Letters for a Spy

by Stephen Benatar

  “My goodness, only imagine if I had been late? Or if your note had got even more delayed? Or—heaven forbid—if it had been lost? Goodbye to my whole big Hollywood career!”

  Her remark had been satiric. In case I hadn’t realized this she ended on a laugh.

  “Not that at the moment I’m positively relying on that—my whole big Hollywood career!”

  She was an actress … an actress still very much playing a role. Her laughter wasn’t natural. Her gaiety was forced. I wanted to say to her: Please don’t.

  I wanted to say to her: I promise you I understand. Don’t feel you have to sparkle.

  But my reply came out only in kind.

  “I’m afraid it’s terribly clear that you regard me as a sham.”

  “No,” she protested. “No! How could you possibly think such a thing? All I meant was … can I quite believe in fairy tales?”

  “Oh, well, as to that,” I said, “I’m sure you can’t. Who can? Especially in the midst of a world war? A fairy tale is Lana Turner sitting at a soda fountain in Schwab’s in LA, drinking a milk shake and filling out a sweater! Your performance last night was built on years of solid hard work and frustration and disappointment. Blood, toil, tears and sweat. Not the sort of thing to find its way into the fairy tales!”

  “Oh, but I disagree,” she said. “Look at Cinderella!”

  I looked at Cinderella. I had never envisaged it as being any part of a secret agent’s brief to look at Cinderella.

  “Yes, you’re right. So, from now on, please don’t believe anything I say. All you should believe is what I wrote on my postcard. You’re a fine actress.”

  “Thank you. That’s kind. And it makes me feel so fortunate, too.”

  “Deserving. Not fortunate.”

  “No—you misunderstand me. Beginning from this morning, I’m taking a few days off. So if some lucky star hadn’t brought you here to Aldershot just in the nick of time…!”

  “Really?” I said. “Well, then, I’m the one who’s fortunate.”

  “I’m curious, though. What lucky star did bring you here to Aldershot just in the nick of time?”

  “Oh.” I took a long pull at my beer and then had to pause to wipe my mouth. “Oh, simply some silly little mix-up. Absurd but providential.”

  I added quickly: “Both me and RKO.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We’re the two who are fortunate. And please don’t tell me you haven’t heard of RKO.” I looked at her severely. “RKO Radio Pictures? RKO Radio Pictures, Inc?”

  “Well, yes, naturally I have. Although you’re probably right: could I have felt completely certain if I hadn’t caught that Inc?”

  “Exactly. But I expect you’re growing impatient to be told about the film?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Hold onto your seat, then. We’ve just acquired the rights to a novel called Laura. And it’s a project which has got us all tremendously excited.”

  “That’s very good to hear.”

  “As a matter of fact I have a copy of it right here beside me.”

  I retrieved the book from where it lay on the chair next to my own, most of it covered by my trilby. It was the novel I had bought in Mold. Its plot concerned a detective investigating the murder of a young woman. He was supposedly hard-boiled but during the course of his enquiries had begun to fall in love with the dead girl—partly because of her portrait over the mantel but partly, too, because of everything he was finding out about her. As it turned out, though, Laura wasn’t the girl who’d been killed. The real victim, her face rendered unrecognizable by the shots fired into it at the front door, had actually been a friend—a friend who had not only borrowed Laura’s apartment for the weekend (with its fatefully soft lighting in the hallway) but also her housecoat. The book was a love story as well as a murder mystery.

  Sybella looked at its dust jacket and blurb; read the novel’s opening paragraph.

  “And what part would I be playing?” she asked. “If the screen tests and everything proved okay?”

  “Oh, didn’t I make that clear? You, Miss Standish, would be given the leading role. Laura.”

  “No!” she said. “No! I don’t believe it!”

  “Well, how can I convince you?”

  “Only with unparalleled difficulty, I should imagine.”

  “Clearly, then, from now on I’ll have to concentrate on being Herculean … superhuman…”

  “Yes, that might help.”

  She flipped through the book with an awe-filled and distracted air.

  “But do you really think they’d accept an English girl in the role of an American?”

  “It has happened before,” I murmured, drily. “And not so very long ago, either.”

  Her expression still betrayed mistrust.

  “And just look at what you did with Freda,” I went on. “With her accent. And, basically, how much difference can there be? If Vivien Leigh could do it so can you.”

  She answered in the same light tone.

  “Indeed, in terms of accent, New York could be even easier than Atlanta. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “And furthermore—who knows?—they might put it in the script that Laura had been raised in England.”

  She briefly returned my smile. But almost immediately shook her head.

  She said: “Things like this don’t happen.” She had reverted to Cinderella.

  I nodded, understandingly.

  And guiltily.

  Reminded myself that I probably couldn’t have got her here in any other way. Reminded myself that there was no secondary role in the novel that she could possibly have played; the doomed girlfriend had featured only as a corpse.

  “No,” I said, “you’re right to be sceptical. In this life you do need to protect yourself. ‘There’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.’ Who was it who wrote that?”

  “Some aspiring actress in Hollywood?”

  “Bull’s eye!”

  And now her laughter seemed more natural. She gave the impression of someone obliged to attend some especially daunting party, who, against all the odds, had suddenly realized that she was having a good time.

  “Tell me,” she said. “In this life do you protect yourself?”

  “I don’t know. I think I like to shift that onus onto God, give him the responsibility.” But I instantly remembered my having questioned Mannheim’s carte blanche in an attempt to establish a possible defence against failure. “Or let’s just say, I trust the two of us are working on it together.”

  “What—you and God?”

  “I know it sounds presumptuous. Since the beginning of time there must be countless millions who—apparently—haven’t received a lot of protection from him. Even since the beginning of this war…”

  Then I quickly changed the subject; that aspect of it, anyway.

  “But talking of self-protection, Miss Standish, did you tell your friends about all this?”

  “About all what? Hollywood … and Lana Turner at the soda fountain in LA?”

  “Yes, but slightly more to the point: about some stranger in the pub a little closer to home.”

  “No.”

  “No? Why ever not?”

  “I’m afraid it’s very clear that you, Mr Redgrave, have never lived at close quarters with upwards of a dozen forthright women! I’m very fond of most of them. But, oh, the hoo-ha there’d have been if in fact I had told them!”

  “Maybe so. But at the risk of sounding boring I still feel you should have. You’d never heard of me until today. For all you knew, I could have been a white-slave trafficker. White-slave traffickers don’t always come clean about their particular line of business—or, at any rate, not on the backs of postcards. You may be a little too trusting?”

  The strange thing was: that although I’d guessed she wouldn’t mention it, part of me had still hoped I was wrong. Why? I knew I wasn’t a white-slave trafficker.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “It
’s not like being a child and accepting sweets from a stranger.”

  “Isn’t it? Why not?”

  She pulled a face. “And, apart from which, the girls will all be getting onto the coach at any minute now. Off on their way to Black pool. So there’d be nobody left to worry about me by the time I got back. Or didn’t get back, as the case may be. Does that make sense?”

  “I’m not sure. Let’s have another drink, to help us decide.”

  I returned with our replacements.

  “Something I was wondering about just now: how is it that you’re getting time off? It hadn’t occurred to me you’d all have understudies.”

  “Oh, no. We don’t. Not in the regular way. What we do have is a stage manager who stands in for us whenever anyone gets ill or goes on leave.”

  “Good grief! She must have the most incredible memory! I mean, thinking of the length of some of those parts…”

  “She has. But she’d rather be Mrs Pembroke—even if she does have to grey up and remember twenty times as many lines—than stand about in her bra and panties doubling as one of the mannequins.”

  “Not to mention doubling as two of the mannequins?”

  Sybella smiled. She explained how in the event of more than one of the cast being sick at the same time—and if the women couldn’t juggle things amongst themselves, “because none of the parts is really that large!”—then ENSA had what they called a Lease-Lend department: a pool of unattached artistes who could be sent anywhere as substitutes, either at home or abroad, generally very willing and able substitutes.

  “So, you see, I really don’t have to worry,” she said. “Nor do you, Mr Redgrave. There is often chaos at headquarters, but somehow—finally—we always manage to pull through.”

  “Well, Miss Standish, you’ll never guess how immensely reassuring I find that small piece of information!” I allowed a little time to go by. “So—if you don’t mind my asking—how do you plan to be spending your few days off?”

  “Oh, I shall be heading back to London. I share a flat there.”

  “You aren’t going home, then?”

  It was out before I realized. Not so important this time, but even so. I should really have to watch it.

  “Home?”

  “Sorry. I just assume that everyone has parents. Everyone, that is, of more or less our ages.”

  “Yes, well, that’s true, I suppose. I do have parents and I love them dearly. All the same, this time it suits me better to return to London. Do you have parents, Mr Redgrave?”

  “No, unhappily. They’re dead. Both of them.” And I apologized to my father even as I said it.

  But before she had time to express any sympathy I hurried on. “I do have grandparents, however. They live near Shrewsbury. And at least you couldn’t find a nicer pair of proxies … not if you were to go searching for a hundred years or more.”

  “That’s wonderful,” she said. Then—after a pause—“I’ve never been to Shrewsbury.”

  “It’s a nice place. I’m always happy there. Where does your own family live?”

  I knew, of course; and I supposed she must have had some pretty special reason for choosing London over Marlborough—and all the more so during this present spell of fine weather—since Marlborough itself wasn’t actually that far from Aldershot.

  My comment, however, was only indirect.

  “Have your parents come to see the play yet?”

  “My parents? Oh, not simply my parents! My sister. My granny. A multitude of uncles, aunts and cousins.” She laughed. “In fact, my mother’s seen it so many times she could be employed as my understudy—I think I must suggest it to Lease-Lend. Mr Redgrave? May I ask you something personal?”

  “Like why aren’t I in uniform?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Two reasons. Asthma and a perforated eardrum. Neither of which is very serious. I’m hoping that the medical board will shortly change its mind; decide to take me in.”

  “Ah.”

  “But since we’re talking about taking people in…”

  I paused. We looked at one another. Her look was understandably expectant.

  I grinned.

  “Only, Miss Standish, I think it’s now the moment to take you into the dining room. I hope you’re feeling hungry? Remember—you had no time for breakfast.”

  17

  Indeed, we were both feeling hungry.

  Yet our appetites in no way interfered with our conversation.

  To begin with, we talked mainly about Laura. Then we discussed films in general, and what experience she had so far picked up in the theatre. She asked me to use her first name; I naturally did the same. We spoke of our families. She hesitantly enquired how my parents had died. I dispatched my father in a car crash—back in 1938, before our falling out over Kristallnacht—but, outside of anything to do with place-names or the film world, this was the only time I actually needed to lie. She very gently pursued the question … and my mother? I told her that my mother, who had been a VAD when she’d nursed my father back to health in England during the last war (and who had married him quietly at the beginning of 1919, also in England, with a boy of some thirteen months wriggling in her arms), that my mother had then, so ironically, had to struggle for more than eight years in order to become pregnant again—whereupon, to compound the irony, she had finally died in childbirth … leaving her nearly ten-year-old son desperately stupefied and missing her forever.

  The single thing I omitted was any emphasis on setting; Sybella would have taken the setting of my early life for granted. I didn’t believe I was being disloyal in speaking candidly about my parents’ first union (and certainly I didn’t feel in any way embarrassed or ashamed) but evidently I couldn’t have sounded quite so matter-of-fact as I’d intended; I saw the tears well up in her eyes. We were by then drinking our ersatz black coffee, after what had otherwise been a remarkably good meal, and I had to look around the pub’s emptying dining room with an air of immense diligence. Instinctively, it seemed, she laid her hand on mine, in mute commiseration, but an instant later appeared to realize what she’d done, and awkwardly drew back. I, too, felt awkward.

  “So what would you say if I settled up now and we went out in the sun for a bit?” I was aware that my question had sounded stilted and abrupt.

  For the most part we got our sunshine in the park. A mum and her two sons were flying a garishly-coloured kite. We watched for a while: the way that the kite strained, the expressions of excitement on the boys’ faces. The older one was probably about seven; you could see his pride and his absorption in the whole of the shared experience. I remarked unthinkingly, “It must be marvellous having a brother,” then hoped that I hadn’t sounded pathetic—I had mentioned earlier that my mother’s stillborn child had been a male. Luckily, she didn’t reply.

  We wandered on. There were several dogs being exercised, and a couple of makeshift games of football; but a key element to a normal family Sunday in the park was missing: the participation of fathers. This made things look surprisingly unbalanced despite the fact that with Aldershot being a garrison town we frequently saw pairs of soldiers, or else small groups of them—obviously perspiring on account of their uniforms. But I still felt obtrusive … me in my grey flannel suit. Even if I didn’t see them (and I assuredly wasn’t on the watch) I imagined I might be getting many of what my grandmother used to refer to as speaking glances; and particularly getting them from women of about my grandmother’s own age.

  “At any minute,” I told Sybella, “I feel that someone’s going to thrust a white feather into my hand!”

  She had been strolling beside me in a reverie.

  “Just let them try!”

  But then she rather spoilt that fine spontaneous cry of indignation by mumbling lamely that in any case it could easily be herself to whom the feather would be given. “Do you remember all that fuss about Faith Brook?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Remind me.”

  “It was while sh
e was playing at Bristol in Aren’t Men Beasts? There were headlines like, ‘Why hasn’t she joined up? This woman ought to be fighting for her country!’”

  Suddenly, she sounded angry.

  “And, believe it or not, the matter was even raised in Parliament! Although, as it turned out, she had already applied to ENSA. Aren’t people beasts?”

  “Yes, I remember now. I’m not sure what happened.”

  Almost, her anger seemed to transfer itself to me. It very nearly sounded, I thought, as if she had recognized my lie.

  “What happened? I’ll tell you what happened. Before you could say Jack Robinson—or in this case Robertson Hare—she was bundled into the ATS! I hope you haven’t also forgotten who Robertson Hare is?”

  “No, of course not.”

  I felt sure that it was in her mind to call my bluff. But at the last moment she restrained herself, presumably took pity on me. Shame. I would undoubtedly have followed my hunch and said he was an actor—was it possible I could ever have heard my grandparents discussing him?—and even that he had been Miss Brook’s co-star in Bristol. (Naturally I found it extremely galling when later enquiries revealed I’d have been right!)

  “But at least the story has a happy ending,” Sybella observed. “She was afterwards transferred to Stars in Battledress, which is pretty similar to ENSA.” Her tone had softened a little.

  “Anyway. Thank you for offering to spring to my defence if some old biddy should come bobbing and weaving at me, wielding a white feather.”

  “I spoke without thinking,” she said. Her tone hadn’t softened that much.

  But she added after a few seconds, “I mean, I consider you fully large enough to deal with such a thing on your own.”

  “You recommend I sock ’em on the jaw?”

  Yet it was puzzling. No smile—not even a glimmer. I wondered if I might have said or done something to offend her.