‘Let’s just say that my love life is complicated,’ Josephine told him, before they had even ordered their food, and Gaddis had felt obliged to reveal that he, too, had been ‘seeing someone for the last month or so’. It was obvious to both parties that they were sizing one another up. Gaddis was not one of those people who believed that a platonic friendship between a man and a woman was impossible, but he was also realistic enough to know that he and Josephine hadn’t agreed to meet solely for the pleasure of discussing historical archives. She was continuously and discreetly flirtatious all night and he returned the compliment, trying as best he could to ease her towards a second date. As the meal progressed, he began to think that she was almost too good to be true: quick-witted, funny and sharp, and able to talk engagingly on seemingly any subject, from cricket to Tolstoy, from Seinfeld to Graham Greene. She was also astonishingly beautiful, but without an apparent trace of vanity or self- regard. Every now and again, as if sensing his attraction, Josephine found a way of reminding Gaddis that there was a more-or-less permanent boyfriend lurking in the background of her life, but these reminders served only to convince him that she was looking for a way out of the relationship.
‘He’s asked me to marry him twice,’ she said, spinning spaghetti on her fork.
‘And you keep saying no?’
‘I keep asking him to give me more time.’
She asked him why his own marriage had ended, which was a subject Gaddis had avoided with Holly for a considerable time, but there was something in Josephine’s open, trusting spirit which encouraged him towards full disclosure.
‘Neither of us was suited to it,’ he said. ‘Marriage put bars around us, restrictions which we weren’t prepared to respect.’
‘You were unfaithful?’
‘We were both unfaithful,’ he said, and was grateful when Josephine turned her attention to Min.
‘And you said that your daughter lives in Barcelona?’
‘Yes. With her mother. And a boyfriend that I do my best to…’
‘Torture?’
Gaddis smiled. ‘Tolerate.’
‘But it’s complicated?’
‘Past a certain point, everything becomes complicated, don’t you think?’
They ordered a second bottle of wine and Gaddis talked of his frustration at missing out on Min’s formative years. He said that he tried to go to Spain ‘at least once a month’, but that it was difficult for Min herself to come to London because she was still too young to fly unaccompanied by an adult. He revealed that, from time to time, he would discover one of her toys stuck behind the sofa, or a single pink sock hidden at the bottom of a laundry basket. He might have added that there had been nights when he had found himself curled up on Min’s bed in the house, sobbing into her pillow, but that was a revelation for a fifth or sixth date; there was no point in entirely dismantling the image he was trying to project of a robust and civilized man.
Pudding came and finally they talked about his research at Kew. It was, out of necessity, the only point in the evening when Gaddis lied outright, claiming that he was preparing a lecture on the activities of the NKVD during World War II. The truth about Edward Crane was a secret that he could share only with himself; it certainly could not be trusted to Josephine Warner. He mentioned the possibility that his research might take him to Berlin.
‘There’s a contact there who I’d like to talk to.’
‘Somebody who was working for the Russians during the war?’
‘Yes.’
Josephine straightened the napkin in her lap.
‘My sister lives in Berlin.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Moved there two years ago. I still haven’t been to visit.’
Looking up from his plate, with a mixture of surprise and delight, Gaddis realized that Josephine was presenting him with the opportunity to invite her to Germany.
‘Maybe I should look her up when I go over,’ he suggested.
‘She’s trouble,’ Josephine replied and Gaddis was sure that he caught a flash of jealousy in her eyes.
However, this proved to be the high tide of their flirtatious rapport. By eleven o’clock, Gaddis had paid the bill and they had walked north towards Goldhawk Road, where Josephine’s behaviour changed markedly. Within seconds she had flagged down a cab, aware perhaps that they were both a little drunk, both attracted to one another and, in different circumstances, might easily have succumbed to a late-night pavement clinch.
‘I had fun tonight,’ she said, ducking into the back seat after kissing Gaddis cursorily on the cheek.
‘I enjoyed it, too,’ he replied, surprised by how quickly Josephine had cut off the romantic possibilities of the evening. He concluded that she was returning to the ‘complicated’ love life that she had referred to at the beginning of dinner.
‘Got to be up at five,’ she explained and waved briefly through the rear window of the cab as it pulled away towards Chiswick. Gaddis had known dates like this before and wondered if he would see her again. She had promised to ‘dig up’ a photograph of Edward Crane at Kew, but they had crossed a professional and personal boundary tonight and he suspected that she would pass the job to a colleague, to avoid any unnecessary complications. Perhaps he was being unduly pessimistic, but there had been something in Josephine’s manner as they walked away from the restaurant which had seemed to shut down any possibility of a relationship. Throughout the meal, she had been unquestionably seductive, raising oblique prospects of further meetings — movies, lunches, even Berlin — but that playfulness had disappeared once he had paid the bill. It was a pity, because he liked her. Walking home through a criss-cross of dimly lit residential streets, he realized that it had been a long time since a woman had crept under his skin like Josephine Warner.
Chapter 23
Two days later, Gaddis was sifting through his mail at the start of the new term at UCL when he turned up an A4-sized manila envelope with a Greek postmark.
Inside, he found a handwritten note on monogrammed paper from Charles Crane. What a wonderful surprise to speak to you on the telephone yesterday. I’ve managed to track down a couple of photographs of Uncle Eddie. One taken during the war and another at my mother’s house in Berkshire in the late 1970s (possibly ’80 or even ’81). If memory serves, Eddie had just retired from the Foreign Office and was about to take up a position on the Board of Deutsche Bank in West Berlin. When you’re finished with them, could I ask that you send them back to the address above? I would be most grateful.
Gaddis pulled out the photographs, his hand snagging on the envelope in his enthusiasm to see them. At last he was going to set eyes on Edward Crane.
The picture from the war was a formal, black-and-white portrait of a soldier in full uniform. It was mounted on a frayed square of greying cardboard and signed and dated ‘1942’ in near-illegible blue ink. Crane was in his early thirties, with brooding, saturnine features and thick black hair which had been carefully combed, parted to one side and run through with oil. It was not the face that Gaddis had been expecting; in his imagination, Crane had been a less physically imposing figure, slim and cunning, perhaps even a touch effete. This Crane was a bruiser, tough and thick-set. It was difficult to imagine that the man in the photograph had possessed the subtlety to hoodwink intelligence services on both sides of the Iron Curtain for more than fifty years. And why the soldier’s uniform? At the time the photograph was taken, Crane would most probably have been working in counter-espionage at MI5, passing the names of potential Soviet defectors to Theodore Maly. Gaddis concluded that Crane had perhaps worn a soldier’s uniform while assisting Cairncross at Bletchley.
The second photograph was a close-up Polaroid taken in a hazy, sun-filled English garden. The hair was still carefully tended, but thinner now and white as chalk. Gaddis was reminded of pictures of the older W.H. Auden because Crane’s face was craggy and tanned, loose about the neck. Calvin Somers had described his skin as looking ‘too healthy’ for a man suffering from pancreatic cancer, but perhaps he had been referring to the colour and texture of Crane’s face, rather than to his apparent youthfulness. The nose, he noted, was flushed, either with wine or sunburn — Gaddis couldn’t tell — and the smile was broad and energetic; this time you could see the charm of the
