Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Charlotte found herself being politely but swiftly ushered out of the room. She made her way back down the long corridors, the falling numbers on the bedroom doors her simple thread back from the minotaur. She felt exhilarated by her meeting with ‘Mr Jackson’ and by the thought of going over to France.

  It would be easier for her to understand herself there; away from the doleful influence of her parents she might be able to see how things had gone wrong in her life. This was the chance she had long wanted – to escape through action, and in her absence from the world she had known to reassemble the fragments of her life into a harmonious whole. This would be accomplished, she felt sure, by the light of the passion that she had for Gregory.

  The thought of him filled her with light and expectation as she strode across the lobby, unconscious of the porter’s sullen stare.

  9

  CHARLOTTE’S HUNGER FOR happiness led her to ascribe to her brief and infrequent meetings with Gregory the status of routine.

  There were a few repeated elements. First of these was his unreliability, or at least his uncertainty until a very late stage that he would be able to come at all. This seemed to her natural for a pilot in a war; and if not, she had no wish to enquire further. Once he had confirmed, she would make sure Daisy and Sally were both out for the evening, which was easy enough to achieve: Terence’s new job with the Admiralty required him to be in London four nights a week, on each one of which Sally required to be taken out, and Daisy’s desire for company showed no sign of weakening. Then there was the question of dinner, which Charlotte would cook to the accompaniment of records Gregory pulled out from what looked like an old plate rack next to Daisy’s gramophone in the sitting room. Of the limited selection Charlotte preferred Ravel and Beethoven, but she came to like the dance music Gregory invariably selected. He brought gin from the mess, which they drank with vermouth and ice; she cooked whatever she could find in the shops. Gregory was not much interested in food and never objected to the recurrence of various forms of pilaff in which Charlotte as artfully as possible disguised the odds and leavings of exhausted rations. She insisted on a proper tablecloth – white linen damask, worn in places, that she had found in a second-hand shop in the Earl’s Court Road – flowers and candlelight; when dinner was finally served she always raised her glass to his and drank his health with playful sincerity. By stressing the repeated elements in all the few evenings they spent together she convinced them both that there were more of them.

  Gregory made his first successful sortie over France, a drop of ammunition, supplies and cash to a G section network near Brive. His navigator was a Londoner called Brierley, whose patient voice guided him over the curfewed blackness of the Occupied Zone down towards the plateau of the Limousin. Arriving twelve minutes early at the drop zone, they circled while Brierley counted off the minutes before directing Gregory back towards the thin torchlight of the waiting men. It was simple; and as he eased back the stick Gregory had to fight the inclination to indulge some exuberant display of relief.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Charlotte, when she saw his modestly smiling face. ‘Does the word “cake” come into it?’

  He laughed. ‘No. Even easier than that.’

  ‘And how would I find out if anything happened to you? I’m not the next of kin. And if the job you’re doing is so secret they wouldn’t list you missing in the paper, would they?’

  ‘You can always find out from Borowski. Or you can get in touch with the Halifax people – McGrath or Wetherby, the squadron leader. I’ll tell him to let you know. But listen, Charlotte, nothing’s going to happen. These are very safe operations. If you can survive in fighters with Messerschmitts swarming all around you, you can drop a few boxes in an undefended field.’

  Charlotte received another letter, asking her to present herself at a country house in Surrey the following Friday evening. She decided to say nothing about it to Gregory until such time as she could confront him with something complete; she did not know why, but she wanted to startle him. At some stage she would have to join the absurdly named FANYs, whose members, Daisy excitedly told her, were issued with silk stockings and the most flattering uniforms. She feared Gregory’s reaction; it would be no use explaining that few of these well-bred women had much to do with the first aid, the nursing or the yeomanry of the organisation’s name, but were chiefly being trained in the use of explosives; in fact, that might provoke his anxiety as well as his teasing. For the time being all he knew was that she had a compelling need to be in France.

  Charlotte told Daisy she was going to see some old friends for the weekend and took a train from Waterloo after lunch. The taxi dropped her at the end of a long gravel drive flanked by laurels. She had been told to arrive at ‘tea-time’, but feared that, at ten past four, she was likely to be the first. She lingered in the driveway and was on the point of finding a quiet place in the neighbouring woods to read her book for half an hour when a fat yellow labrador appeared from behind the bushes, waggling its back half, and emitting the soft, unthreatening bark, part warning to the owner, part greeting to the stranger, that was, unknown to Charlotte, the indigenous call of wet Surrey lawns. The dog waddled up and thrust its broad, flat head up her skirt. As Charlotte struggled to disengage it, she heard heavy footsteps on the gravel and a male voice calling to the dog.

  ‘Don’t worry. He’s quite friendly.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘Tony Sibley. Here, let me take your bag. A couple of girls are here already. Are you Nancy Lee?’

  ‘No. Charlotte Gray.’

  ‘Ah, the Scots lass. Of course. Well, ye’re reet welcome and no mistake. Get down, Sandy.’

  At the bend in the drive a squat Edwardian house came into view. The coloured glass panels in the front door and the stone pots of pink geraniums could not disguise a burly, utilitarian look.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind sharing a room,’ said Sibley, pausing in the tiled hall to consult a noticeboard. Charlotte caught a smell reminiscent of Roderick’s boarding school – prayer books, cottage pie, floor polish. ‘You’re in with Freeburg and Lee. I’ll show you up, then you can come and join us for tea in the drawing room.’ He motioned with his hand to an open door as they began to mount the uncarpeted stairs.

  Sibley was a fit man in his late forties with fair hair and the beginnings of surprising side-whiskers, wispy and grey. He wore a tweed jacket and pale grey flannel trousers which slid up and down his swiftly climbing legs to show maroon socks above his thick-soled shoes. They went down a long landing flanked by mahogany banisters on one side and windows over the garden on the other; although Sibley carried her bag, Charlotte had to hurry to keep up. A threadbare rug made the polished floorboards treacherous where she followed Sibley up a second flight of stairs. He threw open a white door to reveal a plain little room with three wooden beds and a washstand.

  ‘You’re the first. If I were you I’d bag the place by the window,’ said Sibley genially, dropping Charlotte’s canvas and leather grip on to the bed. ‘Bathroom’s at the end of the corridor. See you downstairs in five minutes.’

  Charlotte smiled to herself as she laid her nightdress on the bed and, by so doing, presumably ‘bagged’ it.

  Tea in the main drawing room was served by an imposing woman introduced as Mrs Mitchell, whose role seemed to be somewhere between headmistress and chaperone, as though the dozen young women who eventually assembled could not quite be trusted in Sibley’s raffish company alone. Tea included sponge cake of almost pre-war yellow and peppery tomato sandwiches whose white bread was saturated with pink juice. Afterwards they were instructed to look over the grounds and get to know one another. Sherry and an introductory talk would be at seven, followed by dinner and an early night before the rigours of the dawn. Charlotte smoked a cigarette on the terrace with her room-mates and wondered what on earth she was doing.

  She had never shared a bedroom with anyone before and briefly recoiled from the intimacy of it befo
re reminding herself that saboteurs needed to prepare for worse hardships. Dinner was less good than tea: mushroom soup, cottage pie and steamed pudding all needed something more than the jugs of tap-water provided to wash them down. Gloria Freeburg, forewarned by friends, had brought a flask of brandy in her suitcase, which she shared afterwards with Charlotte and Nancy Lee, but nothing of what Charlotte imagined to be the dormitory spirit developed as a result: both the others seemed anxious about the next day as they discussed the trials of daring that awaited them.

  After breakfast, Sibley took them down the gardens to a paddock, a small roped-off area of which, he explained, was a lake of sulphuric acid. He invited them to split into two teams, elect a leader, and cross the lake with the help of an empty oil drum, two cleft sticks and a length of frayed rope. Other obstacles were set up around the paddock, which looked set for an austerity gymkhana. The women, in issued trousers and plimsolls, responded to Sibley’s encouraging cries and made their way, with only two fatalities, through a small but densely laid minefield and a factory ventilation shaft. Charlotte incurred some time penalties and an acid burn to her left foot but was otherwise unharmed. She sat, flushed and breathless, at the edge of the final obstacle, watching the last three women struggle through. She thought how glad she was, for once, that Gregory wasn’t there.

  He was taking a few practice swings beside the first tee while Ian Watson prepared to let rip.

  ‘Short par four, this,’ said Watson. ‘Green’s just out of sight below the dip, but it’s straight down.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll follow you.’

  ‘Christ, I wouldn’t do that, old boy.’

  Watson planted the ball, stood back a few paces, swished his driver a couple of times, then waddled up to the ball and smacked it down the middle. ‘Settle for that,’ he said.

  Gregory tentatively mounted the tee with a three iron. ‘I told you I haven’t played since—’

  ‘Just get on with it, Gregory.’

  Gregory swung the club back slowly, concentrating on keeping his head preternaturally still, stamped his left heel down at the top of the backswing, kept the club-head accelerating through impact and raised his thumbs, as recommended by a grizzled African caddie to counteract his natural slice. A shock like that from an electric socket jarred his fingers, and the ball fizzed flat and low for fifty yards before burrowing like a homing rodent into the wiry heather.

  ‘Hard cheese,’ said Watson, striding off towards his own shot, which was a short chip from the green.

  The next time they were close enough together to talk was on the fourth fairway, where Watson said, ‘Word is you’ve got a new lady friend. Anyone I know?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Ian. I met her at a literary party in London. Not your sort of circle, I think.’

  ‘Not really yours, either, Greg.’

  Gregory laughed. ‘She’s a remarkable girl. Somehow she’s got it into her head that she ought to get dropped into France. Don’t ask me why. Something to do with her romantic feeling for the place.’

  ‘What? France?’

  ‘Yes. And the French.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Watson. ‘What a bloody shower.’

  ‘I know.’ Gregory looked at his wretched lie in the damp sand. ‘Stand clear.’

  After a few holes Gregory began to play better. His irons, instead of burrowing deep into the Surrey earth, merely clipped out a ragged oval of sandy topsoil. They began to fly straighter, or at worst with an allowable fade. His putting was still approximate. He imagined the hole to be the size of a dustbin lid; he pictured the ball on a piece of string; he conceived of a follow-through so straight as to coerce the ball by the discipline of his forearms into the hole. Still it slid by to the right, drooped left or smacked into the back of the cup and leapt off with frisky topspin.

  Ian Watson had been brought up in Scotland and had played golf since the age of five; the irritation of the game and all its frivolous trickery were natural to him. In front of the sixth green was a magnetic little brook, but he found it easy enough to land his second on the welcoming green beyond. It was good for him to be better than Gregory at golf: having joined the squadron in the winter of 1940 he felt at a disadvantage with men like Borowski and Gregory who had flown in August and September, in what had seemed like pure chaos at the time but had later become glamorously known as the Battle of Britain. Like most of the younger pilots Watson was an assiduous pursuer of women, but news of Gregory’s romance came to them as a surprise. They presumed he had become inactive.

  ‘Tell me more about this girl.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t want any competition.’ Gregory thought briefly of Charlotte’s brown eyes fixed on him with their eager intensity, of the way he would stroke her cheek with his fingers and make her laugh at her own earnestness. He thought of the sensation he sometimes had when she focused on him of being in the spotlight of an alarming intelligence. When he thought about her he felt an awful weakening; there was an impulse to admit some feeling – to give in, and, by submitting, to intensify it. It would be like coming home; it would be like finding an end to his bereaved uncertainty, and he was aware of the effort of will it took to crush the weakening impulse.

  ‘All square,’ said Ian Watson, through narrow lips, as they walked to the sixteenth.

  Gregory looked over a weedy pond to the long, thin green behind it. Although the flag was at the back, it still looked no more than a six iron to him. Watson had stopped offering advice on club selection as the score became closer.

  Gregory swung through the shot, but seemed to make more contact with the wooden tee than with the ball itself.

  ‘WG, I fancy,’ said Watson, watching its tinny, steep parabola. ‘Watery grave.’

  The ball fell among weeds on the far edge of the hazard. Watson took no chance with his shot, and battered his ball low to a bank at the back of the green.

  At the seventeenth tee they turned for the final approach to the clubhouse. Watson spent a long time, tee-ing and re-teeing his ball, then stiffly carved it high away to the right, where it clattered through branches and disappeared from view. Gregory, relaxed beyond caring, watched his slowly hit drive make its own straight way, bouncing over a dog-walkers’ path that crossed the fairway and running on towards the distant flag.

  When they stood on the last tee the match was level. Watson clearly felt that this was not a fair reflection of the game and that somehow he had been defrauded. The last green was set between the clubhouse on one side and a large lake on the other; it was a short par four, almost reachable, like the first hole, in one.

  Gregory hit a three iron to the left, a short, safe shot, that opened the green to his second. Watson controlled his nerve well enough to take a wood, which he hit to within thirty yards of the green. There was a little bounce in his step as he led the way forward.

  ‘Now you want to be careful not to hit the clubhouse from there,’ he said. ‘That window on the end is the ladies’ powder room. Very expensive nineteenth-century glass. I believe that when the Varsity match was played here the Cambridge captain salvaged a half by climbing on to the clubhouse roof, where his partner had put him, and laying the ball dead.’

  With these pictures in his mind – a young man in a pale blue scarf crouched among roof tiles with a niblick; half-dressed ladies at their powdering startled by exploding glass – Gregory stood over his ball. It was a straightforward eight iron. His natural fade would keep him from the clubhouse or the tree that stood sentinel beside it. He glanced up the fairway and saw Ian Watson, waiting for him to play.

  He looked at Watson’s eager face, its expression of friendly anticipation drawn sharper by his will to win. He thought of the similar expression on the face of Bill Dexter, climbing into his Spitfire for the last time; of Forster’s modest, colonial smile as he explained to an enraptured mess how he had made his first kill; of the rubbery grin of the Canadian, Jimmy Somers; of Borowski’s sharp-featured Polish friend whose plane had made
such a crater in the Sussex Downs. Gregory felt a surge of anxious pity for poor Watson. As he stood over the ball he shifted his feet so that they were at forty-five degrees to the line of the shot; on the backswing he snapped his left elbow-joint open so that the club veered down from far outside the line, across the ball, and sent it, with all his strength, soaring, slicing high across the green, hanging still for a moment on the air, then plummeting down into the lake. Watson turned, his face lit up with incredulous delight.

  Charlotte Gray was sitting in a leather armchair, sunk so deep that she could barely make her elbows reach up over the arms. Her eyes were following a line of book spines on a shelf: Gray’s Anatomy; Child Psycho-Analysis by Melanie Klein; Psycho-Analysis of the War Neuroses, Introduction by Sigmund Freud. Her eyes moved over the letters of the titles again and again, though she read without taking in the meaning of the words. Beneath the shelf was the head of the surprisingly young psychiatrist, Dr Burch; it was a head sleek with hair oil, with a bespectacled face of impassive curiosity. He occasionally tapped the end of his pen against the pages in the open folder on his lap. He wrote nothing.

  ‘Let’s talk about your parents. Are they happy?’

  ‘As far as I know.’ She thought of the windswept house, her father’s long absences at work, his awful wordless days, her mother’s nervously chattering complicity.

  Dr Burch said nothing. Charlotte said nothing. She knew he expected her to be motivated, embarrassed even, by the silence into giving more details, and that the spontaneous first rush of information would be, by the nature of its self-selection, significant – either in what it chose to include or by what it chose to suppress.

  So she said nothing.

  Dr Burch smiled, a humourless, slightly reproving smile, as though to suggest that Charlotte was being difficult, or impolite. ‘Would you like to tell me a little more about them?’