The Fatal Englishman

by Sebastian Faulks

  Wolfenden was out of Moscow. In January 1964 he left the Soviet Union and went via London to New York. It was a watershed. He had escaped from the demands of both the KGB and the British; it was possible that he could put his life together again. He did not have career ambitions in quite the same way as his old friend Godfrey Hodgson, who had been for eighteen months the Observer’s Washington correspondent. Hodgson was tall, good-looking and startlingly young for the job; it was assumed that he too would do ‘great things’ – a slightly more realistic assumption, perhaps, given his greater sense of self-preservation (everyone had a greater sense of self-preservation than Jeremy Wolfenden). What Wolfenden wanted more than office promotion was somehow to realise the fantasy of his life. This ambition certainly involved being in the right places, on the right stories and dazzling all the right people by his reckless brilliance; but it did not include the kind of orthodox achievement that could be measured in published books or honours lists. He had won the honours, and they had bored him. His driving wish was to be the emotional nomad whose nonaligned intellectual integrity would somehow be a rebuke to the small-minded.

  However, he had also been deeply disturbed by the Moscow experience, and he arrived in New York in a chastened mood: although his essential aims for himself had not changed, he did hope to live in a different way. If he was to flirt with danger he would like it to be on his own terms and not those dictated by any secret service. It was in this state of mind that he renewed his acquaintance with his pen-pal, the teen-ager nursemaid.

  Martina Browne was working for an advertising agency and living with a girlfriend in a brownstone on West 83rd Street. She had been in love with Wolfenden in Moscow, but he had at that time been engaged to Susie Burchardt and had considered Martina too young. Their intermittent correspondence in the eighteen months since Martina had left Moscow had been based on a quality that was unique in Jeremy Wolfenden’s relationships: sentimentality. This was the bridge between these two disparate characters.

  Martina liked the way Jeremy had played with the Chisholm children. When she had left for London and then New York, Wolfenden told her stories of the Millers and their new twins (‘the girl nondescript and the boy exactly like Lord Beaver-brook’). He called himself Jeremy Fisher and drew pictures of frogs; there was a fantasy by which a flat was a lily-leaf on which a frog squatted. The Miller boy’s name for him, Mr Wuff, was also taken up in the letters. Part of this was a manifestation of a simple kindness in Wolfenden’s character: for all that he had suppressed the existence of his siblings while at Eton, he had come to be truly fond of children and – like his father – something of an expert with them. He used baby-talk in his letters to Martina and cast himself as the naughty boy/Big Bad Wolf and her as the forgiving mother/Little Red Riding Hood. He pretended both to fear her displeasure in the first role and, in the second, to be on the point of gobbling her up in his big strong jaws.

  Like most relationships, it was shaped by the needs of its participants. Martina Browne was drawn to damaged and unhappy men in the hope that she could make them whole again; the life of her drunk and aggressive father acted more as a challenge than a warning. She was flattered that a man of Wolfenden’s intellect was prepared to put his gifts at her service in dreaming up games and fantasies for them both. They may have been at a rather different level from those he might have shared with John Sparrow, but in a sense that made them all the more wonderful.

  For his part, Jeremy Wolfenden was not just charmed by Martina Browne’s good looks and oddly forceful ‘nature-girl’ personality; he saw in her some hope of domestic redemption and safety. His life was in crisis, and demanded critical measures: a heterosexual romance with an almost uneducated mother’s help was a suitably drastic expedient. Two months after he arrived in New York they were married.

  Many of his friends assumed that Martina’s close association with the Chisholm spy-ring and Jeremy’s involvement with British and Russian intelligence was a factor in their marriage. They assumed, to put it bluntly, that it was a put-up job. What better control could SIS exert over Wolfenden than by having their own officer run his life from the marital bed? Even if she genuinely loved him, she would have had to ask permission from her boss, whoever that now was. As far as Wolfenden was concerned, the marriage was a bold move in his determination to free himself from the demands of the KGB. To marry the Chisholms’ nanny, to wed into the family who had smuggled out the nuclear secrets of the Soviet Union… it was at the very least a gesture of defiance to his Soviet persecutors. To many of Wolfenden’s friends there seemed no other explanation. The twin pivots of his character were his intellectual brilliance and his homosexuality: he was the last person in the world to marry a woman who had left school at the age of fifteen.

  Yet it was, naturally, more complicated than that. The affair may have been based on sentimentality and expedience, but it developed into something tougher: a desperate kind of love, that was given poignancy by the fact that Wolfenden was already killing himself, and his wife knew it. David Edwards, his most level-headed friend, believed that Wolfenden was heading for his ultimate fate before he even set foot on Russian soil; and Martina Browne was aware of a destructive anguish inside him that was based on the knowledge that he was not going to live a complete life.

  The wedding took place on 6 April at the Holy Trinity Church at 213 West 82nd Street. It was a small and hasty affair attended by none of the parents. John Miller, who had been posted by Reuters to New York, gave Martina away; Godfrey Hodgson came up from Washington to be the best man. A cine-film was shot, but the cameraman, like everyone else, was drunk. They stood on the steps of the church, Wolfenden in a suit but with a cigarette already burning, Martina looking up at him with unfakeable devotion, her childlike features framed by dark hair cut in a Helen Shapiro bob. As they drove to the reception on East 51st Street Wolfenden had to be restrained from calling into the Telegraph offices to wire over an account of his own wedding in time for the London first editions.

  The honeymoon was spent in Jamaica. While they were away Greville Wynne was surprisingly released from prison and sent back to England in a swap for Gordon Lonsdale. The months that followed in New York provided Jeremy Wolfenden with a period of calm and relative happiness. There may have been an element of play-acting for him, as the wandering gunslinger had a go at the role of domestic husband, but it was an act that amused him. Martina took the home seriously and tried very hard to reform her drunken, wayward man. She was delighted by him. When the paper man came with his little son and asked to be paid, Jeremy couldn’t be bothered to find out how much he owed or to look for the right change. He would just give him a ten-dollar bill and get down to the serious business of talking to the boy. His expense accounts for the office posed a chore too tedious even to contemplate. To some extent Martina did control his drinking; she even managed to make him eat from time to time, though she was discouraged when he pushed aside her roast chicken, describing it as ‘dead hen’. They were absorbed in one another. They had front row seats at Carnegie Hall when the Beatles came to New York, but couldn’t be bothered to leave the apartment.

  The year passed too quickly. Ian Ball was hating Moscow and had no intention of staying an hour longer than was necessary. Wolfenden was frightened of going back there himself; in fact he believed it was impossible for him to return. At some stage in the course of 1964 he managed to persuade his superiors at the Telegraph that he was too deeply compromised to continue as Moscow correspondent. He also told them about his wife’s involvement with the Wynne-Penkovsky case. John Miller’s time in New York for Reuters had not been a success, and Wolfenden suggested to the Telegraph that they should hire Miller in his place. After some consultations, the Telegraph agreed to take on Miller in Moscow and to relocate Wolfenden at a junior level in their Washington office. The deal was done, but with a worrying proviso: Wolfenden would have to go back to Moscow for a ‘hand-over period’ between Ian Ball’s return to the United States and John Mi
ller’s installation.

  It was the best deal he could do. He discussed it with Martina and she had a feeling of doom about his return. She wanted to go with him, and applied to the Russian Embassy for a visa. Her action provoked a severe response from the British Embassy in Washington: the SIS head of station came to see her and told her that on no account was she to return to Moscow; if she did, she could assume she would be arrested and imprisoned for the rest of her life. He told her that Wolfenden would be arrested too. The Russians not only felt vindictive towards the Chisholm spy-ring; they would view her as a newsworthy swap for one of their spies, probably George Blake, who was then in Wandsworth gaol. The SIS man made it clear that the British would not be interested in any such exchange and would make no effort whatever to free her. They were prepared to allow Wolfenden to go alone, if he wanted to risk it.

  It says something for Martina Browne that even this terrifying warning did not fully convince her. She went round and round the problem in her mind, wondering if she could find a way to help her vulnerable husband. He was also extremely worried about the trip, but felt a strong if curious loyalty to the newspaper that had done so little to protect him in the first place. He argued that he couldn’t let the paper down: there was to be a hiatus before Miller could extract himself from Reuters and he didn’t want the Telegraph. to be without a correspondent in Moscow for that time. Martina argued that he should just look after himself; after all, that was what Ian Ball had done: it was his prompt return that was causing the interruption to the Moscow service. She said she was sure Ricky Marsh, the foreign editor, would understand the position if he explained it. Wolfenden was stubborn: he told her he couldn’t allow the paper to suffer, but Martina was so worried about what would happen that she was prepared to risk going with him.

  The Russian Embassy granted her a visa, as the British had feared they might. It was almost as though British Intelligence actually knew the Russians would grant the visa; and this was the most worrying aspect of it. Right down to the day of departure Martina toyed with the idea of going with him; but at the last minute she went to London. While he was in Moscow, she stayed in Iverna Court, just off Kensington High Street, which was as close as she could safely be to him.

  Moscow was even worse than Wolfenden had feared. He was very, very frightened. From the minute he arrived, they were after him: who ‘they’ were he did not explain either to Martina or to John Miller, who landed in Moscow soon afterwards. Miller was shocked by the state of his friend ‘Wolfie’ (he never had managed to pronounce his Christian name); he believed Wolfenden was daily expecting some revelation or denunciation. Miller did not know about the various warnings given by British Intelligence in Washington. What was frightening Wolfenden more than any denunciation was the thought that he was going to be arrested and imprisoned indefinitely in a Soviet gaol. To deal with his fear he relied on the usual specific of neat vodka, but this time with the addition of various benzedrine mixtures.

  He counted the days. The chances of a safe escape were slowly growing until matters took a turn that surprised the world. A meeting of the Politburo summoned Khrushchev back from holiday in the Black Sea and deposed him. With the backing of the KGB, they accused him of wilfulness and haste; Khrushchev appealed to the Central Committee, but they had already had their cards marked. Since Kennedy had, with the aid of the information brought out by Greville Wynne, humiliated Khrushchev over the Cuban missile crisis, his time as leader had been limited. The committee voted him out of the leadership of the Communist Party in favour of the coffin-faced Stalinist Leonid Brezhnev. The story was broken to the world by the London Evening News, whose flamboyant Moscow stringer, Victor Louis, was a Soviet citizen. The Daily Telegraph naturally wanted Wolfenden to stay and report this huge event, which, in the most difficult circumstances it is possible to imagine, he did.

  However compromised, drunk and scared he was, Jeremy Wolfenden’s famous charm had secured him many Russian friends. Sophisticated men like Vladimir Pozner and Yuri Vinogradov were fond of him and sought out his company; the babushkas in Sad Sam worried about his welfare; even the lift girl in the Hotel Ukraina asked wistfully after him. He was in his wayward fashion a great spirit; and the Russians, however crushed and duped by their totalitarian world, could still respond to that. Shortly before the hand-over period was due to expire, he was tipped off by a Russian friend. Do not wait, said the friend: leave now, not tomorrow or the day after, but go to the airport now.

  It was not difficult for the man with no roots to get going, but he arrived in London in an appalling state. He was exhausted by drink and drugs, frightened almost beyond endurance, and pursued by terrible dreams that he had recounted nightly down the fizzing telephone line to Iverna Court. But he had made it. Whatever it had cost him, he had not let the paper down and now, at last, he was free.

  Or so it seemed. The Wolfendens went on holiday to Tangier, where they stayed in bed late, drank, lay by the pool and were generally tired enough to enact the life of the brochure. No smiling Arab boy who ferried out the fizzy drinks could guess at the peculiar stresses they had endured, at the way their white bodies, stretched out beneath the winter sun, had been such busy little conduits for the continental movements of the Cold War. Wolfenden did not want to talk about what had happened to him in Moscow; all he wanted to do, in his wife’s company at any rate, was to play the part of the young husband, to give the fullest possible rein to the small conventional side of him that had never quite cut loose from the tangle of the ‘Wolfenden paradox’. She didn’t press him to talk in detail about things he wished to put behind him; she encouraged him to forget.

  For his part, Wolfenden showed no interest in the detail of his wife’s involvement with the Chisholms’ work. It was now three years since the height of espionage activity and eighteen months since the trial. They had been on opposite sides of the world when it took place and a great deal had happened to both of them in the mean time. Martina believed that Jeremy assumed she was as deeply involved with the spy-ring as Ruari and Janet Chisholm themselves, but that it did not deeply concern him. Her appearance in the Daily Express had severely limited any future activity. Since the only people who knew what Wynne was going to say – or rather read out from his prepared text – were the KGB (who had written it), it is fair to assume that they were, indirectly, the source of the Express tip. It suited them to embarrass SIS further: whether the mother’s help was a serving officer or merely an accomplice they could at least make sure she never got up to any funny stuff again.

  So a writ of silence ran between them. The subject of espionage was fit only for joky captions in the family photograph album. Perhaps when you came to think of it there wasn’t all that much to say: whatever they had done was past and seemed linked to a place they could never revisit and to an extraordinary set of circumstances that would never be reproduced. Whatever happened now was to be about them, and their new apartment in Washington, and his new job, and their pussy cat called Pooskat, and her new job working for a photographer, and their baby talk, and her red VW Beetle called the Flying Flea, and their happy new life of regular meals, and even breakfast, and only social drinking, and maybe one day babies, and not spying, only happy families …

  The head of the Telegraph’s Washington bureau was Vincent Ryder; his number two was David Shears, and the Sunday Telegraph was served by Stephen Barber. Wolfenden’s arrival on 27 December 1964 made it a four-man operation, which, even by the standards of the day, was lavish. Jeremy and Martina had a modern duplex apartment on G Street in the south-west part of town. Stephen Barber and his wife Deirdre were their near neighbours and they saw more of them than of anyone else, including his old friend Godfrey Hodgson and his French wife Alice. Hodgson was surprised by this; he felt it was as though Barber had been told to keep an eye on Wolfenden and, perhaps, to keep him from his old friends.

  Wolfenden told Martina he was happy at last: he used to be unhappy, he said, but not any more. She saw him full
of spontaneity and joy; his reputation went before him, and everywhere they travelled people flocked to hear what he would say. He never short-changed them: the fountain of epigrams was once more in flow, albeit fitfully, and edged with a sentimental tenderness. The Martinis in America, he remarked, were twice the size he had been used to at home; the Martinas, on the other hand, were only half the size of European ones. And she saw the shadow side of him; she could see even in the moments of domestic happiness that he knew he would not reach old age; inside he was on fire with some unquenchable misery.

  He never stopped drinking. He had interludes of drinking less, but not long ones. David Shapiro, his old friend from the Naval Russian course, stayed for five days over Easter and it was clear to him that things were not good. Wolfenden was drinking huge quantities from breakfast onwards; he was not the reckless but essentially humorous pleasure-seeker of old: he was sullen and morose.

  In April Wolfenden wanted to go to the Dominican Republic, but encountered difficulties with flights from Puerto Rico until eventually he persuaded Vincent Ryder to let him charter his own plane. He was introduced to a smart Puerto Rican with captain’s stripes on his shirt who was to fly the plane and to a second, scruffy man with no uniform at all who sat next to the pilot. Wolfenden and his suitcase took up the other two seats in an interior that was about the size of Martina’s Volkswagen.