The Secret Pilgrim Part 4

"And now?" I feared he had switched off again, but finally he answered me.

"Now is less funny. She went to art school, took up with a mad painter and settled in a dower house in the Western Isles of Scotland."

"Why's it less funny? Doesn't her painter like-you?"

"He doesn't like anyone. He shot himself. Reasons unknown.

Left a note to the local council apologising for the mess. No note to Steff. They weren't married, which made it more of a muddle."

"And now?" I asked him again.

"She still lives there."

"On the island?"

"Yes."

"In the dower house?"

"Yes."

"Alone?"

"Most of the time."

"You mean you go and see her?"

"I see her, yes. So I suppose I go too. Yes. I go and see her."

"Is it serious?"

"Everything to do with Steff is ma.s.sively serious."

"What does she do when you're not there?"

"Same as she does when I'm there, I should think. Paints. Talks to the d.i.c.kie birds. Reads. Plays music. Reads. Plays music. Paints. Thinks. Reads. Lends me her car. Do you want to know any more of my business?"

For a while we remained strangers, until Ben once more relented. "Tell you what, Ned. Marry her."

"Stefanie?"

"Who else, you idiot? That's a b.l.o.o.d.y good idea, come to think of it. I propose to bring the two of you together to discuss it. You shall marry Steff, Steff shall marry you, and I shall come and live with you both, and fish the loch."

My question sprang from a monstrous, culpable innocence: "Why don't you marry her yourself?" I asked.

Was it only now, standing in my flat and watching the slow dawn print itself on the walls, that I had the answer? Staring at the ruled-out pages of last June and remembering with a jolt his dreadful letter? Or was it given to me already in the car, by Ben's silence as we sped through the Scottish night? Did I know even then that Ben was telling me he would never marry any woman? And was this the reason why I had banished Stefanie from my conscious memory, planting her so deep that not even Smiley, for all his clever delving, had been able to exhume her? Had I looked at Ben as I asked him my fatal question? Had I looked at him as he refused, and went on refusing, to reply? Had I deliberately not looked at him at all? I was used to his silences by then, so perhaps, having waited in vain, I punished him by entering my own thoughts.

All I knew for certain was that Ben never answered my question, and that neither of us ever mentioned Stefanie again.

Stefanie his dream woman, I thought as I continued to examine the diary. On her island. Who loved him. But should marry me.

Who had the taint of death about her that Ben's heroes always seemed to need.

Eternal Stefanie, a light to the unG.o.dly, luminous, peerless, German Stefanie, his paragon and proxy sister-mother too, perhaps waving to him from her tower, offering him sanctuary from, his father.

You have to put yourself in Ben's position, Smiley had said.

Yet even now, the open diary in my hands, I did not allow myself the elusive moment of revelation. An idea was forming in me. Gradually it became a possibility. And only gradually again, as my state of physical and mental siege bore in on me, did it harden into conviction, and finally purpose.

It was morning at last. I hoovered the flat. I dusted and polished. I considered my anger. Dispa.s.sionately, you understand. I reopened the desk, pulled out my desecrated private papers and burned in the grate whatever I felt had been irrevocably sullied by the intrusion of Smiley and Personnel: the letters from Mabel, the exhortations from my former tutor to "do something a bit more fun" than mere research work at the War Office.

I did these things with the outside of myself while the rest of me grappled with the correct, the moral, the decent course of action.

Ben, my friend.

Ben, with the dogs after him.

Ben in anguish, and G.o.d knew what more besides.

Stefanie.

I took a long bath, then lay on my bed watching the mirror on the chest of drawers because the mirror gave me a view of the street. I could see a couple of men whom I took to be Monty's, dressed in overalls and doing something longwinded with a junction box. Smiley had said I shouldn't take them personally. After all, they only wanted to put Ben in irons.

It is ten o'clock of the same long morning as I stand purposefully to one side of my rear window, peering down into the squalid courtyard, with its creosoted shed that used to be the old privy, and its clapboard gate that opens on the dingy street. The street is empty. Monty is not so perfect after all.

The Western Isles, Ben had said. A dower house on the Western Isles.

But which isle? And Stefanie who? The only safe guess was that if she came from the German side of Ben's family and lived in Munich, and that since Ben's German relatives were grand, she was likely to be t.i.tled.

I rang Personnel. I might have rung Smiley but I felt safer lying to Personnel. He recognised my voice before I had a chance to state my business.

"Have you heard anything?" he demanded.

"Afraid not. I want to go out for an hour. Can I do that?"

"Where to?"

"I need a few things. Provisions. Something to read. Thought I'd just pop round to the library."

Personnel was famous for his disapproving silences.

"Be back by eleven. Ring me as soon as you get in."

Pleased by my cool performance, I went out by the front door, bought a newspaper and bread. Using shop windows, I checked my back. n.o.body was following me, I was sure. I went to the public library and from the reference section drew an old copy of Who's Who and a tattered Almanach de Gotha. I did not pause to ask myself who on earth, in Battersea of all places, could have worn out the Almanach de Gotha. I consulted the Who's Who first and turned up Ben's father, who had a knighthood and a battery of decorations: 11,936, married the Grafin Ilse Arno zu Lothringen, one son Benjamin Arno. " I switched to the Almanach and turned up the Arno Lothringens. They rated three pages, but it took me no time to identify the distant cousin whose first name was Stefanie. I boldly asked the librarian for a telephone directory for the Western Isles of Scotland. She hadn't one, but allowed me to call enquiries on her telephone, which was fortunate for I had no doubt my own was being tapped. By ten-forty-five I was back at the telephone in my flat talking to Personnel in the same relaxed tone as before.

"Where did you go?" he asked.

"To the newsagent. And the baker's."

"Didn't you do the library?"

"Library? Oh yes. Yes, I did."

"And what, pray, did you take out?"

"Nothing, actually. For some reason I find it hard to settle to anything at the moment. What do I do next?"

Waiting for him to reply, I wondered whether I had given too many answers but decided I had not.

"You wait. The same as the rest of us."

"Can I come in to Head Office?"

"Since you're waiting, you might as well wait there as here."

"I could go back to Monty, if you like."

It was probably my over-acute imagination at work, but I had a mental image of Smiley standing at his elbow, telling him how to answer me.

"Just wait where you are," he said curtly.

I waited, Lord knows how. I pretended to read. I dramatised myself and wrote a pompous letter of resignation to Personnel. I tore up the letter and burned the pieces. I watched television, and in the evening I lay on the bed observing the changing of Monty's guard in the mirror and thinking of Stefanie, then Ben, then Stefanie again, who was now firmly lodged in my imagination, always outside my reach, dressed in white, Stefanie the immaculate, Ben's protector. I was young, let me remind you, and in matters of women less experienced than you would have suspected if you had heard me speak of them. The Adam in me was still pretty much a child, not to be confused with the warrior.

I waited till ten, then slipped downstairs with a bottle of wine for Mr. Simpson and his wife, and sat with them while we drank it, watching more television. Then I took Mr. Simpson aside.

"Chris," I said. "I know it's daft but there's a jealous lady stalking me and I'd like to leave by the back way. Would you mind letting me out through your kitchen?"

An hour later, I was on the night sleeper to Glasgow. I had obeyed my counter-surveillance procedures to the letter and I was certain I was not being followed. At Glasgow Central Station, all the same, I took the precaution of dawdling over a pot of tea in the buffet while I c.o.c.ked an eye for potential watchers. As a further precaution, I hired a cab to Helensburgh on the other side of the Clyde, before joining the Campbeltown bus to West Loch Tarbert. The ferry to the Western Isles sailed three days a week in those days, except for the short summer season. But my luck held: a boat was waiting, and she sailed as soon as I had boarded her, so that by early afternoon we had pa.s.sed Jura, docked at Port Askaig and were heading out to the open sea again under a darkening northern sky. We were down to three pa.s.sengers by then, an old couple and myself, and when I went up on deck to fend off their questions, the first mate cheerfully asked me more of his own: Was I on holiday now? Was I a doctor then? Was I married at all? Nevertheless, I was in my element. From the moment I take to the sea, everyone is clear to me, everything possible. Yes, I thought excitedly, surveying the great crags as they approached, and smiling at the shrieking of the gulls, yes, this is where Ben would hide! This is where his Wagnerian demons would find their ease! You must understand and try to pardon my callow susceptibility in those days to all forms of Nordic abstraction. What Ben was driven by, I pursued. The mythic island - it should have been Ossian's! - the swirling clouds and tossing sea, the priestess in her solitary castle - I could not get enough of them. I was in the middle of my Romantic period, and my soul was lost to Stefanie before I met her.

The dower house was on the other side of the island, they told me at the shop, better ask young Fergus to take you in his jeep. Young Fergus turned out to be seventy, if a day. We pa.s.sed between a pair of crumbling iron gates. I paid off young Fergus and rang the bell. The door opened; a fair woman stared at me.

She was tall and slim. If it was really true that she was my own age - and it was - she had an authority it would take me another lifetime to acquire. She wore, instead of white, a paint-smeared smock of dark blue. She held a palette knife in one hand, and as I spoke she raised it to her forehead and pushed away a stray bit of hair with the back of her wrist. Then lowered it again to her side, and stood listening to me long after I had finished speaking, while she pondered the resonance of my words inside her head and compared them with the man or boy who stood before her. But the strangest part of this moment is also the hardest for me to relate. It is that Stefanie came closer to the figure of my imagination than made sense. Her pallor, her air of uncorrupted truthfulness, of inner strength, coupled with an almost pitiable fragility, corresponded so exactly with my expectation that, had I b.u.mped into her in another place, I would have known that she was Stefanie.

"My name's Ned," I said, speaking to her eyes. "I'm a friend of Ben's. Also a colleague. I'm alone. No one knows I'm here."

I had meant to go on. I had a pompous speech in my head that said something like "Please tell him that whatever he's done, it makes no difference to me."

But the steadiness of her gaze prevented me.

"Why should it matter who knows that you are here and who does not?" she asked. She spoke without accent, but with a German cadence, making tiny hesitations before the open vowels. "He is not hiding. Who is looking for him except you? Why should he hide?"

"I understood he might be in some kind of trouble," I said, following her into the house.

The hall was half studio, half makes.h.i.+ft living room. Dustsheets covered much of the furniture. The remains of a meal lay on the table: two mugs, two plates, both used.

"What kind of trouble?" she demanded.

"It's to do with his work in Berlin. I thought perhaps he would have told you about it."

"He has told me nothing. He has never talked to me about his work. Perhaps he knows I am not interested."

"May I ask what he does talk about?"

She considered this. "No."

And then, as if relenting, "At present he does not talk to me at all. He seems to have become a Trappist. Why not? Sometimes he watches me paint, sometimes he fishes, sometimes we eat something or drink a little wine. Quite often he sleeps."

"How long's he been here?"

She shrugged. "Three days?"

"Did he come straight from Berlin?"

"He came on the boat. Since he does not speak, that's all I know."

"He disappeared," I said. "There's a hue and cry for him. They thought he might come to me. I don't think they know about you."

She was listening to me again, listening first to my words and then my silence. She seemed to be without embarra.s.sment, like a listening animal. It's the authority of suffering, I thought, remembering her lover's suicide; she cannot be reached by small worries.

"They," she repeated with puzzlement. "Who are they? What is there to know about me that is so particular?"

"Ben was doing secret work," I said.

"Ben?"

"Like his father," I said. "He was tremendously proud of following in his father's steps."

She was shocked and agitated. "Why? Who for? Secret work? What a fool!"

"For British Intelligence. He was in Berlin, attached to the Military Adviser's office, but his real work was intelligence."

"Ben?" she said as the disgust and disbelief gathered in her face. "All those lies he must tell? Ben?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so. But it was duty."

"How terrible." Her easel stood with its back to me. Placing herself the other side of-it, she began mixing her paints.

"If I could just talk to him," I said, but she pretended to be too much lost to her painting to hear me.

The back of the house gave on to parkland, then a line of pines hunchbacked by the wind. Beyond the pines lay a loch surrounded by small mauve hills. On its far bank I made out a fisherman standing on a collapsed jetty. He was fis.h.i.+ng but not casting. I don't know how long I watched him, but long enough to know that it was Ben, and that he had no interest in catching fish. I pushed open the French windows and stepped into the garden. A cold wind was ruffling the surface of the loch as I tiptoed along the jetty. He was wearing a tweed jacket that was too full for him. I guessed it had belonged to her dead lover. And a hat, a green felt hat that, like all hats with Ben, looked as though it had been made for him. He didn't turn, though he must have felt my footsteps. I placed myself beside him.

"The only thing you'll catch like that is pneumonia, you German a.s.s," I said.

His face was turned against me, so I remained standing beside him, watching the water with him and sensing the nudge of his shoulder as the rocking jetty threw us carelessly together. I watched the water thicken and the sky turn grey behind the mountains. A few times I watched the red float of his line vanish below the oily surface. But if a fish had struck, Ben made no effort to play it or reel it in. I saw the lights go on in the house, and the figure of Stefanie standing at her easel, adding a brush stroke, then backing her wrist against her brow. The air turned cold and the night gathered, but Ben didn't move. We were in compet.i.tion with each other, as we had been during our strongarm training. I was demanding, Ben was refusing. Only one of us could have his way. If it took me all night and all tomorrow, and if I starved in the process, I wasn't going to yield till he'd acknowledged me.

A half moon came up, and stars. The wind dropped and a silver ground mist formed across the blackened heather. And still we stood there, waiting for one of us to surrender. I was nearly sleeping on my feet when I heard the rattle of his reel and saw the float lift from the water and the bare line after it, flas.h.i.+ng in the moonlight. I didn't move and didn't speak. I let him reel in and make his hook fast. I let him turn to me, because he had to if he wanted to walk past me down the jetty.

We stood face to face in the moonlight. Ben looked downwards, apparently studying my feet to see how he could step round them. His gaze travelled up to my face, but nothing changed in his expression. His locked features stayed locked. If they betrayed anything, it was anger.