by William Boyd
‘How’s Jochen?’
‘He’s very well.’
‘Give him a kiss from his father.’
‘No.’
‘Don’t be bitter, Ruth. You knew everything before this started between us. Everything was open. We had no secrets. I made no promises.’
‘I’m not bitter. I just know what’s best for both of us. Bye.’
I hung up. Time to pick up Jochen from school but I knew I shouldn’t have called Karl-Heinz. I was already regretting it: it set everything stirring in me once more – everything that I had managed to tidy, order and label and store away in a locked cupboard was scattered all over the floor of my life again. I walked down the Banbury Road to Grindle’s chanting to myself: it’s over – calm down. It’s finished – calm down. He’s history – calm down.
That night, after Jochen had gone to bed, Ludger and I sat up later than usual in the sitting-room, watching the news on television. For once I was paying attention and, as malign coincidence would have it, there was a report from Germany about the Baader-Meinhof trial that had now lasted more than a hundred days. Ludger stirred in his seat when the picture of a man’s face came up on the screen: handsome in a sleazy kind of way – a kind of sneering handsomeness that you see in certain men.
‘Hey, Andreas,’ Ludger said, pointing at the screen. ‘You know, I knew him.’
‘Really? How?’
‘We were in porno together.’
I went over to the TV and switched it off.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I said. We went through to the kitchen together and I switched the kettle on.
‘What do you mean “in porno”?’ I asked, idly.
‘I was an actor in porno films for a while. So was Andreas. We used to hang out together.’
‘You acted in porn films?’
‘Well only one film. You can still buy it, you know, in Amsterdam, Sweden.’ He seemed quite proud of this fact.
‘What’s it called?’
‘Volcano of Cum.’
‘Good title. Was Andreas Baader in this film?’
‘No. Then he got crazy: you know – Ulrike Meinhof, RAF, the end of capitalism.’
‘I spoke to Karl-Heinz today.’
He went very still. ‘Did I tell you I cut him out of my life for ever?’
‘No, you didn’t, actually.’
‘Ein vollkommenes Arschloch.’
He said this with unusual passion, not his usual lazy mid-Atlantic drawl. A complete fucking bastard, was the closest demotic equivalent I could come up with. I looked at Ludger sitting there thinking about Karl-Heinz and joined him in his silent rant of hate against his older brother. He twiddled a lock of his long hair between his fingers and looked for a moment as if he might suddenly cry bitter tears. I decided he could stay on a day or two more. I warmed the pot, put in the tea-leaves and added the boiling water.
‘Did you do porno for long?’ I asked, recalling his unselfconscious nude stroll through the flat.
‘No. I quit. I began to have very serious problems.’
‘What? With the idea of pornography? Ideologically, you mean?’
‘No, no. Porno was great. I loved it – I love porno. No, I began to have serious problems with mein Schwanz.’ He pointed at his groin.
‘Oh …Right.’
He grinned his old sly grin. ‘He wouldn’t do what I was telling him to do, you know?…’ He frowned. ‘Do you say “tail” in English?’
‘No. Not normally. We say “prick” or “cock”. Or “dick”.’
‘Oh, right. But nobody is saying “tail”? Like a slang?’
‘No. We don’t say it.’
‘Schwanz – “tail”: I think to say “my tail” is better than to say “my dick”.’
I wasn’t keen to pursue this conversation – talking dirty with Ludger – any further. The tea was brewed so I poured him a cup. ‘But hey, Ludger,’ I said cheerfully, ‘keep saying “tail” and maybe it’ll catch on. I’m going to have a bath. See you in the morning.’
I took my pot of tea, my milk bottle and my mug into the bathroom, set them all carefully on the edge of the bath and turned on the taps. To lie in a hot bath drinking hot tea is the only sure way of calming myself when my brain is on the rampage.
I locked the door, took my clothes off and lay in my warm bath and sipped my tea, banishing all thoughts and images of Karl-Heinz and our years together from my mind. I thought about my mother, instead, and the Prenslo Incident, and what she had seen and done that afternoon on the Dutch-German frontier in 1939. It seemed impossible somehow – I still couldn’t fit my mother into Eva Delectorskaya, nor the other way round … Life was very strange, I told myself, you can never be sure of anything. You think everything is normal and straightforward, set and fixed – and then suddenly it’s all flung upside-down. I turned to refill my mug and knocked the teapot over, badly scalding my neck and left shoulder. My scream woke up Jochen and had Ludger beating on the door.
The Story of Eva Delectorskaya
London, 1940
IT WASN’T UNTIL AUGUST that Eva Delectorskaya was summoned, finally, to give her account of the Prenslo Incident. She travelled into work as usual, leaving her lodgings in Bays-water and catching a bus that took her into Fleet Street. She sat on the top deck, smoked her first cigarette of the day and looked out at the sunny expanse of Hyde Park, thinking how pretty the silvery barrage balloons looked, plumply flying in the pale blue sky, and wondering idly if the barrage balloons should be left there when this war ended, if it ever did. Better than any obelisk or martial statue, she thought, imagining a child in 1948 or 1965 asking their parent, ‘Mummy, what were those big balloons for? …’ Romer said this war would last at least ten years unless the Americans joined in. Though, she had to admit, he had made this pronouncement in a mood of some bitterness and shock in Ostend in May as they had watched the German blitzkrieg race through Holland, Belgium and France. Ten years …Ten years – 1950. In 1950, she thought, Kolia will have been dead for eleven years. The blunt truth distressed her: she thought about him all the time, not every day, now, but still many times a week. Would she still be thinking of him as much in 1950, she wondered? Yes, she told herself with some defiance, yes I will.
She opened her newspaper as the bus approached Marble Arch. Twenty-two enemy aircraft downed yesterday; Winston Churchill visits munition workers; new bombers can reach Berlin and beyond. She wondered if this last item was one of AAS’s plants – it bore all the hallmarks and she was becoming something of an expert at recognising them. The story had a sound and plausible factual base but was also gifted with a teasing vagueness and a covert unprovability. ‘An air ministry spokesman refused to deny that such a capability would soon be available to the RAF …’ All the signs were there.
She stepped off her bus as it paused at traffic lights in Fleet Street and turned up Fetter Lane, making for the unremarkable building that housed Accountancy and Actuarial Services Ltd. She pressed the buzzer on the fourth-floor landing and was admitted into a shabby ante-room.
‘Morning, darling,’ Deirdre said, one hand holding out a pile of newspaper clippings while with the other she rummaged in a drawer of her desk.
‘Morning,’ Eva said, taking the clippings from her. Deirdre was a chain-smoking gaunt woman in her sixties who was effectively the administration of AAS – source of all equipment and material, provider of tickets and passes, medicaments and key information: who was available, who wasn’t, who was sick and who was ‘away travelling’, and, most importantly, the provider and denier of access to Romer himself. Morris Devereux joked that Deirdre was in fact Romer’s mother. She had a harsh monotone voice that rather undercut the effect of the constant, warm endearments she employed when she addressed people. She pressed the buzzer that allowed Eva to go through the interior door to the dim passageway off which the team’s offices were situated.
Sylvia was in, she saw; Blytheswood and Morris Devereux were in, too. Angus Woolf was working at
Reuters and Romer himself had a new executive position with the Daily Express but maintained a seldom-occupied office a floor above – reached by a cramped twisting stairway – that had a distant view of Holborn Viaduct. From their various rooms they tried to run the Agence in Ostend in absentia through encrypted telegrams sent to a stay-behind Belgian agent known as ‘Guy’. Also certain words placed in AAS stories in foreign newspapers were meant to alert him and be circulated to their customers in occupied Belgium, such as they had. It was not at all clear that the system was working; indeed, Eva thought, they maintained a pretence of effort and confident news-gathering and dispatch that was impressive, but she knew everyone thought, individually, that what they were doing was at best insignificant, at worst, useless. Morale was becoming lower, daily, and nowhere better exemplified that in their boss’s mood: Romer was visibly tense, snappy, often taciturn and brooding. It was only a matter of time, they whispered to each other, before AAS Ltd was shut down and they were all re-assigned.
Eva hung her hat and her gasmask on the back of the door, sat at her desk and looked out through the grimy window at the nondescript roofscape in front of her. Buddleia sprouted from a gutter-head across the central courtyard and three miserable-looking pigeons groomed themselves on a row of chimney pots. She spread her cuttings on her desk. Something from an Italian newspaper (her story about rumours of Marshal Petain’s failing health); a reference to low morale amongst Luftwaffe pilots in a Canadian magazine (Romer had scrawled ‘More’ on this), and teleprints from two American news agencies about a German spy ring being broken in South Africa.
Blytheswood knocked on her door and asked her if she’d like a cup of tea. He was a tall, fair and burly man in his thirties, with two red patches on each cheek as if permanent incipient blushes resided there, ready to flush his entire face. He was a shy man and Eva liked him: he had always been kind to her. He ran AAS’s transmitters: a kind of genius, Romer claimed: he could do anything with radios and wirelesses, transmit messages across continents with nothing more than a car battery and a knitting needle.
While she was waiting for her tea, Eva began to type out a story she was working on about ‘ghost ships’ in the Mediterranean but she was interrupted by Deirdre.
‘Hello, sweetness, his lordship wants you upstairs. Don’t worry, I’ll drink your tea.’
Eva climbed the stairs to Romer’s office, trying to analyse the complex smell in the stairwell – a cross between mushrooms and soot, ancient stour and mildew, she decided. Romer’s door was open and she went straight in without knocking or coughing politely. He had his back to her and was standing staring out of the window at Holborn Viaduct as if its wrought-iron arches held some encoded meaning for him.
‘Morning,’ Eva said. They had been back in England for four months now, since leaving Ostend, and she supposed, calculating swiftly, she must have seen Romer for about an hour and a half in all that time. The easy familiarity that had seemed to be building in Belgium had disappeared with the collapse of the Agence and the invariable, daily, bad news about the war. Romer, in England, was formal and closed with her (as he was with everyone, the other staff reminded her when she commented on his froideur). The rumours were growing that all the ‘irregulars’ were to be closed down by the new head of SIS. Romer’s day was all but done, so Morris Devereux claimed.
He turned from the window.
‘C wants to meet you,’ he said. ‘He wants to talk about Prenslo.’
She knew who C was and felt a little flutter of alarm.
‘Why me?’ she said. ‘You know as much as I do.’
Romer explained about the continuing ramifications of the Prenslo ‘disaster’, as he termed it. Of the two British agents captured one was the station-head of SIS in Holland and the other ran the Dutch ‘Z’ network, a covert parallel intelligence-gathering system. Between the two of them they knew pretty much everything about Britain’s spy networks in western Europe – and now they were in German hands, under stringent and unforgiving interrogation, no doubt.
‘Everything’s gone, or else exposed or insecure and unusable,’ Romer said. ‘We have to assume that – and what’ve we got left? Lisbon, Berne …Madrid’s a wash-out.’ He looked at her. ‘I don’t know why they want to see you, to be honest. Maybe they think you saw something, that you’ll be able to inadvertently tell them why everything went so spectacularly, magnificently wrong.’ His tone of voice made it clear he thought the whole exercise was a waste of time. He looked at his watch. ‘We can walk,’ he said. ‘We’re going to the Savoy Hotel.’
Eva and Romer strolled down the Strand towards the Savoy. Apart from the sandbags piled up around certain doorways, and the number of uniforms amongst the pedestrians, the scene looked like any other late-summer morning in London, Eva thought, realising as she formed the observation in her mind that she had never spent a peacetime late-summer morning in London before and therefore there was no valid comparison to be made. Perhaps London before the war was entirely otherwise, for all she knew. She wondered what it would be like to be in Paris. Now that would be different. Romer was untalkative, he seemed ill at ease.
‘Just tell them everything – as you told me. Be completely honest.’
‘Right, I will. The whole truth, etcetera.’
He looked sharply at her. Then he smiled, weakly, and allowed his shoulders to hang for a second.
‘There’s a lot at stake,’ he said. ‘A new operation for AAS. I have a feeling that how you come across this morning may have some bearing on all this.’
‘Will it just be C?’
‘Oh no, I think they’ll all be there. You’re the only witness.’
Eva said nothing as she took this in and tried to look unconcerned as they turned into Savoy Court and strolled towards the porte-cochere. The uniformed doorman spun the revolving door to admit them but Eva paused and asked Romer for a cigarette. He gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply, looking at the men and women going in and out of the Savoy. Women in hats and summer dresses, glossy motor cars with chauffeurs, a boy delivering a vast bouquet of flowers. For some people, she realised, a war hardly changed anything.
‘Why are we meeting in a hotel?’ she asked.
‘They love meeting in hotels. Ninety per cent of intelligence meetings take place in hotels. Let’s go.’
She stood on her half-smoked cigarette and they went inside.
They were met at reception by a young man and led up two floors and along a corridor of many corners to a suite of rooms. She and Romer were asked to wait in a kind of hallway with a sofa and offered tea. Then a man came in who knew Romer and they stood together in a corner, talking in low voices. This man wore a grey pin-striped suit, had a small trimmed moustache and sleek gingery hair. When he left Romer rejoined her on the sofa.
‘Who was that?’ she said.
‘A complete arse,’ he replied, putting his mouth close to her ear. She felt his warm breath on her cheek and her arm and side erupted in goose pimples.
‘Miss Dalton?’ The first young man stepped through the door and gestured for her to enter.
The room she entered was large and shadowy and she felt the softness and the richness of its carpet beneath her feet. She sensed Romer entering behind her. Armchairs and sofas had been pushed to the walls and the curtains had been half drawn against the August sun. Three tables had been positioned end to end in the middle of the room and four men sat behind them facing a solitary wooden chair set in the middle of the room. Eva was shown towards it, asked to sit down. She saw two other men standing at the rear, leaning against the wall.
A spry elderly man with a silver moustache spoke. No one was introduced.
‘This may look like a tribunal, Miss Dalton, but I want you to think of it as just an informal chat.’
The absurdity of this statement made the other three men relax and chuckle. One was wearing a naval uniform, with many gold bands on his wrists. The other two looked like bankers or lawyers, she thought. One
had a stiff collar. She noticed one of the men standing in the rear was wearing a polka-dotted bow tie. She glanced quickly behind her to see that Romer was standing by the door with the ‘complete arse’.
Papers were shuffled, glances were exchanged.
‘Now, Miss Dalton,’ Silver Moustache said. ‘Tell us in your own words exactly what happened at Prenslo.’
So she told them, taking them through the day, hour by hour. When she finished they began to ask her questions and more and more, she realised they began to centre on Lieutenant Joos and the failure of the double password.
‘Who gave you the details of the double password?’ a tall jowly man asked her; his voice was deep with a ragged, heavy quality to it; he spoke very slowly and deliberately. He was standing at the rear beside Polka-Dot Bow Tie.
‘Mr Romer.’
‘You’re certain you had it correctly. You didn’t make a mistake.’
‘No. We routinely use double passwords.’
‘We?’ Silver Moustache interrupted.
‘In the team – those of us who work with Mr Romer. It’s completely normal for us.’
There were glances over at Romer. The naval officer whispered something to the man in a stiff collar. He put on a pair of round tortoiseshell spectacles and stared more closely at Eva.
Silver Moustache leant forward. ‘How would you describe Lt Joos’s response to your second question; “Where can I buy French cigarettes?”?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Eva said.
The jowly man spoke again from the back of the room. ‘Did Lt. Joos’s answer seem to you like the response to a password, or was it a casual, natural remark?’
Eva paused, thinking back to that moment in the Café Backus. She saw Joos’s face in her mind’s eye, his slight smile, he knew exactly who she was. He had said ‘Amsterdam’ instantly, confidently, sure that this was the answer she expected.
‘I would say, absolutely, that he thought he was giving me the answer to the second password.’
For the briefest instant she sensed all the men in the room relax, infinitesimally. She couldn’t tell how or why or what indicated this, but something she had said, the answer she had given, had clearly resolved a complex issue, had put their minds at rest on a contentious matter.