Laurent shook his head incredulously. “I would never have believed he could betray us.”
“Don’t judge him hastily,” Roger said. “Perhaps they took his wife or children away as hostages.”
For three days Roger and Devonshire lived in the cellars. When they came out, unshaven, and sick from the poor air, they learned that one of Laurent’s sons had been taken away for questioning and was sent back with all the fingers of his right hand broken, three teeth missing and bruises all over his body.
Devonshire said “It ain’t fair, us staying here any longer. You’re all right, Roger, after that run across country. Nothing wrong with your leg now. I’m not staying ‘ere.”
“I am. I’d like to give my leg another week to heal properly and get strong enough for a hike across the mountains into Spain.”
They spent another week at the farm, Devonshire growing more and more morose. At length he tackled Roger one morning as soon as they woke.
“I’m going home, Roger.”
“I wish I could come with you, but my leg is still too weak and painful. Besides, there’s this big show Laurent has been talking about ever since we- killed Bluthner. I’d like just to stay for that before I leave here.”
Devonshire, whose loyalty was unswerving, had been looking at Roger in challenge. He nodded, as if he had just understood something that had been puzzling him.
“I should have known. Rather you than me. I joined the Mob to fly. I don’t mind shooting it out with a night fighter and I don’t mind taking my chance with flak. But if I’d wanted to shoot a bloody Bren and tramp about on my flat feet, I’d have been a pongo. If you’ve got the guts to stay here for the sake of another bloody scrap with these mad Maquis sods, good luck. You can tell ‘em I’m off: today, if they can fix it.”
There was a marmoreal impenetrability about Devonshire on occasions. This was one of them. Roger, looking at him, was trying to decide whether Devonshire was genuinely impressed by his insistence on staying or whether he was being sarcastic. He was also trying not to betray his relief at being rid of Devonshire’s nagging. And, he tried to avoid admitting, his bravery in insisting on going back to bomber operations.
“I’ll tell Laurent, then.”
That night one of Laurent’s sons took Devonshire away to another safe house four hours’ walk away, the first stage on his journey to Spain.
When the time came to part Devonshire shook hands briefly and spoke with a catch in his voice.
“So long, Rodge. I’ll see your parents and let ‘em know you’re all right. You’ll follow on in a couple of weeks, eh?”
“That’s right, Creamy.”
“An op. on Berlin will seem like a piece of cake after this lot.”
“Don’t let them crew you up permanently with anyone else.”
“No fear. Anyway, by the time I’ve had me leave, you’ll be back, an’ all.”
“I’ll try.”
Roger watched Devonshire’s small form disappear in the gloom and a wave of misery and shame overcame him. He went up to the loft over the barn without a word to Laurent and lay down to sleep. Dawn found him still awake.
*
During the ensuing weeks Viviane and Roger had many trysts. He would leave the farm every two or three days — followed by a sour look from Madame — to meet her, always in a different place. Regularity of any habit or procedure invited an ambush. One never knew what hidden eyes were watching even the most innocent movements and peregrinations.
They made love in the woods and meadows; by the riverbank, in the hay loft. Now and then Viviane lied to her mother that she would be out all night on Resistance business and slept in the barn with Roger.
At every meeting he became more enamoured of her. She had none of the bossiness, the prudery or the dishonesty which had finally made Daphne Palmer so intolerable. Daphne’s ardent kissing and occasional suggestiveness had been mere prick-teasing. Viviane was devoid also of the essentially patronising and bogus attitude to an amorous liaison which had characterised Kate Lingham. Kate had taken lovers with a parade of careful discrimination, not promiscuously, because she felt that a fashionable young society wife ought always to be attended by a grateful and presentable young man and that clandestine affairs were as much de rigueur as wearing the right clothes and using the latest fashionable slang.
Soon after his affair with Viviane began, she had said to him “I don’t want you to have any false ideas about me, Roger cheri. I wouldn’t you like you to think I am better than I am, any more than I would like you to think me worse than I am.”
“If you’re talking about other men, there is no need to. I love you as you are and as far as I am concerned I care only about what has happened, and will happen, since we met. Your life before that is your private concern.”
“You are only my second lover, you know; despite what you may think because I was so easy.”
“I believe you.” And he did. He had quickly come to recognise her complete honesty.
“After my husband was killed I went nearly out of my mind with grief, then anger, and then finally with sheer sexual repression. It was more than a year after his death that I took a lover. I loved him, too, but not as much as I loved my husband or as much as I love you. He was one of us, and the Boches killed him three months after we had come together. That was a year ago.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“Believe me, the feeling I have for you is very deep.”
They were talking again along these lines one night when she was staying with him, a fortnight or more after Devonshire had left. Roger was overwhelmed by a tenderness which he had never felt for any other woman; with an admiration which no one else had ever aroused either; with a sense of unity which he had always hoped to find but which had never before entered any of his intimate friendships.
“Viviane, will you come back to England with me?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I want to marry you.”
She did not reply. He turned his face to kiss her and tasted tears on her cheek.
“Well?”
“I am touched, cheri, but what you are saying is prompted by a false emotion. All the circumstances around us are abnormal, romantic and disorienting. When the war ends I will go back to college to continue my teacher training. When you leave here you will go back to your family. Each to our proper environments. That is best.”
“I am telling you what is best: that we should marry and you come to England with me.” He changed his tone: “You’re being selfish. My escape would be much easier if you travelled with me. I would not be such an object of suspicion to the Boches.”
“Now you’re playing tricks.” She said it jokingly. He wished it were not dark and he could see from her eyes what she really felt.
“If you won’t come with me, I shall come straight back for you. On the very day that peace is declared, or as soon after as possible.”
“Yes, Roger, you do that. But I can’t leave my mother and my duty here with the Maquis. You know that.”
“At this moment all I know is that I love you very dearly and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
“Then let’s make the most of what we have. It’s a good half-hour since you made love to me.”
*
Laurent, expressionless, scanned the tense faces of the men who were seated around the kitchen table; and the two girls, Viviane and Perrine.
“Well, we’ve waited for this since June: two months of careful planning and patience. Now we’ll reap the benefit.”
Every mention of the passage of time put Roger in mind of Creamy Devonshire. It was shortly before his departure that Laurent had first mentioned some big operation brewing. Creamy must surely have reached England by now.
Laurent went on. “The arms, ammunition and explosives will be dropped at two-o’clock precisely, on the heath.” There was no need to be more precise. Everyone knew the place he meant. “We will disperse them. One party
will bring some of the containers here. Some will be taken to the old quarry. The rest will be loaded onto the German lorry and driven to Tours.”
The lorry had been stolen six weeks previously. Two of the group spoke German well. They would dress in German uniforms, and, with forged papers, drive boldly along the main roads. The separate parts of the plan for tonight’s operation were being put together now for the first time, only three hours before the R.A.F. bomber was due to drop the supplies.
It gave Roger a stab of guilt to hear mention of the drop. He had striven to keep the Service out of his thoughts. He looked up and caught Viviane watching him. She smiled, but without conviction, and he looked away again.
An hour before the delivery was due the Maquisards were at the dropping zone. The heath was a plateau covered with gorse, heather and coarse grass, with a worked-out quarry on one side, woods on two others and grazing land on the fourth. There was ample cover and an abundance of paths and cart tracks to provide escape.
The chosen night was lit by only a half-moon and the stars which could be seen through the gaps in the cloud which covered a third of the sky.
Roger wondered what type of aeroplane would be making the delivery. His own last flight across France returned vividly and he shivered in the warm August night at the memory of the flak over Turin, the two dead engines, the baling out into pitch darkness.
Viviane stayed close to him. When he put an arm around her shoulder she was trembling.
“Frightened, darling?”
“Excited. When we distribute all the weapons the British are sending us, we shall have a force strong enough to fight a battalion of Boches and enough explosives to blow up the whole Gestapo Headquarters.”
She put an arm quickly around his neck and kissed him, then moved away into the night.
Roger was the first to hear the approaching aero engines. The Halifax came in sight 600 feet overhead. The lamp signals were exchanged and the parachutes started coming down with the containers.
Figures hurried about in the darkness, occasionally bumping into one another, dragging burdens, wheeling them on handcarts. There was sporadic laughter, there were exclamation of joy and surprise. Recurrent chatter. Laurent kept hissing “Shut up” but his strictures had only a short-lived effect.
Roger stared at the Halifax all the time it was in sight and he stood listening until it had faded from earshot. They were poignant and humiliating minutes for him. Then he set to in a frenzy of haste to load the waiting lorry and the handcarts.
Viviane found him. She was smiling and chuckling, full of exuberance. She kissed him impulsively. “You are wonderful people, you English.”
He paused to try to take her in his arms but she laughed and eluded him.
“Later...we have the rest of the night.”
The bulk of the containers or their contents had been picked up when three searchlights flooded the heath with their glare and Spandaus and Schmeissers opened fire. It came completely without warning.
Roger dropped prone and unslung his Tommy gun. He looked around for Viviane and caught the glint of her auburn hair a few yards away. He began shooting at the nearest searchlight. The Maquisards’ captured Spandaus, their one Vickers machine-gun and two Brens joined in. One beam suddenly went out and there was a cheer from the men around Roger.
Small groups of soldiers were coming towards the Maquisards in short rushes. Bursts of fire kept stopping them but they would pick themselves up every few seconds, leaving their dead and wounded, and advance again.
Roger kept turning to look at Viviane. She lay with a Sten gun at her shoulder, spraying bullets at the enemy, reloading quickly, maintaining a steady fire. He crawled towards her, stopping every few yards to fire ten or a dozen rounds.
When she felt him bump into her when he had hurriedly wriggled the last few yards to her side, she gave him a rueful grin.
Tracer came leaping in their direction. Roger felt a sharp pain in his left arm and shoulder and the arm dropped. The Tommy gun’s barrel hit the grass.
He heard a low moan escape Viviane. He dropped the Tommy gun. Her shoulders had slumped so that she lay with her breasts pressed to the ground. Her head rested on her right arm. Both arms were outspread. She still held the Sten in one hand, her finger on the trigger. It was firing, jerking about in spasms, but the bullets were ploughing along the turf.
Roger put out his unwounded arm and raised her. Her head lolled and blood glistened in her hair. He saw that bullets had hit her in the back of the neck, severing the upper vertebrae and killing her instantly.
He let her fall back, then leaped to his feet and, with one arm hanging at his side, the other cradling the Tommy gun, charged at the only searchlight still illuminating the scene. His bullets shattered it. He began to hurl grenades at the enemy. The flashes of their explosion lit the darkness.
He barged into Laurent.
“Quick...plastic explosive...fuse pencils...”
Presently huge explosions sent great flames leaping high and scattering the enemy long enough to enable Roger to pick up Viviane’s body, hoist it over his right shoulder and join the other Maquisards who still lived and were not too badly wounded to retreat from the heath as fast as they could.
Pere Deferre, the cure of the parish, was middle-aged, sturdy, with a ruddy complexion and a great enthusiasm for le rugby: he was born and brought up in Dax, that stronghold of the great game. He did what he could to help the Resistance but would not indulge in any violence. He considered it a betrayal of the cloth to take up arms. Everyone, French and Germans alike, had to be able to trust priests. He had no sympathy for the monks who had stored arms at their monastery near Paris with the intention of using them themselves against the enemy; and had been caught, shot and tortured by the head of the Gestapo at Melun. Father Deferre considered that they had been traitors to their vows.
To help the Maquisards was legitimate, to take an active part even by hiding arms, let along firing them, was abominable.
He had buried Viviane in the darkness three hours after she died, and said a requiem mass for her which Roger had attended. He offered to shelter Roger so that the doctor could visit him without arousing curiosity; as he would if he went out often to the farm. The priest suffered from asthma and the doctor was a frequent visitor to the presbytery.
Roger was hidden in a room which one of the Resistance men, a builder, had constructed in the attic. Access was through the back of a wall cupboard. He had a folding bed and a proper mattress, but it was not for comfort that he welcomed the change from the barn. The hay loft would remind him too poignantly of Viviane.
Viviane’s death and the church service had yet again brought on introspection and pangs of conscience. The cure’s housekeeper, who was jolly and very fat, ate supper with them. In the event of an alarm, Roger could bolt upstairs and hide in 20 seconds; he had practised it. After the meal, Roger was disposed to linger.
“I want to ask you something, Father.”
“What is it, my son?”
“Do you believe in punishment on earth for sin, or only in the hereafter?”
“There is every reason to believe in both, mon cher Roger.”
“Can one person take on the guilt of another’s sin? If he makes expiation on the other person’s behalf, can he obtain absolution for the other party?”
“We are all responsible for our own sins and must make amends for them ourselves. But we may pray for others. Moreover, man’s judgment is surely harsher than God’s.” Pere Deferre stopped to give Roger a long look, then went on gently, “You need not worry about Viviane. She was a fine girl. I knew her all her life. In her soul, she was one of God’s own.”
Roger, shocked, his cheeks burning, was momentarily tongue-tied. “I d-d-didn’t m-mention Viviane, Father...b-but I know the C-Catholic Church has very strict rules.”
“We are in the world, my son. God created it. He knows its temptations. He put them there. We must not expect ordinary mortals to live thei
r earthly lives as though they were already in Heaven.” He paused again, giving Roger the same hard look but this time with a sparkle in his eyes. “I was a normal, healthy, fit young man, too, you know. I played rugby, I was admired by certain young ladies because I was a reserve for the French team. I...let us say...ate forbidden fruit, the same as any other young fellow in the normal circumstances of life. So, you see, I understand. I understand both you and Viviane.”
Roger sat in silence for a while.
“I would like to know more about your Church, Father.”
“There are pamphlets in the church porch. I shall bring you some. But remember, Roger, physical ill-health — and you lost a lot of blood through your wounds — and shock, such as seeing your sweetheart die violently at your side, predispose one to piety. You will feel differently when you recover your health and strength.”
Roger sat up so sharply that his wounds gave him a bad twinge.
“That is the most cynical statement I have ever heard.”
“Don’t be indignant. I am always glad to minister to anyone’s spiritual needs, but I must warn you that your repentant mood and resolutions for reform are probably only transient. However,” he hurried on, seeing that Roger was about to butt in crossly, “I shall give you every encouragement to make it permanent.” He smiled.
Three days later Laurent came to the presbytery.
“We must move you, Roger. The Boches know that an English officer is in hiding and has taken part in Maquis battles. They are beginning to hunt very seriously for you. With your wounds you are very conspicuous. You cannot travel for many weeks yet.”
The Daedalus Quartet Box Set Page 66