Eva caught a bus to Deptford the next day and went in search of Carlisle House. She found the usual fuming moonscape of dereliction: hills of brick rubble, teetering cliffs of walls and exposed rooms, gas mains still burning through the tumbled masonry with a pale wobbly light. Wooden barriers had been erected around the site and were manned by police and ARP volunteers. Behind the barriers small crowds gathered and looked forlornly on, talking about the senselessness, the mindlessness, the agony and the tragedy. In a nearby doorway Eva took out her passport and then she walked along the line of barriers as far from the crowds as possible and as close as she could get to a flaring gas main. The winter evening was drawing in quickly and the pale flames were becoming more lurid and orange. Darkness meant another raid, possibly, and the muttering groups of neighbours, survivors and spectators began to drift away. When she was sure no one was looking she gently threw her passport into the heart of the flames. For an instant she saw it flare and shrivel and then it disappeared. She turned and walked quickly away.
She went back home to Battersea and told Mrs Dangerfield, with a gallant sigh, that she had a new posting – ' Scotland again' – and had to leave that very evening. She paid her two months, rent in advance and left blithely, happily. At least you'll be away from these raids, Mrs Dangerfield observed enviously, and pecked her goodbye on the cheek. I'll telephone when I'm coming back, Eva said, probably March.
She booked into a hotel near Victoria Station and the next morning banged her head hard against the rough brick embrasure of her window until the skin broke and the blood began to flow. She cleaned her wound and covered it with cotton wool and sticking plaster and took a taxi to a police station in Rotherhithe.
'What can we do for you, Miss?' the constable on duty asked.
Eva looked around, acting disorientated, as if she were still concussed, still in shock. 'The hospital said I should come here,' she said. 'I was in the Carlisle House raid. My name's Sally Fairchild.'
She had provisional identity papers by the end of the day and a ration book with a week's supply of coupons. She said some neighbours had taken her in and gave an address of a street near the bomb-site. She was told to report to a Home Office department in Whitehall within a week in order to have everything regularised. The policemen were very sympathetic, Eva wept a little, and they offered to have a car drive her to her temporary home. Eva said she was going to meet her friends, thanks all the same, and visit some of the wounded in hospital.
So Eva Delectorskaya became Sally Fairchild and this, she thought, was at last a name that Romer didn't know. The chain was broken but she wasn't sure how long she could keep her new identity going. She thought he would take some perverse pleasure in her skill at evasion – I taught her well – but he would always be thinking: how to find Eva Delectorskaya now?
She never forgot this and she knew that more had to be done before she could feel even half secure, and so, in the early evenings, she took to drinking – while her money lasted – in a better class of public house and restaurant bar. She knew that for these next few days while she lived in her hotel and while she did nothing she was safest; as soon as she took up any form of work again, the system would remorselessly claim her and document her. So she went to the Café Royale and the Chelsea Arts Club, the bar of the Savoy and the Dorchester, the White Tower. Many eligible men bought her drinks and asked her out, and a few tried unsuccessfully to kiss and caress her. She met a Polish fighter pilot at the Leicester Square Bierkeller whom she saw twice more, before deciding against him. She was looking for a particular someone – she had no idea who – but she was confident she would recognise him the minute they met.
It was about ten days after she had become Sally Fairchild that she went to the Heart of Oak in Mount Street, Mayfair. It was a pub but its saloon bar was carpeted and hung with sporting prints and there was always a real fire burning in the grate. She ordered a gin and orange, found a seat, lit a cigarette and pretended to do the Times crossword. As usual, there were quite a few military types in – all officers – and one of them offered to buy her a drink. She didn't want a British officer so she said she was waiting for a gentleman friend and he went away. After an hour or so – she was thinking of leaving – the table next to her was taken by three young men in dark suits. They were in merry mood and after listening in for a minute or two she realised their accents were Irish. She went to buy another drink and dropped her paper. One of the men, dark, with a plump face and a thin pencil moustache, returned it to her. His eyes met hers.
'Can I buy you that drink?' he said. 'Please: it would be both a pleasure and an honour.'
'That's very kind of you,' Eva said. 'But I'm just going.'
She allowed herself to be persuaded to join their table. She was meeting a gentleman friend, she said, but he was already forty minutes late.
'Oh that's no gentleman friend,' the man with the moustache said, making a solemn face. 'That's what you call an English cad.'
They all laughed at this and Eva noticed one of the men across the table – fair-haired with a freckly complexion and a big, easy, slouching presence – who smiled at the joke, but smiled inwardly, as if there were something else funny about the statement that amused him and not the obvious slur.
She discovered that all three of them were lawyers attached to the Irish Embassy, working in the consulate office in Clarges Street. When it was the fair-haired man's turn to buy the next round, she let him go to the bar and then excused herself to the others, saying she had to go and powder her nose. She joined the man at the bar and said she'd changed her mind and would rather have a half pint of shandy than another gin and orange.
'Sure,' he said. 'A half pint of shandy it shall be.'
'What did you say your name was?' she asked.
'I'm Sean. The other two are David and Eamonn. Eamonn's the comedian – we're his audience.'
'Sean what?'
'Sean Gilmartin.' He turned and looked at her. 'So what would be your name again, Sally?'
'Sally Fairchild,' she said. And she felt the past fall from her like loosened shackles. She stepped closer to Sean Gilmartin as he presented her with her half pint of shandy, as close as she could without touching him, and she lifted her face to his quietly knowing, quietly smiling eyes. Something told her that the story of Eva Delectorskaya had come to its natural end.
13. Face to Face
'SO THAT WAS HOW you met my dad?' I said. 'You picked him up in a pub.'
'I suppose so.' My mother sighed, her face momentarily blank
– thinking back, I assumed. 'I was looking for the right man – I'd been looking for days – and then I saw him. That way he laughed to himself. I knew at once.'
'Nothing cynical about it, then.'
She looked at me in that hard way she had – when I stepped out of line, when I was being too smart-aleck.
'I loved your father,' she said, simply, 'he saved me.'
'Sorry,' I said, a bit feebly, feeling somewhat ashamed and blaming my sourness on my hangover: I was still paying the price for Hamid's farewell party. I felt sluggish and stupid: my mouth was dry, my body craving water, and my earlier 'mild' headache had moved into the 'persistent/throbbing' category in the headache leagues.