The Human Factor

‘But you said we had time…’

‘I was wrong.’

‘Something’s happened?’

‘Yes. You’ve got to get away with Sam right away.’

‘And you are staying here?’

‘Either they’ll help me to get out or the police will come for me. You mustn’t be here if that happens.’

‘Then it’s the end for us?’

‘Of course it’s not the end. As long as we are alive we’ll come together again. Somehow. Somewhere.’

They hardly spoke to each other, dressing rapidly, like strangers on a journey who have been forced to share the same wagon lit. Only as she turned at the door on her way to wake up Sam she asked, ‘ What about the school? I don’t suppose anyone will bother…’

‘Don’t worry now. Telephone on Monday and say he’s ill. I want you both out of the house as quickly as possible. In case the police come.’

She returned five minutes later and said, ‘I spoke to your mother. She wasn’t exactly welcoming. She has someone for lunch. ‘What about Buller?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

At ten to nine she was ready to leave with Sam. A taxi was at the door. Castle felt a terrible sense of unreality. He said, ‘If nothing happens you can come back. We shall have made up our quarrel.’ Sam at least was happy. Castle watched him as he laughed with the driver.

‘If… You came to the Polana.’

‘Yes, but you said once things never happened twice the same way.’

At the taxi they even forgot to kiss and then they clumsily remembered-a kiss which was meaningless, empty of everything except the sense that this going away couldn’t be true it was something they were dreaming. They had always exchanged dreams-those private codes more unbreakable than Enigma.

‘Can I telephone?’

‘Better not. if all’s well, I’ll telephone you in a few days from a call box.’

When the taxi drove away, he couldn’t even see the last of her because of the tinted glass in the rear window. He went indoors and began to pack a small bag, suitable for a prison or an escape. Pyjamas, washing things, a small towel-after hesitation he added his passport. Then he sat down and began to wait. He heard one neighbour drive away and then the silence of Saturday descended. He felt as though he were the only person left alive in King’s Road, except for the police at the corner. The door was pushed open and Buller came waddling in. He settled on his haunches and fixed Castle with bulging and hypnotic eyes. ‘Buller,’ Castle whispered, ‘Buller, what a bloody nuisance you’ve always been, Buller.’ Buller went on staring-it was the way to get a walk.

Buller was still watching him a quarter of an hour later when the telephone rang. Castle let it ring. It rang over and over, like a child crying. This could not be the signal he hoped for-no control would have remained on the line so long-it was probably some friend of Sarah’s, Castle thought. It would not, in any case, be for him. He had no friends.

Doctor Percival sat waiting in the hall of the Reform, near the great wide staircase, which looked as though it had been built to stand the heavy weight of old Liberal statesmen, those bearded or whiskered men of perpetual integrity. Only one other member was visible when Hargreaves came in and he was small and insignificant and short-sighted he was having difficulty in reading the ticker tape. Hargreaves said, ‘I know it’s my turn, Emmanuel, but the Travellers is closed. I hope you don’t mind my asking Daintry to join us here.’

‘Well, he’s not the gayest of companions,’ Doctor Percival said. ‘Security trouble?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hoped you would have a little peace after Washington.’ ‘One doesn’t expect peace for long in this job. I don’t suppose I’d enjoy it anyway, or why is it that I don’t retire?’

‘Don’t talk of retirement, John. God knows what Foreign Office type they might foist on us. What’s troubling you?’

‘Let me have a drink first.’ They moved up the staircase and took their seats at a table on the landing outside the restaurant. Hargreaves drank his Cutty Sark neat. He said, ‘Suppose you killed the wrong man, Emmanuel?’

Doctor Percival’s eyes showed no surprise. He examined carefully the colour of his dry martini, smelt it, removed with a nail the nick of lemon peel as though he were making up his own prescription.

‘I’m confident I didn’t,’ he said.

‘Muller doesn’t share your confidence.’

‘Oh, Muller! What does Muller know about it?’ He knows nothing. But he has an intuition.’

‘If that’s all…’

‘You’ve never been in Africa, Emmanuel. You get to trust an intuition in Africa.’

‘Daintry will expect a great deal more than intuition. He wasn’t even satisfied with the facts about Davis.’

‘Facts?’

‘That business of the Zoo and the dentist to take only one example. And Porton. Porton was decisive.

‘What are you going to tell Daintry?’

‘My secretary tried to get Castle on the phone first thing this morning. There was no reply at all.’

‘He’s probably gone away with his family for the weekend.’

‘Yes. But I’ve had his safe opened-Muller’s notes aren’t there. I know what you’ll say. Anyone can be careless. But I thought if Daintry went down to Berkhamsted well, if he found nobody there, it would be an opportunity to have the house looked over discreetly, and if he’s in he’ll be surprised to see Daintry, and if he’s guilty… he’d he a bit on edge…’

‘Have you told 5?’

‘Yes, I’ve spoken to Philips. He’s having Castle’s phone monitored again. I hope to God nothing comes of all this. It would mean Davis was innocent.’

‘You shouldn’t worry so much about Davis. He’s no loss to the firm, John. He should never have been recruited. He was inefficient and careless and drank too much. He’d have been a problem sooner or later anyway. But if Muller should be right, Castle will be a serious headache. Aflatoxin can’t be used. Everyone knows he’s not a heavy drinker. It will have to be the law courts, John, unless we can think of something else. Counsel for the defence. Evidence in camera. How the journalists hate that. Sensational headlines. I suppose Daintry will be satisfied if no one else is. He’s a great stickler for doing things the legal way.’

‘And here he comes at last,’ Sir John Hargreaves said.

Daintry came up the great staircase towards them, slowly. Perhaps he wished to test every tread in turn as though it were a circumstantial piece of evidence.

‘I wish I knew how to begin.’

‘Why not as you did with me a little brutally?’

‘Ah, but he hasn’t your thick skin, Emmanuel.’

The hours seemed very long. Castle tried to read, but no book could relieve the tension. Between one paragraph and another he would be haunted by the thought that somewhere he had left in the house something which would incriminate him. He had looked at every book on every shelf-there was not one he had ever used for coding: War and Peace was safely destroyed. From his study he had taken every sheet of used carbon paper-however innocent-and burnt them: the list of telephone numbers on his desk contained nothing more secret than the butcher’s and the doctor’s, and yet he felt certain somewhere there must be a clue he had forgotten. He remembered the two men from Special Branch searching Davis’s flat; he remembered the lines which Davis had marked with a ‘c’ in his father’s Browning. There would be no traces of love in this house. He and Sarah had never exchanged love letters-love letters in South Africa would have been the proof of a crime.

He had never spent so long and solitary a day. He wasn’t hungry, though only Sam had eaten any breakfast, but he told himself one could not tell what might happen before night or where he would eat his next meal. He sat down in the kitchen before a plate of cold ham, but he had only eaten one piece before he realised it was time to listen to the one o’clock news. He listened to the end-even to the last item of football news because one could never be sure-there might be an urgent postscript.

But, of course, there was nothing which in the least concerned him. Not even a reference to young Halliday. It was unlikely there would be; his life from now on was totally in camera. For a man who had dealt for many years with what was called secret information he felt oddly out of touch. He was tempted to make again his urgent SOS, but it had been imprudent to make it even the second time from home. He had no idea where his signal rang, but those who monitored his telephone might well be able to trace the calls. ‘The conviction he had felt the evening before that the line had been cut, that he was abandoned, grew with every hour.

He gave what was left of the ham to Buller who rewarded him with a string of spittle on his trousers. He should long before this have taken him out, but he was unwilling to leave the four walls of the house, even to go into the garden. If the police came he wanted to be arrested in his home, and not in the open air with the neighbours’ wives peering through their windows. He had a revolver upstairs in a drawer beside his bed, a revolver which he had never admitted to Davis he possessed, a quite legal revolver dating from his days in South Africa. Nearly every white man there possessed a gun. At the time he bought it he had loaded one chamber, the second chamber to prevent a rash shot, and the charge had remained undisturbed for seven years. He thought: I could use it on myself if the police broke in, but he knew very well that suicide for him was out of the question. He had promised Sarah that one day they would be together again.

He read, he put on the television, he read again. A crazy notion struck him to catch a train to London and go to Halliday’s father and ask for news. But perhaps already they were watching his house and the station. At half-past four, between the dog and the wolf, as the grey evening gathered, the telephone rang a second time and this time illogically he answered the call. He half hoped to hear Boris’s voice, though he knew well enough that Boris would never take the risk of calling him at home.

‘The stern voice of his mother came out at him as though she were in the same room. ‘Is that Maurice?’

‘Yes.’

‘I ‘m glad you’re there. Sarah seemed to think you might have gone away.’

‘No, I’m still here.’

‘What’s all this nonsense between you?’

‘It’s not nonsense, Mother.’

‘I told her she ought to leave Sam with me and go straight back.’

‘She’s not coming, is she?’ he asked with fear. A second parting seemed an impossible thing to bear.

‘She refuses to go. She says you wouldn’t let her in. That’s absurd, of course.’

‘It’s not absurd at all. If she came I should leave.’

‘What on earth has happened between you?’

‘You’ll know one day.’

‘Are you thinking of a divorce? It would be very bad for Sam.’

‘At present it’s only a question of a separation. Just let things rest for a while, Mother.’

‘I don’t understand. I hate things I don’t understand. Sam wants to know whether you’ve fed Buller.’

‘Tell him I have.’

She rang off. He wondered whether a recorder somewhere was playing over their conversation. He needed a whisky, but the bottle was empty. He went down to what had once been a coal cellar where he kept his wine and spirits. The chute for the delivery of coal had been turned into a sort of slanting window. He looked up and saw on the pavement the reflected light of a street lamp and the legs of someone who must he standing below it.

The legs were not in uniform, but of course they might belong to a plain clothes officer from Special Branch. Whoever it was had placed himself rather crudely opposite the door, but of course the object of the watcher might be to frighten him into some imprudent action. Buller had followed him down the stairs; he too noticed the legs above and began to bark. He looked dangerous, sitting back on his haunches with his muzzle raised, but if the legs had been near enough, he would not have bitten them, he would have dribbled on them. As the two of them watched, the legs moved out of sight, and Buller grunted with disappointment-he had lost an opportunity of making a new friend. Castle found a bottle of J. & B. (it occurred to him that the colour of the whisky no longer had any importance) and went upstairs with it. He thought: If I hadn’t got rid of War and Peace I might now have the time to read some chapters for pleasure.

Again restlessness drove him to the bedroom to rummage among Sarah’s things for old letters, though he couldn’t imagine how any letters he had ever written her could be incriminating, but then in the hands of Special Branch perhaps the most innocent reference could be twisted to prove her guilty knowledge. He didn’t trust them not to want that there is always in such cases the ugly desire for revenge. He found nothing when you love and you are together old letters are apt to lose their value. Someone rang the front door hell. He stood and listened and heard it ring again and then a third time. He told himself that this visitor was not to be put off by silence and it was foolish not to open the door. If the line after all hadn’t been cut there might be a message, an instruction… Without thinking why, he drew out of the drawer by his bed the revolver and put it with its single charge in his pocket.

In the hall he still hesitated. The stained glass above the door cast lozenges of yellow, green and blue upon the floor. It occurred to him that if he carried the revolver in his hand when he opened the door the police would have the right to shoot him down in self-defence-it would be an easy solution; nothing would ever be publicly proved against a dead man. Then he reproached himself with the thought that none of his actions must be dictated by despair any more than by hope. He left the gun in his pocket and opened the door.

‘Daintry,’ he exclaimed. He hadn’t expected a face he knew.

‘Can I come in?’ Daintry asked in a tone of shyness. ‘Of course.’

Buller suddenly emerged from his retirement. ‘He’s not dangerous,’ Castle said as Daintry stepped back. He caught Buller by the collar, and Buller dropped his spittle between them like a fumbling bridegroom might drop the wedding ring. ‘What are you doing here, Daintry?’

‘I happened to be driving through and I thought I’d look you up.’ The excuse was so palpably untrue that Castle felt sorry for Daintry. He wasn’t like one of those smooth, friendly and fatal interrogators who were bred by MI5. He was a mere security officer who could be trusted to see that rules were not broken and to check briefcases.

‘Will you have a drink?’

‘I’d like one.’ Daintry’s voice was hoarse. He said-it was as though he had to find an excuse for everything’

‘It’s a cold wet night.’

‘I haven’t been out all day.’

‘You haven’t?’

Castle thought: that’s a bad slip if the telephone call this morning was from the office. He added, ‘Except to take the dog into the garden.’

Daintry took the glass of whisky and looked long at it and then round the sitting-room, little quick snapshots like a press photographer. You could almost hear the eyelids click. He said, ‘I do hope I’m not disturbing you. Your wife…’

‘She’s not here. I’m quite alone. Except of course for Buller.’

‘Buller?’

‘The dog.’

The deep silence of the house was emphasised by the two voices. They broke it alternately, uttering unimportant phrases.

‘I hope I haven’t drowned your whisky,’ Castle said. ‘Daintry still hadn’t drunk. I wasn’t thinking…’

‘No, no. It’s just as I like it.’ Silence dropped again like the heavy safety curtain in a theatre.

Castle began with a confidence, As a matter of fact I’m in a bit of trouble. It seemed a useful moment to establish Sarah’s innocence.

‘Trouble?’

‘My wife has left me. With my son. She’s gone to my mother’s.’

‘You mean you’ve quarrelled?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m very sorry,’ Daintry said. ‘It’s awful when these things happen.’ He seemed to be describing a situation which was as inevitable as death. He added, ‘Do you know the last time we met-at my daughter’s wedding? It was very kind of you to come with me to my wife’s afterwards. I was very glad to have you with me. But then I broke one of her owls.’

‘Yes. I remember.’

‘I don’t think I even thanked you properly for coming. It was a Saturday too. Like today. She was terribly angry. My wife, I mean, about the owl.’

‘We had to leave suddenly because of Davis.’

‘Yes, poor devil.’ Again the safety curtain dropped as though after an old-fashioned curtain line. The last act would soon begin. It was time to go to the bar. They both drank simultaneously.

‘What do you think about his death?’ Castle asked.

‘I don’t know what to think. To tell you the truth I try not to think.’

‘They believe he was guilty of a leak in my section, don’t they?’

‘They don’t confide much in a security officer. What makes you think that?’

‘It’s not a normal routine to have Special Branch men in to search when one of us dies.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘You found the death odd too?’

‘Why do you say that?’

Have we reversed our roles, Castle thought, am I interrogating him?

‘You said just now you tried not to think about his death.’

‘Did I? I don’t know what I meant. Perhaps it’s your whisky. You didn’t exactly drown it, you know.’

‘Davis never leaked anything to anyone,’ Castle said. He had the impression Daintry was looking at his pocket where it sagged on the cushion of the chair with the weight of the gun.

‘You believe that?’

‘I know it.’

He couldn’t have said anything which damned himself more completely. Perhaps after all Daintry was not so bad an interrogator; and the shyness and confusion and self-revelations he had been displaying might really be part of a new method which would put his training as a technician in a higher class than MI5’s.

‘You know it?’

‘Yes.’

He wondered what Daintry would do now. He hadn’t the power of arrest. He would have to find a telephone and consult the office. The nearest telephone was at the police station at the bottom of King’s Road-he would surely not have the nerve to ask if he might use Castle’s? And had he identified the weight in the pocket? Was he afraid? I would have time after he leaves to make a run for it, Castle thought, if there was anywhere to run to; but to run without a destination, simply to delay the moment of capture, was an act of panic. He preferred to wait where he was-that would have at least a certain dignity.

‘I’ve always doubted it,’ Daintry said, ‘to tell you the truth.’

‘So they did confide in you?’

‘Only for the security checks. I had to arrange those.’

‘It was a bad day for you, wasn’t it, first to break that owl and then to see Davis dead on his bed?’

‘I didn’t like what Doctor Percival said.’

‘What was that?’

He said, ‘I hadn’t expected this to happen.’

‘Yes. I remember now.’

‘It opened my eyes,’ Daintry said. ‘I saw what they’d been up to.’

‘They jumped too quickly to conclusions. They didn’t properly investigate the alternatives.’

‘You mean yourself?’

Castle thought, I’m not going to make it that easy for them, I’m not going to confess in so many words, however effective this new technique of theirs may be. He said, ‘Or Watson.’

‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten Watson.’

‘Everything in our section passes through his hands. And then, of course, there’s 69300 in L’M. They can’t properly check his accounts. Who knows if he hasn’t a bank deposit in Rhodesia or South Africa?’

‘True enough,’ Daintry said.

‘And our secretaries. It’s not only our personal secretaries who may be involved. They all belong to a pool. Don’t tell me that a girl doesn’t go sometimes to the loo without locking up the cable she’s been decoding or the report she’s been typing?’

‘I realise that. I checked the pool myself. There has always been a good deal of carelessness.’

‘Carelessness can begin at the top too. Davis’s death may have been an example of criminal carelessness.’

‘If he wasn’t guilty it was murder,’ Daintry said. ‘He had no chance to defend himself, to employ counsel. They were afraid of the effect a trial might have upon the Americans. Doctor Percival talked to me about boxes…’

‘Oh yes,’ Castle said. ‘I know that spiel. I’ve heard it often myself. Well, Davis is in a box all right now.’

Castle was aware that Daintry’s eyes were on his pocket. Was Daintry pretending to agree with him so as to escape safely back to his car? Daintry said, ‘You and I are making the same mistake-jumping to conclusions. Davis may have been guilty. What makes you so certain he wasn’t?’

‘You have to look for motives,’ Castle said. He had hesitated, he had evaded, but he had been strongly tempted to reply, ‘Because I am the leak.’ He felt sure by this time that the line was cut and he could expect no help, so what was the purpose of delaying? He liked Daintry, he had liked him ever since the day of his daughter’s wedding. He had become suddenly human to him over the smashed owl, in the solitude of his smashed marriage. If anyone were to reap credit for his confession he would like it to be Daintry. Why therefore not give up and go quietly, as the police often put it? He wondered if he were prolonging the game only for the sake of company, to avoid the solitude of the house and the solitude of a cell.

‘I suppose the motive for Davis would have been money,’ Daintry said.

‘Davis didn’t care much about money. All he needed was enough to bet a little on the horses and treat himself to a good port. You have to examine things a bit closer than that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If our section was the one suspected the leaks could only have concerned Africa.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s plenty of other information that passes through my section-that we pass on-that must be of greater interest to the Russians, but if the leak was there, don’t you see, the other sections would be suspect too? So the leak can only be about our particular share of Africa.’

‘Yes,’ Daintry agreed, ‘I see that.’

‘That seems to indicate-well, if not exactly an ideology-you don’t need to look necessarily for a Communist-but a strong attachment to Africa-or to Africans. I doubt if Davis had ever known an African.’ He paused and then added with deliberation and a certain feeling of joy in the dangerous game, ‘Except, of course, my wife and my child.’ He was putting the dots on an i, but he wasn’t going to cross the t’s as well. He went on, ‘69300 has been a long time in L’M. No one knows what friendships he’s made-he has his African agents, many of them Communist.’

‘After so many years of concealment he was beginning to enjoy this snake-and-ladder game. Just as I had in Pretoria,’ he continued. He smiled, ‘Even C, you know, has a certain love of Africa.’

‘Oh, there you are joking,’ Daintry said.

‘Of course I’m joking. I only want to show how little they had against Davis compared with others, myself or 69300-and all those secretaries about whom we know nothing.’

‘They were all carefully vetted.’

‘Of course they were. We’ll have the names of all their lovers on the files, lovers anyway of that particular year, but some girls change their lovers like they change their winter clothes.’

Daintry said, ‘You’ve mentioned a lot of suspects, but you are so sure about Davis.’ He added, unhappily, ‘You’re lucky not to be a security officer. I nearly resigned after Davis’s funeral. I wish I had.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘What would I have done to pass the time?’

‘You could have collected car numbers. I did that once.’

‘Why did you quarrel with your wife?’ Daintry asked. ‘Forgive me. That’s no business of mine.’

‘She disapproved of what I’m doing.’

‘You mean for the firm?’

‘Not exactly.’

Castle could tell the game was nearly over. Daintry had surreptitiously looked at his wrist watch. He wondered whether it was a real watch or a disguised microphone. Perhaps he thought he had come to the end of his tape. Would he ask to go to the lavatory so that he could change it?

‘Have another whisky.’

‘No, I’d better not. I have to drive home.’

Castle went with him to the hall, and Buller too. Buller was sorry to see a new friend leave.

‘Thanks for the drink,’ Daintry said.

‘Thank you for the chance to talk about a lot of things.’

‘Don’t come out. It’s a beastly night.’ But Castle followed him into the cold drizzle. He noticed the tail lights of a car fifty yards down the road opposite the police station.

‘Is that your car?’

‘No. Mine’s a little way up the road. I had to walk down because I couldn’t see the numbers in this rain.’

‘Goodnight then.’

‘Goodnight. I hope things go all right-I mean with your wife.’

Castle stood in the slow cold rain long enough to wave to Daintry as he passed. His car didn’t stop, he noticed, at the police station but turned right and took the London road. Of course he could always stop at the King’s Arms or the Swan to use the telephone, but even in that case Castle doubted whether he would have a very clear report to make. They would probably want to hear his tape before making a decision-Castle felt sure now the watch was a microphone. Of course, the railway station might already he watched and the immigration officers warned at the airports. One fact had surely emerged from Daintry’s visit. Young Halliday must have begun to talk or they would never have sent Daintry to see him.

At his door he looked up and down the road. There was no apparent watcher, but the lights of the car opposite the police station still shone through the rain. It didn’t look like a police car. The police-he supposed even those of the Special Branch-had to put up with British makes and this-he couldn’t be sure but it looked like a Toyota. He remembered the Toyota on the road to Ashridge. He tried to make out the colour, but the rain obscured it. Red and black were indistinguishable through the drizzle which was beginning to turn to sleet. He went indoors and for the first time he dared to hope.

He took the glasses to the kitchen and washed them carefully. It was as though he were removing the fingerprints of his despair. Then he laid two more glasses in the sitting-room, and for the first time he encouraged hope to grow. It was a tender plant and it needed a great deal of encouragement, but he told himself that the car was certainly a Toyota. He wouldn’t let himself think how many Toyotas there were in the region but waited in patience for the bell to ring. He wondered who it was who would come and stand in Daintry’s place on the threshold. It wouldn’t be Boris he was sure of that-and neither would it be young Halliday who was only out of custody on sufferance and was probably deeply engaged now with men from the Special Branch.

He went back to the kitchen and gave Buller a plate of biscuits-perhaps it would be a long time before he would be able to eat again. The clock in the kitchen had a noisy tick which seemed to make time go more slowly. If there was really a friend in the Toyota he was taking a long time to appear.

Colonel Daintry pulled into the yard of the King’s Arms.

There was only one car in the yard, and he sat for a while at the wheel, wondering whether to telephone now and what to say if he did. He had been shaken with a secret anger during his lunch at the Reform with C and Doctor Percival. There were moments when he had wanted to push his plate of smoked trout aside and say, ‘I resign. I don’t want to have any more to do with your bloody firm.’ He was tired to death of secrecy and of errors which had to be covered up and not admitted. A man came across the yard from the outside lavatory whistling a tuneless tune, buttoning his flies in the security of the dark, and went on into the bar. Daintry thought, They killed my marriage with their secrets. During the war there had been a simple cause-much simpler than the one his father knew. The Kaiser had not been a Hitler, but in the cold war they were now fighting it was possible, as in the Kaiser’s war, to argue right and wrong. There was nothing clear enough in the cause to justify murder by mistake. Again he found himself in the bleak house of his childhood, crossing the hall, entering the room where his father and his mother sat hand in hand. ‘God knows best.’ his father said, remembering Jutland and Admiral Jellicoe. His mother said, ‘My dear, at your age, it’s difficult to find another job.’ He turned off his lights and moved through the slow heavy rainfall into the bar. He thought: My wife has enough money, my daughter is married, I could live somehow-on my pension.

On this cold wet night there was only one man in the bar-he was drinking a pint of hitter. He said, ‘Good evening, sir’ as though they were well acquainted.

‘Good evening. A double whisky,’ Daintry ordered.

‘If you can call it that,’ the man said as the barman turned away to hold a glass below a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

‘Call what?’

‘The evening, I meant, sir. Though this weather’s only to be expected, I suppose, in November.’

‘Can I use your telephone?’ Daintry asked the barman.

The barman pushed the whisky across with an air of rejection. He nodded in the direction of a box. He was clearly a man of few words: he was here to listen to what customers chose to say but not to communicate himself more than was strictly necessary, until-no doubt with pleasure he would pronounce the phrase, ‘Time, Gentlemen.’

Daintry dialled Doctor Percival’s number and while he listened to the engaged tone, he tried to rehearse the words he wished to use. ‘I’ve seen Castle… He’s alone in the house… He’s had a quarrel with his wife… There’s nothing more to report…’ He would slam down the receiver as he slammed it down now-then he went back to the bar and his whisky and the man who insisted on talking.

‘Uh,’ the barman said, ‘uh’ and once, ‘That’s right.’

The customer turned to Daintry and included him in his conversation. They don’t even teach simple arithmetic these days. I said to my nephew-he’s nine-what’s four times seven, and do you think he could tell me?’

Daintry drank his whisky with his eye on the telephone box, still trying to make up his mind what words to use.

‘I can see you agree with me,’ the man said to Daintry. ‘And you?’ he asked the barman. ‘Your business would go to pot, wouldn’t it, if you couldn’t say what four times seven was?’

The barman wiped some spilled beer off the bar and said, ‘Uh.’

‘Now you, sir, I can guess very easily what profession you follow. Don’t ask me how. It’s a hunch I have. Comes from studying faces, I suppose, and human nature. That’s how I came to be talking about arithmetic while you were on the telephone. That’s a subject, I said to Mr. Barker here, about which the gentleman will have strong opinions. Weren’t those my very words?’

‘Uh,’ Mr. Barker said.

‘I’ll have another pint if you don’t mind.’

Mr. Barker filled his glass.

‘My friends sometimes ask me for an exhibition. They even have a little bet on it now and then. He’s a schoolmaster, I say, about someone in the tube, or he’s a chemist, and then I enquire politely-they don’t take offence when I explain to them-and nine times out of ten, I’m right. Mr. Barker has seen me at it in here, haven’t you, Mr. Barker?’

‘Now you, sir, if you’ll excuse me playing my little game just to amuse Mr. Barker here on a cold wet evening-you are in ‘Government service. Am I right, sir?’

‘Yes,’ Daintry said. He finished his whisky and put down his glass. It was time to try the telephone again.

‘So we’re getting warm, eh?’ The customer fixed him with beady eyes. A sort of confidential position. ‘You know a lot more about things than the rest of us.’

‘I have to telephone,’ Daintry said.

‘Just a moment, sir. I just want to show Mr. Barker… He wiped a little beer from his mouth with a handkerchief and thrust his face close to Daintry’s. You deal in figures,’ he said. ‘You are in the Inland Revenue.’

Daintry moved to the telephone box.

‘You see,’ the customer said, ‘touchy fellow. They don’t like to be recognised. An inspector probably.’

This time Daintry got the ringing tone and soon he heard Doctor Percival’s voice, bland and reassuring as though he had kept his bedside manner long after he had abandoned bedsides. ‘Yes? Doctor Percival here. Who is that?’

‘Daintry’

‘Good evening, my dear fellow. Any news? Where are you?’

‘I’m at Berkhamsted. I’ve seen Castle.’

‘Yes. What’s your impression?’

Anger took the words he meant to speak and tore them in pieces like a letter one decides not to send. ‘My impression is that you’ve murdered the wrong man.’

‘Not murdered,’ Doctor Percival said gently, ‘an error in the prescription. The stuff hadn’t been tried before on an human being. But what makes you think that Castle…?’

‘Because he’s certain that Davis was innocent.’

‘He said that-in so many words?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s he up to?’

‘He’s waiting.’

‘Waiting for what?’

‘Something to happen. His wife’s left him with the child. He says they’ve quarrelled.’

‘We’ve already circulated a warning,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘to the airports-and the sea ports too of course. If he makes a run for it, we’ll have prima facie evidence-but we’ll still need the hard stuff.’

‘You didn’t wait for the hard stuff with Davis.’

‘C insists on it this time. What are you doing now?’

‘Going home.’

‘You asked him about Muller’s notes?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘It wasn’t necessary.’

‘You’ve done an excellent job, Daintry. But why do you suppose he came clean like that to you?’

Daintry put the receiver down without answering and left the box. The customer said, ‘I was right, wasn’t I? You are an inspector of the Inland Revenue.’

‘Yes.’

‘You see, Mr. Barker. I’ve scored again.’

Colonel Daintry went slowly out to his car. For a while he sat in it with the engine running and watched the drops of rain pursue each other down the windscreen. Then he drove out of the yard and turned in the direction of Boxmoor and London and the flat in St James’s Street where yesterday’s Camembert was awaiting him. He drove slowly. The November drizzle had turned into real rain and there was a hint of hail. He thought, Well, I did what they would call my duty, but though he was on the road towards home and the table where he would sit beside the Camembert to write his letter, he was in no hurry to arrive. In his mind the act of resignation had already been accomplished. He told himself he was a free man, that he had no duties any longer and no obligations, but he had never felt such an extreme solitude as he felt now.

The bell rang. Castle had been waiting for it a long time and yet he hesitated to go to the door; it seemed to him now that he had been absurdly optimistic. By this time young Halliday would surely have talked, the Toyota was one of a thousand Toyotas, the Special Branch had probably been waiting for him to be alone, and he knew how absurdly indiscreet he had been with Daintry. A second time the bell rang and then a third; there was nothing he could do but open. He went to the door with his hand on the revolver in his pocket, but it was of no more value than a rabbit’s foot. He couldn’t shoot his way out of an island. Buller gave him a spurious support, growling heavily, but he knew, when the door opened, Buller would fawn on whoever was there. He couldn’t see through the stained glass which ran with the rain. Even when he opened the door he saw nothing distinctly-only a hunched figure.

‘It’s a shocking night,’ a voice he recognised complained to him out of the dark.

‘Mr. Halliday-I wasn’t expecting you.’

Castle thought: He’s come to ask me to help his son, but what can I do?

‘Good boy. Good boy,’ the almost invisible Mr. Halliday said nervously to Buller.

‘Come in,’ Castle assured him. ‘He’s quite harmless.’

‘I can see he’s a very fine dog.’

Mr. Halliday entered cautiously, hugging the wall, and Buller wagged what he had of a tail and dribbled.

‘You can see, Mr. Halliday, he’s a friend of all the world. Take off your coat. Come and have a whisky.’

‘I’m not much of a drinking man, but I won’t say No.’

‘I was sorry to hear on the radio about your son. You must be very anxious.’

Mr. Halliday followed Castle into the living-room. He said, ‘He had it coming to him, sir, perhaps it will teach him a lesson. The police have been carting a lot of stuff out of his shop. The inspector showed me one or two of the things and really disgusting they were. But as I said to the inspector I don’t suppose he read the stuff himself.’

‘I hope the police have not been bothering you?’

‘Oh no. As I told you, sir, I think they feel quite sorry for me. They know I keep a very different kind of shop.’

‘Did you have a chance to give him my letter?’

‘Ah, there, sir, I thought it wiser not. Under the circumstances. But don’t you worry. I passed the message on where it truly belongs.’

He raised a book which Castle had been trying to read and looked at the title.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Well, sir, you’ve always been, I think, under a bit of a misunderstanding. My son never concerned himself with things in your way of business. But they thought it just as well in case of trouble-that you believed…’ He bent and warmed his hands in front of the gas fire, and his eyes looked up with a sly amusement. ‘Well, sir, things being as they are, we’ve got to get you out of here pretty quick.’

It came as a shock to Castle to realise how little he had been trusted even by those who had the most reason to trust.

‘If you’ll forgive my asking, sir, where exactly are your wife and your boy? I’ve orders…’

‘This morning, when I heard the news about your son, I sent them away. To my mother. She believes we’ve had a quarrel.’

‘Ah, that’s one difficulty out of the way.’

Old Mr. Halliday, after warming his hands sufficiently, began to move around the room: he cast his eye over the bookshelves. He said, ‘I’ll give as good a price for those as any other bookseller. Twenty-five pounds down-it’s all you are allowed to take out of the country. I’ve got the notes on me. They fit my stock. All these World’s Classics and Everyman’s. They are not reprinted as they should he, and when they do reprint, what a price!’

‘I thought,’ Castle said, ‘we were in a bit of a hurry.’

‘There’s one thing I’ve learned,’ Mr. Halliday said, ‘in the last fifty years is to take things easy. Once start being hurried and you are sure to make mistakes. If you’ve got half an hour to spare always pretend to yourself you’ve got three hours. You did say something, sir, about a whisky?’

‘If we can spare the time…’ Castle poured out two glasses.

‘We’ve got the time. I expect you have a bag packed with all the needful?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you going to do about the dog?’

‘Leave him behind, I suppose. I hadn’t thought… Perhaps you could take him to a vet.’

‘Not wise, sir. A connection between you and me-it wouldn’t do-if they went searching for him. All the same we’ve got to keep him quiet for the next few hours. Is he a barker when he’s left alone?’

‘I don’t know. He’s not used to being alone.’

‘What I have in mind is the neighbours complaining. One of them could easily ring the police, and we don’t want them finding an empty house.’

‘They’ll find one soon enough anyway.’

‘It won’t matter when you’re safe abroad. It’s a pity your wife didn’t take the dog with her.’

‘She couldn’t. My mother has a cat. Buller kills cats at sight.’

‘Yes, they’re naughty ones, those boxers, where cats are concerned. I have a cat myself.’ Mr. Halliday pulled at Buller’s ears and Buller fawned on him. It’s what I said. ‘If you are in a hurry you forget things. Like the dog. Have you a cellar?’

‘Not a soundproof one. If you mean to shut him up there.’

‘I notice, sir, that in your right pocket you seem to have a gun-or am I mistaken?’

‘I thought if the police came… There’s only one charge in it.’

‘The counsel of despair, sir?’

‘I hadn’t made up my mind to use it.’

‘I would rather you let me have it, sir. If we were stopped, at least I have a licence, with all this shoplifting we have nowadays. What’s his name, sir? I mean the dog.’

‘Buller.’

‘Come here, Buller, come here. There’s a good dog.’ Buller laid his muzzle on Mr. Halliday’s knee. Good dog, Buller. Good dog. You don’t want to cause any trouble, do you, not to a good master like you have.’ Buller wagged his stump. ‘They think they know when you like them,’ Mr. Halliday said. He scratched Buller behind the ears and Buller showed his appreciation. ‘Now, sir, if you wouldn’t mind giving me the gun… Ah, you kill cats, eh… Ah, the wicked one.’

‘They’ll hear the shot,’ Castle said.

‘We’ll take a little walk down to the cellar. One shot-nobody pays any attention. They think it’s a back-fire.’

‘He won’t go with you.’

‘Let’s see. Come on, Buller, my lad. Come for a walk. A walk, Buller.’

‘You see. He won’t go.’

‘It’s time to be off, sir. You’d better come down with me. I wanted to spare you.’

‘I don’t want to be spared.’

Castle led the way down the stairs to the cellar. Buller followed him and Mr. Halliday tailed Buller.

‘I wouldn’t put on the light, sir, a shot and a light going out. That might arouse curiosity.’

Castle closed what had once been the coal chute. ‘Now, sir, if you’ll give me the gun…’

‘No, I’ll do this.’ He held the gun out, pointing it at Buller, and Buller, ready for a game and probably taking the muzzle for a rubber bone, fastened his jaws around it and pulled. Castle pressed the trigger twice because of the empty chamber. He felt nausea.

‘I’ll have another whisky,’ he said, ‘before we go.’

‘You deserve one, sir. It’s odd how fond one can get of a dumb animal. My cat…’

‘I disliked Buller intensely. It’s only… well, I’ve never killed anything before.’

‘It’s hard driving in this rain,’ Mr. Halliday said, breaking a very long silence. The death of Buller had clogged their tongues.

‘Where are we going? Heathrow? The immigration officers will be on the look-out by this time.’

‘I’m taking you to a hotel. If you open the glove compartment, sir, you’ll find a key. Room 423. All you have to do is take the lift straight up. Don’t go to the desk. Wait in the room until someone comes for you.’

‘Suppose a maid…’

‘Hang a Don’t Disturb notice on the door.’

‘And after that…’

‘I wouldn’t know, sir. Those were all the instructions I have.’

Castle wondered how the news of Buller’s death would reach Sam. He knew that he would never be forgiven. He asked, ‘How did you get mixed up in this?’

‘Not mixed up, sir. I’ve been a member of the Party, on the quiet as you might say, since I was a boy. I was in the army at seventeen-volunteered. Gave my age wrong. Thought I was going to France, but it was Archangel they sent me to. I was a prisoner for four years. I saw a lot and learnt a lot in those four years.’

‘How did they treat you?’

‘It was hard, but a boy can stand a lot, and there was always someone who was friendly. I learnt a bit of Russian, enough to interpret for them, and they gave me books to read when they couldn’t give me food.’

‘Communist books?’

‘Of course, sir. A missionary hands out the Bible, doesn’t he?’

‘So you are one of the faithful.’

‘It’s been a lonely life, I have to admit that. You see, I could never go to meetings or walk in marches. Even my boy doesn’t know. They use me when they can in little ways like in your case, sir. I’ve picked up from your drop many a time. ‘Oh, it was a happy day for me when you walked into my shop. I felt less alone.’

‘Have you never wavered a bit, Halliday? I mean Stalin, Hungary, Czechoslovakia?’

‘I saw enough in Russia when I was a boy-and in England too with the Depression when I came home-to inoculate me against little things like that.’

‘Little?’

‘If you will forgive me saying so, sir, your conscience is rather selective. I could say to you-Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima. Didn’t they shake your faith a bit in what you call democracy? Perhaps they did or you wouldn’t be with me now.’

‘That was war.’

‘My people have been at war since 1917.’

Castle peered into the wet night between the sweeps of the wipers. ‘You are taking me to Heathrow.’

‘Not exactly.’ Mr. Halliday laid a hand light as an autumn Ashridge leaf on Castle’s knee. ‘Don’t you worry, sir. They are looking after you. I envy you. You’ll be seeing Moscow I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Have you never been there?’

‘Never. The nearest I ever came to it was the prison camp near Archangel. Did you ever see The Three Sisters? I saw it only once, but I always remember what one of them said and I say it to myself when I can’t sleep at night-“To sell the house, to make an end of everything here, and off to Moscow…” ‘

‘You’d find a rather different Moscow to Chekhov’s.’

‘There’s another thing one of those sisters said, “Happy people don’t notice if it’s winter or summer. If I lived in Moscow I wouldn’t mind what the weather was like.” Oh well, I tell myself when I’m feeling low, Marx never knew Moscow either, and I look across Old Compton Street and I think, London is still Marx’s London. Soho’s Marx’s Soho. This was where the Communist Manifesto was first printed.’ A lorry came suddenly out of the rain and swerved and nearly hit them and went on indifferently into the night. ‘Shocking drivers there are,’ Mr. Halliday said, ‘they know nothing’s going to hurt them in those juggernauts. We ought to have bigger penalties for dangerous driving. You know, sir, that’s what was really wrong in Hungary and Czechoslovakia-dangerous driving. Dubcek was a dangerous driver-it’s as simple as that.’

‘Not to me it isn’t. I’ve never wanted to end up in Moscow.’

‘I suppose it will seem a bit strange-you not being one of us, but you shouldn’t worry. I don’t know what you’ve done for us, but it must be important, and they’ll look after you, you can be sure of that. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t give you the Order of Lenin or put you on a postage stamp like Sorge.’

‘Sorge was a Communist.’

‘And it makes me proud to think you are on the road to Moscow in this old car of mine.’

‘If we drove for a century, Halliday, you wouldn’t convert me.’

‘I wonder. After all, you’ve done a lot to help us.’

‘I’ve helped you over Africa, that’s all.’

‘Exactly, sir. You are on the road. Africa’s the thesis, Hegel would say. You belong to the antithesis but you are an active part of the antithesis-you are one of those who will belong to the synthesis yet.’

‘That’s all jargon to me. I’m no philosopher.’

‘A militant doesn’t have to be, and you are a militant.’

‘Not for Communism. I’m only a casualty now.’

‘They’ll cure you in Moscow.’

‘In a psychiatric ward?’

That phrase silenced Mr. Halliday. Had he found a small crack in the dialectic of Hegel, or was it the silence of pain and doubt? He would never know, for the hotel was ahead of them, the lights smudging through the rain. ‘Get out here,’ Mr. Halliday said. ‘I’d better not be seen.’ Cars passed them when they halted, in a long illuminated chain, the headlamps of one car lighting the rear lamps of another. A Boeing 707 slanted noisily down on London Airport. Mr. Halliday scrabbled in the back of the car. ‘There’s something I’ve forgotten.’ He pulled out a plastic bag which might once have contained duty free goods. He said, ‘Put the things out of your case into this. They might notice you at the desk if you go to the lift carrying a suitcase.’

‘There’s not enough room in it.’

‘Then leave what you can’t get in.’

Castle obeyed. Even after all those years of secrecy he realised that in an emergency the young recruit of Archangel was the real expert. He abandoned with reluctance his pyjamas-thinking, a prison will provide them-his sweater. If I get so far, they will have to give me something warm.

Mr. Halliday said, ‘I have a little present. A copy of that Trollope you asked for. You won’t need a second copy now. It’s a long book, but there’ll be a lot of waiting. There always is in war. It’s called The Way We Lire Now.’

‘The book recommended by your son?’

‘Oh, I deceived you a little there. It’s me that reads Trollope, not him. His favourite author is a man called Robbins. You must forgive me my little deception-I wanted you to think a bit better of him in spite of that shop. He’s not a bad boy.’

Castle shook Mr. Halliday’s hand. ‘I’m sure he’s not. I hope all goes well with him.’

‘Remember. Go straight to room 423, and wait.’

Castle walked away towards the light of the hotel carrying the plastic bag. He felt as though he had already lost contact with everything he had known in England Sarah and Sam were out of reach in the house of his mother which had never been his home. He thought: I was more at home in Pretoria. I had work to do there. But now there’s no work left for me to do. A voice called after him through the rain, ‘Good luck, sir. The best of luck,’ and he heard the car drive away.

He was bewildered when he walked through the door of the hotel he walked straight into the Caribbean. There was no rain. There were palm trees around a pool, and the sky shone with innumerable pinpoint stars; he smelt the warm stuffy wet air which he remembered from a distant holiday he had taken soon after the war: he was surrounded that was inevitable in the Caribbean-by American voices. There was no danger of his being remarked by anyone at the long desk-they were far too busy with an influx of American passengers, just deposited from what airport, Kingston? Bridgetown? A black waiter went by carrying two rum punches towards a young couple sitting by the pool. The lift was there, beside him, waiting with open doors, and yet he hung back amazed… The young couple began to drink their punch through straws under the stars. He put out a hand to convince himself that there was no rain and someone close behind him said, ‘Why, if it isn’t Maurice? What are you doing in this joint?’ He stopped his hand half-way to his pocket and looked round. He was glad he no longer had his revolver.

The speaker was someone called Blit who had been his contact a few years back in the American Embassy until Blit was transferred to Mexico-perhaps because he could speak no Spanish. ‘Blit!’ he exclaimed with false enthusiasm. It had always been that way. Blit had called him Maurice from their first meeting, but he had never got further than ‘Blit’.

‘Where are you off to?’ Blit asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. He had always preferred to talk about himself. ‘Off to New York,’ Blit said. ‘Non-arrival of incoming plane. Spending the night here. Smart idea, this joint. Just like the Virgin Islands. I’d put on my Bermuda shorts if I had them.’

‘I thought you were in Mexico.’

‘That’s old history. I’m on the European desk again now. You still on darkest Africa?’

‘Yes.’

‘You delayed here too?’

‘I’ve got to wait around,’ Castle said, hoping his ambiguity would not be questioned.

‘What about a Planter’s Punch? They do them OK here, so I’m told.’

‘I’ll meet you in half an hour,’ Castle said.

‘OK. OK. By the pool then.’

‘By the pool.’

Castle got into the lift and Blit followed him. Going up? So am I. Which floor?’

‘Fourth.’

‘Me too. I’ll give you a free ride.’

Was it possible that the Americans too might be watching him? In these circumstances it seemed unsafe to put down anything to coincidence.

‘Eating here?’ Blit asked.

‘I’m not sure. You see, it depends…’

‘You sure are security minded,’ Blit said. ‘Good old Maurice.’ They walked together down the corridor. Room 423 came first, and Castle fumbled with his key long enough to see that Blit went on without a pause to 427 no, 429. Castle felt safer when his door was locked and the Don’t Disturb notice was hanging outside.

The dial of the central heating stood at 75°. It was hot enough for the Caribbean. He went to the window and looked out. Below was the round bar and above the artificial sky. A stout woman with blue hair weaved her way along the edge of the pool: she must have had too many rum punches. He examined the room carefully in case it contained some hint of the future, as he had examined his own house for any hint of the past. Two double beds, an armchair, a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, a desk which was bare except for a blotting pad, a television set, a door that led to the bathroom. The lavatory seat had a strip of paper pasted across it assuring him that it was hygienic: the tooth glasses were swathed in plastic. He went back into the bedroom and opened the blotting pad and learned from the printed notepaper that he was in the Starflight Hotel. A card listed the restaurants and the bars-in one restaurant there was music and dancing-it was called the Pizarro. The grill room by contrast was called the Dickens, and there was a third, self-service, which was called the Oliver Twist. ‘You help yourself to more.’ Another card informed him that there were buses every half-hour to Heathrow airport.

He discovered under the television set a refrigerator containing miniature bottles of whisky and gin and brandy, tonic water and soda, two kinds of beer and quarter bottles of champagne. He chose a J. & B. from habit and sat down to wait. ‘There’ll be a lot of waiting,’ Mr. Halliday had said, ‘when he gave him the Trollope, and he began to read for want of anything else to do: ‘Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing-table in her own room in her own house in Welbeck Street.’ He found it was not a book which could distract him from the way he lived now.

He went to the window. The black waiter passed below him, and then he saw Blit come out and gaze around. Surely half an hour couldn’t possibly have gone by: he reassured himself-ten minutes. Blit would not have really missed him yet. He turned the lights out in his room, so that Blit, if he looked up, would not see him. Blit sat himself down by the circular bar: he gave his order. Yes, it was a Planter’s Punch. The waiter was putting in the slice of orange and the cherry. Blit had taken off his jacket and he was wearing a shirt with short sleeves, which added to the illusion of the palm trees and the pool and the starry night. Castle watched him use the telephone in the bar and he rang a number. Was it only in Castle’s imagination that Blit seemed to raise his eyes towards the window of room 423 while he talked? Reporting what? To whom?

He heard the door open behind him and the lights went on. Turning quickly, he saw an image flash across the looking-glass of the wardrobe door like someone who didn’t want to be seen the image of a small man with a black moustache wearing a dark suit carrying a black attache case.

‘I was delayed by the circulation,’ the man said in precise but rather incorrect English.

‘You’ve come for me?’

‘Time is a little lacking for us. There is a necessity for you to catch the next autobus to the airport.’ He began to unpack the attache case on the desk: first an air ticket, then a passport, a bottle which looked as if it might contain gum, a bulging plastic bag, a hairbrush and comb, a razor.

‘I have with me everything I need,’ Castle said, catching the precise tone.

The man ignored him. He said, ‘You will find your ticket is to Paris only. That is something I will explain to you.’

‘Surely they’ll be watching all the planes wherever they go.’

‘They will be watching in particular the one to Prague which is due to leave at the same time as the one to Moscow which has been delayed due to trouble with the engines. An unusual occurrence. Perhaps Aeroflot await an important passenger. The police will be very attentive to Prague and Moscow.’

‘The watch will be set earlier at the immigration desks. They won’t wait at the gates.’

‘That will be taken care of. You must approach the desks-let me see your watchin about fifty minutes. The bus will leave in thirty minutes. This is your passport.’

‘What do I do in Paris if I get that far?’

‘You will be met as you leave the airport, and you will be given another ticket. You will have just time to catch another plane.’

‘Where to?’

‘I have no idea. You will learn all that in Paris.’

‘Interpol will have warned the police there by this time.’

‘No. Interpol never act in a political case. It is against the rules.’

Castle opened the passport. ‘Partridge,’ he said, ‘you’ve chosen a good name. The shooting season isn’t over.’ Then he looked at the photograph. But this photo will never do. It’s not like me.’

‘That is true. But now we shall make you more like the photograph.’

He carried the tools of his trade into the bathroom. Between the tooth glasses he propped an enlarged photograph of the one in the passport.

‘Sit on this chair, please.’ He began to trim Castle’s eyebrows and then began on his hair-the man of the passport had a crew cut. Castle watched the scissors move in the mirror-he was surprised to see how a crew cut changed the whole face, enlarging the forehead; it seemed to change even the expression of the eyes. ‘You’ve taken ten years off my age,’ Castle said.

‘Sit still, please.’

The man then began to attach the hairs of a thin moustache-the moustache of a timid man who lacked confidence. He said, ‘A beard or a heavy moustache is always an object of suspicion.’ It was a stranger who looked back at Castle from the mirror. ‘There. Finished. I think it is good enough.’ He went to his briefcase and took from it a white rod which he telescoped into a walking stick. He said, ‘You are blind. An object of sympathy, Mr. Partridge. An Air France hostess has been asked to meet the autobus from the hotel and she will lead you through immigration to your plane. In Paris at Rossy when you depart from the airport you will be driven to Orly-another plane there with engine trouble. Perhaps you will no longer be Mr. Partridge, another make-up in the car, another passport. The human visage is infinitely adaptable. That is a good argument against the importance of heredity. We are born with much the same face-think of a baby-but environment changes it.’

‘It seems easy,’ Castle said, ‘but will it work?’

‘We think it will work,’ the little man said as he packed his case. ‘Go out now, and remember to use your stick. Please do not move your eyes, move your whole head if someone speaks to you. Try to keep the eyes blank.’

Without thinking Castle picked up The Way We Live Now.

‘No, no, Mr. Partridge. A blind man is not likely to possess a book. And you must leave that sack behind.’

‘It only holds a spare shirt, a razor’

‘A spare shirt has the mark of a laundry.’

‘Won’t it seem odd if I have no luggage?’

‘That is not known to the immigration officer unless he asks to see your ticket.’

‘He probably will.’

‘Never mind, you are only going home. You live in Paris. The address is in your passport.’

‘What profession am I?’

‘Retired.’

‘That at least is true,’ Castle said.

He came out of the lift and began to tap his way towards the entrance where the bus waited. As he passed the doors which led to the bar and the pool he saw Blit. Blit was looking at his watch with an air of impatience. An elderly woman took Castle’s arm and said, ‘Are you catching the bus?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am too. Let me help you.’

He heard a voice calling after him. ‘Maurice!’ He had to walk slowly because the woman walked slowly. ‘Hi! Maurice.’

‘I think someone’s calling you,’ the woman said.

‘A mistake.’

He heard footsteps behind them. He took his arm away from the woman and turned his head as he had been instructed to do and stared blankly a little to the side of Blit. Blit looked at him with surprise. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I thought…’

The woman said, ‘The driver’s signalling to us. We must hurry.’

When they were seated together in the bus she looked through the window. She said, ‘ You sure must be very like his friend. He’s still standing there staring.’

‘Everybody in the world, so they say, has a double,’ Castle replied.

She had turned to look back through the window of the taxi and seen nothing through the smoke-grey glass: it was as though Maurice had deliberately drowned himself, without so much as a cry, in the waters of a steely lake. She was robbed, without hope of recovery, of the only sight and sound she wanted, and she resented all that was charitably thrust on her like the poor substitute a butcher offers for the good cut which he has kept for a better customer.

Lunch in the house among the laurels was an ordeal. Her mother-in-law had a guest she couldn’t cancel a clergyman with the unattractive name of Bottomley she called him Ezra-who had come home from a mission field in Africa. Sarah felt like an exhibit at one of the lantern lectures he probably gave. Mrs Castle didn’t introduce her. She simply said, ‘This is Sarah,’ as though she had come out of an orphanage, as indeed she had. Mr. Bottomley was unbearably kind to Sam and treated her like a member of his coloured congregation with calculated interest. Tinker Bell, who had fled at the first sight of them, fearing Buller, was now too friendly and scratched at her skirts.

Tell me what it’s really like in a place like Soweto,’ Mr. Bottomley said. ‘My field, you know, was Rhodesia. The English papers exaggerated there too. We are not as black as we are painted,’ he added and then blushed at his mistake. Mrs Castle poured him another glass of water. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘can you bring up a little fellow properly there?’ and his bright gaze picked Sam out like a spot-light in a night club.

‘How would Sarah know, Ezra?’ Mrs Castle said. She explained with reluctance, ‘Sarah is my daughter-in-law.’

Mr. Bottomley’s blush increased. ‘Ah, then you are over here on a visit?’ he asked.

‘Sarah is living with me,’ Mrs Castle said. ‘For the time being. My son has never lived in Soweto. He was in the Embassy.’

‘It must be nice for the boy,’ Mr. Bottomley said, ‘to come and see Granny.’

Sarah thought: Is this what life is to be from now on?

After Mr. Bottomley had departed Mrs Castle told her that they must have a serious conversation. ‘I rang up Maurice,’ she said, ‘he was in a most unreasonable mood.’ She turned to Sam, ‘Go into the garden, dear, and have a game.’

‘It’s raining,’ Sam said.

‘I’d forgotten, dear. Go upstairs and play with Tinker Bell.’

‘I’ll go upstairs,’ Sam said, ‘but I won’t play with your cat. Buller is my friend. He knows what to do with cats.’

When they were alone Mrs Castle said, ‘Maurice told me if you returned home he would leave the house. What have you done, Sarah?’

‘I’d rather not talk about it. Maurice told me to come here, so I’ve come.’

‘Which of you is well, what they call the guilty party?’

‘Does there always have to be a guilty party?’

‘I ‘m going to ring him again.’

‘I can’t stop you, but it won’t be any use.’

Mrs Castle dialled the number, and Sarah prayed to God whom she didn’t believe in that she might at least hear Maurice’s voice, but ‘There’s no reply,’ Mrs Castle said.

‘He’s probably at the office.’

‘On a Saturday afternoon?’

‘Times are irregular in his job.’

‘I thought the Foreign Office was better organised.’

Sarah waited until the evening, after she had put Sam to bed, then walked down into the town. She went to the Crown and gave herself a J. & B. She made it a double in memory of Maurice and then went to the telephone box. She knew Maurice had told her not to contact him. If he were still at home, and his telephone was tapped, he would have to pretend anger, continue a quarrel which didn’t exist, but at least she would know he was there in the house and not in a police cell or on his way across a Europe she had never seen. She let the telephone ring a long time before she put down the receiver-she was aware she was making it easy for Them to trace the call, but she didn’t care. If They came to see her at least she would have news of him. She left the box and drank her J. & B. at the bar and walked back to Mrs Castle’s house. Mrs Castle said, ‘Sam’s been calling for you.’ She went upstairs.

‘What is it, Sam?’

‘Do you think Buller’s all right?’

‘Of course he’s all right. What could be wrong?’

‘I had a dream.’

‘What did you dream?’

‘I don’t remember. Buller will miss me. I wish we could have him here.’

‘We can’t. You know that. Sooner or later he’d he sure to kill Tinker Bell.’

‘I wouldn’t mind that.’

She went reluctantly downstairs. Mrs Castle was watching television.

‘Anything interesting on the news?’ Sarah asked.

‘I seldom listen to the news,’ Mrs Castle said. ‘I like to read the news in The Times.’ But next morning there was no news which could possibly interest her in the Sunday papers. Sunday he never had to work on Sunday. At midday she went back to the Crown and rang the house again, and again she held on for a long while-he might be in the garden with Buller, but at last she had to give up even that hope. She comforted herself with the thought that he had escaped, but then she reminded herself that They had the power to hold him-wasn’t it for three days?-without a charge.

Mrs Castle had lunch-a joint of roast beef-served very punctually at one. Shall we listen to the news?’ Sarah asked.

‘Don’t play with your napkin ring, Sam dear,’ Mrs Castle said. ‘Just take out your napkin and put the ring down by your plate.’ Sarah found Radio 3. Mrs Castle said, ‘There’s never news worth listening to on Sundays,’ and she was right, of course.

Never had a Sunday passed more slowly. The rain stopped and the feeble sun tried to find a gap through the clouds. Sarah took Sam for a walk across what was called-she didn’t know why a forest. There were no trees only low bushes and scrub (one area had been cleared for a golf course). Sam said, ‘I like Ashridge better,’ and a little later, ‘A walk’s not a walk without Buller.’ Sarah wondered: How long will life be like this? They cut across a corner of the golf course to get home and a golfer who had obviously had too good a lunch shouted to them to get off the fairway. When Sarah didn’t respond quickly enough he called, ‘Hi! You! I’m talking to you, Topsy!’

Sarah seemed to remember that Topsy had been a black girl in some book the Methodists had given her to read when she was a child.

That night Mrs Castle said, ‘It’s time we had a serious talk, dear.’

‘What about?’

‘You ask me what about? Really, Sarah! About you and my grandson of course-and Maurice. Neither of you will tell me what this quarrel is all about. Have you or has Maurice grounds for a divorce?’

‘Perhaps. Desertion counts, doesn’t it?’

‘Who has deserted whom? To come to your mother-in-law’s house is hardly desertion. And Maurice-he hasn’t deserted you if he’s still at home.’

‘He isn’t.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, Mrs Castle. Can’t you just wait awhile and not talk?’

‘This is my home, Sarah. It would be convenient to know just how long you plan to stay. Sam should be at school. There’s a law about that.’

‘I promise if you’ll just let us stay for a week’

‘I’m not driving you away, dear, I’m trying to get you to behave like an adult person. I think you should see a lawyer and talk to him if you won’t talk to me. I can telephone Mr. Bury tomorrow. He looks after my will.’

‘Just give me a week, Mrs Castle.’ (There had been a time when Mrs Castle had suggested Sarah should call her mother, but she had been obviously relieved when Sarah continued to call her Mrs Castle.)

On Monday morning she took Sam into the town and left him in a toyshop while she went to the Crown. There she telephoned to the office-it was a senseless thing to do, for if Maurice were still in London at liberty he would surely have telephoned her. In South Africa, long ago when she had worked for him, she would never have been so imprudent, but in this peaceful country town which had never known a racial riot or a midnight knock at the door the thought of danger seemed too fantastic to be true. She asked to speak to Mr. Castle’s secretary, and, when a woman’s voice answered, she said, ‘Is that Cynthia?’ (she knew her by that name, though they had never met or talked to each other). There was a long pause-a pause long enough for someone to be asked to listen in-but she wouldn’t believe it in this small place of retired people as she watched two lorry drivers finish their bitter. Then the dry thin voice said, ‘Cynthia isn’t in today.’

‘When will she be in?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’

‘Mr. Castle then?’

‘Who is that speaking, please?’

She thought: I was nearly betraying Maurice and she put down the receiver. She felt she had betrayed her own past too-the secret meetings, the coded messages, the care which Maurice had taken in Johannesburg to instruct her and to keep them both out of the reach of BOSS. And, after all that, Muller was here in England-he had sat at table with her.

When she got back to the house she noticed a strange car in the laurel drive, and Mrs Castle met her in the hall. She said, ‘There’s someone to see you, Sarah. I’ve put him in the study.’

‘Who is it?’

Mrs Castle lowered her voice and said in a tone of distaste, ‘I think it’s a policeman.’

The man had a large fair moustache which he stroked nervously. He was definitely not the kind of policeman that Sarah had known in her youth and she wondered how Mrs Castle had detected his profession she would have taken him for a small tradesman who had dealt with local families over the years. He looked just as snug and friendly as Doctor Castle’s study which had been left unchanged after the doctor’s death: the pipe rack still over the desk, the Chinese bowl for ashes, the swivel armchair in which the stranger had been too ill at ease to seat himself. He stood by the bookcase partly blocking from view with his burly form the scarlet volumes of the Loeb classics and the green leather Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition. He asked, ‘Mrs Castle?’ and she nearly answered, ‘No. That’s my mother-in-law,’ so much a stranger did she feel in this house.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘I’m Inspector Butler.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve had a telephone call from London. They asked me to come and have a word with you-that is, if you were here.’

‘Why?’

‘They thought perhaps you could tell us how to get in touch with your husband.’

She felt an immense relief-he wasn’t after all in prison-till the thought came to her that this might be a trap-even the kindness and shyness and patent honesty of Inspector Butler might be a trap, the kind of trap BOSS were likely to lay. But this wasn’t the country of BOSS. She said, ‘No. I can’t. I don’t know. Why?’

‘Well, Mrs Castle, it’s partly to do with a dog.’

‘Buller?’ she exclaimed.

‘Well if that’s his name.’

‘It is his name. Please tell me what this is all about.’

‘You have a house in King’s Road, Berkhamsted. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ She gave a laugh of relief. ‘Has Buller been killing a cat again? But I’m here. I’m innocent. You must see my husband, not me.’

‘We’ve tried to, Mrs Castle, but we can’t reach him. His office says he’s not been in. He seems to have gone away and left the dog, although…

‘Was it a very valuable cat?’

‘It’s not a cat we are concerned about, Mrs Castle. The neighbours complained about the noise-a sort of whining-and someone telephoned the police station. You see there’ve been burglars recently at Boxmoor. Well, the police sent a man to see-and he found a scullery window open-he didn’t have to break any glass… and the dog…’

‘He wasn’t bitten? I’ve never known Buller bite a person.’

‘The poor dog couldn’t do any biting: not in the state he was in. He’d been shot. Whoever had done it made a messy job. I’m afraid, Mrs Castle, they had to finish your dog off.’

‘Oh God, what will Sam say?’

‘Sam?’

‘My son. He loved Buller.’

‘I’m fond of animals myself.’ The two-minute silence that followed seemed very long, like the two-minute tribute to the dead on Armistice Day. I’m sorry to bring had news,’ Inspector Butler said at last and the wheeled and pedestrian traffic of life started up again.

‘I’m wondering what I’ll say to Sam.’

‘Tell him the dog was run over and killed right away.’

‘Yes. I suppose that’s best. I don’t like lying to a child.’

‘There are white lies and black lies,’ Inspector Butler said. She wondered whether the lies he would force her to tell were black or white. She looked at the thick fair moustache and into the kindly eyes and wondered what on earth had made him into a policeman. It would be a little like lying to a child.

‘Won’t you sit down, Inspector?’

‘You sit down, Mrs Castle, if you’ll excuse me. I’ve been sitting down all the morning.’ He looked at the row of pipes in the pipe rack with concentration: it might have been a valuable picture of which, as a connoisseur, he could appreciate the value.

‘Thank you for coming yourself and not just telling me over the telephone.’

‘Well, Mrs Castle, I had to come because there are some other questions. The police at Berkhamsted think there may have been a robbery. There was a scullery window open and the burglar may have shot the dog. Nothing seems to have been disturbed, but only you or your husband can tell, and they don’t seem able to get in touch with your husband. Did he have any enemies? There’s no sign of a struggle, but then there wouldn’t be if the other man had a gun.’

‘I don’t know of any enemies.’

‘A neighbour said he had an idea he worked in the Foreign Office. This morning they had quite a difficulty trying to find the right department and then it seemed they hadn’t seen him since Friday. He should have been in, they said.’

‘When did you last see him, Mrs Castle?’

‘Saturday morning.’

‘You came here Saturday?’

‘Yes.’

‘He stayed behind?’

‘Yes. You see, we had decided to separate. For good.’

‘A quarrel?’

‘A decision, Inspector. We’ve been married for seven years. You don’t flare up after seven years.’

‘Did he own a revolver, Mrs Castle?’

‘Not that I know of. It’s possible.’

‘Was he very upset-by the decision?’

‘We were neither of us happy if that’s what you mean.’

‘Would you be willing to go to Berkhamsted and look at the house?’

‘I don’t want to, but I suppose they could make me, couldn’t they?’

‘There’s no question of making you. But, you see, they can’t rule out a robbery… There might have been something valuable which they couldn’t tell was missing. A piece of jewellery?’

‘I’ve never gone in for jewellery. We weren’t rich people, Inspector.’

‘Or a picture?’

‘No.’

‘Then it makes us wonder if he might have done something foolish or rash. If he was unhappy and it was his gun.’ He picked up the Chinese bowl and examined the pattern, then turned to examine her in turn. She realised those kindly eyes were not after all the eyes of a child. ‘You don’t seem worried about that possibility, Mrs Castle.’

‘I’m not. It isn’t the kind of thing he’d do.’

‘Yes, yes. Of course you know him better than anyone else and I’m sure you’re right. So you’ll let us know at once, won’t you, if he gets in touch with you, I mean?’

‘Of course.’

‘Under strain people sometimes do odd things. Even lose their memory.’ He took a last long look at the pipe rack as if he were unwilling to part from it. ‘I’ll ring up Berkhamsted, Mrs Castle. I hope you won’t have to be troubled. And I’ll let you know if I get any news.’

When they were at the door she asked him, ‘How did you know I was here?’

‘Neighbours with children get to know more than you’d allow for, Mrs Castle.’

She watched him until he was safely in his car and then she went back into the house. She thought: I shan’t tell Sam yet. Let him get used to life without Buller first. The other Mrs Castle, the true Mrs Castle, met her outside the sitting-room. She said, ‘Lunch is getting cold. It was a policeman, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Maurice’s address.’

‘Why?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Did you give it him?’

‘He’s not at home. How should I know where he is?’

‘I hope that man won’t come back.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if he does.’

But the days passed without Inspector Butler and without news. She made no further telephone calls to London. There was no point to it now. Once when she telephoned to the butcher on her mother-in-law’s behalf to order some lamb cutlets she had an impression the line was tapped. It was probably imagination. Monitoring had become too fine an art for an amateur to detect. Under pressure from Mrs Castle she had an interview at the local school and she arranged for Sam to attend it; from this meeting she returned in deep depression it was as though she had just finalised the new life, stamped it like a document with a wax seal, nothing would ever change it now. On her way home she called at the greengrocer’s, at the library, at the chemist’s Mrs Castle had provided her with a list: a tin of green peas, a novel of Georgette Heyer’s, a bottle of aspirin for the headaches of which Sarah felt sure that she and Sam were the cause. For no reason she could put a name to she thought of the great grey-green pyramids of earth which surrounded Johannesburg-even Muller had spoken of their colour in the evening, and she felt closer to Muller, the enemy, the racialist, than to Mrs Castle. She would have exchanged this Sussex town with its liberal inhabitants who treated her with such kindly courtesy even for Soweto. Courtesy could be a barrier more than a blow. It wasn’t courtesy one wanted to live with it was love. She loved Maurice, she loved the smell of the dust and degradation of her country now she was without Maurice and without a country. Perhaps that was why she welcomed even the voice of an enemy on the telephone. She knew at once it was an enemy’s voice although it introduced itself as ‘a friend and colleague of your husband ‘.

‘I hope I’m not ringing you up at a bad time, Mrs Castle.’

‘No, but I didn’t hear your name.’

‘Doctor Percival.’

‘It was vaguely familiar. Yes. I think Maurice has spoken of you.’

‘We had a memorable night out once in London.’

‘Oh yes, I remember now. With Davis.’

‘Yes. Poor Davis.’ There was a pause. ‘I was wondering, Mrs Castle, if we could have a talk.’

‘We are having one now, aren’t we?’

‘Well, a rather closer talk than a telephone provides.’

‘I ‘m a long way from London.’

‘We could send a car for you if it would help.’

‘We’, she thought, ‘we’. It was a mistake on his part to speak like an organisation. ‘We’ and ‘they’ were uncomfortable terms. They were a warning, they put you on your guard.

The voice said, ‘I thought if you were free for lunch one day this week.

‘I don’t know if I can manage.’

‘I wanted to talk to you about your husband.’

‘Yes. I guessed that.’

‘We are all rather anxious about Maurice.’ She felt a quick elation. ‘We’ hadn’t got him in some secret spot unknown to Inspector Butler. He was well away all Europe was between them. It was as though she too, as well as Maurice, had escaped-she was already on her way home, that home which was where Maurice was. She had to be very careful just the same, as in the old days in Johannesburg. She said, ‘Maurice doesn’t concern me any more. We’ve separated.’

‘All the same, I expect, you’d like some news of him?’

So they had news. It was as when Carson told her, ‘He’s safe in L’M. waiting for you. Now we’ve only got to get you there.’ If he were free, they would soon be together. She realised she was smiling at the telephone thank God, they hadn’t yet invented a visual telephone, but all the same she wiped the smile off her face. She said, ‘I’m afraid I don’t much care where he is. Couldn’t you write? I have a child to look after.’

‘Well no, Mrs Castle, there are things one can’t write. If we could send a car for you tomorrow…’

‘Tomorrow’s impossible.’

‘Thursday then.’

She hesitated as long as she dared. ‘Well… We could send a car for you at eleven.’

‘But I don’t need a car. There’s a good train at 11.15: Well then, if you could meet me at a restaurant, Brummell’s-close to Victoria.’

‘What street?’

‘There you have me. Walton-Wilton-never mind, any taxi driver will know Brummell’s. It’s very quiet there,’ he added soothingly as though he were recommending with professional knowledge a good nursing home, and Sarah had a quick mental picture of the speaker-a very self-assured Wimpole Street type, with a dangling eye-glass which he would only use when it came to writing out the prescription which would be the signal, like royalty rising, that it was time for the patient to depart.

‘Until Thursday,’ he said. She didn’t even reply. She put down the receiver and went to find Mrs Castle-she was late again for lunch and she didn’t care. She was humming a tune of praise the Methodist missionaries had taught her, and Mrs Castle looked at her in astonishment. ‘What’s the matter? Is something wrong? Was it that policeman again?’

‘No. It was only a doctor. A friend of Maurice. Nothing’s wrong. Would you mind just for once if I went up to town on Thursday? I’ll take Sam to school in the morning and he can find his own way back.’

‘I don’t mind, of course, but I was thinking of having Mr. Bottomley for lunch again.’

‘Oh, Sam and Mr. Bottomley will get on very well together.’

‘Will you go and see a solicitor when you are in town?’

‘I might.’ A half-lie was a small price to pay in return for her new happiness.

‘Where will you have lunch?’

‘Oh, I expect I’ll pick up a sandwich somewhere.’

‘It’s such a pity you’ve chosen Thursday. I’ve ordered a joint. However’-Mrs Castle sought for a silver lining-if you had lunch at Harrods there are one or two things you could bring me back.’

She lay in bed that night unable to sleep. It was as if she had procured a calendar and could now begin to mark off the days of term. The man she had spoken to was an enemy-she was convinced of that but he wasn’t the Security Police, he wasn’t BOSS, she wouldn’t lose her teeth or the sight of an eye in Brummell’s: she had no reason to fear.

Nonetheless she felt a little let down when she identified him where he waited for her at the end of a long glassy glittering room at Brummell’s. He wasn’t, after all, a Wimpole Street specialist: he was more like an old-fashioned family doctor with his silver-rimmed spectacles and a small rounded paunch which seemed to prop itself on the edge of the table when he rose to greet her. He was holding an outsize menu in his hand in place of a prescription. He said, ‘I’m so glad you had the courage to come here.’

‘Why courage?’

‘Well, this is one of the places the Irish like to bomb. They’ve thrown a small one already, but unlike the blitz their bombs are quite liable to hit the same place twice.’ He gave her a menu to read: a whole page was given up she saw to what were called Starters. The whole menu, which bore the title Bill of Fare above a portrait, seemed almost as long as Mrs Castle’s local telephone directory. Doctor Percival said helpfully, I’d advise you against the smoked trout it’s always a bit dry here.’

‘I haven’t got much appetite.’

‘Let’s wake it up, then, while we consider matters. A glass of sherry?’

‘I’d rather have a whisky if you don’t mind.’ When asked to choose, she said, ‘J & B.’

‘You order for me,’ she implored Doctor Percival. The sooner all these preliminaries were over, the sooner she would have the news she waited for with a hunger she hadn’t got for food. While he made his decision she looked around her. There was a dubious and glossy portrait on the wall labelled George Bryan Brummell-it was the same portrait as on the menu and the furnishing was in impeccable and tiring good taste you felt no possible expense had been spared and no criticism would be sanctioned: the few customers were all men and they all looked alike as though they had come out of the chorus of an old-fashioned musical comedy: black hair, neither too long nor too short, dark suits and waistcoats. Their tables were set discreetly apart and the two tables nearest to Doctor Percival’s were empty she wondered whether this was by design or chance. She noticed for the first time how all the windows were wired.

‘In a place like this,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘it’s best to go English and I would suggest the Lancashire hot pot.’

‘Anything you say.’ But for a long time he said nothing except some words to the waiter about the wine. At last he turned his attention and his silver-rimmed glasses towards her with a long sigh, ‘Well, the hard work’s done. It’s up to them now,’ and he took a sip of his sherry. ‘You must have been having a very anxious time, Mrs Castle.’ He put out a hand and touched her arm as though he really were her family doctor.

‘Anxious?’

‘Not knowing from day to day…’

‘If you mean Maurice…’

‘We were all very fond of Maurice.’

‘You speak as though he were dead. In the past tense.’

‘I didn’t mean to. Of course we are still fond of him-but he’s taken a different road and I’m afraid a very dangerous one. We all hope you won’t get involved.’

‘How can I? We’re separated.’

‘Oh yes, yes. It was the obvious thing to do. It would have been a little conspicuous to have gone away together. I don’t think Immigration would have been quite so foolish as all that. You are a very attractive woman and then your colour…’ He said, ‘Of course we know he hasn’t telephoned you at home, but there are so many ways of sending messages a public telephone box, an intermediary-we couldn’t monitor all his friends, even if we knew them all.’ He pushed aside his sherry and made room for the hot pot. She began to feel more at ease now that the subject was laid plainly there on the table before them like the hot pot. She said, ‘You think I’m a traitor too?’

‘Oh, in the firm, you know, we don’t use a word like traitor. That’s for the newspapers. You are African I don’t say South African and so is your child. Maurice must have been a good deal influenced by that. Let’s say-he chose a different loyalty.’ He took a taste of the hot pot. ‘Be careful.’

‘Careful?’

‘I mean the carrots are very hot.’ If this was really an interrogation it was a very different method to that practised by the Security Police in Johannesburg or Pretoria. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘what do you intend to do-when he does communicate?’

She gave up caution. As long as she was cautious she would learn nothing. She said, ‘I shall do what he tells me to do.’

Doctor Percival said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve said that. It means we can be frank with each other. Of course we know, and I expect you know, that he’s arrived safely in Moscow.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Well, I’m not sure about God, but you can certainly thank the KGB. (One mustn’t be dogmatic-they may be on the same side, of course.) I imagine that sooner or later he’ll ask you to join him there.’

‘And I’ll go.’

‘With your child?’

‘Of course.’

Doctor Percival plunged again into his hot pot. He was obviously a man who enjoyed his food. She became more reckless in her relief at knowing that Maurice was safe. She said, ‘You can’t stop me going.’

‘Oh, don’t be so sure of that. You know, at the office we have quite a file on you. You were very friendly in South Africa with a man called Carson. A Communist agent.’

‘Of course I was. I was helping Maurice-for your service, though I didn’t know it then. He told me it was for a book on apartheid he was writing.’

‘And Maurice perhaps was even then helping Carson. And Maurice is now in Moscow. It’s not strictly speaking our business, of course, but MI5 might well feel you ought to be investigated-in depth. If you’ll let an old man advise you-an old man who was a friend of Maurice…’

A memory flashed into her mind of a shambling figure in a teddy-bear coat playing hide-and-seek with Sam among the wintry trees. ‘And of Davis,’ she said, ‘you were a friend of Davis too, weren’t you?’

A spoonful of gravy was stopped on the way to Doctor Percival’s mouth.

‘Yes. Poor Davis. It was a sad death for a man still young.’

‘I don’t drink port,’ Sarah said.

‘My dear girl, how irrelevant can you be? Let’s wait to decide about port until we get to the cheese-they have excellent Wensleydale. All I was going to say was to be reasonable. Stay quietly in the country with your mother-in-law and your child…’

‘Maurice’s child.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What do you mean, perhaps?’

‘You’ve met this man Cornelius Muller, a rather unsympathetic type from BOSS. And what a name! He’s under the impression that the real father my dear, you must forgive a little plain speaking-I don’t want you to make the sort of mistake Maurice has made-‘

‘You aren’t being very plain.’

‘Muller believes that the father was one of your own people.’

‘Oh, I know the one he means-even if it was true he’s dead.’

‘He isn’t dead.’

‘Of course he’s dead. He was killed in a riot.’

‘Did you see his body?’

‘No, but…’

‘Muller says he’s safely under lock and key. He’s a lifer-so Muller says.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Muller says this fellow is prepared to claim paternity.’

‘Muller’s lying.’

‘Yes, yes. That’s quite possible. The man may well be a stooge. I haven’t been into the legal aspects yet myself, but I doubt if he could prove anything in our courts. Is the child on your passport?’

‘No.’

‘Has he a passport?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’d have to apply for a passport to take him out of this country. That means a lot of bureaucratic rigmarole. The passport people can sometimes be very, very slow.’

‘What bastards you are. You killed Carson. You killed Davis. And now…

‘Carson died of pneumonia. Poor Davis-that was cirrhosis.’

‘Muller says it was pneumonia. You say it was cirrhosis, and now you are threatening me and Sam.’

‘Not threatening, my dear, advising.’

‘Your advice…’

She had to break off. The waiter had come to clear their plates. Doctor Percival’s was clean enough, but most of her portion had remained uneaten.

‘What about an old English apple pie with cloves and a bit of cheese?’ Doctor Percival asked, leaning seductively forward and speaking in a low voice as though he were naming the price he was prepared to pay for certain favours.

‘No. Nothing. I don’t want any more.’

‘Oh dear, the bill then,’ Doctor Percival told the waiter with disappointment, and when the waiter had gone he reproached her, ‘Mrs Castle, you mustn’t get angry. There’s nothing personal in all this. If you get angry you are sure to make the wrong decision. It’s just an affair of boxes,’ he began to elaborate, and then broke off as though for once he was finding that metaphor inapplicable.

‘Sam is my child and I shall take him wherever I want. To Moscow, to Timbuktu, to…’

‘You can’t take Sam until he has a passport, and I’m anxious to keep MI5 from taking any preventive action against you. If they learned you were applying for a passport… and they would learn…’

She walked out, she walked out on everything, leaving Doctor Percival to wait behind for the bill. If she had stayed a moment longer she wasn’t sure that she could have trusted herself with the knife which remained by her plate for the cheese. She had once seen a white man just as well fed as Doctor Percival stabbed in a public garden in Johannesburg. It had looked such a very easy thing to do. From the door she looked back at him. The wire grill over the window behind made him appear to be sitting at a desk in a police station. Obviously he had followed her with his eyes, and now he raised an index finger and shook it gently to and fro in her direction. It could be taken for an admonition or a warning. She didn’t care which.

From the window on the twelfth floor of the great grey building Castle could see the red star over the University. There was a certain beauty in the view as there is in all cities at night. Only the daylight was drab. They had made it clear to him, particularly Ivan who had met his plane in Prague and accompanied him to a debriefing in some place near Irkutsk with an unpronounceable name, that he was extraordinarily lucky in his apartment. It had belonged, both rooms of it with a kitchen and a private shower, to a comrade recently dead who had nearly succeeded before his death in furnishing it completely. An empty apartment as a rule contained only a stove-everything else even to the toilet had to be bought. That was not easy and wasted a great deal of time and energy. Castle wondered sometimes if that was why the comrade had died, worn out by his long hunt for the green wicker armchair, the brown sofa hard as a board, without cushions, the table which looked as though it had been stained a nearly even colour by the application of gravy. The television set, the latest black and white model, was a gift of the government. Ivan had carefully explained that when they first visited the apartment. In his manner he hinted his personal doubt whether it had been truly earned. Ivan seemed to Castle no more likeable here than he had been in London. Perhaps he resented his recall and blamed it on Castle.

The most valuable object in the apartment seemed to be the telephone. It was covered with dust and disconnected, but all the same it had a symbolic value. One day, perhaps soon, it could be put to use. He would speak through it to Sarah-to hear her voice meant everything to him, whatever comedy they would have to play for the listeners, and there certainly would be listeners. To hear her would make the long wait bearable. Once he broached the matter to Ivan. He had noticed Ivan preferred to talk out of doors even on the coldest day, and as it was Ivan’s job to show him around the city he took an opportunity outside the great GUM department store (a place where he felt almost at home because it reminded him of photographs he had seen of the Crystal Palace). He asked, ‘Is it possible, do you think, to have my telephone connected?’ They had gone to GUM to find Castle a fur-lined overcoat-the temperature was twenty-three degrees.

‘I’ll ask,’ Ivan said, ‘but for the moment I suppose they want to keep you under wrappers.’

‘Is that a long process?’

‘It was in the case of Bellamy, but you’re not such an important case. We can’t get much publicity out of you.’

‘Who’s Bellamy?’

‘You must remember Bellamy. A most important man in your British Council. In West Berlin. That was always a cover, wasn’t it, like the Peace Corps?’

Castle didn’t bother to deny it-it was none of his business.

‘Oh yes, I think I remember now.’ It had happened at the time of his greatest anxiety, while he waited for news of Sarah in Lourenco Marques, and he couldn’t recall the details of Bellamy’s defection. Why did one defect from the British Council and what value or harm would such a defection have to anyone? He asked, ‘Is he still alive?’ It all seemed such a long time ago.

‘Why not?’

‘What does he do?’

‘He lives on our gratitude.’ Ivan added, ‘As you do. Oh, we invented a job for him. He advises our publications division. He has a dacha in the country. It’s a better life than he would have had at home with a pension. I suppose they will do the same for you.’

‘Reading books in a dacha in the country?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are there many of us-I mean living like that on your gratitude?’

‘I know at least six. There was Cruickshank and Bates-you’ll remember them-they were from your service. You’ll run into them I expect in the Aragvi, our Georgian restaurant-they say the wine’s good there I can’t afford it-and you will see them at the Bolshoi, when they take the wrappers off.’

They passed the Lenin Library-‘You’ll find them there too.’ He added with venom, ‘Reading the English papers.’

Ivan had found him a large stout middle-aged woman as a daily who would also help him to learn a little Russian. She gave a Russian name to everything in the flat, pointing a blunt finger at everything in turn, and she was very fussy about pronunciation. Although she was several years younger than Castle she treated him as though he were a child, with an admonitory sternness which slowly melted into a sort of maternal affection as he became more housetrained. When Ivan was otherwise occupied she would enlarge the scope of her lessons, taking him with her in search of food at the Central Market and down into the Metro. (She wrote figures on a scrap of paper to explain the prices and the fares.) After a while she began to show him photographs of her family-her husband a young man in uniform, taken somewhere in a public park with a cardboard outline of the Kremlin behind his head. He wore his uniform in an untidy way (you could see he wasn’t used to it), and he smiled at the camera with a look of great tenderness-perhaps she had been standing behind the photographer. He had been killed, she conveyed to him, at Stalingrad. In return he produced for her a snapshot of Sarah and Sam which he hadn’t confessed to Mr. Halliday that he had secreted in his shoe. She showed surprise that they were black, and for a little while afterwards her manner to him seemed more distant-she was not so much shocked as lost, he had broken her sense of order. In that she resembled his mother. After a few days all was well again, but during those few days he felt an exile inside his exile and his longing for Sarah was intensified.

He had been in Moscow now for two weeks, and he had bought with the money Ivan had given him a few extras for the flat. He had even found school editions in English of Shakespeare’s plays, two novels of Dickens, Oliver Twist and Hard Times, Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe. The snow was ankle deep in the side streets and he had less and less inclination to go sightseeing with Ivan or even on an educational tour with Anna-she was called Anna. In the evening he would warm some soup and sit huddled near the stove, with the dusty disconnected telephone at his elbow, and read Robinson Crusoe. Sometimes he could hear Crusoe speaking, as though on a tape recorder, with his own voice: I drew up the state of my affairs in writing; not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few heirs, as to deliver my thoughts from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my mind.’ Crusoe divided the comforts and miseries of his situation into Good and Evil and under the heading Evil he wrote: I have no soul to speak to, or relieve me.’ Under the opposing Good he counted so many necessary things’ which he had obtained from the wreck as will either supply my wants, or enable me to supply myself even as long as I live.’ Well, he had the green wicker armchair, the gravy-stained table, the uncomfortable sofa, and the stove which warmed him now. They would have been sufficient if Sarah had been there-she was used to far worse conditions and he remembered some of the grim rooms in which they had been forced to meet and make love in dubious hotels without a colour bar in the poorer quarters of Johannesburg. He remembered one room in particular without furniture of any kind where they had been happy enough on the floor. Next day when Ivan made his snide references to ‘gratitude’ he broke furiously out: You call this gratitude.’

‘Not so many people who live alone possess a kitchen and shower all to themselves… and two rooms.’

‘I’m not complaining of that. But they promised me I wouldn’t be alone. They promised me that my wife and child would follow.’

The intensity of his anger disquieted Ivan. Ivan said, ‘It takes time.’

‘I don’t even have any work. I’m a man on the dole. Is that your bloody socialism?’

‘Quiet, quiet,’ Ivan said. ‘Wait awhile. When they take the wrappers off…’

Castle nearly struck Ivan and he saw that Ivan knew it. Ivan mumbled something and backed away down the cement stairs.

Was it perhaps a microphone that conveyed this scene to a higher authority or had Ivan reported it? Castle would never know, but all the same his anger had worked the trick. It had swept away the wrappers, swept away, as he realised later, even Ivan. Just as when Ivan was removed from London because they must have decided he had the wrong temperament to be the right control for Castle, so now he put in only one more appearance a rather subdued appearance-and then disappeared for ever. Perhaps they had a pool of controls, just as in London there had been a pool of secretaries, and Ivan had sunk back into the pool. No one in this sort of service was ever likely to be sacked, for fear of revelations.

Ivan made his swan song as an interpreter in a building not far from the Lubianka prison, which he had pointed proudly out to Castle on one of their walks. Castle asked him that morning where they were going and he answered evasively, ‘ They have decided on your work.’

The room where they waited was lined with books in ugly economy bindings. Castle read the names of Stalin, Lenin, Marx in Russian script it pleased him to think he was beginning to make out the script. There was a big desk with a luxurious leather blotting pad and a nineteenth-century bronze of a man on horseback too large and heavy to use as a paper-weight it could only be there for decorative purposes. From a doorway behind the desk emerged a stout elderly man with a shock of grey hair and an old-fashioned moustache yellowed by cigarette smoke. He was followed by a young man dressed very correctly who carried a file. He was like an acolyte attending a priest of his faith, and in spite of the heavy moustache there was something priestly about the old man, about his kindly smile and the hand he extended like a blessing. A lot of conversation-questions and answers-went on among the three of them, and then Ivan took the floor as translator. He said, ‘The comrade wants you to know how highly your work has been appreciated. He wants you to understand that the very importance of your work has presented us with problems which had to be solved at a high level. That is why you have been kept apart during these two weeks. The comrade is anxious that you should not think it was through any lack of trust. It was hoped that your presence here would only become known to the Western Press at the right moment.’

Castle said, ‘They must know I am here by now. Where else would I be?’ Ivan translated and the old man replied, and the young acolyte smiled at the reply with his eyes cast down.

The comrade says, “Knowing is not the same as publishing.” The Press can only publish when you are officially here. The censorship would see to that. A press conference is going to be arranged very soon and then we will let you know what you should say to the journalists. Perhaps we will rehearse it all a little first.’

‘Tell the comrade,’ Castle said, ‘that I want to earn my keep here.’

‘The comrade says you have earned it many times over already.’

‘In that case I expect him to keep the promise they made me in London.’

‘What was that?’

‘I was told my wife and son would follow me here. Tell him, Ivan, that I’m damned lonely. Tell him I want the use of my telephone. I want to telephone my wife, that’s all, not the British Embassy or a journalist. If the wrappers are off, then let me speak to her.’

The translation took a lot of time. A translation, he knew, always turned out longer than the original text, but this was inordinately longer. Even the acolyte seemed to be adding more than a sentence or two. The important comrade hardly bothered to speak he continued to look as benign as a bishop.

Ivan turned back to Castle at last. He had a sour expression which the others couldn’t see. He said, ‘They are very anxious to have your cooperation in the publishing section which deals with Africa.’ He nodded in the direction of the acolyte who permitted himself an encouraging smile which might have been a plaster cast of his superior’s. ‘The comrade says he would like you to act as their chief adviser on African literature. He says there are a great number of African novelists and they would like to choose the most valuable for translation, and of course the best of the novelists (selected by you) would he invited to pay us a visit by the Writer’s Union. This is a very important position and they are happy to offer it to you.’

The old man made a gesture with his hand towards the bookshelves as though he were inviting Stalin, Lenin and Marx-yes, and there was Engels too-to welcome the novelists whom he would pick for them.

Castle said, ‘They haven’t answered me. I want my wife and son here with me. They promised that. Boris promised it.

Ivan said, ‘I do not want to translate what you are saying. All that business concerns quite a different department. It would be a big mistake to confuse matters. They are offering you…’

‘Tell him I won’t discuss anything until I’ve spoken to my wife.’

Ivan shrugged his shoulders and spoke. This time the translation was no longer than the text-an abrupt angry sentence. It was the commentary by the old comrade which took up all the space, like the footnotes of an over-edited book. To show the finality of his decision Castle turned away and looked out of the window into a narrow ditch of a street between walls of concrete of which he couldn’t see the top through the snow which poured down into the ditch as though from some huge inexhaustible bucket up above. This was not the snow he remembered from childhood and associated with snowballs and fairy stories and games with toboggans. This was a merciless, interminable, annihilating snow, a snow in which one could expect the world to end.

Ivan said angrily, ‘We will go away now.’

‘What do they say?’

‘I do not understand the way they are treating you. I know from London the sort of rubbish you sent us. Come away.’ The old comrade held out a courteous hand: the young one looked a bit perturbed. Outside the silence of the snow-drowned street was so extreme that Castle hesitated to break it. The two of them walked rapidly like secret enemies who are seeking the right spot to settle their differences in a final fashion. At last, when he could bear the uncertainty no longer, Castle said, ‘Well, what was the result of all that talk?’

Ivan said, ‘They told me that I was handling you wrongly. Just the same as they told me when they brought me back from London. “More psychology is needed, comrade, more psychology.” I would be much better off if I was a traitor like you.’ Luck brought them a taxi and in it he leaped into a wounded silence. (Castle had already noticed that one never talked in a taxi.) In the doorway of the apartment block Ivan gave grudgingly the information Castle demanded.

‘Oh, the job will wait for you. You have nothing to fear. The comrade is very sympathetic. He will speak to others about your telephone and your wife. He begs you begs, that was the word he used himself to be patient a little longer. You will have news, he says, very soon. He understands-understands, mark you-your anxiety. I do not understand a thing. My psychology is obviously bad.’

He left Castle standing in the entry and strode away into the snow and was lost to Castle’s eyes for ever.

The next night, while Castle was reading Robinson Crusoe by the stove, someone knocked at his door (the bell was out of order). A sense of distrust had grown in him through so many years that he called out automatically before he opened, Who is it?’

‘The name is Bellamy,’ a high-pitched voice answered, and Castle unlocked the door. A small grey man in a grey fur coat and a grey astrakhan hat entered with an air of shyness and timidity. He was like a comedian playing a mouse in a pantomime and expecting the applause of little hands. He said, ‘I live so near here, so I thought I’d take up my courage and call.’ He looked at the book in Castle’s hand. ‘Oh dear, I’ve interrupted your reading.’

‘Only Robinson Crusoe. I’ve plenty of time for that.’

‘Ah ha, the great Daniel. He was one of us.’

‘One of us?’

‘Well, Defoe perhaps was more an MI5 type.’ He peeled off grey fur gloves and warmed himself at the stove and looked around. He said, ‘I can see you’re still at the bare stage. We’ve all passed through it. I never knew where to find things myself till Cruickshank showed me. And then later, well, I showed Bates. You haven’t met them yet?’

‘No.’

‘I wonder they haven’t called. You’ve been unwrapped, and I hear you’re having a press conference any day now.’

‘How do you know?’

‘From a Russian friend,’ Bellamy said with a little nervous giggle. He produced a half bottle of whisky from the depths of his fur coat. ‘A little cadeau,’ he said, ‘for the new member.’

‘It’s very kind of you. Do sit down. The chair is more comfortable than the sofa.’

‘I’ll unwrap myself first if I may. Unwrap-it’s a good expression.’ The unwrapping took some time-there were a lot of buttons. When he was settled in the green wicker chair he giggled again. ‘How is your Russian friend?’

‘Not very friendly.’

‘Get rid of him then. Have no nonsense. They want us to be happy.’

‘How do I get rid of him?’

‘You just show them that he’s not your type. An indiscreet word to be caught by one of those little gadgets we are probably talking into now. Do you know, when I came here first, they entrusted me to-you’ll never guess to a middle-aged lady from the Union of Writers? That was because I had been British Council, I suppose. Well, I soon learned how to deal with that situation. Whenever Cruickshank and I were together I used to refer to her scornfully as “my governess” and she didn’t last very long. She was gone before Bates arrived and-it’s very wrong of me to laugh-Bates married her.’

‘I don’t understand how it was-I mean why it was they wanted you here. I was out of England when it all happened. I didn’t see the newspaper reports.’

‘My dear, the newspapers-they were quite awful. They grilled me. I read them in the Lenin Library afterwards. You would really have thought I was a sort of Mata Hari.’

‘But what value were you to them in the British Council?’

‘Well, you see I had a German friend and it seems he was running a lot of agents in the East. It never occurred to him that little me was watching him and making my notes-then the silly boy went and got seduced by a quite awful woman. He deserved to be punished. He was safe enough, I would never have done anything to endanger him, but his agents… of course he guessed who had given him away. Well, I admit I didn’t make it difficult for him to guess. But I had to get away very quickly because he went to the Embassy about me. How glad I was when I put Checkpoint Charlie behind me.’

‘And you are happy here?’

‘Yes, I am. Happiness always seems to me a matter of persons not of places, and I have a very nice friend. It’s against the law, of course, but they do make exceptions in the service, and he’s an officer in the KGB. Of course, poor boy, he has to be unfaithful sometimes in the course of duty, but that’s quite different from my German friend it isn’t love. We even have a little laugh about it sometimes. If you’re lonely, he knows a lot of girls…’

‘I’m not lonely. As long as my books last.’

‘I’ll show you a little place where you can pick up English language paperbacks under the counter.’

It was midnight before they had finished the half bottle of whisky and then Bellamy took his leave. He spent a long time getting back into his furs, and he chattered all the while. You must meet Cruickshank one day I’ll tell him I’ve seen you-and Bates too, of course, but that means meeting Mrs Union-of-Writers Bates.’ He warmed his hands well before pulling on his gloves. He had an air of being quite at home, although I was a bit unhappy at first,’ he admitted. I felt rather lost until I had my friend-like in that chorus of Swinhurne’s, ” the foreign faces, the tongueless vigil and”-how does it go?-” all the pain”. I used to lecture on Swinburne an underrated poet.’ At the door he said, ‘You must come out and see my dacha when the spring comes…’

Castle found that after a few days he even missed Ivan. He missed having someone to dislike he couldn’t in justice dislike Anna who seemed to realise that now he was more alone than ever. She stayed a little longer in the morning and pressed even more Russian names on his attention with her pointing finger. She became even more exigent too over his pronunciation: she began to add verbs to his vocabulary, beginning with the word for ‘run’, when she made motions of running, raising her elbows and each knee. She must have been receiving wages from some source for he paid her none; indeed the little store of roubles Ivan had given him on his arrival had been much diminished.

It was a painful part of his isolation that he earned nothing. He began even to long for a desk at which he could sit and study lists of African writers-they might take his mind for a little from what had happened to Sarah. Why hadn’t she followed him with Sam? What were they doing to fulfil their promise?

At nine thirty-two one evening he came to the end of Robinson Crusoe’s ordeal-in noting the time he was behaving a little like Crusoe. ‘And thus I left the island, the nineteenth of December, and I found by the ship’s account, in the year 1686, after I had been upon it eight and twenty years, two months and nineteen days…’ He went to the window: the snow for the moment was not falling and he could see clearly the red star over the University. Even at that hour women were at work sweeping the snow: from above they looked like enormous turtles. Somebody was ringing at the door-let him, he wouldn’t open, it was probably only Bellamy or perhaps someone even more unwelcome, the unknown Cruickshank or the unknown Bates-but surely, he remembered, the bell was out of order. He turned and stared at the telephone with amazement. It was the telephone which was ringing.

He lifted the receiver and a voice spoke to him in Russian. He couldn’t understand a word. There was nothing more-only the high-pitched dialling sound-but he kept the receiver to his ear, stupidly waiting. Perhaps the operator had told him to hold on. Or had he told him-‘Replace the receiver. We will ring you back’? Perhaps a call was coming from England. Unwillingly he put the receiver back and sat on beside the telephone waiting for it to ring again. He had been ‘unwrapped’ and now it seemed he had been ‘connected’. He would have been in touch if only he had been able to learn the right phrases from Anna he didn’t even know how to ring the operator.

There was no telephone book in the flat-he had checked that two weeks ago.

But the operator must have been telling him something. At any moment he was sure the telephone would call to him. He fell asleep beside it and dreamt, as he had not dreamt for a dozen years, of his first wife. In his dream they quarrelled as they had never done in life.

Anna found him in the morning asleep in the green wicker chair. When she woke him he said to her, ‘Anna, the telephone’s connected,’ and because she didn’t understand, he waved towards it and said ‘Ting-a-ling-a-ling,’ and they both laughed with pleasure at the absurdity of such a childish sound in the mouth of an elderly man. He took out the photograph of Sarah and pointed at the telephone and she nodded her head and smiled to encourage him, and he thought, she’ll get on with Sarah, she will show her where to shop, she will teach her Russian words, she will like Sam.

When later that day the telephone rang he felt certain it would be Sarah someone in London must have conveyed the number to her, perhaps Boris. His mouth was dry when he answered and he could hardly bring out the words Who is that?’

‘Boris.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Here in Moscow.’

‘Have you seen Sarah?’

‘I have talked to her.’

‘Is she all right?’

‘Yes, yes, she is all right.’

‘And Sam?’

‘He is all right too.’

‘When will they be here?’

‘That is what I want to speak to you about. Stay in, please. Do not go out. I am coming to the apartment now.’

‘But when will I see them?’

‘That is something we have to discuss. There are difficulties.’

‘What difficulties?’

‘Wait till I see you.’

He couldn’t stay still: he picked up a book and put it down: he went into the kitchen where Anna was making soup. She said, ‘Ting-a-ling-a-ling,’ but it wasn’t funny any more. He walked back to the window-snow again. When the knock came on the door he felt that hours had passed.

Boris held out a duty free plastic sack. He said, ‘Sarah told me to get you J. & B. One bottle from her and one from Sam.’

Castle said, ‘What are the difficulties?’

‘Give me time to get off my coat.’

‘Did you really see her?’

‘I spoke to her on the telephone. At a call box. She’s in the country with your mother.’

‘I know.’

‘I would have looked a little conspicuous visiting her there.’

‘Then how do you know she’s well?’

‘She told me so.’

‘Did she sound well?’

‘Yes, yes, Maurice. I am sure…’

‘What are the difficulties? You got me out.’

‘That was a very simple affair. A false passport, the blind man dodge, and that little trouble we arranged at the immigration while you were led through by the Air France hostess. A man rather like you. Bound for Prague. His passport wasn’t quite in order…’

‘You haven’t told me what difficulties.’

‘We always assumed, when you were safely here, they couldn’t stop Sarah joining you.’

‘They can’t.’

‘Sam has no passport. You should have put to on his mother’s. Apparently it can take a lot of time to arrange. And another thing-your people have hinted that if Sarah tries to leave she can be arrested for complicity. She was a friend of Carson, she was your agent in Johannesburg… My dear Maurice, things are not simple at all, I’m afraid.’

‘You promised.’

‘I know we promised. In good faith. It might still be possible to smuggle her out if she left the child behind, but she says she won’t do that. He’s not happy at school. He’s not happy with your mother.’

The duty free plastic hag waited on the table. There was always whisky the medicine against despair. Castle said, ‘Why did you fetch me out? I wasn’t in immediate danger. I thought I was, but you must have known…’

‘You sent the emergency signal. We answered it.’

Castle tore the plastic, opened the whisky, the label J. & B. hurt him like a sad memory. He poured out two large measures. I have no soda.’

‘Never mind.’

Castle said, ‘Take the chair. The sofa’s as hard as a school bench.’ He took a drink. Even the flavour of J. & B. hurt him. If only Boris had brought him a different whisky-Haig, White Horse, Vat 69, Grant’s-he recited to himself the names of the whiskies which meant nothing to him, to keep his mind blank and his despair at bay until the J. & B. began to work-Johnnie Walker, Queen Anne, Teacher’s. Boris misunderstood his silence. He said, ‘You do not have to worry about microphones. Here in Moscow, you might say we are safe at the centre of the cyclone.’ He added, ‘It was very important for us to get you out.’

‘Why? Muller’s notes were safe with old Halliday.’

‘You have never been given the real picture, have you? Those bits of economic information you sent us had no value in themselves at all.’

‘Then why…?’

‘I know I am not very clear. I am not used to whisky. Let me try to explain. Your people imagined they had an agent in place, here in Moscow. But it was we who had planted him on them. What you gave us he passed back to them. Your reports authenticated him in the eyes of your service, they could check them, and all the time he was passing them other information which we wanted them to believe. That was the real value of your reports. A nice piece of deception. But then came the Muller affair and Uncle Remus. We decided the best way to counter Uncle Remus was publicity we couldn’t do that and leave you in London. You had to be our source-you brought Muller’s notes with you.’

‘They’ll know I brought news of the leak too.’

‘Exactly. We couldn’t carry on a game like that much longer. Their agent in Moscow will disappear into a great silence. Perhaps in a few months rumours will come to your people of a secret trial. It will make them all the more certain that all the information he gave them was true.’

‘I thought I was only helping Sarah’s people.’

‘You were doing much more than that. And tomorrow you meet the Press.’

‘Suppose I refuse to talk unless you bring Sarah…’

‘We’ll do without you, but you couldn’t expect us then to solve the Sarah problem. We are grateful to you, Maurice, but gratitude like love needs to be renewed daily or it’s liable to die away.’

‘You are talking as Ivan used to talk.’

‘No, not like Ivan. I am your friend. I want to stay your friend. One needs a friend badly to make a new life in a new country.’

Now the offer of friendship had the sound of a menace or a warning. The night in Watford came back to him when he searched in vain for the shabby tutorial flat with the Berlitz picture on the wall. It seemed to him that all his life after he joined the service in his twenties he had been unable to speak. Like a Trappist he had chosen the profession of silence, and now he recognised too late that it had been a mistaken vocation.

‘Take another drink, Maurice. Things are not so bad. You just have to be patient, that’s all.’

Castle took the drink.