The Best of Our Spies (60 page)

He followed her into the kitchen and closed the door. She gestured towards an empty chair at the table and she sat opposite him, nervously pulling at her hair.

‘How did you find me, Owen?’

He ignored her question. ‘What shall I call you? Nathalie, Ginette?’

She shrugged.

‘How did you know about the baby? How could you have known? You must tell me that, Owen!’

Owen was breathing heavily now, the tension and fury mounting up in him.

‘No, I realise I wasn’t meant to know. I was in such a bad state over this whole business that I was drinking too much and sleeping too little so I went to see Dr Peacock in September. He let slip that you were pregnant. You can imagine how much better I felt after that visit. But what it did do was drive me to find you and my child. Is it mine? I don’t even know if it is a boy or a girl!’

She got up and paced around the small kitchen before going over to the sink to get herself a glass of water. When she sat down again her hands were shaking so violently that she had to hold the glass with two hands. He could hear it clattering against her teeth as she took a few sips.

‘It’s a boy Owen...’ She paused and sunk her head into her hands. She stayed like that for a while, the sounds of her quiet sobs filling the room. She tried to compose herself, but when she started speaking again, her voice was weak.

‘... he looks like you. Of course, you are the father... I am sorry, I never intended ... but, you know... it happened. I only found out just before I came back to France, when I went to see Dr Peacock. I was in a panic. I had not intended to get pregnant but I wanted to keep the baby. If I was not being sent to France, I think I would have told you. Not just about the baby, but everything, Owen. I had decided that much. I promise you.’

‘You can tell me now.’

‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘With whom?’

‘Our son.’

‘What is his name?’

‘He is called Philippe, after the French general who liberated Strasbourg. It was my mother’s idea really.’

She tried to drink from the glass again, but her hands were shaking so violently that the water spilled on the table top. She bit her forefinger to try to stop herself crying.

‘Tell me everything first. Why did you work for the Germans? Did they make you work for them or did you volunteer? I want to know everything.’ Owen was doing his best to sound angry, but his overwhelming emotions were sadness and confusion.

She was crying freely, the tears gathering under her eyes before rolling fast down her reddened cheeks. For the first time since he had met her, she looked vulnerable. When the crying subsided and she began to speak he noticed that her face reminded him of the time when she had emerged out of the fog on Westminster Bridge in the winter of 1943. He had realised then that for the first time, she looked unguarded. As if she’d always worn a mask. She now looked as if her mask had been discarded and for the first time, he was able to look at her face with all her true emotions exposed on it.

‘My family is from Alsace. We are of German origin, like a lot of people in this region. In the Great War my father fought in the German Army – Alsace was part of Germany then. As far as he was concerned, he was German. He never thought of himself as French. He worked for the railways and when Alsace became part of France again after the war, he was sent to Lyons to work. We all went there. I had no brothers or sisters. My father was treated very badly in Lyons. People regarded him as a traitor. People did not talk to him at work, we had no friends. In the time we were there, I don’t think we were ever invited to anyone else’s house. I was too young to realise, but I grew up with this atmosphere in the house. By 1921, he couldn’t stand it anymore so he gave up his job and we moved back to Alsace. I was seven then. He couldn’t get any work here in Alsace, so he went to Germany, but things were even worse there, there were no jobs and they treated him as if he was French, so he felt that he did not belong anywhere. He came back to Alsace in 1922 and killed himself in 1923. I discovered his body hanging from a landing over the stairs when I got up during the night to go to the bathroom. I was nine.

‘My mother was destitute, but a German cultural organisation helped with my education and they would give us food each week. As I grew up, I became interested in politics. I felt that a strong Germany was important. So in 1935, I joined the Nazi Party. It was clandestine, of course. Alsace was still in France then. I didn’t think too much about it. Most of the people in the organisation that had helped us had joined it; they had helped fund my nursing training. Maybe I was trying to repay their help. The Germans were the only people who helped us and the Nazi Party were the only people who cared about Germany. I moved to Paris in 1938 and I was recruited as a spy. That’s it.’

‘Did they recruit you or did you approach them?’

‘Does it matter? I wanted to help.’

‘You are a Nazi then?’

‘I don’t know what I was then. I was a young fool. The organisation that helped my mother, it was more political than anything else. Many of those people were involved with the Nazis, so I went to the meetings and began to feel part of something.’

Silence again in the room. She threw back her long hair in the way that Owen remembered it, but now she harshly brushed it away from her face with shaking hands.

‘Owen, please...’

‘My friend out there,’ said Owen, ‘was taken to a camp in Poland with his wife and child and tens of thousands of other French Jews. His wife and son were killed. Millions of people were murdered, they’re saying. From all over Europe. When people find out what...’

Ginette hugged her arms tight across her chest. ‘Owen, you don’t need to tell me. What I have seen since I came back to France...’ There was a long pause. ‘It’s terrible. I felt guilty. I have seen such suffering. I had to escape from Lille after an SS officer tried to rape me. I stabbed him. I became a refugee. In Lorraine I was looked after by Jews and Gypsies who had been in one of these camps that you are talking about. A Jewish doctor from Poland, he looked after me, he told me about the terrible things that had happened.’

Until now, she had avoided eye contact with Owen. She would look at the table, at the floor, at the wall around her or at her hands as she buried her face in them. But now she stared at him, her eyes pleading with him to believe her.

‘You have to believe me, Owen!’

‘Do I!’ With that, he stood up and lashed out. The back of his right hand caught her on the cheekbone, just by the side of her right eye. She did not even flinch. A trickle of blood darted in a surprisingly straight line down her face. She nodded once at Owen, as if to acknowledge what he had done. He had staggered back as if he himself had been hit.

‘Ginette. Is everything all right?’ It was her mother’s voice from the other room.

‘It is fine, mother. Please leave me alone for a while.’

He stood up, his knuckles resting down on the table, leaning right over her. His voice was trembling. She was now the more composed of the two of them.

‘Why should I believe a word you say? Tell me that! What do I know about you? I know that you are a Nazi spy, that you deceived me, that you married me and became pregnant without telling me and then disappeared. And now I have tracked you down, you are trying to talk your way out of it. Look at me – I don’t even know what I should call you – Nathalie, Ginette? Are there any other names I should be aware of?’

Silence. She sat still, saying nothing.

‘Go on, I want to know.’

‘When I was in the Pas de Calais I was known as Geraldine. Why do you want to know all this, Owen?’

‘And any other names?’

‘I also used the name Hélène Blanc for a while, after I left the Pas de Calais.’

‘And what should I call you, tell me?’

He was leaning right over her now, his face just inches from hers.

‘My real name is Ginette. Ginette Troppe.’

‘And so, Ginette Troppe. Give me one very good reason why I don’t drag you now to the authorities. You’re a Nazi spy. You’re on the run and I’ve caught you.’

‘You’ll do what you want to do, Owen. I can’t stop you. But let me say something. You say I ran away, but that is not true. I came back here, to my home town, to my true identity. I could so easily have disappeared after I left the Pas de Calais. There are so many refugees moving around the country, so much chaos – it would have been easy for me to find another identity and then another one. I could have changed my identity very easily. I could have gone to anywhere in France. This country is twice the size of yours. It would have been very easy for me to make it impossible for you to trace me. Think about that, Owen.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘That I wanted to be found by you, Owen. That is why I came back here and that is why I used my original name. Look, I even went back to the hospital that I worked in before the war. I was not hiding from you, Owen, quite the opposite. I was making it possible for you to find me.’

She was staring directly at her husband, her eyes beseeching him to believe her.

‘But why... why did you want me to find you?’

‘It was not just because of the baby. It was because of you. I don’t expect you to believe this, but once I was away from you, when I arrived back in France, I realised that I cared about you. I even started to have those feelings when the British sent me away for training in Lincolnshire, or wherever it was that they sent me. And since then, I have cared about you more and more. I realised that I love you, Owen.’

‘That’s a convenient turn of events, isn’t it?’ he said sarcastically.

‘It’s the truth, Owen. I was surprised myself at my feelings.’

Owen looked shocked. He started pacing around the small kitchen. As he came close to her he realised that it was not just the sight of her and the sound of her voice that had so unsettled him. It was the smell of her too. He would never be able to describe it and he never even realised that she had her own distinctive scent that he had become so familiar with.

‘But hang on. You didn’t leave a forwarding address, did you? British Intelligence had no idea who you really were. I accept that you may have reverted to your proper name and come back to your home town, but how on earth was I expected to know all that? It was only because a lot of hard work and even more luck that I was able to find you.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Exactly what?’

‘That I thought you would find me. I knew that if you really wanted to find me, you would. There’s one other thing, Owen. I left a clue, didn’t I?’

He leaned back against the worktop and frowned.

‘If you did, it must have been a very well hidden one because I missed it.’

‘The brooch, Owen, the cameo brooch. Did you find that?’

He nodded.

‘I knew that I had to leave some message for you. I wanted to leave you something of mine. Did you spot the initials on the back of the brooch?’

‘Yes, just. But how would that help me find you? The reason I found you was because I persisted and because some very decent people stuck their necks out to help me. The brooch didn’t help.’

‘But it helped you realise that I might have left a message for you? That maybe it was a sign of some affection?’

‘Maybe.’

She smiled. It was a smile that he could not recall ever having seen before and considering that he had committed every smile, every gesture of hers to his memory and then replayed them over and over again – he knew he would have remembered a smile like that.

‘But that is the point, Owen! By leaving the brooch for you like that I was sending you a message. You were to understand that it would be worth searching for me. When I left that for you, I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it. Deep down, I must have thought it was a way of giving myself an option – that it might help you find me. I’m not sure.’

She spread her arms open, as if to say ‘and here I am’.
Voilà
.

‘Well, I suppose it worked.’ Owen paused. ‘Did you ever care for me, when we were together, that is...’ He was sounding hesitant now. ‘Or was I only a way of getting information?’

She had composed herself. ‘Let me tell you this first, Owen. You asked me whether I approached the Germans, or whether they approached me. I will tell you the truth. I approached them. One of the men I knew in the organisation, he said that because I spoke German and English I could be of use to the Germans. He made it sound exciting. So I went to Paris to meet a man he knew at the German Embassy…’

‘Georg Lange?’

‘That’s right!’ She sounded shocked. ‘How did you find him? Did he tell you where I was?’

‘Carry on.’

She had gone quiet. Her long fingernails were tracing a haphazard shape on the table. For a moment, their fingertips touched on the shiny surface of it, before they both pulled their hands away in shock.

‘So I met Lange. In 1938. I thought I was going to be something like... I don’t know... a messenger, nothing much more than that. But it was like when I was a child and I used to go on the slide at the playground. Once you started, you couldn’t stop. It was impossible. I was sent to Germany for training and before I realised it properly, I was becoming an agent. I was too involved to do anything about it. I felt like telling them that this was all a mistake; that I was just a nurse. I was even thinking of leaving, but then it became too late. One of the other people being trained with me, a very intelligent lawyer from Poitiers, he announced one evening that he had changed his mind and was leaving. They seemed to let him go, but the next morning they took us to a forest for training and we discovered his body hanging from a tree. They arranged for us to discover his body, of course. To send us a very clear message. It reminded me of my father, the way that the body was perfectly straight, apart from the neck which looked as if it had been rearranged at an unusual angle.’

With the back of her wrist she dabbed at the cut next to her eye. The bleeding had stopped, but a bruise was beginning to appear.

‘So, I was caught in a nightmare, but at the same time, I must have been influenced by everything they were telling me. I suppose I could have run away or something, or just disappeared. But at the time, nothing seemed real. I didn’t believe that there would be a war and I thought that if there was one, then they would have more important things to remember than me and that could be my opportunity to disappear.