The first day of training was the worst because she’d been so damned pleased to get here. The weeks since her interview with Buckmaster had been torture—more waiting, jumping on the post and afraid to go out in case the telephone rang.
Eventually the papers—more papers—arrived. She packed a bag according to instructions, filled out the travel chit and, having sent a note to Campbell giving her new contact address as instructed and telling him to keep the flat on, she left for Scotland.
Arriving had been fine, and the instructor who had met her at the station and driven her through the long dusk of late summer in Scotland to the training camp seemed decent. The camp was some aristocrat’s hunting lodge on the edge of a loch, surrounded by great peaks, blue in the haze, and the sunset—pinks and purples smudged across the sky—had been magnificent. She was the only woman in this group, the instructor told her, looking at her sideways, and she’d shrugged. She was used to being the only woman in a group of men after working as a correspondent in Paris. She understood men. She tried to protest when they showed her to an empty bunk room though, but they weren’t budging. There was no way she’d be allowed to muck in with the blokes.
Still, the next morning when she reported for her first training session in her PT kit at 6 a.m. it had been with a glad heart. Then she saw him. The redhead. And he saw her. One or two of the men shook her hand or nodded to her in a friendly enough way, but before the sergeant who would lead them on the run had wandered out to join them, the redhead had gathered a little group around him and they were shooting looks her way and laughing.
The redhead was rubbing his eyes as if crying. “Ooh, I’ve lost my handbag,” she heard him saying in a high whine. “Please will you fetch it for me?” Then he made more fake sobbing noises and they all laughed.
She should have gone and smacked that grin off his face right there and then, and told them all what a whiny little shit he’d been during the crossing, but just as she was balling her fists the sergeant arrived. Do it anyway? No, they’d kick her out before she’d even got started. She’d have to go back to Buckmaster and beg for a secretarial job and that would kill her. Patience, Nancy.
“Mr. Marshall, if you are quite ready?” the sergeant said, and the redhead grinned and stood at ease. So that was his bloody name.
Nancy had known the run was going to hurt, but she had no idea how much. She thought all the traveling around, the bike riding with radio parts and messages would have toughened her up, but half these guys were in the services already and had been doing PT runs for years. She just managed to keep up, in the final third of the group—never last, but near enough to it to hear the sergeant bullying the stragglers just behind her. He was an odd, square little man three inches shorter than Nancy, but apparently fashioned by God to run up hills like he was having a gentle stroll down the high street. How did the man have that much air in his lungs?
About twenty minutes in, or it may have been three, or an hour and a half—Nancy lost her sense of time pretty quickly when she couldn’t breathe—she noticed Marshall, who had started off at the front of the pack, dropping backward, letting others overtake him. Soon he was running alongside her. He flashed her a quick grin and for a stupid moment, Nancy thought he was going to apologize.
“So your name’s Nancy?” he said. “You doing OK?”
“Fine.” It was a struggle to speak, but she managed that much.
“Just, it must be so hard for you…” The bastard wasn’t even panting. “After all, you have to carry those big bouncing titties with you.”
He said it loud enough to draw glances and grins from the other men around them. He had his hands in front of his body now, cradling imaginary breasts with a look of sorrow and struggle on his face, tongue sticking out, making his fake tits bounce.
“Fuck you,” she said. Not original, but it was short.
He stuck his foot out sideways, catching her mid-air and sending her sprawling into the mud. She landed hard, face in the filth and the air knocked out of her. She lifted her head and saw him easily moving back through the pack to lead it again. The other runners flowed past her.
“Get up, Wake!”
The sergeant was standing over her. Running on the bloody spot.
“I…”
“Just get up!”
She pushed herself up to her knees, then onto her feet. Her T-shirt was black with mud and clung to her. Her hair was plastered to her face and she could feel blood on her cheek.
The sergeant looked at her critically. “You’ll live. Now run.”
And she did. She finished last, of course. No way could she make up the time she had lost, and then because she had to shower, she was late to her first class. She apologized to the instructor and went to find a seat. Marshall and his newly formed crew of grinning sycophants gathered round him were all rubbing imaginary tears from their eyes.
That set the pattern—the assault courses where someone accidentally shoved her off the balance bar, or stood on her hand as they scrambled over the rope net. The sniggering became a constant buzz in her ears that followed her from the mess hall to the training grounds to the classroom. She gritted her teeth and took it.
After her third run, and she made it through that one without getting slathered in mud, the sergeant called her aside and handed her a role of bandages from his pocket and a couple of safety pins.
“Had a wee lassie who was blessed in the chest area here last year, Wake,” he said. “She bandaged herself up before the runs. Said it gave her more support than just a brassiere.”
He flushed to his ears when he said brassiere, but he was right. It helped.
The room had been stripped of all its pre-war furniture. Pale spots on the wall showed where paintings had hung in those unimaginable days. Henri would have liked it then, probably stuffed with leather armchairs and old books. Now the only furniture was the usual metal table, folding metal chairs and a pair of gunmetal-gray filing cabinets. And this guy. Holding up a messy inkblot and staring at her over it. Pale blue eyes and thinning hair. Dr. Timmons.
“What do you see?”
“An ink blot, and you staring at me,” she answered, putting her hands in her pockets and stretching out her legs in front of her. It wasn’t very comfortable, but she wasn’t going to sit up straight like a good little girl in the schoolroom for this man. A psychiatrist. Trick cyclists they called them here. Even the instructors called them that.
He released one edge of his inkblot sheet to write something down.
“Now you’re just throwing good ink after bad.”
She turned to look out of the window. A group of men were being hurried across the driveway in their PT kits. God, she’d rather go with them all the way up a mountain in the pissing rain than this.
“This is a test, Nancy,” he said. “Mental health is just as important as physical. Perhaps more so, in your field. What do you see?”
“A dragon.”
He smiled without warmth and set the paper down. “You are the third recruit from your section to say that. Haven’t you the imagination to come up with something else?”
She shrugged and crossed her ankles.
“Very well. Let’s do this the old-fashioned way. Tell me about Australia. Your childhood.”
She blinked. All those times the instructors had gone on about knowing your cover story in the field, and she’d completely forgotten to prepare one for this guy. Bugger. She was there again, in her mother’s house. Her older siblings had left home, so it was just the two of them. Not speaking. She couldn’t remember one conversation with her mother. Just the lectures. How Nancy was ugly, stupid, sin in human form.
“I was perfectly happy.”
“Lots of friends?” Timmons asked, still making notes.
“Oodles,” Nancy replied. She could feel the heat of the sun as she walked home, moving more and more slowly the closer she got to the ratty clapboard house. Her mother would be waiting when she got there. Not with love, or warmth, but with another monologue of complaint and accusation, salted with Bible quotes. Everything was Nancy’s fault and Nancy was God’s punishment, though Mrs. Wake couldn’t understand what she had done to deserve such an ugly, unnatural, disobedient child.
“And what about your parents?” Timmons had his head on one side, like the macaw in the pet shop on the way to school. Nancy had always thought it was judging her too.
“Terribly, terribly happy,” Nancy said in her best upper-class English accent.
Timmons sighed. “Why did your father run out on his wife and six children then? You were, what, five years old? Have you seen him since?”
“She drove him out,” Nancy said sharply. “The others had left home and she was a bully and a bigot and he couldn’t take it any more.”
“So it was her fault?”
What did this have to do with anything? All that training to shoot instinctively and from the hip was working. She was itching to shoot this bastard; she could feel it in her fingertips.
“Of course it was her fault. Daddy was a prince. He was funny and kind and he absolutely adored me.”
That was true. She had felt that love, and the memory of it kept her sane until she met Henri.
Timmons was writing again. “Not enough to take you with him though.” That hit her like a punch to the gut. “He stayed until all the other children had left home, but couldn’t do the same for you, could he?”
One. Two. The double tap. The little sandy-haired balding bastard. She said nothing.
“You flew the proverbial coop at sixteen, persuaded your family doctor you were eighteen so you could get a passport and run away. So you were an enterprising little girl, good at twisting men around your little finger.”
How the hell did they find this shit out? So what if she had? And she’d made a success of it too. Made friends, learned her trade and had a ball, then fallen in love with Henri, the cherry on top of her life.
“Only a fool would have stayed in that house to be bullied.”
He linked his hands behind his head, pushed his elbows backward to stretch his back. His throat was totally exposed, and his sides. With what Nancy had learned over the last few weeks she could kill him in a moment, and that sad weary sigh could be his last breath.
“Yet here you are, Nancy.”
“What?”
“Half the men hate you and you are continually bullied. And yet you persist.”
She swung her legs back under her and leaned over the desk toward him.
“Because I want to see those fucking Nazis punished. It’s that simple. I’ve seen it. In Austria. In France. They are scum. They need to be wiped out, I need to wipe them out.” She tapped his notebook with her finger. “Now, erase the ‘fucking,’ add a bit of pomp and patriotism, jot it down, we’re finished. Happy?”
He met her gaze steadily and Nancy withdrew.
“You need to wipe out the Nazis, do you, Nancy? Well, I’m sure we’ll all be terribly grateful. But you are part of a team, part of an army, part of a country.”
He sighed again. Damn it, that was irritating.
“You might be a good agent, Nancy. Section D needs independent thinkers, but you also need to realize you are part of something larger than yourself. It may come as something of a shock, but the war isn’t about you.”
Oh, enough already.
“You think I’m doing this because I’m angry Daddy left and Mummy thought I was some black toad squatting on her life?”
He glanced sideways at the inkblot. “It does look a bit like a toad, doesn’t it? Interesting.” He wrote something else down. “Nancy, listen to me. I think you feel like you need the suffering here and the suffering that is in all likelihood waiting for you in France, maybe not consciously, but you do. That you deserve it. That you are the monster your mother told you you were.”
Nancy clenched her fists in her pockets. She could feel the muscles tightening in her jaw. “They actually pay you for this?”
When she was little and things were very bad, she’d hide in the crawlspace under the house and read Anne of Green Gables by the fierce sunlight filtering through the wooden boards of the porch until the pain and anger bled out of her. It was still her favorite novel. The only novel she really liked, actually. She’d put down her book and leave it all there, the rage and fear and self-loathing, under the house. She was sure it would blow up the whole place one day; all those foul feelings she’d left stinking under the porch would ignite, and BOOM! All gone. Then she reached sixteen and out of the blue an aunt sent her a check, and she decided she couldn’t wait for the explosion any longer, so had left all that crap behind instead. Now she took everything Timmons had just said, tied it up in brown paper and stuck it down there too.
She wet her lips, then spoke quietly, reasonably, as if she and Dr. Timmons were discussing bus routes at a London cocktail party. “Ever thought of getting out from behind your desk and fighting yourself, Dr. Timmons?”
He raised one eyebrow. “Like that, is it, Nancy? Very well.” He wrote again, sighed again.
“Just do me one favor, Nancy. Do try and prevent your self-serving bullshit getting anyone killed, won’t you? Dismissed.”