by Manda Scott
He looks down at his hands. ‘They had mortars ready. I had one chance – get in, get him out. If I failed, they’d have flattened Marianne’s farmhouse and everyone in it. I couldn’t let them do that.’
Is she supposed to applaud? Flatly, she says, ‘And now they trust you.’
‘Not enough. I will not be Kramme’s handler when he gets to the US. I will not have access to his file. He’s gone dark and I don’t know where he is and I don’t know who’s running him and I can’t find out who Diem is. It’s a fucking disaster. I’m really, really sorry.’
He doesn’t swear often; he’s not that kind of man. She doesn’t lower her gun, but she’s not about to shoot him. They both feel the change.
He says, ‘Will you sit?’
‘Is it safe?’ His men are around. She can’t see them, but they are there. And she did shoot Long Tall Louis.
‘Nobody will harm you. I swear it.’
She crouches down on the damp, cold leaves. ‘Kramme lived, obviously?’
He nods, wearily. ‘Schäfer didn’t.’
‘Good.’ Patrick, when you see him, spit in his eye.
He nods. His gaze slips to her abdomen, to the first gentle swell. She hasn’t told him, but he can count as well as she can. He looks at her, and the hope in his gaze is heartbreaking. ‘Come with me. Sophie, please. Come with me today. I’ll leave the Agency. We can make a new life.’
She laughs, surprising them both. ‘You’re joking.’
‘Sophie, I didn’t betray you. I did not. I swear this on Toni Gaspari’s grave.’
That’s not subtle. She rises. ‘I need to go.’
He catches her arm. ‘OK, so we don’t have to leave the Agency. Join me. I still have leverage, I can make it happen. Kramme’s in the system now. It’ll take people like you and me to offer the other side of the argument, the voice of reason, the counterweight to what is coming.’
‘What is coming?’
‘I don’t know, but Kramme’s hardly alone. There are plenty of people in my country who think his cause was right and they want to spread it across the world. The assault on the Soviets is the most obvious, but they’ll stifle dissent where they see it, crush anything that seeks to take power from the few and give it to the many. Come with me, Sophie. Help me fight it.’
‘Paul, you can’t make your own private army inside the CIA.’
‘Why not? Kramme will. His family are already stateside. He’ll make a life, plan his strategies. Give it a generation, maybe two, and his people will own this world.’
‘Then my presence won’t help, will it?’
‘It might do. Don’t you see? We have to try. You’d have my patronage. He wouldn’t touch you.’
‘Your patronage?’
‘As my wife.’ He catches her hand. His pull is solidly strong. He is solidly strong. She can imagine him, a golden god, fighting the forces of darkness, and her, a bitter goddess at his side. ‘Marry me. Let us raise our child in the land of the free.’
She draws her hand away. ‘You’ve already got a wife.’
‘Not for much longer.’
Oh, God. She is tired, beyond moving. She could lie here, in the forest, and sleep for a lifetime. Or she could go with him. Patrick is dead. Patrick is dead. Patrick is dead. And still, she cannot leave.
She makes herself rise. With both hands, she lifts her scarf from her neck and holds it out.
‘What?’ He knows what it is to her, what it has been. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Give this to Kramme when next you see him. Tell him to look after it. One day, I will come to collect it.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I know.’ She has to leave now, or she never will. She presses the old, thin silk into his unresisting hands. ‘Goodbye, Paul. May your life be all you could want it to be. Tell Kramme what I said. He will understand.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
7 March 1957
LAURENCE FINDS CÉLINE’S music box wrapped in a sleeping bag and slid into the spare tyre in the boot of her car. A thing of exquisite beauty, it is the inverse of his, made of near-silver ash wood with her initials inlaid in ebony in a fine, cursive script: CVT MdM. He lifts the lid and, expecting ‘God Save the Queen’, does not at first recognize ‘Scotland the Brave’.
Oh, God. Come on, Laurence. You knew he loved her. Get a grip.
The mechanism slides out easily; the edges have been smoothed with graphite to make it so. He tries his own code to gain entry: IOUASCOTCH. Nothing moves. Three times, and it will lock itself. You could open it with a sledgehammer, of course …
He could. He doesn’t want to and he thinks Céline would not have arranged things such that he must resort to destruction of something so heartbreakingly precious. He goes back to her car and searches again without any clear idea of what he’s looking for, only that he’ll know it when he finds it.
And he does: a powder compact, hidden in the lining of Céline’s handbag, which itself is locked in a concealed compartment in the passenger door of her car.
The compact is solid silver with J&C engraved in bold, flowing letters on the front. Nothing else; none of the usual sworls and scrolls of ladies’ accoutrements – this is the functional version. He half expects it to carry a concealed camera, or a cyanide pill.
There’s an instinct to this, but even so, he might have missed it were it not for the mark on the mirror. Céline inherited the family’s need for perfection more than he, Laurence, ever did; even in wartime, a flawed mirror would have been replaced. This, though, is not a chip or a scratch, but a carefully placed drill hole, designed to look like the result of careless use. Eureka!
He carries his trove back into the clean, warm farmhouse where Marianne Fayette is kneading bread dough and barely acknowledges his presence.
From the start, from back in the war, Daniel’s mother has treated him with a mix of pity and disdain that he has not yet been able to unravel. He is polite. She is polite. He has tried to make conversation, to break the permafrost that lies between them, whose origin he does not understand. She has rebuffed his every attempt.
And so now, he stands on the scrubbed stone floor beside the scrubbed wooden table on which Patrick has so recently lain, and he says, ‘Where is he?’
‘Upstairs. He has the bed. He shall have it until they have dug the grave. And until she comes back.’
He says, ‘She might not come back.’
‘She will.’ She’s a tall woman, Marianne Fayette, big-boned, muscular, not fleshy after the manner of the farming ladies of England that he is used to. Without effort, he can imagine her wielding a Sten in defence of her farmhouse, although he doesn’t know if this ever actually happened.
He imagines her a hawk, an eagle, maybe, fierce in protection of her young, and of her mate. Except she failed in that. He thinks that in Patrick’s death, she has lost another hero, and the wind is blowing cold through her soul.
He says, ‘He cared for you. We all knew that.’
The way she stares at him, he wonders if his French is rustier than he had imagined. She bites her lip, pounds the dough a few more times, then: ‘And you for him. Yet still, you sent him to die in this foreign land.’
‘He wanted to come.’
‘And if he had wanted to stay behind, if he had taken an English wife, had English children, would you have let him?’
‘I think they would have been Scottish.’ And, at her incomprehension: ‘It was war. We all did the best we knew how.’
‘Is it still war?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The girl, his wife. She has gone today to fight a war that is not over, yes?’
Ah. ‘I think that for some of us, the war can never be over. We need it, to give our lives meaning.’
‘Are you one of those?’
‘Not in the same way as Sophie is. Céline was, though I didn’t fully understand it until yesterday.’ Her call – hoarse, so that she sounded like a man – drew Kramm
e out. It so nearly worked. Were it not for someone on the outside, it would have done. One day, cousin mine, I am going to find who shot you, and I am going to take him apart into very small pieces, slowly. Diem is a man: of that much Laurence is now sure.
He holds up her box in one hand, the compact in the other. ‘Have you a kitchen knife I might borrow?’
It takes him some time, and a number of failures before he works out the mechanism Céline has set up. When he does, it is, of course, both elegant and ingenious.
Tipping the compact’s lid back beyond its normal range reveals a small sliding switch which, when moved across, allows him to tip the mirror out of the case. Behind it lies silk of the kind they used in the worked-out codes in the war: thin enough to burn in seconds, strong enough to take a cipher written in her neat, angled hand. It’s an easy one. He breaks it in minutes. BE STRONG BRAVE HEART.
Oh, Patrick.
Blinking, he presses the letters in order and the hidden drawer in the music box opens to reveal an envelope with his name written in her hand. Inside is another coding silk, this one with a far more complex cipher.
He stares at it for long minutes: blocks of five letters, spread across the page, row upon row upon row. There are men and women with machines that might crack this open, but he does not have access to them, and in any case, he is not going to let them near it; this is family, and family holds to its own.
Come on, Laurence, think like Céline. It isn’t hard. J&C engraved on the front of the compact. Julie. Julie, and all she meant. None of the others filled that gap – not Véronique, nor the new one, Felicity. He will have to tell her. Not a phone call, a visit. Oh, God. Come on, Laurence. Concentrate.
The poem codes of the war are locked in the oubliette of his memory, never to be expunged. He rummages in there now, comes up with Céline’s first field cipher: a poem by an obscure American woman poet. The hard sand breaks/and the grains of it/are clear as wine …
Below the code is a telephone number: J 413868. Céline, you are a gem. Thank you. ‘Madame Fayette, could I trouble you for some paper and a pencil? An eraser would be useful if you have it.’
An hour later, the obscure American poet is not the key to the cipher. Nor is it an equally obscure, rather maudlin Frenchwoman lamenting the beautiful brunette she has lost in the streets of Paris. It is not any of Celine’s more recent codes, nor Laurence’s own. Julie, to the best of his knowledge, never had any.
It is dark now, and Sophie is not yet back from the mountains. Perhaps, after all, she never intended to return. It is that kind of day.
Marianne Fayette has lit the fire and made him coffee and he has drunk it without particularly noticing it is there. Now she has set a glass of bright, sharp wine at his elbow and he is in the half place between past and present, drinking in the firelight, dozing on the crest of the wine, when he remembers a scurrilous ditty sung on the banks of the Cam. Oh! Did your granny use her fanny ere your granddad came along?
He is standing in a street in Cambridge, with the dust in his lungs and the scent of blood saturating everything, and Céline, who was Theo, weeping. He is in his uncle’s house, with the scent of hot milk and distress, and Patrick, in his own old, ordinary voice, says, So now there will be two Vaughan-Thomases who have had their hearts ripped out by this bloody war.
Some things are only obvious when you see them. Fourth word of the first line, third and sixth of the eighth gives him Granny; Fuck; Night. He breaks them out into alphabetic order, writes the rest of the alphabet after them, and then makes his grid and runs through the first two sets of five digits.
DEARL AUREN
He has to break it without reading or he will fall apart before the end. He does it backwards, which was an old trick that he taught the FANYs in the coding room when the reports were too grim to contemplate.
Another hour, and at the end of it, a letter.
He is weeping. Having started at last, it may be that he will never stop.
Marianne Fayette sits down at his side. She has brought the bottle of wine and another glass. At some point, she lays her hand on his arm.
‘We need to talk.’
She has read the letter. He could have stopped her. He could have thrown it on the fire, but not yet. He needs to read it again, perhaps many times.
He lifts his head. ‘Talk of what?’
‘Of our dead and how we may remember them. Of our lives, and what they are for. Of the vengeance you will wreak when the time is right. More than all of this, we need to talk about the girl who has gone onto a mountain, and the child she carries.’ Her big, flint eyes hold him. ‘You did know?’
‘Sophie told me.’ This is a lie. Until he read Céline’s letter, Laurence didn’t know. Perhaps he is the only one who did not. He feels a fool, but he is not about to broadcast the extent of his ignorance.
Marianne asks, ‘Did she tell you whose it is?’
He shrugs. ‘I don’t suppose she knew. It could be Patrick’s, it could be Paul Rey’s. Maybe it could be someone else’s— Hey!’ She has slapped him. His cheek stings. ‘What was that for?’
‘You promised to take care of her. Is impugning her morals the way to do it?’
‘I wasn’t impugning anything. Who Sophie consorts with is her own affair. I am hardly one to judge.’ He is cross now. It’s cathartic. Reining it in, he says, ‘You may judge her. I don’t. She knows who she is and what she wants and I have no doubt that the men who lie with her do so willingly and feel themselves honoured. As they should.’
‘Come with me.’
She takes his wrist and pulls him with her. Like a mother leading a recalcitrant child, she leads him outside and up the stairs to the hayloft above the dairy.
At the door, he baulks. The snow has stopped falling. Behind him, the world is a grey-silver dusk, a place of pewter moonlight and peace. He wants to break and run. Céline’s words are looping through his head. Twenty years from now, thirty, forty, what will we be, who have welcomed into our nests these vipers? She should have had his job. She was so much better at this.
He says, ‘Why?’
‘You’ll see.’ She pushes open the door. The delicate, gracious scent of lavender fills the air. It does not entirely cover the first sweetness of death, but it might were he not so attuned to it.
She walks in ahead of him. Patrick lies on the bed, unclothed. His features are at peace. Almost, one might imagine a smile. His hair has been washed of blood and brushed back into shape. His fingernails, that were black rims, have been picked and scrubbed clean. A white sheet lies over him, ankles to chin.
Marianne lifts one corner, draws it back. ‘Look at him. All of him.’
He grips her wrist, he who so rarely handles women. ‘Why?’
‘More than anything else, he wanted to be a father. When Lisette and Daniel said they were starting a family, he nearly died of the grief. He tried to hide it, but Sophie saw, and she did what she needed to. So look. And then remember your promise to him.’
But he already knows. A slow, sliding ache racks him. ‘Please.’ He lets go of her hand. ‘Why? Why are you doing this?’
‘Because nobody else will. Since the war, nobody has, and you do need to see. Believe me. There are things you will do because of this that you would not do otherwise. You are a man. It is how men think. Even men such as you.’
She takes a step back. Her gaze is all pity. ‘We made Calvados in the winter after the Boche left that was like none other I have ever tasted. I have one bottle left. I will open it. Come to me when you are ready. Do not hurry. It will not hurt you to spend time with him. He would want it, I think.’
How could he want it? But it is the thought of him, watching, the dryness of his smile, that makes Laurence wait until she is gone, and then he folds back the sheet and folds it and folds it until he is holding a bulked square of white, scented linen.
He stands a long time, holding the sheet, looking on Patrick, and the final indignity that he bore with the same fort
itude as all the rest. Oh, my dear. If you were angry, we knew there was good reason. When you were dull and difficult, did Sophie pity you? Or did she love you, fiercely, so that you knew you were loved for all that you are, not what has gone?
With raw intent, he brings to mind the moments of joy: the hillside on Arisaig in the driving rain; the drive back from the debrief in Hampshire; the brief joy in Cambridge, before Julie died; the long nights in the apartment with the silk sheets and the blackout blinds leaving the air clammy. He remembers Sarpedons, ciphers sent and received, the drip-feed of information coming too late, too slow, too incomplete, the frustration of it. He remembers nights spent sitting by the teleprinter, hands white at the knuckles, waiting for the all-clear. And the decision to join them.
‘I’m not sorry I came. I’m only sorry it wasn’t sooner. I did love you. I didn’t say so. I hope you knew.’
It is time to go. He unfolds the sheet, lays it back across the man who was his friend, takes a step away. On a half thought, uncensored, he steps forward again, and presses a dry, light kiss to the dead brow, and then the lips.
And thus, by accident, we became as gods.
He salutes. It feels right. And he speaks the words that come now, more easily than he might have imagined.
‘I will honour your memory, all of it, as you would have wanted, with integrity and all the shadings of truth. And I shall watch what they do, Kramme and his minions, and when the time is right, I shall destroy them, and they shall know what is being done and why, and in whose name.’
Downstairs, the heady sour-sweet notes of the spirit draw him to an armchair by the fire. Marianne Fayette has shed her own tears and does not hide the fact.
She offers him a glass. ‘Sláinte.’
‘He taught you?’
‘The first night he was here.’ She drains her glass, smiling over the burn of it. Laurence follows, holds his breath as it hits his gut. It is hot, this one, scorching.
She refills. It’s such an old challenge. He is not sure he is up to it. He leans back, lets his gaze float to the fire. And drinks.