Ormerod's Landing (22 page)

The men manoeuvred a small rattling crane alongside the
wagon and hitched its hook to the first bell. The crane creaked
and the cable tautened. The bell was raised a few inches at a time. Marie-Thérèse, like a curled-up baby, tumbled out into the arms of one of the men.

The crane was then moved along to Ormerod's bell. Grate
fully he felt it being raised a few inches at a time and he knew
his ordeal was over. He could scarcely move his limbs and the
men had to help him to the ground. The bells were quietly replaced and the men took the Englishman and the Frenchwoman with them into Vire.

They went through the shadows of the small town to another
'safe' house where a young girl gave them some food, a stew
and bread and a bottle of wine. Several furtive people arrived
and departed during the evening. None of them spoke to Ormerod
, nor could he understand anything that was said. It was
like watching a shadowgraph.

His body was still stiff from the hours beneath the bell and eventually he nodded to sleep in a rough wooden chair in the main downstairs room of the house. He had been sleeping for almost an hour when Marie-Thérèse woke him firmly.

'We leave soon,' she said.

'Oh God. Tonight?'

'Yes. You should be glad. We go to Bagnoles.'

'Ah,' he said, sitting up stiffly. 'That's more like it.'

There was an oil lamp in the room. She allowed herself a

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smile in its light. 'There is time for you to wash and shave your
self before you go,' she said.

Ormerod blinked. 'My disguise not pretty enough for you, eh lady?'

'You look as you are, a fugitive,' she said. Ormerod rose clumsily.

'If it's to Bagnoles we're going, I ought to get myself cleaned
up. I want to look tidy for Mr Smales.'

'Ah, Smales, there is another thing,' she said.

'What other thing?'

She regarded him steadily. 'We have an important operation
in Bagnoles,' she said. 'Nothing must get in its way .,.'

'Oh, now, look here ...' he began to protest.

'Everything will be okay,' she assured. 'But let
us
find Smales
for you - our local people will know where he is, or they can find out. You are not the most silent of men, Dodo, and we must tread carefully.'

Ormerod studied the girlish face in the lamplight. 'Le Blanc's
put his spoke in, hasn't he?' he guessed. 'He's the one. Well I've
come for Smales, and I intend to get him. So the Percheron bloody horse can stuff that...'

'We are under Jean's orders,' she told him bluntly. 'Nothing
can go against that. But we will discover about Smales. I prom
ise, Dodo.'

He rose grumpily. 'I get the feeling I'm being buggered about,' he said. 'What if I don't agree?'

'Jean Le Blanc will shoot you,' she said simply. 'Then you'll
never get to Smales.'

Ormerod knew where the toilet was. He had heard the flush going. He sighed. 'All right. I don't like it, but I'll go along with it.' He regarded her small face seriously. He could not resist touching the cheek with his finger. 'You promise, then,' he said. 'About Smales?'

I promise,' she said. She put up her hand and held his finger against her cheek. 'At Bagnoles,' she said. 'It will be something
amazing.'

They travelled to the fringe of Bagnoles de l'Orne in a butcher's van taking meat to the hospitals. In the hour's journey

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Ormerod was knocked first one way and then the other by sides of pork swinging from hooks. It was not a refrigerated van but it was very cold. He and Marie-Thérèse crouched together in the darkness.

Once they were stopped at a German check-point but the driver of the van was either convincing or the soldiers were lazy because they did not open the rear doors. Ormerod and the woman breathed with relief among the pork.

At the conclusion of the journey they left the van stiffly and were conducted by a young priest to the organ loft of a church on the outskirts of Bagnoles. Ormerod sat on the floor next to Marie-Thérèse who was bowed with exhaustion. He looked about him. The pipes of the organ came like silver fingers through the floor, the roof went up into medieval dimness inhabited by shadows, spiders and bats.

A man came from the town with bread and cheese and coffee. Two mattresses and some blankets were hauled up from below and the fugitives were left there in the dark, the autumn wind snorting through the cracks and crevices in the ancient roof. Marie-Thérèse had hardly spoken a word. Her white face could be seen in the dark. Ormerod arranged the mattresses side by side and helped her to lie down. Then he stretched out gratefully beside her, held his large arms about her slim form, and they slept.

In the morning the furtive man who had previously brought the food returned with more bread, cheese and coffee. Ormerod sat up achingly. Birds were fluttering high up in the ceiling and splinters of daylight showed through the roof. 'The diet is a bit unvaried,' said Ormerod as he and Marie-Thérèse faced each other across the mattresses. 'No one can say you eat well as a spy.'

'We are
here,''
she pointed out. 'That is a victory for us. It was ingenious, don't you think, to get us away beneath the bells?'

'Ingenious but uncomfortable. Now I know how the clapper feels. Anyway, this is Bagnoles. Just think, chummy Smales may be just around the corner.'

She smiled, but seriously. The dusty light in the loft suited her face. 'You will get your chance,' she assured him. 'Smales

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will be found. But first, as I told you last night, Jean Le Blanc has some plans for Bagnoles.'

'Can't say I like the look of friend Jean,' admitted Ormerod. 'He puts the wind up me a bit.'

'The winds up you?'

'Not winds, wind. One wind. It means I'm worried about him.'

'Worried? You mean he frightens you?'

'Well not quite, but it will do. He looks the sort who is capable of anything.'

'That is why we need him. There are too many old women in France. He hates the Boche as I do. It made me sick when I heard French people singing songs with the Germans yesterday. This country is grovelling on its stomach. Now we even give our church bells to the Nazis.'

A noise came from below and Ormerod's fingers went to the gun. It was Jean Le Blanc. His bold dome came through the trapdoor. 'Ah, it's Humpty Dumpty,' said Ormerod.

'Ca va?'
the man said, climbing like an agile giant through the trapdoor. 'It goes well?'

'We are recovered,' answered Marie-Thérèse. 'Are there no alarms?'

'It is quiet,' Le Blanc nodded. 'We have spent all night booby-trapping the bells. When they get to Minden they will explode.'

'Christ, you think of everything don't you?' said Ormerod grudgingly. 'Let's hope nobody moves them in Paris.'

'They are the general's special plaything,' said Le Blanc. 'And the bombs will only blow up when the bells are moved from their bases.' He smiled like somebody remembering a kindness. 'They will make only one sound, those bells, and it will not be ringing.'

He turned his back on Ormerod as though he had nothing more to say to him. He faced the girl, sat down and they conversed rapidly in French for ten minutes. Eventually he seemed satisfied and rose from the mattress.
'Au revoir, Monsieur I'Anglais,'
he said to Ormerod as he opened the trapdoor and descended the ladder. 'Soon there will be important work for you to do.'

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'I can't wait,' nodded Ormerod dryly. The dome began to descend. 'Mind your head,' he called after it. 'They'll never put it back together again.'

For three days Ormerod remained in the church loft. He was simply left there while Marie-Thérèse spent hours away, returning late to sleep exhausted on her mattress on the floor. They seemed to have no use for him; or they had concluded that he was too high a risk. He was bored but not sorry.

The man who had brought them food came back twice a day
and replenished Ormerod in the manner of a zoo keeper feeding a captive bear. He put the food over the top of the trapdoor, muttered a scattering of indistinguishable phrases and went away again. Ormerod grumbled to Marie-Thérèse when
she returned unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon. She
appeared white and drained.

'I'm beginning to feel like the housewife who only ever sees
the milkman,' he complained. 'Off you go to work and I'm stuck here all day waiting for you to come back.'

She understood the wry joke and she smiled faintly at him. 'I am sorry Dodo,' she said wearily. 'We are getting men together here. It is very good. We are organizing something ... something very big. We will need you then.'

Ormerod looked at her through the dimness. He wondered,
not for the first time, how someone so slight could be so concerned with violence. I wouldn't mind something to read,' he
said. 'My eyes are getting used to this place now. I can even spot the bats on the ceiling.'

She nodded tiredly. 'I will see if there is anything in English,'
she promised. 'I will get them to bring it here.'

From the shopping bag she carried she took out the pieces
of a sub-machine gun and began slipping it together. She went
out an hour later and the man brought the food in the evening and pushed an additional carton through the aperture, shoving
it towards the seated Ormerod with ill-grace, like a worn-out Father Christmas delivering a present to the final child in the
world.

In the box were assorted books and magazines and a thought
fully provided candle and matches. Eagerly Ormerod took

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his prize to the enclosed part of the organ loft and there he lit the candle. The organ pipes were close together and all around him. It was as though he were sitting in a barred cage with no space between the bars. He delved into the box. He held the candle eagerly to the first book he took out. His heart dropped.
'Bunty Bunnikins and the Naughty Gnomes,'
he read miserably. 'Oh, sod it! I've read that.' The next offering was just as unpromising:
Super Tales for Girls,
then
A Manual of Organic Chemistry.
Groaning he put his hand in again and came out with half a dozen English boy's comics. Relief flooded through him.
'Hotspur, Champion, The Wizard!'
he whispered to himself. 'That's a bit better.'

The candle spun shadows around the organ pipes. He had forgotten the food. He settled back and began to read 'Rock-fist Rogan', eating every word slowly so that the adventure would not come to a conclusion too quickly. He exhaled deeply at the end of the story. Now for 'Wilson the Amazing Athlete'. Then the 'Wolf of Kabul' with the lethal cricket bat wielded as a club. Ormerod read hungrily. He began to chew a lump of bread and cheese as he read. The frustrating moments came at the end of episodes of serials. He finished the last sentence then stared out into the great darkness of the Normandy church. What happened next? He was so entranced that he only heard Marie-Thérèse arriving when she was almost through the trapdoor.

She laughed outright when she saw him, knees up to his chest, bread in hand and mouth, eyes glowing at the story. 'Ah,' she said. 'They found you some English reading.'

'I'll say,' he grinned. He glanced at the date on the comic paper he was holding. 'I'm catching up on years of neglect.'

Indulgently she moved towards him, and absently taking some bread and cheese from the box, she leaned over and read across his shoulder. Her tension had gone.

'Red Fury,' she recited. 'It is about Communists?'

'It's about a Red Indian,' sighed Ormerod. 'A boxing Red Indian. Kids don't go a lot on Communism.' He was aware of her chin on his shoulder. There was a faint dry smell about her, like old lavender. 'The trouble is,' he said, 'some of the stories are serials, see. You have to break off just when it's

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really getting exciting.' He glanced at the date on the comic in his hand. 'I mean, you don't suppose the people who gave you these might have the
Hotspur
for May 14, 1938, do you?'

She laughed pleasurably and suddenly leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. Then, after a pause, on the lips. He sat retaining his hold on the edge of his comic.

She withdrew her face a few inches. 'In the whole world,' she said with slight mockery, 'there is war and hate, and here you are, Dodo, reading schoolboy adventures.'

He shrugged. 'There was nothing else except
Bunty Bunnikins and the Naughty Bloody Gnomes,'
he told her seriously. 'Or
Organic Chemistry.'

She sighed deeply and sat down, resting her flank against his body and her head against his shoulder. I am so
fatiguée,'
she said. 'We have been doing so much. Everything is organized. Now all that is left is for it to go right or wrong.' She turned and looked into his steady face. I need you to lean on, Dodo,' she said. 'Sometimes it is all too difficult and too much for me.' She closed her eyes. Her face was very pale in the candlelight. In an almost fatherly fashion he awkwardly put his arms about her. They easily encompassed her. She drew close to him and kissed him again. 'I am not too tired for you,' she said, opening her eyes to him.

Pushing aside
Hotspur, Bunty Bunnikins
and
Organic Chemistry,
Ormerod stood up, lifted her and carried her with great care to the mattresses lying on the organ loft floor. Their shadows in the candlelight were cast hugely upon the walls ascending into the cave of darkness. When they had got there and he had laid her down, he stood, in his unskilful way, seeming not to know what to do next. She looked up and noted his expression. She smiled, understanding his clumsiness, and quietly, as if she were alone, began to take her clothes off. He found himself gazing down at her naked shoulders in the opaque light, the graceful arms, the slim neck, the calm breasts. She pulled one of the blankets around her like a habit. He took his upper clothes off also, watching her all the time except when his jersey, his shirt or his vest was covering his eyes. In his preoccupation he omitted to properly unbutton the shirt and it became fixed over his head. She laughed with hardly a