Charlotte Gray (25 page)

On tactical grounds, they said, the current state of emergency helped hasten through some overdue reforms, such as terminating the democratic excesses of the Third Republic. And on moral grounds they thought that a degree of mortification of the flesh (rationing, curfews) was not only well deserved, but would renew the national vigour that had fallen into a state of flabby, Jewish decadence. Charlotte offered the newspaper queasily to Yves, who shook his head silently, as though unwilling to risk his French in front of the three other people in the compartment.

After an hour the door slid open and a policeman asked to see their documents. He wore a different uniform from any they had seen before, but the three French people in the carriage seemed unsurprised by his request and meekly offered up their papers. Charlotte looked out of the window while he examined the identity card of Dominique Guilbert, checked its photograph against her averted face and wordlessly handed it back. She noticed that Yves managed to look both resigned and slightly truculent at yet another official's questioning his bona fides; the policeman himself seemed irritated by his task and slid the door closed with a minimal grunt. Charlotte had to check the beginnings of a smile of elation; she turned it into a yawn as she surveyed the passing countryside of southwest France. The phrase that came to her was 'piece of cake'.

At half past six the train eventually slowed beside a steep, wooded hill in which Charlotte could make out occasional patches of white stone and a couple of houses. Agen, Agen, barked the station tannoy in a jangling south-west accent. Yves and Charlotte descended from the train and walked along the platform to the main concourse, where they found a left-luggage office.

Yves carried a small briefcase.

Across the street from the station was a wedge-shaped building painted pale blue, with ridged plasterwork like a wedding cake, called the Cafe Hotel Terminus.

"We'll meet there after you've taken me to my address," said Yves. Instead of taxis, there were only horse-drawn carts outside the station. In Agen itself there were hardly any cars, and those that there were moved ponderously, powered not by petrol but by charcoal-gas engines-a cumbersome cylinder stuck into the boot. In atmosphere the town was fully southern: the street that took them down to the Boulevard de la Republique had roof tiles and wrought iron balconies of an almost Italian kind; yet at this time of day, the hour that in Rome or Naples would have seen the chattering passeggiata, there were few people on the streets and nothing for them to look at in the shop windows except photographs of Marshal Petain. There was a sullen, despondent air that the hot evening and the sound of women's voices through open shutters did nothing to dispel. A young man came toiling towards them on a bicycle, pouring sweat from the effort of pulling an adapted trailer in which sat two elderly, self-conscious people in Sunday clothes.

For the first time Charlotte felt frightened. The fear -was not of being arrested or deported, but a visceral response to the place itself. There were no Germans, there was no coercion; but this southern town, with many dark-skinned people, not French in the same way as Vichy or Illiers, seemed utterly adrift, in a state close to breakdown.

She hurried Yves down narrower streets towards the address whose location, and the route to which, they had both memorised. They made their way swiftly and unchallenged through the hot, pathetic town; they seemed almost the only people with anywhere to go.

They rang the bell on a door next to an empty cafe and heard footsteps on the stairs inside. A woman with a headscarf opened the door, and after what seemed to Charlotte an unnecessarily protracted exchange of coded reassurances, took Yves inside the house with her.

"Two hours," said Yves as he closed the door behind him. Charlotte walked a long loop back towards the station, as slowly as possible, to pass the time. She found that her lips were moving silently and that she was talking to Gregory, as she often did when she was alone. Her conversations with him served different purposes according to her mood, though the premise on which they all operated was that he was not dead.

Not dead, she thought, as she sat in the bar of the Hotel Terminus; not dead in either sense: still breathing, somewhere in France, and the love she felt for him, which existed between them like some fragile but ferocious third entity, that too was still alive.

Was it only the effort of her memory that sustained it and was that effort bound to be worn down, in the end, by the passage of time? She believed not. The survival of the feeling was in some ways more important to her than the survival of Gregory himself. The existence of that transcendent emotion had allowed her to escape from the confines of her personal history; it had granted value to her life.

It did not seem to matter whether it had first flared then, or then, at that, or this, or any other moment, because if it was real and had value, then it existed outside time.

Yet she did miss him. Simply, like a child removed from its mother, like any being taken from its source of love, she yearned for him now, here, this instant in the bar of the hotel, where she drank foul, dark coffee.

With her hands she longed to stroke his hair; the pores of her skin missed his touch; she felt sick and closed-off inside because the natural fluency of her thought had become shaped by conversation only with him. She did not feel the shapeless despondency that had afflicted her at various times before: on the contrary, she felt directed, almost galvanised. But the weight of her anguish over Gregory this one missing airman, this unreliable, perhaps (she shook her head as her lips moved) unworthy man filled her whole upper half, diaphragm, lungs, ribs, shoulders, with such crushing gravity that the sighs with which she was obliged to displace it shook her entire body.

She looked up from her table and saw Yves standing above her, looking down a little curiously.

"All right?" she said.

He nodded.

"We should perhaps find somewhere to stay the night," said Charlotte.

"Here?"

"It's rather gloomy, isn't it?" said Charlotte.

"I'm sure we could find somewhere a bit more cheerful. Shall we go and explore?"

Yves nodded again, and Charlotte left some coins on the table. She forced all thoughts of Gregory from her mind, trying to channel their unwanted energy into a renewed concentration on the assigned task of looking after Yves.

The problem of room-sharing was one that Yves raised diffidently, in English, in the park to which he directed Charlotte to be sure of not being overheard. It was peculiar enough that it should be she, not he, who did the talking in the hotel, he explained, but downright suspicious that she should then book two rooms. Of course, their identity cards would show they were not married, but that in a way made their travelling together far more plausible: a man would only ever take his mistress, never his wife, on a business trip such as his cover story described, and that was one thing, whatever the changes undergone by this traumatised country, that would still be understood by any real hotelier. His intentions, he would like to reassure her, were of course Yves dozed upright in an armchair in the corner of the room, having absented himself in the passage while Charlotte undressed. The bed was of three-quarter size, guaranteed to compel intimacy between two people but spacious enough for one to stretch out. For all her comparative comfort, Charlotte slept badly. Through the thin walls she could hear a couple making love, she with whinnying abandon, he with dogged grunts and floor-rattling shoves. The single lavatory at the end of the passage flushed on and off throughout the night while unembarrassed footsteps pounded back and forth over the bare boards of the landing.

Charlotte was relieved to be back on the train, heading north, the next morning. There were no seats available and almost no room to stand. Everyone on the train seemed to have at least three large pieces of luggage, and the purpose of most of their journeys, to judge from the smells that came from their suitcases, was to buy and bring home food.

Order seemed to have broken down under the burden of numbers; at one of the many halts on the way north she saw young men wriggling on to the train through the windows.

At Uzerche, Charlotte delivered Yves once more to his destination. Here he was in deep cover, according to Mr. Jackson, and no longer needed her guiding hand. His further movements were of no concern to Charlotte, and, on the G Section model of minimum information, she was strongly discouraged from inquiring about them. She gained the impression that he would be returning to London, perhaps even on the same flight as her, but did not ask. Until then her only contact with Yves would come as a result of wireless messages from London via the operator in Uzerche; communication between there and the Lavaurette area was unpredictable, though such messages as were received would pass through

"Octave'.

In Uzerche, the connection was established much more quickly than in Agen: the retired schoolmaster at whose suburban house they arrived had been expecting them for some hours and seemed relaxed about the contact.

He introduced himself as Gerard and invited Charlotte to have a drink before she made her way. It was mid-afternoon, and Gerard, a tall, courteous man, took a tray of drinks out on to the terrace at the back of his house where two black dachshunds were sleeping fatly on the gravel. He was a widower, he explained, and the dogs were his chief companions; it seemed clear to Charlotte that they were certainly receiving the better part of his meagre food ration. Gerard spoke of his visits to England in the 1920s and of his particular love of the Lake District; his punctilious and enlightened attitude seemed unperturbed by public events, though this civil equilibrium, it seemed to Charlotte, must have required him to avert his eyes.

Their drinks were finished, refilled and finished once again. Gerard's remarks to Charlotte took on a valedictory air. Yves looked at his watch.

Reluctantly, Charlotte stood up to go, and both men escorted her back into the house. She kissed Yves on either cheek as they stood in the hall and shook Gerard's hand.

When she heard the door close behind her and began to walk off down the quiet street, she felt for the first time a panic of loneliness.

Meanwhile, on a grey London evening, Cannerley was waiting in Sir Oliver Cresswell's outer office, twisting the cufflinks in his shirt beneath the scrutiny of an elderly secretary. He assumed there must be something unusually important behind the summons he had received by telephone that morning. This time he had made sure he was early.

"Come in." Sir Oliver appeared briefly at the door, which he left slightly ajar.

"Sit down."

Cannerley perched on the single hard chair that faced the desk. Sir Oliver stood with his elbow resting on the mantelpiece. For such a mentally scrupulous man, he kept a remarkably untidy office, with tottering piles of paper and two or three parched plants. The room was panelled, and above a long table against one wall was a reproduction of the Goya portrait of the Duke of Wellington. Sir Oliver sat down at the desk and looked out of the window.

"You remember our little chat the other day? Well, I've been thinking about it. And a little notion has occurred to me."

"Really?" Cannerley tried not to notice how unpolished his superior's shoes were.

Sir Oliver coughed.

"Are you familiar with the pattern of French resistance, such as it is?"

"Certainly. I wrote a paper on it. It was B-listed, but ' " Of course you did. Well, as you know, the Communists have been the only active group so far. But our government's not worried about them.

They have the whole weight of the Occupant and Vichy and the French populace against them. The problem is that there are now a number of Gaullist outfits starting up."

Cannerley leaned forward.

"I haven't heard much about them."

"There's been nothing to hear. Their policy is to wait for the moment to strike.

"Long-term action", I think they call it."

Cannerley laughed and Sir Oliver wiped the back of his hand swiftly across his own mouth.

"Meanwhile they're in the market for arms drops.

Their main network was infiltrated from the beginning by Abwehr agents. But although it's very small beer at the moment, our masters feel the Gaullist movement is something that needs to be watched."

Sir Oliver had a rolling 'r', which made a phrase like 'arms drops' problematic; it gave it an inappropriate smack of the nursery.

Cannerley found that this childishness made the whole enterprise sound paradoxically more frightening.

He tried to concentrate.

"I didn't know anyone took de Gaulle seriously."

"They don't. But if the war continues to run the Allied way ..."

"Even so," said Cannerley.

"Old Joan of Arc with his merry men in Carlton Terrace ... I mean, for a start, he's been sentenced to death by the French government!"

Sir Oliver sighed.

"Like the French, we have to think of the likely configuration of Europe after the war. We have to consider all alternatives, however preposterous. We want to be the first country in the new Europe, albeit with some American support."

"What about the Russians?"

"Good God, I can assure you there are plans to shake hands with our Russian friends as far East as possible." Sir Oliver gave a shudder.

"Meanwhile, the spiking of the Gaullist networks would serve a number of purposes. It would be a setback for the Abwehr. It would clear the way for G Section networks and stop de Gaulle getting too big for his boots.

It would help keep French resistance under British control. And of course the Service would come out smelling of roses. It's a happy coincidence of idealism and self-interest."