Written in Red

by Annie Dalton

  ‘I’d love to, thanks.’ Anna didn’t have to be at Isadora’s until seven thirty. Jake had gone off to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. ‘I go to all these exotic locations,’ he’d said, a little wistfully, ‘but I never get to see anything except the inside of hotels and airports.’

  ‘So what have you been up to?’ Kirsty said. ‘Whatever it is, it’s doing you good. You look absolutely glowing!’

  ‘I think that’s probably just the cold.’ Anna laughed to cover the flash of fear that had come out of nowhere. It seemed too dangerous somehow to name her happiness out loud in case some malign eavesdropping spirit overheard. Though she was perfectly capable of hexing her own happiness, she thought wryly, it’s not like she needed any supernatural aid.

  ‘Oh, good, there’s Paul!’ Kirsty said. ‘I’ll just go and let him in.’ She ran to the door and Anna heard her say, ‘You’re just in time for mince pies!’

  THIRTEEN

  By the time Anna had finally squeezed on to one of the packed buses leaving the city centre, she was already late. Jake was patiently waiting for her at Isadora’s gate, a bunch of flowers in one hand and a bottle of Veuve Cliquot in the other. ‘I forgot to factor in Christmas shoppers,’ she said apologetically. ‘You should have just knocked and gone in. You must be freezing.’

  ‘Do you think these flowers are OK?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I thought they looked like Isadora but now I’m not so sure.’ The mix of purple hellebores and scented white viburnum with winter berries and evergreens was absolutely Isadora, Anna thought. ‘You were right on both counts,’ she told him.

  He laughed. ‘Funnily enough, I felt quite confident about the champagne.’

  They started walking up to the house just as Isadora came out. ‘What are you two doing out here in the cold?’ She was wearing a Japanese-style jacket in grey silk over baggy grey silk trousers. A pair of long dangling earrings made of very solid looking silver swung from her earlobes. She had dressed up for the occasion, Anna thought, touched. She had dressed up for Hetty.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you again, Jake!’ Isadora said. She kissed him on the cheek then swooped on the flowers. ‘I hope this fabulous bouquet is for me!’

  Jake smilingly held up the bottle. ‘This is also for you.’

  ‘How lovely!’ A flicker of regret crossed Isadora’s face. ‘But I think I might have to save it for another happier occasion.’

  ‘It’s yours now, ma’am,’ he told her. ‘That means you get to choose the time and place.’

  ‘Let me take your coats.’ Isadora quickly shifted back into hostess mode. ‘Everything’s almost ready.’

  In the kitchen all the windows had misted over with condensation. Tansy stood by the cooker, sprinkling finely chopped herbs into a gently bubbling pot. After the chill outside, Isadora’s steamy, fragrant-smelling kitchen felt blessedly warm. Anna and Jake quickly shed their heavy sweaters.

  ‘Hi, you guys!’ Tansy turned around, wooden spoon in hand. ‘Anna, come and taste this soup for me, tell me if it needs more salt?’

  Anna helped herself to a clean spoon, dipped it into the pan and blew softly on the parsley-speckled spoonful. ‘This is more like a stew,’ she said. ‘Are there lentils in this?’

  ‘And white beans, and winter vegetables.’

  ‘It’s good,’ Anna said, cautiously sampling from her spoon. ‘It doesn’t need more salt.’

  Tansy silently indicated the wire rack where three enormous loaves of freshly baked bread had been set to cool. ‘Three different kinds,’ she whispered.

  Anna’s eyes widened. ‘Has she been baking all afternoon?’

  ‘She said it was the only way she could stop herself running over to next door’s builders to blag some tobacco!’ Tansy whispered back. ‘She’s putting a brave face on, but she’s completely freaked about this. It’s good that Jake is here because, let’s face it, he’s pretty much unshockable.’

  ‘He is,’ Anna agreed.

  A short time later everyone was seating themselves around Isadora’s table. Isadora ladled Tansy’s soup into bowls, and Tansy sawed off hunks of bread for everyone.

  ‘I thought I should let you all eat first and then talk,’ Isadora said, a little awkwardly. ‘Certainly my mother would have insisted. But then I’d probably keep thinking of more reasons to put this off, so if you don’t object, I’m just going to begin before I lose my nerve and hope not to spoil everyone’s appetites. I’m rather regretting not opening that champagne,’ she told Jake with a nervous laugh.

  She closed her eyes, as if summoning her resources. ‘I’m not sure exactly where to start. I don’t know how much any of you know about the Cold War?’

  ‘Just what you’ve told us,’ Tansy said.

  ‘Ditto,’ said Anna.

  ‘A little,’ Jake said. Everyone turned to look at him. ‘As well as serving in the armed forces, I’ve read a lot of John le Carré!’ he explained with a grin. ‘The Cold War was a forty-year standoff between the West and the Soviet bloc. It began after the end of the Second World War and lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early nineties, wasn’t it?’ he asked Isadora.

  ‘So it was called a “cold war” because they didn’t fight any actual battles?’ Tansy said.

  ‘After the invention of the atomic bomb, all the rules of military engagement changed,’ Jake said. ‘The bomb made the prospect of another world war way, way too scary to contemplate.’

  ‘Both sides were terrified that the other side had the ability to decimate them in a nuclear war,’ Isadora said. ‘Meanwhile, each side continually tried to best the other in every way they could short of pressing that appalling button.’ She took a sip from her water glass. ‘The Cold War was a time of heightened international tension and suspicion and, at times, outright paranoia. This led to governments building up their own secret spy networks so they could find out what the other side was doing.’

  Jake nodded. ‘But instead of allaying governments’ fears, it actually generated a kind of paranoia feedback loop.’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Isadora said. ‘All these covert intelligence activities only intensified everyone’s panic, further complicated by the fact that agents occasionally switched sides, or played both sides off against each other, or just had their own private and peculiar little agendas.’ She abruptly moved her untouched soup bowl to one side. ‘I should have listened to my mother. I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to eat.’

  ‘I’ll heat some up for you later,’ Tansy said.

  ‘I can always eat unless I’m actually under fire,’ Jake said, ‘and sometimes even then!’

  ‘This does feel a little like being under fire.’ Isadora tucked back a strand of hair that had entangled itself with an earring. She seemed to be inwardly bracing herself before she continued. ‘So now we finally come on to my very small and inglorious part in the Cold War. I think it’s common knowledge now that during the sixties, students at both Oxford and Cambridge were approached by intelligence agencies to spy for them.

  ‘As Tansy and Anna know, at first I was naive enough to imagine that I was the only student Tallis had chosen to help avert a third world war. Tallis was the man who approached me,’ Isadora added for Jake’s benefit. She gave a short laugh. ‘In fact, my missions were mostly pretty mundane. I was just to infiltrate any student groups that Tallis’s people regarded as suspiciously radical. There was also a Marxist group in the town that some students were involved in. I went to meetings and then I dropped off my reports in a dead-letter box. I have to say, the first few times that part of things felt enormously exciting!’ For a moment, Isadora’s eyes shone at the memory. ‘I probably shouldn’t say that, should I?’ she added quickly. ‘But it’s true. Of course, later I found out that Tallis had also been sending the others along to monitor these groups. He’d been rotating us, it turned out.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ Anna said.

  Isadora shrugged. ‘Because he didn’t trust any one perso
n to do the job, or he didn’t want us to arouse undue suspicion? Or maybe he just enjoyed the idea of his six protégées obliviously crossing each other’s paths until he decided it was time for us to meet.’

  ‘So who was Tallis working for? MI5?’ Jake asked.

  Isadora shook her head. ‘We never knew. I think, deep down, we all had inklings that Tallis was playing some long game of his own, but he had this extraordinary ability – a compulsion, perhaps – to make people believe him, and so, ridiculous as it seems to me now, we did! Nowadays he’d probably be diagnosed as some kind of sociopath.’

  Anna remembered the elegant-looking man in the wheelchair who may or may not have been Tallis. She pictured him ironically tipping his hat, almost insisting on being acknowledged, refusing to be some anonymous old bloke in a wheelchair.

  Isadora drank some more water. ‘I can’t entirely hate Tallis.’ Her voice became wistful. ‘All those wonderful months with Hetty and the others I owe entirely to him. But then, sometimes, when I can’t sleep at night, I wonder, was it all smoke and mirrors? Was all of it just lies?’ She set down her glass. ‘You’ve probably all seen Midsummer Night’s Dream?’

  She gave them a forlorn smile. ‘That’s what those months were like for me, a golden magical dream, and yet all the time Tallis was subtly manipulating us behind the scenes just like Puck in the Dream, making us fall in love with the wrong person, or jump at horrors that weren’t actually there, or – far worse, making us blind to horrors that were!’ Isadora brushed her hand across her eyes as if sticky wisps of her handler’s sorcery still lingered. She gave one of her dark hoots of laughter. ‘And that ridiculous contrivance of six young strangers attending the same ball to intercept a spy! Yet Tallis made it so plausible – so thrilling,’ she added, shamefaced.

  ‘You never told us what happened at the ball,’ Tansy said. ‘Did your minor aristocrat actually try to pass information?’

  ‘Nothing happened at the ball.’ Isadora suddenly sounded bitter. ‘Nothing was ever going to happen. I think Tallis was just experimenting on us, his little intellectual lab rats, seeing how deeply he could draw us into his cold-war narrative.’ Her expression softened slightly. ‘We were all deeply disappointed that nothing happened at Blenheim Palace,’ she admitted. ‘After all of Tallis’s elaborate preparations, we’d failed in our first big mission. But then after the ball, as the sun was rising and we were about to drive back to Oxford, this man dressed as a waiter emerged from some trees and beckoned us to follow him deeper into the palace grounds. Well, he could have been anyone! He could have been taking us to our deaths! But I suppose we were all a little drunk as well as under this – this bewitchment that Tallis had laid on us, and so we followed him like lambs in our finery, and found a glorious champagne breakfast laid out for us in this beautiful little gazebo, all strung with lanterns. There was even a heater! Tallis had arranged it for us. Well, after that, it was almost inevitable that we’d all become friends – as he had presumably calculated.’

  ‘You were already friends with Hetty,’ Tansy reminded her.

  Isadora got up from the table, coming back with her envelope of photos. She smiled at Tansy. ‘Yes, Hetty took me extremely firmly under her wing from the start! But after that night the rest of us began meeting together, in cafes and parks, in punts on the river, in each other’s rooms.’ Isadora fanned the photographs out on the table to show Jake and Tansy. ‘We went out in Piers’s car to the Trout at Wolvercote. We went to London to see bizarre foreign art films. We drove to Stratford and saw David Warner’s Hamlet, one of the best performances I’ve seen before or since.’

  ‘But you were all still going along to the meetings?’ Anna said.

  Isadora nodded. ‘We went together and separately. It was the – I won’t say “unquestioned” but unchallenged – basis of our friendship, that we were somehow helping Tallis to save the world. It was part of what made us so special, so golden – like fairy coinage that might disappear if we examined it too closely.’

  Nothing gold can stay, Anna thought.

  ‘Tell us about Hetty,’ Tansy said. ‘Tell us what happened.’

  Isadora touched the photo of Hetty Vallier. ‘Hetty was right at the thrilling golden centre of it all. And then, at some point – I can’t tell you when – everything must have changed. But to my shame it’s only all these years afterwards that I realize this must be what had happened. It’s so easy to lose sight of what is happening to the people you love most. You get distracted by your own concerns, so that you’re looking the wrong way just when you should be paying attention – maybe the person even wants you to look the wrong way – but of course that doesn’t let one off the hook.’ Her eyes were dark with pain.

  ‘Hetty looks like a very special person,’ Jake said.

  ‘Doesn’t she?’ Tansy said. ‘She reminds me a little bit of Marianne Faithful when she was young and gorgeous!’

  Now that Tansy had pointed it out Anna could see a striking resemblance between Hetty and the former convent school girl who had hung out with the Rolling Stones and recorded songs filled with a bittersweet loss that she was officially too young to feel. Hetty’s eyes held that same bittersweet look.

  ‘Hetty was a sixties’ girl before they were invented,’ Isadora said. ‘She chopped her skirts short, when other girl undergraduates were still wearing twinsets and pearls.’

  ‘You said men found her irresistible,’ Anna said. ‘Did Tallis?’ She’d been wondering about the handler’s relationship with the girls in Isadora’s group.

  Isadora’s eyes clouded. ‘I suspect that Tallis recognized very early on that Hetty had qualities that could be useful to him.’

  ‘She was sexy,’ Tansy suggested.

  ‘Extremely sexy, also beguiling, charming and unashamedly upper-middle class – a combination that men often find extremely seductive. Some weekends she’d take off on mysterious jaunts to London. She often returned with money, which she said her stepmother had given her to help pay her bills, but then she’d use it to buy everyone presents or take us out to dinner. Once she came back with a dress – I think it was a Mary Quant? – which she immediately insisted on giving to Catherine. It was almost as if she couldn’t get rid of it soon enough.’

  ‘You think Tallis was, like – pimping her out?’ Tansy said.

  A quiver went through Isadora. ‘I think it – was subtler and rather more complex than that. But I suspect there was some element of pimping, yes. The last time I saw Hetty she intimated – sorry!’ She briefly covered her face, fighting to keep her emotions under control. ‘Sorry,’ she said again, trying to smile. ‘I’m afraid this is the part that I really can’t bear.’

  Everybody could see how agonized she was, but nobody asked if she’d rather stop. She had borne these secrets for too long. Isadora needs us all here to bear witness, Anna thought. She needs us to hold her steady while she gets rid of this poison once and for all.

  Isadora poured herself more water, gulping half of it down before she went on.

  ‘One night, Hetty and Robert were scheduled to go to the Marxist group in the town that Tallis’s people believed might be fomenting communist dissent. I would have gone with them but Tallis needed me to go to a meeting of the University’s Russian Society. I’d been before countless times. It was always completely innocent, just an excuse to discuss Russian films over caviar and vodka, but Tallis said his people needed me to go, so I went.

  ‘When I got back to my room, Hetty was waiting for me. She’d come straight from the town meeting. She seemed extremely upset. That’s when I realized that she hadn’t been herself for a long time. I tried to think when I’d lost sight of her, the real Hetty, and it scared me that I’d let myself be fobbed off by that bright brittle facsimile for so long. She wasn’t bright and brittle that night, however. She seemed angry and frightened.

  ‘She said she had something to tell me. There was a particular person of interest to Tallis’s people, someone who was a regular attendee a
t the town group. She said, “Isadora, it’s all lies! It’s nothing to do with politics and saving the world, it’s all about money.” She said this man had been selling British secrets to the Russians for gain and now Tallis was blackmailing him. Hetty said he’d been playing this man along for months and he’d used her to bait the trap. She could see that I didn’t believe her. She was pacing my room, smoking and crying. She said, “Don’t you understand! This is dangerous, Isadora! He’s not trying to stop these communications with the Soviets. He’s fucking profiting from them?”’

  ‘What did you say to her?’ Jake asked quietly.

  Isadora’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m ashamed to say I laughed. I told her she was being ridiculous but underneath I was horrified. Hetty was breaking the rules. We weren’t supposed to compare notes about things Tallis asked us to do. But Hetty was doing something far more dangerous. She was questioning Tallis’s integrity. She wasn’t even questioning it; she was saying outright that he was corrupt!’

  Anna had secretly feared this was where Isadora’s story was leading. Through her diary entries she felt she had got to know – and like – Hetty Vallier and she felt a cold dread for this generous, quirky but deeply damaged girl.

  ‘That was the last time I saw her alive.’ Isadora’s voice shook. ‘She’d told me that next day she had to go up to London. Tallis needed her to sweeten negotiations with some high-ranking Russian dignitary. She said this was going to be the very last time.’

  ‘Russian?’ Tansy whispered to Anna. ‘I thought—?’

  Isadora was still talking. ‘Hetty said it had just been a bit of a laugh at first. But she had found out that Tallis had a dark side, a terrible and very frightening side, and now she wanted to stop. She wanted us all to stop before it was too late. She told me that she’d met someone, someone straightforward and kind.’

  ‘The American,’ Tansy said.

  ‘She never told me who he was. I didn’t know he was American until you girls read that part of her diary. I didn’t know she was planning to leave the country and make a life with this farmer or whatever he was. It sounds so unlike Hetty, it makes me wonder if she was having some kind of breakdown.’