Tightrope Read online

  There was that moment’s awkwardness when inviting guests into a flat, a shuffling around the narrow spaces available, an exchange of apologies, a desire to lead in conflict with a desire to allow the visitor to go first. But eventually they were seated, he at one end of a sofa and she in an armchair set at right angles to it. The room itself was as anonymous as if it had been part of a hotel suite, furnished following a single, cursory visit to Heal’s and decorated entirely with prints of old London from a dealer somewhere in the Charing Cross Road. On the low table between two sofas and an armchair there were copies of Tatler and Country Life, the kind of thing you might find in a dentist’s waiting room. A discreet young man brought two cups of coffee and a plate of biscuits and then quietly retired.

  Fawley said, ‘Goodness, it seems quite a time ago that we last met, doesn’t it? Where was it exactly?’

  ‘Oxford, Major Fawley.’

  ‘Ah, yes. BNC, of course. My alma mater, as a matter of fact. A good, solid institution. Nothing spectacular like Magdalen or Balliol. Oarsmen, rugger players, lawyers …’

  ‘And spies?’

  He smiled a faint, enigmatic smile. ‘Those as well. Perhaps it goes with the law.’ He sipped coffee and offered cigarettes. As she took one he said, ‘May I start by congratulating you on carrying out your mission with such flawless efficiency?’

  She shrugged. ‘It depends what you mean by flawless. I was arrested and spent the next eighteen months in captivity.’

  ‘It must have been a terrible experience. But you survived.’

  ‘Pure chance.’ She looked around the room, as though looking for distraction, or perhaps a means of escape. ‘Anyway, I’m trying to leave that behind. To look to the future.’

  ‘Quite so. At least now you are back with your family. It can’t have been easy for your parents …’

  ‘It wasn’t. Nor for me.’

  ‘Quite.’ His bland façade seemed disturbed for a moment, as if perhaps he felt some blame. ‘At least you can be assured that Clément Pelletier arrived in England safely and went on to contribute greatly to the war effort.’

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for it. Can you tell me where he is now?’

  ‘I believe …’ His tone suggested he was leaving himself room for later denial, ‘I believe he is in Canada. Might you be making contact with him?’

  ‘Of course I might. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t? He was an old friend of the family – you know that.’

  ‘Of course he was. And yours in particular.’

  ‘Mine in particular.’ She distracted herself from thoughts of Clément by taking notice of the perfect crease of his grey flannels, the polish of his shoes. Brown brogues. ‘Major Fawley,’ she asked, ‘why have you asked to see me?’

  He nodded, as though that was exactly the right question. ‘I read your debriefing with Commander Senter. He is a clever man – a barrister by trade.’

  ‘Another Brasenose man?’

  Again that smile. ‘I rather think, one of the universities north of the border. You manoeuvred your way around his questions like a true professional.’

  ‘What exactly does that mean?’

  ‘You never let him know why you went to Paris.’

  ‘I assumed he knew already.’

  Fawley shook his head. ‘Not at all, not at all. And in that respect, I have a few questions to put to you that … ah, fall outside his remit.’

  Outside his remit. She remembered the phrase from when this man had first intruded on her life, when he had hijacked her original mission and had her sent to Paris. The whole Paris business, the encounter with Clément, the Lysander flight out by the light of the silvery moon, all had been outside the remit of Buckmaster and Atkins and their entire organisation.

  She waited. Lurking behind Fawley’s affable manner and bland expression was, she knew, something to fear. Perhaps it lay in the manila folder that he was opening in front of her. He took from it a postcard-sized photograph and laid it on the table. ‘Really all I wanted to do was tie up a few loose ends. For example, I wonder whether you recognise this man?’

  She looked. A young man sitting alone at a table outdoors somewhere. His hair gleamed like patent leather. Over his left shoulder was the edge of a café window and part of an advertisement poster extolling the virtues of Byrrh, Tonique Hygiénique. The sun cast shadows across the man’s face and he smiled at the photographer as though he was enjoying being snapped.

  The image was a shock. Physical, mental, but she knew now how the two things could not be separated, how the mental intruded on the physical and the physical determined the mental. We are all one creature, the psychiatrist had told her. The mind/body distinction has no meaning. So the shock now was mind and body – a disturbance that was in her head and in the cage of her chest and in the pit of her stomach.

  She said quietly, ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I thought perhaps you might. Can you enlighten me?’

  ‘On the train to Paris,’ she said quietly. ‘When I travelled from Toulouse. He was in the same compartment. He followed me from the station. How do you know about him?’

  ‘His name is Miessen. Is or was. We’re not sure what happened to him.’

  Miessen, nemesis. She knew all about names and non-names, pseudonyms, cover names, field names, codenames. She felt Fawley’s eyes on her, touching her face like the fingers of a blind man. Did he read anything in her expression – a shiver of fear, perhaps? ‘Julius Miessen, that’s what he told me. He tried to pick me up.’

  ‘Did he, indeed?’

  ‘How do you know about him?’ she asked again.

  Fawley clasped his hands and made a little steeple of his forefingers. He rested the steeple against his chin and lowered his head, almost in a gesture of prayer. ‘Miessen worked for us. We wanted him to keep an eye on you, try and keep you out of trouble—’

  ‘Keep me out of trouble? He was a pimp. He offered me work if I wanted it. Escorting German officers. I was … embarrassed, suspicious.’

  Nothing seemed to disturb the bland surface of Fawley’s expression. ‘When was this?’

  ‘He followed me from the station. Austerlitz. My first visit to Paris. I went twice, you see. The first time to set the operation up, the second time to carry it out. This man met me on the train the first time, followed me out of the station and got talking to me …’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘The second time he also followed me from the station. He didn’t intend to be spotted on that occasion but I picked him up coming out of the metro somewhere. I don’t remember exactly. At first I had no idea who it was. I just thought I’d been burned. Brûlé. You know what I mean. I thought he was Gestapo and I’d been blown.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘I threw him off in a church just by the Panthéon. The standard technique – in one door, out another, with a coat change on the way. If I’d known I was being tailed by someone from our side, I’d have done things differently.’

  Fawley allowed himself a wry smile. What amused him? Her sudden enthusiasm for the tricks of tradecraft? Or the simple fact that she had got the better of one of his own agents? ‘And is that it? Was that the sum total of your contact with him?’

  She hesitated. She knew the danger of denial. They’d taught her all that at Beaulieu, and she’d learned more later, at Avenue Foch and at Fresnes. You mustn’t deny what they already know. That gives them the lie, and they can break you on your lies. Quietly she said, ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  It was remembering that she hated. Memory was her enemy, undermining the fragile structure of recovery. And yet Miessen was one of Fawley’s agents.

  ‘When I was in Avenue Foch … they confronted me with him. They’d arrested him, and then brought him for me to see. He was …’ She closed her eyes for a moment, seeing the figure once more, etched on the inside of her eyelids – the triad, the hybrid beast, the crucified man strung out between two thieves, his arms out
stretched, his head hanging down.

  ‘They’d beaten him badly.’

  She remembered someone grabbing the crucified man’s hair and pulling his head upright for her to see him and, presumably, him to see her. As far as he was able. Julius Miessen.

  ‘They wanted to know if I knew him.’

  ‘And you—?’

  ‘Denied it. Of course I denied knowing him. And then they told me that he was a murderer.’

  ‘A murderer?’

  ‘They said he had killed two members of the security forces in Belleville, a week earlier. He’d shot them down in cold blood. And he would be executed for this crime unless new evidence came to light.’

  ‘What had this got to do with you?’

  ‘The shooting took place on the same day that they ambushed me at the Père Lachaise cemetery. I escaped by running into Belleville.’

  ‘So Miessen was in Belleville at the same time on the same day that you were?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Fawley nodded thoughtfully. How much, she wondered, did he know about life in the field? How much did he understand the fear that undermined your very personality? ‘So these security men were after you, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, they were. And they were shot down in cold blood. Nine millimetre bullets, one through the left eye, one in the chest. The second man was dispatched with a bullet through the forehead. Expert shooting, that’s what the Gestapo man told me.’ She felt something tremble inside her, remembering Miessen’s single eye watching her through its narrow slit. A soul gazing out at someone else in hell.

  ‘And Miessen shot them and you got away?’

  Miessen’s single eye watched her, a small jewel of pale blue gleaming between the swollen lids. ‘They asked him if he knew me. He denied it. And then they asked him why he killed two police officers.’

  Fawley waited.

  ‘He said it was an act of war.’ She wanted to weep but she was determined not to. The tears stung, just there, behind her eyes. ‘He could barely speak. They’d bashed him about and he could barely speak. But he said he killed the men as an act of war. So they took him out and shot him.’

  Fawley watched her impassively. Then, like an undertaker packing things away after a cremation, he took the photograph of Julius Miessen and returned it to its manila folder. ‘It sounds as though you owe him your escape from Belleville. And had you not escaped then, you would never have got Pelletier out of France. It looks as though we all owe him a great deal.’

  She looked down at her hands lying in her lap. They’d always been strong. Not ugly, not masculine, but strong. ‘I owe him more than that,’ she said quietly, to her hands. ‘Julius Miessen saved my life.’

  Silence. A momentary frown creased Fawley’s bland forehead. ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘The two men who were shot – Abwehr, Gestapo, I’m not sure what they were. The Gestapo assumed that Miessen killed them but they were wrong.’

  ‘You mean, Miessen did not kill the men?’

  For a moment something rose up inside her – panic, vomit, it was impossible to tell the physical from the mental. She breathed in deeply until whatever it was subsided. Looking him straight in the eye she said, ‘No, Major Fawley, he did not kill them. I did.’

  In the great stillness she felt the tears, bloody girlish tears welling up. The childish catharsis of confession. Bless me father, for I have sinned. Now I must do penance. But what penance should she do? What would he ask of her? ‘They gave me a chance to say so, and perhaps save Miessen’s life. And I looked at him, and I denied having ever seen him. I have the blood of three men on my hands, Major Fawley. The two I shot in Belleville that day, and the man whom I allowed to take the blame.’

  Fawley nodded almost as though he understood. ‘It’s not as simple as that, is it? Morality is never simple. After all, Miessen backed you up. He accepted the sacrifice for the greater good.’

  ‘Whose greater good? His or mine?’

  ‘Who knows what his motives were? Perhaps surprisingly, they seem to have been rather noble. After all, you are alive and he, sadly, is dead. In our line of business that kind of thing happens.’

  ‘But I’m not in your line of business, Major Fawley.’

  His smile was sympathetic. ‘Oh yes, you are, my dear. Yes, you are.’

  And that was her only absolution. A sympathetic smile from Major Fawley. As he stood to see her out he asked, ‘I presume that you haven’t told Commander Senter about any of this?’

  ‘I thought it fell outside his remit.’

  He smiled at the irony. ‘Quite so. Nor anyone else in the shortly to be disbanded Special Operations Executive, I imagine. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?’ He showed her out into the hallway. ‘The car will be waiting for you outside. What are your plans?’ Everyone seemed to ask that. As though she should have a whole life mapped out before her.

  ‘This afternoon, d’you mean?’

  ‘I meant, for the future.’

  ‘Of course you did, and of course I don’t know. Find a job of some kind, I suppose. I don’t have any useful skills, except my languages. And an ability to kill people. Interesting qualifications for a girl who is not yet twenty-three.’

  He looked pained. ‘If anything crops up I’ll get in touch.’

  She considered him thoughtfully. ‘Who exactly do you work for, Major Fawley?’

  He smiled the patient, priestly smile. What would he have replied if he had been a priest? Much the same, really: ‘I’m afraid I can’t really tell you that. But, unlike your present employers, we operate in peacetime just as much as in war.’

  Election

  Uncertain spring became summer. I remember the joy in our household when the election results were declared. Those were days when it was still believed that an election might change matters for the better or the worse. And we also believed that with the war finally over, the peace was about to be won by Mr Atlee’s Labour Party. Industry would be nationalised, the means of production would be in the hands of the workers, the weak would be sustained by the strong, the poor by the rich, the stupid by the intelligent, and all would be well. It didn’t quite work out like that but it’s not my parents’ fault for hoping.

  Vera Atkins, on the other hand, saw things very differently. ‘It’s beyond my comprehension,’ she said. When she said it was beyond her comprehension, she meant she considered it beyond anyone’s comprehension – essentially incomprehensible. She drew on her cigarette and blew smoke into the air. ‘It’s the ingratitude that I find so painful. Churchill leads the country through the war to victory, and instead of thanking him they spit in his face. It is, I feel, typical of the British people.’

  What did Marian think? But Marian was far too used to dissembling to give anything away to Flight Officer – soon to be Squadron Officer – Vera Atkins. ‘It’s the same with all their heroes,’ Atkins went on. ‘First they put them on a pedestal and then they knock them down. Mark my words, once they get to know about us and what we did, they’ll be trying to tear us apart too. That’s why we must call the tune.’

  ‘Call the tune?’

  ‘We need to get our side of the story out to the public first.’

  ‘I didn’t realise there were different sides.’

  ‘Of course there are. There are different sides to every story.’

  ‘And what’s ours?’

  Atkins shrugged. ‘That we did our best under the circumstances. Very trying circumstances at times. And sometimes we had to sup with the devil.’

  Marian wondered at that. Which particular devil was Miss Atkins thinking of? The devil nowadays seemed to be the Soviet Union and yet Véronique had always extolled the virtues of Russia and its revolution. ‘The Red Army will come to save us,’ she used to say. A belief almost like a religion.

  ‘So how are you bearing up?’

  ‘I’m getting bored kicking around at home.’

  ‘That sounds promising. As you know I’ve been making some enquiries on y
our behalf, written some letters …’

  ‘That’s very kind.’

  ‘It’s the least I can do. It seems that there may be a place for you here.’ She passed a letter across her desk. It was headed The Franco-British Pacific Union, and, underneath, Union Pacifique Franco-Britannique. ‘That’s pacific as in peace, not pacific as in ocean. Apparently they have a library that needs cataloguing …’

  ‘But I’m not a librarian.’

  ‘My dear, you can read, can’t you? There can’t be much more to it, can there? Are you going to turn it down?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m happy with anything that’ll get me …’ Marian hesitated – ‘away from my parents,’ was what she wanted to say – ‘… a bit of independence,’ was what she actually said. She picked up the letter and slipped it in her handbag. ‘What are you going to do, Vera?’

  ‘When they throw me on the scrap heap, you mean?’ There was a glimmer of a smile, perhaps a smile of triumph. At Baker Street the organisation was being dismembered. Throughout the building offices were being emptied, files weeded and embarrassing items destroyed, furniture moved to other departments in other buildings where the more intractable problems of peacetime would have to be confronted. But Miss Atkins, Flight Officer, soon to be Squadron Officer Atkins, was going to Germany, to find out what had happened to her girls. That’s what she called them. My girls. She had her list there on her desk, with new notes against various names, but she didn’t need to look down to read them out. She had them by heart: Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Nora Baker, Yvonne Rudellat, Cecily Lefort, Diana Rowden, Eliane Plewman, Yolande Beekman, Madeleine Damerment, Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe, Violette Szabo. A roll call of the disappeared. ‘We know now that Yvonne died at Belsen, shortly after the liberation. But that’s the only definite news so far. Except for those of you who have come back.’

  Marian contemplated the list in silence. Her own name might have been there among les disparues. She thought of annihilation, of being a name on that list and therefore of not being, not existing, surviving as no more than a few disparate memories in people’s minds. The idea was thrilling, making the very core of her being tremble.