The Sea Garden (25 page)

“I have a restless spirit,” he said as they lay in bed during the second week. “But you give me calm. You are pure spring water on a day when the sun bites.”

She took that to mean that she was uncomplicated, while he burned with nervous energy.

“But you want me, don't you?” he pressed.

“I want you,
chéri
.” More than any man she had ever met.

“I need to be wanted,” he said.

“None of the other men managed to persuade me into bed. I'm not that sort of girl, did you know that?”

“Rory told me.”

“What? Well, he shouldn't have.”

“I made him very drunk.”

“Some people would say you were not to be trusted,” she said idly, teasing.

“People say the most disagreeable things about me.”

“Do they—really?”

“I trust no one,” he said, though the implication was that he trusted her. “Though the kindness of others touches me greatly.”

“That first evening at the Coquille. You said you were going to ask me a favour—what was it?”

“Did I?”

“You know you did.”

“I can't remember. Probably something very silly. Like iron a shirt for me. Or give me a map of London with your flat marked in red.”

It was hard to know when to take him seriously, sometimes.

 

H
e went away for several days and returned, a pattern that was repeated throughout the month. Soon it was December, and she tried not to think that he would soon be leaving.

One evening they joined a crowd at the Dorchester bar, a rumbustious mix of pilots, their girlfriends, and assorted faces from the Firm. Jack Wallace was there, and Iris recognized some of the men as Free French agents she had met at Tangmere.

She spent most of her time chatting with Jack, flirting a little in the usual way, though she was uncomfortably aware that she was doing it only so no one would suspect she was with Xavier. For his part, he seemed to be exchanging terse words with one of the Free French.

“You find something you can do, and it seems to work, so you do it again,” Xavier was saying as she went past to say hello to Denise, who had just arrived. Iris slowed her pace and let Denise approach.

“I work hard. It was how I was brought up, to do my best, and in doing so to help others,” she heard Xavier say, shoulders squared, chin tilted upwards.

“No question of money?”

“Not in this case.”

“You are the most cynical person I have ever met.”

“I can assure you that I am not.”

They left it there, with Xavier striding to the bar. But after that, Iris noticed, his natural vitality was held in check. He seemed remote when they got back to Tavistock Square at about ten o'clock. Nancy had taken to staying with another friend while Xavier was in town.

Iris made a pot of tea, to which he raised none of his usual objections. He said little and smoked, each cigarette lit from the previous one.

“My life has been ripped apart these past few years,” he said at last. He spoke angrily in French, as if he was thinking aloud. “I've always refused absolutely to admit defeat. But other people are not, as I always imagined, unanimously blessed with the same dedication—or quickness of mind.”

Iris listened without comment.

“How can you understand the effort of climbing a mountain if you yourself do not climb? The greater the number of people who know anything, the greater the danger.” He dragged on his cigarette.
“Je suis entre deux feux.”

Between a rock and a hard place.

Iris lit a cigarette for herself, was shaking the match out, when Xavier sprang up like a cat. He was halfway to the bedroom door a second later when a key rattled in the latch of the door. Nancy walked in, full of apologies for startling them—it was no go for her at Eileen's that night, as family had turned up unexpectedly.

Xavier quickly recovered his calm, pouring Nancy a cup of tea and asking about her day. If he was tense, he worked hard not to show it. A door opening—such a simple act, but he had not been expecting it. It was an insight into his life in France. He was embarrassed afterwards, tried to make a joke of it, but Iris could tell he had been truly frightened. That was the only incident she could recall when he was not in total control of his emotions.

 

F
ive days later, they were back at Tangmere.

It was another double Lysander operation: Miss Acton and Iris were seeing off the capable Thérèse, seamstress and collector of magazines, for a second mission, along with another agent, Yves; Xavier and a Free French agent were also leaving.

The BBC message had gone out, referencing Caroline, the goat at Bignor Manor: “Caroline's milk is making very good cheese this year.” The weather was cold and cheerless, but the forecast was for a clear night.

Over dinner Xavier was in blustering good form, though. He told stories that implied his eagerness to return to his people in France: about the farmer who was told to build a haystack in the middle of a field because the Germans had realised that it was long enough for a plane to land on—he did what they wanted, but he built it on a wooden platform with wheels so that it could be moved by the reception committee and then put back into place after the plane had left.

Somewhere else, the reception committee for the incoming plane arrived to check out a landing field and discovered that a group of farm workers had been ordered to build a wall across a large field. The workers were persuaded to go very slowly, as an operation was imminent. That night they helped dismantle the wall, and build it up again the next morning as if nothing had happened.

“The hardest part is finding these fields in the beginning,” said Xavier. “They have to be at least six hundred metres long, but you cannot go around the country pacing up and down fields to find out how long they are and how flat, and whether they flood in winter. That would surely draw attention. No, the best ones are found by our people who put on peasant clothes and go out pretending to be mushroom and truffle hunters. Or country people who know the land well, of course.”

The Free French agent and Thérèse listened attentively but said little.

 

T
hérèse was ready. If knowing exactly what she faced on a second trip was worse than the blind optimism and courage of the first, she did not show it.

“Don't forget to send my Christmas cards next week,” she said to Iris.

“They're all in my desk drawer.”

“And here's a birthday card for Mother—January the twelfth. You do have a note, don't you?”

Iris took it. “Don't worry. I'll take care of everything.”

“Thanks, Iris—you're a pal.”

Iris gave her a sympathetic squeeze of the hand.

Away from the others, Xavier gathered Iris into his arms for the last time. She closed her eyes and imagined they were back once again on the rug in front of the gas fire at Tavistock Square. Was it only their special circumstances, or did other love affairs run the course from delightful surprise to infatuation to commitment and cold reality in the space of a month?

“I will get a message to you,” he said.

She nodded, kissing him again rather than wasting time on words.

He released himself gently, then gathered her up again. “I want you to know, Iris, I have never loved as I have loved you. You have been my light in this darkness.”

There was no good-bye. Minutes later the cars were taking them onto the airfield where the planes were ready. Iris watched as Jack climbed into the cockpit and gave a wave. The two F Section agents squashed themselves into the rear passenger seat, but both Yves and Thérèse were carrying two pieces of luggage, including a wireless transmitter set into the usual small suitcase for Thérèse. It was not going to work. Urgent decisions had to be made. With the weather closing in, and the missed opportunities of the previous month's moon flight, there were no other options.

“Thérèse will come with me to Châteaudun,” said Xavier. “I can easily make new arrangements when we get there.”

She swapped with the Free French agent, and followed Xavier with her suitcases.

The smoke of last cigarettes lingered in the night air as the plane rose. For the first time Iris felt she wanted to stop the operation, to bring the passengers back to the ground. A tear prickled and slid down her cheek as she returned to the Cottage and picked up the stray belongings: an English book and a magazine, a box of Swan Vestas matches, and a couple of theatre ticket stubs from a West End show she had seen with Xavier two nights before. She slipped the stubs into her pocket and put the rest in the hidden cupboard in the sitting room to await collection when the owners returned.

6

Messages

London, January 1944

T
hey heard nothing at first from Thérèse, but Rose was doing well with her wireless transmissions from Paris. Right from the start she had proved as reliable as they had hoped. In France, the Firm's focus was moving to the north and the south. The order came from Churchill himself that the arming of the resistance fighters of the Maquis inland from the Mediterranean and the northern resistants behind the beaches of Normandy, in preparation for Allied invasion, was now the priority.

At last a message from Thérèse came through the secure teleprinter link at Baker Street.

Miss Acton handed Iris the deciphered page. “What's your first thought?”

Iris took the paper. In the large room next door the sound of typewriters rose and fell in rolling waves of metallic clatter. Thérèse had “a doctor's appointment on Thursday.” It was what they had been waiting to receive, confirmation that Thérèse was in Lyon, awaiting news of her contact.

“It was a ‘dental appointment' she was supposed to write,” said Miss Acton crossly.

“She's left out her security checks,” said Iris.

Miss Acton fiddled with her pen, the only form of agitation she allowed herself. Slapdash ways had been creeping in among the agents in France, and a new rule had been introduced: “Adios” or “Salut” to sign off if all was well. If the wireless was being operated under duress, then “Love and Kisses.” And Thérèse had ignored it, giving no sign-off.

“What else?”

Iris stared hard at the message. Apart from the lack of checks, it was all as rehearsed, or almost.

Miss Acton went away and returned with Tyndale.

“Send a message back,” he said tersely. “You have forgotten both checks.”

“But that's—” Iris didn't want to say it. How could she criticize the boss for making an elementary mistake? She looked across at Miss Acton, wanting her to be the one to contradict him.

“Silly girl,” said Miss Acton. “I'd hoped for better from her.”

“It's very bad, this lack of attention to detail,” said Tyndale, petulance creeping into his tone. His eye bags were starting to puff and his complexion redden. “I thought you'd drummed it into them all.”

“But Thérèse
is
careful, she always has been,” interjected Iris.

Miss Acton bristled. “Not always, if I remember rightly. There were a couple of times when she was in Tours last time that she forgot the exact form of words we'd agreed.”

“With respect, that's not quite the same as missing the sign-off.”

“Send the message back,” instructed Tyndale. “Get her to reply correctly. She never would concentrate properly.”

“What if she hasn't forgotten?” asked Iris.

Miss Acton's pen tapped furiously. “Well, she has forgotten—she gives neither sign-off. She can't have been caught. She's been with Xavier Descours, and they haven't had time to do anything.”

“Please send again with security check. Be more careful,” Iris was told to signal back.

Minutes later the check was produced. “Adios.” After that Thérèse's messages were scrupulously free from mistakes.

 

T
he next time it happened, in a message from Rose, Iris knew without doubt that something was wrong. With the first flawed radio messages it had been only a woman's instinct, and there was nothing she could say, given Tyndale's conviction that it was a simple slipup. But in view of Rose's composure and efficiency, it seemed ever more unlikely that she had transmitted in a slapdash manner.

“The fist is right,” said Miss Acton.

Iris pulled out Rose's card from a new flip-flop wheel file system she had made of each agent's individual quirks—the spaces and natural rhythm—while sending Morse code. The “fist” could be read like an electronic fingerprint.

It did seem right.

“But you said yourself that we should at least consider the possibility that the lack of checks was deliberate,” said Iris. “The fist could be right because it is Rose sending the message, but under duress.”

Miss Acton hesitated.

“I know it's not my place to suggest this, but I think we should send a message back asking something personal,” Iris went on. Tyndale was out of the office, and she felt more comfortable overreaching.

“You may be right.”

But when Tyndale returned, he ignored all reason and unleashed a volley of invective, at least some of which made it across the Channel in his furious reply to Rose.

 

A
couple of days later a Canadian F Section agent code-named Roland sent a message in French. Tyndale sent a pithy reply: “Why have you changed your language? Do not do this.” Roland began again in English, omitting both his bluff check and true check, again provoking fury at Baker Street.

“We agreed that he was always to transmit in English—how are we to deal with these idiots who won't take instruction?” raged Tyndale. Miss Acton made sympathetic noises.

Iris remembered Roland from a long afternoon in Orchard Court when they had chattered for hours about the theatre. He was a big country lad from the Québécois mountains who had a talent for mimicry and liked to laugh. She had accompanied him to the Playhouse one evening to see a mindless farce, and then taken him on to meet Rory and Jack, who were in town. The evening had been a grand success, not least due to his introduction to the Bag O'Nails nightclub after Iris had left them to it.

“Tell him the bag is still full of nails,” said Iris.

When there was no personal response, just a thank you, Iris was certain. The Roland she knew would have come back with a witty retort.

“This isn't right,” she told them. She showed them the notes she had taken at Orchard Court, the quirks of his conversation and his sense of fun. “If everything was all right, he wouldn't just have said thank you politely.”

“Signalling is dangerous. He's being sensible, keeping it to the minimum,” said Tyndale. She was trying his patience, it seemed.

Tyndale was determined to believe the agents were all safe because any other outcome was unthinkable. He could not lose face, and Miss Acton supported him, equally unwilling to be proved wrong. Plans continued to be made over the radio. Cheerful messages were received at Christmastime from Thérèse, Rose, Yves, and Roland, as well as from most of the others in France.

One afternoon in the ladies' cloakroom on the half-landing at Norgeby House, Iris overheard some girls who worked for the Dutch and Belgian sections whispering in a cubicle. They were worried about anomalies in radio messages to D and B Sections too, and they didn't know what to do about it. They were scared they might lose their jobs, and if that happened, then the background knowledge they had built up would go with them, to no one's benefit.

“You heard what happened to Penelope, didn't you?” said one.

Iris strained to hear, holding her breath.

“A transmission came back saying that Anders had broken his skull on landing north of Antwerp, then there were messages about doctors' reports, and then that he had died of meningitis. Penelope kept asking questions about this. Her brother is a doctor and she asked him, and it all seemed unlikely, very unusual for a landing accident. She was certain that something wasn't right, but no one in authority would listen. Last week she was sacked for ‘letting sentiment override her duty.' ”

“But perhaps if we all—”

“Not a chance.”

Iris knew the woman was right.

 

S
he was at Waterloo Station, seeing a promising new girl off to Guildford, the night the bomb fell. Air raid sirens had sounded, followed by distant explosions, and then the all-clear. The glass roof of the station was blacked out, lamps shaded, leaving eerie silhouettes of policemen and soldiers; music played over the loudspeakers in a vain attempt to lighten the gloom. Glowing cigarette ends moving towards her. Iris and the new girl watched the clock and the empty platform. Ten minutes after the train's scheduled departure, there was no sign of it. Groups of people scurried past in earnest discussion. Announcements over the concourse loudspeaker cancelled one service after another. Iris mentally logged the way the girl's composure had quickly slipped in the confusion. That was disappointing.

The train did not arrive. It was pinned down on the track by debris when the bombs targeting Battersea Power Station failed to hit their mark. They exploded with a deafening, earthshaking force. The wail of the sirens was too late; the streets around were filled with a hail of devastation and choking clouds of dust. One hit the mansion block where Iris's aunt Etty lived. She was pulled out of the rubble alive but badly injured.

In the weeks that followed—her aunt's fight for life; the ruins and the smoke; the difficulties with the agents in France and intransigence in Baker Street—Iris heard nothing from Xavier. In a further devastating blow, Jack Wallace was lost, presumed dead, after a night sortie from Tempsford.

I have never loved as I have loved you
. Now, when she ran the words through her head, as she did countless times every day, her joy was blunted by that invidious past tense. Attuned as she was to every shade of verbal communication, she clung to this interpretation: it was not his love for her that was in question, but the possibility of not returning.

Rose's wireless messages continued, though. She was doing exceptionally well, keeping information flowing to the network of resistance cells in Paris. Occasionally there were anomalies in her transmissions that might have been caused by atmospheric interference, but in the circumstances that was hardly surprising; she had to try to broadcast at a certain time, no matter what.

Then, during the February moon, at past four o'clock in the morning, a Lysander arrived back at Tangmere with an unofficial extra passenger. It was Thérèse. She was thin and bruised, and spitting with anger as she stumbled through the back door of the Cottage.

“You have no idea, do you? Not the faintest clue about what's really going on in France!”

 

E
xhausted as she clearly was, Thérèse was running on shot nerves and rage. At Orchard Court, she was debriefed by Colonel Tyndale and Miss Acton. Iris sat in, writing detailed notes.

“When we got to France, the first thing Xavier was told was that his wireless operator in Provence had been betrayed and executed by the Germans. It was all a mess. I was already dependent on him to get me down to Lyon to join up with Charles, but the heat was on there. So Xavier decided to take me with him to the south as his replacement operator. Only we didn't get that far. I was arrested, taken to Paris, and I tried to warn you, but you ignored all the signs . . . dead as mutton in London.”

“When were you arrested?” asked Tyndale, his tone cold.

“Only a few days after we landed near Châteaudun. Xavier told me to wait for him at a small commercial hotel while he attended to some business in the area.”

“What business—his legitimate business, or liaison with the Resistance?”

“He didn't say. Does it matter? He didn't show up at the hotel where he sent me, but the Gestapo did. They took me—made me bring my luggage, including the radio transmitter. The owner of the hotel was shot on the spot as we went out. They pushed me into a car and took me to some kind of SS headquarters in the town. I spent the night in a cell and was driven to Paris the next day.”

“Where in Paris?”

“The avenue Foch. A beautiful building, very luxurious—the Gestapo are enjoying themselves there, I must say. A most charming German officer by the name of Kieffer received me with great politeness,” said Thérèse. Her bitterness was palpable. “He asked after you, Colonel Tyndale, and whether you were pleased with the progress of F Section agents.”

“Don't be ridiculous! How would any of them know my name and that of the Firm?”

“Oh, they know all right. Kieffer asked me specifically about the wireless messages: Was everyone pleased with their quality?”

Iris's blood turned to ice. She glanced at Miss Acton and saw her close her eyes, as if to steady herself.

“They know everything about our activities in France. On the wall of his office, lest anyone be in any doubt how much the Gestapo knows, is what looks like a large family tree. It's us. It shows how everything links up, who knows who, when and where agents arrived. How the branches intersect.”

“Not possible,” said Tyndale, but the bluster was faltering.

“They have a number of our intelligence agents under their thumb just in avenue Foch. There's not much they don't know. They offered me a choice: either I could play along and pretend I was still at liberty by sending messages under German control, or I would be tortured and imprisoned. It was all very civilized. The whole Prosper circuit has been dismantled, and a substantial number seem to have been turned by Kieffer! I believe the SS is now in command, via our radio transmitters, of our operations in Lyon.”

Miss Acton lit a cigarette with visibly trembling fingers. Senior Service smoke, harsh and tarry, fogged the room.

“And rather obligingly,” Thérèse went on, “the British kept sending more agents to the agreed landing fields! You do realise they now have Roland—the Canadian—and Yves? And they had Rose, too.”

It was far worse than they could have imagined.

“There was no point in lying to them—they already knew almost everything. It was there on the wall. All any of us could do was appear to cooperate while giving away nothing they didn't already know.”

Tyndale had deflated in front of them.

“But even so, I tried my best to tell you. What I cannot understand is how you repeatedly ignored my radio warnings! You put the checks in place, and then you seemed to forget they had ever been agreed! What was the point?”