But at least he hadn’t grown quite so intoxicated that he had lost all self-control and started to invent unashamedly—again, not like some whom you might want to mention—unable to resist the clever, self-regarding thrill. The piling up of detail on detail. Pelion on Ossa. The Empire on the Prince of Wales.
No, he had simply shaken my hand and shown me out. What a hero—when my hand was offered he had actually managed to bring himself to shake it! (Had he rushed off immediately afterwards, screaming for the hot water and soap?)
And he had shown me out the way I had come in, taking me past the receptionist. (With my receiving no more than a hard-faced nod from a woman who fifty minutes earlier had greeted me so pleasantly.) I had descended those impressive stairs and returned into Waterloo Place. There I had noticed the man who was chatting to the newspaper seller: the man in the battered felt hat and grubby raincoat. Had paid him scant attention, though, until I had seen him sometime later in the Strand. Had naturally lost interest again when he had turned off towards the bridge.
Yet what about that other man? The one lolling against the barber’s shop in Paradise Street, with a copy of the Evening News concealing the lower part of his face?
In London, then, I was being followed.
Had they also set a tail on me in Aldershot?
No. In Aldershot, unnecessary. In Aldershot there had always been Sybella Standish to keep her beady little eye in focus.
But how in God’s name had they guessed? At what point would they have told themselves I needed to be watched?
Yes, that was the abiding puzzle. What had I done but go to a solicitor and speak of my desire to contact Mr Martin?
And, anyway, there was nothing new in that. I had already been trying to seek him out in Wales—and without (well, apparently without) attracting to myself any undue attention.
Therefore where—last Friday afternoon—where had lain the crucial difference? Martin was a fairly common name. What had been the signal that had triggered the alarm? Had triggered it inside the Admiralty, let’s say? Inside its Naval Intelligence Division, let’s say? What had been the signal that had unerringly declared: Here is a German spy?
And following on from that, of course, why if the authorities had known, or even just faintly suspected, why hadn’t they apprehended me?
Well, who was it who had once said that—in the solving of any mystery—all you had to do was ask yourself the right question?
We were now in Abbey Road. Its absence of battle scars made a welcome change from the West End; a very welcome change, or so I had been hearing, from the East End. Apart from its sandbags and barrage balloons, Abbey Road was a thoroughfare with a nearly rural aspect. Tree-lined and sunlit. When I finally awoke to an awareness of where we were, my taxi must have been driving along it for roughly a couple of minutes, because already we were pulling into the left-hand kerb, outside the home of Mrs Hilling.
But I was still practically oblivious. I went on sitting in the taxi until the driver turned round and gazed at me enquiringly—until she slid back the partition and actually spoke to me.
“Mister, isn’t this the number you were wanting? Or have you now had second thoughts?”
Second thoughts? Second thoughts? I smiled—almost laughed. But it clearly required far less exertion to move my facial muscles than it did to move my limbs. I stepped down from the taxi and dragged my suitcase after me; closed the door, pulled out the money for the fare, gave the driver a ridiculously large tip. (But it was one which she deserved, for being the woman who had driven me in such a way as to encourage, or at any rate not impede, enlightenment.) I stepped down from the taxi and went through each of these small acts in a state of virtual automation.
Yes, well. Who had said it, in fact—that the only thing needed was to ask yourself the right question? The piece of the puzzle that was going to form the keystone, locking all the other pieces into place.
Because … I had just been shown the keystone.
And like St Paul (in this one respect)—St Paul set down on the road to the abbey at the end of a lengthy and despairing taxi ride—I had finally been floored; floored by the awful power of revelation. And now felt shaky. As indeed he must have.
For even the revelation granted to him could scarcely have seemed more Godsent or less logical: the kind of breathless leap dismissed by sceptics the world over, whether on the outskirts of Damascus or in the purlieus of St John’s Wood—the kind of breathless leap which would have failed you automatically in a geometry exam, despite that instant click of recognition from within. What had I done but mention the name of Mr J.G. Martin?
The right question! (I had realized it at last.) It had pointed me to a solution that was clean and astonishing in its simplicity. And more than that—still in time to be of service to us.
So once again, as when previously it had seemed my assignment over here had been complete, I should really have been feeling cock-a-hoop.
But I wasn’t.
In fact, I was feeling almost anything but cock-a-hoop.
The taxi driver was rejoicing, though. Clearly delighted by the size of her tip, she gave me a broad smile, touched her cap in mock salute and waved to me twice as she drove away. By then, Mrs Hilling had come to the front door and even she appeared elated. Elated by the simple fact I had returned. She asked if I’d had a good weekend and conveyed the idea she’d have been more than pleased to hear about it in some detail. A pretty woman in a flowered overall, she offered me a glass of beer and a corned beef sandwich and mentioned, quite wistfully, that it was ever so comfy in the kitchen—quiet, as well, with her two young monsters back at school and her oldest one just recently called up.
Yet, whereas at any other time I might have responded more graciously, I now made the excuse that I’d already eaten and in addition had a headache; told her that what I really needed was to lie down.
“Ah, yes,” she said, “I didn’t like to say anything, it wasn’t my place, but I felt quite worried you might be overdoing it! Coming up to London for a change of air is one thing. But gallivanting all around the country with that heavy old suitcase of yours…!” She wagged a gentle finger in reproof. “Your regiment isn’t going to take you back, you know, not until you’re properly in the pink again; and you can’t hope to pull the wool over their eyes, any more than you can over mine!”
(In the meanwhile she was under the impression that for the most part I was spending my convalescence tranquilly in Mold, carrying on with my architectural studies and living with my sister who had lately become a Land Girl. My sister, Priscilla.)
But for the present, she explained, she hoped I wouldn’t mind that she had to put me in a different room. Not knowing for sure if I’d be coming back, she had given the larger one, only about an hour ago, to a nice young couple who had spotted her advertisement on the newsagent’s board at the corner of Belgrave Gardens.
“So let me show you your new room—and on our way up I’ll get you some aspirin; they’re kept in the medicine chest in the bathroom. Oh … and, Mr Andrews … you’ve had an urgent message from your friend Mr Smee. I think he’ll be so relieved to know that you’ve got back to us safe and sound.”
She paused on the stairs, to reassure herself that I could manage with my suitcase.
“Still, I only wish I hadn’t forgotten to enquire after the health of that nice mother of his. Such a cultured woman, you know. She used to be an actress.”
Right at this minute, however, I could have told her I had precious little time for cultured women who used to be, or still were, actresses.
But it was definitely perverse how, also right at this minute, everything conspired to remind me of them. Everything. Even something so unlikely you’d almost have sworn it couldn’t happen.
A small framed notice hung over the washbasin in the room I’d now been given. This was a card written in red Gothic lettering but otherwise unadorned. I dully wondered who had judged it worthy of the piece of glass—of the pass
e-partout, the backing, even the length of wire.
“Switched-on switches and turned-on taps
Make happy Huns and joyful Japs!”
And what was especially painful about that—to have felt such a very happy Hun myself at the moment I had first encountered it! To have felt happier, indeed, than for several years I’d even have considered possible.
No, stop it, I said, stop it this instant, just think about the task at hand!
In spite of which I vividly recalled the expression in her eyes. Oh, please! Not again! You can’t—you cannot—have forgotten yesterday! Colonel and Mrs Musket, of the Royal Army Dental Corps?
Was that only three hours ago, that silent but renewed and desperate plea for restraint?
A fleeting voyage through a fool’s paradise. And ‘fool’ was truly the appropriate word. Even if that paradise had proved solid, I could scarcely have felt sadder for having lost it. I remembered her comment about missing someone. Like homesickness, she had said.
But, no doubt, a comment just as sham as all the rest.
Anyway, if for nothing else, I ought to feel thankful that there’d been this telephone message from Buchholz. Which meant that I didn’t merely have to stay up in my new room and think. Or do my best not to think.
Which meant that I didn’t merely have to stay up in my new room and wonder. Or do my best not to wonder.
(Wonder if I really had to see Sybella Standish tonight. Really had to sit beside her at the Prince of Wales. Really had to sit beside her and simulate enjoyment.)
But that would have been pure self-indulgence—my even wondering about it. I had no option. Under no circumstances must she be allowed to realize I had cottoned on.
Or was I wrong? Perhaps there did remain one further option.
To throw myself out of this top-floor window. The small yard beneath was paved in concrete.
However … I smiled wanly and I shook my head.
It might hurt a little.
25
I went into the post office on the corner of Marylebone High Street and Weymouth Street. If I was being tailed (as I felt sure I was) I still didn’t believe that anyone would actually follow me in—the space was too confined, as well as being too public. But even so I remained facing the doorway; I stood in a quiet corner and filled in the lettercard I had just bought.
I used the pencil attached to a holder on the counter.
“Received message via Mrs H. Discovered I’m being watched, have been since Friday—regrettably, before coming to see yourselves. Enormously sorry. Maybe correspond by letter? Or phone after ten? Alternatively, meet at Ridgeway in fifteen, twenty minutes? Will try to shake off tail.”
The Ridgeway was a restaurant up the road, where Devonshire Street met the High Street. Buchholz might prefer some other place—which would obviously be perfectly all right with me.
I licked the edges of the card. Addressed it. Looked around me for a likely messenger.
And saw one straightaway. A middle-aged woman had recently joined the lengthy queue. A lad of ten or eleven, presumably her son, stood next to her. He wore a school cap, blazer, grey-flannel shirt and grey-flannel short trousers. He was reading a story in the Wizard.
“Excuse me, madam?”
Although addressing the woman, I was plainly including the boy.
“I was wondering if your son would like to earn himself five shillings. I need someone to deliver a letter to the newsagent’s in Paradise Street. It wouldn’t take long.”
In one hand I was holding my hat; in the other I had two half-crowns, conspicuous beside the lettercard.
The woman turned towards her son.
“Ronnie?” she asked.
“Yes, please!” replied the boy. “I could be there and back in probably under a minute!”
“I would think more like three,” I said. “You see, Mr Smee will want to send an answer; a short one. But if it takes you longer than five we’ll increase the rate of pay to seven-and-sixpence. What do you say?”
Actually, I felt it was likely to take ten minutes rather than three, but didn’t aim to be discouraging.
His mother said, “Well, as long as he isn’t late for his appointment!” (But there wasn’t any fear of that: she informed me of its time and place.) He crammed the comic into her shopping basket, took the letter and rushed off with an air of great importance—Robin being dispatched by Batman, on a tricky mission to help save the world. His mother had tried to straighten his cap before he left. “Careful as you cross the road!” she called.
I made sure that when he pushed through the inner swing door it would look to anyone standing on the pavement as if I was simply waiting there in line. Silently. Self-sufficiently.
He was soon back. It could even have been under the specified five minutes—I hadn’t been timing him and his mother was only just at that moment getting served. In any case, I held out the third half-crown.
“No, thank you, sir. The job was easy. And the old woman in the shop gave me an aniseed ball as well, while the man wrote out his answer.”
“A business deal is a business deal,” I told him. “It was nice of you to say no, but I’m adamant you’ve got to take it.”
I added: “And I hope everything goes okay at the dentist’s! Thank you for helping me out.”
Then I touched the woman’s elbow and thanked her, too. I returned to my corner and tore open the envelope her son had brought back. The contents read:
“Come anyway. If they were watching you on Friday the damage is done. But they may have assumed that you were visiting friends.”
Which was ridiculous—as Buchholz must have known. I wondered if he were trying to assuage my guilt; to atone for that jibe he had made about my lack of experience.
No, not a jibe, of course.
A justified comment.
26
So—a little sooner than expected—my return to Paradise Street.
We were again in the bedroom. As before, Buchholz wore slippers on his inordinately small feet, and was once more lying on the bed, his back supported by the various bright cushions piled against the wall.
But there were differences this afternoon. Firstly, he hadn’t offered me a whisky and, secondly, there was a lot of custom in the shop below … with many who came in to buy their evening paper smelling pungently of BO. “In England people do,” had said Frau Buchholz, after she had greeted me dourly from behind her counter and made some reference to the grandfather and toddler who had just left—Frau Buchholz, Mrs Smee, who despite her veneer of grime and her filthy-looking scarf, was certainly not afflicted with BO.
A third difference was maybe more important. The man outside the barber’s shop had disappeared; a young woman wearing pigtails and dressed in the tunic of a schoolgirl had taken his place. She was playing with a puzzle: I guessed, from her careful tilting of the flat glass-fronted box and from her tapping of its sides, that it might be one of those containing the hard outline of a map, jaggedly indented, along which you had to coax a piece of grooved Bakelite. Up from the Bay of Biscay all the way to the Baltic Sea. It was a game, as I could easily recall, that demanded total concentration. (If while you were playing it, that was, you cared for absolutely nothing but the game.) I sat in the same chair by the window and watched with wry amusement. At least I no longer had to wonder why they should be bothering to have me followed.
You could say that this was something.
Buchholz had asserted—the same as he’d done before—that he had no wish to know the reason for my being in Britain.
“But would you say your task has been successful?”
“Yes,” I replied.
It sounded curt: an accurate reflection of the way I happened to be feeling—despite his having pardoned me for the situation into which I had thrown both him and his clearly adored mother.
I couldn’t keep it up, though. I added less abruptly: “Yes. I’d say I’ve now done everything I had to.”
A statement not in
tended as a boast … my mood could hardly have encompassed that. All the same, he congratulated me.
But I paid no attention to his irony. If that was what it was.
I said: “I was sent over here to check on the veracity of something. It turns out there’s no veracity attached to it whatever.”
“Which—I take it—is exactly as our superiors in Berlin expected?”
“Which—you may take it—is exactly as our superiors in Berlin did not expect at all.”
He hesitated.
“Are you certain of that?”
“Completely.”
“There’s no faint chance that you might be mistaken?”
“About what? The nature of their expectations?”
“No. The truth of your findings.”
“Not the faintest chance in the world.” I shook my head, decisively.
“I see,” he murmured. “Tell me: what strikes you as so fascinating—I mean, down there in the street? MI5?”
I sighed and turned away from the window. He came and stood beside me and, without lifting the net curtain, stared for several seconds at the pavement opposite.
“You mustn’t blame yourself for that.”
“As you keep on reassuring me. Not everyone, I think, would be so kind. I appreciate it.”
“But your tone still sounds extremely flat.”
“Maybe that’s because my tone actually is extremely flat, and for the moment I can’t be bothered to do anything about it.”
“You seem a little different from the way you were last Friday.”
I didn’t answer.
“Even a great deal different,” he remarked.
Had he known, I reflected, he could have added with similar accuracy that I seemed a great deal different from how I had been in the post office a mere ten minutes ago. That, too, made me uncomfortable. Was it only because in the post office I had been in need of a favour? Or was it also because in the heat of the moment certain memories had receded, and because a silly unfortunate thought hadn’t yet occurred to me—as it had when I was scarcely six feet away from the paper shop. The last time I was here I felt happy. My present state of depression ignored the fact that such, in any case, was not the full unvarnished truth.
Letters for a Spy Page 16