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

what Kowarski does …’ He seemed to cast around for what he wanted to say but couldn’t find the right words. ‘Anyway, if you did get to Paris, it’d be interesting to get some idea of what’s going on at the Collège. That’s all I’m saying.’
    ‘Who knows if that’s where they’ll send me? I’m not going on holiday, you know.’
    ‘Of course I realise that. Don’t be stupid.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘You’re still the same old Squirrel, aren’t you? Getting all hot and bothered.’
    ‘Well, you speak about it as though I could simply get on a train and go and see.’
    He laughed. The momentary anger died away. It was always that way between them – sudden flare-ups of anger quickly dying away. They moved the conversation to neutral ground – the days before the war mainly, that strange Arcadian world that seemed so distant now, a landscape distorted by the passage of time and the intense gravitational field of subsequent events: the house on the lake at Annecy, the chalet in Megève, the sailing and the skiing, the noise and the laughter when the two families, the Pelletiers and the Sutros, came together. Madeleine who befriended her despite being five years older; and Madeleine’s older brother Clément, who seemed touched by something like the finger of God. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieur. A physicist for whom a brilliant future was predicted. A second Louis de Broglie, they said, heir apparent to the king and queen of French science, Fred Joliot and his wife Irène Curie. Ned and he used to talk physics while Marian hung on their words and tried to understand. But they spoke of incomprehensible mathematics and obscure ideas and absurd enthusiasms. Let’s play Piggy-in-the-middle, they’d cry, only they’d call it ‘collapsing the wave function’ and collapse with laughter at the joke that she, a mere fifteen-year-old trying to catch the tennis ball, couldn’t share. And Consequences, they’d play Consequences, which Clément called Cadavre Exquis, the exquisite corpse. The Expatiating Physicist Preconceives a Stupendous Tintinnabulation. That was one of them.
    The waiter came and took their plates. ‘Look, I must go,’ she said, pushing back her chair. ‘I’ve got a long day tomorrow.’
    Ned was suddenly attentive, helping her into her coat and patting her shoulders, as though he understood that she really was going and was off to do something rather remarkable, andneeded his brotherly comfort however awkwardly expressed. ‘D’you know, I envy you?’ he told her. ‘At least you’re involved in something active. I’ve simply got to get on with my work and do what I’m told.’
    ‘These days that’s what everyone does.’
    They went looking for a cab. There was nothing near the restaurant, and so they went towards the West End. It had come on to rain, and the flagstones glistened in what little light there was. She turned up the collar of her coat. Someone barged into them and shouted at them for getting in the way, then staggered on, muttering to himself. There were more people about now, shadows moving through the dark, voices talking and laughing but detached from their shapes so that the sounds seemed disembodied, the expression of the city itself. There were rumours about what happened in the blackout. Sometimes, it was said, people had sex there in the street, while strangers walked past without noticing. There had been stories about this among the girls at Stanmore. One of them had even claimed to have done it herself. A knee-trembler, she called it; and the other girls had laughed.
    ‘Father thinks I should give up what I’m doing,’ Ned said. ‘He thinks it’s an easy way out, and that I should be in uniform like you.’
    ‘I’m sure he doesn’t.’
    ‘He abandoned his job in the Foreign Office in the last war.’
    ‘And ended up sitting in a gun emplacement behind the lines and losing half his hearing.’
    ‘At least he