Renewed tears. ‘He seduced me.’
I gave a scornful laugh. ‘It takes two to sleep together. On a regular basis. He came to you in the mornings, didn’t he? Warm from my bed?’
She had no answer for this.
‘How did you feel, knowing I was still asleep nearby, suspecting nothing? Did that add to the thrill?’
She affected to look both astonished and saddened at the suggestion.
‘It wasn’t like that. I promise you, Kate.’
‘Oh? What was it like, then?’
‘I couldn’t stop him.’
‘What are you saying? That he raped you? Every morning before breakfast?’
My tone was scathing and she closed her eyes in the face of it. There were no tears now, no attempts to win my pity.
‘It didn’t occur to you to scream, cry out for help? How lucky for Alex!’
She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose. It seemed to me that the bloom was vanished from her youthful prettiness. She was raddled, coarsened by all that had happened.
‘Do you remember the night of my nineteenth birthday, Kate?’
I said nothing.
‘It was our first winter in Wales. I got drunk on the Chablis Alex had unearthed from somewhere. He took me up to bed.’
‘I remember.’
‘That’s when it first happened. I was only half conscious, Kate. He was putting me into bed, helping me off with my clothes. Next thing I knew he was kissing me all over. Telling me how much he’d always wanted me.’ She paused, looking shame-faced. ‘I promise you it’s true! Before I knew it, he’d started. I tried to struggle, to get free, but he told me not to cry out or else you’d come and where would we both be then? He told me you’d never believe I hadn’t egged him on. I didn’t know what to do. I was so confused, so drunk. That’s how it happened.’
She was wringing the handkerchief in her fists, as if she could throttle the very memory. Or was desperately fabricating the whole sorry tale as she went along.
‘And afterwards?’ I said.
‘Afterwards he had a hold over me. He threatened to confess everything to you, to shame me in your eyes. I couldn’t bear that thought. I idolized you, Kate, though I know you’ll find that hard to believe now. That’s why I went along with him.’
I could see she desperately wanted me to believe her, to have some sympathy for her. But I was satiated with lies and tawdry excuses. We always seek to justify our most shameful acts by portraying ourselves as victims of circumstance.
‘So,’ I said acidly, ‘you repeatedly submitted yourself to this torture in order that I wouldn’t think badly of you?’
‘It wasn’t torture. I… I enjoyed it after a while. I’m sorry, Kate, but I have appetites like anyone else. Alex was the first, and he was a…’ She caught herself, and had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘I was flattered by his attentions. It didn’t stop me feeling guilty, but it became… something to look forward to, I suppose. What else was there in Wales?’
It was plausible, as plausible as anything I had heard. Victoria, weak-willed, insecure, miserable in our Welsh exile, discovering her ‘appetites’ with Alex, the arch seducer. Hadn’t he blinded me with his charms throughout our courtship and marriage?
‘I always felt you’d find out in the end,’ Victoria said. ‘I’m amazed we lasted so long. I think Bevan knew. He caught us alone together once, and although we weren’t doing anything, he must have guessed what was going on.’
This also made sense in retrospect. Bevan and Alex’s mutual dislike probably arose from this. Alex must have found it intolerable that the Welshman knew his guilty secret, while Bevan’s sarcasm concerning Victoria would naturally follow. Yet Bevan had never said anything direct to me. I began to wonder whether he had always known more than he revealed, and about more than just the sordid facts of my marriage. Whose side was he really on? It was possible he had also used me throughout, feeding me information only when he chose, when it suited his mysterious purposes. In all our adventures and secret machinations, he had emerged unscathed. Or was he, too, now under arrest, a prisoner in some other cell here? Somehow, it was hard to imagine this.
‘There’s something else I need to know,’ I said to Victoria.
‘I’ll tell you anything, Kate.’
‘When you and Alex were together, alone together, I mean, what did you think about?’
She lowered her head again. ‘At first I thought about you all the time. What I was doing to you. I felt wretched. But as time went on… well, you simply lose sight of those things, I suppose. That’s an awful thing to say, I know. The thing is, it wasn’t really Alex that was important – who he was, I mean. I know that probably sounds strange. It probably sounds frightfully immoral, but it’s true. I didn’t even find him especially attractive.’ She swallowed. ‘Often when we were together I’d close my eyes and imagine I was with someone else entirely, a made-up lover. That made it easier to bear, easier to forget the… shameful side of it.’
‘There must have been some excitement in it for you.’
She looked extremely self-conscious.
‘I suppose it was that someone wanted me so badly he couldn’t resist it, despite the dangers. It didn’t matter who the person was. Do you understand?’
‘The same sort of excitement you got from Huahuantli and the others?’
She gave me a wounded look. ‘Is that so bad, Kate? Does it make me so terrible?’
‘I’m the wrong person to ask.’
‘I was growing up, Kate. I made the most hideous mistakes, and I’ll always regret them. But I’ll always love you, no matter what you think of me.’
‘Don’t talk to me about love.’
There was a waver in my voice, and Victoria sensed an opening. She made to rise, to approach me.
‘Sit down!’ I said, mustering as much calm as I could. ‘I don’t want you near me!’
She sat. There was a long silence.
‘They must have put us together to torment us,’ Victoria said at length. ‘Do you think someone’s listening?’
‘Probably.’
‘I don’t care any more. I couldn’t have gone on much longer.’
‘Alex told me he loved you.’
Again she looked awkward. ‘He was always telling me things like that. It didn’t stop him from having his share of servant girls on the side.’
‘Did you love him? At any stage?’
With apparent reluctance, she shook her head. ‘I suppose that makes it worse. I suppose it makes me more terrible, doesn’t it? I went to him because it was better than being alone.’
‘I understand that. You would never have survived without anyone.’
‘We didn’t have much of a life. They wouldn’t let us travel far, and we were always under escort wherever we went. It was as if we were living in a glasshouse, with everyone watching. They never trusted us.’
‘Did Alex ever talk to you about why he betrayed us?’
‘He always said he knew we had no hope of surviving in Wales. He thought we’d all be killed in the end. So he secretly got in touch with the Aztecs on the radio, and they came to an arrangement.’
‘He told them where we were?’
She nodded. ‘In exchange for our lives, he said. And the disk he had – that was what they wanted. The Aztecs saw they could use it for their own ends, plant disinformation, I think they called it, for their enemies.’
‘Using me?’
Another nod. ‘Until they could launch an attack on Russia. It was horrible, Kate. He had to keep feeding you lies.’
Which confirmed Alex’s own story. He had carefully ensured he was separated from us in the confusion so that he could be whisked away, perhaps at a later date, by the Aztecs. No doubt he had also helped them prepare a body which matched his own as closely as possible so that I would be certain he had been killed. I could see he would have preferred this arrangement, even down to the elaborate lengths of pretending that he had died in battle in Scotland: better a dead hero than a secret traitor still living with a wife he had betrayed.