The Lines We Leave Behind Read online

  But this wasn’t just a physical pull. Something more was happening to her. It had been so easy dealing with men in the past. She took her pick and let the chosen boy flatter her. In return, she gave them something back: emotional, if temporary, support, and erotic companionship that hopefully helped them at times of great strain. When they went back to flying operations or embarked on some military venture, Amber knew she’d done her best to distract and relax them. It was a deal. Many of her female friends behaved in a similar way. But with Robert she couldn’t make out the nature of the deal, or its price; only that she had signed up for it and every vein in her body now felt as though it were flowing with champagne.

  He was stroking the small of her back. She’d never thought of it as being one of those body parts that could feel so delicious. She laughed.

  He released her and looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘I feel like a cat.’

  ‘There is something a little feline about you, my dear.’

  And possibly about him, too, she thought. Though he would be one of the big cats: mesmerising, powerful. She tilted her mouth towards his.

  ‘You want some more?’

  This time the kiss was more powerful, almost violent. Her mouth felt bruised.

  ‘My villa will be unusually quiet tonight – all my housemates have gone out,’ Robert said, breaking away. Her legs were actually shaking. ‘And it’s only five minutes from here.’ They walked onto the island, his arm around her back. She passed the turn to her own house. Not too late to change her mind. He wouldn’t hold it against her, she knew him well enough to be sure of that. Her mouth opened to tell him she wanted to go home by herself: she was tired. But on she walked. Of all the women in Cairo he’d chosen her. Not perfect, pretty Naomi or any of the impeccably groomed and sophisticated women at the parties. Her.

  They reached a wrought iron gate and he led her through the jasmine-scented garden and into the villa. ‘My houseboy will be hovering downstairs,’ he whispered. ‘Let’s go straight upstairs quietly.’ Halfway up the stairs he stopped. ‘There’s still time for us to do the sensible thing.’ His eyes scrutinised her. She didn’t move. He smiled and took her by the hand.

  Beside his bed there was a bottle of brandy and two glasses. Had Robert expected to bring someone back with him? He poured her a generous measure. She sat on the edge of the bed sipping it and watching him. Now that they were here the heat between them seemed to have cooled. Wasn’t this a bad idea after all? She was probably just flattered by Robert’s attentions, erotically charged by his physical presence.

  No. Something more was happening. Despite her wariness of him, he’d got under her skin. The tired old cliché was the only one that would do.

  He sat next to her, almost companionably, drinking his brandy. ‘Some of the people in the same building as us aren’t reliable, Amber.’

  She nodded, thinking of the plump man with the moustache, trying to think of something she could say to indicate that she understood this, but failing yet again to find the right words. She was never this inarticulate with people other than Robert.

  ‘Those office doors and walls seem to have eyes. People go to parties. They swim at the Gezira Club, and have their hair shampooed and set at the same French hairdresser you probably used. You haven’t met them, but they’ve noted you.’

  ‘I really shouldn’t have gone out tonight, should I? You were just being kind before when you told me it didn’t matter.’ She felt suddenly almost tearful. Maud could never ever get people right and Amber didn’t seem to be doing much better. She’d ruined things with Robert. Why the hell were they sending someone like her out to Yugoslavia on such an important mission?

  ‘I’m never kind. I just don’t want you bored and lonely. The service asks such a lot of you. And it’s hard, isn’t it? Coming somewhere like Cairo and not knowing anyone apart from us. Oh, I know it’s tremendous fun being out here after living in dark, battered old London. But it can feel overwhelming.’ His voice was soft, confiding. ‘You want to grab at all it offers because you may never have the chance again, but you want this operation to go well. You’ve worked so hard, Amber, harder than you ever have before. You’ve given your heart to our work.’

  She stared at him. How had he known this about her? Was it in her notes, or was he just able to read her? Nobody else had ever shown such insight into her. Robert put down his glass and moved towards her, murmuring her name: Amber, her real name, as she thought of it now. There was still time to say no. But she didn’t.

  Much, much later, lips bruised, the inside of her mouth furred from the brandy, Amber crept out of the villa, scared of meeting one of Robert’s housemates. He had offered to go down with her and walk her back to her own villa, but she was wary of them being seen together. It was well and truly light now. She was due to be in the briefing room with the rest of her group and an instructor who was going to refresh their geographical knowledge of northern Yugoslavia. There would be topography, maps, and bearings to memorise. The session was to be followed by a refresher lesson on wireless repairs, run by someone flown over from England. Concentration and focus would be demanded. She groaned. Perhaps a bath and a cold compress for her eyes. This wasn’t how it had been supposed to go, her life in Cairo. Amber was slipping back into bad habits. I must try harder.

  She must have said the words aloud because a boy pushing a cart laden with figs and dates turned his head to stare at her.

  7

  Early June 1947

  As I promised myself, I’ve written down a brief description of how the affair with Robert began. Describing that first night gives me an impression of ordering my past, making sense of it. He was my boss, in the parlance of the modern workplace, and he’d chosen me. Not the efficient Naomi. Me. I’m still not sure when fascination turned to love, I write. I didn’t spend many nights with him. He switched to employing an almost avuncular banter with me in the classroom, but the harsh rebuffs didn’t completely stop.

  It sounds very clinical. I think I’m afraid to break the carapace I’ve built around those old feelings for Robert. I close my eyes, willing myself back into Cairo, trying to feel my gym kit sticking to my back, smelling that mixture of aromas, hearing the racket of the streets. And feeling his touch on my skin.

  I was disciplined enough to try to detach from the relationship between us when we were training. But in the evenings, if I couldn’t see him, I found myself hanging around in the villa, not wanting to go out, but not knowing what to do with myself. I’d go for my swim, looking out for him all the time. Once I spotted him talking to a group of women, all beautiful, all well dressed, placing a hand on a tanned and shapely arm then leaning in to light a cigarette placed between a pair of perfectly reddened lips. I watched the women, sophisticated, worldly females, play with locks of their hair, pout and look up through their lashes at him. I looked down at my own muscular body in its plain swimsuit. I couldn’t wear anything more glamorous to swim the vigorous front crawl I needed to do to maintain fitness.

  But then when we were together he made me feel as though I filled his world. In bed, when I lay back on the pillows, sated, he’d ask me about my childhood, the time I spent at the mine. I told him about the Serbian cook who let me chop up vegetables and baked pastries for me. About Mama’s little dog who once took on a snake he found in the bushes, how the Albanian gardener had rushed out with a fork to slice the snake in two, and how the two parts of its body had twitched as though it had become two snakes. About the first days back at boarding school in England each September, when I would pull the coarse sheet over my face at night and stuff my knuckle into my mouth so they wouldn’t know I was weeping. Robert would listen, propped up on one elbow, silent, nodding from time to time, his eyes never leaving mine. And I felt as though I had stripped myself inside out and he knew everything about me. He’d kiss me on my forehead as though I were a small child.

  But in the mornings we’d return to the briefing room or head out on trainin
g exercises and he would be back to treating me strictly, like the naughty baby of the family who can’t be relied on. The others noticed. ‘You’re the best at a lot of this stuff,’ one of the men said. ‘But he chews your head off, doesn’t he, if you make the slightest slip-up?’

  Finally, these recollections flow from my pen. I’m so relieved. I want Dr Rosenstein to be pleased with me, to feel that I’m making a good fist of this. I never cared what teachers at school thought, so this is a new sensation for me.

  I am lucky to have Dr Rosenstein as my psychiatrist. Jim sees a Dr Manners.

  ‘Dr Manners is more old school,’ Jim says at lunch. ‘Not so much talking things through. Electrodes and wrapping if you get too excited. I’ve heard he likes the old insulin injections, too.’

  I haven’t ever had one of these, but I’ve heard about the procedure. They inject you and you fall into a coma, sometimes only after you’ve had a few seizures. They bring you back from the coma with an injection of glucose and you wake up, often soaking wet because you’ve been sweating. Or because you’ve wet yourself. If it works, you feel calmer and less obsessed with whatever it was that brought you to madness.

  ‘You’re making progress, aren’t you?’ I ask Jim.

  He shrugs. ‘Suppose Dr Manners is right, though? Suppose the time for talking really does have to come to an end?’

  ‘Do you mind talking about . . . what happened to you in the North Atlantic with him?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mind or not. It’s easier just to do what I’m ordered.’

  I’ve noticed that Jim is happiest when we adhere to a routine. Get up. Have breakfast. Read in one’s room or go for a walk. Lunch. Help in the garden. Badminton or bridge, depending on the weather. Practise his juggling – he’s up to four balls now. Write letters. Read letters. Supper. More bridge. Or a play on the wireless, if Ingrams deems it suitably unexciting. A perfect life. For someone of eighty. Not for someone Jim’s age.

  ‘I’m not sure how much longer my people can afford to keep me here,’ Jim says quietly. ‘They don’t say anything, but I know it’s a struggle for them. I have younger brothers and sisters still at home.’

  I don’t know what to say, how to reassure him. Woodlands costs. I know that my husband probably paid my fees and expenses at first. And now my parents must be footing the bill. I go up to my room to reread the letter my mother has sent me. She cannot keep off the subject of my husband. He is so vengeful. He loved you and you hadn’t been married long. I can’t believe he wants to punish you like this and deprive you of what should be yours. There must be a way of ending this. I am coming to see you soon, darling.

  I’m not sure I want Mama to see me here at Woodlands. She might inadvertently drag in too much of the outside world that I am still struggling with. On the other hand, it would be good to talk in that other language of ours, to reconnect with clear skies and the smell of herbs and trees dripping with fruit. I start to write my mother an answer but can’t concentrate. So I ring the bell and one of the nurses takes me outside. In the garden they’ve trimmed the bushes and Ingrams is directing Jim in turning over a large canvas sheet filled with clippings. When it’s rolled up it looks like a corpse.

  I walk on. The sun has rediscovered some of its warmth, but the heat is still gentle. As I approach the dovecot I see that someone has chucked a rusty old tin over the wall. When I go inside I will throw it away. The lane behind the wall leads down to the village. Sometimes we hear young men, boys really, congregating in the lane. They whistle when they hear us and call us loonies, talk to one another in gobbling, slurring voices. I’m relieved they aren’t in the lane this afternoon.

  I unfold the stepladder and peer into the dovecot. Three pairs are inside, livelier than they were when it was hot. ‘Hello,’ I say softly to them. ‘It’s me again.’ They peer back at me with mild curiosity but little surprise. White doves, symbols of innocence. But vulnerable. I fear that my doves – for so I think of them – will become prey to a raptor, one of the buzzards I’ve sometimes seen in the distance.

  I may not have been dove-innocent in the weeks before I left Cairo to carry out my operation. But I did feel vulnerable. I was falling for Robert, for the gentle man I saw when we were alone together. Even if that gentleness wasn’t always guaranteed. He could switch into something much colder.

  ‘I rang for a taxi and it will be here soon.’ Robert shook Amber gently.

  It was 2 a.m. His housemates must be home. This was the third time she’d come back to his villa.

  ‘Thank you, darling,’ he added.

  ‘I’m not a geisha, you don’t need to thank me.’

  ‘Not at all. You really do like the bedroom side of things, don’t you?’

  She sat up, grimacing.

  ‘Here.’ He poured her a glass of water from a jug on the bedside table. ‘You look a bit rough, sweetheart.’ He leaned over and kissed her breast. ‘But you taste of salt and honey. Biblical, really.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s blasphemous.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ But, as always when he conceded some advantage to her, Robert would do something to show her who was really in charge. They never entirely seemed to escape the roles of master and student. He rolled her over, his movements gentle at first, but becoming more urgent.

  ‘I thought the taxi driver was on his way?’

  ‘He’ll wait.’

  When they’d finished she reached for her cigarettes. ‘I feel awful.’ Probably the worst was yet to come. The brandy on top of the whisky . . . Her father had always warned her not to mix drinks.

  Robert stroked her forehead and lit her cigarette. He had been the one who’d insisted on that last whisky. ‘Hope you can make your supplies last when you’re up in the hills.’ They were issuing her with a ration of Balkan cigarettes, something she could offer round to the Partisans.

  She blew a smoke ring in answer.

  ‘I don’t want the Partisans complaining that our agent is moody because she’s run out of fags.’ He ran a finger down her breast. ‘Or because she misses . . . other indulgences.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll survive any shortages.’ God, she hoped she wasn’t pregnant. Imagine being up a mountain, belly swelling, nauseous.

  He smiled but then his features hardened.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The Partisans may find you a bit . . . advanced in your morals.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You’re a woman who’s enjoyed,’ he emphasised the word, ‘several partners.’

  She felt her cheeks warm. The report from the security vetting she’d had to undergo had certainly been thorough. As he liked to remind her from time to time.

  He reached towards the pile of coins he kept on his bedside table. ‘You’d better get a move on.’ He handed her some money. ‘For the taxi.’

  ‘I don’t need cash, I’m fine.’ She nodded at her evening bag.

  ‘Take it for something else, then. Food, books, I don’t know. A glass of lemonade on the terrace of Shepheard’s Hotel.’

  ‘You pay me a good salary.’

  ‘Women always need extra cash.’ He stroked her thigh.

  She looked at him. ‘Are you paying me?’

  Robert reached for the cigarette case. ‘No more than you deserve. You’re such an incomparably good f—’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’ A bit of her spittle landed on his cheek. She was glad.

  ‘Sorry.’ He dropped his head. ‘Don’t know what got into me. Unforgivable.’

  ‘I thought . . .’ She had misjudged everything. Failed the test Robert had set.

  ‘What did you think, my darling?’ He put his arm around her.

  ‘You and me, is it some kind of a test? A psychological exercise?’ Anger was sweeping away her dismay.

  ‘You must think I’m very sadistic and very sophisticated.’

  ‘Is sleeping with me part of the training process?’ Perhaps he already had the next batch of female agents lined up, and t
hey too would be taken to his bed.

  ‘I can’t imagine you being part of any process,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you before. I think that’s why I’m sometimes . . . Well, it takes me by surprise and I don’t know how to handle that.’ He took her hand, interwove her fingers into his. ‘And then, of course, there’s the operation. Knowing you’ll be off there shortly.’ He took their linked hands to his mouth and kissed the back of hers. ‘I’ve trained you, but I won’t be able to help you, except by wireless signal, when you’re out there alone. Perhaps that thought is making me feel unsettled. Very unprofessional of me when I should be providing constant reassurance. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised you felt like that.’ Amber shook her hand free and pulled him to her. The resultant kiss would leave her skin sore but she didn’t care.

  Eventually he released her. His expression suddenly took on a more casual appearance. She knew by now that this was when he was actually at his most watchful. ‘I do need to talk to you about the drop.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  He shook his head. ‘It needs to be with the others. Later, darling.’

  She pulled on her dress, a red silk number with cap sleeves, cut on the bias, very tight and completely inappropriate for daytime. The taxi driver would know she’d stayed out all night. She couldn’t face sorting out stockings and suspenders, but forced herself to pull on her silk drawers, newly bought in Cairo, where it still seemed possible to find luxuries. She stuffed her feet into her shoes, which seemed to have shrunk overnight, and picked up the bag she’d discarded on the rug. ‘See you later on.’