The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (11 page)

‘What’s that uniform?’ her father asked as she came in the front door.

She shrugged, dumping her suitcase on the floor and accepting his kisses. ‘I’ve been transferred to the FANY.’

‘What on earth is that?’

‘First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. It’s like an army corps for gay young things with nothing better to do with themselves. That’s what people say. As many titles in the FANY as in Debrett’s.’

‘Are you going to be a nurse? I thought you said—’

‘They don’t only do nursing, they do all sorts of things.’

‘All sorts of things? Really, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s best not to ask, Daddy.’

‘So how was the course?’

‘Lots of hard work.’

Her mother came out of the kitchen and gave a little cry of happiness and surprise. ‘You’re looking very thin, darling.’

‘I’m not thin,
Maman
. I’m fit.’

‘And that uniform really doesn’t suit you.’

‘She says she’s transferred to a nursing outfit,’ her father said.

‘Nursing? That’s useful, I suppose. How was Scotland? What happens next? Where are you off to now?’

She wanted to tell them. She wanted to shock them with the truth: Parachute School, she wanted to say. And then B School, whatever that meant, and then into the field. But instead she shrugged the question away. ‘More training, somewhere else. I don’t really know. They don’t tell you much.’

‘Quite right,’ he said approvingly, as one who understood such things.

‘Oh, and there’s a letter for you from Ned,’ her mother said. ‘You’re very privileged: he hardly ever writes to us.’

She didn’t open the envelope until she was in the privacy of her room. The letter was written – Ned’s familiar scrawl – on the back of some Ministry of Supply pro forma, as though he had grabbed the first piece of paper that had come to hand. He said very little, of course. There was the usual greeting and a hope that all went well with her course, and then ‘
here’s what I told you about
…’ and an address, a Paris address in the place de l’Estrapade in the fifth arrondissement.
Numéro 2, appartement G
. And the name, Clément.

‘What does Ned say?’ the parents asked when she came down for dinner.

She shrugged the question away. ‘Not much. Typical Ned. Have you seen him recently?’

They hadn’t. He didn’t really keep in touch. She waited for the conversation to drift on to other things – family, friends, the trials of wartime – before she asked her question. ‘The Pelletier family. What happened to them, do you know?’ She said it carelessly, as though it wasn’t important whether they knew or not. But her father did know, of course. Gustave Pelletier had been in the French foreign office, on secondment to some department of the League. Shortly before the outbreak of war he’d been posted back to Quai d’Orsay to work under Bonnet, but he hadn’t got on with his boss and was sent abroad again. ‘An ambassador in North Africa, or something. Then he resigned and joined the Free French, that’s what I’ve heard. Threw his lot in with Darlan, which wasn’t
such a good idea. I think he’s in Algiers now. Maybe you’ll meet him …’

‘Clément used to write to you, didn’t he?’ her mother asked. ‘I think he was soft on you.’

Marian blushed and cursed herself for it. ‘He wrote occasionally. It’s strange how Ned and he got on so well. They seemed such different types.’

‘The attraction of opposites,’ her mother suggested. ‘And then they had their studies in common, didn’t they?’

‘Their research, yes.’

‘All that atomic stuff. I didn’t understand a word.’ And then the conversation moved away, to other matters, other people, that world they had inhabited in Geneva, an international world that seemed so remote now when everything was narrow and focused and British.

The remaining days of Marian’s leave seemed to drag by, sluggards compared with the frenetic sprinters of those six weeks in Scotland. The tedious domestic life of rations and queues at the grocer’s and reading the newspapers and worrying about matters that were beyond her ken and beyond her power to influence. She had no friends in Oxford. The university city – introverted, supercilious, enmeshed in its own concerns – was no more than a temporary refuge for the Sutro family.

One evening the phone rang when they were in the sitting room reading. Her mother was deep in some turgid French novel that she had borrowed from the Taylorian. Her father was doing
The Times
crossword, agonising over a single clue:
Forges prose
, 9. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said, and went through to the hall before either of them could move from their chairs. She even closed the door before lifting the receiver.

‘Anne-Marie?’ a voice asked. ‘
C’est toi?
’

It was Benoît. Benoît Bérard. She even remembered his surname. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said, and immediately regretted it. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing. I was so bored, so I gave you
un coup de bigo
to see if you were at home.’

‘What’s that?
Un coup de bigo?
’

‘A telephone call.
Le bigophone
. You don’t know
bigophone
?’

She could hear his laughter on the other end of the line. ‘You make things up,’ she accused him. ‘It’s a load of nonsense.’

‘
Bigo
is not nonsense, it is real. Doesn’t the cream of Geneva society say
bigo
? “I give you a tinkle,” that’s what the Anglo-Saxons say. So tell me, what you are doing at home. Have they sacked you from the Organisation?’

‘Not yet.’ And she suddenly understood that this boy was the only person she could talk to openly about what she did, that this telephone conversation, subdued so that nothing could be overheard, was a kind of lifeline, almost a confessional. ‘I’m going to Parachute School on Monday. Can you believe that? Jumping out of aircraft.’

‘They were going to send me there a week ago. And then there was a change of plan. There’s always a change of plan. They’re probably trying to work out a change of plan to get themselves out of the war.’ He broke into his accented English: ‘Ay say old cheps, ay’m afraid there is a change of plen. We are not, ah, fightin’ ‘itler any more, we are, er, fightin’ Stalin.’

She laughed. ‘And what are you doing now?’

‘I’m on another of their shitty courses. How to put explosives into dead rats or something. All I want to do is go home, and all they do is send me on courses.’

‘Maybe …’ she said.

‘Maybe what?’

‘Maybe we can see each other.’

‘But there is no time. Perhaps in London.’

‘Perhaps.’

And then the call was over and the receiver was dead in her hand and she felt abandoned.

That night she dreamed. It was a repeat of a childhood
dream, the falling dream, now fast, now slow, like Alice down the rabbit hole. People watched her as she fell. She knew them all but she didn’t recognise them, that was the strange thing. Except her parents. They were there among the audience. And the French boy, Benoît. He was laughing at her.

On Sunday she accompanied her mother to Mass at St Aloysius on the Woodstock Road. The church was full, as though Catholics had multiplied in the war years.

The sun shall not burn thee by day
, the choir sang,
neither the moon by night
.

Maman
prayed long and hard after the blessing, and when she finally stood up to leave there were tears in her eyes. ‘I prayed that you will be safe,’ she said as they left. ‘Wherever you are going.’

Parachute School passed in a blur of sensation. They learned how to fall from a ten-foot wall, they shot down slides and swung in harnesses from a gantry inside a hangar, they crunched to the ground on mattresses and coconut matting, they ascended in a tethered balloon and dropped to earth from five hundred feet. There was the same exhilaration you found in skiing – the same thrill of surrender to gravity, the same heart-stopping breathlessness that gave, for a moment, a glimpse of dying. At the end of the week they climbed, bound up in parachute harnesses, into an aged Whitley bomber and flew over Tatton Park where they lined up inside the fuselage to plunge out into empty space. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ the dispatcher called, urging them on like a trainer urging athletes to run faster, jump higher, throw longer. And she plunged out into the air and the wind hit her face and snatched her breath away and the falling dream became reality, people on the ground looking up at her and a disembodied voice calling to her to keep her feet
together and flex her knees, before the ground came up and threw her in a crumpled mass into the grass.

After three drops you gained your parachute wings, but women weren’t allowed to wear them on their uniform jacket lest questions be asked. ‘Why the hell should questions always be asked about
women
?’ Marian complained, but no one paid her any attention. Immediately after the ceremony, transport took the members of her course to the railway station at Ringway to catch the train back down to London. The B School course started the next day near Beaulieu in Hampshire.

At Beaulieu, any pretence about what they might be doing was set aside: this was training for the clandestine life. A school for spies, someone said. They’d given her a field name, and that was how she was to be known.
Alice
. It seemed fitting. The school was based in a large country house tucked away in the middle of the New Forest; but everything was French, all casual conversation was French, even the reading material was French. It was as though she had stepped through the looking-glass and emerged at a house party in a remote and rather dilapidated château in the French countryside, inhabited by a motley collection of people who knew only that they should not be known, who understood that they should not necessarily understand.

‘Remember,’ a rather louche young man with brilliantined hair explained to them, ‘the smallest detail you pick up here may one day save your life.’ The Knave of Hearts, Marian thought. A recent arrival from France, he spoke about the intricacies of the rationing system and the problems of day-to-day life. ‘France is no longer the place you knew before the war. You will arrive there and you will be strangers in what you think is home. Don’t walk boldly into a café and ask for a
café au lait
.
There is probably no milk, and there certainly won’t be any coffee. And when you’ve got whatever it is they give you – roasted acorns, probably, or chicory – don’t ask for sugar to stir into it. There is no sugar. All you’ve got is saccharin. If you do ask for sugar, they may wonder where you’ve been for the last two years.’

There was advice on how to comport yourself in a country whose leadership you loathed and whose views you hated; how to blend in and how to fade away, how to see without ever being seen.

‘
Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés
,’ the lecturer insisted, quoting someone. To live happily, live hidden.

There were lectures on the German armed forces and security forces, their uniform, their ranks and their manners – the Wehrmacht and the SS, the
Sicherheitsdienst
and the
Geheime Staatspolizei
, the whole taxonomy of occupation and terror. ‘The Abwehr hate the SD, the SD despise the Abwehr. The battle between the two is almost as vicious as the battle between them and us.’

They explained how to recruit local agents and how to arrange a rendezvous, how to set up dead letter drops and arrange safe houses, how to think and out-think. There were practical lessons in how to tail someone and how to detect that you were being tailed. There was instruction in lock-picking and burglary given by a weasel-faced man who was the only one to speak English and who, so the story went, had done a dozen years in Wormwood Scrubs.

‘If he was such a bloody awful thief that he got caught,’ one of the students asked, ‘why the hell is he teaching us?’

There was a course in encryption and wireless telegraphy. A young man with a prominent Adam’s apple explained the intricacies of the B2 wireless set in terms no one could understand, and then they spent hours learning how to write a message and turn it into apparent gibberish using a double transposition cipher. You chose a poem that you knew by heart and used
words from that to generate the cipher key. If the operator at the other end knew your poem, then she could reverse the process and turn the message back into clear. Marian chose a sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning that she had learned at school.

The words almost brought tears to her eyes, sentimental tears that were soon dispelled by lessons on what to do if you were captured, how to deal with interrogation, how to deflect the questioning, how to survive on your own, afraid and uncertain, convinced that your position is hopeless. They even came for you in the dead of night and dragged you out of bed and bundled you into a car and drove you to another house where there were bare cells, and anonymous men in the uniform of the SD who interrogated you for hours; shone bright lights in your face; shouted at you. You stood in your nightclothes while they threatened you with violence. Stories went round that they even stripped you naked, but Marian and the only other woman on the course tried to reassure each other by dismissing such rumours as nonsense. They’d never strip a woman. They might try and make it as realistic as possible, but they’d never do that. Still, the fear always lurked in the back of your mind.

The other woman was called Marguerite. She seemed a purely English kind of person, a bit of a busybody, the kind of woman who might be a housekeeper or a district nurse; but her French was perfect, spoken with a Belgian accent and figures of speech.

‘Have you come across someone called Yvette?’ Marian asked her. They were like convicts in prison, getting rumours from one another, trading snippets, hearing things on the grapevine.

‘You mean that silly woman who married an Englishman?’