Charlotte Gray (23 page)

"Yves' followed her into the plane and took up his position opposite. He gave her an encouraging wink. Charlotte was filled with a sudden certainty that she was going to feel sick. The lack of any view, the mechanical smell and her sense of anxiety reminded her of sitting in the back of her father's shooting brake on long drives across the Highlands, with the windows half fogged by rain, the air heavy with pipe smoke, her view bounded by the back of her parents' heads and Roderick's bare knees beside her.

There were several wooden crates stowed at one end of the fuselage with parachutes attached. In addition to Yves and Charlotte, there were two RAP

sergeants on board, who would act as dispatchers when they reached the drop zone. The engines started up while the two men checked that everything was securely strapped; then one of them settled himself between Charlotte and the partition that separated them from the nose section, which contained the controls and the flying crew. He patted her on the thigh and grinned.

"All right, my love?" Everyone seemed to be from Lancashire. The plane came to a halt and the engine noise increased. Gregory would know what this meant: perhaps they were waiting for a signal. Then they had it; and the plane began to roar and shake as it committed itself full-heartedly to the runway. The whole body of it seemed to tremble with the effort of making this unnatural transition; metal, weight, loading, bodies and gravity fought against the bull-like perseverance of the engines until, reluctantly, against nature, the plane hauled itself up off the ground.

Until her training at Manchester Charlotte had only once been in an aeroplane, when she flew to Rome to complete her Italian course; all her journeys to France had started with the boat train at Victoria and finished at the Gare du Nord. The peculiar thing about this plane was that it seemed to be pointing downwards: there was a clear upward slope from nose to tail.

After a few minutes she asked the sergeant why this was and he told her it was just a characteristic of the Whitley, nothing to fret about, and that they were in fact climbing steadily. From a cardboard box he produced some cups and a thermos, from which he poured tea. Yves accepted with a smile and Charlotte, thinking her stomach might be happier with something to work on, did likewise.

"I've got something a bit stronger if you'd like it," said the sergeant, holding up a flask. Charlotte remembered her father telling her how the rum ration would come up to the front in the last war before the men were required to go over the top into the storm of steel.

"What is it?" she said.

"Rum."

She shook her head: she did not need that kind of courage to drop into an unoccupied field in the country for which she yearned. Yves also declined, and the sergeant replaced his flask in the box.

"We'll be going over the French coast at Cabourg," he said, 'then down over Tours. We'll have to have the lights off soon. I suggest you try and get some sleep. I'll not let you miss your stop. Oh, and by the way." He was having to shout to be heard over the engines.

"If you hear gun fire that's probably our lad in the rear turret just testing his equipment. Doesn't mean Jerry's on our tail. All right?"

Charlotte had not known there was a gunner on board, but it seemed a vaguely comforting thought. Yves smiled and nodded; he seemed to be dropping off already. The dim lighting was extinguished as they crossed the Channel, and in the darkness Charlotte tried to picture Cabourg below them. She thought of how she had sat in Monsieur Loiseau's shady garden with her book. In the shaping of one man's imagination, this Norman seaside town, renamed Balbec and moved a little to the west, had offered a version of unstable paradise.

After the journey of the little train and the bewitching sight of the small band of girls on the beach, the furtive grandeur of the hotel itself had been the setting of snobbery, humiliation and the narrator's kiss declined by Albertine, the object of his love. Yet as a teenager, reading Proust's novel for the first time, Charlotte had seen Balbec as a place which had encapsulated some perfectly developed society, where an intense feeling might be properly valued, not dismissed merely because, like all things, it passed.

She did not really understand what the jealous narrator meant when he suspected Albertine of enjoying 'hidden pleasures' with Lea and the other women. Now perhaps there were Nazi officers in the hotel dining room; all the bedrooms where once the wealthy inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Germain had changed from their modest woollen bathing costumes into their evening dresses and white ties were occupied, four at a time, by murderous young men in grey uniforms. Perhaps the gorgeous world of the book was more than just fictional; perhaps it was untrue.

Eventually Charlotte felt the sergeant's hand once more on her thigh.

"We're starting to go down, love. We've passed over Tours and we're coming near Limoges. We're going to drop the stores first, then the two of you. Obviously if we did it the other way round you might get a nasty surprise dropping on top of you. He's going first, then you. Now I'm going to show you the line because I want you to be happy that you're firmly attached." He pointed to the connection between the parachute and the static line that would jerk it open as soon as Charlotte was clear of the undercarriage.

"See? Nice and firm. No worries?"

Time."

Both sergeants went forward to the drop hole, which was just behind the cockpit partition. They hauled the two halves of it open and beckoned Yves and Charlotte to come forward. Charlotte peered into the darkness.

At first she saw nothing, and then she could make out the twinkle of lights in a small town. She felt a stinging in her eyes.

The other sergeant gestured them back to their places as the plane began to descend, though he himself stayed by the hatch. The pilot seemed to be having difficulty in getting the heavy bomber on line, and it pitched and heaved weightily as he fought to level off at the prescribed height.

Charlotte felt sweat erupt on her palms as the engine roared, faded and roared. She swallowed hard and forced out saliva; she saw the sergeant by the hatch mouthing something anxiously, but could not hear for the sound of the engines. Then she saw his thumbs go up and she lip-read the word 'lights': somewhere in the heaving darkness below was a farmer with a torch and Charlotte's heart filled with absurd love for him.

The sergeants began to push out the crates, and they could feel the heavy jerk beneath the fuselage as the strops paid out and ripped open the parachutes. Six crates went down in quick succession, then the plane climbed and began a long banking turn to come in for its second run.

"You lot now," grinned Charlotte's sergeant as he beckoned them up to the hatch.

Yves offered Charlotte his hand.

"Good luck." They squatted by the hole as the heavy plane once more bucked and plunged its way round.

Interior lights were switched on in the fuselage and a red lamp appeared on the wall above the hatch. Yves's sergeant pulled him forward, watched the light until it turned green, then heaved him out into the night.

They heard a bang and a flap. Charlotte's sergeant pulled her by the arm to the edge of the hole; she sat with her feet dangling in the darkness. She saw his anxious eyes straining up at the red light. Then he kissed her cheek and hurled her through the floor.

She was driven upside down, then sideways, by the blast; she had no breath, no sense, then she felt the straps of the parachute dig into the flesh on the bottom of her thigh-bones as the canopy opened and the straps took her weight. The parts of her body, which seemed to have been dispersed about the sky, head there, legs far behind, stomach somewhere back in the fuselage, began to reassemble themselves about one central point provided by the pull of gravity on the webbing between her legs. The momentum of the plane meant that the parachute was still oscillating in wide, sickening arcs, but beneath the nausea and the fear Charlotte felt the exhilaration of the drop and the safety of knowing, from the pressure of the straps, that she was safe. The ground hit her while she was still swinging, much before she expected, and she cracked her elbow as her legs-irreproachably together - could not stop her hurtling sideways on impact. She felt earth and grass smacking into her face and entering her mouth. For a moment she lay still, unable to move or breathe. Slowly she gathered herself, bit by bit, and climbed to her feet.

As she breathlessly took in the solid facts of her arrival, smacking the disc on her belly to release the parachute, looking round at the beams of torchlight in the darkened field, she felt no fear, only the irresistible uprising of happiness. In the farmyard the three men worked swiftly to unload the crates from the cart while the rib by horse snorted in the moonlight.

"Almost done. Just wait one minute."

Yves and Charlotte did as they were told; neither could think of anything to say, but they found themselves continually smiling at one another. One of the men produced their suitcases from an opened crate.

They were led into the house and introduced properly to Octave, Auguste and Cesar. Having been trained by a G Section visitor, the men were scrupulous about using only these names, and Charlotte found it difficult to penetrate even this elementary cover to guess what kind of people they were. They did not seem like farmers. The one called Octave was in his late twenties, dark, with a twitchy, humorous face; he spoke quickly and in a markedly Parisian way. Cesar looked like a schoolboy, tall, with big hands and a low voice, but clumsy and deferential in his manner, as though embarrassed by his education.

Only Auguste looked like a man of the region: he was solidly made, with a high colour and a shaggy moustache that seemed prematurely grey. He also took charge of the cooking, producing a five-foot length of thick sausage, which he cut into shorter pieces and threw into a frying pan on the range.

Cesar fetched a round loaf of heavy bread from a cupboard and Octave filled their glasses with wine.

As they drank each other's health. Charlotte had the impression that it was not the first wine the men had drunk that night. When the sausages were almost ready, Auguste broke half a dozen eggs into the pan, then served the whole lot on two plates.

"But what about you?" said Charlotte as Auguste joined the other men at the table and sat back with an expectant look to watch his visitors eat.

"We've already had dinner."

Charlotte calculated that in addition to three fried eggs she had two and a half feet of sausage on her plate.

None of the three men would be available to help them in the morning, so they spent several minutes going over maps and making sure that Charlotte and Yves knew where they were and where they had to go. They admired the false papers that had been made for them in London in a grey stucco-fronted house on the Kingston by-pass, Mr. Jackson had told Charlotte with dry enjoyment. The next day they would walk to the station at Lavaurette, a distance of about five kilometres, and take a train; Octave told them to take what they wanted from their cases for the night, and he would arrange for them to be left at the station: walking across country with suitcases might look suspicious.

When Charlotte could eat no more, she pushed her plate into the middle of the table and over-rode Auguste's exclamations of surprise and disappointment by persuading Cesar, who had been watching with insatiable adolescent hunger, that he might help her out.

The men said goodbye and shook hands warmly. Yves and Charlotte would be quite safe for the night; there was no need for them to worry.

Octave wrote down his office telephone number on a piece of paper, showed it to Charlotte, then, when she had memorised it, put it in his pocket.

"There are hardly any Germans in the Free Zone," he said.

"But you need to watch out for the Vichy police. And be careful with gendarmes, though most of them will turn a blind eye. I'm sure you've been told all this."

Yves nodded. The more time she spent in his company, the more Charlotte liked Yves; he was a calm, taciturn little man, but he had the light of a wicked impatience in his eyes.

They found two bedrooms upstairs on either side of the farmhouse.

Offered the choice by Yves, Charlotte picked the one whose bed had a bolster.

She had kept back from her suitcase one of the G Section French vests, which she wrapped over the part of the bolster on which she intended to lay her face. She had also retained some washing things, though these were less useful since the farmhouse had no running water.

As she pulled the shutters noisily together. Charlotte glimpsed the rear light of a bicycle, wobbling from side to side, as Julien Levade tipsily tried to keep his balance with the weight of Charlotte's suitcase on the metal luggage rack above the rear wheel.

Mlle Cariteau's house, despite its open position on the main road and its numerous large windows, seemed incapable of capturing the light.

The upstairs room in which Andre and Jacob were lodged admitted only slats or wedges of summer sun across the window seat and on to the worn floorboards; the long interior corridors, lined with vast wooden-fronted wardrobes, were in perpetual dusk.

As the days went by, Madame Cariteau, thinking it might stop their thoughts from roaming, tried to settle the boys into the semblance of a routine. She had one or two children's books left from the childhood of her own daughter, and she found a doll and some wooden toys in one of the wardrobes. Sylvie had been a good girl, an easy child to bring up, with a naturally hopeful attitude, despite having no father. So many children in Lavaurette were in the same situation that, although Sylvie might have felt it as a sadness, it was never a peculiarity. But, while the relationship between mother and young daughter had been happy and fruitful, it had also been a long time ago.