The Sea Garden

by Deborah Lawrenson

  “But the messages we received from you, all through last month?”

  “From the avenue Foch. I had long gone.”

  No one needed to mention the information that had been transmitted in return.

  “Where’s Rose now?” asked Miss Acton.

  “She is the one who has gone south with Xavier.”

  If Iris expected them to praise Xavier’s actions in facilitating their almost miraculous escape, she was mistaken.

  “Xavier Descours takes a lot on himself,” said Tyndale with a note of grim sarcasm.

  Neither did Thérèse seem grateful. “He was cavalier about my safety. He just left me in the hotel at Châteaudun. If you ask me, there’s something not right about him.”

  From their reactions, it was evident that Tyndale and Mavis Acton considered this escapade typical of Xavier, his high-handed assumption of responsibility as well as his daring. In these risky endeavours it was essential to make pragmatic decisions at crucial moments, though some would say he acted without regard for others. Iris took a deep breath and concentrated on note taking.

  Two weeks later a message was sent to London from a wireless that was now on the suspect list. Signed off “Geheime Staatspolitzei”—the Gestapo—it thanked them for the extremely useful information, supplies, and pleasant, talkative agents. “Some of them, most regrettably, have had to be shot, but others are being far more cooperative.”

  7

  What Was Left

  London, spring 1944

  The clock at Piccadilly Circus was the centrepiece of the “Guinness Time” advertisement. “Guinness is good for you. Gives you strength.” Iris tried a glass, but a few sips made her feel sick.

  On rainy streets the smell of wet wool and sweat-soaked uniforms of all kinds was unpleasantly overwhelming; travel by tube was unbearable. Even the air in the office at Baker Street was thick with a dusty ink-and-old-paper stench that turned Iris’s stomach. It was as if her sense of smell had suddenly intensified. Was this what it was like to be a dog?

  She was pregnant.

  When Xavier next came to London, she would tell him. Their situation was unconventional, but even so, she knew he would be pleased. Tyndale had already sent word to France that Xavier was being recalled for an urgent update on the situation in France, and to explain himself. Though Xavier would be the one setting out certain bleak facts to Baker Street, of that Iris was certain. He was the one who knew the brutality and the hazards at the sharp end of the operation: the action, the roar of engines and rattle of gunfire—while London drowned in the quiet intensity of paper and secrecy.

  “Evil is like a snake,” Xavier had told her, his bare feet rooted in the pile of her bedroom rug. “If you flap at it or try to stamp on its tail, it will switch round and strike you. You have to aim for the head.”

  She had no doubt who would prevail. But Iris’s defining quality had always been determination. “You just don’t give up, do you?” her mother used to say, usually more in exasperation than wonder. She would need to draw on all her reserves for the coming months and years. She had no claim on Xavier, but that did not mean she could not hope for the future.

  More immediately, she would have to think how on earth to frame the information for her mother. She would have to tell Miss Acton, too, and sooner rather than later. She dreaded doing so, but she had taken out her clothes as far as they would go. There was no longer any disguising it.

  But Xavier ignored the exhortations from London and did not return to England. Since Rose’s escape he had relinquished his role as air movement officer in the north and centre of France and moved south, where the Resistance was strongest.

  At Tangmere the operations continued doggedly, though Iris was not often sent now. The stuffing had been knocked out of F Section—the Dutch and Belgian sections had suffered similarly at the hands of the Gestapo in what they called the Radio Game—and the traffic was predominantly MI6 intelligence and Free French.

  It was one of the Free French, newly arrived by the April moon, who delivered the parcel to Orchard Court. The doorman brought up the unexpected gift with an expression of some distaste, for the paper was tatty and ripped, a Francs-Tireurs propaganda sheet on which Iris’s name was scrawled.

  Iris pulled off the wrapping. It was a bottle of perfume: a voluptuous lavender scent with the label “Distillerie Musset, Manosque.”

  “Was there a message?” she asked, desperately trying to damp down her hopes.

  “No card, miss. But the gentleman who brought it did say something.”

  “Yes?”

  “This is from Xavier.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, miss.”

  He had not forgotten her. She ran her hands over the bottle.

  “Careful, miss.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  The doorman bent over and picked something up from the floor. “This fell out of the packaging. You didn’t even notice.”

  It was soft, an envelope of black velvet two inches long, hand-stitched. No wonder she hadn’t heard it fall.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Iris returned to her desk before opening the flap of the velvet pouch. She pulled out a necklace: a single pearl on a fragile gold chain. She sat transfixed by the lustre of the tiny globe. Through her tears, it glowed against the velvet like a miniature moon in the night sky.

  She undid the clasp and put it on.

  After that, nothing.

  At the end of May 1944, rockets charged with high explosive thrummed across the London sky before their engines cut out. In the ominous silence as they began their descent, the souls on the ground could only pray to avoid a direct hit, that the device would remain airborne for a few seconds longer. On impact, houses caved in like matchwood. As if to defy the destruction, allotments sprang up everywhere on the cleared spaces between smoke-streaked buildings, but there was no security or certainty anywhere.

  Iris was let go from F Section. She would not—could not—wish the baby away, though she wondered how on earth she would manage. Then she stopped herself. How many other women were in the same position? How many were young widows? She would only be one of many. It wouldn’t be easy, of course, but she would manage. What else could she do? A letter to her mother resulted in four pages of disappointment and invective by return post, leaving it clear that she could expect no support from that quarter.

  “I know there’s no hope of marrying Xavier, or any kind of relationship in all probability,” she told Nancy, “but I do want to tell him.”

  So much death—what else to do but balance it with life where it took hold?

  “Is there really no chance of a relationship?” asked Nancy.

  Iris touched the pearl at her throat for reassurance. “I have no idea—but who knows? Who knows anything anymore?”

  When France was liberated that August, and with the baby due any day, Iris steeled herself and telephoned Miss Acton to ask for news but was given short shrift by one of the secretaries who had always previously been polite. Iris felt the moral superiority down the line; she was told she could leave a message, but she should be aware it was unlikely to elicit a response.

  The child was born at the beginning of September, and named Suzanne. Iris and Nancy moved into the bottom half of a bomb-damaged house in Chester Row, near Sloane Square. The house was solid enough, but the wooden fittings had skewed with the force of a nearby explosion, so that the stairs mounted at a disconcerting angle and few of the doors closed properly. They didn’t mind; the rent was cheap in consequence and they would never otherwise have been able to afford such a pleasant location.

  An early visitor was Rory Fitzgerald. Iris was well aware that her situation had been much discussed among her former colleagues: most were surprised, to say the least; almost all felt quietly sorry that she had ruined her chances of a decent marriage; several publicly expressed the view that she was an utter fool. Not Rory. He arrived with a bunch of red dahlias from Yorkshire, a teddy
bear for Suzanne, and a soppy grin on his face. She was so delighted to see him that she almost accepted impetuously when he asked her to marry him; but then reason prevailed, and she let him down as gently as she could. He was too bound up in the events that had brought her into Xavier’s world, and she knew she would never be able to dissociate the man she loved from the man she would have to make herself love.

  She tried again to contact Mavis Acton, with no more luck than before. She wrote her a letter, addressed to Baker Street and marked “Private,” reiterating her wish to help in any way she could and giving her new address. She received no reply.

  Iris cradled the warm, plump weight of the child, feeling the slub of her daughter’s flannel nightdress and the softness of her feet. She cupped the shrimp toes in her hand, and the child moved and settled deeper into her arms with a small breath of contentment.

  Sometimes it seemed the baby was the only part of her life that was still in colour, while the rest had receded into the monochrome of her wartime memories and present losses. All she had left of Xavier.

  Now that it was over, the great, momentous events of the war seemed insignificant compared to the powerful, painful, small personal experiences that had given her this new life. The first kiss in the blackout at Green Park occupied more space than the repetitive work at Baker Street; their nights under the eaves at Tavistock Square glowed more brightly than the flames above bomb-blasted London. Her mind lacked all sense of perspective. The birth of their child was made bearable by the liberation of France and the hope that Xavier would return.

  Loud knocks on the door made them jump.

  It was the week before Christmas. They were not expecting visitors.

  “I’ll go,” said Nancy. “You look far too comfortable to move.”

  “Another pack of carol singers, I expect,” said Iris. “Not that you can blame the poor children for trying anything to earn pennies.” But even as she said it, she could hear there was no feeble rendition of “Away in a Manger.”

  Nancy returned with Mavis Acton.

  Iris got to her feet with the baby.

  Miss Acton glanced at Suzanne, made no acknowledgement, and spoke as if Iris had never left Baker Street. “I got your letter. It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” she said.

  Iris swallowed, feeling grateful for the matter-of-factness. The less emotion, the better. She could deal with Mavis Acton’s brand of compassion.

  Her former boss accepted a cup of tea, and Nancy slipped away to make it.

  She took off her elegant coat and sat by the fire, getting straight to the point.

  “In September, Colonel Tyndale and I went to Paris to set up a meeting point at the Hotel Cecil where our people could come in. We had about a hundred F Section agents still missing, sixteen of them women. At first there was a steady stream of returning agents. Over the following months almost half did turn up, most of them with harrowing tales to tell.

  “We did a tour of the F Section circuits, gathering information and offering congratulations, rather in defiance of General de Gaulle, who is now railing against the presence of any British intelligence in the country, denigrating any part we played. He seems determined to peddle the myth that the French people rose up and liberated themselves without help from anyone. It’s shameless, it really is.”

  Iris had the disloyal thought that perhaps Tyndale had gone to make sure all traces of F Section’s failure in London were covered over.

  “Gradually the trickle of new arrivals in Paris dried up. We began issuing the names of our missing to all the agencies that were piling in, especially the Red Cross. Captured German officers and agents were being interrogated by the Allied military. We started going through the transcripts of these interviews, checking their versions of events with what we knew from our own sources, looking for clues, trying to build up the picture.”

  Miss Acton looked at the baby, still unable to bring herself to speak of the child’s connection to the story.

  “Most of the men involved—in MI6, the SIS, the Foreign Office—are convinced that those agents who have still not made it will get home at some stage. I think otherwise. My responsibility is to remain in place until all are accounted for, especially the women agents. There is some . . . disparagement of my continuing efforts.”

  Her use of the pronoun my was telling. Tyndale had slid from the scene. Iris understood immediately the opportunity she was being offered.

  “You will need some help,” said Iris.

  “I have informed the War Office, such as it remains, that I require an office and an assistant until further notice.”

  “I accept.”

  “How will you manage?” Miss Acton, nodding towards Suzanne.

  “I don’t know yet, but I will.”

  Nancy stepped in. Not for the first time, Iris realised she would never have been able to do what she did without her friend. It was the best chance she had to find out about Xavier, and they both knew it. And Rose, who had gone south with him. Rose was also among the missing.

  Good intentions had gone wrong, mistakes had been made. Mavis Acton was big enough to admit as much, which was more than some of the men would do. There was an embarrassed lack of will to go in search of those who had not returned. It was as though they knew they ought to do it, but would or could not. But they could save face by permitting the women to follow their sentimental instincts, even while they disparaged their efforts. To her immense credit, Miss Acton carried on, past caring who thought her unconventional.

  That winter, the atmosphere turned as dark as the days. Accusations of treachery and collaboration were made. Information was hard to assess. The French security police took control of German records and limited British access. They were told repeatedly to keep away, to stop requesting records pertaining to the actions of years past. The more obstacles thrown in their path, the more dogged their search became. Only now had the Firm begun to be referred to as SOE, the Special Operations Executive, as conceived by Churchill himself.

  Iris left Suzanne with Nancy and went to Paris, where she and Miss Acton (there had been no invitation to call her Mavis) went with a former SIS agent to 3a, place des Etats-Unis, the building used as a Gestapo prison, where Rose and Thérèse had been held, and from where they had escaped. They were shown blood on the walls, some from SOE agents who were last seen alive there.

  The SIS agent survived thanks to being held back at 3a place des Etats-Unis for further interrogation. He managed to escape by befriending the guards, and made a run for it through the same garden gate. One of the guards, a Russian conscripted from Georgia on the eastern front, had been bribed to leave it unlocked. The agent had remained in hiding in Paris until the city was liberated.

  The Poles had most of the up-to-date information. It was through colleagues in the Polish section that they first heard of Ravensbrück. “Before, I thought the worst thing I ever had to do was to sew a tablet of poison into the shirt cuffs of men who knew they would be tortured if captured. Now I know that was a mercy,” Iris told Nancy on her return.

  It was becoming clearer what had happened to the prisoners held as spies. More and more reports were emerging that many of these missing men and women had been “transferred to Germany.” They had been taken to the concentration camps.

  In Paris, more than four hundred people linked to the Prosper network built up by SOE had been killed—and leads to Xavier abounded, though the information was often contradictory.

  One overcast afternoon, in a private room above a nondescript café close to the Gare du Nord, Miss Acton and Iris interviewed a former resistant from the Swagman circuit based in Tours. He was an elderly gentleman, a watchmaker by trade who often had business in Paris. His white hair, round cheeks, and veined nose gave him a harmless, avuncular look. He had last seen Rose in the summer of 1943, shortly after she arrived in France; he had known Xavier too.

  “Descours appeared just at the time when the secret air operations were beginning in 1942. The
landing grounds in France, chosen by Resistance members who were not pilots, were most unsatisfactory. But Descours had been a private pilot, and he knew what was required. He said he would arrange it, and he did. He was impressive.

  “There had always been rumours that he had certain links to the Gestapo. But we looked at his record in France. All we saw was that the fellow did more good than harm. More than a hundred agents transported with no losses. Yes, he was . . . what you call, a chancer, but at that stage we took a line of pragmatism. To operate successfully, it was part of the thin line one walked.

  “But he was quite an operator.”

  The watchmaker lit his pipe.

  “Some people didn’t like him. They wondered if he could be trusted.”

  “Why was that?” asked Miss Acton evenly.

  “The Gestapo in Paris knew too much. There must have been a double agent somewhere. Someone who knew exactly when and where the agents were meeting.”

  “Do you have any theories about who that was?”

  “Personally, no.”

  “But some people were suspicious that it might be Descours?”

  The old man spread his neat, steady hands. “Circumstantially, it could have looked that way. They asked themselves how aircraft could fly secretly over an occupied country without incident—how was it that there were so few shot down? They deduced that it was because the Germans knew all along and allowed the planes to land.”

  “Suppose that was the case,” said Iris. “If they had stopped to think properly, they would have seen that any contact with the German authorities was a necessary evil. Perhaps the Germans were the ones being used.”

  “That’s true. We all knew about a high-ranking German officer here who smuggled gold back to Germany every leave. He had it welded behind his teeth by a French dentist. The dentist had had no choice but to give him this gold service treatment, but he was no collaborator. The German thought so highly of him that he was often invited to dine at the officers’ mess, where he was privy to all kinds of information, which he naturally passed on to our network.”