The English Agent Read online

  She’d just led with a spade when Vera heard the van drawing up at the kerb. It was a warm day, and the window was open a couple of inches at the bottom. She could hear the street sounds: the tring of a bicycle bell, a cat meowing disconsolately and the van’s engine turning off. She could tell it was a van because the sound was somehow more definite than a car, but not as loud and juddery as a bus or truck. Using the pretext of opening the window to let more air in, she got up from the bridge game and walked over to have a look. She pushed up the heavy sash, leaning out slightly. In the distance she could just glimpse the dark green of the plane trees on the edge of Hyde Park. Above, the sky was a dusty blue swathe, like a mohair shawl she’d once owned. She’d left it behind when they came – she wondered what happened to that lovely shawl: was some Iron Guard’s wife swanking about in it these days?

  Vera looked down. Yes, it was a black van. From this angle it was hard to see if it was a police van or not. But who else had the petrol coupons to go roaring about town these days? She pushed the sash even higher, taking in a gulp of air, tepid as the coffee left undrunk in the cup beside her bridge hand.

  ‘Lucky us, Penelope’s got the king, so this one’s ours,’ Vera heard her mother say from inside the room. ‘Vee, dearest, do come in and join us. It’s unnerving having you hanging out of the window like that.’

  She hasn’t heard, Vera thought. How can she not have heard? Vera took one last look down at the van, but nobody had got out – yet – and ducked back inside the room. They had the baize-topped card table out. Vera had invited Penelope and Vera’s mother had asked Mrs Littlewood from the flat below to make up numbers. Vera slipped into her place opposite Mrs Littlewood. To her right Penelope flicked away an auburn curl from her forehead and laid down the ace of diamonds. ‘Is ace high or low, dearie, I can never remember,’ Mrs Littlewood said. Her lipstick had smudged onto her teeth so they clattered yellow-pink together like those rhubarb-and-custard sweets one could buy before rationing.

  From outside Vera heard the sound of a van door slamming shut, footsteps on the pavement. Still no one else seemed to have noticed, not even Mother, who should have been listening out for such things. Distracted, Vera gave away the king of diamonds, and her mother raised an eyebrow in surprise.

  Would they let her take her suitcase? Vera wondered. Would they give her a few precious minutes to pack: some perfume, her best nightdress, Dick’s letters. Or would they just strong-arm her, hustle her out of the front door, into the waiting van and off to Holloway Prison?

  Penelope led with the two of hearts. Vera heard the main door downstairs open and close. Mrs Littlewood heard, too. ‘I wonder who that is? The postman’s already been – what’s trumps again, dearie?’

  Vera’s mother replied that clubs were trumps, and asked if anyone wanted a top-up of coffee. Penelope said no thank you, but she was gasping for a ciggie, so Vera took out her packet of Sobranies, wondering whether or not one could get hold of Sobranies in camps, or if this would be her last one. Her ears strained to hear the soft ping as the lift stopped at their floor.

  Vera had only just sparked up when the doorbell rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said, jumping up before her mother could, thinking to spare her some of the shame of seeing her daughter interned, in front of her guests. I’ll go quietly, she thought, and maybe Mother can think of some kind of excuse. She wedged the lit cigarette in the gap between the index and middle finger of her left hand, exhaling smoke in front of her in the hallway as she walked, approaching the door as if through a fine mist. There was another impatient buzz of the doorbell as she approached. Her fingers slipped, sweaty with fear, on the door handle as she fumbled to open it.

  There at the door was a forest of uniformed men. Vera planted her feet firmly on the hallway floor and took another drag of her cigarette. She made herself count them: one, two, three, four – not a battalion of soldiers, just four police officers. The one in front was looking down at a piece of paper on a clipboard. ‘Excuse me, madam, but we’re looking for a V—’ He paused. Vera couldn’t breathe, felt as if her own smoke was drowning her. This was it. ‘What does that say, George? I can’t read it in this light.’ The man next to him looked down at the sheet. The two at the back shuffled their feet.

  ‘Who is it?’ Vera heard her mother call from the lounge. Vera didn’t answer, unable to speak, waiting. The other man – George – whispered something into the first police officer’s ear. Vera couldn’t hear what he said.

  ‘Victor Carluccio,’ the police officer said, looking up from the sheet at Vera. ‘Mr and Mrs Victor Carluccio,’ he said.

  Vera exhaled in a rush, almost choking. ‘The Carluccios are on the ground floor, dear boy,’ she said, beginning to close the door.

  ‘Thank you, madam, and sorry to trouble you,’ said the officer, and Vera said not at all and shut the door softly in his face before he thought to say anything further. She stayed for a moment, looking at the shut door, listening to the muffled tramp of boots on the carpeted hallway as the phalanx of police moved away. She thought of old Mr Carluccio and his wife, geraniums on their kitchen windowsill, and how their tortoiseshell sometimes wound around her legs when she arrived home in the early hours after her ARP duties. Who’d have the cat, she wondered. Who’d have the cat when they got taken away?

  ‘Who was that, darling?’ said Mother when she went back into the lounge.

  ‘Oh, nobody,’ Vera replied, but her fingertips shook as she tipped the long chimney of ash into the ashtray. ‘Just some people looking for the Carluccios.’ Vera could hear thumping on a door downstairs. And there was still the mewing of that cat outside. ‘Actually, I think I’ll shut the window again, if nobody minds,’ she said, getting up again before anyone answered and rushing over to slam the sash shut. But even as she did so, she could hear shouts from below, footsteps outside, and the sound of a woman starting to sob. This window fell with a thud onto the sill. Vera sat back down.

  ‘It’s you,’ Penelope said. Vera checked her hand, not really seeing it, and plucked out a card, laying it swiftly down.

  ‘I thought we had to follow suit. It’s hearts this time, isn’t it, dearie?’ said Mrs Littlewood, looking at the two of clubs Vera had laid.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t follow suit,’ said Vera, imagining the Carluccios being shunted into the back of that horrid black van. ‘I don’t have any hearts left.’ Even through the closed window she thought she could hear the sound of the van starting up again.

  ‘You’re heartless, ducks,’ said Penelope, smiling at her own joke as the others laid hearts. ‘And this one’s yours.’

  ‘Well, one has to play one’s trump cards eventually,’ said Vera, taking another drag, and bashing the trick into a neat pile in front of her. ‘I suppose I was just lucky, that time, wasn’t I?’

  As Buckmaster held the door open for her and Vera slipped inside the old pub, she shuddered, remembering that afternoon. She nudged her way through a wedge of work-weary men towards the bar. They found a table squashed into a corner, next to the door where the landlord disappeared periodically to ‘sort the pipes’. In the small space the air was an essence of stale beer and smoke. The floor was black, sticky under the soles of her shoes. Vera sat down, letting Buckmaster get the first round in. She rubbed her forefinger along the varnished wood and watched as the landlady caught sight of him and bustled over. She saw Buckmaster’s gaze rest briefly on the woman’s ample bosoms, solid as torpedoes under her pullover, before he ordered the gin and tonics. He came and sat down, necked his G and T in one, took his pipe from his pocket and cleared his throat.

  ‘Good speech from old Winnie the other day,’ he said.

  ‘What, about it being the beginning of the end of the war?’

  Buckmaster nodded, taking out his tobacco tin.

  ‘D’you think it’ll be believed though, what with the Tunisia debacle?’ said Vera. ‘I mean, Russia’s all well and good, but it’s hardly the end of the road, is it, dear boy?’ Vera said,
taking a sip of gin. It tasted like the first mowing of spring. And it took her right back to Crasna, to hunting parties in the forest, and tea on the lawn, and Friedrich. Dear Friedrich. She blinked the image away and took a larger swig.

  ‘The right side will always win through,’ Buckmaster replied, lighting his pipe and nodding, as if it were perfectly clear which side was the right side. And for him – for everyone in the crowded pub, except her – it probably was clear.

  She noticed his glass was already empty ‘Let me get you a whisky,’ she said, getting up. ‘They always have a good stock in here.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll have anything of a half-decent age. I haven’t had an honest single malt since 1941,’ he said.

  ‘Let me try and surprise you.’ She got up and went over to the bar. She’d been here before, with Dick. The night before he left. They’d drunk Laphroaig, she remembered. They’d drunk until the room swerved and tilted, and she’d almost forgotten that they were about to be torn apart.

  The landlady was serving at the other end of the bar, but the landlord had just come up from the cellar, wiping his hands on a rag, red-faced, slightly out of breath. ‘I swear those barrels get heavier every day,’ he said. ‘What’ll it be?’

  ‘Do you have any whisky?’ she said. He motioned to the indifferent bottle of Bell’s behind the bar. ‘Anything older? A single malt?’ She smiled hopefully, even as he began to shake his head. ‘I’ve had some good news, you see,’ she added. ‘My RAF boyfriend has finally agreed to make an honest woman of me!’ She leant forward over the bar and smiled, catching her reflection in the mirrored glass behind the bottles. Handsome, that was what Dick called her – not beautiful, but handsome. Was she? Was she still? Her teeth flashed white between her lipsticked smile. ‘You probably don’t remember, but we used to come here a lot, my fiancé and I, before he was deployed.’ Her mind flicked back to those glorious nights: the pubs, the Proms, the 400 Club, and afterwards. ‘You used to have such a marvellous selection of whisky, I remember.’ She touched the landlord briefly on his hand, where it rested on the bar. He said seeing as it was such a very special celebration, he might manage to find something. He sucked his teeth and said it wouldn’t be cheap though, what with anything over twelve years old being impossible to come by nowadays, even with his contacts, and Vera unrolled a note from her purse, trying not to think about the overdue electricity bill and the holes in her last pair of silk stockings.

  Buckmaster thanked her for the drink. ‘Dericourt brings vintage bubbly and you manage to conjure up single malt – almost feels like I’m back in my old job!’ They clinked glasses and he reminisced a little about his work in public relations before the war. ‘And what did you do, Vee?’ he said. ‘Before.’

  And as he said it she realised with a kind of reverse déjà vu that that was how they’d always delineate their lives in the future, that there would always be a ‘before’ and ‘after’: the war a gaping rift in the centre of their lives. She sipped at her gin and tonic. ‘Oh, you know, finishing school, secretarial college, and far too many parties,’ she said, reaching for her cigarettes. She opened the case. There were only a couple left, so she could see almost all of him: the arched brows, the confident smile underneath the RAF cap. Her Dick: darling Dick. There would be an ‘after’, wouldn’t there? There would be an ‘after’ and the wonderful man in the photograph would be her husband. She just had to make it happen.

  ‘Buckie, I have a favour to ask, as a matter of fact,’ she said, wedging the Sobranie between her fingers.

  ‘Oh yes?’ He was swilling the drink round in his glass so it clung thickly to the sides.

  ‘It’s rather a delicate matter,’ she went on.

  ‘You’re not in some kind of trouble, are you?’ he said, looking up and frowning. ‘Because I’m dreadful at that sort of thing. Terribly squeamish, you see. One of the office girls got “appendicitis” a while ago – you know – and I couldn’t bring myself to . . . I’d just rather not know, Vera, if it’s all the same to you. Take as much time off as you need, to get better.’

  ‘My dear boy, it’s certainly not that,’ she said, blushing at the very thought.

  ‘Oh, good show. I’m not one to judge, but, you know . . .’ He trailed off, taking a large swig, and not looking her in the eye.

  ‘It’s about where I’m from,’ she said in a low voice, leaning forward. There didn’t seem to be anyone close enough to hear, but one couldn’t afford to take chances, even so.

  ‘Yes, Hump did mention you’d been abroad, before the war,’ said Buckmaster.

  ‘Born abroad,’ said Vera.

  ‘Oh, I thought he’d said been abroad. And I did think it odd to mention, at the time, because of course you’d been abroad, otherwise how would you speak so many languages so very well? I mean, it sort of went without saying. So, born abroad, you say?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not a secret, as such, but it’s not something I like to broadcast,’ Vera said.

  ‘Oh, quite.’

  ‘And it didn’t matter much before, really. But these days it would be so much easier if I were in uniform, the way things are – especially with spending so much of my time at airfields during the moon periods.’

  ‘Not Commonwealth, then?’ said Buckmaster, taking another swig.

  ‘Not Commonwealth,’ said Vera.

  ‘I see,’ he said slowly.

  ‘And if things should develop, as they ought, as they will, when our aims have succeeded, then I might be needed elsewhere – across the Channel – and I couldn’t possibly go, in my current situation. I would need to be in one or other of the services, in order to be deployed.’ She spoke in a low voice, but she could see Buckmaster’s eyes flick worriedly round the bar. Nobody could possibly have heard, though, could they?

  Buckmaster cleared his throat. ‘So where, exactly, were you born?’

  Vera hesitated. She’d spent so many years not saying it that there was almost a physical block to getting the word out. It was like having a fishbone stuck in her throat. She took another sip of the bitter-fresh gin. ‘Romania.’ She spoke in such a low voice that it was almost a whisper.

  ‘But Romania is—’ He looked aghast, didn’t even finish his sentence.

  ‘On the wrong side. I know. But when I arrived here that wasn’t the case. Romania didn’t even take sides until—’

  ‘November nineteen-forty,’ Buckmaster interrupted, frowning.

  ‘My mother and both my brothers are British,’ she said. ‘And as you know, I have signed the Official Secrets Act. My fiancé is an RAF pilot. I went to secretarial college in London. I’m British in all but name, Buckie. It was just an accident of birth.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, still frowning. He hasn’t asked about Father, she thought. Thank goodness he hasn’t asked about Father. And he won’t ever know about Friedrich – no one will ever know about Friedrich. ‘And Hump?’ Buckmaster added.

  ‘Of course Hump knows. Hump knows everything.’ Almost everything, she added silently. Hump knows almost everything. But no one knows everything; no one can ever know everything.

  Buckmaster, still frowning, took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘I’m at a loss to know why this hasn’t been brought to my attention before,’ he said.

  ‘But you said Hump mentioned—’

  ‘Only in passing, not . . . look here, this is very serious, Vee. If it gets out—’

  ‘Indeed, if it gets out.’ It was Vera’s turn to interrupt. ‘If it gets out that you have an enemy alien in SOE’s employ, then I’ll be off to an internment camp and you’ll be transferred to some Home Guard unit in less time than it’ll take you to finish that whisky,’ she hissed, fixing him with a stare. ‘Is that really what you want? You said yourself, it’s the beginning of the end of the war and SOE’s time is now. Do you want to miss all of that, just because my silly mother happened to be holidaying in Romania when I made an appearance?’

  Buckmaster looked down into the whisky glass and shook
his head, and for a moment she thought it was all over. She held her breath. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘It’s not what I want. I’ll make enquiries in the morning.’ Vera exhaled, able to breathe again. ‘But I’m warning you, Vee,’ he said, looking up from his drink and straight into her eyes, ‘I’m demanding absolute loyalty from now on. No more shenanigans like we had in the meeting the other morning. Is that clear?’

  ‘Clear as sunlight, my dear boy,’ Vera replied and plucked the last cigarette from the case so she could see all of Dick’s face smiling up at her.

  Chapter 4

  Edie

  There was so much to get through. In training they’d said not to transmit for more than a few minutes at a time, for fear of detection. But this little lot would take her aeons, Edie thought, as she slowly drew the curtains to her room. She nodded at Madame LeBlanc, who lived opposite her on the passage. The elderly Madame’s front room was double-aspect: set on the corner of the main road and the side street where Edie was lodging, overlooking the steps that went down past the drinking fountain. Madame LeBlanc could see if the detector vans were approaching, and she knew that when Edie closed her curtains during daylight it meant she was transmitting. The old woman had promised to keep an eye out.

  Edie locked her door, took out the suitcase from under her bed and placed it on the table beneath the window, hooking up the aerial, which slid under the bottom sash like a rat’s tail and trailed up a bare wisteria vine that climbed the wall outside. The room was all shadows and gloom, but there was enough light from the table lamp to make out the messages she needed to code and send. She checked the clock on the mantelpiece: ten past – just enough time to set up before sending her messages at the scheduled time.

  She pulled the chair closer in to the table, and clicked the set on. It began to hum and crackle. She slipped her hand inside her dress and pulled out her poem-code. She still wasn’t able to transpose the messages without referring to it, even though she knew it was risky to have it written down. She picked up the pencil and licked the tip, metallic on her tongue. As usual, the table wobbled as she transcribed the messages into code, and for the umpteenth time she thought she really ought to find a bit of cardboard to place under one of the metal feet.