Laura heard the buzz as the receiver clicked into place. It was a Friday morning and the telephone had woken her; she did not work on Fridays and she had been sleeping late. Apprehension filled her as she made herself a cup of coffee. She had never expected such a call to come. In fact, Edward’s double life had simply not impinged on her recently. Since the fall of Paris the previous week there had been little time off work for him, and although they managed to see one another a couple of times a week, they were brief meetings. Surely, Laura thought about the call, it must have been a mistake. She was about to telephone Edward and ask him about it, but she remembered Ada’s bitter lessons about secrecy. She must show she understood, she thought; maybe this was just a test. She would not even mention this meeting to Edward.
There was no one in the tobacco shop other than the owner. Wartime deprivation had already taken its toll on the shelves, with boxes of cheap American cigarettes rather than fine cigars dominating the shop. Laura felt a new nervousness when she found Stefan waiting for her in the backroom.
He was standing up and shook his head when he saw her. ‘I didn’t think there would be a need for this,’ he said, and without asking her to sit down, he explained the situation. Edward had begun to experience some problem with passing papers to them; the arrangement they had had before had fallen apart, and he was working such long hours that he could not get to different meeting places. They needed someone who could assist in photographing and passing documents. Laura listened to the explanation without, at first, understanding that she was being asked to play a role herself in the work. She was nodding along to Stefan’s words, and then, once she had recognised what was being asked of her, it felt as though she had already said yes. Stefan told her she was a good girl and that they would start teaching her the ropes the following day. He gave her a time and place for Sunday and dismissed her, telling her to leave this time by the back way. She had not been aware of this way out: it led through a yard into an alley that stank of a bad drain, and then into the street. Laura walked back to Cissie’s flat in a hurry, as if by walking fast she did not have to think of what lay behind or ahead of her.
When Laura got to the basement flat that was their meeting place the following Sunday, she found the key to it as instructed, next to the bins, and let herself in. Stefan arrived only a minute or so later, in a bad mood. He told her that he had followed her there and she had done everything wrong. She listened to his instructions about how she must learn to move around London with more awareness of what was around her, and she felt a weight settle in her stomach as he spoke. She had no idea how she could live up to these expectations.
Then he put a camera into her hands; the smallest camera she had ever seen, a slender rectangle only a little longer than her palm. She had never really used a camera before, and he spent the next hour instructing her how to use the little Minox: how to position papers to catch every letter written on them, how to ensure that there was enough light for everything to be seen. He had papers with him that she had to photograph herself, and when the lesson was over he flipped the film out of the camera and said that when it was processed he would tell her how she had done. Laura was sitting at the table, a headache beginning to grind in her forehead. All this time he had not even offered her a glass of water. ‘You can go now,’ he said. ‘Same time, same place, next week.’
The rules that Laura learned over those months she never forgot. Was it Stefan’s intensity that made them so memorable? Or was it just that once you begin to believe that someone might always be watching you, that you might at any point walk into danger, it awakens a paranoia that is latent in everyone? Laura learned how to take unlikely routes through the city, how to choose streets with only one sidewalk, to find shops with more than one entrance, to hang back until the last second when boarding a bus or a train, to use a dead-letter drop, to remember emergency signals from the coded telephone call to the chalk circle next to the Underground sign. She had no natural talent for this behaviour, but slowly she began to change from someone who drifted through streets and shops and restaurants with little visual awareness of her surroundings, intent on her own mood, to someone who found herself looking at entrances and exits, noticing men whose faces were obscured and women who looked at her too sharply.