by William Boyd
I bent down and rapped sharply on the window. She looked round but seemed very unsurprised to see me. She smiled and reached over to open the door to let me in beside her.
‘You took your time,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d be here ages ago – still, well done.’ She was wearing her pearl-grey trouser suit and her hair was combed and shiny as if she’d just left the hairdresser’s. She was wearing lipstick and her eyelashes were dark with mascara.
I allowed a shudder of anger to pass through me before I clambered into the passenger seat. She offered me a sandwich before I could begin to reproach her.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Salmon and cucumber. Not salmon out of a tin.’
‘Mayonnaise?’
‘Just a little – and some dill.’
I took the sandwich and wolfed down a couple of mouthfuls: I was suddenly hungry and the sandwich was very tasty.
‘There’s a pub in the next street,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and have a drink and talk this over properly. I’m very worried, I have to say.’
‘No, I might miss him,’ she said. ‘Sunday evening, coming back from the country somewhere – his house or a friend’s – he should be here before nine.’
‘I will not let you kill him. I warn you, I – ’
‘Don’t be absurd!’ She laughed. ‘I just want to have a brief chat.’ She put her hand on my knee. ‘Well done, Ruth, darling, tracking me here. I’m impressed – and pleased. I thought it was best this way – to let you figure it out for yourself, you know? I didn’t want to ask you to come, put pressure on you. I thought you would figure it out because you’re so clever – but now I know you’re clever in a different way.’
‘I suppose I should take that as a compliment.’
‘Look: if I’d asked you outright you’d have thought of a hundred ways of stopping me.’ She smiled, almost gleefully. ‘But, anyway, here we are, both of us.’ She touched my cheek with her fingers – where was all this affection coming from? ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘I know I could see him on my own but it’ll be so much better with you beside me.’
I was suspicious. ‘Why?’
‘You know: moral support and all that.’
‘Where’s the gun?’
‘I’m afraid I rather buggered it up. The barrels didn’t come off cleanly. I wouldn’t dare use it – anyway, now you’re here I feel safe.’
We sat on talking and eating our sandwiches as the evening light seemed to thicken dustily, peachily, in Walton Crescent, turning the cream stucco the palest apricot for a few moments. As the sky slowly darkened – it was a cloudy day but warm – I began to notice a small squirm of fear entering me: sometimes it seemed in my guts, sometimes my chest, sometimes in my limbs, making them achy and heavy – and I began to wish that Romer wouldn’t come home, that he’d gone away for a holiday to Portofino or Saint Tropez or Inverness, or wherever types like him vacationed, and that this vigil of ours would prove fruitless and we could go home and try to forget about the whole thing. But at the same time I knew my mother and I knew it wouldn’t simply end with Romer’s non-appearance: she had to see him just once more, one last time. And I realised, as I thought further, that everything that had happened this summer had been designed – manipulated – to bring about this confrontation: the wheelchair nonsense, the paranoia, the memoir –
My mother grabbed my arm.
At the far end of the crescent the big Bentley nosed round the corner. I thought I might faint, the blood seemed to be rushing audibly from my head. I took a huge gulp of air as I felt my stomach acids seethe and climb my oesophagus.
‘When he gets out of the car,’ my mother said evenly, ‘you go out and call his name. He’ll turn to you – he won’t see me at first. Keep him talking for a second or two. I want to surprise him.’
‘What do I say?’
‘How about: “Good evening, Mr Romer, can I have a word?” I only need a couple of seconds.’
She seemed very calm, very strong – whereas I thought I might burst into tears at any moment, might bawl and blub, I felt suddenly so insecure and inadequate – not like me at all, I realised.
The Bentley stopped, double-parking with the engine running, and the chauffeur opened the door and stepped out, walking round the car to the rear. He held the back door open on the pavement side and Romer climbed out with some difficulty, stooped a little, perhaps stiff from the journey. He had a few words with his driver, who then got back into the car and pulled away. Romer went to his front gate; he was wearing a tweed jacket and grey flannels with suede shoes. A light came on in the transom of number 29 and simultaneously the garden lights were illuminated, shining on the flagged path to the front door, a cherry tree, a stone obelisk in the hedge corner.
My mother gave me a shove and I opened the door.
‘Lord Mansfield?’ I called and stepped out on to the road. ‘May I have a word?’
Romer turned very slowly to face me.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Ruth Gilmartin – we met the other day.’ I crossed the road towards him. ‘At your club – I wanted to interview you.’
He peered at me. ‘I’ve nothing to say to you,’ he said. His raspy voice even, unthreatening. ‘I told you that.’
‘Oh, but I think you have,’ I said, wondering where my mother was – I had no sense of her presence, couldn’t hear her, had no idea which way she’d gone.
He laughed and opened the gate to his front garden.
‘Good-night, Miss Gilmartin. Stop bothering me. Go away.’
I couldn’t think what to say next – I had been dismissed.
He turned to close his gate and I saw behind him someone open the door a few inches, left ajar for easy access, no bother with keys or anything as vulgar as that. He saw I had remained standing there and his eyes flicked automatically up and down the street. And then he became very still.
‘Hello, Lucas,’ my mother said from the darkness.
She seemed to materialise from around the box hedge, not moving – just suddenly standing there.
Romer seemed paralysed for a moment, then he drew himself erect, stiffly, like a soldier on parade, as if he might fall over otherwise.
‘Who’re you?’
Now she stepped forward and the dusky late evening light showed her face, caught her eyes. I thought: she looks very beautiful, as if some sort of miraculous rejuvenation were taking place and the intervening thirty-five years of ageing were being erased.
I looked at Romer – he knew who she was – and he kept himself very still, one hand gripping the gatepost. I wondered what this moment must have been like for him – the shock beyond all shocks. But he gave nothing away, just managing to produce a small erratic smile.
‘Eva Delectorskaya,’ he said, softly, ‘who would have thought?’
We stood in Romer’s large drawing-room on the first floor – he had not asked us to sit down. At the garden gate, once he had recovered from the shock of seeing my mother, he had composed himself and his old bored urbanity re-established itself. ‘I suppose you’d better come in,’ he’d said, ‘no doubt you have something you want to tell me.’ We had followed him up the gravel path to the front door and into the house, where a dark-haired man in a white jacket stood waiting cautiously in the hall. Down a corridor I could hear the sound of dishes clattering in a kitchen somewhere.
‘Ah, Petr,’ Romer said. ‘I’ll be down in a minute. Tell Maria to leave everything in the oven – then she can go.’
Then we followed him up the curving staircase into the drawing-room. The style was English country house, 1930s: a few good dark pieces of furniture – a bureau, a glass-fronted cabinet with faience inside – rugs on the floor and comfortable, old sofas with throws and cushions, but the paintings on the wall were contemporary. I saw a Francis Bacon, a Burra and an exquisite still life – an empty pewter bowl in front of a silver lusterware vase containing two wilting poppies. The painting looked lit but there wer
e no picture lights – the thickly painted gleam on the bowl and the vase did that work, astonishingly. I was looking at the paintings as a way of distracting myself – I was in a strange giddy panic: a combination of excitement and fear, a mood I hadn’t truly experienced since childhood when, on those occasions when you wilfully do something wrong and proscribed, you find yourself imagining your own discovery, guilt and punishment – which is part of the heady appeal of the illicit, I suppose. I glanced over at my mother: she was looking fiercely but coolly at Romer. He would not meet her gaze, but stood proprietorially by the fireplace, looking thoughtfully at the rug at his feet – the fire laid, unlit – his elbow resting on the chimney-piece, the back of his head visible in the tarnished freckled mirror that hung above it. Now he turned to stare at Eva too but his face showed no expression. I knew why I felt this panic: the air seemed thick and curdled with their crowded, turbulent, shared history – a history I had no part of, yet was now compelled to bear witness to its climax: I felt like a voyeur – I shouldn’t be here, yet here I was.
‘Could we open a window?’ I said, hesitantly.
‘No,’ Romer said, still looking at my mother. ‘You’ll find some water on that table.’
I went over to a side-table that had a tray of cut-crystal glasses and decanters of whisky and brandy on it as well as a half-empty carafe of visibly dusty water. I poured myself a glass and drank the warm fluid down. The noise of my swallowing seemed terribly audible and I saw Romer glance over at me.
‘What relation do you have to this woman?’ he said.
‘She’s my mother,’ I replied instantly and felt, absurdly, a small stiffening of pride, thinking of everything she’d done, everything she’d been through to bring her here, now in this room. I went and stood closer to her.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Romer said. ‘I don’t believe it.’ He seemed profoundly disgusted in some way. I looked at my mother and tried to imagine what could possibly be going on in her head, seeing this man again after so many decades, a man she had genuinely loved – or so I believed – and who had also taken diligent pains to organise her death. But she seemed very calm, her face set and strong. Romer turned back to her.
‘What do you want, Eva?’
My mother gestured to me. ‘I just want to tell you that she knows everything. I wrote everything down, you see, Lucas, and gave it to her – she has all the pages. There’s a don in Oxford who is writing a book about it. I just wanted to tell you that your secret years are over. Everyone is going to know, very soon, what you did.’ She paused. ‘It’s finished.’
He seemed to chew his lip for a moment – I felt that this was the last thing he had expected to hear. He spread his hands.
‘Fine. I’ll sue him, I’ll sue you and you’ll go to prison. You can’t prove a thing.’
My mother smiled at this, spontaneously, and I knew why – this was already a kind of confession, I thought.
‘I wanted you to know that and I wanted to see you for one last time.’ She took a little step forward. ‘And I wanted you to see me. To let you know that I was still very much alive.’
‘We lost you in Canada,’ Romer said. ‘Once we realised that was where you must have gone. You were very clever.’ He paused. ‘You should know that your file was never closed. We can still arrest you, charge you, try you. I just need to pick up this telephone – you’d be arrested before the night was over, wherever you happen to be.’
Now my mother’s slight smile proclaimed her moment of power – the balance had shifted, finally.
‘Why don’t you do it, then, Lucas?’ she said easily, persuasively. ‘Have me arrested. Go on. But you won’t do that, will you?’
He looked at her, his face giving nothing away, the control absolute. All the same, I savoured my mother’s triumph over him – I felt like cheering, whooping with delight.
‘As far as the British government is concerned you’re a traitor,’ he said, his voice flat, without the trace of any threat or bluster.
‘Oh yes, yes, of course,’ she said, with massive irony. ‘We’re all traitors: me and Morris and Angus and Sylvia. A little nest of British traitors in AAS Ltd. Only one man straight and true: Lucas Romer.’ She looked at him, with a kind of pure scorn, not pity. ‘It’s all finally gone wrong for you, Lucas. Face it.’
‘It all went wrong at Pearl Harbor,’ he said, with a pursed ironic grin, as if he finally realised he was impotent, all control having passed from his hands. ‘Thanks to the Japanese – Pearl Harbor rather fucked everything up.’
‘You should have left me alone,’ my mother said. ‘You shouldn’t have kept looking for me – I wouldn’t have bothered with all this.’
He looked at her, baffled. This was the first genuine emotion I had seen his face register. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he said.
But she wasn’t listening. She opened her bag and took out the sawn-off shotgun. It was very small, it couldn’t have been more than ten inches long – it looked like an antique pistol, some highwayman’s firepiece. She pointed it at Romer’s face.
‘Sally,’ I said. ‘Please …’
‘I know you won’t do anything stupid,’ Romer said, quite calmly. ‘You’re not stupid, Eva, so why don’t you put it away?’
She took a step towards him and straightened her arm, the two blunt stubby barrels were aimed full at his face, two feet away. He did flinch a little, now, I saw.
‘I just wanted to know what it would be like to have you at my mercy,’ my mother said, still perfectly under control. ‘I could happily kill you now, so easily, and I just wanted to know what that moment would feel like. You can have no idea how imagining this moment has sustained me, for years and years. I’ve waited a long time.’ She lowered the gun. ‘And I can tell you it was worth every second.’ She put the gun away in her bag and snapped it loudly shut, the click making Romer jump a little.
He reached for a bell on the wall, pressed it and the awkward, nervy Petr was in the room in a second, it seemed.
‘These people are leaving,’ Romer said.
We walked to the door.
‘Goodbye, Lucas,’ my mother said, striding out, not even looking round at him. ‘Remember this evening. You’ll never see me again.’
I, of course, did look round as we left the room to see that Romer had turned away slightly and his hands were in the pockets of his jacket, pushing down hard, I could tell, from the creases that had formed, and how the lapels of his jacket were deformed; his head was bowed and he was staring at the rug in front of the fireplace again, as if it held some sort of clue as to what he should do next.
We climbed into the car and I looked up at the three tall windows. It was growing dark now and the panes glowed orange-yellow, the curtains still unpulled. ‘The gun freaked me out, Sal,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t loaded.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘I don’t want to talk at the moment, if you don’t mind. Not yet.’
So we drove out of London, via Shepherd’s Bush on to the A40 heading for Oxford. We sat in silence all the way until we reached Stokenchurch and saw, through the great gap that they had carved through the Chilterns for the motorway, the lazy summer night of Oxfordshire laid out before us – the lights of Lewknor, Sydenham and Great Haseley beginning to sparkle as the land darkened and the residual warm agate glow of the sun set somewhere in the west beyond distant Gloucestershire.
I was thinking back over everything that had happened this summer and I began to realise that, in fact, it had started many years ago. I saw how my mother had so cleverly manipulated and used me over the last few weeks and I began to wonder if this had been my destiny as far as she was concerned. She would have lived all her life with the thought of that final meeting with Lucas Romer and when her child was born – maybe she was hoping for a boy? – she would have thought; now I have my crucial ally, now I have someone who can help me, one day I will bring Romer down.
I began to see how my return to Oxford f
rom Germany had been the catalyst, how the process had begun – now that I was back in her life and the entanglement could slowly begin. The writing of the memoir, the sense of danger, the paranoia, the wheelchair, the initial ‘innocent’ requests, all designed to make me part of the process of finding and unearthing her quarry. But, I realised something else had triggered her into acting now, after all these years. Some sense of perceived danger had made her resolve to settle this matter. Perhaps it was paranoia – imagined watchers in the woods, the unfamiliar cars driving though the village at night – perhaps it was sheer fatigue. Maybe my mother had grown tired of being eternally watchful, eternally guarded, eternally prepared for that knock on the door. I remembered her warnings to me when I was a child: ‘One day someone will come and take me away,’ and I realised that in reality she had been living like that since she had fled to Canada from New York at the end of 1941. It was a long, long time – too long. She was tired of watching and waiting and she wanted to stop. And so, resourceful, clever Eva Delectorskaya had engineered a little drama that had drawn her daughter – her necessary ally – into the plot against Lucas Romer. I couldn’t blame her and I tried to imagine what the toll had been over the decades. I looked across at her, at her fine profile, as we drove through the night towards home. What are you thinking, Eva Delectorskaya? What duplicities are still fizzing in your brain? Will you ever have a quiet life, will you ever truly be at rest? Will you now, finally, be at peace? She had used me almost in the same way Romer had tried to use her. I realised that, all this summer, my mother had been carefully running me, like a spy, like a –
‘I made a mistake,’ she said, suddenly, making me start.
‘What?’