I haven’t seen Arthur Martin in the last few weeks, but we meet by chance on the pavement outside Six’s headquarters. I am to talk to recruits about field work in Berlin and Vienna, and Martin has just left a meeting on the crisis in Rhodesia. But all he wants to discuss is FLUENCY and ‘that nasty little affair’ with Stevens. And, to my surprise, he declares, ‘This whole business is poisoning us all.’
I nod and say nothing in the faint hope of witnessing a Damascene conversion to my point of view.
‘We may have been looking at this the wrong way,’ he says. ‘The Russians may not have a middle-grade agent in the Service. It’s possible SNIPER was given a piece of deliberate disinformation – something the KGB knew would sow confusion in the Service. Perhaps the Russians are disguising their agents as defectors and we can’t trust any of them.’
Only a week ago he was quite certain he could see a clear image of a middle-grade mole, and now we are in the wilderness of mirrors again.
‘What about Golitsyn?’ I say.
Martin bristles. ‘Oh, Anatoli is on the level,’ he says, edging away from me, ‘Anatoli is completely trustworthy.’
1 February 1966
Wright has persuaded FJ to cast the net further and wider. I arrive at Leconfield House at a little after nine to find the corridor outside my office choked with furniture. Half a dozen officers from A and D are joining the four interrogators seconded to the investigation last summer. FJ’s secretary says he’s still considering my report, which is sweet of her. Plainly, he’s spiked it already.
We meet in the fifth-floor conference room on the Thursday and Wright presents us with a revised list of people, in and outside the Service, whose loyalty it is our duty to question. There are names a competent Fleet Street reporter would recognise – cabinet ministers, a High Court judge, the Oxbridge professors, senior civil servants – and there are old friends, and friends of Elsa he wouldn’t, like Rees and Hart and Pool. The discussion turns to who will handle what and when, and it is soon apparent they don’t want to involve me, that I am to be eased out of the circle. Then Lecky asks Wright about Jenifer Hart.
‘C-condescending,’ he says, ‘an unrepentant Communist, and she dr-dresses like a tart. The sort of Oxford academic who thinks she’s too clever to live by the same code as the rest of us, and that investigating people’s politics is no better than looking up a lady’s skirt. But I showed her some names, and she picked out a few.’
‘Who?’ I ask. ‘Can we see that list too?’
‘J-just the people we’ve spoken about,’ he says, flicking lazily through the file on the table in front of him. ‘S-sorry, I don’t have it with me.’
He’s lying, and I know why he’s lying, and he knows I know because he launches into a sermon on ‘conflicts of interest’ that ‘test our loyalties’, and while he speaks Evelyn gives me the evil eye. I listen with my head tilted sideways, drawing on a cigarette, like Noël Coward, a picture of composure, even though I know what this amounts to. It’s a simple chain equation, really, where x is Blunt and y is Pool and h is Hart and z is me, and the answer can only be Elsa. Wright – the committee – has begun to investigate Elsa. Change the factors, make Elsa z, and the answer turns out to be me. Angleton is already after me and his reach is long. That’s why measures are necessary.
At half past five I stroll out of the building with my briefcase, like any other government servant. But the moment I turn off Curzon Street my pace quickens. Am I foolish? Perhaps. It isn’t Moscow: they won’t lift her off the street. There are telephone boxes at Green Park station – I can ring her. But one of the boxes is out of order and there’s a queue for the other. So I join the snake of people hurrying home across St James’s Park with hats low and collars turned up against the rain. In the dark little cut that runs between Birdcage Walk and Queen Anne’s Gate I think of Clive, who broke my head on his boot and pissed all over me. Well done, Clive. I’ll always remember you in this place. Is our story over? It’s been a while, I know, but I look for you and your pals everywhere. I’m like an old man with a fear of fear and frenzy.
My neighbour, the Tory MP, is working at his dining-table, and across the street at the door of number 11 Mrs Holland is hunting in her bag for her keys. ‘Hello,’ she says, and raises her hand in greeting. ‘Filthy evening.’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘a filthy day.’
Her front door closes and I kneel before my own as if I’m praying to a house god. The splint I wedged in the hinge is in place but not quite the right place. I open the door carefully and leave my briefcase on the console table. The drawing-room door is open too far, and the newspaper on Elsa’s desk has been moved just a little. I check the phone, I check the lampshades, I check our pictures, the hairbrushes in front of her vanity mirror, the music on top of the piano. The house doesn’t feel the same.
Then I hear Elsa’s key in the door and I hurry along the hall to greet her.
‘Cariad!’ And we’re back on the street before she has time to ask me why.
‘For God’s sake, Harry,’ she says, rubbing her wrist. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Sorry, darling, but there’s something I have to tell you.’
41
3 February 1966
I WATCH MARGARET Rees struggling with her shopping and a bit of my heart goes out to her, though she’s never cared for me. I hear she’s being treated for cancer, and it can’t be easy keeping body and soul together on the little Rees earns from his journalism. But somehow they’ve found the money to come ashore and are renting a top-floor flat on this leafy street in Holland Park. At least, it’s where the postman delivers his bills. The neighbours say she’s living alone, that Rees hasn’t been near the place for weeks.
‘Where is he, Margie?’
She flinches at my voice and her step falters, but only for a moment. There’s only the width of a parked car between us but she doesn’t even glance in my direction. Head bowed, she ploughs on with her heavy bags, no doubt hoping she can cover the fifty yards to her front door in time to shut it in my face. Early evening on a quiet residential street, and people are hurrying home from work under their umbrellas, so I don’t want to risk a scene: she’s quite capable of orchestrating one. We’re almost in step now, so close her bag bumps against my shin.
‘He’s going to have to talk to me,’ I say. ‘He’s in danger, Margie.’ I touch her elbow and she jerks it from me. ‘Margie, is he up there?’
Her pace quickens and, spreading the bags like wings, she steps in front of me to block the last few yards to her garden gate. But they’re too heavy to carry like that for more than a few seconds, and the bag in her right hand falls open, a bottle of milk shatters on the pavement. With a will she might push me aside and skip the last few yards to the door, but her resistance has broken too. She stands passively, arms and bags at her side, like a thrush with broken wings.
‘Let me clear this,’ I say, bending to pick up the glass. The milk has splashed her stockings and the hem of her grey woollen skirt. Then I hear her whimper and rise with the broken glass to face her. ‘I startled you, Margie, I’m sorry.’
Her cheeks are glistening with tears of frustration. ‘Leave him alone.’
‘Where is he?’
‘You’re despicable.’ She wipes her face with the back of her hand. ‘Despicable bullies. All of you.’
‘Peter Wright’s been here.’
She presses fingers to her forehead. ‘Hateful man. He won’t leave us alone. Barging into our lives whenever it suits him. Worse than the Gestapo. He treats Gony like a criminal. Aagh! It makes me so angry. He’s the reason Gony is as he is.’
‘I’m the only person who can stop this, but I need your help, Margie. Where is he?’
‘You? You would make it worse.’ She looks at me defiantly. ‘I don’t know what you want but leave us alone. Leave him alone. Leave the past alone. Now, get out of my way.’
I watch her unfasten the iron gate and struggle up the little flagston
e path to the house with her shopping.
‘Sorry, Margie,’ I shout after her. ‘Sorry. I didn’t want any of this.’ Then I turn away in search of a bin, my hands sticky with cream from the broken bottle.
The following day I telephone Rees’s friend Freddie Ayer. ‘Goronwy didn’t tell me that you were speaking again,’ he says. ‘Unwell? Yes. He’s suffered another breakdown, I’m afraid.’
The old Colney Hatch ‘lunatic asylum’ was once the largest in Europe. I used to pass it on my way through north London to the military’s wartime interrogation centre. Six miles of corridors, they say. But Goronwy is being treated in its grounds, in a new self-contained hospital for patients with neuroses of one kind or another. Ayer called it a ‘patients like us’ hospital for Hampstead housewives, artists, musicians, poets and people from the BBC.
‘Depression, they say.’
‘Have you seen him, Freddie?’ I ask.
‘Only family at this stage,’ his reply.
But I make excuses to the D3 secretary, who is supposed to keep my diary, and drive out the same day.
The cab drops me in front of the old hospital’s wrought-iron gates, and I walk up the drive, round the silent fountain towards the reception hall in front of the chapel. Once again I’m struck not only by the confidence and ambition of the buildings but also their brutal scale. It’s a Victorian civic palace in the Italianate style with a dome and towers and loggia, and yellow brick wings that stretch almost as far as the eye can see. Built to impress, built for numbers, it would serve just as well as a prison, and for many who are committed here that is what it becomes. The brick is beginning to crumble as if our decline from imperial power, through two world wars, can be traced in its decaying fabric. Why am I here? Is it another piece of madness? Rees can be in no fit state to speak to me, yet speak he must, because I know Wright will have no qualms about pressing him in a fragile state.
I push through the doors into the entrance hall and am almost bowled over by a nurse making for freedom.
‘Excuse me, the Halliwick? Can you tell me …?’
‘Just keep walking,’ she shouts over her shoulder, and that’s what I do. Corridor to corridor, to the confused, the mind-numbing echo of many footfalls and distant voices, as if the ghosts of the place walk with me. Until at last a white coat directs me to a door that leads back to the sun, and a path across a well-mown lawn to a new red-brick and glass unit, with more of the human scale.
‘You’re not on the visitors list,’ says the nurse at Reception.
‘Because no one in the family expected me to visit,’ I say. ‘I’m Goronwy’s brother, Geraint, from Wales.’
‘All right, I’ll ask,’ she says truculently.
She’s back after just a few minutes. ‘End of the corridor, through the doors on the left.’
The ward sister is waiting for me and leads me along a carpeted corridor into a recreation area where about a dozen patients are taking part in an art class, most of them women in their forties.
‘How is my brother?’ I ask.
‘Still very depressed, I’m afraid.’ She points to the far end of the room where Rees is sitting with his back to us, staring out at grass and bare earth beds. He’s wearing a white shirt and khaki trousers, as if he were on holiday in Italy – it’s high summer on the ward – but also brown leather slippers of the sort you wear at home. The slippers are affecting because they belong to someone more vulnerable than I remember. I put my hand on his shoulder.
‘Geraint?’
‘No, it’s Harry.’ I step to the side so he can register my presence, which he does without a flicker of emotion. ‘How are you?’
He doesn’t reply, only turns back to stare at the garden. I take the seat to his right. The other patients are busy with their paintings or reading or sleeping: no one is interested in us.
‘I’m sorry to see you here,’ I say (it sounds trite), ‘and I wouldn’t have come but you should know that Peter Wright will visit you too.’ I lean forward in an effort to capture his attention. ‘Are you listening, Goronwy?’
His shoulders shrink as if he’s expecting a blow.
‘It’s all right. Look at me,’ I say. ‘Goronwy, look at me.’ But he shrinks a little more, his face in his hands now, as if he’s preparing to curl into a ball.
‘Goronwy. He’ll ask you about Elsa again. He’ll ask you if she joined the Party. And he’ll ask you about me. Do you understand?’
He understands. Does he care? Does he care about anything? I touch him again and feel his body stiffen. I can’t see his face but a fat teardrop plops on to the floor between those slippers. They’re welling through his fingers. Is it instinct, or what we once meant to each other? I stand and put my arm around his shoulders. ‘Hey, mae’n iawn,’ I say, to say something.
Someone is approaching. A chair is dragged away, and a nurse with a generous ruddy face bobs in front of him. ‘What’s the matter?’ Rees says nothing and she looks up at me in search of an explanation. I could say, ‘Disappointment,’ and ‘Regret,’ and ‘Fear,’ I could mention Guy – does his psychiatrist know? – but instead I look hopeless.
‘I think you’d better go,’ she says. ‘Can you come again tomorrow?’
I don’t reply, but bend and kiss the back of his grey head. Then I walk away.
Sister catches me in the corridor near the nurses’ station. She’s a no-nonsense young woman with large hands and thick calves. ‘What a shame,’ she says, ‘you’ve come so far,’ and she wants to know if my ‘brother’ mentioned the policeman to me because he hasn’t been the same since his visit. He said his name was Inspector Jamison. Grey tonsure. Glasses. Large nose. Fawn jacket. And a stutter. ‘Mr Rees was very distressed,’ she says, ‘and now this today.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘You’re his brother,’ she says. ‘It isn’t your fault.’
I smile ruefully. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
As I walk back along the echoing corridors of the old lunatic asylum I feel only pity for Rees and disgust that a tug of war over the past has brought him to this place. Did Wright wring it from him? I hardly care.
I eat and drink alone at the Reform for the first time in weeks, and by the time I reach home it is late evening. Elsa has left a note on the silver tray that her father gave us for calling cards and letters. I joked at the time that it was a secret dig at his daughter for marrying the footman, and she laughed and threatened to give me the sack if my service didn’t improve. Goodness knows what she thinks of it now things are so tense. Your daughter Bethan rang to speak to you – remember her? she writes. She’ll ring again tomorrow. Don’t wait up for me, Elsa. She doesn’t say where she’s gone or how long she’ll be. She’s worked late every evening this week but one, when she went to bed with a migraine. Next week she flies to West Germany with Mr Healey.
I’m used to finding companionship and solace in music but I haven’t played the piano for a fortnight and have no appetite for it now. Stripping the cover from our bed, I wrap it round me, like a cocoon, and stretch out on the drawing-room couch, cigarettes and an ashtray on the polished parquet floor beside me. I just about manage to resist the urge to pour another drink because it would certainly make my mood worse.
The telephone drags me from sleep at five past ten, and rolling out of the eiderdown cover I stumble into the hall.
‘It’s me,’ she says, and I know she’s upset. ‘Harry?’
‘Here, darling.’
‘Harry, something terrible has happened …’ She has to pause.
‘Elsa, what is it? Where are you?’
‘I’m at Jenifer Hart’s.’
‘I’ll come.’
‘Harry … it’s Phoebe. Phoebe Pool.’ She takes a shaky breath. ‘She’s dead.’
42
ELSA CRIES AND the only comfort I can offer her is to coo, ‘Darling.’ She refuses to let me go to her. ‘I’m staying with Jenifer tonight. I think that’s best.’ How can it be best? I wa
nt her to be with me.
‘Harry, she’s afraid.’ She repeats it slowly: ‘Afraid.’ She won’t say more on the phone.
‘Tell her not to be,’ I say, ‘and, Elsa, please come home as soon as you can.’
She hangs up but I stay on the line for a click, and even though I don’t hear one I whisper, ‘You bastards,’ into the mouthpiece.
Late on Sunday morning I hear the key in the lock and step into the hall to greet her. She looks exhausted and angry. Hand on my chest she wriggles free from my embrace and steps back to the open door. ‘Let’s go for a walk.’
In this drab season, we amble the streets, feeling as grey as the weather.
‘The police told us Phoebe threw herself in front of a train,’ she says.
‘You don’t believe them?’
‘Jenifer says she was pushed.’
‘Was she there?’
‘No.’
‘Then how the hell does she know?’
‘She doesn’t, but she’s afraid.’
I reassure her Jenifer has no reason to be, and if the police say suicide that’s what it is, but all the time I’m thinking, Wright, you bastard, you did this. Of course the coroner will record that she took her own life. No one will testify that she was hounded by a member of MI5; neither will her friend Anthony Blunt confess that she was one of the useful idiots he offered to the Service to seal a deal to save his own skin.
‘This is madness, Harry,’ says Elsa. ‘It’s poisoning our lives. Perhaps I’ll move out for a while, until you can put it behind you.’
‘Please wait until after your trip to Germany. You may feel different.’
‘Why, Harry? Why are they doing this?’
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