It was true. The first time Billy saw two strangers in rehearsal playing a warring old couple after half a lifetime in a bad marriage had been a moment of revelation. He’d believed every gesture, every line of dialogue, every howl of despair, and when the scene was over he couldn’t believe how completely he’d been drawn in. He tried to share this feeling with Ursula. Once you knew how the trick worked, he said, then you couldn’t wait to try it for yourself.
‘You make it sound like a spell.’
‘It is, in a way. That’s exactly what it is. It’s magic. It’s a conjuring trick. It’s illusion. It also puts you in charge.’ He smiled, thinking of the hot summer’s day when he’d discovered the Thunder Run. ‘Until I went on the stage I was a shy little boy,’ he said. ‘Acting changed all that. You can be whoever you want, whenever you want.’
‘And wherever you want?’
‘Of course. We toured as a company. New York was wonderful. They had proper heating as well as decent food. England’s not like that at all. Especially in the north.’
‘You’re telling me you travel well?’
Billy didn’t understand the question. Ursula said she wanted to know whether he was resourceful, whether he could look after himself, whether he could adapt to difficult circumstances. In all three cases, the answer was yes.
‘And do you speak French?’
‘No. Is that a problem?’
‘Not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.’
She studied him for a long moment and then finished her coffee. She wanted to know where Billy was staying and for how long. When he mentioned Topsham a smile briefly warmed her face. She knew the village. In fact she had friends there. A truly beautiful place. And so very English.
‘But I thought you were staying with your mother? That’s the address we got from Wickenby.’
‘That was what I intended.’
‘But it didn’t go to plan?’
‘No.’
She nodded. There was a briefcase tucked down beside her armchair. She extracted a long brown envelope and shook the contents onto her lap. Then she handed Billy what looked like a form.
‘Read it, please,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll be back.’
She collected the mugs and left the room. Billy scanned the form. It came in two parts. The first was a shortened version of the Official Secrets Act, spelling out the penalties for non-compliance. Without much effort, it seemed to Billy, he could be facing the death penalty for divulging state secrets. The second part of the form ran to a couple of brisk paragraphs. By signing on the bottom line, Billy pledged himself to denying that this morning’s meeting had ever happened, and that he’d never paid a visit to 49 Stanlake Road.
He was reading the material a second time when Ursula Barton returned. She had a pen in her hand. She stood over him. Billy was aware of his own name typed beneath the dotted line at the bottom of the form. She said that she’d enjoyed their meeting and that he was free to return to Devon to resume his leave. She made a note of the address where he was staying and said it would be helpful if he would let them know if he moved on. Use the phone number on the telegram. In the meantime she’d be happy to meet his travel expenses.
‘Do you have any questions, Mr Angell?’
Billy nodded, ignoring the proffered pen.
‘Just one,’ he said. ‘Who exactly are you?’
‘Sign on the dotted line, Mr Angell. I’m afraid you have no choice.’
‘You’re not going to tell me?’
‘Alas no,’ the smile again. ‘At least not yet.’
16
Hélène spent another two days in Paris in the hope that she might be able to see Klimt again. Twice she phoned the Abwehr number at the Hôtel Meurice and both times they said he wasn’t available. That evening she stayed at the apartment, hoping he might come home. When he didn’t, she tried the Meurice again and this time she found herself talking to someone prepared to be a little more helpful.
Oberst Klimt, he explained, had been called at short notice to a number of important meetings in Berlin. He might be back in Paris by the end of the week. Alternatively he might be absent for a great deal longer. He’d be happy to pass on any message and perhaps a telephone number if that might be useful. Hélène was tempted to supply both but knew that might not be wise. Important meetings in Berlin? Absent for a great deal longer? She’d been right. Klimt was in deep trouble.
The following morning she took the train back to Tours. She had a friend in the city, someone she’d met that first summer when she and Nathan had taken possession of the chateau. They’d attended a function at the Musée des Beaux Arts three days after the signing of the German/Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and she remembered a conversation with a couple of Tours’ more nervous citoyens. They were anticipating that the Germans would pounce on France the moment war was declared and they were already making plans for a decorous, unhurried move to the Spanish island of Mallorca. Better that, said one of them, than to drown in the inevitable flood of refugees.
In retrospect their advice might have been sound, but Hélène’s friend had ignored it. Her name was Danielle. She was a palaeontologist working at the Department of Pre-History at the local university. Aside from her knowledge of fossils she had an inexhaustible passion for primitive cave paintings and made frequent visits to the Chauvet caves in the Ardèche. The fact that her conception of time stretched back dozens of millennia had always fascinated Hélène. Here was someone, she always told herself, for whom the Thousand Year Reich would be a mere blink.
Once Nathan had departed for Lisbon, the two women had begun to meet regularly. Danielle occupied a cluttered third-floor apartment overlooking the Loire. She lived alone with three cats. As long as she had access to gasoline, Hélène could leave the chateau in mid-morning and be in Tours in time for lunch. Danielle cooked robust dishes which depended on game from Hélène’s estate. Beneath a torrent of conversation she conjured magical tastes from rabbit and hare, washed down with choice red wines from Hélène’s cave, and Danielle somehow managed to lay hands on drinkable bottles of calvados to follow the cheese. The cheese, all of it locally made, came from the father of a student of hers. These regular feasts, for both women, had become a kind of lifeline. Even under the New Order, there was still room for laughter, and a brief reunion with gluttony.
Hélène arrived unannounced. Danielle, immersed in a treatise on the Francevillian group fossils, was still in her dressing gown. Hélène had bought two hundred and fifty grammes of coffee from the concierge who looked after her apartment building, the best connected woman in the 16th. It was early afternoon. Hélène stood by the window, watching a barge emerge through the arches of the nearby bridge, while Danielle brewed the coffee. This friend of hers had an almost telepathic gift for other people’s moods.
‘What’s the matter? What’s happened?’
Hélène told her about Huber, about the telephone call to Nathan, and worst of all about Klimt. She had never mentioned his name before. The news that Hélène had a relationship with a serving Abwehr officer – someone with a finger in everybody’s pie – would have come as a profound shock to most women. Not Danielle.
‘You love this man?’
‘Sometimes, yes.’
‘Very wise. Just a piece of yourself. And never the best piece, eh? Here—’
She’d poured the coffee. Made a space for Hélène among the drift of papers on the floor. The apartment had no proper furniture. Just a collection of huge stuffed cushions scattered randomly. This was a woman who lived at knee-level, Hélène had always thought.
‘So he’s what kind of man, this Klimt?’
‘He’s nice. And sympa when you get to know him.’
‘He looks after you?’ Danielle’s little hand flapped at her belly. ‘All of you?’
‘Very well.’
‘And in other ways? He keeps his countrymen in order? So they don’t bother you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. A re
lationship with logic. Never as common as one might like. Put it on the mantelpiece, chérie. Give it a dusting from time to time. Along with your favourite clock.’
‘This man’s not a clock. He’ll never be a clock. The clocks stopped three years ago.’
‘Lovely, chérie. A lovely image. But nothing lasts forever. Not even your precious Klimt.’
Hélène smiled. Danielle had always been ruthless in her private life. Men were attracted to her intelligence, and her wit, and something Hélène had begun to recognise as a kind of madcap courage, but she rarely let them stay in her bed for more than a month or two. She had a tireless interest in good sex. The two women often compared notes. But men’s minds bored her quicker than their bodies and once that happened she simply moved on. Life, she told Hélène, was une confiserie. The moment you’ve had enough of one sweetie is the moment to try another.
‘So what about Nathan? You think he’s serious about coming back? They’d throw him in a cattle wagon. He must know that.’
‘He does. He must do. Nathan knows everything about everything.’
‘So does he mean it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want to put him to the test? Find out?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re right. I’d never see him again.’
Danielle nodded. The round-up of Jews was taking place everywhere, all over the country. In Tours the first clues had been there from the start: the queues of shuffling Jews awaiting registration, the big yellow stars they pinned to their overcoats, the arrival of trucks to seize their possessions, and finally the long march to the railway station to await transportation to God knows where. The rest of France had developed a nasty habit of looking the other way and that, in Hélène’s view, was regrettable.
‘Understatement, mon petit lapin. I love you for it. But what else do we do?’ Danielle was eyeing the litter of paperwork, notepad after notepad black with her own jottings. ‘Me? I’m a submarine. I just submerge and do what I do and wait for the storm to pass. It means I understand the weather. It means I have some respect for the ocean. It also means I’m probably a coward, one of those timid little moi d’abord our new masters depend on. But it’s not an answer. Not if you’re facing a dilemma like yours.’
Hélène shook her head. Moi d’abord? Me first? In her opinion Danielle was the least selfish of women.
‘Dilemma?’ she wondered aloud. ‘Is that what it is?’
‘Of course. You have two men in your life. Both appear to be in mortal danger. Make sure the next one is more settled. You need a gardener or perhaps a priest. Food for your belly and comfort for your soul. Our German friends understand neither but that’s a different issue.’
‘So what do I do?’
‘Rien. You do nothing. You wait for the enemy. The enemy is Huber. Life is a game, ma petite, and you always hold better cards than you think. Last night I was listening to the BBC. In weeks, the British and the Americans will be in Italy. Musso is a balloon. By September he will have burst. You bring me more game and we celebrate. By then your little dilemma will have resolved itself.’ She tipped her coffee cup in salute. ‘Trust me.’
17
Billy found himself waiting in hope for the telegram. He’d no idea where this strange encounter might lead but the approach of the postman’s boots was no longer a threat. He wanted to find out more. He wanted to meet Ursula Barton again, if only to convince himself that he hadn’t been making the whole thing up. And on the third day back, at eight in the morning, the telegram appeared.
ARRIVING EXETER CENTRAL 11.04.
PLEASE MEET US. URSULA.
Us? Billy performed a courtly little dance around the kitchen chanting another favourite speech from The Tempest:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air…
Was that the truth of it? That real life and make-believe were separated by the thinnest of divides? That – come the afternoon – the last six months of his life, all those faces, all those memories, all those moments of first bewilderment, then despair, then blind terror, would simply vanish? Fizz away? Evaporate? All that heartache? Gone?
He was at Exeter Central station half an hour early. He descended to the platform, waiting for the tell-tale curl of smoke and piping whistle that would announce the arrival of the Waterloo train. When it arrived it was ten minutes early. The carriage doors burst open and the empty platform was suddenly a sea of young faces. This was still holiday season. Torquay, he thought. Paignton. Maybe even the Palmview Hotel.
Ursula Barton was among the last to step off the train. Billy didn’t know whether or not to extend a hand. In the event he was spared the decision. Ursula was already leading the way up the long flight of stairs to the street.
A black saloon was waiting outside the station entrance. At the sight of Ursula the driver snapped a salute and opened the back doors. He was wearing an Army uniform and the moment they were both embarked he slipped behind the wheel and eased the car into the thin afternoon traffic. They motored west, towards the soft green hills that announced the approach to Dartmoor. The road grew narrower by the mile, scabbed with mud and cow dung, threading past a succession of farms. Finally, they arrived.
The house would have been easy to miss. It lay some distance from the road, hidden by a screen of trees. It was Georgian, two-storey, white stucco, tall windows, and sat comfortably in the plumpness of the landscape. To Billy it might once have been a rectory. The scale of the property was perfect, neither grand nor humble. This is where my mum should have ended up, he thought.
The car came to a halt on the crescent of gravel beside the house. The journey from Exeter had passed in silence. The driver opened the rear doors and Billy followed Ursula up the steps. A woman was waiting inside to greet them. She might have been Ursula’s sister – same manner, similar age, same fierce sense of purpose, except that she was most definitely English.
‘In there if you please. Eats when you’re ready.’ She nodded at an open door at the end of the hall.
It was a big room bathed in sunlight. The windows were open and Billy could smell the sweetness of newly cut grass. Two horses were grazing in a meadow beyond the white timber fence.
Billy looked around. The room was beautiful: deep green walls, tasteful country prints, a lovely Adam fireplace. It was a room that managed to marry comfort with good taste and it was dominated by a long antique dining table, highly polished, obviously loved. Three places had been set out at the head of the table.
‘Have you eaten, Mr Angell?’
Billy glanced round. This was the man with the beautifully polished brogues he’d briefly met in London. He had a long, bony outdoors face and eyes made for laughter. There was a persistent hint of Scots in his voice.
Billy admitted he was hungry. A meal, it seemed, would be served in due course. But first, down to business.
The man folded himself into the chair at the end of the table. So far he hadn’t bothered to introduce himself and neither had Ursula offered any clues. Billy, in the spirit of this adventure, decided to think of him as McTavish, partly because he’d once known a stage manager of the same name and partly because he liked the sound of it. McTavish. His master of revels.
Like Ursula, McTavish had a briefcase. He extracted a file and laid it carefully on the table. Billy recognised his name on the front cover, typed on a sticky white label. Below it was a hand-scrawled word he couldn’t read. It carried a question mark.
‘Miss Barton has shared with me the interview she conducted the other day,’ McTavish began, ‘and I must say we’re all gladdened by what she managed to dig out of you.’
Dig out of me? Billy allowed himself a smile. What was he, an allotment? Or the rumour of buried treasure? Or what? And who, exactly, were these people?
McTavish hadn’t finished. He steepled his long finger
s, shot a glance in Ursula’s direction and then addressed himself to Billy.
‘You remember the form you signed? The Official Secrets Act? I’m afraid the same house rules apply on this occasion. What we’re about to share with you is officially secret. More secret than secret. In fact Top Secret.’ There was a glint of amusement in his pale blue eyes and Billy wondered how often he had to make a little speech like this.
‘That’s fine,’ Billy said. ‘It’s the same in the Air Force. Officially nothing much happens. Sometimes I think we get to kill all those people by accident.’
‘Nicely put, Mr Angell. I suspect we’re kindred spirits. It’s all a game, of course. But, then, it has to be.’
He leaned forward across the table. Billy’s eyes settled on a tiny nick on his chin where he must have cut himself shaving.
‘We’re in the spy business, Mr Angell. Or, more precisely, we’re in the counter-spy business. If you want the label on our tin it’s MI5. MI stands for Military Intelligence which some of our brethren regard as a contradiction in terms. It gets more complicated after that but I imagine you get bored as easily as I do so I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that we’re immensely devious, chronically underfunded and largely left to our own devices. Happily, we find ourselves getting quite remarkable results because we have a habit of breaking the rules. Breaking the rules, young man, can be fun. In fact breaking the rules is a dependable source of rude delight.’
Billy had heard of MI5. It was a sister organisation of MI6 and belonged to a sprawling intelligence empire that no one in uniform quite understood. These were the faceless men – and now obviously women – who patrolled the darkness beyond the castle moat and plainly got up to all kinds of mischief. Billy wanted to know more. These people, he told himself, belonged in the theatre. They were larger than life.
‘Are you with us so far, Mr Angell?’ Ursula this time. Billy badly wanted her to use his Christian name but couldn’t think of the best way of asking.
‘I think I understand,’ he said. ‘So how can I help?’
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