“I don’t understand.”
“How cynical are you, Anna?”
“Not much surprises me.”
“About people, their passions and self-interest, about political movements and government agencies?”
“Very cynical.”
“Good.” Iris reached out and picked up the recording device. “Condition one. I may be old, but I am still wary. Please turn this off. Now put it where I can see that the red light has gone. You may make notes, of course. Condition two is that you publish nothing without my approval. Is that agreed?”
“That’s exactly how I would want to do it.”
“All right. Now I will do everything I can to help you.”
“The story about Xavier in Ellie’s notes,” said Anna. “Am I right in thinking that this must refer to Xavier Descours?”
“I think you must be.”
“You knew him, I take it?”
“Yes,” said Iris. “I knew him. Clearly, you are familiar with Xavier Descours from the many accounts of the SOE in France. Some of those accounts are admirably perceptive; others bear no relation to reality. There again, elements of them seemed like complete fantasy, until I found out later they were true.” She smiled. “I was in love with him—but even at the time I only knew a part of him. I accepted that. It was necessary to what we were doing that only certain aspects of one’s life were known. But later on, of course, the deceptions and disguises we had used made it doubly hard to discover the truth.”
Anna nodded, made some rapid notes.
“After the war, Xavier did not turn up in Paris with the other agents who survived. Neither did he surface in the south. It had to be assumed that he had either been captured or killed. I did my best to trace him, without success.”
“Surely others were searching for him too?”
“If they were, they kept me in the dark. But you’re right, other people were looking for him, and I should imagine some were mightily relieved when he would not be found.”
“Explain exactly who you mean.”
Iris sighed. “The intelligence services, all of them: British, French, and what remained of the German. I’m not sure how much you know about the wider picture of the intelligence services, the petty internecine spats between them, what was really going on.”
Anna nodded. “I’ve read enough to know that SOE was considered a liability by other services, SIS and MI6. There was little sharing of information. It was possible they were undermined from within the establishment.”
“We all deal in lies—that is the only truth.” That was what he had told her. Perhaps the time had come to put it all on the record.
“I think now,” said Iris carefully, “that Xavier was not only working for SOE as air movements officer—but that he was working for the British Secret Intelligence Service, and that his real boss was there. I once ran into him unexpectedly, at a Tangmere fog party over at Bignor. He pretended we had never met, and I couldn’t understand at the time. But it was clear he knew Bignor Manor and the Bertrams well. The Bertrams were MI6, not SOE.”
She cleared her throat.
“This sounds outrageous, but it is just possible that the whole of F Section was being used as a blind while the real intelligence work went on at SIS or MI6—and that the decision to sacrifice the Paris agents and the Prosper network was made at the highest level.”
Anna stopped writing. “I’ve heard that theory, of course, but consigned it to the conspiracy file.”
“I said, ‘just possible.’ SIS ran a network of deniable agents—expatriate businessmen, mostly, who had been operating on the Continent for years before the war. Xavier’s profile—the wireless component company, the international contacts—it all fits much better with SIS than SOE.”
“Where does that leave you?”
“A very good question,” said Iris. “If it’s true, then he was probably using me to keep tabs on what was going on inside SOE.”
It was not a happy thought, and the first time she had ever admitted it to anyone but Nancy.
“Don’t imagine I was completely naive,” said Iris. “I was young, but I had become involved in matters of national security—I was pragmatic. I thought his interest in me was probably motivated by some . . . favour I could do for him. Either that or the simple fact that it was easier for him to be with me than to find another woman who might complicate further an already complex life. Apart from everything else, he was a married man.”
“But you did try to find out the truth about him, after the war.”
“The powers that were didn’t take me seriously,” said Iris. “Miss Acton thought that because I was in love with him, my judgement was impaired. Why was it so hard for them to accept that I needed to know the end of the story, precisely because I had been in love with him? I wanted to know the truth, not to bend it, as those who were covering their backs were doing. And I had to be so careful, not only out of consideration for Miles, but for Xavier’s wife as well. He would never have wanted me to upset her, nor would I have wanted to. That would have been cruel, and I never intended to be unkind. I was very lonely, for a long time.”
Laurent de Fayols was waiting for them at Le Train Bleu. How had he known it was one restaurant in Paris that always reminded her of the war and its networks? Above the jostling concourse of the Gare de Lyon, it was a time capsule, pure belle epoque: all gilded mirrors, brass fittings, and white linen, a vast cathedral to the glories of rail travel and dining a hundred years ago; above were the wall and ceiling paintings of Mediterranean destinations depicted in sun-drenched, flower-strewn whimsy: Toulon, Marseille, Nice, Montpellier, Perpignan, Cassis, Hyères.
Iris thought of all those meetings with Mavis Acton and their French contacts after the war, the leads that seemed to promise solutions, then went nowhere. All those names, all those places.
Laurent was a dapper little man, dressed in a dark suit and tie; his hair was suspiciously brown for a man in his sixties, and the tan could not disguise the shadows under his eyes. A bottle of white burgundy was cooling in a silver bucket on the table.
Introductions over (gracious but awkward), orders efficiently taken (memorized, not written down, by the waiter), Laurent de Fayols seemed nervous as he turned his attention fully to Iris. “I understand you knew Xavier Descours, madame?”
“I did.”
“How much did you know about his background?” It could have sounded like a brutal question, but his voice was low and sympathetic.
Iris attempted a wry laugh. “Only what he told me—what he told any of us. That he ran a company making radio and electric components.”
“That’s true,” said Laurent. “It was in Toulon. He made a lot of money out of it before the war. He was known as the Engineer by the Resistance in the south, even though that was not quite right. As for the rest, it seems he did an admirable job of covering his tracks.” He turned to Iris. “Did you ever know his real name?” he asked gently.
“I did not. If he had been recruited by F Section, I would have known, but not otherwise. We never asked. You have to understand—”
“You could never have asked. I do understand.”
There was a long pause.
“His name was Gabriel de Fayols.”
Iris brought her hand up to her face.
“He was the son of the doctor on Porquerolles. My father’s cousin.”
The island boyhood, the deep blue waters he had described to her. It was all falling into place.
“Gabriel?” Anna pulled out a pencil sketch from inside her notepad. “Is this him?”
Laurent narrowed his eyes, too vain perhaps to find his reading glasses. Iris took the paper from him.
“That’s Xavier . . . as I knew him,” said Iris, her glasses already in place. She traced his lovely face with a finger that, like her unreliable legs, no longer seemed to belong to her but to the elderly stranger who had usurped her body. “Where did you get this?” she asked the journalist, irritated that
this was the first time she was seeing it.
“It’s a photocopy,” said Anna. “The original is in Ellie’s notebook. Didn’t you see it?”
Iris had not.
“The sketch was in there,” said Anna. “In the blank pages at the back, as if she opened the book at random and made the drawing. She wrote the name Gabriel underneath and dated it June the seventh.”
“I don’t understand.”
Anna was sharp, you had to credit her. “It implies that Ellie found out about Xavier—and exactly who he was—only three days before . . . she was found dead. The last day she was seen alive, the seventh of June,” she said, turning to Laurent. “Remind me where Ellie was that day—in the garden on your estate?”
“No, she wasn’t there—that is, not during the day. She came to the domaine in the early evening.”
“So how did she find out about Xavier?” cut in Iris.
Laurent looked distinctly uncomfortable. For the first time the suave exterior cracked. “It must have been from my mother. I believe you knew her too, a long time ago, Mrs. Corbin.”
The waiter brought tiny rounds of foie gras with quince jelly and thin curls of toast. Iris was not sure she would be able to eat any of it.
“Your mother? Who is your mother, Monsieur?”
“Was my mother—” He checked himself. “I regret to say she died two weeks ago.”
None of them seemed able to eat. Anna seemed flushed with excitement at the unravelling tale, though perhaps it was the wine; Iris was uneasy, sensing that more was about to be revealed. Anna had brought her notepad to the dining table, a lack of manners that Iris overlooked in the interests of accuracy. Her mind seemed incapable of concentration, sliding dangerously between the present and past fears.
Laurent de Fayols was intent on establishing certain events.
“Mrs. Corbin, I understand that you worked for SOE during the war,” he said. “And that a woman called Mavis Acton was ruthlessly protective of the young women sent secretly to France.”
“Many people admired her,” said Iris, gauging from his tone that he was not one of them.
“My mother despised her.”
“Mavis Acton was not universally liked,” said Iris. “She recruited women into the SOE as agents in France, when no women had ever been to war in quite this way before. She coordinated their missions and worked tirelessly after the war to trace the final movements of those who did not return. She pursued this with great determination—against much opposition from those who were equally determined to wrap the recent past in convenient silence.”
The speech came out pat; she had used it before. There was much to admire about Miss Acton, and Iris would always defend her if she was asked her opinion of her former boss, having learned to keep her real thoughts to herself. “Strong meat, that was Miss Acton,” she would say. “A powerful personality. Well, one had to be, didn’t one?” Mavis Acton could have done no more; after the war she traced all her girls; it was a great pity that Iris never managed to persuade her to keep going on the men.
“You kept in touch with her when the war was over, though?”
“Yes. I was her assistant.”
“You were good friends?”
“I wouldn’t go that far. We worked well together.”
Iris had seen Miss Acton only once more after their tea at Fortnum and Mason. The occasion was Colonel Tyndale’s funeral in London. It wasn’t so much respects Iris was paying as hoping to run into one last chance, among the assembled signatories of the Official Secrets Act, of finishing what she had started all those years before. But Miss Acton appraised her beadily, as she always did, and made it clear that her inquiries had met a dead end a long time ago. She lit one of her strong cigarettes and dismissed her with the same hand that tossed the match.
That had angered Iris. If anyone should have understood how she felt, it should have been Mavis Acton, but the woman displayed a perplexing lack of empathy. She showed no heart, though clearly she had one.
“I have not been successful in finding many declassified papers about the SOE women,” Laurent was saying.
“I gather there are very few actual SOE papers that survive,” said Anna. “They were due to be handed over to the Foreign Office, but there was a fire.”
“A most convenient fire.”
He straightened his cutlery, smoothed his napkin. This was a man who would have loved to light up a cigarette as he always used to in restaurants, thought Iris. He caught her gaze.
“How did you feel when you first found out that the real agents were being held and manipulated by the Gestapo, and that SOE was unknowingly making arrangements directly with the Nazis?” he asked Iris.
How do we feel? Always the same question, so lazily emotive. It was invariably asked on the radio and television, when it was facts that were required. It wasn’t possible to begin to express how they felt, and certainly not for public consumption. Iris pushed away the hundred thoughts that threatened to engulf her. Had she made a mistake in coming? But she of all people knew that if you never took the risk, you might never find what you were seeking.
“I was furious. It was the first time I realized that those in charge were not taking women like me seriously.”
They had known—or rather some of them had known. The women who would gather to gossip in the ladies’ cloakroom on the half-landing at Norgeby House knew, but they spoke only among themselves and said nothing to their superiors, because they were not supposed to know.
“It seems astonishing, but the position of women in society has changed so radically from those times that it barely seems possible now,” said Iris. “But back then, that was the way it was.”
“And it was left to two women to track down what had happened to the SOE women who never returned.”
“That’s right. It was important to know what happened, for the families of those who never came back, even if the conclusion of the story was harrowing. . . . For some it was many years spent not knowing, and in some ways that was worse. . . .”
“But you were satisfied that you managed to find out exactly what happened to each of them?” asked Laurent.
“Yes.”
Anna said nothing, but listened intently.
“Does the name Rose mean anything to you?”
Iris straightened her back and gave up the pretence of eating. She put down her knife and fork. “It was a code name.”
“What happened to Rose after you sent her over here?”
“She was arrested while working as a wireless operator in Paris. She spent some months being held by the Gestapo, before being helped to escape, along with another woman agent.”
It was strange, thought Iris, how readily these facts came to her, when the details of other, far more recent memories remained frustratingly elusive. “The other woman, Thérèse, was flown back to London. Rose went south with Xavier. It was he who had organised the escape. We had only sporadic contact with her after that.”
“Why was that?”
“By 1944 the RAF and the American Air Force had bases in North Africa, Corsica, and Italy—most of the resistance communications from the South of France would have been to those bases. It seems that she was arrested again. There is circumstantial evidence, unproven, that she was sent to Natzweiler, a concentration camp in Alsace. She died there, executed as a spy.”
They were silent for a few moments.
“No,” said Laurent. “Rose didn’t die in a concentration camp.”
Iris frowned. “What are you saying—that you knew her?”
“Rose was my mother.”
Laurent summoned the waiter to pour more wine, and said, “Rose was still working as a wireless operator for the man known as Xavier Descours in August 1944. He was the man who habitually took enormous risks . . . and she kept pace with him. But he abandoned her, left her to fend for herself after a big air operation upcountry in Provence went wrong. She was told to lie low and wait for him, but Xavier never came.
>
“She was arrested by the Gestapo as she was making for the plateau above Manosque where the lavender grows. She had a transmitter—she would have been shot as a spy immediately at any other time—but the Germans knew the tide was turning. It was only days before the Liberation began. They took her north to Digne, threatened her, trying to get as much information as they could, but they didn’t kill her. That night, a young German officer helped her get away. Maybe he just wanted to save his own skin at the end, but he saved her too.”
“Why did she never make contact with us in London?” asked Iris. Too many disconcerting thoughts were chasing themselves. Too many questions.
“She felt she had been badly let down. Perhaps she had no reason to go back. She took the chance to make another life for herself here.”
“Many people did, after the war. For a long time, I thought that was what Xavier must have done.”
“It always comes back to Xavier. Do you know, Mrs. Corbin, that it was because of Xavier that my mother met my father? Charles de Fayols—code name Maurice—was one of those who had helped her escape the first time in Paris.
“Rose met Charles again sometime after she fled Digne. She must have gone south, possibly still looking for Xavier. Anyway, she married Charles in 1946 and became châtelaine of the Domaine de Fayols. I was born two years later. She kept the name Rose, by the way—she liked it. Rose was who she had become.”
Iris pressed her fingers into the linen tablecloth. Her ears buzzed, and too many competing memories derailed her train of thought. Rose and her neat crochet work in the bathroom at Orchard Court, her silence and self-possession, the history that was still being rewritten.
“She must have told Ellie the story in the notebook,” said Iris eventually. “But . . . how did Rose know who Ellie was, her connection to me?”
“A newspaper article, I gather.”
“It would explain the ‘message for Iris,’ ” pointed out Anna.
“I suppose so.”
Iris tried to stay calm. Too many different strands of thought still coiled in her head. When had Xavier given Rose the message intended for her? Just before he had disappeared? She had never conveyed it to Iris, so was it possible that she had only recently passed it on via Ellie? It seemed absurd, but it was the only logical explanation.
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