by Alex Gerlis
‘Indeed, sir. All rather sudden ... not that we have to get married, please don’t misunderstand. But when Captain Edgar came to see me earlier this month it was clear that he was aware of our ... of our, relationship. I didn’t want Nurse Mercier, Nathalie, to get into any kind of trouble and Captain Edgar had urged me to do the decent thing so I proposed. And blow me down, sir, she accepted! I’m the happiest man in the world. She is the most beautiful woman and I love her very much.’
The hammering had resumed outside the window. Captain Archibald started to speak, hesitated, stopped and then spoke.
‘I was going to say, Quinn, that your private life is none of my concern, but, of course, that is untrue. Everything you do, everything about you will be my concern once you start working in my unit. But just be careful. Love is a wonderful thing, but it does have a habit of getting in the way of things. Try to keep your feet on the ground.
‘They’re discharging you from here on Friday, the tenth of April. You start with us at Lincoln House in Duke Street at nine o’clock on Monday, the thirteenth of April. Lucky for us.’
ooo000ooo
CHAPTER EIGHT
London
1942
His wedding had not been what quite as Owen Quinn had envisaged, which was hardly surprising as he had never really given much thought to getting married other than assuming that one day he would. Much more to the point, it was certainly not as Marjorie and William Quinn had ever imagined their son’s wedding would be.
Over the years, Marjorie Quinn especially had frequently imagined her only child’s wedding, even planned some details of it. It would, of course, be a day to remember. Their friends and some relations would all be invited and impressed. The sun would shine, the church would look perfect, the flowers immaculately arranged and no detail disregarded. It would be the height of taste and would inevitably mark their ascendancy in their middle-class community in Surrey. Ideally, the bride would be from their area and certainly from a similar background. She would be attractive and intelligent, though, of course, without any unhealthy modern tendencies towards independence.
Marjorie Quinn did recognise that the war could affect her plans, but had reckoned on her son simply delaying marriage until a year or two after the war. Her cousin’s daughter had married an American and that had been most upsetting, but then that side of the family were from Yorkshire.
But to marry a Frenchwoman, with no family — and a nurse, which was almost trade ... it had all been too awful for Marjorie to contemplate. Of course, William had soon changed his tune when he first met the girl. It was hard to deny that she was ... attractive, one had to acknowledge that. But Owen had known her for just a matter of weeks when they became engaged and he was a patient of hers. It all seemed too hasty and a not a little improper. She wondered whether the whole business may have been the result of any of the medication that Owen was on.
She certainly never imagined that the first time she would meet her son’s bride-to-be would be when they were actually engaged. In a way, she blamed herself. They ought to have visited Owen more often after he was taken to Calcotte Grange. But the journey from Surrey involved a series of train journeys and that took forever and the trains tended to be crowded with soldiers, many of whom were not British.
As soon as they heard of the engagement in late March they had come up. William’s brother had managed to get hold of some extra petrol coupons and they were able to use his Ford Anglia. On the journey up, they had agreed that they would take Owen aside and do their best to talk him out of it. He had always been such an impetuous boy. William said it was because he was an only child.
The day was a disaster from the start; at least it was from Marjorie Quinn’s point of view. As soon as they arrived at Calcotte Grange Owen and the girl piled into the car and they headed off to what she had to admit was a most agreeable tea-room, where they had a small area to themselves by a roaring fire. William could hardly take his eyes off this Nathalie from the moment he first saw her. The girl and Owen actually held hands the whole time and even kissed in front of them. She drank tea without milk and smoked constantly. She ignored most of Marjorie’s carefully rehearsed and very polite questions about her life in Paris and kept asking for amusing stories about Owen as a boy.
The one positive aspect of the whole sorry situation was that at least Owen was not going back to sea, which she had never been happy about. She did like the sound of the new job in London. It seemed important, although Owen insisted that he was not allowed to tell her anything about it.
The young lovers arrived in London in April. The Navy found them a tiny flat in Pimlico, from where you could hear the trains at Victoria Station on a still night. They also put in a good word to allow Nathalie to return to her old hospital, St Thomas’s. She would live in the nurses’ home until their wedding in June.
That had taken place in a grim church in Chelsea. The vicar had a streaming cold but no handkerchief and for some unaccountable reason was unable to pronounce ‘Owen’ properly. He was so slow in both speech and movement that the ceremony felt more funereal than matrimonial. It rained for the duration of the wedding and for some time after. Marjorie and William had invited a dozen friends and a similar number of relatives. Owen had invited the two or three chums from school whom he had been able to contact, along with another Navy officer from his new office. Nathalie had brought along three other nurses, none of whom she seemed to know particularly well, but who all spent most of the ceremony dabbing their eyes.
And that was it. Barely thirty of them in a damp and dimly lit church that could accommodate at least ten times that number. Marjorie Quinn did turn round at one stage during the ceremony and spotted a tall man in the very back row, well into the shadows. He was wearing a dark coat and his face was obscured by a wide-brimmed trilby. She did wonder whether he was one of the Yorkshire relatives, they were the kind of people who would not remove their hats in a church, but when she next turned round the tall man was no longer there. She decided he was simply a passer-by seeking refuge from the rain.
And so on a wet day in June 1942, Owen Quinn, aged twenty-four, married a Frenchwoman two years older than himself.
ooo000ooo
Now it was September and Owen Quinn was surprised at the ease with which he had taken both to his new role in Naval Intelligence and to married life.
The Navy had been what he considered to be surprisingly helpful in finding them the flat in Alderney Street in Pimlico. He really had not realised that they went to that kind of trouble. It was a tiny flat, he had to admit that. The kitchen was little more than a galley and the small lounge which led off it had to accommodate two enormous old armchairs, a pair of rickety side tables and a stained dining table. The narrow bathroom was always draughty but having spent eighteen months at sea and the best part of a year in hospital, Quinn had no problem with the flat, unlike his new wife.
It was an improvement on the nurses’ home, but for her, the bedroom was the only room that Nathalie was happy with. Somehow they had managed to get the double bed that his parents bought them into it and from then on the bedroom became the focal point of their home life.
It was hard to predict Nathalie’s shifts at St Thomas’s. Sometimes it would be long days, occasionally a week of nights, which he hated. Weekends were difficult to plan. She did seem to work more Sundays than not, which he could not really understand but she promised him that she was not being asked to do any more than her fair share. She assured him that working more Sundays meant she was not required to work so many nights. Her Sundays at work did mean that he could go down to Surrey for lunch with his parents.
There was a war on after all and at least they were together. She more than made up for it in their time together. On the occasions when he found himself alone in the flat and becoming maudlin, he would remind himself of how his life had changed in little more than a year. Clinging to the plank of wood in the sea off Crete, he thought his life was over. Now, not only
was he alive but he was married to a woman he loved and who had previously existed only in his dreams. His life, he had to admit to himself, was as near perfect as he could have wished it to be.
Be careful what you wish for, he very occasionally reminded himself. But he would chuckle when he did so. He now seemed to have what he had always wished for and there really did not need to be anything he had to be careful about.
On the rare days when neither of them was working they would go for long walks. She liked to explore London. Owen had lived in the capital as a student, but Nathalie brought a totally different eye to it.
She would spot sights that he had walked past many times but never seen. She would be thrilled at the names of little streets or delighted at a small shop only selling buttons, or appalled at the food shops which she said were disgusting. He would remind her that there was a war on, but she insisted that the food shops and the steamy cafés they would sit and drink in were proof that the English did not care about food.
They would walk along and Nathalie would always look up. Her long hair would drop further down her back, resting sensuously in that spot halfway down it which he would always caress before they fell asleep. She would marvel at the tops of the buildings and the strange creatures carved into them or protruding from the walls.
They would be arm in arm and she would tell him long stories, some amusing, most sad about life at the hospital. And against his better judgement, he would find himself drawn into telling her about his work. Nothing serious, of course, he knew that he was not allowed to do that. But the titbits about daily office life and the people who inhabited it seemed to amuse her and there seemed to be no harm in that. She would laugh loudly and pull herself closer to him and they would kiss and Owen would notice the looks, some disapproving, and many more admiring, of passers-by.
It would be on the occasions like this that he would feel able to again broach her life in France. He had assumed that once they were married, he would find out more about her, but he realised that he really knew very little. He was curious about what school she went to, what hospital she had trained in, what boyfriends she had, what about any extended family?
Nathalie was never rude and would always appear to answer his questions, but by the end of these conversations, he would realise that she had said nothing of any significance. The hospital ‘was a very large one, but you know what these Paris hospitals are like’, which he did not. ‘But you never tell me about your girlfriends!’ ‘There are uncles, aunts and cousins, but we are not a close family. You are my family now.’ He would ask these questions again in bed, after they had made love and were lying face to face on the pillow, stroking each other’s arms. She should have been at her most open then, but the answers would be the same and with a whispered ‘ça suffit’ she would let him know that was enough. The conversation would end.
He was not intending to pry, but he felt that he did not really know his wife and all he wanted was to be part of her life. He imagined that when the war was over they would spend time in Paris. They would stroll through the rive gauche, stopping to look at the second-hand bookstalls and the artists on the Left Bank. They would walk into agreeable bars at any time of the day and he would drink cognac. They would stop at Café des Deux Magots in Place St Germain des Prés, drinking proper coffee and hoping to catch the intellectual discussions around them. If they had enough money they could even dine at Fouquet’s on the Champs Élysées.
He attributed her reticence to a remark she had made one Saturday afternoon in late July when they were walking back towards Pimlico by the river. Maybe he did not appreciate enough what it meant to have to flee your country. It had been a perfect day, warm with a steady breeze and they had walked past the Houses of Parliament, crossed Westminster Bridge, by St Thomas’s, along the south bank before crossing over Chelsea Bridge, heading back towards Pimlico. On Grosvenor Road there was a small group of soldiers coming towards them. As they came closer, he realised they were Free French and greeted them with a Bonjour! Ma femme est française. But Nathalie seemed shy and uncommunicative and after the briefest of pauses she moved him along, explaining that they needed to get home. As they moved away from the soldiers, he asked why. She was silent for a few seconds as they continued walking and when she lifted her head to speak her eyes had turned into those moist, dark shining pools.
‘It is no longer my France. My France has been taken from me.’
And there was the café. It was an incident that bothered him at the time but which he allowed to slip from his mind after her apology.
It was a Thursday afternoon in August and he had finished work early. Nathalie met him in Piccadilly Circus and they walked down Haymarket towards Trafalgar Square. It began to rain in the way that it does in an English summer: a few drops without apparent warning and then a sudden and heavy downpour. Nathalie was wearing high heels and a summer dress. She was not dressed for the rain. They dived into a small corner café and sat against the wall at the end of a long Formica table. The rain had caused her dress to cling against her figure and Owen removed his jacket to drape over his wife’s shoulders. Within minutes the café filled up and a family of four squeezed onto their table.
It was evident from their initial enquiry (‘are these seats free?’) that they were French and Owen happily introduced themselves. It ought, he thought, to have been a perfect encounter for Nathalie. From Paris. The seventh arrondissement. Near Les Invalides. The few sentences that Nathalie uttered were short to the point of being curt. The parents were in their early forties, the two boys in their early teens. They had come to London in early 1940. The father spoke to them in hushed tones as the boys flicked their straws at each other. ‘I travelled a lot to Germany for business during the 1930s. I could see how ...’ He muttered to his wife in French.
‘Dangerous,’ she said.
‘... dangerous it would be for us,’ he continued. ‘ We are fortunate in having family in London. We could not risk remaining in Paris. We cannot imagining ...’
‘Imagine,’ she corrected him.
‘... imagine what is happening there now to our family and our friends. We were so lucky to escape.’
Owen looked quizzical.
‘Where you involved in politics?’
Before the man could answer Nathalie, who had spent most of the time looking at the pepper pot she was fiddling with on the table, spoke.
‘They’re Jews, Owen. Can’t you tell?’
Owen was taken aback. No, he had not been able to tell. These were the first Jews he could recall meeting. But what had really taken him aback was Nathalie’s tone. She had been quiet throughout what he thought was a pleasant and even fortuitous meeting. But her tone and her manner bordered on rudeness.
Before he could say anything else, Nathalie was standing up.
‘We had better leave now, Owen.’
The downpour had not abated. If anything, it was even heavier.
‘Are you sure?’ He knew that if there was one thing she hated, it was getting wet.
But she was already pushing her way through. The family all had to get up to make way for them. Outside she did not wait for him as he tried to leave in a more polite manner. He had to trot to catch her up.
‘What was all that about, Nathalie?’
‘What was what about?’ She was walking fast, despite her high heels. Her arms folded tightly across her as if that might keep her dry.
‘Why did we have to leave so suddenly? It must have seemed rude.’
She stopped and turned at him.
‘You English are so concerned about manners and doing the right thing. That is all you think about. I did not want to be with those people. We were on our own. Why did they have to come and sit there and interrupt us.’
‘Nathalie!’
‘They’re always like that, thinking they can push in and take things over as if they own the place.’
Owen was genuinely confused. They were walking next to each other now, the rai
n still heavy.
‘Who are “they”, Nathalie? I don’t know what you mean.’
She paused to look at him.
‘You’re lucky then.’
They didn’t speak again until they were back in Pimlico.
Later that night she apologised. She realised she must have been rude. She had sat with two people as they died that morning in the hospital and she was upset. Sometimes being reminded of France made her even more upset and that must have been the reason for her behaviour in the café.
ooo000ooo
Duke Street ran from Piccadilly to the north and Pall Mall to the south. Lincoln House was about halfway down and on the eastern side of the street. It was a block down from Fortnum and Mason – where Owen Quinn occasionally wandered into the special Officers’ Department but never bought anything. A few doors along was the Chequers Tavern, a small pub which was reputed to have been the first one built in the city after the Great Fire. It was not, Owen was informed on his first day, regarded as a suitable place for officers to drink. He never found out why.
Lincoln House was a seven storey building, more than eighty years old and difficult to distinguish from the other buildings in an otherwise elegant street. It had dutifully served some of the less exciting parts of the insurance industry until it was requisitioned by the Government in 1940. The attraction was its sheer ordinariness and anonymity. On more than one occasion even after he had been working there for months, Quinn had found himself walking past the gloomy entrance, with its dark brown doors and grey metal shutters, with the words ‘Lincoln House’ picked in fading gold characters painted on a filthy strip of glass above the door. The entrance was tucked against an art gallery that rarely seemed to open and always had the same miserable, dark landscape in the window. The building was narrower than most of the others in the street, but not so much that it stood out. The white façade had weathered over the years and the exposure to London grime and rain gave the exterior a mottled effect. Now the building housed a series of offices, all of which fulfilled some security or intelligence related purpose. The entrance led along the length of the art gallery to a reception area and guardroom at the back. From there, was a main stairwell, on one side of the building, with a door leading off it for each floor, leading to a small suite of offices. When he first went to work on the sixth floor of Lincoln House Quinn had been told that the higher the floor, the more sensitive the work being handled there. He was not sure if this was true, but like so much of the gossip that passed for information in wartime, he did not take it too seriously, but did find a place for it somewhere in his memory. The very first thing that Quinn asked Captain Archibald when he arrived at Lincoln House on Monday, 13 April, was the name of the unit. Who was he working for? What was it called – what should he tell people? It had seemed a reasonable question, not one that he would have expected Archibald to hesitate at answering for quite as long as he did.