Letters for a Spy

by Stephen Benatar

  As I watched this very ordinary, domesticated, almost intimate activity, I wondered if anyone had noticed us at all, noticed in the sense of speculated upon us in any way (oh, the arrogance of that, when up to now I hadn’t even particularly noticed the people at the next table!) and, if so, whether they might actually have seen us as a couple. Not as a husband and wife, of course, she hadn’t any ring on, but certainly as more than just a brother and a sister.

  I felt absurdly proud to think that we might, in fact, all unwittingly be looking like a couple.

  Well, perhaps all unwittingly wasn’t—I mean, not in my own case…

  Oh, God!

  How could it have escaped my attention?

  She hadn’t any ring on.

  19

  “Dearest Bill, I’m so thrilled with my ring—scandalously extravagant—you know how I adore diamonds—I simply can’t stop looking at it…”

  And I hadn’t even thought about it! That was what mattered. In itself, maybe, it wasn’t too important: the absence of a ring which she had no doubt stopped wearing as soon as she’d heard about Bill Martin’s death. I guessed that in Sybella’s position some women kept on their engagement ring, some didn’t. It could be as simple as that. But all the same, it seemed unforgivable that I hadn’t even thought about it.

  Yet this was now the least of it.

  This was now the very least of it. Since—almost immediately—the discovery of one oddity had drawn attention to another.

  “I’m so thrilled … scandalously extravagant … you know how I adore diamonds…”

  Oh, for Pete’s sake! It didn’t even sound like Sybella.

  “Your letter made me feel slightly better (you do write such heavenly ones) but I shall get horribly conceited if you go on saying things like that about me—they’re utterly unlike ME, as I’m afraid you’ll soon find out. Here I am for the weekend in this divine place with Mummy & Jane both being too sweet & understanding the whole time, bored beyond words & panting for Monday so that I can get back to my crowd of silly females, not always that sweet & not always that understanding. What an idiotic waste!…”

  I remembered it word for word—although admittedly I had mentally interpolated a sentence from her second letter. She handed me my teacup and I could hardly take my eyes off her.

  “Why are you staring? Have I a smudge on my face? Has my lipstick smeared?”

  “No, of course not. Was I staring?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, then—I don’t know—perhaps I could have been thinking about its being a nice face, an honest face. A poet might even call it pretty.”

  “If the poet were in his cups, you mean, and getting impossibly carried away?”

  “Something like that.”

  Heavenly? Divine?

  And not simply the phraseology now appeared false; even her actual sentiments. That crowd of silly females who weren’t always that sweet or that understanding was presumably the same crowd about whom she had said before lunch, “I’m very fond of most of them,” and also, more recently, “And everyone’s been wonderful; wonderful.”

  Plus, she didn’t even strike me as the sort of woman who would care a great deal about diamonds. Although how on earth could I be any judge of that, merely because the frock she was wearing this afternoon happened to be a simple one and seemed so very much her style?

  But then, of course, a woman could have more than just one style. What about in the evenings, say, when she might be dressed in a floor-length gown and have her hair piled high to show off pretty earrings and have on a sparkly necklace, or a bracelet, or a brooch? What about in London, say, rather than in Hampshire or in Wiltshire? (And it suddenly occurred to me—not that it mattered, probably—where exactly would that ‘rather dreary dance with Jock & Hazel’ have taken place?)

  Yet anyway, irrespective of location, would a dancing Sybella have metamorphosed into the kind of person who ‘adored’ diamonds? How could I possibly tell?

  However, if Bill Martin had bought her a diamond engagement ring, it could only have been because he knew her taste, had taken pains to find out what type of stone was really going to please her. “You know how I adore diamonds…” Even in the unlikely event that he had got it wrong—indeed, had chosen the ring which best pleased himself, not her—she would still have wanted to convey her gratitude convincingly. And, okay, maybe in the process she had come across as sounding a little precious; but in view of the specialness of the occasion wasn’t that allowable? She might have thought she was sounding appreciative rather than affected.

  Or was there another possibility? Did a woman happy and in love perhaps express herself differently from one who had recently suffered an enormous loss? When you were grieving, did heavenly and divine and beastly—yes, even beastly—virtually disappear?

  Alternatively … Did people sometimes use a separate set of words on paper to the ones they used in conversation? Whether they were happy or not? Whether they were in love or not?

  Unanswerable questions—for the moment—that also had to be filed.

  And besides, now that I was thinking along such lines, such deeply distrustful lines (admittedly a bit late in the day, but at least not too late in the day, thank God), there was still another point to be considered. Again, how could I have missed it?

  Lease-Lend.

  ENSA’s Lease-Lend department must have been kept extraordinarily busy on Sybella’s behalf.

  “A train going out can leave a howling great gap in ones life & one has to try madly—& quite in vain—to fill it with all the things one used to enjoy a whole five weeks ago…”

  Which suggested—surely?—that she and Bill Martin had spent a period of five full weeks together; and that she at least had been away from work throughout it.

  More than suggested. Practically stated.

  So the question then emerged: would Lease-Lend have been likely to show itself so accommodating even for the sake of Major Bill Martin? Who, publicly, was not a figure of importance. He was certainly somebody who had been one of Mountbatten’s officers; who had enjoyed his chief’s ‘entire confidence’ and who had ‘really known his stuff’; somebody possessing a brilliant future, yes; but not somebody as yet eligible to pull strings—in this case ENSA’s strings—solely to make life easier and more pleasant for himself and his fiancée.

  Though come to that, of course, she wasn’t his fiancée. Hadn’t become such, I still maintained, until the 14th of April. So would Sybella at that stage even have notified ENSA about the existence of Major William Martin? Remembering how cagey she had been about him generally.

  Which led me to a further thought—tangential, maybe, but soon to regain prominence. How long until Sybella next saw her flatmate? I tried to remember what I had actually said to Lucy; I hadn’t as clear a recall for the spoken word as for the written. I wanted to reassure myself there wasn’t any real link between that man on the telephone and this talent scout for RKO. Wouldn’t Sybella simply ascribe it to coincidence: the eruption into her life of two wholly unknown males: one on the Friday, one on the Saturday-stroke-Sunday? Of course she wouldn’t ever hear again from the earlier of the two, the chap who had known, or had known of, Bill Martin; who had passed on the news of her engagement.

  But anyway. Erich Anders would have left London well before she began to ponder the true strangeness of it. Both the man who knew too much and the man who apparently knew nothing would have quit the scene for good. Leaving the one thing that did of course betray a link. Aldershot, Lucy had said. She’s going to be in Aldershot.

  However … Figuratively, I gave a shrug. Even if Sybella did eventually put two and two together, what would it matter? By then I’d already have told her—so long as I honoured my vow, as I intended—that Laura was a scam; that I had seen the play on Saturday night, become captivated by her, could think of no other way in which to engineer a meeting. In other words, I should have left her to infer I was unprincipled, only one step removed, perhaps, fr
om that white-slave trafficker of whom I’d spoken. (But simultaneously I should have persuaded her she had nothing whatever to fear from me: persuaded her I was about to vanish out of her life forever.) And if afterwards she started to suspect that things hadn’t been quite as above board as even that sleazy confession had sought to make them sound … well, yes, again … so what? By that time, I should not only have left London; I should have arrived back in Berlin and have made out my report—a report, of course, counselling nothing but the greatest caution.

  And by that time, too, the German High Command would have ratified my implicit recommendation. Word would have gone out ordering the immediate consolidation of all defences on Sicily. The bulk of our manpower in the western Mediterranean would not have been lured off to faraway Sardinia.

  For how could anyone deny the obvious? It made sense—far better sense—that the Allies should attempt to get into Italy via Sicily. (And surely no element of surprise, sir, could ever compensate for that.) Sardinia had been a bluff; it had to be. Sir Archibald Nye had been misleading us. Lord Louis Mountbatten had been misleading us. And sadly—but incontestably—Miss Sybella Standish was simply the latest in a long line of deceivers.

  An actress—and not only on the stage. An actress at The Tap and Tankard and in Manor Park and at the museum and right here, as well, at Daphne’s. An accomplished actress, and putting her training to sound practical use.

  But to what end? To what conceivable end?

  And if all of this was just a performance, why was it being put on for my benefit? What in God’s name had I done to alert anyone to the fact that I needed to be duped?

  Although whatever it was I had done … this was almost irrelevant. ‘Duped’ itself was what counted. If for any reason, any reason at all, I was needing to be duped—why, then, I could return to Germany tonight (or, at least, as soon as such could be arranged), secure in the knowledge that my mission was complete: Sardinia was most definitely a bluff.

  But … return to Germany and say what?

  That Lease-Lend had been too kind to her? That her letters had not been written by herself? That she hadn’t been wearing her diamond ring?

  And furthermore: that her flatmate hadn’t previously heard of Major William Martin? That William’s father had never stayed at the Black Lion in Mold? But that he’d apparently been working on a settlement for his son’s marriage (following some negative feedback from Sybella’s own family) about a week before the major had even got round to popping the question?

  For me, all of this would have been more than enough to destroy our credence in those letters from the sea. Destroy it totally. But, of course, the evidence was purely circumstantial. Could I be certain that others would regard it in the same light?

  Added to which, few of my colleagues understood the nuances of English as well as I did. I might say: “She just wasn’t the type to use ‘madly’ or ‘divine’ or ‘too sweet’.” Yet how much weight was this going to carry when thousands of lives and millions of Deutschmarks and the whole future of The Third Reich might actually depend on it? Even to my own ears it didn’t sound convincing. (Assuredly not so, in fact, when I tried to imagine myself having to say it aloud. And Mannheim—although he might be scared of English prepositions betraying a German—would inevitably require more than English adverbs and adjectives to betray a native-born Englishwoman.) So what then? It was clearly my job and my duty to provide ballast.

  And also my resolve. It had become essential to show that I was someone who could indeed shovel ballast. To show that I was now someone to be taken seriously; those words of Heinrich Buchholz had been difficult to shake off. “Which is maybe why they sent an agent so relatively young and inexperienced.” And what was perhaps even harder to cope with: I was suddenly realizing that during the past few hours my approach to things had not been … well, let us just say … unreservedly professional.

  Might even have been—well, let us just say again—slightly dilettantish.

  Yet hell’s bells! My superiors had certainly had enough time in which to study me. I couldn’t still be that much of an unknown quantity. Over the years, they must surely have studied my weaknesses as well as my strengths.

  So could it honestly have been the case—as Buchholz had basically been intimating—that almost from the start they had viewed the documents as genuine; had looked upon the dispatch of an agent into Britain merely in the light of a formality, an exercise? Therefore why should we send of our best? Isn’t the outcome practically guaranteed? And isn’t it about time, too, that we made some little use of Erich Anders?

  Dear Lord! Was that the way it might have been? Was that what ‘handpicked by the Admiral’ had finally come to stand for?

  Then sod them! Sod them all! If the choice of myself had been little more than just a sympathy vote I would damn well prove I wasn’t a man they could afford to patronize. I would damn well make them wake up in cold sweats in the middle of the night … only to think of what might have happened if they had sent somebody else. Or if they had not sent anyone at all.

  Yes, all right. I could acknowledge it. Ever since meeting this woman I might have been behaving in a vaguely adolescent way. I might indeed have been allowing my personal feelings to get the better of my judgment. All afternoon perhaps (and why even try to hide it?) I might have been half-consciously aware of something being—what?—not altogether right.

  And in that case might have been—yes, half-consciously—suppressing my unease? I really didn’t know.

  But what came to me suddenly and mercifully and with the full force of unexpected absolution … I really didn’t need to know! It was now that mattered. And now—although this was paradoxically so hard to admit, more than hard, since it filled me with a feeling that was close to desolation—now the all-but-inadmissible truth was this: Sybella Standish was leading me up the garden path.

  She was flagrantly deceiving me.

  Your responsibility, Mannheim had said. I couldn’t forget that. I now felt practically certain this whole thing was a hoax. But was that quite enough—‘practically’?

  ‘Your responsibility’ was what he had implied.

  20

  “Anyway … Now that I’ve finished staring…?”

  She didn’t answer. But she looked encouraging.

  “I’ve begun to wonder about your attitude to dress rehearsals,” I went on.

  “Well, naturally you have.”

  “Are they essential?”

  “Yes. I’d have said so. Definitely.”

  “Then taking that into consideration (for, of course, I trust you implicitly)—and as a dress rehearsal for the live theatre in London tomorrow—will you come with me to a picture theatre in Aldershot tonight?”

  I eventually carried the day. Therefore, after I had paid my bill at the counter, I asked the manageress for information. She found me a copy of the previous Friday’s Aldershot News.

  Or, not to sell it short, the previous Friday’s Aldershot News and Military Gazette, Farnborough Chronicle and Fleet Times.

  “My word!” exclaimed Sybella, when—back at the table—I had proclaimed this to her in its full majesty. “You really get all that for just three pence?”

  I turned directly to the entertainments page.

  “At the Empire we can see Humphrey Bogart as King of the Underworld and Cesar Romero as The Gay Caballero.”

  “Right.”

  “At the Alexandra, The Doctor Takes a Wife, with Loretta Young. And Jungle Man, starring good old Buster Crabbe.”

  “Why good old Buster Crabbe but not good old Loretta Young?”

  “I don’t think she ever played Tarzan or Flash Gordon. Not to mention Buck Rogers.”

  “And as soon as she does, things will automatically even out? Fair enough. But are those the only two cinemas open on a Sunday?”

  “No, not at all. No, at the Ritz—oh, yes, let’s settle for the Ritz—Greer Garson! As Mrs Chips she absolutely stole my heart! And apparently this fil
m happens to be The Most Memorable Of All Motion Picture Love Stories, Ever. Which must be true because it says so here. Therefore it seems we just can’t afford to miss it.”

  Yet then I was suddenly mindful of dashed futures and drowned fiancés and wondered if I hadn’t been appallingly tactless. I added hurriedly, “Oh, but no second feature. That’s a bind.”

  “I should have thought it was a definite advantage, if our choice is only between jungle men and gay caballeros. But what’s the picture at the Ritz? Whatever you do, please don’t say it’s Random Harvest!”

  “Why, yes! How did you guess?”

  She gave a groan.

  “Oh, it isn’t fair,” she said. “First, you invite me to the last West End show I went to with Bill; and then—as if God feels the joke has to get funnier with repetition—you pick out the last film we saw together, too!”

  But she quickly held up her hand, pre-empting my reaction.

  “Don’t worry, though. I think you’ll find that during the past hour or so I have managed to gird up my loins, wonderfully.”

  “Oh God,” I said, “the film as well! I had absolutely no idea.”

  “Not like you had before, of course, when bringing up the subject of the show?”

  We both smiled a little.

  “So,” she said, “it will indeed be like a dress rehearsal. More than you imagined!”

  “Oh, no, it won’t,” I said. “Not to that extent. We’ll see The Doctor Takes a Wife. Or—here now—how about The Perfect Crime … which they’re showing at the Pavilion? We didn’t get so far as that.”

  “We didn’t get so far as that,” she reminded me, “for one very good reason. We were stopped by Greer Garson. Greer Garson stole your heart. We must go to see Greer Garson.”

  “Oh, bugger Greer Garson,” I exclaimed. “Let’s both learn about the perfect crime! At some stage, that’s something which might…”