Charlotte Gray Read online

  ‘It depends what you need to know. They’ve been married for a long time. They have two children of whom they’re fond. They have enough money. My father still works. They’re healthy. They certainly have every reason to be happy.’

  ‘But you’re not sure. Is that because you don’t see them much?’

  ‘Some rift, you mean? Not at all.’

  ‘And what about your childhood? Was your home life happy?’

  Charlotte sighed. ‘We were a very ordinary family. I had an elder brother called Roderick. We had a dog and a couple of cats. My mother was a nice woman, a good wife and mother. My father was a serious man. He worked very hard. He was a doctor, a physician to begin with, but he became interested in psychiatry, I think perhaps partly as a result of his experiences in the Great War, though I’m not sure about the timing. He was very well read and would certainly have been aware of Freud and people like that quite early on, though of course they didn’t have the kind of acceptance then that they do now. People thought they were pornographic.’ She inclined her head in the direction of Dr Burch’s bookshelf.

  ‘Did he practise as a psychiatrist?’

  ‘Yes, he did eventually. It was odd, because he really rather despised most other psychiatrists. He thought a lot of it was rubbish. He hated all that talk about dreams. He was happier being a physician.’

  Burch said nothing and Charlotte looked at him. He raised an eyebrow, but still did not speak.

  Charlotte suddenly sat forward in the chair and gave him her fullest and most charming smile, smoothing her skirt down over her hips as she resettled. ‘This must be a thankless job for you, questioning all these young women about their past.’

  Burch recoiled a little in the floodlight of her social manner. In re-establishing the artificial basis of their conversation he was impelled into a slight awkwardness. ‘We’re not here to talk about me, Miss Gray.’ Charlotte felt she had won a small victory.

  ‘Though you might make a more interesting subject.’

  Her attitude was now bordering on the flirtatious. Burch became firmer. ‘You didn’t answer my question. Was your home life happy?’

  ‘Whom shall we call happy? It was all right.’

  Her eyes travelled once more down the line of books and for the tenth time unreadingly traced the kicking spokes of the K in Klein. She was thinking of another doctor’s room: not that of Wolf, or Burch, but a cold first-floor sitting room in a granite house in Aberdeen.

  She is seventeen years old, on the point of leaving school. Her hair is clipped back off her face in the neat combs of the Academy sixth form; her schoolgirl knees are pressed together. The spaces beneath her eyes are puffed outwards in damp pink swellings; she is gasping and heaving to catch the breath denied her by the repeated sobbing of her chest. She cannot hold the grief any more and bends her swollen, shiny face down into her hands with a great cry. She wants by that noise to blow the pathways clear to her lungs and to loosen, then expunge, the gripping memory of her betrayal.

  The doctor to whom she speaks does not believe her.

  ‘I’m going to show you some pictures now,’ said Burch, ‘and I want you to tell me what each one reminds you of.’

  He slipped his hand into the drawer of the desk and brought out a pile of folded papers. He opened the first one and passed it across to Charlotte, who had moved from the depths of the armchair to sit opposite him.

  She looked at the symmetrical shapes made by the paper folded in on itself across a blob of black ink.

  ‘Tarantula.’

  ‘Are you frightened of insects?’

  ‘Averagely.’

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Ink on paper.’

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Wine on paper, paint on paper, black water on paper.’

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Castle in a forest.’

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Scrambled egg with truffles.’

  ‘All right. This one.’

  ‘Nothing really. Insects. Brambles. Patterns in the sand.’

  ‘This one.’

  ‘It’s like an archipelago, somewhere in the southern seas. Here’s the governor-general’s house with its shady verandah overlooking the sea.’

  ‘Charming. This one.’

  ‘Is a face. A gargoyle on a church.’

  ‘This one.’

  ‘Is another blot. We’re back to blots, I’m afraid. Ink on paper.’

  ‘This one.’

  ‘Blot.’

  ‘This one.’

  ‘Blot. Vaguely canine, but still a blot. I have a feeling they’re all going to be blots from now on.’

  Eventually Burch slipped the papers back into his desk. ‘All right. Now I’m going to say a word and I want you to say the first word your mind associates with it. I do want you to take this seriously. You must relax. Let your mind just take its own course. Go and sit back in the armchair and close your eyes.’

  Charlotte sank down into the cushions, leaned her head back and closed her eyes. The room had a churchy smell; she relaxed more than she expected. Burch squatted on the hard chair with a list on his lap. His eyes ran down the words.

  ‘Drink.’ ‘Water.’

  ‘House.’ ‘Garden.’

  ‘Mother.’ ‘Hair.’

  ‘Dog.’ ‘Legs.’

  ‘Apple.’ ‘Eve.’

  ‘Stick.’ ‘Beat.’

  ‘Father.’ ‘Sad look.’

  ‘One word, please. Try again. Father.’ ‘Waistcoat.’

  ‘Home.’ ‘Cold.’

  ‘Friend.’ ‘Girl.’

  ‘War.’ ‘Peace.’

  ‘War.’ ‘Planes.’

  ‘London.’ ‘Flat.’

  ‘Kiss.’ ‘Lips.’

  ‘Floor.’ ‘Board.’

  ‘Ceiling.’ ‘White.’

  ‘Bed.’ ‘Lie.’

  ‘Red.’ ‘Lips.’

  ‘Blue.’ ‘Uniform.’

  ‘Flowers.’ ‘Roses.’

  ‘France.’ ‘Roads.’

  ‘Sex.’ ‘Female.’

  ‘All right. You can open your eyes.’

  Charlotte blinked. Burch laid the folder on his desk. On a low shelf was a rectangular basket containing some wooden blocks, like a child’s building bricks. Burch started to move his hand towards them, then saw Charlotte watching him. Something in her expression appeared to make him think better of it.

  ‘All right, Miss Gray,’ he said, standing up. ‘I think we’ve probably finished. Will you ask the next girl to come in, please.’

  ‘Have I passed? Are you going to recommend me for further training?’

  ‘I think so.’

  As she passed the desk Charlotte glimpsed the notes he had made on a page headed ‘Ensign Charlotte Gray’. The only thing he had written was: ‘T.C. by 1/2’.

  10

  GREGORY TOOK THE stairs two at a time, one hand clamped against the bottle of gin in his coat pocket. He had stopped worrying about his motives; he only knew how anxious he was to see the door of the flat swing open. Charlotte was waiting, leaning against the door frame, wearing a floral summer dress with bare arms and legs. Gregory inhaled the scent of lily of the valley as he kissed her warm neck.

  ‘Is the coast clear?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t think anyone’ll be back before eleven.’

  Gregory ran his hands through Charlotte’s hair. She pushed him away and resettled the tortoiseshell comb he had dislodged.

  Gregory poured drinks. ‘I’m off to France again any day,’ he said. ‘As soon as the weather’s clear.’

  ‘Another drop?’ said Charlotte, sitting down next to him on the sofa.

  ‘That sort of thing. They’ve given me an address in Clermont-Ferrand.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a Citroën garage in the middle of town. The owner’s a part of the local network. He’s called Chollet, I believe, but he goes under the name of Hercule. I’m supposed to get in touch if something goes wrong.’
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  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. I’m sure it’ll be all right.’

  ‘You told me nothing could go wrong in those big Halifaxes.’

  Gregory seemed distracted, then made a sudden effort. ‘I just discovered today what the G section codeword for the moon is. Guess. It’s a girl’s name.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Charlotte. ‘Phoebe? Selena?’

  ‘No, it’s Charlotte! I’ve been reading all these messages about “Charlotte Unsatisfactory”, “Charlotte Impeccable”, “Regret Operation impossible, state of Charlotte”. Charlotte and Isaac, the two most important people in my life.’

  ‘Who’s Isaac?’

  ‘Isaac Newton. The black knight.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Isaac is what pilots call gravity.’

  ‘I see.’ Charlotte smiled and laid her hand on his knee. ‘And how’s your French coming on? Would you like to practise?’

  ‘Not today. I’m just not as clever as you, Charlotte, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘You don’t have to be clever to learn a language. Children can do it.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I can just about make myself understood but as soon as I open my mouth they’ll know I’m not French.’

  ‘You’ll just have to be careful. Don’t look so sad. I hate it when you go all remote like this.’

  Gregory lit two cigarettes and gave one to Charlotte. He sighed. ‘You’re worth ten of me, old thing. That’s the trouble.’

  Charlotte raised a finger. ‘No RAF talk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you call your planes, “old girl” and “old thing”?’

  Gregory smiled tiredly. ‘I’m not like that, you know, Charlotte. All that balls about “wizard prangs”. I don’t really like those sort of people.’

  ‘I know. I know you’re not really like that.’ She had taken his hand as she began to speak in the voice of a soothing and indulgent mother, which Gregory found shamefully affecting. He laid his head on the cotton fabric of Charlotte’s dress while she stroked his hair.

  ‘I sometimes talk like that because I grew fond of those men. That’s the trouble. They probably all seem absurd to you, and in some ways they do to me. But they were very young. They hadn’t even begun their lives. You must forgive them a few silly phrases.’

  ‘You talk of them with such devotion,’ said Charlotte. ‘I sometimes think you’re fonder of them than you are of me.’

  Gregory stood up. ‘Come on. Don’t let’s waste these evenings together being morbid. Let’s have dinner. What is it? Spam?’

  ‘No. It’s a pot au feu à la mode de Ministère de Guerre.’

  ‘Sounds interesting. I want you to tell me more about your training. You’re not really going ahead with this, are you?’

  Charlotte drew the curtains of the kitchen and lit the candles on the laid table. She told him about Dr Burch and of how she would shortly have to go on a course in Scotland.

  Gregory watched her as she spoke. Sometimes, when he heard her talk, he felt that he had merely stumbled from one thing to another without ever properly thinking about it: India, England, Nyasaland, farming, friends, women, war . . . He must have made decisions, some based on quick gratification, some on what was sensible, but he had never thought it through in the dimension Charlotte inhabited. It was almost as though he had never grown up at all, but had just trusted to luck and to a childish belief that things would probably work out. Perhaps if he had undergone her self-scrutiny he would not have been so shaken by the experience of war. He liked to watch the nervous intensity of her narratives, as she described her interviews and experiences. He shuddered at the completeness of her trust in him and felt unworthy of its intensity. He was, in fact, though he did not admit it, a little frightened of her; and the only way to subdue that fear was by indulging the violently erotic feeling that her fierce attention to his well-being aroused in him.

  At ten o’clock he had to leave. Charlotte was asleep on the bed, her face pink and untroubled, her breathing steady. Gregory picked up his service shirt and flannel trousers from the floor and pulled them on. He ran his hand back through his hair, then sat on the hard little chair at the end of Charlotte’s bedroom and looked at her in the unlit gloom of the summer evening.

  He had not told her of the true nature of his flight. Perhaps he would never see her again.

  She was lying on her side with one leg raised as though running. There were tiny dry lines where the skin of her upper foot met the sole. Her toenails were painted scarlet. Gregory’s eyes ran over the sharp ankle bone, up the straight shin to the pocket enclosed by the stretched sinews of her raised knee, the thin pink creases behind the other, straightened, knee, then up the sweep of her thigh, whose packed flesh was of the same firm consistency as that of her lower leg. At the top of the hip-bones were two soft folds, which, to her intense embarrassment, he referred to as love-handles. Gregory’s lips twitched as he recalled her indignation. He explained to her that it was necessary to have some flaw to balance what might otherwise have been too orthodox a figure, but Charlotte was ashamed of them, as she was of the small roundness of her belly that made her tighter skirts swell a little at the front, not fall in the perpendicular line of a fashion drawing. This too Gregory liked, though the way she lay made it invisible to his gaze, which could make out only the bottom of her ribs and her upper arm with its pale freckles trickling over on to the shoulder where her fair hair lay disarrayed, a single darker strand of it stuck to the side of her face by sweat.

  When he had finished dressing he stood by the bed and gave her body one last glance, straining in the almost-full darkness, as she lay deep in one of her death-like sleeps. He was moved by a paradoxical sense that there lay like an invisible film over the practical volume of her rib cage and the bumpy spinal cord with its vital wiring something personal, something essentially hers, that transcended the facts of her physical incorporation. He wanted very much to stroke the line of her thigh and hip, to kiss the mandolin-shaped cheeks, childishly bare; but he feared to wake her, so instead drew the sheet carefully over her and tiptoed from the room.

  He found himself inexplicably reluctant to walk the few steps down the passage to the front door; he wished he had told her what he was really going to do. He took a piece of paper from the hall table and scribbled a note on it. ‘Charlotte Satisfactory. 10.21 p.m. A bientôt. XX’ He went back to her room and left it on the bedside table.

  Gregory had been driving for three-quarters of an hour through the night when he felt a sudden pressure rising in his ribs. For a minute he thought he was going to vomit, and he pulled the car over to the side of the unlit country road. He climbed out and stood by the door. Something was struggling to come out of his chest and was making his arms and hands shake.

  He held on hard to the top of the open door, fighting to control himself. A volume of packed air erupted from his mouth in a cry. He bent over the bonnet of the car to steady himself and found that other wild exhalations were struggling to follow the first. Soon he was sobbing like a child.

  While he knelt on the ground and held his face in his hands he had the curious feeling of standing simultaneously outside himself. In a detached way he could picture the strange figure he made, weeping for no apparent reason in his uniform. His vision was detached, but it was not dispassionate, because he felt a dreadful pity for this second person.

  The reflexes of his body had shown him what his mind had refused to admit. He had not been able to absorb as well as he had thought the things the last two years had shown him. He was still young, and he had seen in that short time things that normally only old men knew. And then there had come this woman.

  When he thought of Charlotte, Gregory felt a terrible exhilaration. Out of all the death had come this redeeming chance. When he thought of the passion she had so transparently conceived for him, he felt singled out by an extraordinary fortune. The chance that of all the women
in the world, the one he loved (and with relief he admitted that this was what he felt) – the thought that she should actually reciprocate his feeling seemed a possibility of incalculably long odds. His incredulous joy at his good luck was almost as exhilarating as the emotion itself.

  He slumped down in the seat of the car. The most terrible aspect of it was the timing. It was only when it was too late to tell her that he had finally understood. In a few days he would be gone, and he might never come back.

  Charlotte wrote to Gregory from Scotland. She pictured him taking the letter to his billet and lying down on his hard bed to read it. It pleased her to think of his fingers where hers had been; she imagined the cigarette smoke that would curl from his hand and billow from his lips, sardonically smiling at her letter.

  My Darling Peter,

  I expect this is against all the rules and I will be shot as a spy if anyone knows I’ve written, so don’t leave this letter lying around. How are you? I do miss you. I think about you in your horrid cold plane and your poor feet freezing. I miss you.

  I arrived at the end of a course at Inverie Bay. The others have been shown how to use Bren guns and Sten guns and how to creep up on the enemy at night and kill silently with their bare hands. I look at those hands with their manicured nails holding cocktails in the evening and have to suppress a giggle. I wonder if the Germans know what’s coming. I seem to have missed all the violent stuff, for which I’m grateful. I have been taught by a man with whisky breath how to transmit by morse; some of this I remembered from the Girl Guides. Don’t laugh. Yesterday an old trawlerman took us out in a rowing boat. The idea is that we should be able to pick up parachutes or stores that have landed in the water. You know how careless those wretched RAF boys are with their drops . . . Anyway, this old chap was very flattering and told me I had a natural feeling for a boat, which was surprising. It was extremely hard work, as the wind was whipping across the bay and the waves were smacking into the side of the boat. My poor arms.

  Every night we have to put on our uniforms for dinner. They’re not nearly as flattering as Daisy believed: they are rather scratchy and my skirt is too tight round the middle – no rude remarks, please. The food is variable, often quite good – fresh herring and mackerel, home-made bread, but a bit heavy and too reminiscent of ‘home’ for my liking. The others on the course are mostly English girls from the Home Counties. There is a girl called Marigold with whom I have become quite friendly. She is very good at the cross-country runs and the obstacle courses. It is perfectly clear to me, and I imagine to the instructors, that I am no good at all at these things. However, since I’ve started the course I have to finish it. They will then decide what job, if any, to offer me. Driving the Brigadier’s car, I imagine, will be just about all they will think me up to. This is a pity, because I do very much want to go to France and do something worthwhile.