Len Deighton - Spy Hook

I hesitated about the right way to describe Lisl's health. I didn't want to frighten her. 'She might have had a slight stroke,' I said tentatively. 'Very slight. Even the hospital doctors are not sure.'

'And this is why you have come?' I noticed her eyes now. They were like the eyes of a cat; green and deep and luminous. Eyes of a sort I'd never seen before.

This old woman certainly didn't beat about the bush. 'No,' I said.

'But it means she'll have to give up the hotel. Her doctor insists it's too much for her.'

'Of course it is. Everyone is telling her that at some time or other.'

'It was your father's house?' I said.

'Sure. It has many wonderful memories for me.'

'It's a magnificent old place,' I said. 'I wish I could have seen it in your father's time. But the entrance steps make it difficult for Lisl. She needs to live somewhere where everything is on the ground floor.'

'So. And who is caring for her?'

'Have you heard of Werner Volkmann?'

'The Jew?'

'The boy she brought up.'

'That Jew family she hid away on the top floor. Yes, my sister was completely crazy. I was living in Berlin until 1945. Even me she never told! Can you believe that from her own sister she'd keep such a thing secret? I visited her there, it was partly my house.'

'It's astonishing,' I said dutifully.

'So the Jewish kid she raised is looking after her.' She nodded.

'He's not a kid any more,' I said.

'I guess not. So what's he getting out of it?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'He feels he owes it to Lisl.'

'He figures he's going to inherit the house. Is that it?' She gave a malicious little chuckle and looked at Gloria. Gloria was sitting on a carved wooden chair: she shifted uncomfortably.

'Not as far as I know,' I said defensively. So bang goes the whole purpose of coming all the way here. Did this vituperative old woman deliberately manoeuvre me into that denial? I couldn't decide. I was still thinking about it when the daughter arrived with tea and that sort of open apple tart in which the thin slices of fruit are carefully arranged in fanlike patterns.

'Ingrid made that,' said the old woman when she saw the way I was looking at it.

'It looks wonderful,' I said, without adding that after the 'light meal' on the plane almost anything would look wonderful. Gloria made appreciative noises too and the daughter cut us big slices.

During tea I asked the old woman about life in Berlin before the war. She had a good memory and answered clearly and fully but the answers she gave were the standard answers that people who lived under the Third Reich give to foreigners and strangers of any kind.

After forty-five minutes or so I could see she was tiring. I suggested that we should leave. The old woman said she wanted to go on longer but the daughter gave me an almost imperceptible movement of the head and said, They have to go, Mama. They have things to do.' The daughter could also show a hard edge.

'Are you just passing through?' Ingrid asked politely while she was handing our coats.

'We are booked in to the big hotel on the road this side of Valbonne,' I said.

'They say it's very comfortable,' she said.

'I'll write up my notes tonight,' I said. 'Perhaps if I have any supplementary questions, I could phone you?'

'Mama doesn't have many visitors,' she said. It was not meant to sound like an encouragement.

When we reached the hotel it was not the 'honeymoon hotel' that I'd described to Gloria. It was at the end of a long winding road – broken surfaced and pot-holed as are all local roads in this region – and behind it there was an abandoned quarry. In a bold spirit of enterprise someone seemed to have fashioned a car park gate from two cartwheels, but on closer inspection it was a prefabricated plastic contraption. A few genuine old wine barrels were arranged across the patio, and in them some rhododendrons and camellias were struggling to stay alive. The hotel was a pink stucco building with shiny plastic tiles.

At the far end of the car park there was an out-building in which some derelict motor vehicles of indeterminate shape and marque were rusting away undisturbed by human hand. We parked beside a new Peugeot station wagon and a van that carried advertisements for a butcher's shop in Valbonne. A large sign said that all cars were parked at owner's risk and another pointed the way to an empty swimming pool which was partially repainted in a vivid shade of cerulean blue.

But once inside everything looked up. The dining room was clean and rather elegant, set with starched cloths and shining glass and cutlery. And there was a big log fire in the bar.

Gloria went straight upstairs to bathe and change but I went into the bar and wanned my hands at the fire and tried the Armagnac that the barman said was especially good. Gloria didn't enjoy alcohol: she preferred orange juice or yogurt or even Seven-Up. It was another manifestation of the generation gap I suppose. Concurring with the barman's verdict I took a second Armagnac up to our room, where Gloria had just finished taking her bath. 'The water is hot,' she called happily. She walked across the room stark naked and said, 'Have a shower, darling. It will cheer you up.'

'I'm cheered up already,' I said, watching her.

All the way from Le Mas des Vignes Blanches to the hotel, she'd kept quiet, giving me time to think about the Winter woman. But when I said, 'So what did you think of her?' Gloria was ready to explode with indignation.

'What a cow!' said Gloria, dabbing herself with a towel.

'If I have to be knocked out in the first round it's a consolation to know it's done by a world champion,' I said.

'She trapped you.'

'And you have to admire the skill of it,' I said. 'She sensed what we'd come for even before we started talking. It was quick and clever. You have to admit that.'

'What a vicious old moo,' said Gloria.

'Are you going to put some clothes on?'

'Why?'

'It's distracting.'

She came and kissed me. 'You smell of booze,' she said and I stretched out my arms to embrace her. 'Well, that's very reassuring, darling. Sometimes I think I've lost the art of being distracting.'

I reached for her.

'No no no! What time's dinner? Stop it! There's no time. I said what time's dinner.'

'It's too late to think of that now,' I said. And it was.

Afterwards, when we were sitting quietly together, she said, 'What are you, Bernard?'

'What do you mean?'

'Are you English, or German, or nothing? I'm a nothing. I used to think I was English but I'm a nothing.'

'I used to think that I was German,' I said. 'At least I used to think that my German friends thought I was a Berliner, which is even better. Then one day I was playing cards with Lisl and an old man named Koch, and they just took it for granted that I was an Englishman and had never been anything else. I was hurt.'

'But you wanted it both ways, darling. You wanted your English friends to treat you like an Englishman, while your German friends thought of you as one of them.'

'I suppose I did.'

'My parents are Hungarian but I've never been to Hungary. I grew up in England and always thought of myself as one hundred per cent English. I was a super-patriot. Being English was all I had to hang on to. I learned all those wonderful Shakespeare speeches about England and chided anyone who said a word against the Queen or wouldn't stand up for the National Anthem. Then one day one of the girls at school told me the truth about myself.'

'Truth?'

'You Hungarians, she said. All the other girls were there watching us, I wasn't going to let it go. She knew that. I told her I was born in England. She said, if you were born in an orange box, would that make you an orange? The other girls laughed. I cried all night.'