By that spring of 1944 the traffic in agents and prospective saboteurs across the English Channel had reached its most active. Although the occupying Germans had built a concrete shield along the French upper coast, north-eastwards into the low countries, extending to Norway, and south to the Spanish border, there were still isolated inlets in Brittany, and landing grounds concealed in the interior of France, where the useful Lysander high-winged monoplane might alight; and there were hidden meadows that could easily accommodate a secret parachute drop.
As far back as 1938, a year before hostilities, the War Office in London had established the roots – a solitary officer and a secret shorthand typist – of a bureau to conduct covert operations in enemy territory and from this, two years later, had grown the initial organisation of the Special Operations Executive.
An eccentric entity, hardly an organisation, it was staffed by unusual people. Its critics have scorned it, alleging that it cost more money and lives than it was ever worth. There was a dashing unorthodoxy to it that at times bordered on the amateur, and it went about even its serious business with a touch of comic opera. The comedy ceased abruptly when agents, some of them brave women, were arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, and executed.
Almost thirteen hundred agents had been shipped and smuggled into occupied France by the springtime before the Normandy invasion of June 1944. Some sections of the French resistance actively shunned them; to others they were just a British oddity, a sideshow. There were some notably failed exploits. One parachutist famously landed on the tiles of a police station; codes were cracked routinely by the Germans who were sometimes aware of secret landings but did not interrupt them, preferring to follow the interlopers back to what the agents believed were safe houses; and it was an astonished and grateful French peasant (or possibly a German soldier) who found a bag containing half a million francs dropped by parachute to finance a guerilla cell that no longer existed.
For all its detractors, however, the Special Operations Executive, one of a number of covert agencies working in France – organisations which at times got dramatically in each other’s way – helped, by wireless contact and operatives, to point the often disparate sections of the French resistance in the triumphantly right direction following the Allied landings of June 1944, in sabotaging rail communications and delaying reinforcements.
In London the bureaucracy had proliferated, military fashion, to occupy blocks of Baker Street, a tangle of backstairs offices.
Paget invariably reported at the bureau with a sense of both excitement and foreboding. He did not count himself a brave man nor a particularly resourceful one; nor was he filled particularly with either zeal or hatred. Why they had picked his name he did not know; unless it was out of a hat. This office was a threadbare upper floor only reached once you had shown your pass and spelt out your appointment to the short-sighted man behind the desk by the street door. There were quaintly silly code-names for the people he had to see. Friar was one, Fairy was another. No one liked playing spies more than the spies. They believed it was only faintly daring to take a captured Nazi officer out to lunch at a decent restaurant in the hope that he might become talkative with drink. At senior level the bureau was nothing if not civilised.
At the reception desk on the top floor there was invariably an upper-crust girl with a pearly voice. Whatever her name, she was known as Fanny, the letters FANY displayed on the shoulder flash of her uniform. It stood for First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, a title provoking even more confusion in that den of disguises and subterfuge. Many women agents who parachuted into occupied territories, some never to be recovered alive, were in the ranks of FANY.
Today’s Fanny was a pink, plumpish young woman with strong teeth which she concealed for much of the time by not smiling. ‘Please wait, squadron leader,’ she instructed Paget. ‘Fairy will be with you shortly.’
Fairy was. He puffed up the carpetless stairs, cheeks expanded, waving a worn briefcase that appeared to be empty. He tried to regain his breath. ‘Would it be beyond the war effort to get somebody to mend the lift?’ he demanded. He offered Paget a damp, resigned palm.
‘Next week earliest, sir,’ Fanny told him.
‘What a way to run a war,’ said Fairy.
‘When I became insistent they asked me if I realised there is a war on,’ pouted the girl. ‘We’re in the queue.’
‘Behind the War Office canteen, I’ll wager.’
‘Aliens Archives,’ she said.
‘Come on in,’ the man said in a deflated way to Paget. He was Colonel Peter MacConnel and he preferred his everyday name to be used rather than Fairy, except under operational conditions. He called back through the door: ‘Coffee please, Fanny.’ Paget could hear her already making it.
MacConnel sat in an oriental armchair with dragons for arms. The room appeared to have been furnished with properties from the stage show Chu Chin Chow, including an exotic screen and a bamboo desk.
Fanny brought in the coffee tray. The coffee pot and cups were bluntly stamped with the initials of the War Department. The plump girl poured the coffee and added the cream in a motherly way. ‘Saccharin only,’ she said sadly. ‘Balkans have appropriated the sugar bowl.’
‘Damn them,’ said MacConnel absently. He thanked the young woman and took a long and longing look at her thickly stockinged legs as she left. ‘Sorry to pull you in again so soon, Paget,’ he said. ‘But you’ve done so well in the past despite your lack of a convincing French accent.’
Paget said: ‘I say I’m from Alsace. Even the Germans think that’s amusing.’
‘Good, excellent.’ He stood up from behind the desk and wandered in a circle. There was a worn, almost ceremonial, ring on the carpet which he had trodden since 1941. ‘Agents are always fallible,’ he ruminated. ‘Not far short of stupid at times. You can only hope that Jerry is even more so. There was a useful chap down at Poitiers, I think, yes, Poitiers, stopped at a barrier, produced his forged identity card, and then absent-mindedly produced another with the same photograph and a different name.’
He went on: ‘Then other dimwits were in a school at night outlining a railway sabotage operation on a blackboard. When they had done they went off home and left the bloody plan chalked on the board. You wouldn’t believe that, would you?’
‘And the Germans found it?’ said Paget.
‘The school caretaker spotted it first and rubbed it off.’ He returned to the desk. ‘Anyway. Here you are.’ He leaned closer as if to prevent anyone in the empty room overhearing. ‘Operation Hole.’
‘Hole?’ said Paget. ‘Who dreamed that up?’
‘Me, actually.’
There was no point in apologising. ‘It’s not bad, as it happens,’ said MacConnel, taking no umbrage. ‘Reasonably appropriate. There are seventy resistance members, from northern and mid-France, the usual mixture, in prison, awaiting execution. The Germans are just getting the paperwork done. The RAF claim they can drop a bomb accurately enough to breach the wall of the jail and allow the prisoners to make a dash for it.’ He studied Paget. ‘I know it sounds implausible. I sometimes thought that these blue jobs could hardly hit Hamburg, but they claim they can do it.’ He took in Paget’s air force uniform as if it were the first time he had noticed it. ‘No offence, mind.’
Paget did not take any. He said: ‘We’re improving.’
‘But to hit a single wall strikes me as being a touch difficult.’ MacConnel leaned close and studied a sheet of paper. He saw Paget was waiting. ‘I expect you want to know what your part in this will be.’
Paget said: ‘Yes.’
‘It will be in your patch, the area where you have worked before, Bookbinder Circuit, so you’ll know the locals. It will be our aim … well, your aim … to coordinate these resistance bods once they’ve done their bunk from prison. Try and keep them from fighting among themselves. You know what they’re usually like, Gaullists, Communists, general bandits. The local people will hopefully have arranged where to hide them. You’re there to sort them into some form of organisation and to make sure that Jerry doesn’t recapture them.’
‘Seventy of them.’
‘Give or take a few. You’ll be going in through the sea route.’
‘When is it?’
‘Soon. It has to be. The Germans will start shooting them.’
Paget knew he would get no more information there. The conversation drifted on to how cricket might recover after the war, how restrictions in restaurants permitting two courses only at five shillings each was ruining decent dining out, how fishing in Scotland had improved now that so many former participants were away fighting.
Just before Paget left, the telephone on the desk jangled and MacConnel picked up the earpiece. ‘Right you are. One o’clock at the Ritz.’ He held out his hand to Paget. ‘The Ritz seems to manage,’ he said.
‘I’ll remember that,’ said Paget, who had never been inside the Ritz. MacConnel walked with him towards the door. ‘Know anything about Verlaine?’ he asked casually.
‘Verlaine? It’s not somewhere I’m familiar with.’
‘It’s not a place, it’s a chap,’ said MacConnel. ‘Never heard of him myself. Paul Verlaine. He’s a poet, a Frog, or was. Been dead a while.’
‘I don’t know his work,’ said Paget.
‘Limericks are more to my taste. Ha! What was that one we used to have fun with in the desert? … “There once was a chap of Benghazi, whose arse got stuck in the kazi” … or something. Anyway, mug up on Verlaine, will you. We may be needing him.’
Lyon’s Corner House was some distance from the Ritz in a number of ways, but it served a wartime tea accompanied by the afternoon melodies of a string quartet. Black-dressed, white-lace-pinafored waitresses, traditionally called nippies, clipped about, busy and balanced with trays, pots of tea, dainty milk jugs and two lumps of sugar per customer. It was a large place, but with a warm and comforting ambience, a low ceiling, peachy lighting, melodic ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods’ (the rural idyll of Hitler’s home land), and the pleasant chink of china.
‘It’s only Joe Lyon’s, but it bucks me up just to sit here,’ said Margaret. She wore a neat hat and a fur collar on her dark costume. She unbuttoned it. ‘It’s warm,’ she said. ‘And romantic.’
Smiling, Paget held her fingers across the table. ‘You must have a good posting to be able to get away for tea,’ she said.
‘The war doesn’t need me this afternoon,’ he replied.
The waitress appeared brightly and said her feet were killing her. ‘The first thing I’ll do when shoes come off the ration’, she told them, ‘is to buy a nice soft pair.’ They sympathised. ‘Mind you,’ she added darkly, ‘as soon as the war’s over they’ll throw us old biddies out and get young girls in.’
She brought them tea, the tray held high above the heads in the big room. ‘No cream cakes,’ she said. ‘Though we do get them.’
But there were small buns with a few currants visible and shrimp paste sandwiches. The room was busy with conversation.
Margaret poured the tea and her extravagant eyes came up over the pot. She laughed slightly. ‘When I tell the boys about Lyon’s they’ll think I’ve been to the zoo.’
He took his teacup from her. She added the milk and they took one piece of sugar each with the silver-plate tongs. ‘Will they tell their father about it?’ he asked.
‘I doubt it. He’s as remote from them as he is from me. He says all he wants is peace.’
‘Don’t we all.’
‘He means personal peace. Inward.’ She needed to change the subject. ‘We’ve never had a real date, you and I, Martin.’
‘Under the conker trees,’ he smiled.
‘In summer. Now it’s like a bit of a dream. These days there doesn’t seem to be any room, any time, for anyone to be in love.’ The string quartet was playing ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’. Quietly she said: ‘I want to have a real love affair with you. A longish one.’
His hand went back to hers. ‘We could start soon,’ he smiled.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I have to be back by nine thirty tonight. The children are with somebody.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll be on duty.’
‘In the evening?’
‘Yes.’ He said it firmly.
Her eyes became mischievous. ‘All right, Martin. Tonight.’ She held her teacup as though proposing a toast. He lifted his as she said: ‘But I still have to be back at nine thirty. We’d better get a move on.’
The house in Warwick Avenue loomed high, neglected, dark. A full-grown sycamore in the front garden rattled irritably, some ornamental masonry was lying flat where it had fallen and the path to the door was padded with last autumn’s leaves.
‘You’re not a burglar in your spare time, are you?’ he asked.
‘There’s not much worth burgling in here,’ replied Margaret. ‘Some old bits of furniture. The rest is in storage. It belongs to my sister and brother-in-law.’ She produced a heavy key and they went up the half-dozen stone steps to the forbidding door. ‘I’ve never been here in the dark,’ she said. She took a small torch from her handbag, passed the handbag to him and found the keyhole. There was a rattle, a heavy click and then a creak and a sigh as she turned a tarnished handle and the door swung. Their feet sounded in the abandoned entrance hall. ‘Poor house,’ she said.
She played the torch across the empty walls and halted its beam on a panelled inner door. ‘I wouldn’t come in here alone,’ she said. ‘Not at night.’
‘Nor would I,’ said Paget. He smiled at the pale, indistinct oval of her face and kissed her. ‘In here,’ she said, pushing the inner door she had picked out with her torch. ‘There are curtains and some of the bulbs work.’
She clicked a switch and two grimy lights in a chandelier flickered and lit making deep shadows. There was a thick round table and some chairs, covered with dust, an almost empty bookcase, damp patches on the walls and outlined spaces where large pictures had hung, a four-seater settee and two bulbous armchairs. ‘It’s very homely,’ said Paget.
‘It has hidden secrets,’ she whispered, going to a cupboard below the bookcase. ‘Champagne,’ she said, holding up the bottle. ‘Well chilled. Let’s go upstairs.’
The puny beam of the torch led their way. The staircase had once been grand, the curving banisters heavy and carved. ‘They’ll never be back until after the war,’ she said. ‘Ben’s in the Middle East and Mollie won’t come to London any more. She’s in Scotland. I come every now and again to see the roof hasn’t fallen in.’ She paused. ‘It’s the first time I’ve used the place socially.’
‘Wonderful place for a party,’ he said on the landing. He heard her giggle and she led him through another wide doorway. The narrow torchlight ran over a cold bed and bulky furniture; open curtains let in a pale suggestion of night sky. She went to the bed and touched a pile of blankets folded at its bottom. ‘Not at all damp,’ she said in a housewifely way. She turned her eyes on him. ‘Now what do you suggest?’
‘Open the champagne,’ he said.
She said: ‘Let’s sit in the bed.’
‘Glasses?’
‘Bathroom,’ said Margaret.
She went quickly and he heard the squealing of the tap followed by the sound of water. ‘Cobwebs,’ she grimaced as she came back. He could just see her face in the thin light seeping through the window.
Martin eased the wire cage from the champagne cork and she went again briskly into the bathroom and returned with a small towel. ‘It’s cleanish,’ she said.
Putting the towel over his forearm, he approached her closely, performed a brief bow and said: ‘Champagne for Modom?’ He used the towel to extract the cork. It came out with a sharp discharge and at that moment the London air-raid sirens began to howl.
‘My God,’ she laughed. ‘That bang started them off.’
‘You don’t want to run for shelter, do you?’
‘No fear. I feel quite safe here. With you.’
There was only a little froth from the bottle.
‘Let’s get in the bed,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit exposed out here.’
It seemed so strange; fifteen years after they had first met they were close together in this deserted, cold, old house in London in an air raid, and they were about to make love. ‘You go your side and I’ll stay this,’ Margaret said.
He went to the far side of the wide bed. ‘Can you see me?’ she asked. She was sitting on the bed.
‘Just about.’
‘Then I’ll start.’
Her shape began to move as she took off the jacket with the little fur collar, then the skirt, and opened out one of the folded blankets. ‘I’m getting in the warm,’ she said.
He took his clothes off down to his underwear and they climbed into the bed, quaintly still sitting, sipping from their glasses. ‘Margaret,’ he said quietly. ‘You are still wearing your hat.’
She let out a squeal and attempted to pull it away but it got snared by the pins. He helped her disentangle her hair. They fell against each other and kissed and laughed again. He kissed her down her shoulders and her neck. Then she pulled his RAF vest over his head, threw it aside, and bit his chest playfully.
She let him take the brassière away from her breasts and they eased each other gently down into the rough and immediate warmth of the blankets. ‘I’ve waited for this’, she whispered, clutching him, ‘for years.’
‘I’ll try not to lose you again.’ As he said it he knew that, in only a matter of hours, they would have no choice.
‘God almighty,’ she said. ‘What wasted time. You’re never going anywhere without me again, Martin. We are going to be together always. After the war. Things being what they are, who knows what’s going to happen to us. But when it’s over we’ll be together – and faithful.’
The scratchy blankets oddly comforted their skins. She caressed him and he put his tongue to her breasts. ‘Let’s start now,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t let’s wait.’
He rolled above her and her legs spread at his touch. Then a diffuse silver light moved across the window. Margaret said: ‘Searchlights. Don’t stop.’ Outside, the beams were probing the night sky. For a moment the room became lighter.
‘Now I can see you,’ said Margaret. ‘By search-light.’
‘And I can see you.’
It seemed that from just outside the window sounded the massive crack of an anti-aircraft gun firing from Regents Park, followed by another and a third. Margaret squealed. He covered her with his body and they clutched each other at the long whistling scream of a falling bomb. The explosion shook the room, the glass of the window fell in and the ceiling came down as they lay petrified together in the bed.
Margaret cried out again and he held her as they heard the screeching descent of another bomb. ‘Under the bed!’ he shouted, jumping over her and pulling her to the carpet. He tried to push her naked body below the bed. The bomb exploded a street away. Choking dust erupted from floorboards and carpet. A standard lamp fell on its face. Glass was flung around the room. Again the guns sounded and the house trembled.
They lay shivering and naked, holding each other on the floor by the bed. The gun fired another salvo and as a pathetic encore, a single picture clattered from the wall.
They sensed the action above them move away.
‘Oh, Martin,’ she sobbed, half laugh, half cry. ‘When will we ever do it?’
‘At this rate after the war,’ he said.
Cold air came through the shattered window. Covered with plaster from the ceiling, coated with grit from the upheaval of the room, they crawled out. There was a smell of smoke. ‘Don’t say the sodding house is on fire,’ she complained. He staggered to the window. ‘It’s down the street,’ he reported. ‘Something is blazing down there.’
‘Oh, Martin,’ she said, sitting naked among the debris. ‘I’ll have to go home.’ He sat beside her and they hugged each other hopelessly. The champagne bottle was still upright and he picked it up and offered it to her with a wry smile. She drank it from the neck, then handed it to him. ‘Bastard Hitler,’ she said. ‘Spoilsport.’
Paget was picked up by a civilian car, a cumbersome Humber driven by a uniformed woman, at eight the next morning. The driver was young and neat with a face like a coin below her cap and straw-blonde hair pulled back behind her neck. The tone of her voice was upper class and she had the flash of FANY on her shoulder.
‘Do you know where we are going, sir?’ she asked within a few minutes of beginning the journey. Men were clearing the streets after the previous night’s air raid; firemen were still playing hoses on the smoking wreckage of a line of shops, their stocks piled outside. A man in a grey suit, probably the proprietor, stood arms stretched sideways in a shattered shop window like an actor on a small stage.
‘No. I hoped you might know,’ said Paget.
‘Bournemouth,’ she replied, regarding him in the driving mirror. ‘About four hours if we’re lucky. Five if we’re not. Everything is ready there.’
He knew what she meant. ‘I got as far as Bournemouth last time,’ he said. ‘But then I was recalled.’
‘As happens,’ she said. ‘Unless that occurs again we will continue to the embarkation point tomorrow.’
Her tone was official, almost prim, as if she had learned her instructions by rote. His mood was not for conversation anyway and he eased himself back in the deep rear seat of the Humber, closed his eyes and wondered about Margaret.
As they had attempted to clean themselves of the dust and the rubble in the house they had discovered there was no water. They tried to brush the debris from them in the eerie half-light coming through the gaping window. There was ceiling plaster in their hair and sticking to their naked bodies.
‘The bomb must have fractured a main,’ he said.
Sneezing with the dust, she began to laugh softly but with an edge of hysteria. ‘Oh, Jesus, Martin. What can I do? I can’t pick up my children like this.’
She followed him into the bathroom. The floor was white with lumps of ceiling. He looked down the grim dim hole of the toilet pan, then closed the lid, stood on it and lifted the top of the high cistern. ‘Water,’ he said, inserting his hand.
‘Oh, thank God. Good job we didn’t use it. I’ll get something.’ She went out and reappeared with the champagne glasses. He ladled the stale water from the cistern and she plugged the sink and poured it in. She began to wash her face with it. ‘Horrible,’ she said.
Thinking of it now as the car travelled through the London suburbs, downcast and worn, he began slowly to smile. He wondered if he loved Margaret, if she loved him. He leaned deeper into the seat and slept for an hour. When he woke the girl was driving through Surrey, heading for Hampshire along the A30, heavy with military traffic. Several times they were stopped at barriers by British and American military policemen and she had to produce a pass. Each of them threw up a brisk salute as she drove on.
She said to Paget: ‘I’m Penelope, by the way. Penelope Bryant-Cross.’
‘Is this what you do all the time?’ he asked. ‘Drive?’
‘This is the job FANY have given me. Not very glamorous. I’ve volunteered for parachute training but they’ve turned me down. Supposedly I’m too small and light. They say I’d be blown off course. It’s a pity. I’ve got good French, I went to school in Arles. But the chances seem to be diminishing anyway. We’re running out of war.’
‘What happens when we get to Bournemouth?’ he asked. ‘The last time I came, when I was recalled, I had supper and went back.’
‘This time you’ll be billeted in a nice apartment,’ she said, still primly. ‘It’s my job to look after you. It’s a pity it’s not summer, sir, we could go on the sands.’
Outside the window they could see the coils of rusty barbed wire curled along the dark-yellow beach. There were brick and concrete pillboxes decaying on the rainy esplanade, apertures for machine-guns gaping like empty eye sockets; protective sandbags had turned green and split, their contents fallen out and hardened to cement. Invaders were no longer expected.
‘What a view,’ said Penelope, pulling back the curtains. The apartment was across the wet road from the sand and the grubby waves that reached the shore from the metallic sea. At the extreme ends of the view were outcrops of land, smudgy shadows. A few disconsolate-sounding gulls struggled with the early afternoon wind.
She remained peering at the desolate scene and said: ‘A chaperone can be arranged if necessary.’
‘A chaperone? Oh, I see. Well, if you would like …’
‘Not for me,’ she said turning in to the room. ‘For you. Some people might consider this a compromising situation.’
Paget laughed and said: ‘I don’t think …’
‘You wouldn’t like him anyway,’ she said. ‘He’s a retired lighthouse man with a fearful pipe and a nasty cough. But he is available.’
Dismissing the subject she said: ‘You’d like a cup of tea, I imagine.’ Paget said he would. He was surveying the flat. It had a bereft air, the furniture was 1920s, there was an amateur painting of Boscombe over the fireplace and a disfunctional calendar still fixed on October 1943. An almost denuded bookcase in grim, dark wood occupied part of one wall and there was a moquette armchair in front of it. A second armchair was opposite and a settee at right angles, all in a faint mauve. ‘A holiday flat before the war,’ summed up Penelope. ‘Requisitioned. There’s quite a number along here. I don’t imagine anyone uses them now, apart from people like us.’
She took her tunic off and became busy in a housewifely way, going into the kitchen and putting the kettle on the gas stove. When she returned she had a box of matches and, brushing aside Martin’s offer of assistance, she knelt and lit the gas fire. ‘It works. That will cheer the place up,’ she said. She looked compact, neat, in her linen blouse and fitted khaki skirt.
Paget looked along the sparse bookshelves. ‘Round the World in Eighty Days,’ he said. ‘I’ve read that. About twenty years ago. And A Thousand Happy Hobbies. That might be worthwhile.’
She laughed. ‘Nobody is resident long enough to get into War and Peace,’ she said. She returned to the kitchen and called back: ‘Strong, with milk and one sugar, isn’t it?’ He said it was. ‘It’s on your file,’ she said. ‘I know all sorts of things about you. Now we’re here, can I call you Martin? In these circumstances we’re permitted to drop the formalities.’
‘I wish you would,’ he said. ‘Do you like Penelope or Penny?’
‘Penelope,’ she said. ‘My mother always says that Penny has the sound of a shopgirl about it. Incidentally, I have to go shopping. I have some decent sandwiches, smoked salmon, would you believe, from Harrods, especially packed for the War Office, which we can have now with the tea. I’ll do some shopping for dinner.’
‘It’s extremely domesticated,’ he observed. She put the tea tray on a low table, took it away again and returned with a duster which she rubbed over the table’s surface. ‘It gets a little disused, I’m afraid.’
They sat, oddly comfortable, by the spluttering fire, with the sandwiches and tea. The day before he had been eating shrimp paste in Lyon’s Corner House. ‘Secret agents seem to do themselves well,’ he said.
‘And why not? Heaven knows what you’ll manage to eat in France.’
Paget said: ‘In the country it’s not too bad, or by the sea, although you have to really like fish. The French will always manage.’
‘To look after number one?’ she finished. ‘My father says that. Even in war.’
‘They haven’t any choice at the moment. When they surrendered, the old man Pétain told them country, family, work. Many French people just keep their heads down and wait for better times. On the farms and in the vineyards they eat and drink enough and they enjoy selling wine to the Germans at exorbitant prices.’
‘What about the resistance?’ she asked.
‘Many people in France curse it. Some boy, seventeen, tried foolishly to do something brave and the Germans caught him and executed him. His mother committed suicide and when his father came back from her funeral he did the same.’
She finished her tea and said in a matter-of-fact way: ‘Imagine what it would be like.’ She took the cups, saucers and plates to the kitchen. ‘I’ll wash up later,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go.’
‘Before the shops shut.’
‘This is a special shop,’ she said. She put on her tunic. ‘You may be surprised.’
There was a double bedroom and a single in the flat. When she had left he opened the wardrobe in the double room and saw the civilian clothes hanging there: a worn jacket and trousers, a collarless shirt and a rough blue jersey. On the floor was a pair of thick black shoes and on a shelf socks and underwear. He checked the labels on each garment. You could buy them anywhere in France.
The seaside wind buffeting at the window woke him. There was a wartime alarm clock, marked ‘Utility’ on the bedside table. He had been asleep for two hours. Penelope had come back without waking him and he could hear her in the kitchen.
She brought him a cup of tea. ‘You’re like my mother,’ he grinned.
‘That is what I’m supposed to be. I have to look after you.’ She went from the room and returned quickly with two newspapers. ‘One Daily Mail, one Bournemouth Echo,’ she said.
‘Let the war wait,’ said Paget, selecting the local paper. ‘Let’s see what the council is up to.’
She laughed pleasingly. ‘I prefer to read about a wedding than some faraway battle.’
‘You did your shopping?’
‘Yes. I hope you like Fortnum and Mason’s chicken pie. Winston Churchill doesn’t get any better. Cold with boiled potatoes and vegetables. Smoked trout to start.’
‘There’s a Fortnum’s in Bournemouth?’
‘Only by special arrangement,’ she said, putting a finger to her lips. ‘They send groceries down for us. I also managed some wine, French, one red, one white. Rare stuff these days, so they inform me. And some gin and proper tonic water.’ She regarded him quizzically. ‘I should have asked you if you drink gin. I do.’
‘So do I,’ he said. While he was stirring the tea she said: ‘If we had dinner early we could go to the cinema. There’s an Abbott and Costello funny.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Not tonight.’
‘It’s not always the best idea. One chap I looked after here wanted to go and the film was Before I Die.’
Momentarily she looked shamefaced and left the room. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, putting her head around the door, ‘they’re broadcasting a jolly good play. The Good Companions, J. B. Priestley.’
‘That sounds more like it,’ he said. ‘An evening by the wireless.’
He drank the tea and scanned the newspaper. ‘Would you like me to run a bath for you?’ she asked from the door. He said he would and heard her turning the taps. She began to sing. A light, sweet voice.
‘I don’t know that song,’ he called.
‘“Shining Hour”,’ she responded. ‘It’s always on American Forces Network. They have all the latest songs. It’s from a Broadway show, I think.’ She paused. ‘Wouldn’t it be blissful to see a show on Broadway?’
When she said it was ready, he went into the bathroom. There was a fresh towelling dressing-gown behind the door. He lay in the soapy water and wondered how long it would be before he would get another bath. Afterwards he put on the French civilian clothes. ‘Might as well wear them in,’ he said when he went into the sitting-room. The gas fire sizzled amiably, the curtains were tightly drawn and the commonplace lights mellowed the room.
‘One of the fellows going to France had to wear sabots,’ said Penelope. ‘He had trouble walking in them.’
‘To be a saboteur you have to wear sabots,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t do to let the Germans spot you hobbling.’
They sat domestically in front of the fire. ‘Houses are very expensive down here,’ she said, paging through the local newspaper. ‘Eight hundred pounds. Here’s another almost a thousand.’
‘This used to be one of the so-called “safe areas” estate agents once advertised,’ he recalled. ‘Very few turned out to be safe. Dover was one, Croydon another.’
‘The Germans will probably stop bombing soon,’ she said. ‘They’ll run out of planes. Or bombs. No more nights like last night.’
Paget laughed reflectively. ‘I was caught bang in the middle of it. A ceiling fell on my head.’
She looked shocked. ‘But you should have said. You ought to have a medical before you go.’
‘Too late now,’ he said. ‘And it was quite a small ceiling.’
They each had a gin and tonic. ‘This taste always makes me think of pre-war days,’ she said. ‘I remember my very first gin. What was your life like then?’
‘Ordinary,’ he said. ‘Grammar school, lived in a village in the West Country. Started in a land agent’s office. Along came the war. Put in for an exciting job, rather recklessly. And here I am. What about you?’
‘Posh, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘My father’s in the House of Lords. Mummy was bringing me up nicely. As far as she knew, anyway. I was going to be a debutante, presented at court and off to polo, Henley Regatta and weeks of balls.’ Wryly she glanced up. ‘Dancing, that is.’
‘Of course.’
‘The war saved me. God, I dreaded the deb part. Photographed with all those lumpish girls.’
She knew where everything was in the apartment. She laid a white cloth and set the table for two with quality cutlery and glasses. ‘We have an hour before the play,’ she said. ‘That’s providing the wireless is working.’ She turned a knob on the mahogany cabinet and after a moment while it warmed up, jaunty organ music came out. ‘Sandy MacPherson,’ said Paget. ‘The man who played for hours and hours the day they declared war. Between the official forecasts of doom, and the warning of immediate air raids which never happened.’
‘I know,’ she sighed. ‘Unfortunately you can’t stop him playing the thing now. I’ll try the Forces Programme if you like. It’s a bit more lively. I don’t think I’ll be able to get AFN on here.’
‘Don’t bother. I’ll just sit with this gin and stare into the fire, thanks.’
She switched it off and went into the kitchen. ‘In France, people listen to American programmes,’ she called. ‘While they’re waiting for the BBC news and those everlasting secret messages. Glenn Miller and his Orchestra are very popular. Even the Germans listen.’
‘We pinched the Germans’ best song, “Lili Marlene”,’ pointed out Paget. ‘Everyone sings it now, no matter which side they’re on.’
‘How odd that you can capture a song,’ she said. She walked into the second bedroom and reappeared wearing a blue jumper and a pair of dark trousers. ‘I’m off duty now,’ she explained. ‘I had to be in uniform when I went for the shopping. They like you to be dressed the part.’ She put a bowl of small, bright spring flowers on the table. ‘Martin, will you open the wine?’ she said, as if it had been his task for years. ‘It will give the red time to see if it feels like being poured, as my father says every evening.’
A corkscrew was on the kitchen table and the white wine in a refrigerator. He could not remember opening a domestic refrigerator before. He opened and shut the door twice, watching the light go on and off. He felt how cold the wine was. ‘How do you feel about women wearing slacks?’ she asked from the other room. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Some men object. Something to do with being threatened, women taking over. There was that picture in the papers of Princess Elizabeth in the ATS, wearing khaki trousers.’
When the potatoes were boiled she suggested he sat at the table. A bemused, comfortable sensation had come over him; the warmth of the room, the odd homeliness of the situation. She brought in the smoked trout and they followed it with the chicken pie. They drank the red wine with the pie. He raised his glass. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done for me,’ he said. ‘It’s almost worth going.’
She regarded him seriously. ‘You could be taken ill,’ she suggested. ‘Right now, Martin.’
He laughed and then realised she meant it. ‘If everybody cried off sick,’ he said, ‘we’d never get the war finished.’
‘Of course not,’ she agreed over the top of her glass. ‘Cheers.’ She seemed embarrassed. ‘God look after you.’
They ate the meal and then listened to the play, one each side of the wireless set. They leaned attentively towards it, hardly exchanging a word in an hour and a half, while the gas fire stuttered and sometimes a vehicle sounded as it passed beyond the windows. They finished the white wine while they listened. When the play was finished Penelope went to the curtains, putting her head between them and wrapping them around her neck so that only a little light escaped.
‘There’s a large moon now,’ she said from the other side of the drapes. ‘It’s shining on the sea.’
‘Would you like to go for a walk?’ Martin asked.
‘I was thinking that. I’ll get our coats.’
They went down the single run of stairs and out of the door on to the beach-side road. They crossed it with scarcely the need to look either way. It was as empty as a canyon. Then they walked, the easy wind coming through the night and brushing against their faces. Bright moonlight made the scene silvery. ‘They can’t black out the moon,’ she said, singing a line of a popular song.
‘They’ve tried,’ he laughed. ‘Smokescreens, those Heath Robinson boilers on lorries belching out smoke, enough to choke anybody within ten miles, then the breeze comes up and blows it all away and there’s the moon. Just loitering up there.’
She put her coated arm in his and they walked familiarly. ‘You’re quite a romantic, Martin.’
‘For a land agent,’ he laughed. ‘I can make up a good yarn, which is probably why I was dragooned into this business.’
He wondered what Margaret might say if she could see him now. They strolled silently for twenty minutes until from the shadow of one of the decayed machine-gun posts a policeman materialised. He might have been having a secret smoke. They wished him good evening and he asked to see Martin’s papers. ‘Not many suspects around to ask tonight, constable,’ said Penelope.
The policeman looked puzzled and said: ‘Have to do my job, miss. Can I see your identity card too, please?’
She shrugged and handed it to him. He returned Paget’s papers and checked hers. He was impressed. ‘Sorry to have troubled you both,’ he said. ‘In civvies like you are, it’s hard to tell.’ He pointed to himself. ‘I’m glad to get out of this get-up, I can tell you, especially the boots. It’s them that kill you. We just got a new issue and we was forced to take them because nobody knows when there’ll be another. But they’re tight as rissoles.’
They walked on, keeping their laughter subdued. ‘Tight as rissoles,’ repeated Penelope. ‘Wherever did he get that?’
‘Heard it somewhere and repeated it without thinking. Maybe he didn’t see the joke.’
She pushed her arm into his more firmly and dropped her voice. ‘It would have been very strange if you had been arrested as a spy in this country.’ Abruptly she turned her small, neat face to him. ‘Shall we go back?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed the walk.’
They let themselves in and felt the warmth of the apartment as they went up the stairs. They had left the fire burning low. She took their coats and poured the last of the red wine. ‘There’ll be some music on now,’ she said. ‘It’s late.’ She switched on the wireless. A dance band was playing.
Martin said: ‘May I have this waltz?’ They smiled at each other and he held out his arms. They danced formally in front of the fire until the end of the tune when a BBC voice announced: ‘The Forces Programme is now going off the air until tomorrow at six o’clock.’ The National Anthem began to play. Penelope giggled, leaning her head against him. ‘I simply can’t stand to attention at this time of night. Not straight from a waltz,’ she said. ‘I’m getting ready for bed.’
With sudden sadness Martin sat in front of the fire. Where would he be this time tomorrow? What would his fate be? When would this strange life end? The gas fire was reflecting on his face, the orange and blue gas jets hummed. He heard her come from the bedroom. ‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘I’d better get some sleep when I can.’
He only turned as he rose from the chair. She was wearing a woolly dressing-gown with pyjama legs protruding from the bottom. Her feet were bare and her face was touched with the same sadness. She undid the belt of the dressing-gown and let it open. He said: ‘Khaki pyjamas.’
‘Army issue,’ she said.
They set out on an overcast morning at eight, heading west, hardly conversing, driving along the grey coast and to the ferry at Poole harbour. As they waited, a military policeman noted the number of the car and strode towards them. ‘Sorry about this, sir. Aircraft about to land. We have to stop the traffic’
They were both now in uniform. ‘Where is there for a plane to land?’ asked Penelope looking at the English Channel on one side of the car and the ample but hemmed-in reaches of the harbour on the other.
‘It’s a Sunderland,’ Paget said.
As though he had given it an introduction the rotund but graceful flying boat appeared noisily from seawards, coming to the narrow entrance of the anchorage, its floats just above the roof levels of the waiting traffic, and ploughed confidently through the enclosed water, tossing up waves of white spray. The clamour of its four engines filled the morning. Penelope put her fingers in her ears. It had almost disappeared from view before the roar ceased and then they saw it returning passively to the landing place.
‘Where does that come from?’ she asked. ‘Or is that careless talk?’
‘It probably was once but everybody for miles around knows by now. It’s the comfortable way from the US, across the Atlantic to the Azores, up to Madeira or Lisbon and then here. It’s for top brass and people like Bob Hope and Joe Louis, the boxer, when they come over to entertain the Americans. It’s a lot more cosy than the northern route.’
The ungainly chain ferry across the narrow channel began busily loading now. Confidently Penelope drove the car aboard. Some smirking GIs squatted on a truck and with pretended coyness crooked their fingers at her but she ignored them. When she drove up the ramp on the other bank the Americans, all together, stood and saluted extravagantly. ‘You wouldn’t think they were soldiers,’ she smiled. ‘They’re like boys.’
‘They will be until they land on the beach.’
Now they were travelling through slight hills which fell serenely towards the sea, their flanks touched with the green of spring. ‘Thomas Hardy country,’ said Paget.
‘We read him at school. Tess was my first heroine.’
Mostly they were quiet. They reached Honiton and were held up for half an hour by a Sherman tank blocking the main street, the Devon country people taking only mild notice from the pavements. A heavy crane was clumsily shifting it. A man in a muffler and a cap tapped on the window of the car and Penelope wound it down. ‘They tanks won’t never be as good as ’orses,’ said the man.
‘’Orses don’t break down,’ said his wife, from the depths of a voluminous old coat. As though encouraged she went on: ‘Throwed us out of our cottage, they Yanks did.’
‘Blowed it up,’ said the man. ‘Just for practice.’
Penelope said lamely: ‘I’m so sorry,’ before driving on and winding up the window.
The sun shone as they went across the south of Devon, diverted by barbed wire and skull-and-crossbone signs warning: ‘Training Area. Beware Live Ammunition.’
They reached the main road, moving with military traffic, and more than an hour later they were entering Plymouth. Much of the naval city had been levelled by bombing. From a mile inland there was an uninterrupted view of the sea and the masts of warships. Daffodils were growing yellow about the ordered ruins and two battle cruisers were lying off Plymouth Hoe. All was peaceful and sunlit there now, the upper structures of other vessels could be seen across the scarred land. Some boys were kicking a football on a cleared bomb-site, goalposts painted on what had once been a cellar wall.
Penelope knew her way. They were admitted through three successive barriers guarded by sailor sentries with fixed bayonets and pulled up outside a building hidden behind a pyramid of sandbags.
Before Paget got out of the car she said quietly: ‘I may not be taking you any further. Sometimes I’m required to carry on to the embarkation point in Cornwall, but sometimes not. They will tell me here.’
‘I see. Are you driving back to London?’
‘By tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I’ll stop in Exeter tonight. I … I have a dinner date.’
He got out of the car at an entrance like a cave buried in the sandbags. ‘The sooner they get rid of these old things the better,’ said the naval lieutenant who greeted him. ‘They really whiff when it’s raining.’
He was shown into a waiting-room with a tall, buttercup-yellow pile of American National Geographic magazines on a central table. There was no one else there. He picked up the top magazine and was surveying photographs of a village in the Andes when a sharp young woman in the uniform of the Women’s Royal Naval Service appeared, treated him to an official smile and invited him through the door. ‘Interesting, those National Geographics,’ she said as he followed her along the corridor. ‘The naval types enjoy them because it shows them the places they’d like to go to but probably won’t.’
She indicated for him to enter a long panelled room, too elaborate for an office despite the single desk at the extreme end. A naval commander rose and came almost the length of the room, hand extended. ‘Squadron Leader Paget,’ he said. ‘Glad you could come.’
‘They said I had to,’ said Paget. They walked back and he took the offered chair. The man’s name was Hawksworth. He sighed. ‘I wouldn’t care to do what you do,’ he confessed. ‘It’s bloody dull here but it’s safe and roomy. I was in submarines before. Hopefully before long none of us will have to play these games.’ He took out a file after unlocking a steel drawer in the desk. ‘Anyway, briefly you’ll be embarking at about eight this evening with another chap, who is on a different mission, from Helford Passage in Cornwall.’ He looked up. ‘But you’ve been before.’
‘Not this way,’ Paget said. ‘Last time I was supposed to go in by sea but it was aborted. The time before I went by air.’
‘Lysander pranged, didn’t it? According to this.’ He patted the file. ‘Unpleasant.’
‘Yes, caught fire. The pilot died but two of us got out.’
Hawksworth said: ‘Well, good. You got off. The sea passage is generally less risky. You’ll be going on what’s called the VAD route, although I can’t for the life of me remember why. There are a number of places on the Brest peninsula used for landings. The Hun hasn’t got eyes everywhere. You have your civvy clothes and we have your dummy papers here. Don’t, for Christ’s sake, forget who you’re supposed to be. One bright spark did. With great difficulty we managed to get him out. He’s up in Scotland now, at that place they stick the failures.’
‘With the people who don’t get through the training,’ nodded Paget.
Hawksworth said: ‘The misfits. Inver … somewhere. One of the Invers. Miles from anywhere.’
‘I’ve wondered what they do,’ said Paget.
‘There’s a workshop. They sit at benches and make things. God knows what. Fluffy toys perhaps.’
He shuffled the papers. ‘Your contact from the Bookbinder Circuit – where do they get these names? – will be on the beach. You’ll get a decent hot meal at Helford. We’ve got a mess down there. Dry, I’m afraid, no booze. We can’t have anybody singing and shouting as they approach a secret landing.’
‘I imagine not,’ said Paget.
They were only occupied for fifteen minutes. As they reached the door Hawksworth said: ‘We have a driver to take you on. Your Fanny can go back to wherever she came from.’
Paget went out. Penelope was waiting in the central area, small in her uniform. ‘They are sending me on with another driver,’ he said.
‘Yes, so I understand. I’ve handed over your civvies and your overnight bag. Somebody is taking care of that.’
They stood without speaking for a moment. Then her face tautened and she came to attention and saluted him. His face reddened. He returned the salute.
‘Goodbye, sir.’
‘Goodbye. And thank you.’
She turned and clipped briskly towards the door. It swung and she was gone. They never saw each other again.