On this evening in early 1940, winter impresses itself deep into the flesh and bones of forlorn, hopeful Britain, at war with well-armed Germany. So it seems hardly fair, does it, that there hasn’t been a winter as cold as this since Queen Victoria reigned? But, as it says in the slogan such as propagandists are thinking up daily, ‘Britain Can Take It!’
The country has been at war since 3 September last year – a day when skies had been blue, a day golden and warm, and almost silent. Long before Christmas all that had changed. Now, the entire country has become relentlessly cold. Days appear shorter and darker and colder than anyone can remember. The frozen British have no one else around to warm them up with a bit of support. So they whistle in the dark, and warm their spirits with slogans and spit patriotism into their hands as they ‘Go To It’.
It is over twenty years since the last war – ‘the war to end wars’. Now this new generation is up in arms, the same old enemy, the same old war, going to slog across the same old terrain as their fathers and uncles. Same old bits and pieces will be left for mothers, sisters and aunts to pick up.
In twenty years and ten million deaths, the ghost of that old war travels on this train in the bodies of young airmen, sailors, ATS women, and men and women, who were boys and girls yesterday, now travelling to shore bases, airfields and army camps. Who has learned anything at all? Who would have thought, after four years spent in putting an end to all those young lives, that it would all start up again?
Well, for one, Eve Anders, travelling from London to Portsmouth on a gloomy, slow railway train, thought so. Still only in her early twenties – born just as the last one was ending – she is experienced in war; has seen its most terrible consequences; not a pessimist, but has been where Hitler’s Luftwaffe and Mussolini’s soldiers were practising the imposition of fascism on a decent fledgeling democracy. She was there last year, at the moment when democracy in Spain was annihilated. She had escaped by the skin of her teeth, sure that worse was to come.
Eve looks out at the cold darkness beyond the window of the London train, yawning. The man whose reflection she sees dimly and whose body warms her skinny back is Dimitri Vladim. He escaped with her and so far they haven’t been parted. But who knows, now that they have left their hide-out?
They are on the last leg of their journey from Australia to the naval town of Portsmouth via London. The long journey hasn’t been too bad until these last fifty miles. The crowded train slows down yet again. Dimitri rubs a circle in the murky steamed-up window and peers into the impenetrable blackness.
No moon, not a glimmer of light in the blacked-out winter landscape. They travel in the corridor, lucky to find even that space, but still shifting and sifting to make room at every gloomy station.
From here on, until the war is over, this is how train journeys will be: people in their tens of thousands packing and moving – even children. By coach and train schoolchildren remove from the security of their own familiar city streets and schools to go away to live in the country, which many of them will find empty and frightening. Eve Anders, now ten years on from that same experience, could tell you how it feels to be a city child and to see for the first time a wide landscape without sight of people.
Dimitri Vladim sees only his own bearded features close to Eve Anders’ profile, and beyond that nothing but the dark.
A shiver runs through him. Eve asks if he is cold. No, he’s fine; just listening to the wolves – but he doesn’t tell her this. Blackness lighted only by snow. One minute he was growing up surrounded by his large, extended family, the next crammed with siblings and cousins – all of them in the charge of grandparents – fleeing ahead of trouble. Enveloped in fur covers and caps, the elders and youngers of the Vladim family skimmed across white plains. There was howling. Why had the children been told about wolves? He heard them howling in the black Russian night, but understood that he and his family were not fleeing from wolves. They were Ukrainians, but the Jewish / German blood of their ancestors was strong. The Vladims were an educated, opinionated, and well-off family.
Dimitri was the first to become a Communist; first to become a soldier; enthusiastic in his belief in the brightness of a Soviet future.
That flight into the snowy darkness is a lifetime away, but the wolves still howl in his subconscious. When he hears them he becomes wary. He heard them last in Spain when he began to doubt his role as a political commissar. He has never told Eve how her body, scrambling and laughing to passionate climaxes with him, had stopped his ears to the warning howls until it was almost too late.
Fellow passengers idly watching him see an unusual man, big and broad, his voice strong. His life as a senior officer in the Red Army shows in his confident manner; his generous nature shows in his mouth, his intelligence in his eyes, and his love of life in the creases around them. Nowhere is evident the pain he has buried for loss of his own country.
Nor the added ache that the woman he assumed was in love with him is not: ‘I love you, Dimitri, very much, but I am not in love with you.’
The result is the same – she will not agree to marriage. She will probably still sleep with him, make love with him, have fun with him, but she will not marry him, which is what he wants. Now, more than ever.
In coming to England with her, he has taken a leap into the unknown. He knows how valuable he will be to the secret service of this country – the latest pack of wolves to circle – but will they risk letting him ‘disappear’? He is GPU, the most professional secret service in the world. That pack too must be out there on the dark plains following the scent of him. He knows GPU thinking only too well.
Their options are that they will finish him off here before he can do too much damage; negotiate for his return and then execute him; ‘persuade’ him to work as a double agent. His best hope now is that he will prove invaluable to the British secret service, who will see to it that Dimitri Vladim ‘disappears’.
He doesn’t really know why marriage has become so important. It is not because he wants to tie her to him – with a woman like Eve that would not be possible – nor because he wants to lay exclusive claim to her body; he has never been like that with women. He has believed, ever since he set eyes on him, that the secret service man Hatton did at some time have a relationship with her. And it is he who has arranged for them to come to England.
Dimitri has sometimes teased Eve about the affair. She always responds crossly and sulkily, insisting that it was not an affair, just an impulsive girlish romance, a crush. There is no meaning to this word.
It doesn’t matter.
And he must be grateful to Lieutenant Hatton for getting him away from Australia. He felt exposed there, and knew he was easily traced.
A thought, deep in the major’s subconscious, struggles to surface. If Eve would marry him, he could become a naturalised British subject, protected by that status. His conscious mind puts the subconscious down before the thought enters his mind.
His conscious says, ‘Is like world outside is vanished,’ he corrects his grammar, ‘has vanished. In Ukraine when I was boy, we played games in the dark, in the spooky cellars of the old house, Grandmother’s house. We played ghouls and ghosts. I do not remember any rules, but there was a purpose which was to scream very much.’
Eve smiles. She has always warmed to his voice, which, she suspects, he deepens and thickens because women like its masculinity. She certainly did the first time he spoke to her. Here in the corridor the lighter-toned English hardly speak and when they do it is quietly, head inclined into shoulder. In the recent past, Eve has become cosmopolitan and familiar with the traits of other nationals, but she is English at the core and she knows how curious the eavesdroppers are.
Each time the train stops Dimitri unhooks the leather strap, lets down the window and leans out. Maybe the driver knows where they are, but who else does? Peering into the dark as the train slows, someone asks anxiously, ‘Excuse me, can you see if this is Guildford? I have to get off at Guildford.’ Or, ‘They said at the ticket office that we should get to Liss by six thirty.’
To oblige, as he has control of the window, Dimitri asks, ‘Is Guildford big place? OK, this is very small railway station, but signal is red. There are trees and bushes all around, some trucks… I think a farm trailer and tractor. Where you think this might be, Eve?’
‘It could be Liss.’
He repeated the name.
‘Or Liphook.’
‘The signal is now green. I get out for you and ask… Liss is next stop.’
The man with the strange accent is a sign of things to come, foreigners with disturbing friendliness – but likeable, this unusual man in a new trilby and three-piece suit. He tells somebody that he is Russian. He could be anyone until he opens his mouth.
When three people get out at Liss, Eve finds herself sharing the small space with a sailor who is probably in his mid-twenties. He sticks a cigarette between his lips. ‘Like one?’
‘Thanks.’
He gives her a quizzical smile. ‘They’re only Woodies, you know.’
‘I like a Woodbine – I was brought up on them.’
Last year she was saving dog-ends and making roll-ups. The days of cigarette brands as class indicators are gone. A packet of five Woodbines have become quite a prize.
‘What about your friend?’
‘I should ask him.’
‘Fag, chum?’
‘Thank you, that is very kind. We have none left.’
‘Only cheap ones.’
Dimitri laughs. ‘We have smoked cheaper ones… even we have smoked nothing at all. I like very much English cigarettes.’
‘Well, well, you never know, do you? I had you as a cork-tip and cigar couple. It don’t do to presume things. Saw you waiting at Waterloo. Noticed you been out of Blighty… you know, you’ve had the old sun on you.’
Eve nods, wary of getting into an exchange of histories; the suntan laid down in Spain, deepened to bronze during the weeks in Australia.
This is her first day back home and, although English newspapers have published articles about the war in Spain written by her, not much news came the other way, so that she has very little idea of what people thought about the violent takeover of the Spanish Republic by the new dictatorship. Probably didn’t think about it at all.
‘It won’t take long to fade in this weather.’
‘Worst winter in living memory, it says in the papers.’
She nods, and they continue an exchange about the great freeze and the shock it was to the South to see what a real fall of snow is all about. She is a southerner and hardly saw snow in all the years she was growing up there.
Dimitri withdraws from Eve and the soldier by leaning on the window handrail, gazing into space and smoking in his idiosyncratic way, two fingers against his lips, hinging them away only to allow the used smoke to escape. From the corner of her eye, Eve watches him – the man who had given up everything to escape into France with her.
Dimitri Vladim, though genial, expansive and uninhibited, is also very good at keeping his own counsel; an easy man with a strong sense of what was right – not moralistic, just a sense of what was right and what was not. In Spain though a political commissar whose function was to interfere when it was in the Russian interests, being also a GPU graduate, he was first and foremost an undercover agent. Eve does not realise what this means: that They will never let him go, but will track him down. He is surprised that They have not done so already. There were few places he could have run to on leaving Spain. True, he has a false passport, but They will not find that too much of an obstacle. And even though he is travelling now as Josep Alier, somebody, somewhere could put two and two together and come up with Major Dimitri Vladim.
He is quite fatalistic about this. For now he will see what happens in England. Maybe the British secret service don’t know about his GPU role, but he can’t count upon that. Once they do know, he will become a bargaining piece. All that he can do now is to wait and see.
During the last year of the war in Spain, mused Eve, they had somehow found one another like creatures in the mating season, but unlike creatures who don’t know about tomorrow, they knew that, like anyone in that war, they could at any time become pieces of flesh and bone to feed rats and crows. Those weeks when Eve had been with Dimitri, she had thought that if they were to be blown up, at least there would be traces of lovemaking on the pieces.
War gives people lunatic notions.
But, as she had thought a hundred times in Spain, what more lunatic notion is there than to go to war? When you saw the results, it was madness. Yet here she was back home, back to the same madness.
The sailor’s voice dragged her consciousness to the surface again.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I was daydreaming.’
‘I was only saying, do you know London at all? You know… seeing as you got on there.’
‘Hardly at all. The first time I went was for the Coronation. Every building was decorated – Union Jacks everywhere. I thought it must be the most splendid city on earth.’
The sailor said, ‘So did I – went with the Sea Scouts; got a look right up the front row in The Mall.’
Eve smiled to herself. He would have been only a slightly smaller version of what he was now – a thin, neat sailor, always shipshape and Bristol fashion about his person; would shave, and oil his hair before he went on duty. ‘I went with a flock of starlings,’ she chuckled, ‘little schoolkids, but I think a flock of starlings would have been easier to control.’
Since then she had seen Paris – three times. And she had lived in Madrid, Barcelona and seen castles in Spain. And churches and colleges razed to the ground. Was it possible that London could end up with its ancient buildings bombed to rubble? Hitler, with his efficient Luftwaffe, would find the capital a fine target.
An airman who was gathering his bags closer to the door said, ‘I was up there then too. Real show, it was. My old man never held with royals – suppose I don’t really, but we hadn’t never seen anything like it.’ A short laugh. ‘He an’t never going to forgive me for enjoying myself.’ He paused and gazed out of the window. ‘I hope we seen the last of all that. Once this war’s over, the royals is going to be finished. Who’s going to miss them?’
Nobody would have dreamed of voicing such a controversial view in public a little while ago. Eve had been told that it was like this in the early days of the Spanish Republic: people spoke their minds about previously taboo subjects, being provocative, breaking down the barriers. Now they were back where they’d started. It had all been for nothing.
The train, which had been running on a single track, now rattled over the points where tracks met or diverged. This was the same track that had provided the sound-track to her childhood, hardly noticeable but comforting. When the goods-yards closed on Christmas and Boxing Days, it was most strange, almost as though the air was empty.
She had spent the first eighteen years of her life within the sound of this railway track. And she had left meaning never to return.
Eve peered out and was thrilled to see a scene that had been such a familiar part of her childhood that she had been unconscious of it: Portsmouth’s big railway goods-yard, with long engine run-in sheds with distinctively shaped roofs, white markers, signal lights and a complicated arrangement of snaking silver rails. Hardly a light showed but a yellow haze escaped the openings of the run-in sheds and was caught by the steam and smoke of the working engines. Now she could hear the clatter and chuffing that had always been there in the background of her early years.
In the clear frosty air, everything highlighted by frost and snow, she had a total picture of a bit of her own past. Ray, her big brother, had worked here. She had crossed the footbridge many times to hop on a train and skive a ride into Portsmouth Central, knowing that if ever she were caught riding without a ticket Ray would bail her out. Railwaymen looked after their own.
Although outwardly unruffled, Eve and Dimitri exuded tension. How close to one another they stood, how white her knuckles, how frequently his jaw worked.
Dimitri put an arm about her and gave her a big kiss. ‘I like this place, and English people are nice.’
‘I hope nobody ever disabuses you.’ Eve patted his hand in a gesture old for her years, but then those weeks before the fall of Barcelona had made her that.
‘I think in England we should marry.’
He’d asked her in Cape Town and he’d asked her in Sydney, Australia.
She kissed him gently on the cheek. Her tone was light and bantering. ‘“When the town clock is working well, do not send for the clockmaker.” I got that bit of wisdom from a Red Army officer I used to know.’
He squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t believe everything Russian soldier tells you.’
The engine hit the terminus buffers. Passengers left their seats, unfolding their stiff, cold bodies, reluctant to face the sharp sea air.
Sea-water, oil and things rotten swilled around the station platforms and were picked up by the wind that came knifing across the harbour. Eve, her feet cold, was anxious to be gone. A couple of porters who looked shrammed in spite of home-made scarves collected first-class passengers’ luggage and took it to the exit on handcarts.
A stark announcement in a voice not used to making public statements: ‘Lissen, please, passengers who wasn’t able to get off at Fratton or Central can find buses and trams outside. There isn’t many taxis. We’re sorry about this, but there’s a real shortage of staff.’
Dimitri hefted the baggage of third-class passengers who needed help and shouted to people who were still unsure about leaving the train. ‘Is Portsmouth Harbour station where we have come to. Some buses can go back to stations missed. Thank you. Bon voyage.’
This was the old Dimitri, the one who had kept their heads above water when the Republic was sinking. He would burst into the little rented room where they sometimes met, holding parcels wrapped in newspaper, announcing, ‘Is ham, real vodka and best American johnnies. Don’t ask where from, is not good for you to know. Eat, drink and we will use up all US navy rubber.’ He was such a good, jolly man that Eve wished that she was able to love, in the way she first believed she had. Love him enough to marry him. But love doesn’t often do what is wanted – otherwise David Hatton might have said he loved her long before he offended her sensibilities and killed her spring-flower love stone-dead.
Hefting their bags Eve and Dimitri went out of the station, hoping for a place on a bus that would take them back to where they were supposed to have been met.
At the ticket barrier a woman wearing a uniform that Eve didn’t recognise stepped forward. ‘Miss Anders, Major, I’m your transport.’ She took some of Eve’s bags. ‘Sanderson, Electra Sanderson. My father – we call him The Dad on the basis that he doesn’t think that there are any more – The Dad’s a classics man. Don’t even ask what my brother’s name is.’
‘Agamemnon?’
Sanderson laughed. ‘Close, Miss Anders. Just wait and I’ll find my porter if he hasn’t run off with my thrup’ny “joey”.’
The porter loaded the bags and Electra Sanderson gave him keys and directions where to find her car.
Dimitri dipped a little bow. ‘This is amazing, how you find us.’
Eve knew how. Contacts, instinct, past experience, bush telegraph. Only months ago she had been a courier waiting at obscure runways for small aeroplanes carrying VIPs.
‘Not so amazing, Major. The station men know me. If there’s a diversion or a delay they pass it on. They’re good chaps. Look, we could get a cuppa here if you’re desperate, or I’ll take you straight round to Griffon House – it’s up to you.’
Dimitri answered for them. ‘I think we should like something that will go to our toes very quick. Is there whisky, maybe? I do not hope for vodka.’
‘Right, Major, let’s see if we’re in luck.’
The buffet was steamy from the tea urn, and blissfully warm. Private Sanderson had obviously done this before because she did not wait at the counter but ducked under and went behind the scenes, bringing a few filled rolls on a tray set with cups and a pot of tea. ‘Don’t look so worried, Major. Money has changed hands.’ A small, thin woman, wearing a tea towel tucked into her belt, came over, plonked a milk jug on the table and said confidentially, ‘No good asking for no more, Miss Sanderson. There’s two good doubles in there.’
Sharing the whisky between two cups and pouring herself tea, Electra said, ‘Cheers. Welcome to Portsmouth, Miss Anders, Major Vladim. Anything you need over the next few days, you can get me at this number. She handed over a piece of paper. ‘But I expect Lieutenant Hatton will… well, you know… brief you… sort things for you.’
Dimitri tossed the whisky back and consumed all the rolls after a half-hearted offer to the women. Sanderson produced a packet of Black Cat cork-tipped cigarettes and told them to help themselves. Then Dimitri got up and, leaning over the counter, rumbled words quietly to the waitress, who shook her head sadly at him. Eve watched him out of the corner of her eye. Whatever it was he wanted, he would probably get.
He returned to the table where their driver was pouring tea for Eve. She indicated the pot to him but he shook his head and winked at her. ‘I wait for more milk to come.’
‘Dimitri, you really are the limit. Not in England two minutes and you’re making your “little arrangements” just the way you did in Barcelona.’
Electra Sanderson showed concern. ‘Was it bad?’
Eve and Dimitri glanced at one another. Eve said, ‘It was bad.’
‘I wanted to volunteer, but The Dad wouldn’t agree.’
This woman was thirty if she was a day, but Eve said in an even tone, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have asked him.’
‘I know. I didn’t ask him about this job. I just went to a friend and said, Can you do with a good driver, and he said yes he could. When I turned up at home in my uniform, The Dad didn’t bat an eyelid.’
‘Here’s your milk then, sir, but honest, the cow’s run dry.’ The waitress grinned cheekily at Dimitri. ‘Miss Sanderson, you tell him, it’s no good him come here doing that charm stuff with me. One and six, sir. War-time prices, I’m afraid. Everything’s going up.’ When she gave his change, he pushed back a note. ‘No, sir, that’s too much.’
‘Is for you, please.’
‘No, sir, I’ll take a tanner if you like, but that’s a ten-bob note, you understand?’ speaking slowly, emphasising as one does to a foreigner. ‘Ten bob’s a lot of money. Don’t you never tip nobody more than a shillin’, and that’s too much.’
‘Amy, you are not nobody, you are saviour of this poor traveller who have such a big body to keep warm. Please, Amy, you take ten bob. Buy some flowers.’
‘Oh, all right then, if you insist. Flowers? Not bloody likely! They tells you not to hoard nothink, but everybody is. I’m putting a few hanks of wool to one side. And I know where I can get a couple of pounds of red three-ply. Thanks, sir, thanks very much.’
‘Red is my favourite colour, Amy.’
The girl laughed, ‘Then I’ll knit you a pair of socks.’
He held up one large foot. ‘This size?’
Amy smiled. ‘Lord, sir, that’s some plates o’ meat, all right. I reckon I’d have to buy up the whole stock of wool – be like knitting a pair of dinghies.’ And tucking the note into her blouse pocket she went smiling back to her steamy tea urn.
Charm, and more charm – Eve hadn’t seen much of that from Dimitri for weeks. The decision to leave Lavender Creek had been right. Both of them were coming back to life. It was ages since they had made love with any enthusiasm. But when he’d said ‘big body to keep warm’ she’d had a stunning recollection of its vitality, its solid virility.
Sensing that her mood had changed, he caught her eye and gave her a wink, then turned to the driver.
‘Has been very nice meeting Portsmouth. Thank you, Miss Sanderson.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Eve. ‘I didn’t know what to expect, coming back to England, and this half-hour has given me time to get my breath.’
They all rose from the table and Sanderson led the way with a bright torch. ‘Steps here, mind the sandbags. Sorry about the train journey. We seem to get more funny ones than the regular ones these days. We all grumble, but don’t like to in case it’s a troop train or something that’s been the hold-up. Oh good, the moon’s come out again. Makes it easier to get about.’
Moonlight showed that the transport was a large car painted over in messy-looking matt camouflage. Even so, the styling was unmistakable.
‘Nice car,’ Eve said.
‘It was The Dad’s. People are asked to give up their cars, so he told me to take it. I look upon it as his seal of approval of me leaving home. He doesn’t know it’s been camouflaged, but he knows that I’m a depot chauffeuse. It absolutely drinks petrol so I expect it will soon have to be put away for the duration.’
Eve smiled to herself. She wouldn’t bet on it. There would always be some VIP who would expect to be driven around in a car the size of his opinion of himself.
‘Would you like to sit up front, Major? Plenty of leg room for you.’
Eve knew a well-maintained engine when she heard one. It ticked over like a Swiss watch, then slipped smoothly into gear and they slid away into the unlighted streets. Vehicles approaching from the opposite direction came into view as slits of light and passed by still with hardly any headlight showing. What must it be like when there was no snow and no moon lighting up the roads? Barcelona had had its streets blacked out, but it felt very strange to be back in her own home town in the same state. The last time she had seen it at night the harbour had been a-glitter with ships dressed over, and seafront and pier lighting.
Griffon House was ten minutes’ drive from the station. Even in the cold moonlight Eve saw nothing that she recognised except the seashore. But then this hadn’t been her stamping ground. Here there were streets of large three- and four-storey terraced villas. It was only on very special occasions that girls from her old part of town kicked up their heels here. Just one building she thought she recognised – the great lumpen hotel where she had once gone to meet David Hatton. Ages, ages, ages ago. She couldn’t stop the frisson of thrill as they passed by. What the hell, that was all done with ages ago. What he had done – satisfying his curiosity about her early life – wasn’t so bad. It was that he hadn’t understood why he should not have done it. Her childhood was her own, and he had assumed that it was all right to delve into it.
The sky had cleared so that the moon was highlighting the curling tops of the waves, their sound like the shushing wind in pine trees. It was a bitterly cold sea, but its sight and sound touched the scar of a day in Spain as near perfect as Eve had known. Later, it had bled tears, and even now was tender when touched.
Sanderson flashed her lights and heavy gates were opened by a soldier wearing a red armband and white flashes, whilst another came close to the car window. ‘Evening, miss. Everything OK?’ he said, looking briefly at a pass she held up. ‘Thanks, miss. Two more for the Skylark.’ Torch-lighting a list on a clipboard, he peered in at Dimitri and Eve. ‘Major Vladim? Right. Miss Anders? Right.’
‘Yes, yes, Corporal, get a move on. My passengers’ feet are cold as Sno-fruits.’
Genially, and in a low voice he said as he tapped his two stripes, ‘Not so much of the “get a move on”, Miss Sanderson.’ Stamping his iron-studded boots on the stone driveway to illustrate that he was the expert on frozen toes, he waved them through. ‘Now, you go careful, Miss Lee, or your dad will come to hear about it.’
As she manoeuvred the car along the narrow driveway, Electra Sanderson said, ‘I… um… should explain. That sort of exchange doesn’t usually go on, you understand. Griffon House security is really taken very seriously. It’s just that he was in the TA – the Territorial Army, volunteers – then he became the local bobby in my village. You could trust your life to Corporal Miles. But I wish that he wouldn’t call me Lee. He wouldn’t get away with it in the regular service but personnel here aren’t your regular people. But of course you would know that. Here we are then.’
The earthy smell of laurel hedge with tom-cat undertones overlaid that of the smell of the sea just a few yards across the road. Eve let the informal Sanderson and Dimitri off-load the bags, placing them in the shelter of a high, wide porch. This was a very grand house indeed: massive double doors with stained-glass window-lights, heavy brass knocker, a bell pull as well as a central brass door boss almost as big as a football, suggested ‘Only persons of rank may enter’. Who had lived here? This must be the grandest house on the seafront in the town where Eve had lived until she was a young woman, yet she wasn’t aware of its existence. But why would she be? This was not a place for a working-class girl.
These comparisons of class and rank had always been part of her thinking. I must stop it, I must stop it, she thought.
Easier said than done for anyone nurtured from birth in the English class structure. As a child Eve had only been able to articulate her sense of inequity as ‘It’s not fair!’ Now she could write pieces for left-wing papers, and argue her corner.
‘Thank you for your help, Major,’ Electra Sanderson was saying. ‘I’ll ring for somebody to let you in, then I’ll be off. I expect I shall see you whilst you’re here.’
The outline and features of the house were easy to see in the bright moonlight.
‘Do you know who lived here?’ Eve asked.
‘I don’t actually. Well, there are rumours that… well, no, one shouldn’t pass on rumours.’
‘Griffon House? Why Griffon?’
‘I do know that. Come back here.’ She took a few steps away from the house until she was brushing against the high, dense laurels. ‘There now, look up.’
Dimitri too looked where the woman pointed.
The beast that stared down was as big as a man and ready to swoop down upon them. Snow and frost etched its folded dragon wings and talons, its patterned breast and great, hooked beak.
‘Good God! It seems to be looking right at us, doesn’t it?’
‘Oh, he is, Miss Anders. He is carved like that to a purpose.’
‘Is this a wooden thing? Or is it plaster?’
‘He is a great hand-carved wooden beast.’
Eve, still looking, said, ‘He? You made a point of that.’
Sanderson gave a litde giggle and straightened her jacket. ‘Very definitely, Miss Anders, but you would need to be in what was called a ‘salon’ to… well, get the full picture. Not a thing one would want impressionable young girls to see – if you get my meaning.’
‘Is not true griffon, but he is Bavarian, that I am nearly sure. He is a house-guard. Is not easy to rob house with such creatures around. There should be others?’
‘Well, yes, Major, there are four more.’
‘But not so… ah – virile. Hey, is right word, Eve?’ He looked up at the ugly creature almost admiringly.
Private Sanderson again gave that knowing little giggle. ‘You are right. The others are female, or maybe neuter. How did you guess?’
‘Is not a guess. I have seen others. Big man monster guarding entrance watching who comes, like the sphinx in Egypt.’
‘You’re not superstitious, Major?’
‘Perhaps. Just a little.’
No one answered the doorbell, but a man shining a torch before him came round the corner of the house crunching frozen snow. ‘Keef?’ Sanderson asked.
‘You have to come to the side door.’ He picked up a couple of bags. ‘This way. Milord’s had all the leaded windows boarded up – in the event of bomb-blast.’
‘The front door looks OK.’
‘It won’t tomorrow.’
Electra said good night, and Eve and Dimitri followed the bobbing light along the path to the door over which an eerie blue lamp shone coldly. A series of curtains that did not slide on rings made a maze of an outer lobby, clinging and hampering, putting up a fight with any attempt at a swift entrance or exit. Then suddenly the visitors were within a warm and welcoming hall whose floor was a startlingly beautiful mosaic.
A tall, slim, splendidly exotic woman, aged over thirty but below forty, bore down upon them. She was dressed in a vivid flamenco skirt and warm jumper in Shetland wool over which floated a long fringed stole that must have belonged with a georgette tea gown. Her hair was bound with a scarf tied in a complicated knot. She was grateful; everything about her floated gracefully.
‘Ah, Keef, these must be the guests from Australia. Goodness, look at that wonderful suntan. Hello, my dears.’ She held out a hand, wrists jangling charms and jewels. ‘Phoebe Moncke. My job is to keep this place running on oiled wheels.’ She laughed generously, leading them further into the house. ‘Joke. Right, Keef? Keef knows; times when it’s a bit of a bear garden.’
Eve shook her firm, dry hand. ‘It looks good to me. Must be a bear garden on oiled wheels.’
Again that warm laugh.
As Dimitri took her hand he raised it and brushed his lips. ‘Thank you, I am very pleased to be in English house, Miss Moncke… is Miss?’
Ignoring the question as to her marital status, she said, ‘Major dear, how sweet. Do call me Phoebe; everyone does. If you need anything and I’m not around, you can give the gong a whack and Keef will come – won’t you, Keef? – like a genie from his lamp. Your wish is his command.’
Keef might have been deaf for all the response he showed. Phoebe Moncke gave them a friendly smile with her mouth and a shrewd look with her eyes. Her chaotic appearance and chatter didn’t chime with the shrewdness.
‘Sorry, but I have to write down some stuff about you – like a hotel, really. Come through to the warm room – we always try to keep one room liveable.’
They went on to the next room but Keef did not follow.
The room, with its decorative ceiling and embossed wallpaper, was at odds with the uninteresting utilitarian furniture. There were no curtains, but shutters were fastened across the tall windows. A fire in the marble fireplace saved everything. Large lumps of tree burned brightly.
‘Take a pew and get warm. Nice G&T?’ After blowing down a speaking tube, she pronounced clearly, ‘Whoever is in there – bring some drinks in the warm room if you will.’
As they were warming up, Keef came in with four drinks on a tin tray, offered them, took one himself and sat close to the fire.
Eve hadn’t had such a good G&T for a long time.
‘Good stuff, Keef. Is this the bottle Baz Faludi brought in?’
‘On its last legs.’
‘Oh well, much appreciated. Cheers, my dears. Welcome to Griff. Now let’s just get shot of the paperwork. The questions are quite straightforward, if you will just check that we have your name right and that sort of thing. And your passports, please. They go into the safe whilst you are with us.’ She laughed. ‘Safe – you should see it – more like a vault. Makes one speculate on what Milord kept in it.’
Eve opened the battered bag that had been with her since she first began travelling, but Dimitri took the bag from her and refastened it. ‘I think we keep these.’
Phoebe smiled. ‘Major dear, it’s easy to see that you have travelled in countries where papers and passports should never leave your person – but this is England.’
‘Of course, Miss Moncke. Is wonderful that I am at last here. I know for sure that secret police will not keep my papers from me in UK. Even so, is better if I keep them safe for now.’
A short, silent skirmish ensued in a battle of egos, which Phoebe Moncke lost – or at least made a strategic withdrawal. ‘So be it, Major darling. Now, I am sure that you will want to get settled in. Keef, will you show them up? Keef, by the way, is in cahoots with me here. He’s good with the paperwork, I’m more practical. You might not think so, but I am. Now, you have connecting rooms, small bathroom at the end of the landing. Be dears and don’t take deep baths. We try not to bathe every day. Two overhead showers, quick and clean at the same time as being patriotic. Must save fuel as we are urged. Quite right too.’
One of Eve’s dearest friends used to say of his covert homosexuality, ‘It takes one to know one.’ Eve knew Phoebe Moncke was as much a put-up job as she herself was. Her approachability, eccentric dress and disarming, dotty way of speaking was acquired, as was Eve’s cool poise and cultured accent. If you weren’t careful you could easily find yourself falling for it.
‘Chatter, chatter, that is my worst trait. Anyone will tell you so. What you need is rest and quiet, so up you go, and we will talk in the morning.’