Alex Dryden - Red to Black

‘Maybe there’s something in between,’ I say.

‘There must be.’

‘We aren’t safe, Finn.’

‘We’ll make ourselves safe.’

‘We need to think about this carefully,’ I say, and then I hug him. ‘I’m glad you’re so happy. I really am. Thank you.’

‘Aren’t you?’ he says.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’ve always been a slow developer,’ he says.

We have supper that evening with Willy and Finn tells him. Willy says that he’d like to have a baby too, by which he means in his environment, I think, rather than literally.

Willy says, ‘He or she has a mother and a father and I’ll be his or her grandfather and I have cousins who’ll be cousins. How do you help a child to be happy, Anna? That’s all you need to think about, believe me. The rest will come.’

I think to myself that there is something about having two men, Willy and Finn, that makes the whole idea seem more palatable.

Later, back at the hut, Finn explains that it is an opportunity; that here we are being given this blessing, which also gives us the chance to do for our child what we missed ourselves as children. He says we would be the best parents, precisely because our own childhoods have been a mess.

‘We’re just the sort of people who should have children,’ he says. ‘We know what not to do.’

‘Either that, or we’ll end up doing what was done to us,’ I counter. ‘That’s pretty common.’

‘How can you say that!’ he says, genuinely aghast. ‘How could we behave in the way our parents behaved?’

‘Isn’t that what all parents say?’

‘I will love this child, Anna, in all the ways I wanted love,’ he says and puts his hand on my stomach.

I want to believe him and I decide to believe him then. Totally. We hold on to each other on this cold April night, with the burner spluttering in the background, and I feel that nothing can ever stand in the way of such happiness.

We stayed at the beach until the hippies departed again and winter set in. Unusually, Willy stayed after the end of summer and into the beginning of winter.

One day in November, Finn announced that he was going away for a few days.

‘Where?’ I asked him, unable to keep the fear out of my voice.

‘I have to see Frank. There are one or two things I still need to tie up,’ he said, so lightly that it hangs in the air between us. ‘Loose ends, that’s all.’

‘You want me to come?’

‘Of course, come, yes.’

He said it genuinely. And so I declined, content that it was something he’d like me to have done.

On the night before he left, Willy had the cook whom he’d retained after the end of the season make us a special dinner.

Afterwards, Willy said goodnight, and Finn and I walked up the beach. He was very calm, I remember, serene even. I couldn’t help noticing that. He was always like this before taking a risk.

But I took it to be the wine and us, that I was pregnant, and that we were beginning a new life. When we went back to the hut, we hardly slept all night. Finn said he didn’t want to go. I said nothing. But he left anyway.

He left around six-thirty in the morning, and Willy gave him a lift, hidden in the back of the van, to the railway station in Aix-en-Provence.

FINN SAID HE WOULD CALLtwice a day until he returned. We waited, Willy and I, for three days without a word from him. On the third day, we were sitting in the restaurant, looking out to sea, and our conversation had dried up. Everything that could have been said about Finn had been said. We’d exhausted every possible explanation for his disappearence and an air of panic enveloped me.

Finally, sighing, Willy got up from the table and went into his hut. After a while he emerged with an envelope and gave it to me.

‘Finn asked me to give you this,’ he said. ‘But only in an emergency.’

I seized the envelope out of his hand, angry that it had taken him so long. Inside was a letter giving me directions, and a key, to the pink house.

So here I am, in the pink house, having reached the end of Finn’s handwritten books and sitting down again in the cellar with its smoky oil burner and its secrets that nobody wanted. I’ve found nothing that tells me where he is now or why he disappeared. These secrets, they are what my life has become. They are so useless.

I am counting up the times when I believed I could have turned Finn away from his course and in my head I’m back in Moscow, at the Baltschug Hotel, hearing Finn say, ‘Come with me, Anna. I want you to come with me.’ And me replying, ‘Ask me something else.’

But finally I came to him, I let go of the past, and we had an agreement; I’d changed, I’d made the leap, and I thought he’d done so too. But it seems he’d gone back, that he was unable to let it all go. And now he’s disappeared.

Willy also had his instructions from Finn, it seemed. He’d gone to Paris. There, through some channel of his working life, whether past or present I don’t know, Willy contacted an officer inside the French intelligence service, the DGSE.

It was established that Finn had gone to Luxembourg. On the first night Finn had arranged to call me, Willy found that an Englishman answering to Finn’s description stayed at the Bretonnerie Hotel, in the Marais district of Paris. There was an ‘incident’–beyond that, the French intelligence officer wouldn’t expand. The hotel was sealed off by the security services and remained so. The Englishman’s room was examined down to every last thread in its carpet. Men in protective suits tested the bedsheets and pillow cases, the curtains, the shower-head over the bath, the bottles in the mini-bar–everything. Again, there was no explanation for this that Willy could find. Finn was nowhere to be found.

And that was just last night, when I spoke to Willy from a call box in Tegernsee.

I’m wondering how much time I’ve got left, who else will find the pink house, and when will they find it. I gather up Finn’s books and I eventually find the microfiches that Dieter gave Finn six years before. They are hidden behind a stone in the wall of the cellar. I put everything into a bag I’ve brought, turn off the oil heater for the last time, and ascend the wooden ladder stairs to the sitting room. I throw the bag down on the floor and close up the metal doors, pull the false wall with its false fireplace across the front of the metal doors and rearrange some ornaments on its mantelpiece that have fallen over in the movement.

I have Finn’s record, and I have the microfiches that Dieter told Finn people would kill for.

I feel a sense of urgency now. I have to get out of here. For someone will find the pink house soon, either from Finn’s or from my side, of that I’m certain. Whichever side it will be, the result will be the same; the evidence will be destroyed and anyone in possession of the evidence will be destroyed with it.

I walk quickly upstairs and throw the few belongings from the bedroom I’d brought with me from the beach hut into another smaller bag. I dust the surfaces of the room, the banisters of the staircase as I walk back downstairs, all the door handles, the fireplace, the kettle and the cup, the whisky bottle and the glass. I dust everything I’ve touched for prints and then I am ready to leave. And at that point, when there’s nothing left to do to distract me from myself, I break down and cry. Finn has gone.

And as I’m crying, I suddenly feel a fear, a presence. There is something in the house. Is it too late? Have they come? I break off from my tears and look around, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. And when I half turn, over to my right and standing in the middle of the doorway to the kitchen, I see there is a man.