Letters for a Spy (17 page)

Well…!

What can one possibly say?

Random Harvest
tells the story of an amnesiac army officer who—during the Armistice celebrations of 1918—escapes from an asylum in the English Midlands, marries a music hall singer and is idyllically happy for about a year, living in a cottage with roses round the door. Then he writes an article and goes off to Liverpool to meet the newspaper man who has agreed to publish it. But, whilst there, he is knocked down by a motorcar. The shock of this rejigs his amnesia. He now recalls that he’s the head of a noble family; yet he doesn’t know his wife any longer, nor have the least remembrance of their marriage … not even when she re-enters his life to become his selfless secretary.

Years later, though, his parliamentary duties—for he is now a well-respected MP—take him back into that same area of the Midlands and he begins to recollect things subsequent to the Armistice … while, most fortunately, not again forgetting things
prior
to the Armistice. So he now rushes back to the cottage with roses round the door, which is happily still vacant and exactly as he and his secretary-wife had left it.

Even more happily, on a sudden sentimental whim,
she
has turned up at the cottage at the same time. So they meet by the garden gate (its hinges still squeaking) under branches still heavy with blossom.

There quickly follows instant recognition—reawakened love—re-impassioned clinch … and final fade.

All this, of course, was preposterous; and not simply that, it was shameless. Why didn’t Miss Garson accompany Ronald Colman to Liverpool? Because the script provided her with a baby. What happened to the baby? That obliging little scrap, having served his purpose, then dutifully died, so that his mum could dedicate herself uniquely to the welfare of his dad. He must have got his notions of self-sacrifice from her.

However—for all its faults—the film was in its way quite splendid and you couldn’t help but be drawn in; not even on a second viewing, to judge from the state of apparent absorption at my side. We left the cinema feeling uplifted. Uplifted and light-footed. I suddenly realized something: that from the moment we had walked unauthorized into that spray-swept auditorium, neither Sybella nor I had once mentioned the name of Bill Martin.

Nor had we mentioned
Laura
. I hadn’t been forced either to intrude or to lie.

Added to which, the sky was a profusion of stars. On nights like this you could feel positively thankful for the blackout.

“God’s in His heaven,” I said, “all’s right with the world!”

She nodded.

“And yet,” I added, “Robert Browning never went to the movies. So how would he have known?”

“Beats me,” she said.

We held hands and sauntered. I escorted her to the camp gates and there took back the jacket I had placed around her shoulders.

And somehow—as I did so—we found ourselves in an embrace.

22

I didn’t get to sleep till after three. Therefore when I received my wake-up call at seven-thirty I felt as heavy—both physically and mentally—as I had felt lithe and weightless just eight hours previously. But the bathwater into which I lowered myself was practically stone-cold (on purpose) and, even though adhering to the regulatory couple of inches, efficiently supplied the shock a sluggish system required. By the time I had eaten breakfast, settled my account and walked to the station, I felt fine again and was looking forward to seeing Sybella. Yet it was now a different kind of anticipation from the one I had experienced earlier: quieter and less heady, more questioning and less accepting. I was back at work. I still felt happy to be spending time with her but I had stopped believing in roses round the door and had become re-infected by suspicion. The very fact that at the camp gates she had responded to me in the way she had: even this now troubled me—shamingly unfair though I realized it to be.

Thankfully, today’s journey resembled Friday’s rather than Saturday’s: no more perching on my suitcase whilst the military squeezed by. Today, seats in a third-class compartment: a compartment shared by only three others, excluding Sybella. She and I sat close and I revelled in our closeness … yet at the same time felt divorced from it. It was almost as though I were having an out-of-body experience, my spirit up in the luggage rack, lying on its stomach maybe, with its head propped on its hand, a dispassionate observer. Dispassionate? More like sardonic. Sitting—or, rather, lying—in judgment.

Even my voice sounded distant: a sensation similar once more to that at the solicitor’s.

“Last night, you know, before I fell asleep, I was thinking about Bill.”

“Me, too,” she said.

“Sort of wondering how he might have felt if he’d been watching.”

“Happy—I hope.”

“But a difficult situation. Even in heaven, when you’ve only recently arrived, wouldn’t it be hard not to feel a little jealous? Resentful?
She didn’t exactly wait for very long, did she? And I used to think she loved me
.”

“He knew I loved him. And he was always extremely understanding. About everything.”

“Perhaps it’s easier to be understanding about everything, than about one thing in particular.”

“He’d have understood how lost I felt. How lonely. And he’d have understood how—when suddenly someone came along who was just so sympathetic and so very easy to talk to…”

Don’t let yourself feel flattered, I told myself.

“That’s kind and I appreciate it,” I said (feeling flattered), “but all the same—”

“Quite apart from being so easy on the eye,” she added.

She could hardly have known it, I supposed (or, yes, probably she did), but this was
not
going to help me in my attempt to stay objective. My tone became brusque.

“Despite his tendency to blush?” I asked. She looked at me.

“Yes, you do rather have this tendency to blush.”

“No, actually I don’t. I think it’s merely you who has this tendency to bring it out in me.”

“Me and Greer Garson both?” She stopped. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was brazen! I can’t believe I said it.”

“Nor me. And I trust—I really do trust—that
you’re
now going a little red?”

“Not in the least. If I am brazen I shall have to brazen it out. When I set off in quest of Miss Garson—shortly after my arrival in California—then she and I can have an interesting little powwow about a young man’s propensity to blush. I think I shall look forward to that.”

“Yes, it should be fun.”

But I was thinking: she does realize, doesn’t she? About me and the movie business. Surely she does? At this point who precisely is taking in whom?

I was immediately struck by something quite nonsensical—that, in a way, I didn’t know which would be worse: whether she did realize or whether she didn’t.

Presumably it was the thought of this enlightening Hollywood encounter which now made her laugh and which now made, too, each of our three fellow passengers look up, agreeably. One was a clergyman, sucking on his brier; the other two, middle-aged women, also smoking, who somehow had the air of civil servants—possibly high-ranking ones. They both wore tweed suits, lisle stockings, sensible shoes; but they sported different types of headgear: a porkpie hat with a pretty feather, and a cheerful silk scarf depicting flower girls in Piccadilly.

After a moment, though, they all returned to their newspapers. Then it dawned on me, guiltily, that I had not only approved of their approval of Sybella, I had even taken a stupid sense of pride in it. I tried to be a good deal firmer with myself.

And also with her.

“So, then?” I invited. (Although, in fact, I moved an inch or two away.) “Tell me about him. Tell me about Bill.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Anything … it’s not important. For instance, I think you mentioned he went up to Scotland? What was that to do with?”

“Oh. Something or other for the government. Naturally, he’d never speak to me about matters of that sort. And I knew better than to ask.” (
OF COURSE I won’t say a word to anyone—I never do when you tell me things
…) “What makes you think it wasn’t just a spot of leave?”

“Well, if it had been, wouldn’t he have taken you with him?” I paused. “Oh, no, I suppose he couldn’t have.”

“Why not?”

“Thinking of the play, I mean.”

She frowned a little.

“What’s the play got to do with it? We’ve only been doing the play for the past couple of weeks.”

“Really?” I said. “The past couple of weeks?”

“Yes. Didn’t you realize?” She raised an amused eyebrow. “I’ve only been with ENSA for the past
three
! And Bill went up to Scotland in … oh, in early March. Though he wasn’t there for long; merely a few days. Even if it did feel like a lot longer…” She said this with a grimace.

But in any case I wasn’t thinking about Scotland. Not any more. For the second time in a matter of seconds I found myself simply repeating what she had said.

“You’ve only been with ENSA for the past three weeks?”

“You look surprised. But the thing is: I was absurdly late in applying—don’t ask me why—up till then I’d had nothing but a deadly boring job in a bakery!” She smiled. “But at least with regard to
Nine Till Six
I got the timing right. They were just on the point of casting and beginning their week’s rehearsal.”

And at least too, I thought, with regard to the double champagne cocktails on the night before Bill Martin left for Scotland—as well as to that worrying matter of the five weeks’ absence from work—she had likewise got the timing right. Lease-Lend no longer entered into it.

So was I mistaken?
Was
I? Just too clever for my own good?

But what about that other question: the discrepancy in style?

Well, suddenly a solution to even that suggested itself. It was like when you had finally overcome some critical impasse in a crossword puzzle; probably you hadn’t thought about it for a while before going back to it afresh. Several other clues at once fell into place.

So how about this? The letters had
not
been written in Sybella’s style; there was no gainsaying that. Yet, all the same, the solution didn’t—inevitably—need to be a sinister one. They had been written in Bill Martin’s style.

And this was the reason.

Bill Martin had not merely liked his women beautiful; he had liked them well-born. At least upper-middle-class. And perceptibly so. Using all the speech patterns of the upper-middle-class. Wasn’t that possible?

And I surmised he had also liked them to be just a fraction scatterbrained. By no means dumb but simply not quite so intelligent as himself. Sybella would have been everything he had wanted … except scatterbrained. But Sybella was an actress and because she had loved him she had been prepared to play along. Galatea to his Pygmalion. Privately, she might even have enjoyed the notion of creating a part and of secretly—but affectionately—being able to smile at his fallibility.

An innocent enough deception … and one, of course, which took us right back into ampersand territory.

Yet if Bill Martin had really not wanted a fiancée who matched him in intelligence I had to concede I was a little disappointed in him.

On the other hand, if this meant that—while his own image tarnished—Sybella’s reverted to what it had been … well, here was something that could easily outweigh my disappointment.
Any
disappointment.

And it might even explain why she had reacted to myself as unreservedly as she had. She possibly hadn’t realized that it had been something of a strain living up to the expectations of the major. No matter how enjoyable. She had certainly loved her fiancé—no question as to that—but she had also needed to remain in character. Yesterday, for the first time in a long while, she might have experienced the relief of once more being herself in the company of an unattached male who … who had clearly considered her attractive.

Despite his attempts not to make this too apparent.

So—now that I finally understood—I could even, without saying anything, move in closer again, reach out for her hand; start savouring both her nearness and the moment itself with renewed pleasure. Renewed wonder. My spirit hopped down from the luggage rack and rejoined me in my seat. I felt ashamed of my suspicions, yet mightily glad, naturally, that I hadn’t communicated them. (So far as I could tell.) I should have liked to talk exclusively about ourselves but I thought that for her own sake, while she seemed able to speak of him composedly, she ought to be encouraged to get Bill Martin out of her system; insomuch as such a thing would be either possible or right.

“When did you meet?” I asked.

“Last Christmas. At a party. In Wales.”

“In Wales? Good gracious. Long way from home!”

“Yes, maybe—but Bill had a large number of Welsh friends with whom he’d always kept in touch.”

I laughed. “I meant from
your
home.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I had an old nanny, you know, and sometimes around Christmas I’d go and stay with her for a few days. After she left us, she retired to Cardiff. Which is where Bill was born and spent the first fifteen years of his life.”

“With a coalminer for a dad?”

“No. With a pharmacist for a dad.”

“Ah.”

“I only met him the once. In some ways a bit of a dry old stick. But with a droll sense of humour and…”

“And?”

“And I think I might have grown to be quite fond of him, that’s all.”

“What about his mum, then—Bill’s mum? A little easier?”

“Not really. No. His mother had been dead for years. And we couldn’t find a Ouija board.”

Oh, praise the Lord! Hallelujah! She was making jokes. She was actually making jokes! Not about Bill himself, of course, but about things very closely connected. I sent up a quick and silent thank you.

“How long was it before you got engaged?”

“On April 14
^th
,” she said. (Why had I even asked?) “Or on March 31
^st
; I’ll let you take your pick!”

“What!”

I had spoken too fast. My tone had sounded sharp. But she didn’t seem to notice.