Barbara Watson wanted to be a friend, a real friend, and I didn’t let her. It was for her own good. She must have known that. What if she’d lost her job too? But Erica is a true friend. Why can’t I say: I miss you too?
Wir sind ja in England, Lili. Hier darf man nicht Deutsch sprechen.
All through the war her mother was afraid. She hoarded pills from the doctor, bottles of them in a drawer. It was in case of a German invasion. They came close; they came very close. The whole country was on tiptoe, holding its breath in spite of the clanking of troop trains, the rumble of heavy lorries, the wheeze of machinery and then the throb of engines overhead. Lily would slide the drawer open, look at the pills, and slide it shut again.
‘You should get a dog,’ says Erica, and Lily smiles.
‘That’s what I wanted to say to my employer, but then I thought I’d better not. He’s very lonely, since his wife died.’
‘A big dog, Lily, not a crybaby like Coco. One that’ll bark like hell if it hears anything.’
‘I like Coco,’ says Lily, stroking the slender, silky back again. ‘The children will be so excited to see her.’
Erica looks at her watch. ‘The four-oh-five is the last train I can get.’
‘They come out at half past three. If we walk to the station, we’ll pass them on their way to the beach. They usually go down there after school.’
‘I’ll write to those Callingtons, if you won’t,’ says Erica.
‘No, Erica.’
‘Oh well, darling—’ Erica breaks off, and blows her nose fiercely into one of Tony’s handkerchiefs. She shakes back her hair and smiles. ‘Come here.’ She puts her arms around Lily and squeezes her tight. She smells of bluebells and her hair tickles. If I’d had a sister, Lily thinks, it would have been like this.
For a moment, when Erica sees the three Callington children come down the lane shoulder to shoulder, a gang, red-cheeked, hardy and bigger than she remembers, she doubts herself. They look as if they belong here. Paul is carrying an empty sack.
‘Coco!’ screams Bridget, peeling away from her brother and sister to pounce on the dog. ‘It’s Coco!’
They are familiar again: three children she has known all their lives, almost. Bridget jumps around her, imploring to be allowed to hold Coco’s leash. Paul and Sally smile but hang back. They are not just bigger, they are older too, in that way of children who can leap a year in a couple of months.
‘How’s Thomas?’ asks Sally at last, shyly.
‘He’s fine. He’ll be so jeal when I tell him I’ve seen you.’
Sally smiles. She’d forgotten how Erica said ‘jeal’, and made it sound a normal thing to be, instead of shameful.
The children want to be away, Erica can tell. They flash glances, signally.
‘I’m awfully sorry, Erica,’ says Paul, sounding like his father, ‘I’m afraid we’ve got to go. You see, there’s been another wash-up—’
‘And we’ve only got an hour before it’s dark. Everyone’s down there already,’ says Sally.
‘Off you go, then,’ says Lily, as if this business of the tide and the dark is perfectly usual. The children say goodbye to Erica, dip to stroke Coco one last time and gallop away down the lane.
‘What are they going to do?’
‘Pick sea coal. A wash-up means that a lot of it has come up on to the beach.’
‘Oh, so that’s what the sack was for.’
‘They collect quite a bit, when there’s a wash-up. Coal is so expensive. And they get driftwood all the time.’
They have a new life already, Erica sees. Even new words. No wonder the children looked different.
‘Thomas would love it here,’ she says, as if Lily has brought her children on an especially marvellous seaside holiday. And Lily, in spite of everything, is pleased.
‘They do look well, don’t they? They’re so much more independent down here. All the children are.’
‘We baby them in London, I suppose.’
‘Yes, when you think that Paul is going on for eleven …’
But Lily knows that she had wanted to baby them. They were to have an uninterrupted childhood, but now, of their own accord, they are sloughing it off. Paul is already older than Lili was when she came to England. He is stern with Bridget about the sea coal. She has to collect her share, not muck about looking for shells. ‘It burns better than ordinary coal, doesn’t it, Mum?’ Paul says with pride as he tips their haul into the coal scuttle.
And now here is Erica, actually walking at her side. Lily has always envied that coat with its belt and long, swinging skirts. Erica had it made years and years ago, out of a bolt of cloth she bought at a mill up in Scotland. The New Look was in. Erica could carry off the style. She has the height and the long, elastic walk; the elegance, thinks Lily, who knows that she herself is not elegant.
At the station the two women embrace. There is no one like Erica. Once a friend, always a friend, Erica said to her once. Erica took the children when Lily went into labour with Bridget. Lily walked three-week-old Clare up and down, up and down so that Erica could snatch some sleep before Thomas came home from school. Erica lent Lily her black velvet cloak and babysat so that Lily and Simon could hear Joan Sutherland sing Desdemona in Otello. Erica paced up and down the autumn garden, alight, blazing, as she told Lily about Bertrand Russell’s speech in Trafalgar Square.
The platform is deserted.
‘It’ll come out of the siding,’ says Lily.
They watch the clock’s minute hand shiver into place. There’s no station buffet, not even a chocolate machine.
‘Here it comes.’
Clanking and hissing, the little branch-line train crosses the points, reaches the platform and lets off a gout of sooty steam.
‘Do you want to go in the Ladies’ compartment?’
‘No need. The whole train’s empty,’ says Erica.
The compartment smells of train dirt. Erica puts down her bag on the seat carefully, so as not to disturb the dust. Under the luggage rack there are glass-covered posters for Margate, Broadstairs and Folkestone. The thought of visiting those places makes her shudder. She pulls down the strap to lower the window and leans out. The guard is walking up the train with his flag and lantern, and Lily is the only other person on the platform. As the train jerks and starts to move Lily keeps pace with it, then falls back. Erica waves for the last time, the train rounds a bend and Lily disappears.
Erica sits back while flat landscape slides past the windows. Darkness is settling on it already. What a place. How can Lily stand it? The train judders and slows, as if it can’t make up its mind whether to go on or to stay here. More than anything, Erica wants to be back in London.
In the middle of the night, Lily wakes. Her eiderdown has fallen off and she’s cold, but that’s not what woke her. It was the owl that did it. It comes most nights, drifting past the window. She thinks of it tilting in the darkness, balancing its wings as it scours the ground below for a flicker of movement.
Suddenly, she is sure beyond doubt that there is someone outside the cottage, watching it, just as there was in London. The walls seem to dissolve and leave her naked. If she looked out she would see them, standing on the lane, turned towards her window. They know she’s here.
There aren’t any neighbours. If anything happened, no one would know until morning. Maybe not even then. It’s too dark for her to look at her watch, and she daren’t switch on the light.
The children are all asleep. Her blood rushes in her ears, almost blotting out the sounds outside. The owl calls again. Or is it the owl this time? The children know how to make the sound of an owl between their cupped palms, for a signal. It won’t be children out there at this time of night. No car. She’d have heard a car.
Soundlessly, Lily gets out of bed and feels her way across the lino to the window. The heavy rep curtain is drawn tight. Whoever is watching will notice even the slightest twitch of movement. Lily presses herself as close as she can to the w
indow and listens, but although she waits until she’s cold all through, she hears nothing.
24
A Useful Idiot
It’s night. In his cell, Simon turns over, dragging the blanket with him. It itches, and the bed is too narrow. Each time he comes to the edge of sleep, he jolts back to awareness like a man about to fall over a cliff. Julian Clowde has been to see him. He should have refused the visit. Why didn’t he? It was the same weakness that had made him agree to go to Giles’s flat and find the file.
‘You’ll plead guilty, of course.’
Clowde’s groomed, implacable face, incongruous in the prison interview room. He made no enquiries. He expressed no concern for Simon’s predicament.
You’ll plead guilty, of course. How the hell had he got permission to see Simon in here, alone, as if he were a solicitor? Simon stared at him, shocked. That was the moment when everything began to fall into place. Those three sets of initials on the file, JRC the last. Julian Clowde was the last man to have sight of the file. It should have been returned immediately, but it had ended up in Giles’s flat, for Giles to photograph.
Long ago, back in Cambridge, Giles had said to him, ‘There’s a chap I’d like you to meet.’ Julian Clowde had been very friendly at first. There were overtures, withdrawn so quickly when Simon didn’t respond that he ended up thinking that perhaps he’d imagined them. But he’d known, really. He’d felt the truth, even if he’d blocked it from his conscious mind. He was a fool. He didn’t act on what he sensed. He told himself Julian was a cold fish, and let it go at that.
‘You’ll plead guilty, of course.’
‘Why?’
Julian Clowde’s eyes were like lizard’s. ‘A guilty plea will work in your favour, as I’m sure you must realise. You’ll be able to enter a plea in mitigation. You were naïf. You came into contact with CND activists and they made use of you. Have you any idea how many Soviet agents are active in London at this moment, or how deeply CND is penetrated?’
So that was the game. ‘No,’ said Simon. ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’
‘Precisely. You had no proper idea of the consequences of your actions. You took those people at face value. A useful idiot – I believe that’s the correct expression. You were a useful idiot and so you were used. It will prevent a lot of unpleasantness, for you and for your family. Your wife has no idea that you and Giles Holloway were quite such great friends. I can’t imagine that thought has ever been far from your mind. And let me assure you’ – he had leaned forward, and there was no feeling anywhere in his features – ‘let me assure you that the jury will be provided with some very interesting letters, should you be foolish enough to think you might cut a fine figure in the witness box. That room of yours on the Madingley Road – now what’s the correct expression?’ He picks out the words with tweezers of contempt. ‘Ah yes. A love nest. Lucky old Giles.’ Julian Clowde gives Simon a look he’d had from him just once before, when he first came to the Admiralty.
‘You’re a great friend of Giles Holloway, I gather? He speaks very highly of you.’
The signal had been given. Simon had muttered something or other in response. A week or so later, when the invitation came to dine with Julian Clowde at his club, he had declined clumsily. And that, he’d thought, was that. Clowde had raised his eyebrows and walked away. Idiot that he was, Simon had thought that there were no hard feelings, not after all these years. Now here was Clowde visiting him in prison, in his perfect suit. In his position, everything became easy.
He was what he’d always been, but for the first time, Simon saw it. It was like that damned kaleidoscope he’d got for Bridgie from Hamleys. You shook it one way and you saw one thing. Julian Clowde, a man on top of his job and his entire department. Cold but decent. He even put up with Giles’s antics, for old times’ sake. You shook the kaleidoscope another way and you saw a grin of contempt. He was letting the mask drop, because it didn’t matter any more whether or not Simon saw what was beneath it. No one would believe Simon now. Simon was disposable. His word against Clowde’s? What a joke. Simon was discredited, and Julian Clowde was a man who never forgot a slight.
Clowde had a lifetime of distinguished public service behind him. Soon he would retire, and get his K. He would spend his time visiting friends in the capitals of Europe, writing his memoirs – Giles said he was a marvellous calligrapher, in his spare time—
‘Lucky old Giles,’ said Julian Clowde, and he shook his head. ‘The jury won’t like it, you know. They’re very down on that sort of thing. They’ll understand exactly what was going on, and they know that our Soviet friends are extremely keen on a spot of blackmail. Why try to teach an old dog a new trick, when the old ones work so well? So there you were, and there was your old friend Giles. You were in and out of his office. Giles goes out every lunchtime, everyone knows that. He’s reliably absent for an hour or more. You knew that. It won’t look good for Giles, it has to be said, but there’s plenty of evidence about his drinking, and that makes a man sloppy. There will be witnesses to the state of his desk. You took advantage of his weakness. It may not look good for Giles, but it will look a great deal worse for you. Giles had an extraordinarily good war, as he may or may not have told you.’
Julian Clowde’s face was set. For an instant Simon wondered: Is it possible that he’s sincere? Does he care what happens to Giles?
‘Giles wouldn’t have had access to that file,’ said Simon. ‘It can’t have been on his desk.’
There was a pause. Julian Clowde raised a hand and passed it over his silver hair. ‘I’m not talking about a file,’ he said, and his eyes gave their peculiar flicker. ‘I’m talking about the other evidence against you.’
Christ. He had let Clowde get away with all that. It was like being operated on while paralysed, but without anaesthetic. He’d let it happen, because in one respect Clowde wasn’t lying. Simon had done what Clowde said he’d done. He’d lain on that narrow bed in the room on the Madingley Road, and he’d been king of the world. He’d thrown his mother’s cheese ration out of the window. He’d made Giles wait while he finished his essay and then he’d let him do whatever he wanted. They had both done whatever they wanted.
They’d got his letters to Giles.
He saw himself with sheets of paper spread on the desk, writing and writing. The hard, white light of Cambridge winter days, and the excitement that went up in him like a rocket at the desire in Giles’s face.
Call it what it was. He had written himself down on that sheet of paper, folded it, and put it into Giles’s overcoat pocket. He had been beside himself, outside himself.
He had been himself. He had loved Giles.
For God’s sake, what was he saying? What was he thinking? He’d betrayed Lily before he even knew her. He’d given away to Giles what could never be given twice. What Lily never knew would half kill her if it came out. She came new to him. She’d never loved anyone before. She told him that. Never trusted anyone enough. She found it hard to trust.
He sat there in the interview room with Julian Clowde, paralysed. What the hell did Clowde put on his hair, to make it gleam like that under the light? This is just how he’ll look when he goes to the Palace to collect his K.
‘I’ll leave you to think about it,’ said Clowde, and he stood up. He was perfectly confident. He knew that Simon would do what was wanted, because he had no alternative. ‘I hope your wife is enjoying her new life down in Kent, by the way. East Knigge, isn’t it? She could hardly have chosen a more out-of-the-way spot. Sensible of her. But on the other hand, it’s very isolated, isn’t it? Oh, I was forgetting, of course you’ve never seen it. I hope she’s careful to keep her doors locked at night.’
Someone’s been down there, he thought, his heart pounding. They know where Lily and the children are.
‘You bastard, Clowde,’ he said, and felt a weight fly off him, as the weight of the cheese once flew as he hurled it from the window. He could have killed Clowde with his bare hands. He c
ould have broken his neck. ‘I know what you are.’
But as he said it, at the moment when his anger surged, he knew something else. Clowde has threatened Lily – why? Why even think of doing that, when he’d got Simon completely trussed up? Clowde knew that Simon was trapped. He knew he would never risk Lily seeing those letters. So there must be something else—
Lily.
The file.
Clowde wanted it back, of course he wanted it back. For Clowde, that file was dangerous, because Simon could never have had access to it, no matter how many times he’d dropped in and rifled through the documents on Giles’s desk. That file was proof. Clowde suspected that it was Lily who knew where the file was. That’s why he threatened her.
‘I doubt if your knowing or not knowing anything is going to make the slightest difference, in this case,’ said Clowde.
‘You touch her and I won’t care what I do.’
‘I think you will.’
But he was suddenly less sure. His eyes flickered, as a lizard’s eyes flicker before it darts into a hole in the wall. He stood up, went to the door, rapped on it.
Simon sweats, pacing his cell. That’s what you do, it turns out, when what was safely tucked away in books becomes real life. You’re in a cell and sure enough you pace it. There’s nothing else you can do. Nothing left. He will warn Lily: he’ll find a way. No, they won’t touch her. It would be too great a risk. It would be in all the papers. They want everything to die down as soon as possible. Simon must get his seven years, or whatever it turns out to be. Giles will be eased out of the way. Pensioned off, probably. He’s too big a risk now.
So Giles kept his letters. Simon remembers the swarm of words that came to him, and how he shaped them. Giles in his mind, Giles’s hands opening the envelope, Giles’s gaze on the paper. He has never written such letters to Lily. He never thought of writing to her, even when they were first together. He didn’t know whether she minded or not. Besides, she knew he wasn’t keen on writing letters. Never had been. At his prep school they had to write a weekly letter to their parents, before supper on Sunday evenings. Simon would dash something off in fifteen minutes. As long as you said you’d had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for lunch, and included the scores for the last set of house matches, your letter would always be passed.
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