Tightrope Read online

  ‘That letter was the first hint we had that everything wasn’t all right,’ her father said. His tone was accusatory, almost as if the letter were to blame. ‘I might tell you, we were pretty damn angry that they didn’t keep us better informed. A month later we got a letter from that Atkins woman confirming they had lost contact with you and you had probably been arrested. And then nothing more until just a few days before you came back …’ His eyes glistened. ‘You can’t imagine how difficult it’s been.’

  Marian sat and watched him doing all those brave and embarrassed things that Englishmen do when ambushed by tears – coughing, breathing deeply, looking away through the window as though something outside had just caught his attention. Her mother didn’t move to show sympathy or anything. A show of sympathy would have merely compounded the embarrassment.

  ‘You do remember Benoît, don’t you?’ Marian asked.

  Her father took out his handkerchief, a fine, white lawn handkerchief, and blew his nose. Her mother said, ‘Yes, of course we do, darling. Such a nice young man.’

  ‘Well, I was in love with him.’

  Her mother looked at her with sudden attention. ‘You hardly knew him, dear.’

  ‘I knew him well enough. And now he’s dead. Killed in action, apparently. Dead, anyway. Dead.’

  She composed a reply to the letter about Benoît. Of course there was no certainty that this Alan Walcott was still at the given address, or even still alive. There was no certainty about anything any more. And framing the fact of Benoît’s death in words of any kind somehow made the fact of it final, something etched in stone rather than just reported to her by Colonel Buckmaster:

  Dear Flying Officer Walcott,

  I write with regard to the letter of 14th March last year that you wrote to my parents – I am the Marian Sutro you refer to. Following my arrest, I have recently returned home after a period of detention in Germany. I regret to inform you that on my return I learned that Benoît Bérard did not survive to see the liberation of France. Shortly after the landings in Normandy he was killed in action while operating against units of the German Army making their way northwards towards the beachhead. I know nothing more than this, I am afraid, but he was a courageous man and was quite prepared to give his life for the France that he loved. Thank you anyway, for contacting my parents and letting them know about your meeting with him. Although I only knew M. Bérard for a short time we were quite close.

  She paused, wondering about that last sentence with its hint of intimacy. Should she strike it out and start again? But she decided not. It would do like that. She signed the letter, addressed the envelope, and went downstairs to find a stamp.

  The letter from Clément Pelletier only came to light some days later when her father discovered it in his own desk. It was, of course, in French and written in that impatient scrawl that she knew so well from letters he had written years ago when she was at school. He called her father ‘Professeur Sutro’, which seemed absurd, and signed himself ‘Votre ami, Clément Pelletier’. What came between was curiously guarded. When in London he had spoken at length with Ned who would surely give them more details about his movements. In the meantime it only remained for him to say that he owed a great debt to Marian and tell them what they probably already knew, that she was a young woman of great courage. He hoped she would be safe.

  Anodyne words, she thought. The address at the top seemed almost generic – L’Université de Montréal, Département de Physique – and the date was January 1944. She put the letter aside.

  Report

  Throughout that spring the other SOE survivors came back from the wreckage that was Germany. A handful of men, fewer women. In France General de Gaulle had branded agents of the SOE as mercenaries and expelled them from the country, while celebrating the achievements of the French resistance as though French men and women had acted alone. In Britain there was desultory interest in these denizens of the underground war – the occasional newspaper article, the occasional radio interview – but generally the story skulked below the horizon of public attention. Uppermost in people’s minds were the struggles with shortages, the coming demobilisation, the forthcoming election.

  Occasionally Marian travelled up to London by train, taking a corner seat in the compartment, burying herself in a book, trying to ignore the glances of the other passengers, braving the journey, the exposure, the sense of desolation and isolation, the fear. Once or twice she found herself in the company of my father. I remember his mentioning this. ‘Travelled up to town with Marian Sutro this morning,’ he would say. ‘She seemed in good spirits, considering. I’ve heard she’s in line for one of their dreadful honours, a CBE or something. I offered to share a cab but she scampered away like a rabbit down a hole.’

  The ‘hole’ was a watering hole, a bar in the station where she would have a glass of sherry before venturing out into the maelstrom of the city. Not the pills that the psychiatrist had prescribed for her. The pills made a sleepwalker of her; but alcohol, a sherry or two, worked just fine, making her lightheaded and careless. I follow her in my mind’s eye as her taxi takes her along the Marylebone Road to Cleveland Street where the doctors weigh her and test her reflexes and listen to what is going on in various parts of her torso and pronounce her fit as a fiddle. ‘How are you feeling yourself?’ asks the medic. What he means is, what is the psychological damage? What is going on inside that head, which we cannot see, cannot hear, cannot palpate?

  ‘I’m all right, I suppose. A bit detached, as though nothing is real. And sometimes rather depressed. Occasionally I get … panicky. For no real reason.’

  ‘Psychological stuff. Are you seeing the shrink?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how’s that going?’

  ‘It’s useful, I suppose.’

  ‘Jolly good. Just remember, we’re here if you need us. Always here.’

  Jolly good. Where did that expression come from? Jolly. She didn’t feel jolly. Good she could understand, but not jolly, which suggested fat, middle-aged men and women, laughing uproariously over nothing much. Seaside postcards. Pantomimes. Not joli at all.

  At the office in Baker Street she sat with a typist to complete her report. They needed it for the records. Just an outline. Field names only.

  I have a copy of the thing in front of me as I write. The original sits in the safekeeping of the National Archive in Kew, in Marian Sutro’s SOE personal file. The catalogue number, if you want such a dry-as-dust piece of information, is HS/9/1089853/2.

  Proper Name: Miss M. Sutro

  Field Name:ALICE

  @Anne-Marie Laroche @Laurence Follette

  Circuit:WORDSMITH

  3rd June, 1945

  REPORT ON MISSION.

  I arrived in September 1943 in the S. W. of France as courier to ROLAND, organiser of the WORDSMITH circuit. I fulfilled this function for approximately 1 month before I was directed to travel to Paris to make contact with MARCELLE, a W/T operator for the CINEASTE circuit. This order came from London, via ROLAND. Contact with MARCELLE had been lost and as I knew her personally, I would be able to identify her. I also had a further task, to contact MECHANIC, a man known to me before the war, whose codename was MECHANIC. Both these people were to be returned to England.

  In Paris contact was made with both MECHANIC and MARCELLE and a Lysander pickup was arranged through the GILBERT circuit. However, I established at the last minute that MARCELLE was blown and was under surveillance by the Gestapo.

  Fortunately I was able to escape the trap set to arrest me and the Lysander pick-up duly took place from the GRIPPE landing field near Tours on November 10. MECHANIC was successfully taken to England.

  The next day, while travelling to rejoin my circuit in the S. W. of France I was arrested by the Gestapo at the station of Vierzon. I was taken to 84 Avenue Foch where I was imprisoned and interrogated for some weeks. I was subjected to some physical violence and the baignoire but gave away nothing that could have been of any
use to the enemy.

  After Avenue Foch I was imprisoned at Fresnes Prison for eight months in solitary confinement. In August 1944 I was transferred to Karlsruhe civil prison and from there, in October, to Ravensbruck concentration camp. Here, with the help of a prisoner working in the ‘hospital’ I succeeded in swapping my identity with a French prisoner who had died of pleurisy.

  So I became was fortunate to be transferred to the sub camp serving the Siemens factory. I worked as a translator because I could speak German. Perhaps this saved my life as conditions in the Siemens camp were better than those in the main camp.

  In late April I was with a group that was moved westwards away from the approaching Russians. On the road our column was machine-gunned by an American plane and in the confusion I escaped with two friends (French). Later we had a lift in a Red Cross lorry and eventually found US soldiers who took us to their headquarters. After interrogation I was transferred to the British forces.

  The story of disaster rendered down to a few hundred words. I imagine her reading it over and pointing out a few things: ‘We need to add an aigu to Cinéaste. And an umlaut to Ravensbrück.’

  The accents are there, as evidence, carefully inked in.

  Miss Atkins read it through rapidly and then put it to one side as if it was of no consequence. She drew on her cigarette and looked at Marian though wreathes of smoke.

  ‘What about you? How are you getting on?’

  ‘I’m all right. It’s sometimes not easy, adjusting to the real world.’

  ‘Of course it’s not. Eventually you’ll need a job, won’t you? Do you have any ideas what kind of thing might suit you? Or are you headed for university?’

  ‘I’d like to do something to give me a bit of independence. But I don’t really have any useful skills …’

  ‘I’ll make enquiries if you like. I have contacts.’

  ‘That would be very kind.’

  VE

  With the surrender on Lüneburg Heath, the war in Europe dissolved into something more resembling exhaustion than peace. ‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing,’ Churchill cautioned on the radio, ‘but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead.’

  Marian walked with her parents to see the celebrations, people cheering and waving rather aimlessly, a bonfire at Carfax, a torchlight procession through the streets culminating in an effigy of Hitler being burned at the Martyrs’ Memorial. ‘I think they’ve got the associations wrong,’ her father murmured as they watched the figure enveloped by flames.

  Two days later one of her mother’s friends came round for tea with her two children, a young daughter and rather older son. Marian wanted to hide upstairs in her room; instead she summoned up her courage and appeared like a ghost at the party, to brave their curious glances. There was, of course, no mention of what she had undergone during the war, but things had already been said, whispered comments between parents had been overheard. The little girl fixed Marian with sharp, inquisitive eyes. ‘What was it like in the camp?’ she asked. ‘Did you live in tents?’

  There was a terrible silence, broken only by her older brother’s caustic sarcasm: ‘Don’t be stupid, Amanda. It wasn’t a Brownie camp, it was a concentration camp. They killed people.’

  The girl’s eyes widened in astonishment. ‘They killed people?’

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ their mother snapped. ‘Go and play in the garden or something.’

  Of course the children did nothing of the kind, but stayed precisely where they were, watching and, in the indiscriminate manner of children, remembering.

  Amanda and Sam Wareham; their mother, Judith.

  Can I keep my distance from my own mother? It’s a trick you learn as your parents diminish with the perspective of time. Judith Wareham, née Juniper, was a loose-limbed woman with chaotic blonde hair and a pair of spectacles as large as saucers. She wrote short stories for magazines like John Bull and Argosy, and attempted to learn French under the tutelage of Marian’s mother; her husband Gordon, absent on this occasion, worked in the physiology department of the university and often travelled up to London where he sat on a variety of committees in the Ministry of Food. Judith always accused her husband of being more interested in fish, fowl and faeces than in human beings, although the truth is that later in his career he was to show altogether too much interest in one of his D.Phil. students, thus bringing the marriage to an abrupt end. But that lay in the future. In 1945 they were together and moderately happy, living in a flat in north Oxford in a state of bohemian laissez-faire with their two children, both of whom had been brought to the Sutro household on this occasion to impart some semblance of easy-going normality to the event.

  Judith tried to move the conversation on. ‘And what is Marian going to do now?’ she asked Marian’s mother, as though the subject of her enquiry were mentally deficient and unable to answer for herself.

  ‘She doesn’t really know yet, do you ma chérie? At present she’s on paid leave.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Marian said. ‘It’s not nice at all.’

  There was another dreadful silence. She stood up and excused herself and went for a walk in the garden, knowing that would be construed as her being distressed by what the children had said or the Wareham woman’s tactless questions. But it wasn’t distress. It was just indifference, a sensation of estrangement from the ordinary matters of human contact. Conversation with anyone felt like trying to talk to people in a foreign language when you only have a fraction of the vocabulary at your disposal and half the grammar. People soon became bored and inattentive.

  That, at least, was her memory of the encounter. My own is rather different, but clear enough, like one of those photos you find stashed away in the back of a cupboard – snapshots of people you half recall in places you don’t remember. I see a tall lady – of course she was tall, I was a mere eleven years old; and of course she was ‘a lady’, because that quaint term was what I called women in those days, just as adults were ‘grown-ups’ and men were addressed as ‘Sir’. So: a tall lady in a white blouse and green skirt, pinched at the waist with a wide belt. This lady reaches out and we shake hands. Later there’s a vague memory of talk among the adults; and then nothing more until we leave – certainly nothing of the awkward conversation about camps and tents and killing. I presume this departure is part of the same occasion because I think, but only think, that she is wearing the same clothes. So presumably she came back from her walk round the garden in order to bid farewell to the departing guests. And as we take our leave, rather than offering to shake hands, Marian bends down to me, says something in French – perhaps, on fait la bise, n’est-ce pas? – and to my intense surprise delivers two kisses, one on each cheek.

  She had a scent that was her own. It’s hard to describe scents. Hers was dry and faintly sweet, of oatmeal and cut grass, a hint of moss, a breath of mushroom, enhanced by the perfume she wore but not drowned by it. I sound like someone struggling with wine tasting notes. She was a stranger to me and this smell was strange – foreign, enticing, disturbing for a young boy who hadn’t yet encountered adolescence but who already knew the allure of sexuality. Perhaps it was also those two kisses and my subsequent fiery blush that etched the moment in my mind.

  My sister didn’t blush, of course. Six-year-old girls expected to be kissed by virtual strangers in those days. Not so, now. ‘She’s not nice,’ she said of Marian when we were in the car driving home.

  ‘Why not nice?’ asked our mother. ‘I think she’s very nice.’

  ‘I don’t like her smell.’

  Which was strange, because that was precisely the thing that stayed in my mind. Yet now I wonder whether Amanda hadn’t unknowingly detected something, some residual stink of the camps that still emanated from Marian Sutro’s body. Maybe it was always there, a subtle hint of corruption that can both attract and repel.

  I didn’t expect anything more to come of the
visit. Childhood is like that – encounters with people you don’t know, don’t understand, never see again. What part could Marian Sutro, a tall, neurotic grown-up twelve years older than me, possibly play in my life? But we would never cast adrift from Marian because my mother held on to her, determined to help despite being rebuffed, determined to interfere. She always befriended waifs and strays, and probably did more damage than she knew. So it was from her that I learned of Marian’s careful reconstruction of a life. I heard about her creeping out into the post-war world, going shopping, braving the cinema, occasionally meeting people, becoming practised at talking obliquely and evasively about what had happened to her, becoming expert at dissimulating. There were things she did not talk about at all. Of course there were. For example her twice-weekly visit to the psychologist who during the First World War had worked with Rivers in Edinburgh. And her encounter – a car was sent for her – with the man she knew as Major Fawley.

  Fawley

  She always thought of Major Fawley as the priest. That was what she remembered of him from their previous meeting, in 1943 in rooms buried deep within an Oxford college: his quiet, priestly manner, the complex theology of his world. This time he received her, not in an Oxford college but in an apartment somewhere in Victoria, where a brass plaque at the street entrance listed Excelsior Import-Export and The Wireless Network Company as the commercial occupants of the building, and a certain Prof Meredith Jones, D.Sc., FRCPE as the single resident. But the actual incumbent was exactly the same as she remembered: the same innocent eyes, the neat nose set in a smooth, blank face, the sense of quiet coupled with a feeling of immanent threat, exactly like the priests of her schooldays. He evinced a faint expression of surprise at the sight of her standing there in the shadows of the landing when he opened the door, as though he had quite forgotten the appointment. ‘Ah, Miss Sutro. How good to see you once again.’