by Alan Judd
‘I’m sure. But why do you –’
‘Happy with my pension and a CMG, if so honoured. Or an OBE. More often earned despite its unjust reputation for being Other Buggers’ Efforts. Doesn’t come up with the rations, which Call-Me-Gods generally do.’
There was another pause while they waited to cross the Tottenham Court Road. ‘No, but you never know,’ Hugo said, when they reached the other side.
‘You never know?’
‘When you might need one.’
There was another pause. They were heading down the road but it wasn’t clear whether Hugo had privately decided they should walk back to Century House or whether he was on his way to another meeting somewhere else and intended, if he had thought about him at all, to leave Charles at the door.
‘What’s she like, this – er – Chantal?’ Hugo asked.
Charles described her.
‘One of the troubles with the office,’ Hugo continued, ‘is that as you get more senior you get less fun. You drive desks, not cases. How long’s she been on the game?’
Charles became uncomfortably aware that Hugo turned frequently and closely towards him, as if seeking visual confirmation of agreement. Charles widened the gap a little.
‘And how much – you know – does she charge for a quickie?’ Hugo asked. ‘Not that I’m interested, mind.’ He barked sharply and turned again. Charles realised now that he was checking his reflection in the shop windows they passed.
‘I’m not sure about a quickie. Less than a night’s rate, presumably. I’ll ask.’
‘Not that I’m interested, as I say. Quite happy with present arrangements. I was thinking of a pub lunch.’
‘Well, I daresay she’d –’
Hugo barked again. ‘I mean for us, you nitwit.’
Lunch was crowded and noisy. They had to stand. Hugo talked about the German spring offensive of 1918 while Charles pondered the mystery of what Hugo called his ‘present arrangements’. It was not easy to imagine how he and Anna had come to be joined together; it was neither easy nor pleasant to imagine they still were.
After lunch they found Martha in Hugo’s secretary’s office, her imposing presence and her refusal either to say what she wanted or leave plainly irritating the secretary.
‘Love one, dear,’ she said, sitting heavily when they got into Hugo’s room.
Hugo was seeing to the hanging of his coat and hat. ‘D’you mean coffee, Martha?’
‘’Course I do. Run out down there. Why else d’you think the mountain would come to Mahomet?’
‘We’ll get you some. Charles?’
‘Please.’
Hugo hesitated, then left the room. Martha chuckled. ‘If that was deliberate, I take my hat off to you. But I see from your face it wasn’t. He wasn’t asking you, dear, he meant you to get it.’
Hugo reappeared, looking cross. ‘Somebody will bring it.’
Martha eased her chair closer to his desk. ‘Hugo, you kill me every time I think of you. Did you know that? Never mind, dear, don’t trouble your head about it. You’ll never understand why. Now, let me lay my cards on your grade 4 table.’
She laid out half a dozen densely-written filing cards, three with photographs of the same man. ‘Your man Igor. Here he is, see: Igor Smoletsky, Ministry of Foreign Trade, or so he tells the world. Identified intelligence officer by the Danes, on the basis of his behaviour pattern and contacts – my guess is they had a DA alongside him – and suspect IO according to the FBI. Not his real name, of course, but the one he most often travels under.’ Her long red fingernail separated three of the cards. ‘These are dates and places of his known travels. I take it that’s what you’re most interested in.’ Her dark eyes, magnified by her glasses, rested on Charles. ‘I’ll leave these with you so you can check them. But I must have them back by close of play. Pain of death. Promise?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,’ said Hugo.
Charles could see at a glance that Igor was a man photographed with his father, and that some at least of their travels coincided.
‘Directorate N, no doubt,’ said Hugo. ‘Illegals support officer.’
Martha’s jowls wobbled as she shook her head. ‘Not for my money, not their pattern. Nor our old friends and opposite numbers in the First Chief Directorate, either. No, I think your man here is Second Chief Directorate, the KGB equivalent of MI5. If the case that interests you began on Russian, or Russian-controlled, territory, then 2CD might have done it and kept it to themselves ever since, without telling their overseas brethren in FCD, or the Illegals directorate, or the GRU or anyone at all. Or perhaps only bringing them in later when they needed help. My guess, given Igor’s age and his travel pattern, is the case goes back a long time, that the agent was an occasional rather than a frequent traveller and that Igor was always his case officer. That would be most unusual in the other directorates. Must have been an important case.’
Hugo was taking notes again. ‘That would explain why none of our defectors had ever heard of it, or anything like it. They’re all FCD, Directorate N or GRU, the sort of people we have contact with. Next to impossible to meet the 2CD, let alone in recruitable circumstances. Martha, you’ve done in a day what MI5 reckon it will take them weeks to do.’
‘Not all my doing, dear. Theirs too, though they don’t know it yet. I talk to my opposite number, Doreen, every day. We do each other favours. You’ll get your official answer from MI5 as soon as they get round to asking Doreen.’
‘So there are two Marthas?’ Hugo laughed and blinked.
‘One’s enough. Make the world lopsided otherwise. She’s half my size, Doreen. Poor girl. Seems to put up with it, somehow.’ She laughed throatily. ‘But back to business for a moment.’ She looked again at Charles. ‘It’s not for me to enquire beyond what you choose to tell me but I couldn’t help noticing a certain family resemblance in the piccies you showed me and I have to tell you that if you sought confirmation that someone was doing something, this circumstantial evidence is the firmest you’ll get short of outright proof. There are lots of coincidences in spying’ – she put one heavily-ringed finger on each of the cards in turn – ‘but not this often, not this many. Yet what they were doing may not be quite, or all, you think. Remember that.’
‘I think you know rather more than we’ve told you, Martha,’ Hugo said.
‘Just remember what I said, dear.’
Charles drove down to his mother’s house on the Friday night, following an early pizza with a former girlfriend who was soon to get married. Most of his friends appeared to be in, or moving towards, that state. Wedding plans and discussions merged in his mind. It didn’t trouble him not to be part of it. In fact, it suited him that his sister Mary would not be at home that weekend, not only because there would be less wedding talk but because he wanted his mother to himself.
The pizza lasted longer than intended, though, so the evening chat he’d hoped for with his mother was no more than twenty minutes by the fire. She was already in her dressing-gown and drinking her Ovaltine. She talked of Mary’s wedding.
‘She says you’re buying her friend’s flat in the Boltons,’ she said.
‘I haven’t seen it yet.’ He was supposed to have rung to view it.
‘I do think it would be a good idea if you could. It’s a nice area and it’s time you had somewhere.’
‘Yes, no, I shall.’ It had been more on his mind to leave a note on the windscreen of the Bristol 405.
After she’d gone to bed he reopened Middlemarch, which he was attempting for the third time, but soon got up and went to his father’s study at the back of the house. It was almost a shrine to his father, filled with the furnishings of his father’s life – the books, the Fribourg & Treyer pipes, the blotting pad and heavy glass inkwells, the school ruler, the tweed jacket with worn leather elbows hanging behind the door, the ancient Windsor chair, the polished brass 25-pounder shell case filled with walking sticks, the First World War bayonet-cum-poker in the he
arth, the battered spectacle case and many other inanimates, all articulate of his father’s presence. The presence would fade, of course, and when the memories that preserved it were themselves extinguished such inanimates would be the only relics, by then unrecognised.
Meanwhile, it still smelt of his father, a combination of tweed and corduroy, logs in the fire-basket, pipes with tobacco left in the bowls. Charles had changed nothing, had not scraped out a single pipe. Now, as he surveyed it, leaning against the oak door he had closed behind him, he imagined sweeping it clean, scourging it, removing all trace of the man. But his imagination baulked at explaining to his mother. He took a few steps around the room, picked a blackthorn walking stick, felt the smoothness of the battered spectacle case, ran his fingers down the sleeve of the jacket. Did such things now stand for something different, or had they never stood for what he thought they had at all; or were they, at some level he could not imagine, compatible with the new truth after all? Was it possible that the man he thought he knew well could have been a continuum, not a fractured vessel? Was it possible to have been what these relics represented, and to have done that?
He pulled out the Windsor chair and sat at the desk. The rain tapped at the windows. With the curtains undrawn, he could see the water-blurred reflection of himself, pensive, sitting as his father might have sat, and becoming more blurred, like that image. If there were ghosts, he thought, let it be now; a sign would be sufficient, anything.
The wind buffeted the windows and the intermittent musketry of the rain became fusillades, perhaps like those that had prompted Edward Thomas’s reflections on such a night of the fate of ‘soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’. Could this be why his father had done it? A sense of compassion, of mission, perhaps as pure in its origin as it was divorced from its consequences? Communism had always done well out of compassion. Yet for his father never to have shown the slightest inclination or sympathy must have been a consummate performance, almost schizophrenic. Every believer, surely, over years and decades, would betray something to someone; they all had, the well-known spies, Philby, Blake and so on. All had confided or given clues; and Viktor had described it as an ideological recruitment.
He stared again at his reflection and resisted the urge to draw the curtains. He was a sniper’s perfect target and since Belfast he had found it impossible to relax before uncurtained windows at night, even though the darkness bred only rain in the Hambleden valley. And nowadays the poor could keep dry.
What had he really known of this man, that other blurred reflection who had sat at that desk? They had been open with each other, he used to think, up to a point, nothing too personal. Neither had wanted that but both – he used to think – shared a tacit understanding that they could be if need be. That’s why little had been said. They discussed things, issues, nothing nearer. It was comradely, based on the assumption that intimate sympathy was there, if called for. Well, it hadn’t been, it now appeared. If he had called for it he’d have got only its simulacrum. No matter how helpful or restorative that might have been, it could not have been real because his father was deliberately, systematically, routinely betraying him, his mother, his sister, almost everyone he knew, and all they stood for. And now he was beyond reach. Charles understood that the past was past, of course, but until it included death he’d had no feel for its finality, for the cold absence of possibility.
He picked up the worn old penny by the inkstand. Britannia had faded around the edges, the head of George V was recognisable but his name worn away. The date – 1918, the year of his father’s birth – could just be made out. His father had always carried this penny. Charles found it when emptying pockets by the still-warm body in the hospital, as recommended by the nurses. He had meant to pocket it himself but it seemed too blatant an act of possession; now, he thought, he had been too nice. He tried to recall all he could of gathering his father’s effects but could remember nothing that he might now recognise as contact arrangements, odd numbers, notes, concealment devices. Few agents trusted everything to memory. The more he considered such practicalities, with the rain still beating against the windows and the room colder now that the heating had gone off, the more his emotions were dissolved and rendered down into a sub-strata of granite. He would be cold, hard, unremitting, just – considerations of the office, MI5 or whatever notwithstanding – in his mission to establish the truth. As he let it take hold it felt like a liberation. When he stood he pocketed the penny.
His mother was pleased by his Saturday morning offer of a pub lunch after a little gentle shopping in Marlow or Henley. After a breakfast walk, without taking one of his father’s sticks, Charles tried to remember Gerry’s lectures on preparing for agent meetings. Have a clear aim, a reason for meeting, know what it is you want to come away with; if you can’t state your aim in a sentence, don’t put the agent to the risk of meeting. Think of everything, every reaction, however unlikely, everything that could go wrong, however unwelcome. Have a response to hand, no matter how trite or temporary, because it’s bound to be better than blankness or panic. There was an office superstition to the effect that if you anticipated a disaster it wouldn’t happen, as in a sense it didn’t, because if you had a way of coping, things tended not to go seriously wrong. The corollary of this was that what scuppered you would be something you hadn’t thought of – the sudden death of the agent in your hotel room, for example – and so you chased your tail in ever-decreasing circles trying to anticipate ever less likely scenarios. Supposing it was you that died, Roger had asked, provoking laughter. It had happened, Gerry said. A case officer had died in a safe house in South Africa, during the meeting. The lesson of that was not to carry anything that would compromise the agent.
Remember, too, that the agent was also a human being, who had a life outside spying. As should you, if you were sensible. Let the agent see that you were human. Be professional at all times, but show that you have a soul, a heart, some humour. And, finally, having thought of all this well in advance, forget it. Don’t go to the meeting with your head bursting with all you intend to say, since you might not then attend to what’s before you. Empty your head, relax, do something different. So long as you had thought of it, it would be there when you needed it, would come when bidden.
So he thought as he prepared for lunch with his mother, treading the sodden footpath down and up through the woods, past the convent and back across the fields towards Frieth. Only by thinking of it in this way could he contemplate asking the unaskable: did you know Dad was a spy? If you didn’t, how could you not have? Were you – are you – one too? What can you remember about people he mentioned, trips he took, things he brought home from work? Did he ever mention Russia, or communism, or spies? Did he ever say anything about a nest-egg?
The office – and particularly MI5 – wouldn’t approve, of course. The investigation was at a very early stage and warning his mother, if she did turn out to be involved, would be tantamount to sabotage. Even if she were it would probably not end in court, yet he was determined that, if she had anything to say, she should say it first to him. She was his mother. This, he would argue in his defence, was why he had done it. But what really drove him, he knew, was a combustible mixture of shame and pride, the determination that it was his case, that he would fix it – whatever that meant.
When he got back from his walk he suspended further thought by taking an axe to the beech logs in the woodshed until it was time to drive to Marlow. The town was busy and after minor household shopping his mother toured the several small, expensive ladies’ dress shops. She was always saying how very good they were, and how opulent everyone seemed to be these days. At least, in Marlow and Henley. She shortened the inspection of one, though, because of Charles’s yawning.
‘I wish you wouldn’t make it so obvious. You’re as bad as your father.’
‘I can’t help it. It’s shops. As soon as I go into a shop I start yawning.’
‘Unless it’s a bookshop or a car showroom
.’
‘Or a pipe shop now. Why don’t I go over there and you come and get me when you’ve finished.’
She bought herself a green silk scarf in the autumn sale and they drove up to Fawley on the far side of the valley, where there was a pub in which they were unlikely to meet anyone they knew. They were early enough to take their pick of the tables. The fire, recently lit, flamed and crackled.
‘I do wish I could get ours to go as well as that,’ she said. ‘Your father could but he approached it as civil engineering. I was never allowed to touch it.’
‘It should be better now I’ve split the logs.’
‘I thought that’s what you must be doing. Thank you, dear.’
They ordered ploughman’s lunches, she with white wine and he with Guinness. He had decided to question her over lunch, and in public, because a meal was a useful distraction, something to be doing while other things went on. Being in public made it harder to retreat into emotion.
‘I was trying to remember when you and Dad bought our house,’ he began.
‘Before you were born. At the end of – no, just after – the war. We had no money, of course – hardly anyone did then – and although houses were cheap you still couldn’t get them if you didn’t have any. At the same time there was a tremendous shortage of housing because of all the men coming back from the war and getting married and wanting their own places rather than living with their in-laws, which is what most people used to do and still happened very often. In fact, we did to start with – well, we had ever since we were married in 1943, whenever Dad was on leave. We lived with his parents in Bristol first and then with Nanny and Granddad in High Wycombe. We were living with them for quite a long time after you were born.’
‘But how did you get the house?’
She dabbed her lips with the napkin. Her eyes always shone with interest when she looked back. ‘Oh, it was such good luck. Well, luck and your father’s friendly persistence. It belonged to a widower, Colonel Capper, who was a miserable old stick or so it seemed, but he’d been badly injured in the first war. He always limped and his face was sort of sliced off on one side, just tight skin. Horrible. Not his fault, poor man, but no one seemed to like him except your father. He got to know him because we often used to come for walks out here and if Colonel Capper was in the garden your father would stop and talk to him. At first, you see, he still used to wear his army greatcoat – saving his demob one for best – and Colonel Capper had been in the Royal Engineers in the first war and I think that was how they got talking. After you were born your father used to come out here more often by himself and I think they must have talked about the house because I know he told Colonel Capper that it was the sort of house we’d love to have if ever we could afford one. And then one day he came home and said Colonel Capper was going into a home in Marlow – no, Henley, because that’s where we used to forward letters – and he’d like us to buy it. Can’t say I blame him. It seemed an enormous sum of money, far more than we could afford, but somehow we did it.’