‘That all sounds most regular. But one has to be sure.’
‘That I’m not a Jew? You don’t want Jews?’
‘We have to be sure that people of the, er, Jewish persuasion are fully aware of the risks.’
‘What risks?’
There was a small tremor of impatience in his voice. ‘Perhaps I should be asking the questions, Miss Sutro. I wonder, how did you acquire your command of the language?’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t
acquire
my command of the language. I simply learned to speak, as everyone does. It just happened to be French. My mother is French. We lived in Geneva.’
‘But you also speak excellent English.’
‘That was from my father, of course. And at school we also spoke English as well as French. It was an international school. And then I spent three years at boarding school in England.’
‘What was your father doing in Geneva?’
‘He worked for the League of Nations.’ She paused and asked, with irony, ‘Do you remember the League of Nations, Mr Potter?’
At the second meeting he put his cards on the table. The expression was his. They met as before: the same place – an anonymous building on Northumberland Avenue that had once
been a hotel – the same room, the same two chairs and bare table and bare light bulb, but this time she accepted his offer of a cigarette. She wasn’t really a smoker, but working in the Filter Room at Bentley Priory, particularly on nights, turned you into one; and anyway, it made her look older to have a cigarette in her hand and somehow she wanted to appear older in the eyes of this man, despite the fact that he knew her real age and so couldn’t be deceived.
‘How do you feel about our first encounter?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘You didn’t really tell me anything very specific. The Inter Services Research Bureau could be anything.’
He nodded. Indeed it could be anything. ‘At that meeting you talked, quite eloquently I thought, of your love of France, of the fact that you wanted to do something more directly for her.’
‘That’s what it was all about, wasn’t it? My language.’
‘More or less.’ He considered her, watching her with an expression that was almost one of sadness. ‘Marian, would you be prepared to leave this country in order to pursue this work?’
‘Go overseas? Certainly. Algeria or somewhere?’
‘Actually, I mean France itself.’
There was a pause. It might have seemed as though she hadn’t quite understood. ‘Are you serious, Mr Potter?’
‘Certainly, I’m serious. The organisation that I represent trains people to work in France.’
She waited, drawing in smoke from the cigarette, determined not to let him see any change in her manner. But there
was
a change, a fluttering of excitement directly behind her breastbone.
‘I want to be frank with you, Marian. I want to put my cards on the table. It would be dangerous work. You’d be in danger of your life. But it would be of enormous value to the war effort. I want you to consider the possibility of doing something like that.’
She seemed to think about the suggestion but her mind had been made up long ago, before even this second interview had
begun, when she had guessed that something extraordinary might be about to happen. ‘I would love to,’ she said.
Potter smiled. It was an expression entirely without humour, the tired smile of a man who deals with overenthusiastic children. ‘I don’t actually want your answer now. I want you to go away and think about it. You’ve got a week’s leave—’
‘A week’s
leave
?’ Leave from the Filter Room was almost impossible to come by.
He nodded. ‘You have a week’s leave. Go home and think it over. Talk it over with your father. The only thing you may let him know is that you may be sent on some kind of secret mission overseas, and that you will be in some danger. If you accept, you will go to a unit that will assess your potential for this particular work in greater depth. It may be that they will decide that my own judgement of your talents was wrong and you are not suitable for the work we are doing. In that case, after a suitable debriefing, you will return to your normal duties and no one will be any the wiser. If the assessment unit decides to move you on to training, then you will begin the work in earnest. Training will take some months before you go into the field.’
‘It sounds fascinating.’
‘I’m not sure that’s the word I would use. You must warn your parents that if you accept this work, you will, to all intents and purposes, disappear from their lives until it is all over. Although your family will be contacted on your behalf by the organisation from time to time and informed that you are well, you will have no direct contact with them and they will have no further information as to your whereabouts. You must tell friends or relatives that you are being posted abroad. Nothing more. Do you understand that?’
‘I think so.’ She paused, considering this man and his solemn, headmaster’s face. ‘What are the risks?’
He breathed in deeply, as though preparing to deliver judgement. ‘We estimate – it is no more than an estimate – that the chances of survival are about fifty-fifty.’
‘Fifty-fifty?’ It seemed absurd. The toss of a coin. How could she not feel fear? But it was the fear that she had felt skiing, the fear of plummeting steepness, the fear she had had when her uncle had taken her climbing, the awe-inspiring fear of space beneath her feet, a fear that teetered on the very edge of joy. She wanted to make a grand gesture, to laugh with happiness and cry ‘Yes!’, even to leap out of her chair and throw her arms around this strange man with his shrill portents of doom. Instead she nodded thoughtfully. ‘What about my unit?’
‘There is no need to return to your unit. If you decide to continue, your things will be collected on your behalf and your colleagues informed of your posting to another job. I must emphasise that no one must be told anything. No cousins, no aunts and uncles, no boyfriends. Do you have a boyfriend?’
She glanced down at her hands, lying passively in her lap. Did Clément qualify? When does a childhood crush metamorphose into an adult relationship? ‘There was someone in France. We used to write, but since the invasion …’
‘Well, that’s a good thing. You must, I’m afraid, break all such connections. No explanation, no farewell. Your brother – I gather he is in a reserved occupation …’
‘Ned? He’s a scientist. Physics.’
‘He must know nothing, absolutely nothing. When the call comes, you will simply follow our instructions and make your way to the Student Assessment Board. You will be there for four days, during which you will undergo various tests to see how you measure up to the kind of person we are looking for.’
‘It sounds like an execution. You will be taken from this court to a place of execution and there you will be hanged by the neck—’
‘This is not a matter for jest, Marian,’ he said. ‘It is deadly serious.’
She smiled at him. She had a winning smile, she knew that.
Her father told her as much. ‘I’m not sure that I am jesting, Mr Potter.’
She walked out of the building, past the sandbags and the sentries, into the bright light of Northumberland Avenue. Did anyone take notice of her? She wanted them to. She wanted to seem extraordinary in the eyes of the anonymous passers-by – brilliant, adventurous, brave. She was going to France. However they organised these matters – would she go ashore by boat? or walk over the border from Switzerland? or land in a light aircraft? – somehow she was going to France. She crossed the street to the embankment to look at the river. The tide was out and sea birds picked over the mud – gulls laughing and crying. She wanted to laugh and cry with them – with joy and a breathtaking kind of fear. Trains rattled across the bridge overhead. People emerged from the shadows of the Tube station, blinking in the sunlight as she was blinking in the sunlight of her new life. Perhaps the next river she would see would be the Seine. How remarkable! Marian Sutro, living under some assumed name – Colette, she fancied – might soon be standing on the bank of the Seine beside the Pont Neuf and looking across the water, past l’Île de la Cité to the Louvre on the far side. All around her the people of the city would be wondering when and if the British were coming to rescue them from their misery, when in fact they would already be there, in her own small presence.
‘We appreciate very much your volunteering,’ the tall man said. He was wearing the uniform of a lieutenant colonel, and apparently he was in charge. Through the window behind him she could see the trees in the centre of the square. The faint sound of traffic came through the glass. The place was called Orchard
Court, and it was unclear whether it was a flat or a suite of offices. Rather it seemed a strange hybrid between the two: through an open door you might glimpse a bedroom with a made-up bed, or a bathroom with black and white tiles and an onyx bidet, and yet other rooms were clearly offices, with dull ministry desks and chairs and gunmetal filing cabinets.
Buckmaster, the man called himself. It was obviously a
nom de guerre
. No one could really be called Buckmaster. It smacked of a John Buchan thriller. Mr Standfast. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of writing to your father myself,’ he said, ‘your being so young, and so on. I tried to reassure him that we’ll look after you as best we can but I doubt it’ll pull the wool over his eyes. I mean, he must know this kind of work can be perilous.’
He nodded, gloomily. You could sense the word being repeated in his mind. Perilous. It had a quaint, Old English sound to it. Castle Perilous. His
nom de guerre
seemed more dynamic than the man himself: he was balding and had a receding chin and feminine lips. Somehow he didn’t inspire confidence.
‘May I know what this organisation is really called?’ Marian asked.
He looked discomfited. ‘Actually, we don’t ask too many questions.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Marian said, ‘but I thought I ought to know.’
‘No, don’t apologise. It’s quite understandable. But we prefer it like that. The less we know of each other the better.’ He smiled at her. ‘Of course, we know rather a lot about you, but then we need to, don’t we? Whereas you don’t need to know much about us. The need-to-know principle, d’you see?’
Did she see? Not really. It seemed ridiculous to have a name and then keep it secret.
‘Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Now that we’ve met I think it’s time to pass you on to Miss Atkins.’
Miss Atkins was an elegant woman with a faintly supercilious expression. She invited Marian to sit down and offered
her tea and biscuits and examined her with an air of detached curiosity, as though considering her for the post of scullery maid or something. If the tall colonel was the king of this particular world, then this woman was clearly the queen. ‘You are very young,’ she observed. ‘Quite one of the youngest recruits we have ever had.’ There was something unnatural about her voice, something strained and false, as though the carefully enunciated syllables were not naturally hers but had been learned for the occasion. ‘People on the Student Assessment Board were of the opinion that you are too immature for what we are proposing. However, Colonel Buckmaster and I have decided to override their judgement and recommend you for training. So we will watch your progress with close interest.’
‘You make it sound like school.’
‘It
is
like school. And you have a great deal to learn.’
‘When does it begin?’
‘Immediately. The first thing is your position as a WAAF. We like our people to have commissions. It gives them more status in France. We will have you gazetted immediately as acting Section Officer.’
‘An officer!’
‘Exactly. However, for various reasons that I won’t go into, we like all our girls to join the FANY.’
‘The Fanny? What on earth is the Fanny?’
‘The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. You’ll have the rank of Ensign and of course the uniform—’
‘But I’m in the WAAF. You just said I would be made an officer.’
Atkins tapped her finger on the desk as though to bring the meeting to order. ‘That is merely an honorary rank. It brings with it a salary that will be paid to you as appropriate, and a certain status when you are in the field. But while you are with us, you will be a FANY. It is the way we do things. Do I make myself clear? You must get kitted out with the uniform immediately.’ She
paused, considering the girl in front of her. ‘It is my duty to remind you that everything that happens from now on, in fact everything that has already happened since your first meeting with Mr Potter, comes under the Official Secrets Act. You do understand this, don’t you? Your training, for example. Where you go and what you see and what you do when you get there. Everything. I know you’ve been doing secret work in the WAAF, but this is not quite the same thing. The secrets of the Filter Room are clearly circumscribed, but none of our work is defined in that way. From now on it is not that your
work
is secret; your whole
life
is secret. This obliges you to make judgements all the time. You must learn to say enough to allay people’s curiosity without ever saying anything that awakens it. Do you see what I mean? You have to appear to be dull and uninteresting. It is a particular skill.’
‘I’m sure I’ll manage.’
‘I suggest you tell people that you are doing preliminary training for liaison duties, with the aim of being sent abroad. Algeria is the obvious place, given your command of French. You may hint at this, but you need not say it explicitly. We like our people to learn to talk pleasantly and say nothing. You may begin to practise it now. And I must warn you that people will be reporting back to me, telling me how good you are with that kind of thing. They will be watching you all the time to see how you comport yourself. Am I making myself clear? Not everyone possesses the qualities we seek, and many fail during training. You must understand that failure is not a personal discredit; it is merely a sign that you do not quite have the qualities that we are seeking. We are looking for very particular gifts, Marian, very
particular
gifts indeed.’