‘What do you feel?’ Elsa says, when we’re together with wine.
‘Mostly relief.’
She lifts her head from my shoulder and turns to look at me. ‘Why?’
‘He was trouble – always.’
‘He couldn’t harm you, could he?’
‘Besides, can you imagine what it was like for him in Moscow? They’re terrible Puritans there.’
Elsa pinches my chin between her thumb and forefinger. ‘Hey, you’re worrying me.’
‘Why?’
‘Answer! Could he hurt you?’
‘From the grave?’
‘Harry! You know what I mean.’
‘Ow!’ She’s pushing her nails into my cheek. ‘Of course not.’ I smirk at her. ‘I’m just teasing.’
Can Burgess hurt me? I lie awake in the early hours, Elsa breathing softly beside me, and wonder. There wasn’t an appetite for blame when Burgess and Maclean defected all those years ago. Dick was at MI5 then, and I remember him saying, ‘No witch hunt! It’s bad for morale,’ but he’s forgotten, and he’s willing to start one now. These things gather a terrible momentum. We must be ready.
I roll on my side to stroke Elsa’s cheek lightly with my fingertips, and whisper, ‘I could tell you my adventures … but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’
‘What?’ she moans.
‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.’
‘No,’ she moans, ‘go to sleep,’ and turns to snuffle her pillow, like the Dormouse.
But these are the witching hours. Trouble staggers towards me in an Old Etonian tie, with a vindictive smile. And Dick has an eye for his legacy. He listens to me, but to Martin more closely.
‘We’re going to clean up the Service, Harry,’ he said to me at his office door. ‘We have to – we’re losing. We’re going to turn over every stone this time. This is about more than one man. You see that, don’t you?’
Goronwy Rees is hiding under one of those stones.
13
1 September 1963
MY EX-WIFE RINGS me on Sunday morning. Our eldest is refusing to go back to school and, for some reason, she thinks I can persuade her. I roll out of bed with the covers and say, ‘I want to make love to you, but I have to be a father.’ Elsa laughs. She’s naked and truly a sight for my sore, sleepless eyes.
‘Hey, don’t laugh,’ I say. ‘You’re coming too.’
I expect her to refuse but she swings her legs round to get up. ‘Why not?’
We motor down the A3 to Virginia Water in her smart little Sprite. She looks young and attractive in a pink pleated skirt made of lamb’s wool and matching sweater, her chestnut hair blowing about her face. God, I love her, I really do. I’m wearing the polo-neck she bought me on holiday in France, ‘because Dirk Bogarde wears them too’. We pull up in front of the house and she stays behind the wheel while I negotiate. Susan’s frazzled and worried about our daughter, too worried to blame me. ‘Talk to her, will you? I can’t.’
My Bethan is small and hippy, and when her face is set in a determined expression, as it is now, I remember the same face in the kitchen at home in Maerdy. ‘Ble buoch chi?’ Mam would say. ‘Where have you been, Harry?’ the pitch and timbre of her voice the music of the Valleys.
But when Bethan speaks I hear flat commuter London. She’s sixteen now and clever enough for university, if she has the confidence, but when I introduce her to Elsa she appears sullen and shy.
‘Back seat, Harry,’ says Elsa. ‘Bethan’s in the front beside me.’ And soon we’re bowling along country lanes at a speed that would shock both her mother and the new secretary of state for war. Bethan turns to look at me and her green eyes – my mother’s eyes – are shining, and I know she’s thinking, Do middle-aged women really do things like this? We stop in a village for sandwiches and pop, and Elsa and Bethan talk about Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, the Beatles, boys and clothes. And when my daughter is sure she likes my crazy, beautiful friend she speaks of home and her troubles at school. I listen and nod and touch her hand, but I may as well not be there. Elsa coaxes, she charms; she hated school too, and was always falling out with her mother and father. ‘I still do.’
Bethan says she doesn’t argue with her father because she never sees him.
‘He was in Vienna,’ is my feeble defence, ‘but he’s home.’
At five o’clock I walk her back to the house. Stepfather is raking leaves on the far side of the garden and he’s careful not to catch my eye. Real father is resolved to make a better fist of things. She’s going to visit us in London, if she goes back to school and if her mother agrees. Elsa has convinced her it’s worth the trouble and it’s Elsa she wants to see again soon.
On the doorstep she asks, ‘Are you going to marry?’
I say, ‘Maybe.’
I tell my ex-wife we’ve made a deal and Bethan is returning to school, and I’m naive enough to assume she’ll be grateful the heartache is over.
‘Without consulting me?’ she says. ‘Don’t get her hopes up. You’ve broken too many promises.’
I hold my daughter’s face in my hands and kiss her forehead. ‘See you soon, cariad.’
‘I’m serious,’ I shout, on our way into London. ‘Marry me!’
Elsa can’t hear over the roar of the Sprite’s engine. I shout louder: ‘Marry me!’
She glances sideways. ‘You’re serious!’
‘Of course.’
A few minutes later we slow for the lights on Wandsworth High Street and she turns to me with a wry smile. ‘Ask me nicely and I’ll think about it.’
‘What’s “nicely”?’
‘Harry! You used to have some imagination.’
‘All right, I’ll surprise you,’ I say, ‘on one knee.’
The porter at Dolphin Square has a message that takes a little of the gloss off my day. Watkins of the Mirror wants to talk about Burgess. ‘Non-attributable,’ he writes, ‘for the obituary – the view from inside.’ I scrunch his note into a ball and put it into my pocket.
‘You know, the girls will want to be bridesmaids,’ I tease in the lift to Elsa’s flat, ‘and we can’t live here when we’re respectable. It’s full of tarts and spies and …’
‘Civil servants.’
‘And civil servants.’
She laughs. ‘Hark at you, the master of the house.’
Guy’s death is reported in The Times the following morning – but only on page ten. That would have hurt. ‘More than either Philby or Maclean, Burgess owed his place in the public notice to the single act of defection. His career before 1951 was one of dissipated talents and disorderly private life.’
‘Is that true?’ Elsa asks, between mouthfuls of toast. She’s dressed in black for work, with a string of antique pearls.
‘Not entirely. “Our diplomatic correspondent”’ – I show her the newspaper – ‘makes the mistake of underestimating the late Mr Burgess. He collected secrets. Not just the ones that crossed his desk at Five and Six, but gossip and the confidences of the powerful. It was his hobby.’
She lowers the finger of toast at her lips to the plate. ‘Did you share any, Harry?’
‘He believed the struggle between capitalism and Communism was the great struggle of our times,’ I say, ignoring her question. ‘Choose America or choose Russia. Choose once and for all. You remember how it was before the war … it wasn’t a crime. But Guy wanted to be important – spoilt rotten by his mother. It always comes down to something like that, doesn’t it?’
She considers this for a moment, then leans forward on her elbows to consider me. ‘Did you confide in him too?’
‘No,’ I say indignantly, ‘no. No more than anyone else. He was just there … But not after the war, not when I left Five for the Firm.’
‘Good.’
‘No, you’re the one I talk to – that’s my big mistake.’
She laughs – ‘Ha! Don’t you worry, dear’ – then, rising with knife and plate, s
he steps over to the sink. ‘I’m late. The minister wants the Service chiefs to …’ Her voice tails to nothing. Frozen she stands, plate still in hand, as stiff as poor Lot’s wife, who saw more than she should.
‘Elsa?’ I push my chair from the table, but before I reach her she turns. ‘The letter from your aunt. What happened to your sick cousin?’
‘What on earth made you think …?’
The plate clatters on the tiles by the sink. She moves quickly towards the door, and her face … She’s furious with me in her cold, controlled way.
‘Hey!’ In the hall now. I hear the cloakroom cupboard open and guess she’s going to leave for work without speaking to me again.
I shout, ‘What the hell’s the matter?’ and sound puzzled, aggrieved, but in the few seconds it takes me to follow her into the hall I recognise only the truth will do. Coat on her arm and she’s slipping on her shoes, black leather civil-service briefcase against the wall.
‘Sorry.’
‘You lied to me,’ she says.
‘Don’t you want to know why?’
‘To me!’ And snatching up her briefcase she rustles down the hall. I have my weight against the door before she can turn the latch. ‘Elsa, let me explain.’
‘Too angry to talk,’ she says, stepping very deliberately on my bare foot.
The next thing I know she’s in the corridor and I’m hobbling after her in my pyjama bottoms. ‘Will you listen!’
Thankfully, the lift is on the ground floor. ‘You’re right, there isn’t a dying cousin.’ The lift machinery whirs, the floor indicator flickers at 1 then at 2, and somewhere in my mind too. ‘Burgess? You think the letter …’ I laugh. ‘It wasn’t from Burgess. Not Guy.’
The lift opens, Elsa steps inside, and so do I. ‘Come on! Let me explain.’
‘No.’
‘It was from Rees.’
She turns to study my face.
‘Yes. Rees.’
Ping. Ground floor, and the doors open on an elderly gentleman. His wrinkled liver-spotted skin suggests a working life in a hot part of the Empire. A stickler for proprieties, no doubt, because he looks quite disgusted at my state of undress, and Elsa can’t suppress a smile.
‘Which floor?’ she asks him. ‘We’re taking the lift back up.’
The old fellow decides to wait for the next.
‘Explain,’ she says, the second the flat door closes.
I sigh. ‘Can we sit down?’
‘No.’
‘Here in the hall?’ But the look on her face … ‘All right, all right,’ I hold up my hands. ‘I haven’t spoken to Rees for – oh, seven years, 1956, not since those bloody awful pieces he wrote for the newspaper …’
‘I know that.’
‘It wasn’t just the lies he told about Guy but our other friends – university people, senior civil servants. He turned them into Communists and degenerates who couldn’t be trusted …’
‘Yes, Harry,’ she says impatiently. ‘What about the letter?’
‘You remember, it was the sort of thing the Americans were doing at the time. A reds-under-the-beds scare – Commie traitors in high places – and we were this close’ – thumb and forefinger almost together – ‘to a witch-hunt for anyone who made the mistake of having something to do with the Party before the war.’
‘The letter …’
‘Well, it’s the same again, cariad. Rees is covering his arse. Rees knew Guy was spying for the Soviet Union but he said nothing. He’d known for years. He knew about Maclean too, and perhaps Philby. Those pieces for the People were a disreputable attempt to save his own skin by ruining the reputation of others. Only Dick White saw it then for what it was.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Rees is afraid the Philby defection has started it up again – that the Security Service is pursuing him. He’s panicking: Am I a suspect? Is my phone tapped? Am I under surveillance?’
‘Can you show me?’
‘I destroyed it.’
‘Did you reply?’
‘No.’
‘You’d know if Goronwy’s phone was tapped …’
‘Not necessarily. Dick is talking about widening the scope of the investigation – to convince the Americans we’re putting our house in order.’
Elsa folds her arms across her chest like an angry schoolmarm. ‘Then why lie to me?’
I shrug. ‘Because it’s Rees, and Rees is trouble. Better you don’t know.’
‘You’re being stupid,’ she says. ‘You always are when it comes to Rees.’
‘Safer for you not to know.’
‘What are you talking about? Are you hiding something?’
‘You know how it is, cariad.’ I try to touch her face, and she brushes my hand aside.
‘No lies, Harry. Not to me. You hear?’
I hear. I hear. But I’m standing in her hall in my pyjama bottoms, and she’s late for a meeting at the ministry, and if she wants the truth and nothing but, it will take time after so many years of silence … so I say nothing.
When she’s gone I sit at the kitchen table with another cup of coffee and consider how to protect us both. Because truth has sides and colours: a different time, the thirties; a different place, Oxford; the story of a broken friendship. Elsa knows some of it because she knows Goronwy Rees, the brilliant, charming, funny academic who took me under his wing all those years ago.
He was a university fellow, and I was just an undergraduate, but Welsh, like Rees, and proud to be, and we shared the same sort of upbringing, the same interests. He introduced me to his circle of friends – journalists, writers, philosophers – and to Guy Burgess. They were hard-drinking, quick-thinking, principled friendships, united by a love of ideas and a conviction that things must change for the better, not least in the coal valleys of our native Wales: we were socialists.
Our friendship should have lasted – I’d stuck with him even when I was tired of his ego and his drinking – but in a piece of madness, an act of self-immolation, Rees went into print about those times. His truth was self-serving – he was careful not to mention me – but he lit a fuse that is burning seven years later, and now we have Philby, we have PETERS, and Dick is talking of a purge. They’ll go back to Rees and they’ll use him. Is he strong enough? The flame is inches from the powder.
Thursday, 5 September. The Times:
Guy Burgess, the runaway diplomatist, was cremated yesterday as a Soviet brass band crashed out the Internationale. His ashes will probably be taken to England by his brother. His body was carried into the crematorium by Mr Donald Maclean, who fled to Russia with him, Mr Nigel Burgess, three Russians and a British correspondent. In one of the two brief funeral orations to the fifteen people present, Mr Maclean said that Burgess was a ‘gifted and courageous man who devoted his life to the cause of making a better world’. Mr H. A. R. Philby, the former British diplomatist, was not present at the funeral.
‘Because he blames Burgess for running,’ Sir Dick White says, folding his newspaper. ‘Burgess didn’t need to disappear with Maclean, we didn’t have enough on him, but for some reason he chose to. Perhaps it was to make a better world!’
We’re meeting at Dick’s club and, because he likes to be a little different, it’s the Garrick. Dickens and Trollope are hanging on a wall somewhere, and I passed the actor Laurence Olivier on the stair. I’m here because MI5 has had its showdown. Martin and Wright threatened to resign if Hollis kept their suspicions from the Americans and it seems that was enough: Roger’s going to Washington tomorrow and he’s taking D1’s preliminary report on a penetration of Five with him.
‘No surprises. The evidence points to a mole at the top of the Service,’ says Dick. ‘Arthur says Mitchell, but the jury’s still out.’
He sips his coffee. Decent Dick who tries to believe the best of people. He’s looking very dapper today in the sort of light summer suit none of his predecessors would have been seen dead wearing but it goes down well at the Garrick.
/> ‘I’m sending you to America too,’ he says, marrying his cup and saucer. ‘We can’t leave it all to Five. We have to make our own mark on this with the CIA, convince them we’re serious about cleaning up our bit of the Service.’
‘Martin has a relationship with Angleton,’ I say.
‘He doesn’t work for me. Come on, Harry, Washington’s lovely in the fall.’
The following morning Peter Wright joins me at the Pavilion Road safe house to read the last rites. My team from Six is moving the furniture and the recording gear in a Morris van, but the camera feed we keep until Mitchell has taken the combination boxes from his safe, shredded his diary into a burn bag, and signed away clearance for his case files.
Midday, he sits alone at an empty desk, and as I watch him staring into space I remember our first meeting in blackout London during the Blitz, when both of us were turning Nazi agents into doubles, and when, for all the darkness and danger, things were incredibly simple. We were fighting for freedom and decency and no price was too much to pay. Now we fight for small advantage in a world threatened by nuclear holocaust, and I try not to consider whether there is a moral case for mutually assured destruction. I do know most of what we do is completely futile. Mitchell may be thinking fondly of the war too, and of twenty more years in the Service he says he loves but may have chosen to betray. Perhaps he is considering the final words he will deliver to his colleagues at his send-off in the Pig and Eye Club this afternoon. Martin and Wright are staying away; I’m going to show faith in his innocence.
‘What now for you?’ asks Wright, when my men have carried his monitor away.
‘America.’
‘Ah, I w-wondered if Dick was sending you there.’
‘And you?’
‘Back to Science for now,’ he says, ‘but I’m going to ask R-R-Roger for a transfer to D Branch. I like this work and there’s plenty to do.’ He pauses. ‘I can tell you for free, the CIA will want to push ahead with a full investigation. Hollis can look forward to a hot reception. By the by, give Jim Angleton my regards, won’t you?’
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