'Because what?'
'Because he'll be dead by tomorrow morning.'
'Dead? How can he be dead tomorrow morning?'
She glanced at me, an impatient glance that said: You still don't get it, do you? Your brain doesn't work like ours. She spoke patiently: 'Romer will kill himself tonight. He'll inject himself, take a pill. He'll have had the method ready for years. It'll look exactly like a heart attack, or a fatal stroke – something that looks natural, anyway.' She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. 'Romer's dead. I didn't need to shoot him with that gun. The second he saw me he knew that he was dead. He knew his life was over.'
14. A True-Blue English Gentleman
MY MOTHER, JOCHEN AND I stood close together under my new russet umbrella on the pavement outside the entrance to St James's Church, Piccadilly. It was a cool, drizzly September morning – packed seal-grey clouds moved steadily above us – as we watched the dignitaries, guests, friends and family arrive for Lord Mansfield of Hampton Cleeve's memorial service.
'Isn't that the Foreign Secretary?' I said, as a dark-haired man in a blue suit hurried out of a chauffeur-driven car.
'He seems to be getting a good turn-out,' my mother said, almost eagerly, as if it were a marriage rather than a funeral, as a small queue began to bulk shapelessly at the entrance to the church, behind the iron palings of the small sunken forecourt. A queue of people not at all used to queuing, I thought.
'Why are we here?' Jochen asked. 'It's a bit boring, just standing out here on the pavement.'
'It's a church service for a man who died a few weeks ago. Someone Granny used to know – in the war.'
'Are we going to go in?'
'No,' my mother said. 'I just wanted to be here. To see who was coming.'
'Was he a nice man?' Jochen said.
'Why do you ask?' my mother said, now taking full notice of the boy.
'Because you don't seem very sad.'
My mother considered this for a while. 'I thought he was nice at the beginning, when I first knew him. Very nice. Then I realised I had made a mistake.'
Jochen said nothing further.
As my mother had predicted, Lucas Romer did not live to see the next morning after we had left him. He died that night from a 'massive heart attack', according to the newspaper obituaries. They had been prominent but rather sketchy and David Bomberg's portrait had been frequently reproduced, in the absence of any decent photographs, I supposed. Lucas Romer's war-work had been summarised as 'for the intelligence services, later rising to a senior position within GCHQ'. Many more words had been expended on his publishing career. It was as if they were commemorating the passing of a great literary figure rather than a spy. My mother and I looked at the guests as the queue to enter the church lengthened: I thought I spotted a newspaper editor, frequently on TV, I saw an ex-cabinet minister or two from distant governments, a famously right-wing novelist and many grey-haired elderly men in immaculately tailored suits, their ties discreetly signalling aspects of their past – regiments, clubs, universities, learned societies – that they were happy to acknowledge. My mother pointed out an actress: 'Isn't that Vivien Leigh?'
'She's long dead, Sal.'
Jochen tugged discreetly at my sleeve. 'Mummy: I'm getting just a little bit hungry.' Then he added considerately, 'Aren't you?'
My mother crouched down and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
'We're going to have a very nice lunch,' she said. 'The three of us: at a lovely hotel up the road called the Ritz.'
We sat at a table in the corner of the beautiful dining-room with a fine view of Green Park, where the leaves of the plane trees were turning yellow, giving up the fight prematurely after the broiling summer – autumn would be early this year. My mother was paying for everything, so she announced at the beginning of the meal, and we were to have nothing but the best on this memorable day. She ordered a bottle of vintage champagne and when it had been poured into our flutes we toasted each other. Then she let Jochen have a sip.
'It's rather nice,' he said. The boy was behaving very well, I thought, polite and rather subdued, as if he sensed there was a complicated and secret sub-text to this unusual trip to London that he would never fathom.
I raised my fizzing glass to my mother.
'Well, you did it, Eva Delectorskaya,' I said.
'Did what?'
'You won.' I felt absurdly emotional, suddenly, as if I might cry. 'In the end.'
She frowned, as if she'd never considered this before.
'Yes,' she said. 'In the end. I suppose I did.'
Three weeks later we sat in the garden of her cottage on a Saturday afternoon. It was a sunny day, but bearable: the unending heat of the summer was a memory now – something to reminisce about – now we welcomed a bit of early-autumn sunshine, with its fleeting warmth. There were swift, scudding clouds and a freshening wind thrashed the branches of the trees across the meadow. I could see the ancient oaks and beeches of Witch Wood heave and stir restlessly as the rattle of their yellowing leaves carried across the uncut blond grass towards us – hushing, shushing – as the unseen currents of air hit the trees' dense massiness and set their weighted heavy branches moving urgently, making the great trees seem alive somehow, shifting, tossing, provoked into a kind of life by the effortless power of the wind.
I was watching my mother reading a document with stern concentration. I had brought it with me, having just come from a meeting with Timothy 'Rodrigo' Thoms at All Souls, where he had given me a typewritten analysis of my detailed summary of The Story of Eva Delectorskaya - and this is what she now had in her hands. Thoms had tried, but failed, to seem unexcited as he spoke but I could sense the scholar's plea underneath his calm explanations of what he thought had gone on in America between Lucas Romer – 'Mr A' as far as Thoms was concerned – and Eva Delectorskaya. Give me all this, his eyes said, and let me run with it. I made him no promises.
Much of what he told me was over my head or else I wasn't fully concentrating – clustering acronyms and names of rezidents and recruiters, members of the Russian politburo and NKVD, possible identifications of the men who had been in the room when Eva was interrogated about the Prenslo Incident, and so on. The most interesting verdict, it seemed to me, was that he identified Romer unequivocally as a Russian agent – he seemed absolutely convinced about this – arguing that he had probably been recruited while he was studying at the Sorbonne in the 1920s.
This fact helped him explain the background to what had gone on in Las Cruces. He felt that the timing was the vital clue and all to do with what was happening in Russia in late 1941 when, coincidentally, another Russian spy – Richard Sorge – had told Stalin and the Politburo that Japan had no plans to attack Russia through Manchuria, that Japanese interests were concentrated and directed towards the west and the Pacific. The immediate consequence of this for the Russians was that it freed large numbers of divisions to fight against the German army, still marching towards Moscow. But the German invasion of Russia was faltering: the tenacity of Russian resistance, the over-extended lines of supply, fatigue and the encroaching winter meant that it was stopped and held finally just a few miles from Moscow.
Thoms had reached for a book and opened it at a marked page at this juncture.
'I'm quoting from Harry Hopkins here,' he said. Harry Hopkins – all I could think of was Mason Harding.
Thoms read, '"As the new Russian armies from the Manchurian front began to mass and gather around Moscow, waiting to launch the inevitable counter-attack there began to grow in the Russian high command – and notably within the NKVD and the other secret services – the realisation that the tide had finally turned: the prospect of Russia defeating the Germans was finally realisable. Certain elements within the Soviet government began to think ahead, about political settlements in the post-war world."'