Section 1: ELLI. Section 2: ‘Middle-grade agent’ inside the Service. Section 3: the list of politicians, professors, Service old boys and girls that I filched from a D3 safe to show Maurice. And her recommendation is that we return to the evidence from the defectors for a new season.
‘What does this deep history have to do with the real purpose of FLUENCY?’ I ask, lifting the Section 3 list.
Martin glares at me; Lecky fiddles with his cigarettes; Stewart brushes dust from his sleeve. How dare I?
‘Well, H-Harry,’ says Wright, ‘we will only find the mole if we go back to the thirties when the enemy built his networks, and these people …’ he places his hand lightly on the Section 3 list ‘… these p-people may have a connection with ELLI. They remain a security threat.’
‘Do we have the resources to investigate so many?’
‘We will have,’ Wright replies, with obvious satisfaction, ‘when the new director general takes charge.’
The front door opens and I walk out of the drawing room into the hall to greet Elsa. ‘We’re going away for two weeks in September,’ she says. ‘I’ve spoken to Fiona and we can have the house in France.’
I help her with her coat, then hold and kiss her. ‘Good evening?’ It’s after eleven o’clock.
‘As these things go.’ Her face is flushed with drink. ‘I met Tom Driberg.’
‘At the Ministry of Defence?’
‘Denis Healey’s trying to be nice to the Labour left – beer and sandwiches and those silly grapefruits with sticks of cheese and pineapple. Standards are slipping.’
‘You’re so bourgeois.’
‘Well, that’s true, but I can tell you, I felt very at home with the left wing of the Labour Party.’
‘Say that a little louder for the microphone, would you?’
She laughs. ‘That had better be a joke, Harry.’
‘Tell me, what did Driberg have to say?’
‘Tea first,’ she says, breaking from my embrace.
I rescue my whisky from the top of the piano and follow her into the kitchen where she’s spooning Earl Grey into the pot.
‘Sure?’ She waves the spoon. ‘You should. You drink too much Scotch.’
‘Hypocrite. You’ve been drinking too.’
‘Tonight, not every night.’
‘Never mind that,’ I say, pulling a chair from the table. ‘How do you know Tom Driberg?’
‘I don’t, but he knew I was married to you.’
‘Oh?’
‘He says he wants to talk to you about Burgess.’
‘What more is there to say?’
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ She picks up her teacup and walks round the table to stand beside me – ‘Come on, then’ – and I push my chair back a little more so she can sit on my knee.
‘He’s going to invite us to his home in Essex,’ she says, stroking the hair from my forehead. ‘He’s amusing. Very rude about his parliamentary colleagues, and about you, but in a nicer way. Homosexual?’
I roll my eyes.
‘Well, how was I supposed to know?’
Lifting my chin I invite her to kiss me, and it’s wine, not beer, I taste.
‘Wine for the ladies,’ she says, ‘which means me because I was the only woman there. The Honourable Member for Liverpool Walton asked me to fetch him a bottle of beer. “I’m not here to serve the drinks, Comrade,” I said. “Ask me about the defence estimates.”’
‘Marx said, Social progress can be measured by the social position of the female sex.’
She kisses me again. ‘That one sounds like Karl.’
I kiss her – ‘It’s Karl’ – then kiss her again. I kiss her face, the nape of her neck. I kiss her hair, and the little notch above her breastbone. I kiss her until she holds me away and rises. ‘Come on, then.’ And she takes my hand to pull me from the chair. I check her. ‘Cariad, a word of warning. That nice Mr Driberg, don’t tell him anything you don’t want the world to know.’
I’m lying, eyes open, wondering whether I can free my arm from beneath Elsa’s pillow and close the gap in the curtains. I sleep badly these days. Tonight it’s Driberg, and the first thing I always think of is the time he reached over to touch my cock. ‘You’ve got a pretty one,’ he said. I thanked him for the compliment and zipped it away at once. That was in the lavatory at the Gargoyle in Soho. Burgess was a member, Driberg too, I think. The artist Matisse was a member and some of his work used to hang in the club. I remember the décor was Moorish and mirrored, as places that come alive in the soft smoky yellow of evening often are. It was the sort of place where an Honourable Member like Tom could touch my cock confident that no one would summon the police and have him arrested for gross indecency. On that night Driberg was in the company of MP Michael Foot, and the artists Bacon and Freud, the writer and Communist Toynbee, little boy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and Dylan Thomas read poetry to us until six in the morning.
Elsa stirs and I slip free, and when she settles I peel the sheet back and step over to the curtains. There’s no one in a car or twitching at a curtain, no glow of a cigarette in a doorway. The street’s empty, and that’s how it should be at one o’clock on a Friday morning. That there might be someone bores and frightens me. Driberg thinks espionage is a great game. He came to see me when he was writing his book on Guy. ‘You know, they accuse Burgess and Maclean of being “split men” and leading double lives,’ he said, ‘but in a world divided East–West, Communism–capitalism, anyone who cares about his fellow man must have doubts and conflicting impulses.’
‘Split men’ touched a nerve with Tom because he was wrestling with the compromises and contradictions of his own life. A Cavalier Communist for a time, public school and Oxbridge like the others, now he’s a Labour MP who lives in a stately home in Essex, where he hides his wife. Ena knew he was a homosexual roué but married him all the same. That was in ’51, the year Burgess and Maclean dropped their friends in the shit by running off to Moscow. I hear Ena has tried to do a flit of her own but the Labour Party has discouraged her because an Honourable Member should have a wife. Driberg belongs to the class of socialist who cares for the working class in general but none of its representatives in particular, yet he’s a member of Labour’s ruling executive and he speaks from the heart (wherever it’s buried) on everything from modern poesy and the Rolling Stones to peace in our time.
Elsa mumbles something in her sleep and her voice draws me back to the room and away from the window. I slip into bed beside her again but am no closer to sleep. The thing is, Driberg has been on my mind for a while. His name is near the top of the D3 ‘further investigation’ list I copied for Maurice. It’s still there and was tabled at yesterday’s FLUENCY meeting. I’m suspicious of coincidences but they happen in small circles. I give up on sleep and pad through to the kitchen for a cigarette and some tea. Three spoons of ordinary that I count out as Tom, Guy and Harry, like the escape tunnels dug by prisoners during the war. Driberg has Burgess’s wicked sense of humour and the same urge to be naughty. I know he would jump at a chance to kick up a fuss about the secret state, take a swing at the establishment he belongs to. He’s a liar (he’s a journalist and a politician, of course he is) and yet, in his way, a sincere champion of the people. Dylan Thomas had it from the owner of the Gargoyle, who was told by the writer Evelyn Waugh, who heard it from Driberg himself, that his mother’s dying words were, ‘Tom, you’re a liar. You’re a liar and all men are liars.’
Well, if all men are liars, Mrs Driberg, your son is no worse than the rest of us, no worse than me. I will talk to Tom.
36
16 August 1965
THE POSTMAN BRINGS an invitation from Mr and Mrs Driberg to lunch at their stately home in Essex. I don’t show Elsa, and decline with a line. The St Paul’s postal unit will be intercepting Tom’s correspondence, and I don’t want our names to crop up in its weekly bulletin. I expect there’s a phone tap on his home and his parliamentary office too.
; I decide to make my approach ten days later, at a meeting of Labour’s governing executive committee in Smith Square. The press is there in force because its members are debating the American bombing campaign in Vietnam. Michael Foot arrives, Barbara Castle arrives, everyone arrives before Tom. The reporters have gone to a local café for tea and a bacon roll by the time Tom turns up. There’s only the representative of the Daily Express.
‘Is that you, Vaughan?’
‘The same.’
It’s six years since we last met, and those years have been cruel to Tom.
‘What are you going to tell the prime minister?’ shouts the hack from the Express.
‘Stop supporting the Americans,’ he fires back.
The reporter is ready with a supplementary but I coax Tom back to his seat in the cab and shut the door before he’s able to answer it.
‘Trying to pick me up? That’s flattering. I must say, you’re wearing very well, Vaughan. Marriage must suit you. I met your charming wife. I’m sorry …?’
‘Elsa.’
‘Yes, Elsa. Well, my invitation still stands. Come to lunch, or we can meet in Soho, for old times’ sake. But …’ he glances at his watch ‘… you’ll have to let me go,’ and he reaches over my legs for the door. ‘Ring me.’
I have the handle – ‘This isn’t a social, Tom’ – and, leaning closer, I whisper, ‘You know what I do for a living?’
He smiles. ‘Of course.’
‘This is about you.’ Our eyes meet, and his are very bloodshot. ‘It’s about the Labour Party – the Labour government.’
‘Then ring my secretary and we can—’
‘No.’ I take a scrap of paper from my jacket pocket and hand it to him. ‘Tonight. Eight o’clock. Change cabs on the way.’
Those bloodshot eyes are twinkling with mischief now, and I know he’ll be there even if he has to make excuses to the prime minister or, more likely, the next young man he’s going to spoil.
‘Hey, are you going somewhere? If not …’ The cabbie is watching us in his mirror.
Driberg snaps at him, ‘Just wait.’ But our business is done and I sit back to let him pass. Hand on my knee he rises and looks sideways at me. ‘Do you remember when I touched …?’
‘How can I forget?’
He chuckles. ‘Such a lovely one.’
I watch him grandstanding as he walks through the protesters outside Transport House and wonder whether I’m making a terrible mistake. But he has proved a fearless champion of civil rights and I know the moment he takes his place at Labour’s table he will condemn the bombing in Vietnam with colour and passion. Tom is just the sort of posh socialist Roundheads like Wright hate most of all.
‘Piccadilly,’ I say to the cabbie.
‘Right you are,’ he replies. ‘That was Tom Driberg, wasn’t it?’
The short taxi ride from Driberg’s apartment in Kensington to the Wheatsheaf pub will take him from society’s inner circle to its outer, from white villas and garden squares to yellow brick terraces and the estates of the working classes he champions in Parliament. Perhaps he knows the pub because the landlord welcomes homosexuals, and the police in this part of west London are too busy chasing real criminals to care what consenting adults get up to in the bar at the back of a local boozer. But Driberg is more familiar with the East End, where he’s thick with a couple of gangsters who run clubs and a protection racket. One of them is a homosexual who serves lads to guests like canapés.
Driberg’s late, naturally. I watch him pay his cabbie and enter the pub, and when I’m sure no one is tailing him I follow. I find him at the bar with a gin and tonic, and for the second time today I’m struck by how he’s gone to seed. I remember in the Gargoyle years he was tanned and fit with a natural wave in his hair, and supremely confident – he might have been taken for a middle-aged maharajah. He’s in his mid-sixties now, his face creased like an old boxer’s, and what’s left of his hair is grey. Time and indulgence have caught up with him, as they are bound to with us all.
‘The landlord recognised me,’ he says, lifting his glass with pride. There are about a dozen people in the pub, a couple of Irish labourers in dungarees standing at the bar, a party of the young around a table against the wall. ‘A malt whisky, please, George.’ Driberg beckons his new friend over. ‘George is from Glasgow.’
‘When you’re ready, Tom.’ I nod at a table in a dark-wood alcove with a view of the door and the bar.
‘I was going to Mick Jagger’s party and I might still, if you hurry,’ he says, flumping on to the burgundy plush bench beside me. ‘Ginsberg introduced us a few weeks ago – Allen Ginsberg, the poet, do you know him? Well, we were talking poetry and Jagger was sitting on the couch in these tight trousers. One couldn’t fail to notice. “Oh, Mick,” I said, “what a basket you have.”’
I snort with laughter.
‘Mick has invited me to his party, so he must have forgiven me,’ he says, with a sly smile.
I reach into my jacket and take out a newspaper cutting from ten years ago. I have kept it between the pages of Driberg’s book about Burgess. ‘Recognise this?’
‘By me?’ He reaches into the breast pocket of his suit for his spectacles: ‘For Reynolds News.’
I take the cutting back. ‘The Burgess-Maclean witch-hunt is now being transformed into a government witch-hunt.’
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘When they surfaced in Moscow, Fleet Street had one of its fits of moral outrage. Is there anything more ridiculous, I ask you? Every few days a new story of Communist plots in the civil service, Parliament, the universities, and the Daily Express was the worst. It was getting very silly, actually, dangerous, and I think I say so.’ He gestures to the cutting.
‘You do. “It is better that there should be a few Burgess-Maclean cases than that our nation, should be like a McCarthyite police state, with elaborate checks on people’s movements and associations and with power for security officers to detain and question suspects.”’
He picks up his glass. ‘To the point, I think.’
‘Yes, and it made me think of you.’
‘And my hand on your cock?’ he says, patting my knee.
I ignore him. ‘We’re in the middle of a proper witch-hunt, Tom, not one cooked up by a few greasy newspaper hacks.’
‘Go on.’
‘A cabal of counter-intelligence officers have used Philby as an excuse to turn us upside down in search of a mole at the top of MI5. At the very top of Five.’
‘How close to the top?’
I pick up my glass; it’s almost empty. ‘Another?’ This is my story and I must be careful how I tell it. ‘Same again?’ I raise my glass and gesture to George at the bar. Driberg glances at his watch impatiently. ‘You said this was about me and the government?’
‘The CIA is driving the whole thing.’ I know the letters CIA will be like a red rag to a bull. ‘It’s a power grab, Tom. The Agency has tried to remove Roger Hollis and place its own people inside MI5. And it’s just the beginning. There’s a list of socialists and former Communists: MPs, civil servants, academics. And Number 10 knows nothing.’
‘I’m on the list?’
‘Of course.’
‘Oh, good. Who else?’
‘Some of your friends and some of mine,’ I say, rising to collect our drinks from George.
‘Evidence, Harry,’ he says, when I return. ‘Names. Dates. Pieces of paper.’
‘All in good time. A little parliamentary pressure … A question or two to the home secretary would be helpful.’
‘How far can I take this?’
‘Well, it’s a matter of trust, Tom. The conversation we’re having now is enough to put me in prison.’
‘You know me, I’m used to keeping secrets,’ he says (‘And breaking them,’ is on the tip of my tongue).
We talk of keeping in touch and agree some simple rules. I’ll make contact when the time’s right, but in an emergency he can ring me from a phone box or write, but
hand-write the address so the envelope can’t be replaced, and seal the corners with sticky tape to prevent MI5’s post-office unit sliding a knitting needle beneath the flap to curl and extract the letter. And commit nothing of importance to paper.
By the time we rise to leave there’s a crowd in the bar. ‘Lot of poofs,’ he observes.
‘There’s a room through there.’ I nod towards a door.
‘Well, why didn’t you say so, old boy?’
I wonder if Tom is the only member of the Labour Party who uses that expression?
While we wait for a cab he talks of Guy in Moscow, of his flat in a Stalinist block surrounded by soldiers and Party apparatchiks. Isolated, lonely, drunk as often as he could be, tears rolling down his cheeks as he picked out hymn tunes he learned at Eton on an old upright piano.
‘He often spoke of you, Harry.’
‘Did he?’ I step into the road to flag a cab. ‘You take this, Tom.’
‘We can share.’
‘Best not.’
Driberg nods. ‘They’ll use the press against us, you know. That awful fellow Pincher on the Express writes whatever MI5 tells him. Accused me of being a KGB stooge. And Goronwy Rees – you’re still in touch with him?’
‘No.’
‘Guy was surprised and hurt by his newspaper pieces – all that tittle-tattle about orgies in Bentinck Street.’ He pauses. ‘He was surprised you weren’t mentioned in any of them, old boy.’
‘Was he? Well, it’s a lesson.’ I open the cab door for him. ‘We’ll have to be careful, won’t we, old boy?’
37
30 August 1965
THE FLUENCY INVESTIGATION wallows in the heat. Files on persons of interest rise and fall from the Registry, Evelyn still haunts the corridors after dark, and we meet on Thursdays to go over the same ground in ever-decreasing circles, like survivors of a desert crash driven mad by thirst and the sun. Most of the intelligence is held at MI5 and Wright is pushing anything like a lead at his own people. So I leave Lecky and his deputy, Hinton, to their own devices at Century House and walk across the park to my desk at Leconfield House every morning. Files from the Registry at Six are delivered to me by the courier and I speak to my colleagues on the scrambler phone for just long enough to be sure they have nothing of importance to share. No one expects FLUENCY to report again before Roger Hollis retires. Because it’s bucket-and-spade weather and normal people are on holiday, I stroll back to St James’s Park a couple of times a week to meet Elsa for lunch, and when she returns to her defence cuts and ministerial briefings I sit alone with my eyes closed and consider what has to be done.
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