by Simon Mawer
Then she kissed me, once on each cheek – ‘I’ll be in touch sometime, Sam’ – and walked away to where the foot passengers were boarding.
Clearing up
After she had boarded, I went ahead with the final part of her plan. First, I drove back to the cottage and cleared up. It didn’t take much time. The impression she had made on the place was minimal. Then I drove on to Hastings, where I parked the car in the station car park. I took the first train back to London, crossed the city by Tube to Liverpool Street station and got the train back to Cambridge. At lunchtime I phoned the language school to tell them I had been sick on Friday but was getting better and expected to be in on Monday. Like some kind of petty criminal, I’d covered my traces, even, I confess it now, wiping the steering wheel and gear stick of the car to make sure I hadn’t left any fingerprints. The key I dropped into the River Cam off St John’s bridge. Maybe it’s still there now, buried in the slime at the bottom of the river, rusted beyond recognition. Or maybe the anaerobic world of the silt means that it hasn’t rusted and instead it’s preserved, mint bright and ready for a car that no longer exists.
Time blurs the edges of memory. How much later was it that I got a phone call from my mother asking if I’d heard about Marian? Two days? Three?
No, I hadn’t heard. What about her?
‘Well, it seems she’s gone missing again.’
I managed a nice little show of incredulity. ‘Again?’
Apparently the story was in the News Chronicle. ‘The Disappearing Heroine’ was the headline. Her husband had reported her disappearance to the police and a few days later her car had been found in the station car park at Hastings, a quarter-light smashed. Presumably that was just a piece of petty crime because people said that the car had been there for some days and it was only when the damage was seen that anyone bothered to report it. There was no sign of the owner. The cliff paths to the east of the town had been searched and the coastguard had scoured the shoreline and the inshore area. No trace of the missing person had been found. ‘The cliff paths,’ my mother repeated in a hollow voice. ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’ And then she added: ‘Weren’t you down at the cottage then, with some of your friends?’
‘We didn’t see her, if that’s what you mean. It was bloody awful weather and we stayed indoors most of the time.’
‘Well, it’s all very sad. We’d thought that she’d got over it all, that she was doing so well, working, settled down with Alan. And then that unfortunate business that got into the papers. When she disappeared. And now it’s happened again.’
Later a journalist appeared at Wadham College and attempted to get an interview with her father, but Doctor Sutro was having none of it. Later there was another brief statement from her husband, who declared himself distraught at her disappearance and ever hopeful of her return. She had gone missing before and had turned up on those previous occasions. She had been, he was reported as saying, under a great deal of stress but he had not imagined, and could not imagine still, that she might do away with herself.
‘Do away with herself’. Suicide was like homosexuality in those days – illegal and unmentionable in polite society.
A week later, when there was still no sign of her, a longer article appeared in the same newspaper, rehashing the 1945 story of ‘Miss Anne-Marie S’ whom they could now reveal was, in fact, the missing woman, Marian Walcott, née Sutro. A heroine of the resistance, decorated by both the British and the French governments, but also, tragically, a prisoner of the Nazis. What had been her fate? No answer was forthcoming and with nothing more to feed it the little flame of journalistic interest soon died out. Marian Sutro had vanished for good this time, popularly thought to have thrown herself off the cliffs, victim, some suggested, of the frightful experiences she had undergone during the war. I have the cuttings still, brown, brittle bits of newsprint squirrelled away inside some ignored book about the SOE. There’s a photograph of her, probably taken for her identity card in 1943. Maybe it was the one used for Anne-Marie Laroche and Laurence Follette as well. But not Emily Jane Goodhew, known to her friends as Emmie.
Goodhew
I leaned forward and turned the recorder off. ‘That’s it, then.’
She looked at the little device lying on the table between us. ‘It’s all in there?’
‘All in there.’
‘What will they do with it?’
I slipped the recorder into my pocket. ‘I’ll get it transcribed and then it’ll be filed away in Registry.’
‘And forgotten about?’
‘Like so much else.’
She downed the last of her gin. I wondered whether to leave. I’d got everything they wanted but of course there was more, so much more. ‘What happened to Absolon?’ I asked.
‘Off the record?’
‘Off the record.’
‘We lived together for a dozen years or more. Herr und Frau, although we were never married. We set up a translation agency. Albrecht and Goodhew. It has a good, reliable ring to it, doesn’t it? Like a firm of solicitors. And then …’ She shrugged. ‘He grew old and resentful. Took to the booze. And my eye had already begun to wander. New people, new experiences, new pains and new consolations. I’ve never been very faithful to one man, have I, Sam? You know that. After Absolon I was married for a few years but it wasn’t a great success although it did get me Swiss citizenship. Which is ironical because Marian Sutro would have been entitled by birth whereas Emily Goodhew had to earn it the hard way. Absolon? He died over twenty years ago but at least he died in a Swiss hospital rather than a Soviet labour camp.’
‘And your first husband?’
‘Poor Alan. Do I sound very callous? I believe it took him years to get the courts to declare Marian Sutro dead but he managed eventually and settled down with a lady who made him a much better wife than I.’ She pushed herself to her feet and went over to the sideboard to pour herself another drink. ‘You know about my brother, I suppose?’
‘Of course.’
‘Poor Ned had a recurring nightmare that everything would end in a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the Americans. But all that happened was a squad of policemen burst in and caught him in bed with his boyfriend.’
‘It wouldn’t happen today.’
‘Neither would a nuclear war between East and West. So I suppose we’ve made some progress.’ Then she was silent, staring at the glass in her hand. ‘That was my only regret, leaving Ned behind.’
‘You never let him know where you’d gone?’
She shook her head. ‘Never break your cover.’
‘Not even when they throw your brother in prison for gross indecency?’
I could see the emotion in her face, even through the mask of age. ‘You don’t understand, do you, Sam? That’s why they betrayed him to the police, to flush me out.’
‘The Soviets, you mean?’
‘Whoever wanted Absolon enough.’
‘And who was that?’
She considered my question thoughtfully. ‘Tell me what happened to Fawley.’
‘I imagined you knew.’
‘Tell me.’
‘They made him Director General. It was a bit of a stop-gap. Like making an old man Pope in the hope he won’t last too long.’
Her smile made her look younger, gave a little glimpse of the woman I remembered. ‘I always saw him like that. A priest.’
‘He had just eighteen months in post, enough to earn him his K, and then he retired. Eastbourne or Brighton, somewhere like that. Grew prize dahlias and played golf.’
She nodded as if prize dahlias and golf were only to be expected. ‘What was his Christian name?’
‘Didn’t you know? These days it’s all first names. Reginald.’
That seemed to amuse her even more. She savoured the name. ‘Sir Reginald Fawley. I fancied him a Cedric but Reginald isn’t far off, is it? That’s where I’d look, if I were you.’
‘You believe that?’
‘If not him, who? Someone in your beloved organisation betrayed Absolon to the Soviets. He told no one on his side what he was doing and yet they knew, the Soviets knew.’
She watched me with that ironical curiosity. ‘I know a great deal about betrayal, Sam. I know its texture and I know its smell. It’s pungent, exhilarating. Like sex.’
I thought of her own smell that had so captivated me and repulsed my young sister. If it still existed, it was buried now beneath the kind of florid perfume old ladies wear. ‘It’s not enough to have a nose for these things. You’ve got to have evidence. A paper trail.’
‘What about Bright?’ she said. ‘What about him?’
I shrugged. ‘There’s virtually nothing on the record. A certain Anton Heiter worked in the British country section of the Stasi for a number of years. That might have been him.’
Perfect teeth, courtesy of some expert and expensive Swiss dentist, punctuated her laughter. ‘Heiter, Bright. Surely he’d have done better with a cover name than that.’ She went back to the sideboard. I thought she was going to insist I have another drink and listen to her theories about a mole in the upper echelons of the Security Service but instead she opened a drawer, took out a heap of typescript and handed it to me. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I thought you might like to read it. It’s my story. Oh, not the postwar mess. What happened during the war. When I was a heroine,’ she added with bitter irony. ‘Perhaps you can do something with it, Sam. It’s yours if you want to take it. A gift.’
I glanced at the title – An Agent’s Life in France – and the first few lines:
His name was Potter, which seemed unlikely to me at the time because it sounded false, like Smith or Jones – the kind of name you’d choose as a nom de guerre if you hadn’t got much imagination. He had a querulous, fluting voice and a distant manner, as though perhaps he had already made up his mind that I was not really suitable for his requirements but he would see me anyway out of politeness.
‘I’m sure it will be fascinating,’ I said, getting up from my chair.
‘At least it’s true.’
‘Unlike what you’ve just been telling me?’
Her laughter showed those even, white teeth to perfection – as much a lie as anything else about her. ‘The strange thing is, it all meant so much at the time, didn’t it – the Cold War, the Bomb, spies, traitors, all that kind of thing. And now? It’s all irrelevant – just a dusty piece of history.’
We talked a bit more, that awkward kind of conversation when both of you know that this will be the very last time you’ll ever meet, and one of you at least was in love with the other. ‘Mon cher Sam,’ she said as we kissed farewell at the front door. ‘T’as des regrets?’
‘No,’ I assured her. ‘None at all.’
‘Then that’s fine.’
‘What about you?’
‘Me?’ She laughed dismissively, a throaty, knowing laugh. Apparently the question wasn’t worth answering.
I walked towards the car. When I looked back, for a moment, just a moment – a trick of the light or something – she looked like the Marian Sutro I remembered. Then the illusion had gone and she was just an old lady standing unsteadily at the door of her apartment, holding up an arthritic hand in salute.
About the Author
Simon Mawer was born in England in 1948 and spent his childhood moving backwards and forwards from England to Malta and Cyprus. He has lived in Italy for over thirty years, teaching at an international school in Rome. He is the author of two works of non-fiction and nine other novels, including Mendel’s Dwarf, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize; The Fall, which won the Boardman Tasker Prize; A Jealous God; The Bitter Cross; The Gospel of Judas; and The Glass Room, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009.