Orders from Berlin (30 page)

Enough! Seaforth needed no reminding of what came next. He put down the book and got up, pacing the room. He was like a volcano waiting to explode. The anger inside him, so long bottled up, was bubbling to the surface. He needed distraction, and Ava could provide it. If not her, it would need to be someone else. He’d be a fool not to take advantage of the opportunity. He went into his bedroom to get dressed.

Almost all day Ava had sat in her husband’s chair at the kitchen table, drinking successive cups of foul-tasting black Camp Coffee and eating nothing as she gazed sightlessly out through the window at a grey patch of overcast sky and the red-brown chimney stacks of the houses on the other side of the street. She sat without moving, but inside her head she was possessed by a feverish anxiety as she tried and failed to make sense of all that had happened since the fateful evening ten days earlier when she had witnessed her father’s murder.

Her husband had killed her father. She kept repeating the sentence back to herself, and with every repetition
it made less sense. The police said that Bertram had done i
t because he needed money. But how and why had Bertram run up such terrible debts when they’d lived practically like paupers ever since they were married? Maybe she could have found the answer hidden away among the documents in Bertram’s desk, but it was too late to look now. Anything of any significance had been taken away by Inspector Quaid and his minions. The papers that were left were still strewn across the floor of the living room. She hadn’t had the energy to pick them up.

Three days earlier, when she found the cuff link in the top drawer, Ava had been certain of her husband’s guilt. But all the thinking she’d done since had made her less sure. It wasn’t that she found the evidence against him any less compelling; rather, it was that she couldn’t visualize him as a murderer. She glanced up at his ridiculous war map covered with the coloured pins that he’d spent hours repairing and replacing after she’d torn it down during their first big argument after the murder. Like all armchair soldiers, he was a coward. If he’d needed to kill, he’d surely have poisoned his victim, not engaged in a wrestling contest.

Yet there was the evidence and now a confession too. Bertram was probably guilty. But probability was not the same as certainty, and it was certainty that she craved. And if it wasn’t Bertram who’d killed her father, then who else could it be? Ava didn’t believe the accusations against Seaforth that Alec Thorn had made to the police inspector. It was obvious that Thorn didn’t like Seaforth seeing her, and the two of them were rivals at work, but she still couldn’t get what he’d said out of her mind.

She got up and went into the bathroom to look in the mirror. She looked terrible – haggard and hollow-eyed. Seaforth was a handsome, successful man. He could
have any girl he
wanted, so why her? She knew nothing about him except that he was a spy, and she’d read
enough about espionag
e to know that spies always had reasons for their actions. So what were Seaforth’s reasons? She found it hard to believe that he was motivated solely by an altruistic concern for her welfare, as he claimed, but she realized that the only way she was going to discover the truth was to see him again. Which was why she hadn’t hesitated about accepting his invitation to dinner when he had called up on the day before. But then afterwards she’d r
ealized that she wanted to see him too. She thought of his blue eyes and the way his thick dark hair fell over his forehead. He wore it long, unfashionably long, so that it almost reached his collar, but she liked it just the way it was. It belied his athletic build and his muscular frame and made him seem feminine somehow, able to understand how women felt.

There was no hot water, but she forced herself to sit in a cold bath while she washed her hair and then sat shivering at her dressing table, taking inventory of her make-up. Not so long ago she had had a full set of cosmetics, and now she was shocked to find that she had practically nothing left. Married life with Bertram had given her no reason to replace her powders and paints as they ran out, and even if she had wanted to, the war had made most make-up either unobtainable or much too expensive for her tightened purse.

An almost empty bottle of French scent reminded her of a time when Paris had been a place of magic and glamour instead of just another outpost of the Nazi empire. As a teenager she’d imagined going there on her honeymoon, but Bertram’s finances had barely stretched to a weekend in Bournemouth, and now it was too late. All her life she’d never left England, and recently she’d begun to wonder if she ever would.

She needed to be ingenious. That was the answer. Apart from the scent, she had a little lipstick and an unused jar of cold cream. She mixed them together to make a rouge to match her lips and then used a solution of sugar and water to set her hair. Some more cold cream mixed with a few flakes of Bertram’s shoe polish gave her a passable imitation of mascara. It would have to do.

Ava had one good dress. It was a black-and-sequin affair with a narrow waistline and plunging neckline modelled on an outfit that Greta Garbo had worn in
Anna Karenina
five years earlier. Her father had bought it for her before the war in a rare moment of generosity, and she had kept it ever since at the back of her wardrobe for special occasions that never seemed to happen, so that it was almost as good as new. She’d thought it fabulous when she first got it, but now it seemed out of place in the make-do-and-mend world of 1940. She worried that Seaforth would think her over-eager, but she needed the dress to maintain what little was left of her brittle self-confidence, and she felt reasonably pleased with the overall effect when she studied herself in the mirror again at six o’clock. As a final touch, she put on a thin necklace made of imitation emeralds. It complemented her green eyes, which she secretly thought to be her best feature.

All that was missing were the stockings. She’d found to her horror that all her rayon pairs were laddered, but she resisted the temptation to follow the advice in a
Picture Post
article she’d read a few weeks before that suggested girls should draw a line with a soft lead pencil up the backs of their calves and thighs to make it look as if they were wearing silk. It wasn’t worth the risk of humiliation if Seaforth saw through the deception, and Ava consoled herself with the fact that, true to its era, the dress’s hemline fell well below the knee.

She put on her coat and picked up her bag, then paused just as she was about to go out of the door, looking back at the flat. Bertram was gone, but his possessions were everywhere – his doctor’s bag on a chair, his hat and mackintosh hanging on the coat rack, his war map on the wall. She rebelled against the silent reproach of these inanimate objects, filled with a sudden anger against their owner. It was her turn to have a chance at life. Abruptly, she took hold of her wedding ring and pulled it from her finger. It didn’t come off easily and she had to tug hard. The knuckle was sore afterwards, but she welcomed the pain. It marked her departure from the married life she wanted desperately to leave behind. She felt like throwing the ring away, but an unexpected caution stayed her hand and she dropped it into her purse instead.

In the communal hallway downstairs, she almost collided with two of her neighbours as they came in through the front door. They looked at her askance, barely returning her greeting. News travels fast, thought Ava. She hadn’t read the newspapers for the last two days, but she found it hard to believe that there hadn’t been some report on Bertram, and there would be more to come. She’d be lucky if it didn’t make the front pages:
battersea staircase murder – woman’s husband charged with father’s murder.
A nice salacious story to distract Londoners from the misery of the latest casualty figures, but for Ava it would be the ruin of her reputation. She would be transformed overnight from an anonymous housewife into an object of ridicule. There would be no going back. Ava shuddered, pulling her coat tight around her body as she turned the corner at the end of the street, heading towards the river.

This time it was Seaforth who was late. They had arranged to meet by the fountain in Sloane Square, and she had just begun to think that he wasn’t going to come when she caught sight of him hurrying across the King’s Road towards her.

She’d wondered on the bus if he was going to kiss her when they met. She didn’t know whether she wanted him to or not, but then when he did, brushing his lips against her cheek, she found she liked it and that she wanted him to do it again. She had to be careful, she realized; she had to resist the spirit of recklessness that seemed to possess her whenever she was with him.

He’d booked a table in a small Italian restaurant. It was on a side street just off the square. At the corner, by the Underground station, they passed two newspaper hawkers who were shouting the evening headlines, competing with each other for attention. They seemed to take it in turns, each news item more horrible than the last and bellowed in a louder voice.

‘Read all about it: Hospital hit in Shoreditch. Seventeen dead.’

‘Land mine explosion in Whitechapel. See all the latest pictures.’

‘I hate this war,’ she said, hurrying past. ‘You can’t get away from it.’

‘And you can’t stop it, either,’ said Seaforth. ‘It’s like a machine they’ve turned on and now they can’t turn it off. However hard they try, they can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Not that they seem to be trying too hard, judging by Churchill’s fighting talk.’

‘That’s because it’s too late. No one in this country wanted war.’

‘Maybe not. But that’s not my point,’ said Seaforth, warming to his theme. ‘Think of the last war: the war to end wars. Four years of slaughter, and for what? Twenty years of peace. Doesn’t that tell you anything, Ava? About what’s happening; about the future?’

‘You can’t talk like that,’ she said, appalled by Seaforth’s cynicism. She couldn’t understand it – it was almost as if he were happy about the arrival of Armageddon.

‘Why not? If it’s the truth? Wars are fought so that the people who make the machines can make money out of them. The only difference now is that the machines are more powerful and the weapons are more deadly. I tell you, behind every tank, behind every bomb, is a man with a roll of banknotes – pounds or Reichsmarks, it doesn’t matter.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to fight. The Germans are evil. Everyone knows that.’

‘What. All of them?’

‘Yes, all of them,’ she insisted. ‘There was a woman in the butcher’s shop the other day who told me about one of their fighter pilots flying low over the park last week. He saw her out with her children and he tried to machine-gun them. She got the kids under a bench and lay on top of them, and they survived somehow. But she said he was laughing – laughing while he tried to kill them. Can you
believe that? I hate the Germans. And I’m surprised you don
’
t too,’ she added passionately. ‘They killed your father, didn’t they? Isn’t that what you told me?’

Seaforth flinched and she stopped, wishing she could take her words back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’

‘No, you’re right,’ he said harshly. ‘The war must go on. The beast must be fed.’

At the restaurant, Seaforth kept twisting about in his chair after they had sat down, unable to get comfortable, and he seemed to settle in his seat only after the waiter had brought them wine and he had downed two glasses in rapid succession.

He looked up, catching her eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not being good company tonight, I know. There’s a lot of pressure at work, but I should learn to leave it behind when I’m not there.’ It was an olive branch and it should have made her feel relieved, but instead she felt for some reason that he was putting on a mask and the real Seaforth was the harsh nihilist she had glimpsed on the walk over.

‘I’m glad I’m here,’ he added, reaching out and covering her hand with his. ‘You look beautiful tonight, Ava. Really you do. Forgive me for being such a brute.’

And she did, trying hard to banish her doubts. How could she not forgive him, looking down at his long, slender fingers touching hers? Like a pianist’s, she remembered she’d thought when he’d put his hand on her arm at the funeral.

‘You’re not wearing your ring,’ he said, turning her hand over and looking up into her face as if he were asking a question instead of stating a fact.

‘I didn’t want to think about Bertram,’ she said, but realized as she spoke that it was a vain wish. She knew she wouldn’t have any peace until she’d found out who’d killed her father.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘None of this has been easy.’

‘No, but it would help if I knew what you want with me,’ she blurted out. If only he’d open up, then maybe she could start believing in him; maybe she could enjoy his interest in her.

‘I want nothing,’ he said, looking her in the eye. ‘Now that I know you’re safe, I want nothing except the pleasure of your company. I like you, Ava. Isn’t that enough?’

It wasn’t, but she couldn’t tell him that. So she smiled and, leaning forward, finished her glass of wine and waited for him to pour her another.

The siren went off just as Seaforth had finished paying the bill and they’d got up to go. Ava hated the sound of it, and instinctively she put her hands over her ears, trying to block out its undulating wail.

He looked at her and smiled. ‘You really have had enough of the war for one night,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘Where?’

‘To my place. It’s near here. Just around the corner.’

‘You never told me that.’

‘I’m a man of many secrets, remember?’

‘What about the siren? Shouldn’t we take shelter?’

‘With the trogs down in the Underground?’ he asked, pointing down the street towards the square, where a rapidly growing queue of people had formed outside the Tube station. ‘It’s up to you, but I think I could live without overflowing toilets and rats for one night. There’ve been no bombs in Chelsea for a couple of days now, and there’s a shelter round the corner in Cadogan Place if you get scared. And I can take you home later. I promise,’ he added, noticing her hesitation.