Charlotte nodded.
Jackson sucked in his breath. ‘This is all terribly straightforward, but of course if it all goes well, and I’m sure it will, we might find you something more exciting another time. Do you follow?’
‘Of course.’ Charlotte nodded.
‘Now there’s just one more thing I must tell you about.’ Jackson settled himself on the edge of the desk. ‘Sometimes people get very lonely over there. You can tell no one about yourself, you have very little human contact with anyone at all. You’re only going to be there for a week, so I’m sure you’ll be fine, but even a week can seem a long time. Be prepared for it and don’t let it affect you. Are you subject to feelings of loneliness?’
Not exactly loneliness, thought Charlotte: bereavement, desolation, despair . . . ‘Not particularly,’ she said. ‘Not really.’
‘Good. You’ll receive your final briefing from one of my staff at the aerodrome. He’ll also give you a small package with the crystals in it. I normally like to come myself, but as you’ve probably noticed we’ve got a rather busy day. Quite shortly I’m going to introduce you to a young woman who’s going to be with you from now until you get on the plane – a sort of a chaperone, really. You can call her Alice. All the girls who do this job are called Alice. She’s just there to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t absent-mindedly slip a packet of Craven A into your pocket and so forth. She’ll even have to accompany you to the you-know-what. It’s all perfectly usual, but before we say goodbye I want to wish you luck. It’s an awfully simple little job, but the first time’s always a bit tense. I’d like you to have this.’
He held out a small box, tied with an orange bow. Inside was a silver powder compact.
‘Thank you,’ said Charlotte. ‘It’s lovely. It’s not too expensive for a girl like Danièle?’
‘Dear me, no. It’s French, too. Look at the maker’s name.’
Julien Levade’s office was on the first floor of one of the larger streets of Lavaurette. A double outer door opened from the street on to a courtyard on the far side of which the main entrance led into a gloomy reception area that smelled of floor polish and caporal tobacco. The receptionist, a plump woman in her thirties called Pauline Bobotte, directed visitors to any of the half-dozen enterprises in the building, and worked the small telephone exchange, parroting the number in her uncompromising accent and prodding in the little plugs with their frayed cords. It was a matter of unquestioned routine for her to listen in on any conversation she chose, and no visitor, however long he had waited in the hall, however urgent his appointment, was allowed to interrupt her deft manoeuvres.
‘Mademoiselle Bobotte?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Monsieur Levade. I wondered if you had one second . . . not if you’re busy, of course.’
‘It’s not time for coffee already, is it?’
‘Very nearly.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Ten minutes later, Pauline Bobotte entered Julien’s office with a small white china cup, slightly out of breath from the slippery climb. Julien thought it better not to ask where she procured the coffee – she was a resourceful woman with good connections among the local shopkeepers as well as a reliable intimacy with a businessman from Toulouse, who frequently stayed in Lavaurette on his way north. Pauline Bobotte was capable of discretion in her turn. For instance, she never asked why various callers referred to Monsieur Levade as ‘Octave’, nor why it was always these people who seemed to be making urgent assignations. There was a time to keep silent and listen.
The price Julien paid for the coffee was a brief, slightly flirtatious conversation with Mlle Bobotte, in which she asked him about his work, and he questioned her about her home life, implying that she concealed from him the large number of suitors who kept her busy.
Pauline Bobotte went to look at the plans on Julien’s drawing board. ‘You haven’t made much progress, have you?’ she said.
‘I’m at the stage of creative thinking. Beautiful shapes are forming in my head. Marble staircases are rising up out of nowhere. Fountains are shimmering. I’m wondering whether there should be peacocks on the lawns.’
‘Well, I hope you’re going to put some bedrooms in this hotel.’
‘Really, Mademoiselle, bedrooms, bedrooms, is that all you think about?’
‘You Parisians are all the same,’ said Pauline Bobotte sternly to hide the beginnings of a blush. ‘Quite impractical. If a traveller stops off for the night he wants a good comfy bed, that’s all. He doesn’t want peacocks and fountains.’
‘I thought we’d keep the cloisters, perhaps put some tubs of flowers along here, geraniums, pansies. What do you think?’
‘I think it’s a shame to wreck a lovely old building. Why can’t it carry on as a monastery?’
‘There hasn’t been a monk there for years. Everything passes, everything changes.’
‘Well, I’m surprised people have got enough money to do things like this nowadays. It’s all we can do to keep body and soul together.’
‘On the contrary, the Occupation has provided ideal circumstances for the shrewd businessman. Life will resume. There will be full hotels and rich clients. Whether they’ll be French or German, of course, I really can’t say. But my employers are prepared for all eventualities and they have no doubt taken care to offend no one. Listen. I think I can hear the telephone.’
Pauline took the empty cup, reluctantly, and made her way downstairs. A few seconds later, Julien’s telephone rang. ‘I’m just putting you through,’ he heard Pauline’s voice say.
‘Octave?’ said a man’s voice.
‘Yes,’ said Julien.
‘Auguste. It’s on. Ten thirty. Understood?’
‘Yes.’
The line, to Pauline Bobotte’s irritation, went dead.
Charlotte waited an hour and twenty minutes, dressed as Dominique Guilbert, sitting on the edge of the bed in yet another room in the flat. There was a short knock at the door and an expensively dressed woman, a little older than Charlotte, came in and introduced herself.
‘Danièle? I’m Alice. I’m going to look after you now.’
Charlotte took in the woman’s tailored suit, her crocodile handbag, and felt the dowdiness of her own mousey hair, her clothes, the cumbersome shoes.
‘The car’s waiting downstairs. It’s about an hour’s drive. Do you need the loo?’ ‘Alice’ had what Charlotte recognised to be a smart – perhaps affectedly so – English accent. Although she was not in uniform, she reminded Charlotte of what Cannerley had said about the FANYs being as posh as Queen Charlotte’s Ball.
‘No, I’m all right, thanks. I went when I took my make-up off.’
‘Super. If you’re quite ready, then, I think we’ll make our move.’
Alice opened the door a few inches and received an affirmative nod from the butler at the end of the corridor.
‘All right, my dear. Here we go.’
Charlotte followed Alice to the front door of the flat, a brief ‘Good luck, Miss’ from the butler following her out on to the landing.
A black Riley was waiting at the foot of the steps outside, a uniformed FANY standing chauffeur-like beside the open rear door. She took Charlotte’s roughened brown suitcase and stowed it in the boot, while Charlotte sank down on to the red leather seat. It was early evening and a newspaper seller was barking some incomprehensible sound. The driver moved a switch in the walnut dashboard and Charlotte heard the indicating finger slide out from the side of the car as the three women pulled out into the traffic and headed north towards St John’s Wood.
Julien finished the dinner the housekeeper had made earlier and left on top of the cooker. He wiped a piece of bread round the edge of the plate to soak up the remains of the gravy generated by the concoction of meat and vegetable. He never asked what the ingredients were in case it put him off, but tonight’s effort had been almost palatable, helped by the half-glass of red wine he had thrown in while rehea
ting it.
He poured the last of the litre of Côtes du Rhône into his glass and lit a cigarette. It was nine thirty. He could not conceal from himself the fact that he was enjoying this very much indeed: he was in perfect time, he was just drunk enough and it was a beautiful, star-packed night. He carried the dishes through to the kitchen and left them by the sink; then he went round the apartment closing the shutters. The high ceilings and the bare floors made it noisy; he left his shoes by the door so as not to disturb the family who lived on the ground floor. He filled a small flask with brandy and slipped it into the pocket of the old leather jacket he took from the row of pegs in the hall. He could not remember when these excursions had taken on such an alcoholic character, but it now seemed indispensable. He checked that the bedroom window was open and noted with pleasure how well the housekeeper had tidied the room: the great wooden-ended bed and its antique canopy looked positively seigneurial, he thought. No one else had wanted this ancient, draughty apartment; only an architect would have been foolish enough to rent it. He put on some heavy boots, patted his pockets to make sure he had cigarettes and took a small rucksack from beside the front door. Inside were four electric torches and some spare batteries.
Julien clattered down the stairs, forgetting as always, until it was too late, that his footsteps would cause a scuffling from behind the concierge’s door. He strode across the hall but was not quite fast enough.
‘Out again tonight, Monsieur Levade?’
‘Absolutely. I’m meeting my fiancée at the station. She’s just arrived from Lyon.’
‘I thought she was from Paris.’
‘Oh, that’s a different one,’ said Julien, as he slipped through the front door. ‘Good night.’
He went round to the side of the building where he kept his bicycle. He connected the dynamo to the wheel and pedalled off, the thin beam of his front lamp expanding to a handsome glow as he accelerated into the village.
On the main road out of Lavaurette, just before the school, was a solid, spacious house that belonged to Mlle Cariteau, the post-mistress. Julien left his bicycle propped against the railings at the side and went cautiously to the back door, where he knocked on the glass.
‘Who is it?’ A manly figure with a woman’s voice moved in silhouette across the lit blind on the door.
Julien smiled. ‘It’s me. Julien.’
A bolt was slid, the door opened on to a large, untidy kitchen, and Sylvie Cariteau offered one cheek, then the other, in greeting.
‘Good evening, Madame.’ Julien went to shake hands with Mlle Cariteau’s mother, who sat in an easy chair by the vast, blackened fireplace.
‘Sit down.’ Mlle Cariteau pulled back a chair at the table, which still bore the remnants of the two women’s exiguous dinner. She poured Julien a glass of wine and pushed it towards him over the pitted oak surface.
Julien looked at Mlle Cariteau. He needed to do no more than raise an eyebrow. ‘All right?’
She nodded. ‘All right. They’re asleep. My mother looked after them today.’
Mlle Cariteau opened her hands and glanced towards the rafters. Julien followed her gaze. He had never been upstairs, but it was easy enough to imagine from the outside of the house that it had ample unused spaces. ‘We have twelve bedrooms,’ said Mlle Cariteau.
‘How are the children, Madame?’
He always had some difficulty, as a Parisian, understanding exactly what Madame Cariteau said. Although she was probably no more than seventy, a lack of teeth added to the puzzle of her accent.
‘They were frightened. The little one, Jacob, wept all morning, then suddenly he seemed to cheer up. I gave them some paper and pencils and they did some drawing. I heard them laughing together in the afternoon. The older one kept asking me when his parents were coming back.’ The old woman drew her lower lip up over both gums and shrugged. ‘I don’t like to let them downstairs, that’s the nuisance of it.’
Julien sighed. ‘We’ll have to try to work something out.’
‘Leave them for the time being,’ said Mlle Cariteau. ‘We can manage.’
Julien looked interrogatively towards the mother, who gave a sour little nod of agreement.
The Whitley smelled of raw machinery: oil, tin, rivet. Charlotte felt a pair of hands pushing on her backside, then a shoulder being added to the shove. She sprawled inside, almost unable to move for the bulk of the parachute, and lay down as instructed by an RAF sergeant across the bomb bay with her head and shoulders propped against the side of the fuselage. Somehow, despite the training, she had been expecting seats. ‘Yves’ followed her into the plane and took up his position opposite. He gave her an encouraging wink. Charlotte was filled with a sudden certainty that she was going to feel sick. The lack of any view, the mechanical smell and her sense of anxiety reminded her of sitting in the back of her father’s shooting brake on long drives across the Highlands, with the windows half fogged by rain, the air heavy with pipe smoke, her view bounded by the back of her parents’ heads and Roderick’s bare knees beside her.
There were several wooden crates stowed at one end of the fuselage with parachutes attached. In addition to Yves and Charlotte, there were two RAF sergeants on board, who would act as dispatchers when they reached the drop zone. The engines started up while the two men checked that everything was securely strapped; then one of them settled himself between Charlotte and the partition that separated them from the nose section, which contained the controls and the flying crew. He patted her on the thigh and grinned. ‘All right, my love?’ Everyone seemed to be from Lancashire.
The plane came to a halt and the engine noise increased. Gregory would know what this meant: perhaps they were waiting for a signal. Then they had it; and the plane began to roar and shake as it committed itself full-heartedly to the runway. The whole body of it seemed to tremble with the effort of making this unnatural transition; metal, weight, loading, bodies and gravity fought against the bull-like perseverance of the engines until, reluctantly, against nature, the plane hauled itself up off the ground.
Until her training at Manchester Charlotte had only once been in an aeroplane, when she flew to Rome to complete her Italian course; all her journeys to France had started with the boat train at Victoria and finished at the Gare du Nord. The peculiar thing about this plane was that it seemed to be pointing downwards: there was a clear upward slope from nose to tail. After a few minutes she asked the sergeant why this was and he told her it was just a characteristic of the Whitley, nothing to fret about, and that they were in fact climbing steadily. From a cardboard box he produced some cups and a thermos, from which he poured tea. Yves accepted with a smile and Charlotte, thinking her stomach might be happier with something to work on, did likewise.
‘I’ve got something a bit stronger if you’d like it,’ said the sergeant, holding up a flask. Charlotte remembered her father telling her how the rum ration would come up to the front in the last war before the men were required to go over the top into the storm of steel.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Rum.’
She shook her head: she did not need that kind of courage to drop into an unoccupied field in the country for which she yearned. Yves also declined, and the sergeant replaced his flask in the box.
‘We’ll be going over the French coast at Cabourg,’ he said, ‘then down over Tours. We’ll have to have the lights off soon. I suggest you try and get some sleep. I’ll not let you miss your stop. Oh, and by the way.’ He was having to shout to be heard over the engines. ‘If you hear gunfire that’s probably our lad in the rear turret just testing his equipment. Doesn’t mean Jerry’s on our tail. All right?’
Charlotte had not known there was a gunner on board, but it seemed a vaguely comforting thought. Yves smiled and nodded; he seemed to be dropping off already. The dim lighting was extinguished as they crossed the Channel, and in the darkness Charlotte tried to picture Cabourg below them. She thought of how she had sat in Monsieur Loiseau’s sh
ady garden with her book. In the shaping of one man’s imagination, this Norman seaside town, renamed Balbec and moved a little to the west, had offered a version of unstable paradise. After the journey of the little train and the bewitching sight of the small band of girls on the beach, the furtive grandeur of the hotel itself had been the setting of snobbery, humiliation and the narrator’s kiss declined by Albertine, the object of his love. Yet as a teenager, reading Proust’s novel for the first time, Charlotte had seen Balbec as a place which had encapsulated some perfectly developed society, where an intense feeling might be properly valued, not dismissed merely because, like all things, it passed. She did not really understand what the jealous narrator meant when he suspected Albertine of enjoying ‘hidden pleasures’ with Léa and the other women.
Now perhaps there were Nazi officers in the hotel dining room; all the bedrooms where once the wealthy inhabitants of the Faubourg St Germain had changed from their modest woollen bathing costumes into their evening dresses and white ties were occupied, four at a time, by murderous young men in grey uniforms. Perhaps the gorgeous world of the book was more than just fictional; perhaps it was untrue.
Charlotte Gray Page 17
