The Sea Garden

by Deborah Lawrenson

  Iris nodded, heart pounding. Xavier had told her that very story. “Where did this gold come from?” she asked, remembering her lover’s disgust at the presumed source, the molten remains of jewellery stolen from Jewish deportees.

  “Better not to ask,” said the watchmaker. “But then, perhaps there was a bigger game.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only that. There were rumours that Xavier Descours was seen at the avenue Foch, and he was no prisoner of the Gestapo. On the contrary, he was on very good terms with the SS man there, Kieffer.”

  Once a person had a first twinge of suspicion, there could be no recovery of complete trust. When Iris thought back to the times she’d spent with Xavier, and examined what happened in the light of what she knew to be true, she was forced to admit that there was plenty of cause for suspicion. The more she found out, the harder it was to see the man she thought she knew; he was as evasive in absence as he had been ruthless in action.

  But then she remembered his self-reliance and energy, his ability to withstand pressure. The secretive nature of all that they did. His underlying sadness too: the way he would not speak of his family; the tightly closed emotions whenever he spoke of home, wherever that was.

  Iris always thought Xavier loved the danger every bit as much as he loved her. He was an egocentric, a marauder, a diehard. Perhaps that was exactly what had attracted her.

  “Qui s’excuse, s’accuse,” he once told her. Whoever makes excuses accuses himself.

  And also: “People say the most disagreeable things about me.”

  Back in London, they were thanked for their efforts and advised to confine themselves to “welfare work.” The head of the Security Directorate had asked for the F Section files, a handover that Miss Acton staunchly resisted. Time was running out to find what they needed.

  “Rules will have to be broken,” Miss Acton decreed.

  The rules had been broken in the first place to get the SOE agents, especially the women, to France. The women were issued with First Aid Nursing Yeomanry suits as a cover story while in Britain, but they had none of the internationally agreed protection conferred by a uniform; in France they wore civilian clothes, which meant they were spies and likely to be executed if caught.

  It was a fight every step of the way. It took six months before the security directorate sanctioned the names of SOE agents being published in prisoner-of-war casualty lists. While they waited for any news, they worked their way through the thousands upon thousands of pages of testimony that was spilling out of commissions in Germany and territories that had been under Nazi control.

  Unspoken was the mutual agreement between Miss Acton and Iris that they would not countenance these agents remaining in limbo with “Missing Presumed Dead” stamped on their files; they would uncover their fates, no matter how terrible. Meanwhile, they parcelled personal effects that had been brought back from the cottage at Tangmere and sent them back to the families of the agents with a brief note: “Unfortunately we are still without further news.” Knowing that the Baker Street office was likely to be closed at any time, they gave out the address of the Special Forces Club, with a polite request that all inquiries should be made through F Section and no other agency, so as not to complicate matters.

  Iris worked on the files, checking and cross-referencing in the sitting room of the house she still shared with Nancy, as Suzanne slept or watched her from the rug on the floor. A telephone was installed (negotiated by Mavis Acton to facilitate the suggested welfare work) that enabled their investigations to continue.

  Among the last letters forwarded to 64 Baker Street was one from “Fabienne Descours” asking if the SOE had any news of her husband, using his code name so there could be no misunderstanding. Iris knew then, in her bones, that he was not coming back.

  Over the months, pieces of the picture began to fit together. Iris was physically sick the first time she read part of a concentration camp file: there had been nothing to prepare her.

  The British were finally allowed to interrogate the French collaborators who had worked in these death camps, testimonies taken before the collaborators were executed. Some of them recalled agents by description, men and women of British and many other nationalities, including French. The trail led to other camps where the staff who had given useful witness statements, and might have been able to provide further clues, had already been executed, confessions unheard.

  By the summer of 1945 there was additional pressure on the search. Relations were deteriorating fast between the Allies and the Russians, and if they wanted access to camps in the east, there was little time to waste.

  The public was not even supposed to know that women had been sent into occupied Europe as spies. Even after the war, when so many were telling their astonishing stories publicly for the first time, as many others were seeking to cover their traces. The father of Violette Szabo, the SOE agent executed at Ravensbrück and later to receive a posthumous George Cross for her heroism behind the lines, was making waves as the War Office dithered about admitting what was considered an unpalatable truth.

  Quietly, it came to be generally accepted that anyone in Europe who had not returned home by August 1945 was not coming back.

  Never one to give up, Mavis Acton travelled to Germany in January 1946 with a list of fifty-two SOE agents who were still missing, twelve of whom were women.

  In London, Iris read the newspapers avidly. Miss Acton telephoned with descriptions of the destruction in Berlin: the jagged walls of bombed buildings, the dust and desolation. Long queues snaked from water pumps in rubble-strewn streets. And the quietness. Defeat manifested as a heavy, silent state of shock.

  From Berlin, Miss Acton travelled to Bad Oeynhausen, headquarters of the British zone, having been promoted to the rank of squadron officer both to facilitate access to the documents she needed to see and, more importantly, to interview key German personnel awaiting trial for war crimes. In particular she wanted to speak to the camp Kommandants of Sachenhausen and Ravensbrück, where she knew several of her “girls” had been transported.

  She compiled a roller index of card files, of names and places where they were last seen alive.

  “Colette and Francine were in Dachau by November 1943, executed two months later,” she said, businesslike. “However, not all our girls were sent over the German border. There was another camp, in the Alsace, tucked into the Vosges mountains: Natzweiler. A small camp. Not many people knew about it. That was how it was supposed to be. It was for resistants, spies, and political dissidents, where they were to vanish without trace. ‘Nacht und Nebel,’ they called it, Night and Fog, into which prisoners would disappear. Very few records, no hard evidence of who lived or died there.

  “There are reports that at least one British woman was taken there. Two Frenchwomen and one Englishwoman arrived at the camp in June 1944.”

  Iris braced herself.

  “According to the evidence I’ve seen, that woman was Rose. We can’t be absolutely certain. We are reliant on witness testimony and description, some from surviving prisoners.”

  “What points to Rose?”

  “The description fits—height and build, hair, all correspond. A fellow prisoner saw her arrive. He particularly remembered her calm bearing, was astonished by it, in fact. The most important account comes from a German who worked at the camp”—Miss Acton hesitated uncharacteristically—“as a stoker in the newly built crematorium. He has stated that these three women were given injections, gassed, and then burned. There were no remains.”

  “But Rose went south with Xavier . . . how did she end up in Alsace?”

  “The women were held first in a prison in Karlsruhe. They could have been sent there from anywhere in France. One of the Frenchwomen left a message scratched on an enamel cup there, of their three names and the date they were moved out. Two names mean nothing to us, but the third was Rosa Williams. Rose’s real name—”

  “—was Rita Williams.”
>
  Iris took the news like a blow to the chest. She should have acted more decisively on her instincts when the agents’ wireless messages came in with their embedded warnings. She should have made Tyndale take her seriously. As it was, the story was growing that the British had known exactly what was going on but decided to play the game themselves, though it involved the sacrifice of their own people. As a face-saving story, it was not convincing in the slightest, thought Iris.

  But it seemed Miss Acton had not discounted the possibility of truth in the watchmaker’s reference to a bigger game. As far as she was concerned now, Xavier Descours was a traitor, a double agent embroiled with the SS in Paris.

  Could that have been the case? He had been recruited in France, and so had never passed through the F Section training and vetting. His cover story was that he worked closely with the Vichy government, and by extension, the Germans, providing electronics equipment, at least in the beginning. Was that a blind to his true loyalty? After most of the members of his circuit were betrayed, he insisted on going back to find out what had happened and to alert other cells to the disaster—or was he returning to betray more himself?

  He had still not been traced.

  The office in Baker Street closed. Iris continued to work from home and to speak on the telephone with Mavis Acton. Over tea at Fortnum and Mason, Miss Acton’s preferred venue to meet face-to-face, Iris tried one last time.

  “If Xavier was in contact with the Gestapo, you could say that he was playing them for all he was worth—far from betraying his circuit when he disappeared, leaving Thérèse at Châteaudun, he was trying to protect her. Don’t forget he organised the escape for her and Rose.”

  “In the end, he was not one of ours,” said Miss Acton.

  “But we were all in it together, weren’t we?”

  “That’s a rather romantic view of things, wouldn’t you say?”

  There was no doubting her meaning. She closed the subject, with an imperious wave to the waiter.

  Mavis Acton was now convinced of Xavier’s guilt, and there was no persuading her otherwise. In the long weeks afterwards Iris felt as if she might have been used—it was just possible Miss Acton had been keeping an eye on her all the time they had been working together, waiting to see whether she was still in contact with Xavier.

  But no contact was ever made, and somehow Iris had to live with the ambiguity of their intimacy and promises, and the knowledge that he and she had been complicit in at least one betrayal—that of his wife.

  On the strength of a fine reference from Miss Acton—she was always fair, which made her conclusions about Xavier that much harder to take—Iris secured a part-time secretarial job at the Home Office. Her minuscule salary went almost entirely into the pot at Chester Row, where the top two storeys of the bomb-damaged house had become available.

  Iris lived here with Suzanne and a young mother’s help called Jane, who had lost her family and all her possessions in the Luftwaffe’s firestorms over the capital. Nancy and Phil, who had married as soon as Phil came home from the Far East, had the lower maisonette. When Nancy and Phil’s first child was born ten months after the wedding, Jane worked for them all. She came to be treated as part of the extended family, and the arrangement proved a boon all round.

  8

  Never Give Up

  Provence, May 1948

  After the war, Xavier was sometimes mentioned in the many books about SOE that began to appear. But a man who is no longer there cannot defend his reputation. He was a convenient scapegoat. Many years later, when more authoritative histories were written with the benefit of newly opened archive material, there were still more questions than answers about Xavier Descours.

  Those who knew him and worked with him always expressed surprise that he was the one who had betrayed them. He was a good man, a moral man, they said. If he had been in cahoots with the Germans, he must have been doing so for the greater good. How had so many of his people escaped capture? How had his flights never been intercepted? During the moon periods, the Luftwaffe was active all along the north coast of France, and although other flights had been intercepted or shot down, the Descours flights had achieved an astonishing record of success. Had he been blamed for others’ failures? Did he take German money? Many claimed he did. But the truth was harder to call.

  It transpired that he had indeed been to the avenue Foch, on more than one occasion. The first time he was called in to be interviewed by the Gestapo’s Kieffer, but he walked free afterwards. Had Xavier managed to persuade the Germans that he should be allowed to go about his business, while keeping them informed? Did he, like the German officer’s dentist, intend to get more out of the arrangement than the Nazis did?

  His fury when he realized how inept London had been in handling messages from the captured radios was real enough. The Germans had everything, from the codes to the timetables when the signals were due. Some ventured that he was so angry, he didn’t care anymore, because to him it was clear that he had been working for idiots. Others remained convinced that the setback had spurred him to work ever harder, but more independently from the British, away from his dangerous game with the Gestapo in Paris.

  Was he dead—or had he begun a new life far away from all the complexities of his wartime tightrope? “Heureux sont ceux qui ont beaucoup peché, il leur sera beaucoup pardonné”—Happy are those who have sinned greatly, for a great deal will be forgiven them—he had once told her. For years she had pulled that aphorism apart, wondering if it held an answer.

  As the years went by, it was not hope of finding Xavier alive that drove Iris, but the desire to know what to tell Suzanne about her father.

  Time and again, Iris came back to the last known sighting of him.

  On the night of August 10, 1944, Xavier Descours was the flight liaison officer for a joint British-American operation in Provence. The RAF flew a Dakota in from Cecina in northern Italy to a secret landing strip known as Spitfire, close to Saint-Christol in the Sault lavender area. The mission that night was not a complete success. On board were fifteen men, including returning French politicians and agents, and seven hundred and fifty kilos of freight. The disembarking French and the freight—mainly weapons and explosives—vanished into the night without incident. But the turnabout and takeoff with a total of thirty men, most of whom were escaping US Fortress aircrew, was more problematic. The Dakota—the largest aircraft to set down at Spitfire—ran out of runway at the end of the field, snagging on a band of lavender growing across the strip to disguise its length from the Germans. The only solution was to let down eight of the US escapees to lighten the load, with promises to return for them the next night. Even then, the plane struggled to get airborne again, though it eventually lifted off at the very limit of its capacity thanks to the skill and nerve of the pilot.

  But by then the repeated bursts of aircraft noise had alerted a German patrol—or had the Germans been expecting the operation? As the reception committee and their charges scattered, shots were fired. Reprisals were swift and cruel.

  After that, nothing. Had Xavier been killed, or captured, then executed? Or had he melted away into a night and fog of his own devising, having played a double game all along, as some were convinced?

  Through the Libre Résistance, a society formed by what was left of the old networks, Iris was put in touch with some of the old maquisards in the south. They exchanged letters, and she used her fortnight’s leave in the late spring of 1948 to go to France. She crossed the Channel and travelled by train to Paris, on to Avignon and then Sault. She was met at the railway station by Gaston Durand and his young wife Emilie.

  Gaston took her suitcase and led her to a van that looked like corrugated cardboard on wheels. “We’ll go to Saint-Christol, but before I show you the field, we’ll all have lunch,” he said.

  The van lurched through a rocky landscape of twisty roads and fields. In the village of Saint-Christol they parked in a narrow street of cracked houses. A cold wind gu
sted, and a clock struck twelve with a thin tinny sound. Chickens scurried across their path as M. and Mme Durand led her into a café that was surprisingly full, and over to a table where a man was already seated.

  “May I introduce Thierry LeChêne? He was there at Spitfire that night.”

  He rose to shake her hand.

  “So you want to know about the last Spitfire operation?” he opened directly. He had a broad Provençal accent that took a moment or two to understand.

  “Yes—and one participant in particular,” said Iris.

  “We will do what we can to help you, but as I’m sure you know, these things were complicated.”

  “I realize that. I’m very grateful—”

  Gaston Durand waved that away. “We are the ones who are grateful. We won’t forget what was done here by the RAF.”

  Iris smiled. “That’s . . . rather refreshing to hear. General de Gaulle has not been so generous-spirited since the end of the war.”

  It was undoubtedly for the best that any further discussion of the president’s aggressive nationalism was interrupted by the arrival of a waitress bringing plates of pâté and salad.

  “The centre for our cell was Céreste,” said Thierry. “Each person in the group knew only the participants closest to themselves, and everyone else by a pseudonym only. A knock at the wrong door might be a death sentence. You were never sure of other people’s loyalties, even those you had known all your life.”

  “We knew of Xavier Descours, but only by his first name. More often he was referred to as the Engineer,” explained Gaston.

  “And he was . . . well respected?”

  “Very well respected. He was one of the best.”