A Gathering Storm (45 page)

‘I must go,’ she said. ‘You are being very rude.’ The grip on her arm became more forceful. She sat. There was nothing else she could do.

‘Now, Paulette,’ he said. ‘There is no need to do anything silly, is there?’

‘I ought to go,’ she repeated. ‘My mother said . . .’

He threw back his head and laughed, a rolling, carefree laugh. Then he leant forward and whispered, ‘Your mother is a long way away, is she not? In England, perhaps.’

She grew still and he released her arm.

‘Let me make myself clear. I am not one of them.’ Again, he glanced at the soldiers. ‘Nor am I one of you, if you get my meaning. But I want to be. I want to get to London and I need you to help me. I help you and you help me, do you see?’

She looked at him blankly.

‘I need to get to London,’ he repeated.

‘Why?’

‘You don’t need to know that. I have been watching and biding my time. I would like your friends to telegraph London for me and say that I have vital information and that I need to be flown to England.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Beatrice said. ‘You’re frightening me.’

He gave her a freezing little smile. ‘I think you do,’ he said.

‘I must go now. I have an appointment.’ She opened her bag and from her purse laid out several coins on the table. Meeting his eyes she said, ‘Goodbye. If you follow me, I . . . I will call for help.’

He smiled again and fear shivered through her.

‘What did he want?’

‘I’ve told you. He said he wanted to get to London, that he has information.’

‘Well, this is a disaster. He’s guessed who you are.’

‘Not who I am, just that I’m not who I say I am. Oh, I don’t know.’

‘You did the right thing, at least,’ Rafe said. He was trying to soothe himself, she thought, as much as her. They were in the small parlour, where she’d found Rafe when she returned. It was here that he spent most of his time fretting over papers on the desk or, like now, pacing the floor, or sometimes just standing by the window, his hands in his pockets, staring out over the fields.

‘What else could I do?’ After she’d left the man who called himself André, she’d picked at random one of the small streets that led off the square and hurried up it, then turned left and right several times before getting thoroughly lost and having to ask her way back to the station. It had not been possible to deliver her message.

‘What should we do?’

Rafe thought for a while. ‘We’ll have to get a message to Buckmaster, see what he says. And we’d better find out all we can about this chap. I’ll get Stefan to put a tail on him. And in the meantime . . .’

‘What?’

‘We’d better carry on as we are. He might just be a bit mad, or operating on his own, as he says. We’ve no reason to suppose he knows about anyone except you.’

‘Well, of course he must, or he wouldn’t have been sitting there waiting when I came in through the door on the first day. Oh, Rafe.’ She stood before him, staring down at his unhappy face. ‘And no, don’t tell me I shouldn’t have come. That’s not what I’m worried about. It’s the success of the mission that concerns me. I’ve only just got here and I seem to have ruined it already. It makes me boil.’

‘It’s hardly your fault,’ Rafe said, hands in pockets, his expression grim. She longed to reach out and put her arms around him, to comfort him, but something in his demeanour warned her away. Nothing felt natural here; there was always the sense that they were being watched, that the enemy could knock on the door at any time and they’d be discovered. It had already happened once or twice in the town. There’d be some hushed conversation in the café about this or that family or individual arrested or sent away somewhere. People would be taken without warning and sometimes without trace.

In the end, the vital message to the house in Périgueux was delivered by other means. André was not seen in the café for several days, but even this made Beatrice nervous. The report came from Stefan that the man was living at a hotel in Limoges. The Germans seemed to let him come and go without harassment.

Just as she was starting to tell herself that he’d given up on her – decided he was wrong about who he thought she was, or accepted her rejection – there he was, sitting at his usual table and smiling at her as he ordered his usual coffee and glass of water. She acted as her alias would have done, tossing her head and refusing to meet his eye, then hid in the kitchen and considered what to do. ‘Act normally,’ was her decision. However, when she ventured out once more, he’d gone, leaving her a ludicrously large tip.

‘Here, you have it,’ she said to Marie. ‘I don’t like him.’ Marie put the money in her purse in the twinkling of an eye.

After that there was no sign of André for a long time.

‘They don’t think anything of it in London,’ Charles told her one afternoon, showing her the message he’d transcribed. ‘Just that we must watch and see. The man is probably a maverick and not dangerous.’

‘How do they know that?’ she wondered aloud.

‘Perhaps that is what Rafe thinks, too,’ Charles replied with a shrug. But Beatrice was not reassured.

It was hard keeping the peace between the different ideologies in the movement. One of the cell near Périgueux had befriended a woman cleaner at the big guardhouse near the bridge, and she’d found out useful information about night patrols. The other members of the cell were impatient to go ahead, but Rafe was trying to persuade them to wait. There was a wider timetable that should not be jeopardized. The atmosphere of the meetings was dark with argument, and sometimes Beatrice, feeling her presence wasn’t important, avoided them and crept away to her room, though her sleep was broken by the rumbling of voices below. Once there was a crash, as of a chair falling.

Her dreams were troubled. Often there was that old one of trying to run and getting nowhere. Sometimes she was trying to save Rafe, sometimes her child, sometimes just herself.

There were quieter evenings, too, when the five of them – the Girands, Rafe, Charles and herself – sat together in the kitchen talking after supper was cleared away, or in the parlour, airless, for they had to keep the windows closed, trying to tune into the BBC on the wireless. Finally, there came a message they’d been expecting. ‘Antony to meet Cleopatra tomorrow night,’ the announcer said. Stefan was dispatched with a second man to the field where Beatrice had landed, to pick up another crate. The mission passed without incident. Beatrice was sent off into the countryside the following day on her bicycle with a message for the
maquisards
about its arrival. The contents of the crate were moved on.

The weather grew hotter, the air thick and heavy. Faraway thunder rumbled, the tension in the air was palpable. It was impossible to sleep and she felt constantly headachey.

One hot night she lay restless, the window open, a net stretched across to keep the insects out. Nothing could keep out the moon, though. It shone through the crack in the shutters onto a gecko splayed motionless on the opposite wall of the room. Some small animal scrabbled in the roofspace above. She listened to it patter about its business across her ceiling and thus didn’t hear other footsteps, outside on the landing. But she did hear someone knock lightly on the door, and sat up, her heart thumping with fear.

The latch was sprung and the door swung open. ‘Bea?’ He came quietly into the room, his lithe figure in the long nightshirt striped with moonlight. The door closed softly behind him.

‘Rafe. Is something the matter?’

‘No. Sorry if I frightened you. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Nor can I. It’s too hot.’

‘I got up for a drink of water, then I thought, well . . . I’d see if you were all right. It’s oppressive, isn’t it?’ There was a huskiness in his voice. She heard him swallow.

‘Come over here,’ she whispered, and he came and knelt on the floor by her bed so that he was looking into her face. His, she saw, glistened with water, or was it sweat? She wrapped her arms around him and drew him close and they sat like that for a while until it grew too uncomfortable, so he got onto the bed and lay beside her. Gently at first, then with increasing passion, he kissed her. His hands began to move over her body and she rolled towards him, wanting him desperately, hardly believing that the moment had come at last.

Later, as they lay in each other’s arms, she said, ‘I’ve wanted this for so long.’

‘Have you?’ he said, his eyes glinting. Eventually he said, ‘Me too.’

‘I didn’t know,’ she whispered. ‘All I could see was that you were tense and unhappy.’

‘There’s no one I can talk to about it, Bea. Not even you.’

‘You don’t have to reveal secret things, but you can tell me about how you feel.’

‘No. I want to be strong for you, not make you frightened.’

She laughed at that. ‘How could I be more frightened than I am? Rafe, I know exactly what could happen to me. There’s no point trying to protect me from it. We’re in this together all the way.’

‘I want to protect you,’ he said.

They lay together, not feeling the need for any more talking. The creatures in the roof settled into silence, perhaps aware of the coming storm. Outside, the little rolls of thunder were grumbling louder and closer, and though the moon no longer shone, the room was periodically lit by lightning. Then came the first urgent taps of rain.

Rafe drew the sheet up over her shoulders and together they lay listening to the storm as it passed overhead. The air became cooler, less heavy, and eventually she slept.

After that night he often came to her. Her room had the advantage of being further away from the Girands’, but his had a double bed. Once they were embarrassed to meet Mme Girand in the corridor, but she merely murmured,
‘Bonne nuit,’
and retreated to her own bedroom.

They went downstairs the next morning feeling very nervous about what might be said, but the woman was exactly the same with them as she always was and the matter was not mentioned, so after a while Rafe’s room was where they spent the night. It was, Beatrice thought, like being in a sort of haven together where they could, for a short time, be blissfully happy.

At first they didn’t talk much; it was as though they lived entirely in the present – alive to a creak of the stairs, or the distant sound of a vehicle or the warning bark of a dog a mile away. Here, at least, the weight of the past had fallen from their minds. There was only the work they had to do, and the delight of exploring each other.

‘Do you think of home?’ she asked him once, but he shook his head.

Once she woke in the small hours to find he was awake, too, lying quietly, just watching her in the half-darkness.

‘What is it?’ she whispered.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I like to see you sleeping. You look so peaceful.’

Rafe, on the other hand, was a restless sleeper. There was another time she awoke in pitch darkness to find him gone. She panicked, got up, found the door was open and slipped down the stairs. It was such a relief to glimpse him outside at the edge of the cornfield, pacing up and down, the tip of his cigarette glowing fiercely. Not wanting to disturb him, she padded upstairs again to bed.

Once, after they’d made love, he clung to her so tightly it hurt. ‘I love you,’ he mumbled. ‘I still can’t believe you’re here.’

‘Oh, Rafe, I love you, too. But I worry . . . will it be different when we’re back in England?’ If they ever got back, said a little voice in her mind.

‘All I know now is that I want to be with you always,’ he said, and she was almost but not quite comforted.

July 1943 moved slowly by and something in the air was changing; Brigitte and Gaston sensed it, the old men in the café felt it. German patrols passed through more frequently; there was a house-to-house search one market-day, ending in a whole family being taken away, their crime being to hide a Jew. Then Stefan brought word that the man he’d had followed, André, had vanished, and enquiries at the hotel led nowhere. He’d simply paid up and left.

‘The tide is turning out there. They’re getting frightened.’ Gaston’s solemn pronouncement followed the news filtering in of the Allied invasion of Sicily.

‘They’ll tighten the screws here, then,’ Rafe replied, and indeed the hope in people’s eyes was tempered by fear. The Resistance might be growing bolder, but everyone was afraid of reprisals. And so the tension grew.

‘Bea, get up!’ Rafe was shaking her awake. There was the sound of banging, shouting all around, coming from downstairs. A woman’s voice – Brigitte’s – could be heard, high-pitched, screaming. Beatrice knew what she had to do. Her hand closed on her pistol under the bed, her ammunition belt. Then her jacket – she pulled it on – and shoes. Rafe, already dressed, wrenched open the shutters. He said, ‘You first – hurry.’

It was all familiar from the training. Step on the chair, swing over the windowsill, hang down, jump, knees together, into the darkness. And she was rolling amongst the weeds, getting to her feet, then stumbling over a low wall and away, running through the cornfield. She could hear Rafe behind her, then his jacket brushed against her arm. ‘Over there,’ he gasped. She swerved towards the hedgerow and a copse of trees, blacker shapes in the blackness.

Bright beams of light, the crack of gunfire. Now they were out of the cornfield and treading on loam. When they reached the copse she looked back. Half a dozen torchbeams were searching the field; the man with the gun was out in front.

Beyond the copse lay another field, then, she knew, dense woodland and, some distance off, the river. ‘This way!’ she cried. Into the field she ran, Rafe just behind her. A bullet sent earth flying up into her face. She cried out, brushed it away, still running. Her breath came in heavy gasps now. The ground changed again under their feet and they were dodging past trees, their clothes catching on undergrowth. She mustn’t look behind or the torchlight would blind her.

She was beginning to see quite clearly in the darkness. They found a path and ran along it, all the time alert to the sounds of pursuit. They came to a lane, crossed it, and cut along the side of another field under a line of poplar trees.