The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (16 page)

‘Whose idea was this?’ she asked as the train trundled out through the London suburbs, ‘yours or theirs?’

‘Mine,’ he said.

‘Do they know about it?’

He nodded. ‘They thought it a good idea. The personal touch. You’ll be more persuasive if you’ve met him.’

‘Who are they, Ned?’

He smiled and shook his head, looking out through the window at the passing buildings. ‘You know I can’t tell you that.’

Cambridge itself seemed smaller than Oxford, more delicate, more vulnerable, as though its only foundation, the fragile subsoil of learning, had been eroded by war and put the whole place in danger of dissolution. They took a bus from the station into the centre and walked a few minutes to where Free School Lane threaded its way between close, medieval buildings. Halfway along the lane there was a gothic gateway that might have belonged to a fourteenth-century monastery but actually announced itself as the Cavendish Laboratory. The porter had the manner of a household butler, at once obsequious and knowing. ‘You’ll be looking for Dr Kowarski, won’t you, sir? I think you’ll find him in his office.’

‘Thank you, Dawkins.’

‘Good to see you back, sir, if only for a brief visit.’

‘It’s good to be back, Dawkins. How are things going?’

‘Pretty strange, sir. Not many undergraduates these days, and an awful lot of hush-hush, if you get my meaning.’

‘I do, Dawkins, I do.’

They climbed stairs and walked along corridors as cold and cheerless as a reform school. An open doorway gave a glimpse into a laboratory where a technician was fiddling with some elaborate piece of glassware. A poster explained the fire drill and where to assemble in the event of an evacuation. Windows were criss-crossed with adhesive tape. Finally Ned knocked at an anonymous door and a gruff voice called them in.

The office they entered was as cluttered as a bear’s den. The window ledge was littered with the bones and sinews of electrical apparatus. On the desk was a scattering of files and open books. At the desk sat the bear himself. His hair was cut short, giving him the appearance of a Prussian army officer in one of Low’s cartoons but his manner was more the bluff heartiness of a Russian than a German. Yet he spoke French, that was the surprise – fluent French with a strong Slav accent. ‘
Mon cher Edward! Je suis ravi de vous voir!
And this lovely young lady is …?’

‘My sister Marian.’

‘Of course, of course. How charming.’ The bear took her hand and raised it to his lips. The gesture was curiously graceful, as though inside his great bulk there was a slender dandy trying to express himself.

‘This,’ Ned explained unnecessarily, ‘is Dr Lev Kowarski.’

Kowarski cleared a chair for Marian to sit. ‘Ned has told me much about you. He promised me you were pretty, and instead I find that you are beautiful. That is the Englishman in him, mixing one with the other. A true Frenchman would never make such a grave mistake.’ He gave an expansive smile. ‘And neither would a Russian.’

‘I’m not sure how to answer that.’

‘There’s no need. Just accept the compliment. Ned tells me that you may soon meet up with a mutual friend of ours.’

‘Possibly.’ It seemed appalling. Her mission, her whole existence was meant to be secret yet here were people who knew all about it: the faceless Mr Fawley, the apologetic Colonel Peters, the Russian bear Kowarski, her own brother. How many others?

‘Well, you must tell him that
I
need him here. Forget Professor Chadwick’s invitation, forget the damned war effort – Lev Kowarski needs him!’

‘Will that be enough to persuade him?’

The man grinned, looking at her sideways. ‘He’s a Frenchman. Put it to him this way: I need him because otherwise the whole project will be dominated by the Anglo-Saxons. Worse, by the Americans. France used to be in the lead in all this, and now she is being elbowed out of the way, so he is needed to help the French cause. Tell him …’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Tell him that they are running away with Fred’s work. Tell him that von Halban and Perrin have gone to Canada and left me here on my own. Tell him that I am nearly at the critical point – can you remember that? The critical point. Tell him …’ He glanced at Ned for a second. ‘Tell him that I am on the trail of element ninety-four. Remember that. Element ninety-four.’

‘That’s easy enough. But what does it mean?’

Kowarski laughed again. It was a typical Russian laugh, humour on the surface but with a cold, dark current flowing underneath. ‘It means,’ he said, ‘the end of the war. Maybe the end of the world.’

She waited beneath the clock at Paddington station, thinking about Alice. A young girl adrift in a sea of dreams, surrounded
by monsters.
It means the end of the war. Maybe the end of the world
. It was a relief to see Benoît coming through the crowd carrying a kitbag and wearing Free French uniform. That’s what he had told her when they’d spoken on the phone: ‘I’ll wear my uniform. Maybe they’ll even mistake me for a gentleman.’ And she didn’t care whether he was a gentleman or not as they walked along the platform to the Oxford train – he was French, a lifeline to France, a real Frenchman against her dubious, hybrid Anglo-Frenchness. And a straightforward man against the anguished complexities of what Clément may or may not have been to her, or what he may or may not have been doing in the laboratories of the Collège de France.

He flung open his arms and embraced her while the other passengers looked on with condescending smiles. Why was she up in London again? Was she seeing another man? Did she have lovers all over the country?

She laughed at his absurd ideas, and wondered whether she would tell him what had happened. ‘I saw my brother. We went to Cambridge for the day. King’s College chapel. Punting on the Backs. All the tourist things.’

He didn’t know the Backs. He didn’t know what a punt was. She tried to explain –
une barque à fond plat
– while people stared. Speaking the language in public made her feel different, as though a mere change of syntax and vocabulary could transform the reserved English girl into a vivacious Gallic: Marian into Marianne. They talked throughout the journey, volubly, carelessly, confident that the others in the compartment would never be able to follow their rapid flood of French. Did he have news of their departure?

‘Any time from next Wednesday, that’s what they said. Once the moon is into its first quarter. But the shitty English weather means that there’s a queue of people built up. It’s like the London rush hour in the rain, everyone waiting for taxis.’

They took the bus from the station and reached the house in the Banbury Road in time for dinner. Her mother fell for him.
He was tall and good-looking and, above all, French; and he seemed to understand exactly what manner of words would delight her. ‘Now I understand where Anne-Marie gets her beauty from,’ he told her when they were introduced.

There was a fleeting puzzlement behind her grateful smile. ‘Anne-Marie?’

Benoît reddened.

‘
Marianne
,’ Marian said. ‘He’s always fooling about with names. Sometimes he calls me Alice as well.’

‘From Wonderland,’ Benoît added, and even that seemed to be a Gallic compliment. Her mother smiled and the faux pas was forgotten, but as soon as they were alone together, he protested: ‘I am invited to stay at this girl’s house and she hasn’t even told me her name! You aren’t Anne-Marie? You are
Marianne
? You make me look a fool.’

‘I completely forgot to tell you. And I rather like Anne-Marie. It’s my cover name, you know that. Anne-Marie Laroche.’

‘So what are you really called?’

There was something thrilling about telling him a truth. ‘Marian,’ she said, ‘Marian Sutro.’

‘Sutro? What kind of name is that?’

‘It’s English. As you can see, my father’s very English.’

‘Seeming English doesn’t mean a thing. Half the bloody English
seem
English but aren’t. Look at Churchill. He’s half American. And look at your king. He’s mostly German, for God’s sake!’

They went to the cinema that evening, sitting in the sweltering darkness of the back stalls with other couples all around them, heaving and grunting. The first feature was a Pathé News report that spoke of fleets of bombers thundering across the sky between Britain and northern Germany.
Hamburg Hammered
, it was called. Aircraft trailed long plumes of vapour across the sky, with American airmen aiming machine guns at unseen enemies. And then the city at night, a galaxy of flame. The RAF by night, the USAAF by day. Round the clock, the commentator
said. He talked of seven square miles of the city laid waste, twelve thousand tons of bombs dropped, fifty-eight thousand dead, numbers impossible to comprehend. The audience stirred in their seats and emitted a sound, something atavistic, both horrified and gleeful at one and the same time.

The main feature came as a relief, some concoction of intrigue and romance starring Joseph Cotten. As three and a half years of war had taught, she pushed the horror aside and felt sixteen again, awkward in the presence of a half-known youth beside her, wary of his motives and intentions, and her own. When he put his arm around her something stirred inside, an emotion that seemed akin to fear – the same pulse, the same sweat of panic – but when he turned her head and kissed her on the neck and then on the mouth, she turned away. ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Not now.’

She sat there in the darkness with Benoît’s arm around her, wondering what she felt. And Clément, what she felt about Clément. She still had his letters, those that had been allowed to reach her. Scraps of paper that she held to herself and treasured and reread as though they were mysterious messages, with hidden meanings enciphered within the plain text.
Je t’embrasse
. The sense hovering between kiss and embrace and love. My uncle, she had told the nuns. Only my uncle. And as though they were written in some strange code, they never guessed what the words meant. But Fawley, the placid, thoughtful Fawley, had understood.

After the film they walked home, their shaded torch casting a feeble light on the pavement at their feet. The clouds had cleared to discover a curved, white nail paring of moon hanging low over the roofs. The moon ruled their lives. It kept them here and it told them when they might go. It held them in safety or plunged them into danger. The idea seemed impossibly romantic and at the same time rather sinister, as though, as astrologists claimed, the movement of the celestial spheres determined what happened in the sublunary world.
‘Minions of the moon,’ she said. ‘That’s what they’ve trained us to be.’

Benoît didn’t understand, either the source of the quotation or its meaning; but she felt her new life as an unfolding drama in which she knew there would be betrayal and hatred without yet knowing the precise dynamics of the plot, the motives and the denouements. Would she tell him about Paris? Knowledge was a burden. Should she lighten the burden by explaining about Clément, and the man called Fawley and the Russian bear Kowarski?

‘What are you afraid of, Marianne?’ Benoît asked. ‘Is it what we’re doing, going to France, all of that? I tell you, there’s no need to be frightened! You’ll see when you get there. It’s just … France. Occupied by people we hate. When you are there, what you feel more than fear is anger.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not that.’

‘What is it, then? I think,’ he said, and hesitated. ‘I think you have another man.’

‘Another man?’ She laughed. ‘No, I don’t.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘There was—’

‘Ah, you see,’ he said as though with sudden understanding, ‘my little Marianne is pining for a loved one—’

‘Don’t be silly. There was a flight lieutenant on the staff at Stanmore. We went out together a couple of times, to the theatre in London and then to a dance. Nothing more. He was posted away. And before the war there was someone in France. He was older than me. I suppose it was a schoolgirl crush, really … but he felt the same about me. I still think of him sometimes.’ She looked at Benoît. ‘That’s it. The story of my love life.’

‘And where is this older man now?’

She knew about confession, how you could pour out your guilt and see it washed away. Confession, contrition, absolution, things that the nuns had taught. ‘Somewhere in France, I suppose. We lost touch when the war came.’

‘So you are free to do as you choose …’

‘Of course I am. It’s just that I don’t really understand myself.’

‘Why should you understand? That is typical of you English. You spend all your time trying to understand yourselves and not enough time getting on with life. That is why so many English girls are frigid.’

‘How many have you tried?’

His laughter saved the moment. ‘Absurd,’ he said. ‘You are absurd.’

At home, they let themselves in quietly so as not to disturb anyone. Outside her bedroom she allowed him to kiss her; but she put her hand on his chest when he made a move to come in. ‘You must let me think,’ she said.

‘Not about yourself still?’

‘No, about you.’

The next morning they went for a walk along the river. The introspection of the previous evening was dispelled by sun and wind. Willows blew lightly in the breeze beneath a sky of ragged cloud and fitful sun. They held hands, and as they walked sometimes they came close together so their bodies touched. She told him a story that sounded so English – about three young sisters and a couple of Oxford clerics who, one summer’s day eighty years ago, had rowed up the river here telling stories. Perhaps her own field name brought it to mind. ‘This is where it happened,’ she said. ‘On the river right here.’

‘What happened?’

‘
Alice in Wonderland
, of course. Charles Dodgson was his real name but he called himself Lewis Carroll for the books.’

‘Even he had a field name.’

It was the kind of joke that she could share with no one else. There were so many things that she could share with no one else. Conversations round the table over breakfast had been a careful obstacle course, as difficult as any interrogation at
Beaulieu. ‘But what are you going to
do
in Algiers?’
Maman
had asked. ‘And what’s all this about nursing? I really don’t understand.’