The men smoke caporal cigarettes and drink piquette, a thin, sour apology for wine. A paraffin lamp adds its unctuous smell to the dark scent of tobacco smoke. Alice knows the men by sight but not by name. They are Gaillard’s men, blunt and cautious farmers who know the land and have worked it, and have the ingrained suspicion that what might seem promising will work out badly in the end.
Between them on the farmhouse table is a map, her map, the map that she has marked. Gaillard puts his finger down where there’s a tiny cluster of houses and a track leading off into the fields. “We meet Marcel’s group at the Bonnard place. We’ll have to use a cart to get the stuff to the nearest road. It’s not ideal but it won’t attract attention.”
“Why there?” one of them asks. “It’s bloody miles away.”
“It’s safe. Alice says it’s safe. The Milice has never been seen round there, let alone les Chleuhs. And there’s the reservoir above Dompierre. That gives the pilot something to steer by.”
“Water is the best landmark,” she explains, wanting to convince them. “A lake or a large river. Water shines in the moonlight. And the shape, the pilot knows the shape exactly, from maps and photographs.” This is her first parachutage, and it’s impossible to underestimate the value of a successful drop. A parachutage is the mark of recognition, the assurance of help, the manifestation of a deity that lives out of sight beyond the horizon but who may care for his children there in the benighted world of occupied France.
The men grunt, unconvinced; but still the plans are laid—who’ll carry the lights, where they’ll stand, how the wind is blowing and where containers are likely to come down, how they’ll be disposed of once they have been emptied.
“Let’s hope it goes well this time,” one of the men says. The others mutter agreement.
“Five days, we’ve got to allow five days,” she warns them. “Things can go wrong.”
“Something always seems to.”
“Why can’t they get it right?” another complains. “Don’t they know what it’s like here?”
Alice watches these men with a mixture of incomprehension and admiration. It seems absurd that she should be telling them what to do. She wants to help them; sometimes she feels almost maternal about them. They need her comfort and her succour but there have been too many postponements and too many failures in the past. The month before she arrived an aircraft circled the carefully arranged dropping zone for half an hour while they flashed the code letter up into the sky. Maybe the pilot never saw it, or maybe he was off course, looking for a different reception committee with a different code. Whatever the reason, eventually it turned away and vanished into the night. Gaillard has given her the sorry history. On another occasion a thin ground mist appeared like a malevolent ghost to conceal the dropping zone. And further south near Albi there was an incident when the pilot dropped too high and the containers drifted away on the wind (maybe the wind had kept him high, maybe he had been nervous about descending to the approved five hundred feet) and only half was ever recovered. Some of the missing equipment—Sten guns, pistols—turned up in the hands of the Milice a few days later, so the story went. That put paid to that dropping zone, so that now they were on this new one, near the Dompierre reservoir, chosen by Alice, with Marcel and his men in attendance. Marcel is a communist, that’s what Alice thinks. A communist who pretends he is a socialist. He has gathered a group of disaffected youth around him, kids who have evaded the Service du Travail Obligatoire and have taken to the hills. There are also a couple of Spaniards, veterans of the civil war, and a deserter or two from the French army. But such a motley collection of resisters is not unusual. Gaillard’s group is a mixture of monarchists and republicans, liberals and socialists and self-styled Gaullists, an almost farcical embodiment of the political problems of the country.
“It’ll happen,” she reassures them, remembering the crew that brought her and Benoît a month ago, their nonchalance, their casual confidence. “This time it’ll happen.”
“Let’s hope so,” says Gaillard.
THEY GO OUT into the gathering dusk and climb into Gaillard’s Citroën van. It’s another gazogène, the charcoal fire already humming with heat. Smoke rises, steam rises. Alice sits in the cab beside the driver while the others climb into the back. There are complaints about the dirt, about the cold, jokes about how Alice gets the best treatment as long as Gaillard is allowed to put his hand on her thigh. She sits against the door as far away from him as possible, precisely to avoid this possibility, while he looks at her sideways through cigarette smoke, smiling. Saturnine, she thinks, pulling her canadienne tight about her throat. Denied a view of the opening of her blouse, his eyes slide down to her knees. “You’ll be cold.”
“I’ve got thick stockings. And a blanket.”
“Still. A woman’s legs.” He says the words thoughtfully, licking his lips—les jambes. “I’ll rub them for you if you like.”
Once she would have felt prim and vulnerable, unable to deal with his lechery. But not now. “Oh, shut your face.”
He laughs. The truck climbs upwards through the darkness, the engine straining against the slope and its faint headlights showing no more than a vague suggestion of the verge, the dry hedges, the rough tarmac of a road that soon surrenders to gravel. The moon is rising behind the trees, casting the cold light of reason on the landscape. “At least there’s no cloud,” she says. “At least it’s a clear night.”
Gaillard grunts.
Marcel’s men are waiting for them at the cluster of three houses where the Bonnard family live. They’ve congregated in the farmyard like itinerant workers looking for a job, stamping their feet and coughing cigarette smoke. There is the sullen gleam of weapons. A pair of oxen sigh steam in the cold air. Overhead a display of stars has grown like crystals of frost, Orion tilted like a windmill, Cassiopeia like the letter W scrawled across the sky. By coincidence that is the very letter that she will flash up into the night sky to bring the aircraft in. Dot-dash-dash. An omen or a cosmic breach of security? Do the constellations care about what goes on in this cold, sublunary world? Ned would say no, of course. The universe is indifferent.
After a brief exchange of orders the men disperse into the half-light, knowing their places, knowing how to gather this improbable harvest. Alice walks with Gaillard, trying to avoid contact with him. Despite her efforts, at one point he grabs her by the elbow to help her over a fence and across a ditch; later he succeeds in putting his arm round her. “Ma petite Alice,” he says. “You’re a tough little kid, aren’t you?” Petite môme, he says. It’s hardly flattering.
“I’m a British officer. I’m not a kid.”
He laughs. “Only a joke. Can’t officers take a joke?”
They blunder through the dark for half an hour before they reach the place. There’s a thinning-out of the trees, an open stretch of grassland cropped close by sheep. In the distance is the high ground of the massif, matt-black mountains against the luminous black of the sky. A faint breeze comes cold from the east but it is nothing to put the drop at risk. Everything should be all right. Gaillard goes off to tell the men where to stand with their torches, three of them in a line in the direction of the wind, with Mam’selle Alice standing at right angles, facing the aircraft as it comes towards them, if it comes towards them, if the whole enterprise comes to a happy conclusion. Others are detailed to stand guard. They are the ones with the weapons—a couple of Sten guns from the last parachutage and four rifles dating from the last war and stolen from a French army barracks.
And then there is nothing more to do than wait. Alice sits against a hillock, wrapped in a blanket, harassed by cold. Gaillard is smoking. She can see the glow of his cigarette in the shadows. At Meoble they warned you not to do that, not to smoke out in the open. It’s like a beacon. But when she mentions it to Gaillard, he merely laughs.
Time passes. The constellations wheel overhead, a vast and implacable chronometer with the moon climbing blindly towards its apex. Alice wonders. She wonders about Ned, she wonders about Clément and Benoît, she wonders about Anne-Marie Laroche and Marian Sutro, about the past and the future. Her pistol—a Browning automatic that she only takes on operations like this—is pressed into her side like an accusing finger. Can she be bothered to move to make herself more comfortable? To move is to feel cold. This must be how Antarctic explorers die, keeping still to conserve their heat. Maybe Scott himself, the quintessential British hero, sat still like this, willing his own little envelope of warm air not to dissolve away into the icy night. She looks up into the stars and for a moment, a fraction of a moment, she feels the depth of space, the void, that aching absence. What is the temperature of outer space, up there between the stars? Surely Ned knows things like that, Ned with his wayward and persistent mind, Ned with his brilliance and his anxieties.
She listens. There are night sounds all around her: the hush of the wind among the nearest trees, an owl’s hoot and the brief scurry of some mammal through the undergrowth, the whisper of cold and decay. And then there is another sound on the air, something muttered and distant, a rumour of war. She stiffens, moves her legs, feels the shock of cold.
“There.”
Gaillard is another shadow, crouched against the hedge. “What?”
“Listen.”
The noise waxes and wanes, nothing more than a murmur rising and falling on the night, like a sea lapping on some distant shore.
“There it is,” she says, struggling to her feet. “Come on!”
Gaillard follows, calling to the men. There’s a sudden urgent bustle, shadowy figures coming out of the shadows, shouting to each other and in their turn being ordered to be quiet.
“In line!” Gaillard calls. “In a fucking line, fifty metres apart like I told you. Christ, it’s worse than herding sheep. At least sheep have brains.”
The sound is nearer now, the drumbeat of aero engines, somewhere out there to the north, somewhere in the dark, too small to be seen against the stars.
“Turn the fucking lights on!”
The men are holding bicycle lamps, mere pinpricks against the black of the earth. Alice stamps her feet and blows on her fingers, fiddling with the switch of her torch. She points the thing in the vague direction of the sound, in what she hopes is the direction, fishing for the thing, dangling the bait of 
and again until her fingers begin to hurt with the effort of turning the switch on and off.
A shout comes from someone in the shadows at the edge of the meadow: “There it is!” But she can’t see the machine, just hear the engines rising and falling as the plane circles, imagine the propellers clawing at the air, dragging the great beast round.
W for Wordsmith, perhaps.
“There!”
And now she sees it, a shape running against the stars, a black cross tilting and turning, coming nearer like a great bird, overbearing and overweening, the engines sounding louder and louder, roaring at them down there on the ground. She finds herself waving ridiculously, in the hope that up there in the aircraft they can see this figure below them. There are tears in her eyes and a stinging in her nose, tears of joy that these unknown men, seven of them, have flown all across France to make this strange rendezvous, them up there and still attached somehow to England, and the reception committee down here, two distant worlds coming into brief and tenuous contact on a desolate hillside above Dompierre. The aircraft thunders over them at a thousand feet or so and turns and circles towards the south, banking against the stars and momentarily blotting out the moon. And then it is back, confronting them, moonlight glinting on its cockpit canopy, the wings adjusting their grip on the air as it feels its way down to five hundred feet. She wants to embrace it, or have it embrace her. She wants to have its power inhabit her body. She wants it more intensely than she has ever wanted anything, from her father’s approval to her mother’s love, to the craving she once felt for Clément. It is an experience, sliding overhead as loud as a train, a thundering, magnificent call of defiance greater than any childish longing. And the parachutes appear, sudden celestial globes emerging from it like eggs from the belly of a great fish, eggs that float in a stream on the tide of night, settling towards the earth where they might hatch out their offspring.
“Over there!”
“Look out!”
One of the containers lands a few yards away, a cylinder about six feet long. Another thumps into the ground fifty yards further on, the parachute canopy settling over it like a ballerina’s skirt in a plié. Men are running after the containers, lugging them to the edge of the field where the ox cart waits. All is motion in the cold moonlight: shadows flitting back and forth, the aircraft climbing away from the drop, engines bellowing as it climbs and turns back for a second run.
“Keep your eyes open!”
And here it is again roaring overhead, dispensing its bounty to the worshippers down on the ground, the whole world vibrating with its power as it climbs away from them and, tilting its wings in salute, turns and recedes over the countryside, a presence that has for a few minutes occupied their minds and their bodies but is now suddenly detached, a remote thing leaving their collective consciousness forever. And in the darkness, as the men run around collecting the containers and lugging them towards the waiting ox cart, Alice weeps for her moment of ecstasy and her apprehension of loss.
There’s a meeting with le Patron, at Gabrielle’s house in Lussac. She doesn’t like this way of meeting—she’d prefer cut-outs and dead letter drops and all that stuff that they taught her at Beaulieu, but this is le Patron’s manner. “They don’t know their bloody arses from their elbows,” he said when she objected right at the beginning. “You need someone who’s been in the field to teach you, not some pimp from Whitehall.”
They meet in the same back room that she has stayed in from time to time, the one with the view over the back roofs and the little alleyway, the room she occupied after her drop. It seems like part of her history now, part of the memory of Anne-Marie Laroche—that morning of excitement and anxiety, the sensation of being safe in one place only, this small, sequestered space with the floral quilt on the bed and the picture of la Vierge Marie on the wall. She’s waiting at the window, looking out on the back garden, when she hears his footsteps on the stairs and the rasping of his breath as he flings open the door.
“Come in,” she says, but he seems not to notice her sarcasm.
“The parachutage went well, then?”
“As well as could be hoped.”
“I hear they used Marcel’s men?”
“That was Gaillard’s decision.”
“Gaillard is a blithering idiot at times. We won’t be able to trust them when the balloon goes up.”
“They’re all right.”
“What the hell do you know about it? They’re bloody commies.”
“Their hearts are in the right place.”
“You don’t fight with your heart. You fight with your head. All they want is the chaos when the landings come and then they’ll be shooting everyone in the back. Including us.”
“Is that what you came to see me about?”
“As a matter of fact it’s not.” He lights a cigarette and looks her up and down speculatively, like a farmer trying to assess how much he might get for her at market. That’s not the way Gaillard looks at her. Gaillard looks at her with the eager eye of a prospective purchaser. “You’ll have to go to Paris,” he says.
“Paris?”
“Yes, Paris. You heard.”
“What for?”
Le Patron coughs at some smoke, then clears his throat. The sound of sandpaper. “It came through on Georgette’s last sked. They’ve lost touch with one of the circuits. Cinéaste. They think …” His mouth turns down in disgust, as though he knows that thought is the one thing they are incapable of. “… they think that it may be a simple thing. Broken crystals or a duff valve, or something. They want you to take some replacements. My guess is they don’t know their arse from their elbow. My guess is that Cinéaste has gone down with the general mess in Paris. You know about Prosper, don’t you?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, Prosper’s coming to pieces. That’s what I gather, anyway. The whole damn circuit.”
“How do you know that?”
“The grapevine.”
“And I’ve got to go to Paris when all that is happening? What for, exactly?” But she knows. Fawley’s there in her mind and he’s talking about Clément. We thought you might be more persuasive than a mere letter.
Le Patron shrugs. “Apparently you know the pianist, that’s the point. So you can recognise her. Her name’s Yvette. Yvette Coombes.”
“Yvette!”
“So the name means something to you? You know the damned woman?”
“Yes, I do. We were together at A School. They posted her away before she’d completed the course. Someone said she went to Thame.”
“That’s it then. Apparently her field name’s Marcelle. There’s an address she was supposed to be using, but nothing else. You’re to try and make contact and take her the spares. That’s the idea. They included them in that last drop.” He takes a final drag on his cigarette and stubs the thing out, then takes a waxed paper packet from his pocket and hands it to her. “Of course you can break it up. Two valves and two crystals. The crystals are the dangerous ones. You might pass the valves off but the crystals would give you away. So you’ll just have to be careful.”
She opens the packet and there they are, part of the mystery of electronics: two valves like small light bulbs and two wireless crystals, squares of Bakelite the size of postage stamps with two metal contacts poking out of one end. She never really understood what they did. Ned would understand, of course, but for her there is nothing more than the memory of a lecture at Meoble, talk of diodes and triodes, of crystals and megacycles and “skip.” What is skip, that sounds so childlike and happy? Ned would know. She picks up one of the crystals and examines it.
“Quite easy to conceal against a spot check, I suppose.” Le Patron laughs. “Tuck them down the front of your knickers, or something. But if they really search you, you’re stuffed.” He hands her a scrap of paper, rice paper that can be swallowed in a moment. “There’s an address of a safe house you can use. A staff nurse at the Salpêtrière. She’s called Béatrice. You were sent by Ricard. She’ll know Ricard. And remember, Paris is not like here. Here things are safe enough if you know what you’re doing. But in Paris …” He shrugs and smokes, and looks at her with something like concern. “It’s the usual pile of shit, I’m afraid.”
After le Patron has gone she stands looking out of the window at the small back garden, thinking of Clément. And the smooth man in the pinstripe suit called Fawley. Excitement is close to fear: there is the same pulsing heart, the same dry mouth, the same thin rime of sweat beneath the arms. So which of the two does she feel, knowing she must go to Paris? Excitement or fear? Or is it both?
And then she thinks of Yvette, that child in a woman’s body, the little girl lost in widowhood and motherhood and the chaos of war, who wept on her cheek and whispered that she was no good, that they would never send her to France. What, she wonders, is Yvette’s part in this little rigmarole?
SHE CYCLES TO Plasonne to collect her things and warn Sophie that she will be away for a few days. Paris, she adds, and then regrets it when she sees Sophie’s expression of fear. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a few days. I’ve got to go and see a friend.”
Back in Lussac, Gabrielle Mercey thinks differently. “You’re going to Paris!” she exclaims, clapping her hands in delight. “Let me come with you!” And then, when it is made clear that they cannot make the journey together, she says, “Wait a second,” and disappears for a moment to come back with a slip of paper with an address written on it. “These are my friends. If you need help you can always contact them. I’m sure they’d give you a place to stay if you need …”
Alice packs a suitcase. She will be able to wear the suit that she arrived in and has never worn since because it is too parisien and the shoes that were bought in a little shop off the Faubourg Saint-Honoré shortly before they left Paris for London, Maman and Papa and she, in the spring of 1940. Gabrielle watches her preparations devotedly, an acolyte at the altar. She is always doing things to help—sewing on buttons, darning stockings, turning the collar of Alice’s blouses—that kind of thing. Her treadle-driven sewing machine is constantly whirring away in the back room of the little house, making and mending in the days of privation. “You’ll look so lovely dressed up for Paris,” she says. “I can imagine you strolling in the Luxembourg, sitting at a café on the Champs-Elysées, attracting the men.”
“I don’t imagine I’ll have time for that.”
“Maybe after the war. Maybe we can go to Paris then.”
“Perhaps.” After the war seems like a fiction, in the way that paradise is a fiction, a time and place of unlimited plenty, of peace and harmony and eternal light. An antidote to the theology of terror.
Alice looks down at her packed suitcase and considers the two wireless valves that she has to carry. The trouble with attempting to hide things is that if they are found then you really are in the shit. That was how one of the Beaulieu instructors put it. If you can get away with it, better use wide-eyed innocence rather than a hiding place. So she wraps them in a face flannel and packs them among her clothes. If there is a barrage and they are found, then she will have to bluff her way out. But she can’t bluff with the crystals. There is no getting away with them. People listen to radios in all innocence, but no one transmits in innocence.
For the moment she leaves the crystals on the chest of drawers and follows Gabrielle down to the kitchen. They eat supper, sitting opposite each other with Gabrielle’s mother at the head of the table. The old woman’s jaws work methodically although she doesn’t seem to eat much. It looks as though she is chewing over the past. “So how is Mathilde keeping?” she asks Alice.
“Don’t be silly, Maman. This is Alice. You know it’s Alice.” Gabrielle has already explained: Mathilde was her mother’s younger sister. She died of TB during the Great War.
The old woman looks angry. “Of course I know it is Alice. But she seems like Mathilde.”
They all go to bed early. “Alice has to get up early tomorrow,” Gabrielle explains. “She has to take the train at Toulouse.”
The old lady laughs. “Toulouse!” she exclaims, but quite what amuses her is not clear.
Alice sleeps fitfully, her waking haunted by fear, her sleep punctuated by dreams. In her dreams she is in Paris, with Ned, with Yvette, with Madeleine and Clément. Clément smiles at her, and reaches out his hand to touch her. Sometimes Paris is London. Once, Benoît is there and they are in bed together, but this seems to be a public thing, with Clément and her own mother watching; and then Benoît becomes Ned and then Clément, with that weird facility that dream figures have, to be different persons at the same time. And then she awakes, soiled with guilt, with the luminous hands of the clock on her bedside table pointing to five-thirty.
She creeps downstairs to boil some water. Back in the bathroom, using the hard, unyielding bar of soap that is all she can find, she shaves her legs. For the first time in months, she applies make-up—a pale foundation, prominent red lips, eye shadow and mascara—and then she has to deal with her hair, combing it out and tying it up in a chignon. Finally she files her nails to even them up, then applies a blood-red nail polish. From being a country girl she is transformed into a city woman: sharp, raffinée, and older.
Wrapped in her bath towel, clutching it to her with her elbows but holding her fingers out to let her nails dry, she tiptoes back to her bedroom where she hesitates for a moment, looking at the wireless crystals that have lain on the chest of drawers like an unspoken threat since the previous evening.
What were the words of Marguerite, the woman she trained with at Beaulieu? “We girls have an advantage over the men.” That prim little smile. “We can always carry items—messages and the like—where no gentleman will ever see them. You might call it inside information.”
Alice blows on her nails to hurry their drying, then carefully picks up the crystals, places them head to tail in cotton wool, and wraps them tightly in a square of lint. From an inner pocket in her suitcase she takes out a condom. She puts the crystals in the condom, tosses her towel aside and sits on the bed with her knees up and her legs spread open. She looks down at herself. What did the nuns used to say? You should not be overfamiliar with your own body. It is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and it is not yours to do with as you please. Rather, you must honour God with it.
She moves her finger up and down until she is moist, then takes the package of crystals and eases it up into her vagina. When she stands the thing feels uncomfortable, something violating her, an ugly presence thrusting against the neck of her womb. Perhaps it will make her sore, but it’ll have to do.
After that, she dresses—a crêpe de Chine blouse and her smart, Parisian suit—and takes her L pill from the drawer where it has lain hidden ever since she came here. She glances at it for a moment before slipping it into the pocket of her jacket. Then she picks up her suitcase in one hand and her shoes in the other so as not to make any noise, and opens the door. But when she emerges from her room she finds Gabrielle waiting at the head of the stairs in her flannel nightdress.
“You were trying to sneak out!”
“I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“I wasn’t going to let you go without saying goodbye.” Gabrielle looks her up and down. “You’re beautiful.”
“I’m nervous. I hope it doesn’t show.”
“Of course it doesn’t show. You look like queen of all you survey.” She throws her arms round Alice and hugs her tight. “Be careful,” she whispers against her cheek. “Promise me that. I won’t wish you good luck.”
“Merde alors,” says Alice, and Gabrielle giggles.
“Merde,” she echoes as Alice goes downstairs carrying her suitcase and her shoes, pausing in the hall to stand awkwardly on each leg in turn to put the shoes on before opening the front door and stepping out into the cold, dark, morning street. “Merde alors!”
She is out of place among the passengers on the bus, but she doesn’t care. She is travelling to Paris. A woman going to Auch for the market makes a bit of extra room for her to sit, as though mere contact with ordinary work clothes might sully Alice’s outfit. The gendarme who checks documents nods appreciatively as he hands her documents back. The bus, as overcrowded as ever, lurches out of the town square, past the church and the mairie, down over the bridge and onto the main road. She is going to Paris, away from the drudgery of the countryside and the sheer labour that she has expended over the last weeks, away from farmers and their families, who are the salt of the earth but like salt have one flavour only. Paris has many flavours. It is a place of possibilities.
From Auch she takes the regional train to Toulouse, and from Toulouse the overnight train to the capital. There are no sleeping compartments these days, no couchettes, only bare wooden seats or the faded plush of first class. She travels first class. Money is no object. She is raffinée and wealthy: money descends on her like a gift from heaven. In her purse she carries thousands of francs. In her vagina she carries two wireless crystals.
The journey is one of those wartime treks that she recognises from Britain, a voyage of fitful movement and inconsequential stops magnified by the size of the country, as though perceived through a distorting lens of space and time, something Ned and Clément might have talked about in one of their mad discourses about the dimensions of the universe. The space–time continuum or some such nonsense—didn’t they try and explain that to her by talking about people on a train? Relative speeds and time dilation. Sharing this experiment in time with her are two middle-aged men who look like government officials of some kind, and an ancient woman who wears elaborate jewellery and views the world through rheumy and disapproving eyes. “I can’t think why they don’t have wagons-lits,” she complains. “What can they be using the things for these days? Carrying soldiers? Of course not. So it is pure inefficiency. Or jealousy. Perhaps it is jealousy, denying us our comforts.”
The men grunt and look out of the window, trying to ignore her. Being party to a conversation that criticises the system is dangerous. People listen and report and lever themselves up the tortuous ladder of preferment by denouncing others. But the woman doesn’t seem to care. The train jolts and sways and she continues to complain: “It’s the fault of the Jews, this mess we’re in. That fellow Blum. A Jew and a communist. What can you expect?”
Alice takes out her book and reads. More passengers get on at Montauban and Brive until the compartment is full. Time dilates and space contracts. She is squeezed against the window by a large man wearing a heavy overcoat and carrying a massive suitcase. With great effort he lifts the case onto the luggage rack overhead.
“Is it safe?” she asks.
“Of course it’s safe. Why wouldn’t it be safe?”
“Because it might fall.”
“It’s safe.”
THE TRAIN CLATTERS on through the night, stopping and starting, moving slowly when there seems no good reason, pausing for long, indeterminate periods in the middle of the countryside. With the blinds down the compartment is illuminated by a feeble blue light, barely sufficient to read by. When they halt they turn out the light and put the blinds up and wipe condensation from the windows. But there is nothing to see in the darkness outside.
Alice sleeps fitfully, her head lurching sideways with the sway of the carriage. Once she awakens to find that she is resting her cheek on her neighbour’s shoulder. He has been too considerate to disturb her. “I’m sorry,” she says, embarrassed. “I’m awfully sorry.” Then she falls silent. That is what France is reduced to: silence between strangers because conversations would be compromising one way or the other. Better to keep quiet.
In the early morning the train rumbles across a bridge and grinds to a halt in a blacked-out station in a great sigh of steam. “Vierzon,” someone says, peering through the glass. Doors slam. There is German spoken on the platform and the sound of movement in the corridor. Soldiers clump on board. Doors can be heard sliding open, and people shouting. In the compartment her fellow passengers look at one another more directly than throughout the whole journey, a look entirely without sympathy. Who is going to be caught doing what? Beside Alice the fat man sweats and fidgets, his fingers fluttering like sea creatures caught in some wayward ocean current. Alice feels the crystals inside her, accusing fingers pointing towards her womb.
And then there is a sudden cry, a shout, a scurrying of footsteps and a scream beyond the spectrum of human sound, something animal that nevertheless carries within it words that are recognisable: France! Shit! Bastards! Followed by a rapid running and a single rifle shot that is loud, flat, and final.
“Communists,” the old lady decides.
Alice peers out of the window. In the light of lamps she can see figures move, dragging something. “Someone’s dead,” she says, looking at the old lady. “Communist or not, he’s dead.” Immediately she regrets the comment, which goes against everything she has been taught, that she should say nothing of any note, that she should enter into no argument or discussion, that dullness is the best camouflage. Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés. That was the motto at the school in Beaulieu.
“But there you are,” the old lady continues with a patient smile, as though the young woman has missed the obvious. “They believe in nothing, so what does it matter?”
Alice looks away. People push past along the corridor and a German officer peers into the compartment. He is wearing a silver breastplate that she knows to be the sign of the Feldgendarmerie, mere military police, to be treated with respect but not feared in the way that some of the other units are to be feared. He catches her eye and for a moment they look at one another like beings from two entirely different habitats, a fish in the depths of a pond examining a fisherman on the bank. Then the man nods and passes on. Moments later the door slides back and a young man enters the compartment, settling opposite her in the one empty place. When he catches her eye he gives a wry smile; she ignores him and buries her head in her book, anxious not to get drawn into conversation.
The soldiers are leaving the carriages. Doors slam shut and the train, ancient and arthritic, flexes its joints and moves forward.
“What happened?” someone asks.
The newcomer shrugs.
“Well, at least we didn’t have to wait long,” one of the civil servants remarks.
“A small inconvenience,” the young man agrees. His smile is faint and supercilious, as though he knows more about inconveniences than anyone else. Later he stands up and excuses himself, stepping over legs and feet to gain the door. Perhaps he has gone to the lavatory, or to stretch his legs, or to smoke a cigarette; but she wonders. His empty seat seems as suspicious and threatening as his presence. When he returns he seems just the same: young, anonymous, indifferent. And yet she cannot rid her mind of the idea that he is watching her, smiling knowingly whenever their eyes meet, wondering who she is and what she is doing. When the ticket inspector passes there is a moment’s confusion as tickets are handed over and then identity cards. There is an awkward juggling and Alice’s card falls to the floor. She leans forward to retrieve it but the young man is quicker, picking it up from between the jumble of feet and straightening up so that his face is close to hers and she can smell some kind of soap on his skin. He is close-shaved but his chin is brushed with blue, like the blueing of tempered steel.
“Please,” he says, handing her the card. She takes it thankfully and returns it to her handbag. Outside the windows of their compartment a thin stain of dawn is smeared across the sky, like blood and lymph oozing from a wound. Acres of railway sidings are visible.
“Juvisy,” the young man says. “We’re almost there.”