Chapter Text
Ever since she could remember, Jean had needed to feel tethered to the ground. She could recall it from her earliest childhood days; at 4, her mother holding her upright as she toddled barefoot through the fields behind the farmhouse, barely taller than their little flock of sheep. At 10, wiping mud down her pinafore after being allowed to join her father working the fields for the first time. At 16, on the outbreak of war, leading a troupe of city evacuees through the woods to teach them how to play amongst the trees.
At 19, a freak accident on replay in the back of her mind, ignoring the rope burning her palms as she lowered her father into the ground.
It was why she adored her basement office, despite Charles’ frequent sneezing as the dust aggravated his allergies. She wondered if her father could see her from down there, existing on the same depth as his final resting place. Sometimes she would take off her shoes and feel bedrock beneath her feet, the gentle claustrophobia of brick walls and ceiling above embracing her when the world felt too cruel. The whole of London could see her from her neglected desk in the typing pool; here, hidden beneath the ground, she was safe.
In a second-floor Shoreditch apartment, she was not. With no source of income, they’d been taken pity on by Jean’s aunt and uncle and been forced to move down to London. The land had been sold and the farmhouse packed up; her father’s sheep sent to slaughter and part of her heart along with them. Jean had exchanged her old bedroom in the farmhouse attic for what had once been her uncle’s private study. The tiny room was just about big enough to squeeze in a twin bed, the rest of the space taken up by a sense of intruding where she didn’t belong.
A sense that had never been more present than when she unlocked the apartment door on returning from work one evening. Her mother and aunt sat at the kitchen table, regarding her with serious looks as Jean slunk into an empty chair.
“Jeanie,” her mother started. “I know that this isn’t going to be easy to hear. But we feel that the time has come for you to reconsider your employment in the war office.”
Every breath of air was stolen from her lungs. “No,” she stammered, staring at them in shock. Dread rose in her chest; this couldn’t be happening.
“We had an agreement, Jeanie. We agreed that you had one year to work there, and then you would take the housekeeping job that Aunt Alice was kind enough to find for you. I’ve been very generous by giving you an extra four months to make sure you’ve truly got it out of your system.”
The disgust on her mother’s face somehow shocked her out of her panicked trance. “But I love my job. You can’t make me give it up just to be some posh family’s maid. I’m making a real difference in there!” she protested, ordering herself strictly not to cry.
Aunt Alice sighed, giving the carefully constructed appearance of someone who’s patience was only just beginning to run thin. “I’m sure you are, dear,” she said, clearly not believing it. “But it’s all done now, your little project –”
“The Operation.”
“Don’t talk back,” Aunt Alice snapped, a momentary lapse in her artificial demeanour. “Whatever you want to call it, it’s done now. They don’t need you anymore.”
Jean sobbed out a tearful laugh. “Mother, you can’t imagine the chaos that would happen in there if they didn’t have me. I thought that Miss Leggatt told you that?” She’d been saved before by Hester telephoning her mother during Mincemeat’s most demanding weeks, convincing her with an only-slightly-elevated report of Jean’s importance. She hoped desperately that the reminder would work a second time.
To her despair, her mother shook her head. “Jeanie, what that woman told me is precisely the problem. You are defiling your femininity in that place, ordering around men as if you were one of them. I don’t want to see you become an old spinster like her in thirty years’ time.”
Jean felt her blood boil. She was used to the constant critique of her own shortcomings, could keep her head low and endure it for as long as it took. But the disdainful comments aimed at Hester had her standing from the table, barely blinking as her chair flew back to hit the wall behind her.
“How dare you!” she shouted. “If I turned out even half of the woman that Hester is, I would be proud. I don’t understand why you can’t see it, for the first time in my life I am doing something useful!”
Her mother at least had the good graces to look shocked at the outburst. Aunt Alice, on the other hand, drew herself up to full height and pointed an accusatory finger at Jean. “This is her father’s fault, Enid. This is what happens when you allow a man to raise his daughter like a son. She gets ideas above her station that she can do a man’s job; you must quash it now before it is too late.”
The cups rattled as Jean slammed her hand down on the table and screamed. “DON'T YOU EVER TALK ABOUT MY FATHER AGAIN!”
Aunt Alice regarded her coldly. “Pack your bags. The Mountbattens are expecting you first thing in the morning.”
Like a tornado she tore through her study-turned-bedroom, pulling her luggage trunk out from under the bed and slamming it down on the mattress. Furious tears blinded her as she grabbed anything she could get her hands on and threw it in the trunk. Her collection of fiction books was swept off the windowsill, the single poster pulled off the wall, her knitted sheep fished out from under the duvet. The room was so small that she’d never fully unpacked in the eighteen months she’d lived there – a blessing in disguise, as there was no wardrobe or cabinet to fetch her clothes from. Anything currently being laundered would simply have to be sacrificed.
She glanced back once, catching her mother’s unreadable expression across the kitchen. One last chance for her to back down, to let Jean choose her own path. But her mother chose to look away.
An hour later found her at MI5’s doorstep. Her feet had moved on autopilot upon leaving the apartment, not noticing until she reached the underground station that she’d retraced her steps. The corridors were mostly empty as she followed her usual route towards the basement, the few people she encountered paying her no heed as she carried on her way. They’d fallen into such bad habits during Mincemeat; it was nothing unusual to see one of the team heading back downstairs at odd hours. Her presence here would go entirely unnoticed.
Upon kicking open the basement door, Jean didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed to find it empty. Her beloved team had all been assigned to new operations since Mincemeat’s conclusion; Monty was working night and day preparing for the Normandy invasions, Charles was following intelligence reports on a potential new German missile, whilst Jean rotated through whichever boardroom was in greatest need of a stenographer. She’d become infamous for her shorthand typing skills, which she credited entirely to keeping up with Monty and Charles’ brainstorming sessions during their Mincemeat days. The basement itself had never received a reassignment though, an unclaimed space where the three of them frequently brought their individual assignments to work on as a collective. Hester had long since given up on reminding them of the confidentiality breaches that they were committing. After all, it was the one place where she, not to mention Monty and Charles, could let down their guard.
She wished she could conjure them all up in that moment, to listen to Monty’s bickering and Charles’ tangents to distract from her own racing thoughts. Instead, she left her shoes by the door and pulled her blanket out from beneath the desk. Hester’s cardigan had been left on the back of her chair; in a moment of shameful neediness, Jean pulled it over her shoulders before curling up on the sofa bed.
Only then did she break, welcoming at last the tears that she’d held back all evening.
“Has anyone seen my cardigan yet?”
Jean feigned ignorance, gladly accepting a cup from the tea tray that Hester had brought into the basement. “I’m sorry Hester, I’ve been keeping an eye out for it,” she promised, guilt biting at the edge of her morals. In truth she knew exactly where the cardigan was: tucked beneath her pillow in her new and improved study-turned-bedroom, where it had been for the last month.
Her initial ‘plan’ to just sleep on the basement sofa had only lasted a week, until a concerned Monty had pulled her aside and asked if he needed to have a word with whoever was forcing so many all-nighters on her. By some stroke of luck, she had discovered an unused room that lead off from the typing pool, home to a broken letterpress machine that had clearly been long forgotten about. A sneaky rummage through Bevan’s desk drawer later, and the key was safely in her trouser pocket. After smuggling an army bedroll from the supply closet and stealing the lamp from her typing pool desk, it was almost a nice place to exist in.
She didn’t dare ponder how a bedroll behind the linotype could feel more like home within a week than her family’s apartment did after over a year.
A loud snore from Monty made her struggle to contain her laughter. He was sprawled out on the sofa bed, a newspaper covering his face which detailed the success of the Normandy beach landings. Jean wasn’t surprised to see he’d fallen asleep, if the number of narrow escapes she’d had trying to avoid him in the corridors after dark was any indication of how many all-nighters he'd been pulling. With the hard work over for now he certainly deserved some rest.
Hester tutted fondly, taking the newspaper and folding it on the desk. Jean’s smile slipped as she saw the paper cutout pinned to Monty’s suit jacket. The King’s honours list had been announced the previous week, with both Monty and Charles being awarded an MBE for their work on Operation Mincemeat. Jean however had been awarded nothing. She’d put on her bravest face, hugging a tearful Charles and clapping Monty on the shoulder when they all found out.
But then Hester had caught her eye across the room, and Jean had grappled against the desperate urge to burst into tears. She’d once confessed that she’d imagined the medals she might receive for her work; it was impossible not to imagine it when she looked at Monty’s bloody paper medal. It was impossible not to hear her mother’s voice in her head, reminding her that she would never be important there. But she would never take that out on her colleagues, who had worked so hard and deserved every commendation. She knew they saw her contributions; it wasn’t their fault that others didn’t.
The door being flung open interrupted her reverie. Jean looked up, everything else forgotten at the sight of Charles’ terrified face. “Charles, what’s happened?” Jean asked, standing abruptly from her desk.
Charles didn’t answer at first, staring at nothing from where he still stood in the doorway. “They’re here,” he eventually whispered, swallowing hard.
Jean took his trembling hands in her own. “What’s here?” she asked him gently. She wished Monty was awake, he was better than anyone at calming Charles down. Bad news wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence given their occupation, but rarely had she seen the man look so distressed.
“Charles, it is imperative that you tell us what’s happening,” Hester urged when he didn’t respond again.
He covered his face with his hands as he gave a shrill sob: “The flying bombs!”
Jean let her own hands drop to her sides. A wave of exhaustion hit her; she knew what those words meant, had read Charles’ intelligence reports on the missiles being assembled in northern France. She’d been lucky enough to sit out the main Blitz from the countryside, the short-lived night raids earlier that year being her first experience of bombings directly over her head. With the naivety of a non-native Londoner, it was hard to imagine how the city would survive another assault.
“The papers reported eight deceased in Mile End this morning. I imagine that this is the cause,” Hester murmured, removing her glasses to massage the bridge of her nose.
Jean stopped listening as Charles and Hester spoke in low voices, mentally mapping out where Mile End stood in relation to Shoreditch. The area had been heavily targeted by the earlier raids, night after night spent crammed into the Morrison shelter and praying selfishly that it wasn’t their roof that caved in. After being forced to step over rubble from a demolished house down the street on her walk to the underground station one morning, she didn’t pray anymore.
“Jean? Are you alright?”
She blinked, returning to the present to find that Monty had joined them. “Yes, just thinking,” she sighed, brushing off his concern. If these new weapons meant renewed attacks on London, how would she find out if the apartment had been hit? She still cared for her family, despite how she’d left them. At least living under their roof meant she knew they were alive.
Monty nodded, a thin-lipped smile on his face. “Well, I suppose we shall resume our trips to Picadilly Circus for the foreseeable future then, darling Jean,” he said, hooking his arm around Jean’s elbow with a grin. With the risk of bombs falling overhead, he’d taken to leaving his bicycle at home and joining Jean and Charles on their commute to the underground station. She’d asked him once if the gesture was in the interest of his own safety or theirs – the sheepish smile that answered her had cleared nothing up.
It had been customary for them since March. Since Fleming came to the office one morning a ghost of a man, his fiancée killed in their bed while he worked overtime through the night. Jean had met Muriel once before, shared an exasperated comment with her while Monty and Fleming drunkenly arm-wrestled at the Christmas party. Of course they faced the war on a daily basis in their career, holding back the onslaught from the relative safety of the home front. But this was the first time that war had snuck beneath their shields and taken one of their own.
She knew realistically that Monty and Charles’ presence on her commute would do nothing to stop a German bomber from deciding that her time had come. But, her courage bolstered by Monty’s invincible façade, it was easy to let herself pretend.
However, she realised in that exact moment, their shared commute would now present a problem. “Indeed we shall!” Jean agreed brightly, forcing herself to smile. She’d thought about telling them all in the first days after she left, she just hadn’t been able to find the right words. Too much time had passed since then. She couldn’t exactly drop into casual conversation that she’d been living upstairs for a month and likely would never go home again. If she had to walk with Monty and Charles to the station and double back once they were through the ticket barriers to keep her secret, so be it.
If Monty noticed her hesitation, he didn’t show it. He followed Charles to the sofa, Jean just about able to hear his quiet reassurances of “We’re alright, Charlie,” as he sat down beside him. Charles curled forward to hide his head in his hands, Monty tracing circles on Charles’ back with a reassuring hand.
Hester, though, regarded Jean quietly as she returned to her own tepid cup of tea. Jean flashed her a smile. As she focused back on her typewriter she could still see herself being watched from her peripheral vision, willing herself not to break under that knowing gaze.
If there was one thing that Jean missed from the apartment, it was the ability to have a hot bath. The single bathtub in MI5 was on the floor above the kitchen, meaning there was no way she could walk back and forth with a boiling kettle several times without arousing some kind of suspicion. So she would grit her teeth and force herself into the cold water, retreating to her warmest pyjamas as soon as she could afterwards. It was a small price to pay for her freedom.
It did mean though, after being caught in an unexpected summer downpour while replenishing her grocery stash one evening, that getting warm again was a lost cause. She woke the next morning with a headache behind her eyes, somehow still freezing despite being bundled under an army-issue bedsheet all night. Her hands shook as she attempted to pin her hair up, almost reduced to fragile tears when the grips refused to cooperate. Once dressed she trudged down to the kitchen, hoping desperately that no one would approach her as she fumbled over the simple process of making tea.
Thankfully she didn’t have any meetings until the afternoon, just some paperwork to catch up on from the previous day. It was only a slight chill; she could push through. It wouldn’t do to let a mere headache make an invalid of her when there were people dying on the front lines.
Two hours later, and she was starting to regret ever waking up. The floor around her chair was littered with crumpled sheets of paper, attempts at typing up her handwritten notes all discarded for stupid errors. Charles had joined her a while earlier, spreading a map across the desk and adding new circles to mark the previous night’s bombings. Jean had snuck a curious glance at first, but quickly returned to her transcript when her vision swam and the street lines blurred together. She would get the bloody thing typed up if it took her all day.
Monty’s naval briefing would finish at 11 each morning; perfectly on time, the basement door was flung open so loudly that both Jean and Charles jumped out of their seats. “Three in one day!” he shouted, skipping gleefully across the room towards the blackboard. “Charlie, excellent jumping as always. Jean, bit of room for improvement still. Keep working on it, I’m sure you’ll get there.”
Jean rolled her eyes, refusing to indulge him with a reply. Monty added a further three tally marks to his scoreboard of sunken German submarines, then hopped up to sit on the desk next to Charles. “Any news from number 10? Are they finally telling the public about the flying bombs?”
“Churchill’s making the announcement at midday,” Charles looked up from his map. Jean noticed the spark returned to his eyes as soon as Monty was within proximity, some of the weight seeming lifted from his shoulders. It was nice to see. “And not a moment too soon, I’ve been fending off my downstairs neighbour trying to ask what’s happening for weeks.”
The unmistakeable sound of heels on the staircase preceded Hester’s arrival; also right on time, six minutes behind Monty to account for her detour to the kettle. “You shouldn’t sit on the desks,” came her usual reprieve, raising an eyebrow at Monty.
Jean grinned, taking the invitation to throw yet another failed transcript at the back of Monty’s head. She adored this routine they’d fallen into. As much as she’d loved the endless chaos of Mincemeat, there was a wonderful familiarity of how their individual schedules would intermittently collide. Like comets in orbit, her addled mind supplied. She had always liked the concept of space.
As Hester handed out the tea, Jean practically snatched the mug to cradle in cold hands. Monty slid off the desk in favour of pulling up a chair beside Charles, ignoring Hester’s glare as he propped his feet back up on the tabletop to rifle through his reports. Jean attempted to return to her typing, but her head pounding made it impossible to focus. It felt like her brain was full of cotton wool and her bones were full of lead, heavy and aching from the mere act of existence.
She shivered, pulling her duffel coat tighter around herself. She always wore it into the basement every morning, to give the impression that she’d arrived from outside, but the thought of taking it off that morning had been unbearable. Hopefully no one would notice that she’d been staring at the same page in her notepad for the last ten minutes.
Naturally, she had no such luck. A gentle hand was laid upon her shoulder, and Jean looked up blearily to see Hester stood beside her. “You should take a break,” she said, concern evident in her voice.
Jean shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut as the pressure behind her eyes increased tenfold. “I’m fine. It’s just a headache,” she insisted, barely louder than a whisper.
“You’ll get far more done later if you take a break now.”
“They need this typed up before the next meeting. I have to be back in the boardroom in –”
She broke off when Hester felt her forehead. The simple act overcame her with the ridiculous urge to cry.
Hester gave a disapproving hum as she removed her hand; Jean almost whined at the loss of physical contact. “You have a low-grade fever. We should get you home, I can ask Colonel Bevan to drive you.”
Sudden panic made her lucid, her head shooting up from where it had slumped forward into Hester’s hand. “No!” she cried out. “I, err, I can’t. My mother had polio when she was a child, I can’t risk her catching this. I’ll just sleep on the sofa bed.”
Silence followed her outburst. Jean’s cheeks burned as she saw Monty and Charles staring at her wide-eyed from across the desk. It wasn’t exactly a lie – her mother really was more vulnerable to illness and had taken precautions whenever Jean brought a cold home from school. But she hated how the words rolled so easily off her tongue, so much easier than just telling them the honest truth. She wondered if this was how Monty had felt before they discovered his secret.
Hester looked entirely unconvinced, her expression cycling through several emotions before she settled on reluctant acceptance. “Very well, if you insist,” she said, and Jean gave the tiniest nod. “I will finish your transcript and attend your meetings this afternoon. Let’s get you settled first.”
Jean nodded again, swaying on her feet as Hester guided her to stand. The feeling of the older woman’s steadying arm around her back opened a gaping hole of grief in Jean’s chest. She wanted her mother; except not her own mother, who chose the idea of a conformist daughter over the reality of a happy one. But she craved a mother’s love so badly in that moment that it gutted her. She’d called Hester ‘Ma’ once, an accidental comment in the typing pool which had made the other girls snicker. They all thought she’d hidden in the bathroom afterwards out of embarrassment. In truth, it was the mortifying realisation that she’d not called her mother ‘Ma’ for years, yet when talking to Hester the word had slipped from her tongue so easily. She hadn’t understood it back then. But now, she thought perhaps she did.
Her body caved over as she collapsed onto the sofa, as if the soft upholstery beneath her had robbed her of her last resolve. Hester offered her an aspirin from her pillbox, nodding in approval when Jean took it along with a long sip of tea. “Well done. That should take the edge off soon. Is there anything else you need?” she asked, smoothing a hand over Jean’s hair.
Once again, she found herself leaning into the touch. At least her illness gave her an excuse for it, obscuring the truth of how desperate she was to be held. “I’m just so cold,” Jean mumbled, curling up on her side as another shiver wracked her body.
At the sound of someone clearing their throat, she looked up to see Monty standing awkwardly before her. Wordlessly, he held out the hot water bottle which he’d been clutching to his abdomen since arriving in the basement.
“Don’t you need it?” Jean asked. The additional box of Kotex had appeared in her bag the previous day as it did every month. Since Monty couldn’t exactly carry them on his person without the risk of repercussions, she would gladly let him steal his own supplies back from her.
Monty shook his head, pressing the hot water bottle into Jean’s pale hands. “You do kind of look like you’re about to die,” he joked wryly, cracking a smile.
Jean could just about muster the energy to give him her best deadpan expression. Then she closed her eyes and let out a sigh of relief, as warmth filled her body for the first time that day. “Thanks, Monty,” she muttered, squinting one eye open to look at him. The delight in his expression could have been mistaken for the response to receiving a knighthood.
Hester laid Jean’s blanket over her, smoothing it out over her shoulders. “Now, I won’t have you back at your desk for the rest of the day, understood?” she said as she gave Jean a pointed look over her glasses, a stern challenge not to argue. The same look that she directed at Monty on a near-daily basis.
“Do you want us to go so that you can sleep?” Charles asked, then added with a chuckle. “We do technically all have desks elsewhere in the building.”
Pushing herself upright, she flung her hand out frantically for anything that was within reach. “Please don’t go,” she whimpered. The room suddenly felt too big from where she lay, vulnerable and afraid beneath her blanket. She closed her eyes as shame overcame her.
A hand squeezed hers, and she realised it was Charles she’d unwittingly grabbed onto. “Course we won’t,” he said. When Jean dared to open her eyes, she saw a reassuring smile on his face.
As the day continued around her, she let herself relax. Hester’s nails on the typewriter made for a familiar background noise, while Charles and Monty quietly discussing Churchill’s announcement gave Jean something to focus on aside from how unwell she felt. It reminded her of back in the farmhouse, when she would begin to doze off in her father’s armchair while the family hosted their neighbours for dinner. He would carefully carry her upstairs and tuck her into bed before rejoining the house guests. And, as she fell back asleep, she would hear the laughter coming from the next room.
She didn’t deserve them, her mind told her as she hugged Monty’s hot water bottle to her stomach. They deserved better than a friend who would lie to them, who was too cowardly to be honest. Monty and Hester had trusted her with the biggest secrets of their lives, and she couldn’t even return the favour when the stakes were half as high. The thought tasted sour in the back of her throat.
She’d tell them all eventually, she promised herself.
… eventually.