by Simon Mawer
Marian turned away to look out of the window. It had started raining again. She thought of Ned walking back through the wet. ‘I’m both,’ she said. ‘Or neither.’
Scotland
I
The journey was one of those wartime odysseys in which time and rationality seemed suspended. Occasionally the train moved with decisive speed. Often, for reasons that were never explained and never apparent, it stopped. Mainly it crawled with caution across a countryside as grey and damp as army bedding – mere fields, shallow hills, small, mean woods.
The compartment she travelled in was reserved. Inter Services Research Bureau it said on the booking docket on the door. The conducting officer was a Scots woman called Janet. Her charges made a strange, heterogeneous group. There was a middle-aged, man who called himself Emile, and a young Canadian who claimed to speak French but actually spoke a broken and uncertain québécois. Maurice, he was called. Marian guessed that it was really pronounced ‘Morris’ but he had put a French slant on it: Mo-reece. The third member was a woman called Yvette. She seemed as small and drab and anxious as a mouse. When they’d met on the platform at Euston she had whispered to Marian that she was so glad there was another woman on the journey and maybe they could be friends and wasn’t everything so vachement bizarre? Now she sat in the window seat opposite, reading a book or watching the monotonous countryside pass by. Once she said, ‘Ce pays de merde,’ then looked round blushing with her hand to her mouth, as though she had not intended to speak out loud. Emile laughed. ‘I know shit compared with which this would be a bed of roses,’ he said.
The journey went on, the grey-green flats of the Midlands giving way to industrial townscapes and then a desolate landscape of moorland and mountain. An England she didn’t know. Passengers climbed on and climbed off, mainly soldiers humping their kitbags on their shoulders and cursing each other with a mixture of good humour and venom. She dozed and read, the one state merging into the other so that she was uncertain whether she had read something or merely dreamed it. Even the enclosed world of their compartment, with its disparate little group of travellers, seemed the product of some distorted imagination. Where were they going, and what were they meant to do when they arrived there? Was it all serious, or was it a joke, a hoax played upon four dysfunctional people, each of whom harboured the pathetic belief that he or she might contribute to the war effort? Maybe, she thought, with a small bubble of laughter rising in her throat, maybe she had actually gone mad during one of the long night watches in the Filter Room and now she was being taken off to some lunatic asylum in the far north of the country, away from the war, away from any danger of falling bombs, where they could all, harmless lunatics that they were, act out their various fantasies.
On the outskirts of Carlisle the train waited for half an hour for something that never happened before lurching forward across the border into Scotland. Rain, which had held off since Crewe, began to fall again.
II
In Glasgow they stayed overnight in a hotel near the station. Marian shared a room with Yvette. Lying in bed in the darkness they did what, presumably, they were not meant to do: they talked about their private lives, speaking in French, as though the language were a code through which they could tell each other the truth. ‘I want to go home,’ Yvette confessed. ‘I don’t care whether the Germans are there or not, I just want to go home.’ She must have been older than Marian, but seemed younger, lost in this strange, distracted journey and ill at ease in a country where her uncertain grasp of English gave her away as someone to be pitied, one of the dispossessed of Europe. Along with her English husband, she had fled south a few days before Paris fell to the Germans. They’d reached the coast and managed to get to Spain by taking a small boat from somewhere near Montpellier. It had been a brave and almost foolhardy journey, but somehow they had made it. ‘Where’s your husband now?’ Marian asked.
The girl lay on her back in the darkness, a shadow with a voice. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry. How awful.’
‘He joined up, you see, and was sent out to Egypt. The ship was torpedoed somewhere near Sicily. He was called Bill. Bill Coombes. I loved him.’
There was silence. Was she crying silently in the darkness? Perhaps not. There was something cold and calculating about her, as though some vital piece of the human machinery had broken deep inside. Later she revealed that she had left her small daughter behind at her parents-in-law’s house.
‘You’ve got a daughter?’
The little voice pattered on in the dark, without stress, without anguish, a strange, featureless landscape of words. ‘She’s called Violette. The English call her Violet. Or Vi. She’s two years old. Lovely little thing, but d’you know, I don’t miss her? Isn’t that terrible? I don’t miss her at all.’ And then unexpectedly she did weep, not for her child but for the fact of not being able to miss her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I must sound heartless. That’s the trouble, I suppose. I am heartless. My heart has been turned to stone.’
Next morning the train left Glasgow in surprising sunshine, passing along the shore beside waters where dour warships lay at anchor, then inland, trundling slowly as though feeling its way into the wilderness. How far north could you go? And how far away from France? The landscape grew wild, the names of the stations acquiring a foreign tone: Ardlui, Crianlarich, Bridge of Orchy. They crossed a desolate moorland and went onward through the hills, past occasional platforms where no one waited, through valleys where no road passed. Eventually there was a glimpse of a few houses and they drew to a halt at a nameless station that suddenly became the focus of military activity. Doors slammed open down the train and other passengers got off, a few anonymous civilians but more men in uniform, bearing a mixture of regimental badges. ‘There’ll be transport down to the loch,’ Janet told them, ‘but we’ll wait in here a while. We don’t want the squaddies seeing ladies in this part of the world.’
And then Marian caught sight of a familiar figure. She was looking out of the window at the motley collection of passengers leaving the train and he passed by immediately below her window. There wasn’t any doubt about it. He was only a few inches away, just beyond the glass – the French boy called Benoît.
People called out. Army lorries revved their engines and drove off. Janet led her flock to the door of the carriage and down onto the platform. Marian shivered against the cold wind, wondering where the French boy had gone, who he was and what he was doing here. It must be – that was the only explanation – that his boast had been the truth: he really was going to return to France.
A solitary truck took them down to the lochside where a motor boat was waiting. They clambered aboard and settled onto narrow seats, clutching their suitcases. The engine roared, the crew cast off and the craft headed out into the water. There was nowhere to go – only out into the desolate loch between empty hills that lined the shore. She thought of the lake at Annecy, with its dramatic alpine scenery. Would it become like this in some distant future, when the Alps had been eroded down to resemble these low, weary hills, and humanity had been reduced to a few miserable survivors? The boat puttered along for what seemed like hours, the water slopping, gunmetal grey, alongside. There was desultory talk among the group, part French, part English. Yvette and Marian huddled together for warmth. ‘This is hell,’ Yvette whispered. ‘Hell is not hot, it is cold. And bare and bleak. This is hell.’
Eventually the boat docked at a deserted jetty on the south shore of the loch. There were two or three huts and a large sign that announced, in red lettering, WAR OFFICE RESTRICTED AREA KEEP OUT and a narrow valley that cut back into the hills. They climbed up onto the jetty, peering round like a group of refugees from some unnamed disaster wondering whether they had really escaped. Clouds of midges descended on them. ‘I’m afraid we’ve got a short walk,’ Janet told them. ‘But at least it’s no’ raining.’
They humped their suitcases along a track that ran beside a small river.
Scattered along the valley were a few huts and cottages, the remnants of a crofting community that had long since died out. It was a place as far from France as it was possible to imagine.
‘Where are they taking us?’ Yvette asked.
‘The back of beyond.’
Yvette looked blank. ‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s a saying. En pleine cambrousse.’
The track rounded a curve in the hillside and there it was, couched in fir trees and clad in ivy like a suburban villa. They stumbled to a halt. In front of the building lay a wide lawn that did nothing to tame the setting: behind the house a rough hillside rose steeply upwards into cloud. There was the sound of wind and water all around, and an air of desolation. Wilderness, Marian thought: a strange, wild word with echoes of bewilderment woven into it. Who had once lived in this place, and what had they done with their lives? It was impossible to imagine.
‘Welcome to Meoble Lodge,’ a young officer greeted them as they stumbled through the main door into the hall. He had a Scottish accent that made it sound like ‘Mabel’ Lodge, the kind of place a maiden aunt might stay at for her holidays, a place of sagging, broken armchairs and sofas and out-of-date editions of Tatler and The Lady. ‘I’m Lieutenant Redmond, and I’m in charge of your course. We do hope you enjoy your stay with us.’
III
The lodge was a curious mix of military camp and university reading group, a world of much huffing and puffing, of pipe smoke and whisky and the smell of damp tweed. Outside, it rained. Inside there was a blazing fire and, after dinner, an open bar where the staff watched, so the story went, to see how well you handled alcohol. Much of what the students knew was the product of rumour and speculation, imagination filling the vacuum of secrecy. What exactly was this organisation that had recruited them? The Special Operations Executive, Emile said, but how did he know? And what were its aims? And why on earth were they shut away like this in the wilds of Scotland, amid the damp and the midges? Thus united in ignorance, the students drew together in some kind of camaraderie, in the way that prisoners unite against the common enemies of deprivation and discomfort.
They were woken on the first and every subsequent morning for PT on the lawn in front of the house. After that they had breakfast, which always included bacon and eggs, the kind of luxury most people had forgotten; but there was no luxury about the course itself. Together they climbed hills and crawled through soaking heather, in pairs they struggled over the assault course, in teams they waded through swollen rivers and constructed rafts to navigate the choppy waters of the loch. The two women had to get by as best they could. Yvette staggered in exhaustion through the exercises. At night she wept silently in the darkness of their shared bedroom. Whenever they talked it was obliquely, in low voices. The rumour had spread within the group – started, it seemed, by Emile – that their rooms had hidden microphones planted in the skirting boards or in the light fittings so that the instructors could listen in on private conversations and find out which ones were weak and which were strong. On one occasion Yvette crept, mouse-like, into Marian’s bed to lie there in her arms like a child, the hot, wet pulp of her lips against Marian’s cheek, whispering so that she would not be overheard.
Marian felt motherly towards her. It was absurd, this feeling of protectiveness. Yvette was eight years older and a widow. She had borne a child. She had escaped from France in an open boat and spent days at sea before making landfall in Spain. She was a woman and Marian a mere girl, and yet the dynamic of their relationship was this, daughter and mother, protected and protector.
‘They think I’m shit,’ Yvette whispered. ‘All I want is to go back to France, so why do they have to do this to me? What kind of training is this? I just want to go home. I may as well give up. They’re going to fail me anyway.’
The next night Marian was woken to shouts from her roommate. ‘Va-t’en!’ Yvette was yelling. ‘Va-t’en!’ But whom she was telling to get out was never clear. When she awoke, mumbling in the darkness, she had no memory of her dream.
While the nights were fearful and empty, the days were full. They went on forced marches for endurance, and ran the assault course for fitness and agility. They swung on ropes over imaginary rivers and climbed walls and crawled, bellies against the ground, beneath barbed-wire fences while a fixed machine gun fired live rounds over them, the bullets cracking deafening inches above their backs. Lectures and activities led one into the other, theory becoming practice so intensely that after a while this learning and doing seemed normal, and their previous lives of indolence and ease an incomplete memory. Only in the evenings, after dinner, were they left to their own devices, but even then there were members of the staff on hand to watch. ‘Of course they’re assessing us,’ Emile confided. ‘It’s an old trick. Play the friend and you’ll find out more than you ever would at a formal interview. I used to do it myself when hiring people. Take them out drinking, that was the best thing. Get a few whiskies in them and have a bit of a laugh. That’s when you find out the truth about a man. In vino veritas, as the ancients used to say.’
‘When did you ever hire people?’ Marian asked, and instantly regretted her question for the elaborate explanation it would conjure up.
‘When I was in the Congo. In mining. A tough life it was. Makes this look like the life of Riley.’
In the rare periods of relaxation some of the students read – there was a small collection of French novels: some Colette, a few detective stories by Gaston Leroux, a much-thumbed copy of Madame Bovary. Maurice and Emile played chess almost incessantly while others studied the pamphlets that they had been given, on field craft and unarmed combat and how to shoot the one-hand gun in the manner of W. E. Fairbairn and E. A. Sykes.
Marian wrote letters. She wrote to her mother and father, to a couple of the girls she had worked with in the WAAF, and to Ned. Occasionally she was engaged in conversation by one of the instructors, a man whose French, though tainted by English, was fluent. He did the rounds of the students, asking them about their pasts, their connections with France, their views on the politics of Vichy and the problems of resistance. ‘Where do you think the French communists’ loyalties lie?’ he asked her. ‘With the French people, or with Stalin?’
‘Are the two things in conflict?’
‘General de Gaulle thinks they are.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I’m asking you.’
He questioned her about others on the course, about the French Canadian with the terrible accent and about Emile.
‘I wish he didn’t know everything.’
The instructor smiled sympathetically. ‘And how do you think Yvette is progressing?’
‘I think she’s fine.’
‘Do you think she’ll make it through to the end? Has she got what it takes?’
‘I think she’s a lot tougher than she seems.’
‘And if she told you that she didn’t want to carry on, what would you say?’
‘But she hasn’t told me that, so I couldn’t answer.’
‘Hypothetically speaking.’
‘I think she can pull through. She’s got a lot of guts.’
‘Do you consider her a friend?’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
‘Everything is to do with me. Everything that might have a bearing on your mission. Where do your loyalties lie, Miss Sutro? With your friends, or with the organisation?’
She laughed at that. ‘I really don’t know what organisation it is. I find it hard to be loyal to something so nebulous.’
‘So what do you think you are doing here?’
‘I’m afraid you are better equipped to answer that than I am.’
Occasionally, to escape the watchful eyes and the attentive ears, she went out alone for a walk, loving the empty solitude of the place in the elongated dusk and prepared even to brave the midges. At least, she reasoned, out here I’m on my own. At least I can think.
IV
Ti
me passed, with that curious relativity that brought Ned’s physics to mind: relative time, elastic time, the hours of discomfort stretching out like days but the whole passage of the course compressing from days into what seemed like mere hours. They did weapons training – pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, a dozen different types of each. They learned to prove a weapon, to strip it and assemble it, to charge a magazine and load it, to fire from the hip and the shoulder and prone. The shooting range was a simulacrum of a town street, built among the outhouses, with targets that were the silhouettes of malignant men that appeared momentarily and at random, pulled up by an artifice of levers and pulleys. The students ducked and weaved, turning this way and that, firing from the centre line of the body, arms out straight.
‘Don’t aim,’ the instructors told them. ‘Instinct is what we want. Like pointing with your finger.’ They talked of Fairbairn and Sykes, twin deities of this strange world of killing. The Fairbairn-Sykes position: ‘Square on to the target, legs apart, knees flexed. Raise the weapon to face level, both eyes open, the weapon obscuring the target. Then two shots in quick succession. Double tap. Bang, bang! If you don’t kill him with the first shot, you kill him with the second.’
Marian found she could do it, that was the strange thing. Gun in hand she could weave through the shooting range and hit the targets with unerring accuracy. ‘That’s right!’ the instructor cried. ‘Show the gentlemen how to do it.’
Emile explained that he had once been a superb shot – even competed at Bisley – until something mysterious had happened in Africa and he had lost his edge as a result. ‘But you’re not bad,’ he conceded grudgingly. ‘Not bad at all.’
After weapons training they were induced into the mysterious world of demolition by a man with the joyous expression of a child with fireworks. ‘Plastique,’ he said, showing them a lump of oily putty. ‘As stable as chewing gum, as explosive as TNT.’ They handed it from one to the other. It smelled of almonds. ‘Detonate it properly and it’ll bring down bridges. The resister’s best friend, plastique.’ Quite why he used the French name was never clear. Did this strange stuff originate in France? As though to help answer that question, he took the lump back and kneaded it into a shape that made the men laugh and the two women blush. And then, to demonstrate its stability, he tossed it on the fire, where the stuff burned and fizzed with a festive flame. Then he took them outside to a bunker among the outhouses and showed them how to tamp the explosive, how to wire up the detonator and finally, with a joyous shout as he wound the induction coil, how a few ounces of plastic could blow a car axle to pieces.