As she finishes her drink, she is thrown back to the past. Thrown back to the dark times in Washington. It is nonsense, surely, to think that she was in any way responsible for Joe’s death. It came hot on the heels of her meeting with Alex, yes, but it is the stuff of a cheap thriller, a fast movie, to think that the two were connected. It makes no sense. Why did Alex not bring them out then? Why did she not talk to Edward about what it all meant? She and Edward were so schooled into secrecy by those instructions, she thinks sadly, and then she begins to wonder. Was it really the orders of their handlers that made them so silent even with one another, or was it simply his character, his desire to live without revelation, keeping himself to himself, even when he was naked with her? Whatever the reason, she can see clearly now that they never had the conversations they should have had.
Even if she is not guilty of that horror, what was she really doing all those years? She thought she was on the straight path to justice, but it all faded and snarled. Is that why Edward found it all unbearable, she wonders? Was it just the threat of exposure that unhinged him – or was it the nature of their work? They were passing the secrets of death, the ways to kill, from one empire to another. No, she stops herself. There is still the hope, everything Florence and Edward believed, the authentic life, equality, freedom – the hope is not dead. But how tinny those slogans sound now, after all she has read, all she has heard, over these years. She thought she was on a path to truth, but it led her to a world where every step, every word, is false.
If she goes, maybe she will be safe at last. She will be able to relax, finally, for once. And Rosa will no longer be the daughter of the traitor; she will be the daughter of a hero. She at least might be able to live a life free of secrecy. Surely Laura owes her that. Laura remembers the trial of Hiss, the imprisonment of Fuchs, the death of the Rosenbergs. She does not have to think of them directly; they are always with her. In Geneva, in London, in Boston, she and Rosa will never be safe. But she has been cleverer than all of them, she thinks to herself. No one suspects her. Valance even thinks that she will work for him, if he needs her. Even Mother, even Ellen, even Winifred; nobody thinks that she was anything but an innocent wife. Her mask has been a good one. Has her face stayed intact behind it?
In her mind a huge battle has begun, an enormous fight of two opposing forces. Consciously, she flutters away from it again, she stands up and walks away from the café and goes back to the others. They swim again before lunch; she wants to fold into the water and be lost in it. They have a delicious lunch of perch, on the lakeside terrace; ice cream with real plums in it. Rosa is in such a good mood, she is happy to play on the swings in the little park in the afternoon and Mother agrees to watch her in the evening when Archie asks Laura if she will come dancing at a neighbouring hotel.
All the physical pleasures are a welcome distraction; she throws herself into them, and even, yes, after the dancing, she goes up to Archie’s room and tries to lose herself in sexual pleasure again. But it is elusive to her. What is she doing, rubbing herself against this man? He knows nothing of her; her mind is a blank to him. He is holding a naked woman in his arms, he does not care who she is, and this makes her self-conscious – if he does not care for her, for her personality, for all she has given and all she has lost, then is it just her small breasts, the slope of her stomach, he wants? Again she is thrown back through the years, to the time when she believed erotic joy meant perfect communion. She remembers how she felt entirely taken over by Edward and his ability to rouse passion in her. And now … now she sees sex the way others have always seen it. They could be any woman, any man lying there. There is nothing unique, nothing irreplaceable, in this. She cannot find her pleasure tonight, but she lets him have his. He says how wonderful it was, how lovely she is. She realises that he does not know that she was not there for him. She rolls away from him, burying her head in the pillow, and he puts out a hand and strokes her back.
And so the holiday goes on. It is all as it should be, Laura realises; everyone is so well mannered, everything is so pleasurable. Even when an electric storm comes over on their last day, they go into Annecy to shop and lunch in the driving rain and manage to enjoy the afternoon. When they part, and Mother and Rosa and Laura get back on the train to Geneva, they are all agreed: it was such a good break. They must do it again soon.
The next day she wakes early. It is Monday. Over breakfast, she tells her mother that she can’t go to the doctor with her that day, even though Mother would like her to help her talk to him about the pains she has been having in her legs. She makes up a pointless excuse instead about the new job and needing to go and talk to Winifred. She feels selfish as she says it, but she has to do this now. She drives back up the road to St-Cergue. It is a good choice of theirs, she thinks as she drives. You can see forever, and be sure there is nobody following. She parks the car a little below where they had stopped before, and finds the footpath into the woods. She goes some way down it, holding the camera, and after a while she lifts it up to her eyes. You cannot see the lake clearly here, but there is a glimpse through the trees, a sliver of blue, misty in the distance. She frames the view until she hears footsteps behind her, and turns around.
‘Stefan.’
After all this time. Older, more tired, than ever – he seems to be walking with a limp. If she has been through a lot, what must he have been through? He nods at her, and they walk together. Then he puts his coat on the ground and they sit down. There are wild strawberries there in the grass, below the trees. Laura picks one; it is just a few seeds, a little sweetness, in her mouth.
‘Will you come?’
‘It’s my choice?’
‘You will do it,’ Stefan says. ‘You believe in the revolution.’ Laura does not know whether that is a question or a statement, but she knows those are not the words she would use.
‘Tell me all about Edward – what does he say, how is he?’
‘I haven’t seen him. But I know he wants us to bring you over. He wants to see his daughter.’
There are so many questions that Laura could ask: about what Edward has said about Rosa, what his life is like, is he working, where is he living, does he feel at home there? Is he drinking? Is he with Nick? But it is hard to get your tongue around questions when you are so used to silence, so Laura just asks why it has been so long. Stefan talks about an agent intercepted at the borders, about difficulty in getting clearance in Moscow for certain activities, about a letter that was destroyed when another agent lost his courage. Laura cannot sift truth from lies. She gets up and tells Stefan that she doesn’t know yet, that she wants him to come back tomorrow, same time, same place. It is the first time that she has ever given instructions to him, but he accepts them.
The next day, they meet again and walk a little way in the shady woods. Stefan tells her that he understands why she feels adrift now. For once she feels him trying to be frank with her. He tells her that the stories he told her the previous day were true, but – and here he stops for a while and Laura sees that he is gathering his strength to be more open than ever before – it was only when Stalin died that the authorities became flexible enough to respond to Edward’s request to make contact with her. Laura takes this in, and recognises that her status as the appendage, the wife, quite outside the grand narrative, will never change.
Stefan tries to bring her back to him. He tells her that Edward has been impatient for news of her; he repeats that he wants to see his daughter, and he reassures her that he is not drinking much. Again, Laura cannot tell what is truth, what is a story concocted to persuade her. In the end she falls silent, and lets him talk through the instructions he has been sent to give. She takes notes in her mind, just as in the old days.
In three days, he says. They will keep a tail on her all the time; two men who will alert her if there is any danger. She will drive to Lausanne and from there take the train to Zurich; from there she must take the Arlberg Express, but she must leave it at the Austrian
town of Schwarzbach St Veit, where she will be met by a driver. He has her ticket ready. Here it is. Rosa will need no ticket. Just like Edward, Laura must leave on a Friday, and she must give an excuse to Mother and her friends about where she is going so that nobody is alerted until Monday. Just like Edward, she will be taken quickly across the border. Just like Edward, she will be able to prepare one telegram, to be sent once she is across.
‘What if I can’t do it?’
‘If you think someone has broken the secret, you must try to alert our men. Thread a scarf through the handles of your shutter on your bedroom window. We’ll wait a fortnight, and then try again here at the same time.’
As she drives back along the lake to Geneva, Laura is thrown forward into what it will be like for everyone if she goes. To her surprise she realises that she feels excited by the prospect. It is childish, she thinks, like the adolescent who says how sorry you’ll be when I’m dead, but she cannot help thinking of how Alistair, Sybil, Giles, Amy – all the people who made their own judgements, who dismissed her and patronised her – how they will finally know. She thinks of Valance, and is filled with elation when she thinks of winning at his game, of pulling out from under his nose. She thinks of a woman she has not seen for many years, who might read the headline in the newspaper, and might remember an eager girl on a transatlantic crossing, and might recognise the twisted journey she has taken, and why she lied to her and left her so many years ago. She knows she should feel sad about Mother and Archie, and even Ellen, and Winifred, who have stood by her all this time, but at the moment she is unable to think of them. As she thinks of the future, they seem to blur and recede.
Now, she clatters up to the apartment with a little more energy. She hears the telephone ringing as she puts her key in the door. ‘I’ll get it!’ she calls to Aurore. It is Archie. ‘Thank you for a lovely weekend,’ she says. ‘Yes, I’d love to meet next week.’ When she comes off the telephone, Aurore is telling her about the new playground they have found in the Parc Beaulieu, the other nannies she knows go there, Rosa had so much fun playing with little Marcel. Laura scoops Rosa up, nuzzling her neck as Aurore speaks. She has kept her safe all this time. She is not such a bad mother. She smiles widely at Aurore, thanking her, and tells Rosa she must show Mama the new park soon.
It’s the usual salad and cold meat for supper, once Rosa is in bed, but Laura finds herself humming along to the radio as she is preparing it. She is aware that she must say something to cover her change of mood, her elation and alertness. ‘Mother,’ she says, ‘I’ve been thinking – you are right, it’s time for us to go back home. We can’t stay here forever. I’ve got to start thinking about getting that divorce – it’s been more than two years.’ Her mother is so pleased. They sit a long while over dinner, talking about how they will go back to America and how Tom will help with the divorce, and Laura enjoys helping Mother imagine this new future.
The next day Laura goes to the hairdresser. She has her hair washed and set. She picks up some clothes from the dry cleaners, and goes to a lingerie shop to buy some new underwear. She goes back home, and still the decision is not quite made, the time is running out. The next day, when her mother goes to meet a friend for lunch, Laura packs most of her and Rosa’s clothes into two big cases and puts them into the trunk of the car. She watches herself doing it. So, she says to herself, you have decided.
When Mother comes back, Laura tells her that she has met Charles and Tamara Hamilton in the market. ‘You remember Tamara, don’t you?’ she says. Her mother is puzzled, as well she might be, because Tamara is nobody, but Laura reminds her impatiently about their children and how Winifred introduced them last winter in St-Gervais. ‘They’ve asked me to come and stay with them in Montreux tomorrow, just to catch some last sunshine. They’ve got a nice pool for the children. I said I would go with Rosa, I hope you won’t be lonely here by yourself.’ Mother insists she will be fine, and the next day in the late afternoon Laura packs a small case, just right for three days, in front of her, and puts on a grey skirt and white blouse, and the blue Schiaparelli coat.
‘You’ve dressed up,’ says her mother, noticing that she is wearing her pearl necklace too.
‘Tamara is quite elegant, isn’t she, though?’ Laura says. Mother comes down with her, holding Rosa’s hand on the stairs as Laura has the case to carry. They walk over to the square where Laura has parked the car. Mother kisses Rosa and settles her into the back seat. It would be odd for Laura to embrace her mother now, here, in this crowded city square, as they never do, or to encourage Rosa to do more than pucker her lips at her. Laura is suddenly shocked by the thought of the parting of grandmother and grand-daughter, much more than by her own parting, and unexpected tears prick her eyes as she starts the car.
All the way to Lausanne, the tears will not go. That heartless mood that had infected her the day before has gone. What will this do to Mother, and how … but the road is unfurling.
Laura begins to drive more and more slowly, as she feels the pull of the daily round of life, dragging her backwards to her mother, to Archie, to Geneva. She realises that nobody will understand what she has done, and why she has done it. Nobody will believe that she was in full control of her actions. She is too fixed in everyone’s minds now as the dupe in a manipulative relationship. They will think that she was threatened by Soviet agents; they will think that she was fooled. Nobody’s opinion will really be changed, nobody will let themselves be surprised. They will continue down their fixed paths, only one or two of them saddened by her long betrayal and her sudden departure.
But as the road to Lausanne unspools, she realises that she fell in love too early and too late to go back on her wager now. It is no longer the golden ideal that sustains her, but the dogged hope. We all realise sooner or later that love does not last, Laura thinks as she drives, just as we realise that utopia does not exist, but it still seems right to her to live as if they do. She can no longer put all her faith in Edward, or in the Soviet Union: she knows too much, she has worked out too much. But there across the border is the one place where she may be able to live honestly, and build a truthful life for her daughter, and she cannot now turn away from that imperfect and desirable future.
And so she parks the car at Lausanne station. She drags the bags out of the trunk and shouts for a porter. She sees another car drawing up beside her, and the usual fear beats in her, but she knows that Stefan said they would have watchers every step of the way, and sure enough the driver is a passive spectator of her departure. She holds Rosa’s hand, and they go slowly under the station’s great arch of an entrance, but then the porter calls to her to hurry, the train to Zurich is already waiting.
She looks for an empty compartment, but they have to share, and they have to sit with their backs to the engine. Laura gets in, settles Rosa beside her and takes out the bottle of milk for her. As the child begins to drink, the train starts up. The exquisite, unseeing Swiss landscape fans out past the window. Laura pulls Rosa onto her lap, and tells her about what they are passing. ‘Moun-ten,’ Rosa says, naming her world, as she always does, object by new object.
Laura has not slept properly for days, and as Rosa begins to doze on her lap, she too falls asleep with her forehead jolting against the window. She is flung awake as the ticket inspector comes around, and light flashes into her eyes as she opens them. For a moment she thinks it is the dawn, and then she sees the streaks of the setting sun across a dull sky, and realises it is the same day, moving towards night.
Acknowledgements
This is a work of fiction.
However, it was inspired by some aspects of the life of Melinda Marling, the wife of Donald Maclean. As such it stands on the shoulders of a number of books about the Cambridge spies and occasionally borrows directly from the historical record, particularly around Donald’s defection in 1951, when he left the family house at Tatsfield with his friend and fellow spy Guy Burgess, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Melinda.
A few times the real words of historical characters are very closely echoed by the characters in this book; for instance, what Alistair writes about Edward in this novel is very close to what Cyril Connolly wrote about Donald Maclean in The Missing Diplomats; the telegram Edward sends to Laura is almost the same as the telegram that Melinda received from Donald, and the letter that appears in the press about Laura’s treatment is almost identical to the letter written by Violet Bonham-Carter to The Times about Melinda.
Laura also comes into contact with some real writers’ work which I have quoted verbatim; she reads Harry Pollitt’s Will It Be War? before going to a party, she reads George Orwell’s ‘Inside the Whale’ in a café in London when trying to find a convincing reason to leave the Communist Party, and she and Edward both read Tchernavin’s I Speak for the Silent. The article she reads on the Normandie appeared in the British Daily Worker in August 1939, while a joke made by Edward about Native Americans was made by Beverley Nichols and is found in his book Uncle Samson.
Aside from these direct quotations, I am grateful to all those who have written about the Cambridge spies, particularly Phillip Knightley, Ben Macintyre, Geoffrey Hoare and Yuri Modin, whose work has helped me to imagine those strange times. I am also grateful to a number of books about communism in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly About Turn: the British Communist Party and the Second World War, edited by Francis King and George Matthews; to those writers such as Philip Ziegler, Matthew Sweet and Juliet Gardiner who helped me to imagine London in the Blitz; as well as those historians and memoirists from Alger Hiss to Whittaker Chambers whose work gives insight into McCarthyite America.
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