The Sea Garden (24 page)

She was about to ask him where he had learned to fly when Rory marched up with Aster, both of them distinctly put out to find Iris so intent on listening to the handsome Frenchman.

Stamper helped himself to more whisky and started telling another of his stories: “. . . It was a lone raider, and he didn't stand a chance against our guns—took a direct hit. Flew on for a mile, then made a terrible sound as it smacked into the ground. We jumped into a car and raced over. It was a Dornier, great big crate of a thing, broke up on impact into at least five pieces. Three bodies in the wreckage, and three live bombs. Flames shooting over the fuselage. My revolver was loaded and I was mustard keen to use it to arrest some live Germans . . . sadly, not to be.”

Music rose louder from the gramophone. The singer warbled about the spell of Paris and an April dawn. Iris, sitting on the sofa, closed her eyes and clenched her hands together to dig her fingernails deep into the flesh of her palms.

“Are you praying, mademoiselle?” asked Xavier, coming to stand in front of her. “And if so, what for?”

She said nothing.

“I'll be looking at the moon . . . but I'll be seeing you . . . ,”
sang the gramophone.

She would not ask him.

For a second she thought he was looking at her in the same way he had in the Coquille restaurant. But then Barbara Bertram passed with a tray of glasses. He caught her hand and brought it up to his lips. “
Chère
Madame Barbara,” he said fondly, taking the tray and placing it deftly on a sideboard. “Would you do me the honour of allowing me this dance?”

His high spirits were infectious. Soon all the girls were dancing. “He's quite something, isn't he?” whispered Aster as she finished a turn round the floor with Xavier. Her colour was high, flushed from the dancing in the too-confined space in his arms.

“Quite something,” agreed Iris, the edge of sarcasm in her voice lost as Aster was swept away again, this time by the jowly Frenchman with the moustache.

Mercurial—that was Xavier, the one all eyes were drawn to, with his olive-skinned good looks, the easy manner and appreciative story-swapping with the men, the chivalrous manners with a dash of flirtation to disarm the women. Even Sam the collie was charmed, returning again and again to his side for Xavier to rub his head and stomach until the poor creature rolled over in ecstasy.

At one point Xavier went out through the glass doors to the garden. She half heard an argument in French outside, but Iris could not see who it involved. When he returned, his expression was closed; then, in an instant, he seemed to don a mantle of social gaiety, and the petulance lingering about his mouth was gone.

He came straight over to her. “Is it our turn to dance at last?”

Iris accepted his hand and his arm around her. His fingertips on her back were light, barely touching the material of her dress, but she felt every connection as they began to move. In his warm hand, hers was secure. It was an odd conjunction of intimacy and awkwardness. He looked into her eyes, saying nothing. When she responded in kind, he pulled her closer. She concentrated on the present: she was in his arms again; Xavier Descours was flesh and blood. How much of our lives are spent wholly immersed in the present moment? It seemed to Iris that it was not very much at all. Not nearly enough.

Was this silence a mark of their complicity—or did he really not remember her? They danced on, to all intents as strangers.

Then she was whirled away by Rory and Jack, then Stamper, and Rory again. And they drank and laughed until she felt like crying.

The following night the moon rose early like a beacon, then was smothered by clouds and rain. The operation was forced to stand down. There would be no more November flights.

 

X
avier's appearance at a gathering at the 400 Club on Leicester Square a few nights later was noted in the ladies' washroom on the half-landing at Norgeby House.

Iris listened, downcast, as a new girl from Colonel Tyndale's office described him as “that ravishing Frenchman” who made her dance so often her feet were aching. All morning at Orchard Court Tyndale had been in a foul mood. And now Iris knew why: according to his chatty new typist (perhaps a mite too chatty?) there had been a run-in with RF Section—République Française, the Free French. Ever since General de Gaulle set up his government in exile in June 1940, they had operated their own secret service department from a house in Duke Street. They brooked no interference from anyone, least of all the British, as they dropped their own agents and formed their own circuits in France.

With his innate sense of fair play, Colonel Tyndale could not comprehend why de Gaulle was so often hostile to his country of exile, so mistrustful. They were supposed to be working together for the greater good.

It was a trying day, and apparently endless, too. It was after nine o'clock when Iris walked round the corner of Tavistock Square, feeling for her keys in the pocket of her handbag, and almost stumbled into him in the darkness. He was leaning against the wall of the entrance portico.

“Iris?”

“Who's that?” she said, though there was only one person who spoke like that, who would have presumed like that.

“Are you on your own?”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I took you home in a taxi, remember?”

“I remember. I thought it was you who couldn't.”

“Can I come in?”

She left him waiting for a short while in silence before she opened the door and led the way up the winding stairs to the top floor.

The flat was cold. Iris went over to the eaves window of the main room and checked the blackout curtain before clicking on a lamp. Xavier stood at the door.

“Do you live here alone?” he asked.

“No. My friend Nancy shares with me.”

“Will she be back soon?”

Nancy had taken leave to be with Phil in Lincolnshire, but she wasn't sure he should know that. “She might.”

Iris took a box of matches and knelt on the rug to ignite the gas fire. Xavier was so quiet that she thought for a desperate few seconds that he was not there—that he had slipped away from her again, or perhaps had never even been there at all. It was four days since he had blanked her at Bignor.

“What can I do to help you?” she asked, trying to keep her tone neutral.

He shook off his coat and dropped down at her side on the tatty rug.

“You can forgive me . . . for the other night.”

“Pretending we had never met? I'm sure you had your reasons.”

“It would not have been wise to show it,” he said.

In any other circumstances she would have asked him to explain himself. If he had been any man but Xavier Descours—if he had not been such a respected key player in the network, far senior to her. As it was, they sat and watched the sputter of the blue flames and listened to the hiss and murmur of the gas. Then, very slowly, he turned to her.

“Would you rather I left?” he asked.

“No.”

He seemed nervous, which surprised her. She still had no idea what he was doing here, whether it was in contravention of some official rules, whether he was here because of her job or whether it was personal.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“Of course it is.”

“It's just—”

“
Qui s'excuse, s'accuse
. Talk to me.”

“What about?”

“Anything. Anything that is not about the war.”

The room warmed. She found a bottle of brandy. The first glass blunted their mutual nervousness, and the second made them laugh too readily and talk nonsense. They ignored the old armchairs and the divan draped in the Moroccan blanket and remained on the floor.

“We ought to eat something,” said Iris. “Though Lord knows what.”

“Mme Barbara is right,” he said. “We should allow ourselves to find enjoyment where we can. Pretend to ourselves that we live only in the present, where there is no war, no inhumanity, no terror.”

Iris raised her glass. “To the present.”

She began to talk about a play she had seen, but was disconcerted by the way he studied her, curious and alert to every movement. After a while they simply watched each other, taking in every detail. For the longest time nothing was said.

“It's the little things that give you away,” he said.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked.

“You are clearly a dedicated follower of the rules.”

“Whereas you are not?”

“Let's say I don't dwell on the rules, the possibility of failure, of disaster. I try to find the positive wherever I can.”

His expression was serious, without a hint of a smile or the amused twist at the corner of his mouth.

There was no contact between them, but her skin was tingling. It took her by surprise; she felt naked, even through the fabric of her clothes. She wondered whether she should stop this now.

The rug seemed rougher under her hand as she shifted on its woollen ridges. “Where are you staying?” she asked.

“I was hoping to stay here.”

Still the silence between them pressed in. He was in no hurry to break it. The gas flame hissed. A door slammed below, and footsteps receded on the stairs. A vehicle passed on the road.

She thought about the bar near the office where the men and women of F Section and other special employments mingled; the “bedtime stories” that were common currency. There was no reason for him not to presume she was the same as all the other young women who lived fast in these uncertain times.

“I've never done this before,” she said.

A small smile reached his eyes. Was he mocking her? Anxiety rose in a wave, and then fell back as he—finally—reached out. He touched the side of her cheek very lightly with a fingertip. The gesture was so tender that she assumed it was an apology.

She pulled away. What had come over her? He was so different from other men; it was his difference and experience that she wanted.

The shapes of the room seemed to shift. The tiles on the fireplace caught the change in the light as he moved to pull her closer. She felt his warm hand on her arm, then it moved to stroke her leg, her ankle. She shifted her position, more afraid now that he would stop than she was of doing the wrong thing. Gently, he reached for one shoe and eased it off, then the other.

She felt no shame, only innocence.

 

S
he arrived at Baker Street the next morning with the warmth of his body still on her. In her bed under the eaves, he slept on. The way he felt had surprised her—so soft and yet strong, his muscles and ribs and the velvet touch of his skin; his sea and herbs scent. The gentle touches that had produced sensations she had never experienced before. The surprise that it was actually happening, the thrill of her own audacity, the impulsive wonder of it all.

It was hard to concentrate. She was light-headed, raw but elated. Don't think about what happens next, she thought, whether he will be there when I return. None of that mattered, only that she had acted on instinct and been rewarded.

He was there when she returned. In the mirror, her reflection glowed and her eyes sparkled. He stayed for the next four nights.

The only person Iris told was Nancy, when she returned from leave.

“It was pretty obvious, as soon as I walked in,” said Nancy. “There's a look that tells the world. You're lit up from the inside.”

They were toasting crumpets she had brought back from Lincolnshire, holding them out on forks to the fire.

“Xavier Descours . . . my goodness, Iris, you
are
a dark horse.”

“Nancy, you can't breathe a word.”

“I know. You know I won't. Where is he now—am I going to meet him?”

“He's away for a few days. Tempsford, I think.”

 

L
ong afterwards, when Iris came to question her own judgement, the one thing she never questioned was the extraordinary joy of her intimate relationship with Xavier. She had wanted it as much as he had.

The troubling complexities of his character and their situation were still dormant. She did not know his real name, but she called him
chéri
—darling—rather than risk his safety by asking; it was of no importance. She knew he was capable of betrayal, though. He was married, for one thing, though he claimed it was unhappily, and there were no children. “The worst part of marriage is the compromising. Everyone says it doesn't work without compromise, but what if that is the very death to the spirit?” She would remember that, too, long afterwards when the words were given weight by her own experience.

“Does your wife not love you?”

“She cares for me all right. That is not the problem.”

“Then what?”

“Children—I always wanted children, a family. But it has never happened.”

Even so, Iris arranged, on Nancy's earnest advice, a consultation at the Marie Stopes clinic to be fitted with a diaphragm. He was right. There could be no disappointment in the present. Who knew what might happen next week? It was war. Different standards applied.

They seized the moment, together. When he let down his guard, he was surprisingly vulnerable. “I live my life in disguise, yet all I want is for you to know me as I really am, love me as I am—and forgive me for it,” he told her.

Love. She was amazed that he spoke so quickly of love; she had not expected that. Even in her new reckless, awakened state, she was not so lost as to be unaware that a man like Xavier Descours was used to having affairs, that he would give women only as much as he wanted. She would not press him to define his feelings; she was not even sure of her own. Was it love she felt, or exhilaration, or just plain lust?

It was not a normal relationship, and never could be. Under the eaves of the attic flat it unfolded unseen, in another secret compartment of a secret life, yet always threatening to burst the confines of this small place of safety. What was it he saw in her? Iris wondered. She held on to remarks he made unprompted but did not ask outright, fearing to break the spell.