William Boyd - Restless

'You're pissed, you silly bitch,' I said out loud, though softly, through my teeth. 'Go home.'

I walked back into the passageway and Hamid was there, pretending to be making a phone call. From the pub the music surged louder – 'I heard it on the grapevine' – almost a Pavlovian sexual trigger for me and somehow, in some manner, in some brief gap in the space/time continuum, I found myself in Hamid's arms and was kissing him.

His beard was soft against my face – not raspy and jaggy – and I stuck my tongue deep in his mouth. I suddenly wanted sex – it had been so long – and Hamid seemed the perfect man. My arms were around him, holding him tight to me, and his body felt absurdly strong and solid, as if I was embracing a man made from concrete. And I thought: yes, Ruth, this is the man for you, you fool, you idiot – good, decent, kind, a friend to Jochen – I want this engineer with his soft brown eyes, this solid, strong man.

We broke apart and, as it inevitably does, the dream, the wish, seemed immediately less potent and desirable, and my world steadied slightly.

'Ruth -' he began.

'No. Say nothing.'

'Ruth, I love you. I want to be your husband. I want you for my wife. I'll come back in six months from my first tour. I have a very good job, a very good salary.'

'Don't say anything more, Hamid. Let's finish our drinks.'

We went back into the bar together – last orders were being called but now I didn't want any more vodka. I searched in my handbag for my last cigarette, found it and managed to light it reasonably competently. Hamid was distracted by some of his Iranian friends and they had a quick exchange in Farsi. I looked at them – these handsome, dark men with their beards and moustaches – and watched them shake hands in a strange way – high, gripping thumbs, then smoothly altering the grip again, as if they were exchanging some covert signal, acknowledging some membership of a special club, a secret society. And it was this thought that must have made me recall Frobisher's invitation and, for some stupid, over-confident, drunken reason, it suddenly seemed worth pursuing.

'Hamid,' I said, as he sat down beside me again, 'do you think there might be SAVAK agents in Oxford?'

'What? What are you saying?'

'I mean: do you think some of these engineers have been planted here, pretending to be students but all the while working for SAVAK?'

His face changed; it became very solemn.

'Ruth, please, we must not talk of such things.'

'But if you suspected someone, you could tell me. It would be a secret.'

I misread the expression on his face – that can be the only explanation for what I said next. I thought I had stirred something in him.

'Because you can tell me, Hamid,' I said, softly, leaning closer. 'I'm going to be working with the police, you see, they want me to help them. You can tell me.'

'Tell you what?'

'Are you with SAVAK?'

He closed his eyes and, keeping them closed, said: 'My brother was killed by SAVAK.'

I tried to vomit by the wheelie bins at the back of the pub, but failed, managing only to hawk and spit. You always think you'll feel better if you vomit but actually you feel much worse – and yet still you try to empty your stomach. I walked with due care to my car and methodically checked it was locked and that I hadn't left anything temptingly thievable on any seat and then set off on the long walk home back to Summertown. Friday night in Oxford – I'd never find a taxi. I should just walk home and, perhaps, it might sober me up. And tomorrow Hamid was flying off to Indonesia.

London . 1942

EVA DELECTORSKAYA WATCHED ALFIE Blytheswood leave the side entrance of Electra House and duck into a small pub off the Victoria Embankment called the Cooper's Arms. She gave him five minutes and then went in herself. Blytheswood stood with a couple of friends at the bar of the snug, drinking a pint of beer. Eva was wearing spectacles and a beret and she approached the bar herself and ordered a dry sherry. If Blytheswood glanced up from his conversation he would easily spot her, though she was confident he wouldn't recognise her, the new length and colour of her hair seeming to alter her appearance significantly. However, she had put on the spectacles at the last moment, suddenly a little unsure. But she had to test her disguise, her new persona. She took her sherry to a table by the door, where she read her newspaper. When Blytheswood left, walking past her table, he didn't even glance at her. She followed him to his bus stop and waited with the others in the queue for his bus to arrive. Blytheswood had a long journey ahead of him, north to Barnet, where he lived with his wife and three children. Eva knew all this because she had been shadowing him for three days. At Hampstead a seat behind him was vacated and Eva slipped quietly into it.

Blytheswood was dozing, his head repeatedly nodding forward then abruptly jerking up as he regained consciousness. Eva leant forward and placed her hand on his shoulder.

'Don't turn round, Alfie,' she said, softly in his ear. 'You know who it is.'

Blytheswood was completely rigid and completely awake.

'Eve,' he said. 'Bloody hell. I can't believe it.' He moved to turn his head reflexively but she stopped him with her palm on his cheek.

'If you don't turn round, then you can honestly say you haven't seen me.'

He nodded. 'Right, yes, yes, that would be best.'

'What do you know about me?'

'They said you'd flown. Morris killed himself and you flew away.'

'That's right. Did they tell you why?'

'They said you and Morris were ghosts.'

'It's all lies, Alfie. If I was a ghost do you think I'd be sitting on this bus, talking to you?'

'No… No, I suppose not.'

'Morris was killed because he'd found something out. I was meant to be killed too. I'd be dead now if I hadn't flown.'

She could see him struggling with his desire to turn and look at her. She was fully aware of the risks involved in this contact but there were certain things she had to find out and Blytheswood was the only person she could ask.

'Have you heard from Angus or Sylvia?' she asked.

Blytheswood tried to swivel his head again but she stopped him with her fingertips.

'You don't know?'

'Know what?'

'That they're dead.'

She jolted visibly at this news, as if the bus had braked suddenly. She felt suddenly sick, saliva flowing into her mouth as if she were about to gag or vomit.

'My God,' she said, trying to take this in. 'How? What happened?'

'They were in a flying boat, a Sunderland, shot down between Lisbon and Poole Harbour. They were flying back from the States. Everyone on the plane was killed. Sixteen, eighteen people, I think.'

'When did this happen?'

'Early January. Some general was on board. Didn't you read about it?'

She remembered something, vaguely – but of course Angus Woolf and Sylvia Rhys-Meyer wouldn't have been mentioned among the casualties.

'Jerries were waiting for them. Bay of Biscay, somewhere.'

She was thinking: Morris, Angus, Sylvia. And there should have been me too. AAS Ltd was being rolled up. She had flown and disappeared; that left only Blytheswood.

'You should be all right, Alfie,' she said. 'You left early.'

'What do you mean?'

'We're being rolled up, aren't we? It's only because I flew that I'm still here. There's only you and me left.'

'There's still Mr Romer. No, no, I can't believe that, Eve. Us being rolled up? Just bad luck, surely.'

He was wishful-thinking. She knew he could read the signs as well as she could.

'Have you heard from Mr Romer?' she said.

'No, actually, as a matter of fact I haven't.'

'Be very careful, Alfie, if you hear that Mr Romer wants to meet you.' She said this without thinking and she immediately regretted it as she could see Blytheswood's head instantly shaking slightly as he ran through the implications of her remark. For all that he had been part of AAS Ltd for several years, Blytheswood was essentially an immensely skilled radio operator, an electrical engineer of some genius; these kind of complexities – dark nuances, sudden contradictions in the established order of things – disturbed him, made no sense, Eva could tell.