Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Of course you can.’

  ‘You won’t laugh at me?’

  ‘That depends if it’s funny or not.’

  ‘No, seriously.’

  ‘Seriously, no. I won’t laugh. If it’s serious.’

  I nodded. For days I had been working out how to do this and now seemed as good a moment as I could have hoped for. In the half light of the sitting room I could face her without the awful handicap of blushing. ‘I’m in love with you,’ I said.

  She didn’t laugh. If she had laughed that might have been the end of it – cringing with embarrassment, I’d have slunk off to bed and never spoken to her, never even looked at her again. But she didn’t laugh. I could see her face, brushed faintly by moonlight. She seemed to be considering my confession with great solemnity. ‘Well, that’s very flattering,’ she said.

  ‘I know you’re much older. But I’ll catch you up.’

  That did bring a faint smile. ‘Come here,’ she said, putting her arm around me and drawing me closer. We sat there for a moment while thoughts sacred and profane tumbled through my twelve-year-old mind. The shivering had stilled. Her body was warm again, alive, something I wanted to cling to.

  ‘I really don’t think I’m worth loving, Sam,’ she said.

  ‘That’s for me to decide.’

  ‘And I’m not sure you are quite old enough to love a woman. At your age you love your mother and your sister but that’s a different thing. When you’re older you’ll fall in love with someone your own age and then you’ll find out what it’s all about.’

  I was getting the sort of story that any adult would have told any lovestruck child in the same circumstances. I knew that. But in childhood it’s easy to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time, even easier than it is when you’re an adult (and it’s pretty easy then): so to me her words seemed imbued with wisdom and understanding.

  ‘Is there someone you love?’ I asked her.

  She was silent for a moment, smoking and thinking. Then, ‘There was,’ she said. A boy, she told me, a French boy. Somehow I understood that by ‘boy’ she still meant a grown-up, someone of her own age, someone who did what she had done, which seemed impossibly brave and wonderful. I listened to her story with growing disappointment. Clearly I would never match up to this French boy, whoever he was. ‘You did all that?’ I asked. ‘You really jumped out of an aircraft together in the middle of the night? Really?’

  ‘Really,’ she assured me. ‘It was a night like this, with a big full moon.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Frightening. Exciting. A whole lot of things, all at once.’

  I struggled to get my mind around the whole idea. This woman. A Halifax four-engined bomber. Night time, hundreds of miles away from home. The Gestapo waiting below. And a companion with her, a man, a boy, whom she wanted to talk about.

  ‘He was much braver than me. Nothing seemed to worry him. Everything was a joke, everything could be shrugged off. D’you know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed, as though my own life was populated by such people. Her arm was still round my shoulders. I lay with my face against her, feeling the warmth of her body and smelling her scent, mingled as it was with the smell of mud and grass. There was nothing that I could imagine more wonderful than this moment, except that she was talking about him.

  ‘And yet, he was very tender. And thoughtful. I think … I don’t know what I think, really. I think I was in love with him and didn’t realise it at the time.’

  ‘I know what you do when you’re in love,’ I told her.

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘Did you do that with him?’

  Looking up at her I saw what I supposed was a smile. ‘It’s what everyone does, Sam.’

  ‘Were you married to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But still you did it?’

  She squeezed me against her. I could feel the soft mass of her breast against my cheek. ‘It was wartime, Sam. You snatch what comfort you can in wartime.’

  ‘Where is he now, this man?’

  There was a moment of silence. The building creaked and shifted. Beyond the windows was the sound of the sea and the mutter of the wind. ‘He’s dead. He died in the fighting in France. So perhaps it’s a good thing we did it when we did. And now I think it’s time for both of us to get back to bed, don’t you?’

  I didn’t but I would have agreed with her about almost anything. Holding hands we tiptoed back along the corridor. Outside my door she bent and kissed me. ‘Sweet dreams,’ she said.

  In my room I waited breathlessly to hear her own door open and close. I knew she’d find nothing amiss. Everything in her room remained exactly as it was when she had left it earlier – her handbag on the chair, a pair of shoes lying on the floor, her nightdress thrown across the bed, even the note she had written to her parents and placed carefully on the pillow where they would have been certain to find it when they came looking for her in the morning.

  She picked the piece of paper up and tore it across. Then, as she had been taught, she burned the pieces carefully in an ashtray and washed the ashes down the basin. I heard the sound of water running. Then she took off her clothes, put on her nightdress, climbed into bed – I heard the sound of the bedsprings – and began to face the remainder of her life.

  Dear Maman and Papa,

  By the time you read this you will already be worrying about where I am. I want to try and spare you any further doubt or anxiety – I have done away with myself. The coastguards will probably find my body at some time but don’t let anyone put himself at risk on my behalf. They won’t be able to save me. If you want to give them some indication of where I might be, tell them to try the beach below the cliffs, but it’s high tide and my body may have been washed out to sea. Maybe I’ll end up in France.

  I’m sorry for all this. I can’t say anything more than that – just sorry for the pain I will have inflicted on you both. Don’t, whatever you do, blame yourselves – blame me. But try and understand that I cannot see any other way to go. Things that happened to me when I was in captivity seem to have taken something out of me. I can’t put it back. Count me, I suppose, as one of the war dead.

  Remember, please remember, that I loved you both, and Ned.

  Squirrel.

  *

  You may wonder if I have made that up. In a sense, so many years after the event, I must have. But I’ve captured the gist of the note, the brevity, the concern about the pain and the coastguards, the curious use of the past tense of the final line, almost implying that, at the moment of writing, she no longer did. And the way she signed off. Squirrel. I know all this because I had been a spy as much as she. I had heard her moving about her room in the dead of night, heard her door opening and closing, listened to her feet moving along the corridor and into the sitting room. I had sensed, rather than heard, the front door open and close; and then I’d watched from the window as her dark shadow crossed the moonlit garden and disappeared up the cliff path.

  I moved quietly, like a thief in the night. Moonlight gave her room a ghostly air. Her nightdress lay across the bed. I bent down and pressed my face into its folds and knew her smell. And then I saw the note. It had been placed on the pillow, in the shallow depression made by her head, a single fold of paper with her writing on it. I dared switch on the sidelight to see better.

  Dear Maman et Papa …

  … Count me, I suppose, as one of the war dead …

  Squirrel.

  I was suspended in one of those strange paradoxes of childhood, where you know and don’t know, understand and yet remain bewildered.

  My body …

  I’d watched her body, sheathed in its swimming costume, alive. And now would it be dead?

  Don’t let anyone put himself at risk on my behalf …

  The words of someone who had risked everything.

  I loved you both, and Ned.

  I replaced the note and slipped out of her r
oom, crept along to the sitting room and sat down on the sofa. For a while I contemplated following her; then thought better of it. She would wish to be alone to complete whatever there was to complete. Or maybe not. So I sat and waited, understanding and not understanding; afraid and yet confident that nothing would happen.

  And then she came back.

  Peace Union

  In the first days of September Marian Sutro presented herself at the offices of the Franco-British Pacific Union. The Union may have sounded like a steamship company, but there the resemblance ended. It was a cultural organisation dedicated, so it claimed in a badly printed pamphlet, to promoting peace and understanding between two ancient enemies and present friends – Great Britain and France. It occupied a suite of ground-floor offices off High Holborn. The library was in the basement.

  ‘We moved all the books out to Rickmansworth for the duration,’ Miss Miller explained. ‘And now we’ve got to move them back again.’ She was a scrawny woman with an air of despair about her, as though she had been waiting too long for someone – Mr Right? – to rescue her from this place and had just recently given up. Her brother, she was quick to inform Marian, had been killed in Spain, fighting for the International Brigade, fighting the war, as she put it, long before the politicians in Britain woke up to it.

  Her boss and the head of the Union was called Mr Roper. He was middle-aged and portly with thin black hair that was dusted with dandruff. He had a penchant for bow ties and wore a green velvet waistcoat that he fancied gave him a literary appearance. Writing was his main occupation, short acerbic articles for poorly printed left wing publications. ‘Our Soviet allies’ was a phrase in frequent use, while ‘capitalist warmongers’ usually referred to the Americans. De Gaulle was frequently excoriated as a creature of the right wing; Jacques Duclos, éminence grise of the French Communist Party, seemed to be capable of doing little wrong. During the war, Roper had fulfilled some vague function within the Ministry of Information; now his main task seemed to be the persecution of his assistant Peter, a slender youth with a prominent Adam’s apple and appallingly bad French. ‘Pierre, viens ici!’ would sound through the offices and, wherever he was, Peter was expected to drop his work and hurry to Mr Roper’s side to receive praise and criticism in equal measure.

  ‘This, Pierre, is Mademoiselle Sutro,’ Mr Roper said when Marian presented herself. ‘At least she can speak French, n’estce pas?’

  Marian admitted that she could.

  ‘We are given to understand that Mademoiselle – do you understand the term mademoiselle, Pierre? – Mademoiselle Sutro did something very hush-hush during the course of the recent hostilities. Whereas all you did was hide in a shelter while the Fascist buzz bombs struck down the dwellings of the workers.’

  Peter grinned awkwardly.

  ‘Pierre was a conscientious objector, you see,’ Roper explained. ‘He still is, I believe. I don’t think it is something you can put on merely when the bullets begin to fly, is it? Once an objecteur de conscience, always an objecteur de conscience. Même lorsque le paix éclate. I don’t expect you comprehend that, do you, Pierre? Even when peace breaks out.’

  ‘Conscientious objection demands its own kind of courage, Mr Roper,’ Peter said, blushing.

  ‘It is, mon cher, the very antithesis of courage.’

  Miss Miller whisked Marian away from this scene of conflict into the quiet shadows of the basement. She led the way round cardboard boxes of books and pointed out metal shelving with faded, peeling labels. 1 Philosophie et psychologie. 2 Religion et Théologie. Subsections descended to the floor: 21 Religions préhistoriques et primitives, 22 Religions originaires d’Extrême Orient, 23 Religions originaire du sous-continent indien, 24 Hindouisme, 25 Bouddhisme, isms, isms, going off into the dark. The musty smell of old paper and decaying bindings was like the smell of grave cloths in an ancient tomb.

  ‘We use the classification décimale universelle,’ the woman said. It was a surprise to discover that she pronounced the French with fluent perfection. ‘I presume you’re familiar with it?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Oh well, you’ll pick it up as you go along.’ She opened one of the boxes and took out a volume of Montaigne’s Essais, a nineteenth-century paper-bound edition with the spine partly missing, and handed it to Marian. ‘Many of the shelfmark labels have come off, which means you’ve got to go to the card index. That’s over here at the desk.’

  They traipsed round the nooks and crannies of the basement. In one corner there was a bed frame and, on the wall behind the shelving, pin-up photos of Danielle Darrieux and a bare-breasted Josephine Baker. Miss Miller tore them down. ‘We had the Free French in here during the war. They used this as a dormitory. Poor lads, who knows what happened to them?’

  ‘I expect they’re at home with Maman now.’

  Miller glanced at her with curiosity. ‘What was it that you did during the war? If I may ask?’

  The lies came easily. She was practised in lies, lies grown like rank weeds out of the ruins of her past. ‘Mr Roper was exaggerating. I was with the FANY. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Driving senior officers around, mainly.’

  ‘Must have been fun.’

  ‘When they weren’t pinching your bum.’

  Miss Miller looked shocked. ‘I’m sure they meant it in the nicest possible way,’ she said without a glimmer of humour. They made their way back upstairs to the offices. ‘When can you start? We need someone as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ve got to find somewhere to live first. At the moment I’m sleeping on my brother’s sofa. He’s not far from here.’

  Miss Miller smiled. She appeared to have more than the usual complement of teeth, a startling horse dentition that seemed suited to a snort and a whinny. ‘I tell you what, until you do you can come and live with me. I always have a PG and my present one just told me she’s leaving. How about that? It’ll be fun, won’t it? You can treat the flat as home. I don’t, of course, allow male visitors after six o’clock, but then I’m sure you’ll understand that. One has to keep standards up, nowadays more than ever.’

  ‘What’s different about nowadays?’

  ‘The war, my dear. The complete breakdown in moral sensibilities. Where have you been for the last few years?’

  ‘Abroad, as a matter of fact. North Africa.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘And thank you for your offer but I think I’m going to look for a place of my own. Perhaps buy a little flat.’

  ‘Buy? You won’t be able to afford anything on what they pay you here.’

  Which was, of course, true. So it was that, at some time in my twelfth year, Marian Sutro moved away from Oxford, out of reach, beyond my immediate knowledge, to live with Miss Miller as her paying guest.

  MBE

  She is the withdrawn figure on the Tube, her face buried in a book. She is the narrow figure on the top deck of the bus, looking down on the street scene but not part of it. She is the woman in the queue who stands aside, the female at the cinema who sits alone. A quiet, sequestered life. When a letter comes from the French embassy informing her in the name of the French people and the French Republic that she has been awarded the Croix de Guerre avec palme en vermeil, with an invitation to attend an investiture ceremony at the embassy, she writes a polite letter of regret: while honoured to be thus decorated, she is unfortunately unable to attend the ceremony. She gives no reason, of course, but the reason is there plain enough: the desperate wish to be ordinary, not to stand out from the crowd, not to be seen but only to see.

  That perhaps was the greatest legacy bestowed on Marian Sutro by her experiences during the war – the desire for camouflage, for mimesis. Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés. To live happily, live hidden. She’d heard the proverb years ago during her training but she’d only recently found the source, when she was down in the library and leafing through a book of Florian’s fables that needed to be put somewhere on the shelves. It comes in the Fable of the Cricket, wh
o survives intact while the pretty butterfly dies at the hands of children. She was like the cricket – cryptic, camouflaged, concealed. A survivor.

  The medal duly arrived at the library by recorded delivery. Not realising what it was, Marian opened the package and stood bewildered, confronting the bronze cross in its little presentation box. An ornate scroll announced Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité and addressed her in the name of the people of the Republic of France. Magnifique exemple de courage et d’abnégation, it said. Une foi inébranlable …

  ‘I thought,’ Miss Miller remarked, looking over her shoulder, ‘that you spent the war driving officers around and trying to avoid having your bottom pinched.’

  Marian closed the lid and stowed the box away in a drawer. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘What use do I have for it?’

  The notification for her British award arrived at the house in Oxford with altogether different wording. His Majesty was pleased to confer on her Membership of the Order of the British Empire, Civil Division, for services during the recent hostilities.

  Her father was furious. She had never seen him so angry before. ‘An MBE?’ he almost shouted. ‘That’s what they give school janitors and golf club secretaries.’

  Quietly, not wanting to make a fuss, she put the letter away in a drawer in her bedroom and wrote a polite letter declining the invitation to attend the Palace for the investiture.

  So, Marian Sutro, MBE, Croix de Guerre, travelling unknown on the Tube and the bus, her face bowed over a book that close inspection might show itself to be in French. Malraux, probably, or Céline. Slowly putting herself back together out of the component parts of memory and fear into which she has been splintered.

  She saw the psychiatrist rarely now. Once a fortnight at most, a journey up to Oxford on the train, then a bus to the quiet, secluded house on the Woodstock Road, to the quiet of Dr Morgan’s consulting room where she was meant to confront her demons. She told him nothing of what happened or didn’t happen on the cliffs in Sussex. That was her secret; and mine.