Tightrope Read online

  ‘Odette has been very helpful in trying to trace some of them. It seems a number of them passed through Karlsruhe prison.’

  ‘I was at Karlsruhe.’

  ‘Yes, my dear. But you don’t seem to remember anyone.’ There was a long pause, as though the reproach was being allowed to sink in. ‘There is something I’d like you to do for me. What I was saying about getting our side of the story out.’ She lit another cigarette. For a moment her face was wreathed in smoke. She might any moment disappear in a flash of light. Mephistopheles. ‘I’d like you to do an interview for a newspaper. Would you do that for me? No names, of course, no breach of privacy. But these dreadful people are just hungry for news about what we did. Would you do that for me?’

  Marian would like to have refused but she couldn’t. Quid pro quo.

  The interview, with a rather seedy journalist from the News Chronicle, took place in the lounge of a hotel in Portman Square, at tea time, amid tinkling teacups and ladies in fur coats complaining about rationing. The journalist promised to keep her anonymity by referring to her only as Miss Anne-Marie S. Miss Atkins was there like a referee, to see that the rules were obeyed and the conventions observed. She talked vaguely of days spent cycling round the countryside, of parachute drops and dead letter drops, of the police and the Milice.

  ‘How do you spell that?’

  ‘Malice with an “i”.’

  He liked the joke. He wrote it down earnestly in his little book, real letters among the shorthand hieroglyphics.

  ‘You were captured, weren’t you? By the Gestapo.’

  ‘That was in Paris. I’d been sent to Paris—’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘To assist a fellow agent. And’ – she glanced at Atkins – ‘there was an important person who had to get to London. I had to arrange that.’

  The man’s eyes lit up. ‘Important? Who was that, then?’

  ‘I’m afraid Miss Sutro cannot tell you,’ Atkins said. ‘People frequently crossed between France and England, but—’

  ‘I can’t mention them by name.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So, why were you arrested?’

  ‘I was betrayed.’ The word ‘betrayal’ quivered in the air between them. For a few moments he nosed around it like a dog trying to identify a scent.

  ‘Miss Sutro cannot go into operational details,’ Atkins said.

  The journalist looked resigned. ‘Anyway, you were arrested. That must have been frightening. Were you tortured?’

  ‘It depends what you mean by torture.’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘They hit me sometimes. And tried to drown me. The baignoire, they call it the baignoire.’

  ‘But you didn’t talk?’

  ‘I didn’t talk.’

  And then the camp. He wanted to know about the camp. He’d seen the newsreels, of course, and interviewed someone who claimed to have been at the liberation of Belsen. What was her experience? ‘My readers would love to know. We need to tell the public what it was like.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘You can’t what?’

  ‘Tell them. You cannot tell anyone what it was like. It wasn’t the stuff of words …’ But she told him something anyway, or tried to, and at the end of the allotted hour they shook hands solemnly, as if it had been some kind of match and she had won on points. ‘If I were you I’d write a book about your experiences,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re not, are you? You’re not me.’ And she felt something strange, the sensation of uniqueness. It wasn’t a good feeling, just one of separation, like being unable to speak the language that is common to all those around you.

  Alan

  The letter came, quite innocently, through the post, when she had forgotten all about the correspondence. So it was only with vague curiosity that she opened it and saw unfamiliar handwriting and the address of the Officers’ Mess, RAF Benson at the top. Who, outside the narrow purlieus of the Organisation, knew who she was and where she lived? But as she read it she felt sudden panic, as though someone had reached out and snatched at her wrist.

  Dear Miss Sutro,

  Thank you so much for your letter. It was very kind of you to reply so promptly. I’m sorry I’ve taken a while to reply but my parents had to forward the letter here and when it arrived I was away on detachment so I’ve only just seen it. Anyway, I must say I am delighted that you are back home safe and sound, but dreadfully sorry to hear about the death of Benoît Bérard. It is no surprise to discover he died in action – he struck me as being a most courageous, as well as carefree man. You must be very upset.

  It is my intention, when I have the opportunity, to travel to France and thank all those who risked their lives for me and for others. There is talk of creating some kind of society of evaders to keep the remarkable spirit of those days alive, which would be wonderful. In the meantime, I wonder whether we might meet up? I’m based at Benson, so not far away from Oxford. I could always pop round and take you out for tea or something. It might be an opportunity for me to brush up my French – I learned quite a bit in the months I was there but not the kind that enables me to read Montaigne or discuss Voltaire.

  Yours sincerely,

  Alan Walcott (now at the dizzy heights of Flight Lieutenant)

  Should she just end the correspondence there, with some brief answer saying that she was too busy these days? That would be the easy way out and the most comforting, closing the door in an instant and retreating to her room to live with herself and her memories. Thus she could become a recluse, dependent on her parents, avoiding her relatives, avoiding the outside world, wanting for nothing, chancing nothing, gaining nothing. She sat for a long while looking at the sheet of Basildon Bond before she picked up her pen and wrote a brief answer:

  Perhaps we can meet up as you suggest. Is the Randolph a suitable venue, for tea some time? I am kicking my heels at home at the moment and am free most days – let me know when you can make it. You can always ring.

  Yours sincerely,

  Marian Sutro (Ensign, FANY but also, for reasons that escape me, an honorary Section Officer in the WAAF)

  That little touch of irony at the end. Maybe he’d like that. She posted the letter and waited for a reply. There was the dentist to see – a molar and a premolar removed, a denture to fit, cavities to fill – and Dr Morgan to visit once again. There were shopping expeditions to Summertown and those walks with her father in the Parks. On Sunday she accompanied her mother to church, where the Catholic rituals of St Aloysius drifted over her like the smoke of incense, leaving behind a faint feeling of nausea. The mere act of leaving the house was becoming ever more difficult to achieve. Sometimes it brought panic, welling up inside her like a kind of vomit, an uncontrollable, visceral fear sweeping up through her heart and flooding into her head.

  ‘It’s like …’ She had searched in her memory for something similar to explain it to Dr Morgan. ‘Like suddenly finding yourself on the edge of a cliff, with nothing to stop you stepping over the edge. I used not to care about that kind of thing. I was a good skier. I’ve parachuted, for God’s sake. And now … sometimes I find it hard to stand on the front doorstep.’

  At Craiglockhart he had dealt with survivors of the trenches; now the problems were more varied and more diffuse: victims of the Blitz and the V weapons, men who had broken down in combat, aircrew from Bomber Command who had asked to be relieved from their duties and had the label LMF – lack of moral fibre – appended to their service records. And now the survivors of the camps, who had God alone knew what kind of hidden neuroses lurking in the depths of their minds. He assured her, in that faint Welsh accent that made him somehow more dependable, that talking about it would make things easier. ‘And it’ll get better with time, I can guarantee you that. But in the meantime if you really need to deal with such attacks I can prescribe something for you …’

  They always sat in wingback armchairs – matching leather ones set at ninety degrees to on
e another so that, although he was not outside her angle of vision, he was at least outside her normal line of sight. She could look at him if she wished. Or she could look at the side of the club fender and the arrangement of dried flowers in the corner of the room or the picture on the wall: a painting of mountains and crags and slate-grey cottages beneath a swirling sky that must be Wales but reminded her of Scotland and her training and those innocent days before the fall.

  ‘I want to tell you about the camp,’ she told him one day. ‘About how we lived and how we died. People have the wrong idea – all the sensational news, the films of dead bodies, that kind of thing. It was different. Not worse, not better. Just different. Very drab, very monotonous. Defined by the colour grey. Our whole world was grey, our clothes were grey, our complexions were grey. Just shades of grey.’

  There was a silence in the constrained space of the psychiatrist’s consulting room. Was he waiting for her to say more? That’s what they did, wasn’t it? Let you lead yourself on into confessions you would not otherwise make. Like an interrogator. Like Fawley.

  ‘And yet our lives were very complex. There were hierarchies, networks, friendship groups. All women, you see. I was part of a group of French girls. Just three of us and our Lagermutter, camp mother. We called her Mutti. We were a family but we were closer than a family, really. That was how things worked in the camp. You looked after each other. On your own you’d never survive; together, you had a chance. Above all, it was Mutti who mattered. She had been headmistress of a lycée in Lyon so she knew about organising girls. Her name was Véronique Barthelemy …’ She hesitated. She had never told anyone this, so why this particular man? Perhaps because he didn’t matter. ‘I want to talk about her.’

  ‘Then do.’

  She cast around for the right words. That was the problem with words – they nailed the thought down, made it explicit, fixed it, crucified it on the cross of exact meaning. But life has no exact meanings, only shades of meaning, hints, versions and contradictions, a confusion of loves and hates, of motives and desires. ‘I have never felt like that for anyone else, nor ever will,’ she said. ‘For those few months she was the centre of my universe. Because of her I’m alive today.’ She paused and thought for a moment. She had been trained to say nothing; nothing, more or less, was what she had said throughout her captivity. But having come this far with her confession she had to go on. And perhaps some kind of absolution lay ahead. ‘I loved her in ways that I couldn’t imagine loving someone. She was my whole life, my earth and my sky, my waking and my sleeping, my feeding and my shitting, my hope and my despair.’

  She said that. Shitting. A word she’d never normally have used.

  ‘I dream about her and I miss her.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s all I wanted to say.’

  Véronique Barthelemy. I looked her up. When she died in the winter of 1944 she was forty-one years old. On the internet you can find the occasional pre-war photograph of her, looking stern and slightly out of focus. She had been married, apparently, to a university lecturer who was part of the same resistance group and who was imprisoned and shot in 1943, the year she was sent to Ravensbrück. After the war Véronique was elevated to the pantheon of national heroes in that wonderful bureaucratic manner the French have, with posthumous awards of the Légion d’honneur and the Médaille de la Résistance. The lycée in Lyon where she taught now bears her name, along with a road nearby that skirts the banks of the River Saône. Lycée Véronique Barthelemy. Avenue Véronique Barthelemy. If I ever get to Lyon …

  Trout

  One morning the phone rang just as she was coming down into the hall. She lifted the receiver to hear a strange voice on the line asking, ‘Is that Miss Sutro? How about lunch next Wednesday, rather than tea? It’s just that tea always gives me indigestion.’

  It took her a minute to realise that it was the man called Alan Walcott talking. What was she to make of his words? Was she meant to laugh?

  ‘Lunch is fine,’ she said, cautiously, in case it might not be fine, in case the mere act of saying yes might commit herself to things she could not accomplish.

  ‘At the Randolph? I’ll meet you in the foyer at twelve-thirty. Is that OK? I’ll be in uniform so you’ll recognise me. The flight lieutenant.’

  ‘There’ll probably be a dozen flight lieutenants.’

  ‘Only one will look as nervous as me.’

  Wednesday was a day of sun. During the morning she spent an inordinate time in her room wondering how she looked, as though the thin, angular woman who looked back at her from the mirror was some kind of lie. She wore a tightly waisted, blue-and-white-striped dress that she had bought at Elliston and Cavell. She wondered whether she should wear a headscarf or a hat. And gloves, should she wear gloves? All these indecisions were ploys to put off the moment when she would have to go downstairs and open the front door and step outside into the world. Finally, she summoned up her courage and crept down, hoping to avoid her mother. Thankfully the sitting room was deserted. First she helped herself to a glass of sherry, then, hatless and gloveless but wearing a headscarf, she opened the front door, called out goodbye to her mother and set off to meet Flight Lieutenant Walcott.

  The walk took her onto the Banbury Road and down towards the open boulevard of St Giles. She looked like a young woman out on a fine summer day, careless and fancy free; she felt like someone edging along the brink of a precipice. The space around her was enormous and threatening, like the Boulevard de Belleville as it had been on that day of her betrayal. Yet here there was no market, no army lorries, no soldiers lining up to sweep between the buildings in their search for her. Plane trees, yes, but the city was just Oxford on a placid midweek day in summer. Not Paris during the occupation, not the silver city tarnished to dull grey. No barrages and rafles, no grim-faced occupiers and glum Parisians, reduced to acquiescence and compliance, but a golden city of ancient stone and placid self-confidence, with birds singing and the occasional don cycling past, gown billowing.

  She hurried into the gatehouse of St John’s College for a moment and stood in the womb-like shadows while her fears subsided. The sherry was doing her good, relaxing her, bringing that small shift of indifference.

  ‘Can I help you, miss?’ one of the porters asked.

  She tried a smile and wondered whether she should have worn a hat after all. Perhaps she’d have looked less like a miss, more like a madam. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just the sun.’ As though sunshine were something to avoid.

  ‘That’s quite all right, miss. Anything you want, just say.’

  Why had he even asked? Did she seem strange? ‘Cultivate distraction,’ the psychiatrist had told her. ‘Try not to dwell on your anxieties. Train yourself to think of other things.’

  She opened her handbag, took out a shining cylinder of lipstick. The pocket mirror showed no more than her mouth. She touched up her lips, feeling the soft, unctuous slide of one lip against the other, a sensuous gesture that was still unfamiliar. Two things sprung into memory: the gold powder compact that Vera had given her as they waited at the airfield for her flight to France; and the Swedish Red Cross workers dealing with newly liberated women from the camp – and discovering that what the women wanted as much as food and clothing was … lipstick.

  And now she was going to meet someone who had known Benoît. A distraction there, sure enough, her mind’s eye giving her a sudden glimpse of Benoît standing in the flat in Toulouse, outlined against the window, naked.

  She adjusted her scarf, smoothed down her skirt and stepped out into the sunlight. Across the road was the Martyrs’ Memorial where Hitler had burned only a couple of months ago and on whose spiked summit a ceramic chamberpot now hung lopsided, waiting for someone from the council to come and take it down. That gave her the blessed release of a moment’s smile. She paused at the kerb for a bus to pass and gained the far pavement at the corner of the Randolph Hotel. A revolving door spun her into the hushed shadows of the foyer.

  She stopped
and looked, fear of outside being replaced by another anxiety, that of the gaze of strangers.

  ‘Miss Sutro?’

  There was only one flight lieutenant and he was standing directly in front of her. The same height as her. A square-cut sort of face and the solid build of a sportsman. She could, in that first moment of looking at him, imagine him playing rugby.

  ‘Yes, I’m …’

  ‘Alan,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘Alan Walcott.’

  There was a moment of awkward introduction, the usual platitudes, the normal manoeuvring round the curious fact of their meeting here in the formal environment of the Randolph with the staff in shabby uniforms and dust on the chandeliers. ‘Is it too early for a drink?’ he asked, ushering her through into the bar. It was only then, sitting by one of the ogive windows that he produced a fold of paper from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Have you seen this? I expect you have …’

  It was a cutting from the News Chronicle.

  ENGLISH GIRL SURVIVED S.S. TORTURE

  News Chronicle Reporter

  Some personal stories of the war may pass into history – and this may be one of them.

  It is the story of Miss Anne-Marie S. a 24-year-old English girl, as she told it to me in a London tea room yesterday.

  I cannot tell you her real name. It is still on the security list. This is her record:

  In France she joined the resistance. Her job was carrying messages between different groups of resisters. But in the course of the work she was sent to Paris to arrange for an important person to be flown out to England. Of course, for security reasons I cannot mention that person by name. Although she was successful in this difficult task, she was betrayed by someone within the French underground and was arrested by Gestapo men at a railway station.