by William Boyd
She strode on down to the river, her rucksack bumping the small of her back. This was an ‘exercise’, she told herself, and it had to be undertaken in the right spirit. There was no race on, so her instructors had told her, it was more to do with seeing how people coped with sleeping rough, what sense of direction they could acquire and what initiative they showed in the time it took them to find their way home when they didn’t know where they were. To this end, Law had blindfolded her and driven her for at least two hours, she calculated now, glancing at the reddening sun. On the way Law had been untypically chatty – to stop her counting, she realised – and as he dropped her off at the top of the remote glen he said, ‘You could be two miles away or twenty.’ He smiled his thin smile. ‘But you’ll no be able to tell. See you tomorrow, Miss Dalton.’
The river that ran along the valley was brown, fast and shallow. Both its banks were thick with vegetation, mainly small, densely leaved trees with pale grey, twisted trunks. Eva began to walk steadily downstream, the saffron sun dappling the grass and undergrowth around her. Clouds of midges swarmed above pools and, as the late Scottish evening drew in, the birdsong grew in confidence.
When the sun slipped below the western edge of the glen and the light in the valley turned grey and neutral, Eva decided to rest up for the night. She had covered a couple of miles she reckoned, but there was still no sign of a house or any human habitation, no barn or bothy for her to shelter in. In her rucksack she had a mackintosh, a scarf, a water bottle, a candle, a box of matches, a small packet of toilet paper and some cheese sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper.
She found a mossy hollow between the roots of a tree and, putting on her mackintosh, huddled down in her makeshift bed. She ate one sandwich and saved the others for the night, thinking that she was rather enjoying the progress of this adventure, thus far, and almost looking forward to her night in the open air. The hurry of the fast water rushing over the round pebbly rocks of the river bed was soothing: it made her feel less alone and she felt she had no need for her candle to keep the gathering darkness at bay – in fact she was rather relieved to be away from her colleagues and the instructors at Lyne Manor.
When she had arrived at Waverley Station that day, Staff Sergeant Law had driven her south from Edinburgh and then along the Tweed valley through a succession of small and, to her eyes, almost identical mill towns. Then they had crossed the river and headed into remoter country; here and there was a long solid farmhouse with its steading and lowing herd, the hills around them higher – dotted with sheep – the woods denser, wilder. Then, to her surprise they drove through the ornamental gates of a manor house, with neat lodges on either side, and on down a winding drive flanked by mature beech trees to what looked like two large white houses, with neatly mown lawns, positioned to look up their own narrow valley to the west.
‘Where are we?’ she asked Law, stepping out of the car and looking at the bare round hills on either side.
‘Lyne Manor,’ he said, offering no more information. The two houses, she saw, were in fact one: what had looked like a second was a long wing, stuccoed and whitewashed like the other, but of obviously later date than the main house – which looked as thick-walled as a keep, and rose a storey higher, with small irregular windows under a dark slate roof. She could hear the sound of a river and through a screen of trees across a field made out a spangle of light from some other building. Not quite the back of beyond, she thought, but almost.
Now as she lay in the rooty embrace of her tree, soothed by the ever-changing cadences of the rushing river, she thought of her two strange months at Lyne Manor and what she had learned there. She had come to think of the place as a kind of eccentric boarding school, and it had been a peculiar education she had received there: Morse code, first, interminable Morse code to the most advanced level, and shorthand also, and how to shoot a number of handguns. She had learned to drive a car and been given a licence; she could read a map and use a compass. She could trap, skin and cook a rabbit and other wild rodents. She knew how to cover up a trail and lay a false one. On other courses she had learned how to construct simple codes and how to break others. She had been shown how to tamper with documents, and was now able to change names and dates convincingly with a variety of special inks and tiny sharp implements; she knew how to forge – with a carved eraser – a blurry official stamp. She became familiar with human anatomy, how the body worked, what its essential nutritional needs were, and its many points of weakness. She had been shown, on busy mornings in those innocuous mill towns, how to follow a suspect, whether alone or as a couple or a threesome or more. She was also followed herself and began to know the signs when someone was on her tail and the various types of avoiding action to take. She learned how to make an invisible ink and how to make it visible. All this was interesting, occasionally fascinating, but ‘scouting’, as these skills were called at Lyne, was not a matter to be taken lightly: the minute anyone looked like they were enjoying themselves, let alone having fun, Law and his instructor colleagues were disparaging and unamused. But certain aspects of her education and training had perplexed her. When the others ‘studying’ at Lyne had gone to Turnhouse aerodrome near Edinburgh to learn how to parachute she had not been included.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘Mr Romer says it’s not necessary.’
But Mr Romer, it seemed, deemed other skills necessary. Twice a week Eva caught the train alone to Edinburgh, where she received elocution lessons from a shy woman in Barnton, who, slowly but surely, removed the last traces of her Russian accent from her English. She began to talk, she realised, like actresses in British films, voicing a formal, clipped, hard-edged English with strange vowel sounds: a ‘man’ was a ‘men’, a ‘hat’ was a ‘het’, her consonants were sharp and precise, her ‘r’s slightly trilled. She learned to speak like a young, middle-class English woman who had been privately educated. No one bothered about her French or her Russian.
The same exclusion occurred again when the others went on a three-day unarmed combat course at a commando base near Perth. ‘Mr Romer says it’s not necessary,’ Eva was told when she wondered why she hadn’t received the movement order. Then a strange man came to Lyne to teach her on her own. His name was Mr Dimarco and he was small and neatly turned-out with a sharp waxed moustache and he showed her his battery of mnemonic tricks – he used to work in a fairground, he said. Eva was told to associate numbers with colours and she soon found she could memorise up to twenty sequences of five numbers with no difficulty. They played complicated versions of Kim’s Game with over one hundred objects gathered on one long table – and after two days she found, to her surprise, that she was recalling over eighty of them without difficulty. She would be shown a film and then be subjected to the most detailed interrogation about it: was the third man on the left in the pub hatless or not? What was the registration number of the getaway car? Was the woman at the hotel reception wearing earrings? How many steps led up to the door of the villain’s house? … She realised she was being taught to see and remember as if from scratch: how to use her eyes and her brain in ways she had never required before. She was learning how to observe and recall in entirely different ways from the mass of human beings. And with these new talents she was meant to look at and analyse the world with a precision and purpose that went far beyond anybody’s simple curiosity. Everything in the world – absolutely anything – was potentially worth noting and remembering. None of the others took these courses with Mr Dimarco – only Eva. Another of Mr Romer’s special requirements, she was given to understand.
When it finally grew almost completely dark by the river, as dark as a Scottish summer night could become, Eva buttoned and belted her mackintosh and folded her scarf up as a pillow. There was a half moon and the light it shed made the river and the small gnarled trees on its banks look eerily beautiful as their colours left them and the monochrome world of the night established itself.
Only two other ‘guests’ h
ad been at Lyne as long as she had: a young gaunt Polish man called Jerzy and an older woman, in her forties, called Mrs Diana Terme. There were never more than eight or ten guests at any one time and the staff changed regularly, also. Sergeant Law seemed a fixture but even he was absent for a two-week period, being replaced by a taciturn Welshman called Evans. The guests were fed three meals a day in a dining room in the main house with views of the valley and river, a mess staffed with young trainee soldiers who barely said a word. The guests were housed in the newer wing: women on one floor, men on another, each with their own room. There was even a residents’ lounge with a wireless, a tea urn and newspapers and a few periodicals – but Eva rarely lingered in it. Their days were full: the comings and goings and the unstated but acknowledged nature of what they were all doing at Lyne made socialising seem risky and slack, somehow. But there were other currents circulating through Lyne that made personal contact diffident and guarded.
The day after she arrived a kind-looking man in a tweed suit and a sandy moustache interviewed her in an attic room in the main house. He never gave his name, nor was there any mention made of rank: she supposed he must be the ‘Laird’ that Law and some of the other staff referred to. We don’t encourage friendships here at Lyne, the Laird told her, think of yourselves as travellers on a short journey – there’s really no point in getting to know each other because you will never see each other again. Be cordial, make chit-chat, but the less other people know about you the better – keep yourself to yourself and make the most of your training, that, after all, is what you’re here for.
As she was leaving the room he called her back and said, ‘I should warn you, Miss Dalton, not all our guests are who they seem. One or two may be working for us – just to make sure the rules are adhered to.’
And so the guests at Lyne Manor all distrusted each other and were very discreet, polite and uncommunicative, exactly as the Laird would have wished and planned. Mrs Terme once asked Eva If she knew Paris and Eva, immediately suspecting her, said, ‘Only very vaguely’. Then Jerzy once spoke to her in Russian and then apologised immediately. As the weeks went by she became convinced that these two were the Lyne ‘ghosts’ – as double agents were known. Lyne students were encouraged to use Lyne’s own vocabulary, different from that employed by the service at large. There was no talk of ‘the firm’ – rather it was ‘head office’. Agents were ‘crows’; ‘shadows’ were people who followed you – it was, as she later learned, a kind of linguistic old-school tie, or Masonic handshake. Lyne graduates gave themselves away.
Once or twice she thought she saw Law giving a knowing glance to a new arrival and her doubts reintroduced themselves: were these the actual plants and Mrs Terme and Jerzy only naturally curious? After a short while she realised that everything was going to plan – the warning itself was enough to start the guests policing themselves and being watchful: constant suspicion makes for a very effective form of internal security. She was sure she was as much a potential suspect as any of the others she thought that she might have uncovered.
For ten days there had been a young man at Lyne. His name was Dennis Trelawny and he had blond hair with a long lock that fell over his forehead and a recent burn scar on his neck. On their few encounters – in the dining room, on the Morse code course, she knew he was looking at her, in that way. He only made the most nondescript remarks to her – ‘Looks like rain’, ‘I’m a bit deaf from the firing range’ – but she could tell that he was attracted to her. Then one day in the dining room when they met at the buffet, where they were helping themselves to dessert, they began to chat and sat down beside each other at the communal table. She asked him – she had no idea why – if he was in the Air Force: he just seemed like an RAF type to her. No, he said instinctively, the Navy, actually, and a strange look of fear came into his eye. He suspected her, she realised. He never spoke to her again.
After she had been a month at Lyne she was called one evening from her room to the main house. She was shown to a door, once again under the eaves, on which she knocked and walked in. Romer sat there at a desk, a cigarette on the go and a whisky bottle and two glasses in front of him.
‘Hello, Eva,’ he said, not bothering to stand. ‘I was curious to know how you were getting on. Drink?’ He gestured for her to sit and she did so. Romer always called her Eva, even in front of people who addressed her as Eve. She assumed they thought it an affectionate nickname; but she suspected that for Romer it was a little indication of his power, a gentle reminder that, unlike everyone else she would meet, only he knew her true history. ‘No, thank you,’ she said to the proffered bottle. Romer poured her a small glass none the less and pushed it across to her.
‘Nonsense – I’m impressed, but I can’t drink alone.’ He raised his glass to her. ‘I hear you’re doing well.’
‘How’s my father?’
‘A bit better. The new pills seem to be working.’
Eva thought; is this true or is this a lie? Her Lyne training was beginning to take effect. Then she thought again: no, Romer wouldn’t lie to me about this because I could find out. So, she relaxed a little.
‘Why wasn’t I allowed to go on the parachute course?’
‘I swear you’ll never need to parachute while you work for me,’ he said. ‘The accent’s really good. Much improved.’
‘Unarmed combat?’
‘A waste of time.’ He drank and refilled his glass. ‘Imagine you’re fighting for your life: you have nails, you have teeth – your animal instincts will serve you better than any training.’
‘Will I be fighting for my life while I work for you?’
‘Very, very unlikely.’
‘So, what am I to do for you, Mr Romer?’
‘Please call me Lucas.’
‘So what am I to do for you, Lucas?’
‘What are we to do, Eva. All will be made clear at the end of your training.’
‘And when will that be?’
‘When I think you are sufficiently trained.’
He asked her some more general questions, some of them to do with the organisation at Lyne – had people been friendly, curious, had they asked her about her recruitment, had the staff treated her differently, and so on. She gave him true answers and he took them in, ruminatively, sipping at his whisky, drawing on his cigarette, almost as if he were evaluating Lyne as a prospective parent might, seeking a school for his gifted child. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and stood up, slipping the whisky bottle into his jacket pocket and moving to the door.
‘Very good to see you again, Eva,’ he said. ‘Keep up the good work.’ And then he left.
Eva slept fitfully by the river, waking every twenty minutes or so. The small wood around her was full of noises – rustlings, crepitations, the constant melancholy hoot of owls – but she felt unafraid: just another night denizen trying to rest. In the small hours before dawn, she woke, needing to relieve herself, and moved to the river bank, where she lowered her trousers and shitted into the fast water. Now she could use her toilet paper, taking care to bury it afterwards. As she walked back to her sleeping-tree she paused and stood and looked about her, surveying her moon-dappled grove with the twisted grey trunks of the trees in a rough circle around her like a loose, warped stockade, the leaves above her head shifting drily in the night breeze. She felt strangely otherworldly, as if she were in some kind of suspended dream state, alone, lost in the remote Scottish countryside. Nobody knew where she was; and she didn’t know where she was. She thought suddenly of Kolia, for some reason, her funny, moody, serious younger brother, and felt her sadness come over her, fill her for a moment. She was consoled by the thought that she was doing all this for him, making some small personal gesture of defiance to show that his death had not been for nothing. And she felt, also, a reluctant, grudging gratitude towards Romer for pushing her towards this. Perhaps, she considered, as she settled down between the embracing roots of her tree, Kolia had talked to Romer about her – perhaps Kolia
had seeded the idea that she be recruited one day.
She doubted she would sleep anymore, her brain was too active, but as she lay back she realised that she was as alone as she had ever been in her life and she wondered if this, also, was part of the exercise – to be completely and utterly alone, in the night, in an unknown wood, beside an unknown river, and to see how you coped – nothing to do with scouting or ingenuity at all, just a way of throwing you back on yourself for a few hours. She lay there, imagining that the sky was beginning to lighten, that dawn was imminent, and she realised she had felt calm all night, had never felt fear – and thought that perhaps this was the real dividend of Sergeant Law’s game.
Dawn came with surprising rapidity – she had no idea what the time was: her watch had been taken from her – but it seemed absurd not to be up and about as the world awoke around her, so she went to the river, urinated, and washed her face and hands, drank water, filled her water-bottle and ate her remaining cheese sandwich. She sat on the river bank, chewing, drinking, and again felt more like an animal – a human animal, a creature, a thing of instinct and reflex – than she had in her entire life. It was ridiculous, she knew: she had spent one night out in the open, a balmy night at that, well clothed and sufficiently fed: but for the first time in her two months at Lyne she felt grateful to the place and the curious induction she was being put through. She headed off downstream with a steady, measured, comfortable pace but in her heart she was experiencing both a kind of exhilaration and a liberation that she had never expected.
After about an hour she saw a metalled single-track road and climbed up from the river valley. Within ten minutes a farmer in a pony and trap offered her a lift to the main road to Selkirk. From there it was a two-mile walk to town and once in Selkirk she would know exactly how far away she was from Lyne.