The Girl Who Fell From the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

comes round occasionally, but she’s always complaining she can’t clean if I leave it in such a mess. Perhaps there ought to be cleaners who’ll come and clean your place before the cleaner comes.’ He laughed his own, absurd laugh.
    She sat in one of the armchairs and he brought her a drink, another gin that she dared not refuse because refusal would have made her a girl again and now she was a grown-up woman. She’d never been that before with Ned.
    ‘So tell me, what’s it all about?’
    ‘I can’t,’ she said.
    ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’
    ‘It’s secret. They made me sign the Official Secrets Act – and that was at the initial interview. Even the interview itself was secret.’
    ‘Oh, stop being mysterious. I’ll bet it’s translation or something. Or spying. Maybe they want you to spy on General de Gaulle.’
    She felt like laughing out loud. Ordinarily he was never interested in what she was doing. ‘Silly schoolgirl things,’ was what he used to say. And then when she said she wanted to read law at university, he was derisive about her choice. Law will teach us nothing except how to evade it, was his view of things. Science will teach us the future. ‘You don’t tell me what you do, so why should I say what I do?’
    ‘Because you are dying to, that’s why. And I
do
tell you what I do. I work on super-high-frequency electromagnetic radiation.’
    ‘But what’s it
for
? That’s what’s important. What do you do this for?’
    ‘I’m making a ray gun to shoot the Luftwaffe out of the sky.’
    ‘Don’t be silly. I know you’re not. That’s just science fiction.’ He really was a fool. He was always telling her things like that. A super-bomb that would blow a whole city to dust. A beam of deadly rays that would kill people with light. Rockets that would hurl high explosive from one continent to another through outer space. The kind of nonsense you read about in bad novels. ‘All I can tell you,’ she said, ‘is that this is my last evening in London. Tomorrow I’m off to Scotland.’
    ‘Scotland?’
    ‘Training.’
    ‘It sounds dreadful. Scotland’s all heather and haggis and men in skirts. But I suppose that if you’re off to the land of haggis we’d better find you a decent meal first.’
    The restaurant Ned had found was in Southampton Row. Apparently people from the lab went there quite often. The place was crowded, people pushing and shoving and trying to get a table even though the waiters insisted that there was none available. But Ned had reserved one, in the innermost depths,where they couldn’t be overheard and where she could finally do what she had intended all the time.
    ‘You must promise not to say anything to the parents,’ she warned him. ‘Or anyone else. You mustn’t say anything. Swear.’
    It sounded like one of their childhood games. He smiled condescendingly. ‘I swear.’
    ‘I mean it, Ned. This is serious. I’ve been recruited by this organisation. They’re sending me for training, and then …’ She shouldn’t be saying this, she knew she shouldn’t. And yet it was too exciting not to share with someone, and Ned was the only possibility. Ned had always been her confidant. She slipped into French. Perhaps it was safer to say it in French: ‘
Ils veulent m’envoyer en France
.’
    ‘En France! Pourquoi? Pas possible! Mon Dieu,
Marian
, t’es folle!’
    ‘It’s they who are mad, not me. At first I thought the job was something to do with language, as you did. Translation, or something. That’s what they led me to expect. But I was wrong. I’m off tomorrow for Scotland. Commando training. This is serious, Ned, completely serious.’ It seemed even more incredible now she was telling him. At least within the Organisation you felt caught up by its mad logic, but here, at a restaurant table with her brother sitting opposite her, the whole story seemed crazy.
    ‘So who are “they”?’
    She glanced round at the nearby tables.