The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

‘You can see yourself – just fields, hedges, cows, then the reservoir, then the government buildings, about two miles away – and open ground most of the way.’

  As we looked I saw a tractor with a circular-saw attachment trimming the hedges, about half a mile away. We could just hear the sharp intermittent whine as it bit into the wood. In a long field next to it a combine harvester was moving ponderously, spewing a hazy white dust into the air around it.

  ‘Binoculars, or a telescope, would be useful.’

  ‘There might be something in the attic. The people locked away a lot of things there. We could look. What about a mirror? You could signal down to the government buildings?’

  ‘I don’t know morse – and without that they’d just come running up here and there’d be some sort of stupid shoot-out with us or the children being used as hostages. What about the postman?’

  ‘Mail comes in a box at the end of the lane, by the main road. Mrs Grace picks it up when she comes, with the papers.’

  ‘It all fits. The KGB might have chosen the place for you.’ I drank the coffee. ‘They must have someone above us in the woods, in a logger’s hut or something, where they can look over the house, the lane and the fields in front of us. And someone patrolling the main road end of the lane and the golf course end as well – all linked by radio. But what do they do at night – if we decided to run then, taking the children with us?’

  ‘I suppose they think that’s very unlikely, with children, in the darkness. Or else they’re going to have him here at night, or on the lane, in a car by the garage.’

  ‘Completely geared to stopping us getting out. But how about someone getting in – Alexei Flitlianov, for example? That could be casier. If he’s here he’ll be doing the same thing as he did in New York: checking the ground out before making a move. And if he’s doing that he must have seen all these people and cars around us. He can’t get through as yet, he’s blocked.’

  ‘If he got out of Russia and hasn’t been picked up in America, he should be able to get into here – or meet us somehow. There must be a way. Look at the place, so easy, so open.’ Helen looked down again on the town baking in the light, the sun shimmering on the uncut corn beyond the lane.

  ‘Is there? I don’t see it.’

  I opened the local paper that had come that morning. I glanced at the editorial, an equivocal piece about a new ring-road inside the town, trying to please the motorists and the conservationists at the same time. And then I saw it – a notice in the entertainments column next to the editorial: the Kirov Dance Troupe and Balalaika Ensemble was coming for a night to the Town Hall next Sunday evening.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ Helen looked at me.

  ‘It’s a coincidence,’ I said. ‘It must be. Must have been arranged months ago.’

  ‘All right. But it means they can have many more than a dozen men around here, all with perfect cover: a whole company, the KGB orchestra no doubt, with a few heavy secret-police dancers thrown in.’

  Again we laughed. But with a strange feeling of genuine elation now.

  ‘What do you think his name is?’ I said, looking out at the man lolling in the chair.

  ‘Ask him, why don’t you? Bring him a cup of coffee.’

  She smiled, touched my arm; we were happy. For this future musical event, though in one way possibly making our prison more secure, none the less suggested hope: it was a vivacious message, confirmation of plans and activities in a real world that we had lost, and through this music we might regain it.

  *

  We waited. One day, two days, Thursday, Friday. We talked and we waited. The sun shone and the colours in the landscape began to turn a little, hints of yellow and red creeping over the trees on the hill. And for part of each night we slept together, came to know each other in that way, carefully and without stress, giving to this part of our relationship a substance, a reality which we could give to little else in our routine.

  The man came each morning, saying little to us, but ever helpful and considerate. With Mrs Grace we had an equally formal relationship. Though this became slightly warmer in the face of her great goodwill towards us. I was surprised at the efforts she made in this way: they were so obviously genuine, as if she really valued our friendship, and was appalled at the turn events had taken. Helen, who had remarked on this same fragile regret and had continued therefore to trust her, let the twins go out with her. And the two children were perfectly happy in what they considered a marvellously continuing game.

  At night a car came and parked next to the garage in the laneway. We watched the news on television which told us nothing. We listened to some records; a military march which Helen somehow liked. I skipped through a biography of Earl Alexander of Tunis and made even shorter work of one on Montgomery. The photographs were interesting: I liked the guns especially. We had Campari sodas in the heat before lunch and at six o’clock. The man had got the bottle in the town for us. And we drank less whisky later on.

  We lit a fire on the second evening, just to see what it was like, and watched the seasoned beechwood flame and crackle, and ate next to it with a bottle of wine. The man got that for us too, half a case: Chambolle Musigny, ’66. Obviously expense was no object in this KGB operation.

  We had time – and nothing to do but occupy and entertain each other in it. And wait. And I thought how, if I had tried to prepare such a situation – with any woman – how very difficult it would have been: and how practically impossible – these happy arrangements in an isolated hideaway – with another man’s wife and children. And it was good to be so lucky – at least in this, that I had Helen, and that we could share each other so sharply and well, as if in the last days of an affair, for we didn’t and couldn’t think of any future.

  The affection and the love between us was, no doubt, all too easily nurtured – for it was contrived, a creation quite outside the dictates of ordinary life. As it had been for her with Flitlianov, and Graham, so it was now with me. And I regretted that: the excitement of the intermittent or the absent, the illicit or stolen, and all the little deaths that come with long familiarity between two people.

  In what was in one way a brief and perfect situation, with wife and family, I saw very clearly how this perfection might continue in a future I couldn’t think about. I experienced in those days all the vitality of love in an affair that had no future, and all the familial gifts of a marriage that had no existence. So that as we did things together – played with the children, read them stories, handled objects about the house, listened to the march, drank wine, made love – I felt myself feeding on a precisely limited number of iron rations which, when finished, would result in our deaths.

  But we were never sad, locked in that place, doing so much, free all day. Like children on holiday, we created a sense of euphoric innocence and limitless adventure around us, in everything we did, so that the least act took on immense relevance and things that were important became invested with magic.

  Our life up there in the hills became a succession of glittering emblems of sanity, gaiety and repose: both of us free from pain in the certainty of the present and the acceptance of an end – poised in full life for once, committed to that alone, for there were no other promises we could make, and no future we could betray each other in.

  *

  On the third morning, Mrs Grace spoke to us.

  The weather had held marvellously, an Indian summer. The children were on the swings, the man pushing them. Afterwards, he’d taken off his coat and wandered round the garden, head in air, hands on hips, savouring the world.

  We were in the kitchen, tidying breakfast, Mrs Grace pondering the larder cupboard.

  ‘Don’t bother cooking anything,’ Helen said. ‘We’ll have a salad for lunch.’

  ‘Yes. I brought some tomatoes.’

  ‘Do you want to take the children out this morning?’

  Mrs Grace turned with a tin of vichyssoise in her hand, put it down by the sink, then went to the
window. While she was still looking out at the man she said, ‘I can take them away altogether, if you like.’

  I looked up from the paper. They were still arguing about the ring-road. ‘You can’t do anything with them here,’ Mrs Grace went on. ‘And you’re going to have to get away, aren’t you?’ She turned towards us, her big, fine face at ease now, as it had been when I’d first met her. We said nothing, spellbound, waiting for some truth, or a trap, not knowing which.

  ‘You may not believe me – but I don’t want to be part of this.’

  ‘But you are,’ I said, annoyed, interrupting her, choosing the trap rather than the truth. ‘You’re the stringer here, must have been for years. You’re not going to throw all that up. What would they do to you? Do you really expect us to believe –’

  She interrupted me. ‘No, I don’t. But I’ve made my mind up.’

  ‘Why don’t you get out on your own, then?’ Helen asked in a much easier voice.

  ‘Because I can help. I don’t know all the details of this plan, and I don’t want to. But I do know that if I don’t take the children away, they will: and hold them as hostages in case you don’t do exactly as you’ve been told. They spoke to me last night. They want to take them next time I bring them out, sometime over the weekend, just before you start your job on Monday in Oakley Park.’

  ‘What about your job?’ I asked. ‘The cause. You’ve not been sitting here in Cheltenham for thirty years without some sort of belief in it all.’

  ‘I’ve plenty of belief in it all. But not in using children. Belief stops there.’

  ‘I thought the end always justified the means?’

  She laughed. ‘Not in this case.’

  ‘How do you know? This “case” might be the most important ever – for you people.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I don’t know that. I’ve not been told.’

  ‘Need you have been? I thought communism was a dictatorial creed. You did what you were told.’

  ‘Yes, I used to do as I was told – until yesterday.’

  ‘Now you’ve set yourself above the party?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quite simply, staring at me coldly. ‘Yes, I have.’

  Helen and I were silent, looking at each other. The cries of the children were suddenly loud in the garden, and we heard them well, and then Helen said, ‘I believe you. What do you want to do? You must be protected as much as the twins.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take them out tomorrow afternoon – but not to the rendezvous we’ve arranged. I’ll take them to a hotel I know, just outside the town. And wait for you. I’m not going to take any messages to your people in Intelligence here. Not that. You must do all that when you get out.’

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘As soon as you miss your appointment with them tomorrow they’ll be down on us like a ton of bricks.’

  ‘You must get out of here before that – before three o’clock. It shouldn’t be too difficult. They won’t be expecting you to run – without the children. They’ll be completely off guard.’

  ‘But the man?’

  ‘Yes, he’s armed. And there’s a car always somewhere in the lane or up on the common – two men, also armed. And people above the house, in the woods.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, hit this man over the head or something – and run straight down over the fields. Your people are down there, aren’t they? You can almost see them from here.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said with a touch of uncertainty. ‘Of course, I see them.’

  Mrs Grace took me up at once. ‘They’re not “your people” then?’ She looked at me.

  ‘It’s complicated. Not exactly.’

  ‘You’re with the Americans?’

  ‘No. Not at all. My “people” – such as they are – are in London. At headquarters. I have to get out and contact them. And on a Sunday it may not be easy. But that’s our problem. And yes, we can try getting over the fields and contact London from there.’

  ‘If you can’t, or have any difficulty and have to hide out overnight – use my dance studio in Pitville. There’s a telephone – and a room above it which no one knows of; in the attic – I prepared it myself. It’s quite comfortable – with a way out over the roofs and into another street.’

  ‘That’s the first place they’ll make for when you don’t turn up,’ I said. ‘After they’ve been to your house.’

  ‘Unlikely. But if they do the studio will be full of people all tomorrow evening: Western Area Ballroom Dancing Certificate Examinations. I’m not involved. If they come, they won’t stay – not with fifty people bouncing about the place.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘That could be useful. How do you get in, where is it?’

  She told us and gave us a spare key to the place. And then she gave us the name of the hotel where she’d meet us on Monday, or whenever we could make it: The Moorend Park, a mile out of town just off the main Cheltenham–Swindon road.

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ she said when she was finished. The man had gone back and was playing with the twins again. But now we could see in his playing the real end of the game.

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘Yes. It’s wonderfully generous of you. But what about you afterwards – your job, your family.’

  ‘I haven’t any. My husband died. My parents killed in the siege of Leningrad. I was away at the time – in Intelligence. Afterwards the KGB placed me as a Displaced Person in a camp in Germany – then I came on here after the war.’

  ‘And all that thrown away – just at the drop of a hat?’ I asked. ‘All gone. You’ll be much more a displaced person now. I find that difficult to –’

  ‘I was sent to get information here, not to kidnap children.’

  ‘We can surely get some sort of protection or asylum for you afterwards,’ Helen said.

  ‘More likely prison.’ Mrs Grace laughed. ‘No, it’s best to say nothing until I’m out of the way. I’ll move on. I’ve money. Perhaps America. This is not my kind of world any more.’ She stopped.

  The man had left the swing and was walking towards the house. We separated. And I thought, looking at the town below us in the sunlight: is this really true? Are we going to be there tomorrow?

  That evening, when Helen and I were alone, and had talked the plan over, I said to her: ‘There’s only one thing – what about Alexei? All those names you have. What do you do with them – and him?’

  She got up to play her march again. ‘He isn’t coming. He can’t. I’ve no idea what to do with them – or him. I’ll just have to take them with me, that’s all.’

  Then the needle hit the disc and the military band blazed into haughty life, a bouncy martial tune of brass and drums and cymbals, heralding some kind of war after all this peace.

  *

  It went like clockwork next afternoon to begin with. Mrs Grace took the children out at 2.30. And at 2.35 I hit the blond young man over the head – over an ear rather, not being used to it. He’d just come back from his car by the garage, reporting the twins’ safe departure on the radio to his colleagues at the end of the lane. I got him with the drawing-room poker from behind the front door as he came into the house, Helen having called him into the house from the kitchen. We were getting on well with him at that point. He went down very quickly. Helen told me to hit him again. But there was no need. I stood there, annoyed somehow. I’d wanted to knock him out but not to hurt him. And he was obviously hurt. I took his gun off him and locked him in the downstairs lavatory, leaving a half bottle of brandy and some cigarettes inside for his recovery.

  And then we were off, running down the steps between the crab-apples, onto the dazzling sunlit lane and into the first field of corn stubble, dodging round the bales of straw, for we were in full view by now of anyone watching above the house in the fir plantation. But as we went the geese in the paddock, shocked and annoyed at this sudden impudence in their domain, set up a frantic cackling, awful cries of alarm all over the quiet hills. And then we heard the crack of a rifle shot beh
ind us.

  But we still would have made it, the long line of straw bales shielding us, if it hadn’t been for the hedge-trimming tractor with the circular saw.

  We’d forgotten about that – no, we’d never thought about it – and then there it was as we went through a gap in the ditch into the second field, making for us fast, about two hundred yards away, speeding across the field to a point where it would cut us off before we could get to the only exit, a gateway in a thick bramble hedge in front of us.

  The saw was spinning fast at the end of a long articulated hydraulic arm, a crab-like pincer whining bitterly on the air. The man inside the cab was practically invisible, protected by a wire mesh, a grey shape bearing down on us from the right. We were gaining on him, but only just, the gate still a hundred yards away. Then he suddenly turned, and instead of trying to cut us off, made straight for the gateway himself. And now he gained on us.

  We slowed up. It was no use. He slewed the tractor round in front of the gate and faced us again, pulling the arm round so that the saw spun right in front of us and just above our heads. Then he began to move forwards, very gradually, driving us back towards the house like a sheep-herder. I got the revolver out and fired. But the thing jerked up in my hand, the bullet going off high above him somewhere in the direction of the Malvern hills. A second shot was nearer, hitting the spinning saw and ricocheting away. I didn’t have time for a third. By then we were moving backwards, dodging the blade. And each way we turned, he turned with us, manipulating the arm and tractor together with easy skill.

  The cows saved us – a herd of insolent young Friesian bullocks. They had been curious at first, on our run down the field, and had followed us. But now, as we were driven back together, they began to stampede, kicking their hind legs up in retreat. And we found cover among them – the tractor stalled, trying – literally – to hack its way through them.

  ‘The golf course,’ Helen shouted, pointing up the hill to our left, away from the lane and a car which had just arrived in front of the house. There was a line of old trees, I saw, beyond the next field, and then a young fir plantation on the lower slopes of the hill beneath the laneway. We made for that, keeping our heads low along the ditches.