by Joseph Hone
But it was the old man who moved suddenly, the chair grating on the wood, turning back quickly into the lodge.
‘No! Don’t do that,’ the woman called after him in English. ‘It’s too late.’ Then she turned to me. ‘You have come at an awkward time.’ She spoke very pleasantly, like a fine hostess from the shires, the English pure as glass even after so many years exile, with just a hint of Scots in it. ‘It’s my daughter Stanka’s birthday you see.’ She leant back in her chair now and took the kerchief from her head – relaxing, twisting her neck about so that her still dark hair dropped round her shoulders. And now she looked quite a different woman suddenly – younger, the face much more finely cut, something chiselled about it now as it became defined by the frame of hair; no longer the babushka – apart from the body beneath which had swelled out over the years on too much good ham and pork sausage.
‘So,’ she went on. ‘You see: you must sit down and not disturb things for the moment. The others don’t speak much English – we will say you are old friends. From London. Sit down and enjoy yourself. You must be tired? You’ve walked all the way from the hotel. No?’
‘Yes,’ I said. The old man had come back now and I had my eye on him. I don’t know what he’d gone away for – a gun, I supposed. But the woman spoke to him in English then. ‘These are our old friends – you remember? The Phillips. They will join us. We will talk later.’ The man seemed to accept this meekly.
She addressed the rest of the family then, in her own tongue, and happy introductions were made all round – to the two boys, the woman in the print blouse and her nervous husband – and to Stanka, bronzed and match-like in her bikini, with fine almond-shaped eyes, whose birthday it was.
Drinks were offered liberally then and I needed it – the full dark red wine in a chunky glass – for it was an eerie situation, sharing this warm birthday feast with the family, pretending to be old friends for the sake of decorum, but with all the huge questions now hanging impatiently in the air about us. And though the family were friendly, asking polite questions in halting English, they were none of them fools and everyone sensed the strange pressures, keeping so many lids on that it couldn’t last.
And it didn’t – and I suppose the fine local wine loosened tongues, without food which we barely picked at, so that at the end of the meal, when the boys had gone to play with their father, the mother had left to tend her baby, and Stanka had gone inside, the five of us remaining sat back and started to talk.
9
It was the big generous-looking woman at the end of the table who took charge – offering us a cherry liqueur with our coffee, smiling at us all, particularly at Madeleine who sat now immediately across the table from her.
‘Mrs Phillips.’ She raised her glass. ‘In a situation like this you either laugh or cry, don’t you think? Forgive me –’ She smiled broadly, ‘I think it better to laugh.’
Madeleine didn’t entirely respond to this toast, though she tried. ‘So you are Eleanor?’ she asked, but not incredulously; more a polite enquiry, confirming an expected thing.
‘I am Eleanor – and this is Zlatko. You are right.’ She waved a hand over towards the old man. ‘My husband.’ He was sitting rather hunched up, his eyes lowered over his coffee, saying nothing. He seemed, for the moment, to be entirely in the thrall of his wife. But I didn’t trust him. I was sure he’d gone back into the lodge for a gun – or a knife.
‘You have been very clever finding us,’ Eleanor went on. ‘After all these years. Why did you bother?’ Her voice fell. ‘We have been very happy.’ She looked around at the terrace, at the afternoon sun filtering through the trees beyond, where the boys were throwing a frisbee with their father. The charcoal embers smoked very slightly. There was a sense of peace, for the moment, far more powerful than the air of strife we had brought with us.
‘I’m sorry – we were looking for Lindsay,’ Madeleine said. ‘He’s disappeared. Three months ago.’ Madeleine’s eyes were glassy with trapped emotion. She was not so calm at heart. ‘We thought – he might be here.’ She looked round vacantly at the heavy canopy of trees.
‘Disappeared? Like me.’ Eleanor shook her head good-naturedly, like a nanny sharing notes over a recalcitrant charge. ‘There’s only us, I’m afraid. He’s not come here. I’d be the last person he’d want to see in any case. But how did you find us?’
‘A grave,’ I said. ‘We found an empty grave up at Mirogoj.’
‘I told you, Zlatko.’ She looked over at the little man reproachfully. ‘So the police must know too.’ And she looked around again, peering through the beech trees towards the thick ring of fir beyond. ‘They’re not here alone,’ she went on.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We are not alone. The police – they know too. At least, about the empty grave.’
‘Why on earth did you do that?’ Rachel spoke suddenly, with childish exaggeration, looking at Eleanor in amazement.
Eleanor turned to her slowly. ‘You are Lindsay’s good daughter. I can see it, so well. Do you really want to know?’
Rachel didn’t reply. It seemed, indeed, from her tense face, that she’d been struck dumb.
‘You were dead – under the tram opposite the Palace Hotel,’ I said, breaking the silence.
‘Ah, yes. That too.’
‘And a memorial – a window in the church outside Dunkeld.’
‘Is there?’ Eleanor asked lightly. ‘That would be Susan, wouldn’t it? She was very formal, of course. Little memorials – very much her. She was like that.’
‘She still is. She’s still alive, you know,’ I said.
‘I didn’t. You see I – Zlatko and I – have had no connection, obviously.’
‘But how could you have cut yourself off like this – from all your own family, for forty years. With such – such …’ Madeleine searched for a word. ‘Telling such fibs,’ she finally said, the nursery word starkly inappropriate.
The table indeed had become like some nightmare version of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, in which there were so many crossed wires, and so much time now all to be re-accounted for that it was difficult to know where to begin on this necessary rearrangement of old life and memory. It was as if the natural order of the world had been entirely contradicted – and we had come to a secret place in the woods where the dead lived again and all temporal order was completely confounded.
Eleanor sipped her coffee. She seemed completely at ease in her re-incarnation for all of us. Indeed, she seemed to find it rather an original joke, a touch of mischief in her eyes, I thought – and I could see the prankster in her then, the funny vital woman she must have been years before, embarrassing her hosts in Vienna – the darling girl of the diplomatic circle in that city before the war, pretending to be a Von Karlinberg. But why the ruse of the empty grave? That seemed just beyond a joke.
‘Cut myself off?’ she said brightly. ‘Yes, I did. I couldn’t stand the family pretence any more: the Phillips family and mine. Lindsay and Susan. The social pretence – and the worse lies behind that.’ She looked round at us efficiently. ‘The thirties at home weren’t just a political cheat, you know – MacDonald and Chamberlain pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. It was a family betrayal first of all – and families like ours particularly: such a lot of self-righteous, comfy, Christian do-gooders – pretending they didn’t know what was happening, keeping out of things, ‘It’s not our affair” – what frauds they were! Yet they were the one sort of people – rich, influential – who could have helped.’
Eleanor became vehement now, but in a perfectly controlled manner. She wasn’t acting anything, merely intent on offering us, as clearly as she could, a whole part of her old life, a memorial revisited.
‘You see, at heart they knew, these families – knew political right from wrong. Yet they didn’t just let Chamberlain and all the other wishy-washy cowards take over – they actually encouraged them! Yes, I cut myself off – though in a way I had no choice: Lindsay wanted rid of me, for other
reasons.’
‘We met an old friend of Lindsay’s in Brussels,’ I said, ‘Ivo Kovačič: he thought Lindsay had pushed you under that tram –’
‘Oh, Ivo …’ Eleanor beamed. ‘He was always so strong and forthright. He’s still alive? I’m glad. But he had no head for subtleties. He was gullible.’
‘Everyone seems to have been pretty gullible – except you and Zlatko. And Lindsay, I suppose. It seems a funny trick,’ I said. ‘Oh, and Willis Parker,’ I added suddenly remembering the little diplomat. ‘He knew about it all, as well. He must have done – which is why they got rid of him.’
‘Willis?’ Eleanor said, with alarm. ‘They killed him?’
‘Yes. And they tried to do the same for me several times, too – anyone who was likely to know. We were dangerous. But why? What was so vital that we might have found out about Lindsay?’
‘What I found out – here in Zagreb forty years ago, in the spring of 1937.’
‘That Lindsay was a double agent – really working for Moscow?’
‘That he wasn’t,’ Eleanor said triumphantly. Her husband interrupted her now – talking bitterly, excitedly in Serbo-Croat – seeming to condemn her. But she took little notice of him, saying in English, ‘They know, Zlatko! They know about us already. The Milicija are somewhere out there – in the trees, watching us now probably. They’d never have allowed the Phillipses to come here on their own. So what’s the point?’ She turned to Madeleine then. ‘And in any case I’m so tired of lies, you see? It’s nearly fifty years now – my lies. And Lindsay’s. While there’s time,’ she glanced out again into the trees. ‘You ought to know now. No one else will ever tell you –’
‘It’s not your business,’ Zlatko interrupted angrily.
‘Whose then?’ she said equally sharply. ‘My life is my business – and years of it was with Lindsay. And it was he, after all, who originally encouraged me – before you came. It was Lindsay who first persuaded me: about Moscow, all that world – before I found out about him.’
‘Found out what?’ I asked. There was silence again in the clearing. The boys had gone down to the lake again and the two women were somewhere in the sun, sitting on the other side of the lodge. ‘Found out that he wasn’t with Moscow?’
‘No. Lindsay was something much more dangerous from their point of view. Like our old friend Philby – there were very few of them – he’d been specially created by the British – a long time before, at Oxford – as a Trojan horse: to pretend he was a communist – which he did very well, so well that while I was up at College with him, he persuaded me to take on the same cause. And of course, just as the British intended, he was duly spotted and recruited by the Soviets – by that Professor friend of his in London. They told him to give himself suitable right-wing cover, while he served his apprenticeship with them. And he did that very well, too: the Foreign Office took him on at once – though God knows I didn’t understand why he changed his views at the time. It was the start of our rows. The fact is – I think Lindsay was totally loyal to his British masters from the very start – or at least to the very few people in British Intelligence who knew he was this Trojan horse.’
The picture at last began to make sense. Of course, I thought, John Wellcome had been the initial recruiter on the British side, at Merton and in his father’s little cottage at Bow Brickhill with the model railways – and it had been David Marcus, latterly, who probably alone, with Wellcome and Willis Parker, knew of Lindsay’s real stance and had thus been so determined to preserve the secret: Lindsay, whom the KGB had thought to be their most reliable man, at the heart of British Intelligence, had in fact been nothing of the sort: it was the KGB he must have so thoroughly betrayed over the years – a worm near the centre of their apparatus. Or had he fooled them? There was a flaw in this – for of course one other person had apparently known of the ploy: Eleanor herself.
‘But you – you knew this too?’ I asked her.
‘Yes. I came to suspect it. Then I knew it. You see, we were both with Moscow by then – after we were married. And there were things he wouldn’t tell them – political matters in the Embassy in Vienna, and here at the consulate in Zagreb. I knew it in the end – you do when you are close, that close, as I was – to someone. Which is why he tried to kill me. And of course he thought he had killed me: Ivo was right. He did push me under that tram. But I survived. An injury, that’s all – but it was a very dead-looking body in the nursing home apparently.’ She smiled, looking over at Zlatko. ‘My friends – we managed to fake it all very well, didn’t we?’
‘You must not say such things,’ he said curtly.
‘Yes, yes – I must.’
I looked at Zlatko. ‘Your brother Josip – of course, he must have helped arrange all that, with his shiny coffins. The police are holding him in Zagreb now.’
‘You see?’ Eleanor turned to her husband. ‘I told you. It’s all too late. They’ve even got Josip.’
‘And another man – who really is dead. Someone called Pottinger, who is certainly with the KGB. So you must all be associated with Moscow – you and Zlatko and Josip. You’ve been together – for years.’
Eleanor looked at me confidently. ‘Can they prove it?’
‘I don’t know. But you’ve told us.’
‘Since it’s a family matter as well – all this – I wanted you to know the truth, that’s all. Wasn’t that why you came here? – before the police: to find out the real truth?’
‘Yes, I – we wanted –’ I looked at Rachel and Madeleine for help. But both of them seemed frozen in the heat – Rachel staring intently at Eleanor with her arms wrapped across her tightly – each of them right round her ribs, like the sleeves of a straitjacket.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We wanted to talk to you first.’
‘About Lindsay and me?’ I nodded. ‘Well, he’s not here. As I said, I’m the last person he’d want to see, I think. You see – on a purely personal level, we rather fell out.’
She looked at us all inquisitively – staring, as it were, into a huge silence. ‘Forgive me,’ she went on in a lower but still decisive voice. ‘I can see you don’t know – Susan never told you. But now that you’ve found me, there’s really no point in lying any more. Patrick wasn’t my child. He was Susan’s, with Lindsay. How is he? Where is he?’
Madeleine’s face had become quite expressionless. She sat there in the hot silence – without stirring, eyes wide open, unblinking, like a woman about to sleep-walk. Rachel appeared to take no notice of this news whatsoever, looking with boredom out into the woods. But I felt it was the assumed uninterest of a clever child or someone deranged – plotting mischief or revenge.
‘Patrick died,’ I said, breaking the silence. ‘Just after the war. An illness.’
Eleanor was genuinely moved. ‘Oh – I am so sorry.’
‘I find all this an unlikely story,’ Madeleine spoke calmly.
‘Why should I lie?’ Eleanor asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I butted in. ‘But on the other hand why have you told us all this about you and Lindsay in any case, throwing over a lifetime’s commitment? That doesn’t make much sense. You could go back to Moscow. A dacha in the Moscow woods.’
‘It’s too late and I’m too old. This is my world. Here. My home is here. And my family. I’m too old. I’ve done my stuff.’
‘But Lindsay? From what you say he never managed to do his stuff at all, did he? Though he must have thought he had – believing you were dead. But you weren’t – and you told Mos cow about him, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Eleanor admitted, looking unhappy for the first time. ‘I had to. They neutralised him, carried him. At least I assume they did.’
‘So Moscow fed him a lot of nonsense for more than forty years. What a waste of a life – trotting between the KGB and SIS all those years with equally useless information.’
It was sad to think of abilities so stupidly wasted: almost a lifetime down the drain. Yet I wasn’t really su
rprised; the whole business, I’d known for years, was a mug’s game from start to finish. I suppose I was surprised, simply, by someone of Lindsay’s calibre involved in such a charade – a nonsense that wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been a stranger. But he wasn’t. He was someone I’d known very well – a sane, reasonable, loyal man, as I’d kept telling myself. And yet now, I saw, it was exactly these qualities which were in question, for what sane, loyal person could have behaved in this way – putting away his wife, with a child by another woman, her sister? Here was madness, not sanity – the acts of someone else altogether.
‘So now you know,’ Eleanor said, a note of tiredness in her voice, as she fanned herself with a napkin in the drowsy afternoon heat. But we were all still awake. ‘You know now – and they are out there, I suppose, waiting for us.’ She turned and looked at me.
‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘I feel I don’t know. It all sounds so unlike the man I knew.’
‘Who knows – the person we know? Not even that person himself. And he’s someone different for each of us. That’s not strange. Lindsay – he was a lot of other men, even for me, who lived with him. So how do you expect to “know” him?’ She leant towards me intently, as if with some vital secret. ‘But you mustn’t think it was all a betrayal. Only at the end. There were lots of other times.’
‘Yes, I know. I found your book – your “Comrade’s Diary” by Maria Von Karlinberg. “The snow wedding” … Before Christmas that year, at Dunkeld, when the champagne was too cold. I spoke to your sister.’
Eleanor nodded her head as I spoke, agreeing with me happily, wordlessly. ‘But of course! You’ve seen already. So you mustn’t take away the impression of lost lives entirely. We had two lives – and one of them was marvellous, as fine as you could wish for. But I couldn’t compromise, settle for less. While Lindsay so doubted himself at heart. He always did – telling little lies about things. And about the big things – like Patrick. A wonderful man – but something of the coward there, too – like so many wonderful men.’