A Gathering Storm (40 page)

A fire crackled in the grate, for October had brought cold winds. A clothes-horse full of little clothes and nappies stood next to the fireguard. There were toys strewn about the floor, toys Beatrice had never seen before. She sat the child down and tried to interest him in some wooden bricks, but he batted them away and crawled quickly into her lap. He’d changed so much, she saw, now he was calmer. His movements were sturdier, his expression more purposeful. ‘No,’ he kept saying.

‘No what, darling?’ she asked.

‘Oh, he says “no” to everything,’ Angie laughed. ‘Even when he means yes.’

Beatrice could hardly keep her eyes off him the whole day. The things he could do. Walk his way round the room, if he held onto the furniture, try to put a spoon to his mouth. She’d missed seeing him learn all these things. It was painful, too, submitting to his new routine.

‘He’s used to sleeping by himself now,’ Nanny said sternly, when Beatrice saw she was expected to have Hetty’s room, Hetty still being with her mother in Cornwall. Nanny, it was, who knew the times of her child’s naps, who ordered the afternoon walk with the pram and who said that he was to have no milk during the night and forbade her to pick him up when he woke briefly during the evening.

‘Oh, Gerald loves him to bits,’ Angie told her when she asked if he minded having him. ‘He’ll be home in a few days, he says, if he can get away.’

Beatrice slept like the dead again that night without remembering her dreams. Woke early, as she’d got used to doing, and let herself out in the morning darkness to run. Otherwise, she tried to lose herself in being a mother again, but all the time a part of her mind was still with the group in Surrey. She felt alert to what might happen next, restless. When she was supposed to be building a tower for her son to knock down for the twentieth time, her thoughts drifted. If they didn’t want her back, then her old life could resume. But she felt disappointment at that idea, too. Her boy was all right, she told herself. He’d be all right if she left again.

Angie noticed her distraction. ‘Let me have him,’ she said. Now that he was used to his mother being there again, he was content to go to Angie. And Beatrice was disturbed to find that her jealousy at this was tempered with relief. She felt sorry for Angie, too. She’d noticed the girl was thin, but as she put out her hands to take the child, she saw quite how loosely her clothes hung on her. How unhappy she must be after the loss of her babies.

When she asked Angie how she was, the reaction was brittle, defensive, though she admitted that yes, the doctor said they could try again. There was no reason not to hope.

After a week, Beatrice received a letter asking her to report for another training session in a further week’s time. Part of her felt a dragging reluctance, but something pulled her onwards: she knew she had to do it. She was needed. She might make a difference.

‘Could you bear to keep looking after him?’ she asked Angie.

‘We’d be desolate if you took him away,’ was Angie’s reply. ‘But where on earth are you going?’

‘I don’t know exactly. It’s just training,’ Beatrice said simply.

October 1942

This time Beatrice and some other agents were sent on a long and tedious train journey to Scotland. At Glasgow they changed onto a small local line, finally being told to alight at a tiny country station where a lorry waited for them. From there they were driven over unmade roads to a handsome granite house overlooking a freezing, pewter-coloured sea. In this desolate but beautiful landscape she was to spend a month undergoing a physical training that would test her stamina beyond endurance.

There was only one other woman in the group, a sturdy, plain-faced girl known as Geneviève, a year or two older than herself, with whom Beatrice shared a room – not that they were to spend much time in it.

‘You girls, you’re the same as the men,’ was the clipped instruction of the officer in charge. ‘No whining to me for favours.’

‘He’ll have you peeing standing up,’ joked his NCO, a small dark Welshman who clearly relished his job of goading on the freshers. The women made an unspoken pact to ignore his comments, which proved the best possible course. They knew they had to be as good as the men, if not better, and not to make a fuss about it. How they peed would be the least of their problems.

It was full commando training. Twenty-five-mile treks across mountains in the dark, scaling the most impossible cliff-faces whilst weighed down with great coils of wire and weaponry, sleeping out on hilltops without blankets in the pouring rain, dragging equipment through icy rivers. In addition, they learned how to shoot a wide variety of guns, handle grenades, make bombs. Geneviève had reserves of energy and endurance that drew open admiration, even from the Welshman. Beatrice stumbled through, never quite as fast as the others in the most exhausting expeditions. It was sheer determination that got her through and it was that that they noticed.

Rarely did she have the opportunity for reflection. If there was ever the time to sit down to write a letter to Angie, or her parents, which was practically never, she could think of nothing she was allowed to say. What was more, the distance between her world and theirs was so great, she could hardly visualize them and ended up merely sending her love. More often than not she simply gave up and went to sleep. Sleep was what they lacked, and became the thing they most desired. She was amazed by the circumstances under which she found she could catnap, in the freezing cold or leaning against a tree. Even twenty minutes would restore her.

There was no time, no reason to think of her child, but there was to think of Rafe.

Once, when she battled to launch a canoe in choppy seas to lay a depth charge, a picture of that awful stormy Cornish sea flew hard-edged into her mind.

Another occasion was the climactic event of her training, the parachute jump. For this they were transported to a Parachute School in the north of England. Exercises in falling – hands in pockets, legs together, on impact rolling to the left or right – were followed by jumps in a hangar from platforms of increasing height, whilst attached to a cable. Finally, she and the others were taken up in a plane and made to do what every nerve in her body screamed against doing: dropping into empty air. The initial sensation was every bit as bad as she had feared, but she managed to jerk open the parachute and euphoria followed as she floated quietly down to a peaceful English landscape spread beneath her. Then the ground was rushing up and she hit it, rolling over into a patch of nettles, a humbling end to all the hubris.

Still, as she rolled up her silken cradle and queued to return her equipment, a sense of satisfaction swelled in her.

‘Well done, girls,’ the young airman said, taking her harness. ‘Here’s your prize.’ He pushed an embroidered badge into her hand. When she looked at it she was shocked. It was an identical badge to the one that had dropped out of Rafe’s pocket.

Rafe had been here before her – if not at this location then somewhere like it. And that meant – well, who knew what it meant – but she understood now what the nature of his most secret work might be and the measure of the danger he’d passed into ahead of her.

This time, when she saw her child again, he was waiting inside the door when Nanny opened it, still wobbly on his feet, but definitely standing. She crouched and opened her arms to him, the rush of love for him overwhelming.

‘Sweetheart?’

He looked at her, and glanced up at Nanny who said, ‘Go on, give your mother a kiss.’ Again, he waited, then gave a big sigh and stepped forward into her arms. ‘Mar Mar,’ he moaned, pushing his arms round her neck.

‘Oh, my darling,’ she spoke in his ear, almost crying with relief. She hadn’t realized until now how much she’d missed him.

She knew, as soon as she set eyes on her, that Angie was pregnant again.

‘I’m a bundle of nerves,’ Angie told her. ‘Something, anything I do, might make me lose it.’

‘What does the doctor say?’

‘That I shouldn’t exert myself in any way, and should eat well. Hah! It’s all very well saying that, but I feel sick all the time.’

Angie was tired, Beatrice could see that, and since she had a whole two weeks off until her final bout of training, she decided to go home to Cornwall.

The boy was fretful on the train, unused to the noise and the people, perhaps missing Angie and Nanny for, twisting and struggling on her lap, he’d sometimes turn and look at her with puzzlement as if to say, what are you doing here? He threw the food she gave him to the floor and only settled when he had his bottle. Finally, he dropped off to sleep in her arms and she watched the passing countryside as the train travelled towards the setting sun. How ordinary this was, she thought, a mother and her child. She could hardly believe that last week she’d jumped from an aeroplane.

January 1943

‘You are no longer Béatrice or Simone. Your name is now Juliette Rameau and you are a children’s governess. Here, take these and study them carefully.’

She was at another country house, this time in Hampshire. At the end of the first day, Miss Atkins and the man in charge of the French operations, Major Maurice Buckmaster, arrived from London. Beatrice was summoned to see them in a comfortable book-lined room with a view across the front lawn, where she sat in front of a big desk as Major Buckmaster described her new role. Tall, slender and athletic, Buckmaster was physically like an older version of Rafe: the same fair hair, but thinning, the same sensitive, slightly puzzled look. Miss Atkins sat quietly behind the desk but he was sitting on it, swinging his legs and perusing Beatrice with a shrewd eye. She looked down at the documents Miss Atkins had given her: a French identity card bearing a photograph of her face, coupons for food and clothing, and a faded picture of two slender, dark-headed girls, presumably Mademoiselle Rameau’s pupils.

‘Your immediate task,
mademoiselle
,’ Buckmaster said, ‘is to rehearse the story of your entire life. We will help you, of course. You must know everything there is to know about yourself, the names of your grandparents, the pets you had when you were a child, where you live, what your father did . . . the list goes on and on. You must know these details so well that you will answer as Juliette Rameau, even under the greatest pressure.’ He said the last two words with emphasis and they chilled her.

‘That’s very clear, sir, I see what I must do.’

‘Do you?’ he said, folding his arms. ‘Do you grasp that you must learn to act as Juliette always, even if the Gestapo drag you from your bed at midnight and question you? You must automatically answer as Juliette. In effect you must
be
Juliette.’

She nodded, looking at him steadily now. ‘I’m ready to start work on it as soon as I’m told,’ she replied.

Miss Atkins stood with a reassuring smile. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘We’ll begin immediately.’

February 1943

Four weeks later, sitting in the little Lysander as it flew over Normandy, nauseated by the smell of fuel and the vibration of the engines, Beatrice remembered this conversation. Concentrating her thoughts on what she had to do kept her mind focused and calm.

The pilot turned his head and shouted, ‘There are the lights, Pickard, look,’ and the man sitting beside Beatrice pushed himself up and peered over the pilot’s shoulder.

‘Right we are,’ Charles Pickard said to Beatrice. ‘Ready for landing?’

The plane slowed and began to descend.

‘Easy does it,’ Pickard whispered. Torch beams flashed, the plane hit the ground with a bump, bounced once and, scraping over the grass with a long sigh, drifted to a halt. Pickard was already getting the door open.

A man and a woman waiting on the cold hilltop greeted them with hugs and soft murmurs of welcome. Beatrice knew they were Pierre and Lorraine, a middle-aged couple, farmers.

Pierre dragged bicycles out of a nearby copse, and Pickard helped Beatrice strap her suitcase to hers. Then he shook her hand and wished her luck and stepped back into the plane. As they waited to wave it off, she looked about her, trying to match her surroundings to the details of the map she’d pored over back in England. They were looking down over a moonlit valley, patchworked with fields and farmsteads.

Her immediate instructions were clear. She was to return home with Pierre and his wife and try to get some sleep. Early in the morning she was to cycle the twenty miles to Rouen and board a train to Paris. ‘The last time I went to Paris I was followed,’ Pierre explained. That’s why Beatrice had to go instead.

They cycled in the cold winter air along winding country roads until Pierre turned suddenly down an unmade lane, across a little bridge and into a farmyard. She was haunted by a sense of familiarity, and it was a moment or two before she realized it was because it was similar to her grandparents’ farm. That must be thirty miles or so north of here; there was no chance at all of her being able to go and find it even if she were permitted. She pushed thoughts of her family away and concentrated on avoiding puddles.

Inside the farmhouse, as Pierre poked the fire and set a pan of onion soup to heat, the feeling of recognition came again, but this time it was accompanied by a sense of rightness that she had come. When, an hour later, she lay down in her cot-bed under the eaves, she was sure she’d be unable to sleep for nerves. Yet it seemed only a moment later that Lorraine’s harsh whisper roused her. It was time to go.

She dressed quickly, in the worn navy suit they’d given her, and checked her clutch bag once again for papers and money.

‘
Dieu vous bénisse
,’ Lorraine muttered, as she kissed her forehead.

‘
Et vous aussi
,’ Beatrice replied softly. Pierre had told her the night before, whilst Lorraine had been busy upstairs, that their grown-up son, their only child, had been conscripted by the Nazis and sent to Alsace to work in a factory, making shells. Six months ago, word had come that he had been killed – in a drunken fight, they were told. This explanation, Pierre did not for one moment believe. Raoul had been a gentle boy, not that sort at all. His death decided them. They’d volunteered for the Resistance.