‘We need to talk about old friends, Goronwy.’
‘Who?’ she says.
‘I’m afraid this isn’t the place.’ I gesture to the neighbouring barges and the stationary traffic on the bridge above us.
Margie squeezes his arm. ‘Darling, you don’t have to.’
Margie, you’re wrong, and it’s on the tip of my tongue to tell you so. But Rees knows: after so much bad blood I would only break the silence if it was necessary.
‘I’ll get my coat,’ he says.
Margie protests and he tries to calm her, and I’m struck by how Oxford and smoky his voice has become, with only the faintest echo of home. Do I sound the same? After thirty years we are as metropolitan smooth as wave-tossed shingle.
I walk him across the bridge to Battersea Park and choose a bench a safe distance from the crowd at the festival funfair. He doesn’t say much, perhaps because there’s too much to say. We’re like old lovers who have rehearsed their grievances for years, and when the time comes, they are at a loss to know where to begin.
‘You heard about Wright, then?’ he says at last.
‘I guessed.’
‘He made all sorts of threats. Margie was very upset – accused him of behaving like the Gestapo. I suppose our telephone’s tapped?’
‘But you spoke to him.’
Rees draws deeply on his cigarette, then flicks the butt on to the gravel path. ‘Yes, I spoke to him. I didn’t have much choice.’ He turns to face me. ‘Eight years, Harry. Eight years. Was it such a crime?’
‘You hurt a lot of people.’ There was always the devil in Rees. I used to make excuses for him, until he betrayed his best friend in a newspaper and there were no more excuses to make. ‘No one trusts you.’
He doesn’t argue. He knows he hurt us, and I want him to feel how much. The threat of prosecution, the whispers, names removed from civil-service commissions, the early retirements, friends who served their country for years reduced to tears by false allegations.
‘I didn’t write about you,’ he ventures.
I gaze into his green eyes. ‘Because you couldn’t.’
He turns away. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘What you told Wright?’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not a fool. I know you can hurt me too.’ He reaches into his coat for a packet of cigarettes only to realise he’s smoked the last one.
‘Here.’ I offer him mine.
‘Bit of a prig, isn’t he?’ He pauses to look for a light. ‘Don’t imagine he’s much fun. He started with Burgess, of course. Why didn’t I tell MI5 he was a spy? And I said what I always say: Guy tried to recruit me in ’thirty-seven, but I wasn’t interested. I didn’t tell anyone because it wasn’t a crime to be a Communist in those days, and later … Well, I assumed the Service knew he was working for the Russians.’
‘And he said?’
‘He said I should be in prison.’
‘What else?’
‘I’m cold. Can we walk?’ He gets to his feet and pulls his sheepskin coat tighter. ‘Can’t we do this somewhere warmer? The Prince Albert’s five minutes away.’
‘Too public, and let’s keep our minds clear, shall we?’
Rees rolls his eyes. ‘Burgess used to say, everyone must believe in something: I believe I’ll have another beer.’
‘I remember. He loved Marx.’
We set off slowly along the river in the direction of the power station. Through the London plane trees that line the terrace, I can see columns of steam and smoke rising from the chimneys, and the breeze carries coal dust to us, the taste of the Valleys.
‘Blunt was next,’ he says. ‘Wright wanted to know all about Blunt. I said I warned Dick White thirteen years ago but he wouldn’t believe me. Old friends, see, Dick and Sir An-tho-ny.’ He launches into a bone-shaking cough.
‘Arglwydd!’ Instinctively, I reach over and slap his back. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Thank you,’ he rasps, gazing up at me with watery eyes. ‘Margie has made a doctor’s appointment for me.’
I nod and look away, a little embarrassed that I’ve touched him. ‘Take your time.’
A string of flat barges is forming in the river for the journey from the power station back to the coal yards downstream, and a bargeman is shouting instructions to the tug at the head of the line. I can’t make sense of what he says but I hear the anxiety in his voice. Brother, I know how you feel.
‘It was rank hypocrisy,’ says Rees, when he can. ‘You and the others turned on me because I told the truth about Guy. Bad form to tell the truth. The establishment closing ranks – all very English. But you, Harry …’
‘Come on! You were Guy’s talent-spotter. You were afraid someone would point the finger at you.’
‘I gave him nothing.’
‘So you say,’ I snap, ‘so you say. What about Wright? There’s more, isn’t there?’
‘He showed me some names.’
‘Who?’
‘Oxford people: Hampshire, Zaehner, Bowra, the Harts, Isaiah Berlin – Berlin! Imagine. A man who escaped from Soviet persecution – I told him it was ridiculous.’
‘Jenifer Hart?’
‘Yes. Jenifer Hart. I said, “I barely know her,” which is true.’
‘Did Guy know her?’
‘He may have.’
‘Who else?’
‘You know how it works. Guy warned me to keep away from other Party members or I would come to the attention of Five. I kept my distance.’
‘Pool? Did he mention Phoebe Pool?’
‘Yes.’
‘Elsa?’
He pulls a face. ‘Yes. I told him that was nonsense. Absolute nonsense.’
‘Did he ask you about me?’
‘And I said that was rubbish, too, that you were amazed when it all came out that Guy was spying for the Russians.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes, Harry. Yes. That’s what I said … Look, do you have another cigarette?’
‘With that cough?’ I offer him my packet. ‘Keep them all, if you like’ – and he lifts his chin in a small gesture of thanks, the fag already tight to the corner of his mouth.
‘Tell me what he wanted to know about Elsa.’
‘Did I know her at Oxford, who were her friends, did I see her at Party meetings. I told him, “I didn’t go to them.” That sort of thing …’
‘And Hampshire, Zaehner, what about the others?’
‘Well, I couldn’t retract my earlier statements.’ He hesitates. ‘I did mention a couple of names again.’
I groan.
‘But not Elsa’s,’ he says hurriedly. ‘Of course not.’
‘Listen to me!’ I reach for his arm. ‘Listen. Wright will be back, and when he does contact you, say you can’t help him with anything else. You hear? Not just for friends, for your sake, and Margie’s.’
‘I hear you, yes.’ Our eyes meet as I search for the truth in his face. ‘I’m sick of all this,’ he says. ‘I was in hospital, you know. Broke down at the table in front of the children. Couldn’t stop crying. I want it to go away. You, too. I want you to go away.’
‘Gwnaf, wrth gwrs.’ I feel suddenly sorry for him and squeeze his arm, because it won’t go away, no matter how many anti-Communist pieces he writes for Encounter magazine. ‘Listen to me. You remember this proverb? Po callaf y dyn, anamlaf ei eiriau.’
He smiles. ‘The wiser the man, the fewer his words. Do you remember those evenings at the Gargoyle with Dylan? The words that were spoken there.’
We walk back to the park gates and, because I must have some faith in him again, I agree to buy him a drink at the Prince Albert. For an hour I listen to his opinions on everything from the war in Vietnam to contemporary poetry, and he expresses them with his usual passion and colour. But I can’t be sure he holds any of them with great sincerity, except perhaps when he turns the conversation to his latest piece on the evils of Soviet socialism for Encounter. Then he speaks with the zeal of the convert
and I am reminded of something Isaiah Berlin said many years ago, at one of the public meetings Rees used to address or at one of his All Souls soirées. ‘Goronwy,’ Berlin whispered, leaning close to my ear, ‘is a man who lets things happen to him.’
It’s eight o’clock in the evening when I deliver him at the barge. I watch him struggling to keep his balance on the pontoon, straighten his back and take a last few delicate steps to the gangway. Ever-vigilant Margie must have heard him approach because she appears in an elegant evening dress and I hear her say, ‘Oh, Gony, we were supposed to be at Freddie’s an hour ago.’
And I leave him to make peace with his wife and walk home to mine.
23
25 May 1964
POSH GILLY IN the D Branch pool takes pity and brings me a cup of tea with two aspirin. I’m at my desk with my head in my hands when Wright walks in with the news that Pest Control has found fifty bugs in the walls of the American Embassy in Moscow. The Russians built the place – ‘With our compliments, Comrade’ – and now the CIA will have to take it apart. Peter Wright has spoken to Angleton. ‘He gave me his sermon about the constant n-n-need for vigilance,’ he says. He makes no mention of our clash on the doorstep of the Courtauld, and I’m in no mood for a resumption of hostilities. We simply leave it hanging in the air, like a smell we’re too polite to mention.
The following day he meets Blunt alone, and twice more over the next week. I listen to the tapes and hear nothing of importance, but Blunt’s fancy French clock strikes nine at one of their sessions and ten just five minutes later. What passes between them in the missing hours when the machine is switched off I can only imagine.
Arthur Martin returns on the glorious first of June to resume the lead role in the investigation. A fortnight with Mrs Martin has done nothing to improve his temper. I listen to him bullying Blunt for some detail that might identify the mole at the top of MI5 without success. Either he doesn’t know or he isn’t going to tell, and short of pulling his nails out we’re unlikely to discover which is the case. Martin is close to acknowledging it, I think, because he talks of stripping the bones of his other carcasses. His chief suspects remain the same. Mitchell must be brought back for interrogation at once, he says, and now his feud with Hollis is out in the open he isn’t afraid to discuss him with the inquiry team too. ‘But we can’t touch him,’ he says, ‘not just yet.’
Martin flies to Paris to have another crack at Cairncross on the fifteenth, and I take the opportunity his absence presents to join my erstwhile companions at Six in exile across the river. My stuff is in boxes in a sweaty little office ten floors below our chief, our Moses, and it is there that Elliott finds me, gazing out of the window at the trains rattling into Waterloo.
‘The spycatcher,’ he says. ‘Spycatcher, you couldn’t have timed your visit to us better!’
He means he has tickets for the Test at Lord’s, and in the spirit of the ‘good old days’ he would like me to escape with him. ‘Kim would never miss a Test if he was in town,’ he says in the cab. ‘I suppose you’ve heard? He’s persuaded his wife to join him in Moscow. She’s gone. Flown east. Just like that.’
Nick’s still in mourning; perhaps he always will be.
Trueman takes his fifth wicket, the Australians are in trouble at 88 for 6, and for once the cricket is genuinely exciting, when Nick leans so close he catches my head with the frame of his glasses. ‘Anthony Blunt … Is it true?’
I ignore him.
‘That’s an affirmative,’ he says.
Australia are out for 176, but Dexter falls second ball of the England innings. When the umpires call stumps we retreat to the members’ bar for drinks with old ‘friends’. But Nick wants to go somewhere quieter, and after half an hour we take a cab to his club. White’s is a club for proper gentlemen, and every time I visit I feel an urge to do something that marks me out as quite the opposite. Elliott guides me to a discreet corner. One whisky, two whiskies, and he tries to pump me for the Blunt story and the latest on the PETERS investigation. By number three he is doing all the talking, and everything is bad. ‘We’re all to pieces,’ he says. ‘Thank God Maurice Oldfield is coming home.’ Fourth whisky, and finally I learn that Dick is putting Nick out to pasture: director of paperclips and telling lies to Whitehall.
‘How’s the wife, old boy?’ he slurs. ‘By Jove, you’re lucky.’
‘Fine, Nick.’
The head porter doesn’t bat an eye when I deliver Nick to a rout chair in the hall. ‘Leave him with me, sir,’ he says, and I’m glad to: I’m struggling to walk a straight line too.
Umbrellas in Piccadilly, the pavements are glistening, but it was only a shower, and the air is fresh and pleasantly cool for June in the city. Lights burning brightly in the mansions at the edge of the park draw the eye. The staff of a well-known weekly have moved into Spencer House, which is very grand, and I wonder if I can persuade its editor to give me a desk beneath a crystal chandelier and an account for business lunches at Rules or the Ritz. I stop to light a cigarette, and am leaning towards the flame when a nasty tingle shoots down my spine. Is someone following me? But it may be the booze. I walk on, and only pause again when I reach The Mall. The quickest way home is by St James’s Park and the footbridge across the lake. Determined to wage war on my own imagination, I take it, soberer with every step, the chill of apprehension clearing the whisky from my mind, like smoke in a gale. Middle-aged adulterers canoodle on a wet bench, and I pass a couple in evening dress, who are quite as drunk as me, but no one with a broad Slavic face, no one with special-forces shoulders, or even a shadow on a parallel path through the trees.
I stop just short of the bridge to grind my cigarette underfoot, and that’s when I catch sight of him, edging along the path as if he’s distracted by more than me. Something of his silhouette, the way he moves … Our paths have crossed before, only I don’t have time to concentrate on anything more than finding a well-lit street, and then the next. Birdcage Walk, cut through to Queen Anne’s Gate. Almost closing time at the Old Star, and 54 Broadway Buildings is just around the corner, but the magic, the old protective circle, has moved south of the river. My best bet is New Scotland Yard, where I can flash my card at a constable and complain of inappropriate advances: ‘A Russian gentleman? Are you sure, sir?’
Not sure enough, which is why I walk on to busy Victoria Street. ‘Come on! Remember Vienna?’ I say to myself, and because I’m a silly sod who’s spent a lifetime taking risks I take this one, too.
No one in close-shuttered Westminster would lift a hand to help me, and I must assume he knows where I live and will try to intercept me before I can shut the door in his face. So I quicken my pace, turning from Great Smith to Little Smith, to Great Peter, until I’m almost in sight of the house. Then he comes slapping towards me. I glance over my shoulder and know it’s too late. Time only to slip between cars, make it harder for him to use his superior reach and weight. But he darts forward too, catches me while I’m turning to confront him and grips my arm: ‘Sir! It’s me. Clive.’
‘Clive!’ For it is he. ‘Uffar gwirion! Christ, Clive, I’m fifty.’
Clive from Stoke, the head of my old watch team. Clive with the chipped face, who was in the forces, then Special Branch, and has shoulders the width of a sports car. Clive, as charmless as a Staffordshire Bull Terrier, but revoltingly successful with women, boasts of losing his virginity at fourteen and is sleeping with the pretty girl who works in admin at Five’s garage in Battersea. The Clive who will kick down my door one day, sit on me, then ask me to come quietly.
‘Sorry,’ he whispers.
‘Bloody hell, boy, you scared the life out of me.’
He looks puzzled.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I snap at him. ‘What do you want?’
‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’
It’s after eleven o’clock and I’m drunk. A cold fear sweat is pricking my body and all I want to do is sleep, so can it wait? Clive doesn’t think so. He whisper
s, ‘Urgent,’ and ‘Trouble.’ He doesn’t know what to do. I’m not sure he’ll get any sense from me, but I agree to listen, and am on the point of inviting him into my home when I come to my senses. I must keep him away from Elsa. Clive and men like him are Vienna in the forties and SUBALTERN. Memories would spiral through our nice little drawing room, like threads of autumn leaves on an icy breeze.
We walk instead to the gardens near Parliament and gaze across the river. Clive flicks his cigarette butt into its waters and rumples his hair. ‘I’m tired of being a pavement artist,’ he explains. ‘It was a chance to improve my technical knowledge.’ Clive is doing dirty tricks for Five now. Only yesterday he was on a job at an art institute in Portman Square. He says he put a couple of bugs into the wall of a bloke called Blunt. Big pat on the back from Peter Wright, appreciation, respect, and here’s something else you can do. Clive bites his lip, still uncertain whether he should say. Tell a man like Clive some old nonsense is a secret and he’ll promise to take it to his grave.
‘Whatever it is, I’m against it,’ I say.
He looks perplexed.
‘A joke. Marx – Groucho Marx.’
‘Ah.’
‘Come on, then, spit it out. It isn’t anything to do with bugging my house, is it?’
He thinks I’m joking and tries to smile. ‘It’s difficult. Peter says C has given him clearance. But you’d know, wouldn’t you?’
I drop my cigarette. ‘Know what?’
‘It’s like this … Peter wants me to break into the director general’s personal office. Sir Roger Hollis’s office! Sod it, Harry, what do I do?’
Poor Clive. For his benefit I frown; a smile would confuse him even more. Clive, you have stumbled into the wilderness of mirrors. Before I do this to you, my sympathy.
‘What do you do?’ I gaze down at the dark river, swirling, eddying, at the turn of the tide. ‘You’ve told me, that’s enough. Just do as he says, Clive.’
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