‘Something up?’ he asked.
‘I thought your watch had stopped,’ she said twisting her head so that she could look at it, ‘but it hasn’t, see, the second hand’s spinning away. I can see the luminous hand.’
‘So what?’
‘Well, it isn’t ticking. Your wristwatch doesn’t tick,’ she said. ‘That’s very strange.’
‘Oh it does, just very quietly,’ he assured her.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ she insisted. ‘I had it right against my ear and I have very good hearing and it doesn’t tick.’
‘It’s a specialist piece. Very advanced mechanism. Swiss.’
‘Hmm. Seiko. Doesn’t sound very Swiss.’
‘They’re a very small firm. Very advanced. Years ahead of their time. I do sensitive work. I have to make sure I have the best equipment.’
‘Which brings us to the point, actually. What do you do?’ she asked, rolling on to her front, raising her head up and putting her chin on her hands. ‘You are a strange and I must say rather intriguing man. You claim to be a soldier—’
‘Claim? What do you mean, claim?’
‘But you’re also a gold-miner from the Australian wilderness. Yet you’ve not only heard of Karl Kraus but you can name his satirical magazine, which is published only in Vienna and which by the way you could read in German. You hold the most astonishingly enlightened views on women and on sex I have ever heard. And you have such a lovely turn of phrase that some of the things you say should be in a dictionary of quotations. You claim to have studied at Cambridge but didn’t seem to remember that they don’t have female students, let alone female professors. What’s more you are as physically fit as any man I’ve ever met, fitter in fact. Your muscles are like iron, which is incidentally most attractive to embrace, and so far I’ve noted two scars on your person which I think may be bullet scars. You never let those two bags of yours out of your sight and you have a watch that does not tick. Not even the tiniest bit. Who are you, Hugh Stanton, and, honestly, what do you do?’
‘Well … I could tell you,’ he said, remembering an old line from his own century, ‘but I’d have to kill you.’
She smiled.
‘I hope you’re joking. Are you a spy then?’
‘I’m just a stranger on a train, Bernie. We both are.’
‘A stranger on a train,’ she repeated slowly. ‘That does sound romantic.’
‘It is romantic. For me anyway. I can’t think of many things more romantic than bumping into a beautiful girl on the Sarajevo to Zagreb express and then spending a night with her in a moonlit hotel room in Vienna.’
‘Just a night?’
He didn’t answer for a moment. Could he stay? For a little while? Have breakfast on their balcony and then stroll about the city all day and in the evening wine and dine and perhaps even dance. This was Imperial Vienna, after all. And then at the end of the evening return to this very room with Bernadette and …
But he had his mission and he had his secrets. So many secrets. And this woman was very clever and observant and inquisitive.
‘I think perhaps just one night is for the best, don’t you?’ he answered.
‘I suppose, perhaps,’ she said, but very sadly. ‘I think if we made it two I just might fall in love with you and I don’t think I’m very good at love.’
‘Anybody can be good at love. You just have to find the right person.’
‘Did you love your wife a lot?’
‘Yes. I loved her a lot.’
‘I’m sure she deserved it.’
‘She did.’
‘So I just need to find the right person then?’
‘Yes, that’s all.’
‘Not a Hungarian feminist.’
‘Not by the sound of it.’
‘Or a mysterious stranger on a train?’ Her chin was still in her hands and she was looking at him. The moon was behind her, casting her into silhouette, but he could feel her eyes. ‘Best to avoid them, too, you think?’
‘All I know is that I don’t really feel I have anything to offer anybody at the moment. And to be quite frank I rather doubt I ever will.’
‘Emotional baggage?’
‘Yes. Emotional baggage. Rather well-travelled baggage.’
‘What will you do? In the morning, I mean, when I’m tossed aside like a soiled glove and left to skulk out of the hotel alone, forlornly trying to hide my shame?’
‘I have an appointment, in Berlin.’
‘You see! Appointment in Berlin – that sounds exactly like a spy novel.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing very exciting. Not as exciting as chaining yourself to the railings outside Buckingham Palace.’
‘That’s not exciting at all. It’s embarrassing and terrifying and horribly uncomfortable. You’ve no idea the hatred we provoke. People jeer and spit, women too. And the police are horrible. It’s as if they feel threatened. How can a woman chained to a railing be threatening?’
‘You’ll win in the end, you know. One day sex discrimination will actually be illegal.’
‘Sex discrimination? Wonderful phrase. Let’s hope you’re a prophet. After all, women do hold up half the sky … Anyway, I think we should forget the future and concentrate on the present. If this is to be our only night together then I think we should make the most of it.’
And so they made love again and afterwards lay in the dark once more and Bernadette smoked another cigarette and Stanton wished he could share it with her. He didn’t, though. He was having enough trouble keeping the tryst from being a ménage à trois as it was without giving Cassie an excuse to appear by the bedside table and tell him that Tessa had brought another leaflet home from school with a rotting lung on it.
‘I envy you going to Berlin,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go one day. I want to meet Rosa Luxemburg more than anyone in the world. Have you heard of her? I doubt there’s many Englishmen who have but you seem so terribly well informed in general.’
‘I most certainly have heard of her. Marxist economist and extreme irritant to the German establishment,’ Stanton replied. He was about to add, ‘Eventually organized a German revolution and sadly ended up beaten to death in the street by a paramilitary murder squad,’ before remembering that those things wouldn’t happen for years yet. And hopefully now never would.
‘You are amazing,’ Bernadette said with delight. ‘I cannot believe you. How many British soldiers have heard of Rosa Luxemburg? Only one, I bet, in the whole world and I’ve just made love to him!’
She kissed him hard and passionately.
Stanton smiled to himself. He’d always known his history degree would come in handy for something.
‘She’s a wonderful woman, you know,’ Bernadette said thoughtfully. ‘I can’t think of anyone I admire so much. Very clever, very passionate, very brave and very important.’
Then, a little while after that, he fell asleep.
The first time in so very long that he had fallen asleep with a woman’s heart beating nearby, and as he drifted into dreams he was astonished to realize that he was happy. Happy in that moment. Happy lying naked with Bernadette Burdette.
27
WHEN HE WOKE up, perhaps an hour later, Bernadette wasn’t in bed any more.
She had put her slip back on and was at the table in the sitting-room part of the room.
Where the porter had put Stanton’s bags.
For a moment, as his consciousness surfaced, Stanton thought it was Cassie. He’d seen her sitting just that way so often, in the darkness, in her nightie. When she’d had some pressing work or study to do and had crept out of bed in the night to do it, and he’d awoken and seen her at the table across the room, her face a kind of monochrome grey silver, illuminated by the light from her computer.