Agents of Treachery – Spy Stories

EAST OF SUEZ, WEST OF CHARING CROSS ROAD by John Lawton

Unhappiness does not fall on a man from the sky like a branch struck by lightning, it is more like rising damp. It creeps up day by day, unfelt or ignored until it is too late. And if it’s true that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, then the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts in Tolstoy’s equation, because George Horsfield was unhappy in a way that could only be described as commonplace. He had married young, and he had not married well.

In 1948 he had answered the call to arms. At the age of eighteen he hadn’t much choice. National Service-the draft-the only occasion in its thousand-year history that England had had peacetime conscription. It was considered a necessary precaution in a world in which, to quote the U.S. Secretary of State, England had lost an empire and not yet found a role. Not that England knew this-England’s attitude was that we had crushed old Adolf, and we’d be buggered if we’d now lose an empire-it would take more than little brown men in loincloths… okay, so we lost India… or Johnny Arab with a couple of petrol bombs or those Bolshie Jews in their damn kibbutzes-okay, so we’d cut and run in Palestine, but dammit man, one has to draw the line somewhere. And the line was east of Suez, somewhere east of Suez, anywhere east of Suez-a sort of movable feast really.

George had expected to do his two years square-bashing or polishing coal. Instead, to both his surprise and pleasure, he was considered officer material by the War Office Selection Board. Not too short in the leg, no dropped aitches, a passing knowledge of the proper use of a knife and fork, and no pretensions to be an intellectual. He was offered a short-service commission, rapidly trained at Eaton Hall in Cheshire-a beggar man’s Sandhurst-and put back on the parade ground not as a private but as Second Lieutenant HG Horsfield RAOC.

Why RAOC? Because the light of ambition had flickered in George’s poorly exercised mind-he meant to turn this short-service commission into a career-and he had worked out that promotion was faster in the technical corps than in the infantry regiments, and he had chosen the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the “suppliers,” whose most dangerous activity was that they supplied some of the chaps who took apart unexploded bombs, but, that allowed for, an outfit in which one was unlikely to get blown up, shot at, or otherwise injured in anything resembling combat.

George’s efforts notwithstanding, England did lose an empire, and the bits it didn’t lose England gave away with bad grace. By the end of the next decade a British prime minister could stand up in front of an audience of white South Africans, until that moment regarded as our “kith and kin,” and inform them that “a wind of change is blowing through the continent.” He meant, “the black man will take charge,” but as ever with Mr. Macmillan, it was too subtle a remark to be effective. Like his “you’ve never had it so good,” it was much quoted and little understood.

George did not have it so good. In fact, the 1950s were little else but a disappointment to him. He seemed to be festering in the backwaters of England-Nottingham, Bicester-postings relieved only, if at all, by interludes in the backwater of Europe known as Belgium. The second pip on his shoulder grew so slowly it was tempting to force it under a bucket like rhubarb. It was 1953 before the pip bore fruit. Just in time for the coronation.

They gave him a few years to get used to his promotion-he boxed the compass of obscure English bases-then Lieutenant Horsfield was delighted with the prospect of a posting to Libya, at least until he got there. He had thought of it in terms of the campaigns of the Second World War that he’d followed with newspaper clippings, a large corkboard, and drawing pins when he was a boy-Monty, the eccentric, lisping Englishman, versus Rommel, the old Desert Fox, the romantic, halfway-decent German. Benghazi, Tobruk, El Alamein-the first land victory of the war. The first real action since the Battle of Britain.

There was plenty of evidence of the war around Fort Kasala (known to the British as 595 Ordnance Depot, but built by the Italians during their brief, barmy empire in Africa). Mostly it was scrap metal. Bits of tanks and artillery half-buried in the sand. A sort of modern version of the legs of Ozymandias. And the fort itself looked as though it had taken a bit of a bashing in its time. But the action had long since settled down to the slow motion favored by camels and even more so by donkeys. It took less than a week for it to dawn on George that he had once more drawn the short straw. There was only one word for the Kingdom of Libya-boring. A realm of sand and camel shit.

He found he could get through a day’s paperwork by about eleven in the morning. He found that his clerk-corporal could get through it by ten, and since it was received wisdom in Her Majesty’s Forces that the devil made work for idle hands, he inquired politely of Corporal Ollerenshaw, “What do you do with the rest of the day?”

Ollerenshaw, not having bothered either to stand or salute on the arrival of an officer, was still behind his desk. He held up the book he had been reading-Teach Yourself Italian.

“Come sta?”

“Sorry, corporal, I don’t quite…”

“It means, ‘How are you, sir?’ In Italian. I’m studying for my O level exam in Italian.”

“Really?”

“Yes, sir. I do a couple of exams a year. Helps to pass the time. I’ve got Maths, English, History, Physics, Biology, French, German, and Russian-this year I’ll take Italian and Art History.”

“Good Lord, how long have you been here?”

“Four years, sir. I think it was a curse from the bad fairy at my christening. I would either sleep for a century until kissed by a prince or get four years in fuckin’ Libya. ‘Scuse my French, sir.”

Ollerenshaw rooted around in his desk drawer and took out two books-Teach Yourself Russian and a Russian-English, English-Russian dictionary.

“Why don’t you give it a whirl, sir? It’s better than goin’ bonkers or shaggin’ camels.”

George took the books, and for a week or more they sat unopened on his desk.

It was hearing Ollerenshaw through the partition-”Una bottiglia di vino rosso, per favore”-”Mia moglie vorrebbe gli spaghetti alle vongole”-that finally prompted him to open them. The alphabet was a surprise, so odd it might as well have been Greek, and as he read on he realized it was Greek, and he learned the story of how two Orthodox priests from Greece had created the world’s first artificial alphabet for a previously illiterate culture by adapting their own to the needs of the Russian language. And from that moment George was hooked.

Two years later, and the end of George’s tour of duty in sight, he had passed his O level and A level Russian and was passing fluent-passing only in that he had just Ollerenshaw to converse with in Russian and might, should he meet a real Russki for a bit of a chat, be found to be unequivocally fluent.

Most afternoons the two of them would sit in George’s office in sanctioned idleness speaking Russian, addressing each other as “comrade,” and drinking strong black tea to get into the spirit of things Russian.

“Tell me, tovarich,” Ollerenshaw said, “why have you just stuck with Russian? While you’ve been teaching yourself Russian I’ve passed Italian, Art History, Swedish, and Technical Drawing.”

George had a ready answer for this.

“Libya suits you. You’re happy doing nothing at the bumhole of nowhere. Nobody to pester you but me-a weekly wage and all found petrol you can flog to the wogs-you’re in lazy bugger’s heaven. You’ve got skiving down to a fine art. And I wish you well of it. But I want more. I don’t want to be a lieutenant all my life, and I certainly don’t want to be pushing around dockets for pith helmets, army boots, and jerry cans for much longer. Russian is what will get me out of it.”

“How d’you reckon that?”

“I’ve applied for a transfer to Military Intelligence.”

“Fuck me! You mean MI5 and all them spooks an’ that?”

“They need Russian speakers. Russian is my ticket.”

MI5 did not want George. His next home posting, still a lowly first lieutenant at the age of twenty-nine, was to Command Ordnance Depot Upton Bassett on the coast of Lincolnshire-flat, sandy, cold, and miserable. The only possible connection with things Russian was that the wind, which blew bitterly off the North Sea all year round, probably started off somewhere in the Urals.

He hated it.

The saving grace was that a decent-but-dull old bloke- Major Denis Cockburn, a veteran of World War II, with a good track record in bomb disposal-took him up.

“We can always use a fourth at bridge.”

George came from a family that thought three-card brag was the height of sophistication but readily turned his hand to the pseudo-intellectual pastime of the upper classes.

He partnered the major’s wife, Sylvia-the major usually partnered Sylvia’s unmarried sister, Grace.

George, far from being the most perceptive of men, at least deduced that a slow process of matchmaking had been begun. He didn’t want this. Grace was at least ten years older than him and far and away the less attractive of the two sisters. The major had got the pick of the bunch, but that wasn’t saying much.

George pretended to be blind to hints and deaf to suggestions. Evenings with the Cockburns were just about the only damn thing that stopped him from leaving all his clothes on a beach and disappearing into the North Sea forever. He’d hang on to them. He’d ignore anything that changed the status quo.

Alas, he could not ignore death.

When the major died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack in September 1959, seemingly devoid of any family but Sylvia and Grace, it fell to George to have the grieving widow on his arm at the funeral.

“You were his best friend,” Sylvia told him.

No, thought George, I was his only friend, and that’s not the same thing at all.

A string of unwilling subalterns was dragooned into replacing Denis at the bridge table. George continued to do his bit. After all, it was scarcely any hardship, he was fond of Sylvia in his way, and it could not be long before red tape broke up bridge nights forever when the army asked for the house back and shuffled her off somewhere with a pension.

But the breakup came in the most unanticipated way. He’d seen off Grace with a practiced display of indifference, but it had not occurred to him that he might need to see off Sylvia, too.

On February 29th, 1960, she sat him down on the flowery sofa in the boxy sitting room of her standard army house, told him how grateful she had been for his care and company since the death of her husband, and George, not seeing where this was leading, said that he had grown fond of her and was happy to do anything for her.

It was then that she proposed to him.

She was, he thought, about forty-five or -six, although she looked older, and whilst a bit broad in the beam was not unattractive.

This had little to do with his acceptance. It was not her body that tipped the balance, it was her character. Sylvia could be a bit of a dragon when she wanted, and George was simply too scared to say no. He could have said something about haste or mourning or with real wit have quoted Hamlet, saying that the “funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” But he didn’t.

“I’m not a young thing anymore,” she said. “It need not be a marriage of passion. There’s much to be said for companionship.”

George was not well acquainted with passion. There’d been the odd dusky prostitute out in Libya, a one-night fling with an NAAFI woman in Aldershot… but little else. He had not given up on passion, because he did not consider that he had yet begun with it.

They were married as soon as the banns had been read, and he walked out of church under a tunnel of swords in his blue dress uniform, the Madame Bovary of Upton Bassett, down a path that led to twin beds, Ovaltine, and hairnets worn overnight. He had not given up on passion, but it was beginning to look as though passion had given up on him.

Six weeks later, desperation led him to act irrationally. Against all better judgment he asked once more to be transferred to Intelligence and was gobsmacked to find himself summoned to an interview at the War Office in London. London… Whitehall… the hub of the universe.

Simply stepping out of a cab so close to the Cenotaph- England’s memorial to her dead, at least her own white dead, of countless imperial ventures-gave him a thrill. It was all he could do not to salute.

Down all the corridors and in the right door to face a lieutenant colonel, then he saluted. But, he could not fail to notice, he was saluting not some secret agent in civilian dress, not Bulldog Drummond or James Bond, but another Ordnance officer just like himself.

“You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, haven’t you?” Lieutenant Colonel Breen said when they’d zipped through the introductions.

“I have?”

Breen flourished a sheet of smudgy-carboned typed paper.

“Your old CO in Tripoli tells me you did a first-class job running the mess. And I think you’re just the chap we need here.”

Silence being the better part of discretion, and discretion being the better part of an old cliché, George said nothing and let Breen amble to his point.

“A good man is hard to find.”

Well-he knew that, he just wasn’t wholly certain he’d ever qualified as a “good man.” It went with “first-class mind” (said of eggheads) or “very able”(said of politicians) and was the vocabulary of a world he moved in without ever touching.

“And we need a good man right here.”

Oh Christ-they weren’t making him mess officer? Not again!

“Er… actually, sir, I was under the impression that I was being interviewed for a post in Intelligence.”

“Eh? What?”

“I have fluent Russian, sir, and I… “

“Well, you won’t be needing it here… ha… ha… ha!”

“Mess officer?”

Breen seemed momentarily baffled.

“Mess officer? Mess officer? Oh, I get it. Yes, I suppose you will be, in a way, it’s just that the mess you’ll be supplying will be the entire British Army ‘East of Suez.’ And you’ll get your third pip. Congratulations, Captain.”

Intelligence was not mentioned again except as an abstract quality that went along with “good man” and “first-class mind.”

Sylvia would not hear of living in Hendon or Finchley. The army had houses in north London, but she would not even look. So they moved to West Byfleet in Surrey, onto a hermetically sealed army estate of identical houses, and as far as George could see, identical wives, attending identical coffee mornings.

“Even the bloody furniture’s identical!”

“It’s what one knows,” she said. “And it’s a fair and decent world without envy. After all, the thing about the forces is that everyone knows what everyone else earns. Goes with the rank, you can look it up in an almanac if you want. It takes the bitterness out of life.”

George thought of all those endless pink gins he and Ollerenshaw had knocked back out in Libya, and how what had made them palatable was the bitters.

George hung up his uniform, went into plain clothes, War Office Staff Captain (Ord) General Stores, let his hair grow a little longer, and became a commuter-the 7:57 a.m. to Waterloo, and the 5:27 p.m. back again. It was far from Russia.

Many of his colleagues played poker on the train, many more did crosswords, and a few read. George read, he got through most of Dostoevsky in the original, the books disguised with the dust jacket from a Harold Robbins or an Irwin Shaw, and when he wasn’t reading stared out of the window at the suburbs of south London-Streatham, Tooting, Wimbledon- and posh “villages” of Surrey-Surbiton, Esher, Weybridge- and imagined them all blown to buggery.

The only break in the routine was getting rat-arsed at the office party a few days before Christmas 1962, falling asleep on the train, and being woken by a cleaner to find himself in a railway siding in Guildford at dawn the next morning.

It didn’t feel foolish-it felt raffish, almost daring, a touch of Errol Flynn debauchery-but as 1963 dawned, England was becoming a much more raffish and daring place, and Errol Flynn would soon come to seem like the role model for an entire nation.

It was all down to one person, really-a nineteen-year-old named Christine Keeler. Miss Keeler had had an affair with George’s boss, the top man, the minister of war, the Rt. Hon. John (Umpteenth Baron) Profumo (of Italy), MP (Stratford-on-Avon, Con.), OBE. Miss Keeler had simultaneously had an affair with Yevgeni Ivanov, an “attaché of the Soviet embassy” (newspeak for spy)-and the ensuing scandal had rocked Britain, come close to toppling the government, led to a trumped-up prosecution (for pimping) of a society doctor, his subsequent suicide, and the resignation of the aforementioned John Profumo.

At the War Office, there were two notable reactions. Alarm that the class divide had been dropped long enough to allow a toff like Profumo to take up with a girl of neither breeding nor education, whose parents lived in a converted wooden railway carriage, that a great party (Conservative) could be brought down by a woman of easy virtue (Keeler)-and paranoia that the Russians could get that close.

For a while Christine Keeler was regarded as the most dangerous woman in England. George adored her. If he thought he’d get away with it he’d have pinned her picture to his office wall.

It was possible that his lust for a pinup girl he had never met was what led him into folly.

The dust had scarcely settled on the Profumo affair. Lord Denning had published his report entitled unambiguously “Lord Denning’s Report” and found himself the author of an unwitting best seller when it sold four thousand copies in the first hour and the queues outside Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in Kingsway stretched around the block and into Drury Lane, and the country had a new prime minister in the cadaverous shape of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had resigned an earldom for the chance to live at No. 10.

George coveted a copy of the Denning Report, but it was understood to be very bad form for a serving officer, let alone one at the ministry that had been if not at the heart of the scandal then most certainly close to the liver and kidneys, to be seen in the queue.

His friend Ted-Captain Edward Ffyffe-Robertson RAOC- got him a copy, and George refrained from asking how. It was better than any novel-a marvelous tale of pot-smoking West Indians, masked men, naked orgies, beautiful, available women, and high society. He read it and reread it, and since he and Sylvia had now taken not only separate beds but also separate rooms, slept with it under his pillow.

About six months later Ted was propping up the wall in George’s office, having nothing better to do than jingle the coins in his pocket or play pocket billiards whilst making the smallest of small talk.

Elsie the tea lady parked her trolley by the open door.

“You’re early,” Ted said.

“Ain’t even started on teas yet. They got me ‘anding out the post while old Albert’s orf sick. What a diabolical bleedin’ liberty. Ain’t they never ‘card of demarcation? Lucky I don’t have the union on ‘em.”

Then she slung a single, large brown envelope onto George’s desk.

“I see you got yer promotion then, Mr. ‘Orsefiddle. All right for some.”

She pushed her trolley on. George looked at the envelope.

“Lieutenant Colonel HG Horsfield.”

“It’s got to be a mistake, surely?”

Ted peered over.

“It is, old man. Hugh Horsfield. Half-colonel in Artillery. He’s on the fourth floor. Daft old Elsie’s given you his post.”

“There’s another Horsfield?”

“Yep. Been here about six weeks. Surprised you haven’t met him. He’s certainly made his presence felt.”

With hindsight George ought to have asked what Ted’s last remark meant.

Instead, later the same day, he went in search of Lieutenant Colonel Horsfield, out of nothing more than curiosity and a sense of fellow feeling.

He tapped on the open door. A big bloke with salt-and-pepper hair and a spiky little moustache looked up from his desk.

George beamed at him.

“Lieutenant Colonel. HG Horsfield? I’m Captain HG Horsfield.”

His alter ego got up and walked across to the door and, with a single utterance of “Fascinating,” swung it to in George’s face.

Later, Ted said, “I did try to warn you, old man. He’s got a fierce reputation.”

“As what?”

“He’s the sort of bloke who gets described as not suffering fools gladly”

“Are you saying I’m a fool?”

“Oh, the things only your best friend will tell. Like using the right brand of bath soap. No, I’m not saying that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that to a highflyer like Hugh Horsfield, blokes like us who keep our boys in pots and pans and socks and blankets are merely the also-rans of the British Army. He deals with the big stuff. He’s Artillery after all.”

“Big stuff? What big stuff?”

“Well, we’re none of us supposed to say, are we? But here’s a hint: think back to August 1945 and those mushroom-shaped clouds over Japan.”

“Oh. I see. Bloody hell!”

“Bloody hell indeed.”

“Anything else?”

“I do hear that he’s more than a bit of a ladies’ man. In the first month alone he’s supposed to have shagged half the women on the fourth floor. And you know that blonde in the typing pool we all nicknamed the Jayne Mansfield of Muswell Hill?”

“Not her, too? I thought she didn’t look at anything below a full colonel.”

“Well, if the grapevine has it aright she dropped her knickers to half-mast for this half-colonel.”

What a bastard.

George hated his namesake.

George envied his namesake.

It was someone’s birthday. Some bloke on the floor below whom he didn’t know particularly well, but Ted did. A whole crowd of them, serving soldiers in civvies, literally and metaphorically letting their hair down, followed up cake and coffee in the office with a mob-handed invasion of a nightclub in Greek Street, Soho. Soho-a ten-minute walk from the War Office, the nearest thing London had to a red-light district, occupying a maze of narrow little streets east of the elegant Regent Street, south of the increasingly vulgar Oxford Street, north of the bright lights of Shaftesbury Avenue, and west of the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. It was home to the Marquee music club, the Flamingo, also a music club, the private boozing club known as the Colony Room, the scurrilous magazine Private Eye, the Gay Hussar restaurant, the Coach and Horses pub (and too many other pubs ever to mention), a host of odd little shops where a nod and a wink might get you into the back room for purchase of a faintly pornographic film, a plethora of strip clubs, and the occasional and more-than-occasional prostitute.

He’d be late home. So what? They’d all be late home.

They moved rapidly on to Frith Street and street by street and club by club worked their way across toward Wardour Street. The intention, George was sure, was to end up in a strip joint. He hoped to slip away before they reached the Silver Tit or the Golden Arse and the embarrassing farce of watching a woman wearing only a G-string and pasties jiggle all that would jiggle in front of a bunch of pissed and paunchy middle-aged men who confused titillation with satisfaction.

He’d been aware of Lieutenant Colonel Horsfield’s presence from the first-the upper-class bray of a barroom bore could cut through any amount of noise. He knew HG’s type. Minor public school, too idle for university, but snapped up by Sandhurst because he cut a decent figure on the parade ground. Indeed, he rather thought the only reason the army had picked him for Eaton Hall was that he, too, looked the officer type at a handsome five feet eleven inches.

As they reached Dean Street, George stepped off the pavement meaning to head south and catch a bus to Waterloo, but Ted had him by one arm.

“Not so fast, old son. The night is yet young.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Ted, I’d just as soon go home. I can’t abide strippers, and HG is really beginning to get on my tits, if not on theirs.”

“Nonsense, you’re one of us. And we won’t be going to a titty bar for at least an hour. Come and have a drink with your mates and ignore HG. He’ll be off as soon as the first prozzie flashes a bit of cleavage at him.”

“He doesn’t?”

“He does. Sooner or later everybody does. Haven’t you?”

“Well… yes… out in Benghazi… before I was married… but not…”

“It’s okay, old son. Not compulsory. I’ll just be having a couple of jars myself, then I’ll be home to Mill Hill and the missus.”

It was a miserable half hour. He retreated to a booth on his own, nursing a pink gin he didn’t much want. He’d no idea how long she’d been sitting there. He just looked up from pink reflections and there she was. Petite, dark, twentyish, and looking uncannily like the dangerous woman of his dreams: the almost pencil-thin eyebrows, the swept-back chestnut hair, the almond eyes, the pout of slightly prominent front teeth, and the cheekbones from heaven or Hollywood.

“Buy a girl a drink?”

This was what hostesses did. Plonked themselves down, got you to buy them a drink, and then ordered house “champagne” at a price that dwarfed the national debt. George wasn’t falling for that.

“Have mine,” he said, pushing the pink gin across the table. “I haven’t touched it.”

“Thanks, love.”

He realized at once that she wasn’t a hostess. No hostess would have taken the drink.

“You’re not working here, are you?”

“Nah. But… “

“But what?”

“But I am… working.”

The penny dropped, clunking down inside him, rattling around in the rusty pinball machine of the soul.

“And you think I… “

“You look as though you could do with something. I could… make you happy… just for a while I could make you happy.”

George heard a voice very like his own say, “How much?”

“Not up front, love. That’s just vulgar.”

“I haven’t got a lot of cash on me.”

“S’okay. I take checks.”

She had a room three flights up in Bridle Lane. Clothed she was gorgeous, naked she was irresistible. If George died on the train home he would die happy.

She had one hand on his balls and was kissing him in one ear-he was priapic as Punch. He was on the edge, seconds away from entry, sheathed in a frenchie, when the door burst open, his head turned sharply, and a flashbulb went off in his eyes.

When the stars cleared, he found himself facing a big bloke in a dark suit clutching a Polaroid camera and smiling smugly at him.

“Get dressed, Mr. Horsfield. Meet me in the Stork Café in Berwick Street. You’re not there in fifteen minutes this goes to your wife.”

The square cardboard plate shot from the base of the camera and took form before his eyes.

He fell back on the pillow and groaned. He’d know a Russian accent anywhere. He’d been set up-trussed up like a turkey.

“Oh… shit.”

“Sorry, love. But, y’know. It’s a job. Gotta make a livin’ somehow.”

George’s wits were gathering slowly, cohering into a fuzzy knot of meaning.

“You mean they pay you to… frame blokes like me?”

“‘Fraid so. Prozzyin’ ain’t what it used to be.”

The knot pulled tight.

“You take money for this!?!”

“O’course. I’m no commie. It’s a job. I get paid. Up front.”

He had a memory somewhere of her telling him that was vulgar, but he sidestepped it.

“Paid to get you out of yer trousers, into bed, do what I do till Boris gets here.”

“What you do?”

“You know, love… the other.”

“You mean sex?”

“If it gets that far. He was a bit early tonight.”

A light shone in George’s mind. The knot slackened off, and the life began to crawl back into his startled groin.

“You’ve been paid to… fuck me?”

“Language, love. But yeah.”

“Would you mind awfully if we… er… finished the job?”

She thought for a moment.

“Why not? Least I can do. Besides, I like you. And old Boris is hardly going to bugger off after fifteen minutes. He needs you. He’ll wait till dawn if he has to.”

Walking to Berwick Street, along the whore’s paradise of Meard Street, apprehension mingled with bliss. It was like that moment in Tobruk when Johnny Arab had stuck a pipe of super-strength hashish in front of him and he had looked askance at it but inhaled all the same. The headiness never quite offset and overwhelmed the sheer oddness of the situation.

In the caff a few late-night ‘beatniks” (scruffbags, Sylvia would have called them) spun out cups of frothy coffee as long as they could and put the world to rights-while Boris, if that really was his name, sat alone at a table next to the lavatory door.

George was at least half an hour late. Boris glanced at his watch but said nothing about it. Silently he slid the finished Polaroid-congealed as George thought of it-across the table, his finger never quite letting go of it.

“This type of camera only takes these shots. No negative. Hard to copy, and I won’t even try unless you make me. Do what we ask, Mr. Horsfield, and you will not find us unreasonable people. Give us what we want, and when we have it, you can have this. Frame it, burn it, I don’t care-but if we get what we want, you can be assured this will be the only copy and your wife need never know.”

George didn’t even look at the photo. It might ruin a precious memory.

“What is it you want?”

Boris all but whispered, “Everything you’re sending east of Suez.”

“I see,” said George, utterly baffled by this.

“Be here one week tonight. Nine o’clock. You bring evidence of something you’ve shipped out-show willing as you people say-and we’ll brief you on what to look for next. In fact, we’ll give you a shopping list.”

Boris stood up. A bigger bugger in a black suit came over and stood next to him. George hadn’t even noticed this one was in the room.

“Well?” he said in Russian.

“A pushover,” Boris replied.

The other man picked up the photo, glimmed it, and said, “When did he shave off the moustache?”

“Who cares?” Boris replied.

Then he switched to English, said, “Next week,” to George, and they left.

George sat there. He’d learned two things. They didn’t know he spoke Russian, and they had the wrong Horsfield. George felt like laughing. It really was very funny-but it didn’t let him off the hook… Whatever they called him, Henry George Horsfield RAOC or Hugh George Horsfield RA… they still had a photograph of him in bed with a whore. It might end up in the hands of the right wife or the wrong wife, but he had no doubts it would all end up on a desk at the War Office if he screwed up now.

He got bugger all work done the next day. He had sneaked into home very late, left a note for Sylvia saying he would be out early, caught the 7.01 train, and sneaked into the office very early. He could not face her across the breakfast table. He couldn’t face anyone. He closed his office door, but after ten minutes decided that that was a dead giveaway and opened it again. He hoped Ted did not want to chat. He hoped Daft Elsie had no gossip as she brought round the tea.

At five-thirty in the evening he took his briefcase and sought out a caff in Soho. He sat in Old Compton Street staring into his deflating frothy coffee much as he had stared into his pink gin the night before. Oddly, most oddly, the same thing happened. He looked up from his cup and there she was. Right opposite him. A vision of beauty and betrayal.

“I was just passin’. Honest. And I saw you sittin’ in the window.”

“You’re wasting your time. I haven’t got the money, and after last night…”

“I’m not on the pull. It’s six o’clock and broad bleedin’ daylight. I… I… I thought you looked lonely.”

“I’m always lonely,” he replied, surprised at his own honesty. “But what you see now is misery of your own making.”

“You’ll be fine. Just give old Boris what he wants.”

“Has it occurred to you that that might be treason?”

“Nah… it’s not as if you’re John Profumo or I’m Christine Keeler. We’re small fry, we are.”

Oh God, if only she knew.

“I can’t give him what he wants. He wants secrets.”

“Don’t you know any?”

“Of course I do… everything’s a sodding secret. But… but… I’m RAOC. Do you know what that stands for?”

“Nah. Rags And Old Clothes?”

“Close. Our nickname is the Rag And Oil Company. Royal Army Ordnance Corps. I keep the British Army in saucepans and socks!”

“Ah.”

“You begin to see? Boris will want secrets about weapons.”

“O’course he will. How long have you got?”

“I really ought to be on a train by nine.”

“Well… you come home with me. We’ll have a bit of a think.”

“I’m not sure I could face that room again.”

“You silly bugger. I don’t work from home, do I? Nah. I got a place in Henrietta Street. Let’s nip along and put the kettle on. It’s cozy. Really it is. Ever so.”

How Sylvia would have despised the “ever so.” It would be “common.”

Over tea and ginger biscuits she heard him out-the confusion of two Horsfields and how he really had nothing that Boris would ever want.

She said, “You gotta laugh, ain’t yer?”

And they did.

She thought while they fucked-he could see in her eyes that she wasn’t quite with him, but he didn’t much mind.

Afterward, she said, “You gotta do what I have to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Fake it.”

George took this on board with a certain solemnity and doubt.

She shook him by the arm vigorously.

“Leave it out, captain. I’d never fake one with you.”

The best part of a week passed. He was due to meet Boris that evening and sat at his desk in the day trying to do what the nameless whore had suggested. Fake it.

He had in front of him a shipping docket for frying pans.

FPI Titanium Range 12 inch. Maximum heat dispersal.

116 units.

It was typical army-speak that the docket didn’t actually say they were frying pans. The docket was an FPI, and that was only used for frying pans, so the bloke on the receiving end in Singapore would just look at the code and know what was in the crate. There was a certain logic to it. Fewer things got stolen this way. He’d once shipped thirty-two kettles to Cyprus, and somehow the word kettle had ended up on the docket and only ten ever arrived at their destination.

He could see possibilities in this. All he needed was a jar of that newfangled American stuff, Liquid Paper, which he bought out of his own money from an import shop in the Charing Cross Road, a bit of jiggery-pokery, and access to the equally newfangled, equally American Xerox machine. Uncle Sam had finally given the world something useful. It almost made up for popcorn and rock ‘n’ roll.

Caution stepped in. He practiced first on an interoffice memo. Just as well-he made a hash of it. “Staff Canteen Menu, Changes to: Subsection Potato, Mashed: WD414” would never be the same again. No matter, if one of these yards of bumf dropped onto his desk in the course of a day, then so did a dozen more. He’d even seen one headed “War Office Gravy, Lumps in.”

He found the best technique was to thin the Liquid Paper as far as it would go and then treat it like ink. Fortunately, the empire had only just died-or committed hara-kiri-and he had in his desk drawer two or three dip pens, with nibs, and a dry, clean, cut-glass inkwell that might have graced the desk of the assistant commissioner of Eastern Nigeria in 1910.

And-practice does make perfect. And a copy of a copy of a copy-three passes on the Xerox-makes the perfect into a pleasing blur.

“Titanium” was fairly easily altered to “Plutonium.”

A full stop was added before “Range.”

“12 inch” became “120 miles.”

He stared, willing something to come to him about “Maximum heat dispersal,” and when nothing did concluded it was fine as it was. And 116 units sounded spot-on. A good, healthy number, divisible by nothing.

He looked over his handiwork. It would do. It would… “pass muster,” that was the phrase. And it was pleasingly ambiguous.

FPI Plutonium. Range 120 miles. Maximum heat dispersal.

116 units.

But what if Boris asked what they were?

Boris did, but by then George was ready for him.

“FP means Field Personnel. And I’m sure you know what plutonium is.”

“You cheeky bugger. You think I’m just some dumb Russki? The point is, to what aspect of Field Personnel does this document refer?”

George looked him in the eye, said, “Just put it all together. Add up the parts and get to the sum.”

Boris looked down at the paper and then up at George.

Whatever penny dropped, George would roll with it.

“My God. I don’t believe it. You bastards are upping the ante on us. You’re putting tactical nuclear weapons into Singapore!”

“Well,” George replied in all honesty. “You said it, I didn’t.”

“And they shipped in January. My God, they’re already there!”

George was emboldened.

“And why not-things are hotting up in Vietnam. Or did you think that after Cuba we’d just roll over and die?”

And then he kicked himself. Was Vietnam, either bit of it, within 120 miles of Singapore? He hadn’t a clue.

Mouth, big, shut.

But Boris didn’t seem to know either.

He pushed the Polaroid across the table to him. This time he took his hand off it.

“You will understand. We keep our word.”

George doubted this.

And then Boris reached into his pocket, pulled out a white envelope, and pushed that to George.

“And I am to give you this.”

“What is it?”

“Five hundred pounds. I believe you call it a monkey.”

Good God-here he was betraying his country’s canteen secrets, and the bastards were actually going to pay him for it.

He took it round to Henrietta Street.

He didn’t mention it until after they’d made love.

And she said, “Bloody hell. That’s more’n I make in a month,” and George said, “It’s more than I make in three months.”

They agreed. They’d stash it in the bottom of her wardrobe and think what they might do with it some other time.

As he was leaving for Waterloo, George said, “Do you realize, I don’t know your name.”

“You din’ ask. And it’s Donna.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Nah. S’my workin’ name. Goes with my surname, Need-ham. It’s like a joke. Donna Needham. Gettit?”

“Yes. I get it. You’re referring to men.”

“Yeah, but you can call me Janet if you like. That’s me real name.”

“I think I prefer Donna.”

It became part of the summer. Part of the summer’s new routine.

He would ring home about once a week and tell Sylvia he would be working late.

“The DDT to the DFC’s in town. The brass want me in a meeting. Sorry, old thing.”

Considering that she had been married to a serving army officer for twenty years before she met George, Sylvia had never bothered to learn any army jargon. She expected men to talk bollocks, and she paid it no mind. She accepted it and dismissed it simultaneously.

George would then keep an appointment with Boris in the Berwick Street caff, sell his country up the Swanee, and then go round to the flat in Henrietta Street.

Even as his conscience atrophied, or quite possibly because it atrophied, love blossomed. He was absolutely potty about Donna and told her so every time he saw her.

Boris didn’t use the Berwick Street café every time, and it suited both to meet at Kempton Park racecourse on the occasional Saturday, particularly if Sylvia had gone to a whist drive or taken herself off shopping in Kingston-upon-Thames. Five bob each way on the favorite was George’s limit. Boris played long shots and made more than he lost. It was, George thought, a fair reflection of both their characters and their trades.

As the weeks passed, George doctored more dockets, pocketed more cash-although he never again collected five hundred pounds in one go (Boris explained that this had been merely to get his attention), every meeting resulted in his treachery being rewarded with a hundred or two hundred pounds.

Some deceptions required a bit of thought.

For example, he found himself staring at a docket for saucepans he had shipped to Hong Kong from the makers in Lancashire.

SP3 PRESTIGE Copper-topped 6 inch. 250 units.

Prestige was probably the best-known maker of saucepans in the country. He couldn’t leave the word intact-it was just possible that even old Boris had heard of them.

But once contemplated, his liar’s muse came to his rescue, and it was easily altered to read

FP3 P F T Cobalt-tipped 6 inch. 250 units.

He’d no idea what this might mean, but, once in the caff with two cups of frothy coffee in front of them, as ever, Boris filled in most of the blanks.

Yes, FP meant what it had always meant. He struggled a little with P F T, and George waited patiently as Boris steered himself in the direction of Personal Field Tactical, and as he put that together with cobalt-tipped, his great Russian self-righteousness surfaced with a bang.

“You really are a bunch of bastards, aren’t you? You’re fitting handheld rocket launchers with missiles coated with spent uranium!”

Oh, was that it? George knew cobalt had something to do with radioactivity, but quite what was beyond him.

“Armor-piercing, cobalt-tipped shells? You bastards. You utter fockin’ bastards. Queensberry rules, my Bolshevik arse!”

Ah… armor-piercing, that was what they were for. George hadn’t a clue and would have guessed blindly had Boris asked.

“Bastards!”

After which outburst Boris slipped him a hundred quid and called it a long ‘un.

Midsummer, George got lucky. He was running out of ideas, and somebody mentioned that the army had American-built ground-to-air missiles deployed with NATO forces in Europe. A truck-mounted launcher that went by the code name of Honest John. It wasn’t exactly a secret, and there was every chance Boris knew what Honest John was.

It rang a bell in the great canteen of the mind. A while back, he was almost certain, he had shipped fifty large stew pots out to Aden, bought from a firm in Waterford called Honett Iron. It was the shortest alteration he ever made, and lit the shortest fuse in Boris.

“Bastards!” he said yet again.

And then he paused, and in thinking, came close to unraveling George’s skein of lies. George had thought to impress Boris with a fake docket for a missile that really existed, and it was about to blow up in his face.

“Just a minute. I know this thing, it only has a range of fifteen miles. Who can you nuke from Aden? It doesn’t make sense. Every other country is more than fifteen miles away. There’s nothing but fockin’ dyesert within fifteen miles of Aden.”

George was stuck. To say anything would be wrong, but this was one gap Boris’s fertile imagination didn’t seem willing to plug.

“Er… that depends,” said George.

“On what?”

“Er… on… on what you think is going on in the er… ‘fockin’ dyesert.”‘

Boris stared at him.

A silence screaming to be filled.

And Boris wasn’t going to fill it.

George risked all.

“After all, I mean… you either have spy planes or you don’t.”

It was enigmatic.

George had no idea whether the Russians had spy planes. The Americans did. One had been shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, resulting in egg-on-face as the Russians paraded the unfortunate pilot alive before the world’s press. So much for the cyanide capsule.

It was enigmatic. Enigmatic to the point of meaninglessness, but it did the trick. It turned Boris’s inquiries inward. Meanwhile, George had scared himself shitless. He’d got cocky and he’d nearly paid the price.

He lobbed another envelope of money into the bottom of Donna’s wardrobe. He hadn’t counted it, and neither of them had spent any of it, but he reckoned they must have about two thousand pounds in there.

“I have to stop,” he said. “Boris damn near caught me tonight.”

Two days later, George opened his copy of the Daily Telegraph on the train to work, and page one chilled him to the briefcase.

Russian Spy Plane Shot Down Over Aden

He had reached Waterloo and was crossing the Hungerford Footbridge to the Victoria Embankment before he managed to reassure himself with the notion that because it had been shot down, the USSR still didn’t know what was (not) going on in the “fockin’ dyesert.”

He told Donna, the next time they met, the next time they made love. He lay back in the afterglow and felt anxiety awaken from its erotically induced slumber.

“You see,” he said, “I had to tell Boris something. There’s nothing going on in the ‘fockin’ dyesert.’ But the Russians launched a spy plane to find out. On Boris’s say-so. On my say-so. I mean, for all I know the Vietcong are deploying more troops along the DMZ, the Chinese might be massing their millions at the border with Hong Kong… This is all getting… out of hand.”

Donna ran her fingers through his hair, brought her lips close to his ear, with that touch of moist breath that drove him wild.

“Y’know, Georgie, you been luckier than you know.”

“How so?”

“Supposin’ there really had been something going on out in the ‘fockin’ dyesert’?”

“Oh Christ.”

“Don’t bear thinkin’ about, do it? But you’re right. This is all gettin’ outta hand. We need to do something.”

“Such as?”

“Dunno. But, let me think. I’m better at it than you are.”

“Could you think quickly. Before I start World War III.”

“Sssh, Georgie. Donna’s thinkin’.”

“It’s like this,” she said. “You want out, but the Russkies have enough on you to fit you up for treason, and then there’s the Polaroid of you an’ me in bed an’ your wife to think about.”

“I got the Polaroid back months ago.”

“You did? Good. Now… thing is, as I see it, they got you for selling them our secrets ‘bout rockets an’ ‘at out east. Only you gave ‘em saucepans and tea urns. So what have they really got?”

“Me. They’ve got me, because saucepans and tea urns are just as secret as nukes. I’m still a traitor. I’ll be the Klaus Fuchs of kitchenware.”

“No. You’re not. The other Horsfield is, ‘cos that’s who they think they’re dealing with.”

George could not see where this was headed.

“We gotta do two things, see off old Boris and put the other Horsfield in the frame. Give ‘ em the Horsfield they wanted in the first place.”

“Oh God.”

“No… listen… Boris thinks he’s been dealing with Lieutenant Col. Horsfield. What we gotta do is make the colonel think he’s dealing with Boris… swap him for you and then blow the whistle.”

“Or let the whistle blow,” said George.

“How do you mean?”

“If I understand that cunning little mind of yours aright, you mean to try and frame Horsfield.”

“S’right.”

“I know HG. He’s a total bastard, but he cant be scared or intimidated. We make any move against him, he catches even a whiff of Russian involvement, he’ll blow the whistle himself.”

“Y’know. That’s even more than I hoped for. Let me try for the full house then. Is he what you might call a ladies’ man?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, no offense, Georgie, but you was easy to pull. If I was to try and pull HG, what would he do?”

“Oh, I see. Well, if office gossip is to be believed, he’d paint his arse blue and shag you under a lamppost in Soho Square.”

“Bingo,” said Donna. “Bingo bloody bingo!”

They dipped into the wardrobe money for the first time.

“I can’t do this myself, and I can’t use the room in Bridle Lane. I’ll pay a mate to do HG, and I know a house in Marshall Street that’s going under the wrecking ball any day now. It’ll be perfect. I’ll get a room kitted out so it looks like a regular pad and then we just abandon it. The gray area is knowing when we might get to HG.”

“It’s Ted’s birthday next week. Bound to be a pub and club crawl. I could even predict that at some point we’ll all be in the same club you found me in.”

“What would be HG’s type?”

“Now you mention it… not you. He goes for blondes, blondes with big…”

“Tits?”

“Quite.”

“Okay, that narrows it down. I’ll have to ask Judy. She’ll want a ton for the job and another for the risk, but she’ll do it.”

Ted’s birthday bash coincided with George’s Boris night at the Berwick Street caff. Something was going right. God knows, they might even get away with this. “This”-he wasn’t at all sure what “this” was. He knew his own part in this, but the initiative had now passed to Donna. She had planned the night’s activity like a film script.

He slipped away early from Ted’s party. Ted was three sheets to the wind anyway. HG was in full flight with a string of smutty stories, and the only risk was that he might get off with some woman before Judy pulled him. As he was leaving, a tall, busty blonde, another Jayne Mansfield or Diana Dors, cantilevered by state-of-the-art bra mechanics into a pink lamb’s wool sweater that showed plenty of cleavage and looked as solid as Everest, came into the club. She winked at George and carried on down the stairs without a word.

George went round to Bridle Lane.

It was a tale of two wigs.

Donna had a wig ready for him.

“You and Boris are about the same size. It’s just a matter of hair color. Besides, it’s not as if HG will get a good look at you.”

And a wig ready for herself. She was transformed into a pocket Marilyn Monroe.

He hated the waiting. They stood at the corner of Fouberts Place, looking down the length of Marshall Street. It was past nine when a staggering, three-quarters pissed HG appeared on the arm of a very steady Judy. They stopped under a lamppost. He didn’t paint his arse blue, but he groped her in public, his hand on her backside, his face half-buried in her cleavage.

George watched Judy gently reposition his hand at her waist and heard her say, “Not so fast, soldier, we’re almost there.”

“We are? Bloody good show.”

George hated HG.

George hated HG for being so predictable.

Donna whispered.

“Ten minutes at the most. Judy’ll pull a curtain to when he’s got his kit off. Now, are you sure you know how to work it?”

“It’s just a camera like any other, Donna.”

“Georgie-we only got one chance.”

“Yes. I know how to work it.”

When the curtain moved, George tiptoed up the stairs, imagining Boris doing the same thing all those months ago as he prepared to spring the honey trap.

At the bedroom door he could hear the baritone rumble of HG’s drunken sweet nothings.

“S’wonderful. S’bloody amazing. Tits. Marvelous things. If I had tits… bloody hell… I’d play with them all day.”

Then kick, flash, bang, wallop… and HG was sprawled where he had been, and George was uttering Boris’s lines in the best Russian accent he could muster.

“You have ten minutes, Colonel Horsfield. You fail to meet me in the Penguin Café in Kingly Street, this goes to your wife.”

He was impressed by his own timing. The Polariod shot out of the bottom of the camera just as he said “wife.”

HG was staring at him glassy-eyed. Judy grabbed her clothes and ran past him hell-for-leather. Still, HG stared. Perhaps he was too drunk to understand what was happening.

“You have ten minutes, Colonel. Penguin Café, Kingly Street. Das vidanye.”

He’d no idea why he’d thrown in the “das vidanye”-perhaps a desperate urge to sound more Russian.

HG said, “I’ll be there… you commie fucking bastard. I’ll be there.”

Much to George’s alarm, he got up from the bed, seemingly less drunk, bollock-naked, stiff cock swaying in its frenchie, and came toward him.

George fled. It was what Donna had told him to do.

Down in the street, George arrived just in time to see Judy pulling on her stilettos and heading off toward Beak Street. Donna took the Polaroid from him, waved it in the air, and looked for the image.

“Gottim,” she said.

George looked at his watch. Didn’t dare to raise his voice much above a whisper.

“I must hurry. I have to meet Boris.”

“No. No, you don’t. You leave Boris to me.”

This wasn’t part of the plan. This had never been mentioned.

“What?”

“Go back to the party.”

“I don’t

“Find your mates. They must be in a club somewhere near. You know the pattern: booze, booze, strippers. Find ‘em. Ditch the wig. Ditch the camera. Go back and make yourself seen.”

She kissed him.

“And don’t go down Berwick Street.”

Donna stood awhile on the next corner, watched as HG emerged and saw him rumble off in the direction of Kingly Street. Then she went the other way, toward Berwick Street, and stood behind one of the market stalls that were scattered along the right-hand side.

She could see Boris. He was reading a newspaper, letting his coffee go cold and occasionally glancing at his watch. He was almost taking George’s arrival for granted, but not quite.

She was reassured when he finally gave up and stood a moment on the pavement outside the caff, looking up at the stars and muttering something Russian. Really, he wasn’t any taller than George, just a bit bigger in the chest and shoulders. What with the wig and flashbulb going off, all HG was likely to say was “some big bugger, sort of darkish, in a dark suit, didn’t really get a good look I’m afraid.”

That was old Boris, a big, dark bugger in a dark suit.

Her only worry was that if Boris flagged a cab and there wasn’t one close behind, she’d lose him. But it was a warm summer evening: Boris had decided to walk. He set off westward, in the direction of the Soviet embassy. Perhaps he needed to think. Was he going to shop George for one no-show or was he going to roll with it, string it and George out in the hope of keeping the stream of information flowing?

Boris crossed Regent Street into Mayfair and headed south toward Piccadilly He seemed to be in no hurry and paid no attention to cabs or buses. Indeed, he seemed to pay no attention to anything, as though he was deep in thought.

She matched her pace to his, trying to stay in shadow, but Boris never looked back. In Shepherd Market he turned into one of those tiny alleys that dot the northern side of Piccadilly, and she quickened her step to get to the corner.

The light vanished. A hand grabbed her by the jacket and pulled her into the alley. The other hand pulled off her wig, and Boris’s voice said, “Don’t take me for a fockin’ fool. Horsfield doesn’t show and then you appear in a silly wig, trailing after me like a third-rate gumshoe. What the fock are you playing at?”

It was better than she’d dared hope for. She’d been foxed all along to work out how to get him alone, this close, in a dark alley. And now he’d done it for her.

She pressed her gun to his heart and shot him dead.

Then she leaned down, tucked the Polaroid into his inside pocket, put her wig back on, walked down to Piccadilly and caught a number 38 bus home.

The first George heard was from Daft Elsie, pushing her trolley round just after eleven the next morning.

“Can’t get on the fourth floor. Buggers won’t let me. Some sort of argy-bargy going on. I askyer. Spooks and spies. Gotta be a load of old bollocks, ain’t it?”

“Two sugars, please,” said George.

“And I got these ‘ere jam don’uts special for that Colonel ‘Orsepiddle. ‘Ere, love, you have one.”

“So,” he tried to sound casual, “it all revolves around the good colonel, does it?”

“Let’s put it this way, love. ‘E’s doin’ a lot of shoutin’. An’ it’s not as if he whispers at the best of times.”

So-HG wasn’t so much blowing the whistle as shouting the odds.

After lunch Ted dropped in, dropped the latest, not-yet-late-final-but-almost edition of the London Evening Standard onto his desk.

George pulled it toward him.

Soviet Embassy Attaché Shot Dead in Mayfair.

George said nothing.

Ted said, “Could be an interesting few weeks. Russkies play hell. Possibly bump off one of ours. A few expulsions, followed by retaliatory expulsions.… God I’d hate to be in Moscow right now.”

“What makes you think we did it? I mean, do we shoot foreign agents in the street?”

“Not as a rule. But boldness was our friend. I gather from a mate at Scotland Yard that they’re clueless. No one saw or heard a damn thing. Anyway… change the subject… what was up with you last night? Throwing up in the bogs for an hour. Not like you, old son.”

“Change it back-does this have anything to do with the hoo-ha going on on the fourth floor?”

“Well, let me put it this way. Be a striking bloody coincidence if it didn’t.”

It became received wisdom in the office that the Russians had tried to set up HG and that he would have none of it. Less received, but much bandied, was the theory that rather than keep the meeting with the man attempting blackmail, HG had simply rung MI5, who had bumped off the unfortunate Russki on his way across Mayfair. That one Boris Alexandrovich Bulganov was found dead within a few yards of MI5 HQ in Curzon

Street added to veracity, as did a rumor that he’d had a photograph of HG in bed with a prozzie in his pocket. Some wag pinned a notice to the canteen message board offering ten pounds for a copy but found no takers.

Ted was profound upon the matter, “Always knew he’d end up in trouble if he let his dick do the thinking for him.”

It became, almost at once, a diplomatic incident. Nothing on the scale of Profumo or the U2 spy plane, but the Russians accused the British of assassinating Boris, whom they described as a “cultural attaché.” The British accused the Russians of attempting to blackmail HG Horsfield, whose name never graced the newspapers-merely “unnamed high-ranking British officer”-and George could only conclude that neither one had put the dates together and worked out that they had been blackmailing an HG Horsfield for some time, but not the HG Horsfield. If they’d swapped information, George would have been sunk. But, of course, they’d never do that.

HG’s “reward” was to be made a full colonel and posted to the Bahamas. Anywhere out of the way. Why the Bahamas might need a tactical nuclear weapons expert was neither here nor there nor anywhere.

George never heard from the Russians again. He expected to. Every day for six months he expected to. But he didn’t.

Six months on, Boris’s death was eclipsed.

George arrived home in West Byfleet to find an ambulance and a crowd of neighbors outside his house.

Mrs. Wallace, wife of Jack Wallace, lieutenant in REME- George thought her name might be Betty-came up oozing an alarming mixture of tears and sympathy.

“Oh, Captain Horsfield… I don’t know what to… “

George pushed past her to the ambulance men. A covered stretcher was already in the back of the ambulance and he knew the worst at once.

“How?” he asked simply.

“She took a tumble, sir. Top o’the stairs to the bottom. Broken neck. Never knew what hit her.”

George spent an evening alone with a bottle of scotch, ignoring the ringing phone. He hadn’t loved Sylvia. He had never loved Sylvia. He had been fond of her. She was too young, a rotten age to go… and then he realized he didn’t actually know how old Sylvia was. He might find out only when they chipped it on her tombstone.

Grief was nothing-guilt was everything.

Decorum ruled.

He did not go to Henrietta Street for the best part of a month. He wrote to Donna, much as he wrote to many of his friends, knowing that the done thing was the notice in The Times, but that few of his friends read The Times and that the Daily Mail didn’t bother with a deaths column.

When he did go to Henrietta Street, he cut through Covent Garden, fifty yards to the north, and bought a bouquet of flowers.

“You never brought me flowers before.”

“I’ve never asked you to marry me before.”

“Wot? Marriage? Me an’ you?”

“I can’t think that ‘marry me’ would imply anything else.”

And having read the odd bit of Shakespeare in the interim, George quoted an approximation of Hamlet on the matter of baked meats, funerals, and wedding feasts.

“Sometimes, Georgie, I can’t understand a word you say.”

She was hesitant. The last thing he had wanted, though he had troubled himself to imagine it. She said she’d “just put the kettle on,” and then she seemed to perch on the edge of the sofa without a muscle in her body relaxing.

“What’s the matter?”

“If… if we was to get married… what would we do? I mean we carried on… once we got shot of the Russians, we just carried on… as normal. Only there weren’t no normal.”

George knew exactly what she meant, but said nothing.

“I mean… oh… bloody nora… I don’t know what I mean.”

“You mean that serving army officers don’t marry prostitutes.”

“Yeah… something like that.”

“I have thought of leaving the army. There are opportunities in supply management, and the army is one of the best references a chap could have.”

The kettle whistled. She turned it off but made no move toward making tea.

“Where would we live?”

“Anywhere. Where are you from?”

“Colchester.”

Colchester was the biggest military prison in the country- the glasshouse, England’s Leavenworth. Considered the worst posting a man could get. He’d never shake off the feel of the army in Colchester.

“Okay. Well… perhaps not Colchester…”

“I always wanted to live up north.”

“What? Manchester? Leeds?”

“Nah… “Ampstead. I’d never want to leave London… ‘specially now it’s started to… wotchercallit?… swing.”

“Hampstead won’t be cheap.”

“I saved over three thousand quid from the game.”

“I have about a thousand in savings, and I inherited more from Sylvia. In fact about seven and a half thousand pounds. Not inconsiderable.”

Not inconsiderable-a lifetime of saving roughly equivalent to a couple of years on “the game.”

“And of course, I’ll get a pension. I’ve done sixteen years and a bit. I’ll get part of a pension now, more if I leave it, and at thirty-five I’m young enough to put twenty or more years into another career.”

“And there’s the money in the bottom of the wardrobe.”

“I hadn’t forgotten.”

“I counted it. Just the other day I counted it. We got seventeen hundred and thirty-two pounds. O’course there been expenses.”

Donna was skirting the edge of a taboo subject. George was in two minds as to whether to let her plunge in. Who knows? It might clear the air.

“I give Judy two hundred. And there was money for the room… an ‘at.”

George bit, appropriately, on the bullet.

“And how much did the gun cost you?”

There was a very long pause.

“Did you always know?”

“Yes.”

“It didn’t come cheap. Fifty quid.”

In for a penny, in for a pound.

Marry without secrets.

George cleared his throat.

“And of course, there’s the cost of your return ticket to West Byfleet last month, isn’t there?”

He could see her go rigid, a ramrod to her spine, a crab-claw grip to her fingers on the arm of the sofa.

He hoped she’d speak first, but after an age it seemed to him she might never speak again.

“I don’t care,” he said softly. “Really I don’t.”

She would not look at him.

“Donna. Please say yes. Please tell me you’ll marry me.”

Donna said nothing.

George got up and made tea, hoping he would be making tea for two for the rest of their lives.