The Lines We Leave Behind Read online

  She curved around one corner and heard Naomi sigh. ‘You’re cheating, cutting off huge chunks of the run.’

  ‘Hardly huge.’

  Naomi eased up on her inside as they approached the end of the gymnasium, preventing her from cutting the corner. ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ For a moment, Amber was fourteen again.

  ‘We’re supposed to be a team.’

  Amber wanted to say something back, but the nausea returned and she needed to concentrate on breathing through it.

  ‘Stop that chatter, number one and number two.’ That was Naomi and Amber. ‘I’ll have you doing twenty-five press-ups.’ The PT instructor scowled at them. ‘Number two, you look like something a dog has vomited up. Don’t let me see you coming here again in that state. Come to think of it, you and number one will do the extras press-ups anyway. You’ve obviously got surplus energy if you’re both gossiping like a pair of old grannies.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Naomi hissed as they made their way to the centre of the gym. But she performed her press-ups without too much effort.

  Amber found herself lying on her stomach after the tenth, the smell of her own sweat bringing back her nausea. ‘Rather be back in bed, number two?’ The instructor stood over her. ‘You can do five extras for that.’

  ‘If you’d kept your mouth shut that wouldn’t have happened,’ Amber said to Naomi when she’d finished and they were drinking water before preparing for rope climbing.

  Naomi put down her water bottle and scowled at her. ‘What time did you go to bed last night?’

  ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘We’re training for a dangerous operation. If you’re not fit enough you could put us in danger.’

  ‘Why don’t you concentrate on your own physical fitness and leave me to concentrate on mine?’ Amber wiped her brow on her sleeve. She was starting to feel a little better now. Perhaps the stale alcohol had now been violently forced through her circulation, no more to trouble her. Another hour in bed would have been good, though.

  To spite Naomi she pulled herself hard up the rope, her biceps aching by the time she had reached the top. Gratifyingly, Naomi couldn’t climb as fast as she could, even though she’d probably had a wholesome eight hours’ sleep. Well, Naomi could sleep all she wanted. Amber had no intention of not enjoying herself in Cairo. The men certainly did. Why should women have to have early nights and avoid parties just because they were women?

  They finished by forming two teams, Amber and Naomi co-opted to opposing sides.

  ‘I know you probably all loved relay races at school.’ The instructor smiled at them, looking as though he were about to give them a treat. ‘But here’s one with a twist – the team that loses will have to run the whole course again. Four-a-side. Two lengths of the gymnasium for each runner. Number one and number two, you can run the last lap.’

  Naomi and Amber eyed one another. The first two runners on Amber’s side provided a comfortable lead. But the third man slipped as he came round the last corner. He managed to regain his balance but seemed to pull a muscle. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered as he touched Amber on the shoulder. She was still ahead of Naomi, it ought to be all right. She’d seldom lost a race at school against a girl her age. But Naomi had determination, even though she wasn’t a natural runner, and it kept her on Amber’s shoulder. One last surge and she’d be free of Naomi . . .

  They reached the end of the gym. Naomi was smaller and could turn more quickly. Amber crouched as she approached the wall and spun round. As she did, Naomi’s plimsolled foot caught her calf. She tripped. Like her team mate, she avoided falling, but by the time she’d regained her balance, Naomi was a yard ahead. This could not be allowed to happen. Amber pushed herself, closing her eyes for the last little bit, her lungs about to explode.

  ‘Interesting,’ the instructor said. ‘A dead heat. Perhaps I should make both teams run the whole thing again to produce a winner.’

  ‘You kicked me,’ Amber muttered at Naomi.

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’ Naomi turned her back.

  ‘Number one and number two think they’re back at school again.’ The instructor observed them. ‘Perhaps I should make the pair of them run against one another?’

  Amber forced herself to stand up straight and look him in the eye.

  ‘Dismissed, all of you, except number one and number two.’ He waved his hands at the men, who shuffled off, looking over their shoulders and laughing at the women.

  ‘You two are supposed to learn the principles of teamwork,’ he said. A small vein had appeared on the side of his head. ‘I should make you run through the streets until you drop to your knees. But I won’t. I’ll ask you to think about why you’re here and I will report back on this.’

  He left them standing together. Reporting back presumably meant he’d be talking to Robert. Amber hung her head.

  ‘If you hadn’t turned up in that state this wouldn’t have happened,’ Naomi said.

  ‘If you weren’t such a nagging prude.’

  ‘Listen to yourself.’ Naomi picked up a towel. ‘People are dying in Europe, but for you it’s all just a party.’

  Amber wanted to throw something back at her, but what was the point? She dreaded seeing Robert this afternoon. With just a week to go until they left, he wouldn’t be thrilled that the two women still did not seem able to work well together. ‘It’s not a party for me,’ she said quietly. As she said the words she realised how true they were. Training, the drop into Croatia, fulfilling her mission, it was about the only thing she’d ever done in her life that had any significance at all. ‘It matters.’

  ‘Prove it, then.’ Naomi walked away.

  Robert said nothing to the women that afternoon when they were back indoors for yet another briefing on German positions in Yugoslavia. Amber made a point of studying the maps intently. Apart from anything else, it was satisfying to see the German army pushed northwards.

  ‘But don’t run the risk of believing that the territory you see here as Partisan-held means that it’s safe,’ Robert told them. ‘The Partisans don’t have air cover, for instance. They may hold ground that the Germans can strafe and bomb without opposition. And positions change all the time. Most of the important cities are still held by the Germans.’ He pointed at the capital, Zagreb, and the other main communication centres. ‘But the ability of the Partisans to blow up bridges and important railway links is impressive and important. It has convinced Churchill to switch to supporting the Partisans, despite some opposition to their political objectives. You will find that your odred, the Partisan group you work with, probably has a commissar in it, or close at hand, to make sure that communist views prevail.’

  When they’d finished, Amber stepped out of the building feeling almost light-hearted. Events this morning had reminded her of being back at school, never entirely fitting in. She’d go for a swim this evening. The pool at the Gezira Club would be cool in the winter evening but would ease her sore muscles. Then she’d have an early night. They were due back in the gymnasium the next morning and she would be there first to wipe that sanctimonious look off Naomi’s face.

  Amber treated herself to a taxi. None of her housemates were home. She found her costume and took herself the few blocks to the club. Most of the civilian members had abandoned the pool as the temperature dropped, but a few over-enthusiastic young officers were dive-bombing one another.

  It was only after she’d swum a number of lengths to ease her limbs that she saw them: Naomi and Robert, sitting at a table together. Naomi wore a sleek, long-sleeved dress that showed off her figure. Robert was pouring her a glass of wine and she was looking at him intently. He said something to make her laugh. Neither of them seemed to have noticed Amber. Robert took Naomi’s hand in his, speaking to her more seriously. Naomi nodded. Amber threw herself into an energetic crawl, hands slashing the cold water as though it were the enemy.

  ‘Of course he’d probably follow
ed me in a taxi when I left the offices and seen me emerge with my swimming things,’ I tell Dr Rosenstein, staring through a clear patch in the smeared glass that is my memory. ‘He drove back to collect Naomi and to tell her to get changed quickly. He wanted me to see them together. He wanted to wrong-foot me.’ Dr Rosenstein says nothing. Probably thinks this is all paranoia. ‘It’s the way he works, keeping you off-balance so you can’t predict what might happen next.’

  ‘Did his tactics work?’

  ‘They kept me feeling insecure.’ I can feel anger sweep through me, three years on. ‘It was a dangerous game. Naomi and I were supposed to be team members, to be able to rely on one another, but somehow he seemed able to play on the things that set us against one another. I could never quite work out how Robert managed it, but he did.’

  ‘He wasn’t sleeping with Naomi?’

  I blink. ‘She wasn’t that kind of girl.’

  ‘But you . . . ?’

  ‘I probably was that kind of girl.’ Dr Rosenstein shows no disapproval. ‘But our relationship hadn’t become intimate at that point.’ Though I do not doubt that Robert was already planning this next stage. I was always a step behind him, never able to predict what he might do. I hadn’t realised just how attracted I’d been to Robert until I’d seen him with Naomi that evening. I wasn’t used to feeling jealous; I’d never cared enough about any particular man to mind.

  ‘I tried hard to forget it.’ I’d swum until I felt dizzy, almost witless, and dragged myself back to the villa, shivering in the cool air.

  ‘You managed to form a better working relationship with Naomi?’

  ‘Yes. Though I don’t think she ever really approved of me.’

  Amber appeared outside the gymnasium before the caretaker turned up with his key to unlock it. Appearing five minutes later, the instructor gave her an approving but surprised nod. The others arrived, men from their all-male hostel and Naomi from the women’s hostel. Naomi didn’t seem to notice Amber as she tightened the laces of her plimsolls.

  This morning’s session concentrated on self-defence. Amber half-hoped the instructor would pit the two women against one another. There’d be some satisfaction in showing Naomi a thing or two, throwing her down on the floor, perhaps, but he set the women against the men. ‘It’s unlikely that you would be able to overpower a fit young German soldier or a Chetnik, without an element of surprise,’ he said. ‘But if you’re pitted against a middle-aged Home Guard on night duty, some of these tricks will help you.’

  Amber managed to twist Samuel’s arm behind him and remove a dagger from Daniel, and let herself relish the looks of surprise on their faces. ‘Not bad,’ the instructor told her. ‘But keep your temper, number two. Remember why you’re doing it, to fulfil your objectives.’

  Naomi, breathing fast after a bout with one of the men, her face pink with exertion, seemed to freeze momentarily in disagreement. For her combat was always personal, Amber guessed. The two women showered next to one another in silence and took a taxi to Rustum Buildings for the day’s briefings, which ended at half-past three.

  The men walked to their hostel, just a block away. Amber found herself standing with Naomi outside the building, looking in vain for a taxi. Drops of rain began to fall. Egyptian rain always seemed to have a particularly dense and wetting quality to it.

  ‘Look, let’s get some lemonade or tea or something,’ Naomi said. ‘No point getting wet. I know a café. It’s clean. We can shelter for a while.’

  Amber blinked. Perhaps she should try a few words in Hungarian with Naomi to show willing. She managed to stutter out a few words. A drink would be just the thing. She wasn’t sure she’d got the sentence exactly right.

  Naomi stopped, amazement blazing across her face. I am parched, she replied in the same language, and then looked cautious. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said in English, ‘that you should have done that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Perhaps you were supposed to listen in to my conversations with the men, and report back if you heard me say anything suggesting that I was more interested in the Budapest part of my mission than in finding airmen?’

  ‘Nobody told me to do that,’ Amber said.

  ‘Robert Havers,’ Naomi said. ‘He is a good trainer, but I don’t . . .’ She looked back over her shoulder at the street. Amber looked too, seeing nobody but the usual beggars sheltering under canopies and people hunting for taxis so they could escape the rain. ‘He has a very peculiar way of instructing us.’ Speaking her mother tongue she sounded more humorous. ‘Last night, when we were at the Gezira Club . . .’

  ‘I saw you,’ Amber said. Her voice was neutral. Good.

  ‘He . . .’ She looked over her shoulder again. ‘He said I should keep an eye on you while we are in Croatia and let him know if you spoke to anyone outside the Partisan group.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  Naomi shrugged.

  ‘And why are you telling me this now?’

  Naomi gave her a long, penetrating stare before stopping and opening the door to a café.

  ‘You can trust me now,’ Amber said. ‘I understand what you’re saying.’ Her face was burning under the dusting of Coty face powder she had powdered on this morning as soon as they’d arrived from the gymnasium. ‘I don’t think he has encouraged us to work together.’

  They sat down at a zinc-topped table. The café was deserted. ‘HQ has a strange atmosphere,’ Naomi said. ‘Some of the people in the organisation really dislike one another, don’t they?’

  ‘You mean that man who put his head around the door?’

  Naomi nodded. ‘With the moustache.’ She gave a little moue. ‘Not the kind of man you’d want to be alone in a lift with.’

  ‘I felt like that too. But there are some strange individuals in that place.’

  Sometimes Amber would bump into people on the stairs in Rustum Buildings and they’d look straight through her as though she wasn’t there. She had experimented with smiling at them, nodding coolly, or ignoring them herself, and always received the same blank response. Did belonging to Robert’s team mean that other people didn’t feel they could even acknowledge your existence? There’d been some kind of undercurrent in that exchange between Robert and the moustached man in the too-tight suit that afternoon.

  ‘Do you still have family in the place we are to visit?’ Naomi asked in Hungarian, eyes still on Amber’s face.

  ‘The odd distant cousin.’ She laid the insides of her wrists down on the zinc table surface. It was blissfully cool.

  ‘I wondered . . .’ Naomi glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. ‘Well, about old connections . . .’ Naomi smiled for the first time, a rueful grin. She herself probably still had family in Budapest, friends, old schoolmates who might pick her out in the street. ‘Whether that was what Robert meant by keeping an eye on you, on who you spoke to.’ Naomi sat back in her chair and looked at Amber again in her penetrating manner.

  ‘Robert wouldn’t like us talking like this, would he?’

  Naomi nodded. ‘You could go straight back to him and report on this conversation.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You’d better not.’ Naomi’s eyes were cold. ‘I can’t go into this operation not trusting one of the people I’ll be working with. The men are fine. We’re a team and we have been since the British first selected and trained us in Palestine. But you, you’re an enigma. I think we’re on the same side now, but I’ll be watching you, Amber. And not just because Robert Havers has told me to.’

  ‘I . . .’ Amber’s face flushed.

  ‘It worries me that you go to those parties. How can you know who’s there?’

  ‘I’m careful.’ Amber thought about it. Disquiet about her past behaviour built inside her. How could she really have known who the other partygoers were? ‘But you’re right, it’s risky.’ Other British people might pick up on areas of her cover story. Other Europeans might not be all they seemed. There were French nation
als in Cairo who resented the action the British had taken to destroy the French fleet once the Germans had conquered France. And as for the Egyptians themselves, some of them were said to be plotting to throw the British out of Egypt. Robert himself went out and about, casually referring to nightclubs and cocktails on the most fashionable terraces. But Robert was Robert. ‘I wasn’t taking things seriously enough before. I was wrong to behave like that. But you can trust me now.’

  The other woman’s face softened. ‘It takes some courage to admit to being wrong. But it may be what saves us.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Naomi half-closed her eyes. ‘We need to acknowledge our weaknesses. Let others tell us when we need telling. It’s so dangerous, what we’re to do.’

  Amber moved closer to the other girl and dropped her own voice. ‘Especially for you. Going where you’re going. At this particular time.’ It was likely she’d still be in Hungary when the Germans arrived.

  ‘Knowing what I know, how could I live with myself if I didn’t try to help my people resist? Or at least give them a chance to escape and hide, if it’s still possible?’

  Chances were that Naomi would end up thrown into some cell, shot in some gloomy courtyard. At the moment, the Hungarians didn’t seem to be deporting Jews to camps in the same way as the Germans, but who knew how long that omission would last? ‘Of course.’ Amber tried to sound conciliatory. ‘I understand.’

  ‘No,’ Naomi said. ‘I don’t think you do. Not entirely. Most British people don’t. They think we Jews are a bit of a nuisance, whining on about mass executions and atrocities when everyone’s trying to get on with winning a war. Especially those of us in Palestine who also annoy the Arabs with our insistence on living there.’

  ‘I’d never really thought about Palestine.’

  Naomi gave her a look that was half-contemptuous and half-amused. The lemonade came and they stopped talking to drink appreciatively.

  ‘We should go.’ Naomi pushed her glass aside. ‘I need to wash some clothes. Hard to imagine it’s still February, it’s so warm during the day.’