by Alan Judd
She asked no questions. She would know all about need to know, better than he since her Sovbloc posting with Hugo could well have involved her in casework more delicate and risky than anything he was likely to do in London. She picked up a cup from the crowded draining board and dried it with the tea-towel, holding it close to her body. When she had dried the second cup she stood holding it in the cloth and facing him. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
He nodded, feeling quite suddenly that he couldn’t trust himself to speak.
‘Sit down,’ she said gently.
‘I’m okay standing.’ His voice sounded gruff to his own ears.
‘You’re making me nervous.’
He sat at the kitchen table and watched as she dried saucers and teaspoons and made the tea. Observing the lift near the ends of her dark eyebrows, the way her blonde hair was pushed back behind her ear on one side, the profile of her cheek bone when she turned, the faint, doubtless hated, crow’s feet on her olive skin and the deft, unselfconscious movements of her small hands made it easy to imagine what it would be like to be obsessed. He had never been obsessed. Was this how Viktor watched the woman he knew as Chantal? Viktor obsessed, or Viktor in love, was something else he could imagine more easily since their walk by the river. Did Viktor feel the movement of an eyebrow as a sudden catch in his heart? Was a detail, an accident of physiognomy such as angle of cheek in relation to eye sufficient to banish all other thoughts from Viktor’s head whenever he noticed it? Was it for something like this that Viktor risked marriage, career, liberty?
‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she said with a smile, as she put tea-pot and biscuits on the table and sat.
It was a phrase his grandmother used often when he was a child. ‘Deal. I was thinking about a deal.’
‘Not cherry or mahogany?’ She put a black tea-cosy over the pot.
‘Your question reminded me of my grandmother. She also used to use one of those.’
She sighed. ‘I’m a bit of an old tea-cosy myself, I’m afraid. At least, I feel I’m becoming one.’
‘No, you’re not.’ His voice felt gruff again. It was strange to feel his voice out of control. Why should the voice be affected? ‘This evening I learned that my father –’ It came in a rush, taking him by surprise, but a sudden tightening in his throat stopped him. Saying it would change it. So far it was private, something that, however corrosive or overwhelming, could be assimilated and dealt with privately. Saying it would give it a public existence, what in Viktor’s world they might call an objective reality. It would be part of history, public property, something for others to play with, yet every twitch on the wire he would feel in his heart; like the movement of an eyebrow.
She was looking at him, her elbows on the table, holding the pot by handle and spout.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t – not now. Another time.’ It was difficult to go on. It was absurd, what words did. Ridiculous, stupid.
She put down the tea-pot and put her hand on his. ‘I could see there was something wrong the moment I saw you. It was written all over your face.’
‘Sorry to burden you with it.’ He held her hand. Her grip answered his. His own reactions astonished him. He had to breathe deeply to get the words out.
‘You haven’t. It’s not a burden, whatever it is.’ The front door opened. She gave a brief squeeze and removed her hand. ‘Tell Hugo everything or nothing. Whatever you feel like. We can talk another time.’
She left them. Over tea, then whisky, he talked to Hugo for an hour, describing everything, including the riverside walk, but omitting all mention of his father. ‘He was interested in my family background,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t volunteer anything.’
‘Quite right, quite right. Make them work for it. He’s probably been told to do a pen-picture of you. They like to know about the family in case there’s any angle they can get hold of. Don’t suppose there is in your case, is there? Nothing you know of? Good. We must remember, though, that he’s on paper as MFA, not KGB. It’s Hookey who seems so convinced otherwise. What was your impression?’
‘I think Hookey may be right.’
Hugo frowned, twitching a couple of times. ‘Hookey isn’t always right. No one’s perfect even in the office. But from what you say Lover Boy’s responses and interests do sound more like those of an intelligence officer than a diplomat. Interesting if true, as the Foreign Office always says.’ He laughed. ‘Now, your write-up.’
Hugo considered aloud whether Charles should report by minute, memo, note for file or contact note. He seemed happier with the bureaucracy of casework than with casework itself, and Charles was content with the distraction. He had not lied directly. He was still postponing. And if the Russians didn’t tell anyone, as Viktor had promised, what difference would it make to the world? None, except that he would spend the rest of his career living a lie. But was it true, or were they making it up? That was something he had to know; had to, and the only way to learn more was to talk about it to Viktor again, and perhaps again and again. Thus would the first lie become a second, and so on. Lies never came singly.
So far, he told himself, he had not lied. But then he recalled a remark of his father’s, made long ago. ‘The essence of a lie is the intent to deceive.’ They were walking above Turville, near the windmill, his father wearing a cap, buttoned-up sports jacket and scarf. It must have been winter. Charles was still in the army and it must have been sometime after he had returned from Northern Ireland, because that was the context, a Belfast inquiry or inquest. They had paused by a stile and his father had tapped the top of it with his blackthorn as he emphasised each word: ‘The essence of a lie is the intent to deceive.’ Well, he should know all about that, if Viktor were to be believed. But what status did the precept have in the mouth of a man living a great lie? Did it have greater weight because spoken by an expert on the subject? Was it given added edge by bitter self-knowledge? Or was it rendered worthless on the lips of one who didn’t – wouldn’t – see what he was doing as lying, preferring to see it as service in a just cause?
It was only when undressing back at the flat that he remembered the envelope. At the time he had pushed it into his pocket, determined to concede nothing, to rise to no bait, to expose not even the vulnerability of interest, but it weighed in his pocket as he hung his jacket. He shut his bedroom door and, squatting on the mattress on the floor, opened it.
For the next few days he went through the motions: got up, went to work, did what he was told, sustained social intercourse. His preparations for Exercise Danish Blue passed muster, for the time being. In lectures he asked no questions and in exercises got away with the minimum. He forgot things – pens, keys, numbers, designations, arrangements. All the normal, everyday activities and routines, previously accomplished without thought, now required effort. He kept putting off his write-up, though Hugo pestered him for it because he wanted it on top of Hookey’s in-tray when Hookey returned from an overseas trip. Charles was glad Hookey was away. It prolonged postponement. Inside, he was dazed, picking his way through rubble. Among the missing was his sense of himself. His father, the man he thought he knew, had gone for good, of course. All his memories, the background from which he had grown so unquestioningly, now meant something different. His new knowledge entailed the construction of a new man, a much less fatherly father. But it was also his own self – he, himself, the ‘I’ he had used with such confidence because taken so completely for granted – that was missing. Or could not be put into action, which was perhaps the same thing. He should move on, he thought – he was not, after all, his father, something of himself must surely be left – but he could not bring himself to re-engage in anything. And the past was now robbed of all possibility of nostalgia.
He wanted to talk, and not to talk. He wanted most to talk to Anna, but he couldn’t do that without talking to the office. It would be an unfair burden on her, no matter what she said. And if he did tell the office, how would they react? So much in h
is family, his background, in the whole inclination of his past had led to the sort of service he sought to perform. By confessing he might lose it all. By not confessing, he would kill the meaning of it.
Twice he started his write-up and abandoned it. The third time, staying late in the lecture room after the others had gone, he did it in one go and took it to Hugo’s secretary for typing the next morning. Misleading on paper was different, he found, to misleading in speech: easier, on the one hand, starker on the other. The brief account contained no untruths but the spaces between paragraphs seemed like chasms when he read it through. He heard nothing from Hugo and for two days more mechanically continued with the course. It was hard to make anything matter. Near the end of the second day Hookey’s secretary, Maureen, rang to ask him to drop by when lectures finished that day. No hurry; Hookey would be there until late.
The outer office was empty and the door to Hookey’s ajar when Charles arrived. The inner office was lit by the subdued light of a desk lamp rather than by the usual harsh strip lighting. Hookey was slumped in his swivel chair, side-on to his desk, reading a file. His hook nose and stubby pipe were reflected in the rain-blurred window. The pipe was a straight-stemmed Lovat with a short, shouldered mouthpiece, the sort designed by Lord Lovat during the Second World War to fit in his battledress pocket. They had been Charles’s father’s favourite.
Hookey put the file face down on his desk. All three of his trays were empty but there was one paper on the blotter before him. Charles’s write-up. ‘Might be wise to shut the door,’ said Hookey quietly, picking up the paper. When Charles was seated he took the pipe from his mouth. ‘Your account, which I received from Hugo, who seems pleased with it, is more interesting for what it does not say than for what it does. Now, I won’t pretend to know what it does not say but I’m damn sure it doesn’t say it, if you see what I mean.’ He held up his hand. ‘Nor am I asking you to tell me. Not yet. Often in this office what’s not put on paper is more important than what is. God knows, I’ve kept enough things from files myself. That’s why no history of this service could ever be comprehensive. But there is one thing more important than anything we might choose to record or not record. That is truth. The truth has to be told to someone, sometime. It almost always is in the end, anyway, so better tell it to the right people in good time. In an organisation in which deception is an essential tool, it is equally essential that we should be honest with ourselves. Never lie to the office. That is the great thing. Once you do, you’re lost. Everything is skewed from then on. And if the office is not honest with itself, it is lost. Professional deceit demands clarity of thought, and clarity is impossible without honesty. This is as near to an institutional religious creed as we have. Honesty is the first and last quality one looks for in an intelligence officer.’ He leaned forward and tamped down his pipe. ‘That’s my sermon, Charles. I’m not saying any more. Up to you now. Eh?’ He raised his eyebrows as the match flared in the bowl.
Charles hesitated, not through indecision but through the self-indulgence of prolonging a life-changing choice, or so it felt. He had sensed all along that he would tell Hookey but knowing that he could still choose not to, even now, was the source of a novel sense of power, like contemplation of an act of revenge that would be utterly self-destructive. He did not luxuriate in it for long. ‘Viktor told me that my father was a KGB spy,’ he said.
Hookey slowly shook out his match and sat back in his chair, saying nothing.
The next morning photographs of Charles’s father were spread across Hookey’s desk. The envelope had contained two dozen. The earliest showed him in Berlin after the war, wearing battledress; others, dated in pencil on the back, were from the ensuing decades, in various countries where his work had taken him. He was open-necked and smiling in India and Thailand, fur-hatted and duffel-coated in snow-covered Sweden, pin-striped in Geneva and New York, tweed-jacketed and corduroyed in Rome, in shirtsleeves and – unusually – sunglasses in Mexico. Charles had very familiar memories of the wartime, ex-Royal Navy duffel-coat that his mother had tried vainly for years to get rid of. Worn and threadbare, it had retreated to the security of the shed, where Charles had found it after the funeral, along with old brogues, tweeds and hats, all stubbornly British, doggedly unfashionable. The coat was there still, and Charles often thought his father should have been buried in it. Such things, more even than the fact that he had never heard his father utter anything remotely sympathetic to the imposition of international socialism, made it still harder to credit that he had systematically, deliberately, over many years, let – as he himself would have put it – the side down.
Yet it was impossible not to credit the story told by the photographs. Ranging from soldierly youth to middle age, mostly black and white but with some of the more recent in colour, they comprised an incomplete but fundamentally accurate itinerary of his father’s travels, and were taken with his obvious collaboration. Some also showed another man with his father, thick-set, crinkly-haired, with broad peasant’s features and a broad grin who appeared, from a couple of pencilled inscriptions, to be called Igor. His father’s case officer, presumably, though that would have been a workname, not a real one. From the same inscriptions, it appeared his father’s KGB code-name was Builder.
‘They often choose code-names which reflect the subject,’ Hookey had said when Charles told him the night before. ‘Odd, given their security mania in other respects. We’ll check out Igor.’
They had talked until late the night before. Once embarked, it was easy, with no tightening of the throat, no effort to control himself. He talked quickly, as if describing someone else’s case, the task itself compelling a distancing perspective, a temporary adoption of other eyes. Hookey showed no surprise. His questions were like a doctor’s, in that Charles felt that his answers were being fitted into a body of knowledge and a context unknown. He had no sense of the significance of what he said, only that it was significant.
At the end Hookey said he would like to go over it again in the morning. Hugo would have to be told, partly because he would have to provide cover for Charles’s absence from his course. ‘I can only imagine what this must be like for you,’ Hookey said, ‘and I can only urge you to keep with it, wherever it leads. Recognition of reality is the beginning of wisdom and understanding, and we’ve got some way to go yet. See me at any time, say anything, ask anything. It’s a bit late for you to find yourself an attractive dinner date and plenty of wine tonight, but that’s what you should do from now on. Every night.’
Now, the three of them sat looking at the photographs, the images that had haunted Charles, night and day, since he had first seen them. The early ones, showing his father in battledress at about his own age, had a suggestion of raffishness that was new. Either Charles had never noticed it before or his new knowledge gave every image a fresh edge. In the later ones his father was more familiar, not only in his clothes but his stance and expression, yet he still seemed subtly and radically different. He had acquired the glamour of unknowability, a strangeness emphasised rather than masked by such homely items as the duffel-coat. It wasn’t only that he was in unfamiliar locations; it was as if he were photographed with another woman, wearing clothes his wife had given him. It was only now, as Charles sat staring at them with the others, that he realised he had always assumed his father to be somehow more innocent than himself. In need of protection, almost. It was his own innocence that angered him now.
This unpredictable anger, directed either at his father or himself and coming and going like bouts of nausea, had made it easy to face Hugo. When they met in his office that morning, anger made Charles feel careless of anything Hugo said about not being told. He almost looked forward to a show of indignation and the chance to display his own indifference.
Instead, Hugo was subdued and slightly embarrassed, as if confronting someone recently bereaved. ‘Hookey briefed me,’ he said, before Charles said anything. ‘I’m very sorry. How absolutely awful for you.’
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‘It’s quite all right.’ Charles felt he must sound absurdly stiff. ‘I mean, these things happen.’
‘Do they? Do they? Not often, I hope. At least, not in this service. Thank God.’ He stood and came round his grade 4 desk, holding out his hand. They shook hands in silence. Hugo twitched and sat again. ‘But we must not let emotion run away with us. There are arrangements to make. We have a duty to be impersonal.’
‘Quite, yes.’ Charles sat.
‘But I must say.’ Hugo leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, hands clasped and face turned to the wall as if he couldn’t bring himself to look at Charles. ‘How – how absolutely awful for you.’
‘Thank you. I hope you didn’t mind my not mentioning it before.’
‘Of course not. Quite understandable.’ Hugo nodded at the wall. ‘Your own father. Awful. Absolutely. Never known a case like it.’
It was a relief when they finally addressed what Hugo referred to as the logistics of the enhanced security perimeter now to be constructed around the case. Charles’s course was told he had been summoned on some urgent positive vetting inquiry concerning someone else; he was said to know one of the referees. It would take all day and, PV-ing being always a confidential matter, he should not be asked anything about it. Hugo made neat notes on his clipboard and then led the way into Hookey’s office.
Now, during the long silence while Hookey slowly refilled his pipe, Charles let his mind float over all he had said, aware that he had yet to give thought to his mother and the effect on her. She would be devastated; it would be like his father dying all over again.
‘There are four aspects,’ Hookey resumed, without any preliminaries and without looking up. ‘Firstly, the story the KGB has told. Is it true and how should we handle it? It will have to be investigated and, although we can do a certain – perhaps a considerable – amount ourselves, we shall have to involve MI5. Espionage alleged to have been committed by British subjects is formally their patch. This will almost certainly limit our freedom in deciding how to respond since what is for us an operational case becomes part of their espionage investigation. Secondly, we –’