by Simon Mawer
‘No, don’t.’ She half turned and clutched at his arm. ‘Come with me. Now. I can contact someone immediately.’ The urgency in her voice. The sensation of grabbing at ideas like a drowning person clutching at bits of flotsam. Someone in the shadows nearby hushed her to silence. Absolon’s face came closer. ‘I can’t do that. I’ve got to go. They want me on a plane this afternoon.’
‘To where?’
‘I told you. Home. Moscow.’ He reached over her shoulder and dropped something into her lap – an envelope, just an envelope. ‘I can’t explain now.’
‘What do you mean, you can’t explain now?’
‘Maybe some time. We’ll see.’
Then he kissed her on the cheek and was gone. She slipped the envelope into her handbag and turned back to the screen where Ray Milland’s whole world seemed to be collapsing around him.
Ten minutes later she left the cinema by an emergency exit just beside the ladies. Out in the glaring daylight there was the usual lunchtime crowd that might have concealed a dozen watchers, but what did it matter who was watching her? They knew where she worked and where she lived. Both sides did. Absolon had gone and she was on her own, burned and useless. Perhaps there was a kind of comfort in that. Back in the office she attempted to do some work but she couldn’t concentrate. She felt sick, physically sick, and had to run to the bathroom to vomit. Once her stomach had settled a bit she summoned up the courage to open the envelope that he had passed to her. Inside were a dozen strips of 35-millimetre film negative. No note, nothing else. As she was about to examine them there was a tentative knock on the door and Miss Miller’s voice asking if she was all right.
‘I’m fine,’ she called, stuffing the negatives back into the envelope and the envelope back into her handbag. When she opened the bathroom door there was Miss Miller waiting. She could see what the woman was thinking. ‘No, I’m not pregnant,’ she snapped. ‘It must have been something I ate.’
That evening she worked late and waited until everyone had gone, Miss Miller with a baleful glance and a knowing ‘you need to take care of yourself’. Only then did she dare open the envelope again. She held the strips of celluloid up to the light to try and make out the images. There were harlequin figures shaped in black and grey patches, performing against a white backdrop, difficult to decipher but easy enough if you knew what they were. Figures wrapped in each other’s limbs. Figures filled with each other’s parts.
She took the negatives to the bathroom and tried to burn them in the basin. During her training there had been an explosives lecture in which the instructor had shown how you could make a bomb using old film stock. ‘It’s nitrocellulose,’ he’d explained. ‘Better known as guncotton.’ But this was safety film and it burned poorly, with much black smoke and lots of melting. She cut up the charred remnants with scissors, wrapped them in lavatory paper and flushed them away. Then, like a child, like a bloody silly little girl, she broke down in tears. Tears for Ned, tears for Absolon, tears for herself. There was the ache of absence like a physical void inside her, physical as much as emotional. Where had Absolon gone? What had happened to him? And why, for Christ’s sake, did she care?
Housebreak
Her world trembled. She sensed cracks beneath the surface, as though something had broken inside, some fissure opened up in the fragile construct that was her life. She rang the number that she knew and arranged a meeting with Fawley but he could offer no comfort.
‘They’ve taken him away,’ she insisted, her voice on the edge of dissolution ‘They’ve dragged him back to Moscow and I’ve no idea what has happened to him. You’ve got to do something.’
But what could Fawley do? He looked at her with solemn concern, his fingers steepled together and gently bouncing against each other. ‘It seems likely,’ he said, and he couldn’t keep a hint of reproach from his tone, ‘that they got wind about the two of you. Possibly that he was passing you information but more likely that you were having an affair.’
‘It can’t be that,’ she cried.
‘Why can’t it?’
She paused, trying to see the way ahead, trying to measure the implications and the consequences. ‘Because he was running me as an agent.’
For the first time, the very first time, she saw shock in Fawley’s expression. Nothing overdone, nothing exaggerated. Just a widening of the eyes and a slight opening of the mouth, immediately closed, immediately brought back under control. When finally he spoke, his voice was soft, lenitive, like the soft caress of a confessor. ‘An agent? What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Marian?’
She almost told him. She almost laid out all her sins before the priest. But instead she shrugged. ‘Nothing. I wasn’t giving him anything significant. What’s the expression? Chicken feed. Just information about the Peace Union, about our contacts – trades unionists, journalists, academics, people who might be sympathetic.’
‘Is that so?’
‘You have to cover your back, don’t you? You taught me that.’
‘Don’t you think you should have told me?’
‘I’m telling you now because it no longer matters. It’s one of the basic rules, isn’t it? You’re safe as long as you’re useful. So we were both safe because we were useful. Safe from them and safe from you. But then something happened to change all that, didn’t it? They must have discovered that Major Absolon of the GRU was planning to defect. How did they get to know that?’
His mask was back in place now, bland and smooth. ‘These things happen, Marian. They happen. Perhaps he himself made a mistake. Took his eye off the ball.’ The cricket metaphor, the bane of an English gentleman’s conversation.
‘But he wouldn’t have, would he? He’s a professional. He knows what to do.’
‘Was he in love with you?’
That stalled her. She didn’t know, she just didn’t know the answer. ‘That’s not the point. The point is, they must have known he was about to come over. How did they know? Somehow they knew what he was going to do. And you’ve got to do something about it.’
‘My dear Marian, you know perfectly well that there is nothing in the world I can do.’
*
She went home, like a refugee having nowhere else to go. Alan offered no comfort. How could she explain to him that she felt bereft, as though someone had died? How could she explain anything to him? They ate a desultory meal together, talking about the ordinary matters of life, the cost of things, the end of rationing, a film they might go and see, an art exhibition that she wanted to visit but he didn’t. And all the time she thought about Absolon, where he might be and what might be happening to him. Russia had absorbed him, Mother Russia that seemed so vast and so amorphous. Thousands and thousands of square miles. Mountains, rivers, the vastness of the steppe scattered with cities one had never seen, never imagined, knew only from reports during the war. Stalingrad. Perm. Kursk. Kiev. All enveloped in a kind of fog. And Absolon was somewhere there, dispersed among the mists.
Later she lay in bed while Alan made love to her in that stolid, insistent way of his that seemed as much a social convention as an act of affection. When it was over she rolled onto her side and tried to sleep, with his sperm inside her doing what it had done ever since they had got married – nothing. Perhaps if she had got pregnant all things would be changed. Perhaps the yearning for Absolon, the fear and the anger would be gone for ever with a child growing within her. But she didn’t get pregnant. She never had and she knew she never would. There is no objective reason, her doctor had assured her, no damage that we can see. But still nothing happened, and she lay like this in bed, sensing her own sterility, afraid for and longing for Absolon.
The next day she came back early from work. It seemed an early evening like any other, the city living beneath its skin of grime, the Tube overcrowded, people complaining. She reached their block of flats and climbed the stairs to the first floor, to the door that said Walcott on a little brass plaque. For a moment, as she searched inside
her handbag for the keys, everything seemed normal – the quiet anonymity of the landing and the mechanical beat of the descending lift gave nothing away. But when she opened the door she knew immediately that something was different. Something had shifted in the order of her private universe. The disposition of magazines beside the telephone in the hallway. Something. She went to the sitting room. She felt it here as well, the recent presence of other people, like a smell on the air – cushions slightly displaced, things on the desk not quite in their usual order, not how she had left them that morning. Fear crawled out from its lair and took hold of her.
‘Alan?’ she called, but there was no reply. Cautiously she pushed open the door to the main bedroom. The room was empty, but things were subtly different, a hairbrush sitting in a way she hadn’t left it, her make-up moved, the placing of things in her drawers altered. In the spare bedroom she fancied it was the same, and in the room that Alan used as an office. Things had been shifted, drawers opened but not closed precisely, papers shuffled, pens misplaced.
And then revulsion at the thought of the intrusion was replaced by understanding, because nothing was missing. Not a single item of her possessions or Alan’s had been taken. Back in the bedroom she scrabbled through the drawers to check. His gold cufflinks were there in their little box. Her jewellery was untouched. Money in the top drawer of the desk remained where it was. Every drawer, every box, every file in the study had been opened; but nothing had been taken. They’d been looking for something – anything – and of course they hadn’t found it because there was nothing to be found. No secrets, no evidence. Not even a phone number.
Slowly – a stiff gin and French helped – the grip of fear slackened. Lessons at Beaulieu had taught her that you have to make a choice between a hidden search and an open search, the latter disguised as an ordinary burglary. Whoever it was had chosen the former and they hadn’t done it well. But she knew that they were still watching her, that they’d followed her from work, that in all probability they were watching the flat even now. She went to the window to glance casually out. There was nothing obvious, just the street and the parked cars and pedestrians walking. What, she wondered, were they after?
When Alan came home she told him nothing.
The next day Ned rang. His cottage near Harwell had been broken into. He’d walked into the village to phone her and his voice was shaking with emotion as he spoke. ‘Someone’s ransacked the place,’ he told her. His voice was the voice of a child, almost blubbing. ‘They’ve turned everything upside down.’
‘Did they take anything?’
‘Take anything? Yes, of course they did. That’s what burglars do, isn’t it?’
She took time off work and went down to help. She found him pacing up and down in the sitting room, opening and closing his fists as though there might be something comforting to grasp if only he could lay hold of it. Around him was the litter of his impoverished life – drawers had been opened and their contents tossed onto a heap in the middle of the room, wardrobes and cupboards emptied. Apparently the kitchen window at the back had been broken in order to get in and what little he had of any value had been taken – little more than a radio and a record player and ten shillings in cash. The records themselves – some Bach, some Vivaldi – had been smashed.
‘Presumably not to their taste,’ he said gloomily. ‘But I don’t see why they have to punish me by breaking them.’
The police had already been round, and someone from the security section at Harwell. Kids from the local council houses, the police constable had suggested. They’d asked for a list of missing items and Ned managed a smile when he explained to Marian how clever he’d been: ‘They also stole the camera, but I didn’t mention that. I thought it better not to.’
‘They took the camera?’
‘Yes. They went through the summerhouse as well and found it there. Don’t worry though, there was nothing on the film.’
‘That’s not the point, is it, Ned? The point is, what happens if the thieves are caught and the damn thing is found?’
The smile slid untidily from his face. ‘It’s nothing, Squirrel. Just a gadget.’
Impatiently she set to tidying the place up. It was only when a semblance of order had been restored and they were sitting down with a drink that she broke the news about Absolon. She tried to make it sound like nothing much, a mere hiccup in the plans, her contact recalled to Moscow. ‘So for the moment we’ll just have to lie low.’
But Ned looked uncomfortable. ‘I’m having second thoughts about the whole business, Squirrel. I don’t think I want to continue, really.’
‘Second thoughts? It’s a bit late for second thoughts.’
‘They’ve got enough information, haven’t they? What more do they want?’
‘It’s no good asking me that, is it? I don’t know anything about it. All I know is my contact has been recalled.’
‘That’s the man you were fucking, isn’t it?’
Anger flared inside her. ‘Don’t use that disgusting language!’
He laughed. ‘You’re such a prig, Squirrel. I’ll bet you use it all the time when you’re with him. That’s the way, isn’t it? The disgusting becomes sublime. It all depends on the context.’
She thought of Absolon, what she did with him and could now no longer do. ‘Anyway, it’s none of your business.’
‘But it is my business, isn’t it? What we’ve done is because of what you’ve done. It’s betrayal whichever way you look at it. And I want to get things stopped. Having that security man round today was the last straw. Wing Commander someone or other. He sniffed around the place as though it were I who’d done something wrong.’
‘It’s just your imagination. I expect he was concerned about whether there’d been a security breach.’
‘There’s been that all right, hasn’t there? And I want it to stop.’
She travelled back to London. Fear, like a caustic fluid, seeped into her mind. She sensed them watching her with wide eyes, like predators in the night. What had they been searching for, in Ned’s cottage, in her flat? Traces of Absolon, perhaps. Evidence of his deception, clues to his threatened defection. She imagined him in some cell beneath the Lubyanka, like a rat in a cage, helpless. She knew. She could share everything with him, even this. Memories of Fresnes Prison emerged from the stew of memory like monsters from the deep: a few feet of concrete; a faucet in the wall and a cracked earthenware water closet in the corner; a bed and a table, both hinged to the wall; a stool chained to the table; a thin blanket and a palliasse. Nothing else. The rattle of a trolley outside in the corridor brought thin soup and a piece of bread. There were cries in the night and, sometimes, the careful tapping of Morse code on the pipes. But always some thin thread of hope, that the Allies would come, that the war would be over, that all would be resolved.
Did Absolon have as much as that?
Ambassador
At the Joint Services School for Linguists in Cambridge, I struggled with Russian irregular verbs and unstressed vowel reduction; in London, Marian Sutro battled with her demons. Work brought some kind of distraction – a lecture series by the anfractuous Dr Eric Hobsbawm on European revolutionary movements; a talk by Professor Blackett of Manchester University on How the Atom May Work for Peace; an essay competition among schoolchildren entitled ‘What World Peace Means to Me’. I remember an article in the Guardian – the principal source of news for us students, and still published from Manchester in those days – about a conference she had organised. There was even a photograph of the principal protagonists delivering a petition to Number 10 Downing Street. An aging French poet and a young, long-haired film director were there, and the suave figure of the French atom scientist Clément Pelletier.
‘French Intellectuals Anti-Atom Bomb Letter To PM’, was the headline. Needless to say, the Prime Minister did not receive the missive in person.
And then another postcard came to my digs, bearing another picture from the Tate Gallery,
only this time a Modigliani portrait of a girl. I examined the image for clues, but clues to what, I couldn’t say. It was a rather sentimentalised face, all doe eyes and rosebud mouth and a skin colour that suggested an excessive consumption of carrots; but at least Marian had spared my blushes and avoided one of the nudes. On the other side was her now familiar writing and a suggestion for another meeting. ‘Formal invitation on the way,’ she wrote. The invitation came some days later, accompanied by a ticket to a concert at the Wigmore Hall. After the concert there would be a reception for the performers, a string quartet from the Soviet Union. It was to this reception, in the presence of His Excellency the Ambassador of the Soviet Union, that I was cordially invited. There was also a scribbled note from Marian. This time bring a toothbrush.
I recall little of that concert. I just remember dark suits and long dresses and the shuffling movement of people, the gleam and shine of two worlds that were quite foreign to me and were both presented here in uneasy juxtaposition – the world of diplomacy and the world of the arts. The quartet – three swarthy men and a woman violinist of ethereal beauty – swayed and pulsated beneath the sunburst cupola of the auditorium like animated figures in a Fabergé jewel box. I forget what they played. It would have been all Russian, of course: Shostakovich, probably, something by Khachaturian, something else by Prokofiev.
But I remember Marian well enough. She was wearing a black evening gown and a short bolero jacket and she had her hair piled up. I had never seen her like that, never seen her doing what she called ‘my Parisian thing’. I remember the slender nakedness of her neck and a skein of silken hairs that drifted round her pale skin like cigarette smoke. She took me to the reception afterwards where there was a press of people and much fawning around the musicians. Holding my arm she steered me through the throng. ‘You must show them that even Englishmen can speak their language,’ she said.