by Alan Judd
‘Do you speak German?’
Viktor nodded slowly, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. This was the nearest he had come, Charles realised, to answering any question with a straightforward yes or no. Either he answered with a question of his own, or he made a statement. Charles suspected he might himself have succumbed to what Hookey had warned against, the professional vice of being too focused, too direct in leading the conversation. Too much concentration on questions you wanted answering, or on answers you sought without wanting to ask, could mean that you were never relaxed enough to listen. He was in charge of the conversation, which was as the training urged, but sensed that his determination might reduce what he was in charge of to something that merely fitted his preconceptions. Viktor, who had asked almost nothing, remained somehow free.
‘I read German better than I speak it,’ he resumed, still nodding to himself. ‘Recently I read a German novel, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. It is a very great novel but very bourgeois and therefore not well known in my country.’ He smiled. ‘Do you know this book, Charles?’ Charles did not.
‘It is for me the greatest exposition of the Faust theme. I am fascinated by that, you see, and I have read every example, I think, even your own Christopher Marlowe’s in Elizabethan English. But Mann’s is the greatest for our century. Is it also in English? Are you allowed to read it?’
Charles smiled at the teasing. Viktor spoke on the Faust theme and its appeal for him throughout coffee, with an energy and conviction far removed from his earlier diffidence. Charles was happy to relinquish his sense of directing and controlling their meeting until afterwards, when they stood outside on the pavement, still talking, and he had to decide whether to offer Viktor a lift back and how far to push for the next meeting. ‘Your aim should be to come away with an agreement to meet again,’ Hookey had said. ‘That’s all. A date might be a push too far. Be easy with him. Try to find a reason for meeting again, apart from liking each other’s faces. One that he can give to his own people. Part on easy terms.’
‘Let me give you a lift back,’ Charles said.
‘May we walk?’ Viktor buttoned his raincoat.
‘Well, yes, but it’s quite a long way.’
‘I mean, around here. I am ignorant of this part of London and should like to see the river which must be very near. Also, I should like to continue our very interesting conversation.’
‘So should I. Let’s walk.’ Briefly, Charles felt himself to be on the receiving end of a too-directed passage of conversation, but brushed the thought aside. He led the way along a back street parallel with the railway, then under one of the railway arches where a small workshop rebuilt old Citroén Light Fifteens. There followed terraced streets of nineteenth-century railway workers’ cottages, one of the quiet secrets of central London, still undiscovered and with only one or two houses renovated. There were corner shops and a pub, a quiet, pleasantly dingy place of faded brown and cream paintwork which Charles used during his few solitary lunchtimes. They crossed Stamford Street and headed slightly downstream of the new National Theatre, along partly cobbled streets which shone with recent rain. Then they were among dark abandoned warehouses, overgrown bomb sites and temporary car parks now decades old. The river was very near but it was not clear whether there was a way to it through the warehouses. Charles spotted a dark narrow alley between two tall crumbling buildings which appeared to lean dangerously towards each other. At the end of the alley he could see the lights of the far bank of the Thames. ‘The river’s this way.’
They stumbled in the alley over unseen rubble. The end was dark up to head height and he feared a wall, but as they got closer he could see steps. ‘Up here,’ he said, with unjustified confidence.
Viktor chuckled behind him. ‘This is a good place for murder, Charles.’
‘We wouldn’t be the first, I daresay.’
From the top of the steps they had a full view of the river. It was low tide and the lights of the far bank were reflected in the pools and glistening mud of the littered foreshore. A set of wooden steps, rickety and partly rotted, led down to it. They could see and hear the traffic on the Embankment but where they stood, only a couple of hundred yards away, was darkness and dereliction, with grass and weeds growing from blackened brickwork and a large rusty iron derrick and platform projecting ominously above them. It was the foreshore that, differently configured, Shakespeare would have known. Trusting to Viktor’s fondness for literary reference, Charles remarked on it.
Viktor nodded. ‘May I ask your opinion, Charles, as to whom you believe to be the most typical English writers? Not the most famous, or the best, but the most typical.’
Charles pondered aloud. Chaucer? Ben Jonson? Dr Johnson? Jane Austen? Trollope? Scott, the Scottish voice of English romanticism about Scotland? Galsworthy? Wells?
‘Yes, yes,’ said Viktor eagerly. ‘You are confirming my theory. You see, I never before had the chance to ask an English person about this question. My theory is that the greatest writers – Shakespeare, of course, Milton or Dickens – are often not the most typical, even if they are chosen to be representative. They are different. This is true for all nationalities. People regard the greatest writers as essential and typical but they are not both. They speak for all mankind, not only for part of it. People say Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are typically Russian but they are not. Of course, they could not be anything but Russian – they are essentially Russian – but they are not typical. Chekov or Gogol are more typical. It is the same for some people who are not writers. We might regard them as typically English or Russian, and they may be essentially so, but they are also more than that. They are for all the world.’
The last phrase echoed from Charles’s lectures. It was an old story, at least as old as Lenin, the Soviet communist appeal to international brotherhood, the implicit link with the emotional tradition of Christianity. National divisions are destructive and obsolescent. Help us to help mankind. Tell us your country’s secrets. It had worked powerfully on western liberal intellectuals, Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’, and had been deployed to great effect ever since in the recruitment of agents throughout the world.
Viktor’s expression of the sentiment in this context indicated, he thought, how it permeated their culture. ‘Shall we take a chance and go down?’ He pointed at the rotten wooden steps.
‘I will go where you go, Charles.’
There was enough light to pick a way between pools, driftwood, plastic containers, old iron, bottles, bits of rope, fridges and bicycle frames. No boats moved on the river and in its eerie isolation the foreshore felt years rather than yards away from the public life of the city. The incoming tide lapped incessantly and a rat scuttled from beneath an empty milk crate back to the darkness of the river wall. Charles had read that you were never more than about three feet from a rat in London. Maybe it was six feet, or sixty.
He was not concentrating. Viktor had said something about Charles’s father but it could not have been what Charles thought. ‘I’m sorry?’
Viktor stood beside the Thames, the lights showing one side of his pale face. He was turned towards Charles and speaking slowly. ‘I have been asked to tell you that we owe you, your mother and your sister many thousands of pounds for the work your father did for us. Of course, he never told anyone and it is a surprise for you and your family. He was one of the Englishmen we were talking about. A patriot for mankind, for all the world, not only for his own country. He did not want money from us but we kept it for him, all that we would have paid him for his years of work. It is in Moscow. We honour our debts and we would like you and your family to have it. We think your father would have liked that. But we must discuss with you how to get it to you, since we do not wish to get you into trouble, in your official position. This is what I have been asked to say to you, Charles.’
A breeze had got up and the water lapped more rapidly. The rat, or another, crept back to the crate. Charles stared at the ripples. Of all the questions he might
have asked, he chose the one that felt most safely academic. The office would like it. ‘Who asked you to say this?’
‘Our people in Moscow.’
‘Your people?’
‘Yes, Charles. My people are like your people.’ His tone was gentle.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Charles, I think we both know the game we are playing.’ His smile stopped as he looked at Charles.
‘Tell me again,’ said Charles.
Viktor clearly knew the files and spoke with well-rehearsed confidence. Charles’s father, he said, had been serving in Germany with the British Army’s Royal Engineers at the end of the Great Patriotic War. He had earlier served, as Charles knew, with distinction in North Africa and Normandy. The sufferings of the people he had seen had made him determine to continue the struggle against fascism wherever it appeared. He had reasoned that the one country most likely to do this was the one that had suffered most from fascism and which had a strong ideology with which to oppose it, unlike the capitalist west which was contaminated by it. Having been allied with the Russians as a soldier in their victorious struggle against the Nazis, he had therefore volunteered to continue to help them in the struggle for peace and justice during the years that followed. He had shared with them the knowledge gained during his work on British establishments and embassies during all the following years, until his sad and unexpected death. His work had been of great value and the Centre had been sorry to be deprived by death of the opportunity to thank him for it. Now they wished to convey their gratitude and the money owed, but they realised that the British authorities would regard his work as merely spying and would make trouble for Charles. He would probably lose his job. But the Centre knew that Charles’s father had worked in secret not to damage his country but to safeguard mankind, and they did not wish Charles to suffer for it. They wanted to discuss how the money could be transferred to him or to his family, or whether he would prefer them to keep it – until later, perhaps. Meanwhile, it was certain that no one would ever know what Charles’s father had done, so Charles had nothing to fear from Moscow.
‘I can promise you that,’ Viktor said.
Charles felt as if his stomach had been taken out, leaving a chasm beneath into which he would fall endlessly as in a childhood dream, if he let himself. To keep going he had to concentrate on what was before him, staring into Viktor’s eyes, not trusting himself to look away. It was like skating not on thin ice but on no ice; momentum was all.
‘This is a more professional evening than I had appreciated, Viktor.’
Viktor nodded, taking it as a compliment. ‘It is an obligation upon us all.’
They had every detail of his father’s overseas assignments, their dates, durations and purposes. There was no doubt they knew it all. At the time Charles did not even try to reconcile what he had heard with his memories of a man he had thought of as an ideal – perhaps, as Viktor would have it, an essential – kind of Englishman, modest, conscientious, loyal, patriotic, concerned to do things properly, whether it was securing an education for his children or putting up a shelf, and as honest as the day. He postponed thought; the implications were too great to be thought about then, though they could be felt.
He managed a smile that felt like a grimace. ‘But what makes you think I share your profession, Viktor?’
‘Because that is what the Centre told me. They know. Perhaps your father told them. They sent you this.’ He took an envelope from his inside pocket.
Charles put it straight into his own. It felt like a concession to look at it now. ‘He died before I joined the Foreign Office,’ he said, emphasising the last two words.
The emphasis was lost on Viktor. ‘Perhaps it is because you were in the British Army.’
‘It doesn’t follow.’ He was beginning to believe the façade of his own composure. There was even some relish in anticipating the security branch tooth-sucking in Head Office when they learned that he was Sovbloc Red already, within months of joining. It would be a pleasure to administer shock, almost a revenge for his own. Virgin covers were painstakingly and expensively protected for as long as possible, especially for anyone interested, as he had been, in a Sovbloc posting. That was to assume, of course, that he had enough of a career left after this to merit any posting anywhere.
He still clung to Viktor’s eyes, as to a rope thrown to him in the river. Viktor returned his gaze with more sympathy than if he looked upon him solely as a quarry, but still watchfully with cool assessment. Charles admired that; that was right, as it should be.
He broke off and walked back towards the wooden steps. Some were missing, others wobbly. ‘Be careful,’ he warned. ‘Tread on the ones I tread on.’ Acting as if he were responsible for Viktor was a minor reassertion of authority. At the top they paused and looked back at the river.
‘You will think about it, Charles?’
Pride forbade any display of concern. He sensed he was regaining the upper hand. They were the demandeurs and Viktor was no doubt under pressure to return with an answer. ‘Think about what?’
‘How you would like us to pay you the money.’ The brute fact hung in the air between them. Viktor was nervous now. ‘We can meet again to discuss it.’
‘Perhaps we should do that.’ Charles went decisively down the steps on the landward side.
Viktor remained at the top, his face in shadow. ‘Charles – I – am sorry for you. I am sorry to be doing this.’
‘Is this what they told you to say or are you becoming less professional?’
‘Yes, and yes.’
Viktor refused a lift, preferring to return by tube. Charles walked with him to Waterloo. They talked about football. Viktor was a keen Liverpool supporter. ‘It is permitted to support capitalist football teams,’ he said. ‘But not if they would play against Moscow Dynamos.’ He smiled but his expression when they shook hands was resigned. ‘I am sorry, Charles. I like you. I hope we go on meeting anyway, you know.’
‘Don’t worry, I know it’s not personal.’ No more than one soldier killing another on the battlefield, he thought, but he felt he was gaining strength by giving reassurance and wanted to show no resentment. ‘It’s not your fault. Exploiting friendships is what we all do.’
Charles drove slowly to his sister’s house. He was probably over the alcohol limit but didn’t care. He felt invincibly sober, as if life from now on held no alternative. His watch told him they had spent three and a half hours together – important for the write-up – but already he could sense his own history being rearranged into before and after this event, already he was looking back on his life up to three and a half hours ago as a state of innocence. Yet still he withheld thought, his mind hovering, uncommitted, in suspension. It was not yet digestible. It couldn’t be processed. It was not only his memories of his father that would need rebuilding, but his sense of his own past. For the time being the way to keep going was to do just that, to keep doggedly going, one foot in front of another, like running up a ploughed field. It was also what you did after a bomb had exploded beneath you, as he knew well from Belfast. You simply carried on, clinging to routine, procedure, reassembling anything around you that was still recognisable.
He rang twice on Mary’s door before noticing that there were no lights behind the curtains, but then the hall light came on. He did not relish spending half the night listening to her problems with her fiancé, but it was preferable to the alternative. It did not occur to him to tell her about their father; she did not even know what he himself did.
The door was answered by a tousle-haired man wearing a towel. ‘I’m Mary’s brother,’ said Charles. ‘I said I’d drop round.’
‘I’m James, her – you know – we’re engaged. She’s asleep. D’you want me to wake her?’
‘Just tell her I called. Sorry to disturb you. We have met, haven’t we?’
‘Think so. At your mother’s house. Can’t remember when, I’m afraid.’
‘Me neither. Well,
sorry to have bothered you.’
The man held out his hand and they shook. ‘Don’t worry. It’s all right. See you sometime.’ He grinned. ‘Well, quite a lot, I guess.’
He would be all right, Charles thought as he turned the Rover onto Battersea Park Road towards the wine bar where Roger and the others were spending the evening. Through the steamed-up windows he made out plain wooden tables, candles, potted plants and ferns. The traffic held him up outside, conveniently because he was still undecided whether to go in. He wanted the distraction of company, but not much company. A man wearing wide flares and with long dark hair straggling over his Afghan coat walked in with a very tall girl whose mohair covered her mini-skirt and who was otherwise all bare thighs, boots and spangles. Must be freezing, he thought. While the door was still open Gerry and Rebecca came out, putting on coats. She wore a white woollen hat and threw a long white scarf around her neck with an extravagant gesture. Gerry shuffled into a voluminous old duffel-coat. They were laughing. Charles moved on with the traffic. He didn’t feel up to being merry.
Nor did he want to be alone, yet. He drove to Hugo’s Wandsworth house. Hugo had said to call round afterwards, if there was time and if he were satisfied there was no surveillance. He had forgotten about surveillance, but no one turned in the street after him, or came the other way. There was no need to talk about it tonight, of course; nothing would change overnight. But the urge to talk about something – anything – was strong.
He made out Anna’s form through the stained-glass door as she came down the hall. Her eyes widened. ‘Charles.’
‘I’m sorry it’s so late. It’s probably too late. I should’ve rung –’
‘You don’t look well. You look tired. Come in.’
When she said it, he felt it. ‘Perhaps I am. It’s just a – I was going to talk to Hugo. But it can wait till tomorrow. I needn’t have bothered you. Sorry.’
‘Hugo’s out. Come in.’
‘Just tell him –’
‘Charles, come in.’ She spoke sternly, with a smile. They went through to the kitchen. He declined a drink, so she put on the kettle. ‘Hugo’s playing war games at the house of a fellow commander-in-chief. He won’t be long.’