Eva shrugged. 'What can we do?'
'Nothing. Or rather – the best we can under the circumstances. At least you were all right,' he said. 'You can imagine what I was thinking when I saw those cars race across the border and stop outside. Then I saw all the running about, heard the shooting.'
'I was in the woods by then,' Eva said, thinking back, seeing once again Joos in his tight suit sprint out of the cafe, firing his revolver. 'Everyone had just had lunch – still doesn't seem real, somehow.'
They left the Continental and walked back out on to the Digue and looked out across the Channel in the direction of England. The tide was out and the beach gleamed silver and orange in the esplanade lights.
'Black-out in England,' Romer said. 'I suppose we shouldn't complain.'
They strolled down towards the Chalet Royal then turned down the Avenue de la Reine – it would lead then back to Eva's apartment. They were like a couple of tourists, she thought, or honeymooners – she checked herself.
'You know, I always feel uneasy in Belgium,' Romer said, continuing in this unusual personal vein. 'Always keen to leave.'
'Why's that?'
'Because I was almost killed here,' he said. 'In the war. In 1918. I feel I've used up all my Belgian luck.'
Romer in the war, she thought: he must have been very young in 1918 – barely twenty, in his teens perhaps. She considered her vast ignorance about this man she was walking beside and thought about what she had done and risked in Prenslo at his behest. Perhaps this is what happens in wartime, she thought: perhaps this is entirely normal. They had reached her street.
'I'm just down here,' she said.
'I'll walk you to the door,' he said. 'I've got to go back to the agency.' Then after a brief pause he added: 'That was very nice. Thank you: I enjoyed myself. All work and no play – etcetera.'
Eva stopped at the door and took out her keys. 'Yes, it was very nice,' she said, carefully matching his banalities. Their eyes met and they both smiled.
For a split second Eva thought that Romer was going to reach for her and kiss her and she felt a fierce giddy panic rise in her chest.
'Night,' was all he said, however. 'See you tomorrow.' He sauntered off, with one of his half-wave, half-salutes, pulling on his raincoat as the drizzle began again.
Eva stood at her door, more disturbed than she could have thought possible. It was not so much the idea of Lucas Romer kissing her that had shaken her – it was the fact that she realised, now the moment had passed and gone for ever, that she had actually rather wanted it to happen.
5. Red Army Faction
BOBBIE YORK POURED ME a small whisky, 'a tiny one,' he said, adding a splash of water, then he poured himself an extremely large whisky and filled water up to the glass's brim. He 'deplored' sherry, Bobbie would frequently say – filth, the worst drink in the world. He reminded me of my mother in the histrionic violence of his over-reaction – but only in this.
Robert York MA (Oxon) was, I had calculated, in his late fifties or early sixties. He was a tall portly man with a head of thin grey hair, the strands of which were swept back and kept under control by some pomade or unguent that smelt powerfully of violets. His room, winter or summer, was redolent of violets. He wore handmade tweed suits and heavy orange brogues and he furnished his large study in college like a country house: deep sofas, Persian rugs, some interesting paintings (a small Peploe, a Ben Nicholson drawing, a large, sombre Alan Reynolds apple tree) and, hidden in some glassed cabinets, were a few books and some fine Staffordshire figures. You would not think you were in the study of an Oxford don.
He approached me from the drinks table with my whisky, and his, set my drink down on a side-table and eased himself carefully into an armchair opposite. Every time I saw Bobbie I realised anew that he was really quite fat, but his height, a certain swiftness and balletic precision of movement and his excellent tailoring had the effect of delaying that judgement a good five minutes or so.
'That's a very attractive dress,' he said suavely. 'Suits you to a tee – shame about the bandage but one almost doesn't notice it, I assure you.'
The night before I had scalded my shoulder and neck badly in the bath and had been obliged today to wear one of my skimpier summer dresses, with slim spaghetti straps, so that no material rubbed on my burn – now covered with a gauze and Elastoplast dressing (applied by Veronica), the size of a large folded napkin, situated on the junction of my neck and my left shoulder. I wondered if I should be drinking whisky, given all the powerful painkillers Veronica had plied me with, but they seemed to be working welclass="underline" I felt no pain – but I moved very carefully.
'Most attractive,' Bobbie repeated, trying not to look at my breasts, 'and, I dare say, in this infernal heat most comfortable. Anyway, slangevar,' he concluded, raising his glass and taking three great gulps of his whisky, like a man dying of thirst. I drank too, more circumspectly, yet felt the whisky burn my throat and stomach.
'Could I have a drop more water?' I asked. 'No, let me get it.' Bobby had surged and struggled in his chair at my request but had not managed to leave it, so I crossed a couple of densely patterned rugs, heading for the drinks table with its small Manhattan of clustered bottles. He seemed to have every drink in Europe I thought – I saw pastis, ouzo, grappa, slivovitz – as I filled my glass with cold water from the carafe.
'I'm afraid I've got nothing to show you,' I said over my scalded shoulder with its dressing. 'I'm rather stuck in 1923 – the Beer Hall Putsch. Can't quite fit everything in with the Freikorps and the BVP, all the intrigues in the Knilling government: the Schweyer-Wutzlhofer argument, Krausneck's resignation – all that.' I was busking, but I thought it would impress Bobbie.
'Yeeesss… tricky,' he said, suddenly looking a little panicked. 'It is very complicated. Mmm, I can see that… Still, the main thing is that we've finally met, you see. I have to write a short report on all my graduates – boring but obligatory. The Beer Hall Putsch, you say. I'll look out some books and send you a reading list. A short one, don't worry.'
He chuckled as I sat down again.
'Lovely to see you, Ruth,' he said. 'You're looking very nubile and summery, I must say. How's little Johannes?'
We talked about Jochen for a while. Bobbie was married to a woman he called 'the Lady Ursula' and they had two married daughters – 'Grandchildren imminent, so I'm told. That's when I commit suicide' – and he and the Lady Ursula lived in a vast Victorian brick villa on the Woodstock Road, not that far from Mr Scott, our dentist. Bobbie had published one book in 1948 called Germany: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow that I had ordered up from the Bodleian stacks once out of interest. It was 140 pages long, printed on poor paper and had no index, and as far as I could determine it was his sole contribution to historical scholarship. As a boy he had holidayed in Germany and had spent a year at university in Vienna before the Anschluss intervened and necessitated his repatriation. During the war he had been a staff officer attached to the War Office and at its end had gone back to Oxford as a young don in 1945, married the Lady Ursula, published his slim book and had been a member of the History Faculty and a Fellow of his college ever since, pursuing, as he candidly put it, the 'way of least resistance'. He had a wide and sophisticated circle of friends in London and a large and decrepit house (thanks to the Lady Ursula) in County Cork, where he spent his summers.
'Did you have any luck with this Lucas Romer person?' I asked him, casually. I had phoned him that morning, thinking if anyone could help me, Bobbie York could.
'Romer, Romer…' he had said. 'Is he one of the Darlington Romers?'
'No, I don't think so. All I can tell you is that he was some kind of spy in the war and has some kind of a title. I think.'