Maud listed her academic achievements.
‘Anything else?’
Her way with mechanical objects. He said nothing.
‘I can speak a bit of German,’ she said, trying harder now. But so could many people. Robert’s smile told her as much.
‘Might be useful later on in the war,’ he said. ‘If we ever get to invade them.’ His grip on her tightened. ‘But perhaps girls like you are most useful in keeping the men going.’ He glanced at Peter. She’d had a lot to drink but not so much that she couldn’t flush more deeply. His hands felt too warm on her waist and shoulder.
‘I think I’d like to sit down now,’ she said. He steered her towards the bar. A glass of brandy appeared.
‘No need to feel you’re not pulling your weight, Maud,’ he said, lighting a cigarette with his left hand.
She put down her brandy. ‘Doctors have to see sick people and they need help managing the appointments and—’
‘I’m sure you do your bit.’
She’d actually liked this man at first. ‘I speak fluent Serbo-Croat as well as German,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t mention it because it’s such an obscure language. And a smattering of Hungarian.’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘My mother is a Croat. She also taught me the Hungarian.’ Mama had grown up in an Austro-Hungarian territory that was now part of Croatian Yugoslavia. Maud felt weary again. She looked around for Peter and spotted him talking intently to an over-made-up woman who’d come to sit beside him at the table. Robert started talking about films. Maud was too tired to keep up the annoyance so she let him go on about cinemas he liked to go to, restaurants that still served decent food. Holidays.
‘Not that we’ll be having many of those in the foreseeable, but I did love Greece.’
‘I’ve never been.’ She hoped he could hear the coolness in her tone.
‘There’s nothing like the Balkans.’
‘Actually, I know the Balkans further north,’ she said. ‘My father was director of a British mine in Kosovo Province in Serbia. We lived with him there for a few years. In the summer we went to the Dalmatian coast, usually to one of the islands, a very small one near Dubrovnik.’
The fug of the nightclub fell away. Maud could smell the aromatic sharpness of the trees, see the light bouncing off the sea, hear the waves lapping on the shingle. Her father had bought her a canoe and they spent summers on the water, paddling around the shorelines, sometimes fishing and building small fires to cook fish on the beaches. They’d stayed in an old merchant’s house set back from the harbour on the island. Mama would be complaining of boredom within a few days, but Maud had relished every hour, from the moment of waking up to see the blue light flitting through the white shutters in the morning, to the starry nights sitting on the harbour trying to make friends with the local cats.
‘I can see you loved it there,’ he said, seeming softer. She found herself opening up as he asked her more questions. Peter had never seemed that interested in her family. Robert asked her more about her mother and she told him about Mama and how she’d grown up in Croatia and Bosnia, and had actually been in Sarajevo one June morning when a maid had rushed home from an errand to tell the family that Franz Ferdinand had been shot. Robert leaned forward as she spoke, nodding occasionally, those hooded eyes on her face. They were a grey colour, quite unusual, almost hypnotic when they were focused on you. She’d never told this story to anyone else before.
‘One day you’ll tell your grandchildren about your direct link to the day the world changed forever.’ For a moment they sat, eyes locked. Robert became matter-of-fact again, talking to her about Yugoslavia and its struggles even before the Germans and Italians had invaded. ‘Croats and Serbs fighting on different sides in the Great War, then shoved together to form a new state that could barely hold itself together and has now been carved up by its invaders.’
‘Poor Yugoslavia.’ She hoped she didn’t sound maudlin. Maudlin Maud. She still missed the country, could close her eyes and remember the little house near the mine where they’d lived. When they’d sent her to boarding school over here, she’d sat on the lawn looking at the flowers and remembering the neat flowerbeds at that house at Trpca mine. Robert seemed to know about the mine, which was rare. Other than the geography teacher, nobody at school really had the faintest idea where Kosovo was or that there were all kinds of mineral deposits there. Nobody cared about the mines or the importance of the lead. And nobody else in the whole of England seemed to speak Serbo-Croat. Sometimes she’d lie under the starched sheets in the dormitory at night and murmur a few words to herself in the language just for the pleasure of hearing them.
‘You’re looking awfully thoughtful, Maud.’ Peter was standing behind her. ‘Time for home, I think.’
She stood up. ‘I’m tired. Work tomorrow.’
‘Don’t look so thrilled at the prospect, darling.’
Robert stood up, too. ‘Perhaps something better will turn up.’ With an almost continental small bow he left them. Strange how he had hardly even said goodnight properly after he’d spent so much time talking to her.
‘How did you come to know that man?’ she asked Peter.
His smooth, fair features showed a rare consternation. ‘It might have been before the war. Newmarket? Cheltenham?’ She could see him puzzling over peacetime race meetings. ‘Strange,’ he said at last. ‘Robert’s that kind of chap, very easy to talk to. But when you try to work out where and when you first met, it’s impossible.’
3
May 1947
‘Do you ever speak Serbo-Croat now?’ Dr Rosenstein asks when I’ve finished talking to her about the nightclub where I met Robert. ‘To yourself, of course, as nobody here speaks it, I imagine.’
‘No. It feels locked up inside me. I know the words are still there, but I can’t reach them.’
She consults the watch she keeps out on her desk. ‘We will shortly need to bring this session to an end for this week, but we have time for you to tell me about the next occasion you met Robert Havers.’
Hearing his full name has made my heart start pounding. I might ask her if we could stop now, but I won’t. I’ve been trained to press on, even when my nerves are screaming at me to stop. You have been chosen because you are the kind of person who can carry on when others would give up.
‘Maud?’ She peers at me. ‘Would you prefer to stop for now? You can write it down first if that’s easier for you and tell me next time?’
I want Dr Rosenstein to approve of me. I push my shoulders back. ‘I’m fine. Robert just appeared again from nowhere. I don’t think I actually told him where the doctor’s surgery was, but I suppose it wasn’t that hard to track me down.’ Not for a man of Robert’s capabilities.
‘Tell me what you can.’ Dr Rosenstein leans back in her chair. ‘I don’t need details that might compromise security. It’s the relationship between the two of you we need to examine next week. It was later on in 1943, wasn’t it?’
‘Early September.’
Peter was away training somewhere in Lincolnshire. It was almost a relief to have him gone. Quiet nights in felt restorative, despite the cramped conditions in the flat she shared with two other girls. There’d been no raids for a while now and she’d seen all the films at the local Regent, so she spent her evenings doing crosswords and mending a flatmate’s broken torch.
Robert approached her one rainy lunchtime, as she stood, ration card in hand, outside a grocer’s shop, weighing up the likelihood of finding a filling for a sandwich she could make in the little kitchenette attached to Dr Farish’s surgery.
‘Do you like Italian food, Maud?’ he asked without preamble, his hooded eyes reminding her of a raptor’s. ‘You probably only have, what, a couple of hours before afternoon surgery starts?’
She blinked. Where had he sprung from?
‘An hour and a half.’
‘Let’s not hang around then.’
All of the reasons why she r
eally didn’t want to have lunch with this man came to mind but seemed to trip over one another before she could articulate them.
Robert was brisker today, almost marching her across the road to Holborn Tube station. She didn’t like to ask questions while they were sitting in the carriage with other people. It was only when they were in a road off Wardour Street at a table with a Chianti-bottle lamp and he’d ordered them both an off-ration game-and-herb stew and a carafe of house red wine, that he asked more questions. Exactly how much of her Serbo-Croat did she recollect? What had been her favourite lessons at school? How fit was she?
As she ate the stew – thick and aromatic – the questions became more peculiar. Did she enjoy her own company? How did she solve problems, such as, for instance, the telephone line at the doctor’s surgery going down? A patient demanding to be seen right away?
Maud sipped her wine and answered, feeling half-embarrassed, half-annoyed. ‘Why are you asking me all these things?’
‘Let’s just say I am talking to you on an official basis.’ He topped up her glass. His voice today was more clipped than it had been in the nightclub.
‘How do I know who you are?’
The identity card flashed underneath her eyes almost before she’d asked the question. She caught sight of his rank and something to do with intelligence. He removed a silver card case from his inside pocket and passed her a card. It gave his name, but no rank, and a telephone number was engraved on it with a second name added in pencil. ‘That’s Scotland Yard’s switchboard number. Ask to be put through to that inspector. He’ll confirm my identity. You’re sensible to be cautious.’
‘You work for the police?’
He smiled. ‘Definitely not. Scotland Yard doesn’t always approve of people like me.’
She answered more questions while eating the marinated pears served for pudding. ‘Do certain things stay in your memory, do you think, Maud? More than they do in other people’s?’
She told him about her strange ability to recollect minor details about Dr Farish’s patients.
‘That must be very useful.’ He topped up her glass again. She hoped she wouldn’t feel too sleepy in the surgery that afternoon. ‘People like it if they think you take enough of an interest in them to remember bits and pieces like that.’
‘Sometimes they find it a bit weird,’ she said.
‘I imagine they would. But what about other things? Do you notice things on your way to work? A schoolboy wearing a different coloured cap? Milk bottles placed on the other side of a doorway from normal?’
She blinked. The number of paving stones between the front door and the Tube entrance. ‘What’s so weird about that?’ She knew she sounded aggressive. How had Robert known?
‘I bet you used to win parlour games, didn’t you, Maud?’
She scowled at him. ‘I’ll need to be getting back to the surgery soon.’ She looked at her watch. Twenty-five minutes and thirty seconds to get back for afternoon surgery. Robert was watching her.
‘There’s enough time,’ he said. ‘Five minutes to the Tube station.’
‘There should be a train within eight minutes.’ The service didn’t run as frequently these days. ‘Less than a minute between Covent Garden and Holborn. Then about three minutes to walk to the surgery,’ she said. ‘And then three minutes to unlock the door and hang up my jacket before the patients start arriving.’ It ought to be enough time but she didn’t want to risk it. Sometimes people looked at her a bit strangely when she gave detailed answers like this. Since the war had started, precision mattered more though. How long would it take to reach a shelter? How many vouchers would you need to buy the ingredients for a meal? ‘I need to go now.’ She stood up. ‘Thank you for my lunch.’
Robert smiled at her and she almost forgot how rude he had been. ‘You see, Maud, I think you’re utterly wasted on sore throats and lumbago and mending radios and torches.’
He nodded at the waiter. ‘I think your attention to detail and your ability to stick to a task make you someone who might be interested in another line of work altogether.’ He stopped talking as the bill was presented and settled. As they headed for the door he continued. ‘I must admit your languages interested us originally. We were worried when we heard you were known as a little eccentric.’
‘Who said that?’ She heard the indignation in her tone. But it was true.
‘Can’t tell you. I’m afraid.’
Probably Doctor Farish, then. Or one of her flatmates.
‘But those we spoke to also said that you were an unusual and striking young woman.’
She knew she wasn’t like other girls. As for being pretty, well, sometimes people thought you were being vain if you were honest about knowing you were attractive. Maud didn’t think she was vain, though. Her own looks: hazel eyes and dark blond hair, with a skin tone half a shade darker than most English girls, were something to protect and conserve, in the way her mother had taught her: proper cleaning and moisturising at night. But physical attractiveness wasn’t commendable in the same way as, say, training in self-mortification like a medieval anchoress. She’d explained all of this to Peter once and he’d burst into laughter. ‘Darling, you are simply unlike any other girl. What the hell’s an anchoress?’
‘I think you could do something very useful for the war effort, Maud,’ Robert said in a warmer tone than he’d used during lunch.
‘What do you mean?’ He escorted her to the station entrance before answering, though what he said wasn’t really an answer at all.
‘Are you good at getting people to trust you, Maud? Can you persuade them to do things?’
She thought. The old lady who hated the medicine Dr Farish prescribed and usually refused it. Hadn’t she been able to get her to keep taking it? Dr Farish had asked how she’d done it. She’d answered that she had told the old lady that she owed it to her poodle to keep well so she could exercise him. She related the story to Robert. He examined her, eyes half-closed as he walked, as though this would bring her more into focus.
‘We’ll be in touch.’ He held out his hand. When she put hers in it, his grip made her blink. She caught the scent of his wool overcoat and the cotton of his shirt and something else, a lower tone beneath them, almost woody. For a moment she felt almost giddy.
When Maud returned to the surgery she couldn’t stop thinking about him, puzzling over him, really. Or over her own reaction to him. Meeting good-looking men was a pleasurable enough occurrence, but she didn’t usually brood over them like this. Robert wasn’t all that handsome. His manners were sometimes questionable; he certainly didn’t have Peter’s sweetness about him. Robert wasn’t sweet at all. And he was old, probably nearly thirty. Strange that he was exciting her attention like this. Perhaps it was because he had the power to offer her the prospect of doing something more interesting than booking in patients and apologising for surgery running late. Maybe this was what was appealing about him.
A new job, a new start to show herself and everyone else what she could do. That was the cause of this flush of excitement. Robert hadn’t even told her that she’d see him regularly if they took her on. Perhaps he was just the recruiter. He hadn’t really told her much about his role.
This thought was a cold clamp over her excitement. He hadn’t actually promised very much and it might all come to nothing.
So be it. Maud went into the consulting room to change over the hand towel before afternoon surgery.
‘I don’t even like him.’ She hadn’t meant to say the thought aloud and it sounded unconvincing, even to her. Maud found herself examining her features in the small mirror over the basin. Her face was flushed – probably the wine at lunch. But her eyes had a wide-open, disbelieving expression like that you often saw on people who’d been caught up in bad air raids. ‘And if I do like him, so what?’
The black surgery telephone rang in reception. Maud blinked. Time to stop talking to herself, before the doctor came back and caught her babbling away like
an idiot.
I’m drained when I finish telling Dr Rosenstein all of this, even though we haven’t even got to the meaningful bits. Perhaps it’s all meaningful, though, if you know what you’re looking for.
Dr Rosenstein stands up. ‘You’ve done well, Maud. Keep writing down what you remember. Rest now.’
Rest. Exercise gently. Eat slowly. Sip a small sherry before lunch. As though I were a convalescent.
Not for the first time the enormity of my situation hits me. ‘Why aren’t I in prison?’
There wasn’t ever a trial, just visits from lawyers and doctors and injections of various kinds. I was in a hospital bed, waking up, feeling as though something momentous had happened, that I had lost part of myself. Then I fell asleep again. I think they gave me another injection. I remember waking up to find myself in a pack, the cold, wet sheet that wraps round you and pins you to a hospital bed, restraining all movement, my breasts sore where they were crushed.
I recall people muttering about the Home Secretary signing something. Bypassing the criminal justice system, perhaps because of my war record?
‘There seems to be no interest in bringing you to trial,’ Dr Rosenstein says. ‘Your solicitor will keep you informed.’
I have a solicitor? I wasn’t aware of this. My parents must have found one for me. I imagine poor Mama begging my father to sort this out, assuring him that there must be some mistake, that I couldn’t possibly be capable of such an attack. My father will be fretting silently, writing letters to anyone he can think of, perhaps even the doctor who employed me to be a receptionist in the war, before Robert found me. Mama and Dad haven’t been to see me here, yet; though I remember them coming when I was first arrested or certified insane or whatever it was happened to me. ‘We need to get you to remember the whole series of events,’ Dr Rosenstein says. ‘We’re making good progress.’ Her eyes flicker to the photograph of her daughter as a baby that sits on her desk beside the telephone. I like the way that she allows her patients to have this little glimpse of her child, that she lets us see her as a mother as well as a professional.
The Lines We Leave Behind Page 2