Free The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer Page A

the trials of wartime – before she asked her question. ‘The Pelletier family. What happened to them, do you know?’ She said it carelessly, as though it wasn’t important whether they knew or not. But her father did know, of course. Gustave Pelletier had been in the French foreign office, on secondment to some department of the League. Shortly before the outbreak of war he’d been posted back to Quai d’Orsay to work under Bonnet, but he hadn’t got on with his boss and was sent abroad again. ‘An ambassador in North Africa, or something. Then he resigned and joined the Free French, that’s what I’ve heard. Threw his lot in with Darlan, which wasn’tsuch a good idea. I think he’s in Algiers now. Maybe you’ll meet him …’
    ‘Clément used to write to you, didn’t he?’ her mother asked. ‘I think he was soft on you.’
    Marian blushed and cursed herself for it. ‘He wrote occasionally. It’s strange how Ned and he got on so well. They seemed such different types.’
    ‘The attraction of opposites,’ her mother suggested. ‘And then they had their studies in common, didn’t they?’
    ‘Their research, yes.’
    ‘All that atomic stuff. I didn’t understand a word.’ And then the conversation moved away, to other matters, other people, that world they had inhabited in Geneva, an international world that seemed so remote now when everything was narrow and focused and British.
    The remaining days of Marian’s leave seemed to drag by, sluggards compared with the frenetic sprinters of those six weeks in Scotland. The tedious domestic life of rations and queues at the grocer’s and reading the newspapers and worrying about matters that were beyond her ken and beyond her power to influence. She had no friends in Oxford. The university city – introverted, supercilious, enmeshed in its own concerns – was no more than a temporary refuge for the Sutro family.
    One evening the phone rang when they were in the sitting room reading. Her mother was deep in some turgid French novel that she had borrowed from the Taylorian. Her father was doing
The Times
crossword, agonising over a single clue:
Forges prose
, 9. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said, and went through to the hall before either of them could move from their chairs. She even closed the door before lifting the receiver.
    ‘Anne-Marie?’ a voice asked. ‘
C’est toi?
’
    It was Benoît. Benoît Bérard. She even remembered his surname. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said, and immediately regretted it. ‘What are you doing?’
    ‘Nothing. I was so bored, so I gave you
un coup de bigo
to see if you were at home.’
    ‘What’s that?
Un coup de bigo?
’
    ‘A telephone call.
Le bigophone
. You don’t know
bigophone
?’
    She could hear his laughter on the other end of the line. ‘You make things up,’ she accused him. ‘It’s a load of nonsense.’
    ‘
Bigo
is not nonsense, it is real. Doesn’t the cream of Geneva society say
bigo
? “I give you a tinkle,” that’s what the Anglo-Saxons say. So tell me, what you are doing at home. Have they sacked you from the Organisation?’
    ‘Not yet.’ And she suddenly understood that this boy was the only person she could talk to openly about what she did, that this telephone conversation, subdued so that nothing could be overheard, was a kind of lifeline, almost a confessional. ‘I’m going to Parachute School on Monday. Can you believe that? Jumping out of aircraft.’
    ‘They were going to send me there a week ago. And then there was a change of plan. There’s always a change of plan. They’re probably trying to work out a change of plan to get themselves out of the war.’ He broke into his accented English: ‘Ay say old cheps, ay’m afraid there is a change of plen. We are not, ah, fightin’ ‘itler any more, we are, er, fightin’ Stalin.’
    She laughed. ‘And what are you doing now?’
    ‘I’m on another of their shitty courses. How to put explosives into dead rats