Moneypenny Diaries: Secret Servant

by Samantha Kate

  He started the engine again, and within minutes we were approaching a wall of bright lights, haloing a barricade. Knots of uniformed guards stood outside, stamping their feet. I felt the fear flooding back. I willed myself to ignore it. The guards asked for our papers and, as they were studying them, two men in long leather coats came striding towards us. One shone his torch through the window, while his partner slowly circled the car, peering underneath and behind the front grille. I froze a smile on to my face, but, inside, my heart was stuttering. He started asking questions, first in Russian and then in strongly accented English, pointing his torch to my face and then slowly down my body.

  Bill kept outwardly calm, but I knew that he, too, must have been horribly aware of the other man, walking slowly towards the back of the car. I felt a lurch as he tried to open the boot, and when he failed, he appeared once more at the window, asking for the keys. Bill looked at me and I could see the suppressed panic in his eyes. There seemed to be no way out. On an impulse, I grabbed the keys and threw them through the window, into the mud-stained slush at their feet. They glared at me, a mixture of fury and pride etched on their faces. I wished I hadn’t done it. The taller man leaned towards the window, thrust his face forwards and spat, before turning and marching back into the night. His friend followed.

  Bill looked at me in amazement, then quickly recovered. He leapt out of the car, retrieved the keys and we sped away to the next barricade. We were ahead of them now, and with little obstruction, we were through that post and the next and speeding to the Finnish side. In ten minutes we were clear. Bill accelerated away, and when we had rounded the corner, stopped the car, turned and kissed me hard. Then, without a sideways glance, he drove round the corner and pulled into a lay-by, where a car was waiting. As we drew to a stop, all four doors opened and we heard cheers. Four familiar faces emerged in our headlights, walking towards us.

  Thursday, 19th March, London

  I am nearly up to date2 and already it feels as though it happened to someone else. Had I not been forced to dredge up my thoughts, I might have dreamt it into the past. With just over a week of convalescent leave to go, I will have to relive it once more, when I write my report.

  I must have slept for several hours after we crossed the border, as when I awoke, we were entering Helsinki. I found myself leaning on Bill’s shoulder. He turned his head and smiled when my eyes opened. ‘Hello there, Penny. Feeling all right?’

  ‘In another dimension, since you ask,’ I replied. ‘I prepared myself to die there. I didn’t think there was a chance of escape.’

  ‘Disappointed?’

  ‘Deeply,’ I replied, before letting my head sink once more on to his shoulder. Then, suddenly, I sat up. ‘Where’s Boris?’

  ‘In the other car,’ Bill replied. ‘Didn’t want his ugly mug to be the first thing you saw when you woke. He’s being taken directly to the Embassy. From there, we’ll cable M for instructions, but I imagine it’ll take a fair bit of diplomatic unscrambling to work out what to do with him. Apparently, he doesn’t care to return to Moscow, but the Finns won’t want him and I don’t know that we do either.’

  I shuddered. ‘That’s what he wanted all along. It’s just dawning on me. All the questions about the Office, they were to soften me up for the big one. He needed to get out. I was his passport over the border. That was why …’

  ‘Why what?’

  For some reason, I didn’t feel ready to talk about Pa’s grave. I smiled at Bill. ‘Nothing, though I wish he’d just asked. It would have saved me a lot of pain.’

  ‘And if he had?’

  I suddenly saw Boris, R’s killer, begging to be helped across the border. I shuddered.

  ‘I’d sleep better if I never saw him again – but there are some questions I need to ask him.’

  Bill looked surprised. ‘Not today. You’re going straight to bed, as soon as the doc’s given you the once-over. You’ll be back in London in no time. Then we’ll see about your friend Boris.’

  I didn’t have the energy to argue. For the next few days, Bill cooed and fussed over me like a mother dove. I slept most of the time: I hadn’t realised quite how exhausted I was and what luxury it was to be able to close my eyes without fear of someone breaking down my door. I spoke to Helena on the phone, and James and M. Bill had thoughtfully brought a suitcase of my clothes with him from London, and it was wonderful, when I got up, to feel silk and cotton against my skin again. A huge bunch of flowers arrived from the Powder Vine and generally I was treated like a cross between an invalid and a heroine.

  I thought about Pa incessantly. Had it really happened? Was it a dream or had I seen his grave and touched the initials he had carved by hand? I needed to know. I needed to talk to Boris.

  After a few days of cosseting, I’d had enough and, when Bill once again insisted that there was no way I could see Boris in Helsinki, I asked to be taken home, where I am now, with Rafiki at my feet, looking out at the first buds of spring on the chestnut-trees outside my window. I went into the Office to see M the day I arrived. He was happy enough to see me, I think, though said nothing of the sort, instead ordering me home to rest. Life returns to normal on Monday. I’m off to Cambridge this weekend to help Helena get ready for the wedding next Friday. I thank every deity for giving me the chance to be there.

  I am filled with the glorious, tangible feeling of being alive. The last few months have been an extraordinary mixture of horror and exhilaration. I failed to bring Philby home, but I think I found my father, at last.

  April

  From Moscow, I travelled to St Petersburg by train, as my aunt had done when it was still Leningrad, and from there I hired a driver to take me to the Finnish border. Again, I found the changes to be superficial; the landscape and geography were reassuringly constant. I made the driver stop in Zelenogorsk, where I, too, felt the stares of every pair of eyes. The opening up of Russia, it seems, has not spread far from the major cities. As we wound our way through the pine and silver-birch woods on the road to Finland, following the shore of the frozen sea, I couldn’t help but wonder whether, down one of the hundreds of small tracks that branched off to either side, I could have found my grandfather’s forgotten grave.

  I returned to London excited and invigorated. Russia had worked some magic on me, and I now saw my new home city in a different light: not dull grey, but a subtle shade of dove – like a week-old bruise. I still missed Cambridge, and something bridled inside me whenever I thought of my abrupt dismissal, but I was beginning to feel comfortable in the anonymity of London.

  I wrote to Rufina Philby. She had made a real impression on me, with her integrity and quiet dignity. Sitting there, in Burgess’s old chair, among Philby’s four thousand books, talking to his wife, I’d felt a closer understanding of what my aunt had experienced.

  Jane Moneypenny’s friend Eleanor Philby left Moscow in 1965, after discovering that her husband was having an affair with Melinda Maclean. By that time, she was desperately unhappy, virtually confined to her flat, prevented from working, and still unable to speak the language. I believe she never recovered from hearing that the party was more important to him than any living person. She went back to northern California and wrote a curiously moving and generous account of that traumatic time: Kim Philby: The Spy I Loved (1968). The following year she died of emphysema.

  Philby’s ménage with Melinda Maclean didn’t last long. She returned to her unhappy marriage, while he eventually found lasting happiness with Rufina. He stayed in Moscow, reading The Times, following the cricket scores, and spreading Frank Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade on his toast. His devotion to the party never publicly wavered, though the KGB remained wary of him until the end, never according him the position or the trust he’d hoped for, and believed he’d earned. Only once, in July 1977, was he invited to the KGB headquarters – now south of the city centre, in Yaseveno – to give a lecture to an audience of more than three hundred officers.

  He was trapped in a ha
lf-world, between hero and burden. In the ‘New Moscow’, I visited the KGB Museum on the second floor of the Lubyanka. There I found myself transfixed by a display window devoted to Philby: photographs of him sitting in Burgess’s same wing-tipped chair, a medal – the Order of the Friendship of the Peoples – a pipe, and a place mat depicting a scene of Pall Mall. The former KGB colonel who showed me around called him ‘the most remarkable counter-espionage agent the KGB had in the West’. But only in death had he finally found full acceptance.

  According to his friend Mikhail Lyubimov, when he was alive he was a problem to the KGB, and an expense. He was kept under constant surveillance: his flat and telephones bugged, his correspondence monitored, and a log kept of every contact he made. ‘Until the day he died, the KGB lived in terror that Philby would go too far in talking to a British journalist – or, worse, announce that he wanted to return to Britain; what a blow that would have been to Soviet prestige,’ Lyubimov wrote in an essay on Philby entitled ‘A Martyr to Dogma’.

  Philby was careful never to cause trouble – the devoted servant to the day he died, on 11 May 1988. But the KGB’s tight rein drove him crazy. ‘When he talked about the veil of secrecy in which he had been wrapped in those early Moscow years, his stutter became more noticeable and his eyes burned with rage … No normal human being could possibly envy Kim’s life,’ Lyubimov maintained. ‘I am convinced that Kim missed England, even though he was at pains to hide this from even those close to him. He was an Englishman to his fingertips.’

  Perhaps, then, his flight north with my aunt was not merely a deception, but a fantasy.

  Six weeks after I was unceremoniously dismissed from the Department of History, I was invited back to the university for a meeting. I was tempted to refuse: my pride had been shattered, and I had no desire to beg the forgiveness of my former boss. But I wanted an opportunity to state my case and to make my peace, if not with the university, then with my home town.

  At the end of March, I caught a train bound for Cambridge. Drawing into the station, I found myself smiling at the familiar landscape, the calm immutability of the flat fields and lazy rivers. The department head was waiting for me in his office, flanked by his secretary and the senior professor who, months earlier, had warned me against making ‘unsubstantiated allegations concerning matters about which you have no proof’. As I sat in a lone, high-backed wooden chair facing them across the table, I felt as if I was back at school in the headmistress’s office.

  ‘Dr Westbrook,’ he began. ‘There is some feeling in this department that you have been unfairly treated.’ I made no response, and he continued. ‘While you indisputably contravened a number of university laws, which in anyone else would be an unforgivable offence, in view of your youth, and in memory of your late father’s eminence, we would like to offer you the opportunity to regain your junior lectureship.’

  ‘If what?’ I asked. It was clearly not a string-free proposition. I had a suspicion what they wanted, and I needed to hear them say it.

  He gave a quick glance at the senior professor, who was staring fixedly at me. ‘Well …’ He cleared his throat. ‘In view of the not inconsiderable embarrassment that your book is causing the department in certain’, he cleared his throat again, ‘government circles, we have agreed to reinstate you with immediate effect, on the understanding that you desist from publication of The Moneypenny Diaries.’

  It was my turn to smile. ‘Sir,’ I said, in what I hoped was a suitably humble voice. ‘I am very grateful to you for your offer. However, I cannot accept, and I wish you had sufficient regard for my integrity as an historian, and’, I flashed him a look of contempt, ‘my father’s daughter, to realise that I would never publish something that I believed to be an untruth. Furthermore, I object vehemently to being blackmailed by an institution that I believe has something to hide, but is unprepared even to answer my phone calls – preferring to threaten me’, I turned my gaze to his colleague, ‘through so-called back channels.’

  At that I stood up and left the room, breaking into a run as I scaled the department steps and emerged into the weak sunshine of a spring day. I ran blindly until I had no breath left, and when I slowed down I found myself on the road to Grantchester, and home. I walked on, and when I reached that dear, familiar cottage I sat on the verge outside and started crying. I cried for my mother and father, for Aunt Jane, for Eleanor and Kim Philby, and finally for me.

  Why were they out to get me? I ran my brain back through everything I had learned about the Philbys and my aunt’s botched attempt to bring them home. That, surely, was not enough to merit a gagging now, forty-two years later?

  Wednesday, 1st April

  I knew I couldn’t count myself fully back in the Office until I’d run the gauntlet of the Powder Vine. M may be the Chief, but Janet, Pamela and the girls are the inquisitors. They’re indefatigable; X Section would be fortunate indeed to have them. I managed to put it off for most of the day.

  M arrived at the Office on the dot of nine and walked past my desk with the briefest of greetings and his habitual demand for the signals. When I took them through, he read them and then, without looking up, dictated a slew of replies. ‘See that they’re sent pronto, Miss Moneypenny,’ he said as I walked towards the door. I’m not sure what I was expecting – certainly not roses – but I was so happy to be back that I felt like waltzing straight up and planting a kiss on the polished bald patch on the top of his head. I didn’t of course; I just went along with the pretence that I’d never been away. Stupid of me to have thought he might have changed in anyway. I’ve seen a thousand people walk in and out of that door and M has always been just M, captain of this ship and inspiration to us all, but not a man to show outward emotion. I wonder whether he called Joanna ‘Miss Moneypenny’ in my absence?

  Throughout the day, friends from all over the building found excuses to stop by my desk. Bill devoted much of his time to fending them off, hustling up to the door at the hint of a visitor and then glaring at them until they buzzed off. It was a fine role reversal. Over the past few weeks, I’ve discovered a number of new sides to Bill.

  I think he had sensed my reluctance to face the Vine, as at five to one he strode through the door and bore me off to lunch. While I’d been away, spring had sprung. We stopped by Franco’s for sandwiches and took them to the park. With our coats on, it was warm enough to sit on the wall at the Palace end of the pond.

  ‘Thank you for inviting me to the wedding,’ he said. ‘Can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it.’

  ‘You already have, dear Bill, about a hundred times. It was both a pleasure and a comfort to have you there.’

  ‘To be welcomed into your family, I can’t tell you …’

  ‘You have. Instead, please tell me about Boris.’

  ‘No need to worry about him. He’s quite safe and he’ll never come near you again.’

  I felt the relief well up inside me. ‘I still dream about him,’ I said. ‘The greater part of me would be happy if I never saw his face nor heard his voice again. However, there is something I need to ask him. I don’t suppose I’ll ever have the chance now. Where is he?’

  Bill looked over my shoulder as if considering what to tell me. Sometimes, I feel that he treats me like the younger sister he never had.

  ‘Don’t mollycoddle me, please. Just tell me.’

  ‘Still in Finland. He’s due to be transferred to London next week, where he’ll be held in custody.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m not at liberty to say.’

  ‘Bill, I need to know. It makes it easier, somehow. Otherwise, I’m going to start seeing him round every corner. If you don’t tell me, I’m going straight to M to tell him that you disobeyed his strictest orders and drove alone over the border to find me.’

  He sighed. ‘Nothing’s fixed yet, but I assume he’ll be taken to X Section for debriefing.’

  ‘Thank you. And Bill …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I would
never have told M.’

  He sighed again. ‘I knew that.’

  We bumped into James on our way back in. He picked me up in his arms and swung me around like a child on a maypole. Then he gave me a long kiss on the lips and laughed. ‘Well, well, well, and so the prodigal has returned.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, 007,’ I said, with an attempt at a disapproving frown. Bill was standing behind him with a strange look on his face. I smiled at him and James turned around.

  ‘Bill, old chap. What have you been doing – stealing my favourite girl for an illicit lunch?’

  He forced a smile. ‘Something of the kind, yes.’

  ‘Well, hands off, she’s mine. Aren’t you Penny?’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I’m not too keen on the harem idea. Judging by the rows upon rows of glamorous women weeping at your memorial service, it’s a growing concern. By the way, how’s Mary?’

  He had the grace to look abashed.

  ‘The picture of domestic contentment in her pretty little villa on the hill. You know, Penny dear, it would be a lucky man indeed who placed a ring on Goodnight’s finger.’

  I felt an involuntary and surprising stab of jealousy. He must have read it in my face as he laughed. ‘Just not me.’

  We all joined in, but I could see, behind Bill’s eyes, a hint of sadness.

  At six, when M had told me to go home twice, I knew further delay was impossible. I could have made a bolt for the front door, but that would have just delayed the inevitable and, if the truth were to be told, I was itching to get back in the thick of the Powder Vine gossip. I just didn’t want to be the subject of it.

  As I had suspected, no one had gone home. They were all there, lined up by the basins, waiting for me. When I walked in, they broke into applause. ‘Hail, the conquering heroine,’ said Janet. ‘Welcome back, we missed you – but why so thin and wan? Where’s that suntan you promised us? Surely, after ten weeks of “leave”, at the very least you could have come back with a few freckles? Maybe it wasn’t quite so hot where you were?’ She gave her best arch smile as the others looked on, like a company of gannets waiting for their feed.