Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

“You’ll be just fine, Mr. Hunter,” my mother said, quite low. Not a stage whisper. Not stagey at all. She meant to sincerely encourage me. Encourage us.

I nodded and turned my eyes to the window and saw nothing and then I turned back to her.

“What did Trask say he expected of you?” I asked.

“Whatever I can give him,” my mother said. “But at worst, when I get to Berlin, if Albert is what we think he is and he believes my performance, we expect the German secret service will approach me to be useful to them.”

And now Trask’s declaration struck me as it almost did in Buffington’s basement, that this recruitable German agent being the mother of a very effective enemy of Germany made her even more interesting to them.

I was so unaware of cursing in response, I could not even say, exactly, which curse it was that I’d used.

She said, “When a son replies to his mother with the exclamation ‘Fuck me,’ she is faced with a choice of several interpretations, none of them pleasant.”

“I’m sorry, Mother,” I said. “Your first ‘useful’ act for the Germans will be to try to lure me into a trap. You understand that, don’t you?”

You could see the same stopping of breath in her that I had felt over my father’s eyes. She was silent for one beat and another and then she said, so quietly that I could barely hear it above the clack of the train wheels, “Fuck me.”

“That’s the right interpretation,” I said.

“Mr. Trask surely knows this,” she said.

“Of course he does,” I said. “And it’s what we have signed up for, you and I. You understand that too.”

“Yes.” Another pause. And she added, “He’ll have a plan.”

“ We will have a plan,” I said. “We all will.”

She nodded.

And we both watched sightlessly for a few moments as the Kentish landscape rolled past.

It was time to get to work. I said, “Have you been to Stockman House?”

“Not yet,” she said, squaring her shoulders to me. “But ‘house’ is British understatement, I’m told. It’s a castle. Just not a terribly old one. Built in the middle of the last century by his grandfather.”

“Is he all inheritance? Or does he have his own dough?”

“He’s got plenty of his own. He’s an industrialist, he says. Metals. But if you push him — and I quickly learned not to — it’s all milk cans and Oxo tins and dustbins. He’s the Industrial Titan of Milk Cans, and he’s a bit touchy about it. For some years now, of course, he’s a member of Parliament, and that’s who he thinks he really is.”

“Does he have family?” Though I tried hard to keep a just-trying-to-get-the-facts tone in my voice, even I could hear the fidgety undertone.

She looked at me for a beat, sizing up my intention with that question. Which was, at least in part, to understand the extent of his romantic availability to her.

Does the punk kid you once were ever fully vanish, especially when it comes to your mother, especially when she’s the only blood family you ever had? And when that mother keeps casting you in his role, as she’d done ever since we’d boarded this train, and when you and he and she are sharing serious personal risks, his child’s issue takes on a new relevance. She had to get close to this man, but not too close.

“A daughter in Scotland,” she said. “He’s a widower.” She paused, waiting for me to openly become the young man with an inappropriate interest in her private life.

I declined. I fed her no cue. She still had the stage.

She said, “His wife died a couple of years ago. An accident.”

She paused again. I made a little wide-eyed chin dip to ask for more.

“She fell off a cliff,” she said. “He lives on a cliff.”

“An accident?”

“Officially.”

“Unofficially?”

“I asked our Mr. Trask that very thing.” The ham in my mother came suddenly to a sizzle: she paused and let it roll on.

I finally asked. “And?”

“He shrugged.”

“Be careful of this Stockman guy,” I said.

“I just have to keep charming him. You’re the one who’ll need to be careful.”

“Is this how the boss did it?” I executed Trask’s little shoulder lift and head tilt.

She answered with a similar exact replica of Trask’s shrug. “ That way,” she said, as if it were different from mine. It wasn’t.

I didn’t debate the point. I was finished bantering with my mother. We had more important business together. I looked out the window. The apple trees had become cherry trees. Far beyond them a church spire rose against the gray sky in a grove of village roofs.

Mother thought she sensed my mood, though she was a step behind now.

“Just so you know,” she said. “Sir Albert’s crazy about me.”

I kept my eyes on the flash of cherry trees and, flickering among them, baskets and ladders and figures reaching up. The trees were fruiting.

“He’ll probably touch my elbow.” She paused.

I concentrated on the cherries.

“Or put his hand on the small of my back.”

I thought about picking sour cherries one summer day in my childhood. Somewhere in upstate New York. It must have been near a summer theater.

“I will take his arm. Do you understand?”

I turned to her. I nodded. I made myself say, “It’s all part of the job.”

As soon as I said it, I believed it.

And my mother leaned forward, reached out, took my hand, and squeezed it.

Albert sent a Silver Ghost to meet us at Broadstairs Station. The liveried driver stood on the platform with feet spread, his hands clasped behind him, as we emerged. He recognized us at once, coming to attention. I almost expected a salute. He took our bags from the porter and handed them off to a man in well-worn blue serge who’d been doing a respectful cringe behind him, and he led us to the Rolls-Royce parked just outside the station door, a landaulette with two leather armchairs and a couple of jump seats in the tonneau, an open driver compartment, and that long, long Rolls hood ending in the marque’s nickel and bronze mascot, the Spirit of Ecstasy, a beautiful woman bent toward the onrushing road with her nightie billowing up along her arms like wings.

We drove south down the coast, clearing Broadstairs, and we approached Dumpton Gate, the “gate” being one of the rare, narrow gaps in the otherwise unbroken white chalk cliffs of the Kentish coast. The road had gradually been gathering a loosely intervaled but considerable traffic: dog cart and carriage, Brit-blue Model T and Daimler landaulette, and folks on foot as well, singly and coupled up, buddied up and in families. We followed a dense grove of sweet chestnuts parallel to the cliff line, showing an iron fence flashing within the trees and farther glimpses of go-to-meeting-size tents. Something more than a weekend house party was happening at Stockman House, at least for today. Then the trees ended abruptly and the iron fence emerged and turned toward the sea. So did we, and so did the other travelers on this road.

We all entered a macadamized access road. The fence uprights were taller than a man and spiked at the top. They’d run through the tree line, no doubt all the way from the gap, and also bordered this southern side of Stockman’s property, surely to the edge of the cliff. He had a serious security perimeter. And through the fence’s transparent blur, beyond the cluster of cream and blue-striped tents set up on the wide, flat green, Stockman House showed itself.

Mother leaned across me to look. For now the place was simply vast — but much wider than tall — and it was black, and this west side of it, away from the sea, gaped open in its center, three long wings around a courtyard.