The Night Gate

Chapter Three

She sits for a long time staring into space, lost in thoughts and memories that he suspects she will not share with him, before suddenly she turns as if just remembering that he is there. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, monsieur?’ And without waiting for his response, eases herself stiffly out of her chair. ‘You won’t mind if I do?’

Her listener smiles. ‘Not at all.’ He would prefer a coffee, but doesn’t want to put her to any trouble.

She is back in her seat a few minutes later, reaching down to lay her mug on the hearth. ‘Too hot to drink just yet. But it’ll not get cold there.’ Bony hands clutch the ends of the chair arms. ‘Now, where was I? Ah, yes. London. July 1940.’ And she resumes her story.

Georgette was a feisty young thing. Well, not so young, I suppose. Although twenty-eight is a very distant memory to me now. And you, too, I daresay. How can I describe her? Not tall, not short. A skinny girl with not much in the way of hips. A bit of a tomboy, I suppose. She liked to wear her hair cut short, which was not very fashionable for the time. Thick, dark, abundant hair. Knee-length pleated skirts and flat shoes, and a worn old leather satchel that she habitually slung from right shoulder to left hip. Wiry. Strong, of body and spirit. You would think twice about picking a fight with her.

She had been stranded in London for several weeks, frustrated and distracted by the news from France. Defeat at the hands of the Germans, an armistice that tore France in two, handing the lesser part of it over to Pétain’s collaborationist régime to administer under orders from the Third Reich. The Free French Zone, they called it. But there was not much free about it.

It was one of those sticky summer days in the English capital when the humidity hangs thick in the air, the sun almost obscured by haze in a nearly colourless sky. She was sitting at a table in the bay window of her mother’s Kensington home, sunlight slanting through the glass, holding suspended the sparkling motes of dust that hung in the still air. She had tried appealing to the more influential of her mother’s friends to find some kind of work for her in London to help in the war effort. Without success. And she was in the process of writing a letter to a certain General Charles de Gaulle. An old friend of her father from the diplomatic corps had told her at her mother’s funeral that de Gaulle had created a Free French Force based right here in London. He had, apparently, made some sort of appeal via the BBC to his fellow countrymen to resist the Nazi occupation. But she had missed it as, it seems, had most of her compatriots. She was only now writing to him as a last resort.

She had barely made a start on it when she was interrupted by the ringing of the front doorbell. Irritated, she padded barefoot across the parquet in the hall and opened the door to a uniformed telegram boy.

‘Telegram, ma’am,’ he said and thrust an envelope at her. ‘Sign for it here.’ He held out a lined pad for her signature and was gone, leaving Georgette to wonder who on earth might be sending her a telegram.

She carried it back to her seat at the table in the window and tore it open as she sat down. Only to gasp in astonishment.

Please attend meeting with General Charles de Gaulle at 11h tomorrow STOP 4 Carlton Gardens SW1 STOP

What was this? A response to her letter, even before she had written it? Was he a mind-reader? And this didn’t seem so much like an invitation as an instruction. In spite of the fact that she had been in the process of writing to him in search of a job, she felt herself bristle.

She knew nothing at all about this man. And yet he, it seemed, knew all about her — or, at least, exactly where to find her. Dark eyebrows furrowed over warm brown eyes.

The air was clearer the next day. A cooling breeze blew softly along Pall Mall, caressing Georgette’s bare legs. Legs that had seen precious little sun this year and were unusually white. Her face, too, which habitually tanned to a golden brown in summer, was pale and colourless. The spattering of freckles across her nose, a genetic inheritance of her mother, seemed all the more prominent. But she was pretty, and in spite of her pallor drew looks wherever she went.

At Waterloo Place she turned down to the left, her corn-blue skirt billowing in the breeze, and then right on to Carlton House Terrace. This was a leafy street, dappling sunshine on the pavement and the elegant frontage of the classical white-stoned Royal Society.

In Carlton Gardens, two French soldiers stood guard at either side of a wall built in front of the porticoed entrance to number four. She fished her telegram out of her satchel and showed it to one of them. He smiled and waved her inside, calling bonne journée at her back, and it felt good to hear French again.

Inside, everyone spoke French, and Georgette was glad to be speaking it again, too. A middle-aged woman in a dark business suit led her up shiny stairs to the first floor, where a door in the corridor to their right stood open. The chatter of a typewriter came muted from within. The woman knocked twice and ushered Georgette into the room. A younger woman sat behind a Royal typewriter that stood on a desk littered with paperwork. Her scrutiny of Georgette lingered a little longer than perhaps even she had expected, surprised possibly by what she saw — a girlish, short-haired young woman wearing a dark blue summer cardigan over an open-necked white blouse, a brown leather satchel pressing her skirt to her thigh. She waved a hand towards a chair. “He’ll be with you when he’s free.” As if, Georgette thought with a prickle of annoyance, that it was she who had asked for an audience with him.

Still, she found herself fidgeting in nervous anticipation, aware of the secretary’s frequently stolen glances, before finally she met the woman’s eye, silently daring her to keep staring. It was no contest. The secretary’s eyes fluttered back towards her keyboard. On such tiny triumphs was Georgette’s life built these days. Of course, she had no idea what lay ahead.

She was startled as the door suddenly flew open, and an enormous man stood framed in the doorway. He had to stoop to avoid the lintel. He wore a dark uniform, leather-belted at the waist, a grey shirt and darker tie whose colour was impossible to identify. His dark brown hair was slicked back and shining, parted severely on the left. His long face was dominated by an even longer nose above a neatly trimmed moustache. The severity of his expression was mellowed by a peculiar warmth in the orange-flecked brown eyes that he turned on Georgette. She stood hastily.

‘Mademoiselle Pignal?’

She nodded, barely able to take her eyes off the size of his ears. At the Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, she had been taught in portrait class that the top of the ear should be level with the eyebrows, the lobe with the bottom of the nose. De Gaulle’s ears broke all the rules, even for a man with such a long nose.

He jerked his head towards his inner sanctum. ‘Entrez.’

She followed him into a large office with tall windows that overlooked the street below. Sunshine lay in narrow strips across a desk that suggested it had only just survived a hurricane. The place reeked of cigarette smoke, and blue ribbons of it still hung in the sunlight.

He dropped into a captain’s chair that creaked as it swivelled, and a shard of sunshine cast the shadow of his nose across one side of his face. A large map of France hung on the wall behind him. A telephone stood on a small table to one side. He nodded towards the chair opposite and she sat down, perching on the very edge of it.

He gazed at her appraisingly as he prised a cigarette pack from a breast pocket, and tapped out the last but one. He lit it with an engraved American brass lighter. ‘Do you have any idea why you’re here?’

‘Should I?’

‘I would hope not. But it’s hard to know these days who you can trust.’ He tipped forward to sift through the chaos in front of him to extract a buff-coloured folder. He flipped it open and lifted the top sheet of several.

She inclined her head towards the folder. ‘Is that my file?’

‘It is.’

‘I’m surprised there’s that much in it.’

He looked at her very steadily. ‘So am I.’ His eyes dropped again to the sheet that he held between fingers that were also occupied by his cigarette. He read, ‘Marie Georgette Pignal. Born August 1912. British mother, French father, Georges Pignal, who served in the diplomatic service. Raised in Bordeaux, but fluent in English as well as French.’

Georgette sighed her exasperation. ‘Did you really ask me here to tell me things about myself that I already know?’

‘No, mademoiselle. I asked you here to gauge what lies unwritten between the lines.’ And he returned, undeterred, to the sheet in his hand. ‘It seems you achieved a remarkable score in your Baccalaureate. Forty-two out of forty-five.’

‘Does that surprise you?’

‘On the evidence of what I have seen so far, yes. But I have learned never to judge a book by its binding.’ He continued reading. ‘You graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, and’ — he paused to raise a sympathetic eyebrow — ‘your father passed away just weeks before you topped the competitive exam for the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. No doubt he would have been very proud of you.’

Georgette kept her lips pressed firmly together, biting the lower lip hard inside her mouth. The death of her father had blighted her adolescence, and the scar it had left was still painful to the touch. But she was determined to give nothing away to this cold fish opposite. Though something in his knowing assessment told her that she was doing a poor job of it.

He took the sheet in his other hand, freeing his right to take a long pull on his cigarette. ‘After graduation in Paris you spent two years at the Ecole du Louvre.’ He looked up. ‘What did you study there?’

‘Is that not in my file?’

‘I’m asking you, mademoiselle.’

‘The history of art.’

‘But you cut your studies short.’

‘I volunteered to help pack the works of art being evacuated from the Louvre in August last year. Then rather than go back to school, I volunteered for the Armée de Terre.’

‘And why did you do that?’

‘There was a war coming. I wanted to defend my country against a German invasion.’

He made a sound that might have been a chuckle, though she could detect no sign of amusement. ‘All on your own?’

She smiled sardonically. ‘Well, I might have had to, General, since the Under-Secretary of State for National Defence ran off to London when the Germans came within shooting distance.’

If there had been even the merest hint of amusement in his face it was immediately banished and he visibly bristled. ‘Pétain was set on capitulation.’ His voice had developed a bark. ‘An armistice. Collaboration. If I hadn’t fled, he’d have had me arrested for opposing him.’

Now she smiled, sensing a shift in the balance of power between them. ‘I know.’ She nodded towards the hand which held his cigarette. ‘And I know that you wear your wedding ring on your right hand because you almost lost your left to a wound during the last war.’

De Gaulle glanced self-consciously at the ring.

‘Since you seemed to know who I was, I took the liberty of informing myself about you on the way here. The cuttings libraries of Fleet Street are a gold mine of information, and entirely free to the public.’

He took another long, thoughtful draw on his cigarette, and as he exhaled, asked through the smoke, ‘So why was it you left the country?’

‘I’m sure you know that, too, General. I was given compassionate leave to attend my mother’s funeral here in London. Then came the invasion.’ She sighed, still deeply frustrated at the thought. ‘And I was stranded.’

‘You and I both.’ De Gaulle eased himself out of his chair and wandered to the window, still smoking, but gazing down now into the leafy square below. ‘And do you still want to serve your country?’

‘Of course.’ Indignation was evident in her voice.

He turned back towards her. ‘Let’s take some air, shall we?’

Traffic in The Mall was light, its red-coloured tarmac more apparent somehow in the absence of vehicles. Sunlight caught all the curves and angles of the distant Buckingham Palace in sharp relief as they walked east to west with Admiralty Arch behind them. The sun had risen high by now above the foliage of St James’s Park to the south and Green Park to the north. The trees that lined their route dispersed the light in ever-changing shapes on the pavement ahead of them.

Georgette felt tiny beside this man, barely reaching his shoulder, and she was much more intimidated by his size and presence out here than she had been seated across the desk from him. He seemed even taller with his kepi pulled down on his forehead, its brim casting a deep shadow across his face. They had been walking for some time, in what for her was an uncomfortable silence, before he spoke.

When finally he did, she was caught entirely off guard. ‘What do you know about the Mona Lisa?’

It took a moment to process her surprise. ‘I helped pack La Joconde for her journey to the Loire.’

‘To Château Chambord, I understand.’

‘That’s right. It was thought that everything would be more secure moved out of Paris. Safe from bombs, and out of reach of the Germans.’

De Gaulle grunted. ‘Nothing in France is out of reach of the Germans.’ He paused to light another cigarette, and she waited patiently for him until they carried on their way. Her curiosity was now aroused. ‘So you helped pack the actual painting?’

‘I did. In a custom-built poplar case cushioned with red velvet, which was then crated up. All the crates were coded using one, two, or three coloured dots to denote their contents. Yellow for very valuable pieces, green for major works, and red for world treasures. The Mona Lisa’s crate was stamped with three red dots, the highest possible rating. And was the only one in the red category to get that.’

‘I assume, since you studied the history of art at the Ecole du Louvre, you know all about its provenance?’

‘I know every last thing about La Joconde, General.’

‘Tell me.’ He kept his eyes ahead of him as he sucked on his cigarette, but Georgette reckoned that those big ears of his would miss nothing.

‘Mona Lisa is a portrait of the wife of an Italian nobleman, Francesco del Giocondo. Some experts believe the version that hangs in the Louvre was not the first that da Vinci painted of her. Others have speculated that it was really a feminised self-portrait.’

De Gaulle faltered mid-stride. He looked down at her. ‘Really?’

She grinned. ‘Highly unlikely, I think. There is so much smoke around this painting it’s amazing we ever get a clear view of it.’

He sighed and resumed his pace.

Georgette said, ‘What we know for certain is that La Joconde was painted in oils by Leonardo da Vinci on a panel of poplar wood, 77 by 53 centimetres, sometime around the year 1503, just sixteen years before he died. In 1515, da Vinci accepted the patronage of the French king, François Premier, and travelled to France on a donkey, carrying with him numerous sketchbooks and unfinished artworks, as well as the Mona Lisa herself. Some believe that it, too, was unfinished, and not completed until the artist was safely installed in France. The journey took about three months. Over the centuries the painting has been in the possession of not only François Premier, but Louis XIV and Napoléon Bonaparte, who reportedly slept with her in his bedroom.’ She grinned up at the general. ‘Well, not in the biblical sense.’

Not even the hint of a smile cracked his face. In fact, he almost seemed not to have been listening. Then suddenly he stopped and turned, and she found herself craning her neck to look up at him. ‘La Joconde belongs to France. Painted by an Italian, yes, but owing her very existence and survival to the republic.’

His vehemence surprised her.

‘And now the Germans want her.’

She frowned. ‘They do?’

He glanced each way along the pavement before speaking again. ‘More specifically, Hitler. He wants it as the centrepiece of a super museum he plans to build in his home town of Linz in Austria.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘British intelligence have sources in Berlin. They report that Hitler has commissioned an art expert to procure it by fair means or foul.’

Georgette was shocked. ‘He can’t! The world would be incensed.’

‘Which is why they won’t just take it. But nothing is more certain than that they will find a way. And we can’t let that happen. La France is the custodian of the most famous painting in the world, mademoiselle. We have kept her safe for centuries, through wars and natural disasters. And now we have to keep her safe from the Nazis.’

He crushed his cigarette beneath a shiny shoe and raised his face towards the heavens.

‘God knows, I have enough to do simply trying to save my country from destruction. Which is why I am passing the baton of responsibility for La Joconde to you.’

Georgette’s eyebrows shot up in astonishment. ‘Me?’

‘Beyond today I can devote no more time or thought to this. But I want it to be your raison d’être. The one thing you can do for your country that no one else can. Go back to France and keep her safe. Guard her with your life. I am in touch with Jacques Jaujard, the director at the Louvre. He will ensure a place for you as an assistant curator wherever it is that the Mona Lisa might end up.’ He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she felt a strange sense of destiny in his touch. He looked at her earnestly. ‘Mademoiselle, we are fighting the Hun not just for France, but for civilisation. This might be a small act of defiance in a world at war, but it does have a greater meaning.’ He took his hand away again. ‘What kind of training did they give you when you joined the army?’

The confusion of thoughts and fears that tumbled through her mind almost robbed her of the power of speech. She shook her head and pulled a face. ‘Basic fitness and weapons handling. But they were never going to let a woman with a rifle anywhere near the front line. They taught me to drive and told me I would be assigned to the catering corps.’

He nodded gravely. ‘In that case I’ll ask the British to find you a place on an SOE training course.’

‘SOE?’

‘Special Operations Executive. A newly formed British organisation for training operatives to be dropped into France to conduct sabotage and surveillance behind enemy lines.’ He cast a sceptical eye over her. ‘You’re going to have to learn how to handle yourself.’ For the first time she saw the hint of a smile in those enigmatic eyes. ‘And how to fall out of an aeroplane at ten thousand feet.’