Part 4 (1/2)
”And now?” I feared he had switched off again, but finally he answered me.
”Now is less funny. She went to art school, took up with a mad painter and settled in a dower house in the Western Isles of Scotland.”
”Why's it less funny? Doesn't her painter like-you?”
”He doesn't like anyone. He shot himself. Reasons unknown.
Left a note to the local council apologising for the mess. No note to Steff. They weren't married, which made it more of a muddle.”
”And now?” I asked him again.
”She still lives there.”
”On the island?”
”Yes.”
”In the dower house?”
”Yes.”
”Alone?”
”Most of the time.”
”You mean you go and see her?”
”I see her, yes. So I suppose I go too. Yes. I go and see her.”
”Is it serious?”
”Everything to do with Steff is ma.s.sively serious.”
”What does she do when you're not there?”
”Same as she does when I'm there, I should think. Paints. Talks to the d.i.c.kie birds. Reads. Plays music. Reads. Plays music. Paints. Thinks. Reads. Lends me her car. Do you want to know any more of my business?”
For a while we remained strangers, until Ben once more relented. ”Tell you what, Ned. Marry her.”
”Stefanie?”
”Who else, you idiot? That's a b.l.o.o.d.y good idea, come to think of it. I propose to bring the two of you together to discuss it. You shall marry Steff, Steff shall marry you, and I shall come and live with you both, and fish the loch.”
My question sprang from a monstrous, culpable innocence: ”Why don't you marry her yourself?” I asked.
Was it only now, standing in my flat and watching the slow dawn print itself on the walls, that I had the answer? Staring at the ruled-out pages of last June and remembering with a jolt his dreadful letter? Or was it given to me already in the car, by Ben's silence as we sped through the Scottish night? Did I know even then that Ben was telling me he would never marry any woman? And was this the reason why I had banished Stefanie from my conscious memory, planting her so deep that not even Smiley, for all his clever delving, had been able to exhume her? Had I looked at Ben as I asked him my fatal question? Had I looked at him as he refused, and went on refusing, to reply? Had I deliberately not looked at him at all? I was used to his silences by then, so perhaps, having waited in vain, I punished him by entering my own thoughts.
All I knew for certain was that Ben never answered my question, and that neither of us ever mentioned Stefanie again.
Stefanie his dream woman, I thought as I continued to examine the diary. On her island. Who loved him. But should marry me.
Who had the taint of death about her that Ben's heroes always seemed to need.
Eternal Stefanie, a light to the unG.o.dly, luminous, peerless, German Stefanie, his paragon and proxy sister-mother too, perhaps waving to him from her tower, offering him sanctuary from, his father.
You have to put yourself in Ben's position, Smiley had said.
Yet even now, the open diary in my hands, I did not allow myself the elusive moment of revelation. An idea was forming in me. Gradually it became a possibility. And only gradually again, as my state of physical and mental siege bore in on me, did it harden into conviction, and finally purpose.
It was morning at last. I hoovered the flat. I dusted and polished. I considered my anger. Dispa.s.sionately, you understand. I reopened the desk, pulled out my desecrated private papers and burned in the grate whatever I felt had been irrevocably sullied by the intrusion of Smiley and Personnel: the letters from Mabel, the exhortations from my former tutor to ”do something a bit more fun” than mere research work at the War Office.
I did these things with the outside of myself while the rest of me grappled with the correct, the moral, the decent course of action.
Ben, my friend.
Ben, with the dogs after him.
Ben in anguish, and G.o.d knew what more besides.
Stefanie.
I took a long bath, then lay on my bed watching the mirror on the chest of drawers because the mirror gave me a view of the street. I could see a couple of men whom I took to be Monty's, dressed in overalls and doing something longwinded with a junction box. Smiley had said I shouldn't take them personally. After all, they only wanted to put Ben in irons.
It is ten o'clock of the same long morning as I stand purposefully to one side of my rear window, peering down into the squalid courtyard, with its creosoted shed that used to be the old privy, and its clapboard gate that opens on the dingy street. The street is empty. Monty is not so perfect after all.
The Western Isles, Ben had said. A dower house on the Western Isles.
But which isle? And Stefanie who? The only safe guess was that if she came from the German side of Ben's family and lived in Munich, and that since Ben's German relatives were grand, she was likely to be t.i.tled.
I rang Personnel. I might have rung Smiley but I felt safer lying to Personnel. He recognised my voice before I had a chance to state my business.
”Have you heard anything?” he demanded.
”Afraid not. I want to go out for an hour. Can I do that?”
”Where to?”
”I need a few things. Provisions. Something to read. Thought I'd just pop round to the library.”
Personnel was famous for his disapproving silences.
”Be back by eleven. Ring me as soon as you get in.”
Pleased by my cool performance, I went out by the front door, bought a newspaper and bread. Using shop windows, I checked my back. n.o.body was following me, I was sure. I went to the public library and from the reference section drew an old copy of Who's Who and a tattered Almanach de Gotha. I did not pause to ask myself who on earth, in Battersea of all places, could have worn out the Almanach de Gotha. I consulted the Who's Who first and turned up Ben's father, who had a knighthood and a battery of decorations: 11,936, married the Grafin Ilse Arno zu Lothringen, one son Benjamin Arno. ” I switched to the Almanach and turned up the Arno Lothringens. They rated three pages, but it took me no time to identify the distant cousin whose first name was Stefanie. I boldly asked the librarian for a telephone directory for the Western Isles of Scotland. She hadn't one, but allowed me to call enquiries on her telephone, which was fortunate for I had no doubt my own was being tapped. By ten-forty-five I was back at the telephone in my flat talking to Personnel in the same relaxed tone as before.
”Where did you go?” he asked.
”To the newsagent. And the baker's.”
”Didn't you do the library?”