A Gathering Storm (44 page)

‘True. They’ve sent them all off east, to work in the factories. You’re right – I’d be stopped if I go out, so I don’t. But, Bea, surely you know what happened to your predecessor?’

‘They didn’t say.’

‘They should have told you. Well, listen . . . I sent Genny down to Périgueux with a message for a Resistance cell there.’

‘Genny,’ she echoed. ‘Geneviève?’

‘Yes. A tallish, well-built girl with heavy eyebrows, quite a self-possessed type.’

‘I knew her, Rafe. Oh, you’d better tell me, I suppose it’s awful.’

‘The Gestapo walked in on their meeting. One of the Frenchmen went crazy and started shooting. That’s all our informant could tell us. But she’s dead. I’m sorry.’

‘Poor Geneviève,’ Beatrice whispered. ‘How did they find out? The Gestapo, I mean.’

‘That, of course, is the question, and I wish I could answer it.’

‘They don’t know about you – us, I mean.’

Rafe shrugged and turned his attention to the view, his breath misting the window as he said, ‘We told London, naturally, but they don’t seem to think there’s a problem. At any rate, they’ve gone ahead and sent you.’

‘Oh. I’m hurt that they didn’t tell me. About Geneviève.’

‘I’m not surprised they didn’t,’ was all he said.

June 1943

One evening, Beatrice stood at the back door, watching the bats flit amongst the trees. She felt as though she’d lived on the edge of this little French town for a long time, with its houses of shabby grey stone that were shuttered into silence in the midday heat, and its marketplace where the old men played boules between the rows of pollarded trees in the late afternoon. Once or twice she’d stepped out with Brigitte to buy food, to make her presence seem ordinary. Her cover was that she was the daughter of Brigitte’s cousin from nearby Nexon, come to help Brigitte and the other woman, Marie, in the café, now that Gaston was finding it too much.

She’d met some of the others in the cell, too. Charles, the wireless operator, lived in one of the tiny rooms over the café and, like her, was half-English. Stefan, whose ugly scowling face hid a shrewd mind, owned the garage. He brought to the operation an extensive knowledge of the area, a rich vocabulary of profanities and an ability to strip down a gun and clean it with remarkable speed. She’d been introduced, too, to a couple of men from surrounding villages, and the local doctor, who would get into long, time-wasting arguments with Stefan about who in the wider group could and couldn’t be trusted. The two men hated one another for some reason that Beatrice had never got to the bottom of, but that Rafe thought concerned Stefan’s wife. The two Frenchmen were bound into loyalty to one another in their loathing of the occupying forces, but Rafe found it very difficult to manage them. Beatrice, whom they called Paulette, was the only woman. She sat silently in the long candle-lit sessions, listening to their plans, for the moment lacking the knowledge to comment. Yet they treated her with a rough respect for they needed her, needed her badly, to take out messages across the surrounding region.

She’d only been on one such mission so far, on Brigitte’s bicycle one morning, with two baguettes sticking up out of the basket, to take instructions to the farmhouse where Victor was hiding out. It was about the onward movement of the cache of weapons they’d brought with them on the plane. The journey there had been entirely uneventful; on the way back two young Germans on motorbikes had made catcalls to her as they passed, but she’d ignored them and they sped off without bothering her further.

In general, it was seen as quite natural that Brigitte Girand’s young cousin should be seen out on errands. She played the part of a shy young thing, which excused her from saying much. At some point it would be natural that she’d want to take the train to visit her family back in Nexon, perhaps, or even her great-grandmother, Brigitte’s aunt, in Limoges. Even someone with a suspicious mind was unlikely to make much of the matter.

In the daytime it was a useful cover to be seen working behind the bar in the café, bringing carafes of wine for the old men and listening to the gossip.

Café le Coq wasn’t a place the Germans cared to frequent; it was too homely, and too tucked-away. They preferred the more stylish place opposite the tiny town hall in the square, where they could see and be seen. Mostly it was the same old locals who frequented the Coq, but still, Beatrice’s nerves were always as taut as piano strings.

This particular June evening, watching the sun dipping over fields, and little dots of glowworms beginning to shine in the grass, Beatrice’s mind began to wander. She started to think of home, and she knew she mustn’t, for the rush of longing was overwhelming. She hastily went back inside to her room. It depressed her, with its bare floorboards, the narrow bed with its lumpy mattress, the cracked bowl and ewer on the chest of drawers and the wooden chair that wobbled noisily if she sat on it. Worse, it was lit by a dim ceiling bulb that flickered maniacally. Sometimes the electricity supply would cut out altogether, leaving her with a candle that smoked horribly and made her head ache, so that it was almost preferable to go to bed in the dark.

She had just finished washing her face when there was a soft knock at the door. ‘Dinner’s ready,’ came Rafe’s voice.

‘I’m coming,’ she replied, but by the time she opened the door he’d gone downstairs.

She frowned. Since that first meeting, he’d been avoiding her. Well, not avoiding her, exactly; after all, they had to work together, and he certainly spoke to her and took every care. But he was aloof, withdrawn, and this hurt her. She couldn’t understand it. She knew he was under a terrific strain – that greyish pallor never left his face, and tiredness and anxiety were etching furrows on his forehead.

She sensed that life here was worse for him than for her. After all, he could never go out without attracting attention because all the young men had been sent away into forced labour, and, yes, she had to admit it, he was English-looking. He had only to open his mouth to confirm that he wasn’t French. And there were things he couldn’t tell her; she knew it was policy even here, in the midst of their activities, not to let others know more than they needed to play their own parts, in case they were picked up by the Gestapo. What they didn’t know, they couldn’t tell. Rafe would know everything, she guessed, and he kept it from her. For her protection, yes, but it was hard having so much between them.

After that first day he’d been punctilious about speaking in French to her. He rarely talked to her about anything to do with their normal lives. Here they were Florian and Paulette, and she felt terribly, terribly lonely.

She pushed her feet into the pair of house shoes Brigitte had given her – worn slippers bulged out by Brigitte’s bunions – and went downstairs.

‘That man came into the café again today’, Brigitte told her husband.

‘What man?’ Gaston growled. He mopped his face with his napkin and broke off another piece of bread, which he dipped in his stew.

‘You know who I mean.’ Brigitte addressed Beatrice, who nodded. It was that smartly dressed man she’d seen on the day she arrived, sitting in the shadows. Today he’d ordered coffee in French that was fluent enough. No one knew his business, but Marie said she had seen him coming out of the police station, so they suspected the worst.

‘There’s something wrong about him,’ Brigitte declared, shaking her head. ‘Anyway, I don’t like him.’

‘You don’t like all sorts of people,’ Gaston said.

‘Being suspicious saves lives,’ Brigitte riposted and started collecting up the empty plates with unnecessary bangings and fumblings.

Gaston winked at Beatrice, who smiled politely and looked at Rafe. Rafe looked more worried than ever, but,
‘C’était delicieux, merci,’
was all he said as he passed his plate to Brigitte and looked up at the clock on the wall. There was to be a meeting tonight.

Later, they sat round that same table over tumblers of red wine: Rafe, Beatrice, Charles, Stefan, the doctor and a couple of others. Stefan had brought along a man only he and Rafe had met before – a great burly type with a handsome hook-nosed face, thick dark hair and eyes that flashed in the lamplight. Beatrice wondered if his ancestors mightn’t have been Mediterranean pirates.

‘There are difficulties.’ The
maquis
leader rapped his fingers on the dining-room table as he spoke. ‘The others want to do things differently.’

Rafe sighed and said, ‘Somehow we have to work together. You know the plan; you’ll have to talk them round. This is not something I’ve come up with – I’ve got my orders from further up. They must know that.’

Stefan swore violently under his breath. ‘They’re a lot of country bumpkins,’ he almost shouted. ‘Concerned with their own petty quarrels. How can we stop the Nazi pigs if we all think of ourselves, huh?’

The stranger’s eyes flashed dangerously.

‘Thank you, Stefan,’ Rafe said quietly. ‘It won’t help to insult others. But I have to tell you, Charles heard again today: we’re to continue with the plan, no changes. Now perhaps we could look at the details again.’

Beatrice didn’t know the exact location of the bridge that was to be blown up, but problems had arisen because of tighter German security, and it seemed that there was a certain hot-headed proposal from this Resistance cell, whose job was to carry out the mission, that involved storming a German position. This was almost certain to end in failure, if not in exposure of the entire operation. They had to be dissuaded from doing this at all costs.

She listened to Rafe’s quiet but firm voice as he soothed the visitor, praised his cell’s courage, appealed to the man’s pride, then twisted his words in such a way as to make the man not only accept the official line, but also make him believe that he’d come up with the idea in the first place.

‘It’s important that your group be seen to succeed in this mission,’ he told the
maquis
leader. ‘When the war is over, the people will look to men such as yourself for leadership, not only because of your bravery but because of your cleverness.’

‘Yes, yes,’ the man said, ‘and we will make sure that they do not look to us in vain. The needs of the ordinary working man will be met. First we’ll deal with the enemies within our ranks, and the collaborators. You know—’

‘Of course you will. But that is for the future,’ Rafe said, a tad impatiently. ‘Now we must address the present, so you will go back to your men and tell them that the original plan is the one to follow. Is that understood?’

‘Yes. You can rely on us.’

‘I know we can. Now, that girl who told you about the shift changes, can you go back to her . . .?’

When the official meeting broke up two hours later, Beatrice crept exhausted to bed, leaving Rafe, Stefan and the
maquis
leader still talking below.

A week later, Beatrice got off a train in Périgueux and walked down a long shadowy street to a square in front of the cathedral. She was supposed to turn up one of the smaller roads off its north side in search of a particular address, but she did not dare because as her journey had progressed she’d become more and more certain that she was being followed.

It was the man she’d seen on the day she’d arrived at Café le Coq; today he didn’t have his briefcase with him, but she’d noticed him pass her compartment in the train, and that’s when she’d started to feel uneasy.

By the time they reached Périgueux she’d almost dismissed her worries, but then she saw him ahead of her on the platform and had hung back, waiting until she thought he’d gone. But walking up the long boulevard to the cathedral square she’d turned round a couple of times and seen him. She’d quickened her footsteps and decided she’d stop at a café to see what he would do next. Outside the smarter of the two cafés in the square, two Nazi officers stood talking and laughing with an elderly but elegantly dressed Frenchman. She passed on to the smaller, shabbier establishment, sat at a table outside, ordered coffee and, while she waited, contemplated the cathedral, a rather astonishing building that combined a square, pineapple-capped bell tower with a roof of nipple-like domes. She was just thinking how alien it was after English Gothic when she caught sight of the man who’d been following her. He was standing at the edge of the square, looking straight at her.

What he did next was surprising. He came over to the table and asked if he could join her. She looked about quickly. The café was busy, so it would have been rude to say no, and anyway she couldn’t think of a reason that wouldn’t rouse his suspicions. So she shrugged and, as he pulled out a chair, stared out across the square.

‘You think it’s ugly,
n’est-ce pas
? I see it in your eyes.’ Brigitte had been right about his odd French with its hard rolling Rs. She wondered whether he might be German.

‘Excuse me?’

‘The cathedral. You don’t like it.’

‘What’s wrong with it? It’s just the cathedral. I was daydreaming. Is it a crime now to daydream?’

The waiter arrived with her coffee and the man ordered some for himself. ‘I will pay for the lady’s coffee,’ he said.

‘Oh, no.’

‘Ah, why not. I wanted to talk to you. I’ve seen you in Café le Coq.’

‘I work there.’ She was watching the Nazi soldiers, who were now shaking the hand of the elegant old gentleman and walking away.

‘My name,’ he said, ‘is André. And you, I’ve heard them call you Paulette.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The café belongs to my cousin and her husband.’ If she tried to sound outraged at his audacity then maybe she wouldn’t sound nervous.

‘But she is not really your cousin.’

‘What a thing to say! Of course she is. Not first cousins. That is, she and my mother were.’ She was worried now.

‘No. You don’t need to say anything more, but I think we both know what I am talking about.’

Beatrice gathered her things and stood up, trying to look very young and very shocked, but he put a hand on her arm and said, ‘It’s all right. Your secret is safe with me.’ His eyes flickered across the square to where the German soldiers now stood watching a group of children playing hopscotch.