The Parrot Cage, page 18
‘Andrew, I must get up. Stop it now.’
‘All right, Madam Headmistress. But only till tonight.’ His voice was full of amusement and a kind of patronising tolerance.
How was it possible, Gerry asked herself as she escaped from the flat and set off towards her office, that two people so intimately joined physically should have so little understanding of each other’s minds? She had had no idea on that first night that he had been frightened. But even so it was hard to believe that he could really feel nothing of her revulsion. In the early days she had always assumed that the reality of love was an instant and unbreakable understanding of the kind that she had found with Peter Suvarov.
Even before she reached the end of that thought, she had already realised its absurdity: there could never have been any love between Suvarov and herself. She had been merely wallowing in self-indulgent fantasy, and he had understood her only because he knew women so well, just as Evelyn Adamson had hinted. He had recognised Gerry’s state of mind because it was all too familiar to him, and he had probably laughed about it with her sister.
Suddenly she felt a hot tide of hate pouring through her, whether for Flixe or for Peter she was not quite sure. But she felt humiliated and bitterly jealous of them both. How could they have deceived her like that? Flixe was hers, her belonging and her responsibility. How could Suvarov have seduced her? And how could Flixe, knowing that Gerry was working for him … Gerry broke off the thought. Of course, Flixe did not know, unless Suvarov had told her. Gerry herself had never told Flixe where or for whom she was working, and Flixe had never been indiscreet enough to ask. So, she said to herself, it’s him. He knows all about both of us, and he could do that to us. Bastard!
As she walked reluctantly to the office, she wondered whether it would be easy to get a transfer to some other organisation or department. But how could she ask him for it? When he had offered, way back in February, she had cheerfully said that she could deal with her feelings about him and wanted to stay in his office. And how could she justify to Andrew or herself her determination to continue working if she were prepared to leave RE(1)R just because the man she had so greatly loved was having an affair with her sister?
He was already at his desk when Gerry walked into the office and she could not forbear to look at him, searching the face she thought she had loved for signs of what he had been doing. His first smile was the same as usual, warm and warming, but it began to fade as Gerry did not answer it. With a sigh, so light that she half doubted that she had heard it, he put down the paper he was reading.
‘Tell me, Gerry.’
‘Oh, I can’t bore you with my troubles day after day. Pay no attention. I’m just a bit tired. My relief was late, you know, last night at the ARP post and so I didn’t get to bed for ages,’ she said, surprised to hear no sound of the boiling emotions in her voice.
Before Suvarov could speak, the door of the office opened and Tony Eynsham came in, saying:
‘Gerry, could you come? Mike’s in a state and I think you’re the only person who could reach him.’
‘Of course I’ll come. What happened?’
‘He and Michel were quarrelling again and Michel said something about the British running away at Dunkirk.’
‘Doesn’t that bloody man understand yet how Mike feels having left his brother there?’ demanded Gerry as they reached the door. She went in, aware that Eynsham had not followed her, to see Mike sitting at his table, very pale and shivering. Everyone else was apparently working, even the French boy whose quarrel had brought Mike to this pitch. Gerry touched him gently on the shoulder. He started violently.
‘Don’t, Mike; it’s only me, Gerry,’ she said.
At that he turned to her, but he did not speak. Gerry tried again.
‘Mike, don’t do this to yourself. Simon’s all right; you told me so. He’s in the camp and your mother’s sending him good food parcels. He’s a lot safer there than all those men in the Arctic convoys or the ones fighting Rommel in the desert.’ She knew that he was not really listening, but she knew also that the sound of a kind voice occasionally helped to soothe his private miseries. But not this time. She glared over his head at the others and one by one they left the analysts’room. Then, as gently as she could, she laid a hand on his head.
‘Mike, dear Mike, what is it?’
‘He’s dead. He was shot trying to escape.’ He sobbed, once, but there were no tears in his eyes. She thought how much easier it would be for him if he had been able to cry. She pulled his head forward and cradled it against her shoulder, wishing that of all the things she might have said to reassure him she had chosen others. He let his head lie against her for a while and she hoped that her slowly growing affection for him would help just a little to ease his distress. At last he pulled away from her and said in a choked voice:
‘Gerry, I must get out of here. Will you come for a walk?’
Mike’s distress wrenched Gerry away from her own selfish preoccupations. He gave her, too, another reason to stay working for Suvarov, and for resisting Andrew’s orders to relinquish her job: while she was apparently the only person who could calm Mike, her determination to remain could be justified. She went back to the flat that evening ready to resist any blandishment or order from her husband.
When she got back one look at his face made her heart shrink and her smile and voice were hard when she greeted him. He did not return either the smile or the words. Gerry shrugged and went into the bedroom to change her shoes.
‘Who was that naval officer?’ Andrew demanded.
Gerry spun round and came back to the sitting-room, one shoe in her hand.
‘What naval officer? Andrew, what on earth is the matter?’
‘The one you were walking round St James’s Park with, arm in arm, this afternoon. He was crying so I suppose you’d been telling him that you’d had enough of him, too, poor brute.’
That arrow was so wide of the mark that Gerry even laughed a little.
‘No, Andy dear. That was poor Mike from the office.’ Her laughter stopped abruptly as she thought of Mike. ‘He’s had the most frightful luck. He was blown up and half-drowned at Dunkirk and as they carried him on board the last ship, with the Stukas dive-bombing all the ships and the beaches, he saw his brother – his younger brother – left behind with all those other poor men. The boy was picked up and had been in prison camp since then.’
‘Had?’ repeated Andrew, sobered and ashamed of himself.
‘Yes, poor Mike’s just heard that he was part of an escape attempt that failed. He was shot just outside the wire.’
Andrew Kyrle laid his face in his hands and muttered:
‘I’m sorry, Gerry. I’m sorry.’ There was a pause while she tried to feel something for him. Then, when she said nothing, he went on: ‘Gerry, promise you’ll never let any other man … I couldn’t bear it.’ When she still did not speak he lifted his head and looked at her. Burying the memory of the short moment when she had believed that Suvarov loved her, she said quite gently:
‘I’m your wife, Andrew. Yours.’ And she believed that it was true in a way that it had not been until she had seen her sister in Suvarov’s embrace.
But despite the shock she had felt when she saw them together, despite the determination she had felt then to burn away all her affection for Peter Suvarov, after a week or two Gerry had found herself just as deeply entangled as ever. There were even times when the knowledge that Flixe found him attractive and admirable enough to love gave strength to Gerry’s feelings for him. Flixe had always been so choosy, and had always had the pick of any men around her. If she were so deeply involved with Peter, he must really be worth something.
Then there were other times when Gerry’s anger and resentment almost threatened to boil over. It was a shock to discover just how jealous she could be – and how the jealousy could operate in two opposite directions at the same time. She forced herself to admit that she was furious with both of them. But at least the power of what they had made her feel helped to distract her from her battles with Andrew.
By the beginning of November she had not so much yielded to him as detached herself from the battlefield. Her physical self was at his disposal, but the real core of her identity was separate. There were times when she almost felt as though she were sitting apart watching herself playing the role of his wife.
She was increasingly busy in the office, which also helped. The three principal sources of intelligence from France seemed to be overcoming their suspicions of RE(1)R and were at last forwarding streams of reports to Queen Anne’s Gate. Gerry was certain that the intelligence they got was censored and doctored, but at least it was beginning to give a relatively clear picture of conditions in occupied France.
The reports that crossed her desk for rewriting or filing were not concerned with the victimisation, torture and killing of individuals by the Nazis, for which she was supremely grateful. It was bad enough to have to read of the effects of the occupation itself on the mass of French people: the curfews and restrictions, the starvation rations they were allotted while vast amounts of French produce were channelled away to Germany; the petty measures that were aimed at controlling the occupied, removing their self-respect, humbling them, turning them into chattels of their conquerors. Gerry had felt contempt and rage for Marshal Pétain ever since he had signed the armistice with Germany and put Britain at such risk of invasion, but just occasionally her emotions were tempered with a kind of sadness that the old man should have thought that by treating with Hitler he would be able to save France and the French from the terrible carnage and destruction he had seen at first hand between 1914 and 1918.
In spite of the amount of material she had to read and process, she had not yet been able to find any thread that linked anything that was happening in France to any of the groups or individuals who were under surveillance in London. But she knew that she did not see everything. One late afternoon when the raw chill of fog was seeping through the edges of the ill-fitting window behind his desk, she ventured to ask Suvarov whether he had found anything. He was standing in front of their small coal fire at the time and she watched his face in its dim orange glow as he started to answer.
‘Gerry, don’t ask things like that.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’ she asked, too surprised to feel a renewal of the hurt he and Flixe had dealt her.
‘That’s not the point. The less you know, the less dangerous you are to us all.’
‘I see.’ She was suddenly visited with so clear a memory of the scene in Mayfair that she actually felt faint. She leaned her forehead on her clenched fist and after a little while said as carefully as she could: ‘It gives one a most unpleasant feeling – sinister almost – to know that people one … likes and trusts, are keeping things from you.’
‘Gerry, it’s not only you,’ he said, sounding bored or tired to death. ‘Part of the difficulty of this job is trying to keep the different parts of it separate and the people in each part unknown to each other.’
‘But we’re all here, anyway. You don’t keep the analysts separate.’
‘There are others, but I don’t want to talk about them, Gerry. The clearer I can keep the divisions the less the chance that anyone may think that they can get to information through you. Do you see?’
‘Yes, I see. I’m sorry.’ She just could not make herself say to him any of the other things she wanted to say or ask the questions that might soothe the beastly jealousy that sometimes made her even more ashamed than her love for him had done.
Flixe
1941
Chapter Thirteen
Flixe was pouring a jug of cold water over her newly washed hair. She winced as the icy cold lashed her scalp but told herself bracingly that at least cold water rinsed the shampoo out quicker than hot. Two more jugs did the trick and, shivering, she wrapped an old pink towel turbanwise around her head and reached for her dressing-gown.
It was curious, she thought as she walked into her bedroom and sat at the dressing-table to cope with her eyebrows, how much she used to enjoy titivating herself before the war. But perhaps every pleasure could be turned into drudgery when it became part of the duty you owed to other people. Or perhaps she was simply cussed and as soon as she was told to do one thing would instantly want to do the other. All she wanted now, after almost eighteen months of her peculiar job, was to spend an evening dressed in her oldest, baggiest trousers and a tatty jersey, curled up on the sofa with a good book. How Gerry the studious would laugh if only Flixe were able to tell her. She herself laughed a little at the picture. And how her father would crow, she thought, not laughing at all as she remembered the innumerable occasions when he had castigated her for vanity or for flirting with his junior officers. Flixe tried to stamp on the memories and to concentrate on her task.
Her eyebrows reduced once more to smooth, perfect arcs above her deep-blue eyes, she took off the towel and started running her fingers through her wet hair to untease the knots before winding in the curlers. But she could not keep her father out of her thoughts, and she admitted to herself a little shamefacedly that her untapped resentment had played a large part in her almost instant acceptance of Peter Suvarov’s extraordinary proposition.
If her father had once said simply, ‘You look nice, Felicity,’ would she have felt it so important to drag every guest’s attention and admiration to herself and away from him … and from Gerry? It really was not, she silently assured her reflection, that she had wanted to take anything away from Gerry; but the number of times when they had been dressed almost identically and Gerry had been admired or kissed and Flixe criticised had made it impossible for her not to try to outshine her elder sister. How those criticisms had hurt! ‘Your socks are wrinkled; anyone would think you were a slum child,’ had given way as the years passed to, ‘Must you have more pudding? Your spots are bad enough already,’ and ‘That frock is cut far too low for someone with your figure,’ … ‘You’ve far too much lipstick on; please remember that your appearance reflects on me,’ and ‘Felicity, do you think that at this year’s Hunt Ball you could confine your peculiar instincts and avoid flirting too grossly?’
Gerry had had spots at fourteen, too, but they had never been the subject of luncheon conversation; she had worn her frocks as low and her lipstick as bright as Flixe, but Gerry could do no wrong (except on the subject of education). Even when she had been caught kissing someone in the bushes when she was about sixteen, she had been dealt with gently. Despite the gentleness, though, Flixe had never been able to forget the repellent expression her father had used in his rebuke: ‘You see, Gerry darling, the sort of men you’ll meet when you’re a little older simply won’t have anything to do with sucked oranges. You must keep yourself to yourself until a good chap falls in love with you and marries you.’
Oh, he was the most ridiculous man! Flixe mentally chastised herself for allowing his idiocies (no doubt rooted in some inadequacy of his own) to have any effect on her at all; but the constant harping on the theme of her untidiness, sluttishness, flirtatiousness and exhibitionism had bred within her an anger that had found no expression until the war had presented her with such a superb opportunity to get her own back.
The telephone bell shrilled through the small, cluttered room, and Flixe lounged over to a table by the window and picked up the receiver, listened for a moment and then said:
‘Yes? Darling, of course … What? Oh, well, just a kimono at the moment. Oh, good. Yes, so do I. What time will you come? … I can’t wait. A bientôt, then.… Yes, indeed.’
When she was ready, she stood examining herself to make certain that the dress looked as it should. Clingingly cut on the bias from pale amethyst satin, it outlined her figure as she stood still and yet the skirt swung seductively around her as she moved. Without vanity, she recognised how well the frock suited her, and she suddenly wished that it was Suvarov whom she was expecting. Inevitably came the memory of the one evening when she had had to act the part of his mistress.
They had walked embraced for about fifty yards to the entrance of the building. Once the doors had shut behind them, Suvarov had taken his arms from around her waist and then led the way to the lift and up to the office’s flat on the third floor. He had let them both in and poured her a glass of hock from the well-stocked fridge. As he handed it to her their fingers touched and she had looked up into his lined face.
She remembered how he had smiled, as though he had understood all the half-formed thoughts in her mind.
‘You’re an exceedingly beautiful woman, Felicity,’ he had said in that irresistible voice of his, which always made something within her shiver with pleasure. ‘And it would be all too easy to fall under your spell. But it would do neither of us any good, and it might do you considerable harm. I’ve learned my lesson in a hard and painful way, and I know that I mustn’t.’
Aware that she was blushing, Flixe had shaken her head and gone to sit in one of the uncomfortable chairs, sipping her wine.
‘In any case,’ she had said when she had been sure that her voice would have all the careless gaiety to carry off what she had to say, ‘one should never mix business with pleasure.’
He had taken her cue and they had talked their way out of the dangerous moment. But she had not forgotten it and smiled to herself as she remembered what it had felt like to stand within his embrace and feel his lips on her hair. That surely was more than he had had to do for the pantomime. Suddenly irritated by her fantasies, she tartly reminded herself that it was not he who she was supposed to be thinking about, and she had enough to do if she was to keep Jean-Pierre West-Grandison happy without succumbing to him completely. He was by far the most dangerous of the men in whom Suvarov was interested and the most dangerous to her peace of mind.
One of her straps was inching out at the shoulder of her dress and she was just pinning it in when the doorbell rang. Arranging her lips into a teasingly knowing smile that she found rather disagreeable whenever she caught sight of it in a glass, she went to open the door.
