2006 - Restless

by William Boyd

  At the station in Burlington she made a phone call to Paul Witoldski in Franklin Forks. It was after midnight.

  “Who is it?” Witoldski’s voice was harsh and irritated.

  “Is this the Witoldski bakery?”

  “No. It’s the Witoldski Chinese Laundry.”

  “Can I speak to Julius?”

  “There’s no Julius here.”

  “It’s Eve,” she said.

  There was a silence. Then Witoldski said, “Did I miss a meeting?”

  “No. I need your help, Mr Witoldski. It’s urgent. I’m at Burlington Station.”

  Silence again. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  While Eva waited for Witoldski to arrive she thought to herself: we are urged, implored, instructed, ordered, beseeched never to trust anyone—which is all very well, she reflected, but sometimes in desperate situations trust is all you can rely on. She had to trust Witoldski to help her; Johnson in Meadowville would have been the obvious choice—and she thought she could trust Johnson too—but Romer had been in Meadowville with her. At some stage he would call Johnson; he knew about Witoldski also but he would check on Johnson first. Witoldski might buy her another hour or two.

  She saw a muddy station wagon pull into the car-park with ‘WXBQ Franklin Forks’ printed along its side. Witoldski was unshaven and wearing a plaid jacket and what looked like waxed fishing trousers.

  “Are you in trouble?” he asked, looking around for her suitcase.

  “I’m in a spot of trouble,” she admitted, “and I have to be in Canada tonight.”

  He thought for a while and rubbed his chin so she could hear the rasp of his bristles.

  “Don’t tell me any more,” he said and opened the car door for her.

  They drove north, barely saying a word to each other; he smelt of beer and other staleness—old sheets, perhaps, a body not recently washed—but she was not complaining. They stopped to fill up at a gas station in Champlain and he asked her if she was hungry. She said she was and he came back to the car with a packet of fig rolls—Gouverneur Fig Rolls, it said on the wrapping. She ate three, one after the other, as they turned west and headed for a town sign-posted Châteaugay, but just before they reached it he turned on to a gravel road and they began to climb up through pine forests, the road narrowing to a single track, the tips of the pine trees brushing the car as they moved slowly along, a thin metallic whisper in her ears. Hunters’ trails, Witoldski explained. She nodded off for a while and dreamt of figs and fig trees in the sun until the lurch as the car came to a halt woke her up.

  Dawn was close, there was a tarnished silveriness in the sky above her that made the pines seem blacker still. Witoldski pointed to a junction, lit by his headlights.

  “A mile down that road you come to Sainte-Justine.”

  They stepped out of the car and Eva felt the cold hit her. She saw Witoldski was looking at her thin city shoes. He went round to the back of the station wagon, opened the tail-gate and came back with a scarf and an old greasy cardigan that she put on under her coat.

  “You’re in Canada,” he said. “Quebec. They speak French here. You speak French?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dumb question.”

  “I’d like to give you some money for the gas—and your time,” she said.

  “Give it to charity, buy a war bond.”

  “If anybody comes,” she said. “If anybody asks you about me, tell them the truth. There’s no need to cover up.”

  “I never saw you,” he said. “Who are you? I been out fishing.”

  “Thank you,” Eva said, thinking she should perhaps embrace this man. But he held out his hand and they shook hands briefly.

  “Good luck, Miss Dalton,” he said, climbed back in his car, turned it at the junction and drove away, leaving Eva in a darkness so absolute Eva did not trust herself to take even one step. But slowly her eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom and she began to make out the jagged tips of the trees against the slowly greying sky and she could see the pale path of the road where it forked. She wrapped Witoldski’s scarf tighter around her throat and set off down the track to Sainte-Justine. She was truly flying now, she thought, she had flown to another country and for the first time she began to feel a little safer. It was a Sunday morning, she realised, listening to the noise of her feet crunch on the gravel of the roadway, and the first birds beginning to sing—Sunday, 7 December 1941.

  ELEVEN

  Begging with Threats

  I LOCKED THE KITCHEN door—Ilse and Ludger were out, but somewhere in Oxford, and I didn’t want any surprises. It was lunchtime and I had an hour before Hamid arrived. I felt strange pushing open the door to Ludger and Ilse’s room—my dining room, I reminded myself—and I reminded myself again that I hadn’t set foot in there since Ludger had arrived.

  The place looked as if refugees had been holed up there for a month or so. It smelt of old clothes, cigarettes and joss sticks. There were two inflatable mattresses on the floor with unzipped sleeping-bags on them—ancient, khaki, army issue, creased, almost like something once living, a cast-off skin, a decomposing giant limb—that served as beds. There were small stashes of food and drink here and there—tins of tuna and sardines, cans of beer and cider, chocolate bars and biscuits—as if the occupants were expecting to undergo a short siege of some kind. The table and chairs had been pushed against the wall and served as a form of open wardrobe—jeans, shirts, smocks, underwear were hung or laid flat on every edge, chair back or level surface. In another corner I saw the grip that Ludger had arrived with and a bulky rucksack—ex-army—that I supposed was Ilse’s.

  I very carefully noticed its position against the wall and just before I opened the main flap the thought came to me that she might have placed some snares. “Snares,” I said out loud, and forced an ironic chuckle: I was spending too much time in my mother’s past, I thought to myself—and yet had to admit that here I was indulging in a clandestine search of my lodgers’ room. I undid the buckle and rummaged inside—I found a few dogeared paperbacks (in German—two Stefan Zweigs), an Instamatic camera, a tattered teddy-bear mascot with the name ‘Uli’ stitched on to it, several packs of condoms and something the size of a half-brick wrapped in kitchen foil. I knew what this was and smelt it: dope, marijuana. I unpeeled a corner of the foil and saw a dense dark-chocolate mass. I took a tiny pinch of it between forefinger and thumb and tasted it—I don’t know why: was I some kind of drug connoisseur who could identify its provenance? No, not at all, even though I enjoyed a joint from time to time, but it seemed the sort of thing to do when one was secretly investigating other people’s belongings. I folded the foil shut again and put everything away. I searched the other pockets of the rucksack and found nothing interesting. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for: a weapon? A gun? A hand-grenade? I closed the door behind me and went to make myself a sandwich.

  When Hamid arrived for his lesson, he handed me an envelope and a flyer. The flyer was to announce a demonstration outside Wadham College to protest at the official visit of the Shah of Iran’s sister, Ashraf. In the envelope was a xeroxed invitation to a party in the upstairs room at the Captain Bligh pub on the Cowley Road on Friday night.

  “Who’s having the party?” I asked.

  “I am,” Hamid said. “To say goodbye. I go to Indonesia the next day.”

  That evening when Jochen was in bed and Ludger and Ilse had gone to the pub—they always asked me; I always said no—I rang Detective Constable Frobisher.

  “I’ve had a phone call from this Ilse girl,” I said. “She must have been given my number by mistake—she was asking for someone I didn’t know—some ‘James’. I think it was from London.”

  “No, she’s now definitely in Oxford, Miss Gilmartin.”

  “Oh.” This threw me. “What’s she meant to have done?”

  There was a pause. “I shouldn’t really tell you this but she was living in a squat in Tooting Bec. We think she might have been s
elling drugs but the complaints made about her were to do with aggressive begging. Begging with threats, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh right. So she’s not some kind of anarchist terrorist, then.”

  “What makes you say that?” There was new interest in his voice.

  “No reason. Just all this stuff in the papers, you know.”

  “Right, yeah…Well, the Met just want us to pick her up. We don’t want her type in Oxford,” he added a bit priggishly and foolishly, I thought: Oxford was full of all sorts of types—as odd and deranged and as unpleasant as they came: one Ilse more or less wouldn’t make any difference.

  “I’ll be sure to call if she makes contact again,” I said, dutifully.

  “Much obliged, Miss Gilmartin.”

  I hung up and thought of thin, moody, grubby Ilse and wondered how aggressively she could beg. I began to wonder if I had made a mistake calling Frobisher—he was very keen—and what had made me mention terrorism? That was a blunder, really stupid. Here I was thinking I might be inadvertently harbouring the second generation of the Baader-Meinhof gang but had discovered that they were just the usual sad sacks and losers.

  The demonstration outside Wadham College was billed for 6.00 p.m., when the Shah’s sister was due to arrive for a reception to declare open the new library that the Shah’s money had paid for. I picked up Jochen from Grindle’s and we caught a bus into town. We had time for a pizza and a coke in the St Michael’s street pizzeria before we wandered hand in hand along the Broad towards Wadham.

  “What’s a demonstration, Mummy?” he asked.

  “We’re protesting. Protesting that the University of Oxford should take money from a tyrant and a dictator, a man called the Shah of Iran.”

  “The Shah of Iran,” he repeated, liking the sounds of the words. “Will Hamid be there?”

  “Definitely, I would say.”

  “He comes from Iran as well, doesn’t he?”

  “Indeed he does, my clever lad…”

  I stopped, astonished—there seemed to be about 500 people gathered in two groups on either side of the main entrance to the college. I had been expecting the usual small quorum of earnest lefties and some punks looking for fun but here were dozens of police, arms linked, keeping the entrance to the college as wide and as clear as possible. Others stood in the street on their walkie-talkies, impatiently waving cars on. There were banners—saying DICTATOR, TRAITOR, MURDERER and OXFORD’S SHAME and (more wittily) THE SHAM OF IRAN—and orchestrated chanting in Farsi led by a masked man with a megaphone. Yet the mood was strangely festive—perhaps because it was a beautiful warm summer evening, perhaps because it was a decorous Oxford demonstration, or perhaps because it seemed hard to be really outraged and revolutionary about the opening of a new library. There was a lot of grins, laughter, banter—still, I was impressed: it was the largest political demonstration I had seen in Oxford. It reminded me of my Hamburg days and, thinking of Hamburg, I was reminded of Karl-Heinz and all the fervent, angry marches and demonstrations we had been on together. My mood collapsed somewhat.

  I spotted Hamid with a group of other Iranians, chanting along with the megaphone man, and pointing their fingers in emphatic unison. The larking English students, in their combat jackets and keffiyehs, looked like amateurs; for them this protest was a kind of extra-curricular luxury, nothing was really at stake—a bit of fun on a sunny evening.

  I looked around at the crowd and at the sweating, harassed policemen holding back the protestors’ half-hearted surges. I saw another two dozen coppers coming down the road from vans parked outside Keble—the Shah’s sister must be due. Then I spotted Frobisher—he was standing on a low wall with other journalists and press photographers—snapping away with a camera at the crowd of demonstrators. I turned my back on him quickly and almost bumped into Ludger and Ilse.

  “Hey, Ruth,” Ludger said with a wide smile, seemingly pleased to see me. “And Jochen too. Great! Have an egg.”

  He and Ilse each had two boxes of a dozen eggs that they were handing out to the crowd.

  Jochen took one carefully. “What do I do with this?” he said, uneasily—he had never really warmed to Ludger, despite Ludger’s ceaseless, amiable jocularity, but he liked Ilse. I reached out and took an egg as well, to encourage him.

  “When you see the rich lady getting out of the limousine you throw it at her,” Ludger said.

  “Why?” Jochen asked—reasonably enough, I thought—but before anyone could give him a cogent answer Hamid had picked him up and set him on his shoulders.

  “Now you can have a good view,” he said.

  I wondered if I should be playing the responsible mother but decided not to—it was never too early in your life to try to destroy the myth of the all-powerful system. What the hell, I thought: the counter-culture dies hard, and in any event it might be good for Jochen Gilmartin to throw an egg at a Persian princess, I reckoned. As Jochen surveyed the scene from Hamid’s shoulders I turned to Ilse.

  “You see that photographer in the denim jacket—on the wall with the others, the journalists?” I said.

  “Yes. And so?”

  “He’s a policeman. He’s looking for you.”

  She turned away at once and fished in the pockets of her jacket for a hat—a pale blue bush hat with a floppy brim—that she pulled on low on her head, and added a pair of sun-glasses. She whispered something to Ludger and they slipped away into the crowd.

  Suddenly the police started to call and gesture to each other. All traffic was stopped and a motorcade of cars led by two outriders with flashing lights came at some speed down Broad Street. The noise of the jeering and the shouting became shrill as the cars stopped and the bodyguards stepped out, shielding a small figure in a silk turquoise dress and short jacket. I saw dark, lacquered bouffant hair, big sun-glasses and, as she was ushered quickly towards the porters’ lodge and the nervous dons in the welcome committee, the eggs began to fly. I thought that the sound of their cracking open as they hit was like distant gunshots.

  “Throw, Jochen!” I shouted spontaneously—and saw him hurl his egg. Hamid let him stay up a second longer and then slid him down his front to the ground.

  “I hit a man on the shoulder,” Jochen said, “one of the men in sun-glasses.”

  “Good boy,” I said. “Now let’s go home. That’s enough excitement for the day.”

  We said our goodbyes and walked away from the demonstration up Broad Street and on to the Banbury Road. After a minute or two we were joined, surprisingly, by Ludger and Ilse. Jochen began at once to explain to them that he had deliberately not aimed at the lady because her dress looked pretty—and expensive.

  “Hey, Ruth,” Ludger said stepping in beside me, “thanks for the warning about the pig.”

  I saw Ilse had taken Jochen’s hand; she was talking to him in German.

  “I thought she was in more serious trouble,” I said. “I think they just want to warn her.”

  “No, no,” Ludger said, with a nervous laugh. He lowered his voice. “Her head is a bit fucked-up. A bit crazy. Nothing heavy, you know.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just like the rest of us, then.”

  Jochen reached for Ludger’s hand. “Give me a swing, Ludger.”

  So Ludger and Ilse between them began to swing Jochen off his feet as we walked homewards, Jochen laughing with uncontrolled pleasure, calling at every swing to be launched higher, higher.

  I dropped back a little, bent down to adjust the strap on my shoe, and didn’t spot the police car until it had pulled up alongside me. Through the open window Detective Constable Frobisher smiled at me.

  “Miss Gilmartin—I thought it was you. Could I have a quick word?” He stepped out of the car, the driver remaining inside. I sensed Ludger, Ilse and Jochen continuing on their way regardless and managed not to look at them.

  “I just wanted you to know,” Frobisher said. “The German girl—seems she’s back in London again.”

  “Oh, right.�
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  “Did you see the demo?”

  “Yes, I was in Broad Street. Some of my students were participating. Iranians, you know.”

  “Yeah, that was what I was wanting to talk to you about,” he said, stepping away from the car. “You move, I take it, among the foreign-student community.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘move’, exactly—but I do teach foreign students all year round, pretty much.” I flicked my hair back out of my eyes and used the gesture to glance up the road. Ludger, Ilse and Jochen were about a hundred yards off, standing still now, looking back at me, Ilse holding Jochen’s hand.

  “Let me put it this way, Miss Gilmartin,” Frobisher said, making his voice confidential, semi-urgent. “We’d be very interested if you saw and heard anything unusual—political, like: anarchists, radicals. The Italians, the Germans, the Arabs…Anything that strikes you—just give us a call, let us know.” He smiled, genuinely, not politely, and I suddenly saw the real Frobisher for an instant, saw his serious zeal. Under the formulaic pleasantries and the air of earnest dullness, was someone shrewder, cleverer, more ambitious. “You can get closer to these people than we can, you hear things we’d never hear,” he said, letting his guard drop again, “and if you gave us a call from time to time—doesn’t matter if it’s just a hunch—we’d really appreciate it.”