Ormerod's Landing (48 page)

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

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sound and, standing up, put her fingers beneath the material and released it from the inside.

'Thanks,' he said. 'My mother was always having to do that.'

She considered his whole body, touched his arms and the
middle of his chest and then his throat. When she leaned against
him her short hair was just below his chin. 'It is so cold in here,'
she said. 'Keep me from being cold.'

He stood with his arms warming her, letting her do the next
thing. She did, unbuckling his belt and deftly undoing his front buttons. The slim flats of her hands went down the hair of his
loins and the thick tops of his legs. He leaned to her and let
his hands caress her back, rubbing her infinitesimally, gently scratching her backbone, letting his fingers run along the tight
skin cleft between her buttocks. She became at once limp and drowsy and encouraged him to the floor. He bent with her and
almost fell on top of her. Regaining his balance he lowered her
to the rough mattress. Lying there, fragile with his large body arched on hands and knees above her, she looked up and,
reaching out for his neck, pulled him carefully down on top of
her. He pulled the second blanket over them.

'You are a very considerate lover, Dodo,' she said eventually,
when they were quiet afterwards.

'It's my nature,' he smiled at her in the half-light. There were
dark circles round the notable eyes.

'I think it is,' she said. 'You will never achieve anything.' She kissed him goodnight. 'We must sleep. Pull the blankets across
us. Tomorrow there are things of importance for us to do.'

In the early summer of 1940 the Normandy spa of Bagnoles de
l'Orne was declared an Open Town, a Red Cross centre for the
wounded of all armies from the fighting in Northern France, and, since all sides acknowledged this, it remained untouched by either troops or bombers. French, German and British
wounded were taken there from the last dying battles of France
and were treated by Germans and French doctors.

The town had long been a delectable situation, in the embrace of a large forest, with a lake at its centre and the famed thermal springs along the road going towards the twin resort
of Tesse la Madeleine. Before the war it was a place of invalid

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carriages, some of then steam-propelled, hotels of the upmost gentility, a demure racecourse, a casino, and widespread parks and lawns where those who had come to take the cure could sit or walk as well as they were able.

The thermal bathhouse was closed in 1940, one of the more unusual casualties of the war, and as the armies fought, advanced, retreated, won and lost, so the wounded and the maimed were brought into Bagnoles. For them the healing spa waters would have been to say the least, inadequate. But all the hotels were requisitioned and turned into hospitals or quarters for medical staff. The six storey Grand Hotel in the Avenue Phillipe du Rozier, facing the central lake, became a hospital for officers, all belligerents agreeing that commissioned wounded men were distinct from non-commissioned wounded.

At Tesse la Madeleine an ambitious mock-Renaissance chateau, towered and turreted and set amid some of the most imposing trees in Europe, became the headquarters of the German medical staff. The chateau, built on a shoulder of rising ground, was approached by two wide, circling roads, with lawns descending through the strong trees and flowering shrubs.

It was at this place, on the first Thursday of October 1940, that General Wolfgang Groemann, the military commander of the district and the man who had bought the bells at Villedieu, arrived at ten o'clock in the morning at the start of a visit to the medical establishment, where he was to meet French and German doctors and talk to the wounded of all nationalities in the hospitals.

Three hours before the general's car arrived at Tesse, before it was light, Ormerod was woken in the organ loft of the church by a touch on his cheek. He sat up to see Marie-Thérèse crouching a yard away clicking pieces of the sub-machine gun together. 'It is time, Dodo,' she whispered through the chill, leaden light. 'We must be on our way.'

'You haven't been doing that jigsaw puzzle all night have you?' he yawned, pulling a face at the gun. She permitted herself a smile but she did not look at him. Eventually the trapdoor opened and the Frenchman who always delivered the food came in. He had coffee and rolls. 'Room service,' said Ormerod.

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They drank the coffee silently and Ormerod put one of the rough rolls in his pocket, thinking he might need it later. They descended the wooden stairs into the vestry of the church. Even as they went down Ormerod saw the white, bare head of Jean Le Blanc almost illuminated in the half dawn. The ponderous eyes came up to meet him. In them he saw disdain and trouble. 'Morning,' said Ormerod politely.

'It is important,' said the big, pallid man, ignoring the greeting, 'that you today get into the Grand Hotel, which is now, of course, a hospital. There are some wounded British in there so it is possible that you will find the man you are looking for.' He glanced up, looking for the interest in Ormerod's eyes. He saw it. 'But most important is that you get into the room - the ward you call it - on the top floor of the building, the sixth floor, and that you remain there until members of our group arrive.'

Ormerod looked at him suspiciously 'What's going to happen? Am I allowed to know?'

'Later you will know,' said Marie-Thérèse at his elbow. 'It is important that the way to the ward is kept open. That there is no one who would stop us getting in there.'

'How do I get in?'

'We have a French doctor who has agreed to help. It was difficult,' said Le Blanc, 'but we were able to get him to assist us in the end. He will meet you and he will see you get to the ward. It may be that you are disguised as a casualty.' He smiled thinly. 'You will be able to spend the day in bed. Leave your gun here with us.'

Ormerod felt the doubts filling him. He glanced at Marie-Thérèse. 'There need be no worry on your conscience,' she said, knowing the meaning of the look. 'The Boche have no conscience when they take people to their concentration camps. They have already started doing that to people in Paris. The Jews in Paris now wear a yellow star.'

Ormerod nodded. 'I'm here to do what you say anyway,' he shrugged. 'Is it possible to know what the plan is? What you are going to do?'

Jean Le Blanc shook his large head. 'You will see in time,
Monsieur l'Anglais,'
he remarked in his mocking way. 'Until

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then you will have to imagine.
We
know what we are doing and that is the important matter, you understand.'

'All right, I understand,' said Ormerod, who did not. He
stood waiting for them. There was still no light over the streets
although the thin echo of a cock crow could be heard from what seemed like miles away. They were waiting for something, apparently listening.

'I heard a cock crow,' he said helpfully. 'That wasn't a signal
was it?'

Marie-Thérèse looked at him impatiently. 'A cock crow is
not a good signal at this time of the day,' she said. 'Many cocks
crow. It would be confusing.'

Whatever the signal was, Ormerod never heard it. Perhaps they were waiting for a set time. They stood like people deep in thought or prayer. Then Jean Le Blanc raised his eyes and
nodded. 'It is time now,' he said. 'There is a man outside with a
bicycle for you. He will take you to the Grand Hotel where
our comrade the doctor is waiting. He will know what to do.'

Not much surprised Ormerod now. He touched the side of
Marie-Thérèse's hand with his thumb and said: 'Good luck.'

'Good luck, Dodo,' she answered soberly. 'For all of us.'

He went out into the stiff morning air. Just outside the door was a man who looked like a farm labourer or a road digger, his rough coat tied round his middle with string, his head covered by a beret like a black mushroom. Ormerod felt he ought to give the man a nod, which he did although it was
wasted because there was no response. Instead the man pushed
a bicycle towards him, a skeletal machine, the like of the one he had himself.

'Forgot my clips,' apologized Ormerod, tucking his trousers
into his socks. 'Hang on, will you.'