8

A WEEK LATER, Charlotte went in to G Section headquarters to receive details of her posting to Suffolk. Before she left, Mr Jackson handed her a letter.

‘This was brought back by one of our chaps yesterday. I’ve given him the most tremendous ticking off, as you can imagine. If he’d been found with this on him they’d have known at once what sort of game he was in. That’s the trouble with agents. Once they’re out there, some of them seem to feel invincible.’ He gave her a knowing look. ‘Anyway, I hope it’s good news.’

Charlotte recognised the handwriting before she opened the letter and saw the signature: ‘Octave’. She took the letter to Regent’s Park and walked up to a semicircle of chairs arranged in front of the bandstand.

My dear Danièle,

I doubt whether you will ever read this letter, but I want to write to you anyway, to set out my thoughts. And who knows, perhaps some Englishman will bring it back to London. You know how reckless these English are.

I am in a very cosy little farm in the hills, quite a long way now from our own town. (I’ll be at least prudent enough not to mention actual names.) I’m with César, who is a splendid young man, and half a dozen others in their twenties who have come to escape the Statutory Work Order. We have enough arms for the time being and are receiving more volunteers all the time. Monsieur Laval’s perpetual desire to please the Germans has rebounded greatly to our advantage.

I have heard no news from my father, but I’m hopeful that the worst rumours about camps and so on are not true. C. told me that, alas, the boys were taken. I pray for their safety. C. travels a lot and brings news as in some way he has managed to keep up good appearances as a model citizen.

I, on the other hand, am not so well respected in the town and must keep my head down. The death of a certain person has not been connected in any way with me as far as C. has been able to discover. I can say no more about this in any detail. However, following scenes at which you were present (or later scenes at which you can guess), our friends in grey do not like me.

I will wait until the war is over. Things will be forgotten if we win. In fact, history is already being rewritten. C. tells me that since the war has turned, many of the Marshal’s oldest supporters are saying they never trusted him and that the General was always the best bet. Some of the most dedicated Pétainists are already beginning to talk about ‘our Anglo-Saxon friends’ and ‘the noble Tartar’!

We will win; somehow we will win. And we have kept alive something of France to make the victory worthwhile. That is the achievement of the dark days.

How long it will take, I don’t know, because it’s very complicated. Within an hour or so of here I know of three different resistance groups. One of them detests the other more than it detests the Occupant! This is a civil war as well as a national war; it is a fight for influence and for possession of history. It is squalid, Danièle, it is mean and horrible, and the only way our group keeps going is to remember its clear objective: to defeat the invader.

I expect you’re safe at home now. Perhaps you’re even back with your lover. Dear Danièle, your friendship was a wonderful thing to me at that time of greatest darkness. Being a man, an awful base creature, I do also treasure the memory of the night of the drop, and I will never forget it. But I know that it was not the most important thing, and I do know that your future is elsewhere.

As for me, I’m very excited by what we can do. Despite the squalor and the shame and the bloodshed that will come, I feel great hope. We will be free, and we will have a true government again. I will return to Paris and I will see my old boss Monsieur Weil restored and in his pomp, ordering oysters from the big restaurants on the Boulevard de Montparnasse.

Will you come down for the opening of the hotel? What a party we’ll have. And I’ll come to visit you as well, many times in the years to come. Thank you for everything, Danièle, my friend, my dear, dear friend. A thousand kisses, ‘Octave’.

The day of Sally’s wedding dawned hot and clear. Charlotte awoke in the bed in Sally’s old room, having come down from her holding school in Suffolk the night before. Sally was with her parents, but Daisy and Alison kept the bathroom occupied for the first two hours of the morning. Charlotte was still in her dressing gown when they heard Michael Waterslow’s imperative hooting in the street below.

Daisy pulled up the window and shouted that he and Gregory should come upstairs. Charlotte dressed in her bedroom and hurriedly put on her make-up in the finally vacated bathroom. When she went into the sitting room, she found Peter Gregory and Michael Waterslow drinking bottled beer, while Daisy and Alison completed their preparations.

Michael was in a morning suit, Gregory was in uniform, his unusually neat appearance spoiled by a small speck of blood on the collar of his shirt. Charlotte kissed his smooth cheek.

‘Must you have that stick?’ she said.

‘I thought it made me look distinguished.’

‘Just as you like.’ She straightened his lapels and smiled.

All of them were ready: they stood in a circle inspecting each other’s appearance. Alison, a slender, dark-haired woman, was in a pre-war Hardy Amies suit; she indignantly pointed out that Charlotte’s dress had too many pleats in the skirt and that both the collar and belt were wider than wartime restrictions allowed. Daisy was wearing a floral print dress with a turban and sunglasses.

After almost an hour in the car, as they approached rural Surrey, Gregory asked Michael if he would mind making a short detour. He had made an arrangement to meet someone, he said, some time after midday. In a village with some Tudor and more mock-Tudor houses with pots of geraniums outside their doors, Gregory directed Michael to a pub called the Rose and Crown. The bar was cool and dark after the hot June sunshine outside.

‘Greg! I never thought you’d make it!’

Borowski loomed out of a shadowy corner and took Gregory’s hand. ‘You remember Leslie, don’t you?’

‘Still alive, Brind?’ said Gregory.

Leslie Brind touched the wood of the bar before shaking hands with Gregory, who introduced the others.

Charlotte watched the delight the men took in each other’s company as they poured drinks into one another and competed in their mocking rudeness. Gregory was persuaded by Borowski to stay for just one more, and then by Brind for just one more on top of that, but they were still in good time for lunch at the town nearest to the wedding. It was market day, and many of the stallholders were packing up and going off in search of food and drink. Michael swung the car beneath an arch in the high street, into a lane that ran down beside the White Hart Hotel and to a car park behind.

Inside the hotel they followed a carpeted corridor to the lounge bar, which was full of local people from the market as well as others in uniform or morning dress who were on their way to the wedding. The women sat at a table while Michael and Gregory pushed their way to the bar.

The bell on the till was ringing in a continuous monotone as a barmaid from the public bar was summoned to help. A tray of drinks was held high above the throng, with tall mugs of beer, glasses of fizzy drinks with slices of cucumber and orange, smaller glasses with cherries on sticks and pink gin. Gregory arrived with an oval plate of sandwiches, hastily cut by the harassed barmaid, but full of fat ham and mustard that, Charlotte thought, would have caused a riot in Lavaurette.

Charlotte found herself swept up in the air of slightly frantic joy. There was no point in resisting it, she thought, as she raised her glass and drank to Sally’s health for the third time that morning.

She looked across at Gregory, who was in earnest conversation with Alison. In all the long months she had forgotten how much she enjoyed his company – the simple pleasure of being with him. And, as he put his head on one side, the better to listen to something Alison was saying, she thought how she had also forgotten how beautiful he was, how very beautiful.

When they reached the churchyard at last, Charlotte saw Dick Cannerley and Robin Morris in anxious conversation. Morris went inside the church, while Cannerley stood for a moment with a pile of service sheets. He divided them between two other young men in morning dress, then followed Morris inside. Cannerley had aged, Charlotte thought.

She stood by the lych gate where Michael had dropped them while he went off to find somewhere to park along the crowded verge. She inhaled the smell of cow parsley from the bank as she looked over the gently swelling tumuli of grassy graves that led up to the church.

There was Peter Gregory, leaning on his stick half-way up the path, talking to Sally’s mother, who was looking nervous beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

In Charlotte’s mind, Gregory belonged to the category of dreams and traumas. The possibility of happiness he had once held out, and that she had briefly tasted, was of an intensity so great that even at the time it had seemed already to belong to the past. The power of such feelings, it seemed to her, lay in their promise of transcendence. People followed them and believed in them because they offered not only a paradise of sensation but the promise of meaning, too; like the miracle of art, they held out an explanation of all the other faltering lights by which people were more momentarily guided.

By their nature, however, these feelings were unreliable. Sometimes, they seemed to be remembered before they were even experienced, and they could leave in those who felt them a fear that only what had been forgotten, what stayed beyond the reach of recollection, was capable of truly transcending the limits of their sad incorporation in the flesh, and of their death.

To believe otherwise remained an act of faith, but it was one that Charlotte felt prepared to make. She walked up the path of the churchyard and took Gregory lightly by the arm. They went between the grey, lichen-covered headstones, and turned for the final few yards towards the door of the Norman church. As they came near to it, Charlotte slipped her hand into Gregory’s and found that it already contained something – the handle of his stick.

She held on tight to his arm, nevertheless, as they walked through the porch, stepped over the stone threshold, worn smooth and low by many centuries of people passing through. They crossed into the cold interior of the church, heavy with the scent of cut flowers and the murmuring of the organ, into the soft air, and disappeared.