Description

In 1942, a young Scots woman, Charlotte Gray, travels to London to take a job as a medical receptionist for a Harley Street doctor. On the train she talks to two men sharing her compartment, and one of them - who works for one of the British secret service agencies at the time - gives her his card. Despite the war, social life in London is in full swing and the attractive, intelligent girl soon meets up with an airman, Peter Gregory. The temporary nature of life at the time is epitomised when she quickly loses her virginity and also her heart to him. The intensity of the romance is heightened when Gregory is sent on a mission over France and news comes back to Charlotte that he didn't return and listed as missing in action.

Charlotte spent much of her childhood in France and speaks the language fluently - a talent that the secret service wishes to exploit in its effort to support the French Resistance. Charlotte decides to throw in her job - which she has no talent for anyway as the doctor informs her - and joins a Special Operations Executive (SOE)* training course. Once it has schooled her in methods of interrogation, dyed her hair a mousy brown and replaced her fillings, Charlotte is parachuted into France to complete a specified mission. But instead of doing her job and heading home, she sets out to find Gregory's whereabouts.

She assists at a parachute drop but then settles down as housekeeper to an ageing and no longer inspired painter, father of her main resistance contact. Over time she comes to understand him in a way she never had understood her own father. Both the painter and Charlotte's father fought in the First World War and bear lasting physical and psychological scars. She also helps to conceal two Jewish children, André and Jacob, after their parents are arrested and deported, and as 1942 progresses we learn about the steadily growing oppression of the Jews in France with complicity by the Vichy French government. The painter is interviewed about his Jewish ancestry, and when he stays silent, his estranged son denounces him in order to save the two little boys. The painter is then packed off to the prison camp/transfer station in Drancy, France (just outside Paris) where Charlotte manages to get a message to him, explaining his son's actions, just before he dies of pneumonia. She misses the gut wrenching scene of the two boys being taken from Drancy and shuttled like cattle to their deaths at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Although Charlotte has faith that Peter Gregory is still alive, she cannot trace him and so in 1943 comes home. Here, she is reconciled with her father. Later, Peter Gregory manages to escape with the aid of the Resistance, returns to England and is reunited with Charlotte.