by Alan Judd
He sat heavily in Charles’s armchair, an ancient sliding wooden structure that creaked loudly. ‘Hume and causation. Or Hume and something. You’ve done that one, haven’t you?’
‘I’ve written it. Haven’t had my tutorial yet.’ The essay was on his desk. ‘Here.’
Nigel took it. ‘They want me to run for president of the JCR. Nicholson, Richards and the others. They hate the thought of Miles getting it.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Don’t know.’ He watched Charles plug in the kettle and spoon the instant coffee. ‘Surprised you don’t make real coffee. You seem the sort of person who would.’
‘Do I? Perhaps I should then. But it takes longer.’
‘Thing is, Miles is such an egregious shit. One of those people whose face is always in front of you, you can’t get away from him. There’ll be even more of him if he’s running the JCR.’
‘Do it, then. I’ll vote for you.’
‘But is it really me, Charles?’
‘I don’t know. Never seen you look so solemn about anything.’ Except for that morning by the Cherwell, he thought.
‘I mean, this could be the start of my political career. It’s truly a life-changing decision. Don’t you think?’
‘I’d never thought of the JCR like that.’
‘It is, though. It’s a question of whether to enter the public arena, to wield the broadsword, or whether to exercise power from behind the scenes, as I imagine you would.’
‘Do you?’ Charles had never thought of himself like that. ‘Do you seek power?’
‘Not yet. But if I do it changes everything. I become a different person. My life will be completely different. Who I marry, what I do, everything.’
‘Milk?’
‘No, thanks.’
Nigel talked about himself for an hour. At the end, when he stood to go, his eyes were duller and he looked tired. ‘Thanks for the coffee. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t marry Sarah, if she wanted me, even if I did seek power. I’d still marry her.’ He spoke as if reassuring Charles. ‘I would. I wouldn’t abandon her.’
‘I don’t blame you.’
‘Thanks for the coffee.’
‘Good luck with the essay.’
‘I’ll drop it back when I’ve finished.’
He did, but afterwards, reading it aloud in his own tutorial, Charles discovered that Nigel had done the same and passed it off as his own, without telling him. His tutor all but accused him of plagiarising. It was a minor dishonesty but indicative, he later concluded. He was going to tax Nigel with it, but by then so much else had happened that it seemed of no account.
In retrospect there were early signs of his and Sarah’s shipwreck, but at the time he was aware only of an unspoken tension, something unacknowledged, an edginess, a wariness, as if each were expecting to resist some unreasonable demand from the other, though none was made. It was by then the term before Schools – their final examinations – and she worried more about hers than he did about his. She was keen to do well and worked harder than he, but his attempts to reassure her counted for nothing, and her worry increased. He attributed the tension to this, but later suspected it was also because their affair had, without their realising it – or perhaps without only him realising it – reached a point of decision. The harbinger of what was to come was, as usual, something fairly trivial, a sudden lurch, a single, unseen, sickening sea-swell that came from nowhere and passed as suddenly, leaving them becalmed for a while.
Her birthday was approaching and he had booked dinner – not on the day but near enough – at the Restaurant Elizabeth, allegedly the best and certainly the most expensive in Oxford. It would cost about a quarter of that term’s grant but he had money saved from his holiday job as a dustman and would make it up in the summer.
Sarah was still seeing Nigel, who had meanwhile won the JCR election and embarked upon what he called ‘the political trajectory’. This had led him towards the Oxford Union which offered, he said, a bigger stage and the prospect of office. With a general election approaching, an Oxford Union debate featuring a Treasury minister and his opposition shadow attracted national press attention. Nigel had invited Sarah to the debate, in which he was to speak. She told Charles she had accepted.
‘But that’s the night I’ve booked dinner at the Elizabeth.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I said I was going to.’
‘But you didn’t say when.’
‘I’m sure I did.’ He wasn’t, but he thought he probably had. ‘Sorry if I didn’t.’ He knew he sounded insincere.
‘Can’t you change it?’
‘It’s difficult. They get very booked up. Probably not for ages.’ He wasn’t sure of that either, but he was irritated. What he had meant as a celebration to ease things had already made them worse. They parted with the issue unresolved.
Back in his college, checking for mail in the porter’s lodge, Charles ran into Nigel doing the same. Had he not met him at that moment he might never have said anything, or might have said it differently. But he was still irritated when he said: ‘Your debate date with Sarah. I’m afraid she can’t make it. We’re going to the Elizabeth. She didn’t realise I’d booked it.’
Hostility showed briefly in Nigel’s eyes, like the flank of a fish turning beneath the surface. ‘Fine,’ he said.
Charles immediately felt guilty. ‘Sorry, but I didn’t realise she’d said she’d go to the debate.’
‘That’s fine, Charles, just fine.’ Nigel walked away.
Charles sent a note to Sarah saying that Nigel was fine about it. They had arranged to go for a walk after her tutorial the following afternoon. In the morning he looked fearfully for a cancelling note but when he called on her that afternoon her door was locked. They met in the quad as he was leaving.
‘Dr Philpot overran,’ she said. ‘Then she brought out the sherry. She always does.’
‘You got my note about Nigel?’
‘Yes, I did.’ She turned towards her room. ‘You might have asked me before refusing on my behalf. I don’t like letting people down.’
‘I thought you’d decided not to go.’
‘You assumed it, you mean.’
The walk was short, because she was cold, but it eased things. She told him she would rather have dinner with him than go to a debate with Nigel, though she didn’t want him in her room that night, pleading tiredness and work. After dining in her college he walked back to his own in a penetrating wind and a few erratic, unseasonal snowflakes.
It snowed much more on the day of the debate, provoking national wonderment. Charles rose early, partly because of the unaccustomed brightness and partly to enjoy the pristine quads and backstreets before boots and tyres turned them to slush. At breakfast in hall someone said the debate had been cancelled; more snow was forecast and both main speakers had seized upon the excuse to pull out. Later, when he ran into Nigel, residual guilt made him want to be generous.
‘Sorry to hear about the debate. You must have put a lot of work into it.’
‘You could say that.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Don’t know. JCR. Have an early night.’
‘Come to the Elizabeth with Sarah and me.’
Nigel, who had wealthy parents and a reputation for expensive living, looked at him. ‘You can’t mean that.’
‘I do, I mean it.’ Charles knew he didn’t as he was saying it. It was stupid, a gesture was all he had intended, but he felt obliged to go on. ‘No, come with us. We’d both like it.’
Nigel hesitated. ‘Okay, if you’re sure. What time?’
Sarah was sitting at her desk brushing her hair, a mirror propped before her, when Charles broke the news. He sat on her bed with his back against the wall, much as he would later in his cell, watching her face in the mirror. When he said it she was holding her hair with one hand and brushing it with the other. She stopped in mid-stroke and their eyes met in the mirror. Her expression betraye
d a brief struggle for self-control, swiftly achieved, then settled resolution. She resumed brushing.
‘Oh, right, it’ll be nice to see Nigel. At least he won’t feel rejected now.’
‘Sorry, it was clumsy of me. It was an impulse, I didn’t mean him to accept it. I’ve been clumsy throughout all this. Sorry.’
‘No need to apologise.’
‘There is. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’
Soon he was apologising for apologising and by the time they reached the Elizabeth they were not speaking. Nigel was there already and they fell upon him with relief at not having to confront each other. The meal was presumably good – Nigel said it was – and certainly expensive. Charles paid. Afterwards he remembered nothing of what he’d eaten, but knew she’d had only a first course and toyed with a trifle. Nigel was at his most entertaining, blooming under their dual attention and failing to notice that neither addressed a word to the other.
It was snowing again when they left. Charles drove slowly through the quiet, whitened streets, dropping the still loquacious Nigel at their college before continuing north to Sarah’s. They said nothing. The squeaking windscreen wipers appeared to brush the same flakes away at each sweep. He drew up at the back of her college, by the usual nocturnal entrance for forbidden male visitors. Snow covered the parked cars and hung heavily on the tree branches; the street lamps showed it already obliterating his tyre tracks.
‘Rotten evening,’ he said. ‘Except for Nigel. He enjoyed himself. All my fault. Sorry.’ He switched off the engine.
She got out and shut the door without looking back, picking her way through the snow to the black wooden door in the college wall. At least she hadn’t told him not to follow. He watched as she carefully brushed the snow off the latch with her rolled umbrella before touching it with her suede gloves. She left the door half open behind her.
He followed. When he reached the door he saw she had paused on the garden path leading to her hall and was doing something in the snow with the tip of her umbrella. Still not looking back, she moved on without waiting for him. When he reached the spot he saw that she had written ‘I love you’ in the snow. It was that night, he believed ever after, that she became pregnant.
4
Now, waiting in his cell for her, he tried to remember how many years had passed before he ceased to think daily about it all. Ten at least, years in which he confided in no-one and pored over every detail until it was as familiar to him as his face in the shaving mirror. Yet he knew all the time there was nothing new to be thought.
He was excited by the prospect of seeing her again, though not because he anticipated any resurrection of the past. It was an unquantifiable prospect; he could not anticipate what he would feel, still less she. It was not, after all, as if there had been nothing since Oxford to complicate things between them.
For now, it was less the personal significance of events than their sequence that he had to get right. Yet where the facts were feelings, personal significance could not be ignored, however distant. Never blessed with the equivocal gift of prophecy, he had been sure that night in her college that she was – or would be – pregnant. It had dropped upon him like a great weight as he lay beside her in the narrow bed, propped on his elbow, gazing on her dreaming face.
‘When is your period?’ he asked, waking her.
She blinked. ‘About a fortnight.’
He had been certain from that moment but she refused to accept it for almost another two months. Normally practical and pragmatic, a woman who faced and said things as they were, she would not even discuss it, reacting with dismissive irritation when he tried. She was focussed on Schools, she said, the eight exam papers she was revising for, and had no time to worry about anything else. Whereas he thought about nothing but, and worried not at all about his own exams. Meanwhile, stupidly – amazingly now – they had simply carried on, while there grew between them the unspoken assumption that she would do nothing and that they would not marry.
But he had asked her, he remembered, almost saying so aloud to himself now as if in self-justification. It was one day when the exams had started, as they walked back across the parks to her college. They had both had papers morning and afternoon, and she felt – wrongly, it turned out – that she had done badly. She would never be a lawyer now, she said, because a poor degree in law never got anyone into any decent firm. She would have to do something else; she had no idea what, she had made a mess of everything. He tried to reassure her, but she did not respond.
‘Not to mention—’ she said eventually, and didn’t.
They walked in silence, he a pace or two behind. The university was playing cricket against a minor county. He tried to remember which, as he stared now at the cell wall. It used to come unbidden to his mind as one of those insistent, unwanted, irrelevant details, but now it was gone. God alone knew what else might have gone with it. He remembered the batsman hitting a four, then the slow ripple of applause, while asking himself whether he really meant what he was about to say.
The way it came out wasn’t much of a proposal, he acknowledged to her years later, yet he felt he had never given himself more to anyone than when he said, ‘Whatever happens, I would marry you anyway.’ She walked on without answering.
When he caught up with her he saw tears in her eyes. He wished he hadn’t said it. It was a self-centred irrelevance that solved nothing. She would still be pregnant, her future was still a mess. That was what mattered to her, he thought. The batsman was out next ball, caught in the slips.
As the baby grew inside her, they grew apart. He felt he was caught in the undertow of a great tide while she, increasingly self-absorbed, seemed content to float with it, except when his attempts to discuss it irritated her. At the end of their final term she returned to her family in Northumberland, not yet visibly pregnant and determined that the baby should be adopted. Neither he nor she had told anyone.
‘He’d have a better life if he was adopted,’ she had said one night, over a miserable Chinese meal. She seemed to take it for granted that it would be a boy.
Charles was secretly, and guiltily, relieved. ‘If that’s what you really want?’
‘It’s better he has a proper home with a couple who want him, don’t you think?’
‘I suppose it would be.’
She toyed with her rice, not looking at him. ‘I mean, we don’t, do we?’
‘I guess not.’ It felt wrong to say it, despite its truth.
She glanced at him, then looked down again and placed her chopsticks neatly on their rest, side by side. ‘Can we go?’
They spent some time together in the summer, intense, uneasy days of compromised passion that were to prove their last. When they were apart they wrote several times a week and, decades later, he still had all her letters in his flat. They would now make unproductive reading for the search team, he thought. Telephoning in those days meant having the right coins and finding call-boxes; he couldn’t use his parents’ phone without being overheard. There had been few calls and fewer visits, either way. These were difficult from the first and became more so. ‘I want to see you, but when I see you I want to hurt you,’ she wrote after one, with an honesty that made her growing hostility easier to take than the polite indifference that followed it.
Another prisoner began banging on his cell door and shouting – presumably the disruptive young man – as Charles tried to recall how he had known that she was seeing more of Nigel, who would drive down from his parents’ home in Edinburgh. She must have told him by letter because he remembered her writing that Nigel was being ‘very sweet’. Judging by her next letter, Charles must have replied intemperately – if again prophetically – since she crossly accused him of being ‘silly’.
The baby – the boy she had expected, whom she named James – was born on a spring morning of sun and showers. He was duly fostered and adopted, despite her parents’ offer to bring him up. Sarah permitted Charles to pay the foster fees,
a fairly small sum that was nonetheless gratifyingly hard to find. To his parents’ growing worry, he did nothing about a career but spent the year following Oxford in a series of labouring jobs, as if physical work might somehow assuage his guilt. It did not, but he still felt that a sentence of nine months’ hard labour might have been about right.
After that he had joined the army and Sarah went to law school, equipped with a better degree than she had predicted. Their letters became fewer and shorter. Nigel had already joined the Foreign Office. Three years later, on the very day he had started with MI6, came the letter from Sarah telling him that she and Nigel were to marry. He sent a reply which it still shamed him to recall – to the effect that he hoped they would both be as happy as they deserved – and went off to MI6 feeling that his old life had dropped away entirely.
All this, and much more, was known to his former mentor, Matthew Abrahams. It was known, too, to Sonia, Matthew’s sometime secretary and later Charles’s confidente; but to no-one else still serving apart – now – from Nigel himself. When Matthew had rung Charles in Scotland the day before Jeremy Wheeler’s call, he had come characteristically to the point, with no preliminaries.
‘This is to warn you, Charles, that you’ll get a call from Jeremy Wheeler asking you to come back for a while to help out with an old case. The case is Gladiator, who has disappeared. In seeking your help, they won’t know what they’re asking. That is, they don’t know the full story. They know only that you were his first and most influential case officer. They do not know the real reason I have instructed them to ask you. I’ll explain when we meet. If we meet.’
The voice was lighter than Charles remembered, but it was still the same precise, slightly daunting, slightly playful Matthew Abrahams he had revered and loved. Tall and stooping, with mordant humour and ruthless integrity, he had more than once been Charles’s boss and latterly, his protector, as Charles had chosen an increasingly eccentric career. Liked and respected by those who worked for him, but treated warily by peers and superiors, he was the most complete intelligence officer Charles had known. He treated Charles with an assumption of equality that Charles never believed he merited.