Charlotte Gray: Book: The Interview

Ten days later Charlotte received a brown foolscap envelope in the post. Inside it was a smaller white envelope. Inside that was a letter headed WAR OFFICE, with the official address in Whitehall. A heavyweight typewriter had punched its inky message into the low-grade paper. It invited Charlotte to present herself to a room on the third floor of a West End hotel. It requested her to bring the letter with her on Wednesday at 2 p.m.

‘I’ve got an appointment to see Mr. Jackson,’ Charlotte told a large man in a stained tunic behind the Reception desk. As she said the name, she saw for the first time how much it sounded like an alias, chosen for the way it was unlikely to be garbled on the telephone. The porter said nothing, but allowed his eyes to travel slowly down Charlotte’s figure. When his inspection had reached her knees, he nodded and called over a youth in braided uniform who took Charlotte across the lobby to a lift.

He rotated a lever inside the cage and they moved heavily upwards. They stopped at the third floor with a juddering suddenness and the boy hauled back the metal doors; Charlotte stepped out into a dim corridor. The youth set off ahead of her, dragging his feet soundlessly along the strip of carpet. Charlotte saw the tired acquiescence in his bobbing shoulders as the room numbers rose into the high three hundreds on her right; every now and then they passed a fire extinguisher and a notice pointing the direction of the air-raided shelter. There was the distant clank of a tea trolley, as though life were sustainable in these twilit corridors without reference to the world outside.

The bell-boy deposited her at a door with no number and knocked. Charlotte put a florin in his had to hasten his departure; she did not want the youth to see her meet this Mr. Jackson. He moved off quickly as the door opened and Charlotte found herself looking at a slightly built man of about forty with buck teeth and thick glasses. He had a pale, froggy look, a damp handshake and a broad, nervous smile.

‘Yes.’ Charlotte pulled it out of her bag and handed it over. Jackson held it close to his face to read it, then visibly relaxed.

‘Jolly good. Now come and sit down. Frightfully uncomfortable, I’m afraid, but we just have to make do with what we’re given.’

There was a trestle table in the middle of the room covered by a green baize cloth. The washbasin in the corner had been partly concealed by a board on which a pile of papers was dangerously balanced; the hard little chair on which Charlotte sat down was also of the willingly collapsible type.

She noticed that Jackson lowered himself very gently on to his, as though he had learned from hard experience. Provisionally poised, he gave her another welcoming smile, like the headmaster at a boarding school inexpertly trying to reassure his new pupils. He slipped Charlotte’s letter into the jacket of his suit, and it occurred to her that there was no longer any evidence of who had asked her or of where she had been.

‘Now then, Miss Gray. I think the best thing is if I try and put you in the picture a little bit. Then I shall ask you one or two questions about yourself. Does that sound agreeable? Jolly good. I’m not going to give you a lot of technical stuff. All you need to know is that I work for something called G Section. We answer to a parent group which in turn answers to the Chiefs of Staff Committee and ultimately of course to the War Cabinet. What we’re concerned with, quite simply, is France.’ He gave a short tenor laugh.

‘I understand that you’re a fluent French speaker and of course that’s jolly handy. It’s a great shame that our two languages are so incompatible. At least, I mean the accents are. We’ve had a few awfully good people we’ve had to turn away because although they speak fluent French they couldn’t pass themselves off as French for a minute because of the accent. Anyway. Our work in France comes broadly under two headings. The first of these is organization. We try to help local Resistance people to set up reliable networks. The other thing we do is sabotage.’

Jackson’s cheery manner had a frightening effect on Charlotte; it made her think nostalgically of the gassy comfort of Dr. Wolf’s rooms.

‘Now most of the people who work for us are volunteers from the services. My job is to take a look at them and see what they’re made of. People sometimes have funny reasons for volunteering. One of the most common, you know,’ he said, pausing and looking humorously but straight into Charlotte’s eyes, ‘is that they’re crossed in love.’

Charlotte raised an eyebrow and smiled politely at this absurdity as Jackson chortled to himself.

He became serious again. ‘We need brute strength sometimes—quick, athletic types who are not afraid. We also need patient, crafty people who are discreet and good at organization. Then of course we need various bods at home, though they mostly have a special technical skill with documents or some such—forgers, cipher people and so on. We recruit from all sorts of unlikely places.’

Charlotte, thinking of her inability to keep up with Dr Wolf’s letters as well as her deficiencies as a saboteur, began to explain to Jackson that perhaps they had better leave it there; but he seemed not to hear her protests and rode over her interruptions as though in the middle of a prepared speech.

‘Discretion is in fact the absolute keystone of the whole thing. Of course one gets tied up in a tremendous amount of red tape with the War Office, who insist on making lists all the time. In a way that makes it all the more important for us to be utterly and totally discreet. Are you good at that sort of thing?’

This time he was looking away, towards the lace curtains that covered the window, but Charlotte had the feeling that he was still somehow able to take in her response.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that’s one thing I probably am good at. But, listen, I don’t think I’m very suitable for—’

‘Let me finish, Miss Gray.’ Jackson gave an extra little laugh to palliate any rudeness. ‘I’d like to tell you one other thing about us. Most of our cipher clerks are teenage girls—jolly good they are too. Many of our staff are women—not just clerks and telephonists, but wireless operators and linguists who run the training schools. We also have women agents in the field. I’m just telling you this in case you were thinking your sex is a disqualification. It most certainly isn’t. However, I must tell you that women who do go to France are subject to particular danger. No woman is allowed to go without fully being put in the picture.’ He looked benignly at Charlotte.

‘That entirely depends on what we find out about you. I would think the most likely thing at the moment is that we might find a use for you in one of our training schools. But You never know. Did you have anything particular in mind?

‘I thought I’d like to go to France. It’s a country I feel very strongly about. But I can see from what you’ve just told me that I’d be quite unsuited to the sort of things you need. The thought of me planning a bomb or something...’

Jackson smiled. His eyes, like the hall porter’s, took in her tailored suit, her hands folded in her lap. ‘My view is always to keep an open mind on these things. Training brings out extraordinary qualities—things people never expected. First of all, though, I think we should establish whether or not we should even go that far. I want you to tell me about yourself.’

Jackson stood up carefully, pushing himself up slowly with his hands. Although this should have put her at a disadvantage Charlotte did not feel intimidated. As she answered his questions about her family background she seemed pleased by her father’s war service and asked her to tell him more about it. He was particularly interested by the fact that Charlotte had also read Italian at university: the Italians, he told her, were expected at some stage to occupy the part of France east of the Rhone, and the thought of someone trilingual excited him.

‘Ha. I doubt it. What do you make of the return of our friend Monsieur Laval?’

‘I don’t feel qualified to say. Instinctively I feel it’s somehow sinister.’

Jackson nodded his head in a brisk, approving way. ‘Of course, it’s hard to say ... I encourage our people not to worry about the complications, but just to keep one thing clear in their minds and that is that the fight for France is not lost. In that respect the Vichy government is quite wrong. For two years they have taken defeat as a fait accompli and tried to manoeuvre for a place in the new German Europe. They have viewed British resistance as perverse and likely to collapse at any moment. Even with America in the war they still think a German victory is inevitable. That is what the whole Vichy philosophy, what I think they would call their Realpolitik, is founded on, and I must tell you, Miss Gray, that is a fatal error. We are not finished. We are going to win.’

Charlotte spoke slowly, trying not to sound sentimental, though she was aware that none of the words she used seemed to have much practical bearing on what she might actually do. Jackson walked slowly round the room, occasionally nodding his head as she talked.

‘I have a feeling,’ she said, ‘that some almost perfect pattern has been lost ... not just in the obvious fact of the Occupation but in the way that it has been dealt with. I think that even when I first went to France as a schoolgirl one could sense that something was unravelling. That was ten years ago. There seemed to be a feeling that people were fed up with politicians and wanted somehow to take the law into their own hands. It was very difficult for a foreigner to understand because to me it looked such a beautiful place, both Paris and the provinces. It seemed untouched by modern developments, as though it had hardly changed since the nineteenth century. Of course I could understand that the politicians were not exactly great statesmen—people like Daladier and Laval and Reynaud and all these characters who seemed to crop up in themselves imagined they were men of great vision. But the contempt people seemed to feel for them was almost anti–democratic. I had the feeling that most French people wanted to do away with parliament and get back to something more straightforward, more dictatorial.’

‘And now they have that wish. Marshal Petain saved them once before, in 1916. He was the hero of the Great War.’

‘Yes, and I’m sure he’s a good man. But there’s something wrong, isn’t there? I doubt whether someone who saved you once, in his youth, can do it a second time, in his old age. It’s as though the French have turned their backs on the problem of the present and run back to Grandpa and told him to take the modern world away.’

‘Yes. But in practical terms what this means is that we are encouraging the French to disobey their government—though I use the word “government” reluctantly, since one must doubt its real legitimacy. The means at our disposal are also what you might call “anti–democratic.” We aren’t going round organizing meetings at which we air the anti-Vichy point of view; we’re using guns and explosives. Even the organizational side of our work is only a prelude to violence. The trouble is, Miss Gray, that this message is still falling on fairly stony ground. A large number of people welcome the Vichy government and deeply respect the Marshal, but an even greater number are motivated by a fear of something worse—of civil disorder. They fear that the Resistance, such as it is, would be the prelude to a full–scale Communist revolution. So they cling to the idea of stability, of law and order, and turn their face away from the actual shape it takes.’

‘Obviously you know much more about this than I do. I haven’t been to France for five years.’

Jackson stopped circling the room and resumed his position on the opposite side of the table from Charlotte. ‘That’s quite enough politics, Miss Gray. What I’d like to do, if you’re agreeable, is recommend you to the people who run our preliminary course. You can have a look around, and see what you make of them. Then we can go ahead with some training if you’re still keen.’

‘I’m bound to say that I’m jolly impressed. Before you begin in earnest you’ll have to see the old trick-cyclist.’

‘The psychiatrist. It’s absolutely routine. All the chaps do it. He asks a few questions about your family and then shows you some funny squiggles and asks if they remind you of a baby’s cradle or a house on fire or some such thing. A lot of mumbo–jumbo, really, but the nature of the work, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate, does attract the occasional misfit. You don’t look very sure. It’s nothing personal, Miss Gray.’

‘Jolly good. Well, you’ll be hearing from us. Don’t try to reach me, just wait till you hear. Do you think you can find your way back to the lift?’

Charlotte found herself being politely but swiftly ushered out of the room. She made her way back down the long corridors, the falling numbers on the bedroom doors her simple thread back from the minotaur. She felt exhilarated by her meeting with ‘Mr Jackson’ and by the thought of going over to France.

It would be easier for her to understand herself there; away from the doleful influence of her parents she might be able to see how things had gone wrong in her life. This was the chance she had long wanted—to escape through action, and in her absence from the world she had known to reassemble the fragments of her life into a harmonious whole. This would be accomplished, she felt sure, by the light of the passion that she had for Gregory.

The thought of him filled her with light and expectation as she strode across the lobby, unconscious of the porter’s sullen stare.

Excerpted from Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks. Copyright ©1999 by Sebastian Faulks. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

CHARLOTTE’S INTERVIEW