I gave it up, feeling that any further comment would have been fatuous. Instead I put my arms round her and kissed her dark curls. They were tighter, more disciplined curls than Diana’s, as blue and black as storm clouds over Nun’s Head.
“I’m going away, Yvonne,” I told her, “but I’ll come back, I promise.”
It was then she said what seemed to me a remarkable thing: “Are you going to look for Mummy and bring her back here?” she asked, simply and without emotion.
“I might even do that, Yvonne,” I said and turned out the bedroom light.
She called as I reached the door.
“Jan!”
“Well?”
“Will you be flying now that you’re an airman?”
“I might. Why?”
“Fly over here and do a victory roll. Do it on my birthday. It’s next Thursday.”
“I’m sorry, I’ll be away by then, but I’ll ask one of the others to do it, if not Thursday, then one day soon after!” Uncle Luke had told me that Polish pilots operating from the base at Shepperton sometimes shot down a hit-and-run raider along the coast. I hoped to God they would do so in the next few days.
I went out into the paddock and down the beach avenue for a pint at “The Green Rifleman”. I felt happier and less confused than I had felt in years.
When I was a boy growing up in Whinmouth I was very interested in war. I never missed an opportunity of coaxing the men who attended British Legion rallies to relate anecdotes of Ypres, the Somme or naval engagements, like Jutland. It seemed to me at that time that to fight in a war would be a glamorous, adventurous occupation and I remember that I was always disappointed and disgusted when characters like old Tom Pigeon, the Dockmaster who had served from Mons to the Armistice, dismissed those four years as a journey across a wasteland. I remember one particular thing Tom said when I was interviewing him for a November 11th edition of the Whinmouth Gazette. Hardly bothering to look up from his revolving of the dock swing bridge, he grunted: “You’m asking me about war, Sonny? Giddon with’ee, there baint nowt one can say about it! Most o’ they years I was idle, and all of ’em I was wet’n cold, or parched an’ sweaty. T’other odd minute or zo I was zo bliddy scared ’twas all I could do to stop maakin’ a mess o’ meself!”
It was a reasonable estimate, taken all round. I was in France throughout the winter they called “The Great Bore War” and until the Nazis broke through and we ran for the coast I had been both bored and half-frozen. Then, after the panic of the invasion summer, I was bored and sweaty, like almost everyone else in Britain and now, nearly two years later, I had exchanged boredom and a sense of futility for the semi-permanent bellyache of fear.
I was scared all right, from the top of my scalp to the tips of my toes. I woke up in the night sweating with fear. I toyed with plates of spam and powdered egg unable to swallow more than a few mouthfuls and when I remembered what I had let myself in for, and what was likely to happen to me, I thought of myself as a man needing a brain specialist. A soldier serving in an ordinary unit isn’t scared until he sees the enemy coast or hears the scream of a bomb or shell but I kept reminding myself that I wasn’t attached to a unit of any kind but was sweating it out by myself, without a soul to confide in, and with absolutely no idea of what was expected of me. There was only one useful by-product of those days I spent waiting for my final briefing. I was completely cured of my endless pursuit of Diana and wished heartily that I had never set eyes on the woman, or had had the strength of will to tell her and her cousin Raoul to fight their private war any way they wished and leave me to fight mine in company of my own choosing.
And then, as always in war, came the anti-climax. The briefing was simple and straightforward and my despatch to the Continent nothing like what I had anticipated in terms of risk, excitement or even route. My ideas about the passage of agents to and from occupied territory were as hazy as any ex-civilian’s. Up to that time I had been a gunner, a temporary interpreter, a transport officer and a trainee in the R.A.F. I had never been asked to do anything more heroic than fire a few rounds at a distant target, to ditch lorries or collect evacuees for shipment to Britain. I had imagined, up to that time, that secret agents behaved more or less on lines laid down by the authors of spy-fiction churned out by the ton during the ’twenties and ’thirties. I should have read Maugham’s “Ashenden”, he was much nearer the mark. There was no disguise (apart from a short, pointed beard I was ordered to grow) and there were no secret codes and poison pills. There was no fearsome parachute drop or complicated cross-country journey involving moments of indecision at checkpoints and station barriers. Instead, I was given a perfect set of papers in the name of a certain Hervé van Orthes, a fine arts expert and insurance assessor of French-Canadian extraction, and after an uneventful journey in the belly of a Free French submarine I was set ashore a few miles west of Villefranche, on the Riviera, and told to make my way to a villa on the eastern rim of the resort to await identification by a contact named “Olive.” I arrived in France knowing very little more than when I had parted from Diana’s cousin in the Group-Captain’s office.
The curious thing was I felt cheated. Cheated but also vaguely relieved. They had given me what seemed to me a vast amount of paper money and this, with my personal documents, hand luggage and an automatic revolver with which I had fired a dozen or so practice rounds, was my entire equipment as a spy, agent or saboteur. It all seemed to me absurdly amateur, as amateur as the notion that Emerald Diana de Royden, née Gayelorde-Sutton, of Heronslea, Devon and Palmerston Crescent, S.W.1, was also dedicated to the fumbling, fictitious business. For all that, I lost my bellyache and almost, I say almost, began to take on full awareness again and look about me with faint stirrings of excitement.
I had never previously visited the Riviera. Throughout my service and during pre-war holidays I had lived in the north, in Paris and the south-west, all of which I knew reasonably well. Yet for many years now I had associated the Riviera with Diana. In pre-war days it had been one of her seasonal playgrounds and her mother, who made a fetish of appearing fashionable, had once owned a villa here, not in Villefranche, but further along the coast, behind Nice. Living out my uneventful life as official chronicler of the fêtes and funerals of Whinmouth, I had thought of the Riviera as somewhere I would never visit, like the Royal Enclosure at Ascot or the Centre Court at Wimbledon. Before the war, Diana and her family made an annual pilgrimage to all these places and I had followed them via the pages of the glossy magazines. That was the extent of the gulf between us, she the daughter of the financial wizard and me the small-town reporter on a Devon country newspaper. It had always seemed to me an unbridgeable gulf and I still thought of it as one. That was why I had eventually come to terms with it and married Alison but now I had to remind myself that Alison was dead and that Diana had whirled round again and I was re-entering her world, not as a lover or husband, but as a callow opponent of the most ruthless tyranny in the history of the world. It all seemed so improbable that I found difficulty in believing it real.
I located the villa easily enough, a newish, rather baroque dwelling, built into a rocky shelf above a coastal road that wound behind the town and towards the Riviera proper. It was built of whitened stone and in the bright Mediterranean sunshine it hurt your eyes to look at it. It had a pretty garden surrounding it and the enclosure was gay with rock plants and flowering shrubs. There were scores of other villas within view but this one looked as if its owner had more money than his neighbours. It had a squat, squarish tower, with glass on three sides and a finely gravelled drive leading up to the entrance and branching off to a large double garage roofed with green tiles. Its garden and approaches were meticulously weeded and along its frontal veranda was an awning of red and white canvas. Viewed as a whole it was conventional but impressive.
There was nobody in the garden so I went up the drive and looked in the garage which was empty of cars but housed some brand-new servicing kit. The green sunbli
nds were down at the front and I was unable to peep through the windows, so I went up some steps and round to the back where the triangle of lawn and rock-garden drove into the cliff face at an angle of about thirty degrees. I put down my bag and tried the back door. It was open so I went in, closing the door behind me.
The kitchen was as luxuriously appointed as everything else in that villa. The sinks and cupboards were new and highly polished, the gadgets devious and very modern. There was a water-softening apparatus and a glass-fronted liquor cabinet containing scores of interesting-looking bottles. There was a wealth of coloured glass, not all of it for practical use and a double row of gleaming utensils clamped to the walls. The general impression I got was one of orderliness and scrupulous cleanliness. I went on through a glass-panelled door and called out but nobody answered and after a long pause I slipped the safety-catch of my automatic and held it in my pocket, moving across the cool hall into a large, low-ceilinged lounge, dusky in filtered sunlight. Everything was new and everything was expensive-looking. Whoever owned the villa seemed to have made himself very comfortable.
The main room giving on to the terrace overlooking the sea was furnished in the taste of a person who is trying, self-consciously perhaps, to break away from the traditional without seeming eccentric. There was a great deal of Swedish glass and wrought-iron, one or two tortured looking lamps and a bookshelf full of French classical novels, bound in red Morocco. The carpet, a blue and silver Chinese, was a work of art and there was a grand piano shrouded in a dust sheet. I prowled about wondering what kind of person would live in a place like this, and why he or she was prepared to let it be used as a rendezvous for strays like me and the enigmatic “Olive”. I inspected the shower-room and then noticed one of those retracting ladders leading to a room in the gable. I pulled the cord and the ladder descended noiselessly. It was obviously very well-oiled. I went up and pushed open the trap. The place had been used as a box-room and there was only one tiny window which was draped so that for a moment or so I was puzzled to discover the source of light. Then I saw that three tiny glazed apertures had been let into the floor immediately above the light fittings of the living-room, kitchen and hall downstairs. It seemed to me an odd device and when I looked more closely I noticed the rawness of the cuts in the joists and a trickle of new sawdust. The peep-holes had obviously been an afterthought and when I checked downstairs I realised that they were invisible from below. I poked around among some cartons and looked behind the boarded partition, where some trunks were stored but the boxes were empty and presently I went down again carefully closing the trap and retracting the ladder.
It was now close on midday and the pep pills I had taken the night before were beginning to lose their effect. I stifled a series of yammering yawns and had a wash at the kitchen sink in an effort to stave off sleep. It was very cool and peaceful inside the house and the occasional swish of a passing car ascending the hill did not disturb the sense of security I felt in there. The pantry shelves contained plenty of food but I was not in the least hungry and presently I went into the big room and found myself a book. Then I remembered that I had neglected to check the bedrooms, which were situated on the western side of the entrance hall, one at the back and one at the front. The back room was completely bare. The other was magnificently fitted up with mahogany furniture in Second Empire style and had a double bed, canopied in grey silk and hung around with tassels of gold wire. Suspended from the canopy frame was a gilt cherub, fat and leering. The accessories on the glass-topped dressing-table were exclusively feminine and the perfume I found there was as expensive as everything else in the villa.
There was a very comfortable armchair in this bedroom and I sat in it, musing, and presently kicked off my shoes and put a cushion behind my head. It was a ridiculous thing to do but, as I say, the serenity of the setting and the comfort of the surroundings were tempting after the stresses of the journey and the uncertainty with which I had set foot in France that morning. At all events in a few seconds I was sound asleep and the thud of the book falling on to the thick carpet failed to recall me. Sprawling there, snoring and oblivious, I was a sitting target for anyone who appeared and if the villa had been blown, as were so many of our refuges in areas patrolled by the Vichy police, I should have ended my career as an agent within twelve hours of beginning it.
I awoke to the sound of running water. Someone was in the shower-room either taking a bath or hoping to convince me that they were taking one. I leaped to my feet, sick with fright and my hand shot into my jacket pocket for the automatic. It was still there and I grabbed my shoes and glanced at my watch, horrified to discover that it was now seven o’clock. I had been asleep for almost seven hours.
It took me a few minutes to pull myself together and rub the drowsiness from my eyes. I saw that the sun was low over the bay and the roofs between the villa and the waterfront were bathed in soft, pinkish light. I craned my neck round the angle of the terrace and could just see the tail fins of a car parked at the entrance of the garage. Then, listening intently, I heard the sound of running water cease and someone open the shower-room door and shut it again. I was at a loss to know how to announce myself or if, indeed, I should do so at all. I had expected the contact “Olive”, or someone deputed by her, to meet me when I arrived at the villa and after satisfying myself that it was unoccupied, I had relied upon seeing a visitor before I was myself seen. Now more than eight hours had passed and we were both in the house but neither, presumably, knew the other was here. My mind was still juggling with the situation when I had another shock, an even bigger one, for the door snicked open without the slightest warning and standing there, wrapped in a mauve bathrobe, was Diana.
I was dumbfounded. I don’t know why but it had never occurred to me that “Olive” might be Diana, or that Diana would be anywhere but with her husband, or with Raoul and his confederates in Paris.
I had been told so little and was so new to the game, that I had never speculated upon the identity of my contact. The word “Olive” did not suggest a person to me but a kind of password into the network of the Resistance.
Then another thing struck me. The woman standing on the threshold was vastly different in appearance from the stocky, rather ravaged-looking creature who had sat beside me in the jeep immediately after Alison’s funeral. She was a reincarnation of the Diana I remembered in the period just before her marriage, a woman with a clear skin and a trim, attractive figure and long, pretty legs that revealed their shape through the folds of the robe. In contrast to me she seemed perfectly relaxed. Her eyes sparkled, reflecting the periwinkle blue that I had marked the moment I saw her ride out of the woods at Heronslea. She looked splendidly healthy and the contrast with her appearance on the last occasion we had met was more striking than her presence.
She stood in the doorway looking at me with an expression of tolerant amusement and as her mouth puckered into a smile, a great rush of yearning and warmth and joy gushed over me and through me, so that I was unable to utter a single word but simply stood there gaping at her, one hand hanging at my side, the other clutching the butt of the automatic in my pocket.
“Sleep well?” she said, cocking her head on one side in a way I remembered when she was teasing, then, when I continued to gape:
“You never told me you snored, Jan! It was awful, like floodwater running through the grating under Teasel Bridge! What a good thing I didn’t marry you after all!”
I found my voice at last and withdrew my hand from my pocket. I said: “How the hell …?” but she had noticed the movement of my right hand and suddenly became serious.
“Have you got a gun in there?”
“Yes, here,” and I took it out and handed it to her. She looked at it critically and then expertly snapped out the magazine and flicked the safety catch on and off.
“You shouldn’t keep it loose in your jacket Safety catches get clogged with bits of fluff. Either it won’t come off when you need it or it shoots when it feel
s like it. You should have a shoulder holster or at least a piece of chamois—look!”
She took an almost identical weapon from the pocket of her bathrobe. It was protected by a little holster made of wash-leather.
“Do you pack a gun even when you take a bath?” I asked, but her eyes did not smile. “It isn’t part of a dressing-up act,” she said, and I felt deflated. She noticed this at once and smiled again, throwing up her head and pulling off her turban so that her lovely mass of hair tumbled. Her hair had always been her loveliest feature. It was dark chestnut and there was so much of it. It had always seemed to me to have an independent life of its own and play games with her. Sometimes it almost talked, hissing like the larches in Heronslea woods. If you were riding behind her at a gallop it seemed to shout into the wind.
She returned the gun and I replaced it in my pocket, wrapping a handkerchief round the barrel.
“Are you ‘Olive’?” I asked, partly because I felt vaguely uncomfortable under her critical scrutiny.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s a dreadful name! I always hated it. It conjures up a vision of a pudding-faced girl with adenoids who works in a chemist’s shop!”
“I once knew a librarian called Olive,” I said, “and she wasn’t a bit puddingy. As a matter of fact she was ash blonde and very pneumatic.”
“Where was that? Not in Whinmouth, I’m sure!” she said, but with genuine interest.
“No,” I admitted, “it was when I was working on the illustrated weekly in Fleet Street. She married a compositor.” Then: “This is a bloody silly conversation, let’s pack it in, Di!”
“All right,” she said, “I expect you’re hungry.”
Diana Page 47