A Gathering Storm (49 page)

The ticket-seller chatted inconsequentially to someone out of sight; a station official came into the office, spoke some instruction about a late train and went out again. Eventually there was peace and the young man came across and moved the boxes so she could crawl out. There was a woman’s coat and scarf hanging on a hook and he helped her put these on. She was shocked to glimpse her reflection in a small square of mirror next to the hook. Grey skin, sunken eye-sockets, frizzy hair. She wound the square of scarf around her head and pulled the coat collar up.

‘Allez chez ma mère,’
he said, pressing a scrap of torn paper into her hand. Then he opened the door, looked about outside, and gestured for her to go. He was a small, wiry man with a merry face covered in acne scars. Quite unremarkable-looking, but she knew she’d always remember him.

As she tried to thank him, he shrugged as though the whole matter was nothing and shut the door behind her.

She tiptoed to the door of the station and peered about. It was lunchtime on a beautiful spring day and the place was deserted. The sun warmed her face. She had no papers, no idea where she was and only one clue, on a scrap of torn paper, of what to do next. But she was alive and she was free.

The ticket-seller’s mother spoke as little as her son, but she did not hesitate to believe Beatrice’s story. Beatrice found herself sitting in a shabby kitchen eating fresh bread and butter for the first time in months, almost crying at how good it tasted. She watched the woman fill a bath by the fire with hot water from a copper urn, then, while Beatrice bathed, lay out some clothes and shoes she said had belonged to her daughter. Something in the way she handled the simple blouse and skirt made Beatrice wonder what had happened to the daughter, but the woman was not the sort to invite questions. The shoes, of stout black leather, fitted her exactly and the woman seemed oddly satisfied by this.

‘I am sorry that you cannot stay here, but it is not safe,’ she told Beatrice when she was dressed.

‘I have family,’ Beatrice told her. ‘Near Le Havre.’ If she went there she could put her worries about them at rest.

‘No,’ the woman said immediately. ‘It is too dangerous that way. Go south. I will tell you the way to Melun. There are people there who can help you.’ She extracted some money from a coffee pot on the dresser.

‘I can’t,’ Beatrice said. ‘You must need it.’

‘Please,’ the woman said, and thrust the money into the pocket of Beatrice’s coat, together with a packet of sandwiches. She had the same sweet face as her son.

‘You are a very good person,’ Beatrice said, taking her hand. ‘After the war. . .’

‘Yes, yes, everything is after the war. It will not be long now.’ She pressed her hand against her chest and Beatrice couldn’t tell whether she meant that the war would be over soon or that she wouldn’t be there to see it. ‘Now, go.’

She followed the woman’s directions, walking, like a cat, in the shadows, so as not to be seen. When night fell she found a barn, as Rafe had once done, and slept under empty sacks, taking care to be up and away at dawn before the farmer was about. All the next day she walked. The only danger she encountered was in a village where she stopped to buy food and ask directions. The baker regarded her with suspicion, and in response to some instinct she varied the route he described to her.

Melun. Finding the address the woman had given her. Knocking nervously at the door of strangers and again finding the miracle of kindness, food and shelter. She stayed with the couple for several days, sleeping mostly and regaining some strength. The wife gave her a bicycle and they sent her south again to a village outside Orléans. There was some argument between them over this. The woman was worried that Orléans was crawling with SS, but the man insisted anyway. There was someone he knew who could get her false papers, and since these could be more crucial to her escape than anything else, she agreed that she should go.

At the country house near Orléans it took over a week for the forger to finish the papers, a long anxious stay, hidden in a wine cellar where there were rats. When they were ready, she went forth again, this time as Jeanne de Varnes, south, always south, for Hitler’s eyes were turning northwards to the coast, to where the Allied invasion was expected daily, and she might just slip away through a chink in his defences while his attention was elsewhere.

She could travel faster now, could use trains with less fear of detection, though the children sitting opposite in the carriage to Angoulême stared curiously at her too-thin face and lustreless skin. She smiled back at them and turned to look out at the passing countryside, awash with longing for the time she’d see her own child back in England.

At Angoulême a doctor examined her scars, an expression of deep compassion on his face. Her toenails were growing again, he assured her, and the ointment he supplied would soothe the scars on her back. Her hosts gave her money and sent her on to Marseille.

The Germans there had bombed the Resistance out of the old city the year before, and the cells had scattered and reformed, but more strongly than before, their efforts utterly focused on destroying the roads and rail that aided the German advance north. Someone was to meet her in a café near the station, that’s all she knew. They’d give her instructions about what to do next, where to go.

What went wrong she never learned. She arrived at Marseille, found the café and waited for over an hour, but no one came. She tried another café in the street, wondering if she’d got the wrong one, but there, too, she drew a blank. Marseille was as far south as she could go without help, and she was alone. She stood staring out across the Mediterranean, wondering what to do next.

In the end she took a room in a run-down boarding house near the docks. It was a rough area and she didn’t like being out in it after dark. The proprietor regarded her with prurience as she filled out the forms. When she came downstairs the next morning, there was an SS officer lounging against the desk in the narrow hallway, chatting to the man. She tried to slip past, with eyes cast down, but he seized her arm and swung her round with a jeering, ‘Well, what have we here?’ Nine in the morning and there was wine on his breath. Anger blazed through her and she pulled away, with a
‘Laissez-moi!’

He came at her, his fist swinging, but her body remembered what to do. She heard the trainer’s voice in her head.
Grab the hand before it hits,
twist it behind his back,
trip him so he falls backwards. Then run like hell.
She did all this and ran.

Flung open the door, into the street. A shout behind her. She dodged sideways down an alley as the bullet hit the window she’d just passed. Then left down behind the line of houses, over a wall into a back yard, through a back door into a kitchen. Through the house and out of the front, down a bigger street. Behind her the sounds of pursuit. She looked about wildly.

Coming towards her was a very old man leading a donkey that was pulling a little cart covered with a tarpaulin. He stopped, called softly,
‘Ici
,
mademoiselle,’
and lifted a corner of the tarpaulin.

‘Merci,’
she gasped, and climbed inside the cart. It was empty, but smelt of sweet manure. The man straightened the tarpaulin then the cart jerked forward as the donkey moved on. The cart trundled over cobbles for some time at a slow but steady pace, turned this way and that. She lay rigid, smelling that familiar smell of horse. Finally, the cart stopped.

When the tarpaulin was pulled away and she sat up, she saw they had reached the end of a quay where dozens of assorted small boats were moored. The donkey was now tied to a ring in the stone wall. The old man stepped onto the deck of a shabby barge. He fired up the engine – Beatrice wondered where he’d got the fuel – then came back to the quay.

Five minutes later, an observer on the shore would have seen a strange sight. A black barge skirting the coast, heading west into the sunset, on its deck the clear shape of a donkey silhouetted against the sky. The old man sitting at the tiller might have been any old man going about his business in war or peace, a handrolled cigarette between his lips, his cap pulled down over his ears. But Beatrice didn’t see any of this. She was hidden in the cabin.

Journey’s End – the Camargue. A wild, desolate landscape where land, lagoon and sea merged in a single horizontal plain. Here Beatrice wandered, a slender, solitary figure, lost, waiting for time to pass. Sometimes as she watched, a great flock of pale flamingos would rise from the water and drift away across the sky and her heart lifted with them. Herds of bulls roamed the marshes, and blunt-nosed white horses with flowing manes, a homelier version of the noble white beasts of her childhood dreams.

She shared a lonely thatched cabin with the old bargeman’s brother and his wife. There was a pair of bull horns over the door to ward off evil spirits. The brother rode the wild horses, and gradually, through the long, humid summer, she learned to master them, too. She hoped he’d come to trust her to go with him to gallop amongst the bulls, though this was man’s work and he merely frowned and shook his head. His own woman was tough, work-hardened – she had to be – but she was gentle enough with the young English girl, tutting over her scars and nursing her back to health and strength with rich beef stews and other stranger, muddier delicacies found in the marshes and pools.

The war felt as though it was happening somewhere far, far away. In June the Allies made landfall in Northern France. The
maquis
rose in the south. In August came the great news of the Liberation of Paris.

Beatrice was like a dreamer awakening. Her restlessness grew. She knew it was time to leave this wild paradise where she’d been lost in time, and go home. Her son would be waiting. And maybe she would find out what had happened to Rafe.

At the beginning of September, the man with the donkey took her back to Marseilles and she presented herself to the new authorities. News of her survival was telegraphed to London. In the third week of September 1944, she boarded a great warship that was overflowing with sailors and soldiers and other flotsam and jetsam of war like herself, and set out through the Mediterranean for England.

Round Spain they went, and Portugal, and up the west coast of France. It was a journey of over a week because the ship stopped everywhere, for some to disembark and others to board – everybody was on the move – but eventually, Beatrice watched from the deck as the buildings of Southampton solidified out of the autumn mist. And disappeared again in a blur of tears.

And there to meet her on the quay, was Rafe.

For a long moment they simply stood and stared at one another. He looked thinner than when she saw him last, but he’d lost that awful strained look. Then his face broke into the most boyish of grins and she groped her way forward into his arms. They clung to one another.

‘I thought I’d never see you again,’ she sobbed into his ear. ‘I thought you might be . . . Oh, never mind, you’re here.’

‘I could hardly believe it when they told me you were safe. Oh, Beatrice . . .’ he murmured.

She pulled back from him and looked about. ‘Where’s Tommy? Where’s my son?’ Why wasn’t he here?

Cornwall, 2011

‘They hadn’t brought him, Lucy,’ Beatrice said, her voice low and trembling. ‘They could have brought him to meet me and they didn’t. They knew I was coming home. Miss Atkins telephoned everybody . . .’ Her voice trailed away and she closed her eyes.

Lucy sat watching her, wondering whether to speak.
Tommy.
Now that she’d finally mentioned his name, Lucy was a maelstrom of emotion.

Of course, she had known that this whole story was leading up to something important, but now that they were getting there she didn’t think she wanted to know what it was. Was this the thing her father had been frightened of discovering? And yet, knowing that there was some secret, he had fiddled about on the fringes of it, trying to find out about Rafe.

‘Where
was
Tommy, Mrs Ashton? Was he all right?’

‘Just let me get my breath, dear, and I’ll tell you.’

September 1944

Rafe said, ‘He’s in Cornwall.’ There was something uncertain in his voice and she looked hard at him. His expression was serious, his eyes unreadable. ‘Bea, there are many things we need to talk about.’

It was then she saw someone standing quietly watching them. A handsome woman in the neat navy uniform of the WAAF, very poised and upright. It was Miss Atkins. She stepped forward and took Beatrice’s hand.

‘Beatrice,’ she said, in her lovely low voice. ‘It’s so marvellous that you’re home. We’ve been searching everywhere for you.’

‘Have you?’ Beatrice said, not quite believing her.

‘Why, yes! But it’s been impossible. So many people coming and going, papers destroyed, tracks covered.’ She shook her head. ‘And getting our own people to give us any information . . . Well, I’ve already said too much. I’m so glad you’re home safely. You must have had an awful time.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘We need to talk, of course. There’s a car waiting. Major Buckmaster is extremely keen to speak to you.’

Beatrice glanced at Rafe, who nodded imperceptibly. ‘I’ll come with you, naturally,’ he said.

‘I can’t go home yet?’

‘Very shortly you can,’ Miss Atkins said, almost crisply. ‘But there are important matters to speak of first.’

Rafe sat in the front of the car, Miss Atkins and Beatrice in the back. As the car pulled away, Miss Atkins turned to face Beatrice and said, very gently, ‘First, my dear, I’m afraid I have some rather sad news for you.’

‘Tommy,’ she cried. ‘Not Tommy?’

‘I understand that your son is quite well,’ Miss Atkins said. ‘No, it’s your mother I’m talking about.’ In August, a year ago, Delphine Marlow had been visiting a friend in Falmouth. On the steep road down to the coast, the bus had lurched into a crater in the road and fallen on its side. She and another woman were crushed underneath. The other woman died at the scene. Delphine lingered on for several days but in the end her injuries proved too grave.