by Simon Mawer
‘I do wish you wouldn’t use that language,’ she said.
He laughed, that acid, malicious laugh. ‘Poor Squirrel. Always trying to pretend.’
In the file entitled ‘Tightrope’ there’s almost nothing about those days. Just a brief account of her abduction and interrogation by ‘agents unknown, probably of the MGB’ and then a final note that says simply, ‘SWALLOW terminated’. It’s signed ‘Fawley’.
And so the Friday morning came, the day when we had scheduled our meeting, our little passade on the Sussex coast. It was one of those damp, chill days that England seems able to conjure up at any time of the year. The early train from Cambridge was full of commuters exuding a faint smell of damp cloth and stale armpits. I found a window seat where I could bury myself in an early collection of Akhmatova’s poems and fancy that Marian was to me as Anna Akhmatova had been to her several lovers, a figure of tragedy, and triumph against the odds.
‘What’s that, then?’ my neighbour asked, peering at the Cyrillic script.
‘Russian,’ I told him.
He looked at me with curiosity. ‘You a Commie, then?’
‘Was Bulgakov?’ I responded. ‘Is Pasternak?’ He wouldn’t have known either name but at least they shut him up.
From Liverpool Street the Underground trains were crowded as far as Embankment and Westminster but then most people got off and I was almost on my own until South Kensington. I walked through quiet, domestic streets as far as the block of flats where Marian lived. The building had something of the air of an ocean liner about it, of decks and railings and panoramic windows. The main doors even had circular lights, giving an impression of portholes. Memories of my last visit were rife as I climbed the travertine stairs but when she opened the door to her flat and hurried me in there was no laughter or excitement in her expression, nothing to hint at what had happened between us the last time I had been here. ‘Did you see them?’ she asked. ‘Did you see them?’
‘See whom?’
‘I’ll show you.’ She took me to the sitting room, keeping back from the window, even instructing me to climb up on the sofa so that we could get a better angle of view down into the street. There was a car on the far pavement with the vague silhouette of someone sitting in the driver’s seat. ‘From the Russian embassy, I think. But they may be from the Security Service. I’m not sure.’
‘They’re watching you?’
‘Don’t you believe me?’ There was a snap in her voice.
‘Well, I—’
‘I suppose if I said they were private detectives hired by my husband, it’d sound quite convincing, wouldn’t it?’
I more or less agreed that it would.
‘Well, they’re not. They’re from the Russian embassy and they’re watching me.’
I admit I toyed with the idea that she might be mad. Lovely, certainly, but crazy. Maybe her experiences during the war had unhinged her. Perhaps this was some kind of shellshock, a form of paranoia induced by whatever had happened to her at the hands of her captors, another manifestation of whatever it was that had assaulted her when she had disappeared for those missing days. I remembered how she had been after that visit to the cinema with my parents to see Odette. The sobbing, shaking, hysterical wreck crouched in our sitting room like an overgrown foetus. Was this, I wondered for an instant, the woman I had before me now?
Keeping back from the window we went through to the kitchen to talk. There was a focused urgency about her manner, about the way she looked at me and the way she explained the plan, the same plan that she had outlined at our meeting in the restaurant but now embellished with baroque detail. Despite my initial doubts, I was swept up in it, carried along, convinced of its sanity and, more, its necessity. As though it was just normal, the kind of thing that happens, the sort of thing you do any day of the week when you live in the clandestine world.
‘You’ll help me, won’t you, Sam?’
Of course I would.
‘So, let’s go.’
She gave me a kiss before she went, just a peck on each cheek. Deux bisous. And then she had closed the door behind her and, faintly through the heavy oak, I could hear her clipping down the stairs. I stood on the sofa at the back of the room to watch her cross the street, a bright, sharp figure in a red mackintosh and matching waterproof hat. Sure enough, exactly as she had predicted, the door of the waiting car opened and a man got out to follow her. He wore a fawn raincoat with the collar turned up and a trilby hat pulled down over his eyes. He followed her in the direction of the Fulham Road at which point I lost sight of the pair of them.
The car remained parked across the street. I waited. It was twenty minutes before it finally did what Marian had predicted and drove away.
As soon as it had gone I took my duffle bag and Marian’s suitcase and left the flat. The stairs led down below the ground floor to the basement garage where, easily enough, I found her car. It was a black two-and-a-half-litre Riley saloon, powerful enough for the Spitfire pilot, I guess. Certainly it was the most powerful car I had ever sat in, never mind driven. I fiddled with the keys for a moment before I got the thing going. The engine seemed to boom and roar in the subterranean confines of the garage but when I edged it out up the ramp into the aqueous daylight everything settled down to something more modest. Cautiously I turned left out of the entrance and headed towards the King’s Road. I didn’t really know my way around that part of London and certainly not by car, but her instructions had been clear enough and it wasn’t difficult to follow the King’s Road all the way to the river and Putney Bridge. As she had instructed me, I parked outside the Tube station and sat there watching people go in and out. It wouldn’t be hard to spot her in that red mackintosh.
I must have waited for an hour or more but somehow I never doubted that she would be there sooner or later, only that when she did emerge from the station it wasn’t the same figure that had left the flat earlier and I almost missed her. There was no red raincoat any longer, and no red hat. Instead she wore a thin black plastic mack and a nondescript headscarf. She ran across the road to the car, yanked open the door and slipped in beside me.
‘Let’s go!’ There was a light in her eyes and a breathlessness about her manner, as though she had been running, as though she had been making love. I pulled away from the curb and out onto the main road, across the bridge over the grey slick of the river. Within a few minutes we found the Brighton Road and were heading south out of the city, Marian alight with excitement, explaining how she had led her follower a dance through the Tube, losing him among the crowds at Piccadilly Circus and dumping her coat as she did so. ‘An old trick,’ she said. ‘I used it in Paris. Problem is, they’ll be worried that I spotted them and deliberately threw them off. That’s always the danger. If they do, then they’ll go into full panic mode and throw everything at finding me. What I’m hoping is that they’ll just head back to the flat and wait for me to return. You did remember to lock up after you?’
I remembered, of course I remembered. ‘Why on earth are they following you?’ I asked. She just smiled and shook her head. Her lips were blood red, her skin as pale as the moon and touched with grey shadows, and somehow she seemed more mysterious than ever.
‘So you’re not going to tell me what this is all about?’
She smiled faintly, smoking now, opening the quarter-light to blow smoke out. ‘You’ll have to trust me, Sam,’ she said. ‘You do trust me, don’t you?’
‘Of course I trust you.’
But I didn’t. I’m not a complete fool. Either she was mad, in which case what I was doing was dangerous, or she was sane, in which case what we were both doing was dangerous. There didn’t seem to be any other option. I thought about her disappearance a few weeks earlier. Was this another of those neurotic breakdowns, paranoia bursting out in her brain like an evil bloom?
‘Just keep an eye on any cars behind us,’ she said. ‘If you think we’re being followed, let me know.’
But there was no
one behind us and for the last part of the journey, across the Weald under leaden skies, the roads seemed deserted. When we stopped at a village shop to buy some stuff for supper I had a devil of a job to rouse anyone to serve me. But finally I succeeded and we continued, now equipped with a loaf of bread, some butter, a pack of Mr Wall’s best sausages and a rather muddy cabbage; no wine, but a couple of bottles of Ind Coope beer. And shortly we came to that point in the road where it runs along a high ridge and through the trees you can see the long, sleek cutting edge of the English Channel.
‘The sea, the sea!’ she exclaimed at the sight. I recalled her father saying the very same thing all those years ago when we all went down together. Perhaps she was quoting him as much as Xenophon. Perhaps there was something mocking in her tone. At the end of the high ground the road wound down and there was Furze Cottage waiting for us among the pines as it waited for any visitors, with a cool, damp indifference.
We parked round the back of the house – ‘right out of sight,’ she insisted – and hurried in through the drizzle. The first thing I did was light a fire in the sitting room with the kindling wood that was there. And the second thing was look to see if the jigsaw puzzle of Ophelia drowning was still in the old wooden trunk. It wasn’t. Perhaps Amanda had taken it home; or perhaps one of the cousins. There was a moment of awkwardness when I picked up our luggage – her suitcase and my duffle bag – and glanced at her for guidance. ‘Separate rooms, I think,’ she said. ‘That’d be better, wouldn’t it?’
I supposed it would, although I didn’t want it that way. If this were only a fling, I wanted as much of her as I could get. I wanted to sleep with her at my side and wake with her there in the morning. But I buried my disappointment, split the bags between neighbouring bedrooms, and went in search of sheets and blankets. We hung the sheets in the sitting room to air a bit and then made up the beds – a double bed for her, a single for me. There was something touchingly domestic about the scene. For a late lunch we made some sandwiches with a tin of Spam I found in the kitchen. Memories of lunch at the Tate. I’d turned the ancient radio on and we listened to the news. I half wondered if her absence would have been noticed and whether there would be one of those SOS messages one used to hear. But there was nothing more than the usual litany of bad news – a strike here, a calamity there, tension in Berlin, bloodshed in Indochina.
In the evening, like a pair of undergraduates in digs, we cooked up the sausages and cabbage, added a tin of beans that I discovered in the larder, opened the beer and ate our early supper in front of the fire. Afterwards I found a half bottle of whisky in a cupboard and we drank while sitting on the sofa. Outside, it rained. Inside, the firelight touched her with red and gold. It felt more like midwinter than summer, the kind of time you tell stories to children, and in recall that strange evening seems to last for ever, flickering in memory as it was lit at the time by the fire. An uncertain and deceptive illumination. In firelight features are meant to be softened, complexions flattered, age brushed away. But Marian looked older, much older. Her eyes seemed hollow, her cheeks sunken. Only her scent was unchanged, that blend of musk and earth with, underlying it all, something mordant that my sister had so disliked. I wanted to make love to her; she wanted only to talk. And so it was that she told me her story – not the recent stuff but what had happened during the war, which was half a lifetime for me but almost nothing for her. Curled up on the sofa and wrapped in a rug, we drank whisky and slipped into a strange state between sleeping and waking while she talked of things that seemed credible and things that I doubted, of Paris in the occupation and her killing two men, shooting them like something out of a cowboy film. She talked of betrayal, of the hard, damp cave of a prison cell and the slow, grinding death of the concentration camp. She talked of running through a forest with two other women, women she never saw again, whose names she never knew. Blurred with alcohol, she was incontinent with talk, spilling out things I had never imagined hearing and would never hear again. Her mood was sombre, as though this were a eulogy for someone who had recently died. ‘I believed, you see, Sam? It was easy to believe in those days when the issues were black and white. Now we only have shades of grey. But then I believed.’ And at the end she warned me, ‘Whatever you do, Sam, don’t get involved.’
I wasn’t receptive to the older person’s advice for the young but I’d have taken anything from her. ‘Involved in what?’
‘Your Russian course is pretty obvious, isn’t it? You may talk about Pushkin and Tolstoy. Or even your poet lady – what’s she called?’
‘Akhmatova.’
‘But tomorrow they’ll be indoctrinating you into the secrets and rituals of their nasty little world. Just don’t get involved, Sam.’
But I confess I found the idea rather exciting. The young man’s easy dismissal of an elder’s advice. ‘Are you still involved?’ I asked and she looked at me thoughtfully, her head on one side, her mouth twisted into a wry little smile.
‘Up to my neck,’ she said. ‘And now I’m running away from them. First thing tomorrow, I’m going.’
‘Going?’
‘And you’re going to help me. You’ll do that, won’t you, Sam?’ Her tone was pleading. She needed help, she explained, someone she could trust not to say anything. Was I that person? All I had to do was drive her to Folkestone to catch the early morning ferry and then get rid of the car. She was going to France and she had no idea when she was coming back. She was sorry, so sorry not to have told me this earlier but it was need-to-know, wasn’t it? I might have let something slip, to my mother or someone. You never knew, that was the problem, you never knew whom you could trust and who might betray you. ‘During the war I was betrayed and I’m still uncertain who it was. Can you believe that? We never really found out. Anyway, I’m relying on you not to betray me. Will you do that?’
‘Of course I won’t betray you.’
‘And am I forgiven for misleading you? You thought we were going away for a dirty weekend together, didn’t you? And here I am running off without you.’
Of course she was forgiven. I had no claim on her whatsoever. But what about her husband, the Spitfire pilot who had never shot down a German?
A little shrug of indifference beneath the blanket. She was beyond understanding what damage she might do to others, beyond caring about anything else except what she had planned.
Did I believe the story she told me? I really don’t know. It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time – that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind. Without it we’d have no war and no religion and precious little else that separates us from the other species. So I believed Marian Sutro and knew she was lying; thought she was sane and assumed she was deranged; trusted her and knew she would betray me in an instant; but I loved her and there was no negative counterpart to that. My love was total and desirous of nothing more than her presence. I suppose you could despise her for taking advantage of me but I can assure you that the possibility never crossed my mind. She wanted my help and I gave it unconditionally. I had never done such a thing before and certainly never since.
*
Dawn leached into the room like the insidious creep of floodwater, turning the depth and mystery of firelight into a cold, damp two-dimensional reality. We pulled apart and she went and washed while I made coffee. We’d found the coffee in a tin in the kitchen but it dated from the last time the house had been used and was stale. ‘It’ll do,’ she said. She was packed now, standing with her suitcase like someone on the platform of a railway station snatching a hot drink before the train comes in. ‘Let’s go,’ she said as she put her mug down.
The drive took an hour, a flatland journey across Pett Level, through the narrow lanes of Rye, past the towering Chain Home masts and across Romney Marsh. Folkestone lay beneath grey overcast, besieged by crying gulls and undermined by marine engines that rumbled almost beneath the level of human hearing. There was spray in the air and that
pearly seaside light that looks as though it has been rinsed through chalk. I parked the car near the harbour station and retrieved her suitcase from the boot.
She handed me money. ‘Get me an open return.’
Beside the ticket office there was a newspaper stand from which the Prime Minister frowned at the nation in an awful simulacrum of the manner in which he had conducted the war. But there was no such war now and he looked like nothing more than an old and wasted bull put out to grass. Behind the counter in the ticket office they were talking about films.
‘He could kiss me like that on the beach any day,’ one said.
‘Not here, he couldn’t. It’d be shingle, not sand and bloody cold with it,’ said the other. She was reluctant to bother with my request for an open return to Boulogne, as though discussing Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr was her primary job and selling tickets was what she did in the moments in between, but eventually I persuaded her to take my money. When I emerged clutching the ticket, the boat train from London was edging slowly across the viaduct into the station. There was a discharge of steam into the dank air, a squealing of iron against iron, the banging of carriage doors as people climbed down onto the platform.
Marian was standing by the car with a headscarf on and her coat wrapped around her. Without make-up she looked like a refugee, one of the hundreds of thousands that haunted the European mainland for so many years in the aftermath of war. She turned and cupped her hands to light a cigarette. ‘You know how they caught me in France?’ she said. ‘I was waiting on a platform and someone called out my name. My real name, not my cover name. “Marian?” she called out. “Marian Sutro?” And I looked round.’ She made a little sound that might have been a laugh, might have been no more than a small cry of misery. Smoke made a little funeral pall around her mouth. ‘Now I don’t even know what my name is.’