high. And then, to her relief, she saw a familiar face.
‘Very nice, how much do you charge?’ Terrier smiled as he looked around the bedroom.
Vivi dropped the pot, relieved, and sank onto the bed.
Behind Terrier, the madam shook her head saying, ‘Please get her out of here quickly. We need this room back, and we don’t want trouble with the Nazis.’
But Vivi was shaking violently with the adrenalin coursing through her body. Terrier sat next to her on the bed. ‘Claudette, listen. We have to go, do you understand? We have to get you out, now.’
His voice filtered through as he laid his hand on her shoulder. Vivi nodded and barely remembered the trip out of the brothel and back to the train, where Terrier resumed his regular deception, linking her arm, giving the impression they were a couple to people around them. She tried to keep her head down as they scuttled through the streets. All she felt was regret.
But once they were in the carriage alone, he looked kindly at her.
‘It’s my fault,’ she spluttered out. ‘I should have retrieved the aerial. Now that poor family… what will happen to them?’
Terrier turned and stared out of the window. ‘It is war. It is a hard time. Though it was unfortunate you drew them to the cell.’
‘What?’ she snapped, staring at him, incredulously. ‘Someone uncovered the network?’
He eyed her warily. ‘We assumed it was you. One of the houses was raided last night.’
She shook her head. ‘I told the household nothing. I wanted to protect them.’ Then she remembered something. ‘Yvette followed me one day to a Resistance meeting. Do you think she told them?’
He lit a cigarette and handed one to her. Vivi took it, her hand shaking, but as she drew in smoke, it calmed her. Terrier was silent. He didn’t have to say anything more. Vivi sat there with her grief, not only with the thought of the family being tortured, or even murdered, but all the members of that cell. All their lives were now weighing down her conscience. Vivi felt young and ridiculous. What had made her think she could do this? Thinking it would be an adventure, that she’d be brave, that she’d change the world. And because of her foolishness, her ridiculous bravado, they were now all dead or on their way to prison. She sat back in her seat and felt numb.
‘We have to get you out in case anybody else has tracked you.’
She realised with a shock he was also concerned for himself. Yvette’s family knew of him, even though they didn’t know where he was from. Vivi hoped that would spare him. On the return trip to Anne-Marie’s, Terrier was silent, with just the rattle of the carriages on the track to comfort her. And when they got her out two days later by another boat, she felt nothing but grief and regret. Vivi had failed. She had not been careful, and now people were dead.
18
On arriving back in England, Vivi stayed for a short period at the manor with her family before being summoned to London to report to SOE. The guilt and shock she’d felt on returning to Britain had subsided into a latent depression that made her feel sick to the pit of her stomach. She was plagued with visions of the family who she’d put in harm’s way and the cell of brave Resistance fighters who had now been captured. Vivi couldn’t even think about whether her mistake had caused any of this and her outlook was bleak.
Her father had been tentatively positive when she had arrived home, clearly quietly thrilled she might finally be settling down. The manor her family lived in had many rooms and beautiful gardens, and it had already been fully converted into a military hospital, with young men arriving while she had been gone.
‘It’ll be handy having you here, Vivi, particularly because you speak so many languages. I think it’d be better for you to be a nurse than whatever else you were… doing.’ He’d said this over his newspaper, after breakfast the day she’d arrived home. He had punctuated his thoughts by nodding his head slowly, as if acknowledging the fact that he knew what she’d been doing was secret. Then added, ‘This is a much more acceptable occupation.’
Vivi had agreed, at least in that moment, to help out where she could. After all, she knew, even after all the training she’d been through, she had failed at her