by Joseph Hone
‘If no one contacts me they’ll try him and put him away – and use him as a future bargaining counter with Moscow if one of our men gets picked up there. That’s what they usually do.’
‘That’s what you call my “getting out in one piece” is it?’
‘What do you expect? I’m amazed you’re still here – that they didn’t manage to get your name from him in the first place. They seem to have got everything else out of him.’
So he was gone – dead for her now, and she knew it at last, without doubts any more. And I thought her face showed some relief in this knowledge finally accepted, so that the tense expectancy in her expression that had hovered there from the beginning disappeared and the lines in her face became moulded in a calm way, like a child asleep after a long and boisterous party. She got off her horse and led it round a dead trunk, which had fallen diagonally along our path. I did the same. And now there was a lot of dead timber in front of us, whitened where it faced the air in jagged ribs, and covered in moss and deep grass underfoot. We picked our way along the ruined path, leading the horses through the olive light.
‘Where does this lead to?’
‘Edge of the national park – there’s a good ride there.’
Something cracked in the thick underbrush to our left.
‘Deer,’ she said. ‘Or something.’ She was thinking of something else, still picking at the greenflies.
‘Not bears, I hope. People are always getting munched up by grizzlies out here aren’t they?’
‘In Yellowstone. Not the Catskills. Why don’t you run? I would.’
‘I’d thought of that. But I want to live for a change. In the world, drinking the wine. Not scurrying about or locked up. Surely you’ve got some names you could give me – just a few suspect KGB fellows? Then I could take home the bacon and spend the rest of my life in the Cumberland Hotel.’
Her face woke up a little – first with surprise, and then, seeing my smile, with one of her own: a little wan, it’s true – but she was trying.
‘Listen, what are you called? I never thought –’
‘Marlow, Peter –’
‘Well, listen, Peter, I’ve not told you everything. I can’t. But it’s nothing to do with your job, I promise, no danger to you –’
‘Don’t worry.’ I was suddenly angry at her reticence after my own confession. ‘I know – it’s to do with Graham. And with his boss in Moscow. The man who recruited him in Beirut: Alexei Flitlianov, isn’t it? Because you were in Beirut when he was, just after Graham had been there. And that makes three of you. And you’re all linked in some way – isn’t that it? – and it’s not to do with this KGB internal security organisation, is it? Or so you say. Then what is it? You tell me.’
She stopped the horse and looked at me wildly. If she’d had a stick with her I’m sure she’d have come at me with it.
‘Come on. Don’t make a scene. It’s the holy hour, time for confession. Why not do it properly?’
‘The British knew all along, then – about the three of us?’
‘No. They can’t have linked you with any of this. They’d have told me. I got it from Guy last night – an infatuation you had with a professor in Beirut – an “Armenian-American” he said. Well, of course, that was Flitlianov’s cover then. They got that out of Graham. I knew that. I just put the two together.’
‘And what else have you put together?’ Her horse started to nibble at her elbow. She pushed it away.
‘Well, since you ask –’ We were getting dramatic, but I didn’t want it that way, so I changed course. ‘No, I’m sorry. But he knows about you and George Graham too.’
‘Christ. Just that we were together – or the political thing as well?’
‘Both, I think. He had a lot of private eyes out after the two of you on that trip you had together in East Africa. And here in New York.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘So he says. And I think it’s true. I saw one of them that day we had a meal on the West Side. From a detective agency here. Not a government man. But Guy said not to tell you, so you’d better forget all about it. He’s stopped it now.’
She was shaking in the green chill, the sun no more than an odd bright dazzle between the leaves. We had no coats. I put my hands high up on both her arms and pressed them together, and then shook her body gently, as though rubbing a fire stick.
‘But how can he know this – and not tell your people in London? He works for them after all.’
‘Yes – but you’re his wife. It’s quite natural isn’t it? He doesn’t want to turn you in. It would ruin his own career too – quite apart from whatever he feels for you.’
‘I’ll take your first suggestion. And it’s not altogether natural; he feels for me – in this way: you with your arms round me. That’s the only way he feels for me.’
‘Yes. He told me all about that too. You shouldn’t be too hard on him –’
Another stick snapped somewhere behind us. ‘Think he’s out after us here as well?’ I asked. ‘With a spyglass, foaming at the mouth?’
She laughed then, and came for a moment completely in my arms. But without anything else. There was no need in us for that – thinking more about what all three of us had lost rather than what we two might gain. We had no freedom to come into our own, both of us still tied to others, half-way through a puzzle, living with ignorance as much as insight.
‘I wonder why we haven’t both been picked up long ago,’ I said, ‘with everyone knowing so much.’
‘I don’t think we’ve started knowing,’ she said. But her horse seemed restless over something, dipping his head and pricking his cars and smelling the dank air, so we moved on.
*
Alexei Flitlianov had been some distance behind them all the while, moving parallel to the lane through the thick bushes and scrub that bordered it. Twice he’d stumbled on hidden branches and stopped, the horses’ hoof beats disappearing into the sunlit green silence ahead of him. But he wasn’t too worried. There were animals about, chipmunks and squirrels and others he couldn’t see, making odd starts and forays, crackling the undergrowth just as he had done. Besides, in the few glimpses he’d had of the couple he’d seen how completely preoccupied they were with each other, deep in talk, quite unsuspecting.
They’d dismounted and finally stopped, and he’d been a little above them then, on a slight rise over the lane, and he’d been able to watch them for a minute with his binoculars through a gap in the trees – watched him hold her first, shaking her a little, and then the two of them together in each other’s arms.
Their words were lost to him, just odd murmurs, but the message was clear enough: she had taken up with this plant from British Intelligence just as he had suspected – some sort of affair, old or new he didn’t know. But did she know what the man’s real job was? That was the point. And if she knew who he was, that he was no UN pen-pusher, what had she told him? When you were close to someone like that, he thought wearily, you told them everything – didn’t you?
Or did you? Perhaps she wasn’t attached to him in that way at all. Perhaps it was nothing more for her than a casual liaison, run to a weekend, scratching a sexual itch. Yet she wasn’t like that. Or hadn’t been. He was annoyed and uncertain.
Had she betrayed him or not? – that was what it all boiled down to.
And because he had so clearly seen them close together in the attitudes of potential infidelity – to her husband in one way and to him in another – he found himself believing that she had told the man everything, that the years had been too long for her, exposed and isolated, and that her faith in him and all his doings had waned or died.
And he knew so well how that could happen – nothing dramatic, no overnight recantation, but a gradual erosion through absence from the centre of things: not an end of belief necessarily, but a terrible weakness in it through too long and empty a familiarity with the creed. A woman, he knew, with a failing marriage, may take up somet
hing illicit and passionate with another man for a while, and love him perfectly, and so regain, and even find a fuller love for her husband when she returns to him. But, in his politics, once you had left you could not come back again to any stronger or more appropriate belief. There was no return ticket to Moscow. And so he saw in their acts at the end of his binoculars the breaking-out of individual happiness and the dissolution of a political ideal. And most people would have said that was fair enough; the two things couldn’t go together; it was a hopeless task to try and link them, and he had simply been very lucky once. But now he saw how every ideal begins and ends in the realisation of eccentric self-will.
He watched them disappear from the space in the trees, saw their heads bobbing up and down among the leaves further along the lane. They were like a cigarette commercial, he thought: happy but dangerous.
Helen was riding ten yards ahead of me as we reached the end of the dark lane. We could see open rising country beyond, a heath with lines of elm and big blocks of forest higher up. And her horse saw all the pleasant invitation too. The big powerful animal had been constrained too long. And she couldn’t hold him properly when he reared and made for this delightful vision of space and pace. And my own horse followed it, its rear legs stuttering for a moment as they found a grip. And then it lunged forward, veering awkwardly to one side as it stepped in one of the ruts. And I was off its back then, like a shot, as cleanly as a champagne cork, and into the ditch at the end of the lane. I hit the bushes and seemed to keep on falling into them, deeper and deeper into the moist grass, my head and shoulder hitting something on the way. And then the piercing shot of pain, that was painful and nauseating at the same instant, so that my mouth was open and retching as the stars burst in my eyes.
After a minute, I suppose, lying there invisible and insensible, my head cleared and I tried to move. And I was surprised that I could – propping myself up into a kneeling position, my head just above the undergrowth.
And then I saw the man, on the far side of the lane just out of the bushes, about fifty yards back, in a green anorak and faded slacks and field boots looking down past me onto the heath with a pair of binoculars. I couldn’t see much of the face under a canvas hat, just something of white hair over the ears and deep-set eyes. I ducked back into the grass as he moved forward slightly to get a better view down onto the heath. And when I looked up again he was gone.
I didn’t tell Helen when she came back for me. I felt some obscure need to possess a secret myself, as a bargaining counter to hers perhaps – for she’d not told me everything yet. And I wanted time to think. Had I seen the man somewhere before? I thought perhaps I had. And what possible agency, or combination of agencies, private or national, did he represent? Perhaps he was just someone working on Perkins’ estate or a National Park warden. But his covert behaviour made this seem unlikely – and Guy had said he’d paid off his Peeping Toms. So who was he?
And I was suddenly very angry at this endless hide and seek. And that must have had a lot to do with my drinking too much at lunch when we got back to the house. First it had been a medicinal brandy, but with the taste in my mouth and the pain in my shoulder melting, I found a psychological easement in the same and other beverages. And Harold Perkins was a willing ally, taking up again over the long dining-table his own liquid crusade against the failure of all right thinking in the world. A liquid lunch and I liked it. And I liked him, the old open man beaten before his time. And I thought: the hell with them – Mr and Mrs Jackson and all their crooked past and knavish tricks. And the hell with their bloody horses as well. I was truculent and I liked that too.
*
‘Can we play in the rooms?’ the twins asked later that afternoon when we’d got back from a picnic at somewhere called Flatrock, a small steeply wooded canyon on the estate several miles away, where a river flooded through a gorge and there was a railed promontory high above it. Their hair and macs were still wet from the spirals of haze that had come over them as they’d played in the fine spume.
‘Can they, Father?’ Helen asked. She spoke as if these rooms were his toys.
‘A little late isn’t it? But it’s OK by me if you go with them.’
‘Let’s get you dried first. And a bath. Then come on up in your dressing-gowns for a bit before you go to bed. Martha?’ She turned to the housekeeper standing by the kitchen door. ‘Will you look after them and bring them up?’ And then to me: ‘Like to see them?’
‘Yes. Show him the rooms, Helen,’ Guy put in quickly, always the perfect host, generously self-seeking.
‘Rooms?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Rooms. But curious.’
And they were. They were up in the long attic of the house, built in under the eaves – an extraordinary adult fantasy, a child’s dream. There was a miniature cobbled street down the middle, with sidewalks, gas lamps and a dog cart at one end. Along either side were a short row of New York brownstone houses with steps up to the four-feet-high front doors. Inside the rooms were not built to the same scale, each side of the street making up the lower floor of one complete house – with a drawing-room, nursery and kitchen, all perfectly furnished to scale in the late Victorian period – a velvet-covered and tasselled chaise longue, rocking chairs, a minute Persian carpet, an upright satinwood piano in the drawing-room, a child’s cot, a high feeding-chair; oleographs of Little Red Riding Hood in the nursery, and a kitchen equipped with a miniature coal stove, tongs, poker, a brass grocer’s balance and a line of little pots and pans, each one bigger than the next, hanging from a dresser, with a series of painted wooden plates above, depicting the life and times of a family of rabbits: a Mrs Twiggy Winkles’ kitchen – the whole mood close to Beatrix Potter, yet twenty years before her time.
‘Grandfather had the place built for his children. Got the idea from the dwarf family – the Kellys – in Barnum’s Circus. They had something of the same thing as part of their act.’
Helen bent down and got into one of the houses – the lights were on in the rooms already – and I climbed into the one opposite. The ceilings inside were about five feet high. She opened the street window and waved.
‘Hi!’
I opened mine.
‘Hello,’ I said less easily. The scale of everything was very strange and unsettling: neither dolls’ houses nor real ones. And I felt neither adult nor child myself but a trespasser of a quite indefinite age and nature. Someone, built appropriately and almost certainly malevolent – a dwarf – would at any moment, I felt, come through the little hall door and ask me to get out of his house. It was the confusion of Alice after the magic potion, when she grew bigger instead of smaller in the rooms of Wonderland.
Helen disappeared from the window opposite and the little piano began to tinkle: Boys and Girls come out to play …
Then she stopped and reappeared at the window, her face very bright and young looking. I crouched by the chaise longue in my parlour, a cumbersome Victorian Lothario.
‘The thing I like best is the street,’ she said. ‘More than the houses.’
I looked out of my window, past the dog-cart on the cobbles, the attic wall at the far end where the rows of brownstones disappeared in a painted perspective. She put the lights out in the rooms and turned the street lights on and we both looked out of our windows. And now I could see the curved metal girders of a bridge on the skyline in the distance, past ghostly four-wheelers and horse trams.
‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ she said. ‘They’d just finished it. One Christmas I remember we put salt all over the street and holy garlands on the doors and had a party up here with the windows frosted and lit up. And I liked best being out on the street and looking up at the bridge and in through the windows. Especially that for some reason. Being outside, not in.’
‘Hardly as a result of a deprived childhood,’ I said in the soft darkness, the place smelling of old candle wax and long-warmed pine from the rafters above us. ‘This and the tree house on the lawn.’ The very
front part of her face – eyes, nose and mouth – were just visible in the faint light: a huge ghost in the middle of the small, perfectly proportioned window frame. I looked up at the street again. ‘And that’s not exactly the expected road to Moscow. I find all that difficult to follow.’
‘That was later. You’d have found it easy enough to follow then.’
‘You remember wanting to look in; not to be inside?’
‘Yes. That’s what I felt – outside my parents, outside all their concerns, the real life that mattered.’
‘Should get a little couch up here and a miniature trick cyclist and open a clinic.’
‘Trick cyclist?’
‘Psychiatrist.’
We had both learnt to laugh together now in this magic settlement under the eaves, drawn by its conceits, as children after the Pied Piper, into the inventions of a happy childishness. But how could it last? We were so obviously not fitted for that world, tall people in dolls’ houses – simply eavesdropping on that music. So I said, as the water suddenly started to rumble in the cisterns for the children’s bath downstairs, ‘It worries me. All three of us here held together in a cat’s cradle. All knowing – but not all knowing together: each of us having a better reason than the other for keeping quiet: you won’t tell the KGB about me, because you’ve got something else more important to do. Guy won’t tell because he somehow thrives on the exciting secrecy of it all. And I won’t tell my people –’
‘Why?’ She sat down on the floor of the front room, leaning on the window sill. ‘It’s not really because you trust me.’
‘The British have fucked me about for far too long. That’s the main reason why. And I feel safer with your secrets than with theirs. But what I want to know is how long do all these pieces of string stay up? How long before someone outside this triangle steps in and cuts it to pieces? Because, we’re not living all this out in a vacuum; there are others – and they don’t share our manners. And Guy – how long to go there? He’s living on hot bricks. He won’t tell them in London about you and Graham – all that he knows about you – the politics as well. Yet of course he should. They’ll put him away for ten years if they ever find out he knew about that. And then he has this running sore with you, this obsessive thing. And that’s explosive. All the more so, since I’m here now, filling Graham’s role.’