The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (12 page)

‘Probably. Coombes was her married name.’

‘She was in the course before me at Thame. We bumped into one another through some muck-up with the transport. Seems an empty-headed creature.’

‘We were in Scotland together. I tried to help her.’

‘Did you now? I doubt it was worth it.’

Dear Ned
, Marian wrote.
Training goes on. More peculiar than you can imagine. At this rate I’m afraid I’ll end up fully trained just when the war ends. Tried to ring you but couldn’t get through. Maybe I’ll get some free time
…

The course finished with a four-day scheme. ‘The Scheme,’ they announced portentously, as they might have spoken of some kind of ordeal by fire, an initiation into the secret rites of the faith. For her scheme, Marian was to invent her own cover, travel to Bristol, find somewhere to stay and then carry out a series of assignments. First, she had to make contact with an agent operating in the city. Once this was done, her task was to set up cut-outs and dead letter drops and make a move towards recruiting likely people who might provide information about aircraft manufacture in the city. In this charade – that is what she called it – the British police were to be her enemy. They would have been informed that a suspected enemy agent was in the area, and it was her job to evade them as surely as she would try to evade the
Milice
and the Gestapo.

‘And if they catch me?’

‘Use your cover story for as long as you can. If things get silly—’

‘It’s been pretty silly all the time.’

‘This isn’t a joke, Sutro. This is as near to being real as we can
make it. In a few weeks it
will
be for real, and then you’ll get no second chance. If things get really difficult with the police, insist that they make a call to this number and ask for Colonel Peters. He’ll tell them that you are an agent in training and he’ll come round and pick you up. That number is your Get Out of Jail card, so you’d better not forget it.’

And so she stepped through a further looking-glass, this time into the person of Alice Thurrock, graduate of the University of Edinburgh and teacher of French, a rather plain woman of twenty-eight who wore flat shoes and a shapeless tweed skirt, and had her brown hair gathered into a bun. She didn’t wear make-up, but did have a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that rested asymmetrically on her nose and gave the appearance of a squint. She had been in Paris until the summer of 1940 and returned to Britain a week before the Germans marched in. Since then she’d joined the WAAF, but last spring she had been discharged on medical grounds, and now she was trying to get things back on an even keel, to do something useful even if the military were no longer interested in her. There was no one else. Both parents were dead, her father in the flu epidemic of 1918 and her mother two years ago of cancer, so she was on her own, more or less. There was a brother in the army but he was out in the Middle East. Unfortunately all her stuff – her degree and teaching certificates, recommendations from former employers, all of that had been left behind in Paris. She had little more than what she could carry in her suitcase. A whole life.

The next few days were a kind of game, with the whole damaged city as the board and those few people she encountered, the pieces. But who was watching? She travelled on buses and tramped the pavements. She made a rendezvous with a threadbare man in a bookshop who gave her various messages to pass on to agents who didn’t exist. She chose flats for wireless transmissions and anonymous sites for dead letter drops. At a girls’ school in Filton, where she managed to get a job as a temporary
teacher, she selected the unwitting school secretary as a cut-out. A newsagent in Queens Road became another. She spent one afternoon identifying possible dead letter boxes – a loose stone in the steps of the Bethesda Chapel in Great George Street, and the space behind a fuse box beside a cinema in Whiteladies Road – and choosing other sites as suitable places to rendezvous with hypothetical agents. She had no idea what relation all this would have with reality but, her natural cynicism suspended for the moment, she played the game with gusto.

Suppers were sorry affairs in a cheerless dining room with the other lodger, a girl called Maisie who worked for the Ministry of Supply. The landlady cooked them a thin stew with many potatoes and little else. An Oxo cube gave an approximation to the flavour of meat. ‘Might as well be in prison,’ Maisie muttered when the landlady was out of earshot. Apart from that little moment of controversy they talked of neutral things, films they had seen, books they had read, film stars they liked. And boyfriends. ‘You got a man?’ Maisie asked.

Marian thought of Clément, of what was and what might have been. ‘Not really.’

‘Don’t blame you. It’s not worth it nowadays. I had a boy but he was called up and now he’s in the Middle East or somewhere. Hardly ever hear from him. I have to make do with my
own comfort, if you get my meaning.’ The girl laughed, blushing. ‘Well, what else can you be sure of these days, eh?’

‘Nothing, I suppose.’

‘You just got to look out for yourself, haven’t you?’

‘I suppose you have.’

Marian lay in bed that night and considered Maisie’s confession. Once upon a time she had thought such an act to be against the God who looked over her and admonished her for things done and things left undone. Although that particular belief had gone it had left behind a grimy residue of guilt, a feeling that this was a mean-spirited and dishonest act. But Alice Thurrock decided that she had no such inhibitions. She was a practical person. If you wanted a few moments of intense and careless ecstasy, then why not? It was your body, to do with as you wanted. You had to look out for yourself because no one else was going to. So she lay in bed quite without compunction, her legs open and her knees drawn up and her fingers involved in the soft intricacies of her vulva. She tried not to think of Clément. She tried not to think of anyone else but herself, this creature of flesh and blood and bone, of awkward limbs and sterile but sensitive breasts, this mortal coil stroking itself to a climax that ransacked her body and washed through her mind and left her placid and heavy with sleep. But still she thought of Clément.

‘Alice Thurrock,’ she said to her reflection in the cracked mirror the next morning, ‘you are a shameless woman.’

On the last day of the exercise they arrested her. They came in the middle of the night when the household was asleep and courage was at its lowest ebb, half a dozen men banging on the front door and pushing past the landlady’s feeble attempts to stop them. They burst into Marian’s room as she struggled into
her overcoat and dragged her downstairs to a waiting car while Maisie and the landlady looked on. From there she was driven to some anonymous house in the Clifton area where she was handcuffed to a chair beneath bright lights and interrogated for hours about who she was and what she was doing in the city.

‘Tell me your name.’

‘Alice Thurrock.’

‘Your middle name.’

‘Eileen.’

‘Your date of birth.’

‘October the eighteenth, nineteen fifteen.’

They’d taken away her overcoat and she had nothing on beneath her nightdress. The light dazzled her so that she could see nothing of her interrogators but she felt violated under their gaze, as though their hands and not only their eyes were on her body.

‘I want my clothes,’ she said, but they ignored her.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Oxford, I was born in Oxford.’

‘Tell us what you are doing in Bristol.’

‘I want my clothes.’

‘Never mind your clothes. What are you doing in Bristol?’

‘I’m trying to find a job. I was in the WAAF but I was discharged on medical grounds—’

‘You’re lying!’

‘No, I’m not. Believe me, I’m telling the truth. My parents are both dead and my brother—’

‘I don’t want to hear about your bloody brother. What were you doing yesterday? You were wandering around, checking places out, trying to talk to people, trying to wheedle information out of them. What were you doing in Filton?’

It was like diving, like holding your breath and diving deep down, swimming down against the lift of the water, your breath held, your lungs bursting, knowing that you could always come to the surface and break through into the air and ask them to stop.

‘I went for a job at the Filton Ladies’ Academy. They were looking for a French mistress.’

‘Where did you learn your French?’

‘I studied French at university.’

‘But you’ve been to France?’

‘Many times. As a child I went on exchanges with a French family during the holidays.’

‘Tell me the name of the family.’

‘Perrier.’

‘Where did they live?’

‘In Paris.’

‘Where?’

‘In the fifth, near the Panthéon.’

‘What was their address?’

‘Look, I want my clothes. I’m cold and I want my clothes. You can’t keep me like this—’

‘We can keep you how we please. We can strip you naked if we like. Now tell us their address.’

It was like a masquerade, where the pretence has worn thin and tempers are frayed. But she played the game, knowing that one day it might not be a game any longer and she wouldn’t have a Get Out of Jail card and the men behind the lights would be members of the Gestapo.

Miss Atkins turned a page. ‘It seems you did well at Beaulieu. “Tolerated arrest and interrogation. Kept to her cover story throughout and made no slips”, that’s what it says.’ She looked up, smiling bleakly. ‘I’m putting you forward for immediate deployment in the field. You’ll go in the next moon period. Your circuit will be
WORDSMITH,
in the South-west.’

Marian felt a small snatch of emotion, a blend of fear and excitement from which it was impossible to recover either. The
South-west. Toulouse, maybe. Or Biarritz, on the coast. Or perhaps Montpellier and the Mediterranean. She searched her memory in vain for anything more. Not Paris. Ned’s idea of her seeing Clément evaporated in a cloud of relief and disappointment.

‘The organiser is one of the most successful of our agents,’ Atkins was saying. ‘Field name Roland. Perhaps you have heard about him? I know how word gets round, despite our best efforts at security. He has been in the field for over a year.’

More than a year! It seemed impossible. A year of the clandestine life. Your cover story would become more real than your true story. The lies would become truths, and truths lies. Lies like beauty.

‘The circuit is very dispersed. It covers a huge area – from Limoges down to Toulouse – and Roland has been struggling to keep the thing under control. He has a pianist who’s been with him for months now, but he desperately needs a courier. One man can’t get round that area on his own. You’ll be dropping with César. He’s going to the same circuit, as a weapons and sabotage instructor. You won’t have much to do with each other in the field, but you ought to get acquainted. I’ve arranged for him to come and meet you. He should be here any moment.’

But César was late. They waited, making awkward conversation and glancing at the clock on the desk. Fifteen minutes after the appointed time there was a cursory knock, the door was flung open and there he was, with a faint smile on his face and profuse apologies on his lips and a kind of childish insolence about him that seemed to appease even Miss Atkins. Apparently there had been a mix-up over appointments, a meeting with someone in RF section. He was most very sorry because he knew how much you British value punctuality, but anyway, here he was, better late than never, isn’t that what you say?

‘This is César,’ Atkins announced primly. ‘As you may see, he has the gift of the gab.’

‘We’ve already met,’ said Marian.

‘Already met?’

‘We bumped into each other in a bar here in London.’

Atkins pursed her lips. ‘In a
bar
?’

‘And again in Scotland. On a mountainside.’

‘On a mountainside? It sounds most irregular.’

‘Just a vein,’ he said.

‘A vein?’

‘Don’t you say that?’

Marian giggled. ‘
Un coup de veine
. Chance, pure chance.’

Atkins glared at the two of them, as though she might be the butt of some private joke. ‘I’m not sure that I approve of chance,’ she said. ‘As I told you, César is going as a weapons instructor. You won’t have much to do with each other in the field …’

Marian tried to ignore Benoît. He was attempting to catch her eye, trying to snare her into laughing. ‘When do we go? You said the next moon …’

‘It depends on the weather. But we have a slot for you in the middle of next week. That’ll give you time to sort matters out, get to know the geography, that kind of thing. César will have useful tips for you – he was in France not long ago and knows exactly what it’s like. Perhaps …’ she made a small gesture of dismissal, ‘you can find somewhere to discuss things.’

They found a corner of what had once been the living room. ‘My little Anne-Marie,’ Benoît said. ‘You see, it is fate that we should be together.’

‘I’m
not
your little Anne-Marie,’ she said, but the idea amused her. Despite seeming no older than she he still had that air of instant superiority, of Gallic arrogance. ‘I think we should use field names anyway. I’m Alice.’

‘But I
hate
César. You are lucky. Alice is lovely. But César! Not even a Frenchman. And an emperor to boot.’

‘So was Napoleon.’

‘That’s even worse. I’m not a Bonapartist or a monarchist or
any of those things. I am a republican! Look, let’s get out of this place. Let’s go for a walk. We don’t have to sit around in here just so they can keep an eye on us.’