by William Boyd
“If you could see where I have been sleeping,” he said, pulling down the bottom eyelid of his right eye with a finger, as if to exemplify a basilisk stare. “Jesus Christ, Ruth, this is the Ritz.” And then he gave his crazy shrill laugh that I remembered better than I wished.
Hamid and I settled down with the Ambersons. Keith Amberson couldn’t get his car started and the family were about to go on holiday to Dorset. Lots of conditional-perfect verbs. I could hear Ludger moving from the kitchen through the flat.
“Is Ludger staying long?” Hamid asked. Clearly Ludger was on both our minds.
“I don’t think so,” I said, realising that in fact I had still to ask.
“You said you thought he was dead. Was it in an accident?”
I decided to tell Hamid the truth. “I was told that he had been shot by the West German police. But obviously not.”
“Shot by police? Is he a gangster, a criminal?”
“Let’s say he’s a radical. A kind of anarchist.”
“So why is he staying here?”
“He’ll be going in a couple of days,” I lied.
“Is it because of Jochen’s father?”
“So many questions, Hamid.”
“I apologise.”
“Yes—I suppose I am letting him stay here for a couple of days because he is the brother of Jochen’s father…Look, shall we continue? Will Keith get his car fixed? What should Keith have done?”
“Are you still in love with Jochen’s father?”
I looked stupidly at Hamid. His brown-eyed gaze was intense, candid. He had never asked me questions like this before.
“No,” I said. “Of course not. I left him nearly two years ago. That’s why I brought Jochen back to Oxford.”
“Good,” he said, smiling, relaxing. “I just had to know.”
“Why?”
“Because I would like to invite you to have dinner with me. In a restaurant.”
Veronica agreed to take Jochen home for supper and I drove out to Middle Ashton to talk with my mother. When I arrived she was in the garden on her knees, cutting the lawn with shears. She repudiated lawn mowers, she said; she abominated lawn mowers; lawn mowers had signalled the death of the English garden as it had existed for centuries. Capability Brown and Gilbert White had no need of lawn mowers: grass should only be cropped by sheep or be scythed in the true English garden—and as she didn’t possess or know how to wield a scythe she was perfectly happy to get down on her knees once a fortnight with her shears. The contemporary English lawn was a ghastly anachronism—striped, shaved grass was a hideous modern invention. And so on, and so on. I was very familiar with the argument and never bothered to try to refute it (she was quite happy to use her motor car to go shopping, I noticed, rather than acquire a pony and trap, as old Capability or Gilbert would have done). Her lawn was therefore shaggy and unkempt, full of daisies and other weeds: this was what a cottage garden lawn was meant to look like, she would pontificate, given half a chance.
“How’s the back?” I said, looking down on her.
“Bit better today,” she said, “though I might ask you to wheel me down to the pub later.”
We went to sit in the kitchen and she poured me a glass of wine and an apple juice for herself. She didn’t drink, my mother: I’d never seen her so much as sip a sherry.
“Let’s have a cigarette,” she said, so we both lit up, puffed away and made small talk for a while putting off the big conversation she knew we were going to have.
“Feeling more relaxed, now?” she asked. “I could tell you were tense. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on. Is it Jochen?”
“No, it’s you, for heaven’s sake. You and ‘Eva Delectorskaya’. I can’t get a grip on all this, Sal. Think what it’s like for me—out of the blue like this, with never so much of a hint. I’m worried.”
She shrugged. “Only to be expected. It’s a shock, I know. If I were you I’d be a bit shocked, true, a bit unsettled.” She looked at me in a strange way, I thought: coldly, analytically, as if I were someone she’d just met. “You don’t really believe me. Do you?” she said. “You think I’m crackers.”
“I do believe you, of course I do—how could I not? It’s just hard to take it on board: all at once. Everything being so different—everything I’d blithely taken for granted all my life gone in a second.” I paused, daring myself: “Go on, say something in Russian.”
She spoke for two minutes in Russian, getting angrier as she did so, pointing her finger at me, jabbing it.
I was wholly surprised and taken aback—it was like some form of possession, speaking in tongues. It left me short of breath.
“My God,” I said. “What was that all about?”
“It was about the disappointment I feel about my daughter. My daughter, who’s an intelligent and stubborn young woman but who, if she’d spent just a little of her considerable brain power thinking logically about what I have told her, would have realised in about thirty seconds that I’d never play such a wicked trick on her. So there.”
I finished off my wine.
“So what happened next?” I asked. “Did you go to Belgium? Why are you called ‘Sally’ Gilmartin? What happened to my grandfather, Sergei, and my step-grandmother, Irene?”
She stood up, a little triumphantly, I thought, and moved to the door.
“One thing at a time. You’ll find out everything. You’ll have the answers to every question you could ask. I just want you to read my story carefully—use your brain. Your powerful brain. I’ll have questions for you, also. Lots of questions. There’s things I’m not sure even I understand…” This thought seemed to upset her and she frowned, then she left the room. I poured myself another glass of wine and then thought about breathalysers—careful. My mother came back and handed me another folder. I felt a spasm of irritation: I knew she was doing this deliberately—feeding me her story in instalments, like a serial. She wanted to keep me drawn in, to make the revelations endure so that it wouldn’t be over in one great emotional earthquake. A series of small tremors was what she was after—to keep me on my toes.
“Why don’t you just give me the whole bloody thing,” I said, more petulantly than I wanted.
“I’m still polishing it,” she said, unperturbed, “making small changes all the time. I want it to be as good as possible.”
“When did you write all this?”
“Over the last year or two. You can see I keep adding, crossing out, rewriting. Trying to make it read clearly. I want it to seem consistent. You can tidy it up if you want—you’re a much better writer than I am.”
She came over to me and squeezed my arm—consolingly, I thought, with some feeling: my mother was not a great one for physical contact therefore it was hard to read the subtext of her rare affective gestures.
“Don’t look so perplexed,” she said. “We all have secrets. No one knows even half the truth about anybody else, however close or intimate they are. I’m sure you’ve got secrets from me. Hundreds, thousands. Look at you—you didn’t even tell me about Jochen for months.” She reached out and smoothed my hair—this was very unusual. “That’s all I’m doing, Ruth, believe me. I’m just telling you my secrets. You’ll understand why I had to wait until now.”
“Did Dad know?”
She paused. “No, he didn’t. He didn’t know anything.”
I thought about this for a while; thought about my parents and how I had always regarded them. Wipe that slate clean, I said to myself.
“Didn’t he suspect?” I said. “Suspect anything?”
“I don’t think so. We were very happy, that’s all that mattered.”
“So why have you decided to tell me all this? Tell me your secrets, all of a sudden?”
She sighed, looked about her, fluttered her hands aimlessly, ran them through her hair, then drummed her fingers on the table.
“Because,” she said, finally, “because I think someone is trying to kill me.”
I drove home, thoughtfully, slowly, carefully. I was a little wiser, I suppose, but I was beginning to worry more about my mother’s paranoia than what I had to accept as the truth about her strange, duplicitous past. Sally Gilmartin was—and this I had to come to terms with—Eva Delectorskaya. But, by the same token, why would anyone want to kill a 66-year-old woman, a grandmother, living in a remote Oxfordshire village? I thought I could just about live with Eva Delectorskaya but I found the murder issue much harder to accept.
I collected Jochen from Veronica’s and we walked homewards through Summertown to Moreton Road. The summer night was heavy, humid, and the leaves on the trees looked tired and limp. A whole summer’s heat in three weeks and summer had just begun. Jochen said he was hot, so I slipped his T·shirt off him and we walked home, hand in hand, not talking, each of us lost in our thoughts.
At the gate, he said: “Is Ludger still here?”
“Yes. He’s staying for a few days.”
“Is Ludger my daddy?”
“No! God, no. Definitely not. I told you—your father’s called Karl-Heinz. Ludger’s his brother.”
“Oh.”
“Why did you think he was?”
“He’s from Germany. I was born in Germany, you said.”
“So you were.”
I crouched down and looked him in the face, took his two hands.
“He isn’t your father. I would never lie to you about that, darling. I’ll always tell you the truth.”
He looked pleased.
“Give me a hug,” I said, and he put his arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. I picked him up and carried him down the alleyway towards our stairs. As I set him down on the top landing I looked through the kitchen’s glass door to see Ludger emerge from the bathroom and wander towards us down the corridor, heading for the dining-room. He was naked.
“Stay there,” I said to Jochen and strode quickly through the kitchen to intercept him. Ludger was drying his hair with a towel and humming to himself as he walked towards me—his cock was swaying to and fro as he rubbed his hair.
“Ludger.”
“Oh. Hi, Ruth,” he said, taking his time to cover himself up.
“Do you mind not doing that, Ludger. Please. In my house.”
“Sorry. I thought you were out.”
“Students come to the back door at all hours. They can see in. It’s a glass door.”
He gave his sleazy grin. “A nice surprise for them. But you don’t mind.”
“Yes, I do mind. Please don’t walk around naked.” I turned and went back to let Jochen in.
“Forgive me, Ruth,” he called plaintively after me: he could tell how cross I was. “It was because I was in porno. I never think. No more naked, I promise.”
THE STORY OF EVA DELECTORSKAYA
Belgium. 1939
EVA DELECTORSKAYA WOKE EARLY, remembered she was alone in the flat and took her time washing and dressing. She made coffee and took it to the small balcony—there was a watery sun shining—where she had a view across the railway line to the Parc Marie-Henriette, its trees largely bare now, but she saw, to her vague surprise, that there was a solitary couple out on the lake, the man heaving on the oars as if he were in a race, showing off, the woman clinging on to the sides of the rowing boat for fear of falling in.
She decided to walk to work. The sun had persisted and, even though it was November, there was something invigorating about the cold air and the sharp slanting shadows. She put on her hat and her coat and wrapped her scarf around her neck. She double-locked the flat as she left, carefully placing her small square of yellow paper under the doorjamb, so that it was just visible. When Sylvia returned she’d replace it with a blue square. Eva knew that there was a war on but, in sleepy Ostend, such precautions seemed almost absurd: who, for instance, was going to break into their flat? But Romer wanted everyone in the unit to be ‘operational’—to establish good habits and procedures, to make them second nature.
She strolled down the rue Leffinge and turned left on the Chaussée de Thourout, lifting her face to the mild sun, deliberately not thinking about the day ahead, trying to pretend she was a young Belgian woman—like the other young Belgian women she saw on the street about her—a young Belgian woman going about her business in a small town in a small country in a world that made some sort of sense.
She turned right at the clock tower and crossed the small square towards the Cafe de Paris. She thought about stopping for a coffee but realised that Sylvia would be waiting impatiently to be relieved from the night shift and so strode briskly onwards. At the tram depot she saw on the billboards the fading posters from last summer’s races—Le Grand Prix Internationale d’Ostende 1939—strange reminders from a world that was then at peace. She turned left at the post office into the rue d’Yser and immediately saw the new sign Romer had had installed. Royal blue on lemon yellow: Agence d’Information Nadal—or, as Romer preferred to call it: ‘The Rumour Factory’.
The building was a 1920s three-storey rectilinear office block, with a curved, pillared porte-cochere over the main entrance, in austere Streamline Moderne style, an effect which was rather undermined by the decorative pseudo-Egyptian frieze that ran under the simple cornice of the top floor. On the roof was a thirty-foot wireless transmitter tower, like a mini-Tour Eiffel, painted red and white. It was this, rather than any architectural pretensions, that made the odd passer-by offer the building a second glance.
Eva walked in, nodded to the receptionist, and climbed the stairs to the top floor. The Agence d’Information Nadal was a small news agency, a minnow compared to the giants like Reuters, Agence Havas or Associated Press but which did, essentially, the same job—namely sell news and information to various customers unprepared or unable to gather that news and information themselves. A.I. Nadal serviced some 137 local newspapers and radio stations in Belgium, Holland and northern France and made a modest but steady profit. Romer had bought it in 1938 from its founder Pierre-Henri Nadal, a spruce white-haired old gent who wore co-respondent shoes and a boater in summer and who occasionally popped in to the office to see how his child was progressing under the new foster-parents. Romer had kept the essentials and discreetly added the modifications he required. The radio tower was heightened and made more powerful. The original staff, some dozen Belgian journalists, were retained but quartered on the second floor, where they continued to sift and disseminate the local news from this small corner of northern Europe—livestock sales, village fetes, bicycle races, high and low tides, closing prices from the Brussels bourse and so on—duly passing their copy down to the telegraphists on the ground floor, who transformed the information into Morse code and telegraphed it to the agency’s 137 subscribers.
Romer’s unit occupied the third floor. A small team of five who spent their days reading every European and relevant foreign newspaper they could find, and who, after due process of consultation and discussion, would insert, from time to time, a particular Romer-story into the mass of trivia beamed out from the innocuous building on the rue d’Yser.
Apart from Romer and Eva the other four members of Romer’s ‘team’ were Morris Devereux—Romer’s number two—an elegant and suave ex-Cambridge don; Angus Woolf, a former Fleet Street journalist who was severely crippled by some congenital deformation of his spine; Sylvia Rhys-Meyer—Eva’s flatmate—a lively woman in her late thirties, married and divorced three times and an ex-Foreign Office linguist and translator; and Alfie Blytheswood—who had nothing to do with the material that came out of the agency but was responsible for the maintenance and smooth running of the powerful transmitters and the occasional wireless encryptions. This was AAS in its entirety, Eva came to realise, very quickly: Romer’s team was small and tight-knit—apart from her everyone seemed to have been working for him for several years, Morris Devereux even longer.
Eva hung her coat and hat on her usual hook and made for her desk. Sylvia was still there, flicking through yesterday’s Swedish newspapers. The ashtr
ay in front of her was brimful of cigarette butts.
“Busy night?”
Sylvia arched her back and eased her shoulders to simulate fatigue. She looked like a stout, no-nonsense county wife, the wife of the local GP or a gentleman farmer, bosomy and broad-hipped, who wore well-cut suits and expensive accessories—except that everything else about Sylvia Rhys-Meyer contradicted that initial assessment.
“Fucking boring, fucking dull boring, boring dull fucking, dull fucking boring,” she said, standing up to allow Eva to take her seat.
“Oh, yes,” Sylvia added. “Your dead-sailors piece has been picked up all over the place.” She opened and pointed to a page in the Svenska Dagbladet. “And it’s in The Times and in Le Monde. Congratulations. His nibs will be very pleased.”
Eva looked at the Swedish text, recognising certain words. It was a story she had suggested at conference a few days before: the idea of twenty Icelandic sailors washed up in a remote Norwegian fjord, alleging that their fishing boat had sailed into heavily mined waters off the port of Narvik. Eva knew at once that it was the sort of story Romer loved. It had already provoked an official denial by the British War Office (Norwegian territorial waters had not been mined by British ships)—more to the point, as Romer would say, it was loose intelligence: a fishing boat sunk by a mine—where?—and it was information useful to the enemy. Any further denials would be either disbelieved or be too late—the news was out there in the world doing its dirty work. German intelligence officials monitoring the world’s media would note the alleged presence of mines off the Norwegian coast. This would be conveyed to the navy; maps would be taken out, amended, altered. It was, in essence, the ideal illustration of how Romer’s unit and A.I. Nadal was meant to work. Information wasn’t neutral, Romer constantly repeated: if it was believed or even half believed, then everything began subtly to change as a result—the ripple effect could have consequences no one could foresee. Eva had had previous small successes during the four months she’d been in Ostend—news of imaginary bridges being planned for, of Dutch flood defences reinforced, of trains being re-routed in northern France because of new military manoeuvres—but this was the first time the international press had picked up one of her stories. Romer’s idea, like all good ideas, was very simple: false information can be just as useful, influential, as telling, transforming or as damaging as true information. In a world where A.I. Nadal fed 137 news outlets, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, how could you tell what was genuine and what was the product of a clever, devious and determined mind?