Killing ‘Hector’ wouldn’t conflict with any SOE principles. Might even call it standard practice, in dealing with double agents. Necessary and justifiable even as self-protection. One traitor dead, how many good lives saved? Or leave an informer alive, you’re dead. A precedent she knew of for sure was when a réseau (network) organizer had asked London for cyanide capsules for precisely such a purpose and Baker Street had promptly had them delivered by a courier from London en route to his own réseau.
She’d woken thinking about it. After a night in which she’d heard cars or trucks passing on the mountain road; it had sounded like a small convoy, and during curfew hours would almost surely have been German. Heading for Natzweiler, perhaps: one had heard that prisoners from camps in Germany were shipped there in batches from time to time, to be finished off. Her waking thought though had been what attitude would Baker Street take, whether if/when she did find herself back in working order, they’d sanction her remaining in the field long enough to eliminate ‘Hector’ or to arrange for his elimination. Their first reaction on hearing that she was alive would be to recall her, get her out of it; it was standard procedure anyway with an agent who’d been in Gestapo hands and might have been turned.
And the prospect of getting back – to Ben, who’d have had no news of her at all since the end of April, the weekend they’d planned to spend together, instead of which he’d have had a telephone call from Rosie’s flatmate saying, ‘Rosie sends her love and says please not to worry but she can’t make it’ – which would have told him she’d gone back into the field: by the time he’d have known it, she’d been there, pedalling through foul weather towards Rennes. No one at 62–4 Baker Street would have told him anything about her disappearance from Châteauneuf-du-Faou, for instance: he’d have been waiting, hoping, having no idea at all – no more than she did – whether the wait would be weeks, months, a year; having only to trust that one day, some day… Not so different in her own mind, either: the thought of return, final return, the war approaching its last stages so you’d have in clear sight the dreamworld she and Lise had envisaged: Lise and her man Alain Noally, and Rosie and Ben Quarry: a foursome in paradise – that had been the vision to which Noally’s death had put a full and final stop. He’d been shot in an ambush by the SD – security branch of the SS – in or near Rennes not long after Rosie had spent a night there with the two of them and then pushed on westward to Châteauneuf; Lise had told her about it just the other day when they’d met in a Fresnes prison cell. Noally had been attending a Resistance meeting and an informer had tipped off the SD – an informer whose activities were almost certainly a derivative of ‘Hector’’s treachery. Rosie and Lise had gone over and over it, in the train between Paris and Alsace, ensuring that each knew everything the other knew in case one survived and the other didn’t, and the link to ‘Hector’ was based on what another résistant had told Lise when he’d telephoned, devastating her with the news of Noally’s killing and warning her to run for it – which she had done, into the trap in which she’d been caught. A domino-effect though – one SOE circuit blown, some of its members arrested and maybe tortured, and one who talks has links to Noally’s contacts in or around Rennes. To which they might have been pointed by Rosie’s own arrival, destination Rennes, of which ‘Hector’ definitely had known. But Noally had been a highly unusual man, and the loss to Lise had been shattering. Her voice in memory, whispering into Rosie’s ear in that filthy cell at Fresnes: If you get back and I don’t, tell them what happened to Alain? And that I didn’t tell them anything and I have no fingernails on this hand? I fainted: before that I shut my eyes, screamed blue murder, also I thought about being in Pont Aven with Alain, and you and your Ben – Rosie, that would have been such bliss!
Memory wandered. From some parts, shied away. Underlying the whole thing had been Lise’s crushing sadness, and now the doubt as to whether she could possibly have survived – let alone got clean away. Also the problem of coming to terms with her own ambivalence, which seemed like disloyalty to Ben – recognizing that if she’d been fit and able to move now and Baker Street recalled her, she’d be reluctant to go, leaving the ‘Hector’ mess unresolved – unfinished business and in more ways than one personal business: the Lise/Noally disaster, and the train, the girls who’d been with her and had not escaped; and before that herself in that chair on the top floor of 11, Rue des Saussaies, wrists strapped to the chair’s arms, dog-whip handy on the interrogator’s desk and ‘Hector’’s eyes and tone of voice pleading, urging her to answer the Gestapo’s questions, save herself by sending others to their Calvaries.
In full awareness – his as well as hers – that she could have told them every damn thing she knew and still have been shipped east to Ravensbrück.
How about him? When they’d finished with him – what?
Scrape of Thérèse’s wood-soled shoes on the ladder. She’d been up here a little while ago – woken her patient, checked she was OK, then gone down to let the dog off its chain and prepare breakfast. Rosie with her eyes open again now, squirming into a position from which she’d be able to sit up. Another pink dawn, she saw, in that little window: Thérèse had pulled the blanket off it when she’d been up before. In daylight there was a view of the mountains framed in it: smoothly rounded, peculiarly balloon-like tops and dark forests that were home to some Maquis groups, she’d told Rosie. In the other direction – which one couldn’t see, there being no window at that end – you’d be looking down a twisting, wooded valley at a distant view of steep, grey roofs. A couple of kilometres away, and only partially visible because of the twists in this cleft in the foothills. To the south were vineyards; Thérèse’s late husband had begun to experiment with vines on his own land here, but after he’d been killed, and the so-called ‘Armistice’ – meaning surrender, 1940 – facing economic necessity she’d grubbed them out and switched to a few cows – had only one now – for milk, and numerous pigs, chickens, and a few ewes – produce for which there was a steady and certain local market.
This was Monday. On Saturday, she’d had to soak Rosie’s blouse off, where it had stuck to wounds and lacerations. She’d been very gentle and patient, spent about two hours bathing her, sponging the blood off, washing and disinfecting. It had still hurt: the iodine had stung like fire, in the recent, major wounds and also in the festering whip-cuts. She’d reserved the sulphur powder for use after the sage-femme’s visit, as there’d only be enough for one application and if it formed a crust once it was on, one could assume the technique would be to leave it on, undisturbed, until the healing process was complete. In fact the sage-femme, who’d arrived in the afternoon by bicycle, hadn’t wanted anything to do with it at first. She was a small, wiry, determined woman, grey-haired, fiftyish, with small slits of eyes and thin lips that seemed barely to move when she spoke. The name ‘Lotte’ had been an alternative to her given name of ‘Lorette’, apparently, the preference of her late husband – who’d been a master wine-maker in Colmar, about forty kilometres south, on the plain between the mountains and the Rhine.
‘He was German, Thérèse mentioned.’
‘Was indeed.’ A challenging gleam in the little eyes. ‘And as fine a man as ever walked the soil of France. He despised the Nazis. Oh yes, they’d have murdered him – certainly they would, he’d have been dead by now in any case!’
‘What did he die of?’
‘Pneumonia. He wasn’t a young man, by then. Now – we’ll have you in the window there. Bring up a kitchen stool, Thérèse. No – two stools, one for me. Where’s that syringe?’ Adding presently as she loaded it with morphine, ‘You’re lucky, to have this. Unobtainable here – except by stealing from the Fridolins.’ Fridolins apparently meant Boches; Rosie had never heard the term before. She’d been standing then, to receive the injection – surprisingly, in her left buttock. After it had taken effect they’d put her on the stool, lolling slightly and supported by Thérèse while Lotte used wads of antiseptic-soaked material in forceps to poke around, probing and sterilizing the wounds, also feeling the bones inside the damaged shoulder. By her assessment – and jerky commentary, which Rosie heard only vaguely through waves of sleepiness, hardly any bodily sensation at all – the bullet had scraped under the left clavicle with a glancing impact which had fractured but very fortunately not shattered it, the bullet however being deflected downward, emerging through torn muscle and cartilage ten centimetres lower than it had entered at the back. A little lower still, it would have found the heart – and/or, as Lotte had grimly pointed out, exited through the left breast.
‘Christ…’
‘Yes – plenty to thank Him for… Mind you, it’ll hurt for some while. You don’t get away scot-free from damage of this kind. Morphine or no morphine. She’ll have to keep this arm in a sling for a few weeks at least. But she was lucky other ways too: a centimetre or two this way – or lower – could have smashed the scapula. The shoulder joint, even. Not to mention the arteries here.’ Addressing Thérèse, by this time… ‘Not surprising they took her for dead. Would have looked to them like a bullet through the heart. And with the blood all over… And this head-wound. Which again – a few centimetres to the left, say… See the way it slants? When it hit her she must have been already falling, she’d had this one in the shoulder first – uh?’
She’d viewed the white sulphur powder with distrust, told Thérèse she could risk it, if she insisted, but she, Lotte Frager, wouldn’t be responsible for administering some unknown cure-all. Fair-ground medicines, she called such things. Rosie had no recollection of these stages, had been in dreamland by that time. In retrospect had a feeling that they’d been happy dreams: which seemed odd. A morphine side-effect, maybe. But her recollections even of the start of it were hazy, a lot of gaps being filled in by Thérèse when she’d woken in the late evening, in racking pain. That night had been fairly hellish.
Thirty-six hours ago, though, and the powder had crusted. Through the bandage surrounding her head, touching it very lightly with her fingertips, she could feel the slant of a hard ridge of it above that ear.
Using her good arm to push herself up now: the damaged one was in a sling made of green velvet, perhaps curtain material, with another strip holding it close across her body, while inside the chemise which Thérèse had provided her entire torso was bandaged, dressings front and back.
Bandages were strips of old sheets or shirts.
‘Did you sleep all right?’
‘Amazingly, yes. Although Bruno’s barking had me awake for a while.’
And her heart had been beating unevenly. She’d never experienced any such thing before. It was OK now, quite normal… Thérèse saying, ‘Fox, probably. Human intrusions, it’s a different bark altogether.’
‘Clever dog… Have you had many human intrusions?’
‘Plenty. But mostly friends bringing others in transit. I doubt we’ll have any while you’re here.’
‘D’you mean you’ve put the word out?’
A shrug: ‘I mean it’s taken care of. Don’t worry.’
‘So what happens if other escapers—’
‘There are other safe houses, Rosalie.’
‘But when they arrived with me, for instance, you’d had no warning—’
‘Don’t worry, we’d cope all right. How’s the shoulder?’
‘Hurts. As she said it would. But less than it did yesterday. Back’s still sore – same again though, nothing like it was. And my head doesn’t hurt at all. Thanks, Thérèse.’ Her breakfast porridge – a large bowl of it, on a tray; she’d wriggled around so it could rest across her knees. ‘Giving you a lot of work, aren’t I? I could come down to the kitchen – d’you think?’
‘No. The ladder – if you slipped—’
‘Michel was up and down it easily enough, with only one arm.’
‘He’s used to being one-armed. You aren’t. He lost his in 1940.’
‘Oh. I’d meant to ask, but—’
‘He and other survivors of his division left from Dunkirk – in a British destroyer, but he was on a stretcher, and the arm was amputated after he got to England. But – speaking of you, Rosalie – if you slipped, and grabbed for a better hold with that one…’ Nodding towards the strapped arm: ‘– which you might do, just instinctively…’ She put the spoon in Rosie’s right hand. ‘Manage all right?’
‘Easily. Thank you… Michel might come today, I suppose.’
‘Or tomorrow, or the next day. Who knows? But my nephew – Charles – will be here this evening. On weekdays he comes after school, you see. Rosalie, I don’t think I’ll tell him you’re here. He’d never breathe a word – knowingly – but – anyway, when he’s here – well, we’ll keep you hidden, and that window covered. Get into trouble if we show lights anyway. And I may have to leave you alone a lot while he’s here. He does come into the house sometimes, of course, but there’s no reason he’d go upstairs.’
Rosie nodded. Enjoying her porridge. ‘OK.’
‘Better that children shouldn’t be burdened with secrets, when they don’t have to be.’
‘Better nobody should. Lovely porridge, Thérèse.’
‘He’s more than once had to know about such things before, when I’ve had escapers here for a night or two. Comings and goings… But with you here probably a month or more—’
‘Month!’
‘Lotte said at least that long.’
‘Never heard of sulphur drugs though, had she… Thanks to Michel, therefore – touch wood. I agree, anyway, about Charles… Thérèse – two things to ask you now: I was ready with one, but first about Charles – what sort of nephew is he, a brother or a sister’s son?’
‘Sister’s. Lisette. She was widowed too, and re-married, Charles isn’t his son – and he and I don’t get on. Consequently I only see Lisette very occasionally – meet in the village sometimes. Charles is a very nice lad, though, he adores the animals and the country life, I’ve left him this place in my will.’
‘Does Lisette know you’re an active résistante?’
‘She wouldn’t want to know. She won’t speak French, even in private, although it’s our own natural language, our birthright… She doesn’t like the boy coming up here, either. Nor does her precious husband. The fact they permit it has a lot to do with what I just told you – his inheritance. They wouldn’t risk missing out on that. Huh?’
‘You didn’t have any children of your own?’
‘No. We were not so blessed. Was that the other question?’
‘Sorry – no, an extra one. I was going to ask you about Michel, and Dunkirk – summer of 1940. I was thinking – must have been during that retreat you lost your husband?’
‘Yes. That time.’ Coming from the window, with the light brightening behind her. ‘Our First Army. End of May, first days of June. That dreadful time. You’re right, to connect the two events. About half of them got away through Dunkirk, but the rest were trapped around Lille. Jacques was one of them. Five divisions, and they held off seven Boche divisions for four days. People say this was to some extent what made the Dunkirk evacuation possible. By the end, poor things, they had no food or ammunition left, the survivors could do nothing but surrender. But my husband had been killed before that.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes. Me too.’ She’d crossed herself. ‘But life goes on. At least, life of some sort. Have to – try, don’t we? God gives us strength, it’s up to us to use it, eh? Survive, then start again – when it’s over. Listen now – with a supreme effort, you could manage another helping, couldn’t you?’
‘Well—’
‘Good. Lotte said you had a survivor’s strength. “Nothing of her, but she’ll come through all right,” she told me. Inner strength, she calls it. What she admires – the old devil. OK – back in a minute…’
The regular intake of real, solid food was already having an effect almost as miraculous as the sulphur powder’s. Not only physically but mentally, just these two days had made a huge difference. Thérèse had groused once, ‘My God, if I ate like that I’d be the size of the barn out there!’ But rest, as well as food, was doing the trick. The one craving she was conscious of from time to time was a desire to smoke. She always had smoked, until the car crash and hospitalization in Morlaix, but since then the only chance she’d had had been a stub-end she’d picked up in a stone-floored passageway in the Fresnes prison and persuaded a comparatively humane wardress to light for her. She’d smoked it because she’d been starving, and it had sickened her. Now, she had no money – had literally nothing – and Thérèse who didn’t smoke, would have had to buy cigarettes on her forays to the village market, if she’d asked for them; they weren’t cheap, and were also rationed, the ration itself minute but saleable. ‘F’ Section in Baker Street would eventually be compensating her for all the expenses she’d occurred – standard procedure, and more than just compensation, there’d be a reward element in it as well – but providing cigarettes now would have meant immediate outlays of hard cash, of which it was obvious there wasn’t much about.
July 10th: another Monday.
Thérèse sat down, on a kitchen stool she’d left up here a week ago. Half an hour past noon: lunch, which she’d just brought upstairs, was a ragout of pork and beans – Rosie having hers in a soup-plate, and a spoon to eat it with. The plentiful food, she’d gathered, was due largely to an illegal system of bartering, run discreetly by local farmers. But at noon, the news had come in a Swiss radio broadcast that yesterday Caen had been taken by British and Canadian troops – the news triggering recollection of Michel’s exposition of the military situation – nine days ago, now, and he’d said he’d be back in two or three.
He’d also said – on the subject of Caen – ‘Then we’ll have them on the run…’
So there might be rapid progress now?
Another thing he’d said, though, in reference to her own plans, had been that they might be ‘overtaken by events’.
Meaning she might still be stuck here, an invalid, while Paris was being liberated and André Marchéval contrived to disappear. In which circumstances – Paris overrun, and the occupiers of 11, Rue des Saussaies either arrested or in flight – would he show up at the parental home or business, knowing it was the one place where SOE or anyone else with a score to settle would be likely to look first?
So you’d lose him. SOE would lose him. That bastard out from under: new identity, sound cover story and forged papers. He’d know enough from his training and experience in SOE to manage all of that.
Unless they shipped him off to Struthof-Natzweiler – having bled him dry?
She’d started on the stew. Delicious… ‘Thérèse, you’ve surpassed yourself!’
‘Lots of it, eat all you can.’
‘Doesn’t it worry you that Michel hasn’t come?’
A wag of the straw-coloured head. ‘I’ll be glad when I see his gazo drive into the yard, certainly. As long as he steps out of it – he and Luc, preferably. But they don’t run to a time-table, you know. Big area – I don’t know exactly from where to where, but it’s a lot of territory and there must be hordes of Maquis in it. Their numbers have been greatly swollen lately – did you know?’
‘Yes.’ A nod. ‘Same all over France.’
‘What Michel’s coping with is the problem of so many groups widely separated, all wanting this, that and the other – and straining at the leash, he said, he and his colleagues having to restrain them from poking their heads up too soon.’
‘I suppose if the big breakthrough is coming now—’
‘They’ll still have to lie low, and wait. Paris will be a primary objective, obviously, but he anticipates an encircling movement to the south of it, north across the Seine then and east to the Rhine – and through these parts, therefore. That’s how he sees it.’ She’d picked up her glass of wine. (Rosie drinking milk. Being good. Diet prescribed by Lotte.) Thérèse’s blue eyes on her thoughtfully. Light-blue eyes and full, round cheeks, rounded chin, skin roughened by wind and weather but with no lines or creases in it yet. With her pink-and-white colouring and the mop of blonde hair she could easily have passed as German.
She’d put her glass down. ‘You’re on edge, Rosalie.’
‘Am I?’
‘Yes, you are. And – well, good heavens… After all you’ve been through… Rosalie – no matter what news Michel brings you – put your health first, don’t try – think of doing anything. It’ll be over soon – and you’ve done your share already, God knows. Even from the little I know—’
‘I’m sure it’s good advice—’
‘But you’re going to ignore it.’
‘No. Thérèse, I appreciate your concern—’
‘I’m concerned that you should simply relax, accept the fact you’ve been badly injured and you’re now a convalescent!’
‘Well – exactly. I am – thanks to you. The other business – it’ll be London’s decision, not mine. They’ll recall me, I might be able to set something moving first, that’s all. There are things I know – an individual I know – and recent experience makes it – in my opinion rather clearly my personal business.’
‘To do with whatever Michel was finding out for you, I suppose.’
‘Yes. His own idea.’ She’d nodded. ‘You were with us, you heard him.’
‘Yes. I did.’ Glancing away – distracted… ‘Just a minute.’ Moving to the window: Rosie hearing it then too – aircraft of some kind, low and already close.
‘It’s a Storch.’ She had it in sight. ‘Spotter plane.’ She’d drawn back a bit. ‘Coming right over us. The sort Michel was looking out for. They use them a lot round here.’
Her words were lost as the hammering racket peaked, then fell away; the machine could only have been a hundred metres or so up. Rosie wasn’t getting any view of the outside world meanwhile – or much light either – with Thérèse’s bulk across the window.
The plane had passed out of her sight too now. Turning back… ‘Flying northwest – Lunéville, Nancy direction.’
The sound was nearly gone: a fading summer sound, as innocuous as a mower on a distant cricket-field. Thérèse sat down to finish her lunch. ‘But listen – whatever this is you’re contemplating or Michel’s suggested – when you’re fit, you’d be stupid to show yourself in public – anywhere, in the open. You’re known to them, identifiable – they may still actively be searching for you. Not to mention that here in Alsace the language would give you away. And – surely, with the war on its last legs now—’
‘But it isn’t, is it? We aren’t out of Normandy yet – let alone anywhere near Paris. People like me and the others I was with are still being shipped east to the camps. They want to brush us under the carpet – last thing they want around is us, to tell our stories!’
‘Surely all the more reason to lie low?’
‘Are you lying low?’
‘Yes – I am—’
‘By sheltering me, Thérèse?’
A spread hand on her chest: ‘I haven’t been imprisoned, tortured, darn near killed. And like as not they’re looking to have another go at you! Rosalie – I know you’re not married, I remember Lotte asked you – but isn’t there anyone special in your life – worth staying alive for?’
She’d put her spoon down in the empty plate. Acknowledging to herself that it was a good question, really the question, and maybe not a bad thing to be reminded of it. She nodded: ‘There is, yes. Man called Ben. Australian, as it happens. And you see, Michel isn’t only looking into this other thing for me, when I’m fit and he’s back he’ll be putting me in touch with London – my bosses – via some person I think you know, or know of—’
‘So?’
‘So I’ll get picked up, flown out.’
July 18th: Tuesday. Evening. Not in the attic, but on the first floor, in Thérèse’s bedroom. She’d been down in the kitchen earlier, but Thérèse had left her when she’d heard the clatter of her nephew’s bicycle, gone out quickly to forestall his bursting into the house; she’d pulled on an old jacket that might once have been her husband’s and blundered out, muttering, ‘See you later.’ Rosie had come up here, as they’d agreed she would, to be out of the way in case they came back in together or the boy did on his own.
She leant back in the shiny horsehair-stuffed armchair, closed her eyes. She’d been sewing, for about the past hour and a half, needed to rest them for a minute. Oil lamps weren’t the best things for needlework. Relaxing, listening to the silence of the house and night. Last night there’d been a lot of bombers over – heading into Germany, evidently on a different flight-path from their usual route or routes. It was the first time she’d heard air activity here on anything like that scale: there must have been hundreds of them streaming over, squadron after squadron, a drone of engines that had gone on seemingly for ages before the tail end of it faded eastward; she’d lain there picturing the night sky full of them, visualizing as she fell asleep the helmeted and masked crews in individual aircraft, thundering on into the Boche heartland.
And some Boche city in flames. As English cities had been often enough, in recent years.
Hadn’t heard them returning. Either she’d slept through it or they’d taken a different route homeward. Direct route, one might guess, shortest distance between two points; but fewer returning than had gone out eastward, you could be sure.
She’d made her recent transition from attic to the lower floors in two stages. First, four or five days ago she’d decided there was no longer any reason to stay in bed, and with this Thérèse hadn’t argued, in fact had found some old clothes that more or less fitted. Rosie had then spent two days just sitting around or prowling up and down under that low ceiling, or squatting at the window watching the slow drift of high cloud from the west and listening for the arrival of a gazo – which still hadn’t come. By the end of the second day she’d rebelled again: despite a day and a night of drizzle and lower temperatures, the attic felt increasingly hot and airless, altogether too confining: and she’d had enough confinement. Thérèse had commented sarcastically, ‘Next thing, you’ll be trotting down to the village, calling on the mayor!’
‘Would he be glad to see me?’
‘Oh, charmed, I’d guess. Offer you a glass of Gewürztraminer, probably. Especially as there are Boche officers billeted in his house!’
‘Might give him a miss, then. But seriously, Thérèse…’
Finally they’d settled for her coming down in the evenings only, after curfew, when at least there wouldn’t be any neighbours dropping in. And for any other less welcome visitors, Bruno would give tongue and she’d take cover.
Negotiating the ladder hadn’t been difficult at all; although Thérèse had then to climb up it to shut the trap-door, then lift the ladder down. Any searcher who meant business would of course have seen it lying there, gone on up and perhaps found clues to the fact that the attic had been occupied, but a perfunctory look round such as Thérèse said was the usual thing in a routine police check-up wasn’t much to be scared of – as long as they weren’t looking for a particular individual, i.e. hadn’t been tipped off. The local police, when not under German supervision, tended not to be looking very hard for people to arrest. If they had Boches with them, of course, it could be a different matter.
Thérèse must have found it a relief not to be clambering up and down with a chamber-pot two or three times a day. Although the deal was only to stay downstairs in the evenings, having found she could use the ladder safely she could also make briefer visits at other times as well. And for meals: she was only too glad to lend a hand at the stove – one hand, in theory, but on her own she’d been furtively using the other one too – with care, naturally, and still having the sling’s support. Jobs like roasting and grinding wheat at night for the morning’s porridge. For sewing too – mending and altering, fixing up old clothes which Thérèse routed out from somewhere or other; none of them could ever have fitted her. But – had to start somewhere, getting back to normal.
She fully intended getting herself out for air and exercise before much longer, too. Nights, she thought, would be safe enough – around the farm, at least, at weekends, when Charles came during the day and not at night. She was thinking about this – how and when to broach the subject – when she heard the outside door open and then slam shut, and Thérèse call, ‘All clear, Rosalie!’ So she’d have finished the evening chores and sent the boy home. Rosie went down, found her in the kitchen discarding the rather foul old jacket; chicken feathers drifting around, in a strengthening of the now familiar farmyard fragrance.
‘Sorry – such a long time. Lot to do though, and I can’t leave it all to the kid… Now, however – what we were talking about –’ kicking off wooden-soled canvas shoes – ‘heavens, hours ago… Oh, I’ll get us some coffee, in a minute—’
‘I’ll do that—’
‘No – sit down… Please. Much easier with two hands. Besides, Rosalie – what I was saying – what we were talking about when Charles came – you’d mentioned – unless I misheard completely – you’re a war widow, too?’
Rosie frowning: ‘Didn’t I mention it before?’
‘No – you did not. You’ve been here – what, eighteen days – and kept such a thing to yourself?’
She smiled, shrugged. Right shoulder, movement of the right hand…
‘Subject just never came up, then. But – if you’re interested – he was a fighter pilot. Royal Air Force. Battle of Britain, all that. In fact he was in the RAF before the war – we married in ’39, a few months before it started, and he was killed – shot down – in February ’42.’
Thérèse gazing at her. Slight shaking of the fair head. ‘My turn to commiserate. But really – so secretive!’
‘Well – not consciously—’
‘I mean – when we’ve talked about my man being killed—’
‘What I meant was, not secretive deliberately. To be frank, it wasn’t what you’d call a marriage made in heaven. Could be why I don’t talk about it. Think about it much, even.’
‘That’s sad, Rosalie.’
‘Yes. Started happily – terrifically – but—’
‘Not a good husband, uh?’
She shook her head. ‘Not.’
Johnny Ewing: Squadron Leader. Who’d thought he was God’s gift to women, and believed in spreading it around. In retrospect all she felt for him was a mild contempt. And to talk about it – about a man with whom she’d once been passionately in love, and who’d died a war hero, of sorts – it was easier not to.
‘You must have been very young.’
‘I was twenty, when we married.’
‘And you haven’t been tempted to re-marry?’
‘I have, as it happens. Have been tempted, I mean. The man I told you about, when you asked me?’
‘A short name, I remember. Bim, Bam—’
‘Ben.’ She smiled. ‘Short for Benjamin.’
‘Ah, yes. But – not for marriage, huh?’
‘It’s this job of mine. That’s – really all…’
‘Ah. I understand.’
‘His job too, really. He’s in what they call Coastal Forces – motor gunboats and torpedo-boats. He’s been wounded twice, quite badly. Any luck, they’ll keep him ashore now. But primarily it’s this. He hates me doing it.’
‘Could one blame him?’
‘No. In fact I promised him this would be the last time.’
‘So in terms of what we were discussing the other day—’
‘I’m longing to be back with him.’
‘Would he have any way of knowing you were arrested?’
‘Nobody would. Probably not even my SOE bosses. Beyond the fact I’ve disappeared from where I was.’
‘They’d know something bad happened.’
‘But as for marrying – I hope – when the war’s over, if we’re both still around, and feel the same… Or even before that – if they recall me – and if I can get to look a bit more like a human being than I do now—’
‘Rosalie, such nonsense!’
‘I don’t know. I do know I’m an appalling sight now. But – until the time comes—’
‘If you love each other—’
‘I love him, and he loved me as I was – so yes, maybe, with luck—’
‘Apart from your hair, Rosalie, which has to grow a little—’
‘Looks as if goats have been at it, doesn’t it? It wasn’t a prison haircut, although you might think so, they hacked it off in a hospital at Morlaix. Shaved this part. With the best of intentions, obviously… But that’s the least of it – what about being scarred from head to foot? All right, head to waist – and knees, Gestapo did that too – but –’ touching her forehead, and that cheekbone – ‘these mostly. OK, my hair’ll cover this, eventually—’
‘You’re still a most attractive—’
‘Like something the cat brought in!’
‘No – you really are. And those scars will disappear quite soon, you’ll see. With your hair grown – it’s lovely hair, and that colour, the coppery lights in it – incidentally the scars aren’t so disfiguring, you know. You think they are, when you look in the mirror that’s what you focus on – uh?’
‘You’re very kind, Thérèse. But I try not to look in the mirror, frankly.’ Glancing across the room at a yellowish one in a dark, heavy frame. ‘I’ve been giving that a wide berth.’ She added, touching the pad of dressing on the inside hollow of her left shoulder, ‘One thing I really do thank God for is that this wasn’t any lower. Not talking about being plugged through the heart, either—’
‘Your breast. Yes. Lotte said that too.’
‘Very, very lucky.’
‘Bim-Bam can thank God too, I think!’
Both laughing: Rosie thinking that the name might stick… Thérèse shaking her head: ‘Actually – no joke, is it? Definitely would not have been. But it’s truly amazing, such luck – effectively, no lasting damage. And you have lovely eyes—’
She’d checked abruptly. Her eyes on the door. Quick glance at Rosie then, but Rosie already moving, on her way. Hearing from halfway up the stairs a double rap on the door – and a metallic clash as the dog’s weight came up hard against its chain. Not barking, though – whining: at someone it was glad to see? Thérèse then – in Alsatian, but the obvious question: ‘Who’s there?’
‘Me, Aunt. Down, Bruno…’ A boy’s voice, switching into French that was accented exactly like Thérèse’s: ‘Bike’s got a puncture – wondered could I borrow yours – since it’s late, and curfew—’
Friday, July 2ist. There’d been rumbles of bombing and/or gunfire the night before last – half asleep she’d wondered, the war couldn’t be this close so soon, could it? – and this last night one single, very loud explosion that had woken her. She hadn’t known what time it was – having no watch she only knew the time of day when Thérèse was with her or she was downstairs within sight and sound of the clock in the kitchen; its ticking was audible all over the little house. But the explosion had woken Thérèse as well, at about three o’clock, she said, and she thought it might have been a plane crashing. If so, it would have been a bomber, presumably, and couldn’t have been far away; in these mountains somewhere, she guessed. There had been aircraft passing over earlier, apparently – which Rosie hadn’t heard. Another item of breakfast-time interest had been a statement in a Swiss news bulletin an hour ago to the effect that there’d been an attempt by senior German staff officers to kill Hitler. He’d been hurt only slightly, had spoken bitterly and defiantly on German radio last night; it seemed a bomb had exploded under the table at some military conference at which he’d been presiding.
Thérèse’s comment was, ‘The devil looks after his own. But they can see the writing on the wall. Some of them wanting to get their coals out of the fire before they’re caught in it themselves.’
Not unlike all the French who were rushing to join the Resistance, Rosie thought. She didn’t say it – having no wish to hurt Thérèse’s feelings. It would be a comment for her to make: she and her like, who’d been résistants since 1940 or thereabouts, and knew the truth of it. Les résistants de ’44, old hands like her were calling the new converts, former fence-sitters or even collaborationists. It would still hurt, though, to have it commented on by an outsider; and in the past few days there’d been a certain wariness in their relationship, due to Rosie’s insistence on ‘going walkabout’ in the dark – starting tomorrow, Saturday, when nephew Charles wouldn’t be around in the evening, or even possibly tonight after he’d gone home. This would be the last night of the old moon, easier therefore for Thérèse to show her the layout of the farm than it would be tomorrow.
‘Thérèse – just thinking – when I push off, leave you in peace—’
‘God. She’s off again…’
‘Well – it’s three weeks now, I’ve been cluttering up your house. And I am pretty well fit. Of course, if Michel doesn’t come—’
‘When you push off, you were saying – what?’
‘To be ready to, really. Thinking of disguise, of sorts.’ She touched her short, dark hair. ‘OK, I can wear your scarf over this, but some of it may still show, and I was thinking – if I could dye it grey, d’you think?’
‘Could.’ A nod. ‘We’d bleach it first, then dye it.’ Snort of humour: ‘What else – two sticks to hobble along on?’
‘Uh-huh. But seriously – must not look as if I’d been injured. Look old, different, but—’
‘I suppose…’
‘Have to do without a sling too. Could you help with the hair?’
‘Want more bread?’
‘Well—’
‘Go on, help yourself. Yes, I’ll bleach and dye it for you. You’d be silly to stop wearing a sling, though.’
‘Well – I’ll try not to use the arm more than I have to, and – look, hook the thumb into my blouse or jacket – like this? A sling would really mark me – wouldn’t it?’
‘If they know where and how you were hit. Maybe you should assume they would. Yes, I suppose… Want more of this?’
Chicory mixture. She shook her head. ‘No – thanks. But if we could do my hair rather soon now – so that when Michel does turn up—’
‘Oh, Lord, what’s this…’
Gazo engine: and the dog barking its head off…
A gazo truck: a load of horse manure, courtesy of a neighbour. Thérèse had been expecting it – for her vegetables, apparently, but it would be left to rot for at least half a year before application, she’d said. There was plenty of it about, as most farms hereabouts used horses for ploughing and carting; and she didn’t like using the pig variety so close to the house. She went out to assist in the unloading, and Rosie took the breakfast things to the sink.
She couldn’t help being on edge: needed to be ready to make a move. First and foremost, to get into a position from which to contact London. Having been here three whole weeks – long, slow weeks, at that – and thinking a great deal off and on about Ben still not knowing she was alive. Not knowing anything at all, please God: but it was conceivable that if SOE finally decided she must have come to grief, they might start breaking it to him gently.
For ‘they’ read Marilyn Stuart, who’d been Rosie’s ‘Conducting Officer’ or guiding light when she’d been a trainee, and was still her closest chum and sometime colleague on the staff in Baker Street; Rosie had introduced Ben to her, the three of them had had a meal together, and it was bound to be Marilyn he’d call on when the silence became unbearable.
Marilyn would try to play it by the book – not tell him anything at all.
Another source of anxiety, though – stashing cups and saucers in the drying rack now, Thérèse still out there unloading horse-shit – a major cause of the restlessness that worried Thérèse so much was ‘Hector’ and what might be happening in the Allied drive on Paris, or around it. If an advance was in progress, which from BBC broadcasts it seemed to be. In particular there’d been mention of a new offensive and extremely hard fighting east of Caen, which might match up with what Thérèse had said, quoting Michel, about an encircling movement to the south of Paris and in this direction. Although there again – in terms of her own needs and priorities – with Michel’s non-appearance, and the fact that he was the only way she knew of to contact London, via some local SOE réseau, in his continuing absence it was beginning to look like pie in the sky. Thérèse hadn’t any solution to offer, either; one had to assume that her own Resistance connections were solely with the escape-line to which this farm was available as a safe-house. It was frustrating, especially as Rosie was beginning to feel she could think about making a move now – that physically she’d be up to it. The sulphur powder was crumbling off her various wounds in brownish scabs and flakes, and seemed to have done the job. Her back was to all intents and purposes healed, only striped in two shades of white. The head wound was no more than a recessed roughness with new hair thickening around and through it, and the shoulder wounds, front and back, were bruise-coloured, still slightly crusted, indentations. Effectively they were bruises, the shoulder felt bruised and nothing more; she thought – hoped – that by now the fractured bone might have joined itself up again.
Her heart hadn’t played any tricks, since that one night. It had alarmed her at the time, but she’d more or less convinced herself she could forget it.
Thérèse pushed the door shut behind her, slid the bolt across. ‘That’s that. Oh, you’ve cleared up.’ She sat down – buttocks overflowing the stool – leant with her forearms on the table. She was distinctly odorous. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘My hair – dyeing it?’
‘Oh, yes.’ A sigh, wag of the head. ‘So we were.’
‘But if it’s difficult—’
‘No.’ Tired smile. ‘I was just telling myself – no peace for the wicked… But – not difficult, no. I could do the bleaching right away – I’ve got that – and get grey dye in the village. I’ve a friend there who’s used it in similar circumstances, as it happens. Have to go into the village anyway. Stay upstairs, will you, while I’m out?’
‘Of course, but – Thérèse, I am taking such advantage of your kindness. I’m sorry—’
‘You needn’t be. If you weren’t here there’d be other things keeping me just as busy. Maybe more so. And I’m enjoying your company – that’s the truth… Anyway, I’ll do the bleaching when I’ve milked Clotilde.’
‘Thank you. You’re – extremely kind… Going to the market, are you?’
A nod. ‘Taking the chicks I killed last evening.’
‘And tonight – here I go again – will you show me round out there – after Charles has gone?’
‘Because of the damn moon, eh?’
Silence, looking at each other. Rosie anxiously – aware that she was being a bloody nuisance, also, in Thérèse’s view, pig-headed, but in the circumstances hardly knowing how not to be. And Thérèse simply looking at her: a look saying something like All right, if you’re so keen to piss off…
She was lonely. Would have been unnatural if she hadn’t been. Heart of a lioness or not. Even a lioness would get lonely, sometimes.
‘Thérèse – I admit, I’m a cat on hot bricks. But you can understand it, can’t you? I mean – I’d hate you to think I was ungrateful, didn’t appreciate—’
‘– like to slow you down, that’s all. To start with the odds as heavily against you as they must be—’
‘I doubt the Boches would be looking for me now. Even if they were three weeks ago, by now with any luck they’ll think I’m dead.’
‘You’ll take Michel’s advice, when he turns up?’
‘Of course. I want his advice – help… He’s an exceptional man, isn’t he?’
‘You noticed.’
‘Must be a worry for you too now – that he might not turn up?’
‘Oh. So many if this, if thats. But –’ movement of the heavy shoulders, shake of the blonde head. ‘How often that sort of doubt’s in one’s mind. In the air we breathe, isn’t it?’ She pushed herself up. ‘Keep saying our prayers, Rosalie. For the time being there’s nothing else.’