The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “Really, Mr. Alleyn, you think the Cold War isn’t war?”

  “No, I don’t think it is.”

  “They were British subjects who betrayed their country. No different from you and what you have done.”

  For a few stretched moments they smoked in silence. Alleyn had known he might come to this bridge one day or the next and had no idea if he would ever cross it. But Westcott made it easier for him.

  “Spit it out, man. There’s something. I know there’s something.”

  “I am not a traitor.”

  Westcott sighed.

  “I am not a British subject.”

  “What?”

  “I am not a traitor, I am a spy. My name is Leonid L’vovich Liubimov. A captain of the KGB, or at least I was the last time I checked.”

  Westcott turned to the policeman.

  “Sorry to ask this of you, George, but would you mind nipping out for some more fags? Forty Capstan. And ask the lad downstairs to put on a pot of coffee.”

  Then he turned back to Alleyn, motioned him to sit with a hand patting the air.

  “Shall we begin again, Mr. Alleyn?”

  §17

  “Lies, Bernard! Lies!”

  Alleyn knew it would be like this and had dreaded it whilst hoping for it. It might just have been better in the safe house or in a room at Scotland Yard, where everything was not naked brick and two shades of mud, but his captors were offering him no favours and his first meeting with his wife since his arrest was in a visiting room at Brixton Prison, where he was on remand awaiting trial.

  “I can only say I’m sorry.”

  “You have lied to me for over ten years, you lied to my family, you lied to your own children—”

  “I don’t suppose—?”

  “Bernard don’t you dare bloody ask! You fucker, you complete fucker. See the children? See the children? Don’t you bloody dare ask me that!”

  “I would like to . . . to have seen them.”

  “Really? And what do you think I should tell them? That daddy’s in prison? That daddy isn’t daddy—”

  “I am still their father.”

  “That daddy isn’t Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn, he’s . . . whatever your fucking name is!”

  “Liubimov,” he said, not much above a whisper.

  “And you expect two little girls to get their tongues round that?”

  “Kate, I’m sorry.”

  “Stop fucking saying that!”

  Her anger hit a gap, an empty space in her own rage that did nothing to diminish it. She hated him as much in silence as in noise—he could feel it like a fist across the table, punching him under the heart.

  She fumbled in her handbag for her cigarettes. Did not offer him one. Lit up and exhaled at length, the plume of smoke hanging in the stillness of air between them.

  “When will the trial be?”

  “Before Christmas I’m told. It should be quick. I’m told they’ve been gathering evidence for weeks, and of course I’ll plead guilty. That should speed things up.”

  “London?”

  “The Old Bailey.”

  “So you’ll be up there with . . . with . . . with Dr. Crippen and Neville Heath.”

  “I’m not a murderer, Kate.”

  “Really? You think so? Try talking to that ex-copper who came to see me. He seems to think you have blood on your hands. All the men you betrayed.”

  “All I did was pass on documents.”

  “And Westcott says that got people killed.”

  “He’s wrong. They told me—”

  “They?”

  “The Russians.”

  “The Russians? Your people.”

  “Yes . . . my people . . . assured me no lives were at risk.”

  “And you believed them?”

  He knew she was right, he knew Westcott was right, and there was nothing he could say to this.

  “Oh God, you’re so bloody naïve. You’ve always been a bit of a ­dreamer, a romantic. It was one of the reasons I was attracted to you . . . it was one of the reasons I loved you.”

  The past tense was telling.

  “But what you don’t seem to be able to grasp is that you have betrayed people, not pieces of paper, and the people you have betrayed most of all are your children. When Westcott came . . . came with three Special Branch coppers and turned the house over I had to pretend I’d lost one of my diamond earrings and the nice men had come to help me look for it. Do you have any idea how humiliating that was? Lying to my children to protect their shit of a father. And this was when we still thought you were Bernard Alleyn. There is no way I can ever tell them who you really are. There’s no way I can ever tell them what you are.”

  She swept a lock of red hair out of her face. Another momentary silence that he could only fill with another apology, the sorry machine on autopilot, the refrain that would punctuate the rest of his life, and what was the point of that? He’d tell her he loved her but was certain this would simply drive her to rage.

  “There’s only one thing I can do,” she said. “I must get them out of London before the trial. They must know nothing about it. I’ll take them to my sister’s in Wales. And . . . and I’ll change our name.”

  “Really Kate . . .”

  “Well we’re not Alleyns are we? I mean, bloody hell, Bernard, we never were Alleyns . . . we were Lub . . . Lub . . .”

  “Liubimov.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette and stood up. Turned her back on him.

  “A name I cannot even fucking pronounce. Oh God, Bernard, what have you done?”

  “Changing your name might be a good idea.”

  She only half looked at him. A glance over her shoulder, not enough to hide the tears.

  “Well you have two, one that sounds like pure fucking gobbledegook and the other a complete liability. I can’t go back to being Caladine. Or I’ll take my mother’s maiden name. Oscar Wilde’s wife did something like that when he went to prison. That should lose the scent. The press won’t find us.”

  “What? Howard?”

  “It’s as good as anything.”

  “You’ll be Catherine Howard?”

  “I can feel one of your tasteless jokes coming on, Bernard. Just don’t say it. In fact don’t ever say another fucking word to me.”

  “But . . . the children, my girls.”

  Now she turned fully, her face a ragged mask of red-raw skin and streaming tears.

  “You’ll never see them again. You have no children.”

  III

  Masefield

  It did not occur to him, an ordinary run-of-the-mill copper,

  that intelligence officers who work because of ideological

  motives and patriotism instead of for money are people of a

  special mold; people whose lives are dedicated to danger, to

  whom arrest is an everyday possibility, and who are

  prepared to accept severe punishment with equanimity as

  an inevitable occupational hazard.

  —Gordon Lonsdale/Konon Molody

  Spy, 1965

  §18

  London: 1960

  Masefield resembled a grown-up version of the fifties cartoon character Nigel Molesworth—the plump, bespectacled prep-school duffer from the sketchbook of Ronald Searle. He’d even heard others call him this derogatory name in the invisible corridors of secrets that ran parallel to the corridors of power in St. James’s.

  Molesworth—fat and useless.

  He’d grown a moustache for a host of reasons . . . to look more “distinguished” (whatever that meant—grey hair was distinguished, bald wasn’t), to look “posher” (which meant growing the right kind of ­moustache—pencil-thin, all but drawn on with Marlene Dietrich’s eyebrow pencil, was
fine, a yard brush wasn’t, a Hitler toothbrush wasn’t), and lastly to look less like Nigel Molesworth. But who knew what Molesworth would grow up to look like? Masefield did. He was damn sure that any day now Searle would come up with an image of the mature Molesworth and he would be a dead ringer for Geoffrey Masefield.

  The posh were not called Geoffrey. The posh were Neville and Nigel and Hugh. The posh were also called Alec . . . as in Alexander Burne-Jones . . . (a set of letters followed, indicative of Burne-Jones’s wartime service, but the only one Masefield even recognised when he’d looked him up was OBE . . . and the old gag Other Buggers’ Efforts). Oddly, Burne-Jones appeared to be his real name.

  He’d met Burne-Jones in 1960 at Rawley’s . . . a Mayfair club—­gambling, to the limited extent the law allowed, in the back room and music, girls, and overpriced drinks in the front. It wasn’t, he thought, a venue that suited Burne-Jones or left the man feeling at all comfortable. But it suited him. When Burne-Jones had said they could meet almost anywhere they would not be overheard, Masefield himself had suggested the notorious London club.

  Everything about it pleased him. Banquettes were so much more sophisticated than tables. Banquettes in deep green Naughahyde, so “now,” so “American” . . . nurturing images of Rock Hudson and Doris Day in some nameless New York nightclub, of Liz Taylor in BUtterfield 8, and the prospect of semi-accidental frottage with a woman’s bottom as she squeezed past.

  The music was not too modern. The standards of the interwar years given a slightly upbeat tempo, a touch more Dankworth, a touch less Joe Loss (although his personal preference was for Edmundo Ros—the girls in Ros’s Regent Street club didn’t strip), but none of that bebop nonsense that grated on the ear . . . and better still a sense that the “trad” revival had never happened . . . not a bowler hat, a washboard, or a banjo to be seen. It was “The Lady Is a Tramp” rendered as it should be . . . bare-breasted and devoid of irony by a young woman whose failings as a singer were more than compensated for by the length of her legs.

  The young, well, youngish man, Burne-Jones had brought with him seemed more at his ease—a Mr. Brown, which Masefield thought but the slightest variation on Smith or Jones, and not at all (oddly enough) a nom de guerre (we were at war, weren’t we?). But he wasn’t posh—the undercurrent of cockney in his voice was not disguised. It was as though he had grown out of the accent rather than attempted to change it.

  Unsurprisingly, what Burne-Jones wanted was never mentioned. He might have been chatting to anyone he’d met propping up a bar on a dull Tuesday night in the West End. They’d swapped war records as any two Englishmen would from 1945 till the last of them popped their clogs, and that wouldn’t be until around 2025, and even then there’d be one or two grimly hanging on, chock-full of antibiotics and nostalgia. Burne-Jones had been of necessity more than a little coy about his “desk job” in Whitehall, and Masefield less so in describing his unexpected commission in the RAOC and the three and a half years he’d spent as a second lieutenant instructing erks in the structure and use of hand grenades while inwardly counting his blessings not to be an erk himself. He’d not seen a whiff of action. He’d never left England. He was embarrassed about this. It was the central experience for men of his generation, and his relation to it was oblique.

  “A bit like coming last in the sack race,” he opined, wanting and not wanting to seem apologetic.

  Burne-Jones waved it aside.

  “We all did our bit, Geoffrey.”

  All the same, the letters after Burne-Jones’s name in Who’s Who hinted at a war not entirely spent at the desk job.

  Brown said nothing about his war, and Masefield readily concluded he was too young to have been in it. His bit, if such it be, had been at school.

  Burne-Jones seemed quite interested in Masefield’s school.

  “Bemrose in Derby. Boys’ grammar school. Only a couple of years old when I got there.”

  “Ah, nothing wrong with a good grammar school.”

  And he felt the first hint of the condescension that he had been expecting to set the tone for this meeting all along. But Burne-Jones moved rapidly on, not volunteering whether his had been Eton, Harrow, or Westminster . . . to university. Nottingham, the nearest university to home, which meant that he had been able to live cheaply, back with his mum—washing done, commuting on the train with a packed lunch and home again in time for a hot meal in the evening . . . Nottingham had held a place for him from his call-up in 1941 until his demob in ’46. After Nottingham, Manchester Municipal College of Technology and the first sense of being able to spread his wings—a feeling even serving in the army had not been able to instill in him.

  “Metallurgy,” he said, the first word he had been able to utter with any pride. “BSc in ’49, MSc in ’51. I could have flipped a coin really. I was a bit of an all-rounder if I say so myself. Could have read arts or science, but I’d always been a bit of rockhound as a boy, so metallurgy seemed the next logical move. I kept languages as a hobby. I have good French and passably good Russian. Not that I’ve ever been there, of course.”

  Brown spoke—not for the first time, but making his first real contribution to the conversation.

  “Мы тоже не были там, Джеффри. Все равно мы говорим свободно.”

  Neither have we, Geoffrey. And we’re both fluent.

  He was smiling as he said it. Burne-Jones laughed, and Masefield hesitantly joined in, forcing a smile to his lips and a boyish giggle to his mouth. And then he found he was laughing for real, laughing for real because at last the cat was out of the bag and they all three knew why they were there, and Masefield knew what would be asked of him, not now perhaps, but any day soon—and that they might make a dream come true.

  It was also the cue for Burne-Jones’s exit.

  “I’m too old for this lark. Forgive me, gentlemen, but I will away to my wife and the rolling pin that surely waits for me. Joe, settle the bill. Only when you’re good and ready of course. In fact, why don’t you and Geoffrey take in the second house.”

  Masefield was only too happy to oblige. Brown had an air about him of being already bored, but Masefield knew that he’d just received orders and was hardly likely to buck them.

  He had only to look at his empty glass and Brown’s hand went up for the waiter and another bottle of Dom Pérignon ’55.

  “Thank you, Joe. Joe is your real name isn’t it?”

  “No, but I’ve answered to it for years.”

  “Will I ever know your real name?”

  “No.”

  “Then why is Colonel Burne-Jones not Colonel Smith?”

  “Because the Russians already know who he is.”

  Brown paused as though picking his next words carefully.

  “So . . . if anything goes wrong . . .”

  “Wrong?”

  “Yes. Wrong. If anything goes wrong, you give ’em Burne-Jones, a name they already know, and Brown, a name which means nothing.”

  A pause, a turning of heads as the band started up again, a too-rapid rendition of “I Get a Kick out of You.” Another bottle of champagne opened in front of them.

  “Well . . . cheers, Mr. Brown.”

  “Cheers, Mr. Masefield. And before we either of us gets legless, and before the next tart onstage gets bra-less . . . Room 54 Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, Thursday at three. Got it?”

  “Oh yes.”

  Brown’s timing was impeccable. The girl onstage was unhooking her bra even as he spoke.

  §19

  The Imperial had seen better days. Wilderness had forgotten who had designed it, but had a dim recollection that the same bloke was responsible for the interior of the Titanic. It resembled a poor imitation of the Midland at St. Pancras. Red tile and turrets—a hideous piece of London Gothic with bits of Tudor revival and all dusted down with a thick coating o
f London grime. Perfect for a biscuit tin, hideous for a hotel. He could all but hear the swish of the wrecker’s ball gathering speed behind him. The trick today would be to get out before it came hurtling through the window of room 54, or the hotel hit an iceberg. All the same he knew why Burne-Jones had chosen it. It exuded that quality so beloved of spymasters, “anonymity,” which was spy-speak for “no one in their right mind would choose to be here.”

  “How did the two of you get on?”

  It might have been phrased casually, but Wilderness knew Burne-Jones wanted a considered opinion. He might not act upon it but he wanted it all the same.

  “Can I take it Mr. Masefield approached us?”

  “Introduced would be the word.”

  “Reliable contact?”

  “Oh yes. Now spit it out, whatever it is.”

  “I’d think twice before taking him on. And since you’re asking me, I suppose you are thinking twice. I didn’t need to be there last night after all, did I?”

  More and more Wilderness was thinking he did not need to be anywhere.

  “Always good to have the occasional night out with you, Joe.”

  Wilderness ignored this fiction.

  “I can’t deny he’s keen. He’s keen, but perhaps too keen. I often think your best people are the ones you have to whip in.”

  “Like you, you mean?”

  “No . . . not of all us need to be given a choice between a prison sentence and serving Queen and Country.”

  “And?”

  “He’s a romantic. A romantic with a silly streak. He loves everything about this. You’re offering to make his dreams come true.”

  “Aren’t we all romantics? Isn’t Queen and Country a romantic notion in itself?”

  “No. It may be to you, but it’s not to me. I’d have sat out the charge of the Light Brigade with a ham sandwich and a couple of bottles of pale ale. I didn’t fall for a country or a cause. I fell for a woman. And speaking of women. After you left last night, Masefield downed that second bottle of fizz all but single-handed and then decided it would be a good idea if we went backstage and chatted up the girls.”

  “Well, we’ve all done that.”