The Unfortunate Englishman

by John Lawton

  “You’re a country boy? I would never have guessed.”

  “Four hundred acres in south Pennsylvania. You can all but spit into West Virginia from the kitchen window. It’s not a lot, but enough to do what I want to do.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Dig a fallout shelter. What else? It isn’t going to be Berlin . . . but it’ll be something else, someplace else. I’ll dig me a shelter with the old man’s steam shovel. I’ll line it in concrete three feet thick, put in a water purifier, bunk beds, a ton of canned food . . . and maybe a hi-fi . . . while away Armageddon listening to that Beethoven guy. Turn him up loud enough maybe I won’t hear the bang when the bomb drops.”

  “Ah,” said Wilderness. “For that you’ll need Tchaikovsky.”

  Dashoffy laughed. Wilderness had always been able to make Jack laugh, and now he wanted above all to take advantage of the upward surge in his spirits.

  “Jack, before you call it quits and dig your hole in the ground . . . one last professional question.”

  “Fire away, kid. Anything. My big mouth will open one last time for your one last question. Name it. Jackie’s dress size, name of McNamara’s dentist . . . my parting gift to you.”

  “Is there an ICBM launch site at Chelyabinsk?”

  “Dunno. We never got the shot.”

  Nothing in Dashoffy’s demeanour led Wilderness to think he was being anything but honest—and that they never got the shot was undeniable.

  “Is there one at Plesetsk?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.”

  “There are three.”

  At last. Always a frisson in being proved right. Try not to be smug. In a fair world he could tell Tom Radley to stand Masefield down now, let him go back to snapping tourist photos and looking for transition metals. But it wasn’t a fair world, and Geoffrey Masefield wasn’t his problem, he was Berlin’s.

  §64

  London

  Wilderness pondered Berlin.

  All the way back to London.

  Wilderness pondered Jack Dashoffy.

  He did not ponder Geoffrey Masefield.

  It was late evening before he got back to his house in Hampstead. His wife had left a note, scrawled, with her customary sense of melodrama, across the sitting room mirror in red lipstick.

  “Stuck in all-night edit. Jxxx.” This happened a lot. The hours of a BBC producer were hardly any more predictable than those of a spy.

  He phoned Burne-Jones.

  “I do hope you had a productive weekend, Joe?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “So non-committal. Tell you what. Let’s make an early start tomorrow. Come over for breakfast. Tell all and we’ll make our minds up whether any of it matters over scrambled eggs and bacon.”

  Burne-Jones was an old-fashioned man. About as domestic as a rhinoceros. Years in the army had taught him how to darn socks, and somewhere along the line he had learnt to cook just one meal. Breakfast was the one meal Burne-Jones would cook. It would never vary, as though he was stripping down a Bren gun in darkness . . . every component to hand and in its rightful place. Breakfast at Campden Hill Square would begin with tea and porridge by the fireplace. Wilderness would let his tea go cold on the mantelpiece and wait for coffee. Burne-Jones never seemed to notice. What mattered, he had learnt early on, was that one should be standing up for porridge.

  “Only a complete cad eats his porridge sitting down,” Burne-Jones had told him. And Wilderness had silently despaired of his father-in-law ever making it into the twentieth century.

  Porridge would be followed by scrambled eggs, whipped up over a flame at the table, with streaky bacon (kept warmish under silver) and wholemeal toast (allowed to go cold in its rattan rack). At the toast and marmalade stage if it was shop talk, Madge Burne-Jones might appear in topcoat and headscarf, clutching a shopping basket, peck Wilderness on the cheek and tell her husband that she was “orf now.”

  And then they’d talk.

  Wilderness unwound the skein of Dashoffy’s argument.

  Burne-Jones listened without interruption, occasionally sipping coffee or crunching toast. At last he said, “Poor Jack. So young and yet so jaundiced.”

  “He’s ten years older than me,” Wilderness replied to no reaction.

  “And there’s nothing new in what he said, is there?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Ah, that word again.”

  “Perhaps telling us that Berlin is the bellybutton of the Cold War is nothing new. We’ve known that all along. I doubt Khrushchev said a word to Kennedy on the matter that couldn’t be gleaned from last year’s newspapers. Even his idea of Berlin as a free city isn’t new . . . ”

  “Quite. It does rather make one query Khrushchev’s use of the word ‘free’—if he only ‘frees’ West Berlin and hangs on to his bit then it’s only half a city and only questionably free.”

  “Perhaps what is new is Jack’s conviction that the new component, that is a newly elected US president, a man in office less than six months, has changed nothing, that he means to do nothing about Berlin. Quite possibly less than Ike might have done.”

  Burne-Jones and Wilderness had long agreed on Ike—that having run the Second World War, been an enforced bystander to the Korean War, he would never allow the USA to commit itself to a conventional war again. He’d build up the nuclear arsenal instead and risk all.

  “What was it again? Pay any price, meet any foe?”

  “Pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.”

  “Hmm . . . almost poetry.”

  “Almost but not quite.”

  “Imagine Baldwin or Eden saying anything quite so lyrical. However . . . you and Jack Dash would appear to have concluded it’s what? Bluster?”

  “More or less. Although the temptation Jack has succumbed to is not one I feel . . . he’s not my president; I feel no need to rush to underestimate him.”

  Burne-Jones smiled at this.

  “How precisely you put it, Joe.”

  “And of course Jack may not be the only man in a hurry.”

  An eyebrow raised at this.

  “Khrushchev may be as rash as Jack. Jack beats a path back to the family farm in Pennsylvania to await Armageddon. Khrushchev returns to the Kremlin basking in glory thinking he’s kicked JFK’s arse for him . . . and they might both be wrong.”

  Burne-Jones glanced at his watch.

  “Macmillan and Kennedy should be meeting just about now. Single topic, I suppose?”

  Burne-Jones paused for a bit of marmalade munch. Then added one word: “Berlin.”

  Wilderness waited, wondering where the one word might lead.

  “What Vienna has confirmed . . . is that Mr. K will do something. The status quo that has held since the end of the blockade in ’49 is probably over . . . it was probably over the day we let West Germany into NATO in 1955 . . . bloody stupid move, but there you are. If Khrushchev had been in a stronger position then, all this might have happened much sooner. Right now he’s not getting what he wants . . . ergo he has to do something . . . and now he thinks he has wrong-footed the American president, and in so doing has wrong-footed us all. So he’ll do something simply because he can do something. The little fat bloke’s moment has come. The man, the moment, the place . . . Berlin.”

  Wilderness said nothing. His boss was meandering. Let him.

  “So . . . how would you feel about going back?”

  How much does a man whose job is to know everything actually know? Wilderness had never mentioned Nell Burkhardt to Burne-Jones. This did not mean that Burne-Jones didn’t know. Burne-Jones had mentioned Nell to him. Once or twice. Good mannered enough never to have used the word Schatzi. He might even know that Wilderness had found trips to Berlin a tad disturbing over the last ten years.
And he would readily conclude that Wilderness should and could separate his private and professional lives. After all he’d married Burne-Jones’s daughter, and the compartmentalisation of mind that required was monumental.

  Her timing was immaculate. He had not mentioned Judy’s name, simply thought of her . . . and there she was, kicking the door shut behind her, dropping a satchel full of papers and tearing off a tatty red beret that told Wilderness she had driven from Lime Grove with the top down on her MG.

  “I am nicknackpaddywhacked . . . any coffee, Pa?”

  Burne-Jones lifted the top on the coffee pot and shook his head.

  Judy sloughed off her shoes and headed for the kitchen.

  “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckettyfuck.”

  “I did not pawn the family silver, mortgage the stately home and sell your grandmother into white slavery in order to pay your school fees to have the net result be a string of obscenities!”

  Judy yelled back, “Don’t mind me. I just pulled an all-nighter. Always makes me grumpy. You two go on talking state secrets.”

  Wilderness had not spoken to her, nor she to him. All the same he was grateful for the interruption. Without doubt Burne-Jones would repeat his last question some other time, but right now he’d not expect an answer.

  §65

  Judy told Wilderness to drive. It would be a pleasure to be at the wheel of her father’s old pre-war MG on a bright June day . . . top down, blonde in the bucket seat.

  “I won’t nod off with the top down,” said the blonde. “But I might just relax.”

  “What was it kept you in the edit suite all night?”

  “The Baschet Brothers.”

  “A couple of French dogs?”

  “Baschet not basset!”

  Wilderness was sure she’d told him this before and he remembered next to nothing, but when talking to Judy bluffing never paid—she could be as resilient as her father. Better to come clean at once.

  “Remind me.”

  “Bernard and François Baschet. Inventors of Les Structures Sonores. Been around about ten years now. Scored Cocteau’s last film. Time for a bit of a retrospective. They invent instruments. I played you some of their music. You called it ‘wibbly-wobbly.’”

  Indeed he had. It was not unpleasant, just unfamiliar.

  “And you?” she said.

  “Eh?”

  “I clearly interrupted something.”

  “Yes. A timely appearance. Your father had just asked me if I would like to go back to Berlin.”

  “Hmm . . . not as if you haven’t been back.”

  “This is different. He wants me to run the Berlin station.”

  “Good Lord! He asked you that?”

  “No . . . but he was about to. Not a lot of confidence in our man in Berlin.”

  “Fuckywuckywoo. Good job I showed up when I did. Do you think he’s trying to drive a wedge between us or is it just carelessness?”

  Wilderness said nothing.

  “I wonder sometimes if he and Ma ever talk to one another.”

  “Meaning?”

  Judy hesitated. Long enough for Wilderness to know exactly what she was going to say.

  “We’ve been married for six years. She wants grandchildren.”

  “You have three sisters.”

  “None of whom are married. Imagine the scandal of a Burne-Jones bastard. The sky would fall. No, Wilderness. We are the chosen vessel for the propagation of her line. It’s just . . .”

  Judy trailed off, waiting for Wilderness to pick up.

  “It’s just that she thinks it’s me and my frequent, nay, prolonged absences. She hasn’t worked out that it’s you.”

  “Thank you. Almost on the button. She hasn’t worked out that it’s me, my choice, my decision.”

  §66

  Stuff, things, documents, passed across Wilderness’s desk, more often than not with a scribbled note from Burne-Jones and sometimes, only sometimes, with just a question mark in the margin. Most were marked “FYI” or “FYEO” and required no response from him.

  Not long after his return from Vienna a manila folder with half a dozen enlarged photographs appeared in his in-tray—Masefield’s latest attempt to clarify the smudgy roll from his Minox.

  Burne-Jones’s note read, “Looks as though you and Jack Dash are right. The U-2 passed right over Plesetsk.”

  But it was of no importance.

  The last two photographs were not from the same sequence. They were not photographs of documents but photographs of photographs. Two blurred aerial shots. In the bottom right hand corner the date had been written in a white crayon, and was the clearest thing in either shot. Burne-Jones, in turn, had ringed the dates in red pencil.

  Wilderness took a magnifying glass to them just to be sure: 1.5.60—in each case.

  He stuffed the photographs back in the folder and walked down the corridor to Burne-Jones’s office.

  Burne-Jones was in his customary, laconic pose, feet up, a chewed pencil twirling in one hand—thinking.

  Wilderness spread the photographs out on the desk.

  “No comment?” he said. “Not even one of your infuriating question marks?”

  Burne-Jones swung his feet to the floor and stood up.

  “I was rather hoping to let you have the first shot.”

  “It’s obvious isn’t it?”

  “Quite. Do we agree it’s Chelyabinsk?”

  “Alec, it could be anywhere, any large industrial complex snatched through a haze of cloud and pollution.”

  “But we know it isn’t, don’t we?”

  “We know. Does Tom Radley?”

  “Passed it to me as I did to you, without a word.”

  “So he hasn’t figured it out?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “The Russians retrieve Gary Powers’s camera intact from the U-2 they downed on May first last year and Tom doesn’t spot it?”

  “Well, either that or he didn’t think it important enough to mention.”

  Wilderness realised he had to change tack, had to risk upsetting Burne-Jones.

  “In that respect he’d be right.”

  “What?”

  “Of course it’s Chelyabinsk, but it tells us nothing. There’s nothing in either shot that would enable us to tell a missile silo from a grain silo.”

  “I agree. Tom is missing the point, but so I fear are you.”

  “You just lost me. The photos are next to useless. What is there to miss?”

  “This—we have them; the Americans don’t. We got them out of Russia when the Americans hadn’t a clue the film had even survived. It means we’re back in the game.”

  Wilderness’s heart sank. They were going to have the same conversation they seemed to be having every six or seven weeks. Uncle Sam . . . the elephant in the room . . . The Man Who Came to Dinner.

  “Alec, they’re just blurs.”

  “I can see that, Joe.”

  “The Americans won’t thank us for sharing them. Half of nothing is still nothing.”

  “No. Perhaps not. But they won’t begrudge us a bit of respect.”

  Wilderness hated this. The special relationship that was about as special as fish and chips on Fridays. One-upping the Americans was pointless.

  “A game, you said.”

  “No, Joe. The game.”

  And Wilderness wondered if it was a game he wanted to go on playing. It was tempting to ask where Masefield’s source, the elusive Professor Matsekpolyev, had obtained film from the destroyed U-2. It made sense that the camera had survived—the Russians had, after all, gleefully displayed the pieces of the plane in Gorky Park for all to see—but how the film got from Matsekpolyev to Masefield mattered more. He did not ask. It was—so clearly—not part of the game.

  He let
it pass. He would not be the one to utter what no one wished to hear.

  Towards the middle of July an oddity appeared among the morning pile sent in by Burne-Jones.

  Wilderness looked blankly at a copy of an order placed with a firm of wiremakers in Ambergate, Derbyshire, for what amounted to over a hundred miles of barbed wire to be shipped to Poland. The kind of overseas order to delight the politicians who exhorted “export or die.”

  Burne-Jones had jotted in the margin . . . “How long is the green line between us and them?”

  Wilderness sent a note back saying, “If you mean Berlin, less than thirty miles down the middle, more like a hundred if you take in the entire perimeter with the DDR.”

  Burne-Jones replied, “I wonder what else we could sell them? I’ve an old Nissen hut in the back garden that’s going begging. To say nothing of my old man’s ARP tin hat.”

  And Wilderness in turn replied, “Now you mention it, I feel I’m living in a nation of wartime spivs . . . stolen nylons . . . frilly knickers . . . dodgy coffee . . . and enough barbed wire to carve up a continent. Hang on to your tin hat.”

  But neither of them raised the matter of whether the order should be prohibited or even investigated further.

  §67

  West Berlin: August 12

  Nell had worked at the Marienfelde Refugee Centre since 1956. It was the hub of the universe. The bellybutton of the world. It said “Germany” as clearly as the Statue of Liberty said “America.” That is, if symbols were to be readily appreciated, and they weren’t.

  The more appreciable interpretation was that Marienfelde was Ellis Island. You glimpsed the great green woman as you sailed through the Narrows into New York Harbor—but you landed at Ellis. Marienfelde was where the fluctuating tide of refugees landed in Berlin.

  To be the refugee, the Flüchtling, was to Nell the European condition. She’d been one herself. Leaving Berlin by train in 1945, a step ahead of the Red Army—returning on foot eight months later to find her hometown occupied by the French, the Americans, the British, and the Russians. All of whom were still there in 1961. She’d watched the dribble of returning prisoners after the war, among them her own father, and with every Soviet-induced crisis . . . 1948, 1953, 1956 . . . she’d seen the dribble become a tidal wave. It was the Hungarian uprising, or to be precise its defeat, that first drew her to work at Marienfelde in 1956. Since then the tide had ebbed and flowed with every passing week, but almost always in the thousands.