William Boyd: Restless

'I work for the British government,' he said. 'You understand what I mean…'

'Yes,' Eva said, 'I think so.'

'Kolia was working for the British government also. He was trying to infiltrate l'Action Française on my instructions. He had joined the movement and was reporting back to me on any developments he thought might be of interest to us.' He paused and, seeing she was not going to interject, leant forward and said, reasonably, 'There will be a war in Europe in six months or a year – between Nazi Germany and several European countries – that much you can be sure of. Your brother was part of that struggle against this coming war.'

'What are you trying to say?'

'That he was a very brave man. That he didn't die in vain.'

Eva checked the sardonic laugh in her throat and almost immediately felt tears begin to flood her eyes.

'Well, I wish he'd been a cowardly man,' she said, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice, 'then he wouldn't have died at all. In fact he might have been walking through this door in ten minutes.'

Romer stood up and crossed to the window, where he too studied Madame Roisanssac hanging out her washing, before turning and sitting on the edge of her father's desk, staring at her.

'I want to offer you Kolia's job,' he said. 'I want you to come and work for us.'

'I have a job.'

'You will be paid £500 a year. You will become a British citizen with a British passport.'

'No, thank you.'

'You will be trained in Britain and will work for the British government in various capacities – just as Kolia did.'

'Thank you – no. I'm very happy in my current work. Suddenly, impossibly, she wanted Kolia to come into the room – Kolia with his wry smile and his languid charm – and tell her what to do, what to say to this man with his insistent eyes and his insistent demands of her. What do you want me to do, Kolia? She heard the question loud in her head. You tell me what I should do and I'll do it.

Romer stood up. 'I've talked to your father. I suggest you do the same.' He walked to the door, touching his forehead with two fingers as if he'd just forgotten something. 'I'll see you tomorrow – or the next day. Think seriously about what I've proposed, Eva, and what it'll mean to you and your family.' Then his mood seemed to change abruptly, as if he were affected by some kind of sudden zeal and the mask dropped for a moment. 'For god's sake, Eva,' he said. 'Your brother was murdered by these thugs, these filthy vermin – you've a chance to get your revenge. To make them pay.'

'Goodbye, Mr Romer, it was very nice meeting you.'

Eva looked out of the carriage window at the Scottish countryside as it sped by. It was summer, yet under the low white sky she thought there lingered in the landscape a memory of many winters' hardships – the small tough trees bent and shaped by a prevailing wind, the tussocky grass, the soft green hills scabbed by their dark patches of heather. It may be summer, the land seemed to be saying, but I won't let my guard down. She thought of other landscapes she had seen from trains over her life – in fact sometimes it seemed to her that her life was one composed of train journeys through whose windows she had watched a succession of alien countrysides flash by. From Moscow to Vladivostock, from Vladivostock to China… Luxury wagons-lits, troop trains, goods trains, provincial stoppers on branch lines, days spent stationary, trainless, waiting for another locomotive. Sometimes crowded carriages, insufferable, overcome with the stench of packed human bodies – sometimes the melancholy of empty compartments, the lonely clatter of the wheels in their ears, night after night. Sometimes travelling light with one small suitcase, sometimes burdened with all their possessions, like helpless refugees, it seemed. All these journeys: Hamburg to Berlin, Berlin to Paris and now Paris to Scotland. Still moving towards an unknown destination, she told herself, wishing vaguely that she felt more thrill, more romance.

Eva checked her watch – ten minutes to go until Edinburgh, she reckoned. In her compartment a middle-aged businessman nodded over his novel, his head lolling, his features slack and ugly in repose. Eva removed her new passport from her handbag and looked at it for maybe the hundredth time. It had been issued in 1935 and there were immigration stamps from certain European countries: Belgium, Portugal, Switzerland and, interestingly enough, the United States of America. All places she had visited, apparently. The photograph was blurry and overlit: it looked like her – a sterner, more obstinate Eva (where had they found it?) – but even she could not tell if it was wholly genuine. Her name, her new name, was Eve Dalton. Eva Delectorskaya becomes Eva Dalton. Why not Eva? She supposed 'Eve' was more English and, in any event, Romer had not given her the option of christening herself.

That evening, after Romer had left so peremptorily, she had gone through to the salon to talk to her father. A job for the British government, she told him, £500 a year, a British passport. He feigned surprise but it was obvious that Romer had briefed him to a certain extent.

'You'd be a British citizen, with a passport,' her father said, his features incredulous, almost abjectly so – as if it were unthinkable that a nonentity such as he should have a daughter who was a British citizen. 'Do you know what I would give to be a British citizen?' he said, all the while with his left hand miming a sawing motion at his right elbow.

'I don't trust him,' Eva said. 'And why should he be doing this for me?'

'Not for you: for Kolia. Kolia worked for him. Kolia died working for him.'

She poured herself a small glass of port, drank and held its sweetness in her mouth for a second or two before swallowing it.

'Working for the British government,' she said, 'you know what that means.'

He came over to her and took her hands. 'There are a thousand ways of working for the British government.'

'I'm going to say no. I'm happy here in Paris, happy in my job.'

Again her father's face registered an emotion so intense it was almost parodic: now it was a bafflement, an incomprehension so complete it made him dizzy. He sat down as if to prove the point.

'Eva,' he said, seriously, weightily, 'think about it: you have to do it. But don't do it for the money, or the passport, or to be able to go and live in England. It's simple; you have to do it for Kolia – for your brother.' And he pointed at Kolia's smiling face in the photograph. 'Kolia's dead,' he went on, dumbly, almost idiotically, as if only now facing up to the reality of his dead son. 'Murdered. How can you not do it?'

'All right, I'll give it some thought,' she said coolly, determined not to be affected by his emotion, and left the room. But she knew, whatever the rational side of her brain was telling her – weigh everything up, don't be hasty, this is your life you're dealing with – that her father had said all that mattered. In the end it was nothing to do with money, or a passport, or safety: Kolia was dead. Kolia had been killed. She had to do it for Kolia, it was as simple as that.

She saw Romer two days later across the street as she left for lunch, standing under the awning of the epicene just as he had that first day. This time he waited for her to join him and, as she crossed the road, she felt a sense of profound unease afflict her, as if she were deeply superstitious and the most maleficent sign had just been made evident to her. She wondered, absurdly: is this what people feel when they agree to marry someone?

They shook hands and Romer led her to their original cafe. They sat, ordered a drink and Romer handed her a buff envelope. It contained a passport, £50 in cash and a train ticket from the Gare du Nord, Paris, to Waverley Station, Edinburgh.