The Officer and the Spy, page 9
Please, no more lying to me.
With a chink, she dropped the lid back on the casserole, took her bowl to the table, sat, and sank her heavy head into her hands.
What could she possibly say to Hector? How to begin to explain what that summer had done to her, without crashing into one of his hoops?
Releasing her head, she reached into the table’s drawer for a spoon, and took a mouthful of stew. She’d never been someone who lost their appetite when they were upset. It simply wasn’t in her make-up. And she really was starving.
But God, it hurt, to be sitting in this silent kitchen, with Esther dreaming upstairs, thinking of him.
Seven weeks, they’d had together, that summer. Seven, uninterrupted weeks.
He’d been working on a college assignment, through all of them; a design for a house. It was what he’d been drawing in his sketchpad, that first June night she’d found him, waiting for her under that tree. She’d asked him to show it to her, and he’d reached for the pad, setting it on his lap, guiding her around the beginnings of a porch, the front steps.
By the end of those seven weeks, that small handful of lines had metamorphosed into a five-bedroomed home, and he’d talked to her about it like it would one day be their own.
‘I’ll build you a swimming pool,’ he’d said. ‘That way you can be a mermaid even if we’re not near the sea.’
She could hear his voice now; that subtle accent. He’d spoken such excellent English. His mother, Brigit, had lived in London for years along with her diplomat parents, before the last war, and had raised him and Krista to be bilingual. So fluent had they both been that, sometimes, Eleni had forgotten they were German at all.
‘We’d have to be near the sea,’ she’d told Otto. ‘I won’t have it any other way.’
‘That’s fine,’ he’d said. ‘I won’t have it any way, but with you.’
He’d been a good liar too.
She couldn’t precisely recall where they’d been when they’d had that conversation. They’d spent so much time together, talked of so many countless things, that it was impossible now, more than four years on, to be certain of what detail, or secret, or dream, or regret, they’d shared, when.
Yet, there were certain things she remembered very clearly.
Such as, their first night, under that tree. The one that they’d started as near-strangers, ended as something rather different, rather better, and which – like a domino tipping, pushing them into their next encounter, then their next, until they were both of them falling, on and on – had turned the rest of their summer into an inevitability.
After it, they simply hadn’t wanted to be apart.
In fairness, he had warned her about Lotte, admitting, right there, under that tree, that she’d been the reason he’d failed to get to the café that afternoon.
‘She’s important,’ he’d said, with a sigh that had made her ache for him, even more when he’d explained about his mother’s multiple sclerosis, and how much more dangerous the illness had become in Germany, where the Nazis were becoming increasingly insistent on eradicating such conditions from their Aryan race. ‘It’s not considered hereditary,’ he’d said, ‘but sometimes it does… recur… and lately my sister’s eyes have been blurring, she keeps getting these pins and needles. She’s tried to act like it’s nothing, but Mama took her to her doctor, he did some tests. It’s not nothing. It’s terrifying, actually.’ His head, against the trunk, had been so close hers. ‘Lotte’s father’s a powerful man. He could protect them both. So… ’
‘She’s important,’ Eleni had echoed.
‘Only in that,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing more.’
She’d believed him. Realizing how little he must want to dwell on it, already only wanting to make him happy, she hadn’t asked him more.
They’d moved on, talking of easier things: his childhood in Grunewald, life in Munich, her own in Portsmouth; Mr Hodgson at her hotel in Portsmouth.
She stirred her stew, replaying how she’d told him about how cross her old manager used to become when sailors had tried to check in with girls who hadn’t really been their wives.
‘They always call themselves Mr and Mrs Brown, or Smith, or Jones. I wish they’d think of something more original. Like, I don’t know… Winterbottom.’
‘Or Nachtnebel,’ he’d said.
‘Nachtnebel,’ she’d repeated, laughing. And, as they’d carried on, thinking up other ridiculous surnames – Fitzhattily, Macloughty, Trinkenshuh – they’d laughed more, until she, looking into his bright eyes, had had tears running down her cheeks.
She set her spoon down, dropping her head back into her hands.
Just before they’d bid one another goodnight, she’d tried to teach him some more Greek, beyond the word hello. The breezy night had been black by then; her bottom, entirely numb on the unforgiving floor.
He’d been awful at Greek. Truly awful. She’d told him as much, and he’d challenged her to see if she could do any better at German.
They’d started with, good evening.
‘Guten abend,’ she’d parroted.
‘Very good,’ he’d said, the tree’s leaves painting shadows on his face. ‘Next, we’ll do, schön, dich kennenzulernen. It’s nice to get to know you.’
‘It’s nice to get to know you, too.’
He’d laughed, softly.
She’d loved his laugh.
‘So?’
She’d tried. ‘Schön, dich kennen… kennen… ’
‘Schön, dich kennenzulernen.’
‘Schön, dich kennenzulernen.’
‘Excellent,’ he’d said. Then, ‘Ich mag dich sehr.’
‘What does that mean?’ she’d asked.
He hadn’t answered. Tips had chosen that moment to interrupt them, pouncing on to Eleni’s lap, reminding her that he needed his dinner, of the imam cooking in the oven.
Ich mag dich sehr.
Eleni had since found out what the words meant.
I really like you.
He’d known already.
I think I knew from the moment I saw you in those shorts, he’d written, in one of the many letters he’d sent after they’d parted, and which she only wished she could be strong enough to throw away.
They hadn’t kissed, that first evening.
Back then, she’d still never kissed anyone, and had had to wait several more days before that had changed.
She remembered that happening as well.
She remembered it perfectly.
It had been on the Friday following. Not an evening had gone by in-between that he hadn’t been waiting for her at the bus stop to walk her home, sit with her again beneath that tree.
But that Friday, he’d managed to get away from the others long enough to surprise her at the café, just as they’d been closing for the siesta. Socrates, also there, had offered to fill in for the rest of Eleni’s shift so that she and Otto could spend the afternoon together.
‘Are you sure?’ she’d asked him, at once thrilled, and full of sudden nerves.
‘Cheek to Cheek’ had been playing, the sun blazing.
‘I’m sure,’ Socrates had said, smiling not at her, but at Dimitri.
‘Go,’ Dimitri had said, shoo-ing her off, ‘before he changes his mind.’
‘Yes, come,’ Otto had said, grabbing her hand, pulling her to him, making her laugh.
She’d taken off her apron, thrown it for Dimitri to catch, and it had landed on one of the remaining customer’s heads. She’d laughed about that too.
She’d laughed a lot, that afternoon.
She still counted it as one of the happiest of her life.
Before the War
Chapter Seven
Crete, July 1936
There wasn’t a cloud in the beating sky. It was 3 July, and the temperature well into the nineties, even at close to four. The cliffs above the beach Eleni had brought Otto to were steep, netted with weeds and wild herbs, pockets of cactus, unshaded from the fierce rays. Neither of them talked as they climbed down, too focused on the effort of not tumbling, their skin sheened with sweat.
He wore shorts and a loose shirt; she wore a blue dress.
‘Where are the shorts?’ he’d asked, just the evening before.
‘Waiting for the weekend,’ she’d said. Their fingers had been touching again. ‘When I’m not working.’
And now the weekend had started early.
They’d driven to the beach in Nikos Kalantis’s motor. Nikos himself had left for Thessaloniki at the start of the week, but not before he’d first annoyed Otto, claiming to have had no idea what he was talking about, when he’d mentioned seeing him watching Eleni and Dimitri dance.
‘He said he hadn’t noticed you,’ Otto had told Eleni, under the tree. ‘He was looking right at you. I’m sure he knew who you were.’
‘What does it matter if he did?’ Eleni had replied, unfazed.
‘It matters that he pretended he didn’t.’
‘I probably just brought back bad memories he didn’t want to talk about. He was awful to my mama, you know… ’
Given he had been, given Yorgos’s prevailing hatred of him, it might have felt odd to her, riding in his motor from the café, had she not been so distracted by who she was riding with; the illicitness of their afternoon escape.
She’d kept stealing looks at Otto as they’d driven, eyes on his tanned hand guiding the steering wheel, the way he’d rested his other arm on the door frame, so enviably at ease; how his sun-bleached brown hair, that needed a crew cut, except she hoped would never get one, because she liked it too much the way it was, had blown in the hot wind.
He’d snuck glances at her too, smiling quizzically beneath his aviator shades. ‘Where are we going?’
‘A bit further,’ she’d said, reaching up to push her own hair from her face. ‘Not much longer.’
It had been Dimitri who’d suggested the spot to her, several miles outside of town, past their villas, past a small, sleepy village called Chorafakia. (‘Where do we go?’ she’d asked him, in hurried Greek, reclaiming her apron from that tourist. ‘Easy,’ he’d said. ‘No problem.’) She’d known the beach the instant he’d mentioned it. Maria had used to bring her as a child, when Yorgos and Spiros had been working, and the Meltemi winds blowing. The tiny, white bay, with its deep, crystal water, was one of the most sheltered on the coast. Reliably deserted too, especially on days as still as this one, thanks to its situation off the beaten track, the difficult climb down. Rarely had Eleni run into another soul there.
Which, for her and Otto’s purposes, made it just about perfect.
It wasn’t the risk of being spotted by Lotte that she worried about. She still hadn’t met her, or any of the others with Otto at the villa, but knew by now that it had been she who’d called for him from the rocks. And Marianne who’d played the cello. And Krista who, back in Germany, played with fire, darting around Berlin, ignoring her father, ignoring her pins and needles, distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets.
She liked the sound of Krista, liked the sound of Marianne. She certainly didn’t want to cause any unnecessary trouble for them, or Lotte.
But what really concerned her that afternoon was not causing anyone on the island an unnecessary heart attack, least of all her papou. Because, however progressive he might be when it came to her working at the café, female suffrage, Crete in 1936 was simply not a place that she, or any young woman, might reasonably expect to get away with being seen, for any length of time, with a young man she wasn’t related to. Sitting each night with Otto at the end of her driveway, under the cover of dusk, was one thing. But heading out and about on a sun-drenched Friday?
They needed to be a lot more careful about keeping hidden for that.
‘It’s certainly hidden,’ Otto said, jumping the last drop to the sand, then turning to help her, except she’d already jumped down too.
He threw his bag on the sand and crouched to extract a bottle of water, offering it to her.
‘Thank you,’ she said, gladly taking it, gulping the liquid down before handing the bottle back to him.
She watched him drink, his lips touching the rim hers had just left. There was a raw intimacy to the moment, the beach’s silence, the lapping of the barely there shore break. Now they were no longer on the move, her nerves about what this unexpected afternoon might hold, returned, disorientating her.
‘See that rock,’ she said, talking through the giddying sensation, pointing at where it jutted from the water. ‘It was covered in sea urchins the last time I was here. Do you want to see if it still is?’
‘Do I want to go swimming with you?’ He grinned.
Her nerves evaporated.
‘Yes, Eleni,’ he started to unbutton his shirt (her nerves returned), ‘I would like to go swimming with you.’
They hadn’t done it together since the first night she’d returned to the island. Whilst she’d been out every morning that week before work, he hadn’t joined her, just as she hadn’t joined him when she’d seen him late each night from her kitchen window. Tempted as she always was to run down to him – alert as she remained for him to surprise her – she’d come to realize how foolish it would be; the bay, like the stage of a theatre; the villas, its seats.
Here though… Here, there was no audience.
He walked to the shore, wading in to waist-deep, the sun bouncing from his broad shoulders, leaving her alone whilst she wriggled from her undergarments beneath her dress, and slipped her costume on. She kept her eyes fixed on him, moving as quickly as she could, not knowing whether he might look back at her.
But, a gentleman, he didn’t, not until she too was wading in, at which point he turned, tucking his hair behind his ear, and whistled, low and long; a gentleman no more.
‘That’s quite a suit. I think I like it even more than your shorts.’
She laughed, the heat in her skin growing, yet not so much that she wanted any of it to stop. ‘Are we going to swim?’
‘Lead the way.’
‘All right—’ she raised her arms in a ‘V’ ‘—I hope you can keep up.’
It was a fair distance, further than she’d recalled; it took a while before the rock started to feel any closer. But with him matching her pace, stroke for stroke, right by her side in the sea she felt so at home in, she only wanted it to go on and on. And, to her relief, the longer it did, the more caught up she became in the steady rhythm of their movement, she felt herself start to relax, her muscles loosen, her mind clear, until, by the time they reached the rock and she was clambering up onto it, footprints evaporating on the hot, porous surface, she was no longer so jittery, or trying to second-guess what might or might not be going to happen; no, she was getting onto her knees, peering over the rock’s edge at the spiky garden of urchins beneath, marvelling that, in all that had happened in her own life since she’d last visited the beach – school moves, house moves, exams – here these urchins had been, clinging on. Here they still were.
‘You are a fast swimmer,’ Otto, still in the sea, said.
She turned, smiling. His high cheekbones were beaded with water, his hair darkened by it. Beneath the clear surface, she saw his chest rising and falling…
‘Do you need to catch your breath?’ she teased.
Ignoring her, he pulled himself up onto the rock, soaking it all over again, looking down at the urchins. ‘Have you ever trodden on one?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. Not here. Near Maria and Spiros’s.’ She’d been little. Maria had carried her back to the house, removed the urchin’s spikes, wiped her tears, kissed the sole of her foot, and taken her to the surgery so that Yorgos could check her over, just to be safe. (‘Well,’ Yorgos had said, kissing her foot too, ‘you won’t do this twice.’) ‘It really hurts,’ she told Otto. ‘It does for days.’
‘I know.’ He moved, laying back on the rock, resting his head on his arms so that his tanned stomach formed a concave. ‘I’ve done it too, in Italy.’
‘Italy?’ she said, lying beside him. She felt the cool drip of her salty hair down her neck, the heat of the stone beneath her drying skin. ‘When did you go to Italy?’
‘Years ago.’ He turned his head, looking at her, his green eyes so close, they blurred. ‘Puglia.’
‘Was it nice?’
He smiled. ‘Not as nice as here.’
She smiled too. ‘Where else have you been?’
‘Only London.’
‘Really?’
‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘my mother wanted us to see it.’ He went on, describing the seedy hotel his father had mistakenly booked for them all, right in the heart of Soho. ‘I think he’d misheard the name of a place a colleague had recommended. Something like that anyway.’ He broke off, remembering. She watched him do it, in the sunshine. How he left her for a moment. ‘I was fourteen, I loved it. I wanted to go to a jazz club. But he made us move the next day, to a guest house in Chelsea.’
‘Oh—’ she pouted in mock sympathy ‘—you poor thing.’
‘I know. It was very hard.’ He shifted his weight. ‘Like this rock.’
‘You want to move?’
‘No.’ Another smile. ‘Not particularly.’
‘Shall I tell you what I want?’
‘Please do.’
‘To know how—’ she raised her hand, and, with her fingertip, touched the slight dent in his nose; the only imperfection in his face ‘—you did this.’
‘You want to know that?’ His brow creased. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘It’s not a very impressive story, honestly… ’
‘Well, now I really want to hear it.’
He rolled his head back, and closed his eyes. ‘Krista did it.’
‘Your sister?’ She burst out laughing. ‘Your sister broke your nose?’
‘My sister broke my nose.’
‘How?’
‘Sledging.’
