She walked out of there with her chin up, of course she did, but she felt hollowed out somehow for the rest of the morning. She had her head handed to her by an instructor she thought had liked her when she misidentified the rank insignia of a German tank officer. Worse still, the instructor took her mistake as an opportunity to point out to them all how mistakes like that could cost them their lives. She hardly kept it together as he banged on and on about how he expected more of her, how they all did, and about the grim and protracted deaths that could await her and anyone who worked with her if she ever made an error like that again.
At dinner she sat alone. Marshall dropped a sheet of paper beside her with a crude childlike drawing of a man in one of the officer’s caps of the Gestapo with an arrow pointing to it and the words “NAZI BAD!” in block capitals. Cheap little arsehole. She screwed it up and threw it at him and he and his little band of brothers giggled. The whispering, the laughter, the long stares. She longed to gouge out his snake-green eyes. She turned back to her food. An apple core caught the side of her head and splattered into the cold gravy of whatever it was they were eating. The slop in this place. She spun round, but Marshall and his merry band were already leaving. Instead a tall, slightly older man was sitting on the bench behind her and shrugged at her as she turned.
“I think they throw apples because they’re still cross about Eve.” He put out his hand, and she shook it. “I’m Denis Rake, but my friends call me Denden.”
No snide remark, no suppressed laughter, no leering stare slithering its way from her head to her toes. Good.
“Fancy a drink, Denden?”
Nancy had been surprised at how easy it was to bring alcohol up here, and how easy it was to get more. It took her until her third week up north to realize the instructors were trying to get them all drunk to see which ones would talk. Fine by her.
She took Denden back to her dorm and fetched out the good bottle of French brandy the barman at the Café Royale had sold her before she came up north. Denden stared up and down the empty dorm.
“At least you get some privacy with your isolation, dearie. I suppose they thought the boys couldn’t control themselves if you bunked with them.”
“That’s about it,” she said, and fetched a couple of water glasses from the bathroom. “The billets officer went pink to his ears when I said I wanted to stick with the men, mumbled something about the showers.”
“Yet he expects me to control myself!” Denden rolled his eyes. Nancy frowned slightly. He was a good-looking man, thin and wiry, but then they all were after six weeks of forced marches and runs in the Highlands and those bloody assault courses. He watched her with quiet curiosity for a moment. “Yes, I’m queer as a coot. That’s why some of the boys don’t like us, because we both like cock. Unless you are a lover of lady parts?”
Nancy had met a fair number of queer men in Paris, thought they were good company by and large. And a homosexual was the only person in the world Nancy’s mother hated more than Nancy herself.
“Only my own. Come on, let’s find a nicer spot to drink.” At the door she stopped and turned round again. “Denden, how can you be so…? I mean, I can’t hide the fact I’m a woman, but you could hide.”
“Yes, I could, but if I can’t be who I am the goose-steppers already have their jackboot on my throat. Besides, I mean, all that worship of the masculine nonsense, half of those leather-clad krauts are queer as I am.”
She laughed, and realized it was the first time she had done so in weeks. A real laugh, not a playing along, fake it till you make it laugh. It felt good.
They went out into the grounds and after some debate and a couple of wrong turns, clambered up onto the high bar of the assault course, then, wrapping their legs around the rope net for security, started doing their drinking seriously.
Denden was a hell of a mimic, his voice swelling with aggression as he repeated the mantras of unarmed combat, oozing weary disdain in the nasal cockney of the sabotage trainer, giving a worried twitch to the long Norfolk vowels of the King’s Gamekeeper at Sandringham who taught them how to poach rabbits and game birds.
“I’m really not sure what King George would make of this,” he said, catching the man’s voice and head shake so perfectly Nancy almost fell off the bar.
“You should be in the theater, Denden!”
“Oh, I was,” he answered, taking a swig from the bottle—they’d never got round to using the glasses. “Well, the circus actually. Tightrope, clowning.”
“You’re bullshitting me.”
He unwrapped his legs from the netting and in a single movement lifted himself until he was standing on their wooden perch, still holding the half-empty bottle of brandy in his left hand. Then he lifted his arms above his head and pirouetted in place, before leaning forward, one leg lifted straight behind him, arms out, and held the pose for one, two, three seconds. Nancy could hardly breathe. Then he threw the bottle up in the air, making it spin. Nancy yelped, but before she knew it he was sitting next to her again just as he had been and had snatched the spinning bottle out of the air without spilling a drop.
Nancy whooped and applauded. Then, as he bowed, she grabbed the bottle off him.
“How did you end up in the circus?” she asked and drank deep.
“Mum didn’t want me around,” he said, staring out into the silvery darkness. “She knew there was something different about me from the age of four, so when the circus rolled through town she handed me over to the ringmaster saying, ‘He’s a freak, he belongs to you.’”
Nancy took another pull at the bottle.
“Thank all the saints she did,” he went on. “They were good to me at the circus. Taught me to do tricks but made sure I could read and write too. The palm reader taught me history and the trapeze artists taught me French and Spanish. We toured a lot in France. Spent half my winters there since I was eight years old.”
Nancy felt a bubble of jealousy pop in her bloodstream. Denden yanked the bottle out of her hand again.
“Much good it will do me,” he said as he released it. “Not sure this lot are going to let me go back to France.”
“Why not?” Nancy turned to him.
“I hate guns. Won’t use the damn things. That’s not too bad, I’m excellent on the radio if I do say so myself, but Timmons is the real problem. Says I’m not fit because I refuse to hide my ‘homosexual illness.’ He’s sure to fail me out. Thanks, freak, but no thanks. Piss off back to the Molly house.”
The burn of her own interview rose in her throat. Bastard trick cyclist. “Denden, want to do something foolish?”
If they really wanted to keep the files secure, they wouldn’t leave them behind two pretty simple locks in a house full of students they’d been training to slip through security a lot tighter than this. That was what Nancy reasoned, anyway.
Once in Timmons’s office they drew the heavy blackout curtains, switched on the desk lamp and made themselves comfortable. The filing cabinet was locked too, and Timmons had even had the sense to place scraps of paper into the drawers which would fall out if they were opened. Denden collected them up to pop them back in later, then he pulled out their files.
“I get excellent marks in combat, tactics, explosives, lock-picking…” Nancy read off her marks with a certain pride from Timmons’s chair.
Denden was leaning up against the cabinet. “‘Rake’s among the best radio operators we’ve seen, but—’ Christ. A one in marksmanship.”
“Well, I got a two on the jump training,” Nancy said, the pride draining out of her voice.
“Bugger that,” Denden said, and set his file on the desk top next to hers, then examined the pens, laid out in a little neat rank on the right-hand side of the desk. “Yes, you’ll do,” he said, picking up one of the pens.
“Denden?”
“What?” he said. “They sent me on a forger’s course too. I’m just having a little practice.”
With a casual flick his one in marksmanship became a seven, and Nancy’s two in jump training was magically upgraded to an eight.
Nancy offered silent applause and Denden grinned shyly, and turned the page.
“Wonderful. The report of the good Doctor Timmons himself. ‘Rake’s shameless perversion is a danger to troop cohesion.’ Not at all. I bring men together.”
She giggled and looked at her own, reading it aloud with a breathless, eyelash-fluttering intensity. “‘Wake is extraordinarily motivated to return to France…’”
“Bless, I think that’s his version of nice,” Denden said. “Do we have any brandy left?”
“Shush, Denden. I’m not done. ‘… but this bravado masks deep insecurity. The guilt over her husband’s… her husband’s capture…’” And just like that it wasn’t funny any more. Not a bit. Where was Henri? What was he feeling right now? “‘… coupled with childhood trauma, compounds the danger of grave instability.’”
Denden put his hand on her shoulder.
“Come on, ducks, that’s enough.” It was, but she couldn’t help herself. She shook him off.
“‘It is my judgment that she is not fit for command and for all her commitment could put herself and her men at risk in the field.’”
The room felt very quiet and outside in the grounds an owl hooted at the moonlit shadows.
“Psychobabble horseshit,” Denden said firmly. “Whatever happened to ‘anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’? And, for the sake of all holy fuckery, you are supposed to be putting people at risk in the field! You have to be able to send men out to sabotage Nazi factories, ambush convoys! Do they think blowing up a train under enemy fire is risk free?”
It was a good speech and kind of him, but it was no good. They were going to wash her out and she’d be stuck in some typing pool, dying inside every day and drinking herself to oblivion every night while the Nazis did what they pleased to France, to her friends, to Henri. And worst of all, they might be right to keep her out of the way, where she could do less damage. She blinked.
“Denden, what are you doing?”
Denden had lifted down Timmons’s portable typewriter from the top of the filing cabinet and set it on the table, then found his blank report forms in the top drawer.
“Budge up, my pretty, and take a quick peek in the corridor will you, in case anyone’s lolling about? I think it’s time we told our own stories.”
Twenty minutes later, Nancy was feeling a lot better. A thought occurred to her.
“Denden,” she said, tucking the slips of paper back into the filing cabinet drawers so Timmons wouldn’t spot someone had been rifling through his business, “got any plans for tomorrow night?”