The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (19 page)

Where is Benoît?

Somewhere from the darkness comes the sound of voices. In the pale, monochrome moonlight shadows seem transformed into objects and objects into mere shadows. But the sound of voices is something different, a patter of whispers on the night, a laugh, an exclamation.

Training takes over, the natural caution that has been drummed into her. She pulls her pistol from her jumpsuit and holds it at the ready. Stories did the rounds during training of people being dropped into the hands of waiting Germans and carted away to a prison cell before they even had time to speak a word of French. A cautious agent is a live agent, that’s what they said, time and again. Watch, wait, listen. Think before
acting. Pause to consider. ‘Wonder, don’t blunder,’ that was how one of the instructors put it.

Two shadows emerge from the backdrop of dark.

‘
Par là
,’ a voice says. ‘
Il est descendu par là
.’

It takes a finite time, a measurable moment of absurd uncertainty, for her to realise that they are speaking French. Still holding the pistol at the ready, she stands out from the shadows. ‘
Bonsoir
,
Messieurs
,’ she says.

One of them exclaims, almost in fright: ‘
Ah!
’ while the other flashes a torch in her face. ‘
Alice? Vous êtes Alice?
’

‘
Bien sûr
.
Qui d’autre?
’ She senses heavy figures behind the light and feels a tough hand grab hers. ‘
Bienvenue en France
,
Mam’selle
,’ the man says. And then he kisses her – rough, unshaven cheeks – on both cheeks; and ridiculously – there is no preparation in the training for this – she finds herself in tears.

They walk through the night, along paths and over hills, it seems interminably. Like one of the night exercises at Meoble, even to the French being spoken by these shadows who walk with her. Except she knows now that the dream has become real.

‘Here we are,’ one of them says. The building is nothing more than a block of shadow against the hillside, with the smell of animals around it and a dog barking somewhere in the back. And then a slice of shadow opens and a yellow light streams out and a woman is silhouetted in the stream of light. ‘Come in,’ she says, ‘come in, come in.’

They crowd into the front room of the farmhouse, five men in blue overalls suddenly discovered from the darkness.

‘This is Alice.’

ALICE
. From mere theory – a field name, a
nom de guerre
, almost a joke – it has become hers. ‘Alice!’ the farmer’s wife
exclaims, and clucks and fusses around her like a hen with a chick. Later Benoît appears, looking like a prisoner being brought in from hiding, glum and bad-tempered because they had found him hanging in a tree by his rigging lines and had to spend almost an hour getting him down. ‘It seems such a farce,’ he mutters to her. ‘As though I was some kind of string puppet.’

‘But it’s not your fault,’ she points out.

‘It
seems
that it is. There’s no
dignity
to it.’

‘This is César,’ one of the men says. Benoît scowls at the sound of his field name and in his scowl she sees what is so often obscured, that he is little more than a child, a boy who finds older people tiresome and younger people tedious. Someone claps him on the back and asks what the matter is, which only increases his displeasure at the whole thing. Outside the building there is the noise of men coming and going. ‘The containers,’ someone announces, coming breathless into the house. ‘We got the lot.’

Apparently the
parachutage
has been an unqualified success. Twelve containers in all. Arms, explosives, even cigarettes and coffee. All kinds of stuff. Bounty from the sky, like one of those cargo cults in the Pacific islands, gifts descending from the heavens.

‘Tomorrow you’ll meet
le Patron
,’ the head of the reception committee tells her. ‘For the moment you’re staying here.’ He is a dark man with slicked-down hair and three days’ growth of beard. A farmer, he says. Pigs. Well, those that the
Chleuhs
have left him, anyway. He has a narrow, suspicious face and, despite being called Gaillard, seems slow and thoughtful.

‘What are
les Chleuhs
?’ she asks.

He laughs at her ignorance. ‘
Les Boches
.’

She doesn’t know
les Chleuhs
. She doesn’t know anything. Benoît always knows, and now he smiles at her ignorance, that smile that so infuriates her.

‘Did
you
know what
les Chleuhs
were?’ she asks crossly.

‘Of course I did. Moroccan tribe, actually. Ignorant morons, see?’

She feels like a victim of shipwreck cast up on a foreign shore and being humoured by the natives. The accents all around her are strange, their manner of speaking hard to follow. Yet they are French, incontrovertibly, absurdly French, with the gruff humour of the countryside and a hint of arrogance: impudent Gascons, watching breathlessly as she unzips her jumpsuit and peels it off, as though she might be naked underneath and about to expose herself entirely to their gaze. But beneath the overalls she is a city girl in plain skirt and sharp jacket and a white crêpe de Chine blouse, ordinary enough in the town but incongruous among these workmen and farmers in their blue overalls.

‘My shoes are ruined.’

‘They’ll clean up well enough,’ the farmer’s wife assures her. ‘But they’re not much good for round here, anyway. City shoes.’

They are forced to eat. She isn’t hungry and all she really wants is to sleep, but Benoît sits opposite her across the table and consumes the most gargantuan meal. Is this how they live, here in occupied France? Ham and pork and cheese and vegetables and a rough red wine that she refuses after the second glass because it makes her feel light-headed. And then a flan with apples and even – is this possible? – fresh cream.

‘I need to sleep,’ she insists, but perhaps she is speaking a different language and they don’t understand her request. ‘Eat,’ she is told. ‘Eat.’ She feels like a goose being force-fed with corn, one of those geese that the farmer surely has out in one of the sheds.
Foie gras
in the middle of wartime.

‘Tell us,’ they ask, watching the two new arrivals carefully as though to be sure to take any morsel that they let fall. ‘When is the invasion going to happen? How long do we have to wait?’

Benoît shrugs. Alice doesn’t know the answer any more than he does but she wants to give them something. ‘Soon,’ she assures them. ‘Just as soon as everything is in place.’

‘We’ve waited so long. What’s keeping them?’

Their insistence seems annoying. Can’t they see that fighting a war is a difficult operation? It isn’t simply a matter of
Churchill and Roosevelt giving an order and everything working out for the best. ‘Where is
le Patron
?’ she asks, to change the subject.

‘He was meant to be here, but someone was arrested and he’s in hiding.’

‘Hiding?’

‘At Montalban. At the Delacroix place.’

How can he be in hiding if they all know where he is? She thinks of Beaulieu, of the constant nagging about security. Tell no one who doesn’t need to know. Don’t talk to people. Don’t strike up casual conversations unless it is suspicious not to do so. Don’t draw attention to yourself. A cautious agent is a live one.

‘I must lie down,’ she insists, putting the food aside and no longer caring whether she offends them or not. ‘Please.’

So the farmer’s wife leads the way to a room upstairs while Benoît stays downstairs with the others. He’ll sleep on the floor beside the fire. He’s quite all right, he can sleep anywhere.

The room upstairs is a small attic under the eaves with whitewashed walls, a single bed, a cupboard and a chest of drawers. Alice feels like a giant, bowing her head beneath the sloping ceiling. ‘My son’s room,’ her hostess explains. ‘Please, make yourself at home.’

‘Where is he?’

The woman’s face is suddenly weary, as though the whole thing has become too much for her, the life on the farm, the men crowding into her house, the lateness of the hour, the war and everything. ‘He was sent to Germany. To work.’ She shrugs. ‘Now you get what sleep you can.’ She leaves an oil lamp on the table beside the bed, gives a brief, fugitive smile and goes out, closing the door gently behind her.

Alice pushes her suitcase under the bed, then straightens up to look round the room. It smells of damp but she doesn’t care. What she does care about is an escape route. Always look for a second way out of a room, a second exit from a bar or a
restaurant, a second way out of a railway station. That’s what they taught her. But the window is jammed shut, the frame thickly crusted with paint. She crouches to peer through the narrow panes. The moon is almost down, visible through trees just above the horizon. That means that the sun will soon be up and whatever is to happen will happen.

There’s a soft knock on the door. She opens it to find Benoît standing there with that wry, ironical look that was once so appealing. ‘I came to say goodnight,’ he says.

She accepts a chaste kiss on the cheek. He hesitates in the doorway. ‘May I come in? All those people downstairs …’

‘No,’ she tells him, ‘no, you can’t.’

‘But
mon chat
—’

She puts her hand in his chest and pushes him back. ‘No,’ she repeats. ‘Don’t be an idiot. And for God’s sake stop calling me that. I’m not your cat or your dog or anything.’

‘
Ma puce
,’ he says laughing.

‘Go away.’

After closing the door she waits to hear his footsteps going down the stairs. There’s no lock on the door, so she props a chair against the handle then turns to undress. Through the mottled silvering of the mirror on the wardrobe her reflection looks back at her, an indistinct image of an indistinct individual unbuttoning her shirt and stepping out of her skirt and standing there in her petticoat. She thinks of Benoît, recalling those days in England. The memory is vivid and yet it seems distant in something other than time and space, as though she has stepped through that looking-glass into another world, another dimension.
ALICE.
Alice with no surname and no story, no parents, no brothers and sisters. Just Alice,
à travers le miroir
.

Where, she wonders, is Marian Sutro?

She shrugs, dismissive of her old personality. She wants to be Anne-Marie Laroche, whose identity card, clothing coupons and ration book – the ration coupons carefully extracted until yesterday – she now carries in her handbag. Anne-Marie
Laroche, student, who left Paris in search of the peace and quiet and decent food of the countryside in order to recover from a bout of pneumonia. Paris is impossible. There are all manner of useless luxuries available but you can’t get fresh eggs and meat. Except at an exorbitant price on the black market, of course. And how could she afford anything like that?

What was she studying in Paris?

Well, she was about to start a course in literature at the Sorbonne, but when the war came all that stopped. And now she doesn’t know what on earth to do, really. She thought perhaps she’d find some work as a nanny. She loves working with children.

Where is her family?

She has no family, no immediate family at any rate.

Where was she born?

You can see it there on the identity card. Look.
Genève, Suisse
. Her father was in the hotel business.

Was?

Yes, he’s dead. So’s her mother.

She frowns at Anne-Marie Laroche’s reflection in the mottled mirror. ‘I’m on my own, really,’ she says out loud. ‘I’ve just got to muddle through.’ Muddle through. It’s so much better in French than English:
je dois me débrouiller
, with all its fogginess and confusion.

Outside, through the dirty panes of glass, the sky is already growing pale. Feeling that strange light-headedness that comes with lack of sleep, she lies down in her slip with her coat over her and a blanket over that and her pistol beneath the pillow. In thirty seconds she is asleep, dreaming of a rocking, roaring tube of darkness, and falling and swinging, the daring young girl on the flying trapeze with people below her applauding. There’s Benoît there too, able to see – a moment of great embarrassment – right up her skirt; and then, in the way of dreams, Benoît becomes Clément, and she suddenly finds that she has no knickers on.

Morning is a new, bright world full of cold. There’s been a light frost overnight, the first frost of autumn, and sunlight ricochets off ice crystals as though they are diamonds. You don’t get days like this in England. You have fog and dank and a raw kind of cold that is like a caustic chemical escaped from a laboratory. Instead, this cold is champagne.

When she comes down, Benoît is still lying on the broken couch in the corner of the living room beneath a pile of blankets and overcoats. He grunts when Alice greets him. ‘I did not close my eye all night,’ he complains, in English. His tone is reproachful, as though Alice sleeping soundly has somehow denied him the possibility of doing the same. The farmer’s wife fusses round them. There’s bread and home-made plum jam. And real coffee that they brought with them.

‘We must speak French,’ Alice admonishes him as he joins her at the table.

‘I want that they think I am English.’

‘That’s ridiculous. And bad security.’

‘Look, I must instruct these people in arms and explosives. They think all Frenchmen are losers and they will not take instruction from another Frenchman like they will from an Englishman. It would be even better to be American.’

‘But you don’t
sound
American. You don’t even sound English. When you speak English you sound like Maurice Chevalier.’ She struggles not to show her amusement.

‘I don’t know what’s so funny. And I do
not
sound like Maurice Chevalier. Anyway, they would not know if I did, would they?’

‘Maybe you should put on an English accent when you speak French. That way they’ll be sure you’re English. Although they probably won’t understand a word you’re saying.’ In vain she tries to contain her laughter. The conversation seems absurd: a
Frenchman pretending to be an Englishman pretending to be a Frenchman.