The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer Page A

outbreak of war. She remembered walking with him in the English Garden in Geneva. She remembered other times and other places. Skiing at Megève. Sailing at Annecy. Sometimes it was difficult to get the chronology right. What had happened when? He and Ned used to play a kind of chess together, blind chess where each player could only see his own board.
Kriegspiel
they’d called it. They needed an adjudicator, to say whether a proposed move was legal or not. Madeleine always refused, so Marian was recruited. And she was willing, of course; happy simply to be in Clément’s presence. Her task was to watch the two boards, while each player saw only his own pieces and hadto makes guesses and estimates of what his opponent was doing. The play had been strangely disjointed, groping in the dark with incomplete information. Exactly like physics research, that’s what Clément used to say. Superposition and uncertainty. A quantum world.
    Above all, she remembered that day on the lake. Always that. A day of sun and wind and a strange, opalescent light. A day of dreamlike difference, where shock seemed normal.
    Clément.

VI
    They were given a free day. It was a rare day of sunshine and breeze, so Marian and Yvette decided to climb the mountain that had been the bane of their lives when they first arrived. Meith Bheinn was its name, a raw hulk of a hill that rose behind the lodge, guarded by crags and the ubiquitous Scottish bogs. But now the climb held no fears. Even Yvette had grown stronger, transformed from the city creature of the first days into someone who could walk with fair ease across this desolate landscape. So they slogged up the slopes, clambered over boulders, splashed, laughing through the marshy patches. ‘Look!’ Marian cried, seeing something scurrying amid the heather.
    Yvette looked. ‘What? Where?’ But the animal had gone. A grouse perhaps, safer keeping to the ground than rising and being shot, living a clandestine life.
    The climb took two and a half hours, and from the top they could see across the isles – Rum, Eigg and Muck close to the land and Skye lying like a shield on the edge of the Atlantic. They were too high for the midges. The wind blew cool but they found shelter in the lee of a boulder where they lay in the fragile sunshine and ate the sandwiches they had brought and talked about what might happen.
    ‘I think they’ll fail me,’ Yvette said. ‘I think they’ll tell me I’m not good for what they want.’
    ‘Don’t be silly. You’re doing fine.’
    ‘No, I’m not. They want people to run over mountains and ford streams and things like that. But what about the cities? What about the towns? That is where the people are. That is where the resistance must be.’
    ‘Maybe we’ll end up in the Massif Central.’
    ‘More likely we’ll be in Paris and we’ll wonder why on earth we were ever made to do this training.’
    It was curious how they used the collective pronoun.
Nous
. As though they might be together. But there would be no ‘we’, surely. They would be on their own.
    ‘What will you do when it’s all over?’ Marian asked.
    Yvette shrugged in that fatalistic, Gallic manner. ‘Find another husband, I suppose. A father for my little girl.’
    ‘In France?’
    ‘Of course, in France. Where else? Perhaps I’ll live in a big apartment, and you and your husband will come to stay—’
    ‘My husband!’
    ‘That Clément you were talking about.’
    ‘Clément’s too old for me.’
    ‘Maybe he was once, but age differences vanish as you get older. Look at you now. You’re not a girl any longer, are you? You’re a woman. You’re catching him up. And there’s a big advantage of having an older man.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘When he dies, you’re young enough for another one.’ They laughed at the idea, at the thought of men being their victims, lusting after them and being bent to their will.
    After a while the wind grew chill and they decided to go back, but as