Restless - Boyd William - Страница 13

'I see.'

He looked at his watch. 'Let's go up here. I've booked lunch. You like oysters, don't you?'

They ate lunch in a decoratively tiled oyster bar attached to a public house. Oysters, she thought, the symbol of our relationship. Perhaps he believes they're a genuine aphrodisiac and I'll like him better? As they sat and talked Eva found herself looking at Romer with as much objectivity as she could muster, trying to imagine what she would have thought of him if they hadn't been thrown together in this curious and alarming way – if Kolia's death had never happened. There was something attractive about him, she supposed: something both urgent and laconically mysterious – he was a kind of spy after all – and there was his rare transforming smile – and his massive self-confidence. She concentrated: he was praising her again, saying how everyone at Lyne was impressed by her dedication, her aptitude.

'But what's it all for?' she said, blurting the question out.

'I'll explain everything once you're finished,' he said. 'You'll come down to London and meet the unit, my team.'

'You have your own unit?'

'Let's say a small subdivision of an annexe to a subsidiary element linked to the main body.'

'And what does your unit do?'

'I wanted to give you these,' he said, not answering, and reached into his breast pocket, removing an envelope that turned out to contain two passports. She opened them: there was her same shadowy-eyed photograph, blurry and stiffly formal, but the names were different: now she was Margery Allerdice and Lily Fitzroy.

'What're these for? I thought I was Eve Dalton.'

He explained. Everyone who worked for him, who was in his unit, was given three identities. It was a perk, a bonus – to be used or not used as the recipient saw fit. Think of them as a couple of extra parachutes, he said, a couple of getaway cars parked near by if you ever felt the need to use them one day. They can be very handy, he said, and it saves a lot of time if you have them already.

Eva put her two new passports in her handbag and for the first time felt a little creep of fear climb up her spine. Following-games in Edinburgh were one thing; clearly whatever Romer's unit did was potentially dangerous. She clipped her handbag shut.

'Are you allowed to tell me more about this unit of yours?'

'Oh, yes. A bit. It's called AAS,' he said. 'Almost an embarrassing acronym, I know, but it stands for Actuarial and Accountancy Services.'

'Very boring.'

'Exactly.'

And she thought, suddenly, that she did like Romer – liked his brand of cleverness, his way of second-guessing everything. He ordered a brandy for himself. Eva wanted nothing more.

'I'll give you another piece of advice,' he said. 'In fact I'll always be giving you advice – tips – from time to time. You should try to remember them.'

She suddenly disliked him again: the self-satisfaction, the amour propre, were sometimes just too much. I am the cleverest man in the world and all I have to deal with are you poor fools.

'Find yourself a safe house. Somewhere. Wherever you happen to be for any length of time, have a safe house, a personal one. Don't tell me, don't tell anyone. Just a place you can be sure of going to, where you can be anonymous, where you can hide, if need be.'

'Romer's rules,' she said. 'Any more?'

'Oh, there are plenty more,' he said, not picking up the irony in her voice, 'but as we're on the subject, I'll tell you the most important rule. Rule number one, never to be forgotten.'

'Which is?'

'Don't trust anyone,' he said, without any portentousness, but with a kind of mundane confidence and certainty, as if he had said 'Today is Friday'. 'Don't trust anyone, ever,' he repeated and took out a cigarette and lit it, thinking, as if he'd managed to surprise himself by his acuity. 'Maybe it's the only rule you need. Maybe all the other rules I'll tell you are just versions of this rule. "The one and only rule". Don't trust anyone – not even the one person you think you can trust most in this world. Always suspect. Always mistrust.' He smiled, not his warm smile. 'It'll stand you in excellent stead.'

'Yes, I'm learning that.'

He drank the rest of his brandy down in a one-er. He drank quite a lot, she'd noticed, in her few encounters with Romer.

'We'd better get you back to Lyne,' he said, calling for the bill.

At the door they shook hands. Eva said she could catch a bus home easily enough. She thought he was looking at her more intently than usual and she remembered that she had her hair down – he's probably never seen me with my hair down, she thought.

'Yes… Eva Delectorskaya,' he said, musingly, as if he had other things on his mind. 'Who would've thought?' He reached out as if to pat her shoulder and then decided against it. 'Everyone's very pleased. Very.' He looked up at the afternoon sky with its great building clouds, grey, laden, threatening. 'War next month,' he said, in the same bland tone, 'or the next. The big European war.' He looked back and smiled at her. 'We shall do our bit,' he said, 'don't worry.'

'In the Actuarial and Accountancy Services.'

'Yes… Ever been to Belgium?' he asked suddenly.

'Yes. I went to Brussels once. Why?'

'I think you might like it. Bye, Eva.' He gave her a half salute, half wave and sauntered away. Eva could hear him whistling. She turned and walked thoughtfully to the bus station.

Later, as she sat in the waiting-room, waiting for the bus to Galashiels, she found herself looking at the other occupants of the small room also waiting for their buses – the men and women, and the few children. She was examining them, evaluating them, assessing them, placing them. And she thought: if only you knew, if only you knew who I was and what I did. Then she caught herself, almost exclaiming with surprise. She realised suddenly that everything had indeed changed, that she was now looking at the world in a different way. It was as if the nervous circuits in her brain had altered, as if she'd been rewired, and she knew that her lunch with Romer had marked both the end of something old and the beginning of something new. She understood now, with almost distressing clarity, that for the spy the world and its people were different than they were for everybody else. With a small tremor of alarm and, she had to admit, with a small tremor of excitement, she realised in that Edinburgh waiting-room that she was looking at the world around her as a spy would. She thought about what Romer had said, about his one and only rule, and she thought: was this the spy's particular, unique fate – to live in a world without trust? She wondered if she would ever be capable of trusting anyone again.

3. No More Naked

I WOKE EARLY, DISTURBED and angry after my familiar dream – the dream where I'm dead and I'm watching Jochen cope with life without me – usually perfectly and completely happily. I started to have this dream after he began to talk and I resent my subconscious mind drawing this deep worry, this sick neurosis, to my attention every now and then. Why am I dreaming of my own death? I never dream of Jochen's death, though sometimes I think about it, rarely, for a second or two before I banish it – shocked – from my mind. I'm almost sure that everyone does this about the people they love – it's a grim corollary of truly loving someone: you find yourself compelled to imagine your world without them and have to contemplate its awfulness and dread for a second or two. A peer through the crack to the emptiness, the big silence beyond. We can't help it – I can't help it, anyway, and I tell myself guiltily that everybody must do it, that it's a very human reaction to the human condition. I hope I'm right.

I slipped out of bed and padded through to his bedroom, to check on him. He was sitting up in bed, colouring in his colouring book, a fritter of pencils and wax crayons around him.