The Sea Garden (29 page)

“Was that one of the stories that had to be changed?” Iris said.

“Maybe. Ah—you can rouge the corpse, but it remains dead,” said the Philosopher. “There were times when grave sacrifices had to be made. The Poet had a protégé, a young man of twenty-two who was as courageous as he was talented as a writer. The Poet himself had supplied his false papers—and one terrible afternoon, not very far from a village, he saw this young man taken by the Germans.

“The Poet could have saved him; he was out of view; he had the Germans in his gunsight; he could have squeezed the trigger, but he did not. He had to make the decision not to fire, to save the village from the ferocious reprisals this would have unleashed. Afterwards he wrote the most moving words I have ever read; he called it ‘an ordinary village, an extraordinary place.' It was a time that marked us for life.”

“I understand that,” said Iris.

Musset gave her a sad smile. “Yes, I think you do, mademoiselle.”

9

Almost Happy

Sussex, 1950 onwards

M
iles Corbin was a good man, apparently without a secret life. For many years after she met him Iris was almost happy. A civil servant like Iris, he rose to a senior position in Customs and Excise; he was as scrupulously honest at home as he was at work. He once told Iris that he had never once cheated at golf, though he was once sorely tempted at Sandwich and never quite forgave himself. It might have been that confession that persuaded her to marry him.

If not quite handsome, with his wispy sandy hair and hollowed cheeks, Miles had a certain dash. During the war he had served as a navigator in the RAF's Coastal Command, from which he developed a serious interest in marine cartography; he also had a passionate interest in Greece, its history and poetry. He clearly adored her, was amusing and kind to Suzanne, and he loved to travel—though it went without saying that not even the smallest bottle of cognac or perfume from Paris went undeclared at Dover on their return.

When Iris fell pregnant with their daughter Betsy, she gave up work and became a full-time housewife. When Suzanne was old enough to understand, she was told that her father had died in the war, like so many brave men.

Iris could not easily forget Xavier. At the smallest provocation he insinuated himself into her thoughts. In Paris in the 1950s, she smelled a distinctive lavender fragrance on a woman who passed her in the street. She almost ran after her to ask what it was, but then held herself in check. The familiar scent lingered in the air, leaving a musky trail and an inexplicable sense of danger. She stood in the rue Saint-Honoré, feeling both trapped and euphoric—or had the perfume only triggered these sensations in her brain?

It wasn't quite the same fragrance. This was a deeper, warmer, more complex distillation than the scent she knew so well: the perfume he had sent her, eked out drop by careful drop; the scent of hope that had diminished by the day, month, year. She still wore the pearl he sent her, symbol of the moons that brought them together and took him away. What a fool she was.

Sporadically over the years, Iris was approached—usually by letter—by the writers and researchers of various books on the clandestine operations of World War II. Invariably she turned down their respectful requests to meet. Some of those who had been involved, especially the agents who had faced the greatest dangers, were eager to tell their stories and enjoyed the recognition. Others, like Thérèse, preferred to remain in the shadows. Iris never heard a word from Thérèse after her last furious outburst at Orchard Court, and respected her all the more for it.

 

W
hen she succeeded in banishing him from her waking hours, Xavier shook Iris awake from dreams that began with the night sky, clumps of cloud, moonlight. The small plane waiting.

He was there, even if she could not see him. She only had to glimpse the silvered darkness to know what would happen. Sometimes she was in the seat next to him, so close she could feel the wool of his coat and the brush of his hand.

For so many years, Iris found him in transcendent dreams; he lived with her, still speaking and dancing and tangling in absurdities with her as she slept. In endless variations of the same dream, Xavier climbed into planes and flew into the night, nights so vivid she felt what he felt: the rush and lift of the headwind under the wings; the chill of the glass beyond which gleamed the moon. Ahead, storm citadels, and skies planted with forests of electric trees. High in a sea of cloud, the small aircraft hardly moved across gusting waves, hanging like a spider on a thread.

Always the same ending: the sky convulsing, throwing up ridges and folds that might be walls of cloud, or hills, or rising waves. Sea or sky? No difference; no place of safety. The pilot knows when his plane passes the point of no return. The crash is imminent. The black night is still beautiful, clouds lit by moonlight. Time slows. It is all so simple now. No more decisions. What to say? What to do? There are only minutes left, only seconds. There is no time left, only the beginning of time.

The plane is carried onwards, blown by the wind into emptiness.

Long, long after he slid up into the night sky away from her, Iris held him in her sights.

 

A
fter Miles died in 1990, Iris embraced widowhood. She moved to The Beeches, an ample Edwardian cottage on the edge of a village near Chichester, happily relinquishing along the way the slavery of the lunch and dinner service, the boredom of making conversation with a decent man with whom she had no spiritual connection. Not that she was heartless, far from it: she had made an honest mistake in imagining she could make a successful marriage to a man she had once respected but never loved. It had always been a contract of companionship, and she thought he knew that. Did that make her a bad woman, or simply a pragmatic one? It was all she was able to be. After the war and its aftermath, there were too many damaged souls; she was yet another. For all those years she had been the perfect wife and mother to Suzie and Betsy while Miles commuted up to London from their home in Surrey, to his government desk; Miles with his ever more solid demeanour, his golfing friends, his increasing dependence on whisky, his outbursts of frustration.

Iris did not tell him that in one of the thick folders she kept in a bedroom trunk was the note she had scribbled the night she had seen Tyndale on
Panorama
, admitting that he knew there were double agents, and intimating that London had sanctioned them, though without telling any of the other agents. The sacrifices, in other words. There were other notes and references. One, a photocopied page from Hansard, answered the questions in Parliament that arose after the first books had appeared, with their notions of conspiracy: “Penetration (by German agents) was deliberately concealed.”

The only person she ever spoke about the war with was Nancy. They both enjoyed their long exchanges by letter and occasionally on the telephone when any genuinely new information surfaced. It had become a touchstone of their long friendship, more than an expectation of a final resolution.

10

Vapour Trail

Sussex, September 2013

T
he telephone rang. Iris moved so slowly in the early mornings—frustratingly slowly, as if she were no longer in complete command of her own limbs—that she was sure whoever it was would give up long before she arrived in the hall to pick it up. If it was yet another cold call about solar panels, she would tell them that no meant no, and if they bothered her again she would report them for harassment.

“Hello, is it possible to speak to Iris Corbin, please?”

“Speaking.”

“Mrs. Corbin, this is Anna Lester from the
Daily Telegraph
. I'm not sure whether you remember, but I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire and the Mavis Acton memorial, and you very kindly gave me some background details.”

Iris sat down carefully on the chair next to the telephone table.

“I remember.” The one time she had relented and agreed to speak, and then only to make sure the facts were correct.

“Do you think I could come and see you? I'm working on a related story, and sometimes it's easier face-to-face.”

“I'm very sorry, but I'm not sure I can help you.”

“The thing is—”

“The answer's no, I'm afraid. I—I am not myself at the moment, a family bereavement.”

“I am sincerely sorry for your loss, Mrs. Corbin. But you see, the—the way—sorry, I—” Anna Lester was struggling to find the right words, “There's no easy way to say this. I had no idea that Ellie Brooke was your granddaughter until I started researching an in-depth piece about . . . about her death. And I've found something . . . that I think you would want to know about.”

“When would you want to come?”

“As soon as possible, whenever suits you best.”

Waiting was always so much worse than facing news head-on. “Come this afternoon, then,” said Iris.

 

T
hrough the open kitchen window, the pumping of a tractor engine from a field below echoed Iris's heartbeat. Here on the outskirts of the village, it was quiet and secluded. Cars passed on the road, but not too many. The hedge was kept high on that side. From the rear of the property were sweeping views of the Sussex countryside and farmland beyond a sloping lawn.

“Shall we go for our walk, Marion?”

The housekeeper glanced at her watch. “Right now? It's early. Might be a bit dewy—why not give it an hour?”

Marion had been at The Beeches so long, she was a vital fixture of the house, like the stairs or the roof. Every elderly person should have a Marion, and it was a crying shame that most couldn't.

“I just have the feeling I have to get on,” said Iris. “Silly really.”

“Well, all right. We'll go now if you like, Mrs. C.”

The trick of it was never to stop. Walking, in this case, but the same dictum might apply equally to anything in life, thought Iris. Never stop, no matter how much you might want to give in. She worked on the principle that if a person walked every day, there would never come a day when she couldn't. It was stopping that would cause the muscles to weaken and the joints to complain.

Marion dried her hands as she slotted the last breakfast plate in the drainer. She was a large, motherly woman with a soft voice. Her hair had turned grey over the past year, which had saddened Iris. For so long, Marion had been the young woman who “did,” the young pair of legs up and down the stairs.

“Not necessary to go far, but necessary to go,” said Iris.

Marion smiled. “Quite right. Breath of fresh air never hurt anyone, neither.”

The only concession Iris had made to her daily walking routine was to allow Marion to accompany her. A fall, at her age, would put her out of action for too long.

(“Slippery slope,” said Iris. “In all senses.”)

A bridlepath led down one side of The Beeches, meandering to a large pond and a cluster of agricultural buildings and a holiday let. It was a gentle English landscape, of flowing fields and winding paths under trees. The kind of landscape that made one feel safe—that was what he had once told her, wasn't it?

A lively wind threaded grass into silver patterns. A chintz of cow parsley danced on the breeze, and a vapour trail smoked high in a blue sky.

“You're very quiet, Mrs. C.”

“Just thinking.”

“There hasn't been any more news . . . from the island, has there?”

They made a slow but steady footfall on the stony path. In a wooded hollow, the pond water was a dusty antique mirror, reflecting oak and beech.

“I may be about to find out.”

 

T
he death of Suzie's daughter Ellie on the island of Porquerolles had been a loss more terrible than any other. The random nature of the tragedy, the circumstances so unforeseen; that was what had been so shocking.

When Ellie did not turn up to take the return flight she had booked from Hyères to London Stansted, there had been days of worry. Her partner in the garden design business, Sarah, raised the alarm when Ellie failed to contact her. It was three agonizing days before the body was found washed up on the southwestern rocks of the island. From the start, it was deemed most likely to be a dreadful accident, or perhaps what was termed inconclusively “misadventure.” Various sightings of Ellie the day before her flight put her close to the Fort de l'Alycastre, the harbour, and the hotel where she was staying—then nothing. It was suggested that she had gone swimming alone and run into difficulties when the weather changed. The sea had done its worst to the body. She was identified by a ring on her finger and the necklace she always wore.

That was the salt in the wound for Iris: the necklace. Ellie had been wearing the wartime “moon” pearl, Iris's one superstition, and it had failed to protect her. It had been given to Suzanne, when she was eighteen, and she had passed it on to Ellie. The pearl pendant had come back to them, but Ellie had not.

The accounts carried by the newspapers had been respectful, by and large, but still painfully speculative. But it was a poignant story: the young woman making a name for herself as a designer of gardens, the evocative Mediterranean location, the dream job, and the tragic outcome. Iris and her daughters understood why some of the journalists had made much of the details, but could not forgive them for the intrusion on their grief.

Even now, Iris had difficulty in accepting what had happened. It had been bad enough when Ellie had lost her young man in Afghanistan, an act of war that had brought granddaughter and grandmother closer than ever. But for Ellie to be taken in this way still seemed perverse.

All the young men and women she knew who had died young had died in war. They had signed up to carry out acts of exceptional bravery; all of them were daring, motivated, and reckless and knew the risks. Some of them had themselves killed.

Different times.

It hardly mattered. Ellie was dead.

 

A
nna Lester was slightly older than her voice on the telephone had intimated, with dark shoulder-length hair and clever brown eyes. A pleasant smile reached her eyes, and her handshake was firm. She wore minimal makeup, if indeed any, and her short linen jacket and trousers seemed to wrinkle more with every movement, an outfit that gave the impression more of a harassed off-duty schoolteacher than a cutthroat reporter on a national broadsheet. There was a resolutely self-deprecating air about her that did not fool Iris for a second: she had been extremely well-informed the last time they had spoken, her questions informed by a genuine interest in wartime history.

“Do you mind?” A small recording device came out of a large bag.

Iris shook her head.

“I find it easier. I make notes too, but . . .” She pressed a button and set it on the side table by Iris; then, perched on the edge of her seat with a notebook, she stared around the sitting room. Duck's-egg-blue walls, hung with fine prints and watercolours. A walnut display cabinet. A magnifying glass poised on a side table on top of the morning newspapers, the
Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
.

Marion brought in tea, served in the decent porcelain cups, then left them to it.

“Best get straight to the point,” said Iris. She smoothed down her skirt and swallowed hard.

“Last week I went to Porquerolles,” said Anna Lester. “We had a tip-off that the police had taken Ellie's client Laurent de Fayols in for further questioning. By the time I got there, he had been released without charge. I was hoping I might get an interview with him, but—understandably, I suppose—he refused to meet me. I decided to retrace your granddaughter's journey and visit the locations where she was known to have been, trying to build up a fuller picture of what happened, looking for details, descriptions that went beyond the police reports. I'm sorry, this must be hard for you to hear.”

“Go on.”

“I stayed at the hotel where she stayed, and spoke about her with the assistant manager. He was friendly and helpful, and remembered her very well. She had arrived looking distressed but said nothing about the suicide on the ferry that delayed her—it was only later he found out why her trip to the island had started so badly.

“She went out every day and often seemed distracted when she returned in the evenings. Though there was one night when she did not come back.”

“Is that significant?”

“Possibly.”

The journalist opened a notepad at a marked page and ran a finger down a column of writing mixed with shorthand squiggles. “I gather Ellie's client sent someone over to collect her luggage in order that she could stay over at the Domaine de Fayols. But the next day she was back at the hotel. On the Friday evening, the last night she was booked to stay at the hotel, she came back much happier. Jean-Luc Martin—the assistant manager—passed on a couple of messages, and she went out again, using a bicycle he lent her. But before she went, she gave him something to put in the hotel safe. Jean-Luc had forgotten about it until I came along, asking questions.”

“What was it?”

“A notebook containing sketches, ideas, and plans for the garden she'd been working on.”

“He must have remembered to show it to the police, surely?”

“Of course. He said he did show it to them in the days after she died, but they looked through it and dismissed it as unimportant. After that, well, I think the truth is that it got lost for a while when it didn't go back into the safe. The Oustaou des Palmiers is a charming little hotel, but the reception and office are extremely cramped and, frankly, a bit of a mess.”

Anna Lester cleared her throat and flushed. “I'm afraid I have a confession to make. I may have let him believe I was rather better acquainted with the family than our conversation a couple of years ago would warrant. But as it turned out—”

“A very old reporter's trick. Spare me the justification.”

“Well, you may not be entirely displeased when I tell you that”—she bent over the capacious leather bag at the side of her chair and fished out a black book—“I have the notebook here. Jean-Luc let me have it, on condition that I handed it over to Ellie's family.”

She held it out.

“I think he was pleased to have it taken back to its rightful owners. They hadn't known quite what to do with it. It wasn't much of a gamble that I would bring it to you. I was upfront about being a journalist, and he was astute enough to realize that I would get a better story by handing it over in person.”

Iris took the bulging, stained book. Minutes passed as she flipped through the pages filled with drawings and notes, measurements and perspectives.

She looked up. “You have read it right through, haven't you?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. There must be more than planting schemes and topiary designs to bring you here with it. What is it?”

The journalist indicated the book. “May I?”

Iris handed it back. Anna Lester turned the pages carefully.

“Here. Can you read this?”

“I'll need my glasses . . . where did I put them? Read it aloud for now.”

“It says: ‘A message for Iris
.
' Your name is underlined twice. Then it reads: ‘Thy word is a lantern unto my feet: and a light unto my path.' ”

Iris composed herself, determined not to react. “Anything else?”

“Yes. There's an account of a World War II operation involving a French Resistance agent and the lighthouse on Porquerolles.”

“Read it.”

The journalist did so.

Iris tipped her head back on the high-winged chair and closed her eyes to listen. Trembling, she was actually trembling.

In August 1944, a plan was made to disable the lighthouse beam in order to confuse the German night defences as the Allies landed at Saint-Tropez in August 1944. British and Americans working with the Resistance in southern France had originally wanted to bomb the lighthouse, but Xavier (a French liaison agent) refused to sanction the destruction of the Porquerolles lighthouse, arguing that it could be more effectively and subtly disabled. He was born on the island—he had known Rousset the lighthouse keeper since he was a boy. How could he allow him to be killed in an explosion? He volunteered to go to Porquerolles himself.

The island was ringed with barbed wire and mines. Xavier was a native of the island, knew every rock and cove, but realised it would be impossible to come by sea. Time was not on his side. He was already running late after waiting an extra day for a repeat landing on the Saint-Christol plateau that had been called off. He begged the use of a Firefly aircraft hidden near Rians in Provence, and piloted the plane himself on the night of August the thirteenth, the last possible night. Allied bombardment prior to invasion was due to start on the fourteenth.