Restless

She had quickly told me the rest of the story. After the encounter in the Heart of Oak there had been a few more dates – meals, an embassy dance, a film – and they realised that slowly but surely they were growing closer. Sean Gilmartin, with his diplomatic-corps connections and influence, had smoothed the processes involved in Sally Fairchild acquiring a new passport and other documentation. In March 1942 they had travelled to Ireland – to Dublin – where she had met his parents. They were married two months later in St Saviour's, on Duncannon Street. Eva Delectorskaya became Sally Fairchild became Sally Gilmartin and she knew now that she was safe. After the war Sean Gilmartin and his young wife moved back to England, where he joined a firm of solicitors in Banbury, Oxfordshire, as a junior partner. The firm prospered, Sean Gilmartin became a senior partner, and in 1949 they had a child, a girl, who they named Ruth.

'And you never heard anything more?' I asked.

'Nothing, not a whisper. I'd lost them completely – until now.'

'What happened to Alfie Blytheswood?'

'He died in 1957, I believe, a stroke.'

'Genuine?'

'I think so. The gap was too big.'

'Any lingering problems with the Sally Fairchild identity?'

'I was a married woman living in Dublin – Mrs Sean Gilmartin – everything had changed, everything was different; nobody knew what had happened to Sally Fairchild.' She paused and smiled, as though recognising her past identities, these selves she had occupied.

'Whatever happened to your father?' I asked.

'He died in Bordeaux, in 1944,' she said. 'I got Sean to track him through the London embassy, after the war – I said he was an old friend of the family…' She pursed her lips. 'Just as well, I suppose – how could I have gone to him. I never saw Irene, either. It would have been too risky.' She looked up. 'What's the boy up to now?'

'Jochen! Leave it alone!' I shouted, crossly. He had found a hedgehog under the laurel bush. 'They're full of fleas.'

'What're fleas?' he called back, stepping away all the same from the dun, prickly ball.

'Horrible insects that bite you all over.'

'And I want him to stay in my garden,' my mother shouted as well. 'He eats slugs.'

In the face of these joint remonstrations Jochen backed off some more and crouched down on his haunches to watch the hedgehog cautiously unroll. It was Saturday evening and the sun was lowering into the usual dusty haze that did duty for dusk in this endless summer. In the thick golden light the meadow in front of Witch Wood looked bleached-out, a tired old blonde.

'Have you got any beer?' I asked. I suddenly wanted beer, some hair of the dog, desperately, I realised.

'You'll have to go to the shop,' she said and glanced at her watch, 'which will be shut.' She looked shrewdly at me. 'You do look a bit the worse for wear, I must say. Did you get drunk?'

'The party went on a bit longer than expected.'

'I think I've got an old bottle of whisky somewhere.'

'Yes,' I said, brightening. 'Maybe a little whisky and water. Lots of water,' I added, as if that made my need less urgent, less blameworthy.

So my mother brought me a large tumbler of pale golden whisky and water and as I sipped it I began, almost immediately, to feel better – my headache was there but I felt less jangled and tetchy – and I reminded myself to be extra specially nice to Jochen for the rest of the day. And as I drank I thought how perplexing life could be: that it could arrange things so that I should be sitting here in this Oxfordshire cottage garden, on a hot summer evening, with my son pestering a hedgehog, and my mother bringing me whisky – this woman, my mother, whom I had clearly never really known, born in Russia, a British spy, who had killed a man in New Mexico in 1941, become a fugitive and who, a generation later, had finally told me her story. It showed you that… My brain was too addled to take in the bigger picture that the story of Eva Delectorskaya belonged to, all I could enumerate were its component parts. I felt at once exhilarated – it proved we knew nothing about other people, that anything about them was possible, conceivable – and at the same time vaguely cast down as I realised the lies under which I had lived my life. It was as if I had to start to get to know her all over again, reshape everything that had passed between us, consider how her life now cast mine in a different and possibly unsettling new light. I decided, there and then, to leave it for a couple of days, let it brew for a while before I attempted fresh analysis. The events of my own life were sufficiently complicated enough: I should worry about myself, first, I said to myself. My mother was made of stronger stuff, clearly. I should think it over when I was more alert, more intellectually articulate – ask Dr Timothy Thoms a few leading questions.

I looked over at her. She was idly turning the pages of her magazine but her eyes were fixed elsewhere – she was looking fixedly, anxiously across the meadow at the trees of Witch Wood.

'Is everything all right, Sal?' I asked.

'You know there was an old woman – an elderly woman – killed in Chipping Norton the day before yesterday.'

'No. Killed how?'

'She was in a wheelchair, doing her shopping. Sixty-three years old. Hit by a car that mounted the pavement.'

'How awful… Drunk driver? Joy-rider?'

'We don't know.' She tossed the magazine on the grass. 'The driver of the car ran away. They haven't found him yet.'

'Can't they identify him from the car?'

'The car was stolen.'

'I see… But what's it got to do with you.'

She turned to me. 'Doesn't it make you think? I've been in a wheelchair recently. I often shop in Chipping Norton.'

I had to laugh. 'Oh, come on,' I said.

She looked at me: her gaze steady, unfriendly. 'You still don't understand, do you?' she said. 'Even after everything I've told you. You don't understand how they operate.'

I finished my whisky – I wasn't going down this tortuously twisting road, that was for sure.

'We'd better go,' I said, diplomatically. 'Thanks for looking after the boy. Did he behave well?'

'Impeccably. Excellent company.'

I called Jochen away from his hedgehog studies and we spent ten minutes gathering up his widely dispersed belongings. When I went into the kitchen I noticed there was a small assembly of packaged foodstuffs on the table: a thermos flask, a Tupperware container with sandwiches inside, two apples and a packet of biscuits. Odd, I thought, as I picked up toy cars from the floor, anyone would think she was about to go off on a picnic. Then Jochen called me, saying he couldn't find his gun.

Eventually we loaded the car and said goodbye. Jochen kissed his granny and when I kissed my mother she stood stiff – everything was too strange today, making no sense. I had to leave first, then I would tackle the anomalies.

'Are you coming into town next week?' I asked, nicely, in a friendly way, thinking I would have lunch with her.

'No.'

'Fine.' I opened the car door. 'Bye, Sal. I'll call.'

Then she reached for me and hugged me, hard. 'Goodbye, darling,' she said and I felt her dry lips on my cheek. This was even odder; she hugged me about once every three years.

Jochen and I drove away from the village in silence.

'Did you have a nice time with Granny?' I asked.

'Yes. Sort of

'Be precise.'

'Well, she was very busy, doing things all the time. Cutting things in the garage.'

'Cutting? What things?'

'I don't know. She wouldn't let me go in. But I could hear her sawing.'

'Sawing?… Did she seem different in any way? Was she behaving differently?'

'Be precise.'

'Touché. Did she seem nervous, jumpy, bad-tempered, strange.'

'She's always strange. You know that.'

We drove back to Oxford through the fading light. I saw black flights of rooks taking to the air from stubbly fields as the smoky light of evening blurred and hazed the hedgerows and the darkening copses and woods seemed as dense and impenetrable as if they had been cast from metal. I felt my headache easing and, taking this as a sign of general improvement, I remembered that I had a bottle of Mateus Rosé in the fridge. Saturday night in, telly on, twenty cigarettes and a bottle of Mateus Rosé: how could life get any better?