At other times, fortunately, it’s quite the opposite: what you see or identify or associate is something so longed for and beloved that you immediately grow calm, Wheeler tells me. You hear the timbre and the familiar diction of the woman you’re speaking to, to whom you have just been introduced. You hear her easy laugh with nostalgic pleasure, or, more than that, with distant emotion. You remember, you listen, you remember: why, of course, yes, I recognise that liking for parties, that infectious good humour, that rapid dissipation of all mists, that invitation to enjoy yourself, that spirit which quickly grows bored with its own sadness and does whatever it can to lighten or truncate the doses that life metes out to her as it does to everyone else, to her too, she doesn’t get off scot-free. But neither does she surrender or yield, defenceless, and as soon as she sees that she can survive the burden, she straightens up a little and tries to shake it off, as far away as possible from her frail shoulders. Not in order to suppress sorrow, as if it had never existed, she doesn’t wash her hands of it or wriggle out of it, she doesn’t irresponsibly forget; but she knows that she can only watch over that sadness if she keeps it in perspective, at a distance, that she might then be able to understand it. And in that middle-aged woman you see an unmistakable affinity with a young woman who is gone forever, with your own wife — Valerie, Val, almost all that remains is the memory of her name, but now, vital, living traces of her appear again, in that other voice and face — the wife who died young and could never even have dreamed of reaching this great age, nor, of course, of giving birth to a child or possibly even fantasising about one, she died too young to imagine herself a mother, almost too soon to imagine herself married to Peter Wheeler, or Peter Rylands, too young either to imagine herself married, let alone actually being married. She had dreamy, diaphanous eyes and very happy, affectionately ironic lips. She joked a lot, she never lost her youthful ways, she never had the chance. Once, with those same lips, she told me why she loved me: ‘Because I like to see you reading the newspaper while I’m having my breakfast, that’s all. I can read in your face the mood in which the world has got out of bed this morning and the mood in which you have got out of bed too, since you are the world’s main representative in my life. And by far its most visible representative too.’ Those words return unexpectedly, when you hear that identical timbre and diction, and see that oh so comparable smile. And you know at once that this mature woman to whom you have just been introduced can be trusted absolutely. You know that she will do you no harm, or not at least without warning you first.
‘This ability or gift was very useful during the war, indeed, in time of war it always proves invaluable, which is why the powers-that-be of the day did their best to organise and channel it, they combed the population for it, because they quickly came to realise how very few people had that gift or faculty, possibly even fewer then than now, war has an incredibly distorting effect on people’s perceptions, half the people see ghosts and witches everywhere and the other half merely perfect their habitual tendency to see nothing at all, and do their best not even to see that. But it was the war that brought it to the forefront, ideas only surface when we need them, even the very simplest of ideas,’ Wheeler had murmured to me in the garden, while we strolled slowly along by the river, waiting for lunch. ‘It’s just a shame that the idea didn’t come up a few months earlier, who knows, Val, my wife Valerie, might not have died. But unfortunately, by the time someone had thought of it, she was already dead. I’m not sure who it was, Menzies or Ve-Ve Vivian, or Cowgill or Hollis or even Philby (I don’t think it was Jack Curry, no, I’d rule him out), they were all vying with each other to be the most inventive, they’ve always prided themselves on that in MI5 and MI6, they kept a watchful eye on what their colleagues did, even ended up spying on each other, it probably still happens. It’s likely that it was Churchill himself who had the idea, he was the brightest and boldest of the lot, the least afraid of ridicule. Not that it matters. It’s impossible ever to know the true paternity of these things, and no one cares, apart from the candidates claiming to have given birth to that brief diversion from dusty death in our now distant yesterdays,’ said Wheeler, adapting Shakespeare’s famous words with a touch of bitter humour, ‘everyone tells their story and no one believes a word of it or pays the slightest attention. Whatever the truth of the matter, it all started with the campaign against careless talk, have you heard of that?’ It rang a bell that expression, literally ‘charla despreocupada’ or ‘negligente’ or ‘descuidada’ or ‘conversación imprudente,’ it was difficult to find a satisfactory and exact translation, I related it to what in Spanish we term ‘hablar a la ligera,’ although it isn’t quite that either, or ‘cotilleo’ or ‘chismorreo’ or ‘habladurías’. I shook my head: I didn’t, at any rate, know of a campaign by that name. Nor, at the time, did I know any of the names that Wheeler had trotted out, apart from that of Churchill, of course, and of Kim Philby (that other foreign or bogus Englishman, born in India and the son of an explorer and orientalist who was, in turn, a native of Ceylon and who, in his forties, converted to Islam), who had also been in Spain during the Civil War as the Times correspondent on the side of the insurrectionists, but apparently under orders (from the Soviets, not the British) to take advantage of his proximity to assassinate Franco (he failed, of course, and didn’t even try very hard: now for that he really should have been punished). Only later did I learn that they had all been civil servants or spies with grave responsibilities, just as it also took me a while to discover, for example (I’m not going to pretend to any God-given knowledge) that the first surname mentioned by Wheeler was written Menzies, even though he pronounced it as ‘Mingiss’. ‘You haven’t, eh?’ Wheeler went on, at the same time opening his folder and rummaging around in it. ‘It began during the war, they plastered the whole country with posters, notices and illustrated examples, with radio and press announcements, using drawings by Eric Fraser and many others, Eric Kennington, Wilkinson, Beggarstaff (I’ve got a few of them here, see?), when we were all convinced and obsessed by the idea that England, Scotland and Wales were infested with Nazi spies, many of them as British as anyone else by birth, education and interests, people who had been bought, fanatical people under a spell, treacherous people, sick, infected people. Everyone distrusted everyone else, especially once the campaign started, with very uneven results in practice (we were, after all, fighting an invincible foe), but it was quite effective mentally or psychologically: people were suspicious of their neighbour, their relative, their teacher, their colleague, the shopkeeper, the doctor, their wife, their husband, and many took advantage of such easy, widespread suspicions, perfectly understandable given the climate at the time, to get rid of a hated spouse. You might not be able to prove that you were living with a German undercover agent or infiltrator, but mere insuperable doubt was enough of an obstacle to prevent you remaining by the side of the supposed monster you had detected, in other words, it provided sufficient grounds for divorce. How could you share a pillow, night after night, with someone about whom you harboured such very grave doubts, with someone so fearsome that he or she would not hesitate to kill you if they suspected they had been unmasked or were under threat? That was what people thought enemy spies were like, whether young or old, male or female, British or foreign, they were all ruthless individuals, with no scruples, no limits, always ready to inflict the greatest possible harm, direct or indirect, on the rearguard or at the front, on group morale or on military equipment, on the civilian population or the troops, it didn’t matter. And that wasn’t an entirely wrong-headed idea either. People exaggerated their fears in order not entirely to believe in them, to conclude, after all, that nothing could possibly be as malign as they imagined, it’s something we all do, deliberately, but apparently unconsciously, thinking the worst, in ridiculous, paranoid fashion, imagining the most gruesome things merely to end up dismissing them in our heart of hearts: at the end of that process, that awful mental journey, shall we say, we alw
ays tell ourselves: oh, it won’t be that bad. The funny or dismal fact is that the truth usually is just as bad, if not worse. In my experience and to my knowledge, reality often matches the most cruel of presentiments, and even, sometimes, surpasses them, that is, it provides a precise match for those ideas rejected at the very height or peak of fear, for ideas that were ultimately dismissed as the crazed, immoderate nightmares of anxiety and the imagination. Numerous Nazi agents on British soil did, of course, kill anyone they had to, anyone who posed the slightest threat to them, as did our agents in occupied Europe, ours being mainly but not exclusively members of the SOE. In time of peace it’s impossible to understand or to know what war is like, it really is inconceivable, it’s not even possible to remember the wars one has actually experienced, those that happened and happened right here, even wars in which one took part; just as in time of war it’s impossible to remember or to conceive of peace. People don’t realise to what extent the one negates the other, how one state suppresses, repels and excludes the other from our memory and drives it out of our imagination and our thoughts (like pain and pleasure when they are no longer present), or, at most, converts it into something fictitious, you have the feeling that you’ve never really known or experienced what is, at any given moment, absent; and when absent, always assuming that it existed before, it doesn’t function in the same way, it doesn’t resemble the past or whatever else is now gone, it’s more like a novel or a film. It becomes unreal, a lie. And as regards war, it just seems unbelievable to us, all that waste.’ I was tempted to ask Wheeler if he too had killed, in MI6 (a bag of meat, a bloodstain), perhaps in the Caribbean, or in West Africa, or in South-East Asia; or before that, in Spain. But he did not allow time for that temptation to become fact, because he barely paused before adding: ‘We find it unutterably hard to believe it afterwards, as soon as war is over; the moment we’re faced by defeat or victory, especially victory. They’re like watertight compartments, the state of peace and the state of war. Such a waste.’ And then he immediately returned to what he had mentioned earlier: ‘Look at this, have you ever seen this before?’
Wheeler took out of his file a yellowing newspaper cutting showing a drawing on which the first thing that leapt out at you was the large swastika in the middle, like a hairy spider, and the web that the spider had woven, which wrapped around or, rather, trapped inside it a number of scenes. ‘Information to the Enemy,’ it said in large letters, the title of a play presumably, to judge by the small print at the bottom, which said: ‘This play by G. R. Rainier, which illustrates how careless talk, however innocent it may seem at the time, might be pieced together by the enemy and give away a vital secret, will be broadcast again tonight at 10:00.’ There were four scenes: three men talking in a pub over a game of darts, the man lurking behind them must be the spy, given that he has a hooked nose, an artist’s long hair and prissy beard, and is wearing what appears to be a monocle; a soldier is sitting on a train talking to a blonde lady, she must be the spy, not just by a process of elimination, but also given her elegant appearance; two couples are talking in the street, one composed of two men and the other of a man and a woman: the respective spies must be the man in the bow tie and the man in the scarf, although here it wasn’t quite so clear (but it seemed to me that they were the ones doing the listening); lastly, a pilot is welcomed home, doubtless by his parents, and alongside them stands a young woman in apron and cap: she is clearly the spy, since she is young, an employee and an intruder. In addition, at the top and the bottom, there was a plane, the one at the top positioned very close to a mysterious van (possibly just a front) with the words ‘Laundry’ painted on its side.
Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear Page 32