by William Boyd
EIGHT
Brydges’
I READ THE LETTER out loud to my mother:
Dear Ms Gilmartin,
Lord Mansfield thanks you for your communication but regrets that, owing to pressure of work, he is unable to comply with your request for an interview.
Yours sincerely,
Anna Orloggi
(Assistant to Lord Mansfield)
“It’s on House of Lords notepaper,” I added. My mother crossed the room and took the sheet from me, scrutinising it with unusual concentration, her lips moving as she reread the terse message of refusal. I wasn’t sure if she was excited or not. She seemed calm enough.
“Anna Orloggi…I love it,” she said. “I bet she doesn’t exist.” Then she paused. “Look,” she said. “There’s the telephone number.” She began to pace up and down my sitting-room. She’d come for an appointment with Mr Scott—a crown had loosened—and she had popped up, unannounced, to see me. The letter had arrived that morning.
“Do you want a glass of something?” I asked. “Squash? Coca-Cola?” It was my lunch break: “Bérangère had just left and Hamid was due at two. Ludger and Ilse had gone to London to ‘see a friend’.”
“I’ll have a Coke,” she said.
“When did you stop drinking?” I said, going through to the kitchen. “You certainly drank a lot in the war.”
“I think you know why,” she said drily, following me through. She took the glass from me and had a sip but I could see her mind was working. “Actually, call that number now,” she said, her face suddenly animated. “That’s the thing: and say you want to talk to him about AAS Ltd, That should work.”
“Are you sure about this?” I asked. “You could be opening some hideous can of worms.”
“Yes, that’s exactly the idea,” she said.
I dialled the London number with some reluctance and then listened to it ring and ring. I was about to hang up when a woman’s voice answered.
“Lord Mansfield’s office.”
I explained who I was and that I’d just received a letter from Lord Mansfield.
“Ah, yes. I’m very sorry but Lord Mansfield is abroad and in any event does not grant interviews.”
So he doesn’t ‘grant’ interviews, I thought. The woman’s voice was clipped and patrician—I wondered if this was Anna Orloggi.
“Would you be so kind as to tell him,” I said, deciding to emphasise the patrician qualities in my own voice, “that I want to ask him some questions about AAS Ltd.”
“It won’t make any difference, I’m afraid.”
“I’m afraid it will if you don’t tell him, especially to your continued employment. I know absolutely that he’ll want to speak to me. AAS Ltd—it’s very important. You have my phone number on my original letter. I’d be most grateful. Thank you so much.”
“I can’t promise anything.”
“AAS Ltd. Please be sure to tell him. Thank you. Goodbye.” I hung up.
“Good girl,” my mother said. “I’d rather hate to have you on the end of a phone.”
We wandered back through to the kitchen. I pointed out my new garden furniture and my mother duly admired it, but she wasn’t concentrating.
“I know he’ll see you now,” she said, thoughtfully. “He won’t be able to resist.” Then she turned and smiled. “How was your date?”
I told her about Hamid and his declaration of love.
“How marvellous,” she said. “Do you like him?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very much. But I don’t love him back.”
“Shame. But is he kind?”
“Yes. But he’s a Muslim, Sal, and he’s going to work in Indonesia. I can see where this conversation is going. No—he is not going to become Jochen’s stepfather.”
She wouldn’t stay for lunch but she told me to call her the minute I heard from Romer. Hamid arrived for his lesson and he seemed fine, more composed. We spent our time on a new chapter with the Ambersons—now returned from their unsatisfactory holiday at Corfe Castle only to have Rasputin run away—and explored the mysteries of the present perfect progressive. “Rasputin has been acting a little strangely lately.” “The neighbours have been complaining about his barking.” The fear of poisoning entered the cloistered world of Darlington Crescent. As he left Hamid asked me again to have dinner with him at Browns on Friday night but I said instantly that I was busy. He took me at my word: he seemed to have lost the agitation of our previous conversations but I noted the new invitation—it clearly wasn’t over yet.
Veronica and I—the single-mother sluts—stood smoking outside Grindle’s, waiting for our children.
“How’s Sally?” Veronica asked. “Any better?”
“I think so,” I said. “But there are still worrying signs. She’s bought a shotgun.”
“Christ.”
“To kill rabbits, she says. And the story about what she did in the war gets ever more…extraordinary.”
“Do you believe her?”
“Yes, I do,” I said bluntly, as if confessing to some crime. I had thought about this matter regularly and repeatedly but the story of Eva Delectorskaya was too textured, detailed and precise to be the product of a mind convulsed with fantastical re-invention, let alone on the verge of senile dementia. I had found the experience of reading the regular supply of pages disturbing because the Eva⁄Sally figures still refused to converge in my mind. When I read that Eva had slept with Mason Harding so that he could be blackmailed I couldn’t connect that historical fact, that act of personal sacrifice, that deliberate surrender of a personal moral code, with the rangy, handsome woman who had been pacing about my sitting-room a few hours ago. What did it take to have sex with a stranger for your country? Maybe it was straightforward—a rational decision. Was it any different from a soldier killing his enemy for his country? Or, more to the point, lying to your closest allies for your country? Perhaps I was too young—perhaps I needed to have been living during World War Two? I had a feeling I’d never truly understand.
Jochen and Avril came bounding out of the school and the four of us wandered back up the Banbury Road.
“We’re having a heatwave,” Jochen said.
“A tropical heatwave. That’s what it is.”
“Is it like a wave in the sea? A wave of heat washing over us?” he asked, making a swooping wave gesture with his hand.
“Or,” I said, “is the sun waving at us, making the heat blow down on earth.”
“That’s just silly, Mummy,” he said, unamused.
I apologised and we wandered homeward, chatting. Veronica and I made plans to have supper together on Saturday night.
In the flat I was setting about making Jochen his tea when the phone rang.
“Ms Gilmartin?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Anna Orloggi.” It was the same woman—she pronounced her surname without a hint of an Italian accent, as if she were from one of the oldest families in England.
“Yes,” I said, aimlessly. “Hello.”
“Lord Mansfield will see you in his club on Friday evening at 6.00 a.m. Have you a pen and paper?”
I took down the details: Brydges’ was his club—not Brydges Club, just Brydges’—and an address off St James’s.
“Six a.m. this Friday,” Anna Orloggi repeated.
“I’ll be there.”
I hung up and felt an immediate elation that our ruse had worked and also a disturbing nervousness, knowing that I was finally going to be the one to meet Lucas Romer. Everything had become real, all of a sudden, and I felt the elation give way to a small squirm of nausea and my mouth seemed suddenly dry of all saliva as I thought about this encounter. I knew I was experiencing an emotion that I claimed to be immune to—I was feeling just a little bit frightened.
“Are you all right, Mummy?” Jochen asked.
“Yes. Fine, darling. Twinge of toothache.”
I called my mother to tell her the news.
“It worked,” I r
eported, “just like you said.”
“Good,” she said, her voice quite calm. “I knew it would. I’ll tell you exactly what to say and do.”
As I hung up a knock came on the door that led down from the flat to the surgery below. I opened the door to find Mr Scott standing there, beaming, as if—through the floor—he’d heard me say ‘twinge of toothache’ and had bounded upstairs to minister to me. But behind him was a hot, short-haired young man in a cheap dark suit.
“Hello, hello, Ruth Gilmartin,” Mr Scott said. “Great excitement. This young man’s a policeman—a detective, no less—wants to have a word with you. See you later—maybe…”
I showed the detective into the sitting-room. He took a seat, asked if he might remove his jacket—steaming hot outside—and said his name was Detective Constable Frobisher, a name I found reassuring, for some perverse reason, I thought, as DC Frobisher hung his jacket carefully over the arm of a chair and sat down again.
“Just a few questions,” he said taking out and flicking through his notebook. “We’ve had a request from the Metropolitan Police. They’re interested in the whereabouts of a young woman named…Ilse Bunzl.” He pronounced it with care. “Apparently she’s called this number from London. Is that right?”
I kept my face impassive. If they knew Ilse had called here, then, I reasoned, somebody’s phone must be tapped.
“No,” I said. “I never got a call. What was her name again?”
“Ilse Bunzl.” He spelt her surname.
“I teach foreign students, you see. So many of them come and go.”
Detective Frobisher made a note—“teaches foreign students” no doubt—asked a few questions (Was there anyone I was teaching who might know this girl? Were there many Germans signed up to OEP?) and apologised for taking up my time. I showed him out the back door, not wanting to increase Mr Scott’s glee. I hadn’t lied—everything I had said to the policeman was true.
I walked back through the hall, wondering where Jochen was, then I heard his voice—low, nearly inaudible—coming from the sitting-room: he must have slipped in behind us as we left, I thought. I paused at the door and peered through the crack by the hinge and I saw him sitting on the sofa, a book open in his lap. But he wasn’t reading, he was talking to himself and making little placing gestures with his hands as if he were sorting out invisible piles of beans or playing some invisible board game.
I felt, of course, a spontaneous, engulfing, near-intolerable surge of love for him, all the more acute because it was voyeuristic and he had no idea I was watching—his unselfconsciousness was as pure as it could be. He set his book aside and went to the window, still muttering to himself but now pointing things out, in the room and out of the window. What was he doing? What on earth was going on in his head? Who was that writer who said that ‘people lead their real, most interesting lives under cover of secrecy’? I knew Jochen better than any being on the planet, yet in some sense, in some degree, the guileless child was already beginning to develop the opacities of the growing boy, the youth, the adult, where the veils of ignorance and unknowing existed even between the people you were closest to. Look at my mother, I thought, wryly—not so much a veil as a thick woollen blanket. And no doubt the same could be said from her side, I reflected, and coughed loudly before I stepped into the sitting-room.
“Who was that man?” Jochen asked.
“A detective.”
“A detective! What did he want?”
“He said he was looking for a dangerous bank robber called Jochen Gilmartin and did I know anyone of that name.”
“Mummy!” He laughed, jabbing his finger repeatedly at me—something he did when he was either particularly amused or extremely angry. He was pleased; I was worried.
I went back to the hall, picked up the phone and called Bobbie York.
THE STORY OF EVA DELECTORSKAYA
New York. 1941
IT WAS TOWARDS THE middle of November that Eva Delectorskaya took the call from Lucas Romer. She was in the Transoceanic offices one morning, working on the spiralling ramifications of her naval-manoeuvres story—every newspaper in South America had picked it up in one way or another—when Romer telephoned himself and suggested meeting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. She took the subway to 86th Street and walked down Fifth, crossing the road from the grand apartment buildings to be closer to Central Park. It was a cold breezy day and she tugged her hat down over her ears and knotted her scarf higher round her throat. There was a scatter of autumn leaves on the pavements—or fall leaves on the sidewalks, as she should learn to call them—and the chestnut sellers were out on the street corners, the salty, sweet smoke from their braziers wafting by her from time to time as she sauntered down towards the great edifice of the museum.
She saw Romer standing waiting for her on the steps, hatless and wearing a long dark grey overcoat she hadn’t seen before. She smiled instinctively, happily, thinking again of their two days in Long Island. To be in New York in November in 1941, going to meet her lover on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum seemed the most normal and natural of activities in the world—as if her whole life had somehow been steering her in the direction of this particular moment. But the realities massing elsewhere behind this encounter—the war news she’d read in the newspapers this morning, the Germans advancing on Moscow—made her realise that what she and Romer were experiencing was, in actual fact, utterly absurd and surreal. We may be lovers, she reminded herself, but we are also spies: therefore everything is entirely different from what it seems.
He came down the steps to meet her. She saw his frowning, serious face and wanted to kiss him, wanted to go immediately to that hotel across the road and make love all afternoon—but they didn’t even touch; they didn’t even shake hands. He circled round her and pointed to the park.
“Let’s go for a stroll,” he said.
“Nice to see you. I’ve missed you.”
He looked at her in a manner as if to say: we simply can’t talk to each other like this.
“Sorry,” she said, “Chilly, isn’t it?” and walked briskly ahead of him into the park.
He increased his speed and caught up with her. They walked along the pathway in silence for a while and then he said, “Fancy a bit of winter sunshine?”
They found a bench with a view of a small valley and some craggy rocks. A boy was throwing a stick for a dog that refused to chase it. So the boy would fetch the stick, walk back to the dog and throw it again.
“Winter sunshine?”
“It’s a simple BSC courier job,” he said. “To New Mexico.”
“If it’s so simple why don’t they do it?”
“Since the Brazil map they want to seem extremely kosher. They’re a bit worried that the FBI might be watching them. So they asked me if someone from Transoceanic could do it. I thought of you. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’ll ask Morris if you don’t fancy it.”
But she did fancy it, as she knew he knew she would.
She shrugged. “I suppose I could do it.”
“I’m not doing you a favour,” he said. “I know you’d do a good job. A good secure job. That’s what they want. You pick up a package and you give it to someone else and you come home.”
“Who’ll run me? Not BSC.”
“Transoceanic will run you.”
“All right.”
He gave her a piece of paper and told her to read it until she’d memorised the details. She studied the words that were written down, remembering Mr Dimarco at Lyne, all his tricks, match colours to words, match memories to numbers. She handed the piece of paper back to Romer.
“Usual telephone code to base?” she asked.
“Yes. All the variations.”
“Where do I go after Albuquerque?”
“The contact there will tell you. It’ll be in New Mexico. Possibly Texas.”
“And then what?”
“Come back here and carry on as normal. It should take you three o
r four days. You’ll get some sun, see an interesting part of the country—it’s big.”
He moved his hand along the bench and interlinked his little finger with hers.
“When can I see you again?” she said, softly, looking away. “I loved the Narragansett Inn. Can we go back?”
“Probably not. It’s difficult. Things are heating up. London is getting frantic. Everything is rather…” He paused, as if to say the words was distasteful. “Rather out of control.”
“How’s ‘Gold’?”
“Gold’ is our only ray of sunshine. Very helpful, indeed. Which reminds me: this operation you’re on is ‘Cinnamon’. You’re ‘Sage’.”
“‘Sage’.”
“You know how they love procedure. They’ll have opened a file and written ‘Cinnamon’ on it. ‘Top Secret’.” He reached in his pocket and took out and gave her a bulky, buff envelope.
“What’s this?”
“Five thousand dollars. For the man at the end of the line, wherever that is. I would leave tomorrow if I were you.”
“Right.”
“Do you want a gun?”
“Will I need a gun?”
“No. But I always ask.”
“Anyway, I have my nails and my teeth,” she said, making claws with her hands and baring her fangs.
Romer laughed, giving her his wide white smile and she suddenly flashed to Paris and that day when they first met. She had a sudden vision of him crossing the street towards her. She felt weak.
“Bye, Lucas,” she said, then looked at him meaningfully. “We have to sort something out when I come back.” She paused. “I don’t know if I can carry on like this—it’s getting to be a strain. You know what I mean—I think—”
He interrupted her. “We’ll sort something out, don’t worry.” He squeezed her hand.