I.
Dawn on Spyland. A watery sun filtered through the mist and the island emerged hesitantly, like a ship coming into port: first the ruins of the church, then the umbrella pines, then, finally, the ivy-covered villa. Mist lingered on around the cottages and outhouses, the cliffs and beaches, the unseen sea, slowly churning. Further out, from the direction of Corfu, a fishing boat came to meet the island through the mist, rising and falling with the waves.
The boat had seen better days, a relic of the island’s former life as headquarters of Britain’s Secret Services in the Mediterranean. If you looked very closely, you could see a faint red motif inscribed around the gunwales.
Three passengers: Costas and Angelos, possibly brothers, certainly Corfiot, employed by MI6 as their fathers had been, for their silence and strength, their ability to ensure that potentially embarrassing episodes such as this were over swiftly and decisively. Today they wore blue fisherman’s jumpers, black watchcaps. Costas steered the boat carefully up to the dock that jutted from the island’s western shore.
The other passenger was Edward Lane, formerly H Europe, a tall, angular man in stiff tweed, his white hair a halo above a wretched face. Lane was one of many sent to the island since the fall of Communism, his skills no longer relevant in a world that had slipped half its moorings. Too much an insider to function on the outside, Lane had been packed off to Vidos to enjoy a well-earned retirement.
As with so many of the inhabitants of Spyland – which was what those who lived there called Vidos – he’d found the secret world difficult to leave behind. Yesterday, he’d disappeared from the group during a shopping trip to Corfu’s Old Town, discovered by Costas in the small hours of the morning trying to force his way into the freight-handling depot at the airport. He’d been waving a cigarette lighter shaped like a revolver at a baffled-looking nightwatchman, shouting that he’d come for Malkin and would not leave until he had eyes on the bastard. Costas had tried to calm him down, taking the gun gently from his hand and using it to light his cigarette.
Lane had seen Malkin in Cofinetta Square, he told Costas. He’d followed him here, to the airport, where he’d lost him among the crowds of tourists arriving for the day’s last flight. The Russians had always envied the British presence on Corfu, Lane said quietly, as Costas steered him towards a taxi where Angelos waited. He’d not been surprised to see Malkin, Lane went on, his oldest foe. What was important now was to understand how much the Reds had learnt about Vidos. Costas shushed him, wrapped a blanket over his shoulders against the 6 a.m. chill, and told the driver to take them down to the harbour.
II.
Nina Woolf lay awake. She had not fallen into what she remembered as the comfortable blankness of sleep for months, not since her arrival on Spyland. The nights burned with memories, everything ablaze. She heard the boat that brought Edward Lane back from the main island, the creak of the front door, then footsteps and Lane’s querulous voice.
She heard his bedroom door open, a moment of muttered conversation, the heavy steps of the men who’d brought him home heading back to the staff quarters. After this, something like silence: the occasional gust of wind, the wash and suck of waves on the beach below. Nina turned over in bed and faced the wall, her eyes open.
She’d learnt the danger of closing her eyes. When she did, half-recalled episodes played like a cinema reel in the blackness, each more monstrous than the last. She was looking for a child, her own, in a dark wood. Then she was the child lost in darkness, stumbling and gripped by the awful knowledge that she was alone, with no one to rescue her. She felt as if she were falling through the rotted floorboards of her mind. She would find herself panting and sobbing until one of the genial Greek wardens would arrive, or Mrs Samways, and she’d feel a sharp prick in her arm and a wash of easiness, of forgetting.
She still didn’t sleep, though. Not even when, in the muddy half-light of sedation, Mrs Samways held her hand and sang lilting songs from her childhood in Wales.
There was something in Nina’s head – although it felt deeper, closer to her core – that was watchful, waiting for the moment that she let her guard down. And when she lay there, with grey-haired Mrs Samways humming sleep my darling, on my bosom, harm will never come to you, there was a moment something within her began to loosen, when it felt as if she might finally sleep. Then all the dread would rush in again, and she’d sit up straight in her bed, her shoulders rising and falling, and she’d know that it was possible for a life, even one as young as hers, to be irretrievably shipwrecked.
III.
After an hour, sun came in through the crack in the curtains of Nina’s room. It came into Edward Lane’s room, whose curtains were open. He lay outstretched on his bed, still in his herringbone suit from the night before, eyes wide and furious, his white hair, over-long and very fine, splaying on his pillow. On his bedside table was a packet of Karelia Slims, an ashtray, and the cigarette lighter shaped like a pistol.
Nina stirred, hoisted herself up and out of bed, and threw open the curtains. The sun had lifted the mist and now sparkled on the sea, on the peaks of the Albanian mountains just a few miles to the east, on the green slopes of Mount Pantokrator on Corfu.
The villa – faded pink, crumbling in places – had been built some hundred and twenty years earlier on a rocky outcrop at the northernmost tip of Vidos. It was shabbily elegant, framed on two sides by the sea, on the others by a terraced garden with an immaculate lawn marked out for crown green bowls.
In one corner of the garden there was a bowls shed painted in bitumen, such as you might find sheltered by leylandii hedges in town parks from Weymouth to Wigan. Nina’s room looked out over the bowling green, a little patch of England, a reminder – like the cricket pitch in the middle of Corfu Town – that this was once Empire.
Vidos was almond-shaped, protected by the curve of Corfu to the west. The southern half of the island was forest: umbrella pines interspersed with olive and scrub oak. To the north it was more open, although the buildings that stood or half stood there always seemed at risk of being swallowed by the jasmine and oleander, plum bago and ivy that grew wildly all around and over them. Vidos had been, briefly, along with the rest of Corfu, a French island, then British, then an animal sanctuary run by an eccentric English dowager. Still its mornings were unusually bright with the sound of birdsong. There were coveys of grouse, bevies of quail, warblers that sang well into winter. Some said that strange beasts lurked in the island’s dense southern woods: tapirs, warthogs, jaguarundis.
There were more birds here than elsewhere on Corfu; that, at least, was undeniable. Even now, in November, a wash of song mixed with the whispering of the pines and the distant tolling of bells that came across the water from the Old Town. Large white rabbits, great-great grandchildren of the sanctuary, had taken up residence in Agios Stefanos, the church whose ruins sat on Vidos’s highest point. They looked down now, the rabbits, over the low white bulk of the sanatorium, past the sheds and workshops, to the villa, glowing pinkly under its ivy mantle.
Just to the west of Vidos, at the mouth of the Gouvia Marina, was another, smaller island: Lazaretto. This, as its name suggested, had been a leper colony and then a concentration camp in which the Italian occupiers had imprisoned and then executed members of the Ethnikí Antístasi – the Greek Resistance – during the war. The presence of a prison island so close by highlighted the ontological fuzziness that surrounded the residents of Spyland. Neither detained nor precisely free, not inmates nor patients exactly, permitted certain liberties but with the sense that these might, at any point, be revoked.
Nina, for instance, after brushing her teeth and pulling on black jeans and a black Sonic Youth t-shirt, was able to stroll without impediment into the rising light, down to the beach that stretched along Vidos’s eastern shore. She could, if she wished, take a boat to the main island of Corfu, explore the Old Town, or ride a bus down to the tourist bars of Benitses and Kavos, or up into the wild and rocky north. But if she should try to board a ferry to Athens, or a plane from the dust-blown airport, she knew – although she was unsure how she knew – that she would be denied boarding, pulled into an airless room, reprimanded by figures who existed out of sight but were certainly there, in the shadows, waiting. She would be hauled back to Spyland, repaired and replanted, to serve out her time.
Nina came out of the woods and onto the beach. It was a mixture of pebbles and sand, jetties stretching out at irregular intervals. There were other properties here: a collection of waterfront cottages that had first been fishermen’s huts, then a half-hearted attempt at a holiday camp, but which were now known as the village. The residents of the village would come up to the villa for tea or medication, but otherwise lived much as retired Brits lived in quiet Greek fishing resorts all over the country.
The only difference was that these retired Brits had all been at one time or another employees of what they referred to between themselves as ‘the Office’ but which was better known as the Secret Intelligence Service, or, informally, MI6.
IV.
Nina’s habit was to swim each morning, regardless of the weather. It was a discipline, ingrained since childhood by her father, who believed that any stretch of water – icy, murky, or treacherous – was worth plunging into. The colder the better, he used to say, claiming that the resistance itself made the immersion meaningful – a lesson, he promised, she could one day apply to life.
Her father had been an erratic presence, drifting in and out of her childhood. Swimming became a way of keeping hold of his shadow, of clinging to the idea of him. But even that idea had grown ragged, a collage of fragments: fleeting memories of his rare visits home between assignments or unexpected appearances at her school, massive and distracted.
If she and Colin had had children, she thought, they might have remembered her the same way – distant, elusive, defined by absence as much as presence. During her sessions with Mr Drinkwater, this had become a quietly disturbing truth: she was, after all, her father’s daughter. She would face life’s battles armed with his strength, encumbered by his frailties. She’d inherited his charm and intelligence, along with his prominent nose, and also, more regrettably, his casual disregard for his own safety – and for the feelings of those who loved him.
Now she walked out on the jetty at the end of the beach nearest the villa. She pulled a pair of goggles from a pocket, slipped them over her dark mass of unruly hair, and then took off her clothes to reveal a severe black one-piece, the choice of one who was definitively here to swim. Her body, which had been a source of pride to her when she was an agent, hard-sprung with muscle, was finally returning to something like its former shape. Her time in the cell in Srebrenica had ruined more than just her mind.
On her shoulder, just above the clavicle and half concealed by the strap of her costume, was a pucker of scarred flesh, a permanent reminder of what went before, of why she was here. Further down, on the same arm, a small but angry blotch of red skin – she scratched it at night, or when her mind curled back to Bosnia – as much a relic of her time there as the bullet wound.
She dived into the water without much of a splash, the whole process as swift as vanishing. She began to swim towards Albania, seemingly untroubled by the choppiness of the waves, the coldness of the water. Below her, caught in the clear winter light, a vast, turquoise realm revealed itself: great rocky involutions of the seabed, stretches of sand interrupted by corals and swaying sea grass, darting shoals of fish in iridescent colours. It was never winter under the sea.
Nina’s morning swim had become something of a conversation topic in the village. She hadn’t ever thought of herself as being observed – her head mostly in the water, her mind empty of everything but the sound and taste of the sea – but several pairs of binoculars were trained on her that morning.
Violet Davenport – an elegant and precise woman with carefully coiffed auburn hair – watched Nina wist fully, thinking of her own youth, of warmer seas and limbs that never hurt, but wanted only to go charging about the place, or to wrap around other limbs. Violet stood on the veranda of their cottage and leant towards the sea, towards Nina. Harris was not yet awake, sleeping off the bottles of Theotoky and ouzo he’d put away the night before.
These were the hours Violet cherished most, when the sun just crested the distant hills, and the world, still half-asleep, shimmered. The pebbles glistened with dew, and the veranda’s table and chairs were jewelled with droplets that caught the early light. She picked up the glass ashtray and emptied the cigarettes – Harris’s, not hers, she had given up years ago – into the oleander that grew in profusion around the village. She heard the bark of Harris’s cough, the groans with which he greeted consciousness.
She gave a last look out to where Nina, very distant now, was sending up pearls of water with the motion of her legs and arms. She might almost have been a dolphin leaping through that ancient sea.
In the next cottage along, Humphrey Musgrave and Benedict Pierce stood at the window of their drawing room, each with a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes.
Humphrey was large and Benedict small. Benedict was quiet and studied while Humphrey was boisterous and expansive. Both were immaculately dressed: worsted suits, white shirts, matching yellow cravats. They had taken a shine to Nina, as they often did to Spyland’s younger guests, seeing them, perhaps, as a means of making touch with the secret world that had for so long sustained them, to which they had devoted their lives, and from which they were now exiled. Benedict had discovered that he and Nina had both been at Hertford, and, years apart, had doted on successive incarnations of the college cat, Simpkin. He seized on it with delight, as if the shared affection, the shared quadrangle, spiralling stone stairwell and ersatz bridge, were proof of some quiet design: fate, nudging them towards each other.
It had become part of Nina’s morning routine to take tea with the couple after her swim. Benedict picked up the robe she had adopted, even though she was still a long way out, barely visible in the chop of the waves, and set off to meet her. Humphrey went to the kitchen to boil the kettle.
Nina turned now and headed back for shore. The sun was higher, the world beneath her a deep and endless blue. She saw needlefish and flickering shoals of anchovy, a solitary octopus huffing his way between shards of sunlight. She didn’t feel cold, or tired, and her head was empty like it never was empty on land. The faces of those left behind – dead, damaged, betrayed – dissolved into blueness. She kicked hard for home, saw the seabed first indistinctly, like a happy memory, then rising to meet her.
She reached the jetty and pulled herself up onto the ladder, feeling the wind sweeping up the channel from the south, cold on her skin. Benedict – mouse-like, apologetic – was hurrying towards her, the robe held before him like a matador’s muleta.
She shook out her hair and stepped into the robe, stooping to collect her clothes. Benedict smiled at her proudly, as if he’d just invented her, then offered his arm. Nina took it, giving him a little squeeze as she did so.
They proceeded down the jetty, nodding to Violet and the saturnine figure of Harris Davenport, who had just emerged behind her in his nightshirt, glowering darkly. He always looked, thought Nina, like a handsome, ruined actor, hauled off stage after forgetting his lines one too many times. Violet waved back.
There was someone else watching them. High on the hillside, in a chair on the sanatorium terrace, sat a man in the white shirt and trousers of that institution. His skin was very white, his hair a deep red, almost luminous. He was smoking hard as he watched Nina, lighting one cigarette from the butt of the last.
Other than the motion of hand to mouth, he was entirely still, so still that a white rabbit, appearing snuf flingly out of the undergrowth, came to sit close to his feet. So they stayed for much of the morning, man and rabbit, transfixed by the view, by the water, by the memory of Nina moving through it.
V.
‘It is, in the end, unforgivable,’ Humphrey said, pouring the tea into Nina’s cup, the cup she always had: bone china with a golden meander running around the rim.
She and Benedict were seated on either side of Humphrey at the table, all of them looking out through the long front window to the sea. ‘Edward Lane, more hazard than man,’ Humphrey continued. ‘To be frank, he always was. Do you remember, Ben’ – here he laid a large hand on Benedict’s arm – ‘how he was during the business in Krasnoyarsk? Utterly feckless. No judgement at all.’
‘And now, poor soul, his mind . . .’ Benedict’s voice was reedy where Humphrey’s was rich. ‘You heard about last night, my dear?’ He turned to Nina.
‘I was awake when they came in. Must have been six or so.’
‘He left us after supper in the Old Town. Went barrel ling off, ranting about Malkin.’
Humphrey took up the story now. ‘They practically had to straitjacket him. He’ll be pinned to the bowling green for the next few months, I shouldn’t wonder, right where they can see him.’
‘Right where they can see him,’ Benedict said. ‘Should be up in the san with the incurables, if you ask me.’ Humphrey smiled lightly, trying not to betray the pleasure he took in such scandals.
Nina sipped her tea. Spyland had always existed to her as a warning, a destination for those who weren’t able to deal with the pressures and double-think of life in the Office. It was spoken of as racehorses must speak of the slaughterhouse: a potential outcome, certainly, but not to be mentioned, or even thought of, when life was all gallops and grandstands.
‘How long has he been here, Lane?’ she asked. ‘His name is familiar.’
‘It should be. He was the coming man for a long time. Never quite reached his destination, though. H Europe for a time, but only in name, and briefly.’
‘And then, with the Fall, he was lost,’ said Humphrey. ‘Swiftly and dramatically. He would have worked with your father, I’d imagine. Your dad joined the Office in, what, the Sixties?’
The residents of the island knew that Nina was the daughter of the notorious Lucan Woolf, although Benedict and Humphrey didn’t seem eager to speak of their professional interactions with him. Unsentimental, dogmatic, prone to violence – what they shared only confirmed what she had already gleaned as a child. And yet – and this, she supposed, was the familial machinery driving so many quiet tragedies – she could not extinguish the longing for his approval, or at least a fleeting sign that he remembered her, here where people were sent to be forgotten.
Benedict rose and refilled their cups, milk first, then the tea. ‘We were at Oxford with Edward Lane. He was a pal, for a time, but then we rather lost touch – he was in counter-espionage, I think. Ran into him once or twice in Siberia. He played a small hand in our getting sidelined.’
‘One doesn’t hold it against him, of course,’ Humphrey interjected.
‘Of course. But I must say I watched his own defen estration with some minor satisfaction. He didn’t see the change coming, you see, and, like so many, he was axed in the Christmas Massacre.’
‘He wasn’t in the première vague of that cohort,’ Humphrey added. ‘But one began to hear his name in the same breath as Spyland.’
‘Wasn’t adjusting,’ Benedict whispered.
Benedict, Humphrey and Harris had been here the longest of anyone, Nina knew this. They’d seen the villa repurposed from its former operational role, had witnessed the sanatorium being built and the cottages reclaimed from the rampant oleander.
‘How many are still here?’ Nina asked. ‘The Christmas Massacre lot?’
Benedict looked at Humphrey. ‘It felt like a flood, didn’t it, carissimo?’
‘A deluge of the disappointed and deranged.’ ‘There were, what, twelve, thirteen in all? They came all through that spring and summer. It was ’93, wasn’t it? Two years ago. Time here . . . so strange.’ Benedict looked out over the sea as he spoke, a wistful note in his voice. ‘Amazing how swiftly some of them turned up their toes. Heart attacks, strokes, felones-de-se.’ ‘Drink,’ Humphrey said.
‘Mainly drink. Problem with having a job that’s also your life. You lose one, the other soon follows. McGill went first. Smuggled a revolver out here with him.’
‘Lucy Fellowes was next,’ Humphrey said. ‘She was the best of that SovBloc gang. They shouldn’t have let her go and she knew it. She used to swim, just like you, Nina.’
‘Beautiful woman, even at fifty, fifty-five . . .’ ‘And one day she didn’t come back. Lost to the depths.’ This last with a delicious shudder. ‘Then there were three or four dreary analysts whose names I never cared to learn. Drunks before they came and once here—’ ‘Corfiot ouzo,’ Benedict mouthed. ‘Mavromatis.’ ‘Much to their taste, my dear.’
‘So that leaves Lane at the villa, the Pottinger brothers and Dennis Robertson in the san, Struan McKenzie and Deirdre Chung down here in the village. Six of them. And we’re, what, twenty-five on the island just now, thirty perhaps, if you include the incurables?’
Nina remembered visiting the thirteenth floor in her first year at the Office, when MI6 was still based at the crumbling Century House on the Lambeth Road. It was September ’91, everything basking in the glow of the Fall, but there, on the thirteenth floor – SovBloc – panic and paranoia clung to their posts. She recalled the fog of cigarette smoke in the air, the drawn blinds, whispered conversations in corners.
Even the clothes had had a faded history about them: brown suits and plaid skirts, Burberry trench coats and kipper ties. One long wall of the room was taken up by a map of the Soviet Union, with a rash of coloured pins around Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk and Kiev. No Commonwealth of Independent States here. There was something tainted in the air of that place, the rash ever darkening, and she’d always been happy to leave, to head back home – to the Balkans, on the fourth floor.
She’d been one of a group of new junior officers under the formidable figure of Clara Sinclair. Nina and her colleagues idolised Clara. They shared her optimism at the prospect of a bright and federal Europe, with the independent Balkan states as important members, freed from the rusty shackles of Yugoslavia. When Clara was named Chief and whisked up to a wide mahogany office, none of them were surprised, although they were sad to see her leave. She brought light and energy as C where her predecessor, Rupert Locke, had been all whispers and tweed. Now Clara was spoken of as a possible foreign secretary, a prime minister, even. She was replaced as H Balkans by a very different character: Boyd Lawson, more a legend than a reality for most of them, although it was Boyd who’d recruited Nina to the Office in the first place.
They finished their tea now and sat in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then Benedict drew out an exercise book and a pen while Humphrey went into his study to read. This, too, had become part of their routine: soon after Nina had come down from the san to the villa, while she was still very raw, far too thin and prone to shivering fits, Benedict had suggested she become his teacher. He was a furious linguist, he told her. He was fluent in Albanian, he’d said, gesturing across to the mainland, but had shameful gaps in his Serbo-Croat.
Nina liked to feel the language on her tongue, the way the words tipped her straight down a childhood slide to Korčula, her father and grandmother in the kitchen of her grandmother’s home, dropping into Croatian together, the language seeming to emerge from the landscape of Korčula, to speak with the accent of the island.
Her grandmother was English, but, when her husband died at Monte Cassino and she’d found herself in a grey and lifeless post-war London, she had come out to Yugoslavia on nothing more than a whim and made it her life. Lucan, in short trousers, had accepted the move with equanimity. Her grandmother had spoken immaculate Croatian, was deferred to by mayor and priest alike, and had become as vehemently Korčulan as she had once been English.
Nina’s father had lived on Korčula until he was packed off to Rugby. He’d gone back to live there for a while as an older man, she knew this – there were photographs of him in his twenties at the harbour in Vela Luka, and on the veranda of his mother’s house, young and skinny, looking up with large, wounded eyes at the camera. Her father’s past was hazy to her, its dates and places difficult to construe, its signal moments mysterious, itself a secret world. She’d loved him though – and it surprised her, the way this was half-phrased in the past tense in her head. Not that she no longer loved him, exactly; rather that she did not know now if the person she loved had ever, really, existed.
