"Don't worry. He's quite friendly."
"Yes, I can see that."
"Tony Sibley. Here, let me take your bag. A couple of girls are here already. Are you Nancy Lee?"
"No. Charlotte Gray."
"Ah, the Scots lass. Of course. Well, ye're reet welcome and no mistake.
Get down. Sandy."
At the bend in the drive a squat Edwardian house came into view. The coloured glass panels in the front door and the stone pots of pink geraniums could not disguise a burly, utilitarian look.
"I hope you don't mind sharing a room," said Sibley, pausing in the tiled hall to consult a noticeboard. Charlotte caught a smell reminiscent of Roderick's boarding school prayer books, cottage pie, floor polish. "You're in with Freeburg and Lee. I'll show you up, then you can come and join us for tea in the drawing room." He motioned with his hand to an open door as they began to mount the uncarpeted stairs.
Sibley was a fit man in his late forties with fair hair and the beginnings of surprising side-whiskers, wispy and grey. He wore a tweed jacket and pale grey flannel trousers which slid up and down his swiftly climbing legs to show maroon socks above his thick-soled shoes. They went down a long landing flanked by mahogany banisters on one side and windows over the garden on the other; although Sibley carried her bag.
Charlotte had to hurry to keep up.
A threadbare rug made the polished floorboards treacherous where she followed Sibley up a second flight of stairs. He threw open a white door to reveal a plain little room with three wooden beds and a washstand.
"You're the first. If I were you I'd bag the place by the window," said Sibley genially, dropping Charlotte's canvas and leather grip on to the bed. "Bathroom's at the end of the corridor. See you downstairs in five minutes."
Charlotte smiled to herself as she laid her nightdress on the bed and, by so doing, presumably 'bagged' it.
Tea in the main drawing room was served by an imposing woman introduced as Mrs. Mitchell, whose role seemed to be somewhere between headmistress and chaperone, as though the dozen young women who eventually assembled could not quite be trusted in Sibley's raffish company alone. Tea included sponge cake of almost pre-war yellow and peppery tomato sandwiches whose white bread was saturated with pink juice. Afterwards they were instructed to look over the grounds and get to know one another. Sherry and an introductory talk would be at seven, followed by dinner and an early night before the rigours of the dawn. Charlotte smoked a cigarette on the terrace with her room-mates and wondered what on earth she was doing.
She had never shared a bedroom with anyone before and briefly recoiled from the intimacy of it before reminding herself that saboteurs needed to prepare for worse hardships. Dinner was less good than tea: mushroom soup, cottage pie and steamed pudding all needed something more than the jugs of tap-water provided to wash them down. Gloria Freeburg, forewarned by friends, had brought a flask of brandy in her suitcase, which she shared afterwards with Charlotte and Nancy Lee, but nothing of what Charlotte imagined to be the dormitory spirit developed as a result: both the others seemed anxious about the next day as they discussed the trials of daring that awaited them.
After breakfast, Sibley took them down the gardens to a paddock, a small roped-on" area of which, he explained, was a lake of sulphuric acid. He invited them to split into two teams, elect a leader, and cross the lake with the help of an empty oil drum, two cleft sticks and a length of frayed rope.
Other obstacles were set up around the paddock, which looked set for an austerity gymkhana. The women, in issued trousers and plimsolls, responded to Sibley's encouraging cries and made their way, with only two fatalities, through a small but densely laid minefield and a factory ventilation shaft.
Charlotte incurred some time penalties and an acid burn to her left foot but was otherwise unharmed. She sat, flushed and breathless, at the edge of the final obstacle, watching the last three women struggle through.
She thought how glad she was, for once, that Gregory wasn't there.
He was taking a few practice swings beside the first tee while Ian Watson prepared to let rip.
"Short par four, this," said Watson.
"Green's just out of sight below the dip, but it's straight down."
"Don't worry, I'll follow you."
"Christ, I wouldn't do that, old boy."
Watson planted the ball, stood back a few paces, swished his driver a couple of times, then waddled up to the ball and smacked it down the middle.
"Settle for that," he said.
Gregory tentatively mounted the tee with a three iron.
"I told you I haven't played since--"
" Just get on with it, Gregory."
Gregory swung the club back slowly, concentrating on keeping his head preternaturally still, stamped his left heel down at the top of the backswing, kept the club-head accelerating through impact and raised his thumbs, as recommended by a grizzled African caddie to counteract his natural slice. A shock like that from an electric socket jarred his ringers, and the ball fizzed flat and low for fifty yards before burrowing like a homing rodent into the wiry heather.
"Hard cheese," said Watson, striding off towards his own shot, which was a short chip from the green.
The next time they were close enough together to talk was on the fourth fairway, where Watson said, "Word is you've got a new lady friend.
Anyone I know?"
"I don't think so, Ian. I met her at a literary party in London. Not your sort of circle, I think."
"Not really yours, either, Greg."
Gregory laughed.
"She's a remarkable girl. Somehow she's got it into her head that she ought to get dropped into France. Don't ask me why.
Something to do with her romantic feeling for the place."
"What? France?"
"Yes. And the French."
"Christ," said Watson.
"What a bloody shower."
"I know." Gregory looked at his wretched lie in the damp sand.
"Stand clear."
After a few holes Gregory began to play better. His irons, instead of burrowing deep into the Surrey earth, merely clipped out a ragged oval of sandy topsoil. They began to fly straighter, or at worst with an allowable fade. His putting was still approximate. He imagined the hole to be the size of a dustbin lid; he pictured the ball on a piece of string; he conceived of a follow-through so straight as to coerce the ball by the discipline of his forearms into the hole. Still it slid by to the right, drooped left or smacked into the back of the cup and leapt off with frisky topspin. Ian Watson had been brought up in Scotland and had played golf since the age of five; the irritation of the game and all its frivolous trickery were natural to him. In front of the sixth green was a magnetic little brook, but he found it easy enough to land his second on the welcoming green beyond. It was good for him to be better than Gregory at golf: having joined the squadron in the winter of 1940 he felt at a disadvantage with men like Borowski and Gregory who had flown in August and September, in what had seemed like pure chaos at the time but had later become glamorously known as the Battle of Britain. Like most of the younger pilots Watson was an assiduous pursuer of women, but news of Gregory's romance came to them as a surprise. They presumed he had become inactive.
"Tell me more about this girl."
"I don't think so. I don't want any competition." Gregory thought briefly of Charlotte's brown eyes fixed on him with their eager intensity, of the way he would stroke her cheek with his fingers and make her laugh at her own earnestness. He thought of the sensation he sometimes had when she focused on him of being in the spotlight of an alarming intelligence. When he thought about her he felt an awful weakening; there was an impulse to admit some feeling to give in, and, by submitting, to intensify it. It would be like coming home; it would be like finding an end to his bereaved uncertainty, and he was aware of the effort of will it took to crush the weakening impulse.
"All square," said Ian Watson, through narrow lips, as they walked to the sixteenth.
Gregory looked over a weedy pond to the long, thin green behind it.
Although the flag was at the back, it still looked no more than a six iron to him. Watson had stopped offering advice on club selection as the score became closer.
Gregory swung through the shot, but seemed to make more contact with the wooden tee than with the ball itself.
"WG, I fancy," said Watson, watching its tinny, steep parabola.
"Watery grave."
The ball fell among weeds on the far edge of the hazard. Watson took no chance with his shot, and battered his ball low to a bank at the back of the green.
At the seventeenth tee they turned for the final approach to the clubhouse.
Watson spent a long time, teeing and re-teeing his ball, then stiffly carved it high away to the right, where it clattered through branches and disappeared from view. Gregory, relaxed beyond caring, watched his slowly hit drive make its own straight way, bouncing over a dog-walkers' path that crossed the fairway and running on towards the distant flag.
When they stood on the last tee the match was level. Watson clearly felt that this was not a fair reflection of the game and that somehow he had been defrauded. The last green was set between the clubhouse on one side and a large lake on the other; it was a short par four, almost reachable, like the first hole, in one.
Gregory hit a three iron to the left, a short, safe shot, that opened the green to his second. Watson controlled his nerve well enough to take a wood, which he hit to within thirty yards of the green. There was a little bounce in his step as he led the way forward.
"Now you want to be careful not to hit the clubhouse from there," he said.
"That window on the end is the ladies' powder room. Very expensive nineteenth-century glass. I believe that when the Varsity match was played here the Cambridge captain salvaged a half by climbing on to the clubhouse roof, where his partner had put him, and laying the ball dead."
With these pictures in his mind- a young man in a pale blue scarf crouched among roof tiles with a niblick; half-dressed ladies at their powdering startled by exploding glass Gregory stood over his ball.
It was a straightforward eight iron. His natural fade would keep him from the clubhouse or the tree that stood sentinel beside it. He glanced up the fairway and saw Ian Watson, waiting for him to play.
He looked at Watson's eager face, its expression of friendly anticipation drawn sharper by his will to win. He thought of the similar expression on the face of Bill Dexter, climbing into his Spitfire for the last time; of Forster's modest, colonial smile as he explained to an enraptured mess how he had made his first kill; of the rubbery grin of the Canadian, Jimmy Somers; of Borowski's sharp-featured Polish friend whose plane had made such a crater in the Sussex Downs. Gregory felt a surge of anxious pity for poor Watson.
As he stood over the ball he shifted his feet so that they were at forty-five degrees to the line of the shot; on the backswing he snapped his left elbow-joint open so that the club veered down from far outside the line, across the ball, and sent it, with all his strength, soaring, slicing high across the green, hanging still for a moment on the air, then plummeting down into the lake. Watson turned, his face lit up with incredulous delight.
Charlotte Gray was sitting in a leather armchair, sunk so deep that she could barely make her elbows reach up over the arms. Her eyes were following a line of book spines on a shelf: Gray's Anatomy, Child Psycho-Analysis by Melanie Klein; Psycho-Analysis of the War Neuroses, Introduction by Sigmund Freud. Her eyes moved over the letters of the titles again and again, though she read without taking in the meaning of the words. Beneath the shelf was the head of the surprisingly young psychiatrist, Dr. Burch; it was a head sleek with hair oil, with a bespectacled face of impassive curiosity. He occasionally tapped the end of his pen against the pages in the open folder on his lap. He wrote nothing.
"Let's talk about your parents. Are they happy?"
"As far as I know." She thought of the windswept house, her father's long absences at work, his awful wordless days, her mother's nervously chattering complicity.
Dr. Burch said nothing. Charlotte said nothing. She knew he expected her to be motivated, embarrassed even, by the silence into giving more details, and that the spontaneous first rush of information would be, by the nature of its self-selection, significant either in what it chose to include or by what it chose to suppress.
So she said nothing.
Dr. Burch smiled, a humourless, slightly reproving smile, as though to suggest that Charlotte was being difficult, or impolite.
"Would you like to tell me a little more about them?"
"It depends what you need to know. They've been married for a long time.
They have two children of whom they're fond. They have enough money. My father still works. They're healthy. They certainly have every reason to be happy."
"But you're not sure. Is that because you don't see them much?"
"Some rift, you mean? Not at all."
"And what about your childhood? Was your home life happy?"
Charlotte sighed.
"We were a very ordinary family. I had an elder brother called Roderick.
We had a dog and a couple of cats. My mother was a nice woman, a good wife and mother. My father was a serious man. He worked very hard. He was a doctor, a physician to begin with, but he became interested in psychiatry, I think perhaps partly as a result of his experiences in the Great War, though I'm not sure about the timing. He was very well read and would certainly have been aware of Freud and people like that quite early on, though of course they didn't have the kind of acceptance then that they do now. People thought they were pornographic." She inclined her head in the direction of Dr Burch's bookshelf.
"Did he practise as a psychiatrist?"
"Yes, he did eventually. It was odd, because he really rather despised most other psychiatrists. He thought a lot of it was rubbish. He hated all that talk about dreams. He was happier being a physician."
Burch said nothing and Charlotte looked at him. He raised an eyebrow, but still did not speak.
Charlotte suddenly sat forward in the chair and gave him her fullest and most charming smile, smoothing her skirt down over her hips as she resettled.
"This must be a thankless job for you, questioning all these young women about their past."
Burch recoiled a little in the floodlight of her social manner. In reestablishing the artificial basis of their conversation he was impelled into a slight awkwardness.
"We're not here to talk about me.
Miss. Gray." Charlotte felt she had won a small victory.
"Though you might make a more interesting subject."
Her attitude was now bordering on the flirtatious. Burch became firmer.
"You didn't answer my question. Was your home life happy?"
"Whom shall we call happy? It was all right."
Her eyes travelled once more down the line of books and for the tenth time unreadingly traced the kicking spokes of the K in Klein. She was thinking of another doctor's room: not that of Wolf, or Burch, but a cold first floor sitting room in a granite house in Aberdeen.
She is seventeen years old, on the point of leaving school. Her hair is clipped back off her face in the neat combs of the Academy sixth form; her schoolgirl knees are pressed together. The spaces beneath her eyes are puffed outwards in damp pink swellings; she is gasping and heaving to catch the breath denied her by the repeated sobbing of her chest. She cannot hold the grief any more and bends her swollen, shiny face down into her hands with a great cry. She wants by that noise to blow the pathways clear to her lungs and to loosen, then expunge, the gripping memory of her betrayal.
The doctor to whom she speaks does not believe her.
"I'm going to show you some pictures now," said Burch, 'and I want you to tell me what each one reminds you of He slipped his hand into the drawer of the desk and brought out a pile of folded papers. He opened the first one and passed it across to Charlotte, who had moved from the depths of the armchair to sit opposite him.
She looked at the symmetrical shapes made by the paper folded in on itself across a blob of black ink.
"Tarantula."
"Are you frightened of insects?"
"Averagely."
"This one?"
"Ink on paper."
"This one?"
"Wine on paper, paint on paper, black water on paper."
"This one?"
"Castle in a forest."
"This one?"
"Scrambled egg with truffles."
"All right. This one."
"Nothing really. Insects. Brambles. Patterns in the sand."
"This one."
"It's like an archipelago, somewhere in the southern seas. Here's the governor-general's house with its shady verandah overlooking the sea."
"Charming. This one."
"Is a face. A gargoyle on a church."
"This one."
"Is another blot. We're back to blots, I'm afraid. Ink on paper."
"This one."
"Blot."
"This one."
"Blot. Vaguely canine, but still a blot. I have a feeling they're all going to be blots from now on."
Eventually Burch slipped the papers back into his desk.
"All right.
Now I'm going to say a word and I want you to say the first word your mind associates with it. I do want you to take this seriously. You must relax.
Let your mind just take its own course. Go and sit back in the armchair and close your eyes."
Charlotte sank down into the cushions, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The room had a churchy smell; she relaxed more than she expected.
Burch squatted on the hard chair with a list on his lap. His eyes ran down the words.
"Drink."
"Water."
"House."
"Garden."
"Mother."
"Hair."
"Dog."
"Legs."
"Apple."
"Eve."
"Stick."
"Beat."
"Father."
"Sad look."
"One word, please. Try again. Father."
"Waistcoat."
"Home."
"Cold."
"Friend."
"Girl."
"War."
"Peace."
"War."
"Planes."
"London."
"Flat."
"Kiss."
"Lips."
"Floor."
"Board."
"Ceiling."
"White."
"Bed."
"Lie."
"Red."
"Lips."
"Blue."
"Uniform."
"Flowers."
"Roses."
"France."
"Roads."
"Sex."
"Female."
"All right. You can open your eyes."
Charlotte blinked. Burch laid the folder on his desk. On a low shelf was a rectangular basket containing some wooden blocks, like a child's building bricks. Burch started to move his hand towards them, then saw Charlotte watching him. Something in her expression appeared to make him think better of it.
"All right. Miss. Gray," he said, standing up.
"I think we've probably finished. Will you ask the next girl to come in, please."
"Have I passed? Are you going to recommend me for further training?"
"I think so."
As she passed the desk Charlotte glimpsed the notes he had made on a page "Ensign Charlotte Gray'. The only thing he had written was: " T. C. by 1/2'.
X
Gregory took the stairs two at a time, one hand clamped against the bottle of gin in his coat pocket. He had stopped worrying about his motives; he only knew how anxious he was to see the door of the flat swing open.
Charlotte was waiting, leaning against the door frame, wearing a floral summer dress with bare arms and legs. Gregory inhaled the scent of lily of the valley as he kissed her warm neck.
"Is the coast clear?"
"Yes. I don't think anyone'll be back before eleven."
Gregory ran his hands through Charlotte's hair. She pushed him away and resettled the tortoiseshell comb he had dislodged.
Gregory poured drinks.
"I'm off to France again any day," he said.
"As soon as the weather's clear."
"Another drop?" said Charlotte, sitting down next to him on the sofa.
"That sort of thing. They've given me an address in Clermont Ferrand."
"Why?"
"It's a Citroen garage in the middle of town. The owner's a part of the local network. He's called Chollet, I believe, but he goes under the name of Hercule. I'm supposed to get in touch if something goes wrong."
"Like what?"
"I... I don't know. I'm sure it'll be all right."
"You told me nothing could go wrong in those big Halifaxes."
Gregory seemed distracted, then made a sudden effort.
"I just discovered today what the G section codeword for the moon is.
Guess.
It's a girl's name."
"I don't know," said Charlotte.
"Phoebe? Selena?"
"No, it's Charlotte! I've been reading all these messages about "
Charlotte Unsatisfactory", "Charlotte Impeccable", "Regret Operation impossible, state of Charlotte" Charlotte and Isaac, the two most important people in my life."
"Who's Isaac?"
"Isaac Newton. The black knight."
"What are you talking about?"
"Isaac is what pilots call gravity."
"I see." Charlotte smiled and laid her hand on his knee.
"And how's your French coming on? Would you like to practise?"
"Not today. I'm just not as clever as you, Charlotte, that's the trouble."
"You don't have to be clever to learn a language. Children can do it."
"Well, I suppose I can just about make myself understood but as soon as I open my mouth they'll know I'm not French."
"You'll just have to be careful. Don't look so sad. I hate it when you go all remote like this."
Gregory lit two cigarettes and gave one to Charlotte. He sighed.
"You're worth ten of me, old thing. That's the trouble."
Charlotte raised a finger.
"No R.A.F talk."
"What?"
"Isn't that what you call your planes," old girl" and " old thing"?"
Gregory smiled tiredly.
"I'm not like that, you know. Charlotte. All that balls about " wizard prangs". I don't really like those sort of people."
"I know. I know you're not really like that." She had taken his hand as she began to speak in the voice of a soothing and indulgent mother, which Gregory found shamefully affecting. He laid his head on the cotton fabric of Charlotte's dress while she stroked his hair.
"I sometimes talk like that because I grew fond of those men. That's the trouble. They probably all seem absurd to you, and in some ways they do to me. But they were very young. They hadn't even begun their lives. You must forgive them a few silly phrases."
"You talk of them with such devotion." said Charlotte.
"I sometimes think you're fonder of them than you are of me."
Gregory stood up.
"Come on. Don't let's waste these evenings together being morbid. Let's have dinner. What is it? Spam?"
"No. It's a pot au feu a la mode de Ministere de Guerre."
"Sounds interesting. I want you to tell me more about your training.
You're not really going ahead with this, are you?"
Charlotte drew the curtains of the kitchen and lit the candles on the laid table. She told him about Dr. Burch and of how she would shortly have to go on a course in Scotland.
Gregory watched her as she spoke. Sometimes, when he heard her talk, he felt that he had merely stumbled from one thing to another without ever properly thinking about it: India, England, Nyasaland, farming, friends, women, war.
He must have made decisions, some based on quick gratification, some on what was sensible, but he had never thought it through in the dimension Charlotte inhabited. It was almost as though he had never grown up at all, but had just trusted to luck and to a childish belief that things would probably work out.
Perhaps if he had undergone her self-scrutiny he would not have been so shaken by the experience of war. He liked to watch the nervous intensity of her narratives, as she described her interviews and experiences. He shuddered at the completeness of her trust in him and felt unworthy of its intensity. He was, in fact, though he did not admit it, a little frightened of her; and the only way to subdue that fear was by indulging the violently erotic feeling that her fierce attention to his well-being aroused in him.
At ten o'clock he had to leave. Charlotte was asleep on the bed, her face pink and untroubled, her breathing steady. Gregory picked up his service shirt and flannel trousers from the floor and pulled them on.
He ran his hand back through his hair, then sat on the hard little chair at the end of Charlotte's bedroom and looked at her in the unlit gloom of the summer evening.
He had not told her of the true nature of his flight. Perhaps he would never see her again.
She was lying on her side with one leg raised as though running. There were tiny dry lines where the skin of her upper foot met the sole. Her toenails were painted scarlet. Gregory's eyes ran over the sharp ankle bone, up the straight shin to the pocket enclosed by the stretched sinews of her raised knee, the thin pink creases behind the other, straightened, knee, then up the sweep of her thigh, whose packed flesh was of the same firm consistency as that of her lower leg. At the top of the hip-bones were two soft folds, which, to her intense embarrassment, he referred to as love- handles.
Gregory's lips twitched as he recalled her indignation. He explained to her that it was necessary to have some flaw to balance what might otherwise have been too orthodox a figure, but Charlotte was ashamed of them, as she was of the small roundness of her belly that made her tighter skirts swell a little at the front, not fall in the perpendicular line of a fashion drawing. This too Gregory liked, though the way she lay made it invisible to his gaze, which could make out only the bottom of her ribs and her upper arm with its pale freckles trickling over on to the shoulder where her fair hair lay disarrayed, a single darker strand of it stuck to the side of her face by sweat.
When he had finished dressing he stood by the bed and gave her body one last glance, straining in the almost-full darkness, as she lay deep in one of her death-like sleeps. He was moved by a paradoxical sense that there lay like an invisible film over the practical volume of her rib cage and the bumpy spinal cord with its vital wiring, something personal, something essentially hers, that transcended the facts of her physical incorporation. He wanted very much to stroke the line of her thigh and hip, to kiss the mandolin-shaped cheeks, childishly bare; but he feared to wake her, so instead drew the sheet carefully over her and tiptoed from the room.
He found himself inexplicably reluctant to walk the few steps down the passage to the front door; he wished he had told her what he was really going to do. He took a piece of paper from the hall table and scribbled a note on it.
"Charlotte Satisfactory.10.21 pm. A bientot XX' He went back to her room and left it on the bedside table.
Gregory had been driving for three quarters of an hour through the night when he felt a sudden pressure rising in his ribs. For a minute he thought he was going to vomit, and he pulled the car over to the side of the unlit country road. He climbed out and stood by the door.
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