He gave it to Harriet, saying: ‘I haven’t time to deal with this. Go and see Dobson.’
‘But supposing we have to go?’ she protested.
He said, as he had said last time: ‘We won’t have to go,’ but Harriet did not find Dobson so reassuring.
When she entered his office with the paper, he sighed and said: ‘We’re getting a lot of this bumf at the moment.’ He rubbed a hand over his baby-soft tufts of hair and gave a laugh that deprecated his own weariness. ‘I wonder,’ he said, as though the matter were not of much importance one way or the other, ‘do you really want to stay? The situation is tricky, you know. There’s a pretty steady German infiltration here. Whether you realise it or not, they’re taking this country over. I very much doubt whether the English Department will be permitted to reopen when the autumn term begins.’
Harriet said: ‘We’re not supposed to leave without orders from London.’
‘That’s theoretical, of course. But if Guy’s work here is finished …’
‘He doesn’t see it as finished. At the moment he’s running the summer school and he’s extremely busy.’
‘Oh, well!’ Dobson gave his head a final rub and said: ‘I’ll see what I can do. But don’t be too hopeful.’
She returned to the flat to await a call from him, not hopeful, indeed prepared for the possibility that they would be given no choice but to go. Whether she liked it or not, their going would cut through a tangle of anxieties.
Wandering round the room, examining their possessions, wondering what to take and what to leave, she looked into the writing-desk drawers and came upon the envelope marked ‘Top Secret’. As she took it up, the flap fell open and she saw there was nothing inside. Some moments passed before she could remember what it had contained.
The previous winter a certain Commander Sheppy – described by David as ‘a cloak and dagger man’ – had come to Bucharest to organise the young men of the British colony into a sabotage group. His intention had ended abruptly with his arrest and deportation. All that had remained of ‘Sheppy’s Striking Force’ was a plan, handed out to the men, a copy of which had been inside this envelope; a section through an oil well, intended to show the inexperienced saboteur where to place a detonator. Both Guy and Harriet had forgotten its existence. Now, here was the envelope unsealed and empty. The plan had disappeared.
This fact bewildered her, then it began to work on her imagination and she was chilled.
As soon as Guy came in to luncheon, she said: ‘Someone has stolen the oil-well plan Sheppy gave you.’
She remembered as she spoke that she was supposed not to know what had been inside the envelope, but Guy had forgotten that. He said merely: ‘But who would take it?’
‘Perhaps Yakimov.’
‘That’s unlikely.’
‘Who then? Surely not Despina or Sasha. It means someone has been in while we were out. The landlord perhaps. Despina says he’s a member of the Iron Guard. And probably has a key.’ The realisation brought down on her a painful sense of doom and Guy, seeing her distraught, changed his attitude and said: ‘It could have been Yakimov …’
‘Then you had better speak to him.’
‘Oh, no, that would give the whole thing false importance. Better say nothing, but you could try and be nicer to him. Let him see we trust him.’
She said, exasperated in anxiety: ‘You think that will make a difference? If Yakimov isn’t grateful now, he never will be. In fact, he’s resentful because you take no notice of him. Why didn’t you leave him to fend for himself? You interfere in people’s lives. You give them a false idea of themselves, an illusion of achievement. If you make someone drunk, he’s likely to blame you when he wakes up with a hangover. Why do you do it?’
Buffeted by this attack, he remonstrated: ‘For goodness’ sake! The plan might have been taken months ago. We can’t tell who took it – but whoever it was, if he’d wanted to make trouble we’d have heard by now.’
She thought this equivocal comfort.
After Guy had gone to the University, she threw herself on to the bed, oppressed by the sense of events becoming too much for her. A few days earlier Despina, treating the matter as a joke, had described Yakimov’s discovery of Sasha in the kitchen. ‘But I was ready for him,’ she said. She had told him the boy was her nephew and he had believed it. ‘The imbecile!’ she cried, tears of laughter in her eyes, but Harriet could not believe that Yakimov had been so easily deceived. She had hoped he would mention the incident himself, so she could tell him that Sasha was one of Guy’s students; but he did not mention it, and his silence disturbed her more than any questioning could have done.
Suddenly, with the thought of Sasha in her mind, she sat upright, shocked by the realisation that when they went they would have to leave him behind. What would become of him? Where could he go?
Thinking of Sasha’s trust in them, his dependent innocence and need, she was stricken by her own affection for the boy. She could no more abandon him than she could abandon a child or a kitten. But he was not a child or a kitten to be carried to safety: he was a grown man who could not leave the country without a passport, exit visa and transit visas, and he was a man for whom every frontier official would be on the watch.
It had been in her mind that their going, if they had to go, would cut through a tangle of anxieties. Now all these anxieties were forgotten in her concern for Sasha.
She put her feet to the ground in an impulse to rush up to him, to insist that he think of someone, anyone, whom they could approach on his behalf, but stopped herself. They had had this out. There was no one, so what point in alarming the poor boy?
She was still sitting on the bed edge, brooding on this problem, when the telephone rang. Dobson said: ‘It’s all right. I’ve been through to the prefectura and told them H.E. requires Guy’s presence here. The order’s rescinded.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ she said with a fervour that must have surprised him.
‘By the way,’ he said before he rang off, ‘you’re wanted at the Consulate. Just a formality. No particular hurry. Drop in when you get a chance.’
The next afternoon, Guy having no classes, they went to the Consulate.
The Vice-consul, Tavares, shouted: ‘Come in, come in, come in.’ Elaborately casual and cheerful, he said: ‘It’s like this …’ He opened a drawer and pulled out some roneoed sheets, which he threw down in front of Guy and Harriet. ‘Every British subject required to fill one in. Never know these days, do you? So, just for the records, we want a few details: religion, next-of-kin, whom to notify in the event of death (as it were!), where to send kit, etcetera, etcetera. You understand!’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet.
When the forms were filled, Tavares noticed that Guy had failed to disclose his religion. Guy said he had no religion. Tavares laughed off this revelation: ‘What were you baptised?’ he asked.
‘I wasn’t baptised.’
Tavares flicked a finger to show that nothing could surprise him. ‘Must put something,’ he said. ‘Y’wouldn’t want to be planted without ceremony. Why not put “Baptist”? Baptists don’t get baptised.’
In the end, Guy put in ‘Congregational’, having been told that old soldiers who claimed this denomination were able to avoid church parades.
Walking home, Harriet said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d never been baptised?’
‘I didn’t think of it. But you knew I was a rationalist.’