‘He obviously isn’t the jealous sort,’ Nicholas said, nodding towards the agent she’d kissed.
‘A night or two with him has nothing at all to do with a couple of months with a Nazi.’
Her candour made Nicholas tell her his own truth. ‘You asked me if I was behaving like a bear because of Skye and O’Farrell and I said no. I think I lied.’
‘You should tell O’Farrell.’
‘Tell him what?’
‘That you love her. That you adore her.’ The same cool voice. The same composed face. Margaux’s, but not Nicholas’s.
The silence following her words was a tangible thing. Like cloud the second before the rain fell: sodden, heavy, suffocating. He felt as if he could reach out and grab great fistfuls of it.
His hand reached up to the wing, holding on. ‘Fuck.’ He could not be in love with Skye. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the brutal truth.
‘It’s why you’re not an agent,’ Margaux continued prosaically. ‘Your face is too easy to read. I suspected it after the dance, but I knew it for certain this morning. I wasn’t going to say anything as I thought the knowledge might be too distracting to take into a plane. But now I think it might give you the best reason in the world to concentrate. You can only tell her how you feel, that this – us – is a lie, if you survive the war.’
If he survived the war. If Skye even felt the same. If she didn’t fall in love with O’Farrell first. God dammit.
He’d signed the Official Secrets Act. Nobody was allowed to know what Margaux did: that a woman was being sent to France as a secret agent. If anyone outside their small group of privileged insiders ever found out that a woman was being used as a spy, there would be uproar all over Britain, and perhaps the world. So he’d agreed to SOE’s idea of an engagement cover-story to explain to everyone why he and Margaux spent so much time together. He was absolutely not allowed to be in love with Skye. There was too much at stake. If he told Skye anything at all about what he did, he’d be court-martialled. His grip on the wing tightened, knuckles white.
‘I can’t tell O’Farrell,’ he said, as if that was the most important part of the conversation. It was the only part he could even begin to deal with. ‘What if … what if she’s meant to be with him? I can’t ruin that in exchange for the nothing I can offer her right now.’
Margaux clicked her tongue impatiently. ‘O’Farrell was at the pub last weekend with at least four WAAFs. You know he doesn’t do commitment. He would have told Skye that too.’
‘There’s also the fact that she most likely thinks I’m a jerk,’ Nicholas said. ‘I keep coming across to her like a disapproving father. What I said to her at Tempsford. And when O’Farrell kissed her cheek in the mess, she saw me frown but it was only because I was thinking that I’d never be able to kiss her cheek; it would be too …’ He couldn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t even know what he’d meant to say. Dangerous. Explosive. Perfect. Insufficient.
‘You seemed to be getting along well enough at the dance.’ Margaux lit up a Gauloise and offered him one.
He shook his head. He couldn’t comprehend how to smoke right now. ‘We’d both drunk too much whiskey, that’s all. Drunken camaraderie.’
‘Nick, you never drink too much whiskey. You always drink right up to the edge but never beyond. Same as the way you push a plane right to its limits but never too far. Or the way you press for each and every moonlight op to go ahead and only relent if you think someone might get hurt. You’re the most controlled person I know. But that must be exhausting.’
‘If I’m not,’ he said grimly, ‘people die. I can’t manage a team of pilots doing work that makes every nerve in their bodies scream like a Stuka bomber if I’m not in control of myself all the time.’
‘Being in control of yourself around Skye is going to be the most exhausting thing of all.’
The accuracy of her words hit him like a payload of bombs. It would be the hardest thing of all. Margaux understood because she had to climb out of a plane in a dark field in France, get herself to Paris and the Hotel Meurice, find her Nazi and smile just enough to titillate him, then bite back the disgust that must surely rise in her throat when he kissed her and took off her clothes. The whole time she had to be in the most perfect control of herself.
‘If you can do what you do,’ he said, ‘then I can manage myself around Skye until this goddamn war ends so that nobody suspects you and I aren’t really engaged, or that I have any feelings for Skye beyond the brotherly.’
Margaux regarded him for a moment, then gave him a full and suddenly brilliant smile. He’d only seen that smile once before: when he’d picked her up from France after the first time she’d spent two months there with the Nazi.
‘I’m not Skye,’ she said, ‘and it won’t be the same, but I still care about you. Come here.’
She opened her arms and he walked into them, holding her the same way she was holding him. As if they were each trying to reassure the other that everything would be fine, but knowing that neither of them believed it.
An engineer – not one of their squadron’s – walked past as they were embracing, and whistled. ‘Shouldn’t you two lovebirds be doing that somewhere more private?’
After the engineer’s footsteps had faded, Nicholas smiled. ‘That should keep our cover going for a bit longer.’
‘It should.’ Margaux pulled back so she could see his face. ‘They told me more women will be joining SOE. They’ll have to come up with a better way of managing our cover stories. Perhaps soon …’
Soon. Maybe the war would end soon. That’s what they all used to say. He’d long ago stopped believing in soons. There was only one thing he could do right now.
‘Let’s fly,’ he said. ‘Let’s survive.’
Sixteen
Nicholas left the coast near Bognor Regis and climbed up to eight thousand feet. It was safer up there, and visibility was so good he could easily see the French coastline in the moonlight. Once he’d crossed into France near Cabourg, he took himself down to a thousand feet, not even wincing at the arc of enemy flak tossed into the sky, possibly at him, possibly at O’Farrell. Both of them were too good to be hit by flak and they passed safely through.
Inland, mist began to drift up from the ground. Despite that, Nicholas felt secure enough to let his mind drift backwards to a point approximately nine months ago when he’d first met Margaux, not long after he’d joined 161 Squadron.
Margaux Jourdan was a bit like the mist below: slippery, dangerous and beautiful to look at. The first time Nicholas had seen her, she was stalking across the field in Somersham, near Tempsford, cigarette in hand, dressed in trousers and a sweater. O’Farrell’s and Richie’s mouths had dropped open, and Nicholas could tell that O’Farrell was about to get himself into serious trouble.
The wind had blown Margaux’s scarf away, revealing long dark hair like Skye’s. Margaux even stood in the same confident way, as if nothing could ever hurt her, and he’d wondered if it was a damn good act, like Skye’s had always been. He was so distracted by Margaux’s hair, and her stance, that he hadn’t even thought to chase after her scarf – luckily O’Farrell had that in hand.
Both Richie and O’Farrell had called Nicholas a lucky bastard when he was paired up with Margaux – each pilot was allocated an agent to train – but Nicholas had shrugged them off. Life was complicated enough without adding to it the potency of romance with an SOE agent.
He’d set to work in a field that had once grown crops, showing two new French operators and Margaux how to set up a flare path. ‘You have three minutes after the plane has landed,’ he told her. ‘The pilot won’t get out of the plane. Let’s practise.’
So Margaux had practised climbing down the ladder from the plane, climbing back up the ladder, handing down the luggage, boarding, disembarking. Everything was practised many more times than necessary because not a single mistake could be afforded in that slim and tense three-minute margin. Throughout, Nicholas c
ould hear O’Farrell laughing with his Joe, using humour and high spirits to get the training done.
After one particularly raucous barrage of laughter, Margaux said impassively to Nicholas, ‘I heard that 161 is a squadron of charmers, all too good-looking, hard-drinking and hard-playing, and with access to enough French perfume and champagne to seduce the entire WAAF population of England.’
It wasn’t clear if this was an accusation or a statement.
‘You’ll be hard-drinking too in a few weeks. If you aren’t already,’ Nicholas responded prosaically.
He knew what people said, but everyone liked a story. Apparently a group of men doing secretive and dangerous things wasn’t interesting enough on its own; it had to be spiced up with half-truths.
‘I think he,’ Margaux nodded at O’Farrell, her face remaining inscrutable, ‘would have taken what I just said as an invitation to prove me right. You seem to use very different methods of working.’
‘We each use what we think is best,’ Nicholas said. Flirtation and joking would not, he sensed, motivate Margaux. Hard-drinking might, he thought wryly. ‘We have a competition at the end,’ he added. ‘We’ll be able to see whose methods were better.’
He thought he saw Margaux smile and knew that she wanted to win.
She continued pulling herself up and down the ladder, but he saw that her hands were forming blisters. She didn’t wince but she slowed and Nicholas frowned; she’d be furious if he told her to stop.
The next time she came down the ladder, he said, ‘When I was twelve, I had to swing across a rope bridge for such a long way that it tore the skin off my hands. A very wise woman told me that aloe vera was the thing to fix them. The Waafery has aloe vera.’
He’d made sure they stocked it after the first training sessions when the same thing had happened to the other Joes.
‘I might visit the Waafery later,’ was all Margaux said in reply, but she picked up her pace and Nicholas knew she’d be one of the best agents he’d have the luck to train.
Later, when they timed the Joes, Margaux won. If they’d been on the ground on a real op, they’d have taken off in less than three minutes.
O’Farrell groaned, then offered Margaux his congratulations. ‘I’ll buy you a drink at the pub.’
‘I’m not your consolation prize,’ she replied, before walking away, still holding her body confidently, still bewitching to look at despite the fact she must be exhausted and her hands must hurt like hell.
‘Thank God she’s on our side,’ Nicholas said.
‘Thank God she’s yours and not mine,’ O’Farrell retorted. ‘If you fly into a trap, I bet she’d push you out of the plane and into the arms of the Germans, and then fly away without a thought for anyone else.’
Nicholas didn’t believe it though.
It was impossible, in those circumstances, not to become close to the person you were training. So he and Margaux formed a strange kind of intimacy in which they spoke little but intuited a lot and worked together well.
Margaux had initially been sent to France as a courier, but when SOE discovered that information-gathering was her special skill, they decided to use it. It meant she had to fly in and out more than most SOE agents as it wasn’t safe for her to radio back everything she learned from the Oberführer. Once this had been ascertained, SOE had suggested that Nicholas and Margaux pretend to be engaged. It allowed them to work and train together in close proximity while keeping everyone outside the close circle of 161 Squadron and SOE ignorant about what Margaux did. Nicholas was used to keeping secrets – nobody was allowed to know what 161 Squadron did either – so he’d figured one extra layer of secrecy wouldn’t matter.
At the time, SOE had had a discussion with Nicholas about his ‘needs’, and he’d almost laughed. He wouldn’t be able to openly date other women if he was supposed to be engaged to Margaux, they said. He told Margaux about it later – of course nobody had had a discussion with her about her needs – and she laughed and said she didn’t plan to be celibate for the entire war, but would be discreet.
Since the cover story had been put in place eight months ago Nicholas hadn’t met anyone worth the bother of a secretive affair. But now there was Skye.
She had too much integrity to come near him in that way while she thought he was engaged. And he wouldn’t love her the way he did if she didn’t have that integrity. In return, he couldn’t make any kind of physical contact with her because he never wanted her to think he was that kind of scoundrel.
There was also the very real likelihood that she wasn’t interested in him. She seemed to be happy enough with O’Farrell. O’Farrell knew that Nicholas’s engagement to Margaux was a sham. Nicholas could, as Margaux had suggested, tell O’Farrell he was in love with Skye, but what right did he have to prevent Skye from dating O’Farrell when all Nicholas could offer her was friendship? And maybe not even that if it proved too difficult to maintain without exposing everything he felt. To reveal anything at all meant putting Margaux at risk, meant exposing SOE, meant breaking the law, meant placing his personal feelings above the freedom of every country invaded and occupied by the Nazis.
He could never do that. And Skye would never want him to, of that he was sure.
The only thing he could do was fly by moonlight into France every month, trying to bring this war to an end as soon as possible. The only thing he could do was look down at the ground and curse because the fog had become thick and limitless and he could no longer find a landmark against which to check his position.
He flew on anyway, hopefully with O’Farrell and his Joe behind him, all of them sure to be thinking the same: that after the previous night’s aborted mission due to fog, and the full moon set to waning, and the reception committee having come out each night to wait for them and leaving disappointed, all any of them wanted was for tonight’s mission to go off without a hitch.
The cumulus dropped to one thousand feet. There was so little moonlight penetrating below it that Nicholas continued on blind, relying on compass and memory. He was supposed to rendezvous with O’Farrell at Blois, but it was impossible to see Blois so he kept going, hoping O’Farrell would do the same. Finally, just when he thought he’d have to abort, the fog lifted enough that he could see a river and a church, and he realised that luck was with him and he was no more than a couple of miles off course.
Fog floated past in patches, and only the thinnest feather of moonlight brushed the ground. It didn’t make for ideal landing conditions but nothing was ever ideal. He flew around once to be sure, but he definitely had enough visibility. He saw the Morse letter ‘S’ flashed to let him know that everyone was ready on the ground.
On his second circuit he saw O’Farrell’s Lizzie with Betty Boop brazenly flaunting herself on the tail. He let O’Farrell make his own lap above the field, then he waggled his wings at O’Farrell, who waggled in response to let Nicholas know he was also happy to attempt the landing.
O’Farrell went in first, as was the plan, and Nicholas, watching, swore.
‘What happened?’ Margaux’s voice sounded in his ear through the intercom.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But a Lizzie shouldn’t land like that unless there’s something on the ground.’
He could see O’Farrell climbing out, which never happened unless there was trouble with the plane. Nicholas was supposed to wait, but he couldn’t, not when he might be able to help.
‘We’re going down,’ he said to Margaux.
‘Of course we are,’ she replied.
It made Nicholas smile. The four of them – O’Farrell and Nicholas, and Margaux and O’Farrell’s Joe – Luc was his name – were as close as anyone could be in the circumstances, ever since Margaux had made O’Farrell swear he wouldn’t flirt with her again. Margaux wouldn’t leave any of them on the ground if she could help it, and nor would Nicholas.
But tonight disaster found Nicholas too. He felt the Lysander protest as soon as it hit the ground. His rudder w
as completely stuck and the stick wouldn’t move at all. Even though the photograph he’d checked at the ops room in Tangmere had looked fine, there must have been a deeply gouged track running across the landing strip. While the reception committees were briefed about the kinds of hazards that could damage a plane, it often happened that a field that was perfect one day might be ploughed or soaked with rain or scoured with machinery the next.
‘God dammit!’ he swore and jumped out of the plane.
The reception committee rushed over, all too aware that he was supposed to be off the ground in another two and a half minutes – and they hadn’t even started unloading the cargo. But at this rate they wouldn’t be going anywhere. The tail unit was broken and the rudder needed to be freed. Nicholas kicked it as hard as he could but it didn’t budge.
At last, with a resounding crack, the bottom struts of Nicholas’s Lysander snapped, freeing the rudder. He raced across to help O’Farrell do the same.
‘Will we still be able to fly?’ O’Farrell asked, no longer the cocky pilot he tried to be but scared, Nicholas could tell, scared that they were two American pilots stuck in France for the Nazis to find. Or that their broken planes would fall out of the sky and so would they.
It was Nicholas’s job to resurrect O’Farrell’s confidence, to make him believe they could do whatever they had to do, even though Nicholas’s own doubts were huge. The friction between the two opposing choices – stay and find shelter until they could be picked up tomorrow night perhaps; or fly and hope – abraded his nerves like the scraping of cold air against warm in a thunderstorm.
‘This is what we’re going to do,’ Nicholas said decisively, as if he knew it would work when the reality was that he had no idea. ‘We mightn’t be able to move our elevator controls, but with any luck – and we deserve some – if we throttle it up, it should ascend. I think you’ll have to cut the engine to get the nose to descend when you get too high and too cold up there. We might be able to make it all the way home by alternating between climbing and falling.’
The Paris Secret : A Novel (2020) Page 18