Madeleine's War (6 page)

Erich nodded. “Oh, I can remember the speeches, word for word. Would you like to hear one now—?”

“No, Erich, we
wouldn't
,” said Katrine firmly. “Not unless you want to hear Madeleine on
Faust
.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, grinning and doing my best to restore order. “Let me have your choices by Friday. I need them then because, every so often, from now on, I shall be asking you to recite your lines—just to make sure that you really have memorized them.”

“Look at that,” said Ivan, pointing.

We all looked across to the lawn where a slate had fallen from the roof.

“What are we looking at, Ivan?”

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay
,

Which husbandry in honour might uphold
,

Against the stormy gusts of winter's day?

He chuckled. “Shakespeare, of course. I
do
like poetry.”

“
I DON
'
T THINK I
'
VE EVER SEEN
the sea looking so peaceful.” Madeleine sent a smooth, flattish pebble—one of many on the white sandy expanse—skidding off the tiny waves that fell at our feet. “It's hard to believe that if you sailed west from here, and kept going, that eventually you'd come to America. If the tide went out any further, you'd be able to walk it.” She picked up another pebble. “We could run away from all this.”

Today there was little wind, no rain, and precious few clouds. The sea was, for once, more green than grey.

Madeleine looked glorious, the deep auburn of her hair against the glitter of the sand and the sea. A light wind blew her hair across her cheeks and forehead and she kept pulling it away; she tilted her face up to the sun and closed her eyes. She looked as natural—and as wild—on that beach as the kittiwakes and the gulls.

I wanted to kiss her. More, I wanted to scoop her up off the sand and to feel the soft warmth of her body.

But I didn't know enough about Madeleine just yet to convince myself how much I liked her, and I was her commanding officer while we were in Scotland. That sounds formal, calculating, but Ardlossan was a small outfit. I had to be careful. I didn't
want
to be careful, but I knew I had to be.

I forced myself to be content just to be on the vast expanse of beach, alone, with her.

“This is the first real afternoon we've had off. The four of us, the recruits, I mean.”

“That's not so odd, is it? You must have worked out by now that nothing happens by accident here. You're watched at all times—‘observed' is perhaps a better word. We gave you absolutely no free time in the first two weeks—because we need to know how you are under pressure, how your judgment is affected, how your temper lasts out, how you behave when you're exhausted, whether your French accent or syntax or vocabulary slips. That's why you had everything thrown at you to begin with. As it happens, you all did rather well.”

“We didn't finish our conversation the other night, when the fire went to sleep before we did. You were starting to tell me about your time in the field. Now, come on. Who
is
Matthew Hammond? I want all the details, good, bad, and gory. Nothing sanitized, please.”

“The early bits are quickly told,” I said. “Brought up in Plymouth, school in Taunton, but with every summer in France because my mother is French, from Delme in Lorraine. My father was a doctor, my mother was his medical secretary, and my sister is, of all things, a cellist with the West of England Orchestra, based in Bath. Or she was until she met and married an American movie producer and decamped to Los Angeles—she now plays with a symphony orchestra there.

“We were a typical doctor's family, I think. Lots of medical talk, openness about blood and other stuff that most people find gory, my father being called out at all hours. He was a good man, but he was really more interested in his work than his children—I rather think children bored him. He took it for granted that I would be a doctor and Alice—my sister—would be a nurse. When it turned out that neither of us was going down that road, he was disappointed; he felt let down and he turned away from us even more. He turned away from me especially—we were a typical family in that Alice was closer to our father and I was closer to our mother.
At least I was. When my father died, she moved into a hotel in Malvern in the West Country. I see her a couple of times a year—not enough, I know.”

The wind was strengthening. The colour was going out of the sea.

“My father had strong feelings—about music, medical research, healthy exercise—but he rarely showed his emotions, he thought that was crude. I think some of that rubbed off on me.”

An ungainly seal hobbled ashore about a hundred yards away. Then it saw us and flopped back into the waves.

“I went straight from school into the army and from there, because I'm bilingual in French and English, I went into SC2, which I helped set up. So I've had a basic army training but no real regular army experience. I did the first course here at Ardlossan that you are doing now.

“I was parachuted into France in November 1941, just a few days before Pearl Harbor. I was dropped into the Franche-Comté area, because I knew it. There are a number of canals between Besançon and Belfort and my job was to contact the local Resistance, help to arm and train them, and then blow up a series of bridges over the canals. This both blocked the canals and destroyed the roads, interrupting trade and military movement in two ways.”

“You became an explosive expert?”

“Very expert at one stage, especially with incendiary devices. We had to be careful, though. If we blew up too many bridges, the Germans retaliated by shooting ten or twenty local villagers.”

“So how did you figure that out?”

“We worked with the Resistance. Some villages, even then, had reputations for being collaborators' villages. We blew up the bridges near those villages and if they shot those villagers…Well, the Resistance weren't
too
bothered. But I don't want you to think it was all that clean and straightforward—it wasn't. I was mainly recruiting and training Resistance people and trying to patch things up between the communists and the Gaullists.”

“Oh? You'll have to explain that.”

“I will, in just a moment, but you'll be getting formal instruction on it very soon. And please, keep talking in French.”

The wind gusted and blew strands of hair across Madeleine's face. She pulled them away. “Sorry.”

I didn't say then what I might have said, that my first love affair, at age eighteen, had been a highly secret fling with the mother of my best friend at school, who had seduced me early one December evening when
her husband and son—both choristers—had been rehearsing for the local carol concert. The affair had been consummated only a few times before she realised how dangerous her behaviour was. I had been hopelessly infatuated with her, and although I too knew that what we were doing was wrong and couldn't—shouldn't—last, it took a while to get over. More important, after that younger girls, young women my own age, were nowhere near as sexually experienced as Rob's mother was, nowhere near as exciting, and for a while that was a problem.

“France, as you know,” I went on, “is a much more left-wing country than Britain. The Communist Party there is very strong. It has been very good for the Resistance, better in fact than anyone else. But of course by no means everyone is a communist, and many are against them. So patching things up was one of my jobs.

“I spent several months in and around Besançon. Most of my time was spent organising airdrops of weapons and explosives—and agents, of course. I set up four circuits in the Lorraine area, which, being near Germany itself, was more heavily populated with Germans than some other areas of France.”

“That must have been dangerous.”

“At times, yes. I remember once, when we were trying to blow up an oil dump, we ran into a large convoy of lorries carrying armoured personnel carriers. They prevented us getting to the canal bridge that we were aiming for, so we hid in the lock-keeper's cottage. When we got there, there was a German major and his French girlfriend, totally naked.”

“What did you do?”

“He wasn't quite naked—he had his gun with him. But I shot him, and the Resistance leader shot the woman—not just because, in his eyes, she was a traitor, but because he knew her and she knew him, and she would surely have betrayed us had we let her go. I can't say I liked what we did, but it's the kind of situation wars throw up.”

I looked back the way we had come. We were still alone on the beach.

“Anyway, the sound of our gunfire had probably drawn attention to us, so we had to get lost that night. We moved off into a nearby forest, but we didn't know that the Germans, suspecting it to be a Resistance hideaway, had mined the paths. One of the Resistance people stepped on a mine and was killed outright, there and then. I was a few yards behind and some shrapnel tore into me, into my chest. God, it was hot. Fortunately, one of the other Resistance people in our patrol was a doctor, and he looked
after me. The shrapnel was locked in my rib cage, and though it didn't reach my heart, it had punctured my lung. The explosion meant we had to keep moving—and I was carried miles. Eventually, I was looked after in a Resistance field hospital, and the Germans, obviously, never found us. I took weeks to recover.

“I wasn't entirely idle. I gave classes in sabotage techniques from my hospital bed—actually a cave in a remote area. I gave English instruction—and I gave advice.”

“How long did your wound hurt?”

“It still hurts sometimes, when I breathe.”

She hesitated. “I hope I don't get injured or maimed. I think I'd rather be killed than disfigured.”

“That's what we all think. I was lucky there, too. The shrapnel didn't spoil my good looks.”

She looked up at me, her lips slightly parted.

“I've still got the piece of shrapnel if you want to see—”

“What's that?” Madeleine said quickly, in almost a whisper. She pointed along the sand, to where a black something had been washed ashore.

Instinctively, we walked towards it.

As we came close we could see it wasn't black, but grey.

Madeleine stood over it. She kicked it, but gently, moving it with her foot. “It's…It looks like—”

“It's a life jacket,” I said. “It got separated from its owner.”

She looked up at me. “Do you think…? Will the owner be—” she peered along the shore “—not so far away?”

“That depends,” I said. “I hope they
were
separated some way off—the life jacket is German.”

“It
is
? How do you know?”

I pointed. “The stencilled writing—there. See? It says
SCHWIMM WESTE.”

She looked out to sea. “And it looks so calm today. How did it get here, do you think?”

I shook my head. “Let's hope that whoever was wearing this was in a torpedoed U-boat that was sunk by our boys. Some of the crew got out, maybe, but there was a storm and…Well, this one didn't make it.”

We stared down at the life jacket in silence.

“I know what you're thinking,” I said after a while.

“Do you?”

“You're thinking that could be you, very soon.”

“I'm not the morbid type.” She nudged the life jacket again with her foot. “In fact, I was thinking about how lives end. This man, whoever he was, almost certainly died alone. Do you think that matters? Is it better to die at home, in your bed, surrounded by family—or doesn't it matter? Does it make any difference?”

She gestured at the life jacket. “I'll bet he was no older than I am. There could be a U-boat out there right now, looking at us with his periscope. Maybe they know about Ardlossan, what it's used for. Maybe they know all about SC2. Maybe that's what this life jacket really means.”

“Unlikely. We're important to the invasion but not—”

“Maybe they think we know when and where the invasion will take place. Maybe they're about to attack—invade
us
!”

I laughed. “Don't let your imagination run wild like that when you are in France. Keep your mind on the ground.”

She was suddenly serious. “You really
don't
know when the invasion will happen?”

“No, of course not. I should imagine not more than a few dozen people know that.”

“Why, then, am I wasting my time with someone so low down the pecking order?”

“You tell me. You suggested walking on the beach.”

She suddenly skipped away from me, along the sand. Then she stopped and turned back. “Tell me about the women in France. Were there lots? Did you have affairs? Was there someone special, who meant more than the others? Someone you still think about?”

I didn't say anything for a moment, thinking back. Madeleine had a way of…She wasn't forward exactly. But she certainly didn't like standing still.

“Do you believe people fall for types?” She looked up at me, her eyes big and round. “I mean, do people fall for the same kind of person over and over again—tall people, wild types, quiet souls?”

“You mean…How does it go?…Like men who always fall for women who remind them of their mothers? Is that what you're saying?” She looked at me and made her eyes appear rounder than ever.

“I don't mean that, no. Not exactly.” I looked out to sea. No submarines as I could make out.

“Let's just say there was one woman who meant more than all the others. And the thing is—she had hair just like yours. Not the colour, but
all curly and unruly and unmanageable. She was for ever doing…what you do with your hair, lifting it up, holding it off your neck.”