The Spy (7 page)

The bus passed the Gloucester.

She glanced back, but the cause of her uneasiness wasn't there.

Valerie closed her eyes, remembering the Royal. She heard the orchestra playing, the assertive baritones of the officers, asking her to dance. As she moved about the floor, her reverie was interrupted by the shrill and irritable voices of two small children, across the aisle, struggling with their nanny burdened with bags of white-papered packages, reeking of offal and fish. To calm them, the nanny was getting them to chant “Humpty Dumpty.”

ABBOTSBURY
, the sign said....

Famous for its swannery. Round and round went the royal swans, in endless circles of stillness, like the women, having nothing else to do, who came to watch them. Could one cook them, like a goose? Weren't their feathers coated with grease? She wondered if swans were good to eat.

Maybe the necks...

There was no telling what she might have to eat in France. Her thoughts returning to the Royal, she wished for a cigarette. Clementine Churchill had sent her a nice letter, on paper that smelled of jasmine, remarking she would see what she could do in recommending her for a better job. It had been some time, she still hadn't heard.

She scratched her nose.

As the country flew behind her, photos of the Dorset Coast, called locally “Golden Cap,” filled her mind; and she thought of the vicarage: the sheer and dangerous slope of grass that ran down to the cliff. Blocked by a hedge, roots crawled over the edge to a straight drop of five hundred feet. Once, when she was ten, she had fought her way through, emerging on the lip of the precipice. She took pictures of it. After, she had stared at the slow-moving waters far below, white-topped breakers smashing into the rocky channel coast.

Children do that.

Climbing down fifty feet, she had climbed back up.

Actually, nothing had been too daring for her to try: if the boys could do it, she could. If they called her bluff, she would leave them standing. Later, fierce fights ensued, after they stole two of her mother's chickens. Her mother, Alma, had got them as chicks through a mail-order advert, appointing her daughter their guardian. Valerie felt honored, but after studying the mental processes of the birds for a few weeks, she had concluded that their brains were still waiting to arrive in the mail.

When she walked into the vicarage, Newton Swyre, her parents—Vicar Edward Crewe and his wife, Alma—were having afternoon tea. Surprised to see her, she could sense their irritation. Strangers, friends of her mother's, were on hand: a plethora of voices. Hurried introductions...names lost in the air. “Mama!” Brian, her little boy, fighting his way through a sea of legs, ran towards her shouting, “Are you going to take me back, Mama?”

She could see her father, standing darkly in the doorway.

“Yes, love.”

But the boy would be safe, here at the vicarage, away from the rockets and explosions in the cities: the children must be protected. Besides, Lieutenant Carrington had insisted—oh yes! her mother made that clear—which got her guests talking about the navy again. A woman Valerie didn't know asked her where they'd be sending her next. Word for word, the girl parroted Hamilton's line. Weren't the bombs still falling at Southampton? No, Valerie assured them, they were falling on London.

Fans fluttered in the heat.

Brian, heavy with ice cream, was put to bed for a nap. The grownups prepared to play cards. Annoyed that she had not called first, her parents attended to their invited guests.

Valerie walked alone over to the church.

Bushes of yellow gorse pushed in upon the road, heavy with the smell of summer's heat. Old oak trees, gnarled from centuries of British history, stood massive sentinels to the eerie trilling of birds. Where the branches joined overhead, the country road seemed particularly narrow. Then, the sun would come streaming through, between the gaps of the leaves, sketching cobwebs on the slate of a child's frightened mind. The air today was tasting hot and sweet, magnetic as if touched by a current. She licked her lips. Could the beams of light, high in the limbs spearing through the tops of the trees, curving down the coast, be the reason “Golden Cap” had received its name? She stepped to one side—into the leaves—and listened. A face was there. Except that it wasn't a face. Trying to photograph it, it was gone. A voice...

It will move through the trees
....

Valerie returned to the road, not daring to glance sideways at the
Inhabitants
. Within the grove, bronzed with sepia, shadowy beings were standing in the sunshine. Silvery at twilight—they were waiting to play with her. It was because she had to go away, she told them, but she had not told them why....

For security reasons.

She glanced back towards the house. Voices were drifting across the field. Someone was laughing. Valerie squinted. A sound, like wind. Thirty feet up, a giant rook exploded out of the branches, and flapped across her path!

Click
!

She passed a rotted bench where the road bled away into slippery sheets of grass, tumbling down to the edge of the cliff five hundred feet above the sea. The church, tarnished with time and the weight of childhood memories, loomed out of the dusk as ominous and threatening as a forbidden book—possibly one of those by Frank Harris, Havelock Ellis, or Rudjer Boskovic that her father kept locked in a special cabinet in his bedroom.

But there was something about her father's books that he didn't know. She thought of them as genies, hiding in a box from which they jumped forth at twilight, just before dark, to gather in the secret places of the woods, fearful and forsaken, or to crowd forward about the walls of the church, the sight of which was now causing dread to swell in her heart....

It was where death lived.

She entered the vestry, found a seat, and turned to the wall on the right. There, on the Roll of Honor, was the name of her brother. In alphabetical order, a short list of the living, the longer list, of the dead. Names of local young men mostly, navigators and cadets: Battle of Britain pilots who had gone up into the cold, dark, terrible air. Next to each name killed gleamed a cross, polished in brass, and down near the bottom, the name of Basil Sinclair. Her mother had explained it. Though he had not come from this parish, her father had made the arrangements. Valerie, who had not been consulted, considered it a personal intrusion.

The vicar meant it as a surprise.

She recalled the day she received the dreaded telegram that read, “
THE LORDS OF THE ADMIRALTY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR HUSBAND BASIL SINCLAIR IS MISSING, BELIEVED KILLED ON WAR SERVICE
.” Her father had talked with her at length. Afterwards, he had told her, “You must remember, my dear, in a war like this,
no one
is privileged.”

“Yes, Father, I've noticed.”

Bombs had fallen on the small town of Bridport.

Still in the church, the candidate said a short prayer. She closed her eyes. “Please, God, if you love me, be with me on this mission, and help me...to...” Tears came, words would not follow. In her heart, she knew prayer could not deliver her and neither could their God. The horrors of Hitler filled her future—there, in its ashes, where she would walk.

She got up and walked out of the church.

She saw the sun dancing, and it was like a disk—two disks shimmering, blue-grey silver rimmed with gold—and she intentionally let it burn her eyes for a few seconds. A third disk emerged from the second, vertically, and at right angles to the first. The south poles joined. She blinked, and uncrossed her eyes. The two suns slid back into one. It was how she took pictures, her film from the world. She knew she was different. Were there others, photographers she didn't know about? She slogged along kicking at weeds, stumbling and feeling crazy, and wanting not ever to return.

She arrived back at the house and opened the door and walked into the room where Brian slept. She sat down on the bed and put her arms around him. He was already awake, and he looked up at her. “Mama, why are you so quiet? What's the matter, Mama?
Mama!
Grandpa hasn't been saying his prayers.”

The child spy
...

She looked lovingly at her son.

“Mama, please. Please may we go?” asked the small child.

“I am sorry, darling. Perhaps soon. Give Mother a kiss.” She dug in her purse and handed him Basil's picture, the photo of his father. “Guess who
this
is,” she teased, her voice musical. Her son sat up, clutching it awkwardly. “Oh, we have been here a long time, haven't we? You are right, dear. We need not be quiet any longer. You have been a very good little boy.”

How could she leave him here?

Invited to spend the night, she accepted. The needs of the guests came first, but they were either already gone, or leaving, and she went into what used to be her room and closed the door. Brian slept with her parents, and she had packing to do. Her room had not changed, and neither had their lives. She looked at the box radio, placed next to the bed by her mother, for her visit. From a distance, she could hear the whispering of the sea. Valerie listened. They went to bed with the chickens out here. She pulled the blackout curtains and set the alarm for 500 hours. Pre-dawn busses lay ahead. She clicked off the light, undressed, and got under the covers. The sheets, which had lain unused for months, smelled like dead bibles. In some terrible and sad way, the vicarage had reclaimed her again. Would she ever be free? They asked her to sleep in her own bed, but she didn't have one anymore.

In the dark, she thought back to her father's bedroom, just down the hall; and to that secret cabinet, long ago. Thumbing through his prayer book, she had discovered a key, buried in its spine. Her parents, gone on holiday, had left her at home for the weekend. She had read the books, beginning with Frank Harris, devouring all five of his volumes. She read the other ones, too. Edward Crewe, she discovered, had tried to lock up evil. But in locking up evil, he had locked up truth. By protecting her from it, he had denied her the knowledge to know it; and she had torn it out of his cabinet with the furious and starving hands of her mind. The afternoon's meeting with Hamilton came back to her. She had it within her; she was going to
be
somebody! The history books, he had said.

Really?

Valerie reached over, she turned on the radio. In coveralls, live from the floor of a factory, the fist of Vera Lynn was swinging at the nation, giving Hitler hell....

Heute Deutschland, Morgen Die Ganze Welt!

Clocks were ticking....

Time passed. She kicked off the covers, as though ready for love. Her eyes had closed in sleep. At the edge of the vicarage, a limousine had arrived. Silver and black in the shadows, it trembled like a cat. Leaves were blowing, and the curtains moved. The programs changed. Music came on. Sinclair rolled over. There, from the nightstand, aglow in the darkness, sweet in their singing and brazen with mourning, the Second Welsh Fusiliers marched steadily past her bedside....

Piping her to glory.

Scotland was hot!

Commissioned before midnight, an officer now, Valerie Sinclair arrived in Edinburgh wearing her W.R.N.S. uniform as Hamilton had instructed. Rockets, missing the tracks, had exploded along the way, and she realized that Germany could still win the war.

Adrift in the terminal on this Saturday afternoon, some kids were eating popcorn. They were stuffing it into their mouths while dropping a good portion of it, and some birds had got in somehow and were following them around. The trails of kids, popcorn, and birds had created a barrier in the middle of the platform which people were carefully sidestepping in order to get where they were going.

The birds, keeping a sharp eye peeled for shoes, had accepted Sinclair into their midst and were sticking close to the smallest kid, who was holding behind the rest of them like an anchor. Dragging a sweater with one hand and spilling popcorn with the other, he was trying to tell the others up front that what he really wanted was a candy bar. Valerie, who had just decided to buy him one, suddenly jumped upon hearing the voice behind her, causing the birds to run out in all directions, like water leaving a drain.

“Good journey, was it?” He picked up her bag.

“Yes thank you, Commander.” The kids were getting away! She had hoped they would lead her to the vendor.

As they walked through the station yard, Valerie trailing, he informed her of her new rank. “You're a Lieutenant,” Hamilton said over his shoulder. “It came through this morning.”

“I
am
?”

Valerie caught him up.

“Better pay and privileges...hmmm?” He steered them around a group of Hindus, wrapped in white and thrusting up posters of Gandhi. Sinclair, interested in such things, wanted to stop and read the messages, which seemed to be printed backwards. Hamilton, muttering something about radicals, pulled her away. “Papers all signed. Looks better for the Record, you see...” What he didn't tell her was, “In case you don't come back.”

Lieutenant Seymour had tracked down Bridley. James was going out of the country, no one knew where, but Seymour had managed to track him to his favorite bar, the El Flamingo, where Bridley was about to be flattened by an irate Irishman who had caught him wiring the urinal in the men's room. Quickly measuring the situation, and sensing Bridle's imminent doom, Seymour had swung first. The Irishman, being a fair chap, had flattened Seymour instead, whereupon Bridley had promptly come up with the requisite signature.

Valerie Sinclair was approved.

“By the way,” purred Hamilton, “Lieutenant Seymour sends you his warmest regards.”

“He
does
? She liked Seymour. He had let her hold his gun.

The Commander looked over the tops of heads. “Ah! De Beck!” Dressed in the rich blue of the Free French, her French counterpart was opening the door of their car. It was Hamilton who had selected this officer, known to him, and recommended by Commodore Blackstone.