Restless

1. Into the Heart of England

WHEN I WAS A child and was being fractious and contrary and generally behaving badly, my mother used to rebuke me by saying: 'One day someone will come and kill me and then you'll be sorry'; or, 'They'll appear out of the blue and whisk me away – how would you like that?'; or, 'You'll wake up one morning and I'll be gone. Disappeared. You wait and see.'

It's curious, but you don't think seriously about these remarks when you're young. But now – as I look back on the events of that interminable hot summer of 1976, that summer when England reeled, gasping for breath, pole-axed by the unending heat – now I know what my mother was talking about: I understand that bitter dark current of fear that flowed beneath the placid surface of her ordinary life – how it had never left her even after years of peaceful, unexceptionable living. I now realise she was always frightened that someone was going to come and kill her. And she had good reason.

It all started, I remember, in early June. I can't recall the exact day – a Saturday, most likely, because Jochen wasn't at his nursery school – and we both drove over to Middle Ashton as usual. We took the main road out of Oxford to Stratford and then turned off it at Chipping Norton, heading for Evesham, and then we turned off again and again, as if we were following a descending scale of road types; trunk road, road, B-road, minor road, until we found ourselves on the metalled cart track that led through the dense and venerable beech wood down to the narrow valley that contained the tiny village of Middle Ashton. It was a journey I made at least twice a week and each time I did so I felt I was being led into the lost heart of England – a green, forgotten, inverse Shangri-La where everything became older, mouldier and more decrepit.

Middle Ashton had grown up, centuries ago, around the Jacobean manor house – Ashton House – at its centre, still occupied by a distant relative of the original owner-builder-proprietor, one Trefor Parry, a seventeenth-century Welsh wool-merchant-made-good who, flaunting his great wealth, had built his grand demesne here in the middle of England itself. Now, after generation upon generation of reckless, spendthrift Parrys and their steadfast, complacent neglect, the manor house was falling down, on its last woodwormed legs, giving up its parched ghost to entropy. Sagging tarpaulins covered the roof of the east wing, rusting scaffolding spoke of previous vain gestures at restoration and the soft yellow Cotswold stone of its walls came away in your hand like wet toast. There was a small damp dark church near by, overwhelmed by massive black-green yews that seemed to drink the light of day; a cheerless pub – the Peace and Plenty, where the hair on your head brushed the greasy, nicotine varnish of the ceiling in the bar – a post office with a shop and an off-licence, and a scatter of cottages, some thatched, green with moss, and interesting old houses in big gardens. The lanes in the village were sunk six feet beneath high banks with rampant hedges growing on either side, as if the traffic of ages past, like a river, had eroded the road into its own mini-valley, deeper and deeper, a foot each decade. The oaks, the beeches, the chestnuts were towering, hoary old ancients, casting the village in a kind of permanent gloaming during the day and in the night providing an atonal symphony of creaks and groans, whispers and sighs as the night breezes shifted the massive branches and the old wood moaned and complained.

I was looking forward to Middle Ashton's generous shade as it was another blearily hot day – every day seemed hot, that summer – but we weren't yet bored to oblivion by the heat. Jochen was in the back, looking out of the car's rear window – he liked to see the road 'unwinding', he said. I was listening to music on the radio when I heard him ask me a question.

'If you speak to a window I can't hear you,' I said.

'Sorry, Mummy.'

He turned himself and rested his elbows on my shoulders and I heard his quiet voice in my ear.

'Is Granny your real mummy?'

'Of course she is, why?'

'I don't know… She's so strange.'

'Everybody's strange when you come to think of it,' I said. 'I'm strange… You're strange…'

'That's true,' he said, 'I know.' He set his chin on my shoulder and dug it down, working the muscle above my right collarbone with his little pointed chin, and I felt tears smart in my eyes. He did this to me from time to time, did Jochen, my strange son – and made me want to cry for annoying reasons I couldn't really explain.

At the entrance to the village, opposite the grim pub, the Peace and Plenty, a brewer's lorry was parked, delivering beer. There was the narrowest of gaps for the car to squeeze through.

'You'll scrape Hippo's side,' Jochen warned. My car was a seventh-hand Renault 5, sky blue with a (replaced) crimson bonnet. Jochen had wanted to christen it and I had said that because it was a French car we should give it a French name and so I suggested Hippolyte (I had been reading Taine, for some forgotten scholarly reason) and so 'Hippo' it became – at least to Jochen. I personally can't stand people who give their cars names.

'No, I won't,' I said. 'I'll be careful.'

I had just about negotiated my way through, inching by, when the driver of the lorry, I supposed, appeared from the pub, strode into the gap and histrionically waved me on. He was a youngish man with a big gut straining his sweatshirt and distorting its Morrell's logo and his bright beery face boasted mutton-chop whiskers a Victorian dragoon would have been proud of.

'Come on, come on, yeah, yeah, you're all right, darling,' he wheedled tiredly at me, his voice heavy with a weary exasperation. 'It's not a bloody Sherman tank.'

As I came level with him I wound down the window and smiled.

I said: 'If you'd get your fat gut out of the way it'd be a whole lot easier, you fucking arsehole.'

I accelerated off before he could collect himself and wound up the window again, feeling my anger evaporate – deliciously, tinglingly – as quickly as it had surged up. I was not in the best of moods, true, because, as I was attempting to hang a poster in my study that morning, I had, with cartoonish inevitability and ineptitude, hit my thumbnail – which was steadying the picture hook – square on with the hammer instead of the nail of the picture hook. Charlie Chaplin would have been proud of me as I squealed and hopped and flapped my hand as if I wanted to shake it off my wrist. My thumbnail, beneath its skin-coloured plaster, was now a damson purple, and a little socket of pain located in my thumb throbbed with my pulse like some kind of organic timepiece, counting down the seconds of my mortality. But as we accelerated away I could sense the adrenalin-charged heart-thud, the head-reel of pleasure at my audacity: at moments like this I felt I knew all the latent anger buried in me – in me and in our species.

'Mummy, you used the F-word,' Jochen said, his voice softened with stern reproach.

'I'm sorry, but that man really annoyed me.'

'He was only trying to help.'

'No, he wasn't. He was trying to patronise me.'

Jochen sat and considered this new word for a while, then gave up.

'Here we are at last,' he said.

My mother's cottage sat amidst dense, thronging vegetation surrounded by an unclipped, undulating box hedge that was thick with rambling roses and clematis. Its tufty hand-shorn lawn was an indecent moist green, an affront to the implacable sun. From the air, I thought, the cottage and its garden must look like a verdant oasis, its shaggy profusion in this hot summer almost challenging the authorities to impose an immediate hosepipe ban. My mother was an enthusiastic and idiosyncratic gardener: she planted close and pruned hard. If a plant or bush flourished she let it go, not worrying if it stifled others or cast inappropriate shade. Her garden, she claimed, was designed to be a controlled wilderness – she did not own a mower; she cut her lawn with shears – and she knew it annoyed others in the village where neatness and order were the pointed and visible virtues. But none could argue or complain that her garden was abandoned or unkempt: no one in the village spent more time in her garden than Mrs Sally Gilmartin and the fact that her industry was designed to create lushness and wildness was something that could be criticised, perhaps, but not condemned.

We called it a cottage but in fact it was a small two-storey ashlar house in sandy Cotswold stone with a flint tiled roof, rebuilt in the eighteenth century. The upper floor had kept its older mullioned windows, the bedrooms were dark and low, whereas the ground floor had sash windows and a handsome carved doorway with fluted half-columns and a scrolled pediment. She had somehow managed to buy it from Huw Parry – Jones, the dipsomaniac owner of Ashton House, when he was more than particularly hard up, and its rear backed on to the modest remnants of Ashton House park – now an uncut and uncropped meadow – all that was left of the thousands of rolling acres that the Parry family had originally owned in this part of Oxfordshire. To one side was a wooden shed-cum-garage almost completely overwhelmed by ivy and Virginia creeper. I saw her car was parked there – a white Austin Allegro – so I knew she was at home.

Jochen and I opened the gate and looked around for her, Jochen calling, 'Granny, we're here,' and being answered by a loud 'Hip-hip hooray!' coming from the rear of the house. And then she appeared, wheeling herself along the brick path in a wheelchair. She stopped and held out her arms as if to scoop us into her embrace, but we both stood there, immobile, astonished.

'Why on earth are you in a wheelchair?' I said. 'What's happened?'

'Push me inside, dear,' she said. 'All shall be revealed.'

As Jochen and I wheeled her inside, I noticed there was a little wooden ramp up to the front step.

'How long have you been like this, Sal?' I asked. 'You should have called me.'

'Oh, two, three days,' she said, 'nothing to worry about.'

I wasn't feeling the concern that perhaps I should have experienced because my mother looked so patently well: her face lightly tanned, her thick grey-blond hair lustrous and recently cut. And, as if to confirm this impromptu diagnosis, once we had bumped her inside she stepped out of her wheelchair and stooped easily to give Jochen a kiss.

'I fell,' she said, gesturing at the staircase. 'The last two or three steps – tripped, fell to the ground and hurt my back. Doctor Thorne suggested I got a wheelchair to cut down on my walking. Walking makes it worse, you see.'

'Who's Doctor Thorne? What happened to Doctor Brotherton?'

'On holiday. Thorne's the locum. Was the locum.' She paused. 'Nice young man. He's gone now.'

She led us through to the kitchen. I looked for evidence of a bad back in her gait and posture but could see nothing.

'It does help, really,' she said, as if she could sense my growing bafflement, my scepticism. 'The wheelchair, you know, for pottering about. It's amazing how much time one spends on one's feet in a day.'

Jochen opened the fridge. 'What's for lunch, Granny?' he asked.

'Salad,' she said. 'Too hot to cook. Help yourself to a drink, darling.'

'I love salad,' Jochen said, reaching for a can of Coca-Cola. 'I like cold food best.'

'Good boy.' My mother drew me aside. 'I'm afraid he can't stay this afternoon. I can't manage with the wheelchair and whatnot.'

I concealed my disappointment and my selfish irritation – Saturday afternoons on my own, while Jochen spent half the day at Middle Ashton, had become precious to me. My mother walked to the window and shaded her eyes to peer out. Her kitchen/dining-room looked over her garden and her garden backed on to the meadow that was cut very haphazardly, sometimes with a gap of two or three years, and as a result was full of wild flowers and myriad types of grass and weed. And beyond the meadow was the wood, called Witch Wood for some forgotten reason – ancient woodland of oak, beech and chestnut, all the elms gone, or going, of course. There was something very odd happening here, I said to myself: something beyond my mother's usual whims and cultivated eccentricities. I went up to her and placed my hand reassuringly on her shoulder.

'Is everything all right, old thing?'

'Mmm. It was just a fall. A shock to the system, as they say. I should be fine again in a week or two.'

'There's nothing else, is there? You would tell me…'

She turned her handsome face on me and gave me her famous candid stare, the pale blue eyes wide – I knew it well. But I could face it out, now, these days, after everything I'd been through myself: I wasn't so cowed by it anymore.

'What else could it be, my darling? Senile dementia?'

All the same, she asked me to wheel her in her wheelchair through the village to the post office to buy a needless pint of milk and pick up a newspaper. She talked at some length about her bad back to Mrs Cumber, the postmistress, and made me stop on the return journey to converse over a drystone wall with Percy Fleet, the young local builder, and his long-term girlfriend (Melinda? Melissa?) as they waited for their barbecue to heat up – a brick edifice with a chimney set proudly on the paving in front of their new conservatory. They commiserated: a fall was the worst thing. Melinda recalled an old stroke-ridden uncle who'd been shaken up for weeks after he'd slipped in the bathroom.

'I want one of those, Percy,' my mother said, pointing at the conservatory, 'very fine.'

'Free estimates, Mrs Gilmartin.'

'How was your aunt? Did she enjoy herself?'

'My mother-in-law,' Percy corrected.

'Ah yes, of course. It was your mother-in-law.'

We said our goodbyes and I pushed her wearily on over the uneven surface of the lane, feeling a growing itch of anger at being asked to take part in this pantomime. She was always commenting on comings and goings too, as if she were checking on people, clocking them on and clocking them off like some obsessive foreman checking on his work-force – she'd done this as long as I could remember. I told myself to be calm: we would have lunch, I would take Jochen back to the flat, he could play in the garden, we could go for a walk in the University Parks…

'You mustn't be angry with me, Ruth,' she said, glancing back at me over her shoulder.

I stopped pushing and took out and lit a cigarette. 'I'm not angry.'

'Oh, yes you are. Just let me see how I cope. Perhaps next Saturday I'll be fine.'

When we came in Jochen said darkly, after a minute, 'You can get cancer from cigarettes, you know.' I snapped at him and we ate our lunch in a rather tense mood of long silences broken by bright banal observations about the village on my mother's part. She persuaded me to have a glass of wine and I began to relax. I helped her wash up and stood drying the dishes beside her as she rinsed the glasses in hot water. Water-daughter, daughter-water, sought her daughter in the water, I rhymed to myself, suddenly glad it was the weekend, with no teaching, no tutees and thinking it was maybe not such a bad thing to be spending some time alone with my son. Then my mother said something.

She was shading her eyes again, looking out at the wood.

'What?'

'Can you see someone? Is there someone in the wood?'

I peered. 'Not that I can spot. Why?'

'I thought I saw someone.'

'Ramblers, picnickers – it's Saturday, the sun is shining.'

'Oh, yes, that's right: the sun is shining and all is well with the world.'

She went to the dresser and picked up a pair of binoculars she kept there and turned to focus them on the wood.

I ignored her sarcasm and went to find Jochen and we prepared to leave. My mother took her seat in her wheelchair and pointedly wheeled it to the front door. Jochen told the story of the encounter with the driver of the brewer's lorry and my unashamed use of the F-word. My mother cupped his face with her hands and smiled at him, adoringly.

'Your mother can get very angry when she wants to and no doubt that man was very stupid,' she said. 'Your mother is a very angry young woman.'

'Thank you for that, Sal,' I said and bent to kiss her forehead. 'I'll call this evening.'

'Would you do me a little favour?' she said and then asked me if, when I telephoned in future, I would let the phone ring twice, then hang up and ring again. 'That way I'll know it's you,' she explained. 'I'm not so fast about the house in the chair.'

Now, for the first time I felt a real small pang of worry: this request did seem to be the sign of some initial form of derangement or delusion – but she caught the look in my eye.

'I know what you're thinking, Ruth,' she said. 'But you're quite wrong, quite wrong.' She stood up out of her chair, tall and rigid. 'Wait a second,' she said and went upstairs.

'Have you made Granny cross again?' Jochen said, in a low voice, accusingly.

'No.'

My mother came down the stairs – effortlessly, it seemed to me – carrying a thick buff folder under her arm. She held it out for me.

'I'd like you to read this,' she said.

I took it from her. There seemed to be some dozens of pages – different types, different sizes of paper. I opened it. There was a title page: The Story of Eva Delectorskaya.

'Eva Delectorskaya,' I said, mystified. 'Who's that?'

'Me,' she said. 'I am Eva Delectorskaya.'

Paris , 1939

EVAN DELECTORSKAYA FIRST SAW the man at her brother Kolia's funeral. In the cemetery he stood some way apart from the other mourners. He was wearing a hat – an old brown trilby – which struck her as odd and she seized on that detail and allowed it to nag at her: what sort of man wore a brown trilby to a funeral? What sign of respect was that? And she used it as a way of keeping her vast angry grief almost at bay: it kept her from being overwhelmed.

But back at the apartment, before the other mourners arrived, her father began to sob and Eva found she could not keep the tears back either. Her father was holding a framed photograph of Kolia in both hands, gripping it fiercely, as if it were a rectangular steering wheel. Eva put her hand on his shoulder and with her other quickly spread the tears off her cheeks. She could think of nothing to say to him. Then Irene, her stepmother, came in with a chinking tray holding a carafe of brandy and a collection of tiny glasses, no bigger than thimbles. She set it down and went back to the kitchen to fetch a plate of sugared almonds. Eva crouched in front of her father, offering him a glass.

'Papa,' she wailed at him, unable to control her voice, 'have a little sip – look, look, I'm having one.' She drank a small mouthful of the brandy and felt her lips sting.

She heard his fat tears hit the glass of the picture. He looked up at her and with one arm pulled her to him and kissed her forehead.

He whispered: 'He was only twenty-four… Twenty-four?…' It was as if Kolia's age was literally incredible, as if someone had said to him, 'Your son disappeared into thin air,' or 'your son grew wings and flew away'.

Irene came over and took the frame from him gently, gently prising his fingers away.

'Mange, Sergei,' she said to him, 'bois – il faut boire.'

She propped the frame on a nearby table and started to fill the little glasses on the tray. Eva held out the plate of sugared almonds to her father and he took a few, carelessly, letting some tumble to the floor. They sipped their brandy and nibbled at the nuts and talked of banalities: how they were glad the day was overcast and windless, how sunshine would have been inappropriate, how it was good of old Monsieur Dieudonné to have come all the way from Neuilly and how meagre and tasteless the dried flowers from the Lussipovs had been. Dried flowers, really! Eva kept glancing over at the picture of Kolia, smiling in his grey suit, as if he were listening to the chatter, amused, a teasing look in his eye, until she felt the incomprehension of his loss, the affront of his absence, rear up like a tidal wave and she looked away. Luckily the doorbell rang and Irene rose to her feet to welcome the first of the guests. Eva sat on with her father, hearing the muffled tones of discreet conversation as coats and hats were removed, even a stifled burst of laughter, signalling that curious mixture of condolence and exuberant relief that rises up, impromptu, in people after a funeral.

Hearing the laughter Eva's father looked at her; he sniffed and shrugged his shoulders hopelessly, helplessly, like a man who has forgotten the answer to the simplest of questions, and she saw how old he was all of a sudden.

'Just you and me, Eva,' he said, and she knew he was thinking of his first wife, Maria – his Masha, her mother – and her death all those years ago on the other side of the world. Eva had been fourteen, Kolia ten, and the three of them had stood hand in hand in the foreigners' graveyard in Tientsin, the air full of windblown blossom, shredded petals from the giant white wisteria growing on the cemetery wall – like snowflakes, like fat soft confetti. 'Just the three of us, now,' he had said then, as they stood beside their mother's grave, squeezing their hands very hard.

'Who was the man in the brown trilby?' Eva asked, remembering and wanting to change the subject.

'What man in the brown trilby?' said her father.

Then the Lussipovs edged cautiously into the room, smiling vaguely, and with them her plump cousin Tania with her new little husband, and the perplexing question of the man in the brown trilby was momentarily forgotten.

But she saw him again, three days later on the Monday – the first day she'd gone back to work – as she left the office to go to lunch. He was standing under the awning of the épicerie opposite, wearing a long tweed overcoat – dark green – and his incongruous trilby. He met her glance, nodded and smiled and crossed the road to greet her, removing his hat as he approached.

He spoke in excellent, accentless French: 'Mademoiselle Delectorskaya, my sincere condolences about your brother. My apologies for not speaking to you at the funeral but it did not seem appropriate – especially as Kolia had never introduced us.'

'I hadn't realised you knew Kolia.' This fact had already thrown her: her mind was clattering, panicked slightly – this made no sense.

'Oh, yes. Not friends, exactly, but we were firm acquaintances, shall we say?' He gave a little bow of his head and continued, this time in flawless, accented English. 'Forgive me, my name is Lucas Romer.'

The accent was upper class, patrician, but Eva thought, immediately, that this Mr Lucas Romer did not look particularly English at all. He had wavy black hair, thinning at the front and swept back and was virtually – she searched for the English word – swarthy, with dense eyebrows, uncurved, like two black horizontal dashes beneath his high forehead and above his eyes – which were a muddy bluey grey (she always noticed the colour of people's eyes). His jaw, even though freshly shaved, was solidly metallic with incipient stubble.

He sensed her studying him and reflexively ran the palm of his hand across his thinning hair. 'Kolia never spoke to you about me?' he asked.

'No,' Eva said, speaking English herself now. 'No, he never mentioned a "Lucas Romer" to me.'

He smiled, for some reason, at this information, showing very white, even teeth.

'Very good,' he said, thoughtfully, nodding to show his pleasure and then added, 'it is my real name by the way.'

'It never crossed my mind that it wasn't,' Eva said, offering her hand. 'It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr Romer. If you'll excuse me I have only half an hour for my lunch.'

'No. You have two hours. I told Monsieur Frellon that I would be taking you to a restaurant.'

Monsieur Frellon was her boss. He was obsessive about employee punctuality.

'Why would Monsieur Frellon permit that?'

'Because he thinks I'm going to charter four steamships from him and, as I don't speak a word of French, I need to sort the details out with his translator.' He turned and pointed with his hat. 'There's a little place I know on the rue du Cherche Midi. Excellent seafood. Do you like oysters?'

'I detest oysters.'

He smiled at her, tolerantly, as if she were a sulky child, but this time not showing her his white teeth.

'Then I will show you how to make an oyster edible.'

The restaurant was called Le Tire Bouchon and Lucas Romer did indeed show her how to make an oyster edible (with red-wine vinegar, chopped shallots, black pepper and lemon juice with a roundel of cold-buttered brown bread to follow it down). In fact Eva enjoyed oysters from time to time but she had wanted to dent this curious man's immense self-assurance.

During lunch (sole bonne femme after the oysters, cheese, tarte tatin, a half bottle of Chablis and a whole bottle of Morgon) they talked about Kolia. It was clear to Eva that Romer knew all the relevant biographical facts about Kolia – his age, his education, the family's flight from Russia after the Revolution in 1917, the death of their mother in China, the whole saga of the Delectorskis' peripatetic journeying from St Petersburg to Vladivostock to Tientsin to Shanghai to Tokyo to Berlin, finally, in 1924, and then, eventually, in 1928, to Paris. He knew about the marriage of Sergei Pavlovitch Delectorski to the childless widow Irene Argenton in 1932 and the modest financial upturn in the family's fortunes that Madame Argenton's dowry had produced. He knew even more, she discovered, about her father's recent heart problems, his failing health. If he knows so much about Kolia, Eva thought, I wonder how much he knows about me?

He had ordered coffee for them both and an eau-de-vie for himself. He offered her a cigarette from a bashed, silver cigarette tin – she took one and he lit it for her.

'You speak excellent English,' he said.

'I'm half English,' she told him, as if he didn't know. 'My late mother was English.'

'So you speak English, Russian and French. Anything else?'

'I speak some German. Middling, not fluent.'

'Good… How is your father, by the way?' he asked, lighting his own cigarette, leaning back and exhaling dramatically, ceilingward.

Eva paused, uncertain what to tell this man: this complete stranger who acted like a familiar, like a cousin, a concerned uncle eager for family news. 'He's not well. He's crushed, in fact – as we all are. The shock – you can't imagine… I think Kolia's death might kill him. My stepmother's very worried.'

'Ah, yes. Kolia adored your stepmother.'

Eva knew all too well that Kolia's relationship with Irene had been strained at the best of times. Madame Argenton thought Kolia something of a wastrel – a dreamer, but an irritating one.

'The son she never had,' Romer added.

'Did Kolia tell you that?' Eva asked.

'No. I'm guessing.'

Eva stubbed out her cigarette. 'I'd better be getting back,' she said, rising to her feet. Romer was smiling at her, annoyingly. She felt that he was pleased at her sudden coldness, her abruptness – as if she had passed some kind of minor test.

'Haven't you forgotten something?' he said.

'I don't think so.'

'I'm meant to be chartering four steamers from Frellon, Gonzales et Cie. Have another coffee and we'll sketch out the details.'

Back in the office Eva was able to tell Monsieur Frellon, with complete plausibility, the tonnage, the timing and the ports of call Romer had in mind. Monsieur Frellon was very pleased at the outcome of her protracted lunch: Romer was a 'big fish', he kept saying, we want to reel him in. Eva realised that Romer had never told her – even though she had raised the matter two or three times – where, how and when he and Kolia had met.

Two days later she was on the metro going to work when she saw Romer step into her carriage at Place Clichy. He smiled and waved through the other commuters at her. Eva knew at once this was no coincidence; she didn't think coincidence played much part in Lucas Romer's life. They exited at Sèvres-Babylone and together they made their way towards the office together – Romer informing her he had an appointment with Monsieur Frellon. It was a dull day, a mackerel sky, with odd patches of brightness; a sudden breeze snatched at her skirt and the violet-blue scarf at her throat. As they reached the small cafe at the junction of the rue de Varenne and the boulevard Raspail, Romer suggested they pause.

'What about your appointment?'

'I said I'd pop by sometime in the morning.'

'But I'll be late,' she said.

'He won't mind – we're talking business. I'll call him.' He went to the bar to purchase the jetons for the public phone. Eva sat down in the window and looked at him, not resentfully but curiously, thinking: what game are you playing here, Mr Lucas Romer? Is this a sex-game with me or a business-game with Frellon, Gonzalez et Cie? If it was a sex-game he was wasting his time. She was not drawn to Lucas Romer. She attracted too many men and, in distorted compromise, was attracted herself by very few. It was a price beauty sometimes exacted: I will make you beautiful, the gods decide, but I will also make you incredibly hard to please. She did not want to think about her life's few complicated, unhappy love affairs this early in the morning and so she took down a newspaper from its hook. Somehow she didn't think this was a sex-game – something else was at stake, some other plan was brewing here. The headlines were all of the war in Spain, of the Anschluss, of Bukharin's execution in the USSR. The vocabulary was scratchy with aggression: rearmament, territory, reparations, arms, bluster, warnings, war and future wars. Yes, she thought, Lucas Romer had another objective but she would have to wait and see what it was.

'No problem at all.' He was standing above her, returning to the table with a smile on his face. 'I've ordered you a coffee.'

She asked him about M. Frellon and Romer assured her that M. Frellon couldn't be happier about this propitious encounter. Their coffees arrived and Romer sat back, at his ease, liberally sugaring his express, then stirring it assiduously. Eva looked at him as she re-hung her newspaper, contemplating his dark face, his slightly smirched and crumpled soft collar, his thin, banded tie. What would one have said: a university lecturer? A moderately successful writer? A senior civil servant? Not a ship broker, for sure. So why was she sitting in this cafe with this perplexing Englishman when it was something she had no particular desire to do? She determined to put him to the test: she decided to ask him about Kolia.

'When did you meet Kolia?' she asked, taking out a cigarette from a pack in her handbag, as casually as she could manage and not offering him one.

'About a year ago. We met at a party – someone was celebrating the publication of a book. We got talking – I thought he was charming -'

'What book?'

'I can't remember.'

She continued her cross-examination and watched Romer's pleasure grow: he was enjoying this, she saw, and his enjoyment began to anger her. This wasn't some pastime, some idle flirtation – her brother was dead and she suspected that Romer knew far more about Kolia's death than he was prepared to admit.

'Why was he at that meeting?' she asked. 'Action Française, for heaven's sake: Kolia wasn't a Fascist.'

'Of course he wasn't.'

'So why was he there?'

'I asked him to go.'

This shocked her. She wondered why Lucas Romer would ask Kolia Delectorski to go to an Action Française meeting, and wondered further why Kolia would agree, but could find no quick or easy answers.

'Why did you ask him to go?' she asked.

'Because he was working for me.'

All day in the office, trying to do her work, Eva thought about Romer and his baffling answers to her questions. He had abruptly ended their conversation after this declaration that Kolia was working for him – leaning forward, his eyes fixed on hers – and which seemed to say: yes, Kolia was working for me, Lucas Romer, and then announced suddenly that he had to go, he had meetings, my goodness, look at the time.

In the metro on her way home after the office had closed, Eva tried to be methodical, tried to put things together, to make the various extraneous pieces of information mesh, somehow, but it wasn't working. Lucas Romer had met Kolia at a party; they had become friends – more than friends, obviously, colleagues of a sort, with Kolia working for Romer in some unnamed capacity… What manner of work took you to a meeting of the Action Française in Nanterre? And at this meeting, as far as the police could determine, Kolia Delectorski had been called out to answer a telephone call. People remembered him leaving in the middle of the main speech, delivered by Charles Maurras, no less, remembered one of the stewards coming down the aisle and passing him a note, remembered the small upheaval of his departure. And then the gap of time of forty-five minutes – the last forty-five minutes of Kolia's life – to which there were no witnesses. People leaving the hall (a large cinema) by the side entrances had found his twisted body in the alleyway running along the cinema's rear, a thickening lacquered pool of blood on the paving stones, a serious wound – several heavy blows – on the back of his head. What happened in the last forty-five minutes of Kolia Delectorski's life? When he was found his wallet was missing, his watch was missing and his hat was missing. But what kind of thief kills a man and then steals his hat?

Eva walked up the rue des Fleurs, thinking about Kolia, wondering what had made him 'work' for a man like Romer and why he had never told her about this so-called job. And who was Romer to offer Kolia, a music teacher, a job that would put his life in danger? A job that had cost him his life? As what and for what, she wanted to know? For his shipping line? His international businesses? She found herself smiling sardonically at the whole absurdity of the idea as she bought her usual two baguettes and tried to ignore Benoit's eager responsive smile to what he took to be her levity. She became solemn, instantly. Benoit – another man who wanted her.

'How are you, Mademoiselle Eva?' Benoit asked, taking her money.

'I'm not so well,' she said. 'My brother's death – you know.'

His face changed, went long in sympathy. 'Terrible, terrible thing,' he said. 'These times we live in.'

At least now he can't ask me out again for a while, Eva thought, as she left and turned into the apartment block's small courtyard, stepping through the small door in the large one and nodding hello to Madame Roisanssac, the concierge. She walked up the two flights of stairs, let herself in, left the bread in the kitchen and moved on through to the salon, thinking: no, I can't stay in again tonight, not with Papa and Irene – I shall go and see a film, the film playing at the Rex: Je Suis Partout - I need to have a change in routine, she thought, some room, some time for myself.

She walked into the salon and Romer rose to his feet with a lazy welcoming smile. Her father stepped in front of him, saying in his bad English, with false disapprobation, 'Eva, really, why are you not telling me you've met Mr Romer?'

'I didn't think it was important,' Eva said, her eyes never leaving Romer's, trying to keep her gaze absolutely neutral, absolutely unperturbed. Romer smiled and smiled – he was very calm – and more smartly dressed, she saw, in a dark blue suit, a white shirt and another of his striped English ties.

Her father was fussing, pulling a chair forward for her, making small talk – 'Mr Romer was knowing Kolia, can you believe it?' – but Eva only heard a stridency of questions and exclamations in her head: How dare you come here! What have you told Papa? What nerve! What did you think I would say? She saw the glasses and the bottle of port on the silver tray, saw the plate of sugared almonds and knew that Romer had engineered this welcome effortlessly, confident of the solace his visit would bring. How long had he been here? she wondered, looking at the level of the port in the bottle. Something about her father's mood suggested more than one glass each.

Her father practically forced her to sit; she declined the glass of port she dearly wanted. She noticed Romer sitting back, discreetly, one leg casually crossed over the other, that small calculating smile on his face. It was the smile, she realised, of a man who was convinced he knew exactly what was going to happen next.

Determined to frustrate him, she stood up. 'I have to go,' she said. 'I'll be late for the film.'

Somehow, Romer was at the door before her, his fingers on her left elbow, restraining.

'Mr Delectorski,' Romer said to her father, 'is there anywhere I can speak privately with Eva?'

They were shown into her father's study – a small bedroom at the end of the corridor – decorated with formal, wooden photographic portraits of Delectorski relatives and containing a desk, a divan and a bookshelf full of his favourite Russian authors: Lermontev, Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov. The room smelt of cigars and the pomade that her father used for his hair. Moving to the window Eva could see Madame Roisanssac hanging out her family's washing. She felt suddenly very ill at ease: she thought she knew how to deal with Romer but now alone in this room with him – alone in her father's room – everything suddenly had changed.

And, as if he sensed this, Romer changed too: gone was the overweening self-confidence, now replaced by a manner more direct, more fiercely personal. He urged her to sit down and drew a chair for himself from behind the desk, setting it opposite her, as if some form of interrogation was about to begin. He offered her a cigarette from his battered case and she took one before saying, no, thank you, I won't, and handed it back. She watched him refit it in his case, clearly mildly irritated. Eva felt she'd won a tiny, trivial victory – everything counted if that vast easy confidence was to be even momentarily discomfited.

'Kolia was working for me when he was killed,' Romer said.

'You told me.'

'He was killed by Fascists, by Nazis.'

'I thought he was robbed.'

'He was doing…' he paused. 'He was doing dangerous work – and he was discovered. I think he was betrayed.'

Eva wanted to speak but decided to say nothing. Now, in the silence, Romer removed his cigarette case again and went through the rigmarole of putting the cigarette in his mouth, patting his pockets for his lighter, removing the cigarette from his mouth, tapping both ends on the cigarette case, pulling the ashtray on her father's desk towards him, lighting the cigarette and inhaling and exhaling strongly. Eva watched all this, trying to stay completely impassive.

'I work for the British government,' he said. 'You understand what I mean…'

'Yes,' Eva said, 'I think so.'

'Kolia was working for the British government also. He was trying to infiltrate l'Action Française on my instructions. He had joined the movement and was reporting back to me on any developments he thought might be of interest to us.' He paused and, seeing she was not going to interject, leant forward and said, reasonably, 'There will be a war in Europe in six months or a year – between Nazi Germany and several European countries – that much you can be sure of. Your brother was part of that struggle against this coming war.'

'What are you trying to say?'

'That he was a very brave man. That he didn't die in vain.'

Eva checked the sardonic laugh in her throat and almost immediately felt tears begin to flood her eyes.

'Well, I wish he'd been a cowardly man,' she said, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice, 'then he wouldn't have died at all. In fact he might have been walking through this door in ten minutes.'

Romer stood up and crossed to the window, where he too studied Madame Roisanssac hanging out her washing, before turning and sitting on the edge of her father's desk, staring at her.

'I want to offer you Kolia's job,' he said. 'I want you to come and work for us.'

'I have a job.'

'You will be paid £500 a year. You will become a British citizen with a British passport.'

'No, thank you.'

'You will be trained in Britain and will work for the British government in various capacities – just as Kolia did.'

'Thank you – no. I'm very happy in my current work. Suddenly, impossibly, she wanted Kolia to come into the room – Kolia with his wry smile and his languid charm – and tell her what to do, what to say to this man with his insistent eyes and his insistent demands of her. What do you want me to do, Kolia? She heard the question loud in her head. You tell me what I should do and I'll do it.

Romer stood up. 'I've talked to your father. I suggest you do the same.' He walked to the door, touching his forehead with two fingers as if he'd just forgotten something. 'I'll see you tomorrow – or the next day. Think seriously about what I've proposed, Eva, and what it'll mean to you and your family.' Then his mood seemed to change abruptly, as if he were affected by some kind of sudden zeal and the mask dropped for a moment. 'For god's sake, Eva,' he said. 'Your brother was murdered by these thugs, these filthy vermin – you've a chance to get your revenge. To make them pay.'

'Goodbye, Mr Romer, it was very nice meeting you.'

Eva looked out of the carriage window at the Scottish countryside as it sped by. It was summer, yet under the low white sky she thought there lingered in the landscape a memory of many winters' hardships – the small tough trees bent and shaped by a prevailing wind, the tussocky grass, the soft green hills scabbed by their dark patches of heather. It may be summer, the land seemed to be saying, but I won't let my guard down. She thought of other landscapes she had seen from trains over her life – in fact sometimes it seemed to her that her life was one composed of train journeys through whose windows she had watched a succession of alien countrysides flash by. From Moscow to Vladivostock, from Vladivostock to China… Luxury wagons-lits, troop trains, goods trains, provincial stoppers on branch lines, days spent stationary, trainless, waiting for another locomotive. Sometimes crowded carriages, insufferable, overcome with the stench of packed human bodies – sometimes the melancholy of empty compartments, the lonely clatter of the wheels in their ears, night after night. Sometimes travelling light with one small suitcase, sometimes burdened with all their possessions, like helpless refugees, it seemed. All these journeys: Hamburg to Berlin, Berlin to Paris and now Paris to Scotland. Still moving towards an unknown destination, she told herself, wishing vaguely that she felt more thrill, more romance.

Eva checked her watch – ten minutes to go until Edinburgh, she reckoned. In her compartment a middle-aged businessman nodded over his novel, his head lolling, his features slack and ugly in repose. Eva removed her new passport from her handbag and looked at it for maybe the hundredth time. It had been issued in 1935 and there were immigration stamps from certain European countries: Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland and, interestingly enough, the United States of America. All places she had visited, apparently. The photograph was blurry and overlit: it looked like her – a sterner, more obstinate Eva (where had they found it?) – but even she could not tell if it was wholly genuine. Her name, her new name, was Eve Dalton. Eva Delectorskaya becomes Eva Dalton. Why not Eva? She supposed 'Eve' was more English and, in any event, Romer had not given her the option of christening herself.

That evening, after Romer had left so peremptorily, she had gone through to the salon to talk to her father. A job for the British government, she told him, £500 a year, a British passport. He feigned surprise but it was obvious that Romer had briefed him to a certain extent.

'You'd be a British citizen, with a passport,' her father said, his features incredulous, almost abjectly so – as if it were unthinkable that a nonentity such as he should have a daughter who was a British citizen. 'Do you know what I would give to be a British citizen?' he said, all the while with his left hand miming a sawing motion at his right elbow.

'I don't trust him,' Eva said. 'And why should he be doing this for me?'

'Not for you: for Kolia. Kolia worked for him. Kolia died working for him.'

She poured herself a small glass of port, drank and held its sweetness in her mouth for a second or two before swallowing it.

'Working for the British government,' she said, 'you know what that means.'

He came over to her and took her hands. 'There are a thousand ways of working for the British government.'

'I'm going to say no. I'm happy here in Paris, happy in my job.'

Again her father's face registered an emotion so intense it was almost parodic: now it was a bafflement, an incomprehension so complete it made him dizzy. He sat down as if to prove the point.

'Eva,' he said, seriously, weightily, 'think about it: you have to do it. But don't do it for the money, or the passport, or to be able to go and live in England. It's simple; you have to do it for Kolia – for your brother.' And he pointed at Kolia's smiling face in the photograph. 'Kolia's dead,' he went on, dumbly, almost idiotically, as if only now facing up to the reality of his dead son. 'Murdered. How can you not do it?'

'All right, I'll give it some thought,' she said coolly, determined not to be affected by his emotion, and left the room. But she knew, whatever the rational side of her brain was telling her – weigh everything up, don't be hasty, this is your life you're dealing with – that her father had said all that mattered. In the end it was nothing to do with money, or a passport, or safety: Kolia was dead. Kolia had been killed. She had to do it for Kolia, it was as simple as that.

She saw Romer two days later across the street as she left for lunch, standing under the awning of the epicene just as he had that first day. This time he waited for her to join him and, as she crossed the road, she felt a sense of profound unease afflict her, as if she were deeply superstitious and the most maleficent sign had just been made evident to her. She wondered, absurdly: is this what people feel when they agree to marry someone?

They shook hands and Romer led her to their original cafe. They sat, ordered a drink and Romer handed her a buff envelope. It contained a passport, £50 in cash and a train ticket from the Gare du Nord, Paris, to Waverley Station, Edinburgh.

'What if I say no?' she asked.

'Just give it back to me. Nobody wants to force you.'

'But you had the passport ready.'

Romer smiled, showing his white teeth, and for once she thought it might be a genuine smile.

'You've no idea how easy it is to have a passport made up. No, I thought…' he paused and frowned. 'I don't know you, Eva, in the way I knew Kolia – but I thought, because of him, and because you remind me of him, that there was a chance you might join us.'

Eva smiled ruefully at the memory of this conversation – its mix of sincerity and vast duplicity – and leant forward as they steamed into Edinburgh and craned her head up to look at the castle on the rock, almost black, as if, made of coal, it sat on a crag of coal, as they slowed beneath it, slipping into the station. Now there were shreds of blue amongst the hurrying clouds – it was brighter, the sky no longer white and neutral – perhaps that was what made the castle and its rock seem so black.

She stepped down from the train with her suitcase ('Only one suitcase,' Romer had insisted) and wandered up the platform. All he had told her was that she would be met. She looked about her at the families and couples greeting each other and embracing, politely declined the services of a porter and walked out into the main concourse of Waverley Station.

'Miss Dalton?'

She turned, thinking how quickly one becomes accustomed to a new name – she had been Miss Eve Dalton for only two days now – and saw that the man facing her was stout in a too tight grey suit and a too tight collar.

'I'm Staff Sergeant Law,' the man said. 'Please follow me.' He did not offer to carry her suitcase.