“What’s that uniform?” her father asked as she came in the front door.
She shrugged, dumping her suitcase on the floor and accepting his kisses. “I’ve been transferred to the FANY.”
“What on earth is that?”
“First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. It’s like an army corps for gay young things with nothing better to do with themselves. That’s what people say. As many titles in the FANY as in Debrett’s.”
“Are you going to be a nurse? I thought you said—”
“They don’t only do nursing, they do all sorts of things.”
“All sorts of things? Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s best not to ask, Daddy.”
“So how was the course?”
“Lots of hard work.”
Her mother came out of the kitchen and gave a little cry of happiness and surprise. “You’re looking very thin, darling.”
“I’m not thin, Maman. I’m fit.”
“And that uniform really doesn’t suit you.”
“She says she’s transferred to a nursing outfit,” her father said.
“Nursing? That’s useful, I suppose. How was Scotland? What happens next? Where are you off to now?”
She wanted to tell them. She wanted to shock them with the truth: Parachute School, she wanted to say. And then B School, whatever that meant, and then into the field. But instead she shrugged the question away. “More training, somewhere else. I don’t really know. They don’t tell you much.”
“Quite right,” he said approvingly, as one who understood such things.
“Oh, and there’s a letter for you from Ned,” her mother said. “You’re very privileged: he hardly ever writes to us.”
She didn’t open the envelope until she was in the privacy of her room. The letter was written—Ned’s familiar scrawl—on the back of some Ministry of Supply pro forma, as though he had grabbed the first piece of paper that had come to hand. He said very little, of course. There was the usual greeting and a hope that all went well with her course, and then “Here’s what I told you about …” and an address, a Paris address in the place de l’Estrapade in the Fifth Arrondissement. Numéro 2, Appartement G. And the name, Clément.
“What does Ned say?” the parents asked when she came down for dinner.
She shrugged the question away. “Not much. Typical Ned. Have you seen him recently?”
They hadn’t. He didn’t really keep in touch. She waited for the conversation to drift on to other things—family, friends, the trials of wartime—before she asked her question. “The Pelletier family. What happened to them, do you know?” She said it carelessly, as though it wasn’t important whether they knew or not. But her father did know, of course. Gustave Pelletier had been in the French Foreign Office, on secondment to some department of the League. Shortly before the outbreak of war he’d been posted back to Quay d’Orsay to work under Bonnet, but he hadn’t got on with his boss and was sent abroad again. “An ambassador in North Africa or something. Then he resigned and joined the Free French, that’s what I’ve heard. Threw his lot in with Darlan, which wasn’t such a good idea. I think he’s in Algiers now. Maybe you’ll meet him …”
“Clément used to write to you, didn’t he?” her mother asked. “I think he was soft on you.”
Marian blushed and cursed herself for it. “He wrote occasionally. It’s strange how Ned and he got on so well. They seemed such different types.”
“The attraction of opposites,” her mother suggested. “And then they had their studies in common, didn’t they?”
“Their research, yes.”
“All that atomic stuff. I didn’t understand a word.” And then the conversation moved away, to other matters, other people, that world they had inhabited in Geneva, an international world that seemed so remote now when everything was narrow and focused and British.
The remaining days of Marian’s leave seemed to drag by, sluggards compared with the frenetic sprinters of those six weeks in Scotland. The tedious domestic life of rations and queues at the grocer’s and reading the newspapers and worrying about matters that were beyond her ken and beyond her power to influence. She had no friends in Oxford. The university city—introverted, supercilious, enmeshed in its own concerns—was no more than a temporary refuge for the Sutro family.
One evening the phone rang when they were in the sitting room reading. Her mother was deep in some turgid French novel that she had borrowed from the Taylorian. Her father was doing the Times crossword, agonising over a single clue: Forges prose, 9. “I’ll get it,” she said, and went through to the hall before either of them could move from their chairs. She even closed the door before lifting the receiver.
“Anne-Marie?” a voice asked. “C’est toi?”
It was Benoît. Benoît Bérard. She even remembered his surname. “I was just thinking about you,” she said, and immediately regretted it. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. I was so bored, so I gave you un coup de bigo to see if you were at home.”
“What’s that? Un coup de bigo?”
“A telephone call. Le bigophone. You don’t know bigophone?”
She could hear his laughter on the other end of the line. “You make things up,” she accused him. “It’s a load of nonsense.”
“Bigo is not nonsense, it is real. Doesn’t the cream of Geneva society say bigo? ‘I give you a tinkle,’ that’s what the Anglo-Saxons say. So tell me what you are doing at home. Have they sacked you from the organisation?”
“Not yet.” And she suddenly understood that this boy was the only person she could talk to openly about what she did, that this telephone conversation, subdued so that nothing could be overheard, was a kind of lifeline, almost a confessional. “I’m going to Parachute School on Monday. Can you believe that? Jumping out of aircraft.”
“They were going to send me there a week ago. And then there was a change of plan. There’s always a change of plan. They’re probably trying to work out a change of plan to get themselves out of the war.” He broke into his accented English: ‘Ay say old cheps, ay’m afraid there is a change of plen. We are not, ah, fightin’ ’itler any more, we are, er, fightin’ Stalin.”
She laughed. “And what are you doing now?”
“I’m on another of their shitty courses. How to put explosives into dead rats or something. All I want to do is go home, and all they do is send me on courses.”
“Maybe …,” she said.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe we can see each other.”
“But there is no time. Perhaps in London.”
“Perhaps.”
And then the call was over and the receiver was dead in her hand and she felt abandoned.
That night she dreamed. It was a repeat of a childhood dream, the falling dream, now fast, now slow, like Alice down the rabbit hole. People watched her as she fell. She knew them all but she didn’t recognise them, that was the strange thing. Except her parents. They were there among the audience. And the French boy, Benoît. He was laughing at her.
On Sunday she accompanied her mother to Mass at St Aloysius on the Woodstock Road. The church was full, as though Catholics had multiplied in the war years.
The sun shall not burn thee by day, the choir sang, neither the moon by night.
Maman prayed long and hard after the blessing, and when she finally stood up to leave there were tears in her eyes. “I prayed that you will be safe,” she said as they left. “Wherever you are going.”
Parachute School passed in a blur of sensation. They learned how to fall from a ten-foot wall, they shot down slides and swung in harnesses from a gantry inside a hangar, they crunched to the ground on mattresses and coconut matting, they ascended in a tethered balloon and dropped to earth from five hundred feet. There was the same exhilaration you found in skiing—the same thrill of surrender to gravity, the same heart-stopping breathlessness that gave, for a moment, a glimpse of dying. At the end of the week they climbed, bound up in parachute harnesses, into an aged Whitley bomber and flew over Tatton Park where they lined up inside the fuselage to plunge out into empty space. “Go! Go! Go!” the dispatcher called, urging them on like a trainer urging athletes to run faster, jump higher, throw longer. And she plunged out into the air and the wind hit her face and snatched her breath away and the falling dream became reality, people on the ground looking up at her and a disembodied voice calling to her to keep her feet together and flex her knees, before the ground came up and threw her in a crumpled mass into the grass.
After three drops you gained your parachute wings, but women weren’t allowed to wear them on their uniform jackets lest questions be asked. “Why the hell should questions always be asked about women?” Marian complained, but no one paid her any attention. Immediately after the ceremony, transport took the members of her course to the railway station at Ringway to catch the train back down to London. The B School course started the next day near Beaulieu in Hampshire.
At Beaulieu, any pretence about what they might be doing was set aside: this was training for the clandestine life. A school for spies, someone said. They’d given her a field name, and that was how she was to be known. Alice. It seemed fitting. The school was based in a large country house tucked away in the middle of the New Forest; but everything was French, all casual conversation was French, even the reading material was French. It was as though she had stepped through the looking-glass and emerged at a house party in a remote and rather dilapidated chateau in the French countryside, inhabited by a motley collection of people who knew only that they should not be known, who understood that they should not necessarily understand.
“Remember,” a rather louche young man with brilliantined hair explained to them, “the smallest detail you pick up here may one day save your life.” The Knave of Hearts, Marian thought. A recent arrival from France, he spoke about the intricacies of the rationing system and the problems of day-to-day life. “France is no longer the place you knew before the war. You will arrive there and you will be strangers in what you think is home. Don’t walk boldly into a café and ask for a café au lait. There is probably no milk, and there certainly won’t be any coffee. And when you’ve got whatever it is they give you—roasted acorns, probably, or chicory—don’t ask for sugar to stir into it. There is no sugar. All you’ve got is saccharin. If you do ask for sugar, they may wonder where you’ve been for the last two years.”
There was advice on how to comport yourself in a country whose leadership you loathed and whose views you hated; how to blend in and how to fade away, how to see without ever being seen.
“Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés,” the lecturer insisted, quoting someone. To live happily, live hidden.
There were lectures on the German armed forces and security forces, their uniform, their ranks, and their manners—the Wehrmacht and the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst and the Geheime Staatspolizei, the whole taxonomy of occupation and terror. “The Abwehr hate the SD, the SD despise the Abwehr. The battle between the two is almost as vicious as the battle between them and us.”
They explained how to recruit local agents and how to arrange a rendezvous, how to set up dead letter drops and arrange safe houses, how to think and out-think. There were practical lessons in how to tail someone and how to detect that you were being tailed. There was instruction in lock-picking and burglary given by a weasel-faced man who was the only one to speak English and who, so the story went, had done a dozen years in Wormwood Scrubs.
“If he was such a bloody awful burglar that he got caught,” one of the students asked, “why the hell is he teaching us?”
There was a course in encryption and wireless telegraphy. A young man with a prominent Adam’s apple explained the intricacies of the B2 wireless set in terms no one could understand, and then they spent hours learning how to write a message and turn it into apparent gibberish using a double transposition cipher. You chose a poem that you knew by heart and used words from that to generate the cipher key. If the operator at the other end knew your poem, then she could reverse the process and turn the message back into clear. Marian chose a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning that she had learned at school.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach …
The words almost brought tears to her eyes, sentimental tears that were soon dispelled by lessons on what to do if you were captured, how to deal with interrogation, how to deflect the questioning, how to survive on your own, afraid and uncertain, convinced that your position is hopeless. They even came for you in the dead of night and dragged you out of bed and bundled you into a car and drove you to another house where there were bare cells, and anonymous men in the uniform of the SD who interrogated you for hours; shone bright lights in your face; shouted at you. You stood in your nightclothes while they threatened you with violence. Stories went round that they even stripped you naked, but Marian and the only other woman on the course tried to reassure each other by dismissing such rumours as nonsense. They’d never strip a woman. They might try and make it as realistic as possible, but they’d never do that. Still, the fear always lurked in the back of your mind.
The other woman was called Marguerite. She seemed a purely English kind of person, a bit of a busybody, the kind of woman who might be a housekeeper or a district nurse; but her French was perfect, spoken with a Belgian accent and figures of speech.
“Have you come across someone called Yvette?” Marian asked her. They were like convicts in prison, getting rumours from one another, trading snippets, hearing things on the grapevine.
“You mean that silly woman who married an Englishman?”
“Probably. Coombes was her married name.”
“She was in the course before me at Thame. We bumped into one another through some muck-up with the transport. Seems an empty-headed creature.”
“We were in Scotland together. I tried to help her.”
“Did you now? I doubt it was worth it.”
DEAR NED, MARIAN wrote. Training goes on. More peculiar than you can imagine. At this rate I’m afraid I’ll end up fully trained just when the war ends. Tried to ring you but couldn’t get through. Maybe I’ll get some free time …
The course finished with a four-day scheme. “The Scheme,” they announced portentously, as they might have spoken of some kind of ordeal by fire, an initiation into the secret rites of the faith. For her scheme, Marian was to invent her own cover, travel to Bristol, find somewhere to stay and then carry out a series of assignments. First, she had to make contact with an agent operating in the city. Once this was done, her task was to set up cut-outs and dead letter drops and make a move towards recruiting likely people who might provide information about aircraft manufacture in the city. In this charade—that is what she called it—the British police were to be her enemy. They would have been informed that a suspected enemy agent was in the area, and it was her job to evade them as surely as she would try to evade the Milice and the Gestapo.
“And if they catch me?”
“Use your cover story for as long as you can. If things get silly—”
“It’s been pretty silly all the time.”
“This isn’t a joke, Sutro. This is as near to being real as we can make it. In a few weeks it will be for real, and then you’ll get no second chance. If things get really difficult with the police, insist that they make a call to this number and ask for Colonel Peters. He’ll tell them that you are an agent in training and he’ll come round and pick you up. That number is your Get Out of Jail card, so you’d better not forget it.”
AND SO SHE stepped through a further looking-glass, this time into the person of Alice Thurrock, graduate of the University of Edinburgh and teacher of French, a rather plain woman of twenty-eight who wore flat shoes and a shapeless tweed skirt, and had her brown hair gathered into a bun. She didn’t wear make-up, but did have a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that rested asymmetrically on her nose and gave the appearance of a squint. She had been in Paris until the summer of 1940 and returned to Britain a week before the Germans marched in. Since then she’d joined the WAAF, but last spring she had been discharged on medical grounds, and now she was trying to get things back on an even keel and do something useful even if the military were no longer interested in her. There was no one else. Both parents were dead, her father in the flu epidemic of 1918 and her mother two years ago of cancer, so she was on her own, more or less. There was a brother in the army but he was out in the Middle East. Unfortunately all her stuff—her degree and teaching certificates, recommendations from former employers, all of that had been left behind in Paris. She had little more than what she could carry in her suitcase. A whole life.
The next few days were a kind of game, with the whole damaged city as the board and those few people she encountered, the pieces. But who was watching? She travelled on buses and tramped the pavements. She made a rendezvous with a threadbare man in a bookshop who gave her various messages to pass on to agents who didn’t exist. She selected flats for wireless transmissions and anonymous sites for dead letter drops. At a girls’ school in Filton, where she managed to get a job as a temporary teacher, she decided on the unwitting school secretary as a cut-out. A newsagent in Queens Road became another. She spent one afternoon identifying possible dead letter boxes—a loose stone in the steps of the Bethesda Chapel in Great George Street, and the space behind a fuse box beside a cinema in Whiteladies Road—and choosing other sites as suitable places to rendezvous with hypothetical agents. She had no idea what relation all this would have with reality, but, her natural cynicism suspended for the moment, she played the game with gusto.
Dear Ned,
This is the most tremendous fun, like an elaborate game of Hide and Seek but with the whole city to play in. Am I a spy or a mysterious criminal? Or am I just Alice who has stepped through the looking-glass? I remember your explaining that Tweedledum and Tweedledee stood for real matter and a new kind of material that is the exact opposite. Terrene and contraterrene, was that what you called it? Maybe I am like that. Everyone around me is real and I am unreal. Perhaps that is why they don’t notice me …
Suppers were sorry affairs in a cheerless dining room with the other lodger, a girl called Maisie who worked for the Ministry of Supply. The landlady cooked them a thin stew with many potatoes and little else. An OXO cube gave an approximation to the flavour of meat. “Might as well be in prison,” Maisie muttered when the landlady was out of earshot. Apart from that little moment of controversy they talked of neutral things, films they had seen, books they had read, film stars they liked. And boyfriends. “You got a man?” Maisie asked.
Marian thought of Clément, of what was and what might have been. “Not really.”
“Don’t blame you. It’s not worth it nowadays. I had a boy but he was called up and now he’s in the Middle East or somewhere. Hardly ever hear from him. I have to make do with my own comfort, if you get my meaning.” The girl laughed, blushing. “Well, what else can you be sure of these days, eh?”
“Nothing, I suppose.”
“You just got to look out for yourself, haven’t you?”
“I suppose you have.”
Marian lay in bed that night and considered Maisie’s confession. Once upon a time she had thought such an act to be against the God who looked over her and admonished her for things done and things left undone. Although that particular belief had gone, it had left behind a grimy residue of guilt, a feeling that this was a mean-spirited and dishonest act. But Alice Thurrock decided that she had no such inhibitions. She was a practical person. If you wanted a few moments of intense and careless ecstasy, then why not? It was your body, to do with as you wanted. You had to look out for yourself because no one else was going to. So she lay in bed quite without compunction, her legs open and her knees drawn up and her fingers involved in the soft intricacies of her vulva. She tried not to think of Clément. She tried not to think of anyone else but herself, this creature of flesh and blood and bone, of awkward limbs and sterile but sensitive breasts, this mortal coil stroking itself to a climax that ransacked her body and washed through her mind and left her placid and heavy with sleep. But still she thought of Clément.
“Alice Thurrock,” she said to her reflection in the cracked mirror the next morning, “you are a shameless woman.”
On the last day of the exercise they arrested her. They came in the middle of the night when the household was asleep and courage was at its lowest ebb, half a dozen men banging on the front door and pushing past the landlady’s feeble attempts to stop them. They burst into Marian’s room as she struggled into her overcoat and dragged her downstairs to a waiting car while Maisie and the landlady looked on. From there she was driven to some anonymous house in the Clifton area where she was handcuffed to a chair beneath bright lights and interrogated for hours about who she was and what she was doing in the city.
“Tell me your name.”
“Alice Thurrock.”
“Your middle name.”
“Eileen.”
“Your date of birth.”
“October the eighteenth, 1915.”
They’d taken away her overcoat and she had nothing on beneath her nightdress. The light dazzled her so that she could see nothing of her interrogators, but she felt violated under their gaze, as though their hands and not only their eyes were on her body.
“I want my clothes,” she said, but they ignored her.
“Where were you born?”
“Oxford, I was born in Oxford.”
“Tell us what you are doing in Bristol.”
“I want my clothes.”
“Never mind your clothes. What are you doing in Bristol?”
“I’m trying to find a job. I was in the WAAF but I was discharged on medical grounds—”
“You’re lying!”
“No, I’m not. Believe me, I’m telling the truth. My parents are both dead and my brother—”
“I don’t want to hear about your bloody brother. What were you doing yesterday? You were wandering around, checking places out, trying to talk to people, trying to wheedle information out of them. What were you doing in Filton?”
It was like diving, like holding your breath and diving deep down, swimming down against the lift of the water, your breath held, your lungs bursting, knowing that you could always come to the surface and break through into the air and beg them to stop.
“I went for a job at the Filton Ladies’ Academy. They were looking for a French mistress.”
“Where did you learn your French?”
“I studied French at university.”
“But you’ve been to France?”
“Many times. As a child I went on exchanges with a French family during the holidays.”
“Tell me the name of the family.”
“Perrier.”
“Were did they live?”
“In Paris.”
“Where?”
“In the Fifth, near the Panthéon.”
“What was their address?”
“Look, I want my clothes. I’m cold and I want my clothes. You can’t keep me like this—”
“We can keep you how we please. We can strip you naked if we like. Now tell us their address.”
It was like a masquerade, where the pretence has worn thin and tempers are frayed. But she played the game, knowing that one day it might not be a game any longer and she wouldn’t have a Get Out of Jail card and the men behind the lights would be Gestapo agents.
Miss Atkins turned a page. “It seems you did well at Beaulieu. ‘Tolerated arrest and interrogation. Kept to her cover story throughout and made no slips,’ that’s what it says.” She looked up, smiling bleakly. “I’m putting you forward for immediate deployment in the field. You’ll go in the next moon period. Your circuit will be Wordsmith, in the southwest.”
Marian felt a small snatch of emotion, a blend of fear and excitement from which it was impossible to recover either emotion. The southwest. Toulouse, maybe. Or Biarritz, on the coast. Or perhaps Montpellier and the Mediterranean. She searched her memory in vain for anything more. Not Paris. Ned’s idea of her seeing Clément evaporated in a cloud of relief and disappointment.
“The organiser is one of the most successful of our agents,” Atkins was saying. “Field name Roland. Perhaps you have heard about him? I know how word gets round, despite our best efforts at security. He has been in the field for over a year.”
More than a year! It seemed impossible. A year of the clandestine life. Your cover story would become more real than your true story. The lies would become truths, and truths lies. Lies like beauty.
“The circuit is very dispersed. It covers a huge area—from Limoges down to Toulouse—and Roland has been struggling to keep the thing under control. He has a pianist who’s been with him for months now, but he desperately needs a courier. One man can’t get round that area on his own. You’ll be dropping with César. He’s going to the same circuit, as a weapons and sabotage instructor. You won’t have much to do with each other in the field, but you ought to get acquainted. I’ve arranged for him to come and meet you. He should be here any moment.”
But César was late. They waited, making awkward conversation and glancing at the clock on the desk. Fifteen minutes after the appointed time there was a cursory knock, the door was flung open, and there he was, with a faint smile on his face and profuse apologies on his lips and a kind of childish insolence about him that seemed to appease even Miss Atkins. Apparently there had been a mix-up over appointments, a meeting with someone in RF section. He was most very sorry because he knew how much you British value punctuality, but anyway, here he was, better late than never, isn’t that what you say?
“This is César,” Atkins announced primly. “As you may see, he has the gift of the gab.”
“We’ve already met,” said Marian.
“Already met?”
“We bumped into each other in a bar here in London.”
Atkins pursed her lips. “In a bar?”
“And again in Scotland. On a mountainside.”
“On a mountainside? It sounds most irregular.”
“Just a vein,” he said.
“A vein?”
“Don’t you say that?”
Marian giggled. “Un coup de veine. Chance, pure chance.”
Atkins glared at the two of them, as though she might be the butt of some private joke. “I’m not sure that I approve of chance,” she said. “As I told you, César is going as a weapons instructor. You won’t have much to do with each other in the field …”
Marian tried to ignore Benoît. He was attempting to catch her eye, trying to snare her into laughing. “When do we go? You said the next moon …”
“It depends on the weather. But we have a slot for you in the middle of next week. That’ll give you time to sort matters out, get to know the geography, that kind of thing. César will have useful tips for you—he was in France not long ago and knows exactly what it’s like. Perhaps”—she made a small gesture of dismissal—“you can find somewhere to discuss things.”
They found a corner of what had once been the living room. “My little Anne-Marie,” Benoît said. “You see, it is fate that we should be together.”
“I’m not your little Anne-Marie,” she said, but the idea amused her. Despite seeming no older than she he still had that air of instant superiority, of Gallic arrogance. “I think we should use field names anyway. I’m Alice.”
“But I hate ‘César.’ You are lucky. ‘Alice’ is lovely. But ‘César’! Not even a Frenchman. And an emperor to boot.”
“So was Napoleon.”
“That’s even worse. I’m not a Bonapartist or a monarchist or any of those things. I am a republican! Look, let’s get out of this place. Let’s go for a walk. We don’t have to sit around in here just so they can keep an eye on us.”
So they escaped like children from school, amused by their suddenly being thrown together. Somewhere up in the sky the moon was waxing but you couldn’t see that; all you could see were clouds and blue and the sun chasing itself in and out of shadow, and barrage balloons floating like great airy maggots. The moon seemed a long way away. Talking together, they walked down to Marble Arch and into the park. It was easy, this talking, despite their unfamiliarity with each other and the differences in their backgrounds. Benoît was a colon from Algeria with something of the hot Mediterranean littoral in his blood, and a sense of alienation. “They call us Black Feet, you know that? What does that mean? That we’re part Arab? That we’re not quite as good as the rest of them? Maybe it means that we’ve stepped in shit.”
He had been called up in the general mobilisation in 1939, and after the fall of Paris his whole unit had surrendered. On the night that they were to be taken off to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, he and a friend had jumped the train. He shrugged it off as something of no consequence. “You seize the moment. You can’t think about it for too long or the moment’s gone. You’ve just got to act, and if it works”—another shrug—“good luck to you.” Much of the time he shrugged; or grinned, as though what he had done was no more than a boyish prank. With his friend he had made his way across the demarcation line into the unoccupied zone, where they’d worked as farm labourers for a while before continuing southwards. Eventually they had crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, where they were flung into jail.
“We made such a fuss that they let us go after a week. Pamplona, that was the place. Do not go to Pamplona. Full of shits. From there I got back to Algeria and joined the resistance. Then this fellow approached me and suggested that I could go back to France if I sold my soul to him.”
Her own experience, so dramatic at the time, appeared banal beside his. When she told him, almost apologetically, about Geneva before the war—the large house, the servants, the privileges that accrue to the family of an international civil diplomat—he shrugged it all off. “You can’t help that. I can’t help being a pied-noir; you can’t help being the daughter of a big shot. At least you’ve not become a spoiled brat. At least you can take what they throw at you.”
He grinned at her. “Let’s go and get a cup of tea. Isn’t that what the English do? A nice cup of tea.” He said it in English, his French accent overlaid with a clumsy Cockney imitation: Uh noice cuppa tey. It made her laugh.
Over tea they talked about what they might do during these tiresome, anxious days of waiting. Benoît was staying in a hotel that the organisation had found for him. They didn’t want him living with other members of the Free French Forces. “They guard me jealously because I should be working with the Gaullists but they want to keep me for themselves.”
She looked at him thoughtfully, her head on one side. “Why don’t you come to Oxford? I’m going back this evening. Why don’t you come and stay next weekend?”
It was an idea plucked out of the air. Why not bring this French boy to see Maman? She would love him, wouldn’t she? It was not the kind of thing Marian had ever done before, but then she was no longer the kind of person she had ever been. She wouldn’t even ask. She would simply tell her mother: “Maman, I’ve invited this French guy for the weekend.” C’mec français, she’d say. Her mother hated that kind of slang. “He’s at a loose end in London and I thought it would be nice for him to see a bit of family life.” Family life. That is what would win her mother over.
THAT AFTERNOON SHE discovered who she was to be. “Anne-Marie Laroche,” an earnest, bespectacled Frenchman informed her. “Anne-Marie as you suggested. Laroche because it is common.” Like a bridge player laying out his hand to take all the remaining tricks, he displayed the identity cards and ration books of this fictitious woman. “A plain name, an ordinary name, a name that is as completely forgettable as you will try to be.”
“Anne-Marie Laroche. I like the name.”
He shrugged, as though liking a name were an irrelevance entirely confined to women. “As you see, I have made her twenty-six years old. The same colouring as yourself, of course. But I’m afraid you’ll have to make her, er … less striking than you are. Good looks are not considered an asset for an agent—you don’t want to go turning men’s heads.” He glanced up at her and blushed and fiddled with the papers in front of him. “Now you need to get to know Mademoiselle Laroche as well as you know yourself …”
Afterwards she had a briefing about the use of ciphers with a flirtatious young man called Marks. He introduced himself as “more Groucho than Karl” and asked her if she remembered from her lectures at Beaulieu how to do a double transposition cipher and laughed out loud when she told him which poem she had chosen for her key. “You and half a dozen other women agents,” he said. She needed something original, something that no German cipher expert could possibly know. Did she write any poetry of her own?
“There’s something.”
“Let me see.” She picked up a pencil and wrote out a poem that she’d written years ago:
Perhaps never
But never
We’ll share love
Together
Yet always
Through all ways
You’re close to my heart
“Who was he?” Marks asked.
She smiled and blushed a bit. “An old friend. I haven’t heard from him for ages. I thought I was in love with him but maybe it was just a childish crush.”
He shrugged. “Crush and love, the only difference is how long it lasts. Let’s see if he brings you luck.” So he set her an exercise to see how many mistakes she made using her poem and she gave a small smile of triumph when she made none.
“Close to my heart,” he said approvingly, and with apparent reluctance released her to her next appointment, which was with a Jewish tailor in Clifford Street who would make her a couple of suits and a coat in French cloth and in the best French manner. The stitching, the lining, the cut, everything was different, he explained, huffing and puffing around her and decrying English fashion. But it would take time. You cannot rush these things. These people always ask for everything by tomorrow.
In the evening she took the train back home. The ups and downs of her present existence bewildered her. One moment she was in the world of the organisation with its tricks and puzzles, its truths and half-truths and downright lies; the next she was at home enveloped by the certainties of childhood. The only thing she carried over from one world to the other was the ability to lie.
“They’ve told me to prepare to go overseas,” she explained to her mother. “Algiers, I expect, but it might be Morocco. They’re terribly vague. I want some stuff that won’t look out of place, clothes and things. Can I see what you’ve got? Oh, and Benoît is probably coming to stay for a couple of days.”
“Who is Benoît?”
“I told you. This mec I met during training. He’s coming for the weekend.”
“What on earth do you mean, mec?”
“Boy, then. What do you want me to say? Chap?” She said it in English—chep—with mockery in her tone.
“Well, whatever you call him, we don’t know him. How can we have someone to stay whom we don’t know?”
“But if he doesn’t come to stay you’ll never know him.”
Her mother made that face, the little moue of anger that she always showed when either of her children bested her in an argument. “Anyway, there’s also a phone message for you. Something else to do with your work, I suppose. A colonel, he said.”
“A colonel?”
She thought: Buckmaster. She thought: disaster, some change of plan, the whole carefully constructed artifice brought crashing down by some outside agency, some matter of chance or coincidence. Maybe something in Bristol, or maybe some other hitch. The head of Wordsmith didn’t want a woman. Perhaps it was that. Or perhaps Buckmaster and Atkins had revised their opinion of her at the last minute and decided that no, she was not suitable material for going into the field. Instead it would be the limbo of the “cooler,” where she would kick her heels in frustration while doing nothing, because she knew what she knew, like some radioactive substance that was too hot to handle and had to be kept in isolation.
But her mother had written the message down on the notepad beside the telephone and the name was not Buckmaster but Peters: would Marian meet Colonel Peters at Brasenose College at ten o’clock the next morning? It took a moment for her to recognise the man’s name—her Get Out of Jail card during the scheme in Bristol, the number she never had to ring.
The college, like everything else, had been taken over by the military. Where you expected gowned figures stalking the quadrangles, instead there was a coming and going of men in uniform, and that sense of shabby impermanence that haunts military installations, as though the enemy is approaching and administration might be making a bonfire of the files at a moment’s notice. In the shadows of the main gate a notice from the Commandant exhorted officers of the Directing Staff to kindly address all problems of a domestic nature to the adjutant rather than the domestic bursar. Someone had ringed the split infinitive in red ink.
She stood hesitantly in the gatehouse wondering why she was here. Alice, she thought, in some eccentric wonderland. But no white rabbit scuttled across the green velvet of the lawn; instead a figure in sports jacket and flannels stepped out of the shadows of the porter’s lodge, held out his hand, and gave a little half-bow. “How good to see you again, Miss Sutro, and looking rather more habillée than at our previous encounter. My name is Peters.”
He had a stooped, donnish air about him and seemed rather too old to be on active service. She frowned. “I’m sorry. Perhaps there’s been some misunderstanding …”
“Oh, no misunderstanding at all. But our previous encounter was a little one-sided, I’m afraid. I was witness to your interrogation in Bristol.”
The revelation was a shock. She remembered shadows behind the lights, men asking questions of her, shouting at her, wheedling, threatening, men whose interest in her seemed almost lascivious. Why did she feel embarrassed by the knowledge that this man had been one of the watchers?
“I must say,” he added, “you conducted yourself in exemplary fashion. To the manner born. I’ve always had my doubts about young women getting mixed up in this kind of thing—there’s been quite a bit of opposition to it, d’you know that?—but girls like you show that my doubts were ill-founded.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s not an insult.” He took her elbow and guided her into the golden light of the quadrangle. “I wrote a glowing report for Colonel Buckmaster. Told him I’d have been happy to have you working for me when I was in the game. Just the ticket.”
Men in uniform walked past them, young officers laughing and joking about something. Through a shadowy archway was another quadrangle with a military-looking tent pitched on one of the lawns. Under the eye of a corporal a soldier was carefully painting cobblestones white. She thought of Alice again, the gardeners painting white roses red.
“What is this all about?” she asked, and Peters nodded thoughtfully, as though she had posed a most penetrating and perceptive question.
“Of course you are curious,” he said. “Of course you are. And we will satisfy your curiosity all in good time.”
He led the way into one of the staircases and up narrow stairs to a door that opened onto a room overlooking the small quadrangle and the end wall of the college chapel. There were a sofa and two armchairs and a low table between them. And rising from one of the armchairs was a second man, rather younger than Peters. He wore a dark blue pinstriped suit and in his top pocket was a white silk handkerchief. His name, so Colonel Peters said, was Fawley. Major Fawley.
They shook hands. The man contrived a smile of sorts. He wore glasses, perfectly circular glasses that gave him an owlish look. Would she like tea? Or perhaps, what with her French background, she would prefer coffee?
“I don’t want anything, thank you, Major Fawley. I just want to know what I am doing here.”
“Of course you do. And I will tell you shortly, but before I answer I must emphasise the extremely confidential nature of what we have to discuss. All of this conversation must be considered most secret. Nothing of what we say here must be repeated to anyone, either within your organisation or outside it.”
“What about Colonel Buckmaster?”
“Not Colonel Buckmaster, nor Miss Atkins. No one.”
“But they are my superiors.”
Fawley nodded. There was something measured about him, something of the stillness of a priest who would understand any point of confusion and have the doctrinal answer ready to hand. “I comprehend your difficulty, Miss Sutro. Of course I do. If everything goes well, Colonel Buckmaster will be made aware of our conversation in due course; but for the moment let’s say that this meeting is outside even his remit.”
Was this another test? Was it some stupid charade put on by the organisation to see how good she was at keeping things secret? “I really don’t understand—”
“You see, I work for a different government department from the one which recruited you—”
“Different? What do you mean, different?”
“In my father’s house are many mansions, Miss Sutro. I’m afraid I am unable to identify the department, save to say that it is most secret. More secret even than the one so … so admirably run by Colonel Buckmaster.”
“I don’t follow—”
“I’m sure you don’t. Let’s say that we are all on the same side, all working towards the same ends, but in different ways.” He reached inside his jacket and took out a cigarette case. “Do you smoke?”
Did she? It seemed a question as difficult as all the others seething in her mind. She thought of the girls in the Filter Room during the night watch, the haze of smoke above their heads, the desultory conversations when there was nothing happening, the sudden action when the radar stations called through and plots began going down on the table. An explosive tension like a parachute jump, not this nagging anxiety, this confusion. She took the proffered cigarette and leaned forward to accept his light. As she sat back in her chair Fawley said, “I understand that you are due to leave for France at the next moon.”
She tried not to betray her shock. At Beaulieu they’d warned her—they’ll surprise you with unexpected knowledge. They’ll find out things from other prisoners and they’ll try and shock you with what they know. But you’ve got to seem indifferent, as though you’ve no idea what they’re going on about. You know nothing, remember that. Nothing. So she tried not to show shock, she tried not to glance at Peters, she tried to appear indifferent. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do, Miss Sutro. For the moment, all I want to say is that when you get to Paris—”
“Major Fawley, I can’t make any comment about this kind of thing.”
He nodded. “Of course you can’t. Let me put it this way: if the chance should arise of your going to Paris, we would like you to do something for us.”
“Something?”
“We’d like you to make contact with your friend Dr Clément Pelletier. Would you be happy to do that?”
The two men seemed to be held in a great stillness. She was aware of a sound from the quadrangle below, the clatter of army boots on paving stones, the sound of men laughing, someone calling in a loud voice across the open space.
“Clément Pelletier?”
“Exactly.”
Thought seemed difficult, as though demanding more strength than she possessed. Like trying to run when waist-deep in water. “How do you know about Clément Pelletier?”
“Dr Pelletier has long been known to us.”
“But how do you know that I know him?”
“It has come to our attention in the course of events.”
“But how, Major Fawley? How exactly has it come to your attention?”
The man smiled benignly. “You were put through the cards, Miss Sutro. Inquiries were made about your background, your contacts, whom you know and have known. The security people can be very thorough. You must understand these things by now.”
“Perhaps I’m just beginning to. So what exactly would be the purpose of my contacting Dr Pelletier? Assuming that I were to go to Paris?”
“We would like you to take a letter to him. Of course we can’t expect you to carry an ordinary letter in an envelope. Instead, we have a rather special letter.” He reached into a pocket and took out a leather wallet. From inside this he took a key, an ordinary key that might have opened a front door lock. He handed it to her. “I imagine you carry a key ring of some kind? When you go to France, ensure that this key is on it.”
She held the thing between thumb and forefinger. “It’s just a key.”
Fawley shook his head. “Not just a key. You see the maker’s name, Lapreche?”
“Of course I can see it.”
“Well, if you file the metal down at the letter R you’ll find a small cavity. In the eye of the letter. You need to do it carefully but I’m sure that a person of Dr Pelletier’s ingenuity is quite capable. Inside that cavity—it’s less than two millimetres across—is what we call a microdot. Maybe you are already familiar with such things? A piece of photographic film little bigger than a full stop.”
She turned the key over in her hand. It shone in the light, a bright silver. LAPRECHE. However close she looked, there was no sign that it had been tampered with.
“Under a microscope the microdot will reveal itself as a letter from a certain Professor Chadwick. I can assure you that Professor Chadwick is a most important person in the world of science.”
She looked from one man to the other. “I know perfectly well who Professor Chadwick is.”
“Of course you do.”
“So why me? If it’s only a matter of sending a letter from Professor Chadwick, couldn’t any agent of yours have done it? You must have people working for you in Paris.”
“Perhaps we do. However, the letter invites Dr Pelletier to come to England—”
“—which is where you come in. We thought you might be more persuasive than a mere letter. I believe—forgive me if I’m wrong—that there is a degree of fondness between you and Dr Pelletier.”
She felt the colour rise in her cheeks. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I say. Fondness.”
“Yes, he was fond of me. Like a brother.”
The man continued in his placid, inquisitorial manner. There was something of the barrister about him, carefully cross-questioning a witness, asking the questions in his own time, never being deflected from his purpose. “Dr Pelletier wrote to you when you were away at school, didn’t he?”
“How on earth do you know that?”
“In most affectionate terms.”
“I asked how you knew.” She felt a burst of rage. Ned, she thought. Her own brother betraying her confidences. And then another possibility dawned. “The nuns. You’ve spoken to the nuns.”
Colonel Peters shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He looked like a reluctant witness to an unpleasant surgical intervention.
Fawley leaned forward and stubbed out his cigarette. “I believe the good Sisters were under the impression that Dr Pelletier was your uncle. That, apparently, is what you told them. Although when they consulted your parents—”
“They did what?”
The man allowed a sympathetic smile to escape. “It seems that we are not the only ones to have made enquiries about you, Miss Sutro.”
“The nuns checked with my parents? Is that what you are saying?”
“Dear old Oncle Clément offering kisses to his beloved niece seems a different thing from an unrelated man, only a few years her senior, doing the same. Doesn’t it?”
Je t’embrasse. She recalled the thrill of reading his words, and the image that she clung to in the cloistered confines of the convent. “His letters stopped. I thought he’d grown tired of writing—”
“So I imagine.”
Understanding dawned, like a revelation: “The nuns kept them from me. They stole them.”
Fawley removed his spectacles and polished them with a large, white handkerchief. “Miss Sutro, what the nuns did or didn’t do with regard to one of their flock is no concern of mine. And believe me, it is no concern of mine what your relationship may or may not have been with Dr Pelletier three years ago, except as far as it might help us. But you do seem uniquely placed to assist us in our efforts to get Dr Pelletier to come to England, don’t you?”
She didn’t know whether to be angry or not. She didn’t know what to say. She felt bewildered, almost violated, as though people had been discovered ransacking her room, going through her private possessions. Thieves in the night. “What work is Clément doing? Why in God’s name is this so important?”
Fawley looked sympathetic. “If I knew the answer to that question, Miss Sutro, I couldn’t possibly tell you.”
“The nuns, Maman.”
“Which nuns, my dear?” As though there were whole flocks of them out walking round the city.
“The nuns at school, of course.” Crows. That’s what they used to call them. “Look out, a crow’s coming,” they’d say, and hurry to hide whatever illicit thing they were doing, reading a forbidden book in all probability. Or writing a secret letter.
“What about them?”
“Did they contact you about Clément? About how he used to write to me?”
Her mother looked vague. Marian knew that look, the expression of someone wondering whether to remember or not. “I believe they did. I got a rather concerned letter from Sister Mary Joseph. She asked … Oh, I don’t recall. She asked, is he Marian’s uncle? Or something like that. And I replied, no of course not, whatever gave you that idea? But he is a family friend, and how can there be any harm in a family friend writing to you? That’s what I said.”
“That’s what you said?”
“Of course, my darling. Why on earth are you asking about all this? It was ages ago, when you were a child. You’re anything but a child now, it seems. These days people grow up so fast. It’s the war, I suppose.”
“They stole his letters to me, do you know that? The damned nuns stole my letters!”
“Please don’t use that kind of language, darling. All this military service has made you coarse. And whatever the Sisters did would have been in your own best interests.”
She didn’t know whether to argue. A year ago she would have. A year ago she would have exploded in a great burst of anger. Now she merely shrugged. “I’m going up to London tomorrow,” she said.
“But you’ve only just come home. Always rushing around. I don’t know what’s going on. Is it that French boy?”
“It’s nothing to do with him. It’s Ned. I’m going to see Ned.”
“Fawley.”
Ned kicked ineffectually at a stone. “What about him?”
They’d abandoned his flat for the garden in the centre of the square. She didn’t want to be inside. She didn’t want to be cooped up, trapped. She wanted to be out in the open where she could breathe fresh air. She needed to breathe deeply, to let anger out and something resembling calm take its place.
“So you do know him?”
“I’ve met him.”
“How? When?”
“He was involved with Kowarski and von Halban, getting them out of France in 1940.”
“So who is he? And why is he so interested in Clément?”
“It’s to do with the war effort.”
“Everything’s to do with the war effort, Ned. You’re to do with the war effort, I’m to do with the war effort. You’ve got to be a child or a geriatric not to be.” She looked round at the garden, stripped of railings, its lawns dug up and given over to growing vegetables. “Even this bloody garden is to do with the war effort.”
“Squirrel, you’ve learned to swear. It’s not very ladylike.”
“I’m not ladylike. They knocked the lady out of me in Scotland. They taught me how to kill, Ned. Do you realise that? Do you?”
“I suppose that’s part of the training. Why should it only be men who are taught to kill?”
She looked at him. Once she would have entrusted him with her life; now matters weren’t so clear-cut. She didn’t know him any more, that was the problem. The Ned of old was like a childhood memory—uncertain, distorted by time. “This man Fawley paid me a visit and all he did was speak about Clément. What’s so important about Clément, Ned? That’s what I want to know. For God’s sake, Fawley and his henchman came all the way to Oxford to proposition me. They’ve set themselves up as some alternative to the organisation that has recruited and trained me.” She felt herself hovering between tears and anger, wavering like something balanced on a fulcrum with only two ways to go, both of which involved falling. “I’ve got no idea what the hell’s going on, and no means of finding out. These people are asking me to do something for them and I want to know what it’s all about. You know and you’re not telling me. Christ alive, I’m your sister, Ned!”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “I’m afraid I simply can’t tell you. It’d put you in danger if you knew.”
“What a bloody pompous thing to say! I’m not a child any longer. I’m up to my neck in stuff that’s just as secret as yours. And why should it be all right for you to know but not me? Typical bloody man. The dear little woman can’t know, but I can.”
“It’s not that. The fact is, you’re going to France. You know what the risks are.” He shook his head. “You mustn’t know, Squirrel. Really.”
“But you should?”
“It’s not my choice. I was part of the team that debriefed Kowarski and von Halban when they got out of France in 1940. I spent that year at the Collège before the war. I know all about their work.”
She looked at her brother with sudden clarity, an intense white light of revelation. “You’ve been briefed to tell me all this, haven’t you? You’re working with them, aren’t you?”
He barely hesitated. “Of course I am.”
She looked round at the ruined garden. What did Ned’s answer mean? Were they no longer brother and sister? Did she now have to judge even her relationships with her own family through the distorting prism of secrecy and connivance? “It was you who told them, wasn’t it? About me and Clément.”
“Certainly, I told them.”
“But why? For God’s sake, why?”
“They came a couple of weeks ago. Shortly after I saw you the last time. I thought it was security screening. You know what it’s like. Lots of questions.”
“About you. Family and friends, our life in Geneva before the war, that kind of thing. And then they asked, what about Clément Pelletier?”
“How did they know?”
“They know I worked with him. It’s not a secret, for heaven’s sake. And then they asked, how well does your sister know him?”
“And you told them?”
“Of course I did. Why shouldn’t I?”
Anger was an organic thing, occupying parts of her body—the brain, of course, but also the chest and the stomach, a tumour of anger, a metastasis of rage. She spoke French. French was a weapon she could use, a rapid, caustic, light flutter of fury. “Because it sounds to me rather like betrayal.”
“Oh, don’t be melodramatic. All I said was that you were quite close.” He looked away, avoiding her eyes. “This is ridiculous, Squirrel. Like brother and sister, I said; nothing more than that. You and me, Madeleine and Clément. I had no idea where it was leading.”
“That’s the trouble, isn’t it? I have no idea where it is leading either. And you don’t help because you won’t even tell me why they’re so interested in Clément Pelletier. Christ, you’re a coward, Ned. I always looked up to you, thought you were my big, clever, brave brother. But now I see you for what you really are.”
At last there was some reaction from him, some glimmer of shame and anger in his look. “And what is that?”
“You’re a cold fish, Ned. You don’t understand the basic human decencies. You shun the parents, and now you’re shunning me. Soon you’ll have nothing left except your stupid bloody physics.”
There was silence. They stood there in the garden with the wreckage of their relationship between them, like two children looking down on a broken toy. Ned glanced over his shoulder, as though it were all his fault, as though he had smashed the thing in temper and the adults were coming to see what the fuss was all about. But there were no adults around, nobody at all, only the trees in the garden and the blank windows of the houses that surrounded the square.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” he said. “If that’s the only way you’ll see how important this all is. I’m putting you in danger, even more danger than you were in before, but I’ll tell you. Clément was part of Fred Joliot’s team at the Collège de France, you know that. Well, they were working on the idea of an atomic bomb.”
Time, that flexible dimension, stopped. She thought of Ned’s jokes—death rays, devices that could see in the dark, bombs that could blow up whole cities. And the silly games they’d played—Pig-in-the-middle, Kriegspiel, Consequences. “An atomic bomb? Are you serious?”
He laughed, that little snorting dismissive laugh that so annoyed her. “Of course I’m serious.”
“Clément was working on an atomic bomb?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? He’s still there, still in Paris, and as far as anyone knows, still working at the Collège de France.”
“And working on a bomb?”
“Who knows if that’s what he’s still doing? But he was.”
“You mean it could happen? Some sort of super-bomb?”
“It’s easy. That’s what makes it so frightening.”
“Easy?”
“Uranium. You must have heard me talking about it, that Christmas before the war. Everyone was talking about it at the time. If you fire a neutron at a uranium nucleus it splits apart into two new atoms—different elements. Barium and krypton.”
She remembered now. “You and Clément came home for the holiday and we all went to the chalet in Megève. We wanted to ski but all you and Clément did was talk about science. I remember no one understanding a word you were saying. Daddy said it sounded like alchemy, turning base metal into gold. The philosopher’s stone. ‘What will you physicists come up with next?’ he kept asking. You got angry with him.”
“As always, he was missing the point. He thought it was a joke, some kind of esoteric conjuring trick. That’s the trouble with diplomats. They’re all classicists. Not a scientist among them. Any scientist would have realised how fundamental it was.” “Fundamental” was one of Ned’s words. He could batter you into submission with it. “It was totally unexpected, this splitting. I mean, really amazing. As startling as firing a pea-shooter at a diamond and—ping!—the diamond splits open … and becomes two new jewels altogether. Ruby and sapphire, say. And at the same time energy is released, a massive amount of energy.”
“But wasn’t all that done in Germany? What’s it got to do with Clément?”
“Hahn and Strassmann were the first to publish, in December 1938. Yes, they were in Berlin. But Irène Curie and Pavel Savitch had got exactly the same experimental results a year before at the Radium Institute in Paris, only they hadn’t interpreted them correctly. I must have told you about this at the time.”
“We were hardly listening, and when we were we didn’t really understand.”
“It’s not that difficult.” He looked impatient, almost angry. “That’s the trouble with people. They just don’t try to understand. You see, atomic nuclei are held together by huge forces, and at the time everyone thought that they couldn’t come apart like that. But they can. If the nuclei are big enough, they can. And when they do the energy equivalent to those forces is released. Then Fred’s lab showed something more: when this fission takes place—that’s what they call it, fission—as well as the energy it also emits neutrons. These neutrons will then hit other uranium atoms and cause them to split as well. If each decaying atom releases at least two neutrons then those neutrons could hit two more uraniums, making them split up in turn. You understand the idea? Atomic billiards, but each single collision creating the possibility of two further collisions. You’d get a cascade of uranium atoms splitting up, one causing two others, two causing four, four causing eight, and so on. An exponential increase. They call it a chain reaction. Joliot and his team showed that it would happen. Not that it might happen—it would happen.”
She was used to conversations like this. Ned had tried to explain his world to her many times. It seemed a bizarre place, of nebulous ideas and cloudy realities. Remember, he’d told her, the atom is mainly nothing at all, a hard nucleus, where all the matter is concentrated, with acres of empty space all around it. If the nucleus were the size of your fist—he’d held up his own—then the outer limits of that one atom, the outer edge of its emptiness, would be about half a mile away. Reality is so much empty space.
“And this chain reaction makes a bomb?”
“Think of the energy,” he said. “When a uranium nucleus splits, you’ve suddenly got two nuclei right next door to each other.” He made a ball of his hands, fingertips touching, and then collapsed the ball into his two fists. “But nuclei shouldn’t be close together like that. They should be—”
And suddenly she saw it. “Half a mile apart! No, twice that. They should be a mile apart!” She almost laughed. She saw into his world for the first time: the pure outrage of having two nuclei so close together was something shocking, against nature.
He nodded, as though it was obvious. “They should be a mile apart and instead they are touching. So they fly apart at colossal speeds to take up their correct distances. We don’t know exactly how fast they move. Maybe a tenth of the speed of light. The energy involved is vast. We talk of electron volts. Each uranium atom that splits apart like this releases two hundred million electron volts of energy. That’s …” He seemed to scratch around for a way of saying it. “Oh, tiny, useless, enough to move a grain of sand. You can’t do anything with it, not in practical terms. But each kilogram of uranium contains a vast number of atoms—imagine twenty-five with twenty-three zeros after it, that’s the number. If all the atoms split one after another in this chain reaction, you have to multiply the amount of energy released from each nucleus by the total number of atoms. Suddenly you’ve got an immense amount of energy. Do you see what I mean? Potentially unlimited.”
She thought of Clément trying to explain his work to her. It’s exactly like Kriegspiel, he had said: groping in the unseen with incomplete information and trying to find out what’s possible. And what was possible was some kind of bomb. She remembered the very last time they’d been together, at Eastertime in Paris with her father and Ned, shortly after her seventeenth birthday. They’d walked close together. Occasionally their hands had touched. You mustn’t be frightened, he’d said to her.
“You’re not listening, are you?” Ned was saying. “You’re not paying attention.”
“Yes, I am.”
“If you want to understand, you’ve got to listen.”
“I am listening.”
“The point is, you must have a sufficiently large mass of uranium. That’s crucial. Remember what I’ve told you before: atoms are mainly nothing at all. The nuclei are like dust motes in an empty room, hard to hit and far apart. Neutrons can go a long way before encountering one, so if you haven’t got enough mass the neutrons simply escape into the air before they actually hit other atoms. Francis Perrin, another man in Joliot’s team, made an estimate of how much uranium you’d need to guarantee that the chain reaction happens. He called it la masse critique. He calculated forty-four tons. Or, with a casing that could reflect escaping neutrons back into the mass, a mere thirteen. He published that in the Comptes rendus so it was completely open to the public. All that I’ve told you was published before the war for anyone to read and work it out for themselves. However, a short while later Joliot’s group filed a secret patent with the Caisse Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique entitled Perfectionnements des charges explosives. It’s a patent on how to make an atomic bomb.”
It was a beautiful day. It should have been cold and miserable, threatening a storm. But instead the sun was shining and leaves were glistening in the light.
“And all this work was done in Paris?”
“All in Paris. At the Collège de France, and at their other lab at Ivry. You came to the Collège once with Papa, don’t you remember?”
“Of course I do. We took you and Clément out for lunch.”
“It wasn’t the happiest of meals.”
“You got angry over the slightest thing.”
“I got angry over the way Clément pandered to you.”
She hadn’t understood at the time, but now she did: the intricate complex of Ned’s jealousies. After lunch they’d walked along the quai where artists were selling paintings of the usual scenes: the cathedral directly across the river and the Eiffel Tower and nostalgic views of the alleyways of Montmartre. Clément had strolled along beside her, while Ned was condemned to walk ahead with their father. “Hurry up,” he’d complained, looking back at them. “We must get back to the lab.”
Clément had ignored him, leaning close to share his thoughts with her, laughing with her, teasing her. “I want to pull your leg,” he said, using the English expression, which seemed to delight him but sounded outrageous to her, so outrageous that it had made her blush.
“And what part did Clément play in all this?”
“He worked on the critical mass problem. Natural uranium is made of two different kinds, different isotopes. Most of it, more than ninety-nine percent, is uranium 238. A mere 0.3 percent of natural uranium is the other kind. It’s called uranium 235. Clément worked on the calculations Perrin had used. Mean free paths and cross-sections and probabilities, a whole lot of stuff. Thermal neutrons and slow neutrons. And then he made a crucial observation: if it was only the uranium 235 that was responsible for the fission and if you could obtain a relatively pure sample of 235, then the calculations would be different. A forty-ton, even a twelve-ton atomic bomb is a lot of bomb. An aircraft couldn’t deliver it. But if you can increase the proportion of uranium 235 in your sample, then the value for the critical mass comes down dramatically.”
“How dramatically?”
“It depends on the degree of enrichment, and even then the maths is not certain. Clément’s revised calculations were in the order of pounds, not tons. Say ten, maybe even less. No mass at all.” There was a rockery among the bushes at the centre of the garden. Ned went and picked up two large stones and brought them over. “Imagine these are lumps of uranium metal, each one a fraction below the critical mass.” He handed them to her. “Imagine it’s uranium. It’s greyish and shiny. Quite decorative, really. Now smash the two together.”
She did as she was told. A children’s game. Crash! And there was a faint and sulphurous smell of sparks.
“There! That’s all there is to it. You’ve just blown London off the map and out of history. Vaporised.”
“Merely by doing that everything vanishes?”
“Merely by doing that. If the two lumps are below the critical mass, as long as you keep them separate nothing happens. Smash them together and the chain reaction begins, fast, almost as fast as the speed of light. The atoms break up in a cascade, each one causing the next two to split in turn and release their energy. If one kilogram of uranium went like that it would release the equivalent energy of twenty thousand tons of TNT, all detonated in a flash.”
She knew TNT. She knew all the explosives: plastic, Nobel 808, ammonal, gun cotton. She knew how to shape a charge and how to fuse it and how to detonate it. She could break a railway line and put a train out of action, or a car. She might have a go at destroying a bridge, although you’d need to be an expert for that, like Benoît. But not this, not a whole city, in an instant.
“This is all theoretical, isn’t it?”
“It’s as certain as existence itself.”
She tossed the stones back among the bushes and brushed the soil from her hands. “I don’t believe you.”
“That doesn’t make any difference. Whether you believe it or not doesn’t change the facts. It doesn’t depend on belief.”
She looked around. There was the garden with the old plane trees, their camouflage trunks and shivering leaves; and beyond, the buildings of the square, one or two of them hollow shells, but still there; and the city itself, battered by the bombing but still incontrovertibly there. It was beyond imagining that it could all be blown away in an instant simply by banging two lumps of metal together.
“And now they know all about me and Clément.” It seemed unreal, circumstance and happenstance and pure coincidence coming together to create a small but terrifying explosion. She looked at him with an expression that tried to mollify her previous anger. “Do you remember playing Pig-in-the-middle, with me in the middle?”
“We called it ‘collapsing the wave function.’ ”
“It used to make me furious.”
“But you kept playing, didn’t you? Because of Clément.”
“That’s what I feel like now. The pig in the middle.”
He smiled, a bitter little smile. “You always were,” he said.
“And I’ve got to keep playing?”
“I’m afraid so.”
The Cambridge train was full. All trains were full these days. Soldiers, airmen, men in dark suits carrying significant briefcases, academics in careless tweed jackets and ill-fitting grey flannels. IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY? posters on every platform demanded, but half of England seemed to have reason enough.
“Whose idea was this,” she asked as the train trundled out through the London suburbs, “yours or theirs?”
“Mine,” he said.
“Do they know about it?”
He nodded. “They thought it a good idea. The personal touch. You’ll be more persuasive if you’ve met him.”
He smiled and shook his head, looking out through the window at the passing buildings. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
CAMBRIDGE ITSELF SEEMED smaller than Oxford, more delicate, more vulnerable, as though its only foundation, the fragile subsoil of learning, had been eroded by war and put the whole place in danger of dissolution. They took a bus from the station into the centre and walked a few minutes to where Free School Lane threaded its way between close, medieval buildings. Halfway along the lane there was a gothic gateway that might have belonged to a fourteenth-century monastery but actually announced itself as the Cavendish Laboratory. The porter had the manner of a household butler, at once obsequious and knowing. “You’ll be looking for Dr Kowarski, won’t you, sir? I think you’ll find him in his office.”
“Thank you, Dawkins.”
“Good to see you back, sir, if only for a brief visit.”
“It’s good to be back, Dawkins. How are things going?”
“Pretty strange, sir. Not many undergraduates these days, and an awful lot of hush-hush, if you get my meaning.”
“I do, Dawkins, I do.”
They climbed stairs and walked along corridors as cold and cheerless as a reform school. An open doorway gave a glimpse into a laboratory where a technician was fiddling with some elaborate piece of glassware. A poster explained the fire drill and where to assemble in the event of an evacuation. Windows were criss-crossed with adhesive tape. Finally Ned knocked at an anonymous door and a gruff voice called them in.
The office they entered was as cluttered as a bear’s den. The window ledge was littered with the bones and sinews of electrical apparatus. On the desk was a scattering of files and open books. At the desk sat the bear himself. His hair was cut short, giving him the appearance of a Prussian army officer in one of Low’s cartoons, but his manner was more the bluff heartiness of a Russian than a German. Yet he spoke French, that was the surprise—fluent French with a strong Slav accent. “Mon cher Edward! Je suis ravi de vous voir! And this lovely young lady is …?”
“My sister Marian.”
“Of course, of course. How charming.” The bear took her hand and raised it to his lips. The gesture was curiously graceful, as though inside his great bulk a slender dandy was trying to emerge.
“This,” Ned explained unnecessarily, “is Dr Lev Kowarski.”
Kowarski cleared a chair for Marian to sit. “Ned has told me much about you. He promised me you were pretty, and instead I find that you are beautiful. That is the Englishman in him, mixing one with the other. A true Frenchman would never make such a grave mistake.” He gave an expansive smile. “And neither would a Russian.”
“I’m not sure how to answer that.”
“There’s no need. Just accept the compliment. Ned tells me that you may soon meet up with a mutual friend of ours.”
“Possibly.” It seemed appalling. Her mission, her whole existence was meant to be secret, yet here were people who knew all about it: the faceless Mr Fawley, the apologetic Colonel Peters, the Russian bear Kowarski, her own brother. How many others?
“Well, you must tell him that I need him here. Forget Professor Chadwick’s invitation, forget the damned war effort—Lev Kowarski needs him!”
“Will that be enough to persuade him?”
The man grinned, looking at her sideways. “He’s a Frenchman. Put it to him this way: I need him because otherwise the whole project will be dominated by the Anglo-Saxons. Worse, by the Americans. France used to be in the lead in all this, and now she is being elbowed out of the way, so he is needed to help the French cause. Tell him …” His eyes narrowed. “Tell him that they are running away with Fred’s work. Tell him that von Halban and Perrin have gone to Canada and left me here on my own. Tell him that I am nearly at the critical point—can you remember that? The critical point. Tell him …” He glanced at Ned for a second. “Tell him that I am on the trail of element ninety-four. Remember that. Element ninety-four.”
“That’s easy enough. But what does it mean?”
Kowarski laughed again. It was a typical Russian laugh, humour on the surface but with a cold, dark current flowing underneath. “It means,” he said, “the end of the war. Maybe the end of the world.”
She waited beneath the clock at Paddington station, thinking about Alice. A young girl adrift in a sea of dreams, surrounded by monsters. It means the end of the war. Maybe the end of the world. It was a relief to see Benoît coming through the crowd carrying a kitbag and wearing Free French uniform. That’s what he had told her when they’d spoken on the phone: “I’ll wear my uniform. Maybe they’ll even mistake me for a gentleman.” And she didn’t care whether he was a gentleman or not as they walked along the platform to the Oxford train—he was French, a lifeline to France, a real Frenchman, against her dubious, hybrid Anglo-Frenchness. And a straightforward man against the anguished complexities of what Clément may or may not have been to her, or what he may or may not have been doing in the laboratories of the Collège de France.
He flung open his arms and embraced her while the other passengers looked on with condescending smiles. Why was she up in London again? Was she seeing another man? Did she have lovers all over the country?
She laughed at his ridiculous ideas, and wondered whether she would tell him what had happened. “I saw my brother. We went to Cambridge for the day. King’s College chapel. Punting on the Backs. All the tourist things.”
He didn’t know the Backs. He didn’t know what a punt was. She tried to explain—une barque à fond plat—while people stared. Speaking the language in public made her feel different, as though a mere change of syntax and vocabulary could transform the reserved English girl into a vivacious Gallic: Marian into Marianne. They talked throughout the journey, volubly, carelessly, confident that the others in the compartment would never be able to follow their rapid flood of French. Did he have news of their departure?
“Any time from next Wednesday, that’s what they said. Once the moon is into its first quarter. But the shitty English weather means that there’s a queue of people built up. It’s like the London rush hour in the rain, everyone waiting for taxis.”
They took the bus from the station and reached the house in the Banbury Road in time for dinner. Her mother fell for him. He was tall and good-looking and, above all, French; and he seemed to understand exactly what manner of words would delight her. “Now I understand where Anne-Marie gets her beauty from,” he told her when they were introduced.
There was a fleeting puzzlement behind her grateful smile. “Anne-Marie?”
Benoît reddened.
“Marianne,” Marian said. “He’s always fooling about with names. Sometimes he calls me Alice as well.”
“From Wonderland,” Benoît added, and even that seemed to be a Gallic compliment. Her mother smiled and the faux pas was forgotten, but as soon as they were alone together, he protested: “I am invited to stay at this girl’s house and she hasn’t even told me her name! You aren’t Anne-Marie? You are Marianne? You make me look a fool.”
“I completely forgot to tell you. And I rather like Anne-Marie. It’s my cover name, you know that. Anne-Marie Laroche.”
“So what are you really called?”
There was something thrilling about telling him a truth. “Marian,” she said, “Marian Sutro.”
“Sutro? What kind of name is that?”
“It’s English. As you can see, my father’s very English.”
“Seeming English doesn’t mean a thing. Half the bloody English seem English but aren’t. Look at Churchill. He’s half American. And look at your king. He’s mostly German, for God’s sake!”
They went to the cinema that evening, sitting in the sweltering darkness of the back stalls with other couples all around them, heaving and grunting. The first feature was a Pathé News report that spoke of fleets of bombers thundering across the sky between Britain and northern Germany. Hamburg Hammered, it was called. Aircraft trailed long plumes of vapour across the sky, with American airmen aiming machine guns at unseen enemies. And then the city at night, a galaxy of flame. The RAF by night, the USAAF by day. Round the clock, the commentator said. He talked of seven square miles of the city laid waste, twelve thousand tons of bombs dropped, fifty-eight thousand dead, numbers impossible to comprehend. The audience stirred in their seats and emitted a sound, something atavistic, both horrified and gleeful at one and the same time.
The main feature came as a relief, some concoction of intrigue and romance starring Joseph Cotten. As three and a half years of war had taught, she pushed the horror aside and felt sixteen again, awkward in the presence of a half-known youth beside her, wary of his motives and intentions, and her own. When he put his arm around her something stirred inside, an emotion that seemed akin to fear—the same pulse, the same sweat of panic—but when he turned her head and kissed her on the neck and then on the mouth, she turned away. “Please,” she whispered. “Not now.”
She sat there in the darkness with Benoît’s arm around her, wondering what she felt. And Clément, what she felt about Clément. She still had his letters, those that had been allowed to reach her. Scraps of paper that she held to herself and treasured and reread as though they were mysterious messages, with hidden meanings enciphered within the plain text. Je t’embrasse. The sense hovering between kiss and embrace and love. My uncle, she had told the nuns. Only my uncle. And as though they were written in some strange code, they never guessed what the words meant. But Fawley, the placid, thoughtful Fawley, had understood.
After the film they walked home, their shaded torch casting a feeble light on the pavement at their feet. The clouds had cleared to discover a curved, white nail paring of moon hanging low over the roofs. The moon ruled their lives. It kept them here and it told them when they might go. It held them in safety or plunged them into danger. The idea seemed impossibly romantic and at the same time rather sinister, as though, as astrologists claimed, the movement of the celestial spheres determined what happened in the sublunary world. “Minions of the moon,” she said. “That’s what they’ve trained us to be.”
Benoît didn’t understand, either the source of the quotation or its meaning; but she felt her new life as an unfolding drama in which she knew there would be betrayal and hatred without yet knowing the precise dynamics of the plot, the motives and the denouements. Would she tell him about Paris? Knowledge was a burden. Should she lighten the burden by explaining about Clément, and the man called Fawley and the Russian bear Kowarski?
“What are you afraid of, Marianne?” Benoît asked. “Is it what we’re doing, going to France, all of that? I tell you, there’s no need to be frightened! You’ll see when you get there. It’s just … France. Occupied by people we hate. When you are there, what you feel more than fear is anger.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that.”
“What is it, then? I think …, I think you have another man.”
“Another man?” She laughed. “No, I don’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“There was—”
“Ah, you see?” he said as though with sudden understanding. “My little Marianne is pining for a loved one—”
“Don’t be silly. There was a flight lieutenant on the staff at Stanmore. We went out together a couple of times, to the theatre in London and then to a dance. Nothing more. He was posted away. And before the war there was someone in France. He was older than me. I suppose it was a schoolgirl crush, really … but he felt the same about me. I still think of him sometimes.” She looked at Benoît. “That’s it. The story of my love life.”
“And where is this older man now?”
She knew about confession, how you could pour out your guilt and see it washed away. Confession, contrition, absolution, things that the nuns had taught. “Somewhere in France, I suppose. We lost touch when the war came.”
“So you are free to do as you choose …”
“Of course I am. It’s just that I don’t really understand myself.”
“Why should you understand? That is typical of you English. You spend all your time trying to understand yourselves and not enough time getting on with life. That is why so many English girls are frigid.”
“How many have you tried?”
His laughter saved the moment. “Absurd,” he said. “You are absurd.”
At home, they let themselves in quietly so as not to disturb anyone. Outside her bedroom she allowed him to kiss her; but she put her hand on his chest when he made a move to come in. “You must let me think,” she said.
“Not about yourself still?”
“No, about you.”
THE NEXT MORNING they went for a walk along the river. The introspection of the previous evening was dispelled by sun and wind. Willows blew lightly in the breeze beneath a sky of ragged cloud and fitful sun. They held hands, and as they walked sometimes they came close together so their bodies touched. She told him a story that sounded so English—about three young sisters and a couple of Oxford clerics who, one summer’s day eighty years ago, had rowed up the river here telling stories. Perhaps her own field name brought it to mind.
“This is where it happened,” she said. “On the river right here.”
“What happened?”
“Alice in Wonderland, of course. Charles Dodgson was his real name but he called himself Lewis Carroll for the books.”
“Even he had a field name.”
It was the kind of joke that she could share with no one else. There were so many things that she could share with no one else. Conversations round the table over breakfast had been a careful obstacle course, as difficult as any interrogation at Beaulieu. “But what are you going to do in Algiers?” Maman had asked. “And what’s all this about nursing? I really don’t understand.”
“It’s all very vague, Maman,” she had replied. “I don’t think they really know themselves.”
“And you, Benoît. What are you going to do?”
“I expect they will put me behind a desk and make me sharpen pencils. French pencils, of course.”
Afterwards they laughed at their careful evasions of the truth, but still she couldn’t tell him the one thing that mattered, the question of Paris and Clément.
BY LUNCHTIME THEY reached a pub beside a weir. She felt hot from the walk, sweat staining her underarms, her body strangely vulnerable in her thin cotton dress. They carried their beer and sandwiches to an empty table outside by the edge of the weir where the sunlight was smudged by spray. Nearby were a couple of RAF pilots and a girl with buckteeth and a loud, braying laugh. Weeping willows made a backdrop that was as iridescent as an Impressionist painting, and even the bucktoothed girl looked beautiful.
“Benoît,” she said, and then hesitated, knowing what she wanted to say but not finding the words, or the nerve.
“Tell me.”
In the water there were trout beneath the surface, hanging in the flow and swinging their tails against the current. That was what an agent had to be, one of the instructors at Beaulieu had said: a fish in water, entirely at home. But at Meoble Lodge they had learned how to catch trout by placing their hands in the icy stream beneath the animals and then flipping them, helpless, out onto the bank.
“I don’t know quite how to say it …”
“You have to decide,” he said.
She looked up at him. “I’m a virgin,” she said. Vierge. The word seemed ridiculous. La Vierge Marie. A plaster statue in blue and white, with stars round its head and a crescent moon at its feet. If Benoît had so much as smiled she wouldn’t have continued. If there had been a glimmer of amusement in his expression, she would have told him to go to hell. But he didn’t. He just watched her as though she were telling him something of solemn importance, as though he were a priest listening to her confession. But this confession was taking place across a wooden table by the side of the weir, across two glasses of beer and a plate of corned-beef sandwiches.
“I don’t want to go to France a virgin,” she said. “That’s all.”
She waited until everything was still, her parents in bed and all the lights out. Then she got out of bed and opened the door to her room and crept down the corridor to the spare room. They’d even been taught this at Beaulieu—how to move through a building soundlessly, how to open doors without any noise, how to be unseen and unheard.
She opened the door and stepped inside into darkness. “Are you there?” she whispered.
“Of course I’m here.”
She crossed the room by feel alone, her naked feet sensing the floorboards and the carpet before accepting any of her weight. At the side of the bed she lifted her nightdress over her head and dropped it on the floor, then felt down to find the edge of the bed and slip in beside him.
She lay quite still, on her back, feeling his presence beside her, a warmth within inches of her body. “Ma p’tite Marianne,” he said, but she put her finger on his lips and shushed him to silence.
“Not Marian,” she whispered. She didn’t want any recognition of who either of them might be. She wanted this to happen not to her but to someone else. To Alice Thurrock with her spectacles and her blunt, practical manner. To Anne-Marie Laroche. To anyone except Marian Sutro.
“Alice,” he said. “My Alice.” There was the hesitant touch of his hand on her breast. It moved down to her belly, paused at her navel and ran like an errant drop of warm water into the rough hair. The contact brought a shock, like a pulse of electricity coursing upwards through the basin of her body. She lay there while he stroked her, softly and methodically.
“Ma belle,” he whispered, “ma fleur. Do you like that? Is it all right?”
“Yes, it’s all right. Like that.” And it was, in its way. Pleasurable despite the shame, the small stroking of the quick of her, as though he had found a deep root of her nervous system and was bringing it to life. But there was no giving on her part. Wasn’t that supposed to happen, a mutual exchange of delight, a giving and receiving at the same time? Yet she felt that she had nothing to give him, no wish to hold him, to have anything to do with the alien fact of him there in the darkness beside her. Maybe it could continue like this, anodyne and indifferent. But then he moved onto her, his invisible weight bearing her down into the mattress, his thighs pushing her legs apart, his belly against hers. Something dull and blind, like a nocturnal animal, nuzzled at her. She gave a cry that might have been pain, might have been rapture; and then she was full of him, fuller than she had ever imagined possible, gorged with him. He made a sound, a small note of surprise, pushing into her as though trying to discover her depths, the movement going on and on, insistent and intrusive; and then just as suddenly he slipped out of her and his penis lay between their two bellies, convulsing like a dying animal spreading its lifeblood.
He rolled off her and away. She felt the wetness under her hand, something glutinous that she had drawn out of him. There was a smell, of earth mould and mushrooms, quite distinctive. “A handkerchief,” she whispered, groping in the dark at the bedside table.
“No!” She rolled out of bed and felt for her nightdress on the floor. Had she bled? That was part of it, wasn’t it? Blood and pain. What the hell would her mother say, finding the sheets stained, with blood or sperm or both? “I must go.”
“Wait. Wait, ma p’tite. Don’t be in a rush. You were so beautiful.”
Was she? What did beauty have to do with it? She was Marian Sutro, no longer a virgin. She pulled the nightdress over her head. The shame, kept at bay until now, came flooding in. She left the room in the same manner as she found it, feeling her way in the darkness down the corridor, but this time going to the bathroom. With the door safely closed behind her she could turn on the lights and see herself as she was, the lean form of an adolescent girl, the pale curve of her abdomen dimpled with her belly button, and below it the flock of hair clotted with his sperm. There seemed to be no blood, but she felt sore. The taps shuddered as she drew water. Would the noise wake her parents? She washed and towelled herself dry, then returned to her room and the cool, clean sheets. Was she now a woman? But the difference was only physical: nothing had changed in her mind. The experiment, if that is what it had been, was a failure. She fell asleep, thinking not of Benoît but of Clément Pelletier, and two lumps of stone crashing together in her hands.
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning she hardly looked at him. Perhaps her mother would think they had quarrelled; her father would not even notice. “We must get back to London,” she told her parents.
“I told you it was only for the weekend. We could be leaving any day now.”
“For Algiers?”
“Probably, Mother. I’ve told you, we can’t be sure, and anyway it’s all very hush-hush.”
On the train they sat apart, a clear two inches of space between them. Benoît looked hurt and puzzled. “What have I done wrong, mon chaton?” he asked.
Nothing, she insisted, nothing at all. But she rejected his attempts to take her hand and re-establish even a faint image of their intimacy of the night before. And she didn’t know why, that was the problem. She found his presence beside her on the train an intrusion greater than anything that may have happened between them. “And please don’t call me mon chaton,” she said. “I don’t like it.”
“Minou, then. I’ll call you Minou.”
She turned away from him and looked out of the window, wondering at her own caprice that seemed something beyond her conscious control, a childish manner that had somehow survived her becoming a woman.
At Paddington they took a cab to Portman Square. The door to Orchard Court was opened to them and Parks the butler was inclining his head and ushering them into the world that they had, for a few days, escaped.