Letters for a Spy

by Stephen Benatar

  I had been going to say come in handy. But now I suddenly heard the echo of my recent words. Previously, I hadn’t blushed in years.

  “Oh, forgive me! Please forgive me. I didn’t mean that!”

  She was smiling. It might have been the broadest smile I had seen from her all afternoon, apart from the hysteria. “I think Dr Freud might say you did—or, anyway, that you meant something very much like it. And it’s rather sweet: you’ve gone all red. Although I know it isn’t nice of me to point that out!”

  “No, I deserve it.”

  “In that case I must take full advantage of your penitence. I should like to see Random Harvest, please. I should really like to see it.”

  She paused.

  “And if I do start snivelling I promise you that it will be at nothing but the film. I tell you I’ve girt up my loins and this will be the perfect test. If not the perfect crime.”

  We said goodbye to the manageress (in fact, the owner—she admitted to us shyly that she happened to be Daphne) and, after an unplanned but timely hour spent at evensong, sat in another café, in the café of the cinema itself, whilst awaiting the conclusion of the afternoon performance.

  Over a glass of ginger beer Sybella showed herself still resolute; still keen to rise to the occasion.

  “I’ll tell you where we saw it,” she said. “At the Empire Cinema in Leicester Square. If you’ve never been there, it boasts one of the most barnlike auditoriums you can possibly imagine. Bill hadn’t been there and he bought tickets for the rear stalls. We had to move forward twice. He said that if people ever stayed at the back he hoped they’d be given binoculars for gazing at the stars.”

  I decided I could risk it. “Sounds as though his jokes weren’t any better than mine.”

  “Perhaps that’s why I feel so much at home with you. Before the cinema we had dinner at l’Ecu de France in Jermyn Street and it was all very jolly because we started off with double champagne cocktails.”

  Her compliment hadn’t gone unnoticed. Nor had her phrase, ‘all very jolly’. Was that, perhaps, coming just a degree closer to the style of those letters?

  “It really surprises me,” I said, “that you can still get champagne cocktails.”

  “On that particular evening we could.”

  “So I’ll tell you what strikes me now: is it any wonder you should need to see this film again? If champagne is what you started off with, you probably found the whole storyline more than a little confusing. Boy meets girl you could possibly have coped with. Boy loses girl was beginning to get tricky. Boy finds girl again … Well, I don’t know, I imagine by then you were both getting desperately out of your depth. Might have done better just to stay at the back and rest your legs. Are you honestly sure you want to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “Go through it all again.”

  “You’re meant to be helping me, you know. You volunteered.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Merely checking.”

  “Very well, then.” Her manner was bright but might have seemed a shade relentless. “Like I say, it was all very jolly—or should have been very jolly—except that the next day he was going off to Scotland and I didn’t know how long he’d be away; he didn’t know how long he’d be away; and I was already beginning to miss him and feel homesick. Well, obviously I was.”

  “Homesick?”

  “Yes. That’s the form my missing him always took. I was reduced to being a baby.”

  Now her voice did falter.

  “Of course, at the time, I didn’t know even the first thing about missing him!”

  She unclasped her bag and fumbled through it for a hankie. I had seen her fumbling for one last night—although, admittedly, that had been in an overall pocket and not in a handbag. But something about her expression must have reminded me. So now it was I who might have seemed a shade relentless: annoyed that I could have forgotten, for so much as a single minute, that this was a performance, a charade: the catch in her voice, the handkerchief, the whole damned lot … And she had asked me emphatically—asked me more than once, hadn’t she?—to put her to the test.

  “So when was this, then? Your double champagne cocktails? His going up to Scotland?”

  But by this time she was dabbing at her eyes—doing so with a rueful, even a half-humorous air of apology. And I found myself thinking that I must be wrong. This could not be a performance. This could not be a charade. What kind of a hardened brute was I, to allow myself to go on doubting her love for him?

  And abruptly—trying to make out that I hadn’t even noticed her distress—I glanced at my watch and stood up.

  “I think you should be finishing your drink. The programme’s about to end at any moment.”

  I walked across and gazed through the glass porthole in one of the dividing doors—myself being gazed at by the adenoidal waitress whose starched white circle sat precariously on a mass of woolly chestnut hair and whose expression seemed gently protective.

  “You’ll know when it’s over,” she explained kindly, “when they all start coming out.”

  I thanked her with a smile and only five seconds later—as if her statement had been the trigger—the shuffling exodus began. As the last of the audience leisurely emerged we went in and took our seats … far earlier than we should have, as it turned out, since no one had yet arrived to let us through. An usherette was waving around a flit gun—wafting misty clouds of disinfectant onto the fuggy, tobacco-laden air—but simultaneously carrying on a desultory conversation with her male counterpart downstairs who was performing the same service for the one-and-nine pennies and whom she twice addressed as Grandpa. Her spraying done, however, she went to take up her position in the doorway; but not before she’d made a reluctant detour to tear in half our own wickedly pristine tickets and to tell us off.

  We had something of a wait until 7.50 … the advertised start of the performance; much later—as Sybella now pointed out in mild mystification—than the beginning of tomorrow night’s show in London. At first we had thought we were going to be the sole occupants of the dress circle and we boasted to each other of how grand we were. But during the last few minutes the place filled up surprisingly fast; and we actually had to admit to feeling pleased about this.

  21

  The programme started with a Pathé newsreel.

  This showed us the calling-off of the coal strike in Washington, just minutes before Roosevelt would have signed an order to seize the mines. Next, we saw General Sikorski broadcasting from London to his people at home, warning them that they must remain friendly to the USSR. Then—appropriately—we had some footage of Stalin himself, in Moscow, stating his desire for a strong free Poland after the war.

  Although I’d been fearing that I might have to watch the Allies entering Tunis and have to witness the rapturous acclaim of the Tunisians—watch the Allies, too, going into Bizerte—I now experienced a twinge of disappointment on realizing that all of this was obviously too recent for the ABC in Aldershot.

  Likewise, of course, the Germans declaring martial law amongst the Dutch in anticipation of an Allied invasion. Yet at the necessary exclusion of that I felt nothing but a frankly recognized—if slightly disturbing—sense of relief.

  The news ended with something more lightweight. Its final segment showed fresh batches of US troops arriving in Suffolk and dispensing chewing gum and toothy smiles. It contained an interview with a group of countrywomen who declared that the Americans would all be made warmly welcome and that, no, they had never yet seen any coloured men—other than at the pictures—but, yes, they would now be looking forward to meeting some.

  However, it still wasn’t time for the feature. First came a Fitzpatrick Traveltalk—“and now as the sun goes down and we reluctantly take our leave of beautiful Buenos Aires…”; and then a trailer for the following Sunday’s seven-day offering, Casablanca, which, like every other English or American movie since the outbreak of war, I naturally hadn’t been able to see. Gon
e with the Wind was also coming back. It occurred to me that this cinema must have a policy of reintroducing ‘by popular demand’ all of the biggest romantic money-makers of the previous few years.

  Then the lights came up once more and the massive theatre organ arose out of the depths in stately style and provided brief selections from Showboat and Me and My Girl; the entire audience sang the lyric to ‘The Lambeth Walk’. Afterwards, the startlingly raven-haired organist took his bow to both stalls and circle: “That was worrying,” I whispered, but his sleek toupee, with its neat central parting, remained spiderlike in place. He and his sturdy spaceship then sank smoothly out of sight and the lights finally dimmed. The curtains swished apart (but not before the censor’s certificate was already waveringly on screen) and at last it was time for Leo to roar and for Random Harvest to begin.

  Well…!

  What can one possibly say?

  Random Harvest tells the story of an amnesiac army officer who—during the Armistice celebrations of 1918—escapes from an asylum in the English Midlands, marries a music hall singer and is idyllically happy for about a year, living in a cottage with roses round the door. Then he writes an article and goes off to Liverpool to meet the newspaper man who has agreed to publish it. But, whilst there, he is knocked down by a motorcar. The shock of this rejigs his amnesia. He now recalls that he’s the head of a noble family; yet he doesn’t know his wife any longer, nor have the least remembrance of their marriage … not even when she re-enters his life to become his selfless secretary.

  Years later, though, his parliamentary duties—for he is now a well-respected MP—take him back into that same area of the Midlands and he begins to recollect things subsequent to the Armistice … while, most fortunately, not again forgetting things prior to the Armistice. So he now rushes back to the cottage with roses round the door, which is happily still vacant and exactly as he and his secretary-wife had left it.

  Even more happily, on a sudden sentimental whim, she has turned up at the cottage at the same time. So they meet by the garden gate (its hinges still squeaking) under branches still heavy with blossom.

  There quickly follows instant recognition—reawakened love—re-impassioned clinch … and final fade.

  All this, of course, was preposterous; and not simply that, it was shameless. Why didn’t Miss Garson accompany Ronald Colman to Liverpool? Because the script provided her with a baby. What happened to the baby? That obliging little scrap, having served his purpose, then dutifully died, so that his mum could dedicate herself uniquely to the welfare of his dad. He must have got his notions of self-sacrifice from her.

  However—for all its faults—the film was in its way quite splendid and you couldn’t help but be drawn in; not even on a second viewing, to judge from the state of apparent absorption at my side. We left the cinema feeling uplifted. Uplifted and light-footed. I suddenly realized something: that from the moment we had walked unauthorized into that spray-swept auditorium, neither Sybella nor I had once mentioned the name of Bill Martin.

  Nor had we mentioned Laura. I hadn’t been forced either to intrude or to lie.

  Added to which, the sky was a profusion of stars. On nights like this you could feel positively thankful for the blackout.

  “God’s in His heaven,” I said, “all’s right with the world!”

  She nodded.

  “And yet,” I added, “Robert Browning never went to the movies. So how would he have known?”

  “Beats me,” she said.

  We held hands and sauntered. I escorted her to the camp gates and there took back the jacket I had placed around her shoulders.

  And somehow—as I did so—we found ourselves in an embrace.

  22

  I didn’t get to sleep till after three. Therefore when I received my wake-up call at seven-thirty I felt as heavy—both physically and mentally—as I had felt lithe and weightless just eight hours previously. But the bathwater into which I lowered myself was practically stone-cold (on purpose) and, even though adhering to the regulatory couple of inches, efficiently supplied the shock a sluggish system required. By the time I had eaten breakfast, settled my account and walked to the station, I felt fine again and was looking forward to seeing Sybella. Yet it was now a different kind of anticipation from the one I had experienced earlier: quieter and less heady, more questioning and less accepting. I was back at work. I still felt happy to be spending time with her but I had stopped believing in roses round the door and had become reinfected by suspicion. The very fact that at the camp gates she had responded to me in the way she had: even this now troubled me—shamingly unfair though I realized it to be.

  Thankfully, today’s journey resembled Friday’s rather than Saturday’s: no more perching on my suitcase whilst the military squeezed by. Today, seats in a third-class compartment: a compartment shared by only three others, excluding Sybella. She and I sat close and I revelled in our closeness … yet at the same time felt divorced from it. It was almost as though I were having an out-of-body experience, my spirit up in the luggage rack, lying on its stomach maybe, with its head propped on its hand, a dispassionate observer. Dispassionate? More like sardonic. Sitting—or, rather, lying—in judgment.

  Even my voice sounded distant: a sensation similar once more to that at the solicitor’s.

  “Last night, you know, before I fell asleep, I was thinking about Bill.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Sort of wondering how he might have felt if he’d been watching.”

  “Happy—I hope.”

  “But a difficult situation. Even in heaven, when you’ve only recently arrived, wouldn’t it be hard not to feel a little jealous? Resentful? She didn’t exactly wait for very long, did she? And I used to think she loved me.”

  “He knew I loved him. And he was always extremely understanding. About everything.”

  “Perhaps it’s easier to be understanding about everything, than about one thing in particular.”

  “He’d have understood how lost I felt. How lonely. And he’d have understood how—when suddenly someone came along who was just so sympathetic and so very easy to talk to…”

  Don’t let yourself feel flattered, I told myself.

  “That’s kind and I appreciate it,” I said (feeling flattered), “but all the same—”

  “Quite apart from being so easy on the eye,” she added.

  She could hardly have known it, I supposed (or, yes, probably she did), but this was not going to help me in my attempt to stay objective. My tone became brusque.

  “Despite his tendency to blush?” I asked. She looked at me.

  “Yes, you do rather have this tendency to blush.”

  “No, actually I don’t. I think it’s merely you who has this tendency to bring it out in me.”

  “Me and Greer Garson both?” She stopped. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was brazen! I can’t believe I said it.”

  “Nor me. And I trust—I really do trust—that you’re now going a little red?”

  “Not in the least. If I am brazen I shall have to brazen it out. When I set off in quest of Miss Garson—shortly after my arrival in California—then she and I can have an interesting little powwow about a young man’s propensity to blush. I think I shall look forward to that.”

  “Yes, it should be fun.”

  But I was thinking: she does realize, doesn’t she? About me and the movie business. Surely she does? At this point who precisely is taking in whom?

  I was immediately struck by something quite nonsensical—that, in a way, I didn’t know which would be worse: whether she did realize or whether she didn’t.

  Presumably it was the thought of this enlightening Hollywood encounter which now made her laugh and which now made, too, each of our three fellow passengers look up, agreeably. One was a clergyman, sucking on his brier; the other two, middle-aged women, also smoking, who somehow had the air of civil servants—possibly high-ranking ones. They both wore tweed suits, lisle stockings, sensibl
e shoes; but they sported different types of headgear: a porkpie hat with a pretty feather, and a cheerful silk scarf depicting flower girls in Piccadilly.

  After a moment, though, they all returned to their newspapers. Then it dawned on me, guiltily, that I had not only approved of their approval of Sybella, I had even taken a stupid sense of pride in it. I tried to be a good deal firmer with myself.

  And also with her.

  “So, then?” I invited. (Although, in fact, I moved an inch or two away.) “Tell me about him. Tell me about Bill.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Anything … it’s not important. For instance, I think you mentioned he went up to Scotland? What was that to do with?”

  “Oh. Something or other for the government. Naturally, he’d never speak to me about matters of that sort. And I knew better than to ask.” (OF COURSE I won’t say a word to anyone—I never do when you tell me things …) “What makes you think it wasn’t just a spot of leave?”

  “Well, if it had been, wouldn’t he have taken you with him?” I paused. “Oh, no, I suppose he couldn’t have.”

  “Why not?”

  “Thinking of the play, I mean.”

  She frowned a little.

  “What’s the play got to do with it? We’ve only been doing the play for the past couple of weeks.”

  “Really?” I said. “The past couple of weeks?”

  “Yes. Didn’t you realize?” She raised an amused eyebrow. “I’ve only been with ENSA for the past three! And Bill went up to Scotland in … oh, in early March. Though he wasn’t there for long; merely a few days. Even if it did feel like a lot longer…” She said this with a grimace.

  But in any case I wasn’t thinking about Scotland. Not any more. For the second time in a matter of seconds I found myself simply repeating what she had said.

  “You’ve only been with ENSA for the past three weeks?”

  “You look surprised. But the thing is: I was absurdly late in applying—don’t ask me why—up till then I’d had nothing but a deadly boring job in a bakery!” She smiled. “But at least with regard to Nine Till Six I got the timing right. They were just on the point of casting and beginning their week’s rehearsal.”