The Best of Our Spies (12 page)

They would be arm in arm and she would tell him long stories, some amusing, most sad about life at the hospital. And against his better judgement, he would find himself drawn into telling her about his work. Nothing serious, of course, he knew that he was not allowed to do that. But the titbits about daily office life and the people who inhabited it seemed to amuse her and there seemed to be no harm in that. She would laugh loudly and pull herself closer to him and they would kiss and Owen would notice the looks, some disapproving, and many more admiring, of passers-by.

It would be on the occasions like this that he would feel able to again broach her life in France. He had assumed that once they were married, he would find out more about her, but he realised that he really knew very little. He was curious about what school she went to, what hospital she had trained in, what boyfriends she had, what about any extended family?

Nathalie was never rude and would always appear to answer his questions, but by the end of these conversations, he would realise that she had said nothing of any significance. The hospital ‘
was a very large one, but you know what these Paris hospitals are like
’, which he did not. ‘
But you never tell me about your girlfriends!’ ‘There are uncles, aunts and cousins, but we are not a close family. You are my family now
.’ He would ask these questions again in bed, after they had made love and were lying face to face on the pillow, stroking each other’s arms. She should have been at her most open then, but the answers would be the same and with a whispered ‘
ça suffit
’ she would let him know that was enough. The conversation would end.

He was not intending to pry, but he felt that he did not really know his wife and all he wanted was to be part of her life. He imagined that when the war was over they would spend time in Paris. They would stroll through the
rive gauche
, stopping to look at the second-hand bookstalls and the artists on the Left Bank. They would walk into agreeable bars at any time of the day and he would drink cognac. They would stop at Café des Deux Magots in Place St Germain des Prés, drinking proper coffee and hoping to catch the intellectual discussions around them. If they had enough money they could even dine at Fouquet’s on the Champs Élysées.

He attributed her reticence to a remark she had made one Saturday afternoon in late July when they were walking back towards Pimlico by the river. Maybe he did not appreciate enough what it meant to have to flee your country. It had been a perfect day, warm with a steady breeze and they had walked past the Houses of Parliament, crossed Westminster Bridge, by St Thomas’s, along the south bank before crossing over Chelsea Bridge, heading back towards Pimlico. On Grosvenor Road there was a small group of soldiers coming towards them. As they came closer, he realised they were Free French and greeted them with a
Bonjour! Ma femme est française
. But Nathalie seemed shy and uncommunicative and after the briefest of pauses she moved him along, explaining that they needed to get home. As they moved away from the soldiers, he asked why. She was silent for a few seconds as they continued walking and when she lifted her head to speak her eyes had turned into those moist, dark shining pools.

‘It is no longer my France. My France has been taken from me.’

And there was the café. It was an incident that bothered him at the time but which he allowed to slip from his mind after her apology.

It was a Thursday afternoon in August and he had finished work early. Nathalie met him in Piccadilly Circus and they walked down Haymarket towards Trafalgar Square. It began to rain in the way that it does in an English summer: a few drops without apparent warning and then a sudden and heavy downpour. Nathalie was wearing high heels and a summer dress. She was not dressed for the rain. They dived into a small corner café and sat against the wall at the end of a long Formica table. The rain had caused her dress to cling against her figure and Owen removed his jacket to drape over his wife’s shoulders. Within minutes the café filled up and a family of four squeezed onto their table.

It was evident from their initial enquiry (‘
are these seats free?
’) that they were French and Owen happily introduced themselves. It ought, he thought, to have been a perfect encounter for Nathalie.
From Paris. The seventh arrondissement. Near Les Invalides.
The few sentences that Nathalie uttered were short to the point of being curt. The parents were in their early forties, the two boys in their early teens. They had come to London in early 1940. The father spoke to them in hushed tones as the boys flicked their straws at each other. ‘I travelled a lot to Germany for business during the 1930s. I could see how ...’ He muttered to his wife in French.

‘Dangerous,’ she said.

‘... dangerous it would be for us,’ he continued. ‘ We are fortunate in having family in London. We could not risk remaining in Paris. We cannot imagining ...’

‘Imagine,’ she corrected him.

‘... imagine what is happening there now to our family and our friends. We were so lucky to escape.’

Owen looked quizzical.

‘Where you involved in politics?’

Before the man could answer Nathalie, who had spent most of the time looking at the pepper pot she was fiddling with on the table, spoke.

‘They’re Jews, Owen. Can’t you tell?’

Owen was taken aback. No, he had not been able to tell. These were the first Jews he could recall meeting. But what had really taken him aback was Nathalie’s tone. She had been quiet throughout what he thought was a pleasant and even fortuitous meeting. But her tone and her manner bordered on rudeness.

Before he could say anything else, Nathalie was standing up.

‘We had better leave now, Owen.’

The downpour had not abated. If anything, it was even heavier.

‘Are you sure?’ He knew that if there was one thing she hated, it was getting wet.

But she was already pushing her way through. The family all had to get up to make way for them. Outside she did not wait for him as he tried to leave in a more polite manner. He had to trot to catch her up.

‘What was all that about, Nathalie?’

‘What was what about?’ She was walking fast, despite her high heels. Her arms folded tightly across her as if that might keep her dry.

‘Why did we have to leave so suddenly? It must have seemed rude.’

She stopped and turned at him.

‘You English are so concerned about manners and doing the right thing. That is all you think about. I did not want to be with those people. We were on our own. Why did they have to come and sit there and interrupt us.’

‘Nathalie!’

‘They’re always like that, thinking they can push in and take things over as if they own the place.’

Owen was genuinely confused. They were walking next to each other now, the rain still heavy.

‘Who are “they”, Nathalie? I don’t know what you mean.’

She paused to look at him.

‘You’re lucky then.’

They didn’t speak again until they were back in Pimlico.

Later that night she apologised. She realised she must have been rude. She had sat with two people as they died that morning in the hospital and she was upset. Sometimes being reminded of France made her even more upset and that must have been the reason for her behaviour in the café.

ooo000ooo

Duke Street ran from Piccadilly to the north and Pall Mall to the south. Lincoln House was about halfway down and on the eastern side of the street. It was a block down from Fortnum and Mason – where Owen Quinn occasionally wandered into the special Officers’ Department but never bought anything. A few doors along was the Chequers Tavern, a small pub which was reputed to have been the first one built in the city after the Great Fire. It was not, Owen was informed on his first day, regarded as a suitable place for officers to drink. He never found out why.

Lincoln House was a seven storey building, more than eighty years old and difficult to distinguish from the other buildings in an otherwise elegant street. It had dutifully served some of the less exciting parts of the insurance industry until it was requisitioned by the Government in 1940. The attraction was its sheer ordinariness and anonymity. On more than one occasion even after he had been working there for months, Quinn had found himself walking past the gloomy entrance, with its dark brown doors and grey metal shutters, with the words ‘Lincoln House’ picked in fading gold characters painted on a filthy strip of glass above the door. The entrance was tucked against an art gallery that rarely seemed to open and always had the same miserable, dark landscape in the window. The building was narrower than most of the others in the street, but not so much that it stood out. The white façade had weathered over the years and the exposure to London grime and rain gave the exterior a mottled effect. Now the building housed a series of offices, all of which fulfilled some security or intelligence related purpose. The entrance led along the length of the art gallery to a reception area and guardroom at the back. From there, was a main stairwell, on one side of the building, with a door leading off it for each floor, leading to a small suite of offices. When he first went to work on the sixth floor of Lincoln House Quinn had been told that the higher the floor, the more sensitive the work being handled there. He was not sure if this was true, but like so much of the gossip that passed for information in wartime, he did not take it too seriously, but did find a place for it somewhere in his memory. The very first thing that Quinn asked Captain Archibald when he arrived at Lincoln House on Monday, 13 April, was the name of the unit. Who was he working for? What was it called – what should he tell people? It had seemed a reasonable question, not one that he would have expected Archibald to hesitate at answering for quite as long as he did.

‘That’s a jolly good question, Quinn. We don’t really have a name. We are part of Naval Intelligence and we handle Special Projects. You’ll have your security briefing later today, but the easiest thing is not to discuss anything with anyone. You work for the Royal Navy, you’re stuck behind a desk – that is as much as people need to know. It’s all that I’ve told my wife for the last twenty-five years. Best advice I can offer is that you should give the impression to people that your job is a bit boring, that you are slightly embarrassed to be doing something as menial as this. Keep it simple. That way, they will soon lose interest. Let me show you round.’

There was not much to see. The whole suite of offices looked as if it had been recently decorated, with the smell of fresh paint evident and that morning boxes and charts were being brought into the office. The central office area had a large chart table in the middle, with maps and charts stacked against it. Around the room were grey filing cabinets that were being filled by a small, well-built woman called Mary. Along the floor were what were now becoming stacks of boxes, many of which seemed to be filled with photographs.

‘Time to meet the whole crew,’ said Archibald. Apart from Mary, there were two other women in the office. Agnes sat in one of three side offices and told Quinn quite clearly that she
ran
the office. She was probably in her late fifties, possibly even older. Her grey hair was pulled into a tight bun and her spectacles were perched on the end of her nose. Whenever she spoke to someone, she lifted her head slightly higher than they would expect so that she could see them through her glasses. And there was Rosemary. English Rose, he thought. The kind of girl he always imagined he would end up with until his dreams had come true. He knew Rose’s type; he had grown up with them. From somewhere in the middle class, somewhere in the Home Counties and somewhere between presentable and plain. Rose was in her late twenties, as far as he could tell, and had it not been for the war would have expected to have been married by now. Rose took security very seriously, it seemed to give her a sense of importance that she had never expected to have. Rose’s role was to type up reports and letters.

There were two other men in the office. There was Porter, who was never referred to as anything other than Porter. He didn’t wear any uniform and was stone deaf. ‘Atlantic convoys’ Archibald told him, by way of explanation. Quinn had to assume that Porter had lost his hearing in a convoy, but he never pushed the matter – he was not sure whether Porter had been Royal Navy or Merchant Navy. He suspected the latter. In so far as there was any communication with Porter, it was done by writing notes. But there was no call for too much communication. Porter’s role was to manage the maps and the charts. To get out the ones that Quinn needed, put away those that he had finished with and collect new ones.

And Riley. He was never quite sure what Riley’s role was, even though he and Quinn did share one of the three side offices. As far as he could tell, he provided some kind of a filter for Quinn, looking at paperwork before it came to him and checking whatever Quinn produced and Rose had typed. Riley only had one arm and the empty sleeve was pinned to side of his jacket. No matter how hot it was – and at times it was very hot in the office – Riley always kept his jacket on.

They were not what Quinn would have described as a merry bunch. It did strike Quinn as slightly odd that the group responsible for Special Intelligence Projects comprised an elderly captain brought out of retirement and who did not seem to be in the best of health, an injured lieutenant, one deaf man and a man with one arm, plus the three women. But a week into his new role, Archibald did mention that they were not the only unit in Naval Intelligence handling Special Projects, so he did not think about it again.

Quinn soon fell into a routine. A project could last a day or a month or longer. Captain Archibald would call Quinn and Riley into his office and outline the project and Quinn would then have Rose type a note for Porter detailing what maps and charts he required. They would all be planned naval operations and Quinn was required to put together a detailed brief on routes, coastlines, sandbanks and the like. It was work that he was good at and that he enjoyed. He just wished that he was at sea doing it.