The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (42 page)

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 there is 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 was the group of students from Swordland, with Benoît …

‘There it is again!’ The sound returns with greater certainty, a muttering on 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 the first lamp on and sets off to 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 gorund 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 flarepath, 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.’

‘A bigwig then.’

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 disc 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 aeroplane’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 in control again now, decision made, as the sound of the Lysander fades into the minutiae of the night. ‘South. I can take 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 among the people. But Gilbert stands in front of her, almost as though he is going to prevent her from leaving the field, while the other two look on in bewilderment, like children watching adults quarrel.

‘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 up, don’t we? Let’s go.’

‘Who was he?’ Gilbert calls after her as she sets off to fetch the other torches. ‘Mechanic, I mean. Who was he?’

She turns. ‘An old friend. Maybe I’ll tell you when it’s all over.’

She’s alone. She’s sitting in a corner of a compartment with two other passengers but she’s alone. She tries to keep awake by watching the countryside pass by, the alluvial flats of the Cher, the vasty fields of France; but tiredness creeps up on her like a thief and steals away her waking. She sleeps, hearing the roar of an aero engine in her ears, then comes to with a start. Her fellow passengers have turned to reading. She watches the trees and fields pass. There are clusters of mistletoe among the bare branches. There was mistletoe in the cemetery, mistletoe overhead when she met Yvette. The druids’ plant. The plant that killed the Norse god Baldur. Kisses at Christmas time, a kiss stolen from Clément. She dozes, dreams, sees herself running in the darkness, feels Clément’s body against her.

What will all that mean in the future? How much do such things last? Will they meet again as mere friends, or will there still be this breathless desire? The future seems an uncertain thing, compromised by the present, by the war, by her own strange life here in the dull and battered country that France has become. The future is irrelevant. What is relevant is this train jogging through the French countryside, and the creep of exhaustion.

Clément will be in England by now. How will they deal with him? The man called Fawley with the owl glasses. Kowarski the Russian bear. And Ned, who will presumably be called on to
debrief him as he debriefed Kowarski in 1940; Ned whose role in this whole thing is as enigmatic as the physics they all study, a world of uncertainty that yet yields certainty – a bomb that will blow the world to pieces.

Meanwhile the others – Gilbert, and the man called David, and the other agent who looked like a bandit – will be on the train from Tours to Paris, to the Gare d’Austerlitz where there are posters giving her description and a reward for her capture. Five hundred thousand francs.

What would her father say? Or her mother? She can imagine the shriek of horror – their dear little Squirrel, with a price on her head and half the Paris police looking for her! – as though it were a disgrace to be wanted as a criminal, whatever the circumstances. Should she have taken the extra seat and flown back to England? She would have found safety, real safety. Where would have been the disgrace in that? No more glancing over the shoulder, no more living with the flutter of fear trapped in the pit of the stomach. And sleep, she’d have been able to sleep. Instead she’s here, somewhere in France. But that is why she came in the first place, after the man called Potter quizzed her in that bare room off Northumberland Avenue: not for Clément, not for Benoît, but for France, that strange abstraction which means so many different things to different people.

The train rattles on, stopping at every station, passengers getting on and off, whistles blowing – the ordinary currency of travel in the heartland of France. Vierzon comes with a clattering of points, the carriage jolting sideways, acres of sidings and rows and rows of goods trains waiting to move and a voice on the public address system announcing ‘Vierzon
ville
’. Where Julius Miessen got on the train that time. Julius Miessen who followed her through Paris. Her nemesis. She pulls her suitcase down from the rack and edges along the corridor behind the other passengers. Someone helps her down onto the platform and wishes her ‘
Bon voyage, Mam’selle
’, and she smiles in
acknowledgement. The Toulouse train will be arriving at platform two.

Toulouse means Benoît. He’ll be wondering where she is, what she’s doing. She’ll appear out of the blue like the last time, perhaps meet with him as they did before in the railwayman’s flat. Passion is a crude, physical thing. It makes her feel uncomfortable, walking along the platform with strangers, remembering. Can they smell the passion on her? Does it transmit through the air? Clément and Benoît. How can she have come to this, the convent girl who had kept her virginity until she was twenty years old, whose sexual longings were always clouded with guilt? Two men within days of each other. The kind of thing that once horrified her. Promiscuity, prurience, sin – a whole thesaurus of immorality. Perhaps it’s the unnatural life she is leading, her personality split between Alice and Marian, the one doing what the other can ignore. Create yourself a cover for every eventuality. Be real to yourself. Live the person you are pretending to be.

Laurence Follette, a student, returning to the Southwest from Paris where she has been for the last week visiting friends. Laurence Follette, weighed down with tiredness, humping her suitcase over to platform two, thinking of Clément, of a bomb that might blow cities to dust, of Benoît standing before her naked as though nudity is the most natural thing in the world.