Madeleine's War

by Peter Watson

  “We have a daughter. Where is she?”

  “Being fed. I’m too weak. They will bring her in soon.”

  “What shall we call her?”

  “You choose.”

  “No, let’s choose together. How about your mother’s name?”

  “No, not that. Something…to remind you of me.”

  “What do you mean? Don’t talk like that—you’ll be getting stronger now that I’m here.”

  She closed her eyes again and nodded.

  “Your mother has told me everything. About how Philippe came back from the dead, how he came to save you even though he knew you were pregnant. The injuries which…which ended his life.”

  She opened her eyes. “He was a good man. You are a good man. I’ve been lucky.”

  Seeing her lying there, pitifully weak, thin, pale, save for the shadows under her eyes—how could she say that?

  But she did.

  I blinked back my tears again.

  “Speaking of good men,” she said, in barely more than a whisper, “I have a favour to ask.”

  The sound of the door opening interrupted us. It was the nursing sister bringing a little bundle into the room.

  I stood up and took the bundle from the nurse.

  She was so small she was barely there at all, but even so, as she wriggled, and as she squirmed, I could feel the energy coiled up in her tiny body. The strength of her minuscule fingers wrapping themselves round my thumb, the gummy lips that twisted into the first smile she would ever direct at me, her vivid whisky-brown eyes—just like her mother’s—trying to focus and to work out what I was, holding her.

  I kissed her forehead. How close to tears can you be and not actually cry?

  “She’s beautiful,” I whispered, lowering her to Madeleine.

  “Not yet,” she replied. “Not yet, but if genes are all they are supposed to be, then, with yours and mine, she stands a good chance of being beautiful someday. If not, you’ll love her anyway.”

  I laughed. “We’ll both love her always.”

  Madeleine closed her eyes and nodded.

  “I have an idea,” I said softly.

  “Yes?”

  “Philippe rescued you, knowing you were pregnant with someone else’s child. He gave this little bundle a chance to live. Let’s call her Philippa.”

  Madeleine smiled. A radiant smile. Like that day in the Lagonda, with the top down, speeding down the Chiltern Hills.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “It will keep part of him alive.”

  “Philippa…Philippa Hammond. Will people call her Pippa, do you think?”

  “Will you mind if they do?”

  Still smiling, she shook her head. “With any luck, she’ll never need a code name.”

  I laughed.

  Looking down, I could see that Philippa was already fast asleep in Madeleine’s arms. Totally content.

  “What were you going to say? You mentioned a favour.”

  Madeleine nodded weakly. “I am alive—little Philippa is alive, we are both alive—because Philippe rescued us.” She paused. “I thanked him—of course I thanked him.”

  She closed her eyes and waited for a moment, gathering her strength.

  “But Philippe knew about my capture, and where to find me, because of the Resistance in Paris, one man in particular, their head of intelligence, who kept an archive and who was informed that I was captive in La Rochelle.”

  She breathed out, the air escaping from her lungs with difficulty.

  “When you get the chance, when you eventually get back to Paris, I’d like you to thank him personally from me. From us, from all three of us, from Philippa in particular, who probably would not have lived but for him.”

  She coughed. Her whole body shook.

  “His name, Philippe said, is François Perrault.”

  Moments before Madeleine spoke, I had anticipated what she was going to say. I could see the shape of the words forming on her lips and I wanted to cry out, “No! Don’t say it, please don’t say that name!”

  My throat was dry, the palms of my hands were clammy. Suddenly I was burning up. The sunlight of Madeleine’s radiant smile had disappeared.

  I had to calm down, but that was easier said than done. Should I tell her straightaway that François Perrault was dead? That I had…? No, she wasn’t strong enough.

  I took Madeleine’s hand and squeezed it lightly.

  “Of course, I’ll do as you say.”

  The sound of the door opening made me turn around. It was the nurse.

  “That’s long enough now, sir. Madeleine must rest.”

  But Madeleine was not playing ball.

  “What time is it?”

  I looked at my watch. “Nearly three.”

  “Come back at seven. I have dinner at six thirty. You can take me for a walk in the garden. There’s a full moon tonight.”

  —

  I STOOD BY THE ENTRANCE to Madeleine’s room and watched the nurse wrap a shawl and a coat around her. What there was of her.

  The nurse had warned me that a walk at night was not a good idea, that Madeleine wasn’t strong enough, that her pneumonia was so far advanced that a little night air could tip her over the edge.

  I hadn’t insisted.

  But Madeleine had. She was going to take a walk. There was a full moon that night and that was that.

  The very sick have a moral authority that is hard to refuse.

  Before she had put on her shawl and overcoat, she had sat on the bed and combed her hair, applied a touch of lipstick and rouge to her cheeks. She had a bit of colour. But she was undoubtedly weak.

  She stepped into her slippers and pulled her belt tightly around her waist. Her hair fell about her shoulders as unruly as ever.

  “Ready for take-off,” she said softly.

  I held out my arm and she slipped hers inside.

  We went out into the corridor.

  Several nuns were there, and her mother.

  She looked at them but said nothing. We crossed the corridor and went out into the garden.

  There were hedges and bushes, long arrays of roses, what looked like willow trees in the distance, a lawn directly in front of us, and the sound of running water somewhere.

  “Look at that,” she said. “Look at the light.”

  The moonlight bathed the garden in a white light, a light quite unlike any other form of light, casting indistinct shadows.

  We looked up and the moon looked down.

  Around the rim of the moon, the sky was indigo blue.

  “When you took off that night in Sussex, I stood and watched your plane. It flew directly towards the moon, or it appeared to, a black silhouette getting smaller and smaller until it was no more. For ages I could hear the plane, but in the moonlight I couldn’t see it.”

  We kept looking up.

  “After you’d gone, I stopped in the pub in Southwater, the Black Prince. There was a soldier there who knew everything about movies. He was telling his friends that Leni Riefenstahl was nearly the star of The Blue Angel, but that Marlene Dietrich got the role instead. Did you know that?”

  “Of course I did, silly.”

  “And I read the other day, in a Paris paper, that she is now filming Hitler’s favourite opera. I forget what it’s called but apparently it has hundreds of extras.”

  “She has had a better war than I have.”

  “She doesn’t have a Philippa.”

  She squeezed my arm.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”

  “You know why. You’d have stopped me going. And…if, by some miracle, you’d allowed me to go, and I had been killed, you’d have grieved twice over. I would have killed your child. I didn’t want that. That’s why I talked about babies so much. I wasn’t feeling well and I worried that you might put two and two together. But if I talked about having babies in the future—that day we went by the unexploded bomb, for example—I thought I might put you off the
scent.”

  An intake of breath. “And before you ask, I thought that, when my tummy began to show, it would be the perfect cover. No one would imagine a pregnant woman being sent as an agent.”

  “And…when the nine months were up?”

  “I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. A baby might be even better camouflage.”

  I said nothing for a long moment.

  “Did they confiscate the acorn I gave you?”

  “They confiscated everything.”

  As she spoke, the moonlight cast the tiniest of shadows along the cleft in her chin.

  “I still have the cigarette case you gave me.”

  “I wonder where Erich is now. What happened to him?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “I thought…if I gave you his case, you might look for him, give it back, find out how he was. Was what he did so bad?”

  “I thought so, at the time.”

  “And now?”

  “I was given special duties, Madeleine. Things I can’t tell you about. I couldn’t go looking for Erich. I’m sorry.”

  “And the others—Ivan, Katrine?”

  “Both captured. Both executed. I’m sorry about that too. The circuits they joined had been penetrated by the Gestapo—they walked into a trap. That would have happened to you, too, if you had contacted your circuit. You would have been dead by now. For weeks, I thought you were dead.”

  I leaned forward and kissed her cheek. “That day, by the Thames, by the Savoy, I gave you the most difficult assignment. You made the most of it, and you are still alive.”

  “I feel a long way from the Savoy,” she said. “I don’t think I could dance right now, but I would like to taste an American cocktail.”

  “They have wonderful names, some of them—old-fashioned, sidecar, screwdriver, white lady. That’s you in the moonlight—a white lady.”

  She smiled. “I like that. But perhaps it’s as close as I’ll come, now.”

  I again thought of that day, months before, on the Embankment, when I had told Madeleine where she was being dropped.

  “Was it what you expected—being in the field, I mean? Being an SC2 agent—did it live up to its billing?”

  She hesitated and pulled her coat more closely to her.

  “No.” She tightened her belt. “You were right—the nerves get to you, everything is so uncertain. I was good in the field, I think, but no, I didn’t enjoy it as I thought I would. I was silly ever to think that. A silly girl.”

  “How was it you got caught?”

  She gave a short laugh. “It’s embarrassing.”

  I said nothing but looked at the shadows.

  “I was in a café, sitting outside in Nallies, about ten miles from La Rochelle. It was a convenient crossroads to watch traffic going either to La Rochelle harbour or to the beaches at Fôret de Longeville. One of the other customers had a West Highland terrier, just like Zola. Its owner let him—or her—wander in and out of the tables. I bent down and stroked it, and spoke to it—just a few words. I said ‘You look just like Zola’—that’s all, but I said it in English. Exactly what you told us to beware of in Ardlossan, but what I was always doing.”

  She coughed and laughed at the same time.

  “I didn’t think anyone had heard me but obviously some collaborator must have. They must have. They followed me, found out where I was living, watched me for a day or so. Found out where I was hiding my transmitter, then reported me. It was my own fault I was caught.” She breathed out and coughed. “No one else’s.”

  “It was an understandable mistake.”

  “You are being kind. I don’t need that sort of kindness. It was a mistake I shouldn’t have made. I would never have been promoted to SC1.”

  A cloud passed over the moon. For a moment all was shadow. Then the moon came out again.

  I squeezed her arm. “There never was any SC1, Madeleine. It was a trick. We thought that if people in SC2 thought there was an SC1, they would try harder, in the hope of being promoted. That’s why we called it SC2. It might also have confused the enemy.”

  She nodded, smiled, and again feebly squeezed my arm. “How many more tricks did you devise that I don’t know about?”

  “You were top of your class at Ardlossan, Madeleine. If anyone qualified for SC1, it would have been you.”

  She shook her head. “It was my one weakness that trapped me in the end.”

  I bit my lip. Her habit of breaking out of French and into English had been one of the things that had initially made me think she might be a German agent. Should I tell her that?

  No.

  She was too weak to know that I had ever doubted her.

  I was ashamed of having doubted her myself.

  “Madeleine, I have to ask you one thing. When you saw Philippe again, when he arrived at that hospital in La Rochelle, after you thought he was dead, what went through your mind, what did you think?”

  She paused but squeezed my arm.

  “Do you doubt my love for you?”

  Doubt. There it was again.

  “I went to see your mother in Blakeney—”

  “Yes, she told me.”

  “She had a photo of you and Philippe on her mantelshelf…She said…she said Philippe was your first love, that a first love is like no other…”

  “Mothers don’t know everything, even if they think they do. When Philippe came for me, in La Rochelle, I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I couldn’t—I was amazed. Well…it was wonderful in its way, and it brought back all that we had been through. But…all that…it was past, it was over. I looked at him and he was the same Philippe, the same wonderful man, but…but…I had your child inside me, there was so much more between us, Matt, dear Matt, between you and me. Ardlossan, the sands, the standing stones, the bicycle rides, black-market whisky, London, all the lovemaking and conversations and training. You formed me. Right from that first meeting at The Farm, you were hard on me but fairly, for a good reason. You treated me as an adult, as an equal.”

  She looked up at the moon, then back to me.

  “When I knew Philippe, he was a boy. Yes, we were innocent and in love, as my mother says, but we didn’t know any better. Now I do. There’s so much more to being an adult than to being a child.”

  It was my turn to squeeze her.

  “I was worried…You know, that photograph of Philippe on your mother’s mantelshelf…it was very prominent.”

  “Why believe my mother rather than me? Why can’t men trust their women?”

  “Did you always trust me?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did?”

  “Do.”

  My gaze swept the garden. Lots of detail lost in the pale light. “Tell me…the interrogation…how bad was it?”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment.

  “I wasn’t tortured. Not with pain, anyway.” She looked up at me. “You were right, half right.”

  She breathed out. “I was humiliated.”

  She squeezed my arm. “Don’t ask how. It was more than being stripped naked—much more. That’s the point. It humiliates me to remember it, and to tell you—anyone—would be to revisit it. Just imagine the worst humiliation you could suffer, and that’s what happened.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Then I whispered, “Did it work?”

  She laughed. “Not as well as pain might have done. I kept thinking of The Farm, of you and those other men ogling my body, and I imagined that what the Germans were doing to me was a test. So yes, Colonel Hammond, your training helped me—a little bit anyway.”

  She took my hand and kissed it. “Even when I was…when I was completely degraded, when I was reduced to being an animal, a wild beast, I clung on.”

  And I had thought she was a German agent.

  She laughed. “I remembered spitting at your people in Scotland so I tried that too. It helped a little.”

  She kissed my hand again. “I think I
was in line for a more physical session when Philippe and his people intervened.”

  We had reached a bench.

  I turned and looked down at her. “Let’s sit here.”

  We sat down.

  The moon was shining brilliantly again.

  Her face was so very pale in the moonlight.

  She didn’t say anything but shortly afterwards she started to shiver.

  I took off my jacket and put it round her.

  “Shall we go in? Let’s go and see Philippa sleeping.”

  Would I ever be able to be with my daughter without thinking of what I had done to Perrault?

  Madeleine stood up. She squeezed my arm. What strength she had was waning.

  She looked up. Her neck as white as moonlight allowed.

  “Is this the last full moon I shall ever see, do you think?”

  “Don’t say that, Madeleine. Don’t say that.”

  · EPILOGUE ·

  MADELEINE DIED three days after I arrived at St. Hilaire, from liver failure brought on by typhus. Although she was a Protestant, she was buried there.

  I don’t know whether this account will ever be published: the Official Secrets Act forbids it for the moment. But I hope one day it will be deposited, perhaps, in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, in London, where Philippa at least might be given the chance to read it. I’d like her to know what happened.

  —

  FOR THE RECORD, I killed François Perrault on Tuesday, 24 October 1944. In the wider scheme of things—the Churchillian scheme of things—how useful was my action? As the world now knows, the German-British Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, began passing information about the atom bomb to the Swiss-American Soviet agent Harry Gold at the end of 1945. So, arguably, I delayed the start of the Cold War arms race, which began in earnest in 1947, by twelve or thirteen months. Was it worth killing a good man for that?

  No one ever found out that it was I who killed Perrault. The Paris police never quite believed Justine’s idea and continued to maintain that it was an épuration that had gone too far: there were just too many similar incidents occurring all over France at the time. Monique Brèger’s account was eventually published, including her role in helping SC2—and she received the Croix de Guerre. The DSO that I received in the 1946 honours list simply said “For services in France during World War II,” so less than nothing was published about Madeleine’s heroism.