Restless - Boyd William - Страница 64

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She booked into a hotel near Victoria Station and the next morning banged her head hard against the rough brick embrasure of her window until the skin broke and the blood began to flow. She cleaned her wound and covered it with cotton wool and sticking plaster and took a taxi to a police station in Rotherhithe.

'What can we do for you, Miss?' the constable on duty asked.

Eva looked around, acting disorientated, as if she were still concussed, still in shock. 'The hospital said I should come here,' she said. 'I was in the Carlisle House raid. My name's Sally Fairchild.'

She had provisional identity papers by the end of the day and a ration book with a week's supply of coupons. She said some neighbours had taken her in and gave an address of a street near the bomb-site. She was told to report to a Home Office department in Whitehall within a week in order to have everything regularised. The policemen were very sympathetic, Eva wept a little, and they offered to have a car drive her to her temporary home. Eva said she was going to meet her friends, thanks all the same, and visit some of the wounded in hospital.

So Eva Delectorskaya became Sally Fairchild and this, she thought, was at last a name that Romer didn't know. The chain was broken but she wasn't sure how long she could keep her new identity going. She thought he would take some perverse pleasure in her skill at evasion – I taught her well – but he would always be thinking: how to find Eva Delectorskaya now?

She never forgot this and she knew that more had to be done before she could feel even half secure, and so, in the early evenings, she took to drinking – while her money lasted – in a better class of public house and restaurant bar. She knew that for these next few days while she lived in her hotel and while she did nothing she was safest; as soon as she took up any form of work again, the system would remorselessly claim her and document her. So she went to the Cafe Royale and the Chelsea Arts Club, the bar of the Savoy and the Dorchester, the White Tower. Many eligible men bought her drinks and asked her out, and a few tried unsuccessfully to kiss and caress her. She met a Polish fighter pilot at the Leicester Square Bierkeller whom she saw twice more, before deciding against him. She was looking for a particular someone – she had no idea who – but she was confident she would recognise him the minute they met.

It was about ten days after she had become Sally Fairchild that she went to the Heart of Oak in Mount Street, Mayfair. It was a pub but its saloon bar was carpeted and hung with sporting prints and there was always a real fire burning in the grate. She ordered a gin and orange, found a seat, lit a cigarette and pretended to do the Times crossword. As usual, there were quite a few military types in – all officers – and one of them offered to buy her a drink. She didn't want a British officer so she said she was waiting for a gentleman friend and he went away. After an hour or so – she was thinking of leaving – the table next to her was taken by three young men in dark suits. They were in merry mood and after listening in for a minute or two she realised their accents were Irish. She went to buy another drink and dropped her paper. One of the men, dark, with a plump face and a thin pencil moustache, returned it to her. His eyes met hers.

'Can I buy you that drink?' he said. 'Please: it would be both a pleasure and an honour.'

'That's very kind of you,' Eva said. 'But I'm just going.'

She allowed herself to be persuaded to join their table. She was meeting a gentleman friend, she said, but he was already forty minutes late.

'Oh that's no gentleman friend,' the man with the moustache said, making a solemn face. 'That's what you call an English cad.'

They all laughed at this and Eva noticed one of the men across the table – fair-haired with a freckly complexion and a big, easy, slouching presence – who smiled at the joke, but smiled inwardly, as if there were something else funny about the statement that amused him and not the obvious slur.

She discovered that all three of them were lawyers attached to the Irish Embassy, working in the consulate office in Clarges Street. When it was the fair-haired man's turn to buy the next round, she let him go to the bar and then excused herself to the others, saying she had to go and powder her nose. She joined the man at the bar and said she'd changed her mind and would rather have a half pint of shandy than another gin and orange.

'Sure,' he said. 'A half pint of shandy it shall be.'

'What did you say your name was?' she asked.

'I'm Sean. The other two are David and Eamonn. Eamonn's the comedian – we're his audience.'

'Sean what?'

'Sean Gilmartin.' He turned and looked at her. 'So what would be your name again, Sally?'

'Sally Fairchild,' she said. And she felt the past fall from her like loosened shackles. She stepped closer to Sean Gilmartin as he presented her with her half pint of shandy, as close as she could without touching him, and she lifted her face to his quietly knowing, quietly smiling eyes. Something told her that the story of Eva Delectorskaya had come to its natural end.

'SO THAT WAS HOW you met my dad?' I said. 'You picked him up in a pub.'

'I suppose so.' My mother sighed, her face momentarily blank

– thinking back, I assumed. 'I was looking for the right man – I'd been looking for days – and then I saw him. That way he laughed to himself. I knew at once.'

'Nothing cynical about it, then.'

She looked at me in that hard way she had – when I stepped out of line, when I was being too smart-aleck.

'I loved your father,' she said, simply, 'he saved me.'

'Sorry,' I said, a bit feebly, feeling somewhat ashamed and blaming my sourness on my hangover: I was still paying the price for Hamid's farewell party. I felt sluggish and stupid: my mouth was dry, my body craving water, and my earlier 'mild' headache had moved into the 'persistent/throbbing' category in the headache leagues.

She had quickly told me the rest of the story. After the encounter in the Heart of Oak there had been a few more dates – meals, an embassy dance, a film – and they realised that slowly but surely they were growing closer. Sean Gilmartin, with his diplomatic-corps connections and influence, had smoothed the processes involved in Sally Fairchild acquiring a new passport and other documentation. In March 1942 they had travelled to Ireland – to Dublin – where she had met his parents. They were married two months later in St Saviour's, on Duncannon Street. Eva Delectorskaya became Sally Fairchild became Sally Gilmartin and she knew now that she was safe. After the war Sean Gilmartin and his young wife moved back to England, where he joined a firm of solicitors in Banbury, Oxfordshire, as a junior partner. The firm prospered, Sean Gilmartin became a senior partner, and in 1949 they had a child, a girl, who they named Ruth.

'And you never heard anything more?' I asked.

'Nothing, not a whisper. I'd lost them completely – until now.'

'What happened to Alfie Blytheswood?'

'He died in 1957, I believe, a stroke.'

'Genuine?'

'I think so. The gap was too big.'

'Any lingering problems with the Sally Fairchild identity?'

'I was a married woman living in Dublin – Mrs Sean Gilmartin – everything had changed, everything was different; nobody knew what had happened to Sally Fairchild.' She paused and smiled, as though recognising her past identities, these selves she had occupied.

'Whatever happened to your father?' I asked.

'He died in Bordeaux, in 1944,' she said. 'I got Sean to track him through the London embassy, after the war – I said he was an old friend of the family…' She pursed her lips. 'Just as well, I suppose – how could I have gone to him. I never saw Irene, either. It would have been too risky.' She looked up. 'What's the boy up to now?'

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