I didn’t know what to say. The truth is, I hadn’t thought about death very much, not then, not—perhaps—as much as I should have done. And what did she mean? Was she thinking of her mother’s awful fate, of her own death, her sisters’, of Will’s—or of Wilhelm’s?
She was thinking of Wilhelm, of course. She was thinking that if he was dead, she might never find out where. That he was lost to her forever. And that if he was dead, he had died not knowing he had a son and what a… what a cold, empty, desolate King Lear–type end that was.
I dug my hands into my pockets. I was playing a… well, not a dangerous game, exactly; that was the wrong word… I was… I knew enough to help her, to give her hope, to remove at least some of the dreadful coldness she felt in her heart. Should I tell her what I knew? If I loved her as much as I told myself I did love her, didn’t I want her to be happy, to be released from the terror that gripped her? That was in my gift.
Love doesn’t work like that. Love has its own logic. My sister had discovered that too. Instead, I told myself that maybe Sam was preparing herself for the fact that Wilhelm was probably dead, that she would never see him or hear from him again. That’s what all this talk of death meant. I didn’t really believe my own reasoning but it got me off the hook, at least for then. I said nothing.
THE NEW YEAR, 1917, was marked by another innovation: the air war—the first in history—was getting under way. On a personal level, I was glad to get the festivities over with. For obvious reasons, Christmas for me was fraught with mixed emotions. Without meeting Wilhelm, I would never have met Sam. At the same time, the course I had followed played on my nerves, more so at Christmas than at other times of the year. His photograph was still safely hidden in my briefcase but I never took it out now, to look at it.
That Christmas, at the end of 1916, we did something Sam had had at the back of her mind for a while without telling me. On the day after Boxing Day, she invited some of the poorer children in her school for tea at the flat. About half a dozen turned up and, from the way they wolfed down the food we provided—sandwiches and jelly, mainly—it was clear that they hadn’t seen a square meal in weeks. All of us were eating less at that stage of the war, and we had all developed a craving for sugar. Meatless days once a week had been introduced by the government. To begin with, I had thought Sam risked being disappointed with her Christmas treat—that her approach was essentially patronizing—but, I have to admit, I was wrong: all the children seemed to enjoy their afternoon with “Miss,” as they called her.
I was disconcerted when, after tea and without warning, she asked me to give a repeat of the talk I had given to the schoolchildren in Middle Hill—the one about the Christmas truce. What did she mean by it, I asked myself. Did she mean anything?
Anyway, I got through it, and the children left.
Later that night, however, we were reading in bed and I was half way through the Morning Post when I shuddered. “Mannheim was bombed, according to this. How terrifying that must be, explosives dropping out of the sky. It must cause widespread panic, bringing killing miles behind the front lines, and affecting civilians as much as trained soldiers. What new horrors will this war bring us next? Didn’t Wilhelm come from Mannheim?”
She didn’t reply immediately; she was underlining something in the book she was reading. “Yes … yes he did. But how did you know that?”
I went cold. Too late I realized my mistake. I tried to remain calm, matter-of-fact. “You told me. How else would I know such a thing?”
“Did I? I don’t remember. When?”
I had made a mistake, a bad one, and having been cold, I was now sweating under my nightshirt. But I had the sense, or the low cunning, not to make too much of it, not to overreact, not to be too specific, not to get into a protracted conversation, giving an elaborate explanation that Sam might brood on.
“You must have told me on some canal bank or other. Do you want to read the article?” I handed her the paper.
She took it, and buried herself in the account I had been reading.
I turned out my light, lay back, and waited for her to finish.
She did and turned out her light.
We watched the shadows from the traffic on the Embankment chase each other across the ceiling. As we often did, talking, before making love.
I waited apprehensively for her next question. Surely she could sense my heart thumping like a drum in my chest. Sweat had formed at my temples—but I daren’t brush it away. That would show how tense I was.
In some ways it was extraordinary that I had not made any mistakes in my deception before now. But one error was all it took, one small foot wrong, one false move could destroy everything, could cost me my happiness, could raze and unravel and dismantle the whole careful choreography I had concocted. The pillow under my neck was damp with sweat.
Her next question would tell me if, in one unguarded moment, I had unwound months of effort. I daren’t look in her direction.
And then I heard Sam’s regular breathing, a rhythm I knew well.
She was asleep.
At the end of January and beginning of February, three things occurred together—though I am not attaching equal weight or significance to each. On the thirty-first, Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare in the eastern Atlantic, even against neutrals, and immediately began sinking American ships. On the same day, Genevieve Afton was tried for treason. I gave evidence at the trial, which was held in a reserve court building just south of the river near Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the archbishop of Canterbury. The court had been bombed by a zeppelin a day or two before, and although the damage wasn’t serious half a dozen soldiers were stirrup-pumping water from a burst main into the courtyard. I was cross-examined for about two hours and, I think, gave a good account of myself. Anyway, I found out later that Genevieve was found guilty and sentenced to death. I tried to put that out of my mind.
I was helped, to some extent, by the fact that a week later the third thing happened and I was promoted again and transferred from the Gym to the basement of the building, colloquially known as the Crypt. My job now was to read raw intelligence reports, reports that had come in from the field, and so had already been pored over by intelligence officers in France, or Flanders, or wherever they’d happened to surface. But we had access to all manner of material and the idea was that we were farther from the action, with a wider perspective, so that, perhaps, we could discern strategic matters in among the mass of material we had access to.
The Crypt was a step up in the career pecking order, but a definite step down in the life amenities department. The room was far more secure than the Gym and for that reason had no windows—the lights were always on, tobacco smoke of one sort or another was always swirling in and around the desks we worked at (no tables now), and the drone of a primitive air-recycling machine provided a steady hum that masked almost all other sounds. No chance of hearing the air-raid warning whistles that had been introduced.
The desks were arranged in concentric circles, facing a central glass booth where the commanding colonel sat, handing out the work. There was a good deal less camaraderie in this department than there had been upstairs, but in any case 1917 was a much more serious time. We all knew that the war could be lost at any moment; we would all have rather been at the Front in some more active role, though we knew that, at any moment, any one of us could come up with a crucial development. So we got on with it.
Upstairs I had been fairly lucky, in that I had made some sort of intelligence breakthrough reasonably early on. In the Crypt, however, it was different. I spent a very difficult two months scanning the paperwork I was given—captured documents, enemy morale reports, statistics of men and matériel provided by our side, interrogation reports—without, to be frank, spotting anything remotely useful. April came, and I was growing anxious.
What I remember most about that winter was not the cold or the rain or even the snow but the wind. We learned to dread
the east wind. If there was an east wind in London, the chances were that there was an east wind at the Front—when the Germans would release their gas.
But then we were overwhelmed by the news that food riots had broken out in Russia, that the Cossacks had refused to fire on the rioters, and that the czar, faced down by railway workers, had abdicated. Russia was an ally, or had been—what was going to happen there?
That’s when I spotted something that, at first, was a long way from Russia. It was a passing reference made by one of our agents in Zurich. Most days he took his midmorning coffee at the Café Odeon. This café, I knew from my general reading, was famous in Zurich as the home of the Dada artists’ cult. It was frequented by Hans Arp, Frank Wedekind, James Joyce, Emmy Hemmings, and many other artists sitting out the war. In the account I am referring to, the agent happened to mention that he hadn’t seen one of the celebrated regulars in a few days: Lenin.
That set me thinking. Incredible events—revolutionary events— were happening in Russia. Lenin was—or should have been—in exile in Switzerland. But surely, now that the revolution was happening, he would want to get back to his home? And wouldn’t that spell trouble?
The procedure in the Crypt was different from upstairs. If you had an idea, you went straight to the colonel.
His name was Lockart, Hamish Lockart, and he was a Scot. He wore a mustache, had a mass of freckles and brilliant red hair. His rimless spectacles made him look like nothing so much as a Prussian.
“Aye?” he would say as you approached him. “What is it?”
A deputy shared his office, a major like me but of much more standing. His name was Frank Stanbury.
“Aye?” said Lockart, as I entered his glass booth. “What is it?”
I told him.
He frowned and didn’t ask me to sit down. “And what do you read into that?”
“Maybe Lenin’s gone back to Russia.”
He shook his head. “How would he get there?”
“Via Germany.”
“Why would imperial Germany allow a known revolutionary free passage?”
“Simple,” I said. “Self-interest. Lenin’s against all traditional authority. What he wants most of all is to pull Russia out of this war. If he did, think how many German divisions that would free up—to transfer to the Western Front.”
“You know this Lenin person, do you?”
“No, of course not. But I read. He thinks—like a lot of people— that this war was started by governments and generals and that it is ordinary people who are being made to suffer. He thinks it’s very likely that if Russia can pull out of the war, others will follow.”
Lockart sat back in his seat. He exchanged glances with Stanbury.
“What do you think, Frank?”
Frank, it was clear, had got where he was by never expressing an opinion, certainly not one that could be contradicted all too easily.
“Difficult,” he whispered, running his tongue around his lips— nerves, probably. “What do you think?”
It was like watching a tennis game, back and forth.
Lockart said nothing for a full minute. He stroked his mustache and kept his gaze on me. His calculation was always the same: not to bother his superiors unnecessarily, but not to stifle the supposedly brilliant ideas of his subordinates.
“Say you’re right. What would our next move be?”
“Double-check whether Lenin’s really gone, using our people on the ground in Zurich—”
“Which wouldn’t be very expensive—”
I nodded. “Then, if he has gone, we need to talk to our people on the ground in Petrograd, warn them to expect trouble and to position themselves accordingly.”
Another long silence. More rubbing of the mustache.
Then: “Very well. Come with me.” He rose, buttoned his tunic, tightened his tie, and led the way out of the basement. We ran up a flight of stairs, strode across the internal courtyard, and entered the building through a set of imposing double doors, made of some fancy Indian hardwood from the empire.
Inside the doors, it was immediately quiet. A plush carpet, spongy as a cricket square, high bookshelves, crystal chandeliers, and the smell of polish, which, for some reason, I found comforting. Across from the double doors, at the end of the carpet and the bookshelves, were more double doors. We were clearly somewhere very senior indeed. As we approached those doors, as we passed a buttress, a desk came into view, with a forbidding-looking woman sitting at it.
“Margaret,” said Lockart. “Is the brigadier free?”
She rose to her feet. She was an imposing figure, “stout,” as my mother would have said, though she was tall enough to carry it. “Just a minute, I’ll check.” She tapped lightly on the doors and stuck her head through the gap she had opened. She turned back to us. “Give him a minute.”
We stood without speaking. Lockart resumed polishing his mustache; Margaret went back to her typing; I watched dust particles dance in the shafts of sunlight from the windows.
The brigadier was as good as his word. After no more than a minute, the door opened, and he came out and shook hands with Lockart.
“This is Major Montgomery, sir,” said Lockart.
“You new?” said the brigadier.
Before I could answer, Lockart did it for me.
“The major was a bit of a star in the Gym, sir. He’s been with us a couple of months.”
The brigadier fixed me with his stare and nodded. A light went on in his head. “I’ve heard about you.” He nodded again and said, “My name’s Malahyde. Come in.”
His room was huge. Same plush carpet, same bookshelves and books as outside, plus a high window that gave onto a courtyard that until then I hadn’t known existed. A lawn with trees.
He waved us to some chairs and himself sat on a sofa, with a low table between us. He crossed his legs, revealing expensive socks and elegant, slim ankles. Very shiny shoes.
“Got something for me, have you?”
Again, Lockart was first off the mark.
“It may be a long shot but… well, that’s what we’re all about in the Crypt.”
There was a pad of paper on the low table. The brigadier took out a fountain pen and laid it on the pad.
“Fire away.”
Lockart looked at me and nodded.
I told Malahyde what I’d told Lockart.
He didn’t move and heard me out in silence. He didn’t even blink. It was unnerving. When I was done, he leaned forward, picked up his pad, and made a few notes. Then he put the pad back down and put away his pen. He was a very tidy man.
“Well, you did right to come to me. It should be easy enough to check whether Vladimir Ilyich is still in Zurich or has disappeared. If he’s still there but ill, or having a secret affair, that’s one thing. If, on the other hand, he really has decamped for Russia, then that’s a different kettle of fish entirely.”
He addressed himself to me. “Major Montgomery, this is good work. If Lenin is on his way to Mother Russia, we’d have found out in due course, but obviously time is of the essence here and you’ve bought a few days, I would guess.” He changed his tone. “But I have to point out that you have signed the Official Secrets Act. You must tell no one about this. Not even your wife, if you have one. Do you understand?”
I nodded. Of course I understood.
“What I mean is, no one likes the Germans at the moment—but they are a good honest enemy. There are, however, plenty of closet Bolsheviks in Britain who’d like to see revolution here someday. We don’t want them making trouble, not just now anyway, with the war the way it is, and if they think Lenin is on his way to Russia that could cause all kinds of bother. Do I make myself clear?”
Again I nodded. I didn’t want an argument and, whatever my politics, I didn’t want Russia pulling out of the war—not for now.
“Keep at it, will you?” The brigadier got to his feet: we were being dismissed. He held out his hand for it to be shaken. “Now I need to get
to work. See if I can build on what you have done.”
We were shown out. As we retreated back down the plush carpet, I heard him bark at Margaret, “Get me Downing Street, will you.”
At just over two, Will was noisier and more unruly than ever. He ran uncertainly around the flat, jabbed his fingers into any hole that would accommodate them, climbed every piece of furniture, burned himself once and scalded himself twice, through getting too close to the fire or the cooking stove. He seemed to have no fear and was as good-natured as a cat on a dairy farm.
Sam had long since settled in as a teacher at St. Paul’s Ladbroke Grove. To begin with, as she had finally admitted, the children had been a good deal more unruly, and quite a bit more smelly, than the darlings of Middle Hill. “But they’re just as bright,” she assured me, before I could offer any criticism. “They’ve had harder and dirtier lives—but they’ve got such spirit, Hal. They fight a bit, call the teachers names—but it’s not hostile. It’s cheek, really. They know we know more than they do, but they don’t think that makes us better than them… we’re all equal. When we get on to the really interesting bits of a lesson, they all quiet down and concentrate. They know all about city life, of course, and, since they usually live in cramped conditions, there’s little we can teach them about the raw practicalities—money, work, sport. We don’t teach sex but we don’t need to—they’ve seen all that, too.”
“So what do you teach them?”
“History. Geography. Biology—how animals work, what happens on farms, which many have never seen, why the seasons change. Art— they love art. Many of them can look at pictures all day long.”
“Do you prefer it to Middle Hill?”
“I keep asking myself that question. I loved village life, but I like my life here too. Growing up in Bristol, we had excursions—day trips—into the countryside. But although I enjoyed those trips, I never felt part of the countryside, never felt it was part of me. In Middle Hill I did start to respond to, you know, the wildlife, the seasons, I started getting to know the hedgerows, the copses, I learned the different breeds of cow and pig, I knew all the words for the different parts of horses’ harnesses, I understood the diagnoses of the local vet—most of them, anyway. And yes, I loved it, all of it. But”—and her eyes shone—“I think the city is my natural habitat. Bristol wasn’t London, oh no, but… your sister was right and I’m glad we are here.”
Gifts of War Page 24