by William Boyd
“I would say, absolutely, that he thought he was giving me the answer to the second password.”
For the briefest instant she sensed all the men in the room relax, infinitesimally. She couldn’t tell how or why or what indicated this, but something she had said, the answer she had given, had clearly resolved a complex issue, had put their minds at rest on a contentious matter.
The jowly man stepped forward, putting his hands in his pockets. She wondered if this was C.
“What would you have done,” he asked, “if Lt. Joos had given the correct password?”
“I would have told him that I was suspicious of the two Germans who were in the rear room.”
“You were suspicious of them?”
“Yes. Remember I had been there all day in the café, breakfast and lunch, in and out. They had no reason to suspect that I was anything to do with the meeting. I thought they were edgy, ill at ease. Now, with hindsight, I realise why.”
The man with the round spectacles raised a finger.
“I’m not quite clear about this, Miss Dalton, but how was it you came to be in the Cafe Backus during that day?”
“It was Mr Romer’s idea. He told me to go there in the morning and observe what happened, as discreetly as possible.”
“It was Mr Romer’s idea.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you very much.”
They asked her a few more questions, for form’s sake, about the behaviour of the two British agents, but it was obvious that they had the information they needed. Then she was asked to wait outside.
She sat down in the ante-room and accepted the offer of a cup of tea. It was brought and when she took it from the young man she was pleased to note her hands were hardly shaking at all. She drank it and then, after about twenty minutes, Romer appeared. He was happy, she saw at once—everything about his bearing, his knowing look, his absolute refusal to smile, confirmed his deep and enormous good mood.
They walked out of the Savoy together and stood on the Strand, the traffic buzzing by them.
“Take the rest of the day off,” he said. “You deserve it.”
“Do I? What’ve I done?”
“I know—what about supper this evening? There’s a place in Soho—Don Luigi’s—Frith Street. I’ll see you there at eight.”
“I’m busy this evening, I’m afraid.”
“Nonsense. We’re celebrating. See you at eight. Taxi!”
He ran off to claim his hailed taxi. Eva thought: Don Luigi’s, Frith Street, eight o’clock. What was going on here?
“Hello Miss Fitzroy. Long time no see.”
Mrs Dangerfield stepped back from the front door to let Eva in. She was a plump blonde woman who wore thick and farinaceous make·up;, almost as if she were about to go on stage.
“Just passing through, Mrs Dangerfield. Come to pick up some things.”
“I’ve got some post for you here.” She took a small bundle of letters from the hall table. “Everything’s nice and ready. Do you want me to make up the bed?”
“No, no, just here for a couple of hours. Then back up north.”
“Better off out of London, dear, I tell you.” Mrs Dangerfield listed London’s wartime disadvantages as she led Eva up to her attic bedroom in number 312 Winchester Street, Battersea.
Eva closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock. She looked round her room, reacquainting herself with it—she hadn’t been here for five weeks or so. She checked her snares: sure enough Mrs Dangerfield had had a good poke around the desk and the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. She sat down on the single bed and laid out her half-dozen letters on the quilt, opening them one at a time. She threw three into the wastepaper basket and filed the rest in her desk drawer. All of them had been sent by herself. She propped the postcard on the mantelpiece above the gas fire; it was from King’s Lynn—she had travelled there the previous weekend precisely to send this card. She turned it over and read it again:
Dearest Lily,
Hope all’s well in rainy old Perthshire. We popped up to the coast for a couple of days. Young Tom Dawlish got married last Wednesday. Back to Norwich Monday evening.
Love from Mum and Dad
She placed the card back on the mantelpiece, thinking suddenly of her own father and his flight from Paris. The latest news she had was that he was in Bordeaux—somehow Irene had managed to post a letter to her in London. “In reasonable health in these unreasonable times,” she had written.
As she sat there thinking, she realised she was smiling to herself—a baffled smile—contemplating the bizarre reality of her situation, sitting in her safe house in Battersea, passing herself off as Lily Fitzroy. What would her father think of this work she was doing for the ‘British government’? What would Kolia have thought?…
Mrs Dangerfield knew only that Lily Fitzroy was ‘in signals’, worked for the War Office and had to travel a lot, spending more and more time in Scotland and northern England. She was paid three months in advance and was perfectly happy with the arrangement. In her four months in London Eva had slept only six times at Winchester Road.
She pulled back the corner of the carpet on the floor and, taking a small screwdriver from her bag, prised up the loose nails on a short section of floorboard. Beneath the floor, wrapped in oilcloth, was a small bundle containing her Lily Fitzroy passport, a quarter bottle of whisky and three five-pound notes. She added another five-pound note and closed everything up again. Then she lay on her bed and snoozed for an hour, dreaming that Kolia came into the room and laid his hand on her shoulder. It made her wake with a jolt and she saw that a wand of afternoon sun had squeezed through the curtains and warmed her neck. She looked in the wardrobe, picked out a couple of dresses and folded them into a paper carrier bag she had brought with her.
At the door she paused, wondering about the wisdom or even the necessity of this ‘safe’ house. This was her training; this was how she had been taught to set up and maintain a safe house without raising suspicion. The secret safe house—one of Romer’s rules. She gave a wry smile and unlocked the door: Romer’s rules—more and more her life was being governed by these particular regulations. She switched out the light and stepped on to the landing—perhaps she’d learn a few more this evening.
“Bye, Mrs Dangerfield,” she called out gaily. “That’s me leaving now: see you in a week or two.”
That evening Eva dressed with more diligence and thought than usual. She washed her hair and curled its ends, deciding to surprise Romer by leaving it down. She teased a lock over her eye, Veronica Lake-style, but decided that was going too far: she wasn’t trying to seduce the man, after all. No, she just wanted him to notice her more, be more aware of her in a different way. He may be thinking that all he was doing was taking an employee out for a treat but she wanted him to realise that not many of his employees looked like her. It was a matter of self-esteem in the pure sense—nothing to do with Romer at all.
She put on her lipstick—a new one, called Tahiti Nights—powdered her face and dabbed rose-water on her wrists and behind her ears. She was wearing a light woollen navy dress, with gathered maize-yellow panels on the front, with a sash belt that accentuated her slim waist. Her eyebrows were plucked into perfect arches and were perfectly black. She put her cigarettes, her lighter and her purse in a cane handbag studded with seashells, had a final check in the mirror, and decided, definitely, finally, against ear-rings.
As she walked down the stairs of the hostel, a few of the girls were queuing for the telephone in the lobby. She bowed as they wolf-whistled and mockingly marvelled.
“Who’s the lucky man, Eve?”
She laughed. Romer was the lucky man: he had no idea how lucky he was.
The lucky man showed up, late, at 8.35. Eva had arrived and had been shown to Don Luigi’s best table, set in a bow window looking out over Frith Street. Eva drank two gin-and-tonics while she waited and passed much of the time listening in to a French couple two tables away
having an indiscreet, not so sotto voce argument mainly to do with the man’s bitch of a mother. Romer duly arrived, made no apology, made no comment on how she was looking and immediately ordered a bottle of Chianti—“The best Chianti in London. I only come here for the Chianti.” He was still animated and excited, his mood post-Savoy having grown more intense, if anything, and as they ordered and ate their starters he spoke fluently and contemptuously about ‘head office’. She half listened, preferring instead to look at him as he drank and smoked and ate. She heard him say that head office was stuffed with the stupidest elite in London, that the people he had to deal with were either idle Pall Mall clubmen or superannuated officials from the Indian Colonial Service. The first lot looked down on the second as petit-bourgeois careerists while the second regarded the first as washed-up remittance-men who only had a job because they had gone to Eton with the boss.
He pointed his fork at her—he was eating what purported to be Veal Milanese; she had ordered salted cod with tomatoes.
“How are we meant to run a successful company if the board of directors are so third rate?”
“Is Mr X third rate?”
He paused and she could sense him thinking: how does she know about Mr X? And then figuring out how she did know, and that it was all right, he replied slowly.
“No. Mr X is different. Mr X sees the value in AAS Ltd.”
“Was Mr X there, today?”
“Yes.”
“Which one was he?”
He didn’t answer. He reached for the bottle and refilled both their glasses. This was their second bottle of Chianti.
“Here’s to you, Eva,” he said with something approaching sincerity. “You did very well today. I don’t like to say that you saved our bacon—but I think you saved our bacon.”
They clinked glasses and he gave her one of his rare white smiles and for the first time that evening she was suddenly aware of him looking at her—as a man will look at a woman—noting aspects of her: her fair hair, long and curled under, her red lips, her arched black brows, her long neck, the swell of her breasts beneath her navy-blue dress.
“Yes, well…” he said awkwardly. “You look very…smart.”
“How did I save your bacon?”
He looked around. No one was sitting close to them.
“They’re convinced that the problem arose in the Dutch branch. Not the British. We were let down by the Dutch—a rotten apple in The Hague.”
“What does the Dutch branch say?”
“They’re very angry. They blame us. Their executive was forcibly retired, after all.”
Eva knew that Romer enjoyed this plain-code, as it was termed. It was another of his rules: use plain-code whenever possible, not ciphers or codes—they were either too complex or too easy to crack. Plain-code made sense or it didn’t. If it didn’t make sense it was never incriminating.
Eva said: “Well, I’m glad I was of some use.”
He said nothing in reply, this time. He was sitting back in his seat, looking at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.
“You look very beautiful tonight, Eva. Has anyone ever told you that before?”
But his dry and cynical tone of voice told her he was joking.
“Yes,” she said, equally drily, “now and then.”
In Frith Street, in the dark of the black-out, they stood for a while waiting for a taxi.
“Where do you live?” he asked. “Hampstead, isn’t it?”
“Bayswater.” She felt a little drunk, what with the gins and all that Chianti they’d consumed. She stood in a shop doorway and watched Romer chase a taxi up the street vainly. When he came back towards her, his hair a bit awry, smiling ruefully, shrugging, she felt a sudden, almost physical urge to be in bed with him, naked. She was a bit shaken by her own carnality but she realised it had been more than two years since she’d been with a man—thinking of her last lover, Jean-Didier, Kolia’s friend, the melancholy musician, as she privately called him—two years since Jean-Didier and now she suddenly felt the powerful desire, wanted to hold a man in her arms again—a naked man held against her naked body. It was not so much about any sex act, it was something about being close to, being able to embrace that bigger solider bulk—the strange musculature of a man, something about the different smells, the different strength. She missed it in her life and, she added, this isn’t about Romer, watching him come towards her—this is about a man—about men. Romer, however, was the only man currently available.
“Maybe we should go by tube,” he said.
“A taxi’ll come,” she said. “I’m in no hurry.”
She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. There is nothing easier in this world, this woman had claimed, than getting a man to kiss you. Oh really? Eva had said, so how do you do that? Just stand close to a man, the woman had said, very close, as close as you can without touching—he will kiss you in one minute or two. It’s inevitable. For them it’s like an instinct—they can’t resist. Infallible.
So Eva stood close to Romer in the doorway of the shop on Frith Street as he shouted and waved at the passing cars moving down the dark street, hoping one of them might be a taxi.
“We’re out of luck,” he said, turning, to find Eva standing very close to him, her face lifted.
“I’m in no hurry,” she said.
He reached for her and kissed her.
Eva stood naked in the small bathroom of Romer’s rented flat in South Kensington. She hadn’t switched on the light and was aware of the reflection of her body in the mirror, its pale elongated shape printed with the dark roundels of her nipples. They had come back here, having found a taxi almost immediately after their kiss, and had made love without much ado or conversation. She had left the bed almost immediately afterwards to come here and try to gain a moment of understanding, of perspective, on what had happened. She flushed the lavatory and closed her eyes. There was nothing to be gained by thinking now, she told herself, there would be plenty of time to think later.
She slid back into bed beside him.
“I’ve broken all my rules, you realise,” Romer said.
“Only one, surely?” she said snuggling up to him. “It’s not the end of the world.”
“Sorry I was so quick,” he said. “I’m a bit out of practice. You’re too damn pretty and sexy.”
“I’m not complaining. Put your arms round me.”
He did so and she pressed herself up against him, feeling the muscles in his shoulders, the deep furrow in his back that was his spine. He seemed so big beside her, almost as if he were another race. This is what I had wanted, she said to herself: this is what I’ve been missing. She pressed her face into the angle of his shoulder and neck and breathed in.
“You’re not a virgin,” he said.
“No. Are you?”
“I’m a middle-aged man, for God’s sake.”
“There are middle-aged virgins.”
He laughed at her and she ran her hand over his flanks to grip him. He had a band of wiry hair across his chest and a small belly on him. She felt his penis begin to thicken in the loose cradle of her fingers. He hadn’t shaved since the morning and his beard was rough on her lips and on her chin. She kissed his neck and kissed his nipples and she felt the weight of his thigh as he moved to cross it over hers. This is what she had wanted: weight—weight, bulk, muscle, strength. Something bigger than me. He rolled her easily on to her back and she felt the heft of his body flatten her against the sheets.
“Eva Delectorskaya,” he said. “Who would’ve thought?”
He kissed her gently and she spread her thighs to accommodate him.
“Lucas Romer,” she said. “My, my, my…”
He raised himself on his arms above her.
“Promise you won’t tell anyone, but…” he said, teasingly leaving the sentence unfinished.
“I promise,” she said, thinking: Who would I
tell? Deirdre, Sylvia, Blytheswood? What a fool!
“But…” he continued, “thanks to you, Eva Delectorskaya,” he dipped his head to kiss her lips briefly, “we’re all going to go to the United States of America.”
SIX
A Girl from Germany
ON SATURDAY MORNING JOCHEN and I went down to the Westgate shopping centre in Oxford—a shopping mall, of sorts, concrete, ugly but useful as most malls tend to be—to buy some new pyjamas for Jochen (as he was going to be spending a night with his grandmother) and to pay the penultimate hire-purchase instalment on the new cooker I’d bought in December. We parked the car in Broad Street and walked up Cornmarket, where the shops were just opening and, even though it promised to be yet another fine, hot sunny day, there seemed to be a brief sensation of freshness in the morning air—a tacit conspiracy or wishful illusion that such hot sunny days were not yet so commonplace as to have become tiresome and boring. The streets had been swept, the rubbish bins emptied and the sticky bus-and-tourist-clogged hell that was a Saturday Cornmarket in reality was still an hour or two away.
Jochen dragged me back to look at a toyshop window.
“Look at that, Mummy. It’s amazing.”
He was pointing to some plastic space gun, encrusted with gimmicks and gizmos.
“Can I have that for my birthday?” he asked plaintively. “For my birthday and next Christmas?”
“No. I’ve got you a lovely new encyclopaedia.”
“You’re joking with me again,” he said, sternly. “Don’t joke like that.”
“You have to joke a little in life, darling,” I said, leading him on and turning down Queen Street. “Otherwise what’s the point?”
“It depends on the joke,” he said. “Some jokes aren’t funny.”
“All right, you can have your gun. I’ll send the encyclopaedia to a little boy in Africa.”
“What little boy?”
“I’ll find one. There’ll be masses who’d love an encyclopaedia.”