Fiction Extract from The Girl From Provence

The Lysander was a responsive little plane, gratifyingly dependent on the wits and savvy of the pilot. Quite the thing to be rolling around in at night, carving a swathe through Orion’s belt, the thin, high-altitude air quickening the senses of Tonio’s battered old carcass.

The Yanks might have deployed all the latest tech in their shiny Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, but the craft were oppressive at 30,000 feet and the cabin pressure would weigh heavy on a man twenty years his junior, never mind a 42-year-old pilot who was dragging round a body that had endured one too many high-speed liaisons with the desert. The Brits’ little Lysanders were far more civilised affairs, ones a man could take complete command of, take charge of his own destiny. If death was to come, it would be Tonio’s own doing.

The full moon smiled its phosphorous grin, picking out crests on the sea below with an opaline glow. A luminous night that belied the horror of Hitler’s war.

Tonio steadied the throttle and unscrewed the thermos. Whisky-laced strong black coffee packed by his engineer. Nectar. He took a fortifying swig and set it back into the holder. Everything in its place; the thrum of the Bristol Mercury 9-cylinder engine, gyro horizon a reassuring parallel to the sea, a silvered cloud slung across the moon, ethereal enough to entertain Greek gods in all their capriciousness. This was his place in the world.

No chance of being assailed from below. The view was clear and not a battleship in sight. The strafers could appear from nowhere like birds out of the horizon at dawn, spitting fire and bombs. He stayed on high alert, confident he could drop and fly low, loop the jalopy back on itself at a moment’s notice and lose them if needed. Flying was still a relatively new phenomenon, and those Boche lads may be younger than him but he had the advantage of twenty years of flying on his side. There were few people in the world who could boast that, and most of these losers were torn from their mothers still wet behind the ears, given ten weeks’ tuition, then chucked into the air, dispensable as gnats.

Still on course, he retrieved a crumpled piece of paper he’d dropped on the floor, fished a stubby pencil out of his pocket and hastily sketched a German battleship, which transformed into an elephant in front of his eyes. Lumbering behemoth with a dark heart, he scribbled, then thought better of it and screwed up the slip of paper, discarding it carelessly on the floor.

Checking the position of the moon, and with the fading star of Mintaka at his back, he bore down towards the coast. The map sat untouched on the rear seat. No need to consult it. He knew the bay of St Raphaël like the back of his hand, from happier times where he’d taken up wide-eyed passengers on hot summer’s days to swing around the bay and marvel at the sparkling expanse. The makeshift landing field the agent had described and pinpointed on the map he also knew; it was part of his sister’s estate at Agay. The familiar clump of three umbrella pines just beyond the big house would be his guide if he flew low enough.

The Esterel coast glowed red, even at this time of night, and Tonio thought his heart would burst to see France again. Two years in exile in New York getting fat, hopelessly trying to shepherd his faithless, fragile and wayward wife from her worst excesses. He still proudly didn’t speak that infernal language, English, even after all that time.

Here he was, back in the homeland, where he was destined to be, in the air, defending his beloved France.

He took a wide curve in. The Boche had anti-aircraft bristling along the entire coast, so he overflew Le Muy, where he dropped a package of documents, hoping he’d been accurate enough not to wake some unsuspecting farmer with the package crashing through his terracotta roof, and doubled back to the Bay of Agay over land.

Flying at 1,500 feet, it was easy to spot the L-shaped landing lights he was looking for, a makeshift affair of brave men holding torches on sticks, simple but effective. He flashed the code in Morse and prepared to land, coming in lower than he needed to over the umbrella pines just to give the landing crew a bit of a jolt. That one always got hearts racing and he liked to make an entrance.

The responsive little ship bumped across the corn stubble and came to a halt just short of a stone shed that had placed itself presumptuously in the way of his trajectory. Nothing could faze him when he was in command of his cockpit, but the relief of being back in France nearly floored him as he stumbled out and onto the soil of the Var.

The torch bearers melted away into the night and, instead, out of the shadows stepped a girl who could only be a product of this exact place. Heavy, arched eyebrows, dark soulful eyes, tanned skin and a face chiselled into stark beauty by poverty and hardship. A mountain girl, judging by her ruddy cheeks and untamed air. He was tall, over six foot two, and he was used to towering over nearly everyone he met, but this girl could give him a run for his money; she was only a few inches smaller than him, willowy and athletic where he was stout and stiff.

She looked him up and down, surprised. It was a look that often greeted him when he stepped out of an aircraft. People expected the great aristocratic aviator and man of letters Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to shimmy out of his cockpit in a dashing flying suit, a gust of wind catching his immaculate scarf as he climbed down. The truth was, he’d rolled out of bed in the late afternoon and dressed in haste, and the flying suits were always a little too small for his big frame. His receding hair was dishevelled, his socks didn’t match, and he was probably still wearing his pyjama top and hadn’t noticed.

‘A warm welcome to the man who fell to Earth.’ She delivered the pre-planned greeting in a whisper, a suitably poetic choice for his return to France. Someone at the bureau had clearly read one of his books.

He handed her a playing card from the deck he always carried.

She fixed her intelligent eyes on his. ‘Ace of clubs?’ she said in a broad southern accent that filled him with nostalgia.

‘One is always the beginning of a mountain number. I think I’m right?’ he said.

She handed it back. There was a self-possessed quality about her that made him feel safe. ‘That’s classified information,’ she answered.

‘Quite right, soldier,’ he said. ‘Lead the way.’

It was like following a fallow deer, and his great clodhoppers felt heavier than ever in her wake.

‘I’ve met you, before all of… this. You were one of Marie-Madeleine’s entourage at a party I didn’t want to go to. I’m her seamstress, and she persuaded me to join the party after her fitting and I felt so out of place. You were pacing, looking longingly up at the skies, and I was there on sufferance. I hate parties, but now I’ve thought back to that moment so many times and wished those times back. We had no idea what we had.’

‘You’re Marie-Madeleine’s pet seamstress! I remember you. She loved to have “projects”, people she thought she could improve. But you were having none of it, looking surly amongst all that glitter and bluster, refusing to be impressed. Good for you.’

‘Not refusing. I just wasn’t. Impressed I mean. I only agreed to go because my best friend Joseph was playing in the band. He was Jewish. They’ve taken him.’

‘Is Jewish,’ corrected Tonio. ‘Don’t give up hope.’

An owl called. The girl didn’t answer, and he wished he could comfort her in some way. She looked so alone pacing along amongst the trees, a canvas satchel over her shoulder, walking so sure-footed and determined. In the old days he’d regale whole rooms with stories of being lost in the desert, hallucinating, ready to welcome death, which seemed sweeter than hope at times. Hope meant striving, he meant to tell her. He instead respected her silence, which melded with this strange twilight just before dawn. She was striving, everybody was, and no one knew how things would turn out.

At the edge of the clearing, she pointed to the house. He didn’t have the heart to tell her he could have found his way with his eyes closed.

‘Sterling effort, mountain girl.’ He smiled.

‘It’s Lilou, Lilou Mistral,’ the girl answered.

‘A good Provençal name, mademoiselle. Vive la France.’ It was good to say the words now that he was finally home.

‘And the Resistance,’ replied Lilou. And she was gone, untamed by him, and, he could tell, anyone else that might attempt it.

The house was in darkness and a lone dog barked a warning. That would be his sister’s Labrador, Coco, and she was swiftly silenced. They were expecting him.

Nelly was at the door to greet him, his beautiful, statuesque fixer, and lover. She was a duchess, and if you were to draw your idea of how one should look, you’d draw her. Tall, confident and bronzed, her fair hair in a perfect chignon that was never out of place, she looked like an aristocrat and fucked like the world was about to end. Which maybe it was. He felt a stab of desire and a recoil of remorse for his wife. Not that his wife knew the meaning of the word remorse. They’d cheated on each other so many times it was a joke. And Nelly, Countess Hélène de Vogüé, was the flipside to Consuelo’s coin. If Consuelo was all Latin-American volcano fire, Nelly was air, and he adored and needed them both in order to survive.

They kissed, and pulled apart. Tonight wasn’t a lovers’ tryst, it was war. She led him through to the shuttered drawing room, the enormous space dimly lit by a single candle. His sister was nowhere to be seen. Marie-Madeleine was sitting, hugely pregnant, at a table, feverishly making notes with Tonio’s old mate, and Marie-Madeleine’s lover, Léon, who was reading out a series of numbers.

There was a time when she’d have swept over to him, sparkling, to welcome him into the party, pressing a crystal champagne coupe on him, with a whispered, ‘You’ll need this darling, the place is a crashing bore, so buckle up.’

Tonight, she only looked up distractedly and waved, though they hadn’t seen each other in years.

He saluted. ‘Your orders, Madame la comandante?’

A man receiving the numbers and tapping them into a radio turned round and paced over to shake his hand.

‘Jean Moulin. I’m honoured, sir,’ he said.

Tonio knew he was to meet high-ranking Resistance officials, but not the man himself, the president of the National Council of the Resistance, ‘All mine, Jean Moulin. Without you, we’d all be dead.’

‘Many of us already are. All the more reason to keep going. We don’t have much time. Once the messages are sent, we’re moving on. We need you at Le Muy airfield in two days’ time to transport an agent back to the base at Alghero. In the meantime, you’ll stay here with your sister and I’m sure you’ll find a way to hide the aircraft in the field till then. It’s a tight take-off, but if anyone can do it it’s you.’

‘Just need a couple of stones at the end of the field to give the old girl a bit of momentum and I’ll be up in the clouds before the Boche take their morning shit, sir.’

That put a cracked smile on their weary faces. The least he could do.

With the radio operator otherwise engaged, Marie-Madeleine took a break, and Léon helped her to her feet. Tonio was afraid she’d snap, she was so thin, and the bump she was carrying seemed in danger of toppling her over.

They hugged.

‘Congratulations to you both,’ he said to Marie-Madeleine and Léon. No need to ask if it was Léon’s and not her husband’s. Anyone who knew them would understand.

‘Pretty difficult to run carrying this little bundle, but it’s a brilliant disguise,’ she said bravely. ‘Talking of little ones, we have a favour to ask. We have to keep moving, and we seem to have taken on a little more ballast than we can fly with,’ she added.

‘You were always a brilliant aviatrix, how so?’ said Tonio. He’d let Marie-Madeleine take the controls of his little red C630 Simoun many a time. She was more competent than most men he’d flown with, and she was better company than ever if they hit a storm or high winds. They both knew that danger heightened the senses in the most delightful way.

‘A little boy. A refugee from the rue Ferrachat, Roman Stavinsky’s son.’