by Simon Mawer
‘Doing what?’ Marian asked.
‘Opening our mail.’
‘Who’s opening our mail?’
Miss Miller gave her pinched lip expression. She was a curious mixture of arch conservative and determined socialist. She adored the new Queen and yet applauded the more extreme pronouncements of Aneurin Bevan; she loved Mr Churchill the war leader and hated Sir Winston the newly-knighted peacetime prime minister. And now she said, as though uttering obscenities, ‘The Special Branch. Or MI5. Or someone.’
‘How on earth do you know?’
‘Oh, you can tell easily enough. They think they’re so clever but when they steam the flap open the paper becomes crinkly and it doesn’t always fit properly when they stick it back.’ She waved an envelope, like Chamberlain waving ‘peace in our time’. ‘You notice it if there are lots of them.’
‘They’ve done this before?’
‘Sometimes. I always report it to Mr Roper but he just shrugs his shoulders. I think we should make a formal complaint.’ She indicated the neatly piled envelopes on her desk. ‘They’ve only bothered with the foreign ones this time.’
Marian went over to have a look. Three letters, two from France and one from Germany. She felt uneasy, like the onset of travel sickness. ‘When did this start?’
‘Only noticed it a few days ago. I daresay they have the same problem at Labour Party headquarters. They’re a law unto themselves, these security people.’
Kriegspiel, Marian thought. She was playing it now, with Fawley; and he didn’t know she had just got him in check. During her lunch break she went round the corner to the nearest phone booth and rang her parents. Her father answered, his familiar voice trembling slightly on the line.
‘Just a small thing, Papa,’ she said. ‘You remember that postcard, don’t you? If anything else comes for me like that, don’t tell me about it over the phone, all right?’
His voice was puzzled. ‘Why on earth not, Squirrel?’
‘It doesn’t matter why not, Papa. Just don’t. Just say this: Aunt Philippa called the other day.’
‘What on earth are you talking about? And what if Aunt Philippa does call?’
‘You know perfectly well she won’t. And if she did, I wouldn’t want to know.’
She replaced the receiver on its cradle and pressed the B button as one did, just to see if the machine would give any of your money back. Outside, across the street, one of the watchers pretended not to notice her.
Nothing to do but wait. You must be prepared to wait, one of the Beaulieu instructors had said. Just wait. Sometimes she went to the British Museum, for distraction. At other times she’d take a bus down to the National Gallery, or go just round the corner to Sir John Soane’s Museum. There was any number of places she could choose but the British Museum was a favourite. It was a mere stroll through Bloomsbury, and it was one day like any other when she went up the steps and through the great classical portico into the marble halls. There was the usual shifting crowd of visitors: tourists, of course, and secretaries on their lunch breaks and disconsolate school groups. She walked more or less aimlessly, past sculptures and carvings, trinkets in gold, pots and pans, the treasures and the detritus of civilisations long gone and found herself quite by chance in one of the rooms on the first floor. A small crowd of children had gathered around the glass box where Ginger crouched among his dusty grave goods. His skin was burnished to autumnal russet, a thin straggle of hair sprouted from his cranium like rusty wires.
‘Cor,’ people murmured, clustering round like passers-by at the scene of a traffic accident. ‘Blimey.’
For a moment, remembering the bodies she had seen in the camp, she felt the rising tide of panic that used to beset her. Here was someone, baked by the crematorium of the Egyptian desert sands more than five thousand years ago and now held up for general curiosity. Would they do this with the victims of the camps, turn them into exhibits in some unimaginable museum of the future?
‘Is he real, miss?’ a child’s voice asked.
‘Of course he’s real. Everything in the British Museum is real.’
‘So what happened to him? Did someone kill him?’
‘I expect he died of natural causes.’
They seemed disappointed by that. Eventually, reluctantly, the children moved on to find another mummy, leaving just Marian and one other visitor looking down on the desiccated form of Gebelein man, predynastic period, c. 3500 BC.
The other visitor looked round at her, and, with a shared start of surprise, they recognised each other. He was that bit older, of course. There might even have been a brushstroke of grey over his temples. But it was Tony Bright just the same.
There was a stumbled moment of exclamation – ‘Good Lord!’ ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ – the two of them talking over each other and Marian feeling a little tremor of mingled fear and excitement, like an earthquake far away just making the cups rattle and the windows shake. ‘How extraordinary, bumping into each other like this,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in Belgium, married to, what was her name? Anne-Griet, wasn’t it?’ And then, when she saw his expression, ‘Oh, God, have I been tactless?’
He laughed. That easy laugh she remembered, when there seemed so little to laugh at. ‘Not really. It never really happened.’
‘God, I hope that wasn’t my fault.’
He grinned. ‘Not really, but I have to say you did awaken me to other possibilities. No, after Hamburg I got back to Belgium and discovered her in the arms of someone else. Figuratively, I hasten to add.’
‘How unfortunate. And now what are you doing?’
He waved a careless hand, as though to show how unimportant such things were. ‘Lecturing here at UCL. Trying to bolster the German department. It’s not the most fashionable subject at the moment, although things are getting better.’
‘Married?’
‘No, not married.’
He paused as more tourists approached. ‘Perhaps we’ve had enough of Ginger,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s see about the box of bones over here.’
Together they moved across the room and looked into the collection of bones that might have been excavated from a disused cemetery only a few months ago but were, so the label said, from Tarkhan, Egypt, c. 3000 BC. ‘Not very encouraging, is it?’ Bright said. ‘Look, why don’t we go and have a bite to eat or something? Or are you pushed for time?’
‘No, that’d be lovely.’
So he took her arm and guided her towards the exit, talking all the time in that way she remembered from Hamburg. A confusing few days that had been, didn’t she agree? What with dealing with the Russians and then meeting her. He didn’t know whether he was coming or going. ‘Sorry, unfortunate turn of phrase. But it was a huge conflict of emotions, I can tell you.’
‘And for me.’
‘I’m sure it was. And now?’
‘Things are better, much better.’
In the pub across the road from the museum they found a secluded corner table where, over a reheated pie and a glass of shandy, she told him about Absolon. Just the meeting in Paris and then his reappearance in London. ‘We’ve seen a bit of one another,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘Lucky fellow. Hamburg didn’t mean nothing to me, you know. It wasn’t just one of those wartime flings. In fact, it was lovely. I think of it often.’
‘Do you?’ She was embarrassed about his thinking of it being lovely. Loveliness was not a word she would have used. She glanced at her watch. ‘Oh, goodness, it’s getting late. I really must go—’
He put out a hand to stop her. ‘Must you? It seems so short. And it’s Friday. Almost the weekend.’
She smiled, wanting to laugh but not daring to. There was that same attraction, still there after so many years. ‘I’d have to phone work.’
‘Why don’t you? What could we do? Go for a walk in the park. Something …’
There was a public call box in the corridor outside the toilets. ‘Something’s c
ome up,’ she told Miss Miller. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to come in this afternoon. I’ll make it up with overtime.’ She came back to their table feeling light-headed and happy. ‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve done it. As free as a bird.’
Bright had bought her another drink, a gin and tonic this time. ‘To us,’ he said, raising his own glass. ‘We could always go back to my flat. Not far from here.’
She sipped the gin and watched him. ‘What are you suggesting?’ But she knew exactly what he was suggesting and the shock was that the idea did not shock her. She remembered him well, the smooth benison of his presence inside her.
‘It’s astonishing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Here we are, together again. Out of the blue.’
‘Yes, here we are.’ She looked round to see exactly where. Her vision seemed to lag behind the movement, as though the pub, with its wooden panelling, its mirrors and its gleaming bottles were only obeying the laws of physics with reluctance. ‘How strange it is. As though it was meant to be. As though it’s fate. What do you think?’ She was feeling peculiar, as if she had already drunk too much. Her words echoed inside her head. Tony was looking at her with concern.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘I’m just tired. It’s been a difficult time recently.’ This time the pub moved of its own accord without her doing anything to help it along. She stood up, putting out her hand to steady herself. ‘I think I need the bathroom.’
Tony Bright was standing as well, concern pasted across his face. ‘The lady’s not well,’ he said to the barman. ‘A bit of fresh air, perhaps.’
He grasped her round the waist, solicitously, like a husband or a boyfriend. He had been her boyfriend, hadn’t he? For eight hours. Her paramour. The door swung open and they were outside on the pavement without her knowing exactly how they’d got there. The bulk of the museum across the road was possessed of its own animated life, moving this way and that like a great beast breathing. Tony’s arm was round her and his face was close to hers. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you home and you’ll be all right.’ Almost magically there was a cab there at the kerbside, the door open onto a dark and welcoming cave with the smell of cigarettes and old leather inside just like the car that she remembered when she didn’t want to remember, the one with the two men crowded in on either side of her, their hands gripping her, their breath on her face. Somewhere far away a door slammed and the world began to move and Tony Bright was reassuring her – ‘you’ll be all right,’ he was saying – and his hands were on her thigh, pulling up her skirt. She saw the top of her stocking and the whiteness of her bare flesh and wondered what he was going to do. She opened her legs, wanting to feel his touch. And then there was a needle, she could see that. A needle and a syringe. ‘You just need to relax,’ he whispered.
Nothing. Then dreams – the falling dream, the flying dream, dreams peopled by those she knew and by strangers. She heard herself speaking as though far away while their voices were close to – Véronique’s, Benoît’s, Clément’s. There was a taste, a smell, the flavour of garlic. Alan was there as well, wreathed in disapproval, as though the smell offended him. But she didn’t care what she did or what she said. He could watch if he wanted to, or not. It didn’t matter. Véronique stroked her body, from top to toe, every part of it, and then others did the same, and then no one at all and she was just there by herself with only strangers talking at her. And she was talking back at them, telling them things they didn’t want to hear, until the others came back, Benoît and Clément and even the young boy called Sam who was so clumsy and so devoted, spying on her all the time, watching whatever she did. And Tony Bright with his hand between her legs. But never Absolon. Where is Absolon? Her dream was without Absolon and she heard herself asking them, shouting at them – WHERE THE HELL IS ABSOLON? – and getting no answer.
Sometimes the various dreams coalesced into a single thing, a gathering of doctors muttering at her side. One of the doctors was Tony Bright, she knew that. White-gowned and rubber-gloved, they inserted tubes into her body. Perhaps they fed her through tubes. Perhaps they emptied her body and her mind through tubes. Tubes and needles. And all the while they asked her questions that she had no answers to, the same questions she asked them which all come down to a single question: where is Absolon? And she didn’t know what to answer them because she didn’t know, she just didn’t know.
When the doctors went away others crowded in. Her parents looking concerned, her mother stroking her brow. Ned was there laughing at her, and Fawley playing Kriegspiel, his brows knitted with concentration, his hand reaching out to move one of his pieces, and the piece he picked up was her. He held her carefully, between thumb and forefinger, her own naked self, wriggling like a worm between his fingers.
Where is Absolon?
Time passed. How much, she couldn’t say. Time is a relative thing. Ned taught her that. It may be stretched and squashed like chewing gum, like space itself, like truth and lies, like fear. Fear spread out thin like the grey sand between the huts and the ranks of ragged women stretching out across the Appellplatz, or fear compressed into a moment of existence like the moment when the woman called Binz stamped on Véronique’s head, or that moment in the impasse, with two men standing there before her and the weapon in her hand. Shots rang out in her mind, echoing from the walls. For a moment one of them looked up at her, before she shot him once more, a single shot straight into his eye.
How much fear can you compress into one moment?
Then the fear had gone and she was turning cartwheels and laughing and people were telling her how amazing she was, until she was poised like a gymnast on the lip of the cliff preparing to jump, and when she jumped the world spun round her, turning over and over while the roar of engines sounded in her ears and she drifted down to the rocks below and hit grass with a thump and stood, wondering where she was, where everyone else was, what has happened or was still happening.
White
She woke to whiteness. Slowly her world assembled itself out of bits and pieces: a bare light bulb floating beneath a white ceiling. Walls of the same, even whiteness. A window, bright with light, but opaque. The mattress beneath her. The thin pillow beneath her head.
A cell.
She remembered Fresnes Prison, the grey of concrete.
She tried to remember other things, her dreams, how she had happened here; but the memories, vivid memories, darted away out of her mind’s grasp like coloured fish darting away from her hand at the very moment she tried to grasp them. Her head ached. Thirst, like fear, gripped her by the throat. Cautiously she sat up.
In the far corner of the room there was a basin. There were other things – a wooden wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a picture on the wall – but the basin was what she wanted. Carefully she moved her legs off the bed. She was wearing some kind of surgical gown, with short, loose sleeves. Looking down she noticed a sticking plaster across the crook of her arm, where the flesh was sore and slightly bruised. Beyond the foot of the bed was an aluminium drip stand and a metal cabinet. These clues assembled themselves into something other than a prison cell.
A hospital room.
Very slowly she stood up. The world wobbled and swayed for a few seconds but once it had settled down she crossed the room to the basin with the utmost care, turned the cold tap and bent to drink. Water was what she needed. Other things could wait; for the moment her thirst was the only thing that mattered.
When she had finished drinking she called out.
‘Hello?’
There was no response. Her voice sounded loud in the white room but there was no sound beyond the walls.
‘Hello!’
Louder this time, but still no movement, no sound beyond the walls of her cell.
She went back to the bed and sat for a while, letting her mind settle, letting the fear subside. Was she ill? Where were the doctors or the nurses? She tried to gather her thoughts, scattered as they were to the distant corners of
her mind. She remembered the museum. She remembered a pub. And meeting … Tony Bright. And then … not much else, except the dreams, confused dreams, people doing things, asking questions. Had she suffered some kind of crisis, a nervous breakdown, perhaps? Was that it? Another attack, like the one she had had before. A cerebral event, that was what the doctor had called it. A fugue.
‘Hello?’
Nothing.
Cautiously, she went to the door, took hold of the handle and turned it. The door opened. She stepped back, fear pumping behind her breastbone. Outside was nothing. Just an empty corridor. She left the door open, retreated to the bed and sat there, fearfully watching the gaping door and the segment of corridor – grey linoleum on the floor, white wall, a skirting board in which there was a single electric plug. No one came.
She scratched herself, scratched her head, picked at her nails.
No one came.
After a while she got up from the bed, went to the door and quietly closed it.
She felt safer like that, with the door closed. This room she knew, more or less. The world outside was a raging, fearful place. She went back to the basin where there was a mirror in which she could examine the pallid, dishevelled face of Marian Walcott, née Sutro. There were other possibilities – Anne-Marie Laroche, also Laurence Follette and Geneviève Marchal – but it was comforting to know that she was Marian Walcott, born Marian Sutro, married to Alan Walcott. As though she might have forgotten. She plucked at her hair to try and bring some kind of order to it. ‘Marian,’ she said out loud to herself. And then, to the rest of the room: ‘Hello?’ Louder this time but still no response.
Was there no one around, no nurse, no doctor, no attendant to come running?
Cautiously, she opened the wardrobe. Clothes, her clothes, hung there in the shadows like her own flayed skin; below them her shoes, with her handbag beside them; on the shelf above were her underclothes, carefully folded. She grabbed up the handbag, scrabbled through the chaos of things inside and picked out her watch. It signalled twenty-five past eleven. But which eleven?