‘Shut up, darling,’ said David.
Petr reflected that a woman like Sonia did not the know the half of it and would scream blue murder if she did. In his neck of the woods, there were things that could be done to those who had gone bush. And were.
The lessons in surveillance tutored on how to spot the signs and there had been quite a trade in hauling people in. If cooperation was unforthcoming, there was always scopolamine, the truth drug. In the worst case, execution and a subsequent dumping of human ashes on the road outside Prague.
During his danger years, his fondness for the West had gone on record and he knew that he had eaten into his luck. On the other hand, he had delivered results.
He looked around the lobby. Anyone observing them would imagine four friends, who represented the new European order, were enjoying an evening together. He glanced over to Laure who was talking at Sonia who was, by now, almost speechless and had resorted to humming the dance tunes.
David Brotton maintained his focus on Petr. The initial impression of a harassed, well-meaning man with a liability for a wife and who was never going to make the high grades was misleading. ‘I’m impressed by the number of eminent chemists working for you at Potio Pharma.’ Brotton had done his homework. ‘The work on anti-virals is going to change modern medicine.’
His admiration was genuine. Petr smiled, ‘The Czech Republic is very proud of Dr Holý and the others.’
‘Dr Holý leads the world in combating AIDS, smallpox, hepatitis B and shingles. Not a bad tally. But in the past…’ Brotton was being careful, ‘public health was compromised, I think.’
He was referring to the time when the concentration of toxic sulphur dioxide in the air over Northern Bohemia had been ten times higher than the legal limit.
‘As you say, it’s in the past.’
‘If Potio Pharma is planning to expand, I would love to know more about your work on anti-virals.’
Would you now, thought Petr. When the federation of European Communist Countries had been forbidden to trade with the West (with a result there was no hard currency), production had been difficult. Now, they were powering ahead.
‘Of course.’ He sketched out a reasonably comprehensive overview of a programme that was being rolled out by the company but left out details that might be useful to the British. If the British wanted parity in the partnership, they would have to pay for it.
Brotton understood perfectly. Glancing at Sonia, he said, ‘I think it’s time for bed.’ He stood up. ‘Next time you’re in Berlin, do get in touch.’
Goodbyes were said and the Brottons moved on. Laure prepared to follow them. ‘Petr?’
He looked at her and thought of her as she had been in Prague. Then, she had been waiting for her future to reveal itself, and that joyful, inquisitive look that she often wore had touched him deeply. He liked, too, her ability to see the funny side of things and he had watched her grief for her father mutate into a relish for life. She conveyed the sense that she was poised on the edge of discovery. And, with her love affair, came radiance.
He had envied it, lusted over it, yearned for it.
‘You must tell me about Tomas. You have to tell me.’
It was after midnight when Petr got back to the hotel and ordered his taxi for the airport for early the next morning.
Brotton had done a good job of grilling him without appearing to do so, and he had returned the compliment. No doubt the other man was as exhausted as he was.
Laure was not stupid. She was right when she said the Czechs were an interesting people. They would be scenting opportunities to make political and financial capital out of their new systems, even if they were still feeling their way. Certainly, the West would be interested in their emergence.
Making for the lift in the lobby, he noticed a woman in a mauve rayon dress nursing a drink in the corner, doing her best to convince Petr that she was not focusing on him. She was middle-aged and almost beautiful but her long hair twisted up into a bun had been dyed too heavily. A watcher? It would no longer be the Party but possibly the new Czech state, anxious that its industrial secrets remained intact. It could be the British, but almost certainly not. A rival pharmaceutical company?
Or, maybe, his habit of keeping watch for the watchers was engrained?
If she was a watcher she wasn’t very good at it because she was easy to spot. Pressing the lift button, he nodded in her direction. She started and colour crept into her cheeks. He toyed with the idea of asking her up to his room but decided against it. If she was on his case, it might result in her being taken off it and that would be a shame as he could identify her so easily.
Sinking down onto the bed in his room, he placed a hand either side of him and pressed down onto the mattress. One of these days, both sides would give up the pretence and just admit they wanted to grab as much information about the other as they could. Then there could be big hugs and declarations of love all round.
He pulled back the sheets, got in and lay down.
He thought about his wife.
Thanks to her care at the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, Eva had been under control.
When they returned to Prague from Paris, she was not. The downs were worse. The ups resulted in frequent hallucinations and a refusal to eat or to sleep. The dark seam of psychosis sewed into her family history and, which he now learnt, went back a long way had surfaced after Maria was born.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she would say after an episode. ‘I’m so sorry, Petr.’
Forgive me.
He remembered the promises they made. To respect each other. To love each other.
To make a good marriage. To be honest. ‘I hate you for not telling me,’ he said on one occasion as she shook like a wounded animal. ‘Think of the risk we’ve taken in having Jan and Maria.’
‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Don’t say that.’
He thought of her when they first met. So fresh and golden and, like him, longing for sex, for happiness in a partnership and willing to take on a younger man.
Unlike Paris, in Prague it was difficult to get hold of the right medication at the time it was most needed. This meant Eva was increasingly confined to their bedroom and the employment of Laure even more necessary.
It had been hot, hot, hot that summer.
Most nights, Eva crashed around the apartment kitchen in the attempt to produce a meal. She drank heavily. ‘For the love of Marx…’ ‘Marx’ was pronounced with ultra sarcasm. ‘…Let me have some relief.’ She went early to bed leaving him, as often as not, with Laure.
Those had been moments of calm interspersed between the bitter episodes of mania and depression where Eva tried to make it work and apologized for what she had become. Those times, he found it unbearable to listen as she struggled to explain what it felt like to battle with inner disintegration.
‘It is as if there is nothing of me. Nothing in me.’
‘I’ve let you down.’
‘I’m afraid.’
He was always frightened the children would hear and did his utmost to shield them. The return to Prague had been particularly dreadful. Prague’s golem had taken Eva by the throat and the gains that had been made in Paris were wiped out.
‘I should die.’
She said that quite often when she came round from the bad patches.
That time – that particular time – they had been in the bathroom getting ready for bed.
‘Don’t, Eva.’
Her eyes slid this way and that and he knew something was threatening. Every instinct told him to get her out of there. Too late, Eva took up his razor from the shelf and was out the door.
Hoping to God the children were asleep, he chased her back into the bedroom. She was standing by the window, her right hand holding the razor poised over her left wrist. At his entrance, she turned. Her face was as white as the sheets, the circles under her eyes violet, the body under the nightdress thickened by the drug regimes.
‘I hate myself.
’
‘If you don’t care about me, think of Jan and Maria.’
Eva wasn’t listening to him. Nor had she for a long time. Or to anyone else. Whatever was in her – the demon – had kidnapped her thoughts, her mind, her feelings.
He tensed. Ready.
She sprang towards the door. He lunged at her, wrestled her onto the bed and held her down.
Eve cried out, ‘Stop!’
He gripped her wrists and she writhed and beat her heels into the mattress. Her hands were slippery but so were his and he failed to get a sustained grip. The hand holding the razor slid from his. She raised it, bringing it slicing down onto his forearm.
The pain was startling. It was quickly followed by a line of red that turned into a stream. His anger erupted giving him additional strength. He bore down on her and succeeded in mastering her flailing arms and holding them in his grasp.
In that position, she quietened, hunched over onto her side, her nightdress blotched and stained and asked the wall, ‘How long?’
He was breathing hard. He got up and opened a drawer. He dropped the razor into it and grabbed a handkerchief, which he tied awkwardly around his arm.
‘Oh God,’ he said, calling on a deity that he did not believe in.
Eva was breathing heavily but motionless, the fight gone out of her.
He bent over to kiss her shoulder, a kiss of peace which said: we’ve got through this one. Raising his eyes, he saw that Laure had been watching from the doorway.
She was transfixed. With horror? Fear? Disbelief?
All three.
Why had Laure got so thoroughly under his skin that summer in Prague? He worshipped his children, his job was demanding and left little time for anything else. He had worshipped Eva too. In his way. He was a man who had done his best to sort out his position – moral, philosophical, practical – and had been faithful to his commitments.
All the same and looking back, he had failed to understand the contradictions within himself.
Dropping his head into his hands, Petr did something he had not done for a long time. Not since he held the photograph of the children and himself taken in front of the Eiffel Tower that Eva had left for him.
He wept.
CHAPTER 21
HE RETURNED TO BERLIN IN THE LATE SPRING. He had been busy. Back home, there had been an economic crisis, the infant Czech stock market had wobbled, national growth had gone into the minus and he was required at the helm of Potio Pharma to steer it through.
After Easter, the situation eased and he considered himself at liberty. A priority was to visit Maria in Paris who had made it clear that she loved France and wasn’t coming home any time soon. Plus ça change.
Maria now wore carefully contrived student clothing, adopted Parisian slang, and dragged him to boites that ‘only the true Parisienne knew about’, which deepened his affinity with his daughter.
Over an espresso in the cafe by Pont des Arts, she asked him what had hit him when he first came to Paris. Petr found himself describing the chestnut blossom in public parks, the startling colour palette of women’s clothes after the greyness of home, individually wrapped bonbons, litter, perfume: all varieties, floral and musky and dangerous.
‘And the dentists,’ he added. ‘Don’t forget the good dentists.’
‘I want live in Paris,’ she told him. ‘Any objection?’
‘Yes. Jan and I won’t see you. But if you wish to, then you must.’
She lit up a Gitane. ‘I’ll come and go.’
From Paris, he contacted the British Embassy in Berlin and asked to be put through to Laure. It took several handovers and there were plenty of clicks on the line, which suggested the call was being monitored.
‘Hallo,’ Laure said eventually.
‘It’s Petr.’
‘Petr. Are you well?’
She sounded detached, as if he was written off in her mental address book. As if, perhaps, she had given up on her questions.
‘I’m coming to Berlin tomorrow for a couple of nights,’ he said. ‘Can we meet for dinner? We might be able to work something out.’
At her end, there was a sharp intake of breath. ‘Come to my flat at seven-thirty,’ she said.
In the Charlottenburg, a district in the former Western sector, trees were shaking out blossom and new foliage. An elusive fragrance drifted down from the most advanced. Holding a bouquet of eye-wateringly expensive orange roses in one hand and a bulky package in another, Petr got out of the taxi and looked up at the building where Laure lived.
What was he going to say? He had not, as yet, made up his mind. For someone who took business decisions crisply, his indecision was unusual and unsettling.
Laure’s apartment was on the third floor of a mansion block leased by the British for their people. The lobby inside was cool and his feet echoed on the stone stairs.
Outside Number 7, he smoothed down the collar of an expensive overcoat – a coat his mother would have condemned as an expression of his shameful bourgeois cravings. He, on the other hand, considered it essential to survive.
Laure opened the door. She was dressed in figure-hugging black trousers and a blue loose-fitting sweater and looked nervous.
He held out the flowers. ‘A little obvious,’ he said, ‘but I thought they had a certain something. The petals feel like soft cotton.’
‘Obvious or not, they’re lovely.’
‘I was hoping they could be tied up in some smart ribbon but there wasn’t any to be had. Only string.’
‘No ribbon necessary.’ She ushered him into the sitting area and disappeared to fetch a vase.
He looked around the room and was struck by how spartan it was, as if she did not expect to live in it. The furniture was utilitarian, the drapes at the windows were cheap ones and there was little to suggest that Laure was interested in stamping her personality on it. The only personal clutter were some objects on the table, intriguingly arranged as if they were a collection behind glass.
‘It’s like a shrine.’
Laure reappeared. ‘I like making a relationship between objects.’
He picked up a small hand mirror with shells on the handle, of the sort he had seen sold in Prague markets. It was, to put it kindly, garish, as was the plastic flag in the Czech colours which he recognized from innumerable Party conventions. Beside them was a stone, which he was pretty sure was the one he had picked up at Tunnel 15.
Who knew what connections Laure made between these things?
The roses placed on the side table, Laure took two glasses out of the cupboard and a bottle of whisky. ‘Your favourite, if I remember?’
He nodded. Nursing the whisky, he gestured at the room. ‘You seem to be comfortable.’
‘I am. I’m lucky and grateful.’
‘I never asked you when we last met about your family.’
‘My mother’s in Paris. My brother’s all over the place.’ Her eyes sparked with humour. ‘We’ve turned into nomads. Brympton can’t get over it.’
He gestured to a briefcase parked by the table. ‘It’s no coincidence that you’ve ended up in the foreign office? They helped you get out of Prague and, no doubt, you were grateful. Is it a good job?’
‘Berlin isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs at the moment. But that’ll change,’ she said, ‘and, yes, it’s a good job.’
‘I suppose the lure of gathering intelligence got to you.’
He was testing the water.
A faintly surprised expression crossed her face. ‘I’m a cultural attaché. Nothing more. Nothing less.’
‘But you have access to information.’ He was thinking of the document she had produced in the car.
‘Every embassy keeps files. It’s the business,’ she said, cool and matter-of-fact.
Nevertheless, an undercurrent flowed strongly, even ominously, through the comfortless room. He felt it. She would too. Petr went over to the window, which looked down at a small square, edged by young lime trees.
> She came and stood beside him but kept a distance. ‘Do you remember the time you came with me and the children to the park in Prague?’
‘Very well.’
‘You kept looking at me. I remember being frightened. Not quite understanding.’
‘What exactly?’
He needed those few extra seconds to marshal his thoughts.
‘That you…’ she squared up to Petr, ‘that you wanted me. Or rather, not so much me, but my youth. Am I wrong?’ She added, ‘It’s an old story, Petr. Father of the house fancying the au pair.’
He didn’t care for the way she had summarized his torment at the time and defended himself. ‘Laure, protest away if you like, but you did understand. You were having an affair, yourself. You knew exactly what goes on between men and women. But, yes, you’re not wrong.’
‘That’s honest,’ she said gently.
‘I was very careful not to take advantage.’
‘I was a young twenty-year-old and your employee, and you had promised my mother to take care of me. In those days, I believed what people told me.’ She moved away, picked up the stone on the table and hefted it from one hand to the other. ‘Before I grew up.’
Laure was protesting too much but it was probably calculated. ‘I honoured that promise. I may have been a communist but not a predator.’
‘True. I owe you that honesty.’
Laure’s mother had sent him a letter, via the French employment agency, explaining that, because Laure was grieving for the unexpected death of her father, her daughter was postponing taking her degree to give her a chance to recover. ‘I would ask that, as a responsible family man, you and your wife take care of her.’
‘All the same, knowing your employer fancies you is grim and frightening.’
As yet, he had not worked out what she was driving at.
‘It didn’t stop your affair with Tomas.’
‘Tomas wasn’t grim and he wasn’t frightening.’
Petr winced. ‘In my defence, nor was I.’
At that Laure grinned. ‘Tomas wasn’t old and wrinkled.’
‘You wretch.’
It was the first time she had referred to that past with any humour and the atmosphere eased.
The Museum of Broken Promises Page 24
