Restless

4. The Shotgun

BÉRANGÈRE CALLED IN THE morning to say she had a bad cold and could she cancel her tutorial. I acceded immediately, sympathetically and with some secret pleasure (as I knew I'd still be paid) and decided to take the opportunity of two free hours and caught the bus into the town centre. On Turl Street I stepped through the small door into my college and spent two minutes reading the notices and posters pinned to the big board under the vaulted gatehouse before going into the porters' lodge to see if there was anything interesting in my pigeon-hole. There were the usual flyers, Middle Common Room sherry-party invitations, a bill for wine I had bought four months previously and an expensive white envelope with my name – Ms Ruth Gilmartin MA – written in sepia ink by a very thick-nibbed pen. I knew instantly who was the author: my supervisor, Robert York, whom I regularly traduced by referring to him as the laziest don in Oxford.

And, as though to punish me for my casual disrespect, I saw that this letter was a subtle reprimand – as if Bobbie York were saying to me: I don't mind your taking me for granted but I do ever-so-slightly mind your telling everyone that you do take me for granted. It read:

My dear Ruth,

It has been some time since last we caught sight of each other. Dare I ask if there is a new chapter for me to read? I really think it would be a good idea if we met soon – before the end of term if possible. Sorry to be a bore.

Tanti saluti, Bobbie

I called him immediately from the phone box in the lodge. He took a long time to answer and then I heard the familiar patrician basso profundo.

'Robert York.'

'Hello. It's me, Ruth.'

Silence. 'Ruth de Villiers?'

'No. Ruth Gilmartin.'

'Ah, my favourite Ruth. The prodigal Ruth. Thank the Lord – you gave me quite a nasty turn there. How are you?'

We arranged to meet the following evening at his rooms in college. I hung up and stepped out into the Turl and paused for a moment, feeling oddly confused and guilty all of a sudden. Guilty, because I had done no work on my thesis for months; confused, because I was now thinking: what are you doing here in this smug provincial town? Why do you want to write a D.Phil, thesis? Why do you want to be an academic?…

No quick or ready answers came to these questions as I plodded slowly up Turl Street towards the High – contemplating going to a pub for a drink instead of returning home for a frugal, solitary lunch – when, as I passed the entrance to the covered market, I glanced over and saw an attractive older woman emerge who looked remarkably like my mother. It was my mother. She was wearing a pearl-grey trouser suit and her hair seemed blonder – recently dyed.

'What're you staring at?' she said, a little crossly.

'You. You look wonderful.'

'I'm in remission. You look terrible. Miserable.'

'I think I've reached a crossroads in my life. I was going to have a drink or two. Care to join me?'

She thought this was a fine idea so we turned about and made our way to the Turf Tavern. It was dark and cool inside the pub – a gratifying respite from the brazen June sun – the old flagstones had been recently washed and were mottled with moisture and there were very few customers. We found a corner table and I went to the bar and ordered a pint of lager for myself and a tonic water with ice and lemon for my mother. I thought about the latest episode in Eva Delectorskaya's story as I set the glasses down, tried to imagine my mother – then virtually the same age as me – watching Lt Joos shot to death before her eyes. I sat down opposite her: she had said that the more I read the more I would understand – but I felt a long way from comprehension. I raised my pint glass to her and said cheers. 'Chin-chin,' she said, in return. Then she looked at me as I drank my beer, puzzled, as if I were slightly deranged.

'How can you drink that stuff?'

'I got a taste for it in Germany.'

I told her that Karl-Heinz's brother, Ludger, was staying with us for a few days. She said she didn't think I owed the Kleist family any more favours, but she appeared unconcerned, even uninterested. I asked her what she was doing in Oxford – usually she preferred to do her shopping in Banbury or Chipping Norton.

'I was getting a permit.'

'A permit? What for? Invalid parking?'

'For a shotgun.' She saw my face move into a rictus of incredulity. 'It's for the rabbits – they're ravaging the garden. And also, darling – I must be honest with you – I don't feel safe in the house anymore. I'm not sleeping well – every noise I hear I jerk awake – but really awake. I can't get back to sleep. I'll feel safer with a gun.'

'You've lived in that house since Dad died,' I reminded her. 'Six years. You never had any problems before.'

'The village has changed,' she said, darkly. 'Cars drive through all the time. Strangers. Nobody knows who they are. And I think something's wrong with my phone. It rings once then cuts out. I hear noises on the line.'

I decided to act as unconcernedly as she had. 'Well, it's up to you. Just don't shoot yourself by accident.'

'Oh, I know how to use a gun,' she said, with a small self-satisfied chuckle. I decided to say nothing.

She rummaged in her bag and produced a large brown envelope.

'Next instalment,' she said. 'I was going to drop it off on the way home.'

I took it from her. 'Can't wait,' I said, and it wasn't, for once, a flippant remark.

Then she covered my hand with hers.

'Ruth, darling, I need your help.'

'I know you do,' I said. 'I'm going to take you to a proper doctor.'

For a moment I thought she might hit me.

'Be careful. Don't patronise me.'

'Of course I'll help you, Sal,' I said. 'Calm down: you know I'll do anything for you. What is it?'

She turned her glass around a few times on the table-top before she answered.

'I want you to try to find Romer for me.'

Ostend, Belgium. 1939

EVA SAT IN THE agency's conference room. A heavy squally shower was passing, the smatter of rain making the sound of fine thrown gravel against the window panes. It was darkening outside and she could see the buildings opposite all had their lights on. But no lights were lit in the conference room – she was sitting in a curious premature winter afternoon's dusk. She picked up a pencil from the table in front of her and bounced its rubber end on her left thumb. She was trying to keep the image of Lt Joos's boyish run across the car-park at Prenslo out of her mind – his fluid easy sprint and then his fatal stagger and stumble.

'He said "Amsterdam",' Eva repeated in a low voice. 'He should have said "Paris".'

Romer shrugged. 'A simple mistake. A silly mistake.'

Eva kept her voice calm and level. 'I only did what I have been instructed to do. You say it yourself all the time. A Romer rule. That's why we always use double passwords.'

Romer stood up and crossed the room to look out of the window at the lights across the street.

'It's not the only reason,' he said. 'It also keeps everyone on their toes.'

'Well, it didn't work for Lt. Joos.'

Eva thought back to that afternoon – yesterday afternoon. When she reached the Hotel Willems and learned that Romer had left she called the Agence immediately. Morris Devereux told her that Romer was already on his way back to Ostend and that he had telephoned ahead to say that Eva was either dead, wounded or a prisoner in Germany. 'He'll be pleased to know he was wrong,' Morris said drily. 'What have you two been up to?'

Eva herself made it back to Ostend by early the next morning (two buses from Prenslo to The Hague, where she had a long wait for a night train to Brussels) and went straight to the office. Neither Angus Woolf or Blytheswood said anything to her about what had taken place; only Sylvia grabbed her arm when no one was looking and whispered, 'You all right, sweetheart?' putting her finger to her lips. Eva smiled and nodded.

In the afternoon, Morris said she was wanted in the conference room and she went through to find Romer sitting there, smart in a dark charcoal suit and a gleaming white shirt with a regimental tie – he looked like he was off to make a speech somewhere. He gestured to her to sit and said, 'Tell me everything, every slightest thing.'

And so she did, with impressive recall, she thought, and he sat and listened carefully, nodding from time to time, asking her to repeat a detail. He took no notes. Now she watched him standing by the window where, with the palp of his forefinger, he followed a rain droplet wiggling its way down the pane.

'So,' he said, not turning round, 'one man is dead and two British secret agents are prisoners of the Germans.'

'That's not my fault. I was there only to be your eyes and ears, you said.'

'They're amateurs,' he said, the scorn in his voice making it harsh. 'Fools and amateurs who're still reading Sapper and Buchan and Erskine Childers. The "Great Game" – it makes me want to vomit.' He turned back to her. 'What a coup for the Sicherheitsdienst – they must be amazed how it was so easy to hoodwink and capture two senior British agents and whisk them across the border. We must seem like complete idiots. We are complete idiots – well, not all of us…' He paused, thinking again. 'Joos was definitely killed, you say.'

'I would say so – definitely. They must have shot him four or five times. But I've never seen a man shot dead before.'

'But they took his body away, anyway. Interesting.' Now he turned and pointed a finger at her. 'Why didn't you warn the two British agents when Joos failed the second password? For all you knew, Joos could have been part of the German plan. He could have been working with them.'

Eva kept her anger banked down. 'You know what we're meant to do. The rule is abort – instantly. If you think something is wrong you don't hang around to see if you're right – and then try to patch things up. You just get out, fast. Which is exactly what I did. If I'd gone into that room to warn them…' She managed a laugh. 'There were the other two Germans with them anyway. I don't think I'd be sitting here talking to you.'

Romer paced around, then stopped, facing her.

'No, you're right. You're absolutely right. What you did – operationally – was absolutely correct. Everyone else around you was making mistakes, acting like complacent fools.' He gave her his wide white smile. 'Well done, Eva. Good work. Let them clean up their own filthy mess.'

She stood up. 'Can I go now?'

'Do you fancy a stroll? Let's have a drink to celebrate your baptism by fire.'

They caught a tram and it took them to the Digue, Ostend's lengthy and imposing sea-wall-cum-esplanade, with its grand hotels and boarding-houses, dominated at one end by the vast oriental bulk of the Kursaal, with its domes and tall arched windows giving on to its gaming rooms, its ballroom and concert-hall, at the other extreme of the gentle curve of the promenade, sat the solid bulky presence of the Royal Palace Hotel. The cafes on the Kursaal terraces were all closed so they went to the bar of the Continental Hotel, where Romer ordered a whisky and Eva chose a dry martini. The rain had let up and the evening slowly cleared enough for them to watch, out at sea, the twinkling lights of a ferry cruising slowly by. Eva felt the alcohol ease and calm her as she listened to Romer repeatedly running over the events of the 'Prenslo Incident', as he now termed it, warning Eva that he might require her to add to or corroborate the report he intended to submit to London.

'Schoolboys would have made a better fist of it than those fools,' he said, still seeming to be brooding on British incompetence, as if the fiasco was a personal slight, somehow. 'Why did they agree to meet so close to the border?' He shook his head in genuine disgust. 'We're at war with Germany, for God's sake.' He called for another drink. 'They still see it as a kind of game where a certain kind of English attitude will always prevail – all fair play, pluck and derring-do.' He paused and stared at the table-top. 'You've no idea how difficult it's been for me,' he said, suddenly looking weary, older. It was the first time, Eva realised, that she had ever heard him admit to or exhibit a trace of vulnerability. 'The people at the top – in our business – have to be seen to be believed…' he said, then, as if he was aware of the slip, he sat up smartly, smiling again.

Eva shrugged. 'What can we do?'

'Nothing. Or rather – the best we can under the circumstances. At least you were all right,' he said. 'You can imagine what I was thinking when I saw those cars race across the border and stop outside. Then I saw all the running about, heard the shooting.'

'I was in the woods by then,' Eva said, thinking back, seeing once again Joos in his tight suit sprint out of the cafe, firing his revolver. 'Everyone had just had lunch – still doesn't seem real, somehow.'

They left the Continental and walked back out on to the Digue and looked out across the Channel in the direction of England. The tide was out and the beach gleamed silver and orange in the esplanade lights.

'Black-out in England,' Romer said. 'I suppose we shouldn't complain.'

They strolled down towards the Chalet Royal then turned down the Avenue de la Reine – it would lead then back to Eva's apartment. They were like a couple of tourists, she thought, or honeymooners – she checked herself.

'You know, I always feel uneasy in Belgium,' Romer said, continuing in this unusual personal vein. 'Always keen to leave.'

'Why's that?'

'Because I was almost killed here,' he said. 'In the war. In 1918. I feel I've used up all my Belgian luck.'

Romer in the war, she thought: he must have been very young in 1918 – barely twenty, in his teens perhaps. She considered her vast ignorance about this man she was walking beside and thought about what she had done and risked in Prenslo at his behest. Perhaps this is what happens in wartime, she thought: perhaps this is entirely normal. They had reached her street.

'I'm just down here,' she said.

'I'll walk you to the door,' he said. 'I've got to go back to the agency.' Then after a brief pause he added: 'That was very nice. Thank you: I enjoyed myself. All work and no play – etcetera.'

Eva stopped at the door and took out her keys. 'Yes, it was very nice,' she said, carefully matching his banalities. Their eyes met and they both smiled.

For a split second Eva thought that Romer was going to reach for her and kiss her and she felt a fierce giddy panic rise in her chest.

'Night,' was all he said, however. 'See you tomorrow.' He sauntered off, with one of his half-wave, half-salutes, pulling on his raincoat as the drizzle began again.

Eva stood at her door, more disturbed than she could have thought possible. It was not so much the idea of Lucas Romer kissing her that had shaken her – it was the fact that she realised, now the moment had passed and gone for ever, that she had actually rather wanted it to happen.