He sat back on his stool and eyed her with interest. ‘Research?’
‘Yes.’
‘What kind of research?’ he asked warily.
‘I’ve been doing some work at the Imperial War Museum. A lot of photographs have turned up from World War Two and we were just interested in how the fishermen in this area contributed to the war effort.’ Her declaration came out in a jumble of words and she knew her face flushed. Nevertheless, he seemed to buy her lie.
‘Well, we were a big part of the war effort. My grandfather, John, used to sail his boat over to the north of France, taking all manner of people. He was even in the D-Day landings. He saw some stuff all right.’
‘Tell me about him,’ she encouraged.
His face lit up. She’d obviously struck on the tale that he invariably wanted to tell, because he settled into a comfortable storytelling rhythm. He reaffirmed what the museum owner had told her, about the way the boats were used to mingle with the French fishing boats. But then he brought up the story involving Vivienne.
‘What can you tell me about that?’ she enquired. ‘It sounds terrifying.’
‘It was terrifying for my grandad, John. He had to have three stitches in his head, and he always had vertigo after that. That Nazi hit him so hard, cracked his skull good, he did, struck him from behind. Didn’t get a chance even to defend himself. Fortunately, once he came round he had the whereabouts to get himself back to England, but he was very nearly caught.’
‘The Nazi was alone?’ she enquired carefully.
‘No, he went with a local girl. She turned up on the beach with him. My great-grandfather had previously taken her over before, for SOE was what was rumoured. It’s a spy network, you know, spies that went in from London and such. That’s what my grandfather did, he said, though no one told him what the people he was transporting were doing. But he said she was dressed in French civilian clothes and had a large suitcase, that probably had a radio or something in it. Her name was Vivienne Hamilton, from up at Hamilton Manor. Apparently she had a reputation even before the war as being reckless. The sort that thinks the rules don’t apply to her and that she can fight the war any way she wants. God knows why those London folks sent her.
‘Well, a year later when she had come back to work at the house, the fisherman had stopped taking spies in because it was getting too dangerous, but somehow she talked my grandad into it. Then she sneaked her Nazi lover out of the hospital – they say the door was left open in the library – and knocked out a guard.’ He grimaced with disgust. ‘Her family and the hospital staff didn’t want to believe that she’d done such a thing. But why would she knock out a guard from behind if she wasn’t part of the plot, if what she was doing was innocent? Surely they both would have been in cahoots, right?
‘Anyway, she knocked out a guard in the house, smuggled out this Nazi, and went down to the water’s edge, where my grandfather often stayed on his boat, ready to go out early fishing.
‘She talked John into having them aboard the boat, and because she’d dressed the Nazi in civilian clothes, he suspected nothing right away. But as they started to sail across, apparently my grandfather started to suspect something. He could hear them talking in a different language, not English, between themselves, and why would they hide that?
‘First, he thought maybe he was a Frenchman she was smuggling back to Paris, but then he confronted them, and Vivienne told him she was protecting the man because they were both in the Nazi Party. By this time the Kraut had changed into his uniform. As the sun was coming up, Grandad John turned round and got the shock of his life, seeing a Nazi in full uniform there on his boat.
‘My grandad tried to talk this Vivienne out of whatever she was doing, he’d known her since she was a young girl. But she kept repeating this was what she wanted to do. He asked her, ‘Is he holding you as a hostage?’ Then she shook her head, saluted, and shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’ And he knew she wouldn’t have done that if she’d been a hostage. She was a bad ’un all right. Somehow the Nazi had corrupted her and managed to turn her to the other side.’
Barney stopped and folded his arms. ‘Good job she didn’t come back alive. She’d have probably come to an unfortunate accident over here. Or spent the rest of her life in jail. But I mean, why did she have to knock out my grandfather? She could’ve escaped; he could’ve got back here unharmed. Didn’t have to knock him out, did they?’ Barney paused, shook his head, and slurped at his pint. ‘Anyway, there’re a lot of good stories as well. That’s the only one with a bad ’un in it.’
Sophie felt sick. It was one thing to suspect that Vivienne had become a Nazi, but to hear about her saluting and striking a man… Surely this did point to the fact she was either being manipulated or had converted to Nazism. One thing was for sure, this was fairly compelling evidence. If Sophie had still been practising law, Barney was not someone she would have relished cross-questioning. The one bright spot was she could now be pretty sure that at least at the beginning of the war Vivienne appeared to have been working for the right side.
Sophie pondered all of this as she sipped her drink, zoning out Barney who seemed to want to tell her another ten stories. She listened politely and nodded at the right times, but her mind was far away, trying to figure this all out. Surely, SOE would have put Vivienne through her paces to make sure she was trustworthy; something major had to have happened for her story to have taken such a dark and disastrous turn.
Sophie managed to slip away after about another twenty minutes, claiming she needed to get home. But Barney could’ve gone on for much longer.
‘Let me know if you need any more stories for your research. I’m here most days between midday and two.’
She nodded, and he must’ve cracked a joke about her as she left, because the bar dissolved into echoes of laughter behind her as she closed the door. She was pretty sure it was something crude and didn’t want to know what it was. As she strode home she thought about her great-aunt again and she wondered about what kind of a person she was. Even with what was pointing to a tragic end, Vivienne must have been confident and self-assured, not like Sophie, who had somehow lost herself along the way. Maybe as she uncovered more of this story she would find out where that audaciousness came from, what it was that drove Vivienne, and what motivated her to do such daring – and dangerous – things.
15
1943
As Vivi continued living in Paris she felt such a mixture of emotions, but mostly she swallowed down her feeling of being terrified and reminded herself she was doing this for England. Her country and the Allies were counting on her to do her job. In a way she was no different to the thousands of young men who marched off every day to do battle. She just wished she felt more sure of herself, more brave. She now saw all her bravado and rebellious ways of her youth through the lens of a harsh reality. And who she had been now seemed so vapid and translucent in the face of the courage she had seen in the French people every day. But nevertheless she kept moving forward, doing the best she could. Some days it felt exciting. Vivi remembered standing next to a German officer on a bus one day, her jacket padded with false ration cards, with her heart trying to thump its way out of her chest. But when he had nodded in her direction before exiting the bus, she had felt exhilarated because he hadn’t suspected a thing, and she had felt the win. She was a spy and she had just defeated the enemy in her own small way.