The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (9 page)

Emile is a tiresome know - all
.

Often Marian thought of Clément. She tried not to, but she did. It seemed ridiculous to revisit a childish infatuation but the memories were powerful and disturbing, the kind of thing that could undermine your whole personality, disturb the equilibrium that adulthood had brought. She remembered him in Paris on that visit with her father a few months before the outbreak of war. She remembered walking with him in the English Garden in Geneva. She remembered other times and other places. Skiing at Megève. Sailing at Annecy. Sometimes it was difficult to get the chronology right. What had happened when? He and Ned used to play a kind of chess together, blind chess where each player could only see his own board.
Kriegspiel
they’d called it. They needed an adjudicator, to say whether a proposed move was legal or not. Madeleine always refused, so Marian was recruited. And she was willing, of course; happy simply to be in Clément’s presence. Her task was to watch the two boards, while each player saw only his own pieces and had
to makes guesses and estimates of what his opponent was doing. The play had been strangely disjointed, groping in the dark with incomplete information. Exactly like physics research, that’s what Clément used to say. Superposition and uncertainty. A quantum world.

Above all, she remembered that day on the lake. Always that. A day of sun and wind and a strange, opalescent light. A day of dreamlike difference, where shock seemed normal.

Clément.

They were given a free day. It was a rare day of sunshine and breeze, so Marian and Yvette decided to climb the mountain that had been the bane of their lives when they first arrived. Meith Bheinn was its name, a raw hulk of a hill that rose behind the lodge, guarded by crags and the ubiquitous Scottish bogs. But now the climb held no fears. Even Yvette had grown stronger, transformed from the city creature of the first days into someone who could walk with fair ease across this desolate landscape. So they slogged up the slopes, clambered over boulders, splashed, laughing through the marshy patches. ‘Look!’ Marian cried, seeing something scurrying amid the heather.

Yvette looked. ‘What? Where?’ But the animal had gone. A grouse perhaps, safer keeping to the ground than rising and being shot, living a clandestine life.

The climb took two and a half hours, and from the top they could see across the isles – Rum, Eigg and Muck close to the land and Skye lying like a shield on the edge of the Atlantic. They were too high for the midges. The wind blew cool but they found shelter in the lee of a boulder where they lay in the fragile sunshine and ate the sandwiches they had brought and talked about what might happen.

‘I think they’ll fail me,’ Yvette said. ‘I think they’ll tell me I’m not good for what they want.’

‘Don’t be silly. You’re doing fine.’

‘No, I’m not. They want people to run over mountains and ford streams and things like that. But what about the cities? What about the towns? That is where the people are. That is where the resistance must be.’

‘Maybe we’ll end up in the Massif Central.’

‘More likely we’ll be in Paris and we’ll wonder why on earth we were ever made to do this training.’

It was curious how they used the collective pronoun.
Nous
. As though they might be together. But there would be no ‘we’, surely. They would be on their own.

‘What will you do when it’s all over?’ Marian asked.

Yvette shrugged in that fatalistic, Gallic manner. ‘Find another husband, I suppose. A father for my little girl.’

‘In France?’

‘Of course, in France. Where else? Perhaps I’ll live in a big apartment, and you and your husband will come to stay—’

‘My husband!’

‘That Clément you were talking about.’

‘Clément’s too old for me.’

‘Maybe he was once, but age differences vanish as you get older. Look at you now. You’re not a girl any longer, are you? You’re a woman. You’re catching him up. And there’s a big advantage of having an older man.’

‘What’s that?’

‘When he dies, you’re young enough for another one.’ They laughed at the idea, at the thought of men being their victims, lusting after them and being bent to their will.

After a while the wind grew chill and they decided to go back, but as they were preparing to descend from the summit they heard voices below them on the hillside. Was it someone from the lodge? They crouched in the lee of their boulder and waited, whispering.

The voices came nearer. Male voices. A burst of laughter. They were coming up from the north, directly towards them.

‘Let’s go,’ Marian whispered to Yvette, ‘we’ll outflank them.’ She led the way eastwards off the summit, keeping low, moving from cover to cover as they had been taught. They crept over tussocks of grass and round scattered boulders. And then they saw the group approaching, half a dozen men in battledress and cap comforters climbing the hillside rapidly, their boots clumping against the rocks.

‘Commandos,’ she whispered to Yvette. They had heard about commandos. Emile had told them. ‘They train round here as well,’ he’d said, ‘Lochailort.’ But he wouldn’t say how he knew, merely gave that smug, know-all’s smile. So the two women crouched behind a boulder as the six men climbed past. They were moving fast, almost as though they were in a race of some kind, and carrying weapons, Sten guns slung against their chests, and heavy packs on their backs.

Abruptly Marian stood up. It was an unpremeditated move, nothing that she had discussed with Yvette. She just stood up there on the hillside in the wind and the sun. ‘Bang! Bang!’ she shouted. ‘You’re dead!’

The men stumbled to a halt and grabbed at their weapons, looking round to see her standing there on a boulder, her hair blown out by the wind, looking for all the world like a Valkyrie, or something. ‘What the fuck?’ one of them exclaimed, and then looked embarrassed.

‘A woman,’ another said. ‘What the devil’s a
woman
doing here?’

And the others laughed, one of them raising his hands above his head. ‘
Je me rends
,’ he cried. ‘
Je suis votre prisonnier
. Do what you will with me.’ There was more laughter, and more French spoken. The one who had raised his hands in mock surrender was the French boy called Benoît.

The leader of the group came across. Yvette had appeared at Marian’s side and stood close as though for protection.