Return to the Field

by Return to the Field (retail) (epub)

  You needed a shutter on your mind.

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘Yeah – sorry. My job, you asked about – started me thinking… No – the answer’s no, not much different. Hardly at all, really.’

  The flotilla was being worked harder, that was about all, but his own work related only – or primarily – to their activities in the moonless periods. In the one that was coming very shortly, for instance, there were the usual crossings scheduled, agents and supplies to be landed and others – shot-down airmen too – to be brought out. One rather special commando-type operation – an SAS team who’d be conducting a reconnaissance in collaboration with a Free French paratroop mission, linked to a possible landing in strength on the west coast of Brittany – was to be conducted by MGB 600, Ben’s old ship. There was plenty going on. Brittany was still full of Germans. It also had – according to latest estimates – thirty thousand Résistants under starter’s orders, as it were.

  He told her, ‘Goes on much the same. How’s the MTC?’

  She shrugged. ‘Oh, us. Wouldn’t think I worked at all, would you?’ She picked up her glass. ‘I do, actually. In fact that’s what I was doing all weekend – and back to it tomorrow. Here’s to you, Ben.’

  ‘And to you. But – if you could bear it, Joannie – I’d like to explain something very personal and – well, important.’

  ‘If you absolutely must…’

  ‘Yes. Sorry, but – I know I shut you up, just then—’

  ‘I hit a raw spot. Not another word until it’s better – or worse, whichever.’

  ‘It’s not what you think. Nothing even remotely like you’re guessing. And this is very serious, Joannie. What I want to say first is – well, just that I’d like it if you and I could stay friends. You know how I’ve felt about you and Bob, but that’s not the point. Point is that I love Rosie and there’s nothing short-term about it, as soon as I can I’m going to marry her. You’ve got to realize that – it won’t change.’

  Toying with her glass… ‘So how come you’re on your own now, day in and night out?’

  ‘Rosie’s in France. That’s how come.’

  ‘In France.’ Gazing at him: frowning. ‘Since when?’

  ‘This time – well, the night we bumped into each other in the Wellington – I was drowning my sorrows, she and I’d have been together that weekend, and—’

  He tossed back his brandy. Nobody would have given it any stars. ‘I’d tried to persuade her not to go back, but…’ He shook his head. ‘I know it won’t do us any good in the long run, but we’d better have some more of this. If you can stand it?’

  ‘Oh – you know me… This France thing – your Rosie – nothing to do with the invasion – no, obviously—’

  ‘No.’ Signalling to the waitress. ‘Nothing at all. And this isn’t the first time she’s been – over there. But as it happens, just at this moment it’s – particularly fucking awful. If you’ll excuse my French.’

  ‘I think – broadly speaking – I’m beginning to catch on.’

  ‘Not a thing one’s supposed to talk about. Only for you to understand – well, what I was saying then. But it’s creasing me up, Joannie.’

  ‘It would. If I’m guessing correctly. Well – God, wouldn’t it… SOE – right? Oh, you poor darling… But why now suddenly – is it some crisis, or—?’

  ‘No. I mean yes. But – as I said, subject’s verboten. In any case – oh…’

  ‘Get you something, sir?’

  The waitress: he nodded, touched his brandy glass. ‘Two more – large ones again, please?’

  Joan murmured as the girl left them, ‘If there’s one bunch of people I really do quite desperately admire—’

  ‘Me too. So desperately, it hurts. Here – smoke…’

  * * *

  He walked her to her brother’s flat, kissed her goodnight in a brotherly manner and set off limping back to Pelham Place. A long haul – on one engine, as it were – but it was a fine night with a magnificent display of stars, and he was in no hurry to go to bed and for a third night running not sleep until it was about time to turn out again. Dreams were bad too, when you did drop off – including the happy ones, waking up then to reality. What you needed – and he was having to fight hard to hold on to – was fundamental hope – faith, might be the word. In which connection – this hit him suddenly, as he was crossing Sloane Square – unaware as yet, of course, that most of the spoiling of his sleep tonight would be due to the first flying bombs landing in south London, in the early hours – might do worse, he told himself, than recall to mind a lecture given him by Bob Stack, Joan’s husband – soon to be ex-husband. Talking about Rosie and her intention of returning to the field, and Ben’s fretting about it, Bob had jeered at him: ‘Scares you witless, Ben? How about her? How about bloody thousands of ’em – wives of bomber crews for instance, d’you think they’re not bloody terrified?’

  Well – OK. Not that the circumstances as they were now had been foreseeable then, in the context of that pep-talk. They’d been – envisageable, certainly. But – leaving Sloane Square behind now, heading for Draycott Avenue – he told old Bob in his mind, Easy to talk like that, old mate…

  Chapter 20

  On the night of June 23, in the Gestapo-run prison at Fresnes where she’d been for about a fortnight, she thought for a second she’d seen Lise.

  Weak in the head as well as body. Hallucinating: telling herself so in the next second – by which time she was down on her hands and knees, in pitch darkness. The stout and viciously unpleasant wardress had flung her in sideways and she’d cannoned off the door-jamb, glimpsed that bewildering image in the brief flood of lamplight from outside before the door had clanged shut again, the clang of its steel like a physical impact inside her skull, and pain flaring in her back, her bruised spine; her entire back and shoulders and right-side ribs could as well have been on fire. Crouching – then subsiding: her head on her palms-down hands and her left hip on the concrete floor; she’d subsided into that position and had for the moment neither the strength nor any urgent reason to move further. Wondering whether there hadn’t been a second figure beyond the one that might vaguely have resembled Lise. The mind did play tricks – was entitled to, after a day such as this had been – although it was still working after a fashion, alert for instance to the fact they did use stool-pigeons and informers inside the prison, even inside its cells, and that they’d give a lot for evidence that she had not lost her memory.

  From somewhere outside a wailing protest rose to a scream, then tailed away. Echoes then: another cell door slammed. She’d got up on to her hands and knees again, somehow: asking into total darkness, ‘Is there any bed-space?’

  She could hear movement. As they no doubt would be listening for hers. She wasn’t approaching them, though: it took all sorts to fill a place like this, and she wasn’t asking to have her eyes scratched out.

  A whisper, then: ‘Might make room, I suppose…’

  It had been a question, maybe, addressed to a third occupant of the cell. She heard a mutter of, ‘You might!’ Then the first one again: ‘Not big, are you?’

  She’d have seen her in that same instant: black against the light from outside, with that ape-like creature propelling her in. She admitted, ‘Not big. No.’

  ‘You hurt? Where’ve you sprung from, what’s your name?’

  ‘Rue des Saussaies, numero onze. But I was here this morning – cell I’ve been in – don’t know how long. Weeks…’

  * * *

  That afternoon, they’d whipped her.

  She’d been woken at about dawn, told to wash – cold water, as always, and no soap – and had been given breakfast of so-called coffee and a piece of bread, then led out to a van like the one that had brought her from Morlaix and locked into one of its individual compartments. The vans had separate compartments so that prisoners could be isolated from each other. From Fresnes into the centre of Paris was only about seven kilometres, and there could
n’t have been much traffic on the roads. In Rue des Saussaies she’d been ordered out, and pushed into the swastika-draped entrance of number 11, which before the Gestapo took it over in 1941 had been the headquarters of the Sureté Nationale. It must have been about eight a.m. They’d man-handled her down into the basement – winding stone stairs, into a stink of damp concrete – and one uniformed thug had just about crippled her, jabbing the butt of his rifle hard into the base of her spine. Because she’d paused for a moment at the sight of a barred door ahead of her. Then they’d left her in a filthy cell all morning, allowing her a piece of bread and a tin mug of lukewarm, unidentifiable fluid as a midday meal before dragging her up to the top floor for interrogation.

  As it had turned out, for a wait of another hour and a half before interrogation: with her wrists and elbows strapped to the armrests of a heavy timber chair, a desk in front of her with a more comfortable-looking chair behind it, and portraits on the wall of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler. She’d been left alone in here, but with the door ajar. Outside it she could see half a metre of corridor, its wall painted in two shades of brown. Voices were audible, from some distance, and some perhaps through other closed doors: it was mostly French, occasionally a burst of louder German. Other sounds came and went: doors opening or shutting, boots on the wood floor.

  On the desk in front of her were two buff-coloured files, and a dog-whip.

  Better than pliers, anyway.

  Loss of memory was still the answer. The only answer: and it would only help her if she could make it stick, convince them of it, and if they needed whatever they thought she’d be able to tell them badly enough to have the patience to wait for it. Patience and of course time: the invasion and Allied advance inland from the beachheads must surely affect the issue, impart some sense of urgency. To expect them to show much patience, in fact, might be to expect too much. If what they wanted was identification of Resistance leaders in the area she’d been concerned with last summer – effectively from Seine-Maritime into the Pas de Calais – they’d want it now.

  Whatever they wanted, they’d want now.

  Her back pained her: the base of her spine, where that bastard had cracked her with his rifle. Hitting her would have been his way of encouraging her to keep going. She’d staggered forward and collapsed against the door, hanging on to it for a moment so as not to fall. She’d been having giddy fits in any case, wasn’t too steady. Hadn’t looked round at the guard partly because she wouldn’t have been able to control her facial expression – hatred – and it might have prompted another blow. In any case why look at any of them, when they were all the same. She’d only thought – for her own relief – Ben would kill you: then in a follow-up thought that so would she – given a chance.

  The truth was she’d barely have had the strength to kill a fly. But dreams helped. You could find ways of convincing yourself that things would change, that this couldn’t conceivably be the end – or the beginning of the end. It was, but she didn’t know it. If God’s idea of justice or mercy or all those virtues he was supposed to be so hot on was to allow this—

  The thing was, to survive. Think of Ben, not God. Of getting back to him. In other respects to deaden the mind, just try to hang on.

  She’d been in the women’s wing at Fresnes for the past sixteen days. In a cell ten feet by five which she’d been sharing with two Frenchwomen who’d stolen food from a military ration truck. The cell had a lavatory in one corner, with cold water you got from a push-button tap above it; food was ‘soup’, a small ration of dry grey bread and about every second day a slice of cheese or sausage. Starvation rations: certainly not calculated to build one up. Whereas here in Rue des Saussaies the cell she’d been in this morning was larger but a lot dirtier, really foul. It had a similarly high, barred window – into some basement area, presumably – and an iron bedstead with a straw mattress that stank. To get to the lavatory you rang a bell and a woman Gestapo guard who looked like a Lesbian weight-lifter would in theory escort you to it. But would not do so, the one who’d locked her in there had warned her, between eight p.m. and eight a.m. Which might have accounted for the state of the mattress. But the inference from that warning had been that she’d be returning to her cell here for the night. If that had been the intention, they must have changed their minds.

  She’d first heard of Number 11 Rue des Saussaies during her SOE training, notably at Beaulieu in Hampshire where amongst other skills one had been taught resistance to interrogation. And since then it had frequently come into conversations in Baker Street and elsewhere. The other place – where one would have been just as likely to wind up – was SD headquarters in the Avenue Foch. The main difference, she’d gathered, was that in the Avenue Foch they tended not to use torture as an aid to interrogation, whereas here they did. In Avenue Foch the threat was simply of death – or transportation to Ravensbrück, which would amount to the same thing. Here in Rue des Saussaies you had that and torture.

  She looked again at the dog-whip. They really were a bit bloody obvious, she thought. Several hours in that squalid basement, then a couple more up here, in solitary again and with that to feast one’s eyes on. Subtle as anything… At interrogation, though, they were quite expert; it wasn’t going to be easy, pretending to have no memory when in fact she had it all back now. The doctor in Morlaix had been right, it had been a temporary condition. Of which these bastards would no doubt be well aware.

  If they were, could they be persuaded that she truly did have no memory at this time, might decide to wait until she did have?

  Give them a fragment or two, let them believe it was coming back?

  Side-thought, though – looking at the dog-whip: who’d want to whip a dog?

  Steps approaching…

  She turned her head to face the half-open door, and a figure appeared in the gap: extraordinarily, humming to itself. Male, in civilian clothes, shouldering in: she recognized him at once – the one with the carefully calculated friendly charm. Marchéval, he’d said his name was. French, but a Gestapo crony, and possibly – perhaps this was too imaginative, had only jumped into her mind because ‘Hector’’s possible defection had been in and out of her mind a lot at that time – possibly SOE’s former Air Movements Officer.

  ‘Zoé…’

  He’d spoken the name as if it was somehow precious to him. Shutting the door quietly… He was dressed as he had been in Morlaix – light beige jacket, blue shirt, patterned tie, brown trousers. Dark-eyed and swarthy. ‘I heard they’d brought you here!’

  As if commiserating. Old friend, startled to see her in this predicament. She asked him, ‘Do I know you?’

  ‘Yes – of course you do!’

  ‘Do you work here?’

  He looked hurt.

  ‘I’m not Gestapo, if that’s what you’re implying. I’m like you – French through and through!’

  ‘There are such things as French Gestapo. And you seem to be at home here. Anyway, I’ve never been here before, so—’

  ‘Zoé – or Suzanne… Or is it Angel?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Those are all names you’ve used. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Are you my interrogator here?’

  ‘Zoé, please – I sneaked a look at your file, in Morlaix—’

  ‘Morlaix?’

  ‘You were in hospital there, remember?’

  ‘A hospital somewhere… Vaguely. Morlaix, perhaps… You were there, were you?’

  ‘Yes. My name’s André Marchéval. Zoé, listen – you won’t think much of me for it, I dare say, I admit I’m making the best of a bad job—’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘What do I mean… Well, I was arrested, and they made me certain offers – also threats. The stick-and-carrot treatment. One either went along with it, or—’

  ‘If I’m supposed to have a notion what you’re talking about—’

  ‘One has – family responsibilities, Zoé. People other t
han oneself – if one refused to co-operate—’

  ‘What had you done to be arrested?’

  ‘I think it’s more than likely you know that. In fact, almost certain. Huh?’

  ‘I’ve no idea at all. I assure you – who or whatever you are—’

  ‘In any case, my personal situation is no concern of yours, it’s irrelevant. The fact is simply this, Zoé – if you defy them, you’ve no hope at all. Truly – none. But if you tell them what they want to know, you could have the sort of deal I have. You’re not well yet, you know – you should still be in hospital. Frankly, I’m appalled—’

  ‘What did you say your name is?’

  ‘André Marchéval. But I do beg you—’

  ‘Some sort of deal?’

  ‘Interested? Well, thank heaven. But there’s another thing too. I’ll make a guess you’re thinking because the British and Yanks have a toe-hold in Normandy it’s all over bar the shouting, you’ve only to hang on. But it’s not so. They’re being held, and before long they’ll be driven back into the sea – or just rounded up. Incidentally, for the past few days there’s been a terrific gale blowing, they haven’t landed a damn thing and the front’s static, exactly where it was ten days ago. And on top of that, it won’t be long before England has to sue for peace anyway. D’you know about the secret weapons – flying bombs?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Small pilotless aircraft, more or less, full of explosive, launched at England from ramps in the Pas de Calais and in Holland. The first of them hit London ten nights ago, and since then day and night they’ve been raining down, killing thousands!’

  ‘I’m supposed to believe this?’

  ‘It’s what’s happening, anyway. At this moment. And there’s even more to come – believe me—’

  ‘By “sue for peace”, you mean surrender?’

  ‘Think it out for yourself. That huge invasion force bogged down on the coast, towns, ports and harbours being smashed, civilian population demoralized… Zoé, the point is – for you – no one’s coming to your rescue. I’m sorry, that’s how it is.’