by Peter Watson
“We didn’t finish our conversation the other night, when the fire went to sleep before we did. You were starting to tell me about your time in the field. Now, come on. Who is Matthew Hammond? I want all the details, good, bad, and gory. Nothing sanitized, please.”
“The early bits are quickly told,” I said. “Brought up in Plymouth, school in Taunton, but with every summer in France because my mother is French, from Delme in Lorraine. My father was a doctor, my mother was his medical secretary, and my sister is, of all things, a cellist with the West of England Orchestra, based in Bath. Or she was until she met and married an American movie producer and decamped to Los Angeles—she now plays with a symphony orchestra there.
“We were a typical doctor’s family, I think. Lots of medical talk, openness about blood and other stuff that most people find gory, my father being called out at all hours. He was a good man, but he was really more interested in his work than his children—I rather think children bored him. He took it for granted that I would be a doctor and Alice—my sister—would be a nurse. When it turned out that neither of us was going down that road, he was disappointed; he felt let down and he turned away from us even more. He turned away from me especially—we were a typical family in that Alice was closer to our father and I was closer to our mother. At least I was. When my father died, she moved into a hotel in Malvern in the West Country. I see her a couple of times a year—not enough, I know.”
The wind was strengthening. The colour was going out of the sea.
“My father had strong feelings—about music, medical research, healthy exercise—but he rarely showed his emotions, he thought that was crude. I think some of that rubbed off on me.”
An ungainly seal hobbled ashore about a hundred yards away. Then it saw us and flopped back into the waves.
“I went straight from school into the army and from there, because I’m bilingual in French and English, I went into SC2, which I helped set up. So I’ve had a basic army training but no real regular army experience. I did the first course here at Ardlossan that you are doing now.
“I was parachuted into France in November 1941, just a few days before Pearl Harbor. I was dropped into the Franche-Comté area, because I knew it. There are a number of canals between Besançon and Belfort and my job was to contact the local Resistance, help to arm and train them, and then blow up a series of bridges over the canals. This both blocked the canals and destroyed the roads, interrupting trade and military movement in two ways.”
“You became an explosive expert?”
“Very expert at one stage, especially with incendiary devices. We had to be careful, though. If we blew up too many bridges, the Germans retaliated by shooting ten or twenty local villagers.”
“So how did you figure that out?”
“We worked with the Resistance. Some villages, even then, had reputations for being collaborators’ villages. We blew up the bridges near those villages and if they shot those villagers…Well, the Resistance weren’t too bothered. But I don’t want you to think it was all that clean and straightforward—it wasn’t. I was mainly recruiting and training Resistance people and trying to patch things up between the communists and the Gaullists.”
“Oh? You’ll have to explain that.”
“I will, in just a moment, but you’ll be getting formal instruction on it very soon. And please, keep talking in French.”
The wind gusted and blew strands of hair across Madeleine’s face. She pulled them away. “Sorry.”
I didn’t say then what I might have said, that my first love affair, at age eighteen, had been a highly secret fling with the mother of my best friend at school, who had seduced me early one December evening when her husband and son—both choristers—had been rehearsing for the local carol concert. The affair had been consummated only a few times before she realised how dangerous her behaviour was. I had been hopelessly infatuated with her, and although I too knew that what we were doing was wrong and couldn’t—shouldn’t—last, it took a while to get over. More important, after that younger girls, young women my own age, were nowhere near as sexually experienced as Rob’s mother was, nowhere near as exciting, and for a while that was a problem.
“France, as you know,” I went on, “is a much more left-wing country than Britain. The Communist Party there is very strong. It has been very good for the Resistance, better in fact than anyone else. But of course by no means everyone is a communist, and many are against them. So patching things up was one of my jobs.
“I spent several months in and around Besançon. Most of my time was spent organising airdrops of weapons and explosives—and agents, of course. I set up four circuits in the Lorraine area, which, being near Germany itself, was more heavily populated with Germans than some other areas of France.”
“That must have been dangerous.”
“At times, yes. I remember once, when we were trying to blow up an oil dump, we ran into a large convoy of lorries carrying armoured personnel carriers. They prevented us getting to the canal bridge that we were aiming for, so we hid in the lock-keeper’s cottage. When we got there, there was a German major and his French girlfriend, totally naked.”
“What did you do?”
“He wasn’t quite naked—he had his gun with him. But I shot him, and the Resistance leader shot the woman—not just because, in his eyes, she was a traitor, but because he knew her and she knew him, and she would surely have betrayed us had we let her go. I can’t say I liked what we did, but it’s the kind of situation wars throw up.”
I looked back the way we had come. We were still alone on the beach.
“Anyway, the sound of our gunfire had probably drawn attention to us, so we had to get lost that night. We moved off into a nearby forest, but we didn’t know that the Germans, suspecting it to be a Resistance hideaway, had mined the paths. One of the Resistance people stepped on a mine and was killed outright, there and then. I was a few yards behind and some shrapnel tore into me, into my chest. God, it was hot. Fortunately, one of the other Resistance people in our patrol was a doctor, and he looked after me. The shrapnel was locked in my rib cage, and though it didn’t reach my heart, it had punctured my lung. The explosion meant we had to keep moving—and I was carried miles. Eventually, I was looked after in a Resistance field hospital, and the Germans, obviously, never found us. I took weeks to recover.
“I wasn’t entirely idle. I gave classes in sabotage techniques from my hospital bed—actually a cave in a remote area. I gave English instruction—and I gave advice.”
“How long did your wound hurt?”
“It still hurts sometimes, when I breathe.”
She hesitated. “I hope I don’t get injured or maimed. I think I’d rather be killed than disfigured.”
“That’s what we all think. I was lucky there, too. The shrapnel didn’t spoil my good looks.”
She looked up at me, her lips slightly parted.
“I’ve still got the piece of shrapnel if you want to see—”
“What’s that?” Madeleine said quickly, in almost a whisper. She pointed along the sand, to where a black something had been washed ashore.
Instinctively, we walked towards it.
As we came close we could see it wasn’t black, but grey.
Madeleine stood over it. She kicked it, but gently, moving it with her foot. “It’s…It looks like—”
“It’s a life jacket,” I said. “It got separated from its owner.”
She looked up at me. “Do you think…? Will the owner be—” she peered along the shore “—not so far away?”
“That depends,” I said. “I hope they were separated some way off—the life jacket is German.”
“It is? How do you know?”
I pointed. “The stencilled writing—there. See? It says SCHWIMM WESTE.”
She looked out to sea. “And it looks so calm today. How did it get here, do you think?”
I shook my head. “Let’s hope that whoever was wearing this wa
s in a torpedoed U-boat that was sunk by our boys. Some of the crew got out, maybe, but there was a storm and…Well, this one didn’t make it.”
We stared down at the life jacket in silence.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said after a while.
“Do you?”
“You’re thinking that could be you, very soon.”
“I’m not the morbid type.” She nudged the life jacket again with her foot. “In fact, I was thinking about how lives end. This man, whoever he was, almost certainly died alone. Do you think that matters? Is it better to die at home, in your bed, surrounded by family—or doesn’t it matter? Does it make any difference?”
She gestured at the life jacket. “I’ll bet he was no older than I am. There could be a U-boat out there right now, looking at us with his periscope. Maybe they know about Ardlossan, what it’s used for. Maybe they know all about SC2. Maybe that’s what this life jacket really means.”
“Unlikely. We’re important to the invasion but not—”
“Maybe they think we know when and where the invasion will take place. Maybe they’re about to attack—invade us!”
I laughed. “Don’t let your imagination run wild like that when you are in France. Keep your mind on the ground.”
She was suddenly serious. “You really don’t know when the invasion will happen?”
“No, of course not. I should imagine not more than a few dozen people know that.”
“Why, then, am I wasting my time with someone so low down the pecking order?”
“You tell me. You suggested walking on the beach.”
She suddenly skipped away from me, along the sand. Then she stopped and turned back. “Tell me about the women in France. Were there lots? Did you have affairs? Was there someone special, who meant more than the others? Someone you still think about?”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, thinking back. Madeleine had a way of…She wasn’t forward exactly. But she certainly didn’t like standing still.
“Do you believe people fall for types?” She looked up at me, her eyes big and round. “I mean, do people fall for the same kind of person over and over again—tall people, wild types, quiet souls?”
“You mean…How does it go?…Like men who always fall for women who remind them of their mothers? Is that what you’re saying?” She looked at me and made her eyes appear rounder than ever.
“I don’t mean that, no. Not exactly.” I looked out to sea. No submarines as I could make out.
“Let’s just say there was one woman who meant more than all the others. And the thing is—she had hair just like yours. Not the colour, but all curly and unruly and unmanageable. She was for ever doing…what you do with your hair, lifting it up, holding it off your neck.”
“What was her name?”
“Celestine. Celestine Naucelle.”
“Unusual, but pretty. Was she?”
“Yes, on both counts.”
“What happened?”
I looked out to sea again. “I killed her.”
I paused before turning back. “Not deliberately, not directly, of course. But I played a part.”
We resumed walking along the beach.
“She was a doctor in a large hospital, an anaesthetist and therefore in demand during operations. She was the first one in her family to go to university and the first female doctor in the hospital where she worked. And she was secretly part of the Resistance, in which she had two roles. She helped with operations for anyone in the underground who was seriously injured during sabotage raids and who had to be treated in hideaways. And she stole medical supplies—drugs, bandages, surgical equipment, even German-made contraceptives. She helped keep the Resistance supplied with all that it needed.
“I met her when she was helping with an operation on an injured Resistance leader who I knew well. He had fractured his skull after falling from a train when a sabotage expedition went wrong. Had he died it would have been a disaster—he had so much information inside his head. He survived the operation but he was so badly knocked about that he was never going to be his old self again. So I was there to debrief him, find out all he knew, the minute he recovered consciousness.
“The operation was a success, but it took time for him to regain consciousness. I sat by his bed the whole time and Celestine looked in every so often. To begin with, I only knew her by her Resistance code name—Méduse, Jellyfish. It sounds so much nicer in French.
“Eventually, I was able to debrief him. By then Celestine—Méduse—and I had got to know each other and, after that, and when we could, when circumstances allowed, we started an affair. We started sleeping together. Because of her Resistance duties, she was anxious not to get pregnant. So we made a point of using the German-made contraceptives—we made endless bad jokes about it.”
“How very adult. How did she die?”
I paused to light a cigarette. The sunlight on the sea glittered like a thousand splinters of broken glass.
“It happened after about six months, by which time we had spent a few weekends together in the mountains, and I had met her parents, and her brother, who was also in the Resistance. Then a big Nazi fish fell into our lap. His name was Möricke and he was the man in charge of the area, a Gauleiter. He was an exceptionally cruel man. In retaliation for a Resistance attack on a railway yard, he had rounded up a group of children, twice the number of the German soldiers who had been killed in the attack, and had them shot, in front of their parents and families. You can imagine how popular he was.
“He was a keen rider but he had an accident and fell from his horse. He broke several ribs and injured his spine. The ribs were not the problem but the spine was. He had injured it in such a way that he couldn’t be moved—at least not very far. He needed to be operated on quickly, and there was no German doctor on hand. A French replacement was found and Celestine was selected as the anaesthetist.
“This all happened in a rush. There was just time to call an emergency meeting of the local Resistance committee. Celestine was there, too, not because she was on the committee, as I was, but because she would be involved in the medical procedure. The committee discussed whether Colonel Möricke should die during the operation. Celestine was asked her opinion and she said she could manage to administer too much anaesthetic and that the excess wouldn’t be noticed—Möricke would just ‘die’ during the operation.”
Madeleine stopped and looked up at me.
I looked down at her. A breeze was getting up—the weather was definitely beginning to turn.
“She described exactly how she would do it. There were seven people on the Resistance committee, six French and me. Normally, I didn’t have a vote on operational issues unless the other six were deadlocked. Which is what happened that time. Three thought it was too dangerous, that Celestine would be found out and executed and that she was too valuable to the Resistance to be put at risk. The other three said it was too good an opportunity to miss, getting rid of a monster, that such an opportunity would never come again, and that, if Celestine was confident herself of getting away with it, it was a risk worth taking, a risk we had to take.”
I smoked my cigarette, hard.
“With the committee split fifty-fifty, all eyes turned to me. I asked Celestine to repeat, exactly, what she would do during the operation, and to explain again why the Germans wouldn’t find out. She repeated what she had said before, in a very matter-of-fact type of way. Her calm was impressive.”
I looked up at the seagulls overhead.
I glanced back to Madeleine. “There was one complicating factor that I haven’t mentioned. One of the men on the Resistance committee, who had voted against Celestine killing Möricke, was a man who had been a lover of hers before I came along. That night he made an impassioned speech about us not putting Celestine’s life at risk, arguing that she was more nervous than she was letting on. Then she made an equally impassioned speech about what a monster Möricke was, who thought nothing of killing chi
ldren, and here was a chance to get rid of him. She knew her job, she said, and begged me to vote for the death of the German brute.”
I took a deep breath.
“So that’s what I did. I voted for Möricke to be killed.”
We had reached an inlet in the beach, a finger of water that flooded inland for several hundred metres, so we turned and began the trudge back to Ardlossan Manse.
“That night Celestine and I went back to the cottage we used, made dinner, and drank maybe too much wine. At least she did, I drank whisky. During the dinner I became aware that she was in fact more nervous than she had shown during the meeting of the committee. We talked and talked and made love endlessly. Just in case, she said, she gave me a gift, a lighter, which she had had inscribed. It said—”
“Don’t tell me!” cried Madeleine. “I don’t want to know. That’s personal, between you.”
I looked at Madeleine, and smiled. I thought it was a good thing for her to say.
“Maybe that was a warning—the lighter, I mean; maybe I should have paid more attention. Maybe we made love too long, maybe it was her nerves. The long and short of it is that next day she botched the job. Möricke was dead even before the operation began. Celestine was arrested, an inquest was held, which showed that Möricke had three times the amount of anaesthetic in his blood that he should have had. There was a summary trial for murder, an abortive attempt to rescue her from prison, during which two Resistance men—one of them her brother—were killed, and, a day later, Celestine was shot.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. The waves out at sea were getting larger and the tide was beginning to turn.
“Can you really be blamed?” said Madeleine softly. “From what you say, she seemed to know her mind and was confident enough. We all have to accept responsibility for what we do.”
MARCH
· 5 ·
AT THE BACK OF THE MANSE was a range of outbuildings, still in the same red-veined stone—mainly old stables and workshops. The windows fitted badly. Some of the old wooden stable hooks were still there, on the walls, no more than pegs really, along with a faint smell of hay, leather, and horse manure. On one especially wet and cold morning in early March, the recruits assembled there. I stood in front of them with Duncan Kennaway next to me.