The Chestnut Tree

by Charlotte Bingham

  He would have known it was as useless to say to Meggie as it had always been to say to him, You mustn’t do this, because it’s very, very, dangerous.

  Of course it was dangerous, and of course she was fearful. It was because it was dangerous and because she was fearful that, of course, she must go.

  ‘Have you thought what you will do if you make a splodge?’ Hugh looked at her, the look in his eyes purposefully casual.

  ‘Of course.’

  Meggie paused by the door and her eyes drifted towards everything and nothing; the future, the past, maps with little pegs that told where agents were, pinholes that showed where agents were no longer. Drawers full of cyanide pills, desks with piles of papers on them, most of which seemed to say ‘Top Secret’.

  ‘Anything I can get you while I’m over there? I hear roast rat’s a speciality in Paris en ce moment.’

  Hugh turned away. ‘Off you go, Meggie Gore-Stewart, and don’t forget what I said.’

  She closed the door behind her, and Hugh went back to his desk and sat down. Hardly had he seated himself when every swear word he had ever known started to run like some ghastly repetitious song through his head.

  He tried to block them out but they went on and on, in the same way that such words sometimes occurred to him suddenly and incongruously in church, shocking the life out of him, and increasing his already profound belief in the devil.

  He stood up, knowing that a change of scene was the only way to stop himself from being overtaken by the guilt he felt each time he sent an agent off to France. Going quickly into the corridor outside he called through a colleague’s door, ‘Coming for a drink, old man?’

  They wandered off together, not really thinking about anything much, because when all was said and done, there was really too much to think about.

  Meggie lay safely hidden in a hay barn in deep Normandy countryside some thirty miles from her destination. Given the amount of time that she knew she would have to stay out of sight, she found she could no longer put off having to face reality for the first time. Even if she accomplished her first mission successfully, or rather once she had accomplished her first mission successfully, her reward would be quite simple: she would be sent back. Only now did she realise that being an agent was not a job, nor was it a vocation, it was a marriage. Once you knew enough you already knew too much, and that was something the Service appreciated to the full. She had been told that some agents had been dropped so many times into France, the rumour was that they ended up staying there rather than return to be dropped again. Not funny really, but not unfunny either.

  Happily, however, she was not alone in the barn. Equally well hidden in the hay bales were two Englishmen, commandos who on an otherwise successful raid on Le Havre had got cut off from their party and perforce been left to find their own way home. The Resistance had come to their rescue, just as the commandos had been promised in advance, and now the two battle-weary soldiers and their glamorous saviour were sitting it out until word came that it was safe to undertake the next part of their journey north to the coast.

  The floorboards of the inn had creaked all the way from Michael’s bedroom to Mattie’s, so badly that by the time Michael arrived at his destination it was as much as he could do to stop laughing.

  ‘There’s no law to say you can’t walk down a hotel corridor,’ Mattie had remarked as she sat brushing out her hair at the dressing table. ‘Who’s to know where you’re going?’

  ‘At this time of night? With a look like this on my face?’

  Mattie had started to laugh too when she saw the deliberately exaggerated expression on Michael’s handsome countenance. There was something indefinably appealing about his looks that made Mattie inwardly sigh with hopeless adoration every time she looked at him. Dressed as a general he looked handsome, strong and full of the right sort of authority. Lying naked in her arms he looked every inch what he had originally thought he might be, a heart-throb, a sort of grown-up version of every girl’s dream.

  ‘Do you think you’ll always be a soldier, Michael?’ Mattie had asked him as they both lay on their backs peacefully smoking a couple of Lucky Strikes. ‘Maybe when the war’s over—’

  ‘Maybe what when the war is over?’

  ‘You could still take up acting.’

  ‘Oh sure. Like I could always become President of the United States.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s so preposterous, General. After all, what’s the difference between playing soldiers and playing other people?’

  ‘Quite a lot, Mattie – I mean in the army the bullets are real and kill you, whereas, although you in Britain probably don’t know this, in films the bullets are not real, and—’

  ‘No, don’t joke. I understand – you’d rather not think about the future. I understand.’

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘I’m strictly a no on this issue. Hell, Mattie – the war’s not even halfway won yet. Suppose it doesn’t go according to plan. And we lose?’

  ‘Shouldn’t we be prepared for that sort of thing to happen? We can’t just get through every day thinking we’re bound to win. I’m sure you don’t believe that. You wouldn’t be a four star general if that was the way you thought.’

  ‘What would you do if we did lose, Mattie? And this lovely country of yours became occupied by the Germans?’

  ‘I think I’d probably kill myself. Actually. But then as long as your lot’s still fighting the good fight, I suppose it’s going to take some sort of miracle for Hitler to win.’

  ‘I guess. Just as I guess that my job is to try to ensure that that particular miracle never happens. Now is that enough about the future, honey?’

  ‘No . . .’

  Michael had glanced at her, before turning away to stub out his cigarette. ‘Stay right where you are while I get us a whisky.’

  Mattie had watched him as he got out of bed to fetch a half bottle of Scotch. There were no lights burning, but the curtains were pulled back and a full moon bathed the room. She knew she should shut up. It would be neither right nor fair to go on trying to ask Michael for some kind of commitment. Besides, little did he know, but he had already made it.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ a voice called quietly from below the hayloft. ‘Your friend is here.’

  Having dropped off into a catnap, Meggie started, before easing her way to the edge of the trapdoor and looking down. Below her stood two figures, one the ample but comforting shape of the farmer’s wife. Dressed in a shapeless dark grey dress with a once white pinafore over it, her grey hair in a tight bun under a triangular black scarf, she smiled up at Meggie. Beside her was the figure of a stranger, a tall loose-limbed man with a large beaked nose and flat black hair, dressed in a pair of cord trousers still bicycle-clipped at the ankles. Apart from his corduroys he wore what looked like a home-knitted bright red polo-neck sweater and a loose dark blue canvas jacket. Even though Meggie had become quite accustomed to the thought of having to trust her life and those of her compatriots to complete strangers, there was something about the cut of this man, the way he was shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot while he waited, or perhaps his habit of what appeared to be incessant sniffing, that put Meggie on her guard. She knew she was right to be wary, although her caution was necessarily academic, for by the time her latest contact discovered her whereabouts her cover was already as good as blown.

  The man introduced himself as Pierre Roux, sent as part of a line that stretched as far as Argentan. He was courteous, apologising for the delay in his arrival and explaining it was due to the present intensity of German patrols in the area, and efficient in the way he explained the details of their proposed route and the concomitant timetable.

  ‘I would have preferred to have made the entire journey by night, m’selle,’ he said. ‘But alas, thanks to these wretched patrols we shall have to make some of the journey by day, otherwise we shall not make your rendezvous. As it is, we shall have to hurry.’
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br />   Meggie – known as Martine on French soil – said she quite understood and that her party was prepared to take whatever trouble was needed to ensure a safe and speedy journey. Not only were the lives of her two commandos precious, but the men also had vital information about the harbour installations at Le Havre. Of course Meggie said nothing about this to her escort, other than to stress that it was their mutual top priority to see the two commandos on board their rescue craft and safely on their way back to England.

  So, after a supper of cold goose, homemade cheese and freshly baked bread washed down with rough cider, the four set off into what was left of the night.

  The sky was clear so the journey was not too arduous, nor were there any undue alarms, so that by the time dawn broke they had covered nearly half of their eighteen-mile journey. They stopped for a rest to catch their breath in a vast barn on the outskirts of a tiny village well off the beaten track, where Meggie and her two soldiers hid themselves behind a collection of old farm machinery and abandoned vehicles, while Pierre took himself off into the village to meet up with the contact who was due to escort them for the second leg of their journey.

  He was gone well over an hour, rather more time than had been estimated. Meggie started to become anxious, realising that she was left with absolutely no option other than to wait for the promised new guide, since none of them had any chance of finding the pickup point on a stretch of totally unknown coastline. She wished she had experienced times like this before, moments which caused her heart to beat faster and her mouth to dry up entirely. She felt that if she had she might know better how to deal with them. However, as the first hour started to stretch towards two, she and her companions came to understand that they were in trouble. Realising that they were on a hiding to nothing by remaining where they were, Meggie started to make a new plan. By now either Monsieur Roux had been captured and was telling all under interrogation or else – something she herself considered more than likely – he had already betrayed their identities and whereabouts to the Gestapo.

  ‘So,’ she announced with one last look along the road that led away from the barn to the village. ‘We’re just going to have to chance it, chaps. Even if we can’t find the beach and pickup point, we can probably lie low somewhere, under cover. Whatever happens we can’t stay here.’

  She led them out single file through the back of the old barn, using the hedge as cover along the side of the road until they reached the small wood at the end of the field. Meggie was armed with a Lüger, a weapon proudly presented to her by the farmer in whose barn they had been hiding, and claimed by him to have once belonged to a German officer whose throat he had cut swiftly and silently one night in a daring raid on Gestapo headquarters in Rouen. After their encounter in Le Havre her comrades in arms had been left with only their service issue knives.

  Being no match for any handpicked squad of German officers, they all three knew their only chance of survival was to keep hidden. Yet once they had found their way through the coppice and saw nothing but open countryside ahead of them for the next four or five miles such a task seemed to be a complete impossibility.

  ‘We can hide out in these woods until nightfall,’ Meggie suggested in a whisper. ‘Hope that Pierre hasn’t either turned traitor or broken down under interrogation, and then try and find our way across these farms until we get to more cover.’

  ‘These woods are too close to the village, surely?’ one of the commandos asked. ‘We might be better – since they’re not on our tail as yet – to make a dash for it over in that direction, to those hills.’

  But just as he was pointing to a mound of undulations on the far western horizon his companion shut him up, indicating with a backward nod of his head to listen behind them.

  All three did, and all three heard the same thing: the quiet but definite tread of others in the same woodland, of people tracing their steps; the heavy fall of soldiers’ boots as they advanced across beds of dry twigs and small fallen branches.

  Mattie and Michael had parted at the inn, as they had both known they had to do. Mattie left Michael to meet some War Office contacts at a nearby hotel, and she herself, being allowed some time off, made her way happily to Bexham.

  As always when approaching the village where she had been brought up, Mattie felt her usual surge of joyous expectation. It was as if she was young again and cantering along on Virginia’s old pony, the light Sussex breeze making her hair stream out behind her, and any minute now they were going to jump a stream or a ditch; that was how excited she suddenly felt as she neared Bexham.

  And then, there it was, slumbering in the early spring sunshine almost complacently, as it seemed to Mattie, like a contented cat on the back step of a cottage. Dear heavenly Bexham with its bobbing boats and its flint-packed walls, its pub and its village green, its residents of old and new, how she loved it. Of a sudden she felt as if she had sloughed off the person she had been in London. She was herself again, not confused and terrified and trying to pretend that she was more grown up than she really was, and ending up being all too grown up. Now she was back, she knew that the old Mattie was back too, and might even be back to stay.

  It was not until she walked up to the front door of her parents’ house that it came to her that not all of Bexham was unchanged. There was something about Magnolias that was different. It was not the fact that her mother’s little motor car was not there, or the lack of flowers in the pots set about the door. It was not just that the blackout blinds in the bedroom overlooking the front were drawn, despite its being day.

  When the front door slowly opened to her long insistent ring and eventually her father stood before her, one look at his forlorn, colourless face, the expression in his eyes, told Mattie that something quite terrible had happened.

  Chapter Twelve

  Richards looked across the room at Judy Tate. She had just removed her mask, and was coughing fit to bust at the dust and the scrim that had been choking all the regular netters at Cucklington House for over a year now, but that was not what was worrying Richards. What was worrying him was that Judy was as white as a sheet, or as pallid as tapioca, as Mrs Gore-Stewart would have had it.

  ‘Time for a well-deserved cup that cheers, Miss Judy.’

  He took her by the arm and led her to the room next door, a room that he had, in the now permanent absence of his beloved Madame Gran, given over to the making and preparing of tea and small morsels to eat. It was after all, he reckoned, the least he could do for the regular netters. The irregular netters, however, were never allowed in the new tea room. Those who just popped in for a bit of a show, and then did not come back for weeks, Richards comforted only with a glass of water and a patronising smile. Tea, not to mention milk, was by now far too precious to waste on the flotsam and jetsam of this world, of that Richards was quite sure.

  ‘You look a little pale, Miss Judy.’

  Judy had been staring ahead of her, but now her eyes, still watery from the netting next door, looked up at Richards.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I feel a bit pale, Richards.’ She smiled a little wanly. ‘I don’t know why, but this last week everything has started to get me down. It is just not me, to be got down, at least I hope it isn’t. I suppose it’s only natural, but it’s so – so self-indulgent, and yet I can’t shake it off.’

  Richards, who had his own worries, not least about the whereabouts of Miss Meggie, nodded sympathetically.

  ‘You need something to take your mind off the war, Miss Judy. Perhaps Mr Walter will be home again on leave soon?’

  ‘I don’t think so, somehow. Anyway we’ve heard nothing more.’

  ‘You just need something to take your mind off everything,’ Richards repeated, still staring down into Judy’s over-white face.

  ‘I suppose that is it, Richards. I must admit that I had so hoped that I would be left with something to take my mind off everything, as you say, but – well, I know that, alas, I probably won’t have now for a very long time.�
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  It was a very discreet way of putting something that Richards knew must have been uppermost in Miss Judy’s mind. He understood intuitively how envious she must feel, seeing that half of Bexham seemed to be pushing prams out nowadays, and so he patted her on the shoulder, but, being the soul of tact, he forbore to comment.

  ‘Tea is good for everything.’

  Judy smiled wanly, and he took her cup.

  ‘Have another one, Miss Judy, and let me tell you a joke. Know the one about the Yorkshire man who ordered a pint of beer and as it was being served to him the barmaid said “Looks like rain”? “Well, it certainly doesn’t look like beer,” came the reply.’

  Judy laughed. Richards loved to collect jokes from the wireless, or from the regulars down at the Three Tuns. There was no joke anywhere that he did not write down in his little black book and memorise especially for cheering the netters, or others engaged in war work in Bexham.

  As the atmosphere was lifting and Judy was beginning to tell Richards about all the little field animals that came up for scraps to her kitchen window at Owl Cottage, Rusty Todd put her head round the corner of the door.

  ‘Come in, come in, Miss Rusty, tea is at hand,’ Richards called to her.

  ‘Very good of you, Mr Richards, but I won’t, if you don’t mind. I must be on my way. Father, you know – he gets restless now that Mother is away so much doing night work.’

  Richards nodded, his face wearing only a most impassive expression. The whole of Bexham knew that Mr Todd had recovered consciousness only to become all but bedridden on hearing of the death of his son Tom; that he blamed himself for taking the boy with him across to Dunkirk; that his physical recovery from his own injuries, miraculous though it was, was as nothing compared to his subsequent mental decline.

  ‘Oh, come on, have just half a cup, Miss Rusty, warm you up in this weather with no heating in the house.’