Tightrope Page 10

  HIT IN THE FACE

  They took her away and interrogated her. They hit her about the face. They plunged her into an ice-cold bath in which she nearly choked to death.

  But not a word of her comrades or her work did she betray.

  For months she was kept in solitary confinement in a Gestapo prison near Paris. Eventually, as Allied forces liberated the French capital, she was one of a batch of suspected English and French girls packed into a closed rail truck. For a week they travelled like this, with little food, drink or sleep, until they arrived at the notorious Ravensbrueck camp in North West Germany.

  There, with the help of a nurse working in the ‘hospital’ she managed to change identity with a French prisoner who had died of disease. ‘Probably,’ Miss Anne-Marie says, with tears of gratitude in her eyes, ‘this unknown victim saved my life because other English girls were murdered.’

  GUARDS’ WHIPS

  Now masquerading as a French woman she was put to work in a factory. Guarded by S.S. men and women with whips and clubs, they toiled 12 hours each day.

  The day came when, 17 months after her capture, she made her escape with two French companions. They hid for days in woods and later hitched a lift with a Red Cross ambulance that took them to the American lines. Only after weeks of medical treatment was she able to return to safety and the arms of her family in England.

  ‘I don’t consider myself a heroine,’ Miss Anne-Marie says, shaking my hand and looking at me with fearless eyes. ‘I just did my duty.’

  ‘Remarkable story,’ he said as she handed the piece of paper back to him.

  She shrugged, not knowing what to say.

  ‘Is it you?’

  ‘Not really. It’s a newspaper story about me. That’s a different thing.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  A waiter came over. Did they have sherry? Sherry had become her saviour. The waiter smiled and inclined his head: for all the shortages, the Randolph could be relied on to satisfy that particular need.

  ‘You can’t imagine how I admire people like you,’ Walcott told her as the waiter went off with their order.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Acting beyond the call of duty.’

  ‘I’m not sure what duty is. So I’m even less sure of what’s beyond it.’

  He replied quietly, in a matter-of-fact tone that carried with it a great conviction. ‘Duty is what I did, and people like me. There’s a lot of people did that – hundreds of thousands, I guess, maybe millions altogether. But I know it is a great deal less than what you and others like you did.’

  In the event they decided against lunch at the hotel. ‘Too stuffy,’ was Walcott’s verdict. ‘Let’s go for a drive instead and find somewhere out in the country. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that would be fine. As long …’

  ‘As long as I get you home in time for your tea?’

  ‘I don’t actually like tea …’

  ‘We have a great deal in common.’

  Laughter was a help. She felt better, light-headed now, her demons consigned to some backwater. The flight lieutenant was amusing and attentive and, as he had suggested on the phone, slightly nervous. It occurred to her that she was the source of this nervousness, that he saw her in a different light, that the person she was inside was very different from the person others perceived.

  ‘Come and meet Gloria,’ he said as he led the way outside. ‘I hope you like her. She’s not always very well-behaved but today seems a good day.’ Gloria turned out to be his car, an MG sports car with its hood down and its green bodywork gleaming in the sunlight. He called it Gloria because, he explained, that was what it was – a glorious little lady. ‘Is it OK? You’ll have to hold your hair on. She’s very windy.’

  They drove up St Giles’ and out along the Woodstock Road and into the country with Gloria’s engine almost battering their conversation into submission. ‘I managed to liberate some petrol,’ he shouted above the noise, ‘but if we run out we’re stuck.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A surprise.’

  Marian didn’t recognise the place until they’d parked the car in a country lane beside a pub. There was a narrow bridge over the river and steps leading down to a stone terrace beside a weir. The rush of water and a dash of spray filled the air. A wooden footbridge led across to an island where there were tables and chairs. You couldn’t mistake it really but she had never seen it from this angle before, never approached it from the road. It was the same pub she and Benoît had reached on their walk up the river a few days before they left for France.

  ‘How strange …’ But the noise of the weir drowned whatever she might have said, while spray caught the sunlight and threw it carelessly about the place as though it were something harmless rather than the dangerous stuff that exposed and burned. Were there still fragments of light left over from that last visit, tossed about in the air, thrown back and forth between the river and the sky?

  ‘You can’t imagine …’ she said as they carried sandwiches and drinks out onto the terrace.

  ‘I can’t imagine what?’

  ‘What a joy it is to get out like this. I’ve been rather cooped up since I got back home.’

  ‘Better confront the demons,’ he said.

  What did he mean by that? Did he somehow sense how she felt? Could he read her mind or had her behaviour given her away? She looked for distraction. ‘Tell me how you got to meet Benoît,’ she said. ‘Were you shot down?’

  He shook his head. ‘You don’t expect to get shot down in my line of business. We fly way up, above the flak and above the fighters.’

  ‘What line of business is that?’

  ‘PR.’

  She knew PR. She cast her mind back to those days before her recruitment, when she had been a plotter in the Filter Room at Stanmore. It would be the day after a raid, or, if there was no wind, perhaps a day or two later to allow the smoke to clear. During the raid they would have been plotting hundreds and hundreds of aircraft rising like starlings into the air over East Anglia; but a day or two later a lone plot would materialise over Oxfordshire, a single aircraft climbing higher and higher and higher. Ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand feet and still climbing as it headed out across the south-east and the Channel, over thirty thousand feet when it disappeared over the curvature of the Earth and the radar stations lost contact. ‘PR,’ the old hands would say knowledgeably.

  A few hours later the solitary aircraft would be back, letting down to the heights of other aircraft before vanishing back into the Oxford countryside. A strange, ominous solitude. Photo Reconnaissance.

  Alan Walcott was delighted that she knew. He talked almost ecstatically about it, of flying high above the weather and the war, floating in a Perspex bubble of blue and white. Slipping the surly bonds of earth, he said. Touching the face of God. Not that he was religious, but that was the kind of thing you felt. ‘But if you get mechanical trouble you’re stuffed. Which is what happened to me.’ He laughed, as though it was a joke. ‘Engine failure over the Ruhr. I was over thirty thousand feet when the damn thing cut out and I made it as far as Belgium before baling out. At which point I found myself swinging from a parachute over the Belgian countryside while watching my kite plummet into the Ardennes. Fortunately some farmers found me before Jerry did. They hid me in a barn for a couple of days then handed me over to one of the escape lines. Comet. Have you heard of it? Anyway, they got me and three others through Paris and down to Toulouse. Where we met up with Benoît. He was great. All the others were serious, business-like, telling you to do this, do that, not to talk, not to smile, play deaf or dumb or something; and then there was Benoît. And he just laughed.’

  She put out a hand and touched his wrist. ‘You know, I came here with him? To this pub, I mean. It was a few days before we dropped into France. We walked, all the way across Port Meadow.’

  ‘I know.’

  She felt a jolt of surpri
se. ‘You know?’

  ‘He told me. He said you walked him for miles along the river and then you came to a pub – a typical pub de campagne, he said. Warm beer and bad food but very pretty. Right by a barrage. That’s what he said. It didn’t take much to work it out once I found out what barrage was. Otherwise it might have been the Perch at Binsey. But once I knew it was a weir—’

  ‘How strange. What else did he tell you?’

  He looked at her, head on one side, eyebrow raised. ‘Is there much else?’

  ‘There’s a bit.’

  ‘Were you in love with him?’

  So blunt. She felt herself blush. ‘We were close. But the life we led didn’t leave much opportunity for that kind of thing.’ What kind of thing? She hadn’t expected to be ambushed by embarrassment in this way.

  ‘Because from what he said about you …’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Nothing you couldn’t tell your mother.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  He laughed. ‘There were four of us shacked up together in a farmhouse outside Toulouse, waiting for transport to take us south. He was meant to look after us. He kept complaining that it wasn’t his job. His job was explosives and weapons training.’

  ‘Just like Benoît—’

  ‘But the two of us got talking. You know the kind of thing: a bottle of Armagnac and a log fire, the other three asleep in the next room. That’s when he told me about you. He said you’d gone off to Paris and he’d considered going after you. Because you were a casse-cou. Is that the expression? Breakneck, reckless, something like that.’

  She laughed. ‘Probably casse-cul.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A pain in the arse. What else did he say?’

  Walcott drank some beer and put the glass down with care. ‘The point is, you don’t say that kind of thing – even casse-cul – about a girl unless she means something to you. I think he was in love with you.’

  There was a raucous noise in the background. She looked round to see a peacock on the terrace. How remarkable. A peacock looking for pickings among the tables. She hadn’t remembered peacocks the last time. All she really remembered was what she had said to Benoît as they sat at a table in the garden just there over the footbridge: ‘I’m a virgin,’ she’d told him. ‘I don’t want to go to France a virgin.’ And she’d waited for the laughter that never came.

  ‘We were good friends,’ she told Walcott. ‘That’s all. And now he’s dead.’ She emptied her glass and put it down alongside his as though to signal the end of the conversation. ‘So what’ll you do now it’s all over?’

  He looked thoughtful. ‘I’ll bet there are a few hundred thousand people asking the same question right now. I’ve no real idea. It’s going to be dull, isn’t it?’

  Perhaps it already was. Her present life seemed episodic. She wanted it to have thrust and direction, as it had in the past, but now it just seemed stalled between one banal incident and another, between talking with the psychiatrist and going shopping with her mother, between walking in the Parks with her father and traipsing up to London for an appointment with the doctors. She felt she was drifting through a neutral space, where there was neither love nor hate, neither danger nor safety, neither peace nor war; a place where crude, physical emotion – a raging heart, a sweating forehead, a rising panic – was triggered by stimuli she couldn’t apprehend, and yet the feelings she ought to own, of contentment, of filial love, of sexual attraction even, were no more than vague memories.

  ‘Perhaps dullness is what we need now.’

  Walcott nodded, as though he understood. They didn’t say much more, just agreed that the weather was fine, considering, and the pub was in a lovely setting, and they’d had a pleasant time. Then they climbed back into Gloria and he drove her home – ‘in time for tea,’ he said, but if that was a hint she didn’t take it and didn’t invite him in as he helped her out of the little sports car.

  ‘That was fun,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll give you a ring some time.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  They shook hands and he climbed back into Gloria. She stood watching as he drove off with a spray of gravel. What did his ‘maybe’ or her ‘perhaps’ mean? Was there an upward inflexion in his voice that made it a question? Or was it merely a statement of fact, indicating improbability? She didn’t know. She felt like someone imprisoned behind a glass wall – able to see the people on the other side and perceive their muffled voices, but unable to hear them clearly or understand what they were saying.

  Perhaps this encounter with Alan Walcott spurred her to write to Clément Pelletier. The right words didn’t come easily but she persevered with the dogged determination that she applied to all her problems at that time.

  How are you doing? she wrote. I’m back in England now and wondering what on earth to do with myself. Perhaps you don’t know that I spent a certain amount of time in a German concentration camp. You’ll have seen the newsreels, I’m sure. Well, for me it wasn’t as bad as the worst you’ll have seen and now I’m fine and getting back my strength day by day. I can’t say I have got over what happened to me because one always keeps things in memory, doesn’t one? The trick is to look forwards rather than back, and get things into some kind of perspective.

  What perspective was that? On the cinema newsreels they continued to show film from the camps. One of them ambushed her when she went with my parents to see something with Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings, a Noël Coward film everyone was talking about. Blithe Spirit. Sharp, acerbic Coward dialogue. But the little trio of Gordon and Judith Wareham and Marian Sutro never got as far as the opening credits because before the feature there was a newsreel film with that bloody Pathé cock crowing triumphantly over the ruins of Germany followed by images of bulldozers shovelling skeletal corpses into pits, and the commentator’s voice sounding throughout the cinema like a commentary to a sports event: ‘While German civilians try to come to terms with what went on within the hell that was Adolf Hitler’s Germany, prosecutors are preparing their case against the instigators of these bestial crimes …’

  And quite suddenly Marian was weeping and gasping for air and vomiting in the aisle like a drunk. My parents managed to get her out into the foyer and calm her down a bit but there was no way they were going to return to watch the wit of Blithe Spirit. Instead they brought her home on the bus and fed her coffee and brandy while I eavesdropped the final scenes of the drama from the secrecy of my bedroom.

  I imagine the psychiatrist had a field day with that one. ‘Did you feel you were one of the corpses?’ he would have asked at their next meeting.

  ‘Certainly not,’ would have been her sharp retort; but at the time she certainly looked like one because I caught a glimpse of her through an open doorway when I crept to the bathroom. She appeared haggard and grey and a scream away from madness. I’d never seen an adult in that state before. She slept the night on the sofa in the sitting room and by breakfast the next morning she had perked up a bit and was laughing and talking, but I imagine it was a frightening moment to feel that normality, the rational person called Marian Sutro, could be so close to this weeping hysteric; that mere shadows on the wall could transform the one into the other.

  She completed the letter and addressed it to Canada, where Ned said Clément was, at the University of Montreal; and Fawley had confirmed it, more or less. But perhaps he was already back in Paris after all. Perhaps he’d never get the letter; perhaps he’d never reply.

  PART II

  Cartwheel

  I give you another memory. How this fits in, I don’t quite know. Chronologically, I mean. I can see its significance, all right. So: the lawn in front of the block of flats in north Oxford where we lived. We are having a picnic. Other residents disapproved of our cluttering up the lawn like this but my parents took no notice of any complaints. Read that literally – they really wouldn’t have noticed that there was
any serious objection to their camping on the lawn with rugs and picnic baskets and all the paraphernalia. The sun was shining, the weather was warm enough, we’d have a picnic. As simple as that. And Marian is there, only this time she has brought a friend, an airman and therefore subject of admiration, a pilot who flies Spitfires and is therefore an object of veneration. Did he fly in the Battle of Britain? I asked.

  He tousled my hair – I hated that – and laughed. ‘It’s a long time ago, old chap. I was still in shorts then. Far too young for the Battle of Britain.’

  ‘So you flew Spitfires after the Battle of Britain?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And did you shoot anyone down?’

  There was adult laughter, although I couldn’t see the joke. Spitfires were to shoot people down. What was he doing flying them if not that? ‘I’m afraid the only things I shot were photographs,’ he said.

  ‘Photographs?’ No doubt my tone was incredulous. What was the point of shooting photographs?

  ‘It’s called intelligence, old chap.’

  My face was scorched with embarrassment. I was intelligent enough to grasp the play on the word intelligent, and my misery was exacerbated by the fact that another family had joined us, a couple with two daughters, prissy little things in bows and ruffles, who were laughing at my discomfiture. Later they insisted on doing handstands and cartwheels and generally showing off their athletic abilities and their underwear, while I glowered clumsily in the background.

  Unexpectedly Marian got to her feet and kicked off her shoes. ‘I can do that,’ she said. There was laughter, and cries of delight from the girls. The men were lying on the ground, propped up on their elbows, drinking beer; my mother was kneeling at the picnic hamper and dealing out careful portions of homemade ice cream. Ice cream was a rarity in those days, to be talked of in hushed tones. So there was a sense of anticipation among the group, both for the imminent promise of ice cream and the challenge that Marian had set herself.