GREGORY TOOK THE stairs two at a time, one hand clamped against the bottle of gin in his coat pocket. He had stopped worrying about his motives; he only knew how anxious he was to see the door of the flat swing open. Charlotte was waiting, leaning against the door frame, wearing a floral summer dress with bare arms and legs. Gregory inhaled the scent of lily of the valley as he kissed her warm neck.
‘Is the coast clear?’
‘Yes. I don’t think anyone’ll be back before eleven.’
Gregory ran his hands through Charlotte’s hair. She pushed him away and resettled the tortoiseshell comb he had dislodged.
Gregory poured drinks. ‘I’m off to France again any day,’ he said. ‘As soon as the weather’s clear.’
‘Another drop?’ said Charlotte, sitting down next to him on the sofa.
‘That sort of thing. They’ve given me an address in Clermont-Ferrand.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s a Citroën garage in the middle of town. The owner’s a part of the local network. He’s called Chollet, I believe, but he goes under the name of Hercule. I’m supposed to get in touch if something goes wrong.’
‘Like what?’
‘I . . . I don’t know. I’m sure it’ll be all right.’
‘You told me nothing could go wrong in those big Halifaxes.’
Gregory seemed distracted, then made a sudden effort. ‘I just discovered today what the G section codeword for the moon is. Guess. It’s a girl’s name.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Charlotte. ‘Phoebe? Selena?’
‘No, it’s Charlotte! I’ve been reading all these messages about “Charlotte Unsatisfactory”, “Charlotte Impeccable”, “Regret Operation impossible, state of Charlotte”. Charlotte and Isaac, the two most important people in my life.’
‘Who’s Isaac?’
‘Isaac Newton. The black knight.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Isaac is what pilots call gravity.’
‘I see.’ Charlotte smiled and laid her hand on his knee. ‘And how’s your French coming on? Would you like to practise?’
‘Not today. I’m just not as clever as you, Charlotte, that’s the trouble.’
‘You don’t have to be clever to learn a language. Children can do it.’
‘Well, I suppose I can just about make myself understood but as soon as I open my mouth they’ll know I’m not French.’
‘You’ll just have to be careful. Don’t look so sad. I hate it when you go all remote like this.’
Gregory lit two cigarettes and gave one to Charlotte. He sighed. ‘You’re worth ten of me, old thing. That’s the trouble.’
Charlotte raised a finger. ‘No RAF talk.’
‘What?’
‘Isn’t that what you call your planes, “old girl” and “old thing”?’
Gregory smiled tiredly. ‘I’m not like that, you know, Charlotte. All that balls about “wizard prangs”. I don’t really like those sort of people.’
‘I know. I know you’re not really like that.’ She had taken his hand as she began to speak in the voice of a soothing and indulgent mother, which Gregory found shamefully affecting. He laid his head on the cotton fabric of Charlotte’s dress while she stroked his hair.
‘I sometimes talk like that because I grew fond of those men. That’s the trouble. They probably all seem absurd to you, and in some ways they do to me. But they were very young. They hadn’t even begun their lives. You must forgive them a few silly phrases.’
‘You talk of them with such devotion,’ said Charlotte. ‘I sometimes think you’re fonder of them than you are of me.’
Gregory stood up. ‘Come on. Don’t let’s waste these evenings together being morbid. Let’s have dinner. What is it? Spam?’
‘No. It’s a pot au feu à la mode de Ministère de Guerre.’
‘Sounds interesting. I want you to tell me more about your training. You’re not really going ahead with this, are you?’
Charlotte drew the curtains of the kitchen and lit the candles on the laid table. She told him about Dr Burch and of how she would shortly have to go on a course in Scotland.
Gregory watched her as she spoke. Sometimes, when he heard her talk, he felt that he had merely stumbled from one thing to another without ever properly thinking about it: India, England, Nyasaland, farming, friends, women, war . . . He must have made decisions, some based on quick gratification, some on what was sensible, but he had never thought it through in the dimension Charlotte inhabited. It was almost as though he had never grown up at all, but had just trusted to luck and to a childish belief that things would probably work out. Perhaps if he had undergone her self-scrutiny he would not have been so shaken by the experience of war. He liked to watch the nervous intensity of her narratives, as she described her interviews and experiences. He shuddered at the completeness of her trust in him and felt unworthy of its intensity. He was, in fact, though he did not admit it, a little frightened of her; and the only way to subdue that fear was by indulging the violently erotic feeling that her fierce attention to his well-being aroused in him.
At ten o’clock he had to leave. Charlotte was asleep on the bed, her face pink and untroubled, her breathing steady. Gregory picked up his service shirt and flannel trousers from the floor and pulled them on. He ran his hand back through his hair, then sat on the hard little chair at the end of Charlotte’s bedroom and looked at her in the unlit gloom of the summer evening.
He had not told her of the true nature of his flight. Perhaps he would never see her again.
She was lying on her side with one leg raised as though running. There were tiny dry lines where the skin of her upper foot met the sole. Her toenails were painted scarlet. Gregory’s eyes ran over the sharp ankle bone, up the straight shin to the pocket enclosed by the stretched sinews of her raised knee, the thin pink creases behind the other, straightened, knee, then up the sweep of her thigh, whose packed flesh was of the same firm consistency as that of her lower leg. At the top of the hip-bones were two soft folds, which, to her intense embarrassment, he referred to as love-handles. Gregory’s lips twitched as he recalled her indignation. He explained to her that it was necessary to have some flaw to balance what might otherwise have been too orthodox a figure, but Charlotte was ashamed of them, as she was of the small roundness of her belly that made her tighter skirts swell a little at the front, not fall in the perpendicular line of a fashion drawing. This too Gregory liked, though the way she lay made it invisible to his gaze, which could make out only the bottom of her ribs and her upper arm with its pale freckles trickling over on to the shoulder where her fair hair lay disarrayed, a single darker strand of it stuck to the side of her face by sweat.
When he had finished dressing he stood by the bed and gave her body one last glance, straining in the almost-full darkness, as she lay deep in one of her death-like sleeps. He was moved by a paradoxical sense that there lay like an invisible film over the practical volume of her rib cage and the bumpy spinal cord with its vital wiring something personal, something essentially hers, that transcended the facts of her physical incorporation. He wanted very much to stroke the line of her thigh and hip, to kiss the mandolin-shaped cheeks, childishly bare; but he feared to wake her, so instead drew the sheet carefully over her and tiptoed from the room.
He found himself inexplicably reluctant to walk the few steps down the passage to the front door; he wished he had told her what he was really going to do. He took a piece of paper from the hall table and scribbled a note on it. ‘Charlotte Satisfactory. 10.21 p.m. A bientôt. XX’ He went back to her room and left it on the bedside table.
Gregory had been driving for three-quarters of an hour through the night when he felt a sudden pressure rising in his ribs. For a minute he thought he was going to vomit, and he pulled the car over to the side of the unlit country road. He climbed out and stood by the door. Something was struggling to come out of his chest and was making his arms and hands shake.
He held on hard to the top of the open door, fighting to control himself. A volume of packed air erupted from his mouth in a cry. He bent over the bonnet of the car to steady himself and found that other wild exhalations were struggling to follow the first. Soon he was sobbing like a child.
While he knelt on the ground and held his face in his hands he had the curious feeling of standing simultaneously outside himself. In a detached way he could picture the strange figure he made, weeping for no apparent reason in his uniform. His vision was detached, but it was not dispassionate, because he felt a dreadful pity for this second person.
The reflexes of his body had shown him what his mind had refused to admit. He had not been able to absorb as well as he had thought the things the last two years had shown him. He was still young, and he had seen in that short time things that normally only old men knew. And then there had come this woman.
When he thought of Charlotte, Gregory felt a terrible exhilaration. Out of all the death had come this redeeming chance. When he thought of the passion she had so transparently conceived for him, he felt singled out by an extraordinary fortune. The chance that of all the women in the world, the one he loved (and with relief he admitted that this was what he felt) – the thought that she should actually reciprocate his feeling seemed a possibility of incalculably long odds. His incredulous joy at his good luck was almost as exhilarating as the emotion itself.
He slumped down in the seat of the car. The most terrible aspect of it was the timing. It was only when it was too late to tell her that he had finally understood. In a few days he would be gone, and he might never come back.
Charlotte wrote to Gregory from Scotland. She pictured him taking the letter to his billet and lying down on his hard bed to read it. It pleased her to think of his fingers where hers had been; she imagined the cigarette smoke that would curl from his hand and billow from his lips, sardonically smiling at her letter.
My Darling Peter,
I expect this is against all the rules and I will be shot as a spy if anyone knows I’ve written, so don’t leave this letter lying around. How are you? I do miss you. I think about you in your horrid cold plane and your poor feet freezing. I miss you.
I arrived at the end of a course at Inverie Bay. The others have been shown how to use Bren guns and Sten guns and how to creep up on the enemy at night and kill silently with their bare hands. I look at those hands with their manicured nails holding cocktails in the evening and have to suppress a giggle. I wonder if the Germans know what’s coming. I seem to have missed all the violent stuff, for which I’m grateful. I have been taught by a man with whisky breath how to transmit by morse; some of this I remembered from the Girl Guides. Don’t laugh. Yesterday an old trawlerman took us out in a rowing boat. The idea is that we should be able to pick up parachutes or stores that have landed in the water. You know how careless those wretched RAF boys are with their drops . . . Anyway, this old chap was very flattering and told me I had a natural feeling for a boat, which was surprising. It was extremely hard work, as the wind was whipping across the bay and the waves were smacking into the side of the boat. My poor arms.
Every night we have to put on our uniforms for dinner. They’re not nearly as flattering as Daisy believed: they are rather scratchy and my skirt is too tight round the middle – no rude remarks, please. The food is variable, often quite good – fresh herring and mackerel, home-made bread, but a bit heavy and too reminiscent of ‘home’ for my liking. The others on the course are mostly English girls from the Home Counties. There is a girl called Marigold with whom I have become quite friendly. She is very good at the cross-country runs and the obstacle courses. It is perfectly clear to me, and I imagine to the instructors, that I am no good at all at these things. However, since I’ve started the course I have to finish it. They will then decide what job, if any, to offer me. Driving the Brigadier’s car, I imagine, will be just about all they will think me up to. This is a pity, because I do very much want to go to France and do something worthwhile.
Next week we are going to Manchester, where we will be trained in parachute jumping. Even I can manage to fall out of a plane, I should think. Before that, however, there are two important dates: first, the 36-hour cross-country trek, which is famous for being very, very tough indeed (‘Believe me, lassie, ye’ll be lucky if ye can get yer wee shoes on fer a week afterwards’ – a good deal of that rather gloating talk from the whisky-breathing wireless instructor), and the day after that: tea with mother. I tried to explain that I had no free time, everything very hush-hush and so on, but she had insisted we meet in Fort William and is making a special journey from Edinburgh to come and see me. We do in fact have two days off before Manchester, so I can’t very well say no.
Some of the girls have apparently been given instruction in how to resist interrogation. For some reason this involved two of them being told to take their clothes off while they were questioned by two ‘Gestapo’ officers. So that there was no question of impropriety the large woman who runs the dormitories was present as a sort of chaperone. Marigold said she thought this woman’s interest was rather more unhealthy than that of the men!
I will be back in London at the beginning of the week after Manchester where I will wait to hear my fate. Will you be able to come up to town? Probably you will have done your trip to France by then, ‘Charlotte’ permitting. I do hope you can come up and we can start to have our evening routine again. I miss your sad old face and the horrid things you say and do when there are just the two of us. You can’t write to me here, but you could write a letter to the flat in London to wait for my return.
Do you love me just a little bit?
I send you my biggest, biggest kisses. Charlotte.
One of the reasons Charlotte had wanted to come on the course was somehow to shock Gregory into an increase of feeling: perhaps if he felt she were demonstrating her independence of him he might recognise the true extent of his dependence on her. She had not been sure that she would ever, really, go to France; but, now she had seen the other women who had volunteered and recognised that they were not much different from her – no stronger, no braver, no better at the language – the prospect of her actually going had become real.
Meanwhile, she needed reassurance. She wanted to be told by him, not once but many times, that he needed her; she wanted him to tell her that the compromises she had made with her modesty for the sake of his desires were understood; more than anything, she wanted him to tell her that he valued her.
All this, she thought, as she sat on the stopping train to Fort William, without seeming weak or clinging. It was a hot afternoon, and from the carriage window she saw a fisherman on a stool by a narrow river. While his right hand gripped the rod, he was waving his left back and forth by his neck to drive off the midges. It was strange to see this placid scene: Scotland, France . . . Were men now fishing off the banks of the Seine near Monet’s house at Giverny? Why were they not fighting? How many citizens did it take to wage a war, and what was the responsibility of the ones who did not? Someone must carry on with the ordinary business of working, eating, going to bed: somebody must fish. Could you in all conscience play your line across the seething waters of the Garonne at Toulouse, knowing that where it met the sea at Bordeaux the docks were patrolled by German soldiers? You voted for a government, then did what you were told: no one could really ask for more. And what right had she, a foreigner, to interfere?
Charlotte waited at the station for the Edinburgh train and saw her mother’s familiar but ever stouter figure step down on to the platform. She waved from the ticket barrier, then turned away so she would not have to hold her mother’s gaze while she walked the length of the train. Amelia Gray’s powdery cheek dabbed against her daughter’s unmade-up skin and, nominal contact made, recoiled. Charlotte took one of her bags, which bulged with her unvarying baggage of knitting, library books and presents wrapped in tissue paper.
For Charlotte there were vests, handkerchiefs and chocolates, which she unwrapped in the hotel lounge while they waited for the waitress to bring tea. Amelia, satisfied by Charlotte’s gratitude, settled back in the floral-covered armchair. She was a big, handsome woman, run to fat, whose waved brown hair was shot with grey. Her fussing indulgence worked hard to compensate for her natural reticence and her fear of scenes, storms or emotions.
The waitress wore a frilled apron and a white cap clipped to her hair with pins that Charlotte noticed as she laid the heavy tray down on the low walnut table. Wisps of cress trailed from the sides of bulging egg sandwiches; three different kinds of cake were fanned about a willow-patterned plate.
‘Tell me how you’re getting on with this course.’
‘We’ve finished. Tomorrow I’m off to Manchester, then back to London.’
‘What’s it for, though?’
‘The FANYs. You know, the First Aid—’
‘I know what the FANYs are. Mary McKechnie’s daughter is a FANY too. Are you going to be a driver?’
‘I expect so, yes.’
‘So why do you need to go on a course?’
‘I’m not really supposed to say. You never know who’s listening.’
‘Really, Charlotte.’ Amelia laughed. ‘I’m your mother.’
There was a pause in which Charlotte could have said more, but after a moment’s awkwardness she could tell that her mother was relieved not to know: her curiosity was formal.
‘Ooh, you know. He’s just . . . Father.’
‘Busy?’
‘Of course. Very busy. They’re making a lot of changes at the hospital and he wants to be involved in the reorganisation.’
‘Are you seeing much of him?’
‘He’s getting back very late.’
‘And have you heard from Roderick?’