Light of the Moon Read online

  Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prize-winning Consider the Lily, international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, The New Mrs Clifton, The Museum of Broken Promises and Two Women in Rome. Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival.

  Also by Elizabeth Buchan

  Daughters of the Storm

  Light of the Moon

  Consider the Lily

  Against Her Nature

  Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit

  Perfect Love

  Secrets of the Heart

  Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

  The Good Wife

  That Certain Age

  The Second Wife

  Separate Beds

  Daughters

  I Can’t Begin to Tell You

  The New Mrs Clifton

  The Museum of Broken Promises

  Two Women in Rome

  First published in hardback in Great Britain in 1991 by Macmillan, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

  First published in paperback in Great Britain in 1992 by Macmillan, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

  This eBook edition published in 2022 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan, 1991

  The moral right of Elizabeth Buchan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 538 0

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For Adam, who built the Lysander so carefully, with love

  I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

  I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

  Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

  I parried; but my hands were loathe and cold.

  Let us sleep now . . .

  ‘Strange Meeting’ Wilfred Owen

  PART ONE

  MAY 1941–DECEMBER 1941

  EXTRACT FROM THE DIARY OF EVELYN, NÉE ST JOHN

  NOTHING IS SIMPLE. NEITHER LOVE, NOR TRUST, NOR hate, nor evil.

  It is no use fighting if it is at the cost of our humanity. It is no use surviving if, by the end, we are incapable of love.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘NAME?’

  ‘Evelyn St John.’

  ‘Any middle name?’

  ‘Violette,’ the girl said reluctantly. ‘I never use it.’

  ‘We like to be precise,’ said the man who had introduced himself as Captain Fuller. ‘Your age?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Evelyn replied without thinking and realised she had been rude. She had not meant to be, and she wanted this job – whatever it was.

  Captain Fuller extracted a paper from his file and began to read out details from it in a level voice. ‘Age twenty-one. Daughter of John and Eugénie St John of Manor Farm, Castle Cary, Somerset. Paternal grandparents dead. Maternal grandparents French and live near Tours. Brother, Peter, aged eleven. Educated at a girls’ school in Bath. Obtained matriculation. Unemployed since then. Bilingual and regular visitor to France. Interests include hunting.’

  Evelyn clutched her brown crocodile handbag. She could have added a few things for Captain Fuller: her father’s assets (considerable, but mostly in land), her mother’s confidential visits to a Harley Street consultant specialising in nervous depression, that their marriage was unhappy and that she and her father fought at regular intervals on everything from the rights and wrongs of the recent war in Spain to whether Evelyn could go to university or leave home to take a job. If Captain Fuller was interested in the fine detail, she could throw in several unflattering photographs of herself in the Tatler attending hunt balls and cocktail parties in an expensive but particularly hideous taffeta dress which her mother insisted she wore. She could also add the list of social occasions on which she had failed to shine and retired to read in the powder room, the painful episode with Arthur Jayford, and the titles of the books beside her bed – mostly French novels, chief among them Madame Bovary, the eponymous heroine of which, in her search for the delights of a grand and gaudy passion, fascinated Evelyn. She might have added that, in her most depressed moments, Evelyn felt she had been born cloven, an uneasy, unsettling mixture of French and English, belonging in neither country and suspected by both.

  This was her second interview in three days. At the preliminary interview a uniformed officer took details of her family and childhood and tested her written and spoken French. He then read out passages from the Official Secrets Act and asked her to sign them, enjoining her to tell no one about their conversation.

  Still mystified as to what it was about, Evelyn returned to her Aunt Fanny’s pretty house in Thurloe Square and asked if she could stay on for a few more days. ‘Goodness,’ said Aunt Fanny. ‘We’d better get you some decent town clothes.’ Pleased with the way her plan was developing, her aunt proceeded to plunder her daughter’s wardrobe in order, as she put it, to ‘refurbish’ the girl. It was she who had mentioned to a friend with influential contacts in the FANY organisation that she had a bright, healthy, bilingual niece kicking her heels at home and could she help? Fanny was fond of her brother John, but considered positively medieval his idea of keeping a daughter cooped up at home until she married. Evelyn needed to widen her horizons, and the war needed girls like Evelyn.

  So, dressed in a Harris tweed costume which was a little too tight, one of her cousin’s linen blouses, a straw hat and her only pair of silk stockings, Evelyn faced Captain Fuller in the Victoria Hotel, room number 238, in Northumberland Avenue. She still had no idea about the work on offer but imagined it was perhaps translation work of an important and confidential nature, the secrecy and vagueness surrounding the job increasing its attraction. She had been expecting to find a Captain Prader, but as Captain Fuller explained when he rose to greet her, he was standing in for his colleague who was indisposed.

  The room overlooked a quiet inner courtyard and was furnished with a table covered with a grey army blanket, two chairs and a filing cabinet. The grate was empty. The only note struck against its unredeemable impersonality was Captain Fuller’s leather briefcase and his copy of Picture Post.

  Captain Fuller got out a pipe and made a play of tamping the tobacco down into the bowl while he considered Evelyn. Tall, dark, green eyes, a trace of puppy fat. Very nervous. Captain Fuller was not at all sure he approved of this experiment to recruit women into the organisation. Captain Prader, however, was very keen: women put up with loneliness much better, he argued. They do not require company in the way
men do. They will make good agents.

  ‘Your maternal grandparents,’ he asked, switching to French – fluent, but careful and correct. ‘Where exactly do they live?’

  ‘In a village ten miles east of Tours.’ She answered him flawlessly.

  ‘What does your grandfather do?’

  ‘He farms and also runs a small printing business as a hobby. My uncle, my mother’s brother, helps him.’

  ‘Do you have any cousins?’

  ‘André. He is twenty-two. Madeleine, who is twenty. Yvonne is now sixteen, I think.’

  ‘And you are known in the area?’

  ‘Yes, indeed. My mother’s family have lived there for generations. We are an important part of the village.’

  ‘I see. Are you well known there?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I have been there every summer since 1934. Including 1939. I was there when war was declared but I managed to get a passage home quite quickly. My mother was anxious that I grew up speaking French. She sometimes came with me.’ Evelyn began to relax a little. ‘I have quite a few friends there, but, of course, we haven’t been in touch since—’

  ‘Tell me about your background.’ He did not look particularly interested. Evelyn dutifully recited more facts. Born at the family home in Castle Cary, her father joined up in 1916, was wounded and sent home. Her parents married in 1919 and she had been born in 1920 and sent to boarding school at the age of eleven. Her father forbade her to go to university (‘Damn fool stuff’) and refused to allow her to work. (‘Your place is at home, my girl.’) It was only the advent of another war that persuaded John St John to allow Evelyn to answer Aunt Fanny’s summons.

  ‘How does your mother feel about the situation in France?’ Captain Fuller edged closer to Evelyn’s political opinions.

  ‘My mother?’ What had her mother to do with the job? ‘My mother has found it difficult to settle in England and is deeply grieved about the fall of France.’

  Could Evelyn admit that Eugénie had made a mistake in leaving her native France? That she found it impossible to settle to a life where the high spot of the year was the hunting season: those busy, noisy meets when the sun shone through the bare trees in a red haze and frozen mist steamed in layers like a ballerina’s skirt? At these times, Eugénie felt her foreignness and tasted the isolation of the outsider. Or, so she said. A life where children were to be seen but not heard, where the talk was of coverts and spavins, and dog hairs a necessary accompaniment to interior decor. Where any woman over thirty suspected of attending to her looks was considered a little odd. Where the old, secure ways stretched complacently into the future.

  Far, far better if John St John had chosen a woman who would have fitted into the squire’s life he knew. Whose inner ear would have been tuned to the heartbeat of the English countryside. Perhaps it would have made the relationship between him and his daughter easier if he had been more happily married.

  ‘How do you occupy yourself at home?’

  Good question, thought Evelyn. I help run a large, rather dilapidated farmhouse. I deputise for my mother on her bad days and I dress myself up occasionally and drive to similar large houses where I am supposed to enjoy myself. Sometimes I do – but mostly I wish I was somewhere else. ‘I help my mother with our social commitments,’ she replied and met his blank gaze.

  ‘Reasonably discreet,’ Captain Fuller wrote on his form. ‘Not over-forthcoming.’ It was a promising trait. He looked up at his subject. He could not warm to Miss St John. She was the kind of girl his passionately Northern, working-class Quaker mother had distrusted when she was alive. Jack had seen plenty of the type when, a scholarship boy from grammar school, he had gone up to Oxford. Tallish, big-boned girls with plummy vowels, who turned him prickly and envious at the same time.

  ‘You have no other commitments, Miss St John?’ Captain Fuller’s implication was quite clear.

  ‘No.’ She sounded a little uncertain.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Evelyn thought of the fleeting but intense crush she had developed for one of her cousin’s friends in France. She thought of Arthur Jayford. Newly commissioned into the local regiment, Arthur had accompanied her to several dances. Once, at a hunt ball, she had permitted Arthur to kiss her because she was curious and had imagined she had found a kindred spirit. She tried hard to give him what was required as he crushed her bulky taffeta dress against his starched shirt, and failed. The feel of his lips and intrusive tongue had been disgusting and she pushed him away. Arthur repaid her rejection by dancing for the rest of the evening with Sophie Quinlan Jones and ignoring Evelyn, who went home and cried.

  ‘If you mean, Captain Fuller, do I have any attachments of a personal nature, then no, I do not. But why are you asking me?’

  He had the grace to look down at the grey army blanket. ‘My apologies, Miss St John. But I can assure you these questions are necessary.’

  ‘Snooty mare.’ That was his mother sounding off in his ear. Miss St John was a snooty mare. He wrote, ‘unattached’ in the file and blotted the ink.

  Jack Fuller’s real name was Pickford – this was an organization where real names were frequently disguised. His mother died when he was ten, leaving him alone with an ambitious father in the little Yorkshire town of Ripon. Being a solitary boy, there was no one to whom he felt he could turn to help him deal with his grief at her loss. It was not just the misery of a small boy longing for the comfort of a parent; his mother had been his guide to the world. He saw it through her eyes. The ‘them’ and ‘us’. ‘Us’ signified a magic intimacy, and the rest were either shiftless, snobbish or, casting the net wider, too rich for their own good. Or, the worst insult of all, ‘Southerners’.

  His father had not understood Jack’s real needs. He was too busy to see that a child requires an unselfish adult to make the world safe and was more interested in his own aspirations for his son. Pickford’s was a small grocery shop which made almost no money, but he knew what he was doing when it came to his only offspring. He sent Jack to elocution lessons (paying for them with his tobacco money), arranged for private tuition in maths and Latin and ensured Jack went to grammar school. After an initial rebellion, playing truant from school, Jack performed perfectly. He won a scholarship to Oxford with no trouble, dominated the Union and electrified his peers with passionate speeches in defence of socialism.

  He was spoken of as an up-and-coming young man, with a brilliant political career ahead of him. At Oxford, the plummy-sounding girls who went to bed with him, risking their reputations, thrilled to this young and fascinating student – and congratulated themselves on their social pioneering. Once, Jack smuggled a slim, wanton, impeccably bred beauty to his room and allowed her to seduce him before he knelt above her and took over. Afterwards they talked, and Jack began to expound his ideas of a free and equal society emerging from the ruins of the upper classes. She smiled patronizingly.

  ‘If you practised what you preach, you wouldn’t be so disgustingly eager to take me to bed.’

  Jack never saw her again, but he remembered her words and the unpleasant moment when he realised that he had been as guilty as any of social climbing.

  He took his time writing his notes, every so often snatching covert glances to help him ratify his impressions. An agent should never be too striking. They had to understand about camouflage. Be prepared to be in the background. Always. Miss St John, he had to own, was striking. She shifted in her seat, one long leg placed decorously beside the other, and he had a disconcerting vision of what she could become – a swannecked beauty with a generous mouth.

  ‘What is your opinion of the German nation?’ Jack tamped down the tobacco in his pipe.

  ‘I hate what it is doing to itself and to the rest of Europe.’

  ‘But you don’t hate the Germans?’

  ‘Not all Germans agree with Adolf Hitler.’

  He looked up from the file. ‘But they do, Miss St John, they do. Germany is intent on establishing a thousand-year old Reich. Su
rely the lessons of Czechoslovakia and Poland are obvious – let alone events since then?’ Deliberately, he added a wounding rider, ‘Even to the unsophisticated mind.’

  Evelyn reddened. She had followed political developments avidly since Hitler assumed power and needed no reminding of Poland’s agony. ‘We should have gone to her aid,’ she said. ‘The Poles believed we would.’

  ‘Really? Even with the Russians just waiting for an excuse to cross the Polish border?’ Jack stopped there, disconcerted. As a socialist with Communist leanings, he still found painful the memory of the Nazi-Soviet pact made in August 1939.

  Evelyn pulled on her gloves, hoping that he would bring the interview to a close. ‘If you will excuse me, Captain Fuller, I have another appointment,’ she lied.

  Jack ignored her. ‘What about France? What do you feel about her?’

  ‘What are we doing for France, Captain Fuller? Perhaps you would be good enough to tell me. You seem to be well informed.’

  Despite himself, Jack suppressed a smile. Miss St John seemed less flat a character when she was angry and her hostility set up a satisfying crackle between them. Evelyn leant forward on her seat. ‘We fled back across the Channel after Dunkirk, and we have sunk the French fleet. For months now she has been under German occupation. I know we are suffering at home. I know our troops are fighting in Greece and in North Africa. But what are we doing to help the French?’

  Instead of answering her, Captain Fuller gave two quick nods as if he agreed. He articulated his next question with care. ‘Would you ever commit murder, Miss St John?’

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘Yes, murder. And would you be capable of lying to and deceiving even your closest friends and relations?’

  In reply she shoved her arm through the strap of her handbag and rose to her feet.

  ‘Captain Fuller. I really must go.’

  ‘Would you?’ For the first time, Captain Fuller smiled, a smile that indicated sympathy. But the man was mad. Evelyn struggled to assume the expression she often adopted at social occasions to mask her real feelings.