The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘But don’t worry,’ I went on. ‘It didn’t matter by the time I found out. We were coming apart anyway. The usual things. Nothing exciting, like finding out she worked for the KGB. Nothing like that.’

  ‘I’d better change,’ she said, quickly finishing with the twins’ clothes. ‘Thank you for the story. Dinner’s quite soon. Help yourself to drinks downstairs if there’s no one about.’

  She turned and left the nursery, loosening her blouse at the waist as she walked back along the corridor to her bedroom.

  *

  The KGB, she thought, closing the door of her room, opening her blouse, starting the zip on her skirt. At first she thought with alarm – has he found out? Does he know anything? What does he know? And then she realised that if he had discovered her it was because all the time she had somehow wanted him to, that she had unconsciously left a transparent area in herself for him to see through. She had – now she knew – from their first meeting trusted him, for himself alone and because of that other he personified.

  ‘The usual things. Nothing exciting – like finding out she worked for the KGB. Nothing like that.’ His pointed voice and look reminded her so much of her own confusions when she had found out about Graham’s involvement with the same organisation, when their few weeks in East Africa had started to go wrong.

  *

  … At the end of the safari we went back to the College of African Wildlife near Moshi, winding up the little road from the town through green coffee plantations and lush farms, with the mountain and its great collar of snow always in front of us, glistening through the tall green forest which covered its middle slopes. The air was crisp there, at ten thousand feet around the College, huge trees and bougainvillaea blowing their rusty purplish leaves over the basketball and squash courts – the place like a marvellous Swiss health resort in the fall.

  He phoned Nairobi several times for messages just after we got back, and then we walked down the slope in front of the College across the rough football pitch. A group of students were at one end of it, jumping about a volley-ball net, jumping high in the evening.

  ‘I have to go back to Ethiopia,’ he said. ‘A project way down in the Awash Valley the office want me to check on before we go on to Uganda. A new cotton plantation – and the Russians are building a road. They’re making a small plane available to us, direct from Addis.’

  *

  ‘… And the Russians are building a road.’ She remembered the phrase again, clearly from all the years, because it had been the first intimation of the awful knowledge which had come to her in those days – like the setting of a charge that was to explode under all their ease.

  *

  It was stiflingly hot after we landed on the cracked sandy soil of the Awash Valley and the Danakil all rushed out from their low grass huts to see us. The older men of the settlement stood a little apart, their women behind them, but the children – the child-brides toting babies on their backs and the boys – all clustered round the small plane in a frenzy. ‘They want to be the ones to guard it,’ the pilot said. ‘It’s a great privilege to guard the bird. It’s a bird to them, of course.’

  Two Israeli members of the UN cotton-growing team met us; we drove back to their camp which they’d built beneath a glade of thorn trees by the river.

  ‘Until they finish the road, we’re two days from any civilisation out here,’ the project supervisor said. ‘We were the first Europeans many of these people had ever seen.’

  The Chief Engineer of the Russian project – Leonid somebody – joined us for lunch in the tin shack, a small yet burly fair-haired man in shorts, a rather Aryan face, young-looking and high-spirited; he talked a lot in good English – talked too much, I thought, for an engineer: more like a teacher or an actor. And I thought half-way through the meal that there was something hidden and unexpressed in him just because he prattled so much.

  That afternoon we drove with him to his road works, about five miles away upstream, where they were finishing the last stretch to the new agricultural settlement for the whole area.

  With the heat at more than a hundred and twenty degrees, the billowing clouds of dust, the screeching roar of the huge graders and scrapers and trucks, the site was an impossible place for any sustained conversation. Yet I noticed that this was exactly what George and the Russian were doing, walking away from the rest of us, pointing out things to each other, their mouths moving rapidly in what must have been shouts, though we could hear nothing of it at all.

  Of course it all looked so perfectly natural and appropriate – the two of them wandering off like that, dodging between the huge machines, dwarfs beside the ten-foot tyres: George had made the trip to do just this – get information about the road and the cotton crop. What was it that made me certain that he was getting quite a different sort of information altogether, that the two of them weren’t talking about gradients and gravel at all?

  When we got back to the hotel in Addis that evening, we went to the mid-thirties cocktail bar, the Ritz, full of angular mirrors, wicker chairs and a smouldering eucalyptus fire in one corner. We got on to high cane stools by the counter and sipped lagers from tall glasses like a pair from an advertisement in an old Vogue magazine and started to talk.

  ‘You are an ass, Helen,’ George said calmly, kindly, still so much at ease, happy in the long hot day with lagers at the end of it, food and sleep yet to come. ‘The heat’s gone to your head. What on earth could I have been talking to that Russian about – if not his bloody road?’ He laughed.

  ‘You went to get some sort of message from him, instructions. That’s why we had to come all the way back here.’

  ‘Look, I had to go off with him you idiot. How else would I have found out about his work? It’s absolute nonsense – your “intuition”; your watching the two of us shouting and feeling “left out” and therefore there was something “clandestine” between us; that I’m a KGB agent. That’s the worst sort of woman’s magazine stuff. How on earth did you get hold of that idea?’

  ‘I felt it, that’s all. And you’re quite right to deny it. But not my feeling. That happened.’

  ‘Very well then, we’re both right. And I’m sorry. I accept your intuition; you must accept my facts. We’ve misunderstood each other, that’s all.’ He paused. ‘But Helen, what an extraordinary thing to think about me. I might just as well say that you were a Russian agent. It’s as likely.’

  *

  She heard a floorboard in the corridor creak, a long succession of knuckles breaking as the joists in the old house cooled after the heat of the day. A door opened and closed – one of the bedrooms along the passage. But she knew exactly which one – and knew at once: the Tree room looking out over the deformed chestnut on the front lawn. She recognised all the sounds in the old house, could put a name to them all and a reason behind each of them. She had at one time or other slept in all these bedrooms: the Tree room where he had been put for the weekend, the Boston room with her grandmother’s collection of rocking chairs, the Blue room – and all the others.

  At different ages all along her life – and therefore, to herself, as quite a different person – she had stretched herself out all over the fabric of the house, and left a part of herself in each room, an amalgam of fact and memory, an animal secretion which could be followed now like a trail, a sure scent leading her to any part of her past which she chose to re-visit. The sound of a door slamming – any door – its particular resonance, could fill her suddenly with the unhappy essence of long-distance habitation in this shell – remind her at once of the demands, the drama and the disappointments of her childhood here. One door closing was in sure memory of her mother’s frustrated affection for her; the sound of another was an exact memorial to her father’s preoccupied indifference. She had never had any trouble in finding out where it had all begun – nor in knowing what a bore it all was, so much unnecessary enmity towards decent life.

  She got undressed and ran a bath in the small room attach
ed to their bedroom where the fittings had never been changed, the huge brass taps, golden, top heavy, the wash-basin grossly substantial like the bath itself. Yes, she had wanted a father, she thought, as she got into the sweet water, smiling. And had been given a mother instead.

  She sank in the water, feeling the small buoyancy in her body each time she breathed, and thought then of that night in the thirties hotel in Addis, long after they’d gone to bed, when she had woken up suddenly from the deep sleep of sex, and looked across at George, and seen a man writhing, dreaming, talking – a man she’d never met.

  *

  Guy was by himself when I got downstairs, sitting in an armchair by the fire, his long legs stretched out like trip-wires across the sheepskin rug. He had dozed off in the heat. A book he’d been reading lay on the floor beside him. I could see the cover in the lamplight: White Savages by Ole Timbutu.

  By then I had really given up surprise so I was able to say to him quite easily when he woke: ‘What’s the book?’ And he replied just as easily: ‘New novel about East Africa I brought up for the weekend. Rather like books about the place.’

  ‘Good?’

  ‘Not very. Haven’t got far but it’s too complicated. Don’t know who anyone is – sort of intellectual thriller. I prefer the straightforward stuff. Have you read The Day of the Jackal?’

  ‘No.’

  Could he really be unaware of the real nature of the book, of the identity of the two main characters? I decided to say nothing about it.

  He started to read from the blurb: ‘“… frighteningly recreates the obsessive quality of a jealous vision – an outsider’s view of other people’s happiness” … What on earth is that supposed to mean?’

  It seemed to me that he was being intentionally obtuse. He stood up, a puzzled look on his thin face – all the signs of a mystified family man confronted with some psychological aberration totally unknown to him.

  ‘Drink? Over here – what would you like?’

  We walked over to a table in the corner by the verandah windows. There was the Fleischmann’s gin again, I noticed. He poured out two deep measures and added a froth of White Rock tonic to each. Then he said quietly, fingering the long dark blue velvet curtains, pulling them gently across the darker night outside: ‘That’s why I bought the book, Marlow. East Africa first – but then I read that on the blurb. It’s funny – how one wants to talk about it. And besides you …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re right in the middle of it. Part of it.’

  ‘I’m not her lover. I told you. For God’s sake.’

  ‘You are in one way – the image of him. And therefore the reality is not impossible. You must see that.’

  ‘That’s a very long shot indeed. But – all right, tell me about it.’

  We walked slowly round the large octagonal hall, drinks in our hands, as if the big room were a small warm garden and the fire a bonfire of old twigs and leaves at one end of it.

  ‘You were in prison. So you’ll know the feeling: you are inside and excluded; she is outside and included. You are looking on, powerless: you want to put her in the prison with you. That was really why you married her – to hold her completely supine, making your presence – your rather heartless presence – unique and indispensable to her. And when you begin to fail in this – as you will, for she is far from supine – when she begins to move away from you, back into life, then comes the other thing, the thing you really wanted, the punishment: you start to follow her with a magnifying glass, a telescope. Because if you can’t have her on your own narrow terms, you must see how she deals with other men on her terms: that’s what you really wanted all along – for her to make that move so that you could find out the exact emotional weight of her privacy with someone else; the precise shape of her fantasy and invention with him – conversationally, emotionally, sexually. Above all you must see; this is the obsession: you want to see her eyes, their shared regard. One must see exactly; nothing less will do – to map out precisely the free flow of all her imprecisions: capture her emotion. Then there is the release.’ I was astonished.

  ‘What was your prison – that brought you to all this?’

  ‘It’s usually failure, isn’t it? – a deep sense of that in oneself.’

  ‘Why? – since you aren’t. Not conventionally –’

  But he didn’t answer, so caught was he in the excitement of his words – words, for that moment, exactly mirroring and releasing his obsession.

  ‘One wants to see someone else’s success, don’t you see? – where you have failed. If love is not mutual, then certainly the punishment will be. I know all that dreary business of destruction. It’s not as if I didn’t know what it was.’ He turned away – almost shouting, shaking, maddened like a rejected lover.

  ‘But you don’t know where it began – why it’s there? I’m sure a psychi –’

  ‘Of course he would,’ Guy came back vehemently. ‘He could tell me at once – what I know myself. And together we’d paper the whole thing over for a while with convenient friendly words. But how do you cure it? I don’t think you do. I don’t really think one can. And do you know why? Because you are not to be cured of your pleasure. One forgets that – that it isn’t finally a pain.’

  ‘Pleasure unto destruction, though, which is the same thing.’

  ‘The ideal combination, isn’t it? What I’ve been looking for all along.’

  ‘Of course – if you don’t want the help: there isn’t any. That’s an intellectual decision, I didn’t think you lacked that ability.’

  ‘I’ve made that decision many times – only to find it overridden.’

  We both drank heavily from our glasses, both shaken now. I well understood his sense of incurability, the weight of guilt he carried from something far back: something he said he knew about. What was it?

  ‘What was it?’ I asked, the two of us passing the heavy double hall doors, drawing near the fire again. ‘Where do you drag up all this sense of failure from? As a child?’

  ‘I was happy then. Or reasonably. Never remember thinking myself unduly unhappy, anyway. No, it was marriage I think. Marrying the wrong person – or for the wrong reasons; both of us. Somebody else might have stood my failings better – or needed to depend on me more deeply; someone not so full of life – so many lives – as she is. You see, I was too taken with her ease of living, far too much, her natural capacity for everything now. I started to bear down on her for that – a net on a butterfly. I suppose I should have had a duller marriage, something cosy. I couldn’t understand her – her volatile – well, a sort of secret energy in her life, a sheer determination to be happy, to rise above. There always seemed something hidden in her happiness, some reason for it that wasn’t me, and which I had to find out about.’

  ‘And then you found it was another man?’

  He nodded. ‘And still I wasn’t satisfied.’

  ‘There were others?’

  ‘None that I ever found out about. But by then one imagined there were. One always imagined there was something else with her – because one felt it: a thought, a secret, a man – it didn’t matter what. But whatever it was I never felt completely alone with her – you know, possessing each other fully. Always something between us.’

  He hadn’t been wrecked entirely on the shoals of his own obsessions, I thought. He was right: there had always been ‘something’ between them: her Marxism, not just a lover – her politics which he pretended to be ignorant of. Yet, if he had read those African detective reports properly, how could he have been? – their political discussions about China and Nyerere’s autonomous communes. That was the thing that had surely destroyed their marriage as much as anything, which he must have known about, but wasn’t telling.

  But what about her? With such beliefs why had she married him, why had she led him on, lied to him? Why take up with this pillar of the establishment, this man of property and capital? Why should a woman searching for revolution fall in wi
th a man dedicated to preventing it – a British Intelligence officer? She must have had some guilt too and for the first time I felt sympathy for her husband. What had her marriage been for her? – a way of extracting secret information from him, a liaison of sheer political convenience?

  Suddenly, for all her charming energy, her happy commitments to life, I found it easy to dislike her. And I did so for a moment, thought her a proper bitch, before I realised I might not be justified, that I didn’t really know. After all, why shouldn’t she have loved him to begin with, whatever the difference of their political beliefs? She had the capacity for love as well as social theory; why shouldn’t she be given the benefit of the doubt?

  We had come back to the fire. He took a coloured spill from the mantelpiece, bent down and lit it from the smouldering logs. He didn’t smoke. She used them, with her long thin silver-ringed cigarettes.

  ‘In the beginning,’ I asked, ‘was it all right? What happened?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, calmer now, dousing the spill. ‘Oh, yes. Twelve years ago. My family were farming in Northern Rhodesia; in the beginning it was fine.’

  ‘What was she doing out there?’

  ‘Teaching. In an American Mission school in the Highlands. Quite near us.’

  ‘Mission school?’

  ‘Well, it was some Quaker foundation, actually. American-backed. No proselytising. Self-help, all that. She’d taken a degree at the American University in Beirut where her father worked. But she didn’t much like the school. She was just leaving when I met her.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Horses.’ He laughed, a little quick, snorting laugh. ‘My parents ran a riding school as a sideline. She came to ride. It’s really too much, isn’t it? The Quaker girl, the mission school, a lot of piccaninnies; then the Big House, the young master, riding together – the colonial highlands, the huge skies, sundowners on cane chairs, flame trees over the verandah and a lot of decent old black retainers moving at the double. God, it had everything for Woman’s Own. Absolutely everything. But it worked.’ He stood up from the fire, his face and voice easier now, the light thin body of a man hopefully passing into a period of convalescence after a bad illness.