East of Suez, West of Charing Cross Road

by John Lawton

  It didn’t feel foolish—it felt raffish, almost daring, a touch of Errol Flynn debauchery—but as 1963 dawned, England was becoming a much more raffish and daring place, and Errol Flynn would soon come to seem like the role model for an entire nation.

  IT WAS ALL down to one person, really—a nineteen-year-old named Christine Keeler. Miss Keeler had had an affair with George’s boss, the top man, the minister of war, the Rt. Hon. John (Umpteenth Baron) Profumo (of Italy), MP ( Stratford-on-Avon, Con.), OBE. Miss Keeler had simultaneously had an affair with Yevgeni Ivanov, an “attaché of the Soviet embassy” (newspeak for spy)—and the ensuing scandal had rocked Britain, come close to toppling the government, led to a trumped-up prosecution (for pimping) of a society doctor, his subsequent suicide, and the resignation of the aforementioned John Profumo.

  At the War Office, there were two notable reactions. Alarm that the class divide had been dropped long enough to allow a toff like Profumo to take up with a girl of neither breeding nor education, whose parents lived in a converted wooden railway carriage, that a great party (Conservative) could be brought down by a woman of easy virtue (Keeler)—and paranoia that the Russians could get that close.

  For a while Christine Keeler was regarded as the most dangerous woman in England. George adored her. If he thought he’d get away with it he’d have pinned her picture to his office wall.

  IT WAS POSSIBLE that his lust for a pinup girl he had never met was what led him into folly.

  The dust had scarcely settled on the Profumo affair. Lord Denning had published his report entitled unambiguously “Lord Denning’s Report” and found himself the author of an unwitting best seller when it sold four thousand copies in the first hour and the queues outside Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in Kingsway stretched around the block and into Drury Lane, and the country had a new prime minister in the cadaverous shape of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had resigned an earldom for the chance to live at No. 10.

  George coveted a copy of the Denning Report, but it was understood to be very bad form for a serving officer, let alone one at the ministry that had been if not at the heart of the scandal then most certainly close to the liver and kidneys, to be seen in the queue.

  His friend Ted—Captain Edward Ffyffe-Robertson RAOC—got him a copy, and George refrained from asking how. It was better than any novel—a marvelous tale of pot-smoking West Indians, masked men, naked orgies, beautiful, available women, and high society. He read it and reread it, and since he and Sylvia had now taken not only separate beds but also separate rooms, slept with it under his pillow.

  About six months later Ted was propping up the wall in George’s office, having nothing better to do than jingle the coins in his pocket or play pocket billiards whilst making the smallest of small talk.

  Elsie the tea lady parked her trolley by the open door.

  “You’re early,” Ted said.

  “Ain’t even started on teas yet. They got me ’anding out the post while old Albert’s orf sick. What a diabolical bleedin’ liberty. Ain’t they never ’eard of demarcation? Lucky I don’t have the union on ’em.”

  Then she slung a single, large brown envelope onto George’s desk.

  “I see you got yer promotion then, Mr. ’Orsefiddle. All right for some.”

  She pushed her trolley on. George looked at the envelope.

  “Lieutenant Colonel HG Horsfield.”

  “It’s got to be a mistake, surely?”

  Ted peered over.

  “It is, old man. Hugh Horsfield. Half-colonel in Artillery. He’s on the fourth floor. Daft old Elsie’s given you his post.”

  “There’s another Horsfield?”

  “Yep. Been here about six weeks. Surprised you haven’t met him. He’s certainly made his presence felt.”

  With hindsight George ought to have asked what Ted’s last remark meant.

  Instead, later the same day, he went in search of Lieutenant Colonel Horsfield, out of nothing more than curiosity and a sense of fellow feeling.

  He tapped on the open door. A big bloke with salt-and-pepper hair and a spiky little moustache looked up from his desk.

  George beamed at him.

  “Lieutenant Colonel. HG Horsfield? I’m Captain HG Horsfield.”

  His alter ego got up and walked across to the door and, with a single utterance of “Fascinating,” swung it to in George’s face.

  Later, Ted said, “I did try to warn you, old man. He’s got a fierce reputation.”

  “As what?”

  “He’s the sort of bloke who gets described as not suffering fools gladly.”

  “Are you saying I’m a fool?”

  “Oh, the things only your best friend will tell. Like using the right brand of bath soap. No, I’m not saying that.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that to a highflyer like Hugh Horsfield, blokes like us who keep our boys in pots and pans and socks and blankets are merely the also-rans of the British Army. He deals with the big stuff. He’s Artillery after all.”

  “Big stuff? What big stuff?”

  “Well, we’re none of us supposed to say, are we? But here’s a hint: think back to August 1945 and those mushroom-shaped clouds over Japan.”

  “Oh. I see. Bloody hell!”

  “Bloody hell indeed.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I do hear that he’s more than a bit of a ladies’ man. In the first month alone he’s supposed to have shagged half the women on the fourth floor. And you know that blonde in the typing pool we all nicknamed the Jayne Mansfield of Muswell Hill?”

  “Not her, too? I thought she didn’t look at anything below a full colonel.”

  “Well, if the grapevine has it aright she dropped her knickers to half-mast for this half-colonel.”

  What a bastard.

  George hated his namesake.

  George envied his namesake.

  IT WAS SOMEONE’S birthday. Some bloke on the floor below whom he didn’t know particularly well, but Ted did. A whole crowd of them, serving soldiers in civvies, literally and metaphorically letting their hair down, followed up cake and coffee in the office with a mob-handed invasion of a nightclub in Greek Street, Soho. Soho—a ten-minute walk from the War Office, the nearest thing London had to a red-light district, occupying a maze of narrow little streets east of the elegant Regent Street, south of the increasingly vulgar Oxford Street, north of the bright lights of Shaftesbury Avenue, and west of the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. It was home to the Marquee music club, the Flamingo, also a music club, the private boozing club known as the Colony Room, the scurrilous magazine Private Eye, the Gay Hussar restaurant, the Coach and Horses pub (and too many other pubs ever to mention), a host of odd little shops where a nod and a wink might get you into the back room for purchase of a faintly pornographic film, a plethora of strip clubs, and the occasional and more-than-occasional prostitute.

  He’d be late home. So what? They’d all be late home.

  They moved rapidly on to Frith Street and street by street and club by club worked their way across toward Wardour Street. The intention, George was sure, was to end up in a strip joint. He hoped to slip away before they reached the Silver Tit or the Golden Arse and the embarrassing farce of watching a woman wearing only a G-string and pasties jiggle all that would jiggle in front of a bunch of pissed and paunchy middle-aged men who confused titillation with satisfaction.

  He’d been aware of Lieutenant Colonel Horsfield’s presence from the first—the upper-class bray of a barroom bore could cut through any amount of noise. He knew HG’s type. Minor public school, too idle for university, but snapped up by Sandhurst because he cut a decent figure on the parade ground. Indeed, he rather thought the only reason the army had picked him for Eaton Hall was that he, too, looked the officer type at a handsome five feet eleven inches.

  As they reached Dean Street, George stepped off the pavement meaning to head south and catch a bus to Waterloo, but Ted had him b
y one arm.

  “Not so fast, old son. The night is yet young.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, Ted, I’d just as soon go home. I can’t abide strippers, and HG is really beginning to get on my tits, if not on theirs.”

  “Nonsense, you’re one of us. And we won’t be going to a titty bar for at least an hour. Come and have a drink with your mates and ignore HG. He’ll be off as soon as the first prozzie flashes a bit of cleavage at him.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “He does. Sooner or later everybody does. Haven’t you?”

  “Well . . . yes . . . out in Benghazi . . . before I was married . . . but not . . . ”

  “It’s okay, old son. Not compulsory. I’ll just be having a couple of jars myself, then I’ll be home to Mill Hill and the missus.”

  It was a miserable half hour. He retreated to a booth on his own, nursing a pink gin he didn’t much want. He’d no idea how long she’d been sitting there. He just looked up from pink reflections and there she was. Petite, dark, twentyish, and looking uncannily like the dangerous woman of his dreams: the almost pencil-thin eyebrows, the swept-back chestnut hair, the almond eyes, the pout of slightly prominent front teeth, and the cheekbones from heaven or Hollywood.

  “Buy a girl a drink?”

  This was what hostesses did. Plonked themselves down, got you to buy them a drink, and then ordered house “champagne” at a price that dwarfed the national debt. George wasn’t falling for that.

  “Have mine,” he said, pushing the pink gin across the table. “I haven’t touched it.”

  “Thanks, love.”

  He realized at once that she wasn’t a hostess. No hostess would have taken the drink.

  “You’re not working here, are you?”

  “Nah. But . . . ”

  “But what?”

  “But I am . . . working.”

  The penny dropped, clunking down inside him, rattling around in the rusty pinball machine of the soul.

  “And you think I . . . ”

  “You look as though you could do with something. I could . . . make you happy . . . just for a while I could make you happy.”

  George heard a voice very like his own say, “How much?”

  “Not up front, love. That’s just vulgar.”

  “I haven’t got a lot of cash on me.”

  “S’okay. I take checks.”

  SHE HAD A room three flights up in Bridle Lane. Clothed she was gorgeous, naked she was irresistible. If George died on the train home he would die happy.

  She had one hand on his balls and was kissing him in one ear—he was priapic as Punch. He was on the edge, seconds away from entry, sheathed in a frenchie, when the door burst open, his head turned sharply, and a flashbulb went off in his eyes.

  When the stars cleared, he found himself facing a big bloke in a dark suit clutching a Polaroid camera and smiling smugly at him.

  “Get dressed, Mr. Horsfield. Meet me in the Stork Café in Berwick Street. You’re not there in fifteen minutes this goes to your wife.”

  The square cardboard plate shot from the base of the camera and took form before his eyes.

  He fell back on the pillow and groaned. He’d know a Russian accent anywhere. He’d been set up—trussed up like a turkey.

  “Oh . . . shit.”

  “Sorry, love. But, y’know. It’s a job. Gotta make a livin’ somehow.”

  George’s wits were gathering slowly, cohering into a fuzzy knot of meaning.

  “You mean they pay you to . . . frame blokes like me?”

  “’Fraid so. Prozzyin’ ain’t what it used to be.”

  The knot pulled tight.

  “You take money for this!?!”

  “O’course. I’m no commie. It’s a job. I get paid. Up front.”

  He had a memory somewhere of her telling him that was vulgar, but he sidestepped it.

  “Paid to get you out of yer trousers, into bed, do what I do till Boris gets here.”

  “What you do?”

  “You know, love . . . the other.”

  “You mean sex?”

  “If it gets that far. He was a bit early tonight.”

  A light shone in George’s mind. The knot slackened off, and the life began to crawl back into his startled groin.

  “You’ve been paid to . . . fuck me?”

  “Language, love. But yeah.”

  “Would you mind awfully if we . . . er . . . finished the job?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “Why not? Least I can do. Besides, I like you. And old Boris is hardly going to bugger off after fifteen minutes. He needs you. He’ll wait till dawn if he has to.”

  WALKING TO BERWICK Street, along the whore’s paradise of Meard Street, apprehension mingled with bliss. It was like that moment in Tobruk when Johnny Arab had stuck a pipe of super-strength hashish in front of him and he had looked askance at it but inhaled all the same. The headiness never quite offset and overwhelmed the sheer oddness of the situation.

  In the caff a few late-night “beatniks” (scruffbags, Sylvia would have called them) spun out cups of frothy coffee as long as they could and put the world to rights—while Boris, if that really was his name, sat alone at a table next to the lavatory door.

  George was at least half an hour late. Boris glanced at his watch but said nothing about it. Silently he slid the finished Polaroid—congealed as George thought of it—across the table, his finger never quite letting go of it.

  “This type of camera only takes these shots. No negative. Hard to copy, and I won’t even try unless you make me. Do what we ask, Mr. Horsfield, and you will not find us unreasonable people. Give us what we want, and when we have it, you can have this. Frame it, burn it, I don’t care—but if we get what we want, you can be assured this will be the only copy and your wife need never know.”

  George didn’t even look at the photo. It might ruin a precious memory.

  “What is it you want?”

  Boris all but whispered, “Everything you’re sending east of Suez.”

  “I see,” said George, utterly baffled by this.

  “Be here one week tonight. Nine o’clock. You bring evidence of something you’ve shipped out—show willing as you people say—and we’ll brief you on what to look for next. In fact, we’ll give you a shopping list.”

  Boris stood up. A bigger bugger in a black suit came over and stood next to him. George hadn’t even noticed this one was in the room.

  “Well?” he said in Russian.

  “A pushover,” Boris replied.

  The other man picked up the photo, glimmed it, and said, “When did he shave off the moustache?”

  “Who cares?” Boris replied.

  Then he switched to English, said, “Next week,” to George, and they left.

  George sat there. He’d learned two things. They didn’t know he spoke Russian, and they had the wrong Horsfield. George felt like laughing. It really was very funny—but it didn’t let him off the hook. . . . Whatever they called him, Henry George Horsfield RAOC or Hugh George Horsfield RA . . . they still had a photograph of him in bed with a whore. It might end up in the hands of the right wife or the wrong wife, but he had no doubts it would all end up on a desk at the War Office if he screwed up now.

  HE GOT BUGGER all work done the next day. He had sneaked into home very late, left a note for Sylvia saying he would be out early, caught the 7.01 train, and sneaked into the office very early. He could not face her across the breakfast table. He couldn’t face anyone. He closed his office door, but after ten minutes decided that that was a dead giveaway and opened it again. He hoped Ted did not want to chat. He hoped Daft Elsie had no gossip as she brought round the tea.

  At five-thirty in the evening he took his briefcase and sought out a caff in Soho. He sat in Old Compton Street staring into his deflating frothy coffee much as he had stared into his pink gin the night before. Oddly, most oddly, the same thing happened. He looked up from his cup and there she was. Right opp
osite him. A vision of beauty and betrayal.

  “I was just passin’. Honest. And I saw you sittin’ in the window.”

  “You’re wasting your time. I haven’t got the money, and after last night . . . ”

  “I’m not on the pull. It’s six o’clock and broad bleedin’ day-light. I . . . I . . . I thought you looked lonely.”

  “I’m always lonely,” he replied, surprised at his own honesty. “But what you see now is misery of your own making.”

  “You’ll be fine. Just give old Boris what he wants.”

  “Has it occurred to you that that might be treason?”

  “Nah . . . it’s not as if you’re John Profumo or I’m Christine Keeler. We’re small fry, we are.”

  Oh God, if only she knew.

  “I can’t give him what he wants. He wants secrets.”

  “Don’t you know any?”

  “Of course I do . . . everything’s a sodding secret. But . . . but . . . I’m RAOC. Do you know what that stands for?”

  “Nah. Rags And Old Clothes?”

  “Close. Our nickname is the Rag And Oil Company. Royal Army Ordnance Corps. I keep the British Army in saucepans and socks!”

  “Ah.”

  “You begin to see? Boris will want secrets about weapons.”

  “O’course he will. How long have you got?”

  “I really ought to be on a train by nine.”

  “Well . . . you come home with me. We’ll have a bit of a think.”

  “I’m not sure I could face that room again.”

  “You silly bugger. I don’t work from home, do I? Nah. I got a place in Henrietta Street. Let’s nip along and put the kettle on. It’s cozy. Really it is. Ever so.”

  How Sylvia would have despised the “ever so.” It would be “common.”

  Over tea and ginger biscuits she heard him out—the confusion of two Horsfields and how he really had nothing that Boris would ever want.

  She said, “You gotta laugh, ain’t yer?”

  And they did.

  She thought while they fucked—he could see in her eyes that she wasn’t quite with him, but he didn’t much mind.