The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (10 page)

‘
Two
of you?’ the man shouted. He wore captain’s pips on his shoulders and his face was dark with rage. ‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing here? Don’t you know this is a restricted area? Where the bloody hell have you come from?’

‘We’re from Edinburgh,’ Marian said. ‘We’ve come for the weekend.’

‘For the weekend?
Here
? Do you have identification? Where are your papers?’

‘We left them down in the car. We didn’t expect to meet a policeman up here.’

‘I’m not a bloody policeman!’ The captain was struggling with the possibilities, trying to work out what to do. His face was red, from exertion perhaps, or anger, or the embarrassment of meeting women in a place like this. ‘Where in God’s name are you staying?’

‘At a hotel.’

‘A hotel? Round here?’ He shook his head in bewilderment. ‘This is most irregular. You shouldn’t be here at all. We’ll have to escort you down.’

‘Does that mean we’re under arrest?’

‘It means I’m keeping an eye on you until I can be sure of your story. As far as I know you could be spies.’

‘We’re not spies. Honestly.’

‘Of course you’ll say that. Spies would say that, wouldn’t they?’

‘I suppose they would. But actually we’re secretaries, at the Office for Inter Services Liaison in Edinburgh. You can check if you like.’

‘Inter Services Liaison? Never heard of it.’

‘It’s very important. It does liaison. Between the services.’

‘However important it is, you shouldn’t be here. You’d better come with me.’

So they set off down the hill, the captain leading the way, the two women following, escorted by the men.

‘Will we be in trouble?’ Yvette asked in a whisper.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Benoît walked beside them. He was looking at her with a curious, sideways glance, as though trying to remember. Then his eyes lit up. ‘You are Anne-Marie!
La belle
Anne-Marie who would not go dancing with me.
Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites là
?’

‘Is it any of your business?’

He laughed. He looked quite different from the half-drunk youth who had tried to take her dancing. Younger, certainly, but dark and thoughtful. ‘She is very surprising, our Anne-Marie. I didn’t expect to see her here. I only expect to see sheep in this shitty part of the world, not beautiful women. And not London girls who suddenly show they are, in fact, French. You fooled me, you know. I never guessed you were French until when you walked away.
Emmerdeur
, you called me.’

‘You were.’

‘It was my last evening before coming here.’

‘And mine.’

‘We should have spent it together.’

‘You should have been sober.’

The captain looked over his shoulder, suddenly alerted to the language that was being spoken. ‘Are these women
French
?
Estce que vous êtes françaises?
’

The group stumbled to a halt. There was a further interrogation. What were two French women doing here? The faint suspicion arose in the officer’s mind that he was being made to look a fool. ‘Are you people from Meoble?’ he demanded.

Marian smiled, as though it was a moment of revelation. ‘Meoble Hotel, that’s the place. That’s where we’re staying. Not really a hotel, more a work camp.’

‘Look, are you taking the mickey?’

‘Well, I wasn’t going to tell you straight away, was I? It’s all secret. I wasn’t going to go blabbing to any Tom, Dick or Harry we bump into on a mountainside.’

The officer regarded her with something approaching fury. ‘I
am
not
any Tom, Dick or Harry. I’m an experienced alpine climber. I’ve climbed on Everest with F. S. Smythe. I’ve trekked up to the foot of Kanchenjunga. And I don’t expect lip from a young girl out on a hiking trip. So you two come with me and we’ll see what’s going on.’

He turned and stormed off down the hillside with the rest of his group following on the broken slope, slipping and sliding at the steeper bits, herding the two girls among them. Benoît was still beside her. He tried to keep his voice low so that the captain wouldn’t hear. ‘So you
are
in training.’ He shook his head in amazement. And admiration. ‘What a
casse-cou
you are! Where are you from?’

‘Geneva.’

‘Ah,
une Genevoise
. I can hear it in your accent.’

‘My father was an official of the League of Nations.’

‘Posh!’

‘He’s not posh. He’s just an ordinary man. He’s my father.’

‘And is the posh girl enjoying the course?’

‘I told you, we’re not posh.’ But she admitted that she was enjoying it, in a masochistic kind of way. It was like a glorified expedition with her Uncle Jacques, who used to take her climbing in the Alps.

‘Except for the weather?’

‘Except for the weather.’ They laughed. You had to laugh at the weather. The only alternative was to cry, and there was no point in doing that as no one would notice the tears. ‘We’ve canoed across the lake,’ he told her, and then corrected himself with elaborate sarcasm: ‘
Loch
. They get very excited if you call it a lake. And now we’ve been racing up to the top. It’s some kind of competition. They love competitions, these British. Apparently there’s a league table, like the football. I think that’s what they think of the war – it’s a competition, and whoever wins gets the Ashes. You’ve heard of the Ashes?’

‘Of course I’ve heard of the Ashes.’

‘Who would fight for ashes? Only the English.’

He was based at a place called Swordland, on the other side of the loch. Swordland seemed magical and fantastic, like something to do with the Knights of the Round Table. ‘How strange that we should meet like this,’ she said. But was it strange? So much seemed strange nowadays that all concepts of strangeness were distorted. Only a couple of weeks ago she had been a bored WAAF working shifts in the Filter Room at Bentley Priory amid the smoke from cigarettes and the smell from armpits. And now she was here in this remote landscape, with the vague promise of France ahead of her and a whole collection of skills that she would never have imagined acquiring. She knew how to kill a man with a blow to the neck and how to derail a train with a few pounds of explosive; she could signal with Morse and fire a Thomson sub-machine gun. She could move silently at night and penetrate barbed-wire fencing noiselessly and cross a river by pulling herself along a single rope. How was anything strange beside that?

‘Perhaps we can get together when we have leave?’ he suggested.

‘Perhaps.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Oxford.’

He looked disappointed. It was his disappointment that encouraged her. ‘Are you in London?’

‘Of course. They put me up in a hotel.’

She was about to ask other questions – where was he from? where was his family? how did he make it to Britain? all that kind of thing – when the captain looked round from the front of the group. ‘What’s all this talk? Where the hell has security gone? Bérard, you come up here with me, please.’

She laughed. ‘Do as you are told.’

Benoît made a face, and hurried ahead to join the captain. ‘Oxford
trente-deux quatre-vingt-neuf
,’ she called out to his back. He glanced round and smiled. His smile was appealing, the smile of the little boy playing at being a soldier.

*

Down at the lodge, Marian and Yvette were ordered into the lounge like recalcitrant children, while the captain and Lieutenant Redmond conferred on the lawn. Marian stood back from the window so that she could see without herself being seen. There was much gesticulating and frowning.

‘They’re treating us like infants,’ Marian said. ‘I’ll walk out. They can’t stop me. I’ll simply go home, and they can stuff their plans.’

Yvette sniffed. ‘They’ll throw me out.’

‘Don’t be daft. It’s me they’re after.’

‘They think I’m no good.’

‘Stop saying that. They’re idiots. They take themselves so bloody seriously. And they make as many mistakes as anyone else. I mean, they’re not especially clever or anything, they just think they are.’

‘They’re the ones in charge, though.’

The two officers disappeared from view. Now there were only the students from Swordland sitting on the grass in front of the house, six anonymous, khaki-clad men, with a heap of rucksacks and a pile of ugly-looking weapons; and that boy called Benoît who had seemed amused and self-contained, and accepting of her in a strangely familiar way, as though they had known each other much more than that chance acquaintance in a bar.

‘I want to go to France,’ Yvette said. ‘That’s all I want to do.’

‘You’ll go to France. I’m sure you’ll go to France.’

Now the Swordland group was gathering up its kit. They must have been given orders that they were about to depart. She could see Benoît bending to lift his pack and sling it over his shoulder. Perhaps she should stride carelessly out and bid them goodbye and show everyone that she thought the whole incident the most colossal joke. That would put the cat among the pigeons. And then the door to the sitting room opened and there was the earnest Lieutenant Redmond summoning them into his office, exactly like the Mother Superior summoning her to the study for one of those humiliating lectures.

‘What the hell were you two playing at?’ he demanded. He sat at his desk leaving the two women standing in front of him.

‘Soldiers,’ Marian replied.

The lieutenant frowned. ‘It’s not a joke, Sutro. It was an appalling breach of security, and bloody foolish to boot. Surprising them like that. Jumping up like a pair of schoolgirls and … what was it you shouted?’

‘Bang bang, you’re dead.’

‘Bang. Bang. You’re dead.’ He said the words slowly, savouring them. ‘Whatever you may think, this is not Cowboys and Indians, Sutro. Haven’t you any idea of what danger you were in? They might have shot you.’

‘
Shot
us? You mean they run around the country shooting innocent civilians at random? We might actually have been what we said we were – a couple of secretaries up from Edinburgh for the weekend. And I thought we did pretty well with our cover story, considering.’

He humphed. Like an old colonel, she thought.
Humph
. Perhaps that was his name – Humphrey Redmond.

‘You seem to treat this whole thing as a game, Sutro. This course, the organisation, everything.’

‘No, I don’t. That’s simply not true.’

‘You’re always making fly comments. You’re always criticising. You seem to think you know everything. I’m damned if I’m going to have security breached and reports made all because of a hoity-toity girl with an aggravating smile and an insolent manner.’

Her eyes smarted. ‘That’s unfair.’

‘This is nothing to do with being fair. It’s to do with trying to train people to fight. Whether you like it or not, this is a military establishment and in military establishments officers don’t like being made to look fools. The captain was bloody furious, you realise that, don’t you? You even called him a policeman!’

‘I was only being consistent with my cover story. Dizzy
secretary. Look, this is a bit of a nonsense if all we’re talking about is hurt feelings.’

‘And then you referred to him as “any Tom, Dick or Harry”.’

‘Well, which one is he?’

The lieutenant’s expression faltered. For a moment it wasn’t clear whether he was about to rage or laugh. ‘He’s two of them, actually.’

‘
Two
of them?’

‘Captain Thomas Harry.’

Incipient tears had metamorphosed into incipient laughter. She nodded thoughtfully, and tried to avoid the man’s eye. There was something there, she realised now, some little spark of anarchy in his look, and a small pulse of sexual sympathy that passed between them. ‘He’s a bit of the other one, too,’ she said.

Two days later, Yvette was told that she was being posted away. She should pack her bags and be prepared to leave first thing the next morning.

‘I’ve failed,’ Yvette said. ‘I told you so.’ Her face was drawn in tragedy. She suddenly seemed old, small and wizened, like someone who had suffered a bereavement: the downturned mouth, the clenched muscles in her cheeks, the dry and staring eyes. ‘That silly business on the mountain did it. It’s your fault.’

‘Of course it isn’t. They’d have thrown me out as well if that had been anything to do with it. Anyway, Redmond saw the funny side. And you’re not being thrown out. You’re being posted to another training place. You said so yourself.’

‘That’s just their way of trying to soften the blow.’

‘Where did they say?’

‘Thame Park, or somewhere. Where the hell is that?’

‘Thame? Near Oxford. Perhaps we can meet up when they give us leave.’

Yvette shrugged. ‘Who knows? I think they will send me home. I think I’m no good. I bet Thame is – what do they call it? The cooler.’

Emile came over with a glass of whisky in his hand and a smug smile on his face. ‘You can go away for a start,’ Marian told him, but he stood there, immune to animosity.

‘They say they are sending me to Thame Park,’ Yvette said. ‘What is Thame Park? Is it where they hide the people who are no good? You said there was somewhere for that. The cooler, you called it.’

He knew, of course. He had all sorts of gen about the Organisation. He knew names and acronyms and code names. ‘Thame Park’s not the cooler. Thame Park’s STS 52.’

‘STS 52. What the hell is that?’

‘It’s the wireless telegraphy school. They’re going to make a pianist of you.’

‘Une pianiste?’

‘Wireless operator,’ he said impatiently. ‘Don’t you know the lingo yet?’

Marian was on her own now. It was a strange feeling, being the only woman among eight men. It gave her power – she knew instinctively the power of women over men – but also vulnerability, as though with Yvette gone she was now exposed as the next victim in line. But she would not fail. That she knew. The course was at one and the same time a training and an examination, and she would not be found wanting.