by Tessa Lunney
I looked out the window at the soft rain, the streets black and silver, pedestrians tearing wet leaves underfoot as they hurried. On the back of the photos was Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark.” The memory returned: Fox had collected me in a car after a six-hour pass—in 1917? 1918?—and we stopped at an abandoned orchard to gather apples. He had recited “Ode to a Skylark” over and over, snippets and lines, the sun warm on my blouse as I held fruit in my skirt, his tie undone and he smiled: that memory of his one true smile. The lines on the back of the photographs sounded through my mind in his quicksilver voice, lingered with the scent of overripe apples and uncut grass, so I couldn’t properly remember more Shelley. Fox didn’t much like Shelley and Byron but I didn’t know exactly why. I had assumed that they were too sexy and radical for him. This poem was a departure.
I ordered more coffee and a Florentine to go with it. This departure had to be the first clue. If it was Shelley on the back of the photographs, then it was probably Shelley in the mission. Shelley was a lord who was also a political radical, an atheist, abolitionist, anarchist, and advocator of free love. He had drowned in Italy a hundred years ago but my aunt still frowned on his poetry as risqué. I scribbled ideas down in my notebook—radical politics, Italy, aristocrats, love triangles, Frankenstein, rebellion and exile—could the poet’s life have some bearing on the mission he had assigned me?
I took a big bite of the Florentine but let it sit in my mouth as the caramel dissolved and the dark chocolate melted, until the flakes of almond sat alone on my tongue. I wrote down all the glaringly obvious things Fox had written in the mission too. Muddy trench, gas-blind, amputated, shelled fields, realpolitik, primed dud, Versailles—all of these clearly referred to the war. Did they also, in some way, refer to the violence in the original Shelley poem? There were other things that seemed to be mission-related, but I wasn’t sure—black-clad, religion in a brown shirt, free corps. There was nothing particular about these things, except they reminded me of my chat with Theo about Fascists in his apartment and around Europe. The Germans were nicknamed Brownshirts but called themselves the Freikorps, or “free corps.” I didn’t know the uniform of the Italian Fascists, or if the British or French had their own fascist groups.
This mission had to have something to do with the war, possibly with the Brownshirts, and as princes was mentioned twice then possibly something to do with them. But they didn’t point to the core of my mission: what I was supposed to do and when. The letter read like a warning, not a set of instructions. Presumably, when I called Fox, I would get the key that would lead to instructions—because I had to call him, no matter how much I worked out by myself. An important part of Fox’s games was that only he knew the rules. All his agents had to check with him, constantly, that we were doing what he intended. I loved the puzzle but I hated the game; I loved the risk but the greatest danger was always Fox himself. If working for him as his agent became a permanent job—and, with Tom’s future at stake, that seemed likely—could I protect myself from Fox? I hadn’t been able to during the war. I was stronger now, I was no longer a naïve girl, but was I strong enough? The only proper answer was that I had to be. If I wasn’t strong enough already, I had to become strong enough to resist him.
I looked over the photographs again. They were as much provocation as payment. They were ambiguous and so invited me to be suspicious of Tom. If that’s what Fox hoped, then he hoped in vain. I wasn’t suspicious of Tom, but of Fox—who took these photos? Who developed them? How did Fox come by them? It seemed incredible that Fox could stumble upon them by chance. Much more likely was that he knew they were being taken, or even that he had organized for them to be taken. But why? I had no idea about that, nor for the poetic lines on the photos’ backs. The backs read almost like a plea for love, that “harmonious madness,” which was impossible. I tucked the photos back into the envelope with the letter. I would show them to Tom on Friday and see if they triggered any memories.
I buttoned up my coat and paid. I had to work out more of the mission before I spoke to Fox, so my next stop was to find the Shelley poem that the mission had bastardized. I needed to go to an English-language bookshop for that and I could think of no better place than Sylvia’s.
7
“Polyphème”
Shakespeare and Company was only a short walk across the park and around the corner. Sylvia Beach had made a name for herself as the publisher of Ulysses, the epic by James Joyce that was too scandalous to publish anywhere but Paris. It was apparently as thick as a brick and just as impenetrable. Unless you were a sophisticated reader, of course, and then it was the key to all literature and Joyce was a genius. Sylvia also ran a lending library, sold second-hand books as well as new ones, stood as a postbox for American writers recently moved to Paris, and was generally big sister to all the Atlantic flotsam who washed up looking for bohemia. I admired her for publishing Ulysses but I loved her for the rest. I hadn’t been to her new shop yet, I was excited to see it, to see who was there, and to see Sylvia again.
Rue de l’Odeon was peppered with people, speaking English with French inflections and French in all sorts of American accents, as they gathered outside Shakespeare and Company and Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop opposite. The creamy façade of Sylvia’s shop invited me on and the yellow light invited me in. Sylvia looked up when I opened the door.
“Kiki! When did you get home?” Sylvia’s smile extended across the counter, as warm as an embrace. Home: the word made me smile in return.
“Only a few days ago! Hello,” I held out my hand to the woman seated next to Sylvia, “I’m Kiki Button.”
“Nancy—Cunard.” Her vowels were as round as a sea-tumbled stone. “I’ve come for another copy.” She indicated the blue brick of Ulysses that sat heavily in her lap.
“Nancy’s a poet,” said Sylvia, “and runs with ‘the Crowd.’ ”
“Do I?” Nancy looked amused.
“Of course you do. Bob, Djuna, Mina, Bryher, Ken Sato…”
“Oh, them! Yes. Better add Michael to that motley crew, he’s coming over soon. And Tristan, as he’s fallen out with Breton again…”
“I heard.”
“They’ll make it up, they always do. They have to, no one else understands these Dadaists.” Nancy turned her enormous blue-green eyes to me. “Are you an artist?”
“A gossip columnist.”
“Oh, handmaiden to the devil!”
“Kiki’s a reader.” Sylvia smiled. “Have you come for a read or a chat, dear Miss Button?”
“You come for one and stay for the other, isn’t that how it works, Kiki?”
Nancy’s voice was fluting. She was slender, dressed in black chiffon, and bangles jangled on her wrists. Physically, she seemed like some kind of nymph or fairy, powerfully magical, but there was nothing ethereal about her direct gaze or her sharp words. I’d been fluttering about in my own head, dreaming of poets and princes, and Nancy yanked me into the present.
The walls held shelves to just above head height, after which they were covered with portraits of writers, many of whom had handed Sylvia their photo once she’d put their books in her window. Sylvia stocked so much poetry, both new and in the library; none of the dross that I was forced to read at school, but Romantics, radical Victorians, and Modernists. I had borrowed T. S. Eliot last year and found Gerard Manly Hopkins here too.
I listened to them gossiping about poets as I scanned the shelves for Shelley; “How is dear Tom? When is The Criterion out? I’ve heard such amazing things about his new poem from Ezra.” Sylvia must be talking about T. S. Eliot and… Ezra Pound? “I’ve seen some of the draft—it’s called ‘The Waste Land.’ You will be astounded. But, then, Vivienne’s worse than before.” Was Nancy talking about Mrs. Eliot? I was out of my depth.
“How is Michael doing, Nancy?”
“Oh, you know, his work is successful and titillating and boring.” She waved her hand in a gesture that signalled “and all the rest.” “He’s st
ill a lion in the sack, though, and after holding my hand all through my recovery, I’m not complaining.”
“Is Ulysses for him?”
“Good God, no. It’s for George. Or perhaps one of the men George is trying to impress. He asked me to get him a copy.”
“You won’t be able to smuggle that in your trousers, like Hemingway’s friend did.”
“Ha! No. My hat box has a false bottom. I may as well take advantage of my womanly wiles while I can. Wouldn’t you say so, Kiki?” She had a wicked smile. “Come over, don’t pretend you’re not listening.”
I cleared my throat to hide my blush. “I prefer corsets myself,” I said, “I used my school girdle to smuggle rum out of Sydney. Even if the customs inspectors deign to handle the underwear, they expect a corset to be heavy and don’t bother to look too closely.”
“Bravo, I’ll have to try that.” Nancy looked me up and down.
“Especially as we don’t wear the contraptions nowadays.”
“I have to admit, I still do,” said Sylvia. “They help to support my back with lifting all these books. Adrienne too.”
“She lifts her own boxes, does she?” Nancy’s eyebrows shot up. “I thought one of her poets would do that for her.”
Sylvia laughed. “They’re even worse! No, we do everything, of course.”
“Of course! I’ll drink to that. I better go. I promised to meet Tristan this morning to help his sort out this thing with Breton. There’s some friend of Emerald’s who is hanging around too. I don’t want to see him but he’ll turn up at the Rotonde regardless.” Once again Nancy turned abruptly to me. “Do you read new work?”
“Her library card says so.” Sylvia nodded at me.
“Good. Then you’ll fit in with all the misfits who frequent this freak show. If you see me in the Rotonde, Kiki, don’t be a stranger. I’ll see you soon, Sylvia.” She kissed Sylvia on both cheeks and glided out of the shop.
“Nancy’s a whirlwind but somehow, when the dust settles, you want the chaos back. Have you come for more poetry, Kiki?”
“Shelley.”
“Percy or Mary?”
“Percy this time. I’m not familiar with him.”
“He’s a bit outré, that’s why. But I do have one… here.…” Sylvia walked briskly from behind the desk to the bottom corner of one of the shelves. Nestled among books of history and political philosophy was a compendium of Shelley. She wiped off some nonexistent dust.
“This volume contains examples of his other writings, so some bright spark decided to recategorize him. But it has all his major poems.” She cocked her head as she handed the book over. “Why do you like the British Romantics so much? You borrow them as often as you buy detective novels or read our little reviews.”
She was a full head shorter than me and looked at me how I hoped a sister would have looked at me, how my mother never looked at me. I wanted to unburden myself, to tell her everything about Fox and Tom, my mother and the missing diary, Bertie and the war. A bicycle tooted outside and someone waved hello to Sylvia. In the few moments it took for Sylvia to look, wave, and then return her attention to me, I had pulled myself together. I had to lie; that was a spy’s core work, after all, to distract, deflect, and dissemble. I could satisfy my desire to talk a little bit though; after all, the best lies are partly truth.
“I was a nurse in the war and my supervising surgeon recited them over the operating table, quoted them as he smoked his postoperative cigarette in the rain, used them to talk to the men who all thought he’d lost the plot. Just snatches, snippets, flying bits of verse. They stuck in my mind. I’ve made it my mission to slowly hunt down the full poems to find where all these snippets belong.”
“More post-war reconstruction.”
“Speaking of, do you recognize the line ‘an old, mad, blind, despised—’ ”
“ ‘–and dying king’? Yes, it’s ‘England in 1819.’ That was a big favorite a couple of years ago, on its centenary. It should be in there. Hello!” She moved off to greet her next customer, but not without giving my arm a little squeeze as she went by. So much was in that squeeze—that she knew I felt more than I said, that she was here to listen but not to pry.
Sylvia was right too, as the book fell open to the poem’s grimy page.
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th’ untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.
This was the poem Fox referenced. The whole poem was my mission, almost exactly as written, with just a few words substituted. The politics of England in 1819, and England in 1922, had to speak to each other; the use of the whole poem almost demanded it. I flicked through and there were other grimy pages of poems well-loved and over-read, “To a Skylark,” “Masque of Anarchy,” “Mutability.” I would need to take this home to study it. Despite the telegram with “Darkling I listen,” it appeared that Shelley, not Keats, would guide this mission.
“I’ll take this, Sylvia. And a copy of… the new Eliot poem?”
“Alas! It’s not yet published.”
“Keep a copy aside for me when it is.” I watched her enter my name in her library index. “Tell me, was it only the occasion of the centenary that made the poem popular?”
“Poem? Oh, ‘England in 1819’? I’d only just opened the shop then. I opened a year after the Armistice, almost to the day. I had quite a few veterans come in, English mainly, who wanted to read it. I think they felt its fury spoke to them. Shelley’s rage at the massacre at Peterloo translated across the last century to tell them something about the war.”
“As all good literature does. Peterloo, of course…” The name was a play on the Battle of Waterloo. I dredged up my schoolgirl history. It was a riot… of soldiers? Put down by soldiers? According to the poem, it was exemplary government corruption. No wonder it appealed to bitter survivors of our war.
“I’ll come back for the Eliot.” I got as far as the door when Sylvia called my name.
“I almost forgot! Someone paid for this copy of Ulysses for you, Kiki.”
“Who?”
“I was hoping you might tell me! I received a check in the post from a John Smith—does such a man even exist?—with a postmark from Westminster, London. Is Mr. Smith a literary lover?”
It could only be Fox. “He was never my lover.”
“Well, he has good taste.”
“I think he means this to be a joke. But the joke will be on him when I read it and love it.”
“Oh, you will, I promise you.” Sylvia beamed.
All I could hope for was that Joyce wasn’t as cryptic as Fox.
I couldn’t work on the letter without more clues. I couldn’t get more clues until I spoke to Fox and I couldn’t speak to Fox until he provided his contact details. Were they in Ulysses? I almost dropped the book on the cobblestones; it would be too cruel, and just like Fox, to hide his contact details somewhere in 900 pages of dense text. All these games… how urgent was the mission, really, if he didn’t tell me straightaway? The wind picked up the rain remnants from the road and flung them at my ankles. It would also be too cruel, and just like him, to let me waste time unraveling clues, so I would then have to rush to complete the mission. I needed more cigarettes, and a proper drink, and maybe even some food. I wanted warmth and comfort.
No wonder I spent so much time in cafés. They were the only places where I could give the orders.
8
“runnin’ wild”
It was a jolt to remember that my life was more than spying. More letters had arrived while I was out, all from Bertie, all reminding me that I had other work to do. Among the cards of invitation to various parties around Paris, the letters of introduction to people to confirm my status as a writer for the Star, was Bertie’s delightful, pointed, personal note.
Have you settled in, dearest Kiki? Have you stuffed yourself with oysters and champagne at the Rotonde? Have you smoked out your old lovers? Have you left your shoes in one parlor and your stockings in another? Because Our Editor, Sir Huffandpuff Himself, wants a column of yours sooner than yesterday. Here are some more invitations to keep you going—diplomatic or American, mostly, but they’ll do. In the meantime, send your anxious readers a Hello to let them know you’re back. Send me a Hello.
And he was right, of course, in what he didn’t say: that Paris and Fox, Theo and champagne, had made me forget what paid for my independence. The necessity of a weekly gossip column on the bright lights of Parisian society had barely registered, but without it, I was dependent either on my father or on Fox; never again.
I could do better than dull diplomatic drinks though. I was booked to dine with scandal.
* * *
Maxim’s was fast becoming the most famous restaurant in Paris. It was full, even on a Thursday afternoon. Groups of beautiful women sat at tables in the window. They reminded me of the working girls that sat in the large front windows of houses by the trainline, goods on display as the trains rolled into Paris, except here their clothes were silk and noticeably free of holes. The interior was dark enough that, once inside, you couldn’t tell if it was morning or midnight. What you could see were the lush Art Nouveau decorations in red, gold, green, and black. Nude women lounged in murals above the diners. Flowers curled in the stained-glass windows, around mirrors, and their bell-shaped blossoms became lampshades. Each door was round and framed with stylized leaves. It was heavenly, if you liked that sort of thing. The people here clearly did, as did the couple who had just entered and looked around with delight. Their skin was luminous and their dark hair shone, their clothes were perfectly tailored and they gave their coats to the staff without even looking; they had to be Prince Felix Yusupov and Princess Irène, Theo’s sister and brother-in-law.
