by Simon Mawer
‘This is César,’ Atkins announced primly. ‘As you may see, he has the gift of the gab.’
‘We’ve already met,’ said Marian.
‘Already met?’
‘We bumped into each other in a bar here in London.’
Atkins pursed her lips. ‘In a bar?’
‘And again in Scotland. On a mountainside.’
‘On a mountainside? It sounds most irregular.’
‘Just a vein,’ he said.
‘A vein?’
‘Don’t you say that?’
Marian giggled. ‘Un coup de veine. Chance, pure chance.’
Atkins glared at the two of them, as though she might be the butt of some private joke. ‘I’m not sure that I approve of chance,’ she said. ‘As I told you, César is going as a weapons instructor. You won’t have much to do with each other in the field …’
Marian tried to ignore Benoît. He was attempting to catch her eye, trying to snare her into laughing. ‘When do we go? You said the next moon …’
‘It depends on the weather. But we have a slot for you in the middle of next week. That’ll give you time to sort matters out, get to know the geography, that kind of thing. César will have useful tips for you – he was in France not long ago and knows exactly what it’s like. Perhaps …’ she made a small gesture of dismissal, ‘you can find somewhere to discuss things.’
They found a corner of what had once been the living room. ‘My little Anne-Marie,’ Benoît said. ‘You see, it is fate that we should be together.’
‘I’m not your little Anne-Marie,’ she said, but the idea amused her. Despite seeming no older than she he still had that air of instant superiority, of Gallic arrogance. ‘I think we should use field names anyway. I’m Alice.’
‘But I hate César. You are lucky. Alice is lovely. But César! Not even a Frenchman. And an emperor to boot.’
‘So was Napoleon.’
‘That’s even worse. I’m not a Bonapartist or a monarchist or any of those things. I am a republican! Look, let’s get out of this place. Let’s go for a walk. We don’t have to sit around in here just so they can keep an eye on us.’
So they escaped like children from school, amused by their suddenly being thrown together. Somewhere up in the sky the moon was waxing but you couldn’t see that; all you could see were clouds and blue and the sun chasing itself in and out of shadow, and barrage balloons floating like great, airy maggots. The moon seemed a long way away. Talking together, they walked down to Marble Arch and into the Park. It was easy, this talking, despite their unfamiliarity with each other and the differences in their backgrounds. Benoît was a colon from Algeria with something of the hot Mediterranean littoral in his blood, and a sense of alienation. ‘They call us “Black Feet”, you know that? What does that mean? That we’re part Arab? That we’re not quite as good as the rest of them? Maybe it means that we’ve stepped in shit.’
He had been called up in the general mobilisation in 1939, and after the fall of Paris his whole unit had surrendered. On the night that they were to be taken off to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, he and a friend had jumped the train. He shrugged it off as something of no consequence. ‘You seize the moment. You can’t think about it for too long or the moment’s gone. You’ve just got to act, and if it works …’ another shrug, ‘good luck to you.’ Much of the time he shrugged; or grinned, as though what he had done was no more than a boyish prank. With his friend he had made his way across the demarcation line into the unoccupied zone where they’d worked as farm labourers for a while before continuing southwards. Eventually they had crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, where they were flung into jail.
‘We made such a fuss that they let us go after a week. Pamplona, that was the place. Do not go to Pamplona. Full of shits. From there I got back to Algeria and joined the Resistance. Then this fellow approached me and suggested that I could go back to France if I sold my soul to him.’
Her own experience, so dramatic at the time, appeared banal beside his. When she told him, almost apologetically, about Geneva before the war – the large house, the servants, the privileges that accrue to the family of an international civil diplomat – he shrugged it all off. ‘You can’t help that. I can’t help being a pied-noir; you can’t help being the daughter of a big shot. At least you’ve not become a spoiled brat. At least you can take what they throw at you.’
He grinned at her. ‘Let’s go and get a cup of tea. Isn’t that what the English do? A nice cup of tea.’ He said it in English, his French accent overlaid with a clumsy Cockney imitation: Uh noice cuppa tey. It made her laugh.
Over tea they talked about what they might do during these tiresome, anxious days of waiting. Benoît was staying in a hotel that the Organisation had found for him. They didn’t want him living with other members of the Free French Forces. ‘They guard me jealously because I should be working with the Gaullists but they want to keep me for themselves.’
She looked at him thoughtfully, her head on one side. ‘Why don’t you come to Oxford? I’m going back this evening. Why don’t you come and stay next weekend?’
It was an idea plucked out of the air. Why not bring this French boy to see Maman? She would love him, wouldn’t she? It was not the kind of thing Marian had ever done before, but then she was no longer the kind of person she had ever been. She wouldn’t even ask. She would simply tell her mother: ‘Maman, I’ve invited this French guy for the weekend.’ C’mec, she’d say. Her mother hated that kind of slang. ‘He’s at a loose end in London, and I thought it would be nice for him to see a bit of family life.’ Family life. That is what would win her mother over.
That afternoon she discovered whom she was to be. ‘Anne-Marie Laroche,’ an earnest, bespectacled Frenchman informed her. ‘Anne-Marie as you suggested. Laroche because it is common. So, a plain name, an ordinary name, a name that is as completely forgettable as you will try to be.’ Like a bridge player laying out his hand to take all the remaining tricks, he displayed the identity cards and ration books of this fictitious woman.
‘Anne-Marie Laroche. I like it.’
He shrugged, as though liking a name were an irrelevance entirely confined to women. ‘As you see, I have made her twenty-six years old. The same colouring as yourself, of course. But I’m afraid you’ll have to make her, er … less striking than you are. Good looks are not considered an asset for an agent – you don’t want to go turning men’s heads.’ He glanced up at her and blushed and fiddled with the papers in front of him. ‘Now you need to get to know mademoiselle Laroche as well as you know yourself.’
Afterwards she had a briefing about the use of ciphers with a flirtatious young man called Marks. He introduced himself as ‘More Groucho than Karl’, and asked her if she remembered from her lectures at Beaulieu how to do a double-transposition cipher and laughed out loud when she told him which poem she had chosen for her key. ‘You and half a dozen other women agents,’ he said. She needed something original, something that no German cipher expert could possibly know. Did she write any poetry of her own?
‘There’s something.’
‘Let me see.’ She picked up a pencil and wrote out a poem that she’d written years ago:
I wonder whether
Or ever
You’ll love me
Forever
Or always
Our pathways
Will keep us apart
Perhaps never
But never
We’ll share love
Together
Yet always
Through all ways
You’re close to my heart
‘Who was he?’ Marks asked.
She smiled and blushed a bit. ‘An old friend. I haven’t heard from him for ages. I thought I was in love with him but maybe it was no more than a childish crush.’
He shrugged. ‘Crush and love, the only difference is how long it lasts. Let’s see if he brings you luck.’ So he set her an exercise to see how many mistakes
she made using her poem, and she gave a small smile of triumph when she made none.
‘Close to my heart,’ he said approvingly, and with apparent reluctance released her to her next appointment, which was with a Jewish tailor in Clifford Street who would make her a couple of suits and a coat in French cloth and in the best French manner. The stitching, the lining, the cut, everything was different, he explained, huffing and puffing around her and decrying English fashion. But it would take time. You cannot rush these things. These people always ask for everything by tomorrow.
VII
In the evening she took the train back home. The ups and downs of her present existence bewildered her. One moment she was in the world of the Organisation with its tricks and puzzles, its truths and half-truths and downright lies: the next she was at home enveloped in the certainties of childhood. The only thing she carried over from one world to the other was the ability to lie.
‘They’ve told me to prepare to go overseas,’ she explained to her mother. ‘Algiers, I expect, but it might be Morocco. They’re terribly vague. I want some stuff that won’t look out of place, clothes and things. Can I see what you’ve got? Oh, and Benoît is probably coming to stay for a couple of days.’
‘Who is Benoît?’
‘I told you. This mec I met during training. He’s coming for the weekend.’
‘What on earth do you mean, mec?’
‘Boy, then. What do you want me to say? Chap?’ She said it in English – chep – with mockery in her tone.
‘Well, whatever you call him, we don’t know him. How can we have someone to stay whom we don’t know?’
‘But if he doesn’t come to stay you’ll never know him.’
Her mother made that face, the little moue of anger that she always showed when either of her children bested her in an argument. ‘Anyway, there’s also a phone message for you. Something else to do with your work, I suppose. A colonel, he said.’
‘A colonel?’
‘That’s right.’
She thought: Buckmaster. She thought: disaster, a change of plan, the whole carefully constructed artifice brought crashing down by an outside agency, some matter of chance or coincidence. Maybe in Bristol, or maybe some other hitch. The head of WORDSMITH didn’t want a woman. Perhaps it was that. Or perhaps Buckmaster and Atkins had revised their opinion of her at the last minute and decided that no, she was not suitable material for going into the field. Instead it would be the limbo of the ‘cooler’, where she would kick her heels in frustration while doing nothing, because she knew what she knew, like some kind of radioactive substance that was too hot to handle and had to be kept in isolation.
But her mother had written the message down on the notepad beside the telephone and the name was not Buckmaster but Peters: would Marian meet Colonel Peters at Brasenose College at ten o’clock the next morning? It took a moment for her to recognise the man’s name – her Get Out of Jail card during the scheme in Bristol, the number she never had to ring.
VIII
The college, like everything else, had been taken over by the military. Where you expected gowned figures stalking the quadrangles, instead there was a coming and going of men in uniform, and that sense of shabby impermanence that haunts military installations, as though the enemy is approaching and administration might be making a bonfire of the files at a moment’s notice. In the shadows of the main gate a notice from the Commandant exhorted officers of the Directing Staff to kindly address all problems of a domestic nature to the adjutant rather than the domestic bursar. Someone had ringed the split infinitive in red ink.
She stood hesitantly in the gatehouse wondering why she was here. Alice, she thought, in some eccentric wonderland. But no white rabbit scuttled across the green velvet of the lawn; instead a figure in sports jacket and flannels stepped out of the shadows of the porter’s lodge, held out his hand and gave a little half-bow. ‘How good to see you again, Miss Sutro, and looking rather more habillée than at our previous encounter. My name is Peters.’
He had a stooped, donnish air about him and seemed rather too old to be on active service. She frowned. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps there’s been some misunderstanding …’
‘Oh, no misunderstanding at all. But our previous encounter was a little one-sided, I’m afraid. I was witness to your interrogation in Bristol.’
The revelation was a shock. She remembered shadows behind the lights, men asking questions of her, shouting at her, wheedling, threatening, men whose interest in her seemed almost lascivious. Why did she feel embarrassed by the knowledge that this man had been one of the watchers?
‘I must say,’ he added, ‘you conducted yourself in exemplary fashion. To the manner born. I’ve always had my doubts about young women getting mixed up in this kind of thing – there’s been quite a bit of opposition to it, d’you know that? – but girls like you show that my doubts were ill-founded.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
‘It’s not an insult.’ He took her elbow and guided her into the golden light of the quadrangle. ‘I wrote a glowing report for Colonel Buckmaster. Told him I’d have been happy to have you working for me when I was in the game. Just the ticket.’
Men in uniform walked past them, young officers laughing and joking about something. Through a shadowy archway was another quadrangle with a military-looking tent pitched on one of the lawns. Under the eye of a corporal a soldier was carefully painting cobblestones white. She thought of Alice again, the gardeners painting white roses red. ‘What is this all about?’ she asked, and Peters nodded thoughtfully, as though she had posed a most penetrating and perceptive question. ‘Of course you are curious,’ he said. ‘Of course you are. And we will satisfy your curiosity all in good time.’
He led the way into one of the staircases and up narrow stairs to a door that opened onto a room overlooking the small quadrangle and the end wall of the college chapel. There was a sofa and two armchairs and a low table between them. And rising from one of the armchairs was a second man, rather younger than Peters. He wore a dark blue pinstriped suit, and in his top pocket was a white silk handkerchief. His name, so Colonel Peters said, was Fawley. Major Fawley.
They shook hands. The man contrived a smile of sorts. He wore glasses, perfectly circular glasses that gave him an owlish look. Would she like tea? Or perhaps, what with her French background, she would prefer coffee?
‘I don’t want anything, thank you, Major Fawley. I just want to know what I am doing here.’
‘Of course you do. And I will tell you shortly, but before I answer I must emphasise the extremely confidential nature of what we have to discuss. All of this conversation must be considered most secret. Nothing of what we say here must be repeated to anyone, either within your organisation or outside it.’
‘What about Colonel Buckmaster?’
‘Not Colonel Buckmaster, nor Miss Atkins. No one.’
‘But they are my superiors.’
Fawley nodded. There was something measured about him, something of the stillness of a priest who would understand any point of confusion and have the doctrinal answer ready to hand. ‘I comprehend your difficulty, Miss Sutro. Of course I do. If everything goes well, Colonel Buckmaster will be made aware of our conversation in due course; but for the moment let’s say that this meeting is outside even his remit.’
Was this another test? Was it some stupid charade put on by the Organisation to see how good she was at keeping things secret? ‘I really don’t understand—’
‘You see, I work for a different government department from the one that recruited you—’
‘Different? What do you mean, different?’
‘In my father’s house are many mansions, Miss Sutro. I’m afraid I am unable to identify the department, save to say that it is most secret. More secret even than the one so …’ he hesitated, ‘so admirably run by Colonel Buckmaster.’
‘I don’t follow—’
‘I’m sure you don’t. Let’s say that we are a
ll on the same side, all working towards the same ends, but in different ways.’ He reached inside his jacket and took out a cigarette case. ‘Do you smoke?’
Did she? It seemed a question as difficult as all the others seething in her mind. She thought of the girls in the Filter Room during the night watch, the haze of smoke above their heads, the desultory conversations when there was nothing happening, the sudden action when the radar stations called through and plots began going down on the table. An explosive tension like a parachute jump, not this nagging anxiety, this confusion. She took the proffered cigarette and leaned forward to accept his light. As she sat back in her chair Fawley said, ‘I understand that you are due to leave for France at the next moon.’
She tried not to betray her shock. At Beaulieu they’d warned her – they’ll surprise you with unexpected knowledge. They’ll find out things from other prisoners and they’ll try and shock you with what they know. But you’ve got to seem indifferent, as though you’ve no idea what they’re going on about. You know nothing, remember that. Nothing. So she tried not to show shock, she tried not to glance at Peters, she tried to appear indifferent. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do, Miss Sutro. For the moment, all I want to say is that when you get to Paris—’
‘Major Fawley, I can’t make any comment about this kind of thing.’
He nodded. ‘Of course you can’t. Let me put it this way: if the chance should arise of your going to Paris, we would like you to do something for us.’
‘Something?’
‘We’d like you to make contact with your friend Dr Clément Pelletier. Would you be happy to do that?’
The two men seemed to be held in a great stillness. She was aware of a sound from the quadrangle below, the clatter of army boots on paving stones, the sound of men laughing, someone calling in a loud voice across the open space.
‘Clément Pelletier?’