‘No wonder they wanted him to learn French,’ murmured Charlotte. ‘He never told me he was doing this.’
‘You must try not to worry. He’s a hell of a good pilot. Got the luck of the devil, too. I should think he’s most likely drinking too much local wine with some farmer waiting to be picked up tomorrow by another plane. They’ll do everything they can to get him back, you know. They won’t want to leave a pilot of his experience over there.’
‘But what if he’s crashed?’
‘Well, that’s a different matter. I wish there was more I could do to help. I’ll try and get in touch with his people, if you like. Who’s his next of kin?’
‘He hasn’t got any. He’s an only child.’
Charlotte tried to say goodbye to Borowski, but the words would not pass her throat; she put the receiver down, but in her blurred vision missed the cradle, so it slipped from the table and dangled by its plaited brown cord with Borowski’s anxious voice twirling in the bakelite earpiece as Charlotte sank to her knees and laid her head on the floor.
Half an hour later Daisy Forester let herself into the flat and called out to see if anyone was there. She had had a long day at St James’s and was looking forward to a bath, a change out of her hot clothes and whatever the evening might offer. When there was no answer, she turned on the water in the tub, then went to her bedroom and undressed. A minute later she emerged in her dressing gown and was on her way into the bathroom when she noticed a suitcase sticking out of the door of Charlotte’s room at the end of the corridor.
‘Charlotte?’ She padded down to the open door. ‘Charlotte? My God, what’s the matter? Tell me.’
‘He’s . . .’ The words were squeezed singly through the air-lock of her throat. ‘Dead. He’s . . . crashed . . . Oh, Daisy . . . it’s not fair.’
‘Take it easy, Charlotte. It’s all right. Calm down, now. Calm down.’
Charlotte clung to Daisy’s shoulders while Daisy stroked her hair. ‘Gently now, gently.’
Charlotte looked up again and Daisy saw the passivity of grief yielding in her expression to something more violent. ‘It’s not . . . fair. I so loved him . . .’
Although Daisy found her eyes damp with the depth of her sympathy, she simultaneously felt detached. Perhaps it was to do with having Charlotte’s body in her arms: her failings seemed enclosed by Daisy’s grasp. Fond though she was of Charlotte, she had always viewed her as unstable: the way she had fixed herself on this obviously damaged man, the way her unquestioned education afforded her so little protection. She was a little intimidated by Charlotte’s self-possession, but she felt sorry for her because she was so vulnerable.
Charlotte began to wail again, and Daisy was reminded of a poem she could not place . . . A woman wailing. It was frightening because it was so elemental; the noise she made as she pulled herself away from Daisy’s embrace and threw herself back on the bed was atavistic.
‘Now, come on, Charlotte,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to stop this, you’ve got to calm down. Now come on.’ She lifted her up again and held her jaw quite firmly so Charlotte had to look at her. When Charlotte tried to wrench her head away, Daisy shouted at her. ‘Stop it!’
Charlotte’s face for a moment filled with hatred, then softened. ‘I can’t,’ she sobbed, but did then seem to drift off the pitch of her emotion, back into a more manageable grief.
Over the minutes, stroking her hair, holding her hands, Daisy elicited the story as far as Charlotte could tell it. As soon as she could see that there were some grounds for hope, however unsteady, Daisy switched all her efforts into encouraging Charlotte to believe that Gregory was alive. She proposed practical ways of finding out: telephone calls they could make, letters they could write, friends they could ask to contact other friends.
After a quarter of an hour she coaxed from Charlotte the first twitch of a timid, bloated smile and felt a great relief that this hurdle was behind them, followed by a guilty foreboding of the qualities of patient friendship that the long weeks would demand.
‘Now I’m going to make us both a nice big drink,’ said Daisy. ‘You stay here. I won’t be a minute.’
On the way to the kitchen, she felt a sogginess in the carpet under her bare feet where the water had trickled from the forgotten bath.
11
RICHARD CANNERLEY WAS late for his meeting with Sir Oliver Cresswell, and this worried him considerably as he hurried up the steps of the Travellers Club. Cannerley’s father was dying, and he had lingered too long by his bedside at the Westminster Hospital. Every day when he said goodbye he presumed it would be for the last time, and he tried to fix the moment – the moment of his father living – in his mind, as though in this way he might preserve him. It was a routine that varied only slightly from one he had used as a child on the last day of the holidays, when he would impress on his memory the final sight of his parents to last him through the boarding-school term ahead.
In the taxi he wondered if he might use the excuse of his father’s illness to mollify Sir Oliver for his lateness. It was his father, after all, who had instilled in Cannerley his sense of national pride and honour, these things of which he presumed Sir Oliver was the inheritor. Unfortunately his father had also bequeathed a code of conduct which would view the pleading of personal emotion as an excuse for professional inadequacy to be quite improper.
Cannerley found Sir Oliver on a sofa in the back window of the drawing room. Breathlessly, keeping his excuses vague, he accepted the waved offer of a seat.
Sir Oliver’s physical appearance was a little disappointing to Cannerley. He took no care when he sat down, so that his suit jacket was always creased at the back. There was nothing so glaring as an egg or gravy stain on the lapel, but the fabric never had the soft or laundered look of something absolutely clean. His uncropped eyebrows overhung a pair of thick and greasy spectacles.
‘This Charlotte Gray woman,’ said Sir Oliver, when Cannerley had settled down. ‘I gather you know her.’
‘Yes,’ said Cannerley eagerly. ‘I put her on to G Section.’
‘Have you kept in touch?’ It was a favourite phrase.
‘Certainly.’
Sir Oliver nodded. ‘You remember Fowler, the crooked little businessman I told you about?’
‘The chap who’s our way into G Section?’
‘Exactly. Well, he’s managed to get me a copy of their psychological reports on this Gray female. They’re rather good. Some suspicion of childhood upsets. Otherwise clear-thinking, resourceful. Determined.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Cannerley. ‘She’s determined all right, but she’s set on the wrong thing. She’s got some fixation about France.’
Sir Oliver nodded. ‘What do you know about her boyfriend?’
‘He’s an ex-Spitfire pilot,’ said Cannerley. ‘Like a lot of those Battle of Britain chaps he’s a pretty useless case. He was on some ludicrous suicide mission over Dieppe or Le Havre in the spring. The RAF really are incredible.’
‘But the girl’s keen?’
‘Absolutely besotted, according to my enquiries. She was certainly resistant to other forms of male charm.’
‘I see.’ Sir Oliver inhaled deeply and Cannerley heard the rattle of mucus behind his nose. ‘He’s gone missing over France. He was in a Lysander. He appears to have had an accident.’
‘Is he alive?’ said Cannerley.
‘We don’t know. The point is that this Gray woman is likely to be sent over to Fowler’s section. That’s the rumour, anyway.’
‘From Fowler?’
Sir Oliver nodded.
‘But surely she’s not up to being an agent?’ said Cannerley.
‘God, no, she’ll go as what G Section charmingly calls a “courier”. She has to deliver an agent to his destination, then run a little errand of her own.’
‘Rather like a FANY at home.’
‘Exactly. Be alert. Keep her seams straight. Not stall the car. Apparently the agent needs an escort because his French is
n’t up to it.’
‘Can’t they find enough French speakers?’
‘Apparently not. Remarkable, isn’t it? They say it’s all right when he’s among friends, but they don’t want to risk him talking to security and so on.’
Sir Oliver paused as a Spanish waiter came over and refilled his after-lunch coffee cup. ‘Anyway,’ he said, when the waiter had disappeared, ‘I wondered if this missing airman might work to our advantage.’
‘I’m not quite with you.’
Sir Oliver spooned some of the gritty coffee sugar into his small white cup and stirred it briskly. ‘I’m not sure there’s anything to be “with” yet.’
‘I see.’ Cannerley felt flattered to have been privy, at such an early stage, to Sir Oliver’s famously intricate thought processes. ‘But is there anything you’d like me to do?’
‘Yes. The usual thing.’
‘Keep in touch.’
‘Exactly.’
Cannerley, seeing that Sir Oliver could not be bothered to extend the conversation with smaller talk, made his way out into Pall Mall. As he stood waiting for a taxi, he felt an oppressive melancholy descend. Something was not right. Was it the girl? He envied the airman, but he did not feel unduly concerned for her. No, it was something to do with Sir Oliver that had unsettled him.
A taxi stopped. ‘Ormonde Gate,’ said Cannerley through the window, but once inside he leaned forward and tapped the glass. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind. Westminster Hospital.’
Charlotte set off for the New Forest on the train with Marigold Davies. In her handbag was the note Gregory had left by her bed on the last night she had seen him, and a letter from his squadron leader.
Dear Miss Gray,
Further to our telephone conversation today I am writing to confirm that while we have received no news of Flt Lt Gregory since he left on a mission some time ago we have no reason to believe the worst. Although we are a standard RAF squadron independent of other organisations albeit working in liaison with other services you will no doubt appreciate that I am not at liberty to disclose details of the flight, either with regard to its destination or in respect of its operational purpose. I can tell you that Flt Lt Gregory is an extremely able pilot and a patriotic officer with a proper sense of duty. My own belief is that for any one of a number of possible operational reasons he was unable to execute the full purpose of his mission but that he will make every endeavour to contact us when it is safe and prudent for him to do so.
He will be officially posted ‘Missing’ but I’m sure you have every faith in him, as most assuredly do his colleagues.
Yours sincerely,
Allan Wetherby, Squadron Leader
On the telephone, Wetherby had told her ‘strictly between ourselves’ that the most likely explanation was that the man Gregory was supposed to pick up had not been there. Without the agent or the support of his network, Gregory would have been unable to refuel and therefore obliged to ‘make his own arrangements’. Charlotte pictured him begging petrol from a farmer in his dreadful French and finding himself reported to the Vichy authorities; she tried to develop this picture in her mind because the only alternative was to believe that he was already dead.
She told Marigold nothing of her worries as the train headed out into Surrey. She had confided in Daisy, and that was enough. Now she would complete her training with the greatest assiduity, and when it was finished she would go to France and find him.
Security, recognition, interrogation and security. That, the intelligence officer running the course told them with a smirk at his witty repetition, was what Group D was all about. Charlotte and Marigold were among only six women on the course; they sat next to each other and learned to identify every German plane and badge and rank and regiment. Vaguer but more important were the instructions for recognising German counter-intelligence officers, the Abwehr and their colleagues, of whom there were unknown numbers in France – presumed standing at station ticket barriers, sitting in cafés, idly making bogus calls from public telephone boxes. In her state of stunned concentration Charlotte committed every detail to memory and entered mistake-free test papers when required.
A grave, actorish man in his sixties gave them practical hints on looking ordinary and natural. It was no use knowing a cover story and giving away nothing under interrogation, he told them; they had to look at all times like people who didn’t even have a cover story.
Charlotte shared a bedroom with Marigold and a young woman called Liliane, whose mother was French. She took the course more lightly than the other two, and claimed that when she first went to Scotland it was in answer to an advertisement for bilingual secretaries; the first time she realised she was not being groomed to be a typist was when they offered to instruct her in silent killing.
The three of them were joined by three men for an exercise in interrogation. They were told to prepare a cover story giving details not only of assumed identities but of the precise way in which they had all passed the four hours of the previous afternoon, in the course of which a local train had been derailed. Each was then to be interrogated separately.
Charlotte was woken at three in the morning by a torch being shone in her face, and was taken down by an orderly to the billiard room at the back of the house, where two officers were waiting, dressed in SS uniform. One was the course commander, one was a man she had never seen before. The presence of a senior uniformed FANY made Charlotte wonder if this was to be a naked interrogation, like the one Marigold had described. The two men had either not heard of or had disregarded the idea that one interrogator should abuse and one cajole: they both attacked her from the start, standing close, using their physical size to intimidate her. Charlotte, drawn from her deep sleep, pale and puffy-eyed, her pink dressing gown drawn tight about her, found all the details of her learned story undisturbed and was able to repeat them with the mental precision that she always had on first waking.
They tried to destabilise her by claiming other members of her group had given different accounts of how they had passed the afternoon, but Charlotte told them they must have been mistaken. She was sure the self-taught mnemonic tricks that had helped her pass school tests as a girl were still working.
After two hours they let her go. She climbed back up the broad shiny staircase and went along the corridor to her room. She turned the door handle, gently, so as not to wake the others, and walked across the lino-covered floor, shedding her dressing gown as she went. The bed springs made no noise as she slipped beneath the blanket and prepared to resume her interrupted sleep.
Her mind was too full. It was a warm night, and the curtain had been drawn back a little to allow any breeze to enter through the open window.
She had found the early parts of her training impossible and absurd, but her attitude had changed: it now seemed urgent and serious, and even the sight of two Englishmen dressed up in Nazi uniform did not strike her as ridiculous. These pantomimes and costumes, these colours of allegiance, were tokens of a deadly moral order. She was not fooled by their superficial absurdity: British people laughed at Hitler and his preposterous acolytes, but, as German philosophers long before the Nazis might have argued, abstract evil did not choose the form in which it emerged in the particular.
She thought of France under darkness. It was hard to imagine how this country which in her first visits was still so harrowingly proud of itself, intoning the word Verdun like a muttered prayer, could so utterly have lost the thread that connected it to the innocent glory of Rheims and Proust’s Combray and Louveciennes, the village the Impressionist painters had made seem essential. There was this sense, on a grand scale, of national breakdown, and next to it was the loss of continuity in her own small life. She felt that the outcome of the one depended on the other; that only if France could find itself again could she hope to reconnect her own future to the lost happiness of her past.
More urgent than this hope was the need to get herself as soon as possible to Clermont-Ferrand:
to track down Monsieur Chollet in his garage and see if Gregory had called; and, if not, to use whatever method her cunning and determination could devise to go out in the dark and find him.
The curtain blew back a few inches from the window as the hoped-for breeze rustled through; and in the revealed slit of sky she saw a clouded moon. Charlotte crescent, Charlotte full . . . She closed her dry eyes and felt her lips come inwards in a narrow line. She saw his face. Don’t worry, my love, don’t worry, I’m coming to get you.
PART TWO
SUMMER 1942
1
ANDRÉ DUGUAY WAS running down an overgrown alley between two fields. It was a short cut his mother had forbidden him to take for fear of the adders thought to nest in the long grass, but André was in a hurry. The muscles in his fatless thighs slid up and down beneath the rim of his shorts; his calves, on which the baby whiteness of his skin was acquiring a dim honey-coloured gloss in the course of the summer, propelled him bounding over wiry bramble traps, the ruts of long-dried mud, the sleeping serpents.
When he arrived at the road, panting, he hesitated for a moment. Left, right . . . He was still too young to know the difference, but he knew the school was that way, up the hill: his route must therefore be towards the woods. He followed the road for ten minutes, walking to regain his breath, then running a little to make up time. Eventually, he saw the path he recognised and heard the frenzied barking of a German shepherd dog as the sound of his first footfall reached the farmyard. André walked cautiously nearer. Often his father had told him what to do when confronted by dogs, but still he had the urge to stroke them: in the rough diagram of his understanding, animals were with children against an adult world of rules and obligations. He stood still, offered the back of his hand to the dog and made no move to cross its territory until the animal backed off, its hairy tail swishing, its growls diminishing to a provisional acceptance.
Charlotte Gray Page 13