MI5 and Me

by Charlotte Bingham

  He thought for a minute, and as always it felt as if I could not only hear the wheels of thought going round, I could actually see them – a bit like in a flour mill. Which might be the reason why the Commander liked cakes so much. Perhaps they slowed up the thought processes?

  ‘I never knew that,’ he said eventually. ‘I never knew that there was a click. Quite a loud one, you say?’

  ‘Well, I imagine it must be loud,’ I said, backtracking quickly in case I was going to get the third degree for not being entirely accurate. ‘If all these foreign friends of hers know about it.’

  ‘Something must be done,’ Commander Steerforth announced suddenly. ‘Although what, I wouldn’t know. The boffins who go in for this sort of thing are frightfully slow. Their brains take longer to warm up than the average person’s, I always say. Tell a boffin something and they just scribble down a whole lot of numbers, and then subtract them, and then add them up again, and at the end of it you can be sure that the click on the telephones will still be as loud as it ever was. I’ve seen it in action, I tell you. As soon as they start saying X equals Y, best be on your guard. It’s all wool-pulling.’

  I nodded but my mind was on other things as I was feeling quite hungry. Arabella had discovered that the coffee bar round the corner did a mean line in Spaghetti Bolognese and I was anxious to meet her there as near to midday as possible, that being the time when you could not only get a seat, but also a reduction on the menu price.

  ‘Well now, I don’t suppose you feel you have done much, young Lottie,’ Commander Steerforth was saying when I came back to earth from my pre-lunch fantasies. ‘But you have. You have already done a great deal on inactive service. But I have to ask you once again, just to be on the safe side. Was there anything else you noticed that you might perhaps have forgotten to mention?’

  I pulled myself back from thinking about food, which as usual was difficult for me, and in an effort to look more active, I frowned.

  ‘The lady in question,’ I said carefully, ‘is very beautiful. And she drinks vodka.’

  At the mention of vodka Commander Steerforth immediately looked on high alert.

  ‘This is noteworthy,’ he said. ‘Did you note the label?’

  As a matter of fact I had noted the name on it down when Arabella had left the room only because it was in Russian. I reached into my handbag and showed Commander Steerforth the back of my chequebook, where I had written down the name in lipstick after leaving the flat.

  ‘I see.’ Commander Steerforth nodded, his expression serious. ‘This is in Russian. It must be Russian vodka. Well done! Well done indeed. You might seem to be a bit fluffy but you have the right instincts – and you know something?’

  I didn’t, but I did remember to look modest because I thought he might be going to compliment me.

  ‘You can’t make an agent, whether active or inactive. It has to be already in here.’ He tapped his chest, lightly. ‘And of course with you it is in the blood. We will trace this lipstick of yours – I mean, we will trace this make of vodka and go to the source. That will be a good start.’

  ‘I think you should try Harrods wine department. The lady in question apparently shops nowhere else.’

  ‘Good, good. More unravelling. Just what we need. Was there anything else you noted with your Eye Spy with My Little Eye eyes?’

  ‘Nothing I actually saw – but there was something else, namely a telephone call from an import–export company. Apparently they keep calling her and she has to struggle to understand their foreign accents. She finds it very dull.’

  ‘Did you note the name of this import–export company?’

  I consulted the back of my chequebook again.

  ‘Trigata,’ I told him, spelling it out slowly because the lipstick was a bit smudged. ‘They keep on ringing her up and she has no idea why.’

  Following this, Commander Steerforth sent me to Files to find out if they had anything on a company called Trigata. They had nothing. It was disappointing, but in another way good for me because he felt his inactive agent had done so well that he let her off early for lunch, to meet Arabella and talk men over spaghetti.

  Basically she had been put off them by her mother.

  ‘Mater’s attitude to the opposite sex is not what you would call everyday,’ Arabella told me, but only after we had whopped up the spaghetti. ‘What she feels about men could be written on the back of your chequebook.’

  I immediately felt I was under suspicion. Had Arabella seen the lipstick marks? I thought not, I hoped not, I prayed that her mentioning my chequebook was just a coincidence.

  ‘Yes, but what exactly would you write on it, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘Give me your chequebook and I will show you.’

  I handed it over after thanking God, who was presumably a committed anti-communist, that I had had the foresight to tear off the back and give it to Commander Steerforth to put in his safe, which he had duly done.

  After I had handed her my backless chequebook, she wrote something on the last page.

  What she wrote made dreadful reading.

  ‘Is that really what your mother thinks of the opposite sex?’ I asked.

  Arabella, at her most sphinx-like, nodded slowly.

  ‘Yes, that is what Mater thinks of men. She has told me so many times, and nothing will change her mind.’

  ‘What about your father, though?’

  ‘It was a weekend marriage, and then he went away and never came back. The war, you know. But Mater always says she had a great war, and won’t hear a word against it.’

  I frowned. I had heard people say this or variations of it before, mostly friends of my parents. Some even said ‘I had a wonderful war’, which always made me wonder what on earth they’d been doing to have such a wonderful time when there was a world war raging. My mother was able to explain it a little; although she would never really betray her own generation, she nevertheless gave intimations sometimes.

  ‘The men, you know, they needed their comforts,’ she would say, at her vaguest.

  This was a metaphor, I knew enough to realise that, but still it led me to believe that all these women who had enjoyed a wonderful war had been rushing about making hot drinks and filling hot water bottles to comfort the men, until my mother added cryptically that of course some of the women earned themselves a bit of a reputation. So that ruled out hot water bottles and cocoa, I could see. No one ever got a bad reputation for filling a hot water bottle. No – this was obviously far more to do with the kind of thing hinted at on Bognor Beach.

  ‘So would you say that your mother’s war became a way of life?’ I asked, trying to sound delicate.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ Arabella agreed. ‘Coffee?’

  The coffee was delicious, but it did nothing to make me feel better about Mater whom I now felt I was probably sending to be shot as a spy for drinking vodka with a funny label on it and taking unwanted calls from an import–export business.

  ‘How do you feel about men?’ I asked Arabella.

  ‘I don’t know any,’ she said factually. ‘Only the odd types who come to the flat and you wouldn’t want to go near them with a toasting fork. And of course the men at the Office, but they’re not really men, are they? They’re all types, which is different. Army type, Navy type, civil servant type, and so on. The men I would like to meet simply don’t exist.’

  ‘Suppose you tell me what you would like in a man?’

  Arabella looked at me and smiled. She had a smile that went up to her eyes, which I always find reassuring.

  ‘Very well. First of all he would be handsome, but not in a very overt way, as in not the door flinging open and you see a stunning face looking at you. No, no – not like that at all. More an engaging face. Large eyes, of course, and a broad forehead, which would tell you he has brains. I would like him to be tall, because tall men are less likely to bully, but most of all he would be funny – not as in telling jokes because that’s awful �
�� just funny with a squiffy way of looking at life, you know, the way some people are.’ She stared at me. ‘But then no one ever meets someone like that, do they? Funny and handsome, someone who is always doing romantic things, always thinking of things that might enchant you. Such men do not exist.’

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that Arabella might have a point.

  ‘The best men are the male heroes created in fiction – by women,’ she went on, pressing home her point as she saw that I was now thrown into some considerable doubt about the opposite sex.

  ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel, Heathcliff, Rhett Butler, Mr Darcy – all created by women, and that is because they couldn’t find a man they really liked, which made them sit down and create one.’

  Arabella looked understandably proud of the point she had made. I felt crushed. I knew I was not a very romantic person, but the idea that the only really fascinating men were created by women saddened me.

  Back at the Office I passed through the usual security checks with a smile and a joke, thinking that the afternoon promised to be a little less fraught and I would soon be back on the number nine bus and going on to a bottle party at my cousin Jamie’s flat. That was what I was looking forward to, but I had not counted on Commander Steerforth whose mill-like brain was obviously now grinding busily.

  ‘Something of great significance has come up,’ he said. ‘I have cross-referenced Trigata – the import–export business that you divulged to me earlier.’

  I tried not to look shocked. I’d had no idea that I was capable of divulging anything. It didn’t sound the sort of thing I was brought up to do.

  ‘Yes – and you are on to something there, something of great interest to us. Well done! No one suspected Trigata until now, not even the lady who was being plagued by their calls. They are a hotbed of enemy agents.’

  I looked at him, astonished.

  ‘Trigata are also the source of the vodka and caviar. They are using this import–export lark as a cover for infiltration, and the love interest of the lady in question, a certain Sergei, is a second secretary at a certain embassy. And we all know what they are.’

  I didn’t like to say that I didn’t even know what first secretaries were like.

  I must have looked blank, which was not difficult for me, because Commander Steerforth tapped his desk.

  ‘Come on, come on – secretaries at embassies are always spies. It’s de rigueur.’ He sighed in a rather happy way. ‘Yes, they know ours are and we know theirs are, and the lady in question has been entertaining this particular second secretary – this Sergei – for some months now. So Trigata, thanks to you, will now have its telephone tapped.’ He looked at me. ‘Of course you know that the lady in question is one of us?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  We both knew what he meant. She was a plant, but not the kind you saw at the Chelsea Flower Show.

  ‘She started during the war in SOE. Very brave, you know, and she’s sort of gone on from there. She was brilliant in the war. I cannot divulge more, but believe me the Office is very grateful to her, and the luxury she lives in is a very small price for us to pay.’

  I could only feel relieved that the Commander’s habit of divulging things was at an end, at least for that afternoon anyway, but even so I turned to go back to the Section with my head reeling. Arabella’s mother was a beautiful and brilliant double agent, and this despite my father telling me that he knew of very few beautiful agents except in fiction. All that business of having her on file – that had to be to fool anyone who might themselves be an undercover agent. I mean, the other side had to suspect that she was one of them. It was that simple – and that complicated.

  I couldn’t even ask Arabella if she knew what I knew. I could only assume that she didn’t. So I went to my cousin Jamie’s bottle party with several bottles of my father’s youngest wine, and I am sorry to say the party was made all the better for my knowing there was not a spook in sight. At least that was what I thought, but of course knowing what I now knew, I also knew that I couldn’t be quite sure. The truth was, whether I liked it or not, I was well and truly spooked.

  THE RUNNING BUFFET

  The atmosphere at Dingley Dell was calm, if a little grey around the edges. The calm was due to the routine into which the house had settled, this being one where Mrs Graham grumbled, my mother looked saintly, and Hal sat about looking morose, which did not suit him. His filming had come to an end, and although he had been flattered that he had been given a trailer for the first time, he hated filming and longed only to get back to the theatre, but theatre had not recovered from his last appearance, so no new offers were coming his way

  I think my father must have felt a bit sensitive about the fact that he had manipulated Hal, not to mention Dame Lily, into doing a play that had only lasted three days, but even he could do nothing about theatre managements. When an actor was on the back burner he tended to remain isolated there, until such time as something happened to change everything – which it sometimes didn’t.

  Hal was on the back burner all right, and the dreadful play from Berlin had put him there. Something had to be done, not least to relieve my mother because Hal was constantly under her feet. She complained that not only did he and Melville constantly use the telephone to ring their agents, but the agents constantly rang the house, in order to take an inordinate amount of time telling either Melville or Hal that there was no work for them.

  When he wasn’t taking phone calls, or making phone calls, Hal would sit staring blankly at the telephone. Whenever I saw him it seemed to me that he was willing it to ring with word of a new part that would be coming his way today, or tomorrow, or next week.

  ‘Really, Hal,’ my mother would say, over and over again. ‘I am sure the right part for you will happen, but not if you keep standing guard over the telephone. Much better to go off and do something else, and the moment you get involved elsewhere, believe you me, the call will come. You are far too talented to be out of work for long.’

  ‘My dear lady,’ Hal finally boomed in return to this almost daily injunction, ‘I wish that I could do something else, but I was born in a costume basket, backstage – Liverpool, I believe – and I have been trained for nothing more than acting, acting, acting. My father was an actor, my mother was an actress, and my grandparents too – all actors. I am part of a dynasty good for nothing else than becoming other people. Nothing to be done about it. I cannot now take up carpentry or welding. Or work as a postman. That would be like getting a fish to do ballet in the desert.’

  I could see that he was rather pleased with his metaphor, but since the telephone then rang and he sprang up to get to it before Melville could, there was no time for him to savour his own cleverness.

  As Melville’s musical was still running he was less of a concern, but he still hurtled downstairs of a morning to get to the telephone before Hal, and Hal still had the agony of knowing that Melville was fully employed and likely to go on being so, while Hal might never get the right part again.

  I supposed that there would be a change in his luck soon, as I also supposed that his day-to-day living costs were covered by the Office, but of course I didn’t dare ask my father if this were so. However, I did ask him if we could help Hal in some new way.

  ‘That was just what I was wondering,’ my father said with sudden warmth. ‘My thinking entirely, our Lottie.’ He occasionally called me ‘our Lottie’ when he was feeling pleased with me; and having had a Yorkshire upbringing in a windy rectory, it suited him. It went with the pipe that he always smoked when in this particular mood.

  He drew on his pipe for a while and there was the distinct sound of both of us wondering how to help Hal.

  ‘Hal wanted to be recruited because he could never get into the Army on account of his faulty feet. His mother was always cramming them into ladies’ shoes when he played girls in their touring company – as a consequence they are permanently bent. However, despite his missing o
ut on National Service, I now feel he has given a great deal for his country in terms of his career. Theatre people, you know, they don’t really hang around a flop like cats around a dustbin. Hal is off the lists of so many it is hard to see where to start.’

  I thought about this. I liked to seize any and every opportunity to ingratiate myself with my father so I looked very concentrated, and allowed a long silence to elapse.

  ‘Stands to reason that what he needs is to become more famous than he is now,’ I volunteered. ‘He needs to do something like throw himself in front of the Queen’s horse.’

  My father shook his head.

  ‘Never ask the great British public to love you if you harm even so much as one hair of a horse or a dog, or even a cat for that matter, let alone the Queen’s horse … but I do understand what you are saying. You are reaching towards some bold act that will start people talking about Our Hal.’

  It was true. I was thinking about how Hal could become really famous, but not coming up with anything. I left my father with his pipe and, since I could smell baking, went downstairs to get some cake because Mrs Graham was busy cooking for one of my mother’s ladies’ teas. Her chocolate cake being something special, I was preparing to wheedle her into making one for the Commander, who was such a good egg I felt he deserved it.

  A few days later, after I returned from MI5, my father called me into his study. He had on his grimly excited expression, which usually signified grim excitement to come.

  ‘I have had quite an exciting idea.’ I looked reverential, because that always went down rather well. ‘Yes,’ he said after one of his very long pauses, which it was always unwise to interrupt. ‘Yes. The idea is that we should help Hal by starting up a new extreme left-wing party, which he would head.’

  I frowned. This idea, with due respect to my father’s experience in spy-work, didn’t sound very exciting. It seemed more like the Steerforth Notion, a bit on the dullish side.

  ‘How would that go?’ I asked, feeling for eggshells beneath my feet. ‘I mean, for instance, what would you call it?’