Code Name Verity(68)

When the tide turns. And it will.

One thing I have noticed, reading over this story, which not even Hauptsturmführer von Linden has noticed, is that I have not put my own name down on anything I have written in the past three weeks. You all know my name, but not, I think, my full name, so I am going to write it down in all its pretentious glory. I used to like to write my full name when I was small – as you will see, it was quite an accomplishment for a small person:

Julia Lindsay MacKenzie Wallace Beaufort-Stuart

That is what it says on my real papers, which you have not got. My name is a bit of a defiance against the Führer all on its own, a much more heroic name than I deserve, and I still enjoy writing it out so I will write it again, the way I write it on my dance cards:

Lady Julia Lindsay MacKenzie Wallace Beaufort-Stuart

But I don’t ever think of myself as Lady Julia. I think of myself as Julie.

I am not Scottie. I am not Eva. I am not Queenie. I have answered to all three, but I never introduce myself by those names. And how I have detested being ‘Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart’ these past seven weeks! That is what Hauptsturmführer von Linden usually calls me, so polite and formal – ‘Now, Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart, you’ve been very cooperative today, so if you have had enough to drink, let’s begin on the third set of codes. Please be accurate, Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart; no one wants to have to ram this red hot poker through your eyeball. Could someone please sluice out Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart’s soiled knickers before she is taken back to her room?’

So even though it is my name, I don’t think of myself as Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart either, any more than I am Scheherazade, the other name he’s given me.

I am Julie.

That is what my brothers call me, what Maddie called me always, and that is what I call myself. That is what I told Marie my name is.

Oh God – if I stop writing now they will take this paper away, all of it, the yellowed recipe cards and the prescription sheets and the embossed stationery from the Chateau de Bordeaux and the flute music, and I will be left with nothing but to wait for von Linden’s judgement. Mary Stuart had her Skye terrier – what comfort will I take with me to my execution? What comfort for any of us – Marie, Maddie, the cabbage-stealing scullion, flute girl, the Jewish doctor, alone at the guillotine or in the air or in the suffocating freight wagons?

And why? Why?

All I have done is buy myself time, the time to write this. I haven’t really told anyone anything of use. I’ve only told a story.

But I have told the truth. Isn’t that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.

I have even remembered some electrifying famous last words which I have been saving up to finish with. They are Edith Cavell’s, the British nurse who smuggled 200 Allied soldiers out of Belgium in The Last Lot, the 1914–1918 war, and who was caught and shot for treason. Her very ugly monument stands not far from Trafalgar Square and I noticed it, not bombed but buried in sandbags, when last I was in London (‘The Last Time I Saw London’). Some of her last words are carved on the statue’s plinth.

‘Patriotism is not enough – I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.’

She has ALWAYS got a pigeon on her head, even under the sandbags, and I think the only reason she manages not to feel any hatred for those flying rats is because she has been dead for twenty-five years and doesn’t know they’re there.

I think her actual words were, ‘I am glad to die for my country.’ I can’t say I honestly believe such sanctimonious twaddle. Kiss me, Hardy. The truth is, I like ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ better. Those are fine last words. Nelson meant that when he said it. Edith Cavell was fooling herself. Nelson was being honest.

So am I.

I am finished now, so I will just sit here writing it again and again until I can no longer stay awake or someone discovers what I am doing and takes the pen away. I have told the truth.

I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told the truth. I have told