by Simon Mawer
‘Then there are the time pencils.’ He held them up like a child showing his collection of bangers. ‘Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty, thirty. You make your selection, twist the stem to break the capsule and Bob’s your uncle.’
Time pencil. Again she thought of Ned, something he might invent, a pencil that could mark out the passage of time, a pen that could recall the past and predict the future, a quill that might consign the present to oblivion.
Dear Ned, she wrote. I hope you are quite well. Here they work our fingers to the bone but in a strange way I am enjoying myself. When we get leave at the end of this course maybe I can get to London to see you.
But she had little time to think about him. Here there were people of far greater curiosity than her scientist brother, men who knew how to kill and destroy, like the instructor in close combat, a middle-aged man with a brush of short, ginger hair and the gloomy manner of an undertaker. He delivered a first-aid course in reverse – how to cut the brachial artery with a knife slash to the forearm, how to dislocate the knee with a single stab of the foot, how to snap a man’s spine by dropping him across your knee, how to inflict the maximum damage in the minimum time. You could render a man helpless with a handclap to both ears, knock him unconscious with a matchbox, kill him with an umbrella.
‘Remember this: you don’t want to get into a fight, but if you have no choice then you want to get out of it as quick as possible. The quickest way is to kill your opponent. I’m sorry if that offends the ladies’ sensibilities, but that’s the fact of the matter.’
It did not offend Yvette’s sensibilities: with all the devotion of an acolyte committing to a new religion, she loved silent killing. She loved the heft of a knife in her hands, the wicked gleaming tongue of steel with the initials of the designer at the base of the blade: THE F-S FIGHTING KNIFE, it said, the plain truth engraved there without any euphemism. Fairbairn and Sykes again. The hilt lay softly in her hand, balanced between thumb and forefinger like a conductor’s baton. ‘I could kill with this,’ she murmured.
They practised on one another with dummy weapons, and what started as self-conscious play-acting grew close to the real thing, something tense and terrific, as though a life depended on it. And Yvette showed the way, approaching her victim from behind, as quiet as a cat. The rest of the course watched, breathlessly, something that was at once compelling and obscene: the small woman moving, the sudden pounce, the knife striking down into the shoulder, right behind the collarbone where the subclavian artery lay deep among muscle and connective tissue, where, if you got it right, the victim would die within four seconds.
V
Marian lay awake and thought about killing. Killing in the abstract was fine. Killing at one remove, killing in theory. She remembered the Filter Room, a dozen WAAFs crowding round the table in the early evening with the calls coming through from the radar stations. The girls in a scrum, reaching out over one another to put tokens down on the map like gamblers at the roulette table placing their last bets. The excitement as single plots became dozens, became hundreds, tracks identified and called, pointing out across the bulge of East Anglia and heading towards the sea, each single plot being seven men and that meant seven lives. Seven times seven hundred. Five thousand lives, give or take. They’d march soundlessly across the board and disappear beyond the edge of the known world and the girls would wait, smoking, drinking tea, chatting in a desultory fashion while the killing went on, distant killing that you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, the pulverising of the German cities. But what the ginger instructor was proposing was different: killing when you could feel the man’s throat beneath your arm, his breath on your cheek, his blood on your hands. How do you do that?
‘Oh, it would be no trouble for me,’ Yvette assured her. ‘I think I would enjoy it.’
If it wasn’t death, it was destruction. How to blow a door, put a car out of action, destroy a train. She found herself paired with Emile. He always knew everything about it even before the lecture had begun. ‘Used to work on the railways in the Congo,’ he explained when they were being taught how to sabotage a railway line.
‘Was that before or after the mines?’
‘That’s a complex question.’
‘No, it’s not. It’s not even one I want an answer to.’ But she got an answer nevertheless, the precise chronology of his career as mine engineer, railway engineer, construction engineer, any kind of engineer you might wish for. ‘It was a tough life showing the blacks the way forward.’
‘You and Mr Kurtz, you mean?’
That puzzled him. It was always a triumph to puzzle Emile. ‘Kurtz? I never met anyone called Kurtz.’
She hated him. She didn’t often hate people, but she hated Emile. One of the people on our course is a pompous KA, she wrote to her father the next day. The kind you abhor.
They practised wireless telegraphy and Morse code regularly, tapping on the key with nervy fingers and trying to take down the irritating buzzing into a coherent sequence of dots and dashes. The boat will dock at Dover on the fifteenth. The Test Match will result in victory for Australia. Daft messages like that.
‘Each operator has his own fist. As individual as handwriting.’
Hands stammered on the Bakelite knobs. Arthritis, they called Morse keying: like arthritis it brought a painful tension in the wrist, aching carpals and metacarpals, stiff and inflexible fingers. ‘Accuracy is everything. Accuracy and speed. Lives may depend on it. Perhaps even yours.’ Flimsies passed back and forth from instructors to students, misreadings underscored in blue crayon.
She keyed, without a mistake:
Emile is a tiresome know - all.
Often Marian thought of Clément. She tried not to, but she did. It seemed ridiculous to revisit a childish infatuation but the memories were powerful and disturbing, the kind of thing that could undermine your whole personality, disturb the equilibrium that adulthood had brought. She remembered him in Paris on that visit with her father a few months before the outbreak of war. She remembered walking with him in the English Garden in Geneva. She remembered other times and other places. Skiing at Megève. Sailing at Annecy. Sometimes it was difficult to get the chronology right. What had happened when? He and Ned used to play a kind of chess together, blind chess where each player could only see his own board. Kriegspiel they’d called it. They needed an adjudicator, to say whether a proposed move was legal or not. Madeleine always refused, so Marian was recruited. And she was willing, of course; happy simply to be in Clément’s presence. Her task was to watch the two boards, while each player saw only his own pieces and had to makes guesses and estimates of what his opponent was doing. The play had been strangely disjointed, groping in the dark with incomplete information. Exactly like physics research, that’s what Clément used to say. Superposition and uncertainty. A quantum world.
Above all, she remembered that day on the lake. Always that. A day of sun and wind and a strange, opalescent light. A day of dreamlike difference, where shock seemed normal.
Clément.
VI
They were given a free day. It was a rare day of sunshine and breeze, so Marian and Yvette decided to climb the mountain that had been the bane of their lives when they first arrived. Meith Bheinn was its name, a raw hulk of a hill that rose behind the lodge, guarded by crags and the ubiquitous Scottish bogs. But now the climb held no fears. Even Yvette had grown stronger, transformed from the city creature of the first days into someone who could walk with fair ease across this desolate landscape. So they slogged up the slopes, clambered over boulders, splashed, laughing through the marshy patches. ‘Look!’ Marian cried, seeing something scurrying amid the heather.
Yvette looked. ‘What? Where?’ But the animal had gone. A grouse perhaps, safer keeping to the ground than rising and being shot, living a clandestine life.
The climb took two and a half hours, and from the top they could see across the isles – Rum, Eigg and Muck close to the land and Skye lying like a shi
eld on the edge of the Atlantic. They were too high for the midges. The wind blew cool but they found shelter in the lee of a boulder where they lay in the fragile sunshine and ate the sandwiches they had brought and talked about what might happen.
‘I think they’ll fail me,’ Yvette said. ‘I think they’ll tell me I’m not good for what they want.’
‘Don’t be silly. You’re doing fine.’
‘No, I’m not. They want people to run over mountains and ford streams and things like that. But what about the cities? What about the towns? That is where the people are. That is where the resistance must be.’
‘Maybe we’ll end up in the Massif Central.’
‘More likely we’ll be in Paris and we’ll wonder why on earth we were ever made to do this training.’
It was curious how they used the collective pronoun. Nous. As though they might be together. But there would be no ‘we’, surely. They would be on their own.
‘What will you do when it’s all over?’ Marian asked.
Yvette shrugged in that fatalistic, Gallic manner. ‘Find another husband, I suppose. A father for my little girl.’
‘In France?’
‘Of course, in France. Where else? Perhaps I’ll live in a big apartment, and you and your husband will come to stay—’
‘My husband!’
‘That Clément you were talking about.’
‘Clément’s too old for me.’
‘Maybe he was once, but age differences vanish as you get older. Look at you now. You’re not a girl any longer, are you? You’re a woman. You’re catching him up. And there’s a big advantage of having an older man.’
‘What’s that?’
‘When he dies, you’re young enough for another one.’ They laughed at the idea, at the thought of men being their victims, lusting after them and being bent to their will.
After a while the wind grew chill and they decided to go back, but as they were preparing to descend from the summit they heard voices below them on the hillside. Was it someone from the lodge? They crouched in the lee of their boulder and waited, whispering.
The voices came nearer. Male voices. A burst of laughter. They were coming up from the north, directly towards them.
‘Let’s go,’ Marian whispered to Yvette, ‘we’ll outflank them.’ She led the way eastwards off the summit, keeping low, moving from cover to cover as they had been taught. They crept over tussocks of grass and round scattered boulders. And then they saw the group approaching, half a dozen men in battledress and cap comforters climbing the hillside rapidly, their boots clumping against the rocks.
‘Commandos,’ she whispered to Yvette. They had heard about commandos. Emile had told them. ‘They train round here as well,’ he’d said, ‘Lochailort.’ But he wouldn’t say how he knew, merely gave that smug, know-all’s smile. So the two women crouched behind a boulder as the six men climbed past. They were moving fast, almost as though they were in a race of some kind, and carrying weapons, Sten guns slung against their chests, and heavy packs on their backs.
Abruptly Marian stood up. It was an unpremeditated move, nothing that she had discussed with Yvette. She just stood up there on the hillside in the wind and the sun. ‘Bang! Bang!’ she shouted. ‘You’re dead!’
The men stumbled to a halt and grabbed at their weapons, looking round to see her standing there on a boulder, her hair blown out by the wind, looking for all the world like a Valkyrie, or something. ‘What the fuck?’ one of them exclaimed, and then looked embarrassed.
‘A woman,’ another said. ‘What the devil’s a woman doing here?’
And the others laughed, one of them raising his hands above his head. ‘Je me rends,’ he cried. ‘Je suis votre prisonnier. Do what you will with me.’ There was more laughter, and more French spoken. The one who had raised his hands in mock surrender was the French boy called Benoît.
The leader of the group came across. Yvette had appeared at Marian’s side and stood close as though for protection.
‘Two of you?’ the man shouted. He wore captain’s pips on his shoulders and his face was dark with rage. ‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing here? Don’t you know this is a restricted area? Where the bloody hell have you come from?’
‘We’re from Edinburgh,’ Marian said. ‘We’ve come for the weekend.’
‘For the weekend? Here? Do you have identification? Where are your papers?’
‘We left them down in the car. We didn’t expect to meet a policeman up here.’
‘I’m not a bloody policeman!’ The captain was struggling with the possibilities, trying to work out what to do. His face was red, from exertion perhaps, or anger, or the embarrassment of meeting women in a place like this. ‘Where in God’s name are you staying?’
‘At a hotel.’
‘A hotel? Round here?’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘This is most irregular. You shouldn’t be here at all. We’ll have to escort you down.’
‘Does that mean we’re under arrest?’
‘It means I’m keeping an eye on you until I can be sure of your story. As far as I know you could be spies.’
‘We’re not spies. Honestly.’
‘Of course you’ll say that. Spies would say that, wouldn’t they?’
‘I suppose they would. But actually we’re secretaries, at the Office for Inter Services Liaison in Edinburgh. You can check if you like.’
‘Inter Services Liaison? Never heard of it.’
‘It’s very important. It does liaison. Between the services.’
‘However important it is, you shouldn’t be here. You’d better come with me.’
So they set off down the hill, the captain leading the way, the two women following, escorted by the men.
‘Will we be in trouble?’ Yvette asked in a whisper.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Benoît walked beside them. He was looking at her with a curious, sideways glance, as though trying to remember. Then his eyes lit up. ‘You are Anne-Marie! La belle Anne-Marie who would not go dancing with me. Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites là?’
‘Is it any of your business?’
He laughed. He looked quite different from the half-drunk youth who had tried to take her dancing. Younger, certainly, but dark and thoughtful. ‘She is very surprising, our Anne-Marie. I didn’t expect to see her here. I only expect to see sheep in this shitty part of the world, not beautiful women. And not London girls who suddenly show they are, in fact, French. You fooled me, you know. I never guessed you were French until when you walked away. Emmerdeur, you called me.’
‘You were.’
‘It was my last evening before coming here.’
‘And mine.’
‘We should have spent it together.’
‘You should have been sober.’
The captain looked over his shoulder, suddenly alerted to the language that was being spoken. ‘Are these women French? Estce que vous êtes françaises?’
The group stumbled to a halt. There was a further interrogation. What were two French women doing here? The faint suspicion arose in the officer’s mind that he was being made to look a fool. ‘Are you people from Meoble?’ he demanded.
Marian smiled, as though it was a moment of revelation. ‘Meoble Hotel, that’s the place. That’s where we’re staying. Not really a hotel, more a work camp.’
‘Look, are you taking the mickey?’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to tell you straight away, was I? It’s all secret. I wasn’t going to go blabbing to any Tom, Dick or Harry we bump into on a mountainside.’
The officer regarded her with something approaching fury. ‘I am not any Tom, Dick or Harry. I’m an experienced alpine climber. I’ve climbed on Everest with F. S. Smythe. I’ve trekked up to the foot of Kanchenjunga. And I don’t expect lip from a young girl out on a hiking trip. So you two come with me and we’ll see what’s going on.’
He turned and stormed off down the hillside with the rest of his group follow
ing on the broken slope, slipping and sliding at the steeper bits, herding the two girls among them. Benoît was still beside her. He tried to keep his voice low so that the captain wouldn’t hear. ‘So you are in training.’ He shook his head in amazement. And admiration. ‘What a casse-cou you are! Where are you from?’
‘Geneva.’
‘Ah, une Genevoise. I can hear it in your accent.’
‘My father was an official of the League of Nations.’
‘Posh!’
‘He’s not posh. He’s just an ordinary man. He’s my father.’
‘And is the posh girl enjoying the course?’
‘I told you, we’re not posh.’ But she admitted that she was enjoying it, in a masochistic kind of way. It was like a glorified expedition with her Uncle Jacques, who used to take her climbing in the Alps.
‘Except for the weather?’
‘Except for the weather.’ They laughed. You had to laugh at the weather. The only alternative was to cry, and there was no point in doing that as no one would notice the tears. ‘We’ve canoed across the lake,’ he told her, and then corrected himself with elaborate sarcasm: ‘Loch. They get very excited if you call it a lake. And now we’ve been racing up to the top. It’s some kind of competition. They love competitions, these British. Apparently there’s a league table, like the football. I think that’s what they think of the war – it’s a competition, and whoever wins gets the Ashes. You’ve heard of the Ashes?’