The Diplomat's Wife

by Ridpath, Michael

  Kay had given me instructions to meet a new handler in London involving park benches in Regent’s Park, but I had no intention of following them, and Kay knew it. She said that the London branch of the Comintern was a shambles since all its controllers had been recalled to Moscow to be liquidated. I had continued to give Kay snippets of embassy gossip in Berlin, mostly relating to Britain’s pointless negotiations with Russia. We agreed it was best for the long-term health of both of us if Moscow continued to see me providing Kay with information, and Kay passing it on.

  Kay was in real danger of being recalled to Moscow and suffering Lothar’s fate. Since meeting Lothar in the Bois de Boulogne, I had been very aware of the danger to myself from the British secret service and even the French and German authorities. To them was now added the Comintern, or rather the NKVD, the very people for whom I was doing all this.

  After what I had learned about Hugh and Lothar, and following the signature of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, I was finished with spying for Russia. I knew it and Kay knew it, but neither of us said anything about it. War was coming, and with it, my time in Berlin would come to a natural end. What Kay would do, I didn’t know and we didn’t discuss.

  I was looking forward to returning to England for many reasons. It was only when I arrived in London that I realized which was the most pressing. To see Dick again.

  We had corresponded after his return, but only a few times, and our letters were friendly but more restrained than I would have liked. Dick had attempted to join the RAF but failed, due to some minor problem with his eyes. His next stop was the army, but he had received a summons from the new Ministry of Information, where a clique of his friends was gathering. He wrote to me that he was in two minds about accepting it. On the one hand, he wanted to fight for his country against the Nazis. On the other, he thought of himself as a pacifist who believed war was wrong. Fighting with words was a compromise. I could tell he wasn’t really happy about it, though.

  I read and reread his letters to me in Berlin, until I knew every word by heart. They were full of friendship and affection.

  By now I knew I wanted more.

  The day after we arrived at the house in Hill Street, I sent him a note asking him to telephone me. This he did. We arranged to have dinner the following week at Simpson’s in Piccadilly.

  I didn’t tell Roland.

  Dick seemed pleased to see me, and in good spirits all around. He described how he had passed my message on to the mysterious Mr Heaton-Smith at a pub in Pimlico. Heaton-Smith had been duly grateful, but we agreed it didn’t seem to have made a blind bit of difference to Britain’s diplomacy. It probably hadn’t been believed. After subtle probing on my part, Roland had revealed that the Foreign Office hadn’t received any warning as early as the end of June when Dick had met the MI6 officer. I wondered whether I should have told Roland myself; perhaps he could have found a way around the ambassador after all. But then Kurt had made me promise I wouldn’t, and, strangely, I trusted that German diplomat more than the British.

  Dick and I agreed that the Soviet Union had proved herself utterly untrustworthy.

  Dick regaled me with stories of the hapless Ministry of Information, which was based at the University of London in Bloomsbury. He mentioned a number of names I had heard of, writers whose books I had read or whom I had seen reviewed. But I could tell there was something wrong.

  ‘You would like to be fighting, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dick. ‘Maybe. I am jealous of all those other fellows who are putting on uniforms and square bashing. Oh, I know war isn’t glorious. But this time, we are truly fighting against evil. Or they are. I’m coming up with slogans about potatoes.’

  ‘Can you leave?’

  ‘Not right away. I’ll give it a couple of months and see.’

  Simpson’s was crowded, and the menu was still pretty good. We had both ordered partridge: it was shooting season in the fields and copses of the country’s estates, estates like Chaddington, even if it wasn’t in France. Yet.

  ‘It’s good to see you,’ Dick said.

  The time had come to say what I was going to say. I assumed lots of women, married women perhaps especially, would know exactly how to proposition a young man. I was sure that my mother, for example, was an expert at it. But if there were such things as ‘feminine wiles’, I didn’t have any.

  ‘Dick?’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you think we could find a hotel after dinner?’

  I had expected one of two reactions. A smile of happiness, perhaps a complicit good-humoured laugh, and then an equally good-humoured discussion of the practicalities. That’s what I had hoped for, and what over the previous week I had persuaded myself I was most likely to receive. But I also knew there was a chance of a kind, gentle but firm rejection. If that happened, I would accept it, and Dick and I would remain good friends.

  What I got was something quite different. A look combining shock and surprise. Dick’s mouth opened, and then he closed it again.

  I felt instantly humiliated. What had I been thinking? I had assumed that Dick would be a man of the world like all the other men of the world I knew, or at least like Roland.

  But Dick wasn’t a man of the world.

  ‘But I thought . . .’ he stammered. ‘I thought you had decided to stay with Roland. That’s what you told me in Berlin.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And I have. But . . . It seemed . . . Everyone else . . .’ I was floundering badly.

  ‘Oh, Emma. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s I who should be sorry.’

  ‘Emma, I’m engaged.’

  ‘Engaged? To be married? To whom?’ This was an eventuality that hadn’t occurred to me.

  ‘To Frances.’

  ‘Frances? American Frances? The one I introduced you to in Paris?’

  ‘That’s right. We’ve been writing to each other. She came over here for the summer to stay with an aunt.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I’m telling you now.’

  ‘But why not before?’

  ‘We only got engaged last week. It was either that or she was going to have to go back to Philadelphia.’

  ‘But . . . Oh! I’ve made such a chump of myself!’

  ‘No, you haven’t. I’m sorry if I have led you on.’

  ‘Oh, Dick! You have been a perfect gentleman – always. It’s me making an idiot of myself. I always make an idiot of myself.’

  ‘Here. Don’t worry about it. Have some more wine.’

  He reached for the bottle. But the humiliation was boiling up inside me. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t bottle it up. I couldn’t take back what I had said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dick. I have to leave.’

  * * *

  To my surprise, Roland was home when I got back. I had expected him to be at the Travellers.

  ‘You’re early,’ he said.

  I ignored him and rushed up to my room. It was my bedroom, the one I had used as a child whenever the family decamped to Hill Street. Roland was in my parents’ bedroom, alone.

  I slammed the door, threw myself on to my bed and wept.

  How could I have been so stupid! To throw myself at Dick like that. To give all those secrets to a foreign country, betraying my own. For someone who considered herself to be reasonably intelligent, I was a chump. A perfect chump.

  There was a knock on the bedroom door.

  I ignored it.

  Another knock.

  ‘Go away, Roland!’

  The door opened.

  ‘I said go away!’

  But he sat on the bed next to me. My face was buried in my pillow, but I could feel his weight.

  ‘Were you seeing a man?’ Roland said.

  I had simply told him I was having dinner with a friend. I hadn’t specified the sex. For the first time, it occurred to me that part of me had wanted to make Roland jealous. What was the point of that? Idiot!


  I nodded, my head moving up and down deep in the pillow.

  ‘And it didn’t go well?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Move over,’ he said, tapping my knees.

  I bunched them up, and he shifted to the end of my bed.

  I sat up. It was ridiculous. Me sitting at one end of my childhood bed, crying, and my husband at the other. My husband whom I hated.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

  But I looked up at him. Those deep, dark brown eyes were gazing at me with something that looked to me a lot like love.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Well, it’s true. And it’s a problem.’

  ‘Oh. Because I don’t love you,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Roland gazed at me steadily. ‘I think you do.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I loved you from the moment I saw you. Or pretty soon afterwards.’

  ‘You definitely are mad.’ But I was watching him closely, my chin on my raised knees.

  ‘Over the last five years, I have got to know you really well, and the more I see of you, and the more I know you, the more I love you.’

  Why is he doing this? I thought. Why is he going all out with his seduction technique? But I listened.

  ‘I love your enthusiasm for life, I love your intelligence, I love the way you think, I love your sense of humour, I love your kindness. And I love your eyes. Your smile. Your body.’

  ‘Don’t you say this to all your women?’

  ‘No, Emma. No, I don’t. Because I didn’t love any of them. Extraordinary as it may seem, you are the only woman I have ever loved. Sometimes I think you are the only woman I ever can love. Which, as I say, is a bit of a problem.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ I said. But then the obvious question flashed in my mind. ‘Even . . .?’

  Roland nodded. ‘Even her. Oh, I was infatuated with her. At the time I thought I loved her, but I didn’t really. I know that now. Because of you.’

  Golly, Roland was good at this stuff. I could feel myself slipping.

  I shored up my defences. ‘What about the other women?’

  ‘There haven’t been any other women.’

  I stayed silent.

  Roland looked away. Then he looked straight at me. ‘Not for two years. And not her. Not since you found out about us. Not her.’

  ‘And the other women? More than two years ago. Who were they?’

  ‘I paid for them. Like you suggested.’

  ‘And then you stopped?’

  ‘I stopped. I was ashamed. All those affairs with married women I had in my twenties. I don’t know what I was doing, what I was looking for. But I do know what I am looking for now. I wanted to win you back. And I knew it would take some time. But the time is now.’

  ‘You want me to take you back? But don’t we live together anyway? Isn’t that good enough?’

  ‘Not as man and wife. Yes, at first I wanted you to take me back. But now I realize what I want is for you to answer that question.’

  ‘What question?’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  I had forbidden myself from asking myself that question ever since Kay had told me that Roland was having an affair with my mother. But over the years I had grown used to Roland. He had been considerate. He had been respectful. He had been understanding. He had even been affectionate in as open a way as I would let him, which was not very open. He was reliable. I trusted him. Grudgingly, I admired him. He was always there. Despite myself, I loved our conversations.

  I remembered the flash of jealousy I had felt when that blonde German girl had stared at him.

  He was very good-looking.

  I remembered how he had sent my heart into palpitations when I had first met him. I remembered the ride up to Dartmoor, the way he had treated me so seriously. Later, I had assumed that was all for show. But I knew some of it, at least, was real.

  Now I was no longer spying for the Russians, there was no reason to remain with Roland. I could walk out and leave him tomorrow.

  Or I could stay.

  ‘Don’t ask me to forgive you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not asking you to forgive me. I hope you will one day, but I’m not asking you.’

  ‘Because I can never forgive you.’

  Roland swallowed. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But do you love me?’

  The dam was cracked. The dam of my justified suspicion and mistrust, which I had shored up over the last three years, broke.

  ‘Yes, Roland.’ I smiled. ‘Yes. I love you.’

  I said it not because he had sweet-talked me into saying it, but because I knew it was true, and I couldn’t hide it from myself any more, and I didn’t want to hide it from him.

  He leaned over and kissed me – gently at first.

  Then I grabbed him, and he was mine and I was his.

  Forty-Seven

  June 1979, West Berlin

  * * *

  ‘So, you and Grandpa got back together?’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ said Emma with a smile. ‘You were right. It’s important I told you about that. I know you liked him.’

  ‘I did. I was very fond of him.’

  ‘So was I,’ said Emma. ‘Oh, I don’t want to say it was all plain sailing, especially at first. I found it very hard to trust him; I had second thoughts a couple of weeks later and we parted for a bit before I had third thoughts and we got back together. I always found it hard to forgive him what he did with my mother. But I did love him.’ She smiled. ‘And he loved me. I know he did.’

  ‘But no more children?’

  ‘No. At first I didn’t want any more. It took me a while to believe that Roland would always be around. And then . . . Then it just didn’t happen.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘We had Caroline. The rest you know. Roland became a successful career diplomat and I was a dutiful diplomat’s wife. Roland was knighted; we retired to Cornwall; you and Mel came on the scene.’ She paused. ‘Roland died. And now I’m going to die.’

  Phil resisted the urge to contradict his grandmother. She was going to die. Soon.

  ‘One last thing you need to know about Roland,’ Emma said with a wicked smile. ‘The sex was good. Very good.’

  ‘Grams! Did I really need to know that?’ Phil protested.

  ‘Someone did. And like it or not, that someone is you. Now be off with you! But don’t tell Heike any of this – you promise?’

  ‘I promise.’

  * * *

  Phil knew, as soon as they sat down in the Turkish restaurant in Kreuzberg, that Heike wanted to sleep with him.

  It was the way she talked, the way her eyes flashed, the way she touched his hand unnecessarily. There was an enthusiasm about her, a determination, that she hadn’t displayed before.

  It made Phil nervous. Nervous that he would screw it up and put her off. Nervous that he wouldn’t put her off, and then screw it up.

  It also made him excited.

  She talked a lot, very fast, and Phil struggled to keep up with her German, but she was patient when he admitted defeat, repeating things slowly for his benefit. She was funny; he was funny, or at least she seemed to think so. They drank a bottle of Turkish red wine and then ordered another. The food was delicious – skewers of lamb on a stick, known as a kebap. Phil had never been to a Turkish restaurant before. Apparently there were loads of Turkish guest workers in West Berlin, and Kreuzberg was where many of them lived.

  ‘My grandmother was telling me about coming here before the war,’ Phil said. ‘She had a friend who lived around here somewhere. Above a printer’s shop.’

  ‘I’d have thought this would have been a bit scruffy for diplomats, even then,’ said Heike.

  ‘Oh, he
r friend wasn’t a diplomat.’

  ‘What was she?’

  Phil didn’t want to sound evasive, although remembering his promise to his grandmother, he didn’t want to say too much. ‘She was American. A student, I think. Not much money, at any rate. Grams had known her in Paris.’

  ‘Oh. Was that the woman you mentioned before? The one who asked your Oma to spy for the Russians?’

  Phil hesitated before answering. ‘It may be,’ he said, with an attempt at indifference. He had forgotten how much he had told Heike in Paris.

  ‘Your grandfather was a diplomat in the British Embassy here?’

  ‘Yes. Just for a year. Until war broke out.’

  ‘It must have been wild then. All those Nazis.’ Heike shuddered. ‘Not our greatest moment.’

  ‘No.’ But Phil didn’t want to refight the war with Heike. ‘West Germany seems to me to have done an excellent job of becoming a democracy.’

  ‘I suppose we have,’ said Heike. ‘But I sometimes wish we had chosen a more socialist path. You said your grandmother actually spied for the Russians?’

  Phil remembered he had said that. He couldn’t deny it now, no matter what he had promised Emma.

  ‘That’s what she told me.’

  ‘She can’t have been happy living here with the Nazis?’

  ‘No. I don’t think many British people were then. Apart from the ambassador at the time. He liked them, apparently.’

  ‘You know, my grandfather was killed by the Nazis? In Dachau in 1938.’

  ‘I didn’t realize you were Jewish?’ Phil said.

  ‘It wasn’t only the Jews who died in the concentration camps,’ said Heike. ‘My grandfather was a member of the KPD, the German Communist Party. The Nazis locked him up. He was only forty when he died. They said he fell over and hit his head, but of course nobody believes that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘He was a very brave man; I would have liked to have met him.’ Heike sighed. ‘I wonder if I had been alive then whether I would have looked to the Soviet Union for support against Hitler. Like your grandmother did. I like to think I would. I can’t believe I wouldn’t have seen through him.’