Restless

  The Story of Eva Delectorskaya

  London. 1942

  EVA DELECTORSKAYA WATCHED ALFIE Blytheswood leave the side entrance of Electra House and duck into a small pub off the Victoria Embankment called the Cooper’s Arms. She gave him five minutes and then went in herself. Blytheswood stood with a couple of friends at the bar of the snug, drinking a pint of beer. Eva was wearing spectacles and a beret and she approached the bar herselfand ordered a dry sherry. If Blytheswood glanced up from his conversation he would easily spot her, though she was confident he wouldn’t recognise her, the new length and colour of her hair seeming to alter her appearance significantly. However, she had put on the spectacles at the last moment, suddenly a little unsure. But she had to test her disguise, her new persona. She took her sherry to a table by the door, where she read her newspaper. When Blytheswood left, walking past her table, he didn’t even glance at her. She followed him to his bus stop and waited with the others in the queue for his bus to arrive. Blytheswood had a long journey ahead of him, north to Barnet, where he lived with his wife and three children. Eva knew all this because she had been shadowing him for three days. At Hampstead a seat behind him was vacated and Eva slipped quietly into it.

  Blytheswood was dozing, his head repeatedly nodding forward then abruptly jerking up as he regained consciousness. Eva leant forward and placed her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t turn round, Alfie,’ she said, softly in his ear. ‘You know who it is.’

  Blytheswood was completely rigid and completely awake.

  ‘Eve,’ he said. ‘Bloody hell. I can’t believe it.’ He moved to turn his head reflexively but she stopped him with her palm on his cheek.

  ‘If you don’t turn round, then you can honestly say you haven’t seen me.’

  He nodded. ‘Right, yes, yes, that would be best.’

  ‘What do you know about me?’

  ‘They said you’d flown. Morris killed himself and you flew away.’

  ‘That’s right. Did they tell you why?’

  ‘They said you and Morris were ghosts.’

  ‘It’s all lies, Alfie. If I was a ghost do you think I’d be sitting on this bus, talking to you?’

  ‘No …No, I suppose not.’

  ‘Morris was killed because he’d found something out. I was meant to be killed too. I’d be dead now if I hadn’t flown.’

  She could see him struggling with his desire to turn and look at her. She was fully aware of the risks involved in this contact but there were certain things she had to find out and Blytheswood was the only person she could ask.

  ‘Have you heard from Angus or Sylvia?’ she asked.

  Blytheswood tried to swivel his head again but she stopped him with her fingertips.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That they’re dead.’

  She jolted visibly at this news, as if the bus had braked suddenly. She felt suddenly sick, saliva flowing into her mouth as if she were about to gag or vomit.

  ‘My God,’ she said, trying to take this in. ‘How? What happened?’

  ‘They were in a flying boat, a Sunderland, shot down between Lisbon and Poole Harbour. They were flying back from the States. Everyone on the plane was killed. Sixteen, eighteen people, I think.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Early January. Some general was on board. Didn’t you read about it?’

  She remembered something, vaguely – but of course Angus Woolf and Sylvia Rhys-Meyer wouldn’t have been mentioned among the casualties.

  ‘Jerries were waiting for them. Bay of Biscay, somewhere.’

  She was thinking: Morris, Angus, Sylvia. And there should have been me too. AAS Ltd was being rolled up. She had flown and disappeared; that left only Blytheswood.

  ‘You should be all right, Alfie,’ she said. ‘You left early.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We’re being rolled up, aren’t we? It’s only because I flew that I’m still here. There’s only you and me left.’

  ‘There’s still Mr Romer. No, no, I can’t believe that, Eve. Us being rolled up? Just bad luck, surely.’

  He was wishful-thinking. She knew he could read the signs as well as she could.

  ‘Have you heard from Mr Romer?’ she said. ‘No, actually, as a matter of fact I haven’t.’

  ‘Be very careful, Alfie, if you hear that Mr Romer wants to meet you.’ She said this without thinking and she immediately regretted it as she could see Blytheswood’s head instantly shaking slightly as he ran through the implications of her remark. For all that he had been part of AAS Ltd for several years, Blytheswood was essentially an immensely skilled radio operator, an electrical engineer of some genius; these kind of complexities – dark nuances, sudden contradictions in the established order of things – disturbed him, made no sense, Eva could tell.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of time for Mr Romer,’ he said finally, with a bit of petulance in his voice, as if he were a loyal estate worker being asked to pass judgement on the lord of the manor.

  Eva realised she couldn’t leave it like this. ‘Just …’ she paused, thinking fast, ‘just don’t ever tell him we’ve had this conversation or you’ll be as dead as the others,’ she said, her voice harsh.

  He took this in, his head slightly bowed now, his shoulders slumped, not wanting this information at all, and Eva saw her opportunity and was out of her seat and down the stairs before he had time to turn round to see her go. The bus was slowing for some traffic lights and she jumped off and ran into a newsagent’s. Blytheswood, had he looked, would have seen the back of a woman in a beret, nothing more. She watched the bus pull away from the lights but he didn’t get off. Let’s hope he took me seriously, she thought, wondering all the same if she’d made a bad mistake. The worst, the very worst, that could happen was that Romer would know for sure that she was now back in England, but that was all, and in any event he was probably working with that possibility in mind – nothing had really changed – except that she knew now about Angus and Sylvia. And she thought about them both, and the times they had shared, and she remembered, with bitterness, the vow she had made to herself in Canada and how it hardened her resolve. She bought an evening paper to discover the latest news of the air raids and the casualty figures.

  The convoy had left St John, New Brunswick, on 18 January 1942, as planned. It was a stormy crossing but, apart from the bad weather, uneventful. There were twenty passengers on their ex-Belgian cargo ship – the SS Brazzaville – carrying aero-engines and steel girders: five government secretaries from Ottawa transferring to the London embassy, half a dozen officers from the Royal Regiment of Canada and an assortment of diplomatic staff. The heaving ocean kept most of the passengers to their cabins. Eva shared hers with an inordinately tall girl from the Department of Mines, called Cecily Fontaine, who needed to vomit every half-hour, as it turned out. By day Eva spent her time in the cramped ‘staterooms’ trying to read, and for three nights managed to claim one of the two empty beds in the Brazzaville’s sick bay before a stoker with a grumbling appendix drove her back to Cecily. From time to time Eva would venture on deck to gaze at the grey sky, the grey turbulent water and the grey ships with their belching smokestacks butting and smashing onward through the waves and jagged swells – disappearing in explosions of wintry spume from time to time – gamely making for the British Isles.

  The first day out of St John they did their life-jacket evacuation drill and Eva hoped she’d never have to trust her person to those two canvas-covered cork-filled pillows she slipped over her head. The few seasickness survivors gathered in the mess under naked light bulbs to eat horrible tinned food three times a day. Eva marvelled at her redoubtability: four days into the voyage, only three of them were mustering for meals. One night a particularly large wave wrenched one of the Brazzaville’s lifeboats from its davits and it proved impossible to winch it back into its original position. The Brazzaville slipped back through the convo
y because of the lifeboat’s drag until – after furious signalling between the accompanying destroyers – it was cut free and allowed to drift away into the Atlantic. The thought struck Eva that if this unmanned lifeboat was found drifting wouldn’t it be assumed that its mother ship had gone down? Perhaps this could be the little bit of luck she was looking for. She did not rest her hopes upon it, however.

  They arrived at Gourock eight days later just before sunset and, as the sulphurous peachy light illuminated their surroundings, they found themselves docking in a harbour-graveyard of scuttled, listing and damaged ships, masts askew, funnels missing, bleak testimony to the U-boat gauntlet that they had managed to run unscathed. Eva disembarked with her pale and shaky colleagues and they were taken by bus into Glasgow’s Central Station. She was tempted to leave them there and then but decided that a discreet departure overnight en route to London would be more efficacious. So she stepped off the sleeper at Peterborough, leaving her sleeping colleagues unaware, and carefully positioning a note for Cecily, saying that she was going to visit an aunt in Hull and would rejoin them in London. She doubted she would be missed for a day or two and so caught the next train for London and headed directly for Battersea and Mrs Dangerfield.

  She burned her Margery Atterdine passport, leaf by leaf, and dropped the ashes here and there all over Battersea. She was now Lily Fitzroy, at least for a short while, and she had almost £34, all told, to her name once she had converted her remaining Canadian dollars and added them to the money she had hidden beneath the floorboards.

  She lived quietly in Battersea for a week or two. Elsewhere in the world the Japanese seemed to be moving effortlessly through South-East Asia and there were new reverses for the British forces in North Africa. She thought of Romer every day and wondered what he was doing, confident that he’d be thinking of her too. The air raids were still coming in but without the regularity and remorseless ferocity of the Blitz. She spent a few nights in Mrs Dangerfield’s Anderson shelter at the bottom of her narrow garden, where she regaled her with tales of her fictitious life in the USA, making Mrs Dangerfield’s mouth open and eyes widen at the news of the wealth and profligacy of America, its superabundance and democratic generosity. ‘I would never have come back myself, dear,’ Mrs Dangerfield said with sincere feeling, reaching for her hands. ‘A few days ago you were having cocktails in the Asporia-Waldorf, or whatever it’s called – now you’re sitting under a useless piece of tin in Battersea, being bombed by the Germans. I would’ve stayed put if I’d been you. Better off there, my darling, than in sad old London, blown to blazes.’

  She knew this curious limbo couldn’t last and indeed it began to chafe on her. She had to take action and get information, however meagre. She had escaped, she was free, she had her new name, passport, ration book and coupons but she was aware she was only drawing breath, pausing for a while: there was still some distance to run before she could truly feel at ease.

  So she went to Electra House on the Embankment and spent two days watching the employees arrive and depart before she spotted Alfie Blytheswood emerging one evening. She followed him home to his house in Barnet and the next morning followed him from home to work.

  She sat in her room in Battersea, thinking over the news Blytheswood had given her. Morris, Angus and Sylvia dead – but she had been destined to be the first. She wondered if her overturning of the Las Cruces operation had in a way made the others’ deaths inevitable. Romer couldn’t risk anything more, now Morris had exposed him as a ghost, and there was also the fact that Eva knew, also. What if Morris had hinted to Sylvia or, more likely, Angus? Angus’s mood had been odd those last days – perhaps Morris had hinted at something …Romer couldn’t risk it, in any event, and so he began rolling up AAS Ltd – carefully, guilefully – leaving no trace of his hand in the matter. Morris’s suicide, then a leak of information about a Sunderland flight from Lisbon to Poole – date and time – and a high-ranking soldier on board as cover …It spoke of real power, she realised, a huge and powerful network with many intermediate contacts. But Eva Delectorskaya was still unaccounted for and she began to wonder if the chain of identities she had acquired for herself could be extended ad infmitum. If Romer could engineer the shooting-down of a flying boat in the Bay of Biscay it wouldn’t take him long to find Lily Fitzroy – a name he already knew. Only a little time would elapse before, one way or another, via the cumbersome but dogged bureaucracy of wartime Britain, the name of Lily Fitzroy surfaced. And then what? Eva knew all too well how these things turned out: a motor accident, a fall from a high building, a black-out robbery turned to murder … She had to break the chain, she realised. She heard Mrs Dangerfield climbing the stairs.

  ‘Fancy a cup of tea, Lily dear?’

  ‘Lovely, yes please,’ she called.

  Lily Fitzroy, she realised, had to go.

  It took her a day or two to calculate how it might just be done. In bombed-out London, she logically supposed, people must constantly be losing everything they owned. What did you do if your block of flats collapsed and burned while you were cowering in your basement shelter in your underclothes? You stumble out, dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown, into the dawn after the ‘all clear’, to find that everything you possessed had been incinerated. People had to start again, almost as if they were being reborn: all your documentation, clothing, housing, proofs of identification had to be re-acquired. The Blitz and now these night raids had been going on since September 1940, over a year, now, with thousands and thousands of dead and missing. She knew black-marketeers exploited the dead, kept them ‘alive’ for a while to claim their rations and petrol coupons. Perhaps there was an opening for her, here. So she began to scan the newspapers looking for accounts of the worst attacks with the biggest number of casualties – forty, fifty, sixty people killed or missing. A day or two later names would be printed in the papers and sometimes photographs. She began to look for missing young women about her age.

  Two days after the encounter with Blytheswood there was a big raid over the East End docks. She and Mrs Dangerfield went down the garden to the shelter and sat it out. On clear nights the planes often followed the meandering line of the Thames upriver looking for the power stations at Battersea and at Lots Road in Chelsea, unloading their bombs somewhere in the general vicinity. The residential areas of Battersea and Chelsea, consequently, received more bombing than they might ever have expected.

  The next morning on the wireless she heard the news of the raids on Rotherhithe and Deptford – whole streets flattened, an entire housing estate evacuated, blocks of flats burned out and destroyed. In the evening paper more details were supplied, a small map printed of the most grievously damaged areas, the first lists of the dead and missing. She was looking – ghoulishly, she knew – for whole families, groups of four or five people with the same surname. She read of a charitable-trust estate in Deptford – three blocks almost totally destroyed, a direct hit on one, Carlisle House – eighty-seven people feared dead. The West family, three names, the Findlays – four names, two of them young children, and worst of all the Fairchilds with their five children: Sally (24), Elizabeth (18), Cedric (12), Lucy (10) and Agnes (6). All missing, all believed dead, buried under the devastation, hope for survivors remote.

  Eva caught a bus to Deptford the next day and went in search of Carlisle House. She found the usual fuming moonscape of dereliction: hills of brick rubble, teetering cliffs of walls and exposed rooms, gas mains still burning through the tumbled masonry with a pale wobbly light. Wooden barriers had been erected around the site and were manned by police and ARP volunteers. Behind the barriers small crowds gathered and looked forlornly on, talking about the senselessness, the mindlessness, the agony and the tragedy. In a nearby doorway Eva took out her passport and then she walked along the line of barriers as far from the crowds as possible and as close as she could get to a flaring gas main. The winter evening was drawing in quickly and the pale flames were becoming more lurid and orange. Darkness me
ant another raid, possibly, and the muttering groups of neighbours, survivors and spectators began to drift away. When she was sure no one was looking she gently threw her passport into the heart of the flames. For an instant she saw it flare and shrivel and then it disappeared. She turned and walked quickly away.

  She went back home to Battersea and told Mrs Dangerfield, with a gallant sigh, that she had a new posting – ‘Scotland again’ – and had to leave that very evening. She paid her two months, rent in advance and left blithely, happily. At least you’ll be away from these raids, Mrs Dangerfield observed enviously, and pecked her goodbye on the cheek. I’ll telephone when I’m coming back, Eva said, probably March.

  She booked into a hotel near Victoria Station and the next morning banged her head hard against the rough brick embrasure of her window until the skin broke and the blood began to flow. She cleaned her wound and covered it with cotton wool and sticking plaster and took a taxi to a police station in Rotherhithe.

  ‘What can we do for you, Miss?’ the constable on duty asked.

  Eva looked around, acting disorientated, as if she were still concussed, still in shock. ‘The hospital said I should come here,’ she said. ‘I was in the Carlisle House raid. My name’s Sally Fairchild.’

  She had provisional identity papers by the end of the day and a ration book with a week’s supply of coupons. She said some neighbours had taken her in and gave an address of a street near the bomb-site. She was told to report to a Home Office department in Whitehall within a week in order to have everything regularised. The policemen were very sympathetic, Eva wept a little, and they offered to have a car drive her to her temporary home. Eva said she was going to meet her friends, thanks all the same, and visit some of the wounded in hospital.

  So Eva Delectorskaya became Sally Fairchild and this, she thought, was at last a name that Romer didn’t know. The chain was broken but she wasn’t sure how long she could keep her new identity going. She thought he would take some perverse pleasure in her skill at evasion – I taught her well – but he would always be thinking: how to find Eva Delectorskaya now?