Gare d’Austerlitz, early morning. The Feldgendarmerie have set up a barrage at the head of the platform with trestle tables and soldiers going through people’s luggage. Queues have formed. One or two people—officials, men in uniform, a mother with her children—are waved through but everyone else has to queue. Alice stands in line, with the crystals nudging her womb.
A story did the rounds at Beaulieu: one agent carrying his wireless set in a suitcase was faced with just such a search. Noticing a woman with a baby in her arms and two young toddlers trailing along behind her, he lifted the younger child into his arms. “Let me help,” he said to the harassed mother, and, along with his newly acquired family, he was waved through the checkpoint without being searched.
No such brilliance here, only the slow plod forwards in the line until finally Alice reaches the front of the queue, puts her suitcase onto the table, and opens it. She stands indifferently while the policeman sorts through her clothes, waiting for him to find the wireless valves. Her heart beats loudly—surely he can hear it—but somehow her mind seems calm, as though she is about to go on stage and she knows her lines and the tension is what she needs to play her part well.
“What’s this?”
The racket of the mainline station is all around, enveloping her with its echoes from the roof, a stunning contrast to life in the countryside at Lussac. Even Toulouse seems a small town compared with this.
“Those? Oh, they’re for a friend.” She shrugs. “His wireless has broken and he wants to listen to Grossdeutscher Rundfunk and he can’t find spares for love nor money. I managed to find something in Toulouse. I hope to goodness they’re the right ones.” She smiles at him. He is young, as young as she, and being male means that he looks even younger because those things that happen to men—the hardening of the features, the toughening of the jaw, the rough growth of stubble—have not yet happened to him. A mere boy.
The boy turns the valves in his hand, then glances up at her and returns her smile. “Gut,” he decides, then tries it in French: “Ça va. Vous pouvoir aller.”
“Pardon?”
“Allez,” he repeats, “allez!”
She feels a small stir of triumph deep inside her where the crystals lie. Of course she may go. Why on earth would he wish to detain her? She smiles at him, takes up her suitcase and makes her way to the ladies’ cloakroom. In the cubicle she drops her knickers and hitches up her skirt and squats, feeling with her finger, probing inside and levering out the package of crystals. Then she opens her case and wraps them in a towel, adjusts her clothing, and goes out. Benoît would have laughed.
The deserted station forecourt is slick under a grey sky, the sky of Paris that she has dreamed about, imagined, feared, almost forgotten, and is laid now like a blanket over her childhood memories of the city. Walk purposefully but without hurrying. That’s what they said at Beaulieu. Always know where you are going and why. Always have a story to explain yourself. But she has no story to explain what she is doing, nothing beyond the simple fact that she wants to look, wants to see the city for the first time in years. So she crosses the road to the embankment and stands looking at the view across the river, remembering that time in London, the day after that first interview when she walked onto the embankment beside the Hungerford Bridge with the trains rattling overhead. Then she envisaged this moment, looking out across the slow slick of the Seine from the quai, imagined the drama of her presence here. But the reality is that she is small against this great sweep of river and sky, and insignificant. Anything she might be able to do is as nothing. And yet she feels again the weight of two stones in her hands and smells the acrid stink of sparks and hears Ned’s voice: That’s all there is to it. You’ve just blown London off the map and out of history. Vaporised.
A voice behind her says, “Hello again.”
She turns. It’s the young man from the train, her companion since Vierzon. He has followed her. He has managed a shave and a change of shirt—she notices that—and he looks appealing enough, except that he is not appealing, that no casual encounter appeals these days, that the whole vacant city lies around her and none of it is appealing because it is a threat of unknown proportions and unperceived dimensions, and everyone within it is a possible enemy. She turns back to the view. “What do you want?”
“It’s Anne-Marie, isn’t it?”
She feels a sudden emptiness inside, as though, with the crystals no longer there within her, her bowels have dissolved into a loose and insidious fluid. “How do you know that?”
“Laroche. Anne-Marie Laroche. When you dropped your identity card. I’d have spoken during the journey, but with all those others around … and at the barrage I didn’t want to distract your cheerful young soldier just as he was smiling into your eyes.”
“Are you trying to pick me up? Because if so, I’m not interested.”
He laughs. There is something familiar in his laughter—a lightness, an honesty, rather like Benoît’s. “I thought we might have a coffee together. Or breakfast. Have you had breakfast? We can get something near here. I happen to know the owner, and there’s a chance that I can persuade him to give us some real coffee. How about that?” He talks fast, his words sliding easily over her request to be left alone. “My name’s Julius, by the way. Julius Miessen. Julius, Jules, whichever you like. I thought you looked a bit lost in the big city, and …”
“I’m not at all lost.”
“That’s fine then. But you can’t go far lugging that suitcase. Let me give you a hand.” He moves to pick up her case but she pushes him aside.
He steps back, smiling, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m sorry. Only wanted to help, that’s all. Paris isn’t an easy place to be these days. You need friends. Rationing’s a nightmare and the black market has gone through the roof, but a young woman like you can have a very comfortable time.”
“What are you talking about? Look, leave me alone, will you?”
“Do you need a place to stay? Or I can find you work, if you like. Easy enough. You’ll make a thousand francs a day.”
“What the devil do you mean?”
“You know the kind of thing. Nothing you wouldn’t want to do. There are lots of men in this city who are crying out for a bit of companionship.”
“What the hell do you think I am?”
He laughs. “An intelligent, respectable girl who needs a bit of cash. That’s all. Where are you from? I can usually place people but not you. Educated, though.”
“Go away, will you? I don’t need your work and I don’t want it. Now leave me alone or I’ll call the police. Do you hear me? I’ll call the police.” She looks round, as though there might be policemen just ready for her cry of distress; but the quai is deserted, trees swaying in the breeze, one or two cars passing down the road, cyclists going past, cyclists everywhere. Even one of those vélo-taxis, a rickshaw contraption with a skinny man pedalling and two German soldiers sitting in the back laughing.
The man shrugs. “Here’s my card. Miessen sounds German, doesn’t it? But don’t worry, it’s not. Dutch. Dutch father, French mother. If you’re ever hard up don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
She takes the card just to get rid of him; then picks up her suitcase and walks off along the embankment as though she had a purpose in going out of the station, as though she had somewhere to go here on the banks of the Seine between the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Gare de Lyon. At the bridge she turns and glances back. He’s standing there, watching. What does that mean? Who is this man, with his rapid talk, his knowledge of her name, his offer of work? A pimp? An agent? A man who preys on young women coming to the capital, trying to recruit them for whatever business he has going? Entertaining Germans, probably. She shivers with revulsion. The word “prostitute” sounds in her mind, with its hissing sibilant. She can’t go back now. He is there between her and the station, and she can only pretend that this walk across the river was what she intended all along. So she picks up her suitcase and crosses the bridge, walking on alone beneath the neutral sky and the sullen river, feeling exposed. Crows and pigeons wheel overhead like predators. The silver city lies all around her, tarnished and battered, a once beautiful artefact reduced by misuse to something you might find on a stall in the flea market, fingered by punters looking for a bargain. Downstream there is a familiar view, the hunched back and splayed legs of the cathedral squatting in the midst of the stream like a great arthropod, but even that seems tawdry, something remembered from a dream, the dream of childhood when fears could be laughed at in the light of day.
On the far embankment bicycles clatter past like an army of insects, swarming locusts that have stripped the landscape bare. An army lorry overtakes them, hooting. There are German soldiers in the back. One of them catches her eye and gives a jaunty little wave. She shrugs and turns away, crossing the road in the wake of the lorry, dodging through the bicycles. Where should she go now? A train rattles past somewhere nearby. She can hear it but not see it: a métro line out of sight below the bridge. But where is the station? The train emerges from beneath the embankment and climbs onto the next bridge to cross back over the river. How to get on it? She feels angry and incompetent, a refugee adrift in the big city frightened by the attentions of a strange man, forced against her will to make this detour.
“Just over there, dear,” a woman replies when asked. It’s obvious now, the sign obvious, the occasional pedestrian going down to the platform obvious. Also obvious is a black Citroën parked near the entrance with two men standing beside it, smoking and watching people pass by. Belted raincoats and trilby hats, but you can’t pretend it is anything other than a uniform. Don’t panic. Keep calm. Breathe deeply and walk slowly but with purpose.
As she approaches they stop a man and demand to see his papers, then order him to open the bag he is carrying.
Walk confidently. Don’t catch their collective eye. Ignore them as you would ignore anything that doesn’t concern you. But they watch her. She can feel their eyes touching her legs and thighs, patting her backside. Stuff you, she thinks, and strides past looking the other way, sick with fear.
The métro station is a refuge, somewhere the anonymous congregate within the milieu of this strange city that is a simulacrum of the Paris that she knew. There is a poster showing a young man looking out from a dark doorway towards a bright and hopeful horizon. IF YOU WANT TO GET AHEAD, it says, COME TO WORK IN GERMANY. She waits, her suitcase beside her, for the next train going south to place d’Italie, back the way she has come, back on track, confusion conquered for the moment.
When the train arrives the carriages are packed. She edges in among the passengers and pushes down the car, stepping over legs and feet, apologising as she goes. Someone offers her his seat—“Je vous en prie, Mam’selle,” he says, smiling—and she turns to see that grey-green uniform, those black and silver badges of rank: a German officer, a Hauptmann. Should she refuse him or accept? Is the spirit of resistance to shun the occupiers? She knows how to behave in Lussac or Agen or Toulouse, but here in Paris?
The train swings onto the bridge and rattles across the river. “Thank you,” she says, and sits primly with her knees together and her eyes straight ahead, conscious all the time of his standing over her, watching. No one else looks at her, though. No one cares. Just a girl, a gonzesse, being eyed by a Frisé. She is safe; for the moment, beneath the appreciative gaze of a German officer and circumscribed by the indifference of the city, she is safe.
The house is in a run-down street near the place d’Italie, an area of narrow, sloping lanes and crowded cottages. The pavé glistens with rain. On the corner is a small café and next to it what was once a print shop but is now a shuttered shell, the owners departed, leaving behind nothing more than the ghost of their presence, their name on the shop sign: IMPRIMERIE BERTRAND. Paris is a city inhabited by ghosts. Ghosts of young men, ghosts of Jews, ghosts of communists and socialists. A poster advertises thousands of francs’ reward for anyone giving information about a wanted “terrorist,” but a long strip has been torn out of it so that the face is no longer there. Is she a terrorist? Presumably she is. She places her suitcase down on the pavement outside number 45, rings the bell, and waits, conscious that people might be watching, conscious that she is exposed there on the street without a decent cover story. What if there is no one at home? What will she do then? But after a while there is the sound of someone shuffling around inside and a man’s voice calling out, “Who is it?”
Alice speaks softly and urgently, leaning towards the door. “I’m looking for Béatrice. I’m a friend.”
An old man opens the door a few inches so that he can peer through the crack. He is wearing a blue boiler suit and a black beret. His lips are sunken, as though he has not yet put his teeth in, and wisps of white hair poke out from beneath the beret. In the shadows behind him hovers a woman of similar age. “I’ve come from Ricard,” Alice says. “Is Béatrice here?”
“No, she’s not.”
“She’s at work?”
The man glances over his shoulder at the woman as though for guidance. “She’s gone away.” He tries to close the door but Alice holds it open.
“Ricard sent me. Please let me come in.”
“I said she’s gone away.”
“You can’t leave me standing here on the pavement. I’ve nowhere else to go.”
As he relents and opens the door further, she seizes the opportunity to push past into the narrow hallway. There’s a smell of drains, the claustrophobic stink of fear and deprivation. Unbidden she goes into the front room, thankful to be off the street and out of the view of strangers. Lace curtains blur the view of the houses opposite. There’s heavy flock wallpaper and a large dresser occupying one entire wall. A holy picture—the sacred heart of Jesus—offers the narrow room its blessing. On the other wall is a framed photograph of Marshal Pétain.
“You’ve got to leave,” the man protests, coming after her.
Seeing the weakness of her husband, his wife takes over. “You can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous. They came looking for her. We don’t know what she was mixed up in but they are looking for her. They may have followed you. For all we know, they’re watching the house …”
“No one followed me.”
“You’ve got to go.”
“Look, I’ve just come from Toulouse. On the overnight train. I’m exhausted and I need somewhere to rest. Can’t you let me stay one night? Then I’ll be gone and you won’t hear any more from me.”
“It’s not safe.”
“Is Béatrice your daughter?”
The woman nods. “My daughter, yes.”
“She’s gone,” says the man. “And now you must leave too. Don’t you understand?”
Alice looks at them, at the implacable faces of rejection. The nightmare has become real: she has nowhere to go. She puts her suitcase down on the floor. “Can I sit for a moment?”
The woman sucks her lips and watches her, as though expecting her to pull some kind of trick.
“Let her sit,” the man says. “Make her some coffee.”
There is a moment of unspoken argument between the couple, a shared look that encompasses a whole lifetime of marital conflict.
“Only a moment, and then she’s out.”
Once she has gone the man stands watching, like a prison guard, while Alice sits on one of the uncomfortable, overstuffed chairs. She’s faint with tiredness, but she has to think what to do next. The prospect of finding a hotel or a pension looms ugly in her mind. Her name would go down in a register. She would have to surrender her papers to the scrutiny of hostile eyes. She would be exposed to the regard of the authorities, as vulnerable as a nocturnal animal caught outside in the daylight. But perhaps she can try and make contact with Yvette directly. Perhaps the solution lies there. Or the address Gabrielle gave her—can she trust that?
“I’m sorry to make things difficult for you,” she says to the man.
“You’re a friend of Béatrice’s, then?”
“A friend of a friend.”
He nods. Something in his eyes betrays sympathy. “It’s not that I don’t want to help, but it’s the wife, see? She gets frightened. It’s the priests, they put all kinds of ideas into her head, about what you should do and what you shouldn’t. Béatrice doesn’t go along with any of that any more than I do. But the wife …”
“I quite understand.”
“If it was up to me …” He looks away, embarrassed, trying to justify his weakness. “Used to work on the railways. A union man all my life …”
She thinks of the address that Gabrielle gave her. Could she throw herself on the mercy of strangers? And then she considers the other possibility, the one that stares her in the face. The former railwayman is talking on, about strikes before the war, about how they didn’t stand for no nonsense, about demonstrations and sabotage. “We dealt with les jaunes as they deserved,” he is saying. “Oh yes, we didn’t take no shit from them.” And part of her mind is wondering who “the yellows” could be, while the other part recalls the address that she already knows, the reason she is here in Paris, whatever the business with Yvette. Place de l’Estrapade.
Clément.
The woman comes in with the coffee—a filthy concoction of acorns and chicory—and they drink in awkward silence before Alice gets to her feet to leave. Outside it has begun to drizzle, a thin, bitter drizzle as unpleasant as any ersatz coffee.
From place d’Italie she takes the métro once more, gets off at place Monge and surfaces at the barracks of the Garde Républicaine. Over one of the gates an inscription exhorts the people to Travail, Famille, Patrie, where once it was Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Against that institutional power she feels as nothing, just a girl with a suitcase of clothes and a couple of radio crystals. What use is that? She turns up the hill, going by the memory of the street map that she has in her pocket. Always know where you are going. Always move with purpose. Always have a reason for doing what you are doing. But what is her reason now?
In rue Lacépède she pauses, vague with tiredness, puts her suitcase down, and looks in a shop window. Is anyone following? That dreadful man Julius Miessen, perhaps. But there is no one in the milky reflection, no figure floating in front of the dusty items behind the glass—pots and pans, a colander, a half-moon chopping knife, things that are used for preparing the food that has all but vanished from the shelves. She glances round for confirmation. The narrow street behind her is empty. Bicycles chained to lamp posts. No cars. No people. She stands for a moment, flexing her shoulders like an athlete, before picking up the suitcase once again and going on up the hill into the place de la Contrescarpe, a small, rain-swept square with two run-down cafés round the edge and in the middle a urinal and a single blighted tree. She chooses one of the cafés—a low-beamed, shadowy place—to sit and eat and think; above all she needs to think.
A waiter brings something that the menu calls onion soup, a brown swill in which a few onion scales float and a flaccid piece of bread lies drowned. She sips the soup and buries her head in a book, trying to ignore the fact that she is the only female customer in the place and that one of the other clients is eyeing her thoughtfully. Tiredness brings with it a dangerous wandering of the mind. She can’t concentrate. She has to concentrate. She is out in the open, with the hawks hovering all around. She needs somewhere to sleep, somewhere to relax for a while, somewhere to summon up the courage that was instilled into her in Scotland and Beaulieu and Bristol; and the only place she can think of is Clément’s.
“D’you want the plat du jour?”
She looks up, startled. The waiter is hovering over her, taking the soup bowl and wiping vaguely at the table. “Yes,” she says hurriedly in case he should suddenly withdraw his offer, “yes, please.”
He nods and goes away. She turns a page unread and recalls sailing on the lake at Annecy, remembers the Pelletiers’ house fronting the water, with a lawn and a landing stage where they kept the skiff moored. And they went sailing. She remembers that—the kick of the wind in the sails, the dash of spray, and laughter, an open, equal laughter. And a sensation somewhere inside her, an organic compulsion quite novel and disturbing, something whose focus was Clément, in shorts and an old torn shirt, with his hand on the tiller of the little dinghy, the boat beating into the wind and the spray flying and both of them laughing.
“Where shall we go?” he shouted. “America?”
Clément, with whom she would have gone anywhere.
The plat du jour arrives. It’s a slab of something rusk-like, swimming in a thin, brown sauce and entitled, with a fine irony, gâteau de viande à la mode. With it come thin strips of rutabaga. She knows rutabaga from boarding school. A fearful alien in the French cuisine, rutabaga is swede. She eats with distaste, thinking of the food at Plasonne and how different life is here in the city. The occupation has reversed the norms—the city is reduced to penury, the countryside has become a place of riches. Where, in all this poverty, she wonders, do Clément and his sister stand?
Something makes her look up from her food. There’s a disturbance in the square: a black Citroën traction has driven in and parked opposite the café. Through the window she can see the white chevrons on the radiator, and behind the windscreen the silhouettes of the occupants. What do they want? What are they watching? Panic seethes below the surface of her composure. What are they doing, watching this place? What if they suddenly come in and start a search? What if there are others waiting in the side streets and she finds herself in the midst of a rafle? What if …?
“What are they after?” she asks the waiter.
But the man gives nothing away. Just that Parisian shrug. “Who knows?”
Meanwhile the watchers in the car do nothing, merely sit and watch while the desultory life of the café goes on. She forces herself to take a few more mouthfuls before picking up her suitcase and heading for the ladies’ lavatory down in the basement, an odorous place with a single cubicle and a squatting plate in the floor. The door doesn’t lock, but she has no choice and anyway there don’t appear to be any other women among the customers. She places her case on the floor and opens it. In a pocket sewn in the lining are the two crystals, wrapped still in their little bed of cotton wool. Rapidly, with nervous fingers, she assembles her little packet, then drops her knickers and crouches, legs awkwardly spread, to push the thing inside her. There is no hint of that unexpected and delicious thrill she felt the first time: this is like some unpleasant medical procedure, a lumpy, intrusive insertion. Cautiously she straightens up and moves her hips and thighs to make certain that the thing is in place.
What would Benoît say if he knew? Make some ribald joke, probably. Or an offer of help. Suddenly, shut in this squalid cubicle, isolated in the midst of the city, she wishes she could see him again. All would be forgiven. His bewildered and bewildering attentions would be welcome. She’d let him go there if that was what he wanted; anything rather than this.
The momentary weakness is pushed aside. There’s a box of cleaning things beneath the basin. She upends it and steps up to reach the lid on the top of the cistern. The valves will go in there. She can’t hide them anywhere else, but she can tape them to the underside of the lid, exactly as they showed her at Beaulieu, and then return to reclaim them some time later. “Unless they’ve called the plumber in the meantime,” the instructor said. He meant it as a joke, but it doesn’t seem so funny now. Nothing seems funny: fear chases away humour.
She slides the lid back, steps down and composes herself. She even touches up her make-up in the cracked and discoloured mirror before going out and finishing her meal. The Citroën is still there. “They don’t seem to be doing much,” she remarks as she pays her bill.
“You never know,” the waiter replies, guardedly.
Picking up her suitcase she heads towards the door and the dank outside, and the traction with its anonymous occupants. Her wooden heels clip on the pavé in a brisk percussion. She strides with confidence, her public façade belying the fear inside and the foreign presence pressing against her womb.
She draws level with the car.
Nothing will happen. She is merely unsettled by the strange environment, by Paris with its grim poverty, its cowed silences, its passivity. She has got the wind up for nothing whatever. They aren’t looking for her, they aren’t interested in her, they are only doing what they always do: instilling fear and uncertainty.
As she passes the car, the passenger door opens and a woman gets out, a small, almost dainty woman, dressed not in a uniform raincoat but in a leather jacket with a fur collar.
“Come here!”
Alice stops. A woman is worse than any man. A woman knows the intricacies of the female mind and body. A woman knows what women can do.
“Me?”
“You.”
The single word, peremptory. Expecting to be obeyed. She crosses to the car and stands like a schoolgirl summoned by one of the prefects, the prefect who is always ordering you around, the prefect who seems to be amused by you alone.
“Papers.”
Her papers are scrutinised. But papers mean nothing: they lie as often as they tell the truth. That is the nature of the things. The woman’s small, almost perfect, almost pretty face looks up at Alice. It is framed with golden curls but the features are hard, like porcelain. “Lussac? Where’s that?”
“The southwest.”
“So what are you doing here?” The woman’s French is native, her accent Alsatian. She’s a hybrid like Alice is a hybrid. An amalgam of things. German and French, English and French, it doesn’t make much difference. A bastard.
“Visiting.”
“Visiting who?”
Never give away more than you are asked. Never volunteer information. Appear amiable and slightly slow-witted.
“Friends.”
“Why do you have friends in Paris?”
“I used to study here.”
The woman considers this, looking up into Alice’s eyes. “Where are you from?”
“The southwest. I just said—”
“Where were you born? Where were you brought up?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Geneva. It says on my card. Geneva. But my parents were French.” And while Alice speaks, the woman lifts her head almost as though she is sniffing at the words that issue from Alice’s mouth, searching for hints of accent, assonances and intonations that may prove, or disprove, her story.
“French from where?”
“Grenoble.”
A nod. Apparently she is satisfied that what Alice says is true, that there are hints of Switzerland and the French Alps in her victim’s voice. “Your case.”
“Yes, your case. Open it.”
“Oh, I see. Of course.” An ingénue: willing, confused, apologetic, slightly frightened because no one is entirely legal these days. She looks round for a place to put the case, and, deciding that there is nowhere more convenient, opens it on the ground. The woman crouches to rifle through her things, leaf through the underwear and the sweaters, the sanitary belt and towels, the skirt and jacket, her slender hands going down into the corners like small animals searching through undergrowth for things to eat and coming up with three brown paper packets. “These?”
“Presents. Coffee.”
“Where did you get them?”
“Toulouse.”
“Black market?”
“No.”
The woman sniffs them, smiles, and takes one for herself, returning the others to the suitcase almost as though she were presenting Alice with a gift. She straightens up.
“Turn to face the car. Hands up on the roof. Legs apart.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
So Alice stands spread-eagled, while the woman’s hands go over her body, under her jacket to feel the sweat of her armpits, then round the front to cradle, for a long moment, her breasts. She can hear the woman’s breathing close behind her. The hands move gently, appreciatively against her nipples, then on, down her flanks and over her thighs, then suddenly, with a shocking intrusion, up her skirt so that one of them, the right, cups her between the legs, feeling her through the cotton of her knickers. Alice gasps with outrage. The hand continues, a small exploring rodent, feeling and seeking, up her belly then back down and into the cleft between her buttocks, even touching, through the cotton, her anus. Then both her hands are sweeping down her thighs and the ordeal is suddenly over.
Alice turns. The Alsatian woman is impassive, lighting a cigarette as though nothing has happened, as though her fingers haven’t scurried through the most intimate parts of Alice’s body, as though all that has taken place is the normal intercourse of search and enquiry, what happens these days in the benighted city. “You can go,” she says. “Just go.”
For a moment Alice fumbles with her suitcase, pushing things in order, closing the lid and trying to force the locks closed. Thoughts stumble through her mind, an untidy mix of fear and shock and relief. And gratitude. She can go. She has been violated, but she can go. Her hands are shaking, but she is free to go, the Alsatian woman showing no further interest in her but leaning into the open door of the car and saying something in German to the figure behind the steering wheel.
Don’t show relief. Relief is the worst. Anyone can be anxious, fearful even; but relief means that something has happened that merits their attention.
Trying not to show relief, Alice picks up her suitcase and continues her walk across the square towards the far corner, walking calmly and with purpose without looking back. Nothing happened or will happen. Don’t hurry, whatever you do, don’t hurry.
She gains the sanctuary of the buildings and turns out of sight. There are few people around, and no one who takes notice of a lone woman carrying a suitcase through the streets of Paris. Half the pedestrians she has seen are carrying suitcases. Suitcases are the motif of the city, redolent of hoarded, trivial treasure and impermanence.
On the wall a plaque announces: RUE DE L’ESTRAPADE.
L’estrapade is a torture, she knows that. Something tearing, like the rack. Above the roofs she catches a glimpse of the dome of the Panthéon, where heroes lie buried, the lesser gods of a secular state. But now the God of the Old Testament rules the city, with jealousy and murderous revenge. At the end of the road there’s a triangular place, a place of convergence with trees and two benches and an old woman sitting talking to sparrows that skip and hop and yearn for breadcrumbs that are no longer found in the starveling city. Place de l’Estrapade. She stops and considers what to do.
Never hesitate, never appear to be at a loss. If you are undecided you excite interest. People wonder what you are looking for, where you have come from, what your business is. But she is at a loss: she has lost all sense of perspective and proportion.
A young woman walks past pushing a pram. She catches Alice’s eye and there is a momentary recognition, a faint unvoiced smile of sympathy. For a dreadful moment Alice wants to call out to her, for help, for comfort, for some plain human contact. But the woman has moved on and she is on her own, confronting the door of number 2 and the board of names and numbers and brass bell pushes. One of them reads Pelletier, Appartement G. As she hesitates to ring, the door opens and a man comes out. He nods bonjour and holds the door open for her and she slips inside into an archway and the luminous green of an inner courtyard.
To her relief there is no concierge in the guichet to ask awkward questions about who she is and what business she has here. Stairs rise into shadows and a lift shaft ascends, one of those open frames within which a platform of steel filigree rises and falls with clocklike precision, a piece of machinery that moves with all the predictability of ordinary mechanics.
Wave mechanics is not like Newtonian mechanics, Clément told her. With wave mechanics you must cast out all idea of certainty. At the time she had no idea what he was talking about; now it seems perfectly clear. Cast out all ideas of certainty.
She takes the lift to the top floor, where there’s an imposing door on the left with the letter G dead in its centre and the name Pelletier engraved in brass. When she rings, the door is opened by a maid, a sour and shrivelled creature who must have spent years keeping unwanted visitors at bay. She considers Alice’s enquiry as though it might be some kind of affront. “Mam’selle Pelletier is not at home.”
“Will she be back soon?”
“I have no knowledge of Mam’selle’s movements.”
Alice smiles. She needs to win this woman’s confidence, at least for a few minutes. “What a shame. It would have been such fun to surprise her. And Monsieur Clément, is he at home?”
“He is here, yes.”
The answer brings a flood of relief. “So could you call him?”
The woman sucks on her thoughts. “Who shall I say …?”
“Let’s keep it a surprise, shall we? Let’s see if he remembers me. I haven’t seen him for many years. We are old family friends, from Geneva. When I was a young girl I used to worship him.”
Sympathy battles with jealousy across the maid’s face. She obviously worships him as well. Eventually sympathy wins and she allows Alice to step forward into her kingdom. “I will see if he is available.”
Alice waits in the hallway, sitting on an upright chair like a domestic waiting for an interview, her suitcase on the floor beside her. She picks nervously at her nails, thinking of Ned. Ned is here and he is not here, both at the same time, like that bloody cat they told her about, the cat that was both dead and not dead. What was the name? Schrödinger. Schrödinger’s cat.
“It’s horrid putting a cat in a box!” she protested, and the two boys laughed at her stupidity.
“It’s a thought experiment, you idiot,” Ned exclaimed.
Entanglement was a term they used, entangled particles. And now she feels the entanglement of past and present, of Marian Sutro and Anne-Marie Laroche, of Ned and Madeleine and Clément.
“Can I help you?”
She looks up, startled. He has appeared in the corridor leading off the hall, standing back from the light so that his face is in shadow. But she recognises him just the same, the small, precise agony of recognition that makes her flush as though she has been hit across the cheek.
She gets to her feet, feeling foolish—a child once again, reduced to explaining herself to an adult who probably doesn’t care any longer. “Clément,” she says, “it’s me. Marian.” The name sounds strange in her ears, as though she is talking about another person, someone she, and he, once knew.
“Marian?” His expression changes, from puzzlement to something approaching apprehension. Apprehension in both meanings of the word: recognition, but also fear. “Good God, what on earth are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d look you and Madeleine up—”
“I thought you were in England—”
“And I need somewhere to stay.”
“To stay? Of course you may stay.” He comes closer and puts his hands on her shoulders. He seems bigger, where once he was thin and rather awkward. Dégingandé, her mother used to say. His looks seem to have been hardened by the four years since she last saw him, as though a piece of sculpture that was once polished to an unearthly beauty has been roughened up by a chisel. He leans forward and kisses her, on one cheek and then the other. “My God, how extraordinary,” he says. “My little Marian is not so little any more.”
“I was exactly the same height then.”
“I wasn’t referring to height.” Now he’s smiling. Perhaps the apprehension was only an illusion, a trick of the light. His smile is what she remembers, how he found amusement in all things, even the most serious; and the way his mouth articulated the smile, the mouth she so admired and now finds that she admires still—something feminine about it despite the masculine chin above which it is set, something quirky and ironic. “Come,” he says, with his hand at her back for guidance. “Come into the salon. Leave your suitcase. Marie, who observed that you seemed a little défraîchie—how would you say that in English? Unfresh? I see you only as charming and a little wind-blown—anyway, Marie will see to it. Would you like some coffee? I can offer you some real coffee, believe it or not. Is that what you would like? I seem to remember Squirrel used to loathe coffee, but I suspect things have changed now, haven’t they?”
Squirrel. The sound of her nickname, a name that no one ever uses outside her family, ambushes her. Clément’s arm is round her shoulders and she finds herself weeping, a fearful sensation of helplessness that she despises at the very moment of feeling it. “I’m sorry,” she says through a blur of tears; and that small, hard fragment of her personality that calls itself Alice or Anne-Marie Laroche or anything other than Marian or, for God’s sake, Squirrel, watches with contempt this lachrymose creature being folded into Clément’s arms and comforted by the texture of his pullover against her cheek and the touch of his hand on her head.
“What is there to cry about?”
“Nothing,” she says against his chest. “Relief, that’s all. I’ve been travelling since yesterday. I’m exhausted.”
He lets her go, slowly as though he fears she might fall. “Of course,” he says, “Of course. I’ll get Marie to make up a room for you immediately.”
“Actually, I need to use the bathroom, if I may. I …”
“The bathroom. But certainly. How thoughtless of me. Let me show you … and meanwhile Marie can make some real coffee and even open her secret supply—oh yes, I know she has one—of sugar. Is there sugar in England? I rather imagine there is.”
Once safely inside the bathroom, she locks the door and squats to remove the crystals. It’s painful now, a sharp burning, as though something scalding hot were being pulled out of her. She unwraps the package of crystals and slips them into her handbag. Then she pees, and washes her hands and peers into the mirror. A tired, anxious face looks back at her, ravaged by tears, the eyes reddened, the skin flushed. She splashes cold water to try and coax some life back into her appearance and pats her skin dry on a towel that is soft and white, not like the thin grey rags she used at Plasonne.
Is there sugar in England? I rather imagine there is.
A small blizzard of questions buffets her mind, matters of logic and logistics, of family and friends and the uneven shifts of loyalty. For a moment she struggles to be Alice once more, trying to calculate her next moves, aware of danger. But she knows that this rationality will only last these few moments of privacy until she confronts Clément once more and all the associations of childhood come crowding in to bury her in a soft, cold snowdrift of memories. She brushes her hair into some semblance of order, pats down her skirt, straightens her jacket, and steps out into the hall.
He’s waiting in the salon. It’s a long, ornate, and old-fashioned room with three full-height windows overlooking the square outside. There’s an air of faded elegance about the furnishings, as though the room has been preserved in memory of an older generation. Clément seems modern against this backdrop, a careless figure in his open-necked shirt and pale blue pullover, with perfectly ironed trousers and brightly polished shoes. So different from Ned. He rises to his feet, looking at her with the faint amusement that he always showed, as though she were about to do or say something delightful and absurd. “That’s better. A metamorphosis. From caterpillar to butterfly.”
She attempts a laugh. “Where’s Madeleine? I expected to find Madeleine.”
“Am I a poor substitute?”
“You’re not a substitute at all. You’re Clément. But I had hoped to find Madeleine as well.”
He shrugs. “Paris is no place to be at the moment. She went to Annecy. With my wife.”
She betrays nothing. That much she has learned, to receive any revelation with apparent indifference. There’s a pause while coffee is poured before she manages a response. “You’re married, then?”
“Certainly I’m married. With a six-month-old baby.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thank you. It’s a shame you couldn’t have met Augustine.”
“The baby?”
“The wife.” He offers her a cigarette, lights one himself, watches her through the smoke. She shifts her legs, crossing them and turning herself sideways on the sofa, remembering his look while she did the same thing years ago, in the sitting room in their house in Geneva, his eyes glancing down at her knees. It made her blush. “The baby’s called Rachel.”
“And you let them go without you.”
“They’re safe where they are, and this is where my work is.”
“I feared you might have been taken for the STO or something. Been shipped off to some labour camp in Germany.”
Faint laughter. “Fortunately I’m too old for that kind of thing. But what about you, Marian? What on earth are you doing here?”
“I’ve been in the southwest all this time, living on a farm …”
“But your parents—”
“Are in London.”
“Didn’t you go with them?” His eyes are on her lips, as though reading what she is saying and seeing there the soft tremor of deceit.
“I was in England for a while but then I went back to Switzerland …” She makes up the story as she goes, extemporising, elaborating, searching ahead for flaws even as she lays down the lies.
This is what you were told never to do. Never make up a cover story on the fly. Never try to bluff. Always, always prepare yourself in advance. “There’s nothing flashy about the clandestine life,” one of the instructors said. “It’s dull and methodical and that’s what you must be. Dull, quiet, methodical.” And here she is, being silly and capricious and making an exhibition of herself.
“… I have dual nationality, you see. From my mother. I went back to Geneva for a while to study, but I always felt drawn to France so I came back last year and”—she shrugs—“I’ve been here ever since. It’s where my heart is.”
Does he believe her? She feels the thrill of panic. She doesn’t know this man. She once worshipped him, but she never knew him, then or now. “That all sounds most patriotic,” he says. “Although I must admit, I never thought of you as French. English, I thought, with a touch of French élan. A traditional dish served up with an unusual spice.”
“I feel French. I’ve always felt French, especially in England.”
“And now you’ve come to Paris …”
“To find a friend. I’ve heard she’s in trouble. Look, I really must get some sleep. I’m exhausted.”
“Of course, of course.” Suddenly he is solicitous, concerned for her well-being and apologetic for being insensitive. “I’ll have Marie show you your room. You must have a lie-down.” He uses the English expression “lie-down” with its hints of childhood, its echoes of family days in Geneva and Annecy. He must have heard it then, on her father’s lips, or perhaps her mother’s. It is one of those words that her family uses even when speaking French.
“I’ll wake you when dinner’s ready.”
THE BEDROOM IS like the sitting room, redolent of a previous generation. There are heavy velvet curtains and elaborate belle époque furniture and an ormolu clock on the mantelpiece that ticks out the time in magisterial fashion. And evidence of Madeleine’s recent presence: her dresses in the wardrobe, her underclothes in one of the drawers and, on the dressing table, a pair of hairbrushes that still have strands of her blond hair among the bristles. A photograph of her and her mother in a silver frame smiles reassuringly at the pre-war world.
Madeleine should be here to bring comfort and security, to defuse the explosive device that lies at the heart of things.
Alice turns off the light and pulls the curtains aside to look out. There is a drop of four storeys down to the courtyard in the middle of the building. No way out. She’s trapped and alone, and the trap is one of her own making and she is too tired to care. She draws the curtain, takes off her jacket and skirt and lies down in her slip, pulling the eiderdown over her. In a minute she is asleep.
THEN AWAKE. THE room is darker now. There is no hint of daylight skulking beyond the curtains. But a figure is standing over her in the shadows and for a moment she has no idea where she is or who this may be. She cries out and grabs the eiderdown, pulling it and herself towards the pillows, cringing from him. And then memory comes crowding in and he’s apologising for startling her—“I should have left you to sleep”—and she’s denying it, denying the fright, explaining it away as a bad dream.
“You’ve slept four hours. Marie has dinner ready.”
“Four hours! My God.”
“Take your time. There’s no rush.”
She prepares herself as best she can: a quick wash in the bowl of cold water that the maid has put out, and then some make-up—a dash of crimson lipstick, a hint of eye shadow and mascara, a faint blush. Faced with Clément she cannot be a girl again. She cannot be young and naive. She needs the protection of maturity.
Dinner is laid in the dining room, at one end of a table designed to seat fourteen. Clément sits at the head with Marian beside him, leaving the rest of the table an empty expanse of polished walnut. The maid has an aged mother to look after and has already gone home, leaving the food in the kitchen, so Clément serves, solicitous and attentive, apologetic about the inadequacies of the household, concerned that Marian is quite comfortable. He pours wine ceremoniously, standing at her right-hand side while she tastes. Château La Mission Haut-Brion is the name on the label. The wine is excellent, too excellent for her to be able to judge but of a quality out of all proportion to what they have to eat, which is plain and parsimonious—some scrawny chicken legs and a few potatoes. Barely enough to eat, even if you take advantage of the black market, barely enough fuel to warm two rooms, barely enough of anything. “This is what we’re reduced to,” he observes, poking at the chicken with his fork. “Great wines and starvation rations. It’s ridiculous. Were it peacetime I would take you to the Tour d’Argent and have you eat oysters and foie gras.”
She laughs. They ate once in Paris together, that time with her father and Ned. It wasn’t at the Tour d’Argent but in a small bistro in the rue des Grands-Augustins where Clément said artists and writers went; but they had seen no one of note. Does he remember?
Of course he does. “Did you expect me to forget?”
“Things change, don’t they?”
“Some things don’t.” Outside it is raining hard; inside there is the warmth of this dangerous intimacy that bridges years and memories: a man who was once some kind of deity to her, and is now sitting beside her, his features eloquent and familiar, the blue eyes that seem a brilliant contrast to his black hair, the mobile femininity of his mouth, an expression that used to seem painfully sensitive and alluring and now appears amused and self-deprecating.
His father is in Algiers, playing politics. His mother is at the house in Annecy, with his wife and Madeleine.
And what is he doing?
He shrugs. “What I have always done. Working at the Collège. Teaching. Trying to keep things as normal as possible. What else can one do?”
“Your research?”
“It continues as far as it’s possible these days.” He smiles. “I used to try and explain it to you, didn’t I? Try to turn it into something intelligible to the ordinary person.”
“Is that what I was?”
He looks at her without smiling, as though trying to puzzle out the answer. “You were much more than that.”
Does she blush? Perhaps it’s the wine. “Remember when we went up to Megève that time,” she says, “to the chalet, just the four of us?”
“When Madeleine skied right over that hut …”
“And landed in a snowdrift on the other side …”
“And the door opened and someone came out and asked her what the hell she was doing, that this was private property and how would she like it if someone skied over her roof and landed in her garden?”
The memories circle round, like predators preparing for a kill. “And sailing on the lake,” Marian says. “Remember that? Ned was unwell and Madeleine stayed with him and so it was the two of us alone.”
He does remember that, of course he does. She can see it in his expression. He remembers pushing the boat out into the lake, the two of them wading out thigh-deep and then throwing themselves laughing over the gunwales. He remembers exactly.
“When was it?”
“You know perfectly well when it was. The summer of 1938.”
It was the kind of adventure where familiar places became unreal, pervaded with the strangeness of the whole hot summer’s day, dazzled by the glare of sun on water. The two of them lean and brown and laughing. Barefoot and bare-legged. Pushing each other and mock-fighting and he grabbing her hands to stop her hitting him, their difference in age somehow telescoped so that she felt older than her years and he seemed younger. They brought the little boat ashore on a promontory where there were some reeds and a small inlet and a piece of beach. “Where are we?” she asked, as though they might be lost.
“Who knows?” he said, helping her out of the dinghy, then keeping hold of her hand as they walked up the beach. She’d never held a man’s hand before, except her father’s and Ned’s. Girlfriends’, yes, of course. But never a man’s. It seemed a gesture imbued with great significance: he likes me, she thought. He wouldn’t hold my hand if he didn’t like me.
Like. That equivocal word. More so in French. Aimer. The ambiguity of words struck her, their uncertainty and imprecision.
Behind the beach there was a small wood and the roof of a house hidden amid the foliage. They crept up to a garden wall and clambered on rocks to peer over onto lawns and flower beds and a weeping willow. Somewhere a dog barked but the house seemed deserted, its blind windows reflecting the sky and the mountains. Clément’s arm was round her waist to steady her. She remembered that more than she remembered the garden. Clément’s arm around her. And then his turning her to face him, his face so close that she could feel the warmth of his skin.
She sips her wine and tastes what he suggests she should find there—a hint of cigar, a touch of chocolate, a suggestion of cedar wood—looking at this man beside her whom she knows but doesn’t know. “It almost seems to have happened to other people.”
“Yet it was only a few years ago. Six.”
“Five. You’d come down from Paris and I was back home for the holidays …” She catches his glance and holds it deliberately. “I’d never been kissed before.”
“I hardly dared touch you. In case I frightened you.”
“I was only sixteen, Clément. The first time I’d been kissed like that. And embarrassed. God, how I was embarrassed!”
“You seemed older.” Suddenly, disarmingly, he grins. “You felt older.”
She shakes her head, remembering how they climbed down and sat against the wall. He was kissing her and she had closed her eyes because that was what you did, that was what girls said when they discussed it—you close your eyes and let yourself go—and his hand was on her knee and she put her own hand over his. The ambiguity of gesture. Actions as equivocal as words. His hand, her hand, their two hands moved upwards inside her shorts where no one had ever touched her except perhaps a doctor or her mother, where the hair blossomed and, to her intense shame, her flesh protruded like an insolent and vulgar pout. She felt embarrassed and ecstatic at one and the same time, wondering what he might do and what she wanted, neither of which seemed clear. “I thought … God knows what I thought,” she says. Unexpectedly she is almost in tears, mourning a distant child whom she vaguely remembers and hardly understands; and a man she loved. “I thought you’d marry me. I thought I’d get pregnant. I thought you were the most wonderful thing in creation and I was the most despicable. You said—do you remember what you said to me?—one day, you said, one day I will love you properly.”
He watches her now. There is a strange vulnerability to his expression, as though something has been stripped away leaving the younger man exposed beneath. “I adored you,” he says.
“You went back to Paris—”
“—you disappeared back to school in England—”
“You wrote me those letters. They were the things that kept me alive in that awful place. The bloody nuns used to read them, did you know that? Worse than censorship. Sister Benedict was the French teacher and she hated me because I spoke the language properly and she didn’t. She had this dreadful English accent—if you can’t hear the language, how on earth can you teach it? Anyway, I’d told them you were my uncle and at first they believed me—”
“You stopped writing.”
She shakes her head. “That’s the point. I didn’t stop, but I thought you had. You see …” And suddenly she is that child again, teeming with desire and indignation, her eyes smarting. “Can you believe it, they confiscated your letters? They became suspicious about Oncle Clément and they confiscated your letters without telling me and I thought you’d given me up.” The moment of anguish has become real again, the child trapped in boarding school with no means of contacting the outside world. “I was desperate, Clément. I wrote asking what had happened, begging you to write, pleading with you. I suppose the nuns simply didn’t post them.”
“How very English.”
“How very Catholic. They contacted my parents to find out if you really were my uncle. Maybe it was something I wrote. Did they open my own letters? I’ve no idea. I begged you to write, and hated myself for doing so. I wrote things I shouldn’t have. Maybe they read those too …” She looks at him, tears battling with laughter. He reaches out and takes her hand and she feels that stirring within her, something undermining, as though the ground beneath her feet has shifted. “But by then the invasion happened and suddenly you were entirely cut off anyway, with no hope of contact. It’s a whole world ago and here I am getting all excited about it.”
Carefully, as though it might break, she withdraws her hand from his. “And now you’re married, and a father. What’s Augustine like? Tell me about her.”
“You were shocked, weren’t you? To discover that I’ve got married.”
“It was a surprise.”
“You don’t think I’m the marrying type?”
“That it could happen without my knowing. Without any of us knowing.”
“Word doesn’t get round these days.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“No, I haven’t. Augustine’s pretty and wifely and doesn’t bother her head with tiresome things like science or scientists. Devoted to her child, like any mother, I suppose.” He smiles. She can’t read his expression. Maybe she never was able to. “Both our families approve. Which is quite surprising, really.”
“Why surprising?”
“Because she’s a Jew.”
The word juive detonates in the close room, scattering her thoughts like debris. “Is that why she left Paris?”
He nods. “She went after the Vél’ d’Hiv rafle. You know about that, don’t you? Augustine wasn’t affected by the roundup, of course. She was married to me, and anyway it was the foreign Jews they were after. But we thought it would be best for her and the baby to leave the occupied zone, and the obvious thing was to go to Annecy.”
“And she’s safe now?”
He shrugs. “Now the Italians have gone, things have changed, but for the moment she’s all right.”
“I’m sorry. It must be terrible to be separated like that.”
He mulls over her question, holding his glass by the stem and swirling the wine so that he can see the colour against the candle flame. When he answers it is carefully, as though he has measured his words. “Things weren’t altogether happy between us. I’m very fond of her, of course. But as with so many matters, the full story is complicated and appears different depending on how you look at it.”
“Like those particles you used to talk about.”
“You remember that, do you? If you know a particle’s momentum, you cannot know its position.”
He makes a wry face. “Or my momentum? Which?”
She looks at him, sensing the danger that lies in shared laughter. Laughter drew them together five years ago, across the gulf of age and education. “Your momentum was always your research.”
“At the cost of my marriage?”
“You tell me.”
He shrugs. “The work goes on. With the Germans looking over our shoulders, of course. At the beginning they put Wolfgang Gentner in to supervise what we were doing. He was one of Fred’s graduate students before the war, so one of us really. Thanks to him we got the cyclotron going. Did I ever tell you about the cyclotron?”
“I expect so.”
“Fred’s pride and joy. The Germans wanted to ship it off to Heidelberg but Gentner insisted that it stay here in Paris. Gentner was posted back to Germany and now we’ve got Riezler. He’s a good man too.” He shrugs again, that damned Gallic shrug. “They protect us, Marian. The Germans themselves protect us. They revere Fred and he charms the pants off them and we’re all allowed to get on with our work.”
“That sounds like collaboration.”
“It’s accommodation. It’s what all Frenchmen do, one way or another. Keeping quiet. Turning a blind eye.”
“And that’s your contribution to the liberation of France? Obscure research and a bit of Gallic charm? What’ll you say when Rachel asks, What did you do in the war, Daddy? Oh, I charmed the enemy and they left me alone.”
“I’ve not heard you being sarcastic before. It doesn’t suit you.”
“There’s quite a lot that doesn’t suit me these days, but at least I know which side I’m on. You’re supping with the devil, Clément—you need a very long spoon. The others in your lab escaped to England, didn’t they?”
He frowned. “You know about that?”
She answered without thinking: “Ned told me.”
Clément raised his eyebrows. “Ned told you, did he? Dear old Ned. I’ll bet he’s feeling smug, tucked up in his nice safe laboratory in England, isn’t he? When did he tell you, I wonder? Before you left England for Switzerland?” He considers her, head slightly tilted to one side as though trying to get the measure of her. “What are you really doing here, Marian?”
“Doing here? I told you, I’ve come to see this friend.”
“Ah, the mysterious friend. But whose friend is she? Is she Marian Sutro’s friend? Or is she Anne-Marie Laroche’s?”
There is a sudden stillness in the chilly room. An old portrait, pretending to be some bewigged and waistcoated ancestor, looks down on them with an expression that suggests he would have understood such things as noms de plume and noms de guerre. Maybe that was how he escaped the Revolution and the Terror.
“You’ve been going through my handbag.”
He shrugs once more, as though going through someone’s handbag is the most natural thing in the world, which perhaps it is in this city of fear and suspicion. “Marie wondered if you had a ration card, so I went to look. You were asleep and I didn’t want to wake you. I told her that you didn’t, which is true in a sense, because the only card I found belonged to a certain Anne-Marie Laroche. The same Anne-Marie Laroche who owns the identity card with your picture on it.”
How do you judge your response? How do you balance surprise with mild outrage and make your response convincing? There was no ready formula, nothing the schools could teach you, neither the A School with its assault course and unarmed combat, nor the B School with its clever deceptions and fake interrogations. None of those lessons can help you when you are exposed like this with an old friend who might have been your lover, and you’ve let your guard down and you have no idea how he feels or where his loyalties lie. She tries to meld indignation with self-righteousness. It’s a difficult trick but one that she remembers from school, when caught out breaching one of the arcane rules that governed the convent.
“That’s awful! Going through someone’s things like a policeman. I was going to mention it when the moment arose. A friend got me the card. I was Marian Sutro when I came from Switzerland but a friend organised another card for me to make it easier. Because the name might seem Jewish, if you want to know. Thousands of people do that kind of thing for one reason or another. Half the country is illegal now, you know that as well as I do.”
Clément considers this idea thoughtfully, and finds it wanting. “You’ve come from London, haven’t you, Squirrel?” he says. “How did you get here, I wonder? By plane, I expect. Did you land in a field somewhere, or did my brave Squirrel descend from the air by parachute?” He smiles, an adult humouring a child. “The daring young girl on the flying trapeze.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. And don’t call me Squirrel.”
“Well I can’t really call you Marian, can I? What about Anne-Marie?”
Carefully—at least her hand is steady—she picks up her wine glass and sips. Can she trust him? Trust no one, they told her at Beaulieu, not even your best friend. But this is Clément, for God’s sake—Clément, whom she loved with all the passion of a young girl; Clément, whose letters she waited for with breath held; Clément, the man for whom she first felt that strange emotion that can undermine a whole personality like a river eating away at the foundations of a building, or an earthquake shattering them: sexual desire.
“Yes,” she says as though admitting something shameful. “I’ve come from London.”
SHE’S AT HIS mercy now. No cover, no bodyguard of lies. Naked and helpless, with him watching her carefully, like an interrogator who is able at his job, enticing the betrayal of secrets rather than trying to extract them by force. She recalls all the warnings and the play-acting that they did at Beaulieu, how different interrogators might behave, how to stand the glare of lights and the shouting and having your head plunged under water until you were gasping for life. But also the other technique, the quiet, insidious one which, drawing you into a world of compliance and sympathy, makes you share confidences and secrets with the interrogator, whom you come, so the story goes, almost to love. But they never taught her how to deal with this.
“So why have you turned up here? Surely not just for old times’ sake.”
It’s like that game they played, the blind chess. Kriegspiel. Only now the barrier between the two players has come down and he can see her board with all its pieces. “They want you in England, Clément.”
“Who do?”
“People that matter. Ned, of course. But more important than that, Professor Chadwick, Dr Kowarski—”
“Lev?”
“He says that the future of the French effort depends on it.”
“Who told you that?”
“Kowarski himself.”
“You’ve met him?”
“In Cambridge. Von Halban has gone to Canada and Kowarski is on his own in Cambridge. And he needs you to keep his group going. Otherwise …”
“Otherwise what?”
“The Americans will be the only players in the game. That’s what he told me.”
He shakes his head in denial or disbelief, it isn’t clear which, as though in the course of an experiment he has been faced with some startling observation that goes against all that he has come to expect. The splitting of an atom, maybe. “And what’s your own role in all this, Marian? Are you the bait?”
“What on earth do you mean by that? I’m nothing more than the messenger.”
“A particularly attractive one.”
“Are you suggesting—”
“What do these people, whoever they are, actually know about us, Marian? I mean us two.”
She reddens, thinking of Fawley and the avuncular Peters, wondering herself how much they understood. “They know we were friends.”
“That’s a very careful use of the past tense.”
“We haven’t seen each other for ages, Clément. Four years. Things have changed. For God’s sake, you’re married. Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s something, certainly. But if you’d kept writing, if this bloody war hadn’t broken out—”
She shakes her head, as though trying to shake his words out of her ears. “Clément, you’ve been drinking, I’ve been drinking. We mustn’t say anything we’ll regret in the morning.”
“Are you right? Maybe we should say the things now that we’ll regret later. Maybe that’s the only way we’ll be honest with one another. I’ll start. Six years ago I fell in love with my friend’s younger sister. She was far too young for me, but that doesn’t change the fact. She seemed to feel the same for me, indeed on one occasion we came within a whisper of becoming lovers. And now she suddenly appears in front of me, matured into a rather frightening young woman, and do you know what?”
“I don’t want to hear.”
“I find we still laugh at the same things.”
“I told you. We mustn’t say anything we’ll regret in the morning.”
“But how can we tell we’ll regret them until we’ve said them?” He makes a wry face. “That sounds like one of the more abstruse aspects of physics. Schrödinger’s cat, neither dead nor alive until—”
“You open the box.”
“You remember.”
“Of course I remember. But that’s not why I’m here.” And as though to show how true that is she opens her handbag, takes out the key ring, unclips the Lapreche key, and hands it to him.
He examines it curiously. “The key to your heart?”
“The key to my presence here. There’s a letter to you from Professor Chadwick himself. I’m told that makes it important.” She explains the trick, how he can open up a minuscule compartment and take out a microdot. It sounds like a parlour game. “You’ll need a microscope to read it. I presume you can find one easily enough.”
He holds the key exactly as she did, between thumb and forefinger, as though it is something delicate and precious. “How very ingenious. It goes with the devious Anglo-Saxon mind. I’ll read it with interest.” Then he laughs suddenly, and shakes his head in disbelief. “Do you remember that game we used to play with Ned? Throwing a ball over your head and you trying to catch it?”
“Pig-in-the-middle.”
“We called it ‘collapsing the wave function.’ ”
“I didn’t understand what you were talking about.”
“Neither did we.” Still holding up the key and looking at her with that half-amused, half-puzzled expression, he asks, “Who’s pig-in-the-middle now, I wonder?”
There is no answer to that, really. It’s uncertain, like one of his particles.
SHE LIES IN bed, awake. She can hear him moving around the flat: the closing of a door, the running of water, a booming in the ancient plumbing.
She remembers. The breathless excitement of returning home for the holidays, hoping that he would be back from Paris as he had promised in his letters. But all they had were a few snatched moments, fragments of time alone when the families were together, mere minutes when she could say things to him that were otherwise unutterable. “A quantum particle can be in two places at once,” he explained, and she laughed at the stupidity of it all. “I can be two places at once,” she retorted. “I can be in the dormitory at school lying alone in my bed, and I can be in your arms at the same time.”
“He’s only leading you on,” one of her school friends said when she told her about him. She knew that the friend was right but she also knew that she was wrong: it was possible to hold two contradictory ideas at one and the same time just as it was possible, so Clément claimed, for a particle to be in two contradictory states at the same moment. A wave and a particle both at the same time, something like that. She called her own condition Marian’s Law of Superposition, and delighted at the idea of sharing it with him.
What collapses the wave function is discovery.
She listens to him walking along the corridor and pausing for a moment outside her door. Then he moves on, and she can hear the door to his own bedroom open and close and there are no further sounds within the apartment other than the shifts and creaking that a building makes as it cools in the night. But there are noises from outside—a car roaring down a nearby street; someone running along the road outside; a door slamming and someone shouting; and late at night she is awakened from the fog of sleep by what she thinks must be distant gunfire.
Morning seems different. The threats of the day before have receded like a tide. They’ll return just as surely, but for the moment there is calm and quiet, with the rough sea a long way away. Outside, the grey drab of the previous day has been replaced by a sky of peerless blue, as soft as angora.
She gathers her things and creeps down the corridor to the bathroom to wash. Back in the sanctuary of her room she is half dressed and finishing her hair when there’s a knock on the door.
“Come in.”
He wears an expression that she remembers, part contrition, part amusement. “I’ve come to apologise,” he says. “You were right.”
“Right?”
“About conversations that we’ll regret in the morning.”
“We’d drunk too much.”
“Or maybe, not enough.”
She shrugs, continuing with the task in hand, conscious of his eyes on her, feeling the thrill of nakedness without the fact of it. “I’m in a hurry and you’re putting me off.”
“I’m only watching.”
“That’s the trouble.”
“To see this friend. I told you.”
“But you’ll be back this afternoon, won’t you? You’re not going to run away again?”
“Again?”
“You ran off to school in England.”
“I wasn’t running. I was sent.”
“You were sent here as well, weren’t you?”
“I could have refused. It was my decision to come.”
“And you won’t leave without telling me?”
“No.” The hair is fixed. She turns back to him. “I’m an adult now, Clément, not your little girl.”
“I never thought of you as a little girl. You always seemed absurdly grown up to me.” He comes into the room and kisses her chastely on the cheek. “I’ll see you when I get back from the lab. We’ll do something. We can’t stay cooped up in here. How about the theatre? I can get tickets.”
“The theatre?”
“What could be more Parisian than going to the theatre?”
The theatre seems dangerous, calling attention to oneself. “Perhaps …”
But she doesn’t finish what she is saying, and he doesn’t wait to hear it. “That’s all right then. I’ve got to go now but I’ll try not to be late this afternoon.” He glances back before closing the door. “Be careful, won’t you? Paris is a dangerous place.”
SHE LISTENS FOR the front door to slam. In the dining room Marie is in attendance, hovering over the table and the poor apology for breakfast—some grey bread and a yellow slime that isn’t butter. But there is coffee, real coffee from the packet Alice has handed over. It isn’t clear whether this gift has warmed Marie towards her. The woman watches her carefully, as though she expects her to steal the silver. “Will Mademoiselle be in for dinner? Monsieur Clément gave me to understand …”
“I’ll be here for dinner, yes. I’ll be here for a few days.”
“And you have no ration card?”
Alice looks helpless and makes her apologies, that she left it at home, that it was stupid of her. The woman sniffs. “That makes my job all the more difficult.”
“I know it does. But I had to leave in a hurry. This girlfriend of mine I’ve got to see …” She leaves the rest unsaid but implied: nameless female troubles—a lover, perhaps, or maybe even an errant husband; or pregnancy, unwanted and unexpected. “I know Monsieur Clément would never accept it, but if some money would help …”
The maid doesn’t flinch. “That wouldn’t be right, would it? You’re our guest.”
“But you might be able to get some things on the black market. Some real butter, maybe. Monsieur Clément need never know.”
“I expect you get butter in the country, don’t you?”
“Some, yes we do. The farmers keep some back, and if you know the right people …”
The woman nods. “My cousin farms in Normandy. We get stuff from him but it’s more and more difficult these days.”
The nod seals the matter. The handing over of money takes place with all the discretion of an illegal street-corner transaction, as though even here the police may be watching.
FROM THE MOMENT she steps out of the house she assumes she is being followed. Always assume the worst, one of the instructors warned them: a pessimist makes the best agent. Around the Sorbonne she mingles with students going to lectures, walking into one of the great courts and out by a different exit to see if she can tease a follower out of the crowd. In the rue Saint-Jacques she gazes into shop windows and scans the reflection of the other side of the street, looking for loiterers, looking for anyone who might be looking for her. At the métro station on the boulevard Saint-Germain she descends the stairs on one side of the street and emerges on the other, watching for anyone doing the same. No one follows. She is clear and clean, a bright, free woman alone in this anxious city. She makes her way back to the métro and pushes among the crowd on the platform to get onto a westbound train. At Odéon she changes to the line that goes under the Seine, going north beneath the city, away from Clément, away from Marian Sutro.
YVETTE’S ADDRESS IS a block of flats near the cemetery in the Twentieth, a grimy, four-storey building with a mansard roof and decaying mouldings on the façade, the kind of place that has come down in the world ever since the plans of Haussmann first put it there. Alice walks straight past the building, looking. There is a clochard going through bins; a couple sitting in the window of the café directly across the street; young lovers who stand there debating some issue with typical Parisian intensity; a woman walking her dog; a newspaper seller with copies of Le Matin and Les Nouveaux Temps. Further down is a street market with a few threadbare stalls selling old clothes and bits of hardware—sewing-machine parts, sections of plumbing, pots and pans, anything that might be of use in a world where everything is reused and nothing is new. People are rummaging through the junk. She turns over a few old sweaters and glances back at the building.
“You’d look lovely in that one, dearie,” the stallholder says.
Alice smiles and considers the possibility of purchase before putting the sweater down and walking on up the hill towards the cemetery. People are coming and going through the gates, some with misery etched into their faces. At a stall nearby she stops to buy flowers, a meagre clutch of anemones, to give herself some kind of alibi before going in through the gates. She walks purposefully down one of the lanes between ornate epitaphs and pious weeping angels and finds a bare sepulchre on which to deposit her flowers. The inscription says Jules Auvergne, poète. She has never heard of him. Do flowers to the unknown dead from the unknown living have any significance in the afterlife? She returns the way she has come, back past the street market to the opposite side of Yvette’s building, watching the people in the street, trying to make an assessment, trying to answer the one question that has to be answered: is Yvette’s apartment under surveillance?
At a window seat in the café across the street she sips coffee and reads her book. Time passes. At the next table two girls are discussing a boy in low and urgent voices. He’s a bastard, apparently, un salaud who is going with two different girls at the same time. Should they tell the victims? The debate goes on without ever reaching a conclusion. Beyond the window the scene shifts in that casual, contingent way of the street: women meeting and talking, complaining; people coming and going at the market stalls. In an impasse on the opposite side of the street children are playing tag, three girls and a younger boy, quite oblivious to the world around them. Chat! they call and scatter across the pavé away from whoever is “it.” Whenever the door to Yvette’s apartment block opens whoever comes out has to manoeuvre through the game. It isn’t until half past ten that the figure stepping through the door is Yvette herself. Suddenly she is there, scurrying out into the daylight, wearing a drab brown dress with a fawn gilet thrown over her shoulders. She hurries past the children and disappears up the impasse.
Alice calls for the bill. There’s no need to rush, she tells herself. The mouse will return to its nest. And sure enough, a few minutes later, clutching a brown paper bag to her chest, Yvette reappears.
Leaving change on the table, Alice grabs her bag and goes out. Across the street Yvette is searching in her bag, then fiddling a key into the lock. Trying not to hurry, Alice reaches the entrance to the building just in time to block the door and push her way inside. Counterweighted by some kind of pulley system, the door slams shut behind her. The hallway is gloomy, illuminated by a dusty fanlight. There are two bicycles propped under the stairs and a battered pram. Yvette is already climbing the stairs, barely glancing at the stranger who has followed her in.
Yvette grabs the banister and looks round. Even in the shadows Alice can see fear in her wide eyes. “Who’s that?”
“Can we talk?” Alice asks.
Recognition dawns. “What are you doing here? Go away. I don’t want to see you.”
Alice climbs the stairs towards the woman. Outside there are the cries of the children playing, silly, quotidian sounds. Inside, this sudden, unexpected meeting of shadows. “I’ve come to see how things are going.”
“You can’t come here.”
“Are you on your own?”
“I’m going.”
She turns to climb the stairs. Alice grabs her arm, her fingers locking round the fragile elbow. “Let’s talk. There’s no one around. Let’s talk here. Like old friends. Who are you these days? I’m Anne-Marie Laroche. Who are you?”
“Yvette,” the woman answers dully. “Just Yvette.”
“Can we go upstairs? Are you on your own?”
Yvette shrugs. “Of course I’m on my own. That’s it, isn’t it? We’re all of us on our own.”
“You’re not on your own now.”
The woman stands there. It isn’t even clear if she is pondering the matter. Then, as though surrendering to the inevitable, she shrugs and goes on up, with Alice following.
YVETTE HAS DONE well in the choice of flat: it is a typical pianist’s apartment right at the top of the building, with sloping ceilings and mansard windows giving out onto a parapet where you can deploy an aerial. Outside the windows, pigeons scratch and scrape on the tiles. The sound of their beating wings is like hands being clapped. In the distance Alice can see the domes of the Sacré-Coeur. Once she loved the building, but Clément told her it was hideous, so now it seems exactly that: hideous, a whited sepulchre.
“I knew they’d come to get me,” Yvette says. “I just didn’t guess it’d be you.” She’s making coffee at a paraffin cooker in one corner of the room, the precious coffee that Alice brought. All the time she looks round, not specifically at Alice but over her shoulder, like an animal on the watch for predators. The scent of coffee mingles with the stench of paraffin.
“I haven’t come to get you, Yvette. I’ve come to help.”
“I don’t need help.”
“You went off the air. They thought your set might have a fault. I’ve brought crystals for you—”
“I don’t need fucking crystals. I don’t need anything.”
“What’s happened, Yvette? What’s happened to your circuit? Cinéaste, isn’t it?”
“How do you know that?”
“It was in the signal from London.”
“They sent you specially?”
“I was already in the country. They didn’t know what had happened when you went off the air. Tell me what happened, Yvette. To Cinéaste.”
“They were blown. They were all meeting in a café—”
“We were told not to do that.”
“But that’s what happens, isn’t it? That’s what people actually do, whatever they said in training. What the hell do they know? Anyway, I was late. The métro broke down or something. So I got there just in time—”
“In time for what?”
“Not to get caught. To see it happen. They knew. The Frisés, I mean. They knew about the meeting. Someone must have betrayed us. I watched from down the street. There were dozens of them. Soldiers and police. They surrounded the place and grabbed them all and took them away.”
“What did you do?”
Yvette brings the coffee over. “I laid low. What else could I do?”
“And no one came for you?”
“Nobody. They didn’t know this address, see. I’d only just found it. You know, moving around, what you’re meant to do.”
“So how did London find out?”
She shrugs, as though such matters are of no consequence. “My final sked, I suppose. I thought they might help me, so I told them about the circuit, and gave this address and then I realised they couldn’t do anything for me at all, that I was on my own, that as far as they were concerned I could go and fuck myself. So I cut the transmission. The city is crawling with detector vans. If you’re on for more than a minute or two they can get a fix on you and then you’re in the shit.”
“Don’t you have other places to transmit from?”
“They’ve all been blown, haven’t they? They got Emile, you know that?”
“Emile?”
“He’d only arrived a week earlier. A Lysander …”
“But when I last saw him he was waiting for a drop.”
“He refused to jump. At the last minute, he refused to leave the aircraft—”
“He refused?”
“They had to take him all the way back, and the next time they had to get him in by Lysander.”
“He told you this? Surely he wouldn’t have admitted it.”
Again she shrugs, looking suddenly embarrassed. “He told me. He’s not like we used to think.” She sips her coffee, holding the cup in both hands for comfort, looking up at Alice with fear and confusion in her eyes.
“We need to get you out of here,” Alice tells her. “We need to get you home, back to safety, back to little Violette.”
It’s the mention of her daughter that does it. For a moment Yvette’s face hesitates, as though it can’t make up its mind what expression to adopt. And then suddenly it breaks up like a paper mask dissolving in the rain, the features crumpling, the whole losing its coherence and becoming something else, a mere assembly of ruined features. She sits there with her head bowed, convulsed with sobs and apologising for not being up to it. That’s what she has always done: apologise for her failures. “I’m frightened,” she says through the mess of tears. “I never thought I would be, but I’m frightened. I’m frightened of what they might do to me and frightened of what I might tell them. I’m frightened. And I’m frightened of what might happen to Violette if I don’t survive.”
Alice puts her arm round her shoulders. “Violette’s safe, you don’t have to worry about that. And we’ll sort you out. We’ll get a pick-up. How can I get a message to you without coming here?”
“You know it’s better to have a cut-out. What about the café across the street? Can I leave a message there?”
“I suppose so. I go in occasionally. The owner’s a fat guy called Boger. You can leave something with him.”
“Go in regularly to check. Have you still got your wireless?”
Yvette nods. “It’s under my bed. I wanted to get rid of it but I didn’t know how.” Her eyes widen. “You’re not going to use it … for the love of God, I’ve told you, it’s not safe!”
“I’ll get rid of it for you. I’ll take it.”
“That’s dangerous, going out on the street with that thing.”
“It’ll be all right. Everyone in Paris is carrying a suitcase these days.”
Yvette attempts a laugh. “They haven’t all got a B2 transceiver in it.” It isn’t a bad effort, considering the tears.
Alice encourages her. “You know I brought spare crystals for you? Stuffed up my fanny.”
“Your fanny?”
The idea seems hilarious. They shriek with laughter, a laughter that borders on hysteria. And then the mood veers dangerously, like a vehicle out of control. “And there’s this,” Yvette says, opening a drawer in the table and taking out a bundle of cloth. It’s like a conjuring trick: one moment a bundle of oily cloth, the next moment there is a pistol lying in her narrow hand—a Browning nine-millimetre semi-automatic.
“Jesus Christ, Yvette. What are you doing with that?”
“It’s standard for a pianist. You can’t pretend you’re doing anything innocent, can you? So you may as well be armed.”
Alice takes the weapon from her. She is immediately familiar with it, that is the disturbing thing. All those hours spent at Meoble Lodge on weapons training. The different types. More models than a soldier would see in a lifetime. She points the pistol at the floor, flips out the magazine, works the slide back and forth a few times, pulls the trigger and listens for the empty snap of the firing mechanism. “Ammunition?”
Yvette produces a loaded clip and a box with a dozen rounds in it. “Take it.” She pushes everything across the table. “Take the shitty thing away.”
Alice crosses the city, humping the suitcase. It’s a battered, leather-bound thing with a few old hotel labels stuck on it and a handle repaired with tightly whipped twine. She hates it for being dull and ugly and as dangerous as a bomb. It sits on the floor of the métro car by her feet where any policeman or soldier might ask her to open it, and that would be enough to detonate the thing.
At Réaumur-Sébastopol she has to change trains, lugging the hateful object through the tunnels where her footsteps echo against the tiled walls. There are others going the same way and she tries not to catch their eyes, tries not to be noticed. “Let me help you, Mam’selle,” a fellow passenger suggests, drawing alongside her and putting his hand down to take the handle. She pulls the case away from him and attempts not to look. But even out of the corner of her eye she can recognise that grey-green uniform, those black and silver flashes plainly enough. A major in the Wehrmacht.
“I’m quite all right, thank you.”
“As you wish.” His French seems good, his manner quiet and courteous. He follows her to the platform and waits beside her as the train draws in. “Are you going to Montparnasse station?”
“No.”
He glances down. “The suitcase has become an emblem of our times, hasn’t it? So many people have their lives in a suitcase. Regrettably.”
She shrugs, ignoring his question and praying for the train to come. When it draws in the officer follows her into the car and finds a seat opposite. He has a faint smile on his lips, as though he knows her secret. “Let me guess …” he says. The train moves away from the platform. Other passengers look away. “… You are not going to the railway station, so you are not travelling. So you are visiting. That’s right! You are visiting your aged aunt who lives all by herself in Montparnasse.”
It’s about one minute between stations, on average. She has six stops. Allow time for people to get on and off, what does that make it? She tries to do the mathematics in her head while the smiling officer attempts to guess the reason for her journey.
“Or perhaps your boyfriend. You are travelling to see your boyfriend who is one of those left bank intellectuals of whom your family disapproves. A poet, maybe. Or a philosopher.”
“Leave her alone,” a woman says.
“I’m sorry, Madame?”
“I said, leave her alone.” The speaker is a dowdy, middle-aged woman in grey. Her face is grey, her manner is grey, but she is the one who is willing to speak out in defence of a young woman. “Politeness is politeness, whatever uniform you are wearing.”
The major seems nonplussed. “I’m sorry.” He inclines his head towards the woman and, across the car, towards Alice. “I apologise if I have offended you. I only wanted to make polite conversation.”
“Politeness is not trying to make conversation with strangers what want to be left alone,” the woman observes, nodding as though to emphasise her point. Alice smiles thankfully in her direction. Embarrassed, the major looks at other things, the other passengers crowding on at the stops, the notices posted above the seats, the blackness beyond the windows.
As the train slows for Saint-Michel, Alice gets up and moves to the door. The major follows, standing mere inches from her, waiting for the car to stop and the doors to open. When she steps down, so does he. She walks on, trying to ignore his presence but there is a crowd building up at the foot of the stairs and the officer catches up with her. They edge forwards. Something is blocking the exit above, slowing the crowd. Rafle, someone says. The word goes round. Rafle. Round-up. At the top of the stairs there is daylight visible, and she can see uniforms, people pushing and shoving, the general disturbance of men and women looking for their papers, opening their bags. A German voice calls out something in French. People mutter and curse. She grips the suitcase. Perhaps she can dump it. Perhaps she can turn back round and wait for the next train. The crowd presses round her. Panic rises, a tide of sweat and heartbeat, a strange ringing in her ears.
“Please,” says the major at her shoulder. “We cannot wait for this nonsense. Allow me to help you, Mam’selle.” His hand is on hers, easing the suitcase from her grasp.
She lets the thing go, surrenders the bomb that could kill her in an instant. Panic tells her to let him go, to turn round and try to escape through the station. She’d be away before he gets to look inside the case. She’d be free and away. But panic is the worst advisor. Panic can kill. She follows him upwards, pushing up the stairs in his wake. Someone in the crowd calls out, “Fucking tart.”
She reaches the top. German soldiers and French police are going through papers, going through pockets, going through bags. Maybe they are looking for somebody, or maybe it’s no more than one of those random events, the nagging inconvenience of occupation. The major is talking to one of the soldiers. “I can vouch for the Fräulein,” he says. “She’s with me.” The soldier turns and beckons her through. She goes past the barrage and onto the sanctuary of the pavement, where the fresh air is cool on her face. Corralled to one side is a group of men and women wearing the yellow star. Beyond, two lorries are parked with people being pushed on board. But no one is interested in her. The panic subsides, leaving a debris of racing pulse and weak knees and sweat.
The major hands her the suitcase. “I’m afraid I have an appointment. Otherwise I would accompany you.”
She takes the thing from him. “That’s all right. It’s not very heavy.”
“But you don’t look well. Rather pale.”
“It was all those people …”
“Perhaps …” Perhaps what? He’s a good-looking man, a thoughtful-looking man, a man who would make someone a good lover, a good husband, a good father. “Perhaps a coffee? I have a few minutes.”
“Or maybe we could meet up for a drink later?”
“I have a boyfriend, you see.”
“I wasn’t suggesting anything—”
“People would misunderstand, wouldn’t they?”
He nods, looking crestfallen. “I suppose they would.”
She attempts a smile and turns and walks away, past the entrance to the métro, past the people trickling through the barrage. All the time she knows that his eyes are on her.
THE SUITCASE TAKES on a personality of its own. It lies there in her room, hidden under the bed, waiting. She knows it is there, Marie knows it is there—impossible to disguise the fact of it as she stood at the door of the apartment waiting to be let in. Clément will have to be told it is there. A suitcase. She doesn’t know exactly what to do with it, or exactly what to do with Clément. She doesn’t know what to do at all. All she knows are the abstract facts—she has to arrange a pick-up; she has to get Yvette back to England; she has to persuade Clément that he should do the same.
“A Wehrmacht officer tried to chat me up on the métro,” she tells him.
“I’m not surprised. I’d try and chat you up on the métro.”
“You’re married.”
“I expect he was.”
She laughs. She doesn’t want to feel at ease like this. She wants to feel anxiety, caution, the wariness that has been drummed into her. But she feels only an absurd and childlike happiness in his presence. And safe—she feels safe. The most dangerous illusion of all.
As promised, he has got tickets for something, a play at the Théâtre de la Cité. It starts early—performances always start early these days, so you can get home before the curfew—and they can easily walk. Does she want to do that?
“I really want to know if you managed to read the letter.”
He shrugs, as though the matter is of little consequence. “Yes, I did. I went to the workshops in the basement of the Collège and borrowed a file. In order to adjust a key that didn’t quite fit, that was my story. The difficulty was persuading the technician that I could manage without his help. And then I had to make up some damn fool excuse to borrow a microscope from the biology lab.”
“And the letter?”
“It’s not that easy to keep track of a full stop. I was frightened I’d sneeze or something.” He’s teasing her. As he always has. Mockery that is like a secret caress, disturbing and thrilling at the same time.
“But you succeeded?”
“Yes, I did. Very ingenious. Some kind of photographic reduction process …”
“Never mind all that. What did it say?”
“It was most flattering. Flattery from Professor Chadwick is a rare commodity. He was interned in Germany during the last war, did you know that? He knows Germany and German science like the back of his hand. A dangerous enemy. Churchill blusters and calls them the Hun, but Chadwick knows them. The question is, do I fall for his flattery?”
“It’s not flattery, Clément. For God’s sake, they want you.”
“But who is it who wants me, and what for?” He laughs and glances at his watch. “If we don’t get a move on we’ll be late for the theatre.”
They go out, strolling arm in arm and keeping step with each other as though they are practised at walking together. Her initial fears dissolve in the sunlight of the evening. The city has managed to work some magic at last and deliver a fair imitation of its old self, the Paris before the war. The plane trees in the boulevard Saint-Michel are shedding leaves of gold and red as though nothing has happened out of the ordinary and there has been no war, no invasion, no occupation. Near the Lycée Saint-Louis they pass a café where students congregate, young men with long hair, girls with short skirts and brightly coloured stockings. One of the boys calls out, “Bonsoir prof!” and gives him a thumbs-up. Another voice exclaims, “Quelle bonne gonzesse.” Laughter follows them down the street.
“Zazous,” Clément says. “The police round them up and cut their hair. Throw them in jail sometimes. The authorities understand how to deal with political dissent. That’s easy. But these kids aren’t political and that confuses them.”
At the river she pauses and looks. This is where she strolled with him that spring day in 1939 with Ned and her father. The strange contingency of events strikes her: how distant this place is from that sunny afternoon. Within the rigid matrix of three dimensions it appears to be the same: there is the pont Saint-Michel and the Seine; there the buttresses and towers of Notre Dame, painted gold in the setting sun; ahead the steep roofs of the Palais de Justice. But it is a different place entirely when the fourth dimension of time is sprung from its shackles. The naive girl in a bright summer frock is there no longer. She no longer walks along the quai holding his hand and trying not to skip like a child. She no longer blushes at his compliments. She is a woman now, dressed in grey like the city itself, half a decade and a whole world away. And now she knows that the man beside her was, on that distant summer day, edging his way through the intricacies of nuclear physics towards the possibility of an atomic bomb.
She asks, “Why didn’t you leave France in 1940 when the others did, Clément?”
He doesn’t answer immediately, as though surprised by the question. “I thought I ought to see things through,” he says eventually. “This is where I belong. Not like Kowarski or von Halban. Not like you. France is all that I have, for better or worse.”
“I love France too.”
“It’s nothing to do with love. More mundane than that. More like habit. And something else, a sense of honour, perhaps. Does that sound very pompous?”
“Rather.”
“Obligation. Try that. I’m not proud of what’s happened. Almost no one is. But I feel I can’t shrug off responsibility.”
“And running away to England would be doing that?”
“Perhaps it would.”
“Or maybe it would be shouldering responsibility.”
He laughs. “You always were a determined arguer, even when you didn’t know what you were talking about.”
They cross the bridge and walk past the Palais de Justice. Swastika banners hang down the front of the building, the colours of sealing wax and boot polish. German soldiers mount guard, apparently indifferent to anyone who passes by; yet still she feels vulnerable, a mouse crossing a field with the hawks hovering overhead. It’s a relief to gain the right bank of the river and find Parisians in the place du Châtelet, crowds in the cafés, a scattering of theatregoers around the entrance of the theatre, even though there are some grey-green uniforms among the people shuffling in through the doors to the foyer. Posters announce the play—Les Mouches. The playwright is the latest sensation in the literary world of the city, a teacher of philosophy who has one novel and a collection of short stories to his name. “The novel’s called La Nausée,” Clément tells her, and she laughs. “Nausea? Why stop at mere nausea? Why not ‘vomit’?” But the idea doesn’t seem very funny, and neither does the play, which turns out to be a reworking of the myth of Orestes and Electra, an astringent mix of ritual and violence in which the protagonist demonstrates his freedom from the gods by committing murder, and the Furies buzz around the cast like flies around a pile of excrement. The strange dynamic of the piece finds echoes in the half-empty streets of the city, in the sudden raids and the meaningless arrests, in the collusion of the inhabitants and the defiance of a few misfits. “Pardonnez-nous de vivre alors que vous êtes morts,” the chorus repeats, and there’s an outcry of approval from some people in the half-empty auditorium. Forgive us for being alive when you are dead.
THEY GET BACK to the flat by nine, having argued about the play on the way back. It was about the occupation and the resistance. It wasn’t. It showed how the French people should strive towards the condition of freedom. It showed only how violence could be seen to be heroic. “And the sets!” she cries, amid laughter. “And those ridiculous masks!”
Marie has left food for them in the kitchen. They are like students in a shared flat, living on short commons and from hand to mouth. Only the wine remains of high quality. He raises his glass to her, but exactly what he is drinking to isn’t clear. A stray hair has come adrift from her chignon and he reaches across to push it behind her ear. She recognises the gesture, feels it in a way she cannot control—more fundamental than a mere emotion, something organic welling up inside her that manifests itself only in trivial things—a quickening of the heart, a flush at the neck, a deepening of her breathing.
“So where do we go from here, Squirrel?” he asks.
“We go nowhere, Clément. I didn’t come here to be your mistress. I’m here for one thing only, to get you back to England. All you have to do is make your choice. Can’t we at least agree that that is what the damned play was all about? Making a choice?”
He laughs and turns to his food. “You don’t let up, do you? You ought to become a lawyer when this whole mess is over. You’d never let the witness off the hook.”
“I’ve got a job to do. It’s as simple as that. I need to know.”
He pauses, as though trying to construct some kind of answer. “There’s a story going round the lab,” he says eventually, “a rumour really, but that’s all we live on these days—rumour and speculation. It’s about Bohr. You know Bohr? I used to talk about him a lot. Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, the most important man since Einstein.”
Of course she remembers. Bohr was everything that Clément admired—the patient genius who proposed startling ideas while all around were scratching their heads and not knowing what to do, the man who started revolutions and gave a fatherly hand to his followers who struggled in his wake. If I could be any other person than myself, he once confessed, I would be Niels Bohr. The idea seemed absurd. How could one wish to be a person that one was not? And yet here she is, Anne-Marie Laroche, a person she is not.
“Ever since the outbreak of war Bohr has been there in Copenhagen like Fred is here in Paris, living quietly and getting on with his own research despite the occupation. But at the end of last month he disappeared from his home and reappeared in Sweden. And now there’s a rumour that he’s gone to England. Bohr’s an outspoken pacifist. He could easily have stayed in Sweden and appealed to the nations of the world to come together in peace and harmony, and yet apparently he has gone to England.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“They seem to be collecting physicists. Consider whom they’ve already got: Chadwick, of course, and Cockcroft, and a few lesser types like Oliphant and Feather. But above all there are the Jews who escaped before the war.” He counts them off on his fingers. “Frisch, Szilárd, Peierls, Franz Simon, a dozen others. And then there’s Perrin, von Halban, and Kowarski from the Collège. Fermi is already in the US and so is Bruno Pontecorvo, who worked here under Fred a few years ago, and Teller and some others. And now they’ve got Bohr.” He looks at her. “If you see most of the grandmasters in the world getting together, you’ve got a pretty good idea there’s about to be a game of chess.”
“Kriegspiel, perhaps.”
“Perhaps literally.” He toys with his food for a while. “Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
Is this the moment to tell him? She hesitates no more than an instant. “Yes, I do, Clément. I know exactly what’s going on. Ned told me.”
His expression barely falters. “What did he say?”
“He said it was obvious, that most of the relevant information was published before the war and that anyone could work it out.” She feels the need to defend her brother, as though by telling her he might have been guilty of some heinous crime. “I blackmailed him into telling me, really. I took advantage of his position, accused him of putting his work before his family, that kind of thing. I even accused him of being a coward, which was unfair considering how hard he’s been trying to give up his research and get into the army.”
“And he told you what?”
“He never said it directly. He only explained how it might be possible. To make a bomb.”
There is a great stillness. Only the bare, functional kitchen around them, the tiled range, the sinks, the draining boards and windows now draped with blackout curtains. The voltage of the electricity supply is low and the light bulbs glow like dull anger.
“He told you that?”
“They might be, he said they might be. Making an atomic bomb. He told me that all the necessary information had been published shortly before the outbreak of war, that you could work it out from that if you bothered to read the papers.”
He looks around as though searching for a way out. But they are in an impasse. “Is Ned involved? Directly, I mean. Is he working on this?”
“Not directly, no. I don’t believe so, at any rate.” For a moment she hesitates, looking at him for some kind of reassurance. “Is it a possibility, Clément?”
He nods. “Oh, yes, it’s possible. Most certainly, it’s possible.” He gets up and walks over to the window, draws the blackout curtain aside, and peers into the courtyard of the building, as though perhaps there are people out there looking up at them.
“I heard Ned talk about heavy water. What is it? It sounds ridiculous. Heavy water and light air. Some scientific fantasy.”
He pulls the curtain back and makes sure not a crack of light escapes. “It’s a form of water that can be used to encourage fission. It was Kowarski’s pet project. He and von Halban took our entire supply with them when they escaped from Bordeaux, one hundred and eighty-six litres of the stuff, all from Norway. The world’s total supply, in fact. We smuggled it into France during the spring of 1940 but we barely had time to start any experiments before we had to get it out.”
“In case the Germans got hold of it?”
“The whole thing was started in Germany, wasn’t it? Ned talked about Hahn.”
He sits back down at the table. “Hahn and Strassmann started it, yes—when they did their first work on fission. At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. But Irène and Pavel Savitch did the same work here, at the Radium Institute.”
“But if the Germans started it, they could equally well finish it, couldn’t they?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. They’ve got the men—Hahn, Diebner, Weizsäcker, Heisenberg, above all Heisenberg. They have a group called the Uranverein, the Uranium Club. Gentner let it slip in a conversation when he was here. Fred and I assumed …”
“What did you assume?”
“That they were trying to generate power from the process. Gentner mentioned a Uranmaschine, a uranium machine, a kind of nuclear generator that would be able to sustain a controlled chain reaction, giving unlimited energy. It’s quite a realistic possibility. Easier than a bomb. That’s what the heavy water is for, as a moderator—”
“But they could be making a bomb?”
“Possibly. They’ve got the resources. Czechoslovakia is a good source of uranium, and Norway for heavy water. The difficulty as I see it is getting enough of the right uranium isotope. It’s very rare.” He opens his hands helplessly, as though things he has been holding safe have just been scattered all over the floor. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, Marian.”
“But you are.” She casts around for something further to say, anger bubbling up inside her, a lava of hot fury. “It’s Pandora’s box, isn’t it? You scientists open it up to see what’s inside and all the ills of the world fly out. And once they’re out, no one can put them back.”
Clément laughs at her indignation, but it is a laugh without much humour. “I suppose you’re right, more or less.”
“Ned said it would wipe out an entire city. In an instant.”
Clément nods. It’s the matter-of-fact gesture that’s so frightening. “My estimate is that the whole of the centre of a city like Paris would be totally destroyed by just one such bomb; as far out as, say, Montmartre in the north and Montparnasse in the south. I mean exactly that—no building left standing. Beyond that it would be the same destruction as an ordinary bombing raid for, what? a further three or four kilometres. Within the inner area everyone would be killed. Outside that a few might survive, only to die days later from the effects of radiation. The question is”—he looks across the table at her—“how can you expect me to get involved with something like that?”
For a moment his guard is down. Bewilderment makes a child of him. Suddenly she feels older than he, as old as her parents, older than her parents, wiser and sadder than anyone could possibly be. “A few weeks ago they raided Hamburg,” she tells him. “Maybe you heard about it. They used ordinary bombs, of course, and they laid waste seven square miles of the city, killing fifty-eight thousand people in the process. Not a few hundred, not even a few thousand. Fifty-eight thousand. What particular moral equation do you fit those figures into, Clément? You’re good with equations—your wave mechanics, or whatever you call it. How do these figures fit in? The problem with this war, Clément, is that there are no innocents. You can’t stand aside and say it wasn’t your fault. It’s everyone’s fault. At this very moment people are being killed on your behalf. You can’t say you didn’t want it to happen because it is happening. Now. And it seems likely a single one of your atomic bombs dropped on Berlin would stop the war in an instant.”
“Would that make it right?”
“When it was all over we’d be free to have an anguished discussion about the morality of it all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed.”
SHE CLIMBS INTO her cold bed and waits motionless for her body to bring warmth to the sheets. She thinks of Marian Sutro, a person she has been and, perhaps, will be again; a girl possessed of childlike enthusiasms and the capacity for devotion. Where is Marian now? She thinks of Clément beside the lake at Annecy, and Benoît in London and Scotland and here in France. She remembers being in the cinema, with Benoît’s arm around her shoulders and that Pathé newsreel—Hamburg Hammered—on the screen. Bombers roaring through the night, with a city of glowing embers in the blackness below them. In the Filter Room she plotted raids going out, the RDF operator whispering in her ear: “New track: Victor Oboe, fife-one, eighter-three, ten plus at five, showing IFF,” while she reached across the table and placed counters on the table where East Anglia bulged into the North Sea, single aircraft growing to dozens, dozens to hundreds, squadrons climbing into a darkening sky and merging into a great stream in their advance towards the Dutch coast, five thousand men setting off into the night. The four o’clock watch used to count them out and the midnight watch would try to count them in as they crept back over the North Sea, battered, shot up, empty of bombs, empty of fuel, empty, finally, of the fear that must have possessed them throughout the hours of the raid. How many dead? And on the ground, how many?
Fifty-five thousand in Hamburg alone.
Or was it fifty-eight? You could lose three thousand people in a mere slip of the memory.
The bear laughs at her out of her dreams. It means the end of the war; maybe the end of the world.
The café is a short walk from the river in the rue Saint-André des Arts. As she opens the door a bell tinkles somewhere in the back and the man at the bar looks up from wiping glasses. The place is undistinguished inside—brown wooden panelling; some photographs on the wall, scenes of a Paris from before the First War; a poster for Byrrh; a chalkboard with the word Menu but nothing else written on it. She sits at a corner table and orders a coffee. When the barman brings it over she says, “I’d like to speak to la patronne. Is she around?”
He looks her over thoughtfully. “She may be.”
“Tell her that my aunt in Marseilles sent me.”
The man sniffs, as though there is something implausible about aunts of any kind but especially aunts from Marseilles. Behind the bar he talks on the phone for a few moments. “You’ll have to wait,” he says as he puts the receiver down.
She nurses her coffee. The barman reads a newspaper, the latest edition of La Gerbe, running the headline Le Maréchal Parle à la Nation. A few people pass by outside; one or two peer in. She stares out into the street and wonders. She wonders about Yvette and she wonders about Clément. In the southwest there was little time to wonder, but here in the city it is different: you have to wait, and waiting brings thoughts and concerns and anxiety. In peacetime the countryside was still and the city a hive of activity; in wartime the circumstances are reversed.
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“Will I have to wait?”
The barman shrugs. “It all depends.”
LA PATRONNE arrives half an hour later. She is a middle-aged woman with the relics of beauty in her face and a faint air of concern in her expression, as though she has mislaid something but isn’t quite sure what. “My aunt Régine in Marseilles sent me,” Alice explains.
The woman purses her lips. “I haven’t heard from her for ages. How’s her rheumatism?”
“It only plays up when there’s the sirocco. Otherwise she’s fine.”
She nods. “You’d better come round the back.”
Behind the bar is a small room that is part storeroom, part kitchen. There’s the ubiquitous picture of Marshal Pétain on the wall and another of Maurice Chevalier. A wall calendar advertises Peugeot bicycles. The woman pulls out a chair and then stands watching as Alice sits, as though this is some kind of interrogation. This isn’t how it was meant to go. There was meant to be something more, a sense of welcome, some hint of camaraderie, of shared fear and shared determination. Alice glances back to the doorway. She can see the barman’s back blocking any exit.
“I’m Alice,” she says.
“Claire.”
“They told me to come here.”
The woman watches her. It’s impossible to work out what she is thinking. Finally she says, “I heard about you. A week ago. When did you get here?”
A small surge of relief, but relief tempered with caution: they can pull you in, lead you on, drag you so deep in that you’ll never get out. “Two days ago. I’ve been in the southwest. Wordsmith. Do you know Wordsmith?”
The woman shrugs. “What do you want with us?”
“I need a pick-up. Can you arrange that?”
“Why from here? If you’re in the southwest, Spain’s only over the border.”
“It’s for people here in Paris.”
“How many passengers?”
“Two.”
“Who are they?”
“I can’t say.”
“Are you one of them?”
The woman chews her lip thoughtfully, then turns to the calendar on the wall. There are a few pencil scribbles—bills to be paid, deliveries made, things like that. But what is most obvious is that it’s one of those calendars that has the phases of the moon marked above the date: a black spot for new moon, crescents waxing and waning, a white circle for the full moon. Claire points to the next full. “Even if we can do it, you’ll have to wait at least ten days. Can your passengers manage that?”
“I think so.”
“I’ve got a flat you could use, but who knows how safe it is these days?”
“They’re all right as they are.”
The bell sounds in the bar and some customers come in. Claire pushes the door closed and lowers her voice. “It’s dangerous here in the city, you know that? Not like the countryside. Here everything’s in chaos. This place may be under surveillance.”
“I didn’t notice anyone—”
The woman laughs. “You wouldn’t. They let you get on with things and then pull you in when they wish. A lot of the time the only reason you are operating is because they allow it. Do you know about Prosper?”
“I’ve heard something.”
“Well, it’s been blown. Dozens of arrests. Hundreds. And others. Inventor, Cinéaste.” She looks round the tiny room as though in surprise to find the walls still standing. “At the moment we’re lucky.”
“One of my passengers is from Cinéaste.”
The woman looks incredulous. “That’s impossible. Everyone was taken.”
“Her field name’s Marcelle.”
“The pianist? Surely she was picked up with the rest of them.”
Alice shakes her head. “I’ve found her. She’s been in hiding. Apparently she was late for the rendezvous when the others were arrested …”
“Do you know her? I mean, would you recognise her?”
“Of course. We trained together.”
“Where?”
“Scotland.” But the woman seems to want more. “Meoble Lodge on Loch Morar,” she adds, and Claire digests this extra piece of information, turning it over in her mind like a dealer turning over a piece of porcelain in his hands. Is it fake or is it genuine? Is it whole or is it damaged?
“How did you find her?”
“Marcelle? She’s pretty scared. At least she seems scared—”
“I mean, how did you know where she was?”
“Oh, I see.” Alice smiles at her misunderstanding but searches in vain for a corresponding smile on the woman’s face. “The address came from London. They contacted Wordsmith, because they knew that I would be able to recognise her. She told me the last thing she gave them was her new address—it’s a new place she had just found, so she hadn’t told anyone else. Then she went off the air. I’ve got her wireless now.”
“It’s my understanding that she was arrested with the others.”
“Can you trust her?”
“Of course I can trust her. She’s more than a colleague, she’s a friend.”
Claire is silent for a while, as though considering the value of friendship. “What about the other passenger?”
“Nothing to do with Cinéaste. Nothing to do with any circuit. London wants him out.”
“Safe?”
“I can vouch for him, but I can’t tell you who he is.”
Claire shrugs. “Some shitty politico, I expect.” Then an idea occurs to her. “If you’ve got Marcelle’s wireless you can ask for a message from London. Do that. Have a message broadcast over the BBC.”
“What message? Why?”
The barman puts his head round the door. “I’ve got to go in ten minutes,” he says. “You’ll have to take over.”
“Paul is going in ten minutes,” the woman tells Alice. “That way I’ll know that I can trust you.” For the first time she smiles.
ONCE MORE SHE takes the métro across the city, and this time leaves a message with the fat man called Boger at the café, for Yvette to meet her at the entrance to the cemetery. It’s safer like that, out in the open away from eavesdroppers. They walk at random through the city of the dead, past tombs and memorials and epitaphs. Some of them bear sad bunches of decaying flowers. One or two are names one recognises, a poet here, an artist there. Others have honorific letters after their names, as though you ought to recognise them even if you don’t.
Alice says, “I’ve been speaking to people.”
There’s a lurch of anxiety in Yvette’s expression. “What people?”
“People who work for the organisation.”
“Who are they?”
“It doesn’t matter. But they say that every member of Cinéaste was picked up. Including you.”
“Well it’s not true, is it? I’m here.” There’s a snap in her voice, a sharp edge of temper. “What are you saying? Are you accusing me of something?” Yvette’s voice rises up the register. Is it anger or panic? The two emotions feed off each other in a desperate symbiosis. “I’m on my own, Marian. You can see that. I’m alone. Christ, don’t you believe me?”
“Calm down. I’m just saying people are suspicious.”
“But who are these people? Who the hell knows anything about me? What have you told them?”
For a moment the whole conversation teeters on the edge of chaos. They seem about to have a shouting match, an inchoate row of accusation and recrimination there among the memorials and the mausoleums. “It’s all right, Yvette,” Alice says soothingly. “I believe you. But you know what it’s like. You know how afraid everyone is. Particularly now, particularly with what happened to Prosper.”
Yvette calms down. Prosper and the fate of Prosper bring with them a sudden tide of fear, and fear conquers anger. “You know what Emile told me? Before they were all arrested, you know what he told me?”
“Emile is a bloody know-all.”
“But you know what he told me? He told me that there was a traitor in Prosper.”
“If he was clever enough to know that, why wasn’t he clever enough to avoid being caught?”
Yvette gives a little, apologetic laugh. “You know what?”
“What?”
“Emile and I …” She tries a smile but it doesn’t really work. “We were sleeping together.”
“Sleeping together?”
Yvette giggles. A hint of her old self. “Does that sound dreadful?”
Alice smiles. “He wouldn’t be my choice.”
“But he was a comfort. It’s a lonely job being a pianist …”
They reach the tomb of Balzac. The writer’s head gazes imperiously over the city he had once dissected, with a single mourner standing in front of it, a long-haired man in a crumpled black suit who stares at the memorial with all the fixation of the mildly deranged. When the man has moved on out of earshot Alice says, “Anyway, it’s all organised. The pick-up, I mean. But we’ll have to wait. You understand that, don’t you? Until the next moon.” It’s like talking to a patient, explaining the prognosis, repeating her words to make sure they’ve been understood. “Do you understand? We’ll have to wait for the next moon period. Meanwhile continue to do what you’ve been doing up to now—lie low and keep out of harm’s way. Have you got money?”
Yvette lights a cigarette, eyeing Honoré de Balzac, mort à Paris le 18 août 1850 through a pall of smoke. Her fingers—delicate, slender, expert with a knife—are stained yellow. “I have to buy on the black market. I don’t trust my ration cards.”
“I’ll give you some cash. All you’ve got to do is wait for me to contact you again.”
Somewhere in the cemetery a bell begins to toll. People are walking towards the crematorium at the top of the slope. “There’s a funeral,” Yvette says. She pinches off the end of her cigarette. “Let’s go. The last thing I want to see is a funeral.”
She pulls the suitcase out and puts it on the bed. Clément is at the door, watching. She opens the case and stands back for him to see.
“There.”
The dull gleam of black metal, of glass dials and Bakelite knobs. He peers at the thing as though it were a new piece of research apparatus. “You know how it all works?”
She shrugs. “I hope so. I did the basic course, not the full WT School. My Morse is useless.” She closes the lid and looks up at him. “So what do I say to them?”
“I’ve spoken with Fred. I explained about the letter from Chadwick.”
“You’ve done what? What did you tell him?”
“You can trust Fred. He can keep a secret. We all live with our secrets these days, Marian.”
“But I don’t want him to be living with mine. Don’t you realise how dangerous this is? For Christ’s sake, what else did you say to him?”
“Squirrel, you’re becoming heated.”
“Don’t call me Squirrel! I’m not a child any more, Clément.”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t mention you. I told him in the vaguest terms. A letter has come into my possession, that kind of thing.”
“So what did he say?”
“He’s been very shaken by Bohr’s going over to the Allies. He said that he would go himself if it weren’t for Irène and the children. At least he would be able to find out what’s going on, that’s what he said.”
“Is that all?”
“He thinks I should go in his place. His representative, if you like.”
She can see the conflict in his expression. “But what do you think, Clément? What are you going to decide? Because you’ve got to make a choice. That’s the one positive thing that this war has brought: we have to choose. The French more than anyone.” She’s angry—at him, at the city, at the whole damn country with its sullen acceptance of its fate, resignation that leaks over into accommodation and becomes, when you looked away for a moment, collaboration. When he doesn’t answer, she turns away. There is an escritoire in the corner of the room, an elaborate affair with inlaid wood and delicate, cabriole legs. Perhaps it is where Madeleine used to sit to write letters. There are paper and pencils in the various little compartments, and a diary with some addresses in it and a photograph of a dark and handsome young woman—Augustine?—proudly showing a baby to the camera. She draws up a chair, places a sheet of paper on the desk, and sits down to write:
MARCELLE CONTACTED. CINÉASTE BLOWN AND ALL
OTHERS ARRESTED MARCELLE NEEDS EVACUATION ALSO
MECHANIC CONTACTED HE MAY BE COMPLIANT STOP
Clément stands watching, a cigarette in his hand.
ALSO CONTACT MADE WITH CLAIRE FOR PICK-UP
PLEASE BROADCAST FOLLOWING MESSAGE ON BBC
START PAUL IS GOING IN TEN MINUTES END REPEAT
PAUL IS GOING IN TEN MINUTES AWAIT RESPONSE IN
ONE HOUR
“Is all this rather dangerous?” he asks. “I imagine it is. Transmitting, I mean. I imagine they scan the frequencies …”
“Of course they do.”
“Directional aerials and a little exercise in triangulation to pinpoint the transmitter …”
“You have to get your message through and get off the air as quickly as possible. They say you’ve got something like thirty minutes for your first transmission. Less for the subsequent ones. The Germans have DF vans out on the streets …”
“DF?”
“Direction Finding. Radiogoniométrie. Now be quiet because I’ve got to encrypt the thing.” On a new sheet of paper she writes out her poem:
Perhaps never
But never
We’ll share love
Together
Yet always
Through all ways
You’re close to my heart
“Tell me what you are doing.”
“I’m arranging for you to go to England.”
She ignores his laughter and continues with her work, choosing five words from the poem—whether, or, our, apart, heart—and numbering their letters to give the key. Then she writes her message out beneath the key and begins to chase the letters through the double transposition to make the plain text appear mere nonsense, a string of random letters with no apparent meaning. When that is done, she adds her personal group to the start of the message, followed by an indicator code to identify the words of the poem, and then her two security checks. Finally she rewrites the whole message in groups of five letters, then checks them through for the slightest error, that single mistake that would shift the whole transposition by one letter and turn apparent nonsense into total gibberish—an indecipherable. “Indecipherables are the bane of our lives,” Marks warned her. “Make keying errors and we’ll sort things out. Get your ciphering wrong and it’s a complete snafu.”
“What’s a snafu?”
He grinned. “It’s code. A technical term.”
Clément watches. She tries to block him from her mind. He shouldn’t be watching but he is watching. He shouldn’t be here alone with her, but he is. She has let her guard down and she knows it. This process—the whole rigmarole of composition and enciphering, the subtle intricacies of transposition keys—is as intimate as washing yourself, or peeing, or any of those bodily functions that you hide from prying eyes. And here she is, her cover abandoned, her defences thrown down, exposed to his gaze. She feels the guilt of transgression.
He asks, mockingly, “So what have you decided I’m going to do?”
She gathers up her papers, grabs the suitcase, and pushes past him into the corridor. “I’ve decided what you ought to do. The rest is up to you.”
Outside the front door the landing and the stairwell are in darkness, as silent as a church. Access to the roof is through a door on the landing that she discovered just as she found everything else out, checking the place over for escape routes and alternative exits. She even discovered where the key to the roof door was kept, in the kitchen, beneath the eagle eye of Marie. A single bulb casts a pallid light as she lugs the suitcase up the stairs, feigning indifference to his following her.
At the head of the steps is a narrow closet that smells vaguely of soap. There’s a cement sink and a washboard and a wooden basket. She puts the suitcase down, opens the door to the roof, and steps out. The rooftop is a place of shadows, of slopes and pyramids of slate and a dusty pond of glass through which you can peer down into the hall where they were a few minutes ago. Above the neighbouring buildings the dome of the Panthéon is touched by the last light of the evening. Clément appears in the doorway watching her.
“Does anyone else come up here?” she asks.
“It’s our access. Private. Where Marie hangs the washing.”
She lays the aerial wire out as best she can while he stands there, smoking and watching. Is he considering her proposal? It isn’t that she has forgotten how to read him, it is, she realises now, that she never could read him, never could understand whether he was talking seriously or not. His ideas of science always seemed fantastical, and his ideas about life concrete and reliable. But now everything appears in reverse. Now science brooks no doubt and ideas seem riddled with contradiction and uncertainty. Only this procedure, the intricacies of encryption and transmission, drummed into her at Meoble and at Beaulieu, appear to have a purpose.
She finds a plug in the wall behind a mop and pail, plugs the wireless set into the mains, and switches it on. There is the faint, nervous hum of electricity. The voltage dial flicks into life. She lifts the headphones and holds them to her ear, listening to the sound of silence rushing through the airwaves like a stream.
“This is beyond a joke, Marian,” he says.
She looks round. “It has never been a joke, Clément. Not for me. I’m risking my life to do this, and yours as well. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to concentrate. I’ll be down in half an hour.”
When he has gone, she upends the pail as a seat and props the wireless set on a collapsible picnic table that she has found hidden behind some sacking. She glances at her watch, notes the time, and puts the headphones on. Then she inserts the crystal, one of those crystals she carried inside her, switches to the five-megacycle band, and takes up the position she tried to learn, with scant success, during training, fingers balanced on the knob of the Morse key. Cautiously she starts sending out her call sign, the hesitant dots and dashes vanishing into the wilderness of the evening like faint birdsong.
She pauses and listens.
In Brest and Augsburg and Nuremberg receiver stations will have detected that little flutter on the airwaves. Phones will be ringing, one station calling the other while their directional aerials will be shifting round the compass to nose out the bearing of this fragile new intruder. Lines will be drawn on a map of Europe, to intersect in a triangle over the city of Paris … and meanwhile in a country house in southern England, that manor house at Grendon Underwood, a FANY wireless operator may or may not be listening, may or may not be crying out, “It’s Alice!” and calling her supervisor over and putting her hand on her Morse key to tap out a response.
She sends out her call sign again. She can picture the aerials turning, listening, like predatory bats detecting a new call on the night air, the song of a night bird who fears to be captured yet needs to be heard. She counts the seconds, praying to whichever deity might rule the airwaves. And then Grendon’s call sign flickers faintly in her ears and brings with it a small thrill of astonishment, as though she has murmured a prayer and God himself has answered.
She begins her transmission, tapping slowly, knocking on wood, praying for accuracy, the stuttering letters filtered through lessons incompletely learned and inadequately followed. She shifts her backside on the pail and taps on, her words laboriously released into the rush of the ether. There is no such thing as the ether, Ned told her once: it was a figment of the nineteenth-century scientific imagination. And yet she can hear it in her headphones like the roaring of an ocean beating on some distant shoreline, a constant background to the small whisper of her message. She ends the transmission with Love and kisses. That is Marks’s fault. Don’t sign off with “Message ends,” he warned her. Don’t do anything that someone might guess. Say “Cheerio”; say “It’s been nice talking to you”; say anything except “Message ends” or “Over and out,” or any of that stuff they tell you at signals school. Because if it’s a cliché to you, then it’s just as much a cliché to the Germans. And if they guess it right, they’ll begin to unpick your knitting. Because your whole bloody enciphered message is no more than a glorious anagram of the original. And that’s the trouble with it.
She puts the headphones aside and turns the power switch to OFF. The voltage dial dies back to zero. Another glance at her watch. Seven minutes thirty-five seconds. The prey’s call is no longer on the air and the aerials have stopped straining to hear. If the detector vans have put out from their lairs, they are left with nothing to seek.
She goes downstairs, imagining events in England, her message being hurried to the cipher section, one of the girls getting her poem from the file and starting to unpick the cipher, undoing what she so laboriously did just half an hour ago at Madeleine’s desk. Will coherence emerge from the nonsense?
Clément looks up questioningly as she comes in. She shrugs. “I’ll have to wait. I’ve given them an hour.”
They eat the paltry meal that Marie has prepared. They talk, of nothing, of trivia, of the past, of his father and what he is doing in Algiers, of his sister and mother. And then of Augustine, living a sequestered life in the house in Annecy with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, knowing that she is a Jew and therefore somehow tainted. Like one of those isotopes he studies. Radioactive.
“I’ve been on the telephone to them,” he tells her. “It’s not easy talking on the phone these days. Of course you can’t say anything openly but I gathered that they’re trying to get into Switzerland. It should be possible to arrange a visa. We still have friends there …”
“So she’ll be all right, then.”
“That sounds like an accusation.”
“Well, what about the thousands who won’t be all right, who can’t cross the Swiss border and be looked after? Tell me about them?”
“I don’t know about them, Marian.” His tone is weary, as though he has rehearsed this argument over and over. “I can’t take responsibility for them any more than you can. They have to get by as best they are able.”
“But you can do something about it, can’t you? I’m giving you the opportunity. I’m doing that because I believe in what I’m doing. I haven’t believed in God for years, but do you know what? I think I’ve come to believe in Satan. And the only way to combat Satan is to be as ruthless as he is.”
In the cipher room at Grendon her words will be emerging from the blur of nonsense, like a photographic image appearing in the developing tray. The cipher clerk will be signing off the message in clear and dashing with it to the communications room. Teleprinters will chatter between Grendon and London, flimsies will be rushed into offices somewhere in Baker Street. Buckmaster and Atkins will meet up to discuss their response.
And Fawley? The self-effacing Fawley will be informed. Mechanic may be compliant. Will he ponder over the meaning of that careful subjunctive?
She gets up from her chair. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” she tells him. “Don’t wait up for me.”
LISTENING WATCH AT the top of the stairs, with the receiver on but the transmitter disconnected. The rush of the ether in the headphones, punctuated by muttering and stuttering. Cold seeping into her limbs and her backside growing numb from sitting on the unyielding pail. She blows on her fingers and listens to the empty music of the spheres. Exquisite boredom, inaction underpinned by tension like a bowstring that is never released.
And then comes the small whisper of intimacy like a lover’s voice in her ear. Her starved fingers begin to scribble down the twitterings, the dots and dashes, a thin trickle that signifies that someone somewhere is thinking of her.
The message is repeated. She turns on the transmitter and waits for the valves to warm up. A moment’s acknowledgement, a few taps of the Morse key and the thing is over, the message received, the fragile moments of contact sundered. She turns the set off and waits for it to cool. There is the housekeeping to do, all those tasks you have to complete: reeling in the aerial, gathering up every scrap of paper, replacing things exactly as they were, removing all the evidence that she has been there. Back downstairs she retreats to her bedroom to decipher Grendon’s reply.
Dry acknowledgements, understated praise, all the things one might expect. They want to know more, of course, more about Cinéaste, more about Prosper, more about the disaster that has struck the Paris circuits. But she isn’t going to tell them. Every minute on air is a minute off your life. She takes a large glass ashtray and carefully burns all the leaves of paper, every scrap of message and code, then goes to the bathroom and flushes the ashes down the lavatory. Feeling exhausted, feeling the damp in her armpits and the sweat on her brow, she goes into the salon and finds Clément still up and waiting for her.
“There,” she tells him. “I’ve done it.”
Her hand is unsteady as she takes the glass of cognac he offers. He brushes a strand of hair from her forehead. “You look tired.”
“I am.”
“You frighten me,” he says. “I’ve never seen you like this. Driven. Obsessed.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve got a job to do, that’s all. I’m not a child any more, Clément.”
“You keep saying that.”
“It’s true.”
He puts his arms round her. She feels comforted by the contact. She doesn’t want to feel that, but she cannot deny it. She remembers watching the children playing in the impasse near Yvette’s flat, a little boy falling on his hands and knees, the tears that welled up inside him as he looked for sympathy. But there was no sympathy for him then, and there can be none for her now. Tears are the last thing she needs. Carefully she detaches herself from his embrace.
“It’s not safe for me here,” she warns him. “We can’t do anything until the next moon, and I can’t just hang around waiting. I’ll have to go tomorrow.”
“Go? Where, in God’s name? You’re safe here, Squirrel.”
This time she laughs at the use of the childhood name. “Paris is a dangerous place at the moment, you know that. Much as I’d like to, I can’t hide in the flat for ten days. My being here is a risk. People notice things. People gossip. It’s as simple as that. If you keep moving, you’re safer. It’s staying in one place that’s dangerous. I’ll be back in good time, a week from now. And in the meantime you’d better make up your mind about what you are going to do. For my sake, if no one else’s.”