His name was Potter, which seemed unlikely. He had a querulous, fluting voice and a distant manner, as though perhaps she was not really suitable for his requirements but he would see her anyway, out of politeness. “Thank you for coming all this way,” he said. “And for taking time off from your work. Do, please, make yourself at home.”
The exhortation seemed impossible to fulfil: the room itself was stripped almost bare. There was the space where a bed might have been—a headboard was attached to the wall and there were two little shelves that would have been bedside tables—but apart from that the only furniture was a table and two chairs. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling.
She sat, neither forward on the edge of the chair nor back as though she were in the sitting room at home, neither one thing nor the other but upright, relaxed, and watchful, while Potter sat opposite her and smiled benignly. He was an undistinguished-looking man, the kind that her father called a bank-manager type. Except bank managers always had moustaches and wore dark suits; but this man was clean-shaven and wearing a tweed jacket, with a waistcoat. A headmaster, she decided. A headmaster about to interview a difficult pupil, the kind of head who asks questions rather than delivers lectures. The kind that lets you tie yourself in knots. The Socratic method.
“Now, I expect you are wondering why I’ve invited you here …?”
His letter had asked her not to come in uniform. She’d thought that strange at the time, even slightly peculiar. Why not in uniform, when the whole damn world was in uniform? So she’d chosen something plain and businesslike—a navy skirt and jacket with a white blouse, and the only decent pair of shoes she had managed to bring from Geneva. She’d tried to avoid using them too much in the last couple of years. They were too precious. And silk stockings, she wore silk stockings. Her last pair.
“You said something about French in your letter. You had use for my language ability.”
“Exactly. Peut-être …” Potter paused and smiled deprecatingly. “Peut-être nous devrions parler français?”
There was an English accent and a certain woodenness about the phrasing, as though he was using the language consciously rather than naturally. But he did it well enough. She shrugged and followed his lead, slipping from one language to the other with that strange facility that she had and her father could never manage. “The thing is, Papa,” she had told him once, “for you it’s two languages. But it’s not for me. For me there’s only one language. I simply use the bits of it that are appropriate at the time.” And so the rest of this conversation, a very guarded, evasive conversation, was in French, Potter with his quaint formalities, Marian with her rapid flutter of colloquialisms.
“I must emphasise from the start,” he warned her, “that the work would be of a most secret nature. Everything about it, even our meeting here today, must be held in absolute confidence. It all comes under the Official Secrets Act. You do understand that, don’t you? I believe you have already signed the act because of your work in the WAAF. But we do like to be sure.”
So she signed the form once more, a solemn little ceremony like a registry-office marriage, for which Mr Potter lent his fountain pen and waited reverently for the ink to dry.
“So tell me a little about yourself, Miss Sutro. The name, for example. Not Jewish, is it?”
“Sutro? It may have been once, I don’t really know. My father is C of E, and his father was even a vicar. Which led to a certain amount of difficulty when Papa married my mother because she is Roman Catholic. That’s how we were brought up—RC.”
“That all sounds most regular. But one has to be sure.”
“That I’m not a Jew? You don’t want Jews?”
“We have to be sure that people of the, er, Jewish persuasion are fully aware of the risks.”
“What risks?”
There was a small tremor of impatience in his voice. “Perhaps I should be asking the questions, Miss Sutro. I wonder, how did you acquire your command of the language?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t acquire my command of the language. I simply learned to speak, as everyone does. It just happened to be French. My mother is French. We lived in Geneva.”
“But you also speak excellent English.”
“That was from my father, of course. And at school we also spoke English as well as French. It was an international school. And then I spent three years at boarding school in England.”
“What was your father doing in Geneva?”
“He worked for the League of Nations.” She paused and asked, with irony, “Do you remember the League of Nations, Mr Potter?”
At the second meeting he put his cards on the table. The expression was his. They met as before: the same place—an anonymous building on Northumberland Avenue that had once been a hotel—the same room, the same two chairs and bare table and bare light bulb, but this time she accepted his offer of a cigarette. She wasn’t really a smoker, but working in the Filter Room at Bentley Priory, particularly on nights, turned you into one; and anyway, it made her look older to have a cigarette in her hand and somehow she wanted to appear older in the eyes of this man, despite the fact that he knew her real age and so couldn’t be deceived.
“How do you feel about our first encounter?” he asked.
She shrugged. “You didn’t really tell me anything very specific. The Inter-Services Research Bureau could be anything.”
He nodded. Indeed it could be anything. “At that meeting you talked, quite eloquently I thought, of your love of France, of the fact that you wanted to do something more directly for her.”
“That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? My language.”
“More or less.” He considered her, watching her with an expression that was almost one of sadness. “Marian, would you be prepared to leave this country in order to pursue this work?”
“Go overseas? Certainly. Algeria or somewhere?”
“Actually, I mean France itself.”
There was a pause. It might have seemed as though she hadn’t quite understood. “Are you serious, Mr Potter?”
“Certainly, I’m serious. The organisation that I represent trains people to work in France.”
She waited, drawing in smoke from the cigarette, determined not to let him see any change in her manner. But there was a change, a fluttering of excitement directly behind her breastbone.
“I want to be frank with you, Marian. I want to put my cards on the table. It would be dangerous work. You’d be in danger of your life. But it would be of enormous value to the war effort. I want you to consider the possibility of doing something like that.”
She seemed to think about the suggestion but her mind had been made up long ago, before even this second interview had begun, when she had guessed that something extraordinary might be about to happen. “I would love to,” she said.
Potter smiled. It was an expression entirely without humour, the tired smile of a man who deals with overenthusiastic children. “I don’t actually want your answer now. I want you to go away and think about it. You’ve got a week’s leave—”
“A week’s leave?” Leave from the Filter Room was almost impossible to come by.
He nodded. “You have a week’s leave. Go home and think it over. Talk it over with your father. The only thing you may let him know is that you may be sent on some kind of secret mission overseas, and that you will be in some danger. If you accept, you will go to a unit that will assess your potential for this particular work in greater depth. It may be that they will decide that my own judgement of your talents was wrong and you are not suitable for the work we are doing. In that case, after a suitable debriefing, you will return to your normal duties and no one will be any the wiser. If the assessment unit decides to move you on to training, then you will begin the work in earnest. Training will take some months before you go into the field.”
“It sounds fascinating.”
“I’m not sure that’s the word I would use. You must warn your parents that if you accept this work, you will, to all intents and purposes, disappear from their lives until it is all over. Although your family will be contacted on your behalf by the organisation from time to time and informed that you are well, you will have no direct contact with them and they will have no further information as to your whereabouts. You must tell friends or relatives that you are being posted abroad. Nothing more. Do you understand that?”
“I think so.” She paused, considering this man and his solemn, headmaster’s face. “What are the risks?”
He breathed in deeply, as though preparing to deliver judgement. “We estimate—it is no more than an estimate—that the chances of survival are about fifty-fifty.”
“Fifty-fifty?” It seemed absurd. The toss of a coin. How could she not feel fear? But it was the fear that she had felt skiing, the fear of plummeting steepness, the fear she had had when her uncle had taken her climbing, the awe-inspiring fear of space beneath her feet, a fear that teetered on the very edge of joy. She wanted to make a grand gesture, to laugh with happiness and cry Yes!, even to leap out of her chair and throw her arms around this strange man with his shrill portents of doom. Instead she nodded thoughtfully. “What about my unit?”
“There is no need to return to your unit. If you decide to continue, your things will be collected on your behalf and your colleagues informed of your posting to another job. I must emphasise that no one must be told anything. No cousins, no aunts and uncles, no boyfriends. Do you have a boyfriend?”
She glanced down at her hands, lying passively in her lap. Did Clément qualify? When does a childhood crush metamorphose into an adult relationship? “There was someone in France. We used to write, but since the invasion …”
“Well, that’s a good thing. You must, I’m afraid, break all such connections. No explanation, no farewell. Your brother—I gather he is in a reserved occupation …”
“Ned? He’s a scientist. Physics.”
“He must know nothing, absolutely nothing. When the call comes, you will simply follow our instructions and make your way to the Student Assessment Board. You will be there for four days, during which you will undergo various tests to see how you measure up to the kind of person we are looking for.”
“It sounds like an execution. You will be taken from this court to a place of execution and there you will be hanged by the neck—”
“This is not a matter for jest, Marian,” he said. “It is deadly serious.”
She smiled at him. She had a winning smile, she knew that. Her father told her as much. “I’m not sure that I am jesting, Mr Potter.”
SHE WALKED OUT of the building, past the sandbags and the sentries, into the bright light of Northumberland Avenue. Did anyone take notice of her? She wanted them to. She wanted to seem extraordinary in the eyes of the anonymous passersby—brilliant, adventurous, brave. She was going to France. However they organised these matters—would she go ashore by boat? or walk over the border from Switzerland? or land in a light aircraft?—somehow she was going to France. She crossed the street to the embankment to look at the river. The tide was out and sea birds picked over the mud—gulls laughing and crying. She wanted to laugh and cry with them—with joy and a breathtaking kind of fear. Trains rattled across the bridge overhead. People emerged from the shadows of the Tube station, blinking in the sunlight as she was blinking in the sunlight of her new life. Perhaps the next river she would see would be the Seine. How remarkable! Marian Sutro, living under some assumed name—Colette, she fancied—might soon be standing on the bank of the Seine beside the Pont Neuf and looking across the water, past l’Île de la Cité to the Louvre on the far side. All around her the people of the city would be wondering when and if the British were coming to rescue them from their misery, when in fact they would already be there, in her own small presence.
“We appreciate very much your volunteering,” the tall man said. He was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant colonel, and apparently he was in charge. Through the window behind him she could see the trees in the centre of the square. The faint sound of traffic came through the glass. The place was called Orchard Court, and it was unclear whether it was a flat or a suite of offices. Rather it seemed a strange hybrid between the two: through an open door you might glimpse a bedroom with a made-up bed, or a bathroom with black and white tiles and an onyx bidet, and yet other rooms were clearly offices, with dull ministry desks and chairs and gunmetal filing cabinets.
Buckmaster, the man called himself. It was obviously a nom de guerre. No one could really be called Buckmaster. It smacked of a John Buchan thriller. Mr Standfast. “I’ve taken the liberty of writing to your father myself,” he said, “your being so young, and so on. I tried to reassure him that we’ll look after you as best we can but I doubt it’ll pull the wool over his eyes. I mean, he must know this kind of work can be perilous.”
He nodded, gloomily. You could sense the word being repeated in his mind. Perilous. It had a quaint, Old English sound to it. Castle Perilous. His nom de guerre seemed more dynamic than the man himself: he was balding and had a receding chin and feminine lips. Somehow he didn’t inspire confidence.
“May I know what this organisation is really called?” Marian asked.
He looked discomfited. “Actually, we don’t ask too many questions.”
“I’m sorry,” Marian said, “but I thought I ought to know.”
“No, don’t apologise. It’s quite understandable. But we prefer it like that. The less we know of each other the better.” He smiled at her. “Of course, we know rather a lot about you, but then we need to, don’t we? Whereas you don’t need to know much about us. The need-to-know principle, d’you see?”
Did she see? Not really. It seemed ridiculous to have a name and then keep it secret.
“Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Now that we’ve met I think it’s time to pass you on to Miss Atkins.”
Miss Atkins was an elegant woman with a faintly supercilious expression. She invited Marian to sit down and offered her tea and biscuits and examined her with an air of detached curiosity, as though considering her for the post of scullery maid or something. If the tall colonel was the king of this particular world, then this woman was clearly the queen. “You are very young,” she observed. “Quite one of the youngest recruits we have ever had.” There was something unnatural about her voice, something strained and false, as though the carefully enunciated syllables were not naturally hers but had been learned for the occasion. “People on the Student Assessment Board were of the opinion that you are too immature for what we are proposing. However, Colonel Buckmaster and I have decided to override their judgement and recommend you for training. So we will watch your progress with close interest.”
“You make it sound like school.”
“It is like school. And you have a great deal to learn.”
“When does it begin?”
“Immediately. The first thing is your position as a WAAF. We like our people to have commissions. It gives them more status in France. We will have you gazetted immediately as acting section officer.”
“An officer!”
“Exactly. However, for various reasons that I won’t go into, we like all our girls to join the FANY.”
“The Fanny? What on earth is the Fanny?”
“The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. You’ll have the rank of ensign and of course the uniform—”
“But I’m in the WAAF. You just said I would be made an officer.”
Atkins tapped her finger on the desk as though to bring the meeting to order. “That is merely an honorary rank. It brings with it a salary that will be paid to you as appropriate, and a certain status when you are in the field. But while you are with us, you will be a FANY. It is the way we do things. Do I make myself clear? You must get kitted out with the uniform immediately.” She paused, considering the girl in front of her. “It is my duty to remind you that everything that happens from now on, in fact everything that has already happened since your first meeting with Mr Potter, comes under the Official Secrets Act. You do understand this, don’t you? Your training, for example. Where you go and what you see and what you do when you get there. Everything. I know you’ve been doing secret work in the WAAF, but this is not quite the same thing. The secrets of the Filter Room are clearly circumscribed, but none of our work is defined in that way. From now on it is not that your work is secret; your whole life is secret. This obliges you to make judgements all the time. You must learn to say enough to allay people’s curiosity without ever saying anything that awakens it. Do you see what I mean? You have to appear to be dull and uninteresting. It is a particular skill.”
“I’m sure I’ll manage.”
“I suggest you tell people that you are doing preliminary training for liaison duties, with the aim of being sent abroad. Algeria is the obvious place, given your command of French. You may hint at this, but you need not say it explicitly. We like our people to learn to talk pleasantly and say nothing. You may begin to practise it now. And I must warn you that people will be reporting back to me, telling me how good you are with that kind of thing. They will be watching you all the time to see how you comport yourself. Am I making myself clear? Not everyone possesses the qualities we seek, and many fail during training. You must understand that failure is not a personal discredit; it is merely a sign that you do not quite have the qualities that we are seeking. We are looking for very particular gifts, Marian, very particular gifts indeed.”
Particular gifts seemed like particular friendships, those relationships that hovered on the boundaries of sin and awoke fear in the nuns’ minds. “In fact,” Miss Atkins added, with an expression of faint disapproval, “some of the qualities we are looking for may not be entirely admirable ones.”
The hotel they found for her was in a narrow cul-de-sac tucked away behind Regent Street. Many of the guests appeared to be regulars and the hall porter seemed to know most of them by name. “Good evening, Madam,” he greeted her as she went through the revolving door. “I do hope you have a pleasant stay here.” And his expression suggested that, despite all the warnings about secrecy, he was well aware of exactly what this young woman with her shabby suitcase and her plain grey suit was all about.
She went up to her room, hung her clothes in the wardrobe, and threw her new uniform onto the bed. It was an ugly creation in khaki barathea. F.A.N.Y., it said on the shoulder flashes. A ridiculous name, enough to make you blush. The uniform lay there lifeless on the bed, a corpse dragged into her life, something she would have to explain away when she next went home. It seemed daft. She was already in the WAAF and, for goodness’ sake, they also insisted that she be part of this peculiar corps with the embarrassing acronym. Whoever they were—the Inter-Services Research Bureau, as they called themselves—they appeared to be able to do precisely what they pleased.
She looked round the room indecisively. What should she do? It was far too early to go round to Ned’s. She’d rung him and told him she was at a loose end in London and he’d invited her round for dinner. She’d have to explain why she was in London, which might be a bit awkward. Explain nothing, they’d told her.
They. She had no other word for them, the strange Colonel Buckmaster and the impassive Miss Atkins and their various minions. Perhaps they were watching at this very moment to see how she behaved. The idea amused and frightened her. She looked around the stuffy room with its ornate wardrobe and overstuffed armchair and expansive bed. Concealed microphones? Hidden cameras? She stood in front of the mirror on the wardrobe door and examined herself. What would they see? Marian Sutro or Marianne Sutrô? Where did the stress and the accent lie? And what was now going to happen to this curious, hybrid being?
Standing before the mirror she undressed, tossing her clothes onto the bed and transforming herself from the confident young adult whom others might see into the timid child whom she alone knew, jejune, pallid, with awkward limbs and hips and small, pointed but pointless breasts. What to do with this creature who had never known a man, never stayed in a hotel alone before, never even been in a bar by herself? And yet here she was, on her own in the grey, battered city, about to begin some kind of training to prepare her for France. Was anything more unlikely?
She opened the wardrobe door and swept the young Marian aside. Taking out her cocktail dress, she held it against her. It had an elegance that you could no longer find in London; or maybe could never have found in London even before the war because she had bought it in Geneva from a couturier who always got the latest things direct from Paris. She had carefully nurtured it through the family’s precipitate escape from Switzerland through France, and then through the tiresome months of exile in England. Only once had she worn it, at a dance to which one of the officers at Stanmore had taken her. He’d told her how fond he was of her, and ended up attempting to take the dress off in the back seat of his car. The dress would be entirely wasted on Ned, of course; but at least there would be no repetition of that particular embarrassment.
She washed and dressed and put her hair up—Clément always told her that she looked older like that. Then she did her make-up—still unfamiliar, still quite daring—took her coat, and made her way cautiously downstairs. The bar was a place of smoke and noise and the male shout of laughter, the loud braying sound of the Englishman in his element. One or two men glanced at her as she pushed past and found a corner seat, but most ignored her. These days a woman alone in a bar was no longer a matter of note. She nursed a gin and tonic and watched. Men outnumbered the women by three or four to one. They were officers, all of them. But now, apparently, she was also an officer, and a FANY as well. Goodness knows what that meant in the complex world of British protocol.
“May I sit beside you?”
She looked round. Everyone else in the bar seemed to have beer or gin, but he had a glass of red wine in his right hand and a stool in the other, and the accent was unmistakably French. A lighted cigarette bobbed up and down between his lips. “You are alone and you are the most beautiful lady here, I think …”
She shrugged and looked away towards the door, as though she was expecting someone. The Frenchman sat. He was young, no older than she was, and good-looking enough, with a casual, nervy manner, the kind of boy she recognised from Grenoble when she and her cousin had gone out in the evening, giggling and whispering to each other in the cafés, pretending they were older than they really were.
“You wish to smoke?” He offered a cigarette from a battered pack. It wasn’t a Senior Service, or anything like that. It was a caporal. She shook her head. He shrugged. “My name is Benoît. May I know yours?”
She was uncertain how to answer. Anyway, if she were to give her name, what would it be? Was she Marian or Marianne? The question was a delicate one. People were pushing all round them, and somehow she seemed united with this unknown French boy. Where had he come from? Why was he here? What was his place in this loud, ruined, irrepressible city? Someone shoved against her, apologised, then blundered on into the crush. And she wondered whether this Frenchman had been sent to trap her into giving something away.
“I’m Anne-Marie,” she said, on a whim.
“Ah, Anne-Marie. It is a beautiful name.”
“It’s a name. Just a name.”
He sipped his wine and made a face. “Pourquoi toutes ces gonzesses anglaises sont glaciales?” he asked himself.
“I’m sorry?”
“You understand French?”
She hesitated on the edge of confession. “Glacial, I understood glacial. What exactly is glacial?”
He grimaced. “The English summer is glacial. L’été glacial, that is what I say. My English is so-and-so. Look, you are here alone. I am here alone. We talk, maybe? Have a drink together? It is a good idea, isn’t it? I tell my life story.”
Marian considered. She liked the idea of being glacial. It gave her some kind of reassurance against the possibility of being thought a tart. Or a fanny, for God’s sake. She tried not to giggle. “There isn’t time for your whole life story. I have to meet someone for dinner. You can tell me what you are doing in London.”
He drew on his cigarette. “I escape from France.”
“You escaped? How remarkable. Did you swim?”
He laughed. His laugh was appealing. His manner was arrogant, an insufferable arrogance, but his laugh was a young boy’s. “In January it is not so good for swimming. I am in Paris and so I go south—over les Pyrénées to Spain. With a friend. We climb through the snow, and then when we get over the border they put us in prison.” He made a disparaging face. “This is not so good. But then they let us out because we make so much trouble. So we get to Algérie, and here we are.” He smiled, as though it was a brilliant trick pulled off in front of an audience, an escape worthy of the great Houdini. “And now I return to fight the Frisés.”
“Where is your friend?”
“My friend?”
“You said you were with your friend.”
“Oh, him.” He waved a vague hand. “He finds someone for dancing this evening and I leave him go. Do you wish to dance? We can go find him.”
“I’m afraid not. I have to meet my brother for dinner.”
“Your brother? You ’ave no boyfriend?”
“It’s nothing to do with you whether I have a boyfriend or not.”
The boy nodded, his face wreathed in the pungent smoke from his caporal. “You ’ave no boyfriend. If you like, I can be your boyfriend.”
“I don’t think that would be appropriate.”
“Appropriate?”
“It would not be a good idea.”
He looked glum, like a disappointed child. Surely his story of escape from France was pure fantasy. And yet he was here, a French boy in the noisy heart of the city, among the uniforms of a dozen nations. He must have got here somehow.
“Look,” he said, putting his cigarette down on the edge of the table. “I play you a game, right? If I win, you come with me dancing. If I lose, you go and see your brother.”
“I have to see my brother whether I win or lose.”
“It is a very simple game.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a box of matches. “I show you.”
“I really don’t want—”
“I show you all the same.” He began to lay out the matches in rows on the table between them—a row of three, a row of four and a row of five. “Now you take as many as you like from any row. Then it is my chance. I take from one row like you do. Then it is your turn again, and so on. The person who has the last piece to take is loser.”
She shrugged and tried to look indifferent. “But I’m not playing for anything. I mean, if I lose that doesn’t mean to say that you’re taking me dancing.”
He looked at her with a faint and infuriating smile. “We see. You go first.”
So they played among the spilled beer and the empty glasses, the youth with a strange concentration, as though his whole future depended on it, Marian with a distracted impatience that told him, she hoped, that she didn’t care for either the game or his company. Of course he won. She knew he would. He grinned at her and said, “We play again,” and the second time he won again, and the third time.
“It’s stupid,” she said. “It’s one of those games that you can’t lose.”
“But you have lost.”
“Because you have the trick.”
“The trique?” He spluttered with laughter.
She blushed, understanding the double entendre and angry that she couldn’t disguise her embarrassment. “The way of doing it.”
“Ah, the truc! That is always the way, isn’t it? You win always if you know the truc.” He gathered up the matches and returned them to their box as though they were valuable trophies. “And now we find somewhere to dance. In this city of merde you eat always badly, but at least you can find place to dance.”
“I’m not going dancing with you. I told you.”
He looked at her with pale and erratic eyes. There was something unsteady about him, as though he had been drinking all afternoon and would continue all evening. “You know what truc I am making? I am returning to France, do you know that? I am going back to la patrie and cut German throats. And you will not even dance with me.”
“You’re drunk,” she said. “I don’t go dancing with men who are drunk.”
“And you are frigide,” he retorted. “And I do not dance with women who are frigide.”
She picked up her handbag and got up from her chair. “I must go.”
“Why must you go?”
“Because otherwise I will be late.” He made a grab at her hand but she shook him off. “Tu m’emmerdes!” she told him as she walked away. She didn’t look back, not even to see the shock in his expression. How to get away? If she went to her room he would probably follow her, and she damn well wasn’t going to hide away like a frightened little girl. Pulling on her coat, she walked quickly through the foyer and out through the revolving doors. A taxi was delivering a fare to the hotel. She climbed into the empty seat.
“Where to, Miss?” the cabbie asked.
She gave Ned’s address. “Bloomsbury,” she said. “Russell Square, more or less.”
“More or less Russell Square it is, darling.”
The cab crept through the darkened streets. There were cinemas open in Piccadilly, their faint lights cast down on the pavement. Black shapes shifted in front of them like shades in Hades, queues of silhouettes lined up along the pavements and edging towards the box offices. But beyond the borderline of the Tottenham Court Road there was no one around, and Bloomsbury was a dark maze.
“You all right here, Miss?” the cabbie asked as he let her down.
“Quite all right,” she said, handing over the fare. She scrabbled in her respirator case for her torch. By its feeble light she made her way to the door where Ned lived. There was a panel of bell pushes, but as she was about to press the one labelled Dr Edward Sutro, the door opened and someone came barging out.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Bloody blackout.”
She dodged past him into the hallway and the door slammed shut behind her. She felt for the switch, turned on a pale, watery light in the stairwell, and climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor. It was a relief when Ned answered her knock.
“My goodness, Squirrel,” he said as he saw her standing on the landing. “You look dressed to kill.” He hugged her to him. A hug from Ned was like being jumped on by a Great Dane, entrancing but at the same time awkward and uncomfortable. His own clothes gave the impression they had been picked up at a jumble sale. His hair was awry, and his smile was the distracted grin of someone who is delighted to see her but whose mind is really on different, abstract things. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Tell me all about it.”
“About what?”
“What on earth you are doing. I spoke to the parents on the phone the other day. They said you’d left the WAAF. Something about going abroad. Father thought Algiers …”
She followed him through into the sitting room. The place was typical of Ned. Books were crammed into every available shelf and piled on the floor. His desk was littered with papers. A couple of decrepit armchairs stood opposite each other across a Persian carpet that was old and worn but gave the impression that it might once have been a valuable piece. On the wall behind the desk was a framed print of the Collège de France.
“Doesn’t anyone come and clean for you?” she asked. “At least you had a scout at Cambridge.”
“Bedder. Scouts are Oxford. Here there’s a charlady who comes round occasionally, but she’s always complaining she can’t clean if I leave it in such a mess. Perhaps there ought to be cleaners who’ll come and clean your place before the cleaner comes.” He laughed his own, absurd laugh.
She sat in one of the armchairs and he brought her a drink, another gin that she dared not refuse because refusal would have made her a girl again and now she was a grown-up woman. She’d never been that before with Ned.
“So tell me, what’s it all about?”
“I can’t,” she said.
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“It’s secret. They made me sign the Official Secrets Act—and that was at the initial interview. Even the interview itself was secret.”
“Oh, stop being mysterious. I’ll bet it’s translation or something. Or spying. Maybe they want you to spy on General de Gaulle.”
She felt like laughing out loud. Ordinarily he was never interested in what she was doing. Silly schoolgirl things, was what he used to say. And then when she said she wanted to read law at university, he was derisive about her choice. Law will teach us nothing except how to evade it, was his view of things. Science will teach us the future. “You don’t tell me what you do, so why should I say what I do?”
“Because you are dying to, that’s why. And I do tell you what I do. I work on super-high-frequency electromagnetic radiation.”
“But what’s it for? That’s what’s important. What do you do this for?”
“I’m making a ray gun to shoot the Luftwaffe out of the sky.”
“Don’t be silly. I know you’re not. That’s just science fiction.” He really was a fool. He was always telling her things like that. A super-bomb that would blow a whole city to dust. A beam of deadly rays that would kill people with light. Rockets that would hurl high explosive from one continent to another through outer space. The kind of nonsense you read about in bad novels. “All I can tell you,” she said, “is that this is my last evening in London. Tomorrow I’m off to Scotland.”
“Scotland?”
“Training.”
“It sounds dreadful. Scotland’s all heather and haggis and men in skirts. But I suppose that if you’re off to the land of haggis we’d better find you a decent meal first.”
THE RESTAURANT NED had found was in Southampton Row. Apparently people from the lab went there quite often. The place was crowded, people pushing and shoving and trying to get a table even though the waiters insisted that there was none available. But Ned had reserved one, in the innermost depths, where they couldn’t be overheard and where she could finally do what she had intended all the time.
“You must promise not to say anything to the parents,” she warned him. “Or anyone else. You mustn’t say anything. Swear.”
It sounded like one of their childhood games. He smiled condescendingly. “I swear.”
“I mean it, Ned. This is serious. I’ve been recruited by this organisation. They’re sending me for training, and then …” She shouldn’t be saying this, she knew she shouldn’t. And yet it was too exciting not to share with someone, and Ned was the only possibility. Ned had always been her confidant. She slipped into French. Perhaps it was safer to say it in French: “Ils veulent m’envoyer en France.”
“En France! Pourquoi? Pas possible! Mon Dieu, Marianne, t’es folle!”
“It’s they who are mad, not me. At first I thought the job was something to do with language, like you did. Translation, or something. That’s what they led me to expect. But I was wrong. I’m off tomorrow for Scotland. Commando training. This is serious, Ned, completely serious.” It seemed even more incredible now she was telling him. At least within the organisation you felt caught up by its mad logic, but here, at a restaurant table with her brother sitting opposite her, the whole story seemed crazy.
“So who are ‘they’?”
She glanced round at the other tables. Perhaps they had followed her here. Perhaps they were listening to see what she said. But the other diners were engrossed in their own conversations, indifferent to the couple in the corner whispering to each other in French. “I’ve no idea. ‘The organisation,’ that’s what they call it. They’ve got a place in Portman Square. But the real name’s secret.” She laughed. “I ask you, what’s the point of having a name if it’s secret?”
“Maybe it’s like the naming of cats.”
“The name that no human research can discover—”
“—but that the cat himself knows and can never confess.” They laughed. He’d bought her the book for her Christmas present in the first year of the war: whimsical poems about cats by one of the most serious of poets. “Where will they send you? Might you go to Paris?”
Would she? She had no idea. The future was all mysterious, an unknown world.
“Because if you were to go to Paris, you might look up Clément Pelletier.”
“Clément?” Her surprise was feigned, part of a defence mechanism left over from childhood. She had already thought of Clément, of course she had. How could she not? As far as she knew he was still in France, but she couldn’t be certain. That was what happened these days; families and friends dispersed, contacts lost, relationships blighted. Perhaps he had forgotten her by now, as she, occasionally, managed not to think of him. But memories remained, small nuclei of longing and guilt lodged within her mind. “I haven’t seen him for years. He’ll have forgotten who I am.”
Ned grinned. “I very much doubt that.”
Marian felt herself blushing. She looked away in the hope Ned wouldn’t notice, but if he did he said nothing. Once he would have remarked on it and made it worse—Marian has gone all red, he’d say so that everyone would stare.
“Didn’t he used to write to you when you went away to school?”
“Occasionally.”
“More than occasionally. I think he was pretty soft on you.”
“I was only fifteen, Ned. Fifteen, sixteen. Just a girl. He was more than ten years older.”
“You didn’t seem that young.”
“And anyway, he’s probably married with children by now.” She picked at her bread, sipped some beer—beer was all they had; these days wine was as difficult to find as oranges or bananas. “Have you heard anything about him?”
“Nothing but speculation. I believe he’s still at the Collège de France. There’s the cyclotron that Fred Joliot had installed immediately before the outbreak. Presumably it’s working now, unless the Germans have carted it off to Heidelberg or somewhere.” He shrugged, fiddling with the cutlery. “God knows what’s going on there.” He appeared distracted, as though mention of Clément and Paris had upset him. Only after the waiter had brought their food did he continue. “You know, I’ve never really understood why Clément stayed behind in France. He had the opportunity to get out of the country in 1940 but he stayed put.”
“What are you suggesting? That he should have run away?”
“Others from the Collège escaped—Lev Kowarski, von Halban—and brought out a whole lot of equipment. Why in God’s name didn’t Clément come with them? He was there in Bordeaux. There was a berth on the ship. He could have been in England the next day. What did he have to lose?”
“Maybe his honour. The others aren’t French, are they?”
“Russian and Austrian.”
“Well, there you are. Clément is French through and through. For God’s sake, abandoning your country when it’s invaded isn’t particularly admirable. If more people had stood and fought …”
“But he wasn’t fighting, was he? He was doing scientific research.”
“So perhaps he felt above it all. Pure science, that’s what he used to say.”
Ned gave a bitter laugh. “One thing I’ve discovered, Squirrel, is that there is no longer any such thing as pure science. What I do, or what Kowarski does …” He seemed to cast around for what he wanted to say but couldn’t find the right words. “Anyway, if you did get to Paris, it’d be interesting to get some idea of what’s going on at the Collège. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Who knows if that’s where they’ll send me? I’m not going on holiday, you know.”
“Of course I realise that. Don’t be stupid.” He looked at her and smiled. “You’re still the same old Squirrel, aren’t you? Getting all hot and bothered.”
“Well, you speak about it as though I could simply get on a train and go and see.”
He laughed. The momentary anger died away. It was always that way between them—sudden flare-ups of anger quickly dying away. They moved the conversation to neutral ground—the days before the war mainly, that strange Arcadian world that seemed so distant now, a landscape distorted by the passage of time and the intense gravitational field of subsequent events: the house on the lake at Annecy, the chalet in Megève, the sailing and the skiing, the noise and the laughter when the two families, the Pelletiers and the Sutros, came together. Madeleine, who befriended her despite being five years older, and Madeleine’s older brother Clément, who seemed touched by something like the finger of God. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieur. A physicist for whom a brilliant future was predicted. A second Louis de Broglie, they said, heir apparent to the king and queen of French science, Fred Joliot and his wife Irène Curie. Ned and he used to talk physics while Marian hung on their words and tried to understand. But they spoke of incomprehensible mathematics and obscure ideas and absurd enthusiasms. Let’s play Pig-in-the-middle, they’d cry, only they’d call it “collapsing the wave function” and collapse with laughter at the joke that she, a mere fifteen-year-old trying to catch the tennis ball, couldn’t share. And Consequences, they’d play Consequences, which Clément called Cadavre Exquis, the Exquisite Corpse. The Expatiating Physicist Preconceives a Stupendous Tintinnabulation. That was one of them.
The waiter came and took their plates. “Look, I must go,” she said, pushing back her chair. “I’ve got a long day tomorrow.”
Ned was suddenly attentive, helping her into her coat and patting her shoulders, as though he understood that she really was going and was off to do something rather remarkable, and needed his brotherly comfort however awkwardly expressed. “D’you know, I envy you?” he told her. “At least you’re involved in something active. I’ve simply got to get on with my work and do what I’m told.”
“These days that’s what everyone does.”
They went looking for a cab. There was nothing near the restaurant, and so they went towards the West End. It had come on to rain, and the pavements glistened in what little light there was. She turned up the collar of her coat. Someone barged into them and shouted at them for getting in the way, then staggered on, muttering to himself. There were more people about now, shadows moving through the dark, voices talking and laughing but detached from their shapes so that the sounds seemed disembodied, the expression of the city itself. There were rumours about what happened in the blackout. Sometimes, it was said, people had sex there in the street, while strangers walked past without noticing. There had been stories about this among the girls at Stanmore. One of them had even claimed to have done it herself. A knee-trembler, she called it; and the other girls had laughed.
“Father thinks I should give up what I’m doing,” Ned said. “He thinks it’s an easy way out, and that I should be in uniform like you.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“He abandoned his job in the Foreign Office in the last war.”
“And ended up sitting in a gun emplacement behind the lines and losing half his hearing.”
“Your work is more important than anything you could contribute as a soldier. Once you get that ray gun to work.”
He laughed. They had come to a cinema. There was a dimly illuminated sign. EXCELSIOR, it said. People were streaming out, laughing and shouting. Taxis were waiting at the kerb and a man called, “Anyone for Kensington?” He was wearing uniform—she made out captain’s pips on his shoulder—and had two women with him. The women were giggling together, leaning against each other for mutual support.
Marian ran forward. “Can you drop me off on the way?”
“No trouble at all, my dear.”
To Ned she said, “Wish me luck.”
“Come on, love,” the captain called. “The meter’s going.”
As she climbed into the cab Ned broke into French. “Do you know when you’ll leave for France?”
She looked back, holding the door. “I’ve no idea.”
“Come on, Miss. We’ve got to go.”
She sat back in the cab.
“Keep in touch,” he called through the window. “How do I contact you?”
“Through the parents,” she said, “how else?”
“I’ll send his address. Clément’s, I mean. Just in case.”
The taxi drew away. She watched him standing in the road until he gave a little wave and turned away. “It’s awfully good of you to wait,” she said to the others in the cab. “I’m sorry I kept you.”
“Where are you going?” the officer asked. The women looked at her and giggled. Why? Were they drunk, or was there something comic about her?
“Just off Regent Street. I don’t think it’s out of your way, is it?”
“Didn’t I hear you speaking French?” one of the women asked. “Are you French? Golly, you sound awfully English to be French.”
Marian turned away to look out of the window. It had started raining again. She thought of Ned walking back through the wet. “I’m both,” she said. “Or neither.”