by Simon Mawer
On two occasions they went away for the night, to a small hotel on the Thames at Marlow. She always chose a time when Alan was away on business and she told him she was going to Oxford to see her parents. But still they were careful, booking in as Mr and Mrs Laroche and as part of their cover speaking French to one another. Spying was so like adultery, she thought. The secrecy, the deception, the constant betrayal, in heart as much as in action.
It was on the second of those occasions that she warned Absolon about his side of the agreement. They were lying in bed in the morning, with a thin grey light leaking out of the clouds outside the hotel and the chambermaid keen to get in to do their room. ‘My side are becoming impatient,’ she told him. ‘They want something more substantial from you.’
He lay there in the warmth of their bedclothes. Dark hair against the almost luminous white of his skin. She knew him better than she knew Alan, knew the creases and corners of his body, his smell and his taste. ‘It’s not easy,’ he said. ‘It’s a balancing act.’
‘I know all about balancing acts. But you’ve got to start giving me something concrete.’
‘You don’t understand the level of suspicion I have to deal with. Everyone watches everyone else. Even the scientists, so I’ve heard. You know who’s in charge of the atom bomb project in the Soviet Union?’ He turned his head to look at her. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, and it’s only a rumour. But do you know who?’
She didn’t. She lay amid the pillows and felt his hand between her thighs and didn’t give a damn about who was in charge of anything.
‘Lavrenty Beria.’
But she had no idea who Beria was. She waited a bit, feeling his hand moving. ‘Absolon, I think they’d be willing to make a deal,’ she said. ‘If you were to come over I think they’d give you the whole lot – a new identity, a new life in Canada or Australia or anywhere you want.’
The hand was stilled. ‘In return for what?’
‘A full debrief. Everything you know. Your whole life, really.’
‘And what about you?’
She lay motionless in case her slightest movement might shift the pattern of the moment. The plain room, lit by a weak morning sun. Bare, hotel furniture. Her clothes lying on the floor. ‘I’d come with you,’ she said quietly. ‘Canada, anywhere.’
She also spent the occasional weekend at Ned’s cottage. ‘You can come with me, if you want,’ she’d assured her husband, but he didn’t want any contact with her queer brother. She could see that, even if he didn’t say it directly. ‘I’ve got better things to do,’ he might say. Or, ‘I wouldn’t feel comfortable,’ as though Ned might try and seduce him. So for those two days it would just be the two of them, brother and sister shut away in their little conspiracy. Ned was nervous, more nervous than usual, jumping when the phone rang at the cottage, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone was following when they went shopping in Reading or Newbury. He would smuggle material from work to photograph over the weekend. Security was a chimeric beast, at times overweening in its attentions but in other ways careless – the guards gave a cursory glance in his briefcase when he left the laboratory but they never thought, or dared, to search his pockets. Perhaps it wasn’t considered a gentlemanly thing to do. ‘So I don’t have to take that bloody camera in to work,’ he explained to Marian. ‘Can you imagine if security found that on me?’
In the shed at the end of the garden he had made a makeshift copy stand out of pieces of doweling and strips of plywood. The thing could be disassembled and the component parts looked like nothing at all – offcuts, leftovers – but once put together the contraption would hold the camera at the correct height above any document to be photographed. Two Anglepoise lamps, one on each side, gave clear illumination. He clicked the release cable and the little camera snatched the image and secreted it away within its tiny cartridge. On the very first occasion Marian watched, looking over his shoulder to see how things were going. The document he was photographing was an academic paper of some kind, each page stamped across the top with the rubric TOP SECRET. She felt as though she was peering through a keyhole into a locked room and watching something indecent taking place. Thereafter she stayed in the cottage whenever he worked away in the garden shed.
Tate
It is the simultaneity of events that intrigues me, their strange synchronicity. While Marian was conspiring with her brother I was cycling between my digs and the Victorian villa that housed the Joint Services School for Linguists. While she was spread-eagled beneath her Russian lover I was struggling with Russian conversation and anticipating, in an agony of expectation, our forthcoming appointment at the Tate Gallery. If you had asked me what I was expecting I would have been hard put to find an answer. Perhaps nothing more than the thrill of being in the company of someone who was in so many ways an exotic stranger – the Frenchness, the war record, the almost suicide, all those things I didn’t comprehend. And, I suppose, the undercurrent of sexuality that I detected in her. But I was naive in those days. We were all naive, virgins almost all of us – virgin soldiers playing at academics. We might talk about women but rarely encountered any and I could barely recognise sexuality in an encounter.
On the Saturday in question I had some kind of commitment that I had to get out of, one of those absurd playlets we used to put on, written by a student whose later works graced the West End stage. With some difficulty I extricated myself from a sketch that I had been rehearsing. Family reasons, I explained mendaciously. My aunt is ill. Something like that. I even talked about the John Radcliffe Hospital in order to give my lies verisimilitude, and worried, as I did, about the difficulties of creating a cover story on the fly, of compounding lie with lie, detail with detail, to create a complex fabric of deception that could all be undone with one twitch on a loose thread. Occam’s razor applies to deception as much as it does to any argument: don’t go multiplying your entities without good reason. Further, the excuse brought to my blushing mind the rather ridiculous fact that Marian was certainly old enough to be my aunt; indeed almost – but not quite – old enough to be my mother.
‘Woodhouse aunt or Saki aunt?’ the author of the sketch asked.
I fudged an answer – ‘Sherry aunt, in fact’ – which seemed to amuse him and earned me my release. So it was that on Saturday morning I travelled up to town in an orgy of anticipation and a nagging concern that my dwindling financial resources might not be up to the adventure. And, of course, an even more acute worry that she wouldn’t make the rendezvous. I imagined her in her Paris days, meeting agents beneath the eye of the Gestapo, exchanging passwords and code phrases. How would meeting with a callow youth match up to that? But when I walked along the pavement from the Millbank bus stop, there she was, standing at the top of the gallery steps looking like Lady Tate herself welcoming visitors to her domain.
I didn’t know quite what to make of that morning. I didn’t even know how to go round an art gallery in someone’s company. Do you look at the pieces together and exchange whispered ideas or do you go your separate ways? Is there an etiquette? I examined her examining the Turners, concentrating on them as though this was the most important thing in the world, and I assumed that she knew something about them that I didn’t. Once or twice she caught my eye and smiled across the gleaming expanse of stone floor. She seemed to match the austere classicism of the galleries – a coldness, a monochrome exactness that stirred me to paroxysms of barely contained delight. What was running through her mind as she gazed on The Lake, Petworth: Sunset, Stag Drinking or Tivoli: Tobias and the Angel? I wanted to understand, wanted to occupy the space behind those shadowed eyes, eyes that had seen things I could not imagine.
And then we found ourselves standing in front of the Millais of Ophelia Drowning – the brilliant, luminous, captivating original of the image we had toyed with all those years ago in the cottage in Sussex. For a long while she drowned before our eyes. Then quite softly Marian took my hand. The contact was like an electric shock. ‘It was a very unha
ppy time for me, you know that?’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘I could never tell how much you understood.’
My breath was held. ‘Perhaps more than you think.’
‘You were all very kind to me at a time when I didn’t really appreciate it. Your mother was very kind.’
‘She tries to be kind to everyone, but she doesn’t always succeed.’
Very gently she shook my hand as though shaking it free. ‘Let’s go and see your Modiglianis.’
And then there was the moment – we were crossing the great space of the Octagon – when she was distracted by something. It seemed nothing much at the time. ‘Do you mind waiting here a moment?’ she asked, and left me standing by one of the pillars while she went off to talk to someone. A tall man in a rather crumpled dark suit. I thought perhaps, an official of the gallery. I noticed brilliantly polished shoes and a receding hairline, before he turned away and moved with her behind a pillar. They talked for a while – I fancied it was an animated conversation – and then he disappeared into one of the neighbouring galleries while she came back across the Octagon towards me.
‘A friend,’ she said, trying, and failing, to sound dismissive. ‘Acquaintance, more like.’ But I saw the light in her eyes plain enough. My imagination blossomed into a fantasy about secret assignations and adulterous encounters. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking,’ she added.
How, I wondered, did she know what I was thinking? Could she read my mind or did my expression give me away? And if that was so, what other secrets might she descry? The unknown man dismissed, we continued on our way into the special exhibition. Its title was ‘Modi or maudit? Modigliani in Paris’. We laughed together at the pun despite the fact that I didn’t quite understand it. There were sculptures, of course, those blank, Cycladic faces that Modigliani favoured; and there were the nudes, nudes elongated and languid that lay around the gallery like women in a harem. Tufts of dark hair smirked from pubis and axilla. I tried to avoid Marian’s glance, and blushed when I failed.
Respite was offered by the smaller gallery where the drawings were hung, where there were blessed shadows in which I could hide. Each drawing – mere strokes of pencil or charcoal – stood in its own pool of thoughtful light. And there she was: Anna Akhmatova. Until that moment I had no idea that the two of them, Akhmatova and Modigliani, the poet and the painter, had had an intense, pre-revolutionary affair in Paris. The only evidence was a card on the wall – Anna Akhmatova, 1911. Black crayon on paper. Alexandre collection – and the drawing itself, a spare sketch of curves, mere suggestions of limb and torso, lines of beauty and lineaments of desire. The breasts were tipped with a pencil point, the head was in profile with the famous Akhmatova nose as blunt as a Roman senator’s and her hair gathered and fringed like a Roman matron.
Difficult to describe my emotions. This image was an epiphany, proof of the fell hand of coincidence at work in our sublunary world. You speak of the devil and there he is beside you; you dream of an angel and there she is before you.
‘Dreams come true,’ Marian said, at my shoulder.
We had lunch in the café. This was long before art exhibitions became a focus of pilgrimage, so the place was almost deserted. There were sandwiches made with counterfeit ham and others with something that resembled cheese. And Marian sitting opposite me watching with curiosity as I told her the story of the First Secretary from the British embassy in Moscow visiting Akhmatova in Leningrad in 1946, and how the two – the visitor from the West, a young Russian specialist at the embassy, and the great poetess – had spent a night together.
‘A night together?’
‘Talking,’ I insisted. ‘He was a philosophy don, for God’s sake!’
‘Don’t philosophers do sex?’
‘They spent the whole night talking,’ I insisted.
‘How extraordinarily unimaginative.’
‘About poetry and culture, about the Russians in exile and the ones who stayed behind, about the whole disaster of Russian literature.’
She laughed at my blushes. I talked passionately, I suppose, and it’s a short step from passion to embarrassment. When we came to leave she refused to let me pay. ‘My treat,’ she said. ‘If you can call spam sandwich a treat.’
So I let her pay and followed her out of the gallery in a confusion of thanks and protestations: ‘If you pay for everything, it’ll make it difficult the next time. If there is going to be a next time. I mean, if you want to do something else, not necessarily the Tate. Perhaps a cinema or something …’
I must have sounded a complete fool but she did me the honour of not pointing it out. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘I’ve had a lovely time.’
I agreed. Lovely it had been. And more than lovely, although I didn’t tell her that: thrilling, exciting. She summoned a cab – ‘Isn’t your train at three-thirty? We’d better hurry’ – and then, as we sat in the taxi heading up Whitehall, she asked, ‘Why …?’
‘Why what?’
‘Do you have to get back this afternoon?’
There was no reason in the world.
‘So why not come and stay? Come for supper and stay the night. I’ll be able to repay some of Judith’s hospitality and Alan will enjoy the company. Someone who can talk cricket with him. You can talk cricket, I take it?’
‘I hate cricket.’
‘Well, make it up. Men can do that kind of thing. Women can’t. A woman sounds daft talking about bowling maidens over but it seems a natural thing for a man to do.’
‘To bowl maidens over?’
‘To talk about it. They rarely manage actually to do it.’ She caught my hand again, this time to press her point home. ‘What do you say?’
‘I haven’t even got a toothbrush.’
‘I’m sure we can manage something. And you can borrow a fresh shirt from Alan. You look about his size. Go on, be brave and unconventional.’
Of course I said yes. It seemed a spontaneous idea on her part, that was the thing. Beautifully judged, because she was a natural at the subtle arts of deception. I remember her leaning forward to talk to the driver, the curve of her back, one arm stretched out to open the little hatch in the partition. ‘Forget King’s Cross. Take us to South Kensington.’
The flat in South Kensington was in a red-brick block dating from the 1930s. As she let us in I remember my feeling of curiosity at seeing how someone else lived. My own family home was a clutter of things – papers and books piled on the floor, bikes in the hallway, manifestoes of whatever cause my mother had espoused at the time on the kitchen table – but the Walcotts’s flat was plain and spare, barely touched by the accumulation of stuff that you get when somewhere is lived in for years. They might have rented it just the other day, or been about to sell up and move out. Not a thing out of place and barely any place taken by something trivial or decorative. The sitting room occupied the corner of the block and had curved windows that made me think of the waiting room in an airport – a pre-war airport with languid women drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes in long holders and waiting for a DC3 on the tarmac outside to be fuelled up. A chrome model of a Spitfire on a side table heightened the illusion, but the famous pilot was conspicuous by his absence.
‘I’d quite forgotten,’ she said as she searched the refrigerator for ice. ‘Alan had to go down to Portsmouth to see his mother. The poor dear’s twisted her ankle or something. So I’m afraid it’s just you and me until he gets back.’ She glanced at me with a faint smile. ‘Is that all right?’
It was. It was beyond my dreams, but I didn’t tell her that. What we actually talked about I can’t recall but I do remember the ease with which we chatted, the amusement and the laughter. Our conversation was like a dance. We knew the steps instinctively and laughed at the small triumphs of understanding that we achieved. I thought to myself that there had been nothing like this before, that this woman with her austere face, was closer and warmer to me that anyone else I had encountered. Do I sound abs
urd? The truth was, I was falling – if I had not already fallen – in love.
We were interrupted by the sound of a key in the front door. ‘That must be him.’ And, to my disappointment, it was indeed Him, the Spitfire Pilot himself, back from strapping his mother’s ankle, huffing and puffing and complaining about the traffic on the A3. He looked askance when he saw me.
‘It’s Sam. You remember Sam Wareham, don’t you? Of course you do. I told you we’d bumped into each other the other day. Judith’s son.’
We shook hands. Despite having been out of the Air Force for a few years now, Alan Walcott still looked every inch the model of a modern fighter pilot. Not tall – you couldn’t be too tall, he explained, or you wouldn’t fit into the Spit’s cockpit – but somehow giving the impression of height. At ease with himself. Good looking in the manner of the times: Brylcreemed hair, square-jawed, firm of gaze. He clenched a pipe in his hand as though it were a joystick and looked me over as if I was on parade. Did he remember me? For a moment he thought not, and then connections were made and understanding dawned. ‘Do you mean the cartwheel king? Goodness gracious, all that time ago. And you thought I was ever such a miserable chap for not having shot down any Germans. You’ve grown a bit, haven’t you?’
‘And my collarbone’s healed,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘I remember a sound like a pistol shot. Echoed round the Close, it did. Well, I never – when I came in I thought you must be another of Marian’s left wing lot. You’re not a lefty, are you?’
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. Marian’s politics had never occurred to me. But she came to my rescue. ‘Sam’s at Cambridge at the moment. Doing a Russian course.’
‘Russian? Why Russian?’
‘He’s doing National Service. They need Russian translators.’
‘Going to be a spy, are you?’
‘Why must you see spies everywhere, Alan?’
‘Because they are everywhere, aren’t they? Look at that Cambridge couple, Burgess and Maclean. Rotten apples infect all the rest. And those damn scientists, friends of your brother’s every one.’