Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  Please look after yourself, my little squirrel. That is the best thing you can do for me today and every day. Don’t worry about me, think only of yourself: eat well – as well as you can! – keep your clothes clean, make yourself pretty and work hard for Maman and for yourself. The sweetest joy of my life was buying little things for you when you were younger. How I loved your solemn face, the way, when you were tired, your laughter hovered on the brink of tears; above all, the way you loved me as only a little girl can, with no resentment or fear of me and such trust.

  I will return in good health, quite soon, I think. Even if this letter does not reach you – the orderly was unsure of the facilities for posting – I hope my previous letter has got there. Please keep the photograph of me as a souvenir until such time as you see me again.

  Look after yourself, my darling little girl. I am not lost; I will return. I embrace you with all my heart.

  Charlotte put down the letter. ‘No resentment or fear of me.’ Were fear and resentment the normal emotions between a daughter and her father? ‘Such trust . . .’ She was touched by the unknown man’s tenderness. She had not imagined fathers to feel such vulnerability or to rely on their daughters for comfort.

  From the Métro station Argentine, Charlotte emerged into the wide spaces of the Avenue de la Grande Armée. It was only a few steps to a triangle of street-ends, from which the rue Villaret de Joyeuse led gently downhill.

  The door of the building was open, and Charlotte proceeded cautiously over the scarlet carpet of the hall. In front of her was a lift, with broad stone stairs to the left. She needed only to climb half a flight to reach a glass door with the name of a company printed in black. She pressed the lower bell, as instructed, and a few seconds later the door was opened by a plump, fair-haired man with a brightly coloured cravat. He ushered her across a gloomy vestibule and through the front door of a dark apartment with low ceilings. He showed her to a hard, upholstered chair in the sitting room, then went down the corridor and returned with a bottle of brandy and two glasses.

  ‘Chin-chin, Danièle.’ He sounded English.

  ‘Yes . . . Chin-chin.’

  A white Persian cat slunk into the room and rubbed itself against Félix’s legs.

  ‘So. How did you manage to get up here?’

  ‘Trains. Buses. I’ve done a lot of travelling. Are you English?’

  ‘Yes, but my dear Mama was French. I have a little shop in the Place des Ternes. It’s a perfect front.’

  ‘And can you help with transport?’

  ‘Stop it, Marat! He’s scratched all the furniture and it’s not my flat. As a matter of fact, you’re in luck. On Wednesday night, weather permitting, a Lysander is leaving from a field near Rouen. I’ve been in touch and they’ve got room for a small one.’

  ‘How will I get there?’

  ‘I can arrange everything. You look awfully tired.’

  ‘Tired? Do I?’

  ‘Yes. A lot of people who pass through here look the same way. They’ve been active for several weeks and I think they’ve got used to being short of sleep. I notice these things, though.’

  Charlotte thought guiltily of her late start that morning, and how she had missed the departure of the buses from Drancy. Yet Félix was right. Now that she sat in this domestic room, each spare surface of which was covered with small ornaments, she felt an ache in her arms and back, while her legs felt almost boneless with fatigue.

  Félix stood up and pushed the cat away. ‘I expect you’d like a rest. Then this evening I’ll find you some nice dinner. You’re hungry, I expect, aren’t you?’

  Charlotte nodded. Speech seemed suddenly beyond her. Félix led her down a dark corridor, and opened a door on the left. It was a large shadowy room with a huge oak desk, a narrow window hung with net curtains and a low bed with a tasselled cover. ‘Will you please take care of these?’ she said, handing him the bundle of letters and cards from the train. ‘Perhaps you could post them.’

  ‘I’ll call you later,’ said Félix as he shut the door, the letters in his hand.

  Charlotte lay down and closed her eyes.

  André Duguay was standing in the darkness. Three hours in the truck, and still the train had not moved. Some people were still talking; an old woman was moaning her prayers.

  The wheels ground suddenly on the track, and they were thrown against one another. The full pail of water had been drunk, and the empty one was already full of waste, which slopped beneath their feet as the train jerked forward.

  Jacob had slumped to the wooden plank floor, through whose narrow gaps he could see slivers of French ground.

  The hours would not pass. High up there was a small slit in the wall of the boxcar. A tall man stood by it and told them what he could see. ‘Epernay,’ he said, when the train had pulled into a station, and another man began to weep, as though with longing for the lost associations of the name.

  Although it was winter outside, the air was rank. When it grew dark the train stood motionless for many hours. The slit man said there was no light. They seemed lost in a night without direction.

  André had fallen against other children. They leaned on one another, half sleeping, with no room to lie down. A man near him was thrusting himself at a woman. She had lifted her skirt and moaned when he pushed.

  The old woman was still muttering in Hebrew; sometimes she sang with a wailing voice that sounded to André very foreign, from a strange, far-off land.

  I will see Maman, thought André; when I get there, I will see Maman.

  ‘Metz,’ said the slit man. Each time the train stopped, there was a beat of hope. A destination, any place on earth, was better than being lost in the bottomless night. The doors were thrown back and they saw a snowy countryside. A German soldier was shouting at them and a woman translated.

  ‘If anyone tries to escape he will be shot. If anyone has died, throw out the body.’

  They begged him for water. Even a handful of snow.

  The old woman was almost mad. The doors were closed again. The stretched hours would not amount to days; there was no sense of time passing, though by now it was the second night. Someone had died in their wagon, and the others were edging away from the body.

  André held Jacob in his arms.

  There was another stop. The slit man said they were at a station with a German name. ‘There are ordinary people. It’s morning. They’re going to work. They’re staring at our train.’

  They moved on again into another day. André held tight to hope. His life had been ordered properly: bad things did not happen. If he could believe strongly enough in the normal world that he inhabited, it would return.

  The stench of the boxcar was making him feel sick. He had almost forgotten the darkness. They went through fatigue and its boundaries so many times that they were beyond exhaustion.

  It was deep night. The train stopped.

  The slit man said, ‘There’s no town, only fields. This is it. We’re there.’

  There was elation: at last they had arrived. Then some smoke came through the slit, a pungent smoke.

  ‘There’s a long platform. Hundreds of people. German soldiers. There are dogs. It’s very bright, there are searchlights. There are people in striped uniforms. They must be the workers. They’re unpacking the wagons. Hey!’ In German, the slit man called out, ‘What happens here?’

  ‘What do they say, what do they say?’

  A sweep of light came through the narrow grille as the slit man turned back into the packed wagon. ‘One went like this.’ He ran his index finger like a knife across his throat. ‘And one went like this.’ He made a twisting gesture with his fingers that, to André, conjured rising smoke.

  With a scream of metal runners, the doors were pulled back and the wagon was filled with light. ‘’Raus, ’raus, alles ’raus!’ There were men shouting. There were dogs howling.

  André held Jacob as they stumbled forward. Two dead men were on the step. Someone helped the boys down.r />
  ‘Say you’re older than you are.’

  ‘Say you’re younger than you are.’

  A huge dog was tearing at its chain. It was the closest thing André could see to a world he had lost. He forgot his parents’ firm instructions and made to stroke it.

  He was pushed away by a man in stripes. His wooden clogs went clacking up and down the ramp. The striped men were hunched and hurrying; they would not look at you. Their faces were tight on their bones.

  André saw a tall woman with fair hair. She was like his mother: he would follow her. ‘Come on, Jacob.’

  Up ahead, from a remote, high building, they saw flames pouring into the black sky, and there was this burning, melting smell. Was it the rails, hot beneath the iron wheels? It seemed too rich.

  Shuffling up the platform, André made his effort of belief. From his memories of being alive, from the trust of normality and in his parents’ world, he tried to dredge up faith. That certainty was invincible; no hell could overcome it. He would see his mother.

  The people were dividing. The fair-haired woman was pushed one way, and André saw her child steered into another line. The woman screamed at the man in uniform. He merely shrugged and pushed her, too, into the line of children. André was pleased. He would be with her.

  The dogs were leaping at him, but he held Jacob hard. They were coming to a tall man who stood on the platform with a stick, like a man doing music.

  He moved his baton gently, inclined his head, gazing with wise eyes on those in front of him, directing them this way or that. He was like the doctor in Drancy, who tapped the children’s chests and made them better with his touch.

  André had trust in the man; but when their time came he barely glanced at the Duguay boys.

  Now they were in a line of children and old people. They were climbing into lorries.

  André was at the back. They went past a long ditch in which ragged flames were rising. From a tipped lorry, what looked to André like giant dolls with broken limbs were being poured into the trench.

  They stopped at two whitewashed farmhouses with thatched roofs. The lorry’s headlights showed up pretty fruit trees.

  Now they were naked. It was very cold in this room. Jacob took André’s hand and found that there was already something in it – a tin soldier.

  André kissed Jacob’s shorn head, the stubble tender on his lips.

  There was another room, another door, with bolts and rubber seals, over whose threshold the two boys, among many others, went through icy air, and disappeared.

  6

  FROM THE CAR which took her from the airfield into London, Charlotte noticed signs of early spring among the hedgerows. It was noticeably warmer than in Lavaurette or Paris; there were buds and scents the Highlands would not see for weeks.

  She thought of the house where she had spent her childhood, of the bursting pink and white blossom on the chestnut trees, the daisy-covered lawn on which she walked out one May morning and saw inlaid with a fantastic marquetry of violets. The house outside Edinburgh, where her parents now lived, held no interest for her by comparison: it was a solid building, ample and spacious, but neither its view over the hills nor its square, chilly rooms were inviting to her.

  Yet it was to this house that she found her thoughts turning as the black Wolseley entered the London suburbs. She must not only contact her parents, she must go to see them as soon as she was free. Such a visit seemed less of a duty than usual; she found that she was anxious to see them again and to reassure them.

  The FANY driving the car asked if she wanted to be dropped anywhere, or if she should go straight to G Section headquarters. Charlotte thought of her narrow room in Daisy’s flat and wondered who was living there now. Presumably G Section would help find her somewhere for the time being.

  ‘Straight to the office, please,’ she said. She was the only passenger in the car, and was enjoying the comfort of it. There had been four of them in the Lysander, which was one more than the usual load. One man had been on the floor, one on the shelf, and Charlotte had shared the seat with a third man, who politely arched himself away from physical contact with her. Charlotte felt she should be similarly delicate, with the result that her hip developed periodic spasms of cramp.

  The fat leather bench-seat of the Wolseley felt luxurious, and she sat back to watch the big buildings of Whitehall as the car waited for a group of men with briefcases to hurry across the street. There was hardly any traffic as they moved smoothly up towards Trafalgar Square.

  Charlotte thought of the gaping suitcase on the platform at Le Bourget-Drancy. CARITEAU. The single word had removed all doubt. Until then, she had felt that the camp at Drancy was perhaps not as bad as people feared. Levade had died from illness, from whatever problem his chest had developed at the Domaine, and the camp had not affected the outcome of his disease. And André and Jacob, they were refugees, like hundreds of thousands in Europe; it was a hard fate for children, but they would survive being moved around, as others had survived. Then the cases and bundles, contemptuously hurled down the platform, had in an instant crushed that easy hope – Cariteau: the simple name from an old village, cast aside.

  It occurred to Charlotte that she was too tired to register exactly what she felt about the death of Levade and the deportation of the boys. She suspected, as she sometimes had when tormenting herself with thoughts that Peter Gregory was dead, that her emotions could not encompass the complexity of feeling that the circumstances seemed to demand. It was beyond her; the pressure of sadness would eventually find its own expression. Meanwhile, there were times when you merely had to go to your next appointment, go through the day and hope for sleep at the end of it.

  The car pulled up some way from the flat in Marylebone, and the FANY asked Charlotte if she could remember the way.

  ‘It’s just a final precaution. You know Mr Jackson.’ The woman smiled.

  ‘Thank you. I can manage from here.’

  The door was opened by the butlerish figure Charlotte remembered from the day of her departure, and she felt drab in Dominique’s clothes beneath his appraising eye. He gave no sign of recognition as he showed her to an empty bedroom in which to wait. Charlotte sat on the bed with her case on her knees. She did not feel anxious about what Mr Jackson might think of her extended stay; or, at least, she felt she had the answer to any reprimand, because she was happy to resign from G Section at once.

  ‘This way, Miss.’

  She followed the butler to the door of Mr Jackson’s office, where he knocked discreetly.

  ‘Ah, Danièle. Thank you, Philips, you can leave us now.’

  Jackson stood up and came round the desk, his froggy face split open by a huge smile. Charlotte held out her hand, but to her surprise he kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Welcome home, Danièle, welcome home. You poor thing, you’ve had a rough time, haven’t you?’

  ‘No, I . . . I think it went quite well, really. I was able to do what I went there to do.’

  ‘Absolutely. Transmissions from Ussel have been with us loud and clear since August. You seem to have inspired the local operator.’

  Charlotte smiled as she thought of Antoinette with the wireless aerial draped round the furniture of her bedroom.

  ‘I saw Yves a month or so ago on a return visit. He spoke very well of you. Said your French was absolutely tip-top.’

  ‘That’s very kind of him, though I’m not quite sure he’d be the best judge of that.’

  ‘Quite, quite. Anyway, Violinist has been performing well. We managed to get a lot of stores in, thanks to you and your Frenchman.’

  ‘Are you still doing drops there?’

  ‘Not there, no. It’s too dangerous. Since Mirabel, alas, disappeared. But there’s another drop zone not far away. What they’re doing now is helping train the troops. They’re getting a lot of volunteers, thanks to the Germans.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard of the Statutory Work Order
? Ah, well, Monsieur Laval has been our best recruiting sergeant. He’s decreed that all young men have to go and work in Germany for a time, a sort of national service. He’s achieved what General de Gaulle and even we have so far not quite managed, which is to drive large numbers of young men into the Resistance.’ Mr Jackson paused and coughed. ‘Of course, the fact that the Allies are now manifestly winning the war may have been a further incentive.’

  ‘That’s good news.’

  ‘It’s very good. Now, tell me, Danièle, what was going on in Paris? I’m glad you were able to make contact with Félix, he’s an excellent chap. But, to be frank, we had rather expected to pick you up from somewhere near Limoges. A long time ago. Last summer, to be precise.’

  ‘It was important that I stay.’ Various fabricated and implausible stories suggested themselves to Charlotte, but in the end she thought she might as well tell the truth. All Jackson could do was dismiss her from the service, and, now that she had been to France, she had no desire to stay in it. Her encounter with Mirabel had not shaken her conviction about the morality of the war, but it had lessened her loyalty to G Section. It had also frightened her; and, for fear of incriminating herself or others, she thought it best to say nothing of it to Mr Jackson.

  Meanwhile she did her best to explain to him about her feeling for the country and her conviction that it had been necessary for her to remain there. The wireless operator had, after all, been able to reassure them that she was safe and useful. Both Mirabel and Octave had said they needed more people. As for being in Paris, she told Jackson about the night they took Levade from the Domaine; she talked of her sense of responsibility to him and to the Duguay boys. And if Julien was a key part of the G Section network, whether he admitted it or not, then she was presumably entitled to pursue his interests.

  Jackson gave a little laugh. ‘I’m quite used to our people popping up in the most unexpected places, don’t worry about that. They have carte blanche to travel where they like. But those are agents, and not, if I may say so, couriers. I had heard from Mirabel that you were still there and I was happy for you to stay on for a time, but you must understand that a woman is more at risk than a man. The other thing, which I’m sure you know, is that every time you travel and use people and addresses, the more you expose them to danger. It’s really a matter – to borrow an expression – of “Is your journey really necessary?”’