‘Did I wake you?’
She turns and he smiles at her. She wraps the towel expertly into a turban and comes over to the bed. She puts her hands around his face.
‘While you are here you are mine and mine alone,’ she says as she kisses him. Drops of water from her hair fall on to his face, like dew.
*
He gets out of bed. He can hear her next door in the kitchen making breakfast. He sees his reflection in the mirror on the wall. He is thin and white, his unshaven face furrowed, the hairs on his chest curling white and grey; there are lines and spots on his body, the marks of age that he cannot conceal. How scrawny he has become, how inelegantly old, the vibrancy and elasticity of her skin that he delights in is missing from his own. How can she want him? He rubs his hand across his chest. How can she bear to touch him? He is grotesque, ugly, spent, old. Surely she must see him for what he has become?
He doesn’t move when her hands slide around his chest from behind. He feels the warmth of her body against him, her breasts against his back. She leans her chin on his shoulder and looks at the double reflection in the mirror. Then she smiles.
‘I know what you are thinking and it is not true,’ she says. ‘If it were, we would not be here together.’
*
She lies on her stomach beside him on the red rug, her head resting on her arms, asleep. He is on his back, hands behind his head, eyes screwed up against the bright sunlight, very much awake. He wears a pair of baggy khaki shorts that made her laugh when he put them on. His legs look like sticks, she says. She has put nothing on. He sees her walk from the house to the garden. He watches the movements of her body and wants her to remain like this for ever.
How many days is it, he asks himself, since I looked through my binoculars and saw you for the first time?
That day changed his life. He has decided that that was the moment when he fell in love with her. He glimpsed her beauty, never dreaming that before long he would possess it. Now, like a painter with his model, she allows him to see her in all her moods and movements. He wants to capture every moment with her, to hold in his memory a set of clear, living images. Eva at her dressing table. Eva washing her hair. Eva asleep. Eva loving him. She knows this instinctively, allowing him the freedom to look at her, to want her, to love her.
*
Can he see Christine sitting in their garden further up the hillside? Or is he imagining it? Can she see him? All she has to do is go into the kitchen, his binoculars are resting on the side table. If she were to look down the hill she would see him lying in a garden on a red rug, the naked body of an unknown woman asleep beside him. Would she cry out in pain? Run down the hill until she found him? He knows Christine. That’s not her way. She harbours bitterness and chooses her moment to use it. She would replace the binoculars in their place, pick up her book from where she had left it on the kitchen table, sit down once more on her deckchair and wait. Christine has always waited, though what for, God knows. She has the patience of the lost.
*
In the late afternoon, when the heat has relented, Eva insists they take bicycles and ride down to the lake. (He is reluctant to leave the house and she does not understand why. She has to work hard to persuade him.) The pale green water stretches away into a misty haze above which he can make out the tops of the distant hills. He sees the wooden chairs on stilts sticking out of the water and the seated fishermen patiently watching their lines. He hears voices of children shouting as they swim. (Is Dora among them? Will she see him with her mother?) He watches Eva adjust the shoulder strap of the swimming costume she wore when he saw her at the Gellert. She pulls the seat of her costume over her buttocks and he sees the tiny blemish on the skin of her thigh – how he wants to suck the poison from her – before she runs to the end of the wooden pier and dives in.
*
Water pours off her hair and body. She pushes the hair from her eyes and takes him in her arms. She kisses him, a deep, long kiss that leaves him gasping. She laughs with pleasure and pushes him backwards on to the bed.
‘We’re soaking wet,’ he says.
‘The sheets will dry,’ she replies as she climbs over him, blocking out the world from his sight. He is enveloped in a wave of sweet wet darkness. There is nothing else now, only the two of them and their passion as his body responds to hers.
*
They have dinner out of doors in a restaurant up in the hills. She sits beside him, a languid figure, saying little, eating slowly, leaning against him. The buttons on her skirt have fallen open; he sees her lean brown legs that only an hour before he has kissed with such longing. He refills her wine glass. She looks up at him, smiles, reaches up and kisses him softly on the cheek with the inside of her lips. In that movement, the strap of her dress falls off her shoulder and he sees her breast exposed almost to the nipple. She makes no move to pull it up. All the time he feels the heat of her, like an animal.
*
The moonlight throws the image of the leaves from the birch tree against the wall of the bedroom. A night breeze comes off the lake. He watches the movements on the wall, a natural film projected for his benefit. He feels her move against him. She sits up, pushes the hair out of her eyes, reaches for his hand and holds it against her cheek.
‘When I dream,’ she says sleepily, ‘it is always of oceans, great waves breaking over me, icy water on my skin, blue sea and skies, things I have never seen.’
*
He sleeps fitfully. In his dreams, Christine stands at the door of the bedroom and watches. He wakes full of anxiety, his heart beating fast. There is no one there, of course. He looks at the woman beside him. She has thrown off the sheet. He wants to touch her but is afraid that his fingers will wake her. He lies down again beside her, in wonder, as the moonlight plays across her body.
2
The knocking was tentative, exploratory, not demanding or insistent, but it frightened her as she went to answer the door. A woman in her sixties, unsmiling, said quietly: ‘May I come in for a moment? I would like to speak to you.’
‘Who are you?’
The woman put her fingers to her lips to indicate her unwillingness to give her name in the hall in case she was overheard.
‘Julia Kovacs told me you were her friend.’
‘How did you know Julia?’
The woman hesitated. The courage that had driven her here and made her knock at the door was suddenly deserting her. Eva watched the struggle make itself apparent through the changing contours of her face.
‘I was a warder at the woman’s prison.’
Then you must know how Julia died. Maybe you know who killed her.
‘Come in.’
She was sturdy, well preserved, wide shoulders, strong arms. Eva could imagine her in prison uniform, an intimidating presence because of her ordinariness. Her face was impassive, a mask that would yield compassion or terror, whatever the circumstances demanded.
‘Did Julia ask you to see me?’ What she meant was, did Julia give you a last message for me?
‘No.’ The woman saw no reason to explain. ‘She told me once she had a friend who was an international swimmer. That’s all. She never told me your name. She never mentioned anyone by name. She was afraid she might betray her friends. It’s taken me some time to find you.’
The woman was a stranger. Why should she believe her? Better, safer, to assume she is lying, that she is here for another purpose – what? – than to accept at face value anything she says. Be cautious. Don’t trust her.
‘Julia disappeared more than a year ago. Why have you waited until now to speak to me?’
‘My husband died recently.’ There was nothing apologetic in the woman’s manner. In her mind the logic was complete. ‘I’m leaving the prison service. I am going to live with my daughter in Szeged.’ For the first time she hesitated, looked down at her clasped hands. Eva sensed some struggle within her, though her face gave no sign of it. ‘I am ashamed of what I did,’ she said suddenly.
‘I want to leave that part of my life behind.’
You worked for Julia’s tormentors. You wore their uniform, you obeyed their orders, you took their money. You were the agent of their cruelty. You felt momentary compassion for a woman in pain and now you want to cleanse yourself of all your guilt so you may live out the remainder of your days with some kind of peace of mind. What had the priest said? Not forgiving means living in the past and that in itself is a form of death. Well, this woman was part of the murderous crew who ended Julia’s life. Why should she do anything for her? She was surprised at the depth of her anger.
‘I didn’t come to ask forgiveness,’ the woman said. There were tears in her eyes now. Was this real suffering or pretence? ‘That’s more than I deserve. Nothing you can say will erase the memories of what I did. They are with me always. I shall have to live with them until I die. All I can do is tell you what I know. I owe her memory that much. That is why I came. I have to tell someone, and there is no one else I can tell except you.’
‘Why is that?’
‘You knew Julia.’ The woman was weeping now without disguise, tears of grief and contrition. ‘You will know what I mean when I tell you that Julia made me see that what I did was wrong.’
‘How did she do that?’ Eva asked. If the woman was lying she had to reveal herself now, before it was too late.
‘She was the bravest woman I ever saw. Whatever they did to her, and they did some terrible things, they couldn’t break her. She never told them anything. She hated them but she wasn’t afraid of them. She showed me that it was possible to stand up for what you believe to be right. I never thought I would live to see the day that happened. She made me believe I could be brave too, not like her but in my own way.’
‘What were her interrogators looking for?’
‘How do I know? I was only a warder. They believed she knew something, otherwise why would they have beaten her like that? On her face, her hands, her feet. I don’t know where she found the strength not to give in.’
Don’t tell me, Eva wanted to shout. Don’t tell me what they did to her. If this is the truth, it is too horrible to bear. I don’t want to know what happened. Don’t destroy my memories of Julia.
It was already too late. She saw in her mind a woman with a bruised and swollen face, split and bleeding lips, smashed fingertips, blood leaking out from under the nails where her hands had been crushed, and other damage to her body that couldn’t be seen but was visible in the way she bent over her stomach and dragged her right leg. In her eyes a dazed look of disbelief and horror at what she was having to endure. Her Julia was gone. The woman with the wild blonde hair was transformed into someone she didn’t know, couldn’t recognize.
It was a moment of great pain. But she was certain now the woman was speaking the truth, and if she wanted to know about Julia, then she had to face it too.
‘Tell me about her,’ Eva said. ‘There are things I want to know. How did she die?’
‘They didn’t hang her, which was what they wanted to do. She died in her cell.’
‘Did she kill herself?’
‘No.’ The woman shook her head. ‘She would never have done that. She must have been in the prison about two weeks. She’d been interrogated and badly beaten. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the worst. She couldn’t stand up when they brought her back. They’d done something awful to her knees and feet. I helped to clean her up. There wasn’t much I could do except wipe the blood. I noticed she was breathing badly. I tried to get them to agree to transfer her to a hospital, but they wouldn’t do so. If she dies, they said, so what? She’s going to die anyway. One less to deal with. I watched her through the peephole in the door to her cell. I think she knew I was there. Most of the time she stared at the ceiling, as if that was the way into another life where she could live free from pain. I went away for ten minutes and when I returned she was dead.’
So that was how Julia had died. Beaten until her heart gave out. But why? Why did they have to torture her? What did she possess that they needed so desperately to know? The answer to that question was as elusive as ever.
4
‘Why isn’t the truth getting through?’
Pountney’s inability in the days that followed to find any answers to Sykes’s challenge was, he was sure, the cause of his anxiety attacks. He was being pulled in two directions at once. He was working for a man he disliked and helping him conduct a investigation, and here he agreed with Sykes, whose pointlessness was increasingly clear to everyone except Watson-Jones. At the same time, he was unable to find satisfactory answers to Sykes’s unasked questions. If the ‘truth’ was failing to get through, where was it stopping? Who was stopping it and why?
The dilemma he faced, how to be two people at the same time – the civil servant who performs his tasks in a politically neutral and professional manner, while at the same time keeping faith with the growing doubts and anxieties about the rightness of what he was being asked to do – mirrored the dilemma of his life. He had always been two people, and he had always been successful in concealing who he really was, often from himself. Now, for reasons he didn’t understand, the alchemy that kept the elements of his personality intact was no longer working.
*
He managed his long-planned escape from Park Road in Harlow to Hobson Street in Cambridge a week before his eighteenth birthday. He owed his emancipation to grammar school, a good history teacher, his own application (‘The boy’s at his books again,’ his mother would whisper to his father, which meant he could avoid Saturday duty behind the counter), a talent for exams (‘It’s a matter of mastering a few techniques, really’) and the power of dreams, imagining each day what he might become. He quickly saw that he could enter Cambridge with one identity and emerge three years later with quite another, no questions asked. By the time he joined the Foreign Office his accent, the patterns of his speech, even the clothes he wore belonged to a Gerard Pountney he had invented for himself. He was beginning to weave mysteries about his life.
In his early days in King Charles Street he had been overwhelmed by the glamour of power, so close he could lean forward and touch it. Who would believe that Gerry Pountney, only son of the Park Road baker, was drafting memoranda that went spiralling upwards to land eventually on the desks of ministers? Sometimes he could hardly believe it himself. He could be forgiven for thinking that his words might be steering the nation’s fortunes – admittedly edited and redrafted by other hands, but still with some essence of his contribution remaining even if the words were no longer his. As he read the incoming telegrams each morning, he had an intoxicating sense that the world’s events were under his personal control. The breathtaking quality of those early months allowed him finally to bury all traces of the cramped rooms above a baker’s shop in Harlow which he had left, so it seemed, generations before.
*
Woven into the excitement and novelty of his life in the Foreign Office was another darker thread, a sense that whatever he might achieve for himself, whatever his success, he remained incomplete. It was not loneliness, he had got used to that, it was the slow realization that his life lacked intimacy; his achievements and his occasional disappointments were unshared. He had no focus outside himself and there were times, he was discovering, when that was not enough. Perhaps, he told himself, that was the price he had to pay, another sacrifice in a life built on sacrifices. But rationalizing his feelings didn’t make the ache of incompleteness to go away.
*
Towards the end of his second year in the Foreign Office, and within months of his first posting abroad, he met Harriet Sykes. He took her to a Menuhin recital at the Wigmore Hall and afterwards, over a drink, she told him the story of her childhood. Her father, the senior partner in a firm of City solicitors, had refused his eldest child a place in his life for not being the son he had expected, had indulged his son because of his physical disability and terrorized his wife for her failure to produce the ‘whole child’ it was
his right to father.
‘You must have suffered so,’ Pountney said, wanting to comfort her in his arms.
‘You cannot imagine what it was like,’ she replied mysteriously, her dark eyes wet with tears. Beneath the table, his knee briefly touched hers.
A week later, after a visit to the Academy Cinema to see Les Enfants du Paradis, he found the courage to tell her of his youthful resolution to break away, and how Cambridge had provided a secure haven while he perfected the means of his escape into the world he had always dreamed of. He stopped short of telling her that he was his own invention, hoping she would only see instead his courage and determination. She smiled and touched his hand.
At that moment his heart opened and he saw himself bathing her wounds in a love that would redeem her past. They had so much in common: they were both casualties of their childhoods, creatures who had struggled against obstacles others would not recognize. He would give Harriet the comfort and emotional security she had never had. She would be his life’s companion. Together, he told himself (when had he ever been able to think such a word before?), together they would fight their demons. For the first time in his life he had found a reason to exist for someone other than himself. Harriet was what was missing from his life. In her he had found the reason for all his sacrifices. He would restore the wholeness she lacked. The hardships he had endured had their reward, after all. The key to life was patience, having the ability to wait for what you wanted. For years he had been patient. Now he was ready to fall in love.
They walked through Soho in search of a taxi. She held tightly on to his arm, unnerved by the boisterous invitations of the prostitutes standing in doorways. Was it his imagination, or was she already clinging to the raft of his love with all the desperation of a drowning swimmer? He entwined his fingers with hers and clasped her hand.
Secret Kingdom Page 18
