‘Don’t be too down, Alec. As I say, there are other options.’
‘Yes.’
Then he replaces the receiver.
At around six I go over to Saul’s in my car; for company, and for some way of shaking off the gloom. It takes about three-quarters of an hour to get there through the rush-hour traffic, and to find somewhere to park. He has put a notice up on the door of his flat. It reads: ‘Just As Much Junk Mail As You Can Spare, Please.’ When I see it, I smile for the first time in hours.
He pours two vodkas - mine without ice - and we sit in front of the television in the sitting-room. A balding actor on This Is Your Life has just been surprised by Michael Aspel, sporting his big red book. Saul says something about minor celebrities in Britain being ‘really minor’ and retrieves a cigarette he had going from an ashtray.
‘Who’s that?’ he asks as a middle-aged woman in pink emerges on to the stage, mugging to camera.
‘No idea.’
She starts telling a story. Saul leans back.
‘Christ. Is there anything more tedious than listening to people telling anecdotes on This Is Your Life?’
I do not respond. There is a constant, nagging disquiet inside me which I cannot shake off.
‘What’ve you been up to?’ he asks me. ‘Day off as well?’
‘Yeah. I’ve had a lot happening.’
‘Right.’
He twists towards me on the sofa.
‘Everything all right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You look knackered.’
‘I am.’
There shouldn’t be any need to, but I try to convey a greater sense of melancholy than may be visible, just in case Saul hasn’t detected it.
‘Alec, what is it?’
He switches the television off with the remote control. The image sucks into itself until it forms a tiny white blob which snuffs out.
‘Bad news.’
‘What? Tell me.’
‘I’ve done a stupid thing. I handed in my notice to Nik.’
‘That isn’t stupid. It’s about time.’
This irritates me. He always thought I was wasting away at CEBDO. Fiddling while Rome burns.
‘I did it for the wrong reason. I did it because I was sure I was set at the Foreign Office.’
‘That job you were applying for?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t get it?’
‘No. I found out today.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You didn’t tell anyone else I was applying for it, did you?’
‘No. Course not. You told me not to.’
I believe him.
‘Thanks.’
‘So what happened?’ he asks. ‘Did you fuck up the exams?’
‘Yeah. Toughest thing I’ve ever done.’
‘You shouldn’t be disappointed. I’ve heard they’re like that. Hardly anyone gets through.’
‘It’s more shame than disappointment. It’s as if my worst fears about myself have been confirmed. I thought I was clever enough to make a career out of it. It really seemed to make sense. I spent so long thinking I was good enough to do top-level work, but now it turns out I was just deluding myself.’
I don’t like admitting failure to Saul. It doesn’t feel right. But there’s an opportunity here to talk through a few things, in confidence, which I want to take advantage of.
‘Well, I never knew why you wanted to join in the first place,’ he says.
I drain the vodka.
‘Because I was flattered to be asked.’
‘To be asked? You never said anything about being asked. You didn’t say anything about anyone approaching you.’
Careful.
‘Didn’t I? No. Well I met someone at a dinner party at Mum’s. He’d just retired from the Diplomatic Service. Put me on to it. Gave me a phone number.’
‘Oh.’
Saul offers me a cigarette, lights one of his own.
‘What was his name?’
‘George Parker.’
‘And why did you want to join?’
‘Because it was exciting. Because I wanted to do it for Dad. Because it beat ripping Czechs off for a living. I don’t know. What’s the most exciting thing that happens nowadays? John Major beats John Redwood in a contest for the leadership of the Conservative Party. Big fucking deal. But this meant so much to me. I’ll never get a chance like that again. To be on the top table.’
The conversation dies now for a second or two. I don’t think Saul is really in the mood for it: I’ve come around uninvited on his day off.
‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I think you’re lucky not to have got in.’
This is exactly the wrong thing to say.
‘Why? Why am I in any way lucky? This was my big chance to get ahead, to start a career.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think -‘
‘It’s been every day for four months.’
‘I had no idea -‘
‘You’re not the only one who’s ambitious, you know. I have ambitions.’
‘I didn’t say you didn’t.’
He is being defensive now, a little patronizing. My shouting has unnerved him.
‘I wanted to work abroad, to have some excitement. I wanted to stop pissing away my youth.’
‘So what’s stopping you? Go out and get a different job. The Foreign Office isn’t the only organization that offers positions overseas.’
‘What’s the point? What’s the point in a corporate job when you can get downsized or sacked whenever the next recession comes along?’
‘Don’t exaggerate. Don’t just repeat what you’ve heard on TV.’
‘Anyway, it’s too late. I should have done it straight out of LSE. That’s the time to spend two or three years working away from home. Not now. I’m supposed to be establishing myself in a career.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Look around, Saul. Everybody we knew at university did the milk round, did their finals, and then went straight into a sensible job where they’ll be earning thirty or forty grand in a couple of years’ time. These were people who were constantly stoned, who never went to lectures, who could barely string a sentence together. And now they’re driving company cars and paying fifty quid a month into pension plans and BUPA. That’s what I should be doing instead of fucking around waiting for things to happen to me. It doesn’t work that way. You have to make your own luck. How did they know what to do with their lives when they were only twenty-one?’
‘People grow up.’
‘Evidently. I should’ve gone into the City. Read law. Taken a risk. What was the point in spending four years reading Russian and business studies if I wasn’t going to use them?’
‘Jesus, Alec. You’re twenty-four, for Christ’s sake. You can still do whatever you like. It just requires a bit of imagination.’
There’s a glimmer here of something hopeful, a zip of optimism, but the stubbornness in me won’t grasp it.
‘If you could have just met some of the people I did the entrance exams with. To think that they could have got the job and not me. There was this one Cambridge guy. Sam Ogilvy. Smooth, rich, vacuous. I bet they took him.’
‘What does it matter if they did? You jealous or something?’
‘No. No, I’m not. He was… he was…’ How to describe Ogilvy to Saul? In an uncomfortable way, they reminded me of one another. ‘What did that man on TV call Tony Blair? “A walking Autocue in a sensible suit.” That’s exactly what this guy was like. In order to get anywhere these days we have to be like Sam Ogilvy. An ideas-free zone. A platitude in patent leather shoes. That’s what employers are looking for. Coachloads of Tony Blairs.’
There is a message from Hawkes on my answering machine when I get home at eight fifteen. Were it not for the fact that I have had four vodkas, I might be more surprised to hear from him.
‘Alec. It’s Michael. I’m coming to London tomorrow and I suggest we get together for lunc
h. Have a chat about things. Give me a ring in the country.’
His voice sounds stern. He leaves a contact number and I say ‘Yeah, fuck off’ to the machine, but out of inquisitiveness I scribble it down on a pad.
For dinner I microwave some pasta and watch television for an hour, unable to concentrate on much beyond the shock of SIS. The rejection begins to act like heartbreak: just when I think I’ve found some respite, after six hours of soul-searching and self-pity, something triggers the pain again - a memory of Stevenson, of Rouse standing firm in the window. So many ideas and plans, so many secret aspirations that will now remain untested. I was absolutely prepared to live my life as a shadow of who I really am. Surely they saw that? Surely there was something I could have done for them? I cannot understand why I have been discarded with such speed and ruthlessness: it makes no sense. To be left with this shaming feeling, the grim realization that there is nothing which marks me out from the crowd.
At around nine, after finishing a half-empty bottle of wine in the fridge, I go out to the corner shop and buy a four-pack of Stella. By the time I have finished the first can, I have written this in longhand:
Alec Milius
111E Uxbridge Road
London W12 8NL
15 August 1995
Patrick Liddiard
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
No. 46A––Terrace
London SW1
Dear Mr Liddiard
Further to our conversation on the telephone this morning, there are one or two points I would like to raise in relation to my failed application to join the Secret Intelligence Service.
It concerns me that your department is in possession of a file which contains detailed information about me, ranging across my background and education, with further confidential material about my professional and personal life.
Could you please confirm by return of post that this file has been destroyed?
Yours sincerely
Alec Milius
I read it back a couple of times and extract ‘by return of post’, which doesn’t sound right. Then, with the letter stamped, addressed and in my pocket, I lock up the flat and head for a bar in Goldhawk Road.
10
Meaning
I am woken at nine forty-five by the noise of the telephone, the sound of it moving towards me out of a deep sleep, growing louder, more substantial, incessant. At first I turn over in bed, determined to let it ring out, but the answering machine is switched off and the caller won’t relent. So I throw back the duvet and stand up.
It is as if one part of my brain lurches from the right side of my head to the left. I almost fall to the floor with the pain of it. And the phone keeps on ringing. Naked, stumbling across the hall, I reach the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘Alec?’
It’s Hawkes. And with the sound of his voice I immediately re-experience the stab of my failure at SIS, the numb regret and the shame.
‘Michael. Yes.’
‘Did I wake you?’
‘No. I was just listening to the radio. Didn’t hear it ring.’
‘My apologies.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Can you meet me for lunch?’
The thought of gathering myself together sufficiently to spend two or three hours with Hawkes feels impossible with such a headache. But there is a temptation here, a sense of unfinished business. I spot his telephone number scribbled down on the pad beside the phone.
We haven’t exhausted every avenue. There are alternatives.
‘Sure. Where would you like to meet?’
He gives me an address in Kensington, and then hangs up.
There had better be something in this. I don’t want to waste my time listening to Hawkes telling me where I went wrong, saying over and over again how sorry he is. I’d rather he just left me alone.
He cooks lunch for the two of us in the kitchen of a small flat on Kensington Court Place, beef Stroganoff and rice that is still crunchy, with a few tired beans on the side. Never been married and he still can’t cook. There is an open bottle of Chianti but I stick to mineral water as the last of my hangover fades.
Thankfully, we barely discuss either SIS or Sisby. His exact words are: ‘Let’s put that behind us. Think of it as history,’ and instead the subjects are wide-ranging and unconnected, with Hawkes doing most of the talking. I have to remind myself continuously that this is only the second occasion on which we have met: it is strange once again to encounter the man who has shaped the course of my life these last few months, the aloof figure that lurked on the perimeter of my subconscious. There is something capricious about his face: I had forgotten how thin it is, drawn out like an addict’s. And he is still wearing a frayed shirt and a haphazard cravat, still the same pair of velvet loafers embroidered on the toe with a coat-of-arms. How odd that a person who has given his life to secrecy and concealment should be so willing to stand out from the crowd.
Afterwards, scraping creamy leftovers of rice into a swing-bin, he says:
‘I often like to go for a walk after lunch. Do you have time?’
And largely because there has not yet been any talk of improving my situation, I agree to go.
Hyde Park is buzzing with rollerbladers and a warm wind is blowing north to south across the grass. I have a desire for good, strong coffee, a double espresso to give me a lift after lunch. My energy feels sapped by the exercise.
We have been talking about Mum when Hawkes says:
‘You remind me very much of your father. Not so much in the way you look - he always seemed about twenty-one, never appeared to age - but in manner. In approach.’
‘You’d lost touch? You said when we met…’
‘Yes. Work took me away. It’s what happens in the Office, I’m afraid.’
I don’t feel like asking a lot of questions about Dad. I’d rather Hawkes brought up another subject. But as we are passing the Albert Memorial he says:
‘I admired his tenacity tremendously. He was entrepreneurial almost before the word had been invented. Always working on a plan, a scheme for making money. Not a fast buck. Not to cheat anyone. But he loved working, he was ambitious. He wanted to make the best of himself.’
And this intrigues me. I remember Dad more as an absence, always away on business, and never wanting to talk about work when he came home. Mum has certainly never spoken about him in such a way.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Let me give you an example,’ he says. ‘I imagine that you have friends from school or university who spend a lot of their time just sitting around, or wasting away in dead-end jobs.’
I sure do. I’m one of them.
‘I don’t have that many friends,’ I tell him. ‘But yes, there are a lot of people who come out of higher education and feel that their choices are limited. People with good degrees with nowhere to go.’
Hawkes coughs, as if he wasn’t listening. ‘And this job you’re doing at the moment. I suspect it’s a waste of your time, yes?’
The remark catches me off guard, but I have to admire his nerve.
‘Fair enough,’ I smile. ‘But it’s not a waste of time any more. I quit over the weekend.’
‘Did you now?’ he says, not disguising a degree of surprise, perhaps even of pleasure. Is it possible that Hawkes really does have some plan for me, some opportunity? Or am I simply clinging to the impossible hope that Liddiard and his colleagues have made an embarrassing mistake?
‘So what are you going to do?’ he asks.
‘Well, right now it looks as though I’m going to become one of those people who spend a lot of their time just sitting around.’
He laughs aloud at this, breaking into a rare smile, which stretches his face like a clown. Then he looks me in the eye, that old paternal thing, and says:
‘Why don’t you come and work for me?’
And the offer does not surprise me: somehow I had expected it. A halfway house between CEBDO and th
e coveted world of espionage. A compromise. A job in the oil business.
‘At your company? At Abnex?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m very flattered.’
‘You have Russian, don’t you? And a grounding in business?’
‘Yes,’ I reply confidently.
‘Well then, I would urge you to think about it.’
We have stopped walking and I look down at the ground, drawing my right foot up and down on the grass. Perhaps I should say more about how grateful I am.
‘This is extraordinary,’ I tell him. ‘I’m amazed by how -‘
‘There is something I would need to ask in return,’ he says, before I become too gushy.
I look at him, trying to gauge what he means, but his face is unreadable. I simply nod as he says:
‘If you decided that you wanted to take up a position…’ Then he stalls. ‘What are your feelings, instinctively? Is oil something you’d like to become involved in?’
In my confused state it is almost impossible to decide, but I am intrigued by Hawkes’s caveat. What would he ask for in return?
‘I would need to get my head together a little bit, to think things through,’ I tell him, but no sooner have the words come out than I am thinking back to what he said about my father. His ambition. His need to improve himself, and I add quickly:
‘But I can’t think of any reason why I would want to throw away an opportunity like that.’
‘Good. Good,’ he says.
‘Why? What would you need me to do?’
The question sets us moving again, walking slowly down a path towards Park Lane.
‘It’s nothing that would be beyond you.’
He smiles at this, but the inference is clandestine. There is something unlawful here that Hawkes is concealing.
‘Sorry, Michael. I’m not understanding.’
He turns and looks behind us, almost as if he feels we are being followed. A reflex ingrained into his behaviour. But it’s just a group of four or five schoolchildren kicking a football fifty metres away.
‘Abnex has a rival,’ he says, turning back to face me. ‘An American oil company by the name of Andromeda. We would need you to befriend two of their employees.’
‘Befriend?’
He nods.
‘Who is “we”?’ I ask.
A Spy by Nature (2001) Page 11