Restless (39 page)

My mother smiled at this, spontaneously, and I knew why – this was already a kind of confession, I thought.

'I wanted you to know that and I wanted to see you for one last time.' She took a little step forward. 'And I wanted you to see me. To let you know that I was still very much alive.'

'We lost you in Canada,' Romer said. 'Once we realised that was where you must have gone. You were very clever.' He paused. 'You should know that your file was never closed. We can still arrest you, charge you, try you. I just need to pick up this telephone – you'd be arrested before the night was over, wherever you happen to be.'

Now my mother's slight smile proclaimed her moment of power – the balance had shifted, finally.

'Why don't you do it, then, Lucas?' she said easily, persuasively. 'Have me arrested. Go on. But you won't do that, will you?'

He looked at her, his face giving nothing away, the control absolute. All the same, I savoured my mother's triumph over him – I felt like cheering, whooping with delight.

'As far as the British government is concerned you're a traitor,' he said, his voice flat, without the trace of any threat or bluster.

'Oh yes, yes, of course,' she said, with massive irony. 'We're all traitors: me and Morris and Angus and Sylvia. A little nest of British traitors in AAS Ltd. Only one man straight and true: Lucas Romer.' She looked at him, with a kind of pure scorn, not pity. 'It's all finally gone wrong for you, Lucas. Face it.'

'It all went wrong at Pearl Harbor,' he said, with a pursed ironic grin, as if he finally realised he was impotent, all control having passed from his hands. 'Thanks to the Japanese – Pearl Harbor rather fucked everything up.'

'You should have left me alone,' my mother said. 'You shouldn't have kept looking for me – I wouldn't have bothered with all this.'

He looked at her, baffled. This was the first genuine emotion I had seen his face register. 'What on earth are you talking about?' he said.

But she wasn't listening. She opened her bag and took out the sawn-off shotgun. It was very small, it couldn't have been more than ten inches long – it looked like an antique pistol, some highwayman's firepiece. She pointed it at Romer's face.

'Sally,' I said. 'Please…'

'I know you won't do anything stupid,' Romer said, quite calmly. 'You're not stupid, Eva, so why don't you put it away?'

She took a step towards him and straightened her arm, the two blunt stubby barrels were aimed full at his face, two feet away. He did flinch a little, now, I saw.

'I just wanted to know what it would be like to have you at my mercy,' my mother said, still perfectly under control. 'I could happily kill you now, so easily, and I just wanted to know what that moment would feel like. You can have no idea how imagining this moment has sustained me, for years and years. I've waited a long time.' She lowered the gun. 'And I can tell you it was worth every second.' She put the gun away in her bag and snapped it loudly shut, the click making Romer jump a little.

He reached for a bell on the wall, pressed it and the awkward, nervy Petr was in the room in a second, it seemed.

'These people are leaving,' Romer said.

We walked to the door.

'Goodbye, Lucas,' my mother said, striding out, not even looking round at him. 'Remember this evening. You'll never see me again.'

I, of course, did look round as we left the room to see that Romer had turned away slightly and his hands were in the pockets of his jacket, pushing down hard, I could tell, from the creases that had formed, and how the lapels of his jacket were deformed; his head was bowed and he was staring at the rug in front of the fireplace again, as if it held some sort of clue as to what he should do next.

We climbed into the car and I looked up at the three tall windows. It was growing dark now and the panes glowed orange-yellow, the curtains still unpulled.

'The gun freaked me out, Sal,' I said.

'It wasn't loaded.'

'Oh, right.'

'I don't want to talk at the moment, if you don't mind. Not yet.'

So we drove out of London, via Shepherd's Bush on to the A40 heading for Oxford. We sat in silence all the way until we reached Stokenchurch and saw, through the great gap that they had carved through the Chilterns for the motorway, the lazy summer night of Oxfordshire laid out before us – the lights of Lewknor, Sydenham and Great Haseley beginning to sparkle as the land darkened and the residual warm agate glow of the sun set somewhere in the west beyond distant Gloucestershire.

I was thinking back over everything that had happened this summer and I began to realise that, in fact, it had started many years ago. I saw how my mother had so cleverly manipulated and used me over the last few weeks and I began to wonder if this had been my destiny as far as she was concerned. She would have lived all her life with the thought of that final meeting with Lucas Romer and when her child was born – maybe she was hoping for a boy? – she would have thought; now I have my crucial ally, now I have someone who can help me, one day I will bring Romer down.

I began to see how my return to Oxford from Germany had been the catalyst, how the process had begun – now that I was back in her life and the entanglement could slowly begin. The writing of the memoir, the sense of danger, the paranoia, the wheelchair, the initial 'innocent' requests, all designed to make me part of the process of finding and unearthing her quarry. But, I realised something else had triggered her into acting now, after all these years. Some sense of perceived danger had made her resolve to settle this matter. Perhaps it was paranoia – imagined watchers in the woods, the unfamiliar cars driving though the village at night – perhaps it was sheer fatigue. Maybe my mother had grown tired of being eternally watchful, eternally guarded, eternally prepared for that knock on the door. I remembered her warnings to me when I was a child: 'One day someone will come and take me away,' and I realised that in reality she had been living like that since she had fled to Canada from New York at the end of 1941. It was a long, long time – too long. She was tired of watching and waiting and she wanted to stop. And so, resourceful, clever Eva Delectorskaya had engineered a little drama that had drawn her daughter – her necessary ally – into the plot against Lucas Romer. I couldn't blame her and I tried to imagine what the toll had been over the decades. I looked across at her, at her fine profile, as we drove through the night towards home. What are you thinking, Eva Delectorskaya? What duplicities are still fizzing in your brain? Will you ever have a quiet life, will you ever truly be at rest? Will you now, finally, be at peace? She had used me almost in the same way Romer had tried to use her. I realised that, all this summer, my mother had been carefully running me, like a spy, like a-

'I made a mistake,' she said, suddenly, making me start.

'What?'

'He knows you're my daughter. He knows your name.'

'So what?' I said. 'He also knows you've got him cold. Everything's going to come out. He can't lay a finger on you. You told him – you challenged him to pick up the phone.'

She thought about this.

'Maybe you're right… Maybe that's enough. Maybe he won't make any calls. But he might leave something written.'

'What do you mean: "leave something written"? Leave something written where?' I couldn't follow her.

'It would be safer to leave something written, you see, because…' She stopped, thinking hard as she drove, hunching forward almost as if, in that posture, she could drive the car home more swiftly.

'Because what?'

'Because he'll be dead by tomorrow morning.'

'
Dead
? How can he be dead tomorrow morning?'

She glanced at me, an impatient glance that said: You still don't get it, do you? Your brain doesn't work like ours. She spoke patiently: 'Romer will kill himself tonight. He'll inject himself, take a pill. He'll have had the method ready for years. It'll look exactly like a heart attack, or a fatal stroke – something that looks natural, anyway.' She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. 'Romer's dead. I didn't need to shoot him with that gun. The second he saw me he knew that he was dead. He knew his life was over.'

MY MOTHER, JOCHEN AND I stood close together under my new russet umbrella on the pavement outside the entrance to St James's Church, Piccadilly. It was a cool, drizzly September morning – packed seal-grey clouds moved steadily above us – as we watched the dignitaries, guests, friends and family arrive for Lord Mansfield of Hampton Cleeve's memorial service.

'Isn't that the Foreign Secretary?' I said, as a dark-haired man in a blue suit hurried out of a chauffeur-driven car.

'He seems to be getting a good turn-out,' my mother said, almost eagerly, as if it were a marriage rather than a funeral, as a small queue began to bulk shapelessly at the entrance to the church, behind the iron palings of the small sunken forecourt. A queue of people not at all used to queuing, I thought.

'Why are we here?' Jochen asked. 'It's a bit boring, just standing out here on the pavement.'

'It's a church service for a man who died a few weeks ago. Someone Granny used to know – in the war.'

'Are we going to go in?'

'No,' my mother said. 'I just wanted to be here. To see who was coming.'

'Was he a nice man?' Jochen said.

'Why do you ask?' my mother said, now taking full notice of the boy.

'Because you don't seem very sad.'

My mother considered this for a while. 'I thought he was nice at the beginning, when I first knew him. Very nice. Then I realised I had made a mistake.'

Jochen said nothing further.

As my mother had predicted, Lucas Romer did not live to see the next morning after we had left him. He died that night from a 'massive heart attack', according to the newspaper obituaries. They had been prominent but rather sketchy and David Bomberg's portrait had been frequently reproduced, in the absence of any decent photographs, I supposed. Lucas Romer's war-work had been summarised as 'for the intelligence services, later rising to a senior position within GCHQ'. Many more words had been expended on his publishing career. It was as if they were commemorating the passing of a great literary figure rather than a spy. My mother and I looked at the guests as the queue to enter the church lengthened: I thought I spotted a newspaper editor, frequently on TV, I saw an ex-cabinet minister or two from distant governments, a famously right-wing novelist and many grey-haired elderly men in immaculately tailored suits, their ties discreetly signalling aspects of their past – regiments, clubs, universities, learned societies – that they were happy to acknowledge. My mother pointed out an actress: 'Isn't that Vivien Leigh?'

'She's long dead, Sal.'

Jochen tugged discreetly at my sleeve. 'Mummy: I'm getting just a little bit hungry.' Then he added considerately, 'Aren't you?'

My mother crouched down and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

'We're going to have a very nice lunch,' she said. 'The three of us: at a lovely hotel up the road called the Ritz.'

We sat at a table in the corner of the beautiful dining-room with a fine view of Green Park, where the leaves of the plane trees were turning yellow, giving up the fight prematurely after the broiling summer – autumn would be early this year. My mother was paying for everything, so she announced at the beginning of the meal, and we were to have nothing but the best on this memorable day. She ordered a bottle of vintage champagne and when it had been poured into our flutes we toasted each other. Then she let Jochen have a sip.

'It's rather nice,' he said. The boy was behaving very well, I thought, polite and rather subdued, as if he sensed there was a complicated and secret sub-text to this unusual trip to London that he would never fathom.

I raised my fizzing glass to my mother.

'Well, you did it, Eva Delectorskaya,' I said.

'Did what?'

'You won.' I felt absurdly emotional, suddenly, as if I might cry. 'In the end.'

She frowned, as if she'd never considered this before.

'Yes,' she said. 'In the end. I suppose I did.'

Three weeks later we sat in the garden of her cottage on a Saturday afternoon. It was a sunny day, but bearable: the unending heat of the summer was a memory now – something to reminisce about – now we welcomed a bit of early-autumn sunshine, with its fleeting warmth. There were swift, scudding clouds and a freshening wind thrashed the branches of the trees across the meadow. I could see the ancient oaks and beeches of Witch Wood heave and stir restlessly as the rattle of their yellowing leaves carried across the uncut blond grass towards us – hushing, shushing – as the unseen currents of air hit the trees' dense massiness and set their weighted heavy branches moving urgently, making the great trees seem alive somehow, shifting, tossing, provoked into a kind of life by the effortless power of the wind.

I was watching my mother reading a document with stern concentration. I had brought it with me, having just come from a meeting with Timothy 'Rodrigo' Thoms at All Souls, where he had given me a typewritten analysis of my detailed summary of
The Story of Eva Delectorskaya -
and this is what she now had in her hands. Thoms had tried, but failed, to seem unexcited as he spoke but I could sense the scholar's plea underneath his calm explanations of what he thought had gone on in America between Lucas Romer – 'Mr A' as far as Thoms was concerned – and Eva Delectorskaya. Give me all this, his eyes said, and let me run with it. I made him no promises.

Much of what he told me was over my head or else I wasn't fully concentrating – clustering acronyms and names of
rezidents
and recruiters, members of the Russian politburo and NKVD, possible identifications of the men who had been in the room when Eva was interrogated about the Prenslo Incident, and so on. The most interesting verdict, it seemed to me, was that he identified Romer unequivocally as a Russian agent – he seemed absolutely convinced about this – arguing that he had probably been recruited while he was studying at the Sorbonne in the 1920s.