The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (40 page)

The Sister takes hold of the toddler. ‘Thank you for your help,’ she says. ‘I imagine you’ll want to be moving on.’

‘I’m afraid I have to.’

‘Don’t use the
métro
,’ the nun warns her. ‘They’ll shut it down. They always do.’ She smiles sympathetically. ‘And God bless you,’ she adds.

She walks through the gathering dusk of the city, hurrying through the back streets, crossing boulevards like an animal slinking across an open field where predators lie in wait. Military vehicles roar past while she hangs back in doorways.
Crowds issuing up from the
métro
mill around helplessly in the darkness. For some of the way she joins up with two girls who are trying to get home to Issy in the south. They are speculating about what has happened. A power failure was one possibility, but that doesn’t explain the military vehicles. ‘There’s always something going on,’ one of the girls complains. ‘Maybe it’s the Jews again. I mean, there’s still hundreds of them around. If not the Jews, then it’s communists.’

Once across the river Alice separates from them, apologising for leaving, agreeing that they should meet up again, taking down a phone number. She watches them go with regret. Fear stalks her once she is on her own, fear that is only partly assuaged when the door to the apartment on the place de l’Estrapade finally closes behind her.

‘You look a complete mess,’ Clément exclaims. ‘What have you been up to? And where on earth did you get that coat? Didn’t you take one of Maddy’s?’

She detaches herself from his embrace and lights a cigarette, her hands shaking. ‘I had to give it away.’

‘That’ll make her happy.’

‘They nearly got me, Clément. They had me bottled up in Belleville—’

‘What the hell were you doing in Belleville? It’s a slum.’

‘Meeting Yvette.’

‘Who the hell’s Yvette?’

‘Yvette,’ she repeats, as though it’s obvious. ‘Yvette. I went to meet her and they almost caught me.’ She looks round, looks at her watch, looks for distraction. There are things to do, preparations to make, decisions to reach; anything but thinking. ‘The radio.
Radio Londres
. We need to know if the pick-up is on.’

He leads her into the salon, pours a glass of wine, tries to sit her down on one of the uncomfortable sofas. ‘There’s time yet. Tell me what happened.’

But she can’t sit down. Sitting down would mean inertia and
she cannot sit still, not at the moment. There are voices in the background, high-pitched, angry voices chattering words that are not quite audible, like an angry conversation taking place in another room. She tries to look at him but somehow she can’t do that either, she can’t look at anything for any length of time, can’t concentrate on anything, can’t bring her mind into focus on any single thought, certainly can’t sit down. ‘Will Madeleine really be cross about the coat?’

He laughs. ‘Maddy? I shouldn’t think she’ll notice.’

Madeleine won’t be cross. It’s a blessed relief. She pauses to listen to the voices. But the sane part of her mind is still there, struggling for command. You’re imagining things, it tells her. It’s the stress. Hysteria. She draws on her cigarette, feeling the bite of smoke in her lungs, and looks round for something to do. The cigarette. She concentrates on that, on how to breathe the smoke in and how to expel it. That’ll do for now. That, and trying to ignore the voices.

‘You haven’t told me what happened, Marian.’

‘I killed someone.’ She says it quietly. Perhaps he won’t hear what she said. Would that make the confession invalid, if the priest didn’t hear it exactly? But he has heard. He stands there looking at her with confusion in his face. ‘You’ve done
what
?’

She turns her head away. ‘Two men. Maybe both. I’m not sure. Yes, I’m sure. Both.’

He bends and puts his hands on her shoulders and tries to look into her eyes, as though he might read the truth there. ‘
Two men
? What on earth do you mean?’

Isn’t it clear enough? She has killed people. That’s what the voices seem to be saying. They’re murmuring, just below the level of audibility so that she isn’t certain they are even there: she has killed two men. Killing is what everyone else seems to be doing at the moment, except that they mostly do it at one remove, dropping a bomb or firing a shell or launching a torpedo, or even sitting at a laboratory bench and designing weapons. But she has done it exactly as they promised at
Meoble Lodge – at close quarters, hand to hand. Double tap. And in cold blood, more or less. A good term that, cold blood. Because blood’s never cold. Not until you’re dead, anyway.

She makes herself look him in the eye. ‘They had me cornered in a cul-de-sac in Belleville. So I shot them. I’m a murderer, Clément. They’ve turned me into a murderer.’

‘Don’t be absurd.’

‘And that man was there, the man who followed me before. I saw him there. Julius Miessen he’s called.’

‘Well, he’s not following you now.’ He reaches out and pulls her against him. She feels the sting of tears. He bends and kisses her cheek and her eyes, and then her mouth. She tries to pull away. ‘The radio,’ she insists. ‘We must listen to the radio.’

‘Don’t you ever give up?’

‘I can’t give up,’ she replies. ‘Don’t you understand? If I give up, I’m dead.’

They sit in the
salon
with the wireless on, tuned through the roar of jamming to
Radio Londres
. The drumbeat of the letter V plays out into the room. And then the announcer’s voice: ‘
Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français
. First we have some messages for our friends.’

They wait as the messages are read out, the sentences of nonsense, sometimes poetic, often merely banal. The voice is calm, like a parent reciting a poem to a child, oblivious to the noise all around:

‘
Grand-mère a cueilli de belles fleurs … La pluie tombe sur la plaine … Jean veut venir chercher ses cadeaux … Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau … Le garagiste a les mains pleines de graisse …
’

‘That’s it,’ she cries. ‘The garage man has greasy hands. That’s the one.’ The mess of emotion that she feels becomes, for a moment, something physical. Nausea, bile bubbling up inside her throat. ‘We’re going. The pick-up is on. The trouble is …’

What is the trouble? The trouble is that she feels sick, that the
voices are still whispering to her, like a tune going round and round in her head, something that you can’t get rid of.

‘The trouble is, they’ll be watching for me. The whole of bloody Paris will be looking for me now. They know I’ve organised a pick-up and they’ve got my description. Yvette will have told them everything. I’m blown wide open, Clément.’
Brûlée
is the word. So much better than the English because that is what she feels – burned, scorched. ‘I’m a danger to everyone.’ She attempts a smile. ‘Radioactive.’

Clément shrugs. ‘I’m used to that. All you have to do with something that is radioactive is keep it in a lead-lined container. Where do we have to go tomorrow? You’ve not told me anything yet.’

‘We’ve got to catch the Bordeaux train.’

‘From Austerlitz? That’s easy.’ He smiles, that infuriating smile that he always uses when he is about to prove you wrong or foolish, the smile she loathed and loved at the same time. ‘We catch the train further down the line, at Ivry. We’ll use the laboratory van. The Collège has certain privileges and one of them is the van – it runs pretty often between the Collège itself and the lab at Ivry. Tomorrow it’ll be going to Ivry. Does it all the time.’ He takes her hand and draws her towards him. ‘Now you need some rest. More than anything, you need to sleep.’

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 there’s Benoît. The alleyways have no end, no way out, all ways blocked. An
impasse
. And then there’s another part of the dream that 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 South-west.’

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.