The Secret Pilgrim (8 page)

Had we talked about Stefanie on those occasions? We hadn't. Stefanie was someone we discussed in motion, glancingly, not side by side through a stationary wall. Stefanie was a phantom shared on the run, an enigma too delightful to dissect. So perhaps that's why I didn't think of her. Or not yet. Not knowingly. There was no dramatic moment when a great light went up and I sprang from my bath shouting, “
Stefanie!”
It simply didn't happen that way, for the reason I'm trying to explain to you; somewhere in the no-man's-land between confession and self-preservation, Stefanie floated like a mythic creature who only existed when she was owned up to. As best I remember, the notion of her first came back to me as I was tidying up the mess left by Personnel. Stumbling on my last year's diary, I began flipping through it, thinking how much more of life we live than we remember. And in the month of June, I came on a line drawn diagonally through the two middle weeks, and the numeral “8” written neatly beside it—meaning Camp 8, North Argyll, where we did our paramilitary training. And I began to thank—or perhaps merely to sense—yes, of course, Stefanie.

And from there, still without any sudden Archimedean revelation, I found myself reliving our night drive over the moonlit Highlands. Ben at the wheel of the open Triumph roadster, and myself beside him making chatty conversation in order to keep him awake, because we were both happily exhausted after a week of pretending we were in the Albanian mountains raising a guerrilla army. And the June air rushing over our faces.

The rest of the intake were travelling back to London on the Sarratt bus. But Ben and I had Stefanie's Triumph roadster
because Steff was a sport, Steff was selfless, Steff had driven it all the way from Oban to Glasgow just so that Ben could borrow it for the week and bring it back to her when the course restarted. And that was how Stefanie came back to me—exactly as she had come to me in the car—amorphously, a titillating concept, a shared woman—Ben's.

“So who or what
is
Stefanie, or do I get the usual loud silence?” I asked him as I pulled open the glove compartment and looked in vain for traces of her.

For a while I got the loud silence.

“Stefanie is a light to the ungodly and a paragon to the virtuous,” he replied gravely. And then, more deprecatingly: “Steff's from the Hun side of the family.” He was from it himself, he liked to say in his more acerbic moods. Steff was from the Arno side, he was saying.

“Is she pretty?” I asked.

“Don't be vulgar.”

“Beautiful?”

“Less vulgar, but still not there.”

“What is she, then?”

“She is perfection. She is luminous. She is peerless.”

“So beautiful, then?”

“No, you lout. Exquisite.
Sans pareil.
Intelligent beyond the dreams of Personnel.”

“And otherwise—to you—what is she? Apart from being Hun and the owner of this car?”

“She is my mother's eighteenth cousin dozens of time removed. After the war she came and lived with us in Shropshire and we grew up together.”

“So she's your age, then?”

“If the eternal is to be measured, yes.”

“Your proxy sister, as it were?”

“She was. For a few years. We ran wild together, pick mushrooms in the dawn, touched wee-wees. Then I went to boarding
school and she returned to Munich to resume being a Hun. End of childhood idyll and back to Daddy and England.”

I had never known him so forthcoming about any woman, nor about himself.

“And now?”

I feared he had switched off again, but finally he answered me. “Now is less funny. She went to art school, took up with a mad painter and settled in a dower house in the Western Isles of Scotland.”

“Why's it less funny? Doesn't her painter like you?”

“He doesn't like anyone. He shot himself. Reasons unknown. Left a note to the local council apologising for the mess. No note to Steff. They weren't married, which made it more of a muddle.”

“And now?” I asked him again.

“She still lives there.”

“On the island?”

“Yes.”

“In the dower house?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Most of the time.”

“You mean you go and see her?”

“I
see
her, yes. So I suppose I
go
too. Yes. I go and see her.”

“Is it serious?”

“Everything to do with Steff is massively serious.”

“What does she do when you're not there?”

“Same as she does when I'm there, I should think. Paints. Talks to the dickie birds. Reads. Plays music. Reads. Plays music. Paints. Thinks. Reads. Lends me her car. Do you want to know any more of my business?”

For a while we remained strangers, until Ben once more relented. “Tell you what, Ned. Marry her.”

“Stefanie?”

“Who else, you idiot? That's a bloody good idea, come to think of it. I propose to bring the two of you together to discuss it. You
shall marry Steff, Steff shall marry you, and I shall come and live with you both, and fish the loch.”

My question sprang from a monstrous, culpable innocence: “Why don't you marry her yourself?” I asked.

Was it only now, standing in my flat and watching the slow dawn print itself on the walls, that I had the answer? Staring at the ruled-out pages of last June and remembering with a jolt his dreadful letter?

Or was it given to me already in the car, by Ben's silence as we sped through the Scottish night? Did I know even then that Ben was telling me he would never marry any woman?

And was this the reason why I had banished Stefanie from my conscious memory, planting her so deep that not even Smiley, for all his clever delving, had been able to exhume her?

Had I looked at Ben as I asked him my fatal question? Had I looked at him as he refused, and went on refusing, to reply? Had I deliberately
not
looked at him at all? I was used to his silences by then, so perhaps, having waited in vain, I punished him by entering my own thoughts.

All I knew for certain was that Ben never answered my question, and that neither of us ever mentioned Stefanie again.

Stefanie his dream woman, I thought as I continued to examine the diary. On her island. Who loved him. But should marry me.

Who had the taint of death about her that Ben's heroes always seemed to need.

Eternal Stefanie, a light to the ungodly, luminous, peerless, German Stefanie, his paragon and proxy sister—mother too, perhaps—waving to him from her tower, offering him sanctuary from his father.

You have to put yourself in Ben's position,
Smiley had said.

Yet even now, the open diary in my hands, I did not allow myself the elusive moment of revelation. An idea was forming in me. Gradually it became a possibility. And only gradually again, as my
state of physical and mental siege bore in on me, did it harden into conviction, and finally purpose.

It was morning at last. I hoovered the flat. I dusted and polished. I considered my anger. Dispassionately, you understand; I reopened the desk, pulled out my desecrated private papers and burned in the grate whatever I felt had been irrevocably sullied by the intrusion of Smiley and Personnel: the letters from Mabel, the exhortations from my former tutor to “do something a bit more fun” than mere research work at the War Office.

I did these things with the outside of myself while the rest of me grappled with the correct, the moral, the decent course of action.

Ben, my friend.

Ben, with the dogs after him.

Ben in anguish, and God knew what more besides.

Stefanie.

I took a long bath, then lay on my bed watching the mirror on the chest of drawers because the mirror gave me a view of the street. I could see a couple of men whom I took to be Monty's, dressed in overalls and doing something longwinded with a junction box. Smiley had said I shouldn't take them personally. After all, they only wanted to put Ben in irons.

It is ten o'clock of the same long morning as I stand purposefully to one side of my rear window, peering down into the squalid courtyard, with its creosoted shed that used to be the old privy, and its clapboard gate that opens on the dingy street. The street is empty. Monty is not so perfect after all.

The Western Isles, Ben had said. A dower house on the Western Isles.

But which isle? And Stefanie who? The only safe guess was that if she came from the German side of Ben's family and lived in Munich, and that since Ben's German relatives were grand, she was likely to be titled.

I rang Personnel. I might have rung Smiley but I felt safer lying to Personnel. He recognised my voice before I had a chance to state my business.

“Have you heard anything?” he demanded.

“Afraid not. I want to go out for an hour. Can I do that?”

“Where to?”

“I need a few things. Provisions. Something to read. Thought I'd just pop round to the library.”

Personnel was famous for his disapproving silences.

“Be back by eleven. Ring me as soon as you get in.”

Pleased by my cool performance, I went out by the front door, bought a newspaper and bread. Using shop windows, I checked my back. Nobody was following me, I was sure. I went to the public library and from the reference section drew an old copy of
Who's Who
and a tattered
Almanach de Gotha.
I did not pause to ask myself who on earth, in Battersea of all places, could have worn out the
Almanach de Gotha.
I consulted the
Who's Who
first and turned up Ben's father, who had a knighthood and a battery of decorations: “
1936, married the Gräfin Ilse Arno zu Lothringen, one son Benjamin Arno.
” I switched to the
Almanach
and turned up the Arno Lothringens. They rated three pages, but it took me no time to identify the distant cousin whose first name was Stefanie. I boldly asked the librarian for a telephone directory for the Western Isles of Scotland. She hadn't one, but allowed me to call enquiries on her telephone, which was fortunate for I had no doubt my own was being tapped. By ten-forty-five I was back at the telephone in my flat talking to Personnel in the same relaxed tone as before.

“Where did you go?” he asked

“To the newsagent. And the baker's.”

“Didn't you go the library?”

“Library? Oh yes. Yes, I did.”

“And what, pray, did you take out?”

“Nothing, actually. For some reason I find it hard to settle to anything at the moment. What do I do next?”

Waiting for him to reply, I wondered whether I had given too many answers but decided I had not.

“You wait. The same as the rest of us.”

“Can I come in to Head Office?”

“Since you're waiting, you might as well wait there as here.”

“I could go back to Monty, if you like.”

It was probably my over-acute imagination at work, but I had a mental image of Smiley standing at his elbow, telling him how to answer me.

“Just wait where you are,” he said curtly.

I waited, Lord knows how. I pretended to read. I dramatised myself and wrote a pompous letter of resignation to Personnel. I tore up the letter and burned the pieces. I watched television, and in the evening I lay on the bed observing the changing of Monty's guard in the mirror and thinking of Stefanie, then Ben, then Stefanie again, who was now firmly lodged in my imagination, always outside my reach, dressed in white, Stefanie the immaculate, Ben's protector. I was young, let me remind you, and in matters of women less experienced than you would have suspected if you had heard me speak of them. The Adam in me was still pretty much a child, not to be confused with the warrior.

I waited till ten, then slipped downstairs with a bottle of wine for Mr Simpson and his wife, and sat with them while we drank it, watching more television. Then I took Mr Simpson aside.

“Chris,” I said. “I know it's daft but there's a jealous lady stalking me and I'd like to leave by the back way. Would you mind letting me out through your kitchen?”

An hour later, I was on the night sleeper to Glasgow. I had obeyed my counter-surveillance procedures to the letter and I was certain I was not being followed. At Glasgow Central Station, all the same, I took the precaution of dawdling over a pot of tea in the buffet while I cocked an eye for potential watchers. As a further precaution, I hired a cab to Helensburgh on the other side of the Clyde, before joining the Campbeltown bus to West Loch Tarbert.
The ferry to the Western Isles sailed three days a week in those days, except for the short summer season. But my luck held: a boat was waiting, and she sailed as soon as I had boarded her, so that by early afternoon we had passed Jura, docked at Port Askaig and were heading out to the open sea again under a darkening northern sky. We were down to three passengers by then, an old couple and myself, and when I went up on deck to fend off their questions, the first mate cheerfully asked me more of his own: Was I on holiday now? Was I a doctor then? Was I married at all? Nevertheless, I was in my element. From the moment I take to the sea, everyone is clear to me, everything possible. Yes, I thought excitedly, surveying the great crags as they approached, and smiling at the shrieking of the gulls, yes, this is where Ben would hide! This is where his Wagnerian demons would find their ease!

You must understand and try to pardon my callow susceptibility in those days to all forms of Nordic abstraction. What Ben was driven by, I pursued. The mythic island—it should have been Ossian's!—the swirling clouds and tossing sea, the priestess in her solitary castle—I could not get enough of them. I was in the middle of my Romantic period, and my soul was lost to Stefanie before I met her.

The dower house was on the other side of the island, they told me at the shop, better ask young Fergus to take you in his jeep. Young Fergus turned out to be seventy, if a day. We passed between a pair of crumbling iron gates. I paid off young Fergus and rang the bell. The door opened; a fair woman stared at me.