Evelyn enjoyed her company. Julia was also a reader and liked talking about books and plays, though she wasn’t pretentious about it as some of the students at Oxford had been. There was a meandering quality to her mind, like a kite cut free from its string; it was hard to keep up with her. She was learning about trade unions, orchids (“for Hugh”), and she had attended a few lectures at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in Gordon Square—curious about how other people lived, she said.
“So you feel more settled now you’re back in London?” Evelyn asked when the empty serving stand had been collected.
“Yes, I suppose I do. More settled than before, in any case.” Julia smiled. “Problem is, I’ve never been much good at being told what to do. That’s why school wasn’t for me. I don’t like rules. Unbridled and lawless, that’s what my parents always said. Practically a barbarian. Must have Viking blood somewhere in there. Have I ever told you my father’s pet name for me? Foxling. He gave it to me when I was a girl.” She tapped her canine tooth, which protruded fang-like from her mouth. “He says as soon as he clapped eyes on these gnashers he was convinced I’d been swapped by my mother and the vixen of the den. Probably explains why he’s never much liked me.”
She stared moodily at her empty glass, while a man at the piano started playing Debussy. Then she looked up.
“What about you? What do your family call you?”
“Me?” Evelyn felt herself smile. “I don’t really have a pet name, which I rather regret now. It softens you, I think. Gives a sense of intimacy.”
“Or the veneer of one.” Julia tilted her dark head. “Anyway, I think Evelyn suits you. It’s grown-up. I’ve always thought some people keep the shape of their face from childhood, and then one can chart a pathway through their life . . . But you’re not like that. In fact, I’m not sure I can imagine you as a very small child, all impressionable and malleable. It’s like you arrived fully formed.”
She turned to watch the pianist, something almost wistful in her expression, while Evelyn brought out her cigarette case, her hand not quite steady as she struck the match against the box. Julia couldn’t have known how she had touched upon the truth of her: that at times Evelyn felt hollowed out, as if there was nothing beneath her shiny exterior at all.
* * *
Afterward, Julia offered to walk with her to Grosvenor Square, where Evelyn was to deliver a file to the American embassy. It was already getting dark as they headed up South Audley Street, a few stray stars appearing low in the sky.
“You’re not much alike, you and Sally,” Julia said after a while, pulling her coat tighter around her waist. They cut through the Mount Street Gardens behind the chapel. “I wonder why you ever became so close.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Sally’s . . . How shall I put this?” Julia glanced at Evelyn, appearing to weigh up something in her mind. “Let’s just say she’s not much engaged in the currents of the time. I wonder what it is you find to talk about.”
“I think you’re being unfair to Sal,” Evelyn said. “She’s just not that political. And she’s always been kind to me, and generous—the whole family, in fact, has treated me like I was practically one of them. I have a lot to be grateful for.”
“Yes, and you’ve been a good friend to her,” Julia said. “That means a lot to Hugh. He stakes everything on friendships—it’s one of his best qualities.”
They walked on, quiet for a few minutes, until they came to the edge of the square. Evelyn gazed up at the embassy, seven stories tall, resplendent in the dusk, the last glimmers of light at the bay windows outlining the Corinthian columns.
“Have you been inside?” Julia asked.
“Only to the foyer,” Evelyn said.
“It’s awfully ostentatious, isn’t it? Mind you, that’s the Americans for you.” Julia chuckled. “You don’t have much to do with them, then, at the War Office?”
“No. They’re keeping well out of things for now. But further up the ranks I believe it’s all very much jump-how-high sort of stuff from us.”
“Mm. I hear old Joe Kennedy has built a replica Oval Office in there—to inspire his brats to achieve the highest office. Who said the Yanks were egalitarian, eh? They crave empire as much as we do . . .” Julia brought out another cigarette and was about to light up in a pool of violet lamplight when she paused, her head tipped again with a new thought. “You know, you ought to come to the family home in Ludlow after the wedding. Stay with me in the old barn. Wesley Manor is just down the road and I could introduce you to my new friend, the navy man.” She smiled, but there was some uncertainty in it this time. “He’ll like you.” She raised a hand to flag an approaching taxi, the downcast headlights flaring at her stockinged legs. “And let’s go out again. Next week, maybe? I’ll telephone.”
Ten
THE FLAT WAS on the third floor of an imposing redbrick apartment building called Chemley Court set back from the Thames. It had two bedrooms, an open dining room with an alcove, a sitting room, and a galley kitchen at the back. Bennett White greeted Evelyn at the front door in a pair of old corduroys and tatty felt slippers, a few toast crumbs clinging to his burgundy sweater—a far cry from the dapper suit he’d worn when they first met. His study, which he ran out of the second bedroom, was just as disheveled, she discovered as he steered her down a hall overrun with piles of old papers, and had stained wineglasses and mugs dotting the floor. Several plates of half-eaten sandwiches had been squeezed into the oak shelves like bookends. Near the door sat White’s assistant, Ted Young, a slight, harried-looking man of about thirty with a shock of crinkly hair, bashing away at a typewriter. The room reeked of sweat and mold, but beneath all this was another, even more peculiar smell. White pointed to the metal cage under the window seat.
“It’s my northern short-tailed shrew.” He frowned. “You’re not squeamish about these sorts of things, are you, Evelyn?”
“Not at all.” Evelyn swallowed. “I’m just more familiar with domesticated animals. Cats and dogs. I manage horses, at a pinch.”
“I’ve always been more interested in wild animals,” White remarked. “What can you do with a dog? Teach it to sit, command it to stay. There’s no art in that. But a creature that you must tame . . . that is fascinating.”
Of course, she had seen White around the prison before he had invited her to lunch at the Ritz last week—in the corridors, outside Chadwick’s cell, once or twice across the noisy caf—but he had appeared taller and more solid than she remembered as he sat smoking at a table beneath a bronze chandelier. Evelyn had judged him to be in his early fifties, wearing tweeds and odd-colored socks (one blue, one red), but all very stylish; certainly not like most of the drab ex-army men drifting around the Scrubs.
They had eaten in the Marie Antoinette suite, a room as big and grand as a ballroom. It wasn’t exactly to Evelyn’s taste, but White assured her they would get a decent feed there, which they did, enjoying salad niçoise and beef stroganoff, and a very good bottle of chardonnay from Touraine. On the overmantel next to their table was a basket of white roses—floral motifs, in fact, were positioned all around the suite—and fixed to the walls were lamp holders propped up by miniature Apollonic lyres. Everything else was decorated in ostentatious gilt, and beside their table was a floor-to-ceiling mirror, which meant Evelyn had the peculiar feeling of watching herself throughout the meal.
While they ate, White had spoken warmly about his division, which ran three case officers from a flat in Pimlico; he described their idiosyncrasies as he might those of his own family, and Evelyn began to see that there was something disarming about him. He drank heartily, tearing off great chunks of bread to mop up the creamy sauce, and though he asked her many questions about university, her childhood in Lewes, and her parents, he was never probing. He seemed genuinely interested.
“Now look here, Evelyn,” he said finally, when the plates had been cleared and their coffee arrived. “You’ve been patient, but I’ll cut
to the chase. I was impressed with your recent work at Latchmere House, very impressed. You got good intelligence from the Dutch boy—it seems you have a knack for it. So I’d like you to come and work for me.”
His face had turned red from the wine, which made his eyes smaller and darker, and Evelyn thought how much he resembled one of those birds he was said to know so much about. A magpie, perhaps, on the lookout for its next scrap.
“What about Mr. Chadwick?” she asked.
White took a neat drag on his cigarette, then another, before grinding it into the ashtray.
“John and I agree that you would be better placed in counterintelligence. Besides, I need another girl on my team.”
Evelyn felt herself nodding. Another girl. She wanted to do something with her hands, which she’d placed on the tabletop, to stop them fidgeting.
“And I would be your assistant? Answering the telephone, typing, that sort of thing?” Her voice sounded flat.
White’s eyes widened. “Good Lord, no. I will run you as an agent.”
“An agent?” Evelyn had the urge to laugh at the sheer surprise and delight of it, but when she saw his face, the intensity of his expression, she felt instead a bolt of fear. “But I’ve no experience.”
White sat back. “I’ve read your file, Evelyn. It’s not unique. There’s the usual good report from the Somerville principal, strong grades, another language, and other distinctions. Captain of the college tennis team, wasn’t it? These records never tell me all that much about a person. We have, after all, different identities around different people. I imagine a scholarship girl from Lewes has many . . .” He smiled blandly. “But I suspect you’ve always been good at making people like you. That’s why I wanted to meet you. And now I can see you are indeed calm and self-assured. Attractive. Not enough to draw attention to yourself, but certainly enough to charm. And, like all good spies, you never give away too much of yourself.”
He had offered her a cigarette and they sat there smoking. White finished his coffee and wiped his mouth with the napkin.
“I have a mantra for agents handling their subjects,” he said. “Formed of their own image. Imitation is, after all, the highest form of flattery. I tell all my agents this. How we must adopt the precise attitudes of our interlocutor.”
“And is that what you would have me do in your team?” Evelyn asked. “More interrogations?”
“Perhaps in time. But first we will place you somewhere to gather information. Reporting on what you see, what you hear. Counterintelligence is about distraction, deception, but at its core is truth. You must make your subjects believe in you and your convictions.”
Before they parted, White bent down to retrieve a file from his satchel, slapping it down on the table. TOP SECRET was stamped on the cover. “Read this,” he said. “And then come and see me next week.”
Watching him leave, Evelyn caught a glimpse of her own reflection. It was unsettling—she didn’t look herself at all, dressed as she was in a blue tambourine beret, her brown felt suit, her lips painted very red. Her face was still pink, but she didn’t mind that; it gave her vibrancy, as though you could almost see the blood being pushed through her veins. She stood up and stepped away from the table and as she did her reflection moved toward the partition where the pieces of mirror met, splitting her in two. She stared at the glass, transfixed, while the suite slowed almost to a standstill; even the waiters by the door had fallen silent and motionless, as if they too were waiting for her next move.
* * *
By midafternoon, the study was already growing dark. White reached over to flick on the lamp, but it was a weak bulb, casting the room in deeper shadow. Evelyn watched him pull a tobacco pouch from the desk drawer and begin the careful ritual of filling his pipe.
“What do you think of our little spy den?” he asked.
Evelyn peered about the room, aware of Ted muttering under his breath as he replaced the ink ribbon in the Royal.
“It’s . . . unconventional.”
This elicited a smile. “You probably think we’re all mad. But the thing is, Jack Littleproud is away on a case right now, leaving me a man down, so we’re scrambling to keep on top of things.” White pointed across the room. “I recruited Ted from Oxford, actually, though it was a few years before your time. He was monitoring some undergraduate students. Awful rabble, campaigning for pacifism, weren’t they, Ted?”
“That they were,” said Ted with a sigh, giving Evelyn a pained look.
“So”—White squinted across the desk as he struck a match—“you read that case file?”
“Yes, sir.” Evelyn brought out the folder and handed it to him across the desk. “It was most instructive. Clearly you don’t nab the founding member of a Soviet spy ring overnight.”
The case related to an investigation of communist espionage conducted by an agent code-named “Posey.” The infiltration had started back in 1930, when Posey made contact with an Englishman named Frederick Gibson, a member of the Friends of the Soviet Union. He took a liking to her, the report said, as she reminded him of his sister, and they soon formed a friendship. But years had passed before Gibson asked Posey to rent an apartment in Kensington, where he would meet with other communists and share documents he’d stolen from the Woolwich Arsenal, and the substance of the case had been gathered from there.
As she had read the file over the weekend, it became clear to Evelyn that White wanted her to absorb the tactics of Posey—cautious friendship, ingratiation and, ultimately, betrayal—but she found herself most intrigued by the black-and-white photograph pinned to the front page. It was a portrait of a young woman in a dark cardigan and blouse, her hair drawn into a plait. A scribble on the back read S.G. 1934. Evelyn couldn’t believe that this was the agent who’d been embedded for years in a communist cell. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. According to the file Susanna Grey had worked at Chemley Court until earlier that year.
White stood up and went to the window where he smoked solemnly, his eyes fixed on the street below.
“Eight years,” he muttered. “That investigation took its toll on all of us, but Susanna in particular. Some days I wondered if we would ever come out the other side of it. That’s the thing about this job: there’s no room for even a shred of doubt, no room for conflicted loyalty.” White scowled. “You need that certainty to guide you like a beacon, otherwise . . .” But when he turned back toward Evelyn his face had cleared. “In any case, you’ll have seen that Susanna used no magic or disguise to infiltrate that group. Authenticity is always the best method in espionage. Truth with just the lightest shade of dark. I want you to do the same with your investigation into the Lion Society.”
“The Lion Society?”
“It’s a group made up of fascist sympathizers, mostly renegades from the Establishment. Nasty pieces of work. The MP Andrew Randall is the founder. Apparently he keeps the names of his members in a red leather-bound ledger. We have knowledge of some of these people but not all, and it’s already quite a list. The Duke of Wellington, Lord Lymington, B. L. Chesterfield . . . There are two branches of the club: one for women, one for men. The women meet each week at a Kensington restaurant owned by a Russian émigré family called Ivanov.”
Evelyn knew the place on Queen’s Gate. “And what does the club do?” she asked, lighting a cigarette.
“At first we thought Randall only wanted to expose the activity of what he calls the organized Jewry. They all loathe Jews—it’s the raison d’être of the club—but it had been fairly innocuous stuff until now. Distasteful posters around London, anti-Semitic graffiti, that sort of thing. Lately, however, we’ve heard whispers of more troubling ambitions. Randall is now actively collaborating with Nina Ivanov, the leader of the women’s group, to create a groundswell of support for Germany from within the political establishment. It’s our belief that they already have direct links with the Nazi leadership in Berlin and that they have begun to leak crucial intelligence out of B
ritain to undermine our campaign. We’ve had our eye on a particular broadcaster for some time. He fled to Germany last summer and has since worked for the Rundfunkhaus radio station run by the Ministry of Propaganda. We think the Lion Society is feeding him top-secret information about the British war effort and taking instruction from him.”
Evelyn glanced at the unsmoked cigarette that had burned down almost to her fingers. She stubbed it out.
“What do they hope to achieve by doing that?”
White offered her a grim smile. “It’s simple, really. They plan to form an alliance when Hitler invades Britain.”
“Invasion?” Evelyn repeated it softly, thinking of Jacob Vermeer. Lucky you speak German, bitch.
White tapped a finger against the desk. “That’s why we need you inside this organization. We need that membership list and we need to know who is leaking intelligence. Find the name and address of every wretch who has ever paid a penny to the Lion Society so we can build a case for the Home Secretary to issue the internment orders. As many of these men and women as possible should be locked up—and if I had my way, we’d throw away the key.”
Evelyn was aware of a curious vibration in the balls of her feet, like she was standing on an air vent above the underground, until she realized it was her heart thudding away like that, making her whole body hum.
“But how would I join this club?” she asked. “I can’t very well walk in off the street . . .”
“I already have an agent planted on the inside,” White said. “Mrs. Armstrong, a top-notch old duck—she’s been embedded in there for years. She reports that the women’s leadership group are looking to recruit from the War Office; they want moles in the bureaucracy to help their cause. Mrs. Armstrong has already supplied a paper on The Merchant of Venice and Zionism that Nina Ivanov was told you wrote. It was rather good, actually, and she thought so too.” White flashed a brief smile. “We plan for Mrs. Armstrong to introduce you to Ivanov at the restaurant, for her to take a liking to you in person, and everything else to follow from there.”
An Unlikely Spy Page 14