Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Next week we are going to Manchester, where we will be trained in parachute jumping. Even I can manage to fall out of a plane, I should think. Before that, however, there are two important dates: first, the 36-hour cross-country trek, which is famous for being very, very tough indeed (‘Believe me, lassie, ye’ll be lucky if ye can get yer wee shoes on fer a week afterwards’ – a good deal of that rather gloating talk from the whisky-breathing wireless instructor), and the day after that: tea with mother. I tried to explain that I had no free time, everything very hush-hush and so on, but she had insisted we meet in Fort William and is making a special journey from Edinburgh to come and see me. We do in fact have two days off before Manchester, so I can’t very well say no.

  Some of the girls have apparently been given instruction in how to resist interrogation. For some reason this involved two of them being told to take their clothes off while they were questioned by two ‘Gestapo’ officers. So that there was no question of impropriety the large woman who runs the dormitories was present as a sort of chaperone. Marigold said she thought this woman’s interest was rather more unhealthy than that of the men!

  I will be back in London at the beginning of the week after Manchester where I will wait to hear my fate. Will you be able to come up to town? Probably you will have done your trip to France by then, ‘Charlotte’ permitting. I do hope you can come up and we can start to have our evening routine again. I miss your sad old face and the horrid things you say and do when there are just the two of us. You can’t write to me here, but you could write a letter to the flat in London to wait for my return.

  Do you love me just a little bit?

  I send you my biggest, biggest kisses. Charlotte.

  One of the reasons Charlotte had wanted to come on the course was somehow to shock Gregory into an increase of feeling: perhaps if he felt she were demonstrating her independence of him he might recognise the true extent of his dependence on her. She had not been sure that she would ever, really, go to France; but, now she had seen the other women who had volunteered and recognised that they were not much different from her – no stronger, no braver, no better at the language – the prospect of her actually going had become real.

  Meanwhile, she needed reassurance. She wanted to be told by him, not once but many times, that he needed her; she wanted him to tell her that the compromises she had made with her modesty for the sake of his desires were understood; more than anything, she wanted him to tell her that he valued her.

  All this, she thought, as she sat on the stopping train to Fort William, without seeming weak or clinging. It was a hot afternoon, and from the carriage window she saw a fisherman on a stool by a narrow river. While his right hand gripped the rod, he was waving his left back and forth by his neck to drive off the midges. It was strange to see this placid scene: Scotland, France . . . Were men now fishing off the banks of the Seine near Monet’s house at Giverny? Why were they not fighting? How many citizens did it take to wage a war, and what was the responsibility of the ones who did not? Someone must carry on with the ordinary business of working, eating, going to bed: somebody must fish. Could you in all conscience play your line across the seething waters of the Garonne at Toulouse, knowing that where it met the sea at Bordeaux the docks were patrolled by German soldiers? You voted for a government, then did what you were told: no one could really ask for more. And what right had she, a foreigner, to interfere?

  Charlotte waited at the station for the Edinburgh train and saw her mother’s familiar but ever stouter figure step down on to the platform. She waved from the ticket barrier, then turned away so she would not have to hold her mother’s gaze while she walked the length of the train. Amelia Gray’s powdery cheek dabbed against her daughter’s unmade-up skin and, nominal contact made, recoiled. Charlotte took one of her bags, which bulged with her unvarying baggage of knitting, library books and presents wrapped in tissue paper.

  For Charlotte there were vests, handkerchiefs and chocolates, which she unwrapped in the hotel lounge while they waited for the waitress to bring tea. Amelia, satisfied by Charlotte’s gratitude, settled back in the floral-covered armchair. She was a big, handsome woman, run to fat, whose waved brown hair was shot with grey. Her fussing indulgence worked hard to compensate for her natural reticence and her fear of scenes, storms or emotions.

  The waitress wore a frilled apron and a white cap clipped to her hair with pins that Charlotte noticed as she laid the heavy tray down on the low walnut table. Wisps of cress trailed from the sides of bulging egg sandwiches; three different kinds of cake were fanned about a willow-patterned plate.

  ‘Tell me how you’re getting on with this course.’

  ‘We’ve finished. Tomorrow I’m off to Manchester, then back to London.’

  ‘What’s it for, though?’

  ‘The FANYs. You know, the First Aid—’

  ‘I know what the FANYs are. Mary McKechnie’s daughter is a FANY too. Are you going to be a driver?’

  ‘I expect so, yes.’

  ‘So why do you need to go on a course?’

  ‘I’m not really supposed to say. You never know who’s listening.’

  ‘Really, Charlotte.’ Amelia laughed. ‘I’m your mother.’

  There was a pause in which Charlotte could have said more, but after a moment’s awkwardness she could tell that her mother was relieved not to know: her curiosity was formal.

  ‘How’s Father?’

  ‘Ooh, you know. He’s just . . . Father.’

  ‘Busy?’

  ‘Of course. Very busy. They’re making a lot of changes at the hospital and he wants to be involved in the reorganisation.’

  ‘Are you seeing much of him?’

  ‘He’s getting back very late.’

  ‘And have you heard from Roderick?’

  ‘Yes, I have. I had a nice letter from him the other day. His battalion’s still in Lincolnshire, but they’re hoping to go overseas soon. They don’t know where yet. He says he’s very fed up with all the training. He wants to get out there and do something.’

  ‘Typical Roderick.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘No. He knows how to look after himself.’

  Amelia poured some more tea for both of them. She took a piece of cake, her third, then put it down again. Something effortful was clearly going on, Charlotte thought.

  ‘Of course I do worry about you – both of you.’ She was looking down at the table. ‘I wish you’d get married, Charlotte. Have you got a young man?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It’s none of my business, of course. I just . . .’

  ‘Go on.’ Charlotte felt embarrassed by her mother’s obvious discomfort but thought that, having come unusually close to frankness, she should be encouraged.

  ‘I sometimes ask myself whether I really did enough for you when you were a child.’ Amelia’s face was tense with effort. Charlotte said nothing. ‘Perhaps I was not a very good mother.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Amelia could go no further, and Charlotte, who could see the effort she had made, took pity on her. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, and patted her arm. She felt her mother’s instinctive flinch at being touched.

  ‘You say that, Charlotte, you say it’s all right. But I don’t really know what you think. I never have.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mama. It’s all right.’

  Eventually Amelia said, ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘I don’t. Not usually.’ Charlotte had not even been aware of lighting a cigarette. It was Gregory’s fault.

  ‘Remember what your mother told you,’ the parachute instructor called leeringly to the women as they queued up to do their preliminary jumps from a fourteen-foot tower. ‘Legs together.’

  ‘I wonder how many times he’s said that,’ said Marigold, standing with Charlotte in the queue.

  The next day they jumped from a plane. Charlotte was grateful for the dispatcher’s u
ncompromising shove; short moments of terror were followed by a feeling of powerless ecstasy as the canopy jerked open. The hardships of Inverie Bay seemed to have been worthwhile, and with the exception of one man who turned his ankle, they were all eager to go up again. Marigold told Charlotte that the final part of their training, in the New Forest, was arduous and dull, but in the exhilaration of jumping they treated this as a typical service rumour.

  The next day Charlotte said goodbye to Marigold at Euston and took a taxi. The driver jerked and twisted sickeningly through narrow back streets to bring them out into Trafalgar Square; perhaps with her uniform and her suitcase at the station he had taken her for a stranger to the city, Charlotte thought, as they accelerated down the Mall. Office workers on their lunch break sat in striped deck chairs on the grass of Green Park where they threw bread to the scraggy ducks. London still functioned.

  Would there be a letter from Gregory when she got back to the flat? He was not much of a writer. Apart from the occasional note left on her bedside table (what did he think when he looked at her vulnerable and asleep?), she had very little by which to recognise his handwriting. Surely, however, he would have the simple politeness to have answered her letter, even if it was just in a few lines.

  When they arrived at the house Charlotte felt her fingers tremble slightly on the key. Perhaps it was merely from the exertion of hoisting her heavy case up the steps. Inside the hall she went rapidly through the letters for the first-floor flat on the old walnut dresser: there was nothing for her. Up in the flat, she sorted the papers, previous post and magazines on the hall table. She had an invitation to a gallery, a bank statement, a postcard from Roderick in Lincolnshire and a clothes catalogue.

  She felt a descending bitterness and loss of hope that were out of proportion to the lack of a letter. She went into the sitting room and sat down on the sofa. This is a war, a historic emergency, she told herself, and he is flying dangerous machines; how high in the list of priorities does my self-righteously expected letter come? That was the logic of the situation; but, as her professor of French at university occasionally used to remark, what use is logic when faced with the power of truth?

  Charlotte went to the kitchen to make some tea. It had relapsed in her absence, though not quite to the pure state of chaos that had once existed. Charlotte warmed the pot, set the cup ready, and poured the boiling water on the leaves before discovering to her extreme irritation that there was no milk.

  She took her black tea through to the sitting room and looked through a day-old newspaper on the sofa. If he hadn’t rung by seven, she would get in touch with Marigold Davies, who was staying in some kind of hostel, and go out with her for the evening. The Times reported no good news from the Eastern Front, where Hitler’s armies continued to move into Russia. Charlotte put down the paper and went to the hall to get a book from her suitcase. It was cool and quiet in the flat, the noise of the turning pages loud in the gloomy sitting room. Charlotte had the sense of life happening elsewhere, while the carriage clock on the mantelpiece ticked off the passage of unfilled minutes. Occasionally she glanced up from her book to the black telephone on the table in the window; once she went over to it and checked that the receiver had been properly replaced. She laid down the book and closed her eyes.

  The days had been very full: the psychiatrist, the obstacle courses, the throwing herself from the hold of a slowly chugging plane . . . The extraordinary had become normal, or, if not normal, everyday. Some aspect of the past few weeks had stirred something unwelcome in her thoughts, though it remained just beyond the reach of conscious memory. With her head tilted back against the pimply nap of the sofa, Charlotte probed into the reaches of her mind.

  She is in her childhood bedroom. There is the fender that wraps its iron mesh about the coal fire; there is the scarlet rug with its faded golden curlicues. There is a row of dolls propped up along the wall beneath the window. There is a blue-painted wooden bookshelf with a row of stories about witches, schools and ponies. There is the battered bed, beneath the deep and comforting eiderdown. It is night-time and she is playing in her dressing gown on the floor – puzzles or a book in the few minutes before bed. It is a fragile paradise.

  She hears an awful noise. It is half shouting, half crying. She goes along the landing, through an open door. Her father is kneeling by a bed. He turns to her, and she is frightened by the tears on his masculine and warlike face. She is aware that at some invisibly remote level she may pity him, but in her child’s mind all she experiences is fear.

  She goes to him. He has some agonising need. Then the picture, quite clear until this point, explodes and fragments: there is the sensation of betrayal and violation. It is physical pain to an extent, but stranger than that is the sense of borders crossed, a world tilted out of its true orbit.

  What really happened she could never fully recall. The harder she tried, the more remote it grew, until it seemed to have happened at another time, in another life, in an existence where different rules applied. All she could be certain of was the intense reality of the incident; it was more real than any clear or normal recollection.

  Charlotte opened her eyes again. She had lived for so long with this half-memory that it was part of the scenery of her mind. It had become assimilated, albeit in faint outline, into the person she was; and in long, uncomplicated passages of her life it was as unregarded as any other fragment of the past. What had presumably moved it back into the centre of her awareness were Dr Burch’s questions; but she was confident that she could let it drift away, that this most fully real experience could be successfully relegated once more to the shadows.

  She took her teacup back to the kitchen. She just had time for a bath before the others came home from work, so she took her suitcase down the corridor to her bedroom and had squeezed it half-way through the door when her eye was caught by a piece of paper on the bed. It was a note from Daisy. ‘Dear C, Welcome back – I think it’s today you’re coming back. Someone called Borowski (?) rang and left this number. Could you ring him back? Love, Daisy.’

  Charlotte took the piece of paper back into the sitting room. For two hours she had been sitting in the flat and never even thought to look in her bedroom. She lifted the receiver and waited for the operator. Her voice sounded distant but remarkably calm as she read out the number from Daisy’s note. It’s probably an invitation to a squadron dance, she told herself. It’s probably to ask if Gregory and I will make up a four at bridge or tennis; Borowski hasn’t been able to reach Gregory himself since he moved, so I’m the only way to get in touch. He’s probably just looking for Gregory, nothing to do with me at all . . . He’s ringing to say he’s dead, they’ve heard, they tried to reach me . . . In a curious way, the question of whether she became hysterical was almost a conscious choice.

  The number was of the pilots’ mess, where a steward answered. ‘Flight-Lieutenant Borowski? You’re in luck, madam. I’ve seen him around this afternoon. It may take some time to find him, though. Do you want to hang on?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘All right, I’ll send someone.’

  In the excruciating silence Charlotte heard each crackle on the line as the sound of Borowski’s happy step/funereal pace, as he strode cheerfully/plodded mournfully to the telephone; she framed offers of religious devotion in the event of Gregory’s escape – good works, church attendance . . . She made herself smile at the extravagance of her nunnish vows, because at root she was sure that such terrible things as she envisaged didn’t really happen to her. She needed just to concentrate and not give way to premature jubilation, not to tempt providence, until the all-clear sounded.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello. Is that Borowski?’ She didn’t know his first name. ‘It’s Charlotte Gray. I think you rang.’

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s right.’ Something church-like, decent, solemn, already sympathetic, in Borowski’s voice made Charlotte sit down suddenly on the hard chair next to the telephone.

&nbs
p; ‘Yes, Peter Gregory asked me to give you a call if . . . if, you know, if there were any mishaps or what-have-you. And, I just thought I’d—’

  ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s not very good news, I’m afraid. He’s gone missing. It’s a bit unclear. As you know, he’s with the Halifax chaps and I’ve only got this second-hand, but I gather he went down last week. They haven’t heard a squeak since.’

  ‘But . . . he told me you couldn’t crash a Halifax.’

  ‘He wasn’t in a Halifax. Apparently he was in a Lysander, which is a little single-engined monoplane. He’d been training on the quiet to do some pick-up. I don’t know the details. They’re tiny things. They can land on about five hundred yards of grass. They use them to pick up personnel. Agents, I suppose. He was a natural, having been in fighters.’

  ‘Do you know any more? Is he alive?’

  ‘I’m afraid I really don’t know. As I say, it’s all second-hand. What you should do is try and talk to the people where he’s based. It’s a bit tricky because the work they’re doing is all so hush-hush, but they’re perfectly nice chaps. The squadron leader’s someone called Wetherby, I think Greg told me.’

  ‘If he hadn’t crashed, then he would have come back, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Not necessarily. I don’t suppose he’d have enough fuel. I doubt whether the range is much more than four hundred and fifty miles, even if you strip off the arms and armour and whack on another tank. So if for some reason his man didn’t turn up and he couldn’t refuel, then he’d be stuck.’