CHARLOTTE BEGINS TRAINING

Charlotte set off for the New Forest on the train with Marigold Davies. In her handbag was the note Gregory had left by her bed on the last night she had seen him, and a letter from his squadron leader.

Dear Miss Gray,
Further to our telephone conversation today I am writing to confirm that while we have received no news of Flt Lt Gregory since he left on a mission some time ago we have no reason to believe the worst. Although we are a standard RAF squadron independent of other organizations albeit working in liaison with other services you will no doubt appreciate that I am not at liberty to disclose details of the flight, either with regard to its destination or in respect of its operational purpose. I can tell you that Flt Lt Gregory is an extremely able pilot and a patriotic officer with a proper sense of duty. My own belief is that for any one of a number of possible operational reasons he was unable to execute the full purpose of his mission but that he will make every endeavour to contact us when it is safe and prudent for him to do so.
He will be officially posted ‘Missing’ but I’m sure you have every faith in him, as most assuredly do his colleagues.
Yours sincerely,
Allan Wetherby, Squadron Leader

On the telephone, Wetherby had told her ‘strictly between ourselves’ that the most likely explanation was that the man Gregory was supposed to pick up had not been there. Without the agent or the support of his network, Gregory would have been unable to refuel and therefore obliged to ‘make his own arrangements’. Charlotte pictured him begging petrol from a farmer in his dreadful French and finding himself reported to the Vichy authorities; she tried to develop this picture in her mind because the only alternative was to believe that he was already dead.

She told Marigold nothing of her worries as the train headed out into Surrey. She had confided in Daisy, and that was enough. Now she would complete her training with the greatest assiduity, and when it was finished she would go to France and find him.

Security, recognition, interrogation and security. That, the intelligence officer running the course told them with a smirk at his witty repetition, was what Group D was all about. Charlotte and Marigold were among only six women on the course; they sat next to each other and learned to identify every German plane and badge and rank and regiment. Vaguer but more important were the instructions for recognizing German counter-intelligence officers, the Abwehr and their colleagues, of whom there were unknown numbers in France – presumed standing at station ticket barriers, sitting in cafes, idly making bogus calls from public telephone boxes. In her state of stunned concentration Charlotte committed every detail to memory and entered mistake-free test papers when required.

A grave, actorish man in his sixties gave them practical hints on looking ordinary and natural. It was no use knowing a cover story and giving away nothing under interrogation, he told them; they had to look at all times like people who didn’t even have a cover story.

Charlotte shared a bedroom with Marigold and a young woman called Liliane, whose mother was French. She took the course more lightly than the other two, and claimed that when she first went to Scotland it was in answer to an advertisement for bilingual secretaries; the first time she realized she was not being groomed to be a typist was when they offered to instruct her in silent killing.

The three of them were joined by three men for an exercise in interrogation. They were told to prepare a cover story giving details not only of assumed identities but of the precise way in which they had all passed the four hours of the previous afternoon, in the course of which a local train had been derailed. Each was then to be interrogated separately.

Charlotte was woken at three in the morning by a torch being shone in her face, and was taken down by an orderly to the billiard room at the back of the house, where two officers were waiting, dressed in SS uniform. One was the course commander, one was a man she had never seen before. The presence of a senior uniformed FANY made Charlotte wonder if this was to be a naked interrogation, like the one Marigold had described. The two men had either not heard of or had disregarded the idea that one interrogator should abuse and one cajole: they both attacked her from the start, standing close, using their physical size to intimidate her. Charlotte, drawn from her deep sleep, pale and puffy-eyed, her pink dressing gown drawn tight about her, found all the details of her learned story undisturbed and was able to repeat them with the mental precision that she always had on first waking.

They tried to destabilize her by claiming other members of her group had given different accounts of how they had passed the afternoon, but Charlotte told them they must have been mistaken. She was sure the self–taught mnemonic tricks that had helped her pass school tests as a girl were still working.

Her mind was too full. It was a warm night, and the curtain had been drawn back a little to allow any breeze to enter through the open window.

She had found the early parts of her training impossible and absurd, but her attitude had changed: it now seemed urgent and serious, and even the sight of two Englishmen dressed up in Nazi uniform did not strike her as ridiculous. These pantomimes and costumes, these colours of allegiance, were tokens of a deadly moral order. She was not fooled by their superficial absurdity: British people laughed at Hitler and his preposterous acolytes, but, as German philosophers long before the Nazis might have argued, abstract evil did not choose the form in which it emerged in the particular.

She thought of France under darkness. It was hard to imagine how this country which in her first visits was still so harrowingly proud of itself, intoning the word Verdun like a muttered prayer, could so utterly have lost the thread that connected it to the innocent glory of Rheims and Proust’s Combray and Louveciennes, the village the Impressionist painters had made seem essential. There was this sense, on a grand scale, of national breakdown, and nest to it was the loss of continuity in her own small life. She felt that the outcome of the one depended on the other; that only if France could find itself again could she hope to reconnect her own future to the lost happiness of her past.

More urgent than this hope was the need to get herself as soon as possible to Clemont Ferrand: to track down Monsieur Chollet in his garage and see if Gregory had called; and, if not, to use whatever method her cunning and determination could devise to go out in the dark and find him.

The curtain blew back a few inches from the window as the hoped-for-breeze rustled through; and in the revealed slit of sky she saw a clouded moon. Charlotte crescent, Charlotte full.... She closed her dry eyes and felt her lips come inwards in a narrow line. She saw his face. Don’t worry, my love, don’t worry, I’m coming to get you.