Their bombing raids over France had killed hundreds of civilians, according to the speaker, and all of the deaths were quite unnecessary.
"They say they're destroying German installations and French factories that supply the German war effort, but that's a lie. The English have always been our enemies and the Monster Churchill is prolonging the war for his own selfish ends! This is war for Wall Street, war for the City of London, war for the Israelites!"
The name of Churchill was greeted by a wide range of expletives from the throaty crowd, the most common of which was "Jew'. A couple of drums started up a regular beat, though the people could not decide whether the chant should be "R.A.F-Assassins' or "Churchill, de Gaulle Jew!": the first had a good hammering rhythm, but the latter had a catchy, iambic quality. Charlotte looked at some of the banners and placards being waved and saw the usual demonic faces of ringleted, black-coated figures, depicted in the act of thieving, hoarding and plotting in connivance with the British, Russians and Americans. One had a photograph of a Lancaster bomber imaginatively decked out with stars of David.
Poor Gregory, Charlotte thought as she moved quietly away from the square.
She glanced back once over her shoulder at the crowd, whose breath was making angry statues in the freezing air.
By five o'clock she was back in Lavaurette. Pauline Bobotte told her that Monsieur Levade was busy, so she left some packages of food she had brought for dinner at the desk and made her way slowly towards the public baths. The thought of the drop that evening had chased away the bitterness she felt at watching the demonstration: the people who would hold the torches in the field did not see things in that way; nor did Antoinette, patiently tapping out her messages in the drizzly hills of Ussel.
The public baths had been installed eight years earlier by a socialist mayor anxious that Lavaurette should move with the times. They had become popular during the fuel shortages, though even now they were disdained by the town's elite who preferred to wash in cold water or not at all than to mingle with the shopkeepers and the proletariat.
In the tiled vestibule Charlotte was given a ticket and a towel by an old woman stationed in a glass-fronted box. On the opposite wall was a giant framed photograph of Marshal Petain, looking down indulgently on his clean people; beneath it, to the words Work, Family, Fatherland, a local sign writer had neatly added: Hygiene.
Although it was only a few minutes after six, the baths were already almost full. A long, concrete-floored space had eight tubs on either side, and was divided down the middle by wooden benches with attached rails at head height on which were hooks for clothes and towels.
Charlotte could taste on her tongue the steam that rose up against the cold air and made it difficult to see if there was room for her. She walked along the duckboards until she came to a free place, where she put her parcel on the bench and began to undress.
As she quickly slipped Dominique's brassiere over her shoulders and ran it down her arms, she found herself addressed by a naked Mlle Cariteau, who was about to climb into the bath next to her. Charlotte was unsure of the etiquette and found herself blushing, unseen, in the steam.
Sylvie Cariteau was making conversation in the positive and factual manner she favoured in the post office and Charlotte did her best to respond in the same style.
Sylvie Cariteau turned away and walked round her bath to feel the temperature of the water. Charlotte watched the departure of her strong back and solid haunches with relief as she quickly finished undressing and climbed into the high-sided bath. On her other side was Madame Galliot from the ironmongery, though without her glasses and with her hair let down her back it was a moment before Charlotte recognised her.
Naked, she seemed younger and less formidable. She walked up beside Charlotte's bath and leaned over to take one of the bars of soap that were perched on the taps. As she did so.
Charlotte's eye took in Madame Galliot's torso and the huge lower expanse of black hair which looked for a moment like the giant sporran of some fabulously virile clan. Charlotte lowered her head and splashed water into her face.
Above the thunder of water on porcelain and the swishing waves of women mixing hot and cold inside their tubs, there were shouted conversations and splashing. Charlotte could make out Pauline Bobotte's plump, shiny body with its pointed breasts and roll of fat around the middle that no privations appeared to have threatened. As she vigorously dried herself, the flesh of her buttocks wobbled like that of a woman in a Rubens painting, and Charlotte wondered if this was what men liked. Would Gregory like it? He would certainly enjoy being here, she thought, though he would have noted sadly the absence of Madame Galliot's daughter. Perhaps Irene was too proud to take her clothes off in front of other people.
Cakes of soap, so severely rationed outside, were in abundance here; they smelt of something harsh and chemical, but there were plenty of the palm-sized pink bricks. Charlotte washed with luxurious pleasure in the deep water, replenished from the unlimited supply, and when there was no reason to prolong her immersion, she reluctantly stood up and turned towards the central bench.
She had lost weight in the months she had been in France, though to her irritation it had gone from her hands, her feet, her cheeks, places from which she had no need to lose it. She was aware that above each hipbone there was still a little surplus flesh and that a slight roundness persisted in her belly, even though the ribs above were protuberant.
As she stood by the bench and raised her leg to dry her thighs and her knees with their fine bones. Charlotte found that she was staring at Pauline Benoit, naked except for her cherry lipstick and a ribbon in her hair, or rather that Pauline was staring at her, and in particular at her groin.
Charlotte followed the other woman's eyes to the thin, inverted plume of golden hair that her raised leg only half concealed; then she looked back at Pauline, saw her eyes now on her face and on the dark, cropped coiffure. She understood what had intrigued Pauline. After almost five months in France, it was the first evidence of a mistake by G Section.
When she had put on the new dress, she took the rest of her clothes out to the washroom that adjoined the baths, where she towelled her hair vigorously and tried to arrange it in the mirror. Sylvie Cariteau combed her black bob and smiled her candid smile at Charlotte.
"Will you come and have a glass at my house after dinner with Monsieur Levade?"
"Thank you."
"To wish you good luck."
In the vestibule. Charlotte wrapped her coat about her, put on her scarf and handed in the sopping towel. It was not far to Julien's apartment, and for the first time ever, unless Pauline Benoit was going to run naked across the Place de 1'Eglise, she would reach the staircase unchallenged.
"My God, Daniele, you look wonderful," said Julien when Charlotte stepped into his apartment.
"You remember Cesar, don't you?"
The head boy of the lycee stood up and held out his big hand to be shaken, apparently not daring to offer his cheek; Charlotte kissed him anyway and accepted the glass Julien held out to her.
"We're expecting a couple more for dinner," said Julien.
"Lepidus is bringing some pate and Antony is supposed to have a pear tart.
Don't ask how they manage it."
"What am I drinking?" said Charlotte.
"It's an alcohol made from apples, a sort of local calvados. Madame Benoit gave it to me. It's a little rough, I'm afraid, but I haven't been able to get much wine. I like your dress. Was that from the shop Pauline told you about?"
"Yes. It makes me look a bit like my mother, but it was the best they could do. Is everything all right for tonight?"
"Yes, there was confirmation on the BBC. It's not till midnight, but I want us to be there by half past ten. We'll meet the others there.
We've got a new man in to replace Auguste."
"Good," said Charlotte.
"Don't tell me his name. Caligula?"
"This is a serious business, Madame. As a matter of fact it's Tiberius."
"I knew it was only a matter of time before you reached the perverts."
"That's enough. Cesar, amuse Daniele, please, while I finish making dinner.
I have a little surprise for you."
The prospect of action seemed to have restored Julien's old humour and Charlotte heard him singing as he clattered about in the kitchen.
Antony and Lepidus arrived together, bringing their promised contributions, which they laid on the table before helping themselves eagerly to Madame Benoit's apple spirit. Antony was a plump man with thick-rimmed glasses whom Charlotte recognised, though she did not say so, as the local optician.
Lepidus, the third member of the peculiar triumvirate, was well into his seventies, red-faced, and with a hand that shook so badly that he had to steady it with the other when he clasped his brimming glass. A minute or so later his eyes were still watering, but his hand was calm.
Julien's surprise turned out to be a brace of rabbits he had shot in the grounds of the Domaine that morning. He had prepared them in a sauce whose main ingredient was mustard, referred to on its packet by the new regime as 'condiment'. He had put some of the rice with the offal to make a stuffing and served some macaroni on the side in place of potatoes, or 'feculents' as the ration-masters called them.
There was also a small heap of something orange which even in their extreme hunger Julien's guests treated cautiously.
"They call it " rutabaga"," Julien explained to Antony, who had lifted a forkful up to his spectacles for closer examination.
"I think it's something they normally give to cattle. The commissars of Vichy have strongly recommended it to their loyal, hungry people."
"Hmm," said Antony, inspecting the blob on the end of his fork.
"I don't suppose it features very often on the menus at the Hotel du Pare."
"I dare say not," said Julien.
Even Cesar, with the appetite of three men, managed only a little of the curious vegetable. Charlotte, who recognised it as swede, wanted to tell them that where she came from it was considered a delicacy when accompanying the haggis; but as Daniele she could only shrug and share their puzzled revulsion. Julien poured wine into glasses that were always empty and pushed affirmatively towards his bottle.
Watching Lepidus's lip hook avidly over the rim of his glass and suck.
Charlotte "wondered to what extent political idealism was his motive in risking his life on a freezing winter's night.
Reaching the agreed drop zone was no longer the simple matter it had been before the advent of the Germans. They left the house separately, at a quarter to ten in order to beat the curfew, and were instructed by Julien to make their own way to the farm, without lights on their bicycles.
"You can come with me, Daniele," he said.
"We'll bring up the rear."
As Charlotte free-wheeled down the rue de 1'Eglise, the wind whistling through the insubstantial fabric of Dominique's overcoat, she was aware both of how much she had drunk and of the fact that, whatever the amount, it was less than half that consumed by any of the others.
She followed Julien to Madame Cariteau's house on the main road.
"We've got half an hour," said Julien, rapping on the glass of the back door.
Sylvie Cariteau, her hair shiny from the effects of the pink carbolic soap, let them into the kitchen where she had set out six glasses on the cleared and scrubbed table. In answer to her daughter's call, Madame Cariteau appeared at the door to the main part of the house with Andre and Jacob.
"I don't know what all this is about," the old woman muttered, 'and I don't think I want to know, I'm a loyal citizen. Sylvie doesn't tell me anything. "
"We should have a song. A song from each of us," said Sylvie Cariteau, and sat down at the piano.
"Who'll go first?"
"Madame, Madame, you go," said Andre, looking up at Charlotte.
"I think you have an admirer," said Mlle Cariteau.
The only song Charlotte could think of was "Alouette', which she sang, with some help with the words from Sylvie and Andre. Julien drained another glass before starting up an old folk song about a man who was jealous of his wife but was cuckolded all the same.
Madame Cariteau's clucking disapproval was drowned by a chorus full of 'la-la-las' with which the boys were able to join in.
Madame Cariteau walked over to the piano and folded her arms across her chest. She launched herself precipitately into something that her daughter was not expecting, and there were some family words before they agreed to start again.
Madame Cariteau's voice, once it had found the right key, turned out to be surprisingly clear and firm; no trace of self-consciousness blurred the high notes of the traditional song she had chosen.
Looking at the old woman's stout, worn body. Charlotte was amazed by the youthful purity that had been preserved intact within it; it was like watching a clear stream erupt from dark, decaying undergrowth.
The chorus went: "But then I was young and the leaves were green/ Now the corn is cut and the little boat sailed away." It was a song of the most self-admiring sentimentality about the different ages of a man's life. One of the verses began: "One day the young men came back from the war, the corn was high and our sweethearts were waiting..
" and there was a silence in the Cariteaus' kitchen as though the music had exceeded the sum of its modest parts. Charlotte could not help thinking of Madame Cariteau's husband and of all the men who did not come back for Sylvie. She found tears filling her eyes and was appalled both by the feeling and by her lack of musical taste.
Julien called out a virile 'bravo' to break the mood and brought Jacob forward to the piano. He sang a tune he had learned at school, though his shyness made it difficult to understand. It was something about "To the right, to the left, please take my hand, and come and dance, and..." but after two or three attempts the words seemed to peter out at this point.
Sylvie Cariteau sang a canon by Bach, her voice oddly coarser than her old mother's. Finally, Andre sang all the many verses of the story of a little ship that had never sailed and set off on a long voyage. The chorus involved Julien conducting with the empty wine bottle: "Sailors sail upon the waves!" It went down so well with the boys that they had to go through it again.
On the final note, Julien embraced both women warmly, kissed the boys, took Charlotte by the elbow and out into the night. They were ten minutes up the road before Charlotte had caught her breath.
In the farmhouse they met the other members of the group, standing round beneath the lanterns hung from the beam of the kitchen, smacking their upper arms with their gloved hands, drinking from coffee cups and enamel mugs they filled from an unlabelled bottle on the table.
Charlotte watched in disbelief as Cesar, Lepidus and Antony helped themselves again. One of the other men produced a dry sausage, which he cut into lengths and handed round. A youngish man with curly hair and a beard took a pistol from his jacket, emptied the bullets into his hand, twirled round the empty chamber, held it up to the lantern, checked the sights and carefully reloaded it. Most of the others had firearms of some kind. Charlotte knotted her headscarf more tightly under her chin and smiled at Cesar as she declined his offer of a sunflower-leaf cigarette. The men muttered and growled at each other as they shrugged, lit cigarettes and occasionally punched one another on the shoulder.
On the bare table Julien placed two cups to show the location of the farm building and of a barn the other side of the drop zone. Then he drew tracks in the wood with this finger to show the plane's path and the line that the men's torches must make. It was a large bomber, he didn't know what make, but it would be heaving out sixteen containers into the void. It was dangerous to be underneath because of the weight of what was coming down, so no one was to move a pace from his designated spot.
"Listen," said one of the men, slightly less agricultural-looking than the others, 'my brother-in-law was in the air force and I know a thing or two about flying. The chances of a bomber finding that little clearing and being able to drop on the lights you've described--it's hopeless."
Julien smiled tolerantly.
"They've done it before."
"Just on co-ordinates and a couple of torches, you don't think--"
" If you don't want to take part, you can leave now. Go on."
The man shrugged and puffed for a moment, but stood his ground.
"It's all right. I'll stay."
"Good." Julien turned to a small man who looked from his torn clothes and bedraggled appearance as though he had spent several nights in the woods. He had an unwashed smell that reminded Charlotte of a beggar who had once lurched at her from a doorway in Glasgow, but Julien seemed to defer to his knowledge of the terrain, and particularly of a wood they needed to cross.
He told them he had heard the second BBC bulletin and that the drop had been confirmed; they would meet four more volunteers at an agreed clearing in the woods.
Julien looked at his watch.
"Is everybody ready? From the time we make contact with the other four until the drop is completed and everything has been cleared away there must be no talking. Do you understand?"
The men shifted their weight and stamped their feet on the cold stone floor.
Charlotte thought they looked like ghillies preparing for a rough shoot on the estate of some minor aristocrat fallen on hard times. She saw two of them fill flasks from the bottle on the table and slip them into their pockets.
As they left the building and clattered over the moonlit farmyard, Charlotte felt the sweet illicit thrill she remembered from her childhood when, on the endless summer nights beneath the northern skies, she and Roderick would climb out of their bedroom windows, go down a ladder they had left beside the house and make for the fields.
The aching cut of the December wind brought her back to the present, but the moonlight was as white and as evenly spread as on a Highland night in August.
"Charlotte"... admirable," she thought.
They walked in single file, obediently silent, down a narrow path beside a field in which half a dozen cows stood like iron statues.
The tramp-like man in front, who, Julien whispered to Charlotte, was a poacher, then made them drop down into a ditch and up the other side into a dense wood. Hearing the noise of breaking twigs and shuffled leaves.
Charlotte shivered at how easy it would be for a German patrol to run a machine gun swiftly down their line. After about twenty minutes they emerged on to the rim of a large clearing, which Charlotte could make out was edged on all four sides by woods.
Charlotte jumped at the sound of a creature coming through the thick undergrowth at her shoulder. She had no gun and found she had let out a small cry as she grabbed Julien's arm. The creature was followed by three others. They whispered greetings to Julien who motioned them to go forward into the field.
In the twenty minutes before the plane was due, Julien placed the men with torches at intervals of a hundred yards and told the others that each of them must count the number of parachutes with the utmost care.
He took Charlotte by the wrist and positioned her on the edge of the field.
"Watch carefully, Daniele. And count. One parachute missed means we can never use this place again. And they'll be on to us."
Charlotte watched the sky, picking out the tilted saucepan of the Great Bear, from which northerly direction the plane would presumably arrive.
The thought of the English plane with men from London, Lincolnshire, perhaps from Aberdeen, that had ploughed through the night and would by dawn have taken its men home to tea and English newspapers made her feel, for the first time since she had been in France, a lurching homesickness.
Above their heads was a narrow crescent moon in a sky almost yellow with the light of sludgy galaxies. The curved shape reminded her of some lines by Victor Hugo that she could never, irritatingly, quite remember, about a careless god who had been reaping in the sky, then stopped and 'left his sickle in this golden field of stars'.
They stood in their places, listening to the darkness. The huge country lay peacefully all about them, indifferent to the whereabouts of some tiny plane.
How futile it seemed. Charlotte thought: the villages in the Cevennes would still cling to their rocky defiles, the Loire would still broadly flow; the vastness of the silent, undisturbed country made their sincerest efforts look quite useless.
She strained against the silence of the night. There was the sound of some night-bird, fussing over the limits of its territory, a sudden rattle in the undergrowth of the woods, perhaps a rabbit or a grounded pheasant, then the icy stillness once more all round. Then there came a sound like breath, like a soft grunt caught and stifled on the beat of a pulse. She reached out and touched Julien's hand.
She pointed upwards.
"Yes?"
Julien put his finger to his lips and listened. The noise grew louder, becoming a whirring growl.
"Yes." Julien ran out into the field and shouted to the men in the line.
The sound was now continuous, and above the deeply pulsing engine there was a whining note as though it was straining to slow down.
At last the plane came into sight. A black square against the white moonlit clouds, it grew swiftly in size as it began to descend on them.
With no lights, it was like a thunderous animal coming down closer and closer, until it filled the sky to one side of the torches only a few feet above their heads and made the ground tremble with the huge sonorous notes of its exhaust. Charlotte saw four vast engines, then the belly of the plane, then square rudders on the tail as it passed over them and began to climb. It dropped nothing, but started to rise and bank slowly to its right.
"What's wrong?" called Charlotte to the figure nearest to her.
"Wasn't it ours?"
"Yes." It was the man with the brother-in-law in the air force.
"It was a Halifax. It'll come back." His tone was grudging.
The sound of engines was almost lost as the heavy plane made its long, heavy turn, then, at the point of vanishing, it began a slow crescendo.
Once more the black, ragged square approached beneath the lights of the Bear and this time it came in almost flat on the line of the waiting torches. The noise of the propellers seemed to echo and ring off the frozen sky, and as the plane levelled out above them the moon struck a tingling reflection in the perspex canopy.
At the moment the four engines seemed on the point of stalling, the belly of the aircraft broke open and heavy dark blossoms filled the sky behind it like a handful of black confetti. They swung on swift, narrow arcs and landed with a tinny sound on the hard earth. Before the plane was out of sight, the field was full of people running to the collapsed parachutes and wrenching them free of their metal cargo. In the excitement Charlotte had forgotten to count.
Julien was running round trying to find out how many parachutes had come down. Charlotte hurried over to the nearest one, where she found the poacher opening the cylinder down one side. There were three further canisters inside with two wire handles for carrying. He pulled one out, handed it to Charlotte, and pointed her to the corner of the field while he folded the parachute into the empty outer container. The squat little tube was extraordinarily heavy, and the wire handles cut deeply into Charlotte's hands. She noticed that most of the men had somehow hoisted the tubes on to their shoulders. She took off her headscarf and wrapped it round her palms to protect them as she lugged the cylinder across the field.
There was a growing pile inside a small clearing at the edge of the wood where Julien was discouraging the men from opening the containers until everything had been brought in from the drop zone.
The rule of silence had been completely forgotten in the exhilaration of the moment as they smoked and laughed and congratulated themselves on the successful drop.
As Charlotte went back into the field to retrieve another of the heavy packages she heard the sound of the plane again. It came down on a different angle this time, not directly overhead, but on a slow, wide turn from east to west. As it dipped in above the clearing it seemed dangerously low, and the sound of its groaning engines made Charlotte think for a moment that it was going to stall and bury itself in the ground. A torch to her left was flashing a morse signal to the roaring, juddering plane, and as her eyes ran up along its beam.
Charlotte, alone in the field, her hair whipped against her face, looked up and saw for a second in the black open cave of the bomb bay a g down on her.
His silhouette was caught for a moment, lit from behind by a light in the fuselage. Then the plane was climbing as swiftly as its bulk would permit, the engine noise rising in pitch as it completed its turn and pointed north for home.
"They like to have a look at their clients sometimes. It's their way of saying hello." It was Julien.
"Come on. Let's see what they've brought us."
Charlotte followed him back to the wood. She was shaking.
In the clearing the men were transferring the contents of the metal containers into sacks. There were Bren guns, pistols, ammunition and hand grenades; there was also plastic explosive, which the men inspected doubtfully, and a huge number of cheap-looking Sten guns with magazines and loaders.
Cesar let out a cry of delight as his canister disgorged bars of chocolate, butter, tins of food and prime Virginia cigarettes, a packet of which he opened at once and handed round.
"You've got to stop them taking the parachutes," said Julien.
"They'll try and make them into clothes and anyone can see from the stitching where they've come from."
Eventually they finished burying the stores and covered the place with leaves and loose branches.
"The horse and cart'll be here tomorrow night," Julien said, 'but it's too dangerous to take it all back to Lavaurette with the Germans there.
We'll have to keep it at the farm. Is that all right?"
The farmer he had turned to shrugged as he pulled deeply on his English cigarette.
"We had a visit from the police two weeks ago when we had two calves and a pregnant sow in the cellar. They didn't see a thing."
"Come on, then." The men began to file back through the wood, with the poacher leading, then out on to the narrow track. Many of them stumbled and swore as they went. One of the men passed Charlotte a flask.
Although she had already drunk more than ever before in her life she felt the bonds of comradeship required her to accept. Here was service at last in the ill-defined but urgent moral cause that had first sent her south to London; here was the reason she had decided to stay in France. She was not going to appear half-hearted at this late stage.
"Are you all right?" Julien asked her at the farm, as the men mounted their bicycles and rode off shakily towards their homes.
"I think so." It was hard to say precisely. She had been frightened by the dangerous proximity of the plane and by the noise it made, then felt tricked and wounded by the vision of the single airman looking down on her. She also felt a powerful bond with these absurd drunken men stumbling about in the darkness, a sense of gratitude to them for having understood what needed to be done. She was one of them, and wanted to be closer.
Her skin felt swollen with this odd mixture of emotion as she followed Julien back into Lavaurette, her bicycle wobbling dangerously as they turned the sharp corner out of the Place de 1'Eglise.
"Will you be all right to get home?" said Julien, leaning his machine against the wall.
Charlotte nodded.
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