Restless (6 page)

'We have to talk about this.'

'There's much more to come. Much more. You'll understand everything when you hear the rest.'

Then she changed the subject and asked about Jochen and how his day had been and had he said anything amusing, so I told her, all the 'while sensing a kind of weakening in my bowels – as if I needed to shit – provoked by a sudden and growing worry about what was lying up ahead for me and a small nagging fear that I wouldn't be able to cope. There was more to come, she had said, much more – what was that 'everything' that I would eventually understand? We talked some more, blandly, made our appointment for next Saturday and I hung up. I rolled a joint, smoked it carefully, went to bed and slept a dreamless eight hours.

When I returned from Grindle's the next morning, Hamid was sitting on the top step of our staircase. He was wearing a short new black leather jacket that didn't really suit him, I thought, it made him look too boxy and compact. Hamid Kazemi was a stocky, bearded Iranian engineer in his early thirties with a weightlifter's broad shoulders and a barrel chest: he was my longest-serving pupil.

He opened the kitchen door for me and ushered me in with his usual precise
politesse,
complimenting me on how well I looked (something he'd remarked on twenty-four hours previously). He followed me through the flat to the study.

'You haven't mentioned my jacket,' he said in his direct way. 'Do you not like it?'

'I quite like it,' I said, 'but with those sunglasses and black jeans you look like you're a special agent for SAVAK.'

He tried to cover up the fact that he didn't find this comparison amusing – and I realised that for an Iranian it could be a joke in dubious taste so I apologised. Hamid, I remembered, hated the Shah of Iran with special fervour. He removed his new jacket and hung it carefully on the back of his chair. I could smell the new leather and I thought of tack rooms and saddle polish, the redolence of my distant girlhood.

'I received the news of my posting,' he said. 'I shall go to Indonesia.'

'I
am going
to Indonesia. Is that good? Are you pleased?'

'Am going… I wanted Latin America, even Africa…' He shrugged.

'I think Indonesia sounds fascinating,' I said, reaching for
The Ambersons.

Hamid was an engineer who worked for Dusendorf, an international oil engineering company. Half the students at Oxford English Plus were Dusendorf engineers, learning English – the language of the petroleum industry – so they could work on oil-rigs around the world. I had been teaching Hamid for three months now. He had arrived from Iran as a fully qualified petro-chemical engineer, but virtually monoglot. However, eight hours of one-on-one tuition a day shared out between four tutors had, as Oxford English Plus confidently promised in their brochure, made him swiftly and completely bilingual.

'When do you go?' I asked.

'In one month.'

'My God!' The exclamation was genuine and unintended. Hamid was so much a part of my life, Monday to Friday, that it was impossible to imagine him suddenly absent. And because I had been his first teacher, because his very first English lesson had been with me, somehow I felt I alone had taught him his fluent workmanlike English. I was almost his Professor Higgins, I thought, illogically: I had come to feel, in a funny way, that this new English-speaking Hamid was all my own work.

I stood up and took a hanger off the back of the door for his jacket.

'It's going to lose its shape on that chair,' I said, trying to disguise the small emotional turmoil I was feeling at this news of his impending departure.

As I took the jacket from him I looked out of the window and saw, down below on the gravelled forecourt, standing beside Mr Scott's Dolomite, a man. A slim young man in jeans and a denim jacket with dark brown hair long enough to rest on his shoulders. He saw me staring down at him and raised his two thumbs – thumbs up – a big smile on his face.

'Who's that?' Hamid asked, glancing out and then glancing back at me, noting my expression of shock and astonishment.

'He's called Ludger Kleist.'

'Why are you looking at him like that?'

'Because I thought he was dead.'

Scotland . 1939

EVA DELECTORSKAYA WALKED DOWN through the springy grass towards the valley floor and the dark strip of trees that marked the small river that flowed there. The sun was beginning to set at the far end of the small glen so at least she knew which direction was west. Looking east, she tried to see if she could make out Staff Sergeant Law's lorry as it wound down between the folding hillsides towards, she assumed, the Tweed valley but there was a mistiness in the evening light that blurred the pinewoods and the stone walls alike and there was no possibility of picking out Law's two-ton truck at this range.

She strode on down to the river, her rucksack bumping the small of her back. This was an 'exercise', she told herself, and it had to be undertaken in the right spirit. There was no race on, so her instructors had told her, it was more to do with seeing how people coped with sleeping rough, what sense of direction they could acquire and what initiative they showed in the time it took them to find their way home when they didn't know where they were. To this end, Law had blindfolded her and driven her for at least two hours, she calculated now, glancing at the reddening sun. On the way Law had been untypically chatty – to stop her counting, she realised – and as he dropped her off at the top of the remote glen he said, 'You could be two miles away or twenty.' He smiled his thin smile. 'But you'll no be able to tell. See you tomorrow, Miss Dalton.'

The river that ran along the valley was brown, fast and shallow. Both its banks were thick with vegetation, mainly small, densely leaved trees with pale grey, twisted trunks. Eva began to walk steadily downstream, the saffron sun dappling the grass and undergrowth around her. Clouds of midges swarmed above pools and, as the late Scottish evening drew in, the birdsong grew in confidence.

When the sun slipped below the western edge of the glen and the light in the valley turned grey and neutral, Eva decided to rest up for the night. She had covered a couple of miles she. reckoned, but there was still no sign of a house or any human habitation, no barn or bothy for her to shelter in. In her rucksack she had a mackintosh, a scarf, a water bottle, a candle, a box of matches, a small packet of toilet paper and some cheese sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper.

She found a mossy hollow between the roots of a tree and, putting on her mackintosh, huddled down in her makeshift bed. She ate one sandwich and saved the others for the night, thinking that she was rather enjoying the progress of this adventure, thus far, and almost looking forward to her night in the open air. The hurry of the fast water rushing over the round pebbly rocks of the river bed was soothing: it made her feel less alone and she felt she had no need for her candle to keep the gathering darkness at bay – in fact she was rather relieved to be away from her colleagues and the instructors at Lyne Manor.

When she had arrived at Waverley Station that day, Staff Sergeant Law had driven her south from Edinburgh and then along the Tweed valley through a succession of small and, to her eyes, almost identical mill towns. Then they had crossed the river and headed into remoter country; here and there was a long solid farmhouse with its steading and lowing herd, the hills around them higher – dotted with sheep – the woods denser, wilder. Then, to her surprise they drove through the ornamental gates of a manor house, with neat lodges on either side, and on down a winding drive flanked by mature beech trees to what looked like two large white houses, with neatly mown lawns, positioned to look up their own narrow valley to the west.

'Where are we?' she asked Law, stepping out of the car and looking at the bare round hills on either side.

'Lyne Manor,' he said, offering no more information.

The two houses, she saw, were in fact one: what had looked like a second was a long wing, stuccoed and whitewashed like the other, but of obviously later date than the main house – which looked as thick-walled as a keep, and rose a storey higher, with small irregular windows under a dark slate roof. She could hear the sound of a river and through a screen of trees across a field made out a spangle of light from some other building. Not quite the back of beyond, she thought, but almost.

Now as she lay in the rooty embrace of her tree, soothed by the ever-changing cadences of the rushing river, she thought of

her two strange months at Lyne Manor and what she had learned

there. She had come to think of the place as a kind of eccentric boarding school, and it had been a peculiar education she had received there: Morse code, first, interminable Morse code to the most advanced level, and shorthand also, and how to shoot a number of handguns. She had learned to drive a car and been given a licence; she could read a map and use a compass. She could trap, skin and cook a rabbit and other wild rodents. She knew how to cover up a trail and lay a false one. On other courses she had learned how to construct simple codes and how to break others. She had been shown how to tamper with documents, and was now able to change names and dates convincingly with a variety of special inks and tiny sharp implements; she knew how to forge – with a carved eraser – a blurry official stamp. She became familiar with human anatomy, how the body worked, what its essential nutritional needs were, and its many points of weakness. She had been shown, on busy mornings in those innocuous mill towns, how to follow a suspect, whether alone or as a couple or a threesome or more. She was also followed herself and began to know the signs when someone was on her tail and the various types of avoiding action to take. She learned how to make an invisible ink and how to make it visible. All this was interesting, occasionally fascinating, but 'scouting', as these skills were called at Lyne, was not a matter to be taken lightly: the minute anyone looked like they were enjoying themselves, let alone having fun, Law and his instructor colleagues were disparaging and unamused. But certain aspects of her education and training had perplexed her. When the others 'studying' at Lyne had gone to Turnhouse aerodrome near Edinburgh to learn how to parachute she had not been included.

'Why not?' she asked.

'Mr Romer says it's not necessary.'

But Mr Romer, it seemed, deemed other skills necessary. Twice a week Eva caught the train alone to Edinburgh, where she received elocution lessons from a shy woman in Barnton, who, slowly but surely, removed the last traces of her Russian accent from her English. She began to talk, she realised, like actresses in British films, voicing a formal, clipped, hard-edged English with strange vowel sounds: a 'man' was a 'men', a 'hat' was a 'het', her consonants were sharp and precise, her 'r's slightly trilled. She learned to speak like a young, middle-class English woman who had been privately educated. No one bothered about her French or her Russian.

The same exclusion occurred again when the others went on a three-day unarmed combat course at a commando base near Perth. 'Mr Romer says it's not necessary,' Eva was told when she wondered why she hadn't received the movement order. Then a strange man came to Lyne to teach her on her own. His name was Mr Dimarco and he was small and neatly turned-out with a sharp waxed moustache and he showed her his battery of mnemonic tricks – he used to work in a fairground, he said. Eva was told to associate numbers with colours and she soon found she could memorise up to twenty sequences of five numbers with no difficulty. They played complicated versions of Kim's Game with over one hundred objects gathered on one long table – and after two days she found, to her surprise, that she was recalling over eighty of them without difficulty. She would be shown a film and then be subjected to the most detailed interrogation about it: was the third man on the left in the pub hatless or not? What was the registration number of the getaway car? Was the woman at the hotel reception wearing ear-rings? How many steps led up to the door of the villain's house?… She realised she was being taught to see and remember as if from scratch: how to use her eyes and her brain in ways she had never required before. She was learning how to observe and recall in entirely different ways from the mass of human beings. And with these new talents she was meant to look at and analyse the world with a precision and purpose that went far beyond anybody's simple curiosity. Everything in the world – absolutely anything – was potentially worth noting and remembering. None of the others took these courses with Mr Dimarco – only Eva. Another of Mr Romer's special requirements, she was given to understand.

When it finally grew almost completely dark by the river, as dark as a Scottish summer night could become, Eva buttoned and belted her mackintosh and folded her scarf up as a pillow. There was a half moon and the light it shed made the river and the small gnarled trees on its banks look eerily beautiful as their colours left them and the monochrome world of the night established itself

Only two other 'guests' had been at Lyne as long as she had: a young gaunt Polish man called Jerzy and an older woman, in her forties, called Mrs Diana Terme. There were never more than eight or ten guests at any one time and the staff changed regularly, also. Sergeant Law seemed a fixture but even he was absent for a two-week period, being replaced by a taciturn Welshman called Evans. The guests were fed three meals a day in a dining room in the main house with views of the valley and river, a mess staffed with young trainee soldiers who barely said a word. The guests were housed in the newer wing: women on one floor, men on another, each with their own room. There was even a residents' lounge with a wireless, a tea urn and newspapers and a few periodicals – but Eva rarely lingered in it. Their days were full: the comings and goings and the unstated but acknowledged nature of what they were all doing at Lyne made socialising seem risky and slack, somehow. But there were other currents circulating through Lyne that made personal contact diffident and guarded.