Our Friends in Berlin

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘What d’you think we should do?’

  ‘Sit tight. In the meantime I need some chickenfeed – some intelligence that she can verify but that won’t compromise us.’

  ‘Are you getting worried?’ she asked in surprise.

  He shook his head. ‘Not yet. She knows all the traffic has to go through a Gestapo agent – and I’m still the only one they’ve got.’

  Tessa looked at him. ‘The way you said that inclines me to think you almost believe it yourself.’

  She was right: he had immersed himself in the part of controller for so long it had become almost a separate identity. When he was in the company of Marita and the rest he found it easy to be convincing, because his imposture had become second nature. His front of self-assurance had never flinched. He had never allowed them to doubt him.

  They talked on for a while, until Tessa glanced at her watch and made a movement to leave. He looked at her again, appraisingly. There was some subtle change in her – it wasn’t just the clothes or the make-up.

  ‘You look different, I don’t know why,’ he said, suddenly confused.

  She narrowed her eyes, then laughed. ‘You think so?’ She put her hand on his. ‘I was going to wait before I – Alan’s decided we should bring the wedding forward.’

  ‘I see. Are you pleased about that?’ He was really at a loss to know.

  ‘Very. But there’s another reason we’re hurrying it along.’ She briefly glanced down, to her stomach, then raised her eyes again to his. It took him a moment, but he got there.

  ‘Oh. Oh …’ She still had her hand over his. For a few moments he was too surprised to speak. ‘Gosh, Tessa – congratulations. When is –’

  ‘We’ll marry in June, probably. You know, I really thought I was too old to …’

  ‘But you’ve done it! I’ll – we’ll miss you, of course.’

  She laughed again, and rose to her feet. ‘I’m not going yet. Not due till September.’

  He stood with her, and in a spontaneous rush of feeling he leaned over and planted a dry kiss on her cheek. She beamed at him, murmuring a few words he didn’t catch. She pulled her gloves back on, and raised a hand in farewell. He sat down again on the bench and watched as her figure receded into the distance.

  He would miss her. She had been his case officer for nine years, in which time they had become close. He could not have failed to pick up Tessa’s steady yet unexpressed feelings for him. Three years ago her cold-blooded shooting of Billy Adair had been the saving of his life. He had replayed the incident often, recalling the shock of her quick movement – feet planted apart, left hand holding the gun arm steady – and the black smoking hole in Adair’s eye. Had the assassin lived to tell Marita of Hoste’s true identity it would have been over for him. He could only ever be grateful to Tessa for that. In his heart he felt something more than gratitude, but his recessive character – his neurotic secrecy – prevented him from examining the feeling. Starved of light and hope, it slowly expired within him.

  These thoughts preoccupied him on his walk home. His friendship with Tessa would endure. They would always have that secret bond between them. It had roped them together like two climbers on a cliff face. Yet on the surface they treated one another with the same unruffled cool. Only now did he wonder how it might have been if he, not Alan, had popped the question. It made no difference now, but he felt sure that Tessa had wondered about it, too.

  16

  Amy looked at her watch. The guests would be arriving in about an hour. Outside she could hear the bustle of the hired staff carrying glasses and crates up the stairs. The bureau had last year expanded its premises to the floor above, which would be used this evening for the main bar. She knew she ought to put a spurt on, but the mass of files from ’39 and ’40 she had been poring over this afternoon still riveted her. All those men and women who had come here seeking marriage partners, first at Bruton Place, then here at Brook Street: it was hard to comprehend the sea of names, faces, that had washed through the door. How many from the thousands could she remember? She and Jo had spent the afternoon trawling through their early triumphs and disasters, misty-eyed with feeling one moment, screeching with laughter the next. The things people had written in the ‘Requirements’ box would amuse them for hours.

  Not a giant, not a dwarf. Not American.

  Someone with furniture would be an advantage.

  No permed hair. Not too brainy. Of gentlefolk.

  No sulkers. Near to Chertsey if possible.

  Would prefer a well-off lady. (Jo had written in the margin, We get a lot of these.)

  Charm, with a sense of the absurd. I emphatically have no money.

  No objection to painted fingernails, scent or a dowry.

  And yet among the fortune-hunters, the crackpots and the fusspots, there were those driven by an honest yearning for companionship. They didn’t want money, or a drudge in the guise of a spouse; they sought only to connect with another human being. Amy took particular trouble over these, and made an effort to match up people she deemed, from their profile, good-hearted. You couldn’t be infallible, of course, but generally she had a sound instinct for character, and had scored more successes than failures. Her skill was reflected in the eventual expansion of the marriage bureau; they now employed two junior assistants to help with the volume of mail, and plans were afoot to set up a new branch in Bristol. The war, once feared as the enemy of romantic fancy, seemed to have fired the ardour of the single man and woman.

  She was about to close and seal the box-file when her eye fell on a letter whose handwriting seemed to call to her. She unfolded it and read. It was signed by a Miss Gertrude Mayhew, whose face she tried to conjure from the legions who had passed through her office. A vague image of a pale, grey-eyed woman, not unattractive, possibly in her forties – or was she picturing someone else altogether? She checked the details on her application form – worked in an insurance office, lived in Ealing with her mother, had included certain unexceptional details about her life. It was only when Amy read what was written in the ‘Requirements’ box that she remembered why this one had stuck.

  Someone I can fall in love with. I am very lonely.

  She examined Gertrude Mayhew’s form again. They had arranged a date, there it was, August 1940. There was no follow-up, nothing to indicate what had ensued. There were a few who dropped off the list. Some would meet their assigned match and then disappear – no report tendered of good or ill, just a silence. Others were too embarrassed or dispirited to continue the search, and their details collected dust inside a box-file. Where was Gertrude now? she wondered.

  I am very lonely.

  Her reverie was broken by Miss Ducker poking her head round the door, checking the blackout precautions: did Miss Strallen want some help? Amy smiled her thanks, and together they unrolled the blankets to hang over the tall sash windows that looked down on Brook Street. Miss Ducker chunnered away excitedly about this evening’s occasion, a party to mark the fifth anniversary of the Quartermaine Marriage Bureau. They were expecting around 150 guests – friends, backers, favourite clients and their spouses – so it might be a crush even with the extra floor. Talking of which, she’d better go and check that the junior assistants had blacked out the windows up there; they didn’t want the warden coming round.

  When she had gone Amy locked her office door and took down the dress, suspended from a hook on its padded hanger. Five years of the bureau. April 1939. The war had been going almost as long. Time was when she would have bought herself a new outfit for a party like this. An impossible luxury today. The dress she was putting on was nice enough, a fitted mulberry-coloured silk thing she had bought at Jaeger, seven or eight years ago. She had had it cleaned for tonight, and the tailor on Avery Row had repaired tears in the seams. Make Do and Mend: a communal piety she cordially detested. Back at her desk she took out a mirror to do her make-up, scrutinising her complexion. No cause for alarm – yet – though the faint circles beneath her ey
es betrayed fatigue: the raids had murdered sleep again. She would be thirty-two in October. Thirty-two – and unmarried. When she had last been home even her mother, not generally disposed to prying, had wondered aloud whether Amy mightn’t care to keep one of the ‘eligible bachelors’ at the bureau for herself. How to explain it, the professional matchmaker who had stayed single? Even Johanna, her loyal partner in spinsterhood, had at last broken ranks. She had met a man – a member of the landed gentry, no less – at a house party in Somerset, and married him within a year. Amy was secretly dismayed, but her unworthy hope that Jo’s decision was reckless had so far been in vain: they seemed happy together.

  There had been affairs, mostly one-sided, all of them ended by her. She disliked herself for this skittishness – she who was so prudent in advising and choosing for others. One of them, an older man, on being given his marching orders had told her that as long as she enshrined ‘perfection’ as the standard she would always be disappointed. The remark had astonished her, and she later wondered why he had been moved to make it, for she had never suggested to him – or to anyone – that such a state might be attainable. Perfection wasn’t even interesting; it was the flaws and mistakes that made up a person, the imperfection. You couldn’t have the pearl without the grit. What she really hankered for wasn’t perfection, it was kindness, and wisdom. But experience had shown her that the world was short of kind, wise men.

  The party was still in a roar towards midnight. The sounds of a distant raid were ignored; in fact the only panic at Brook Street was the moment someone whispered that the beer was nearly gone. Johanna, who had already moved heaven and earth to round up sufficient booze, went off with a friend to beg for extra supplies from a grand house in Mayfair they knew. Relief arrived twenty minutes later in a taxi carrying half a dozen crates, before most of the party had even heard there was a crisis. Jo’s resourcefulness was loudly toasted, and the music started up again.

  Amy had been hemmed in by well-wishers near the staircase. She knew only some of them. They wanted to jump on the merry-go-round of congratulations that Jo had set in motion earlier in the evening; her speech had amusingly chronicled the ups and downs of the bureau, sketching an account of their financial scrapes (she praised the forbearance of their ‘saintly’ bank manager) and the remarkable run of luck that had kept the premises open during the worst of the Blitz. She recalled among certain friends the looks of incomprehension and outright distaste on first presenting the idea of a marriage bureau, and could still remember the tone of voice of ‘the prominent cleric’ who visited the office one afternoon to remonstrate with her on the subject of public morality. He stayed for tea, and they ended up discussing their shared love of Kipling and thick-cut marmalade.

  Jo, saving her most heartfelt words for the close, pondered her good fortune in finding not only a true friend but the very rock on which the bureau was built – ‘It could not have enjoyed anything like its present success without the diligence, sympathy, good humour, fine discrimination and unswerving devotion of my partner, Amy Strallen.’ A roar went up, and Amy blushed to her roots as the room drowned in applause. She had not had a minute to herself since, and had drunk enough gin to know that she would pay for it tomorrow. It was awful, and marvellous, to hear herself gabble away. And then amid the cavalcade of faces one bobbed into view whose features she was unequivocally pleased to see.

  ‘I spotted you across the room a while ago,’ said Georgie Harlow, smiling, ‘but I couldn’t get near you!’

  ‘Darling,’ she cried, hugging her, and grateful for the excuse to wriggle clear of the scrum. They dodged their way to a corner of relative quiet. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come.’

  This was true. Having moved to a manor house in Sussex Georgie was hardly seen in town any more. Following the Billy Adair case her confidence had been rocked, and she might have languished indefinitely had it not been for the quiet persistence of her former beau, Christopher – the man whom Amy had originally put her way. Through his kindness he had helped restore her spirits, and when he proposed to her again she accepted him this time without misgiving. Amy was a bridesmaid at the wedding.

  ‘I missed Johanna’s speech,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Apparently it was all about how wonderful you are.’

  Amy laughed, shook her head. ‘She overdid it. Probably feeling guilty because I’ve been running things here while she’s away in Bristol.’

  ‘Is it true she’s setting up an office there?’

  ‘Yes, which will mean finding someone to replace her. I can’t run it on my own. But forget all that. How’s the country life?’

  ‘Wonderful, actually. I didn’t realise how anxious the job had made me. Chris has been so good about it all.’

  ‘You don’t miss London, then?’ said Amy, with a nod to the raucous mood around them.

  ‘Occasionally. I still see a few friends from Whitehall, you know … As a matter of fact, I was up here a few weeks ago and saw that fellow who –’ She stopped herself abruptly, and coloured.

  Amy stared at her. ‘Which fellow?’ she asked, and at the same moment she knew exactly who.

  ‘The MI5 man. Hoste. Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up …’

  Jack Hoste. She hadn’t thought of him in a while. Her gaze met Georgie’s, and she smiled. ‘It’s fine – really. Did you talk to him?’

  ‘Very briefly. We only ever met because of what happened. He’s one of the top people there, but nobody in our building knows much about him.’

  ‘I imagine that’s just how he wants it,’ said Amy, and paused. ‘There was never anything between us, you know.’

  ‘I know, you said so. I just wondered –’ Georgie said, with a gentle, hesitant look that softened Amy’s heart. What harm was there in bringing it up now?

  ‘I felt quite bad at the time, after they told me what he was. For a while everything went to pot. I couldn’t trust anyone – any man. I felt such a fool to have been taken in. But then I remembered how nice he was, and the bravery he showed when he didn’t have to. It’s a curious feeling – as if something had happened to me and not to him. I thought I hated him, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.’

  Georgie was still staring at her, the concern vivid in her eyes. She probably wishes she’d never mentioned it, thought Amy, who had never talked about Hoste to anyone in the years since. It didn’t matter; she didn’t have to feel bad about it any more.

  At that moment Johanna came up, somewhat tipsy, accompanied by a friend she wanted to introduce to Amy. His name was Gerard Bellamy, an army officer, tall, dark-haired, velvet-voiced – disconcertingly eligible. Georgie seemed to twig the unspoken contrivance of a match, and tactfully withdrew, mouthing a farewell to her friend. Amy, pasting on a smile, felt frustrated by the interruption, as one does on being woken from a dream that had been promising some revelation. She sensed that Georgie had something else to say about Hoste, and now there would be no telling. The next time she checked her watch it was half past one, by which point even the pretence of sobriety was beyond her. She heard her words come out slurred, and Captain Bellamy was eyeing her with undisguised bemusement. When she decided to call it a night, he insisted upon walking her home: the streets were blacked out, and he was not prepared to let her attempt the journey alone.

  On emerging into the night the sudden change of air caused her to stagger. Bellamy, quick on his feet, managed to hold her up.

  ‘Are you all right, Miss Strallen? Should I call a car?’

  She shook her head with the vehemence of the dead drunk. She was damned if he was going to bundle her into a car. Then might he be allowed at least to take her by the arm? he asked. She submitted to this, and they proceeded at an unsteady bat north up Bond Street. At first she was aware only of his voice at her ear, coaxing, level, unhurried; by degrees she tried to tune in to what he was saying. They appeared to be having a conversation. He wanted to know about her work, it seemed, and she heard herself explain to him the rudiments of matching one person w
ith another. It wasn’t a science, this business, it was trial and error, and sometimes they had to rely on intuition. Or whatever. She told him about the ‘Requirements’ box on the application form, and he laughed when she quoted the silly, self-deluding things that clients chose to write. She liked his laugh, and tried to provoke it again with other stray fragments from the befuddled reaches of her brain.

  When he spoke next she was aware that he had adopted a more teasing note: In their place what would she write, asked to express her own Requirements? He sounded rather pleased to have turned the question round. But Amy, in her unstable mood, considered the idea with terrible seriousness.

  ‘“Someone I can fall in love with,”’ she said, dredging a memory from earlier in the day – possibly from earlier in her life. Before she could stop herself, she added, ‘“I am very lonely.”’

  I’m quoting somebody, a client, she meant to say, but she didn’t. Something forlorn had hold of her voice. The captain, who seemed to hear it, looked round at her; he was at a loss for an answer. They kept walking, their footsteps on the pavement suddenly louder. He didn’t say another word until he wished her goodnight at her door.

  17

  They sat drinking tea in the Kardomah on Fleet Street, the light dimmed by the cladding of sandbags stacked against its front windows. The traffic of newspapermen through the door was more or less constant; he had never seen the phone booth in the corridor unoccupied.

  ‘I don’t know why you like this place so much,’ Hoste said, looking around them. ‘It’s full of hacks earwigging one another’s conversation.’

  Marita stared across the table at him. ‘How typical of you to think like that,’ she replied. ‘You see a place where strangers may overhear your secrets – whereas I regard it as somewhere to filch their secrets for myself.’

  ‘In all the years I’ve been coming here I don’t recall picking up a single bit of gossip of the slightest interest.’