‘But then this third power proves stronger, Charles. It makes the shrewdest tactical move. Its forces occupy the land in the middle; the borderland between its two opponents. Cuts them off from each other – makes communication so dangerous as to be impossible.’
‘That’s right, Robert. That would be the shrewdest thing. And then it can fight each one separately; lay siege. Gradually spread fear and intimidation – so that soon our two nations are full of doubt and mistrust. And once the invader has bled them dry of hope, he can make the final strike. To each side, he gives the ultimatum: help me, or die.’
‘Yes, Charles – it’s the best tactic; make life impossible for both sides. And then leave them with that terrible choice: to join forces with the oppressor, or else perish. And it’s not a simple choice; not a matter of making some heroic sacrifice. Because this is a nation of people – women and children. Innocent people. But still there’s some resistance – an attempt to help the other suffering nation. So the oppressor relents a little. He says that he will be lenient; if forces are joined, then the other side need only be taught a lesson – only limited action.’
Charles understood everything now. He could see at what cost Robert had been given his precious book. ‘It would be a terrible dilemma, wouldn’t it?’ Charles said. ‘To have to betray a friend – but only a little. To teach him a lesson. So as to save both. And to save all those innocent people.’
‘Mostly to save the innocents, Charles. It’s the women and children who are the most important element in history – because they’re always the first victims.’
Anne and Duncan. What would Robert not do to protect them? Charles moved towards the piano. He ran his finger along the top – it needed dusting. Jenny did it little more than a week earlier.
‘Thanks for the history lesson, Robert. I’m sure your book will be very good.’
‘The book means nothing to me, Charles. It’s only words on paper.’
Charles sat down at the piano. ‘A shame you didn’t bring your violin, Robert. Remember how we used to play together?’
‘We should have practised more. We never did manage to get the Kreutzer right, did we?’
‘We never got anything right.’ He turned to look at the other man; the nervous, helpless creature. Mays had won.
Robert got up, and then went to the bathroom. His jacket still lay across the arm of the chair from which he had risen.
He had been ordered to spy on King – it was all clear now. The simplest tool of persecution; to set people one against the other – to spread fear and suspicion. What crime had Charles committed? It would only be a fine, or perhaps six months. Mays could not have recruited Robert – it must be the Party who had enlisted him. The vetting would have been handled by Section Five; they had persuaded Robert to watch Charles, just as the police wanted Charles to keep an eye on Robert. A battle of two Government departments. But if each one of them, Charles and Robert, played his part well enough, then what was there for either to fear?
As long as Robert handled his side of it properly. He was trying to warn King; was that not sufficient proof of his good faith? And yet Charles knew that for Robert things were not so simple. There was Anne, and Duncan. Was his warning to Charles not also a plea for forgiveness?
Charles lifted Robert’s jacket, and ran his hand into the inside pocket. An address book. Only a name, to keep Mays off his back. He might need Mays if Section Five made problems. A name, any name for starters. It would be somewhere inconspicuous – not amongst the addresses of family and colleagues. Yes – here. A loose slip of paper inside the back cover. John: 376812. It had to be. He said it three times until he remembered the number. Everything put back. He returned to his place.
Robert came in. He picked up his jacket – paused as he lifted it from the arm of the chair. He put it on, then looked up to meet King’s eyes. Thinking about it long afterwards, King would remember what he saw now as the worn face of a man already dead.
‘What time do you leave tomorrow?’
‘First thing. It’s a long drive. I want to make an early start.’
‘Drive safely.’
‘I will. And look after yourself, Charles. Always remember to look after yourself.’ There was nothing more to say.
‘Give my love to Anne and Duncan.’
‘Of course.’ Robert paused. ‘Charles … if anything were to happen to me. I don’t want to be morbid – but I’m not used to going away and leaving them. It’s a long drive. If anything happened … you’d take care of them, wouldn’t you?’
‘You know what they both mean to me.’
‘Yes. I’ve always known that. Goodbye Charles.’
‘Good luck. With the book.’
Robert reached out his hand – Charles grasped it firmly. It seemed as if there was something more that Robert needed to say; as if he were struggling to find words. But none came. Their hands remained locked in a gesture whose full meaning each could only guess at. Finally, they embraced.
‘Goodbye Charles.’
And then he left. It was the last time they would see each other.
Next day, King got a phone call at work. It was Mays again, wanting him to come to the police station. Charles already knew what he would say, before he was shown into the interview room.
‘I don’t spy on my friends, Inspector Mays. There’s no reason why I should. If you want to arrest me then go ahead, though I don’t know what you’ll charge me with. Otherwise, you can go to hell.’
Mays remained calm. ‘You’re a subversive. You write horrible seditious pamphlets. You consort with perverts. I can arrest you for anything I like, and I can have you put away for as long as I like. Are you going to help me?’
‘Go to hell.’
Mays opened the drawer of his desk and brought out a large brown envelope. ‘Waters has gone to Scotland. While he’s away I want you to go to his house – visit his wife. And when you get the chance, I want you to leave this hidden somewhere among his papers. Just give us a ring when it’s done.’
He threw the envelope across the desk onto King’s lap. Lifting open the flap to examine the contents, King saw a dog-eared foreign magazine. The cover showed a naked man.
‘It’s not a lot to ask, Dr. King. I could easily have had Waters tailed, or turned his house upside down looking for something that would incriminate him, but it really isn’t necessary. This way, it’s a lot less painful for everyone concerned. I know you’re both guilty. Proof is nothing more than a formality, for the sake of the paperwork. Just do this little thing for me, and I’ll forget all about your dubious past. The slate will be wiped clean. You’ve got three days. Let me know when it’s done.’
King went back out into the daylight. He had already made his decision. There would be no more betrayals – what could they do to him? Six months at worst. The time had come for him to call a halt to this spiral of madness. He put the envelope and its contents into the first litter bin he passed. For the first time in two weeks, he felt happy.
When he went back to work, he found Joanna alone, typing. He whispered in her ear, and asked if she’d like to come to his place that night. She gave a nod without saying anything; her fingers still clattering on the keys of the typewriter.
King would do nothing. That was his great decision. Mays could go to hell. Had they perhaps threatened Jenny like that, as well? Made her search through Charles’s things? But then again – why? There was still something missing; something which Charles didn’t understand, but maybe Robert did. He had all the facts now.
Later, Joanna came to his flat. They had sex once more on the carpet where they had first lain two nights previously. So unlike Jenny – so business-like. When they finished, she got up and walked briskly to the bathroom. Even when she was naked she had the same way of moving; the same haughty air. She came back with a toilet roll, which she handed to King, who was still lying exhausted on the floor.
King was not usually given to opening up his heart to a wo
man after he had sex with her; he did not regard the intimacy of physical intercourse as an excuse for unburdening his soul. But on this occasion, he wanted to talk. He felt proud of the stand he had made against Mays – he had told him to go to hell.
Joanna was wiping her crotch with toilet paper – an action as smoothly honed as when she cleaned her typewriter. Her figure was towering over him as he lay on the carpet – her perfect figure. Her face was not pretty; she had an arrogant look. But her body was one of the most perfect that Charles had ever seen; finely proportioned, and with the lean athleticism of a greyhound.
King wanted to tell her everything. He wanted to tell her about Robert, and Mays. He even wanted to tell her about Jenny. He said nothing. Now Joanna was moving about the room, stretching like a ballerina. Her perfect body. She gave a little yawn. Then she came and sat across him; straddling his groin.
He was thinking about Jenny, and how he must have hurt her.
She repositioned herself slightly, and fell to playing with his genitals; reaching to push his dormant flesh from one side to the other. Lifting and stretching the pink stub of his penis, like a toy.
‘I once knew a man who could come twice. Like a multiple orgasm. Have you ever been able to do that?’
He told her no, and she said perhaps she shouldn’t be talking about other men. He told her he didn’t mind – but this only made her say more on the subject.
‘And there was one who made me give him a blow-job every morning. He was an architect. He’d push my head down onto him.’
‘Why did you put up with him?’
She shrugged. ‘He was convenient, at the time.’
Charles thought about Jenny, and that tiny bedsit. The vase of flowers, and the photographs on the wall, of her family. The letters she had kept in her drawer. He had loved her simplicity – her weakness. And it was her weakness that had made her betray him; he still didn’t understand how, or why – perhaps Robert knew the whole story by now. But it was precisely what was so good about her that had led things to go so terribly wrong.
Joanna was still playing with him. She had made him go hard. She held the shaft aloft like a flag. Then laid it down. She stood up, and began to dress.
25
Three days went past and Charles made no effort to contact Anne. The following week, he went home as usual at lunchtime to play the piano. Still he felt exhilarated by his defiance – and he had heard nothing more from Mays. Sitting himself at the keyboard, he chose the score of the Diabelli Variations. He was soon engrossed in the music.
To see why King should have selected that piece to play, let us first recall the strange origin of the work. In 1819, the publisher Anton Diabelli sent a little waltz theme he had written to fifty or so of the leading composers in Vienna. He wanted each to write a variation, which he would publish as a sort of compendium of contemporary musical taste. Beethoven (who was already working on the Ninth Symphony and the Missa Solemnis) dismissed the waltz as a ‘cobbler’s patch’ – nothing more than vamping, and unworthy of his attention. Even so, the theme began to suggest to him some latent possibility (strange, how the most persistent ideas are often the most irritatingly trivial). During the next four years, Beethoven produced no less than thirty-three variations on Diabelli’s little waltz. He alone would give Diabelli his compendium of musical taste; there was a fughetta in the style of Bach, a study after the manner of Cramer – even a quotation from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Characteristically of Beethoven, it was an act of defiance – and a joke.
When King sat down at the keyboard, he still felt thrilled by his own act of defiance against Mays. Flood had been nothing more than a feeble prank – a cobbler’s patch. And now it was over – King had called ‘enough’. Robert could write his book, and they could forget all about it.
When the telephone rang, Charles ignored it.
The Diabelli Variations, in addition to being Beethoven’s greatest piano composition, is also one of his most difficult. A full sixty minutes in performance, and a piece which requires a considerable technique. It was one of the most demanding pieces which King could possibly select. An act of defiance, and of celebration. It was the punchline of a joke at Mays’ expense.
But then the flow of sound interrupted. The doorbell. King swore, went and answered, and saw two policemen who showed a warrant, entered, and began to search his flat. One took the sitting room, the other the bedroom; opening drawers, checking shelves.
‘I told you, we’ve got a warrant to search the premises.’
‘But why?’
‘Because we suspect you might be in possession of illegal substances.’
‘What? Do you mean drugs?’
The score remained open on the piano where King had stopped. It seemed that the joke still was not over. He stood and watched in disbelief while the two policemen quickly went about their work. One of them was checking the entrance passage which led off to the bathroom and bedroom. He lifted a corner of the carpet, near the bathroom door, and called out to his colleague. ‘Got it.’ He was picking up a small polythene pouch with something dark inside.
King protested: ‘For Christ’s sake, you’ve just planted that.’
They took him to the police station. In the interview room, Mays ordered him to sit down.
‘You stupid bastard, King.’
‘You had them plant it in my flat – anyone can see that.’
‘You’re no use to any of us here now. It’s like this; we can charge you, you’ll get six months, and you’ll be sacked from your job. Or else you can make things easier for yourself; resign now, we drop charges, and you’ll be rehabilitated.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Somebody thinks you need to be taught a lesson. And I don’t fucking blame them. They’ll give you another job somewhere out of harm’s way where you can learn to behave yourself. Don’t think you’ve got any choice in the matter; you either do it now, or else in six months’ time when you come out of prison.’
When he returned home, the score still lay open where he had left it. It had been a premature celebration. Strange, how the most trivial thing can grow, become transformed, and have consequences of the most grave and colossal kind. He had written an article in defence of the rights of homosexuals; he had included a true but seditious statement concerning a former Minister for Home Affairs. And so the pamphlet had been retained in a file for five years, lying dormant, until it could be brought out and his life could be totally changed. Strange how a harmless trifle can be the origin of a process of transformation – of variation – which is far beyond anything it might seem to merit. King sat on the piano stool and looked at the printed notes without laying his hands on the keys. Mays had indeed won – his threat had not proved idle. And such a blatant manner in which the threat had been realized! Was it even necessary for those two constables to go through the charade of searching for something they had already brought with them?
Now King was to be ‘rehabilitated’; they were going to try and transform him – strip him of his pride and will; lay him low, so that he would emerge humbled and obedient.
He turned the pages of the Diabelli Variations. Gazed at that final chord – the final punchline. A chord which is resolved harmonically, and yet leaves something unanswered; an inversion of the tonic chord, which misses the beat. A punchline which can leave you laughing, or else puzzled and bewildered.
The following day he received a letter offering him a post teaching maths in a school in Leeds. He was being taught a lesson. He went to see Anne.
‘Robert knew this would happen,’ he told her, ‘I’m sure of it. What’s going on?’
She said she knew nothing. She was cold and unwilling to talk to him. Duncan came running in to show Charles a toy train which his father had given him before leaving. Anne drew the boy to her side, and stared at King.
‘You’d better go.’
Later, he handed in his resignation – so smooth and easy, the whole process. In a land where ev
ery step involved a mountain of forms in triplicate, this move was to be the easiest he had ever made. He was allocated a flat in Leeds, not far from the school where he would work. Vague references were made to its additional proximity to the university. After a few years of penance they might give him a job in the physics department there.
He had a month’s notice. Joanna said she was sorry he had decided to leave; King explained to her that he had no choice in the matter. She seemed alarmed, but didn’t try to find out any more about it. During the remaining four weeks before the move, their affair continued fitfully. Charles told her he would try and return to Cambridge at weekends to do research.
Shortly before his month ran out, Charles learned the news that Robert had been killed in a car accident. They had taught Robert an even harder lesson, Charles thought. He had begun to drive home from Scotland; it was night, raining. The car must have gone too fast into a bend; it left the road and went through the barrier, then down into a ravine. He had died instantly.
Charles went to see Anne again. She seemed less hostile now that she needed him. They sat together in silence. When Duncan came in and asked again when Daddy would be coming home, she said simply ‘not yet.’
King had not forgotten his promise to Robert, but his attempts to offer help all met with swift rebuttal. She would need to think things through, but they would probably move away from Cambridge. They were going to stay with her sister in York for a while.
Then she went and fetched a sealed letter addressed to Charles. Robert had written to her from Scotland, enclosing this additional message for King, which was to be given to him ‘if anything happened’.
‘He knew they might try and kill him, Charles. I don’t know what it was you got him involved in, and I don’t think I want to know – at least not yet. But I do want to say that I forgive you. I know he was your friend, and you would never have done anything to hurt him. He thought the world of you, Charles.’
He took the letter from her, and she did not resist when he took hold of her hand, and lightly stroked it. There were many things he would have liked to ask her.
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