Charlotte Gray

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘I do understand,’ said Charlotte. ‘It seemed necessary to me, that’s all I can say. And perhaps you haven’t had firsthand accounts of these camps and trains before.’

  ‘No, indeed. That could be useful. It’s not really my pigeon, but I certainly know who would be interested.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Charlotte, ‘if you’d like me to resign, I quite understand.’

  ‘Good God, no! My dear Danièle, you’re a first-class asset. I wouldn’t dream of letting you go. There are one or two people in this organisation who doubt your utter dependability. I think I recall hearing the phrase “loose cannon” used by one of them. We may find you a slightly more . . . domestic role at first. But as far as I’m concerned you’ll jolly well stay with G Section until the hostilities are satisfactorily concluded.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I’ve really done all I can do, and—’

  ‘Excuse me, Danièle. Will you please stop talking such utter rot? I presume this is just a way of teasing me into buying you lunch. Very well. If you’d like to go to the bedroom at the end of the corridor, I’ll get Valerie to bring your old clothes back. You can smarten up a bit and we’ll pop out in half an hour. How does that suit you?’

  ‘It sounds fine. There’s just one thing.’ From her handbag Charlotte took out an empty bottle of hair dye and placed it on Jackson’s desk. ‘I was fortunate enough to be given this.’

  ‘Fortunate?’ said Jackson. ‘It was only your decision to stay on that made it necessary. Surely Valerie had already organised everything here.’

  ‘Not quite everything.’

  ‘Why are you smiling, Danièle?’

  ‘I don’t think she foresaw the possibility of my taking a bath – in a public bath house.’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Certain . . . inconsistencies of colouring.’

  ‘What do you – oh my God, I see what you mean. Yes, yes, indeed.’ Jackson stammered for a moment, then regained his composure. ‘Well, I think you’ve certainly caught us with our trousers down, if you’ll forgive the expression.’

  ‘Gladly.’

  ‘I’ll make a note about the dye for future use. Now. Lunch. Do you like fish?’

  ‘Yes, I still like fish.’

  It seemed that what Jackson had in mind was a job training agents. Charlotte would help with their language and pass on various tips and information from her own experience. He mentioned one of the holding schools in Suffolk. There would have to be a full-scale debriefing in London first, and in the meantime he could offer a bed in one of the FANY hostels.

  Charlotte felt oddly ill at ease in her old clothes. The skirt was loose, and the stockings, after months of Dominique’s, felt draughty when she walked. After lunch she sat on Jackson’s desk, swinging her legs back and forth, and making telephone calls. It was a delight to speak English.

  Her mother wanted her to come to Scotland at once, but Charlotte said there were things she had to attend to in London. Roderick, her mother told her, was in Tunisia and doing well when they had last heard. Then Charlotte telephoned Daisy at the Red Cross. Daisy let out a long theatrical scream of delight, and, when she had regained coherence, arranged to meet that evening.

  Finally she telephoned Squadron Leader Allan Wetherby.

  She did not really expect to be able to talk to him, but after various delays and protective enquiries she heard the man himself say, ‘Wetherby.’

  ‘You very kindly wrote to me a few months ago about a friend of mine, Peter Gregory. I’m sure this is most irregular, but I just wondered if you had had any news.’

  Charlotte found that the combination of trying not to sound too eager and of speaking English for the first time for six months made her sound, in her own ears, almost regal.

  Wetherby appeared unimpressed.

  ‘It’s just that since you wrote to me, I thought you wouldn’t mind having an unofficial word,’ said Charlotte.

  Wetherby coughed. ‘I tell you what, Miss Gray. I have heard reports – and I must stress that these are very, very unofficial reports – of one of our chaps making touch with various local people, who belong to . . . to a different organisation. With whom we’re co-operating.’

  ‘These unofficial reports, they’re just rumours, are they?’

  ‘No, they’re better than that. The dates and the places just about tally. Except . . .’

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘Except I don’t know how he ended up in Marseille.’

  Charlotte thought of Gregory’s French. ‘He could have ended up anywhere.’

  ‘I suppose so. At any rate, someone’s trying hard to make his way back. Whether it’s Gregory or not I can’t say for sure.’

  ‘How can I find out more?’

  ‘I don’t know if you can. Unless you try your luck with . . . the other organisation.’

  ‘All right. Thank you.’

  The trouble was, she did not trust herself to ask Jackson if he knew anything without giving away her interest. By the time he knocked before re-entering his own office, she had been through, and abandoned, various ruses concerning the brother of a friend, the fiancé of a neighbour and so on. She would have to think of a better lie.

  Meanwhile, Gregory was on his way. No, that was a foolish thing to think; she would not allow herself to believe it. But the more she struggled to suppress her springing hope, the more it animated her.

  ‘My God, Charlotte, what happened to your hair?’

  ‘Oh, I just felt like a change of colour.’

  Daisy let Charlotte out of her fierce, welcoming grip. ‘Come in, come in. I’ve arranged a bit of a party later on. Let’s have a look at you.’

  Charlotte went into the sitting room, where Daisy stood back and inspected her. ‘I think you’ve lost weight. Apart from that, you look gorgeous. Why didn’t you write, though? We were worried sick.’

  ‘I couldn’t really write. It was all—’

  ‘All very hush-hush, I know. You can’t have your old room back, I’m afraid. We’ve got a new girl. Alison.’

  ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Delightful. You’ll meet her later on. Little bit of a prude, but otherwise terrific fun. Which reminds me, have you heard anything? About . . .’

  ‘Peter? Not exactly. But I spoke to the squadron leader this afternoon and he sounded quite hopeful. Apparently there’s someone stumbling around there, trying to get back. They just don’t know if it’s him.’

  ‘It must be awful not knowing.’

  ‘I’d rather not know than know the worst.’

  ‘Of course.’ Daisy looked a little doubtful. ‘Sally’s got a new boyfriend. They’re engaged. She’s absolutely dotty about him.’

  ‘What happened to Terence?’

  ‘She found out he was being unfaithful to her.’

  ‘What, with his wife?’

  ‘No, with another woman.’

  ‘Oh dear. Poor Sally. You wouldn’t think, looking at Terence, that—’

  ‘She’s well out of it if you ask me. This new chap’s a bit of a stuffed shirt, but at least he’s single. You can sleep on the sofa, by the way, if you haven’t got anywhere else.’

  ‘It’s all right, thanks. They’ve found me a room in a funny little block in Riding House Street.’

  ‘You can always come back, Charlotte. When Sally leaves. Listen. I think that’s Michael.’

  Daisy went to the window and looked down into the narrow street where Michael Waterslow was hooting the horn of his car.

  ‘Yes, come on, let’s go down. Lazy so-and-so. He never comes up.’

  Michael drove them to a pub in Maida Vale, a huge building with engraved Victorian glass and a gleaming mahogany bar. To Michael’s disappointment there was a blackboard outside with a mournful drawing of a long-nosed character, new to Charlotte, and the words ‘Wot, no beer?’

  ‘We’ll just have to drink gin instead,’ said Michael.

  As the evening progressed, they were joined first by R
alph, at whose flat in the Fulham Road Charlotte had met Gregory for the second time, then by his drunk friend, Miles.

  Michael, with his neatly pressed suit and punctilious manner, was a generous host and kept a steady tide of drinks coming to the table. At one point he turned to Charlotte and said, ‘Don’t worry about Greg. I know it’s a long time, but he’ll be back. He’s got the luck of the devil. That’s the whole point about Greg.’

  Charlotte nodded and smiled. Gregory seemed more real to her since she had been with people who knew him – even people as marginal as these now seemed to her. It was no longer her will-power alone that was keeping him alive.

  The party swelled in numbers as the evening went on. There were people Charlotte recognised from the Melrose literary party and others she had never seen before. Primed by Daisy and Michael, they all bought drinks and toasted her safe return. In the smoky racket of the pub, Charlotte became aware that she had drunk too much. She went outside for a moment into the night and walked up and down, breathing in the cold air. She thought for a moment of Julien, hiding out on some freezing hillside. She thought of Levade, and of the gaping suitcase.

  Then she went back into the noisy warmth and accepted the full glass that was pressed into her hand.

  The next day, in a bare room in Whitehall, while she sat describing her French experiences to three men behind a table, she found that parts of the night before came back to her, bit by bit, unexpectedly.

  There had been another pub, in St John’s Wood, and then a group visit to an ABC café. Then there was a club somewhere in the West End. She noticed how close Daisy and Michael were dancing. When Daisy returned to the candle-lit table, Charlotte asked her, ‘Are you and Michael . . .’

  ‘Yes, darling, I’m afraid so. He’s awfully sweet, you know.’

  Charlotte had begun to laugh in a feeble, defenceless way, that she later recognised was close to tears.

  The three men in Whitehall dismissed her. They had been interested in what she told them and would pass it on, though it was not really their pigeon either. Next there was a full debriefing in the flat in Marylebone with Mr Jackson and two senior colleagues. Charlotte had to keep asking for glasses of water.

  A week later, she sat on the train to Edinburgh. She placed a suitcase, her own at last, not Dominique’s, in the luggage rack and sat down by the window.

  Until York she was alone in the compartment. She read a book for an hour, then gazed at the English fields. Nothing about their tracks and barns, the clumps of elm and ash, the mess of farming with its rusted tractors and dung-smeared animals was, on the surface, any different from what she had seen from the windows of numerous trains in France.

  She stood up to go to the buffet car and caught sight of her reflection in the small, rectangular mirror with its bevelled edges above the seats opposite. The hairdresser to whom she went in Bond Street could see enough of her hair’s natural colours to give him an idea of how he should re-dye the Ussel brown. The result was so close to how she had looked on the train coming down a year before that even Charlotte could barely see the difference.

  Her face was perhaps a little thinner, though the change was not obvious. Were there black marks beneath her eyes? Not really: her skin was still so young that it was incapable of showing weariness in lines or shadows. The dozen dark brown freckles over the bridge of her nose and beneath her eyes remained the same, and she remembered how Gregory used to touch them with the tip of his tongue, claiming they had a taste of their own. Yet even if her skin denied it, she was not the same person who had gone down the swaying corridors with Cannerley and Morris.

  After the second pub, after the nightclub, when they had gone back to the flat and drunk coffee, Daisy, in a moment of extreme alcoholic candour, had said something like, ‘When you first arrived from Scotland, darling, I thought you were a bit of a shop-window mannequin, with all your clothes and your self-control. But you’re not, are you?’ Daisy had leaned forward and placed her hand on Charlotte’s thigh. ‘You’re . . . God, I don’t know. You’re a rum one, aren’t you?’

  Charlotte pulled back the door of the compartment and stepped out. Levade had told her one day that there was no such thing as a coherent human personality. When you are forty you have no cell in your body that you had at eighteen. It was the same, he said, with your character. Memory is the only thing that binds you to earlier selves; for the rest, you become an entirely different being every decade or so, sloughing off the old persona, renewing and moving on. You are not who you were, he told her, nor who you will be.

  Amelia Gray was waiting at Waverley station. She signalled cheerily to Charlotte from the barrier and grappled with her briefly in a botched, powdery kiss.

  Charlotte abandoned herself to her mother’s control. She sat in the passenger seat of the car and responded happily to Amelia Gray’s anxious questions. However much Charlotte had been disappointed and irritated by her over the years, she had always been fond of her, and there was a self-indulgent pleasure in allowing herself to be mothered.

  ‘Your father’ll be back at about seven. He’s got a meeting at the hospital, but he’s so much looking forward to seeing you.’

  ‘Good. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep in touch more. It was impossible.’

  ‘Just so long as you’re safe and well now, that’s what matters.’

  In her absence, Charlotte’s parents had acquired a small terrier called Angus. For some reason this struck her as peculiar. Were they lonely? Was it a substitute for their children? What future did they envisage for themselves and the dog?

  Amelia Gray had kept bedrooms for both her children in the spacious house, even though neither of them had lived there for some time. On the bookshelves in Charlotte’s room were various tales of witches and ponies she had had as a child; the bed was the same one she had had in their old house in the Highlands.

  She unpacked her case, in which she had put enough things to last four or five days. In the chest of drawers were old clothes of hers, wrapped in tissue paper and mothballs by her mother. They looked slightly less ravishing than she had imagined in the draper’s shop in Limoges.

  The disjunction between what had happened to her in France and the life, both past and present, suggested by her bedroom in her parents’ home was very strange. She could not reconcile the different experiences at all, and trying to do so made her feel unreal, as though she was still drunk from her return party.

  She went downstairs to the sitting room where her mother poured her a glass of sherry. Half an hour later they heard the front door open.

  William Gray was not sixty years old, but he had not worn well since his return from the Western Front. He seemed to move straight from youth to late middle age, without passing through the vigorous part of his life; then, in the twenty-five years that followed, he had rapidly aged. His mental curiosity and his wiry body gave him a certain energetic presence, but it was that of a springy old man who is fit for his years. His hair was white, and his eyes were sunk deep in his head, with heavy pouches underneath. His skin felt dry and cracked where Charlotte kissed him on the cheek.

  There was an awkwardness between them that never changed. As Gray tried to express his delight at seeing her again, Charlotte recoiled; when she gave him her most candid and affectionate look, he would make some dry remark. Amelia Gray watched, powerless to help, as she fluttered between them.

  Charlotte was aware of the way she reacted to her father, and knew that it was different from her behaviour with other people. One of the reasons she had so much valued the company of friends as a child was that, with them, she felt liberated and at ease, while at home she felt reduced. As the evening progressed, she was disappointed to find herself going down familiar paths, becoming evasive and discouraging in her answers to her parents’ questions. She was not like this with Julien, or Daisy, or Levade and, least of all, with Gregory. She did not like herself for it.

  At dinner, Gray opened a bottle of wine he had long been saving and
drank to his daughter’s safe return. He was encouraged and amused by how much of it Charlotte drank, and went to fetch another from the cellar. She told him of a man she had known in France, who could drink huge quantities with no apparent effect, and said it must have been from him she had learned. For a time they talked of French customs and habits, of Paris and the provinces, and everything went well. Amelia Gray served out plates of gooseberry tart, made with fruit she had bottled from the garden.

  Afterwards, they sat round the fire in the sitting room, and Gray poured brandy from an old ship’s decanter on the sideboard.

  ‘And will you be going back to France?’ he said.

  ‘I doubt it. Things are changing rapidly. It’s becoming more of an open war. They need men and guns more than interpreters and so on.’

  ‘I see,’ said Charlotte’s mother. ‘And the work you did, what—’

  ‘Don’t tell us,’ said Gray forcefully. ‘We don’t need to know.’

  ‘All right,’ said Charlotte. ‘I won’t.’

  A silence descended. It seemed that their combined mental resources were unable to conjure a single conversational topic beyond the one that had been brought so abruptly to an end. Eventually, Amelia Gray managed to achieve utterance by addressing the dog and telling him it was time for bed. With the help of some business with the coffee cups she was able to restore some sense of geniality.

  Charlotte expected that her mother would return to say good night, and that she herself would take the opportunity to go up to bed at the same time. After ten minutes or so, it became clear that Amelia Gray was not coming back, and that Charlotte would have to negotiate her own departure.