The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer

Author:Simon Mawer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 1444814486
Publisher: Charnwood
Published: 2012-05-03T07:00:00+00:00

III

After le Patron has gone she stands looking out of the window at the small back garden, thinking of Clément. And the smooth man in the pinstripe suit called Fawley. Excitement is close to fear: there is the same pulsing heart, the same dry mouth, the same thin rime of sweat beneath the arms. So which of the two does she feel, knowing she must go to Paris? Excitement or fear? Or is it both?

And then she thinks of Yvette, that child in a woman’s body, the little girl lost in widowhood and motherhood and the chaos of war, who wept on her cheek and whispered that she was no good, that they would never send her to France. What, she wonders, is Yvette’s part in this little rigmarole?

She cycles to Plasonne to collect her things and warn Sophie that she will be away for a few days. Paris, she adds, and then regrets it when she sees Sophie’s expression of fear. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be back in a few days. I’ve got to go and see a friend.’

Back in Lussac, Gabrielle Mercey thinks differently. ‘You’re going to Paris!’ she exclaims, clapping her hands in delight. ‘Let me come with you!’ And then, when it is made clear that they cannot make the journey together, she says, ‘Wait a second,’ and disappears for a moment to come back with a slip of paper with an address written on it. ‘These are my friends. If you need help you can always contact them. I’m sure they’d give you a place to stay if you need …’

Alice packs a suitcase. She will be able to wear the suit that she arrived in and has never worn since because it is too parisien and the shoes that were bought in a little shop off the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré shortly before they left Paris for London, Maman and Papa and she, in the spring of 1940. Gabrielle watches her preparations devotedly, an acolyte at the altar. She is always doing things to help – sewing on buttons, darning stockings, turning the collar of Alice’s blouses – that kind of thing. Her treadle-driven sewing machine is constantly whirring away in the back room of the little house, making and mending in the days of privation. ‘You’ll look so lovely dressed up for Paris,’ she says. ‘I can imagine you strolling in the Luxembourg, sitting at a café on the Champs-Élysées, attracting the men.’

‘I don’t imagine I’ll have time for that.’

‘Maybe after the war. Maybe we can go to Paris then.’

‘Perhaps.’ After the war seems like a fiction, in the way that paradise is a fiction, a time and place of unlimited plenty, of peace and harmony and eternal light. An antidote to the theology of terror.

Alice looks down at her packed suitcase and considers the two wireless valves that she has to carry. The trouble with attempting to hide things is that if they are found then you really are in the shit. That was how one of the Beaulieu instructors put it.

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