never
We’ll share love
Together
Yet always
Through all ways
You’re close to my heart
‘Who was he?’ Marks asked.
She smiled and blushed a bit. ‘An old friend. I haven’t heard from him for ages. I thought I was in love with him but maybe it was no more than a childish crush.’
He shrugged. ‘Crush and love, the only difference is how long it lasts. Let’s see if he brings you luck.’ So he set her an exercise to see how many mistakes she made using her poem, and she gave a small smile of triumph when she made none.
‘Close to my heart,’ he said approvingly, and with apparent reluctance released her to her next appointment, which was with a Jewish tailor in Clifford Street who would make her a couple of suits and a coat in French cloth and in the best French manner. The stitching, the lining, the cut, everything was different, he explained, huffing and puffing around her and decrying English fashion. But it would take time. You cannot rush these things. These people always ask for everything by tomorrow.
VII
In the evening she took the train back home. The ups and downs of her present existence bewildered her. One moment she was in the world of the Organisation with its tricks and puzzles, its truths and half-truths and downright lies: the next she was at home enveloped in the certainties of childhood. The only thing she carried over from one world to the other was the ability to lie.
‘They’ve told me to prepare to go overseas,’ she explained to her mother. ‘Algiers, I expect, but it might be Morocco. They’re terribly vague. I want some stuff that won’t look out of place, clothes and things. Can I see what you’ve got? Oh, and Benoît is probably coming to stay for a couple of days.’
‘Who is Benoît?’
‘I told you. This
mec
I met during training. He’s coming for the weekend.’
‘What on earth do you mean,
mec
?’
‘Boy, then. What do you want me to say? Chap?’ She said it in English –
chep
– with mockery in her tone.
‘Well, whatever you call him, we don’t know him. How can we have someone to stay whom we don’t know?’
‘But if he doesn’t come to stay you’ll never know him.’
Her mother made that face, the little moue of anger that she always showed when either of her children bested her in an argument. ‘Anyway, there’s also a phone message for you. Something else to do with your work, I suppose. A colonel, he said.’
‘A
colonel
?’
‘That’s right.’
She thought: Buckmaster. She thought: disaster, a change of plan, the whole carefully constructed artifice brought crashing down by an outside agency, some matter of chance or coincidence. Maybe in Bristol, or maybe some other hitch. The head of WORDSMITH didn’t want a woman. Perhaps it was that. Or perhaps Buckmaster and Atkins had revised their opinion of her at the last minute and decided that no, she was not suitable material for going into the field. Instead it would be the limbo of the ‘cooler’, where she would kick her heels in frustration while doing nothing, because she knew what she knew, like some kind of radioactive substance that was too hot to handle and had to be kept in isolation.
But her mother had written the message down on the notepad beside the telephone and the name was not Buckmasterbut Peters: would Marian meet Colonel Peters at Brasenose College at ten o’clock the next morning? It took a moment for her to recognise the man’s name – her Get Out of Jail card during the scheme in Bristol, the number she never had to ring.
VIII
The college, like everything else, had been taken over by the military. Where you expected gowned figures stalking the quadrangles, instead there was a coming and going of men in uniform, and that sense of shabby impermanence that haunts military installations, as though the enemy is approaching and administration might be making a bonfire of the files at a moment’s notice. In the shadows of the main gate a notice from the
We’ll share love
Together
Yet always
Through all ways
You’re close to my heart
‘Who was he?’ Marks asked.
She smiled and blushed a bit. ‘An old friend. I haven’t heard from him for ages. I thought I was in love with him but maybe it was no more than a childish crush.’
He shrugged. ‘Crush and love, the only difference is how long it lasts. Let’s see if he brings you luck.’ So he set her an exercise to see how many mistakes she made using her poem, and she gave a small smile of triumph when she made none.
‘Close to my heart,’ he said approvingly, and with apparent reluctance released her to her next appointment, which was with a Jewish tailor in Clifford Street who would make her a couple of suits and a coat in French cloth and in the best French manner. The stitching, the lining, the cut, everything was different, he explained, huffing and puffing around her and decrying English fashion. But it would take time. You cannot rush these things. These people always ask for everything by tomorrow.
VII
In the evening she took the train back home. The ups and downs of her present existence bewildered her. One moment she was in the world of the Organisation with its tricks and puzzles, its truths and half-truths and downright lies: the next she was at home enveloped in the certainties of childhood. The only thing she carried over from one world to the other was the ability to lie.
‘They’ve told me to prepare to go overseas,’ she explained to her mother. ‘Algiers, I expect, but it might be Morocco. They’re terribly vague. I want some stuff that won’t look out of place, clothes and things. Can I see what you’ve got? Oh, and Benoît is probably coming to stay for a couple of days.’
‘Who is Benoît?’
‘I told you. This
mec
I met during training. He’s coming for the weekend.’
‘What on earth do you mean,
mec
?’
‘Boy, then. What do you want me to say? Chap?’ She said it in English –
chep
– with mockery in her tone.
‘Well, whatever you call him, we don’t know him. How can we have someone to stay whom we don’t know?’
‘But if he doesn’t come to stay you’ll never know him.’
Her mother made that face, the little moue of anger that she always showed when either of her children bested her in an argument. ‘Anyway, there’s also a phone message for you. Something else to do with your work, I suppose. A colonel, he said.’
‘A
colonel
?’
‘That’s right.’
She thought: Buckmaster. She thought: disaster, a change of plan, the whole carefully constructed artifice brought crashing down by an outside agency, some matter of chance or coincidence. Maybe in Bristol, or maybe some other hitch. The head of WORDSMITH didn’t want a woman. Perhaps it was that. Or perhaps Buckmaster and Atkins had revised their opinion of her at the last minute and decided that no, she was not suitable material for going into the field. Instead it would be the limbo of the ‘cooler’, where she would kick her heels in frustration while doing nothing, because she knew what she knew, like some kind of radioactive substance that was too hot to handle and had to be kept in isolation.
But her mother had written the message down on the notepad beside the telephone and the name was not Buckmasterbut Peters: would Marian meet Colonel Peters at Brasenose College at ten o’clock the next morning? It took a moment for her to recognise the man’s name – her Get Out of Jail card during the scheme in Bristol, the number she never had to ring.
VIII
The college, like everything else, had been taken over by the military. Where you expected gowned figures stalking the quadrangles, instead there was a coming and going of men in uniform, and that sense of shabby impermanence that haunts military installations, as though the enemy is approaching and administration might be making a bonfire of the files at a moment’s notice. In the shadows of the main gate a notice from the
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