the BBC news last night said your mission had been cancelled. A lie. If, when you have seen the lay of the land, you decide the Le Gâvre circuit hasn’t been penetrated, then you can declare yourself to them. But—and this is all-important—if you think they have been compromised, then you have to continue acting on your own. Either way, you must let us know via your wireless transmitter.”
r />   Madeleine didn’t say anything for a while.

  Then, without looking at me, she murmured, “If the circuit has been penetrated, and I can’t contact them, what happens next?”

  I reached for my cigarettes.

  “You have two choices. Later today we will give you details of a ratline in that part of France, by means of which you can escape, and come back home. Or…or you can stick it out—if you can manage it—and wait for the invasion, then join the local uprising, helping with sabotage. Once the invasion has begun, lots of locals who are too scared to act now will come out of the woodwork, and it will be much safer for you.”

  I put my hand on her arm, two cigarettes in my fingers. “Madeleine, I can’t hide from you the fact that this is now both a much more important, and a far more dangerous mission than we have ever discussed before. And I can’t hide from you that I have no idea what the odds are of your surviving in the field, without the protection of a local circuit who know the ropes in the area where you will be operating. So…if you want to withdraw, you can. We can’t force you, and a reluctant agent in the field is almost certainly worse than useless, and as good as dead.”

  Again I brushed her arm with my fingers, and held up a cigarette.

  “I mean it.”

  She took the cigarette but hesitated for quite a while before nodding her head. “I know you mean it, Matt. And it’s tempting. But we’ve been here before, we know that that’s what wars do, throw up these impossible situations which no one in their right mind could ever contemplate at any other time. They make ordinary people do extraordinary things, in which they either succeed or don’t succeed, and in which they either survive or don’t survive.”

  She looked out at the river and bit her lip.

  I held out my lighter and lit her cigarette, then my own.

  “And if every ordinary person refused to go through with every extraordinary, impossible mission—what then? What would happen to us as a fighting force, as a people, and what would we—we as a generation, I mean—tell our children?”

  She took hold of my hand.

  “It’s my time, Matt. As you say, I’ve been given something to do that’s more dangerous than we thought, but even more important. The two go together. It’s right. For-mi-dable.”

  She squeezed my hand.

  “I’m glad you told me here, by the river. This is a lovely sight, Parliament, all these bridges, the curve of the river, the Savoy.” She smiled. “When I get back, you can take me to the Savoy for dinner—we can go dancing, have an American cocktail, and walk along here afterwards. Is that a date?”

  I nodded and swallowed hard. “It’s a date.”

  · 12 ·

  I WAITED IN THE MEADOW IN SOUTHWATER until all sight and sound of Madeleine’s Lysander had quite vanished. The field was flooded with moonlight, and I sat in the Lagonda and opened the package she had slipped into my hand just before she left. It was the silver cigarette case Erich Langres had given her at Ardlossan after she had rescued him.

  As the dew came out, the grass began to smell, fresh and damp. She had been given an important duty in the war, more important than either of us had imagined when she had joined SC2. But it suited her ambitions exactly. She had gone abroad in the best possible frame of mind.

  I was pleased for her but…how empty that field seemed now that she was gone. She’d be parachuting in on a field very like this one before the sun came up. With no one to meet her—alone, as I was now.

  To take the edge off my gloom, I drove to the pub in the village, the Black Prince, the one I had never had time to visit before. I sat for a moment in the car park, filling my new silver cigarette case with smokes.

  The bar was busy, so I ordered a whisky chaser and found myself a quiet corner.

  There were some soldiers in the bar and they were discussing a film they had just seen, The Spoilers, with Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne.

  One of the men was obviously a film maniac. “That was her one hundred and twenty-eighth film,” he announced.

  “Prove it,” said someone else, not really interested.

  “Colin, only people called Colin know that sort of thing,” said a third.

  “She was paid four hundred and fifty thousand dollars by Alexander Korda for her role in Knight Without Armour, which was made in London.”

  “Someone shoot him.”

  “Colin, get some beers in.”

  “While she was in London, the Nazis offered her oodles of money to go back to Germany. Know what she did?”

  “Colin, shut up!”

  “She took out American citizenship.”

  “You could do the same, Colin. You can leave now.”

  “I like knowing about beautiful women, don’t you?” Colin would not be silenced.

  “She’s certainly beautiful,” someone chimed in. “That poster for The Blue Angel, with her wearing stockings and suspenders, and that song—what was it?”

  “ ‘Falling in Love Again,’ ” said Colin quickly. “You know she nearly didn’t get that role? There was someone else in the offing—you’ll never guess who? Go on, guess. Anyone?”

  “No, Colin, let’s have some proper conversation now, not one quiz after another—”

  “Go on, guess. It’s someone you’ve all heard of. I promise I’ll shut up afterwards.”

  “No, Colin.”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “You’ve been told already—it’s your turn to get in the drinks. That’s much more important than some German actress’s name.”

  “Do you all give in?” Colin’s gaze swept the bar.

  His eye fell on the barman. “How about you?”

  The barman shrugged. “I only know the names of three German women—Dietrich, Eva Braun, and that film-maker, the one who did the Olympics; Lenny somebody.”

  Colin looked disappointed. “There you are,” he said. “You’re right, that’s who it was, Leni Riefenstahl.”

  Well, well, well. Colin might be a pain but…did Madeleine know what I now knew? Suddenly, I felt warmer inside.

  JUNE

  · 13 ·

  I LAY ON MY BACK IN BED and looked up at the ceiling. The first light of the day had leaked into the room about twenty minutes before, and there were no more moving shadows. This early in the morning, the traffic in St. John’s Wood Road was thin.

  How boring the ceiling was in daylight. Since Madeleine had been gone, since she had flown away towards that mottled moon, I couldn’t sleep.

  I put my arm out to where she should have been. She was slender but she had left a vast, empty space of sheet and eiderdown in her absence. And a faint smell of her, now fading fast.

  Madeleine had been dropped near Le Gâvre as planned, thanks to Jack. Or so she had said in her first transmissions, transmissions that were correctly encoded and contained no mistakes, other than the deliberate ones. So far as we could tell, it was her “fist,” and her true and bluff checks were correct. We didn’t know exactly where she was, or how she was faring on a day-to-day basis because, quite rightly, she didn’t waste time on air with extraneous details like that. But she had clearly bicycled her way towards St. Nazaire, from near to which she had sent us several reports—that the streets were awash with German troops, that more troops were still arriving, and that she had faced several roadblocks but had been let through all of them—no one was interested in a bookbinder of antiquarian books, who read German authors in translation. She was proving just as adept as we had hoped. I couldn’t ever relax while she was in the field but…but, so far, she was doing all right. More than all right—“fan-tas-tique,” as she might have said.

  And, most important of all, she was confirming that the Germans, at the very least, were not pulling their troops out of the St. Nazaire area, rather the reverse. She reported that she had overheard a conversation in a baker’s shop, to the effect that an order for a nearby German barracks in St. Nazaire had just been doubled, on account of more troops arriving. Exactly th
e kind of convincing detail we needed.

  She couldn’t get within ten kilometres—six miles—of the actual coast, she had told us: the Germans kept the coast fiercely guarded—they had a coastal exclusion zone like we did—but she had familiarised herself with a large hospital in St. Nazaire as a good place to overhear gossip. And she had seen a submariner brought in for treatment after he had been caught up in a fight aboard his ship. St. Nazaire, we knew, was a submarine base, so that seemed to indicate that the subs—or U-boats as the Germans called them—were not being relocated: another piece of good news.

  Rondin’s reports showed much the same picture. Hilary had communicated this immediately to General Grieves, who had taken the information to Churchill and Eisenhower.

  “With any luck,” Hilary had said to me when he came back from the meeting, “our little plan—your plan—to convert the penetration of our circuits into a double bluff, seems to have worked a treat. Fingers crossed, eh? I got the impression from the mood of the meeting that the invasion is only days away now.”

  That had cheered me no end. It would be good to be having a go at the Germans, taking the fight to them, rather than merely soaking up punishment as we had been doing, in London anyway, for five long years. And I was pleased for Madeleine’s sake. She had survived the first few very dangerous days of her time on the ground in France alone. More than survived—she had shone. Once the invasion had begun, her life would surely become much easier. She had told us that she didn’t think the local circuit in St. Nazaire—code-named Crossbow—had been penetrated.

  The ceiling above the bed wasn’t getting any more interesting, so I decided to get up. I put on my dressing gown, a gesture which always excited Zola, who clearly couldn’t tell the difference between a dressing gown and a raincoat and always optimistically concluded that we were going out for a walk. Instead, I went through into the kitchen and put on the kettle, to boil some water for tea. There were no eggs, but I had some bread, a few days old, and a small block of margarine. I could at least make some toast.