6
Breakfast at the Hotel Splendide was served under an awning on a patio overlooking the beach as tiny birds hopped between tables to pick at crumbs. ‘So beautiful,’ said Caro, finishing her coffee. ‘What do you think this place used to be?’
‘A slave plantation,’ Tom said.
Charlie put down the postcard he was writing.
‘Is that a guess?’ Caro asked her husband.
‘No. There’s a sanitized history in the men’s loo complete with old photographs. Faithful black servants born the children of slaves, etc. Men working cane presses, stripped to the waist. Women cutting sugar cane, ditto …’
‘Anna’s black,’ Charlie said.
‘Your friend from the beach? Half black,’ Caro corrected.
‘She says she’s black,’ Charlie said firmly.
Tom smiled despite himself. ‘She can be what she wants.’
‘Can I be anything I want?’ Charlie asked.
‘Yes,’ Tom said, before Caro could disagree.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘He can be anything he wants.’
Caro smiled. ‘Within reason.’
‘I’m not sure reason has anything to do with it.’
‘Maybe not,’ she said, but her voice was kind, and she went back to her novel and was quickly lost in its hero’s search to discover which of fifty parrots had been the one to sit on Flaubert’s writing desk.
‘Is your book good?’ Charlie asked.
She answered without looking up. ‘It’s interesting.’
Charlie raised his eyebrows and returned to his lock, which he could now open without looking. In fact, that seemed to make it easier. Dipping into his pocket, Tom produced a shiny brass padlock and Charlie grinned.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘I asked the hotel to buy it for me. There’s no window in the side though.’
‘I don’t need one,’ Charlie promised.
Charlie took the lock, turned it over in his hands and, absent-mindedly, and entirely without knowing he was doing it, began humming the song they’d heard sung to the steel drums.
The poor cook got the fits,
Throw away all of my grits,
Captain’s pig done eat up all of my corn.
Let me go home, I want to go home,
I feel so break-up, I want to go home.
He reached for his pick with the ragged end, changed his mind and selected a simpler one. Noticing his father’s surprise, Charlie said, ‘Rakes are practically cheating. Like bump keys. Felix said so.’
‘Bump keys?’
‘They work. But that’s mostly luck.’
‘Luck is good.’
‘Skill is better,’ Charlie said firmly.
Out beyond the rocks, a catamaran was decanting sun-cooked tourists into a rubber dinghy, and conveying them ashore. Tom could think of nothing worse.
‘Major Fox?’
He looked up to see the hotel manager.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘This arrived for you, sir, from London.’
The man held a copy of that day’s Times.
A Foreign Office comp slip with Tom’s name and rank was stapled to the top. Looking up to thank the man, Tom discovered he’d gone.
Bomb attack in Beirut.
State of emergency in South Africa.
Interim report on the Challenger disaster, complete with pictures of the shuttle exploding. City of London to be deregulated …
Caro looked up from her Julian Barnes to find Tom scowling.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.
‘This came for me.’
‘I didn’t know you could order The Times.’
‘You can’t,’ Tom replied.
Nine in the morning Grand Bahamas meant 2 p.m. in London.
Eight-hour flight time, an hour to get it delivered, perhaps an hour to get it biked out to Heathrow in the first place. Someone had acquired an early edition of the paper, put it on a plane at 0400, and arranged for its arrival to coincide with Tom’s breakfast.
‘Daddy,’ Charlie said.
The manager was back.
‘My apologies, there’s a Lord Eddington on the phone.’
Caro instinctively pushed back her chair and the man looked embarrassed. ‘He asked to speak to your husband.’
‘You’re sure?’ Caro said. ‘He’s my father.’
‘Quite sure, Madame. He definitely asked for Major Fox …’
7
The hotel telephone was at one end of the reception desk.
Three young women behind the desk looked at Tom as he headed towards them and hastily looked away. At a frown from the manager they hurried off to find other things to do while Tom took the call.
‘Fox,’ Tom said, picking up the receiver.
‘Tom? It’s Charles Eddington.’
‘Everything all right at home?’
‘All fine,’ Caro’s father assured him. ‘How’s the holiday?’
‘Good, I think. Charlie’s learnt to waterski and Caro’s reading her way through a suitcase full of novels.’
‘And you?’ Lord Eddington asked.
‘I’m enjoying being with them.’
‘Is that true?’
Tom had to stop himself taking offence.
At various times Caro’s father had been Minister for Education, Minister of Defence and Home Secretary. These days, he sat in the Lords and was a member of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet. Six months before, he’d put divorce papers for Tom in the diplomatic post. And Caro’s mother had despatched her daughter to Moscow, with orders to make him sign them.
She’d arrived as Tom was heading out. He’d arranged to swap incriminating photographs with a renegade Soviet general in return for the British ambassador’s kidnapped daughter. Tom barely escaped with his life.
He said, ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘You can ask.’ Caro’s father kept his voice neutral.
‘What did you have against me?’
‘Tom … Dear God. You turned up at my house with my teenage daughter on the back of your bloody motorbike. You were training for the Catholic bloody priesthood, and I walk into the dining room to find my daughter wrapped round you like ivy.’
‘She meant you to find us.’
‘I know that.’
‘I didn’t,’ Tom said.
‘No. I don’t imagine you did.’
‘And she wasn’t a teenager,’ Tom said. ‘She’d turned twenty.’
‘Only just, and already pregnant. Which none of us knew, thank God. I’d probably have shot you.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That isn’t enough?’
Tom hesitated. ‘I’ve always felt there was more.’
‘Look, I had someone positive vet you. Actually, a bit deeper than that. I had to know if you were after Caro’s money. You weren’t. I realized that quickly enough. But, you know, at the beginning I wondered …’
‘Caro thinks I should resign my commission.’
‘She what?’
‘I think she sees me as the chaplain of some public school, leading the cadet force and turning out to cheer the boys on from the side.’
‘Sounds hideous.’
Tom had to agree.
‘Look,’ Eddington said, ‘if you’re really enjoying yourself then I’m sorry. I thought I might be doing everyone a favour by giving you a chance to cut things short. However, needs must, I’m afraid. The MOD have agreed to let my department borrow you.’
Tom felt his guts tighten.
‘You did get today’s Times, didn’t you?’
‘That was you?’ Tom said. ‘It’s just arrived.’
‘Bugger. I thought it would be there hours ago. Read the letters page?’
‘Not yet,’ Tom said.
‘Do, please … I’m about to go into Joint Intelligence. Call me back in an hour.’ The line clicked as, on the other side of the Atlantic, Caro’s father killed the connection.
‘Y
our father sends his love,’ Tom told Caro. ‘And to you,’ he said, looking at Charlie. ‘I said you’d learnt to waterski. He was impressed.’
‘Did you tell him about the locks?’
‘No, but I have to call him back so I’ll tell him then.’
Caro looked up.
‘I’m sure it’s nothing important,’ Tom said.
A hijack in Karachi. Prince Andrew and Fergie on holiday, again. The USSR had named its team for the disarmament talks. Sir James Anderson, an ex-Labour minister, had died in a cottage fire … Tom skimmed the news as he headed for the letters page, which was its usual mix of the erudite, the deluded and the obscure. He didn’t have to read far.
Sir Cecil Blackburn wishes to return.
Sirs, I realize that an announcement of my wish to return will be greeted with disbelief, and that the first instinct of Sir Geoffrey Howe, as Her Majesty’s foreign minister, will be to decide that my friends in East Berlin would never allow me to return to the country from which I felt myself exiled so many years ago.
I can assure Sir Geoffrey that this is untrue.
I write this with the GDR’s blessing, and their guarantee that once London has granted permission, Berlin will make immediate arrangements for my safe passage to England. The world is changing. Let none of us be in any doubt of that. The East Germans do this in a spirit of glasnost and perestroika.
[Openness, rebuilding – ed]
To my own country, the country that made me a Cambridge provost, honoured me as a professor of Classics, and knighted me for my work as an art historian, I am a turncoat. ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’ Lady Macbeth could no more wash Duncan’s murder from her fingers, or Patroclus deny Hector’s death, than I can deny that charge. I wish to return all the same.
I accept that I will be put on trial. That I will, despite my age, in all probability be sentenced to prison. I accept without equivocation the authority of the English courts to pass sentence. My only wish is to return to my family, stand trial for treason and die in my own country when the time comes.
Yours faithfully
Professor Sir Cecil Blackburn Bt
‘Oh shit,’ Tom said.
‘Tom …’
Charlie was grinning and Caro looking cross.
Instead of apologizing, Tom pushed the paper across, and ruffled Charlie’s hair, which would usually have elicited a furious shrug, but this time only merited an eye roll. Tom watched Caro re-read a phrase, mouthing it aloud.
‘Patroclus didn’t kill Hector,’ she said. ‘Hector killed Patroclus. Achilles slaughtered him for it, tied his battered corpse to the back of his chariot and dragged it round the walls of Troy.’
‘Who’s Achilles?’ Charlie asked.
‘Greek,’ Tom said. ‘Blood-thirsty, good with a sword.’
Having considered asking more, Charlie asked instead if he could have a milkshake. Caro told him to order it at the bar, remember to say please and thank you, and watched him go with relief. ‘That’s why Daddy called?’ she said, the moment Charlie was inside. ‘Because of a letter in The Times from someone who doesn’t even know his Greek history?’
‘Seems to be.’
‘What does Daddy want?’
‘I’ll find out in half an hour.’
‘Don’t let him bully you. He’ll take advantage of the fact we’re getting on.’
‘I thought you liked him.’
‘He’s my father. I love him to pieces. He’s still a nightmare.’
Tom looked at his wife in surprise. Pushing back his chair, he let his hand brush her shoulder. ‘I’m getting another coffee. Want one?’
‘I’m fine. Here’s Charlie …’
The boy was on his way back with a sweating glass in which two fat straws jutted from mud-coloured sludge. He smiled when he saw his father looking.
‘Mummy’s going to take you to the pool while I telephone Grandpa. Then I’ll take you waterskiing and Mummy will read her book. Okay?’
Charlie nodded happily.
Caro’s father answered first ring.
‘Tom. Is that you?’
‘Yep,’ Tom said. ‘It’s me.’
‘You’ve read Blackburn’s bloody letter then? The Blessed Margaret is furious. She thinks it’s a trick.’ Caro’s father sighed. ‘Unfortunately, these days she thinks everything’s a trick. That idiot husband of hers doesn’t help.’
‘Is he ill?’ Tom asked. ‘Is he coming home to die?’
‘First thing the Foreign Secretary asked. There’s no mention of illness in his bloody letter. And, believe me, there would be. He wouldn’t miss a trick like that. Dying old man, filled with regret, wants only to be allowed to breathe his last in the land of his birth. He’d have led on it and added some bloody quote from Dante to give it a veneer of cultural respectability. Insufferable man.’
‘You know him?’
‘He taught me Classics at college. Hell of a shock to discover he was one of theirs. Least political man I’ve ever met. Wouldn’t have had him pegged as a communist. Far too fond of the good life.’
‘Why’s he coming back?’
‘That’s the point, Tom. We don’t know.’
‘And that worries you?’
‘Of course it bloody worries us.’
‘What made him defect?’
‘Something to do with a Sunday Times investigative team digging up dirt. This must have been early seventies. He got out just ahead of a police raid. A small boat from Deal to the French coast is the rumour. A lift in a lorry to Brussels. I bet he loved that. A train to Hamburg. It’s said he went round the top, landed at Archangel and reached Berlin from the east via Moscow.’
‘Sounds a little complicated.’
‘Lex parsimoniae. Occam’s Razor and all that. Far simpler to put the bloody man on a Baltic steamer to Rostock and transfer there. Nothing to stop the Russkies interviewing him in Berlin …’
Caro’s father was talking too much. The kind of too much that said he didn’t want to give Tom time to think or get a word in edgeways. So Tom let Eddington talk and waited for the words to run out before asking his question.
‘What do you want?’
A tight silence followed. ‘I’d have thought that was obvious,’ Caro’s father said finally. ‘We want you to go and get him.’
‘Who’s we …?’
‘Me,’ Eddington said heavily. ‘The Foreign Secretary, the PM. You’ll need to interview Blackburn. Ensure this is what it seems. That the bloody man really does want to return. He’s doing this of his own will. If he is … Well, bring him back. But make bloody sure he understands he’ll face trial.’
‘Why me?’
Eddington hesitated. ‘You know how these things work, Tom. The Soviets are the real power in East Berlin. After that recent business in Moscow you have friends in the Politburo. That might be useful.’
If everything goes tits up?
‘That’s it?’ Tom said.
‘Not entirely. Blackburn asked for you.’
‘How does he even know I exist?’ Tom said.
‘I don’t know,’ Eddington replied. ‘Why don’t you ask him when you get there?’
8
A week before Sir Cecil’s letter appeared, Sir Cecil had stopped in front of the squat black weight of Berlin’s Domkirche, looked up at the cathedral’s over-heavy façade and knelt to tie his shoe. Then, securely laced, he headed for the Grande, a hard-currency hotel for foreigners. One of the few places it was occasionally possible to find an English newspaper.
The hard-currency hotels reminded him of Casablanca.
Areas of ambiguity filled with prostitutes, spies, undercover police, fantasists and passing commercial travellers. Sir Cecil proclaimed himself endlessly shocked not to find Rick’s Bar in the basement.
In summer he had coffee. Almost drinkable.
In winter he ordered hot chocolate, properly made in front of him from cocoa powder, sugar and cinnamon. Invariably he ate a pastry.
Today he waited for a dour-looking Scot to finish a copy of the Telegraph he shouldn’t have brought across the border. Having spent more time than Sir Cecil could stand looking at share prices, the man turned to the sports section, as if anybody cared about that stuff.
The moment he abandoned his seat, Sir Cecil went to claim the paper he’d abandoned. Taking it back to his sofa, Sir Cecil turned to the crossword and pulled out his red Parker 51, reading the first clue carefully.
Crossword filled in, he skimmed an advertisement for a Wedgwood plate celebrating the marriage of Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson. It was almost as ugly as the happy couple. He was discarding the paper when a little man sidled over. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve finished with that?’
Having claimed the copy, the man returned to his seat, ordered another coffee and skimmed the crossword. Sir Cecil had answered every question correctly except for 9 down, 13 letters.
In place of an answer he’d written the name of a Conservative grandee killed in a terrorist outrage more than ten years ago. The little man tried to remember the details and couldn’t. There’d been something about grandchildren. A connection to Intelligence that had seen newspapers point fingers at the IRA. There’d been a service in Westminster Abbey, if he remembered rightly. One of the Royals attended. Charles, probably.
He had time for things like that.
It was three days before Sir Cecil returned to the hotel.
On the first day he bought a small pot plant outside a shop where Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse met the square, then stopped for a second to look at the People’s Theatre, damaged in the war like everything else, people included. No one appeared to be keeping an eye on him.
Evgeny, whose job that was, was off with his girlfriend.
Sir Cecil could remember when the city had been in ruins. He’d come up here with other officers, in the first few months after the end of the war, when everyone could still pass freely. You had to have been there to understand the joy of it. The sheer relief of finding yourself alive and on the winning side.
Everything they wanted was there for the taking.
On the second day, Sir Cecil stood at a corner on Unter den Linden, holding a copy of Neues Deutschland, which had a review of a film based on a play he’d written to order shortly after defecting.
Nightfall Berlin Page 3