Secret Kingdom (18 page)

‘Come in.’

She was sturdy, well preserved, wide shoulders, strong arms. Eva could imagine her in prison uniform, an intimidating presence
because of her ordinariness. Her face was impassive, a mask that would yield compassion or terror, whatever the circumstances demanded.

‘Did Julia ask you to see me?’ What she meant was, did Julia give you a last message for me?

‘No.’ The woman saw no reason to explain. ‘She told me once she had a friend who was an international swimmer. That’s all. She never told me your name. She never mentioned anyone by name. She was afraid she might betray her friends. It’s taken me some time to find you.’

The woman was a stranger. Why should she believe her? Better, safer, to assume she is lying, that she is here for another purpose – what? – than to accept at face value anything she says. Be cautious. Don’t trust her.

‘Julia disappeared more than a year ago. Why have you waited until now to speak to me?’

‘My husband died recently.’ There was nothing apologetic in the woman’s manner. In her mind the logic was complete. ‘I’m leaving the prison service. I am going to live with my daughter in Szeged.’ For the first time she hesitated, looked down at her clasped hands. Eva sensed some struggle within her, though her face gave no sign of it. ‘I am ashamed of what I did,’ she said suddenly. ‘I want to leave that part of my life behind.’

You worked for Julia’s tormentors. You wore their uniform, you obeyed their orders, you took their money. You were the agent of their cruelty. You felt momentary compassion for a woman in pain and now you want to cleanse yourself of all your guilt so you may live out the remainder of your days with some kind of peace of mind. What had the priest said? Not forgiving means living in the past and that in itself is a form of death. Well, this woman was part of the murderous crew who ended Julia’s life. Why should she do anything for her? She was surprised at the depth of her anger.

‘I didn’t come to ask forgiveness,’ the woman said. There were tears in her eyes now. Was this real suffering or pretence? ‘That’s more than I deserve. Nothing you can say will erase the memories of what I did. They are with me always. I shall have to live with them until I die. All I can do is tell you what I know. I owe her memory that much. That is why I came. I have to tell someone, and there is no one else I can tell except you.’

‘Why is that?’

‘You knew Julia.’ The woman was weeping now without disguise, tears of grief and contrition. ‘You will know what I mean when I tell you that Julia made me see that what I did was wrong.’

‘How did she do that?’ Eva asked. If the woman was lying she had to reveal herself now, before it was too late.

‘She was the bravest woman I ever saw. Whatever they did to her, and they did some terrible things, they couldn’t break her. She never told them anything. She hated them but she wasn’t afraid of them. She showed me that it was possible to stand up for what you believe to be right. I never thought I would live to see the day that happened. She made me believe I could be brave too, not like her but in my own way.’

‘What were her interrogators looking for?’

‘How do I know? I was only a warder. They believed she knew something, otherwise why would they have beaten her like that? On her face, her hands, her feet. I don’t know where she found the strength not to give in.’

Don’t
tell
me,
Eva wanted to shout.
Don’t
tell
me
what
they
did
to
her.
If this is the truth, it is too horrible to bear. I don’t want to know what happened. Don’t destroy my memories of Julia.

It was already too late. She saw in her mind a woman with a bruised and swollen face, split and bleeding lips, smashed fingertips, blood leaking out from under the nails where her hands had been crushed, and other damage to her body that couldn’t be seen but was visible in the way she bent over her stomach and dragged her right leg. In her eyes a dazed look of disbelief and horror at what she was having to endure. Her Julia was gone. The woman with the wild blonde hair was transformed into someone she didn’t know, couldn’t recognize.

It was a moment of great pain. But she was certain now the woman was speaking the truth, and if she wanted to know about Julia, then she had to face it too.

‘Tell me about her,’ Eva said. ‘There are things I want to know. How did she die?’

‘They didn’t hang her, which was what they wanted to do. She died in her cell.’

‘Did she kill herself?’

‘No.’ The woman shook her head. ‘She would never have done that. She must have been in the prison about two weeks. She’d been interrogated and badly beaten. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the worst. She couldn’t stand up when they brought her back. They’d done something awful to her knees and feet. I helped to clean her up. There wasn’t much I could do except wipe the blood. I noticed she was breathing badly. I tried to get them to agree to transfer her to a hospital, but they wouldn’t do so. If she dies, they said, so what? She’s going to die anyway. One less to deal with. I watched her through the peephole in the door to her cell. I think she knew I was there. Most of the time she stared at the ceiling, as if that was the way into another life where she could live free from pain. I went away for ten minutes and when I returned she was dead.’

So that was how Julia had died. Beaten until her heart gave out. But why? Why did they have to torture her? What did she possess that they needed so desperately to know? The answer to that question was as elusive as ever.

‘
Why
isn
’
t
the
truth
getting
through
?’

Pountney’s inability in the days that followed to find any answers to Sykes’s challenge was, he was sure, the cause of his anxiety attacks. He was being pulled in two directions at once. He was working for a man he disliked and helping him conduct a investigation, and here he agreed with Sykes, whose pointlessness was increasingly clear to everyone except Watson-Jones. At the same time, he was unable to find satisfactory answers to Sykes’s unasked questions. If the ‘truth’ was failing to get through, where was it stopping? Who was stopping it and why?

The dilemma he faced, how to be two people at the same time – the civil servant who performs his tasks in a politically neutral and professional manner, while at the same time keeping faith with the growing doubts and anxieties about the rightness of what he was being asked to do – mirrored the dilemma of his life. He had always been two people, and he had always been successful in concealing who he really was, often from himself. Now, for reasons he didn’t
understand, the alchemy that kept the elements of his personality intact was no longer working.

*

He managed his long-planned escape from Park Road in Harlow to Hobson Street in Cambridge a week before his eighteenth birthday. He owed his emancipation to grammar school, a good history teacher, his own application (‘The boy’s at his books again,’ his mother would whisper to his father, which meant he could avoid Saturday duty behind the counter), a talent for exams (‘It’s a matter of mastering a few techniques, really’) and the power of dreams, imagining each day what he might become. He quickly saw that he could enter Cambridge with one identity and emerge three years later with quite another, no questions asked. By the time he joined the Foreign Office his accent, the patterns of his speech, even the clothes he wore belonged to a Gerard Pountney he had invented for himself. He was beginning to weave mysteries about his life.

In his early days in King Charles Street he had been overwhelmed by the glamour of power, so close he could lean forward and touch it. Who would believe that Gerry Pountney, only son of the Park Road baker, was drafting memoranda that went spiralling upwards to land eventually on the desks of ministers? Sometimes he could hardly believe it himself. He could be forgiven for thinking that his words might be steering the nation’s fortunes – admittedly edited and redrafted by other hands, but still with some essence of his contribution remaining even if the words were no longer his. As he read the incoming telegrams each morning, he had an intoxicating sense that the world’s events were under his personal control. The breathtaking quality of those early months allowed him finally to bury all traces of the cramped rooms above a baker’s shop in Harlow which he had left, so it seemed, generations before.

*

Woven into the excitement and novelty of his life in the Foreign Office was another darker thread, a sense that whatever he might achieve for himself, whatever his success, he remained incomplete. It was not loneliness, he had got used to that, it was the slow realization that his life lacked intimacy; his achievements and his occasional disappointments were unshared. He had no focus outside
himself and there were times, he was discovering, when that was not enough. Perhaps, he told himself, that was the price he had to pay, another sacrifice in a life built on sacrifices. But rationalizing his feelings didn’t make the ache of incompleteness to go away.

*

Towards the end of his second year in the Foreign Office, and within months of his first posting abroad, he met Harriet Sykes. He took her to a Menuhin recital at the Wigmore Hall and afterwards, over a drink, she told him the story of her childhood. Her father, the senior partner in a firm of City solicitors, had refused his eldest child a place in his life for not being the son he had expected, had indulged his son because of his physical disability and terrorized his wife for her failure to produce the ‘whole child’ it was his right to father.

‘You must have suffered so,’ Pountney said, wanting to comfort her in his arms.

‘You cannot imagine what it was like,’ she replied mysteriously, her dark eyes wet with tears. Beneath the table, his knee briefly touched hers.

A week later, after a visit to the Academy Cinema to see
Les
Enfants
du
Paradis
, he found the courage to tell her of his youthful resolution to break away, and how Cambridge had provided a secure haven while he perfected the means of his escape into the world he had always dreamed of. He stopped short of telling her that he was his own invention, hoping she would only see instead his courage and determination. She smiled and touched his hand.

At that moment his heart opened and he saw himself bathing her wounds in a love that would redeem her past. They had so much in common: they were both casualties of their childhoods, creatures who had struggled against obstacles others would not recognize. He would give Harriet the comfort and emotional security she had never had. She would be his life’s companion. Together, he told himself (when had he ever been able to think such a word before?),
together
they would fight their demons. For the first time in his life he had found a reason to exist for someone other than himself. Harriet was what was missing from his life. In her he had found the reason for all his sacrifices. He would restore the wholeness she lacked. The hardships he had endured had their reward, after all. The key to life was patience, having the ability to wait for what you wanted. For
years he had been patient. Now he was ready to fall in love.

They walked through Soho in search of a taxi. She held tightly on to his arm, unnerved by the boisterous invitations of the prostitutes standing in doorways. Was it his imagination, or was she already clinging to the raft of his love with all the desperation of a drowning swimmer? He entwined his fingers with hers and clasped her hand.

*

Throughout the summer she eagerly accepted his invitations to concerts or the cinema. Never again did she reveal her inner turmoil as she had done on their first evening together, though she regularly added details to his growing lexicon of her unhappiness. Nor did he, despite his feelings, reveal his deeper secrets, his burning desire to share his life with her. Their embraces were tentative, fumbled, neither having an instinct for passion or its expression. But her gestures and her behaviour convinced him that she returned his love. She wanted him to be her saviour, to help her right the great wrong in her life. Wasn’t that what she was telling him, if not in so many words? And he was more than willing to undertake the obligation. He felt ennobled by the role his experiences had prepared him for. The hardships of his life were justified, leading up, as they did, to this moment. The future was clear, defined and infinitely rewarding. He was going to save the life of the woman he loved.

On a warm evening in September, he told her that his first posting had come through and that in a few weeks he would be going abroad. The thought that this might bring their relationship to an end had become unbearable for him. He told her that he loved her and wanted to marry her. To his astonishment and delight, she agreed. He kissed her hand. She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the lips, upsetting a glass of wine as she did so. In his unclouded judgement, this was a triumphant moment.

*

His illusions about the redemptive power of love survived the early years of his marriage intact. Then Harriet’s father died. To her surprise and fury, her brother, Stephen, inherited most of the family money. Her mother had enough to keep her modestly until her own death while she, the only daughter, had a small legacy with which she bought their house in Richmond. Through furious tears
she claimed that Stephen, the brother for whom she had suffered so much, had cheated her, though how she was unable to say. The best she could manage was an accusation that he must have worked on their father while he was defenceless in the nursing home. It was so dreadfully unfair. What had Stephen ever done for their father except cause him grief?

Pountney sensed danger. He saw the prospect of losing Harriet to an obsession that had lain dormant since their marriage. He tried to reason with her. Her father was beyond her reach now. They were happy enough, weren’t they? They had all they needed. What a chance to cut the past adrift. She would have none of it. Stephen, amused by her fury, was adamant that he would not alter the dictates of the will (‘It must have been what Daddy wanted because he signed it’). Her younger brother now took over the role in her life left vacant by her father’s death. Pountney was unhappy but powerless.