Nancy looked at her watch. They were making her wait. It had taken twenty-four days to get all her paperwork sorted out, twenty-three days more than she needed to get bored of her new freedom and start working out how to get back to France.
Henri had not made it out and to London yet. She made sure the flat was ready for him when he arrived, complete with his favorite brandy and a bottle of champagne in the cupboard. And a pair of slippers and a decent shirt. All of it was black market of course, and horribly expensive, but she wanted him to be comfortable as soon as he arrived. But she couldn’t wait for him. Couldn’t sit there doing nothing but stare at the four walls.
She had arrived at the Headquarters of the Free French Forces in Carlton Gardens at 9 a.m. precisely, having walked briskly from her flat in Piccadilly in her best heels and a well-cut suit, which showed off her curves without looking like it was supposed to show off her curves. Batting her eyelashes at the guards had got her as far as the waiting room, or rather a chair in the marbled hallway under the eye of a Frenchwoman with reading glasses. The old trout scowled at Nancy, but she had an obsequious smile ready for any man in uniform marching through the hall with a fistful of papers in his hand and a self-conscious “here I am, saving France” look on his face.
Nancy looked at her watch. Then at the woman. Then at her watch again.
“Madame…” Nancy said.
The woman was too wrinkled and slow to be a trout. The woman held up her hand, and Nancy decided she looked more like a tortoise directing traffic.
“They know you are waiting, Madame”—she adjusted her reading glasses and looked down at her notepad—“Fiocca.”
“But…”
“Do you have some other urgent appointment?” the tortoise said, opening her eyes very wide.
Nancy crossed her arms and slouched in her chair. No, she didn’t, and that was exactly the damned problem. After months of every moment being packed with danger and activity, she had exactly nowhere to be at all.
“Madame Fiocca?”
Nancy looked up. A thin, olive-skinned man in a lieutenant’s uniform was hesitating in front of her. His shoes were as polished as the marble floor. She nodded.
“If you would follow me.”
The office he led her into must have been the cupboard where the charlady stored her mops in peacetime. Still, the officer had managed to squeeze in an oversized antique desk and a good chair for himself. Nancy got a metal folding chair which squeaked when she sat on it. The shelves where the char used to keep her dustpans and polishing cloths were packed with rows of manila files. She stared about her.
“I thought there was a paper shortage,” she said.
He ignored the remark and continued reading the file he had open on the table in front of him. Her file.
“I’m right here, you know,” she said after five minutes. “If you want to know what I did in France, you can ask me.”
He glanced up. “Yes, we’ve had reports you were quite helpful. The Gestapo even gave you a pet name. How charming.”
“Charming? You think that’s charming?”
He smiled at her. Big mistake. The frustration that had been building as she had waited and waited and waited burned loose.
“Do you also think it’s charming that the Gestapo are holding my husband? Do you think it’s charming that I risked my neck and his a thousand times in Marseille, that I have three years’ worth of experience dodging the Nazis while you’ve been arranging your paperwork? When was the last time you saw action? I was outrunning bullets last month and I need to get back out there. Now. So sign me up and I’ll leave you to your filing.”
His smile froze. “Madame, the Free French Forces do not accept women. You are by nature unsuited for warfare, it’s a scientific fact.”
For crying out loud, she thought. “You’re a scientist too? Amazing. I just told you, I’ve been at war ever since the Nazis rolled into France, so I guess science is wrong.”
“But your womanhood—”
“By which you mean what? My vagina? Does my vagina mean I can’t hold a gun? Run a safe house? Smuggle money, men, ammunition? Trek across a mountain range? All my vagina means is I’ve learned to do all of that and more in high heels.”
He leaned backward in his chair and put his fingertips together and looked down his nose.
“I am sorry, Madame. The operations of the Free French Forces can’t be compromised by a person so obviously emotionally unbalanced, the way you speak of your…” He flushed to his roots.
“Vagina, vagina, vagina—it’s a scien-fucking-tific term!” Nancy shouted.
He glanced nervously around him as if expecting the walls to collapse in shock and tried to rally. “Given your knowledge of anatomy, perhaps you should be a nurse, give succor to our brave fighting men.”
“I’d succor them if I could find any brave fighting men!” She sprang up, knocking her metal chair backward and pulling open the door to the marble hall. The officer flinched. “And I’d gladly take a scalpel to your balls too, but I suspect they’ve already been removed!”
Her voice echoed in a satisfying fashion in the high hallway and she slammed the door behind her. The tortoise was staring at her open-mouthed.
“Keep his bollocks in your drawer with your pencil sharpener, do you?” Nancy said, and she swept out onto Carlton Gardens, round the corner and into St. James’s Park without looking back.
After an hour of walking round the park in tight miserable circles, past the show allotments and the anti-aircraft guns, she started to see the funny side, so she strode into the Red Lion off Duke Street, halfway back to her flat, bought drinks for every man in uniform and told the story. She did it well. Every new arrival had to hear the tale again, and the barmaid kept giggling along at the new bits Nancy added as the story bloomed. As the lunchtime rush reached its height, the tortoise lady had become a terrifying gargoyle and the officer a quivering wreck of a man with sweaty palms and a nervous twitch in his eye.
“Then he called it my womanhood!” Nancy said, lifting her glass.
“Beginning to think that’s where you store all your booze,” a sergeant muttered, trying to light a cigarette with the swaying flame held out by one of his friends.
“I volunteer to scout the territory,” a fresh-faced American said with a brave attempt at a wink.
“What are you, nineteen?” Nancy replied, blowing out the wavering flame and offering the sergeant one from her own lighter with a steady hand. “You wouldn’t even know where to plant your flag.”
The men cheered and thumped the American on the back until he choked on his beer. Nancy looked at the lighter in her hand. She’d never smoked—she’d been too afraid when she was living on a journalist’s wage in Paris of burning holes in her one good dress to start—but she always carried a lighter. It gave you a chance to talk to people. Something about taking that offered fire, bent over your hand, meant they were more inclined to talk to you, take you into their confidence. Henri had laughed hard when he’d told her that, called her a witch and the next week given her a gold Cartier model engraved with her first name. She’d lost it with her other jewels and papers escaping from the train.
She heard him now, his laugh, among all the cheers of these strangers and wondered what he’d think of her interview in Carlton Gardens. Oh, he’d have laughed too, done himself an injury and then boasted about his impossible wife to his friends, no doubt. But he’d have understood, too, her frustration, her rage at the narrow stupidity of these men. How useless and angry she felt right now.
“Then what, Nancy? You got to hear this, George,” the sergeant said. “George, he said she should be a nurse, can you fucking imagine it? Isn’t that what he said, Nancy?”
Nancy looked at their faces, saw Henri, saw Antoine and Philippe. They waited, a little unsure as to what was coming next. She beamed at them.
“Damn right, he did. Mildred?”
The barmaid set down the glass she was polishing. “What can I get you, Nancy?”
“Champagne all round! We’re drinking to my medical career!”
The crowd cheered again.
The pub was supposed to close between two and six, but no one wanted to go home and once they’d got one of the local bobbies in to warm himself up with a brandy no one tried to make them. When Nancy staggered out into the shadowy dark she had made at least a dozen more lifelong friends and felt lonely as all hell. Not that she took up any of the offers, chivalrous or hopeful, to see her home.
The London night air felt cold and damp on her face—not the salty tang of Marseille, but a swampy, coal-soaked damp that would get into your bones if you let it. Behind her a figure moved between the shadows, keeping her in sight. She missed her footing on the curb, pulled herself upright and set off across the square, looking at the paving stones in front of her, swinging her handbag, then sauntered down the shortcut in the side alley, singing a song the Scottish sergeant had taught her.
The man following her quickened his pace, keen not to lose her in the growing dark. He stepped into the alley and paused. His quarry had disappeared. Then he froze, feeling the cold sting of a blade just below his Adam’s apple.
“You’ve been following me since Carlton Gardens,” Nancy whispered in his ear. “Now who the hell are you?”
“You really can take your drink, can’t you?” he said. He had a Scottish accent. “That little stumble was just a show for me, was it?”
Nancy pressed the blade into the throat, not quite enough to break the skin, but close. “I asked you a question,” she said. “Why have you been following me all day?”
“Madame Fiocca, I’ve been following you all week,” the man said calmly, then stamped down hard on the top of her right foot. The pain shot up her leg and at the same moment he grabbed onto her forearm and bent forward, throwing her over his shoulder. She landed awkwardly on her hip, and the knife spun out of her hand and across the alley.
“You utter bugger, that’s ripped my stocking!” Nancy gasped as soon as she had breath to speak again. She pulled herself up on her elbows.
The man laughed and put out his hand. “My apologies. My name is Ian Garrow.”
She stared at his shadow hard for a moment, then took his hand, and he hauled her to her feet.
“I know you,” she said, rubbing her hip. “You worked with Marie. You made it out then?”
“I did,” he replied. “And just in time. Last I heard, Marie is still safe, but a lot of the network has been rolled out. Very few are getting through now.” He paused. “I was told about your stunt pushing that lad into the river. Apparently Pilar told several people. Pretty remarkable given she rarely says anything at all.”
“He whined.”
Garrow took out a cigarette and waited a moment. Nancy didn’t offer him the use of her lighter, so he struck a match and in its brief flare she saw his hollow cheeks and long nose.
Nancy felt a burst of hope in the middle of her chest. “Any other news out of Marseille?”
“Some, but nothing about your husband, I’m afraid.”
Suddenly Nancy was sore and tired and miserable again. Maybe it was drinking all the bathtub gin in New York after she’d first left Australia, but for some reason Nancy could never stay drunk for long. The champagne buzz from the bar, the thrill of the laughter and chat, even the excitement of the brief and humiliating fight with Garrow had left her.
“Mrs. Fiocca,” Garrow said quietly, “do you really want to fight?”
“Dear God, I think I’ll go mad if I can’t, Garrow,” she replied.
He put his hand in his pocket and drew out a card and passed it to her. It felt like a business card, though she couldn’t read it in the darkness.
“Come to that address, tomorrow, say three o’clock?” Then he put his hand to the brim of his hat and walked away from her into the shadows.