There was an easy rolling of the sea which, even though the night was dark, gave it a visible sheen. They were five miles off the coast of Brittany. The man who was on a separate mission but was to be landed with Paget, and whose name was Clegg, came on to the deck and stood alongside him. They were both drinking coffee. There were no lights on the boat.
‘In half an hour there’ll be no talking,’ said Clegg. ‘It’s a bit like being at boarding-school, really. Have you been in this way before?’
‘No. I’ve only been in once. By plane.’
‘That used to be a bugger, but it’s easier now. When they moved into the Unoccupied Zone the Germans gave themselves a bigger chunk of France to watch. The last air drop I did there were two hundred people waiting on the ground. Flares, everything. Like a fairground. Not a Jerry in sight.’
‘Let’s hope they’re absent tonight.’
‘This bit of the coast isn’t too bad. As long as you remember to scrape your footprints from the sand. Jerry has become half-hearted. He’ll fight like he always did, like hell, once we invade but he knows he’s done for. The last time I landed I went by submarine.’
‘That’s a bit extravagant, isn’t it?’ said Paget.
‘In the Med. Sometimes it’s one of those felucca things, fishing boats from Gib, bloody uncomfortable, but they’ve also got this French submarine which is otherwise useless. It’s got some fault in the torpedo tubes and its torpedoes tend to go around in circles.’
Paget laughed quietly. ‘Another part of the pantomime.’
‘It is a pantomime,’ agreed Clegg. ‘But you tend to stop laughing if the Gestapo get hold of you. They are not funny people.’
They drank their coffee. A naval lieutenant came from the wheel-house and said: ‘Nice night for a landing. I’ll have to ask you to come below now, gents. We’re getting closer. And you’d better say your good-lucks because from here on we must keep dead silence.’
‘Good luck,’ said Clegg.
‘And you,’ said Paget. ‘Good luck.’
The strangers shook hands.
The clumsy boat moved towards the shore. Everyone on board, the two passengers and the four crew, eyed the darkness, the lieutenant through night binoculars. They had slowed to three knots. Eventually a black line rose ahead even darker than the sky. Then there was a single pinprick of light followed by another a minute later. They were there.
The boat moved close in and Clegg and Paget, first hanging their shoes around their necks by the knotted laces and rolling up their trousers like schoolboys going shrimping, climbed into a rubber dinghy with a rating who paddled easily and silently to the shore. From the beach came another blip of light.
At a nod from the sailor they eased themselves over the side. Paget found himself in a foot of cold water. Four dark cut-outs on the shore made towards them. He heard a soft precautionary click as the sailor in the dinghy cocked a gun. Paget and Clegg had no weapons. No words were spoken but they were led in from the beach to where the black cliffs stood above it. A man with a rake appeared and began to erase their footprints from the sand.
There was a hooded person leading the group who, without speaking but with an odd formality, shook hands with the two arrivals. They realised it was a woman by the size of her hands. She pointed ahead and they made their way up a firm cliff path to a road where a Renault van was parked. It was blatantly white, smudgy in the darkness. The driver was waiting and without noise he opened the rear doors. Clegg and Paget clambered in and the woman climbed in after them. It smelt of fish. She pushed back her hood. She was dark and middle-aged. She smiled. ‘Welcome to France,’ she said quietly.
The train for Rennes left at seven in the morning. Paget stood with a group of early workers as they waited with everyday indifference, most of them smoking, one drinking from a bottle, while the train steamed in. There was a dozy German sentry at the end of the platform.
Paget felt his heart tighten but the bleak normality of the scene reassured him. He got into a compartment and sat on a wooden seat with a line of unspeaking men carrying their lunch-boxes and their newspapers. It was getting light and two men, one each side of the compartment, released the blackout blinds to let in the drab daylight. One man smoked a pipe, two sucked at cigarette stubs. They opened their newspapers. Paget wished he had bought one.
For twenty minutes the train chuffed without speed through the flat landscape. He began to look out of the window, but then realised it might mark him as a stranger and instead pretended to read the back of the newspaper of the man sitting opposite. It was the sports page and there was a report of a boxing match with a picture. Then, at a minor station, the engine hissed and stopped.
The occupants of the compartment looked up with annoyance. One checked his watch. ‘Des Boches,’ said another and the rest grunted or nodded and went back to their reading. Paget felt fear running through him. It was too late to do anything but sit, wait, and try to look like the others. The Germans were moving through the train; he could hear them opening the doors of each compartment and demanding identity documents. He hoped his forgeries were good forgeries. Men were being taken from the train on to the platform and he could see them standing unconcerned, apparently unguarded; a random check.
The door of the next compartment opened loudly and he heard a subdued commotion there. Without a word the Frenchman opposite took the outside pages from his newspaper and handed them to Paget. They heard the next door close and a thin and bespectacled young German officer appeared outside their compartment, opened their door and took a step inside. He seemed bored, as indifferent as the Frenchmen who scarcely looked up at him. Wordlessly, each produced an identity document and held it up. Paget was the last to produce his. The German barely glanced at it but retreated to the door and crooked a finger, calling him to follow.
He made himself cease trembling. As he tried to get to his feet from between the other men he almost handed the man opposite the page of his newspaper but stopped himself. He went between the pairs of rough trousered knees and into the corridor. With a little relief he saw that other passengers were being ordered to leave the train. There were twenty, all men, on the platform when he joined them.
The passengers all seemed indifferent to the interruption of their journey. The short-sighted German officer and two soldiers with rifles shuffled them around two corners and into the wooden station building. Mentally, Paget began rehearsing his French accent.
In single file they were shepherded into the waiting-room of the station. Some sat on the benches and the Germans told them to stub out their brown cigarettes. There was a corridor which led through the station building with a closed door at the platform end; off this was another room where there was evidently a senior officer. He called something from the inner room and the two soldiers organised the men into a single file. Five of them were moved along the corridor and turned left into the room where the officer was waiting. One German soldier went into the room with them and the other, with little enthusiasm or alertness, chivvied them from behind. Paget sat down on a bench, eyeing the door at the platform end of the corridor. The five who had been taken into the inner room emerged after a few minutes and with Gallic shrugs turned left and went down the corridor, through the far door and, Paget could see, out on to the platform. Another five were moved into the inner room and Paget positioned himself to be part of the next section. In a few minutes the second batch of men came out and turned left along the passage and out through the door.
He steeled himself. The soldier indicated that the next five, with Paget one from the end, should go in for examination. His comrade had remained in the inner room and the lieutenant was also in there. Only the one dull German soldier ushered the men forward. He went to the front of the line as they shuffled in and for a few moments he was out of sight. Paget firmly but quietly walked straight along the passage, opened the door, and let himself out on to the platform.
Standing there was a grubby local train of three carriages. It was just moving away. He looked over his shoulder, then went at a stiff-legged hurry along the platform and, opening the final door, jumped aboard.
He looked back a second time at the platform but there was no commotion. His group of men had been released from the interrogation and they were slouching through the door. Amazed that it should have been so easy, he turned into the compartment and sat on the wooden seat opposite the only other occupants. There was a gross-faced fat man, enfolded in jerseys and grasping a heavy white stick; he had one blank eye and the nondescript dog that took up the seat beside him was also missing an eye.
Paget muttered something under his breath and his fellow passenger responded by banging his stick on the floor twice. Paget wondered where they were going.
They passed a station whose name meant nothing to him. The sun had come from behind the miserly morning clouds and they were travelling roughly west. Then the train slowed and hesitatingly halted. Voices came from the corridor. The blind man pointed with his stick to the outside carriage door and muttered a single word: ‘Partez.’
Paget went. He slipped open the door and jumped down on to the embankment, toppling with the force of his descent and rolling through soaked bushes and rough grass until he came to rest against a wall. He lay still, moving only his eyes to see if he could fix what was happening in the train. Nothing was apparent and after a few minutes it began to move again.
He lay against the wall, trying to calm the sound of his breathing. He was cut and wet. Carefully he got to his knees and then to his feet. His head came inch by inch over the wall and he found he was looking into a churchyard, full of old and cockeyed graves with a grim church and some meagre trees. He could see there was a road beyond, a red bus making its slow way to some unknown destination. He needed to avoid the railway now.
Apart from the bus there was no discernible movement anywhere. He climbed over the wall, feeling the old bricks shudder, and landed on the other side directly on top of an abandoned angel, its wings broken, leaning against the wall among other cemetery detritus.
Dodging sharply between the tombs and vaults he made his way towards the church. He was only yards short, one gravestone away, when a priest came from the porch accompanied by two unpleasant-looking men who were in civilian clothes but one of whom was carrying a gun. The other saw him immediately, shouted and pointed. He ran, zigzagging between the masonry, expecting a shot and a fragment of flying angel. Abruptly he was confronted with a vault like a small house, stained, dark and dripping. The door was hanging open and he almost fell down the ragged steps and into the deathly and smelly gloom. He could hear the men searching, calling in French to each other. At least they weren’t the Gestapo. From where he crouched he could see the edges of two mouldy coffins lying on shelves. He wanted to go home.
They found him quite easily. There was nowhere he could run. The two men, with the priest hovering like a crow behind them, appeared at the top of the broken steps and the one with the gun pointed it directly at him. He came out with his hands above his head.
It was a close, wooden-panelled room containing nothing but the upright chair on which he sat. The men had left him and locked him in although he suspected that one remained outside the door. During the journey in a clanking Citroën, which once broke down and had to be coaxed into restarting, the man holding the gun had kept nudging his ribs with the muzzle, but there was an amateurish air about them that gave him hope; they did not tie his wrists and although they had discussed blindfolding him they had no blindfold and instead, rather shamefacedly, they instructed him to keep his eyes closed.
Through his eyelashes he perceived that they leaned forward to check him at intervals; he barely saw that the car was entering a heavy stone gate and going up a long drive with regular trees at its sides. They took him out with clumsy roughness and, with further warnings about shutting his eyes, pushed him up a flight of stone steps. A rusty but resounding bell was rung and a creaking door opened. The man who responded greeted them civilly and asked no questions. Paget was then led into the panelled room and the door closed behind him.
After half an hour it opened and he quickly closed his eyes. But a grave voice told him that the precaution was unnecessary and he opened them to see a seedy-looking man wearing a servant’s coat, old-fashioned and dusty, who said: ‘Madame Dupard will receive you in a few moments.’
By now nothing surprised Paget and, at the man’s invitation, he went into a baronial hall where every floorboard sighed as he trod towards an ornate door. The servant followed him and, once he was in an old, dim and overfurnished room, suggested that he took a chair and waited for Madame Dupard.
He was not kept waiting long. She came through a draped entrance at the extreme end of the room. She was elderly and wore ancient clothes but her eyes were bright and she approached him in a sprightly manner as though genuinely pleased to see him.
‘Monsieur,’ she said in a chesty voice. ‘How nice of you to come. I am sure you would like a glass of champagne.’
Paget said he would. The dusty servant, almost at once, brought a tray with two flutes and a bottle of Bollinger with a touch of froth at the neck. Nothing was said while he poured the glasses with a shaky hand. Then he went from the room, backing across the frayed carpet, and Madame Dupard, speaking in English, said: ‘I’m afraid I do not know your name. But perhaps it is better that I don’t.’
‘I am afraid so,’ said Paget. It was difficult to believe he was standing there lifting a champagne glass when an hour before he had been a fugitive hiding for his life in a smelly tomb. He grinned at her. ‘We are trained never to give our names.’
She cackled drily. ‘Hah, that is always the first rule to go under interrogation, you know. But I will call you Eric. I like the English actor Eric Portman.’
Paget bowed briefly. ‘I’m Eric,’ he acknowledged and said: ‘I know you are Madame Dupard.’
‘Celestine Dupard,’ she said. ‘A sad widow. My husband Clovis was well known in the former Unoccupied Zone, in Vichy itself. He knew everything and everybody from Marshal Pétain down to the most confused resistance fighter. The Gestapo, everyone. He died from strain.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Paget inadequately.
‘He had a young, active and demanding mistress,’ she shrugged, waving her glass slightly. ‘A mere enemy occupation does not stop such liaisons. But the pace was too much for poor Clovis.’
The servant paddled into the room and refilled their glasses. ‘Please, Eric,’ she said, ‘sit comfortably and tell me your adventures, as much as you can allow. Nothing surprises me in this war and I am very trustworthy. Bruno will bring us some food. I expect you are hungry.’
It was as though he were telling her a tall story, something he made up as he went along. He could scarcely believe it himself. Only forty-eight hours before he had been in Bournemouth with Penelope listening to a J. B. Priestley play. ‘You must rest too before you continue your journey,’ Madame Dupard said. ‘There is no difficulty. The Germans call here only by appointment.’
‘You seem to have everything arranged very nicely,’ he commented.
‘We have had some practice. The occupation has been for almost four years. We know the Hun and he knows us. It is a temporary but almost workable arrangement. Now tell me.’
Cautiously Paget said: ‘I was sent to contact a circuit, a resistance group, in Rennes.’
‘Bookbinder, I think,’ she said.
‘Yes. Bookbinder. You know.’
‘Very well.’
‘The Germans stopped the train and took me with a group, a random check I imagine, into a station. It was all very loose, very haphazard.’
‘No one is more haphazard than the ordinary occupation soldier,’ said Madame Dupard. ‘Their minds are elsewhere.’
‘This was amazingly easy. I managed to slip out while they were checking papers and I jumped on a train that was just leaving. They came after me. Someone might even have told them.’
‘One learns quickly,’ she shrugged. ‘There is a lot of treachery. All it needs sometimes is the reward of extra rations.’
‘Anyway, I jumped from the train and ended up in a churchyard where the priest and two men, one with a gun, caught me. I thought I was done for. But now I am here.’
‘The Diderot brothers,’ she sighed. ‘They play games like little boys. Spies and agents, Gestapo and resistance. They are fools. They shot a man dead once and he was only an innocent employee of the bus company.’
‘They go around playing these games? Guns and all?’
She laughed. ‘Monsieur, you should have seen people like them before, in the Unoccupied Zone, in Vichy, when there was more opportunity for these sorts of activities. There were agents and double agents and others who were not anything but believed they were. Old scores to be settled, you know, private crimes to be committed, bribery and fraud, businesses to be obtained at bargain prices once the local Jews had been sent off to Germany. It was a confused scene. People indulged in their fantasies. Once two of these fools arrested, well kidnapped, a man … What do you call it…? Shanghaied? And the man turned out to be a Nazi agent. There was some trouble over that.’
‘Do they always bring wanted men to your door?’ asked Paget.
She smiled reflectively. ‘Ah, now that is something I cannot tell you. We must both keep our secrets. Sometimes the most unsuitable people have arrived, vagabonds, burglars, all manner. One man went off with a set of my towels.’
The silent servant Bruno reappeared and pulled two chairs out from a graceful table which had been laid for two with shining cutlery, shapely glasses and white napkins. ‘We should eat,’ said Madame Dupard. ‘I’m sure you are hungry. Then you must rest and while you do so I will discover where to send you.’
Le Coq Noir was in the centre of Rennes. ‘It is a good place,’ Paget was told by the taxi-driver who had brought him from the station. The taxi was fuelled by gas from a balloon on its roof. ‘Nice clean women and the wine’s not too bad. The Boche like it.’
It was eleven at night. He paid two francs at the door and went through the nightclub dimness towards a diffuse light over the bar. There was a band playing ‘Moonlight Serenade’, trying and failing to sound like the Glenn Miller Orchestra. A dozen people were dancing, others were at tables, and there was conversation and some laughter. He saw the girl at the bar. Black hair, short as a bathing cap, red home-made dress, large eyes and crucifix. Just as Madame Dupard had described her. As instructed, he asked her if she would like a Hermann Goering frappé and she said yes.
‘You would like to meet Gilbert,’ she said, answering him in English.
‘You knew?’
‘Anyone who buys me that stupid cocktail needs to see Gilbert,’ she said. ‘Somebody told you. Come with me.’
She made for the dance floor and held out her pale arms. Once more he wondered what was happening to him. He began to dance with her, a foxtrot, and she eased him closer to her body. ‘It is better to go to see Gilbert by dancing,’ she said in a not particularly confidential voice. ‘Walking straight to the office could create suspicion.’
‘Are there Germans in?’ he whispered.
‘Not yet. They come later. It is the French I worry about, monsieur. We have a black-market war at the moment and there has been enough trouble.’
They reached the far side of the room. The band hiding behind garish lights played indomitably. She guided him off the floor and led him without hurry to a padded door in the shadows. She knocked and went in immediately. ‘For you,’ she said to a perspiring fat man in a sagging dinner jacket. He was standing to one side of the desk upon which was an anti-tank rocket launcher.
‘A beauty, eh?’ he said as he glanced up at Paget. ‘Made in Czechoslovakia. They always make the best’
He was unsurprised to see Paget. ‘I thought you would have been here before this,’ he said.
‘I had trouble,’ replied Paget. He nodded to the menacing weapon on the desk. ‘Should you be displaying that?’
Gilbert laughed. He had a moustache which he seemed to be trying to sniff up his nose. ‘It is okay, monsieur,’ he assured. ‘The Germans will not be in yet. Last night, after business, we had an expert who came in and gave a dozen of us a lecture on how to use the weapon.’ He tapped a box with his foot. ‘We have twelve rocket shells also. Each one would pierce a tank. And we hope for another launcher. Please, monsieur, take a seat.’
Staring at the lean launcher at eye-level, Paget felt his way to a chair by the desk. Gilbert leaned over, picked up the weapon with heavy forearms and eased it on to the floor. ‘I must not leave it there,’ he said. ‘You will think I’m showing off.’
Without asking, he poured two glasses of brandy from a bottle on a side-table. ‘You seem to have the Germans all worked out,’ said Paget. ‘Everybody does.’
‘We think so. Then sometimes they turn nasty and execute someone, often the wrong person. But they are weary, monsieur, they want to go home. If they have a home when they get there. They have no spirit. They will fight,’ he patted his heart, ‘but not with this.’
Paget said: ‘The way things go on here, as far as I can see, the German intelligence service must be pretty thick.’
‘Services,’ corrected Gilbert. ‘Intelligence services. There’s the Abwehr, the GFP, the SD and three more at least. They all work against each other. Piggledy-higgledy. They do more damage to each other than we could ever do to them. Each one knows something but will not tell the others. Jealousies, betrayals, impotence … I mean, of course, incompetence. It is worse even than the French resistance.’
‘Don’t you want to check my identity?’ suggested Paget.
Gilbert flapped a hand. ‘If you like. It makes no difference. Many people come through here without papers. I know who is who. Why did you come?’
Paget was dismayed. ‘You don’t know?’
‘I knew you were due, but I forgot why. I am very busy. Apart from the espionage, I have this nightclub to run.’
‘The RAF are to bomb the prison,’ Paget said, looking for astonishment in Gilbert’s face but finding none. ‘They believe they can hit the outer wall and facilitate the escape of the French resistance members who are under sentence of death there. Seventy, I believe.’
‘Sixty-eight,’ sniffed Gilbert. ‘The odd two were in the sickbay when it happened. Imagine being in the sickbay when you are under a death sentence.’
Paget was stunned. ‘It’s already happened?’
Gilbert nodded. ‘Excellent bombing, too. Everyone escaped through the hole in the wall.’
‘But … but … I was supposed to come here to coordinate the escapees.’ Gilbert pulled his moustache from his nostrils and smiled wryly. Paget went on: ‘To … well, sort them out. To make sure they were dispersed and not recaptured.’
Gilbert laughed as though he had been told a genuine joke. His shoulders continued to shake as he poured two more brandies. ‘Well, it was all done without your help, monsieur. Everyone is now tuckered away, as you say. I’m afraid your people in London are sometimes out of touch with what is happening. Maybe even with real life. It’s like one of the games they play at your noble schools … public schools, is it?’
‘So I came for nothing.’ Paget’s voice was a whisper.
Gilbert appeared sorry for him. ‘Monsieur,’ he said, leaning on the table. ‘Everything in this war is one grand fuck-up. Well, most things. Both sides. The side that has the fewest fuck-ups will win, with the help of superior forces, of course.’
He sighed. ‘This whole resistance business is raddled with it. Many French people want nothing to do with the resistance. They want a quiet life. Then someone who likes to make a name assassinates some Nazi and what happens? Twenty-five perfectly good Frenchmen are taken and shot. You have to weigh up the consequences.’
He finished his brandy with a gulp. ‘Sometimes the resistance fights itself,’ he continued, spreading his large hands. ‘Communists, who didn’t even join in until Hitler invaded Russia, Republicans, Gaullists, Corsicans, Spaniards, Fascists even. Believe me, monsieur, the liberation of France may only be the beginning of a civil war.’
He took in Paget’s downcast expression. ‘All the sabotage we have been able to arrange, sometimes at great risk, has been little beyond an annoyance to the Boche.’ His voice became suddenly encouraging: ‘The real action will be when the invasion happens. Then the resistance will come into its glory. Every rail track, every junction, every signal-box on the French railways will be disabled. The Germans will be attacked from the backside at every opportunity.’ He leaned over and patted the rocket launcher.
‘I think I’ll have to come back later,’ said Paget caustically.
‘Once the signal is given,’ agreed Gilbert. ‘When we hear on your BBC that terrible poetry from Verlaine.’
Slowly Paget said: ‘You know about Verlaine?’
‘The sobbing of violins in the autumn,’ recited Gilbert. ‘Everybody knows it. The Germans also, I expect. It is difficult to keep any secret in France these days.’
The Englishman, still taking it in, said: ‘I wasn’t aware of the exact words. It could be a trick. Maybe it will be replaced by something else nearer the invasion.’
Gilbert smiled thinly. ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon,’ he suggested.
‘Ding dong dell, pussy down the well,’ sighed Paget.
‘Anything will do,’ said Gilbert. ‘Three blonde mice is a good one.’ He stood up and patted Paget on the shoulder. ‘I am sorry it has been such a disappointment. We must make arrangements to get you back to England.’
Paget’s eye was caught by a wall calendar. It said: ‘Avril 1.’
‘I came here once before,’ he said.
‘Oh, sure. You were in the Lysander that hit the sheep and caught fire. We pulled you out.’
‘No, I got out myself. You pulled out the pilot and he was dead.’
‘That’s correct, now I remember. The sheep suffered too. Everyone in the area had mutton that night.’
‘Is Antoinette still in this region?’
Gilbert appeared puzzled but then said: ‘Antoinette Barre. Beautiful, eh? She was the one who sheltered you afterwards.’
‘Yes.’
‘She has gone to Bordeaux, I think. Yes, Bordeaux. She is doing good work for us. She is very well informed.’
‘Good contacts?’
‘The best. She has married a German officer.’