The Villa Golitsyn

by Read, Piers Paul;

  The alternative – to tell Fowler everything that had happened – would certainly lead to dismissal and disgrace. Even if Fowler could control the police, nothing could hold back the pack of scavenging journalists, hungry for rich scandals in high places. He would be lampooned as a pervert and sent to prison. There would follow the humiliating search for some other employment; the embarrassment of his friends; the shame of his children; the smug satisfaction of his wife. He would prefer to kill himself than suffer such indignities, but rather than kill himself he would overcome his scruples and lie to Fowler and go on living as before.

  What if that made him a traitor in his turn? What did it signify? ‘Traitor’ was an old-fashioned word from the world of Shakespeare’s plays. One could betray governments, perhaps, but not one’s country; and even the zeal for secrecy among governments was an exaggerated fetish of politicians and civil servants. What difference would it make if Baldwin did now pass the secrets of the British and American governments to the governments of China or the Soviet Union? There was never going to be a war because both sides already knew all they needed to know – that their enemies could destroy them many times over. All the rest was a charade. What difference was made to the destinies of the Western nations by the treason of Maclean, Philby or Blake? None. None at all. And Baldwin’s espionage would do as little as theirs had done, so why should Simon destroy his life to unmask it?

  The knot of nerves in his stomach had loosened. He drove faster on the open road. What was England anyway? he asked himself. He conjured up a collage of images and memories – the Queen, the Horseguards, Hensfield House, Helen in her school uniform, the Houses of Parliament, his wife’s mother, the Ludleys’ land agent, Fowler … So what if lying about Baldwin did in some obscure way hasten the day when all these would be swept away? What did he care if there was a Communist Revolution? The weather would not change. The beer would taste the same. He would enjoy the expropriation of his parents-in-law’s estates in Dorset: he would be glad to see Hensfield House seized from its smug heir who was ‘something in the City’. Simon would not suffer from a change in regime: Popular Democracies needed Civil Servants just as much as Parliamentary Democracies. Either would give him a job and pay him a pension.

  He reached the outskirts of London, still angry that he faced such a dilemma but satisfied that he had reached the right decision.

  It was six by the time he reached home. He went from his car to a supermarket, bought some groceries and climbed the stairs to his flat. He was happy that at last he was alone with his own books, pictures and furniture. He turned up the heating and took a bath, then dressed in jeans and a jersey, made himself supper – shrimps mixed with scrambled eggs on toast, salad, blackcurrant yogurt and half a bottle of white Burgundy – and ate what he had made in front of the television.

  He remained absorbed in the drama he was watching until he dropped a blob of yogurt onto his lap. He licked the spoon and scooped it off the denim of his jeans, but in doing so noticed another stain beside it. He wondered what it was, and then remembered that a dribble of strawberry jam had dropped from a piece of baguette one morning when he had eaten breakfast in the garden of the Villa Golitsyn. Willy had been sitting next to him.

  He looked back at the screen and tried once again to lose himself in the programme, but the memory of Willy, sitting in the sun, was suddenly stronger than the images on the screen. ‘What would Willy have done?’ he asked himself; and answered almost immediately: ‘Willy would have agreed. After all, he knew it was Baldwin. If he had thought it important, he would have told me.’

  He looked again at the television but Willy, in the shadow of the cypress tree, would not leave Simon’s mind. If anything he seemed to shake his head and say: ‘Don’t be too sure, Simon, old boy. I’m an unpredictable fellow.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Simon thought to himself, ‘what do I care what Willy would have thought?’ And he concentrated once again on the television; but by now he had lost the thread of the plot, so he stood up, switched it off and poured himself a glass of Scotch whisky.

  He sat down again with The Times, which he had not had time to read that morning, but neither the newsprint nor the whisky were any more successful than the television at dislodging the image of his dead friend. So he thought once again of what Willy’s attitude would have been to his predicament. Certainly everything he had argued to himself about the demise of a certain class was in tune with what Willy had learned from E. H. Carr. But Willy would not have cared for Baldwin – the self-righteous bullying of the man. Nor did Simon. Willy would probably have told Fowler the truth and damned the consequences – pour épater les bourgeois – but as Willy himself had said, Simon embodied a different kind of Englishman: no extravagant, suicidal gestures, no crazy, Quixotic bursts of patriotic self-sacrifice should be expected of him. He must run true to form: he must save his own skin.

  He poured himself another drink and then lit one of his small Dutch cigars. For some odd reason he could not convince himself that Willy would agree with this reasoning. ‘But how the hell can I know what Willy would have thought?’ he asked himself in an exasperated tone of voice. He had contradicted himself over and over again: he would probably have referred Simon to Moses on Mount Sinai, but which of the Ten Commandments covered the Official Secrets Act? The Eighth, perhaps: Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. But why should Willy mind if he was branded posthumously as a traitor? He was dead – past caring about his reputation as a patriot. He had no family in this world to suffer from his dishonour, and there was no other world from which Willy could listen to Simon lie to Fowler; nor any Last Judgement, like that painted on the chapel wall, at which Willy could come forward and bear witness against him.

  He poured himself another drink, and repeated to himself that Willy was dead; but the more he insisted upon this rational fact the more real became the phantom of his dead friend until Simon – like Willy at Hertzen’s tomb – began to talk aloud to his dead friend as if he alone could help him. ‘What shall I do?’ he asked in a plaintive, desperate voice. ‘What the hell shall I do, Willy?’

  ‘Face the music, Milson,’ the voice seemed to reply.

  ‘I can’t, Willy.’

  ‘Never give in to a bully,’ said Willy again – not now the Willy of the Villa Golitsyn but the healthy, heroic figure whom Simon had known at school.

  ‘I must, Willy, don’t you see? A man’s first duty is not to his country, or even to his friends. It’s to himself.’

  ‘But to his soul, Simon. Not to his reputation.’

  ‘I don’t believe in the soul, Willy.’

  ‘Then call it self-respect.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Willy, let me off,’ said Simon, sitting with his face thrust into his hands, his cigar forgotten in the ashtray beside him. ‘I can’t do what you want. I can’t face the consequences.’

  ‘Don’t let me down, old boy.’

  ‘But I’ve already let you down with the girl.’

  ‘Then now is your chance to make up for it.’

  ‘I can’t, Willy, I can’t,’ said Simon again; and then clutching the bottle of whisky with both hands he stood, sobbing, and staggered to bed.

  FIVE

  When Simon reached his desk at half past nine the next morning there was already a message from Fowler asking him to report as soon as it was convenient. He went up in the middle of the morning.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Fowler – almost curtly. Then he offered him coffee in a softer tone, an offer which Simon declined. ‘How did it go, then?’ he asked, sitting down behind his desk as before and stirring a mug of coffee which had been placed on his blotting pad. ‘I hope at least that you had some decent weather.’

  ‘It was mixed,’ said Simon. ‘There were some storms …’

  ‘Yes. I heard about Ludley.’

  ‘He was with his sister and another friend.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Fowler. ‘I read about it in the paper.’

  ‘I
stayed on for a week or so to see to the repatriation of the bodies.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘They were buried yesterday in Suffolk.’

  ‘And our little business?’ asked Fowler. ‘Did Ludley say anything before he died?’

  ‘We talked about it,’ said Simon. ‘He knew what I wanted to know but he wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘Did he give a reason? Was he afraid?’

  ‘No. He said he thought it wasn’t important. He liked to tease people, you know. He was playing a game.’

  ‘A game, perhaps, to cover up for himself?’

  ‘No,’ said Simon in a slow, deliberate tone of voice. ‘I have other evidence that it wasn’t Ludley.’

  Fowler was sipping his coffee. When Simon said this he put down his mug and leaned forward on his desk. ‘What evidence?’

  ‘I saw Baldwin yesterday,’ said Simon.

  ‘Baldwin? Do you mean our Baldwin? Leslie Baldwin?’

  ‘Yes. He is the other man, I think?’

  ‘I never said so.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘At Ludley’s funeral.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He seemed to know what you had asked me to do in Nice and … he tried to blackmail me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘In Nice there was a girl – a schoolgirl.’

  A look of distaste came onto Fowler’s face.

  ‘I had thought she was more than sixteen,’ said Simon, ‘but it turned out that she was a year younger.’

  Fowler’s expression relaxed. ‘Not a child?’

  ‘No, but they took photographs – compromising photographs.’

  ‘I see.’ Fowler paused. ‘So he’s worried, which must mean that he’s still busy.’

  ‘He said that if his appointment is not confirmed, he’ll know why and he’ll sand the photographs to the press and to the police.’

  Fowler sat fingering the upper lip where once he had had a moustache. ‘Has he still got the photographs on him?’ he asked. ‘They’d be evidence …’

  ‘No. He gave the prints to me, but he must have the negatives.’

  ‘He’s not a fool. They’ll be held by someone else.’

  ‘I shall resign, of course,’ said Simon.

  ‘No,’ said Fowler. ‘Wait. It’s possible, you see, that if Baldwin is still busy then we’ll confirm his appointment anyway.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s not my decision,’ said Fowler, ‘but a spy can be useful if he doesn’t know we know.’

  ‘That hadn’t occurred to me.’

  ‘And sooner or later they’ll come back to you, if they’ve got those photographs. That could be useful too.’

  ‘So what shall I do?’ asked Simon.

  ‘Nothing. Leave it to me.’ Fowler got to his feet and came out from behind his desk. ‘I appreciate what you’ve done,’ he said, shaking Simon by the hand. ‘It couldn’t have turned out better.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I resign?’ asked Simon.

  Fowler laughed. ‘Good Heavens, no. If all our people resigned over something like that, we wouldn’t have much of a Foreign Service. But I should watch your step. All sorts of things go on in the South of France which are best not done at home.’

  Simon returned to his desk and began to sift through the papers which had piled up in his absence.

  ‘A girl phoned,’ his secretary said. ‘She said she’d ring again.’

  ‘Did she give her name?’

  ‘No. She sounded young. It might have been your daughter.’

  It had been Helen. She telephoned again after lunch to say that all was well at home. ‘I’m going to a sixth-form college in Windsor,’ she said.

  ‘That sounds much better than boarding school.’

  ‘Yes. And they haven’t sold Pixie.’

  ‘Who’s Pixie?’

  ‘My pony.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’ll come up and see you if you like?’

  ‘Later on, perhaps.’

  ‘Whenever you like.’ She sounded unconcerned. ‘Did you see the bit in the paper about Willy and Priss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was in the Telegraph.’

  ‘What did it say?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. Just the facts. But that wasn’t the point about them, was it? The facts?’

  ‘No,’ said Simon. ‘They never are.’

  About the Author

  Piers Paul Read, third son of poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read, was born in 1941, raised in North Yorkshire, and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College. After studying history at Cambridge University, he spent two years in Germany, and on his return to London, worked as a subeditor on the Times Literary Supplement. His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published in 1966. His fiction has won the Hawthornden Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, A Married Man and The Free Frenchman, have been adapted for television and a third, Monk Dawson, as a feature film. In 1974, Read wrote his first work of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which has since sold five million copies worldwide. A film of Alive was released in 1993, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. His other works of nonfiction include Ablaze, an account of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl; The Templars, a history of the crusading military order; Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, and The Dreyfus Affair. Read is a fellow and member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. He lives in London.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1981 by Piers Paul Read

  Cover design by Kat JK Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-4467-7

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  PIERS PAUL READ

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