‘How will he persuade her?’
‘He’ll have information she wants.’
‘What about?’
‘About what motivates her.’
‘Patriotism?’
‘Yes,’ said Sir Oliver. ‘What else?’
‘Some love of France?’
‘And?’
Cannerley felt sick. He licked his lips. ‘The airman.’
Sir Oliver inclined his head slightly.
‘I see,’ said Cannerley. ‘He’ll tell her where to find him.’
‘Only if she otherwise proves insufficiently . . . ductile.’
‘But suppose he’s dead?’
Sir Oliver opened his hands in a modest shrug. ‘To be honest, I don’t think it terribly matters.’
‘I see. So long as she doesn’t find out, you mean.’ Cannerley drew on a short lifetime’s habit of self-control. He continued to be businesslike. ‘And Fowler’s all right, is he?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Sir Oliver. ‘Most obliging. A small-time rogue, superficially very respectable and thus terrified of having his tax irregularities made public.’ He coughed. ‘A fairly typical G Section appointment.’
Cannerley smiled briefly. ‘And the girl’s up to it?’
‘It’s just a message. Regular FANY work, as you pointed out. And it keeps it all at arm’s length from Fowler. We’ll need him again.’
‘But won’t G Section want to claim responsibility?’
‘I very much doubt it. They’re supposed to be co-ordinating resistance, not misleading other factions. “Setting Europe ablaze” and so forth.’ Sir Oliver subdued another smile. ‘In theory.’
‘And they’d be embarrassed to admit that they’d got this girl banging round like a loose cannon.’
Sir Oliver nodded. ‘And that their local chief’s a crook. Of course, if it does backfire, then G Section are in the soup.’
‘I see.’
‘And you may well think that a consummation even more devoutly to be wished. However, for the time being the discrediting of the Gaullists must remain our first objective. The great thing is that it’s all completely risk-free.’
‘Except for the girl.’
‘Possibly.’ Sir Oliver took a cigarette from a silver box and tapped it briefly on the desk.
‘She’s horribly exposed, isn’t she?’ said Cannerley. He had a sudden picture in his mind of Charlotte’s brown eyes, trusting, slightly bashful, when he had first outlined some possibilities to her at the Ritz. ‘And she’s not even an agent, she’s just running an errand.’
‘They say she speaks very good French.’
Cannerley ran a hand over his smoothly shaved chin. He knew he looked doubtful, but he couldn’t help it. He had an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. It was like the time as a child when he had tried to show off to his friends on the beach at Polzeath. He had swum far out to sea and waved. It was only at that moment he knew that he could not possibly make it back to dry land without help.
‘There’s no gain without risk, Cannerley.’ Sir Oliver peeled off his smudged spectacles and took some papers from the desk, which he held up almost flat against his face to read.
‘Yes, but what would happen if it went wrong?’
‘Well.’ Sir Oliver looked up. ‘Let’s think. What would happen to someone who excited the wrath of a group of French guerrillas and of the German security who had penetrated them . . .’
‘Quite apart from the German military and the French police.’
‘The likely outcome,’ said Sir Oliver, ‘is not something I feel I could predict with any degree of precision.’
Cannerley pursed his lips.
‘But do remember that the nature of this war in France is likely to change. If the Allies are successful in North Africa then the Germans will want to go into Southern France as well. There’ll be no more Free Zone. The more things go against them, the harsher they’ll be on the countries they occupy. And that means that they will eventually provoke real resistance. Even in France.’
‘And we’ll be in the best position to run it,’ said Cannerley.
‘Precisely,’ said Sir Oliver. ‘This is just a little warning shot. Things will get much rougher. Fowler’ll have to get a move on, though, because I think the girl’s due to come back soon. Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know. Since you put the girl their way.’
‘Absolutely. Thank you.’
‘Joan will see you out.’
When Cannerley left the building he went for a walk along the Embankment. The Thames was sluggish and grey as it drifted down from Battersea and Vauxhall. It made him think of fast-flowing French rivers, like the Tarn and the Dordogne, of action and sabotage, and of what Charlotte Gray might be doing.
It was not that he particularly cared about her; that was not the problem. The difficulty was that he was frightened. Everyone he knew had made an accommodation with the War, with the demands on their lives of a national emergency, and it seemed to him that he had been drawn into the wrong compromise.
His father was still living, weakening for consecutive days, then briefly reviving. When he was dead, Cannerley felt that an understanding of the world, a way of dealing that was tactical, discreet, yet based on certain given principles, would die with him. He had believed Sir Oliver and others of an intermediate generation had inherited this unwritten, almost mystical understanding; but now in Sir Oliver he saw only the practical aspect of it: the manoeuvring for position, the promotion of one set of interests over another, regardless of its intrinsic merit and with no thought for the human consequences. When his father died, Cannerley thought, there would be no one in the world whom he could unconditionally admire.
I am a coward, he thought: I’m trapped and I’m too frightened to move.
The nature of his work meant that there was no one with whom he could share his worry. His only choice was to carry on, to act, more than ever, by the book.
4
BY THE TIME the train arrived in Limoges, the windows were steamed up with a misty drizzle, which, Charlotte found as she left the station, had wrapped itself about the whole grey town.
She had not had a full stomach since the night of her arrival, but Limoges was the kind of place that should have been able to offer every variety of comfortable, traditional dining – modest enough to draw on the fertile local farms, large enough to support big restaurants with menus of Parisian ambition. Charlotte pictured one of those slightly surprising French dinners, such as the one she had had with the Loiseau family in the rue de Tournon, which seem to be coming to a close only to erupt again with the arrival of a loosely set omelette or a pair of roast quails on fried bread.
It was easier to go shopping alone as a woman than to dine alone, and Charlotte exchanged her bread coupon for six ounces of dusty loaf. Her monthly cheese ration having been exhausted by lunch at the Café du Centre at Lavaurette, she was obliged to buy a small piece of fatless cheese for cash from a conspiratorial and suspiciously well-fed creamery owner. He mentioned the possibility of Bayonne ham and tinned peas as well, but Charlotte told him she would be back another day.
That night she sat down on the bed in her hotel room in Limoges and laid out her possessions. There was a small black velvet package lined with foam rubber that contained the set of wireless crystals; a silver powder compact; French branded toothpaste and brush; sanitary towels (made in Toulouse) discreetly pressed on her by Alice at the aerodrome; a piece of paper with scribbled train times she had copied from the hall of the station at Limoges, carefully using French numerals (the fat nine with its short stalk and little upward tail; the one with its great looping sidepiece; a four with only a minuscule vertical); a detective story of the kind that might interest Dominique Guilbert, purchased in Uzerche; a spare set of Dominique’s clothes, two sets of underwear and a folded raincoat. There was also an awkwardly large sum of francs which Dominique was, if asked, obliged to carry for hotel bills and to pay for her father’s medical care.
&nb
sp; Charlotte was forced to confront the fact that she was now candidly frightened. It was dangerous to be in Limoges, because this was where Dominique’s father was supposed to be, and it would be easy to expose her story. It was too complicated, however, to get to Clermont from any other point of departure; it would take too long and might cause her to miss her plane back. For the same reason she had, with some relief, ruled out the possibility of bicycling.
She set out the bread and cheese on the table and took a glass from beside the bed. The only water in the room was in a bidet, concealed behind a greasy curtain, and Charlotte felt her face assume its minister of the kirk expression at the thought of it. In the bathroom at the end of the landing she scrupulously washed, then filled the tumbler and returned to her room to dine.
Oh, Peter, she thought, raising her glass and staring at the faded floral wallpaper ahead of her: there is no point in dinner without you, without gin or candles or your rumbling voice. But when she most wanted his words in her head they would not come. She could choose only between her own, obsessive thoughts and the disapproving tartness of Dominique.
For eight or nine days after the news of Gregory’s disappearance his face lay flat against the retina of her memory: exact, complete, an image through which all else was filtered. Then, one morning, she woke up and it had gone. Although she could have described his features pore by pore, even drawn a likeness, the unity, the character itself had disappeared. However she turned the kaleidoscope, the pattern would not come back into focus and she was tormented by its absence.
There was the sound of a church bell striking nine and Charlotte went to look out of the window. She could see over rooftops down a clenched little side street to the angle of a cobbled square; there were a few lights showing behind closed doors, but there was no one outside.
In its peculiar way, this must be what Mr Jackson had warned her against, this haunting loneliness. Jackson could have known nothing of the burden of Gregory’s absence, but even without that it was bad enough. There was no one in whom she could confide; no one in whom her real self could find answering warmth; and even this glorious country, where once she had only to breathe to feel accompanied and fulfilled, had so lost touch with its prelapsarian self that it had become a foreign land.
She went back to the table and looked down at the dusty crumbs; she ran her fingertip through them and tried to hold her thoughts together.
In Lavaurette, Julien Levade was attempting to find out what had happened to Monsieur and Madame Duguay. For two years there had been great movements of displaced people across France, and the division of the country into zones, one occupied, one nominally free, had made it almost impossible to trace individuals. Although Laval’s insistence that the Vichy police be responsible for the maintenance of law in the Occupied as well as the Free Zone might have given a greater unity to police or town hall records, it had been accompanied by an increased secrecy about the movement of Jews. While people of Benech’s opinion viewed policing of the Occupied Zone as a sign of how much French autonomy remained, Julien feared that it simply allowed the Gestapo to let the French police do their interrogation and their killing for them.
He had seen large camps for Jewish refugees being built throughout the Free Zone by the Vichy government, unprompted by the Germans, and could not understand his country’s reluctance to take in these refugees; it puzzled him that every new arrival from the East was so furiously resisted. Unwilling to accept them, the Government was still more loth to help the refugees escape, even when it became clear that the Germans had designs on them: instead of encouraging them to leave through the free southern ports, it put them behind barbed wire to await an unspecified disposal.
Most of these people had come from Poland, some from Germany, a few from other European countries. When Julien was told that French Jews were also being rounded up in Paris, he had at first dismissed the rumour as Communist-inspired. His grandfather Max Rutkowski had loved his adopted country with the passion of the immigrant who has found the civil freedoms denied him at home and become embedded in his new society. His admiration of France was increased by emotional gratitude, so that he ascribed even his professional success and family harmony to the beauty and justness of the heavenly civilisation in which he lived. Although Max Rutkowski’s own father was Catholic, he was proud of his Jewish blood, and of the religion in which he had been brought up, and felt confident enough to acknowledge it in the Paris suburb where he lived. By the time he became engaged to a French Jewess, Rutkowski had, for administrative convenience and out of love for its French sound, changed his family name to Levade, but he had no hesitation in bringing up his son, Auguste Levade, in the faith. Although, in the third French generation, the question of nationality was less urgent for him, Julien had, through his grandfather Rutkowski and his father Levade, acquired a reflexive admiration for his country, which his patriotic education had enforced.
Julien’s mother, with whom he lived when his father left them soon after Julien’s tenth birthday, was a French Catholic whose family could trace its bourgeois path back a hundred years or so into respectable obscurity. Julien survived his father’s departure apparently unharmed; his naturally even temperament absorbed the shock and helped his mother to do likewise. His work at school continued to earn the praise of his teachers, who thought it easily within his power to realise his ambition to be an architect.
Julien’s involvement with resistance activity at first owed as much to high spirits as to political conviction. He was unsure about the lugubrious general in London; although he liked the idea that only a battle, not a war, had been lost and that a pure spirit of France was being kept alive overseas, it was difficult to say with certainty that this untested, slightly comic person was its one true guardian. The Communist Party was banned, since, through its connection with Russia, it theoretically supported the Allies. Julien had attended a secret meeting in Limoges, where they talked of sabotage and armed resistance, but he felt uneasy about the Communist plans for France, their enthusiasm for Stalin and most particularly for the way they had, a few years earlier, helped derail the Popular Front, the one government for which he had ever felt enthusiasm. It took an approach from Mirabel on an earlier mission to force Julien into action. His aims seemed attractively simple: blow up as many trains as possible and set up networks which would eventually help kick out the invader. It was the simple, non-political vigour of his language that attracted Julien.
By running errands, taking calls and helping to dispose of parachuted stores, Julien accepted that his actions, however rustic and drink-assisted, did amount to a political statement of a kind. Although he felt a shiver of unease about showing disrespect towards the Marshal, who had been the national hero of his boyhood, he was unsentimental enough to see the deficiencies of the Government. He was not inspired by its unprincipled haggling over the question of sovereignty, and feared that when the force of Russia and America came to bear, as it surely would, the clinging to the illusion of autonomy would be not a bargaining weapon, but a liability that the Germans would exploit.
The disappearance of Monsieur and Madame Duguay changed everything. The look on Bernard’s face provided Julien with an instant of clear and shocking revelation: a chain of compromise and inertia, at no single point perceptible as choice in moral colours, had had in the end a cumulative effect. The complicity of an honest man, thinking only that he wanted to be back with his family for dinner, had closed an evil circle. From that day Julien’s flirtatious high spirits concealed a new determination: everyone, he presumed, had his own moment of clarity, but for him the revelation was provided by the look of blameless guilt in a gendarme’s eye. His rage, after its first eruption in the hôtel de ville, was concealed from the people of Lavaurette. He thought it would be safer that way; but in his subsequent search for information, Pauline Bobotte’s switchboard became a hot blur of activity.
Charlotte packed with care in the morning, checking that nothing extraneously Britis
h could somehow have found its way into her possessions. Only my thoughts, she said aloud, as she made one final sweep through the room and fixed her mind on her destination: Ussel.
The station at Limoges was already full by the time she arrived, forewarned by experience, half an hour early for her train. She had a cup of coffee in the buffet and, with the taste of roasted wheat seeds in her mouth, made her way down the platform.
The scene reminded her of the countryside on the day of her arrival; there was an element of unsettling caricature. Although it was really she who was being deceptive, it seemed to her that it was the other way round: that the travellers going about their business, the traffic of the provincial station, the manners, dress and customs of the people, indistinguishable from those that had entranced her on her first childish visits, were in fact part of a conspiratorial drama.
When the train slid into the platform, however, there was not even the rudimentary attempt at patience that she had learned to accept as the French version of Edinburgh queuing; there was a surge round each door which forced back into the carriages several passengers who were trying to dismount. A few disapproving people, including Charlotte, quickly surrendered to the inevitable force of numbers and joined the press for places.
By force and good luck she found a seat, though there was no room in the rack for her suitcase, which she had to carry on her knees. She could see by the easy way many people threw their bags around that they were empty; when they returned that evening to Limoges from their destinations in the surrounding countryside, the cases would be heavy with eggs, ham, sausage, oil of any kind, and would exude the smells she had noticed on her previous journey with Yves. After the bad temper of boarding had receded and the train had been going for half an hour, Charlotte felt an unmistakably festive air creep into the compartment and found it answered in herself by the double exhilaration of her journey.