She dreams. Not the falling dream this time but a running dream, running through alleys, running from people, killing people who won’t lie down and die but speak to her in voices she doesn’t understand. Sometimes her parents are there, sometimes Ned, once Benoît. The alleyways have no end, no way out, all ways blocked. An impasse. And then another part of the dream is more dangerous still, a part where she’s lying naked, on the borderline between want and need, and Clément’s shadow is over her, exploring the inner workings of her body, touching her in places where the machinery seems broken or defective. “You’re beautiful,” he tells her, but she knows otherwise.
She wakes to his presence in the darkness beside her, the corrugations of his spine against her belly and her breasts. The voices, if there were voices, have ceased. She slides away from him, slips out of bed and crosses the cold floor to find Madeleine’s dressing gown. The air in the apartment has the dead hand of winter about it. The lavatory seat is cold. Warm vapour rises around her as she pisses.
Memories come slowly, unpicked from her dreams: Yvette at the tomb of Balzac. The running, the shooting, two men dying. And Clément bringing her comfort of a kind. First Benoît, now Clément. Is it fear that has made her like this?
She returns to the bedroom, feeling her way through the darkness. He is sleeping still. She crosses to the window and pulls back the blackout curtains. The moon, a gibbous moon, a hunchbacked moon, is setting. There is the faint flush of dawn to the east but the sky is still dark and if she cranes upwards the stars are visible. She feels the snatch of fear and excitement, a compound emotion like that of sex.
There is movement in the bed behind her. “What time is it?”
She lets the curtain fall back. “Time to get up. Marie will be here soon.”
“I’m leaving today,” she explains. “Going back to the southwest.”
The maid nods, tight-lipped, serving them coffee and a few slices of bread with a thin scrape of something that may be margarine. “I expect it’s better that way.” She has to leave before lunch to see to her mother. “I’ll be back this evening to prepare your dinner, Monsieur Clément,” she says, but by the evening all she will find will be a letter from him explaining that he too has left, and where there is money for her, and what to say if anyone asks.
Monsieur Clément has gone to the country for a while. He left no forwarding address.
“She’ll assume we’ve gone off together,” Marian says.
“Of course she will.”
“And she’ll tell Madeleine, who’ll tell Augustine.”
He shrugs, that Gallic shrug.
With Marie gone there are things to do, clothes to pack—borrowed for the duration from Madeleine—food to prepare for the evening meal, a thermos flask of coffee to make. She explains the plan, what train they will take, where they will get off, how the whole operation will go. Clément writes a letter to Madeleine, something anodyne, exhortations to look after les canards if she can and he’ll be in touch as soon as possible. And one for Augustine, to be forwarded if possible. We’ll have to sort things out after the war, he writes, but after the war seems an impossible concept, something dreamed up by a theoretical physicist, a place and time where anything might be possible, or nothing.
Marian watches him seal the envelope and address it, feeling a curious detachment from what is happening. Nothing around her seems real. The mouldering apartment, Clément, her own presence there, the memories of what happened that night and the day before. She might be enacting a cover story, playing the part with care, getting the lines perfect, but knowing all the time that the whole thing is a careful construct, a lie she is forced to play.
The midday news announces an early curfew. There is talk of security, of terrorists in the city, of the scurrilous and underhand methods of the Anglo-Saxons, of the murder of two officers of the German police in cold blood. They eat a frugal lunch, not saying much, like a married couple who have been so long together that they have exhausted all the possibilities.
“What’s the matter, Squirrel?” he asks, but she only shakes her head. Nothing’s the matter that can be explained in a few words, and each phrase she wants to utter seems to contradict the one that came before: she loves him and she doesn’t love him; she wants to escape with him and she wants to stay here; her loyalty is to no one but herself and her loyalty is to Wordsmith. She is a woman who is free and pure; she is a woman polluted. She’s a soldier fighting in the front line; she’s a murderer. And where does Benoît come into this knot of paradox? She wants Benoît for his normality, for his lack of guile, precisely for his lack of ambiguity.
Afterwards they leave the apartment together, wearing warm coats and hats against the cold and carrying suitcases, like any number of people leaving their homes these days, leaving the city, going into exile, going to the East, vanishing off the face of the earth. She pulls the brim of her hat down to try and hide her face. Are people looking for her? She feels curiously indifferent to whether they are or not, as though it is all happening to someone else, the other person in her life, the girl called Alice who knows what to do and how to do it—the girl who has shot down two pursuers in cold blood, who can summon riches from the sky and communicate with the gods.
The service entrance of the Collège de France is only five hundred metres away on rue Saint-Jacques, guarded by wrought-iron gates that open as soon as the gatekeeper recognises Clément. The van is waiting, a brown and lumpish Citroën TUB sitting behind the neoclassical buildings of the Collège like a turd at the backside of an elegant old lady. There are others travelling, a technician who will drive and a woman who is going out to the laboratory to pick up some samples.
“Laurence is an old family friend,” Clément explains as they climb aboard. “We’re going away for the weekend.”
The woman looks askance. “How’s Augustine?” she asks pointedly.
“She’s fine, the baby’s fine, everyone’s fine.”
“They’re in the Savoie, aren’t they?”
“Annecy, yes.”
“Give them my love when you’re next in touch.”
Equipment is loaded into the van after them, instruments for the Ivry lab, some lead-lined containers that hold radioactive isotopes. Clément and the woman talk, of dysprosium and lanthanum, of cross sections and neutron capture, while Alice sits beside them and feels herself an intruder in a foreign world.
“Did you hear about the shooting in Belleville?” the technician asks over his shoulder as he drives. “It was on the news.”
They’ve heard something. Apparently they’ve arrested someone. The chemist believes they’re also looking for a woman. At least, that’s the story going round.
“Communists, I expect,” the technician says. “Don’t these bloody people realise that there’ll be reprisals? More innocent deaths, and all for what?”
Alice tries to display indifference to the news. From the back of the van she can see little of the journey. There is no traffic beyond the morning rush of bicycles, no roadblocks beyond a moment at the Porte de Choisy when they have to slow as a gendarme flags them down. At the last moment the man appears to recognise the van and waves them on. Within half an hour of leaving the Collège, the van has drawn to a halt outside the station of Ivry-sur-Seine.
It is a morning of brisk breeze and ragged cloud, the southern outskirts of Paris rinsed by the recent rain, littered with leaves and buffed up to a shine by the wind so that one might almost ignore the drab acres of cheap housing and shoddy factories, the wasteland of railway sidings and warehouses.
“Have a good weekend,” the chemist says as they get down. She is not smiling.
“I’ll bring you a surprise,” Clément promises her. “Some foie gras.”
“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
On the platform a bedraggled collection of people wait for the train. They carry bags and suitcases and have the hungry look of hunter-gatherers in their eyes: Paris is a starveling—the countryside where they are headed is the land of plenty. Alice and Clément stand aloof, huddled against the wind and talking of little, as though none of this really matters. They are just a couple on a suburban station with a plan for the weekend that involves betrayal and deceit.
The Bordeaux train draws in from the Gare d’Austerlitz half an hour late and already packed. Even in the first-class carriages it is only possible to find two seats together by begging people to move. There is grumbling and complaint but eventually they are settled, wrapped up in each other’s company, apparently oblivious to their fellow travellers. Clément puts his arm around her. She feels his warmth, a warmth that she has always guessed at but knows now as something intimate, an aura given off to her directly from skin to skin, a fluid like that which courses dangerously inside her. “If only …” she says, but she never finishes the sentence and when he asks she only shakes her head. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
If only we were really going away for the weekend. If only this journey would never end. If only there were no such thing as choice.
At Étampes, police get on board and walk down the corridors, stepping over people and suitcases, demanding papers and asking questions. An officer stands at the door of the compartment and calls for all identity cards. There is the dutiful pause while people rifle through handbags, search through pockets. Alice takes out the card marked Laurence Aimée Follette and hands it over, then reaches up and kisses Clément. Insouciance, carelessness, indifference in the face of daily inconvenience. The policeman glances at her photo, glances at her face, and hands the document back. With great sighs the train traipses on into the flat farmland of La Beauce, where the fields are brushed green with sprouting winter wheat and the sky is a cool autumnal blue.
In the outskirts of Orléans they slow. There was a bombing raid a few nights earlier and the marshalling-yards of Fleuryles-Aubrais are wrecked, wagons thrown about, buildings still smoking, rails twisted here and there as though knotted by some bad-tempered child. In silence people stare out of the window at these signs of what is to come, while the carriages stutter and jolt over the single track that has been put back in commission. At the station itself doors slam, people come and go, heavy boots clumping along the corridors, Germans this time, shoving their way down the carriages.
“Why are you travelling to Libourne?” they ask.
Clément glances at Laurence and gives her a kiss. “We’re spending a few days away.”
The German looks at her and then at her papers. “You’re a long way from home.” He speaks good French. There is something disturbing about that: no barrier of incomprehension behind which you might hide.
“I’ve come to see Clément. I’ve missed him. And in Paris, you know, there’s his family around.” She looks the German dead in the eye and gives a little smile. “It’s natural, isn’t it, wanting to be on our own?”
“How do you know him?”
She clings to his arm, silly, infatuated, doing dangerous things with an older man. “From years ago, in Annecy. Our parents knew each other. We used to spend holidays together.”
The man thinks a moment, says, “Wait,” and goes off with their documents. Alice doesn’t move. Time slows, indicated only by the thin trickle of sweat from her armpits. She thinks of Ned. Gravitational time dilation, that is a phrase he used. He tried to explain it to her and only got annoyed when she likened it to how time speeded up when you were enjoying yourself. “That’s subjective!” he cried in exasperation. “Nothing more than an impression. What I’m talking about is a real difference caused by being in a different gravitational field.” Is she now in a different gravitational field? Time seems slowed to the point where this moment, in this crowded compartment with her hand gripped in Clément’s, appears eternal.
“What can they be doing?” she whispers.
“Looking at lists, I expect. Names. Nothing more.” He seems remarkably cool. Maybe he is better suited to the clandestine life than she.
The soldier returns, sliding open the door to the compartment with a crash. “All right,” he says, passing the documents back. At the same moment, with a peremptory jolt that is like time itself changing gear, the train moves forward, on through the city of Orléans itself, the city of the Maid, la Pucelle, Saint Joan of Arc. And then they are past the buildings and into the bare fields of the flood plain with the line of the river visible as a distant fringe of willows. She dozes, her head against Clément’s shoulder, his arm round her. She recalls the dreams she had as a girl, wanting only this—to be alone with Clément. And now she feels nothing but a strange detachment, a sense of the remoteness of things, as though she were somewhere else, watching their two figures from a distance.
Beaugency, Blois, Amboise. The train rumbles across the river on a stone bridge and edges its way through the drab suburbs of Tours, past factories and marshalling-yards, rattling over points, lurching sideways so that passengers, standing to get their cases down, are thrown against one another.
Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, Saint Peter of the Bodies, a name that emerged, presumably, from the charnel house of Catholic guilt and damnation. They stand up to retrieve their suitcases, step over feet, shuffle down the corridor to the end of the carriage. Clément climbs down onto the platform and takes the suitcases from her, then helps her down. The guard blows his whistle and the train draws away, leaving a scattering of passengers on the platform like the debris left behind by an ebbing tide.
And Gilbert.
He has got down from a carriage further up the train. He is carrying a briefcase, looking like a travelling salesman bound for a meeting with a client. Without so much as a glance at them he turns and walks away towards the concourse and the ticket office. They queue behind him, and once they have bought their tickets, follow him to the platform. There is no one around, no one taking the slow train to Vierzon, no one to notice them on this late autumn afternoon with the sun casting long shadows and the wind cold on their faces. When the train appears they climb into the same compartment, talking idly as though they are strangers who have been thrown together by chance. But once the door has closed Gilbert changes. “I missed you at Austerlitz.” His tone carries a hint of accusation.
“We got on at Ivry. We thought it might be easier.”
“A good thing too. The place was crawling with police. There were posters all over the station, with a description that fits you well enough.”
“Posters!”
He nods. “And your names. Marian Sutro, is that right? Also known as Alice, also known as Anne-Marie. They call you a Jew. Are you Jewish?”
“Not for generations. Not even for the Nazis.”
“Anyway, there’s a price on your head. Five hundred thousand francs. Pretty cheap, I’d say.” He looks at Clément, his eyes flicking down to take in their held hands. “Where’s the second passenger? You said there would be two. Wasn’t the other one from Cinéaste?”
“She’s not coming.”
“Why is that?”
“I told you I had my doubts about her.”
“And this is Monsieur Mechanic, I presume. Have you ever flown before?”
“Never.”
“Don’t eat too much beforehand.”
“Eat too much? You mean we get dinner?”
“All part of the service.” He turns back to Alice. “Looks like you got out just in time. Maybe you should leave tonight as well, go back in the other seat.”
“She’s going to,” Clément says.
She shrugs and looks out of the window at the fields of France. A price on her head. Five hundred thousand francs. What was that? Two thousand pounds? More. A fortune. Enough to buy a mansion. And a car.
Gilbert asks, “Is that right?”
She would be back in England tomorrow morning. She could spend Christmas at home, and then maybe return to France in the spring, return to the southwest, to Wordsmith and to Benoît. “Yes,” she replies, “yes, I am.”
“Good,” he says. “Sensible choice.”
The train draws into a station. VERETZ-MONTLOUIS, the signboard announces.
“We’re the next stop,” Gilbert tells them. “A couple of minutes.”
Clément puts his arm round her. “Nearly there, Squirrel.”
Gilbert watches them thoughtfully. Outside on the platform a whistle blows. Did anyone get on or off? This quiet corner of rural France seems a universe away from Paris, no one visible on the platform, no crowds, no fear. The train moves on with great asthmatic breaths as though taking in fresh air for the first time in weeks. Away to the right, through their pale reflections in the windows, are the flat fields of the flood plain between the Loire and the Cher, brushed with light from a setting sun. The sky is a luminous blue like the blue of a stained-glass window. Poplars stand like plumes in the drift of sunlight.
At Azay-sur-Cher station the bicycles are waiting, four of them in a shed behind the station house as Gilbert said they would be. He wheels the spare one beside him as they ride—“We’ll need it for the incoming passengers”—and that is the first time Alice thinks of the other side of the operation, that someone will be coming in, maybe people she knows from training, people from a world that is only a couple of hours away by light aircraft, a world where you don’t glance over your shoulder for people following, where you don’t have to guard what you say, where fear isn’t an endemic disease that eats away at mind and body. Where you don’t have five hundred thousand francs on your head and aren’t being sought for murder.
They cycle off into the gathering dusk, over a level crossing and through the fields. Some of the land is arable, some has been left for grazing. There are patches of woodland, poplars planted as windbreaks, willows along the rim of a canal. Through the trees to the east the moon is rising, a bone-white globe replacing the dying sunlight with a different kind of illumination, a flat monochrome. The sun shall not burn thee by day, she thinks, neither the moon by night. It is almost a prayer but not quite a prayer, for she doesn’t believe in prayer, doesn’t believe in God, believes only in the power of evil and the fragile battle of men and women against it.
After a couple of kilometres they turn off onto a farm track and bump over ruts and potholes out into the fields. Gilbert brings them to a halt near a small copse. Beyond the trees a field stretches away to the east, a rough meadow as flat as a billiard table. “It looks all right,” he says. “We had to call one op off a few months ago when we found that the farmer had put cows out to graze, but things look OK this evening. The only worry tonight is fog. Fingers crossed.”
On one side of the field is an ancient barn. There’s some hay in one corner, a rusted old harrow and some other nameless bits of farm equipment lying around, an old leather harness hanging on a hook. Gilbert seems to know his way around, almost as though he is at home. From a bundle of fence posts he selects three stakes about four feet long, each with an end sharpened to a point. “Let’s go and set things up.”
There is still enough light to see by as they walk out into the field. A hundred yards out he stands for a moment with his finger up in the air, like a water diviner detecting things that are outside the range of normal human sensibility. Then solemnly he plants one stake in the ground and strides off into the distance, marching with wide steps as though performing some arcane, hieratic ritual. By the time he comes to a halt and plants the second stake they can see him only as a vague shadow; he paces rightwards, plants the third stake, and returns to them with the satisfied air of a job well done. “Now all we can do is wait.”
Back in the barn they make themselves as comfortable as possible, unwrapping the food they have brought and sipping ersatz coffee from thermos flasks. There is desultory talk, underpinned with the tension of what might or might not happen. Gilbert briefs them. In the aircraft they’ll find parachutes left by the incomers. He explains how to buckle up. There will be two flying helmets already plugged into the intercom. They’ll have to put them on to be able to talk to the pilot. The on-off switch is on the front of the oxygen mask.
“Oxygen?”
“You won’t need it but that’s where the intercom switch is. More likely you’ll need the sick bag—the Lizzies fly at eight thousand at the most and it might be a bumpy ride.”
After they’ve been over and over the procedures two or three times, the men turn to talk of the war, what is happening in Russia, in Italy, in the Far East, how the conflict is progressing and how it might go. Alice clutches Clément’s arm and ignores Gilbert’s glance of curiosity and answers only in monosyllables when addressed. Orion the hunter drags a whole panoply of constellations across the sky and behind it the moon climbs, flooding milk across the fields. She remembers waiting for the parachutage, how boredom merged into a strange state of contemplation in which even the cold became something exterior, something that couldn’t hurt you. Clément kisses her in the ear, a startling sound in the silence of the night. “Soon we’ll be in England,” he whispers, and she thinks of England, dull, drab England, and wonders what will happen. She pictures him in an untidy divorce after the war, and then the two of them setting up home together as husband and wife in some other country. Canada, maybe, where the man called von Halban has already gone and where they speak French as well as English.
And Benoît? Two men, both of whom she loves, or thinks she loves, or maybe loves. They occupy different parts of her life, as though she were two people, her personality split by war, the one unknown to the other. But that isn’t difficult. She was trained to keep secrets.
“One day we’ll look back at this and laugh,” Clément says, but she can’t see the joke, or even imagine the possibility of one.
AT MIDNIGHT GILBERT gets to his feet and stretches. “Let’s get ready.” He opens his case and takes out four torches, testing each one in turn and issuing instructions like a commander ordering his troops into action. She follows him out into the moonlight. Underfoot the ground is hard with frost. Luminous scarves of mist are wrapped around the trees along the edge of the field and a bank of fog lies over to their right where the river runs. Gilbert is worrying about fog. Fog can ruin a pick-up in the best weather. A completely clear night may become impossible in a matter of minutes—all it takes is for the air temperature to fall below the dew point. “One minute it’s totally clear; the next you’re completely invisible.”
But they aren’t invisible. They are ghostly shadows moving quietly across the pale countryside, wraiths in the darkness. They walk down to the two furthest stakes and tie the torches in place, then come back to where Clément is waiting with the suitcases. There is something absurd about his appearance, a man in a dark coat standing beside his luggage in the middle of a deserted field, like a passenger translated from a railway platform. He needs a bowler hat, un melon, to complete the image.
“And now we wait,” Gilbert says.
They wait. Figures in a monochrome landscape, buffeted by a faint breeze, staring at the stars, painted by the moon. Cold seeps into them. Clément puts his arm round Marian and holds her close. There are the sounds of night, the mutterings and scurryings, the distant barking of a dog, the whispering of the breeze as it passes across their ears, and underneath everything a murmur that might be the sound of the nearby river. And then something else comes on the air, a rumour of things to come. She hears it first. Perhaps her younger ears are more sensitive.
“There!”
“What?”
“Shh!”
It dies away. Did she imagine it? The frustration of seeing something that others cannot see, a bird scurrying amid foliage, camouflaged against predators. That day with Yvette on a hillside in Scotland.
“There!”
“Where?”
“Over there. Look!” A grouse or something, slinking through the heather, abjuring flight for being so treacherous—if you flew they shot you down. Safer to walk. The next thing they had seen or heard were the trainees from Swordland, with Benoît …
“There it is again!” The sound returns with greater certainty, a muttering in the night becoming a grumble, a hint of a roar.
“Yes!” says Gilbert. And now there is no doubt—an aero engine, the sound rising and falling on the breeze and then settling, louder, to a steady drumbeat. They strain to see something as the noise grows. Gilbert points his torch into the night sky, flashing the letter M. And the answer comes back, a small star blinking in the blackness.
“That’s it!”
Alice turns on the first lamp and sets off toward the other lights, stumbling on the hard, uneven ground, a child again, running through the moonlight. She reaches the second light and snaps the torch on, then crosses to the third. Above her the aero engine drums on the darkness. As she hurries back to where the men are waiting she can see the Lysander moving against the night, a black cloth sweeping away the dust of stars. It turns towards them, hanging from its wings like a raptor stooping to its prey, tilting in the flow of air, the engine note rising and falling as the pilot jazzes the throttle. The shape grows larger and larger. For a moment landing lights come on, eyes staring out of the wheel spats, as brilliant as spotlights in a theatre, so that down on the ground they seem exposed to view like figures on a stage. Then the thing flies past them, the wheels hit, the aircraft bounces, hits again, rumbles down the flare path, throttling back and going beyond the second lamp but turning as predicted, turning to the right and coming inside the third lamp, coming back to them where they wait, stunned by the din, beside the first.
“What a bloody racket!” she yells against the sound.
The slipstream hits them as the aircraft turns once more and points into wind, its left wing hanging over the first lamp, the pilot waving from the cockpit. Gilbert runs up to talk to him. In the rear of the cockpit two figures are moving. The hatch slides back and someone calls above the engine noise, “Is this Le Bourget?” He heaves his leg over the edge of the cockpit, finds the first rung of the ladder and in a moment he’s on the ground and his colleague is handing suitcases down to him.
“Everything OK?” he yells over his shoulder. “Had a bloody good flight. Piece of cake, really. I’m David. Goodness, a female!”
“I’m Alice.”
“You flying out?”
“Two of us.”
Clément shakes hands with him. She can see his expression in the half-light—astonishment. Like a child before a Christmas tree.
“Part of the firm?”
“He’s not.”
They pass Clément’s case up and then wait while the second passenger climbs down, an older man with a ragged moustache and stubble on his chin. He looks like a bandit. Maybe he is a bandit. Gilbert is shouting from beside the nose of the aircraft, his words picked up by the slipstream and thrown back at them in disorder. “Get … move …! No … time … waste!”
She turns to Clément. “YOU GO FIRST!” she yells. That song runs through her mind: Puisque vous partez en voyage / Puisque nous nous quittons ce soir. Obediently he climbs the ladder up the side of the aircraft and clambers into the cockpit. She follows him up, watches while he settles himself into the seat, helps him buckle the parachute harness.
Then she points down to the ground. “MY CASE!”
He nods and says something, his words snatched away by the slipstream. She looks round at the field, pallid in the moonlight, like mortified flesh. And the roaring of the engine ahead of her, battering her with a gale. Gilbert is there below the cockpit, looking up. “Hurry up!” he mouths.
She recalls how time slowed when she shot the men in Belleville. The plasticity of time, the relativity of time, the whole world going slow then, but fast now—the engine roaring, the propeller a blurred disk bisected by a sword of moonlight, the stars rampaging across the sky—and this great stillness inside her. The men on the ground look up at her curiously, their faces white thumbprints of surprise.
She climbs down the ladder and jumps to the ground. From the glasshouse of the cockpit Clément looks down, his face obscured by the oxygen mask, his eyes staring at her. Hard to read the expression in his eyes. Nothing more than globes of jelly and gristle. She shakes her head.
“GO!” she yells into the slipstream from the propeller. And gestures downwind with her hand. “GO! GO! GO!”
Gilbert runs back from the aircraft. The pilot gives the thumbs-up. The engine gains noise, roaring and raging at the night, straining for a moment against the brakes before lurching forward, bumping, flexing, gathering speed, with Clément staring down from the cockpit, his face no more than a smudge of shadow. Then he has gone and abruptly the Lysander is in the air, climbing up on spread wings, a bat shape against the dark, rising, turning, swinging through the stars and leaving Alice standing in the backwash from the aircraft, her hair blowing in the wind, her coat flapping round her. And she’s in tears, fucking bloody silly girlish tears, while Gilbert shouts in her face, his calm insouciance gone for once, dashed away by the plane’s slipstream. “What the hell are you playing at? This isn’t a bloody game!”
“I’m not playing a game.”
He grabs her arm. “Paris is lethal. I told you. You’re blown, burned, finished. There’s a price on your head.”
“But I’m not going back to Paris.”
“Where then?”
She feels back in control now, decision made, the sound of the Lysander fading into the minutiae of the night. “South. I can get the train at Vierzon. My cover is good and I’m safe in the south. I’ve still got things to do. My mission isn’t over yet.” Mission. The word has an almost religious flavour to it. Sent from the sky to work amongst the people. But Gilbert stands in front of her, almost as though he is going to prevent her leaving the field, while the other two look on in bewilderment, like children watching adults quarrelling.
“It’s all right,” she insists. “I know what I’m doing.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t think you’ve any idea. You’re just another of Buckmaster’s amateurs, playing around in a world you don’t understand.”
“I’ve done all right so far.”
“Hey,” one of the men calls. “Aren’t we going to get a move on? We can’t stand around here arguing.”
Suddenly it’s cold. She needs to move, to get things going again, to be away from here and back in Toulouse, back in Lussac, arguing with le Patron, laughing with Benoît, being where, for the first time for years, she feels at home. She pushes past Gilbert to pull the nearest stake out of the ground and retrieve the torch. “We need to clear things up, don’t we? Let’s go.”
“Who was he?” Gilbert calls after her as she sets off to get the other torches. “Mechanic, I mean. Who was he?”
She turns. “An old friend. Maybe I’ll tell you when it’s all over.”