by Winona Kent
Why now? he’d wondered. Why now?
Something, somewhere, had been lost, denied. Something he’d once had, but only in the very deepest recesses of his memory—a faint blur, like a photograph taken at the wrong exposure.
Old wounds.
Places you thought had healed a long time ago, edges knitted together like those soft spots at the tops of babies’ heads.
He drained the contents of the soda tin and, taking studied aim, consigned it to a nearby wire basket filled with similar remains.
For years he’d blamed his father for not crossing the vast, unclaimed territory that stretched between them, that rugged desert that was filled with treacherous chasms and cold, exposed ridges, unresolved anger and lost feelings.
They could meet on their common ground—acting—and they could hold civilized conversations that never once deteriorated into the kind of animosity that often plagued children of other broken marriages.
But loving one another was too frightening a thought, and the threat of it caused him to push away, hard.
He’d almost said no to his father’s request. Do your own footwork—look in your computers. It’s nothing to do with me.
He gazed down at the panorama of London spread before him, and then stood up, fingering the slip of paper in his trousers pocket upon which his father’s telephone number was written, along with the name of the tiny alternative theatre in Wimbledon Potter Maynard had last been known to inhabit.
The club, dimly lit, and in deepest, darkest Soho, was nasty. The carpet was worn, and it smelled of stale spirits and cigarette smoke, and the front door, downstairs, was guarded by a large, evil-looking man in a shiny dinner jacket. It was the stuff of Rank and British Gaumont, Mona Lisa and Minder.
“Potter,” Evan said, extending his hand. “It’s been years.”
“Good Lord.” Emerging from his booth, Potter Maynard ignored the hand, and instead embraced the entire man. “I wouldn’t have recognized you. Evan bloody Harris. What have you done with your hair?”
Evan considered his most visible feature. “It is a bit on the fiery side, isn’t it?”
“A bit.” Potter looked around, borrowed a chair from an adjacent table, and dragged both back to his booth. “When I knew you in California, you were dark.”
“I invested in a supply of black hair dye, Potter. The powers at large didn’t think that a red-headed hero would wash with the American viewing public. You’re somewhat grey in that area yourself.”
“Also bottled,” the actor replied, confidentially. “Imparts the ambience of notability and great distinction, don’t you think? Do join us.”
Potter’s table was furnished with a dingy cloth and a flickering candle inside a cheap ruby glass, and two women—neither of whom seemed remotely interested in the company of their host.
“Ladies,” Potter said. “I give you Evan Harris, distinguished actor, old friend.”
“Delighted,” one of the women replied, not sounding very delighted at all, and Evan sat down. One of the legs belonging to his chair was missing its bottom half-inch; he planted his foot on the floor, to correct the wobble.
On a too-small stage at the front of the room, a stripper who looked as though she would rather have been hoovering her floors was going through the motions, accompanied by a solitary saxophonist on a stool.
“Wine…?” Potter inquired, giving a bottle of dubious vintage a poke across the table.
“No,” said Evan. “Thank you.”
“We’re celebrating the demise of the alternative to alternative theatre,” Potter said, topping up his own glass. “We opened—and closed—in record time.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Evan said.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” Potter answered, philosophically. “It was positively atrocious. I haven’t witnessed anything quite so ghastly since my old amateur dramatic society decided to mount a musical adaptation of Norman Simpson’s Resounding Tinkle.”
One of the women snickered, and her not-delighted companion decided to seek solace in a cigarette. Her disposable lighter was being stubborn. Evan had no matches; he proffered the candle instead, and it was accepted with indifference.
The snickering woman, whose hair had no doubt begun the evening fashionably, took a compact mirror out of her handbag and checked her teeth, drawing the corner of her lower lip down with the tip of her little finger.
Behind them, the exotic dancer had finished taking everything off, and was collecting her wardrobe from the floor of the stage. She might have been picking up after her children.
Potter appeared to be about to topple into an abyss of alcoholic retrospection, and Evan wasn’t certain he was up to it.
“Why don’t we go for a walk, Potter? Get some fresh air into our lungs.”
“All right,” the actor replied, brightening. He threw a small wad of money onto the table. “Ladies—I take your leave.”
Both women seemed distinctly unconcerned.
Potter Maynard was tall and balding. What hair he had left was thin and long and, as he had already pointed out, quite grey. He reminded Evan, as they emerged at the unfashionable end of Oxford Street, close to Tottenham Court Road, of the Hanging Judge from the golden age of the Hollywood westerns. The man should be wearing a black frock coat and string tie, he thought, not a baggy green corduroy jacket and the wrinkled trousers from a long abandoned suit.
“We were divorced in 1970,” Evan said. “End of television series, end of marriage, end of California.”
“And the boys…?”
“Gwennie had custody.”
Potter digested this bit of history, then changed the subject.
“However did you find me, old chap? I’m not, as you might have gathered, quite a traveller on the beaten path of life these days.”
“My son,” Evan smiled. “Remember Anthony?”
“Clever little thing. Inordinately fond of the skateboard, as I recall. Whatever became of him?”
“He decided to pursue a career in the theatre, Potter. He’s playing in the West End.”
“You don’t say.” Potter Maynard was genuinely pleased. “I’m so glad. Do pass on my heartiest congratulations. He was dressed up as Batman, the last I saw of him. Batman on wheels, cascading down the road in front of your house in that god-forsaken Canyon.”
Evan laughed. The famed length of Oxford Street was silent, and quiet: the heart of London had gone to sleep. One burgundy-coloured taxi crept past, slowly, then rumbled away when it became apparent that the two men did not require a lift. An 89 bus—an all-nighter on its way to London Bridge—followed, and there were some tourists—Americans—unaccustomed to early nights, laughing loudly in harsh, echoing voices.
They crossed into Soho again.
“Potter,” Evan said, “I need your assistance.”
“How so, old chap?”
“Your sister.”
“Nora? Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. We’re estranged. Tried the kids?”
“I don’t believe they’d be much help either, Potter.”
“Just as well, I suppose,” Potter judged, philosophically. “I had occasion to encounter Kevin several years ago in that cardboard jungle he was calling home. Useless layabout. Perfectly capable of earning his way, yet he claims all the years under Mrs. Thatcher have made a social misfit out of him. I am incapable of sustaining gainful employment, he says.”
They walked a little further into Soho, down Wardour Street, past the darkened offices of the film distributors, equipment firms, agents and publicists.
“I’ll tell you why Nora and I don’t speak to one another,” Potter decided. “I’ve never told anyone up til now, but there’s no point in keeping it quiet anymore. That era’s over and done with. It’s all live and let live these days.”
Evan waited.
“It was something I discovered, quite by accident. In my youth—I say, in my youth, because it was centuries ago. I was quite the star in those days, invitations
to all of the social bashes. Nora had occasion to host a party. Can’t quite remember why—something superficial, I should think. A birthday. Perhaps it was hers. Anyway, I was there, along with about 100 other souls. And there was one chap in particular—a fellow Brit. I unearthed him in the garden with my sister, sharing, shall we say, a cornucopia of intimate moments.”
Evan gave the actor a quizzical glance.
“Can’t for the life of me remember his name. It wasn’t so much the act, you understand, although I thought it frightfully bad manners on Nora’s part, what with a roomful of guests not two steps inside, toasting her many happy returns. It was the substance of their conversation that I found so offensive.”
“How long were you hiding in the bushes, Potter?”
“Dear boy! I wasn’t hiding at all! I was…how shall I phrase it? Engaged in a speculative chat of my own. Lovely fellow—attached to Grosvenor Square. Wouldn’t have done at all for it to have got about, of course.”
“And Nora’s conversation…?” Evan inquired.
“It was after my newly found acquaintance had departed—back to the festivities, solo re-appearance, propriety and decency all round. Whereas, down at the bottom of the garden, our Miss Maynard was busily instructing her gnome in the fine art of espionage.”
“Instructing?” Evan said, interested. “Or issuing instructions?”
“You don’t sound at all shocked, dear man.”
“Nothing much surprises me nowadays, Potter.”
“Well, I was shocked, I assure you. I may be a liberal thinker, but I’m still an Englishman. And the activities my sister was describing to her toadstool lover were decidedly un-English. She was spying, my good man, for the other side. And what’s worse, she was encouraging the mushroom to do the same. I was altogether disgusted with her.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Potter said. “Absolutely nothing. I resolved there and then to have nothing more to do with the hateful woman. She aided me considerably in that respect some two weeks later, when she confronted me in my dressing room and informed me that should I ever breathe a word I’d overheard that evening to a solitary soul, not only would my own career suffer irreparable damage, but also that of the young American who’d agreed to meet me later, as well as three or four other gentlemen of notable distinction she’d seen fit to photograph in my company in various stages of…well.”
He looked at Evan.
“He eventually killed himself. The gnome. He was with MI5. She’d backed him into some sort of sticky corner, and he opted for the honourable way out. So now you know.”
There was, Evan thought, a distinct note of sadness in the man’s voice.
“Did you ever learn the name of this man from MI5?”
“Alas, no.”
“Thank you for telling me, Potter.”
“Not at all, dear fellow. I feel positively unburdened.”
“You wouldn’t happen to recall whether Nora knew Simon while he was working aboard the Cilla Rose.”
“What, while he was a pirate?” Potter shook his head. “More ancient history, I’m afraid. Couldn’t tell you one way or the other. I never was one for keeping close track of her comings and goings.”
They had arrived back at the street of blinking light-bulbs, sex shops and nonstop revues.
Potter was busily transferring his address and telephone number onto the cover of a What’s On he’d had rolled up in the back pocket of his trousers.
“You must look me up, old boy. Perhaps we can arrange to terrorize the West End together. I’m personally acquainted with a trio of quite dreadful cross-dressers who could easily pass for the three witches of Macbeth: our entertainment is guaranteed.”
He handed over the entire magazine.
“Another time,” Evan promised.
And he departed, leaving Potter Maynard standing alone in front of a poster for the All-Girl Revue next door.
Chapter Nine
Sunday, 25 August 1991
The afternoon was uncomfortably hot, and it was made all the more unbearable by the slow and lingering death Evan was undergoing, trapped between a pair of dirty, diesel-spewing, double-decked buses.
His one consolation was his car radio, and a BBC interview he’d been looking forward to hearing for several days.
“It’s all nonsense. There’s absolutely no glamour in spying. James Bond would have been laughed out of MI6 in a minute.”
Evan turned up the volume. Britain’s foremost female writer of spy fiction was in fine form.
“I mean,” Emma Braden continued, “can you imagine such a fellow—this highly-visible, flamboyant creature, flaunting his sexuality all over the planet, broadcasting his name, his clandestine affiliations—to all and sundry? Can you imagine how quickly the word ‘secret’ would disappear from his official dossier? The man’s a security nightmare.”
“Come along now,” the bright young broadcaster was saying. “What are you trying to tell me? That our favourite TV spies—Mrs. Peel, John Steed, Purdy—that they’re all simply figments of someone’s overactive imagination? That in spite of the obvious tongue in cheek humour, you don’t believe one word of your own best selling stories?”
“Not a tomtit,” Emma replied, magnificently, and Evan laughed.
“I can hardly believe I’m hearing this from the woman who, at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s, single-handedly imparted life to the now-legendary Jarrod Spencer.”
“I write to escape,” Emma said, “not to make sweeping statements on the human condition. Jarrod Spencer was my first fictitious hero. I surmised a very real need for laughter in what was, after all, a fairly serious predicament for the world’s superpowers.”
“And yet, after only five books, you abandoned Spencer, and pursued a new series of characters.”
“He was taken away from me,” Emma said—a slight note of bitterness, Evan thought, in her voice. “I sold the rights to an American television company, and they made episodes out of him. They gave him partners and plots—and I found that although I had created Jarrod Spencer, I no longer owned him. I judged it best to begin again.”
The bus ahead of Evan let forth a blast of superheated black diesel and lurched forward a few yards before coming once more to an abysmal stop. Evan drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
“And begin again you did,” the interviewer continued, “with a very serious tale of espionage. In your sixth novel, you wrote about a man who wanted more to be remembered for the gritty dullness of his chosen profession than the excitement inherent in his being a spy. There were no women of mystery, black-hatted and black-stockinged, with questionable ethics and dangerous motives. There were no dashing defenders of empire, no tooth-gnashing villains…no devious plots for single-handed planetary domination—”
“The true grit of espionage,” Emma agreed. “The day to day slog of international intrigue—cypher clerks and embassy typists, low grade operatives sitting outside suspect houses at four o’clock on a winter’s afternoon, recording comings and goings with the nub of a pencil in a coffee-stained notebook, while catching their deaths of a cold in an unheated Ford Escort. It was my Cornwellian period.”
The bright young broadcaster laughed. “Referring, of course, to David Cornwell, whose nom-de-plume is John Le Carré—”
“Who is one of my very favourite authors,” Emma added.
“And it’s still your contention, is it, that the charming fictitious superheroes who’ve been responsible for every single one of your best selling novels both before and after the infamous Number Six, are nothing but that—pure fiction?”
Evan imagined Emma at that point smiling—her smile betraying something of the Mona Lisa: I know much that you don’t.
“I assure you,” she said, “unequivocally—in this day and age especially, the reusable chap who ventures out, week after week on impossible missions, delivering the world from certain doom and destruction at the hands of a parade of rather colo
urful and quite laughable villains—simply doesn’t exist. Never has—never will.”
Evan could see her with a water glass, toasting the young man in triumph.
“Sorry.”
Britain’s foremost female writer of spy fiction lived and worked in organized chaos. Bundles of research sat in jumbled stacks along the wainscotting of her study, separated by elastic bands, bits of coloured cardboard, hand-scribbled notes. There were two filing cabinets, one on either side of the fireplace, old-fashioned, made out of varnished wood. Cups and saucers and late-night plates attesting to biscuits and toast littered the top of a small table, a windowsill, and the arm of a comfortable chair.
“Purging the demon?” Evan inquired, as she put away her pencils and paper.
“Conjuring him up,” she replied. “I’m thinking of resurrecting Jarrod Spencer.”
He looked at her. “You’re not.”
“I am. I’ve missed the man—he slipped away from me before I’d had my fill. He was unfinished business. He’s going to be my knight in shining armour, Evan—to rescue me from the doldrums.”
Evan smiled. He’d met her in California decades earlier, the mistress of his then alter-ego, the original creator of the solitary man with the dark hair and even darker wit, master of gadgetry and martial arts, saviour to the free world.
Jarrod Spencer had been written from a woman’s point of view—“Closet sadists,” she once labelled her gender, in another rather memorable interview. “The essential difference between male readers and female is that men like their heroes to have near-misses. Life-threatening situations from which they narrowly escape, virtually unscathed. The ladies prefer a spot of torture—nothing too dangerous, mind you—just enough to impart a semblance of suffering, from which their hero ought to be delivered in one piece—if perhaps a trifle bruised. Heroes who have suffered require mothering. That’s the secret of writing for women.”
“What did you think of my interview?” she inquired, leading him back out to the kitchen.