Arcadia

by Iain Pears

  What I mean is that it took a lot of practice to get these emotions under control, and Henry, dear man, taught me more than anyone, with patience and kindness. Do you know, I even thought of marrying him? But how could I have possibly done such a thing? I still planned to go home one day and we were ageing at different rates. I had habits (drink, drugs and work, mainly) which he could not understand. Great friends make bad spouses. I cannot easily say how much I regretted it. I almost abandoned everything, just for the sake of happiness. It was the first time in my life I had ever loved anybody. The realisation that I could, and the extraordinary impact on me in comparison to the chemically induced emotions I was used to, made me think deeply. Did I really want to go back to a place where such things were illegal, where people conducted themselves only in a narrow range of efficient civility?

  I fear I hurt poor Henry, but I think that even he realised that I would have been a difficult partner; he had certainly seen enough to know that I would be, at best, an uncertain companion who would not easily fit into the quiet contemplative life he had in mind. On the other hand, he never found anyone to take my place. I regret that too; had I not come into his life then perhaps he would not have become the slightly reclusive figure of later years, although considering the polite and distant way most of his contemporaries dealt with their marital relationships I am not sure he was missing so very much.

  We spent a great deal of time in each other’s company until the war started, and afterwards, when I went back to France, he would come and visit almost every vacation. We drove around France and Italy, staying in little hotels, eating in restaurants, enjoying ourselves as the world recovered from its trauma. He taught me about Christmas and birthdays, how to give gifts and pay compliments. I still smile when I think of that period.

  He was a great talker as well. We would sit until late at night and I would question him remorselessly about everything – life, family, work, education. About his country, the books he liked, those he didn’t. About music, theatre, poetry and the cinema. About the French and the Germans, the Italians, Americans and the Spanish. About politics and religion. About manners, customs, habits. I absorbed it all and came back for more. He taught me the art of conversation, of being in company for no purpose. The pleasure of wasting time.

  It was not that I didn’t know the facts. I knew many of them better than he did. I just didn’t know what they meant, how they fitted together. Henry didn’t provide all the answers, but he was a good start, and his generosity and kindness was the greatest lesson of all. He changed me irrevocably, and certainly for the better. I fear that I was not able to do the same for him. But from that moment, I began to question many things I had previously taken for granted.

  *

  It was because of Henry that I came to England and again because of him that I spent much of the next five years doing my bit for British Intelligence, although in a very much more lowly capacity than his. He came to rescue me in France in early 1940, which was terribly chivalrous of him, and whisked me off to safety. I had already decided this was the best option, but Henry’s assistance and then recommendation was useful in getting me employment to pass the time. If this sounds both grand and unlikely, then it was not. The country was desperate for expertise of all sorts and my quite phenomenal ability at languages was useful. My somewhat greater skill at mathematics remained unknown, however; properly tanked up, I could have done all of Bletchley Park’s work for it over a cup of tea, but that would have been hard to explain. Besides, I didn’t really want to do it; I rather thought it would have been pleasant to be a land girl, ploughing the fields and growing vegetables for the war effort. Dawn, fresh air, the nobility of physical labour, all that stuff. The camaraderie of a common purpose, getting drunk in pubs on days off. Lots of sex. I had a particularly romantic notion of working in a factory, joining a union, complaining about the oppression of the capitalist classes.

  But no: because of Henry, I worked for intelligence, ploughing through Polish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek and Russian texts with a speed which was considered by my superiors to be extraordinarily impressive. Boring work, for the most part. I wouldn’t have minded being parachuted into France and shooting people as Henry got to do, as it sounded quite fun, except that I was extraneous to history and so there was no guarantee I would survive. The moral considerations were complex, as well; I would hardly be murdering people, as from my point of view they were long dead anyway, but I would be shortening their lives, and I would have had to calculate the potential consequences for each target. Too much work. I still think I would have been quite good at it, though. I did think of offering myself as a sort of Mata Hari, seducing German officers, combining business with pleasure, but Henry’s superior, the saintly Portmore, was rather prudish and thought it a bit unladylike and un-English. Pointing out that I was neither a lady nor English did not persuade him. Later in the war, though, such scruples were abandoned.

  It had its moments, although in my case the drama was a little spoiled by knowing the outcome. I didn’t share the frisson of fear at the thought of defeat, nor the remarkable uplift at the realisation of likely survival. I only let my guard slip once, in 1941, with Henry’s friend Sam Wind, a man I never liked much. I had just about figured out relationships between the sexes; male friendship was quite beyond me, at least the very peculiar English variety of it. I was being cheerful – don’t worry, I’m sure it will all be fine – and Wind had snapped back that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Once Germany had defeated the Soviet Union and could turn back to us …

  ‘No,’ I said with a cheery wave of the hand. We were in a pub and I had been sampling the whisky. ‘After Pearl Harbor and Stalingrad …’

  Then, of course, I remembered it was only October. Some time to go before either of those. And the Germans were doing jolly well at that moment.

  Sam, who was supercilious and superior at the best of times, gave me one of his finest sniffs of disdain, but as the news of the Japanese surprise attack began to come through in December, I remember him looking at me in a funny sort of way. All I can say is that it was the only time I ever made a mistake like that.

  19

  The file of papers Wind had given Lytten lay unopened in a drawer until Monday evening. Lytten had, in the past, been both flexible and adaptable, but he had never considered either to be a virtue and now he lived quite strictly to an orderly regime. That included not doing any work on a Sunday. He went to church in the morning at ten thirty, not because he was religious but because he found it a calming experience, and, what was more, the thing one should do on a Sunday morning. He liked the music, the architecture and the rhythm of ceremony. Then he walked home and had lunch. Cold meat, cold boiled potatoes, some bread and cheese. Occasionally he would accept an invitation for dinner. Otherwise, in the afternoon he would read or sometimes write, although never anything to do with his academic duties, and never at the behest of Samuel Wind.

  He had known Wind for much of his life; like many male English friendships it was based on faint disdain mixed with longevity. That is, he had disliked the man for such a long time that he no longer minded the way he tended to talk primarily about himself, the way he dismissed any concerns but his own, the drawling contempt that he affected for almost everyone and everything. Life had conspired to throw them together far too often; they had, briefly, attended the same school, then the same university. When Portmore brought Lytten into Intelligence, Wind somehow found a way of joining him. He was able, he was ambitious but … what? Lytten never bothered to figure it out. He was too pleased with himself, and was always there.

  Eventually he submitted; he made a sandwich, stacked the fire and drew the curtains, then picked up, at last, the little folder of papers.

  It didn’t take long to read it. There were a few East German briefing papers of only mild interest. The rest were gibberish, padding, random bits of paper swept off someone’s desk with no meaning. Only one sh
eet mattered, and on that there was only one sentence, suitably meaningless.

  ‘I will see the Storyteller in Paradise.’

  Underneath was a date and a time. Here we go, he thought.

  *

  He was distracted for the rest of the evening, trying to make notes for his tale but more often staring emptily, a faint smile only occasionally playing over his face as he thought about the Storyteller. The idea had been woven through his life so much it was now embedded in his imagination as well. Was that why it had come to him when he searched for the centrepiece that would hold Anterwold together? He did not want to write about priests or kings, let alone talking lions or wizards, but all societies need authority figures. So he had come up with the Storytellers, on the grounds that they had a chance of being more peaceful than generals and more benevolent than politicians. They had popped into his mind quite on their own, so he had thought, but now he realised they had been there all along, waiting for him.

  He had been the Storyteller, of course; it was a nickname given to him in 1946. When he followed the invading armies as they crossed first France, then the Rhine and into Germany, his job had not been to fight, but to interrogate captured Germans left behind as their armies retreated without them. Then he spent a year and a half living in the ruins of Berlin, surrounded by a depressed and frightened population. He was nominally a liaison officer, a messenger boy talking to the French in French, the Germans in German. He knew many of his opposite numbers well, and there he became known as the Storyteller. It might have been because, one night, at an impromptu dinner in one of the few buildings not ruined, the group of half a dozen had begun to tell each other stories. It had been his idea; he had mentioned the Canterbury Tales, how Chaucer’s pilgrims entertained each other on their long road with anecdotes, and how Boccaccio’s characters whiled away the time when hiding from the plague. They should do the same, he suggested. Tell us your stories. Truth or fiction; each man could choose.

  He was the impresario of these strange evenings, the comradeship of people who knew that they would soon be enemies. After the Russian had talked of how he had learned German, and the Frenchman of life in a prison camp, and the American of his parents’ route to the US from Europe, and his travels all the way back again, then Lytten told his tale, about kings and battles, the fantastical tales of Britain and the myths of the Mediterranean, putting in enough of each so that at various times each man nodded into his drink in melancholy recognition, for they were all quite drunk by the time he started, and even drunker by the time he finished.

  If that was not the reason someone might remember him as the Storyteller, then other reasons, less admirable, might be responsible. For the silent war of East and West was already beginning and Lytten was there to sow uncertainty and distrust. He had done a good job, until he gave up in disgust at his task and at himself.

  Now he was being summoned back to that world. He would meet this man in Paradise. Besides, he had little enough to do at the moment and he was curious as to how it would turn out. Then he could wash his hands of it all.

  He would ask Rosie to look in to see if Professor Jenkins had returned – if he ever did the animal was bound to be ill-humoured, demanding and hungry. Then he would take the morning train to London, consult with the powers that be, and get this tiresome business under way.

  *

  Whenever Lytten went to London he avoided the nine-thirty train, as it was generally full of people he knew and he could sometimes not avoid being dragged into a conversation with someone whose name he could not remember. Most observed the unwritten rules; you would nod, smile, exchange a few words, then ignore each other totally for the rest of the journey. Occasionally, though, there would be someone who did not understand that morning train journeys were for the purposes of contemplation, not idle chatter. Just in case, Lytten always took the ten o’clock. Now he had to go twice in two days, and he was annoyed at the waste of time.

  The first day he went to see Portmore, an occasion which always made him feel slightly like an eager schoolboy hoping for praise. The old man wanted to know every last detail, and Lytten thought it best to clear the little operation with him. So he discreetly went and listened carefully as Portmore, ever more garrulous as he aged, ranged over missions great and small, recent and ancient, and in the end told him to go ahead.

  ‘Then I will leave for Paris tomorrow,’ Lytten said.

  ‘What is the meaning of this mysterious message?’

  ‘I believe it is from a man I once knew.’

  ‘What does he want, do you think?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. A chat about old times? A job offer?’

  Portmore smiled thinly. ‘Why would the Soviets want any more employees here? They’ve got enough already. How are your enquiries?’

  ‘I have been through the records of seven of the eight people you think are most likely to be traitors. All can be cleared.’

  ‘That leaves Sam, does it? You left him to last?’

  Lytten hesitated, then nodded. ‘If there really is a traitor, as you seem to think. Are you sure you are correct?’

  ‘Every time we get a defector, he is arrested and shot first. Every time we run an operation, our people are picked up or watched. Our contacts in Hungary are in prison. The Americans won’t tell us anything any more. I am sure, as you must be.’

  Portmore leaned back in his chair and stretched. ‘I am constantly being told it is time to retire, hand over to someone else. They are right. But I do not wish to leave the Service in this state. I’ve spent my entire life working for it, and I will not risk handing it over to a traitor. There is one, Henry, and I need you to keep looking until he is found. If we are not trusted, then we cannot work.’

  ‘What if I do not succeed?’

  ‘Then I will have to bypass all the most obvious candidates, just in case. Go for someone else. I have someone in mind who would suit. He’s not ideal, but I cannot take the risk.’

  Lytten nodded. It was a distasteful business, and he hated every moment of it. But who else could do it? Only he knew enough, and only he was above suspicion because he had left so many years back.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Keep me informed, if you will. I shall sit here and wait. You go off to Paris and have a good time. I hardly need to remind you how important this might be.’

  Lytten thought about that meeting a great deal, as he lumbered back on the train, ate breakfast the next morning, and locked the house to go off yet again. So much so he didn’t even notice the man standing on the pavement watching him as he heaved his bike round and began to push it towards the street.

  *

  Lytten stopped, uncertainly, as he saw the curious fellow standing there, staring at him, in the middle of the driveway. He looked frightened to death.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  No reply. Just a slightly crazy stare, which faded suddenly as the eyes focused on him.

  ‘No!’ he almost shouted. ‘Of course not! Why should you?’

  ‘Well then … would you mind getting out of my way?’

  ‘Oh, sorry! So sorry.’ He jumped sideways, looking red in the face and flustered. Then he opened and shut his mouth several times and eventually blurted out: ‘Are you Henry Lytten?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lytten said. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, turned on his heel and ran up the road, as fast as his legs could carry him.

  *

  Lytten dismissed the incident from his mind. Oxford was, after all, full of strange folk whose grasp of the social niceties was often tenuous. The man had been no more awkward, rude or deranged than many of his colleagues who would twitch in embarrassment when meeting someone. Persimmon, for example.

  On the boat train to Paris, because he knew it would put him to sleep, Lytten read the man’s latest instalment. What better way of casting off dull care? Just about anything, in fact, but he had promised. Chapter 12 of Persimmon’s lengthy diatribe extolling the vi
rtues of Modern Scientific Management. Or rather, his work of science fiction, which seemed, in fact, to have little science and no fiction in it. Rather Persimmon, whose enthusiasm for Central Planning made him such a danger at the dinner table, and whose swivel-eyed intensity made him such an uncomfortable part of the Saturday conversations in the pub, was writing a story of such indescribable tedium that anyone who read it would feel like killing themselves. If he was correct that the future of humanity lay in carefully organised scientific efficiency, then killing yourself now would probably be a good idea.

  Persimmon was a youngish man, thin, gawky, severe in appearance, who did everything in annoying moderation. He never ate too much or drank too much. He never laughed, and smiling sometimes seemed painful to him. His thin lips had trouble parting far enough to let words out, or food in. For the most part he would sit through dinners silently, eyes flickering over colleagues, and, even if he did speak, it was so quietly that only the grim precision of his enunciation made anything he said comprehensible. His colleagues put up with him but no one thought he was the greatest asset to the place and some wondered why on earth they had ever elected him. Since when was politics a subject anyway? The new generation of serious folk seemed to have an inferiority complex about never having been in a war and so made up for it with radical politics, reluctant to accept that their parents had made the world a better place. Maybe not; maybe that was just Lytten feeling old and jaded.