The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (23 page)

A shout comes from someone in the shadows at the edge of the meadow: ‘There it is!’ But she can’t see the machine, just hear the engines rising and falling as the plane circles, imagine the propellers clawing at the air, dragging the great beast round.

W for
WORDSMITH
, perhaps.

‘There!’

And now she sees it, a shape running against the stars, a black cross tilting and turning, coming nearer like a great bird, overbearing and overweening, the engines sounding louder and louder, roaring at them down there on the ground. She finds herself waving ridiculously, in the hope that up there in the aircraft they can see this figure below them. There are tears in her eyes and a stinging in her nose, tears of joy that these unknown men, seven of them, have flown all across France to make this strange rendezvous, them up there and still attached somehow to England, and the reception committee down here, two distant worlds coming into brief and tenuous contact out here on a desolate hillside above Dompierre. The aircraft thunders over them at a thousand feet or so, and turns and circles towards the south, banking against the stars and momentarily blotting out the moon. And then it is back, confronting them, moonlight glinting on its cockpit canopy, the wings adjusting their grip on the air as it feels its way down to five hundred feet. She wants to embrace it, or have it embrace her. She wants to have its power inhabit her body. She wants it more intensely than she has ever wanted anything, from her father’s approval to her mother’s love, to the craving she once felt for Clément. It is an experience, sliding overhead as loud as a train, a thundering, magnificent call of defiance greater than any childish longing. And the parachutes appear, sudden celestial globes emerging from it like eggs from the belly of a great fish, eggs that float in a stream on the tide of night, settling towards the earth where they might hatch out their offspring.

‘Over there!’

‘Look out!’

One of the containers lands a few yards away, a cylinder about six feet long. Another thumps into the ground fifty yards further on, the parachute canopy settling over it like a ballerina’s skirt in a
plié
. Men are running after the containers,
lugging them to the edge of the field where the ox cart waits. All is motion in the cold moonlight: shadows flitting back and forth, the aircraft climbing away from the drop, engines bellowing as it climbs and turns back for a second run.

‘Keep your eyes open!’

‘They’re coming back!’

And here it is again roaring overhead, dispensing its bounty to the worshippers down on the ground, the whole world vibrating with its power as it climbs away from them and, tilting its wings in salute, turns and recedes over the countryside, a presence that has for a few minutes occupied their minds and their bodies but is now suddenly detached, a remote thing leaving their collective consciousness for ever. And in the darkness, as the men run around collecting the containers and lugging them towards the waiting ox cart, Alice weeps for her moment of ecstasy and her apprehension of loss.

There’s a meeting with
le Patron
, at Gabrielle’s house in Lussac. She doesn’t like this way of meeting – she’d prefer cut-outs and dead letter drops and all that stuff that they taught her at Beaulieu, but this is
le Patron
’s manner. ‘They don’t know their bloody arses from their elbows,’ he said when she objected right at the beginning. ‘You need someone who’s been in the field to teach you, not some pimp from Whitehall.’

They meet in the same back room that she has stayed in from time to time, the one with the view over the back roofs and the little alleyway, the room she occupied after her drop. It seems like part of her history now, part of the memory of Anne-Marie Laroche – that morning of excitement and anxiety, the sensation of being safe in one place only, this small, sequestered space with the floral quilt on the bed and the picture of
la Vierge Marie
on the wall. She’s waiting at the window, looking out on
the back garden when she hears his footsteps on the stairs, and the rasping of his breath as he flings open the door.

‘Come in,’ she says but he seems not to notice her sarcasm.

‘The
parachutage
went well, then?’

‘As well as could be hoped.’

‘I hear they used Marcel’s men?’

‘That was Gaillard’s decision.’

‘Gaillard is a blithering idiot at times. We won’t be able to trust them when the balloon goes up.’

‘They’re all right.’

‘What the hell do you know about it? They’re bloody commies.’

‘Their hearts are in the right place.’

‘You don’t fight with your heart. You fight with your head. All they want is the chaos when the landings come and then they’ll be shooting everyone in the back. Including us.’

‘Is that what you came to see me about?’

‘As a matter of fact it’s not.’ He lights a cigarette and looks her up and down speculatively, like a farmer trying to assess how much he might get for her at market. That’s not the way Gaillard looks at her. Gaillard looks at her with the eager eye of a prospective purchaser. ‘You’ll have to go to Paris,’ he says.

‘Paris?’

‘Yes, Paris. You heard.’

‘What for?’

Le Patron
coughs at some smoke, then clears his throat. The sound of sandpaper. ‘It came through on Georgette’s last sked. They’ve lost touch with one of the circuits.
CINÉASTE
. They think …’ his mouth turns down in disgust, as though he knows that thought is the one thing they are incapable of ‘… they
think
that it may be a simple thing. Broken crystals or a duff valve, or something. They want you to take some replacements. My guess is they don’t know their arse from their elbow. My guess is that
CINÉASTE
has gone down with the general mess in Paris. You know about
PROSPER
, don’t you?’

‘I’ve heard of it.’

‘Well,
PROSPER
’
s
coming to pieces. That’s what I gather, anyway. The whole damn circuit.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘The grapevine.’

‘And I’ve got to go to Paris when all that is happening? What for, exactly?’ But she knows. Fawley’s there in her mind and he’s talking about Clément.
We thought you might be more persuasive than a mere letter
.