Restless - Boyd William - Страница 26

'Yes.'

'Thank you very much.'

They asked her a few more questions, for form's sake, about the behaviour of the two British agents, but it was obvious that they had the information they needed. Then she was asked to wait outside.

She sat down in the ante-room and accepted the offer of a cup of tea. It was brought and when she took it from the young man she was pleased to note her hands were hardly shaking at all. She drank it and then, after about twenty minutes, Romer appeared. He was happy, she saw at once – everything about his bearing, his knowing look, his absolute refusal to smile, confirmed his deep and enormous good mood.

They walked out of the Savoy together and stood on the Strand, the traffic buzzing by them.

'Take the rest of the day off,' he said. 'You deserve it.'

'Do I? What've I done?'

'I know – what about supper this evening? There's a place in Soho – Don Luigi's – Frith Street. I'll see you there at eight.'

'I'm busy this evening, I'm afraid.'

'Nonsense. We're celebrating. See you at eight. Taxi!'

He ran off to claim his hailed taxi. Eva thought: Don Luigi's, Frith Street, eight o'clock. What was going on here?

'Hello Miss Fitzroy. Long time no see.'

Mrs Dangerfield stepped back from the front door to let Eva in. She was a plump blonde woman who wore thick and farinaceous make-up, almost as if she were about to go on stage.

'Just passing through, Mrs Dangerfield. Come to pick up some things.'

'I've got some post for you here.' She took a small bundle of letters from the hall table. 'Everything's nice and ready. Do you want me to make up the bed?'

'No, no, just here for a couple of hours. Then back up north.'

'Better off out of London, dear, I tell you.' Mrs Dangerfield listed London's wartime disadvantages as she led Eva up to her attic bedroom in number 312 Winchester Street, Battersea.

Eva closed the door behind her and turned the key in the lock. She looked round her room, reacquainting herself with it – she hadn't been here for five weeks or so. She checked her snares: sure enough Mrs Dangerfield had had a good poke around the desk and the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. She sat down on the single bed and laid out her half-dozen letters on the quilt, opening them one at a time. She threw three into the wastepaper basket and filed the rest in her desk drawer. All of them had been sent by herself. She propped the postcard on the mantelpiece above the gas fire; it was from King's Lynn – she had travelled there the previous weekend precisely to send this card. She turned it over and read it again:

Dearest Lily,

Hope all's well in rainy old Perthshire. We popped up to the coast for a couple of days. Young Tom Dawlish got married last Wednesday. Back to Norwich Monday evening.

Love from Mum and Dad

She placed the card back on the mantelpiece, thinking suddenly of her own father and his flight from Paris. The latest news she had was that he was in Bordeaux – somehow Irene had managed to post a letter to her in London. 'In reasonable health in these unreasonable times,' she had written.

As she sat there thinking, she realised she was smiling to herself – a baffled smile – contemplating the bizarre reality of her situation, sitting in her safe house in Battersea, passing herself off as Lily Fitzroy. What would her father think of this work she was doing for the 'British government'? What would Kolia have thought?…

Mrs Dangerfield knew only that Lily Fitzroy was 'in signals', worked for the War Office and had to travel a lot, spending more and more time in Scotland and northern England. She was paid three months in advance and was perfectly happy with the arrangement. In her four months in London Eva had slept only six times at Winchester Road.

She pulled back the corner of the carpet on the floor and, taking a small screwdriver from her bag, prised up the loose nails on a short section of floorboard. Beneath the floor, wrapped in oilcloth, was a small bundle containing her Lily Fitzroy passport, a quarter bottle of whisky and three five-pound notes. She added another five-pound note and closed everything up again. Then she lay on her bed and snoozed for an hour, dreaming that Kolia came into the room and laid his hand on her shoulder. It made her wake with a jolt and she saw that a wand of afternoon sun had squeezed through the curtains and warmed her neck. She looked in the wardrobe, picked out a couple of dresses and folded them into a paper carrier bag she had brought with her.

At the door she paused, wondering about the wisdom or even the necessity of this 'safe' house. This was her training; this was how she had been taught to set up and maintain a safe house without raising suspicion. The secret safe house – one of Romer's rules. She gave a wry smile and unlocked the door: Romer's rules – more and more her life was being governed by these particular regulations. She switched out the light and stepped on to the landing – perhaps she'd learn a few more this evening.

'Bye, Mrs Dangerfield,' she called out gaily. 'That's me leaving now: see you in a week or two.'

That evening Eva dressed with more diligence and thought than usual. She washed her hair and curled its ends, deciding to surprise Romer by leaving it down. She teased a lock over her eye, Veronica Lake-style, but decided that was going too far: she wasn't trying to seduce the man, after all. No, she just wanted him to notice her more, be more aware of her in a different way. He may be thinking that all he was doing was taking an employee out for a treat but she wanted him to realise that not many of his employees looked like her. It was a matter of self-esteem in the pure sense – nothing to do with Romer at all.

She put on her lipstick – a new one, called Tahiti Nights – powdered her face and dabbed rose-water on her wrists and behind her ears. She was wearing a light woollen navy dress, with gathered maize-yellow panels on the front, with a sash belt that accentuated her slim waist. Her eyebrows were plucked into perfect arches and were perfectly black. She put her cigarettes, her lighter and her purse in a cane handbag studded with seashells, had a final check in the mirror, and decided, definitely, finally, against ear-rings.

As she walked down the stairs of the hostel, a few of the girls were queuing for the telephone in the lobby. She bowed as they wolf-whistled and mockingly marvelled.

'Who's the lucky man, Eve?'

She laughed. Romer was the lucky man: he had no idea how lucky he was.

The lucky man showed up, late, at 8.35. Eva had arrived and had been shown to Don Luigi's best table, set in a bow window looking out over Frith Street. Eva drank two gin-and-tonics while she waited and passed much of the time listening in to a French couple two tables away having an indiscreet, not so sotto voce argument mainly to do with the man's bitch of a mother. Romer duly arrived, made no apology, made no comment on how she was looking and immediately ordered a bottle of Chianti – 'The best Chianti in London. I only come here for the Chianti.' He was still animated and excited, his mood post-Savoy having grown more intense, if anything, and as they ordered and ate their starters he spoke fluently and contemptuously about 'head office'. She half listened, preferring instead to look at him as he drank and smoked and ate. She heard him say that head office was stuffed with the stupidest elite in London, that the people he had to deal with were either idle Pall Mall clubmen or superannuated officials from the Indian Colonial Service. The first lot looked down on the second as petit-bourgeois careerists while the second regarded the first as washed-up remittance-men who only had a job because they had gone to Eton with the boss.