The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  “Oh,” I said. I had nothing to offer her there, not yet.

  “But what shall we do—what plans do they have?” she went on, like a traveller stuck at a midland junction on a winter Sunday morning: upset but still confident.

  “There aren’t any. I haven’t any plans. They sent me out to see if Henry was here. And bring him back if he was, I suppose. But I don’t see how any of us are going to get back.”

  “Have they got on to you as well?”

  “Yes. Cherry and Usher too for some strange reason. The whole circle.” I told her what had happended earlier in the evening.

  “But what about the people in London?” she said, insisting now, but still controlled. “At Holborn?”

  I tried to think of Bridget at a meeting with Williams or having a drink in the wine bar in the Strand, just as I tried to imagine Cherry and Usher getting the number eleven bus—and it didn’t work. Bridget, like them, was a part of Cairo, part of its very core; they were natural seismographs alive to its smallest tremors. They had not always been happy there; so much the more were they bound to it: they had lived a real life in the city, had given nothing false to it, in every minute passed there. Their dreams of elsewhere, of rain, ploughed fields, sloes in the hedgerow or London Transport, were as unreal as mine would have been for sun and coral, and clear blue water. The known years spent in a landscape never tie us to it, the marked calendar from which we can stand back and reflect or think of change; we are bound to a place by the unconscious minutes and seconds lost there, which is not measurable time or experience, and from which there is no release.

  “Holborn doesn’t know anything about getting out of here. But I’ll let them know tomorrow. I have a contact through the library.”

  She had begun to look glum and a little hopeless now, sitting on the dressing-table stool, drink in her hand, swaying out in a clumsy arc from the balance she’d made, elbow on her knee.

  “But why should you want to leave? You haven’t told me.”

  “We’ve been here for days. They picked Henry up at the airport He got away. They got on to Hamdy. We came here, it’s his place, they don’t know about it.”

  “Hamdy’s with us, of course?”

  “Yes, of course. Didn’t you know?”

  “I was never active. You knew that. I’m in Library in Holborn. I don’t get to hear much about people in the field.”

  “Yes, Henry told me.”

  “You’ve seen quite a lot of him?”

  “Odd times. When he was out here. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “No.” And I could see she knew he hadn’t told me. “No, he didn’t tell me he saw you. Why should he? Why drag it up? I knew nothing about you.”

  “Yes—but why? I wish you’d bothered. Sometimes.”

  “Come on. It was finished, done with. We had a merry time. Then there was an unfortunate ‘professional arrangement’; if you remember”

  “Our marrying, you mean?”

  “If you can call it that. I meant the other thing—getting married because it suited the professional circle you all had out here.”

  “It wasn’t just that.”

  “No. All right, not just that, then. There were a lot of other funny things, before that. It passed off well enough, really. It could have been much worse. We could have stayed together and clawed each other for years. We were lucky to miss that. But you can see—it’s not really the sort of thing one Mothers’ about afterwards. One tends to want to forget it.”

  My tone was so much the lying pedagogue: I had wanted to “bother” her about it—for years afterwards—so much. Now it was her turn: she wanted to be bothered and worried about things like that; to feel, even at this late stage, that in distant conversations between Henry and me, she had been included: I worrying, Henry consoling.

  Her sense of indispensability, of course, was part of her great attraction—when you were with her, when you thought you were the only person who shared her exclusively: when she was indispensable to you.

  She put her drink down behind her and looked at me, hand cupped about her chin—that gesture I knew so well, when she turned from provocation to trust: the tired child, gazing into the fire, waiting for a story. Now for the first time since I’d emerged from Colonel Hamdy’s office ten years before, it didn’t have to be, couldn’t be, a fairy tale.

  “Anyway, the talk with Henry is finished. He’s gone over to Moscow. He’s probably at their Embassy here now. That’s where he’s disappeared to.”

  I wondered what her first words would be in reply, thinking that I could measure in them the strength of her affection for him. “I don’t believe you” would have been a natural response, for Henry had hidden his real self just as well from her as he had from the professional spy catchers. But instead she did the most natural thing, saying in a hardly surprised, serious voice: “How do you know?”

  I showed her the plaster round my heel and told her of my visit, under Henry’s name, to Dr. Novak at the Kasr el Aini Hospital.

  “You mean you suspected he was going over—London thought he was?”

  To cut a long story short I said, “Yes, that was what happened.”

  “And what if he were to walk in here—now?” She wanted so much to see me wrong, almost believing about Henry, but not quite, not yet.

  “If he were to do this, do that—Bridget, he’s not going to walk in the door. He’s gone out, over. He’s with Moscow. It’s the one thing he’d never have told you; nothing to be upset about.”

  “I thought you knew him—as well as I did”

  “Yes, and I’m not surprised. Henry was like that, one knew everything about him except the boring things that mattered.”

  “What on earth is he going to do in Moscow?” she went on with mystified concern.

  “Write books, perhaps. He was good with words. Books and drink; argue with the housekeeper, read the English papers. A medal later on when they’ve squeezed him dry and put him out to grass. There are girls in Moscow too.”

  I couldn’t resist the easy cruelty.

  “That’s just spite. You might just be inventing the whole thing.”

  “You know I’m not. I didn’t come all this way just to do you down, I can tell you.”

  “Why did they send you then?” she said in a higher, faster voice, heading for a point where she would break. “You said you only worked in Library.”

  “I don’t know why they sent me. Because I know the place, the language—and wasn’t known here now. That was the official reason.”

  “You’re just the same sort of vague fellow, aren’t you? Bumbling round the place, letting everyone use you. It used to be teaching, now it’s spying—but never really knowing what you’re doing. Or why.”

  “You’re overdoing it. You’re probably the only person who ‘used’ me, as you put it. But that doesn’t matter, as I said. What are you going to do? That’s the question.”

  “There are the other arrangements.” She was almost prim now. “Hamdy was making them through a contact in Athens. That’s through central office, not Holborn. I thought for a moment you were that contact. That’s all. We just have to wait till he calls back. Hamdy’s ill anyway.”

  “He’s not And there won’t be any call. Hamdy has nothing to do with our section, or with central office. That’s why I wanted him kept out of the way.” I stood up to fill my glass for I honestly thought she might go for me on the bed. And I wanted to stop her too if she decided to make a run for his bedroom. But she did nothing except ease her legs on the stool.

  “I suppose you think he’s going over to Moscow as well—for a row with the servants.”

  “No, I don’t Somewhere else. As far as I can make out he’s with the Israelis.”

  “Ha, ha,” she said in a dry way. “Give me some more too, will you?”

  I moved across, poured, added some water.

  “You’ve let your imagination get the better of you, you really have.” She looked at me a moment, questioning
. Then smiled, suddenly at ease. I was mad. Henry would be back later, a little drunk, but safe, and Hamdy was recovering in the other room. They’d be off together as soon as the call came, as it would come. I had given her hope at last because, of course, I was mad.

  After the years of bureaucracy in Holborn, doing nothing but thumb through Al Ahram, this trip into the field—into the world of guns and golden Dunhills and dark glasses—had driven me off my head: I was a gambler speculating wildly, suggesting complex allegiances, where, in reality, everything was as it seemed. For Bridget, the business of espionage was dull—but true, and it was wearisome enough to have to accept that situation. That it and the people involved were dull but untrue, as I had suggested, was beyond her comprehension. It was time to humour me. The man who calls “Wolf” once too often—I was the child now who need never be believed. Relief flooded across her face.

  “You really worried me.” She got up, walked over and bent down for a moment, hands on knees. “Why do you do it? After so long—what was the need to try and hurt again? You really didn’t have to. To hurt and possess, always that, never giving up. It’s what went wrong before and you’re still at it.”

  She stood up. The grave, widely-spaced eyes were an admonition linking past with present. It was part of the same expression that had brought things to an end ten years ago—and it was intended to serve the same purpose now: a look of kindness, even worry, above all a deeply mystified, discursive inspection, as a drunk might study someone overboard from a yacht.

  “I’d better see how he is. But for God’s sake don’t be stupid. I won’t tell him. Let’s just concentrate now on getting out of here without all this drama. All of us. That means you too.”

  “That’s good of you, I’m sure.” She moved away towards the door. I swivelled the drink round in the glass and sighed.

  She called me a few moments later. The light was on beside the bed, the table next to it piled high with old French novels, even an early Colette. There was a bottle of chalky medicine and an open box of pills. There were cigarettes and matches and the coverlet was nicely turned down—slippers, pyjamas, dressing gown at the ready. Someone was expected.

  “Who sleeps here?” I asked. “Henry?”

  “No, Hamdy.”

  “Where is he? The bathroom? Is he ill again?”

  “No.” Bridget closed one of the paperbacks lying on the pillow, tucked the sheet in, pushed the slippers under the bed.

  “He’s gone.” Then she turned the light off. “Why the Israelis of all people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We went back into the drawing-room.

  *

  We talked in more normal voices now; it made the apartment all the more silent.

  Bridget went into the bedroom, and brought the drinks back in with her five minutes later. She had tidied her hair, powdered herself or something; there was a physical difference I couldn’t quite identify. It wasn’t a fall of confidence, much more a careful self-regard. She moved about the drawing-room settling things, rearranging cushions, emptying ash-trays. I had become a visitor who had dropped by at an awkward moment.

  “If you work it out—I don’t see who else he could be with. Moscow would have got him out of here long ago—”

  ‘—‘No, you don’t have to go on about it It fits. Everything fits.”

  I wondered if she would cry, once. But of course not.

  “Before you came back this evening—that call did come, when I was up in the ventilator. He mentioned the name of a Greek boat in Alex. You could get—”

  “—Something Tel Aviv must have fixed up for him,” she said brightly.

  “Couldn’t you have gone with him?”

  “No, I couldn’t. You don’t run risks getting someone like him back home. Nor would Henry. I can see the problem. Now that I can see who they were really working for.”

  “You couldn’t have guessed.”

  “I should have. I’ve known them long enough. Both of them. Hamdy better than any. You wouldn’t know that; Henry didn’t.” She started to talk quickly now, to herself at first, then to me, turning, pecking her face in quick starts like a hen querying something. “Hamdy knew my parents. I’d known he was working for the British almost from the start. I thought it was the only thing he never told me.”

  “I told you once in the Semiramis—there’ve been too many men; still. We’ve all been playing games. You and I, Henry and the Colonel. Point is, though, they’ve kept a last trick up their sleeves. We should have had one too.”

  She raised her eyebrows, blew some air into her cheeks, trying to give her face the one expression it could never naturally assume—a stupid, deceived cast.

  Blinded by these men? Could it ever have been so? Was she really one of those women who are natural camp followers, taken and used everywhere, only to be discarded at the final battle? I didn’t think so.

  There was a simpler explanation. She had been as close to Henry and the Colonel, as involved, as it’s possible to be. She had given them every truth about herself. But she didn’t really know them at all. So the passion was maintained—on mystery, on things that could never be counted. In my case, where there had been gross expectations and disappointment, she had come to know everything about me, so that we fell apart.

  “If you ever do get out of here what will you do? What do you want—something in Holborn?” It was a rhetorical question; I knew she’d never be sorting cables on the fourth floor. The risk would have been too great with anyone who had been so directly involved with Henry. I supposed, if she did get back, they would give her some money and help her to find a small flat. Already I saw her as a burden, as someone I might have to remember Christmas cards for, wilting away like a poor cousin in Kensington. But perhaps she might decide to go to Israel.

  “Or go to Israel?”

  “No. Not that and not Holborn. I can get out of the whole thing now. I can do that at last.”

  “I’ll go to the Consulate library tomorrow morning, get a proper message through to London. Then we can decide.”

  “You surely won’t get near the Consulate. Or the library. They’ll have the place surrounded.”

  “We’ll see. We’ll think of something.” I didn’t know what, for she was right.

  “Yes,” she said easily, “let’s think about it tomorrow.”

  The heat, with the whisky, had made us sweat. I got up and poured some more. There was nothing else to do. The apartment smelt of rotten lilac, powder and tobacco—curtains of different steaming smells as one moved across it. My face was burning, pumping with blood; and my heel had started to throb. I gave Bridget what was left in the bottle.

  “You always dress out here like an Arctic explorer, Peter. Why is it?”

  I looked at her, wondering if she had introduced this old sartorial theme with the same sexual innuendo behind it that we had understood so readily years before. But her expression was no more than tired inquiry; she seemed to have quite forgotten its earlier implications. I was annoyed at thinking differently. For me she was a woman who had come to mean exactly what she said; there were no overtones with her now. It was all precise words; and the words would support us as long as we used them officially, kept them to the professional matters in hand. They would bear no real weight.

  Yet her remarks about my dress reminded me—as something dead but otherwise intensely real in a museum—of the life they once had: a talisman still capable of stirring desire. She had used those same words once, with feeling, and they would do now as encouragement for any woman.

  “I’m hot, that’s all. I’ll take a shower and lie down. I’m exhausted.”

  “Don’t eat any of the food.” Her voice trailed casually after me as I left the room. “It’s all bad, I’m afraid.”

  She had tucked her legs up beneath her on the sofa, shoes spilled on the floor, kness bent double like two delicate ivory ornaments, Bhuddist carvings beneath the dark hem of her skirt which had risen up her thighs. She was s
itting in a way she never used to—except when we were alone together, high up in Garden City, the windows open, waiting for the evening. An unthinking remnant of our intimacy had survived at least, I thought, but only as a formality, with no more meaning than the chivalry we mimic in shaking hands with a stranger.

  I let the shower play over my face and through my mouth, spitting out water and saliva and the taste of whisky every now and then in white-flecked oily globules which ran slowly in the rushing stream along the bottom of the bath, before gathering speed in the current and spinning furiously into the whirlpool of the drain.

  I almost fell asleep on my feet looking at the liquid cone of water, and I would certainly have dropped off had I been taking a bath. But I wanted to stay awake.

  The drawing-room was empty when I got back, towelling my hair, just wearing my pants, and I went along the corridor to the bedroom we’d been in. The door was half open, light shining through into the darkness beyond. Bridget was in the huge bed, beneath a single sheet, arched on her side, facing me. She opened her eyes.

  “I’m sorry.” I let the towel fall around my shoulders. After the long rush of cold water I felt a moment’s chill run down my back and shuddered. “I’m going on the sofa. Goodnight.”

  I had my hand on the door ready to close it. “Shall I close the door?” But already, in asking the question, I had opened the door slightly, moved a fraction into the room.

  “Come in. Close the door.”

  She pulled the sheet back as I walked towards the bed.

  *

  Of course, I said to myself, if we hadn’t drunk so much, been so tired, it would never have happened. It was a combination of despair, drink and exhaustion which had made our bed for us that night, I thought. But I thought wrong.

  She wanted me as much as I did her: we were equally dedicated to the idea. Now that there were no overtones, no emotion, no backlog of frustration and no future to the business, we could give ourselves to each other with the same uncluttered vehemence as we’d done on the first occasion we’d met. There was nothing perverse in it; it was purely self-seeking. We took to each other with the sharpest sort of appetite—that of perfect strangers.