Berta Isla

by Javier Marías

  ‘Judge for yourself, Tom. How many missions have you carried out? How many were successful? How many were unmitigated failures? Only one. I checked your service record this morning. Have you been useful or superfluous? You should be flattered that we immediately saw you as a potential agent, someone who would be useful in the defence of the Realm. There aren’t many men like you, as you know. Despite your long time away from operations, we’re very pleased with you, and you should be too. It’s been a very equitable arrangement really. We have perhaps come out more on the credit side, but both parties have gained.’

  Tomás’s anger grew; he again touched the butt of his gun, as a way of calming himself and containing his rage.

  ‘What do you mean, “credit side”? And what gains are you talking about? I’ve spent more than twenty years reluctantly lying to my wife. I’ve spent twelve years dead as far as she and my children are concerned, children I don’t even know any more. And dead as far as my parents were concerned; I couldn’t be with them even at their funerals. I’ve risked my own neck and that of my family too. You forced me into a way of life I’d already rejected; no, you didn’t let me choose my own life.’

  ‘Ah, I knew it would come down to that,’ said Tupra, ‘The poor-little-rich-kid philosophy of our times, which is ubiquitous now, regardless of what class people come from. Since when have people chosen their own lives? Over the centuries, with very few exceptions, people’s lives have been laid out for them. That was the norm, not a tragedy. Most never moved from one place, they died in the place they were born, in the country, in a village or some wretched city, or, later on, in some wretched slum. Families with a lot of children would send one son into the army, another into the Church, if they were lucky and were accepted, because at least, then, they wouldn’t starve to death; and they dispatched them very early on too, lost sight of them when they were still only beginners, to use your word. If the daughters were pretty, then they’d find them husbands, sometimes an old man and often a tyrant, and if not, they would teach them some vaguely useful secondary skill, like sewing, embroidery, cooking, in the hope that someone would take them into service; or they’d pack them off to a poor girls’ convent where they would be unpaid maids. And that was in families with a bit of money, so just imagine what it was like for those who had nothing. The poor little rich kid didn’t choose his own life. That’s how it was for all humanity until very recently indeed, and what we have now is pure illusion. It’s always been considered reasonable to want to get on in life and prosper, and history is full of social climbers. But how many made it up the ladder then and how many do so now? A tiny minority. The majority accept their lives and get on with them without asking any questions, grateful for what they’ve been given, and that’s the norm too: just dealing with life’s daily difficulties and being contented with your lot. Not being able to choose isn’t an affront, it’s standard practice. It is in most countries, as it is in ours, despite the collective illusion. Do you think I chose my life, or Blakeston chose his, or the Queen for that matter? The Queen had less choice than anyone. So what are you talking about, Nevinson? You’re describing extraordinary privileges, which you have enjoyed to the full. Did anyone put a gun to your head in that pub in Oxford? Were you forced to agree? Did Blakeston twist your arm and threaten to break it? Of course you chose. And you’re not going to tell me that you haven’t enjoyed it.’

  ‘Being accused of murder is worse than having your arm broken,’ Tom retorted, albeit without much conviction. How quickly Tupra had, once again, succeeded in undermining his confidence and intimidating him. He touched the butt of his gun for a third time, although this time the gesture was pure superstition, even fantasy. He could always stop talking, if talking meant he would lose. He could take out his gun, cut to the chase and silence Tupra, but that was no more than a theoretical consolation, a fantasy: now that he was so newly and justifiably free, now that he could go back to Berta if she would have him, now that he wasn’t going to end up in the prison he’d avoided in that Oxford pub. Had he enjoyed that life? Perhaps he had in a way, just as an addict enjoys his addiction, and gives himself over to it entirely. But he had also hated it and found it painful. He would miss it, he would rejoice at its ending, and he would miss it. It had all sprung from a deceit, it was sullied and besmirched. He would bid it farewell for ever. And, yes, he would miss it.

  Tupra looked at him coldly now. He had little patience for weakness, complaints, reproaches, or with anyone who contradicted him. He was cordial, and even pleasant, in situations in which he could instruct, enlighten, hold forth and convince. He could be chatty, and make his companion feel important and the object of his esteem; some even came to feel it an honour that he should require their services and think them valuable. Tom had sometimes felt the same, but not always. He had also seen Tupra’s harsh, draconian side, and how he used that to impose his will by dint of persuasion or force, and, on one occasion, he had been witness to a near-beating, although Tupra had stopped in time or else realised that the mere threat of a beating was enough. He could see from Tupra’s expression that he was bored, but not disappointed, because he was the kind of man who feels disappointed in advance of any actual reason to be disappointed. Tom, after all, was just one of many recruits, and Tupra didn’t have time to attend to the troubles of each individual.

  ‘You could have stayed and faced up to the accusation,’ he said. ‘And if you’d done so … well, if you had, you’d have discovered that the accusation couldn’t possibly stand, it would have melted away like an ice cream. And you would have calmly resumed your ordinary life.’ It was exasperating to Tomás that Tupra should speak so casually about that initial trick, that initial farce, as if there were nothing unusual about such a deception, nothing reprehensible. There wasn’t even a hint in his voice of implicit apology, the slightest suggestion of shame. They had soured his entire existence and, to Tupra, that was simply an occupational hazard. ‘What’s it got to do with me if you made a bad choice, if you couldn’t deal with your fear, if you gave in. That’s not my responsibility, I simply get on with my job, which is to do my best by the Realm. Besides, I think it’s given you a very singular life, a life out of the ordinary, which some will be able to read on your face. There’s nothing at all to read on most people’s faces.’ ‘An illegible stone,’ thought Tomás Nevinson. There was no point in getting angry or arguing with that man, he was like the sea’s throat that swallows everything without a thought.

  ‘I’m leaving, Bertram. I’m resigning. I’m going back to Madrid. I’ve finished here.’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop you, Nevinson, there never has been. Besides, you’ve been out of the loop for a long time now. We won’t miss you as much as we would have years ago. If you’ll forgive the expression, we feel we’ve recouped our investment, you’ve performed well for us.’ He lit another cigarette, and Tomás lit one of his own, a way of keeping his feelings under control. ‘But you be careful.’ Tupra shifted in an instant from the official to the friendly. ‘If you go back to Madrid and stay there quietly, you shouldn’t be at too great a risk. But the danger is still there, you know, so don’t completely lower your guard. Even if years pass without anything happening.’ He clicked his fingers to summon the waitress, a Latin, very un-English gesture. ‘For us there’s always a risk, until we die.’ It was kind of him to include himself in this, to share that sentence.

  ‘I’ll take the risk, which really isn’t that great,’ said Tom. ‘Every day is full of risks: illness, an accident, a mugging. It would be arrogant to think that anyone would remember me. Everyone’s too caught up in his or her own present, and I belong to another age. The new generations get on with their lives and don’t care about the past, they don’t feel it’s their concern. And I am the past now.’

  ‘That’s usually the case,’ said Tupra. ‘But there could always be someone still anchored in the past, who does remember. There’s usually at least one person who does. It’s quite another matter
for that one person to actually bother to do anything about it. The tendency is just to let it go, water under the bridge. They put away their resentment and move on. But while that’s true, don’t rely on it. Resentment can sometimes make people get up from their chair and take the few necessary steps. Just enough.’

  ‘One more question, Tupra.’ Despite the concern Tupra was showing for him now, he couldn’t bring himself to revert to calling him by his first name. Tomás had decided not to pursue his complaints, given that Tupra was immune to them, but his feelings of resentment were growing, resentment towards Tupra and someone else. ‘How much did Professor Wheeler have to do with my recruitment, with the whole business?’

  Tupra responded at once, without a moment’s hesitation, and he sounded sincere, but who knows.

  ‘Absolutely nothing. Wheeler didn’t know a thing. He merely discovered you and recommended you, that’s all. He did sound you out, but he obviously wasn’t persuasive enough. We did the rest. He, like you, believed that the young woman was dead. He remarked on the coincidence, of course, on that stroke of luck, but he accepted it as precisely that, or so he said. Or, rather, he said nothing.’ Tupra gave a half-smile. ‘We couldn’t tell him the truth, because with Wheeler you can never be sure. He’s far more decent than we are; he really is from another age. He might well have ruined everything. He would certainly have objected. And would certainly have alerted you.’

  ‘So, according to you, it was better to deceive him too. I find that pretty hard to believe. He took part in the war, where you have to lose all scruples, and I don’t know if you recover them later on.’ Tupra did not respond. There was no need. ‘And what about that policeman Morse? He did know the truth. He’d examined the corpse.’

  ‘Don’t think too badly of Enfield Morse. I remember the name because it’s the name of a gun, like being called Winchester or Remington or Smith & Wesson. Being a man of conscience, he did put up some resistance, and his superiors had to come down really hard to make him do what he had to – orders from above and all that. He’ll be an inspector by now, if not some still higher rank. His career will have made up for that unfortunate incident, because I imagine that, if he’d dug in his heels, his career would have been finished. Was there anything else, Nevinson?’

  To Tupra, these were all mere anecdotes, he had millions of them and sometimes he liked to bring them out. He had taken out his wallet to pay, but there was only one waitress and she didn’t come.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ Tomás sat staring down at the table either pensively or as if he suddenly felt completely empty. ‘The fact is it’s too late for everything.’

  ‘Not too late to go back perhaps,’ said Mr Southworth, trying to cheer him up, to draw him out of his stupor. ‘Have you spoken to your wife yet, have you phoned her?’

  ‘No, it’s not something I can say over the phone,’ said Tomás, his gaze still unfocused, fixed but not focused on one spot. ‘Nor in a letter either. I’m not sure, I need to think about it still. The fact is, though, I have nowhere to go. I can’t go back to Valerie and Meg and shut myself up there again. However much I love my little girl, they’re both part of my long exile, my days without a name or a face, I don’t even know which is my real face. But I wonder if going back might be the worst thing I could do to Berta, and I would hate to upset her. She wouldn’t know what to do with me, where to put me or how to talk to me. If, that is, she would take me back. I’d have to see. And as for my children, well …’

  ‘I see the difficulty – well, “difficulty” is hardly the word for it. I certainly wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. And what about Tupra? Was that the end of the conversation?’ asked Mr Southworth.

  ‘I do have something else to say,’ said Tupra, and he waved his wallet around in front of his eyes, to draw Tomás out of his abstraction, at least a little. ‘Even though you won’t be on active service, you will remain subject to us. Nothing too onerous, so don’t get alarmed. Keep us informed of your movements and whereabouts, of course. Molyneux will probably continue to be your contact, until he’s moved on, if he is, of course. Consider him an appendage of mine. The Crown is very grateful, but you know that already. You have given good service, which is why we’ve spent years subsidising your family.’ That was the word he used, ‘subsidising’, no beating about the bush. He didn’t say ‘helping’ or ‘taking care of’. ‘And now you’ve acquired another family. Whatever were you thinking of? Without our contribution, you’ll have a hard time trying to maintain both. Anyway, if you do go back to Madrid, we’ll find a slot for you back at the embassy or the British Council or, at worst, the British Institute, where there are always vacancies, and with your skills, you’d make an excellent teacher. Unless you want to find another job under your own steam, which you’re perfectly free to do, always assuming you’re lucky enough to find one. If not, we’ll pay you your salary anyway, just as we’ve been paying your wife for some years now. We never abandon those who have worked to defend the Realm, you can be sure of that. However, we will abandon anyone who lets the Realm down or allows his tongue to run away with him or reveals things he shouldn’t and cannot reveal. Your wife is sure to ask you questions when you reappear, how could she not? And others might too, your children, for example, who won’t understand a thing, but will want to hear all kinds of tales of derring-do; but since she knows more, she’ll be the one to ask more. Tell her whatever you like, that the dead wouldn’t let you in, that you’ve had amnesia, which, of course, she won’t believe, but it doesn’t matter. However, don’t tell her the truth whatever you do, unless you want us to withdraw your maintenance payments and all financial help.’ And again he used a rather offensively bureaucratic term – ‘maintenance payments’, no less. ‘That would happen immediately, but it wouldn’t be the only thing. We could even prosecute you. You’re still bound by the Official Secrets Act and will be for the rest of your life, so don’t forget that. By the 1911 Act and the revised 1989 Act, which are essentially the same if you take the trouble to compare them.’ The waitress finally came over, and Tupra handed her a note. While he was waiting for his change, he added: ‘In short, just to make things clear: it’s exactly as if you’d been part of Sefton Delmer’s PWE.’

  This advice was unnecessary. Tomás was now a veteran and unlikely to forget. He was no longer the terrified, impressionable young man he had been at that first meeting with Tupra. Besides, what Ted Reresby had said to him all those years ago – Tupra, he recalled, had been Ted Reresby to that striking lecturer from Somerville, Carolyn Beckwith by name (and had probably slept with her that night) – had remained engraved on his memory: ‘We don’t really belong anywhere, neither officially nor officiously. We are simultaneously somebody and nobody. We both exist and don’t exist. We both act and don’t act, Nevinson, or, rather, we don’t carry out the actions we carry out, or the things we do are done by nobody. We simply happen.’ Those words had sounded like something out of Beckett and he had barely understood them. Now, they no longer sounded like Beckett and he could understand them, because he, too, had been through the same thing, he had ‘happened’ several times. Now, though, he would stop.

  Tupra or Reresby didn’t leave a tip, not even a penny. He was usually very generous, even extravagant compared with his thrifty compatriots. It was his way of punishing the waitress for her delay in attending to him. As Tom well knew, he always dished out rewards and punishments. They both stood up and, once out in the street, Tupra offered him his hand, as the English tend to do when they say goodbye for some time or for ever; they don’t usually shake hands willy-nilly. Tomás took his own hand out of his raincoat pocket – a reflex reaction more Spanish than British, he who had always been so careful not to let such trivial details give him away. However, to go from stroking the butt of his gun to shaking Tupra’s hand seemed excessive, as did shaking the hand of someone who had done him harm, irreparable, irreversible, prehistoric harm. And so he put his hand back in his pocket, without even
touching Tupra’s proffered hand, which Tupra elegantly diverted to lighting another cigarette with the fluctuating flame of his lighter. He wasn’t in the least offended. He probably didn’t care, and wouldn’t punish him for it.

  ‘Goodbye, Tupra.’ Tomás wouldn’t have many opportunities to speak to Tupra in the future, but, he thought, he would never again call him by his first name as he often had, as if he were a comrade in arms, which he couldn’t deny he had been on occasion.

  ‘Goodbye, Nevinson, and good luck. Give my regards to your wife, once you’re back in Madrid with her. She’s a very nice woman, and intelligent too.’ A thought crossed Tomás’s mind, but he immediately dismissed it: ‘I hope he didn’t take too much of a liking to her.’ But this was no time for pointless, retrospective questions. Tupra added with an encouraging smile: ‘I think that, although, over time, she’s got used to the idea, she’ll be very glad you’re not dead.’

  IX

  * * *

  For a while, I wasn’t sure my husband was my husband, or perhaps I only needed to feel that and was merely playing at being unsure. Sometimes I thought he was, sometimes not, and at others, I decided to believe nothing and simply continue living my life with him, or with that man so similar to him, albeit older, and who had emerged from a mist somewhere and had never been counted among the dead, which meant that while it couldn’t be said of him: ‘We die with the dying: see, they depart, and we go with them’, it could be said: ‘We are born with the dead: see, they return, and bring us with them’. And I, too, had grown older in his absence.

  As long as I decided to believe nothing and to carry on regardless, I felt safe in a way. It was as if I’d returned to that state of waiting and uncertainty that benefits us all and helps us make the transition from day to day, because there’s nothing worse than the feeling that everything is fixed and certain, or set firmly on the right path; that what should have happened has happened or is in the slow process of happening, that there will be no anxieties or surprises until we reach the conclusion, or only phoney anxieties or surprises, which we could have safely predicted, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Most of the Earth’s inhabitants settle into their daily lives and merely watch the days begin and see how they trace an arc as they pass and then end: that’s how I would like to have lived when I was young and there was only the future stretching out before me, and no potholed present or past. However, since my experience was quite different and I became used to that, it’s the latter experience I still want now: anyone who grows accustomed to a state of constant waiting never entirely allows it to end, it’s as if half your air had been taken away. And so, for a time, Tomás both was and wasn’t him. I observed him with a mixture of suspicion and satisfaction, and, absurd though it may seem, the one contributed to the other, or, rather, they were mutually dependent and fed each other reciprocally, and the suspicion was the waiting, its prolongation or survival.