“I have not,” he said, with a smirk.
“Haven’t joined or haven’t, restrained yourself?”
A broader smirk. “The first. I like you, Ned. I cherish wit when I find it, I always have done. Not that we’re overburdened with it at my place of work. Where wit’s concerned, I’d be inclined to refer to the Tank as a total desert.”
“No friendship or peace groups?” I continued, affecting disappointment. “Fellow-travelling organisations? Taken out membership to any homosexual or otherwise deviant-oriented clubs, formed a secret passion for any under-age choirboys lately?”
“No to the lot, thank you,” said Frewin, now smiling broadly.
“Run up vast debts, causing you to live beyond your means? Set up some tasteful redhead in the style to which she is not accustomed? Acquired a Ferrari motorcar on the hire purchase?”
“My needs remain as modest as they have always been, thank you. I am not of a materialist or self-indulgent nature, as you may have gathered. I rather abhor materialism, frankly. There’s too much of it these days. Far.”
“And no to the rest?”
“All no.”
I was jotting all the time, making annotations against an imaginary checklist.
“So you wouldn’t be flogging secrets for money then,” I commented, turning a page and adding a couple of ticks. “And you have not launched yourself upon a course of foreign language instruction without first obtaining the consent of your employing department in writing, I take it?” My pencil was poised once more. “Sanskrit? Hebrew? Urdu? Serbo-Croat?” I suggested. “Russian?”
He was standing very still and staring at me, but I pretended to be unaware of this.
“Hottentot?” I continued facetiously. “Estonian?”
“Since when’s that been on the list?” Frewin demanded aggressively.
“Hottentot?”
I waited.
“Languages. A language isn’t a defect. It’s an attribute. An accomplishment! You don’t have to list all your accomplishments, just to get cleared!”
I tilted back my head in reminiscence. “Addendum to the Positive Vetting procedure, November, 1967,” I recited. “I always remember that one. Fireworks Day. Special circular to all employing departments, yours included, requiring advance notice in writing of all intended language instruction courses. Recommended by Judicial Steering Committee, approved by Cabinet.”
He had turned his back to me. “I regard this as a totally out-of-court question and I refuse to answer it in any shape or form. Write that down.”
I puffed through my pipe smoke.
“I said write it down!”
“I wouldn’t say that, Cyril, if I were you. They’ll be cross with you.”
“Let them be.”
I drew on my pipe again. “I’ll put it to you the way HQ put it to me, shall I? ‘What’s all this nonsense Cyril’s been getting up to with his chums Boris and Olga?’ they said. ‘Ask him that one— then see what he comes up with.’”
Still turned away from me, he was scowling indignantly from place to place around the room, appealing to his polished world to witness my profanity. I waited for the explosion I was sure would come. But instead he peered at me in hurt reproach. Us, he was saying, friends—and you do this to me. And in the way that the brain in stress can handle a multitude of images at once, I saw before me, not Frewin, but a typist I had once interrogated in our Embassy in Ankara: how she had rolled back the sleeve of her cardigan and thrust out her arm at me and showed me the festering cigarette burns she had inflicted on herself the night before our interview. “Don’t you think you have made me suffer enough?” she asked. Yet it was not I who had made her suffer; it was the twenty-five-year-old Polish diplomat for whom she had sacrificed every secret she possessed.
I took my pipe from my mouth and gave him a reassuring laugh. “Come on, Cyril. Aren’t Boris and Olga two of the characters on this Russian course you’re doing on the sly? Papering their house together? Going off to stay at Auntie Tanya’s dacha, all that? You’re doing the standard Radio Moscow language course, five days a week, 6 a.m. sharp, that’s what they told me. ‘Ask him about Boris and Olga,’ they say. ‘Ask him why he’s learning Russian on the q.t.’ So I’m asking you. That’s all.”
“They’d no business knowing I was doing that course,” he muttered, still grappling with the implications of my question. “Bloody sniffer dogs. It was private. Privately selected, privately pursued. They can get lost. So can you.”
I laughed. But I was also put out. “Now don’t be like that, Cyril. You know the rules as well as I do. It’s not your style to ignore a regulation. It’s not mine either. Russian is Russian, and reporting is reporting. It’s only a matter of getting it down in writing. I didn’t make up the regulations. I get a brief, the same as anyone else.” I was talking to his back again. He had taken refuge at the bay window, and was gazing out at the rectangle that was his garden.
“What’s their names?” he demanded.
“Olga and Boris,” I repeated patiently.
This enraged him. “The people who brief you, idiot! I’m going to enter a complaint about them! Snooping, that’s what it is. It’s bloody brutal in this day and age. I’m holding you to blame too, frankly. What’s their names?”
I still didn’t answer him. I preferred to let the fury bank up in him.
“Number one,” he announced in a louder voice, still staring at his mud patch. “Are you writing this down? Number one, I am not taking a language course within the meaning of the Act. A language course is going to a school or class, it is sitting on a bench with a bunch of snivelling typists with bad breath, it is submitting to the sneers of an uncouth instructor. Number two. I do, however, listen to radio, it being one of my continuing pleasures to scan the wavebands for examples of the quaint or esoteric. Write that down and I’ll sign it. Finish, okay? Then take yourself off. I’m done with you, thank you up to here. Nothing personal. It’s them.”
“Which was how you stumbled on Boris and Olga,” I suggested helpfully, writing again. “Got it. You scanned the wavebands and there they were. Boris and Olga. Nothing wrong in that, Cyril. Stick with it and you might even land yourself a language allowance, if you pass the test. It’s only a few bob, I suppose, but it’s better in your pocket than theirs, I always say.” I continued writing, but slowly, letting him hear the maddening scratch of my government-issue pencil. “It’s always the not reporting that bothers them most,” I confided, apologising for the foibles of my masters. “‘If he hasn’t told us about Olga and Boris, what else hasn’t he told us?’ You can’t blame them, I suppose. Their jobs are on the line, same as ours.”
Turn another page. Lick tip of pencil. Make another annotation. I was beginning to feel the excitement of the chase. Love as commitment, he had said, love as part of life, love as effort, love as sacrifice. But love for whom? I drew a heavy pencil line and turned a page.
“Can we pass on to your Iron Curtains, please, Cyril?” I asked in my weariest voice. “HQ are devils for Iron Curtains. I wondered whether you’d any fresh names to add to the list of those you’ve already given us these past years. The last one’—I flipped to the back of the notebook—”my goodness, that was aeons ago. A gentleman from East Germany, a member of a local choral society you joined. Is there no one you can think of since at all? They’re a bit after you now, Cyril, I’ll admit, now that they’ve caught you not reporting the language course.
His disillusionment in me was again sliding into anger. Once again he began punching the unlikely words. But this time it was as if he were punching me.
“You will find all my Iron Curtain contacts, past and present, such as they are, duly listed and submitted to my superiors, according to regulations. If you had troubled yourself to obtain this data from Foreign Office Personnel Department prior to this interview—and I mean why they send me a hack like you—”
I decided to cut him short. I did not think it useful that he should be
allowed to reduce me to nothing. To insignificance, yes. But not to nothing, for I was the servant of a higher authority. I pulled a sheet of paper from the back of my notebook. “Look, now, here you are, I’ve got them. All your Iron Curtains on one page. There’s only been five ever, in your whole twenty years. HQcleared, I see, the lot. Well, so they would be, as long as you report them.” I put the sheet back in my notebook. “Anyone to add, then? Who’s to add? Think now, Cyril. Don’t be hasty. They know an awful lot, my people. They shock me sometimes. Take your time.”
He took his time. And more time. And more. Finally he took the line of self-pity.
“I’m not a diplomat, Ned,” he complained in a small voice. “I’m not out doing the gay hurrah every night, Belgravia, Kensington, St John’s Wood, medals and white tie, rubbing shoulders with the great, am I? I’m a clerk. I’m not that man at all.”
“What man’s that, Cyril?”
“I like a treat, that’s different. I like a friend best.”
“I know you do, Cyril. HQ knows too.”
A fresh resort to anger to mask his rising panic. Deafening body language as he clenches his great fists and lifts his elbows. “There is not a single name on that list that has crossed my path since I reported the persons concerned. The names in that list related entirely to the most completely casual encounters, which had no follow-up whatsoever.”
“But, what about new people since?” I pleaded patiently. “You’ll not get past them, Cyril. I don’t, so why should you?”
“If there was anyone to add, any contact at all, even a Christmas card from someone, you may rest assured I would have been the first to add him. Finish. Done. Over. Next question, thank you.”
Diplomat, I noted. Him, I noted; Christmas. Salzburg. I became if anything more laborious.
“That’s not quite the answer they want, Cyril,” I said as I wrote in my notebook. “That sounds a bit too much like flannel, frankly. They want a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ or an ‘if yes, who?’ They want a straight answer and they’re not settling for flannel. ‘He didn’t own up to his language, so why should we think he’s owning up to his Iron Curtains?’ That’s what they’re thinking, Cyril. That’s what they’re going to say to me too. It’ll all come back on me in the end,” I warned him, still writing.
Once again I could feel that my ponderousness was a torture to him. He was pacing, snapping his fingers at his sides. He was muttering, working his jaw menacingly, growling again about getting names. But I was far too busy writing in my notebook to notice any of this. I was old Ned, Burr’s Mr. Plod, doing his duty by HQ.
“How’s about this then, Cyril?” I said at last. And, holding up my notebook, I read aloud to him what I had written: “‘I, Cyril Frewin, solemnly declare that I have not made the acquaintance, however briefly, of any Soviet or Eastern Bloc citizen, other than those already listed by me, in the last twelve months. Dated and signed Cyril.’”
I relit my pipe and studied the bowl in order to make quite sure it was drawing. I put the burned-out match in the matchbox, and the matchbox in my pocket. My voice, already slowed to a walking pace, now became a crawl.
“Alternatively, Cyril, and I say this advisedly, if there is anyone like that in your life, now’s your chance to tell me. And them. I’ll treat everything you say in confidence, so will they, depending what I tell them of it, which isn’t always everything, not by any means. Nobody’s a saint, after all. And HQ probably wouldn’t clear them if they were.”
Intentionally or otherwise, I had touched the fuse in him. He had been waiting for an excuse and now I had delivered it.
“Saint? Who’s talking saint? Don’t you call me bloody saint, I won’t have it! Saint Cyril, they call me, did you know that? Of course you did, you’re taunting me!”
Taut-faced and rude. Battering me with words. Frewin against the ropes, slugging anything that came at him. “If there were such a person—which there is not—I would not have told you or your snooping PV lot—I would have reported the matter in writing, according to regulations, to personnel department at the—”
For the second time, I allowed myself to cut him short. I didn’t like him conducing the rhythm of our exchanges. “But there really isn’t anyone, is that right?” I said, as pressingly as my passive rôle allowed. “There’s no one? You haven’t been to any functions— parties, get-togethers, meetings—official, unofficial—in London, outside London, abroad even—at which a citizen of an Iron Curtain country was remotely present?”
“Do I have to continue saying no?”
“Not if the answer’s yes,” I replied, with a smile he didn’t like.
“The answer is no. No, no, no. Repeat no. Got it?”
“Thank you. So I can put none, can I? That means no one, not even a Russian. And you can sign it. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Meaning no?” I suggested, making another weak joke. “I’m sorry, Cyril, but we do have to be crystal clear, otherwise HQ will fall on us from a great height. Look, I’ve written it down for you. Sign it.”
I handed him my pencil and he signed. I wanted to instil the habit in him. He handed back my notebook, smiling tragically at me. He had lied to me and he needed my comfort in his wretchedness. So I granted it to him—if only, I am afraid, because I wanted to take it away again very soon. I stowed the notebook in my inside pocket, stood up, and gave a big stretch as if announcing a break in our discussions, seeing that a tricky point was behind us. I rubbed my back a bit, an old man’s ache.
“What’s all that digging you’ve been doing out there, Cyril? I said. “Building your own deep shelter, are you? Hardly necessary these days, I’d have thought.”
Looking past him, my eye had fallen on a pile of new bricks stacked in a corner of the mud patch, with a tarpaulin tied over the top of them. An unfinished trench, about two feet deep, cut across the lawn towards them.
“I am building a pond,” Frewin retorted, seizing gratefully on my facetious diversion. “I happen to be very fond of water.”
“A goldfish pond, Cyril?”
“An ornamental pond.” His good humour came sailing back. He relaxed, he smiled, and his smile was so warm and unaffected that I found myself smiling in return. “What I intend to do, Ned,” he explained, drawing near to me in friendship, “is construct three separate levels of water, beginning four feet above the existing ground, descending over eighteen-inch intervals to that trench. I shall then illuminate each pool from beneath with the aid of a concealed lamp. I shall then pump the water with an electric pump. And at night, instead of drawing the curtains, I shall be able to look out on to my own private display of illuminated pools and waterfalls!”
“And play your music!” I cried, responding in full measure to his enthusiasm. “I think that’s splendid, Cyril. Genius. I’m most impressed, I really am. I’d like my wife to see that. How was Salzburg, by the way?”
He actually reels, I thought, watching his head swing away from me. I hit him and he reels, and I wait till he recovers consciousness before I hit him again.
“You go to Salzburg for the music, they tell me. Quite a Mecca for you musicians, they tell me, Salzburg. Do they do opera at Christmas, or is it all carols and anthems you go for?”
They must have closed off the street, I thought, listening to the enormous silence. I wondered whether Frewin was thinking the same as he went on staring into the garden.
“Why should you care?” he answered. “You’re a musical ignoramus. You said so. As well as being a very considerable snooper.”
“Verdi? I’ve heard of Verdi. Mozart? He was Austrian, wasn’t he? I saw the film. I’ll bet they do you Mozart for Christmas. They’d have to. Which ones do they do?”
Silence again. I sat down and once again prepared myself to write to his dictation.
“Do you go alone?” I asked.
“Of course I do.”
“Do you always?”
“Of course I do.”
“Last time too?”
“Yes!”
“Do you stay alone?” I asked.
He laughed loudly. “Me? Not for one minute. Not me. There’s dancing girls waiting for me in my room when I arrive. They’re changed every day.”
“But music night after night after night, the way you like it?”
“Who says what I like?”
“Fourteen nights of it. Twelve, I suppose, if you count the travel.”
“Could be twelve. Could be fourteen. Could be thirteen. What does it matter?” He was still concussed. He was talking from a long way off.
“Which is what you go for. To Salzburg. And what you pay for. Yes? Yes, Cyril? Give me a signal, please, Cyril. I keep thinking I’m losing you. And it was what you went for this Christmas too?”
He nodded.
“Concerts, night after night? Opera? Carols?”
“Yes.”
“Only the trouble is, you see, HQ says you only stayed the one night. You arrived on the first day as booked, they say, and you were off again next morning. You paid the full whack for your room, all two weeks, but the hotel never saw hide nor hair of you from your second day till you came back at the end of your holiday. So quite reasonably, really, HQ are asking where the bloody hell you went.” I took my boldest leap so far. “And who with. They’re asking whether you’ve got someone on the side. Like Boris and Olga, but real.”
I turned a couple more pages of my notebook, and in the deep silence the rustle was like falling bricks. His terror was infecting me. It was like a shared evil. The truth lay a membrane from us, yet the dread of it seemed to be as terrible to the man who was trying to keep it outside the door as to myself, who was trying to let it in.
“All we need to do is get it down on paper, Cyril,” I said. “Then we can forget it. Nothing like writing something down for getting it out of the way, I say. It’s no crime to have a friend. Even a foreign one isn’t a crime, as long as he’s written down. He is foreign, I take it? Only, I notice a certain hesitation in you here. He must be quite some friend, I will say, if you gave up all that music for him.”
The Secret Pilgrim Page 32