'I spoke to Karl-Heinz today.'
He went very still. 'Did I tell you I cut him out of my life for ever?'
'No, you didn't, actually.'
'Ein vollkommenes Arschloch.'
He said this with unusual passion, not his usual lazy mid-Atlantic drawl. A complete fucking bastard, was the closest demotic equivalent I could come up with. I looked at Ludger sitting there thinking about Karl-Heinz and joined him in his silent rant of hate against his older brother. He twiddled a lock of his long hair between his fingers and looked for a moment as if he might suddenly cry bitter tears. I decided he could stay on a day or two more. I warmed the pot, put in the tea-leaves and added the boiling water.
'Did you do porno for long?' I asked, recalling his unselfconscious nude stroll through the flat.
'No. I quit. I began to have very serious problems.'
'What? With the idea of pornography? Ideologically, you mean?'
'No, no. Porno was great. I loved it – I love porno. No, I began to have serious problems with mein Schwartz.' He pointed at his groin.
'Oh… Right.'
He grinned his old sly grin. 'He wouldn't do what I was telling him to do, you know?…' He frowned. 'Do you say "tail" in English?'
'No. Not normally. We say "prick" or "cock". Or "dick".'
'Oh, right. But nobody is saying "tail"? Like a slang?'
'No. We don't say it.'
'Schwartz - "tail": I think to say "my tail" is better than to say "my dick".'
I wasn't keen to pursue this conversation – talking dirty with Ludger – any further. The tea was brewed so I poured him a cup. 'But hey, Ludger,' I said cheerfully, 'keep saying "tail" and maybe it'll catch on. I'm going to have a bath. See you in the morning.'
I took my pot of tea, my milk bottle and my mug into the bathroom, set them all carefully on the edge of the bath and turned on the taps. To lie in a hot bath drinking hot tea is the only sure way of calming myself when my brain is on the rampage.
I locked the door, took my clothes off and lay in my warm bath and sipped my tea, banishing all thoughts and images of Karl-Heinz and our years together from my mind. I thought about my mother, instead, and the Prenslo Incident, and what she had seen and done that afternoon on the Dutch-German frontier in 1939. It seemed impossible somehow – I still couldn't fit my mother into Eva Delectorskaya, nor the other way round… Life was very strange, I told myself, you can never be sure of anything. You think everything is normal and straightforward, set and fixed – and then suddenly it's all flung upside-down. I turned to refill my mug and knocked the teapot over, badly scalding my neck and left shoulder. My scream woke up Jochen and had Ludger beating on the door.
London, 1940
IT WASN'T UNTIL AUGUST that Eva Delectorskaya was summoned, finally, to give her account of the Prenslo Incident. She travelled into work as usual, leaving her lodgings in Bays-water and catching a bus that took her into Fleet Street. She sat on the top deck, smoked her first cigarette of the day and looked out at the sunny expanse of Hyde Park, thinking how pretty the silvery barrage balloons looked, plumply flying in the pale blue sky, and wondering idly if the barrage balloons should be left there when this war ended, if it ever did. Better than any obelisk or martial statue, she thought, imagining a child in 1948 or 1965 asking their parent, 'Mummy, what were those big balloons for?…' Romer said this war would last at least ten years unless the Americans joined in. Though, she had to admit, he had made this pronouncement in a mood of some bitterness and shock in Ostend in May as they had watched the German blitzkrieg race through Holland, Belgium and France. Ten years… Ten years – 1950. In 1950, she thought, Kolia will have been dead for eleven years. The blunt truth distressed her: she thought about him all the time, not every day, now, but still many times a week. Would she still be thinking of him as much in 1950, she wondered? Yes, she told herself with some defiance, yes I will.
She opened her newspaper as the bus approached Marble Arch. Twenty-two enemy aircraft downed yesterday; Winston Churchill visits munition workers; new bombers can reach Berlin and beyond. She wondered if this last item was one of AAS's plants – it bore all the hallmarks and she was becoming something of an expert at recognising them. The story had a sound and plausible factual base but was also gifted with a teasing vagueness and a covert unprovability. 'An air ministry spokesman refused to deny that such a capability would soon be available to the RAF…' All the signs were there.
She stepped off her bus as it paused at traffic lights in Fleet Street and turned up Fetter Lane, making for the unremarkable building that housed Accountancy and Actuarial Services Ltd. She pressed the buzzer on the fourth-floor landing and was admitted into a shabby ante-room.
'Morning, darling,' Deirdre said, one hand holding out a pile of newspaper clippings while with the other she rummaged in a drawer of her desk.
'Morning,' Eva said, taking the clippings from her. Deirdre was a chain-smoking gaunt woman in her sixties who was effectively the administration of AAS – source of all equipment and material, provider of tickets and passes, medicaments and key information: who was available, who wasn't, who was sick and who was 'away travelling', and, most importantly, the provider and denier of access to Romer himself. Morris Devereux joked that Deirdre was in fact Romer's mother. She had a harsh monotone voice that rather undercut the effect of the constant, warm endearments she employed when she addressed people. She pressed the buzzer that allowed Eva to go through the interior door to the dim passageway off which the team's offices were situated.
Sylvia was in, she saw; Blytheswood and Morris Devereux were in, too. Angus Woolf was working at Reuters and Romer himself had a new executive position with the Daily Express but maintained a seldom-occupied office a floor above – reached by a cramped twisting stairway – that had a distant view of Holborn Viaduct. From their various rooms they tried to run the Agence in Ostend in absentia through encrypted telegrams sent to a stay-behind Belgian agent known as 'Guy'. Also certain words placed in AAS stories in foreign newspapers were meant to alert him and be circulated to their customers in occupied Belgium, such as they had. It was not at all clear that the system was working; indeed, Eva thought, they maintained a pretence of effort and confident news-gathering and dispatch that was impressive, but she knew everyone thought, individually, that what they were doing was at best insignificant, at worst, useless. Morale was becoming lower, daily, and nowhere better exemplified that in their boss's mood: Romer was visibly tense, snappy, often taciturn and brooding. It was only a matter of time, they whispered to each other, before AAS Ltd was shut down and they were all re-assigned.
Eva hung her hat and her gasmask on the back of the door, sat at her desk and looked out through the grimy window at the nondescript roofscape in front of her. Buddleia sprouted from a gutter-head across the central courtyard and three miserable-looking pigeons groomed themselves on a row of chimney pots. She spread her cuttings on her desk. Something from an Italian newspaper (her story about rumours of Marshal Pétain's failing health); a reference to low morale amongst Luftwaffe pilots in a Canadian magazine (Romer had scrawled 'More' on this), and teleprints from two American news agencies about a German spy ring being broken in South Africa.
Blytheswood knocked on her door and asked her if she'd like a cup of tea. He was a tall, fair and burly man in his thirties, with two red patches on each cheek as if permanent incipient blushes resided there, ready to flush his entire face. He was a shy man and Eva liked him: he had always been kind to her. He ran AAS's transmitters: a kind of genius, Romer claimed: he could do anything with radios and wirelesses, transmit messages across continents with nothing more than a car battery and a knitting needle.