by Simon Mawer
‘We’ve had a couple of letters. Everyone’s all right. There’s even been a suggestion that I should go and visit, but of course travel is still a problem. When it’s all over, we’ll go, won’t we, Frank?’
When it’s all over. You didn’t need to say what. It seemed an impossible fantasy, to return to France in safety.
Paris, November 1943
Breakfast is a bowl of milky coffee – real coffee – and two slices of toast with jam. She washes in the basin and, when she asks, someone takes her down the corridor to the lavatory again. Then she is back in her cell but this time the waiting time is short, for after a few minutes the door is unlocked once more and two men in grey overalls grab her and hurry her downstairs to the floor below, to a blank room furnished only with a zinc bath in the middle of the floor and a single wooden chair. Standing beside the chair is a small man with slicked back hair and a narrow face. He smiles and invites her to sit. The questions begin, questions floating on a threat of violence, the men waiting just out of her field of vision, the bath tub there in front of her.
Who is MECHANIC?
Who was the passenger in the aircraft?
When did you come to France?
Who were you going to meet in Toulouse?
She is wearing her blouse and skirt but she feels naked beneath their collective gaze.
Who is MECHANIC?
I don’t know what you mean.
Who was the passenger in the aircraft?
I don’t know what you are talking about.
When did you come to France?
I’ve always been in France.
Who were you going to meet in Toulouse?
I wasn’t going to meet anyone.
When it comes, the change is sudden. Perhaps the man nodded. Perhaps he gave some kind of signal. But she didn’t really notice. Just that, without any apparent warning, she’s grabbed by the arms and lifted out of the chair and propelled towards the bath tub. Someone takes the neck of her blouse from behind and drags it down over her shoulders.
The tub is half full of water. It looks innocent enough. You might imagine a mother bathing a baby there, dipping her elbow to test the temperature. Marian is as helpless as a baby in the hands of these two men. Helpless and hapless as they hold her over the water.
‘So,’ says the interrogator. His French is good but the ‘So’ is entirely German. Zo. ‘Who is MECHANIC? We know he is the man whom you dispatched to England. But who is he?’
‘I don’t know who he is.’
‘But you must know who he is. You were most friendly with him. Affectionate.’
And instantly she understands the implications of what he has said. She tries to turn her head to look at her questioner but his hands grab her by the hair and hold her steady, facing forwards. ‘How do you know that?’ she asks. ‘How do you know what we did or didn’t do? How do you know we were affectionate?’
There is a silence. She needs to see his expression, but she can’t. Her head is held as though in a clamp and all she can see is bare wooden floorboards, the zinc bath tub, the shimmering surface of water. ‘Marian,’ the man whispers, ‘we know so much, so much. We know about Miss Atkins and we know about Buck. We know all your little London secrets. We know about the Orchard. We know everything about your organisation, where it works and what it is called. Now tell me, who was this man called MECHANIC?’
She says nothing.
It happens in an instant. No warning, no noise from the man behind her. One moment she is held there between the two men, facing the tub; next she is propelled forward and upended into the water.
The shock of cold. She holds her breath. Of course she holds her breath. Hands hold her down. The residue of air shortens. Still the hands hold her down. Although she doesn’t want to, she struggles. Still the hands hold her down. And then she feels she is bursting and the air is fighting to get out of her and bubbles appear at her nostrils and her struggling expands to occupy the whole of her body. It isn’t breathing in that matters, it is breathing out, getting rid of the exhausted air inside her, purging herself of its filth.
Then she is out and gasping, like a fish on the deck of a fishing boat. Soaking wet and gasping for the blessed benison of air.
And then she is back in. No option, no question, no warning. Back in. A gust of water in her face. She’s drowning. Air and water blend in nose and mouth. Airways are waterways. Her lungs are riven with pain. Her mind, if she has a mind, is empty of everything but the terror of water and the fight for air.
She’s out, gasping, vomiting, tearing at the small fraction of air she is allowed, grabbing bites of it like someone starved snapping at chunks of bread.
‘Who is MECHANIC?’
‘Where is your wireless?’
‘What were you doing in Paris?’
Then she is back in the water. Air and water have become one thing, an element you desire and abhor, life and death. Her eyes bulging, her heart pounding, her mind drawing down to the narrow dimensions of survival. She is going to die.
Then out again, on her knees before the tub, held by the hands, breathing in and breathing out at the same time, convulsions of breath that seem to jam the air and water in her windpipe. And a moment’s glimmer of coherent thought gives her one idea: she will drown herself. As she goes in the next time she’ll draw a lungful of water and she will die.
‘All you need to do is tell us who MECHANIC is. And then all this will stop.’
She gives no answer.
The hands plunge her forward. She will draw in a lungful of water and she will die. The water comes up and hits her face and the truth is made manifest: she cannot. She cannot force herself to drown. It is against the merciless logic of physiology. You fight for breath. You fight to keep the water out, you fight against the wall of water for as long as you have oxygen in your blood and in your brain. The laws of nature are immutable.
They heave her out once more and she is gushing water, vomiting water, exhaling water, fighting for air. She is an aquatic creature out of her element, dying on the dry land. She is dying and she wants to die and she cannot die.
‘Who is MECHANIC?’
‘Where is your wireless?’
‘What were you doing in Paris?’
She lifts her hand. Gasping and gagging, she lifts her hand.
The men wait, watching. She is an aquatic beast lying in her own water, a fish flapping at the bottom of the boat. The words come out in bits: ‘Place. De. La. Con. Trescarpe. Café. De la. Contrescarpe.’
They wait. ‘Go on,’ the man says softly. ‘Take your time.’
‘Radio,’ she says. ‘In the. Bathroom. The basement. In the bathroom. In the basement. The people there …’
‘What about the people there?’
‘They don’t … know … anything. They don’t know … anything about it.’
She has bought time with a fragment of truth. That is how she must live, feeding them fragments of truth.
Some hours later they return. She can tell the difference in the mood. ‘This!’ the man shouts at her. ‘This!’ He holds his hand out to display the two radio valves. ‘Where is the radio? I want to know where you have put the radio.’
‘It was there,’ she tells them. ‘Really, it was there. Someone must have found it. How can I help that?’
The blows begin. If it had been the baignoire she would not have been able to withstand it. But instead it is blows, slaps, punches and, when she falls to the floor, kicks to the head and kidneys. Perhaps things are breaking inside, she cannot tell. But she can withstand the hitting and the punching, she can place herself outside and watch it happening. The baignoire was different. It worked at the very fabric of her being, inciting her body to fight for life even as she willed it to end. But being hit is different. Pain is different. You can move through the agony into a world of detachment, above and beyond your assailants. Bloody of body, you can become bloody-minded.
‘Marian,’ the man says, putting out hi
s hand and touching her on the cheek where it’s bruised. A different man, in a different room, one of those on the top floor just along from her cell. There are two chairs and a table. She is sitting in one of the chairs but he has come round to stand near her, to bend down and stroke her cheek. His fingers are soft, like a woman’s. She wonders – one of those erratic, divergent thoughts – whether he plays a musical instrument. The piano, perhaps. His long, delicate fingers. Or maybe he’s a surgeon, his hands softened like a girl’s through over-washing. Scrubbing up, isn’t that what it’s called? ‘Marian, what have they done to you?’
It was different when they were hitting her or when they were trying to drown her. There was something despicable about all that, something craven. And if you could despise them you could attempt to bear the pain or the gasping for air. But this man gently fingers the bruises round her eyes, touches the cut on her cheekbone and comes away with a smear of her blood. Lifting her chin he turns her head so that she has to look up at him. He is wearing eau de cologne. She can smell it. He has a kindly, thoughtful face, a look you might trust. She wants comfort from him, the touch of his hand, the consolation of his voice. And she wants him to kiss her. She wants to see him stoop towards her and touch her bruised and swollen lips with his. She wants him to lift her skirt and touch her there. She wants to please him.
‘I promise you, Marian,’ he says. ‘I won’t let them do anything like this to you again. As long as you give me something to go on. I must have something to show them, something to convince them.’ He strokes her cheek. ‘It’s us against them, Marian. Us against them.’
There’s a pause while he draws up a chair and sits opposite her, close to her, leaning towards her and holding both her hands. ‘Now,’ he says gently, ‘let’s see if we can’t sort some things out. First, the man you called MECHANIC in your final transmission. The one you made in clear. The man you took all the way to the landing ground. Tell me about him. Were you and he friends?’
She must give him something. In return for his kindness, in return for not sending her back to the other man, in return for being her protection. ‘Friends, yes.’
‘Were you perhaps, lovers?’
London
Days of dreams. Nights of nightmare. Most of the time she kept to her own room, reading and sleeping. She found the bed too soft to sleep. Instead she lay on the floor with a blanket pulled over her, and then when she woke in the early morning she had to mess up the bed to make it look as though she had slept the whole night there. When she came down to meals her parents watched her closely, as if she were a newly acquired animal and they weren’t sure what to feed her.
‘You must eat,’ her mother insisted. ‘You must build yourself up.’
‘I’m just not hungry.’
When she slept, her dreams seemed real; when she awoke the world appeared dreamlike, remote and alien, as though she was watching it all through a sheet of plate glass, as though it was happening somewhere else and to someone else. Someone came to visit – a cousin, an aunt – and she stayed closeted in her room.
After a few days – had it been the weekend? – the organisation sent a car, complete with FANY driver and a conducting officer, to take her up to London, to the Central Medical Establishment in Cleveland Street where the medics were waiting for her. They X-rayed her chest and then attached her to a machine that produced a trace of her heart activity. Naked, she felt no shame. Shame was a luxury that had vanished long ago. Perhaps it would return with time and care but for the moment she lay there, gaunt and sinewy, her breasts mere pouches on the basket of her ribs, her belly a withered hollow, while the doctor hummed and hahed and prodded her here and there and listened through a stethoscope to whatever was happening inside. The sores on her legs and chest were caused by hypovitaminosis. They were getting better, weren’t they? And her cough was nothing. It would be gone in no time. There was nothing on the X-ray to worry about.
The idea of a cough being nothing seemed remarkable – where she had come from a cough could be a death sentence.
‘What about my periods? I haven’t had a period since …’ She could barely remember. Some time in prison. When was that? Years ago, centuries ago, that golden age.
‘Oh, they should start again now your diet is back to normal.’ He talked about a convalescent home, a place they’d set up where they could keep an eye on things.
‘I don’t want a convalescent home. I’m not ill, am I? I want to be with my family.’
He tapped his pencil on the blotter in front of him and chewed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps that’s the best thing under the circumstances. You’ll have to have regular check-ups but considering the circumstances you are reasonably fit. I’ll prescribe vitamin and mineral pills. Otherwise, just eat a normal, healthy diet. You’ll get a ration supplement, of course. I’m pretty sure we’ll be back to normal soon enough.’
We. Why did doctors so often resort to the collective pronoun? As if they might be able to bear some of the burden.
‘You’re due to see the dentist next and then I’ve got you down to have a chat with the trick cyclist.’
It was a joke but she didn’t understand it. ‘Psychiatrist,’ he explained.
‘Psychiatrist? Am I mad?’
‘Good lord, no. Perish the thought. But you ought to see a specialist, to help you adjust.’
The visit to the dentist was less comforting – her teeth were decalcified, one or two compromised. They would have to be extracted.
‘Will it show when I smile?’ she asked, unsmiling. But the dentist smiled back. ‘Don’t worry, there are excellent prostheses these days. The men will still come flocking.’
The psychiatrist was a Group Captain, ‘a neuropsychiatrist, as a matter of fact, but don’t let that frighten you. It’s just a fancy title, that’s all.’ He only wanted a chat really, about life in general. How was she sleeping? How was she feeling? Did she feel angry? Miserable? Depressed? Happy? Were there mood swings?
‘I don’t feel anything much,’ she told him. ‘I want to, but I don’t. I just want to be left alone.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘Sometimes I feel afraid. For no particular reason.’
‘That’s hardly surprising.’
‘And my parents …’
‘Tell me about your parents.’
‘They fuss. I think my father feels guilty that he let me go.’
‘I can imagine that.’
‘And my mother doesn’t seem to understand. Neither of them understands. I just want to be left alone to pick up the pieces.’
‘Do you feel you are in pieces?’
‘Not me,’ she snapped. She didn’t mean to snap, but that’s how it came out. ‘Pieces of my old life, I mean. I want to go back to France. I want to see the places and people I loved. I want to love them again …’
He waited, head slightly on one side.
‘But I don’t.’
‘Your parents, you mean?’
‘Yes, my parents.’
The strange conversation went on. It was not unlike going to confession. She recalled confession from school, when they made up sins so that they had something material to admit to. And now? Where did murder and betrayal feature in the confessional world of this bland neuropsychiatric specialist with his quiet manner and his carefully folded hands? She felt as though she was pared down, her whole personality cut back to a hard kernel, capable only of survival. No emotions, few appetites.
‘I tell you what I’ll do,’ the Group Captain said. ‘I’ll put you in touch with a colleague of mine in Oxford.’
‘Is it necessary? Is there something wrong with me?’
‘I’m sure there’s not. But you may want to talk things through.’ He handed her a visiting card that said Dr Andrew Morgan, Clinical Psychologist. There was a little blizzard of letters after the name. FR this, MR that. Do letters equal ability? she wondered. How many letters did Ned trail behind him? Or Clément?
‘Dr Morg
an’s a Welshman, but none the worse for that.’ The Group Captain laughed, to show it was a joke. ‘Worked with Rivers at Craiglockhart during the last war. Do you know about Rivers?’
She didn’t. She didn’t know about anything very much.
‘Dealt with shell shock. Very advanced for the time. We’ve gone all American these days and now we call it combat fatigue.’
‘I haven’t been in combat.’
‘It’s just another name. Not a very good one. Anyway, I’ll write to him so that he knows about you when you get in touch.’
When she was finished there was the car to take her to Baker Street, to number 83, which called itself Norgeby House and bore a discreet plaque on the outside announcing itself as the Inter Services Research Bureau. She had never been here before. She only knew Orchard Court, the flat in Portman Square where F Section always dealt with its agents. Now there was this office block with a uniformed guard and a reception desk and a chit to fill out for visitors, while the conducting officer and the receptionist exchanged a bit of backchat, complaining about working hours.
‘It’s being so cheerful keeps me going,’ the receptionist said. The conducting officer laughed, but Marian missed the joke. It was like listening to humour in a foreign language where you understand the words but not the sense of the thing. Nor did she understand her reception on the second floor where the French Section was housed: as soon as she followed her escort through the door the clatter of typewriters was stilled and people left their desks and stood in the corridor to watch. She felt guilty, as though she had done something wrong and was being called to account and everyone knew. Like in school. Like in a dream, one of those awful nightmares where you find you are naked and walking in public and people stare. But these people were smiling so it couldn’t be that bad. There was a smattering of applause, as though she was a star of some kind. One or two even greeted her by name although she could not, for the life of her, recall who they were. Smiles and handshakes followed her into Colonel Buckmaster’s office where he perched on the edge of his desk and looked benevolently on her as though she was a niece who had done something rather splendid, like winning a gymkhana. ‘You conducted yourself in the finest tradition of the organisation,’ he told her, but how did he know what she had done or how she had done it? And did the organisation have anything like a tradition? It was founded in 1940 and now, its raison d’être over, it was all but finished. So there was hardly anything traditional about it, was there?