The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  It tasted of nothing. A mild nausea as his stomach wrestled with digesting it. It was the real reason he’d asked for a mirror, not to see his scars. He knew them as well as he knew the back of his hand. He’d shaved them every day for eight months. It was to see if he was still grey the best part of a week later. He wasn’t. But nor did he look healthy and normal. He looked sick as a dog.

  Three British officers hacked away at a lawn, created a flat if lumpy clearing and hammered wrought iron into croquet hoops. Broom handles nailed onto wooden blocks served as the mallets.

  “Need a fourth, old man. Just like bridge. Feel up to it?”

  He was clueless. He caused fits of laughter when he whacked the ball with enough force to send it fifty yards past the hoop into the long grass.

  “Bloody funny place Canada,” one of them opined. “Don’t have Dundee cake, don’t play croquet. What do you chaps do over there?”

  “We sit in our igloos and freeze our bollocks off.”

  More laughter, hoots of laughter, backslapping, thigh-slapping laughter.

  And he realised how ill prepared he was, how little the NKVD had been able to teach him and how quickly he would learn. He would learn to play the Englishman. He was certain of it now.

  A month in the country and he’d regained about half the lost weight. He tipped the scales at ten stone exactly—which made him skinny at five foot eleven. And his skin, whilst not exactly rosy, had passed the pallor of death.

  After Hanover, Hamburg. Billeted with a host of other officers at the Atlantic Hotel—awaiting a flight home. Lancasters, which his alter ego had flown—and with which he had not the faintest ­familiarity—which had pounded Germany’s cities to dust, were now used as transports. The first offer came in in a matter of days. A short hop to RAF Kelstern. Far too risky. Whilst most of the squadron were dead or missing, there was a chance the ground crew might recognise him—or, worse, would fail to recognise him. He faked a stomach ache and lost his place in the queue. It was three weeks before the adjutant out at Fuhlsbüttel found him a flight. Another stripped and impotent Lancaster—he could at least now describe one, if asked, but God forbid anyone should ask him to fly one. That moment came sooner than he thought. Low over the North Sea the pilot invited him into the cockpit to take the flight engineer’s seat.

  “You can take her in if you like, old man.”

  “It’s been too long. Very kind of you, but far too long. One forgets.”

  He wondered about the “one”—his first dropped brick. Very English, scarcely Canadian. But the pilot seemed oblivious to pronouns.

  “Whatever you say, old man. Personally I don’t think I’ll ever be able forget. I’ll be flying a Lancaster in my dreams when I’m eighty.”

  Alleyn would have other dreams.

  They touched down at RAF Wyton, only twenty miles from Cambridge.

  Cambridge suited him to perfection. He would be officially demobbed the minute he set foot on English soil. Cambridge was where Moscow had set up his first contact. They had, the NKVD had told him, plenty of willing hands and willing minds in Cambridge, still.

  “They’re idiots of course. But well-meaning, Marx-reading, Moscow-loving idiots.”

  One of the well-meaning, Marx-reading, Moscow-loving idiots found Alleyn a job almost at once. He had landed, crossed the first bridge—he had an identity, a passport, a demob suit and a job . . . B.F.C. Alleyn BSc (Toronto) of the Physics Department, King’s College, Cambridge. England looked strange to him. It was beginning to dawn on him that he did not look strange to England, that the red star riveted to his forehead was a figment of his very self-conscious imagination, that he was just another “bloke,” another middling Englishman in a decent job and a cheap suit.

  §12

  Cambridge: May 1946

  In May of 1946 Alleyn was walking home from King’s, along the backs to his digs in Sidgwick Avenue, when he came across a damsel in distress. The chain had come off the rear sprocket on her Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub and she was crouched at the side of the path with a bicycle he had heard referred to as a sit-up-and-beg lying on its side. The young gentlemen of Cambridge passed her by with not a gentlemanly word.

  “Can I help?”

  “Oh, if you would. I know nothing about bikes. I just pump up the tyres every so often.”

  Alleyn had ridden his bike all over Moscow before the war. He had a British one. A Raleigh made in Nottingham. It was the proletarian Rolls-Royce. Identical to this but for the absence of a skirt-tangling crossbar.

  He righted the bike.

  “Much easier to keep it upright. Would you mind picking up a couple of twigs?”

  She looked baffled but did as he asked, and while she held the handlebars Alleyn flicked the chain back on with the twigs. Then he held up his hands.

  “See? No oil.”

  The girl held up one of hers, black with grease.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alleyn said and fished in his pocket for a clean hanky.

  “Oh, I couldn’t. It’s Irish linen.”

  “It’ll wash.”

  She took it.

  “Then I’ll wash it. And I’ll return it to you. You’ve been so kind. You must let me buy you a coffee one day soon.”

  Alleyn got a good look at the girl. Twenty-ish, almost as tall as he was himself, a wide mouth, good un-English teeth, red hair tied up at the back of her neck and a smile flickering in green eyes.

  “I’d love to. You’re at Newnham?”

  They were so close to Newnham College, one of only two colleges that admitted women, it seemed logical that they might be neighbours.

  “No, Girton. So it really was rather important to get the bike fixed or I’d be pushing it for three miles. Look, my last exam is on Thursday morning. I’d like to buy you coffee. Do you know that little Italian place near King’s? Practically opposite King Henry’s statue?”

  He knew it.

  “Okeydokey. Shall we say half past twelve?”

  §13

  “Do I detect an accent?”

  In the café L’Ombelico del Mondo—an affectation reduced simply to The Bellybutton by the students—the redhead had been waiting when Alleyn arrived. She had taken the elastic band from her hair and was shaking it free as he crossed the room.

  “Canada. I would hope it’s rather faint by now. I’ve been here since ’38. Do I detect an accent?”

  Now one hand brushed at the liberated mop of hair.

  “Well, if you do you have very good ears. I’m from Hertfordshire. Home counties King’s English. The voice of the BBC. A quite ordinary accent really . . . but my parents are Irish. Perhaps a hint of blarney?”

  “More than a hint I think.”

  Another sweep of the hand.

  “You know, we haven’t introduced ourselves. I’m Kate Caladine, and I’m in my second year at Girton, reading English.”

  “And I’m Bernard Alleyn. I’m at King’s. But I’m not a student. I’m a demonstrator in physics. I got my degree long ago. In Canada.”

  “Hmm . . . Cambridge seems full of chaps about your age. You know, finishing their degrees now because the war sort of got in the way.”

  “Oh the war certainly got in my way.”

  “How long?”

  “Forty-two to forty-four in a Lancaster. Forty-four to forty-five in a Stalag Luft in Silesia.”

  He was, he realised, weaving quite a web. There was a limit to how much he knew about the real Alleyn simply because they had not had the time to learn or long enough with the man before he died. The first rule of impersonation was never deny a known fact and never invent a lie that can be easily contradicted by record. No one had been at all sure what the real Alleyn had been doing between the outbreak of war and volunteering for the RAF. It would have been easier had he arrived from Canada simply to volunteer in ’41. It woul
d have been a clean line. The past put safely behind him and hence behind Liubimov. But he hadn’t, and that was a matter of record. No one was even sure he had a degree of any kind, but Liubimov was a physicist, so physics it had to be, and a diploma was mailed to him from the forgers at the London embassy, together with references from a Canadian academic who had conveniently died during the war. Alleyn—the real Alleyn—had muttered about living in Edinburgh in his dying and his rambling, and it would make sense never to go near Edinburgh. He hoped she wouldn’t ask now. He hoped that ubiquitous phrase “before the war” would not be used. He had nothing prepared.

  “Oh, you poor thing. Was it absolutely awful?”

  This helped. It was the textbook response. As easy to handle as his phony birth date.

  “Not entirely. I lost weight, I learnt some German . . . and I played a lot of table tennis.”

  She laughed. The big green, Irish eyes lit up. The tangle of hair shook.

  “Physics?” she said, clearly tacking away from what she saw as a painful matter despite her laughter. “I thought all you chaps were at the Cavendish.”

  “Oh no, by no means all of us. They’re the competition. Our cheeky younger brother.”

  She laughed at this too. Her laughter reminded him that he had been starved of laughter. Crossing Prussia with the Red Army had provided moments of laughter—black, vicious laughter, an all-pervading, self-congratulatory schadenfreude . . . you were alive, some other bugger wasn’t. That was always worth laughing at. He hadn’t heard a ­woman laugh in months. Even then it would only be the college cleaners’ morning-after-the-night-before ribaldry—indifferent to his presence. Now, a good-looking woman was laughing at something he had said. Words would not describe the pleasure that rippled up his spine, down his arms, to bring his skin up in tingling goose bumps.

  Just before she left, standing on the pavement in King’s Parade, she stuck out a hand, rather stiff and manly. Surprised, Alleyn shook and found she had slipped his handkerchief back into his hand, and as she walked off in the direction of Caius with not a backward glance, he squeezed the linen and felt something firmer than cloth. It was a tightly folded piece of paper: a note.

  7 o-clock, Saturday. Arts Theatre. Major Barbara. Meet me there. KC.

  He felt a flutter in his chest, a rapid increase in his pulse rate, heard the sound of his own beating heart, and with it the roar of suspicion and the howl of fear. Who the hell was Major Barbara?

  §14

  At Christmas the same year Kate and Bernard engaged to marry. He’d met her parents at the end of the summer, out at a worse-for-wear Victorian rectory perched on what passed for a hill in Hertfordshire. Her mother talked too much to ask any question that might have foxed him, and her father, a Church of England vicar, preferred to bury himself in his study and his sermons rather than bother with most of the responsibilities of parenthood. They accepted him as who he pretended to be.

  In the New Year of 1947, Bernard sat the Civil Service entrance exam and was accepted into the top (administrative) grade. At the interview he was told that the Service was delighted to receive applications from men with a scientific background.

  “So much of it is technical these days. The War Office is crying out for chaps like you.”

  War Office? Pay dirt.

  “Won’t you be sad to leave Cambridge?” his future mother-in-law asked.

  “A little. But the only future at King’s would be to transfer to the teaching staff and to do that I would need to publish and quite possibly write a PhD. I think I have better prospects at the War Office.”

  Mrs. Caladine had smiled at this, not quite the beguiling smile of her daughter—he had used a word so telling when marrying into an English family: “prospects.” Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn not only had an identity, he now had prospects. And had chosen the word after much careful thought.

  §15

  In March he moved up to London. Cold, damp digs in Charlotte Street. A couple of fleeting, chilly visits from Kate. A constraining single bed. Winceyette sheets. Then in May she had sat her last exam. Nothing more to do.

  “You’ll be staying on for the May Ball, though?”

  The May Ball was always in June.

  “Bernard, have you ever been to a May Ball?”

  “No.”

  “Good. And we’ll neither of us be going to this one. Bunch of bloody Hooray Henries in penguin suits. I’d rather be here. I’d rather be here with you.”

  “We can’t stay here for ever,”

  Indeed they couldn’t. A senior Civil Service post proved highly ­mortgage-worthy and in an era of chronic housing shortage Alleyn considered himself extremely lucky to get a 972-year lease on a first-floor flat in Cholmondeley Road, Highgate. Mortgageable he might be, but he did not have the necessary two-hundred-pound deposit. The Rev. Caladine did and obliged. And in September 1947, newly wed, Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Alleyn moved into their new flat just in time for the coldest winter in God knows when, to huddle around a paraffin heater, hoping love might make them indifferent to temperatures in the low 20s.

  In 1949, their first child, Beatrice Perdita, was born. And in 1951 their second, Cordelia Rosalind.

  “I didn’t study Shakespeare for nothing, now did I?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. So there!”

  By 1955 Alleyn held a senior position in the Directorate of Military Operations and Intelligence equivalent to that of an army colonel; he answered to the Minister for War, dealt daily with generals, with MPs, with the Cabinet Secretary, advised select committees, nipped in and out of Downing Street, had an office overlooking Whitehall and a salary well beyond the glass wall of the thousand-a-year-man. With the housing shortage easing, Britain tentatively recovering from a war that whilst over seemed nonetheless eternal, he managed to buy the lease of the ground floor flat and put the late-Victorian red-brick and stained-glass villa back together. A house once more. A home once more. A family home.

  The day he took a sledgehammer to the jerry-built partition in the hallway that had framed the door to the upper flat he counted as one of the most pleasing days of his life. Life held many pleasing days. Days when he could put one of Virginia Woolf’s ticks on the page of life. He had not imagined life could be this way. A round of simple and not-so-simple pleasures. Austerity be damned. Rationing be damned. Life was good. The girls’ names were down for Godolphin and Latymer School. Kate gave up teaching, stayed home and reviewed fiction for the Observer. Life was too good to be true.

  His home was his castle. The Englishman’s God-given right, even if the Englishman was a complete fake.

  And his contacts never called at the house. Everything he passed from the War Office to the Soviet Union was done by dead letter boxes or clandestine meetings in London parks. His home was his castle. It wasn’t England and it certainly wasn’t Russia. Russia was dour men barely glimpsed on meeting, grasping hands and muttered half-­somethings. Russia was . . . a world away.

  Life was too good to be true . . . and it wasn’t.

  §16

  London: November 1959

  Alleyn sat in his cell and waited. There seemed to be little else he could do. They’d confiscated his belt, his tie, and his cyanide capsule—not that he would have swallowed cyanide, and after this long was it even potent any more? Who knew? He didn’t.

  He’d asked for something to read and the day copper had brought him Just William by Richmal Crompton. He read it and counted it a gap in his training that he’d never read it before. All those Will Hay films he’d been force-fed, all those John Buchan novels and Rudyard Kipling short stories, and no one had thought that the preparation for the essential Englishman might include a grasp of the anarchy of a middle-class English childhood.

  He’d asked to see his wife and had been told that would not be possible, yet.

  He thou
ght of the room as a cell—a door that was permanently locked, windows with the shutters nailed up and a permanent police presence just outside the door—but really it was the back bedroom of a Regency villa in Belsize Park used by MI5 as a safe house. At some point he was certain, he’d be taken to the cells, to Pentonville or Brixton, but not before they charged him and not before they’d finished interrogating him.

  Retired Chief Superintendent Westcott was a patient man and once he’d posed a question listened carefully to the answer, occasionally jotting something down in his notebook and courteously sharing his cigarettes.

  Alleyn answered as truthfully as he could, drawing the line at naming names.

  “Forgive me, Mr. Westcott, but what ideology I believe in is irrelevant now. It’s a matter of what I believe myself to be as a man.”

  Material was another matter. He told Westcott details, such as he could remember, of every document he’d passed to the Soviet Union, but after thirteen years the oldest memories were vague at best.

  It was three days before he was charged, and Westcott no longer being a serving police officer, the Special Branch inspector who’d arrested him on Millbank between office and home, on his way to the Underground, was called in to read him his rights and formally make the charge.

  Westcott was stuffing his pockets, gathering up his notebook, pencils . . . cigarettes.

  Clutching the packet, he opened it and, finding only two of the twenty remaining, offered one to Alleyn saying, “We might as well split these.”

  He held out his lighter and flicked it.

  As Alleyn took the first drag he said, “I know it will sound naïve, Mr. Westcott . . . but what will happen to me?”

  “That’s for the courts, but I think I should warn you that the death penalty still applies for treason.”

  His hand shook as he put the cigarette to his lips once more.

  “Really, I . . . I had no idea . . .”

  “Think of Lord Haw-Haw . . . think of young Amery.”

  “That was in wartime.”