Red Joan (14 page)

Small things, not insurmountable.

A taxi then, to somewhere in England. She could ask one of Lally's children if she might stay for a while. Not the girls. They would be too inquisitive. The boy, maybe. Samuel.

She closes her eyes. It is a stupid, desperate idea. Samuel is no longer the little boy whose photograph is still in her purse along with pictures of Lally's girls, and the old, faded one of Lally in a punt in Cambridge during the war. He would be fifty-four now, five years older than Nick, with a wife and children of his own. She cannot simply turn up and expect him to harbour her indefinitely. He would probably telephone Nick as soon as she went to the bathroom, concerned that his odd black-sheep aunt was turning senile, if Nick hadn't already called him first. They are not close, Nick and his cousins, but they are dutiful about keeping in touch, all of them keen to make up for the stilted, long-distance relationship their mothers had maintained until Lally's death; two women who were, or so they were told, once inseparable.

But even if Samuel did agree to hide her for a few days, they would be sure to find her sooner or later—probably sooner—so it wouldn't do any good. It would only alarm Nick and make her appear more guilty.

Although of what? They still haven't told her exactly.

She turns over and feels a shiver of fear scrape across her stomach. There is nothing she can do, except, of course . . .

But she will not do that. She cannot. She must remain strong. She must not let anything slip.

She thinks of her room in Newnham during the days following her visit to the woman's house, the ceiling above her bed, the light flooding in from the window. So many memories dredged up from nowhere, jostling with each other for her attention. She remembers lying perfectly still, immoveable, shivering, trying not to think of anything at all, trying not to think of Leo, while at the same time praying for him to visit, wondering if she could have been more sympathetic to his anger over Stalin's treaty with Hitler, hoping it might not all be over between them. Certainly not allowing herself to think of the tiny thing she thought she had glimpsed in the woman's house, impossibly small and which appeared in her dreams as a poor, sorrowful soul with too-large eyes and golden skin.

She has a sudden memory of Sonya bringing mugs of warm milk and blankets to her room, reading out loud to her in Russian as a practice for her end-of-term language tests.

‘Have you seen Leo?' she would ask every time Sonya came in, causing Sonya to smile at her and tip her head, not quite a yes but not quite a no either.

‘Just rest,' she would whisper. ‘Don't worry about him.'

And another memory of Sonya arriving with armfuls of hydrangea, pink and white and blue, harvested during the night from the college flower beds at Newnham, and filling jam jar after jam jar with these beautiful, delicate bursts of colour so that the whole room seemed to be brimming with gemstones when she made her announcement.

 

‘I'm leaving for Switzerland tomorrow. I need to get out before the war starts.'

‘Why?'

‘I'm not British like you. I have a Russian passport. If I stay and Britain ends up fighting against the Soviets, I could be deported or interned.'

Joan tries to turn over, manoeuvring herself away from the windowsill of flowers so that she can face Sonya. She struggles upright and although the movement exhausts her, she is adamant that Sonya is being unnecessarily dramatic. It is something of which Leo often accuses her, and Joan can see that there is a measure of truth in it. ‘They wouldn't do that. You've been here for years.' Her voice is weaker than she intends, breathier. A sudden shooting pain in her stomach causes her to cry out and clench her eyes shut until the shock of it has passed.

Sonya takes her hand and squeezes it, bringing it up to her lips for a quick kiss. ‘I'm not willing to take that risk. And who knows? Maybe I'll meet an Englishman out there and marry him. Then I'll have a nice clean British passport like you.'

Joan smiles weakly. ‘Maybe.'

‘Besides, it'll be good for Uncle Boris to have some company for a while. He has been rather neglected these past few years. He always liked to have young people around.'

At the mention of Uncle Boris, Joan feels a pulse of alarm breaking through the hot fog of her delirium. She has not seen Leo for over a week now, not since she had tried to talk to him after her conversation in the café with Sonya. It had been a final attempt to tell him everything, as she believed that, in spite of what Sonya said, she owed it to him to tell him. Yet when she went to find him the next day, she found that he was still angry with her, with Stalin, with anyone who tried to reason with him. He told her that nothing else in the world mattered now that the revolution had been betrayed. Nothing. Joan had placed her hand on his arm when he said this and he had shaken her off, not quite looking at her. He was not unkind to her exactly, just distracted, careless. Perhaps if he had known . . .

But he had not known. She had not told him. She had left quite suddenly after he shook her off, tears brimming in her eyes, and Leo had not come after her. It was Sonya who came to find her later that day when she heard that Joan had been to see him, Sonya who seemed to know exactly where she would be and that she would have spent the afternoon sobbing desolately into her pillow, who brought her a small supper of bread and cheese, along with some sharp-tasting apples from the college gardens, and who whispered gently in her ear that she would take her to see the woman the following day. She wouldn't have to go alone.

And now it is Sonya who is protecting her, keeping Leo away from her until she feels better and everything can go back to the way it was. ‘Is Leo going too?'

Sonya stands up from the bed and walks to the window. ‘Leo? No. He won't come.'

Joan hears this with a mixture of relief and concern. Relief that he is not going and she will have the chance to make things up with him and concern that he might actually be imprisoned if what Sonya says is true. Anti-Russian sentiment would be bound to increase once the war actually starts. ‘Why not?' she asks.

Sonya sighs, and Joan can tell that Sonya is annoyed with him for not going with her. ‘Some nonsense about his thesis. He needs to be here so that he can have access to the documents he needs.' She rolls her eyes. ‘Apparently it will cost millions of Soviets their lives if Leo doesn't finish his PhD. I didn't realise how deluded he was. He's so self-important. I don't know who he thinks has told him that he is the only person who can save the revolution.'

‘Grigori Fy-something,' Joan murmurs, sinking back into the pillow. Her head is hot and clammy. She can feel her stomach burning. She should not have sat up for so long. ‘He said it would only matter if it came to war.'

Sonya does not answer immediately. She steps towards her and takes her hand once more. ‘Who?' she asks gently.

Joan shakes her head in delirious response. What was it he told her? ‘A man he met in Moscow. He showed him that the grain figures were lying . . . ' she corrects herself, ‘ . . . misleading.'

Sonya doesn't move. Her hand feels suddenly cold. ‘Lying?'

Oh God. Joan remembers now. He had made her promise and she had done so, easily, casually, as if there were no question. She covers her eyes with her hand, trying to block out the glare of daylight. How she wishes there was a way of taking her words back, of unsaying them, of scrubbing them out. The pain in her stomach causes her to gasp, only this time it does not stop as it has before. It twists and tugs. ‘Misleading,' she repeats. ‘He told me not to tell anyone. Please. Please don't tell Leo I told you.'

‘About this Grigori Fy-something?'

‘Yes,' she whispers.

Sonya does not move for a long time. Even her breathing seems to slow and then stop altogether. She bends down next to Joan's bed and strokes her hair. ‘Of course I won't tell. You don't have to worry.' She leans forward and kisses Joan's cheek, and at that moment Joan can feel the soft beat of Sonya's heart through her thin cotton blouse. ‘By the way, I brought this for you.'

Joan's eyes flicker. She sees that Sonya is holding something in her arms, a silk dress of iridescent blue which she is placing on the sheet next to Joan's pillow. ‘I want you to have it,' Sonya continues, ‘to remember me while I'm away. I always thought it looked better on you anyway.'

‘Dear Sonya,' Joan whispers, tears coming to her eyes as she feels a sudden rush of guilt for having worried even momentarily that Sonya was not to be trusted with a secret. ‘Whatever will I do without you?'

‘You'll write to me, of course. I'm relying on you to tell me everything.'

T
he small red light of the surveillance camera flashes deliberatively in the corner of her bedroom. Joan rolls over, turning away from it. The rain outside is gentle now, pattering and peaceful. She knows that she needs to get up and prepare herself. MI5 will be here soon, and Nick too, and they will not want to waste any time in getting on with the questioning. They are anxious to get through everything by Friday, almost as if they expect to lose her as they lost William.

Is that it? Is that what they are scared of?

She pulls on her dressing gown and slippers and goes downstairs to the kitchen. She fills the kettle and cuts a slice of bread from the loaf she bought on Saturday. Was that really only three days ago? She feels time slipping beneath her, the past suddenly so clear and sharply defined in comparison with the fuzziness of the present. She sits down quite suddenly.

In the stillness, she remembers the cavernous sound of the corridors in the empty, unfilled days after Sonya had gone to Switzerland, the unnatural calm of her life as she convalesced. Mornings as quiet as sand, punctuated by the bursts of colour in the jam jars along her windowsill.

She thinks of her reunion with Leo once she was well again; her secret remaining unknown between them, something to be forgotten and ignored so that their lives could carry on as before. She remembers the fervour with which he clung to the idea that Stalin's pact with Hitler was indeed a tactical manoeuvre to buy the Soviets more time, just as Sonya had said, and how jubilant he was at the dawning realisation that his thesis really would be useful to the revolution now that war was bound to come. She remembers how hard he worked during those early months of the war, how pale he became with studying late into the night. And she remembers how it felt to know that his gaze was on her once again, his hands in her hair and his lips on her skin, such attention all the more necessary after having been withdrawn for so many weeks.

A car. Footsteps on the path. The sounds are familiar now.

Joan stands up and places the slice of bread under the grill.

She waits. The knock comes five seconds later, as she knew it would.

She flicks the switch of the kettle. She knows she should not keep them waiting, and yet she does. Just for a moment. Because she finds that if she closes her eyes now, she can still recall the scent of those flowers on her windowsill, heady and sweet, smelling of cut grass and honey.

 

When it comes the war seems to take place somewhere else, not in Cambridge, although even in this relatively untouched town there are gas masks and ration cards and no new gloves for the winter. And such a long winter! Joan has never had chilblains before but she gets them on her fingers this year which she considers apt, chilblains being the sort of thing one ought to get during a war. She decides to give up her fingerless gloves in favour of homemade mittens until the spring arrives, and she knits a thick cardigan for herself, just in case this winter should, in fact, last for ever.

At first, there is a sense of waiting for things to happen. Everybody knows that this war will be different from the last, yet nobody is quite sure of the manner in which it will be different. Aeroplanes, certainly, but it seems somehow impractical to think of fighting a war for territory up in the sky.

A scheme is concocted to dig trenches in the Newnham garden to shelter the members of the college in the event of an air raid. This scheme stalls slightly when two Saxon skeletons are discovered in a flowerbed and are excavated with toothbrushes and tiny spades, but once this excitement has dissipated, the project is taken up again in earnest. The idea is that the whole college should be able to disperse into the trenches at the blow of a whistle, and Joan takes her turn at digging along with the other girls on her corridor. A fire brigade is formed which appears to consist of nearly the entire college, and there are air-raid drills, fire-watching patrols and stirrup pump practices to attend, along with cold night-time excursions to the trenches. The gardens are turned into giant vegetable patches and beehives are trundled in to make honey.

There are rarely any meetings to attend now, what with most of the contingent being signed up or sent away in some capacity. The town seems to be full of evacuees and army men, along with some members of the government who are temporarily housed in the university for the duration of the war. The talk among those who are left is mostly about the war effort which, at this early stage, appears to be a collective heave of nothing specific. And Joan wants to do something specific. She wants to make an effort.

Well-spoken ladies in brass-buttoned uniforms come to visit, hoping to persuade the girls to stay at Cambridge to finish their studies and then to join the services, or to teach, or do some other job of a useful nature. After much discussion, Joan decides that she will join the Women's Royal Naval Service, or perhaps the female attachment to the Air Force, and she is excited by the prospect.

Leo's response to this is brusque. ‘Well, that's a waste of an education. You should be more grateful for what you've had.'

‘You sound like my father.'