by Len Deighton
This was my family now: three children in effect, for seeing Gloria with my children was to recognize the way that she was just a grown-up child with all the sudden changes of mood that children believe normal. I looked at her that Sunday afternoon. It was a promise of the spring to come, the sun shone from a blue sky, and we sat in the dilapidated conservatory that, more than any other thing, had made Gloria want to live in Balaklava Road. The potted plants and flowers that filled every shelf had been bought at the local garden centre but the effect was green and luxuriant, and for Gloria effect was everything.
The sun gave new life to Gloria, as it does to so many women, and I had never seen her looking more beautiful than she did that day. The sunshine had turned her blonde hair to the colour of pale butter. Her high cheekbones and wonderful teeth made her broad smile infectious and despite my misery – or perhaps because of it – I fell in love with her all over again.
Not once but often I had wondered how I would have survived that terrible time after Fiona’s defection without Gloria there at my side. Apart from working all week, studying for university and attending to the household chores she cared for my children and worried about me. Most of all she renewed my self-respect at a time when my male ego was badly bruised by Fiona’s departure.
I suppose I should have told her all this but I never did. At the bad times when I needed her most I had no stamina for such tributes, and when things were going well between us there seemed to be no need of them.
‘You can’t move, you’re in jail,’ said Sally. ‘You’ll have to throw a double six.’
‘Yes, I’m in jail.’ I said. ‘I forgot.’
Sally laughed.
I wondered if the children were aware of the difficulties that their mother’s defection had brought. They were always polite to Gloria and occasionally affectionate but there was no way that she could replace their mother. At best they treated her as an elder sister, and the authority they granted her was on that basis. I worried about them, and work was not going well. Dicky Cruyer complained that I was not working hard enough to clear my desk. I countered that I was getting too many messenger-boy trips to Berlin but Dicky laughed and said that the Berlin jaunts were one of the best perks of the job. And Dicky was right. I liked the trips to Berlin. I’d be desolated to be deprived of the chance to see my friends there.
Were all the people I’d always trusted and depended upon working against me? Perhaps I was beginning to go mad: or maybe I was far gone! At nights I stayed awake, trying to figure out what might be going on. I went to a pharmacy and bought sleeping tablets that had no discernible effect. Something more powerful would have required a prescription from a doctor, and regulations for senior staff said that any medical consultations of any sort have to be reported. Better to stay awake. But I felt more and more exhausted. By Wednesday I had decided that the only possible way of escaping from this nightmare was to talk to someone at the very top. Since the Deputy was a new boy and something of an unknown quantity this meant the Director-General, Sir Henry Clevemore. The only remaining task was to locate him; I was determined to do this before my next Berlin trip.
Apart from some spells in a nursing home, Sir Henry lived in a big stockbroker-Tudor mansion near Cambridge. In the distant past I had taken urgent papers there. Once I’d even been given lunch by the old man; a privilege so rarely granted to anyone but his immediate associates that Dicky interrogated me afterwards and wanted to know every word uttered.
How often Sir Henry came to London nowadays no one on my floor seemed to know. As far as the staff were concerned he was only to be glimpsed now and again emerging from –or disappearing into – the car of the express lift that took him to his top floor office, his face gloomy and his back hunched.
Sir Henry’s office was still there and still unchanged; a desperate muddle of old books, files, ornaments, mementoes and souvenirs too cheap and ugly to be enshrined in his richly furnished home but too imbued with memories to be thrown away.
The irrepressible and ever enchanting Gloria provided an answer to my problem when she invited a friend of hers to sit down with us in the canteen for lunch. Peggy Collier, a prematurely grey-haired lady who’d befriended Gloria right from the first day she’d come to work here, said something that indicated that Sir Henry must be in London every Friday. Peggy said that every Friday at noon she had a box of ‘current and vital’ papers ready and waiting for the D-G. It was delivered to the Cavalry Club in Piccadilly. Also I remembered that the Operations log-book showed the Cavalry Club as the contact number for the Deputy D-G every Friday afternoon.
Peggy said a special messenger brought the document box back to the office at varying times between five and seven pm. It was poor old Peggy who had to wait for the box to arrive, and then refile all the documents the D-G had been looking through. Sometimes – in fact quite frequently – this meant that Peg did not get home in time to prepare a proper meal for her husband, Jerry – spelled with a J because it was short for Jerome not Gerald – who worked as a fully qualified accountant for the local office of the Inspector of Inland Revenue and so was always home early, not having the train journey which Peggy had to endure from the office on account of the absurd rents they charge anywhere near the centre of town, and anyway wasn’t the rent they paid out in the suburbs where they lived next door to Jerry’s mother enough? And who wants a cold meal at night after a long day’s work, although by the time you’ve dished up a cold meal it has taken almost as long as cooking? And who can afford the price you have to pay in the little shop just along the road from the bus stop that stays open to midnight – it’s run by foreigners but no matter what you say those people don’t mind hard work and that’s something you can’t say about some of the English people Peg knows – but really the prices they charge for ready-prepared food. They have pork pies, cooked chicken or those foreign sausages that are all meat and Jerry likes but which Peg finds funny tasting on account of the way they are full of chemicals or anyway that’s what the papers say, still you can’t believe everything you read in the papers, can you?
‘Who takes the box?’ I asked.
‘Anyone cleared to carry “Top Secret”,’ said Peg.
‘I see,’ I said.
‘And his dog,’ said Peggy. ‘The driver takes the box and the dog. The dog walks in Green Park.’
The Cavalry Club is not one of those ‘gentleman’s Clubs’ which have been infiltrated by advertising men and actors. The only time outsiders gained access to these sacred portals was in January 1976 when members of the newly closed Guards’ Club were allowed in. The quiet dignity of this old house at the Hyde Park Corner end of Piccadilly fits well with its elite and clannish membership. Reminded of their reputation for consuming more French champagne than any comparable establishment, these clubbable cavalrymen are likely to account for it by the popularity their premises enjoy as a venue for regimental events and the private cocktail parties that are so often to be heard even in the quiet of the library.
Sir Henry Clevemore was in the otherwise unoccupied writing room when I took his document box to him. He always chose this room, which was on the ground floor. It is different to all the other rooms in the Club, for it can be entered from the street without passing through the main entrance and answering questions from the men behind the desk. Here were stored cocktail party chairs and a billiard table that the committee didn’t want to throw away. The room smelled of ancient leather and scented polish and Sir Henry was alone there. There were no cocktail parties to be heard, only the sound of buses crawling along the rainswept street outside. Sir Henry was sitting before a writing desk at the window, with a frantic wide-nostrilled charger of the Light Brigade thundering through the oilpaint above him. Beneath the vivid painting – framed and reverently positioned – there were pressed flowers collected from the ‘Valley of Death’ and a lock of hair from Wellington’s favourite charger.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Sir Henry vaguely, his arms extended to take the
document box.
‘Yes, Sir Henry,’ I said as I handed it to him. ‘I was hoping that you’d grant me a few minutes of your time.’
He frowned as I put the box on the table in front of him. It was not done of course. Decent chaps didn’t bamboozle their way into a fellow’s club and then corner them for a chat. But he managed a brief and mandatory smile before reaching into his pocket and bringing out a key on a long silver chain.
‘Of course, of course. Splendid! My pleasure entirely.’ He was still hoping that he’d misheard, that I would say goodbye, and go away and leave him to his paper-work.
‘Samson, sir. German Desk.’
He raised his eyes to me and rubbed his face like a man coming out of a deep sleep. Eventually he said, ‘Ummmm. Brian Samson. Of course.’ He was a strange old fellow, a gangling, uncoordinated, emaciated teddy bear, the bruin-like effect heightened by the ginger-coloured rough tweed jacket he was wearing, and his long hair. His face was more wrinkled than I remembered and his complexion had darkened with that mauvish colour that sickness sometimes brings.
‘Brian Samson was my father, sir. My name is Bernard Samson.’ The D-G put on his spectacles and for a moment he stared at me quizzically. This action disarranged his hair so that demoniacal tufts appeared above each ear. The lenses glinted in the light from the window. The frames were incongruously small for his long droopy face and did not fit properly upon his nose.
‘Bernard Samson. Yes, yes. Of course it is.’ He unlocked the box and opened it to get a glimpse of the papers. He was excited now, like a child with a box of new toys. Without looking up – and without much conviction – he said, ‘If we can find that waiter we’ll get you a cup of coffee…or a drink.’
‘Nothing for me, thank you, Sir Henry. I must get back to the office. I’m going to Berlin this afternoon.’ I reached out for the lid of the box and firmly and gently closed it.
He looked up at me in amazement. Such insubordination was like a physical assault, but I enjoyed the shining armour of the self-righteous innocent. He did not voice his anger. He was a luminary of the expensive end of the British education system which specializes in genial, courteous philistines. So, concealing his impatience, he invited me to sit down and take as long as I wished to tell him whatever I had to say.
There were plenty of stories that said the old man was non compos mentis, but any concern I had about explaining my worries to a potty boss were soon gone. I decided to leave out my visit to Dodo in Hampton Wick and my strange encounter with Jim Prettyman. If the Department said Jim was dead, then dead he would remain. As soon as I began Sir Henry was bright-eyed and alert. As I told him what I had discovered about the funds passed over to Bret Rensselaer’s company, and what I could guess about the way in which the money had been moved from place to place before going to the Berlin bank, he interrupted me with pertinent comments.
At times he was well ahead of me, and more than once I was unable to understand fully the import of his questions. But he was an old-timer and too much of a pro to reveal the extent of his knowledge or the degree of his fears. This didn’t surprise me. On the contrary I fully expected any Director-General stolidly to deny suggestions of treason or malfeasance, or even a possibility that any member of staff might be getting a second biscuit with their afternoon tea.
‘Do you garden?’ he said, suddenly changing the subject.
‘Garden, sir?’
‘Dammit man, garden.’ He gave a genial smile. ‘Dig the soil, grow flowers and shrubs and vegetables and fruit?’
I remembered Sir Henry’s twenty-acre garden and the men I’d seen labouring in it. In his lapel he wore a small white rose, a mark of the rural Yorkshire upbringing of which he was so proud. ‘No, sir. I don’t garden. Not really.’
‘A man needs a garden, I’ve always said so.’ He looked at me over his spectacles. ‘Not even a little patch?’
‘I have a little patch,’ I admitted, remembering the wilderness of weeds and nettles at the rear of Balaklava Road.
‘July is my favourite month in the garden, Simpson. Can you guess why?’ He raised a finger.
‘I don’t think I can, sir.’
‘By July everything that’s coming up is up. Some lovely things are ready for cropping: raspberries, red currants and cherries, as well as your beans and potatoes…’ He paused and fixed me with his eyes. ‘But if any of them haven’t appeared above ground, Simpson. If your seeds failed to germinate or got washed out in the rains or frozen by late frosts…’ His finger pointed. ‘There’s still time to plant. Right? July. Nothing you can’t plant in July, Simpson. It’s not too late to start again. Now do you follow me?’
‘I see what you mean, sir,’ I said.
‘I love my vegetable garden, Simpson. There’s nothing finer than to eat the crop you’ve planted with your own hands. I’m sure you know that.’
‘Yes, I do, sir.’
‘Our world is like an onion, Simpson,’ he said with heavy significance, his voice growing hoarser by the minute. ‘The Department I mean, of course. I told the PM that once, when she was complaining about our unorthodox methods. Each layer of the onion fits closely upon its neighbour but each layer is separate and independent: terra incognita. Follow me, Simpson?’
‘Yes, Sir Henry.’
Thus reassured he said, ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico: are you familiar with that splendid notion, Simpson?’ Characteristically unwilling to take a chance, he explained it in a soft aside. ‘Anything little known is assumed to be wonderful. The watchword of the service, Simpson…at least the watchword of the appropriations wallahs, eh?’ He laughed.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Tacitus, wasn’t it?’
His eyes flickered behind the spectacle lenses; a glass-eyed old teddy suddenly come to life. He cleared his throat. ‘Awww! Yes. Read Tacitus have you? Remember any more of it, Simpson?’
‘Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset,’ I quoted and, after giving him a moment to digest it, I took a leaf out of his book and told him what it meant. ‘Everyone thought him capable of exercising authority until he tried it.’
The watery eyes gave me a steady stare. ‘Haw! A palpable hit! I take your point, young man. You’re wondering if I am capable of exercising my authority. Is that it?’
‘No, Sir Henry, of course I’m not.’
He scratched his nose. ‘Exercising it forcefully enough to explore the substance of your fears and concerns.’ He turned his head and coughed in a quiet gentlemanly way.
‘No, sir.’ I got to my feet to take leave of him.
He looked up at me. ‘Have no fear, my boy. I’ll act on your information. I’ll root through every aspect of this matter until no shadow of a doubt remains.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ He heaved himself up to offer his hand in farewell and his spectacles fell off. He caught them in mid-fall. I suppose it happened to him a lot.
Once outside in Piccadilly I looked at my watch. I had more than enough time to pick up my case from the office, take the car to Ebury Street and pick up Werner, who’d been in London shopping and was booked on the same plane back to Berlin-Tegel. So I walked towards Fortnum’s and the prospect of a cup of coffee. I wanted just a moment to myself. I needed time to think.
There were dark clouds racing over the tree tops of Green Park and the drizzle of rain had now become spasmodic heavy showers and gusting winds. Tourists trudged through the downpour with grim determination. On the park side of the street the artists who displayed their paintings there had covered them with sheets of plastic and gone to find shelter behind the colonnade of the Ritz Hotel. As I passed Green Park tube station a woman’s umbrella was blown inside out, and a man’s wide-brimmed felt hat went flying away into the traffic. The hat bounced, a car swerved to avoid it but a bus rolled over it and a man selling newspapers laughed grimly. There was a rumble of thunder. It was cold and wet; it was a thoroughly miserable day; it was London in winter.
For some there is a perverse satisfaction to wa
lking in the rain: it provides a privacy that a stroll in good weather does not. Passers-by bowed their heads, and butted into the downpour oblivious of anything but their own discomfort. I recalled my conversation with the Director-General and wondered if I had handled it right. There was something curious about the old man’s demeanour. Not that he wasn’t concerned: I’d never seen him more disturbed. Not that he wasn’t prepared to listen: he weighed my every word. But something…
I turned into Fortnum’s entrance and went through the food store to the tea shop at the back. It was crowded with ladies with blue hair and crocodile handbags, the sort of ladies who have little white dogs waiting for them at home. Perhaps I’d chosen a bad time. I sat at the counter and had a cup of coffee and a Danish pastry. It was delicious. I sat there thinking for some time. When I finished that coffee I ordered another. It was then that I realized what I’d found odd about my conversation with the Director-General. No matter how outrageous my story and my theories might have sounded to him, he had shown no indignation, no anger; not even surprise.
I must have lost track of time, for I suddenly looked at my watch and realized that my schedule was tight. But I hurried and by the time I got to Ebury Street I was only a few minutes late. Werner – with that dedicated punctuality that is inherently German – was waiting for me on the pavement, briefcase packed, bills paid, black Burberry raincoat buttoned and umbrella up. At his feet there was a large carton marked ‘chinaware very fragile’. ‘Sorry, Werner,’ I said in apology for my late arrival. ‘Everything took a bit longer than expected.’
‘Plenty of time,’ said Werner. The driver opened the door for him and then heaved the carton of chinaware into the boot. It looked damned heavy. Werner made no comment about this huge and cumbersome item of baggage. He reached over to put his umbrella in the front seat alongside the driver and then took off his trilby hat to make sure his ticket was inside it. Werner kept tickets and things in his hatband. He was the only person I knew who did that.