The Officer and the Spy, page 1
Praise for The Officer and The Spy
“With the historical authenticity of Sebastian Faulks, the perfectly observed family relationships of Santa Montefiore, and the gut-wrenching twist of Jojo Moyes . . . It is historical fiction at its heart-breaking best. Epic, enthralling and deeply emotional, to say I loved it is an understatement. Jenny Ashcroft is a superb writer.”
Iona Grey, Letters to the Lost
“An unforgettable story of great love torn apart by war, of heroism and betrayal, passion and pure evil, all set against an idyllic Greek island backdrop. It’s a genuine masterpiece, a book to lose yourself in.”
Gill Paul, The Secret Wife
“What a beautiful novel. So romantic, so epic, so tear-jearking. I absolutely adored it and can’t wait to read the next Jenny Ashcroft novel. Five stars all round.”
Lorna Cook, The Forgotten Village
“I was completely spellbound. A beautiful, poignant love story with a clever twist, all set against the backdrop of war-torn Crete. It’s the best book I’ve read this year.”
Kathleen McGurl, The Forgotten Secret
“The Officer and The Spy has simply blown me away! Such a powerful and poignant love story set against the beauty and danger of wartime Crete. At times I could hardly bear to read on, and yet couldn’t put it down.”
Liz Trenow, Searching for my Daughter
“The Officer and The Spy is beautifully written, powerful and poignant. Time and place are brilliantly evoked, with a moving love story at its core. It is excellent.”
Tracy Rees, The House at Silvermoor
JENNY ASHCROFT is the author of several historical novels, including Beneath a Burning Sky and Island in the East. She previously spent much of her life living in, working in and exploring Australia and Asia, and now splits her time between Australia and the UK.
The Officer and The Spy is in part inspired by her Greek grandmother’s stories and is Jenny’s most personal novel to date.
Also by Jenny Ashcroft
Beneath a Burning Sky
Island in the East
Meet Me in Bombay
Under the Golden Sun
Copyright
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
1
First published in Great Britain by
HQ, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022, as The Echoes of Love
Copyright © Jenny Ashcroft 2022
Jenny Ashcroft asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © May 2023 ISBN: 9780008603137
Version 2023-01-10
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008469009
For my grandmother, Maria Rosis
Contents
Cover
Praise
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Before the War
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
London, 1940
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Before the War
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
London, 1940
Chapter Nine
Before the War
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Crete, 1941
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Crete, 1942
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
England, 1974
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Crete, 1943
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Crete, 1974
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
‘Remembering wartime Greece.’ Transcript of research interview undertaken by M. Middleton (M.M.) with subject seventeen (#17), at British Broadcasting House, 4 June 1974
M.M:
You knew Crete well then, before the occupation?
#17:
I did.
M.M:
Chania…?
#17:
Chania especially.
M.M:
I gather the town was much changed by the invasion.
#17:
The entire island was.
M.M:
I realize it was heavily bombed…
#17:
It went well beyond that.
M.M:
How so?
#17:
[Pours glass of water] Freedom, vanished.
Safety, vanished. Crete was cut off, from almost everything. [Drinks water] You must understand what that was like.
M.M:
Perhaps you could help me.
#17:
It became a world in itself. We were all of us there, and that was it. Tremendously isolated. Life outside felt [searches for word] theoretical.
M.M:
Theoretical?
#17:
Not real. Suspended. For the duration.
None of the normal rules applied. Or at least… one could forget they should.
M.M:
And have you been back since?
#17:
No.
M.M:
Some will consider it odd, that you’ve decided to speak out about it all now, after so many years.
#17:
I am sure some will.
M.M:
And what would you say to them?
#17:
That they’re quite correct.
M.M:
Can you offer an explanation for why you’re doing it?
#17:
[Long silence]
M.M:
An encounter?
#17:
[Sighs. Shakes head]
M.M:
A new recollection, perhaps…?
#17:
No. No. I’ve always remembered everything.
M.M:
Then…?
#17:
I’ve recently become… unwell.
M.M:
I am sorry.
#17:
Yes. [Deeper sigh] It rather… illuminates… one’s life, knowing it’s drawing to a close. [Pauses] If there really is to be some grand reckoning, then mine is now dauntingly imminent.
M.M:
And how do you feel you will fare?
#17:
Poorly.
M.M:
You feel guilty?
#17:
Yes. Yes, I feel guilty.
M.M:
For what though, exactly?
#17:
For so much. [Coughs] Every single day.
Before the War
Chapter One
Crete, June 1936
It felt like the beginning of so many summers that had gone before. Eleni, sitting beside her grandfather in his beloved Cadillac, roaring along the dusty coast road from Chania – sticky with sweat beneath her travelling clothes: the skirt suit that had been so appropriate in Portsmouth, but in Greece was too thick, too dull; grey with lingering English chill – gave not a moment’s pause to the possibility that the one ahead might be different. Why should she? She’d been summering in Crete since she was a baby. This was to be her nineteenth stay. She trusted in what the island held waiting for her, entirely.
The road grew quieter, the further her papou, Yorgos, drove them out of Chania’s bustling centre. There were no other motorcars on the winding hillside pass, just the odd farmer and laden donkey, goats that grazed in the dry, golden heat. Yorgos overtook them all, at a speed Eleni’s British father would have called reckless, had he been there, but which she hardly noticed. She rested her head back, feeling the ba lmy wind in her tired eyes, the ebbing sun a warm cloth on her face, and, heedless of the Cadillac’s wheels skimming the cliff edge, luxuriated in the relief of her three-day odyssey across Europe finally being over.
She’d travelled by herself that year. Her father, Timothy – a naval captain, and off to sea himself for the summer – hadn’t been happy about it. He’d wanted her to take her usual chaperone: a retired teacher by the name of Miss Finch. But Miss Finch had, only the week before, broken her leg – playing croquet, of all things – leaving Timothy no time to recruit a replacement, and little choice but to give in to Eleni’s assurances that she could manage the trip alone. Which she had. Happily. Sorry as she’d felt for Miss Finch (and really, poor Miss Finch), it had been such a relief, not having to spend endless hours nodding along to her tales of various nieces and nephews, so many pet rabbits, and pure liberation, deciding for herself when to have a drink, or read, or simply stare from the carriage window in silence.
And now she was here.
Here.
She tilted her head, looking down and out at the sea below; a glittering cloth tinged rose by the dusk, sliced in two by the furrows of the ferry that had brought her from Athens. Idly, she watched it steam away to the horizon, wondering who was now on it, what kind of lives they led, and all the while Yorgos talked, his gruff voice raised above the engine, grilling her on her solitary passage through France, Mussolini’s Italy, speaking in rapid Greek, no concession to the months that had passed since she’d last used the language, his tolerance for it not being her mother tongue extremely low.
‘Did the trains run on time?’
‘They were fine,’ she said; ola kala.
‘Not crowded?’
‘No.’
‘You had no trouble in Italy? The blackshirts… ’
‘I hardly saw any,’ she said. ‘Only at the border.’ Having her documents scrutinised by the abrasive soldiers was never comfortable, but she’d survived the ordeal many times before. The fascists had, after all, been running Italy since she was a child. She’d known to keep her expression blank as the men had studied her, then her papers, then her again. She’d distracted herself by looking at the posters on the railway sidings. ‘Mussolini never gets older in his pictures,’ she mused. ‘Apparently he shaves his head so no one will guess he’s going grey.’
‘I don’t want to waste oxygen talking about him,’ said Yorgos.
‘You started it…’
‘And now I’m finishing it.’ He shifted gear. ‘You had enough to eat?’
‘Plenty.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘Really.’
He grunted, disbelieving.
Still smiling, she didn’t attempt to convince him.
He’d never be convinced she ate enough anywhere but on Crete. Her diet was an obsession for him. He’d feed her now until September, not happy unless she left having gained at least a stone to see her through the British winter. She’d manage it, with remarkable ease, but couldn’t be nearly so pleased about it.
‘Why?’ Yorgos would demand. ‘What, you want to be one of these magazine models?’
She wouldn’t entirely mind.
He’d arm her with fruits and vegetables to return to England with as well, refusing to accept that any food could be got there that wasn’t brown. She’d take the heavy box, even though it was a pain to carry, the fruit would inevitably bruise, and she really didn’t need it, because she hated denying him anything. And because she knew how his certainty that the British diet had killed her mother plagued him – as though more tomatoes and olives and spinach could have saved her from the Spanish flu.
Perhaps they might have.
‘Here we are,’ he said, unnecessarily, rounding the bend Eleni had been waiting for, veering on to the steep track of rocks and wildflowers that led down to the villa.
She braced her feet against the motor’s floor, stopping herself from lurching forward as they sped on, feeling a wave of joy as the bougainvillea-shrouded house came into view.
It hadn’t changed.
It never changed.
She stared, drinking in its perfect sameness.
She had no place she’d grown up in, back in England. She’d moved with her father countless times around their Portsmouth suburb of Gosport, their naval quarters upgraded with each new promotion he’d secured through the ranks (an indoor latrine, running hot water, that kind of thing). When she’d turned eleven, Timothy had spent long periods in Africa, and boarding school dormitories had joined her rotation of bedrooms. At fifteen, he’d taken a desk job back in Portsmouth and summoned her home to complete her school certificate there. She’d only just finished. She wasn’t sure what should come next, only that her father expected her to be waiting in their newest house – a modern detached with both garden and garage – when he returned from his summer patrol of the Libyan Sea. (I feel a… hole… of sorts, without you, had been his farewell at the docks, delivered without him once touching her, or meeting her eye. Take care now. I miss you. Dear. In my way.)
This villa had been her constant. Perched in the elbow of land between Chania and Souda, overlooking the sea, it was, like so much of Crete, built in the style of the Venetians who’d occupied the island before the Turks had invaded, back in the 1600s. It wasn’t grand, and needed repair in parts, but to Eleni, flattened by the functional monotony of Gosport, its imperfections only added to its beauty. The terracotta walls, fissured by age, battered by centuries of heat and wind, were as pale as peach flesh; the shutters, no bluer than a hazed sky. At night, they’d creak in the breeze coming up from the shore, and she’d lie listening to them, soothed by the thought that her mama must have once done the same.
‘And she watches,’ said Yorgos, as he always did, pulling to a halt at the front door. He turned off the ignition, flooding them in a silence broken only by the song of the cicadas, the lapping waves below. ‘Happy, because you are here.’
Eleni smiled.
Slowly, she climbed from the motor, drawing deep on the villa’s layered scents: citrus from the lemon trees; the bougainvillaea’s pollen; the thyme that grew, everywhere. She closed her eyes, losing herself in them all, these smells she’d missed too, too much.
She didn’t think about Yorgos watching her, his satisfied nod at her contentment.
She didn’t think about much at all.
She simply breathed.
It was her favourite breath of the year.
The breath that truly started summer for her.
The breath when her monochrome world shifted fully into colour, and her loneliness gave way to belonging.
The breath when – however impossible she’d find it to ever admit to her father – she came home.
It was dark by the time she set off to swim that night, picking her way down the stairs a long-gone Venetian had cut into the hillside. She could hear Yorgos clattering around on the terrace above, readying the grill for their dinner. The light of his oil lamp oozed into the blackness, joining the glow of the moon, helping to illuminate her rocky path downward. She wore her bathing costume beneath her robe, held a towel under her arm. The costume’s new elastic was stiff, clinging in a way that made her very conscious of how little of her it covered. She’d bought it for the summer at Landport Drapery on Portsmouth’s Commercial Road, using the money she’d saved working as a weekend receptionist at Queen’s Hotel.
‘Don’t fritter it away, now,’ her boss, Mr Hodgson, had instructed, handing over her final payslip.
Did he give similar instructions to the male staff, she’d wondered.
Regardless, the costume was navy blue, cut with a sweetheart neck, down to a daring high thigh, and she loved it. It was the most glamorous thing she’d ever owned. She had no idea what her papou was going to say when he saw it, or the shorts she’d impulsively bought at Landport’s as well.
