Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  For the second time Charlotte plunged into a Red Sea that was reluctant to part. Another glass of warm gin was pressed into her hand, and she drank it quickly in the hope that it would transform the scene from a smoky rush-hour to a starlit bacchanal. It sat in her stomach, acidly, and seemed to do nothing at all. Cannerley insinuated them into a group near the closed window; it included the little pop-eyed man who had been in the doorway, the woman in the black velvet dress, who presumably worked for the Flagstaff Press, Cannerley’s friend Michael, who looked like a civil servant, shiny and correct, and a tall man in RAF uniform with tie aslant and an expression of confused detachment.

  ‘In my view,’ Michael was saying, ‘the anti-Semitism of the French would have found its way to the surface with or without a Nazi invasion. Pétain’s government is merely the expression of a long-felt national wish.’

  The little man with the bow tie was having none of this. He began to rattle off the opinions of various writers, puffing at his cigarette as he went along, so the names of the authors he quoted came out each in its own smoky bubble. ‘Anyway,’ he said, holding out his glass to a passing whisky bottle, ‘it’s all in Benjamin Constant.’

  ‘How are you on Benjamin Constant?’

  Charlotte found herself addressed by the RAF man. His face was drawn into a smile. As she looked up at him Charlotte noticed a small patch just beneath his chin where he had not shaved properly. His voice was quizzical, but not threatening.

  She smiled. ‘Not quite up to date, I’m afraid. What about you?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him. Saint-Exupéry I’ve heard of. He’s a pilot, like me. Not Benjamin Constant, though.’ He coughed. ‘I suppose it’s not really my sort of party.’

  ‘What is your sort of party?’

  ‘I like dancing, or night-clubs. Otherwise I’d rather be outside.’

  ‘Flying?’

  ‘Yes. Or walking. But not standing around. You look like a literary girl, though.’

  ‘Do I really?’ Charlotte laughed. She thought of saying, ‘What makes you say that?’, but caught herself. Having eliminated the arch, she was obliged to settle for the literal. ‘I’ve just arrived in London. I wasn’t invited to the party myself.’

  She was aware of a gramophone starting up. Some tinny jazz tune was cutting through the burble of talk; Daisy was at her elbow, still flanked by her two men. She wanted to be introduced to Charlotte’s pilot. Names went round; his was Peter Gregory.

  Charlotte found Daisy’s back between her and Gregory and felt a twist of irritation. She saw his head bend down in polite attention to Daisy’s chatter; his hair was so untidy she wondered if he could have combed it at all before coming out.

  There was a slow leakage of guests from the party. Through the double doors and down the stairs a continuous trickle of people made its way to other flats and houses, where more gin and whisky would be drunk. Those who remained began to dance. Michael Waterslow, the host, had drifted away from Charlotte’s group and helped to roll back the rug in one half of the room. Half a dozen couples were swaying to the beat on the revealed wooden floor. Among them, weaving a solitary pattern, was one who bore the unmistakably sheepish look of the author.

  With Gregory’s hand lightly on her back, Charlotte tried to remember the quickstep movements learned at Mrs Heaton’s dancing class; as one of the taller girls she had usually taken the boy’s part, and now the backward movements seemed elusive. In any event, Gregory was what might politely have been called an instinctive mover; he did not seem to be following any particular step, though there was a vague rhythm in his shambling movement and a certainty of touch on her hand and back. He talked to her a little, but his voice seemed to come from too great a height to be able to compete with the hopping tenor saxophones. Charlotte briefly closed her eyes as she swept about the floor. This was a mistake, she recognised at once, when not just her body but the whole of Redcliffe Square seemed to spin within Gregory’s retaining grasp. She opened her eyes, gripped his hand a fraction tighter and was aware of a tiny line of damp along her upper lip.

  After the song had finished she went to the top of the stairs, where she hoped the air would be fresher. Dick Cannerley emerged from the flat and asked if she would dance with him. The thought filled Charlotte with a disproportionate revulsion. She wondered where Gregory had gone. She had not excused herself from him but hurried off rudely. She went back into the flat to apologise to him, to find Daisy and tell her she was leaving, to thank Michael for the party, to escape from Cannerley . . . She was not sure why she went back across the dance floor, which had become, in her short absence, like some ruleless rugby game of lurching communal contact. She reached the other side and found the woman from the Flagstaff Press in a deep embrace with the sandy-haired editor: whatever he might do for Melrose ‘next week’ did not seem to be, in the view of the publishing woman, soon enough. Seeing no one else she knew, Charlotte decided that all she could do was leave. She set off to fetch her coat and bag from the bedroom and was almost knocked over by a man being roughly ejected from a group of people by the door. Swearing and muttering, he staggered to the landing and plunged down the stairs at an involuntary run, bouncing heavily off the wall. In the bedroom Charlotte found a couple lying on top of her coat: the woman’s dress had ridden up round her thighs, and she was laughing in an enthusiastic, horsy way. Charlotte wrenched her coat clear and made for the landing. She threw one last look behind her as she went downstairs and out into the night, where the cold wind drove the air from her chest. By the railings in front of the house a man was being sick into the basement area; he turned his anguished, sweating face up to her. Even in the blackout, she could recognise beneath the giant spectacles a particular sheeplike quality. ‘Baa,’ he said.

  4

  PETER GREGORY WAS sitting in a wooden barrack-room in southern England. A lecture was being given and he was not listening. The Germans were putting into the sky a terrifying machine with a BMW engine of 1800 horsepower and with a speed of over 400 miles per hour. It could fly faster and turn quicker than even the nimble Spitfire. There seemed no hope for Fighter Command unless someone could think up something miraculous and quick . . .

  Gregory was thinking only of a suburban road in India. It was not like the metalled roads with paved edges that crawled through England’s deadening suburbia: it was flanked by palm trees, deep ditches, and was filled with running, bare-backed children. There was a house at the end, which was his house, and in its cool rooms he would shortly be given tea with samosas, jellies, gulabjamuns and cucumber sandwiches. Then he would go on to the verandah at the back of the house and his mother would read to him. He would want to see his friends but she would insist that books were important for his education.

  But what good were books? They had not saved anyone. The lecturer was frightened by the Focke-Wulf 190. Gregory heard his awed description of the German plane and looked at the faces of his fellow pilots, intent and yellow in the low gleam of the overhead bulbs. He was probably the oldest amongst them and the thought made him weary. There was a time when the inexperienced daring of those who sat next to him seemed in itself worth fighting for; but these young faces looked not so much innocent as vacant. They had absorbed some myth, some pattern of behaviour to which they believed they should aspire.

  The lecture over, Gregory wandered outside, hands in pockets. Borowski, a Polish pilot of daring but erratic skill whose survival was a cause of constant wonder, offered him a cigarette, and they went over to the mess for a game of billiards.

  Borowski told Gregory about the RAF’s new wonder-plane: the Typhoon. It had 24 cylinders set in an H section, and sleeve valves. Borowski’s solemn pronunciation of ‘sleeve valves’ made Gregory smile as he lined up a gentle cannon off the top cushion. It ‘belts out’, as Borowski had it, more than 2000 horsepower and had a top speed of well over 400 mph – ‘easily enough to match those Fockes’. Borowski spoke fluent English, but to compensate for his accent he lost no opportu
nity to display his knowledge of RAF slang.

  Gregory slid the red into the middle pocket and went to replace it on the spot. He thought he would like to try one of these Typhoons. The fighter squadron to which he was attached was not doing much these days. The Hurricane was an admirable plane in its way, but its best days were past: having flown Spitfires in the summer of 1940, he was not roused by anything the Hurricane could offer. He had been careful in his report to Group HQ of his lone flight to Le Havre. He knew other squadrons were also running experimental flights, testing new ideas and equipment, but Landon had told him it was very unlikely his exercises would ever become part of the squadron’s activities. He had almost certainly flown his last such mission.

  Borowski had seen a photograph of the Typhoon. ‘It’s gigantic. You don’t get a leg-up from the fitter, you have to be a mountaineer to reach the cockpit. Then you don’t just slide in, you go in through a door like a Daimler. It has a four-bladed propeller of about twenty feet across, four cannons mounted in the wing and eight rockets too. Hell of a crate.’

  Gregory and Borowski went to the bar for a bottle of beer before lunch. The other thing that Gregory had been contemplating, he told Borowski, was a switch to night fighters. You had a navigator, who read the radar for you and told you where the blips were coming; you couldn’t see anything until you were right behind the enemy. It was all quite different from the fast-reaction daytime flying he had been taught, where you took your bearings from the ground or from other planes that you could see. But they said night flight required a special kind of skill, or at least a kind of calm, because the process of reading instruments was not an art, but a form of trust.

  Gregory was good at trust, at least where his own safety was concerned. He had come to think he was inviolable. He thought he was the last survivor; and of certain small groups he was. He knew that other pilots from the first days of the war were still flying, and that even of those who had fought in the Battle of Britain there were many who were still alive. His friends, however, were all dead. Those with whom he had joined and those he met in the first months, who became in the strain of mutual reliance even closer to him than his original friends, were all gone. He had been to their funerals, one after the other, or sent his commiserations to their grieving parents when he could not go, and he felt that now he was alone, the guardian of what they had all once been.

  Borowski had been on leave and wanted to know what Gregory had been doing lately. Gregory told him he had motored up to town for a book party.

  ‘A party for a book?’ Borowski was curious. ‘What kind of party? Was it a birthday party?’

  ‘No, more like a christening.’

  ‘And did the book enjoy it?’

  ‘More than the author, by the look of things.’

  ‘And were there some spiffing WAAFs?’

  ‘I didn’t see any. Though there were some good-looking women. I even danced with one, her name was Charlotte, but I didn’t stay late.’

  ‘You didn’t take the girl on to a nightclub? You’re losing your touch, Greg.’

  Gregory poured the last of his beer from the bottle. ‘I was tired.’

  That afternoon he went to see Landon, the squadron commander, to ask if there was any chance of a transfer; he had heard that, now the testing was over, some new Typhoon squadrons were being formed. Landon sighed and picked up a paperknife from his desk.

  ‘That little mosquito-sting we sent you on, Gregory. The day trip to Le Havre. Wasn’t that excitement enough? Because I can tell you, it was bloody hard to organise. We are an enlightened service, as you know, but we draw the line at throwing planes away.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘You know what I told them in the end? I told them it was just a clapped-out Hurricane that nobody wanted to fly and that the pilot was a flak-happy bloody nuisance.’

  Gregory said nothing. He never knew if Landon was telling the truth.

  ‘Anyway, you don’t want to test Typhoons. They’re death traps, from what I’ve heard. They’re all going arse over tip when they dive. Something called “compressibility”. Also you can’t see a bloody thing at the back.’

  Gregory shrugged.

  Landon swung his polished shoes up on to the desk. He was pressing down some tobacco into a pipe, which he occasionally settled between his teeth, then removed, then, to Gregory’s irritation, began to repack. He never seemed to light it.

  ‘I could probably arrange for you to have some leave, if that would help. I’m sure you’re due some.’

  ‘I don’t want leave. What would I do? Hang around with those idiots at the Cavendish or the Bag o’ Nails?’

  ‘You could go on a walking tour of Scotland.’

  ‘I could.’

  Landon took a heavy petrol lighter from the desk and rolled the wheel slowly on the flint. A blue flame almost engulfed his hand. When it had settled, he lifted it towards his pipe, held it horizontal, then snapped the lid shut on the flame and put his pipe back on the desk. Next to it was a letter from the Air Ministry he had received that morning. He pulled it towards him.

  ‘There is one other option. Something I’ve just heard about. But I don’t really think it would suit you. It means flying at night. In bombers.’

  ‘In bombers? I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘You don’t actually drop bombs. Let me explain.’

  Charlotte Gray was drinking tea in the kitchen. In the week she had been in the flat she had pushed back the tide of chaos. Not too much – she didn’t want to seem obtrusive; but there was now a small impetus towards order: at least the bath was clean and the bread was put back in the bin.

  She was a dreamy starter of the day, didn’t like to talk for the first hour of wakefulness. Her sleeps were like death. She was sunk many levels down below the light of everyday and her waking was like being drawn from the bottom of a fathomless well. The odd thing was that while she found it hard to speak and therefore avoided company, her brain worked at its fastest, so she could anticipate at once what people meant and was frustrated by their inability to express it.

  Her fear that she would have to be bright in breakfast conversation had proved groundless. Daisy left the flat by eight to be early at her desk; whatever the excesses of the previous evening, she would be pounding down the stairs, toast in hand, to be at work before the others. The first half-hour could not be fun: Charlotte saw the level of the aspirin bottle in the bathroom, heard the early-hours returns and Daisy’s whispered cautions counterpointed by a deeper voice. But her resilience seemed limitless, and the storm-force of her evening return was anticipated by telephone calls forecasting parties.

  Sally departed ten minutes after Daisy, leaving sometimes a grinning Terence to clog the bathroom basin with his sticky shaving soap and his moulting badger brush. Sally was a secretary at the headquarters of a charity who were particular about punctuality.

  Dr Wolf did not begin his consultations until ten; he liked Charlotte to be there by nine-thirty so he could go through the post with her and settle her with things to do while he consulted. Even allowing for Charlotte’s morning slowness, it was not an early start.

  The news in the paper was gloomy. The Russians were in retreat, as the Germans drove them back from town to town; the Japanese were threatening Singapore; the Americans had in theory joined the war, but for all the popular belief that this meant the Allies must win, it seemed to Charlotte they had as yet made little difference.

  She resented the anguish that reading the newspaper brought and felt the news of deaths keenly; the war had aroused in her a feeling that surprised her. When she was a girl her father had taken the family to France and pointed out the million-acre graveyards of the British dead; Charlotte did not take in all he said about the war, but even at the age of seven understood that such a thing could never be endured again. An unthinking allegiance to a national cause seemed to have been the motive that led ten million men to die, and the danger of such thinking had been alive in the calcu
lations of all the people she had known.

  Yet something had changed. She had come to see the enemy as not one competing cause whose selfish aims were as defensible as any other’s, but as a plain manifestation of evil. When she told Cannerley on the train that she was patriotic, she was not saying quite what his easy smile suggested he thought; she was saying that, despite the implicit danger, and against her former judgement, she had come to feel this way. What she meant was that she had unwittingly developed an almost motherly identification with the men being killed. She despised their killers. There was no doubt in her mind; and although she was not particularly pleased to have been driven to this conviction, she saw no possibility of its changing.

  There was news from France, a country she saw through the eyes of her sixteen-year-old self. The Loiseau family in their house near Chartres had an innocent severity in their approach to learning. Monsieur Loiseau worked in an engineering business and was patriotic to the point of chauvinism; it seemed natural to him that an English – Scottish, he corrected himself with heavy humour – girl should want to learn the language of Racine and Voltaire. It was natural, too, for him to insist that no English be spoken in his house and that his sons help Mlle Gray in every way they could. An unconcealed horror of ‘English’ customs made both Monsieur Loiseau and his wife anxious that Charlotte should also learn about French manners, wine, restaurants, theatre, the niceties of conversation. They were able to recreate in their ample bourgeois house a placid version of a better age, as though Verdun had never happened and as though the panic-stricken coalitions of the actual government might yet avert disaster. Madame Loiseau took Charlotte to Paris, negotiated a number of green-and-white-flanked buses, and showed her the Sainte Chapelle and the Panthéon. Afterwards Monsieur Loiseau joined them for dinner at a restaurant in the rue de Tournon. It was Charlotte’s first proper dinner, with four courses and wine from Bordeaux, accompanied by a lecture from Monsieur Loiseau on the viticultural regions of France.