by Simon Mawer
Marian saw faces turn towards her, ranks of pale moons.
‘I believe I’m not even allowed to mention the name of her outfit because it remains secret, but Ronnie Aldrich tells me it used to masquerade as the Inter Services Research Bureau. So not all bureaucrats are what they seem to be. And I understand she is actually an honorary Flight Officer in the WAAF but she’s here in civvies this evening and I must say her evening dress is a darn sight more stunning than mess kit. Anyway, it is a great honour to have her here as our guest – ladies and gentlemen, raise your glasses to Flight Officer Marian Sutro, latterly of the French resistance.’
Her heart convulsed. Gripped by something resembling fear she sat alone while the whole room rose, people looming over her, looking down on her, smiling and brandishing their glasses and their teeth.
‘Marian Sutro!’
Her name echoed like a mantra round the dining room, the name that was hers and not hers, the name that had been covered by a whole panoply of other names – Alice, Anne-Marie Laroche, Laurence Follette, Geneviève Marchal – all hiding the one fragile fact of Marian Sutro, who sat alone at the table riven with fear.
It was Beryl who came to the rescue, grabbing her by the arm and ushering her out of the room to the sanctuary of the ladies. She sat Marian down and drew another chair close. ‘I don’t blame you,’ she said. ‘I’d have died a dozen deaths with all those people staring at me. But don’t worry. Give them a few minutes and they’ll have forgotten all about you.’
Other women followed them in. There were curious glances in her direction but the chatter was all about other things – men and boys, the awful pudding, the possibility of someone getting pie-eyed in the bar afterwards. Women leaned towards the mirrors to touch up their lipstick, speaking all the while. ‘Did you see Sandra’s dress? I thought her bosom was going to fall out all over the blancmange.’
‘Who would have noticed the difference?’
Shrieks of laughter.
Somehow Beryl had conjured up two glasses of gin. She pushed one into Marian’s hand. ‘Here, take some medicine. Makes the wounded spirit whole and calms the troubled breast.’ She offered cigarettes as well, Player’s Airman.
Marian drew thankfully on the smoke. Smoke and gin seemed a good combination. ‘Why didn’t Alan warn me?’ she asked.
‘Oh, don’t blame him, poor soul. He’s floundering around not knowing what hit him.’
Behind Beryl the chatter went on: ‘What about Raymond and Jenny? Is he going to pop the question?’
‘He’s already popped the cherry.’
Laughter.
‘Did you see Brenda’s shoes? How many coupons did they take?’
‘Coupons, my backside. Her brother’s in the business.’
Beryl leaned forward and took hold of Marian’s hands. ‘Look, darling, the problem is always that we don’t know how others see us. We think one thing but half the time they see another. I’ll be honest with you. When I first met Bill I was on the make, but he saw an innocent little girl with stars in her eyes. And when Alan looks at you he sees a woman who’s way out of his class. Nothing like his usual girlfriends.’
‘I’m not his girlfriend. We’ve only met up a couple of times – beer and sandwiches at the Trout and a picnic with friends.’
‘Well, that’s up to you. But ever since he’s not stopped talking about you. The poor lad thought you weren’t interested in him. He only plucked up courage to invite you this evening because I insisted. So he’s frightened of you, and you’re frightened of I don’t know what. Memories, I suppose. Ghosts. Who can blame you? I’ve seen similar things with pilots – something happens and they lose their nerve and go to pieces. If it becomes official they get labelled LMF and demoted—’
‘LMF?’
‘Lack of Moral Fibre, darling. Unofficially, if their CO is in his right mind he doesn’t report it and they get quietly posted away. People understand.’ She squeezed Marian’s hands. ‘Believe me, darling, people understand. So don’t go blaming them—’
‘I’m not blaming anyone but myself.’
‘Don’t even do that. Try and see yourself as this lot see you. A stunning woman, dressed like a film star, who has done things no one here would dream of. Parachuted into occupied territory, lived a secret life, been captured and, I don’t know, tortured probably. Then sent to a concentration camp – we’ve all seen the films, for God’s sake. And here she is, drifting into their mess like Greta bloody Garbo. They’re bowled over, darling. All the women think you’re gorgeous and all the men … well, I won’t go into what the men think but it doesn’t involve the Vionnet dress. So when you want to run away from people because you are frightened of them, just remember this: they are terrified of you.’
They went back into the fray. People had moved from the dining room to the bar. There was more laughter, the sound of the Englishman in drunken pursuit of fun. Women stood round the edges and watched as two junior officers played some silly game that involved sitting blindfolded on the floor and each trying to hit the other with a rolled-up newspaper. ‘Are you there, Moriarty?’ they called to each other.
Alan stood beside her and took her hand. ‘Are you all right? Christ, you gave me a turn.’
‘I’m quite all right, thank you.’
‘I thought you were going to keel over.’
One of the younger officers came up and said, ‘I saw your story in the paper. It was you, wasn’t it? Anne-Marie S or something. I just want to say, how bloody thrilled I am to meet you.’
She smiled and didn’t know how to answer. It was like being royalty, receiving congratulations for something that she didn’t merit. They chatted for a while about nothing much. Music was coming from a gramophone in the anteroom – the strains of Artie Shaw playing ‘Begin the Beguine’. Some people were dancing.
‘Do you want to go back to the hotel?’ Alan asked.
‘I think I want to dance, although I’m not very good. The last time I danced was in 1943. It seems a long time ago.’
So he took her hand and led her out onto the floor. Dancing was a palliative. They shuffled around among the shifting couples, suddenly close together, their bodies touching for the first time. She felt calm and inconsiderable, no longer the object of curiosity but just someone there among others, doing what they did. It was during the dance that he kissed her. She had been expecting it of course, but still it was another small epiphany, a fractional release from things that bound her, the taste of someone else’s cigarettes and wine, the hint of an intimacy that might be. They moved together so that he was pressed against her belly, a hard rib between them.
‘Alan,’ she said. Just his name.
His mouth was close to her ear, his voice very loud. ‘Is that all right?’
‘I think it’s rather a surprise.’
She felt the breath of his laughter. ‘Not entirely my fault. Yours as well.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘Neither can I. Maybe that covers quite a lot of things.’
It was after one o’clock that they finally left. Beryl gave her a kiss and told her she’d been the belle of the ball. Bill said well done, as though there had been something to do in the first place and, whatever it was, that something had been done successfully. She thought them all wonderfully friendly and slightly absurd. Drunk, probably. Was she drunk as well? The world seemed very easy at the moment, so perhaps she was. Even the rain that was falling as they went out to the car didn’t matter. They crammed themselves into Gloria’s narrow cockpit while drizzle rattled on the roof as though they were in a tent.
‘They’re nice,’ she said. ‘Bill and Beryl. Très chouette.’
‘What’s schwet?’
She laughed. ‘An owl. Sympathique. I’ve no idea why an owl should be sympathetic.’
As they drove, the headlights carved an unsteady beam through the smudged, charcoal night. When they reached the hotel the place seemed shut up. They clambered unsteadily out onto the pavement
, giggling and whispering in the rain, giving out a small cry of triumph when they discovered that the main door opened and there was a small light shining at the reception desk. But no night porter on duty. She retrieved the key to her room while Alan stood uncertainly in the shadows. ‘Are you all right?’
She was all right. Better than expected. ‘Do you want to come up?’ she asked, wondering what her question signified, and what his response would mean. That was the trouble with questions and answers. You were never sure what either meant.
The stairs were uneven and full of insidious creaking. They tiptoed along a narrow corridor and when they came to the door to her room the key did not seem to fit.
‘Are you sure it’s the right one?’ he whispered.
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘I meant the room, are you sure this is the right room?’
That seemed most ridiculously funny. Fiddling with the lock, they stifled giggles. ‘D’you know, they trained us in housebreaking?’
‘You’re joking.’
‘Deadly serious. An ex-convict came and gave us lessons in how to pick locks.’
‘And you can’t even—’
‘Open a damned door with the key.’ There was a little explosion of laughter as the lock finally yielded. The room was damp and dusty, scented with her perfume, a kind of sanctuary. Scattered on the bed were the clothes she had changed out of earlier – stockings, underwear, her skirt on the floor, her jacket tossed across a chair. ‘I didn’t really expect this,’ she said. But she felt quite determined, liberated by drink and by the tensions of the evening; and younger, much younger than she had been for months. There were other factors working within her as well: a reawakening of sexual attraction of course, the rhythms of her body re-emerging from dormancy; but also something else, the feeling that this might shake her out of the reserve in which she was trapped – that she might love him.
Alan frowned. ‘Look, if you—’
She held up her hand. ‘Don’t. For years I haven’t really been able to make decisions for myself. Now I can.’ And then she kissed him, standing in the middle of the room among the litter of her things. His mouth tasted of cigarettes and whisky. There was something shockingly intimate about the contact, the sensation of his tongue, the feeling of his opening up to her and she to him.
He tried to pull away. ‘Marian, I don’t have, you know …’
‘What?’
‘A Johnny. French letter. Whatever you want to call it.’
She laughed. ‘Capote anglaise, that’s what the French say …’
‘It wouldn’t be safe.’
‘Safe? I haven’t been safe for over two years.’
The aphrodisiac of laughter, the mingling of wine and whisky and cigarettes, the struggling with buttons and fasteners until they were more or less naked, clumsy together, falling onto the bed as though in some kind of conflict, all rules and constraints gone. She didn’t care, that was the frightening thing. She didn’t care that his chin was rough against her neck and her breasts. She didn’t care when she felt his hands on her, opening her thighs, cupping her there, his finger inside, stroking. She didn’t care what he was doing or might do. She reached down to take hold of his cock. She’d never done anything like that before, never with Benoît, never with Clément. The touch of it surprised her, the fluid mobility of the skin, the strange heaviness it possessed, as though weighted with some dense element as yet unknown. She drew him towards her. ‘Marian,’ he cried out. But she didn’t want to say his name in return. That would change things, create out of this a moment of consummation, a declaration of intent, a bond of some kind. She knew what she was doing, how much this might mean, how dangerous it was. And she didn’t care, because danger was something she had learned to survive.
‘Come inside me,’ she whispered and felt the thrill of saying it. ‘Come inside me,’ she repeated, pushing herself upwards against him. There was that sudden, shocking intrusion, a pushing and shoving, cries of ‘Oh God’ – appeals to a deity she didn’t believe in except perhaps at this carnal moment, when all things seemed subsumed into one, the single fact of his presence there within her and her swollen self engulfing him and convulsions coursing through her, inundating her, leaving her exhausted on the bed, like a prisoner pulled from drowning and dumped unceremoniously on the floor to gasp for air.
Later, much later, he slipped from the bed and dressed. In the way that one is aware of things happening in a dream, she sensed his bending down to kiss her and then the door opening and closing so quietly that it might not have happened. Nine o’clock, she remembered before she drifted off to sleep: he said he’d come for her at nine o’clock.
When she awoke her watch said six-forty. Her head ached with memory and alcohol. Her mouth was dry. She crept to the bathroom and washed him from her, inside and out. She was a bit sore. What if she got pregnant? If she got pregnant she’d have a baby. It would give her something to do, someone to care about other than herself. But she wouldn’t get pregnant. Her period was only a few days ago. These things didn’t happen.
By quarter past seven she was in the dining room having breakfast before any other guests were up. Back in her room she packed her things and carried her case downstairs. According to the girl at the reception desk there was a bus for Oxford at eight o’clock. There was just time to pay the bill, scribble a message and seal it in an envelope. ‘Flight Lieutenant Walcott will be coming at nine,’ she told the girl. ‘Make sure he gets it.’
She felt curiously free of all encumbrance. The outside world, Wallingford High Street, held no threat. It seemed absurd that it might ever have done so. Waiting for the bus was what she had done in Lussac, in Condom, in Toulouse, in a dozen other places in France when she was strong and composed and sure of herself. She felt like that now. She could do anything.
Dear Alan,
I’m sorry to leave like this. I thought it better that way instead of being rather awkward with each other. Thank you for everything, really. It was a lovely evening in every way. Please don’t be upset.
Affectionately,
Marian
Aftermath
He rang. She knew who it would be, as one knows these things. A kind of sixth sense, although she didn’t believe in such a power. ‘Yes,’ she said when he spoke his name. ‘Of course.’
‘Were you expecting me to ring?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Are you angry?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Not ashamed, I hope.’
‘No, not ashamed either. Ashamed is to do with religion, isn’t it? I don’t have any religion.’
‘Look, can we meet? We can’t discuss this on the phone. I want to see you, talk to you face to face—’
‘Some kind of post-mortem?’
‘Is it dead, then?’
There was a silence. ‘I don’t know, Alan.’
‘Then let’s talk about it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
He wrote her letters explaining how he felt for her. From the moment when he had first set eyes on her, when she had appeared in the foyer of the Randolph Hotel, he had fallen in love with her. He’d never believed in love at first sight and yet it had happened. But he also understood. After all that had happened to her, he understood that she didn’t want to be hurried into a relationship. Yet what had happened between them was not his fault alone, was it? They were both to blame and in retrospect it had been a stupid thing to do. But what had happened had happened. No use crying over spilt milk. Was that an unfortunate metaphor? he wondered.
She laughed at that.
And, he had to say it, that night had been the most wonderful of his life. Even though he couldn’t recall much of it.
A later letter suggested that perhaps there was another possibility. The idea hadn’t occurred to him earlier, but it was this: she had fallen pregnant and didn’t want to burden him with the problem. But he would stand by her, of course he would. And acknowledge the child as h
is and give it – her, him – his name.
She liked that phrase: fallen pregnant. Falling out of grace, falling into pregnancy. She wouldn’t mind being pregnant. It might give her something to live for. Might.
After reading it she tore up each letter and then, the careful training of the organisation being what it was, burned the pieces in an ashtray.
A Bomb
The news came one warm evening in August. She heard it while sitting in her bedroom, listening to the wireless. It was the usual newsreader’s voice, high-pitched, eager, imbued with the sense that everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds:
‘President Truman has announced a tremendous achievement by the Allied scientists: they have produced an atomic bomb. One has already been dropped on a Japanese Army base. It alone contains as much explosive power as two thousand of our great ten-tonners. The President has also foreshadowed the enormous peacetime value of harnessing atomic energy.’
She sat there as though slapped, while the disembodied voice maundered on about Bank Holiday thunderstorms and a record crowd at Lord’s where Australia had made 265 for five wickets, as though nothing much else had happened. But she remembered. She remembered Clément explaining and Ned talking in the depressed, dispassionate tone of scientists, of what could be done and would be done. She remembered standing in the gardens outside Ned’s flat with two flints in her hand and banging them together. The sulphurous smell of sparks. ‘That’s it,’ Ned had said. ‘You’ve just blown London off the map.’
That night she dreamed. The falling dream that she hadn’t had for so long. Falling, falling into the darkness that became a flash of light. Clément was part of the dream, falling with her.
*
The next morning the main pages were covered in the story, a thin layer of triumphalism and evasion washing almost everything else onto lesser pages. An army base, the man on the radio had said; but it wasn’t an army base. It was an entire city destroyed, a city she had never heard of. That was what Clément had explained, talking of Paris – how, if this kind of bomb exploded over the Île de la Cité, the destruction would reach south to Montparnasse and northwards all the way to the Butte de Montmartre. A city vaporised. And he was right. The sketch maps in the newspapers showed that it was so, with rings drawn around a simple cross in the middle of this Japanese city. The rings were labelled ‘total destruction’, ‘severe structural damage’, ‘moderate structural damage’, ‘light damage’.