by Simon Mawer
After three drops you gained your parachute wings, but women weren’t allowed to wear them on their uniform jacket lest questions be asked. ‘Why the hell should questions always be asked about women?’ Marian complained, but no one paid her any attention. Immediately after the ceremony, transport took the members of her course to the railway station at Ringway to catch the train back down to London. The B School course started the next day near Beaulieu in Hampshire.
III
At Beaulieu, any pretence about what they might be doing was set aside: this was training for the clandestine life. A school for spies, someone said. They’d given her a field name, and that was how she was to be known. Alice. It seemed fitting. The school was based in a large country house tucked away in the middle of the New Forest; but everything was French, all casual conversation was French, even the reading material was French. It was as though she had stepped through the looking-glass and emerged at a house party in a remote and rather dilapidated château in the French countryside, inhabited by a motley collection of people who knew only that they should not be known, who understood that they should not necessarily understand.
‘Remember,’ a rather louche young man with brilliantined hair explained to them, ‘the smallest detail you pick up here may one day save your life.’ The Knave of Hearts, Marian thought. A recent arrival from France, he spoke about the intricacies of the rationing system and the problems of day-to-day life. ‘France is no longer the place you knew before the war. You will arrive there and you will be strangers in what you think is home. Don’t walk boldly into a café and ask for a café au lait. There is probably no milk, and there certainly won’t be any coffee. And when you’ve got whatever it is they give you – roasted acorns, probably, or chicory – don’t ask for sugar to stir into it. There is no sugar. All you’ve got is saccharin. If you do ask for sugar, they may wonder where you’ve been for the last two years.’
There was advice on how to comport yourself in a country whose leadership you loathed and whose views you hated; how to blend in and how to fade away, how to see without ever being seen.
‘Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés,’ the lecturer insisted, quoting someone. To live happily, live hidden.
There were lectures on the German armed forces and security forces, their uniform, their ranks and their manners – the Wehrmacht and the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Geheime Staatspolizei, the whole taxonomy of occupation and terror. ‘The Abwehr hate the SD, the SD despise the Abwehr. The battle between the two is almost as vicious as the battle between them and us.’
They explained how to recruit local agents and how to arrange a rendezvous, how to set up dead letter drops and arrange safe houses, how to think and out-think. There were practical lessons in how to tail someone and how to detect that you were being tailed. There was instruction in lock-picking and burglary given by a weasel-faced man who was the only one to speak English and who, so the story went, had done a dozen years in Wormwood Scrubs.
‘If he was such a bloody awful thief that he got caught,’ one of the students asked, ‘why the hell is he teaching us?’
There was a course in encryption and wireless telegraphy. A young man with a prominent Adam’s apple explained the intricacies of the B2 wireless set in terms no one could understand, and then they spent hours learning how to write a message and turn it into apparent gibberish using a double transposition cipher. You chose a poem that you knew by heart and used words from that to generate the cipher key. If the operator at the other end knew your poem, then she could reverse the process and turn the message back into clear. Marian chose a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning that she had learned at school.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach …
The words almost brought tears to her eyes, sentimental tears that were soon dispelled by lessons on what to do if you were captured, how to deal with interrogation, how to deflect the questioning, how to survive on your own, afraid and uncertain, convinced that your position is hopeless. They even came for you in the dead of night and dragged you out of bed and bundled you into a car and drove you to another house where there were bare cells, and anonymous men in the uniform of the SD who interrogated you for hours; shone bright lights in your face; shouted at you. You stood in your nightclothes while they threatened you with violence. Stories went round that they even stripped you naked, but Marian and the only other woman on the course tried to reassure each other by dismissing such rumours as nonsense. They’d never strip a woman. They might try and make it as realistic as possible, but they’d never do that. Still, the fear always lurked in the back of your mind.
The other woman was called Marguerite. She seemed a purely English kind of person, a bit of a busybody, the kind of woman who might be a housekeeper or a district nurse; but her French was perfect, spoken with a Belgian accent and figures of speech.
‘Have you come across someone called Yvette?’ Marian asked her. They were like convicts in prison, getting rumours from one another, trading snippets, hearing things on the grapevine.
‘You mean that silly woman who married an Englishman?’
‘Probably. Coombes was her married name.’
‘She was in the course before me at Thame. We bumped into one another through some muck-up with the transport. Seems an empty-headed creature.’
‘We were in Scotland together. I tried to help her.’
‘Did you now? I doubt it was worth it.’
Dear Ned, Marian wrote. Training goes on. More peculiar than you can imagine. At this rate I’m afraid I’ll end up fully trained just when the war ends. Tried to ring you but couldn’t get through. Maybe I’ll get some free time …
IV
The course finished with a four-day scheme. ‘The Scheme,’ they announced portentously, as they might have spoken of some kind of ordeal by fire, an initiation into the secret rites of the faith. For her scheme, Marian was to invent her own cover, travel to Bristol, find somewhere to stay and then carry out a series of assignments. First, she had to make contact with an agent operating in the city. Once this was done, her task was to set up cut-outs and dead letter drops and make a move towards recruiting likely people who might provide information about aircraft manufacture in the city. In this charade – that is what she called it – the British police were to be her enemy. They would have been informed that a suspected enemy agent was in the area, and it was her job to evade them as surely as she would try to evade the Milice and the Gestapo.
‘And if they catch me?’
‘Use your cover story for as long as you can. If things get silly—’
‘It’s been pretty silly all the time.’
‘This isn’t a joke, Sutro. This is as near to being real as we can make it. In a few weeks it will be for real, and then you’ll get no second chance. If things get really difficult with the police, insist that they make a call to this number and ask for Colonel Peters. He’ll tell them that you are an agent in training and he’ll come round and pick you up. That number is your Get Out of Jail card, so you’d better not forget it.’
And so she stepped through a further looking-glass, this time into the person of Alice Thurrock, graduate of the University of Edinburgh and teacher of French, a rather plain woman of twenty-eight who wore flat shoes and a shapeless tweed skirt, and had her brown hair gathered into a bun. She didn’t wear make-up, but did have a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that rested asymmetrically on her nose and gave the appearance of a squint. She had been in Paris until the summer of 1940 and returned to Britain a week before the Germans marched in. Since then she’d joined the WAAF, but last spring she had been discharged on medical grounds, and now she was trying to get things back on an even keel, to do something useful even if the military were no longer interested in her. There was no one else. Both parents were dead, her father in the flu epidemic of 1918 and her mother two years ago of cancer, so she
was on her own, more or less. There was a brother in the army but he was out in the Middle East. Unfortunately all her stuff – her degree and teaching certificates, recommendations from former employers, all of that had been left behind in Paris. She had little more than what she could carry in her suitcase. A whole life.
The next few days were a kind of game, with the whole damaged city as the board and those few people she encountered, the pieces. But who was watching? She travelled on buses and tramped the pavements. She made a rendezvous with a threadbare man in a bookshop who gave her various messages to pass on to agents who didn’t exist. She chose flats for wireless transmissions and anonymous sites for dead letter drops. At a girls’ school in Filton, where she managed to get a job as a temporary teacher, she selected the unwitting school secretary as a cut-out. A newsagent in Queens Road became another. She spent one afternoon identifying possible dead letter boxes – a loose stone in the steps of the Bethesda Chapel in Great George Street, and the space behind a fuse box beside a cinema in Whiteladies Road – and choosing other sites as suitable places to rendezvous with hypothetical agents. She had no idea what relation all this would have with reality but, her natural cynicism suspended for the moment, she played the game with gusto.
Dear Ned, this is the most tremendous fun, like an elaborate game of Hide and Seek but with the whole city to play in. Am I a spy or a mysterious criminal? Or am I just Alice who has stepped through the looking-glass? I remember your explaining that Tweedledum and Tweedledee stood for real matter and a new kind of material that is the exact opposite. Terrene and contraterrene, was that what you called it? Maybe I am like that. Everyone around me is real and I am unreal. Perhaps that is why they don’t notice me …
Suppers were sorry affairs in a cheerless dining room with the other lodger, a girl called Maisie who worked for the Ministry of Supply. The landlady cooked them a thin stew with many potatoes and little else. An Oxo cube gave an approximation to the flavour of meat. ‘Might as well be in prison,’ Maisie muttered when the landlady was out of earshot. Apart from that little moment of controversy they talked of neutral things, films they had seen, books they had read, film stars they liked. And boyfriends. ‘You got a man?’ Maisie asked.
Marian thought of Clément, of what was and what might have been. ‘Not really.’
‘Don’t blame you. It’s not worth it nowadays. I had a boy but he was called up and now he’s in the Middle East or somewhere. Hardly ever hear from him. I have to make do with my own comfort, if you get my meaning.’ The girl laughed, blushing. ‘Well, what else can you be sure of these days, eh?’
‘Nothing, I suppose.’
‘You just got to look out for yourself, haven’t you?’
‘I suppose you have.’
Marian lay in bed that night and considered Maisie’s confession. Once upon a time she had thought such an act to be against the God who looked over her and admonished her for things done and things left undone. Although that particular belief had gone it had left behind a grimy residue of guilt, a feeling that this was a mean-spirited and dishonest act. But Alice Thurrock decided that she had no such inhibitions. She was a practical person. If you wanted a few moments of intense and careless ecstasy, then why not? It was your body, to do with as you wanted. You had to look out for yourself because no one else was going to. So she lay in bed quite without compunction, her legs open and her knees drawn up and her fingers involved in the soft intricacies of her vulva. She tried not to think of Clément. She tried not to think of anyone else but herself, this creature of flesh and blood and bone, of awkward limbs and sterile but sensitive breasts, this mortal coil stroking itself to a climax that ransacked her body and washed through her mind and left her placid and heavy with sleep. But still she thought of Clément.
‘Alice Thurrock,’ she said to her reflection in the cracked mirror the next morning, ‘you are a shameless woman.’
V
On the last day of the exercise they arrested her. They came in the middle of the night when the household was asleep and courage was at its lowest ebb, half a dozen men banging on the front door and pushing past the landlady’s feeble attempts to stop them. They burst into Marian’s room as she struggled into her overcoat and dragged her downstairs to a waiting car while Maisie and the landlady looked on. From there she was driven to some anonymous house in the Clifton area where she was handcuffed to a chair beneath bright lights and interrogated for hours about who she was and what she was doing in the city.
‘Tell me your name.’
‘Alice Thurrock.’
‘Your middle name.’
‘Eileen.’
‘Your date of birth.’
‘October the eighteenth, nineteen fifteen.’
They’d taken away her overcoat and she had nothing on beneath her nightdress. The light dazzled her so that she could see nothing of her interrogators but she felt violated under their gaze, as though their hands and not only their eyes were on her body.
‘I want my clothes,’ she said, but they ignored her.
‘Where were you born?’
‘Oxford, I was born in Oxford.’
‘Tell us what you are doing in Bristol.’
‘I want my clothes.’
‘Never mind your clothes. What are you doing in Bristol?’
‘I’m trying to find a job. I was in the WAAF but I was discharged on medical grounds—’
‘You’re lying!’
‘No, I’m not. Believe me, I’m telling the truth. My parents are both dead and my brother—’
‘I don’t want to hear about your bloody brother. What were you doing yesterday? You were wandering around, checking places out, trying to talk to people, trying to wheedle information out of them. What were you doing in Filton?’
It was like diving, like holding your breath and diving deep down, swimming down against the lift of the water, your breath held, your lungs bursting, knowing that you could always come to the surface and break through into the air and ask them to stop.
‘I went for a job at the Filton Ladies’ Academy. They were looking for a French mistress.’
‘Where did you learn your French?’
‘I studied French at university.’
‘But you’ve been to France?’
‘Many times. As a child I went on exchanges with a French family during the holidays.’
‘Tell me the name of the family.’
‘Perrier.’
‘Where did they live?’
‘In Paris.’
‘Where?’
‘In the fifth, near the Panthéon.’
‘What was their address?’
‘Look, I want my clothes. I’m cold and I want my clothes. You can’t keep me like this—’
‘We can keep you how we please. We can strip you naked if we like. Now tell us their address.’
It was like a masquerade, where the pretence has worn thin and tempers are frayed. But she played the game, knowing that one day it might not be a game any longer and she wouldn’t have a Get Out of Jail card and the men behind the lights would be members of the Gestapo.
VI
Miss Atkins turned a page. ‘It seems you did well at Beaulieu. “Tolerated arrest and interrogation. Kept to her cover story throughout and made no slips”, that’s what it says.’ She looked up, smiling bleakly. ‘I’m putting you forward for immediate deployment in the field. You’ll go in the next moon period. Your circuit will be WORDSMITH, in the South-west.’
Marian felt a small snatch of emotion, a blend of fear and excitement from which it was impossible to recover either. The South-west. Toulouse, maybe. Or Biarritz, on the coast. Or perhaps Montpellier and the Mediterranean. She searched her memory in vain for anything more. Not Paris. Ned’s idea of her seeing Clément evaporated in a cloud of relief and disappointment.
‘The organiser is one of the most successful of our agents,’ Atkins was saying. ‘Field name Roland. Perhaps you have heard about him? I know how word get
s round, despite our best efforts at security. He has been in the field for over a year.’
More than a year! It seemed impossible. A year of the clandestine life. Your cover story would become more real than your true story. The lies would become truths, and truths lies. Lies like beauty.
‘The circuit is very dispersed. It covers a huge area – from Limoges down to Toulouse – and Roland has been struggling to keep the thing under control. He has a pianist who’s been with him for months now, but he desperately needs a courier. One man can’t get round that area on his own. You’ll be dropping with César. He’s going to the same circuit, as a weapons and sabotage instructor. You won’t have much to do with each other in the field, but you ought to get acquainted. I’ve arranged for him to come and meet you. He should be here any moment.’
But César was late. They waited, making awkward conversation and glancing at the clock on the desk. Fifteen minutes after the appointed time there was a cursory knock, the door was flung open and there he was, with a faint smile on his face and profuse apologies on his lips and a kind of childish insolence about him that seemed to appease even Miss Atkins. Apparently there had been a mix-up over appointments, a meeting with someone in RF section. He was most very sorry because he knew how much you British value punctuality, but anyway, here he was, better late than never, isn’t that what you say?