“And is that how Jonty makes you feel? Giddy, like you’ve been on a waltzer? Because he makes me feel a bit sick, too.”
Sally had also climbed to her feet, face flushed, her pale hair curling at her temples. There was a dark patch of sweat on her dress and she gave the hem a grumpy tug.
“Perhaps, Julia, you should think more about who you give your love to. Then you might find real happiness.”
“Maybe.” Julia watched her mildly, then turned to Evelyn and held out her hand. “It was Shelley, wasn’t it, who asked, What is all this sweet work worth, if thou kiss me not?”
Peering up at her, Evelyn was aware of the bruise at her lip where Jonty had tried to kiss her, and she grew afraid once again that Julia had seen them. But when the sun dipped between the trees, flaring at her back and concealing her face, she somehow knew that Julia was smiling.
They began to stroll back. The sun was about to disappear behind the manor, but the air was still weighed down with the afternoon heat. At the tall reeds Julia stopped, admiring the few ducks bobbing about in the middle of the lake.
“Why don’t we swim?”
“But we’ve no costumes,” Sally said. “I could grab something from the house . . .”
“No need for that.”
Julia stripped down to her underwear and ventured into the shallows. Her neck looked very brown above her white shoulders.
“Julia! What if someone sees?”
“No one will see. Come on! Evelyn?”
Evelyn gazed at the lake. It was the color of long-steeped tea. She watched Julia wade out, a few threads of hair coiled about her throat. She eased off her sandals, then pulled off her dress. Her skin felt raw in the last stripes of sun.
Sally stared at her, arms folded. “Well, I’m not going in,” she muttered. “You’re both mad.”
“Suit yourself.”
Evelyn took a few steps into the chilly water, the silt squelching between her toes. She could hear Sally, petulance in her voice, as the water rose to her waist. Evelyn wasn’t a strong swimmer, but she still felt safe. Julia floated nearby on her back, her feet in the shape of a vee. Evelyn dived deep beneath the shiny surface of the lake. It was glorious, like slicing through the dark, and she swam out farther, doing a few lazy strokes toward the impervious ducks. Behind them the manor watched on, its rectangular shadow stretching wide across the lawn.
* * *
Parker drove Evelyn and Sally into Birmingham. By now the weather had cooled down, and heavy rain fell all the way to the station. Evelyn had said her goodbye to Julia in the drawing room, her hair still damp from the lake. In the next few weeks Julia would be traveling up to London, where Hugh had arranged some work for her at the Benevolent Society, and she asked Evelyn to telephone her at Curzon Street. They’d go out for dinner, she promised, or to a show. Sally had stood in the doorway during this exchange, chewing at the end of her plait, sullen as though she had been scolded.
It was a quiet journey to London. The first-class carriage was almost empty, as was the dining car, which they visited after Rugby. Sally ordered the fillet of trout followed by blue cheese, and Evelyn had rib-eye steak then apple-and-rhubarb strudel. The waiter brought a carafe of cabernet franc to the table.
“This trout isn’t too bad,” said Sally, piercing a head of asparagus with her fork. “You can have bad luck on these trains. I remember once on the way to Edinburgh I had the worst soup of my life—Windsor, I think it was.”
Evelyn sipped at her wine as the train lurched from side to side.
“I suppose you’ll be very busy in London,” Sally said. “Too busy to play with me.”
“Awful, this employment business, isn’t it? Next I’ll be joining a union.” But when Sally only stared glumly out the window, Evelyn said, “There’s plenty you could do too, you know. Volunteer, perhaps? Take a class. You could even join Julia at the Benevolent Society. Serving tea and biscuits to the downtrodden could be the making of you.”
But Sally wouldn’t yield. “Oh, it’s all so dreary!” She sighed. “And we know she’s only doing that as a kind of penance. Julia only ever does something if there’s a reward in it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s true! I adore her, you know I do, but you must take her as she is. And she’s a wolf! There’s never enough for her to gobble up.” Sally set down her fork, eyes fixed on her plate. “When we were little girls she would come over to the manor and steal all my things. Toys, books, even food at the table, if you can imagine it . . . It became a great joke to my parents. But I hated it. And the thing was, she didn’t want any of it for herself. She only wanted it because it belonged to someone else.”
Countryside streaked by in a dark blur, the occasional spark of a streetlamp or fireplace through the window of a cottage.
“She seems an intriguing person to me,” Evelyn said. “Someone who has turned her life around.”
Sally snorted. “You’re worse than Daddy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Around her finger.” Sally made a twirling motion. “She’s smarter than she looks, Evelyn. Was a prefect, for a time, at Wycombe Abbey. Bet she didn’t tell you that.”
“Well, no . . .”
Folding her arms, Sally made a face, as if an obscure point had been proved, and Evelyn sat back, trying to reconcile this picture of Julia with the woman she’d just encountered. She knew she should believe Sally, but somehow she couldn’t.
After coffee, they returned to the compartment. An elderly woman had joined them, though she was asleep beside the sliding door. Evelyn edged past her to the maroon-colored plush seat beneath the luggage rack and read her book while Sally dozed in her spot opposite. But as the train neared Euston, Sally woke with a start and straightened, pressing her nose to the window.
“What is it?”
But Sally wouldn’t look at her, and after a few moments Evelyn thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“You won’t forget me, will you?” she said finally, her face pale and closed off as she sat back and toyed with her mantilla comb.
Evelyn set aside her book. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Remember that time at school, when we went to Brighton for the day and visited the Palace Pier? Lucy Kingston-Smith was there, and Cynthia Buckland—oh, how I loathed her.”
Evelyn blinked. “Yes.”
“Well, you probably don’t recall, but when I went to buy tickets for the organ show at the Dome, you all ran away, leaving me on my own in the street . . .”
Sally’s face was caught in such anguish that Evelyn felt something pitch inside her. She did remember, mostly how being included in this excursion had felt like the momentous arrival at some longed-for destination, and then it all being spoiled by Sally’s tears afterward on the long walk back to the school. Sally had never understood why it had been so important for Evelyn to get along with those girls, or what it meant to feel like an outsider. Evelyn leaned forward, taking her friend’s hand.
“Why are you bringing all this up now?”
Sally smiled, a brief gleam against the glass. “I don’t hold any grudges, Evelyn. How could I? I don’t care about what happened. It was fine in the end, wasn’t it? I found you on the pier, eating ice cream. Cynthia was talking to that man with the dog . . . But whenever I think of it, it’s not with any kind of anger or even pain; it’s always with the same surprise I felt all those years ago.”
She sat back, pinch-faced, as Evelyn shook her head. She wondered if all the excitement of the weekend had sent Sally over the edge.
“Surprise at what?”
“At how easily you were persuaded to go along with it all.” She sniffed, her eyes never leaving the window and the rush of houses, high streets, and depots as the train surged deeper into London.
Evelyn leaned into her seat, gently rocked by the movement of the train, uncertain how to reply.
“I say this only because I care about you—” But Sally was dr
owned out by a blast of the horn. The train was arriving.
They sat like that, heads tipped back against their seats, watching one another, almost wary, Sally fixing up a stray clump of blond hair, while her arms, Evelyn saw, had broken out in gooseflesh.
* * *
The platform was crammed from the disembarkation of another commuter train. With no porters about to help with the luggage, they had to force a path through the steam and press of bodies, the shrill whistle ricocheting around the station. Evelyn was nimbler than Sally as they made their way toward the Great Hall, and they became separated on the stairs.
On the street, the night air was cold, almost raw, and a light drizzle had begun to fall, making the bitumen glitter. Evelyn took huge, gulping breaths, her lungs expanding, her chest rising; she was tall among the crowds. As she hailed a taxi, she turned at the sound of her name, having forgotten all about Sally, and it took her a moment to recognize her friend through the rain.
Late September 1939
Four
THE BUS PARKED outside the Victoria and Albert Museum looked like any other Regent double-decker only it had no route name or number on the front panel, nor any advertisements fixed to the bright red flank. Evelyn crossed the road quickly, weaving between the soldiers at the Cromwell Road checkpoint sandbagging the museum, and climbed on board. There were a few other young men and women already seated inside, but they didn’t acknowledge her as she made her way down the aisle and sat on a fold-down seat near the driver’s cabin. Nobody spoke as the bus made its way along Queen’s Gate, snaking around Kensington Gardens before continuing in a north-westerly direction.
Evelyn kept her hands in her coat pockets, every now and then running a fingertip over the sharp edges of the telegram. It had been waiting for her on the hall table when she’d come home last night to Bramham Gardens. With no postmark or return address, the telegram had instructed her to be at the whistle stop across the road from the museum at nine o’clock the next morning, where she was to board the unmarked bus. There was no sign-off or further instruction, other than: Tell no one. Evelyn had read over the message twice before stuffing it inside her blouse. Then she had gone to the front door and poked her head outside, as if a clue might be found in the dark. But only a few cars had trundled by, then the paperboy on an old bicycle doing his evening round; this was a quiet enclave in Earl’s Court, away from the commotion of the train station and the nearby thoroughfare.
Later that night, as she sat at Mrs. Banker’s dining room table, pushing the slab of potted ham and string beans around her plate, half listening to the Newcastle twins’ excited chatter about joining up at the exchange, Evelyn wondered if it had been a prank. It was all too wild, too mysterious, to happen to her; not even the declaration, it seemed, had shaken up her life in any material way. In fact, apart from the soldiers on the street and the new Anderson shelter in the boardinghouse’s back garden, you’d hardly know there was a war on at all. Yet here she was on an unmarked bus hurtling through Shepherd’s Bush.
After another twenty minutes, the driver pulled up at an ornamental iron gate. Evelyn peered through the grimy window toward the cameo emblem on the gatehouse entrance, then at the uniformed guards standing beneath it. It seemed they had stopped outside a fort. A few crows perched in a nearby tree had their eyes trained on the bus as steam from the exhaust gathered below the glass like mist.
“Where are we?”
A tinny voice, male, from near the front.
The driver came out from his booth as he tilted his cap. “Didn’t they tell you?” His smile was toothless. “This is Wormwood Scrubs. The prison.”
That got everyone talking in urgent whispers. Alone at the front of the bus, Evelyn shot another look toward the menacing facade and shivered. Why had she been brought here? There’d been no mention of prisons in the telegram. So it was a prank—but before she could dwell on this she was on her feet with the others, marching down the aisle and out into the bright morning. It was there, on the thin strip of grass beside the road, legs trembling as an officer in green fatigues barked out some instruction, that Evelyn recognized Caroline Menzies, dressed in a smart naval uniform with brass buttons, standing among the soldiers by the gate.
True to his word, Hugh had telephoned Caroline after the engagement party, and the following week Evelyn had received an invitation to the War Office, the enormous neo-Baroque building on Horse Guards Avenue in Whitehall. Caroline was in her early thirties, tall with a scoliosis stoop, wavy auburn hair, and spectacles. “I manage the female staff at the Ministry of Supply,” she explained as they sat in her makeshift office on the second floor and shared a pot of weak tea. Caroline had been fidgety—telephones kept shrieking unanswered outside the door and the noisy clatter of typists’ heels charging up and down the shiny marble floor perforated the balsawood partition wall like gunfire—so Evelyn made her case efficiently, describing her typing expertise (one hundred and fifty words per minute, she boasted) and exaggerating her aptitude for shorthand. She had experience in neither activity, but planned to enroll in a course. But it was her German studies that Caroline seemed most interested in; she even made a note of it in her small leather book. She had promised to keep in touch, but Evelyn hadn’t heard another word—not even after she joined Mrs. Banker’s other lodgers around the wireless that first Sunday morning of the month as Chamberlain made his emergency broadcast.
Now, siphoned off into a separate group, the young men were marched away through the iron gates, leaving the handful of remaining women on the grass verge. They all watched the big doors of the main building creak and slam shut, the air soon growing still once more.
Caroline came over with a clipboard pressed against her chest and gave them a stern smile. “Ladies, do come with me,” she said.
But rather than head through the gatehouse entrance after the men, Caroline guided them down a cobbled lane adjacent to the brick fortress, stopping at a large blue door guarded by another soldier, who waved them inside. It was like entering a frigate, thought Evelyn, shuddering from the slap of metallic cold that greeted them. They pushed on, trailing beneath the open stairways, and passing row after row of dullish cells. On the first floor, the landings rattled with the barrage of men and women leaping up and down those metal stairs, while the scraping of chairs, shouts from officers on other blocks, and the inmates’ muffled replies were all audible amid the horrendous din. They could have been crossing Paddington station at a quarter past five, the shrill, cavernous echoes like the shouts of paperboys, the bang and buckle of cell doors as noisy as an approaching train, and the farther they walked, the more the girls around Evelyn flinched and muttered unhappily.
Finally they reached another set of gates, opening onto a hall, and Caroline asked them to wait while she fetched a supervisor. Evelyn stood with the others in a small circle, exchanging shy smiles. The air smelled rank, like old urine mixed with feces, and a few yards away she saw a low-fitted sink with flies gathering around the plughole. There didn’t seem to be any natural light or fresh air.
“It’s awfully sinister, isn’t it?” remarked a pretty redhead, and they all tittered, though their laughter was cut short by a noise directly above them. An inmate had come careening down the walkway, screaming at the top of his lungs, “You fuckin’ cock!”
Three guards came after him and he was tackled to the floor, where he writhed about for a moment or two, still swearing, until one of the guards drew back a fist and punched him in the stomach, a solid clock of knuckle against flesh. A few girls whimpered, burying their faces in their hands, but Evelyn found herself edging forward, neck craned, fascinated—she rarely saw violence of any kind, and here it was, so close she could almost smell the man’s blood. The scuffle was over in seconds, though most girls still had their eyes clenched shut by the time Caroline returned.
She pointed to Evelyn. “Miss Varley, this way.”
As the girls looked her up and down, Evelyn imagined they were wondering what she ha
d done to be singled out like this, and once they had set off she waited for Caroline to explain. Caroline, however, was silent on their way through a low doorway opening into another corridor; she didn’t mention their meeting at Whitehall, and Evelyn began to wonder if the woman even remembered her.
It was quieter down here, squirreled away from the commotion of the ground floor and its elevated walkways, and they went on for a few more minutes until Caroline stopped outside a cell door.
“Listen, Evelyn,” she said, her voice low and strained as she turned to face her. “I’m sorry for all this cloak-and-dagger stuff—it must all seem a bit . . . I don’t know . . . barmy to you. When we met, I didn’t mean to deceive you. It just makes everything easier if we recruit under the guise of the War Office.” Tugging at the cuffs of her jacket, she offered Evelyn a hopeful smile. “All right?”
Evelyn didn’t reply. They were interrupted by a raised voice inside the cell, the noise coming from a man standing beside a desk, a telephone jammed between his shoulder and ear. When his bloodshot eyes settled on Evelyn he muttered, “I’ll call you back, David,” and slammed down the receiver.
“I’ve brought Miss Varley,” Caroline said, peering around the jamb. Then, to Evelyn, she added, “This is Mr. Chadwick.”
Chadwick stood with his hands on his hips, breathing hard, a pulse beating wildly at the base of his throat. He didn’t look much like a bureaucrat; dressed in a crumpled brown suit and surrounded by acrid ashtrays and half-drunk coffee cups, he could have passed more convincingly as a Soho bookie. His eyes were enormous behind a pair of bifocal glasses.
“Thank you, Caroline.”
He yanked out a desk drawer and rummaged around, finally producing a packet of cigarettes. He lit one and stood there smoking furiously for several moments, then nodded at the chair.
“Take a seat.”
But Evelyn didn’t move, and her mouth was dry when she tried to swallow. This was fear, she realized. Cold, bright fear. Not because she was afraid of what might happen to her in this cell, but because she was alert to the understanding that she had stumbled upon something extraordinary. That, quite possibly, her life was about to change.
An Unlikely Spy Page 7
