But that was the thirties. Roger Hollis was at Oxford in the twenties when students on the left – there were only a few – were too busy condemning the last world war to imagine the next. They saw Berlin as the free-thinking capital of Europe, where – as Rees liked to put it – one could be on the right political side, the proletarian side, and where sex was encouraged because morals were viewed as simply a bourgeois prejudice. No one imagined the monster lurking at the bottom of the swamp.
I don’t know if Hollis was a student radical (I doubt it very much). I do know he was a contemporary and acquaintance of Dick White, and that Wright is flying solo on this one. I imagine he’s hoping to find enough in the Bodleian Library to justify this fishing trip, and that if he doesn’t, no one will be the wiser. I watched him scuttle across the Old Schools Quadrangle under an umbrella, shake it dry and disappear into the library, where he will be flicking through volumes of the student newspaper, club minutes, and the debating records of the Oxford Union. ‘R. H. Hollis spoke in praise of Lenin,’ would do nicely, I’m sure. If he finds it I’ll eat his trilby hat. If he doesn’t, who knows? He may just conjure something from thin air, or even from a drawer full of dust.
Wright doesn’t reappear until five past two. From a bench in the King’s Arms I watch him turn left out of the library on to Broad Street. I finish my pint and follow. Ten minutes to Worcester College, and his appointment is at half past, so he may drop into a café at Gloucester Green for a cup of tea and a roll. The new baron provost of Worcester and his fellows will be very familiar with the story of the wine-and-roses student who was rusticated by the college before final exams yet rose to become guardian of the nation’s security. Hollis will be a regular at high table. I expect MI5 has a talent-spotter and contact at the college (it was the bursar at mine). If so, Wright will have flattered him with false confidences in the usual way. Something like ‘Mum’s the word, but one of Sir Roger’s contemporaries may be talking to the Russians. Can you help?’
The rain’s stopped and students and trippers have come out to play. There’s cover enough for me to use in Broad Street and Wright is taking none of the precautions against being followed that become second nature in the field. He looks distracted, caught in two minds, pausing at the gates of Exeter College, touching his lips, glancing at his watch. I follow him a little further and he stops again. Thirty yards ahead of me now, opposite side of the street, shop window with reflections on his left, parked cars on his right, and if he turns towards them he may see me. I sense that’s what he’s going to do and drop to my shoelaces in front of the iron gates of Trinity. Sure enough he has turned and is retracing his steps. I do the same.
Right at the bottom of Broad Street and the majestic circular, domed reading rooms of the Radcliffe Camera are in front of us, and to its left, the high wall and gate of the graduate college, All Souls, where all the members are fellows and as wise as Solomon.
He walks towards the cut between the college and the University Church, then left on to the High, and I follow. But I’m too slow, too careful, and I’ve lost his fawn trilby among the hats and bobbing heads on the pavement. Is he in the Lodge at All Souls? Yes, it will be All Souls. I’m still considering whether to wait for him in the café opposite when he steps on to the street again. Ten yards, fifteen at most, and if he glances sideways he will certainly see me. Thank God for his hat because in the time he takes to adjust it I turn to seek the sanctuary of the University Church.
The porter at All Souls greets me by name. ‘To see Mr Rees, sir?’ he says, as if it were only yesterday. ‘Afraid we haven’t seen him in a while.’
‘Did the last gentleman ask for Mr Rees?’
The porter hesitates. ‘I can’t say, sir.’ Wright has shown him a police ID and told him to say nothing.
‘That’s all right,’ I say. ‘Is Professor Berlin in college?’
His rooms were on the other side of the quad thirty years ago. I sit on a bench beside a postgraduate student with mop hair and appalling acne and wait for him to emerge. Rees recommended Berlin to me and, I suppose, me to him. Berlin, the first Jew to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls, Rees, the first Welshman. Berlin was the cleverer, Rees the more entertaining, or so it seemed to this poor undergraduate. I was a guest sometimes at their gatherings, invited to admire their wit and erudition, and now Isaiah Berlin is a professor knight and international éminence grise, while Goronwy inhabits a wilderness of his own making.
The door opens, a young man scurries out with Berlin’s new book on liberty under his arm, and I slip inside before my spotty companion can take his place. Isaiah is standing on the rug in front of his electric fire, a cigarette at the corner of his mouth. He appears lost in a thought, as philosophers should always be. Then he turns and sees me, and his thick eyebrows lift over the frame of his glasses. ‘’Arry,’ he says, with a broad smile, ‘come in, come in,’ and he puts out his cigarette and steps forward to shake my hand. ‘What an unexpected pleasure. Sit down. What have you done with Mr Jeffries?’
I gather that is the name of the postgrad waiting so patiently at the great man’s door for his hour of warmth and light: Mr Jeffries, please can you come back at the same time tomorrow.
Then Isaiah telephones for tea. I listen to his precise Russian-accented English, and for the second time today I feel a lump in my throat, which is unconscionably weak-minded of me. He’s dressed in an expensive dark wool three-piece suit that was probably cut on Savile Row, yet isn’t quite the English gentleman. But I’m sure he doesn’t care to be. Mid-fifties now. The fine lines that arched between his cheek and jaw have become creases and the little that’s left of his hair is grey at the temple. But what do these things matter to a philosopher with eyes that always seem to sparkle with empathy and wit. He says I don’t look a day older, which is gratifying, of course. I’m sure he remembers how vain I am, because he remembers everything.
In an old armchair and a fireside glow of books and art, it is possible to believe once again that man is progressing to perfection. A scout brings the tea and Isaiah pours, and we speak of nothing that might threaten his pretty bone-china cups. Naturally he knows I work for the Service and that Rees was there for a time too, because people at Oxford of Isaiah’s sort do. He’s on good terms with our old-boy professors, Hart and Zaehner, and another philosopher knight, Hampshire, is a friend and collaborator. He knew Burgess and was engaged to dine with him the week he fled to Moscow. So, he grasps my meaning at once when I say, ‘There was another of us here today, a man called Wright, and he was asking for Rees.’
Isaiah takes off his glasses and touches them to his lips. ‘Isn’t that over?’
‘I’m afraid it isn’t.’
‘You have nothing to do with him, I suppose, or you wouldn’t have taken the trouble to visit me.’
I smile ruefully. ‘I read his pieces for Encounter magazine. Do you think he knows it’s bankrolled by the CIA?’
Berlin raises his eyebrows. ‘I don’t expect he does.’
‘He’s living in London?’
Isaiah rises from his chair and takes a thick address book from his desk. ‘Have you a pen? South Terrace, Thurloe Square, South Kensington. I don’t seem to have the number but that won’t be difficult for a man in your line of work, will it?’ He snaps the book shut. ‘He was in a hospital, you know. A nervous breakdown. He’s still quite fragile, and still drinking too much. Penniless, of course. Poor …?’
‘His wife? Margaret. Margie.’
‘Is that her name? Poor Margaret. Cigarette?’ He offers me an elegant silver box. ‘You remember Maurice Bowra? The warden at Wadham. Maurice says Goronwy just wanted to stab someone. Simple as that. He didn’t care who he hurt when he denounced innocent people in his newspaper pieces.’
One of those ‘innocents’ was Anthony Blunt, but I don’t say so because I know they’re on excellent terms.
‘Is it too much to suggest it’s something Welsh in him?’ he says. ‘Goronwy reminds me
of your prime minister, Lloyd George. Delightful, affectionate, vain, a source of great vitality, but petulant and impetuous, too. A prisoner of his upbringing and of other people’s expectations. Always the enfant terrible, and so was poor Guy.’ He pauses. ‘But you knew them better than I did.’
‘I don’t know that I did.’
Glasses back on, he leans forward and peers at me. ‘What is it you want, ’Arry?’
‘Does there have to be something?’
‘No, but there is, isn’t there? This man, Wright … You want me to speak to Rees before he does.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And tell him to keep his mouth shut?’
‘Tell him to think twice before he stabs anyone else.’
‘You?’
I smile. ‘His friends and yours at this university.’
‘I see. Because you have reason to believe …?’
‘Yes, I do. It would be a mistake for Rees to offer Wright anything. Pryfed i cachu. Flies to shit, Isaiah.’
‘May I enquire whether this has anything to do with protecting our country?’
‘I think so. Our values, certainly. The things we fought for in the war. Our independence – your view of liberty and mine. At the risk of sounding hackneyed, Quis custodiet … I forget the Latin, I’m sure you have it – who guards the guards?’
‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes. But Juvenal was writing about fidelity in marriage.’ He gazes at me long enough to be sure I feel uncomfortable, then places his hands on his knees to rise. ‘Why don’t you tell Rees yourself, ’Arry? Is it pride? Is it fear? I don’t think I want to be involved. I hope you understand.’
‘Of course.’
I know I won’t persuade him, and when he rises I follow suit, and we shuffle across his polished floor to the door. I’m about to offer my hand when he asks, ‘Do you think Wright will wish to speak to me?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
He nods. ‘Goronwy wasn’t much of a Communist. He was more interested in drama and women. He found Guy’s badness attractive, and Guy knew how to manipulate him … It’s ruined him.’
In the cold, hard, wet stone world beyond Isaiah’s study, I seek shelter again. Rain is cascading from gargoyles and gutters and droning in the All Souls cloister, like a choir of elderly monks at their office. As I listen in something like a trance, the music changes and I hear an echo of this college in the thirties, irreverent, provocative, atonal, the voices of Rees and Bowra, Berlin and Burgess, from whom I learned that there were only two unpardonable sins: ignorance and boredom. (Explain that to the man in the fawn trilby hat, will you?) We didn’t have much time for saints then or ever, but I do remember the words of an old prayer to St Peter I used to hear in the All Souls chapel: ‘O glorious apostle, who can bind and loose sinners as you will, forgive those of us who chose the progressive way, especially those who were more active than others – we were very green in judgement.’ Amen.
21
23 April 1964
THE GLASS OF water Arthur Martin lifts to his lips is shaking. He sips once, he sips twice, then places it carefully on the director general’s conference table beside his notebook and his tape recorder. He has offered us an entrée, now the plat, served cold, naturally. He’ll take his time, to be sure we savour his triumph: grammar-school boy who couldn’t go to university tackles Blunt, professor knight and palace favourite. After eleven interview rounds in almost as many years, a knockout in the twelfth.
‘I told him Cairncross confessed a few weeks ago, that he thanked me for making him do so. Then Blunt asked me to give him five minutes to wrestle with his conscience, and I let him step out of his office. He returned with a drink – whisky, I think – and stood by the window, and he said, “It’s true.” And, well, that was that: he sat down in his chair and confessed.’
Martin sits back with a smile that reminds me of the sickly piety of a plaster saint. He thinks Blunt’s confession is his apotheosis, after years of martyrdom at the hands of the Service’s Cavaliers – its non-believers. ‘Well done, Arthur,’ we chorus.
‘He isn’t sorry,’ says Martin, and he switches on the tape so we can hear Sir Anthony speak some ‘why I did it’ stuff about the thirties and Fascism and his vision of a better way. His voice is deep and mellifluous, his accent expensive, his language cultivated, his manner charming. He is the perfect English gentleman of the clever metropolitan sort – only he isn’t, because he’s a secret homosexual and a spy. I don’t like him but I feel sorry for him, and anxious too, because the tape we’re listening to is just a beginning. Martin is promising to wring him dry.
The following morning, I take a cab to MI6’s new headquarters south of the river to brief Sir Dick. Century House is just as ugly as Six’s bar sages predicted it would be, and although we’ve moved only a short distance from our old home it feels like a great divide. Perhaps Dick is hoping government will forget we’re here. A little further, and we may drop off the edge of the known world, and then the transformation will be complete. Instead of spying on our enemy we will be able to devote all our grey concrete days to investigating our own people.
Dick tells me before my backside has hit his leather that he ‘always hated Blunt’ and that his ‘hauteur is irritating’, which is not how I remember their relationship at all. And I tell him that Blunt has named another of his associates at Cambridge – Leo Long – as a Russian agent. Dick nods as if he knows this already, which he may well do.
‘Does he know the name of his replacement at Five?’ he says. ‘Moscow would only have let him retire after the war if they could count on an even better-placed source.’
‘You’re right, sir,’ I say, because he wants to be. There must be a bigger traitor than Blunt, someone to blame for the mistakes of the fifties, the clues missed, the interrogations that came to nothing, the failure of the Dick White years.
‘You know, I supported Leo Long’s application to join the Service,’ he says, as I rise to leave. ‘Christ! What a mess.’
Over the next few days we crawl over Anthony Blunt’s life. Wright and McBarnet are preparing research briefs and I chip in with material from Six. Martin meets with Blunt at night and the following morning we go over the tapes and check for evasions and lies. He says he was recruited by Burgess, that their first controller was a Hungarian – ‘Theo’ – that he was replaced in 1937 by a controller called ‘Otto’ from somewhere else in middle Europe. They were both cultured middle-class men who knew how to make the proletariat appealing to Cambridge graduates. ‘I don’t think I would have become a spy if the approach had come from a Russian rather than a European,’ he says. But ‘Otto’ was recalled to Moscow in ’38 in one of Uncle Joe Stalin’s purges, and for months the ring was without a controller. Contact was made again through the first of Philby’s many wives. ‘Because Kim had only one ambition in life and that was to be a spy.’
The spools turn through another few feet of tape and into the forties, and soon it’s time to lace up the fifties, and there are names, but only of people who are known to the Service or don’t really matter. Martin is losing patience.
I hear him say: ‘Who replaced you in Five?’
And Blunt replies, ‘I was quite tempted to stay. But they didn’t need me. Kim was rising to the top of the Service. I know what you want, but I can’t help you.’
But still we go on.
On the second Sunday in May, I take a few hours for lunch to celebrate Elsa’s birthday. Bethan and Mary join us at the Ritz. Bethan is swotting for her final exams before university and has somehow contrived to fall out with her mother again. She says she wants to live with me, and glances shyly at Elsa in the hope of some encouragement. My clever, attractive, funny wife has them both eating from the palm of her hand, and I’m very grateful because I like being a father again.
We window-shop in Piccadilly and wander across Trafalgar Square, where the nuclear-disarmament people are campaigning for the country to set an example. The Honourable Labou
r Member for Barking is waiting to speak.
Elsa nudges me. ‘Driberg.’
‘The very same.’
Old Tom Driberg used to bugger about Bentinck Street with Guy, and he had the foresight to visit him in Moscow to write the book of why he went over to the other side.
‘Let’s not hang about,’ I say, ‘or we might end up in the Special Branch photos.’
Elsa laughs. ‘Worse for you or for someone in Defence like me?’
‘You, because I’m working under cover.’
We walk the girls along Whitehall and show them where Elsa works in the new Ministry of Defence. The War Office is no more; she has moved to the bleak white neoclassical monstrosity that someone without imagination christened ‘MOD Main’, and might very well be mistaken for a Communist Party block in Moscow. And Daddy – the girls want to know – where does Daddy work? ‘Daddy works across the road in the Foreign Office,’ I say, ‘and poor Daddy must go there now.’ I listen to them laughing with Elsa as they walk away, then cross into Downing Street. The Queen of the Files is waiting for me in her shawl of many colours. ‘Not run off to Moscow?’ she’ll say – she always does. I’ll tell her I’ve been putting on the Ritz and ask her to dance.
Monday morning, and an unholy row is taking place along the corridor in Soviet Counter-espionage. Peter Wright knows why. ‘Arthur and Malcolm,’ he says, with a wry smile. ‘Malcolm wants to move some of our people to other duties.’
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