Then there was screaming. They rushed out of the café to find that a young woman had been surrounded outside in the square. A crowd had pushed her until her back was to the railings, not far from the memorial for those lost in the Great War. Men and women were shouting, shouts that quickly turned to jeers. Through a cacophony of angry voices they insisted that she had betrayed resistants—they named Candide and the Actress, and others too. They spat the accusation that she was jealous of the Actress. She denied it, of course, but it was then that they recognized her as Christine, who had once been Auguste Baumel’s sweetheart.
Christine tried to escape the mob, but was jostled back, cornered. She was screaming, begging for her life. Three shots were fired. There was a look of petrified disbelief on her face as she went down. Then the swarm melted away. Afterwards no one remembered who had wielded the pistol.
A less bloodthirsty mob might have shaved Christine Lachasse’s head, or tarred and feathered her, as happened in other towns and villages after the Liberation, when summary justice was handed out to women who had betrayed resistants or slept with the enemy. Apparently the Poet had tried to dissuade the villagers from violence of any kind—the political situation between the partisan factions was too finely balanced to upset—but even he had not prevailed.
“It was Christine, then?” Marthe still could not take it in. “Christine who was responsible for Arlette being taken by the Milice?”
“I had my doubts about her, always,” said Madame. “You once heard us asking if she was safe, and you thought we were talking about you, do you remember?”
Marthe did, with some shame that she had jumped to such self-centred conclusions. “So was that why Auguste stopped seeing her?”
“Of course.”
Marthe gasped. “She came to the farmhouse that day—when I heard Kenton and Scotty in the barn. Do you think—”
“I don’t know.”
“But even so—shot in cold blood.”
“This is no time for taking high moral positions,” said Mme Musset.
The end of the fighting in Provence brought a bitter satisfaction. The settling of local scores began. The bludgeoning heat of high summer added to the unleashing of anger and resentment, which would continue for months and years. Others demanded patriotic celebrations. Kenton and Scotty made arrangements to leave.
On their last night, there was a victory dance in one of the tree-lined squares in Manosque. The townsfolk young and old linked arms and climbed the stones into the old town high above the plain, beckoned by the sound of a band whose players struggled, in their enthusiasm, to keep a coherent tempo. At the centre, the hubbub of excited talk, shrieks of laughter, drums, and bass competed with the stomp of feet.
“Shall we dance?” Kenton asked Marthe as the band caught its stride. He grabbed her before she had time to reply.
And she was in Kenton’s arms, letting him whirl her around. The night was still hot. Her forehead was damp around her hairline. She put her head back and felt the motion lift her. Round and round, they went in time with the beat, in joy and sorrow for what had passed, and in hope for what was to come. The coloured lights would be moving around her, the other dancers, the plane trees around the square. She saw it all and more, in her imagination: The huge aircraft landing in the dark field. Kenton and Scotty walking on either side of her along the moonlit road. And Arlette, so full of life, tap-dancing across the blending room, in the café, waiting at the bus stop at Céreste.
A tear trickled down her cheek.
Kenton slowed, and then stopped dancing. He touched her face so gently, it felt like a breeze at first. Then she felt softness on her lips, then warmth and tenderness. He was kissing her, and she kissed him back.
When they arrived back at the farm, the Mussets were already asleep. Kenton took Marthe’s hand and led her to her bed.
He left early the next morning.
She refused to feel sad. It was a fine lesson in love, Marthe decided. In the darkness, they had all discovered what they truly were. There were those who had flown to the light, and those who had pulled back farther into the blackest corners. They had all had to learn the architecture of darkness, just as she had once learned to read the smells and sounds and textures of constant night.
After the war, she worked harder than ever to understand the language of scent, the best marriages of disparate aromas and strengths. She used the flowers and herbs that grew all around her, blending combinations into an intimate biography of her life.
One by one, the Musset factory put the scents into production. They sold well. Buyers responded to their sincerity and their relationship with the landscape. The old steam distillery evolved into the prestigious “Parfumeur-Distillateur Musset,” and Marthe Lincel became a creator of perfumes sold throughout Provence.
“A simple scent captures a moment in time,” she once said. “A perfume tells a story on the skin.”
The letter from Kenton came several years later.
Somewhere, somehow, he had found someone to translate his thoughts twice over: into French and into Braille. The trouble he had taken spoke as much as the words themselves. “I have still never met anyone like you,” he wrote. “I think of you in your blue hills with your fragrances, as I hope that you think of me too, sometimes, in my land far away, and know that we are the same, that a part of us is together.
“I wanted to tell you that I am happy, and I am getting married. I hope you are happy too. You deserve it, dearest Marthe. I shall always be grateful to you for what you did for Scotty and me. Without you, I wouldn’t be here today, and I shall always love you in my way.”
With that letter came a notice from a bank in Paris and a lawyer’s letter. The Attwaters of Boston had deposited a large sum of money to be used by the Musset distillery, with the stipulation that it was to allow Marthe Lincel to continue her work as a parfumeuse, and in time to open a perfume emporium in Paris.
When her parfumerie opened in the place Vendôme in Paris in 1950, Marthe sent a magazine article heralding the event to Boston. The photographs showed a slim, elegant woman with a beguiling expression. She was posed in front of a counter full of scent bottles and their fashionable striped boxes, smiling. Her dark hair was cut in a short, fashionable style, and her dress was from Dior. Another captured her sitting on a gilded chair. It wasn’t possible to tell from these skillful photographs that Marthe Lincel’s lively eyes could not see.
The pictures she drew on were vibrant as ever, though. The crumbling stone farmstead overlooking the great Luberon valley where she was born. The blending room of the distillery in Manosque where she had experienced a kind of rebirth, beginning the transformation into the woman she was now. Scent was memory, and memory a complex blend of scent and emotion: the perfect flowers of the lavender hills, like millions of mauve butterflies fluttering on stalks; the violet; the heliotrope of home, with its heart of sweet almond and cherry vanilla. She mixed them all into her signature fragrance Lavande de Nuit, along with a breath of civet musk and a haunting trace of smoke.
Book III
A Shadow Life
1
Orchard Court
London, April 1943
The bath at Orchard Court was a deep black marble affair. This was unusual enough for a London flat (Iris was not the only one who looked at it longingly), but not as extraordinary as the onyx bidet by its side, the pair set off by striking black-and-white tiles. As there was nowhere else for visitors to sit as they waited, the bathroom had to serve.
Throughout March and April that year, an increasing flow of young men and women had arrived in the lobby of Orchard Court, a building on the corner of Portman Square and Orchard Street, and were shown up to this small flat, in which the sitting room and two small bedrooms were used as offices. The callers were never invited to Baker Street, but to this anonymous property a short walk away. “Best they never set foot inside the Firm, that way there’s no danger of anyone seeing or hearing something they shouldn’t
know,” said Miss Acton.
That day, two men and a woman were sitting on the edge of the black marble bath; another man was standing. Two partially open umbrellas were hooked over the taps, dripping.
The visitors had been greeted at the door of the second-floor flat by Iris Nightingale, newly promoted to intelligence assistant, and shown immediately into the bathroom, where they perched incongruously in their town clothes.
Colonel Tyndale had been unavoidably detained, and the reason was not good news, Iris surmised, judging from his expression a moment ago in the hall. His narrow face was not built for unnecessary argument; his brow flamed and the bags under his eyes grew pronounced whenever voices rose in anger or frustration. He had finally arrived at Orchard Court, in a hollow-cheeked fluster of raincoat and papers; he and Miss Acton were now closeted in the sitting room where the interviews would take place.
At the door of the bathroom Iris produced a bottle of brandy and some unmatched glass tumblers. “It won’t be long now,” she said brightly. “How about a drink?”
It really was the least she could do. Often the guests had very little idea why they had been invited to these odd gatherings. Their only qualification was that they had a French or Belgian parent, or spoke near-native French from years spent on the Continent. They came in batches after passing a selection interview in a small airless office consisting of two plain tables and some scuffed wooden chairs in the basement of the War Office, and were required to sign the Official Secrets Act.
These four were quiet ones, hardly speaking to Iris, let alone to each other. Not necessarily a bad thing. At this stage, it was merely a fact to note. Iris gave a friendly smile as she committed certain obvious traits to memory. The man she guessed was the oldest, thirty-five perhaps, in a well-cut suit, gave the briefest grimace at the mention of Miss Acton’s name. He tipped his drink back in one. The man next to him wore a suit that had crinkled and was damp on the shoulders, and his blond hair was slicked back—caught out in the rain shower. He leant back against the tiles and looked up to the ceiling. The third man was very young. He met her eye, and a nervous tic jerked beneath his own, high on the left cheekbone. The woman sat calmly, answering when she was addressed but otherwise giving the impression that she was waiting for a doctor’s appointment, absorbed in private thoughts. She was in her early twenties, pretty, though her dark hair looked as if she had cut it herself. She was the only one to refuse a drink. After a while, she got out some crochet work and bent her head over it.
“Sun and showers, what a day,” ventured Iris.
“Typical bloody England,” replied the man in the smart suit. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. Defensive, despite the air of sophistication.
“Better in here than out,” said the youngest, with an eagerness to please that only underscored his nervousness.
“I expect so,” said Iris.
The woman listened, now and then looking up from the hook and yarn to watch them in the mirror by the basin. Smart cookie, thought Iris. First impressions were vital. In some situations, that was all the chance they would have.
A low buzzer sounded.
“And we’re off,” said Iris, nodding towards the nervous young man and deciding to put him out of his agony by giving him the first slot. “If you’d like to come with me. . . .”
It went without saying that Iris had no idea what she was getting into, though that was true one way or another, she suspected, of everyone who enlisted, was drafted, or served their country in any capacity during the war. If anyone asked, Iris made a self-effacing reference to the “little job” at which she was still plugging away. One of the other girls told her that she used to tell her friends she worked at Marks and Spencer’s London headquarters, whose building they had taken over, until the questions about the chances of obtaining good-quality clothes under the counter became too onerous. She had to pretend to leave and “go into teaching.”
Iris had planned to join the Wrens when she left school, and might well have done so but for the intervention of her headmistress. Term was almost over when the jutting shelf of Miss Jeffery’s bosom arrested any further progress down the library corridor.
“I understand you are contemplating your future in the Women’s Royal Naval Service.”
“Yes, Miss Jeffery.”
“Have you considered playing to your strengths as a linguist and training as a secretary who can work in French and German? There is a bursary available, and I would be very pleased to recommend you.”
And so, because Miss Jeffery had almost always been kind and well-meaning, qualities all too rare in Iris’s checkered experience of school life, the advice was taken. Iris enrolled in the three-month residential secretarial course in Bedford, gratefully accepting the bursary to pay her board and lodging, and assuming throughout that the language instruction in military and naval terms was required to enable her to enter the Wrens as a secretary or wireless telegraphist. The instruction was good, and Iris, always meticulous in her work, came top of her class of twenty-five in the final exams. She emerged with a certificate in typing, shorthand, and French and German translation. Her tutoring in Morse code did not seem to be certified on paper.
A few days after she’d completed the course, a letter came to her aunt’s flat in Battersea from the Inter Services Research Bureau, giving no details but asking Iris to contact them to arrange an interview for a job. She telephoned the number she was given and was asked to present herself at a small hotel in Victoria the next day.
“Could you tell me a little more about the position, please?”
“Why don’t you come along, and then it will be easier to explain,” said the woman’s voice, clipped and authoritative, on the other end of the line.
“I will, but could you tell me please how you came to know I was looking for a job? It seems a bit—”
“You have been recommended. We’ll see you tomorrow then, at ten. Good-bye.”
The next day the bus from Battersea dropped her at Victoria Station in plenty of time to walk to her appointment. October leaves had collected on the sandbags that lined the streets north of the river. The hotel was a soot-streaked commercial establishment behind Ebury Street. She was directed at the reception desk to a small room on the first floor, facing the street. She had hardly raised her knuckles from a tentative knock under the metal number 4 before a young woman wearing pearls and a grey serge suit pulled the door open. Twin beds had been pushed against opposite walls to provide seating. Between the beds, a wooden table took up most of the space.
A wide-shouldered woman with a gravelly voice stood up, held out her hand, and introduced herself as Miss Allott.
“Do take a seat.”
Iris took the bed on the other side of the table.
Miss Allott stared intently at a flimsy sheet of paper for a few moments.
“Born 1922, and you’ve just turned nineteen.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Iris.
“Lived in Hove, but in 1931 you were sent to a boarding school in Switzerland for six years. What were the circumstances of this move?”
Iris was taken aback, but found herself answering politely as ever, the natural result of years spent under the control of Miss Jeffery and her ilk. This Miss Allott, with her carefully sculpted hair and severe expression, was undoubtedly one of them.
“My father died. My mother remarried and went to live in Berne with her new husband.”
“There follow various boarding schools in Sussex and Wiltshire . . . would you care to elaborate on the reasons?”
“My mother . . . felt she was unable to cope. She was having difficulties in her second marriage. We returned to England. She couldn’t settle in Sussex, so she tried Wiltshire. I think she wanted me close by but not actually at home.”
“And where is she now?”
“She lives just outside Salisbury.”
“Other family?”
“An aunt, my mother’s sister. I’m currently staying w
ith her.”
“So . . .” Miss Allott did not pursue the investigation. “Languages—you speak French and German well, and some Italian too?”
“I speak them well enough. French with fluency, German adequately. Some Italian, but only enough to get by.”
Miss Allott crossed her arms and leaned forward across the table. “Que pensez-vous de la situation politique en France actuellement?”
Iris replied that it was an impossible situation politically for the French. Was their government for or against the old France and its people; were the members of the Vichy regime motivated by political expediency or personal power? And all the while the ordinary citizens were surely only trying to get by as best they could.
After a few more questions about her unsatisfactory background, Iris was abruptly dismissed from the twin-bedded interview room. She was making for the door when Miss Allott tossed one last ball.
“Would you say you were imaginative, Miss Nightingale?”
What an odd thing to ask.
Iris hesitated. “I don’t consider that I am, particularly. I’m not a dreamer, if that’s what you mean. I would say that I was rather straightforward . . . sensible. I’ve rather had to be, with a mother like mine.”
Miss Allott frowned. She said nothing more, and a moment later Iris was out in the corridor again. She had said too much about her personal difficulties. It seemed she had failed to satisfy her interlocutor, just as she always did her mother. But the next day a letter arrived inviting Iris to present herself for work the following Monday at 64 Baker Street.
It would be a few months before Iris realised that Mavis Acton (not Allott at all) made up her mind almost immediately as to the suitability of a candidate, and very rarely revised that opinion.
Iris signed the Official Secrets Act on her first morning at 64 Baker Street. It was an elegant light-grey stone building, six windows wide; a brass plate by the door offered the anodyne misinformation that these were the offices of the Inter Services Research Bureau. She was introduced, with perfunctory politeness, to Colonel Hugh Tyndale, head of F Section. His harassed manner implied that Iris had arrived at a tricky juncture, but it was not long before it became apparent that this was his normal demeanour. He looked down on her—he was a tall, thin man with a stoop—and blinked through round tortoiseshell glasses before nodding his dismissal and hurrying past.
The Sea Garden Page 18