Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  The musicians frowned and nodded when I congratulated them in my tortuously improving Russian.

  ‘How are you finding it in England?’ I asked the female violinist.

  A faint scent of onions hung around her. Was this the smell of fear? She looked terrified at having to admit that she was enjoying her visit very much. ‘We cannot see as much of London as we would like because we have work to do. Always practising, always practising.’ The ghost of a smile lit up her face when she thought of something safe to say: ‘We are very honoured to represent our country in this manner.’

  Someone took her arm and led her away, perhaps towards people who did not speak Russian. An official of the embassy appeared by my side and asked where I had learned the language. ‘You speak very well,’ he said, in English, and a moment later I was being introduced to the ambassador himself.

  ‘Vashye Pryevoshodityel’stvo,’ I said. ‘Your Excellency, it is a great honour to meet you. And to hear your wonderful musicians.’

  He was a shrewd-looking man, small and desiccated. His lips moved thoughtfully as he considered my little speech. ‘In the Soviet Union we do not have Excellencies,’ he said. ‘There we are all comrades.’

  I think it might have been intended as a pleasantry but before I had time to respond the lackey had ushered me away and the hangers-on had closed round the great man again like pilot fish around a shark. At the same time I noticed Marian making her way through the crowd. And then there was the incident. I didn’t hear much, just her voice raised above the general noise, and a throb of shock that reverberated through the onlookers. She’d asked a question, that much I heard. But exactly what she’d asked and what the answer might have been there was no way of knowing. In a moment she was out of the press and being escorted away by two men wearing ill-fitting black suits. She shook their hands off like someone getting rid of dust or dirt. Astonishment encircled her. What had happened? Nothing much to disturb the even tenor of the evening – a moment of embarrassment, a flurry of outrage, hastily constructed conversations to cover the incident. A few minutes later the ambassador left and the reception more or less came to an end.

  In the taxi afterwards Marian laughed it off. ‘I asked the old trout a question, that was all.’

  I imagined political protest, something awkward about the Korean war or the arms race, but I was wrong. ‘About a friend of mine who used to work at the embassy,’ she explained. ‘They posted him away suddenly and I’ve not really heard from him since. I just want to know, that’s all.’ There was a light in her eyes, an expansiveness in her gestures, which suggested rather too much to drink. ‘What about you? You got to talk to His Excellency as well …’

  ‘Not Excellency. “In Soviet Union we are all comrades,” that’s what he told me.’

  ‘What a sour old puss. Did he at least smile? Perhaps he was making a joke.’

  ‘In Soviet Union, there we are all comedians,’ I said, with an exaggerated Russian accent. Laughter, displaced by alcohol, rose and overflowed. Incontinently we leaned against each other while the cab wound its way through the London streets towards South Kensington. It wasn’t late when we reached our destination but we treated it as such, giggling like children returning after hours and frightened of waking the adults. We crept up the staircase to the front door of her flat and she hushed me to silence as she turned the key in the lock. ‘He’s asleep,’ she whispered, closing the door silently behind us. With a hand on my shoulder to balance, she slipped her shoes off. ‘Better not wake him.’ She padded across the hallway, then stopped and turned back and looked at me shamefaced, her voice suddenly normal.

  ‘How could I be so stupid?’

  ‘Stupid?’

  ‘I forgot. He was going tomorrow but he brought the flight forward to this afternoon. To the United States. Most important for his career.’ Her mouth turned down at the mention of the word career. ‘He wasn’t coming to the concert anyway – can’t bear the things. But …’

  Was she explaining too much? Was I victim of some silly subterfuge? I knew only the implications of what she was saying, implications that plunged me into a state of anticipation that I had never known before. I could see it in her eyes, or thought I could. Something passed between us that I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now: action at a distance, a little radiant burst of enigmatic energy. ‘What about a nightcap?’ she suggested. And then, almost as though she didn’t understand what might be happening either, she asked, ‘Is that what we should do?’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ I answered. So we had a whisky each, in the sitting room, with something on the record player – Edmundo Ros? – and something else in the air. She sat on the sofa much as I remembered from that terrible night at Furze Cottage, with her legs drawn up under her and her feet bare. She’d slipped off her jacket. Her shoulders were white and almost luminous, like alabaster. I remember a vaccination scar the size of a small coin pressed into the skin of her upper arm, as though she had been branded with a medallion.

  ‘So, what is it they say?’ she asked, raising her glass. ‘Za vashe zdorovye!’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She laughed and downed the whisky in one gulp. ‘There: true Russian style. Now tell me how you enjoyed the concert.’

  So I told her. Very much indeed, I said, and thanked her for inviting me.

  And the little violinist? Would I have enjoyed her?

  What, I asked primly, did she mean by that?

  She laughed. ‘If you had the opportunity, would you sleep with her?’

  I contemplated this question with a degree of uncertainty. Yes or no? Yes might make me seem some kind of immoral degenerate. No might make me appear a prude. ‘She had a curious smell,’ I said. ‘A hint of onions.’

  ‘How very earthy. But you haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘Yes, then.’

  She laughed delightedly, holding her hand to her mouth. ‘Did you fancy her more than your poet? More than Akhmatova?’

  ‘Akhmatova is rather old now. But neither are on offer.’

  ‘No, they’re not.’

  We watched one another. I was confused, wondering what exactly was happening.

  ‘Do you remember that time at Furze Cottage?’ she asked. ‘When we sat up half the night talking?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ For her it would only have seemed a short while ago; but for me it lay on the far side of the boundary between adulthood and childhood, as far away as another continent and another century. I recalled it and didn’t recall it, saw the two figures sitting there on the sofa in the sitting room in the cottage as though I was neither of them, as though I had conjured them out of my imagination.

  ‘What did you think at the time?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Me. About me going for midnight walks. What did you think?’

  ‘Something vaguely Brontë-esque, I suppose. Striding over the cliffs through the wind and the rain—’

  ‘It was bright moonlight.’

  ‘I wondered if you’d come back.’

  ‘Really?’ She looked at me, head on one side. ‘Where did you imagine I’d gone?’

  I hesitated, but alcohol had done its job, stripped away any reticence. ‘I knew, Marian. I knew where you’d gone, more or less. I mean, I knew what you were intending to do.’

  Her expression didn’t change. Even when full of alcohol she still had that ability to hide what she was thinking or feeling, to dissimulate. ‘You knew? How did you know?’

  I shrugged. ‘I was a child, more than a little in love. I followed you everywhere, don’t you remember?’

  ‘My little spy. Did you follow me that night?’

  ‘Not exactly. I heard you leave and then’ – I tried to laugh it off – ‘I went snooping.’

  Her brown eyes had that luminous quality about them, as though they were giving out rays rather than taking them in. Was that how she had looked at her captors all those years ago? Eyes of anger, eyes of hate, was
that it?

  ‘Snooping?’

  ‘In your room. I was only a child, for Christ’s sake …’

  ‘You read the note I left?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And you kept my secret?’

  ‘Never told anyone. Until now.’

  She pondered this. ‘So it’s our secret, then. All these years I thought it was only mine but all the time I shared it with Sam the Spy.’ There was a fragment of a smile. ‘Strange to share secrets.’

  ‘You must have many.’

  ‘More than you can imagine.’

  There was a pause. I thought she might tell me something more but she only swung her feet off the sofa and stood up. ‘I think it’s time for bed, don’t you? Can you undo my buttons? I had to get Alan to do me up and now, thank God, there’s you to undo me.’

  She turned her back on me and stood there while I did as I was commanded, my fingers stumbling with the buttons, a dozen and more of them down the length of her back as far as the concavity at the base of her spine. As the buttons came undone the material opened up like a wound, to expose white flesh and the supple snake-like corrugations of her spine. Her shoulder blades resembled vestigial wings folded awkwardly below the skin. I wondered if there might be scars, if she might have been whipped or branded or whatever they had done to Odette, but there was nothing to disturb the even fabric of her flesh except a few small moles, scattered at random across the undulating skin. As she turned, holding the dress against her chest to prevent it falling, we were standing very close. I could smell her, that same smell I remembered from so long ago. Something raw about it.

  ‘Sam,’ she said. ‘Would you like to sleep with me?’

  There was a hiatus, a stillness, a caesura. More than that – a yawning chasm between the world now and the world of a moment ago. This was the woman whom I had known for much of my life – since before the time when I possessed clear and consistent memories. This was Marian Sutro whom, for all that time, I had worshipped and adored. She was to me the paragon of all female virtues: courageous, independent, slightly bloody-minded, more than a little amused by the idiocies of others, disturbingly attractive. A fruit that was both acerbic and sweet, bitter and emollient. And she had suggested that I might sleep with her.

  Or had she? Perhaps she had merely asked the question hypothetically – did I fantasise about sleeping with her? Just as earlier she had asked about the Russian violinist. In which case the honest answer was, again, yes.

  Thoughts twisted and coiled round on themselves, like snakes that might have dropped out of the trees into Eve’s lap: how much I knew about this woman, and how little. Had I even heard her right? Had she really said ‘with me’? There seemed, to my virginal mind, a dozen innocent possibilities.

  ‘Well?’ She was smiling faintly, almost mockingly, looking up at me from under strongly drawn eyebrows.

  Something was stuck in my throat. I tried to swallow, trying to rid myself of the obstruction. ‘But what about Alan?’

  ‘Alan has his own life; don’t you worry about him.’ And abruptly there was a change in her demeanour, a hardening, a snap. ‘Look, my naive little spy, I’ve made you an offer. It won’t stay on the table indefinitely.’

  ‘And if I say yes, we sleep together. Just like that?’

  ‘How else should it be?’

  I wonder how many lovers she had had by then. Can I count them? Benoît Bérard, the first. Then Clément Pelletier. Véronique Barthelemy, camp mother and comforter, must, I suppose, be included. And then Marian’s husband, of course. But the intelligence officer called Tony Bright as well, and also, I believe, a brief and unsuccessful affair with a fellow SOE officer whom she encountered after the war – two lost souls, trying desperately to recapture things that were forever lost to them. And there was Absolon, David Trofimovich Absolon. Doubtless there were others. Where, I wonder now, did I come in the register of Marian Sutro’s lovers?

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

  We used the guest room. I would have liked to use her own bedroom, where she habitually lay with the Spitfire pilot who had never shot down an enemy aircraft, but perhaps that was one step too far. So we found ourselves in the narrower confines of the spare bed, clinging to one another as though to save ourselves from drowning. I remember each moment in the smallest and most particular detail, the smell of her, the exact touch of her cool skin, the taste of whisky and cigarettes in her mouth, the loose texture of her breasts as I nuzzled my face against them, the rough hair where she guided my hand and the slippery oyster I discovered embedded there – an encounter never again so shocking and so delightful. And then her hands were on my head, pushing me down beyond the point where my imagination faltered. I hadn’t conceived that such a thing was possible. Believe me. Those were different times from nowadays, times when such acts had to be discovered for yourself or learned from someone else. You wouldn’t find them in a glossy, illustrated book or on a website that anyone can access – it was knowledge to be imparted by adept to neophyte as one might pass on the rituals of a secret society, with all the magic and mystery and misunderstanding that that entails. I remember not knowing what was happening and being fearful; and then finding myself amazed at the pure wonder of it, the strange embrace, the sensation of drowning within her, of floundering in her heat and her delicate, elusive flavour. And her breathless explosions of pleasure, which in her case were uttered in French – oui, oui, oui! – and the coincident marvel of discovering that she could find such delight in what I could do to her. It was sexual love of an intensity I have never experienced since.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Sam,’ she said when, in the subsequent post-coital diminuendo, I made an affirmation of my love. ‘One day you’ll find someone perfect to love.’ Which was almost exactly what she had said when we sat together on the sofa in Furze Cottage a decade earlier. And it was not true. I never did find anyone perfect to love – does anyone? – and I truly loved her then and I truly love the memory of her still, despite all that happened later.

  Afterwards she slipped out of the bed and went to her own room. I felt bereft.

  Breakfast

  Marian Sutro (I still cannot bring myself to think of the surname Walcott) in her kitchen in the bright, cool light of a Sunday morning, making toast. She is barefoot, barelegged, wearing a plain grey skirt and white blouse. Her hair is loose, her face without make-up and touchingly vulnerable. She looks older than her years. I remember her feet, their bony whiteness, the way they flexed as she moved around the room. Long toes, nails painted blood red. I never imagined that you might be fascinated by your lover’s feet but now I discovered that you can be – you can be fascinated by any part of her, and bewildered by the beauty.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ she said, not looking at me. ‘I think I had a bit too much to drink.’

  ‘There’s nothing to apologise for.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’ She glanced round and made a little self-deprecating face. ‘What would your mother say? Dirty old Marian seducing her little boy. I should be ashamed.’

  ‘But you’re not?’

  ‘I gave up shame a long time ago.’

  ‘And I gave up being her little boy a long time ago. Anyway, I wanted to be seduced.’

  ‘Were you expecting it? Am I that bloody obvious?’

  ‘I was pleasantly startled.’

  That amused her, which I took as a positive sign, although, God knows, laughter can signify many things and only a few are benign. For a few minutes she busied herself with breakfast. Every movement she made fascinated me, even the manner in which she tore off a corner of toast and applied butter and marmalade to that piece alone, then popped it in her mouth. I’d not seen someone eat toast like that. In our house we spread the butter and marmalade over the whole slice, like a navvy at his tea break. Her method seemed cautious and refined. Perhaps it was French.

  ‘Alors, Monsieur Wareham,’ she said, looking at me thoughtfully. Coming under her gaze was a distur
bing experience. I knew her and didn’t know her. Knew more about her body than I ever imagined even in my most fervid fantasies; and knew so little of the mind that was part of that body. ‘When we’ve finished breakfast, I think you’d better go.’

  ‘Go?’ I was dumbfounded.

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘That’s it? I mean, it’s over as soon as it’s begun?’

  ‘Perhaps we went a bit far. I think I need some time. To reflect.’

  ‘So when will I see you again?’

  She shrugged. Gallic indifference. ‘We’ll see. But for the moment, let’s just be the best of friends, shall we? I don’t want it all to end in tears, Sam.’

  So I finished my frugal meal in bitter disappointment and afterwards she walked with me to the Tube station. A chaste kiss on each cheek at the barrier and a final breath of that perfume I now knew so well. Something sweet, something sour. My sister had hated it.

  Gorshkov

  On the Monday there was consternation at the Peace Union. Mr Roper was beside himself with fury. ‘All that work we put into gaining the confidence of our Soviet brothers and it’s all destroyed in a moment with an outburst by that stupid woman!’

  That stupid woman was standing in front of him, as contrite as a schoolgirl.

  ‘What was it all about, anyway?’ Roper demanded.

  ‘A friend,’ said Miss Miller primly.

  ‘The press officer at the embassy,’ Marian explained. ‘He was doing a story on the Peace Union and then suddenly he was recalled.’

  ‘Which upset Mrs Walcott no end.’ Miss Miller looked tight-mouthed and indignant. ‘One really ought to learn to keep one’s private life separate from one’s work.’ She turned on her heel and flounced out of the meeting.

  ‘And now I’ve got to go back to building bridges,’ Roper said gloomily. It was unclear whether he mean with the Russians or with Miss Miller.

  A few days later Gorshkov, the man from the embassy cultural department, phoned. He wanted Mrs Walcott, no one else. ‘To discuss,’ he said when she had finally been brought to the phone.