Warlight(51)

So he could be photographed in Vienna having dinner at the Casanova Revue Bar with a beautiful teenager and her parents, and, after sending his companions off in a taxi to their hotel, be elsewhere two hours later, with a courier or a stranger. And if a few years later he was seen at that same Vienna bar with Rose, the same beautiful young woman no longer a teenager, he was there not for the seemingly obvious reason but for another purpose, as she was. They would slip from one language to another, depending on who was beside them, or who was noticed over the other’s shoulder. They behaved as uncle and niece without irony. It was believable, even to themselves. For he needed to release her often on her own into another role—undressing down to her nakedness into one disguise or another. She might be in a European city working with him, then return on leave to her two children. And after a time she would be with him again in another city where Allied and enemy agents stumbled across each other. But for him, their roles of uncle and niece were a decoy, not only for their work, which freed him to be with her, but to continue his growing obsession.

His job as a Gatherer meant finding talent in either the semi-criminal world or among specialists—such as a well-known zoologist who had spent most of his life in labs weighing the organs of fish, and could thus be relied on to precisely construct a two-ounce bomb in order to destroy a small obstacle. It was only with Rose, eating across from him at some roadside inn, or driving beside him from London towards Suffolk on the dark roads, her pale hands blond under the speedometer as she lit a cigarette for him, it was only with her that the purpose of his work slid from him. He desired her. All those inches of her. Her mouth, her ear, the blue eyes, the quiver at her thigh, her skirt lifted and bunched: was it to satisfy him? His hand wishing to be there. Everything left his mind but that tremor.

The one thing he did not allow himself was to consider how he must appear to her. Normally he’d have assumed he could seduce a woman with his wisdom, character, whatever it was that might have drawn her to him in the first place. But not simply as a man. He felt old. Only his thoughtful eyes could swallow her without hesitation or consent.

And she? My mother? What did she feel? And was it he or she who had persuaded the other into this adventure? I still don’t know. I like to believe they entered this tremulous universe as teacher and student. For this was not just physical love and desire: it encompassed the neighbouring skills and possibilities of their surrounding work. The knowledge of how to retreat if contact with the other was broken. Where to hide a weapon in a train carriage so the other would know where it was. Which bone to break in the hand or the face to make a person irrational in response. All of that. Alongside his wish for a moment when she might awaken as if there were Morse between them in the darkness. Or the place she perhaps wished to be kissed. How she would turn onto her stomach. The whole dictionary of love, war, work, education, growing up, growing older.

—

“There’s a walled city near Ravenna,” Felon whispered, as if its location needed to remain secret. “And inside the city, within its narrow streets, is a small nineteenth-century theatre, an intimate jewel, that looks as if the rules of its construction were based only on the principles of miniatures. Someday we can visit it.” He said this more than once, but they never went there. There were other mysteries he knew of: escape routes out of Naples or from Sofia, the surrounding plains that three armies had camped in with a thousand tents before the second Siege of Vienna in 1683—there was a map he’d seen, made from memory, long after the siege. He explained how mapmakers were once hired, even by great artists such as Bruegel, to help choreograph their crowd scenes. And there were the remarkable libraries to see, such as the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. “One day we can stand within it.” He tossed out the offer. It was a further mythical destination, she thought.

What did she contain in comparison to all that experience? It was like the embrace of a giant, she felt raised a league or a fathom into the air in order to witness such knowledge. Even though married, even though a linguist skilled in argument, she felt she had no vista of importance, that she was no more than a girl threading a needle by candlelight.

She had been surprised to discover Felon was secretive and complex almost out of a gentlemanly or shy courtesy. He was better at response, while she was cleverer at intellect, which was why she was eventually put in charge of harvesting data on enemy manoeuvres—as she’d once done on a small scale from a hotel roof, aided by that singular man known to me and my sister as The Moth; and in the fourth year of the war herself began broadcasting over the airwaves into Europe. She who once listened to everything Felon said was no longer the pupil. She became more actively involved, parachuted into the Low Countries after another radio operator was killed, journeying to Sofia, Ankara, and other, smaller outposts that cordoned off the Mediterranean, or wherever uprisings occurred. Her radio signature, Viola, became known widely on the airwaves. My mother had found her way into the larger world, somewhat the way that young thatcher had done.



The Astral Plough

Long before I came to work at the Archives, just after my mother’s funeral, I had pulled that paperback from one of her shelves and discovered in it the hand-drawn map on eight-by-six-inch paper of what looked like a chalk hill with low-gradient contour lines. For some reason I had kept this drawing that had no place-names. Years later, when I worked in the Archives, I discovered that whatever needed to be written down or typed up had to be done so on both sides of that same quarto-sized paper stock, single spaced. Every person in the service had to abide by this rule, from the interrogator “Buster” Milmo to a temporary secretary taking shorthand. It was a practice observed in almost every intelligence office, from Wormwood Scrubs—parts of which had once been used as an intelligence headquarters, and where as a boy I assumed my mother was entering to serve a prison term—to Bletchley Park. No other paper stock was allowed. I realized I had a map connected with Intelligence, which had been kept by my mother.