by John Gardner
‘So you can name names?’
‘I can name ones I believe have been planted, yes.’
The silence seemed to go on for a long time. Then Arnold spoke again —
‘As far as any internal investigations go — within my agency, or your firm, or Five — I believe the object will be merely a question of balancing the books. Setting the record straight. If they can say, “He was one, he is one, and so is he”, that will satisfy them. It really doesn’t seem to matter how the inquisition fiddles the figures, just so long as everything tallies at the end of the day.’ He took a deep breath, inhaling through his nose, like a diver about to go off the top board. ‘Any day now, Naldo, they’re going to finger your late, beloved Uncle Caspar as the KGB’s second-biggest mole in the SIS. And he isn’t around to defend himself. There’s chapter and verse on Caspar in the Elephant files. More, those files make further suppositions.’
‘What kind of suppositions?’ Naldo’s face flushed red with anger.
Arnie made a strange gesture, a moving of the head. ‘From Caspar Railton, they seem to think that it’s not a huge leap to encircle our mutual uncle, Dick Railton-Farthing. He would be classed as both SIS and CIA. It doesn’t take a massive intellect to see who gets the treatment next.’
‘You, Arn?’
‘Of course. And you also, Naldo.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Naldo with some feeling.
They sat in seething silence for a while. Then Naldo looked at his watch. ‘Christ, it’s almost six o’clock.’
‘Time flies when you’re having fun.’ Arnold was not being funny, or pleasant.
‘Fuck off,’ Naldo said again, reaching for his coat. ‘I’m going to call Barbara, but not from this place.’ Six o’clock in Berlin was five in the afternoon in London. At the time of leaving, and walking out into the snow, Naldo did not intend to return. Arnold’s conclusions were bizarre and obscene. He wanted nothing to do with them.
FOUR
1
Just as Arnold and Naldo were settling down to talk, in the so-called green house near the Charlottenburg S-Bahn, Berlin, so Naldo’s wife, Barbara, was, for the first time in her life, experiencing the onset of jealousy. She was not jealous of her husband, in spite of his long absences and the natural disinclination to talk about his work in any detail. She was no stranger to this kind of life, for her maiden name was Burville, and the Burvilles had, for centuries, been a military family. In any case, her marriage to Naldo had lasted for seventeen years with only the usual sturm and drang, plus a liberal share of angst. But who was counting?
Barbara was used to her parents, brother, uncles and cousins disappearing abroad for long periods. Sometimes disappearing for ever, for as a child she had been an Army brat.
Later, in the Second World War, she had done her own stint, in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, preferring this to its army equivalent, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). Now, on a winter afternoon, at the age of forty-five she felt dissatisfaction: a sense of having missed out somewhere along the line. She knew, like Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie, that she was in her prime.
She had a loving husband — when he was there — and a couple of children of whom she was justly proud, but somehow certain variations on the theme of life appeared to have passed her by.
It was something that happened to many women of her age during the 1960s, when life and its mores suddenly burst wide open, warped, doubled back, changed everybody’s perspective, and altered lives out of recognition. Youth was on the move, there was a new freedom in the air, and Barbara wanted to grasp at it before she went really over the hill. At her age she knew her body was certainly not yet even at the brow of the hill.
The first cause of disillusionment was a childhood friend with whom she had lunched at the Connaught Hotel. Barbara had been at school with Vivienne Long, and later was her bridesmaid when she married Lord Anthony Short. After twenty years, the obvious quip was getting somewhat tired, but Vi Short never appeared to tire, just as she refused to age. She had married well — some said she took Tony simply for his estate in Scotland, and the magnificent Regency house in Chelsea, plus a generous allowance. She was a year or so older than Barbara, but had shared secrets with her since adolescence. So Barbara knew, with delicious detail, that Lady Vi had taken lovers, when and where she felt like it, down the years of her marriage.
After lunch, during which Vi Short had spoken at length, with all the disturbing minutiae, of her latest conquest — a stockbroker not quite young enough to have been her son — Barbara set out to do what remained of her Christmas shopping. As she waited for the commissionaire to get her a taxi, she was aware of someone else coming out behind her, down the steps of the Connaught. She turned to see a man of, she guessed, around her own age. He was not particularly striking, medium height, smartly dressed, with a dark single-breasted Aquascutum topcoat over what seemed to be a suit. The coat had a fashionable narrow velvet trim around the lapels and neck, and nobody could miss the single red rose pinned, rather rakishly, to the right lapel.
The man smiled and bowed his head in Barbara’s direction, and at that moment the taxi arrived. Barbara asked the driver to take her to Harrods, and noted the cabbie’s sigh, for the pre-Christmas traffic through Knightsbridge was murder. It was only when she was seated in the cab that Barbara realised she had felt rather flattered by the stranger’s obvious glance. The look, smile and bow bore all the hallmarks of someone who had been attracted to her. Ten years on, someone like Barbara might well have put him down as a sexist male chauvinist pig. At the time no such thoughts entered Barbara Railton’s head.
The cabbie was disinclined to talk, so the journey was passed slowly, backed by the radio, with Petula Clark belting out ‘Downtown’, and the up-and-very-much-coming Cilla Black tearing at adolescent heartstrings sobbing ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’. Barbara wondered what Naldo was doing — he expected to be back either late that night or by tomorrow evening, though she had no idea where he was. They had only recently come back to London from the Berlin posting, and this was to be their first Christmas in England for five years: a true Railton Christmas, to be spent with the entire family at Redhill.
She watched the pavements as they negotiated the traffic, and seemed to see nothing but mini-skirts, short fur coats, young men with shoulder-length hair, who wore flared trousers or jeans under knee-length coats.
The shop windows were full of good cheer, and the crowded pavements reeked of youthful arrogance. So it was, at that moment, as they approached Harrods, that Barbara had this sudden shaft of jealousy and realized, with some humour, that she felt exceptionally randy. In plain terms, she was a woman in her mid-forties who fancied a temporary change in partners.
Vaguely, the danger of such an adventure — unlikely in any case — crossed Barbara’s mind. Many serving intelligence officers claimed their work restricted, and frustrated, their private lives, because they could share nothing with their nearest or dearest. Of course this was not the whole truth, certainly not as the Railtons and their American cousins, the Farthings, believed. Families did know about the job. They had to know, just as they had to accept the sudden guarded telephone call, and the unexplained absence. The family of any career intelligence officer knew well enough what sort of job he did, and for the most part they remained silent. That was that. A fact of life.
As she paid off the cab, she vaguely noticed a familiar figure alighting from another taxi behind her. It was the man with the red rose, and even then it did not concern her. She wandered through the food hall, made a mental note to order the veal and ham pie that Naldo liked so much. Then she took the lift up to the toy department. There was a particular model kit that young Arthur wanted, and she had thought of getting Naldo something absolutely outrageous, like one of the new Scalectrix sets. She could just see Naldo, with cousins, uncles and children spread out across the floor at Redhill, controlling electrically-powered model racing cars around a track. The more she thought of it,
the more it appealed to her. Anyway, she was feeling profligate that afternoon. It might be a good idea for her to spend some money on a completely frivolous gift.
She found the model kit easily, then headed to the area where assistants were busy showing off the Scalectrix tracks, and tried to make up her mind whether to be relatively economic with the purchase, or go the whole hog and buy the most expensive one she could see.
‘Kids are hell to buy for, aren’t they?’ The voice was pleasant and unaffected. She looked up and found herself thrown into a schoolgirlish flustered state as she recognised the man from outside the Connaught, the one with the red rose. In the far corner of her mind she knew it should not have surprised her, as she had been conscious of him outside the store.
‘They’re hell to buy for — kids,’ he rephrased it and she caught the scent of an expensive aftershave — Aramis she thought — and found the man’s amused grey eyes quite disconcerting.
‘Yes,’ said Barbara, lamely. Then, pulling herself together, ‘Yes, they are, but actually I’m shopping for my husband.’
He laughed, and she liked the way his eyes laughed with his voice and mouth. She also liked his thick greying hair, and the lips which were a shade too thick, and then felt foolish for thinking like a character from one of the women’s magazine stories she sometimes read at the hairdresser. ‘Your husband’s a lucky man.’ He smiled. ‘I wish my wife would buy me one of these. All men are kids at heart.’
She summoned up the courage and asked, ‘Are you following me? You were outside the Connaught as I left.’
He smiled again. ‘Of course I’m following you — though, by chance, you were going my way.’
‘You often follow strange women?’
‘Never, until today. Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you, but, well, you looked so bloody attractive and I just wanted to talk to you.’
‘Oh!’ She felt a little flush of blood, not to her face, but in the depths of her body as she realized what was happening. He was trying to pick her up, and she found it a very pleasant experience. Nobody had tried to pick her up for years. In any case, service wives were warned about this kind of thing, but only on foreign postings. Before she realized it she was telling this highly desirable man that she was flattered.
‘Philip,’ he said, slipping the glove off his right hand and extending his arm. ‘Philip Hornby.’
His palm was very dry.
‘Oh, my children have got some of your trains,’ she said, without thinking.
‘Alas, a different family,’ he said, laughing again.
She introduced herself and he said that now they had the formalities out of the way, couldn’t they have tea together?
‘I have to get my husband’s toy first.’ There was no question in her mind about having tea with him. In fact, far away, hardly even noticed, she knew that she would have more than tea. The lunchtime conversation with Vi had worked its tiny wickedness. ‘Maybe you can help. I don’t know which one to get for him.’ She waved a hand towards the boxes of Scalectrix.
‘Has he asked? Put it on his list?’
‘No, it’s a surprise. He’ll be angry and then adore it. Him and half the family.’
‘Then get him the biggest and best you can find.’
She did just that and had it charged, asking them to deliver. ‘It must be this week,’ she told the assistant. ‘We’re going away for Christmas.’
‘Certainly, madam.’ The assistant rechecked the address — just off Kensington Gore, the house to which Naldo had first taken her. His father and mother had bought it during the First World War. It slid through her mind that a new decision would have to be made at Christmas. Caspar had asked that the famous Railton property in Eccleston Square should go, not to his children, but to Naldo, should Phoebe wish to move. ‘That area is easy for us, madam, probably on Thursday if it’s convenient.’
She hardly heard what the woman was saying, so it had to be repeated. ‘Oh, yes, that’ll be fine.’ Then, turning to Philip she put on her wide smile and, surprising herself, said, ‘Shall we have tea now? I’d like that very much,’ and, taking his arm, she almost led the way to The Silver Spoon, which was Harrod’s tea room.
They drank Darjeeling, ate little triangular sandwiches and cream cakes, talking for over an hour. He was in advertising — ‘The managing director, in fact’ — and lived with his wife and three young children in Suffolk, near Lavenham, but kept a pied-à-terre in London. ‘Just around the corner, actually. Hans Crescent.’
She was thrown for a second. Hans Crescent had a reputation within the Railton family. Years ago, one of Naldo’s relatives had kept a German agent in Hans Crescent. She had been murdered there. ‘Nice,’ was all Barbara said now, and thought Naldo would have been proud of her as she gave nothing of the real life away. Naldo, she said, was a civil servant — ‘Very dull, really. Ministry of Transport. Dashes around the country telling people about their roads.’
They discovered, just as, years before, she had found with Naldo, that they had similar tastes in books, music, cinema and theatre. He suggested they might go to see the new film version of Tom Jones — ‘I hear Finney’s terrific in it.’
‘When?’
‘Can you make it tonight?’
She thought for twenty seconds, she could always say she had been with Vi if Naldo did come back late. ‘Why not? I’ll have to nip home and change, though. My son and daughter are around. I like to make sure they’re OK.’ If anything went wrong she could telephone him, ‘If you let me have your number.’
‘Sure.’ They exchanged numbers, and Hornby said he could pick her up.
‘No. No, I don’t think that would go down at all well. Let me phone you, and I’ll pick you up. How about that for a deal?’
‘Right,’ he said, giving her the address, then slowly standing up. ‘I’ll see you into a cab.’
She thanked him for the tea, and the nice afternoon. Almost as an afterthought, as she was getting into the cab, she gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then wondered why. It was something that, until this moment, she would never normally have done to such a relative stranger. Riding back to Kensington Gore, Barbara felt a twinge of guilt, there one minute, then gone the next, overcome, suffocated by the feeling that it, whatever ‘it’ was, would not hurt anyone. They had talked of poetry over tea, and discovered a mutual passion for the modern giants. It should not have surprised her that, as the cab bore her away, T.S. Eliot sauntered through her head: ‘The Waste Land’ —
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
Damn, she thought. She did not really like Eliot. Auden was her poet, and she knew all too well, that, lovely woman or not, she would stoop to folly.
Behind her, Philip Hornby walked down into Hans Crescent, went into his building and took the lift to the fourth floor. He did not even take his coat off before dialling the number. They answered at the third ring.
‘Flashman, here, for Brown,’ he said.
‘Brown speaking.’
‘Flashman. She went for it. She’s careful, but I think, sadly, she’s a definite security risk. Give me a day or two.’
‘All the time you want. Ring me tomorrow.’ Brown closed the line.
Her key was in the lock as the telephone began to ring. Arthur had already answered it and now held the instrument out towards her. ‘Dad, for you,’ he said, and disappeared quietly up the stairs. She could hear Emma thumping out Chopin, very badly, in the music room, as they called one of the spare bedrooms above.
‘Sorry, love, won’t be back until tomorrow. Afternoon probably.’ He sounded flat, matter-of-fact, and she knew he was somewhere on the continent because of the tiny delay and particular sound on the line.
‘Can we plan for tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘Why not? Get tickets for a show. I should be free, OK?’
‘Have a nice time. Love you.’
‘Love you,’ in an automatic voice as he closed the line. Naldo was rarely demonstrative on the telephone. Any exchanged endearments had become almost liturgical.
‘Words without thoughts never to heaven go’ ran through her mind. Shakespeare was catching.
Barbara went into the drawing room and put on a record — Mahler, which Herbie had given them for Christmas last year. The Second: Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic.
2
Naldo cradled the telephone and stood looking at the instrument. The snow had become heavy, and he had trudged two blocks before finding a small hotel where they had a coin telephone unlinked to the switchboard. All the way he fought an icy wind, which carried the stinging flakes into his face. Direct dialling had not long been in use, and still not available in some parts of Europe, so he put his call to Barbara through the operator, reversing the charges.
‘Cold out?’ Arnold looked up from the book he was reading as Naldo stomped his feet on the small mat inside the door. He looked fifteen years older: grizzled, with hair and eyebrows crusted with snow, his face florid from the freezing wind. He had taken his time about getting back. The obscene things Arnold had suggested made him more cautious. In this kind of weather any watcher could have been forgiven for getting spotted. Naldo was 99 per cent certain that nobody was on his back.