Staying Alive Read online

  ‘I’ll do that later. I’ve a laptop in my room.’ I asked her, ‘Did you take a pistol in with you on this trip?’

  Headshake. ‘Could have, of course – and later as you know changed my mind on this – but at that stage I was accepting advice that if one was to get into shoot-outs one couldn’t expect to last long thereafter, and meanwhile it was an item which – well, if one was searched, would guarantee being arrested and no doubt shot or – whatever. As with the transceiver of course, but one wouldn’t normally be toting that around. Not if I could help it, one wouldn’t. No, the only item of significance I haven’t mentioned, and which Marilyn handed to me last of all, was your regular standard issue poison pill – little gelatine capsule of potassium cyanide which if the worst came to the worst – well, I’d been told that if I bit on it I’d be dead before my teeth had actually come together.’

  ‘Handy.’

  A smile, and the shrug again. ‘In some circumstances, a convenience.’

  ‘Convenience.’ I liked that. Suggested, ‘How about we bite on another dry martini?’

  Our third, that was, and waiters were trying to pressure us into ordering food, but we’d been in that place long enough, were ready for a change of atmosphere. I suggested a small restaurant I’d noticed on my way here and thought looked promising, Rosie was amenable and had no alternatives in mind; in fact she wasn’t familiar with twenty-first-century Toulouse, hadn’t patronised the better (i.e. black market) restaurants in 1942, and none of them would have been recognisable to her now in any case, even if they still existed.

  The place I’d seen was called the Colombier, and wasn’t far from l’Ambassade. Just along Boulevard Arcole to where it becomes Boulevard de Strasbourg, along there and up to the left a bit.

  Arcole pronounced with a hard ‘c’, incidentally. Should perhaps have mentioned that before. But I asked her, while on the subject of towns and their topography, whether she still knew Paris as well as she had in 1945, the year of her SOE swansong as recorded in my last Rosie novel, Single to Paris.

  ‘Darned well should do. It’s my home, for God’s sake, has been since 1961!’

  The brasserie’s blue-tinted glass door hissed shut behind us. Wet paving and cool night air but no rain falling at this moment.

  ‘Nineteen sixty-one. So you didn’t stay long after Ben was killed. I’d wondered.’

  ‘Remember what we’d been expecting to do out there, in Aussie?’

  ‘An Australian governmental land-clearing scheme Ben had reckoned to go in for, wasn’t it. Returning ex-servicemen being offered some enormous acreage, and as much again if they cleared the first lot on schedule?’

  ‘Right. He was really set on it. Would have gone in for it if they’d accepted him, but as you know he’d had two smash-ups in motor-torpedo boats, and he was really too lame for that hard labour. He swore black and blue that he was perfectly all right, went through agonies trying not to limp, and so on, but they still wouldn’t have him. Obstinate bugger, he was bloody mad at ’em, although the alternative was so simple and obvious – his father had been asking him since God knew how long to join him in his timber business; Ben saw this as the “soft option”, which in principle he was against, had to make it on his own. Well – you know this, I think – the old man had started it in the early thirties, he’d been in the Merchant Navy, had his master’s ticket, left the sea when he married Ben’s Aussie mother, and had the intention of building boats – yachts – but got diverted into timber. Which was a success right from the start. Yes, you mentioned it somewhere – how just before the war when Ben was adrift in Paris chasing girls and trying to get to be an artist, keeping himself alive by washing dishes in the big hotels, and so forth, the old man writing letter after letter calling him home by the next boat, Ben saying yeah, yeah, coming – got as far as England and joined the RNVR in September 1939.’

  She’d stopped, pointing up to the left, where we were about to cross at a major intersection. ‘Place Jeanne d’Arc, right?’

  ‘Is it? I’m sure you’d know, Rosie. Yes – must be. So we take the next left after this. You’re saying he did finally go into the timber business?’

  ‘He’d’ve been crazy not to. It was going like a bomb and the old man really did need some help. He’d obviously counted on Ben seeing sense eventually, he was tickled pink and Ben of course having made up his mind went for it hell for leather, like he did everything. He certainly earned his keep – bloody good keep, and – you know, everything coming up roses.’

  ‘Until 1958.’

  ‘Fifty-seven actually. The two of us were lunching in the MHYC – Middle Harbour Yacht Club. One of the biggest and most successful in the country, although this was before they built the smart new clubhouse. They were a great crowd. Ben’s father had been in on the start of it, and Ben like him was mad on sailing. He’d done a lot of it as a boy, there in Brisbane before leaving to seek fame and squalor in Gay Paree.’

  ‘At lunch, you say. Just like that – out of the blue, whatever it was?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  ‘A year before they killed him, meaning to kill you!

  ‘That’s – yes… Is this where we turn?’

  ‘If it’s Rue Bayard—’

  ‘Beginning to rain.’

  ‘Hang on.’ Umbrella, large enough for two. It was only a bit of drizzle, actually. I asked her, to get this into perspective, ‘In 1957, you’d have been thirty-nine, Ben forty-five, and his father – what, sixty-five or seventy?’

  ‘More like seventy-five. He was eighty in ’62, the year I left. Fit as a fiddle, but – you know, sad. He’d made himself rich, and Ben would have been too. I came in for that, of course – inheritance I mean. Truth is, the old man and the company did me proud.’

  ‘Good for them. Better than bush-clearance, eh?’

  ‘Well, there’d have been a hell of a lot of land and several million sheep. And then again, if we’d been doing that, more than a thousand miles away, we wouldn’t have been in the yacht club that lunchtime, huh?’

  ‘Consequently you’d still have Ben, still be living there?’

  ‘I’d still have Ben.’

  ‘Maybe a crippled Ben.’

  ‘Or who knows, maybe dead. I mean without – assistance. He was a few years older than me, you know.’

  I was suggesting we might cross the road, at this point, starting over right after the passage of an ambulance with a screaming siren. I could see the restaurant on the other side, only a short way up. I was thinking that the subject of Ben’s death was overdue for dropping – thinking this as the ambulance and its spray rushed by and she repeated, ‘Still have old Ben. That truly is a thought. Hey, rains stopped…’

  * * *

  We drank a bottle of good wine with our excellent meal, booked a table for the next evening, Friday, and agreed that I’d handle evenings while she’d pick up daytime tabs – in the Brasserie des Aviateurs anyway, where from Friday on we’d most likely be mingling with former BCRA and/or SOE stalwarts and it would be easier for her to treat me as her guest. In the evenings, she said, she’d ‘sing for her supper’; and I pointed out that we were going to need all the song-time we could get, especially as we’d be covering happenings not only in Toulouse and the Languedoc in 1942 but also Brisbane in 1957/8. Maybe she’d play hooky from some of the reunion’s daytime sessions? She promised me she would; probably from most of them. And the Brisbane stuff would take no time at all. As little as half an hour, maybe, it was the build-up to it that was going to keep us busy.

  I took her word for that. Over supper she’d only talked about the para drop and how she’d got from Cahors to Toulouse. I tried to push it along a bit, but was realising we’d cover more ground much faster in daytime sessions without attentive waiters; and I’d need to be a little cunning, if not ruthless, in getting her well away from the conference hotel and its brasserie – i.e. from what had brought her here in the first place.

  We summoned a taxi to take
her back there now. I’d walk, the Mermoz being really very close. It wasn’t far short of midnight, and I was reckoning on spending an hour or more at the laptop; a little fresh air and exercise now couldn’t do any harm. In the morning we were to meet for coffee in the Aviateurs at ten. Now, outside the restaurant, I kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Rosie. Can’t even begin to tell you how grateful I am, or how much I’m enjoying your company. It was a wonderful idea.’

  ‘As you’ve mentioned a few times. But I’m enjoying myself too, I really am. Honest truth, would’ve been a bore to have been here on my own. Give my best to your wife.’

  ‘I will. Ten o’clock, then.’

  ‘Don’t work too late…’

  * * *

  It was too late to call my wife in Ireland. Although midnight here was only eleven there — eleven-twenty by the time I was back at the Mermoz. She’d gone over there to spend a few days with her sister, whose husband was in hospital and (we thought, although no one was saying this) unlikely to come out of it; I doubted whether either she or her sister would appreciate being woken in the middle of the night, just for a chat.

  In any case, time now to focus on twenty-four-year-old Rosie in her parachuting gear in a Lancaster bomber of the Special Duties Squadron, droning over France towards Cahors. Not far to go: they’d dropped a pair of male French agents somewhere near Limoges, spewing them out through the hole in the deck about a quarter of an hour ago, and at the Despatcher’s suggestion she’d now moved into their place on the trembling cold metal, a couple of feet for’ard of the hatch. You went out feet-first and facing the tail: more a matter of pushing off than jumping. Hatch still shut at this stage: round hatch, whereas in the old Whitleys from which she’d done her training jumps they were square.

  ‘OK, Missus?’

  Missus, indeed. Well, she’d look to him like a tub of lard with two eyes at the top under the tight dark headscarf. He was a flight sergeant, Polish, high-voiced to be heard over the general racket, small man in a wool hat. Big ears, crooked smile. She’d answered, ‘Fine, thanks.’ Feeling like a triced-up sack of spuds and very, very nervous, but actually drawn towards that hole in the deck, thinking of it as an emergency exit, her only way out of this.

  ‘Crazy, but how it was.’ Rosie sipping wine as she’d told me this. ‘Sack of spuds I said, but more like jelly, internally bloody shaking. Smiling at the Pole and telling him “Fine!” while shivering and sweating in the cold, and the aircraft shaking even harder. Probably somewhat over the hill: SD Squadron didn’t get first pick. But don’t get me wrong, I was probably more het-up than I’d ever been, but I never thought my number would be up, I was going in there to do this and that and then get out again, I doubt it even occurred to me as conceivable I wouldn’t.’

  Still was scared, though, she’d admitted. Actually, terrified. Hardly surprising to me, however contradictorily or confusedly she’d put it, when one recalled that fifty per cent of them did not come back from their various jaunts. Despite that irrational faith in one’s own survival. How you had to feel, to have gone in for it in the first place. Anyway, I’ll tell it my way now, the way I’ll write it, my interpretation of her recollections as condensed that night on the laptop. The Despatcher opening the hatch as the machine dropped lower: she’d be jumping from only 600 feet, and that was moonlight out there as well as a howling rush of wind. No doubt if she’d peered over the edge, looking down, she’d have had a view of the ground – woods, fields, maybe a river or two – the Lot, for instance, the big one that ran right through Cahors, looped around its city centre, but she wasn’t inclined to look down – ‘having no head for heights’, she’d said – in any case she’d be down there on it in a minute. On it or in it – field, please God, not tree or bloody river, and pasture preferable to vineyard, on account of posts and wires. Despatcher urging her to shift forward, to the brink: he hooked her rip-cord to the static line and pointed at the red light which when it turned green would be the pilots signal to her to jump. Machine settling lower and banking now, she guessed adjusting its approach to line up on the torches or lanterns, of which there should be four in a straight line with a fifth set off at right-angles to the top end of that line, this one flashing a pre-agreed morse letter.

  If the reception party was in place, it would mean they’d heard the BBC’s confirmation, broadcast of some prearranged message personnel telling them she was on her way.

  They were in place. Light switching to green. Despatcher’s gloved hand on her shoulder, a short, sharp shove and a scream of ‘Go-o-o!’ trading into the howl of wind as she went out and the rip-cord did its stuff, canopy opening to arrest her flight in a fantasia of moonlight, stars, fields and hedgerows, and a welcome reduction of noise in her immediate vicinity. The Lanc would hold on for at least a few nodes, rather than turn back soon enough for anyone on the ground to guess this had been its target area. Rosie swinging through dark sky and reminding herself about landing with knees bent: then she’d hit turf, rolled with the smell of it in her nostrils and the thought in her head. Now what? Knowing perfectly well what, though, already doing it, gathering in the cords and billowing silk, on her knees and then at a crouch, pleasantly surprised at having suffered no injury, and getting it all in more efficiently than she’d ever done in training jumps, thanks to the lack of any wind; not letting up on the effort even when a rough male voice called ‘Bienvenue! Mais parfaitement, madame!’ Madame Suzette Treniard, widow, back on French soil again at last – and two of them now, relieving her of the mass of parachute material while she unhitched the two suitcases from the harness and then divested herself of both harness and jumpsuit. Standing again – headscarf loosened, strap of the handbag over one shoulder of her tatty old coat, seeing that the man who’d got to her first, the taller one who’d been first on the scene, was stuffing her discarded gear into sacks. Earthy smell of potatoes, doubtless the sacks’ previous contents. He’d shouldered the load, growled to the shorter, noticeably broader man, ‘See you again all too soon, Alain, I dare say.’

  So this would be Alain Déclan, right-hand man to the réseau’s boss. He’d said to the tall one, ‘Count on it. And thanks.’

  ‘For nothing. Adieu, madame.’

  ‘Perhaps au revoir, monsieur.’

  Déclan watched him go, trudging off with the sacks over his shoulders, then asked her in English, ‘All set, Lucy?’ Stooping to pick up the larger of her cases; she’d taken possession of the smaller one, the one that mattered enough to give your life for. Peering at him, making him out as quite short – five-seven or eight maybe – but very solid. Sweater, and peaked cap, face black-looking in the moonlight. Not so much bearded as maybe hadn’t been shaved for a week or so. She’d nodded to his question, asked him, ‘Should I take it you’re Batsman?’

  Wrong way to have put the question should have asked him, ‘What’s your code-name?’ He knew it now – even if he was an imposter and hadn’t before, in which case he’d be glad of the information. Sloppy of her: he’d started it, of course, by calling her Lucy, which was her code-name, the only name she or SOE in England would ever use in signals. He’d grunted an affirmative anyway, adding ‘Come on. First thing is pick up the lamps.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘My camionette’s not far.’ Camionette meaning truck or pickup. ‘We’ll sit it out till daylight, then I’ll drop you at the station.’

  ‘In Cahors?’

  ‘Where’d you imagine?’

  ‘Conceivably, Toulouse.’

  ‘Daft, would that be. I’m on that road night time, chances are I’m stopped. OK for me, they know me – if they’re locals that is. I’ve a wife at Léguevin – west of Toulouse, that is – I’m local, near enough. But who do we say you are – middle of the night, suitcases an’ all, including you know what?’