The journey was one of those wartime odysseys in which time and rationality seemed suspended. Occasionally the train moved with decisive speed. Often, for reasons that were never explained and never apparent, it stopped. Mainly it crawled with caution across a countryside as grey and damp as army bedding—mere fields, shallow hills, small, mean woods.
The compartment she travelled in was reserved. INTER-SERVICES RESEARCH BUREAU it said on the booking docket on the door. The conducting officer was a Scotswoman called Janet. Her charges made a strange, heterogeneous group. There was a middle-aged man who called himself Emile, and a young Canadian who claimed to speak French but actually spoke a broken and uncertain Québécois. Maurice, he was called. Marian guessed that it was really pronounced “Morris” but he had put a French slant on it: Mo-reece. The third member was a woman called Yvette. She seemed as small and drab and anxious as a mouse. When they’d met on the platform at Euston she had whispered to Marian that she was so glad there was another woman on the journey and maybe they could be friends and wasn’t everything so vachement bizarre? Now she sat in the window seat opposite, reading a book or watching the monotonous countryside pass by. Once she said, “Ce pays de merde,” then looked round blushing with her hand to her mouth, as though she had not intended to speak out loud. Emile laughed. “I know shit compared with which this would be a bed of roses,” he said.
THE JOURNEY WENT on, the grey-green flats of the Midlands giving way to industrial townscapes and then a desolate landscape of moorland and mountain. An England she didn’t know. Passengers climbed on and climbed off, mainly soldiers humping their kitbags on their shoulders and cursing each other with a mixture of good humour and venom. She dozed and read, the one state merging into the other so that she was uncertain whether she had read something or merely dreamed it. Even the enclosed world of their compartment, with its disparate little group of travellers, seemed the product of some distorted imagination. Where were they going, and what were they meant to do when they arrived there? Was it all serious or was it a joke, a hoax played upon four dysfunctional people, each of whom harboured the pathetic belief that he or she might contribute to the war effort? Maybe, she thought, with a small bubble of laughter rising in her throat, maybe she had actually gone mad during one of the long night watches in the Filter Room and now she was being taken off to some lunatic asylum in the far north of the country, away from the war, away from any danger of falling bombs, where they could all, harmless lunatics that they were, act out their various fantasies.
On the outskirts of Carlisle the train waited for half an hour for something that never happened before lurching forward across the border into Scotland. Rain, which had held off since Crewe, began to fall again.
In Glasgow they stayed overnight in a hotel near the station. Marian shared a room with Yvette. Lying in bed in the darkness they did what, presumably, they were not meant to do: they talked about their private lives, speaking in French, as though the language were a code through which they could tell each other the truth. “I want to go home,” Yvette confessed. “I don’t care whether the Germans are there or not, I just want to go home.” She must have been older than Marian, but seemed younger, lost in this strange, distracted journey and ill at ease in a country where her uncertain grasp of English gave her away as someone to be pitied, one of the dispossessed of Europe. Along with her English husband, she had fled south a few days before Paris fell to the Germans. They’d reached the south coast and managed to get to Spain by taking a small boat from somewhere near Montpellier. It had been a brave and almost foolhardy journey, but somehow they had made it.
“Where’s your husband now?” Marian asked.
The woman lay on her back in the darkness, a shadow with a voice. “He’s dead.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry. How awful.”
“He joined up, you see, and was sent out to Egypt. The ship was torpedoed somewhere near Sicily. He was called Bill. Bill Coombes. I loved him.”
There was silence. Was she crying silently in the darkness? Perhaps not. There was something cold and calculating about her, as though some vital piece of the human machinery had broken deep inside. Later she revealed that she had left her small daughter behind with her parents-in-law.
“You’ve got a daughter?”
The little voice pattered on in the dark, without stress, without anguish, a strange, featureless landscape of words. “She’s called Violette. The English call her Violet. Or Vi. She’s two years old. Lovely little thing, but d’you know, I don’t miss her? Isn’t that terrible? I don’t miss her at all.” And then unexpectedly she did weep, not for her child but for the fact of not being able to miss her. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I must sound heartless. That’s the trouble, I suppose. I am heartless. My heart has been turned to stone.”
Next morning the train left Glasgow in surprising sunshine, passing along the shore beside waters where dour warships lay at anchor, then inland, trundling slowly as though feeling its way into the wilderness. How far north could you go? And how far away from France? The landscape grew wild, the names of the stations acquiring a foreign tone: Ardlui, Crianlarich, Bridge of Orchy. They crossed a desolate moorland and went onward through the hills, past occasional platforms where no one waited, through valleys where no road passed. Eventually there was a glimpse of a few houses and they drew to a halt at a nameless station that suddenly became the focus of military activity. Doors slammed open down the train and other passengers got off, a few anonymous civilians but more men in uniform, bearing a mixture of regimental badges. “There’ll be transport down to the loch,” Janet told them, “but we’ll wait in here awhile. We don’t want the squaddies seeing ladies in this part of the world.”
And then Marian caught sight of a familiar figure. She was looking out of the window at the motley collection of passengers leaving the train when he passed by immediately below her window. There wasn’t any doubt about it. He was only a few inches away, just beyond the glass—the French boy called Benoît.
People called out. Army lorries revved their engines and drove off. Janet led her flock to the door of the carriage and down onto the platform. Marian shivered against the cold wind, wondering where the French boy had gone, who he was and what he was doing here. It must be—that was the only explanation—that his boast had been the truth: he really was going to return to France.
A solitary truck took them down to the lochside where a motorboat was waiting. They clambered aboard and settled onto narrow seats, clutching their suitcases. The engine roared, the crew cast off, and the craft headed out into the water. There was nowhere to go—only out into the desolate loch between empty hills that lined the shore. She thought of the lake at Annecy, with its dramatic alpine scenery. Would it become like this in some distant future, when the Alps had been eroded down to resemble these low, weary hills, and humanity had been reduced to a few miserable survivors? The boat puttered along for what seemed like hours, the water slopping, gunmetal grey, alongside. There was desultory talk among the group, part French, part English. Yvette and Marian huddled together for warmth. “This is hell,” Yvette whispered. “Hell is not hot, it is cold. And bare and bleak. This is hell.”
Eventually the boat docked at a deserted jetty on the south shore of the loch. There were two or three huts and a large sign that announced, in red lettering, WAR OFFICE RESTRICTED AREA. KEEP OUT, and a narrow valley that cut back into the hills. They climbed up onto the jetty, peering round like a group of refugees from some unnamed disaster wondering whether they had really escaped. Clouds of midges descended on them. “I’m afraid we’ve got a short walk,” Janet told them. “But at least it’s no’ raining.”
They humped their suitcases along a track that ran beside a small river. Scattered along the valley were a few huts and cottages, the remnants of a crofting community that had long since died out. It was a place as far from France as it was possible to imagine.
“Where are they taking us?” Yvette asked.
“The back of beyond.”
Yvette looked blank. “Where’s that?”
“It’s a saying. En pleine cambrousse.”
The track rounded a curve in the hillside and there it was, couched in fir trees and clad in ivy like a suburban villa. They stumbled to a halt. In front of the building lay a wide lawn that did nothing to tame the setting: behind the house a rough hillside rose steeply upwards into cloud. There was the sound of wind and water all around, and an air of desolation. Wilderness, Marian thought: a strange, wild word with echoes of bewilderment woven into it. Who had once lived in this place, and what had they done with their lives? It was impossible to imagine.
“Welcome to Meoble Lodge,” a young officer greeted them as they stumbled through the main door into the hall. He had a Scottish accent that made it sound like “Mabel” Lodge, the kind of place a maiden aunt might stay at for her holidays, a place of sagging, broken armchairs and sofas and out-of-date editions of Tatler and The Lady. “I’m Lieutenant Redmond, and I’m in charge of your course. We do hope you enjoy your stay with us.”
The lodge was a curious mix of military camp and university reading group, a world of much huffing and puffing, of pipe smoke and whisky and the smell of damp tweed. Outside, it rained. Inside there was a blazing fire and, after dinner, an open bar where the staff watched, so the story went, to see how well you handled alcohol. Much of what the students knew was the product of rumour and speculation, imagination filling the vacuum of secrecy. What exactly was this organisation that had recruited them? The Special Operations Executive, Emile said, but how did he know? And what were its aims? And why on earth were they shut away like this in the wilds of Scotland, amid the damp and the midges? Thus united in ignorance, the students drew together in some kind of camaraderie, in the way that prisoners unite against the common enemies of deprivation and discomfort.
They were woken on the first and every subsequent morning for PT on the lawn in front of the house. After that they had breakfast, which always included bacon and eggs, the kind of luxury most people had forgotten; but there was no luxury about the course itself. Together they climbed hills and crawled through soaking heather, in pairs they struggled over the assault course, in teams they waded through swollen rivers and constructed rafts to navigate the choppy waters of the loch. The two women had to get by as best they could. Yvette staggered in exhaustion through the exercises. At night she wept silently in the darkness of their shared bedroom. Whenever they talked it was obliquely, in low voices. The rumour had spread within the group—started, it seemed, by Emile—that their rooms had hidden microphones planted in the skirting boards or in the light fittings so that the instructors could listen in on private conversations and find out which ones were weak and which were strong. On one occasion Yvette crept, mouselike, into Marian’s bed to lie there in her arms like a child, the hot, wet pulp of her lips against Marian’s cheek, whispering so that she would not be overheard.
Marian felt motherly towards her. It was absurd, this feeling of protectiveness. Yvette was eight years older and a widow. She had borne a child. She had escaped from France in an open boat and spent days at sea before making landfall in Spain. She was a woman and Marian a mere girl, and yet the dynamic of their relationship was this, daughter and mother, protected and protector.
“They think I’m shit,” Yvette whispered. “All I want is to go back to France, so why do they have to do this to me? What kind of training is this? I just want to go home. I may as well give up. They’re going to fail me anyway.”
The next night Marian was woken to shouts from her roommate. “Va-t’en!” Yvette was yelling. “Va-t’en!” But whom she was telling to get out was never clear. When she awoke, mumbling in the darkness, she had no memory of her dream.
WHILE THE NIGHTS were fearful and empty, the days were full. They went on forced marches for endurance and ran the assault course for fitness and agility. They swung on ropes over imaginary rivers and climbed walls and crawled, bellies against the ground, beneath barbed-wire fences while a fixed machine gun fired live rounds over them, the bullets cracking deafening inches above their backs. Lectures and activities led one into the other, theory becoming practice so intensely that after a while this learning and doing seemed normal, and their previous lives of indolence and ease an incomplete memory. Only in the evenings, after dinner, were they left to their own devices, but even then there were members of the staff on hand to watch.
“Of course they’re assessing us,” Emile confided. “It’s an old trick. Play the friend and you’ll find out more than you ever would at a formal interview. I used to do it myself when hiring people. Take them out drinking, that was the best thing. Get a few whiskies in them and have a bit of a laugh. That’s when you find out the truth about a man. In vino veritas, as the ancients used to say.”
“When did you ever hire people?” Marian asked, and instantly regretted her question for the elaborate explanation it would conjure up.
“When I was in the Congo. In mining. A tough life it was. Makes this look like the life of Riley.”
In the rare periods of relaxation some of the students read—there was a small collection of French novels: some Colette, a few detective stories by Gaston Leroux, a much-thumbed copy of Madame Bovary. Maurice and Emile played chess almost incessantly, while others studied the pamphlets that they had been given on field craft and unarmed combat and how to shoot the one-hand gun in the manner of W. E. Fairbairn and E. A. Sykes.
Marian wrote letters. She wrote to her mother and father, to a couple of the girls she had worked with in the WAAF, and to Ned. Occasionally she was engaged in conversation by one of the instructors, a man whose French, though tainted by English, was fluent. He did the rounds of the students, asking them about their pasts, their connections with France, their views on the politics of Vichy and the problems of resistance.
“Where do you think the French communists’ loyalties lie?” he asked her. “With the French people, or with Stalin?”
“Are the two in conflict?”
“General de Gaulle thinks they are.”
“And what do you think?”
“I’m asking you.”
He questioned her about others on the course, about the French Canadian with the terrible accent and about Emile.
“I wish he didn’t know everything.”
The instructor smiled sympathetically. “And how do you think Yvette is progressing?”
“I think she’s fine.”
“Do you think she’ll make it through to the end? Has she got what it takes?”
“I think she’s lot tougher than she seems.”
“And if she told you that she didn’t want to carry on, what would you say?”
“But she hasn’t told me that, so I couldn’t answer.”
“Hypothetically speaking.”
“I think she can pull through. She’s got a lot of guts.”
“Do you consider her a friend?”
“What’s it got to do with you?”
“Everything is to do with me. Everything that might have a bearing on your mission. Where do your loyalties lie, Miss Sutro? With your friends or with the organisation?”
She laughed at that. “I really don’t know what organisation it is. I find it hard to be loyal to something so nebulous.”
“So what do you think you are doing here?”
“I’m afraid you are better equipped to answer that than I am.”
Occasionally, to escape the watchful eyes and the attentive ears, she went out alone for a walk, loving the empty solitude of the place in the elongated dusk and prepared even to brave the midges. At least, she reasoned, out here I’m on my own. At least I can think.
Time passed, with that curious relativity that brought Ned’s physics to mind: relative time, elastic time, the hours of discomfort stretching out like days but the whole passage of the course compressing from days into what seemed like mere hours. They did weapons training—pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns, a dozen different types of each. They learned to prove a weapon, to strip it and assemble it, to charge a magazine and load it, to fire from the hip and the shoulder and prone. The shooting range was a simulacrum of a town street, built among the outhouses, with targets that were the silhouettes of malignant men that appeared momentarily and at random, pulled up by an artifice of levers and pulleys. The students ducked and weaved, turning this way and that, firing from the centre line of the body, arms out straight.
“Don’t aim,” the instructors told them. “Instinct is what we want. Like pointing with your finger.” They talked of Fairbairn and Sykes, twin deities of this strange world of killing. The Fairbairn-Sykes position: “Square on to the target, legs apart, knees flexed. Raise the weapon to face level, both eyes open, the weapon obscuring the target. Then two shots in quick succession. Double tap. Bang, bang! If you don’t kill him with the first shot, you kill him with the second.”
Marian found she could do it, that was the strange thing. Gun in hand she could weave through the shooting range and hit the targets with unerring accuracy. “That’s right!” the instructor cried. “Show the gentlemen how to do it.”
Emile explained that he had once been a superb shot—even competed at Bisley—until something mysterious had happened in Africa and he had lost his edge as a result. “But you’re not bad,” he conceded grudgingly. “Not bad at all.”
After weapons training they were inducted into the mysterious world of demolition by a man with the joyous expression of a child with fireworks. “Plastique,” he said, showing them a lump of oily putty. “As stable as chewing gum, as explosive as TNT.” They handed it from one to the other. It smelled of almonds. “Detonate it properly and it’ll bring down bridges. The resister’s best friend, plastique.” Quite why he used the French name was never clear. Did this strange stuff originate in France? As though to help answer that question, he took the lump back and kneaded it into a shape that made the men laugh and the two women blush. And then, to demonstrate its stability, he tossed it on the fire, where the stuff burned and fizzed with a festive flame. Then he took them outside to a bunker among the outhouses and showed them how to tamp the explosive, how to wire up the detonator, and finally, with a joyous shout as he wound the induction coil, how a few ounces of plastic could blow a car axle to pieces.
“Then there are the time pencils.” He held them up like a child showing his collection of bangers. “Five minutes, ten minutes, twenty, thirty. You make your selection, twist the stem to break the capsule, and Bob’s your uncle.”
Time pencil. Again she thought of Ned, something he might invent, a pencil that could mark out the passage of time, a pen that could recall the past and predict the future, a quill that might consign the present to oblivion.
Dear Ned, she wrote. I hope you are quite well. Here they work our fingers to the bone but in a strange way I am enjoying myself. When we get leave at the end of this course maybe I can get to London to see you.
But she had little time to think about him. Here there were people of far greater curiosity than her scientist brother, men who knew how to kill and destroy, like the instructor in close combat, a middle-aged man with a brush of short, ginger hair and the gloomy manner of an undertaker. He delivered a first-aid course in reverse—how to cut the brachial artery with a knife slash to the forearm, how to dislocate the knee with a single stab of the foot, how to snap a man’s spine by dropping him across your knee, how to inflict the maximum damage in the minimum time. You could render a man helpless with a handclap to both ears, knock him unconscious with a matchbox, kill him with an umbrella.
“Remember this: you don’t want to get into a fight, but if you have no choice then you want to get out of it as quick as possible. The quickest way is to kill your opponent. I’m sorry if that offends the ladies’ sensibilities, but that’s the fact of the matter.”
It did not offend Yvette’s sensibilities: with all the devotion of an acolyte committing to a new religion, she loved silent killing. She loved the heft of a knife in her hands, the wicked gleaming tongue of steel with the initials of the designers at the base of the blade: THE F-S FIGHTING KNIFE, it said, the plain truth engraved there without any euphemism. Fairbairn and Sykes again. The hilt lay softly in her hand, balanced between thumb and forefinger like a conductor’s baton. “I could kill with this,” she murmured.
They practised on one another with dummy weapons, and what started as self-conscious play-acting grew close to the real thing, something tense and terrific, as though a life depended on it. And Yvette showed the way, approaching her victim from behind, as quiet as a cat. The rest of the course watched, breathlessly, something that was at once compelling and obscene: the small woman moving, the sudden pounce, the knife striking down into the shoulder, right behind the collarbone where the subclavian artery lay deep among muscle and connective tissue, where, if you got it right, the victim would die within four seconds.
Marian lay awake and thought about killing. Killing in the abstract was fine. Killing at one remove, killing in theory. She remembered the Filter Room, a dozen WAAFs crowding round the table in the early evening with the calls coming through from the radar stations. The girls in a scrum, reaching out over one another to put tokens down on the map like gamblers at the roulette table placing their last bets. The excitement as single plots became dozens, became hundreds, tracks identified and called, pointing out across the bulge of East Anglia and heading towards the sea, each single plot being seven men and that meant seven lives. Seven times seven hundred. Five thousand lives, give or take. They’d march soundlessly across the board and disappear beyond the edge of the known world and the girls would wait, smoking, drinking tea, chatting in a desultory fashion while the killing went on, distant killing that you couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, the pulverising of the German cities. But what the ginger instructor was proposing was different: killing when you could feel the man’s throat beneath your arm, his breath on your cheek, his blood on your hands. How do you do that?
“Oh, it would be no trouble for me,” Yvette assured her. “I think I would enjoy it.”
IF IT WASN’T death, it was destruction. How to blow a door, put a car out of action, destroy a train. She found herself paired with Emile. He always knew everything about it even before the lecture had begun. “Used to work on the railways in the Congo,” he explained when they were being taught how to sabotage a railway line.
“Was that before or after the mines?”
“That’s a complex question.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not even one I want an answer to.”
But she got an answer nevertheless, the precise chronology of his career as mine engineer, railway engineer, construction engineer, any kind of engineer you might wish for. “It was a tough life showing the blacks the way forward.”
“You and Mr Kurtz, you mean?”
That puzzled him. It was always a triumph to puzzle Emile. “Kurtz? I never met anyone called Kurtz.”
She hated him. She didn’t often hate people, but she hated Emile. One of the people on our course is a pompous KA, she wrote to her father the next day. The kind that you abhor.
They practised wireless telegraphy and Morse code regularly, tapping on the key with nervy fingers and trying to take down the irritating buzzing into a coherent sequence of dots and dashes. The boat will dock at Dover on the fifteenth. The Test Match will result in victory for Australia. Daft messages like that.
“Each operator has his own fist. As individual as handwriting.”
Hands stammered on the Bakelite knobs. Arthritis, they called Morse keying: like arthritis it brought a painful tension in the wrist, aching carpals and metacarpals, stiff and inflexible fingers. “Accuracy is everything. Accuracy and speed. Lives may depend on it. Perhaps even yours.” Flimsies passed back and forth from instructors to students, misreadings underscored in blue crayon.
She keyed, without a mistake:
Emile is a tiresome know-all.
Often Marian thought of Clément. She tried not to, but she did. It seemed ridiculous to revisit a childish infatuation, but the memories were powerful and disturbing, the kind of thing that could undermine your whole personality, disturb the equilibrium that adulthood had brought. She remembered him in Paris on that visit with her father a few months before the outbreak of war. She remembered walking with him in the English Garden in Geneva. She remembered other times and other places. Skiing at Megève. Sailing at Annecy. Sometimes it was difficult to get the chronology right. What had happened when? He and Ned used to play a kind of chess together, blind chess where each player could only see his own board. Kriegspiel they’d called it. They needed an adjudicator, to say whether a proposed move was legal or not. Madeleine always refused, so Marian was recruited. And she was willing, of course; happy simply to be in Clément’s presence. Her task was to watch the two boards, while each player saw only his own pieces and had to makes guesses and estimates of what his opponent was doing. The play had been strangely disjointed, groping in the dark with incomplete information. Exactly like physics research, that’s what Clément used to say. Superposition and uncertainty. A quantum world.
Above all, she remembered that day on the lake. Always that. A day of sun and wind and a strange, opalescent light. A day of dreamlike difference, where shock seemed normal.
Clément.
They were given a free day. It was a rare day of sunshine and breeze, so Marian and Yvette decided to climb the mountain that had been the bane of their lives when they first arrived. Meith Bheinn was its name, a raw hulk of a hill that rose behind the lodge, guarded by crags and the ubiquitous Scottish bogs. But now the climb held no fears. Even Yvette had grown stronger, transformed from the city creature of the first days into someone who could walk with fair ease across this desolate landscape. So they slogged up the slopes, clambered over boulders, splashed, laughing through the marshy patches.
“Look!” Marian cried, seeing something scurrying amid the heather.
Yvette looked. “What? Where?” But the animal had gone. A grouse perhaps, safer keeping to the ground than rising and being shot, living a clandestine life.
The climb took two and a half hours, and from the top they could see across the isles—Rum, Eigg, and Muck close to the land and Skye lying like a shield on the edge of the Atlantic. They were too high for the midges. The wind blew cool but they found shelter in the lee of a boulder where they lay in the fragile sunshine and ate the sandwiches they had brought and talked about what might happen.
“I think they’ll fail me,” Yvette said. “I think they’ll tell me I’m not good for what they want.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re doing fine.”
“No, I’m not. They want people to run over mountains and ford streams and things like that. But what about the cities? What about the towns? That is where the people are. That is where the resistance must be.”
“Maybe we’ll end up in the Massif Central.”
“More likely we’ll be in Paris and we’ll wonder why on earth we were ever made to do this training.”
It was curious how they used the collective pronoun. Nous. As though they might be together. But there would be no “we,” surely. They would be on their own.
“What will you do when it’s all over?” Marian asked.
Yvette shrugged in that fatalistic, Gallic manner. “Find another husband, I suppose. A father for my little girl.”
“In France?”
“Of course, in France. Where else? Perhaps I’ll live in a big apartment, and you and your husband will come to stay—”
“My husband!”
“That Clément you were talking about.”
“Clément’s too old for me.”
“Maybe he was once, but age differences vanish as you get older. Look at you now. You’re not a girl any longer, are you? You’re a woman. You’re catching him up. And there’s a big advantage of having an older man.”
“What’s that?”
“When he dies, you’re young enough for another one.” They laughed at the idea, at the thought of men being their victims, lusting after them and being bent to their will.
After a while the wind grew chill and they decided to go back, but as they were preparing to descend from the summit they heard voices below them on the hillside. Was it someone from the lodge? They crouched in the lee of their boulder and waited, whispering.
The voices came nearer. Male voices. A burst of laughter. They were coming up from the north, directly towards them.
“Let’s go,” Marian whispered to Yvette, “we’ll outflank them.” She led the way eastwards off the summit, keeping low, moving from cover to cover as they had been taught. They crept over tussocks of grass and round scattered boulders. And then they saw the group approaching, half a dozen men in fatigues and balaclavas climbing the hillside rapidly, their boots clumping against the rocks.
“Commandos,” she whispered to Yvette.
They had heard about commandos. Emile had told them. “They train round here as well,” he’d said, “Lochailort.” But he wouldn’t say how he knew, merely gave that smug, know-all’s smile. So the two women crouched behind a boulder as the six men climbed past. They were moving fast, almost as though they were in a race of some kind, and carrying weapons, Sten guns slung against their chests and heavy packs on their backs.
Abruptly Marian stood up. It was an unpremeditated move, nothing she had discussed with Yvette. She just stood up there on the hillside in the wind and the sun. “Bang! Bang!” she shouted. “You’re dead!”
The men stumbled to a halt and grabbed at their weapons, looking round to see her standing there on a boulder, her hair blown out by the wind, looking for all the world like a Valkyrie.
“What the fuck?” one of them exclaimed and then looked embarrassed.
“A woman,” another said. “What the devil’s a woman doing here?”
And the others laughed, one of them raising his hands above his head. “Je me rends,” he cried. “Je suis votre prisonnier. Do what you will with me.” There was more laughter, and more French spoken. The one who had raised his hands in mock surrender was the French boy called Benoît.
The leader of the group came across. Yvette had appeared at Marian’s side and stood close as though for protection.
“Two of you?” the man shouted. He wore captain’s pips on his shoulders and his face was dark with rage. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here? Don’t you know this is a restricted area? Where the bloody hell have you come from?”
“We’re from Edinburgh,” Marian said. “We’ve come up for the weekend.”
“For the weekend? Here? Do you have identification? Where are your papers?”
“We left them down in the car. We didn’t expect to meet a policeman up here.”
“I’m not a bloody policeman!” The captain was struggling with the possibilities, trying to work out what to do. His face was red, from exertion perhaps, or anger, or the embarrassment of meeting women in a place like this. “Where in God’s name are you staying?”
“At a hotel.”
“A hotel? Round here?” He shook his head in bewilderment. “This is most irregular. You shouldn’t be here at all. We’ll have to escort you down.”
“Does that mean we’re under arrest?”
“It means I’m keeping an eye on you until I can be sure of your story. As far as I know you could be spies.”
“We’re not spies. Honestly.”
“Of course you’ll say that. Spies would say that, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose they would. But actually we’re secretaries, at the Office for Inter-Services Liaison in Edinburgh. You can check if you like.”
“Inter-Services Liaison? Never heard of it.”
“It’s very important. It does liaison. Between the services.”
“However important it is, you shouldn’t be here. You’d better come with me.”
So they set off down the hill, the captain leading the way, the two women following, escorted by the men.
“Will we be in trouble?” Yvette asked in a whisper.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Benoît walked beside them. He was looking at her with a curious, sideways glance, as though trying to remember. Then his eyes lit up. “You are Anne-Marie! La belle Anne-Marie who would not go dancing with me. Mais qu’est-ce que vous faites là?”
“Is it any of your business?”
He laughed. He looked quite different from the half-drunk youth who had tried to take her dancing. Younger, certainly, but dark and thoughtful. “She is very surprising, our Anne-Marie. I didn’t expect to see her here. I only expect to see sheep in this shitty part of the world, not beautiful women. And not London girls who suddenly show they are, in fact, French. You fooled me, you know. I never guessed you were French until when you walked away. Emmerdeur, you called me.”
“You were.”
“It was my last evening before coming here.”
“And mine.”
“We should have spent it together.”
“You should have been sober.”
The captain looked over his shoulder, suddenly alerted to the language that was being spoken. “Are these women French? Est-ce que vous êtes françaises?”
The group stumbled to a halt. There was a further interrogation. What were two French women doing here? The faint suspicion arose in the officer’s mind that he was being made to look a fool. “Are you people from Meoble?” he demanded.
Marian smiled, as though it was a moment of revelation. “Meoble Hotel, that’s the place. That’s where we’re staying. Not really a hotel, more a work camp.”
“Look, are you taking the mickey?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to tell you straightaway, was I? It’s all secret. I wasn’t going to go blabbing to any Tom, Dick, or Harry we bump into on a mountainside.”
The officer regarded her with something approaching fury. “I am not any Tom, Dick, or Harry. I’m an experienced alpine climber. I’ve climbed on Everest with F. S. Smythe. I’ve trekked up to the foot of Kanchenjunga. And I don’t expect lip from a young girl out on a hiking trip. So you two come with me and we’ll see what’s going on.”
He turned and stormed off down the hillside with the rest of his group following on the broken slope, slipping and sliding at the steeper bits, herding the two girls among them. Benoît was still beside her. He tried to keep his voice low so that the captain wouldn’t hear. “So you are in training.” He shook his head in amazement. And admiration. “What a casse-cou you are! Where are you from?”
“Geneva.”
“Ah, une Genevoise. I can hear it in your accent.”
“My father was an official of the League of Nations.”
“Posh!”
“He’s not posh. He’s just an ordinary man. He’s my father.”
“And is the posh girl enjoying the course?”
“I told you, we’re not posh.” But she admitted that she was enjoying it, in a masochistic kind of way. It was like a glorified expedition with her Uncle Jacques, who used to take her climbing in the Alps.
“Except for the weather?”
“Except for the weather.” They laughed. You had to laugh at the weather. The only alternative was to cry, and there was no point in doing that as no one would notice the tears.
“We’ve canoed across the lake,” he told her, and then corrected himself with elaborate sarcasm: “Loch. They get very excited if you call it a lake. And now we’ve been racing up to the top. It’s some kind of competition. They love competitions, these British. Apparently there’s a league table, like the football. I think that’s what they think of the war—it’s a competition, and whoever wins gets the Ashes. You’ve heard of the Ashes?”
“Of course I’ve heard of the Ashes.”
“Who would fight for ashes? Only the English.”
He was based at a place called Swordland, on the other side of the loch. Swordland seemed magical and fantastic, like something to do with the Knights of the Round Table. “How strange that we should meet like this,” she said. But was it strange? So much seemed strange nowadays that all concepts of strangeness were distorted. Only a couple of weeks ago she had been a bored WAAF working shifts in the Filter Room at Bentley Priory amid the smoke from cigarettes and the smell from armpits. And now she was here in this remote landscape, with the vague promise of France ahead of her and a whole collection of skills that she would never have imagined acquiring. She knew how to kill a man with a blow to the neck and how to derail a train with a few pounds of explosive; she could signal with Morse and fire a Thompson sub-machine gun. She could move silently at night and penetrate barbed-wire fencing noiselessly and cross a river by pulling herself along a single rope. How was anything strange beside that?
“Perhaps we can get together when we have leave?” he suggested.
“Perhaps.”
“Where do you live?”
“Oxford.”
He looked disappointed. It was his disappointment that encouraged her. “Are you in London?”
“Of course. They put me up in a hotel.”
She was about to ask other questions—where was he from? where was his family? how did he make it to Britain? all that kind of thing—when the captain looked round from the front of the group. “What’s all this talk? Where the hell has security gone? Bérard, you come up here with me, please.”
She laughed. “Do as you are told.”
Benoît made a face and hurried ahead to join the captain. “Oxford trente-deux, quatre-vingt-neuf,” she called out to his back. He glanced round and smiled. His smile was appealing, the smile of the little boy playing at being a soldier.
DOWN AT THE lodge, Marian and Yvette were ordered into the lounge like recalcitrant children while the captain and Lieutenant Redmond conferred on the lawn. Marian stood back from the window so that she could see without herself being seen. There was much gesticulating and frowning.
“They’re treating us like infants,” Marian said. “I’ll walk out. They can’t stop me. I’ll simply go home, and they can stuff their plans.”
Yvette sniffed. “They’ll throw me out.”
“Don’t be daft. It’s me they’re after.”
“They think I’m no good.”
“Stop saying that. They’re idiots. They take themselves so bloody seriously. And they make as many mistakes as anyone else. I mean, they’re not especially clever or anything, they just think they are.”
“They’re the ones in charge, though.”
The two officers disappeared from view. Now there were only the students from Swordland sitting on the grass in front of the house, six anonymous, khaki-clad men with a heap of rucksacks and a pile of ugly-looking weapons; and that boy called Benoît who had seemed amused and self-contained, and accepting of her in a strangely familiar way, as though they had known each other much more than that chance acquaintance in a bar.
“I want to go to France,” Yvette said. “That’s all I want to do.”
“You’ll go to France. I’m sure you’ll go to France.”
Now the Swordland group was gathering up its kit. They must have been given orders that they were about to depart. She could see Benoît bending to lift his pack and sling it over his shoulder. Perhaps she should stride carelessly out and bid them goodbye and show everyone that she thought the whole incident the most colossal joke. That would put the cat among the pigeons. And then the door to the sitting room opened and there was the earnest Lieutenant Redmond summoning them into his office, exactly like the Mother Superior summoning her to the study for one of those humiliating lectures.
“What the hell were you two playing at?” he demanded. He sat at his desk leaving the two women standing in front of him.
“Soldiers,” Marian replied.
The lieutenant frowned. “It’s not a joke, Sutro. It was an appalling breach of security, and bloody foolish to boot. Surprising them like that. Jumping up like a pair of schoolgirls and … what was it you shouted?”
“ ‘Bang bang, you’re dead.’ ”
“ ‘Bang. Bang. You’re dead.’ ” He said the words slowly, savouring them. “Whatever you may think, this is not Cowboys and Indians, Sutro. Haven’t you any idea of what danger you were in? They might have shot you.”
“Shot us? You mean they run around the country shooting innocent civilians at random? We might actually have been what we said we were—a couple of secretaries up from Edinburgh for the weekend. And I thought we did pretty well with our cover story, considering.”
He humphed. Like an old colonel, she thought. Humph. Perhaps that was his name—Humphrey Redmond.
“You seem to treat this whole thing as a game, Sutro. This course, the organisation, everything.”
“No, I don’t. That’s simply not true.”
“You’re always making fly comments. You’re always criticising. You seem to think you know everything. I’m damned if I’m going to have security breached and reports made all because of a hoity-toity girl with an aggravating smile and an insolent manner.”
Her eyes smarted. “That’s unfair.”
“This is nothing to do with being fair. It’s to do with trying to train people to fight. Whether you like it or not, this is a military establishment and in military establishments officers don’t like being made to look fools. The captain was bloody furious, you realise that, don’t you? You even called him a policeman!”
“I was only being consistent with my cover story. Dizzy secretary. Look, this is a bit of a nonsense if all we’re talking about is hurt feelings.”
“And then you referred to him as ‘any Tom, Dick, or Harry.’ ”
“Well, which one is he?”
The lieutenant’s expression faltered. For a moment it wasn’t clear whether he was about to rage or laugh. “He’s two of them, actually.”
“Two of them?”
“Captain Thomas Harry.”
Incipient tears had turned into incipient laughter. She nodded thoughtfully, and tried to avoid the man’s eye. There was something there, she realised now, some little spark of anarchy in his look, and a small pulse of sexual sympathy that passed between them. “He’s a bit of the other one, too,” she said.
TWO DAYS LATER, Yvette was told that she was being posted away. She should pack her bags and be prepared to leave first thing the next morning.
“I’ve failed,” Yvette said. “I told you so.” Her face was drawn in tragedy. She suddenly seemed old, small, and wizened, like someone who had suffered a bereavement: the downturned mouth, the clenched muscles in her cheeks, the dry and staring eyes. “That silly business on the mountain did it. It’s your fault.”
“Of course it isn’t. They’d have thrown me out as well if that had been anything to do with it. Anyway, Redmond saw the funny side. And you’re not being thrown out. You’re being posted to another training place. You said so yourself.”
“That’s just their way of trying to soften the blow.”
“Where did they say?”
“Thame Park, or somewhere. Where the hell is that?”
“Thame? Near Oxford. Perhaps we can meet up when they give us leave.”
Yvette shrugged. “Who knows? I think they will send me home. I think I’m no good. I bet Thame is—what do they call it? The cooler.”
Emile came over with a glass of whisky in his hand and a smug smile on his face.
“You can go away for a start,” Marian told him, but he stood there, immune to animosity.
“They say they are sending me to Thame Park,” Yvette said. “What is Thame Park? Is it where they hide the people who are no good? You said there was somewhere for that. The cooler, you called it.”
He knew, of course. He had all sorts of gen about the organisation. He knew names and acronyms and code names. “Thame Park’s not the cooler. Thame Park’s STS 52.”
“STS 52. What the hell is that?”
“It’s the wireless telegraphy school. They’re going to make a pianist of you.”
“Une pianiste?”
“Wireless operator,” he said impatiently. “Don’t you know the lingo yet?”
MARIAN WAS ON her own now. It was a strange feeling, being the only woman among eight men. It gave her power—she knew instinctively the power of women over men—but also vulnerability, as though with Yvette gone she was now exposed as the next victim in line. But she would not fail. That she knew. The course was at one and the same time a training and an examination, and she would not be found wanting.
Dear Ned,
There is a rumour that we will have leave when this is all over. Perhaps I can come and see you? Maybe even stay with you, if that wouldn’t be getting in the way. Have you been to see the parents? I know how busy you are but you must make an effort and find the time.
On one of our few free days I went hillwalking with a friend. It was a rare sunny day, with the view from the top of miles and miles of deserted hills. And the islands. The Hebrides, that always makes me think of wind and rain. Is it in the name? It sounds breezy and cool, doesn’t it? Hebrides. Say it over to yourself. I know you don’t like words. Numbers have no hidden meanings, you say. But it is the hidden meanings in words that make them so wonderful. When it is sunny like it was that day the place is as beautiful as anywhere in the world, but too often it is raining. And it also has the dreaded midge. These ought to be bottled and dropped on German cities by the RAF. The war would be over in a few days, although the Allies would probably stand accused of violating the Geneva Convention.