Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  I needn’t have worried about the conversation. Mike’s decidedly more talkative, and had come along with an agenda of things to say. In any case, M had much to talk about too. He began by reminiscing about his graduate student days before the war, remembering how he and Dad had been at our age. That’s where they’d met: Dad, a newly employed junior librarian, would bring him documents and rare books from the archives. He could see the family resemblance, M said, though Dad had been even slimmer than we were back then. There hadn’t been a great deal to eat in Grandma’s family through those inter-war years.

  They’d lost touch, he said, not long after Dad had been called up.

  ‘But I made it my business to keep an eye out for Tommy,’ said M, referring to our father by a name we hadn’t heard used since Grandma died. This was much easier, said M, when Dad left the Gunners and joined the Signals – the Intelligence Corps.

  ‘I always knew where your father was and what he was up to,’ said M.

  M had been travelling and showed us his holiday snaps from Beirut and Israel. Yes, he had to admit he’d lost track of Tommy after he went back into the university library; but he did know of his marrying and having children. There hadn’t been the occasion to keep in touch, but now that Dad was approaching retirement, M had thought to renew the acquaintance for old time’s sake and expressed a desire to meet his friend’s sons. Which is why we were perched on his sofa, both of us feeling faintly taken aback that such a person had been following the career of an NCO in the I-Corps, now a redbrick university librarian in his mid-fifties.

  After we finished our coffee, M picked up the phone beside his armchair and called for a car. It would arrive almost immediately. So we were ushered out of that tiny living room back down the corridor and stairs. Going out through the vestibule, M opened another door on the left and spoke to a man sitting at a console with closed-circuit television screens in front of him. He was taking his young guests to lunch and would be away for a couple of hours at most. I could see from this glimpse into his security arrangements that not only was there an intercom to identify visitors, but also a camera at head-height in the wall, and another perpetually scanning the street outside. In its screen I could see that the large black limousine, which would take us to his chosen restaurant, had already arrived.

  ‘Don’t you think it was a bit unprofessional to be showing off his surveillance devices to a couple of young strangers?’ I had wondered.

  ‘Very underplayed, of course,’ said Mike, ‘but doubtless effective protection.’

  Yet why had the head of MI6 wanted to meet us, a provincial librarian’s half-couth sons, in his guarded service flat? It was a question neither Mike nor I could answer. Yes, M had known Dad before the war – a slim, weak-looking, baby-faced boy, unsuited to manual work, growing up in the precarious climate of the inter-war years. Book stacks had seemed the safest place for him. So, at the time of Munich, he was cataloguing Puritan pamphlets, writing out the file-cards by hand. M was engrossed in post-graduate research on something about mediaeval history. I imagined them meeting for the first time across a polished wood access window, M handing Tommy a reader’s request slip. It might have been September ’38. He’d been introduced to M’s professor at the university. ‘And just what do you know about mediaeval manuscripts?’ older colleagues from the library mysteriously asked him.

  Dad reached the right age in March 1940 and so was conscripted. He went into the artillery, his post held over for the duration. Never having spent a night away from the family’s terrace house, he had suffered from dreadful homesickness. During the Battle of Britain Dad was part of an anti-aircraft battery stationed near St Just in Cornwall. Out of sheer boredom down there, he decided to transfer to the Army Air Corps, where he would volunteer to fly. Piloting unarmed Lysanders into Occupied Europe by night, he would drop and pick up liaison officers working with the French Resistance. ‘You’ll be killed,’ Grandma said, and again she got her way. So it was the Intelligence Corps. Dad’s searchlight battery was later converted to anti-tank guns for the invasion of Europe, his old comrades decimated in the Normandy beachhead. If Dad had learnt to fly or stayed in the artillery, we would never have been born. Mike and I owed our very existence to Grandma’s maternal possessiveness and Dad’s bolshie boredom with the rigid disciplinary routines of a fighting regiment.

  So the war had come and dispersed many friendships. It took M out of mediaeval history and into Intelligence proper. It killed Dad’s best friend, William Dixon. He was the vicar’s son at Holy Trinity, where Dad sang in the choir. It was one of those terrible accidents of war. A convinced pacifist, he decided, as the war dragged on, that the proper thing to do, even for one of his convictions, was to contribute to ending it. He volunteered for the Royal Engineers. They were unloading something from a transporter somewhere in Northern France. It had tipped over and crushed him: one of the innumerable, heart-rending, pointless deaths wars cause. On Dad’s bookshelves was an anthology, The Modern Poet, edited by Gwendolen Murphy, which Will had given to Tommy at Christmas 1941. It had come down to us from a lost, an irrecoverable world.

  Dad’s medals were kept in a dressing table drawer among his socks and ties. There was the Italy Star, with oak leaves. That meant he’d been mentioned in dispatches. It was for working round the clock interpreting captured German maps. When Mike and I were boys, he still had his language learning books from that time: a strictly limited vocabulary of German compound nouns soon to be consigned to the small print of military history. I imagined him in his tent through the winter rains of ’44, under a mosquito net in olive groves, or on the slopes of Monte Cassino months after the battle had ended. Et in arcadia ego … but he had fallen ill with jaundice and malaria. It was why he never gave blood, as Mum in the fifties sometimes did. A troop train was intercepted in the Brennero on the basis of intelligence his unit had gleaned. Ground attack P38 Lightnings will have seen it off. But where did we get the idea he felt those deaths on his head still now? Our dad had never fired a shot in anger. The only corpse he ever saw was after the Armistice, and his only encounter with the enemy was there in the north of Italy just after the fighting stopped, a very pleasant chap, he said, relieved to be alive and on his way back to a flattened German city beyond the Elbe.

  Then came Palestine. Dad was sent there as part of the British forces supposedly policing the mandated territories, keeping the peace between Palestinians and Israelis, as they would soon become. But in fact his unit was intercepting radio signals between ships of the Russian Black Sea fleet; the Cold War already begun. And M was in the Middle East at the same time too.

  Dad had been in Palestine for almost twelve months after the end of the war in Europe. Along with all the others in his unit, he’d impatiently waited for demobilization. Then, finally, in May 1946 his longed-for journey home began, travelling by train from Tel-Aviv to Alexandria, then by sea to Marseilles. After a week’s wait there, they had a twelve-hour journey in a primitive train with wooden seats and nothing else. All along the railway line they found military camps where German prisoners of war were at work. In some of them the ex-Wehrmacht were well fed and in good health, but in others they too were like skeletons, something, Dad said, he would never forget. And how happy they were to reach Calais and cross the Channel to Dover. The grass in England was just so green. It was raining cats and dogs, and peace was all before them.

  ‘What did you do in the war, Dad?’ Mike and I would ask the time-honoured question, little boys in the 1950s, the whole country still getting over those years of rationing and fear. Then we’d listen with fascination and pride to this life unfolding just a few years before we were born.

  Those old feelings had rather blown up in Mike’s face one high-table dinner at, as it happened, Anthony Blunt’s old college. Being one of the fellows’ guests, he found himself seated beside the Master and engaged in occasional conversation. It turned out this distinguished personage had spent time in our part of the world during the
war. He’d been in the navy and served on convoy escorts during the Battle of the Atlantic. Just to keep the conversation going, Mike mentioned that Dad had been in the Intelligence Corps. The Master then asked did he know the joke about their cap badge? No, Mike didn’t. So, for his benefit, the Master described the rose surrounded by a wreath, making sure the image was clear in my brother’s mind’s eye —

  ‘A pansy resting on its laurels!’

  On one occasion, talking with mum about not having children too early, she told me there hadn’t been a choice for her.

  ‘I had to have some,’ she said, ‘to prove your dad wasn’t a sissy.’

  That was before I’d come out, of course. Going to live in Italy had made it slightly easier, and now the family had at least got used to the idea. Yet it was curious to reflect, if true it were, that we’d been conceived so as to counteract a rumour, imagined or real. And what’s more it wouldn’t have proved anything, anyway! How miserable to think, if only in moments of depression, that this was the reason our mum had entered into the sacred state of motherhood.

  We were not much older than Dad had been in 1939 on the day we went to M’s flat in Pimlico. At the time, Mike said, he felt we’d somehow been a disappointment. But how should we have behaved? That imagined failure of our meeting was probably a result of M’s aloneness. However willing, it was difficult to be an ear for talk when the people concerned and the terms of reference were very much over our heads.

  M had booked a table at Beotys restaurant in St Martin’s Lane and happened to mention that the last occasion he’d eaten there was with Graham Greene, the novelist. Greene might have been working on The Human Factor at that very moment. It had been another disappointment to M, who felt betrayed by the portrayal of his service in that book. But what had we detected of M’s aloneness? He was unmarried, without children. He lived in a hidden world that traded in the semblances of discovered certitude, however much the market conditions required its workers to practise suspicion and doubt. M’s conversation cast no shadow. Seen in another light, his words were like wallpaper behind which gaps had opened, where the winds of rumour gusted, shifting the wall surface ever so slightly.

  M had said he’d kept an eye on Dad all through the war. Was that to reassure us? The name M used to refer to our dad had an air of travesty about it. ‘Tommy’, the name Grandma used, was what the boy growing up between the wars had been called. By the time Dad had become a chief librarian and family man in the post-war he was definitely ‘Tom’, the name Mum and his friends used. But M had known the delicate boy.

  It will have been at least thirty-five years after their acquaintance ended that a letter arrived at the house. It asked for news and invited Dad down to London to visit his old friend M. Dad must have been mystified, certainly intrigued, and no doubt a little suspicious. Why make contact after all that time? It was yet another mystery.

  M’s letter received a reply, filling in a little of the missing decades. After his months in Palestine and demob, Dad returned to his post in the library. It was around that time he met his future wife, a woman exactly six years younger, the duration of the war. Marrying the geography graduate, he had freed her from the agonies of teaching to a classroom-full of teenage girls. Mike and I had followed at nine-month intervals afterwards. And all the rest was literature … library books, that is. Perhaps M knew it anyway. The invitation to visit him in London was accepted, and there were a number of subsequent meetings, a couple of lunches at Locketts, that sort of thing.

  A first glimpse of this thread in Dad’s past life came when, returning from a term at university, Mike picked up the copy of a Smiley novel from beside Dad’s chair. When asked what it was like and why he was reading it, Dad said Le Carré’s main character was supposed to be based on his old friend, M, the head of MI6. He spoke with unconcealed pride at having so distinguished an acquaintance. Apparently Le Carré always denied this supposed source of inspiration. But whether M was Smiley or not hardly mattered; he might as easily have been Ian Fleming’s ‘M’. Still, this man, so apparently nondescript, certainly attracted speculation. Though M may have been justifiably furious when his identity was leaked, didn’t he use the chatter and gossip he was said to have relished as a form of deep cover?

  So M had been gay all along. Dad’s expressed assumption had proved correct. I could imagine Dad at nineteen getting involved in friendships with young men near his own age, in which however innocent or naive the occasions of meeting and talking about music, or theatre, the interest may have been partly driven by an element of attraction. Sometime after I finally told the family about my life in Italy, Mike mentioned that he too could recall unconsciously, or, better, half consciously, attracting such interest, only to be surprised and flustered should the feelings thus aroused in others even indirectly try to make themselves understood.

  In the only biography of M, he is reported as regretting he didn’t marry, the rumour about his sexuality categorically denied. Yet now the Prime Minister herself had told the House that M had admitted his sexual preferences, declaring he repeatedly lied about it in security clearance interviews. Perhaps that explained his well-known contempt for lie detectors when interrogating defectors. The Iron Lady had also assured the House that, despite the fact of his sexuality, he had never been a threat to national security. A patriot, Sir M certainly was, crucially unlike his near contemporaries and enemies, deadly enemies even – Philby, Burgess, MacLean, Blunt, and others … if others there were.

  Mrs T had told the House that M was a practising homosexual in his youth before the war. But then there had been that incident in a pub in Northern Ireland involving, it was alleged, soliciting in the toilets – which had forced him to make this admission and ask the Prime Minister to accept his resignation. M a homosexual! Was that supposed to be breaking news? At the time of M’s resignation it had been given out that health reasons were behind his second retirement. And he’d died of cancer just a short while after. That’s how it was presented. M was supposed to have propositioned someone in the lavatory of a pub, and they’d reported it to the landlord. But could he have been set up? There were dark rumours in the papers that M, an MI6 man, had been asked by the Prime Minister to trespass on territory usually reserved for MI5. Could this have been what happened?

  It was such a mystery why this distinguished servant of the state, this spymaster, had wanted to have lunch with us. At his flat we were shown those holiday snaps from the shores of the Middle East. His friends must have been his contacts. He just gave the impression of spending time with friends all round the world.

  ‘Heaven knows what he and his friends were actually up to!’ Mike had said.

  At Beotys M was familiar with all the waiters, and treated them as if they were part of his staff. Back then we’d never seen anyone so relaxed with a menu. Like a Mafia godfather, he seated himself with his back to the wall. It must have been force of habit, for he did the same at Locketts, M’s regular haunt in Marsham Street that was bombed a year or two later.

  ‘That meeting with M was unreal,’ Mike said, letting the paper slide off his lap onto the carpet. ‘We never knew a thing about his motives.’

  I had read somewhere a description of the head of MI6 as ‘a lonely man with a taste for gossip over well-cooked meals’ or something of that sort. Yes, we must have been a disappointment, or a sadness in some way. That was what I felt after we were dropped off at the Tate. Mike and I wandered rather dazed around the rooms of famous pictures, those representations bereft of their illusionism after our mysteriously trivial lunch. Perhaps he needed to meet ordinary people from time to time just to retain his sense of proportion.

  ‘Or maybe he hoped to catch a glimpse of his lost youth,’ Mike said, ‘of Dad as he’d been back then?’

  Back then, Dad had dark brown hair, sallow skin, a small nose someone once described as roman. M would also have been able to observe a life that had developed in ordinary time and space, the everyday world he saw himse
lf and his service as protecting. He could catch up with some of the lives he believed his vocation had made possible.

  Being chauffeured with M to the restaurant, we were driven past that great cottaging spot, the statue of Edith Cavell. There was one of those street artists rapidly sketching at the foot of its plinth. She was doing the double portrait of a young tourist couple. On the faced stone it gives the exact date and time of Cavell’s execution, and, below it: ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must hate no one.’ With that statement and the example of her death, Nurse Cavell had seemed raised above questions of state. She had seemed to see the values of humanity as higher than those of a country’s interests. Her bravery too was a reason for M’s loneliness. The ‘values of humanity’: that’s an empty phrase, but when demonstrated by the witness of a human life, it’s given a bit more substance. In this world such demonstrations of value are perhaps less rare than we’re prone to assume. As a quality that provides the motive for an action, it is usually cherished, when found – but found, because of its rarity, to exist in an ultimate, an ultimate state such as the moment of a sacrificial death. People don’t inhabit such states most of the time, merely benefiting, or suffering, from the promotion of their state’s perceived interests. Some, and M was one, served that interest and the interests of other nations specially allied to it.

  Could a state’s interests coincide with the values of humanity at large? If M had ever needed to defend his intelligence in front of some Commons select committee, if he’d had to speak up for the value of his research even though he couldn’t reference it to protect his sources, if, a cradle Anglican and a practising one, he had ever sensed that the interests he served were not coincident with his higher moral values, surely he would have felt lonely? One of his tasks in life was to persuade others to betray their state’s or their cause’s interests. Hadn’t the Prime Minister called him out of retirement to set up the super-grass system in Ulster? How had he persuaded others to betray what would have seemed to be their upheld, sustaining values when he himself appeared to be someone incorruptible?