The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

by Simon Mawer

  Apparently the parachutage has been an unqualified success. Twelve containers in all. Arms, explosives, even cigarettes and coffee. All kinds of stuff. Bounty from the sky, like one of those cargo cults in the Pacific islands, gifts descending from the heavens.

  ‘Tomorrow you’ll meet le Patron,’ the head of the reception committee tells her. ‘For the moment you’re staying here.’ He is a dark man with slicked-down hair and three days’ growth of beard. A farmer, he says. Pigs. Well, those that the Chleuhs have left him, anyway. He has a narrow, suspicious face and, despite being called Gaillard, seems slow and thoughtful.

  ‘What are les Chleuhs?’ she asks.

  He laughs at her ignorance. ‘Les Boches.’

  She doesn’t know les Chleuhs. She doesn’t know anything. Benoît always knows, and now he smiles at her ignorance, that smile that so infuriates her.

  ‘Did you know what les Chleuhs were?’ she asks crossly.

  ‘Of course I did. Moroccan tribe, actually. Ignorant morons, see?’

  She feels like a victim of shipwreck cast up on a foreign shore and being humoured by the natives. The accents all around her are strange, their manner of speaking hard to follow. Yet they are French, incontrovertibly, absurdly French, with the gruff humour of the countryside and a hint of arrogance: impudent Gascons, watching breathlessly as she unzips her jumpsuit and peels it off, as though she might be naked underneath and about to expose herself entirely to their gaze. But beneath the overalls she is a city girl in plain skirt and sharp jacket and a white crêpe de Chine blouse, ordinary enough in the town but incongruous among these workmen and farmers in their blue overalls.

  ‘My shoes are ruined.’

  ‘They’ll clean up well enough,’ the farmer’s wife assures her. ‘But they’re not much good for round here, anyway. City shoes.’

  They are forced to eat. She isn’t hungry and all she really wants is to sleep, but Benoît sits opposite her across the table and consumes the most gargantuan meal. Is this how they live, here in occupied France? Ham and pork and cheese and vegetables and a rough red wine that she refuses after the second glass because it makes her feel light-headed. And then a flan with apples and even – is this possible? – fresh cream.

  ‘I need to sleep,’ she insists, but perhaps she is speaking a different language and they don’t understand her request. ‘Eat,’ she is told. ‘Eat.’ She feels like a goose being force-fed with corn, one of those geese that the farmer surely has out in one of the sheds. Foie gras in the middle of wartime.

  ‘Tell us,’ they ask, watching the two new arrivals carefully as though to be sure to take any morsel that they let fall. ‘When is the invasion going to happen? How long do we have to wait?’

  Benoît shrugs. Alice doesn’t know the answer any more than he does but she wants to give them something. ‘Soon,’ she assures them. ‘Just as soon as everything is in place.’

  ‘We’ve waited so long. What’s keeping them?’

  Their insistence seems annoying. Can’t they see that fighting a war is a difficult operation? It isn’t simply a matter of Churchill and Roosevelt giving an order and everything working out for the best. ‘Where is le Patron?’ she asks, to change the subject.

  ‘He was meant to be here, but someone was arrested and he’s in hiding.’

  ‘Hiding?’

  ‘At Montalban. At the Delacroix place.’

  How can he be in hiding if they all know where he is? She thinks of Beaulieu, of the constant nagging about security. Tell no one who doesn’t need to know. Don’t talk to people. Don’t strike up casual conversations unless it is suspicious not to do so. Don’t draw attention to yourself. A cautious agent is a live one.

  ‘I must lie down,’ she insists, putting the food aside and no longer caring whether she offends them or not. ‘Please.’

  So the farmer’s wife leads the way to a room upstairs while Benoît stays downstairs with the others. He’ll sleep on the floor beside the fire. He’s quite all right, he can sleep anywhere.

  The room upstairs is a small attic under the eaves with whitewashed walls, a single bed, a cupboard and a chest of drawers. Alice feels like a giant, bowing her head beneath the sloping ceiling. ‘My son’s room,’ her hostess explains. ‘Please, make yourself at home.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  The woman’s face is suddenly weary, as though the whole thing has become too much for her, the life on the farm, the men crowding into her house, the lateness of the hour, the war and everything. ‘He was sent to Germany. To work.’ She shrugs. ‘Now you get what sleep you can.’ She leaves an oil lamp on the table beside the bed, gives a brief, fugitive smile and goes out, closing the door gently behind her.

  Alice pushes her suitcase under the bed, then straightens up to look round the room. It smells of damp but she doesn’t care. What she does care about is an escape route. Always look for a second way out of a room, a second exit from a bar or a restaurant, a second way out of a railway station. That’s what they taught her. But the window is jammed shut, the frame thickly crusted with paint. She crouches to peer through the narrow panes. The moon is almost down, visible through trees just above the horizon. That means that the sun will soon be up and whatever is to happen will happen.

  There’s a soft knock on the door. She opens it to find Benoît standing there with that wry, ironical look that was once so appealing. ‘I came to say goodnight,’ he says.

  She accepts a chaste kiss on the cheek. He hesitates in the doorway. ‘May I come in? All those people downstairs …’

  ‘No,’ she tells him, ‘no, you can’t.’

  ‘But mon chat—’

  She puts her hand in his chest and pushes him back. ‘No,’ she repeats. ‘Don’t be an idiot. And for God’s sake stop calling me that. I’m not your cat or your dog or anything.’

  ‘Ma puce,’ he says laughing.

  ‘Go away.’

  After closing the door she waits to hear his footsteps going down the stairs. There’s no lock on the door, so she props a chair against the handle then turns to undress. Through the mottled silvering of the mirror on the wardrobe her reflection looks back at her, an indistinct image of an indistinct individual unbuttoning her shirt and stepping out of her skirt and standing there in her petticoat. She thinks of Benoît, recalling those days in England. The memory is vivid and yet it seems distant in something other than time and space, as though she has stepped through that looking-glass into another world, another dimension. ALICE. Alice with no surname and no story, no parents, no brothers and sisters. Just Alice, à travers le miroir.

  Where, she wonders, is Marian Sutro?

  She shrugs, dismissive of her old personality. She wants to be Anne-Marie Laroche, whose identity card, clothing coupons and ration book – the ration coupons carefully extracted until yesterday – she now carries in her handbag. Anne-Marie Laroche, student, who left Paris in search of the peace and quiet and decent food of the countryside in order to recover from a bout of pneumonia. Paris is impossible. There are all manner of useless luxuries available but you can’t get fresh eggs and meat. Except at an exorbitant price on the black market, of course. And how could she afford anything like that?

  What was she studying in Paris?

  Well, she was about to start a course in literature at the Sorbonne, but when the war came all that stopped. And now she doesn’t know what on earth to do, really. She thought perhaps she’d find some work as a nanny. She loves working with children.

  Where is her family?

  She has no family, no immediate family at any rate.

  Where was she born?

  You can see it there on the identity card. Look. Genève, Suisse. Her father was in the hotel business.

  Was?

  Yes, he’s dead. So’s her mother.

  She frowns at Anne-Marie Laroche’s reflection in the mottled mirror. ‘I’m on my own, really,’ she says out loud. ‘I’ve just got to muddle through.’ Muddle through. It’s so much better in F
rench than English: je dois me débrouiller, with all its fogginess and confusion.

  Outside, through the dirty panes of glass, the sky is already growing pale. Feeling that strange light-headedness that comes with lack of sleep, she lies down in her slip with her coat over her and a blanket over that and her pistol beneath the pillow. In thirty seconds she is asleep, dreaming of a rocking, roaring tube of darkness, and falling and swinging, the daring young girl on the flying trapeze with people below her applauding. There’s Benoît there too, able to see – a moment of great embarrassment – right up her skirt; and then, in the way of dreams, Benoît becomes Clément, and she suddenly finds that she has no knickers on.

  III

  Morning is a new, bright world full of cold. There’s been a light frost overnight, the first frost of autumn, and sunlight ricochets off ice crystals as though they are diamonds. You don’t get days like this in England. You have fog and dank and a raw kind of cold that is like a caustic chemical escaped from a laboratory. Instead, this cold is champagne.

  When she comes down, Benoît is still lying on the broken couch in the corner of the living room beneath a pile of blankets and overcoats. He grunts when Alice greets him. ‘I did not close my eye all night,’ he complains, in English. His tone is reproachful, as though Alice sleeping soundly has somehow denied him the possibility of doing the same. The farmer’s wife fusses round them. There’s bread and home-made plum jam. And real coffee that they brought with them.

  ‘We must speak French,’ Alice admonishes him as he joins her at the table.

  ‘I want that they think I am English.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. And bad security.’

  ‘Look, I must instruct these people in arms and explosives. They think all Frenchmen are losers and they will not take instruction from another Frenchman like they will from an Englishman. It would be even better to be American.’

  ‘But you don’t sound American. You don’t even sound English. When you speak English you sound like Maurice Chevalier.’ She struggles not to show her amusement.

  ‘I don’t know what’s so funny. And I do not sound like Maurice Chevalier. Anyway, they would not know if I did, would they?’

  ‘Maybe you should put on an English accent when you speak French. That way they’ll be sure you’re English. Although they probably won’t understand a word you’re saying.’ In vain she tries to contain her laughter. The conversation seems absurd: a Frenchman pretending to be an Englishman pretending to be a Frenchman.

  By the time they have finished breakfast Gaillard has come with the car. It’s a black Citroën traction avant with a large cylinder like a water heater at the back. ‘Un gazogène,’ he explains. ‘You have gazos in England?’

  Alice doesn’t think so, but she doesn’t even want to consider the question. England is not where she wants to be, even in the minimal way of a fleeting thought. She is Anne-Marie Laroche who has never been to England.

  They pile their suitcases onto the back seat and Benoît sits among them as the car jolts along narrow country roads. They travel through an empty countryside, on byroads that are devoid of traffic, past isolated farms and the occasional hamlet. Where are all the people? The countryside seems deserted, the villages empty. The size of the landscape strikes her, the miles and miles of farmland and woodland, the distant villages and even further towns, the vasty fields of France. What is she and what is Benoît in all this space? How can they achieve anything?

  Benoît is dropped at one of the villages on the way. People are expecting him, a group who have already gone into hiding, young men who have evaded the forced-labour laws and live a clandestine life, sleeping in barns and in remote farmhouses. He gets out of the car and leans in at Alice’s window to give her a kiss. ‘Cheerio, Mouse,’ he says, in English. ‘Take care of yourself and keep your knees together.’

  She doesn’t know whether to laugh or be angry with him. He has so often been like that, flippant and immature. It is something of a shock to see him go, and something of a relief. For the last few days he has been there to cajole her, laugh at her, show her how things are and how they might be, and now he is no more than a figure seen through the small rear window of the car, diminishing as they drive away, diminishing in importance as well as size.

  ‘He shouldn’t speak English,’ Gaillard says. He smokes as he drives, a cigarette wedged into the side of his mouth.

  She shrugs, trying to feel indifferent about Benoît and his little quirks. ‘When do we get to Lussac?’

  ‘Not far now. You mustn’t worry,’ he adds, almost as though he can sense her anxiety. ‘There are no Germans there. The gendarmes …’ He shrugs, as though gendarmes are of no consequence. He keeps his eyes only partly on the road. Otherwise they are on her, on her face or on her bosom or on her knees. She tugs at the hem of her skirt, but somehow she is sitting on it and her knees remain resolutely exposed to his view.

  ‘Your stockings.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Women don’t wear them round here. That’s Parisian.’

  ‘Well, that’s where I’m from, isn’t it?’ She stares out of the side window, not liking the man, uncomfortable under his gaze that is at the same time critical and lascivious.

  ‘You’ll need to think about these things. What to do and what not to do. When to order coffee and when not to order coffee, that kind of thing. However well you may think you know it, this is not the country it was, nor will it ever be again. Some things are permanent.’

  ‘I know all that.’

  He smiles disparagingly, as though no one can know who has been away even for a few weeks. ‘At Lussac you’ll go to an address I’ll give you. Gabrielle Mercey is your contact. She doesn’t know you’ve come from London, all right? She’s a helper but she doesn’t know much. I’ve just picked you up from the station, from the Paris train. It’s better that way.’

  ‘They’ll think I’m French?’ Benoît’s ridiculous pose as an Englishman has infected her, and now the idea that she won’t only have to deceive Germans but also French men and women seems a task beyond her abilities.

  ‘Of course.’ That sideways glance, to face, to bosom, to knees. ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, wondering if he is being sarcastic. ‘Of course.’ Bien sûr.

  IV

  Lussac is a small, dull market town with the memory of a castle in the centre and the vague recollection of walls round the periphery. Place de la République forms a triangle with a church at the apex and the mairie at the base, Church and State in uneasy juxtaposition as they have been for centuries. A tricolore hangs limply from the flagpole in front of the mairie. A couple of market stalls have been set up in the square where women in headscarves argue over the price of potatoes.

  Alice walks the pavements of France for the first time, alone, like a child in a nightmare. The sun is bright on the pavé but there is something dark about the people, as dark and shuttered as some of the houses. They hurry past, heads down. One or two glance at her indifferently, although somehow she expects them to stare with wonder, as though it is written across her forehead that she does not belong, that she is a performer, an artiste who has swung down from the sky, the daring young girl on the flying trapeze. There is nothing to support her, no safety net beneath. She can ring no one, ask no one, rely for help on no one. She has nowhere to go but along this line of frontages towards an address that Gaillard has given her: numéro 23, rue de la Bastille.

  ‘Tell her that Gaillard sent you,’ the man said as he dropped her off near a bus stop.

  ‘There’s no password?’

  Gaillard laughed. ‘I can tell you’ve just come from London.’

  Twenty-three, rue de la Bastille is on a side street off the main square. When she knocks, an elderly woman opens the door and stands there on the step looking down at her with suspicion. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Gaillard sent me.’ For a moment, looking at this pinch-faced woman with the scraped hair and the narrow mou
th, she feels panic bubble up inside. ‘Are you Madame Mercey? Gaillard said you’d put me up for a few days. My name is Alice. I’ve been in Paris.’

  Is the woman going to react? Alice looks round to see if anyone is watching. Never approach a rendezvous directly, they taught her. Always look for signs that the place is being observed. Always make sure that you are not being followed, that you are not leading them to the next link in the chain. If it’s a house, walk straight past the first time, as though you are going somewhere else. Watch for anything out of the ordinary. Watch for watchers. Watch for the man in the window of the house across the street, or the street sweeper leaning on a broom, or the couple talking and pretending to kiss. Only then, if everything seems OK, make another pass.

  But she has done none of this. She has simply walked along the street and up to the door as though it were peacetime, as though the world weren’t at war and the country occupied by the enemy.

  Tell them Gaillard sent you.

  ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Gabrielle Mercey?’

  The woman shrugs, but stands aside and cocks her head to indicate that Alice should enter. At that moment there is a clatter of footsteps on the stairs and a younger woman appears from the floor above. ‘Alice!’ she exclaims. She is in her thirties, and bright and smiling in contrast to the older woman’s dour expression. ‘Are you Alice?’ She comes down the stairs and scolds her mother for not being more welcoming and grabs Alice’s hands to shake. ‘Come, give me your suitcase. I’m Gabrielle. You must be confused, but you’ll soon get used to us. Maman is a sour old puss. She’s always grumbling about me and my ways, but she’s good at heart. Come through to the back. Have you had breakfast? Did you sleep well? Goodness, you can’t have had more than an hour or two, can you? Are you exhausted?’