by Betty Burton
‘Absolutely! Specialists in every field from safe-cracking behind enemy lines, to sleeping with the enemy.’
‘Whoa, Faludi, that would be too special for me.’
‘You see, Hatton? You have formidable male preconceptions. The Bureau will take transvestites, homosexuals, women and the walking dead.’
David raised his eyebrows.
‘Now do you see how different The Bureau will be?’ Faludi smiled, a smile that had in the past made famous actors and youths swoon for love of him. Faludi was what he had once described as ‘of the Ancient Greek persuasion’, which meant he liked girls and boys.
As they talked, from time to time Faludi glanced at some loose pages on his desk. David Hatton guessed that these had probably been gleaned from the file that Intelligence had undoubtedly been keeping upon his left-wing activities.
‘Tell me about this woman.’ The captain tapped a page. ‘Her file is new, pretty sparse.’ He took off his glasses and tapped his teeth with the tortoiseshell earpiece.
‘You’ll have to give her a name, Faludi. You know me and women.’
Faludi put his glasses on again. ‘Factory girl, caused “trouble at t’mill”. Joined the Party in ’38… popped up again in Spain with a new name… left in spring ’39 with a Russian soldier, a GPU major, no less, and two Spanish nationals – children. There are cross-references with your own file. You know who I mean – Anders, Miss Eve Anders. Tell me what she’s like.’
David felt a chill of apprehension run through him that Whitehall should already have gleaned so much about such an apparently obscure young woman. Why had they bothered?
‘She has very feminist views – she wouldn’t appreciate being in the same list as the walking dead. She’s probably the liveliest and bravest woman I’ve ever known, one of the most loyal, the most dedicated to her cause.’
‘Which is?’
‘Which is something that will sound trite and idealistic.’
‘Nothing wrong with idealism.’
‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité. My friend is idealistic – a humanist, romantic, self-educated, articulate…’
‘And very beautiful.’
‘“Lovely” is the better adjective. Eve Anders is a lovely young woman.’
‘And she ditched you for a Russian soldier.’
‘She didn’t ditch me. I wasn’t even in the same league as the Russian.’
Faludi frowned. ‘Sorry, David, I hadn’t realised… I had assumed it was nothing serious.’
‘Neither was it!’
‘All right. No need to get stroppy then. You can hardly blame me; you do have a certain reputation.’
David didn’t reply.
‘You know her well enough to tell me that she and The Bureau might suit one another?’
‘Put it this way, Faludi… sir, you think that you are fishing with a sprat to catch this big GPU mackerel…’
‘That is not what I think. I am impressed by what I see on Miss Anders’ file. So far we haven’t many female operatives, and this young woman appears to be excellent Bureau material. What’s funny?’
‘If she knew you referred to her as “material”, you might find that you’d caught a piranha fish. Yes, yes, I know her well enough to recommend her to The Bureau. And I know that she won’t leave the safety of Australia unless the Russian gets protection from us.’
‘A GPU-trained officer working for us? Oh, he’ll get protection all right.’
‘They rescued a couple of orphans. You’d need to persuade them that they will not be returned to Spain.’
‘Go and talk to a fellow I know in the Commonwealth Office. Arrange for the children to remain in the care of whoever they are with in Australia. Make sure it’s good; we don’t want to have our prospects worrying about children.’
‘Out of curiosity, Faludi, how did you find them?’
‘We never lost them, dear boy.’
‘You mean him, the Russian, don’t you?’
‘Major Dimitri Vladim was GPU. We want him. And, from what we know about the girl – well, we get two for the price of one.’
‘She’s not a girl, sir. Being young doesn’t make her a girl. Eve Anders is a mature woman in experience. Her upbringing and Spain made her that.’
‘Excellent. Down to business. Orders are – persuade them and bring ’em over safely. No fuss.’
* * *
The next time Lieutenant Hatton reported to Captain Faludi was to confirm that he had been successful. Miss Anders and Major Dimitri Vladim were on a commercial airline flight.
2
Eve Anders looked out of the aircraft’s round window and saw the ground drop away below.
She had mixed feelings about going home. Leaving the children hadn’t been easy, but she had to be sensible. She was no mother substitute for them, never would be. Jess Lavender, with her large family, would fill that role.
Here she was again, elated at the thought that she had been persuaded to get back into the struggle for democracy.
There had been times when Eve felt that she’d had democracy up to here.
Democracy and justice existed like things frail and sick, things that couldn’t be left to take care of themselves. They prodded you and banged on the floor. Attend to me!
Why listen when nothing changed?
At fourteen she had hammered on her head teacher’s door and said, It’s not fair what you’ve done. It hadn’t been fair, but nothing had changed.
At seventeen, she had stood in front of a crowd of workers and said, It’s not fair the way factory girls are treated. It hadn’t been fair, but the girls had been intimidated; they retreated so that, again, nothing had changed.
Then Spain – so much misery, so much blood and death, such a lot of orphans and widows, such great numbers of maimed men – all that, yet still democracy in Spain had died. Dead as mutton.
And now her own country had invited her to jump through the same hoop. Attend to me!
She had been thrilled to bits when David Hatton had made contact with her. A special unit was being formed. It was in need of women. Too hush-hush to talk about on the telephone. He absolutely knew for sure that she would revel in this new work.
‘You know that I would never leave here without Dimitri.’
He’d said that he thought that could be arranged.
She knew all this was bait to her curiosity, but she was ready to go home, so she took the bait.
3
On this evening in early 1940, winter impresses itself deep into the flesh and bones of forlorn, hopeful Britain, at war with well-armed Germany. So it seems hardly fair, does it, that there hasn’t been a winter as cold as this since Queen Victoria reigned? But, as it says in the slogan such as propagandists are thinking up daily, ‘Britain Can Take It!’
The country has been at war since 3 September last year – a day when skies had been blue, a day golden and warm, and almost silent. Long before Christmas all that had changed. Now, the entire country has become relentlessly cold. Days appear shorter and darker and colder than anyone can remember. The frozen British have no one else around to warm them up with a bit of support. So they whistle in the dark, and warm their spirits with slogans and spit patriotism into their hands as they ‘Go To It’.
It is over twenty years since the last war – ‘the war to end wars’. Now this new generation is up in arms, the same old enemy, the same old war, going to slog across the same old terrain as their fathers and uncles. Same old bits and pieces will be left for mothers, sisters and aunts to pick up.
In twenty years and ten million deaths, the ghost of that old war travels on this train in the bodies of young airmen, sailors, ATS women, and men and women, who were boys and girls yesterday, now travelling to shore bases, airfields and army camps. Who has learned anything at all? Who would have thought, after four years spent in putting an end to all those young lives, that it would all start up again?
Well, for one, Eve Anders, travelling from London to
Portsmouth on a gloomy, slow railway train, thought so. Still only in her early twenties – born just as the last one was ending – she is experienced in war; has seen its most terrible consequences; not a pessimist, but has been where Hitler’s Luftwaffe and Mussolini’s soldiers were practising the imposition of fascism on a decent fledgeling democracy. She was there last year, at the moment when democracy in Spain was annihilated. She had escaped by the skin of her teeth, sure that worse was to come.
Eve looks out at the cold darkness beyond the window of the London train, yawning. The man whose reflection she sees dimly and whose body warms her skinny back is Dimitri Vladim. He escaped with her and so far they haven’t been parted. But who knows, now that they have left their hide-out?
They are on the last leg of their journey from Australia to the naval town of Portsmouth via London. The long journey hasn’t been too bad until these last fifty miles. The crowded train slows down yet again. Dimitri rubs a circle in the murky steamed-up window and peers into the impenetrable blackness.
No moon, not a glimmer of light in the blacked-out winter landscape. They travel in the corridor, lucky to find even that space, but still shifting and sifting to make room at every gloomy station.
From here on, until the war is over, this is how train journeys will be: people in their tens of thousands packing and moving – even children. By coach and train schoolchildren remove from the security of their own familiar city streets and schools to go away to live in the country, which many of them will find empty and frightening. Eve Anders, now ten years on from that same experience, could tell you how it feels to be a city child and to see for the first time a wide landscape without sight of people.
Dimitri Vladim sees only his own bearded features close to Eve Anders’ profile, and beyond that nothing but the dark.
A shiver runs through him. Eve asks if he is cold. No, he’s fine; just listening to the wolves – but he doesn’t tell her this. Blackness lighted only by snow. One minute he was growing up surrounded by his large, extended family, the next crammed with siblings and cousins – all of them in the charge of grandparents – fleeing ahead of trouble. Enveloped in fur covers and caps, the elders and youngers of the Vladim family skimmed across white plains. There was howling. Why had the children been told about wolves? He heard them howling in the black Russian night, but understood that he and his family were not fleeing from wolves. They were Ukrainians, but the Jewish / German blood of their ancestors was strong. The Vladims were an educated, opinionated, and well-off family.
Dimitri was the first to become a Communist; first to become a soldier; enthusiastic in his belief in the brightness of a Soviet future.
That flight into the snowy darkness is a lifetime away, but the wolves still howl in his subconscious. When he hears them he becomes wary. He heard them last in Spain when he began to doubt his role as a political commissar. He has never told Eve how her body, scrambling and laughing to passionate climaxes with him, had stopped his ears to the warning howls until it was almost too late.
Fellow passengers idly watching him see an unusual man, big and broad, his voice strong. His life as a senior officer in the Red Army shows in his confident manner; his generous nature shows in his mouth, his intelligence in his eyes, and his love of life in the creases around them. Nowhere is evident the pain he has buried for loss of his own country.
Nor the added ache that the woman he assumed was in love with him is not: ‘I love you, Dimitri, very much, but I am not in love with you.’
The result is the same – she will not agree to marriage. She will probably still sleep with him, make love with him, have fun with him, but she will not marry him, which is what he wants. Now, more than ever.
In coming to England with her, he has taken a leap into the unknown. He knows how valuable he will be to the secret service of this country – the latest pack of wolves to circle – but will they risk letting him ‘disappear’? He is GPU, the most professional secret service in the world. That pack too must be out there on the dark plains following the scent of him. He knows GPU thinking only too well.
Their options are that they will finish him off here before he can do too much damage; negotiate for his return and then execute him; ‘persuade’ him to work as a double agent. His best hope now is that he will prove invaluable to the British secret service, who will see to it that Dimitri Vladim ‘disappears’.
He doesn’t really know why marriage has become so important. It is not because he wants to tie her to him – with a woman like Eve that would not be possible – nor because he wants to lay exclusive claim to her body; he has never been like that with women. He has believed, ever since he set eyes on him, that the secret service man Hatton did at some time have a relationship with her. And it is he who has arranged for them to come to England.
Dimitri has sometimes teased Eve about the affair. She always responds crossly and sulkily, insisting that it was not an affair, just an impulsive girlish romance, a crush. There is no meaning to this word.
It doesn’t matter.
And he must be grateful to Lieutenant Hatton for getting him away from Australia. He felt exposed there, and knew he was easily traced.
A thought, deep in the major’s subconscious, struggles to surface. If Eve would marry him, he could become a naturalised British subject, protected by that status. His conscious mind puts the subconscious down before the thought enters his mind.
His conscious says, ‘Is like world outside is vanished,’ he corrects his grammar, ‘has vanished. In Ukraine when I was boy, we played games in the dark, in the spooky cellars of the old house, Grandmother’s house. We played ghouls and ghosts. I do not remember any rules, but there was a purpose which was to scream very much.’
Eve smiles. She has always warmed to his voice, which, she suspects, he deepens and thickens because women like its masculinity. She certainly did the first time he spoke to her. Here in the corridor the lighter-toned English hardly speak and when they do it is quietly, head inclined into shoulder. In the recent past, Eve has become cosmopolitan and familiar with the traits of other nationals, but she is English at the core and she knows how curious the eavesdroppers are.
Each time the train stops Dimitri unhooks the leather strap, lets down the window and leans out. Maybe the driver knows where they are, but who else does? Peering into the dark as the train slows, someone asks anxiously, ‘Excuse me, can you see if this is Guildford? I have to get off at Guildford.’ Or, ‘They said at the ticket office that we should get to Liss by six thirty.’
To oblige, as he has control of the window, Dimitri asks, ‘Is Guildford big place? OK, this is very small railway station, but signal is red. There are trees and bushes all around, some trucks… I think a farm trailer and tractor. Where you think this might be, Eve?’
‘It could be Liss.’
He repeated the name.
‘Or Liphook.’
‘The signal is now green. I get out for you and ask… Liss is next stop.’
The man with the strange accent is a sign of things to come, foreigners with disturbing friendliness – but likeable, this unusual man in a new trilby and three-piece suit. He tells somebody that he is Russian. He could be anyone until he opens his mouth.
When three people get out at Liss, Eve finds herself sharing the small space with a sailor who is probably in his mid-twenties. He sticks a cigarette between his lips. ‘Like one?’
‘Thanks.’
He gives her a quizzical smile. ‘They’re only Woodies, you know.’
‘I like a Woodbine – I was brought up on them.’
Last year she was saving dog-ends and making roll-ups. The days of cigarette brands as class indicators are gone. A packet of five Woodbines have become quite a prize.
‘What about your friend?’
‘I should ask him.’
‘Fag, chum?’
‘Thank you, that is very kind. We have none left.’
‘Only cheap ones.’
Dimitri laughs. ‘We have smoked cheaper ones… even we have smoked nothing at all. I like very much English cigarettes.’
‘Well, well, you never know, do you? I had you as a cork-tip and cigar couple. It don’t do to presume things. Saw you waiting at Waterloo. Noticed you been out of Blighty… you know, you’ve had the old sun on you.’
Eve nods, wary of getting into an exchange of histories; the suntan laid down in Spain, deepened to bronze during the weeks in Australia.
This is her first day back home and, although English newspapers have published articles about the war in Spain written by her, not much news came the other way, so that she has very little idea of what people thought about the violent takeover of the Spanish Republic by the new dictatorship. Probably didn’t think about it at all.
‘It won’t take long to fade in this weather.’
‘Worst winter in living memory, it says in the papers.’
She nods, and they continue an exchange about the great freeze and the shock it was to the South to see what a real fall of snow is all about. She is a southerner and hardly saw snow in all the years she was growing up there.
Dimitri withdraws from Eve and the soldier by leaning on the window handrail, gazing into space and smoking in his idiosyncratic way, two fingers against his lips, hinging them away only to allow the used smoke to escape. From the corner of her eye, Eve watches him – the man who had given up everything to escape into France with her.
Dimitri Vladim, though genial, expansive and uninhibited, is also very good at keeping his own counsel; an easy man with a strong sense of what was right – not moralistic, just a sense of what was right and what was not. In Spain though a political commissar whose function was to interfere when it was in the Russian interests, being also a GPU graduate, he was first and foremost an undercover agent. Eve does not realise what this means: that They will never let him go, but will track him down. He is surprised that They have not done so already. There were few places he could have run to on leaving Spain. True, he has a false passport, but They will not find that too much of an obstacle. And even though he is travelling now as Josep Alier, somebody, somewhere could put two and two together and come up with Major Dimitri Vladim.
