Restless

5. Red Army Faction

BOBBIE YORK POURED ME a small whisky, 'a tiny one,' he said, adding a splash of water, then he poured himself an extremely large whisky and filled water up to the glass's brim. He 'deplored' sherry, Bobbie would frequently say – filth, the worst drink in the world. He reminded me of my mother in the histrionic violence of his over-reaction – but only in this.

Robert York MA (Oxon) was, I had calculated, in his late fifties or early sixties. He was a tall portly man with a head of thin grey hair, the strands of which were swept back and kept under control by some pomade or unguent that smelt powerfully of violets. His room, winter or summer, was redolent of violets. He wore handmade tweed suits and heavy orange brogues and he furnished his large study in college like a country house: deep sofas, Persian rugs, some interesting paintings (a small Peploe, a Ben Nicholson drawing, a large, sombre Alan Reynolds apple tree) and, hidden in some glassed cabinets, were a few books and some fine Staffordshire figures. You would not think you were in the study of an Oxford don.

He approached me from the drinks table with my whisky, and his, set my drink down on a side-table and eased himself carefully into an armchair opposite. Every time I saw Bobbie I realised anew that he was really quite fat, but his height, a certain swiftness and balletic precision of movement and his excellent tailoring had the effect of delaying that judgement a good five minutes or so.

'That's a very attractive dress,' he said suavely. 'Suits you to a tee – shame about the bandage but one almost doesn't notice it, I assure you.'

The night before I had scalded my shoulder and neck badly in the bath and had been obliged today to wear one of my skimpier summer dresses, with slim spaghetti straps, so that no material rubbed on my burn – now covered with a gauze and Elastoplast dressing (applied by Veronica), the size of a large folded napkin, situated on the junction of my neck and my left shoulder. I wondered if I should be drinking whisky, given all the powerful painkillers Veronica had plied me with, but they seemed to be working well: I felt no pain – but I moved very carefully.

'Most attractive,' Bobbie repeated, trying not to look at my breasts, 'and, I dare say, in this infernal heat most comfortable. Anyway, slangevar,' he concluded, raising his glass and taking three great gulps of his whisky, like a man dying of thirst. I drank too, more circumspectly, yet felt the whisky burn my throat and stomach.

'Could I have a drop more water?' I asked. 'No, let me get it.' Bobby had surged and struggled in his chair at my request but had not managed to leave it, so I crossed a couple of densely patterned rugs, heading for the drinks table with its small Manhattan of clustered bottles. He seemed to have every drink in Europe I thought – I saw pastis, ouzo, grappa, slivovitz – as I filled my glass with cold water from the carafe.

'I'm afraid I've got nothing to show you,' I said over my scalded shoulder with its dressing. 'I'm rather stuck in 1923 – the Beer Hall Putsch. Can't quite fit everything in with the Freikorps and the BVP, all the intrigues in the Knilling government: the Schweyer-Wutzlhofer argument, Krausneck's resignation – all that.' I was busking, but I thought it would impress Bobbie.

'Yeeesss… tricky,' he said, suddenly looking a little panicked. 'It is very complicated. Mmm, I can see that… Still, the main thing is that we've finally met, you see. I have to write a short report on all my graduates – boring but obligatory. The Beer Hall Putsch, you say. I'll look out some books and send you a reading list. A short one, don't worry.'

He chuckled as I sat down again.

'Lovely to see you, Ruth,' he said. 'You're looking very nubile and summery, I must say. How's little Johannes?'

We talked about Jochen for a while. Bobbie was married to a woman he called 'the Lady Ursula' and they had two married daughters – 'Grandchildren imminent, so I'm told. That's when I commit suicide' – and he and the Lady Ursula lived in a vast Victorian brick villa on the Woodstock Road, not that far from Mr Scott, our dentist. Bobbie had published one book in 1948 called Germany: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow that I had ordered up from the Bodleian stacks once out of interest. It was 140 pages long, printed on poor paper and had no index, and as far as I could determine it was his sole contribution to historical scholarship. As a boy he had holidayed in Germany and had spent a year at university in Vienna before the Anschluss intervened and necessitated his repatriation. During the war he had been a staff officer attached to the War Office and at its end had gone back to Oxford as a young don in 1945, married the Lady Ursula, published his slim book and had been a member of the History Faculty and a Fellow of his college ever since, pursuing, as he candidly put it, the 'way of least resistance'. He had a wide and sophisticated circle of friends in London and a large and decrepit house (thanks to the Lady Ursula) in County Cork, where he spent his summers.

'Did you have any luck with this Lucas Romer person?' I asked him, casually. I had phoned him that morning, thinking if anyone could help me, Bobbie York could.

'Romer, Romer…' he had said. 'Is he one of the Darlington Romers?'

'No, I don't think so. All I can tell you is that he was some kind of spy in the war and has some kind of a title. I think.'

He had said he would see what he could dig up.

Now he heaved himself out of his armchair, tugged his waistcoat down over his gut and went to his desk and searched among the papers there.

'He's not in Who's Who or Debrett's,' said Bobbie.

'I know: I did check,' I said.

'Doesn't mean a thing, of course. I assume he's still alive and kicking,'

'I assume so.'

He took some half-moon spectacles out of a pocket and put them on. 'Here it is,' he said, and looked over the rims at me. 'I called one of my brighter undergraduates who's become a clerk at the House of Commons. He did a little digging around and came up with someone called Baron Mansfield of Hampton Cleeve – family name Romer.' He shrugged. 'Could that be your man?' He read off the sheet of paper.

'Mansfield, Baron, created 1953 (Life Peer), of Hampton Cleeve. L.M. Romer, chairman Romer, Radclyffe Ltd – ah, the publishers, that's the bell that rang – 1946 to the present day. That's all I've got, I'm afraid. He does seem to live very discreetly.'

'Could be,' I said. 'I'll check him out, anyway. Many thanks.'

He looked at me shrewdly. 'Now, why would you be so interested in Baron Mansfield of Hampton Cleeve?'

'Oh, just someone my mother was mentioning.'

My mother had said two things in the Turf Tavern: one, that she was sure Romer was alive and, two, that he had been ennobled in some way – 'A knight, a lord, or something, I'm sure I read about it,' she had said. 'Mind you, that was ages ago.' We left the pub and strolled towards Keble College, where she had parked her car.

'Why do you want to find Romer?' I asked.

'I think the time has come' was all she said and from her tone of voice I knew further questioning would be fruitless.

She ran me to the end of Moreton Road: Hamid was due in five minutes and, sure enough, there he was, sitting on the top of the steps.

We spent two hours with the Ambersons, enjoying their delayed holiday near Corfe Castle, Dorset. There were a great many remonstrations about what Keith Amberson 'should have done' and many complaints from affronted wife and children about his oversights. Keith was abashed and apologetic. Hamid seemed to have caught Keith's mood as he seemed a little subdued throughout and over-studious in an untypical way, stopping me frequently to make long and laborious notes in his jotter. I wound things up earlier than usual and asked him if there was anything on his mind.

'You have still not responded to my dinner invitation,' he said.

'Oh, yes, any time,' I said, having forgotten all about it, of course. 'Just give me a couple of days' notice so I can get a babysitter.'

'What about this Saturday night?'

'Fine, fine. Jochen can stay with his grandmother. Saturday would be lovely.'

'There is a new restaurant on the Woodstock Road – Browns.'

'So there is, yes – Browns, that's it – I haven't been, that would be lovely.'

Hamid visibly brightened. 'Good – so, Saturday at Browns. I'll call here and collect you.'

We made the arrangements and I walked him through to the back door. Ludger was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich. He paused, licked his fingers and shook Hamid's hand.

'Hey, brother. Inshallah. Where are you going?'

'Summertown.'

'I'll come with you. See you later, Ruth.' He took his sandwich with him and followed Hamid down the stairs – I could hear the dull metallic boom of their steps as they clattered down.

I looked at my watch: ten to four – ten to five in Germany. I went to the phone in the hall, lit a cigarette and called Karl-Heinz on his private line at his office. I heard the phone ringing. I could picture his room, picture the corridor it was on, the building it was in, the nondescript suburb of Hamburg where it was to be found.

'Karl-Heinz Kleist.' I heard his voice for the first time in over a year and I felt it, for a second, sap all my strength. But only for a second.

'It's me,' I said.

'Ruth…' The pause was minimal, the surprise wholly disguised. 'Very good to hear your sweet English voice. I have your photo here on my desk in front of me.'

The lie was as fluent and as unfalsifiable as ever.

'Ludger's here,' I said.

'Where?'

'Here in Oxford. My flat.'

'Is he behaving himself?'

'So far.' I told him how Ludger had showed up, unannounced.

'I haven't spoken to Ludger for… oh, ten months,' Karl-Heinz said. 'We had a disagreement. I won't see him again.'

'What do you mean?' I heard him find and light a cigarette.

'I told him: You are no longer my brother.'

'Why? What had he done?'

'He's a bit crazy, Ludger. A bit dangerous, even. He was mixing with a crazy crowd. RAF I think.'

'RAF?'

'Red Army Faction. Baader-Meinhof, you know.'

I did. There was an interminable trial going on in Germany of Baader-Meinhof members. Ulrike Meinhof had committed suicide in May. It was all a bit vague – I seemed never to find the time to read newspapers these days. 'Is Ludger mixed up with these people?'

'Who knows? He talked about them as if he knew them. I told you I don't speak to him anymore. He stole a lot of money from me. I kicked him out of my life.' Karl-Heinz's voice was very matter-of-fact – it was as if he was telling me he had just sold his car.

'Is that why Ludger came to England?'

'I don't know – I don't care. You have to ask him. I think he always liked you, Ruth. You were kind to him.'

'No I wasn't – not particularly.'

'Well, you were never unkind.' There was a pause. 'I can't say this for sure but I think he may be wanted by the police. I think he did some stupid crazy things. Bad things. You should be careful. I think maybe he is on the runaway.'

'On the run.'

'Exact.'

I paused this time. 'So there's nothing you can do.'

'No. I'm sorry – I told you: we had this fight. I will never see him again.'

'OK, great, thanks a lot. Bye.'

'How's Jochen?'

'He's very well.'

'Give him a kiss from his father.'

'No.'

'Don't be bitter, Ruth. You knew everything before this started between us. Everything was open. We had no secrets. I made no promises.'

'I'm not bitter. I just know what's best for both of us. Bye.'

I hung up. Time to pick up Jochen from school but I knew I shouldn't have called Karl-Heinz. I was already regretting it: it set everything stirring in me once more – everything that I had managed to tidy, order and label and store away in a locked cupboard was scattered all over the floor of my life again. I walked down the Banbury Road to Grindle's chanting to myself: it's over – calm down. It's finished – calm down. He's history – calm down.

That night, after Jochen had gone to bed, Ludger and I sat up later than usual in the sitting-room, watching the news On television. For once I was paying attention and, as malign coincidence would have it, there was a report from Germany about the Baader-Meinhof trial that had now lasted more than a hundred days. Ludger stirred in his seat when the picture of a man's face came up on the screen: handsome in a sleazy kind of way – a kind of sneering handsomeness that you see in certain men.

'Hey, Andreas,' Ludger said, pointing at the screen. 'You know, I knew him.'

'Really? How?'

'We were in porno together.'

I went over to the TV and switched it off.

'Do you want a cup of tea?' I said. We went through to the kitchen together and I switched the kettle on.

'What do you mean "in porno"?' I asked, idly.

'I was an actor in porno films for a while. So was Andreas. We used to hang out together.'

'You acted in porn films?'

'Well only one film. You can still buy it, you know, in Amsterdam, Sweden.' He seemed quite proud of this fact.

'What's it called?'

'Volcano of Cum.'

'Good title. Was Andreas Baader in this film?'

'No. Then he got crazy: you know – Ulrike Meinhof, RAF, the end of capitalism.'

'I spoke to Karl-Heinz today.'

He went very still. 'Did I tell you I cut him out of my life for ever?'

'No, you didn't, actually.'

'Ein vollkommenes Arschloch.'

He said this with unusual passion, not his usual lazy mid-Atlantic drawl. A complete fucking bastard, was the closest demotic equivalent I could come up with. I looked at Ludger sitting there thinking about Karl-Heinz and joined him in his silent rant of hate against his older brother. He twiddled a lock of his long hair between his fingers and looked for a moment as if he might suddenly cry bitter tears. I decided he could stay on a day or two more. I warmed the pot, put in the tea-leaves and added the boiling water.

'Did you do porno for long?' I asked, recalling his unselfconscious nude stroll through the flat.

'No. I quit. I began to have very serious problems.'

'What? With the idea of pornography? Ideologically, you mean?'

'No, no. Porno was great. I loved it – I love porno. No, I began to have serious problems with mein Schwartz.' He pointed at his groin.

'Oh… Right.'

He grinned his old sly grin. 'He wouldn't do what I was telling him to do, you know?…' He frowned. 'Do you say "tail" in English?'

'No. Not normally. We say "prick" or "cock". Or "dick".'

'Oh, right. But nobody is saying "tail"? Like a slang?'

'No. We don't say it.'

'Schwartz - "tail": I think to say "my tail" is better than to say "my dick".'

I wasn't keen to pursue this conversation – talking dirty with Ludger – any further. The tea was brewed so I poured him a cup. 'But hey, Ludger,' I said cheerfully, 'keep saying "tail" and maybe it'll catch on. I'm going to have a bath. See you in the morning.'

I took my pot of tea, my milk bottle and my mug into the bathroom, set them all carefully on the edge of the bath and turned on the taps. To lie in a hot bath drinking hot tea is the only sure way of calming myself when my brain is on the rampage.

I locked the door, took my clothes off and lay in my warm bath and sipped my tea, banishing all thoughts and images of Karl-Heinz and our years together from my mind. I thought about my mother, instead, and the Prenslo Incident, and what she had seen and done that afternoon on the Dutch-German frontier in 1939. It seemed impossible somehow – I still couldn't fit my mother into Eva Delectorskaya, nor the other way round… Life was very strange, I told myself, you can never be sure of anything. You think everything is normal and straightforward, set and fixed – and then suddenly it's all flung upside-down. I turned to refill my mug and knocked the teapot over, badly scalding my neck and left shoulder. My scream woke up Jochen and had Ludger beating on the door.

London, 1940

IT WASN'T UNTIL AUGUST that Eva Delectorskaya was summoned, finally, to give her account of the Prenslo Incident. She travelled into work as usual, leaving her lodgings in Bays-water and catching a bus that took her into Fleet Street. She sat on the top deck, smoked her first cigarette of the day and looked out at the sunny expanse of Hyde Park, thinking how pretty the silvery barrage balloons looked, plumply flying in the pale blue sky, and wondering idly if the barrage balloons should be left there when this war ended, if it ever did. Better than any obelisk or martial statue, she thought, imagining a child in 1948 or 1965 asking their parent, 'Mummy, what were those big balloons for?…' Romer said this war would last at least ten years unless the Americans joined in. Though, she had to admit, he had made this pronouncement in a mood of some bitterness and shock in Ostend in May as they had watched the German blitzkrieg race through Holland, Belgium and France. Ten years… Ten years – 1950. In 1950, she thought, Kolia will have been dead for eleven years. The blunt truth distressed her: she thought about him all the time, not every day, now, but still many times a week. Would she still be thinking of him as much in 1950, she wondered? Yes, she told herself with some defiance, yes I will.

She opened her newspaper as the bus approached Marble Arch. Twenty-two enemy aircraft downed yesterday; Winston Churchill visits munition workers; new bombers can reach Berlin and beyond. She wondered if this last item was one of AAS's plants – it bore all the hallmarks and she was becoming something of an expert at recognising them. The story had a sound and plausible factual base but was also gifted with a teasing vagueness and a covert unprovability. 'An air ministry spokesman refused to deny that such a capability would soon be available to the RAF…' All the signs were there.

She stepped off her bus as it paused at traffic lights in Fleet Street and turned up Fetter Lane, making for the unremarkable building that housed Accountancy and Actuarial Services Ltd. She pressed the buzzer on the fourth-floor landing and was admitted into a shabby ante-room.

'Morning, darling,' Deirdre said, one hand holding out a pile of newspaper clippings while with the other she rummaged in a drawer of her desk.

'Morning,' Eva said, taking the clippings from her. Deirdre was a chain-smoking gaunt woman in her sixties who was effectively the administration of AAS – source of all equipment and material, provider of tickets and passes, medicaments and key information: who was available, who wasn't, who was sick and who was 'away travelling', and, most importantly, the provider and denier of access to Romer himself. Morris Devereux joked that Deirdre was in fact Romer's mother. She had a harsh monotone voice that rather undercut the effect of the constant, warm endearments she employed when she addressed people. She pressed the buzzer that allowed Eva to go through the interior door to the dim passageway off which the team's offices were situated.

Sylvia was in, she saw; Blytheswood and Morris Devereux were in, too. Angus Woolf was working at Reuters and Romer himself had a new executive position with the Daily Express but maintained a seldom-occupied office a floor above – reached by a cramped twisting stairway – that had a distant view of Holborn Viaduct. From their various rooms they tried to run the Agence in Ostend in absentia through encrypted telegrams sent to a stay-behind Belgian agent known as 'Guy'. Also certain words placed in AAS stories in foreign newspapers were meant to alert him and be circulated to their customers in occupied Belgium, such as they had. It was not at all clear that the system was working; indeed, Eva thought, they maintained a pretence of effort and confident news-gathering and dispatch that was impressive, but she knew everyone thought, individually, that what they were doing was at best insignificant, at worst, useless. Morale was becoming lower, daily, and nowhere better exemplified that in their boss's mood: Romer was visibly tense, snappy, often taciturn and brooding. It was only a matter of time, they whispered to each other, before AAS Ltd was shut down and they were all re-assigned.

Eva hung her hat and her gasmask on the back of the door, sat at her desk and looked out through the grimy window at the nondescript roofscape in front of her. Buddleia sprouted from a gutter-head across the central courtyard and three miserable-looking pigeons groomed themselves on a row of chimney pots. She spread her cuttings on her desk. Something from an Italian newspaper (her story about rumours of Marshal Pétain's failing health); a reference to low morale amongst Luftwaffe pilots in a Canadian magazine (Romer had scrawled 'More' on this), and teleprints from two American news agencies about a German spy ring being broken in South Africa.

Blytheswood knocked on her door and asked her if she'd like a cup of tea. He was a tall, fair and burly man in his thirties, with two red patches on each cheek as if permanent incipient blushes resided there, ready to flush his entire face. He was a shy man and Eva liked him: he had always been kind to her. He ran AAS's transmitters: a kind of genius, Romer claimed: he could do anything with radios and wirelesses, transmit messages across continents with nothing more than a car battery and a knitting needle.

While she was waiting for her tea, Eva began to type out a story she was working on about 'ghost ships' in the Mediterranean but she was interrupted by Deirdre.

'Hello, sweetness, his lordship wants you upstairs. Don't worry, I'll drink your tea.'

Eva climbed the stairs to Romer's office, trying to analyse the complex smell in the stairwell – a cross between mushrooms and soot, ancient stour and mildew, she decided. Romer's door was open and she went straight in without knocking or coughing politely. He had his back to her and was standing staring out of the window at Holborn Viaduct as if its wrought-iron arches held some encoded meaning for him.

'Morning,' Eva said. They had been back in England for four months now, since leaving Ostend, and she supposed, calculating swiftly, she must have seen Romer for about an hour and a half in all that time. The easy familiarity that had seemed to be building in Belgium had disappeared with the collapse of the Agence and the invariable, daily, bad news about the war. Romer, in England, was formal and closed with her (as he was with everyone, the other staff reminded her when she commented on his froideur). The rumours were growing that all the 'irregulars' were to be closed down by the new head of SIS. Romer's day was all but done, so Morris Devereux claimed.

He turned from the window.

'C wants to meet you,' he said. 'He wants to talk about Prenslo.'

She knew who C was and felt a little flutter of alarm.

'Why me?' she said. 'You know as much as I do.'

Romer explained about the continuing ramifications of the Prenslo 'disaster', as he termed it. Of the two British agents captured one was the station-head of SIS in Holland and the other ran the Dutch 'Z' network, a covert parallel intelligence-gathering system. Between the two of them they knew pretty much everything about Britain's spy networks in western Europe – and now they were in German hands, under stringent and unforgiving interrogation, no doubt.

'Everything's gone, or else exposed or insecure and unusable,' Romer said. 'We have to assume that – and what've we got left? Lisbon, Berne… Madrid's a wash-out.' He looked at her. 'I don't know why they want to see you, to be honest. Maybe they think you saw something, that you'll be able to inadvertently tell them why everything went so spectacularly, magnificently wrong.' His tone of voice made it clear he thought the whole exercise was a waste of time. He looked at his watch. 'We can walk,' he said. 'We're going to the Savoy Hotel.'

Eva and Romer strolled down the Strand towards the Savoy. Apart from the sandbags piled up around certain doorways, and the number of uniforms amongst the pedestrians, the scene looked like any other late-summer morning in London, Eva thought, realising as she formed the observation in her mind that she had never spent a peacetime late-summer morning in London before and therefore there was no valid comparison to be made. Perhaps London before the war was entirely otherwise, for all she knew. She wondered what it would be like to be in Paris. Now that would be different. Romer was untalkative, he seemed ill at ease.

'Just tell them everything – as you told me. Be completely honest.'

'Right, I will. The whole truth, etcetera.'

He looked sharply at her. Then he smiled, weakly, and allowed his shoulders to hang for a second.

'There's a lot at stake,' he said. 'A new operation for AAS. I have a feeling that how you come across this morning may have some bearing on all this.'

'Will it just be C?'

'Oh no, I think they'll all be there. You're the only witness.'

Eva said nothing as she took this in and tried to look unconcerned as they turned into Savoy Court and strolled towards the porte-cochere. The uniformed doorman spun the revolving door to admit them but Eva paused and asked Romer for a cigarette. He gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply, looking at the men and women going in and out of the Savoy. Women in hats and summer dresses, glossy motor cars with chauffeurs, a boy delivering a vast bouquet of flowers. For some people, she realised, a war hardly changed anything.

'Why are we meeting in a hotel?' she asked.

'They love meeting in hotels. Ninety per cent of intelligence meetings take place in hotels. Let's go.'

She stood on her half-smoked cigarette and they went inside.

They were met at reception by a young man and led up two floors and along a corridor of many corners to a suite of rooms. She and Romer were asked to wait in a kind of hallway with a sofa and offered tea. Then a man came in who knew Romer and they stood together in a corner, talking in low voices. This man wore a grey pin-striped suit, had a small trimmed moustache and sleek gingery hair. When he left Romer rejoined her on the sofa.

'Who was that?' she said.

'A complete arse,' he replied, putting his mouth close to her ear. She felt his warm breath on her cheek and her arm and side erupted in goose pimples.

'Miss Dalton?' The first young man stepped through the door and gestured for her to enter.

The room she entered was large and shadowy and she felt the softness and the richness of its carpet beneath her feet. She sensed Romer entering behind her. Armchairs and sofas had been pushed to the walls and the curtains had been half drawn against the August sun. Three tables had been positioned end to end in the middle of the room and four men sat behind them facing a solitary wooden chair set in the middle of the room. Eva was shown towards it, asked to sit down. She saw two other men standing at the rear, leaning against the wall.

A spry elderly man with a silver moustache spoke. No one was introduced.

'This may look like a tribunal, Miss Dalton, but I want you to think of it as just an informal chat.'

The absurdity of this statement made the other three men relax and chuckle. One was wearing a naval uniform, with many gold bands on his wrists. The other two looked like bankers or lawyers, she thought. One had a stiff collar. She noticed one of the men standing in the rear was wearing a polka-dotted bow tie. She glanced quickly behind her to see that Romer was standing by the door with the 'complete arse'.

Papers were shuffled, glances were exchanged.

'Now, Miss Dalton,' Silver Moustache said. 'Tell us in your own words exactly what happened at Prenslo.'

So she told them, taking them through the day, hour by hour. When she finished they began to ask her questions and more and more, she realised they began to centre on Lieutenant Joos and the failure of the double password.

'Who gave you the details of the double password?' a tall jowly man asked her; his voice was deep with a ragged, heavy quality to it; he spoke very slowly and deliberately. He was standing at the rear beside Polka-Dot Bow Tie.

'Mr Romer.'

'You're certain you had it correctly. You didn't make a mistake.'

'No. We routinely use double passwords.'

'We?' Silver Moustache interrupted.

'In the team – those of us who work with Mr Romer. It's completely normal for us.'

There were glances over at Romer. The naval officer whispered something to the man in a stiff collar. He put on a pair of round tortoiseshell spectacles and stared more closely at Eva.

Silver Moustache leant forward. 'How would you describe Lt Joos's response to your second question; "Where can I buy French cigarettes?"?'

'I don't understand,' Eva said.

The jowly man spoke again from the back of the room. 'Did Lt. Joos's answer seem to you like the response to a password, or was it a casual, natural remark?'

Eva paused, thinking back to that moment in the Cafe Backus. She saw Joos's face in her mind's eye, his slight smile, he knew exactly who she was. He had said 'Amsterdam' instantly, confidently, sure that this was the answer she expected.

'I would say, absolutely, that he thought he was giving me the answer to the second password.'

For the briefest instant she sensed all the men in the room relax, infinitesimally. She couldn't tell how or why or what indicated this, but something she had said, the answer she had given, had clearly resolved a complex issue, had put their minds at rest on a contentious matter.

The jowly man stepped forward, putting his hands in his pockets. She wondered if this was C.

'What would you have done,' he asked, 'if Lt. Joos had given the correct password?'

'I would have told him that I was suspicious of the two Germans who were in the rear room.'

'You were suspicious of them?'

'Yes. Remember I had been there all day in the cafe, breakfast and lunch, in and out. They had no reason to suspect that I was anything to do with the meeting. I thought they were edgy, ill at ease. Now, with hindsight, I realise why.'

The man with the round spectacles raised a finger.

'I'm not quite clear about this, Miss Dalton, but how was it you came to be in the Cafe Backus during that day?'

'It was Mr Romer's idea. He told me to go there in the morning and observe what happened, as discreetly as possible.'

'It was Mr Romer's idea.'

'Yes.'

'Thank you very much.'

They asked her a few more questions, for form's sake, about the behaviour of the two British agents, but it was obvious that they had the information they needed. Then she was asked to wait outside.

She sat down in the ante-room and accepted the offer of a cup of tea. It was brought and when she took it from the young man she was pleased to note her hands were hardly shaking at all. She drank it and then, after about twenty minutes, Romer appeared. He was happy, she saw at once – everything about his bearing, his knowing look, his absolute refusal to smile, confirmed his deep and enormous good mood.

They walked out of the Savoy together and stood on the Strand, the traffic buzzing by them.

'Take the rest of the day off,' he said. 'You deserve it.'

'Do I? What've I done?'

'I know – what about supper this evening? There's a place in Soho – Don Luigi's – Frith Street. I'll see you there at eight.'

'I'm busy this evening, I'm afraid.'

'Nonsense. We're celebrating. See you at eight. Taxi!'

He ran off to claim his hailed taxi. Eva thought: Don Luigi's, Frith Street, eight o'clock. What was going on here?

'Hello Miss Fitzroy. Long time no see.'

Mrs Dangerfield stepped back from the front door to let Eva in. She was a plump blonde woman who wore thick and farinaceous make-up, almost as if she were about to go on stage.

'Just passing through, Mrs Dangerfield. Come to pick up some things.'

'I've got some post for you here.' She took a small bundle of letters from the hall table. 'Everything's nice and ready. Do you want me to make up the bed?'

'No, no, just here for a couple of hours. Then back up north.'

'Better off out of London, dear, I tell you.' Mrs Dangerfield listed London's wartime disadvantages as she led Eva up to her attic bedroom in number 312 Winchester Street, Battersea.

Eva closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock. She looked round her room, reacquainting herself with it – she hadn't been here for five weeks or so. She checked her snares: sure enough Mrs Dangerfield had had a good poke around the desk and the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. She sat down on the single bed and laid out her half-dozen letters on the quilt, opening them one at a time. She threw three into the wastepaper basket and filed the rest in her desk drawer. All of them had been sent by herself. She propped the postcard on the mantelpiece above the gas fire; it was from King's Lynn – she had travelled there the previous weekend precisely to send this card. She turned it over and read it again:

Dearest Lily,

Hope all's well in rainy old Perthshire. We popped up to the coast for a couple of days. Young Tom Dawlish got married last Wednesday. Back to Norwich Monday evening.

Love from Mum and Dad

She placed the card back on the mantelpiece, thinking suddenly of her own father and his flight from Paris. The latest news she had was that he was in Bordeaux – somehow Irene had managed to post a letter to her in London. 'In reasonable health in these unreasonable times,' she had written.

As she sat there thinking, she realised she was smiling to herself – a baffled smile – contemplating the bizarre reality of her situation, sitting in her safe house in Battersea, passing herself off as Lily Fitzroy. What would her father think of this work she was doing for the 'British government'? What would Kolia have thought?…

Mrs Dangerfield knew only that Lily Fitzroy was 'in signals', worked for the War Office and had to travel a lot, spending more and more time in Scotland and northern England. She was paid three months in advance and was perfectly happy with the arrangement. In her four months in London Eva had slept only six times at Winchester Road.

She pulled back the corner of the carpet on the floor and, taking a small screwdriver from her bag, prised up the loose nails on a short section of floorboard. Beneath the floor, wrapped in oilcloth, was a small bundle containing her Lily Fitzroy passport, a quarter bottle of whisky and three five-pound notes. She added another five-pound note and closed everything up again. Then she lay on her bed and snoozed for an hour, dreaming that Kolia came into the room and laid his hand on her shoulder. It made her wake with a jolt and she saw that a wand of afternoon sun had squeezed through the curtains and warmed her neck. She looked in the wardrobe, picked out a couple of dresses and folded them into a paper carrier bag she had brought with her.

At the door she paused, wondering about the wisdom or even the necessity of this 'safe' house. This was her training; this was how she had been taught to set up and maintain a safe house without raising suspicion. The secret safe house – one of Romer's rules. She gave a wry smile and unlocked the door: Romer's rules – more and more her life was being governed by these particular regulations. She switched out the light and stepped on to the landing – perhaps she'd learn a few more this evening.

'Bye, Mrs Dangerfield,' she called out gaily. 'That's me leaving now: see you in a week or two.'

That evening Eva dressed with more diligence and thought than usual. She washed her hair and curled its ends, deciding to surprise Romer by leaving it down. She teased a lock over her eye, Veronica Lake-style, but decided that was going too far: she wasn't trying to seduce the man, after all. No, she just wanted him to notice her more, be more aware of her in a different way. He may be thinking that all he was doing was taking an employee out for a treat but she wanted him to realise that not many of his employees looked like her. It was a matter of self-esteem in the pure sense – nothing to do with Romer at all.

She put on her lipstick – a new one, called Tahiti Nights – powdered her face and dabbed rose-water on her wrists and behind her ears. She was wearing a light woollen navy dress, with gathered maize-yellow panels on the front, with a sash belt that accentuated her slim waist. Her eyebrows were plucked into perfect arches and were perfectly black. She put her cigarettes, her lighter and her purse in a cane handbag studded with seashells, had a final check in the mirror, and decided, definitely, finally, against ear-rings.

As she walked down the stairs of the hostel, a few of the girls were queuing for the telephone in the lobby. She bowed as they wolf-whistled and mockingly marvelled.

'Who's the lucky man, Eve?'

She laughed. Romer was the lucky man: he had no idea how lucky he was.

The lucky man showed up, late, at 8.35. Eva had arrived and had been shown to Don Luigi's best table, set in a bow window looking out over Frith Street. Eva drank two gin-and-tonics while she waited and passed much of the time listening in to a French couple two tables away having an indiscreet, not so sotto voce argument mainly to do with the man's bitch of a mother. Romer duly arrived, made no apology, made no comment on how she was looking and immediately ordered a bottle of Chianti – 'The best Chianti in London. I only come here for the Chianti.' He was still animated and excited, his mood post-Savoy having grown more intense, if anything, and as they ordered and ate their starters he spoke fluently and contemptuously about 'head office'. She half listened, preferring instead to look at him as he drank and smoked and ate. She heard him say that head office was stuffed with the stupidest elite in London, that the people he had to deal with were either idle Pall Mall clubmen or superannuated officials from the Indian Colonial Service. The first lot looked down on the second as petit-bourgeois careerists while the second regarded the first as washed-up remittance-men who only had a job because they had gone to Eton with the boss.

He pointed his fork at her – he was eating what purported to be Veal Milanese; she had ordered salted cod with tomatoes.

'How are we meant to run a successful company if the board of directors are so third rate?'

'Is Mr X third rate?'

He paused and she could sense him thinking: how does she know about Mr X? And then figuring out how she did know, and that it was all right, he replied slowly.

'No. Mr X is different. Mr X sees the value in AAS Ltd.'

'Was Mr X there, today?'

'Yes.'

'Which one was he?'

He didn't answer. He reached for the bottle and refilled both their glasses. This was their second bottle of Chianti.

'Here's to you, Eva,' he said with something approaching sincerity. 'You did very well today. I don't like to say that you saved our bacon – but I think you saved our bacon.'

They clinked glasses and he gave her one of his rare white smiles and for the first time that evening she was suddenly aware of him looking at her – as a man will look at a woman – noting aspects of her: her fair hair, long and curled under, her red lips, her arched black brows, her long neck, the swell of her breasts beneath her navy-blue dress.

'Yes, well…' he said awkwardly. 'You look very… smart.'

'How did I save your bacon?'

He looked around. No one was sitting close to them.

'They're convinced that the problem arose in the Dutch branch. Not the British. We were let down by the Dutch – a rotten apple in The Hague.'

'What does the Dutch branch say?'

'They're very angry. They blame us. Their executive was forcibly retired, after all.'

Eva knew that Romer enjoyed this plain-code, as it was termed. It was another of his rules: use plain-code whenever possible, not ciphers or codes – they were either too complex or too easy to crack. Plain-code made sense or it didn't. If it didn't make sense it was never incriminating.

Eva said: 'Well, I'm glad I was of some use.'

He said nothing in reply, this time. He was sitting back in his seat, looking at her as if he was seeing her for the first time.

'You look very beautiful tonight, Eva. Has anyone ever told you that before?'

But his dry and cynical tone of voice told her he was joking.

'Yes,' she said, equally drily, 'now and then.'

In Frith Street, in the dark of the black-out, they stood for a while waiting for a taxi.

Where do you live?' he asked. 'Hampstead, isn't it?'

'Bayswater.' She felt a little drunk, what with the gins and all that Chianti they'd consumed. She stood in a shop doorway and watched Romer chase a taxi up the street vainly. When he came back towards her, his hair a bit awry, smiling ruefully, shrugging, she felt a sudden, almost physical urge to be in bed with him, naked. She was a bit shaken by her own carnality but she realised it had been more than two years since she'd been with a man – thinking of her last lover, Jean-Didier, Kolia's friend, the melancholy musician, as she privately called him – two years since Jean-Didier and now she suddenly felt the powerful desire, wanted to hold a man in her arms again – a naked man held against her naked body. It was not so much about any sex act, it was something about being close to, being able to embrace that bigger solider bulk – the strange musculature of a man, something about the different smells, the different strength. She missed it in her life and, she added, this isn't about Romer, watching him come towards her – this is about a man – about men. Romer, however, was the only man currently available.

'Maybe we should go by tube,' he said.

'A taxi'll come,' she said. 'I'm in no hurry.'

She remembered something a woman in Paris had told her once. A woman in her forties, much married, elegant, a little world-weary. There is nothing easier in this world, this woman had claimed, than getting a man to kiss you. Oh really? Eva had said, so how do you do that? Just stand close to a man, the woman had said, very close, as close as you can without touching – he will kiss you in one minute or two. It's inevitable. For them it's like an instinct – they can't resist. Infallible.

So Eva stood close to Romer in the doorway of the shop on Frith Street as he shouted and waved at the passing cars moving down the dark street, hoping one of them might be a taxi.

'We're out of luck,' he said, turning, to find Eva standing very close to him, her face lifted.

'I'm in no hurry,' she said.

He reached for her and kissed her.

Eva stood naked in the small bathroom of Romer's rented flat in South Kensington. She hadn't switched on the light and was aware of the reflection of her body in the mirror, its pale elongated shape printed with the dark roundels of her nipples. They had come back here, having found a taxi almost immediately after their kiss, and had made love without much ado or conversation. She had left the bed almost immediately afterwards to come here and try to gain a moment of understanding, of perspective, on what had happened. She flushed the lavatory and closed her eyes. There was nothing to be gained by thinking now, she told herself, there would be plenty of time to think later.

She slid back into bed beside him.

'I've broken all my rules, you realise,' Romer said.

'Only one, surely?' she said snuggling up to him. 'It's not the end of the world.'

'Sorry I was so quick,' he said. 'I'm a bit out of practice. You're too damn pretty and sexy.'

'I'm not complaining. Put your arms round me.'

He did so and she pressed herself up against him, feeling the muscles in his shoulders, the deep furrow in his back that was his spine. He seemed so big beside her, almost as if he were another race. This is what I had wanted, she said to herself: this is what I've been missing. She pressed her face into the angle of his shoulder and neck and breathed in.

'You're not a virgin,' he said.

'No. Are you?'

'I'm a middle-aged man, for God's sake.'

'There are middle-aged virgins.'

He laughed at her and she ran her hand over his flanks to grip him. He had a band of wiry hair across his chest and a small belly on him. She felt his penis begin to thicken in the loose cradle of her fingers. He hadn't shaved since the morning and his beard was rough on her lips and on her chin. She kissed his neck and kissed his nipples and she felt the weight of his thigh as he moved to cross it over hers. This is what she had wanted: weight – weight, bulk, muscle, strength. Something bigger than me. He rolled her easily on to her back and she felt the heft of his body flatten her against the sheets.

'Eva Delectorskaya,' he said. 'Who would've thought?'

He kissed her gently and she spread her thighs to accommodate him.

'Lucas Romer,' she said. 'My, my, my…'

He raised himself on his arms above her.

'Promise you won't tell anyone, but…' he said, teasingly leaving the sentence unfinished.

'I promise,' she said, thinking: Who would I tell? Deirdre, Sylvia, Blytheswood? What a fool!

'But…' he continued, 'thanks to you, Eva Delectorskaya,' he dipped his head to kiss her lips briefly, 'we're all going to go to the United States of America.'