Ormerod's Landing (38 page)

Ormerod hardly understood a word. But the apologetic tone
was obvious. 'They've had someone signalling aircraft,' he reminded Marie-Thérèse. She put it to the old man. He shrugged and pointed to the youth with the ukelele. 'It was the fool in the corner,' he shrugged. The youth, who was trying to fit
his fingers over the strings, looked up and acknowledged the reference as if it were a compliment. 'We have taken the torch
from him now. He is a poor idiot but we still want him to live.'

Marie-Thérèse said: 'Well, you may not like us here, but we
are here. So that is that. The quicker we get to the mainland -and that means that you must get us there - the better it will be for us all.' She looked at them scornfully. I have no wish to stay in this place with you.'

The mangy mongrel, having smelled Ormerod's feet in detail,
lifted its scrawny leg and urinated down his trousers. Ormerod felt the warm wetness soak through. He pushed the dog away violently. Nobody smiled. The old man drank a glass of cider with one lift. 'The Germans will be coming very soon,' he said
quietly when he had put the empty glass on the table. 'They will be looking for the two men you ... er ... killed today. If we try to get to the mainland and they are coming across in their boats they will stop us. Then we will all be shot. You will have to wait until they come here.'

'Then we must wait with you,' said Marie-Thérèse pointedly.
Her pistol was only an inch from her hand on the table. Some of the men could hardly take their gaze from it. 'We are not
holing up in that place you call a fort. They will find us easily
there. We must be part of this island.'

'You will never be that,' said one of the men suddenly. 'Here
we keep peace."

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'While your country is in slavery!' she replied angrily. 'Have
you no guts, no fight?'

'The time for guts and fighting is over,' said the man facing her with solid fatalism. 'You have come too late.'

That night, at the insistence of Marie-Thérèse, Ormerod went to sleep at the house of the island idiot. She went to the home of the older man. If the Germans came in the middle of the night it would appear better that way.

The idiot, whose name was Clement, was patently delighted
that Ormerod was to stay at his mother's cottage and they went home across the sand, under a bursting moon, with the
young man playing wildly and tunelessly on his ukelele and
Ormerod blithely joining in the ragged song. As they went an
aero-engine sound came from the north and a solitary RAF Blenheim flew across the island at about two hundred feet.
Clement, now relieved of his torch, gesticulated excitedly and
Ormerod, feeling he had to do something, performed a forlorn
wave. 'One of ours,' he nodded knowingly at the boy. The plane crossed against the stars. It made him feel homesick for Putney.

Clement's mother was sane but insanitary and she welcomed
him to their cottage, sitting him down and giving him a large lump of bread like a stone and some cold fish followed by
some of the foulest coffee he had ever consumed. She was glad
to have him to stay, she assured him, for there were many
little jobs about the house he could do. She was a fat, wobbling
woman with hair that had defended itself against any comb for the past thirty years. She kept smiling at Ormerod and
jabbering at the boy who eventually wished Ormerod a mad
goodnight and went up the short flight of stairs to his bed.

Ormerod fell to wondering how many bedrooms there were in the cottage. He had an uneasy feeling there could hardly
be more than two. The suspicion increased when the woman
began making pointing movements towards the staircase, and he eventually mounted it, bending his head as he reached the low landing.

To his relief the steamy woman remained downstairs, look
ing at herself in a stained mirror. In the room a wide and

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lumpy double bed took up most of the available space, covered by a patchwork quilt that gave it the appearance of undulating countryside. There was an oil lamp on a table jammed in one corner. Ormerod felt excessively weary. He reached down his back and pulled the bulky jersey over his head. Then he took off his trousers and got into the bed.

Three minutes later Clement's awful mother clumped up the stairs, came into the room and unceremoniously got into the bed on the other side.

'Wait a minute! Hang on!' protested Ormerod, waking and sitting abruptly upright. 'What are you doing, madame?'

'Mon lit,'
the lady said gummily. She had taken her teeth out and donned a voluminous flannel nightdress. Her eyes glittered blackly. She let off a great soft grin. Ormerod glared at her, horrified.

'Mon lit,'
she insisted.
'Mon grand lit.'
She leaned over and punched his pillow.
'Pour vous, monsieur.'
Then she repeated the punch on her own side of the bed.
'Pour moi.'
With that she flung herself under the quilt and discharged a tremendous rush of wind. Ormerod, further horrified, remained sitting and staring.

But Clement's mother went quickly to sleep, snoring profusely and scratching herself frenetically at intervals. Ormerod felt the tiredness gripping him throughout his body. His head lolled and he dropped back against the brass headrail. His own weight made him descend into the bed and eventually he too pulled the quilt around him and slept dreamlessly.

In the morning the sun came like fire into the room. He stirred and realized where he was. To his relief his bed partner had gone and eventually the idiot son appeared balancing a cup of coffee which he promptly dropped just inside the door and had to go back for replenishment. Ormerod drank the coffee, washed in a bowl of water on the dressing table and went down the tight, crooked stairs.

On the lowest step he was confronted by the old woman brandishing a chopper. She appeared belligerent but she merely thrust it into his hand and pointed irrevocably to the back of the cottage. Ormerod walked, obedient but puzzled, opened the door and was faced by an eight-foot pile of logs. He turned

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and looked askance at the woman. She uttered a shriek like an old raven and made a chopping movement. Clement appeared and pointed clownishly at the logs. Ormerod began chopping.

He could hardly have foreseen that his first full day as a
secret agent would begin with a session of chopping wood. He
sweated in the early sunshine and wondered where Marie-Thérèse was. Even as he thought of her she appeared at the small gate at the end of the back garden of the house. Seeing him she stopped and, for the first time since they had been together, he saw her laugh without restraint. She laughed like
a young girl, her hands trying to cover her mouth. 'Oh my God,
Dodo,' she mocked. 'You are a wood-chopper!'

'Go on, enjoy yourself,' he said bitterly. 'This is not the worst of it. I had to sleep in the same bed as that old hag last night. I'm having a bloody marvellous time, believe me. I think I'll surrender to the Germans.'

The very mention of the word seemed enough to bring her
seriousness back. She advanced up the path. She looked fresh
and pink, her hair just curling over the blue jersey. 'It is good that you look like one of the islanders,' she said. 'We must be part of the landscape.'

'Any sign of the Boche?' he said. He realized that he had used her word. She noticed it.

'They have radioed to the lighthouse asking if the two soldiers
have been seen,' she shrugged. 'But it seems their fishing trip was not official. Their officers did not know.'

'Taken French leave, eh?' he said. 'That's if Germans can take French leave.'

'Their comrades are trying to find them - also unofficially,'
she went on. 'They do not want to make too much stir because
they will make trouble with their own officers. The men are not permitted to come this far out to sea.'

Ormerod put the chopper down. He bawled towards the house: 'Is this enough missus?' The woman came to the door,
saw Marie-Thérèse and with no change of expression went into
the shadows again. Clement came out and, seeing the girl, beamed like a child and went forward to shake her hand.

'Can we expect them out here with a boat soon?' asked Ormerod. "They won't leave it too long.'

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'By tonight,' she said. 'They can ask their questions and once
they have gone we can go to the mainland and begin work.'

'They'll have to report their pals missing - officially - sooner
or later,' pointed out Ormerod. 'Then they'll be back to search for the boat. I hope to God the bodies don't float to the surface.'

She shook her head. 'The rocks in the net weighed them down. Also there is a lot of weed in the place where we drowned them. The weather is changing too. They may find the boat but they won't find the men. They will think they
have just gone missing on a fishing trip. Many people have.'

He split a log with a single blow of the chopper. Clement was impressed and clapped. Marie-Thérèse said: 'I think it would be a good thing if we walked right around this island. It will give us some idea of how the land is. Just in case we need to move at night. In case they start looking for their friends. Has madame given you some breakfast?'

'No, but I think I'll skip it. She's more dangerous than the
Jerries. If it's anything like the coffee, I'll never finish this
assignment on two feet. I'll come with you now.' He handed the chopper to Clement. 'Here son,' he said. 'You have a bash.'

Doubtfully the youth took the implement and Ormerod quietly went towards the back gate with Marie-Thérèse. They
let themselves out and began to walk over the filmy morning
grass towards the north of Chausey. Behind them they heard the blows of the chopper as Clement attacked the wood.

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They walked, at first unhurriedly, to the top of as much of a hill as the island could boast. The grass was springy beneath their feet and the undergrowth gave off a ferny smell. Once
Marie-Thérèse slipped and Ormerod put out his hand to assist her, but she waved it away as if ashamed that she had lost her
footing.

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From the top of the hill, which was not much more than a knoll, they could see the entire island and all the satin sea around them. The tide was running away and the off-shore islands and rocks were humped like cattle. The autumn morning sun was increasing in strength and the sky was without
clouds. Below them they could view the everyday domestic life
of the settlement going on like a ritual dance. Some of the
men were loading an obese boat with lobster kreels, two women
did their washing in tin tubs outside their cottages and carried
the cleansed clothes to hang on long poles in the breeze. Dogs sat and watched and cats slouched on walls. From the school-
house the sound of high reciting voices drifted to them.

At every inlet and cape of the island the sea eased itself against sand and rocks without hurry, in the manner of a
besieging army that knows it will never break a fortress. The
small fields of the island were easy green and cattle moved as
if every step were carefully considered. To the south the light
house stood in its daytime doze and to the north the house called the chateau stood on the end cliff like a solitary man looking hopefully towards England. And France, a low but distant horseshoe of land, curved around the eastern horizon. Ormerod sat down heavily and took it all in.

'Bit peaceful for a war, isn't it?' he observed to Marie-Thérèse.

She stood beside him for a moment, as if she were guarding
him, then she dropped with a sigh to the turf and sat down a yard away. 'Everything is too peaceful,' she said unhappily. 'Nobody seems to realize that there
is
a war.'

'Don't you know there's a war on?' He mimicked the slogan he had heard bandied about so much in England. She remembered it too. She laughed wryly.

'Anyway,' he said. 'At least you can
see
France.'

'Yes, I see it,' she replied quietly.

'How long have you been away?'

'Almost a year,' she said to his surprise. I went to London in November. I returned for a few days at Christmas and then I went back again to England.'

I didn't realize that,' he said. I thought you'd probably gone over about the time of Dunkirk with all the others who got away.'

She shook her head. 'No, I was training for this,' she replied. Her chin dropped sadly. 'I never thought France would surrender. I did not imagine it could happen. I thought I would be training to go to Austria or Poland. But not France. Not my own country.'

Just off-shore the gulls had found some fish debris floating on the surface and whirled about it like pieces of paper caught in a wind spout. The men below them had finished landing the boat and were sitting on the stones around the beach drinking coffee. One of the washing women was singing tunelessly, plaintively and the thin song came to them on their hillock.

'Where's this place St Jean le Thomas?' asked Ormerod, looking at the vague horizon. He said it more to bring her from her chagrin than anything.

'It is about that point,' she said, pointing to the south-east. 'Perhaps we will land there. It has a long beach and it is quiet. The Germans must watch it but there is very much to watch. Perhaps we will get so far by boat and swim the rest.'

I can't swim,' Ormerod told her. 'Didn't they tell you that?'

She sighed. 'I thought perhaps you could not,' she said, shaking her head. 'You get better and better.'

'If I'm not satisfactory, send me home,' he suggested. 'Please.'

She apologized suddenly. 'I am unreasonable,' she said. 'But you must realize how I feel. I have been training all this time and then they send me with ... well ... you.'