The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (41 page)

‘Did you hear about the shooting in Belleville?’ the technician asks over his shoulder as he drives. ‘It was on the news.’

They’ve heard something. Apparently they’ve arrested someone. The chemist believes they’re also looking for a woman. At least, that’s the story going round.

‘Communists, I expect,’ the technician says. ‘Don’t these bloody people realise that there’ll be reprisals? More innocent deaths, and all for what?’

Alice tries to display indifference to the news. From the back of the van she can see little of the journey. There is no traffic beyond the morning rush of bicycles, no roadblocks beyond a moment at the Porte de Choisy when they have to slow as a gendarme flags them down. At the last moment the man appears to recognise the van and waves them on. Within half an hour of leaving the Collège, the van has drawn to a halt outside the station of Ivry-sur-Seine.

It is a morning of brisk breeze and ragged cloud, the southern outskirts of Paris rinsed by the recent rain, littered with leaves and buffed up to a shine by the wind so that one might almost ignore the drab acres of cheap housing and shoddy factories, the wasteland of railway sidings and warehouses.

‘Have a good weekend,’ the chemist says as they get down. She is not smiling.

‘I’ll bring you a surprise,’ Clément promises her. ‘Some
foie gras
.’

‘Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.’

On the platform a bedraggled collection of people wait for the train. They carry bags and suitcases and have the hungry look of hunter-gatherers in their eyes: Paris is a starveling – the countryside where they are headed is the land of plenty. Alice and Clément stand aloof, huddled against the wind and talking of little, as though none of this really matters. They are just a couple on a suburban station with a plan for the weekend that involves betrayal and deceit.

The Bordeaux train draws in from the Gare d’Austerlitz half an hour late and already packed. Even in the first-class carriages it is only possible to find two seats together by begging people
to move. There is grumbling and complaint but eventually they are settled, wrapped up in each other’s company, apparently oblivious to their fellow travellers. Clément puts his arm around her. She feels his warmth, a warmth that she has always guessed at but knows now as something intimate, an aura given off to her directly from skin to skin, a fluid like that which courses dangerously inside her. ‘If only …’ she says, but she never finishes the sentence and when he asks she only shakes her head. ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

If only we were really going away for the weekend. If only this journey would never end. If only there were no such thing as choice.

At Étampes, police get on board and walk down the corridors, stepping over people and suitcases, demanding papers and asking questions. An officer stands at the door of the compartment and calls for all identity cards. There is the dutiful pause while people rifle through handbags, search through pockets. Alice takes out the card marked
Laurence Aimée Follette
and hands it over, then reaches up and kisses Clément. Insouciance, carelessness, indifference in the face of daily inconvenience. The policeman glances at her photo, glances at her face, and hands the document back. With great sighs the train traipses on into the flat farmland of La Beauce, where the fields are brushed green with sprouting winter wheat and the sky is a cool autumnal blue.

In the outskirts of Orléans they slow. There was a bombing raid a few nights earlier and the marshalling yards of Fleury-les-Aubrais are wrecked, wagons thrown about, buildings still smoking, rails twisted here and there as though knotted by some bad-tempered child. In silence people stare out of the window at these signs of what is to come, while the carriages stutter and jolt over the single track that has been put back in commission. At the station itself doors slam, people come and go, heavy boots clumping along the corridors, Germans this time, shoving their way down the carriages.

‘Why are you travelling to Libourne?’ they ask.

Clément glances at Laurence and gives her a kiss. ‘We’re having a few days away.’

The German looks at her and then at her papers. ‘You’re a long way from home.’ He speaks good French. There is something disturbing about that: no barrier of incomprehension behind which you might hide.

‘I’ve come to see Clément. I’ve missed him. And in Paris, you know, there’s his family around.’ She looks the German dead in the eye and gives a little smile. ‘It’s natural, isn’t it, wanting to be on our own?’

‘How do you know him?’

She clings to his arm, silly, infatuated, doing dangerous things with an older man. ‘From years ago, in Annecy. Our parents knew each other. We used to spend holidays together.’

The man thinks a moment, says, ‘Wait,’ and goes off with their documents. Alice doesn’t move. Time slows, indicated only by the thin trickle of sweat from her armpits. She thinks of Ned. Gravitational time dilation, that is a phrase he used. He tried to explain it to her and only got annoyed when she likened it to how time speeded up when you were enjoying yourself. ‘That’s subjective!’ he cried in exasperation. ‘Nothing more than an impression. What I’m talking about is a
real
difference caused by being in a different gravitational field.’ Is she now in a different gravitational field? Time seems slowed to the point where this moment in this crowded compartment with her hand gripped in Clément’s appears eternal.

‘What can they be doing?’ she whispers.

‘Looking at lists, I expect. Names. Nothing more.’ He seems remarkably cool. Maybe he is better suited to the clandestine life than she.

The soldier returns, sliding open the door to the compartment with a crash. ‘All right,’ he says, passing the documents back. At the same moment, with a peremptory jolt that is like time itself changing gear, the train moves forward, on through
the city of Orléans itself, the city of the Maid, la Pucelle, St Joan of Arc. And then they are past the buildings and into the bare fields of the flood plain with the line of the river visible as a distant fringe of willows. She dozes, her head against Clément’s shoulder, his arm round her. She recalls the dreams she had as a girl, wanting only this – to be alone with Clément. And now she feels nothing but a strange detachment, a sense of the remoteness of things, as though she were somewhere else, watching their two figures from a distance.

Beaugency, Blois, Amboise. The train rumbles across the river on a stone bridge and edges its way through the drab suburbs of Tours, past factories and marshalling yards, rattling over points, lurching sideways so that passengers, standing to get their cases down, are thrown against one another.

Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, Saint Peter of the Bodies, a name that emerged, presumably, from the charnel house of Catholic guilt and damnation. They stand up to retrieve their suitcases, step over feet, shuffle down the corridor to the end of the carriage. Clément climbs down onto the platform and takes the suitcases from her, then helps her down. The guard blows his whistle and the train draws away, leaving a scattering of passengers on the platform like the debris left behind by an ebbing tide.

And Gilbert.

He has got down from a carriage further up the train. He is carrying a briefcase, looking like a travelling salesman bound for a meeting with a client. Without so much as a glance at them he turns and walks away towards the concourse and the ticket office. They queue behind him, and once they have bought their tickets, follow him to the platform. There is no one around, no one taking the slow train to Vierzon, no one to notice them on this late autumn afternoon with the sun casting long shadows and the wind cold on their faces. When the train appears they climb into the same compartment, talking idly as though they are strangers who have been thrown together by chance. But once the door has closed Gilbert
changes. ‘I missed you at Austerlitz.’ His tone carries a hint of accusation.

‘We got on at Ivry. We thought it might be easier.’

‘A good thing too. The place was crawling with police. There were posters all over the station, with a description that fits you well enough.’

‘Posters!’

He nods. ‘And your names. Marian Sutro, is that right? Also known as Alice, also known as Anne-Marie. They call you a Jew. Are you Jewish?’

‘Not for generations. Not even for the Nazis.’

‘Anyway, there’s a price on your head. Five hundred thousand francs. Pretty cheap, I’d say.’ He looks at Clément, his eyes flicking down to take in their held hands. ‘Where’s the second passenger? You said there would be two. Wasn’t the other one from
CINÉASTE
?’

‘She’s not coming.’

‘Why is that?’

‘I told you I had my doubts about her.’

‘And this is Monsieur Mechanic, I presume. Have you ever flown before?’

‘Never.’

‘Don’t eat too much beforehand.’

‘Eat too much? You mean we get dinner?’

‘All part of the service.’ He turns back to Alice. ‘Looks like you got out just in time. Maybe you should leave tonight as well, go back in the other seat.’

‘She’s going to,’ Clément says.

She shrugs and looks out of the window at the fields of France. A price on her head. Five hundred thousand francs. What was that? Two thousand pounds? More. A fortune. Enough to buy a mansion. And a car.

Gilbert asks, ‘Is that right?’

She would be back in England tomorrow morning. She could spend Christmas at home, and then maybe return to France in
the spring, return to the South-west, to
WORDSMITH
and to Benoît. ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘yes, I am.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Sensible choice.’

The train draws into a station. Veretz-Montlouis, the signboard announces. ‘We’re the next stop,’ Gilbert tells them. ‘A couple of minutes.’

Clément puts his arm round her. ‘Nearly there, Squirrel.’

Gilbert watches them thoughtfully. Outside on the platform a whistle blows. Did anyone get on or off? This quiet corner of rural France seems a universe away from Paris, no one visible on the platform, no crowds, no fear. The train moves on with great asthmatic breaths as though taking in fresh air for the first time in weeks. Away to the right, through their pale reflections in the windows, are the flat fields of the flood plain between the Loire and the Cher, brushed with light from a setting sun. The sky is a luminous blue like the blue of a stained-glass window. Poplars stand like plumes in the drift of sunlight.

At Azay-sur-Cher station the bicycles are waiting, four of them in a shed behind the station house as Gilbert said they would be. He wheels the spare one beside him as they ride – ‘We’ll need it for the incoming passengers’ – and that is the first time Alice thinks of the other side of the operation, that someone will be coming in, maybe people she knows from training, people from a world only a couple of hours away by light aircraft, a world where you don’t glance over your shoulder for people following, where you don’t have to guard what you say, where fear isn’t an endemic disease that eats away at mind and body. Where you don’t have five hundred thousand francs on your head and aren’t being sought for murder.

They cycle off into the gathering dusk, over a level crossing and through the fields. Some of the land is arable, some has
been left for grazing. There are patches of woodland, poplars planted as windbreaks, willows along the rim of a canal. Through the trees to the east the moon is rising, a bone-white globe replacing the dying sunlight with a different kind of illumination, a flat monochrome.
The sun shall not burn thee by day
, she thinks,
neither the moon by night
. It is almost a prayer but not quite a prayer for she doesn’t believe in prayer, doesn’t believe in God, believes only in the power of evil and the fragile battle of men and women against it.

After a couple of kilometres they turn off onto a farm track and bump over ruts and potholes out into the fields. Gilbert brings them to a halt near a small copse. Beyond the trees a field stretches away to the east, a rough meadow as flat as a billiard table. ‘It looks all right,’ he says. ‘We had to call one op off a few months ago when we found that the farmer had put cows out to graze, but things look OK this evening. The only worry tonight is fog. Fingers crossed.’

On one side of the field is an ancient barn. There’s some hay in a corner, a rusted old harrow and some other nameless bits of farm equipment lying around, an ancient leather harness hanging on a hook. Gilbert seems to know his way around, almost as though he is at home. From a bundle of fence posts he selects three stakes about four feet long, each with an end sharpened to a point. ‘Let’s go and set things up.’

There is still enough light to see by as they walk out into the field. A hundred yards out he stands for a moment with his finger up in the air, like a water diviner detecting things that are outside the range of normal human sensibility. Then solemnly he plants one stake in the ground and sets off into the distance, marching with wide steps as though performing some arcane, hieratic ritual. By the time he comes to a halt and plants the second stake they can only see him as a vague shadow; he paces rightwards, plants the third stake and returns to them with the satisfied air of a job well done. ‘Now all we can do is wait.’

Back in the barn they make themselves as comfortable as
possible, unwrapping the food they have brought and sipping ersatz coffee from thermos flasks. There is desultory talk, underpinned with the tension of what might or might not happen. Gilbert briefs them. In the aircraft they’ll find parachutes left by the incomers. He explains how to buckle up. There will be two flying helmets already plugged into the intercom. They’ll have to put them on to be able to talk to the pilot. The on–off switch is on the front of the oxygen mask.

‘Oxygen?’

‘You won’t need it but that’s where the intercom switch is. More likely you’ll need the sick bag – the Lizzies fly at eight thousand at the most and it might be a bumpy ride.’

After they’ve been over and over the procedures two or three times, the men turn to talk of the war, what is happening in Russia, in Italy, in the Far East, how the conflict is progressing and how it might go. Alice clutches Clément’s arm and ignores Gilbert’s glance of curiosity and answers only in monosyllables when addressed. Orion the hunter drags a whole panoply of constellations across the sky and behind it the moon climbs, flooding milk across the fields. She remembers waiting for the
parachutage
, how boredom merged into a strange state of contemplation in which even the cold became something exterior, something that couldn’t hurt you. Clément kisses her in the ear, a startling sound in the silence of the night. ‘Soon we’ll be in England,’ he whispers, and she thinks of England, dull, drab England, and wonders what will happen. She pictures him in an untidy divorce after the war, and then the two of them setting up home together as husband and wife in some other country. Canada, maybe, where the man called von Halban has already gone and where they speak French as well as English.