‘Beautiful, yes? We have just been admiring it, too.’ His voice carried the faint sibilance of a mid-European accent. He introduced himself as Tomas Vachek – Marita’s cousin – and his friend as Adam Pavelec. Amy offered them her hand, mesmerised for a moment by Tomas’s pale grey eyes and the jolly pink of his complexion. He had the muscular outdoorsy look of someone who climbed mountains and went rowing.
‘Marita must hold you in very high regard,’ she said. ‘She’s not in the habit of throwing parties.’
He gave a quick suave tilt of his head both to acknowledge the honour and to suggest it had been worthily bestowed. Adam was the more talkative of the pair, and Amy took to him immediately. She liked his humorous self-confidence. The pair were on leave for two weeks, it transpired, from a bomber crew stationed up in Norfolk. As he talked about his routine Amy felt suddenly conscious of the shameful business following Munich, the way the government had allowed Germany to ride coach and horses through Czechoslovakia. And yet here were two of their countrymen voluntarily fighting on Britain’s behalf. Presumably they were taking their leave while they still could.
She said to Adam cautiously, ‘I dare say you’ll be rather busy in the coming weeks.’
‘We’ve heard rumours, of course. Perhaps you also?’ There had come a sly insinuating note into his voice which she took as another of his mischievous darts; but then when he kept silent she realised he was half serious.
‘Oh, nothing in particular. The usual whisperings.’ They faced one another like card players, none of them willing to show their hand.
As though accepting her reticence Tomas said, ‘I have not visited London in some time. The building damage … it’s very shocking. You have lived through all this?’
She nodded. ‘We’ve taken a fearful battering this year. And yet even that wasn’t as bad as the first raids, in ’41. It’s strange what you can get used to.’
She wanted to know about them – she had never met a bomber pilot before, or in fact any other sort – but at that moment Marita interposed herself. She was holding a bottle of white wine, with which she refilled their glasses.
‘I’m pleased you’ve met,’ she said. ‘Did you know, Tomas, that Amy is one of my dearest friends? We visited Germany together before the war.’
Amy smiled back, quietly surprised. It was unlike Marita to be demonstrative, though it may have been she was putting on a show for her visiting kinsman. When Tomas heard that they’d been to Nuremberg his expression took a quick animated jump, as if he had just returned from there himself. He asked Amy what she’d made of the place.
‘It was handsome,’ she replied, and looked to Marita for support. ‘Like I imagine Rome might have been once. I don’t suppose, since the bombing …’
Tomas gave a slow philosophical shake of his head. ‘Not like Rome now. When you see how many tons of explosive are dropped it seems extraordinary that anything is left standing at all.’
Marita cut in. ‘Perhaps during your leave Amy might show you both around town – it’s not all cinders and dust.’
‘We would be honoured,’ said Adam, with a little bow, and seemed about to continue when Marita shepherded them onto another loose knot of guests nearby. She drew Amy away on her own, eager to know how far ‘things’ had progressed with Hoste.
‘We heard a violin concerto at the National, then spent the rest of the afternoon drinking. I have the impression that he’s … smitten.’
‘And you?’ said Marita, her eyes hooded.
‘Well, I rather like him. Though I never imagined I’d have that much in common with a tax inspector …’
There was a pause before she replied. ‘Hmm. You’ll find Hoste full of surprises.’
‘What d’you mean by that?’
‘Oh, just that he may seem rather ordinary, perhaps a little dull, on first appearance. But there’s more to him than meets the eye.’
‘It’s strange that you’ve kept up with him all this time, yet never said. Would you rather we hadn’t met like that?’
‘Not at all. But a selfish instinct warned me to keep you apart. If things had gone well he might have persuaded you to leave London with him – it could have been the end of our friendship. I wasn’t prepared to allow that.’
‘So why now?’
Marita returned an ambiguous veiled look. ‘Because I know you well enough to trust you. You and Hoste must do what you will, but the bond between us two I regard as secure. Is that presumptuous of me to say so?’
‘No. It’s not.’
The expression on Marita’s face just then flashed on her memory, returning her to a moment she thought she had discarded, or discounted, years ago. They had been in a hotel room together, in Lancashire, Marita sitting on the edge of her bed one night; she had touched her hair, hadn’t she, or stroked it? Some confidence had passed between them, some provisional offer made, which was never mentioned again. It had been a mutually agreed irrelevance once Marita had announced she was getting married. Yes, years ago it was; but not forgotten, perhaps, by either of them.
It had gone eight by the time Hoste reached St James’s, and the cleaners had set to work on their nightly trawl through the building. Lamps had been turned low, and a mauve light was decanting itself through the windows on the park side. He poked his head round the door, hoping Tessa might have stayed late, but her chair sat empty. There was no one about.
‘Looking for someone?’
It took him a moment to recognise Philip Traherne, silhouetted at a corner desk. He took a few steps into the room.
‘What are you sitting in the dark for?’
For answer Traherne held up a small flashlight. ‘It saved me putting up the blackout. I’ve been here reading like a schoolboy after lights out.’
Hoste, adjusting his eyes to the gloom, took a seat at the desk opposite. Traherne’s flashlight cut a stripe across the room from where he had set it down. He leaned down and pulled out a drawer.
‘Since you’re here, fancy a drink?’ He had pulled out a bottle of Martell and a couple of glasses. He poured a finger of the brandy and handed it across. Hoste felt the weight of the glass in his hand: only Philip could be relied upon to keep crystal tumblers in the office.
‘Cheerio,’ said Traherne, squinting over the rim of his glass. ‘You have the air of a fellow with something on his mind.’
Hoste took a quick swallow and felt the heat of the alcohol bloom in his chest. ‘I saw Marita a few days ago and she let slip something that might be –’ He stopped himself as his internal security system pulsed out a warning: he was taking a risk even talking about this. Traherne leaned forward expectantly.
‘Something …?’
‘She knows about Fortitude and Overlord, if not by name.’
‘Ah.’
‘Apparently an Abwehr agent in Lisbon picked it up. You’ll never guess where it came from.’
Traherne shook his head in puzzlement. In reply Hoste made a little circular movement with his finger, indicating their own building. He tried to gauge his companion’s expression in the half-light.
After a beat, Traherne said in a hushed voice, ‘Impossible.’
‘There’s more. Marita said this agent came by it from an intercept – to Russia.’
A long silence ensued. Traherne was on the verge of speaking, twice, and hesitated. Walls had ears. But the understanding between them was such that Hoste knew they were pondering the same question. By a minute inclination of his brow Traherne asked it.
‘Well, my instinct is to start with the one I know least well,’ said Hoste.
Traherne spoke in a guarded undertone. ‘Lang.’
He nodded. ‘Didn’t you think it a bit rum, the way he was just parachuted in on us? We’ve run the Section tight as a drum for years. Not a single breach, in this office at any rate. But – what? – six weeks after he’s joined us we’ve sprung a leak and Marita’s got hold of something that might turn the entire war.’
‘Could be a co
incidence. I’ll sound out Hammond and Castle.’ He sighed. ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ He registered Hoste’s blank expression. ‘Sorry, I forgot you don’t have Latin. “Who will guard the guards?”’
He had gone with Traherne to the pub, and after last orders caught a tram back to Charing Cross Road. There hadn’t been a raid for over a month, but the habits of the blackout were by now ingrained. On the lightless streets he moved among people reduced to furtive shadows; it was the sound of footsteps that warned you of someone close. The windows of the bookshop below his flat were shuttered tight as any Bond Street jeweller’s.
He had just switched off the wireless, yawning, when he heard the dull ring of his doorbell. Moving to the window he pulled back a corner of the blind and looked down. It was so dark in the court he could barely make out a thing; but then a figure took tottering steps backwards and the pale oval of a face – a woman’s – swung up. He descended the stairs to open the door, and there, forlorn and bedraggled, stood Amy Strallen. In the shielded beam of his flashlight he saw that her eye make-up was badly smudged and her hair in disarray.
‘Miss Strallen? Are you all right?’
‘May I come in?’ she asked in a small voice.
‘Of course,’ he said, standing aside in invitation. He noticed her unsteady gait as she passed him into the hallway. Something was wrong, he could see that. As he led her up the stairs he heard her snuffle, like a cat. Was she drunk?
In the living room he turned on a side lamp, sensing that she wouldn’t appreciate the full glare of the overhead light. She really did seem in a state; on closer inspection he saw that her stockings were shredded, and blood was trickling down one knee. ‘Good God, what happened to you?’ ‘Oh, I had a bit of an accident,’ she replied, and asked him if he might have some iodine and a sticking plaster. He hurried out to the bathroom to fetch his medicine chest, and on bringing it to her he disappeared again into the kitchen. He didn’t have any brandy, but there was a bottle of Dewar’s, and he took down a glass.
When he got back to the living room the medicine chest lay open but untouched. Amy sat in the armchair, head bowed. At first he thought she had fallen asleep, but then saw the ghost of a tremble in her shoulders. She was crying, silently, or almost silently – a tiny stifled sob, quick as an intake of breath, had just escaped her.
‘You poor lady,’ he said, which didn’t sound right. ‘Amy. Here, down the hatch.’ He poured out a tot of the Scotch, but she shook her head.
‘I can’t. I’ve been drinking all evening. If I have any more I’ll be sick.’
Oh dear, he thought. Perhaps Hammond had it right about her being a hopeless drunk. He knelt before her, peering at her skinned knees, and dousing the cotton gauze with iodine he began, gingerly, to dab at the wounds. She submitted with a sharp hiss of discomfort.
He smiled up at her. ‘Do you remember doing this for me that night – during the raid?’
‘Of course,’ she replied, pleased that he should recall it.
His doing so encouraged her to open up. She had been to a party, and had found herself having a long and intense conversation with Marita about him – Hoste – about whether getting together with him could possibly work. At first she wondered if the prospect annoyed her, since her attitude towards Amy had always been rather possessive. But as they talked, the idea of it grew on her. It was the moment Marita warned her that Hoste might not be quite the man he seemed that indicated her belief in the match – she was preparing her for the revelation of his secret life.
‘So, you convinced her,’ said Hoste, searching her face.
Amy nodded. ‘And I felt such a relief that I immediately started tipping it back. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know how it went …’ In her determination to be responsible she hadn’t really considered how drunk she was, and that it would make her journey through the blacked-out streets even more perilous than usual. She was crossing Kingsway when a car loomed up out of the night; she hurried to make the kerb but wasn’t properly picking her feet up, and stumbled. She went flying and landed in an undignified heap on the pavement, her knees taking the brunt of it but her hands painfully scraping the flags. The car had driven on, unnoticing. She had limped the rest of the way to his flat.
‘It was reckless of you to try and dodge through the blackout.’ Especially in your state, he might have added. ‘But I’m very glad you did.’
She smiled at that, and he acknowledged it with a little lift of his chin. Something occurred to him now; he went to the window and, by a minute degree, peeled back the curtain. The court below was a pool of black, but there, in the embrasure of a shop entrance, he thought he detected a movement, some rearrangement in the play of shadows. She could tell from his tensed position that something had caught his eye.
When he closed the narrow slice of curtain and came back to sit down with her he said, ‘I think you’ve been followed.’
‘Oh no,’ she groaned, ‘I didn’t –’
‘No, it’s fine,’ he assured her. ‘To have put someone on you means she’s fallen for it. That’s what we wanted.’
He glanced at his watch, and told her that she should stay put for the night.
‘You’ve been shaken up, there’s no sense in your going out again.’
‘But I have to get up for work tomorrow,’ she protested as he began to prepare the divan in the corner of the room.
‘I’ll make sure you’re up bright and early. The bathroom’s all yours.’
When she returned, wearing his dressing gown, he had made up her bed and moved the lamp to within her reach. An instinct of modesty made him look away while she settled herself. When he turned round she had pulled the sheet over herself, her hair unloosed and fanned against the pillow. She looked suddenly girlish, and he perched himself at the edge of the bed like a family doctor.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked her.
‘Oh, a bit sore – you know.’ Their low voices seemed to intensify the stifled intimacy between them. ‘It was odd, just before, when you said – I’d never heard you call me Amy before.’
‘You don’t mind? It’s a fine name. Amy.’
She liked hearing him say it. ‘Should I – may I call you Jack?’
He laid his hand, tenderly, on the outline of her shoulder under the sheet. ‘I think you should. Isn’t that what people in love would do?’
In the half-light he made out the ghost of a smile on her face. They stared at one another for a few moments, conspirators together. He made a movement towards her, and stopped – but she answered it by leaning forward to touch his lips with hers. The contact seemed so tentative it was as though they weren’t really kissing at all. Her heart, which had seemed for so long a dim, shrivelled thing, suddenly inflated.
‘Amy,’ he breathed, before drawing her towards him.
21
Hoste was walking down Victoria Street, a jacket slung over his shoulder. London was drowning in a heatwave. Office workers were out on their lunch hour, strolling in pairs or else loitering outside pubs, wondering if they had time for another half. He had stopped to gaze in a shop window when a voice called out to him and then seemed to fade. He looked around, catching sight of Tessa Hammond on the open platform of a bus that was going the other way. She waved to him, and he waited until she had stepped off and jog-trotted towards him.
‘I was just heading to the office,’ she said, coming up, beads of perspiration on her brow. ‘Where are you off to?’
For answer Hoste held up his tweed jacket, the one Philip Traherne had lent him years ago, and afterwards told him he should keep. It was still the smartest item of clothing he owned – had ever owned. ‘I’m taking it to the Hoffman place over there. It needs pressing, and some repair work.’
Tessa had fallen into step with him. ‘Any progress with Amy Strallen?’ she said with a sidelong look.
He nodded slowly. ‘I saw her last night. She’s done all we’ve asked of her. Marita apparently believes we’ve fallen for one a
nother.’
‘Good girl. We need one more push from her and you’re home and dry.’
Hoste made a pained expression. ‘I wonder if the pressure is too much for her – she was in a terrible state.’
‘Oh no. Drunk?’
‘She had been drinking,’ he said cautiously, ‘but only because her nerves were shot. If you knew what Marita was like you’d understand.’
They had reached the cleaner’s and stepped inside, setting off the little bell on the door. An acrid whiff of chemicals permeated the air, and from the recesses of the shop came the gigantic hiss of the steam press. By instinct they dropped their conversation while the man behind the counter took the jacket and wrote out a ticket. It would be ready for him tomorrow.
Back on the street Tessa continued to interrogate him. She’d got it from Traherne that he had mentioned a leak – could it be true?
‘It could. Marita told me one of their agents in Lisbon had picked it up by accident – and seemed convinced it had come from MI5. Any ideas?’
‘Hundreds of people work in that building. It could be anyone.’
‘It would have to be someone with clearance at a very high level. They know about Fortitude and Overlord.’
‘That doesn’t narrow it down either. There must be dozens of people who’ve been briefed on that.’
Our Friends in Berlin Page 23
