‘Or,’ Le Prevost said, with a twist of his little mouth, ‘do I mean
especially
?’
We were dismissed and when were out of the building, heading along Curzon Street, it was Shirley, not me, who was scathing.
‘Our
cover
,’ she kept saying in a loud whisper. ‘Our bloody cover. Cleaning ladies pretending to be
cleaning ladies
!’
It was an insult, of course, though less of one then than it would be now. I didn’t say the obvious, that the Service could hardly bring in outside cleaners to a safe house, any more than it could call on our male colleagues – they were not only too grand, but they would have made a terrible job. I surprised myself with my stoicism. I think I must have absorbed the general spirit of camaraderie and cheerful devotion to duty among the women. I was becoming like my mother. She had the Bishop, I had the Service. Like her I had my own strong-minded inclination to obey. I did worry, however, whether this was the job that Max had said was right up my street. If it was, I’d never talk to him again.
We found the garage and put on our aprons. Shirley, wedged in tight behind the wheel, was still muttering mutinously as we pulled out into Piccadilly. The van was pre-war – it had spoked wheels and a running board and must have been among the last of the sit-up-and-beg contraptions on the road. The name of our firm was written on the sides in
art deco lettering. The ‘k’ of ‘Springklene’ was done up as a gleeful housemaid wielding a feather duster. I thought we looked far too conspicuous. Shirley drove with surprising confidence, swinging us at speed round Hyde Park Corner and demonstrating a flashy technique with the gear stick, known, she told me, as double declutching, necessary on such an ancient crate.
The flat occupied the ground floor of a Georgian house in a quiet side street and was grander than I expected. All the windows were barred. Once we were in with our mops, fluids and buckets, we made a tour. The squalor was even more depressing than Le Prevost had implied and was of the obvious male sort, right down to a once-sodden cigar stub on the edge of the bath, and a foot-high pile of
The Times
, with some copies roughly quartered, moonlighting as lavatory paper. The sitting room had an abandoned late-night air – drawn curtains, empty bottles of vodka and scotch, heaped ashtrays, four glasses. There were three bedrooms, the smallest of which had a single bed. On its mattress, which was stripped, was a wide patch of dried blood, just where a head might rest. Shirley was loudly disgusted, I was rather thrilled. Someone had been intensively interrogated. Those Registry files were connected to real fates.
As we went round taking in the mess, she continued to complain and exclaim, and clearly wanted me to join in. I tried, but my heart wasn’t in it. If my small part in the war against the totalitarian mind was bagging up decaying food and scraping down hardened bathtub scum, then I was for it. It was only a little duller than typing up a memo.
It turned out that I had a better understanding of the work involved – odd, considering my cosseted childhood with nanny and daily. I suggested we did the filthiest stuff first, lavatories, bathroom, kitchen, clearing the rubbish, then we could start on the surfaces, then the floors and finally the beds. But before all else, we turned the mattress, for Shirley’s sake. There was a radio in the sitting room and we decided
that it would be consistent with our cover to have pop music playing. We went at it for two hours, then I took one of the fivers and went out to buy the wherewithal for a tea break. On the way back I used some change to feed the parking meter. When I returned to the house, Shirley was perched on the edge of one of the double beds, writing in her little pink book. We sat in the kitchen, drank tea, smoked and ate chocolate biscuits. The radio was playing, there was fresh air and sunlight through the open windows and Shirley was restored to a good mood and told me a surprising story about herself while she finished off all the biscuits.
Her English teacher at the Ilford comprehensive, a force in her life the way certain teachers can be, was a Labour councillor, probably ex-Communist Party, and it was through him that she found herself at the age of sixteen on an exchange with German students. That is, she went to communist East Germany with a school group, to a village an hour’s bus ride from Leipzig.
‘I thought it was going to be shit. Everyone said it would be. Serena, it was fucking paradise.’
‘The GDR?’
She lodged with a family on the edge of the village. The house was an ugly, cramped two-bedroom bungalow but there was a half-acre of orchard and a stream, and not far away a forest big enough to get lost in. The father was a TV engineer, the mother a doctor, and there were two little girls under five years who fell in love with the lodger and used to climb into her bed early in the morning. The sun always shone in East Germany – it was April, and by chance there was a heatwave. There were expeditions into the forest to hunt for morels, there were friendly neighbours, everyone encouraged her German, someone had a guitar and knew some Dylan songs, there was a good-looking boy with three fingers on one hand who was keen on her. He took her to Leipzig one afternoon to see a serious football match.
‘No one had much. But they had enough. At the end of
ten days I thought, no, this really works, this is better than Ilford.’
‘Maybe everywhere is. Especially in the countryside. Shirley, you could have had a good experience just outside Dorking.’
‘Honestly, this was different. People cared about each other.’
What she was saying was familiar. There had been pieces in the newspaper and a TV documentary reporting in triumph that East Germany had finally overtaken Britain in living standards. Years later, when the Wall came down and the books were opened, it turned out to be nonsense. The GDR was a disaster. The facts and figures people had believed, and had wanted to believe, were the Party’s own. But in the seventies, the British mood was self-lacerating, and there was a general willingness to assume that every country in the world, Upper Volta included, was about to leave us far behind.
I said, ‘People care about each other here as well.’
‘Well, fine. We all care about each other. So what are we fighting against?’
‘A paranoid one-party state, no free press, no freedom to travel. A nation as prison camp, that sort of thing.’ I heard Tony at my shoulder.
‘
This
is a one-party state. Our press is a joke. And the poor can’t travel anywhere.’
‘Oh, Shirley, really!’
‘Parliament’s our single party. Heath and Wilson belong to the same elite.’
‘What nonsense!’
We had never talked politics before. It had always been music, families, personal tastes. I assumed that all my colleagues had roughly the same sort of views. I was looking at her closely to see if she was teasing me. She looked away, reached roughly across the table for another cigarette. She was angry. I didn’t want a full-on row with my new friend. Lowering my tone I said softly, ‘But if you think that, Shirley, why join this lot?’
‘I dunno. Partly to please my dad. I mean, I’ve told him it’s the Civil Service. I didn’t think they’d let me in. When they did everyone was proud. Including me. It felt like a victory. But you know how it is – they had to have one non-Oxbridge type. I’m just your token prole. So.’ She stood. ‘Better get on with our crucial work.’
I stood too. The conversation was embarrassing and I was glad it was over.
‘I’ll finish off in the sitting room,’ she said, and then paused in the kitchen doorway. She looked a sad figure, bulging under her plastic apron, her hair, still damp from her exertions before our tea break, sticking to her forehead.
She said, ‘Come on, Serena, you can’t think all this is so simple. That we just happen to be on the side of the angels.’
I shrugged. Actually, in relative terms I thought we were, but her tone was so scathing that I didn’t want to say so. I said, ‘If people had a free vote across Eastern Europe, including your GDR, they’d kick the Russians out, and the CP wouldn’t stand a chance. They’re there by force. That’s what I’m against.’
‘You think people here wouldn’t kick the Americans off their bases? You must have noticed – the choice isn’t on offer.’
I was about to reply when Shirley snatched up her duster and a lavender canister of spray-on polish and left, calling out as she went down the hall, ‘You’ve soaked up all the propaganda, girl. Reality isn’t always middle class.’
Now I was angry, too angry to speak. In the last minute or so Shirley had upped her Cockney accent, the better to use some notion of working-class integrity against me. How dare she condescend like that? Reality isn’t always middle class! Intolerable. Her ‘reality’ had been ludicrously glottal. How could she traduce our friendship and say she was my token prole? And I’d never given a moment’s thought to the college she was at, except to think that I would have been happier at hers. As for her politics – the outworn orthodoxy of
idiots
. I felt I could have run after her and shouted at her.
My mind was filled with withering retorts, and I wanted to use them all at once. But I stood in silence and walked around the kitchen table a couple of times, then I picked up the vacuum cleaner, a heavy-duty affair, and went to the small bedroom, the one with the bloody mattress.
That was how I came to clean the room so thoroughly. I went at it in a fury, running the conversation over and over again, merging what I’d said with what I wished I’d said. Just before our break I had filled a bucket to clean the woodwork round the windows. I decided I would clean the skirting boards first. And if I was going to be kneeling on the floor, I would need to vacuum the carpet. To do that properly I carried out into the corridor a few pieces of furniture – a bedside locker and two wooden chairs that were by the bed. The only electric socket in the room was low down on the wall under the bed and a reading lamp was already plugged in. I had to lie on my side on the floor and reach in at full stretch. No one had cleaned under there in a long time. There were dust balls, a couple of used tissues and one dirty white sock. Because the plug was a tight fit it took an effort to pull and jiggle it clear. My thoughts were still on Shirley and what I would say to her next. I’m a coward in important confrontations. I suspected we would both choose the English solution and pretend that the conversation had never happened. That made me angrier still.
Then my wrist brushed against a piece of paper concealed by one of the legs of the bed. It was triangular, no more than three inches along the hypotenuse, torn from the right-hand top corner of
The Times
. On one side was the familiar lettering – ‘Olympic Games: Complete programme, page 5’. On the reverse, faint pencil writing under one of the straight edges. I backed out and sat down on the bed to take a closer look. I peered and understood nothing until I realised I was holding the scrap upside down. What I saw first were two letters in lower case. ‘tc’. The line of the tear sliced right through the word below. The writing was faint, as though there had been
minimal downward pressure, but the letters were clearly formed: ‘umlinge’. Just before the ‘u’ was a stroke that could only have been the foot of the letter ‘k’. I turned the piece of paper upside down again, hoping to make the letters do something else for me, demonstrate that I was simply projecting. But there was no ambiguity. His initials, his island. But not his handwriting. In a matter of seconds my mood had shifted from intense irritation to a more complex mix – of bafflement and unfocused anxiety.
Naturally, one of my first thoughts was of Max. He was the only one I knew who knew the name of the island. The obituary had made no mention of it and Jeremy Mott probably didn’t know. But Tony had plenty of old connections in the Service, though very few were active now. Perhaps a couple of very senior figures. They surely wouldn’t have known of Kumlinge. As for Max, I sensed it would be a bad idea to ask him for an explanation. I would have been giving away something I should hold on to. He wouldn’t tell me the truth if it didn’t suit him. If he knew anything worth telling, then he had already deceived me by keeping silent. I thought back to our conversation in the park and his persistent questions. I looked at the scrap of paper again. It looked old, faintly yellowish. If this was a significant mystery, I didn’t have enough information to solve it. Into this vacancy came an irrelevant thought. The ‘k’ on the side of our van was the missing letter, dressed up like a housemaid – just like me. Yes, everything was connected! Now that I was being really stupid, it was almost a relief.
I stood up. I was tempted to turn the mattress back just to look at the blood again. It was right under where I’d just been sitting. Was it as old as the piece of paper? I didn’t know how blood aged. But that was it, here was the simplest formulation of the mystery and the core of my unease: did the name of the island and Tony’s initials have anything to do with the blood?
I put the paper in the pocket of my apron and went along
the hallway to the lavatory, hoping I didn’t run into Shirley. I locked the door, knelt by the pile of newspapers and began sorting through it. Not every day was there – the safe house must have stood empty for longish periods. So the copies reached back many months. The Munich games were last summer, ten months ago. Who could forget, eleven Israeli athletes massacred by Palestinian guerrillas? I found the copy with the missing corner only a couple of inches from the bottom and pulled it clear. There was the first half of the word ‘programme’. August 25th, 1972. ‘Unemployment at its highest level for August since 1939’. I faintly remembered the story, not for the jobless headline but for the article about my old hero Solzhenitsyn across the top of the page. His 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech had just surfaced. He attacked the United Nations for failing to make acceptance of the declaration of human rights a condition of membership. I thought that was right, Tony thought it was naive. I was stirred by the lines about ‘the shadows of the fallen’ and ‘the vision of art that sprang from the pain and solitude of the Siberian waste’. And I especially liked the line, ‘Woe to the nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power.’