He sat down at a table, his eyes fixed on the door, but a safe distance away from it, his back against the wall, well protected. He waited for five minutes, during which time more people came in; there was only one woman on her own, but she was middle-aged and didn’t look remotely like an actress. He ordered some tea, and before they brought it, he finally saw someone come in who could possibly be Mrs Rowland. She was rather well dressed, as Will had told him, but in a more frivolous style than most English women, better groomed; she was about thirty and quite striking, not pretty exactly (her nose came within a millimetre of being too long), but altogether rather good-looking. She stood in the doorway, surveying the occupied tables, clearly searching for someone in particular, someone she would recognise at once. She looked blankly at Tom, without a glimmer of recognition. Then timidly, inquiringly, he raised one hand, keeping his other hand – still gripping the wooden handle of the gun – in the pocket of his overcoat, which he had not yet taken off. He saw a look of disappointment, almost desolation cross the woman’s face, a look that instantly became one of exasperation or annoyance. This wasn’t a very English reaction either, too spontaneous, too blatant. She recovered enough to more or less erase that look, and came over to his table. He stood up to greet her, one hand still in his pocket.
‘Mrs Rowland? I’m Jim Rowland. I understand you wanted to see me. But I don’t think we know each other, do we?’
She made no move to sit down, nor to shake his hand. She remained standing, avoiding his gaze, as if in a hurry to leave. She nervously smoothed her thick straw-coloured hair. Her pale eyes were not quite prominent enough to be described as bulging, and were just a touch too pale to be the colour of white wine, that is, slightly yellowish. All her features seemed to conspire to make her rather plain, and yet, while she did border on the ugly, she nevertheless managed to be very attractive.
‘I’m sorry, it’s not you I wanted,’ she said in what sounded to Tom like an Italian accent. He would have to hear more to know for certain, she could be Yugoslavian or from some other Eastern European country. This thought put him even more on his guard.
‘Well, I’m definitely me,’ he answered. ‘I don’t know who you were hoping to meet. You came to my school this morning.’
‘I was hoping to find my husband, but you’re not him. Forgive me. It was a mistake. You have exactly the same name. I’m so sorry to have put you to any trouble. And I’m sorry, too, to have bothered you. Have a good afternoon.’
It occurred to Tomás that it was quite a coincidence to have chosen the name of a man being pursued by his new wife. She was in no mood to explain any further. She turned to leave, having first murmured another hasty apology. Since he wasn’t her Jim Rowland, she had nothing to say to him and certainly wasn’t going to tell him her life story. He still couldn’t pin down her accent, which was quite marked, but not grotesquely so.
At that moment, they brought him the tea he had ordered, and the woman had to stay where she was to allow the waitress to pass.
‘Wait. Now that we’re here, wouldn’t you like something to drink?’ Tom said, then immediately realised that, in his present life, even the most elementary curiosity was forbidden to him.
Had he insisted, he was sure it wouldn’t have taken much to persuade Mrs Rowland to sit with him for a few minutes and set out her case, her history and that of her husband. But he mustn’t attract anyone’s attention in that provincial town. If someone saw him at the hotel chatting to a foreign-looking woman, when foreigners were still a rarity, someone would notice and people would talk, he would suddenly seem less anodyne than they’d thought and they would ask him questions. And if she somehow managed to draw him in, if he got interested and felt tempted to help her find that other Jim Rowland, for example (he was, after all, an expert at finding people), he would be stepping out of his assigned role. ‘I’m a drab, bland schoolteacher, who couldn’t be more ordinary, and to whom nothing unexpected can ever happen,’ he reminded himself. ‘My adventurous life is over, at least for as long as I stay here.’ Then another thought occurred to him: ‘Perhaps this woman is pretending. Perhaps she’s been sent here to meet me face to face and find out if I am, in fact, Tom Nevinson; she’ll have been shown photos of me and recognised me despite the glasses, the moustache and this stupid pseudo-intellectual beard. She won’t do me any harm herself, but she might tell someone else: “Yes, that James Rowland is definitely Tom Nevinson. Over to you.” Or perhaps the people who sent her, and who will turn up later, know me by another name. That’s why she doesn’t want to sit down for a casual chat. She’s seen enough, her mission is complete, and she knows that, on the basis of her testimony, they’ll do me in.’ What came into his head was the Spanish term, dar matarile, ‘to do someone in’. That’s what being bilingual is like, both languages are always drifting around in your head, and sometimes emerge simultaneously.
‘No, thank you,’ said Vera Rowland, if that was her name. She skirted round the waitress and walked smartly out of the room. She would doubtless go straight back to room 38 and catch a train the next morning, going who knows where.
VIII
* * *
That was the only unpleasant surprise he experienced during his long, dull stay in that town, which, like so many other towns, never seemed to be fully awake. The whole business had lasted only a few hours, but it took him months to drive it from his mind, all the time expecting someone else to arrive, a man or a woman with a job to do. Or two men, like Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager at the beginning of that film from the 1960s, The Killers, which he seemed to recall took place somewhere similar, in a school or a boarding house, where John Cassavetes had been holed up for years, working as a teacher or something. In Spanish, it was called Código del hampa – The Criminal Code – and he saw it when he was about fifteen. It was loosely based on a short story by Hemingway of which all he could remember was that the victim of the paid assassins – a Swedish man called Ole Andreson, he did also remember that name – made no attempt to run away or defend himself, but simply accepted his execution – the justificatory euphemism used by any group that needs to justify itself, including the SIS and, therefore, Tom too – as if he were weary of waiting or weary of being afraid and said to himself: ‘At last they’ve found me. I shouldn’t complain. I was given a little extra time. Useless, meaningless time, but nevertheless a little extra time to spend in the universe. And since all such respites must have an end, so be it.’ The assassins in the film, Marvin and Gulager, were so struck by his attitude that they set about conducting their own investigation. If something like that happened to him, thought Tom Nevinson, he wouldn’t remain inert and passive like the Swede, he wouldn’t allow them to gun him down in front of a blackboard without putting up a fight. During the months it took him to shake off that fear, he would always carry his gun in his pocket, even when he was teaching. He knew he would grow weary if that situation went on for much longer, but not weary of living with fear, because fear had been his constant companion since he was very young, ever since the night someone killed Janet Jefferys, shortly after he, Tom, had sex with her. He was too accustomed to fear to grow weary of it, having known fear in almost every possible form.
But time passed and no one appeared, no one came for him or tried to ‘do him in’. Gradually, he began to relax, although never completely, always keeping his antennae alert: some people are in no hurry at all and will wait patiently for the one moment when you lower your guard. He would sometimes think about that woman, Mrs Rowland, and couldn’t help amusing himself inventing possible stories, since he would never know the truth, and he regretted not having made her stay with him for a while at the Jarrold, so that he could question her; it would have been easy enough to persuade her: ‘You owe it to me for the minor inconvenience you caused.’ If she hadn’t come simply in order to identify him, then she really must have been on the trail of her husband, which was very odd indeed. Perhaps she was some sort of mail-order bride. She must have moved to
England, where she’d got married, or so she thought, to a certain James Rowland (‘I’m also Mrs Rowland,’ Will said she’d told him as a last resort, after he’d twice failed to understand her foreign surname; a shame really, because that would have provided Tom with more information), and he, for whatever reason – disappointment, regret, belated jitters, bigamy – had tomado las de Villadiego, to use that phrase which, in Mr Southworth’s view, was still in current usage, and quite simply deserted her. Or perhaps she had been tricked into joining a prostitution ring, in which case she’d clearly managed to escape, because she certainly didn’t look like an abused, submissive whore. She’d seemed very resolute, almost commanding, and certainly not helpless; she was tastefully made up; and, while her continental clothes may have been rather too frivolous for that priggish country, they were certainly not loud. Perhaps she wanted to have her revenge on that devious husband and was intent on tracking down all the existing Rowlands in Britain, ruling them out one by one. Or perhaps she merely wanted to demand an explanation, after having been so unceremoniously dumped. This all sounded very strange, but, then, imagination was not Tom Nevinson’s strong point, and he could think of no other possible scenario, except that it was rather as if Berta had set off to scour the world in search of him, because he really was a disappeared husband. As far as Berta was concerned, though, he was dead, and there was no point looking for him, not even for his dead body abandoned at some remote point on the globe, and, besides, in theory, others would already have tried or would have tried and failed.
With the passing of time, the whole episode faded from his memory, or else he kept it in mind only until it took on the quality of a prediction or an omen. Later, he met Meg, unexpectedly made her pregnant, went to live with her and their daughter Valerie, whom he adored, but with whom he would spend only a few years. He sometimes felt as if he’d lived in that town all his life, had been born there and would die there an old man; that everything that had happened before, however varied and intense, was just a dream. This happens to almost everything that ceases to exist, which, precisely because it does cease to exist, always seems like a dream. What no longer exists is like ash on the sleeve.
Then, in 1993, he received the visit. Tupra informed him of this the day before, but neither he nor Blakeston deigned to come, neither did any of the various individuals, doubtless mere errand boys, who had brought him that cash payment every six months, something that had never once failed in all those years. They sent someone new, possibly a subaltern, an intern, a beginner. Despite being warned of the visit, Tomás approached the meeting with great caution and with his old Undercover in his hand, as was only right when meeting any stranger. They met in one of the visitors’ lounges in the Jarrold, to which Tomás had immediately taken a fancy, and where, subsequently, he would sometimes go on his own to read the newspapers, as if he, too, were merely a visitor passing through. The messenger was a dandyish, rather pudgy young man, inoffensive in appearance and pedantic in speech, very well turned out and with an absurd Dickensian kiss-curl on his forehead, like a polychrome moulding (he had bicoloured hair, blond and brown, a style fashionable in the 1990s). He said his name was Molyneux, an apparently French surname, not uncommon in England and which had a certain cachet, and he had come to tell him that, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid break-up of the USSR, no one in those Eastern European countries was either particularly alert at the moment or very active. The Stasi and the other secret services were more worried about their own fate, about their slow dismantling and – sensing what was to come – afraid that, one day, depending on the direction taken by events, they might themselves become the object of reprisals or lynchings (after what had happened to the Ceauşescus in Romania, no one felt entirely safe). Everyone was taking up positions and, in some cases, a general stampede had already begun, along with the destruction of compromising files.
‘We do not believe,’ he said, using a rather grand ‘we’, which doubtless included Tupra, ‘that they’re much concerned now with settling old scores, that must be the last thing on their minds.’ As for Ulster, there was real, if secret, progress being made, and it was unlikely they would want this disrupted by some extemporaneous act of revenge. It was always possible that a loose cannon, an unrepentant diehard, might try, because no one can control the individual psyche (Molyneux used the word ‘psyche’, for he was equally pedantic in his choice of vocabulary). ‘There will still be damage done and murders committed before peace or something like it is achieved, we take that for granted; not for nothing have there been three thousand dead in the last twenty years, that’s counting the casualties on both sides.’ But the current tendency was towards moderation, leaving the unresolved unresolved, at least until the Last Trump sounds, and Molyneux tittered to himself, pleased with his little joke. ‘In short, Mr Nevinson – sorry, Mr Rowland,’ the pudgy young man went on, ‘it seems to us that it’s time for you to come back, to leave. Not in order to rejoin the service, not at once. That might happen one day should we need you, but, then again, it might not, we can’t make any promises. You worked yourself into the ground last time, and you’ve been out of training for many years now.’ This was his perfunctory way of announcing to Tom that he might be definitively retired. ‘It will be a gradual process, but, for the moment, you can return to London and see how things develop. It’s a nice central location, too, so don’t worry, you won’t be banished to some remote suburb, as if you were still in exile, but you’ll be a safe distance from us, at least temporarily. Of the very few people who know your identity and your face, most will believe you’re dead, so you shouldn’t be in any danger; still, better safe than sorry. Best to maintain your current appearance and not show your face at our offices or those of the Foreign Office.’
That young whippersnapper, thought Nevinson, had the nerve to speak to him about ‘us’, an ‘us’ that excluded him; he bit his tongue, choosing not to put him firmly in his place just yet; Molyneux was, after all, an emissary from Tupra; but Tomás found that Napoleonic forelock so absurd, perched there like a cockroach, that he felt like grabbing a pair of scissors or a comb and scissoring or combing it into extinction.
At the same time, though, he couldn’t help feeling touched and grateful, and even experienced a ridiculous impulse to kiss the young whippersnapper on his bulging, kiss-curled forehead, for being the bringer of such good news. During those long, slow years, there had been quite a few afternoons after school when he’d walked to the station and gone out onto the platform that bore the sign Trains to London. He’d watched those trains come in and stop for a couple of minutes, calling to him with their open doors, inviting him to climb aboard. He’d felt such a longing to walk over, climb on, and pay for his ticket on the train. It was so simple, so normal, and so many passengers did it without a second thought, as a matter of routine. For him, on the other hand, it had become an impossibility, as unimaginable as setting off for Java. Once in London, it was only a few stops on the Underground to the airport, where he could get a direct flight to Madrid, to Berta and his real or first children. Sometimes, when he was at a low ebb, he’d watched those trains leave with almost painful longing. He’d watched them move off much as some nineteenth-century country bumpkin standing on a footpath or in a field would have observed the trains passing in the distance.
‘When can I move?’ he asked Molyneux.
‘In a week’s time, a small flat will be ready for you in Dorset Square, which, as you know, is near Baker Street. It’s pretty small, more of a garret really, but large enough for an interregnum. You just tell us when you want to move. Take as long as you like, because the flat will be there waiting for you.’
Young Molyneux would, of course, be unaware that during the Second World War, a section of the famous SOE had its headquarters at No. 1 Dorset Square. Tomás wondered if he would end up living in the same building, even if it was just for an ‘interregnum’, to use Molyneux’s word; if, that is, it was still owned by the Secret Se
rvice after half a century. ‘Crown properties probably remain the property of the Crown for ever,’ he thought. ‘The Crown only lets us go when it no longer needs us.’
‘The flat will be ready in a week’s time, you say. Well, then, I’ll be there in a week’s time.’
It simply wasn’t an option to leave without a word, without so much as a goodbye or an explanation, as so many unscrupulous husbands, and a few wives, have done over the ages. To avoid Meg kicking up a fuss and trying to find him, to avoid her reporting his disappearance to the police, he decided to tell her the truth, or part of the truth. No one would have been able to find the James Rowland he was, because he didn’t exist, but it troubled him to think of Meg vainly scouring the country, like that foreign Mrs Rowland, because you never can tell what desperate people might be capable of, that is, people who don’t understand what has happened to them.
‘I’ve been married for many years, and I have two children,’ he told her. ‘When our marriage ended, I came here to forget about them, because it was too painful living in such close proximity. That’s why I didn’t want to marry you, because I’m already married, and still am, we never divorced, you see. At least I didn’t take my deception that far, and didn’t break any laws. I now have the possibility of going back to my previous life, and, yes, you’re quite right, I shouldn’t have remained so silent about my past, it would have been better and fairer to have told you everything. My silence wasn’t ill-intentioned, but it was utterly selfish, but then we all survive as best we can, taking one day at a time, defending ourselves against infinite grief and grabbing whatever comes our way, without even thinking about the consequences. Yes, I did use you, but I would remind you that I never wanted things to go this far, I didn’t want us to have a child together. Not that I regret it now, on the contrary, I’m glad of it, as you well know. I can’t ask you to forgive me, and I don’t expect or deserve that. It breaks my heart to think I won’t see you or Val every day, but you must understand that, for years now, my heart has been in pieces over my other children, whom I’ve known for longer.’ He felt ashamed to use such expressions, to speak of his pain, his broken heart – his infinite grief, for heaven’s sake – but he had to do it. Such words wouldn’t make things easier, but not to trot out such clichés would be even worse; in certain circumstances, people need them, especially when someone is about to leave. They’re pure window-dressing, but you have to say them; they don’t help, but they soften the blow, if not at the time, then at least retrospectively. Besides, it wasn’t the first occasion on which he’d had recourse to them: anyone who spends his life pretending to be someone else has to learn to use those trivial words, however ashamed they may make him feel. ‘You won’t lack for anything. I’ll send you money every month to cover expenses, so you mustn’t worry about that. I know that’s the last thing on your mind right now, but later on, you’ll realise how important it is.’
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