The Caves of Perigord_ A Novel - Martin Walker [28]
“I didn’t know Mummy had told you about that,” said Jack. “But it won’t be for long. We get the old place back, once the invasion goes in and the war is over.”
“I sure hope the guys take care of it,” said McPhee, embarrassed. “Maybe I’ll know somebody in the brigade, tell them to look after it.”
“A pity you do not know somebody among the Germans who have been occupying my house since 1940,” said François.
In the silence that followed, as François smoked and McPhee stared out of the train window, Jack realized that a pattern had been established. The Frenchman needled the American, even when he did not mean to. There was a constant irony in everything that François said, and a bitterness that he did not bother to conceal. Jack took it equably. He had come across far odder types in the desert, and had learned to tolerate eccentricities in the regiment.
They were comrades in arms, bound together by duty and by a common mission, and he admired the Frenchman’s brains and grit even if he didn’t follow the chap’s obsession with politics. But the American seemed in his own way as clever and as well read as François, just as attuned to the political minefield they were heading into, but somehow less nimble than François in discussing it.
“I never asked you, Jack,” François broke in. “How do you speak French so well?”
“A governess I had before I went away to school. She was French. And then skiing at Chamonix in the winter, Cap d’Antibes in the summer, I kept in practice. Just seemed to have an ear for it. And never much liked lying on the beach, so I’d go and talk to the fishermen and the waiters,” Jack replied. “Then, the interpreter’s course was something to do while I was in Quetta. Couldn’t play polo all the time. So I was assigned to liaison duties during the phony war, based in a corps HQ at Longwy on your Maginot line. I suppose that’s how we first met, when they were looking through the files in Cairo for any odd bod whose docket said he spoke French when you came back with General Koenig’s boys, after Bir Hakeim.”
François nodded. “And you, McPhee. Your French is good, too.”
“Usual way, François. A sleeping dictionary, a petite amie. I was in France in 1939, best year of my life. Springtime in Paris, a girl, a crazy idea that maybe I could be a writer. Can’t figure whether I fell in love with her or with France, and while I was working it out, I ended up speaking a language I never could handle at school, although they tried hard enough. Hell, you learn a lot in bed.”
“Perhaps we should try to find you a pretty teacher of demolitions,” laughed Jack. “Then you’d sort out your fuses and your ammonal fast enough.”
“Explosions in bed,” grinned François. “There’s an idea.”
“Don’t worry about me, you guys. We have the best part of another year of training before we get sent in. Figure it out. We in the Jedburgh teams are meant to drop into France just before the invasion to help coordinate the Resistance. There’ll be no invasion this year, not with the American troops still coming in, and the new front in Italy. Besides, the summer’s just about over and we can’t cross the Channel with the storms coming on. We’d never be able to ensure supplies to the beachhead. So the invasion will be next year, May or June, ’44. So we’ll drop into France in May. That gives us nine, maybe ten more months. More training. Winter in Scotland, underwater demolitions training in those freezing lochs. I have all the time in the world.”
“You are right, of course,” François said. “Except for one thing.”
“What’s that”?
“The Germans. More precisely, the Abwehr and the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the Gestapo. They are not idle. They roll up the Resistance cells with a dismaying regularity. If the clever chaps in Baker Street who devised this whole operation think that there are too few networks on the ground for us to work with when we drop in, they may send some of us in early, to have the time to build up our own teams.