by William Boyd
“How are you, Mademoiselle Eva?” Benoit asked, taking her money.
“I’m not so well,” she said. “My brother’s death—you know.”
His face changed, went long in sympathy. “Terrible, terrible thing,” he said. “These times we live in.”
At least now he can’t ask me out again for a while, Eva thought, as she left and turned into the apartment block’s small courtyard, stepping through the small door in the large one and nodding hello to Madame Roisanssac, the concierge. She walked up the two flights of stairs, let herself in, left the bread in the kitchen and moved on through to the salon, thinking: no, I can’t stay in again tonight, not with Papa and Irene—I shall go and see a film, the film playing at the Rex: Je Suis Partout— I need to have a change in routine, she thought, some room, some time for myself.
She walked into the salon and Romer rose to his feet with a lazy welcoming smile. Her father stepped in front of him, saying in his bad English, with false disapprobation, “Eva, really, why are you not telling me you’ve met Mr Romer?”
“I didn’t think it was important,” Eva said, her eyes never leaving Romer’s, trying to keep her gaze absolutely neutral, absolutely unperturbed. Romer smiled and smiled—he was very calm—and more smartly dressed, she saw, in a dark blue suit, a white shirt and another of his striped English ties.
Her father was fussing, pulling a chair forward for her, making small talk—“Mr Romer was knowing Kolia, can you believe it?”—but Eva only heard a stridency of questions and exclamations in her head: How dare you come here! What have you told Papa? What nerve! What did you think I would say? She saw the glasses and the bottle of port on the silver tray, saw the plate of sugared almonds and knew that Romer had engineered this welcome effortlessly, confident of the solace his visit would bring. How long had he been here? she wondered, looking at the level of the port in the bottle. Something about her father’s mood suggested more than one glass each.
Her father practically forced her to sit; she declined the glass of port she dearly wanted. She noticed Romer sitting back, discreetly, one leg casually crossed over the other, that small calculating smile on his face. It was the smile, she realised, of a man who was convinced he knew exactly what was going to happen next.
Determined to frustrate him, she stood up. “I have to go,” she said. “I’ll be late for the film.”
Somehow, Romer was at the door before her, his fingers on her left elbow, restraining.
“Mr Delectorski,” Romer said to her father, “is there anywhere I can speak privately with Eva?”
They were shown into her father’s study—a small bedroom at the end of the corridor—decorated with formal, wooden photographic portraits of Delectorski relatives and containing a desk, a divan and a bookshelf full of his favourite Russian authors: Lermontev, Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov. The room smelt of cigars and the pomade that her father used for his hair. Moving to the window Eva could see Madame Roisanssac hanging out her family’s washing. She felt suddenly very ill at ease: she thought she knew how to deal with Romer but now alone in this room with him—alone in her father’s room—everything suddenly had changed.
And, as if he sensed this, Romer changed too: gone was the overweening self-confidence, now replaced by a manner more direct, more fiercely personal. He urged her to sit down and drew a chair for himself from behind the desk, setting it opposite her, as if some form of interrogation was about to begin. He offered her a cigarette from his battered case and she took one before saying, no, thank you, I won’t, and handed it back. She watched him refit it in his case, clearly mildly irritated. Eva felt she’d won a tiny, trivial victory—everything counted if that vast easy confidence was to be even momentarily discomfited.
“Kolia was working for me when he was killed,” Romer said.
“You told me.”
“He was killed by Fascists, by Nazis.”
“I thought he was robbed.”
“He was doing…” he paused. “He was doing dangerous work—and he was discovered. I think he was betrayed.”
Eva wanted to speak but decided to say nothing. Now, in the silence, Romer removed his cigarette case again and went through the rigmarole of putting the cigarette in his mouth, patting his pockets for his lighter, removing the cigarette from his mouth, tapping both ends on the cigarette case, pulling the ashtray on her father’s desk towards him, lighting the cigarette and inhaling and exhaling strongly. Eva watched all this, trying to stay completely impassive.
“I work for the British government,” he said. “You understand what I mean…”
“Yes,” Eva said, “I think so.”
“Kolia was working for the British government also. He was trying to infiltrate l’Action Française on my instructions. He had joined the movement and was reporting back to me on any developments he thought might be of interest to us.” He paused and, seeing she was not going to interject, leant forward and said, reasonably, “There will be a war in Europe in six months or a year—between Nazi Germany and several European countries—that much you can be sure of. Your brother was part of that struggle against this coming war.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“That he was a very brave man. That he didn’t die in vain.”
Eva checked the sardonic laugh in her throat and almost immediately felt tears begin to flood her eyes.
“Well, I wish he’d been a cowardly man,” she said, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice, “then he wouldn’t have died at all. In fact he might have been walking through this door in ten minutes.”
Romer stood up and crossed to the window, where he too studied Madame Roisanssac hanging out her washing, before turning and sitting on the edge of her father’s desk, staring at her.
“I want to offer you Kolia’s job,” he said. “I want you to come and work for us.”
“I have a job.”
“You will be paid £500 a year. You will become a British citizen with a British passport.”
“No, thank you.”
“You will be trained in Britain and will work for the British government in various capacities—just as Kolia did.”
“Thank you—no. I’m very happy in my current work.” Suddenly, impossibly, she wanted Kolia to come into the room—Kolia with his wry smile and his languid charm—and tell her what to do, what to say to this man with his insistent eyes and his insistent demands of her. What do you want me to do, Kolia? She heard the question loud in her head. You tell me what I should do and I’ll do it.
Romer stood up. “I’ve talked to your father. I suggest you do the same.” He walked to the door, touching his forehead with two fingers as if he’d just forgotten something. “I’ll see you tomorrow—or the next day. Think seriously about what I’ve proposed, Eva, and what it’ll mean to you and your family.” Then his mood seemed to change abruptly, as if he were affected by some kind of sudden zeal and the mask dropped for a moment. “For god’s sake, Eva,” he said. “Your brother was murdered by these thugs, these filthy vermin—you’ve a chance to get your revenge. To make them pay.”
“Goodbye, Mr Romer, it was very nice meeting you.”
Eva looked out of the carriage window at the Scottish countryside as it sped by. It was summer, yet under the low white sky she thought there lingered in the landscape a memory of many winters’ hardships—the small tough trees bent and shaped by a prevailing wind, the tussocky grass, the soft green hills scabbed by their dark patches of heather. It may be summer, the land seemed to be saying, but I won’t let my guard down. She thought of other landscapes she had seen from trains over her life—in fact sometimes it seemed to her that her life was one composed of train journeys through whose windows she had watched a succession of alien countrysides flash by. From Moscow to Vladivostock, from Vladivostock to China…Luxury wagons-lits, troop trains, goods trains, provincial stoppers on branch lines, days spent stationary, trainless, waiting for another locomotive. Sometimes crowded carriages, insuffera
ble, overcome with the stench of packed human bodies—sometimes the melancholy of empty compartments, the lonely clatter of the wheels in their ears, night after night. Sometimes travelling light with one small suitcase, sometimes burdened with all their possessions, like helpless refugees, it seemed. All these journeys: Hamburg to Berlin, Berlin to Paris and now Paris to Scotland. Still moving towards an unknown destination, she told herself, wishing vaguely that she felt more thrill, more romance.
Eva checked her watch—ten minutes to go until Edinburgh, she reckoned. In her compartment a middle-aged businessman nodded over his novel, his head lolling, his features slack and ugly in repose. Eva removed her new passport from her handbag and looked at it for maybe the hundredth time. It had been issued in 1935 and there were immigration stamps from certain European countries: Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland and, interestingly enough, the United States of America. All places she had visited, apparently. The photograph was blurry and overlit: it looked like her—a sterner, more obstinate Eva (where had they found it?)—but even she could not tell if it was wholly genuine. Her name, her new name, was Eve Dalton. Eva Delectorskaya becomes Eva Dalton. Why not Eva? She supposed ‘Eve’ was more English and, in any event, Romer had not given her the option of christening herself.
That evening, after Romer had left so peremptorily, she had gone through to the salon to talk to her father. A job for the British government, she told him, £500 a year, a British passport. He feigned surprise but it was obvious that Romer had briefed him to a certain extent.
“You’d be a British citizen, with a passport,” her father said, his features incredulous, almost abjectly so—as if it were unthinkable that a nonentity such as he should have a daughter who was a British citizen. “Do you know what I would give to be a British citizen?” he said, all the while with his left hand miming a sawing motion at his right elbow.
“I don’t trust him,” Eva said. “And why should he be doing this for me?”
“Not for you: for Kolia. Kolia worked for him. Kolia died working for him.”
She poured herself a small glass of port, drank and held its sweetness in her mouth for a second or two before swallowing it.
“Working for the British government,” she said, “you know what that means.”
He came over to her and took her hands. “There are a thousand ways of working for the British government.”
“I’m going to say no. I’m happy here in Paris, happy in my job.”
Again her father’s face registered an emotion so intense it was almost parodic: now it was a bafflement, an incomprehension so complete it made him dizzy. He sat down as if to prove the point.
“Eva,” he said, seriously, weightily, “think about it: you have to do it. But don’t do it for the money, or the passport, or to be able to go and live in England. It’s simple; you have to do it for Kolia—for your brother.” And he pointed at Kolia’s smiling face in the photograph. “Kolia’s dead,” he went on, dumbly, almost idiotically, as if only now facing up to the reality of his dead son. “Murdered. How can you not do it?”
“All right, I’ll give it some thought,” she said coolly, determined not to be affected by his emotion, and left the room. But she knew, whatever the rational side of her brain was telling her—weigh everything up, don’t be hasty, this is your life you’re dealing with—that her father had said all that mattered. In the end it was nothing to do with money, or a passport, or safety: Kolia was dead. Kolia had been killed. She had to do it for Kolia, it was as simple as that.
She saw Romer two days later across the street as she left for lunch, standing under the awning of the epicene just as he had that first day. This time he waited for her to join him and, as she crossed the road, she felt a sense of profound unease afflict her, as if she were deeply superstitious and the most maleficent sign had just been made evident to her. She wondered, absurdly: is this what people feel when they agree to marry someone?
They shook hands and Romer led her to their original café. They sat, ordered a drink and Romer handed her a buff envelope. It contained a passport, £50 in cash and a train ticket from the Gare du Nord, Paris, to Waverley Station, Edinburgh.
“What if I say no?” she asked.
“Just give it back to me. Nobody wants to force you.”
“But you had the passport ready.”
Romer smiled, showing his white teeth, and for once she thought it might be a genuine smile.
“You’ve no idea how easy it is to have a passport made up. No, I thought…” he paused and frowned. “I don’t know you, Eva, in the way I knew Kolia—but I thought, because of him, and because you remind me of him, that there was a chance you might join us.”
Eva smiled ruefully at the memory of this conversation—its mix of sincerity and vast duplicity—and leant forward as they steamed into Edinburgh and craned her head up to look at the castle on the rock, almost black, as if, made of coal, it sat on a crag of coal, as they slowed beneath it, slipping into the station. Now there were shreds of blue amongst the hurrying clouds—it was brighter, the sky no longer white and neutral—perhaps that was what made the castle and its rock seem so black.
She stepped down from the train with her suitcase (“Only one suitcase,” Romer had insisted) and wandered up the platform. All he had told her was that she would be met. She looked about her at the families and couples greeting each other and embracing, politely declined the services of a porter and walked out into the main concourse of Waverley Station.
“Miss Dalton?”
She turned, thinking how quickly one becomes accustomed to a new name—she had been Miss Eve Dalton for only two days now—and saw that the man facing her was stout in a too tight grey suit and a too tight collar.
“I’m Staff Sergeant Law,” the man said. “Please follow me.” He did not offer to carry her suitcase.
TWO
Ludger Kleist
“YES, MRS AMBERSON THOUGHT, it was my doing nothing that made the difference.”
Hugues looked more than usually puzzled, almost panicked in fact. He was always puzzled by English grammar, anyway—frowning, muttering, talking to himself in French—but today I had painted him into a corner
“My doing nothing—what?” he said, helplessly.
“My doing nothing—nothing. It’s a gerund.” I tried to look alert and interested but decided, there and then, to cut the lesson short by ten minutes. I felt the pressure of desperate concentration in my head—I had been almost furious in my application, all to keep my mind occupied—but my attention was beginning to fray badly. “We’ll tackle the gerund and gerundive tomorrow,” I said, closing the book (Life with the Ambersons, vol. III) then added, apologetically, aware of the agitation I’d aroused in him, “C’est très compliqué.”
“Ah, bon.”
Like Hugues, I too was sick of the Amberson family and their laborious journey through the labyrinth of English grammar. And yet I was still bound to them like an indentured servant—tied to the Ambersons and their horrible lifestyle—and the new pupil was due to arrive: only another two hours in their company to go.
Hugues pulled on his sports jacket—it was olive green with a charcoal check and I thought the material was cashmere. It was meant to look, I supposed, like the sort of jacket that an Englishman—in some mythological English world—would unreflectingly don to go and see to his hounds, or meet his estate manager, or take tea with his maiden aunt, but I had to confess I had yet to encounter a fellow countryman sporting clothing quite so fine and so well cut.
Hugues Corbillard stood in my small, narrow study, pensively stroking his blond moustache, a troubled expression still on his face—thinking about the gerund and gerundive, I supposed. He was a rising young executive in P’TIT PRIX, a low-cost French supermarket chain, and had been obliged by senior management to improve his English so that P’TIT PRIX could access new markets. I liked him—actually, I liked most of my pupils—Hugues was a rare lazy one: often he spoke French to me through
out the lesson and I English to him, but today had been something of an assault course. Usually we talked about anything except English grammar, anything to avoid the Amberson family and their doings—their trips, their modest crises (plumbing failures, chicken-pox, broken limbs), visits from relatives, Christmas holidays, children’s exams, etcetera—and more and more our conversation returned to the unusual heat of this English summer, how Hugues was slowly stifling in his broiling bed and breakfast, about his incomprehension at being obliged to sit down to eat a three-course, starchy evening meal at 6.00 p.m., with the sun slamming down on the scorched, dehydrated garden. When my conscience pricked me and I felt I should remonstrate and urge him to speak in English, Hugues would say that it was all conversation, n’est ce pas? with a shy guilty smile, conscious he was breaking the strict terms of the contract, it must be helping his comprehension, surely? I did not disagree: I was earning £7 an hour chatting to him in this way—if he was happy, I was happy.
I walked him through the flat to the back stairway. We were on the first floor and in the garden I could see Mr Scott, my landlord and my dentist, doing his strange exercises—waving his arms, stamping his big feet—before another patient arrived in his surgery down below us.
Hugues said goodbye and I sat down in the kitchen, leaving the door open, waiting for my next pupil from Oxford English Plus. This would be her first day and I knew little about her apart from her name—Bérangère Wu—her status—beginner⁄intermediate—and her timetable—four weeks, two hours a day, five days a week. Good, steady money. Then I heard voices in the garden and stepped out of the kitchen on to the landing at the top of the wrought-iron staircase, looking down to see Mr Scott talking urgently to a small woman in a fur coat and pointing repeatedly at the front gate.
