Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Eventually Charlotte felt the sergeant’s hand once more on her thigh. ‘We’re starting to go down, love. We’ve passed over Tours and we’re coming near Limoges. We’re going to drop the stores first, then the two of you. Obviously if we did it the other way round you might get a nasty surprise dropping on top of you. He’s going first, then you. Now I’m going to show you the line because I want you to be happy that you’re firmly attached.’

  He pointed to the connection between the parachute and the static line that would jerk it open as soon as Charlotte was clear of the undercarriage.

  ‘See? Nice and firm. No worries?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Both sergeants went forward to the drop hole, which was just behind the cockpit partition. They hauled the two halves of it open and beckoned Yves and Charlotte to come forward. Charlotte peered into the darkness. At first she saw nothing, and then she could make out the twinkle of lights in a small town. She felt a stinging in her eyes.

  The other sergeant gestured them back to their places as the plane began to descend, though he himself stayed by the hatch. The pilot seemed to be having difficulty in getting the heavy bomber on line, and it pitched and heaved weightily as he fought to level off at the prescribed height. Charlotte felt sweat erupt on her palms as the engine roared, faded and roared. She swallowed hard and forced out saliva; she saw the sergeant by the hatch mouthing something anxiously, but could not hear for the sound of the engines. Then she saw his thumbs go up and she lip-read the word ‘lights’: somewhere in the heaving darkness below was a farmer with a torch and Charlotte’s heart filled with absurd love for him.

  The sergeants began to push out the crates, and they could feel the heavy jerk beneath the fuselage as the strops paid out and ripped open the parachutes. Six crates went down in quick succession, then the plane climbed and began a long banking turn to come in for its second run.

  ‘You lot now,’ grinned Charlotte’s sergeant as he beckoned them up to the hatch.

  Yves offered Charlotte his hand. ‘Good luck.’ They squatted by the hole as the heavy plane once more bucked and plunged its way round. Interior lights were switched on in the fuselage and a red lamp appeared on the wall above the hatch. Yves’s sergeant pulled him forward, watched the light until it turned green, then heaved him out into the night. They heard a bang and a flap. Charlotte’s sergeant pulled her by the arm to the edge of the hole; she sat with her feet dangling in the darkness. She saw his anxious eyes straining up at the red light. Then he kissed her cheek and hurled her through the floor.

  She was driven upside down, then sideways, by the blast; she had no breath, no sense, then she felt the straps of the parachute dig into the flesh on the bottom of her thigh-bones as the canopy opened and the straps took her weight. The parts of her body, which seemed to have been dispersed about the sky, head there, legs far behind, stomach somewhere back in the fuselage, began to reassemble themselves about one central point provided by the pull of gravity on the webbing between her legs. The momentum of the plane meant that the parachute was still oscillating in wide, sickening arcs, but beneath the nausea and the fear Charlotte felt the exhilaration of the drop and the safety of knowing, from the pressure of the straps, that she was safe. The ground hit her while she was still swinging, much before she expected, and she cracked her elbow as her legs – irreproachably together – could not stop her hurtling sideways on impact. She felt earth and grass smacking into her face and entering her mouth. For a moment she lay still, unable to move or breathe. Slowly she gathered herself, bit by bit, and climbed to her feet. As she breathlessly took in the solid facts of her arrival, smacking the disc on her belly to release the parachute, looking round at the beams of torchlight in the darkened field, she felt no fear, only the irresistible uprising of happiness.

  In the farmyard the three men worked swiftly to unload the crates from the cart while the ribby horse snorted in the moonlight.

  ‘Almost done. Just wait one minute.’

  Yves and Charlotte did as they were told; neither could think of anything to say, but they found themselves continually smiling at one another. One of the men produced their suitcases from an opened crate.

  They were led into the house and introduced properly to Octave, Auguste and César. Having been trained by a G Section visitor, the men were scrupulous about using only these names, and Charlotte found it difficult to penetrate even this elementary cover to guess what kind of people they were. They did not seem like farmers. The one called Octave was in his late twenties, dark, with a twitchy, humorous face; he spoke quickly and in a markedly Parisian way. César looked like a schoolboy, tall, with big hands and a low voice, but clumsy and deferential in his manner, as though embarrassed by his education. Only Auguste looked like a man of the region: he was solidly made, with a high colour and a shaggy moustache that seemed prematurely grey. He also took charge of the cooking, producing a five-foot length of thick sausage, which he cut into shorter pieces and threw into a frying pan on the range. César fetched a round loaf of heavy bread from a cupboard and Octave filled their glasses with wine.

  As they drank each other’s health, Charlotte had the impression that it was not the first wine the men had drunk that night. When the sausages were almost ready, Auguste broke half a dozen eggs into the pan, then served the whole lot on two plates.

  ‘But what about you?’ said Charlotte as Auguste joined the other men at the table and sat back with an expectant look to watch his visitors eat.

  ‘We’ve already had dinner.’

  Charlotte calculated that in addition to three fried eggs she had two and a half feet of sausage on her plate.

  None of the three men would be available to help them in the morning, so they spent several minutes going over maps and making sure that Charlotte and Yves knew where they were and where they had to go. They admired the false papers that had been made for them in London – in a grey stucco-fronted house on the Kingston bypass, Mr Jackson had told Charlotte with dry enjoyment. The next day they would walk to the station at Lavaurette, a distance of about five kilometres, and take a train; Octave told them to take what they wanted from their cases for the night, and he would arrange for them to be left at the station: walking across country with suitcases might look suspicious.

  When Charlotte could eat no more, she pushed her plate into the middle of the table and overrode Auguste’s exclamations of surprise and disappointment by persuading César, who had been watching with insatiable adolescent hunger, that he might help her out.

  The men said goodbye and shook hands warmly. Yves and Charlotte would be quite safe for the night; there was no need for them to worry. Octave wrote down his office telephone number on a piece of paper, showed it to Charlotte, then, when she had memorised it, put it in his pocket.

  ‘There are hardly any Germans in the Free Zone,’ he said. ‘But you need to watch out for the Vichy police. And be careful with gendarmes, though most of them will turn a blind eye. I’m sure you’ve been told all this.’

  Yves nodded. The more time she spent in his company, the more Charlotte liked Yves; he was a calm, taciturn little man, but he had the light of a wicked impatience in his eyes.

  They found two bedrooms upstairs on either side of the farmhouse. Offered the choice by Yves, Charlotte picked the one whose bed had a bolster. She had kept back from her suitcase one of the G Section French vests, which she wrapped over the part of the bolster on which she intended to lay her face. She had also retained some washing things, though these were less useful since the farmhouse had no running water.

  As she pulled the shutters noisily together, Charlotte glimpsed the rear light of a bicycle, wobbling from side to side, as Julien Levade tipsily tried to keep his balance with the weight of Charlotte’s suitcase on the metal luggage rack above the rear wheel.

  Mlle Cariteau’s house, despite its open position on the main road and its numerous large windows, seemed incapable of capturing the light. The upstairs room in which André
and Jacob were lodged admitted only slats or wedges of summer sun across the window seat and on to the worn floorboards; the long interior corridors, lined with vast wooden-fronted wardrobes, were in perpetual dusk.

  As the days went by, Madame Cariteau, thinking it might stop their thoughts from roaming, tried to settle the boys into the semblance of a routine. She had one or two children’s books left from the childhood of her own daughter, and she found a doll and some wooden toys in one of the wardrobes. Sylvie had been a good girl, an easy child to bring up, with a naturally hopeful attitude, despite having no father. So many children in Lavaurette were in the same situation that, although Sylvie might have felt it as a sadness, it was never a peculiarity. But, while the relationship between mother and young daughter had been happy and fruitful, it had also been a long time ago. Madame Cariteau found that her touch with small children seemed to have gone; she fought to remember how to talk to them, what they required for entertainment. Luckily, the elder boy seemed to have picked up the rudiments of reading, so, after lunch, when she dispatched Jacob to his bed to rest, she took André on her knee and went through Sylvie’s old books with him.

  It was a narrow decision as to whether André Duguay or Madame Cariteau was the better reader. Her greater experience of having seen groups of letters clustered on shop fronts or road signs made her able to recognise some long or complex words, as she would have recognised a human face; but André’s dogged phonetic technique helped build up the sounds of words that had defeated Madame Cariteau. After some days of resting his head against the old woman’s bosom, inhaling her unwashed, ancient but oddly comforting smell, André in any case came to know the story of the crocodile and her missing egg so well that he barely needed to look at the words. Madame Cariteau was impressed by his scholarship and by her own unsuspected aptitude for teaching.

  To his question, ‘Where is my mother?’, she gave her response in the same words: ‘They’ve gone away, but they’ll be back. Until then you’re quite safe with us.’ By never varying this formula she managed to make André feel that the question was less and less worth framing; and from a hundred times a day the frequency with which he asked it declined to half a dozen.

  Madame Cariteau enjoyed looking after the children, and saw it as a natural act of female kindness. Although she accepted that Jewish people were dishonest and anti-French, and that the Vichy legislation to restrain their activities and confiscate their businesses was overdue, she didn’t see how the little ones were to blame: after all, it was not André or Jacob’s fault that they were born Jewish. Her daughter’s view was more developed, which was why it was she who had been approached by Julien to look after the children in the first place. That was her business, Madame Cariteau thought: Sylvie was entitled to any opinions she liked, but none of them need affect her own attitude.

  André, meanwhile, just wanted to be happy, and, having been happy all his life, was driven naturally towards this regular state of mind. Sylvie Cariteau told her mother she thought he was ‘adaptable’, and praised him for it, but it was a blinder craving than that. Because he had no power to change his circumstances, his will to survive and his legacy of natural content deceived him into experiencing them as bearable.

  Yet something was checked in him. Without his mother’s constant touch, he shrank a little; his movements became less fluid; he walked more often than he skipped; he remembered himself more, never any longer forgetting to say please or thank you. Slowly, too, he began to register his father’s absence; he missed his physical bulk and the stability it represented; he missed the feeling of bodily release that followed their wrestling matches. And for all the way the observable changes were so small, he also still had fits of misery.

  ‘I think we should speak French, don’t you?’ said Charlotte.

  ‘All right,’ said Yves. ‘Just as well to get in practice.’

  They walked down a cart track until they came to a small country road with high hedgerows and cow pastures on either side. The sun had a midday strength by only ten o’clock; the sound of cattle-bells came from distant fields, in some of which the hay had already been rolled into huge circular bales. Charlotte felt well rested and at home; the events of the previous evening had for once driven tormenting thoughts of Gregory from her mind and she had slept well.

  The brightness of the late summer sunlight made the landscape look almost surreally French; the farm buildings and the vegetation were so typical that they verged on exaggeration: everything is safe, they seemed to say, everything is unchanged. Yet Charlotte also felt the fraudulence of her own position and imagined that it would be clear to anyone they met. What else could she and Yves be but two British people who had parachuted in last night, bent on undermining the French government and its German masters?

  When they eventually passed a young man on a bicycle and exchanged a brief greeting, Charlotte felt an impulse to declare herself, admit the game was up and ask him to take her to the nearest police station; but neither this man, nor an old woman in a farmyard, nor Bernard, the gendarme, whom they passed on the outskirts of Lavaurette, paid them any attention at all. When she told Yves what she had felt, he admitted to the same sensation, and they agreed to put out of their minds at once the peculiar and infantile idea that their true identities were so apparent.

  Even so, when they had retrieved their suitcases from the station-master’s office and gone to the ticket window, Charlotte could not help feeling surprised at the ease with which the first francs she unrolled from the large bundle provided in London were accepted by the clerk, or at the weary manner in which he went through the routine of issuing their tickets.

  The idea of being someone else, of being Dominique Guilbert, born in Paris, married to a clerk, was in fact appealing to Charlotte. The anguish of Peter Gregory’s presumed death meant nothing to Dominique Guilbert; nor was Dominique in the least affected by the lesions and unresolved knots of Charlotte Gray’s childhood: she had her husband and her sick father to think about.

  The train did not leave till two o’clock, so Charlotte and Yves went into Lavaurette for lunch. The dining room of the Café du Centre was half full, mostly with men. Charlotte’s eye raked over the waitress – an attractive, disdainful young woman, too aware, in Charlotte’s judgement, of her good looks and the effect they had on men. She brought them a small meal of indifferent quality and afterwards abruptly clipped the coupons from the Kingston bypass.

  They walked back to the station and waited for the train. Before joining the established network in Uzerche, Yves had business to do in Agen, a large town further to the south-west. The slow connections out of Lavaurette meant that they would spend all afternoon on the train, and Charlotte bought some newspapers to pass the time. She gave one to Yves, though she was not sure how much of it he would understand; the French he had talked to her so far had been worse than Mr Jackson had suggested. His other skills must be of a high and unusual quality for G Section to have risked him, Charlotte thought; perhaps one day she would discover what they were.

  3

  TWENTY MINUTES ON foot from Lavaurette was a house with slate-covered towers and a low, rectangular courtyard that included an arched pigeonnier, surrounded by abundant but untended land. It was not quite a château, though it was almost big enough; it was known in the town, to the postman and to its very few visitors, as the Domaine. It was not the sort of house that anyone in Lavaurette wanted to live in: it was too remote, too draughty, too imposing. It was impossible to heat in winter, and in summer impossible to fill, with its echoing salon, immense panelled dining room and numberless bedrooms, none sealed or closed but all kept in a state of suspended life, the beds made, the floors not exactly clean but swept occasionally, the decorations faded but intact.

  A family must once have lived here, though even the most fruitful parents could not have filled all the rooms; it would have needed cousins and visitors to justify the half-dozen servants’ bedrooms in the attic, and to prevent the long, connected sp
aces from imposing their silence. For many years the undisturbed volume of the rooms had swelled against the practical limits that contained it; the air seemed to have expanded within the confines of the house until it could spread no further and had instead become thicker, turning back on itself, and cloaking such movement as there was with quietness.

  It was early morning in the Domaine; wood pigeons were calling in the trees beyond the long grass, and the climbing sun was already striking deep inside the house through the open shutters on the east side.

  In one of the smaller bedrooms the house’s single inhabitant was sitting up in bed and frantically searching his memory; he was trying to remember if he had dreamed. By his bed was a large pad of paper with pencil notes and sketches, put there for the purpose of instant recollection; but one page had taken him three months to fill, and neither the images nor the words seemed to be of any consequence. The man scratched his thick white hair and sighed. Nothing.

  In the corner of the room was a small shrine. On a table, a figure of the Virgin was set on a lace cloth, with a missal and some candles. The man climbed out of bed, a little stiffly, rubbed the tendon behind his ankle, and made his way over to the shrine, where he knelt down to pray. As a convert to Catholicism, he was anxious to do everything the right way, but as a Jew he could not quite shake off a more conversational style of dealing with his Maker. He prayed for himself and he prayed for his departed friends, may God have mercy on their souls, whose names he kept in the missal and spoke out loud. His own family name, Rutkowski, had been changed by his father to Levade, in what he believed was a compromise between the phonemes of his adored, adopted country and an acknowledgement of his Hebrew origins.

  He said a brief prayer for his son Julien and for the other children he had sired but had not known. He fiercely regretted that he could feel no tie with these scattered people, whose ages varied from forty to ten; he did not even know if there were four or five or six, though he believed there was a daughter in Limoges. Since his ten-year conversion to Christianity, he had felt troubled by this negligence.