‘If I may?’ says Maurice, very calmly. ‘I think the cabinet secretary was fairly clear, Harry. Wilson doesn’t want to antagonise the Americans, but he does want changes to the Service.’
‘What sort of changes?’
‘He told you: our relationship with Jim Angleton, and the FLUENCY investigation will be shut down. More scrutiny of the Service by Parliament, and … some staffing changes.’
‘There’s no need to be diplomatic,’ says Dick. ‘I’m going.’
‘What about Wright?’
‘None of your damn business, Vaughan,’ FJ growls at me. ‘You’re not holding the Security Service to ransom.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m doing.’
‘Then you’re not as clever as I thought you were. You should know it’s dangerous to poke a tiger with a stick.’ FJ squints at me as if he’s lining the sight of a rifle. ‘You’re not the only one who has something to lose.’
For the first time in weeks I feel a pang of fear.
‘Your wife was a member of the Party, wasn’t she?’ he says. ‘Her associates – Pool, Hart, the recently deceased Mr Floud … and you, Vaughan, above all, you. JACK and ROSA.’
I shake my head. ‘That’s rubbish.’
FJ raises his chin belligerently. ‘You will remember the meeting with Golitsyn … that he told us the KGB was running a female agent in Vienna. She was a Jewess, and when the order came to roll up SUBALTERN, no one was to touch her. So …’
‘So the witch-hunt isn’t over,’ I say bitterly. ‘You’re still prepared to believe that charlatan.’
Maurice is fidgeting with his cigarette lighter, desperate not to catch my eye. Because he’s the one who knows I care very deeply for someone the Service can bring low. Counter blackmail with blackmail is their – his – strategy, plain and simple.
‘Elsa has never been a Communist,’ I say.
Dick snorts derisively. ‘She says she didn’t know you were a Party member, that you lied to her. Perhaps she was lying to you.’
‘Golitsyn is an anti-Semite. And what are you paying him? Ten thousand a month? He’ll keep giving you names. I won’t let him – you – ruin my wife.’
‘You’ve done that already, I hear.’
That hurts.
Maurice clears his throat noisily. ‘A gesture of good faith, Harry. Return the file, give us your word you’ll keep this whole affair under your hat, and this other matter with your wife, it will go away. She will be free to move on, you can have your pension …’
‘That’s the deal?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘I see.’ They watch me. Dick’s face is a painful-looking red, as if he’s fallen asleep on a Costa Brava beach; FJ is stroking the lobe of his elephant-size ear; Maurice is polishing his glasses on his Manchester University tie. He’s trying not to smile. He’s glad there are going to be changes, but he doesn’t want me to tear the house down. And if he delivers old Harry he will be gathered back into the fold – the top job may still be within his grasp.
‘But I don’t believe you,’ I say, pushing my chair from the table. ‘The file is my insurance – Elsa’s insurance.’ And I get to my feet and begin to limp towards the door.
‘Wait, Vaughan!’ Dick tries to command me. ‘Vaughan!’
‘Don’t ask the goons to stop me,’ I shout over my shoulder. ‘You don’t want a scene in the Cabinet Office.’
The doors wouldn’t look out of place in Buckingham Palace. Mahogany panels and architraves, full-grain French-polish finish: quite beautiful. I’m sure no one has had the temerity or the impertinence to slam them in the hundred years they’ve hung here. I’m going to, Guy. I open the right-hand one, step out and swing it back to meet the other. What a noise, really! A boom to send a shudder through the civil service, the Reform, White’s and the Carlton, to reach Wilson in Moscow and wake Angleton in Washington, to lift the last dust from the corners of our old Empire and set generations of its masters revolving in their fucking graves. Fuck ’em all.
55
THE COPPERS WHO brought me from the camp make no effort to prevent me leaving. I imagine I cut rather a pathetic figure as I limp towards Trafalgar Square, right hand gripping the top of my trousers. Turning into Horse Guards I weave my way through the throng of tourists and World Cup football fans, who surround the troopers in their pantomime uniforms, and cross the parade ground with a vague notion of bathing in whisky at the Reform Club. I stop and rest by the white-stone memorial to the Guards Division, my mind reverberating with echoes of the last hour. I realise I can’t bear to set foot in my club or anyone else’s. Maurice says Elsa is on leave from the ministry. I’ve been away for so long, she may have made our house her home again.
I hail a cab before I remember I have no money. The driver likes my linen jacket but doesn’t think it’s worth the fare, so I hobble home across Broad Sanctuary and through the abbey precincts, turning left, right, then left again through the neat, narrow streets. There’s a layer of dust on the beading and frame of the door and city rain has smeared grime on the windows, like tears of mascara on a woman’s face. The shutters are closed but I knock and knock, a godless man praying for a small miracle.
Our elderly neighbour opposite has heard me and comes to her door in her fluffy pink little-girl slippers. ‘Your wife left a key with me,’ Mrs Holland says. ‘Hang on just a tick.’ She disappears inside, pulling the door shut behind her. Perhaps she’s thinking of those nice ‘policemen’ who rented her house to watch me.
‘Here you are!’ The key is dangling on a pink ribbon. I let her keep the ribbon.
The bulb has gone in the hall, the shade, the furniture too. And it’s the same in the sitting room she used to call the drawing room, except the old upright piano and a canterbury full of music. I run my forefinger along the dusty keys to bottom C. Bong. Then again. Bong. It needs tuning. My whisky tumblers are on the table we bought together, and just half a bottle of whisky. As I’m cleaning a glass at the sink there’s a knock at the front door. I hear the letterbox flap open and Maurice clearing his throat. ‘Harry, I want to speak to you. Please.’
He blinks at me nervously. ‘Thought you’d be here.’ He has taken the precaution of stepping away from my door into the street.
‘It’s my home, Maurice.’
‘Yes.’
I turn away and back to the kitchen and he follows me. ‘Do you want a drink?’
He does.
‘I’m going to have to charge you for it,’ I say, raising the bottle. ‘This isn’t going to be enough for me.’
‘Of course, they still have your things.’ He reaches inside his jacket for his wallet.
‘I’ll pay you back when I can.’
‘No need,’ he says, placing five pounds on the table.
‘What do you want, Maurice? Did Dick send you?’
‘No one sent me. I came because you deserve the truth.’
‘Ah,’ I reply sceptically.
I’m standing against the sink and Maurice is seated at the table a few feet away.
‘You were hoping for a revolution,’ he says, ‘and I’m afraid you will be disappointed. Number 10 will expect Dick’s successor to stop the CIA meddling – to sup with a longer spoon – but you heard Burke Trend: Jim Angleton will get his audience. Wright will keep his post – a post.’ He raises his hand to stifle my protest. ‘Oh, Harry! Come on. It’s an American show now – if Jim wants Wright … We’re on the slide, you know that, and Wilson knows it, too. You won’t have heard the news …’
I laugh harshly.
‘… for months. But the economy is on the rocks. Prices and wages are running wild, and we’re relying on the Americans to prop up the pound. We’ve got nothing to bargain with. Our cupboard is bare. That’s why Wilson wants this nastiness with Washington to go away. Turning on the CIA would be a terrible mistake.’ He pauses. ‘Wilson is clear …’
‘You’ve spoken to him?’
‘Not directly – to someone who h
as, and who bears you no ill will.’
‘Trend?’
Maurice ignores me. ‘Wilson is disgusted with Dick and FJ. He swore at them both, called it “treason”. But he knows the WORTHINGTON file would hurt him – might even finish his career. The Gaitskell murder plot is absolute nonsense – fantasy – but his friendship with Kagan and Sternberg, his association with a KGB agent in London, those trips to Moscow … You know it’s possible the KGB does have something of a compromising nature.’
‘Christ, Maurice.’
He frowns. ‘You’re not thinking, Harry. Think! We don’t know. Wilson doesn’t know. Let’s assume he’s a saint – there’s nothing he can’t tell his wife. Well, his reputation can still be damaged – if there’s enough smoke. The prime minister doesn’t trust the Service not to leak the file to his enemies in the press, and we both know he’s right not to. Why doesn’t the prime minister clear out the Service? Why can’t he start a revolution? Because he’s afraid of us, and with good reason.’
‘You, Maurice. Not me.’
‘The rogue elements in the Service,’ he counters. ‘Afraid, and because he’s a bit of a Boy Scout, he’s fascinated by the Service, too. Harry, he wants us to bury that file, burn it, anything to keep it out of the press. He doesn’t trust you not to leak it – nobody trusts you. I speak as your friend: hand it over or your life will be hell.’
I laugh bitterly and open my arms to the room. ‘You see? Worse than this?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘If I hand the file to you I become the problem, because it’s all up here.’ I tap my temple with a forefinger. ‘Someone at the top of the Service – you, perhaps – will come up with a brilliant plan to tidy the loose ends, first me, then Elsa.’
‘And if we give you some sort of guarantee?’
I laugh again.
Maurice frowns and adjusts his glasses. ‘It isn’t our Service that should concern you.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘No, you fool, a warning. Remember, it’s all about the Americans.’ He leans forward, his hands spread on his broad thighs. ‘Jim’s very upset.’
‘Anatoli, too, I hope?’
‘Oh, yes, Anatoli too.’ He gets to his feet and sways towards me. ‘Ah. A little too much on an empty stomach, I think. Look, do you want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder? That’s what it will mean.’
‘I’ve spent my life doing that, Maurice.’
‘Just think about it, will you? When you’re calmer, you know where to find me.’
I follow him to the front door where he stoops to pick up the post that has been collecting on the mat for weeks. The effort has him gasping. ‘I’ll do that, Maurice,’ I say, but he refuses to let me. After a good deal of grunting and sighing he turns to present me with the bundle. ‘I just want to be sure,’ he says. ‘Believe me, Harry, it’s in your interests to let us have whatever copies you have.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that. It’s insurance, that’s all. You can tell Dick, tell Trend, I won’t hand it to anyone else.’
He nods.
‘And tell Dick I resign. Tell him I won’t be a member of a club that accepts people like him and – and me any more.’
‘Marx?’
‘The same,’ I say, reaching over his shoulder for the latch.
She left the bed in the spare room, a chest of drawers and the armoire de mariage we bought on our honeymoon in France. My suits and jackets and best shirts are crumpled in a heap where the Special Branch goons who searched the house threw them three months ago. The dressing-gown, too.
I spend the day brooding and drinking Maurice’s fiver, and the following morning I nurse my hangover in Toni’s café, where I discover in the bundle of post a solicitor’s letter notifying me of Elsa’s wish to sell the house and separate. The law recognises desertion of a spouse as grounds for divorce. Well, Elsa, I accuse you of deserting me.
I played it in my head for weeks, hurt, confused, sometimes furious, I would shout and stamp about the cell until one of my jailers beat on the door and threatened to beat me too. You betrayed me, Elsa. You let that snake Wright seduce you with his s-s-suspicions and lies – told him everything you knew. Why? In the terror hours of the night I saw you with your KGB controller and imagined your whole life as a performance, our lives together as a sham. You were ROSA, or someone like her, and you betrayed me to save yourself as you were schooled to do, and the tears at the grave in Vienna were crocodile tears, because you betrayed young Paul Lovas too, you betrayed SUBALTERN, you were the ‘Jewess’ mole in Vienna, my Jewess, my wife. And I was so shaken by my reflections I would stand with my forehead against the cell wall and concentrate on the coolness of the painted brick, the susurration of the trees beyond the fence, the cry of a blackbird startled by something in the night.
Fear will make us believe anything. I want to tell her our love is stronger. I want to say: don’t let us be victims.
21 July 1966
I hear she’s on holiday in the South of France, and that she’s taken another flat in Dolphin Square. Number 328. I consider flying out to find her on one of the passports I cached in the bank deposit box but, after much reflection, decide to wait.
Watchers followed me everywhere for the first few days, and I rushed around London trying to do important things before they grabbed me and carried me back to Ham or to the basement of the War Office. They disappeared today. They followed me to the dentist, and when I left forty minutes later they’d gone. There is beery rejoicing in the streets, because England has beaten France in the World Cup.
The following day I ring my erstwhile employers and request a meeting to discuss my pension. A young thing in Finance and Administration tells me it’s on hold and I may not be eligible, so I take a cab across the river and try to barge into Century House. Security won’t let me up and no one in Finance will come down, so I ask to speak to Maurice. Eventually, Nick Elliott arrives in Reception and leads me to an office on the ground floor. ‘Persona non grata, old boy,’ he says, as if I didn’t know. I tell him, pension and passport or I’ll put it in the hands of my lawyer, along with the three months I was held at Her Majesty’s pleasure. ‘Nothing personal, Nick,’ I say.
‘Of course not,’ he replies, with a broad smile. ‘Need a recommendation?’
Parting is awkward as we pretend we’re going to keep in touch: ‘Perhaps at the cricket.’
Wilson is back from Moscow to tackle the crisis in the country’s finances, and I read in The Times that his visit to Washington will not take place. I guess he’s not welcome. On Monday, I visit my brief to discuss the file. Mr Simpson doesn’t know the details but would very much like to. ‘Release it to the press,’ he says. ‘Turn your imprisonment into a political cause célèbre,’ but I’m conscious of Maurice’s warning and that it will do Wilson (and Elsa) more harm than good. Simpson will find another crusade to elevate him to the bench. ‘Is it safe?’ he asks.
‘Fort Knox safe,’ I say.
‘Are you safe?’
To that I have no answer.
26 July 1966
‘Where’s Elsa?’ Bethan asks reproachfully. She knows ‘on holiday’ isn’t the whole story.
She is on her way to a pop concert – a group called the Animals – and with time to spare she has dropped by in the hope of finding Elsa at home.
‘Is it something you’ve done?’ she says.
My personal history gives her the right to ask, and I try not to feel hurt by her accusatory tone. ‘It’s not what you think,’ I say.
‘Then what?’ Feet square apart, hands on her broad hips, it would be easy to imagine I’m being held to account by her grandmother. Elsa and Oxford and a smart Etonian boyfriend have given her the confidence to look at the world and her father with a steady eye. ‘It’s complicated,’ I say. ‘Actually, it’s to do with work.’
‘The Foreign Office?’
‘Elsa’s angry with me because I may have to go away again.�
��
Bethan rolls her eyes to the kitchen ceiling in mock despair. ‘Daddy, that’s a lie. You’re a spy! Mother told us.’
I frown. ‘She shouldn’t have. I hope you haven’t told—’
‘No,’ she says scornfully, ‘just what you told us to say – diplomat – and Mary says the same.’
‘She knows too?’ I feel guilty and ashamed that they’ve had to lie for me. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’
I tell her I’m retiring and yesterday I had lunch with a contact on the Economist and there may be work for me in Vienna or Bonn. ‘But I won’t go if Elsa wants me to stay,’ I say.
Bethan takes a determined step towards me – ‘Persuade her’ – and takes my hand. ‘It’s too sad.’ When she looks up at me there are tears in her eyes. ‘Please, Harry.’
I’ve spoken to Elsa’s solicitor and have found one of my own, but I’ve instructed him to do nothing at this stage. I do chores, buy some clothes, walk miles about the streets of central London, morning and evening, and I feel some strength returning. England are in the final of the World Cup and will play West Germany. At breakfast Toni wants to talk about the game, the barber who cuts my hair too. The whole circus is a welcome distraction. I expect Harold Wilson’s grateful too.
30 July 1966
The radio sits on top of the piano, along with a bottle of pale ale, and when someone scores I stop and listen to the commentary. England are winning and I’m happy for them, but I want to make music, drink music, and after months in the desert, Fats and Basie are flowing again. Why? I don’t know why, only I wouldn’t mean a thing, no, no, no, without someone to sing to.
In the strange way of these things, that’s the sad little number I’m singing when she opens the sitting-room door.
Let music in your heart, but you must do your part …
I’m not expecting her; I don’t hear her in the hall; I feel her presence.
‘Hello,’ she says flatly.
‘Hello, you,’ I reply, twisting on the piano stool to look at her. She has a healthy tan and is still dressed for the Riviera in a white blouse, green linen split skirt and tennis shoes. I’m in a striped shirt with holes at the elbows, like Bogart in The African Queen. I’m afraid to go to her, which is bloody foolish of me, I know.
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