The Girl Who Fell From the Sky Read online

  ‘You’ve got to leave,’ the man protests, coming after her.

  Seeing the weakness of her husband, his wife takes over. ‘You can’t stay here. It’s too dangerous. They came looking for her. We don’t know what she was mixed up in but they are looking for her. They may have followed you. For all we know, they’re watching the house …’

  ‘No one followed me.’

  ‘You’ve got to go.’

  ‘Look, I’ve just come from Toulouse. On the overnight train. I’m exhausted and I need somewhere to rest. Can’t you let me stay one night? Then I’ll be gone and you won’t hear any more from me.’

  ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘Is Béatrice your daughter?’

  The woman nods. ‘My daughter, yes.’

  ‘She’s gone,’ says the man. ‘And now you must leave too. Don’t you understand?’

  Alice looks at them, at the implacable faces of rejection. The nightmare has become real: she has nowhere to go. She puts her suitcase down on the floor. ‘Can I sit for a moment?’

  The woman sucks her lips and watches her, as though expecting her to pull some kind of trick. ‘Let her sit,’ the man says. ‘Make her some coffee.’

  There is a moment of unspoken argument between the couple, a shared look that encompasses a whole lifetime of marital conflict.

  ‘Only a moment, and then she’s out.’

  Once she has gone the man stays watching, like a prison warder, while Alice sits on one of the uncomfortable, overstuffed chairs. She’s faint with tiredness, but she has to think what to do next. The prospect of finding a hotel or a pension looms ugly in her mind. Her name would go down in a register. She would have to surrender her papers to the scrutiny of hostile eyes. She would be exposed to the regard of the authorities, as vulnerable as a nocturnal animal caught outside in the daylight. But perhaps she can try and make contact with Yvette directly. Perhaps the solution lies there. Or the address Gabrielle gave her – could she trust that?

  ‘I’m sorry to make things difficult for you,’ she says to the man.

  ‘You’re a friend of Béatrice’s, then?’

  ‘A friend of a friend.’

  He nods. Something in his eyes betrays sympathy. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to help, but it’s the wife, see? She gets frightened. It’s the priests, they put all kinds of ideas into her head, about what you should do and what you shouldn’t. Béatrice doesn’t go along with any of that any more than I do. But the wife …’

  ‘I quite understand.’

  ‘If it was up to me …’ He looks away, embarrassed, trying to justify his weakness. ‘Used to work on the railways. A union man all my life …’

  She thinks of the address that Gabrielle gave her. Could she throw herself on the mercy of strangers? And then she considers the other possibility, the one that stares her in the face. The former railwayman is talking on, about strikes before the war, about how they didn’t stand for no nonsense, about demonstrations and sabotage. ‘We dealt with les jaunes as they deserved,’ he is saying. ‘Oh yes, we didn’t take no shit from them.’ And part of her mind is wondering who ‘the yellows’ could be, while the other part recalls the address that she already knows, the reason she is here in Paris, whatever the business with Yvette. Place de l’Estrapade.

  Clément.

  The woman comes in with the coffee – a filthy concoction of acorns and chicory – and they drink in awkward silence before Alice gets to her feet to leave. Outside it has begun to drizzle, a thin, bitter drizzle as unpleasant as any ersatz coffee.

  III

  From place d’Italie she takes the métro once more, gets off at place Monge and surfaces at the barracks of the Garde Républicaine. Over one of the gates an inscription exhorts the people to Travail, Famille, Patrie where once it was Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Against that institutional power she feels as nothing, just a girl with a suitcase of clothes and a couple of radio crystals. What use is that? She turns up the hill, going by the memory of the street map that she has in her pocket. Always know where you are going. Always move with purpose. Always have a reason for doing what you are doing. But what is her reason now?

  In rue Lacépède she pauses, vague with tiredness, puts her suitcase down and looks in a shop window. Is anyone following? That dreadful man Julius Miessen, perhaps. But there is no one in the milky reflection, no figure floating in front of the dusty items behind the glass – pots and pans, a colander, a half-moon chopping knife, things that are used for preparing the food that has all but vanished from the shelves. She glances round for confirmation. The narrow street behind her is empty. Bicycles chained to lamp posts. No cars. No people. She stands for a moment, flexing her shoulders like an athlete, before picking up the suitcase once again and going on up the hill into the place de la Contrescarpe, a small, rain-swept square with two run-down cafés round the edge and in the middle a urinal and a single blighted tree. She chooses one of the cafés – a low-beamed, shadowy place – to sit and eat and think; above all she needs to think.

  A waiter brings something that the menu calls onion soup, a brown swill in which a few onion scales float and a flaccid piece of bread lies drowned. She sips the soup and buries her head in a book, trying to ignore the fact that she is the only female customer in the place and that one of the other clients is eyeing her thoughtfully. Tiredness brings with it a dangerous wandering of the mind. She can’t concentrate. She has to concentrate. She is out in the open, with the hawks hovering all around. She needs somewhere to sleep, somewhere to relax for a while, somewhere to summon up the courage that was instilled into her in Scotland and Beaulieu and Bristol; and the only place she can think of is Clément’s.

  ‘D’you want the plat du jour?’

  She looks up, startled. The waiter is hovering over her, taking the soup bowl and wiping vaguely at the table. ‘Yes,’ she says hurriedly in case he should suddenly withdraw his offer, ‘yes, please.’

  He nods and goes away. She turns a page unread and recalls sailing on the lake at Annecy, remembers the Pelletiers’ house fronting the lake, with a lawn and a landing stage where they kept the skiff moored. And they went sailing. She remembers that – the kick of the wind in the sails, the dash of spray, and laughter, an open, equal laughter. And a sensation somewhere inside her, an organic compulsion quite novel and disturbing, something whose focus was Clément, in shorts and an old torn shirt, with his hand on the tiller of the little dinghy, the boat beating into the wind and the spray flying and both of them laughing.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ he shouted. ‘America?’

  Clément, with whom she would have gone anywhere.

  The plat du jour arrives. It’s a slab of something rusk-like, swimming in a thin, brown sauce and entitled, with a fine irony, gâteau de viande à la mode. With it come thin strips of rutabaga. She knows rutabaga. A fearful alien in the French cuisine, she knows it from boarding school: rutabaga is swede. She eats with distaste, thinking of the food at Plasonne and how different life is here in the city. The occupation has reversed the norms – the city is reduced to penury, the countryside has become a place of riches. Where, in all this poverty, she wonders, do Clément and his sister stand?

  Something makes her look up from her food. There’s a disturbance in the square: a black Citroën traction has driven in and parked opposite the café. Through the window she can see the white chevrons on the radiator, and behind the windscreen the silhouettes of the occupants. What do they want? What are they watching? Panic seethes below the surface of her composure. What are they doing, watching this place? What if they suddenly come in and start a search? What if there are others waiting in the side streets and she were to find herself in the midst of a rafle? What if …?

  ‘What are they after?’ she asks the waiter, but the man gives nothing away. Just that Parisian shrug. ‘Who knows?’

  Meanwhile the watchers in the car do nothing, merely sit and watch while the desultory life of the café goes on. She forces herself t
o take a few more mouthfuls before picking up her suitcase and heading for the ladies’ lavatory down in the basement, an odorous place with a single cubicle and a squatting plate in the floor. The door doesn’t lock, but she has no choice and anyway there don’t appear to be any other women among the customers. She places her case on the floor and opens it. In a pocket sewn in the lining are the two crystals, wrapped still in their little bed of cotton wool. Rapidly, with nervous fingers, she assembles her little packet, then drops her knickers and crouches, legs awkwardly spread, to push the thing inside her. There is no hint of that unexpected and delicious thrill she felt the first time: this is like some unpleasant medical procedure, a lumpy, intrusive insertion. Cautiously she straightens up and moves her hips and thighs to make certain that the thing is in place.

  What would Benoît say if he knew? Make some ribald joke, probably. Or an offer of help. Suddenly, shut in this squalid cubicle, isolated in the midst of the city, she wishes she could see him again. All would be forgiven. His bewildered and bewildering attentions would be welcome. She’d let him go there if that was what he wanted; anything rather than this.

  The momentary weakness is pushed aside. There’s a box of cleaning things beneath the basin. She upends it and steps up to reach the lid on the top of the cistern. The valves will go in there. She can’t hide them anywhere else, but she can tape them to the underside of the lid, exactly as they showed her at Beaulieu, and then return to reclaim them some time later. ‘Unless they’ve called the plumber in the meantime,’ the instructor said. He meant it as a joke, but it doesn’t seem so funny now. Nothing seems funny: fear chases away humour.

  She slides the lid back, steps down and composes herself. She even touches up her make-up in the cracked and discoloured mirror before going out and finishing her meal. The Citroën is still there. ‘They don’t seem to be doing much,’ she remarks as she pays her bill.

  ‘You never know,’ the waiter replies, guardedly.

  Picking up her suitcase she heads towards the door and the dank outside, and the traction with its anonymous occupants. Her wooden heels clip on the pavé in a brisk percussion. She strides with confidence, her public façade belying the fear inside and the foreign presence pressing against her womb.

  She draws level with the car.

  Nothing will happen. She is merely unsettled by the strange environment, by Paris with its grim poverty, its cowed silences, its passivity. She has got the wind up for nothing whatever. They aren’t looking for her, they aren’t interested in her, they are only doing what they always do: instilling fear and uncertainty.

  As she passes the car, the passenger door opens and a woman gets out, a small, almost dainty woman, dressed not in a uniform raincoat but in a leather jacket with a fur collar.

  ‘Come here!’

  Alice stops. A woman is worse than any man. A woman knows the intricacies of the female mind and body. A woman knows what women can do.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You.’

  The single word, peremptory. Expecting to be obeyed. She crosses to the car and stands like a schoolgirl summoned by one of the prefects, the prefect who is always ordering you around, the prefect who seems to be amused by you alone.

  ‘Papers.’

  Her papers are scrutinised. But papers mean nothing: they lie as often as they tell the truth. That is the nature of the things. The woman’s small, almost perfect, almost pretty face looks up at Alice. It is framed with golden curls but the features are hard, like porcelain. ‘Lussac? Where’s that?’

  ‘The South-west.’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ The woman’s French is native, her accent Alsatian. She’s a hybrid like Alice is a hybrid. An amalgam of things. German and French, English and French, it doesn’t make much difference. A bastard.

  ‘Visiting.’

  ‘Visiting who?’

  Never give away more than you are asked. Never volunteer information. Appear amiable and slightly slow-witted.

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘Why do you have friends in Paris?’

  ‘I used to study here.’

  The woman considers this, looking up into Alice’s eyes. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘The South-west. I just said—’

  ‘Where were you born? Where were you brought up?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Geneva. It says on my card. Geneva. But my parents were French.’ And while Alice speaks, the woman lifts her head almost as though she is sniffing at the words that issue from Alice’s mouth, searching for hints of accent, assonances and intonations that may prove, or disprove, her story.

  ‘French from where?’

  ‘Grenoble.’

  A nod. Apparently she is satisfied that what Alice says is true, that there are hints of Switzerland and the French Alps in her victim’s voice. ‘Your case.’

  ‘My case?’

  ‘Yes, your case. Open it.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Of course.’ An ingénue: willing, confused, apologetic, slightly frightened because no one is entirely legal these days. She looks round for a place to put the case, and, deciding that there is nowhere more convenient, opens it on the ground. The woman crouches to rifle through her things, leaf through the underwear and the sweaters, the sanitary belt and towels, the skirt and jacket, her slender hands going down into the corners like small animals searching through undergrowth for things to eat and coming up with three brown paper packets. ‘These?’

  ‘Presents. Coffee.’

  ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘Toulouse.’

  ‘Black market?’

  ‘No.’

  The woman sniffs them, smiles and takes one for herself, returning the others to the suitcase almost as though she were presenting Alice with a gift. She straightens up.

  ‘Turn to face the car. Hands up on the roof. Legs apart.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard.’

  So Alice stands spreadeagled while the woman’s hands go over her body, under her jacket to feel the sweat of her armpits, then round the front to cradle, for a long moment, her breasts. She can hear the woman’s breathing close behind her. The hands move gently, appreciatively against her nipples, then on, down her flanks and over her thighs, then suddenly, with a shocking intrusion, up her skirt so that one of them, the right, cups her between the legs, feeling her through the cotton of her knickers. Alice gasps with outrage. The hand continues, a small exploring rodent, feeling and seeking, up her belly then back down and into the cleft between her buttocks, even touching, through the cotton, her anus. Then both her hands are sweeping down her thighs and the ordeal is suddenly over.

  Alice turns. The Alsatian woman is impassive, lighting a cigarette as though nothing has happened, as though her fingers haven’t scurried through the most intimate parts of Alice’s body, as though all that has taken place is the normal intercourse of search and inquiry, what happens these days in the benighted city. ‘You can go,’ she says. ‘Just go.’

  For a moment Alice fumbles with her suitcase, pushing things in order, closing the lid and trying to force the locks closed. Thoughts stumble through her mind, an untidy mix of fear and shock and relief. And gratitude. She can go. She has been violated, but she can go. Her hands are shaking, but she is free to go, the Alsatian woman showing no further interest in her but leaning into the open door of the car and saying something in German to the figure behind the steering wheel.

  Don’t show relief. Relief is the worst. Anyone can be anxious, fearful even; but relief means that something has happened that merits their attention.

  Trying not to show relief, Alice picks up her suitcase and continues her walk across the square towards the far corner, walking calmly and with purpose without looking back. Nothing happened or will happen. Don’t hurry, whatever you do, don’t hurry.

  IV

  She gains the sanctuary of the buildings and turns out of sight. There are few people around, and no one who takes notice of a lone woman carrying a suitc
ase through the streets of Paris. Half the pedestrians she has seen are carrying suitcases. Suitcases are the motif of the city, redolent of hoarded, trivial treasure and impermanence.

  On the wall a plaque announces: RUE DE L’ESTRAPADE.

  L’estrapade is a torture, she knows that. Something tearing, like the rack. Above the roofs she catches a glimpse of the dome of the Panthéon, where heroes lie buried, the lesser gods of a secular state. But now the God of the Old Testament rules the city, with jealousy and murderous revenge. At the end of the road there’s a triangular place, a place of convergence with trees and two benches and an old woman sitting talking to sparrows that skip and hop and yearn for breadcrumbs that are no longer found in the starveling city. She stops and considers what to do.

  Never hesitate, never appear to be at a loss. If you are undecided you excite interest. People wonder what you are looking for, where you have come from, what your business is. But she is at a loss: she has lost all sense of perspective and proportion.

  A young woman walks past pushing a pram. She catches Alice’s eye and there is a momentary recognition, a faint unvoiced smile of sympathy. For a dreadful moment Alice wants to call out to her, for help, for comfort, for some plain human contact. But the woman has moved on and she is on her own, confronting the door of number two and the board of names and numbers and brass bell pushes. One of them reads Pelletier, Appartement G. As she hesitates to ring, the door opens and a man comes out. He nods bonjour and holds the door open for her and she slips inside into an archway and the luminous green of an inner courtyard.

  To her relief there is no concierge in the guichet to ask awkward questions about who she is and what business she has here. Stairs rise into shadows and a lift shaft ascends, one of those open frames within which a platform of steel filigree rises and falls with clocklike precision, a piece of machinery that moves with all the predictability of ordinary mechanics.

  Wave mechanics is not like Newtonian mechanics, Clément told her. With wave mechanics you must cast out all idea of certainty. At the time she had no idea what he was talking about; now it seems perfectly clear. Cast out all ideas of certainty.