by William Boyd
She never forgot this and she knew that more had to be done before she could feel even half secure, and so, in the early evenings, she took to drinking – while her money lasted – in a better class of public house and restaurant bar. She knew that for these next few days while she lived in her hotel and while she did nothing she was safest; as soon as she took up any form of work again, the system would remorselessly claim her and document her. So she went to the Cafe Royale and the Chelsea Arts Club, the bar of the Savoy and the Dorchester, the White Tower. Many eligible men bought her drinks and asked her out, and a few tried unsuccessfully to kiss and caress her. She met a Polish fighter pilot at the Leicester Square Bierkeller whom she saw twice more, before deciding against him. She was looking for a particular someone – she had no idea who – but she was confident she would recognise him the minute they met.
It was about ten days after she had become Sally Fairchild that she went to the Heart of Oak in Mount Street, Mayfair. It was a pub but its saloon bar was carpeted and hung with sporting prints and there was always a real fire burning in the grate. She ordered a gin and orange, found a seat, lit a cigarette and pretended to do the Times crossword. As usual, there were quite a few military types in – all officers – and one of them offered to buy her a drink. She didn’t want a British officer so she said she was waiting for a gentleman friend and he went away. After an hour or so – she was thinking of leaving – the table next to her was taken by three young men in dark suits. They were in merry mood and after listening in for a minute or two she realised their accents were Irish. She went to buy another drink and dropped her paper. One of the men, dark, with a plump face and a thin pencil moustache, returned it to her. His eyes met hers.
‘Can I buy you that drink?’ he said. ‘Please: it would be both a pleasure and an honour.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Eva said. ‘But I’m just going.’
She allowed herself to be persuaded to join their table. She was meeting a gentleman friend, she said, but he was already forty minutes late.
‘Oh that’s no gentleman friend,’ the man with the moustache said, making a solemn face. ‘That’s what you call an English cad.’
They all laughed at this and Eva noticed one of the men across the table – fair-haired with a freckly complexion and a big, easy, slouching presence – who smiled at the joke, but smiled inwardly, as if there were something else funny about the statement that amused him and not the obvious slur.
She discovered that all three of them were lawyers attached to the Irish Embassy, working in the consulate office in Clarges Street. When it was the fair-haired man’s turn to buy the next round, she let him go to the bar and then excused herself to the others, saying she had to go and powder her nose. She joined the man at the bar and said she’d changed her mind and would rather have a half pint of shandy than another gin and orange.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘A half pint of shandy it shall be.’
‘What did you say your name was?’ she asked.
‘I’m Sean. The other two are David and Eamonn. Eamonn’s the comedian – we’re his audience.’
‘Sean what?’
‘Sean Gilmartin.’ He turned and looked at her. ‘So what would be your name again, Sally?’
‘Sally Fairchild,’ she said. And she felt the past fall from her like loosened shackles. She stepped closer to Sean Gilmartin as he presented her with her half pint of shandy, as close as she could without touching him, and she lifted her face to his quietly knowing, quietly smiling eyes. Something told her that the story of Eva Delectorskaya had come to its natural end.
13
Face to Face
‘SO THAT WAS HOW you met my dad?’ I said. ‘You picked him up in a pub.’
‘I suppose so.’ My mother sighed, her face momentarily blank – thinking back, I assumed. ‘I was looking for the right man – I’d been looking for days – and then I saw him. That way he laughed to himself. I knew at once.’
‘Nothing cynical about it, then.’
She looked at me in that hard way she had – when I stepped out of line, when I was being too smart-aleck.
‘I loved your father,’ she said, simply, ‘he saved me.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, a bit feebly, feeling somewhat ashamed and blaming my sourness on my hangover: I was still paying the price for Hamid’s farewell party. I felt sluggish and stupid: my mouth was dry, my body craving water, and my earlier ‘mild’ headache had moved into the ‘persistent/throbbing’ category in the headache leagues.
She had quickly told me the rest of the story. After the encounter in the Heart of Oak there had been a few more dates – meals, an embassy dance, a film – and they realised that slowly but surely they were growing closer. Sean Gilmartin, with his diplomatic-corps connections and influence, had smoothed the processes involved in Sally Fairchild acquiring a new passport and other documentation. In March 1942 they had travelled to Ireland – to Dublin – where she had met his parents. They were married two months later in St Saviour’s, on Duncannon Street. Eva Delectorskaya became Sally Fairchild became Sally Gilmartin and she knew now that she was safe. After the war Sean Gilmartin and his young wife moved back to England, where he joined a firm of solicitors in Banbury, Oxfordshire, as a junior partner. The firm prospered, Sean Gilmartin became a senior partner, and in 1949 they had a child, a girl, who they named Ruth.
‘And you never heard anything more?’ I asked. ‘Nothing, not a whisper. I’d lost them completely – until now.’
‘What happened to Alfie Blytheswood?’
‘He died in 1957, I believe, a stroke.’
‘Genuine?’
‘I think so. The gap was too big.’
‘Any lingering problems with the Sally Fairchild identity?’
‘I was a married woman living in Dublin – Mrs Sean Gilmartin – everything had changed, everything was different; nobody knew what had happened to Sally Fairchild.’ She paused and smiled, as though recognising her past identities, these selves she had occupied.
‘Whatever happened to your father?’ I asked.
‘He died in Bordeaux, in 1944,’ she said. ‘I got Sean to track him through the London embassy, after the war – I said he was an old friend of the family …’ She pursed her lips. ‘Just as well, I suppose – how could I have gone to him. I never saw Irene, either. It would have been too risky.’ She looked up. ‘What’s the boy up to now?’
‘Jochen! Leave it alone!’ I shouted, crossly. He had found a hedgehog under the laurel bush. ‘They’re full of fleas.’
‘What’re fleas?’ he called back, stepping away all the same from the dun, prickly ball.
‘Horrible insects that bite you all over.’
‘And I want him to stay in my garden,’ my mother shouted as well. ‘He eats slugs.’
In the face of these joint remonstrations Jochen backed off some more and crouched down on his haunches to watch the hedgehog cautiously unroll. It was Saturday evening and the sun was lowering into the usual dusty haze that did duty for dusk in this endless summer. In the thick golden light the meadow in front of Witch Wood looked bleached-out, a tired old blonde.
‘Have you got any beer?’ I asked. I suddenly wanted beer, some hair of the dog, desperately, I realised.
‘You’ll have to go to the shop,’ she said and glanced at her watch, ‘which will be shut.’ She looked shrewdly at me. ‘You do look a bit the worse for wear, I must say. Did you get drunk?’
‘The party went on a bit longer than expected.’
‘I think I’ve got an old bottle of whisky somewhere.’
‘Yes,’ I said, brightening. ‘Maybe a little whisky and water. Lots of water,’ I added, as if that made my need less urgent, less blameworthy.
So my mother brought me a large tumbler of pale golden whisky and water and as I sipped it I began, almost immediately, to feel better – my headache was there but I felt less jangled and tetchy – and I reminded myself to be extra specially nice to Joche
n for the rest of the day. And as I drank I thought how perplexing life could be: that it could arrange things so that I should be sitting here in this Oxfordshire cottage garden, on a hot summer evening, with my son pestering a hedgehog, and my mother bringing me whisky – this woman, my mother, whom I had clearly never really known, born in Russia, a British spy, who had killed a man in New Mexico in 1941, become a fugitive and who, a generation later, had finally told me her story. It showed you that …My brain was too addled to take in the bigger picture that the story of Eva Delectorskaya belonged to, all I could enumerate were its component parts. I felt at once exhilarated – it proved we knew nothing about other people, that anything about them was possible, conceivable – and at the same time vaguely cast down as I realised the lies under which I had lived my life. It was as if I had to start to get to know her all over again, reshape everything that had passed between us, consider how her life now cast mine in a different and possibly unsettling new light. I decided, there and then, to leave it for a couple of days, let it brew for a while before I attempted fresh analysis. The events of my own life were sufficiently complicated enough: I should worry about myself, first, I said to myself. My mother was made of stronger stuff, clearly. I should think it over when I was more alert, more intellectually articulate – ask Dr Timothy Thoms a few leading questions.
I looked over at her. She was idly turning the pages of her magazine but her eyes were fixed elsewhere – she was looking fixedly, anxiously across the meadow at the trees of Witch Wood.
‘Is everything all right, Sal?’ I asked.
‘You know there was an old woman – an elderly woman – killed in Chipping Norton the day before yesterday.’
‘No. Killed how?’
‘She was in a wheelchair, doing her shopping. Sixty-three years old. Hit by a car that mounted the pavement.’
‘How awful … Drunk driver? Joy-rider?’
‘We don’t know.’ She tossed the magazine on the grass. ‘The driver of the car ran away. They haven’t found him yet.’
‘Can’t they identify him from the car?’
‘The car was stolen.’
‘I see …But what’s it got to do with you.’
She turned to me. ‘Doesn’t it make you think? I’ve been in a wheelchair recently. I often shop in Chipping Norton.’
I had to laugh. ‘Oh, come on,’ I said.
She looked at me: her gaze steady, unfriendly. ‘You still don’t understand, do you?’ she said. ‘Even after everything I’ve told you. You don’t understand how they operate.’
I finished my whisky – I wasn’t going down this tortuously twisting road, that was for sure.
‘We’d better go,’ I said, diplomatically. ‘Thanks for looking after the boy. Did he behave well?’
‘Impeccably. Excellent company.’
I called Jochen away from his hedgehog studies and we spent ten minutes gathering up his widely dispersed belongings. When I went into the kitchen I noticed there was a small assembly of packaged foodstuffs on the table: a thermos flask, a Tupperware container with sandwiches inside, two apples and a packet of biscuits. Odd, I thought, as I picked up toy cars from the floor, anyone would think she was about to go off on a picnic. Then Jochen called me, saying he couldn’t find his gun.
Eventually we loaded the car and said goodbye. Jochen kissed his granny and when I kissed my mother she stood stiff – everything was too strange today, making no sense. I had to leave first, then I would tackle the anomalies.
‘Are you coming into town next week?’ I asked, nicely, in a friendly way, thinking I would have lunch with her.
‘No.’
‘Fine.’ I opened the car door. ‘Bye, Sal. I’ll call.’
Then she reached for me and hugged me, hard. ‘Goodbye, darling,’ she said and I felt her dry lips on my cheek. This was even odder; she hugged me about once every three years.
Jochen and I drove away from the village in silence.
‘Did you have a nice time with Granny?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Sort of.’
‘Be precise.’
‘Well, she was very busy, doing things all the time. Cutting things in the garage.’
‘Cutting? What things?’
‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t let me go in. But I could hear her sawing.’
‘Sawing? … Did she seem different in any way? Was she behaving differently?’
‘Be precise.’
Touché. ‘Did she seem nervous, jumpy, bad-tempered, strange.’
‘She’s always strange. You know that.’
We drove back to Oxford through the fading light. I saw black flights of rooks taking to the air from stubbly fields as the smoky light of evening blurred and hazed the hedgerows and the darkening copses and woods seemed as dense and impenetrable as if they had been cast from metal. I felt my headache easing and, taking this as a sign of general improvement, I remembered that I had a bottle of Mateus Rosé in the fridge. Saturday night in, telly on, twenty cigarettes and a bottle of Mateus Rosé: how could life get any better?
We ate supper (there was no sign of Ludger and Ilse) and watched a variety show on television – bad singers, clumsy dancers, I thought – and I put Jochen to bed. Now I could drink my wine and smoke a couple of cigarettes. But, instead, twenty minutes after I had washed up the dishes, I was still sitting in the kitchen, a mug of black coffee in front of me, thinking about my mother and her life.
On Sunday morning I felt about a hundred per cent better but my thoughts still kept returning to the cottage and my mother’s behaviour the day before: the edginess, the paranoia, the packed picnic, the untypical touchy-feeliness …What was going on? Where could she be going with her sandwiches and thermos – and made up the night before, which would seem to indicate an early start. If she was planning a trip, why not tell me about it? And if she didn’t want me to know, why leave the picnic out in such prominent display?
And then I realised.
Jochen accepted the new arrangements to his Sunday with good grace. In the car we sang songs to pass the time: ‘One Man Went to Mow’, ‘Ten Green Bottles’, ‘The Quartermaster’s Store’, ‘The Happy Wanderer’, ‘Tipperary’ – these were songs my father had sung to me as a child, his deep vibrating bass filling the car. Like me, Jochen had a terrible voice – completely out of tune – but we sang along, lustily, carelessly, united in our dissonance.
‘Why are we going back?’ he asked between verses. ‘We never go back the next day.’
‘Because I forgot something, forgot to ask Granny something.’
‘You could speak to her on the phone.’
‘No. I have to speak to her, face to face.’
‘I suppose you’re going to have a row,’ he said, wearily.
‘No, no – don’t worry. It’s just something I have to ask her.’ And, as I had feared, the car was gone and the house was locked. I retrieved the key from under the flower pot and we went in. As before, everything was neat and orderly – no hint of a rapid departure, no sign of panic or fearful haste. I walked through the rooms slowly, looking around, looking for the clue, the anomaly that she would have left me, and, eventually, I found it.
On these baking sultry nights, who in their right mind would light a fire in their sitting-room? My mother had, clearly, as a cluster of charred logs lay in the grate, the ashes still warm. I crouched down in front of it and used the poker to disturb the pile, looking for the remains of burned papers – perhaps she was destroying some other secret – but there was no sign: instead my eye was caught by one of the logs. I picked it out with the fire tongs and ran it under the tap in the kitchen – it hissed as the cold water rinsed the ashes away – and the glossy cherrywood grain of the wood became immediately evident. I dried it off with some paper towels: there was no mistaking it, even half charred: it was obviously the main part of the butt of a shotgun, sawn off just behind the hand-grip. I went out to the garage where she had a small work-bench and kept her gardening implement
s (always oiled and neatly racked away). On the bench was a hacksaw and vice and scattered around it the small silver corkscrew frills of worked metal. The shotgun barrels were in a burlap potato sack under the table. She had taken no real care to hide them; indeed, even the shotgun butt had been more scorched than burned away. I felt a weakness in my gut: half of me seemed to want to laugh – half of me felt a powerful urge to shit. I understood, now, that I was beginning to think like her: she had wanted me to come back this Sunday morning to find her gone; she had wanted me to search her house and find these things and now she expected me to draw the obvious conclusion.
I was in London by six o’clock that evening. Jochen was safe with Veronica and Avril and all I had to do was find my mother before she killed Lucas Romer. I took the train to Paddington and, from Paddington, a taxi delivered me to Knightsbridge. I could remember the street that my mother had said Romer lived on, but not the number of the house: Walton Crescent was where I told the taxi driver to take me and drop me close to one end. I could see from my street map of London that there was a Walton Street – that seemed to lead to the very portals of Harrods – and a Walton Crescent that was tucked away behind and to one side. I paid the driver, a hundred yards off, and made my way to the Crescent on foot, trying all the while to think as my mother would think, to second-guess her modus operandi. First things first, I said to myself: check out the neighbourhood.
Walton Crescent breathed money, class, privilege, confidence – but it did so quietly, with subtlety and no ostentation. All the houses looked very much the same until you paid closer attention. There was a crescent-shaped public garden facing the gentle arc of four-storey, creamy stuccoed Georgian terraced houses, each with small front gardens and each with – on the first floor – three huge tall windows giving on to a wrought-iron filigreed balcony. The small gardens were well tended and defiantly green despite the hosepipe ban – I took in box hedges, roses, varieties of clematis and a certain amount of mossy statuary – as I began to walk along its curving length. Almost every house had a burglar alarm and many of the windows were shuttered or secured with sliding grilles behind the glass. I was almost alone on the street apart from a nanny wheeling a pram and a grey-haired gentleman who was cutting a low yew hedge with pedantic, loving care. I saw my mother’s white Allegro parked across the street from number 29.