The More Deceived (3 page)

Edward was on his feet too. ‘Which department is Mr Lyall’s?’

Vansittart hesitated. Then he said, ‘I suppose you will have to know. Lyall is Director of of Industrial Intelligence. His job is to study arms deals amongst our European friends and possible enemies and gather and collate industrial intelligence from our people abroad. The department is most secret and must not be referred to outside this room.’

‘And what was the result of Major Ferguson’s meeting?’

‘It never took place. Westmacott disappeared the evening before Ferguson was to interview him.’

‘Disappeared? When was this?’

‘Exactly a week ago.’

‘And no one has any idea where he is?’

‘No. Westmacott left the Foreign Office about his usual time – five thirty or six, we believe – and has not been seen since. Ferguson will brief you but he’s in the dark along with the rest of us. Of course, this may have nothing to do with what we have been talking about but . . .’

‘Would his knowledge have been useful to the . . . to other countries? Does he have access to secret documents?’

‘Up to a point. Ferguson will give you all the gen.’ Sir Robert seemed anxious now to get rid of his guest. ‘He saw certain low-level secret documents . . . He was, as I say, relatively junior but Lyall trusted him. He might have seen more than he was supposed to. Ferguson will arrange for you to talk to Lyall. As you can imagine, Westmacott’s wife is distraught but at least we have kept the news of his disappearance out of the press – for the moment anyway. Lord Weaver and the other proprietors have been most understanding.’

Always, Edward thought, there was this fear of the public knowing what was going on. Government kept control by not permitting the general public to know what was done in its name and what mistakes were made. However, perhaps in this instance there was some justification. As he said his farewell to Sir Robert, he realized he had never actually said he would take on the investigation. His agreement had been presumed. He sighed. No doubt in a few hours he would receive a telephone call from Major Ferguson and feel bound to respond positively. He could not deny that he was intrigued. Mr Churchill was a colourful character. He had seen him once in the House of Commons in full flood and been carried away by his oratory. His friend Marcus Fern admired him and Edward trusted his judgement. In fact, he had an idea that Fern was working for him in some capacity or other. But still, he thought, there was something of the charlatan about Churchill.

When Edward got back to Albany he found an irate Verity reading his correspondence and smoking furiously.

‘Oh, there you are. I suppose you forgot you are taking me to the exhibition and then a slap-up dinner before I return to the front line?’

Edward tried to kiss her but she dodged him. ‘Fiddlesticks! Don’t think you can get round me with that sappy stuff. There’s a hundred places I could be, instead of waiting on you. Where have you been, anyway? ‘

‘Simmer down, old thing. I hadn’t forgotten our dinner engagement but I was called to an important meeting at the FO, don’t y’know.’ He spoke loftily but Verity was unimpressed.

‘Huh! I bet you were called in to polish a few boots!’

‘On the contrary, my dear Watson, Sir Robert Vansittart himself wished to consult me on a matter of international importance.’

‘Less of the Dr Watson. Well,’ she added grudgingly, ‘what was so important the FO wanted to talk to you about? Are you to be our next ambassador to Transylvania?’

‘Can’t tell you, I’m afraid. Sworn to silence. Sir Robert specifically warned me against talking to Communist journalists.’

‘Blast you, Edward! Stop teasing. Tell me all about it,’ she commanded him, stubbing out her cigarette in a potted palm.

‘Sorry, I mean it – no can do. You’ll have to get me drunk at Gennaro’s tonight and see if you can loosen my tongue. By the way, where are you staying? You can’t stay here, you know. The managers wouldn’t like it.’

‘I have no intention of staying here. If you want to know, I’m staying with Charlotte and Adrian.’

Adrian Hassel was a painter and his wife a successful novelist. They were friends with whom Verity usually stayed when she was in London, no longer having a place of her own.

Edward saw that she was on edge. She lived on her nerves, eating little and smoking too much, courting danger, choosing to live the uncomfortable and occasionally dangerous life of the war correspondent. He knew from experience that a few days before she went back to Spain, where civil war now raged, she would become nervous and irritable, only regaining her equilibrium when she was actually in the front line. The anticipation was much worse than the reality, she said, but Edward doubted this. She had been out of Spain for a couple of months and the respite had done her good. She had put on a little weight and the dark circles under her eyes had disappeared. She had been with him on the
Queen Mary
a few weeks before and, although the trip to the United States had not been without incident, she had benefited from sea air and good food. Then she had spent two weeks meeting influential Americans: union leaders, left-wing politicians and Communist Party sympathizers.

There had been relatively few of these last, she had been disturbed to discover, and she had been dogged by FBI agents – at least she assumed they were FBI – who made it clear she was seen by the government as an undesirable. Edward and she had become lovers on the
Queen Mary,
or rather they had had one brief and interrupted night when, despite his having an injured leg which hurt whenever any pressure was put on it, they had managed to make love. It could hardly have been described as a night of passion but they had sealed some sort of emotional knot, though neither of them could have defined its nature. Verity was not the marrying kind. Most girls of her class were married by twenty-five with a baby or two and a husband at the office all day. She was racketing round the world doing a dirty job which, if it had to be done, most people would say should be left to men to do.

The English knew about war. They had not too long ago survived a particularly bloody one but they had relatively little interest in foreign wars. The civil war in Spain was of crucial importance to Communists and those on the left in politics but these were few in number if vociferous. Most readers of the
New Gazette
wanted to read about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who were shortly to be married in France, and the imminent coronation of King George VI. Verity was resigned to seeing her reports from the front relegated to a few columns squeezed on to the inside pages though she had written a series of articles about ‘daily life’ in the United States which had proved popular. As Edward sniffed, she might as well turn them into a book and call it
Inside America
. Two weeks was surely ample time to get the measure of that great country.

‘I hadn’t forgotten we were dining but I have to admit I had forgotten we were going somewhere first. Give me five minutes to shower and put on a clean shirt. You can entertain me while I change. Remind me where we are going first of all. It might affect my choice of necktie. And, please, don’t tell me about all our Comrades in Spain without clean shirts or neckties. I really don’t want to know.’

Just as he reached his dressing-room, he heard the sound of an épée falling on the floor.

‘Hey! Desist! Leave my weapons alone, woman.’

‘What on earth . . .? Don’t say you are taking up fencing? At your age . . . ! What are you trying to prove?’

‘I am not trying to prove anything. I was merely taking some exercise that would strengthen my leg and . . . Can you help me with this collar?’

‘You men!’ Bossily, sword still in hand, Verity bustled into the dressing-room.

‘Here, I say, dash it!’ Edward exclaimed as she tugged at the recalcitrant stud. ‘What are you trying to do? Cut off my . . . ? Ouch! Don’t do that!’ He had his trousers round his ankles and was therefore at a disadvantage.

Verity laughed. ‘Men look such asses without their trousers.’

‘You’re such an expert on male attire? Hey! Stop prodding me with that sword. I mean it. Unhand me, girl!’ He drew her to him and relieved her of the sword. He kissed her on the lips and she made no protest except to say, her voice rather unsteady, ‘What about Fenton?’

‘I’ve just remembered, it’s his evening off.’ He hopped about, clinging to Verity with one hand while trying to remove the trousers round his ankles with the other.

With a gurgle of laughter, she pushed him on to the chaise longue. ‘Why is it, whenever I kiss you, you fall over?’ she said when she could breathe again. She was referring to how, on the
Queen Mary,
Edward’s damaged knee had made him unsteady on his pins. ‘I begin to think it’s a sophisticated seduction technique.’

Although she prided herself on being tough and certainly she instilled fear in both women and men over whom she did not consider it worth taking trouble, she was not half as hard-boiled as she pretended. She loved Edward but felt she would be at a disadvantage if she let him know how much. She was afraid she could never give him what he needed . . . what he deserved . . . and she had warned him that she could never be a wife to him. If he still loved her, as he said he did, that was fate and something she knew she could do nothing about.

‘Huh!’ he grunted. ‘Why are women’s undergarments more difficult to negotiate than a minefield?’

‘Ouch! You’re hurting. I suppose I had better do it myself.’ She got up and slipped out of her dress and then removed her brassiere and knickers with a grace and lack of embarrassment which made it all seem so natural. ‘I didn’t mean for this to happen,’ she said as she lay down beside him. ‘The trouble is that, when I get cross, I get . . . Golly, this bed thing’s narrow. There! You’re sure it’s Fenton’s evening off?’

Edward said nothing. He thought there was something particularly erotic about making love on so respectable a piece of furniture as a chaise longue.

When they had finished and lit cigarettes, he said, ‘We do love each other, then? I mean, I know I love you but . . . On the
Queen Mary
. . . it wasn’t something you regretted?’

‘Don’t let’s have this conversation,’ Verity begged him. ‘We go round and round in circles. Of course I love you. I’m not some tart who gets into bed with just anyone. Let’s change the subject, shall we?’

‘I suppose so. But I like going round and round in circles with you. I always think I might just understand it this time. However,’ he went on hurriedly, seeing a look in her eyes which he knew meant her patience was being tried, ‘you never told me where we are going, before dinner.’

‘Oh my God! Stop whatever it is you are doing . . .’ – he was in fact stroking her stomach – ‘and get up. We’re terribly late. We were late before this . . .’ She gestured at the chaise longue.

‘Well then, do we have to go at all?’ Edward replied, lying back lazily, admiring her neat posterior as it disappeared into the bathroom. ‘I bet it’s one of your Communist gatherings where I catch people sizing me up with a view to hanging me from a lamp post.’

‘No, it’s not. Or rather André is a Communist but it’s not a Party “do”,’ she called over the sound of running water.

‘André?’

‘André Kavan. He’s a photographer and he’s got this exhibition in Jermyn Street. That’s what we have to go and see. It’s opening today.’

‘What sort of photographer?’ Edward inquired suspiciously.

‘A
great
photographer. He has his stuff in
Life
. You’ll recognize it when you see it.’

‘He’s a war photographer? You met him in Spain?’

‘Not just war but, yes, his photographs of the war in Spain are amazing. It makes me want to give up writing. You know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words? Well, it’s true.’

Edward, always jealous when he heard Verity enthusing about some man he did not know, wanted to ask if they were lovers and, as if reading his mind, she said, ‘And before you ask, he has a girlfriend – Gerda Meyer. She’s almost as good a photographer as he is. And she’s beautiful which is rather unfair. I expect you’ll fall for her the moment you see her. All the men do but be warned: she’d eat you for breakfast and have forgotten you by supper.’

‘I don’t need any such warning,’ Edward said with hauteur. ‘My heart is . . . well, you know where it is.’

‘It wasn’t your heart I was talking about,’ Verity said drily.

‘Really, V, wash your mouth out. When I think that, when I first knew you, you were pure as the driven snow. So how did you meet? On some ruined battlement?’

‘We met in the Ritz in Paris, if you must know. André’s a great friend of Belasco’s. We were all having dinner together.’

Edward was wise enough to say nothing. Ben Belasco was an American novelist whom Verity had met when she first went to Spain and they had had a brief but intense affair. As far as Edward knew, that was all in the past. Certainly he was going to assume so.

‘So is Mr Kavan – your photographer friend – French?’ he asked instead.

‘No, he’s a Hungarian Jew. He was thrown out of Hungary by the Fascists. I suppose Paris is his home now but I think he has a Polish passport. He speaks about ten languages – all very badly. He’s a gypsy.’

It was after seven when they reached the gallery but the party was still going strong. There were a lot of ‘Comrades’ present and Edward was rather proud to be escorting Verity. She was something of a star since her success with her Left Book Club bestseller and her reports from the front in the
New Gazette
. She had as many enemies as admirers, of course, who liked to gossip about her scandalous relationship with Lord Edward Corinth.

Verity was looking smart in a navy-blue coat with a wide belt covering the slightly creased little black dress which she liked so much. She loved hats and her navy lacquered straw hat with its white ribbon seemed to Edward just perfect. He could hardly believe that she was, in some indefinable way, ‘his’. As she disappeared into the crowd to greet old friends, he was left on his own. He glanced at the photographs on the walls and then looked more closely. They were remarkable. Taken very close up, they were almost indecently intimate but, as he peered at them, the images became grainy and began to dissolve. They revealed faces wrenched out of their normal expressions by the horror of war. There were old women with babies in their laps and dishevelled younger women running across a square staring up at the sky from which it was obvious bombs were raining down. One particularly chilling image was of a Spanish soldier, head thrown back, one hand stretched out, his gun – some sort of rifle – falling to the ground. When Edward looked closer, he was shocked to see that this was a picture of a man caught at the moment of his death. There was no visible enemy, no blood, no gaping wound but there could be no other interpretation. A bullet had checked him as he ran and stopped him dead. Edward saw that the photograph was captioned ‘Soldier falling’.