David Oldman - Dusk at Dawn

‘Ten?’ Cumming repeated, chewing the fact before swallowing it. ‘Well, that can’t be helped. Never mind. Family and all that… blood will out.’

Paul began to wonder how many more platitudes he had on hand.

‘It would have been helpful if you knew something about the Czech operation,’ Cumming suggested, ‘but when it boils down to it that’s water under the bridge. Your cousin Rostov is more important at the moment. He’s the one with the contacts.’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ Paul said. ‘My mother is estranged from the rest of the family and we haven’t been in touch for some years. My Russian’s a little rusty, too, so I doubt if I can be of much use….’

His voice trailed off. Paul’s intent had been to let the man down softly but Cumming was glaring at him oddly. The captain’s colour rose alarmingly as his right hand reached for a paperknife that lay on the desktop.

‘ Cumming !’ Browning shouted. ‘Think of your trousers, man. You’ve barely a decent pair left.’

Cumming’s hand stopped, hovering above the paperknife. He took a breath, his colour subsiding. He stared at Paul. Paul stared back, convinced they were both mad.

‘Are you saying,’ Cumming asked through gritted teeth, ‘that because of some family disagreement you are refusing to contact your cousin when requested to do so by your country?’

Paul shifted uncomfortably. ‘No, of course not sir. It’s only—’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Cumming said cutting him off. ‘Father?’

‘What?’

‘Your father?’

‘Oh. He’s dead.’

‘Mother?’

‘No. I mean, yes, she’s alive.’

But Cumming had turned to Browning. ‘Wasn’t there some talk of internment? Kell sent her file?’

‘ Internment ?’

Paul watched in astonishment as Browning rummaged through the stack of folders on the desk, pulled one out and handed it to Cumming. It was thick and well thumbed.

‘Alice Rostov,’ Cumming confirmed with a glance at Paul. ‘Just so we haven’t got this other chap’s mother.’

Browning laughed. ‘That’s a good one, Cumming.’

Paul stared at the file. ‘What do you mean, internment? And who is this Kell?’

‘Kell? He’s—’

‘Careful Browning,’ Cumming cautioned. ‘Need to know, old fellow… need to know.’ He gave Paul the benefit of another inscrutable look and began leafing through the file on his mother.

Paul watched in horror. He should have known that this was his mother’s fault. As soon as Cumming called him by his real name he should have realised that she was the one who’d got him into this mess.

And, even before he knew the details, he was sure beyond a doubt that it was going to be a mess.

Despite the suffocating greatcoat, Paul had begun to doze. The hypnotic clatter of the train rolling along the rails and the exhaustion of the day combined like a soporific and, in that misty half-world of sleep, he had begun to imagine the rock of the carriage and the rattle of the wheels to be the movement of tumbrels… carrying him and his mother to the guillotine.

He woke with a start. For a second he thought they had reached the scaffold. Panic rose in his throat. Then he realised the train had pulled into a station. Bathed in sweat, he closed his eyes again trying to still his beating heart.

It seemed to him that if he was going to dream of anything it should be the man in the cap he’d left in the alley. Not his mother. Not some elaborate delusion about imminent execution. Cumming’s file must have affected him more deeply than he had realised.

Looking up cautiously, he saw the man opposite had begun to collect the couple’s bags from the luggage rack. The woman glanced quickly towards Paul once more, opened her handbag and took out an envelope. As they stood to leave, she handed it to him. He took it from her, rather bewildered, and a moment later saw them through the window as they stepped down onto the platform.

It occurred to him that the letter might be some last instruction from Cumming, that the couple had been charged with seeing him safely onto the Yarmouth train. He opened the envelope. There was no letter inside. Instead he found a white feather.

Resentment welled up inside him. He turned to the window and looked out at the platform. The few other people who had disembarked the train were making their way through the ticket gate. The couple had disappeared. A moment later the guard’s whistle blew and the train jolted forward.

Paul screwed up the envelope and hurled it onto the compartment floor. To imagine the whole time she had sat opposite him she had thought him a shirker… a coward! He stared bitterly at where the envelope lay on the floor then, afraid someone else might enter the compartment and find it, picked it up and stuffed it into the pocket of the greatcoat.

At least he was on his own at last. He took the coat off and pushed it onto the luggage rack above his head. He examined his jacket for blood and found, that dry, it had left no more than a dark stain barely distinguishable from the weave of the cloth. He scratched at it tentatively with a fingernail, thinking about his mother.

He supposed her politics had always veered towards the radical. That had been how she had met his father in the first place, while doing some sort of voluntary work during the Russian famine of 1891. This exhibition of liberal tendencies alone, he suspected, would have been sufficient to alienate her from the rest of the Rostovs. But to marry his father before returning to St Petersburg and manage to lose the certificate that confirmed the fact, seemed to put the tin hat on it, so to speak. In retrospect, it had also been careless of his father to have entered into a mixed marriage — raznochinsky , it was called — and present his family with not only a woman of whom they had no prior knowledge, but also a woman who was English , a former governess and one who could argue only the most tenuous claim to breeding, to boot. Despite what the rest of the Rostovs suspected, Paul didn’t doubt that there had been a ceremony of some description. Knowing his mother as he did, he believed she would have been horrified by anything less. In the absence of supporting evidence, though — no certificate, no photographs, no corroborating witnesses — everyone had been obliged to take the fact on trust. This had left his mother (and Paul himself, when he arrived some respectable time thereafter) at a permanent disadvantage with regard to the rest of the family.

At his most cynical Paul had usually pictured the marriage ceremony as little more than the two of them in front of an equally liberal priest, exchanging rings and a vow before a candle. It seemed as if the rest of the Rostov family had inferred a similar interpretation of the event. Not that, while a child, he had ever been fully aware of the tensions within the family that his father’s actions had engendered. At least, not at first. It had always seemed curious to him why his two cousins, Mikhail and his sister Sofya, although of much the same age as Paul adopted an equally supercilious attitude towards him as that their parents displayed towards his mother. At the time, he had been innocent enough put this down to some innate quality they possessed through their being fully Russian rather than, as he was, only half-Russian. He assumed he could expect only to display in ratio half the superciliousness they did. It wasn’t until later he realised that his cousins had had a better understanding of the domestic situation than he had ever grasped. They, of course, had had the benefit of parental tutelage. Paul, being fatherless by this time, received no such bigoted instruction, being forever encouraged by his mother to ‘get on’ with his little cousins regardless of their attitude.