Constant Nobody

by Michelle Butler Hallett

  Seeking a particular British boat and the captain who’d agreed to ferry her report back to London, Temerity glanced back at the injured man. He disappeared within a cloud of delousing gas pumped by a stocky man in a peacoat. As the gas dissipated, the injured man pointed to himself with his good arm, then to the line of boys before him, the boys aged from maybe four to fourteen and wearing cardboard discs around their necks. Temerity could guess what he said. You see? The gas did me no harm. Now it’s your turn. One of the boys stepped forward. Soon a cloud of delousing gas covered him, and he coughed.

  Three Basque mothers recognized Temerity and hurried toward her. Surrounded by drawn and worried faces, by tearful pleas to convince England to take their daughters, Temerity wanted to scream. She listened to the mothers’ words, nodded in understanding, and reminded them the committee would do everything in its power, and now could you please excuse me?

  Ducking into the crowd, Temerity continued to seek the British boat. She told herself the hunger pangs would settle soon.

  Behind her, the injured man called out in Spanish, then in French, his voice almost lost in the dockside racket. —I need someone who can write Russian. Can anyone write in Russian?

  She knew the voice. No denying it. As she turned to face it, the speaker surveyed the crowd for a response. His beard, longer now, seemed to sharpen his cheekbones — perhaps that was hunger — and his wavy dark hair stirred in the wind off the sea. The boys stared into the crowd with him.

  Kostya called again. —Please, my shoulder is hurt, and I can’t hold the tags. Can anyone write in Russian?

  Lost to his sight in the crowd, Temerity strode toward him, approaching the dock as he dug in his jacket for a pencil. Two of the boys pointed at her, and Kostya turned around.

  His big eyes shone with pain; the wounds on his left neck and ear flushed a darker red. Staring, he wanted to ask Temerity how she’d reached Bilbao, ask how and why they’d met again. He knew he should demand her silence about the clinic, make some quiet threat to finish the job. He didn’t bother. Such conversations belonged to that time, brittle now in retrospect, before bombardment.

  Gesturing to the boys, Temerity spoke in Russian. —Evacuation?

  — To Leningrad.

  — So few? And only boys?

  Kostya pointed behind him to a small fishing boat, its name in Cyrillic letters. —It’s all I can do. And I don’t trust the captain around girls. There’ll be other ships. Soon. They may even get a Royal Navy escort from you British. Solidarity, comrade.

  — Just give me the pencil.

  He did so, and Temerity knelt before the first boy, reading his name. She switched to Spanish. —Good day, Enrico.

  Kostya stood behind her, just to her right, speaking first in Spanish, then repeating his sentence in Russian. —Enrico, you are now Genrikh.

  Holding the name tag in her left hand, Temerity wrote the Russian name above the Spanish name with her right. —Next.

  Kostya gestured for the line of boys to move. —Eduardo, you are now Eduard. You see? Russian’s not so strange.

  Eduardo tried to read his disc upside down, frowned.

  The next boy came to Temerity, and Kostya said nothing.

  Temerity spoke instead. —Miguel, you are now Mikhail. Perhaps they’ll call you Misha.

  Kostya muttered in Russian. —Hurry up.

  The twelve boys re-named, Temerity stood up and gave Kostya back his pencil. —This needs sharpening.

  Perceiving a tension between the two adults, a tension he could not understand, one of the older boys giggled.

  Temerity pointed to her own ear, neck, and shoulder, mirroring the path of Kostya’s wounds. —Gernika?

  Voice bland, workaday, he spoke as if commenting on the weather. —Gerrikaitz. The Luftwaffe bombed us first, then Gernika in the afternoon. Were you in Gernika?

  — Yes.

  — Hurt?

  She tugged her hair out of the way and exposed a scabbed bruise on her forehead. —Nothing serious. Cristobal Zapatero?

  Kostya shook his head.

  — Well, I expected no better.

  Kostya stared down at the dock, at the water visible between pieces of wood.

  As Temerity turned to leave, Kostya surprised them both by calling to her. —Wait, please.

  She faced him, crossed her arms.

  He stepped closer. —It’s a long way to Leningrad, and I don’t want to run out of stories. Tell me an English story, so I can share it with the boys later.

  Temerity hesitated. —Tam Lin. He fell from his horse, and he should have died, but the queen of fairies caught him, kept him prisoner, and then he lived for hundreds of years. He never aged. One day, the queen of fairies got tired of him and gave him a castle, and he lived there in silence until Lady Margaret, the local lord’s daughter, picked his flowers. After an argument, Tam Lin and Margaret fell in love, Margaret fell pregnant, and the fairy queen got angry. She turned Tam Lin into a snake, a bear, a lion, a wolf, all to frighten Margaret off. Margaret held Tam Lin tight, and together they broke the spell. Then they grew old together and died.

  — That’s it?

  — That’s not enough?

  The man in the peacoat called out to Kostya. He called back acknowledgement, then grasped Temerity’s upper arm, too hard at first, and stared into her eyes. —I have to go, Marya Morevna.

  — I doubt Marya Morevna had freckles on her eyelids.

  — She had courage. Like you.

  She shook him off. —Take care of those boys.

  The man in the peacoat bellowed again.

  Kostya rolled his eyes. —Yes, Comrade Captain, yes, I’m coming! Fucked in the mouth, I hate sea travel. I won’t be able to eat for days.

  Temerity almost laughed, then stepped away, calling back over her shoulder. —Don’t let them forget their Spanish names.

  Kostya ducked into the wheelhouse, giving no sign he’d heard.

  [ ]

  FEME SOLE 1

  London

  Monday 24 May

  — A pity you’re missing Empire Day, Miss West.

  Here in a windowless brown office that she compared to the dead end of a bowel, Temerity studied the man she and her father had privately called a fool. Freeman, Edward West liked to complain, bloody Neville Freeman. How he ended up in charge of field agents, I shall never understand. The man can’t think his way out of a compound sentence. The Service is full of incompetence. Once Temerity’s private language tutor and now her handler, Neville Freeman looked timid and plain. He cultivated this impression. In his mid-forties, he combed his thinning brown hair over to one side and oiled it in place. His deep-set blue eyes seemed to hide behind his round spectacles, those lenses glinting in the light. Each word he spoke either sank or puffed his cheeks, and air whistled through the gap between his two front teeth.

  Temerity’s mouth felt puckered and dry from too much gin the night before. —One hardly expects holidays in the Service.

  — Quite. Please, sit down.

  She did so, glancing at the isochronic map on the wall. Holidays? A nice little sea voyage, Bilbao to Southampton on the Habana, a ship built for eight hundred and carrying four thousand, rough seas and resultant mess, and the decorations at the Southampton docks, pennants and ribbons and flags left over from the coronation of George VI, pennants and ribbons and flags gone limp with rain and now leaking dye, thought to signal a sufficient welcome for child refugees. After all, the decorations had been good enough for a king. Oh yes, a holiday to remember.

  Neville pulled out his desk chair, scraping it on the floor. —Please, let me offer my condolences on the death of your father.

  She busied herself with her cigarette case; the cloisonné felt so cool and smooth beneath her fingertips. —Thank you.

  — Our Russian cryptanalysis won’t be the same without him. He had an astonishing gift for languages. I rather admired him for refusing to use the title. ‘Just call me West,’ he always said. And you, too. I sh
ould call you Lady Temerity, yet it’s Miss West who sits before me. I always said of your father, even when we disagreed, and we disagreed rather a lot, that he was a man who understood his debt to the empire. Your grandfather made his fortune on Darjeeling and Simla tea, wasn’t it?

  Temerity’s eyes glittered. —Tea, prostitution, and opium. And for that, he was made a peer.

  — Yes, well, that was a long time ago. Was your father ill before you left for Spain?

  Temerity told herself not to think of her last conversation with her father. —Run down, I thought. We had Spanish flu in ’18, not long after my father came back from overseas. My mother and my brother died. It damaged my father’s lungs. He was prone to pneumonia, came down with it every few winters.

  — You look rather run down yourself, Miss West. When did you last eat a decent meal?

  — Lamb chops and asparagus were hard to come by, I admit, Spain being a war zone and all.

  Neville raised his eyebrows. —Quite.

  Eyes on her handbag, Temerity lit a cigarette. She knew Neville expected her to lean in so he could light it for her. She’d not got the patience for such games, not today. —Do you know who had the gall to send me flowers?

  — Half the men in London, I would imagine.

  Temerity decided to ignore that. —A sympathy bouquet, I mean. William Brownbury-Rees.

  Neville gave a reassuring smile. —Yes, that was a bother, but surely it’s all sorted out now.

  — Freeman, did you hear me? He sent flowers to my flat. He knows my real name, and he knows where I live. How did he find me?

  — Burke’s Peerage?

  — Very funny.

  — Perhaps he’s just smart.

  — Certainly not.

  — Then he had help. The British Union of Fascists has members in distressingly high places. All the more reason MI5 needs to keep an eye on them.

  Temerity recalled the thud of her head bouncing on the floor as Brownbury-Rees pinned her and called her a treacherous whore, the taste of his blood when she bit through his lip, the high scream as she managed to grasp and twist his scrotum. She exhaled a long stream of smoke. —I want to bring charges.

  — Not wise.

  — I beg your pardon?

  — First, it will draw too much attention to Five’s activities, and Five won’t be in a mood to help, not after you transferred out to join us in SIS. Second, you were in a compromising position. How did you describe it in your report? ‘He’s eating out of my hand.’ Perhaps that’s why it didn’t sound quite like what you said. And spare me the hard-as-nails act. I knew you when you had spots.

  Temerity shut her eyes. Neville’s gaze, that steady gaze of evaluation — a butcher deciding where best to cut meat — could still unsettle her. Polyglot Neville Freeman had, during a self-imposed exile from the Service, worked for Edward West as a modern languages tutor, instructing adolescent Temerity. Delighted with her own gifts for languages, Temerity had sacrificed Roedean and returned home to Kurseong House for intensive study of German, French, Italian, and Spanish, with some headway into Danish. Neville admitted defeat when Temerity announced she wished to learn Russian. Edward, with some help from Five, found an impoverished White Russian émigré, one Count Ilya Ostrovsky, happy to offer lessons in exchange for a room of his own and something decent to eat. He got both at Kurseong House. As Temerity progressed in Russian, nearing sixteen, she felt like the main character in a play about to start, the audience murmuring just beyond drawn curtains. Her father, her Aunt Min, Neville Freeman, and Count Ostrovsky all seemed to expect her to follow a clear path — clear to everyone except Temerity. Then Neville muddied the view one spring afternoon by reaching across the table to grasp his student’s hand and stare at her in blatant desire. Frightened and repelled, Temerity snatched her hand back, upsetting the loose pages of her latest German composition. Edward and Ilya walked in on this situation, their quiet but intense conversation in Russian falling silent. Neville Freeman left Kurseong House the next day. The Secret Service had welcomed him back, polyglots always in high demand, and Temerity, like her father, felt only irritation and not surprise when, years later, she found herself reporting to Neville Freeman. The man’s a damned fool, Edward often said, and he’s a symptom of everything that’s wrong with the Service: not enough training, not enough cash, and not enough brains. No, we’ve got the likes of Neville Freeman wasting our best resources on risky operations. He seems to think capable polyglots grow like rhubarb. How he got to a position of command, I’ll never know.

  Glass clinked as Neville poured whisky into two glasses and passed one to Temerity. Then he pronounced his judgment on the matter of Brownbury-Rees. —We shall do nothing. Chin-chin.

  Temerity just stopped herself from telling Neville to go to hell. The words had reached her tongue with frightening speed. Raw. She felt raw, as if all courtesy, all restraint, had burned away.

  In those Gernika fires, perhaps.

  She took a good swallow of whisky.

  — Miss West, I could put you on bereavement leave. There’s no disgrace in that.

  — Disgrace?

  — We’ll come back to that. For now, you must have arrangements to look after.

  She shook her head. The new inheritance laws meant that she, and not some absurdly distant male relative, now owned Kurseong House and the small estate in the Kent village of Prideaux-on-Fen. —I’ve already sent word to keep the house in dust sheets. I need to work.

  — Are you quite sure you’re up to it?

  — Of course.

  Neville topped up their drinks. —Good, because we really must discuss the manner of your return to England. It’s caused some confusion here in the department, as your last orders said to stay in Spain until recalled. It looks rather like when you hopped on the Habana, you abandoned your post.

  — Children, Freeman, we evacuated children from Bilbao, and they needed chaperones.

  — Children change nothing.

  — Really? Perhaps the ancient Romans are more to your taste. They said war changes everything. God knows, the Luftwaffe rather upset my plans. Should I have stayed at the clinic and reported on developments by power of mental telepathy? Or should I have stayed in Gernika and hidden in the ashes? Did you care nothing of me when you learned Gernika was bombed?

  — You’re an agent, Miss West. I care about your results. But about Bilbao—

  — Where else could I go? I finally got to speak with our consul. He was frantically busy organizing prisoner exchanges, for God’s sake, with the Francoists. He asked me to help Leah Manning and then that silly vicar we’ve got posted there with the evacuation donkey-work, so I could do something useful whilst I waited for orders from London, and it was so hard to get any food, and I was surrounded by frightened people, and after all that fire in Gernika, the Francoists are marching closer, and then all those parents in Bilbao begging me to get their daughters to safety, and we finally get some children out, almost four thousand of them, and it’s nothing…

  She closed eyes and rubbed her temples.

  — Miss West? Oh, please don’t cry. I can’t bear sadness in women.

  — I’m not sad. I’m bloody angry!

  Neville stood up and turned his back while Temerity blew her nose. —Tell me again what happened in the clinic. It’s an extraordinary story.

  — Story? POUM defies Moscow. Should we not be better friends with POUM? By standing aside and just watching, we betrayed Cristobal Zapatero and every other POUM communist. There’s your story. God’s sake, are we to sacrifice our allies?

  Neville watched Temerity light and almost drop her second cigarette. —Britain is not officially involved in the Spanish war, so we can hardly speak of allies. As for Zapatero, however unfortunate his end with the NKVD, he knew what he’d signed up for, and if he didn’t know, he quickly learned. Strange bedfellows and all that. But I’m not worried about Zapatero. I’m worried about you. Now, we’ve got a chance to calm any concerns about you d
eserting your post in Spain.

  — I deserted nothing! That NKVD agent—

  — Missed, yes, so you said. From such a short distance. And him a professional.

  Temerity’s fingers twitched as she rubbed her cigarette case. —I’ve told you the truth.

  — All of it?

  — Of course.

  Not sure why, she’d omitted the business with the name tags. Now she asked herself if helping that same NKVD agent with refugee children mightn’t be some sort of treason.

  Treason to whom?

  Sweat dampened her underarms.

  — Please understand me, Miss West. Another handler might worry about your emotional state, but I know to cut a woman some slack. What matters here is not so much the truth as what we believe to be the truth. I suffer no doubts when it comes to your loyalty. I believe it to be true. And that makes me your greatest protection.

  She said nothing.

  — Your father always wanted you behind a desk in decrypt. He thought you’d be safe and still using your gifts for king and country, still doing your duty. But you wanted to be in the field. Is that still true?

  — Yes.

  Neville stood up from his chair and gestured to the isochronic map on the wall above a case of leather-bound books. Blobs of colour, fading and darkening in zones, spread from one country to another, indicating travel times by steamer and rail. Stroking the pads of his fingers from Leningrad to Moscow, Moscow to Odessa, Odessa to Vladivostok, Neville looked over his shoulder at Temerity. —One thing we’ve noticed in the Russian decrypt is bullets. The Bolshies use rather a lot of bullets. At the same time, Stalin has hauled this immense union of states from a medieval existence to what he calls a radiant future. Electrification, paved roads, metros, and radio: how have they done it so fast? Is it like St. Petersburg — sorry, Leningrad — built on the bones of slaves? We need more agents on the ground, Miss West. We need to know what the hell is going on.