Commander Amanda Nightingale Read online

  Time flew. It was all so easy. So easy. To smile and smile, and be vilaine. The Mayor was speaking now in a tone of slightly psychopathic irony which over the years she had come more and more to detest.

  "And what they are saying now, ladies and gentlemen, is this. They are saying, it wasn't us. We didn't know. We were against Hitler from the beginning. We simply couldn't understand it when the telephones of all our Jewish friends did not answer any more. And we are believing it again, as we believed it in the nineteen-twenties during the Weimar Republic. And we will probably believe it all over again next time if we are foolish enough to let them pull the wool over our eyes. Now I want you to judge one thing. We have all read in the papers about the inhuman courage of our friend and Member. It was not the Gestapo who ill-treated her. It was not the S. S. It was not the S. A. It was not any other of the concatenation of diabolical initials that made the Nazi Party into the vile thing it was. It was the German Army officers, those strutting fops, who try to behave like Englishmen when it serves their purpose, and who, when victorious, torture and murder, rape and pillage…"

  Thought Amanda, the vulgar hypocrite is on his favourite hobbyhorse again, and she tried to resume her dreaming but his voice was too strident, and she wished he would shut up. All at once, as the hall hushed, he did conclude, with words dripping in the most unquestionable sincerity. "And now, I present you, humbly and at the same time proudly, my dear political opponent, and even dearer personal friend, Amanda Nightingale. Mrs. Nightingale, Britain salutes you. France salutes you. The whole Allied world salutes you, and I hope you will not consider it unimportant that we, your friends in Northminster, salute you."

  Amanda rose to a crash of acclaim that might have made any dozing veteran at the tables think he was back on the Somme. It held, increased, and became unmanageable in a thunder of «Bravos». Lights danced in Amanda's eyes as the photographers scampered along the front of the platform, like mice along wainscoting, and flashed at her as they passed. It was all so easy, Amanda thought. I am doing it in my sleep. She waited, smiling for a full three minutes. And then, as it gradually slowed, she turned with poise to her neighbours at the table of honour. A smile, deprecatory, tight-lipped, to the Ambassador and the Minister. To her husband, his hands clapping upward toward her face, a friendlier smile, more intimate. To her father, the future Bishop of East Anglia, a different smile, respectful but loving. He was a man of such probity that she was sure if he ever committed even the tiniest sin, or had even a slightly improper thought, he would arraign himself before the tribunal of his own conscience for prolonged shriving. She knew every thought in the dear old man's head, and noticed that he was applauding a fraction less heartily than the others. She could guess why. Heroism was all very well, he was thinking, but daughters of the cloth of the Church of England had no business getting involved in madcap adventures which result in rape, or at least not to the extent that it gets into print. To her younger sister, Jennifer, Amanda had a different smile still, a warm, huggy, big-sister smile. Amanda noted that the raving little nymphomaniac had left her husband babysitting, so that she could stop on the way home and get fucked by the municipal gardener.

  Gradually the noise ebbed like a great grey wave, and the silence became tense, punctuated only by coughs.

  "Mr. Mayor," Amanda said slowly, "Votre Excellence, Your Grace, ladies and gentlemen." Her voice was surprising for a well-built, mature woman in her thirties. It was high, bell-like, like a girl's, meticulously accented, and beautifully vowelled. It was a product of her education, and some young men around London were unkind enough to refer to it as the Cheltenham squeak. "In the past few years I have been flattered by much undeserved praise (shouts of "No"), and this unbelievable reception tonight makes me particularly humble. Oh yes. I recall when I was invited to Moscow in 1945, and visited the Bolshoi with Marshal Stalin, I was warned by the British Ambassador that it was proper in Russia to applaud oneself while one is being applauded. I did it, but I thought it inappropriate then. It would be even more inappropriate now (surprised silence, then roar of laughter.)

  "Now, my friendly enemy the Mayor, not I, introduced politics a few moments ago, but no politician ever sees any harm in that (laughter). But seriously, I do wish to take up with him the moral issue that he raised. We are not at war now with the Germans. We defeated the Germans unconditionally, and it seems to me we have unconditional responsibility for their future (very mild applause). After all, if we are to judge the Germans by those we know, we must also judge them by the beloved German lady we have in this hall tonight, Lady Goodman (loud applause, acknowledged with a slight bow by a dark-haired woman in thick glasses at one of the tables), who is one of the pillars of our community.

  "I have at home tonight, by the grace of our victory in the recent war, three children sleeping peacefully. At least I think they are sleeping peacefully (laughter). They had better be (loud laughter). I do not believe small German children, in their beds now, are Nazis. I think they are human beings like mine. If my children grow up with no better philosophy than 'hang the Germans', or 'the only good German is a dead German', then I consider we are morally lost and the war was fought in vain. Jesus said…"

  * * *

  The joy of Guy Nightingale's life was the new Rolls Royce Silver Dawn, one of the first cars off the postwar assembly line, one of the perquisites he inherited from his father along with the chairmanship of the Northminster Brewing Company. The great queen sped in serene silence through the black spring night. "You were marvellous, Amanda," he said. "Simply marvellous."

  Amanda yawned.

  "It has been a long day," said Guy. "I don't know how you stayed so fresh. I must say I thought you laid it on a bit thick about the Germans. Considering everything, I mean. I thought your father was going to have a fit. You know what he thinks about the Germans. It isn't as if even your pal Lady Goodman was a member of his church."

  "I don't know which of us," said Amanda, "Tom Tracey or I, hates the other worse."

  "I wouldn't worry. He won't survive the municipal elections. You seemed very dreamy during the speeches. What was on your mind?"

  "Oh thoughts," said Amanda. "Thoughts."

  The Rolls turned into the park gates and hissed along the pebbled driveway to the Nightingale house. As all the servants were asleep, Guy unlocked the door and they climbed the stairs silently. Amanda tiptoed to the door and peered into each of the children's rooms in turn, and listened to reassure herself of regular breathing. In her own bedroom she found Guy pouring himself a last whisky and soda. He had removed his black tie, wing collar, and trousers, and stood in his collarless shirt with his black socks still held up by garters. At the dressing table, she unzipped her Stiebel dress and devoted herself to a jar of cold cream. She was aware of Guy in the mirror, standing with his Scotch and looking at her with an expression that, over the eleven years of their marriage, had become as familiar to her as the Lord's Prayer.

  "I am going to London tomorrow," she said. "If I have to see another good lady of Northminster mentally taking my clothes off, I shall be sick."

  "With the Goodman woman, I suppose."

  "Probably."

  "You know what I think of her, but there's nothing I can do about it." Guy kept looking at her. "You are very beautiful, Amanda," he said.

  Liar, Amanda thought to herself, smearing her cheeks. I am nothing of the sort. I am growing old. I am growing old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I have lines in my face. My breasts are held to my chest by little blue veins. When I sit like this I have an incipient potbelly, and sometimes, when it is cold, I suffer from piles. So much for Amanda, the glamorous I. I am the prey of worms. I am also drunk.

  This last came as quite a surprise to herself. Amanda was drunk so rarely that the question of whether she might at any time become, by drinking, drunk, never occurred to her. The excitement of the day, the cocktails, the champagne, had caught up with her, quietly. She felt most odd, but she said nothing.r />
  She reached behind to unhook her brassiere, and Guy appeared behind her to handle her. In her preoccupation with her unexpected and novel condition, she had forgotten Guy.

  "Do wait," she said, rose, swayed slightly, and went into the bathroom to make adjustments. Afterwards she lay back with eyes closed, and the room went around as Guy covered her with his ginger, freckled body. At times like these her mind was usually formulating her schedule for the next day, the children's dental appointment, or their football boots, her next committee meeting, the Cathedral social, the hat she would wear at lunch to out-hat the other ladies, the selection of the next play for the Northminster Repertory Theatre. Tonight, almost against her will, she found herself being drawn back into the affairs of the moment.

  "Why Guy!" she murmured.

  But, of course! she said to herself, I am Northminster's public, ambulatory aphrodisiac, by gracious sanction of monarch, state, fourth estate, and Church. I have the whole community inflamed. All the men are imagining they are raping Amanda Nightingale. Lucky, lucky ladies of Northminster tonight. Guy too. He is fingering my scar, thinking of the wicked Germans who inflicted it. Funny, the amount of dust that flies when a book, long closed, reopens.

  For more than a year after the war, her experiences had dominated her dreams and her waking thoughts alike, until she realized that dwelling on the past was the foundation on which failure is built. She said to herself one day, put it out of your mind, Amanda, once and for all. And she had done so. It must be years now since she had thought, in detail, of those macabre days and nights of pain, of the razors that sank into her flesh, of faces looking down into her face, very close, faces as pale as limes, lips moving silently, the way lips move through the arias of the opera, but in tune to the rhythms of her pain. And not all the faces were the faces of men. The women smiled more when she cried out, wiped the perspiration from her forehead and her upper lip before continuing, with infinite patience, to hurt her more. Who did what to her, and when, and how, were details that had become hopelessly and inextricably confused in her mind. She thought of the German with the whip and the clownish name of Bimbo, lying dead in the streaming moonlight; and the deep-set, combat-weary eyes that seemed to sleep a sleep with each blink of the Frenchman, Lucien, also dead.

  The champagne had made her head spin. She was drunk. That was why she was thinking such thoughts. She thought of the other time she fell, drunk, bringing crockery down with her, crashing on the floor, and her focusing and unfocusing eyes were on the level of the jackboots. She held Guy tightly because she was suddenly afraid that if she let go of him she might find herself back there…

  Chapter Two

  It is doubtful whether Number 64 Baker Street will ever be as famous as Number 221B, and it is even debatable whether as much was ever accomplished there as in the chambers of the great detective. But from 1941 onward, it was the headquarters of the "Special Operations Executive", or S. O. E., or, as its members called it more" simply, "the Firm", whose purpose was to train men and women to lead the resistance groups inside occupied Europe, and sabotage the German war effort from within. These brave people, of all Allied nations, were transported, disguised in civilian clothes, by airplane, parachute, fishing boat, into a land controlled by the Germans, policed by malevolent militias, sown with collaborators and informants. In this nether-struggle the rules of war ceased to pertain. The members of the Firm neither abided by the rules of war themselves, nor in the event of capture, did they expect the Germans to. It was a task in which death waited at every street corner, in every encounter. And, as in all such missions, the volunteers far exceeded the numbers required, and had to be most carefully screened.

  It was for one such mission, in the spring of 1944 shortly before D-Day, that four people assembled in a ground-floor office at 64 Baker Street, and held their final briefing. One was a Frenchman, one an Irishman, one a Canadian, and one an Englishwoman, Amanda Nightingale.

  It was raining. Rain fell as it can only fall in the season which the Victorian poets found so salubrious. It fell in grey, unvarying sheets on the street outside and on the windowpanes. Within the office there was silence, the briefing was over, but no one moved. Elsewhere in the building, army boots crashed on bare, ill-used floors, people shouted; muffled, in this single pool of silence, one could hear the telephones ringing, and then moving to the full stop of many «hellos», uttered in trim, feminine, military voices.

  The four people, all in the uniforms of different services, looked out at the rain and the sodden traffic swishing up and down outside. The great clock on the wall ticked and, in the distance, telephones continued to ring. At the executive desk, a French officer sat, his mind far, far away, jonglettant, as he would have said in his own language. A hand waved in front of his face like a fan would probably not have raised a blink. Major Schneider's thoughts were not on Baker Street even though he was considering it, rapt. The ash on his cigarette hypnotized the other three as it grew longer and longer without falling.

  Lucien Schneider was one of those rare war heroes, men of lower rank, whose exploits nevertheless grew so legendary that they burst from the carapace of their own propaganda and became the common property of friend and foe alike. This small elite included Bader, the Englishman; Skorzeny, the German; Murphy, the American; and Schneider, the Frenchman.

  Schneider was not a professional soldier. He had been a schoolteacher before the war, and at the time of the invasion of France he was a sergeant. When he heard of France's surrender, he smashed his platoon radio, so that his men should not know, and continued to fight for three days until the platoon was overrun. Badly wounded in the leg, Schneider was taken prisoner. Within six months he had escaped and made his way to North Africa, where he was commissioned in the Foreign Legion. When he discovered that the Legion was remaining loyal to Petain, he escaped again and joined General Leclerc's Free French in the Cameroons. He was present at Bir Hakeim, the greatest single French battle of the war.

  Later he was flown to England, assigned to the S. O. E., and sent to France to organize the Resistance in the key Normandy sector. Time and again the Germans swept whole departments of northern France, thousands of men with one single objective: find «Lucien» — as he was known. And even as they passed bridges were blown up, troops trains derailed, arsenals stripped of their weapons, strongboxes of their cyphers. Then Lucien, languid, unrecognized by the populace, would reappear in London at the headquarters of General de Gaulle's Fighting French, or at Baker Street, and even occasionally at 10 Downing Street where, in general, French visitors were few and those few scarcely welcome.

  No one would confidently have guessed Lucien Schneider's age. He might have been thirty, or fifty. He was lean, lean as the Ancient Mariner. His face was heavily lined, his blue eyes sunk so deep in their sockets as sometimes to seem invisible, his cheeks so empty that the jowls could have been those of an old man. But his smile was a boy's, so rich, so full of humour and understanding; one could see why a man might die just to earn it. He was wearing the uniform of a major in the Tirailleurs, with many ribbons in green and yellow, and a pale blue fouragère on his shoulder.

  "Bon," he said, pulling his eyes from the rain, and making his three subordinates almost spring to attention in their seats. Like a magician he picked the cigarette from his lips, one fraction of a second before the ash would have fallen, and stubbed it out into an ashtray already noisome with stubs.

  "Little else to say," he said. "I call you by your names for the last time: Captain O'Donovan, Captain Mazursky, Commander Nightingale. Good-bye to all that. We are now Lucien, Andre, Claude, Yvette. Those are the names the Maquisards are expecting to receive. They do not know your real names. Your real names have ceased to exist. My last advice is, take no risks. You can't afford to, for everybody else's sake as well as your own."

  Captain Mazursky, in the uniform of Princess Pat's Canadian Light Infantry, tried to be jocular. "How about you, Lucien?"

  "Me?"

&nb
sp; "How about the risks you take?"

  Lucien regarded him with his deep-set eyes in an expression hard to define. "You have had plenty of combat experience, Claude. You know as well as I do that the dead man is the man who took one risk. Not one too many. One is too many. If you remember that, we will all come out of this war alive. Be especially careful until I join you. I will be in France before you. But our rendezvous is not until three days after you land." He smiled his boy's smile. "As you know, in France it is considered bad luck to say 'Good luck'. One says 'Merde. Merde, alors."

  He held out his hand, and the three rose. "Not you, Yvette," he said. "I have more to say to you."

  Amanda sat down again, apprehensively. The other two adjusted their berets, saluted and left. Then Lucien was alone with Amanda, the rain falling outside and the smell of chalk from the blackboard heavy in the nostrils. Amanda had suspected all day that such a thing would happen. From the pocket of her uniform she took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. She wore the uniform of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, generally shortened to FANY, a patrician organization founded in 1907. On her shoulder she bore the crown of Commander, equivalent in rank to Major.

  Lucien had sunk back into his contemplation of the rain and seemed in no hurry to talk. Amanda felt a nerve twitching at the corner of her mouth and prayed it did not show. She happened to know something that Lucien did not know she knew; namely, that O'Donovan and Mazursky had petitioned him to have her replaced by a man. They argued that as it was their first mission to France, the presence of a girl would add too much to the anxieties and responsibilities. They said that they had nothing against Amanda personally, but she knew this was not true. They both disliked her and believed she had been given the assignment because she had pulled strings with important people she knew socially in Whitehall (which, in truth, she had).