The Girl Who Fell From the Sky Page 3

  So they played among the spilled beer and the empty glasses, the youth with a strange concentration, as though his whole future depended on it, Marian with a distracted impatience that told him, she hoped, that she didn’t care for either the game or his company. Of course he won. She knew he would. He grinned at her and said, ‘We play again,’ and the second time he won again, and the third time.

  ‘It’s stupid,’ she said. ‘It’s one of those games that you can’t lose.’

  ‘But you have lost.’

  ‘Because you have the trick.’

  ‘The trique?’ He spluttered with laughter.

  She blushed, understanding the double entendre and angry that she couldn’t disguise her embarrassment. ‘The way of doing it.’

  ‘Ah, the truc! That is always the way, isn’t it? You win always if you know the truc.’ He gathered up the matches and returned them to their box as though they were valuable trophies. ‘And now we find somewhere to dance. In this city of merde you eat always badly, but at least you can find place to dance.’

  ‘I’m not going dancing with you. I told you.’

  He looked at her with pale and erratic eyes. There was something unsteady about him, as though he had been drinking all afternoon and would continue all evening. ‘You know what truc I am making? I am returning to France, do you know that? I am going back to la patrie and cut German throats. And you will not even dance with me.’

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she said. ‘I don’t go dancing with men who are drunk.’

  ‘And you are frigide,’ he retorted. ‘And I do not dance with women who are frigide.’

  She picked up her handbag and got up from her chair. ‘I must go.’

  ‘Why must you go?’

  ‘Because otherwise I will be late.’ He made a grab at her hand but she shook him off. ‘Tu m’emmerdes!’ she told him as she walked away. She didn’t look back, not even to see the shock in his expression. How to get away? If she went to her room he would probably follow her, and she damn well wasn’t going to hide away like a frightened little girl. Pulling on her coat, she walked quickly through the foyer and out through the revolving doors. A taxi was delivering a fare to the hotel. She climbed into the empty seat.

  ‘Where to, Miss?’ the cabbie asked.

  She gave Ned’s address. ‘Bloomsbury,’ she said. ‘Russell Square, more or less.’

  ‘More or less Russell Square it is, darling.’

  V

  The cab crept through the darkened streets. There were cinemas open in Piccadilly, their faint lights cast down on the pavement. Black shapes shifted in front of them like shades in Hades, queues of silhouettes lined up along the pavements and edging towards the box offices. But beyond the borderline of the Tottenham Court Road there was no one around, and Bloomsbury was a dark maze.

  ‘You all right here, Miss?’ the cabbie asked as he let her down.

  ‘Quite all right,’ she said, handing over the fare. She scrabbled in her respirator case for her torch. By its feeble light she made her way to the door where Ned lived. There was a panel of bell pushes, but as she was about to press the one labelled Dr Edward Sutro the door opened and someone came barging out.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘Bloody blackout.’

  She dodged past him into the hallway and the door slammed shut behind her. She felt for the switch, turned on a pale, watery light in the stairwell and climbed the narrow stairs to the third floor. It was a relief when Ned answered her knock.

  ‘My goodness, Squirrel,’ he said as he saw her standing on the landing. ‘You look dressed to kill.’ He hugged her to him. A hug from Ned was like being jumped at by a Great Dane, entrancing but at the same time awkward and uncomfortable. His own clothes gave the impression they had been picked up at a jumble sale. His hair was awry, and his smile was the distracted grin of someone who is delighted to see her but whose mind is really on different, abstract things. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘Tell me all about it.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘What on earth you are doing. I spoke to the parents on the phone the other day. They said you’d left the WAAF. Something about going abroad. Father thought Algiers …’

  She followed him through into the sitting room. The place was typical of Ned. Books were crammed into every available shelf and piled on the floor. His desk was littered with papers. A couple of decrepit armchairs stood opposite each other across a Persian carpet that was old and worn but gave the impression that it might once have been a valuable piece. On the wall behind the desk was a framed print of the Collège de France.

  ‘Doesn’t anyone come and clean for you?’ she asked. ‘At least you had a scout at Cambridge.’

  ‘Bedder. Scouts are Oxford. Here there’s a charlady who comes round occasionally, but she’s always complaining she can’t clean if I leave it in such a mess. Perhaps there ought to be cleaners who’ll come and clean your place before the cleaner comes.’ He laughed his own, absurd laugh.

  She sat in one of the armchairs and he brought her a drink, another gin that she dared not refuse because refusal would have made her a girl again and now she was a grown-up woman. She’d never been that before with Ned.

  ‘So tell me, what’s it all about?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’

  ‘It’s secret. They made me sign the Official Secrets Act – and that was at the initial interview. Even the interview itself was secret.’

  ‘Oh, stop being mysterious. I’ll bet it’s translation or something. Or spying. Maybe they want you to spy on General de Gaulle.’

  She felt like laughing out loud. Ordinarily he was never interested in what she was doing. ‘Silly schoolgirl things,’ was what he used to say. And then when she said she wanted to read law at university, he was derisive about her choice. Law will teach us nothing except how to evade it, was his view of things. Science will teach us the future. ‘You don’t tell me what you do, so why should I say what I do?’

  ‘Because you are dying to, that’s why. And I do tell you what I do. I work on super-high-frequency electromagnetic radiation.’

  ‘But what’s it for? That’s what’s important. What do you do this for?’

  ‘I’m making a ray gun to shoot the Luftwaffe out of the sky.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I know you’re not. That’s just science fiction.’ He really was a fool. He was always telling her things like that. A super-bomb that would blow a whole city to dust. A beam of deadly rays that would kill people with light. Rockets that would hurl high explosive from one continent to another through outer space. The kind of nonsense you read about in bad novels. ‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is that this is my last evening in London. Tomorrow I’m off to Scotland.’

  ‘Scotland?’

  ‘Training.’

  ‘It sounds dreadful. Scotland’s all heather and haggis and men in skirts. But I suppose that if you’re off to the land of haggis we’d better find you a decent meal first.’

  The restaurant Ned had found was in Southampton Row. Apparently people from the lab went there quite often. The place was crowded, people pushing and shoving and trying to get a table even though the waiters insisted that there was none available. But Ned had reserved one, in the innermost depths, where they couldn’t be overheard and where she could finally do what she had intended all the time.

  ‘You must promise not to say anything to the parents,’ she warned him. ‘Or anyone else. You mustn’t say anything. Swear.’

  It sounded like one of their childhood games. He smiled condescendingly. ‘I swear.’

  ‘I mean it, Ned. This is serious. I’ve been recruited by this organisation. They’re sending me for training, and then …’ She shouldn’t be saying this, she knew she shouldn’t. And yet it was too exciting not to share with someone, and Ned was the only possibility. Ned had always been her confidant. She slipped into French. Perhaps it was safer to say it in French: ‘Ils veulent m’en
voyer en France.’

  ‘En France! Pourquoi? Pas possible! Mon Dieu, Marian, t’es folle!’

  ‘It’s they who are mad, not me. At first I thought the job was something to do with language, as you did. Translation, or something. That’s what they led me to expect. But I was wrong. I’m off tomorrow for Scotland. Commando training. This is serious, Ned, completely serious.’ It seemed even more incredible now she was telling him. At least within the Organisation you felt caught up by its mad logic, but here, at a restaurant table with her brother sitting opposite her, the whole story seemed crazy.

  ‘So who are “they”?’

  She glanced round at the nearby tables. Perhaps they had followed her here. Perhaps they were listening to see what she said. But the other diners were engrossed in their own conversations, indifferent to the couple in the corner whispering to each other in French. ‘I’ve no idea. “The Organisation”, that’s what they call it. They’ve got a place in Portman Square. But the real name’s secret.’ She laughed. ‘I ask you, what’s the point of having a name if it’s secret?’

  ‘Maybe it’s like the naming of cats.’

  ‘The name that no human research can discover—’

  ‘—but that the cat himself knows and can never confess.’ They laughed. He’d bought her the book for her Christmas present in the first year of the war: whimsical poems about cats by one of the most serious of poets. ‘Where will they send you? Might you go to Paris?’

  Would she? She had no idea. The future was all mysterious, an unknown world.

  ‘Because if you were to go to Paris, you might look up Clément Pelletier.’

  ‘Clément?’ Her surprise was feigned, part of a defence mechanism left over from childhood. She had already thought of Clément, of course she had. How could she not? As far as she knew he was still in France, but she couldn’t be certain. That was what happened these days; families and friends dispersed, contacts lost, relationships blighted. Perhaps he had forgotten her by now, as she, occasionally, managed not to think of him. But memories remained, small nuclei of longing and guilt lodged within her mind. ‘I haven’t seen him for years. He’ll have forgotten who I am.’

  Ned grinned. ‘I very much doubt that.’

  Marian felt herself blushing. She looked away in the hope Ned wouldn’t notice, but if he did he said nothing. Once he would have remarked on it and made it worse – Marian has gone all red, he’d say so that everyone would stare.

  ‘Didn’t he used to write to you when you went away to school?’

  ‘Occasionally.’

  ‘More than occasionally. I think he was pretty soft on you.’

  ‘I was only fifteen, Ned. Fifteen, sixteen. Just a girl. He was more than ten years older.’

  ‘You didn’t seem that young.’

  ‘And anyway, he’s probably married with children by now.’ She picked at her bread, sipped some beer – beer was all they had; these days wine was as difficult to find as oranges or bananas. ‘Have you heard anything about him?’

  ‘Nothing but speculation. I believe he’s still at the Collège de France. There’s the cyclotron that Fred Joliot had installed immediately before the outbreak. Presumably it’s working now, unless the Germans have carted it off to Heidelberg or somewhere.’ He shrugged, fiddling with the cutlery. ‘God knows what’s going on there.’ He appeared distracted, as though mention of Clément and Paris had upset him. Only after the waiter had brought their food did he continue. ‘You know, I’ve never really understood why Clément stayed behind in France. He had the opportunity to get out of the country in 1940 but he stayed put.’

  ‘What are you suggesting? That he should have run away?’

  ‘Others from the Collège escaped – Lev Kowarski, von Halban – and brought out a whole lot of equipment. Why in God’s name didn’t Clément come with them? He was there in Bordeaux. There was a berth on the ship. He could have been in England the next day. What did he have to lose?’

  ‘Maybe his honour. The others aren’t French, are they?’

  ‘Russian and Austrian.’

  ‘Well, there you are. Clément is French through and through. For God’s sake, abandoning your country when it’s invaded isn’t particularly admirable. If more people had stood and fought …’

  ‘But he wasn’t fighting, was he? He was doing scientific research.’

  ‘So perhaps he felt above it all. Pure science, that’s what he used to say.’

  Ned gave a bitter laugh. ‘One thing I’ve discovered, Squirrel, is that there is no longer any such thing as pure science. What I do, or what Kowarski does …’ He seemed to cast around for what he wanted to say but couldn’t find the right words. ‘Anyway, if you did get to Paris, it’d be interesting to get some idea of what’s going on at the Collège. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Who knows if that’s where they’ll send me? I’m not going on holiday, you know.’

  ‘Of course I realise that. Don’t be stupid.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘You’re still the same old Squirrel, aren’t you? Getting all hot and bothered.’

  ‘Well, you speak about it as though I could simply get on a train and go and see.’

  He laughed. The momentary anger died away. It was always that way between them – sudden flare-ups of anger quickly dying away. They moved the conversation to neutral ground – the days before the war mainly, that strange Arcadian world that seemed so distant now, a landscape distorted by the passage of time and the intense gravitational field of subsequent events: the house on the lake at Annecy, the chalet in Megève, the sailing and the skiing, the noise and the laughter when the two families, the Pelletiers and the Sutros, came together. Madeleine who befriended her despite being five years older; and Madeleine’s older brother Clément, who seemed touched by something like the finger of God. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieur. A physicist for whom a brilliant future was predicted. A second Louis de Broglie, they said, heir apparent to the king and queen of French science, Fred Joliot and his wife Irène Curie. Ned and he used to talk physics while Marian hung on their words and tried to understand. But they spoke of incomprehensible mathematics and obscure ideas and absurd enthusiasms. Let’s play Piggy-in-the-middle, they’d cry, only they’d call it ‘collapsing the wave function’ and collapse with laughter at the joke that she, a mere fifteen-year-old trying to catch the tennis ball, couldn’t share. And Consequences, they’d play Consequences, which Clément called Cadavre Exquis, the exquisite corpse. The Expatiating Physicist Preconceives a Stupendous Tintinnabulation. That was one of them.

  The waiter came and took their plates. ‘Look, I must go,’ she said, pushing back her chair. ‘I’ve got a long day tomorrow.’

  Ned was suddenly attentive, helping her into her coat and patting her shoulders, as though he understood that she really was going and was off to do something rather remarkable, and needed his brotherly comfort however awkwardly expressed. ‘D’you know, I envy you?’ he told her. ‘At least you’re involved in something active. I’ve simply got to get on with my work and do what I’m told.’

  ‘These days that’s what everyone does.’

  They went looking for a cab. There was nothing near the restaurant, and so they went towards the West End. It had come on to rain, and the flagstones glistened in what little light there was. She turned up the collar of her coat. Someone barged into them and shouted at them for getting in the way, then staggered on, muttering to himself. There were more people about now, shadows moving through the dark, voices talking and laughing but detached from their shapes so that the sounds seemed disembodied, the expression of the city itself. There were rumours about what happened in the blackout. Sometimes, it was said, people had sex there in the street, while strangers walked past without noticing. There had been stories about this among the girls at Stanmore. One of them had even claimed to have done it herself. A knee-trembler, she called it; and the other girls had laughed.

  ‘Father thinks I should give up what I’m do
ing,’ Ned said. ‘He thinks it’s an easy way out, and that I should be in uniform like you.’

  ‘I’m sure he doesn’t.’

  ‘He abandoned his job in the Foreign Office in the last war.’

  ‘And ended up sitting in a gun emplacement behind the lines and losing half his hearing.’

  ‘At least he tried.’

  ‘Your work is more important than anything you could contribute as a soldier. Once you get that ray gun to work.’

  He laughed. They had come to a cinema. There was a dimly illuminated sign. EXCELSIOR, it said. People were streaming out, laughing and shouting. Taxis were waiting at the kerb and a man called, ‘Anyone for Kensington?’ He was wearing uniform – she made out captain’s pips on his shoulder – and had two women with him. The women were giggling together, leaning against each other for mutual support.

  Marian ran forward. ‘Can you drop me off on the way?’

  ‘No trouble at all, my dear.’

  To Ned she said, ‘Wish me luck.’

  ‘Come on, love,’ the captain called. ‘The meter’s going.’

  As she climbed into the cab Ned broke into French. ‘Do you know when you’ll leave for France?’

  She looked back, holding the door. ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Come on, Miss. We’ve got to go.’

  She sat back in the cab. ‘Keep in touch,’ he called through the window. ‘How do I contact you?’

  ‘Through the parents,’ she said, ‘how else?’

  ‘I’ll send his address. Clément’s, I mean. Just in case.’

  The taxi drew away. She watched him standing in the road until he gave a little wave and turned away. ‘It’s awfully good of you to wait,’ she said to the others in the cab. ‘I’m sorry I kept you.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ the officer asked. The women looked at her and giggled. Why did they? Were they drunk, or was there something comic about her?

  ‘Just off Regent Street. I don’t think it’s out of your way, is it?’

  ‘Didn’t I hear you speaking French?’ one of the women asked. ‘Are you French? Golly, you sound awfully English to be French.’