As Maclean and Toynbee were the only witnesses to their berserk behaviour and were awash in gin, not surprisingly there is little detail of what went on. Sheila Engert reported that when they found the flat dry, they “emptied drawers, upset furniture” and threw dishes into the bathtub before the pair left. Melinda told Geoffrey Hoare that “a lot of the girls’ clothes were pushed down the lavatory.” Toynbee through his own haze had “a clear view only of a single episode . . . Donald raises a large mirror above his head and crashes it into the bath, when to my amazement and delight, alas, the bath breaks in two and the mirror remains intact.” Alcoholic remorse kicked in immediately but only briefly: “We wept in each other’s arms, confessed we’d much rather be dead—we ended up a stepladder on the balcony in some vague hope we might fall.” They returned to Wardle-Smith’s flat and passed out on his bed, Maclean still holding a leg of mutton which he had been “gnawing.”
In the early evening, Melinda found out where they were after some frantic telephoning around his known associates, and she and Harriet “half carried, half dragged a completely sodden Donald down the stairs and into their car.” Harriet then returned and with the suffragi’s help, carted Toynbee back too. He was promptly “banished as the serpent in Eden”—the cavalier way he could write that in his diary suggesting the lack of seriousness with which he took the entire incident and the lack of understanding of what it might have done to his friend’s marriage and career. The following day he wrote to his friend Lady Julia Mount from the Metropolitan Hotel, declaring that “after three weeks snuggery, I am out on my ear and no mistake about it. Poor Donald has indulged in a wild crescendo of drunken, self-destructive, plain destructive episodes—and his wife has made me responsible. Actually, I’ve done my honest best to control him, but, as you can imagine, not with much to show for it.” Just over a year later, when Melinda was describing her life with Donald she did not attach any blame to Toynbee but simply characterised his stay as one “of a few weeks immediately before Donald went amok.”
The morning after his rampage, Donald had a conversation “shivering and retching and groaning in front of the Marling sisters.” Melinda took it upon herself, pale but resolute, to go to see Campbell, making the most of his affectionate reliance on her, rather than encourage her remorse-filled husband to do the deed. She told Campbell that Donald was very ill, undergoing a nervous breakdown, and must be sent to London to see his doctor. Campbell agreed, and despatched an understated telegram to London: “Maclean has applied to me for leave of absence to return to the United Kingdom for a few weeks. He is suffering from strain and obviously in need of a break at home which has made him rather over-wrought. I gather he has not had more than a short period in the United Kingdom for several years. I have reached the conclusion that the sooner he goes the better for his health and state of mind.” No mention of drunkenness or the flat incident (about which Campbell had probably been told little or nothing) officially got back to London. When the American Embassy lodged the inevitable complaint, Campbell pleaded to his flinty opposite number, Ambassador Caffrey, for his understanding in keeping the business quiet on the grounds that Maclean had chosen to have treatment. Caffrey, who found Maclean “a heavy drinker and somewhat offensive,” agreed not to take it up with the State Department and the Foreign Office. Maclean wrote a contrite letter to the women whose apartment he had destroyed, promising to pay for the damage, and the sisters visited that evening to explain his breakdown and his return to London.
*
The immediate reaction from Maclean’s Cairo colleagues was both supportive of their man and wilfully blind to Melinda’s constancy during his descent into alcoholism. Edwin Chapman-Andrews, Minister in the Embassy and friend and neighbour of the Macleans, also made no mention of the final events when he wrote a long and confidential letter the following day to head of personnel, George Middleton, Maclean’s long-standing service friend. Middleton would have needed no persuading that Maclean “is a very good man, fundamentally, and well worth making the effort for,” and probably would not have been surprised to hear that “he was inclined to hit it up a bit and had gone in with rather a fast set keen on sitting up late at night or all night and assing about a bit,” although Chapman-Andrews “had no idea” how far this “assing about” had gone. Maclean’s night-life in Cairo sounded like undergraduate high jinks.
The near-inability to attach blame to their colleague led to a diplomatically veiled attack on both Britain’s closest ally and the person who had loyally supported and protected her husband (and his colleagues) for the previous eighteen months. At first Chapman-Andrews did not even name Melinda, whom Middleton knew perfectly well from Washington. He wrote in syntax so tortured that it is clear he found it hard to build his case:
As you know, Donald has an American wife . . . She is a vivacious and no doubt attractive person and the whole build-up of her character is so definitely American and can never become anything else that I think there has been some maladjustment almost inevitable in the case of an American woman of this sort married to a man who has to represent some other country (in this case Great Britain!) in a third country.
The US diplomatic corps was characterised as a crew of rather idle topers: “Anyway, Melinda has associated a good deal with Americans here and members of the American Embassy staff and some of the latter (at all events), having not much else to do perhaps through the day, are inclined occasionally to hit it up with a bit of hard drinking through the night. And this is where Donald was inclined to fall down.” “Some . . . perhaps . . . a bit”—the qualifiers cannot abnegate the responsibility for the British man who “has the cares of Head of Chancery on his shoulders” while his wife took “to Cairo social life rather as a duck to water whereas Donald . . . took to it less gladly and, no doubt, in order to launch himself with more gusto, started to hit it up and the whole thing became a vicious circle.”
Chapman-Andrews was nevertheless right when he noted that this “vicious circle” had damaged Maclean’s self-esteem. He recommended rest and convalescence and suggested that a London position might be the answer “where his wife would at least have a chance to become a little anglicised.” In spite of the terrible burden of having an American wife who has apparently driven him into this pit, “the amazing thing,” to Chapman-Andrews, was that Maclean’s work “has been so good considering what he must have been suffering.” The potential damage to Britain’s standing abroad, and indeed the possibility that Maclean might have become a victim of blackmail, did not occur to him. They were protecting the colleague they liked and admired, not leaving anything on his file that would prevent his climb to the top of the ladder, compassionately standing by their own. And with no idea of what was coming out of Arlington Hall.
*
Early on the morning of Thursday 11 May 1950, the day after this letter had been sent, Geoffrey Hoare drove to Farouk airfield on his way back to England. He had spent the previous ten weeks on assignment in Pakistan and knew nothing about what had been going on. At the airport he found Donald, “a rather strained and unhappy Melinda,” Harriet and Chapman-Andrews. Unable to admit to a close friend the scale of his defeat, Donald told him that he was on his way to London “on private business for a few days.” They sat opposite each other on the journey, chatting “desultorily” from time to time, shared a meal in Rome and arrived in London that evening. Hoare “noticed nothing wrong with him in any way except possibly he was rather more silent than usual.” It was a remarkable feat of self-control for Maclean, who must still have been queasy from the binge of two nights earlier. It was also a sad indictment of how he could not confide in a sympathetic ear at a desperate moment.
The trip was the last time Hoare was to see his Cairo friend, and the last time Maclean was to arrive home in England.
* She was later to miscarry the baby.
14
Reconciliation
As the Foreign Office had no knowledge of any of the disastrous excess
es of Maclean’s last weeks and days in Cairo, and believed that he was “suffering from strain and obviously in need of a break at home,” they welcomed him back with every show of solicitous concern.
For as long as Homer was unidentified and his importance unrecognised, the unknown potential for yet more damage to international relations, morale, reputation and, that vital ingredient of British life, amour propre was still threatening. As the investigation took its serpentine, credulous course, the danger to Maclean’s liberty, marriage and health grew ever greater.
*
Maclean went straight from the airport to his mother’s flat in Kensington. Lady Maclean was puzzled by his reappearance, announced by telegram only the day before, but was reassured that he was going to get treatment for his nervous condition. That night they went to the cinema to see Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, which was soothing in its normality.
The next day Maclean had a lunch appointment with his old Washington pre-breakfast tennis partner George Middleton. Middleton was surprised that Maclean did not want to come into the office or meet him at his club. In spite of his position he had no idea of the reasons for Maclean’s return, or of his sense of shame and hence his desire to avoid anywhere he might be recognised. They settled on “a small and rather obscure restaurant.” Middleton wrote immediately after their lunch that his guest was “clearly in a nervous state” but looking physically well. Maclean was able to mask his anxiety pretty effectively as he had with Hoare. Middleton was later to say that “Even in the light of subsequent events I cannot recall any danger signals in his general behaviour and conduct as they were known to me.”
Maclean described his symptoms without any acknowledgement (maybe without any real knowledge) of the part that alcohol might be playing in his current state: Middleton reported that “He said ‘there was something wrong with his head’; his mental processes were erratic and he was not always in control of himself. Specifically, he had attacks of ungovernable rage which frightened him and he realised that he was in need of medical help . . . In his present mood he was anxious to see a psychiatrist. He feared that if he delayed treatment the mood might change and it would be too late to effect a rapid cure.” No mention of specifics, no mention of the effect on his family, but possibly the hope for a fresh start where he might not have to be a spy any more and run the risk of feeling as worthless to Moscow as he had during the recent period of casual neglect.
He might now be in a position to re-establish himself back in England, and back in the Foreign Office, after six years of continuous service abroad and fourteen and a half years of high-stakes espionage. He could belong to one side only. He must have hoped to some degree that he had been discharged by Moscow: he had not heard from them after his plea for release and may have assumed that in their eyes he was blown after Cairo and could now be left alone. Perhaps his need for a single life rather than two was taking precedence over his ideological ambitions. Middleton was anticipating a “long spell of treatment if he is to get back to normal and avoid the danger of a relapse, so we shall probably have to count him out for Cairo.”
The letter he wrote to Melinda, “Darling Lin,” that same afternoon from his mother’s flat (“I am tucked away in the womb very comfortably”) is hopeful, remorseful, sincere, lonely and self-laceratingly loving.
I am so grateful to you my sweet for taking all you have had to put up with without hating me. I am still rather lost, but cling to the idea that you do want me to be cured and come back. I am leery of making promises of being a better husband since past ones have all been broken; but perhaps if some technician will strengthen my gasket and enlarge my heart I could make a promise which would stick . . . I think very much of you my darling, miss you badly and love you. Don’t feel sad about me as I will come back a better person and we can be happy together again I am sure.
He is “overwhelmed with sadness” at leaving the boys, and will never forget Harriet’s “sweetness” to him. It was a reminder of what they had shared so far in their eleven years together: the stillbirth, the miscarriages, the dislocations, the duplicity, the desperate rage, his desire, as expressed in the letter left behind in P Street, to disappear, all bound up in his struggle with alcoholism. At this crucial moment, he realised that he could not bear the thought of carrying on without the wife who had shared the tumult and suffered for it, his only emotional prop. The letter gave no hint that he felt himself to be on the brink of exposure or defection, unaware as he was that the wheels of the Venona and the secret services were in motion.
The “score” as told to Middleton did not seem to include alcoholism and flat-wreckage. An appointment had been made for him through the Treasury Medical Adviser, Dr Chiesman, to see Dr Henry Wilson, a psychiatrist used “when employees’ psyches missed a beat,” as Peter Solly-Flood’s had been deemed to do when he had made his drunken advances to Harriet Marling in Washington. “Missing a beat” reads like a civil service euphemism for a drink problem. That his case was being handled with care and urgency was evident when his first appointment was set up for 9:00 the following day, a Saturday. The kindly, frankly speaking Wilson, who had rooms in Harley Street, was one of the leading authorities in his field, had been “adviser to the Royal Navy in the war” and was much consulted by neurologists and specialists. He himself specialised in “psychiatric emergencies.” Even before they met, Maclean was hedging about putting himself in Wilson’s care: “I see no point in resisting George’s offer to start me on this path anyhow; but also if it looks like being what I need, I shall get an analysis for nothing; but I promise to be expensive and go to Erna or elsewhere if it doesn’t look good.” “Erna” was Dr Erna Rosenbaum, a pyschoanalyst in Wimpole Street whom Melinda already knew. Either Donald was resisting the pull of the official man, with the fear of what Wilson might feed back to the office, or, more likely as a man in touch with the intellectual currents of his times, he genuinely felt that the real cure for what he was suffering from might be in analysis.
In his letter, Maclean told Melinda how much he hated leaving her with all the responsibility for house, family and servants; he also said to Middleton that he was worried about going on sick leave as that would presumably entail losing his overseas allowances. Middleton was as reassuring as he could be in saying that Maclean would get “the most favourable treatment” possible, but that the first thing was to get Wilson’s opinion. That came fast, on the Monday morning, and recommended investigation of a “cerebral dysrhythmia” (an irregularity in the rhythm of the brain waves) as the “attacks are so episodic and they are associated with a degree of such frightening aggression.” Wilson, ignorant of Cairo debacles, “found it very difficult to believe” that the patient he had just seen “has got on as well as he has in the Foreign Office,” thinking that for a “man in his position he was somewhat slow and retarded.” For which we might read that he was in shock, guarded about what he wanted to divulge, and possibly still stupefied by his last bender and subsequent detoxification.
Wilson touches on alcoholism in what followed in his report, but even a man of medicine at that time had little understanding of the disease, and he failed to remark on Maclean’s denial of responsibility. Maclean’s father, he noted, had “rather strong temperance ideas.” His mother was “that type of strong personality you often do get as the parent of episodic drinkers.” Maclean himself said he had been “liable to be very demanding if he was frustrated and he was inclined to blame all of his present troubles on this and difficulties with his wife.” Maclean’s colleague and friend Nicholas Henderson was puzzled by what Maclean said to him about Melinda in this period, that “his attitude towards his wife was not conducive to ideal married life,” yet when he had seen the family together in Washington they appeared to be close. Maclean knew that this report would have influence in the Foreign Office, and that it was safe to blame his mother and Melinda, to whom he was so solicitous on paper. Lady Maclean was similarly “inferentially critical” of Melinda for k
eeping news of herself and the children from her favourite son for “weeks on end,” and “explained her rather curious behaviour” by saying that she was “perhaps typical of American wives.”
Melinda, unaware of the slanders being blithely disseminated about her, was in close touch with her husband at the beginning of their separation, receiving daily letters from him. He wrote to her after his examination by Dr Wilson to say that he did not want to go into the Maudsley psychiatric hospital for the recommended tests. “Fear plays a leading part in my resistance, but I also much doubt there is any point in it.” That “fear” may well have been the fear of what to tell any psychiatrist, particularly one appointed by the employers he had been betraying throughout his working life; or fear of a further collapse. A year later his colleagues took a more dramatic view, suggesting that he had chosen an “unqualified psycho-analist [sic]” because if he were to “undergo proper medical psychiatric treatment” he would be “frightened about what he might say under some such truth drug as ‘pentothal.’ ”
A Spy Named Orphan Page 28