Letters for a Spy

by Stephen Benatar

  “And why should you think that that would stop anyone? Our own propaganda machine is at least as efficient as theirs, in terms of what it puts in and what it leaves out.”

  I paused. “Though, anyway, it may well have got into the German newspapers by now. Yes—thinking about it—I’m almost sure it will have.”

  Because, I thought, if the whole thing were a trick, wouldn’t British Intelligence be keeping a lookout for some mention of the accident, no matter how pared down? And if, on the other hand, it weren’t a trick, wouldn’t they still be expecting to see the crash reported … once, that was, they had received their letters back from Madrid? It again annoyed me that there could be points like this which I had missed.

  I informed Buchholz that I had changed my mind—for the moment—in regard to his having to make contact with Berlin.

  “Good,” he said. “Quite excellent. So long as you feel happy about it?”

  “Yes. Completely.”

  “In that case, now accept the whisky you wouldn’t have earlier on and let us drink to the fact of your feeling happy. And also to the fact of my feeling happy. Even one less message out—and one less message in—can make a big difference to the safety of our sanctuary here.”

  He glanced about him, sardonically.

  “To its safety, if not its splendour!”

  We went downstairs a short time later. Before we did so, Heinrich changed into his shoes.

  “As you can see, my dear … we like to dress for dinner!”

  His mother did, certainly. Frankly, that lady wouldn’t have been recognizable. She had washed her face and removed her scarf and cardigan; had put on a floor-length dress in Cambridge blue, which so intensified the colour of her eyes that they became fully as piercing as her son’s, setting off in turn the snowy softness of her hair. And she now wore make-up. Even her delivery had changed. Although she unfailingly kept to English, her voice had shed its London accent, along with all the stridency going with it.

  “I give them what they expect,” she said, “and in Paradise Street, poor devils, with the workhouse just around the corner, what else can they expect?”

  When I asked where she had ever learned such skills, she told me that a dozen years ago she had appeared in Der Kongress Tanzt with Conrad Veidt and Lilian Harvey, and in Die Dreigroschenoper with Lotte Lenya, and that after the war she wanted to return to acting.

  “If they make a film about Methuselah I shall campaign to play his mother.”

  I said that as part of my assignment I was hoping soon to meet an English actress. Wouldn’t she be impressed to hear I knew someone who had once starred with Conrad Veidt and Lotte Lenya?

  “No, ‘starred’, unhappily, is putting it far too strongly. And, anyway, wouldn’t it be slightly safer just to mention Lilian Harvey, who was—still is, of course—so prettily and sweetly and respectably English?”

  “Oh,” remarked Heinrich, “Conrad Veidt’s okay. Nearly a British institution, he’s been working over here so long. But I doubt that Eric is really going to mention you at all.”

  He looked down at his nails.

  “Wouldn’t it be fascinating, though, to hear how English actresses in any way fit in with the current preoccupations of the Abwehr? Yet sadly, Mama, for the moment that’s a pleasure I fear we must forgo.”

  He smiled.

  “But after the war, Erich, after the war…”

  13

  I felt that I was back in business.

  Following a meal that was both tasty and companionable I left the Buchholzes, went into the first telephone box I came to and dialled the Knightsbridge number I had now transcribed into my book.

  But I had probably picked a bad moment: nearly nine-fifteen on a Friday evening, at a period when London social life was reputedly at its zenith. Why in heaven’s name hadn’t I thought to do this before supper? Now, most likely, I should have to phone again tomorrow and in the meanwhile resign myself to a complete waste of time that might have been avoided. Oh, damn it! Why was I so foolish?

  Yet on the sixth or seventh ring somebody answered.

  “Reggie, you beast! You’d better have a pretty good excuse!”

  I pressed Button A.

  “The best excuse in the world,” I replied, easily. “This isn’t Reggie.” But bless him, I thought: he had caused me to feel instantly at home.

  “Oh.” A sharp intake of breath, a nervous and embarrassed giggle. “Then all I can say is—whoever you are, you have had a very narrow escape!”

  “Thank you. I’d better be fast, though. He might be trying to get through even as we talk.”

  “Well, in that case, let him sweat! Serve the fellow right!”

  “Okay. Point taken. By the way—am I speaking to Sybella?” I knew very well I wasn’t.

  “No, I’m sorry. Sybella isn’t here. This is Lucy.”

  “Oh, right—how are you, Lucy? This is Eric. Sybella’s mother didn’t think Sybella would be in town, but knew you’d be able to tell me where she’d gone.”

  “Ah! Not too sure about that. Depends on how carefully she’s filled in the calendar above her bed.”

  She went to look. I felt anxious; offered up a prayer. I couldn’t afford to lose the whole weekend—it seemed unlikely I’d be able to raise the ENSA people until Monday. Again, why hadn’t I worked at it with greater resolution on leaving the solicitor’s? She came back.

  “Tonight, Biggin Hill; tomorrow afternoon and evening, Aldershot.” The relief was palpable. For once, I remembered to say thank you.

  “Oh, great! Do you know where in Aldershot? And will that be only for tomorrow or will it also include Sunday?”

  “Where? Well, I’d suppose at the garrison theatre, wouldn’t you? And then she’ll obviously be spending the night on camp—lucky girl!—and I imagine they’d be likely to move off straight after lunch on Sunday. Oh, drat, I forgot to check their next date. I’m afraid you’ll have to hold on again.”

  It was that ‘lucky girl’ which did it.

  “My God,” I exclaimed, before she’d even had a chance to lay down the receiver, “then you can’t have heard the news about Major Martin!”

  I had to blame it on the Scotch, of course, and on that bottle of red wine which had accompanied our Sauerbraten and vegetables—“Eric, my dear boy, well naturally we must! How often do we have a visitor?”—blame it more on those things than on the simple shock of Lucy’s bubbly and facetious comment.

  But whatever I might choose to blame it on, how could I—how could I—have let it happen?

  Yet I knew the thought which had betrayed me. Tomorrow a whole week would have gone by since the funeral. And I was now aware that William’s father had been told. Therefore Sybella, as William’s fiancée, must also have been told.

  She must have.

  So I had obviously assumed (definitely not a permissible assumption) that Lucy would have known as well. But ‘lucky girl’ wasn’t the phrase of someone who had known. And, if it hadn’t been for the whisky and/or the wine, I would have registered that fact roughly three seconds earlier than I did, and reacted accordingly.

  Only three seconds earlier!

  And now, of course—only three seconds later!—I perfectly well understood why Sybella hadn’t passed on the information to her flatmates. Quite simply, she hadn’t felt up to it. Not yet. Who would have?

  But the question which faced me at present—clearly—was how to set things right. Lucy would say, “Received what news about him?” And I couldn’t possibly tell her; not when Sybella herself hadn’t done so.

  Yet Lucy’s reply was marginally different from the one I had expected.

  “The news about who?”

  “Major Martin.”

  I repeated it distinctly, for by now I had managed to gather my thoughts and I guessed that in retrospect she would already have caught on—I couldn’t run the risk of giving her another name. (Besides, what earthly good would that have done?) Because of a strange and rather difficult
hiatus I even expanded on it.

  “Bill Martin. Her fiancé.”

  But, in any case, the name wasn’t important. It was the news itself which was going to prove the problem. (Oh, perhaps—after all—not so terribly much of one. “I’m sorry,” I should have to say. “I’ve just remembered that I gave my word to keep this thing a secret.”)

  Yet the woman I was speaking to—Sybella’s flatmate, Sybella’s close friend—now broke her silence with a gasp.

  “Oh, come off it!” she exclaimed. “Who are you? You’re only pulling my leg—surely?”

  “What?”

  “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I answered, stiffly. “I am not pulling your leg. Why would you think that?”

  None of this was real. Indeed, it was almost surreal—like at the solicitor’s. No longer just a matter of not telling somebody about somebody’s death, it was now more a matter of … well, I wasn’t sure of what, exactly. In one way it was possibly similar to riding on a roller-coaster: alternately up high, enjoying the view, full of confidence—then back at ground level, moving through mist, having to re-explore absolutely everything that I encountered. I said: “Are you telling me, then, that Sybella didn’t recently become engaged? To a man named Bill Martin? A major in the Royal Marines?”

  “Well, I’m telling you that if she did it’s the very first I’ve heard about it! Or about him, either, if you really want to know.”

  “Yes, I see,” I answered slowly—totally the opposite of what was true. “Then I suppose I must have been mistaken. Sorry. You’ll have to ignore everything I’ve just said.”

  “Ignore…?”

  “And in any case, we’ve quite forgotten Reggie, haven’t we? He must have sweated long enough by now. Isn’t it time you showed a little mercy?”

  But my heart wasn’t in it any more. My tone sounded leaden.

  “Anyhow, Lucy, I appreciate your help.”

  “Gosh, but—well, you can’t simply tell me to ignore it and then leave it at that! The treacherous little minx … oh, you just wait till I catch up with her! But you know, Eric—is that right: Eric?—I can’t believe there hasn’t been some monumental mix-up … that this isn’t something which will soon have all of us in the most terrific gales of laughter…”

  I could tell: she had now begun to come to terms with her astonishment, her natural curiosity was about to reassert itself. Therefore I spoke firmly; even abruptly.

  “Good night, Lucy—thank you—it’s been good talking to you!” Before long I should be getting quite used to cutting people off.

  But when I’d put down the phone I stayed on a further minute in the booth, just standing there and staring through the glass. The High Street was dark, of course, yet even in broad daylight I probably shouldn’t have noticed much.

  However. At least my brain was gradually—very gradually—resuming operations. Just like Lucy’s.

  So Sybella hadn’t told her, then, about Bill Martin?

  Yet evidently she had told others. “By the way, Aunt Marion said to bring you to dinner next time I was up, but I think that might wait?” And it sounded as if Bill had certainly met Jock and Hazel—and most likely more than once: “You know what their friends always turn out to be like…”

  Therefore, I could take comfort; she hadn’t kept him entirely to herself.

  And fairly soon I began to feel better. Heinrich Buchholz had suggested I should contact a Mrs Hilling, who had a lodging house in Abbey Road: “a nice enough Englishwoman,” he had said, “who will do her best to make you comfortable.”So I first caught a taxi to Euston to collect my suitcase and then took that same taxicab back towards St John’s Wood.

  All right. Sybella had definitely kept quiet about her engagement. But was that really so difficult to understand? For one reason or another, people often preferred at first to be secretly engaged. (I remembered Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill in Emma—which made me smile a little: I was only, approximately, a hundred-and-thirty years behind the times.) On the other hand, she had also kept quiet about having Bill Martin as a boyfriend, let alone as a fiancé. Not everywhere, thank God, but in certain quarters, manifestly. That one was perhaps a little harder. When you were in love didn’t you want to advertise the fact and throw the name of your beloved into nearly every sentence?

  But, naturally, I didn’t know how Sybella might feel about Lucy. Just because they shared a flat didn’t necessarily mean that they were close—bosom pals—confidantes. No. Sitting in the taxi as it went up Baker Street I reminded myself that I knew next to nothing of the status quo.

  And then a short while later—we were now in Lisson Grove—I asked myself what difference did it make. (I could hear Franz Mannheim posing precisely that same question.) Why should it have dismayed me even for one minute? We know Bill Martin and Sybella were engaged, whether secretly or not—and yes, okay, let’s admit she did behave a bit strangely in keeping his existence hidden from her flatmate, hidden from her other flatmate too, presumably, but so what? Am I now becoming such a die-hard cynic that any new revelation must automatically set off warning bells? Purely on account of its being unexpected—well, isn’t that the whole point concerning revelations? And warning bells alerting me to what, for heaven’s sake? That the man floating in the Atlantic, bearing letters to General Alexander from General Sir Archibald Nye—and to the Admiral of the Fleet and to General Eisenhower from Lord Louis Mountbatten—was in some sense not so real, not so trustworthy, simply because his girlfriend hadn’t rattled on about him? Well, didn’t that in fact render him more trustworthy? Perhaps Sybella hadn’t bandied his name around for one perfectly good reason: she’d known about the nature of his work and had been terrified of endangering him in some way. In a climate where everyone was persistently being urged to refrain from careless talk, should it even strike me as surprising that a responsible person had done her best to follow a responsible instruction?

  No, it should not. Not for an instant.

  (But actually, I thought, for someone in a situation like mine, it was no bad thing to be hearing warning bells. Even to be hearing them at every turn. All I had to guard against, however, was taking them each time for an injunction to jump ship.)

  And, anyway, I must continually hold fast to that all-important possibility which had just re-occurred to me.

  She had known about the nature of his work.

  14

  The previous day’s train journey from Mold to Euston had been a relatively easy one, notwithstanding its couple of time-consuming changes, but this morning’s journey into Hampshire was an altogether different matter.

  As soon as I came up from the underground at Waterloo and emerged into the mainline station I received warning of how it was going to be. The crowds appeared impregnable.

  And almost at once I gave up any attempt to penetrate them. My suitcase in itself would hardly have allowed it. Mrs Hilling had wanted to lend me an overnight bag and look after the rest of my belongings until I came back, but since I had neither known how long I’d be away nor whether, in fact, I should be going back, this was an offer I hadn’t accepted. So now I found myself with an encumbrance which seemed doggedly insubordinate and which banged continually against both my own shins and other people’s. I was repeatedly needing to apologize.

  Yet, on the whole, everybody remained calm-tempered. Perhaps this was partly a consequence of the music being piped over the public address system. Good and lively. Or perhaps it had more to do with the traditional British mentality: accustomed both to muddle and to muddling through. (“Oh, things will work out, eventually. Somehow. We always land on our feet and come up smiling.” Many Germans, indeed, found this attitude contemptible, quite beyond their understanding.) But I heard a lot of laughter in the shuffling crowd. I also heard a lot of grumbling. Yet it was grumbling laced with humour.

  And in the end even my suitcase proved a blessing. For if I’d left it in London not only would I have had nothing to sit
on myself but obviously shouldn’t have been able to offer anyone else a seat—that ‘anyone’ being a pretty redhead serving with the Wrens, who had been some half-dozen places ahead of me in the queue and whose hair I’d been sporadically admiring. Throughout the journey she chatted to me so entertainingly, and was so philosophical about all the servicemen and civilians and railway officials who were forever squeezing past us, that her company appeared to reduce our travelling time by half.

  Actually I had felt tempted, as we were pulling into Aldershot, to invite her to the ENSA show. But fortunately I’d decided against this even before I saw her being exuberantly embraced by a large and handsome staff sergeant.

  And the warmth of their reunion gave me such a pang! I left the station rather hurriedly.

  Yet in any case, after I had found a B and B and had also stopped for lunch, I was too late for the matinée I’d half hoped we’d be attending.

  Still, I then bought my ticket for that evening’s performance. It cost me three-and-six. I could have got one for as little as two shillings but I wanted a seat in the front stalls. I had expected the garrison theatre to be inside the camp. Tonight, for some reason, the Theatre Royal—in Gordon Road—would be filling in.

  The playbills all told me what ENSA stood for: Entertainments National Service Association. Yet none of them clued me in on Sybella’s surname. They didn’t list performers.

  The woman in the box office said, both to myself and to the corporal in front of me—she must have been repeating it to everyone:

  “You do realize, don’t you, that it’s a play, not a concert party or revue? For that kind of thing you’d need the Hippodrome. Don’t fret, though: the cast here is composed entirely of ladies—sixteen ladies—so none of you boys should find yourselves with any grounds for complaint!”

  Nine Till Six. Last week at some camp in the Midlands a group of soldiers—“a little bit under the influence,” she said—had thought that it was going to be a girlie show. They had stormed out, “behaving rather rudely as they did so,” and could easily, it seemed, have been court-martialled as a consequence.