“What do you think happened to him?”
They exchanged glances and shrugged expressively. “You have to understand. Xavier was not a local. He came in like the British and Americans came in, and then he left. We never saw him afterwards, and he didn’t turn up for any of the honours ceremonies, but there could be many reasons for that.”
“Do you have any reason to think that . . . he didn’t make it to the end?”
He shook his head. “We have been putting the word out, as you asked. But no one has come up with any new information.”
“What about a young woman code-named Rose, his wireless operator? Was she there that night?”
Again, they looked blankly at each other.
“You never came across her at all?”
“No. But that was as it should be. There had been problems keeping our wireless operators safe. The first one was shot. Maybe too many people knew what he was doing. If the Engineer was doing his job right, he would have kept his operator well out of it.”
As they ate, Thierry showed her photographs: grainy pictures of men in peasant clothes, posing in groups in the fields. Some carried a gun with a rose at the end like a garden hose.
“Dropped by parachute by the RAF, those,” said Thierry.
“Designed by the Czechs,” added Iris acerbically.
Afterwards, at the field they called Spitfire, they stood in contemplation.
“Is that the strip of lavender that proved such a hazard to the plane?” she asked Thierry.
“More has been planted since then. There wasn’t that much during the war, but we had to disguise the length of the fields somehow.”
“The people living on the farms out here must have heard the engines,” said Iris.
“They knew,” said Emilie.
“They say now,” said Gaston, “that five percent of the French population actively collaborated with the Germans, five percent were active in the Resistance, and ninety percent did nothing. But here, one has to revise that to take account of all the small acts of resistance. The farmers who gave their land to allow the planes to come down and the drops of equipment to be made, which meant that at a time of hunger they couldn’t use it to grow crops, and also implicated themselves and their families. They had to count on the loyalty of villages close to the landing fields—all the people who closed their eyes and ears to what was going on. It was a complicity of the many.”
They looked out at the lavender field, its neat corduroy rows, and the plants still in the process of waking from grey to purple. Hills rose on three sides.
“Hell of a place to land a plane as big as a Dakota,” said Thierry.
“How did you get here that night?” Iris asked him. She was trying to picture it, the full moon, the night noises, shadows moving.
“I came in the lavender van with the man they called the Philosopher—Victor Musset. He ran a soap and scent factory at Manosque. My cousin Auguste was a committed resistant, but in his other life he was a lavender farmer, a big supplier to Musset’s. That was how the connection was made.”
The bottle of scent.
“Musset . . . is he still alive?”
“Certainly.”
“Might it be possible for me to meet him?”
The Durands put her up on their farmstead in the hills above the town of Apt. Emilie told her how she had been the network’s courier, usually on her bicycle.
Two days later Iris was shown into a bar in the medieval heart of the town by the cathedral. It was a dark and undistinguished room with a vaulted ceiling, made to seem lower by Victor Musset’s height. He was a large man; judging by his girth, he enjoyed his food. He did not generally talk about the war, he told her. Too many bad memories.
M. Musset had a small glass of cloudy pastis in front of him, from which he hardly drank.
“It is a long time past,” he said, in a kind voice, sadness in his spaniel eyes. “People change their stories. Sometimes they don’t even know they are doing it. They hear more of the background in later years and assume they knew those facts at the time. But they did not. None of us could see the whole picture, or foresee the outcome. All I know is what I saw, but even then I cannot be certain I am not overlaying that with knowledge acquired subsequently.
“What you must never forget is that the Resistance was diverse, made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of allegiances. We wanted to emerge from the war into a different country from before, a different political landscape. By August 1944 an active member of the Resistance had a life expectancy of three months, yet many young men felt it was worth the risk.”
“According to the RAF records,” said Iris, “the Dakota did return the next night for the Americans stranded near Spitfire, but there were no lights on the ground at the coordinates.”
“The reception committee decided it was too dangerous to try again.”
“Were the Germans watching the field?”
“They might well have been. The morning after the Dakota landed, they shot an elderly couple who worked the nearest farm, no doubt after torturing them for whatever information they had, and burned the farmhouse to the ground. Terrible, simply terrible—and so pointless, you know? The war was nearly over—why did they have to do that?”
Iris shook her head.
“That was the first time one of Xavier’s operations had gone wrong,” he said. “They used to say he was the best of the best.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Who can say? Many people grabbed what they could at the end of the war, especially those who had been striving for a new France, a better France. It was a time when scores were settled, and sometimes not everything was as it seemed. He may be someone else now, or he may be the person he was before the war that we never knew. From what we know now, it was not just the south of France that he covered, but right up to Paris. He was a wealthy man, we knew that. He could have come from anywhere, and returned anywhere. Or his body might be in a mass grave.”
“He was a successful businessman, I can tell you that. Before the war, and during it, he ran an electronics company. We made inquiries all over France, but he is not involved now in any similar business,” said Iris.
“He was usually known to our cells as the Engineer. That makes sense.”
“What do you think happened to him, monsieur?”
“In the absence of any further information, if you ask me what I believe, then I have to tell you that he is probably dead.”
“But there is no evidence of that?”
“None that I know of.”
Iris nodded slowly, not willing to speak.
“I have made some inquiries,” Musset went on, “but no one here knows what happened to him after the night the Dakota landed. I remember there was an incident at the time because not even his wireless operator knew where he’d gone. I’ve even asked the Poet.”
“The Poet?”
“The leader of our cell. A man who would never have been passed fit for any army—too shambling, too apparently disorganised. He had two safe houses in Céreste, each with two exits, just like the fields we used. It was quiet in this region, but strategically important, between Lyon—a hotbed of intrigue, denunciations, and Gestapo terror—and the coast.
“Tough decisions had to be made. When we heard that a woman who worked at the pharmacy here in Apt where messages were dropped had threatened to denounce the network, one of us had to take action. Our man was on a bicycle. He shot her while she was outside the station, did it very quietly, and cycled back to Céreste.”
“Was that one of the stories that had to be changed?” Iris said.
“Maybe. Ah—you can rouge the corpse, but it remains dead,” said the Philosopher. “There were times when grave sacrifices had to be made. The Poet had a protégé, a young man of twenty-two who was as courageous as he was talented as a writer. The Poet himself had supplied his false papers—and one terrible afternoon, not very far from a village, he saw this young man taken by the Ge
rmans.
“The Poet could have saved him; he was out of view; he had the Germans in his gunsight; he could have squeezed the trigger, but he did not. He had to make the decision not to fire, to save the village from the ferocious reprisals this would have unleashed. Afterwards he wrote the most moving words I have ever read; he called it ‘an ordinary village, an extraordinary place.’ It was a time that marked us for life.”
“I understand that,” said Iris.
Musset gave her a sad smile. “Yes, I think you do, mademoiselle.”
9
Almost Happy
Sussex, 1950 onwards
Miles Corbin was a good man, apparently without a secret life. For many years after she met him Iris was almost happy. A civil servant like Iris, he rose to a senior position in Customs and Excise; he was as scrupulously honest at home as he was at work. He once told Iris that he had never once cheated at golf, though he was once sorely tempted at Sandwich and never quite forgave himself. It might have been that confession that persuaded her to marry him.
If not quite handsome, with his wispy sandy hair and hollowed cheeks, Miles had a certain dash. During the war he had served as a navigator in the RAF’s Coastal Command, from which he developed a serious interest in marine cartography; he also had a passionate interest in Greece, its history and poetry. He clearly adored her, was amusing and kind to Suzanne, and he loved to travel—though it went without saying that not even the smallest bottle of cognac or perfume from Paris went undeclared at Dover on their return.
When Iris fell pregnant with their daughter Betsy, she gave up work and became a full-time housewife. When Suzanne was old enough to understand, she was told that her father had died in the war, like so many brave men.
Iris could not easily forget Xavier. At the smallest provocation he insinuated himself into her thoughts. In Paris in the 1950s, she smelled a distinctive lavender fragrance on a woman who passed her in the street. She almost ran after her to ask what it was, but then held herself in check. The familiar scent lingered in the air, leaving a musky trail and an inexplicable sense of danger. She stood in the rue Saint-Honoré, feeling both trapped and euphoric—or had the perfume only triggered these sensations in her brain?
It wasn’t quite the same fragrance. This was a deeper, warmer, more complex distillation than the scent she knew so well: the perfume he had sent her, eked out drop by careful drop; the scent of hope that had diminished by the day, month, year. She still wore the pearl he sent her, symbol of the moons that brought them together and took him away. What a fool she was.
Sporadically over the years, Iris was approached—usually by letter—by the writers and researchers of various books on the clandestine operations of World War II. Invariably she turned down their respectful requests to meet. Some of those who had been involved, especially the agents who had faced the greatest dangers, were eager to tell their stories and enjoyed the recognition. Others, like Thérèse, preferred to remain in the shadows. Iris never heard a word from Thérèse after her last furious outburst at Orchard Court, and respected her all the more for it.
When she succeeded in banishing him from her waking hours, Xavier shook Iris awake from dreams that began with the night sky, clumps of cloud, moonlight. The small plane waiting.
He was there, even if she could not see him. She only had to glimpse the silvered darkness to know what would happen. Sometimes she was in the seat next to him, so close she could feel the wool of his coat and the brush of his hand.
For so many years, Iris found him in transcendent dreams; he lived with her, still speaking and dancing and tangling in absurdities with her as she slept. In endless variations of the same dream, Xavier climbed into planes and flew into the night, nights so vivid she felt what he felt: the rush and lift of the headwind under the wings; the chill of the glass beyond which gleamed the moon. Ahead, storm citadels, and skies planted with forests of electric trees. High in a sea of cloud, the small aircraft hardly moved across gusting waves, hanging like a spider on a thread.
Always the same ending: the sky convulsing, throwing up ridges and folds that might be walls of cloud, or hills, or rising waves. Sea or sky? No difference; no place of safety. The pilot knows when his plane passes the point of no return. The crash is imminent. The black night is still beautiful, clouds lit by moonlight. Time slows. It is all so simple now. No more decisions. What to say? What to do? There are only minutes left, only seconds. There is no time left, only the beginning of time.
The plane is carried onwards, blown by the wind into emptiness.
Long, long after he slid up into the night sky away from her, Iris held him in her sights.
After Miles died in 1990, Iris embraced widowhood. She moved to The Beeches, an ample Edwardian cottage on the edge of a village near Chichester, happily relinquishing along the way the slavery of the lunch and dinner service, the boredom of making conversation with a decent man with whom she had no spiritual connection. Not that she was heartless, far from it: she had made an honest mistake in imagining she could make a successful marriage to a man she had once respected but never loved. It had always been a contract of companionship, and she thought he knew that. Did that make her a bad woman, or simply a pragmatic one? It was all she was able to be. After the war and its aftermath, there were too many damaged souls; she was yet another. For all those years she had been the perfect wife and mother to Suzie and Betsy while Miles commuted up to London from their home in Surrey, to his government desk; Miles with his ever more solid demeanour, his golfing friends, his increasing dependence on whisky, his outbursts of frustration.
Iris did not tell him that in one of the thick folders she kept in a bedroom trunk was the note she had scribbled the night she had seen Tyndale on Panorama, admitting that he knew there were double agents, and intimating that London had sanctioned them, though without telling any of the other agents. The sacrifices, in other words. There were other notes and references. One, a photocopied page from Hansard, answered the questions in Parliament that arose after the first books had appeared, with their notions of conspiracy: “Penetration (by German agents) was deliberately concealed.”
The only person she ever spoke about the war with was Nancy. They both enjoyed their long exchanges by letter and occasionally on the telephone when any genuinely new information surfaced. It had become a touchstone of their long friendship, more than an expectation of a final resolution.
10
Vapour Trail
Sussex, September 2013
The telephone rang. Iris moved so slowly in the early mornings—frustratingly slowly, as if she were no longer in complete command of her own limbs—that she was sure whoever it was would give up long before she arrived in the hall to pick it up. If it was yet another cold call about solar panels, she would tell them that no meant no, and if they bothered her again she would report them for harassment.
“Hello, is it possible to speak to Iris Corbin, please?”
“Speaking.”
“Mrs. Corbin, this is Anna Lester from the Daily Telegraph. I’m not sure whether you remember, but I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire and the Mavis Acton memorial, and you very kindly gave me some background details.”
Iris sat down carefully on the chair next to the telephone table.
“I remember.” The one time she had relented and agreed to speak, and then only to make sure the facts were correct.
“Do you think I could come and see you? I’m working on a related story, and sometimes it’s easier face-to-face.”
“I’m very sorry, but I’m not sure I can help you.”
“The thing is—”
“The answer’s no, I’m afraid. I—I am not myself at the moment, a family bereavement.”
“I am sincerely sorry for your loss, Mrs. Corbin. But you see, the—the way—sorry, I—” Anna Lester was struggling to find the right words, “There’s no easy way to say this. I had no idea that Ellie Brooke wa
s your granddaughter until I started researching an in-depth piece about . . . about her death. And I’ve found something . . . that I think you would want to know about.”
“When would you want to come?”
“As soon as possible, whenever suits you best.”
Waiting was always so much worse than facing news head-on. “Come this afternoon, then,” said Iris.
Through the open kitchen window, the pumping of a tractor engine from a field below echoed Iris’s heartbeat. Here on the outskirts of the village, it was quiet and secluded. Cars passed on the road, but not too many. The hedge was kept high on that side. From the rear of the property were sweeping views of the Sussex countryside and farmland beyond a sloping lawn.
“Shall we go for our walk, Marion?”
The housekeeper glanced at her watch. “Right now? It’s early. Might be a bit dewy—why not give it an hour?”
Marion had been at The Beeches so long, she was a vital fixture of the house, like the stairs or the roof. Every elderly person should have a Marion, and it was a crying shame that most couldn’t.
“I just have the feeling I have to get on,” said Iris. “Silly really.”
“Well, all right. We’ll go now if you like, Mrs. C.”
The trick of it was never to stop. Walking, in this case, but the same dictum might apply equally to anything in life, thought Iris. Never stop, no matter how much you might want to give in. She worked on the principle that if a person walked every day, there would never come a day when she couldn’t. It was stopping that would cause the muscles to weaken and the joints to complain.
Marion dried her hands as she slotted the last breakfast plate in the drainer. She was a large, motherly woman with a soft voice. Her hair had turned grey over the past year, which had saddened Iris. For so long, Marion had been the young woman who “did,” the young pair of legs up and down the stairs.
“Not necessary to go far, but necessary to go,” said Iris.
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