Europe at Midnight (37 page)

I had no answer to that. Instead I said, “My parents were academics. My father taught English; my mother taught History. Their parents were all academics too, and their grandparents. It was... traditional, where I’m from. I’ll grant you what they did wasn’t as dangerous as what you do, but they never managed to improve their lives a single jot. Things only got worse, in fact.”

Horace put the poker back in the hearth and sat back. “What did they do?”

They both died of illnesses that could easily have been treated in Europe,
I thought
. Then I helped to lead a revolution and only made things worse.
I said, “They didn’t do anything. They couldn’t.”

“Well I
can
do something,” Horace said. “I can stand up on behalf of the fishermen and tell the owners that we won’t be taken for fools any more. I can make them take us seriously as men. You tell the people in Władysław that.”

“All right,” I said. “I promise I’ll do that.”

A
ND
I
DID.
It was almost midnight when I got back to the rooming house where I was staying. It was high up on the ladder of streets that made up Victoria, almost on the edge of the rough craggy moorland that lay behind the town, and from my desk at the window I could look down on stepped rows of slate rooftops that descended to the half-moon of the harbour and the boats sleeping there. Beyond them, its wavetops touched with moonlight, was the hard sheen of the sea.

Under the light of the desk-lamp, I took out a pad of writing paper and a fountain pen and began to rough out my story. I put in everything Horace had told me to put in, and then I began chopping it up and copying it onto a pad of forms I had bought from the local telegraph office a few days earlier.

When I’d finished, I sat looking at my reflection in the window. I’d lost some of the weight I had put on in Europe, but my face was still unfamiliar to me, well-fed and filled-out. The last of my kind.

I took up my pen again, turned to a clean page of writing paper, and began to write another kind of story.

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
after a hearty breakfast of smoked fish and home-baked bread, I walked down into the town. I had two envelopes in my pocket. At the telegraph office, I took a wad of forms from one of the envelopes and waited patiently while the clerk counted the words of my dispatch to the
Intelligencer
to make sure I hadn’t tried to sneakily over-run the pre-paid limit. When the clerk was satisfied, he took the forms into the back room for transmission to Władysław, and I went back out into the cold windy day.

Further down the hill, nearer the harbour, was a tea-shop called Annie’s. It was dark and shabby and I had never seen more than three people there, sitting in miserable silence with cups of tea and a plate of scones. I sat down at one of the tables by the window and when the waitress came over I ordered tea.

The tea arrived, and while it brewed in the pot I got up and went to the lavatory. There were two cubicles. Neither was occupied. I went into the furthest one, closed the door behind me, took the second envelope from my pocket, and, reaching up, slipped it behind the cistern. I left the cubicle, washed my hands, and went back to my tea.

I
LEFT
V
ICTORIA
a couple of days later. About a month after that, Horace and Rowena and the regulars at the meetings quietly disappeared. Nobody knew where they’d gone. A rumour went round that they had all decided to move south, to try and find other work, but nobody believed it. The fishermen of Victoria went to work as usual. Nobody talked of laying down tools again.

T
HERE WAS A
similar situation among the coal miners of Hawshire a few months later. Again, I went down there to report for the paper, and again there were disappearances and things became quiet again. Everywhere I went, calm and contentment seemed to follow in my wake, along with a few homes missing a family member.

By this time, Michael had decided I had a taste for it. During dull evenings, I had started writing real articles for the
Intelligencer
, just to occupy my time. I’d included these with my reports to the Directorate, and Michael had decided they were worth submitting to the paper, a bit of harmless colour to backstop my cover story. The editor seemed to like them, and I started getting requests for bona fide articles about events in various parts of the country. I became a journalist
without portfolio
, and soon my work for the
Intelligencer
outweighed the work I was doing for the Directorate. They paid well, too.

I did that for five years.

6

“W
E HAVE A...
thing,” Michael said.

“A thing?”

“Hm. How to put it? An
errand
, really, I suppose. In Europe.”

We were sitting in his office at the Directorate, a room with a desk and some filing cabinets and a couple of chairs and a large and luxuriant potted aspidistra in one corner. It was Spring, and I had just returned from a long trip to the East to report on a song festival for the paper.

“Europe,” I said.

“We were wondering if you’d be interested.”

“Of course.”

“You have some experience over there, and to be honest we’ve hardly been making the best use of your talents recently. It should only take a day or so.”

“I could use a change of scenery,” I mused.

“We can’t let you go alone, of course,” he said apologetically. No offence intended. It was Directorate policy: no unaccompanied trips across the border.

“Of course.”

“Just a milk-run of a delivery. Nothing too strenuous.”

“Right.” I remembered the last time someone had described a job to me as a milk-run.

M
Y BODYGUARD/CHAPERONE WAS
a surprise. When I arrived at Central Station the next day I found the Farmboy waiting on the platform, a little overnight holdall beside his feet. We looked at each other and he smiled and nodded hello, and he never said a single word to me the whole time we were away.

We went in through Ernshire this time. Again there was a succession of trains from Władysław, and the next afternoon we were leaving the station in Stanhurst, having, so far as I understood these things, somehow and without even noticing having crossed what the English called The Channel. We took a carriage outside the station and drove out into the countryside a short distance, then we dismounted, I paid the driver, and we climbed a stile and set out across a field.

On the other side of the field was a line of trees. The Farmboy seemed to know the way. We walked through the trees, and a few minutes later the air smelled acrid and was full of noise and we stepped out into West London.

I
DIDN’T REALLY
have a plan. The Directorate only allowed trusted officers to cross the border, and the Farmboy was there as much to keep an eye on me as to protect me. I didn’t want to do anything that might make them decide not to send me to Europe again.

On the other hand, I had been out of touch for over five years. Baines and Bevan had planned this to be an open-ended operation, but I should at least try to leave a sign that I was still alive and functioning. To this end, I had sewn into my jacket a picture-postcard of the village green at Eveshalt, addressed to Baines’s home.

I also had, in my travelling bag, a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied up with rough twine. It was heavy, but when I shook it nothing moved inside. It felt suspiciously like a brick, in which case this whole thing was a test and the postcard should stay exactly where it was, digging into my armpit through the lining of my jacket. There was no way to tell if anyone else was watching me.

We took a bus into central London, and then another bus north to a place called Crouch End, not very far from Highgate. There was a chaotic little restaurant on the High Street, just by the Clock Tower. We went in and ordered coffees, sat with my bag sitting open on the floor beside the table. When we had finished, we left again. My bag was considerably lighter. I had never seen the package go, and I never found out what it was.

Outside on the pavement, I said to the Farmboy, “Burger King?”

The Farmboy smiled.

W
E ATE AT
the same Holborn outlet that Lionel had taken us to all those years ago. The place had been redecorated but the food was the same. I was aware that the majority of Europeans looked down their noses at fast food, for either culinary or ideological reasons, but after five years of steak and kidney puddings and roast beef and boiled vegetables it tasted wonderful. The Farmboy evidently felt the same way; he ate two burgers and two large portions of fries and looked perfectly happy when he had finished.

Afterward, we used the Underground. I still found it alarming and confusing, but the Farmboy seemed entirely at home in the maze of tunnels and rushing trains and crowds.

We went down to Piccadilly, to a shop called Fortnum & Mason, where Michael wanted me to collect a parcel, already paid for and left for the name of Richards. Mr Richards’s parcel turned out to be a wicker picnic hamper the size of a small suitcase. I peeked inside and saw jars of pâtés and jams and something called
caviar
, tins of tea and coffee, biscuits in expensive-looking packets, and two bottles of champagne. In this spirit, I bought myself a packet of aniseed balls – you could get them in the Community, but they weren’t the same – and we caught the Piccadilly Line out to Heathrow and then a local bus to the border. No one saw us arrive, no one saw us leave. We had been in Europe for six hours and the postcard was still in my jacket.

7

W
E SETTLED INTO
a routine. Every week or so, Rafe came into the shop with a list of books he wanted and to see whether I had been able to find the ones from last week’s list. Usually, I had. Christine still looked at him with distrust, but he was paying well for his purchases and, from the number of well-dressed folk who started to drift into the shop, he was recommending us to his friends too.

They were not the only new customers to start drifting in, and I found these people of interest. Academics, mostly. Tweedy and inoffensive, browsing the shelves, occasionally asking after some volume or other but mostly chatting in groups of two or three in quiet corners of the shop. After a few weeks, I got to know them by sight, and was on nodding terms with most of them and speaking terms with a couple. A casual observer wouldn’t have noticed, but I was there all the time, and after a while it seemed to me that their visits coincided with Rafe’s. It occurred to me that, if I were of a suspicious nature, it would look rather as if they were watching him. For his part, Rafe seemed to relegate them to the status of regular customers, just part of the furniture, if he noticed them at all.

This was all very interesting and it was impossible to know right now how it was going to impact on the real reason for my presence in the bookshop. I’d mentioned Rafe to Michael, just in passing during one of our regular informal debriefs, but I certainly wasn’t about to let on why he interested me. The fact that he seemed to interest the academics as well was a complication I couldn’t assess yet.

One evening, a month or so after the academics started to visit the shop, I was just tidying up for the day when one of them came over and said hello, a neat, sprightly old man with a goatee beard. We’d spoken a couple of times before, mostly about the weather.

He said, “I noticed Professor Delahunty comes here rather a lot.”

“One of our regulars,” I said cheerfully. “Likes his books, does the Professor.”

“I’m George, by the way. George Quinn.”

“Tommy Potter.” We shook hands.

“I’ve got a favour to ask you, Tommy,” George said. “And please, you’re well within your rights to tell me to bugger off.”

“Of course. How can I help you?”

“Could I just have a look at the list of the books you’ve sold Professor Delahunty? Just for a moment?”

I thought about it, on two levels. I thought about it as Tommy Potter, bookseller, and I thought about it as Tommy Potter, intelligence officer, and came to different decisions on each.

I said, “I don’t know. It’s sort of irregular, George. We take care of our customers; they like people not to know their business.”

George noted that this was not an outright refusal and said, “I won’t tell anyone else. And I’ll make it worth your while.”

I thought about it again, but this time I only thought about it as an intelligence officer, watching one of his operations unfold like an unlikely flower.

“How much?” I asked.

“How does twenty sound?”

“How does forty?”

George smiled, and I smiled, and he gave me two twenty-crown notes and I got out the ledger and showed him Rafe’s page and he looked at it for a couple of minutes, then thanked me and left.

A
FTER THAT,
G
EORGE
came over for a chat more and more often. Usually it was just harmless conversation about a book he was looking for – he was interested in Nineteenth Century Southern poets – but now and again, always in the evenings when nobody else was about, he wandered over to the desk and asked if he could have a quick look at the ledger. These requests were always accompanied by the production of two crisp twenties, which had been established as the price of client confidentiality at the shop.

Eventually, these transactions grew into little exchanges of personal information. George asked about my politics, and I told him, truthfully, that I had none. He wanted to know how I felt about the Presiding Authority. He didn’t ask any of these questions straight out, but that was the information he was looking for. As I gave each correct answer, the questions became more straightforward, until one evening he asked if I’d like to join him and his colleagues at a nearby pub.