The Flowers of the Forest

1

I tried to work again this afternoon, going upstairs to the attic in the cottage which I have made into a study. But from my window I could see the sky, quite blue, almost balmy, for the first time this year, after months of damp and grey — light fluffy clouds sailing over the small hills of this part of Oxfordshire where I have come to live.

But I was impatient again for something I couldn’t touch, something that was surely happening somewhere out there in the world at that very moment, as I sat at my desk thumbing the typescript of the book on the British in Egypt which I’d been working on for the past few years. I had started to read again my chapter on the Suez debacle and its aftermath, a period I’d lived through in Cairo 20 years before. But the writing seemed cold and irrelevant on the page, so far removed from the blazing heat and anger — and yet, for me, the love — of those years: the smell of lime dust and urine and burnt newspapers sweeping up from the back streets of the city: the rumour of sour bread and burnt kebabs that they cooked on a barrow at the corner of my street by the Nile, rising up in the baking air past our open bedroom window, where I lay with Bridget through the hot afternoons, doing the one thing we did so willingly and well then …

I was impatient for that, perhaps — something like that again — some dangerous reality and not this studied history in a calm world: the Cotswolds, where it seemed I’d been asleep for many years. I had felt like Mole all that day: Mole waking on the riverbank that first real day of spring, coming out into the light on the water after the bad dreams of winter, getting his house in order before setting out on his long adventure.

I was not yet tired of country life last Christmas. But now that spring had come and some nameless cure took place in me, boredom had begun, nibbling away at my days, making each of them several hours too long.

The mornings were all right when I worked, and most afternoons when I journeyed over the small hills. But the evenings were difficult. There was no pub in my village, while the one three miles away was empty on weekdays and full of television playwrights and producers at weekends. Sometimes I watched their work on the box at home in the evenings, and that was worse.

The village, quite lost in the folds of high sheep pasture ten miles or so beyond Woodstock, was more than attractive; that quality alone would have ruined it years before. It was inviolate: a manorial hamlet, almost all of it still owned by an eccentric army officer, the last of his line, and rich beyond the dreams of avarice, so that he had no need of weekenders in his village or modern bungalows — and more, before I came, had once taken a shotgun to some intrepid London house hunters he had found admiring a ruined cottage on the edge of his estate.

Nearly all the tied cottages on the single small street had their doors and gable ends painted the same shade of very sombre blue — except for mine, a neo-Gothic, red-brick cottage behind the church, not part of the Major’s empire, but which had belonged to the local sexton and I had bought from the Church Commissioners.

There was a unique fourteenth-century Tithe Barn by the Manor Farm with arrow-slit windows, while the small church, with its dumpy Anglo-Norman tower and ochre-coloured stone was a wonder in slanting sunlight, and considered perfect of its kind.

But I am no rural chronicler: the Bartons, a colonial family, came to live in the old rectory shortly after me; I fell out with them one evening over sanctions in Rhodesia and have barely seen them since. The Major and I have never met at all. But I am not alone in that. He is not a social man. The Vicar, a persistent and over-social Welshman, now from another village, bearded me several times early on, believing me to be a television dramatist, and suggesting I compose a Christmas Masque based on the career of a local seventeenth-century divine whose voluminous and uncollected papers, he told me, were available somewhere deep within the Bodleian Library.

I disappointed him, I’m afraid. Though I still sometimes go to church. The place has a very simple white-washed nave, with the original brick showing through on the window corners, and old pine-box pews that smell of candle wax.

I chose this village specially, nearly four years ago, for its isolation — when they ‘retired’ me, after the fracas with the KGB in Cheltenham. McCoy had seen it differently, though, and had offered to recommend me for an MBE on the Foreign Office List, since for him, needless to say, the whole business had ended in vast success. Instead I took the £15,000 gratuity they had offered and told McCoy I hoped never to see or hear from him again.

‘Don’t be like that, Marlow,’ he’d said, in his ugly Belfast voice, words and tones no real Foreign Office man would have used, for of course we had both worked for a far less intelligible government department: the — and I find it hard even to write the words — the Service: DI6 as they call it now. British Intelligence: the Middle East Section in that terrible glass tower in Holborn.

It was accepted by the small farming community that I was an academic of some sort, a suggestion I planted soon after I first came, when I told the Postmistress, Mrs Bentley, I was researching the story of one of the English Crusades, a sort of medieval Regimental History, as I put it, of their campaigns in the Near East. Subsequently, neither she nor the other villagers enquired further about my work, doing no more than to wish me well at it from time to time.

I was not, I should say, entirely a recluse. Once a girl friend I’d known in Paris years before came and stayed with me, arriving with her husband, an over-educated young man who held a position in the Banque de France, in a large silver Citröen which blocked half the village street for a weekend, while they spoke to me at length and in French of their recent journey among the Danakil tribe in the lowlands of Ethiopia. After I’d seen them off in Oxford I happened to spot a second-hand abridgement of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples and read it for a week.

Better friends came too: at fairly long intervals and yet repetitively, for I have never been part of any wide circles. It was the walking I enjoyed most after my leg wound healed. The physiotherapist had recommended it. But I soon found it pure pleasure and took to the hills like an alcoholic, strolling the old Roman roads and empty lanes in every weather.

Yet, as they say of childbirth, one comes to forget even the worst kind of pain and one day a few weeks ago I realised I might be coming to an end of my rural needs. I had started, not talking to myself, but worse — holding imaginary parties in the small dining room of the cottage: scintillating affairs with old friends, many of them dead, which spilled happily over into the other rooms of the place as I wandered through them, sherry glass in hand, imagining it zibib or some other sharp foreign drink from long ago.

On that particular evening, I had begun to recreate the annual reception for the Queen’s Birthday at the old British Residency on the Nile, where I had worked in the mid-fifties. By sunset I had summoned up a bevy of dark Nubian waiters, each slashed at the waist with royal blue cummerbunds, carrying silver trays of iced martinis high over their heads, pushing through the guests under the flame trees on the long lawn which, before the corniche road was built, went all the way down to the river in those days.

At the end of the evening, the furniture all askew and the sherry bottle empty, I felt a terribly sharp bite of social disappointment that my friends had left. I felt, in my small cottage, the weight of huge empty spaces around me, echoing reception rooms and verandahs, and smelt the mud of the low water riding on the breeze over the Nile and heard the evening cry of the Muezzin, harshly amplified from the mosque tower by Kasr-el-Nil bridge …

I realised when I woke with a headache next morning that I had cured myself at last — but that if I stayed much longer in the country I should get ill again.

That was last week: I tried to forget about it and I returned to my book. But this morning the fire has come back and I have drunk nothing. Tomorrow, I know, I shall go to London.

There was a reason, had I needed one: my solicitor, who also handled my finances, such as they were, had written some time before, suggesting a visit to discuss the possibility of some ‘judicious re-investment’ as he put it — an unnecessary thought to my mind, since what little money I had, in the hands of a well known Irish brewery, appeared judiciously placed already.

Barker, an Englishman of a lost kind who had only one eye, tended to the legal problems and finances of many retired people from the Service: he had once been vaguely attached to it himself, in 1942, as a Captain in charge of a commando company, before being invalided out, with partial vision, after a sten gun had blown-up in his face, on secret manoeuvres in Scotland before the Dieppe raid. His had been a short, inglorious war. Subsequently he had tried to recompense for this by maintaining contact with a world of derring-do in the shape of elderly Brigadiers with tax problems and younger men in the SIS whose marriages had gone astray.

He had moved offices since I had last seen him and sat now, back to the window, on the top floor of an old Georgian building in Jockey’s Fields up from High Holborn: a judicious man indeed, surrounded now with his comfortable club furniture, but still with the remnants of unsatisfied activity in his face. He fidgeted while he talked, charging and releasing the silver cap of a ball-point like a rifle bolt.

‘I rather think Metal Box might be worthwhile,’ he said, gazing to one side of his desk where a stack of old tin deed boxes ran half way up the wall.

I followed his gaze, misunderstanding him. ‘Metal box? I don’t have any —’

‘Oh, no. I meant the company who make them: containers, foil, wrappings of all sorts.’

‘I see. What’s wrong with the brewery?’

‘Nothing. But I hear — confidentially — there’s to be a new rights issue with MB: two for one. If one bought in now… It might keep you going for another year.’

‘At most?’

‘At most, if that.’ Barker was like a doctor staving off bad news: one suspected that he had something worse up his sleeve. ‘Inflation. Your money is not what it was and really a year is too long. It may run out sooner. Had you thought of any kind of — work?’ he added very diffidently. ‘You used to, didn’t you? The Service …’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll have to think of something,’ I said, ‘but not that.’

‘Of course your cottage must have increased in value — a great deal. You could sell —’

‘No, not that either. That’s the last thing I want. London again, a flat, a job.’

‘Well …’ Barker paused, letting the future hang in the air like a bankruptcy. ‘We’ll have to think of something.’

I’ve forgotten what else we spoke about that morning, except that we agreed to move some money on to Metal Box in a last bid for solvency, since what struck me after some minutes in Barker’s new office, and absorbed me more and more while I was there, was the view from his window: towering up over the old slate roofs of Gray’s Inn, not more than a few hundred yards away, was the monstrous glass block I’d worked in for ten years: naval recruitment at the front with sundry other government offices upstairs, including my own in the Middle East Section of Intelligence.

Indeed from where I sat I could actually see the window of my old office in Information & Library, the eighth floor, fourth along, where I had thumbed through Al Ahram on damp Monday mornings, waiting for Nellie with the coffee trolley, or gazed out all afternoon at the concrete mess they were making round St Paul’s throughout the sixties, before checking my watch against opening time.

More and more often, during Barker’s meticulous financial suggestions and provisos, my eye would wander back to the glass façade over his shoulder. And I found, having first recognised it with distaste, that I had begun to think about it with fascination, as a man experiences an extraordinary sense of déjà vu, which haunts him for the rest of the day. I was drawn by incidental memory deep inside the building, through the security checks with Quinlan, the old Irish Service Corps sergeant in the hall, up the murmuring lifts and along the windowless corridors, permanently invested with a lavender-smelling disinfectant they flushed the latrines with, hearing the ‘thwack-thwack’ of busy typewriters running up top copies ‘For Your Eyes Only’ with a single flimsy for registry that more often than not in those days would find its way to Dzherzhinsky Street by the end of the week.

It was an eerie feeling, sitting safe in Barker’s big red leather chair, huddled among his reassuring nineteenth-century deed boxes, their white lettering naming old families in Herefordshire and great houses in the south-west, while looking out at this glass castle gleaming in the sunlight, an architectural havoc, where all the bad fairies lived and I had worked passage for a rotten decade that had ended nearly ten years before.

Henry, in his old tortoiseshell specs, had gone from that eighth floor in 1967, sent packing by Williams on his last long journey down the Nile — and so had I, sold out by the same man, from that meagre office with its scratched walnut furniture, half carpet and hatstand I never used, finding solace by comparison in the hospital wing of Durham Jail. Even the duds who left the building in one piece had few reasons to be grateful to anyone in it, while the best usually found death or exile in the small print of their contract half-way through their time there.

And yet, as I say, I was drawn to it. Even the worst memorials serve to remind us that, as well as the pain, we have lived once, and seen happiness with friends in certain streets when it was evening, had lunch with them on good days or weekend picnics in a Bloomsbury square: that there was some pleasure despite the horror of the times.

Drinks with Henry, for instance, in that wine bar down the Strand: the champagne which he always ordered, back from some mission, running his finger down the frosted side like a child playing on a clouded window-pane, celebrating a safe return from some folly in the east — the married commuters from Sevenoaks and their secretaries sipping sherry and whispering sweet mischief over candle-lit barrels while we spoke of more distant intimacies: Ahmed’s cloudy news from behind the bar at the Cairo Semiramis and what had passed that week by the pool at the Gezira club.

These days one can find the past preserved in squalid modern brick and glass as much as in old deed boxes — and so it lay now, across the roofs from me, like a temptation one knew was wrong and thus could not resist.

The wine bar was empty at 11.30, after I’d left Barker’s and walked down to the Strand in the hot summer sunshine. The candles on the barrels were unlit and the manager, an accommodating and sleekly brilliantined Jeeves whom I had known well in the past, must long since have died or moved. But otherwise the place seemed exactly the same as it had been ten years before, almost to the day, when I had last sat there with Henry, swapping gentle taunts about the fatuous vacuity of our lives.

Even the salt biscuits were the same — too dry and crumbly for pleasure, tasting of old paper.

And one never forgets a smell, which brought it all back quicker than anything — a musty sourness embedded in the wood and in the furnishings, of wine spilt over many years, that had remained like a coward in the room long after all the happy tribe had left.

I took a glass of Beaune with me and sat down in the far corner. I thought of my finances and of Barker’s polite warnings. I prayed I wouldn’t have to leave my cottage, which already, after only a few hours in London, beckoned me like a woman. A job, as Barker had hinted? I was unemployable.

I gazed at the snack menu to take my mind off the idea: ‘Paté de foie à la Maison: 95p’ — a nerveless mix of liver and old bottle-ends still doing time after more than ten years at three times the price. The place began to sicken me with its bland constancy, a stage set always for the same production, with the same props and the same cast waiting for curtain-up at lunchtime: the silly bowler-hatted city men strayed adventurously beyond Throgmorton Street, lunching with fast women — account executives probably — long nosed and 40 who laughed too much; gossip writers from the staider papers, a lone bishop, his purple bib showing like a sore thumb, and country gentlemen in tweeds, up in town for the day without a table in Simpsons, who took the set lunch upstairs in the small restaurant after two rash glasses of South African amontillado below.

They were beginning to come in all round me now and I was just about to leave, thinking of a more piquant lunch in Soho and some easy film in Leicester Square afterwards.

I saw him almost from the moment he pushed open the glass doors, coming in out of the sunshine like a harassed refugee: the thin figure sloping up to the bar, in his dark and slightly grubby pinstripe suit, and the old navy blue pullover, same as ever, tight around his neck, so that just the knot of some regimental tie peeped out, like an apology, which none the less could be fully displayed in an emergency and astound everyone with the truth. For Basil Fielding actually had all the right credentials. He hadn’t changed either in ten years, I couldn’t see his face clearly as he moved behind some people to make his order at the bar. But I could remember it well enough, now that the man himself had given me the outlines: the always badly shaved cheeks and chin, stubbled like fine white sandpaper, the slightly blue, spittle-encrusted lips, the ears which drooped thinly down either side of the large face rather like an elephant’s, the air of apologetic dejection. Fielding looked so shifty you couldn’t believe it of him. The devious expression was like a bad caricature, for his eyes always hovered on the edge of such real laughter it made him seem incapable of dishonesty or malice. Or so I had thought in those former years.

Basil had been the wandering minstrel of our Mid-East Section in the old days, almost a licensed jester, a sad man who yet rejoiced. His job had been ill-defined, most particularly by himself. But it had been in Protocol, even he knew that. It was his function to control liaison and run such formal paperwork as existed between our own and other allied intelligence services, particularly with the CIA. Though I remember once he had lunched at the Soviet Embassy, on some diplomatic pretext or other — for he was officially on the Foreign Office list — and had returned that afternoon with a more than useful piece of information about the rocket base in Baikonur, extracted by Basil from a surprised military attaché, like a poacher tickling a trout.

There wasn’t really much doubt about it: behind the inefficient footling exterior, Fielding possessed some nameless gift, a man who could lull people with his inanities while all the time calculating just how much he could rob them of without their noticing. While he hummed and hawed and groaned with platitudes, I remember — as though hurtling through some cosmic black hole — that was when he was at his most dangerous, when he had noticed some great potential out of the corner of his eye — some bureaucratic advantage — and was beginning his stalk towards it.

He hasn’t seen me yet, I thought. ‘Don’t talk to him,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t start anything. He hasn’t seen you.’ And I turned away from him and blew my nose.

Perhaps this sound alerted him, some sharp aural file index of his identifying me from afar. For the next thing I knew he was beside me, standing diffidently over me, holding two glasses of wine in his age-marked hands — one at such an angle that some drops fell onto my table. I thought he might be drunk for a moment, or hungover.

‘Marlow! — the last person. How are you? Haunting the old places?’

How apt Basil could be, like a fortune-teller who, ten years before, had divined my return here to the very hour and had come now to confirm his prediction.

‘Saw you as I came in,’ he went on. ‘Hiding over there in the shadows. You’re not meeting anyone, are you?’ He gestured to the seat beside me.

‘No — of course not. Let me get a drink.’ I stood up.

‘I’ve brought you one.’

‘You knew I was coming here?’

‘No!’ he said, drawing the word out in mock horror, as though my thought was quite outlandish. ‘No, my goodness. Just a restorative. In for a whizzer,’ he said brightly, as if trying to jolly himself along with the phrase. And again I had the impression of some unnatural elation in Basil, some disorder in his day which had brought forth such fluent slang. ‘Darley’s here,’ he went on. ‘And Jameson.’ He looked back towards the bar. ‘You remember.’

I did, vaguely. They had been tyros in my day: new field men making a mess of an old circle in Damascus.

‘We’re all going to church round the corner. The RAF place — St Clement Danes,’ Basil went on, licking his dry lips and looking mischievously at me over the rim of his glass before taking a long quaff from it.

‘Church?’ I looked at my watch, I remember, the thought so surprised me — as though Basil, an unbeliever of all sorts in the old days, had taken now to some new faith that worshipped on an hourly basis.

‘Memorial service. Alkerton. Sir George. Deputy head of SOE during the war, of course. Old fellow died a month ago. You didn’t see it?’ he asked, as thought I might have been an essential witness in a street accident.

‘No. I don’t have much interest in that sort of thing now.’

‘No,’ Basil agreed and drank deeply again. If not drunk to begin with, as I had thought, he seemed intent on reaching that state as quickly as possible now.

‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘We’re all going. Everyone’s coming.’ His tone was that of a child anticipating a treat. ‘Drink up and have one at the bar with us. They’d love to see you again. Darley and Jameson, I mean. You’re still quite a hero in the department, you know — though what is it? It must be ten years —’

‘I’d rather not, Basil, really —’

‘Come on, old man. They’ve seen you. It won’t do any harm.’

The silly phrase rang out with nothing but innocent temptation then: a day in town, some fine weather, a drink with old colleagues — what could have been more natural? And hadn’t I been thinking of just such things all morning, and for a month before? — the lure of the odd good parts of the past. And here it all was, come timely, in the shape of Basil and Jameson and Darley — if not Henry. All the same, though not close friends, these three had never harmed me, were innocent cogs in another part of a stupid machine: and their names, like those on some old colonial war memorial, suggested only simple comradeship that morning as the corks began to pop and the bishop took another half of Veuve de Vernay, the perfume of many freshly opened bottles beginning to invade the room and warm the stupid chatter all around me.

I got up with Basil after a mild argument and went with him to the bar.

‘Ah,’ Darley said carefully, holding out his hand, inspecting me like a masterpiece that yet might just possibly prove to be a fake. ‘“Home is the hero …”’

‘“And the hunter home from the hill,”’ Jameson added in a deep sotto voce, before turning away and belching a fraction. They were drinking champagne, the bottle between them already badly depleted.

‘Coming back into the ranks?’ Darley asked.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘I–I was just up in town. I’m not staying.’

I felt like one of the tweedy men around me, awkward and guileless in this knowing, cosmopolitan atmosphere, anxious for Paddington at 5.10 and a first-class corner seat to Kemble Junction. I didn’t have the right words with me; I didn’t fit.

‘My goodness,’ Darley said vigorously, the drink beginning to talk in him, ‘But you’ll have to come to the service. Everyone’s coming. Church is just round the corner.’

A week before I should have refused: the idea would have seemed preposterous. But a week before I hadn’t started to dream of the old Residency on the Nile over an empty sherry bottle.

I didn’t reply one way or the other. But I could feel the drink seeping into me, laying a firm foundation of acquiescence.

‘And lunch,’ Basil said in his humble way, eyes downcast, looking at me through his eyelashes like a virgin. ‘There’s a fork lunch at the Special Forces Club in Mayfair afterwards.’

‘Ah yes, ‘Jameson said comfortably, ordering the other half of champagne. ‘What a day. What — a — day!’ He smiled beatifically, dragging the phrase out, then raising his glass and savouring the frosty bubbles. He was like Mole too, I thought, released from the underground into the sunshine that first day of spring. ‘We’ve taken the day off, you see,’ he went on. ‘All of us.’

I suddenly saw the telegrams from Cairo and Beirut — the ‘extras’ and the ‘ordinaries’ — piling up all over our building: unheeded, blowing along the corridors in that lavender wind, with only Quinlan, in his smart uniform and old campaign ribbons, left to chase hopelessly after them; the whole of the Middle East — Arafat and Sadat and Gaddafi — who would do nothing untoward that day, who would go into purdah for twenty-four hours or lie prostrate tending their soul, and all because Sir George (the ‘Dragon’ as he’d been known) had passed on and was to be handsomely commemorated with a few hymns, a quantity of drink and international truce among the intelligence community.

A clock chimed twelve from some church nearby. We left the bar and fell out into the sun, dizzy with goodwill, as children released for the day on a king’s funeral.

Sir George — we knew now, at last, in a spate of memoirs and histories released by the thirty-year official papers ruling — had been a hero during the war, channelling Allied support through Special Operations Executive to any number of resistance groups on the continent — though much of his effort, it had since been confirmed by the war historians, had unfortunately taken the form of saturation bombing: one agent placed on the continent at the expense of ten caught and executed.

Certainly I didn’t see many women or civilians in the church when we got there: widows or children from that war, bereft by Sir George’s elaborate ploys. No doubt they preferred to keep their own private counsels that morning, sharing informal griefs, far from that loud and self-congratulatory church.

The congregation, then, was official and extensive, filling every pew right to the back where we sat, spilling over to the very doors of the church.

We had heard the babble of many tongues as we came in: hard-faced, white-haired old men — French, Dutch, Belgian, Scandinavian, Slav. They’d come in chartered planes, Basil told me, from all over Europe. And here they were, triumphant, as all survivors are, but now with more triumph still, that here, in an old Wren church, rebuilt over the wild flowers and dead masonry of the blitz, they had come to celebrate a final victory: they had outlived their patron and master: the Dragon had been put away. They had at last succeeded him and though it was too late to rule, for this one day they would be kings; memories could be deeply stirred, all sorts of derring-do evoked — now, in the rich history of the church, where even the dirtiest wars became part of the Good Fight, and later, more informally, over a fork lunch in Mayfair.

Yet I didn’t blame them — the old men in their severe suits, some tailored for one arm, the crimson of many decorations and orders peeping over breast pockets and round lapels. Theirs had been a better fight than ours had ever been in the glass tower half a mile away. That was obvious and I felt an interloper, a spy in a glittering council chamber, suddenly seeing for the first time the whole map of the Grand Design.

I don’t suppose that more than a quarter of the congregation knew the words or the music of the first hymn, ‘To Be A Pilgrim’. But the voice of the whole church, like the rising frenzy of a victory parade, hit the vaulted roof by the start of the second verse, when people had found their stride, miming the words where they didn’t know them.

Then the choir sang an anthem, accompanied by trumpeters from the Central RAF Band — the sweet-harsh sounds piercing the silence in a long voluntary when the voices had died: ‘Per Ardua ad Astra’.

An Air Marshal read the first lesson: ‘“I have lifted up mine eyes unto the Lord and seen my salvation …”’

The second hymn had not such a sprightly tune and there was a more ragged response to it. The words, too, were less easy and many among the foreign congregation dipped into their hymn sheets in confusion. Perhaps because of their failure to do the hymn justice in the end, a restlessness fell over the church just after the start of the address, given by an old comrade-in-arms of Sir George’s.

‘Nobody can be all things to all men. And there are people — some of you here indeed — who will have had your disagreements with the Dragon. He was never a man to beat about the bush. But that you are here, however many bones you picked with him in the past, is a measure of his — and your — constancy and success.’

Now the restlessness seemed to have congealed and isolated itself some three or four pews ahead of me: there was a strange movement of heads and flurry of broad backs. Then I saw what it was: a middle-aged man in a white Burberry had slumped across the pew in front of him, and friends or colleagues to either side were trying to revive him, pulling his head back and opening his collar. I couldn’t see the man’s face. But his thin hair was tossed about and his head lolled on a shoulder next him, falling sideways, right down on the pew behind, like a confident lover in the back row of a cinema.

They got him out, sliding him along the bench and onto the side aisle, just ahead of me to my left. His two friends held him, linking round his back, the man’s arms stretched about their shoulders. Then they came past me, holding him up like a hooker going into a tight scrum, except that his legs trailed along over the flagstones like a marionette’s. I have never seen anyone so dead.

But few people in the congregation had noticed. The address went on unabated. ‘… Sir George had many enemies. But at the end only one was undefeated: the Last Enemy …’

Life was imitating death, I thought, as I glanced at Basil beside me, a query in my expression, for he had been watching this little drama intently, as if he knew the man.

‘What? Who?’ I whispered.

But Basil dodged the question, by moving out of his seat as quickly as a cat, and following the grisly trio down the side aisle. I heard one of the small side doors open and the man’s feet scraping over a grating — and when I turned I saw Basil for an instant in his dark suit, framed in the doorway, standing like an expectant undertaker outside in the sun.

2

I remember thinking it was too soon for corpses — that Basil, for all his devious skills, could hardly have laid this on for me. Yet even so, that was surely the moment to have bailed out — away from that victorious church, celebrating death all too effectively — and found myself a back table at L’Escargot.

Instead I hung around after the service. I suppose I was curious: that dull passion of our trade which, though buried for years in Oxfordshire, could not have quite died in me and had come again that day, into the air, warmed by drink and memory and by the vision of a Burberry with a body inside being humped out of a Wren church.

Basil was shifting about uneasily on the pavement like a bookie’s runner when we came out. An ambulance had picked up the man some moments before, the siren trailing away down towards the Strand.

‘Who was it?’ Jameson asked. The Beaune had crusted up on Basil’s lips in the heat and he licked them now, curling his tongue about like a fly-catcher, as though trying to re-activate the taste.

‘Jock. Jock McKnight. He was in Nine with me — just after the war.’

‘Nine?’ Darley asked innocently.

‘Slavs and Soviets.’

‘Heart?’ Jameson inquired anxiously, straightening his tie, sobering up. This untimely death had cast a gloom over the whole proceedings.

‘I should think so,’ Basil said. ‘He must have been getting on.’

Basil peered round him, gazing inquisitively at the congregation as they left the church. Despite his medical verdict, he might have been looking for a murderer, I thought.

‘Yes,’ he went on, continuing his inspection over Darley’s shoulder. ‘We both worked on an inter-departmental committee years ago: set up to deal with Tito after he broke with Moscow. Jock was very good on the Slavs and Soviets. Pity. Ticker must have packed in.’

Basil moved towards the main doorway of the church to speak to someone and we vaguely followed. There was a tub of laurel just inside the railings by the side entrance and I put my foot up on the rim of the barrel to do up one of my laces while I waited.

Just as I put my shoe up a drop of blood fell on the toe cap. Blood? Yes, it was certainly blood. The bright sunlight showed its colour clearly now — dripping down over the shiny green leaves from somewhere deep inside the bush. Then I saw where it must come from: there was a hymn sheet pressed into the middle of the leaves, about half way up. I could just see the deeply embossed print on the cover: ‘In Memoriam: George Alkert —’ But when I went to pull it out half the thick cartridge paper came away in my hand. The back of the sheet was sodden with fresh blood and my thumb and index finger was soaked with it now, as if I’d just pressed my hand deep into a still bleeding wound.

And there was another moment to run. And yet by then one wanted to know: had Basil lied about the man’s death or was he genuinely ignorant? And what of the man’s two friends who had helped him out? Were they friends or enemies? And what of the man himself, who had obviously put the hymn sheet away into an inside pocket after the memorial address had started. Had he been shot with a silencer? And if so, by whom and why?

Cowardice, I sometimes think, is not so common as we like to imagine. We are more often rash to the point of bravery. And if not that, pride will usually prevent a retreat — even in some unimportant matter like doing the dishes before we allow ourselves to sit down for coffee. We set up borders and checkpoints for ourselves every day, small trials of strength, confirmations of nerve or integrity in a hundred small measures taken. So too, in larger issues, we will set ignorance, curiosity or even superstition up against our better judgement — determined to prove that what is purely wilful in our nature has more value than our sanity. The Greeks defied the fates in myth: but we sometimes do it in fact — sudden spendthrifts, goaded beyond endurance by the prosaic in our lives. And that was true of me, no doubt, as I followed the others down along the Strand, unwillingly yet impatient, pushing through the lunchtime crowds.

The sun lay directly overhead now like a hot plate. Girls in thin dresses floated in the light, shrieking with sudden inane enthusiasms, turning quickly, stopping, getting in our way, exchanging brash and knowing looks with boys in bother boots, their faces happily cleaned out of thought or care. They had the nature of plant life unique to the city: miraculous fruit, erupting overnight, that bloomed on tarmac and oil fumes: diaphanous-skinned girls, ready to drop at a touch now into some lap on a bench down by the river.

I had forgotten the vigorous arrogance of London summer lunchtimes, the mocking youth of secretaries and long-haired clerks. What would I do walking off into those crowds alone? There was no girl to pick up there who wouldn’t think me a middle-aged refugee from the mackintosh brigade; no bar to be easily propped up off Leicester Square with talk to strangers about prospects for the Derby; and to eat alone at L’Escargot would be to sit there wondering about the blood on my fingers. Then, too, there had been the shapes of death all morning in the summer air. An elephant will move away and die apart from its tribe. But humans are less considerate and tend to herd together in the face of mortality, so that when Basil hailed a cab near the Savoy and called me to hurry up, I quickened my step. It was too late to turn back then — even if I’d wanted to.

The Special Forces Club enjoyed a small leasehold at the back of a large Victorian town house at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac just off Park Lane. The front and grander part of this red brick pile was now a smart, but not exclusive gambling club, with a candy-striped awning reaching out over the front door. But that day it was the old tradesmen’s entrance, twenty yards away, which commanded attention, as cars clogged up the narrow approach and old, stiff-shouldered, white-haired men embraced each other on the pavements, not yet sure of their direction, so that the lane was filled with guttural continental queries.

‘C’est par là!’

‘Non — c’est tout droit. Et prenez garde!’

‘I’m not a member,’ I said to Basil as he pushed his way ahead through the crowd.

‘Be my guest,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder and looking at me, mischief flooding his eyes. Basil was considerably smaller than me, almost an overgrown schoolboy. And I saw him then as a sophisticated sixth-former abroad with a group of younger boys, pressing us forward towards the first forbidden delights of a brothel.

The heat and the crush inside the club was so great that my first thought was to try and rise above into some cooler airs. Another bar was open on the first floor, we were told, and we all made our way up to it, threading our way between old men already exhausted, sitting on the stairs, underneath photographs of their former glory, great moments from Europe’s clandestine past: Jean Moulin with a machine pistol among resistance comrades on some scrubby hill: Randolph Churchill in a huge sheepskin coat playing chess over a bottle of rakia somewhere in Yugoslavia.

At the top of the stairs we came into a long gilded dining-room where a white-laid table, groaning with food and drink, ran along all one side, and three big bow windows, wide open, gave over a small courtyard at the back, a chestnut tree springing up from the middle of it, some of its mint-green spring leaves almost touching the windows. It was less crowded; there was a glimmer of a breeze coming in, mixing with the sharp, tart smell of lemon and gin and the sound of cracking ice as it drowned in tonic. Basil rubbed his hands judiciously and licked his lips once more. Then, after an interval in which he seemed to calculate the quantity of alcohol available and equate it satisfactorily with his future capacity, he moved off to do battle at the long white table.

And yet he must have drunk no more than tonic water most of that afternoon. Certainly an hour later he was totally sober when he introduced me to the man in the billiard-room: a different Basil, no longer the inane schoolboy, no longer deferential: Basil in command.

I’d been talking to a middle-aged French woman about her experiences in the resistance, how in 1943 she had been put on top of the notorious lime quarry outside Meudon and faced by a German Wehrmacht major with a Lüger, anxious for information about her comrades.

‘I didn’t tell him, though,’ she said.

‘Why didn’t he shoot you then?’

‘I didn’t know — at that moment. I was taken back to Paris — then sent to an ordinary prison camp, and released eventually. The major “lost” my file — on purpose.’

‘Why?’

‘He fell in love with me — there, on top of that quarry. He’d been interrogating me for days before.’

I was astonished and not prepared to believe the story — and I said so.

‘No, it’s true,’ she said. ‘There are stories — some stories — from that war, that ended well.’

‘How do you know — did you meet him again?’

Basil had come up next me meanwhile and was pressing me for a word, but I persisted with the woman.

‘Yes,’ she said smiling. ‘I did. He survived the war. He traced me in Paris afterwards. I married him,’ she added simply. Then she turned and looked round the room, searching someone out. ‘There. He’s over there,’ she said.

I followed her glance and as I looked a man pressed through the crowd, coming towards us, glass in hand: quite an old man, upright, smiling, with the remnants of fair hair.

She introduced us. ‘My husband,’ she said.

We shook hands. Then Basil forced me away. I was glad I didn’t stay longer. I didn’t want to know anything more about it, yet I walked on air with Basil into the billiard-room, thinking how wrong I’d been about life: life only as defeat.

‘This is the Prime Minister,’ Basil said, as we pushed our way into a gloomy, panelled room with long clerestory windows high above the covered billiard-table: a room where the sun had never been and sad old men had played with sticks and balls for a hundred years. In the far corner a group of continentals — a French army officer in a pillbox hat and a one-armed man I hadn’t noticed before in a wheelchair — surrounded a figure brandishing a pipe.

‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘Was he in the resistance? I didn’t know.’

The wine I’d had, without much food, had begun to play in me some time before, and I felt I could see the afternoon out nicely now, with one or two more drinks and a few jokes, before dinner and early bed in a club I belonged to not far down the road.

Basil paused at one corner of the billiard-table, trying to negotiate a passage between two excitable old partisans who were playing a war game with matches on the greeen baize cover.

Basil said, ‘He wants to meet you.’

I thought he meant one of the men in front of us and I half held out my hand before Basil pulled me on towards the corner of the room.

And then I was face to face with the Prime Minister, his sage, plump head nodding rhythmically in answer to some elaborate explanation from the French officer about de Gaulle’s dissatisfactions in 1940 — a matter which the Prime Minister clearly felt uninterested in. Our arrival provided him with a thankful exit, and he turned to both of us, smiling at me hugely, shaking my hand with surprised bonhomie, as if I were a long lost relative come to praise him on ‘This is Your Life’.

‘Mr Marlow,’ he said, again with the hint of deeply considered joy in his voice — as if here at last was the only person in this gathering that he really wanted to meet. ‘How good of you to come.’ He turned to his companions. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’

The Prime Minister put an arm round my shoulder and led Basil and me some little distance along the wall of the room, to where there was a small raked stand of old cinema tip-up seats where members could watch the billiard games. We sat down in line abreast — the seats going ‘clank-clank-clank’ as they took our weight, like louts settling into the back row of a local Odeon, noisily and abruptly. And I thought no more conspicuous meeting with a Prime Minister, about something presumably confidential, could have been contrived. Yet perhaps I was wrong: here in this room crowded with the clandestine, in a building packed to the doors with old secrets now come to a fine and alcoholic bloom, who would have suspected the start of any new conspiracy?

‘I won’t waste your time,’ the Prime Minister said, in a way which suggested he was rather more anxious not to waste his. ‘You’re one of our best men, I understand,’ and again, before I could contest this, he seemed about to put his hand on my arm, as though he too was uncertain of the truth in this statement and was anxious to persuade me of it by touch. But at the last moment he withdrew his hand and started to light up his pipe instead.

‘I’m sorry, sir. But I’m not —’ I looked across at Basil in the far seat. He was leaning out towards me, the PM between us, his face a mask of official rectitude.

‘I’m afraid I’m not one of your men at all, Prime Minister. There’s been some misunderstanding —’

‘No, of course you’re not one of our men — not officially. But it was you, wasn’t it, whom we have to thank for that business in Cheltenham 5 or 6 years ago? The names of those Soviet diplomats you got for us — a hundred of them or more, not a bad bag — half the KGB men they had over here. We owe you a great deal for that.’

‘I was involved in that — yes. Regretfully —’

‘We all have regrets, Mr Marlow. We wouldn’t be human otherwise. I have many myself. The point is —’ He cleared his throat and picked a piece of burning ash from the bowl of his pipe. Then he re-lit again, with another consequent delay, before he found his stride with it and began to puff vigorously. ‘Point is, something rather serious has come up which I think you can help us on.’

‘I don’t work for Intelligence any more.’

‘No, of course you don’t. And that’s just why we need you. Let me explain briefly. Then Fielding here can fill in all the details afterwards. Primarily — at the moment — this is a political problem …’ Again he stopped to tend his pipe.

‘I’m not a politician.’

‘You mustn’t keep saying “No”, Mr Marlow. I’m not just a politician either. I’m also head of the Security and Intelligence services in this country. And that’s why I’ve asked to meet you — unofficially of course.’ He glanced round the room, smiling broadly, a happy old King Cole taking appropriate obeisance from his courtiers, while apparently chatting to me about nothing more important than next week’s cricket with the West Indians.

‘I wanted to meet you,’ he went on, turning to me without dimming his smile a fraction, ‘because I know you’ve had your doubts about working for us in the past —’ I was about to assent to this but before I could, this time he really did put his hand on my arm. ‘Now I understand those doubts, Mr Marlow. Doubts are part of every considered response. I’ve had them myself. But in this instance I wanted to see you myself — personally — to reassure you that this directive comes right from the top and isn’t some hare-brained scheme dreamed up by a lot of backroom Intelligence crackpots. ‘He stopped once more and sucked hard at the dying bowl. Then he looked for his lighter. ‘This job has my personal authority — right down the line. And Mr Fielding here is answerable to me over it, as well as to his own department. It’s a matter of possibly the utmost importance. I say “possibly” because as yet we simply don’t know how real the threat is. However, after this morning’s incident with McKnight at the church there’s no question — we’re in deep.’

‘So he was killed, wasn’t he?’ I looked across at Basil.

‘It seems so,’ Basil replied diffidently, as though options lay even beyond the grave.

‘And there’s the point,’ the Prime Minister said, his smile gone and a deep seriousness flooding his face; he was obviously winding up towards his peroration. ‘McKnight is the third to go in as many months. Dearden, Phillips and now McKnight.’

‘What links them?’ I asked.

The Prime Minister took his pipe out and looked at me carefully, essaying a shade of deep drama. ‘That’s my out cue line, Mr Marlow. I have to get back to the House. Fielding will give you the rest of details. I’m here just to give you my word: this is “official” — no tricks involved. We need you.’

He stood up and his seat whipped back with a loud bang. Basil and I stood up — and there were two more loud bangs. People glanced at us. The Prime Minister took my hand, leaning towards me. ‘I need you,’ he said finally in the soft, steely tones of a false lover. And then he was gone, an aide touching his arm and leading him forward to the top of the billiard-table where toasts were about to be proposed. The Prime Minister made the first, raising a tulip-shaped glass of champagne:

‘To Sir George — his memory: to you — his colleagues in adversity: and to all those who fell secretly in the cause of a better world.’

There was silence in the long dark room as everyone raised their glasses. A dead, smoky heat rose up to the clerestory windows. I was stunned and suddenly very tired and the drink had quite deserted me.

‘Come on.’ Basil nudged me, whispering. ‘Drink up. Your country needs you.’

‘You are a cheat, Basil. My God — I should have seen it the moment you stumbled up to me this morning, spilling the wine: you were playing the Trojan horse.’

We’d left the club and taken the underpass over into Hyde Park and had paused now at the beginning of the sandy ride down Rotten Row, looking along the sloping avenue of heavy chestnut trees. Basil had taken one of his shoes off and was shaking some grit out of it.

‘Let’s walk on the grass,’ he said.

There had hardly been any rain since the start of April. Spring had come and gone in a weekend and the sky was cloudless now — a tired, dusty blue as though it had been summer for a long time. I felt as if I’d been with Basil for a week, too, and not a few hours — and I was tired of him, as a host who had betrayed me, yet with whom I still had to tie things up before exchanging formal goodbyes.

‘A cheat?’ Basil said carefully, as we struck off towards the Serpentine. He looked hot in his old pinstripe and the long lobes of his ears were red with excitement. ‘Nonsense, Peter. You heard the Prime Minister —’

‘I suppose you followed me this morning — the whole thing was arranged. Barker must have told you about my coming up. Well, let me tell you —’ I said aggressively.

‘Wait a minute —’

‘You wait a minute. The short answer is “No”. I’m not doing any more jobs for you — or the Prime Minister.’

Basil said nothing. He looked up at me and smiled gingerly, like someone admiring the bravery of a fool.

‘I’ve been caught twice before with you people,’ I went on. ‘The first time gave me four years in Durham Jail — and the second a bullet in the leg. I’ve had all that,’ I stormed.

‘You also had £15,000,’ Basil said vaguely, looking aside at a half-naked couple throwing a frisbee over a prancing dog. ‘Don’t blame Barker, by the way. He only confirmed what we knew already. You’re broke, Peter. Stony broke.’

‘I can sell my cottage. I can get a job.’ I lied.

‘What? With four or five thousand on the mortgage still to pay? That won’t leave you with much. And a job? At 40, with your experience: a few years teaching at some wog prep school, ten years thumbing through Al Ahram with us, and a criminal record. You could get a job — washing up dishes, Peter, and you know that. So let’s stop talking cock, my old man. You need money — and we’ll give it to you. More than the £15,000 you had last time. And something substantial to open the account.’

Basil loosened his tie and blinked in the hard light. ‘God, if this is only April, what’s it going to be like later on? Never mind, we’ll have some tea in a minute. I want to take you to an hotel near here. Because it’s not just the money. There’s something else that will interest you about this job — partly why we’ve asked you to do it.’

‘What?’

‘Come. I’ll show you.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Tea-time. Should have started by now. We’re going to have some tea: some iced lemon tea and some expensive cream cakes, Peter. You can make up your mind after that — and I’ll tell you about the job then too.’

How confident he was, I thought. And yet I had to admit that I shared some of his confidence: with this money I wouldn’t have to lose the cottage — that was my first thought. The wine bill could be paid, all that San Patricio sherry — and the new radials that my car needed all round. We turned off before the Serpentine and walked south towards Knightsbridge.

‘Tea and tuck, Basil,’ I said. ‘It’s just blackmail. You think I can be bought for that — like Billy Bunter?’

Basil shrugged his shoulders. ‘You were always such a moral fellow, Peter. Well, you simply can’t afford them any more. That’s the long and short of it. Besides, this isn’t immoral: you can see it’s straight. Why else the PM?’

‘You people could con even him,’ I said.

I should have walked away and left Basil then, sweating on the pavement, waiting for a break in the traffic, before we crossed over to Wilton Place. But I thought then that my life had been too full of what I ought to have done. Besides, Basil had set the whole thing up so skilfully that I couldn’t resist moving on to this next carrot: what could he possibly have in store for me over a glass of iced tea and a plate full of cream cakes? It was as simple as that — and Basil knew it, looking at me confidently when we finally managed to cross over and made our way towards the Grand Hotel.

The lobby was quiet and nearly empty, for this was a small Grand Hotel. But once through the bevelled glass doors and into the gilded tearoom, we sank into a pool of gentle privilege, the tact of money, a crowded well-being. We took a table right at the back, while the rich chatted softly over Royal Worcester teasets, nurtured by attentive waiters sailing round their tables, hands held high with plates of hot scones and Viennese chocolate cake.

A samovar of tea, a huge silver-plated edifice, bubbled in the centre of the room — and beyond it, standing by the window like a dark exclamation mark against the long white net curtains that filtered the afternoon sun and gave the room the feel of a watery, lemon-grey aquarium, was a woman — dark-haired and deeply bronzed, playing the flute.

They say you never forget a face. But I did then; it was clear that Basil, looking at me carefully and then up at the dais, wanted me to recognise something, to remember someone.

‘Well?’ I said, looking at the £5 a head tea menu. ‘You normally do your business here? Never miss a trick to ham it up, do you? I’ll have the Welsh rarebit — and a beaker of cold tea.’

Basil smiled ominously. ‘It’s ten or fifteen years, isn’t it? Or have you seen her since?’

‘Who?’

Basil glanced up again at the woman in the pale smock dress, her copper-coloured arms floating up and down as she nursed the instrument, which obscured her lips and chin. Perhaps that was why I hadn’t recognised her sooner — as I did then, a second before he mentioned her name.

‘Rachel Phillips.’

It was her short parting, just an inch or so long, right above her brow, and the bouncy, untutored hair that ran away from it down either side, enclosing her head in a windy circle of dark curls, that jogged my memory and made my stomach turn suddenly: hair that I’d run my hand through with such pleasure years ago. And then, before I’d fully appreciated her identity and presence here, I remembered a time on the lake in Scotland, below her house in Perthshire — the first time I’d done this, out in a rowing boat, when I’d leant forward on my oars and ruffled that hair, nearly twenty-five years before.

And my first thought then was: did Basil know about this too? Had he been hiding there then — on the wooded shore with binoculars? And I thought, yes, Basil must know practically everything, even that far back perhaps. And I wasn’t angry to begin with, as one isn’t when an outsider, a relative or a friend, admires someone one loves, when one has first introduced them into the family circle. Instead, for a moment, I was grateful to Basil, as though he were a long-lost uncle come to commend my choice of wife almost a generation after the engagement. And indeed, having run the gamut of childish infatuation and advanced on love, Rachel and I had once thought to marry and had met with little encouragement — either from ourselves or our circles.

Subsequently, in our twenties, and until she had married ten or so years before, we had shared each other intermittently, but without any permanency, for when she had wished that, I hadn’t, and by the time I changed my mind she had moved on to other dreams. We had grown together, home from boarding schools through years of holidays, in thoughtless leaps and bounds but with as many angry retreats. And when we had loved afterwards it had been with the same extremes of pain and excitement. Our exaggerated feelings for each other always retained the flavour of nursery antagonisms: petty squabbles over toys or idyllic trysts behind the laurels, which had become the bitter quarrels and loves of adulthood without any change in their childish nature: antipathies and desires which never benefited from growth or reason.

That Basil should bring me to her again, in the tearoom of a London hotel, her cool music flooding the spaces all around us — well, as I say, I was charmed at first. But a moment afterwards I was afraid. Basil rarely did anything without the long view in mind: I remembered a seemingly innocuous quarrel he had once inaugurated with a young visa clerk in our travel section which had ended in the man’s being sent down for fourteen years at the Old Bailey. Basil had spotted a flaw in the fellow long before anyone else. And now Rachel, for some reason, had swum into his sights — in a matter which, for some other reason, I was to be joined to her in. If I feared for her, I feared as much for us as well.

Basil intended some meeting between us — I sensed that clearly; it was part of his plan. But had he any idea of what such a renewal would mean to me? Had he really spied out that personal terrain — from a lakeside perch gazing across the water at us, children touching each other in a boat, or seen us through the window of that shabby blitzed flat we had once shared at the back of Notting Hill Gate? Did he know only the softness and easy humour we had found together in those early days in London: lying on that broken sofa, as I had done, listening to her practise behind a closed door in the bathroom, the only privacy she needed then. Or had he waited till the weekend, and been another customer in the small corner store in Ladbroke Grove, and seen the whirlwind row over what to buy and how much to spend on provisions for the following week?

Was my past that far back, long before I’d spied or married myself or come to such ruin in Durham Jail — all the life which had come before me now as precisely as an old scrapbook — was that untouched part of me to be opened to the casual view? — released by Basil from an airtight box and become, with all the other failed emotion, heir to corruption?

‘I want you to meet her — again,’ Basil said.

‘I thought as much.’

I breathed hard, restraining my anger in the polite room full of delicate music. A meeting, Basil would have thought, hardly different from one of his own held in those airless basement rooms in Holborn: hardly different indeed — in that it would have been just as devious. Rachel had always been proud of what she saw as her innocent carelessness in human affairs. She herself was a gift, she thought — like her music — which would inevitably be appreciated. In fact she knew well how wrong this view was, how frightened she was of herself — and so, like a spy, she constantly hid her tracks and changed her identity the better to avoid the unacceptable reality of her person.

Thus it was that a casual involvement with her took the course of a prolonged adolescence, while a commitment was a return to the heart-stopping trials of childhood. She had surprised me then, to depths unknown. I’d come to accept that music was her only passion — the one thing, besides her father, that she really cared about.

‘You’ve been doing your homework, haven’t you?’ I turned on Basil with some bitterness. ‘How did you dig her out of my life? No one in the department could have known.’

The waiter arrived before Basil could reply and he spoke to him with heavy humour. ‘… yes, don’t forget, a double ration of pancakes …’ For a thin man Basil had an inordinate greed in everything: a fat man was desperately trying to get inside him. He leant forward now and tinkered with the carnations in a small silver vase between us.

‘It’s years since I last saw her — properly,’ I went on when the waiter had left, ‘before I joined the section in Holborn, before I went to Egypt.’

‘Your file, Peter — the forms you had to complete when you came to us: you gave her father as a reference. And why not? He was an old friend — of yours and your family: and a distinguished man. But she was always more than a friend, wasn’t she?’

That was true, I thought — unfortunately. How much better simply to have been a friend of Rachel’s.

And how she would have laughed at the idea — that crystal, mocking, serious laughter, all in one: laughter like a wild bell. Friendship required balance, foresight, discretion — and Rachel had few gifts there. She viewed friendship as a kind of failure, something second-best, a slur on the real potential of human association which she saw in primary colours, in terms only of extravagant love or hate.

‘But I left Holborn nearly ten years ago,’ I said. ‘My file must be pretty dead by now. How did you pick me out of the bag?’

‘The files never die with us, Peter. You know that.’ Basil crushed a carnation bud and put his fingers to his nose. ‘In fact, with computers, they’ve taken on a whole new life. When this Phillips business came up six weeks ago we ran his tape through. Part of it included all official contacts made by or to him while he was in the service: the names of people he’d dealt with overseas and at home here — a complete business directory in fact. We have them on everyone now. Well, there was your name, among some hundreds of others. And I said to myself, well, that’s funny: what’s friend Marlow got to do with Lindsay Phillips? They weren’t in the same section, years between them. A look at your own file and the matter became clear: an old family friend: especially the daughter — a few discreet enquiries. Forgive me.’

‘You could raise the dead, couldn’t you? — with your bloody files. But what “Phillips business”? He was just a diplomat, surely — in the Foreign Office.’

‘He wasn’t. He’s been with us for over 40 years. And he’s disappeared. That’s the business.’

I laughed. ‘This is where I came in, Basil — just like old Henry going down the Nile: you want me to find him.’

Basil nodded. The waiter glided up to us with a feast of goodies, placing them carefully all over the small table, while Basil relished them in advance, seducing the eclairs and undressing the sandwiches with his eyes.

He nodded now again, sagely, licking his lips. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re good at finding people: so find him — if he is to be found.’ He took a buttery pancake and manoeuvred a bowl of strawberry jam through the other dishes towards it.

‘How does she fit in?’ I asked, looking over at Rachel. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘She plays here. Three afternoons a week — in the season.’

‘She used to be better known. I’m surprised.’

‘Why? They pay well.’

I laughed. ‘She never needed money. That used to be our problem: she had too much of it.’

Basil took no notice, biting into his jam-laden pancake. ‘Yes, they pay well,’ he said at last. ‘She needs the practice. But really — she likes an audience, doesn’t she?’

That was true, I thought. Rachel had never really sought private admiration — for she feared the ensuing commitment. In that sphere she preferred to give: to dominate in particular — or else to weep. It was only from a public, I remembered well from her early concerts, that she properly ‘received’ — taking from the eyes of many an approval she refused in her personal affairs. So often ‘unworthy’ — of me, or of life — in the light of a crowd her skin began to glow.

Basil paused before his next pancake and listened to the music. ‘Gluck’s Dance of the Spirits,’ he said. ‘Delicious. She does it beautifully, doesn’t she?’

‘I don’t follow you, Basil.’

‘And beautiful herself, too. Wonder she hasn’t married again.’

‘I hear the last one sank with all hands. That’s probably why.’

Rachel had once tried to be her age — in marriage. But she had failed: not from any lack of fidelity, I’m sure, but because the only fidelity she cared about was impossible: she wished at all costs to be true to herself, while yet ensuring that her soul should surprise her every hour. She walked into a new country each morning and threw away the map at bedtime. I had found it difficult to share these abrupt journeys she made about herself: the young German conductor I’d heard she’d married had obviously found it impossible. In exchange for certainties she offered a complete lack of restraint. But there never had been any real certainty, apart from her father. She and I had separated: the German had moved on, finding her, I suppose, the one score he couldn’t interpret, and she had been left holding mysterious gifts — which only her music could give a satisfactory form to.

Basil continued to look across at her, his eyes becalmed for a moment, trying to focus on some more sensual greed. ‘That nose — straight down from her brow like a ruler and eyes like black ink bottles. Greek god department. No? And that skin …’

‘She used to say anyone really in love with her was queer. Do you fancy her, Basil? Or are you pimping for her?’

He signed, turning back to the table, before considering the merits of the creamy eclairs or the soft almond icing on the Battenberg cake.

‘We’ve been trying to help her, that’s all. I told you — her father disappeared. Two months ago, up in their house in Scotland.’

‘You work for the missing persons bureau, do you?’

‘You don’t understand. Latterly Phillips was head of Nine: the Soviets — as well as Tito and the rest of that Balkan crew down there. That’s been his stamping-ground since he rejoined after the war. And now — thin air. At least there were the bodies left over from the other two, Dearden and McKnight.’

‘They were in Nine as well?’

Basil nodded. ‘Dearden headed a circle out of Zagreb — he was a businessman there — covering Croatia, Slovenia, the Hungarian border areas: McKnight was his case officer, ran him from London — and Phillips, well, he was control — directly responsible for the whole operation.’

‘Head of Section personally responsible? I’m surprised.’

‘Not in this case you wouldn’t be. This was grade A stuff — all the way: the Soviet threat to invade Yugoslavia, grabbing a good-looking Med port, Split or Rijeka: a takeover after Tito’s death — all that. I’ll give you the details later.’

‘I’ve had quite a lot already. And I’ve not agreed to anything.’

Basil had chosen an eclair — and now the cream inside had squashed out all over his chin. He dabbed at his face with a napkin.

‘Nothing you couldn’t get from the papers, Peter — if you read any down there on the wolds. And as far as Western intelligence is concerned, you don’t suppose we’re looking the other way over all this, do you? Any fool must know that. Balance of Power in the scales here: sovereignty of non-aligned nations: Little Red Riding Hood and the big bad Soviet wolf. Used to be brave little Belgium — and that set off quite a rocket, as I recall. Well, now it’s brave little Yugoslavia we’re having to go out and bat for.’

‘And that’s where I come in — third wicket down? With the first three dead. Thanks. But I think this bowling is too fast for me, Basil.’

Basil munched away before looking up at Rachel again and clearing his throat. ‘You come in — with her. Where you left off, maybe all those years ago. With her — and her mother too.’

‘Madeleine?’

‘Yes. She’s down in London at the moment. We want you to meet them both.’

I smiled. ‘Officially?’

‘Just the opposite. Officially we’ve got nowhere — which is why we need you. The Scots police, Interpol, his own section, half the special branch down here — we’ve turned the man inside out these past two months and found nothing. Just nothing.’

‘Maybe there is nothing. A lot of people these days walk out the door one morning and never come back. It’s inflation.’

Basil pursed his lips and sipped his tea for the first time. ‘You don’t disappear one morning if you’re Lindsay Phillips. A happy man: well married, nice family, lot of money, work he liked and six months off retirement in a beautiful country house. You don’t walk out on all that.’

‘Maybe he lost his memory then. Amnesia. That happens too.’

‘Unlikely — when you consider Dearden and McKnight. Very unlikely.’

‘Kidnapped, murdered?’

Basil nodded. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Or perhaps he defected?’ I said lightly.

‘Hardly. Do you remember him?’

I had to agree. Lindsay Phillips, I remembered, had been like an early idealised map of the world: everywhere you looked were the legends of honour and duty, the trade winds of patriotism and hard work; the cherubs in each corner blew long scrolls of charity and faith and each Cape was one of hope. Major Lindsay Phillips was to me, at least when I was young and had stayed in his house during the war, the epitome of the good soldier — a man who, home from leave and reading the lesson in the little church on the edge of his moorland estate, seemed hardly different from his eminent forebears, commemorated there in bad stained glass above the pews: Victorian officers killed in the Ashanti wars or Governor-Generals buried in Westminster, emblemised now as St George or the Good Shepherd; sunny coloured pictures: Camelot knights in armour or strong men with sheep on a green hill, which I gazed on then as on the pages of some boy’s adventure book: ‘Brigadier General Sir William Phillips: Queen’s Own 11th Hussars: Died at Glenalyth, November 1936: Faithful unto Death.’ That was the father.

‘It doesn’t make much sense, Basil — my succeeding where you’ve all failed. How am I supposed to find out any more than you did?’

Basil humphed. ‘A friend always knows more than an outsider: a close friend, an old friend.’ Basil tolled the bell of friendship as if he really believed in it — the one true faith which he had lost and I still in some way possessed.

‘I’m to use my friendship with these people to spy on them, is that it?’

‘Not at all. Not for a moment. Can’t you see it from their point of view? — stop thinking about spying: they want to find out what’s happened to him, more than we do. Don’t you see? You’ll be helping them.’

‘But without telling them I’m working for you — why that?’

‘Because you tell things to a friend you wouldn’t to a policeman. That’s one obvious reason,’ Basil said impatiently.

‘That’s a real cheat: you assume the family has something to hide?’

‘They may have,’ Basil said judiciously. ‘But that’s not the point — as you know perfectly well. It’s a matter of familiarity, long-standing association: in such circumstances people say things … one is in a position to learn.’ Basil left this idea of inquisitive friendship hanging on the air.

‘Exactly. It’s called placing an agent, Basil. A deep-cover illegal. The target here is the Phillips family and I’m to be dropped over the landing zone at the next full moon. Well, that’s nonsense. I can’t do it.’

Basil stopped eating for a moment, starving himself to give weight to his next pronouncement. ‘Listen, the end justifies the means in this case: if you can help them, would you refuse to? And if you do manage to find out what’s happened to him — well, they’ll tell us in any case. So you need deal only with them if you like. And I’ll make another offer: we’ll leave it up to them, see if they make the first move. Madeleine Phillips is down here for the Chelsea Flower Show. You remember the family business they have up on their estate in Perthshire: bee suppliers and that honey of theirs — “Glenalyth Heather”. Well, they’ve got a stand at the show. Both the women will be there tomorrow. I want you simply to go round there and introduce yourself, show your face — and we’ll take it from there. I can’t do fairer than that.’

‘What do you mean?’

Basil eyed the final eclair like an executioner — moved his hand towards it, but then, at the last moment, reprieved it. ‘I think they’ll ask you to help them, Peter, without your doing anything.’

‘That’s a long shot.’

Basil looked up at the chandelier. ‘God help us.’ Then he shifted in his chair, taking a firm grip on himself. ‘I don’t think you realise the situation, Peter: how desperate these two women are: a husband and a father — just disappearing one afternoon. Someone you loved — not knowing. Not knowing anything, you see. Not even a body. People have an enormous need to tidy things up that way, you know. It preys on their mind: the corpus delicti. And they need it, dead or alive, the flesh or the bones. It becomes a kind of passion — to find out. “Love’s last gift: remembrance” — that’s what it’s all about. But they can’t remember. They don’t know what shape or form or place to remember him in.’

Basil killed the last eclair now, biting deeply into the chocolate icing. ‘Yes, I think they may well ask you to help them. They’re rather lost just now,’ he added, trying to master the cream filling.

‘They must have fifty close friends, Basil, here and in Scotland. That won’t wash — that I’m the only friend they’d think might help them.’

‘You’re the only friend with a foot in both camps, though, the personal and the professional: the family friend and the intelligence expert. And Phillips kept those two worlds quite separate. Anyway, we better get out of here before she stops.’ He gave a last longing look up at Rachel on the dais, then took out a crisp £10 note and left it on the table for the waiter. ‘It’s up to you,’ he said before he saw me looking at the money. ‘Yes, and that too. I told you: this is important, right the way along. And though I know you’d never do anything simply for money — you’re far too serious for that — don’t forget it: you need it. Sherry is going up all the time and the beer is falling, even those Liffey-water dividends.’

‘You’re everywhere, Basil, aren’t you? The bloody Light of the World. Who did you have looking through my window in the village?’

Basil leant across to me, confidingly, so that I thought I was about to hear some trusting revelation: Mrs Bentley the Postmistress or the nosey vicar.

‘More things in heaven and earth, Peter. You can’t expect to know everything. But that’s why I fancied you for this: you want to know, don’t you? You have a great need there: to find out, get to the heart of the matter. Well, here’s your chance — with Lindsay Phillips. Go to the flower show, see what happens, and I’ll come round to your club tomorrow evening.’

‘Can’t I call you?’

‘No. That’s another problem — there’s a leak somewhere in our section at the moment. Anything you and I do will be person-to-person for the time being. Six o’clock, shall we say, the club?’

I nodded. Basil touched my arm: ‘Don’t be so serious. You can always say No.’

I glanced at Rachel away on the far side of the room, coming to the end of a piece, her eyes far away somewhere. She had dropped out of life, as if down a hole underground, into the heart of her music. I envied her that ability: I envied her this recurrent artistry which kept her young, and gave her a secret world where she could happily spend a lifetime growing up. I have always been impatient for some kind of maturity.

Basil was right — though about the wrong person: I needed to know again about Rachel, not her father. Though I hadn’t seen her for more than ten years, I suddenly felt the thought clearly in the sweet, cake-scented air: that as in the old days she and I could happily tease each other once again. We need to tease one another more than we know, and love may come to depend on it.

3

The big man in the crumpled, candy-striped summer suit and loafers strolled along the southern rim of Hampstead Heath, towards where they were flying the new dual-stringed stunting kites, which swooped and fell about in the warm afternoon breeze, high up in the air above Jack Straw’s Castle.

He turned to his companion — older, more formally dressed — speaking quietly in Russian. ‘I’ve not seen these kites — they’re extraordinary. Could you send some home for me?’ Fyodor Kudashkin gazed wistfully up into the sky. ‘The children would love them,’ he added.

‘Yes. We’ve sent some back already,’ the London Resident said. ‘I’ll send some for you. How many children do you have?’

Kudashkin didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the sky — sharp, clever blue eyes — with laughter in them, and a thinly bridged, straight nose with an equally forceful, dimpled chin: nose and chin jutting out now like pincers, savouring the air, while the bright eyes were downcast for a moment, a hint of sentimentality creeping in over the edges, the eyes of an exile dreaming of home for the first time.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They’re about old enough.’ Then he turned to the Resident and now he was precise, intent, his dream quite gone. ‘Are they difficult to use? I can’t quite see how they work.’

‘They come with full instructions,’ the Resident said patiently. ‘I’ll send some home for you.’

The two men had moved on now, between the old beech trees, down the hill from the heath, towards Frognal.

‘How is your accommodation? Do you need anything?’ the Resident asked. ‘Since ‘I’m your only contact here and we are not likely to be meeting again, you’d better let me know now.’

‘No. I have everything.’

‘Everything we know — I’ve given you.’

‘Yes, you’ve been most helpful. Apart from McKnight this morning. That may hamper my operations.’

No change of tone or hint of criticism emerged in these last sentences. But the Resident knew that in voicing such a comment at all Kudashkin must equal or outrank him in the KGB hierarchy. Yet since he did not know — indeed, he thought, specifically had not been told — of this man’s exact place on the ladder, the Resident, by way of professional revenge, did not attempt to placate Kudashkin or exonerate himself.

‘They were my instructions. From Centre,’ he replied simply.

‘Not the intent. I speak of the method — and the place: messy, risky.’ Kudashkin used his words judiciously, without rancour, just as the Resident had been equally restrained and unruffled. They might have been two bored agricultural inspectors, far from their Moscow homes, in some backward province discussing an outbreak of fowl pest that had got out of control.

‘Since we put Dearden down in Zagreb, McKnight was under twenty-four-hour close surveillance,’ the Resident went on. ‘Sleeping at his office and never out of his own house at weekends. But we knew he was going to the church this morning. He was an old friend of Alkerton’s. It was quite straightforward.’

But Kudashkin didn’t appear to be listening, lost once more, looking up at the sky again at a last vision of the kites dancing in the early evening light.

‘You won’t forget, will you, to send some home for me?’

They took a path down the hill now and were soon in the narrow streets above old Hampstead village, deserted at the fag end of the hot afternoon.

‘But what about Phillips?’ Kudashkin suddenly broke the silence again. ‘He’s the one we want, yet he went to ground before either of them. I don’t follow that — unless they’re hiding him somewhere.’ His tone was intimate, almost possessed, the Resident thought, as if this search for Phillips had already absorbed half his career.

‘His family certainly think he’s disappeared. So do his colleagues. We know that. It seems genuine.’

‘It “seems”. But that’s not enough. We have to know exactly where he is — dead or alive. Unless we can account for Phillips his whole Yugoslav operation must be considered still active — which limits our operations over there severely. We have to know.’

They went on down the hill, stopping just before Admiral’s Walk, where Kudashkin, posing as a visiting American academic on sabbatical, had rented a basement apartment in a handsome Georgian house. ‘I’ll leave you here, then,’ he said. ‘Use the ordinary post if anything fresh turns up on your side.’

‘Good luck.’

They didn’t shake hands, just drifted apart, immediately becoming strangers in the leafy street. The Resident watched Kudashkin go — the academic in old spectacles, hands in pockets, the casual stride, a big-boned easy figure with an air of savoir vivre — the thin fair hair and deep-cut features giving him the look of an old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon: a man in a crumpled linen suit, from Australia or South Africa perhaps, like thousands of other similar colonial visitors in London that hot summer.

His cover was fine, the Resident thought. But he was curious once more, seeing him disappear among the chestnut trees along the Walk, why Centre had sent over such an obviously senior officer, as simply a hit man it seemed, or at least to do a job which, given time, he could easily have handled himself. Finding out what had happened to Lindsay Phillips was simply a matter of time and routine, the Resident thought, and he resented this critical interference from on high.

The flowers bloomed heavily in the long tents, their perfume exhausted in the moist air, saturated now with a smell of trampled grass and bleached canvas. People shoved their way in from the stark glare outside, already sweating at ten o’clock, before struggling around the exhibits with vehement mania.

I had come inside to pass the time, since neither of the two women had been at the ‘Glenalyth Heather’ stand on the central thoroughfare half an hour before. But now that I wanted to get out again I could hardly move.

A woman trod on my foot. ‘Excuse me!’ she said, outraged. A Japanese couple, the little man focusing a Nikon carefully on a Begonia Grandiflora, were quietly toppled over the ropes into the Belgian house plants stand.

Someone started to jab my shoulder vigorously. I’d had enough. ‘Excuse me!’ I said, turning.

It was Rachel, her mother pressed in behind her, almost lost in the crowd.

‘Hello! It is you, I was sure —’ she shouted before the surge of people took her away from me like a tide. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she asked when she was pushed back again. ‘Are you with someone? Come on out — it’s impossible here.’

Rachel’s face was caught before me, close to me, held still in the vice of the crowd for a moment, set like a dark cameo against the splash of scarlet colour in a bank of flowers behind her. Pinpricks of moisture glittered on her skin. A faint rose lipstick exactly filled her bow-shaped lips. Nothing moved. The sounds in the tent were turned off. Then the film started again. She was pushed away from me and I moved towards the exit behind her. But that instant was enough to set the intimate shapes of her face against my memory of her and re-create the whole person afresh: the marks in her skin, the deep-set eyes on either side of the too-straight nose, the flurry of thin curls round her brow. I saw these for less than a moment, against the crowded confusion of flowers and people all about her, yet they had the same effect on me as if I’d gazed on her, sitting still in front of me in a deserted room, for an hour. A second can give one a deeper insight into someone than an hour’s steady gaze — for there, in the unexpected cast, the surprised moment, the half-open lips, the real person speaks. With language and time we can all pretend otherwise.

I greeted Madeleine outside, before we found ourselves caught in a queue for the conveniences and moved away once more.

‘Peter!’

There was surprise and enthusiasm in her voice and yet a sharpness in it too that I’d not remembered, and her smile was a thing produced, set up on fragile supports, a play that would not run long. Her eyes had not the natural depth of Rachel’s — yet with the strain, and the tears I suppose, of her loss, and the disguise of mascara, they looked deeper now.

Where Rachel tended to run amok in her life, Madeleine, I remembered, favoured restraints. Yet lacking Rachel’s profligate outlets, she had a greater hoard of emotion than her daughter. Like her husband’s bees, she stored up rich feelings: a familial honey which she offered to those closest to her in small samples. Sometimes in the past I thought she craved a wider market for these gifts. Yet, if she was frustrated, this never appeared in her manner in which, most of all, she proved how much she was herself. Madeleine possessed herself — not professionally, though she helped with the business management of their honey farm — but in matters of her real temperament, the course of life, the fate of her soul. And in these things one felt she had rarely denied either her will or her spirit. There had been, I remembered, something of a bright crusader in Madeleine — a crusader in some visionary cause which she wished to recruit you to, her face suddenly turned young and gold and sharp as frost under her ash coloured hair.

But now, always so young to me as a child (and she was, after all, a second wife to Lindsay, a dozen or more years junior to him), her face had aged in sadness, and given her an equality with her husband, as I’d remembered him. She had become, in losing him, his contemporary.

We walked away from the crowded tents towards a display of garden furniture, the three of us chatting brokenly, exchanging odd notes of greeting.

‘I’m sorry about Lindsay,’ I said at last.

Madeleine spotted a luxuriously upholstered garden swing seat and now she sat down on it suddenly, testing the cushions, pushing the bench to and fro delicately with her long legs. She didn’t reply and I thought I had been wrong to remind her of her loss. But then she looked up at me from beneath the wide brim of her crisp linen hat, patting the place beside her, and I sat down next her while Rachel stood in front of us playing with the tassels on the awning.

‘Peter, it’s so nice to see you! Such a surprise. I know, yes. We don’t know, we simply don’t know what’s happened. But thank you. And let’s not think about now. Let’s hear about you — what are you up to here? It’s years since we heard anything of you.’

She narrowed her eyes, looking at me with concern. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I rather dropped out of life. I was in jail, you know …’

‘Yes. We learnt that.’ She paused and Rachel took up the running, bending down now on her haunches, confronting us both.

‘We thought you still were in jail,’ she said brightly, without the care of her mother’s voice, but with the fascinated curiosity that a child displays in hearing of some disaster. She looked at me closely, a smile waiting its cue all round her eyes. ‘A jailbird with arrows all over you — running the library, I suppose?’

She’d lost no time in starting to tease — taking my seriousness up again and seeming to stamp it, this time, with the final punishment of prison. Yet I didn’t mind. Rachel’s great quality was her almost complete lack of indifference: she cared more with her rudeness than others do with sweet words and the only thing I’d ever come to fear in her was an expected response.

‘They let me out four years ago,’ I said. ‘I was…’ I hesitated. ‘I was framed.’

The word was so far removed from my previous life with both of them that it seemed meaningless to me now, a hieroglyph in the language of some vicious world that I had been part of for many years but which now, like some time traveller, I had escaped from, returning successfully to an earlier, almost idyllic civilisation which surrounded me just then in the shape of two women: one pushing lightly on a garden swing, the other gazing at me; the first in a cool dress and fragile hat, softening the marks of pain, whom one wanted to help now from her retreat at any cost; and the other, cheeky and surprised, bent over the ground, swaying on her haunches, as if about to spring, haphazardly, on a world all round her full of tempting choice.

I was surprised at Rachel’s air of happy fancy that morning. For it was her world, surely, as much as her mother’s, which had been brutally circumscribed by their loss. Rachel had loved her father unwisely and too well — and so had never been able to see me as more than a permanent lover, a temptation on the outskirts of her life, which had been my problem: legitimacy with her, I had thought then, would have been an easy substitute for maturity. Yet she may that morning, I suppose, since her relationship with her father was unrealistic, have decided to miss him in an equally inappropriate manner — with a touch of madness rather than conventional tears.

‘Come, let’s have some coffee,’ Madeleine said. She turned to me. ‘Peter? We’ve got a big thermos. You’re free?’

I nodded. I was certainly free then, with no thought of Basil Fielding, not even a ghost now from that ugly world I had escaped from.

Billy, the manager of the honey farm, together with an assistant, dealt with enquiries in the front of the small exhibition stand while we three sipped coffee on stools among a mass of bee-keeping equipment at the back. I set my cup on a galvanised honey extractor, price £58, plus VAT, and brought the two women up to date on some of my life: Durham jail, the disasters of New York, the end of things with the KGB in Cheltenham five years previously and the subsequent sherry dreams of Egypt lost in the Cotswolds. It was not an encouraging story. And I realised then how, for Madeleine at least, it might have been a story something like her husband’s. Intelligence work, based as it is on the possible truth only through certain deceit, can never be really encouraging. And though Lindsay, of course, had always been ‘doing something in the Foreign Office’, now I knew better, and I wondered if Madeleine would confirm this for me. She did.

‘Did you know that was Lindsay’s work — the sort of thing you’ve been doing?’ she asked.

And there was the first opportunity for lying. ‘I used to wonder,’ I said, still trying to keep a foothold on the truth with them.

‘Yes,’ she went on. ‘Which of course makes us think it was to do with that, his … his disappearance.’

She took to the word hesitantly, with a kind of feigned surprise, as though he were a conjurer at a children’s party who had disappeared in the midst of an astonishing trick, but was there all the same, behind a curtain or mirror, and would show himself again any moment. Lindsay was for her, I could see — even in absence — an ever-present air which encapsulated her, a warm caul which she never wished to be expelled from. The almost childishly eager white-haired man with the half-smile I’d remembered was there next to Madeleine then, at that very moment — fully fledged in spirit, hovering on the brink of our discussion, a apt comment on the tip of his tongue — there, as a comfort to her, in everything except flesh and blood.

‘How did he disappear?’ I asked. ‘On intelligence business?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Madeleine dismissed the idea as if it had never happened. ‘I was never really part of his life in that way. A lot of people came up and talked to me — looked everywhere — but I couldn’t help them. He kept that side of his life mostly separate from me, except that I knew he was doing it.’

‘Naturally, I suppose,’ I said.

‘But it wasn’t natural,’ Rachel interrupted scornfully. ‘That was the problem: living two lives like that. No wonder something happened one day …’ Her voice trailed off.

Rachel looked at me, her blackberry eyes surprised and angry. Then her focus changed and she looked right through me, into a void. For her Lindsay had truly gone then and was not lurking behind the beehives at the edge of the stall.

‘Anyway, Mummy, you knew more than that about his work. Don’t be so dozy about it. You knew.’

‘Not exactly what he did in London. I didn’t.’ Madeleine changed tack now, became roused, the flash of the crusader that I remembered coming into her eyes again. I could see the two women had argued things in this way recently — and could equally see that nothing had been resolved. How could it? The deceits implicit in Lindsay’s game are often immeasurable, even to experts. What could a familial love, even so strong as theirs, bring to deciphering them? Yet the two women wouldn’t know this. Indeed just the opposite: they would have tried to use their love as a key, for they were part of a biblical tradition, a world of old fashioned virtues; in Rachel’s case a large house in Perthshire, a small moorland church, where she and her ancestors before her had learnt over many generations that it was exactly this quality of disinterested love, and not any aptitude for clinical investigation, which would answer the most awkward questions. Love alone unbolts the dark, they would both have thought — however dark and impenetrable. But probably not this dark, I thought just then: not Lindsay’s dark.

‘What do you think?’ Rachel suddenly confronted me, her coffee forgotten, and Madeleine looked carefully at me as well, a huge query in her face, and I could see Basil’s plan taking vague shape in both their expressions.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, trying to deter them. ‘What do your friends think?’

‘Like us — what can they think? You knew our friends — the Thompsons, the McAulays. What could they know about Intelligence, about agents and spies?’ Madeleine bit these last words out with a touch of sad derision, like a nanny reproving an older child, still playing with tin soldiers.

I remembered these country neighbours at Glenalyth: the Thompsons (he was a solicitor in Perth) and the new rich McAulays who had to do with whisky and lived in the grand Hall near Glenalyth, where I’d gone to children’s dances with Rachel: dreamy, tippling, sad Mrs McAulay who had passed quite away in a daze from strong malt one evening. As Basil had hinted, such good people would know nothing of these clandestine matters — and more, would have scorned the whole business if they had.

How far Lindsay had removed himself, I fully realised now, from the consensus of his background, his family and his Scottish neighbours — for whom, as he had to me, he must always have appeared as the best and the brightest of the good soldiers: Marlborough and Merton Colleges, the Foreign Office in the thirties — Rome, Paris, Vienna — a Captain in the Argyll and Sutherland’s, leading part of their advance up through Italy from Monte Cassino into Austria at the end of the war, and finally Whitehall again — something suitable, the long run in, with suitably tactful honours every ten years: home-based with the Diplomatic Service, dealing with the Russkies, it was said by his intimates, no doubt. But never too loudly: Lindsay Phillips, faithful servant jaws of death and valley of the shadow, who had generously served his country long years but had come back at the last to Scotland and his honey, where his heart was…

How could such a man have his heart in any darkness, they would have said? — as Madeleine and Rachel far more vehemently believed, and with better reason, for I could remember, over the years that I’d spent with them, so many incidents: evidence of his love for them; moments which were never exhibitions of affection but minute and continual evidence of it. He was, with his wife and daughter — and with Patrick his dead son too, whom I had been brought to live with as company during the war, nine years old and gone with typhoid fever one Christmas in my time there — a sure emblem of ease and kindness — for all of us then a comforting shadow, held in the damp, woody smell of his old country coats and hats and mackintoshes in the hall or in the dim tobacco-filled study at the back of the house, a spirit that laid hands on you at odd moments throughout those long Scottish country days, who yet might at any moment suddenly materialise down a telephone, calling from London, or come driving up the valley through the fir trees along the stony avenue, with Henty, his father’s old chauffeur, in the next seat of the big green Wolseley.

In these many ways, I remembered, Lindsay was never absent. Yet now, with Basil’s information together with his inexplicable departure, the messages that came along the wire were incoherent notes of horror and distress — and Henty, I felt, would never fetch Lindsay again from another overnight train at Perth.

‘What exactly happened?’ I asked.

The two women seemed to withdraw from the event — the need once more to confront the actuality of their loss. But Madeleine took up the burden gracefully — one which Rachel couldn’t face again, I think, for she moved away to the counter.

‘I was in the small drawing-room. Lindsay was outside dealing with his bees. I’d seen him a few minutes before. I called him in for tea but he didn’t reply so I went out and looked for him but he wasn’t anywhere round the hives on the Oak Walk. So I looked over the garden — and then I got Billy and the others and we looked everywhere else all the afternoon: the loch, the forest — and before then, of course, all the rooms, the attics, the yard, the stables. He hadn’t taken the car or any of the bicycles and no one had seen him in the village. And no one had called by, or seen him on any of the roads. He’d just been out there on the Oak Walk one minute and then he was gone, totally. And we’ve not heard or seen anything of him since.’ She stopped abruptly, turning from me.

Her face had become so wan in the telling of this story that I couldn’t bear it and I didn’t wait for any more of Basil’s predictions to take effect.

‘Could I help?’ I asked. ‘Help you to find out …?’

She smiled in assent.

‘You might know more about it than the Thompsons. Or the McAulays,’ she added weakly.

I might indeed, I thought.

4

I noticed the man at the bar of my club before lunch: chalk-striped suit, pearl tiepin, Jewish, an over-neat, small, silver-haired fellow, something of the air of a homosexual jeweller; meticulous in his responses, nodding his head repeatedly now, obviously marking time over gin and tonics with an elderly companion, a stooped figure who had all the lineaments of a Club Bore.

He picked fastidiously at the bowls of olives and onions in front of him, saying ‘Um’ and ‘Ah!’ and ‘Yes’ many times against some endless tale he was being told. I was at the counter, studying a large sherry, back from the Flower Show with an invitation to the Wigmore Hall that evening and dinner afterwards with the Phillips and some of their London friends: Rachel was giving a concert. It was her birthday too: she was thirty-eight.

I noticed the man because I had known him once — not well, but I had seen him about now and then in Holborn years before. And then his name came to me: David Marcus, the Scots lawyer who had originally come to our Mid East Section as a ferret, expert on double agents and potential defectors — common as rabbits with us then — the man, they said, who never let go and, indeed, who had finally unearthed Williams, his chief in the department, as a KGB mole, an event which indirectly had led to my release from Durham jail five years previously. Marcus had subsequently been promoted to Head of Section. But that, as I say, was years ago and he could certainly only have gone upwards since then. He had the vigorous tenacity and ambition of his race — aimed for the mountain-top in my days at Holborn, and sure to be up there now, on the pinnacle, chipping away at the tablets. I’d never seen him in the club before — he struck me more as a Garrick man, if anything — and I fancied, with the well-worn premonition that becomes second nature in this business, that he had turned up at the bar that morning to see me.

Sure enough, when the old ormolu clock behind the bar struck one and the members had partly straggled off to lunch, he made his move. There was now an open space on the counter between us. He turned, saw me, and made a passable imitation of surprise.

‘Ah, Marlow. How are you?’ He pushed a bowl of bitter onions towards me. I was several yards away and didn’t move, merely smiled and nodded, a fish that wouldn’t be tempted.

‘Have another sherry,’ he went on, thoughtfully producing a tastier bait. Now he moved towards me, flourishing a £5 note — a gesture that at once alerted Reddy, the normally somnolent Irish barman, who came alive now with the quizzical, avaricious features of a monkey. Reddy looked up at us, his long arms aggressively on the counter now, as if about to vault it if I declined the drink. It was Reddy who made the meeting inevitable. I took a sherry. ‘A large one,’ I added.

‘Nice to see you,’ Marcus said. The elderly bore stooped down, trying to muscle in. But Marcus would have none of him for the moment, impatience creeping into his gestures.

‘Is it?’ I smiled.

‘Who is?’ the bore said, lending a conspicuous ear.

Marcus looked at his watch. It was clearly going to be touch and go whether he could get his business done with me while yet maintaining his cover in the other man’s company — something I could see he was equally intent on doing.

‘What are you up to these days?’ he asked brightly.

‘Oh, a book on Egypt. What about you?’

Marcus put his hand into his jacket pocket and I thought for a second that he was going to produce a gun and shoot me, either for my impertinence or for some devious professional reason, his legal restraints quite lost to him. Instead he took out a latch key with a label on it while he continued talking. ‘I get around,’ he said.

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘Why?’ the bore said.

‘Still the old things,’ Marcus added.

‘And some new ones too, I shouldn’t be surprised.’ I made little attempt to avoid the sarcasm.

‘New what?’ the bore interjected.

‘New horses,’ Marcus turned to him finally. He had the key now in the palm of his hand. ‘Our friend here — he and I have stakes in a horse together.’ Whatever he was up to these days hadn’t dulled his imaginative response, I was glad to see. That had always been his gift, of course: to imagine answers to a problem — often, it seemed, sheer fantasies about a Soviet move or a possible double agent, before putting on his lawyer’s wig and laboriously following them up and almost invariably finding the nightmare true.

‘Oh,’ said the bore, ‘I had a dream once, night before the Derby: horse called “Stardust”. Put my shirt on it —’

‘No,’ Marcus cut him off. ‘We have a hurdler. Over the sticks, you know.’ At the same moment Marcus slipped me the key, leaning towards me, saying softly, ‘Be there — this afternoon. Three o’clock.’

The address on the label was W2, somewhere off the Edgware Road. I laughed on my way upstairs to lunch, and ordered a half bottle of Latour to go with the beef. I had been sad all morning at the Flower Show, for that had been real. This, on the other hand, was clearly high farce. Yet I knew too — and it came to me soon enough and even the rich wine couldn’t dispel the thought — that though Marcus might play with horses, what he really found funny was horseplay with death.

It was the largest block of flats I’d ever seen: ten storeys and as big as Twickenham Rugby ground, on Kendal Street half a mile up from Hyde Park. My appointment was in Windsor House, through an archway and into a huge forecourt. There must have been about a hundred bell-pushes outside, but the main door was open. I dangled my key and a hall porter, in his shirt sleeves, saw me past without comment. I’d finished lunch with an Armagnac in the club, so was feeling sweaty myself but fairly perky as I took the lift up. I wondered if I should have had a gun.

I opened the lock on the heavy door while gazing impudently into the spy hole. But Marcus was sitting on a tea-chest reading The Times when I got inside, like the fox on the tree stump in Jemima Puddleduck, his little feet dangling off the floor, while another considerably larger man, a bodyguard, was by the window, looking out over the roofs into the depths of the lead blue spring sky.

Marcus stood up, folding The Times carefully, then gestured, as if to a seat. But there were none. There was no furniture at all in the apartment, just half a dozen other tea-chests, some of them open, with kitchen and other household equipment peeping out, together with two rolled-up carpets and a stack of empty picture frames against one wall. The place was nude.

‘Oh, there isn’t —’ Marcus said.

‘Never mind.’ I looked round the sterile room. I knew where I was: one of the ‘safe’ houses — a refinement, often called ‘one time pads’ — which DI6 kept in various large apartment blocks about London, each with the appearance of imminent occupation, but never lived in and rarely maintained for any length of time, where the tea-chests and old carpets could be picked up at a moment’s notice and transferred to another vacant apartment, often in the same block. They were used normally for appointments with only one individual — for debriefing a defector — or sometimes just for a single meeting, with an outsider, as in my case. Though the tea-chests, I knew, would contain enough food and other necessities to keep a man incommunicado in the apartment for a month. This fact, together with the presence of the muscular factotum, led me to suppose that Marcus, apart from wanting something from me, might impose unpleasant sanctions in order to obtain it.

I sat on a tea-chest opposite him, the Armagnac still living in me, quite prepared to do battle. But Marcus didn’t say anything. It was hot in the room. A bluebottle stirred viciously against the window; a huge puffy white cloud slid into view over Paddington. Summer was a strong rumour everywhere now. Finally Marcus sighed, thinking some deep thought. But I wasn’t going to let Marcus intimidate me with any longueurs.

‘Well?’ I asked sharply.

Marcus woke. ‘Ah, yes. Well, thank you for coming. And for going along with me over that old bore.’

‘I was curious. That’s all.’

‘Coffee?’ Marcus was starting to play the old switch-theme game, softening up the opposition, disorientating him. ‘Arthur? Brew up a kettle, will you.’ Arthur took an electric kettle from one of the chests and disappeared into the kitchen. It seemed I was probably the first person to use this safe house. Marcus was either playing it big — or else it was big.

‘Of course, curious,’ he went on. ‘That’s why Fielding got on to you. I can see that. I wanted to talk about that.’ He fidgeted with his cuffs. He was hot, I could see, but afraid to lose dignity by taking off his coat. I took my own off to further discomfit him.

‘Why?’

‘Well, we don’t want you to look for Phillips. That’s why,’ Marcus said apologetically.

‘We? Isn’t Basil part of “you”?’

‘Well, not exactly —’

‘So who are you these days?’

‘Basil’s with the Slavs and Soviets: Section Nine. I’m Deputy Chief.’

‘Of the Section?’

‘Of the Service.’

‘I see.’

Marcus suddenly came alive now, as if, in getting things straight with these little introductory word games and having so circuitously established his bona fides, we could now properly embark on the real business, a matter, it would seem, of lesser moment than his own credentials. ‘Yes, Marlow. We’d really prefer it if you didn’t go along with Basil.’

I kept the offensive. ‘You’re going to have to tell me why, aren’t you?’

Arthur put his head round the kitchen door just then. ‘Milk and sugar?’ he sang out in a surprising thin, harassed voice, like a fretful waitress.

‘Please,’ Marcus said.

‘No sugar.’ Then I turned to Marcus. ‘You don’t happen to have a good cognac in any of those chests, do you?’

Marcus resumed without a smile or a comment. ‘No-I’m not going to have to tell you. But I —’

‘The Prime Minister authorised this, you know. You’re above him, I suppose?’

Marcus sighed again. ‘The PM is not in possession of all the facts —’

‘He rarely is with you people.’

‘Marlow, are you going to listen,’ Marcus said abruptly.

‘Are you going to tell me the truth — or even take a stab in that direction?’

‘Yes, I am, if you’d wait a moment,’ he added petulantly.

‘Are you keeping Phillips somewhere?’

‘No. We’re not. He has disappeared. We don’t know where he is. But we don’t particularly want him found either — for his own good, and certainly for his reputation at least, among his family and friends.’

‘He’s gone over to Moscow?’

‘I doubt it,’ Marcus said wryly. ‘Rather the opposite camp. Phillips, I’m afraid, was another sort of traitor. The right wing. So far out, in fact, he fell overboard completely.’

‘National Front?’

‘Good God, no!’ Marcus was briefly appalled. ‘Retired Army wallahs down in Devon: vigilantes with handles to their names, those sort. As well as people in the Service.’

I shook my head in wonder.

‘No, it’s true. There’s always been a vaguely right-wing element in the SIS. And since the scandals of the fifties and early sixties — Philby and that lot — together with Labour coming in again then, it’s hardened very considerably during the last ten years — and around Phillips, we found out about six months ago. He was the kingpin.’

‘How? How did you find out?’

‘No need for details. But we discovered he’s put taps on the PM’s office in Downing Street: bugs in the wall, the lot. We traced it back to him, kept him under close surveillance. It was him and two or three others. Then, just when we were sure and were going to pick him up, he disappeared, went under. Someone must have got word to him.’

‘The usual,’ I said. ‘But you still need to nail him, don’t you? All the more so, I should have thought.’

‘Well, yes: at first I thought exactly that. “Do everything — find him,” I said. And so we turned him over for two months. But nothing — absolutely. So then I thought, well, leave him. He’s gone. He’s out — drowned himself up in that loch of his in Scotland most likely. Let dead dogs lie. Because you see, Marlow, if we did find him he’d have to stand trial with no end of a rumpus then.’

‘Indeed.’ A rumpus, I knew, after all the other scandals, was like a fifth horse of the apocalypse in our service.

‘So you see, if you help Lindsay’s family — or Basil — you’ll be doing them a disservice, Marlow. They’ll end up with a traitor instead of, as now, a hero, albeit missing or dead.’

Arthur brought us two mugs of coffee; cheap stuff, too much chicory. But I drank it, thinking, it gave me time. Of course there was one flaw in Marcus’s story — so obvious he must have left it intentionally, I thought.

‘Why haven’t you told the PM all this?’

Marcus obviously found the coffee as tart as I had, for he put the mug down and didn’t touch it again.

‘Oh, we did tell him. He knows all about what Phillips was up to. It was the PM who lied to you, Marlow. He wants him found all right, but not for the reasons he gave you, obviously. He’d like him found — and topped, if it were still possible, along with the others. He’s livid with us now — all on for a rumpus.’

Marcus paused, seeming to consider the awful effects of such a thing coming to pass: first three decades of reds under the bed, now fascists bugging the PM’s study. I could see if this came to light Marcus and his cronies would be in for a roasting.

‘Well, naturally, I’m just as anxious to stall him. It’s our service, after all. Prime Ministers come and go. We have to live with our mistakes.’

‘And Basil?’ I asked. ‘Where does he fit in? Does he know what you told me about Phillips?’

‘No. At least, I hope not. And I’d thank you not to tell him either. He’s just anxious for kudos. And don’t forget — Phillips was running a genuine grade A job out in Yugoslavia, against Moscow. That’s all perfectly above board. But it was cover for his real activities.’

‘But the other two, Dearden and McKnight: that was Moscow, wasn’t it? So maybe they got Phillips as well?’

‘Maybe they did,’ Marcus was pleased with this idea. He was very bland now, believing he had made his case secure with me. ‘That’s certainly my opinion. They dumped him in that loch, or something, so that Zagreb circle is well and truly dead now anyway. But Phillips still matters to us: we don’t want a right-wing purge, a month in the Old Bailey and enough classified fodder to keep the Sunday Times “Insight” boys happy for a year. And that remains a possibility — if you go sniffing about after him.’

‘Especially if I find him, you mean?’

‘Alive, I mean. If you find him dead that won’t matter at all, of course. But we’d prefer it if you didn’t bother, in fact — if you kept off it.’

Marcus had gone just a fraction too far. He was hiding something; he didn’t want me to go looking for Phillips for some other reason entirely — I had no idea what. Everything on the surface added up — I could see that: Phillips, though never authoritarian in my memory of him, did have just that kind of upper-class, very conventional, army background which could have led him to such a clandestine right-wing position within the service.

Very well then, I thought: Marcus’s scenario on Phillips was quite probable — but for two things: his not wanting me to find him, which seemed unlikely anyway — for if I did find him, alive, it would surely be no great trouble for Marcus to keep his mild treason under wraps, as he’d done with the other conspirators. No one knew of the matter so far in any case, and, unless the PM himself let the cats run, there was no reason why anyone should know. Secondly, there was the matter of Phillips’s other official concerns: the Zagreb circle, apparently instrumental in preventing Moscow from getting a foothold in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. This, indeed, was grade A, an operation sanctioned from the very top (and most likely being run in tandem with the Americans, more anxious than we to maintain that country’s independence). And it struck me that no Deputy Chief of an intelligence service could so lightly dismiss the loss of a principal operative in such a sehe me, as Marcus had done, and that Phillips’s work in this respect was, in any case, more important than his being discovered playing toy soldiers with some old colonial darlings down in the shires.

Well, let him hide whatever he wants, I thought. The matter had come into a private realm that morning at the Flower Show, a world beyond any that Marcus lived in or could apparently comprehend.

I said, ‘I’m going to help them anyway, Marcus. I offered to this morning. Purely as a private matter — unless you have in mind to lock me up here for a month.’

Marcus didn’t smile. ‘I see,’ he said, like a housemaster confronted with a boy who was bigger than him, and likely to prove it.

‘Yes. I don’t know that you do see, but this has really nothing to do with you. I’m not interested in all your political stories. The Phillips are old friends of mine. That’s the level it’s on as far as I’m concerned. I left your service years ago — and it’s I who have the extreme prejudice about it. If I find Lindsay it’ll be for his family. What you do about it then is your own affair. There is a world outside yours, you know — of people and families, not part of your mad power plays. And I don’t care if Phillips was trying to score on the right wing, not a bit: I wouldn’t fancy it myself, but I understand it very well. It’s his background after all, and you people taught him to fight for it over the years. Anyway, it’s all absolutely insignificant in comparison with a man’s disappearance — his possible death — for his own family. And that’s what I’m concerned with. So let’s just beg to differ, shall we?’

Marcus eased his collar and sniffed. My response couldn’t have surprised him, and he seemed now in his mind to be addressing himself to the next item on an already prepared agenda.

‘Beg, Marlow: that’s the word all right. For, of course, I shan’t authorise Basil’s payment to you.’

‘You’ve been close on his tail, haven’t you?’

‘And will remain so — and yours, I’m afraid. Why don’t you give it up, Marlow?’

‘You’d pay me more, would you?’

‘Yes,’ he said lightly. So he was hiding something. But I laughed, rather than give any hint of feeling this.

‘A few days ago I had the bank manager on the ’phone, murmuring about foreclosures, bald tyres all round and a sherry bill that looked like I was washing in the stuff. Yet here I am being offered a small fortune either way. I can’t lose, can I?’

‘Yes, you can, Marlow,’ Marcus said quickly. ‘I assure you you can.’

‘Thirty pieces of silver, indeed,’ I looked at him with distaste. ‘You don’t intimidate me. And you won’t. Oh, you can lock me up here, I suppose. But that won’t last. Why don’t you give it up? I told you: this is a personal matter now. I won’t screw your pitch, whatever dull game you’re playing. I give you my word on that.’

Marcus nodded several times, looking at me closely.

‘Very well then. We’ll see. I’d only add, Marlow, that no one can ever really give their words in this business: not me, not even your friend Phillips, who gave so many.’

Marcus left this curious thought hanging in the warm air before showing me out and when I looked back I saw Arthur carefully stowing the electric kettle away, deep within a tea-chest. This caravan was obviously moving on at once. Marcus was covering his tracks against me already. As far as he was concerned our meeting had never taken place.

Basil met me in the club that evening at six, wandering brokenly round the lobby in his smudged blue suit, gazing at the cellar notices and club functions as I came down the oak staircase. The valet had pressed my own suit while I’d had a bath. Basil saw this from a distance, sizing me up, his shifty eyes detailing my clothes. Ah, he seemed to say, the clubman hero, up from the country to a world of snooker parties and dinner nights and Margaux ’47, while I risk myself about mean streets and sterile offices; a lone pad in Kensington after a half pint and a divorced wife down in Cornwall.

What a liar Basil was, I realised again just then. He looked like an embarrassed retainer, a tradesman wringing his hands and doffing his cap, come to secure a debt from a gentleman in his London club. Whereas I knew now that it was Basil who held the advantage, who had me on a string, who had only told me half the Phillips story. I had suspected something of this, of course, since I’d first met him in the wine bar in the Strand the day before — known then that dealing with him was like disabling an octopus: that Basil always had an extra hand to stab you in the back.

He looked worse than usual, if that were possible: hang-dog and pale-faced, with the blood drained right out of the thin lobes of his elephant ears: a water biscuit now, wafer-thin, who might at any moment disintegrate, flake away right there in the middle of the hall, leaving just a pile of old clothes: a liquor-spattered pullover, minor public school tie and a pair of dirty desert boots from Marks and Spencer. And I thought I knew why he looked like death warmed up: Accounts, he’d probably discovered that afternoon, had held up my first payment on some technicality: his plans for me had been spiked by Marcus.

The Library was empty. The two long sash windows were open at the bottom, muslin curtains drifting slightly in the warm air, while the evening traffic rushed round Grosvenor Square in the distance.

‘You look done in,’ I said. ‘The bar is open.’ I thought what a treat it might be if Marcus were to turn up again and see us both there, for indeed I’d not come to look on their apparent service rivalries as anything but a re-run of an old farce, endemic to British intelligence since the war.

‘No. No, I think here —’

We sat by the long-dead grate filled with a dusty paper fan, in two big leather armchairs, stuffed dusty clubmen in dark suits, a distance apart, up to some weary mischief.

‘Cheer up,’ I said. ‘I saw them this morning. I’m going to help them.’

Basil’s face didn’t flower at all.

‘Oh, good,’ he said at last.

And then I was surprised. He drew a long envelope from his pocket and passed it across to me. There was a wad of new £20 notes inside an inch thick.

‘Five thousand. To start with. Don’t pay it in all at once,’ Basil said. ‘Sign the chit: not your own name. We’ve put you down as Wardell. Alan Wardell.’

I looked at the flimsy Treasury receipt with its five carbons and wondered how on earth Basil had managed to outsmart Marcus. I supposed the money had come direct from some other secret fund directly administered by the PM. But I signed it anyway and put the money away. It bulged in my inner pocket, a Christmas present without end for a child.

‘Cash?’ I said.

‘Well, one likes to be definite about money: keep one’s word.’ Basil looked at me sharply, as though I’d tried to make a fuss about accepting it or was about to ask for more.

‘No, I meant that it’s usually by cheque. It was last time.’

‘Not in this instance. We don’t want any trace between you and us — and in any case you’re not an employee of ours any more, Peter.’

Basil, just as Marcus had done, preened himself on his secret status and my public exclusion — the invisible membranes between us which we both saw, oppositely, as a division between the quick and the dead.

‘So you saw them then?’

‘It went like clockwork,’ I nodded.

‘What did I tell you.’

‘You told me. But now tell me more.’

I didn’t quite know what I wanted Basil to talk about. But I wanted to get him going on some kind of chat which might give me a lever into what was going on between his faction (and the PM’s, obviously) and Marcus’s. It seemed that Basil was very much the PM’s man; and though I wasn’t going to tell him anything about my meeting with Marcus I wanted to see if this right-wing threat was the real reason for sending me after Phillips.

‘Tell you about what?’ Basil said, stonewalling.

‘About our meeting, for example. You said there was a leak somewhere in your section, that I couldn’t ’phone you. Is that how it’s always going to be?’

‘The leak? Oh, that’s just a precaution. As you know yourself there have always been divisions in the service: presently it’s a slightly left-wing element causing trouble — which Phillips was identified with. Well, quite a few of the traditionalists would be very happy if he never turned up again. So we’re keeping you well clear of them, that’s all: no open contact if possible, no phone calls. I’ll use your club here for any messages. Put them up on the board in the back hall. You do the same for me. Either I or someone else will drop round here most days. Allright?’

‘Yes.’

Basil picked up an old copy of Country Life on the table next him and started to flick through the pages of fine houses. Our interview seemed at an end.

‘Good,’ I said, while pondering Lindsay Phillips’s remarkable transference from extreme right to left wings in the political spectrum in the space of a few hours, in the estimation of two of his colleagues. One of them was lying. Perhaps both were. I couldn’t restrain a smile.

‘Yes?’ Basil looked at me sharply.

‘Nothing.’

We got up and walked towards the door. One thing at least was obvious: Basil and Marcus were on opposite sides of the fence in the matter of Phillips — Basil anxious to prosper the PM’s cause by nailing these old men with microphones, while Marcus was equally anxious to forestall him. I was the patsy in the middle of what was no more than an unusually bitter internal squabble.

Basil wouldn’t take any sort of a drink at the end of our meeting, sloping off into the evening without even wishing me well. That surprised me too. Perhaps his merrymaking the previous day had filled him with remorse. But I doubted it. In the old days he’d been such a funny man; now the gift seemed suddenly to have died in him.

I watched him disappear into the rush hour, merging at once among the other preoccupied, anonymous figures. Basil had suddenly become like them, not a man of witty parts any more, but someone who had turned in on himself, the better to hide some dangerous secret, like a suburban murderer now, hurrying home to bury his wife’s corpse.

I glanced at the piece of paper he’d given me before we left the Library; he’d written down the name of the man in Scotland who I could safely liaise with in my investigations up there. Chief Superintendent Carse of the Perthshire CID, Court Buildings, Tayside, Perth. I knew the buildings well — a black gothic pile, stained with years of mist and spume from the huge tumbling river right in front of it beyond the quayside — a river fed by all the streams of my childhood higher up, the burns and lakes that spread like fingers and hands between the hills, a whole lost world falling from the moors about Glenalyth.

5

A fat man in small gold-rimmed specs — an excessively large and jolly man like an apologetic bear — was marshalling our theatre party in the long foyer of the Wigmore Hall for Rachel’s birthday concert that evening.

They used to say one never spots a rival in matters of the heart until it is too late. But I could see it then, almost the first minute I laid eyes on George Willoughby-Hughes, that he would always be someone’s rival in this way, that he would pop up untimely, like an impertinent water diviner, searching out and tapping every intimacy, for he had that dangerous quality of adolescent energy allied to an equally childish vulnerability: the kind of man who would organise Coarse Rugby parties on Wimbledon Common for his male friends on Saturday afternoons only to have his bruises tended by most of their wives at all odd hours for the rest of the following week.

He busied himself now, a man gloriously come into his own, bursting out of an old double-breasted ‘thirties dress suit, surrounded by half a dozen of the Phillips’s friends, strangers to me but part, obviously, of a vast encircling intimacy to him. He held out his arms to them, indiscriminately, turning about on his neat dancing pumps, facing one person while still addressing another, like a huge clockwork toy, some masterwork of greeting, where the mechanism had lost synchronisation with the slightly squeaky voice.

‘Julia! Max! Come — come!’ He looked beyond me imperiously, towards some new arrivals, then pushed forward to greet them. As he moved I saw Madeleine who had been hidden by his great bulk.

I kissed her on the cheek. She wore a long midnight-blue velvet skirt, splayed out from her waist, topped by a voile blouse, the arms floating in a thinner weave, but coming tightly up into a sort of ruff about the throat. The others, including her companion, an elderly man in a thick beard, were all in evening dress.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking down at my lounge suit, a little tired now, two days out from home.

‘It doesn’t matter a bit. Come.’ She took my arm, looking over my shoulder. ‘Meet George.’

And I knew at once who George was. I could hear him now, bounding behind me like a frisky animal.

‘George?’ I asked quietly.

‘George Willoughby-Hughes. You never met, did you? Rachel’s agent, Rachel’s manager, Rachel’s —’

She paused, looking over my shoulder. ‘Rachel’s lover,’ I thought she might finish with. But she smiled, saying simply, ‘Rachel’s cross.’

‘Hello! Good man,’ George said, putting a hand on my shoulder and squeezing it. ‘Fine, fine. Wonderful. I’ve heard so much —’ He looked beyond me again, already marking down another more urgent social call. ‘Just a minute, a moment —’ He pushed past me. Then he turned back. ‘You’re on the aisle: B-10. Behind Sir Brian.’ Then he was gone. Luckily Madeleine was still there.

‘Sir Brian?’ I asked her. I felt I almost needed a drink.

‘Brian Allcock,’ Madeleine said. ‘The Professor — an old colleague of Lindsay’s. Over there.’ She gestured with her eyes. It was the man with the thick beard: a bird’s nest of a beard: a long, studious slightly eccentric face, like Edward Lear’s in all but the nose which was of ordinary size. He looked like a musicologist, rudely unearthed just a moment before from the pages of some fascinating but smudged original manuscript: a myopic, romantic figure in a dress suit of Edwardian vintage — a man impossible to associate with any kind of secret derring-do. If a good cover were a prerequisite in his trade, then this man must, I thought, have been invisible in his work.

‘And June — and Max,’ Madeleine said, turning me towards the most recent arrivals.

‘Hi,’ said Max. June and Max were American.

‘Friends of Rachel’s —’

‘And you! And of you, Madame!’ Max interrupted over-courteously, pushing forward, kissing Madeleine’s hand.

Max was short and thickset, as his wife (or girl-friend) was tall. Max wore a frilly dress shirt and had barely any hair: a youthful chubbiness about the face but with far older eyes — an unreal tan over the skin, not oily, but something assumed all the same with lotions or sun-lamps, giving him a veneer of slight artistry and inevitable success. He wasn’t old enough to look like a million dollars: give that a year or two, he seemed to say: I still have a leasehold on youth — and the money will come soon enough, goddammit …

For June, on the other hand, the cash had obviously been inherited already. A woman with a genuine tan and dark Mediterranean hair rising up from a white silk sheath dress, she looked like someone born to lose her father’s fortune gamely.

‘Hi,’ said Max to me again, while June smiled at me from a height, beatifically. Her hand was so limp and damp I felt it would come away with mine if I held it too long, and drop like dough to the floor.

‘Max writes musicals,’ Madeleine said. ‘With George. George does the music, Max the words. A lyricist,’ she added sweetly.

‘Hi.’ Max addressed me thus a third time. He was no spendthrift with words. They must have been quite short musicals, I thought.

Then there was Marianne: George’s wife. I could hear her loud, broken voice talking rapidly to someone over by the box-office before I met her — the ever more insistent tones of someone who can never bring themselves to get to the point of a story for fear of then losing their interlocutor.

Marianne — as verbose as Max was reticent: fiftyish and sad, a music copyist once, she soon informed me. She and George lived round the corner off Marylebone High Street, she added, among many other things: Marianne, who talked so much because her world was empty, and words could fill that for an hour or so, words to other people, huge verbal deposits, as I afterwards learnt, from her long silence with George, which she banked now among us with great clatter and alarming gusto.

‘Well?’ Madeleine asked me later, looking me straight in the eyes, too forcefully — as if trying to hold on to something, to stop herself sinking in this pool of friendly emotion. Madeleine was sitting on the edge of a cliff. We had left the morning and the stark white tent filled with brilliant colours where she had hidden as a masked intruder. But here, where the drama was far more tense and subtle, the indistinct lines of emotion on her face suddenly reflected this and the pain became awfully clear once more: wounds of past thought opened her eyes again like Japanese flowers in water. She seemed, as I watched her, before the concert started, to pre-empt the music, hear it secretly herself and run through all its heartbreak before a note was struck.

I thought she was about to break down and cry; I touched her arm. ‘What is it?’

‘No. Nothing — of course. Nothing.’ She gripped herself mentally even as she spoke.

Her face changed then, brightened. Light spread into her eyes, seeped over the edges and crinkled all the valleys in her skin. Her face warmed — as if by a lot of little fires — and the sad mould splintered off her cheeks right there in front of me.

Just as Basil an hour before had been a dark omen in his shabby suit, a Charon crossing Brook Street into the dull evening, so Madeleine was a harbinger now, marvellously bright, emerging from tragedy, a dove come to an ark where all of us had been lost many days far out on the waters. She cast out pain like a saint just then. Marshalled by George, with her glittering imprimatur, something — faith or art — would lock the doors in the hall and resolve everything for an hour or two.

The bell went. The flock was finally gathered together.

‘Well,’ Madeleine said, ‘shall we go?’ She turned and led us into the evening.

I am no musician. I might tell some of this story more easily if I were. As it is that evening and most of its characters must remain strange to me. Rachel is the one exception, since it was her particular problem, which came to a head that night, that she so craved an end of mystery, a less ambiguous connection with the world than that which art follows, that she forsook her music in this cause, and thus she entered my dull lists again — which she had escaped from years before: the ambush of verbal cause and effect, the dry rot of why and wherefore, the death rattle of explanation that lies acorss the border from what is simply felt.

Still, she gave up her music later, after that concert, and there is still that concert to describe. And here, too, since in the estimation of those who were there and knew about music, it was by far her best performance, I am faced with defeat in writing about it. Bad music, since it fails, easily falls into the realm of words. But if the harmony rises, finding perfection, each step it takes is one more giant stride away from language.

There is a crucial phrase in flute playing, remembered from my days in Notting Hill with Rachel: ‘a good embouchure’— describing the essence of the whole business, in which the player’s lips must be so formed and placed against the raised mouthpiece that the air stream strikes the edge of the hole in such a way as to produce a perfect tone. And tone, of course — I remember too — tone, as Rachel always said, is supreme; the rest is secondary. But, oh, the drudgery of it all — that comes back as well — of Rachel locked in the bathroom playing in front of the mirror for hours, developing that perfect sound. A proper stance, the right way of holding the instrument, ease in the complex fingering; in mastering these, tone could be lost. Playing the transverse flute well is almost a miracle: a juggling act with a half a dozen techniques, each to be kept up effortlessly: to reach perfection requires a mastery which is breathtaking — literally, for here is an art where player, instrument and music must come together as one perfect voice — a human voice, based on air, on breathing, and thus subject to an exactly limited capacity. But that evening one couldn’t tell where Rachel drew breath: the music appeared seamless.

Accompanied piano pieces by Prokofiev — his Sonata in D Major — by Saint-Saëns, Chopin and Gluck’s ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ which she had played the previous day in the hotel — and finally, before the interval, a flute cadenza, Drigo’s Serenade from Les Millions d’Arlequin, which she made so light and haunting a thing that nobody moved or clapped for a long moment when she had finished.

What more to say than that it was perfect? A critic, perhaps, might explain the perfection — to what purpose I don’t know — while for any real truth he would have to explain the whole woman, and how difficult that would be, even for her friends. Her music took her light-years away from us, as it did that evening, on the small stage, a woman lost to us, in a long green tartan skirt and white silk blouse, travelling deep into a world without words.

In one way her behaviour after that evening was an attempt to be counted among ordinary mortals at last — and her release from the secrecies of music was, she felt, a necessary step in that direction. She told me later that she had come to live on too rarefied a plane, lost to the concerns of ordinary existence. Wrongly, as it turned out, she believed that her father had lived in just such an ordinary world and that to find him she must descend from her many pedestals and seek him in the undergrowth of mundane existence.

There were kisses and congratulations backstage afterwards, which I stood back from in the doorway of the small Green Room, crushed next the end of a big grand piano in the corridor, as people rattled to and fro, George trundling about like a sack of potatoes, flapping his arms and organising flowers, beads of sweat pouring down his joyous face.

‘Darling … dear … how wonderful …’

A lot of wonderful dears and darlings floated on the warm, over-scented air. I saw Rachel, catching her eye for an instant, between the insistent pushing figures. I lifted my hand to her, like an uncertain traffic policeman. And she, too, paused a second in her other greetings, to return an equally unfinished smile before her face disappeared again in the crush: a smile which to me, at least, spoke of tired failure and not success.

I turned and nearly walked straight into a huge beard: Sir Brian Allcock had been standing right behind me looking over my shoulder, equally on the edge of things.

‘What a birthday present — for us!’ he said. ‘What inspiration, elegance.’ His tiny, pale blue eyes glittered deep within his whiskers. He clapped now, involuntarily, banging his long fingers together several times as if overcome retrospectively. He perched behind me, owlishly, looking down on these exaggerated joys with incredulous wonder, as if at the mating antics of some obscure species. ‘A colleague of Lindsay’s,’ Madeleine had told me. I was curious. Certainly he could have been no ordinary field agent, I thought. He was much older than Lindsay, too, in his seventies at least: a frail yet clamorous wraith on the outskirts of the feast.

‘Yes,’ I said, smiling up at him with some sense of fellow feeling.

‘The Drigo piece,’ he went on gazing enthusiastically into the Green Room. ‘She played that incomparably. Better than he did himself. I heard him once — just before he left St Petersburg.’

‘Indeed?’ I answered.

I had no idea who this musician Drigo was. But St Petersburg gave a date to the old man’s reminiscence — a date and a place, too, in pre-Revolutionary Russia. A colleague of Lindsay’s: could he be that? I decided to risk a mild interrogation.

‘You worked with Lindsay then, did you?’ I asked easily.

‘Uh!’ the old man snorted, shreds of his beard bristling for an instant round his mouth. ‘No, I never worked with him. I was his tutor, at the School of Slavonic Studies here.’

‘In the thirties?’

‘Yes — about then. When he came down from Oxford, doing the Foreign Office exams.’ He stopped then, seeming to run off into some old cubby hole of his mind, searching for something Finding it, but without wishing to explain it, he said vehemently, ‘Such a pity about him, such a stupid, dreadful thing.’ Then he seemed to dream again, casting his mind back to some dark pool in the past.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I was hoping to help the family: to find him.’

Sir Brian woke up and looked at me closely now. ‘You’re one of his Intelligence people, are you?’ — and he ran on in a great hurry before I could contradict him — ‘Well, what a damn silly business that was. I warned him about it — oh, yes, back at the time. Told him not to get mixed up with it; told him he’d be a prime choice, with his background, his gift for language, his sympathies. Yes, it was all a very foolish thing, you see. And now look.’ The old man’s eyes lit up and he raised his long, bony fingers like a prophet about to explain everything. But he didn’t continue. His hands fell limply and he started to munch his lips, as if he had said too much.

‘Look — at what?’

‘Well,’ he grunted, and then, sotto voce: ‘The Russians must have taken him back. He knew too much.’

Sir Brian stalled again, looking down his nose at me triumphantly.

‘Taken him back? He knew something —’

‘Look here, young man,’ the old man interrupted me quickly, in a sharply professorial tone. ‘I’m not here to teach you your business. You must know what he knew far better than I.’

‘Oh, I don’t work for Intelligence,’ I said, realising the lie suddenly.

‘Goodness me,’ Sir Brian perked up in mock alarm. ‘I thought you said you did — and here am I giving away State secrets: every Tom, Dick and Harry. Dear me, I must curb my tongue.’

Again he appeared to do just this, biting in on his lips, chewing wisps of his beard. ‘Ah! Madeleine — Rachel.’ His beady blue eyes had found an out cue and he moved away from me abruptly, into the Green Room, to make his own little entrances and congratulations, a great bearded beanpole, seemingly an ineffective old eccentric, but possibly something else altogether: a man who found easy cover in these assumed peculiarities — a vain old man, who knew something perhaps, and, if so, whose vanity might have betrayed him.

I stood with the others on the pavement outside, waiting for our transport, breathing the warm spring evening air, a night with a different perfume in it now: London air, after a long hot day, a faintly warm smell of tarmac and petrol fumes dying out now as Findlater’s big gold clock down the street touched half past nine.

Taken Lindsay back? — I thought: ‘He knew too much.’ A slip of the old man’s slippery tongue perhaps. But taken him back?

Rachel came out of the hall just then and, though I was standing some distance away from her, at the edge of the pavement, she called across to me, beckoning to me with a smile, to go with her and her mother and Sir Brian in their car. I had just time to note a look of frustrated disapproval cross George’s features as he closed the door behind us, looking through the window into the dark interior, his big sad face like a moon about to disappear behind a cloud.

They still owned the big terrace house in Hyde Park Square — on the north side, looking over the tall bleached plane trees in the narrow gardens, the only side of the estate not bombed out in the war and rebuilt: a row of formidable mid-Victorian town houses rising up, tier upon tier, like the decks of an old Atlantic liner; white-stuccoed, with tall porticos and heavy doors, they stood imperiously among the clutter of modern bijou residences and apartment blocks which surrounded them on all sides: encircled by this concrete mess, but protected by the stockade of the small park and its graceful trees, these houses had resisted everything and continued to insult their attackers now, effortlessly, by their mere existence.

Cumbersome and awkward to run, even in the days when I had stayed there just after the war, nearly all of them had been divided up into flats: all except the Phillips’s, which they had held onto through thick and thin and still possessed in an undivided state. It had been Madeleine’s family home. Her great-grandfather, who had bought the house after the Crimean War, was, like Lindsay’s, a military man; and her family, like his, had never given ground, nor lacked the money to maintain the grounds they held.

None the less, an anachronism twenty years before, such a private way of life in central London today must have been practically unique. Lindsay, it’s true, had lived there most of the year for his work; Madeleine for part of the year — every winter at least — and Rachel had organised a self-contained flat for herself on the top floor. Patrick too, I suppose, had he lived, might have made it his home — while after his death, and had I ever married Rachel, I suppose I could well have been living in part of it myself.

But even with all this real or potential habitation there were still half a dozen large rooms left over: a formal dining-room, music room, library, study, spare bedrooms and a billiard saloon — mostly unused in my days there, heavily furnished in the original Victorian modes, with long, thick velvet drapes over the high sash windows: rooms ideally fitted for children’s hide-and-seek on winter weekends or half-terms when I had come down with Rachel to London to see the circus or the Palladium pantomime; heavy rooms, smelling of polished mahogany, with moustachioed portraits of Imperial gallants floating down like trapeze artists on long wires from brass rails on either side of the ceiling.

Our car drove round the south side of the square to get to the house, and I could see it now — the first few storeys rising like a white cliff above the street lights, up into the darkness of Rachel’s top flat: Rachel’s few maids’ rooms which, even when we had lived together in Notting Hill, she had frequently returned to openly, by way of seeing her parents, but just as often surreptitiously, as I afterwards found out, to start converting these rooms. Already then, like a fifth columnist, in the midst of her life with me, she was planning her defection, organising her separate return over the border to her real home.

This house, together with Glenalyth, was where her real life came from — and she a kite held to them on a string, let out to fly by her father. Of course, I had thought then to cut this string; instead, in her short time with me, I had only managed to bind her far more closely to this solid edifice and all the secure emotions it contained. What a fruitless quest I had made with her then, set on a shared life amidst the razed, post-war squalor of Ladbroke Grove: how could one set an Ascot gas heater and broken windows looking out on an already clamorous immigrant street against this heavy dreadnought of a house — which, together with its hard-headed crew, had forced its way successfully through a century of violent change, of war and social riot, familial deaths and entrances, individual dissents and strengths, unsuitable passions and alliances — which were all to be finally subservient to some stronger ghost, an intangible inheritance, which still lived in this great pile of brick and mortar.

My association with Rachel seemed, in its shadow, to be nothing more than an illicit day trip, a foolish excursion round the bay, in which luckily, and quite without our deserving it, we had not been drowned. This house was my inanimate rival.

Indeed, I think I am more than partly right: if Rachel and her family had a real failing — and it’s difficult to be objective about it since, as I say, I was its victim — it was that they hung onto their past, protected it — not with money which to them was simply an adjunct, as natural as air — but with an unenquiring acceptance. To them their position in life was an ancient fait accompli with which, without knowing it, they insulated themselves against all outsiders and newcomers.

They were like tightrope walkers in their estimation of themselves: as though they knew in some secret, quite unspoken place that their kind of life was a rare thing, a glittering performance above the multitude — they knew too, quite simply like born professionals, that to maintain this style in drear times, among the new commonality, they must never look down. But now the man who had lived there, governed its directions, maintained and nurtured and filled it so appropriately, had disappeared, fallen inexplicably from the high wire, had broken all the rules at last and suddenly lost his balance.

George, who had somehow managed to reach the house before us, was at the open doorway, his face alight with some secret anticipation, holding us in the hall to begin with while the other guests arrived before leading us all upstairs to the first floor drawing and music rooms. Here he fumbled with the handles of the double doors before finally managing to open them with a flourish.

As he did so a cataract of music swept upon us — a clash of tympani, followed by a sweet rush of violins and cello, some wind instruments piping in strongly then, taking up and running vigorously along with the old Strauss melody. It was with some surprise that we gazed into the room, for at first we could see nothing but an empty floor and a long table laid out near the window for a buffet supper. But on entering the drawing-room and looking round to the right through the open curtains that led to the music room behind, the matter became clear: inside, on the heavy old dining-room chairs arranged in several semi-circles, was half a fair-sized orchestra, 20 or 30 people in evening dress rushing clamorously through the overture to Die Fledermaus.

George smiled — quite taken up for a moment, justifiably, with his coup de théâtre. Rachel embraced him.

‘What on earth —?’ she said before disappearing into his bear-hug.

‘Your birthday present!’ George shouted above the music and the two of them stood there for a moment, arms linked, watching the performance. I thought of my own present for Rachel, something I’d seen in a Bond Street gallery that afternoon, a smooth, oval sea stone — a paperweight — with a contented cat painted on it, something solid and nice but quite without the demon grace of this gesture, a gift that wouldn’t endure byond the evening, but was so bright and unexpected a thing that it was far more than a gift: it was Rachel’s own life, a dazzling portrait, drawn from her, shown and confirmed to the world, and now returned to her keeping. George’s affection for Rachel, I saw now, was no lugubrious thing, but a deep care which he could yet offer to her lightly, in the seeping tones of half the London Philharmonia.

George, among his friends and good offices in the musical world, had managed to hire part of the orchestra for this latter part of the evening — friends of Rachel’s too, among the players it was obvious, doing her the honour and favour, as some of them smiled at her, right in the middle of some elaborate passage, con brio. And they played in the heavily draped room for half an hour — the easier, celebratory music of Lehar and Strauss, Wiener Blut and such like, waltzes and polkas, but played them with an intense delicacy that gave the music a quite extraordinary, crystal sharp effect: like flame cutting through steel.

Later we drank wine and some champagne and cut deeply into raised game pies and moist pâtés, the orchestra joining us. Of course it was a merry evening; it could hardly have been otherwise. And no doubt it had been intended as just such by George: a means of helping the two women to start again, to wipe out the pain of the past two months. In that, at least, he succeeded. Indeed, without his musical resuscitation that night it’s doubtful if Rachel — and Madeleine particularly — would ever have had the heart to embark with me on the journeys they did. George’s gift brought them back to life and made it possible for them to contemplate action once more: action which would fill the gap of absence — for once started on their search for Lindsay and for as long as they remained at it, they could believe in his existence somewhere, a life apart from theirs, which they would eventually discover, re-uniting it with their own in one happy family again. George it was, in his generosity and loving commitment to Rachel, who set the long fuse alight, and I the man who tended that flame so carefully. At the time who could have done otherwise?

6

‘I don’t know what he could have meant — it must have been a mistake,’ Madeleine said to me purposefully, already dressed, over a late breakfast. I’d stayed the night, in a spare bedroom, with a pair of Lindsay’s pyjamas. Rachel was still sleeping upstairs in her flat.

‘Yes, it may have been. But that’s what he said: that the Russians had taken him back.’

Madeleine had finished her coffee, taking the cups and plates over to the sink, where she paused a moment, hand on the tap, gazing out over the rooftops at the back of the house. The sky was a leaden blue again. Already, before ten o’clock, the day had a charge of heat in it which was beginning to leak out all over the city.

‘He meant — they may have kidnapped him,’ she said at last. ‘He must. But we went into all that in Scotland at the time, with the police and the people from Lindsay’s office. We’re only sixty miles from Aberdeen. Russian trawlers often call there — and there was one there the day he disappeared. But it stayed for more than a week afterwards, for repairs, with the Special Branch people watching it all the time. There was no sign of Lindsay and we’ve never had the slightest evidence that they may have taken him.’

‘All the same, why don’t we speak to Allcock again? I tried to last night, but he —’

‘Oh, I have spoken to him, Peter,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘And he said more or less what he said to you. He was very kind — he’s one of Lindsay’s oldest friends after all — but a little scornful. “The Russians have probably got him,” he told me in the end. Well, I thought that a little too melodramatic — and so did Lindsay’s colleagues when I spoke to them about it. But, it may be true, I suppose?’ She looked at me quizzically, one rubber glove half on, about to wash up.

‘Well, maybe. I don’t know. Just he seemed so certain about it. Who is Brian Allcock? What’s his background?’

‘Oh — eminent Slavonic scholar: taught for a while in Moscow, in the twenties, then at London University: books on the culture and heritage of all the Slavs, on endless committees: The British-Soviet Friendship Society now. All those sort of official things. And Lindsay consulted him a lot; travelled with him, too. They were friends.’

‘And his politics?’

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. ‘He’s not interested in politics as far as I know. He’s an academic — sort of caricature of a professor, as you saw yourself. I’ve always thought him a rather fussy, self-important old party. But I get on with him. I suppose I rather tend to pull his leg.’

‘Was Lindsay close to him?’

‘In a way — well, no: not close really.’ Madeleine considered my question, frowning. ‘Lindsay admired him: as the brilliant teacher he might have become himself. And Brian in his turn took great pride in Lindsay — initially at least — hoping he’d follow him in some academic line. Brian never married — and there was something of that, too, in the relationship to begin with, I think: the father-son business. Lindsay’s own father wasn’t easy, you know.’

‘He said he’d been in St Petersburg?’

‘Oh yes,’ Madeleine smiled shortly. ‘As a tutor with some of the decadent nobility there, before the revolution. He’s really a walking history of twentieth-century Russia. He even met Lenin: they had a glass of tea together in some station waiting-room.’

‘I’d like to talk to him again.’

Madeleine looked doubtful. ‘He’s an awful old fusspot, you know. He’ll probably just try and bite your head off again.’

‘All the same.’

‘Well, I’ll phone him.’

Madeleine took her gloves off decisively and moved to a kitchen extension, looking up his number on a big card above the handset. She let the phone ring and ring but there was no reply.

‘Funny,’ she said. ‘He’s always there first thing in the morning. And there’s an Irish woman who does for him who comes in then as well.’ Madeleine looked fairly surprised.

‘I’ll go round and see him,’ I said.

Madeleine gave the number of a house beyond Russell Square, off Great Ormond Street on the southern edge of Bloomsbury. ‘The ground floor flat,’ she said. ‘Only door on the right. You can’t miss it: it smells of cat rather.’

I got a cab luckily — straightaway — on the corner of Edgware Road.

The house was in Rugby Street, the middle of a rather decayed, genteel, mid-Victorian terrace, opposite a pub a few yards away on the other corner. A woman opened the door very soon after I’d rung the bell — a doughty, red-faced Irishwoman with an old scarf turbanned round the back of her head, coming to a rough knot in the front, as if there was still a war on, St Paul’s was in smoke up the road and she had been halfway through listening to ‘Workers’ Playtime’ inside.

‘Come on in,’ she said, the easy brogue still thick after probably thirty years in London. ‘The Professor’s expecting you, said for you to go on in if you came. He’s just down the road at the library. Be back any minute.’

Before I had time to reply to any of this she had led me into a small drawing-room on the ground floor looking over the street, very cluttered and rather dark and smelling of cat, the sun streaming through the windows and hitting a recent explosion of dust motes like a searchlight.

‘Just finished in here,’ the woman shouted happily, bending double in a corner and unplugging a Hoover. ‘Sit down. Sit down. He’ll be back any minute.’ She seemed to want to reassure me and indeed I must have seemed surprised at my welcome.

So I sat down and she left me. The room was an Aladdin’s cave filled with the treasure trove of many journeys, it seemed, to Russia and eastern Europe: a grave, thin-faced icon of the Christ-king with a silver halo stared at me from above an upright piano against one wall, a sheet of music by some unpronounceable Slav composer open on the stand; a line of crude but colourful Dalmatian pottery ran along a top shelf above five other shelves packed with Slavonic academic and cultural volumes; a rough, peasant-weave blanket in a deep scarlet covered an easy chair — and next to it, a little round table, a Bosnian coffee stand, with a fine circular brass top with some strict advice from the Prophet beautifully engraved in classical Arabic round the edge.

On this lay a fat typescript — a doctoral thesis, it seemed, when I glanced at it, already open at the title page: ‘The Years of Hope. Part One: The Soviet Union 1917–1923.’ It was nearly 700 pages long, with footnotes as copious as the text. A heavy business, with a name and address on the bottom: ‘Arthur C. Pottinger, School of Soviet Studies, Columbia University, N.Y.’

The doorbell went and I jumped, involuntarily. The Irish woman appeared from the kitchen and hurried through the room before I could explain myself. ‘He must have forgotten his key,’ she shouted back at me from the front door. But when she opened it, it wasn’t the Professor but another younger man who stood on the threshold: a big, easy-looking fellow in moccasin loafers and a crumpled candy-striped summer suit. He stood there for a moment, surprised, cut out sharply in the sunlight from the street. An American, I thought, and certainly the Professor’s properly expected guest: big-boned, strong-featured, in his mid-forties, with deep eyes behind glasses and a lot of five-o’clock shadow rimming his jowls.

‘Hi!’ he said, suddenly breaking into action, his face creasing in a big smile, that smile of permanent good fellowship which is the badge of most old-fashioned Americans. The Irish woman looked curiously at him, then at me.

‘I’m sorry. There’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said explaining my position.

‘Well, that’s perfectly all right,’ the other man said with extreme good humour, coming forward, offering me his hand. ‘I’m Art Pottinger. Just came by to see the Professor about my —’ Then he saw his thesis open on the little table behind me. ‘Why, there it is. I asked him to take a look at it. We were just going to have a few words about it.’

‘Oh, I won’t keep you,’ I said, ‘I only wanted a quick word with him myself. It’ll keep — another time.’ I moved towards the door.

‘Well, please, now, not on account of me.’ Pottinger held his hands up deprecatingly. ‘Don’t worry about me. My work can wait too. Who did you say you were?’

He had that nice American knack of asking a personal question and making it seem entirely appropriate and not at all impertinent.

‘Just a friend — of friends of his. Marlow. Peter Marlow. I was with the Professor last night, with these friends, at a concert. I just wanted to check something. It’s not important.’

‘Well, wait a minute now: why not, goddammit?’ Pottinger said expansively. ‘The Professor plays a lovely piano.’ He moved towards the upright in the corner. ‘Why not stay and ask him? Check it out with him and maybe he’d play us something. I guess he knows as much about music as he does about Russian history,’ Pottinger said like an admiring juvenile. ‘What concert did you get to? I’ve been trying to take some music in ever since I got over, just bin’ too busy, I guess. Was it good — the Festival Hall …?’

Again, he asked this question with such natural enthusiasm that I replied at once, just as naturally.

‘No, the Wigmore Hall — a girl called Rachel Phillips. She plays the flute.’

‘Oh. Rachel Phillips?’ Pottinger said carefully, as if the name represented a piece of valuable china in his hands. ‘Phillips …’ he narrowed his eyes, lending a visual confirmation to his mental exercise. ‘Yes, now maybe I’ve heard of her. She’s good?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

At that moment a key grated in the door and the Professor walked in, carrying some books. He saw me at once and stopped dead, staring at me with considerable annoyance.

‘Forgive me,’ I said.

The Professor, carrying his load under one arm, sidled across the room, quite fast, like a crab. Then he dumped the books down on the little Bosnian table so that the brass top jumped and clattered.

‘I just dropped round,’ I said. ‘Madeleine called you earlier but you were out. We thought you might be able to help over something. But some other time: it’s the wrong moment.’

‘Indeed it is — to say the least,’ the Professor said, spitting through his whiskers. He was breathing heavily, clearly put out, glaring at me with his little blue eyes like a fighting cock. He had seemed so much a wraith-like, ineffective figure the previous night. But now there was a ragged, dangerous edge to him, as if some nasty alarm had gone off in his soul during the night.

‘I’ll give you another call, if I may. Or Madeleine will,’ I said, moving towards the door.

‘Yes, that would be more appropriate. Though I can’t think how —’ He was obviously going to finish this sentence with ‘— how I can help you.’ But he stopped half-way through, abandoning the thought ruthlessly, and it was just then I happened to look over at Pottinger, standing by the piano. His face was set, quite still, like an eavesdropper’s — as though he, more than I, had been anxious to hear the end of the Professor’s sentence. But at once he came back into vast good humour. ‘Well — now don’t mind me! I can wait — I can come back.’ He was so anxious to help I was sorry to disappoint him.

‘No, no — not at all. Nice to have met you and my apologies.’ I left the two men standing rather uneasily together, closing the door sharply. After I’d done so, I saw that the Professor had left his latchkey outside in the lock. So, without knocking, I opened the door again with the key, to give it back to him. Pottinger was standing much closer to the Professor now, one hand partly raised, half-way through some sentence. His easy charm had faded quickly and he seemed intent on something rather serious at that moment. I thought at the time that he had been about to embark on some abstruse historical point in his thesis.

Now I wonder if he wasn’t talking about something very much in the present — the journey which we learnt 24 hours later the Professor had taken, leaving London that same afternoon for the Continent.

‘He’s gone for a holiday,’ the solid Irishwoman told Madeleine on the phone the next morning — while I was listening on an extension. ‘Ah, an’ sure God love him, isn’t that the way with him? — never knowing what he’s doing from one minute to the next. Well, he just upped and packed his traps after lunch and took off for Heathrow.’

‘Where to?’ Madeleine had asked.

‘Amsterdam,’ the Irish woman said confidently, as if she knew that city intimately. ‘He said he was going to look at the flowers there. The tulips, he said.’

‘Did he say when he was coming back — or where he was staying?’

‘At the end of the week he thought — but he’d be moving around a bit, he said.’

I’d looked at Madeleine afterwards. ‘Was he interested in flowers?’

‘No. Not that I knew of.’

But that was the following morning, when the bird had flown. Before then several other matters had cropped up. Immediately after I’d left the Professor’s flat something worried me — I couldn’t quite place it, but I was uneasy. So, having walked away from Rugby Street, I doubled back, first down to Theobald’s Road, then up John Street, turning left half-way and along to where I knew I’d hit the pub opposite the Professor’s house, The Rising Sun. I knew the area fairly well in any case — my old office in the glass house beyond Gray’s Inn was only a few minutes walk away. The pub was on a corner. The public bar entrance was hidden from the Professor’s view but the lounge windows, round the other side of the corner room, gave directly out onto his street and I could see his doorway even standing back at the bar with a weak beer in my hand.

What was it about Pottinger? — or rather about his association with Allcock — an amalgam which had produced such an uneasy atmosphere. Was it simply my presence? I thought not. Singly, both men — the Professor the previous evening and Pottinger alone with me — had both rung true. But together they set off some alarm in me. They seemed to know each other rather better than they pretended, like adulterous lovers avoiding each other’s gaze in the presence of a spouse: that was what worried me. And I remembered Pottinger’s half-raised hand when I’d surprised them a second time — facing the Professor with a look close to the dictatorial, or at least not with the expected expression of a respectful student.

Before I’d taken a second mouthful of the warm beer it struck me that Pottinger might be with the CIA — or at least hovering somewhere in that line of country — and there was one way, possibly, to find out: to follow him, rather clumsily, when he came out and see how successfully, if at all, he tried to break the trail.

Well, the surprising thing was when he did emerge, more than half an hour later, and I followed him rather clumsily up Great Ormond Street, across Russell Square, and towards the British Museum, he didn’t try to break at all, though several times I’m sure he must have seen me, turning to look back at a zebra crossing or seeing my reflection in shop windows which he stopped and gazed into once or twice. He must have seen me, yet he ambled along like a lot of other tourists in the area enjoying the sun that morning.

And then suddenly he disappeared — at a point where it seemed impossible for him to do so — as if some huge hand had scooped him up while my back was turned for a second. He’d been looking into the window of the joke and games shop just opposite the British Museum gates, while I’d been on the other side of the street, my head turned up towards a poster on the BM railings for a few seconds. But when I looked across the road again the candy-striped suit had vanished. He wasn’t in the joke shop, filled with half a dozen children making monkeys out of themselves with hideous papier mâché masks, and he wasn’t in the Museum Tavern next door, fairly empty at that time; he certainly hadn’t crossed the road towards the Museum gates and he was nowhere down the street opposite. There was nothing I could do then, except admire his skill — or his luck perhaps, for I supposed at the time that he might have escaped me purely by chance, a thought which I tended to dismiss next morning when I learnt of the Professor’s departure.

It seemed just possible then that Pottinger had come to warn Allcock of something and that I had set them both out of joint by my unexpected appearance at their rendezvous. But to warn him of what? And then I saw that it could well have been me: that the warning had only begun with my arrival there, and my speaking to Pottinger — for hadn’t I told him that I’d come to ask the Professor something, to consult him over some point that had cropped up the previous night at a concert — a concert of Rachel Phillips’s, as I’d told him too. And my query? — what had the Professor meant by saying that Lindsay Phillips had gone back to Russia?

If I was right, then Pottinger had some previous interest in Lindsay — while the Professor had some knowledge of him sufficiently damaging to warrant his immediate exit from the country, thus avoiding any more awkward questions about him, either from me or, more awkwardly still, from the Special Branch.

In sum, the two men could, indeed, have some far more intimate connection than had originally been apparent and their subsequent purposes together had been such as to deny me some crucial knowledge of Lindsay.

I had no proof of course. The Professor might have been no more than an old fantasist, with schoolboy dreams of derring-do, in his theories about Lindsay’s disappearance — while Pottinger could well be exactly what he said he was. And was there anything necessarily strange in the Professor’s taking a spring holiday at short notice? So I told Madeleine nothing of my suspicions after she’d finished talking to the Irishwoman.

Nonetheless, for the first time, entirely through my eyes and efforts, without recourse to the curious and conflicting evidence on Lindsay’s past from Marcus and Fielding, I had stumbled on a much stranger glimpse of the man, quite different from their stark political antitheses, and light-years away from the loving and honourable vision which Madeleine and Rachel cherished of him: was Lindsay possibly a deep-cover KGB officer? A mole buried at the heart of British Intelligence for far longer than Philby or any of the others had been, with the Professor, given his long-standing Soviet connections, falling naturally into the role of confidant and possible recruiter while Pottinger, with equal ease, took on the part of Lindsay’s KGB control.

I could have tried to check these ideas out there and then through Fielding and one of the counter-espionage sections. But I didn’t. If they were true I wanted to protect Madeleine and Rachel from their implications until I found out for myself, quite certainly, that they were true. For if they turned out to be false I should have set up a cloud over Lindsay’s reputation difficult ever to erase — since how, with absolute certainty, could one ever prove them false? One could only prove them true in this way, with the Professor cropping up in Moscow six months later, or by Pottinger’s own admissions at the hands of some brutal or skilful interrogator. So I let the matter lie.

At the same time these suspicions subtly altered the previous bias of my search for Lindsay. From that morning on everything I remembered or found out about his life I had to put not only against my firm image of him as a totally honourable man, but also against this seemingly impossible proposal that he was a traitor. I was looking for two men, I thought for a moment, before realising that only one had disappeared. But which one, then?

7

Every individual life is a marvellous excess of lyric and tragic information — while a family together creates an even more profligate history, a huge unrecorded folklore of ancient intimacies, passions, truths, lies, hatreds — which have all sunk in time, like the debris of a lost civilisation, buried layer upon layer in the years they have lived through. Even an old and close friend has little hope of properly gauging the real weight of their various previous associations, of sharing their visions, or finding reasons for their particular choices and antagonisms.

He may, with luck or patience, clearly isolate certain special moments in those lives — colourful occasions, times of distress, or even a precise incident from an afternoon long ago which can be made to rise clear of time and live again like a song. Or he may stumble upon a great flaw in the puzzle, an appalling error in what seems at first to be a different jig-saw altogether, the shards of another and quite barbarous civilisation. He may, then, attempt to fit these conflicting pieces of life together, fragments of the mosaic. But who, without extreme intuition or some quite visionary effort, will ever uncover either the right picture or the whole picture?

Even a man’s wife, I thought, looking across at Madeleine in the drawing room, who has specially loved him, may be the most deceived — a woman who has shared more than anybody else with him yet may be least privy to his secrets; for if we lie, and we will, it is to those we are closest to that we must lie most completely.

It was clear to me then, as I looked at that kind and vulnerable face across the room, that my continued researches into Lindsay’s life might bring a renewed pain into it — and that unless, through some lucky inspiration, I could summon up the whole man, the unrelated, incidental details of his life which I might unearth could create a horror for her as deep as his loss had done.

I said to Madeleine, thinking of this, ‘How much did you really know about Lindsay’s work?’

‘Oh, enough. Quite a lot, in some things,’ she replied at once. ‘I wasn’t one of those golf widows in the Intelligence service, numskulls who have to be made to believe their husbands work in the Coal Board. I knew from the very beginning what he was doing, and latterly that it was important work.’

‘But the details, I mean?’

‘Well, not all of them, obviously. But again, some details, though perhaps not all the important ones. I knew the moment he became deputy chief of the old Soviet Section, Section Nine, after the Philby fracas — that was in the mid-fifties — and that ten years later, when Stevenson retired, he took over from him as head of it.’

‘He told you all these things?’

‘Of course. And other things, too: office politics mostly: personalities — who was trying to push who, that sort of thing. But he didn’t chatter about any of his actual intelligence plans, if that’s what you mean, naturally.’

Madeleine, over by the fireplace, replacing some ornaments on the mantelpiece from the party two nights before, turned and looked at me, a touch of anger suddenly running through her face.

‘Are you trying to say that he kept something important back from me?’

‘No,’ I stalled.

‘Well, he very probably did. A lot of important things.’ Madeleine ran on now, not looking for a precise answer to her original point. ‘And why not? I was never to be officially informed about his work. He told me what he thought he could, or what might be of joint interest, or about something, as I say, in the way of office politics that was frustrating him. You know the sort of things. But I didn’t have all his plans.’

‘Yes. I see that. It was perfectly natural.’

‘Then what are you getting at?’ She walked across the first-floor drawing-room and looked out into the square, the big plane tree right opposite the house already come into sharp green leaf, its branches trailing over the portico against the deep blue sky.

‘Simply, if I’m to help any, I’m going to have to go back through a lot of his life, I think.’

She turned decisively, smiling as if regretting her earlier anger and as though she had never suggested that Lindsay had ever kept one particular thing back from her. ‘Yes, I see that. I’ve been doing that myself too — and I’m very on to help you. The people from his office were doing the same thing with me, talking to me, going through some of his papers. But we didn’t really get anywhere: we dragged through his papers just as we dragged through the loch.’ Madeleine sighed and looked back into the square. ‘I’ve gone through our life together, too, by myself: you know, trying to think of something in the past that might have led to this.’ she paused.

‘And?’ I said after along moment.

‘Well — and nothing,’ she said simply. ‘We were very happy. We, that is.’

‘Yes. Of course there was Eleanor.’

Madeleine faced me again. ‘Yes, there was, and I thought of that. And certainly he talked a lot about her after it all happened, before we married, naturally: it was a frightful business — married to someone, seeing her disintegrate in front of you, getting madder day by day, poor woman, and then killing herself in Zagreb that day — well, that nearly killed him afterwards. But that was forty years ago, I keep telling myself.’

Madeleine looked through me now, her focus lost, quite caught up in those terrible events in Lindsay’s life so long before, which I knew barely anything about. ‘Then there was Patrick, too,’ she said with an effort. ‘I’ve thought about that as well — thirty years ago. That was as bad — to have a wife and then a son go. And I’ve wondered if Lindsay might have suffered some sort of delayed reaction to these things: some kind of — of, oh I don’t quite know: some kind of brainstorm. I spoke to Hunter — Gavin Hunter — the service analyst about this and he thought, well, he thought it might just be possible. But very unlikely.’

‘What?’

‘That Lindsay might have killed himself — a long-delayed reaction: some guilt about these deaths that he’d repressed. Though God knows I don’t think there was anything, possibly, he could have done about either of them Eleanor was that way, in any case. And Patrick went so quickly. It’s true, it was just at the end of the war, early in 1945, and we couldn’t get in touch with him — he was somewhere in Austria rounding up a lot of fascist Yugoslavs, and he didn’t find out about Patrick’s death till a week after it had happened. But that wasn’t his fault: I was the one who felt the guilt: I was responsible for Patrick after all. I was looking after him.’

She didn’t turn back from the window and I knew she must be feeling quite awful at that moment. I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t turn; she was crying, I thought.

‘Yes,’ said. ‘I understand. But it isn’t all a vale of tears. Believe me.’ I didn’t believe that myself just then, but I had to say it. Lindsay’s life at that moment — and Madeleine’s too — suddenly seemed like one of the saddest stories ever told.

‘You see, the trouble for me,’ I said, ‘is where do I begin — with Lindsay’s life? I only came to know him in any adult way in the mid-fifties. Before that he was just a distant, miraculous uncle to me, that I saw now and then during the war — in a smart uniform at Perth Station, or skating on the loch that Christmas morning it iced over, and reading the lesson later like God, and giving us half-crowns wrapped up in silver paper afterwards — then disappearing the next day with Henty in a pony and trap back to the war again. There’s a whole huge life about him which I never touched. I only really knew a child’s version of him.’

Madeleine turned from the window. I had moved away and given her time to recover, I think, with these memories of Lindsay, for her face had cleared again now.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see that. But why — to find him — must you know all that life? I don’t quite see. I’m willing to help, but I don’t —’

‘I don’t quite know either, now I think about it. Except what else is there that the police and the others haven’t tried? One has to take some new approach.’

‘I see that, but Peter, if you think his disappearance was to do with his work, why bother so much with his personal affairs? Why not talk to his colleagues?’

‘Because they wouldn’t talk to me. For most of them I’m no more than a traitor, never properly cleared for that Egyptian business ten years ago. But the other point was this: I think he may have had some “brainstorm” as you put it, that Hunter might be right — and that’s why he suddenly went: a breakdown, not necessarily for personal reasons, though these may have helped. The pressures of this kind of clandestine work over, how many? — thirty, forty years — impose tremendous strains, which you have to keep on and on and on bottling up. Well, one day the whole thing can just break wide open.’

‘Yes, I can see that —’

‘Especially if you have no other outlet.’

‘But that’s the whole point,’ Madeleine broke in. ‘Lindsay had an outlet: his bees. He was with them whenever he got the slightest chance. Oh, I know what you mean, in his world, stuck in London, away from me, people can often take to drink or women, I realise that. But Lindsay didn’t: he had his bees,’ she said vehemently, coming towards me, wringing her hands for emphasis. ‘They were everything to him — that, and the honey farm generally.’

‘Yes,’ I said, opening the lid of the little gold-plated music box without thinking, so that a military tune — ‘The Dashing White Sergeant’, I think — suddenly sprang up into the warm room, startling us both.

‘Yes, his bees,’ I said, closing the lid after a moment, and we paused and I thought about Lindsay’s bees — the many annual rituals I’d seen him go through with them as a child: stalking round the hives to begin with, in the spring, with Billy, his bee manager, the two of them dressed like sinister divers, I’d thought then, dressed in thick overalls and black veils, as I watched them out on the Oak Walk from the safety of the morning room window. And Lindsay, at the end of some other summer, in September just before I was packed back to the school I went to in North Wales — Lindsay, in a honey-smeared white apron, out in the dark bee rooms at the end of the yard that had been converted from the old coach house and stables, supervising the honey extraction, the precious pure heather honey that had to be squeezed out laboriously in a wax press, slowly turning down a large corkscrew at the top, while the thick white juice oozed out like toothpaste from the bottom.

Madeleine was right: Lindsay did indeed have his bees. And I was reminded then that it had been in the middle of tending them that he had disappeared. I mentioned this to Madeleine.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve wondered about that too — why he went just then.’

‘Well, that’s what I mean about the personal things in his life. His bees, for example, that’s not something the police would have looked into.’

Suddenly I was faced with the enormity of Lindsay’s disappearance right under his wife’s nose, on a fine day in spring, in the middle of what he was happiest at. It seemed, if he knew what he was doing, that he had done something extraordinarily cruel towards his wife by choosing just that moment to get out of her life. Yet this idea was so out of character with the man that I was forced to think of other reasons — that he had indeed been kidnapped or lost his memory. But here too I was confronted by the entirely unlikely when I remembered him — the last person to suffer any mental vagaries, and the circumstances at Glenalyth the least propitious in which to kidnap him.

But why, in any case, the bees? Did they have any special relevance? Why choose that moment, so intimate, so domestic, to disappear from life? The more I thought about it all, the fewer answers occurred to me. And yet, there was an answer, I knew, some definite reason for it all, and Madeleine must have been having rather the same kind of thought at just that moment for she said to me: ‘You know, on a quite objective level — as if all this had happened to somebody else — I’m quite appalled by the hideous lack of any logic to any of it. If he’d disappeared overseas or in London or at a hundred and one other moments in his life I could have understood it: he worked in that kind of world after all, where — where such things happen to people. But at Glenalyth, at home, on his own doorstep …’ She shook her head. ‘It’s as if some huge hand had come down from the sky and picked him up while my back was turned.’

I thought how just the same thing seemed to have happened to Pottinger opposite the British Museum. Yet there must be reasons there again, I reminded myself: some trick of light, perhaps, in Pottinger’s case, or the fact that he’d run for a taxi while I wasn’t looking. ‘You have a great need to know, don’t you?’ Fielding had said to me in the hotel.

But suddenly I felt now that I didn’t want to know about Lindsay at all: that my re-creation of his soul was surely not my business — that it was a matter inviolate and private to him or lay in the hands of some God. I saw my attempts at omniscience as a dangerous impertinence, for what should I know of a world where people were scooped up by huge hands? It lay outside my normal competence, surely, to arrive at any fair bill about his life. And why should I expect any inspired luck in re-creating the whole of him? If there was a reason for everything there was, too, a reason why some things were better left unsaid. And perhaps this was so in Lindsay’s case. For as Madelaine had pointed out, his disappearance was so inexplicable that it suggested the agency of some malign power which we might do better not to bring to light.

On the other hand, it was clear — if such thoughts even crossed her mind — that Madeleine was determined on the journey. It was her nature to think the best of people and she had obviously never thought a fraction less than this of her husband. She looked at me now, with one of her forceful, bright crusader looks: ‘You know, Peter, I think if he is to be found you’re the person who’ll do it. I feel that and I think you’re probably right: the reasons are in his past somewhere, if we can only put our hands on them. And I think you may do that — you who knew him, liked him, had a special sympathy with him: I think you can.’

I thought how closely her words paralleled with Basil Fielding’s: how he had said she would come to me, of her own accord, asking my help, since I was an old friend, a dear friend: and one told things to friends that one didn’t tell policemen. Yet I was a policeman, too, of a sort, and she didn’t know that. Already I had betrayed her in a mild way — ways which are inevitable sickness in the world Lindsay and I had worked in, but which can become a general plague so that the truth dies everywhere before the game is finished. Yet Madeleine had made it impossible for me to back out: I was, indeed, close to her now and committed to her cause, an old friendship rekindled between us in the warmth of that early summer morning in the gracious drawing room: a friend with a shadow, though, which she couldn’t see and which I would not admit to her.

‘I hope you’re right,’ I said.

‘I’m sure,’ she replied with feeling.

We heard Rachel clattering down from upstairs just then.

‘Oh God — Oh Montreal,’ she said, bursting into the room. ‘It’s nearly eleven and I’m supposed to meet George and Max — My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me — where, oh where is my music case?’

‘In the hall — if it’s not upstairs.’

‘Yes, it must be. But it never is.’

Then Rachel stopped charging round the room and said hello to me.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re back again. Good. What’s been happening?’

‘Brian has upped and gone off on a holiday suddenly,’ Madeleine said.

‘So?’ Rachel asked.

‘Well, you know he said to Peter about Lindsay’s going back to the Russians —’

‘But that’s just a nonsense,’ Rachel interrupted. ‘You know that. Brian is an old fool in his dotage. He’d tell you pigs could fly if he thought you’d like to hear it.’

‘Yes. But this wasn’t something we wanted to hear.’

‘Oh God.’ Rachel sighed with elaborate exaggeration. ‘What on earth would Daddy want to go back to the Russians for? Just because he was in Intelligence and because of what happened to Philby and all those other wretches, you think it must have happened to him, that he was a KGB man or something. But Good Christ,’ she said vehemently, ‘you must know that most of the people in British Intelligence — the vast majority — are not double agents or KGB men. And Daddy certainly wasn’t. Now — my music case.’ Then she stopped and looked at me. ‘Hey!’ she said, ‘Come with me — we’ve hardly said a word to each other: come and bike with me and meet the others?’

‘Bike?’

‘Yes, you can use Mummy’s — can’t he?’

I’d not seen much of Rachel in the past 36 hours — she’d been upstairs a lot of the time — sleeping or recovering in some other way from her birthday evening. But now she seemed to be dancing into life again, in a neat pair of blue cotton trousers, and a long-collared white shirt. She looked summery fresh, while I felt like a decaying tailor’s dummy.

‘I should be getting back home,’ I said. ‘I need a change of clothes.’

‘Later, later,’ Rachel chanted. Then she paused in her skipping about and looked at me down her long straight nose. ‘You are still going to help us — are you? And come to Glenalyth next week — and not go on about old Brian Allcock?’

Madeleine had opened the bottom of the long sash window and a breath of warm air fluttered into the high room. Pigeons warbled deep in the green-leafed plane trees and a mower hummed over the grass in the square. Both women looked at me now.

‘Yes,’ I said, not knowing where to begin helping them, or how.

Madeleine broke the silence. ‘Peter said it was a matter of going back through Lindsay’s life, of looking through his papers.’

‘Maybe,’ Rachel said before adding impatiently, ‘Maybe. But we have to live, too — meanwhile.’

I thought at the time that she was trying to leave the thrall of her father behind her with these words, as she had been in her comments about the Professor. But now I see that she meant it was necessary, for her at least, to live towards the mysterious place where she believed he had hidden himself. Where I would have to go back in time to discover him, she, who knew him so well in all that past, was sure he could only lie ahead of her.

‘Come on,’ she said quickly. ‘The bikes are in the back hall — and I must have left my music there as well — in the carrier basket.’

A great contentment broke through me as we started off on our bicycles: that ease with another person that rarely comes, when one is with them, without having to speak, and yet is perfectly joined to them, without words.

I tried to think when I had last been happy in this way with Rachel as we rode out of the square in the sunshine. The end of our time together, before I’d gone to Egypt and married Bridget in the mid-fifties, had been largely acrimonious.

It was more than 20 years, I decided, since anything remotely enjoyable had happened between us — and I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that our real lives together, when we had been truly engaged with each other, had only existed in our childhood and adolescence, before we had set ourselves up alone outside our families.

There was, in short, something deeply self-indulgent in both of us which had wrecked our adult relationship, but which had made our earlier years together at Glenalyth, where our securities were guaranteed by others, a great success. There in the Highlands we had played games — not tag or tennis, but more often a quite vicious sport of the mind, the sort of intentional mental anatagonisms that are so roundly condemned now in the arid new ‘interpersonal’ psychology, but which for us then were filled with perfect excitement: games truly defined since, with certainty, one of us would lose, the other win. We were filled with each other, for better — or, more often — worse.

But now in what way did we impinge on the world, I wondered? — if we did so at all, for the world is rarely bothered by two people on bicycles rolling through a big city on a warm morning.

8

‘Did you see the two of them skipping about on those bloody bikes like lovers,’ the young Special Branch detective said. ‘I thought we were going to run them down several times.’ The unmarked police car, which had been following some way behind the two cyclists since they had left Hyde Park Square, drove past the coffee shop now and on down Wigmore Street until it came to a halt just before John Bell & Croyden’s chemists. The plain-clothes man next the driver got out onto the pavement before leaning back into the car and taking a copy of the Express from the glove compartment.

‘Back you go then,’ his colleague told him brightly. ‘And don’t eat too many Danish pastries. I’ll let them know where you are.’

‘You do that,’ the other man remarked sourly. ‘And remember — I’m supposed to be off at one o’clock. So get the next crew up here at once, okay? I don’t want to be chasing after this lot till midnight on my own.’

The driver nodded before closing the door and picking up the radio mike from beneath the dashboard. Then he called from the window: ‘Don’t worry, Jack. They’ll probably go on for lunch at the Ritz — so you can do your trench coat act with the head waiter there. And don’t forget to put it all down. Remember what they said: “No expenses spared” — there’s a fit on with these two, God knows why. They don’t look like villains to me.’

The plainclothes man wandered back up Wigmore Street, shuffling his hands through his coat pockets, like a disgruntled provincial up in town for the day, while the driver gave his call sign to headquarters and then the present location of the two cyclists: ‘Yes, the coffee shop — “Miranda’s” or something, corner of Duke and Wigmore Streets — you can’t miss it … Yes, only Jack’s with them now … and listen, he wants a replacement up here as soon as possible …’

Marcus gazed thinly out at the bright summer sky over St James’s Park. A telephone rang on his broad uncluttered desk and he turned.

‘Well?’ he said looking across at Basil Fielding, before picking the phone up. ‘Yes.’ he said, and the Special Branch man the other end gave him details of the present whereabouts of the two cyclists. ‘Thank you — fine. Keep with them and let me know any changes.’

‘Well,’ Fielding said, repeating the word gently, sitting opposite Marcus in a red leather chair, looking grubby but not intimidated. ‘I accept your point, naturally: I work for your department, not the Prime Minister —’

‘One might even say you worked for me, Fielding. Might one not?’ Marcus looked at Basil with acid care.

‘Of course. Though it’s fair to point out, perhaps, that we all work for the PM, since he is nominally head of Intelligence services in this country. So to that extent my dealings with him were not, technically, any contravention of my contract with you.’

‘Hair-splitting, Fielding, And non-existent hair, too. You can perfectly well see you cannot serve two masters in this matter. You must abide by the orders of those who have executive control over you, not nominal control. Fact is — and let me repeat it: for a variety of reasons we do not wish Phillips found — and if the PM wishes otherwise —’

‘As he most certainly does —’

‘Then he must employ you personally in the matter.’

‘Sir, that with respect is ridiculous: the PM has given you direct orders in the matter of Phillips; my orders from him have been entirely indirect, mere confirmation of an action he supposes you are vigorously proceeding with.’

‘He has indeed, Fielding. But we do not invariably follow such orders — not to the letter, at least, which is what you are doing. We only go through the motions on some occasions, and this is one of them. You, on the other hand, are definitely taking your coat off in this matter. And that we don’t want —’

‘I might find him?’

‘Marlow might find him. He has an awful knack that way. Amateurs often have. He found us the names of half the KGB men over here a few years back. As you know, I stopped your cash advance to Marlow yesterday. I wish now to have him stopped — from any further meddling.’

Fielding looked at Marcus, smiling wanly now — the sudden smile of an unexpected winner, a punter who has just seen his money romp home on a rank outsider. ‘I’m sure you know, as I do — from your own meeting with Marlow — that he intends to help the Phillips family in any case, whether we like it or not.’

Marcus gripped the edge of the blotter in front of him. ‘My meeting with Marlow?’

Fielding nodded and Marcus didn’t pursue the denial he had in mind. He relaxed his grip on the paper. ‘So Marlow told you?’

‘No, as a matter of fact. I happened to drop into the club myself that lunchtime — when you met him. I saw you both at the bar.’

‘What?’ Marcus began to rise and fill out like a balloon.

‘Yes. I was in the coffee room — glanced through the doorway. And there the two of you were. Oh, I’m a member,’ Fielding went on by way of easy explanation. ‘But if I may continue: I can’t see how we can now prevent Marlow, in his private capacity, from helping the family. He’s obviously doing just that already.’

Marcus drummed his chubby fingers on the table top for an instant, a brief little drum roll, as though to herald some surprising and decisive action. ‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Marlow hasn’t begun to pick up any real threads. And that’s what I want from you now, Fielding: a firm commitment to stop him before he does. And unless I have that from you, well, your days will be numbered in the House of the Lord. I want you to make it your personal business from now on to stop him.’

Fielding looked into his lap, his hands cupped over his crotch, head to one side — a crucified figure suddenly, midway along a via dolorosa. ‘I have no alternative, do I?’ he said meekly, putting a finger to the knot of his grubby regimental tie.

‘And keep clear of the PM while you’re at it,’ Marcus added tartly.

‘Right.’ Fielding stood up. ‘Right, I’ll do my best to dissuade Marlow.’ He paused and then said offhandedly. ‘There’s really only one point. Why is Phillips not to be found? I don’t think I quite follow that.’

Marcus looked at him maliciously. ‘When were you last given a positive vetting, Fielding?’

‘Oh, four, nearly five years ago.’

‘Time you had another session then. Keep you out of any more mischief. I’ll make arrangements with the security people. And don’t worry about Marlow. I’ll have someone else attend to him. All right?’

‘Very well,’ Fielding said before turning and sloping out of the room like an underfed stable boy. But once outside in the corridor he hummed a jaunty little tune to himself, a smile touching his haggard face. ‘Every dog has his day,’ he said, half-aloud, as he stopped by the lifts and pressed a button for the ground floor.

An hour later Marcus was seated opposite the Prime Minister in the cabinet room of 10 Downing Street. On either side, along the middle of the broad table, strategically placed both in opposition and in a careful order of their own hierarchies, were a dozen other sharp-faced men, both military and civilian, dressed for the sober occasion in careful suits and uniforms — though without the new air-conditioning system, which still had not been made to function properly, the room was hot and oppressive in the bright sunshine which streamed through the long windows from the rose garden at the back of the building. Motes of dust rose from the carpet as a heavy woman, one of the Prime Minister’s personal secretaries, clumped across the room pushing a trolley of coffee and biscuits.

This meeting of the inner cabinet together with all the Security and Intelligence Chiefs had lasted for more than half an hour already. The Minister for Defence, next the PM, coughed once more — a harsh dry hack of a cough, a recalcitrant tickle in the bottom of his throat that had defied every lozenge and beaten back each breathy attack which he had made upon it since the meeting had begun.

‘I’m sorry — it’s the dust.’

The PM accepted a cup of coffee, then turned to the Secretary of the Cabinet seated two places away from him on his left, the vacant place between them kept for the Foreign Secretary who had not managed to turn up, his flight back from Rhodesia delayed by a sandstorm at Cairo airport. ‘When will they do something about the air conditioning?’ he asked the Cabinet Secretary.

‘When the service engineers’ pay demands are met,’ the older man replied.

‘Surely we can fix it ourselves?’

‘Do you mean you — or I, Prime Minister? Or both of us?’

The PM turned away and sipped his coffee. He looked towards the opposition on the other side of the table then — gazed at them, he hoped, with unconcealed distaste.

There was Marcus, deputy head of DI6, whom he had trusted completely and now doubted, and next to him, Lindsay Phillips’s replacement as head of Section Nine, a man he didn’t know at all, a young fellow from the north country called Jackson with an unpleasant Border accent, and beyond him Sir Alan Maynard who ran domestic security at DI5: and then Simon Bryant — another youngster, the PM thought — currently in charge of SIS’s Counter-Espionage section. They were all so young, the PM reminded himself once more — young men given their chance of rapid promotion through the appalling mistakes of their seniors during the past 15 years, yet who now themselves had apparently allowed the unpardonable to happen.

The PM put aside his cup and looked again at his memoranda. Then, with a last tired glance around the room for silence, he commenced his performance again.

‘I take it, then, that we none of us now are really in any doubt at all that Phillips is — or was — a major Soviet agent. And has been since the beginning of his career with the Diplomatic Service in the early thirties?’

No one dissented. A pin could have dropped.

‘Bryant,’ the PM said roughly, ‘I think you, if anyone, had doubts?’

‘Not after Petnicki’s depositions, I suppose, Prime Minister. I had doubts simply because I could not see how Phillips could have possibly survived so long: as I said before — over forty years, it’s a long time. Half a dozen other Soviet or East European defectors have come and gone with information about doubles in our services meanwhile. Krevitsky, just before the war, for example, and Volkov in Ankara in 1948, who originally put us onto Burgess and MacLean — as well as Philby. And other sources, too. But none of them mentioned Phillips.’

‘Or rather,’ the PM interjected, ‘as you put it in your notes to me, one of them — surely Krevitsky at least — did spot Phillips. And we thought it was MacLean. There were, in fact, two “upper-class, well-educated Scotsmen in the FO” who were Soviet agents — not one, as Krevitsky had thought. Isn’t that it?’

‘Yes, sir. Though of course all that was long before —’

‘Yes, Bryant, long before your time. I can see that.’ The PM glared at Marcus. ‘And before yours too, David,’ he added. ‘The fact is, once we found out about MacLean we didn’t bother about any more well-bred intellectual Scots traitors.’ Again the PM looked pointedly at Marcus. ‘What is it about the Scots, David, that they should continue to be such devious thorns in our flesh?’

Marcus was very cool. ‘I hardly think such nationalistic innuendo is called for —’

The PM held up an arm. ‘No, no, of course not. It was beneath me. My apologies.’ But he didn’t mean a word of the apology.

‘So we may confirm that point,’ the PM went on. ‘Phillips, more than Philby or any of the others, must have caused the real damage — to what exact extent it’s impossible as yet to estimate — if it ever is. But put in the simplest terms: as far as Moscow was concerned Phillips took over where Philby left off — to the extent, even, of actually taking over Philby’s old Soviet department, Section Nine. Which means that almost everything we’ve run against the Soviets after, as well as before, 1952 — up until about three months ago, in fact — has been run as a minus factor against us. Now what our allies are going to ask is how was it possible —’ The PM paused, genuinely amazed, ‘How was it conceivably possible for us to appoint another Soviet agent, to replace Philby in his own section? How — more or less certain then, as we were, that Philby was a traitor — how could we have immediately promoted another in his place? You’ll agree, it looks worse than carelessness. Finally, of course, since at the time we combed right through that left-wing Cambridge generation in all our SIS staff — how could we possibly have failed to spot Phillips?’

Marcus answered very promptly, as though waiting a prearranged cue. ‘The answer is simple: MacLean, Burgess, Philby, they were all Cambridge men. But Phillips had no connection with them whatsoever. He was up at Oxford. And his communist associations there — so far as we can tell — were non-existent.

‘But so it was with Philby,’ the PM broke in. ‘He was never a card-carrying member at Cambridge.’

Marcus blinked his eyes rapidly several times, as though literally unable to believe in the Prime Minister’s existence just at that moment. ‘The real issue,’ he said slowly, wishing to labour the point, ‘was that Phillips was checked out in every possible way after the Philby business. And several times — three times in fact — since then: an absolutely clean bill each time: you have his security clearance sheets as an appendix to my report in front of you, sir.’

The PM glanced down at his papers, fingering through them, but without really looking at them, for he knew exactly what his reply would be: he had been waiting for Marcus to give him the opportunity to make it. ‘Yes, I note your appendices. Interestingly enough —’ he looked up, closing the file in front of him, ‘Interestingly enough, of course, I note that you — you personally, David — were the last person to give Phillips a positive vetting in 1970. And as you say yourself: an absolutely clean bill of health.’

As the PM intended, a silence seemed to grow all over the room, spreading like a malign fungus. But Marcus was quite unworried by it. He looked detached, frustrated, annoyed even.

‘I did indeed,’ Marcus said at last, as if he had willingly connived in the long silence, not in the least put out by its implications. ‘Prime Minister,’ he said suddenly, leaning forward, confronting the man opposite him like a bank manager dealing with a bad overdraft, ‘A Soviet agent — if such Phillips is — placed in British Intelligence from the very beginning, a man without definable left-wing connections then, will — unless he makes a mistake or there is some quite fortuitous luck involved — be impossible to detect subsequently: that’s the nature of the game in a democracy such as ours. Phillips made no mistakes, and we had no luck with him, until this Yugoslav defector, Petnicki, arrived over here. Even then, apart from what Petnicki actually told us, there was nothing in Phillips’s record, when we went right through it, to confirm Petnicki’s statements about him —’

‘Nothing, David? Nothing, that is, apart from NATO’s new contingency plans in the event of a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia. Only Phillips — apart from yourself, the Minister for Defence and myself — was privy to those plans. “Nothing” was quite a lot, wasn’t it? And I have to explain what you call “nothing” on Friday morning to the American Secretary of State and General Haig.’

‘I see several ways round your dilemma, sir,’ Marcus said coolly. ‘You may surely say to the Americans — since Phillips has not yet turned up anywhere — that these plans may have leaked from NATO headquarters itself, or from the French, for example,’ he added with a smile. ‘We don’t, in fact — apart from Petnicki’s word — have as yet any incontrovertible evidence that Phillips actually passed these plans over to the Russians; nor do we have any absolutely firm evidence that Phillips was a Soviet agent. We merely hold strong suspicions, largely based on his sudden disappearance, once he knew of Petnicki’s arrival here.’

The PM’s response was eminently self-righteous: ‘Surprising as it may seem to you, I have no intention of covering up in the way you suggest, David. Our allies will have the truth as I see it: they will be rightly appalled — once more — at the performance of our Intelligence services, as am I. But I trust they will keep quiet about it. It is you, David, who is in the hot seat. I and my government would probably survive such public admissions of failure: but not you. On the other hand, if Phillips were to be found either dead or alive, we might save something from the disaster: with Phillips safely accounted for, either on trial or as a corpse, the effects of this appalling bungling could be minimised. I suggest you do everything in your power — you and the other special services,’ the PM glanced at Marcus’s companions, ‘to try and find the man — which leads, gentlemen, to your final opinions of what you think has actually happened to this little Scotsman. Sir Alan?’ The PM looked over at the head of DI5.

Maynard was over-confident. ‘It’s my view that the man has gone over to Moscow, either with pre-arranged Soviet help on that Russian trawler that left from Aberdeen. Or that he left entirely on his own: off the cuff — crossed over to the continent, either by air on that Edinburgh-Paris flight the day after, where we have a rough identification from emigration control of a man like Phillips travelling without very much luggage: or else that he left later in the week, by any one of a dozen ways. I don’t hold with any suicide theory, or with any sudden loss of memory on his part: completely untypical of the man.’

Simon Bryant, the bouncy head of Counter-Espionage, immediately came in here, without being asked, his eyes bright with righteous enthusiasm.

‘I agree, sir. The dates in the whole matter seem to me to be conclusive: Petnicki came to us from the Yugoslav Embassy in Paris on 17th March. Now, naturally — since this came very much within Phillips’s province in his own Slavs and Soviets section — he was advised of Petnicki’s arrival here and of our impending interrogation of him. This had to be done — in case, for example, Petnicki had been some kind of a leg-man in one of Phillips’s circles in Yugoslavia. Yet outside our own counter-espionage section — and apart from Chief of Service, of course —’ Bryant glanced at Marcus, ‘only Phillips was notified.’ Bryant consulted his notes. ‘That was on the 16th — the day after a personal meeting between Phillips and my deputy, Anderson, where Phillips confirmed that Petnicki had no connection with any of our own overseas intelligence circles and there was no form on him anywhere within Section Nine: Petnicki was clean — he was “real”. That established, we proceeded with our interrogation and by the end of the week — on the 21st March — Phillips, who had gone up to Scotland for the weekend, disappeared. It was the day before — the 20th, a Saturday — that Petnicki first gave us a picture of this “Scotsman” in SIS who he said he knew was working for the Soviets in Yugoslavia: late Saturday night, in fact. It took us most of Sunday morning to get Central Registry on the ball — but by lunchtime that day we had narrowed it down to Phillips and two other Scotsmen, neither of whom had anything to do with Yugoslavia. As you know, we flew two men up to Perth on Sunday afternoon to question him —’

‘Yes, I know the rest,’ the PM said. ‘You were very quick, but not really quick enough. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how Phillips managed to get away or “disappear” about an hour before you arrived in Perth. One might almost think he’d been warned.’ The PM looked at Marcus.

Again Marcus was totally composed. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, almost a cheeky tone in his voice. ‘It’s possible. And there was — we know from his wife — a phone call which Phillips took that Sunday, after lunch. The telephone is at the end of the hall in their house. His wife was with him at the time — they were just going out to the garden together. She heard him say “You have the wrong number.” So, of course, that may have been a warning. But only “may”: we can’t be sure. We can’t, for example, be sure that the call came from London, which is where the warning would had to have come from, since the Phillips’s home number has been on a direct dialling system from London for over a year.’

‘You have it all so nicely balanced, David,’ the PM said. ‘“On the one hand: this. On the other: that. It could — and it couldn’t: it might — and it mightn’t.” Do you find it impossible to make your mind up in any way on this matter?’

‘I’m afraid that in the absence of any conclusive evidence I must take that approach, Prime Minister,’ Marcus replied brightly. ‘This whole matter of Phillips is very much a matter of balance as far as I’m concerned — which in itself is typical of most intelligence investigations such as this. It’s often, indeed, a matter of very fine balances.’ Marcus looked distantly at the PM. ‘Very fine indeed. If I may say so.’

‘Yes, I know all that, Marcus. I don’t want a thesis on the art of espionage: I want your opinion, simply, as to where this man is or what’s happened to him.’

‘I don’t know, Prime Minister. I truly don’t have a definite opinion: I can only offer you several alternatives.’

The PM sighed minutely. ‘Let us bear with them then.’

‘My first thought — and I take it first only because it’s the one all of you here seem most to favour — is that he has gone over to Moscow —’

‘Thank you, David. At last. And it follows then, doesn’t it, that Phillips was a major Soviet agent?’

‘That might follow. Though not necessarily major —’

‘We can dispense with the “not necessarilys”, I think. What then, if that is true? What’s the Soviet move? When is he likely to surface?’

‘With the others, Burgess and Philby, it took several years. They’ll wait for some suitable occasion when they can make useful propaganda out of it before they uncover him. Or they may use him as a confidential bargaining counter, held against some advantage Brezhnev wants from the West. And that could be any time: next week or next year —’

‘Splendid,’ the PM interjected. But this time it was Marcus who came very smartly back at him, holding up his hand like a traffic policeman. ‘If I may, Prime Minister. What I really have to say is this: we should continue to bear very much in mind my original point: we have as yet no absolutely conclusive evidence that he has gone over to Moscow. None of our sources over there, legal or illegal, have mentioned any rumours of him. And nor have the CIA. And he’s been gone over two months. Thus we must continue seriously to consider the other alternatives: that he is still over here, dead or alive: that, for example, realising we suspected his loyalty, he killed himself — drowned in that loch of his up there perhaps. And there is a third alternative, one which we’ve not properly considered at all: that realising we were on to him, he just upped and disappeared somewhere else, but not to the Soviet Union.’

‘Doubtful, isn’t it?’ the Defence Minister put in. ‘He took nothing with him — no luggage, passport, cash?’

Marcus allowed himself a minute pinched smile — a nasty grimace, it would have been, had it lasted more than a second. ‘Of course, Minister, he would have made detailed arrangements for such a move long beforehand.’ Marcus returned to the PM. ‘What I’m suggesting is that Phillips, rather than going over to Russia and a drab life in the Moscow suburbs, may have gone to South America or some such place where we don’t have any political extradition treaties — there to wait for his wife to join him, before starting afresh.’

‘Surely not,’ the old Secretary of the Cabinet put in, aghast, unable to restrain himself. ‘Surely, from what I know of him, he’d too much at stake at home in Scotland: his house, his family, his bees; an old family, after all. Very respected.’ He shook his head in righteous disbelief, ‘I really can’t see someone like Lindsay ending up in some banana republic. That stretches fantasy too far.’

‘They have bees in South America,’ Marcus put in deliberately. ‘And a lot of old and respected families out there, too, I understand. Phillips may not have seen Scotland and his distinguished ancestry as the be-all and end-all, you know — especially if he was a life-long Communist, as must follow from your initial scenario that he was a Soviet agent.’

‘I think we’ve had enough of these disputatious theories, David. Though am I to gather from what you’ve just said that you now doubt that Phillips is a Soviet agent? I thought we were all agreed on that?’ The PM gazed at Marcus malevolently.

‘No, Prime Minister — I’ve not reached the stage of doubting anything yet: I’m still establishing grounds, making my enquiries.’

He gazed at the PM with the clear cool eyes of an innocent child. The meeting closed shortly afterwards — just long enough for Marcus, apparently, to confirm a narrow victory over the Prime Minister in the whole matter.

At lunch, though, which the PM took privately later with the Cabinet Secretary and the Minister, another card was brought into play.

‘Of course it’s useless,’ the Minister said, ‘using anyone in his own service for any kind of surveillance on Marcus — or confidential investigation on him. He’d spot it at once. Besides, it’s my reading that everyone that counts in the SIS is behind Marcus on this in any case. They’re closing ranks, naturally.’

‘Naturally,’ the PM said, putting aside his half finished plate of cold meat salad. ‘But I have someone outside Marcus’s ranks — yet within the SIS: a very senior chap, who has already voiced mild doubts about Marcus in any case. I’ll brief him in the matter.’ The PM sipped a little water, lifting the glass a fraction as though toasting an equally small triumph.

‘Is that wise?’ the Cabinet Secretary asked, concerned at once by this devious approach. ‘Dividing loyalties in that way? Can you trust this man?’

‘Oh, I think so,’ the PM went on, basking confidently now in the warmth of his illicit conceit. ‘At worst, this fellow is the Devil I know. Whereas with Marcus — there’s no question — he’s hiding something. Something which I should know, therefore something serious. And I have to find out.’

‘No question,’ put in the Minister.

‘So either I fire him now — which is bolting the door with the horses gone — or I use this other fellow to try and find out what’s going on. This whole Phillips situation couldn’t be worse in any case. Might as well attack, as sit back and wait for the chopper.’

‘Of course.’

‘Indeed.’

The two men readily agreed.

‘But this “other fellow”?’ the Cabinet Secretary queried innocently. ‘Who?’

‘Better keep him under wraps, if you don’t mind. For the time being. Don’t want his cover blown. Fewer the better — you know the sort of thing.’ The PM looked at the other two with an amiable confidentiality and after they had left he put a call through to Basil Fielding.

‘Don’t use my name,’ the PM told the secretary before she rang. ‘Just put him on to me if he’s there.’

Basil Fielding was there, back at his office in Holborn, and he recognised the Prime Minister’s voice at once.

‘Can you get round here — before three?’

‘I’d like to,’ Fielding said. ‘Unfortunately I have a security clearance meeting then.’

‘Well, hand it over to someone else.’

‘I’m afraid I’m the subject of this meeting —’

‘What — who ordered this?’

‘Deputy Head. This morning. It rather takes me off active duty, I’m afraid,’ Fielding added sweetly.

‘Never mind that. You get round here this evening on your own steam. Come by the garden entrance — say seven o’clock. All right?’

‘Yes. Certainly. I’ll be there.’

Both men were pleased with the outcome of their conversation: the Prime Minister because it seemed to confirm his worst suspicions about Marcus; and Basil Fielding since now, quite as an unexpected bonus, he had considerably enhanced his grip on the Prime Minister.

Fyodor Kudashkin had no idea who the man had been in the Professor’s rooms — except that, in trailing him so clumsily afterwards, he thought he must come from some branch of British Security or Intelligence. The London KGB Resident might know: Kudashkin retained a clear image of the unexpected visitor that morning. A session with one of the Embassy artists and an Identikit might well establish him.

But meanwhile, like some canny animal in a miracle of nature, Kudashkin had changed colours — his crumpled, candy-striped summer suit replaced by something much less conspicuous, a blue Dacron two-piece with a rather vulgar kipper tie to go with it in the same false material. He carried a shiny black PVC briefcase with him into the lobby of the Londoner Hotel together with a tartan zip bag in the same cheap style. His easy windblown hair had been reformed, mastered now with some sticky lotion that had set the strands over his skull like dried seaweed after a tide has left it. His cheeks were padded out with cotton wool and he had suddenly achieved a fashionable, if ridiculous, walrus moustache. His old spectacles had gone too, replaced by an ostentatious new pair, rimless, the glass cut in a smart hexagonal pattern. Overnight he had changed from vague Ivy League academic into an aggressive salesman from New Jersey.

The clerk gave him his key and he went straight up to a small room at the back of the hotel in Marylebone. Once inside, he sat on the bed and dialled another room number in the same hotel. ‘Room 32,’ he said when a voice answered. ‘The third floor. Come straight over.’ Then he went to the window, gazing up over the grimy rooftops into a broad sweep of deep blue sky, while waiting for the Croat policeman from Zagreb.

Ivo Vladovič would not be easy to outwit, Kudashkin thought — reminding himself again, as the big man came into the bedroom, what a tough old bird this ex-partisan commander was: a great hulk of a man, with a light belted raincoat draped now over his shoulders, a face like badly chiselled rock, mottled cheeks hollowing with age, a drooping nose over a long chin and hands that clasped a cigarette holder like the shaft of a spade.

Kudashkin had long since realised that, unlike the servile security or police chiefs with whom he’d dealt in the other Eastern bloc nations, this man, though nearly as orthodox as they in his Marxist politics, would brook a minimum of interference in his plans for unseating Tito and introducing a hard-line, Moscow-orientated regime in Yugoslavia. He and the other Yugoslav Cominformists were anxious for indirect Soviet support in their schemes — but for no more than that. When the day came which would see the end of Tito and his Marxist apostasy it was Vladovič who was determined to rule the roost and call the tune: Vladovič who would run the country then — in association with Moscow, yes — but an association hardly closer than that which existed between the two countries at present.

It was one of Kudashkin’s responsibilities to prevent this happening and to ensure a far more rigid control of Yugoslavia in these political eventualities — a task made the more difficult since he knew this Croatian police chief mistrusted him deeply already.

The two men shook hands, but hurriedly. Vladovič turned then and without taking his coat off walked over to the other side of the room. Then he stood facing Kudashkin, like a tree.

‘I’ve only two days in London,’ he said formally. ‘I would like to have things settled by then.’ He spoke Russian well, but again in a hurry. There was a permanent impatience in his voice. For time was running out — his time at least, and soon any changes in Yugoslavia would have to be left in the hands of younger men. Kudashkin had recognised this over-anxious intent in the man before — a chink in his armour which he hoped to enlarge so that Vladovič would overreach himself and find a place, with the others like him, in one of Tito’s jails. For the Soviets had their own man in Yugoslavia groomed for the succession after Tito, a younger and far more malleable Serb, already a member of the party’s Central Committee in Belgrade. Vladovič was an anachronism, though he retained much support, particularly among the exiled Yugoslav Cominformists of his own wartime generation. It was a matter of treading carefully then, of using both carrot and stick with the man.

‘I can’t promise anything,’ Kudashkin said. ‘Not in that time.’

‘You promised Phillips — the British Intelligence officer. We handled his man Dearden for you, in Zagreb. And Phillips was supposed to come out, you said — to investigate. Well, he hasn’t.’

‘He will,’ Kudashkin said confidently. ‘They’ve delayed him here. But he’ll come, and then you can take him.’

Vladovič remained ill at ease, unconvinced. ‘It’s late, though,’ he said angrily. ‘It puts every other arrangement out: I was supposed to arrest this Phillips weeks ago — shortly after Dearden was killed. The two events were meant to nearly coincide. I could have clearly proved Western interference in our internal affairs then.’

‘You still can: he will come.’

Vladovič opened his arms, stretching his hands out in a hopeless gesture, so that his coat, opening around him like bat wings, nearly slipped to the floor. ‘You seem to forget our other agreements,’ he said viciously. ‘They had to happen at the same time —’

‘Not exactly. They couldn’t, since we don’t control everything. Phillips’s movements, for example —’

‘Look, the Croatian fascists, Radovič and the others, in Munich and Brussels: our plan?’ Vladovič said intently. Kudashkin nodded calmly. ‘You remember — we were to accuse Phillips of dealing with them, supporting them — showing how the West was anxious to create an alliance with these exiled nationalists, and was thus favouring a break away independent state of Croatia after Tito’s death — which would give us the opportunity of clamping down and taking over?’

‘Yes, that was the plan.’

‘Well, as I forecast, Radovič came to Zagreb three weeks ago, under cover, and we spotted him. But there was no Phillips — and no one else from British Intelligence there either that we could link Radovič with. I had to let him go. So we’re back where we started. Radovič won’t come again for a long while — a year maybe.’

Kudashkin smiled. ‘I remember all that. But Phillips will come, you can rely on it. And Radovič can then be taken in Brussels — and brought back into the country. You’ve done that before.’

‘It’s far more risky though, taking someone outside.’

Kudashkin was tart and officious now. ‘What you have to realise is that none of us can guarantee an exact date for Phillips’s arrival; we never could. You are being inflexible: we had to allow for variations in our plans.’

‘I realise that. Some allowances. But it’s three months since Dearden went — and every day Tito consolidates his succession. Flexibility, yes. But the time factor now is even more important. If we have to wait much longer it will be too late: Tito will have completed his plans for a collegiate leadership after his death. We must have action within the month — which means we must have Phillips. Or, if not him, then someone else from British or Western Intelligence whom we can pin these charges on.’

‘You shall have Phillips,’ Kudashkin said easily. ‘As I told you — I understand from our Resident here that he has simply been delayed with other work.’ Then he paused, a possibility forming in his mind: ‘Him — or someone else. We’ll let you know who — as soon as our sources in British Intelligence tell us.’

Alone again, Kudashkin considered his position. It was doubtful if Vladovič would ever see Phillips in Yugoslavia now, he thought. Phillips seemed genuinely to have disappeared: Allcock had known nothing, apart from confirming that the family were neither hiding him nor, as far as he knew, privy to any British Intelligence ruse in which his disappearance had been intended. He had then packed the old man off to Amsterdam for a week or two as a precaution.

Now it was time to approach his other crucial source in the matter: Basil Fielding. He had a long-standing arrangement to meet him later that afternoon near the man’s apartment in Kensington. Perhaps Fielding would have some fresh information, some new clues. Or, if not, perhaps together they might form some other plan which would both satisfy the impatient Croat and lead to his downfall.

That evening Fielding met the Prime Minister in Downing Street. After a few minutes he said, ‘I have an idea — I think: a way to test Marcus’s loyalties. If you agree …’

The Prime Minister nodded — and then, overcome with some pent-up frustration, he said: ‘You know, it’s inconceivable, surely, that Marcus should have warned Phillips that Sunday. If he did, it can only point to one thing — that he’s tied up with the Soviets in some way. But I can’t believe that.’

Fielding raised his eyebrows, looking distantly into the shadows of the room, a wise face full of hard and secret responsibilities now. ‘Well, somebody warned Phillips,’ he said gently, as though he was anxious, above all things, to be fair to Marcus. ‘They must have done. But may I suggest what we might do?’

‘Yes, tell me.’ The Prime Minister lit his pipe again.

‘Well, to start with, if I may — to go back to the beginning: has Marcus confirmed to you that Phillips never had any left-wing connections, as a student, for example?’

‘Yes. At our meeting this morning. “None — as far as we know,” he said.’

Fielding smiled gingerly, licking his slightly purple lips. ‘Well, he couldn’t have looked too hard. I have the evidence here.’ Fielding produced photocopies of several old sheets of badly type-written paper and handed them to the PM. ‘The minutes,’ he said, ‘of the Oxford University Labour Club: October 1932. I dug them out of the Bodleian Library.’

The PM glanced through them, but seeing nothing of import, looked up at Fielding.

‘At the end, sir: the faint handwriting at the end.’

‘Ah, yes, these names, I can hardly read them — Barton, McGinness, Phillips. Yes, “Phillips — Merton”. And then some others — all with the letter “R” bracketed after them.’

‘It either means “Resignation” or “Re-election”,’ Fielding said. ‘It’s the start of the academic year and the minutes are about voting in the new officers of the Club.’

‘“Phillips: R.”’ The PM looked at the document closely again. ‘Yes, I suppose it must. What do the earlier minutes say?’

‘They’re not in the Bodleian file, sir. Removed, possibly. I’m trying to get hold of other copies. But meanwhile we have that. It seems perfectly clear that Phillips was involved with the Socialists then. And if someone did remove the other minutes which mentioned him by name, they overlooked that one — the handwriting is so faint at the end there.’

‘So?’ the PM looked eagerly at Fielding.

‘Well, either Marcus is lying; or else he’s made no real effort to check into Phillips’s past at all. Now here’s what I have in mind — as a test …’

‘Yes?’ The PM took up his pipe once more.

9

I never expected to spend that evening drinking with Rachel — the long pub crawl we embarked on, shortly after they opened at 5.30, when she’d finished her music session with George and Max in a rehearsal room at the Wigmore Hall, and she’d asked me to meet her again — alone — in The Dover Castle, a pub round the corner in a mews near Wigmore Street.

Rachel had never used drink in the old days. If her music had been going badly she took it out on other people, not herself — through straightforward bitchiness or nearly malicious jokes: her excesses of wilful energy in any case, diverted from her flute, never led her to the drinks cupboard. Yet she took to it that night like long-lost sex, straightaway, when she came in out of the evening sun in the mews and joined me on a stool in the corner of the bar where I’d been sipping a sherry.

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘A large one.’

‘Difficult day?’ It was like living with her again.

‘No. Not very. But a nonsense day. A nonsense life I’m beginning to think too.’

She unbuttoned the loose-fitting cord safari jacket with huge pockets she had on now and took a silk scarf from her throat, rustling a hand through her short hair. She put the scarf on the edge of the counter where it began to slide off before I caught it. The fine silk was wafer-thin in my hands, like a magician’s prop that could be rolled up the size of a marble. It smelt of something too, as I held it for a moment. And then I recognised it — a faint perfume, like warm plums. When I’d slept with her years before she had smelt of just the same thing; that slight fruit smell, almost gone by morning when we woke, but still just there, overlaid by other warmths that had bloomed during the night. No, Rachel hadn’t drunk much then — and I had yet to find any real taste for sherry.

‘A large one,’ I said to the barmaid when she came. ‘Well?’ I turned to Rachel, putting the scarf back on her knees, where she smoothed it out with her hands and started to stroke it sadly, pondering the fine material.

‘You look tired,’ I said, continuing the role of pillow to lay her woes on — a familiar part for me, Rachel in the old days entering one of her “unworthy” moods before recovering dramatically and biting my head off. Had Rachel not changed at all, I wondered, just grown older? Was everything intact, as it had been — all the imbalances of her temperament, the rage she brought to bear on life’s dissatisfactions, the heart-stopping sorrows she found then, unable to beat the system — meditating numbly like a penitent on the bed for hours afterwards. Had she sorted out nothing in that rag-bag mind of hers? I hoped she had. And yet I feared this hope. One comes to love people for their flaws, which they truly possess, mistrusting their virtues as something assumed, or forced upon them by circumstances.

‘Tired?’ She quaffed half the schooner of sherry. ‘Yes. Of George. And Max for that matter. What a pair of geniuses they are — oh, I know that. But somehow I can’t feel them any more — or their musical on Dottie Parker.’

‘Musical on who?’

‘Dorothy Parker. You know — the Catholic wit, the witty soak. It’s called Dottie. We were working on it all this afternoon — and next week up in Scotland. They want some flute arrangements. It’s a lovely idea — but I’m bored with it. Or them, rather. And George is so kind as well. And that’s worse.’

‘George?’ I queried. ‘Is he …?’

‘Yes. Or he was. I was foolish enough to sleep with him once. He’s never forgiven me. You should never sleep with your manager, did you know that?’

She looked at me, narrowing her eyes — a twinkle in them, just a hint of the ‘Come hither’ look.

‘Well —’

‘Not if they’re in love with you, I mean. That’s the problem.’

‘Because you’re not?’

‘No.’ She pulled a thread from the seam of her cord jacket. ‘I loved George, the busy child. But with me he soon lost that — grew up and became terribly serious and responsible. Marriage was the next thing on his mind: dumping poor Marianne — and a Manor for us in the shires playing Schubert duets by candlelight. It was sad. Of course, I couldn’t.’

‘My God,’ I said, ‘whenever I made a joke you used to think I was getting at you. You wanted me serious —’

‘Yes — because you are serious, essentially. And George is really a child. What’s wrong is when people try and change what they are.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I see …’ I smiled. Sometimes they have to do that: the old person becomes a bore. You just said it yourself. A “nonsense life” you said you had.’

‘Oh, I have to change,’ she said briskly. ‘But I don’t see why you people should. You haven’t. People change worst of all “in love” of course. With George — it was dreadful, took all the stuffing out of him. Became bad opera. He ceased to be able to see himself — went all airy-fairy, like a hippo dancing.’

Rachel hadn’t lost her little cruelties. No love was good enough for Rachel: she treated every version offered her as suspect since anyone who could love her must be a fool. Only one love did she believe in — her father’s, the one she could not properly have, which would therefore never threaten the armour of her self-disgust.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘About George.’

‘Yes — he’s really extremely annoyed about you.’ She raised her glass again.

‘He’s no reason to be.’

‘The past. He’s jealous of that. And the future! Thinks he knows what’s best for me,’ Rachel added slowly.

I must have had an air of Puritan shock at that moment, for she started to laugh, a poopy, spluttering childish laugh, air filling her cheeks and changing her face — which took me right back, past the woman I’d known, to the girl she’d been in our childhood. Rachel’s childish nature still flew too readily to the surface. And yet it was an exciting quality for all that, a master-stroke against time — for one saw her then just as she had been when young, in which all her years were thrown off and she lived again, for seconds on end, as an 8-year-old once more, squabbling on the climbing frame or refusing to share a toy. There were times with Rachel when she could lay her whole life out for you, like a long panoramic folding-plate in a book, and you could see all the main incidents in it at once, like widely separated spires and domes pricking into the sky above a city — times when, through a mannerism, a change of expression or a sudden new tone in her voice, she unlocked and released her past, destroying all the traditional processes of time, leaving one with a momentary vision of the complete life; no longer part of herself focused on one moment, but the whole spread over all the years from the beginning.

‘I hated you,’ she said. ‘And I can see why —’

‘Yes, you had to live with me, not just imagine it all, like Lindsay. I was real —’

‘Don’t interrupt! If I didn’t have much confidence about myself — you never helped.’

‘I wasn’t your father.’

‘Fathead!’

‘At twenty — one’s looking for a little adult equality: not just nursery tea and sympathy. Well — he’s gone. You’ll have to grow up now.’

There was a silence then. She picked up my hand then, quite suddenly, and put it for an instant to her cheek.

The silence continued. Her scarf fell again, this time to the floor, so that I had to bend right down to get it, and when I stood up to hand it back to her she was looking at me.

‘Do you know what I think?’ I said, suddenly tired of so many words and years talking to Rachel about her father. ‘I think it’s all a lot of weak nonsense on your part. You should have sorted yourself out years ago about Lindsay; not now when it’s a little late — and he’s gone, and you feel like a widow. Is that what you wanted me here alone for — to hear this, to have it confirmed?’

‘No.’ She was indecisive, looking at me closely.

‘I mean, at twenty — maybe young girls still have the sort of crush for their handsome daddies in the Foreign Office. But twenty years on, still mooning round his coat-tails, and it’s like some bad old Scandinavian play.’

I said my piece and lifted my glass like a satisfied bully. I suppose I still believed in shock therapy — as I had in the old days. It hadn’t got me anywhere then but one retains an awful fidelity to one’s weaknesses: and that, after all, was exactly what Rachel was doing with Lindsay.

‘You can’t lose him — until you find yourself: is that all there is?’ I asked, hammering a last nail in.

‘No,’ she said gently.

She reached into her shoulder bag. ‘Here, I’ll get the next one.’ She called the barmaid. ‘Two large sherries,’ she said to the girl.

‘And I never saw you drink so much, Rachel.’

She turned to me, looking pleased with herself. ‘You could never accept that I loved Lindsay pretty easily.’

The girl came with the sherry. The evening clatter was rising all around us, the happiness of drinkers embarking on a whole hot summer of beer. Only one man seemed alone in the whole bar, a bad-tempered looking fellow reading the sports page of the Express in the far corner.

‘You put a good front on it,’ I said, above the din.

‘What?’ She leant forward, undoing the last button on her cord jacket.

‘Nothing, really — except that with a few large sherries everything looks better — especially the past. But remember, I’ve seen you weep your eyes out about your father.’

‘Yes.’ She smiled hugely. ‘That’s what’s so nice: you remember everything — and you’re still annoyed.’

I did remember, but I just sat there listening to her now, for she had suddenly found her stride, a perfect mix of alcohol and natural enthusiasm which might not last. ‘You see,’ she flew on, ‘my problem isn’t that I was stupidly in love with Lindsay: it’s just that I’ve suddenly come to remember almost everything I ever did with him. I see it so clearly now, as if things we’d shared had happened absolutely yesterday — like photographs you take out of an old drawer which become so intense that you can step into them and pick up your life at that point and start living it again. That’s what I feel. Do you see? I can just step back into all this other life, whole chunks of it, absolutely real: like climbing that big copper beech one afternoon, the one by the back drive, and watching Lindsay come down the hall steps with the rowlocks and going down to the lake through the rhododendrons. Well, I remembered that to start with — and next I knew I was following him down the path — and this was a quite new memory. I mean, I seemed to be doing it for the first time — I was standing by the boat-house, actually looking at him out on the lake rowing. Seeing the ripples, as though I could just walk over the water to him, and the water lilies all out by the island, so it was summer and I must have been about ten. And he waved at me — he wasn’t too far out because I could see the leather patches on his jacket. And I wasn’t dreaming. Well, it’s eerie — that all this comes back to me, as something I’m actually experiencing now and not then. Just as if everything that ever happened to me had lost all its natural sequence and my whole life had become a simultaneous experience, like people are supposed to feel when they’re dying. So you see that’s why I can’t think Lindsay’s gone. I can see him so completely, absolutely …’

‘Do other people come back to you in this way — your mother, for example?’

‘Or you?’ Rachel put in brightly.

‘Or me, yes.’

‘Yes, they do. Once I’ve found Lindsay again at some exact spot in the past — then I can usually place you all in relation to him: you and Billy and Henty, Anna and Sally in the kitchen, everyone.’

‘Him and you — then all of us?’

‘Yes. For example, that afternoon when he was out in the boat rowing — well, he was fishing too. I could see a line coming out from the back, trailing over the green stern. But something was wrong — he rarely went out on his own, always took one of us. And how can he fish and row at the same time? And then I saw what it was. Of course — Aunt Susan was with him! It was she who was fishing from the back, trolling for pike. And then the whole thing made sense: there she was — rather long and thin and brown — do you remember? Those brown cardigans and skirts she always wore? — and dark stockings — so that we called her the Tree. Anyway, there she was crouched in the back of the boat in that straw panama of hers. You remember? You must.’

‘Yes. Aunt Susan — you mean Eleanor’s elder sister. Is she still alive?’

‘Yes — in their old house outside Dunkeld. Remember, she used to look after us when the others were away in London for something? She’s about seventy. Mummy sees her now and then. But Susan never much liked Lindsay: thought he’d neglected Eleanor that time he was in Yugoslavia with her before the war and she killed herself.’

I nodded. Rachel’s tiredness had been washed away in these memories and she had the excitement about her now of someone — herself indeed — half-way through a performance of some brilliant music.

‘But if they didn’t like each other, what were they doing in the boat together?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. That was strange. But they were certainly in the boat together.’

‘Did he ever talk to you about Eleanor?’ We’d stopped drinking — our heads closer like old conspirators, the better to hear each other above the chatter, both of us intent now on this past together.

‘He never didn’t speak to me about her — when I asked.’

‘What —’

‘Oh, kind of heart-breaking: how fond he’d been, which was his way of saying “in love with”. And I asked him what had been wrong with her, and he said, simply, that she’d gone dotty.’

‘In those words?’

‘Yes: “dotty”.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’ Rachel looked puzzled, and started to fiddle with her scarf again. ‘Well, he said she’d come rather to spy on him, thought he was having affairs, which of course was absolutely ridiculous. Anyway, she became intensely possessive, jealous apparently. To the point of dementia. That’s what he said.’

‘To the point of …?’

‘Well, of rushing out under that tram in Zagreb.’

‘It’s strange, given Lindsay’s background, that he should have taken up with someone so uncontrolled like that, isn’t it?’ I looked at Rachel for confirmation. But now, taking up her sherry again, she was totally at ease once more, anxious, it seemed, to minimise these unexpected contradictions in her father’s personality.

‘Oh, yes — but don’t forget, they were both hardly more than twenty when they married. And his background may have been stable. But it was ghastly as well: that domineering father of his, the wicked old General: anything to get away from him and out of the house, I can see that — and off with someone sympathetic, which Eleanor was by every account, to begin with: sympathetic — intelligent too.’

‘Yes. But if Eleanor was so intelligent —’

‘Well, she just didn’t like the diplomatic life, when it came to it. She was a country woman — like Mummy. Paris, Rome, Vienna — that wasn’t her style at all.’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Anyway,’ Rachel continued with even more conviction, changing the precise topic. ‘First marriages, too young, are often rather rotten. I know with Klaus and me.’

‘Did he love you too much?’ I asked with some mischief.

‘No. He just decided I didn’t know who I was — and was never likely to learn. A bit German of him. But that wasn’t his fault. Conductors are interpreters — and Klaus kept annoying himself by thinking I wasn’t playing myself properly, wasn’t hitting the right notes in my psyche.’

‘So why did you start with Klaus then?’

She let out a small shout of joy. ‘I wanted what I hadn’t got, of course. And saw it in him. And you must know what that is by now — don’t you?’

‘Do I?’

‘Order, security, straight-forwardness, literalness, seriousness …’ Rachel tolled each word lugubriously. ‘All that mousy bag of tricks.’ She was excited now, staring at me, her lips open, intent on some invisible fascination that had risen up and was there in the air, suspended between us, held by our gaze at each other.

‘Yes, but why, Rachel? No one’s life could have been more secure or loving than yours as a child. How did you come by all this insecurity, this craving for order?’

‘Well, I can’t understand that either. It’s as if my early life hadn’t in fact been all loving and wonderful at all.’

‘I see.’ But I didn’t.

We looked at each other intently, mystified by what might have been, by what might have happened years before.

We walked out into the evening sun a few minutes afterwards, the bar too smoky and crowded now. But outside the rush hour had cleared and the streets were nearly empty, the tall office blocks, catching the late sun high up like white cliff tops, had all drained away — the people gone home or settled in the many pubs along the route we took, just wandering, with nothing particular in mind, towards Marylebone High Street.

And then, crossing over the main road here, we lost ourselves in a string of narrow lanes and passageways beyond. Rachel was a little ahead of me on the narrow broken pavement, swinging her leather shoulder bag in her hand like a sling, head down, thinking of something. She turned back at the entrance to a short street that led to a car park. ‘What shall we do? Pick up the bikes at the Hall? Or have another drink?’

There was a pub, I saw, on the other side of the road, a little way up, between a row of garages and small offices: a workers’ bar in peeling brown paint and smudged windows, a simple boozer hidden away behind the smart streets of Marylebone like an old cloth-cap relative in a posh wedding photograph.

Rachel had stopped now right in the middle of the narrow street, and just then a car had turned the corner and come up behind her, quite fast, and she’d had to move quickly out of the way. She stared after it malevolently as it disappeared up towards Marylebone Road, still swinging her bag as if about to unleash it after it.

‘That man was in the pub with us,’ she said.

‘Which man?’

‘The man in that car, next to the driver.’

‘Well, his friend must have come and picked him up. Or do you think he’s following us?’ I added.

‘You should know. You’re the spy, aren’t you?’ Rachel walked up to me, cocked her head, slinging the bag over her shoulder. I shrugged.

‘Well, that’s the other problem, isn’t it? Let’s have a drink and talk about it.’

The lounge bar was a long, tatty room done in the same yellowing paint with several pin-tables and a bad girlie calendar on one wall and some of last year’s Christmas decorations still above the bar. A man sat in a wheelchair at one end, drinking a pint, leaning his hunched back up towards the counter, feeding himself carefully with his twisted fingers. A boy, who seemed under age, sat on a bench next him, sipping Coke from a tin. The crowd were in the public bar across the way from us, men in shirtsleeves and overalls playing darts, shouting between the concentrated silences and then moving in and out of the shafts of smoky evening sunlight.

‘Just the place for a suspicious assignation,’ Rachel said, gazing at a half nude girl fingering her boobs, as a man wiping his hands in a drying-up cloth came up to us. We had beer this time. The sherry had gone to my head, though Rachel showed no effects of it at all.

‘You are a fool,’ she said when the man had gone. ‘For a spy: that man in the car — that’s the third time I’ve seen him today. He was following us this morning, in the same car, when we left Hyde Park Square.’

‘Well?’ She was possibly right, I thought, remembering Marcus’s warnings. He was probably keeping an eye on me. I wasn’t very surprised. And I felt irresponsible just then, uncaring almost, with the heat and the sherry.

‘Well — is it me, or you they’re following?’ Rachel repeated herself very precisely. The boy said something to the cripple at the end of the counter, about football. The barman joined them, a cockney with yellow, tobacco-stained hair. They started to argue and for some reason I couldn’t stop listening to them, following obsessively their conflicting post-mortems.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Who are they following?’ Rachel said again.

‘I don’t know who the hell is following us, or which of us,’ I said abruptly. ‘Maybe they’re keeping an eye on you, as his daughter. Or maybe me, because I worked for them once. Or maybe you’re quite wrong and it’s no one following anyone.’

‘I’m as tired as you are of policemen.’ Rachel read my thoughts. ‘But —’

‘Fine. I told Madeleine I’d help. I’ll come up with you next week to Glenalyth. Start from there, from the beginning, lay out all the evidence, clues, papers, dates: a master plan — and see what turns up.’

‘The beginning?’

‘It’s there, isn’t it? It must be — somewhere in his past, the things he did, the friends he knew, it’s somewhere there.’ I felt angry then — angry at some long blindness I thought I detected in the two women which had allowed Lindsay finally to slip through their fingers. ‘For example, you thought it was perfectly natural for Lindsay to have married Eleanor. I’m not so sure.’

Rachel put her glass down and now she did look for a moment as if the drink had suddenly taken her.

‘And then again, and more importantly maybe, why did Lindsay join British Intelligence in the first place? Wasn’t like him at all, not the man I remember — shading round back alleys and so on. He was just the opposite. So why?’

‘He was — patriotic,’ Rachel said after a moment.

‘Yes, exactly. Very upright and public spirited. Very open. That’s why it doesn’t add up.’

‘I don’t see —’

‘You don’t see the contradictions?’

‘No, really. Not at all.’

‘Well, I do. And that’s where I’d start looking for him: in his contradictions.’

I could see that Rachel didn’t either like or understand this line. But I pursued it.

‘Well, he joined Intelligence because a close friend of his at Oxford did, in the early thirties. That’s what I always heard. It was perfectly straightforward.’

‘A friend?’

‘Yes. He’s a don there still, I think. At Merton, Daddy’s old College. John Wellcome — that’s his name. He used to come and see us sometimes in London.’

‘He’s left Intelligence then?’

‘He must have, I suppose.’

‘That’s exactly the sort of person I’d like to see.’

‘He’ll hardly talk. It’s all Official Secrets, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe. But if I got your mother to speak to him, I don’t see why not. I’m trying to find out what happened to Lindsay, after all, not subvert the government.’

Rachel did not look too happy about this. I said, ‘Don’t you want him found, if he is to be found?’

‘Of course.’ But she was half-hearted somehow. ‘If you talk to John Wellcome — why not all the others? All the other people he’s had to do with over the years.’

‘Who, for example?’

‘Oh, I don’t know exactly. But there’s MacAulay who was his CO during the war, in the Argyll and Sutherland —’

‘Not the whisky MacAulays?’

‘Yes — the big house, The Hall. They used to have juvenile dances.’

‘I remember. The wife always on the bottle. I didn’t know he was Lindsay’s CO, though.’

‘And there’s Parker. Willis Parker, a very old friend — went through the FO with Daddy before the war. He’s in Brussels now. With the British delegation to the EEC. And there must be dozens of others. But what can they say?’

‘We could find out,’ I said.

Later, when it got dark and we’d walked back towards Wigmore Street to collect our bikes, we ended up in a third bar, just off Marylebone High Street, an old-fashioned local this time, with gas lamps all gone electric, but with real aspidistras in the window. A few uncertain men from the service apartments nearby were listening to a fair-haired sailor boy playing an upright piano, glancing at him covertly.

‘Hadn’t we better eat?’ I’d said.

‘No. Later. I like this.’

Her face was flushed now. She took off her loose cord jacket and just stood there listening to the smooth piano for a minute, breathing deeply, embarking on some private performance of her own, as though she had joined an orchestra late and had just at that moment taken up her instrument but was already perfectly in tune with the others. She was fascinated, involved, like someone released from a long confinement or dull toil into a miraculous life. The sailor boy changed tempo — sliding into ‘Stranger in Paradise’, I think, playing in a cocktail-hour, starlight-room manner, trilling expertly, syncopating the notes. It was all rather unreal — but we’d had seven drinks and it sounded fine.

‘You see!’ Rachel turned to me vehemently. ‘This is what I want.’ Her eyes were glassy — with emotion or drink, I couldn’t say. ‘For years and years I was up on a pedestal being prim and musical — but never this music, this life!’

She looked round at the wan old bachelors — and someone laughed raucously on the other side of the room, a fair-haired colonial rough, brandishing his arms, hammering some bad joke into the witless eyes of two young Englishwomen next to him.

‘This?’ I asked. ‘Is this the life?’

‘Yes.’

I got the drinks. Rachel looked much younger now with the colour in her cheeks and the unaccustomed drink — which had brought out a great vivacity in her, not a flirtatious thing, but a surprise which she had not known she possessed and which she played with then as with some glittering new toy.

‘Didn’t you do plenty of this with George?’ I asked. ‘The “Hail fellow well met” stuff? I’d have thought that was very much his style: “Knees up Mother Brown and six pints of bitter”.’

‘Yes. We used to. Before he fell in love with me.’ Rachel spoke as if of some great life before a tragic death. ‘After that, all he wanted to do was take me to Glyndebourne.’

‘I don’t see —’

‘You won’t fall in love with me again, will you?’

‘No more cakes and ale?’

‘Oh, that. Well, that’s all right, isn’t it? But love is like having a puncture. You suddenly can’t go anywhere. You’re stopped.’

What she meant, I thought then, was that — deprived of the real object of her love — she would now preserve that emotion carefully, against her father’s return. Rachel was a classic case of someone who must lie to maintain any foothold in dull reality; in love she was a Conquistador who could only feel that emotion in face of an unattainable El Dorado.

‘How shall we manage then?’ I asked lightly. ‘Less than lovers, more than friends.’

‘Any way at all,’ she said. ‘As long as we’re not what we were before. Anything, anything else,’ she went on earnestly, frowning now, looking at me in a way which years before I would have called passionate, yet which now was supposed to deny all such feelings.

So we stood there, a big bowl of lilac and narcissi between us, getting quietly squiffy, melting into the warm room, ‘Begin the Beguine’ dripping from the piano: a feeling of sweet carelessness had crept up on me all unawares — that cloudless confidence with a woman that seems to make going to bed with her only a matter of time. And then I thought — yes, even that she might offer, siren-like, to deflect us from our purpose.

So I said, ‘What if I find myself wanting to sleep with you?’

She laughed and looked at me as though I was a dunderhead.

‘“Found wanting” indeed! I should hope —’

And then, before she could properly reply, the velvet drapes across the door began to dance and shiver like a nursery ghost and George blundered into the bar, untimely to the dot, the water diviner in luck once more; the keen traveller, who would find Rachel over half the world, had made nothing of flushing her out of all the pubs in Marylebone.

‘My God, my God, why has thou forsaken us,’ Rachel said to him at once, mocking him, quite merry, offering him her beer glass.

George really played the role of jealous lover too close to the bone that evening, so that the performance lacked objective style: it was full of ungoverned feeling, forceful yet painful, like a stage-struck amateur attempting Othello in a village hall.

‘So here you are,’ he said shortly, without looking at me. He dried then, rooted to the spot, swaying slightly, out of breath, without managing another word. He’d forgotten his lines. I offered him a drink to fill the pause, turning back towards the bar and calling the landlady, inserting some neat, impromptu stage business so that he might collect himself.

‘We thought you were coming back for dinner,’ I heard him say at last to Rachel, not bluntly aggrieved but in the tones of a sad ringmaster who had inexplicably lost a valuable animal.

‘Oh, do relax George,’ she told him. ‘We were just talking about Lindsay.’

I got George a pint of real ale, the beer frothing up over the edge of the glass — a generous pint, and I thought how strange it was that this gregarious schoolboy of a man should so isolate himself in the toils of an operatic hopeless love, an illness without relief: prostrating himself at her feet, as at some holy grail, pleading for Chamber Music in the shires and trips to view Chartres Cathedral on long weekends — with a half-crazed wife in the background, loneliness bleeding out of her like a wound: a music copyist, somewhere round the corner in a service flat, longing to join George’s orchestra.

It all seemed an unpleasant business then, naive and cruel, something which only a schoolboy, indeed, could have contrived in his relationships. Or had it been Rachel’s fault initially in leading him on, as she had once done with me before throwing me over, repeating the trick afterwards with the German conductor — Rachel, who would punish every man for not being her father? That was as likely, I thought — and so much the more reason for her disbelief in love now that her father had gone, for I supposed she loved others only in Lindsay’s presence, as it were, as a way of wounding and taking revenge on her father, and without him found no pleasure in the exercise.

‘Yes, Lindsay,’ she repeated. ‘Trying to find him.’

I heard George grunt in annoyance. ‘Him again.’ Like me, I think George was coming to see Lindsay as his real rival — a far greater shadow over his love than ever I could cast.

The suddenly, handing George his beer, I wanted to throw it at him: the whole business was ridiculous. And I longed to turn on this big, willing bear-like man and clobber him for his abject, fruitless loving. But George pre-empted my anger, reversed it, by attacking me.

‘How,’ he said sarcastically, nursing his pint for a moment like a huge penguin in the crotch of one arm, ‘How do you expect to find Lindsay if no one else has, the Police, the Special Branch, in two months turning over every stone?’

I’m sure George saw my interest in Lindsay as nothing more than an excuse — a convenient and direct access I’d discovered to Rachel which I would now patrol to his exclusion.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I thought I should try.’

‘Peter knew him well, after all,’ Rachel put in.

‘So did I. But does that help?’ George was sweating, his glasses clouded over, so that he had to look over the gold rims at me.

‘A long time ago, though.’ Rachel was trying to help me again. ‘There might be something in the past —’

‘Oh, come on, Rachel; someone kidnapped him or bumped him off.’

‘Well, who then?’ She turned on George. ‘I want to know, who?’

‘All right, I don’t know. But I can’t see how Peter’s going to be any more help.’

‘Well, he did work once in the same organisation — British Intelligence,’ Rachel said carefully. ‘That might help.’

This information came like an ace against George’s meagre hand. ‘Did you?’ he asked me. And I nodded, feeling the cruelty of it all once more. One can summon limitless pity for the unloved in such circumstances and I tried to soften the blow. ‘Not that my work had anything to do with his,’ I said. ‘I was very junior.’

But George would not be placated. I think he had suddenly decided, just then, that finding Lindsay was the key which would release Rachel to him once more. George loved the dramatic gesture, I knew, the moment taken out of time and set up timelessly: half the London Philharmonia for Rachel’s birthday, or a trip with her over the moon, both were equally within his gift, he felt, and more besides, for he had such a flowing, uncluttered confidence in his love. Like the two women, he believed in Victory through love, against all the odds. Though I knew that in Lindsay’s world there were no such victories, and no room at all for such naively generous enquiries. All the same, at the time, his next words touched me.

‘Well, it may not be too difficult,’ he said with a sudden, kind authority.

‘What?’

‘Finding out what happened to Lindsay.’ George drank then, deeply, like a knight before battle.

‘How?’ Rachel asked.

‘I’ve a friend in Intelligence here. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t think —’

‘Who?’

‘Chap called Basil Fielding. Quite high up now, I think. I was at College with him after the war, knew him well then. I could ask him about it all.’

I looked at George, as at someone who had just performed an astonishing trick — as indeed he had.

‘Oh,’ was all I could say. It was my turn then to forget my lines.

10

By the time I got back home to Oxfordshire the following afternoon I realised there was nothing to be done about George’s unexpected friendship with Basil. In the pub, the night before, I’d not even bothered to advise him against renewing it: if he did this, Basil presumably — since he wished to maintain such secrecy in the whole matter — would not mention my involvement with him and would simply stall with George, play the great bear along.

In the end, as I drove home from the station, I was left only with a feeling of discomfort about the two of them in my mind — an additional mystery in a business already confused: these two together didn’t fit into any plot that I could conceive. They were extra luggage; awkward, unwanted, a dramatic oversight; characters who, denied a proper part in the proceedings, might start to write their own dangerous lines.

I had a bath when I got in, and at last some fresh clothes, and then I poured a large sherry, Garvey’s San Patricio, lightly iced from the bottom of the fridge. I still had a few bottles of it left, kept for special occasions or emergencies. It was six o’clock, my old rural cocktail hour, and I was happy to be alone again, leaning once more on the deep window-sill looking out on the side of the church where the evening sun fell on it, warming all the old ochre stone, and beyond that the empty evening hills, rolling away to the west beyond the village.

I would have dug out my unfinished Egyptian typescript or got ready for a walk, if the phone hadn’t gone just then — Madeleine, from London, telling me she had finally managed to contact John Wellcome and that I should call him at his home outside Oxford for an appointment to see him. She gave me his number.

‘You will be coming up with us to Glenalyth next week, won’t you?’ she said as an afterthought before putting the phone down — and I remember looking at the weathercock on top of the old tithe barn down the road just then and seeing it swing suddenly so that I delayed a moment before saying, ‘Yes, of course I’ll be coming.’

But she noticed the pause in my voice and taking it for a doubt said, with just a touch of pique: ‘You don’t have to, of course. You know that.’

‘No, no. Of course I want to. I was just looking at the weathercock on a barn opposite the cottage here. It suddenly changed direction.’

‘Well — why not?’

‘There isn’t any wind, that’s why. Or there wasn’t when I came in.’

We said goodbye and then I opened the window and put my head out into the warm evening: and there wasn’t any wind, none at all, not a murmur. But the weathercock had definitely swung round by about 180 degrees.

It was nerves, I suppose; the tensions of the last three days. But it suddenly struck me that Marcus, with the connivance of the mad old Major in the Manor, had put someone to watch over me in the tithe barn. An irrational thought, but it was enough to make me decide to call John Wellcome from outside my cottage, since if they had decided on such physical surveillance they would certainly have put a tap on my phone as well.

So I left the cottage and was half-way down the village street to the call-box by the post office when I had the further thought: if they’d gone to the trouble of tapping my own private phone they would surely have done the same with the village call-box. I knew I was losing my head then and I went back home and made the call from there — scowling forcefully all the same up at the arrow-slit windows of the barn as I passed it.

John Wellcome’s voice was very unlike his name, excessively cold and business-like. Without enthusiasm he told me he’d be watching cricket at the Oxford Parks the following day — the University XI against Surrey — and I could meet him on the far side of the ground, opposite the pavilion, by the sightscreen, at one o’clock.

‘I’m sure I can’t help you,’ he added. ‘But of course, since Madeleine has asked me, I’ll … do what I can.’

‘I’m sure I can’t help you.’ How often they say that, I thought, especially the ones who can.

John Wellcome sat watching the cricket in a deck chair by the sightscreen as I walked round the boundary line towards him, a minute fellow in a round tweed hat pulled down over his head like a pastry casing, and a jacket in the same rough greenish material, though the day was hot again, a hard blue sky running away over the playing fields to where the city murmured beyond the chestnut trees on the Parks Road. A girl sat next to him, his daughter I supposed, a thin girl in a long shapeless Indian print skirt, unkempt sun-bleached hair and bare feet. A baby crawled in front of them, almost naked, gurgling and eating bits of grass as it made its way out towards the middle of the field.

‘Do take him off, Caroline. He’ll get hurt.’

Wellcome spoke with pedantic care as I came up behind them and the girl called the child like a dog. ‘Here, Bonzo, come back, come on. Back, back!’ She had an American accent — a pretty face, but worn, with hollow cheeks and the slightly bluish skin of an old woman. The Guardian book page lay open beneath her chair and the baby’s feeding-bottle had been discarded on top of it, along with some soiled paper nappies.

‘Don’t get up, please,’ I said, introducing myself. They didn’t.

‘Ah, Mr Marlow. Here already,’ the man said rather glumly, and I felt a dull student come with a duller essay for my weekly tutorial. ‘My wife, Caroline.’ He gestured sharply towards the girl like a conductor bringing in a distant and unimportant instrument, and she looked up, gazing right through me with her tired eyes for an instant.

‘Hi,’ she said before turning back to deal with her son, who had now crawled quite far out into the field.

‘Goddammit! That child!’ She got up and dragged him back over the boundary. The child started to cry and then, seeing me and believing I must be the cause of its restraint, it howled even louder.

‘I’m sorry — to disturb you like this.’ There was nowhere for me to sit and I stood above them uncertainly, the child bellowing so loudly now that one of the umpires turned towards us in distant surprise.

‘You’ll have to take him away, Caroline.’ Wellcome spoke like a judge passing a death sentence. His wife got up and left us, carrying the protesting baby. But she chose a path right across the front of the sightscreen, half-way through the bowler’s run, so that the batsman at the far end held his arm up and the game came to a halt. The umpire turned again and now he gestured at us angrily.

‘I did tell you, Caroline, not to do that when the bowler is running up. They can’t see the ball if you do.’

‘They must be blind then. I don’t play this game, you know.’ She left us, flapping away in her Indian skirt, the child perched like a water-jug on her shoulder, and I took her seat next the coldly irascible don.

‘Well now …’ But Wellcome paused, taking up a pair of binoculars from his lap and looking out over the game which had re-started. The batsman played and missed a ball. ‘There! That’s Edrich all over — dabbing outside the off stump again. Lost him his England place. Only real fault, but you’d think he’d have learnt to control it by now.’

‘Edrich?’ I looked out at the distant batsman, playing the stroke he’d missed again, studiously prodding the air. ‘Of Compton and Edrich? He must be getting on.’

‘No, of course not. This is John Edrich. Used to open for England.’

‘Oh. I’m not really very much in touch …’

Wellcome nodded without taking his eyes off the game. ‘So, you used to be with the old firm,’ he said.

‘Well, nothing serious. I was in Information and Library — the old Mid East Section. In Holborn.’

‘Oh yes. The Wogs and the Wops.’ Wellcome had small, rather piggy blue eyes, and he shaded them now against the sun.

‘Italians? I don’t remember …’

‘All from the same neck of the woods.’ He took out a packet of cheap whiffs and lit one. ‘You don’t smoke, do you?’ he said, putting them away almost at once. ‘Oh, now this is interesting.’ He studied the game intently once more. There was a change of bowling. ‘Thought they’d bring him back for a spell before lunch. This is Ambler, our new opener: very lively, though he’s getting almost nothing from the wicket, playing like an old carpet this year.’

He blew the smoke from his cheap whiff and it trailed back into my eyes, making them smart, and the lanky student called Ambler made a slow and thoughtful progress back to his mark quite near the boundary.

‘He takes an awful long run,’ I said. The game seemed to have died in the heat, the sun right above us, the fielders and batsmen all waiting on some great revelation which would materialise at the end of Ambler’s stately walk.

‘Yes. But he’s very pacey,’ Wellcome said.

And so he was, so far as I could judge from his run, arms flailing round at a clamorous rate as he came into the crease before whipping the ball down — a bouncer that rose sharply over Edrich’s head so that he nearly ducked into it.

‘Oh, naughty,’ Wellcome expostulated. ‘Naughty!’

‘I wanted to ask you —’ I said. But Wellcome put his hand up, before taking his field glasses again.

‘Wait, don’t tell me, yes, he’s getting a warning.’

The umpire was speaking to Ambler now, the bowler pawing the return crease like a horse, before the two of them walked down the pitch to examine something closely on the earth.

‘Of course! He’s running onto the pitch again.’

‘Isn’t he allowed — doesn’t he have to?’ I pretended innocently.

Wellcome looked at me with annoyance. ‘Yes, but not after his delivery, you see.’

‘About Lindsay Phillips,’ I started again. ‘I wondered what you thought.’

Wellcome didn’t reply for a long moment, not until Ambler had turned once more and started his run. ‘Absolute tragedy, that’s what I think.’

Ambler was coming in again like fury now — a good-length ball this time which Edrich dabbed at again, missing it, as it flew close over the stumps.

‘My!’ Wellcome drew in his breath sharply. ‘That was a better one. On a pitch with any help, you know, this boy is quite unplayable.’ He licked his lips in appreciation.

‘You knew him well, didn’t you? Here at Oxford. You joined the service together, I understand?’ I decided not to waste any more time. But Wellcome was not so inclined.

‘No. We didn’t.’ There was silence again.

‘Rachel, his daughter —’

‘Oh, yes, I know her,’ Wellcome said at once, glad to suggest his willing co-operation over something, at least, in our conversation.

‘She thought it was because of you that Lindsay joined Intelligence in the first place.’

‘Did she indeed? I wonder what gave her that idea?’

‘No?’ We had to wait for another ball before he said anything more.

‘No, certainly not. That wasn’t so.’ Wellcome twirled and pinched the dying cheroot in his fingers. ‘I was already in the service — or about to be, rather.’

‘Yes, that’s what she meant, I think: that he took after you.’

Wellcome looked distressed suddenly, as if he’d just come across some stupid critical interpretation in my weekly paper. ‘“Took after” me?’ he said.

‘Well, you were older than him …’

Wellcome shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes. But not by much. I was in my last year at College when I met him — end of ’31, I think; he’d just come up. Or was it his second year? I forget. Yes, it may have been. I came back to College, you know; got a fellowship. I saw more of him then, I think.’

‘You didn’t stay in Intelligence then, after you left College?’

Wellcome had picked up his field glasses and was looking at the game closely again. Ambler’s last ball of the over. But I had the feeling he was listening to me carefully at last.

‘No, I got a fellowship, I told you: rather to my surprise. I didn’t take up Intelligence work again until the war started and I went to London. Worked with Dick Crossman in that black propaganda department. I didn’t see Lindsay again until after the war, when he was back from the Army, and I was back here in College. So I don’t know where Rachel got the idea that Lindsay “took after” me. Lindsay joined up on his own bat as far as I know — absolutely.’

‘You mean he was recruited by someone down here? One doesn’t just apply, surely, for a job like that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Wellcome was abrupt. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘But there must have been someone who approached —’

‘You know I really can’t go into all that. I simply can’t: there’s no thirty-year release clause as regards my Intelligence work, I’m afraid. It’s still entirely confidential. I thought in any case you wanted my opinion about what had happened to Lindsay, not how he got into the job.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. But I think the two things may well be connected.’

The players were coming off the field now, for the lunch interval. Wellcome stood up, wiping his brow with an old red hanky. I looked at him. He seemed flustered suddenly, as if he’d just undergone some sudden exertion, instead of being parked quietly on a deck chair for the last two hours. We started to walk round the boundary line towards the pavilion.

‘How do you mean, the two things “connected”?’ Wellcome asked, with grudging interest now: the College dunderhead had surprised him with a new angle on a difficult poet.

‘Someone must have specially encouraged Lindsay at the time to join Intelligence. After all, he wasn’t the sort, was he? Very formal, open kind of person, very direct. Not cloak-and-dagger at all.’

‘Well, someone may have. But it wasn’t me.’

‘Could he have been forced into it in some way?’

‘Do you mean blackmailed? Never.’

‘No. I meant against his better judgement. You see, it doesn’t add up to me — either his disappearance or his joining in the first place. Both seem quite unlike him.’

We could see Caroline now, over by the tennis courts, watching two young men play, smashing the ball about with vigorous acrobatics. A shade of anxiety crossed Wellcome’s face. He had lost touch with me again.

‘You see, if I could find out how — and why — he joined Intelligence, I think I might get a line, at least, on why he disappeared.’

But Wellcome appeared absorbed in his young wife now, the child, Bonzo, scrabbling round the wire fence, rattling it, undoubtedly putting the players off their game.

‘She really shouldn’t …’ I heard him mutter; his helpless pained expression seemed a visible payment just then for this unlikely marriage of his. ‘I think Lindsay was recruited in a perfectly ordinary way,’ he said at last. ‘His disappearance, I grant you, remains a mystery. But you know, HQ must know why — and how — he joined them. All in the files. They must have gone into all that already.’

‘They won’t tell me.’

‘Don’t you trust them?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose you’ll find out on your own, and I can’t help you.’ Wellcome was almost sarcastic now. ‘It was all a long time ago, wasn’t it? It’s my view that he joined out of perfectly ordinary, patriotic reasons — because someone came down from London and asked him to, that’s all. Why should there be any mystery about it? And as for his disappearance, well, he’s not the first in that line of business, is he?’

‘No. That’s what struck me, of course: do you think he was a double, that he’s gone back to Moscow?’

‘Certainly not. Not in the least. Though I think it possible they may have killed him.’

‘And the body?’

‘Dumped it in that loch of his, at Glenalyth.’

‘Were you ever up there?’

Wellcome smiled for the first time, as if he had at last got the whole business in hand. ‘No, no, I wasn’t. You know, you make me out to be a much closer friend of Lindsay’s than I ever was. We were colleagues for a short while, after the war — and shared the same staircase in Merton once, that’s really all.’

‘Oh yes? Which staircase was that?’ I asked with innocent interest. Wellcome had stalled with me ever since we’d met and I thought I’d try some shock tactics now before he dismissed me. The child had seen his possible father in any case — and seeing me as well, had started to cry again. I didn’t have long. But Wellcome halted in his walk now, alert once more. ‘Oh, were you at Merton?’

‘No. But I just thought I might go round there now. Maybe there’s someone still there who remembers Lindsay, an old porter perhaps, or one of the College Scouts. You see, if I could get some real impression of Lindsay in Oxford, that would help …’

I looked at Wellcome pointedly. He was blinking up at me, his small blue eyes startled in the sunlight. Then he laughed, an abrupt, grating laugh like a bad actor experimenting with a part. ‘I don’t follow. It’s forty-five years ago. The Scouts will all be dead. There won’t be anyone there. Complete waste of time.’

‘It’s worth a try. You see, someone, forty-five years ago, someone from London you suggest, must have come down one day, by train probably, and talked to Lindsay, recruited him. Now, if I could find —’

‘But that’s nonsense!’

‘Is it? You said that’s how it must have happened, that it wasn’t anyone in Oxford.’

‘Yes, but you don’t really expect anyone to remember that, do you, even if they were alive?’

‘No, possibly not. All the same …’ I paused, thinking out the next step in my role. ‘Perhaps they had a drink in the Mitre,’ I went on enthusiastically, ‘or the Eastgate. Or met at the Randolph for tea. I might go there and ask. Where would you meet a student in Oxford, if you wanted to recruit him for Intelligence, in the early thirties? They must have met somewhere.’

‘I find that an unbelievable approach. You must be out of your mind.’ Wellcome was worried now. I’d hit bottom at last and stumbled on something. I’d no idea what, but I felt Wellcome knew.

‘It’s just intuition,’ I said. ‘It’s all I have to go on.’

Wellcome looked at me with pitying animosity. ‘I shouldn’t interfere, if I were you,’ he said. ‘Not like that.’

‘Why not? Isn’t so much intuition — in Lindsay’s world, and yours? The theories about Eng. Lit. you profess — you can’t actually prove them, can you? Or are you a Leavisite?’

I thought Wellcome was going to slap my face. Instead he looked at me in amazed horror for a moment before hurrying away over to his wife, where he picked up the squealing Bonzo. Caroline trailed after them, casting backward glances at the gallant tennis players.

Was it a second marriage, I wondered? If so, it seemed unlikely to turn out any better than his first. Wellcome was a liar through omission, where the greatest untruths bloom. No marriage would survive that. Yet it seemed Lindsay’s had done, or had he simply been more skilful than Wellcome in his evasions because he had much more to hide?

11

I said, ‘There’s something phony about Wellcome, that’s all. I thought he was a close friend of Lindsay’s: he spent most of his time denying it.’

Rachel stood over by the window in the big first-floor drawing-room in Hyde Park Square, riffling through piles of old sheet music kept in the window seat there.

‘Can’t find the damn thing. Must be here: Telemann, Telemann, where for art thou?’ She started to go through the dusty music once more.

Madeleine had gone up to Glenalyth by air the previous day: she couldn’t stand British Rail. George and Max had already left too, travelling to Liverpool by car to see some new musical there prior to its London opening before joining us at Glenalyth the next day. Rachel and I were alone in the empty house, a huge white ship becalmed in the dazzling afternoon streets of Paddington.

‘I’ll have to buy another copy, that’s all.’ Rachel let a pile of music fall with a thump on the floor, the dust rising up in sunlit motes, then put her hands on her hips and stood with her legs apart like a big letter A against the light with her back to me.

‘You don’t mind going by train,’ she said without turning, still preoccupied.

‘No.’ I stood up. ‘I was talking about Wellcome. He was hiding something.’

‘I’m not surprised. I told you you’d get nothing, rummaging through all Lindsay’s old colleagues like that. Most of them are awful bores. MacAulay and Willis Parker for example: absolute stiffs.’

Rachel seemed pleased by my lack of success in these enquiries. She turned at last.

‘What am I going to do with George and Max round the piano, with a toot and a flute for a whole week?’

‘Yes. What are you doing? I wondered …’

“Nearer my God to thee”, I think. George likes the idea of having me under his eye for a while.’

‘It’s unpleasant —’

‘Oh, don’t worry! George’s wife is coming: Marianne, and Max’s wife, June. At the weekend. A real little house party. And you.’

Rachel looked at me pleasantly and then, walking over from the window, she put her hand on my shoulder for a second. But still she searched the room with her eyes distractedly.

‘I don’t fancy playing the man between.’

‘George might bonk you one, you mean? Yes, he’s a big fellow.’

‘Has he spoken to his old friend in British Intelligence yet? Fielding, wasn’t it?’

Rachel had gone over to the mantelpiece now and was tinkering with the silver music boxes there.

‘Yes. He has, he says. He’ll tell you all about it.’

‘What did he tell you?’

‘The man was surprised to hear from him.’

I thought again what a liar Basil was. Or had he genuinely forgotten George and their college days? But who could forget George? At college he was probably even more memorable, creating juvenile alarms at the debating society and frothing at the lips afterwards in the local boozer. I wondered when anyone would ever start telling the truth.

Rachel said, ‘George is just a Saint George. He believes in miracles. As if this old friend of his could help. Probably never heard of Lindsay. But everyone wants to help, don’t they? Especially George.’

‘Don’t you want the help?’

‘Lindsay will turn up somewhere, sometime. I wonder sometimes if any of us can do much about it meanwhile.’

She lifted the lid on one of the music boxes and a delicate tune emerged, a Viennese polka which spread through the warm airs of the room, someone else’s sweet memory invading the silence. I had never heard the tune before.

‘All these music boxes were Eleanor’s, you know. Daddy bought them for her before the war — there was a man in Zagreb who had a whole collection. Do you remember them?’

‘No. They must have been kept down here. Not at Glenalyth.’

Rachel nodded. ‘That’s why Aunt Susan didn’t get them. She took almost everything else of Eleanor’s: has a sort of shrine of her things at Dunkeld.’

‘I never went to her house. We never did, I think.’

‘I hope we never have to. She’s a vicious old party. I never really liked her: one of those “not to” people when we were children. Full of revenge: I should have been Eleanor’s child — and Patrick, her own nephew, was dead.’

‘Why did Lindsay ever have her at Glenalyth then?’

‘To be kind, that’s all. Kind to everyone.’

Rachel closed the music box decisively, killing all the past, the tune stopping half-way through a phrase.

‘Come on, are you packed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Country clothes? You can borrow Lindsay’s gumboots.’

‘Hardly need them, this weather.’

I looked out on the bright square. Already the grass was browning slightly though June was hardly begun.

Rachel had a white, tightly pleated cotton dress on, and now she twirled round in it, the material opening like a fan for an instant, displaying a lacy petticoat beneath.

‘You’re worried. Why?’ She looked down at me before starting to check through her shoulder bag. ‘Now; tickets, bank card, chequebook, pills, sunglasses, latchkey. All we need is the Telemann sonata and some food. There’s no food on this night train, can you imagine? Well have to buy some.’

‘What do I owe for the tickets?’

‘Don’t worry. I’m keeping a note. It’s quite cheap anyway. I had to take a double sleeper, second-class, you don’t mind? The first-class ones were all full.’

‘No.’ I laughed. ‘But why?’

Rachel stopped rummaging through her bag. ‘Why what?’

‘I just wondered — going by the night train, that’s all.’

‘Is that strange? I don’t like aeroplanes, you know that.’

‘I’d forgotten. Of course Lindsay always had a thing about trains and railways, I remember that. All those toys in the attic at Glenalyth — great black LMS clockwork engines and things.’

‘Don’t start all that again.’

‘But it’s true, isn’t it? You like trains as well.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ She smoothed the already very smooth pleats in her skirt.

Rachel was making this journey with me in memory of better times, I thought — of other travels with her father along this same route from London to Perth, secure in a first-class corner seat with him, flying past the ugly Midland towns, the dark railway sidings and slag-heaps, clattering over the points, northwards to the clean blue lakes and moors, ever closer to that meeting with Henty in the big green Wolseley and the sudden magic of the Highlands — bright morning after the long sweet night. And now I was to play the same role for her. I thought how successfully Rachel had gratified herself — ignoble envy rising in me again for her ability to discover and live in so many secret, self-sufficient worlds within herself, where time — and people too — could be changed about, shuffled and re-lived at will. I have rarely done better than to move rather slowly forward in my life.

‘No, there’s nothing wrong with going in trains,’ I said with sudden enthusiasm, ‘It’ll be great fun.’

The Telemann sonata we picked up at Musica Rara in Great Marlborough Street, and the evening’s goodies were packed into a big shopping bag for us at Robert Jackson’s in Piccadilly. I chose a dry Aligote to go with the Chef’s Terrine and the cold roast halves of wild duck, and Rachel said there should be a good Beaujolais to follow with the slices of underdone spiced silverside and the Normandy goat’s cheese: she chose a Fleurie and then added a jar of real orange juice for the next morning …

The big electric engine throbbed quietly away on its own, at the end of a long line of blue and white carnages, a louder sonorous echo rising up into the stuffy night air. And now the platform, though there were ten minutes to go before the train left, was an impatient bustle of passengers pushing and shoving all along its length. Rachel had hired a porter. ‘You could have taken one of those trolleys,’ I said. She didn’t hear me.

Already, with a face divorced from reality and too many magazines tucked under one arm, she had started on her journey, her pace quickening unconsciously, drawn irrevocably into all the nervous magic of departure — checking her watch, her tickets, looking up at the carriages, searching out our number with the bright eye of a gambler at a fixed wheel who alone knows he must win.

‘Here it is!’ she called, like a look-out on a whaler, and we climbed up into a sleeper near the front of the train with only a parcel van between us and the engine.

I tipped the porter when he’d settled our bags and thought the compartment seemed rather small for two people. Then, right behind us, the sleeping-car attendant poked his nose through the door, a small pixie of a man with a very shiny thirties band-leader’s hair style, parted straight down the middle, an almost cheeky fellow with some deep northern accent.

‘Yoo tweo travellin’ together?’ He looked doubtfully at his booking sheet. ‘Mr Marlow. Miss Phillips?’

I nodded. He remained doubtful. It was so long since I’d gone through any of this — years before in a hotel in Paris with Rachel where they had never given a damn about such unlicensed relationships. But here, for a moment, I thought the man was about to separate us, invoking some old northern railway bye-law or Presbyterian canonical. I put my hand in my inside pocket, thinking to tip him at once, before I noticed Rachel’s amused expression of patrician disdain. ‘My good man …’ I fully expected her to say. But all that emerged from her firm lips was, ‘Yes, we are together.’

But then the attendant, still, I suppose, thinking me an interloper and smelling money somewhere, gave the game away.

‘I cuid get you a sleeper in first class, Madam — if ye wished. There’s several available.’

‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘This will do. Thank you.’

‘Shall I make up the beds now then?’ the band leader asked.

‘Later. We intend to dine first.’ She pointed to Robert Jackson’s bag on the seat: the Beaujolais bottle had slipped out, its dark neck thrusting along the couchette. The man noticed it.

‘Will ye want a corkscrew?’ he asked without the slightest change in his dour expression.

‘We have one, thank you. I think.’ Rachel looked at me and I nodded, before the train gave a lurch and we were off.

‘Well, call me if you need anything,’ the attendant said, looking at me with a change in his eye now — either of envy or amusement, I couldn’t say.

Rachel had kissed me firmly before the train had properly got out of the station. ‘Childish train fantasies indeed — and George,’ she said. ‘It never crossed your mind, did it, that it simply might be you. Travelling like this. Just you.’

It was almost too warm in the narrow compartment and Rachel at once started to take off her soiled cotton dress — leaving the lacy Victorian petticoat beneath. Then she picked up the Aligote.

‘It won’t be very nice,’ I said. ‘Not chilled at all.’

‘It’ll do,’ Rachel said. ‘It’ll do.’

One doesn’t expect love these days on night sleepers, even first-class, and I would have been surprised in any case by Rachel’s sudden sweet affections.

I said later, ‘There were other more comfortable occasions — your flat upstairs in Hyde Park Square, or you could have come down to the cottage.’

We were fingering our way through the first courses, the Périgord terrine and then the wild duck, licking our thumbs over the paper plates, sitting opposite each other in the corners of the bottom couchette, she with her feet up on it, a big hanky spread out over her petticoat. The train’s movement had become firmer and faster some time before. And now, reaching its cruising speed, it settled into its long night’s run with an immutable constancy — a huge metal necklace being dragged across the earth, which nothing now could ever impede and whose passengers, equally without appeal, shared the same sense of the inevitable.

‘Why? Why not before?’

‘Because we couldn’t have got to Perth at the same time, that’s why.’

Rachel fluffed her dark curls and the smile was barely there, hiding nervously behind her too-straight nose. She started to eat the duck then, pulling a leg apart with her fingers, and her hands trembled. I thought: a nervous little girl at the start of a dorm feast. She seemed, without her shoes, in her lacy petticoat with her feet tucked up beneath her, to have become younger and smaller now, an Alice fallen into some Wonderland, finished with the magic potion and shrinking by the minute; a Victorian Miss in a frilly nightie before bed, waiting for a story. Her other intents — whatever other adult schemes she nurtured just then — seemed far out of place with her present juvenile manner and dress.

She crunched into the leg of duck and then lifted the bottle of Aligote onto her chin and took a long swig. She handed the bottle across to me, wiping her lips with her bare arm.

‘You used to be so meticulous,’ I said.

‘About what?’

‘About everything: wines, beds, napkins, life.’

‘I hated that ruined dump in Notting Hill, if that’s what you mean. You always thought it was “running home to Daddy” when I left. It was just I couldn’t face the scum on the bath any more. Anyway, wouldn’t it be awful if we all stayed the same?’ She grasped the mallard’s leg again. ‘You just can’t accept good fortune,’ she said.

‘Whose?’

‘Ours.’ She took the bottle back from me and drank once more. ‘I didn’t tell you, but when I saw you at the Flower Show that morning, you were a new person — I wanted to be with.’

‘Why?’

‘You’d stopped worrying about me, at last.’

‘No risks with me, you mean, now. No hard lines, no broken hearts.’ Just a jolly romp on a night express, I felt like adding, but didn’t.

‘I didn’t say that.’

Rachel, though she’d drunk about a third of the wine, was still nervous, holding back, like someone afraid of their good fortune. ‘We’d stopped fighting at last,’ she went on. ‘You can suddenly want someone then.’

‘I fought in the old days because I was worried about you.’

‘Exactly. A lot of people call that love. Shall we try the beef? The Beaujolais must be getting cooked too.’

I picked up the bottle where I’d opened it and put it next the hot vent on the floor. It had a faint, yet rich, flowery smell, like old roses at the end of summer. It struck me that with a bit of steady drinking on the good wines like this, she and I need never really get to grips at all that night. And in truth I didn’t feel I could touch her then, since Rachel, for all her confident words, had the air of a child prostitute at that moment: falsely confident, nervous — terrified even — just beneath the surface. The spiced silverside was tasty, though, and we had a tube of grain mustard to go with it. The Beaujolais was perfect.

I sat back, determined to relax. If I wasn’t going to fight any more, I needn’t worry about sex — or love for that matter, either, for the two had always gone together before with her, and I couldn’t separate them now, even though that was apparently what she expected me to do. She would be disappointed perhaps, but the various vineyards should dull the pain, I thought.

‘Try it,’ I said. ‘It’s perfect.’

‘I know what you’re thinking.’ She took the bottle but didn’t drink, balancing it in one hand, stroking it absent-mindedly with the other. ‘Enough of this and it wouldn’t matter what we both felt or thought. Your fighting and my wanting: neither problem would arise.’

‘I’m still something of a puritan.’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you expect? I’ve not changed as much as you. I wish I could.’

She drank from the bottle then, ending it up again on her chin, Carmen-fashion. ‘Yes. Just as serious as ever — counting your thoughts out like an old Jewish moneylender and wondering how many you can afford to spare the next client. Most people would give their eye teeth —’ She bit into a slice of the silverside. ‘You’re unreasonable,’ she said, her mouth still full.

‘I loved you. That doesn’t seem unreasonable. Even though it meant fighting. This is just going through the motions.’

‘“The more we are together, the happier we will be”.’ She looked up at the ceiling, hopelessly. ‘Well, we’re fighting all right now — good-oh! You’ve had me in your way. Thanks.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I love you, in that way.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ she said sadly.

‘Let’s try the goat,’ I said lightly, trying to ease the situation. And the goat, too, was good: a long barrel of cheese in waxed paper, just crisp on the outside, but chalky-soft with a faint tartness running into the centre.

We ate in silence as the train clattered over the points of some hidden Midland junction, and we were suddenly strangers now, new passengers looking over the remains of a boozy picnic left by some previous and unaccountably lively travellers in the compartment.

And then, when it seemed that nothing further could happen between us that night other than to climb distantly into our separate bunks — when we seemed dead to each other, when we’d tidied up the debris and put the empty bottles back in the shopping bag, when there was absolutely nothing else left to do — Rachel turned away from me and started to undress with the quite unconscious provocation of a preoccupied strip-tease artist: first the petticoat, pushing the straps off her shoulders, pulling it up her naked torso, over the hills of her small breasts, then a suspender belt and seamed stockings, then her pants.

Finally she turned, her face untroubled, full of adult calm, no longer a child waiting for a story at all, but a woman who’d heard most stories in the world. She looked at me doubtfully for a moment — fully dressed the other side of the compartment, wondering where to put the rubbish-filled shopping bag. Then she smiled — a smile no longer hidden behind her formal nose, but the full smile of someone perfectly content in all her admissions at last.

‘We can love each other in our separate ways, then, can’t we?’ she said.

And we did.

Morning came, after we’d left Glasgow and crossed into the Scottish country, an early mist beginning to clear, giving way to a pale blue sky, but the day without any heat in it yet, as we climbed away into the highlands of Perthshire, up through the dewy green fields dotted with cows, lying down or standing quite still in the fresh light, producing a first cud, like black-and-white models in a child’s farm.

Rachel had woken during an early stop, at some station before Glasgow, below me in her own bunk then, and had said something I couldn’t hear, so that I’d leaned over and looked down on her.

‘What?’

She looked up at me, half-asleep, hair spilled over the pillow, just her hands peeking out above the sheet.

‘It’s cold.’ She pulled the sheet up further, to just beneath her nose, so that only her eyes smiled, the first fruits of them that slept …

‘It’s the frozen north,’ I said. Temperature drops out of sight in these parts. Very few people ever live to tell the tale.’ We need to tease each other more than we know, and love may come to depend on it.

I’d climbed down then and held her for a minute, that sweet warmth smelling of plums with me again, the sense of other mornings alive once more as a porter clattered a trolley in the half light beyond our curtained windows: the world in balance, time stopped, held between day and night for a moment, between travel and conclusion, briefly spellbound.

‘Do you remember the story?’ Rachel said. ‘I forget the name of it, we used to have it as children, about the dragon that went into a big wood to look for the stars — or was it the source of a river? — to find something important anyway — and came to an extraordinary country the other side of the forest, full of crystal lakes that you could see right down to the bottom of, and valleys made of great shafts of glittering marble, full of unbelievable trees and flowers, where it was always moonlight and there was no sun and the dragon used his fiery breath as a torch to guide him when he came to caves, even more strange, with stalactites and stalagmites, going down into the earth. Do you remember?’

‘No. Should I?’

‘You must. Susan read it to us — next the old wireless in the drawing room and we had to stop because of the news and “the Allies have taken Rome”, we heard.’

‘It sounds like part of Journey to the Centre of the Earth to me.’

‘No, it wasn’t. I can’t even remember the name of it — and I’ve never seen the book at home again.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, I wondered if I’d dreamt it.’

‘Last night?’

‘No. As a child — a dream so strong I’ve remembered it as a book.’

‘Perhaps. But why?’

‘Because in the book, or the dream, there were never any other animals or people. The dragon was always alone, all fiery and upset.’

‘He doesn’t find what he’s looking for?’

‘No. I don’t think so. That’s why he’s upset, I suppose.’

‘Hardly a child’s book, then. They always end happily. More like a child’s dream. Your dream.’

‘What does it mean?’ Rachel’s eyes were nearly closed: she was dropping off to sleep again.

‘I suppose you felt alone as a child. I was a little older; Patrick’s age, after all. I played with him. That was why I’d been brought to Glenalyth. And you? You have a date for your dream: the Allies taking Rome, June 1944. Your father must have been there — a little before Patrick died.’

‘Yes. I was seven or eight. But Aunt Susan was there. Perhaps it was some other story she was reading us, because Mummy came into the room just then — I can see that absolutely clearly — one arm on the mantlepiece, the other leaning across Aunt Susan’s face, switching on the radio. And then: “The Allies have taken Rome”.’

She had dozed off then, her face cradled in my hand; a door slammed and the clatter of trolleys stopped outside the window. Time would start again, I knew now. Any moment the wheels would creak and roll once more.

Our carriage moved forward a fraction — imperceptibly, with out any noise — before the engine took up the slack with a soft roar and we were off again.

Later, after some long gulps of the fresh orange juice and a look at the misty land — when I had gone out into the empty corridor and seen the damply glazed fields and model cows — I went on for a wash and brush up in the gents’ WC — the train rocketing through long curves and small defiles now as we eased our way up into the hills. I washed my teeth and shaved cautiously, looking in the swaying mirror of the small cubicle, the carriages lurching about on this older track like some juvenile mechanism at a fun-fair: the rattle of other homecomings in this way years before, a small ache of expectation in the pit of my stomach, the certainty of a warm day in the hills by a lake ahead of me: a return in an hour, even without Henty and the green car, to a house I had been happy in. I put my shaving things away and unlocked the door.

A man was waiting outside, blocking my path, right in front of me.

‘Excuse me,’ I was carrying my wash-bag in one hand, and I was surprised when he didn’t move but simply put his own hand out, as if to take the sponge-bag from me.

‘I’m sorry.’ I tried to edge round him.

‘Let’s have a dekko then,’ he said. He had his hand on the bag now, looking at it intently. I thought he must be mad. He had that arrogant yet mystified look of the insane: a curly-headed, boyish fellow, thick-set with a body and a Cockney accent like a builder’s labourer. Yet he might have been Irish or lowland Scots originally, with his neat blue suit and coarse features sticking out of his open collar like a healthy vegetable. Perhaps, with his handler, he was on his way to some institution far north, out of harm’s way.

‘Give us a look then,’ he said again. But I wasn’t in the mood to humour him and held on to my bag.

‘Excuse me, I don’t think —’

In a flash he’d moved his thick stubby fingers from the bag onto my wrist, and before I could do anything about it had grasped it viciously and twisted my arm round, up behind into the small of my back, where he held it like a vice.

‘Come on, my old cock,’ he murmured into my ear. ‘You were bloody long enough coming for a leak. Bin waiting for you all morning. We’ve not got a lot of time. Move!’

He jerked my arm and propelled me towards the swaying carriage couplings beyond the lavatory which led into the parcels van next the engine. Once through the interconnecting doors he gave me a great shove so that I fell several yards away from him, into a great pile of Sunday newspaper colour supplements stacked up in the middle of the van. By the time I got to my feet he had closed the door and pushed a large box against it, below the level of the small window which I noticed was already covered over with a sheet of cardboard. Now he was facing me: with a gun.

‘Just get back where you were. On the floor — that’s right, right down.’

I sat down again while he moved over to the big double loading doors of the van and started to unlock the triple bolts, top and bottom and the long safety bar across the middle. The pleasant ache in the pit of my stomach of a moment before had turned to one of ulcerous fear. But a fear which made me think furiously, too, after the first numbness had worn off.

He must be one of Marcus’s hit men, I thought, caught up with me when I had least expected it, for I had never taken Marcus’s threats seriously. If this were so, then he was unlikely to shoot me: the plan would obviously be to make it seem an accident — a man with too much wine and a woman, who had fallen out of the train in the early morning, hungover, making for the gents.

My assailant had gloves on now — and the top and bottom bolts were free. But he was having trouble with the larger safety bar in the middle: it was stuck. I looked round the van, thinking I might edge towards him and push him out the door with my feet when he had it open. An unlikely ploy, I decided. And then I saw the beehives — half a dozen wooden hives on the other side of the van, not new but well seasoned, the bees obviously being moved up to some summer heather field in the Highlands for a gathering of that specially rich waxy white honey.

The lout had the doors open now, swinging them wide. For a moment I didn’t realise what was intended: a huge, colourful hole had simply opened in the side of the van — an inconceivable error in railway management: then I realised this hole was for me. The fresh morning air rushed in, the wheels clattered far more loudly now and I saw the countryside beyond, a blurred vision of blue and summer green, with the sun just getting up properly, the mist all gone and the Highlands rising up on the horizon beyond like a travel brochure.

I decided, in order to gain time and move back towards the hives, to play the coward — getting to my feet, cringing, yelping as I retreated, and indeed the rôle didn’t take much acting.

‘No! No!’ I squealed as he came towards me.

‘Come on, my old love. I got a job to do,’ the youth said offhandedly. He was a professional.

The train suddenly went into a cutting — granite rocks rearing up outside the open doors. I hated the idea of being cut open at speed on their razor edges. A surge of hatred, a feeling of gut survival rose in me, lending all the more force to my sudden kick at the first beehive on my right. The man was about two yards in front of me and, as I thought, he didn’t shoot but rushed me instead, pinning both my arms in a bear hug — but not before I got another successful kick, taking the roof off a second hive.

The lids were off both of them now, one hive completely on its side, with the honey frames in the whole top section spewed out over the floor. And the bees, stunned for a moment, were crawling about in great furry brown blobs as we struggled.

And struggle we did, closer to the open doors.

Luckily the first bee to strike chose my assailant — a vicious jab in some most tender place, for he relaxed his grip on me for a second with a shriek of pain. Our sweat and the smell of fear must have been an added infuriation to the already furious insects, for when they really started to sting it was with a voracious rapidity and energy and soon the two of us were well apart, oblivious of each other, slapping our faces and necks and ears and scalps in hideous pain.

His gun had dropped to the floor behind the colour supplements but neither of us had a mind for it now, intent only on saving ourselves from the marauding bees. A man can die of bee stings, I remembered — and two open hives of them, well enraged, attacking in a confined space is a likely death sentence. I had to get out of the van as quickly as possible. I picked up a big bundle of Observer supplements and threw them at the lout — and then another bundle, in his face, the wire ties cutting his cheek. He was down on the floor now, stunned, and I was able to get back to the interconnecting doors and move the packing case while he lay there.

Then the man crawled for his gun. But he never got to it. The bees must have got down his open collar and into his shirt by then, for before he could get a hand to it he started to writhe about in agony on the floor, twisting and turning in a frenzy, like a rank amateur on a bed of nails, a man with too few hands and too much skin to save himself

Saving myself, there was no time to do anything but leave him there. I had the packing case aside now, pulling off the cardboard screen on the window, before moving into the next carriage, and closing the door behind me. I looked back at him. He was like a human firecracker, exploding repeatedly as he jerked his body, still vainly swatting the bees — standing up now, swaying towards the open loading doors. There was no escape towards the engine and he had quite forgotten his gun. He could have pulled the communication cord, of course, but the thought didn’t have time to cross his mind, I suppose; for the bees had found their stride with him at that point, clustering round his head in a huge impenetrable cloud.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared and the van was empty. I didn’t see him go.

I just heard a faint thunderous buzzing sound through the glass and saw the dense shadows of bees circling the van, some of them beginning to swarm over the glass of the connecting door, like insects in a zoo. But otherwise the space inside was empty. Some great hand had come down from somewhere again and plucked the man away. I pulled the communication cord myself then and the train came to a halt eventually in a long squeal of brakes. The next thing Rachel was with me in the corridor, I remember — and behind her, running up, the guard from the other end of the train.

‘I’ve had a little trouble with some bees,’ I told him, my face already puffing up in excruciating pain. But not as bad as his trouble or his pain, I thought, the moment before I fainted.