by William Boyd
A holidaying couple from Durham gave her a lift from Selkirk to Innerleithen and from there she took a local taxi the remaining few miles to Lyne. She ordered the taxi to stop half a mile from the gates and, paying off the driver, circled round the foot of the hill opposite the house so she could approach it from across the meadows, as if she’d just been out for a pre-prandial stroll.
As she approached the house she could see that Sergeant Law and the Laird were standing on the lawn, looking out for her as she came in. She opened the gate on the bridge over the small stream and strode up to meet them.
‘Last home, Miss Dalton,’ Law said. ‘Well, done, all the same: you were the furthest away.’
‘We didn’t expect to see you come in round Cammlesmuir, though,’ the Laird said, shrewdly, ‘did we, Sergeant?’
‘Aye, true, sir. But Miss Dalton is always full of surprises.’
She went into the dining room, where a cold lunch had been left out for her – some tinned ham and a potato salad. She poured herself a glass of water from a carafe and gulped it down, then gulped down another. She sat and ate, alone, forcing herself to eat slowly, not wolf her food, though she had a huge hunger on her. She was feeling intense pleasure – intense self-satisfaction. Kolia would have been pleased with her, she thought, and laughed to herself. She could not explain why, but she felt she had changed in some small but profound way.
Princes Street, Edinburgh, a mid-week morning in early July, a breezy cool day with big packed clouds rushing overhead, threatening rain. Shoppers, holiday-makers, Edinburgh folk going about their business, filled the pavements and bulked in shifting crowds at the crossing points and bus stops. Eva Delectorskaya walked down the sloping street from St Andrews Square and turned right on to Princes Street. She was walking quickly, purposefully, not glancing back, but her head was full of the knowledge that at least six people were following her: two ahead, she thought, doubling back, and four behind, and perhaps a seventh, a stray, picking up instructions from the others, just to confuse her.
She paused at certain shop windows, looking at the reflections, relying on her eye to spot something familiar, something already seen, searching for people covering their faces with hats and newspapers and guidebooks – but she could see nothing suspicious. Off again: she crossed the broad street to the Gardens side, darting between a tram and a brewer’s dray, running between motor cars to the Scott Monument. She walked behind it, turned on her heel and, picking up speed now, strode briskly back in the opposite direction towards Calton Hill. On a whim she suddenly ducked into the North British Hotel, the doorman having no time to tip his cap to her. At reception she asked to be shown a room and was taken up to the fourth floor. She did not linger as she enquired about rates and where the bathroom was. Outside, she knew, all would be temporary consternation but one of them at least would have seen her go into the hotel. Word would be passed: within five minutes they would be watching every exit. ‘Go out the door you came in’ – Law always said – ‘it’ll be the slackest watched.’ Good advice, except everyone following had heard it also.
Down in the lobby again, she took a red headscarf out of her bag and tied it on. She took her coat off and carried it over her arm. When a gaggle of people, heading for an omnibus parked outside, gathered by the revolving door, she joined them and slipped out in their group, asking a man, with as much animation as possible, where she could find the Royal Mile, then darted round the rear of their charabanc, recrossed Princes Street again and then sauntered slowly, dawdling westwards, pausing to look in shop windows, only to study reflections. There was a man in a green jacket she thought she had seen before on the other side of the street, keeping pace with her, turning his back from time to time to look up at the castle.
She ran into Jenners and up three floors. She moved through haberdashery towards the milliners’ department. Green Jacket would have seen her: he would have told the others she was in the department store. She went into the ladies’ lavatory and strode past the stalls down to the end. There was a staff entrance here that, in her experience, was never locked. She turned the handle – the door opened and she slipped through.
‘I’m sorry, Miss, this is private.’ Two shop assistants on their break sat on a bench, smoking.
‘I’m looking for Jenny, Jenny Kinloch. I’m her sister: there’s been a terrible accident.’
‘We’ve no Jenny Kinloch here, Miss.’
‘But I was told to go to the staff room.’
So she was led through corridors and back stairways smelling of linoleum and polish to the staff room. No Jenny Kinloch was to be had, so Eva said she had to make a telephone call, perhaps she’d got the details wrong, perhaps the shop was Binns, not Jenners, and she was directed with some impatience towards a telephone cabin. Inside she took off her headscarf and combed out her long hair. She turned her coat inside out and stepped out through the staff entrance and on to Rose Street. She knew she’d lost them. She had always lost them but this was the first time she’d beaten a six-man follow –
‘Eva!’ The sound of running footsteps.
She turned: it was Romer, a little out of breath, his wiry hair tousled. He slowed, composed himself, ran a hand across his head.
‘Very good,’ he said. ‘I thought the red scarf was a master-stroke. Make yourself conspicuous – tremendous.’
Her disappointment was like a bitter taste in her throat. ‘But how did you – ’
‘I was cheating. I was close. Always. Nobody knew.’ He stood in front of her now. ‘I’ll show you how to do a close follow. You need more props – specs, a false moustache.’ He took one out of his pocket, and out of his other a flat tweed cap. ‘But you were very good, Eva. Nearly shook me off.’ He was grinning his white smile. ‘Didn’t you like the room at the North British? Jenners was tricky – the Ladies, nice touch. A few outraged Edinburgh maidens, there, I’m afraid. But I knew there must be a back way out because you’d never have gone in.’
‘I see.’
He looked at his watch. ‘Let’s go up here. I’ve booked lunch. You like oysters, don’t you?’
They ate lunch in a decoratively tiled oyster bar attached to a public house. Oysters, she thought, the symbol of our relation-ship. Perhaps he believes they’re a genuine aphrodisiac and I’ll like him better? As they sat and talked Eva found herself looking at Romer with as much objectivity as she could muster, trying to imagine what she would have thought of him if they hadn’t been thrown together in this curious and alarming way – if Kolia’s death had never happened. There was something attractive about him, she supposed: something both urgent and laconically mysterious – he was a kind of spy after all – and there was his rare transforming smile – and his massive self-confidence. She concentrated: he was praising her again, saying how everyone at Lyne was impressed by her dedication, her aptitude.
‘But what’s it all for?’ she said, blurting the question out.
‘I’ll explain everything once you’re finished,’ he said. ‘You’ll come down to London and meet the unit, my team.’
‘You have your own unit?’
‘Let’s say a small subdivision of an annexe to a subsidiary element linked to the main body.’
‘And what does your unit do?’
‘I wanted to give you these,’ he said, not answering, and reached into his breast pocket, removing an envelope that turned out to contain two passports. She opened them: there was her same shadowy-eyed photograph, blurry and stiffly formal, but the names were different: now she was Margery Allerdice and Lily Fitzroy.
‘What’re these for? I thought I was Eve Dalton.’
He explained. Everyone who worked for him, who was in his unit, was given three identities. It was a perk, a bonus – to be used or not used as the recipient saw fit. Think of them as a couple of extra parachutes, he said, a couple of getaway cars parked near by if you ever felt the need to use them one day. They can be very handy, he said, and it saves a lot of time if you have them already.
Eva put her two new passports in her handbag and for the first time felt a little creep of fear climb up her spine. Following-games in Edinburgh were one thing; clearly whatever Romer’s unit did was potentially dangerous. She clipped her handbag shut.
‘Are you allowed to tell me more about this unit of yours?’
‘Oh, yes. A bit. It’s called AAS,’ he said. ‘Almost an embarrassing acronym, I know, but it stands for Actuarial and Accountancy Services.’
‘Very boring.’
‘Exactly.’
And she thought, suddenly, that she did like Romer – liked his brand of cleverness, his way of second-guessing everything. He ordered a brandy for himself. Eva wanted nothing more.
‘I’ll give you another piece of advice,’ he said. ‘In fact I’ll always be giving you advice – tips – from time to time. You should try to remember them.’
She suddenly disliked him again: the self-satisfaction, the amour propre, were sometimes just too much. I am the cleverest man in the world and all I have to deal with are you poor fools.
‘Find yourself a safe house. Somewhere. Wherever you happen to be for any length of time, have a safe house, a personal one. Don’t tell me, don’t tell anyone. Just a place you can be sure of going to, where you can be anonymous, where you can hide, if need be.’
‘Romer’s rules,’ she said. ‘Any more?’
‘Oh, there are plenty more,’ he said, not picking up the irony in her voice, ‘but as we’re on the subject, I’ll tell you the most important rule. Rule number one, never to be forgotten.’
‘Which is?’
‘Don’t trust anyone,’ he said, without any portentousness, but with a kind of mundane confidence and certainty, as if he had said ‘Today is Friday’. ‘Don’t trust anyone, ever,’ he repeated and took out a cigarette and lit it, thinking, as if he’d managed to surprise himself by his acuity. ‘Maybe it’s the only rule you need. Maybe all the other rules I’ll tell you are just versions of this rule. “The one and only rule”. Don’t trust anyone – not even the one person you think you can trust most in this world. Always suspect. Always mistrust.’ He smiled, not his warm smile. ‘It’ll stand you in excellent stead.’
‘Yes, I’m learning that.’
He drank the rest of his brandy down in a one-er. He drank quite a lot, she’d noticed, in her few encounters with Romer.
‘We’d better get you back to Lyne,’ he said, calling for the bill.
At the door they shook hands. Eva said she could catch a bus home easily enough. She thought he was looking at her more intently than usual and she remembered that she had her hair down – he’s probably never seen me with my hair down, she thought.
‘Yes … Eva Delectorskaya,’ he said, musingly, as if he had other things on his mind. ‘Who would’ve thought?’ He reached out as if to pat her shoulder and then decided against it. ‘Everyone’s very pleased. Very.’ He looked up at the afternoon sky with its great building clouds, grey, laden, threatening. ‘War next month,’ he said, in the same bland tone, ‘or the next. The big European war.’ He looked back and smiled at her. ‘We shall do our bit,’ he said, ‘don’t worry.’
‘In the Actuarial and Accountancy Services.’
‘Yes …Ever been to Belgium?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Yes. I went to Brussels once. Why?’
‘I think you might like it. Bye, Eva.’ He gave her a half salute, half wave and sauntered away. Eva could hear him whistling. She turned and walked thoughtfully to the bus station.
Later, as she sat in the waiting-room, waiting for the bus to Galashiels, she found herself looking at the other occupants of the small room also waiting for their buses – the men and women, and the few children. She was examining them, evaluating them, assessing them, placing them. And she thought: if only you knew, if only you knew who I was and what I did. Then she caught herself, almost exclaiming with surprise. She realised suddenly that everything had indeed changed, that she was now looking at the world in a different way. It was as if the nervous circuits in her brain had altered, as if she’d been rewired, and she knew that her lunch with Romer had marked both the end of something old and the beginning of something new. She understood now, with almost distressing clarity, that for the spy the world and its people were different than they were for everybody else. With a small tremor of alarm and, she had to admit, with a small tremor of excitement, she realised in that Edinburgh waiting-room that she was looking at the world around her as a spy would. She thought about what Romer had said, about his one and only rule, and she thought: was this the spy’s particular, unique fate – to live in a world without trust? She wondered if she would ever be capable of trusting anyone again.
3
No More Naked
I WOKE EARLY, DISTURBED and angry after my familiar dream – the dream where I’m dead and I’m watching Jochen cope with life without me – usually perfectly and completely happily. I started to have this dream after he began to talk and I resent my subconscious mind drawing this deep worry, this sick neurosis, to my attention every now and then. Why am I dreaming of my own death? I never dream of Jochen’s death, though sometimes I think about it, rarely, for a second or two before I banish it – shocked – from my mind. I’m almost sure that everyone does this about the people they love – it’s a grim corollary of truly loving someone: you find yourself compelled to imagine your world without them and have to contemplate its awfulness and dread for a second or two. A peer through the crack to the emptiness, the big silence beyond. We can’t help it – I can’t help it, anyway, and I tell myself guiltily that everybody must do it, that it’s a very human reaction to the human condition. I hope I’m right.
I slipped out of bed and padded through to his bedroom, to check on him. He was sitting up in bed, colouring in his colouring book, a fritter of pencils and wax crayons around him.
I gave him a kiss and asked him what he was drawing.
‘A sunset,’ he said, and showed me the lurid page, all flaming orange and yellow, capped with bruised brooding purples and greys.
‘It’s a bit sad,’ I said, my mood still influenced by my dream.
‘No it’s not, it’s meant to be beautiful.’
‘What would you like for breakfast?’ I asked him.
‘Crispy bacon, please.’
I opened the door to Hamid – he wasn’t wearing his new leather jacket, I noticed, just his black jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, very crisp, like an airline pilot. Normally I’d have teased him about this but I thought that after my faux pas of the day before and the fact that Ludger was in the kitchen behind me it would be best to be pleasant and kind.
‘Hamid, hello! Beautiful morning!’ I said, my voice full of special cheer.
‘The sun is shining again,’ he said in a monotone.
‘So it is, so it is.’
I turned and showed him in. Ludger was sitting there at the kitchen table in T-shirt and shorts, spooning cornflakes into his mouth. I could tell what Hamid was thinking – his insincere smile, his stiffness – but there was no possibility of explaining the reality behind this situation with Ludger in the room, so I opted for a simple introduction.
‘Hamid, this is Ludger, a friend of mine from Germany. Ludger – Hamid.’
I had not introduced them the day before. I had gone down to the front door, brought Ludger up to the flat, installed him in the sitting-room and continued – with some difficulty – with Hamid’s lesson. After Hamid was finished and gone I went to find Ludger – he was stretched out on the sofa, asleep.
Now Ludger raised his clenched fist and said, ‘Allahu Akbar.’
‘You remember Ludger,’ I said, brightly. ‘He came yesterday, during our lesson.’
Hamid’s face registered no emotion. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said.
‘Shall we go through?’ I said.
‘Please, yes, after you, Ruth.’
I led him through to the study. He seemed very unlike his usual self
: solemn, almost agonised in some way. I noticed he had had his beard trimmed – it made him look younger.
‘So,’ I said, continuing with the false breeziness, sitting down at my desk, ‘I wonder what the Ambersons are up to today.’
He ignored me. ‘This Ludger man,’ he said, ‘is he the father of Jochen?’
‘No! Good God, no. What made you think that? No – he’s the brother of Jochen’s father, the younger brother of Karl-Heinz. No, no, absolutely no.’ I laughed, with nervous relief, realising I’d said ‘no’ six times. No denial could have been more underscored.
Hamid tried to disguise how happy he was at this news, but failed. His grin was almost stupid.
‘Oh. All right. No, I thought he …’ he paused, held up both his hands in apology. ‘Forgive me, I should not induct like this.’
‘Deduce.’
‘Deduce. So: he is Jochen’s uncle.’
This was true, but I had to admit I had never thought of Ludger Kleist in this way (he didn’t seem remotely avuncular – the words ‘Uncle Ludger’ conjoined appeared creepily antithetical) and, indeed, I had also introduced Ludger to Jochen as ‘a friend from Germany’ – and they had had no time to become better acquainted as I had to take Jochen to a birthday party. Ludger said he would go ‘to a pub’ and by the time he returned that evening Jochen was in bed. The uncle-revelation would have to wait.
Ludger was dossing down on a mattress on the floor of a room in the flat we called the Dining Room – in honour of the one dinner party I had given there since we had moved in. It was, in fact, and in theory, the room where I wrote my thesis. Its oval table was stacked with books and notes and drafts of my various chapters. I allowed myself to believe, contrary to the dusty evidence, that this was the room where I worked on my thesis – its very existence, its designation and compartmentalisation seemed to make my wishes somehow real, or more real: this was where my calm, scholarly, intellectual life took place – my messy disorganised real life occupied the rest of the flat. The Dining Room was my discrete little cell of mental endeavour. I dispelled the illusion quickly: we pushed the table to the wall; we laid down Ludger’s inflatable mattress on the carpet – it had become a spare room again–one Ludger professed himself to be very comfortable in.