The Sea Garden (19 page)

The pictures she drew on were vibrant as ever, though. The crumbling stone farmstead overlooking the great Luberon valley where she was born. The blending room of the distillery in Manosque where she had experienced a kind of rebirth, beginning the transformation into the woman she was now. Scent was memory, and memory a complex blend of scent and emotion: the perfect flowers of the lavender hills, like millions of mauve butterflies fluttering on stalks; the violet; the heliotrope of home, with its heart of sweet almond and cherry vanilla. She mixed them all into her signature fragrance Lavande de Nuit, along with a breath of civet musk and a haunting trace of smoke.

Book III

A Shadow Life

1

Orchard Court

London, April 1943

T
he bath at Orchard Court was a deep black marble affair. This was unusual enough for a London flat (Iris was not the only one who looked at it longingly), but not as extraordinary as the onyx bidet by its side, the pair set off by striking black-and-white tiles. As there was nowhere else for visitors to sit as they waited, the bathroom had to serve.

Throughout March and April that year, an increasing flow of young men and women had arrived in the lobby of Orchard Court, a building on the corner of Portman Square and Orchard Street, and were shown up to this small flat, in which the sitting room and two small bedrooms were used as offices. The callers were never invited to Baker Street, but to this anonymous property a short walk away. “Best they never set foot inside the Firm, that way there's no danger of anyone seeing or hearing something they shouldn't know,” said Miss Acton.

That day, two men and a woman were sitting on the edge of the black marble bath; another man was standing. Two partially open umbrellas were hooked over the taps, dripping.

The visitors had been greeted at the door of the second-floor flat by Iris Nightingale, newly promoted to intelligence assistant, and shown immediately into the bathroom, where they perched incongruously in their town clothes.

Colonel Tyndale had been unavoidably detained, and the reason was not good news, Iris surmised, judging from his expression a moment ago in the hall. His narrow face was not built for unnecessary argument; his brow flamed and the bags under his eyes grew pronounced whenever voices rose in anger or frustration. He had finally arrived at Orchard Court, in a hollow-cheeked fluster of raincoat and papers; he and Miss Acton were now closeted in the sitting room where the interviews would take place.

At the door of the bathroom Iris produced a bottle of brandy and some unmatched glass tumblers. “It won't be long now,” she said brightly. “How about a drink?”

It really was the least she could do. Often the guests had very little idea why they had been invited to these odd gatherings. Their only qualification was that they had a French or Belgian parent, or spoke near-native French from years spent on the Continent. They came in batches after passing a selection interview in a small airless office consisting of two plain tables and some scuffed wooden chairs in the basement of the War Office, and were required to sign the Official Secrets Act.

These four were quiet ones, hardly speaking to Iris, let alone to each other. Not necessarily a bad thing. At this stage, it was merely a fact to note. Iris gave a friendly smile as she committed certain obvious traits to memory. The man she guessed was the oldest, thirty-five perhaps, in a well-cut suit, gave the briefest grimace at the mention of Miss Acton's name. He tipped his drink back in one. The man next to him wore a suit that had crinkled and was damp on the shoulders, and his blond hair was slicked back—caught out in the rain shower. He leant back against the tiles and looked up to the ceiling. The third man was very young. He met her eye, and a nervous tic jerked beneath his own, high on the left cheekbone. The woman sat calmly, answering when she was addressed but otherwise giving the impression that she was waiting for a doctor's appointment, absorbed in private thoughts. She was in her early twenties, pretty, though her dark hair looked as if she had cut it herself. She was the only one to refuse a drink. After a while, she got out some crochet work and bent her head over it.

“Sun and showers, what a day,” ventured Iris.

“Typical bloody England,” replied the man in the smart suit. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. Defensive, despite the air of sophistication.

“Better in here than out,” said the youngest, with an eagerness to please that only underscored his nervousness.

“I expect so,” said Iris.

The woman listened, now and then looking up from the hook and yarn to watch them in the mirror by the basin. Smart cookie, thought Iris. First impressions were vital. In some situations, that was all the chance they would have.

A low buzzer sounded.

“And we're off,” said Iris, nodding towards the nervous young man and deciding to put him out of his agony by giving him the first slot. “If you'd like to come with me. . . .”

 

I
t went without saying that Iris had no idea what she was getting into, though that was true one way or another, she suspected, of everyone who enlisted, was drafted, or served their country in any capacity during the war. If anyone asked, Iris made a self-effacing reference to the “little job” at which she was still plugging away. One of the other girls told her that she used to tell her friends she worked at Marks and Spencer's London headquarters, whose building they had taken over, until the questions about the chances of obtaining good-quality clothes under the counter became too onerous. She had to pretend to leave and “go into teaching.”

Iris had planned to join the Wrens when she left school, and might well have done so but for the intervention of her headmistress. Term was almost over when the jutting shelf of Miss Jeffery's bosom arrested any further progress down the library corridor.

“I understand you are contemplating your future in the Women's Royal Naval Service.”

“Yes, Miss Jeffery.”

“Have you considered playing to your strengths as a linguist and training as a secretary who can work in French and German? There is a bursary available, and I would be very pleased to recommend you.”

And so, because Miss Jeffery had almost always been kind and well-meaning, qualities all too rare in Iris's checkered experience of school life, the advice was taken. Iris enrolled in the three-month residential secretarial course in Bedford, gratefully accepting the bursary to pay her board and lodging, and assuming throughout that the language instruction in military and naval terms was required to enable her to enter the Wrens as a secretary or wireless telegraphist. The instruction was good, and Iris, always meticulous in her work, came top of her class of twenty-five in the final exams. She emerged with a certificate in typing, shorthand, and French and German translation. Her tutoring in Morse code did not seem to be certified on paper.

A few days after she'd completed the course, a letter came to her aunt's flat in Battersea from the Inter Services Research Bureau, giving no details but asking Iris to contact them to arrange an interview for a job. She telephoned the number she was given and was asked to present herself at a small hotel in Victoria the next day.

“Could you tell me a little more about the position, please?”

“Why don't you come along, and then it will be easier to explain,” said the woman's voice, clipped and authoritative, on the other end of the line.

“I will, but could you tell me please how you came to know I was looking for a job? It seems a bit—”

“You have been recommended. We'll see you tomorrow then, at ten. Good-bye.”

The next day the bus from Battersea dropped her at Victoria Station in plenty of time to walk to her appointment. October leaves had collected on the sandbags that lined the streets north of the river. The hotel was a soot-streaked commercial establishment behind Ebury Street. She was directed at the reception desk to a small room on the first floor, facing the street. She had hardly raised her knuckles from a tentative knock under the metal number 4 before a young woman wearing pearls and a grey serge suit pulled the door open. Twin beds had been pushed against opposite walls to provide seating. Between the beds, a wooden table took up most of the space.

A wide-shouldered woman with a gravelly voice stood up, held out her hand, and introduced herself as Miss Allott.

“Do take a seat.”

Iris took the bed on the other side of the table.

Miss Allott stared intently at a flimsy sheet of paper for a few moments.

“Born 1922, and you've just turned nineteen.”

“Yes, that's right,” said Iris.

“Lived in Hove, but in 1931 you were sent to a boarding school in Switzerland for six years. What were the circumstances of this move?”

Iris was taken aback, but found herself answering politely as ever, the natural result of years spent under the control of Miss Jeffery and her ilk. This Miss Allott, with her carefully sculpted hair and severe expression, was undoubtedly one of them.

“My father died. My mother remarried and went to live in Berne with her new husband.”

“There follow various boarding schools in Sussex and Wiltshire . . . would you care to elaborate on the reasons?”

“My mother . . . felt she was unable to cope. She was having difficulties in her second marriage. We returned to England. She couldn't settle in Sussex, so she tried Wiltshire. I think she wanted me close by but not actually at home.”

“And where is she now?”

“She lives just outside Salisbury.”

“Other family?”

“An aunt, my mother's sister. I'm currently staying with her.”

“So . . .” Miss Allott did not pursue the investigation. “Languages—you speak French and German well, and some Italian too?”

“I speak them well enough. French with fluency, German adequately. Some Italian, but only enough to get by.”

Miss Allott crossed her arms and leaned forward across the table.
“Que pensez-vous de la situation politique en France actuellement?”

Iris replied that it was an impossible situation politically for the French. Was their government for or against the old France and its people; were the members of the Vichy regime motivated by political expediency or personal power? And all the while the ordinary citizens were surely only trying to get by as best they could.

After a few more questions about her unsatisfactory background, Iris was abruptly dismissed from the twin-bedded interview room. She was making for the door when Miss Allott tossed one last ball.

“Would you say you were imaginative, Miss Nightingale?”

What an odd thing to ask.

Iris hesitated. “I don't consider that I am, particularly. I'm not a dreamer, if that's what you mean. I would say that I was rather straightforward . . . sensible. I've rather had to be, with a mother like mine.”

Miss Allott frowned. She said nothing more, and a moment later Iris was out in the corridor again. She had said too much about her personal difficulties. It seemed she had failed to satisfy her interlocutor, just as she always did her mother. But the next day a letter arrived inviting Iris to present herself for work the following Monday at 64 Baker Street.

It would be a few months before Iris realised that Mavis Acton (not Allott at all) made up her mind almost immediately as to the suitability of a candidate, and very rarely revised that opinion.

 

I
ris signed the Official Secrets Act on her first morning at 64 Baker Street. It was an elegant light-grey stone building, six windows wide; a brass plate by the door offered the anodyne misinformation that these were the offices of the Inter Services Research Bureau. She was introduced, with perfunctory politeness, to Colonel Hugh Tyndale, head of F Section. His harassed manner implied that Iris had arrived at a tricky juncture, but it was not long before it became apparent that this was his normal demeanour. He looked down on her—he was a tall, thin man with a stoop—and blinked through round tortoiseshell glasses before nodding his dismissal and hurrying past.

It was clear too that Miss Acton was the lynchpin of the operation. She may have had a commanding manner and expectation of total obeisance, but Miss Acton carried herself in the certain knowledge that men still found her attractive despite the weight of years; she must have been in her mid-forties. Her dark hair was immaculate, waved and pinned. Her signature scent of fern whispered of Paris before the war. Her excellent legs marched in high heels. Clip-on earrings made of silver and mother-of-pearl caught the attention, as if a single butterfly wing had alighted on each earlobe. The high-necked blouses in soft fabrics were chosen to drape and flatter. Mavis Acton was calm and reserved at all times, her edicts issued in low tones that both asserted absolute authority and attested to the strength of the Senior Service cigarettes she smoked with such fervent pleasure.

It struck Iris that in many ways she had swapped a world run by schoolmistresses for an uncomfortably similar setup run by another version of the type, lacking only the bushy eyebrows and corridor-blocking chest.

For the first few months, Iris's duties consisted of typing reports and translating from both French and German. She was part of a team gathering intelligence about all aspects of occupied France. Some of the information was very basic: the travel network, the way food coupons worked, the latest coins in the occupation currency minted by the Germans. Most of this came from newspapers provided by businessmen from neutral countries who were still permitted to travel into France, or who met their French counterparts in Lisbon or Geneva.

There were strict office rules. In the evenings, it was considered a serious breach of security to leave out any papers. Every book, every newspaper clipping, every single written word, had to be locked in steel filing cabinets.

Before they left the office in the evening, a night duty officer would come round with one of the twenty-four-hour guard to collect all wastepaper. Then they went through the room testing locks on cupboards and the steel cabinets, and checking that nothing of value was sitting in an unsecured drawer.

 

A
word please, Miss Nightingale.”

Iris followed Miss Acton into her office.

“You realise, don't you, that any slipup could put the lives of our people at risk?” said Miss Acton. She did not wait for a reply. “Blotting paper, Miss Nightingale. I am extremely displeased that you have been so careless. If you had been here longer, leaving out blotting paper would have been utterly unforgivable.”