The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  ‘Very well then.’

  She walked with him to the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For tonight. For dealing with that awful man.’

  Fleming walked home through streets strewn with rubble and debris. Piles of bricks here and there, heaps of broken glass swept into the gutters. Scraps of paper fluttered through the smoke-scented air; the morning birdsong trilled harsh and neurotic. He passed a ruined house that was not much more than a scorched shell, yet it revealed part of one wall still intact, with wallpaper, fireplace and a framed print still tacked above the mantelpiece. The city turned upside down, all of its secrets rudely shaken out.

  Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem. The rhythm of his stride tapped out its maddening aubade. His mind was hungry for dreams. Reality was always far too complicated. He felt a quiet fury at how action had once more been frustrated by doubts of conscience and official procedure. The hesitation when he’d pointed the gun, all the bother of waiting for the Special Branch to turn up, the banal chatter with Miller. Why couldn’t he have just killed the man and made love to the woman? Already he was returning to his mental refuge, the simple narrative of fantasy. Soon he would be trapped in the martial bureaucracy of Room 39, or sulking in his study where his rare books would taunt him from their shelves. But for now he had a storehouse of ideas, of characters and settings, and he would save them up. For the day when he came to write it all down.

  Miller washed her face and walked into the bedroom. As she pulled back the heavy blackout curtain, a column of light slowly stretched across the floor. Her eyes watered slightly as she blinked against the brightness. She looked at herself in the mirror, a trace of a smile on her pale lips. Fleming’s diffidence had made her bold. She had enjoyed playing with him. She might even have slept with him if he’d been brave enough to stay. She picked up a lipstick and held it to her mouth. Her hand trembled. What had she been thinking earlier? About the Political Warfare Executive, that was it, the strange notion she had had that maybe they had set up the whole incident. An outlandish idea but there were some things that just didn’t seem to make sense. She finished applying the deep red to her lips and then pouted at her image in the looking-glass. As she put the lipstick down she noticed a trace of white on the dresser. At first she thought that she must have spilt some powder there. As she looked again she saw that it was the letter M lightly chalked on the polished woodwork.

  8 / DEBRIEFING

  M made a show of casually filling his pipe when she entered but he was looking up at her all the time. She knew that he would be carefully gauging her expression, noting her reactions to any comment or gesture. He had often said that he could read her mind. It had been something of an endearing joke between them. He certainly believed in the faculty of extrasensory perception. It had now become the instinct of a bitter intimacy. And yet the most shocking thing about the whole affair was that she still felt a lingering affection for him. His very duplicity gifted him with an indestructible charm. Perhaps it was this quality that had attracted her to him in the first place. It had certainly made him a formidable spymaster. He intrigued and exasperated her and yet she felt a protective anxiety about him. She knew that deep down he was more scared than she could ever be.

  ‘I’ve had a good look through the Special Branch report,’ M declared, tapping the cardboard dossier on his desk. ‘Anything you’d like to add?’

  She had prepared herself thoroughly for this strangest of debriefings. She knew that it would be a coded match, that to say anything explicit would be dangerous. She tried to judge what signals to give.

  ‘Well, I did voice my concerns about my suitability for field work in this area, M.’

  ‘And you were absolutely right, Joan. I mean, you could find yourself in danger again, couldn’t you?’

  She tried to react as calmly as possible to this tacit threat. She knew now that he had set the whole thing up as a message to her. A warning shot. Despite the implied brutality, she felt sure that he did not mean her any real harm. It was merely a petulant reminder of his power over her. Now they were caught up in a self-generating algebra of distrust. A farcical algorithm: that she knew that he knew that she knew that he knew and so on. She had to find a way out of that, to let him know that she could keep a secret.

  ‘There’s been a security risk,’ she offered. ‘And we’ll have to proceed with extreme caution.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ M rejoined.

  ‘The important thing is that proper cover is maintained, for everyone in the department. For this operation and any other.’

  ‘Yes,’ M agreed with a thoughtful nod. ‘Proper cover must be maintained.’

  Of course she had been his cover for that long double game of his life. She loathed the deception that he had practised on her but could not help but respect the way that he had carried it out. This capacity for deceit and utter ruthlessness had become necessary for the times they lived in.

  ‘It’s been a wretched business, Joan,’ M said with a thin smile. ‘But you’ve acted with initiative and, might I say, with extreme discretion. I’d like to put you out of harm’s way for a while. You’re due a bit of leave. Take a couple of days off.’

  ‘That’s hardly necessary, M.’

  ‘Please,’ he insisted. ‘It’ll be for the best.’

  ‘Very well then. Thank you.’

  It would give her time to think, she reasoned. She could not go on being his cover for much longer but to ask for a transfer now would never do. She would have to find someone to replace her first. She took a good look at Maxwell Knight. The epitome of the English gentleman of a certain class, the finest dissembler on the face of the earth. He could lie from the depths of his soul. His flair for espionage was at one with his odd occult beliefs and clandestine sexuality. But it suddenly struck her that this perfidious world could one day be tricked by its own guile. That this theatre of treachery, of disinformation and counter-intelligence would inevitably deceive itself. M put his pipe to his mouth, clenched his teeth around it and lit a match.

  ‘Now,’ he puffed, drawing in the flame, his gaunt visage wreathed in smoke, ‘17F should be here by now. Can you show him in?’

  Joan stood up and walked to the door. She was light-headed from lack of sleep. Her nerves were shot but she knew that she had to keep calm and carry on. Like everybody else. A minor character in the drama, playing out the simple surface rituals. Going out into the ante-room to engage in a silly flirtation with the handsome commander from Naval Intelligence.

  2

  the female pope

  When Anna asks you about your sister, you know it’s serious.

  And this is your chance to make your confession. To tell the story of Jenny.

  The sister you got rid of all those years ago.

  Jenny was the creative one in the family, you say. We grew up in the suburbs, a nice upbringing but, you know, boring. Jenny always made things seem more exciting than they really were. She was a punk before anybody else we knew. She went to Slough Art School and then dropped out in the second term. She left home and moved to London.

  You stop for a moment and glance across the table at her. Anna Guttridge. A harsh name for someone so pretty. You met her at Andy Begg’s party. You flirted with her and she seemed interested. You talked about the 1980s: it’s some sort of project of hers. You meet for a drink and it turns out that she’s a writer, researching a book on the New Romantic scene or something. And she knows about your sister. Usually Jenny gets written out of that story. Maybe because she never played the game with the press. And it’s her voice in your head, saying: Johnny, she’s a journalist, of course she seems interested in you, but she’s only interested in the story. You want to reply that you can’t help yourself, that you have to take every chance you can get. It’s not easy, you know. Jenny never foresaw how hard it would be for you. To get close to people.

  And in order to get
close to anyone you’ll eventually have to tell them what happened to your sister. What you did to her. And you hope, well, maybe this time they’ll understand. At least Anna seems interested in Jenny in the first place. And despite everything you do want to keep her memory alive. You owe her that much. You continue: in 1978, 1979, Jenny was moving around. She ended up squatting in this big terraced house in Islington. She was singing in a few short-lived punk bands.

  Where did she get the name Pirate Jenny? Anna asks. You tell her that it came from this Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song about a servant girl in a port town who dreams the pirates are going to come and kill all her masters. Jenny used to say that our only honest sense of utopia is dreaming of a dystopia for our enemies, that we want vengeance as much as we want redemption. Anyway, she’d got hold of this buccaneer outfit that had been hired from Berman’s and Nathan’s in Shaftesbury Avenue and never taken back. This was a good two years before Vivienne Westwood had a runway show of her first pirate collection and well before Adam Ant started his swashbuckling act. Sartorially, Jenny was way ahead of the game. And in other ways, too.

  How? Anna asks, and you watch the quizzical curl of her top lip, the blue-green eyes that seem slightly out of focus, a smatter of tiny freckles around her nose. You marvel at the beautiful curiosity of her face.

  Well, you know, right after punk no one was sure what was going to happen. Jenny had plenty of ideas. Then Anna asks: and where were you around this time?

  And there’s that voice again. The voice in your head telling you to be careful. Jenny’s voice. She’s still looking out for you, despite what you did to her. You’ve got to be careful how you tell her story. You don’t want to scare Anna off. You got away with it after all these years but you still remember those questioning looks you used to get when you first started going out after she disappeared. The looks you still get sometimes.

  Oh, I was still living at home, you say. I used to go up and stay with Jenny some weekends. When she got the band together, you know, Black Freighter, I used to roadie for them.

  This is not quite the truth but not exactly a lie either.

  Black Freighter, right. Danny Osiris’s first band.

  Oh no, you correct her. It was always Jenny’s band.

  Sorry, it’s just—

  I know. Danny’s such a big star now. But back then he was still Danny Ogungbe. It was odd because when they met they were living in the same street. Almost next door to each other. With a Nigerian father and a Polish mother, Danny was a working-class soul boy who still lived with his parents in a two-room flat with no bath and an outside toilet. That part of Islington was pretty squalid back then. That’s why there were so many squats in the area, you know, a lot of empty houses declared substandard by the council. Anyway, Danny was a bright kid and very good-looking — the combination of African features with pale skin and fair hair made him appear quite other-wordly. He’d grown up on the wrong side of the Essex Road but he was full of dreams. He’d done acting classes at the Anna Scher school and had taught himself to play jazz-funk on a battered old Fender copy. And he had this fantastic soul voice. He started going around to Jenny’s squat to practise. They both knew other musicians so a band began to take shape. It was Jenny’s idea at first, it was her project. The Black Freighter was a ship of fools come to liberate the world from reason. She’d got hold of a Minimoog, one of those early analogue synthesisers that played only one note at a time, which was actually ideal for Jenny. She was never that musical, you see. But she was full of ideas and she wrote fantastic lyrics. The idea was to be adventurous without being self-indulgent. They were plugged into that post-punk, year-zero feel.

  But Black Freighter didn’t last very long, did it?

  No. Jenny always wanted to be experimental. Danny, well, he had his eye on the main chance. Who can blame him?

  So was it musical differences that split the band up?

  That old cliché. No, it wasn’t that. Jenny and Danny carried on writing together even after the band fell apart. That bit always worked, you know, his music, her lyrics. No, it was in the attitude that they parted company.

  The attitude? Annie asks. She has thick, dark eyebrows that intersect in this fantastic frown. And you wonder about her attitude. She’s intrigued by you, you can feel it. But maybe she suspects something.

  Yeah, the attitude, you repeat. Jenny was more into a sort of performance art aesthetic. She became part of the gender-bender scene, except she took it one step further. Boy George and Marilyn had this simple gestalt, you know, boy looks like girl. Jenny liked to dress so that no one could tell if she was a boyish girl or a girlish boy. She wanted to keep them guessing. The pirate has no boundaries, she used to say.

  That’s cool.

  You look straight into her turquoise eyes and watch the inky pupils dilate. You search for some sort of signal from her. Like a lovelorn teenager. But then you are a late starter. You’ve had a sort of second adolescence in your thirties. At an age when most people are ready for a mid-life crisis, you’re still stuck in puberty.

  Tell me about that time, she says, holding your stare.

  Why are you interested in this stuff?

  Well, it’s fascinating, I guess.

  And it strikes you that maybe she thinks you’re gay. It’s a common enough mistake: people see the goatee, check the slightly fey demeanour. Maybe her interest in you is just a faghag thing.

  Yeah, well, Jenny could get extreme about gender politics but she was an idealist really. She dreamt of a world where none of it would matter. She spent a lot of time in the clubs, you know, Billy’s and the Blitz. The beginning of that New Romantic thing was fabulous.

  And that’s when she ended up in the David Bowie video?

  You laugh out loud.

  What? she demands.

  And you love the way she can smile and frown at the same time. And you want to tell her everything.

  Look, Anna, you say. About gender politics.

  You stop. You feel that you’re about to make a complete fool of yourself. You know you’ve got to be careful. If she finds out too early it could blow everything. You stand up.

  What is it?

  You want to say, but you’re not ready yet.

  I’ve got to go, you tell her.

  Johnny, whatever’s the matter?

  You start walking and she follows you out of the bar. Outside on the street you turn to her.

  Look, this is really stupid. I know you’re only really interested in Jenny but—

  But what?

  I’m interested in you, Anna.

  She smiles.

  Well, the feeling’s mutual.

  Yeah? You can hardly believe it.

  Yeah.

  And she kisses you gently on the lips. You get all excited but you know you’ve got to take your time over this.

  Then meet me here tomorrow night, you tell her. And I’ll tell you the story about the David Bowie video.

  The next night you pick up where you’d left off.

  It was a complete disaster, you say.

  What happened?

  Bowie had come down to Blitz one night, unannounced. Can you imagine? There was an uproar. Every single person in that club would have had his poster on their bedroom wall as a kid. He’d been sneaked in around the back and was upstairs in a private room. Everyone wanted to go up and see him. Especially when word got round that he was looking for people to appear in his next video. Jenny was in with Steve Strange, you know, who ran Blitz. He’d already been picked, so she managed to blag her way in. It had been decided that the costumes should be space-age ecclesiastical: dark flowing robes and gothic headgear. Jenny got into a conversation about Gnosticism with Bowie. She told him how she knew that his song ‘Station to Station’ was about the Kabbalah, and mentioned some other occult influences in his work, the Crowley references and so on. He was impressed, if a little wary. She got chosen to be in the video.

  The pick-up was for six o’clock the following morn
ing outside the Park Lane Hilton. The club didn’t close till two-thirty so Jenny just took a bit more speed and kept going until dawn. So, she was a bit wired when the coach turned up to take them to the location, which was on a beach in Southend. Bowie was in a pierrot costume, walking along the shoreline, followed by Steve Strange, Jenny, and two other girls in their robes with a bulldozer coming up in the rear. It was a simple enough set-up but it needed to be precise so people had to concentrate and follow their marks. Jenny was very talkative, from the excitement, the lack of sleep, the amphetamines, and, well, she was going a little bit mad. At first she was charming, you know, raising the energy of the shoot. Clever, too, she talked about the costumes and their meanings. She started to bang on about archetypes, saying Bowie was the Fool in his jester’s motley and she was the Female Pope in her ceremonial gown.

  She soon began to get tiresome. In between takes she insisted on engaging Bowie in an intense conversation that he clearly wasn’t keen on. Jenny had no idea how annoying her behaviour was becoming. The final straw was talking to Bowie about the notorious incident at Victoria Station in 1976, when it was alleged that he had made a Nazi salute. Well, he certainly didn’t want to be reminded of that. But in some mad way Jenny thought she was reassuring him, like she was doing him a favour by bringing it up. She announced rather grandly to him that she knew that it hadn’t been a fascist gesture he was making, that it was the sign of Baphomet.

  The sign of Baphomet?

  Yeah, it’s some hermetic thing. You raise your hand towards heaven, then you lower it to point to the earth. It’s supposed to connect the two. It means: as above, so below, or something like that. From Kether to Malkuth, she kept chanting. There she was, manically demonstrating this sacred sieg heil to David Bowie on a beach in Southend. Well, that was it. She was hustled off the set and paid off with the fifty-pound fee. She never actually appeared in the video, though her memory distorts on that one. She was convinced it was her up there, and when ‘Ashes to Ashes’ came out, she even told everyone she had helped with the choreography. There’s this bit where Steve Strange lifts his arm and makes this bowing movement. But it isn’t the sign of Baphomet. He’s moving the hem of his robe so it doesn’t get caught in the shovel of the bulldozer.