The Sixth Directorate

1

The city had climbed up in front of us long before, when we’d passed under the Verrazzano bridge eight miles out; the towers, the points, all the steps and cliffs of Manhattan growing up on the horizon, poking gradually into the sun, like an ultimate geography lesson — some final, arrogant proof in steel and concrete that the world was round. From a distance the city was a very expensive educational game, a toy not like other toys.

And one had seen those towers so often in so many images — in polychrome and black and white, moving or with music — that all of us standing on the forward deck that morning had the expression of picture dealers scrutinising a proffered masterpiece, leaving a polite interval before crying ‘Fake!’

These preconceptions were a pity since, from a distance, in the sharp light over a gently slapping metal-blue sea, the place looked better than any of its pictures, like the one advertisement layout that had escaped all the exaggerated attentions of the years, come free of Madison Avenue, the press, all the published myths and horrors of the city.

Sharp winds had rubbed the skyline clean, light glittered on the edges of the buildings and all I saw was a place where I was unknown, where unknown people bore ceaselessly up and down those cavernous alleys, between bars and restaurants and offices, all busy with an intent that had nothing to do with me.

The city stood up like a rich menu I could afford at last after a long denial.

The first feeling in the streets was like meeting a girl somewhere, in a group, swapping something, giving and taking, creating an appetite, sharing a look and a mood which you know will take you together before nightfall. There was something inevitable and long-expected, something one had missed, in New York.

The noise and rush from the cab, the filth of the dockside streets, were words quickly spoken, suddenly desired intimacies, saying it was right, and right, we wanted it now. The clatter was like whispers, the flashing signs sure signals of an impending affair. And there was nothing of the ugliness of an old whore for someone who would take anything, but the true excitement of coming to a new land, a territory of undiscovered tribes.

We had been sailing for many days about an uncharted sea when on the feast of St Brendan, towards noon, an island appeared set in a metal bay. We found it to be place of the carob tree, with vines and sweet water, a land different from all our knowledge. And being soured in the known world, and anxious in our time, and fraught with journeying, we took rest in this new place …

The island was an empty map as I crossed it that afternoon. All I had heard or learnt, everything I had imagined — the scalps of other people’s experience, the rag-bag of guidelines that we rattle on our belts throughout most of life — all these received notions disappeared at the cross-park exit above the Plaza Hotel, waiting for the lights to change. I was looking at two men in homburgs and thick-soled brogues talking on the sidewalk. The collars of their straight black coats were turned up under their ears, their faces almost completely hidden from the wind. They stood there quietly, firmly, communicating: two slabs of black marble. And I realised I couldn’t imagine what they were saying, couldn’t invent a language for them, couldn’t invest any of my experience of mankind in them — to tell me what their business might have been, or anything of the fabric of their lives. It was as if an anthropologist had been given the opportunity of observing the nature, the language, the social rites of a tribe so far removed from his own experience, and all the learning of the world, that he was forced to conclude that their society was not only unique but linked directly with pre-history.

Out of all mankind I couldn’t place these two men at all. Nothing I had taken up in forty years through the world had prepared me for them. The basic usages and assumptions which linked man — even savage with literate man — were absent here. Yet I was not gazing at robots; these two had life.

And then I knew what it was. There was nothing absent in them. They were as ordinary as any men. It was I who had lost something at last — a received vision of mankind. For so long in life, in my job, I had been taught to categorise and define, to value or hate something only when I could name it, to fear always the unknowable and unnameable. And these two men had sprung up at me from the sidewalk without definition, identity. There was no meaning I could attach to them, as when one gazes so long at an object that the language we have ceases to justify it, as a fork will lose its forkiness and the world itself become mysterious and chaotic once we have broken through the barriers of common usage. In just the same way I had looked so long, so casually at men that they had lost their true capacity and potential. I had come to assume simply their existence and death and had forgotten that one is obliged to them in other ways, that they themselves have other moments.

But that afternoon in the city, from having been wraiths and carcases, these two people stood up in front of me as freshly and sharply as parents must when a child can first name them, and place them in a common territory. And it was then too, I think, in that moment of new recognition that I finally passed from the world of Marlow with all its distortion and disaster into that of George Graham — a world which I could now make over completely in a new shape.

2

‘I’m Wheel of Reports,’ the man said, snuffling and choking from a terrible cold on the 33rd floor of the UN building. ‘Adam Wheel and pleased to meet you.’ I took a step towards a big grey metal desk done in a curvilinear style of the early fifties which backed out onto the East River.

‘Don’t touch — for God’s sake!’ the man cried hoarsely. He gestured towards two huge wobbly piles of mimeographed paper on his desk and then to similar stacks which reared up all over his office.

‘Committee Reports,’ Wheel advised me. ‘Six thousand tons of paper a year. The UN and its agencies must be one of the biggest despoilers of woodlands anywhere. The 24th Committee on Namibia — South West Africa to you; the 6th on St Kitts and the Windward Islands; report on the 1038th session on the Decolonisation Committee, 19th session on pollution in the atmosphere, the 7th on underwater pollution, the 22nd Committee on the implementation of the 1947 Kashmiri Treaty …’ Wheel padded round his office, touching and naming the piles like a commander remembering famous regiments and their battle honours.

‘You’ll come to it all in good time, sir. And good to have you with us, Mr Graham. Sit down and welcome to the glass house.’

Wheel was something like Henry Miller in middle age, a big man, balding, with a loping, easy-going confident American manner. There was a heavy jaw and a wide, beaming, friendly face with long bones in the right places, yet there was nothing clumsy about him. He seemed neither diffident nor pushy — seemed to lack all the labels of contemporary American malaise, to be a Middle American in a forgotten sense, neither a smart East Coast liberal, Golden State conservative, nor a hick from the grass roots; not a Nixon man or a Kennedy one either. The only real bias he showed lay in the unfashionable impression he gave of being at ease in his own country.

Wheel’s department — a new flower in the wildly blooming bureaucracy of the place — was dedicated to reporting on the reports. It was his job to study the need and efficacy of the tons of paper that rolled from the basement presses every day in three languages; the often illiterate reflections of general, plenary, ad hoc and other committees — reports in hundreds of copies that were usually only read by two people; the speaker, and the translator. But of this I learnt later. For the moment the talk was of my own future contribution to this babel. ‘On the Improvement and Co-ordination of the UN Information Services, with particular reference to the broadcasting media’, to give my projected work its full title. Wheel handed me over a copy of the ‘Projected Preliminaries’ on this scheme, a droll and lengthy document which I had tried to read on the way over. Everything was ‘projected’ or ‘preliminary’ in the UN; it was safer that way; action or completion were horrifying thoughts.

‘I suggest you just read things up for a week or two. Look around. Listen to some tapes. See some film. Meet the people. Can’t rush this sort of thing — reporting on the reports, sort of spying on the spies, what?’

I nodded to each of his suggestions except the last.

Wheel gestured round his office again hopelessly, then took another momentous puff into his hanky.

‘What you’ll have to realise here, Mr Graham, is that the swords have been beaten into Xerox machines not ploughshares. That’s all we really do here — a living memorial to memoranda. That’s all. I don’t know how that ploughshare business ever came into it. This is the real 3M organisation, I tell you — “Memoranda, Mediocrity and Money”. There are men in this building, I tell you — farmers, even goatherds who never saw this side of the Mexican High Sierras until ten years ago — who are pulling down 25,000 dollars a year now, with fourteen dependent children at 700 dollars a throw, three wives at double that, no tax and a pension that makes mutual funding look silly. How can you better it?’

I looked at Wheel with intent. These homespun truths were not expected.

‘Well you can’t, I’m telling you,’ Wheel went on with some vehemence.

His bald pate ducked in and out of the huge pencils of sunlight that came in off the East River, the whole morning lit up with a fine sharp blaze — water, air and sky as crisp as broken ice, special weather everywhere. But isolated at this height over the river, in a room silent and humming with warmth, there was something more: the ridiculous sense of being in a magic machine, a personal airship. There was the sure sense that one could detach the glass cubicle from the rest of the building and float over the Erie and Pennsylvania Railroad barges that swung awkwardly in the stream, saunter in the air above Welfare Island before drifting down with a Circle Line steamer towards Chinatown and Battery Park. Then, of course, I didn’t know these names or places. But in my own office next to Wheel’s, I came to know them, spending most of my time gazing eastwards towards Queens, becoming adept in all the shifting geography of the river.

I had wandered over to the broad window as Wheel was talking. A small sea-plane had dipped down suddenly from up river, just cutting over the top span of the Triborough Bridge, to our left, starting its glide now in front of us, the floats, like big black pear-drops, wavering for a moment, the rudder swinging as the pilot steadied himself in the cross-wind before dropping to the calmer airs beneath. It seemed to wait forever, hanging just over the water, in the long perspectives far down river. And then, when one felt that it must have decided to rise again for some safer terminus, like a wary bird, it suddenly dropped and disappeared behind a fountain of white water.

‘One of the “Commuter Specials”,’ Wheel said. ‘Wall Street brokers take them on the round trip every day. From Long Island, Westchester and other costly suburbs.’

Wheel had joined me at the window, seeming to be as pleased as I was at this slap in the face of the dull ways of the world.

‘I suppose the staff here come the same way? — with all that money.’

Wheel might almost have been annoyed. He shook his head viciously several times before speaking and closed his eyes as if to erase the first impossibly rude words of his reply.

‘You’ve got it all wrong, sir! We’re all saving to go home here. We don’t spare the money on sail boats for the kids, don’t talk about sea-planes. We don’t know life at all. We don’t deal with that sort of thing — never. That wasn’t a sea-plane you saw then — that’s imagination; that’s what you saw. Imagination at work. I laugh when I think of it,’ Wheel said gently. ‘It’s like a million dollars, those floats and canvas. We must want it, yet we must despise it. It’s everything we can’t admit here, in the organisation: rampant ambition, individuality, survival of the fittest — all the things that made this city are wrapped up in those commuters and their box of tricks, and in theory, U Thant should be up on the roof gunning for them. But it’s not like that, Mr Graham, not at all. We’re all trying to thumb a ride with them.’

Wheel suddenly laughed uproariously. ‘Jesus, I’ll have to make you pay for this if I go on much longer. I tend towards the ironic view. Think nothing of it.’

But I did. I wondered for a moment if Wheel might be my ‘contact’. His talk of ‘going home’, his political bias, which he had tried to discount as mere irony — these might have been clues to a professional commitment to the Left.

We went in next door to my office and Wheel introduced me to my secretary. She was a well-intentioned and proportioned Latin-American lady of middle years whose minimal though enthusiastic greetings suggested that her working English would follow a similar pattern, a guess which she was later to confirm many times. Wheel called her ‘Mrs Antonio’, which seemed to surprise her, as though this was neither her marital status nor her name, and this too I afterwards found to be correct. Her name was Miss Fernandez. She was a newcomer to the organisation and, like myself, still capable of surprise.

Outside our offices was a large, windowless secretarial pool, lined with filing cabinets and filled with an assortment of strange and tongue-tied women — silent and unusual because they shared no common national identity or language and were thus forced into a quite unnatural abstinence of gossip and chit-chat. Due to the unique nature of their employer, these ladies were a more than usually divided lot. They sat about the area at various haphazardly placed desks, some with small partitions round them, some nude to the view, some in groups and others distantly isolated, as though the women had been attempting to repeat the geographical dispositions and political alliances of the countries which they came from.

There were small, china-boned Asiatic girls with wide-spread blackberry eyes like islands in faces that were otherwise quite blank maps — and bigger, older women from the more developed lands, who had missed affection many years before, whose eyes spoke loudly of that loss but were still full of dangerous hope, beacons of long and sharply-drawn desire, waiting, each one, for their Captain Cook.

Afterwards Wheel introduced me to the rest of his department, the monk-like occupants of many other small steel cubby-holes whose windows gave out on either side of the narrow building. They were a forbiddingly dull lot — except for the last of them.

‘Let’s end up with Mrs Soheir Taufiq, who covers our Arabic interests,’ Wheel had said brightly — anxious as I was, it seemed, for some vision of life in the building.

Mrs Soheir Taufiq was straight from the Great Earth Mother department; an overflowing Egyptian of indefinable years, hair built up at the back of her head in a huge bun and big black grapes for eyes. Her face was leathered and deeply grooved, forceful, competent.

She had two girls with shorthand notebooks beside her, and was ministering to them alternatively with words and figures which they stumbled over and which she clarified with powerful and forbearing accents.

I had assumed that she was conducting UN business in her dictation. But Wheel told me later that she was most often to be found at her own correspondence, a matter which she needed considerable assistance with, since she wrote at length and had a wide circle of friends.

‘Yes, I know,’ Wheel had continued afterwards, ‘but she’s invaluable to us here. Such a diplomat. And she has contacts all over the Middle East which even the SG couldn’t easily make. They consult,’ he added, in as dark a manner as he could muster, ‘whenever he wants another angle on Sadat and the rest of his friends. A real diplomat.’

And indeed, for me, she had been just that. Of all the staff I met that morning, apart from Wheel, she was the only one who showed any real interest in my arrival, an uncomfortable interest almost. She must have studied Graham’s UN application and curriculum vitae fairly closely and as a result of this I had, for the first time, to properly inhabit the man and his past — to go back over his career, over the many details of his life I had so laboriously learnt in Marylebone and on the boat journey over, right back to the time when he had taught in Cairo in the mid-fifties, before I’d ever gone there myself.

And she spoke to me in Arabic, not English. Mrs Taufiq suddenly moved from a relaxed Anglo-American idiom to an equally colloquial argot of Cairo, full of those awkward vowels, sudden elisions and clamorous consonants that I’d not heard in four years but which drew me back to the city as surely as if she’d taken a blindfold from my eyes and plugs from my ears and placed me squarely next the pastry counter at Groppi’s on Soliman Pasha in the middle of that dirty, blazing, busy city, where the smells rose with the sun, lime dust and coffee dregs, the slops of five thousand years, urine and burnt newspapers — all brooding in the alleyways, running along the streets and climbing up the shattered concrete that shook and danced all day in the pounding it took from the waves of light. She led me back there so surely in her words. Had I closed my eyes I might have been her lover in that distant time, for she mimicked perfectly all the elements of disquiet that I had taken from that language and the women then.

But now, with my eyes open, her words carried a different menace: were they part of an innocent inquiry or an interrogation with a special motive? Was she merely politely interested in George Graham or intent on proving his credentials? The curtain had gone up at last and I was linked with her in the first words of that long dialogue I was to play with her and with others, re-writing and acting the words simultaneously, enacting a drama that a week before had actually been a man’s life; a dramatist who had since fallen out of favour — whose works, in fact, had been ruthlessly obliterated.

Graham was dead; long live George Graham. I had been handed a few props, some of his tattered belongings in a sack, an old Hamilton square-faced watch, a pair of flannels and a Mentmore fountain pen, along with some pages of a prompt copy from the original production. Yet the dry bones would have to move again and the words flow, for McCoy and Harper, I remembered, had never stopped impressing upon me how Graham, in his time, had taken life and its pleasures with the confidence of a king.

‘You were at the British school in Heliopolis, then?’ Mrs Taufiq seemed anxious to confirm a point in Graham’s past which I had not mentioned.

‘Briefly. Just for two terms. Before I went on to Victoria College.’

‘You were with Pendlebury in Heliopolis — no? And the Frenchman. What was his name? Jabovitch. Well, Franco-Russian. White Russian,’ Mrs Taufiq added as if the man had been a bad wine. ‘With a monocle.’

‘Pendlebury, yes. He was the head in my time. But the other fellow — with a monocle?’

I’d known about Pendlebury from the files McCoy had got together. But the Franco-Russian was outside my area completely. There’d been nothing on him. I couldn’t therefore risk any flat confirmation or denial.

‘You must have known him,’ Mrs Taufiq went on. ‘I had a daughter there at the time who used to give imitations of him when she came home. Quite shocking.’

If this was a test I had to accept it full face. I smiled at Mrs Taufiq, almost lovingly, taking her eye to eye, letting the creases gather sagely all over my face.

‘You know, it’s such a long while ago. And there were so many odd foreigners about in Cairo then. Monocles were the least of it. Did you ever come across Malt? Did English in Heliopolis for a while. Used to come to class in a dressing-gown and throw books at the dunderheads from the gallery in assembly hall. Brilliant man, a fine scholar, quite out of his depth with children. Fell under a train at Bab-el-Luk on Black Saturday. Remember — when they burnt Shepheard’s? There was so much going on then I’ve really forgotten Jabovitch.’

She tried to come in again but I didn’t let her.

‘I was on the terrace of Shepheard’s that morning, in fact. With one of the British Council men. Man named Beresford, small fellow with red hair. You must have come across him. Lived in Garden City, always giving parties.’

The trick was to turn the questions back to her, allowing only the facts I knew about Graham to emerge, embellished by my own later knowledge of the city — to pour out the authorised version of my tale, leaving no moment for her to get a finger in a crack and prise open the invention. Wheel stood by as audience for the performance.

‘I loved Egypt, you know. I was able to get around quite a bit with the Council, used to give lectures — in Tanta, Zagazig, Alex. Doing the Lake Poets in some stuffy upstairs room looking over the tram terminus to a lot of dazed old ladies and young nationalists who stood up at the back and wanted to know what Wordsworth had to do with the liberation of the Egyptian people — there were no daffodils in Egypt, of course — and when we were getting out of the Canal Zone?’

Mrs Taufiq shared some mild laughter with Wheel. I felt I’d passed. I didn’t expect any more questions. And there were none. Instead Mrs Taufiq started to speak of the city of Cairo and its people in the same tones of affectionate remembrance as I myself had used.

‘Yes, I must have been at some of your lectures. I used to go quite often to the Council.’ She looked at me carefully, with appreciation or irony I couldn’t say. ‘You know, it’s funny, because although I don’t remember you, Mr Graham, I remember someone very like you in Cairo. Not in the mid-fifties, but a few years later. A teacher at Victoria College in Maadi where my son was. I saw him once or twice at the school and at the Sporting Club there. An Irishman, I think. I don’t remember his name. Not you, of course, because this was after Suez. But like you. Tall, chatty, rather liked jokes.’

Mrs Taufiq drew out each of these last descriptions slowly, as though in doing so, she could the better resurrect the total memory of this person, give the cloudy mixtures time to coagulate and take a shape which she could then drive through her mind, from the past to the present, into a clear vision and identity.

I waited, petrified. She was looking for myself, trying to disinter something as deeply buried as anything Graham possessed in the same place and time.

‘Quite a good-looking fellow,’ she went on, distantly, with regret, as though this favourable attribute was an unfortunate hurdle in the journey of recall and she was sad that I lacked a squint or a gammy leg which would have immediately confirmed her ageing perceptions.

‘Oh yes?’ I said lightly.

‘Yes. I remember he married the daughter of some friends of mine. The Girgises in Maadi. It came to a bad end I seem to remember.’

I took out Graham’s pipe with its chipped bowl and filled it with the aromatic Dutch tobacco he used.

Mrs Taufiq paused, thinking. I lit a match and the little steel room was filled with sweetness. She seemed to have given herself over to the memory of it all, completely — to someone, to something that had happened on an evening long ago on a terrace in Maadi, as if the tobacco had become a little madeleine for her and through its aroma she was just on the point of breaking into time and recapturing the past. I felt her thoughts brush past and around me, lightly but insistently, searching for the key, disembodied characteristics looking for a name.

But she failed in her arithmetic, or seemed to have done. She looked at me again, making a last attempt, wrinkling her eyes up quizzically, then giving the blurred negative up for lost. Yet even if she had failed to identify me, I wasn’t sure at all of the innocence of her attempt.

‘Well, that’s a coincidence,’ I filled the silence.

‘Come on, Soheir,’ Wheel broke in lightly. ‘You’re always seeing ghosts —’

‘Oh yes. Always,’ she interrupted. ‘Farouk, Nasser, the Maadi Sporting Club — all ghosts —’

‘And now you’re seeing Mr Graham here — who’s from Scotland — as an Irishman on the hard courts in Maadi and holding the bar up afterwards with a gin sling. You know, Soheir — you’ll have to write your memoirs. I’ve always told you. She’s full of coincidences.’ Wheel turned to me. ‘Everything links up in the end, isn’t that right, Soheir? Full circle, in the eastern mythology. The Wheel of Karma, you used to call me. Mr Graham was a handsome dragon in a previous incarnation. She goes big on all that sort of thing, Mr Graham,’ Wheel added, gently ribbing her. ‘I was a Manhattan Indian — remember, Soheir? — before the Dutch bought me out for twenty-four dollars and a string of beads. Don’t take any notice of her, Mr Graham, or she’ll have you in on one of her table-tapping sessions. Talk about coincidences — if Mr Graham looks like your friend in Maadi, then you’re Mrs Meir. I’ve always told you. Sitting down — couldn’t tell you apart.’

This must have been an old joke between them and indeed there was a distinct resemblance. But at the moment Mrs Taufiq wasn’t in a mood for jokes. She was still thinking.

‘No, Adam. It’s got nothing to do with mysticism. It’s just a likeness, that’s all. A nice likeness.’ She looked up at me again. ‘What was that Irishman’s name?’

‘That’s the only thing with Soheir,’ Wheel said, chatting to me on the way back to his office. ‘She has this spiritual kick, a little of the crystal ball. Take no notice. It doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘I’m sure,’ I lied. ‘Of course.’ And I drew hard on Graham’s pipe like a lifeline.

‘Come on. I’ll introduce you to the Delegates’ Lounge. Best bar in New York. You could use a beer, no? Cultural shock — arrival in the New World, tall buildings, going round in circles. Don’t want you jumping out a window on your first day.’

I nodded. I could use a beer.

‘You know, there was a family arrived here a few months ago, from Ceylon. She’d never been much further than a paddy-field, up-country somewhere. He was an agricultural specialist. They put the lot of them in the Plaza building, up the road, up thirty floors. Well, after a month or so being locked up in the clouds, the wife tried to take herself and her two children back home — out of the window of the apartment. Defenestration. Funny word. You’d think it had something to do with sex. Landed on East River Drive in the middle of the rush hour. Cultural shock. Awful tragedy.’

I nodded again. I could use a second beer already. We walked towards the first of the three lift banks, each of which served a third of the building. We were on the top third, the 22nd to the 38th floors.

‘What about here?’ I asked. ‘Do you have much trouble with that sort of thing — defenestration?’

‘Well, they have the trouble. We just pick up the bits afterwards in a red blanket. But, now and again. Yes, it happens. And more often than it should. There’s a lot of subdued temperament around here It’s the nature of the business.’

‘How do they get out? None of the windows open, I notice They’re all sealed.’

‘Ah, but the Directors — the D1s and 2s — they have keys.’

‘So it’s only the senior staff that do themselves in? I’d have thought they might be the least frustrated.’

‘You have a point there. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, maybe it’s the guilt that sends the directors tumbling. That would fit. It has to be one or the other, doesn’t it? Either you tell yourself you’ve got to go, the bad faith becomes unsupportable, or else it’s just plain madness — disorientation: not knowing who you are, what you’re doing, or why. There’s quite a bit of both about here. Especially the compass spinning round like a top bit. You’ll see. Takes most people quite a while to find their feet here — their “role” as they like to call it. And some never do, my god. They head straight for the rocks.’

We got off at the third-floor staff concourse, just next the main staff cafeteria, the news and candy stand and the shoe-shine man. Wheel immediately decided on an appointment with this fellow and I waited behind him while he put his boots up.

People streamed round us, queueing up for early lunch. There was a strong smell of some foreign gravy and a warm blast of scented air from secret whirring machinery. To our left at the end of a long corridor a barber’s shop advertised itself discreetly; to our right, at an equally discreet distance, was the New York Chemical Bank with a train of grave people fiddling with their wallets making their way politely to and fro; the whole area was remarkably like the first-class passenger concourse of a big tin liner, moored disconsolately and permanently beyond territorial waters, going nowhere.

Only the shoe-shine man seemed real — a middle-aged, balding New Yorker in a short-sleeved tartan shirt, bent permanently forward on a little wooden chair over his work, head bobbing furiously, his hands and forearms a dusty brown with the years of his trade. He was like a stowaway on this listless ship full of impeccable people, someone from a ghetto who had shinned up the anchor drain on our last night in port and had now been set to work his passage by the captain.

The two men exchanged scattered, staccato pleasantries for awhile, then fell silent. The sun swept off the East River through a huge glass window baking us all, exotic but tasteless cakes in a perfumed oven

Then the shoe-shine man started to hum and sing in an abrupt and inexact high tenor: some pop song from years before.

Winchester Ca-thed-draall …

… hum dum de de dum …

As my ba-by left town …

When he was finished he suddenly thumped the shoe box with his palm: ‘Next please. Step right up.’

‘Tap, tap, tap’ — the man went now, using both hands on the box. ‘Tappety, tap; tappety, tap, tap, tap,’ as though beginning something stylish on drums or sending a morse message.

I suddenly thought I felt the first intimations of Wheel’s warning cultural shock, the compass spinning madly. The sun seemed to rip through the glass, settling on all of us with the intensity of a flamethrower.

‘Tappety, tap, tap, tap …’

The building had swelled all morning with echoes, something straining behind all the appearances, an indecipherable message trying to get through — something trying desperately to be known, but which one could never quite get hold of. The music went on in the first-class saloon but there was a hole somewhere in the bottom of the boat.

‘Winchester Ca-thed-drall …’

The man had started up again, the inane tune cutting through the busy noise of the concourse in its high register, like a clue so obvious that no one notices it.

We passed through the double swing doors at the end of the concourse and the sounds were all suddenly turned out behind us like a light. The long corridor behind, which bordered the Security Council and other committee chambers, led to the Delegates’ North Lounge over a carpet so soft and dark that it turned its travellers into skiers on some small slope in the evening, gliding slowly homewards. Everyone cut their pace here, hovered like birds, the better to fall on the right man or group, exchanging diplomatic messages, before passing back to committee or on to the lounge.

This long dark ante-room was full of precisely intentioned messages; a slip of the tongue here could ruin the false consensus; you were sure of the man here before you opened your mouth; here were endless coincidental but contrived meetings. But who might approach me in this place with whispers, I wondered, linking arms over the deep carpet? And would the message be for Graham — or one that would not come at all, the messenger having seen me for the man I was, not Graham, but the figure Mrs Taufiq had partly resurrected earlier that morning. And if that happened — what could I expect? What penalty might they contrive for stealing their man’s identity? Mrs Taufiq had raised me up again, the man of Cairo and of Durham jail that I had thought well lost. If the place was full of echoes, I realised it was because I was listening now to everything with the ears of two people, Graham and myself, moving from person to person in unnerving stereophony.

There were more than a hundred or so delegates dotted about in groups and armchairs in the huge lounge at the end of the building but not more than half a dozen people standing at the bar down by the river end of the great football pitch. And the customers here all looked English or American — journalists, Wheel told me, UN correspondents for the most part, their backs firmly to the delegates, arms and elbows against the counter, pondering the bottles with all the wan humanity of drinkers. The bar didn’t belong to the room at all; it seemed to have been tipped into the plan as an afterthought, as discreet deference to the Anglo-American habit of drinking vertically and perhaps, even more obliquely, as a special acknowledgment to the latter’s major financial contribution to the running of the organisation.

When we got down to this distant fountain, Wheel put a finger into his collar and pulled. It was hotter in the lounge than anywhere else I’d been in the building. The sun, which had been cold outside, had here baked the huge room all morning through the thirty-foot windows that ran all along its length. Now, just after midday, it had gone above the building, leaving everything done to a turn.

The delegates, lightly inspired by this warmth and coffee, released a mild euphoria on the air like the end of an unimportant embargo. For once these devious men were obvious in their games over the glass field. In this huge privacy they no longer temporised, they lost their public timidity; here they could He unequivocally.

In such a place, this hypocritical Purgatory, Wheel was in his element. We twirled our glasses. Wheel had introduced me to a strong Canadian ale. We watched the dark foam ripple round the edges, smelling the sudden release of hops and barley that pricked our noses like an explosion in a brewery. Then he lifted his eyes to the moving scene in front of us like an old racegoer, weighing form.

‘That Russian there,’ he said, pointing to a peasant eminence who had stood up near us, ‘is known as the “Russian who said Yes”. Years ago — this is his second time here — he once said “Yes” by mistake at some quite unimportant committee on agricultural tariffs. He was sent home for a year. When he came back the same committee cheered him to the echo. It was uproarious. And that’s Omar Feki. The Banker. He won’t sit down. When he first got here, twenty years ago, on his first day, he sat down — there, on one of those sofas — and had his pocket picked by another Arab. A terrible business. It turned out the robber had been one of his customers in Beirut — some old disagreement about his account. So Feki’s been on his feet ever since. They call him “Once Bitten”.’

It was only then that I noticed the couple at a table opposite the bar, their backs to the sunny view, the rose gardens and the statue of Peace beyond. The bright light had shielded them from me until that moment, keeping them more or less in silhouette, so that I had to put my hand over my eyes briefly, pretending to look out on the river, before I could make them out clearly.

The man had his legs crossed, so that one foot swayed dangerously in the path of diplomats on their way to the coffee shop beyond the bar: a long, thin foot, bound in a fine dark worsted cloth and ending in a traditional, hand-made English laced shoe. He was conspicuously lean and tall, even while seated, and just as obviously English in a way — though he couldn’t have been more than forty — that was as old-fashioned and correct as his dress. A thin, firm face, something a little pinched about the lips; careful eyes and long flat ears — a certain chiselled hollowness touched up by a confident weariness: he might have taken drugs or been the last son of a profligate earl — chances very much favoured the latter.

But it wasn’t a wooden face by any means. Only its present outlines were fixed. For the moment it had simply withdrawn the currency of expression; it was resting, as if inwardly reflecting on its assets, leaving only a rough estimate of its worth on view, so that passers-by might be warned of the stakes involved before making an investment.

Yes, these barely animate remains seemed to say — I’m very ready to smile, and more besides: at the right sort of joke from the right sort of person; two events, which, as the expression confirmed, it considered extremely unlikely in the present circumstances. The man might have been in the hall of the Travellers’ Club facing at last a long and thankfully postponed lunch date with a provincial relative.

The woman was a little younger, halfway through thirty perhaps, and where he was a little wan and fluted, she had the bearing of someone likely to be generous to a fault. But with her height, for she was tall as well, the fractional plumpness about the hips and chest, far from being a disadvantage, gave her the virtues of a classical anatomy — the slightly exaggerated contours which artists used to attempt but human beings rarely achieve.

The two of them sat there, both with tubby crystals of light Scotch, with a confidence and ease that made everyone else in the long room seem misplaced. But it was a divided confidence. One could tell immediately: they were not self-, but other-seeking.

Wheel noticed them just after I did and raised his hand. The man stood up in answer and, leaning over the woman, took her glass. Her eyes followed him as he came towards us.

‘The Jacksons,’ Wheel said. ‘Compatriots of yours, Mr Graham. Guy’s with the politicals. Floor above us.’ And when her husband was being introduced to me the woman’s eyes met mine in a brief gaze, smiling a little social message, as if to say: ‘I’m glad you’ve met him, for now so much the more easily will you meet me.’

The three of us went back to join her at their table, our glasses refilled.

‘George Graham — just joined us from London. Guy Jackson — Helen Jackson,’ Wheel pointed each of them out with his arm to me, repeating the formalities of introduction with them both individually as though he was as much aware of their separateness as I had been.

‘Mr Graham is going to report on our reports — a new spy in the nest.’ Wheel looked at both of them and laughed, but got little response. Both of them were looking at me intently, as if I was an expected guest.

And of course I was expected, by him at least. I realised that at once: Jackson was my SIS contact with London, with McCoy and Harper. They had briefed me about him. And I saw those two rugged, despoiled faces, cracked and devious in their separate despairs, rising up like a shudder in the warm and alcoholic air.

As for Helen Jackson, her name rang out for me with an echo I couldn’t catch, until suddenly I saw how it summed up her classic proportions. But at that moment, though, just after we had been introduced, she reflected her Trojan namesake like a statue. The warmth of her overture was still there, brightly on her face, but it had developed no further. The expression of welcome had frozen everywhere on her skin, startled to death.

Wheel set her animation going again with some sly remark about her presence in the building and her husband took me up with an interest in which the quality of restraint was obviously feigned, as though he were trying to get me to sell him something he wanted badly without my realising this and putting too high a price on it.

‘Wheel told me you were coming over,’ he said agreeably, as if I were a neighbour of his and had just dropped by from the end of the street. ‘With the COI, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, Reports Officer. East Africa mainly.’

Jackson lifted his glass and I noticed a brassily gold signet ring on the marriage finger. It struck one as glaringly out of place with the rest of his restrained decor, like a dropped ‘h’ in the middle of a speech from the throne. It seemed precisely intended as a vulgar flourish, calling attention to itself; an obscenity in the middle of the general refinement which he had purposefully isolated. I felt suddenly that he wore it as a mark of failure and not of love, as evidence of an unachieved fidelity, like a campaign medal from a dirty war.

‘God knows what you’ll make of our UN reports,’ he went on, and I could hear Wheel’s inquiries of Helen Jackson from the other side of the table ‘… and the kids?’ Guy Jackson’s voice was soft, I realised now, like an old man’s; his words spaced out too, as though he was anxious to give himself the maximum amount of time for thought still compatible with coherent expression.

‘I’m above you — the SG’s political department. Very few reports come out of us, thank God. We keep it to ourselves. But the rest of the building is an absolute snowfall. No doubt Wheel has told you. You were on the Africa desk in London, weren’t you?’

‘Latterly, yes. East Africa, Malawi, a bit of Rhodesia.’

‘I know that part myself. I farmed there for a while. In the south. Where are you staying?’

“They’ve put me up temporarily at the Tudor Hotel round the corner. Till I get an apartment.’

I was still considering the problems of accommodation ahead, the dull business of phone calls, arguments and too much money, when I stopped thinking of everything, as if I’d been shot, all die senses shocked out of me, and I was still running like a chicken without a head.

Africa. It was Africa again. ‘I farmed there for a while.’ I fell on Jackson’s casual words like a man in a music quiz trying vainly to complete a verse in a popular song. ‘… farmed there for a while. In the south’ …? The south. Farming up-country? In the old Rhodesias or South Africa? And then the answer flew at me, the corresponding phrase, the next line of music: ‘Oncehe was someone in the country; now, just something in the city’ — the words of some married woman (‘He doesn’tknow’) in letters to George Graham. The letters I had read in Marylebone and on the boat over.

This was the message, I was sure, that had cheated me, lain in wait for me all morning, the echoes of something unrevealed searching everywhere in the building for expression; a secret in the dry atmosphere hidden in the shoe-shine man’s harsh singing, which only I could interpret, which was for me alone.

And now it had come clear, in Jackson’s polite responses: ‘I used to farmthere for a while. Inthe south.’ He had given me a phrase in a vital lost language through which I could now elucidate a whole civilisation’s hieroglyphics. The puzzle resolved itself so simply and clearly that, before I thought of the long academic journey ahead towards full interpretation, I rushed headlong, an exultant professor, into translating the first sentence of the mysterious text: I could suddenly see this thin, amused man Guy Jackson — with his wife Helen — standing outside a colonial farmstead on the uplands, the huge skies reaching down over them, a blue canopy, smothering the fever and acacia trees that coloured an old lawn. They had just come back from doing something active — were standing there by the porch in old clothes, sweating, welcoming the evening.

I looked quickly across at Helen Jackson deeply gossiping with Wheel. I had forgotten: there was one other person who must have drawn from the morning something quite buried and forbidden: an equal secret. If she was the woman in the letters I was not the man she had written them to; her lovely messages had gone badly astray. Only she would know that, but she would know it well — too well, the memory spreading like a fire through so many hotel bedrooms. I was looking at a woman who had been waiting for her lover, and he had turned up all right, bright and early, untrue in everything except in name. And that was false, too — how she must have remembered — as false as all my body was to all of his.

Helen Jackson and George Graham: they had been the lovers in the story, in those letters, who had come to argue about the past and future of Africa and the same ruthless pendulum of happiness: ‘I am not afraid of the future …’; the ‘natural Tory’ whose confident politics had collapsed and the disappointed Marxist; it all fitted. I was sure of it. Her aristocratic curiosity exactly reflected Graham’s comments on her, while her suddenly frozen welcome after she heard my name confirmed all my own quick inventions.

Helen Jackson, the wife of my London contact, was my mistress. What was the rest of the equation? Had she any idea, for example, who George Graham really was? Was their relationship the only illicit thing they shared? Had she been covertly bound to him, hidden with him, for six years, without knowing his final identity? She must have been blind to that, I thought. Yet how had it all come about? How had a deep-cover KGB agent come to love the wife of a senior officer in British Intelligence? Initially one can think only of coincidence in such a strange meeting, but years in the same profession made me have my doubts.

Jackson and I chatted on about New York apartments, the relative merits and dangers of the East and West sides; they had a place in a new block on the East Side, off Second Avenue in the Fifties.

‘Wretchedly expensive and only really half safe — with the children. But there’s not much alternative. It’s only ten minutes’ walk here, which cuts out the transport business. You’ll come round — come for drinks this evening if you’re free. We’ve a few friends coming.’

I thanked him without saying yes or no. Already I felt myself an interloper, the lover gliding easily into the circle of the husband’s trust, the cheat who takes every liberty — another man’s wife, his gin — who tells his children a bedtime story before dinner, and makes clandestine arrangements for tomorrow with his wife while she tidies up afterwards in the kitchen.

Jackson was pushing me into a role I didn’t want. Yet this woman had been part of George Graham, the deepest thing in his life, possibly. I could not avoid the implications of this indefinitely. I saw at once that I should either have to sort things out with Helen Jackson, or explain the whole matter to her husband. But this latter course never struck me seriously; I was not going to betray this confidence of Graham’s no matter in how many other ways I was his stooge. She and I would speak about it by ourselves, I thought. I should tell her the position, she would have to accept it and keep her mouth shut about it — as she had done about Graham for six years previously. For that time she had withheld the fact of her real lover from her husband; now she could do the same with his pretender.

Wheel had gone on talking to her about her children, two girls, Sarah and Sheila, whose ages I couldn’t determine from the odd snatches of conversation — some question of a nanny or a teacher, I couldn’t make out which, so that they might have been two years old or twelve. And from her expression it seemed that Helen Jackson was as uninvolved in her conversation with Wheel as we two were on the other side of the table. The curious intensity had dropped from her eyes, the invitation had all been withdrawn, her flourishing airs quite subsided. Before, though cast in a classic mould, her buoyancy and vitality had lifted her far above those confines into a sphere of lightness and finesse. Now she seemed exhausted, a weight had fallen on all her natural virtues; she was hesitant in everything, as though quite overcome with mundane domestic worries. She turned to her husband: ‘Adam has the address — of that nursery school on the West side. We should go take a look at it.’

It was only then I realised she was American: the accents, the grammar, were light but distinct. Could this woman have lived in South Africa or the old Rhodesias? Perhaps I was quite wrong about her. Then she took a notebook from her bag and started to write down the address and I had no more doubts; the handwriting was the same as that in the letters — even the ink, a black ink — the same slanting, hurried, rather immature scrawl. She was leaning forward, using the space of table right in front of me, as though anxious that I should see her writing clearly, be able to compare the messages. She seemed wilfully to be offering me conclusive proof of our previous association, of her fidelity and my lies. When she had finished writing she looked up at me, but spoke to her husband: ‘Where’s Mr Graham staying?’

I repeated my piece about the Tudor Hotel, and she said at once like an old friend: ‘Oh, you can’t go on staying there. Friends of ours on the West Side have an apartment in an old block; it’s a co-op — they know the super; I’m sure you’d get something there. Wouldn’t he, Guy?’

‘Yes, might be a chance. Might be lucky.’

Shc looked down at the address she’d just taken from Wheel. ‘Their block’s not far from the nursery school — Ninety-second on Park. Come with me if you like, Mr Graham, while I take a look at the school.’

‘That’s an idea,’ Guy Jackson said nicely. ‘You don’t want to wander too much around the West Nineties on your own if you can help it. Even in daytime. Take him along, Helen.’

He might have been a mari complaisant furthering his wife’s cause. Yet I was sure it was a piece of genuine solicitude on his part, towards me at least. She alone was making the running — furthering her intended inquiries with me and wasting no time about it.

How much experience she must have had in that sort of thing, I thought — bluntly arranging meetings, deceiving her husband right under his nose with all the urgent rashness that love requires and forgives. And I didn’t blame her. She had not loved casually, that I knew. All her blatant intensity — the full weight of her happy curiosity that had filled her face until a few minutes before — had once devolved over another man, and had done so completely, without deviation or restraint; one could see that too — she would not play with any man.

I thanked her for her offer and then turned away at something Wheel had started to propound about muggings on the West Side.

And then I looked back at her for a second, for no reason, and found her looking at me, quite openly, her face puzzled in a quiet way, the lines of interest reviving minutely, with sadness, looking at me as any woman might on a messenger who had come to tell her that her hopes were dead. There was no purpose behind her gaze, no future; it was nothing more than a brief query, the formalities of identity, a woman gazing on a body in a mortuary.

Yet it was a face I recognised now, shorn of all its happy drama: it was the one I had invented myself after reading her letters on the boat journey over, trying to invest Graham with a realistic sexuality: Helen Jackson was very nearly the woman I had walked towards at the crowded party in Westminster — that spring, six years ago when I’d just got back from Kenya: glasses falling about the place, the long table at one end littered with bottles, half a curtain drawn against the glare of evening light from the river….

I remembered my inventions on the boat: ‘She was tall and rounded in a way that could never for a moment be described as fat…. There was something of a hurry in her. The eyes always moved, were always swinging or lifting, like a commander at the head of an armoured division pressing into a new country

And this was Helen Jackson — the woman in front of me now — in many essentials: the long falls of hair sweeping down either side of her face … Had I, during those few moments on the boat, in some way really come to inhabit the remains of George Graham without knowing it? He would have known exactly what she looked like — the dark hauteur, the brown eyes sprinkled, broken here and there, with some even darker element — the constant attacks and surprises she made with her features: her permanent forwardness and willingness. Graham would have known these battle formations uniquely well, as an old soldier from that happy campaign. But not I. And I have no belief in transfiguration either. I had walked straight into an ambush on my first morning ashore and that new identity, that cover I had so carefully built up, was now all gone.

3

I didn’t go to the Jacksons’ apartment that night for drinks — pleading tiredness after the long day. And that was true, at least. I would have postponed forever, if I had been able, this meeting alone with Helen Jackson. I had no taste for it and even less for its outcome. It could not be other than something awkward, at the least, for both of us — for her in a personal way and with me professionally. At worst, it could have a disastrous end for both of us.

I had thought about it on and off, lying on my hotel bed that evening — thought of alternatives to my seeing her, but had found none.

And in any case, I wanted an end to running, to escaping. The whole point of my taking over Graham’s identity was to stop the dissolution, the canker, the treachery and all the other needless horrors which are the usual ends to our silly profession. I had said originally that I would pick up the remnants of Graham’s life and fulfil it for him, complete it — deny the forces that had ruined him and very nearly done the same for me. I should have then to meet Helen Jackson; I should regard our impending confidences as a second lesson in the ways of the real world.

We met downstairs in the main lobby of the Secretariat Building next morning. She and Guy had walked over from their apartment in the East Fifties and the three of us stood there, by the elevator banks, the secretariat staff moving past us towards the large Southern ladies who operated the machinery and the cooler supervisors who marshalled the passengers outside their allotted traps.

Even on my second day in the building, I felt a sudden huge luck in not having to go with them all, upwards into their dry glass cells, these hopeless workers of the world. I could go out and spend the crisp morning flat-hunting with a woman in a suede overcoat and a long red and white woollen scarf whose tails fell down, one in front, one behind; like the start of a school reunion, when we are all older and richer and better dressed and can spend the day as we will, without orders or denials. Even the business ahead could not dampen the moment’s happy expectation I felt then, Guy Jackson and the others disappearing into the air-conditioning, we into the real weather outside.

‘Do you like walking?’ she asked. I pushed the glass doors open for her, against the run of fretful people.

‘Yes, I do. I used to walk a lot.’

‘Guy likes the office. He used not to. He likes to get to his office. He was more active once. Where did you do your walking? Round Westminster?’

We had stopped at the pedestrian crossing outside the UN entrance looking over First Avenue.

‘I was in the field a lot — as well as a desk. In East Africa — doing TV programmes, compiling reports: that was the active part of the job.’

‘Yes, I know. Guy told me.’

A roaring stream of cars and lorries sprang up from the underpass to our right and we could hear each other no longer.

‘You used to live in Africa, didn’t you?’ I said when we’d got to the far side of the Avenue and had started to walk up 42nd Street.

‘Just after we were married. In Northern Rhodesia — now Zambia.’ She turned, and looked back at the long line of national flags in front of the Secretariat. ‘I can’t see the flag.’ She gazed at the colours cracking in the wind, shading her eyes from the sun coming off the river between the Con Ed chimneys. ‘Green and black and white — I think.’

‘It should be easy.’ I said. ‘Z. It must be the last flag on the line.’

‘What about Zanzibar?’

‘Part of the Republic of Tanzania.’

‘You know all about Africa.’

‘No. Just the alphabet.’

She turned back and we went on. Yes, we might have been starting out on a school reunion — tempting and teasing each other, seeing where the ground lay after so many years.

‘We call “Z” “Zee” over here — took me quite a while to learn your way.’

‘Why did you bother?’

‘Oh, they were very particular — Guy’s relations in Africa, his friends. They didn’t know what he was doing marrying an American in the first place. The usual thing — he should have married a Country Lifegirl and taken her to live on a thousand acres in Gloucestershire.’

The huge glass wall of a building loomed up on our right — fifty square yards of glass set between dark stone pillars and copper casements. Inside I could see nothing but a dense greenery — tall flowering cherries, palm-like trees with falling rubbery leaves, ferns, a carpet of exotic shrubs and bushes, a hothouse jungle with pools of water and little streams a few feet from the street. I stopped to look at it.

‘The Ford Foundation,’ she said. ‘Were you long in Africa?’ We both gazed through the glass at this immense natural contrivance; even Arcadia was not beyond the concrete and glass ambitions of Manhattan. Had I been long in Africa? All right — I would play the game as long as she wanted; in any case, I wasn’t going to have the whole business out with her in the middle of 42nd Street. She wanted to make final confirmation of my credentials, of course, make quite certain that I was the real shadow of her lover before inquiring about what had happened to his substance. I had no objections.

‘In East Africa, yes. I went there first after Suez in ’57, taught for several years in Nairobi, then the University at Kampala, finally in Nyasaland — more or less in a sort of technical college in Blantyre. It’s Malawi now. That was in the early sixties.’ I knew Graham’s curriculum vitae off pat and looking into all the rampant tropical greenery, I felt for a second as if I’d actually experienced Graham’s Africa — instead of just a holiday there once, in Nairobi at one of the near game parks, from Cairo in the fifties.

‘Nyasaland was just next to us. I mean — about five hundred miles away. But that’s next-door in Africa. We left when the Federation broke up, and went to Kenya with Jomo. Guy was always very multi-racial.’ She smiled slightly.

‘Yes, I left Malawi then, too. Came back to London.’

It was a ridiculous charade. I couldn’t look at her.

‘With the British Council, weren’t you?’

She could so easily have said ‘were you?’ but she had to press it. I could so easily, so properly, have said ‘How do you know?’ since I’d said nothing of this to her husband the previous day. All he knew was that I was an ex-COI man. But of course I knew how she knew and I let her keep her games. I knew how she must feel — wanting quickly, desperately to hear all — what had happened to George Graham, and why. And I knew, for all her headlong questions, the restraints she must have been imposing on herself. We hadn’t begun yet; we were in the middle of 42nd Street.

‘Yes, I was with the British Council in Africa. What did you — he do — in Rhodesia? Mining?’

She smiled properly now for a moment, for the first time that day, like a woman forcing herself to be brave at a railway station. But not a true smile, merely proof of her knowledge that such an expression had a real existence, a smile like the badge of an organisation you have been expelled from.

‘He looks like a miner, doesn’t he?’

‘Farming, then — tobacco or cattle. Up country. A colonial farmstead. Not posh, but quite old, with a long wooden verandah, and fever trees round the lawn. Orange-blossom climbing the front wall and a big acacia tree outside the kitchen door.’ I gazed at the green jungle in front of me, all the rubbery paraphernalia of the trees motionless beyond the glass. Moisture ran down the huge windows in small rivulcts. ‘The garden must have smelt like a ladies’ hairdresser’s on a hot evening.’ I turned and looked at her. The smile had been held but was now an expression of open-eyed surprise as well.

‘Not quite. But almost. How do you know? You sound like a detective.’

‘Not really.’

‘Not even in the same line of country?’

‘Anyone who imagines too much is a detective.’

We walked on up 42nd Street — through the canyon, grey and busy and useless, the bright light of the morning now almost defunct as if the street were a long way underground and the real land began at the top of the buildings.

We took a bus up to the Grand Army Plaza, got off and walked into Central Park. Within moments we came to a zoo, right in the middle of it. I hadn’t expected it; there were no turnstiles, it was free: a small but well-organised zoo. She seemed as surprised by it as I was. Africa was waiting round every comer for us that morning.

‘The sea-lions are great,’ she called back to me.

We had stopped by a pool, edged all the way round by a happy crowd. I could hear huge wallops on the water, followed by fountains of spray rising above the spectators’ heads. Black and shiny shapes like wet gumboots jumped about between the crush of people. She had forced herself right up to the rails, for a proper view — always pushing forward, I thought, taking on any new thing to its limits, no matter what the physical discomfort or what other pressing concerns she might have: giving up everything for the moment, just as Graham had done — for the girl in Marylebone High Street with the awkward umbrella who Harper had thought was a contact; bent forward in eager chat with the turbaned Sikh on the Delhi-Calcutta express; the long discussion about how to cook Boeuf Stroganoff in Chez Victor which Harper had recorded. Everything that was now, was now only once, and you cut away every other part of life, before and after, in order to test it fully: the horrors that are due to great ideas; the little roads that went somewhere: how alike she and Graham were in this approach, their appetite for uncluttered experience. I envied them their continual availability. In the face of so much choice, and so much more that is simply chosen for us, they seemed to know unerringly the right paths to take — the journeys that would reward them, justly and with ease, without vanity or egoism. I tended to think too much — saw always the alternatives — and prison had strongly reinforced this bad habit.

‘You don’t like them, then?’ She came back to where I was hovering on the outskirts of the crowd, a biscuit man with a barrow beside me, with a decayed monkey on a string, trying to sell me a pretzel.

‘I’ve never liked the sea. Too cold, too big. And slippery. And salt in your mouth. And rough.’

‘Perhaps you like lakes? Unless you don’t like water at all. When were you born?’

The barrow man finally managed to sell me a pretzel. Two pretzels. I gave her one. I felt like an uncle with a godchild. ‘February.’

‘Water, then. A watery sign. You must like water.’

‘Yes, all right. I like lakes. They’re quieter at least.’

‘Lake Nyasa?’

‘Lake Malawi you mean.’

‘Yes — well you must have liked that when you were in Malawi. It was tremendous — all those blue mountains round it, like Scotland. Don’t you remember? We used to go there for holidays. One couldn’t swim in it of course.’

‘No, of course not.’ I remembered that problem very well from my days in Egypt — the snail-infested water of the canals and lakes there where the liver bugs thrived, common all over Africa in still water: Bilharzia.

‘Bilharzia,’ I said. ‘That was the trouble, I remember, in Lake Victoria too, in Uganda — couldn’t swim — had to rub yourself all over in engine grease if you went out in a boat. Gets right through the skin.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

We walked on, into the lion house. She was silent now, throwing a tail of her scarf round her neck again in another loop as if a cold wind had come up and not the warm meaty aroma, the acid wafts of old urine, that now surrounded us. We looked at one of the huge animals asleep under a dead tree trunk, dead like it. Then she spoke, neither of us looking at the other, our eyes embedded in the tawny beast.

She said: ‘The only point about Lake Malawi — anyone who’d been in the country would know it — is that you can swim in it. That’s why we went there for holidays. The current from the Shire river keeps the water moving and the weeds away. It’s practically the only lake in Africa that is bilharzia-free.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Oh dear, I am sorry.’

The animal stirred, flicked its tail an inch, looked at us for a dull moment, before dispensing with the view and turning over flat on its other side.

‘George knew that lake in Malawi,’ she went on. ‘I met him there once. We swam in it. There was a scrubby sort of Holiday Inn place above Fort Johnston on the western shore. No one ever went there, not after the break-up of the Federation. It was empty. We spent a week there doing nothing.’

‘How did you manage that? Graham left Africa in 1961, came back to London.’

‘He came back to Africa quite often afterwards. I thought you’d done your homework.’

‘Yes, but you’d left Rhodesia by then, hadn’t you?’

‘Yes, we were in Nairobi. Guy had an attachment there from the Foreign Office — leased as an adviser to the Kenya government. He took up with Whitehall when he stopped farming. Though in fact he was always with the FO — in one way or another.’

After the zoo we had taken a cab further up Fifth Avenue to the Guggenheim Museum and were now wandering round Frank Lloyd Wright’s strange inverted cone, pacing his gentle ramps slowly upwards and outwards, looking half-heartedly at the paintings. I wondered why it was that she would speak to me only while on the move — and always moving from one place to another — and I thought it might have been in order to frustrate some marital eavesdropper. Her husband might just have hired someone to follow us, might have long suspected her infidelity. He might even have learnt privately all about George Graham before being told by McCoy to be my contact in New York. But often as I glanced behind us that morning I never saw anyone. Of course agents will do exactly the same thing — this constant walking — when, through some slip-up, they are forced into open contact. So I supposed that from both our points of view this keeping on the hop was fair enough: I was the agent, she the mistress. We both had plenty to hide — she in the search for her lover, I in preventing her finding him. But for the moment, as though fearing the worst, Helen Jackson kept off any detailed approach to his whereabouts. We talked, simply, of our own approaches.

‘So you went back to meet Graham in Malawi?’ I said. ‘Long after you’d left that part of the world.’

‘Yes, I met him there. Among other places, I was going back to see friends in Zambia anyway. He was researching a programme in Malawi. We met up. It wasn’t difficult.’

‘No, of course not.’

She had all of Africa to be unfaithful in — those huge spaces where two such white lovers would surely have stood out as clearly as black magic at the North Pole. It may not have been difficult but it must have been risky — with her husband in Jomo’s government in Nairobi, a town that was the sounding-drum for all the far-flung gossip of East Africa. But one took risks in that sort of situation. I had forgotten that. And in a strange way the closer you went to the fire in such circumstances the safer you were. That was an old saw, tribal or civilised. Compromise was the only really dangerous thing between lovers.

‘I thought the long trip you made was in East Africa — Uganda, Kenya — Tsavo National Park, for example?’ I looked at her with a notebook in my eyes, like a police constable, a bad replacement for a small part in The Mousetrap.

‘There were several long trips.’

‘You walked to the top of a small hill, didn’t you — in Tsavo? — near an old mining village, with a Jack Hawkins figure in a bush-hat who talked about beating hippos on the nose with a walking stick on the banks of the Nile …’

It was my turn to ask her if she remembered things properly.

I started to push the matter myself now, feeling a need to display my ‘homework’. But more, I think, I was experiencing the beginnings of a mild jealousy, the jealousy of a new lover, who, even at a first meeting, wants to possess all the knowledge, all the intimacies of the woman’s previous affairs. Even then I wanted the entire baggage of Helen Jackson’s recollected experience.

‘Yes, I thought you’d have gotten onto that last letter. That was stupid of me.’

‘You didn’t say anything rash. No one could have identified you from it — no address, signature, nothing. You had someone post it in Uxbridge.’ Then it struck me. ‘London Airport, of course.’

We had stopped by a group of Klees; dark lines, blots, jagged edges, nightmares. She turned away from it, with relief. But it was because of what I’d just said.

‘I knew Graham was coming over here — we were going to meet. But you mean you didn’t know about me? Who I was — where I was?’

‘How could I have? It was pure chance — my meeting you here on my first day.’

‘What about the others — the people — the people who sent you here?’

‘They couldn’t have known about you either. They never mentioned you in connection with Graham. And I didn’t show them your letter. It struck me as something completely personal, nothing to do with what I was doing for them.’

‘Was doing?’

‘Am doing.’

‘What are you doing then?’

‘That’s covered by the Official Secrets’ Act.’

‘I know. Guy is in the same business, the same games.’

‘I thought they never told their wives.’

‘You can’t ever have had a wife, then.’

‘Oh, I did. She was in the same silly business too.’

We’d moved off Klee and on to some important-looking groups by Chagall, Delaunay, Léger and Jackson Pollock. She had unwound her red and white scarf completely now, taken it off, and was carrying it in her hand, all bunched up like a football. Then she opened the top of her suede coat.

‘No, it’s really quite simple,’ I said. Then I thought of Graham’s shoes on the table in Marylebone. ‘Well, my part is fairly simple. It’s just bad luck that I should bump into you like —’

‘Listen,’ she put in quietly, but digging her fingers into the wool. ‘The only simple things are these: you’re impersonating George Graham. You’ve done a lot of homework on it; you’ve been helped — by experts. You’re tied up with British Intelligence in some way; Guy is too. George and I were — well, how would you describe it? You’ve read the letters.’

‘Yes. An affair?’ I paused, showing her loss of a proper language to describe these things. ‘What else could you call it. I don’t like the word.’

‘I love him.’

I let her keep the present tense. It was fair. It did proper justice to all that I had learnt of her and George Graham, everything that had passed between them, even though I was sure that, technically, the grammar was now quite incorrect; it had been overtaken by events, though she knew nothing of it, willing as ever to live in the present to the very last.

We had moved into an Annexe — the Tannhauser Collection, off the second floor, and were looking at a Manet: ‘Before the Mirror’.

‘Anyway, these things are clear enough,’ she went on. ‘You’ve come to New York as George Graham and so you know all about — us.’

‘Yes.’

‘My “infidelity”. That’s the word I don’t like either. All the same, it would do me no good in most quarters — if people knew. But listen, you’ve stolen someone else’s life — worse, don’t you think, than taking someone else’s wife? And you can’t tell me anything at all about that because of the Queen of England.’

‘Yes. The Crown. That’s quite right.’

‘Which points to only one thing, of course — otherwise you could tell me what’s happened to him, about something “entirely personal”, as you said yourself, just a little adultery after all, nothing really Top Secret. But you can’t — so it’s quite clear: George Graham must be with British Intelligence as well, and you’ve got to protect him and the “organisation”.’

‘So?’

She looked a little blank. ‘I never thought —’

‘How should you? You were in the classic position. Agents don’t go round telling their mistresses what they really do, do they?’

We inspected a Pisarro — ‘Les Coteaux de l’Hermitage’ — and then moved on to Renoir’s ‘Woman with a Parrot’.

‘What’s happened to him? Where is he?’

‘In London. I should think he’s all right. I never met him.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. I told you. I can’t tell you.’

Even Renoir couldn’t hold her. She walked on. She tossed her hair.

‘Why did you tell me anything to begin with then?’ she said at the next picture.

‘To get the situation straight, if I could. You knew — you were the only person — to know about me. I had to talk to you. But what can you do? If you press the issue about my impersonation you’ll explode your marriage and your husband’s job — at the very least. And you’ll be absolutely no nearer to George Graham. But what I really wanted to say to you was this: I’ll say nothing at all about what I know about you and him, not to your husband, not to anyone in London. That’s the bargain — if you let me finish my business here. And maybe when it’s all over you can pick up things again, where you were with him —’ I couldn’t go on with the lie and I think she noticed.

‘That’s very likely, of course, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t honestly know.’

‘Rather a one-sided bargain, isn’t it? — and nothing really at the end to keep it for, from my point of view. Just to keep you in one piece — while he ends up in pieces.’

‘I would tell you. If it didn’t matter. I’d tell you about him. I know what you must feel. I’m sorry.’

‘“If it didn’t matter,” you say. Who do you think this matters so much to, this man — if not to me?’

We walked on, not seeing the pictures at all. She was glowering. Then she began to hang back, isolating herself, looking at odd pictures alone. Soon we were yards apart, so that eventually I turned and walked back, angry, coming towards her like an unwanted consolation prize.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t you think I’ve the right to try and get out of this in one piece too? I didn’t propose myself for this job. Doesn’t that strike you? I didn’t fix up this stupid business in London — any of it. I meant I was sorry — for me as well, if you like. I hate all this just as much as vou do — as much. I think. as Graham hated it all too.’

‘Hated?’

‘Hates.’ How quickly one lied, saving myself, not him.

‘And you think if we work together all of us might get out in one piece?’ she said dully.

‘Yes.’

Her face brightened. I’d struck something hopeful in her again, that optimism she was so ready with — the warm parts that went with all her forward bias. ‘That’s quite possible,’ I said.

‘All right. Let’s do that. And thank you for the sorry.’

We were conspirators, then. But I loathed the conspiracy. It would bring no new or happier state; it was a lie. She would play along with me only because I had offered her the chance of taking up with Graham at some future point — a point which I knew could have no existence. Graham had been a senior KGB officer and she didn’t know it. If he survived at all he would be sent down for as many years as I had been. He was lost to her, I thought, as firmly as death. A marriage between them would never be arranged. That freedom together, which she had sought so carefully, so vehemently, with such secrecy in her letters to him — when she could leave Guy, the question of the children properly settled — had, for all her care and vivid imagination, no possible end in reality.

And one day she would find this out, sharply and conclusively, all within a minute. That would be the worst thing — the moment when she discovered that all her efforts, her love, had proved as useful as careless, spendthrift fancies, while the years of careful passage she had made about his body had the same value as a one-night stand — the fumbling explosions of sex after a party.

Hard-headed, calculating, in the arrangements of her love for so long, she had thrown foresight away, now that it could arrange nothing, bring no tangible, immediate benefit. All it could give her was doubt in his existence, which was impossible. She had to believe just this one thing — that she would see him again. Hope is such an available commodity, so readily dispensed. By definition, it needs no proof of origin, no warranty of satisfaction. And so I had been able to dole it out to her just then, like a money-changer in old Port Said, bribing her with the promise of a renewed emotion which I knew could never again have any currency.

An affair of her sort is like a revolution after a hundred years of repressive peace. The odds are all against it. It requires more organisation than a marriage to achieve half the trust and only a fraction of the physical availability. And apart from the need, the belief, the resources are non-existent. Such a liaison survives as a constant minus factor — a beleaguered force making odd successful forays but always threatened with retreat and rout. Its defeat is far more likely than the end of formal ties where convention, habit, economics and children form an often impregnable rear-guard. An affair may thrive for a while on its implicit disadvantages, like a guerrilla army. But if it loses, it loses everything. Unlike a marriage, there are no reserve troops, no stores, no headquarters and no constitution to fall back on. There are no long-held lies or truths. To survive, the people in this dream of a free country must keep constantly on the move, never two nights sleeping in the same place — must constantly disband and re-group and the password has to be changed at every meeting.

Strategy, persistence, imagination, patience, trust in absence — the ability to bring everything to bear in a sudden short moment of engagement, to slip away without loss, to lie up in the long intervals without complaint or murmur: this was the field manual she and Graham had shared, the handbook of their affection.

And I praised her for that, for her skill in this campaign, for we must all hope for the success of passion, just as we must suffer its ruthless ways and means. To possess the quality at all is to possess it too abundantly, to willingly betray one person so as to fulfil it with another — to be capable of dividing it, sharing it, and multiplying it many times with many people. Like faith, it is a gift that will serve a multitude, with all the deceptive increase of the loaves and fishes.

She had had an affair. She had managed it well. It had begun quite simply, casually no doubt — in a room somewhere, a visit to someone or at a party. And once the mark had been made, a dam of mutual interest against the indifference of the world, love had grown and spread out behind them like a lake — over half a continent, through half a dozen years. So many women would have botched the whole thing long before, in a fraction of the space, would have turned the delicate business into a nightmare for everyone concerned. But she had pursued it tenaciously — sometimes, surely, recklessly — yet kept the balance perfectly. I was surprised that nothing had gone wrong until now, that so deep and passionate a layer of her personality had gone unnoticed for so long — by her husband, her friends, the gossips everywhere. It was almost as if — like Graham, like any of our sort who inhabit permanent cover — she had conducted this real business of her life with all the assiduity of a master-spy, like an agent whose marriage is nothing more than a deep cover for his real activities.

We left the Museum and crossed back into Central Park. We were still walking. She wound the red and white football-scarf about herself again and we moved up a short wooded slope towards a high wire fence. Beyond it lay a reservoir, a large mirror dumped in the middle of the dirty city, ruffled in the clear, blowy weather, vibrating gently with skyscrapers, flocks of seagulls far away patterning it like bits of torn paper as they floated and glided over it.

I was surprised by this woman with a boy’s scarf and expensive suede coat walking next the water in the middle of New York: an impeccable Foreign Office husband, just the right number of zero-population children, an apartment on the East Fifties; all this was so studiously correct, so much in the new convention. Yet it was not her: she was no English rose from the shires. She was an American who had gone out to Rhodesia, of all places, and somehow out there wound up with a Russian spy, of all people. Yet an inconsistent nature was the last thing one would have expected of her. There was, for all to see, something very formal in her bearing, in the traditional adornments of her marriage — just as there was in the dark textures of her face, where the shapes — the lips, the nose, the chin — were as classically content as some Umbrian madonna in the Uffizzi, and the skin — a browned, moist pearl — might have been old stone from a Carrara fountain.

She had all the rare finesse of a Park Avenue debutante who has passed thirty without a sigh, the skin fed with expensive lotions, hunger pampered with the right foods, at the right time, in the best auberges; the body massaged, formally and at night, in all the right places. There was, too, the untended confidence, something she tidied up now and then, brought up to date like a passport, in the happy social toils she made about midtown Manhattan: a beautiful person, a genuine ornament among the fun people.

She gave at a glance all the evidence of a graceful shallowness, a sense of tinkering with life, a surface concern — of days made up or exclusive engagements arranged through long telephone calls, noted in gilt-edged diaries, and experienced precisely, thirty minutes past the hour, each hour, on most evenings: drinks in a penthouse garden overlooking the park, dinner at Le Pavillon, and dancing at Arthur’s later. But never a drink too many, a row with the waiter, or music with the wrong man.

And yet none of this was true, not a moment of it; everything was different in her. All this sophistication was truly skin-deep. I knew this; I supposed Graham must have done as well. But I doubted if anyone else did. Her real existence had been carried out far from these glittering props. Her thoughts, her whole being, began when she had finished balancing the invitations and place names for dinner in Manhattan, and began instead to balance airline flights from Nairobi and old friends in Zambia against a meeting with her lover on Lake Malawi. She had never properly lived in the smart places: their apartment in the East Fifties, somewhere exclusive in Wimbledon, or an old-fashioned farmstead in the Colonies. These had been no more than poste-restante addresses, where her husband or friends might reach her between her real purposes in life — the odyssey she’d made through hotel bedrooms and National Parks with another man.

But why had the other man been with the KGB?

‘Graham, of course, didn’t know what your husband did — what he really does?’ I asked her. It was useful having the answers, the original source, so close to hand. An official investigation into the whole business, asking the same questions, would never have succeeded in a thousand years.

‘He knew he was in government. Of course he did.’

‘But just as a civil servant?’

‘You called it the “classic position” didn’t you? Well, it was. He didn’t tell me he was in British Intelligence. I didn’t tell him my husband was.’

‘How did you first meet him? How did you come to be at that African party in Westminster in 1965?’

‘Home leave in London. We’d come back from Nairobi that summer. Guy had connections with all the African desks in London — at the FO, the COI, with the Embassies. We were invited. One’s always meeting people at parties I’m afraid. Isn’t one?’

‘I’m sorry to pry.’

‘Fine. Go ahead. Fill in the spaces. You can’t imagine everything, can you? Even you?’

She was quizzical then, turning to look at me against the metal-blue water, a serious half-smile threatening the open American face. I noticed how completely she could change her expression, what a distance there was between her normally uncommitted, even naïve looks — too beautiful to touch, like a toothpaste or Coke advertisement in an old National Geographic magazine — and the deep lines of knowledge and loss she could take on in an instant, as though a map of Europe had suddenly been overlaid on one of the new world.

‘He was interested in paintings, wasn’t he?’

Two bicyclists, a middle-aged man and woman, both in Bermuda shorts and woollies and racing shoes, came towards us along the path, wheeling their expensive British machines. They were puffed and breathing heavily. Their faces shone silently with mild exertion, a happier conspiracy than ours that sharp morning.

‘Yes,’ she said when they’d passed, looking over her shoulder at them with kind curiosity. ‘He is.’

‘Modern painting. I’m afraid I’m not much good at it.’

‘Well, come on, for God’s sake. You can’t double for him all the way. You’re not even like him, physically I mean. I wonder why they ever chose you to impersonate him? Anyone who’d ever met Graham would know you were a phoney straight away.’

She had an uncomfortable ability with her innocuous banter — taking you straight from trivialities to a leading question. I had thought to quiz her without her knowing. But she was doing the same thing, more successfully, with me.

She said, ‘It can’t be anything very serious, whatever your London people are up to, if they chose you for the job. The only tiling you have in common with George Graham is his name. Who are you, Mr Graham? What’s your real name? Why you for this job — and what job? Don’t tell me — I know you can’t. But you can see my interest.’ Two policemen rode past us on two big chestnut mares. All four of them looked Irish. Again, she turned and stared back at them, over her shoulder, as if the physical gesture might be an aid to recalling the past, fathoming my secrets. ‘Someone in London must have thought you had a lot in common with George,’ she went on. ‘Mustn’t they? If not in looks, then in something else, something more important, where looks didn’t matter. Career, let’s say. Maybe your curriculum vitae matches his in some way, your personal background. Why choose you otherwise? There’s nothing in a name. But shared experience — that’s another thing. Suppose you and he had done some of the same kind of things, lived in the same places, knew the same people: then someone who didn’t know what George looked like — but knew his background — would take you for him, as soon as you confirmed all the other details.’

‘I can’t stop your imagination. You’re becoming a detective as well.’

‘George’s main career was in the Middle East, not Africa you know. He had fluent Arabic but not much Swahili. He was teaching with the British Council — in Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria — all through the fifties, before I met him. But you’ve never been within a million miles of those places, have you?’

Again, the suddenly overlaid smile that was not a smile but the shadow of knowledge — as though, without my saying a word, I had confirmed something for her which she had long suspected. ‘Yes,’ she might have been saying, ‘the day began too well, and, just as we both thought without saying it, it has rained before evening.’

‘No, not within a million miles,’ I said.

But it was no use. She could spot a lie at the same distance.

We walked all the way round the reservoir, coming out somewhere in the West Nineties on the Park. A few blocks up a small nonconformist church, wedged long ago between huge high-rise apartment buildings, looked out over the trees and grass, its nineteenth-century steeple a discouraged pin-prick in the surrounding canyon.

The play-school was in the basement, through some heavy oak doors, down cold steps. The church above seemed to have forgotten its function long ago. Prayer-books lay on the pews, as if they’d been left there by mistake, the only objects not sold in an auction a year before. But downstairs it was bright and warm, the area partitioned with long coloured curtains which ran about on overhead runners, displaying one group of infants, hiding another, like Chinese boxes.

‘Mrs Jackson, Mr Jackson, Hi! Nice to see you,’ a young woman said in too affable a tone, I thought, until I remembered she was American. I was in America. Good humour was the premier badge of citizenship here. No matter what disasters happened elsewhere — in bed, in Viet Nam, with the blacks or whatever, a smile was the steeply inflated currency of the country, a cure for every ill.

‘You didn’t bring the children?’ the pert little woman said too curiously, looming up at us, wide-eyed, through saucer-shaped smoked glasses. Children, she seemed to suggest, would have committed us, like a prepayment, and as it was we might have been about to waste her time.

‘No,’ Helen Jackson said — not rudely, but saying no more, so that the effect was almost the same. She could disrupt an untoward inquiry in an instant, I realised, and I wondered at my own good fortune earlier.

We wandered round, through the curtains and partitions, gazing at mysterious coloured designs on the walls, puzzling educational shapes and strange toys which the children played with confidently.

‘What should I call you then?’ Helen said, when we were by ourselves, looking at a child massaging its face with a bright poster paint, like soap. ‘You’re not George Graham. Or Guy Jackson.’

‘The Third Man?’

‘Yes. The whole thing is nonsense enough.’ The child came towards us with the pot of paint, holding it as an offering in both hands above her face, looking up at us intently. It seemed she was intent on sharing the deluge with us. We went on again, behind another curtain like a maze, to a group playing with a basket full of fancy clothes, dressing up and discarding them carefully, like fastidious actors.

‘You said you were married. Weren’t there children?’

‘No. We never got that far.’

‘She was in the same business you told me — never time to get to bed?’

‘Oh, we managed that all right. We did that.’

‘It’s over now — I take it?’

‘Yes. You can take it.’

‘A “husband-and-wife” team, isn’t it called? That must have been something. I didn’t think such things really existed.’

‘Oh yes — the Krogers …’ But I couldn’t think of anyone else.

‘You must believe a lot — in what you do. Mixing work and play like that — for the “cause”.’

‘Dedicated, you mean.’

‘Yes. You don’t look the sort that’s just in it for the money.’

‘What’s your husband in it for? Not the money, I’m sure. But money for others. He believes in the West, doesn’t he? — a million dollars a minute for everyone who can grab it.’

‘No, he’s just an Intelligence Officer. A professional. You’ll see. You’re the one who really believes in it all — or who doesn’t believe a damn. I’m not sure which yet.’

‘I’m just a professional too. Doing a job that I don’t much like. But do well enough.’

‘No, you don’t do it well enough, that’s the whole point. You’re only doing it because you coincide with Graham in some way.’

‘If I told you all about myself would that make you feel better — if I told you how different I was from him?’

‘It might. But that wouldn’t be altogether true either. Because you aren’t that different from him. Oh, I don’t mean physically — you’re nothing like him in that way. But you share a sense of folly with him — treating the world as a spectator-sport, booing and catcalling everybody from your small corner.’

She annoyed me with her insight. ‘Expectations lying in the gutter, you mean? A wrong turning taken long ago? I’ve heard that before. A lot of people feel that these days: a sense of folly. Liberals without a belief in progress. We’re common as clay. That means nothing — sharing that with Graham.’

Luckily the little woman came back at that moment and started lecturing us on how their approach at the nursery differed from Spock’s — ‘You know, I think it’s that we’re much more tidy here, not that awful running round the place, doing what they want, allowing them to make a mess of everything …’

She hadn’t seen the child with the poster paint.

A sense of folly, indeed. How right Helen Jackson was. I thought of Harper’s silly, unformed Colonial face — never grown beyond pint pots with the rest of the Earl’s Court Australians — and McCoy’s Northern disappointment, his maiden-aunt profundities. The hail-fellow-well-met and the forgotten non-conformist. What a duo they made, two St Georges in dark glasses, holding up all the values of the West. Yes, it had been a spectator-sport for me, as I’d expected, with the Russians, it had been for Graham. But there was a difference, though. For both of us it was a game where the players could suddenly spring up from the arena, find you out from all the others, and savage you. That was in the rules as well. Graham had been caught when he must have thought himself forever free, like a Fenian traitor murdered in America years afterwards a world away from Dublin. And I was waiting now, a clear target on the skyline — waiting for this ‘stayer’, who might approach me amicably as arranged — or kill me. One could laugh at the folly but one was part of it; that was the snag. The fools had no manners; for them the end would always justify the means. They had no inhibitions.

‘Yes,’ the woman chattered on obsessively, ‘some people feel Dr Spock may be to blame — for the drug scene, for Viet Nam, by encouraging too permissive an attitude towards the young over the past generation

I thought again of running, before the stayer had time to fix me in his sights, for good or ill — run with the few dollars I had out of the firing line, into the anonymous multiplicity of life. Perhaps I could take up teaching somewhere again. Nothing could be more anonymous than that — an usher in some backward place in an even more backward school. No one would know me or find me there.

But I felt the heat of the basement just as I touched on thoughts of escape; the long morning’s walk began to tell, the legs already feeling wasted, strong with the rumour of coming weakness after the years of inactivity in Durham.

‘Discipline, organisation,’ the bossy woman went on, pulling on the words like a harsh bell, ‘not through force — but by firmness and example. We try to let them see that there is a limitation — from the beginning.’

She pulled back a long curtain without warning, displaying all one end of the basement. The rollers on the ceiling shrieked briefly, ringing as though bones were being cut behind my eardrums.

And then I was falling into the open space, as if a wall had given way in a tall building. I put my arms up to ward off the blow, my wrists trembling against my eyes. There were some old pews lined up against the end wall, children playing among them, and either they were coming closer to me or I was walking towards them. I couldn’t tell. Then both movements were happening together so that we seemed to converge.

The children were lined up in the pews now, staring at me silently, sitting properly in their desks. There was a blackboard just behind me. I had chalk in my hand and was laboriously explaining the implications of the three witches in Macbeth. The heat poured down into the room from above, from a sun that had perched for years just above the rafters, and the smell rose all about me — the dry dust of concrete and lime wash from long-burnt tropical buildings.

It was fifth-form English at the College in Cairo, fifteen years before. Samia, the bright girl in the front row, had her hand up — she always knew the answers; her mother was English, married to an Egyptian engineer from the refinery in Suez. Amin in the back row, the tall twenty-five-year-old schoolboy, had his hand up as well, making faces, preparing to embark on one of his elaborately wearisome jokes. The headmaster, mad Dr El Sayid, would be dictating the afternoon’s business to us in the staff room in fifteen minutes: ‘Marlow — football for you, on the lower field. The junior houses, Port Tewfik and Suez….’ And at last, after school, the evening, the empty evening, with Bridget. The drive into the city along the Nile, the pyramids on the far side of the river cut out in soft charcoal against the huge orange tablecloth of falling light; meeting her beyond the pillars of the Semiramis lobby, in the bar there, over Sudanis and gin, while the air-conditioning under the floorboards trembled in fits and starts; swaying the old room like mild water under a ship: meeting her, so quickly ruining the meeting, arguing with her …

I must have fallen into the first row of pews. I remember the children scattering, some laughing, others crying. I felt like a bird swooping on them, falling out of a huge blue sky, a kite over the Nile above Gezira island, attacking them. That was all.

I was sitting in one of the pews myself, collar opened, the smoked saucer spectacles peering at me, handing me a glass of water. Helen Jackson was behind her. They were both talking, but I couldn’t take in a word of what they said. The vision of those years in Cairo was still there, astonishingly real, like a dream remembered immediately on waking. I felt if I got up then and there and walked out of the room my feet would immediately sink into the desert, the fields of berseem clover around Maadi where the school had been, the hard cracked earth of the football pitch. I would float away down the feeder canal beyond the last goalpost, past the line of ragged Scots fir, sink happily into the murky water where the bilharzia snails lurked, host to that small fatiguing worm which could now freely feast on me as I trailed away to join the river.

I was suddenly filled, completely inhabited, by this past — these days of teaching and loving, before spying and marriage. I could feel the weight and texture of each of those years — as if the years had been stones in my hand, each one a clear representation of the pain, the pleasure, the ultimate stupidity of that time.

I knew then I’d never teach again, never run back that way. I wanted none of it — nothing, except one thing: the chance now of making good these lost opportunities, the wrong turnings taken long ago. And then, I thought, I’ve heard this idea somewhere before, quite recently. Someone had said it to me. Who? I drank the water.

‘Are you all right?’ Helen Jackson looked at me.

‘Yes, yes. Just faint, that’s all. The journey, culture shock. Wheel said it might happen. Lucky I wasn’t up at a high window.’

The curtains had been pulled across again, covering up the rest of the basement, isolating us. One of the other teachers had quickly taken charge of the children, distracting them with a new game. I could hear them moving about, enacting some nursery rhyme, with one child running round in a circle, chanting:

‘I sent a letter to my love

And on the way I dropped it,

And one of you has picked it up

And put it in your pocket.

It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you,

It wasn’t you,

But it was YOU!’

Then there were the sounds of mad scampering round and round the room. ‘I senta letterto my love…’ I remembered then. It had been in her letter to Graham, something about the past: ‘We think we have experienced the past …’ Yes, that was it. ‘… because, willy nilly, we have lived through it. But there were hundreds of turnings … which we knew about then but never took. I want to take them now.’ That was it, I was sure; that was her real absorption — this cartography of previous time. And I wanted to ask her about it at once. Why did she want this? What was her old life? What had gone wrong in it? At that moment all this seemed the most relevant business in the world, against which our earlier preoccupations about Graham paled. I hadn’t realised it until then, that this was what she and I really had in common — not just Graham, but a passionate attachment to an unfulfilled past.

We left the basement, moving past the suddenly quiet children, the little woman shepherding us like refugees being taken to a railhead. She had ceased to elaborate on her educational theories; Spock and Froebel and Pestalozzi died in her. Clearly, neither she nor they meant anything to us. Victims of some older, deeply punishing educational tradition, we had stormed into her firm new reason, mad and dangerous, tarred with phobias, nightmares, nursery resentments, fainting spells, upsetting all her dreamless enlightenment.

On the way out into the street I nearly fell again, into the arms of a man coming in the doorway, a tall fellow with a Pancho Villa moustache.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I am sorry,’ as though it had been his fault. He was English.

‘People from everywhere. They must do well,’ I said, doing my collar up in the bright rushing air.

‘They do. But I didn’t. I’ll find somewhere else. I’d sooner they didn’t go to nursery school at all. All these theories. And tough Madames. Hungry?’

‘What?’ I was still dazed — with the bright light now as much as anything. It seemed to be forcing itself down on me, cutting through the tall sheets of concrete, swinging round my head dangerously like a plumb-line in the quick wind.

‘Eating. Food. Fainting like that. You know, you’re thin as a rake.’

‘I should “look after myself” you mean? That’s very English. Like a landlady. What about my finding an apartment?’

‘Okay, you don’t have to eat. I should care.’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

We stood on the sidewalk outside the church — arguing, the childless couple again, married too long. No, I thought, not that again, not that.

I said, ‘Yes, I’d like something. Maybe I could do the apartment business another day? I’m exhausted.’

‘There’s a French place lower down on Amsterdam. Norman — or Breton. I’m not sure. It’s supposed to be good. Shall we try it?’

The taxi cruised down Amsterdam. I’d not yet become used to the long straight avenues, the size of the huge cars that floated about the place, gliding in and out of lanes like boats. Everything I’d learnt was so clearly from a smaller, more careful world. The huge heights, the long lengths and depths of Manhattan, the hard grid of the city — there was no subtlety but it spoke of things that I’d missed hearing in a long time. It said: ‘Things are as they seem here.’ It was blunt. There was no mystery, beauty or imagination about it. And for once — that day, the light showering down and the huge tin cigars floating about around us — I liked that. The lines of shoddy buildings and transient, three-dollar hotels, shops with steel gratings over the windows, the taxi doors locked on the inside — one knew the risks here at least, the facts — knew where you stood. And it was almost a balm — this horror, this open wound of the island — after all the polite murder, the old-school-tie men in Whitehall, their graceful houses in SW1. If you died here I felt it would be in open combat; if you were happy in the city it would be a condition truly earned, without provisos, conventions, compromises, traditions — a true state, free from the drag of the past.

‘You’re prickly. As well as thin,’ she said as though I was a fruit for bottling.

‘No. It’s just the old clichés. They weary me.’

‘But you are thin as a rake. You don’t look to have eaten properly in years.’

She was on to me again, Sherlock Holmes inspecting the mud on my boots, seemingly caring only for the present, but anxious really for the past: who was I? What had happened to George Graham? But now I had the same ambitions. Not just ‘How had she met George Graham?’ But who was she? I wanted to go right back. I was as anxious for her past as she was for mine. We’d become lovers in that respect.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s make up for it then. Let’s make up for it.’

4

The restaurant was small and crowded — and Norman, I suppose, Au Gars Normand. There were coats of arms from the region and photographs of old Tour de France cyclists on the walls, the traditional poster of Mont St Michel, and dark, diamond-paned, leaded windows which completely drowned the light from the street.

We had come to some happy spice island moored just off a barbarous shore. The air was warm with strange savouries, something sharply burnt, thyme crushed with lemon, the perfume of many freshly opened bottles. I thought of my four years on old mutton in Durham, and of that moment several weeks before when I had struggled with McCoy in ‘E’ block, yelling at him, trying to punish him for all the lost time. Normandy had been a place of mine — a school trip to Dieppe one Easter and afterwards, when I’d worked for McCoy in Holborn, I’d slipped away there for odd weekends: the boat train pulling out of Victoria Station, through the orchards and chalk lands, wheels groaning round the pier at Newhaven: then the sudden grip in the stomach, already abroad on the French steamer, the early light-headed nonsense of travel: the burnt tobacco, a Pernod or some other rash drink in the saloon, and later — watching a foreign spring come up from a train window vanishing southwards. All that expectation; and that at least had never disappointed. And so I had shouted at McCoy about Muscadet and lobsters like a crazed emperor, clamouring murderously for cheese, creamed chicken and sole Dieppoise. What a fool I’d been, I thought to myself afterwards, as if these things were the one saving grace in all the world, the only part of life worth regaining outside those granite walls.

Yet perhaps I’d been right: the act of eating and drinking, the agreed necessity, companionship in that shared desire — why deny these were fair ambitions, sure emblems of our humanity? It was not the food I cared so much about but the truce it brought, the peace. And I felt then that I’d been right to shout about it, to try and kill McCoy for it — for here it all was at least, at last the recompense, so that there were no more questions to be asked, no anger, no other answer needed.

We waited for a table next a small bar by the curtained doorway, almost a zinc comptoir in the old fashion, with a French girl who managed the hats and coats and moonlighting with the drinks. The whole place was such a genuine import — with a signed photograph of Georges Carpentier behind the bar — that I thought when the girl came back she might say: ‘Monsieur, vous désirez …?’ But she didn’t. She said nothing, simply looked at me with a query in her awkward smile.

‘What would you like while we wait — a Pernod or some other rash drink?’ Helen Jackson got a long thin cigarette out of her bag and fiddled with it.

‘Whisky, please.’

‘It may not go with the wine — that’s if you like wine. Grain and grape.’

‘So you have clichés too, do you?’

‘I think I’ll try a Pernod. It’s years since I’ve had one.’

‘Whisky, please — just with water. Does that make it any better?’

I lit her cigarette.

‘Fine.’

The French girl turned away to arrange things. We stood there — she at an angle to the bar, elbow on the wood; I was facing it squarely, leaning against it, both arms outstretched. The drinks came and with them a plate of black olives. I raised my glass, but the word ‘cheers’ seemed out of place. I’d denounced clichés.

‘Cheers,’ she said in an English way, with that thought-reading ability she held so lightly.

‘All right. You win.’

We drank, saying nothing. We had made a silence in the noisy place, intended and happy. Waiting. White clouds stormed slowly in my glass, the medicine of anis on my tongue. Zibib. Cairo on the hottest days when the coldest Stella beer did nothing but increase the sweat. I picked up an olive and bit into it decisively, and then into another.

‘Sorry.’ I pushed the saucer towards her and she took one without a word. The pips started to pile up on another dish. We drank. She smoked. I smoked too. It struck me suddenly that she liked smoking and drinking, as a man might — not as a necessary social attribute, to survive bores in smart drawing-rooms, but as something genuinely enjoyed, for its own sake. Over all her appropriate surfaces here was a minute crack, perhaps, a depth to possible excess willingly embarked on, a happy fault in the otherwise so carefully tended geography of her life. Of course, one might have said that she appealed to me because I shared these tastes, because she was simply a drinking man’s woman, a half-bottle girl. And perhaps there was some truth in that — sisters-under-the-skin in the thirsty kingdom. Certainly her appeal had begun. It started just then, at the bar. I know, because of all the descriptions I must make here, I feel that the small business of her just standing there, carefully chewing olives before lunch, is the most important, the most necessary.

You will have to try and see what I saw — exactly. No other woman’s face will do, or an approximation, a face and body close to hers, or some sheer invention or a shape made up from other faces. It will have to be her alone — the easy bearing, the precise falls of flesh and cloth: the particular slope of shoulder, the sunflower-coloured Donald Davies dress, the loose sleeves crushed against the counter, fingers resting on the glass. It will have to be that particular hand, fairly flat and wide with ordinary fingers. Yet the long wrist, longer than most, disappearing into the yellow tunnel of wool. And you may not have another face but this one — the one staring at me lightly now, this face that has aged without telling anybody, yet which is a curtain behind which some people have been told everything. A naïve face that immediately takes on depth when you look at it properly, the large eyes gathering knowledge, the long cut of the mouth, sometimes so formless, becoming firm with intention the whole expression grasping definition, meaning, purpose from nowhere, so that in the passage of a few seconds you have looked at two separate people.

You will have to see this warm envelope of skin, the stamp of bright colours, the lines of life all meeting eagerly on this one moment of time, a particular presence cutting deeply into present experience, giving herself to it, being carried along with it. And yet for all this happy commitment to the immediate, a mysteriously inhabited envelope as well, trailing long sheet anchors in the past — not the completely buoyant spirit but one which, as I had discovered from her letters, was as deeply linked with previous time as to any present moment of whisky and olives.

I had been surprised initially by the force of her letters to Graham — as one must be by the intense fact, the unalterable evidence of another’s passion suddenly disturbed by an outsider — and surprised again by the glimpsed countries beyond, the times and places of its being.

And now, waiting for lunch, I was able to see in Helen Jackson the two people together properly — the innocent and the old — and feel their real weight for the first time, as through a stereoscopic device where a quite ordinary photograph, a landscape of hills, say, will take on completely new values, where it ceases to be a flat representation, one truth at one time, but becomes a succession of different truths going back over many different times.

She looked at me and I at her — just as the door opened and someone outside shouted ‘Hello,’ just as the girl left us for the coats and hats, just as the waiter came and told us our table was ready … And that is the moment you must see: a look where language is well lost, where one starts to live, feel life, under the impetus of another person’s regard — after which, with such shared regard, two people must then live differently; where speech will be in a new tongue, the whole grammar of exchange made afresh.

We drank Sancerre to begin with, a year old. The smell of it was so fresh and rich that one feared to taste it and lose touch with a vineyard — the wooden fruit-filled aroma, of chalk soil and rain on some small hill, that blew out of the glass, moist and chill, a cloudy genie released from the lamp that I cradled in my hand. And at last we seemed to be able to talk of other things besides George Graham. She must have noticed my unusual application to the food, sensed something of my four-year denials, for I could barely restrain myself over the menu, nor the attack I made on the meal when it came.

She said, watching me, ‘Food is going back isn’t it? I mean — the basic reassurance — of one’s right to greed and sympathy, like a baby. It’s just a chore for most of us — most of the time, something to fill the day with. But you eat the other way, as if your whole life depended on the meal. As if it was your last.’

‘You mean “Do this in memory of me”? Christ, I’m just eating.’ I looked at her, pausing over the blue-point oysters.

‘Yes, but not the gourmet or the gourmand, that’s not you. You eat as if you were — as if the whole food thing was something you’d lost.’

‘Symbolic of good fellowship and warmth? That’s a pretty common reason for going to restaurants.’

‘Have you lost that?’

‘Maybe. Like Rip Van Winkle.’

I let the oyster lie in my mouth for a moment, then bit it gently before it slipped away. ‘Food is a homecoming, if that’s what you meant — when you said eating was “going back”. A house that’s always there, even when everything else has disappeared. A constant. It doesn’t disappoint.’

I sipped the sea-water and lemon juice from the last oyster and the waiter took our plates away. We had ordered the plat du jour: gigot d’agneau de Beaumanière. I didn’t know quite what it meant. But apparently it was the main smell in the room — the leg of lamb cooked in pastry somehow, with veal and herbs the waiter had tried to explain — and the smell was good. The Sancerre in its ice bucket was sharp and cold as ever but now its taste of orchards was mixed with that of the sea, and the astringent lemon, and when you drank it, it was neither the sea nor the wine that was in your mouth but some new flavour, echoing down the throat, indeterminate and frail.

The waiter carved the gigot we’d ordered from a small table beside us. The Beaumanière consisted of a parcel of brown, egg-basted pastry which enclosed the leg of lamb, which in turn — the bone removed — enclosed a black stuffing of mushrooms, pork, and veal. Each time he sliced it, the knife fell through the strange football without any resistance. It was as firm yet as pliant as ice cream. Afterwards, he carefully spooned up the debris of herbs and stuffing and laid it over the slices of meat. Nice, but a fiddly way to cook a leg of lamb, I thought.

‘You wrote about that to George Graham, didn’t you?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry to drag it up again — but it seemed to absorb you.’

‘What?’

‘This “going back” thing. About not wanting to re-live the past, that it had nothing to do with nostalgia — but to “live now all that was unlived then”. I think you said “What was so un-lived then? You’ve lived pretty fully surely?” Yet you seem to see yourself as somehow unawakened — the sleeping beauty, Rip Van Winkle.’

‘It’s too long, that story.’

‘Of course it is. You’re all of thirty-five.’

‘Well, if it’s not nostalgic — it’s unrealistic, isn’t it?’

‘Why? Being unhappy with a man? That’s not unrealistic. That’s exactly what people mean when they want to change, to divorce: the chance to live what was unlived, to move away from an unlivable life. You wrote about that to Graham too.’

‘It’s not all that, not all to do with people — with being, living better, with one person rather than another. It was as much to do with a generally unlivable life. And that was unrealistic. That can’t be changed so easily. There’s no divorce from it — other than through madness perhaps.’

‘Not divorce — but you can change it, can’t you? Change the “generally unlivable”. That’s not unrealistic!’ And then I suddenly thought: ‘You’re political, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have thought it.’

She ground some pepper on her gigot, strong though its flavours were already. ‘No, it’s not that — nothing to do with Women’s Lib.’

‘I didn’t mean that, I meant — simply politics. How should we all be living, how to make that change.’

She looked at me sharply, as though I was a child and had found something I didn’t know was dangerous and was holding it towards her.

I thought of Graham’s Marxism, and the image she had given him once of the old-fashioned colonial Tory — their arguments about the future of happiness and the future of Africa. Yes, it seemed as if it might be a long story — but not too long, not for me.

She said: ‘It’s not only the poor that want to change the world, you know — or the intellectuals.’

I looked at her dress, her make-up, her general bearing — all the rich and careful choices about her person. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘It’s just a surprise — finding the rich wanting revolution.’

As soon as I’d said this I didn’t know quite what I meant. I couldn’t follow the implications of it. She noticed this momentary confusion and stepped in before I could clarify the thought.

‘That’s not it at all. I don’t want revolution. My God — I wanted that old bore of a thing — to be at ease, happy. That’s all. And I’ve spent time thinking of all the ways there are toward those ends. Some of the ways are political. Obviously, you don’t just sit still crying “poor little me”. You do something about it. You make the effort, you give, if you want any return. Well, almost all that sort of outward effort is political in some degree, though it may not appear so. Your happiness — or at least mine — depends a lot on society’s.’

‘The personal and the political, they must come together for you in some way? Like some people, they say, can only make love in moving vehicles. It’s very difficult.’

She laughed a little. ‘Why do you suddenly see me as a political animal, rather than as just — an animal? That’s the way I’d like to come together. If you want to know.’

‘That passage in your letter to Graham about Africa — what else could one think? It’s not an expected topic between lovers surely? — the relative demerits of the old colonialism and the new imperialism in the dark continent. I was surprised by it in the letter, and even more so now, seeing you: rich Manhattan girl, apartment on the East Fifties, married to a diplomat. Well, now that’s not the expected background for a person who suggests that every act has a political relevance, who feels that individual happiness must depend on the general well-being of society. That’s not usual at all. I thought people like you rang the bell for a drink when they felt out of sorts.’

The smile came again — the naïve one, in which knowledge and experience have been dismantled and hidden.

‘That’s pretty old-fashioned of you. Where have you been locked up all these years — the Tower of London? You seem to have the old chivalrous idea of women — helpless creatures you have to lay down cloaks for. Does money mean you can’t have a mind — does sex — I mean the gender — debar me from political interest, or action for that matter? Come on. I’ll really start to believe in Women’s Lib if you go on like that. The world has changed since you put your head in the sand, wherever that was; I’m not trying to change it, I’m just part of the change.’ She looked at me closely, shades of the detective creeping over her face again. ‘You’ve been away somewhere a long while, that’s the feeling you give me. The way you eat — as if you’d not eaten properly in years. And talking to me — and the way you look at me, as if you’d just emerged from a bout of some strange sleeping sickness and the last woman you’d seen was in corsets and curlers.’

‘Rip Van Winkle again you mean? “Change and decay in all around I see.” Or something. No, it’s not that. I’ve just been in England. This is America; it’s new to me. That’s all. A little cultural shock, I told you.’

How close she could come to the truth about me, I thought. And how far away, despite all the evidence in her letter to Graham, I was from her real verities.

‘Of course,’ she said suddenly, as though she had just then realised the sum of all our talk was diagnosing an illness we both shared but refused to admit to, ‘the most tiresome thing about both of us is our indulgence in the past — and in the future. And the little action we give to now. We miss out on that vital link — the present, the here-and-now.’

‘Was George Graham like that too?’

‘No. He was good at all three. He had hopes and memories everywhere, but he never let them slow him up.’

‘That’s just temperament isn’t it? Other people can complete us. We may have something special for them. What do you think you had for him?’

We were half-way through a bottle of light Beaujolais. I poured her another glass and it bubbled slightly. The chatter in the dark room was dying about us as people moved out back to work.

‘I’m sure I just had all the ordinary things for him. We didn’t have to talk about it. We had trust. We knew each other very well — and that didn’t kill the other thing, you know, the excitement. Just saying that now it sounds extraordinary, not ordinary. Of course affairs are far easier than most marriages, I know that. That’s really the whole point of them. But this one lasted. It might just as well have been a marriage.’

‘Yes, six years. They don’t usually last that long, I suppose. How was it your husband never came to find out about it, even suspect it. Or did he? Six years is a long time to pretend — and gallivanting round East Africa with Graham, how did you manage that without his knowing?’

‘We separated for six months in the mid-sixties, a year after we moved to Nairobi. I went round East Africa with Graham then. Afterwards my mother was ill before she died, upstate here, and I came back to help look after her.’

‘What brought you back to your husband then? Why didn’t you stay apart, get a divorce, marry Graham — or whatever you wanted to do together?’

‘Back in your best Sherlock Holmes mood, aren’t you?’

I thought I might have gone too far. But no, there came another of those easy smiles that she was so ready with, as if the worst of life could be dispelled by this — shining teeth, the Colgate gleam.

‘I was with child. Two childs in fact,’ she said, lightly, happily. ‘And they were his, not George’s.’

‘Twins?’

‘Yes. Sarah and Sheila. Twins. They’re almost five. They brought us together again, like the good books say. But it wasn’t really a happy ending. It began to die again, I’m afraid.’ She paused, almost visibly casting her mind back over the marriage. ‘Though there are many ways I’m perfectly fine with him, when he’s at ease — and not trying to possess me like a life-insurance policy.’

‘Your husband doesn’t look the unconfident sort. Rather the opposite.’

They’d brought some cheese, Brie and Caprice des Dieux, and a big wicker basket of fruit and she chose Brie and an apple.

‘He’s not. He has bouts of manic jealousy, that’s all — when he wakes up out of his work. He’s very English. He had to feel he owned me before he could love me — had to see me as a dependent relative before he could bed me. He’s frightened of me, I think, but won’t ever admit this. He never trusted me, because he didn’t dare to know me, couldn’t face what he might find. We were always that little bit off-beam with each other. And of course soon that means you’re going in totally different directions — heading straight for two different sets of rocks.’

‘Yes, the oldest journey in the world. Did he have you followed then — or now?’

‘I thought he must be doing that once, in Nairobi. But he said no, of course not. And I never noticed anyone.’

‘You wouldn’t — if they were doing their job properly.’

‘Well, maybe he did. He should have been able to arrange it properly. After all he’s in the same silly business himself.’

Coffee came. She sniffed and then tasted some of my Calvados, not wanting any herself. ‘Burnt apples,’ she said listlessly. She had tired of all her lighter, happier attributes — of all those airs of bright invitation when, before lunch with whisky in her hand, she had seemed so at ease in the sway of the world, to be so happily anxious to take what it might bring in the way of present adventure or future reward.

She had dragged herself back into her past, and I had helped her willingly, and I regretted it now, ashamed at my curiosity that had dulled her. At the same time, though, I felt just as clearly that somehow she needed that past, to explain it, re-live it. She needed it more than drink; it was her drug, her tipple, and I had encouraged her, as she had wanted, in this real and secret excess.

She said, lighting one of her long thin cigarettes, ‘Now you know it all, really. Rather a sordid little tale, even without private eyes. I should have left him — organised the whole thing better. There were the children, I know. But we could have arranged something before about them if I’d really wanted. I was tired. And I shouldn’t have been tired,’ she said with sudden energy. ‘I was tired of another change after moving around the place for ten years. And he’s moving again now. Quite soon. Back to England, some new posting.’

‘London?’

‘No. Something in the country. A Foreign Office job, to do with communications. In the Cotswolds, Cheltenham. Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘No. Anyway, there’s no good reason for leaving him now. Our mutual friend, Mr Graham — he’s disappeared. Dead for all I know. Or a dead end for me at any rate. I’m not likely to find him.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yes, you told me. You’re sorry. I know that. But I don’t know anything else about you.’

‘Wait. Wait and see.’

‘Wait and see what? You turned up from nowhere. You’re just as likely to disappear in the same way. The March Hare.’

‘Oh, I’ve come from somewhere, all right. And if I disappear I won’t know any more than you about it, I can tell you. I’m in the dark as much as you are. I’m not the conjuror in all this. I told you; I’m just the trick.’

She believed me. It wasn’t difficult. ‘Jesus God. I’d sooner you weren’t. Tricks, games — I’d sooner we were all out of that and could find some living to do.’

‘Yes.’

Her face had become dull, drawn. Nothing stirred in it — asleep, apart from the open eyes. I could sense very well her horror in the mysteries I had put around her. I was the false Prince Charming that could not kiss her back to life. George Graham had been that figure, the key to her bright future. I had set her adrift in the dark, far from land, and delivered her over, not to making up for the past in a new life, as she had wanted, but simply to remembering all the old dooms. I had condemned her to sudden age in the middle of a perfect maturity.

She left me outside the restaurant and took a cab back uptown to see her friends on the Park. And it was then, just afterwards, that I saw the man on the other side of the Avenue trying too eagerly to hail a cab going in the same direction. He had stepped a yard off the pavement by the cross street, with the lights green behind his back. The cab driver, crossing town with his foot down, didn’t give him a chance. The near-side fender hit the man in the legs, spinning him over like a ninepin.

I ran across to the accident, the taxi stalled in the middle of the crossroads, the body lying at the corner a few yards from the gutter — a tall fellow in a dark mackintosh, hatless, fair-haired. And that was the first thing I saw, before I’d even noticed the twisted leg tucked in behind him — the moustache, the fair-haired Pancho Villa whiskers. It was the man who had bumped into us two hours before, forty blocks uptown outside the church.

Coincidence? I hardly considered this after my conversation with Helen Jackson ten minutes before. The man had been following us all morning. And there must almost certainly be two men involved, I thought, if it was a proper surveillance — one for each of us in case we separated, or just a second man to relieve the first. We’d been about the city now for nearly five hours.

I could have lost him in the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. But I wanted to see if I could identify any second pursuer. He’d surely come, if he existed, to help his colleague, I thought. Or would he have tried to follow Helen Jackson uptown? A difficult decision. But I thought he’d have realised it was too late to go after her. If there was a second man, he’d soon be here, somewhere in the crowd.

I hadn’t long. I bent over the figure in the road, pulled his wallet out and emptied the contents over his chest. Then I started to pick all the pieces of paper up again and put them back. Half-way through, I found his card: James Moloney, with the address and phone number of a New York private detective agency. I pushed it up my sleeve just as another man joined me with tufts of white hair sticking out from beneath a small black homburg, carrying a pack of sandwiches. And then the cab driver arrived. The three of us leant over the body. Pancho Villa was unconscious. There was a graze on the side of his head, but no bleeding. No more than a broken leg perhaps.

‘Jesus, that guy is lucky to be alive,’ the cab driver said. ‘Don’t move him. What are you doing?’ The homburg had seen the half-filled wallet on his chest and was looking through it. ‘Just checking his name and address — and his Blue Shield card. He’s going to need it. Go phone a hospital. Where’s the nearest?’

‘Hell, I don’t know,’ the driver said. ‘St Luke’s I guess, up on Morningside Drive. OK, you stay with him.’

A police car had stopped over by the restaurant and two patrolmen walked casually across the Avenue towards us. The cab was still in the middle of the crossroads.

‘Where’s the driver of that cab?’ the first patrolman shouted. ‘Let’s get it the hell out of here.’

‘He’s gone to phone the hospital,’ the homburg said. The first patrolman went to move the cab while the second bent over the body. ‘Who is he? What’s his name?’ He took his wallet and started shuffling through the papers and a few folded bills inside.

I eased my way out of the crowd, hurried across the Avenue and went back inside the restaurant. There was a piece of clear glass in the centre of the door and through it I saw the homburg in a moment, clear of the bunch of people now, sandwiches still gripped in his hand, looking wildly about for me. He was the second tail.

‘Yes, sir?’ The head waiter came up behind me. ‘Did you leave something?’

I patted my pockets. ‘Yes — I think I had a pack of cigarettes, I wonder if …’ I turned back and saw the man with white tufts of hair and a homburg running across the flow of cars on the Avenue, coming towards the restaurant.

But one of the patrolmen had seen him too and now he was yelling across the Avenue at him, waving a notebook. He followed him and stopped him just in front of the restaurant door. ‘Hey, fella — you a friend of his?’ The two men started to argue about the accident. ‘You know anything about him? They say you and another fellow saw it all happen — you were there from the start, the cabbie says The two men recrossed the Avenue. I let them get back to the crush of people before going to the telephone booth at the back of the restaurant. ‘Moloney here,’ I said, when I got through. ‘There’s been some trouble on the Jackson job. The fella who ordered the surveillance, the husband isn’t it, what’s his name? tall British fella —’ ‘Yeah, it’s the husband, sure it is,’ the other voice broke in. ‘Get on with it Moloney, what’s up?’ I started talking again but almost immediately cut myself off, letting a finger dance rapidly on the handset cradle.

5

‘Who are they then — if you say that our British SIS people over here aren’t tailing me?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have one of our men try and check the man out at St Luke’s Hospital if you like.’

Guy Jackson fiddled with his expansive, brassy wedding ring. I could hardly keep my eyes off the nervous performance in a man otherwise so bland and cool. His office was immediately above mine, on the floor above, the thirty-fourth, of the UN Secretariat building. Jackson — so carefully dressed, like a judge in mufti — gave the impression of a very meaningful worker for the organisation — of dedication to the ideals of the charter and competency in carrying them out. It was almost impossible to see this tired-faced, disdainful, lanky aristocrat in his pin-stripes and waistcoat as a British SIS officer. Still, I suppose it was as good a disguise as any — anything to get out of the old trench-coat image. I think he overdid it, though.

‘They may have someone following you,’ he said. ‘On orders from London, direct. But I’ve heard nothing about it. My instructions were simply to liaise with you, wait for information — if and when this ‘stayer’ chap made contact with the names of the KGB men Moscow wants to check on.’

‘But you know all about me as well, don’t you? Not George Graham — but Peter Marlow. I’ve just been let out of Durham Jail.’

‘Yes. I know. Of course.’ He seemed puzzled for a moment, looking at me carefully as though the implications of this double identity had only struck him for the first time now.

‘Had you ever heard of George Graham before?’ I asked. ‘The George Graham. He spent a lot of time in East Africa. In Nairobi and round about.’

‘No. Why should I have? Why do you ask? It’s a big place — East Africa.’

‘Small enough, too, for white people now. He was working over there quite a lot. Radio programmes, documentary films, for the COI. A government department. You were in the Foreign Office. I thought you might easily have run across him.’

‘I was on an attachment in Nairobi — to the Kenyan Government. I wasn’t with the FO then.’

‘Yes, of course.’ The charade had gone far enough. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I know who was tailing us this morning. Some New York private eye business. I phoned them after the accident, found the card on the man. Now governments don’t hire private detective agencies to do their surveillance for them.’ I paused. Jackson had stopped fiddling with his wedding ring. ‘But husbands do. Why don’t you tell me? What were you having us tailed for?’

Guy Jackson smiled. He seemed as inappropriately suited to the role of jealous husband as to that of spy — his self-assurance so visible, like a silver spoon in his mouth.

‘Jealousy is a terrible thing,’ he said flatly. He might have been describing the British weather.

‘I know. She told me.’

‘You haven’t wasted much time, have you?’ He was suddenly brisk, affronted.

‘Listen, I only met your wife yesterday. You don’t think —’

‘Oh, it can happen in far less time than that, Marlow,’ he broke in. ‘My wife can be in bed with someone within an hour of meeting them,’ he went on eagerly, as though commending one of her virtues.

‘Women can, but seldom do.’ I laughed slightly. But he didn’t take it well. I could see he was badly smitten. ‘It usually takes longer than that, even these days,’ I added, trying to placate him. But this idea of sex delayed pleased him no more than the idea of a quick bang, and he said almost angrily: ‘But in any case, it wasn’t you. It was the real George Graham they were following.’

I smiled again. How quickly this haughty man had tumbled into a world of bedroom farce — of sleuths, French maids and trousers falling down — drawn to these mockeries of eavesdropping and double identity to avoid the tragedy of it all. And he was right: farce makes infidelity bearable — cauterises it, cheapens it, brings a belly laugh to kill it. Guy Jackson had found the Iago he needed in the squalid truths of a private eye. But it had kept his sanity, else he might have killed her, I thought. The outwardly calm and detached offer the best chances in that line. He was one of those husbands, I supposed, who at all costs have to ‘know’ of infidelity — who can only possess their women properly on tape or through detective-agency reports, always at second hand: men who cannot see or feel their wives except through the eyes — and in the arms — of another.

‘But,’ I said, ‘you knew the real George Graham had been taken, two weeks ago in London — that I’d replaced him. London explained all that to you.’

‘I was still interested. It’s become a habit.’

‘When did you first know about it — about him?’

‘Six years ago, just after she first met him, on one of our leaves in London. And afterwards in Nairobi, when we separated.’

‘You mean — you sent someone after them on that trip they made around East Africa?’ I was really surprised.

‘Yes — as far as anybody could follow them — in the circumstances. It’s pretty open country.’

To say the least, I thought. Taking the territorial imperative too far altogether.

‘God, what a habit,’ I said.

‘A habit of our trade, Marlow, or just — a bad habit?’ Jackson asked easily.

‘Neither,’ I lied. ‘I understand the professional habit and the personal temptation well enough. I meant what a habit in the circumstances. Your wife has been running round with a senior KGB officer for six years. And your private eyes never got that information for you.’

‘No, never. Just the evidence of personal, not a political infidelity,’ he said unctuously.

‘And what do you think now? Don’t you think she’s involved politically with him as well?’

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s never been any evidence. Absolutely none. Just coincidence. Pure coincidence.’

‘I wish I could be as sure. I don’t trust coincidence in this business. It was just a “coincidence” — my own wife turning up in Moscow by chance one day — that sent me down for twenty-eight years.’

Light pierced the gaps in the tall buildings to either side of us, bright crystal knives of afternoon sun slanting from the west over the East River. The air-conditioning sighed from grilles beneath the sealed windows. I was tired again, suffocating in the false climate.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘the windows don’t open. Need a special key.’ He got up and turned the machinery down, then he came back towards me, clasping his hands religiously. ‘If you want to be sure — why don’t you try and find out yourself? You’re in a much better position, after all, than any agency, government or private. You’re George Graham, her lover.’ He paused, as if considering the excitement of the idea. ‘It must have been a cruel surprise — when you turned up here and not him. She must be curious, to say the least, about your provenance, about what’s happened to him. Doesn’t that give you quite a lever with her?’

‘Yes, I’d thought of that.’ What I really thought was that he wanted me to pimp for him now, to feed his jealous obsessions. ‘You forget, though, that’s not what I’m here for — to carry on your private eyeing for you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know — since you mention the political factor; this could be relevant to your job here: as well as being lovers she might just have been one of Graham’s KGB contacts. Even the “stayer” we’re all looking for.’

I remembered her conversation in the restaurant — how individual happiness must have links with a wider, social contentment. Guy Jackson’s idea hadn’t struck me before. But it did now. It was just conceivable, in the way that so much else in her life, that had seemed inconceivable, I now knew to be true.

‘It’s worth a try — looking at the whole thing in that way,’ he said.

‘You want it “that way”? That she should turn out to be a KGB agent? You want the punishment as well as the peeping?’

‘Of course not.’ He was suddenly back-tracking. ‘We’ve children, a family. I’ve a career. All that would be ruined.’

But he did want to see it that way, I think — in the corners, at the very far edges of his psychological horizon. A destructive sexuality lay at the heart of his confidence. This emotional masochism that made him tick, which gave him an obsessional vivacity, whenever he talked about his wife — was the same quality that was gradually eating away at him. He was a man living on a drug, and dying of it at the same time.

Yet, I thought, his curiosity about his wife was not so different from my own — we shared an interest in her; he seemed almost as ignorant as I was about her real nature, her past. So that all he had been really doing was encouraging me, for his own purposes, in a pursuit I had decided upon myself already.

‘Well, she shouldn’t know of all this in any case,’ he said, sitting down at his desk, picking up an FAO report, returning to his role as guardian of the world’s conscience. ‘I’m sure she’s never been — politically involved with him.’

‘Just her lover, not her commissar. I agree.’

‘There’s no need to chase after that hare. It was a bizarre thought, that’s all. You understand — living with a woman who —’ he paused, at a loss.

‘Has so many other lives?’

‘Yes‚’ he nodded. ‘Exactly. One becomes prey to the worst emotions.’ He spoke like a Victorian paterfamilias tempted by a shopgirl in the Bayswater Road. ‘And of course there’s another point, Marlow: without ever having been politically involved with him, she may, unwittingly, have passed on information — about my work, with the Foreign Office and so on. He may have used her.’

‘Nothing of that emerged when they interrogated him in London. I was told specifically — that he wasn’t involved with any women. Besides, London would have been on to you at once, surely, if he’d told them about her?’

‘Yes, they would. I’d thought of that. I’m sure it was nothing more than a genuine relationship. All the worse in one way, all the better in another. But we should keep it to ourselves in any case, and I’ll call the man off. Forget the whole business.’

He and I were joined in a conspiracy now, for of course London ought to have been informed of this development at once, whether it was pure coincidence or not. But that was his decision. He was the liaison officer; I was just the stalking horse. And how, I wondered, should anyone ever know the truth of their relationship? If London, with all their tortuous tricks, had failed even to extract the fact of her existence from Graham, how should Jackson and I ever expect to discover whether they had ever been anything more than lovers? — or find out, which we seemed to want even more, the exact nature and emotional weight of their love? That part of her was surely safe from all our prying eyes — an affair securely locked in time, as it was distant in Africa. She had lost that love herself; how should we ever find it?

I felt this so clearly then that she was safely beyond our grasp, saying goodbye to Jackson in his grand office — like a solicitor and client who have completed the sad formalities relevant to a dead friend’s lost estate. And yet a week later a process started which was to lead me into Helen Jackson’s old life — which was to animate her past as sharply as though someone had filmed it all — or at least written a script of it.

6

I had been asked to a reception for new members of the Secretariat given jointly by the US government and the City of New York. The party was held on the top floor of the US delegation’s office opposite the UN building on First Avenue — a long room with a dreadfully slippery floor filled with a lot of awkward foreigners sliding about the place with tumblers of orange or tomato juice. It was an appalling occasion — of well-meant hospitality and formal speeches, which instead of all being delivered at once, which might have saved matters, came in fits and starts throughout the hour.

Between bouts of these kindly homilies on our expected participation in the social delights of New York, Wheel, who had come with me, introduced me to an African girl — beautiful in an un-African way: tall and skinny, everything about her — face, lips, legs — long and thin; semitic-looking, Arab blood from somewhere, a colour like a grey-blue dust powdered over her skin, and eyes the shape of oval saucers, tremendous pools, with circles of dark water in the middle.

She was from Ethiopia, distantly connected with the Royal family there. Recently, she had joined the UN as a guide — a Princess, no less. She was with her younger brother that evening, and he looked just like her. He was in movies — a producer in a company recently formed to make African films — and that was where the script began.

Michael and Margaret Takazze. I suppose he was in his mid —, and she in her late twenties. They had the air of two successful, vivacious, very confident orphans. There was about them the stamp of a long-isolated warrior civilisation, a temperament, I felt, at once intensely civilised and savage.

We talked a little about nothing, about my work in the UN among other things. And then she said, ‘Are you the George Graham that made that documentary on Uganda, that won a prize — what was it called, Michael?’

‘The Mountains of the Moon.’

‘Yes, that’s the one. It was good. Fine. I’ve seen it several times. It was on over here a few months ago, on the educational channel.’

I laughed, agreed that I was the man, and wished that there’d been some real drink about. It was one of Graham’s COI films about the Ruwenzori mountains in the Western Province of the country which I’d seen hurriedly before leaving London. But I’d never been to Uganda.

‘You must know Uganda well,’ she said. ‘Have you been back recently? I was at Makerere University there before I went to the Sorbonne.’

‘No, I’ve not been back, I’m afraid. All that was some time ago. I’ve rather forgotten it all,’ I said quickly, thinking wildly.

Then Wheel said, turning to the boy, ‘Have you found any good stories yet — for one of your African productions, Michael?’

‘Yes,’ he answered with almost tired assurance. ‘We’re working on it at the moment. An extraordinary story by a Kenyan writer, Ole Timbutu. Have you heard of him, Mr Graham?’

‘No, I–I don’t think so.’

‘Yes, he’s written a novel about it — White Savages. It came out here a few months ago. He’s adapting it.’

‘Oh yes? I didn’t see it. I’d like to.’

‘It’s a mad book,’ the Princess put in, smiling. ‘I hope you’d like it — it’s none too kind to the English.’

‘I hold no brief for the British in East Africa,’ I said. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘It’s the story behind Obote’s coup de palais, among other things,’ the Prince explained. ‘Two English people, a man and his mistress — she’s married to someone else — both working for British Intelligence; travelling around East Africa — a love affair — and then how they bring about the fall of King Freddie, betraying him.’

‘And it’s true,’ his sister added. ‘There were these two people — Timbutu got it all from a journalist on the Kenya Standard.’

‘A sort of spy story?’ I asked her carefully.

‘Yes, that’s the basis — but there’s the allegory, White Savages — the two people regress into savagery by the end.’

‘They eat each other?’ Wheel asked hopefully.

‘Metaphorically,’ agreed the Prince.

‘Quite a story,’ Wheel went on. ‘Full colour, wide screen.’

‘I’d certainly like to read the book,’ I said. ‘Do you know where I can get a copy?’

‘I’ve got several, I’ll lend you one. Be glad to hear what you thought of it,’ the Princess said graciously.

7

The novel arrived on my desk some weeks later, dropped by messenger from the Princess. On the same day, I received a note from Guy Jackson asking if I’d like to spend the following weekend with them upstate at his father-in-law’s house. They’d be travelling there by car on Friday afternoon and there’d be a place for me. I called Jackson at his office to thank him, but he wasn’t in.

Wheel and I had a drink together in the Delegates’ Lounge before lunch that day. ‘How are things going?’ he asked.

‘Coming along.’

What about your domestic arrangements — the apartment you were looking for with Mrs Jackson?’

‘Nothing came of it. I’m all right at the Tudor Hotel for the time being. They’ve moved me to a larger room at the back away from the traffic. And the Jacksons have asked me up to their place in the country next weekend.’

‘Oh, yes? Belmont — I don’t know it.’

‘But you know the Jacksons pretty well?’ I asked Wheel. ‘How did you happen across them in the UN? It’s a big place.’

‘No, not that well.’ Wheel seemed anxious to assure me, as though I’d accused him of social climbing. ‘I met him here at the bar. You may have noticed — very few Secretariat people come into the North Lounge at all. We’re a sort of Club, anyone who uses the place regularly. Guy is usually here every day — has two religious martinis, then lunch.’

It seemed a fair explanation. Yet I thought what unlikely friends they were — the meticulous, rather withdrawn Englishman and the gregarious, talkative Middle-West American — the bald and big-boned Wheel and this finicky, discreet Foreign Office figure whose hobby lay in the careful investigation of his cuckoldry. Unusual companions, as different from each other as a rodeo rider and a butterfly collector.

I went back to my office after lunch, closed the door, put aside a two-volume FAO report on the Implementation of Agrarian and Riparian Information for Small Farmers in South East Asia, and took a look at White Savages by Ole Timbutu.

It was a short book, told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a kind of God-like omnipresence, who, it seemed, had in part actually observed the activities of the two main characters (a man and a woman described simply as ‘He’ and ‘She’), and had filled in the rest from memory or imagination, one couldn’t be sure which.

With this mysterious, sexless narrator, its accent on minute physical detail, unnamed people and equally undetermined African settings — its lack of every sort of formal designation — the book was like a nouveau roman of the Robbe-Grillet school. The prose moved slowly over the surface of things like an insect for long unparagraphed pages, followed by bouts of nervous, often inconsequential, and always inconclusive dialogue, as though in a badly transcribed tape-recording, succeeded finally by passages of bleak psychological and sexual description, flat as a medical manual.

Ole Timbutu. A Kenyan. I was curious about him and his biography on the back flap was as vague as anything in his book. Kenya has very little modern literature in English to say the least — and none at all, I was sure, in the style of the nouveau roman. Ole Timbutu seemed an unlikely figure — and White Savages an unlikely novel — to emerge from a decade of African Uhuru, from the extrovert, beer-laden social temper of Nairobi. The book, despite its savage themes, used forms and made assumptions which were sophisticated and civilised to a degree. It smelt of the Left Bank, not the African plainslands. There was some innate contradiction in all this which I couldn’t fathom.

The town was surrounded by clumps of shimmering, bluish trees — behind the airport and running up the hills and through the suburbs of straw and tin shacks — and their scent was everywhere in the air, a tangy smell, far from romance, like part of a cold cure. The porter carrying their bags wheezed heavily and hoarsely. Asthmatic. Eucalyptus. The smell was everywhere, everyone permanently out of breath. The sign at the airport, giving the name of the town they had come to, said ‘8159 feet above sea level’.

What country? It could only be Ethiopia, the capital Addis Ababa, 8,000 feet up, the start of the trip which Helen Jackson and George Graham had made about East Africa in 1966. But subsequently, such easy interpretation became more difficult — the action of the characters more vague, their dialogue more allusive. The two people, the two ‘White Savages’ and their bleak love-making, seemed to fade into the groves of eucalyptus around the town like figures in a Douanier Rousseau painting.

But then, forty pages in, I came to a passage which reminded me of something I couldn’t at once place.

‘Africa,’ she said, ‘is not all fat-lipped. The man we spoke to last night at the Perroquet had very thin lips.’

‘He was not Bantu. These people are Semitic. Africa south of here is fat-lipped. The people here regard all other Africans as slaves. This is an old Kingdom cut off from the world on top of a mountain where everyone is thin and proud.’

‘They have almond eyes in faces from a Byzantine fresco,’ she said. ‘I should like to look like them.’ She stirred the tall glass of white rum with a cherry stick.

‘It is a fairy story here,’ he said, ‘that is ending. The old men with sticks and lanterns against the night are dying. The frescoes are fading.’

And then I knew what it was: these descriptions of Ethiopians in their isolated Christian kingdom almost exactly paralleled the physical characteristics of the Princess. I saw her face quite clearly with these identical attributes: the almond eyes, huge pools in the thin face from some Coptic Church painting.

And then it struck me who ever had written these precise physical descriptions must have actually been to, or lived in Ethiopia. The novel was far too detailed to have been worked up by Ole Timbutu from the hearsay of some Nairobi journalist. And who the hell was Ole Timbutu? He was beginning to seem less and less real a figure — his authorship a pure fiction. So who had written the novel?

The woman with almond eyes, I thought, and a face from a Byzantine fresco. The woman who had studied in Paris, who had an air at once intensely civilised and savage. Margaret Takazze had most of the necessary attributes for authorship of this tale, just as her sex would have made her the least suspicious of shadows. She could have very well met and talked with the two protagonists of the story, without their being the least suspicious of her.

Was it possible? If it was, there was an uncomfortable corollary to her story: she had been pursuing someone called George Graham; she must have known his name. And I was George Graham. But we were two different people as she must so readily have confirmed at the reception when we had met a week before. She had asked me just that, to be sure — ‘Are you George Graham, the one that made the film?’ and yes, I’d said, I was. I was.

And then I began to think that there was just too much convenient and inconvenient fate in the whole business — yes, I thought just that, so that it wasn’t long before I discounted the idea of her authorship, or her involvement with these two figures lost in time, which she had resurrected and which I was trying to. It was too long a shot by far.

But I was wrong.

I called her at the UN guides centre but she was out with a group. So, taking White Savages with me, I went downstairs to the Conference building to see if I could find her. It didn’t take long. She was at the top of the escalator on the 4th floor standing beside a model of the UN building, explaining the various departments and their functions to twenty or so speechless, middle-aged visitors. I joined them casually, watching her, dressed now in something native to her kingdom, sari-like, in green silk, sparkling in stripes and patterns of gold. She recognised me at once with a brief smile, as though I was expected, just a taste of conspiracy in her expression, I thought.

‘Hello?’ A question as well as a greeting.

‘I like the book, what I’ve read of it. Are you free at all later? Could we talk?’

‘Yes,’ she said without any surprise. ‘This is my last tour. Meet me in the coffee shop on the ground floor in the UN Plaza apartments at five o’clock. Go out the visitors’ entrance here, up First Avenue, right on 48th, and you can’t miss the block on your left. A great big phallus. Coffee’s at the bottom.’ She was precise as she was outspoken in her arrangements.

‘Fine. I’ll bring the book,’ I said brightly. Then I added: ‘I’d like you to autograph it for me.’ But she didn’t reply, her head half turned away towards her flock. Just her eyes came back to me, swinging round, fixing me with their dark beams, briefly pondering.

Guy Jackson was back in his office when I called to thank him for his weekend invitation. He was in a cooler, less obsessive mood.

‘Fine then. Meet me here at three o’clock next Friday and we may avoid the rush hour out of town. We don’t want to be late. It’s the twins’ birthday. Helen’s organised a tea-party for them with their grandfather.’ It was as if we had never spoken of his jealousy, of his wife’s infidelity — or at least as if these were not his problems, but simply part of an interesting movie we had both recently seen and discussed. But I had to draw him back to the plot.

‘I’m sorry to drag it up again — but what sort of detective agency did you use in Nairobi six years ago. Who was it — who did the actual following?’

Jackson sighed. ‘I don’t know who it was. It was part of a security company out there, supplying guards for banks and so on. The man I dealt with was a Rhodesian. He gave me the reports. That’s all I ever saw.’

‘You never heard of an African involved in it all — a man or a woman?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I was just thinking. Curious. I couldn’t imagine there being any private detective agencies in a place like Nairobi. I thought gossip would do all that kind of work for you out there. Did you keep the reports — were they very complete?’

‘No, I burnt them. And yes, they were fairly complete. And there was no gossip. The two of them were extremely discreet. She went round the place with him as his secretary-assistant on the COI programme he was filming and researching.’

‘Didn’t you find it surprising that someone could follow the pair of them so closely, across the breadth of Africa in all those open spaces, without being noticed?’

‘Yes, I did. But that was what I was paying for. That was their job.’

‘They did it well.’

‘Yes,’ he said, the sadder and wiser man, ‘they did. It’s a long, dull story. Forget about it.’

‘I will — but I’m a little uneasy about the weekend. That’s really why I brought it up. I want to know as much as possible. You see my position, don’t you? It’s rather an awkward threesome, isn’t it? She knows, you know and I know. But we don’t all three know the same things together. With her I’m Mr X, impersonating her lover, about whom you know nothing. But in fact you do know about him — you know everything. I’m in the middle and I know very little.’ Jackson nodded his agreement.

‘Of course, she’s been asking you where he is?’ he asked.

‘To say the least.’

‘It was her suggestion — that you came up for the weekend.’

‘I’ve told her nothing.’

‘Of course.’

‘Except asking her to say nothing about it all, my impersonating Graham — to you or anyone — until I finish my work here. But how long can this go on for — this charade?’

‘I should tell her I’ve had her followed you mean, that I know all about George Graham?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Look, it’s simply a personal business, all this with Graham. We’ve agreed on that. There’s no political connection. So why upset our present situation?’

‘She wanted a divorce.’

‘Yes, I knew that. She can have it now.’

‘Now that he’s gone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now that you won’t be bruised — by knowing and thinking of the man she’s leaving you for? Now that there’s no one for her?’

‘Yes. Is that unreasonable?’

‘Fairly.’

‘Then I’m unreasonable. Where does that leave you for your weekend? You can get out of it easily enough.’

But why in the circumstances, I thought, had Jackson not got me out of the invitation before? I was a potential risk to him — both professionally and personally — in any association I might have with his wife. I might give any number of games away. Yet it seemed he wanted me to see as much as possible of her (as he had encouraged me to go flat-hunting with her in the first place) in circumstances which he could control and oversee. He would lose his private eyes and replace them with mine. I would spy on his wife for him and make my reports — perhaps that was what he hoped. Sensing my interest in her he had the opportunity now of hearing of her flaws and infidelities direct from a surrogate lover — or perhaps as her real lover, for such seemed the role he was tacitly encouraging me in. Realising the wild obsession that lay at the heart of his relationship with her, this was one explanation at least. At the same time, though I was not interested in satisfying his voyeurism, I was interested in his wife. I felt sure that somewhere in her past with Graham lay the key to my own immediate future. There was something I didn’t know, which she would never tell me — something which had happened between them, a plan, a future arrangement, which could only now have an outcome in me. I needed to know about her now for reasons quite beyond affection or sex.

So I said: ‘No, I’d like to come up for the weekend. It sounds a marvellous place. Wheel was telling me about it.’

‘Yes, he knows it. Good then, just a family weekend. And the rest — let it drop. I’ve had them call the man off. We’ll forget that.’

‘The man? But there were two men. I told you. There was a second man, with sandwiches and a homburg, deep-set eyes and white hair round his ears.’

‘Must just have been a bystander. I checked — the agency had only one man on the job: Moloney — the man you impersonated.’

‘There were two of them, I know. The other fellow tried to go on following me afterwards, when I’d slipped back into the restaurant.’

‘Not from the agency there wasn’t. There was someone else following you — if you’re sure. That’s all.’

‘That’s all? Well who? If there wasn’t anyone sent after me from London.’

‘Your KGB contact perhaps. The “stayer”. That was the plan, wasn’t it? He was going to check you out, make sure you were really George Graham, before passing on the information about KGB unreliables over here. No doubt he’ll be in touch with you now, give you those names — and we can wrap all this up and send you home.’

‘I doubt it,’ I said, while doubting just as much Jackson’s glib idea of ‘home’. Where was that? A small flat I’d had in Doughty Street near the office in Holborn, before the years in Durham jail. And I doubted Jackson himself now as well. Or rather Wheel and Jackson together, for hadn’t he just said that Wheel knew the house upstate in the Catskills? Yet Wheel at lunchtime had said equally clearly that he didn’t know it. That he had never been there. Someone else was following me. And someone was lying.

As I left Guy’s office I bumped into Wheel just about to enter it, carrying a sheaf of papers.

‘Hi!’ he said, flourishing that badge of permanent good humour which was his face. But I wasn’t entirely convinced by it now. The two of them didn’t just meet in the Delegates’ Lounge for two religious martinis before lunch. They shared some business together as well. Wheels within wheels …

‘Yes,’ she said in the Coffee Shoppe where everything had an ‘e’ at the end of it, the décor and furniture all folksy and ye olde from an England that never was, panelled in synthetic fumed oak with black plastic beams overhead. ‘Yes,’ she said, sitting on a milkmaid’s stool, dressed now in a rust-coloured Pringle sweater, the same shade in slightly flared corduroys and a leather belt, ‘I wrote the book. How did you guess?’

I just said I’d guessed and she licked her lips gently.

‘How did you come to be playing the detective?’ I went on.

‘I wasn’t. We were all there together, staying at the same hotel in Addis. George Graham was a friend, my English professor at Makerere University in the early sixties.’

What was she saying? Already I was on the defensive.

‘Is that what you do to old friends? Write novels about their private lives, their mistresses?’

‘What do you do with my old friends, Mr Graham? Kill them? Your story is surely better than mine. Though I don’t suppose you’ll ever publish it. I used a pseudonym. You’ve stolen his real name, his body, his life.’ She played with a sachet of sugar, tore it open, dipped a finger in and then sucked it.

‘How did you manage to follow them round East Africa without being noticed?’

‘How do you mean? That was part of the job.’ She was properly surprised. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you when you took him over? We were filming together, a documentary about an African girl visiting other African countries: I was the girl. Didn’t you see the film?’

‘No. One of his I didn’t see. There wasn’t a lot of time before — before I came over here.’

‘I used to think that George was involved in something more than just public relations for the British government.’

‘Think? You surely must have actually known — from what you’ve written in your book.’

‘No, I didn’t know exactly. That was an invention of mine in the novel. Now I see that I was right. You’ve taken his place. And I shouldn’t know about it,’ she went on. ‘Should I? Such bad luck — our running into each other the other night. Your “cover” is broken. Isn’t that the word?’ Now she laughed outright. ‘Just like the spy novels. I have you in my grasp, at my mercy — Grrrrr!’ She leant across the table towards me over the sour coffee, mimicking a tiger. I drew back involuntarily, alarmed. ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to tell anyone.’ She rested her hand on my arm for an instant. ‘I’ve nothing to do with that world, I promise,’ she said, the animal tamed in her now, meek and mild, still lightly amused. ‘This is my world. New York this month. This here, this now. My apartment upstairs. That book was a long time ago. Written and finished with. I’m not going to use it against you.’

She started one of her long smiles, a rising beam of fun coming over her face, like sunlight emerging, drifting slowly into a blaze from behind a dark cloud. She was one of those women who, in an instant, can fill themselves with happiness — as if she had a tap in her soul, a confident fountain of truth and trust which bubbled immediately for everyone at her request.

‘I’d like to hear more about it. The novel …’

‘Why don’t you tell me first?’ she leant back, withdrawing her favours for a moment, bargaining gently. ‘You’re going to have to trust me, aren’t you? I know too much already. Or are you thinking of knocking me off? That’s how it works, isn’t it, in the stories. Hitchcock and James Bond. I have to be “liquidated”.’

More laughter, more happiness. It was as though I were the feed in a comic act she had hired me for. ‘Anyway, why the novel, why the past? Why not things now? About you. About me. Isn’t there always time later for the past?’

She seemed to be propositioning me.

‘I’m fascinated,’ she said, suddenly, sharply, apropos of nothing, like one of her characters in White Savages.

‘About?’

‘Having coffee with a spy.’ She said in a deep, funny voice, ‘Do you carry a revolver?’

‘No, as a matter of fact. No guns, no golden Dunhills, no dark glasses.’

‘No vodka martinis either — very dry, stirred and not shaken. Or is it the other way round?’

I felt the skin on my face move awkwardly, creases rising inexplicably over my cheeks. Then I realised I was smiling.

‘Yes, I drink. Sometimes. Bottles of light ale, though. I’m a spy from one of those seedier thrillers, I’m afraid.’

‘Let’s have a drink then.’

‘Here?’

‘God no. Upstairs.’

I looked at her blankly.

‘Women are out too, are they? Not even “sometimes”? What a very dull book you are.’

‘I disappoint you.’

‘Not yet.’

She stood up and tightened her belt a notch. She was already pretty thin.

Her apartment was on the 10th floor, with almost the same view of the East River as my office had, except that we were further upstream now, and closer to the ground: she saw less of the huge northern horizon than I did but she was closer to the boats. A big silver motor cruiser, rigged out for deep-sea fishing, moved down the current in the last of the sunlight, a burly figure with a beard and a baseball cap at the helm.

It was one of those very modern, expensively decorated New York Design Centre apartments made for money to live in, not people.

She fiddled with a bottle of Fleischmann’s gin, vermouth, lemon and a bowl of ice which she’d brought in from the kitchen, handling the component parts smartly, like a nurse with a hypodermic tray in her long, clever fingers.

‘Well, what about the book then. What do you want to know?’

‘I was interested in the woman he was with.’

‘Miss Jackson?’

‘Mrs.’

She came over with the drink and sat down on the floor opposite me. But this wasn’t comfortable, so she sat bolt upright instead, like an idol, cross-legged, her narrow back arched forwards, as thin as the stem of the martini glass.

‘Yes, she wasn’t just his secretary. I knew that. Well, what about her — you’ve finished the book?’

‘No. What happens?’

She leant towards me, arching her back between her legs as though starting something in yoga, putting her glass on the floor between us.

‘Why you? Who are you?’

I had postponed the decision. But now I made it willingly: I would tell her the truth, or some of it anyway. I felt perfectly confident of her discretion; talking with her I had sensed almost immediately a quality that I had missed with everyone else since I’d left prison — with the Jacksons, with Wheel and all the men in London: the sense of rational life in a real world. With this woman there were no flaws — no lost affairs, no unsatisfied obsessions, no old wounds, no guilt that would warp the future. I could see now how, by comparison with those others, she was quite free of that air of impending calamity which marked them and which I had not recognised before.

She had come out of Africa and into the white man’s world and had gone beyond the diseases of both: she had left the savagery and the cleverness equally — a person, one felt, who had thrown doubt and enmity and jealousy right away. She was dark from the Dark Continent but her vision was completely bright, an astonishingly clear heart in the darkness. It was a simple thing to tell the truth with her.

So I said, ‘I was never a spy. But now I’m involved in that stupid game, for boys with guns, and I don’t play it well. British Security are using me as a stalking-horse. George Graham, the real one, has been working for the Russians for years. They caught him in London a few weeks ago and replaced him with me — we share a similar sort of background — and I’ve been sent over here to wait for some of his Russian colleagues in a KGB network to contact me, and then hand over their names. There’s more to it. But that’s the essence — and I’m liable to get my head knocked off if the KGB or anyone else finds out.’ I looked at her seriously.

She laughed. ‘That’s the corniest story.’ But she believed me. ‘My God!’ She paused, considering, I suppose, the guns and golden Dunhills and all the rest of the childish impedimenta which my words must have conjured up for her — a world as unreal to her, I was sure, as it was to me. ‘Why risk telling me?’ she said.

‘You asked. And I need to know. I need to know as much as possible about Graham and his past — which is partly this woman.’

‘Your “life depends on it”.’

‘Perhaps. Insofar as my successful impersonation depends on it.’

‘Why? You’re not likely to run into this woman in New York are you?’

It was my turn to laugh. ‘She would have said just the same of you — if she’d known. I “ran into” Mrs Jackson on my first day here, just as I did with you that evening a few weeks ago.’

‘What a lot of accidents.’ She turned her glass slowly between her fingers, elbows leaning on either knee. Then she went on, even more precise in her words than before. ‘Yes, I know about them. Apart from what I saw of them myself when we were filming in Ethiopia, what’s in my book. My brother was the “detective” you spoke of — or one of them, they used several. That’s how I filled in a lot of my story.’

‘But — how? He can’t have been much more than a child at the time.’

‘So much the better. He may have looked that way — but he wasn’t. The whole thing appealed to him. Childish I suppose. I never followed the reason behind it all. Now I see it — it wasn’t a private inquiry this, but a government one.’

‘Apparently not. It was entirely private. Her husband had an obsession about her being with other men — and knowing all about it.’

‘An expensive sort of pornography. But the material we gathered wasn’t like that at all — not much sex: it was political.’

‘You mean they were both talking politics?’

‘Of course. That was in most of the reports I saw. A lot of it’s in the book: Maoism and the political future of Africa; Nyerere’s Chinese policy. They were both extremely left-wing about it all — not the doctrinaire, hard-line stuff but a “new Marxist interpretation for new conditions”, you know — they were very keen on Nyerere’s self-help programme, small autonomous communities and not big industries. Of course all this was a surprise — coming from her. She didn’t seem that sort at all — much more the high flyer, the jet-set girl in a suede overcoat and dark glasses with that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth American face.’

‘Yes, that’s her all right. You had the impression they were working together in some way — professionally?’

‘Yes. Well, I assumed so.’

‘And the KGB — was that ever mentioned, that they were involved in that together?’

‘Not that we ever heard. But whatever he was up to, she was too. That’s certain. There was an argument about the work they were doing one evening in Kisumu on the lake in an empty hotel. One of the agency men overheard the end of it. She didn’t agree with him about something — the Uganda plan I suppose. She wanted to get out of the whole thing.’

She got up to refill our glasses. ‘But it’s all years ago. How can it have to do with you now? Her husband, or whoever had those reports, must know all this too. It can’t be much of a secret somewhere. Where is the husband — are they still married?’

‘Her husband’s here. With British Intelligence, like me. He’s my “control” in fact. You’ll know the term — it goes with these martinis, “stirred and not shaken”.’ I took the glass from her.

‘You’re going too fast for me now,’ she said, ‘except’ — she stood there in the middle of the room still and straight as a totem-pole — ‘except in that case you must know all this already, that it wasn’t just a sexual liaison —’

‘But also a political one — you’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

I stood up and took my glass with me over to the windows. The big Pepsi-Cola sign had come on above a warehouse on the opposite bank, a coloured gash against the dust-filled, leaden sky. Other lights appeared as I watched, spreading over Queens and lights on the river, lights everywhere rising across the suburbs as darkness came. Everything that gives us our measure of time, our notions of vitality and decay, was visible before me as I watched.

And yet here I was trying to pick up the details, all the emotional weights and measures, of something that had passed more than two thousand days before — trying to grasp all the implications, the real flavour of Helen and Graham’s association, for even as I changed, pushed from one moment’s consciousness to another with the day, so their past in Africa so long before had taken on now a new accretion of reality, a new truth, an added dimension which affected me. Here was another vital facet, a link between their past and my future: Guy Jackson, Margaret Takazze had just made clear to me, must have known all about his wife’s political involvement. But that morning he had denied just this.

What on earth was he up to? Had he, in fact, been pursuing his wife, not for himself, but on behalf of British Intelligence — McCoy, Harper and the others in London knowing of her real involvement with Graham all the time, and sending me to New York to meet her, to sound her out in some way, to trap her? And if this was so, why had I not been told?

I had trusted Guy Jackson too as my only sure liaison in the whole matter — this Jackson, with his Foreign Office robes, old boy’s tie and high purposes, who now appeared as trustworthy as a ferret, who held truth like a colander: this Jackson who knew far more about his wife than just the fact that she was unfaithful to him, but had said nothing, who perhaps had no jealous obsessions about her at all but was simply hunting her down and using me as the pointer. And then there was Wheel who had introduced me to them both that first day at the UN — so conveniently as it now appeared. Wheel, who had never been upstate in Belmont … Indeed, indeed. Where did the expansive Wheel fit in? — the decent, funny man from the Mid-West, the big man from an older, more confident America?

Her eyes were so deep, I noticed, when I turned away from the window, seeing her standing behind me in the darkness which had come over the room: eyes buried away in her skull, the huge whites visible like light behind a mask.

‘What do you want to do?’ she said, walking slowly towards me. And then a different question, remembering my professional predicament as well as my presence with her: ‘What are you going to do?’

But she was in my arms before I could reply and by then my answer had become a question: ‘Are you sure you want this?’ Always the procrastinator, I thought; the pretended diffidence — as if I’d not wanted it myself after so long.

I could feel her smiling, her cheek crinkling next my ear. She smelt of wool, freshly washed, the smell of a warm linen-cupboard where someone had buried a bar of sweet soap deep in the clothes. We stood there easily, lightly pressed together like two vegetables slowly growing.

‘You’ve surely better things to do.’

‘I have. Not better, but other. I’m going out in an hour.’

I did nothing — and suddenly felt I could do nothing. Now that it was possible, the years of abstinence in Durham jail, and all the abandoned imaginings of those years were the only things that rose in me then. I had become someone, so successfully self-educated in the sexual that I had no arts in the real university. So I prevaricated once more.

‘Why me?’ I really believed the question. She didn’t reply. ‘You’re bleak about this in your novel. Is that why? A bleak thing …?’

She moved her head round to the other side of my face, her lips brushing my chin. ‘Not bleak, no. I was exact about it, I hope. We should be more exact.’

She lifted one of her long legs off the floor and, standing like a heron, she wound it slowly round behind the back of my thighs.

‘You mistrust it when it’s easy, don’t you?’

She let her leg slide to the floor.

‘It’s simply that I’m not used to it,’ I said.

‘Of course, you’re Mrs Jackson’s lover,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t quite realised all that that must mean for you both — in the way of mistaken identity, sexual disappointment, diminished performance.’

She rolled her pullover up her midriff towards her chest, one rusty skin peeling off to reveal another. Her small conical breasts rose with it, caught tightly by the fabric, before they fell outwards suddenly like pips from a squeezed fruit.

‘That doesn’t inhibit me.’

‘No.’ She paused, holding the jumper up, turning it the right way out again, shaking it. ‘No. It’s decisions that inhibit you,’ she went on. ‘I thought that was the basis of your kind of job — the quick decision.’

‘I’ve been out of my job for a long time. Anyway I’m sorry. Go ahead, don’t let me hold you up. You want to go out.’

She bent down, slipping her briefs off with one hand. ‘I want you to come in.’

She was right. I’d always been held up by the trappings of sex, the preludes, the difficulties. And no doubt that was why Helen Jackson, with her copious old wounds and blocks, appealed to me.

The pleasure always lay at several removes from the real pleasure — in all the meticulous inquiries I made as to its whereabouts. It reminded me of Jackson’s sad efforts to sustain his marriage by spying on it. And there was something of the same hopeless prevarication in Helen Jackson’s six-year affair, I suddenly thought, some block there as well. How unsatisfactorily intermittent it must all have been for her. How could she have supported it? Why hadn’t she gone to live with Graham? Unless it was that she craved precisely the intermittent and insecure in any relationship that was to be real for her.

I stood in the dark room as if anchored to it, held fast by these dull speculations, the detective always sharp on the scene of the crime, who yet never knows the action, the shape, the real colour of the crime itself. And I would not have thrown off this mood of flatulent disengagement if the telephone hadn’t rung at that moment on one of the low tables in the main room.

She knelt on the floor beside it — pressed her knees together, thighs running in a smooth dark line to a small triangle of hair, her back rising upwards, arched slightly, the tummy rounded, pushing outwards, her waist narrowing dramatically, and then the abrupt conical breasts. She was like an art-deco design, a sculptured book-end, a copper-plated Diana from some suburban household between the wars.

‘Yes? Hello! Yes, fine — in an hour. Eight. No, there’s no need. As we arranged. I’ll meet you there. Fine. ’Bye.’

‘Who was that?’ The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. The inquiries, the doubts, were under way. She stood up and gripped my wrist sharply, gazing at me.

‘The man I’m going out with tonight.’

And then it was all right, when she came into my arms. I could feel her now for the first time — warm and electric. For she was not mine now, not my responsibility, my script. She was the object of someone else’s designs. And it was an easy thing then, playing the robber right under this man’s nose.

Her leg came up once more like the heron’s, and this time I wanted her without hesitation as she wrapped it round me, and we made love that way, standing like birds, almost motionless.

8

Belmont House lay at the foot of the Catskills in New York’s Ulster County, two hours’ drive up the Hudson Valley along the interstate parkway, then westwards along roads that became narrower and less frequented as they ran towards the hills.

The valley was a busy place with its six-lane highway running straight through to Chicago, and its supermarkets as big as villages on the outskirts of towns. But once off this main artery the countryside changed character gradually as it rose from the valley until an almost primeval America took over — a landscape of rugged woodlands, forested hills, high buffs, ravines, great boulders and torrents of water — inhabited only at the edges of the small roads, elderly people living in straggling villages with frame houses, all alike with mosquito-wired front porches and miniature lawns, and chickens wandering disconsolately in steep back patches.

Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, there were stone farm houses back from the road, with apple orchards and cows and barns and thirty acres of cultivated land. But these settlements too soon ran out into wilderness — thick underbrush with outcrops of rock and the bleached white wood skeletons of huge fallen trees like whale bones. It was a hidden land, seemingly unexplored, untouched by anything except extremes of weather: glaciers and blinding sun — inhabited, one felt sure, only by Indians, a lost tribe whose braves were sharpening their knives behind the rocks even now, waiting to fly through the air like bats onto the shoulders of the unwary voyager.

Belmont House lay ten miles or so beneath the highest of the Catskill peaks, on a ridge of land, once an Indian trail, bordering what was now a thickly forested national park. There was a village which we passed through a mile from it, Stonestead, a single street with a pretty white clapboard church, a general store, a liquor store and the district headquarters of the American Legion, the neatest building in the place with a flagpost and a clean-cropped young man lowering the colours as we came through in the bright afternoon light. We turned off the main road here and followed what would have been no more than a lane if it hadn’t been tarmacked.

The house itself was lost among huge elms and chestnuts at the end of a long curved drive, so that one came on it suddenly in a clearing of spreading lawns, dotted with maple groves and flowering shrubs. It was a long two-storied yellow clapboard mansion with attics and a steep hipped roof over the central block and green louvred storm shutters on either side of all the tall windows: classic American colonial, a transplantation from the plantation south, with its huge white-columned portico, triangular pediment and towering chimneys. Its proportions were solid and dignified, without being heavy, the landscaping carefully premeditated yet the effects informal, the views of the Catskill and Shawangunk mountains precisely commanding: love and thought had had an outing here — and money too — an old-fashioned American capitalism still buoyantly evident, which didn’t surprise me, for Helen Jackson’s grandfather, she’d told me on the drive up, who had created the place in the 1890s, had been a New York broker, a friend of Carnegie and Rockefeller, a vital cog in that huge monopolistic machine that had come to control America by the turn of the century.

And indeed if one takes account of familial opposition, the sometimes violent reaction between successive generations, Helen Jackson’s Marxist apostasy, if such it was, was quite conceivable: she had found distress in all this unearned bounty, fled the rich hearth for the hovels of the poor, left the castle for the cabin as Princesses do in fairy stories. And I believed that for a moment, as we got out of the car by the porch, just as one believes in fairy tales: by turning logic upside down. Seeing her in front of the great house, confidently stepping into her heritage, the idea of her hidden nature, of revolution beneath the eye-shadow — this seemed so unlikely a thought, so bizarre, that one felt it must be true.

Harold Perkins laid aside a book he’d been reading and came running down the porch steps to greet us — a small compactly built, bubbling man with white hair cut en brosse, wearing a yachting pullover and plimsolls. He looked like a retired tennis coach and not the son of a millionaire broker. And it was obvious almost immediately that he had reacted against the influence of his father not just by taking up the academic career which Helen had told me about, but by retaining, as he did now in his mid-sixties, the dress, the air of a college freshman, running down the library steps, breathlessly anxious for a game before sunset.

Yet there was, just beneath his friendly ebullience, something else that I noticed in that first moment and was later to confirm in strength: a diffidence, an excuse in his approach to us all on the gravel surround, as if he were butting in on a party he’d not been invited to: the marks on his small face — a shriven quality — of something which had hurt all his life; a disappointment in the mild blue eyes: patience unrewarded, efforts unrecognised, the real personality unachieved: these failures, which one glimpsed in his face, were not evident for one moment as self-pity but as the marks of an expected fate, now fulfilled and patiently borne — character flaws which had worked themselves to the surface over the years in small downfalls on the hurdles of the world.

Inside the porch was a large, octagonally-shaped hall, darkly panelled, with a chandelier dropping from the high ceiling, which ran across the width of the house to a verandah looking westwards down a sloping lawn and beyond that a meadow which the sun was beginning to leave, the sky above now pale blue and pink with a cold haze above the grass.

The birthday tea had been laid out on a round table in the middle of the hall with red crackers piled up on the circle of white linen and balloons laid along a wide Carrara marble mantelpiece, the coloured skins gently expanding above a grate of smouldering logs.

A middle-aged woman, unsuitably dressed in a green trouser suit, was introduced to me — the housekeeper I understood — a woman called Anna with flushed, attractive, Italianate features in a face that was too small for her body, and some sort of deeply New England accent. ‘What a lovely surprise,’ she said, greeting the twins with an affectionate ease she did not show to the adult arrivals. And there were two other children already there, a boy and a girl from a neighbouring family who had come to make up the party. It was very much a family occasion and, of course, I felt outside it: there was the sense, all the more clear now, that I’d been asked up here too precipitately, for reasons that were not entirely to do with hospitality or friendship. I felt uncomfortably close to the fiction of The Man who knew Too Much.

Guy Jackson took me up to my bedroom at the end of the house facing out over the lawn and the meadow. The branches of a tree, I noticed, almost touched the window and when I looked out I saw in the fading light that it was a huge tree whose trunk had divided itself in an extraordinary way so that it had spread itself out over a large area, its branches falling to the ground across its central stem, like the spokes of an opened umbrella, and then — re-seeding itself in some way, or joining the trunk of another tree, I couldn’t quite tell which — it had sprung up again in another serpentine growth, great branches rising and falling over a space bigger than a tennis court. Along the inside, twining itself among all these bizarre natural forms, a wooden balustraded walk-way had been built leading to a thatched tree-house, a little conical pavilion, at the far end. How wrong the phrase ‘the idle rich’ was, I thought.

When I came down the party was under way with the ticklish, sweet smell of mild explosive in the air over the woodsmoke as the children pulled the English crackers with faces savagely taut for a moment as they tugged, screwed up and frightened before the snap and the short sparks of light in the firelit room. Helen Jackson moved round the table supervising the party, watching her children, Sarah and Sheila. She was close to them now, so obviously tending, watching them: reason enough for not leaving her husband. I thought. That seemed so clear now, and I was surprised that I had ever thought otherwise.

They were not identical twins, though identically dressed in brown corduroy dungarees and white pullovers and straight fair hair with fringes like the spokes of a rake down about their noses. I watched her watch them and it was as if her life with George Graham, all the past she had written and we had spoken about, the places where she had lived, no longer existed in her — that it had been completely erased in this link she had made again with her roots in this house in the woods. This was where she really belonged, where her natural affinities lay, and what had happened in those other places were no more than visits of a rich man’s daughter, a grand tour made by a woman essentially domestic, calm and full of her children.

The hall had become warm with the roused fire, the excited breath and movement of the children, and with an impalpable warmth of family community where this present reunion was one more play in the long repertory of meeting and departure that had taken place in the room over the years — a warm confirmation, for the moment, of continuity, of a heritage willingly accepted.

I stood with my back to the grate next Mr Perkins with a cup of tea in my hand and he said, ‘It was good that you could get up here. Very good.’ But he said nothing else, looking away abstractedly. The children now put on paper hats and there was some squabbling over the peanut-butter sandwiches before they settled into them, hurrying over the plainer food, eyes fixed on the two birthday cakes in the middle of the table, iced in pink and blue with sugar animals and five candles apiece. Finally Harold Perkins was called to the table to light the candles. And when he was finished they put the lights out and two small circles of flame lit up four pink faces and fired the chandelier above with diamonds.

After tea they opened their presents. I had brought them a pair of Babar books — Babar’s Travels and Babar’s Friend Zephyr. And of course the first thing they noticed on the second page of the Zephyr book was the double-page spread of Monkeysville, the city with its shops and rope ladders built in the trees. ‘Like us,’ they shouted. ‘The tree houses — like ours!’ They were children for whom even the most inventive art naturally imitates life.

‘They can change them — if they have them already. I asked at the shop,’ I said to Helen.

‘No,’ she smiled. ‘Not them. They have the earlier ones. Thank you. And this is surely from Alice in France,’ she went on turning again to the children, helping them open a flat, well-packed parcel. Inside was a selection of children’s records, small forty-fives, French nursery rhymes, folk songs and fables — and also a larger record: Alice Perkins at the Porte des Lilas. There was a glossy photograph of her on the sleeve, a girl like Louise Brooks with glasses and short dark hair, bobbed and fringed, cradling a guitar. She had at the moment the features of a beautiful but severe schoolmarm. ‘I may be a popular singer,’ the photograph suggested, ‘but that’s not the point; that’s neither here nor there. I have serious work to do’ — an impression which Helen immediately confirmed for me.

‘That’s Alice — my runaway younger sister. Lives in Paris. She’s the revolutionary for you. Every cause you can think of from Viet Nam to the battle of Wounded Knee. She got herself locked up in Paris with the students, May ’68. Do you remember the song? — “This City never was for lovers.” She’s very serious.’

‘I’ve heard of her, not the song. I’d no idea —’

‘Oh yes. She’s the famous sister. Guy and I don’t see much of her. Thinks we’re outrageously bourgeois and right-wing. Almost fascist pigs. Father — do you want to hear Alice’s latest?’ She turned to him, waving the sleeve in the air like a flag.

‘What is it this time? “Wrap the Red Flag round me”? Let’s hear it. I like her.’

Helen put the record on in the next room — a dark drawing-room with heavy leather furniture I could just see through a doorway off the hall — and the sound of a sharp, classic guitar emerged through the hi-fi equipment, a decisively fingered, lilting introduction, followed by a surprisingly deep, almost male voice — ringingly vibrant, slowly rising into the music, becoming passionately modulated, Piaf-like, whenever the words offered the chance:

‘Si je n’avais plus

plus qu’une heure à vivre,

je la voudrais vivre

auprès de ton lit –

sur un lit d’amour …’

‘That’s not altogether revolutionary,’ I said when Helen returned.

‘I’m sure there’s something in it — some hidden political thing,’ she said, picking up the sleeve. ‘It’s by someone called Moulouji — “Algerian musician and singer.” The Arab cause. It’s that, don’t you think? That’s it.’

Helen seemed strangely anxious to cast her sister in the role of musical agitator — as someone who, in her rather mocking tones, she viewed as politically irresponsible. Yet her father’s politics, as I was to learn later that evening, had been very similar — as were her own, I knew, despite the pains she took to disguise this. The three of them had taken from this rich estate not the autocratic bounty that was their inheritance but a deep sense of shame in the injustice of that gift. Their history in this house had somehow led them all to a shared political cause — the concerns of an imperilled world that lay beyond its gates. How on earth had all this ever come to pass?

… He remembers Alice so affectionately, Helen thought as she listened to her sister’s voice, a radiant presence about the hall. He thinks of her so much as a continuation of his own philosophies, as someone making up for his own political failure. I’m the older, safer, drearier daughter — the Manhattan socialite who married a dull diplomat: a stuffed shirt from the British Foreign Office. I’ve taken after Mother, an old daughter of the revolution — while Alice is a daughter of the proper revolution. That’s what he thinks. But that’s how I wanted it, exactly how. That was the cover. And now the point of it all? It’s gone. I needn’t have bothered — all the lies, the distances I’ve made with my family. I could have been true in the open and sung rebelly songs like Alice and had a good time with her and Father and shocked my husband. Although Guy wouldn’t have married that me, the real one. Not a chance. So that marriage was a lie I could have avoided too.

I shouldn’t have taken it all so seriously. It could have been something you sang about when you were young, talked about in college, argued about in bars and cafés, a dream you shouted from the rooftops while the pigs were letting off gas grenades at you: kidnapping the Dean, burning the draft cards and blowing up the computer building. I could have done it that way — the way you grow out of it, like Paris in the spring, because you weren’t ever really going to see it come about, were you? The revolution or whatever you called your hope. Sing about it passionately, yes, like Alice; that was very much part of the scenario — because it was going to fail. That was always in the last reel, wasn’t it? — the riot police, gas-masks, rubber bullets, then real ones, then tanks, finally the rigged trial and the ten-year sentence. And then you spent the rest of your life making up sad songs about it all, commemorating the failure.

But oh no, not that. That’s why I took it seriously. I didn’t want that. I saw that from the beginning. Alexei showed me and George too — the student phase, the amateur revolution of the privileged. I took it seriously. Took it and made it like a hidden birthmark, a faith like a disability that could never be displayed until the day broke — when the illness, the sore, would burst into miraculous flower and all would be well. But would it? Miracles were worse than the songs: they never happened. The seriousness had failed. God, how it had failed.

Serious. That had been the key word in everything. ‘If you are serious about it,’ she remembered Alexei saying, ‘you will put up with every setback. And they’ll come, be sure of that — the public disappointments, and much worse, the personal loss of faith. And when they do, remember the choice, the decision you make now — that you believe these ideas we’ve talked about are right. And nothing should really change that. We have only one life — and people like us try to cram too many opinions into it. But the others can’t. They have to live without comment.’

And yes, she thought, I still do believe those ideas to be right. But it’s a dry belief, without feeling. And I must suffer that. I must go on. That was part of Alexei’s whole scheme — that whatever happened there would still be people outside to carry the business through. The person next to me — George, who shared and warmed my belief — is gone, that is all. And someone has taken his place. He smokes his pipe, wears his watch, carries his old fountain pen. But it is not him. I have not properly understood all that yet — looking at these objects that once touched the body I touched.

The children can have their story now. He can read it to them, this other man, whoever he is. And I shall find out who — that, and what has happened to him — that other. I shall find out all of it — about him. And him. He will tell me.

The party finished and the children went to bed. ‘Will you read them one of your Babar stories, George?’ Helen asked me, something unexpressed in her voice and face: ‘George.’ George Graham. I wished I could have told her the truth of it all — my truth and his.

I read to the children in the nursery next their parents’ bedroom where Helen had gone, moving about, unpacking. ‘“The elephant’s school at Celesteville is closed for the whole summer,”’ I read. ‘“Zephyr, the little monkey, as well as his bigger schoolmates, goes off for the holidays. What fun to go and see his family again! But how sad to leave his friends, King Babar, Queen Celeste, the Old Lady, his teacher, and his beloved Arthur …”’

‘“… Queen Celeste, the Old Lady, his teacher, and his beloved Arthur! All four have promised to come to the river near the bridge to see him off and bid him a last fond farewell …”’

Helen listened to his voice in the next room, quietly pointed and assured as if he’d been used to reading bedtime stories all his life. Had he children of his own from his failed marriage, she wondered? But she asked him? She’d forgotten. There was nothing she knew about him. And worse, there was nothing she could remember in him, as there had been with the other men. He stood up for her in the guise of someone deeply loved, as a memorial to him, and thus he constantly provoked her memory of the real man. And so, in the days since she had met him, she had started to remember, involuntarily at first, the past cascading back to her — odd very clear incidents at odd moments. But soon she found that she needed these memories and so she came to create, to nurture them, to hold them to her like a passport, her only identity — these papers which alone would take her successfully into the future. Without them, the present, the days ahead were condemned. To survive she must carry her past with her all the time — the ideals, the purposes and the men who had shared her life with these things — and to be able to produce it as an immediate reference whenever she asked herself ‘Where — and what now?’

‘“They have to use a rope ladder to climb up to the house perched there in the treetops. Zephyr scrambles up easily, but laughs as he says to himself, ‘This wouldn’t do for my friends the Elephants’ …”’

Elephants. She closed the drawer she had filled with the twins’ clothes. After the filming in Ethiopia, she and Graham had gone on alone, southwards to Kenya, to Tsavo National Park to look at the elephants. George had been researching another TV story — the College of African Wildlife on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. And from there they’d gone out on a training safari with the College instructors and students — careering across the open plainsland of the huge park in open lorries.

That first morning had always been a clear enough thing to hold. It hardly took the form of memory, but lived safely, ever available in the grammar of the historic present: that first time properly alone with him, believing so surely than in the next few weeks — a happy stretch of certain days ahead of them. Confident with him, yet not grasping, a reasonable happiness, no more than that, and surely that would come in this empty world — this plainsland which human dissension had not yet marked?

And loving him too. That as well. But love as an easy thing now, something you could stop thinking about if you wanted to.

… The first night out we camped, not in tents, but in the crumbling manager’s house in a ruined mining village at the centre of the park with the students bedding down in the old labour lines. And it was creepy and far more strange than tents under the stars. There was no electricity in the house yet the bulbs were still there and the electric fires had never been taken away and I found an old hair-dryer in a cupboard of the manager’s bedroom where we’d been put to sleep with our bags. Mr and Mrs Graham …

That evening when it turned cold and pitch-dark within half an hour of sunset, great blocks of cedar from a ruined tree in the garden roared in the living-room grate, the Tilley lamps hissed like snakes as they were pumped up in the kitchen, and people chatted and laughed over their beers before dinner.

And that night up in the manager’s old bedroom getting undressed, talking to George, watching him, standing with one hand against the chimney breast, warm from the huge fire that had blazed all evening in the grate immediately below — and thinking him somehow uneasy now that we were alone.

‘Do you like it here? Or loathe it? Honestly? You’re so wary of liking things. Or just wary of running round East Africa with someone else’s wife?’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s what you might, or might not do with me in the future that worries me.’

‘This is just a prolonged one-night stand?’

‘Not for me.’

‘Nor me.’

‘There’s the problem then.’

‘What about living now?’ I asked. ‘What about that great old idea? Let’s leave the words for later, George, when we’ve lost this, if we do. That’s what words are for.’

He got into his sleeping bag in the narrow camp bed beside mine — the two beds like two separate valleys with an iron ridge between them. It was ridiculous. We took the sleeping bags off and put them down next to the grate where the floor was warm from the fire below and made love and slept there, very warm in the cold night, a broken window-pane rattling, sleeping and doing it again, waking when the wind had gone very early before dawn, and feeling entirely alone stretched out naked in the middle of Africa.

‘“… Zephyr falls asleep almost as soon as his head touches the pillow. But in the middle of the night, the nightingale wakes him with his song: ‘Trou la la — tiou; tiou-tiou! Tidi-Tidi’ …”’

The twins had fidgeted during the story, unable to relax after the excitement of the day. But now, quite suddenly, they were still, their eyelids wavering. And by the next page, with Zephyr, pushing his little rowing boat out into the lake, they were both fast asleep. ‘“Oh, what a daredevil that fellow Zephyr is,”’ I read to the sleeping, empty room, closing the book.

But it wasn’t empty. Helen had come in and was standing behind me. ‘You don’t have children, do you?’ she asked, turning off the main light and standing now in the half darkness, a small bedside lamp with a decorated shade illuminating the room faintly with the colours of some nursery fable. ‘I don’t remember — you told me you were married to someone in the same business, in British Intelligence.’

‘No. None.’ I stood up. She was carrying some of the twins’ clothes and had started to put them away in a small chest of drawers.

‘Did you know about her from the beginning — I mean, that she was in the same business?’

‘No. I only found out in the end. Almost the very end. She’d been in the business as a colleague — and more — of a number of other men — in other organisations.’

Helen looked up at me — with compassion or derision, I couldn’t say in the darkness.

‘But don’t worry,’ I went on. ‘It didn’t matter by the time I found out. We were coming apart anyway. The usual things. Nothing exciting, like finding out she worked for the KGB. Nothing like that.’

‘I’d better change,’ she said, quickly finishing with the twins’ clothes. ‘Thank you for the story. Dinner’s quite soon. Help yourself to drinks downstairs if there’s no one about.’

She turned and left the nursery, loosening her blouse at the waist as she walked back along the corridor to her bedroom.

The KGB, she thought, closing the door of her room, opening her blouse, starting the zip on her skirt. At first she thought with alarm — has he found out? Does he know anything? What does he know? And then she realised that if he had discovered her it was because all the time she had somehow wanted him to, that she had unconsciously left a transparent area in herself for him to see through. She had — now she knew — from their first meeting trusted him, for himself alone and because of that other he personified.

‘The usual things. Nothing exciting — like finding out she worked for the KGB. Nothing like that.’ His pointed voice and look reminded her so much of her own confusions when she had found out about Graham’s involvement with the same organisation, when their few weeks in East Africa had started to go wrong.

… At the end of the safari we went back to the College of African Wildlife near Moshi, winding up the little road from the town through green coffee plantations and lush farms, with the mountain and its great collar of snow always in front of us, glistening through the tall green forest which covered its middle slopes. The air was crisp there, at ten thousand feet around the College, huge trees and bougainvillaea blowing their rusty purplish leaves over the basketball and squash courts — the place like a marvellous Swiss health resort in the fall.

He phoned Nairobi several times for messages just after we got back, and then we walked down the slope in front of the College across the rough football pitch. A group of students were at one end of it, jumping about a volley-ball net, jumping high in the evening.

‘I have to go back to Ethiopia,’ he said. ‘A project way down in the Awash Valley the office want me to check on before we go on to Uganda. A new cotton plantation — and the Russians are building a road. They’re making a small plane available to us, direct from Addis.’

‘… And the Russians are building a road.’ She remembered the phrase again, clearly from all the years, because it had been the first intimation of the awful knowledge which had come to her in those days — like the setting of a charge that was to explode under all their ease.

It was stiflingly hot after we landed on the cracked sandy soil of the Awash Valley and the Danakil all rushed out from their low grass huts to see us. The older men of the settlement stood a little apart, their women behind them, but the children — the child-brides toting babies on their backs and the boys — all clustered round the small plane in a frenzy. ‘They want to be the ones to guard it,’ the pilot said. ‘It’s a great privilege to guard the bird. It’s a bird to them, of course.’

Two Israeli members of the UN cotton-growing team met us; we drove back to their camp which they’d built beneath a glade of thorn trees by the river.

‘Until they finish the road, we’re two days from any civilisation out here,’ the project supervisor said. ‘We were the first Europeans many of these people had ever seen.’

The Chief Engineer of the Russian project — Leonid somebody — joined us for lunch in the tin shack, a small yet burly fair-haired man in shorts, a rather Aryan face, young-looking and high-spirited; he talked a lot in good English — talked too much, I thought, for an engineer: more like a teacher or an actor. And I thought half-way through the meal that there was something hidden and unexpressed in him just because he prattled so much.

That afternoon we drove with him to his road works, about five miles away upstream, where they were finishing the last stretch to the new agricultural settlement for the whole area.

With the heat at more than a hundred and twenty degrees, the billowing clouds of dust, the screeching roar of the huge graders and scrapers and trucks, the site was an impossible place for any sustained conversation. Yet I noticed that this was exactly what George and the Russian were doing, walking away from the rest of us, pointing out things to each other, their mouths moving rapidly in what must have been shouts, though we could hear nothing of it at all.

Of course it all looked so perfectly natural and appropriate — the two of them wandering off like that, dodging between the huge machines, dwarfs beside the ten-foot tyres: George had made the trip to do just this — get information about the road and the cotton crop. What was it that made me certain that he was getting quite a different sort of information altogether, that the two of them weren’t talking about gradients and gravel at all?

When we got back to the hotel in Addis that evening, we went to the mid-thirties cocktail bar, the Ritz, full of angular mirrors, wicker chairs and a smouldering eucalyptus fire in one corner. We got on to high cane stools by the counter and sipped lagers from tall glasses like a pair from an advertisement in an old Vogue magazine and started to talk.

‘You are an ass, Helen,’ George said calmly, kindly, still so much at ease, happy in the long hot day with lagers at the end of it, food and sleep yet to come. ‘The heat’s gone to your head. What on earth could I have been talking to that Russian about — if not his bloody road?’ He laughed.

‘You went to get some sort of message from him, instructions. That’s why we had to come all the way back here.’

‘Look, I had to go off with him you idiot. How else would I have found out about his work? It’s absolute nonsense — your “intuition”; your watching the two of us shouting and feeling “left out” and therefore there was something “clandestine” between us; that I’m a KGB agent. That’s the worst sort of woman’s magazine stuff. How on earth did you get hold of that idea?’

‘I felt it, that’s all. And you’re quite right to deny it. But not my feeling. That happened.’

‘Very well then, we’re both right. And I’m sorry. I accept your intuition; you must accept my facts. We’ve misunderstood each other, that’s all.’ He paused. ‘But Helen, what an extraordinary thing to think about me. I might just as well say that you were a Russian agent. It’s as likely.’

She heard a floorboard in the corridor creak, a long succession of knuckles breaking as the joists in the old house cooled after the heat of the day. A door opened and closed — one of the bedrooms along the passage. But she knew exactly which one — and knew at once: the Tree room looking out over the deformed chestnut on the front lawn. She recognised all the sounds in the old house, could put a name to them all and a reason behind each of them. She had at one time or other slept in all these bedrooms: the Tree room where he had been put for the weekend, the Boston room with her grandmother’s collection of rocking chairs, the Blue room — and all the others.

At different ages all along her life — and therefore, to herself, as quite a different person — she had stretched herself out all over the fabric of the house, and left a part of herself in each room, an amalgam of fact and memory, an animal secretion which could be followed now like a trail, a sure scent leading her to any part of her past which she chose to re-visit. The sound of a door slamming — any door — its particular resonance, could fill her suddenly with the unhappy essence of long-distance habitation in this shell — remind her at once of the demands, the drama and the disappointments of her childhood here. One door closing was in sure memory of her mother’s frustrated affection for her; the sound of another was an exact memorial to her father’s preoccupied indifference. She had never had any trouble in finding out where it had all begun — nor in knowing what a bore it all was, so much unnecessary enmity towards decent life.

She got undressed and ran a bath in the small room attached to their bedroom where the fittings had never been changed, the huge brass taps, golden, top heavy, the wash-basin grossly substantial like the bath itself. Yes, she had wanted a father, she thought, as she got into the sweet water, smiling. And had been given a mother instead.

She sank in the water, feeling the small buoyancy in her body each time she breathed, and thought then of that night in the thirties hotel in Addis, long after they’d gone to bed, when she had woken up suddenly from the deep sleep of sex, and looked across at George, and seen a man writhing, dreaming, talking — a man she’d never met.

Guy was by himself when I got downstairs, sitting in an armchair by the fire, his long legs stretched out like trip-wires across the sheepskin rug. He had dozed off in the heat. A book he’d been reading lay on the floor beside him. I could see the cover in the lamplight: White Savages by Ole Timbutu.

By then I had really given up surprise so I was able to say to him quite easily when he woke: ‘What’s the book?’ And he replied just as easily: ‘New novel about East Africa I brought up for the weekend. Rather like books about the place.’

‘Good?’

‘Not very. Haven’t got far but it’s too complicated. Don’t know who anyone is — sort of intellectual thriller. I prefer the straightforward stuff. Have you read The Day of the Jackal?’

‘No.’

Could he really be unaware of the real nature of the book, of the identity of the two main characters? I decided to say nothing about it.

He started to read from the blurb: ‘“… frighteningly recreates the obsessive quality of a jealous vision — an outsider’s view of other people’s happiness” … What on earth is that supposed to mean?’

It seemed to me that he was being intentionally obtuse. He stood up, a puzzled look on his thin face — all the signs of a mystified family man confronted with some psychological aberration totally unknown to him.

‘Drink? Over here — what would you like?’

We walked over to a table in the corner by the verandah windows. There was the Fleischmann’s gin again, I noticed. He poured out two deep measures and added a froth of White Rock tonic to each. Then he said quietly, fingering the long dark blue velvet curtains, pulling them gently across the darker night outside: ‘That’s why I bought the book, Marlow. East Africa first — but then I read that on the blurb. It’s funny — how one wants to talk about it. And besides you …’

‘I know.’

‘You’re right in the middle of it. Part of it.’

‘I’m not her lover. I told you. For God’s sake.’

‘You are in one way — the image of him. And therefore the reality is not impossible. You must see that.’

‘That’s a very long shot indeed. But — all right, tell me about it.’

We walked slowly round the large octagonal hall, drinks in our hands, as if the big room were a small warm garden and the fire a bonfire of old twigs and leaves at one end of it.

‘You were in prison. So you’ll know the feeling: you are inside and excluded; she is outside and included. You are looking on, powerless: you want to put her in the prison with you. That was really why you married her — to hold her completely supine, making your presence — your rather heartless presence — unique and indispensable to her. And when you begin to fail in this — as you will, for she is far from supine — when she begins to move away from you, back into life, then comes the other thing, the thing you really wanted, the punishment: you start to follow her with a magnifying glass, a telescope. Because if you can’t have her on your own narrow terms, you must see how she deals with other men on her terms: that’s what you really wanted all along — for her to make that move so that you could find out the exact emotional weight of her privacy with someone else; the precise shape of her fantasy and invention with him — conversationally, emotionally, sexually. Above all you must see; this is the obsession: you want to see her eyes, their shared regard. One must see exactly; nothing less will do — to map out precisely the free flow of all her imprecisions: capture her emotion. Then there is the release.’ I was astonished.

‘What was your prison — that brought you to all this?’

‘It’s usually failure, isn’t it? — a deep sense of that in oneself.’

‘Why? — since you aren’t. Not conventionally —’

But he didn’t answer, so caught was he in the excitement of his words — words, for that moment, exactly mirroring and releasing his obsession.

‘One wants to see someone else’s success, don’t you see? — where you have failed. If love is not mutual, then certainly the punishment will be. I know all that dreary business of destruction. It’s not as if I didn’t know what it was.’ He turned away — almost shouting, shaking, maddened like a rejected lover.

‘But you don’t know where it began — why it’s there? I’m sure a psychi —’

‘Of course he would,’ Guy came back vehemently. ‘He could tell me at once — what I know myself. And together we’d paper the whole thing over for a while with convenient friendly words. But how do you cure it? I don’t think you do. I don’t really think one can. And do you know why? Because you are not to be cured of your pleasure. One forgets that — that it isn’t finally a pain.’

‘Pleasure unto destruction, though, which is the same thing.’

‘The ideal combination, isn’t it? What I’ve been looking for all along.’

‘Of course — if you don’t want the help: there isn’t any. That’s an intellectual decision, I didn’t think you lacked that ability.’

‘I’ve made that decision many times — only to find it overridden.’

We both drank heavily from our glasses, both shaken now. I well understood his sense of incurability, the weight of guilt he carried from something far back: something he said he knew about. What was it?

‘What was it?’ I asked, the two of us passing the heavy double hall doors, drawing near the fire again. ‘Where do you drag up all this sense of failure from? As a child?’

‘I was happy then. Or reasonably. Never remember thinking myself unduly unhappy, anyway. No, it was marriage I think. Marrying the wrong person — or for the wrong reasons; both of us. Somebody else might have stood my failings better — or needed to depend on me more deeply; someone not so full of life — so many lives — as she is. You see, I was too taken with her ease of living, far too much, her natural capacity for everything now. I started to bear down on her for that — a net on a butterfly. I suppose I should have had a duller marriage, something cosy. I couldn’t understand her — her volatile — well, a sort of secret energy in her life, a sheer determination to be happy, to rise above. There always seemed something hidden in her happiness, some reason for it that wasn’t me, and which I had to find out about.’

‘And then you found it was another man?’

He nodded. ‘And still I wasn’t satisfied.’

‘There were others?’

‘None that I ever found out about. But by then one imagined there were. One always imagined there was something else with her — because one felt it: a thought, a secret, a man — it didn’t matter what. But whatever it was I never felt completely alone with her — you know, possessing each other fully. Always something between us.’

He hadn’t been wrecked entirely on the shoals of his own obsessions, I thought. He was right: there had always been ‘something’ between them: her Marxism, not just a lover — her politics which he pretended to be ignorant of. Yet, if he had read those African detective reports properly, how could he have been? — their political discussions about China and Nyerere’s autonomous communes. That was the thing that had surely destroyed their marriage as much as anything, which he must have known about, but wasn’t telling.

But what about her? With such beliefs why had she married him, why had she led him on, lied to him? Why take up with this pillar of the establishment, this man of property and capital? Why should a woman searching for revolution fall in with a man dedicated to preventing it — a British Intelligence officer? She must have had some guilt too and for the first time I felt sympathy for her husband. What had her marriage been for her? — a way of extracting secret information from him, a liaison of sheer political convenience?

Suddenly, for all her charming energy, her happy commitments to life, I found it easy to dislike her. And I did so for a moment, thought her a proper bitch, before I realised I might not be justified, that I didn’t really know. After all, why shouldn’t she have loved him to begin with, whatever the difference of their political beliefs? She had the capacity for love as well as social theory; why shouldn’t she be given the benefit of the doubt?

We had come back to the fire. He took a coloured spill from the mantelpiece, bent down and lit it from the smouldering logs. He didn’t smoke. She used them, with her long thin silver-ringed cigarettes.

‘In the beginning,’ I asked, ‘was it all right? What happened?’

‘Yes,’ he said slowly, calmer now, dousing the spill. ‘Oh, yes. Twelve years ago. My family were farming in Northern Rhodesia; in the beginning it was fine.’

‘What was she doing out there?’

‘Teaching. In an American Mission school in the Highlands. Quite near us.’

‘Mission school?’

‘Well, it was some Quaker foundation, actually. American-backed. No proselytising. Self-help, all that. She’d taken a degree at the American University in Beirut where her father worked. But she didn’t much like the school. She was just leaving when I met her.’

‘How?’

‘Horses.’ He laughed, a little quick, snorting laugh. ‘My parents ran a riding school as a sideline. She came to ride. It’s really too much, isn’t it? The Quaker girl, the mission school, a lot of piccaninnies; then the Big House, the young master, riding together — the colonial highlands, the huge skies, sundowners on cane chairs, flame trees over the verandah and a lot of decent old black retainers moving at the double. God, it had everything for Woman’s Own. Absolutely everything. But it worked.’ He stood up from the fire, his face and voice easier now, the light thin body of a man hopefully passing into a period of convalescence after a bad illness.

‘A romantic novel. That’s exactly what it was to begin with. And I suppose that was wrong too. We didn’t think. We didn’t have to. It was a perfectly mindless, completely happy time. All of it. And you know — I was wrong: it did work then — the reciprocal thing. There were no doubts. Once I understood her unhappiness she came to me completely. That’s very much part of the romantic thing too, isn’t it? — coming to someone in the rebound, finding each other through that.’

‘The rebound? I didn’t know.’

‘Another drink before they come down? I think that must be Harold.’ I heard a door open upstairs above the stairway; and then closing: a strange sound like a bellows sighing.

‘Yes,’ he said, as if he’d told me before. ‘Some student infatuation in Beirut. One of her professors. Nothing to it. He was much older. But one’s very hurt at that stage. Very easily. It means a lot. She’d gone and buried herself in Rhodesia. No — we were very happy. That fellow made us very happy — some Armenian-American: brought us together; she needed me then.’

He went to the drinks table again. And I thought, well, I’d been wrong about that: she hadn’t married him for any bad reason. She had loved him.

And then, thinking of this correspondence, and the weeks before in London in Graham’s apartment where I’d read it, I remembered briefly all the work I’d done at the same time on Graham’s dossier, his curriculum vitae, the reports and transcripts which Croxley and his men had extracted from him.

And something worried me in all this information I’d absorbed and partly forgotten, something which Guy had just now hinted at — some vital connection between his words and Graham’s file. What was it? Quaker girls, mission schools? No. Beirut? Yes, something there. And then I had it: some ‘Armenian-American’ she’d been infatuated with. Those words. That was it. And now it came back to me clearly, urgently, my stomach turning: George Graham had been recruited into the KGB in 1952 by Alexei Flitlianov — Croxley had told me all about him — the local Beirut Resident. And Flitlianov at the time had been ‘posing as an Armenian-American teaching at the American University’.

The chain was now suddenly clear, though the links weren’t; several years after Graham’s recruitment by Flitlianov Helen had had an affair with this same man in Beirut, and several more after that she had done the same thing with George Graham. But did all three know that this had happened?

The water was cooling in the big bath upstairs. Helen pushed the hot tap with her toes, moving her foot quickly away from the sudden trickle of very hot water, bending her knee upwards sharply, legs apart, twisting her body out of the way of the fiery current …

Twisting, dreaming, talking …

She had woken very early that morning in the hotel in Addis, sweating in the small double bed, and had looked across at George — thinking him awake too, for though he had his back towards her, he was writhing about, struggling restlessly. But when she leant over him, the sheet thrown away far down his body, she saw that his eyes were closed — tightly closed, with crow’s feet wrinkling away from them on either side. His face had the tense disappointment of someone trying not to cry: his normally relaxed body, his limbs which flowed so readily in any kind of movement, now seemed animated by some awkward, kicking demon. His hand came down searching for the sheet, trying to pull it up over him — to hide, to bury himself in it, legs drawn up all ready for the womb.

She took the sheet herself and drew it up over him gently, her hand touching his chest. But he pushed her away, struggling for some freedom from her, mumbling incoherently in a resentful tongue, words whose tone was both expiatory and guilty.

An anguish filled his sleeping mind that she had never come across before, transmitting itself to her urgently but indistinctly, a Mayday message from someone sinking far down over the horizon, the desperate intention lost in the static of a nightmare.

But she thought she knew what the message was. She had touched his real life with her words in the bar downstairs the previous evening, found his most secret place. She had been right. He was with Moscow.

She left the bed silently and turned on the tepid shower in the small cubicle at the end of the room. And then he woke turning quickly on his back and lying quite still after the torment of his sleep, propped up a little, arms arched behind his head, blinking at her in the shower, a happy form again in the early morning light, listening to the trickle of water on the tiles.

‘I thought it was raining. A shower,’ he said.

She smiled, feeling within her the hardening excitement of desire and sure reward, the same sense of imminent pleasure that she had felt at the Whitehall party after she’d first met him, seeing him walk across the room towards her, rescuing her from the Belafonte man from the Voice of Kenya Radio. And just as they had come together physically so quickly and easily after that, so she felt now a certainty that they could share each other in another way, a mental release as sharply pleasurable as the sexual.

‘I’m sweating,’ he said.

‘Were you dreaming? A nightmare? You were pushing and shoving about — possessed. I’ve never seen you like that.’

‘No. No dream I can remember.’ He looked at the sheets about him, rumpled and tossed in the shapes of an Arctic landscape, his knees rising steeply in the middle of it. ‘Just very hot for some reason.’

The water danced on her shoulders, catching the bottom of her hair, turning the ends of it into a lot of swimming black elvers trying to fall down her back in the rush of water.

‘You were killing yourself, darling. Because you won’t say. But you mustn’t. Because you can say. Now.’

‘What?’ He wiped his eyes, starting to move again restlessly in the bed. ‘What was I saying — was I talking in my sleep?’

‘Nothing I could follow. But I know. I’m sure I do.’

‘Not that again. Not the bloody Russian.’

She moved her head around the flow of water, letting it come over the front of her body, looking at him through the rain fall.

‘I work with them too.’

‘You have such fantasies.’ He relaxed again, taking the sheet up and flapping it several times, aerating the bed. ‘But go on then,’ he continued, amusing himself with the conspiracy. ‘Which Directorate of the KGB? Who is your control? — isn’t that what it’s called? — and what’s your target? And your poison pill when they get you — you’ve got that, I hope?’ He paused, looking at her happily, and then with annoyance when she didn’t reply. ‘What are you doing to me? What game are you trying to play? It’s bloody stupid.’

She dried herself at the end of the bed and then came forward, pushing down his knees, lying on top of him with the sheet between them.

‘Why a game?’ Then she considered her question, arching her body against his. ‘Well, a game in the sense that we shouldn’t get all dreary and upset about it.’ She didn’t kiss him. She wanted to look at him — every moment. So she let her face move gently with her body, coming to him with her eyes, then drifting away again.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this is quite crazy: if I did work for the Russians, your lying on top of me like this, quizzing me. That’s real Mata Hari. I wouldn’t tell you a word, would I?’

He touched her shoulder, then ran one finger down judiciously to the point of her breast as she leant away from him. The sun had burst on the window, a streak of gold across the curtain.

‘You don’t have to tell me. Let me tell you,’ she said.

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘You think I really have such fantasies — as that?’

‘No, funnily enough — you’re rather serious. That’s what worries me.’

‘You really think I’m a plant — from the other side?’

‘It’s not unknown — is it?’

She pushed herself up from him for an instant with one arm and pulled the sheet down from between them with the other.

‘And this is the seduction scene?’ he went on, looking at her with interest, with a calm surprise. ‘This is where I “tell all”.’

‘No. This is just the seduction scene.’

He was hard then beneath her, his skin damp and warm against hers, her body bruised with cold water. She touched him and it was hers — an object as freely available, as openly acknowledged as his index finger might have been. It had been like that from the beginning — always like that, making love, as easy as falling off a hundred logs together. They loved very openly, happy with every skill, without secrets or stress. And so, just as surely she thought, his other life could now be brought into the light with loving.

He put his finger on the tip of her nose, pushing it gently upwards. ‘I don’t believe it. You know I don’t. An all-American girl, bright wide face, long mouth, smile like a toothpaste —’

‘Advertisement — you bastard!’ She clutched his shoulders and moved onto him. There was soap there too, which had not all come away in the shower, so that he came into her without any effort.

‘Married to a Whitehall diplomat, too. You really expect me to believe you work for the Russians? You work for the British. You’ve been sent to seduce me. Well, I’m not telling. So there.’

She moved on him now, his head sliding down the pillow, his eyes closing, thinking.

‘You have no evidence. And I have no evidence,’ he said happily, turning his head away. ‘So what’s it all about? Want to play at being spies? Is that it? Some frustrated sense of adventure? All right, then, if that’s what you want — who recruited you, where?’

She pushed on him harder, more urgently. ‘The KGB Resident. In Beirut.’

‘When?’

‘1957.’

He opened his eyes, but didn’t turn round. She stopped moving. She was excited, close to the end.

‘What was his name?’

She lifted herself up from him and looked with fascination down along his body to where they were together, her hair falling damply on his shoulders.

‘Alexei Flitlianov,’ she said, her throat constricting, her stomach beginning to rise in her body. And then suddenly the tension broke far inside her, and she had to come — falling down on him, pushing him into her deeply and violently until her body seemed to turn inside out and tip upside down, a steep plunge that lasted for a long time and no time at all — there was no measure she could give to it, it was so full, so spinning, so draining.

‘Alexei Flitlianov.’ She said again, ‘Alexei —’ letting all the tension flow from her as the truth emerged, like a birth, so that the name rose up for her, a repeated affirmation, a new sound, a new life in the sunlit room, as sharp and real as the physical truth she had just experienced, and thus, so linked with it, something which could not now ever be doubted, or denied.

He turned round now, amazed, gripping her, head straining backwards, his whole body beginning to tremble against hers, arching himself, then coming — at last, she felt, responding to her truth, sharing her spirit.

But what he said surprised her.

‘Not him, surely. Surely not — no, no,’ as the long spasm died in him.

Then they lay together, absolutely still, without speaking, knowing the truth though they had spoken nothing of it yet, listening to the rising voices on the street outside, the porters and taxi drivers outside the hotel arguing on the new day, the clip-clop tympani of many hooves going to market.

At breakfast that morning, at a corner table over milky bitter coffee, the men clearing out the ashes of the eucalyptus fire in the Ritz Bar next door, he asked her in tired astonishment: ‘How did it all begin? Alexei Flitlianov and you? You of all people. What made you believe in this, in all this — that world. Moscow.’ He stopped, lost for a moment in the enormous implications. ‘In something people don’t really believe in any more.’

She started to tell him, shielding the morning sun from her eyes.

Harold Perkins drank three martinis quietly but quickly before dinner and by mid-way through the meal, his hand beginning to slide clumsily round his claret glass on the long polished dining table, he was studiously, carefully drunk.

It had been a beautifully laid table — English silver, red Bohemian glass finger-bowls, tall clear celery glasses, Waterford decanters, a big spreading vase of wildflowers in the middle. And to begin with Harold had presided over it all with happy regality. But now he was a small, beaten emperor, his white crew-cut head swaying low over the half-eaten remains of his food, delving into unhappy memory.

‘Marshall Aid gave us ideas above our station,’ he said with sad venom. ‘That was where it began — we couldn’t stop at the soup-kitchen, had to police the charity as well. Suddenly, there was a “moral responsibility” that went with the handouts. The next thing we were the defenders of the “Free World” and guns replaced the butter.’

He had been talking of the Middle East, of his life in Beirut, but now he had brought his frustrations into a global context.

‘You know, I’m not too old. But I’ve seen all I want to see — so I’m old that way — McCarthy, McCarran, Nixon and the rest. When you start to police the world there’s something rotten under the carpet at home. And so you have to have a moral justification to support your guilt — encourage hysterical grass-roots self-righteousness. And that brings out your witch hunters, and all the other two-bit men suddenly stricken by high principle, my God.’ He tailed off, wiping his chin.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Guy murmured. ‘Indeed.’

‘And as for your United Nations,’ Harold got onto his high horse again, looking hard at Guy. ‘That collection of … of … the underdeveloped world, indeed. What cheek!’

‘The less developed, we call it —’

‘Sitting on their asses in six hundred committees, singing while the world burns. Why in hell should they want our development? What’s it really done for us?’

‘Coffee?’ Helen stood up. Harold continued to browbeat Guy. ‘Yes,’ I said, getting up and following her into the kitchen. The housekeeper had disappeared, leaving the coffee cups on a tray and a big dishwasher warbling in the corner.

‘He lost his job you see,’ Helen said, quite suddenly, putting the kettle on, opening a fresh tin of Yuban Columbian Rich Blend, and sniffing it. ‘His opinions. Those ones. He was in Washington. An under-secretary in the State Department’s Middle East Bureau — Eisenhower’s first administration. A little Left in the thirties, communist friends then, though he was never in the party. But McCarthy got onto him, dragged it all up in a congressional committee; wanted him to name his friends. He took the Fifth, refused. And he was ruined, fired, kaput. No one here would give him another job — nothing in Washington, nothing academic. Finally, he got a post at the American University in Beirut and we all went out there. It wasn’t the money. He just wanted the work — the position to work for those opinions. He was no Communist, but he might just as well have been — he’d have suffered no more. He might as well have gone the whole way.’

She stood over the double sink, warming a big earthenware coffee pot under the tap, the busy domestic movements of a social woman, a hostess handling everything with supreme confidence — wrapping up her father’s political past as easily as she went about making coffee.

And I thought I saw it then: the beginning — or perhaps just the final confirmation — of her beliefs: she had taken up her father’s failure, fifteen years before in Beirut, and made a success of it. Senator McCarthy had ruined her father’s career, but made hers, delivering her into the hands of Moscow while attempting to save his country from the same scourge.

‘What an awful business,’ I said, trying to get through one of those moments when there is really nothing to say.

She turned. ‘Yes. You probably knew all about it anyway.’ The kettle boiled. She made the coffee, pouring the water straight over the warmed grounds. ‘Knew about me, about Father, about everything.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I feel it. Felt it all along. You know everything about Graham, you’ve taken him apart and put on all the bits and pieces yourself so you must know about me — how could you not?’

Suddenly she was slack, empty, the coffee brewing on the table between us, all the social energy gone, her face tired, troubled — the one where she put on experience and knowledge and was no longer an advertisement for success and innocence. ‘Why have I been pretending with you all this time? You must know, mustn’t you? And I’m tired, really tired.’

‘Know what?’

She was tired beyond anger, which would have been there otherwise. ‘Why don’t you tell them — your own people — and have them tell the Americans? Isn’t that your real job over here? — to check me out, to find all Graham’s contacts, the people he would have dealt with over here, who wouldn’t know what he looked like?’

‘And you’re one of them?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I thought you were just his mistress.’

‘Nothing more?’

‘Yes. I’ve begun to think something more. But you knew what he looked like — you couldn’t have been one of my contacts.’

‘I wasn’t supposed to know Graham at all. That was just sheer chance.’

‘You’re telling me you were an agent with him — you realise that? — with the KGB?’

‘You knew it,’ she said, gazing down at the coffee pot. Then she pulled her hair to either side of her ears and looked up at me, standing terribly straight, with an expression of royalty taking the salute on a parade ground. ‘Why carry on this farce, the pretence? You knew — either from Graham himself when they caught him in London, or some other way.’

‘Some other way. I told you, Graham never mentioned any women. I heard nothing about you in England. I explained all that to you as well.’

‘Yes, I believed you — that, and the fact that you wanted none of the whole business. It struck me all along — that you were some kind of fall-guy, forced into the whole thing.’

‘Maybe. But why do you tell me that you’re a KGB agent? That’s more important. Why not get hold of your Russian contacts here, and tell them about me: that I’m impersonating a KGB officer. They’d be interested in that.’

‘I don’t have any contacts here. That’s why.’

‘Funny kind of agent.’

‘Yes.’ She stopped dead, passing the ball to me.

‘Well, there you are — that’s just it: you’ve confirmed something I suspected. But there must be so much more —’

‘Oh, the CIA could get the rest out of me. No trouble, don’t you think?’

‘Exactly. So why tell me? Without any prompting. No agent ever does that. I’m on the other side, even as a fall-guy, you knew that. It doesn’t make sense. You trusted me. Why? That you never do in our business. Never.’

‘You trusted me, didn’t you? — not telling them, or Guy, about Graham and me. And saying nothing about the letters. It’s quite simple. And that meal we had — watching you — watching you eat as if it hadn’t been for years. Looking at you. Talking with you.’ Then she came back and leant over the table, looking at me carefully. ‘About Rip Van Winkle, and my marriage — remember? And Women’s Lib. And before lunch — drinking, that Pernod or whatever, munching olives. It was pretty easy to trust you. And even easier, remembering you were George Graham. And wanting him.’

I remembered Guy’s talk about how she had married him on the rebound. And it was the same with me, finding me that way as well. And I thought then that it was all too neat, too convenient: she’s only playing, pretending trust: she wants to find out more about me before telling her Russian contacts, before turning me over.

She took up the coffee tray. ‘I can see you don’t believe it all — you’re looking for the flaw. But there isn’t any. Not for us. There needn’t be because neither of us are playing that game — not involved in the big league. You’ve something else on your mind altogether and I’ve very little left to do now. So don’t you see? — if we trust each other we’ll both get out of it in one piece.’

‘Why — why that trust in me?’

‘We’re both more or less transparent to the other — don’t you see that? That’s why.’

I half saw … ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m no professional. But I know one thing about the business — they don’t let you out of it once you’re in. Least of all the KGB. Besides, to be with them in the first place, for them to have taken you on — you of all people — you must have believed in everything, hook, line and sinker. You surely don’t give all that up so easily — least of all just because your lover has disappeared. It couldn’t have been so weak a thing with you — so lightly to throw it away now.’

She moved towards the door. I could hear footsteps coming towards the kitchen. ‘We can talk,’ she said. ‘There’s the whole weekend.’ She left the room.

Yes, she thought, that night in bed, he was right: it was no weak thing and I cannot, will not lightly throw it all away. But I must get out of this — not lose the belief, but the hell of believing and not being able to live or share it any more.

Her two lives — political and emotional, both secret — now had no reality for her, were dead. With George, for more than six years, she had shared them both and could have lived that way well with him in the future. But there was no one now. He was gone. And her position with Alexei Flitlianov, whom she saw very rarely, was no more than that of post-mistress for his organisation, a safe repository for the letters that came to her private mailbox which she held under another name at Grand Central post office in New York — letters with envelopes inside which contained the coded names of the recruits for his clandestine agency within the KGB, in which George had been his principal overseas deputy.

She had been nowhere near the mailbox in New York since the day she’d met Graham’s double at the UN, for she had to assume the worst — that they had found out about this poste-restante address from Graham in London, which he had used in writing to her — and would be watching it now, waiting to see who picked the mail up. And she had no way of contacting Alexei in Moscow. That contact was always one-way — a marked envelope in the box which she then opened. There was no other contact — George had been her only unofficial connection with Flitlianov’s group, a connection which Alexei had never known about.

Thus she held the key, the master plan to the whole secret organisation within the KGB. And the group had now been penetrated by the British, of all people, and she was quite helpless to do anything about it, to warn anybody — for that had never been an expected part of her job since, apart from Alexei, she was never supposed to know the identity of anyone else involved in it. And she never would have done except for the chance of meeting Graham six years before in London.

Of course, she should never have confided in George Graham. They should have stayed just lovers. Why had love made her so sure — and so stupid? Alexei had left her, almost fifteen years before in Beirut, with clear instructions: tell no one, ever, of her position; do nothing, ever, which might draw attention to her real beliefs. If anything ever went wrong in picking up the letters from Alexei she would have to deal with it herself — she was never to try and contact him. He had told her quite clearly that afternoon nearly fifteen years ago when he had bought them both a little cigarette pipe and driven round the hills above Beirut — warned her that she would take no risk at all in the work she wanted to do other than one major risk: immediate and complete exposure which she would have no warning of if the KGB, or anyone else, discovered her poste-restante address. Did she realise that? Was she so sure she wanted the task? … Yes, she realised all that, she wanted the task.

She and Alexei had been talking on the way to Bhamdoun, circling up the hill roads from the coast, the car windows all wide open, gradually feeling the increasing sharpness of the spring air as they rose higher towards the mountains. Beirut had been damply hot with the onset of summer, people oppressed and sweating already at ten o’clock in the café on Hamra where they had met that morning in the city.

They drove for an hour and when they were high enough from the sea where the air was warm without damp or chill, and there was a sudden view down a small rocky valley — a ruined orchard, it seemed, of feathery scrub and old olive trees — they stopped, parking just off the road, and tried their cigarette pipes. They looked ridiculous smoking them — amateur comedians experimenting with a hopeless act — the long American cigarettes sticking up vertically about their eyebrows, shuddering up and down, their teeth chattering as they laughed.

‘It mustn’t be a strain for you. I’d hate that,’ he’d said later.

‘Hate to be saddled with me, you mean — the object of a hopeless longing?’ She laughed. ‘No. Not that. We’ve talked that out, haven’t we? You’re older — one foot in the grave — that’s the only difference.’

‘It’s quite a lot. Not just fifteen years; a totally different past — and a different future.’

‘We talked that one out too. We agreed on that: just to have now.’

He threw the cigarette away and just sucked the pipe, examining the minute bowl carefully. ‘You have it all so well organised in your mind, Helen. You set all your feelings out so clearly — like things on a tray — all in order. As if you were older than I was, had lived it all, and found just these few really valuable things — got rid of all the rest — the bad feelings, disappointment, being hurt. I’ve always been amazed by the clarity of your vision.’

‘You’ve just an old-fashioned idea about women, that’s all — you old Georgian peasant. I’m not orderly for want of feeling for you either, Alexei, or to prevent feelings for you. Don’t think that.’

‘No. No — I know that.’ He paused, looking at her carefully instead of at the pipe. ‘It makes me frightened of leaving you that’s all, that’s what worries me. Missing your temperament. It’s something very important to me, your balance — yet your full love: the uncomplicated way you express your feelings, yet the depths you show as well but never talk about. One wants that all one’s life — passion and the reason. One wants the same thing politically, after all.’

She looked at his unbalanced face and thought how much his lack of symmetry appealed to her: the chipped front tooth, hair dark, even slightly coarse at the top, fine and going white at the sides, the eyes set a bit too close and too deep, the long arms a little too long and the torso a little too short. And she thought: we do not love human perfection. Have we come to that simply through long disappointment? Or is it a quality in our nature, a natural truth, an essential factor in the preservation of the world? And if so, why should we hold out such hopes for any political ideal? Why should she? As an antidote to human failure — hers as a child, and her father’s now — searching for an outside order, like a child ruminating in a huge candy shop craving the satisfaction of all that ordered sweetness. Yes, that had been the original impetus in her case, however much she had rationalised her beliefs afterwards. She might just as well have taken to God and all the hands of Providence, she thought.

In the shape of her father humanity had dropped her once. Thus she expected — indeed could only love — imperfection and failure there. But politically, in retaliation for all unsuccessful nature, she wished for the moon. Yet fulfilment in that quarter would have frightened her as something quite unnatural. So she was secretly pleased at Alexei’s pessimism now, which confirmed her natural experience, and at the same time disgusted at her pleasure.

They went a little way down the valley towards the minute vision of sea, pushing through the dry underbrush beneath the old trees, slipping on loose stones, frightening salamanders, treading on clumps of lemon thyme, running their nails along the stalks of other herbs as they passed, collecting dry balls of leaves, a pungent pot-pourri, pushed up into the palm of their hands as if by machine as they moved along, which they smelt before throwing them away behind them.

And it was a bit of one of these leaves, thrown over his shoulder, that caught her in the eye, and his hands smelt incredible as he looked for it, the skin dry and the ribs on his fingers a little coarse like fine sandpaper.

The hands of care about her face, without invitation or suggestion. They had not come here to do that. They had come out for the day to walk and talk and look — two ordinary people, she thought, ordinarily involved in the most casual pursuits, not bent on any sexual gratification, not grasping for emotional success. All that they knew they possessed in any case. And even though time was running out that did not matter either. Didn’t matter today, now — or not yet she wondered? Well yes, it might matter a little. And she would get over it. For surely there was that balance, that complete understanding between them that must include a palliative against any real future hardship?

Yet now he had said he was going to miss something — her, it, everything … It seemed a contradiction of all the terms in their association. Now he was setting up loss, the hurt — assembling the bridges that she had never thought to cross, suggesting pain, and therefore creating a future that had never existed before — a time of empty, unhappy consideration and memory for both of them. It annoyed her.

She said, angrily, ‘Why tempt me — tempt yourself — with a future between us, Alexei, sad or happy? Why do that with talk of missing me?’

And she was surprised at the small, measured anger of his return: ‘You can easily think of now — there’s lots of it for you, even if it wasn’t a quality you possessed so fully anyway — living now, with reason, curiosity, passion, all that. But perhaps without too much reflection, the need for hope. And we need both: ironic reflection as well as the singing and dancing.’

‘Listen, what sort of hope can you suggest for us? If you had, I would have thought about it, I can tell you. Shall we go and live in Moscow? Or back in the States? Or anywhere — I don’t mind. But there isn’t that hope; there never was.’

They had come suddenly, for the first time together, to that stage of telling things in love — putting it into too many words, justifying it, commenting, trying to commemorate it in speech and not in deed — the time when one feels the first intimations of losing it and tries to save it by punishing the other.

Pain rose from somewhere strange inside her and blew up in her mind, a bitter explosion, and with it came a world of violent needs, an uncontrollable desire to demean their whole shared experience, to cut it all down to size and turn it into nothing more than a prolonged one-night stand.

‘Words, you have the words, Alexei — all as neatly arranged as you said my feelings were. And just because you put it into words you think it’s all explained — and therefore all over and all right. You’ve justified yourself — but not me, not my feelings. I can’t argue myself into that kind of happy goodbye anymore — I could, but not now, now you’re more or less saying it: “Cheerio, and toodleloo, and goodbye and wasn’t it wonderful? Absolutely great. Oh yes, and we shouldn’t worry about anything else, no, not at all, absolutely nothing. Because it’s been great — and hasn’t it been great in bed too? Hasn’t it? Smashing.” And that’s all there ever really was — all we really wanted: the now business and doing it first thing in the morning as well. And thanks very much and we can both of us reflect on it ironically afterwards. “Ironic reflection” — that’s just what I needed, that makes it all absolutely wonderful. But I can’t fucking well reflect on it all ironically. Not now.’

‘I didn’t say any of that, Helen. I said I’d miss your future — that’s what I said.’

‘That’s what kills me — because I’d never seen us missing each other until you mentioned it.’

Tears came, unnoticed, her face angled from him, her vision clouding, a sense of warm water perfectly composed about her eyeballs, supporting them easily with a salty buoyancy, which might at any moment collapse.

‘What you’re angry at, Helen, is my loving you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I know the feeling, how much easier without that, with just the fun and the affectionate thing between us. And not the tense business under it all. I know that: the wasting sense when you’re thought of, not with me, which isn’t a feeling to live at all comfortably with, which is always pushing you to all sorts of desperation, which is not loving but more destroying, so that you would do anything to turn the tap off — but can’t. You’re sorry for that, Helen — those sort of feelings in each of us that we don’t talk about because there isn’t a future in it. I know. All we can do is live it now, and not think about it too much. And that’s marvellous. But it’s also very little.’

And she didn’t feel like crying then. The tears had drained away while he talked without ever falling, leaving her eyes tender and ticklish and dry. And she could look at him now, and she did quite easily, and without any more anger. And she said, ‘Where shall we have our picnic?’

9

The sign above the side door of the liquor store at the end of the single village street of Stonestead said ‘Rooms — Vacancies’. But the door was locked, so Alexei Flitlianov came round to the front, stepped up onto the small verandah that gave out onto the hot tarmac, and came into the shop. There was no one there either.

It was hot in the small quiet room — full of a long afternoon’s heat — with the quick ‘flap-flap-flap’ of tyres on huge trucks as they passed over the soft tar every few minutes outside. But outside there had been a breeze and on it now, coming from an open doorway that led to the back of the building, he smelt meat burning, the air singed with fat falling on charcoal, a dry smoky breath that he could almost taste in his mouth as it flowed through the room and out of the mosquito-wired front door.

A woman appeared in the corridor, passing from the kitchen to the garden, wiping her hands vigorously on a meat-stained apron. But she saw him. She was a small, delicate, spinsterish, shy-looking lady with glasses, wearing very new coloured plimsolls. Yes, she had a room: $2.50 by the night, or $14.00 the week. He took it for two nights, paying in advance.

‘Put your car out back,’ she said, not at all shy. ‘Down the side. There’s a lot at the end.’

‘Grigorian,’ he said, though he’d not been asked to sign anything and she seemed quite incurious about him. ‘Mr Grigorian. I’m from overseas. Come to look up some of my relatives round here.’

‘Oh yes? Not a name I’ve heard round these parts. But we’re new here. Only a couple of years. They’ll most ways know in the store down the street.’

She showed him up to his room.

He had followed the Jacksons and the Englishman up from New York that same afternoon, an hour behind them, in a hired Avis, for he’d known exactly where they were going — to the house at Belmont. He’d seen Helen and the children with their summer gear piling into the car outside their apartment in the East Fifties and had followed them down Second Avenue to the UN building where she’d picked up her husband and the other man outside the staff entrance.

He’d been nowhere near her mailbox at Grand Central post office, of course, and had sent nothing to it. Nor could he risk telephoning her — the phone would surely be tapped — for she was almost certainly being followed by someone else from the CIA or British Intelligence, as well as by Graham’s double, so that any direct approach to her in New York had been out of the question too. The only chance of making a safe contact with her, he felt, was in the wilds of the country, in the house upstate which she’d talked to him about in the past, where there was plenty of cover, where she went riding, where he might get a message to her and where there was a fair chance that any secondary surveillance might be dropped for the weekend. In any case, in those open spaces, he could see who might be following her — besides the other man, which he could not do in New York.

The other man — the man the British had put in Graham’s shoes. How had he got onto Helen, he wondered? Simply through her poste-restante address in New York? They’d got that information out of Graham in London of course, watched the mailbox and seen her pick something up from it quite recently, then followed her back home and identified her. The man couldn’t have found her any other way. And now they’d be looking for all that coded information which she possessed, were closing in for it. Where did she keep it? Whatever happened he would have to get that correspondence first.

But the other man — he, him, the unknown rather uncertain-looking Englishman wearing Graham’s clothes he’d followed all across the Atlantic — there was something strange there, beyond the man’s impersonation, which worried him. How had Helen become so immediately friendly with him? How had he picked up with her so soon, so easily, so conveniently?

He remembered the long lunch the two of them had had together in the Norman restaurant on the West Side and the street accident afterwards where he’d nearly been caught with the other man who’d been trailing her — a long meal of close chatter within a few days of meeting the woman. Was it all just sheer chance — or had the man some other personal or previous relationship with her? And in any case why had the British chosen the same man to replace Graham with and to follow her? Sheer administrative convenience perhaps? He could think of no other reason.

He unpacked his small suitcase, looked over the new Zeiss pocket binoculars, cleaned the lenses gently, and then found the little pipe at the bottom of the bag. Without thinking he put a cigarette into it and smoked it that way for the first time in fifteen years. He looked at the tiny piece of wood, the yellow bakelite stem, the minute cherry bowl, the ridiculous angle of the cigarette, the curling smoke. And he remembered briefly — a very mild memory with nothing harsh in it — the first time he’d smoked it. He remembered being in Beirut simply a man with her and not a KGB agent — the pipe was full of all that, so much easier a life, when a person had obsessed him and not an idea. And the temptation there’d been to follow that emotion through and not the dry toil of political theory. Of course with her he might have had both, the first nurturing the second — the salami curling in the sunshine of that olive-filled valley and the long haul of revolutionary change. But that would have all have had to take place in the West, as a defector, as an academic somewhere perhaps, as an outsider in any case, as one of so many dispossessed Marxists, intellectual agitators whose work could never be more than a frustrating, masturbatory itch, an idealistic commentary or forecast on a movement which you had to be inside ever to influence. A man thinking as he did, at the very centre of the KGB, was worth a hundred hopeful books from sympathisers in the West.

And so he had stayed in Russia — and left her outside in the world for other men to have lunch with, and long talks in small Norman restaurants on the West Side.

What had they talked about? He wished his long training could have told him what — that his profession as spy could have done this one thing for him, more important than all the other things at that moment: the words, the tone of voice, the angle of her face, the statements and hesitations — the tempting magic of two people at the start of even the most casual relationship; the unique stance they will take towards each other — the spoken thought, and the unspoken one behind that; the present fact between them; the next one already forming, jointly proposed, immediately agreed upon and defined, and the limitless variety of future moments. That was what lunch with her had been like in Beirut — the meetings in the early days. And he realised that he was thinking of Helen and this other man as potential lovers, not as quarry and hound. Or old lovers? — the thought suddenly struck him. He sensed — or did he imagine? — this extremity of familiarity between them, thought he saw in their behaviour the beginning of something, or the happy renewal of an old habit.

10

In London that Saturday morning Harper had come in specially for a meeting with McCoy in their Holborn office — an empty glass honeycomb, shot through from wall to wall with bright July sunshine, Mid-East espionage and Navy Recruitment both closed down for the weekend. The duty security officer let them into McCoy’s office on the eighth floor in the northern wing and a smell of sun-warmed disinfectant greeted them, a disgusting mixture of synthetic lavender and carbolic.

McCoy studied the text of the message which had come up overnight from Government Communications HQ in Cheltenham, rustling the flimsy but heavily typed orange paper, the letters pierced through to the other side like Braille.

‘Well, Marlow’s had nearly two months — and no joy.’ He looked up at Harper, passing him the message. ‘Nothing. No approach to him. And no approach to the mailbox at Grand Central. And nothing sent to the box either. We’ve no idea who the person is who’s getting all this stuff — the names of all these people. They must be onto us. Someone’s seen through Marlow.’

‘Of course we don’t know how often these communications take place,’ Harper said seriously, trying to give his hope weight. ‘Or how often the letters are picked up. They may let it pile up — or the recipient may be away.’

‘It’s no good, Harper. Something should have come through that mailbox by now. It’s the only dead-letter drop for this KGB internal security division in America. There must have been messages to send. That’s what Graham was going to do in the States after all — be given a batch of names from that box and check their security out.’

‘Well, we know it’s a woman.’ Harper pressed his optimism. ‘The Post Office authorities in New York told us that. It was a woman who rented out the box in the first place.’

‘Yes, three years ago. And the clerk fellow had no exact memory of what she looked like.’

‘Said she was American, quite young and pretty.’

‘Even in America there are quite a few women who fit that description.’ McCoy was sour and depressed. His scheme was falling apart, the trail had died, the CIA would soon cease to collaborate with them on it, and he didn’t want that. He wanted something to take out of it all, even if only the smell of success which he could waft in the faces of his superiors. And Harper knew this. McCoy’s vanity was really the only card he held.

So he said, ‘We’ve not had Marlow on it long enough surely? You were more than eight weeks before you pulled in Graham.’

‘Exactly — and no one contacted him either.’

‘Can’t always hurry these things.’

‘I know that. But we’ve lost this hand. I feel it. We’ve got all the information we’re going to get on this KGB secret security service — from Graham himself. Special Branch are still working on him. Perhaps they’ll get some more from him. We might as well leave it at that.’

‘Why? After all there’s no urgency, no deadline. Marlow appears quite happy — why not leave him there for the moment? And we’re not paying for him after all — the UN is. And the twenty-four-hour surveillance on that mailbox is costing very little. And there’s one other thing: I don’t think this fellow Jackson has run Marlow as well as he might, not got enough out of him. I’d like to talk to Marlow. You see I’m sure that this KGB Security Officer — this “stayer” in New York — must have sounded Marlow out already. Someone in the UN maybe — she must have made some sort of tentative approach to him, either socially or professionally, and Marlow’s thought nothing of it, not seen the approach as at all important. And Jackson is not trained as an interrogation officer. He doesn’t know the right lines with him, how to run back through each and every person Marlow’s met since he arrived in New York, Probably has his mind on his next posting. Moving to Cheltenham isn’t he in August? Some new course in communications there.’

‘Yes. He said something about that. Couldn’t go on liaising with Marlow.’

‘I think I’d find something out if I spoke to him. I’m sure I would. I feel it —’

‘I feel you won’t. The trail’s dead. They’ve packed up.’ Harper’s spiel had been frustrated at its climax and he was annoyed. But he showed nothing. The humps and hollows, the switchbacks of skin about his pockmarked face remained quite stationary. Had he been pressing too hard? He tried the opposite approach as a last chance.

‘Maybe you’re right. Just thought we might rescue something from it all. But it’s too long a shot, I agree. Not worth it,’ he said, crossing his fingers in his mind. He got up and looked out the side window onto Red Lion Street. Then Harper’s stomach turned and he smiled as he heard McCoy say: ‘Well — perhaps. Yes. Yes — if you like, why not try it, Harper? Last chance for a feather in our caps.’

And they agreed then and there that Harper should leave for New York on the following day.

‘Thank you, sir,’ Harper said as they left the office, blowing their noses against the fearful smell. ‘I think I may find this woman — “American, quite young and pretty.” I think I will.’ And he really hoped he would, for Moscow wanted nothing less.

‘I hope you do, Harper — for all our sakes,’ McCoy added, looking at him very carefully. And he really hoped he would, smelling once more the chance of his own sweet success.

Without noticing it — they never had — the two men walked past the Hepworth abstract in the forecourt and out into the warm sunlight, both deep in thought as to how each might deceive and trap the other.

11

‘Yes, take him riding, Helen.’ Guy Jackson got up and went to the dining-room window, sipping his coffee. Hair too neatly brushed, in a polka-dot Skula dressing-gown, framed in the grand casements, he had the air of someone testing for the part Cary Grant got in the original High Society, There was something insincere in his suggestion. He looked out over the terraces of sloping lawn, past the meadow to the trees and mountains rising beyond, with too eager an expression, as if contemplating a bed and not a landscape. ‘We can swim later. Or take a picnic lunch to Flatrock.’

The twins were in the kitchen, being fed by the housekeeper. Harold Perkins had not appeared for breakfast — no reasons offered, and none needed.

‘But I don’t ride. I’ve never ridden,’ I said, lying. I’d been round the pyramids several times years before — the sand made it easy falling — and as a child I’d been thrown twice by an old pony, suddenly come young again, passing other horses on the road. ‘Well, I’ve fallen off more times than I’ve ridden,’ I added.

But it was no use. Guy wanted me off riding with her, getting his generous obsessions to work again first thing, gathering fodder for his morning fantasies. By lunch time, no doubt, he’d have organised some other little scheme for our exciting togetherness and his absent delectation.

The stables and other yard buildings were quite a distance down from the side of the house, behind a big patch of chestnut trees with a grand arched gateway leading into them. There were two big bay hunters which we looked at, eighteen hands or whatever, fierce in the eye and quite frisky too, one of them bowing and pawing the ground ominously. And I said at once, there and then, that I wouldn’t think of riding either of them. Suicidal.

‘No. Not these ones. There’s another horse over the way, an old thing that barely moves. You’ll be all right.’

Helen hadn’t gone in for the riding garb, I was glad to see — the dreadful black boots and jodhpurs business, the whip and saucy cap: just in Levis and a shirt, as I was myself. But she was very professional about all the rest of the mysterious business — testing the girths, adjusting bridles, dispensing with martingales.

My horse indeed was quite an old thing, with a downy sheen of white the length of its nose, something like a small Shire cart-horse with tufty hair round its hooves and the melancholy expression of a seasoned drinker. But it had a powerful-looking rump and was in no way decrepit. I was prepared to believe in its age but not therefore in any serious mechanical failure — slightly less horsepower, simply, by comparison with Helen’s super charger.

But there was no way out now — Guy’s ridiculous idea had become a fact with the groom busying himself with my stirrups, Helen telling me how to sit, and Guy himself pondering the whole scene with silent approval. What a bore his fantasies were, I thought — a dangerous bore; nothing so funny as horseplay — as horseplay with death.

And yet there was a feeling of sharp enjoyment — getting up on the beast and sitting in the saddle before anything happened, smelling the saddle-soaped leather and the damp cheesy smell of horse, my head ten feet up looking straight at the low gutters of the stable, the smooth crown of Guy’s head, and finding Helen parallel to me, the two of us suddenly in a quite unexpected position, strangely suspended above the ground. And I’d have been perfectly happy to have stayed that way and just walked round the yard for a bit and then got off and gone home. But of course that wasn’t the idea at all, and off we went, out the archway and along the back drive that led through neatly planted maples and old elms down towards the farm.

And this part was easy enough, and happy, at walking pace beside the other horse, on the sure surface, the morning air coming on my face, marvellously cool and lively, an element as clear and constant as water — and looking up at the very high skies with great white clouds that reduced the proportions of everything on the land — land that was wilderness and blue hills in front of us, and to our right Hereford cattle, the dairy and barns made to seem like models from a child’s farm kit. Birds started from the hedge, some of them so brightly coloured with red wings, and one with a scarlet tail, that I feared the horses might bolt.

It was magnificent, untouched country, rich in foliage, colour, form — rampant in everything. It was as if a classic English parkland had exploded and run wild over a thousand acres: a world unfound, it seemed, where people had not come.

I said, ‘Guy seems terribly concerned to get us off alone together.’

‘Yes — pimping for me. One of his problems.’

My horse was falling behind. ‘What do you do to make it go faster?’

‘Kick it — gently.’

I kicked. Nothing happened. She looked back. ‘Harder.’

I kicked it harder. Nothing.

‘Knows you don’t know how to ride. They sense it at once.’

‘Thanks.’

She reined in, waiting for me.

‘Isn’t that rather uncomfortable?’ I asked.

‘What? You’ve got to sit up straight, not slouch. Keep your knees in line with your toes.’

‘No, I meant the pimping.’

‘Yes. But there’s always got to be something in someone, hasn’t there? — some flaw. Better to have it in the open. He really does it quite openly. That’s something.’

She looked over at me, questioningly, perfectly upright yet relaxed, as if I was the only person now who was hiding anything. And of course that was true. She pressed the advantage.

‘How is your work going? Think you’ll be able to finish it and get back home?’

‘No. Nothing’s happened.’

‘We agreed — you remember, in Central Park — to work together so that both of us might get out of this business: “in one piece” you said — you with your work done and me with — I don’t know what now. Have you forgotten? That’s what I was saying last night too. Don’t let the reins slack — hold them firmly, hands just above the withers.’

We moved off the back drive towards the hills to the north along a narrow, heavily overgrown lane, a rutted old cart track with rotten branches and sometimes whole tree-trunks fallen along our path, and elders and a great deal of tangle from other trees above us.

‘No, I remember.’ I sighed mentally. The fine day seemed less good and the air was dank and almost wintery and rotten-smelling in the covered laneway. ‘You want a progress report, you and the KGB. For me to hand you on a plate all my stupid arrangements. That’s ridiculous.’

She bent away from a large briar, then held it back for me as I passed. Her shirt was dotted with some kind of greenfly and they must have got into her hair too for she started to scratch her head. ‘Look, you could have gone back to New York last night and told your people about me,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t. And nor will I. I promise — even if I had someone to tell.’

Well, why not this conspiracy as good as any, I thought? Just she and I. I knew a great deal about her now — and felt no more need to tell them about it in London than I had at the beginning when I’d read her letters. And as for her betraying me — that was a hurdle of trust I had to take blindly or not at all. I didn’t go on her looks or her words. They meant very little in the decision. It was a matter of simple choice on my part and nothing else, a gamble one way or the other — something for life or against it.

So I told her. And it was quite easy once I started — very easy, really, telling this second woman all about myself. I suppose I must have a penchant for that sort of confidence.

I told her about Durham jail, coming to London, being forced into Graham’s shoes and being packed off to New York to wait for the contact, the ‘stayer’ with the names of suspect KGB agents — told her the whole thing, and it sounded a wonderfully stupid charade in the telling.

‘Graham was going to set up a KGB satellite circle over here — part of their internal security division,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s what you’re in too? You’re the “stayer” surely?’

‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘You’ve got all the qualifications they told me to expect — someone quite unexpected, outside all the usual grubby circles, not active in any way, just a post-box, with practically unbreakable cover: Manhattan socialite, yet Marxist — that’s all you.’

‘It’s not. I’m not your contact. I promise.’

‘No.’ And I believed her words and her face then. ‘No, I suppose not. That would be too easy — you could give me the names I need then, couldn’t you, and I could go home with them and get a medal.’

‘I’ve nothing to do with that KGB security circle.’

‘But Graham had. And you were linked with him — and don’t tell me you neither of you knew the other was in the KGB.’

Either her face was colouring or the green light was getting darker. She didn’t answer my point and I let it be. The answer was obvious: her silence confirmed it. Instead she asked, ‘And Graham — what will they do with him?’

‘If no one contacts me they’ll try him and put him away — and use him as a future bargaining counter with Moscow if one of our men gets picked up there. That’s what they usually do.’

‘That’s what you call my “getting out in one piece” is it?’

‘What do you expect? I’m amazed you’re still here — that they didn’t manage to get your name from him in the first place. They seem to have got everything else out of him.’

So he was gone — dead for her now, and she knew it at last, without doubts any more. And I thought her face showed some relief in this knowledge finally accepted, so that the tense expectancy in her expression that had hovered there from the beginning disappeared and the lines in her face became moulded in a calm way, like a child asleep after a long and boisterous party. She got off her horse and led it round a dead trunk, which had fallen diagonally along our path. I did the same. And now there was a lot of dead timber in front of us, whitened where it faced the air in jagged ribs, and covered in moss and deep grass underfoot. We picked our way along the ruined path, leading the horses through the olive light.

‘Where does this lead to?’

‘Edge of the national park — there’s a good ride there.’

Something cracked in the thick underbrush to our left.

‘Deer,’ she said. ‘Or something.’ She was thinking of something else, still picking at the greenflies.

‘Not bears, I hope. People are always getting munched up by grizzlies out here aren’t they?’

‘In Yellowstone. Not the Catskills. Why don’t you run? I would.’

‘I’d thought of that. But I want to live for a change. In the world, drinking the wine. Not scurrying about or locked up. Surely you’ve got some names you could give me — just a few suspect KGB fellows? Then I could take home the bacon and spend the rest of my life in the Cumberland Hotel.’

Her face woke up a little — first with surprise, and then, seeing my smile, with one of her own: a little wan, it’s true — but she was trying.

‘Listen, what are you called? I never thought —’

‘Marlow, Peter —’

‘Well, listen, Peter, I’ve not told you everything. I can’t. But it’s nothing to do with your job, I promise, no danger to you —’

‘Don’t worry.’ I was suddenly angry at her reticence after my own confession. ‘I know — it’s to do with Graham. And with his boss in Moscow. The man who recruited him in Beirut: Alexei Flitlianov, isn’t it? Because you were in Beirut when he was, just after Graham had been there. And that makes three of you. And you’re all linked in some way — isn’t that it? — and it’s not to do with this KGB internal security organisation, is it? Or so you say. Then what is it? You tell me.’

She stopped the horse and looked at me wildly. If she’d had a stick with her I’m sure she’d have come at me with it.

‘Come on. Don’t make a scene. It’s the holy hour, time for confession. Why not do it properly?’

‘The British knew all along, then — about the three of us?’

‘No. They can’t have linked you with any of this. They’d have told me. I got it from Guy last night — an infatuation you had with a professor in Beirut — an “Armenian-American” he said. Well, of course, that was Flitlianov’s cover then. They got that out of Graham. I knew that. I just put the two together.’

‘And what else have you put together?’ Her horse started to nibble at her elbow. She pushed it away.

‘Well, since you ask —’ We were getting dramatic, but I didn’t want it that way, so I changed course. ‘No, I’m sorry. But he knows about you and George Graham too.’

‘Christ. Just that we were together — or the political thing as well?’

‘Both, I think. He had a lot of private eyes out after the two of you on that trip you had together in East Africa. And here in New York.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘So he says. And I think it’s true. I saw one of them that day we had a meal on the West Side. From a detective agency here. Not a government man. But Guy said not to tell you, so you’d better forget all about it. He’s stopped it now.’

She was shaking in the green chill, the sun no more than an odd bright dazzle between the leaves. We had no coats. I put my hands high up on both her arms and pressed them together, and then shook her body gently, as though rubbing a fire stick.

‘But how can he know this — and not tell your people in London? He works for them after all.’

‘Yes — but you’re his wife. It’s quite natural isn’t it? He doesn’t want to turn you in. It would ruin his own career too — quite apart from whatever he feels for you.’

‘I’ll take your first suggestion. And it’s not altogether natural; he feels for me — in this way: you with your arms round me. That’s the only way he feels for me.’

‘Yes. He told me all about that too. You shouldn’t be too hard on him —’

Another stick snapped somewhere behind us. ‘Think he’s out after us here as well?’ I asked. ‘With a spyglass, foaming at the mouth?’

She laughed then, and came for a moment completely in my arms. But without anything else. There was no need in us for that — thinking more about what all three of us had lost rather than what we two might gain. We had no freedom to come into our own, both of us still tied to others, half-way through a puzzle, living with ignorance as much as insight.

‘I wonder why we haven’t both been picked up long ago,’ I said, ‘with everyone knowing so much.’

‘I don’t think we’ve started knowing,’ she said. But her horse seemed restless over something, dipping his head and pricking his cars and smelling the dank air, so we moved on.

Alexei Flitlianov had been some distance behind them all the while, moving parallel to the lane through the thick bushes and scrub that bordered it. Twice he’d stumbled on hidden branches and stopped, the horses’ hoof beats disappearing into the sunlit green silence ahead of him. But he wasn’t too worried. There were animals about, chipmunks and squirrels and others he couldn’t see, making odd starts and forays, crackling the undergrowth just as he had done. Besides, in the few glimpses he’d had of the couple he’d seen how completely preoccupied they were with each other, deep in talk, quite unsuspecting.

They’d dismounted and finally stopped, and he’d been a little above them then, on a slight rise over the lane, and he’d been able to watch them for a minute with his binoculars through a gap in the trees — watched him hold her first, shaking her a little, and then the two of them together in each other’s arms.

Their words were lost to him, just odd murmurs, but the message was clear enough: she had taken up with this plant from British Intelligence just as he had suspected — some sort of affair, old or new he didn’t know. But did she know what the man’s real job was? That was the point. And if she knew who he was, that he was no UN pen-pusher, what had she told him? When you were close to someone like that, he thought wearily, you told them everything — didn’t you?

Or did you? Perhaps she wasn’t attached to him in that way at all. Perhaps it was nothing more for her than a casual liaison, run to a weekend, scratching a sexual itch. Yet she wasn’t like that. Or hadn’t been. He was annoyed and uncertain.

Had she betrayed him or not? — that was what it all boiled down to.

And because he had so clearly seen them close together in the attitudes of potential infidelity — to her husband in one way and to him in another — he found himself believing that she had told the man everything, that the years had been too long for her, exposed and isolated, and that her faith in him and all his doings had waned or died.

And he knew so well how that could happen — nothing dramatic, no overnight recantation, but a gradual erosion through absence from the centre of things: not an end of belief necessarily, but a terrible weakness in it through too long and empty a familiarity with the creed. A woman, he knew, with a failing marriage, may take up something illicit and passionate with another man for a while, and love him perfectly, and so regain, and even find a fuller love for her husband when she returns to him. But, in his politics, once you had left you could not come back again to any stronger or more appropriate belief. There was no return ticket to Moscow. And so he saw in their acts at the end of his binoculars the breaking-out of individual happiness and the dissolution of a political ideal. And most people would have said that was fair enough; the two things couldn’t go together; it was a hopeless task to try and link them, and he had simply been very lucky once. But now he saw how every ideal begins and ends in the realisation of eccentric self-will.

He watched them disappear from the space in the trees, saw their heads bobbing up and down among the leaves further along the lane. They were like a cigarette commercial, he thought: happy but dangerous.

Helen was riding ten yards ahead of me as we reached the end of the dark lane. We could see open rising country beyond, a heath with lines of elm and big blocks of forest higher up. And her horse saw all the pleasant invitation too. The big powerful animal had been constrained too long. And she couldn’t hold him properly when he reared and made for this delightful vision of space and pace. And my own horse followed it, its rear legs stuttering for a moment as they found a grip. And then it lunged forward, veering awkwardly to one side as it stepped in one of the ruts. And I was off its back then, like a shot, as cleanly as a champagne cork, and into the ditch at the end of the lane. I hit the bushes and seemed to keep on falling into them, deeper and deeper into the moist grass, my head and shoulder hitting something on the way. And then the piercing shot of pain, that was painful and nauseating at the same instant, so that my mouth was open and retching as the stars burst in my eyes.

After a minute, I suppose, lying there invisible and insensible, my head cleared and I tried to move. And I was surprised that I could — propping myself up into a kneeling position, my head just above the undergrowth.

And then I saw the man, on the far side of the lane just out of the bushes, about fifty yards back, in a green anorak and faded slacks and field boots looking down past me onto the heath with a pair of binoculars. I couldn’t see much of the face under a canvas hat, just something of white hair over the ears and deep-set eyes. I ducked back into the grass as he moved forward slightly to get a better view down onto the heath. And when I looked up again he was gone.

I didn’t tell Helen when she came back for me. I felt some obscure need to possess a secret myself, as a bargaining counter to hers perhaps — for she’d not told me everything yet. And I wanted time to think. Had I seen the man somewhere before? I thought perhaps I had. And what possible agency, or combination of agencies, private or national, did he represent? Perhaps he was just someone working on Perkins’ estate or a National Park warden. But his covert behaviour made this seem unlikely — and Guy had said he’d paid off his Peeping Toms. So who was he?

And I was suddenly very angry at this endless hide and seek. And that must have had a lot to do with my drinking too much at lunch when we got back to the house. First it had been a medicinal brandy, but with the taste in my mouth and the pain in my shoulder melting, I found a psychological easement in the same and other beverages. And Harold Perkins was a willing ally, taking up again over the long dining-table his own liquid crusade against the failure of all right thinking in the world. A liquid lunch and I liked it. And I liked him, the old open man beaten before his time. And I thought: the hell with them — Mr and Mrs Jackson and all their crooked past and knavish tricks. And the hell with their bloody horses as well. I was truculent and I liked that too.

‘Can we play in the rooms?’ the twins asked later that afternoon when we’d got back from a picnic at somewhere called Flatrock, a small steeply wooded canyon on the estate several miles away, where a river flooded through a gorge and there was a railed promontory high above it. Their hair and macs were still wet from the spirals of haze that had come over them as they’d played in the fine spume.

‘Can they, Father?’ Helen asked. She spoke as if these rooms were his toys.

‘A little late isn’t it? But it’s OK by me if you go with them.’

‘Let’s get you dried first. And a bath. Then come on up in your dressing-gowns for a bit before you go to bed. Martha?’ She turned to the housekeeper standing by the kitchen door. ‘Will you look after them and bring them up?’ And then to me: ‘Like to see them?’

‘Yes. Show him the rooms, Helen,’ Guy put in quickly, always the perfect host, generously self-seeking.

‘Rooms?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Rooms. But curious.’

And they were. They were up in the long attic of the house, built in under the eaves — an extraordinary adult fantasy, a child’s dream. There was a miniature cobbled street down the middle, with sidewalks, gas lamps and a dog cart at one end. Along either side were a short row of New York brownstone houses with steps up to the four-feet-high front doors. Inside the rooms were not built to the same scale, each side of the street making up the lower floor of one complete house — with a drawing-room, nursery and kitchen, all perfectly furnished to scale in the late Victorian period — a velvet-covered and tasselled chaise longue, rocking chairs, a minute Persian carpet, an upright satinwood piano in the drawing-room, a child’s cot, a high feeding-chair; oleographs of Little Red Riding Hood in the nursery, and a kitchen equipped with a miniature coal stove, tongs, poker, a brass grocer’s balance and a line of little pots and pans, each one bigger than the next, hanging from a dresser, with a series of painted wooden plates above, depicting the life and times of a family of rabbits: a Mrs Twiggy Winkles’ kitchen — the whole mood close to Beatrix Potter, yet twenty years before her time.

‘Grandfather had the place built for his children. Got the idea from the dwarf family — the Kellys — in Barnum’s Circus. They had something of the same thing as part of their act.’

Helen bent down and got into one of the houses — the lights were on in the rooms already — and I climbed into the one opposite. The ceilings inside were about five feet high. She opened the street window and waved.

‘Hi!’

I opened mine.

‘Hello,’ I said less easily. The scale of everything was very strange and unsettling: neither dolls’ houses nor real ones. And I felt neither adult nor child myself but a trespasser of a quite indefinite age and nature. Someone, built appropriately and almost certainly malevolent — a dwarf — would at any moment, I felt, come through the little hall door and ask me to get out of his house. It was the confusion of Alice after the magic potion, when she grew bigger instead of smaller in the rooms of Wonderland.

Helen disappeared from the window opposite and the little piano began to tinkle: Boys and Girls come out to play …

Then she stopped and reappeared at the window, her face very bright and young looking. I crouched by the chaise longue in my parlour, a cumbersome Victorian Lothario.

‘The thing I like best is the street,’ she said. ‘More than the houses.’

I looked out of my window, past the dog-cart on the cobbles, the attic wall at the far end where the rows of brownstones disappeared in a painted perspective. She put the lights out in the rooms and turned the street lights on and we both looked out of our windows. And now I could see the curved metal girders of a bridge on the skyline in the distance, past ghostly four-wheelers and horse trams.

‘Brooklyn Bridge,’ she said. ‘They’d just finished it. One Christmas I remember we put salt all over the street and holy garlands on the doors and had a party up here with the windows frosted and lit up. And I liked best being out on the street and looking up at the bridge and in through the windows. Especially that for some reason. Being outside, not in.’

‘Hardly as a result of a deprived childhood,’ I said in the soft darkness, the place smelling of old candle wax and long-warmed pine from the rafters above us. ‘This and the tree house on the lawn.’ The very front part of her face — eyes, nose and mouth — were just visible in the faint light: a huge ghost in the middle of the small, perfectly proportioned window frame. I looked up at the street again. ‘And that’s not exactly the expected road to Moscow. I find all that difficult to follow.’

‘That was later. You’d have found it easy enough to follow then.’

‘You remember wanting to look in; not to be inside?’

‘Yes. That’s what I felt — outside my parents, outside all their concerns, the real life that mattered.’

‘Should get a little couch up here and a miniature trick cyclist and open a clinic.’

‘Trick cyclist?’

‘Psychiatrist.’

We had both learnt to laugh together now in this magic settlement under the eaves, drawn by its conceits, as children after the Pied Piper, into the inventions of a happy childishness. But how could it last? We were so obviously not fitted for that world, tall people in dolls’ houses — simply eavesdropping on that music. So I said, as the water suddenly started to rumble in the cisterns for the children’s bath downstairs, ‘It worries me. All three of us here held together in a cat’s cradle. All knowing — but not all knowing together: each of us having a better reason than the other for keeping quiet: you won’t tell the KGB about me, because you’ve got something else more important to do. Guy won’t tell because he somehow thrives on the exciting secrecy of it all. And I won’t tell my people —’

‘Why?’ She sat down on the floor of the front room, leaning on the window sill. ‘It’s not really because you trust me.’

‘The British have fucked me about for far too long. That’s the main reason why. And I feel safer with your secrets than with theirs. But what I want to know is how long do all these pieces of string stay up? How long before someone outside this triangle steps in and cuts it to pieces? Because, we’re not living all this out in a vacuum; there are others — and they don’t share our manners. And Guy — how long to go there? He’s living on hot bricks. He won’t tell them in London about you and Graham — all that he knows about you — the politics as well. Yet of course he should. They’ll put him away for ten years if they ever find out he knew about that. And then he has this running sore with you, this obsessive thing. And that’s explosive. All the more so, since I’m here now, filling Graham’s role.’

‘But you haven’t.’

‘Exactly. And that’s the danger. He’s pushing it all the time. It’s the potential that attracts in these circumstances; not the reality. That kills the obsession.’

‘You mean we should climb into bed together in front of him. And then live in peace?’

‘No. I meant that Guy is the loose end between us. Whatever we have to complete he may —’

‘Screw it up?’

I thought for a second that it was Helen who had spoken. And I looked across to her. But she was looking the other way. And then I saw Guy.

He was standing in the shadows at the end of the street, at the far end of the attic just above the stairway, towering over the first of the gas lamps, a tall leggy figure changed now incongruously into his pin-stripe suit for dinner, a distinguished monster making an entry in some horror movie.

And now Helen turned on him in a vicious way, a ruthless manner I’d not seen in her before, poking her head out of the window and hitting him with words, bitter accents, a loathing that seemed far too strong for the little houses, a fury that would split them open like an earthquake. All the years of her marriage seemed to explode inside her now — the first words a gaudy rocket signalling the start of a violent carnival.

‘Bastard. Motherfucker. Aren’t you? Say so, for God’s sake. No life of my own — without you. Anywhere. Always creeping up behind me — looking, listening, peeping. Trying to run my life for me — what I should do, and think, and who I should meet. All the time, forever. And all over Africa too. Even there, I hear. In a million miles of space you still have to live off me like a vegetable. Everywhere. And now in the attic. It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? — all along. Getting us up here somewhere quiet so you could spy on us. All right then: I can do it here with him now, right now here in front of you — that’s what you want. And maybe then you’ll leave me in peace and go away.’

She had lost control, taking command instead of a terrible flirtatious anger, imperious and wanton — her face sparkling, a bright offering, looking at me with an absolutely determined desire. She stood up in the little room, began to unbutton her blouse and take off her skirt.

‘For God’s sake, Helen, stop it,’ I shouted across the road above the noise of the cistern. Guy had come forward now. ‘You’re mad,’ he. said. ‘I simply came up to join you both.’ He knelt down on the sidewalk so that he could look in the window and try to calm her. She bent down to meet him with her blouse half open and hit him on the face — two, three times. He took it and then hit her back just as hard. I tried to get out of my house to separate them but it wasn’t easy with the small door opening inwards, my pocket catching on it, and by the time I was out on the street they were at it hammer and tongs. Or rather poker. She had picked up the small metal poker that went with the drawing-room grate and was trying to get at him with it through the window, the two of them playing Punch and Judy. But Guy had leant back now and the bludgeon flayed wildly in the air in front of his nose.

Then she stopped. It was the moment for collapse or tears. But neither came from her. Instead she put the poker down and looked at the two of us bitterly: Anna Magnani at the end of a barney with her lover — blouse awry, hair tossed about, red weals rising on her cheeks. But they were not acting. This was terribly real — and quite ludicrous in the miniature setting. But they neither of them seemed in the least aware of this last point — the two of them shaking, still locked in the horrific surprise of their acts, contemplating their violence now, unfulfilled by it, wondering how to extend it in word or deed so that each, if it were possible, could part satisfied having killed the other.

‘You’ve owned me for too long, Guy,’ she said, making his name an insult not an appelation. ‘I’ll do what I want, wherever, with whoever’

He laughed without humour. ‘You’ve always done that, Helen. Think of something new. This is certainly a waste of time — I told you, I just came up the stairs. I’d no idea —’

She aimed to hit him again.

‘Look, not this — stop it,’ I said. But they weren’t listening. I had come to that country in a marriage where an outsider, no matter how understanding or sympathetic, has no visa and where he can really only do the inhabitants a disservice with advice, where his papers of entry can only be forged. The bitter conflicts, the blame or lack of praise, together with the many decencies and times of real happiness in a long association — all this is usually an impossible count for the participants to add up and come to any mutual understanding over. For an outsider it is a vast impenetrable algebraic display only a fraction of which he can begin to equate. The rest, though he may think otherwise, is mere guesswork.

Yet how much I had wanted to know it all — all Helen’s various and previous lives that Guy had just spoken of: that passionate curiosity of hers that had dispossessed him, given him the sickness of a leper, an outcast — forever looking in through windows. And yes, she had once done just the same thing — felt bitterly excluded from her family. But because of this she had come to look out on all the world while he, his obsessions far gone and lost to optimism, had come only to look in on her. They could never meet again now in any fair balance, I thought, he trying so hard to find her and she fleeing from him — lost to each other in a dreadful game of mental hide and seek.

‘It’s your life, Helen,’ Guy went on in a reasonable tone. He could afford it. He was in the driver’s seat for the moment. ‘Has been for years. I’ve had little to do with it. I’ve told you — settle up about the children and leave any time you want. I don’t own you. That’s terribly obvious. And, yes, I tried to. But that’s over. You wanted it once, remember? But for a long time you’ve wanted both — security and freedom. And we’ve not had the patience or the temperament to manage both, have we? But you’ll have to choose now.’

‘You’ve spied on me,’ she said with wide eyes, staring at him, pouring an intense hatred into him, ‘and had your fill. And now I can go, can I? I’ve performed for you, fulfilled your dirty fantasies. And now I can just fuck off? Well I won’t. This is my house, our house. The fucking off is for you, Guy. Not me.’

‘Is it? You really think so? Use your head, Helen. Reason. Or you won’t survive anything. This will be the last of your nine lives. I am the “loose end” between you two. It’s not just our marriage we’re talking about or the children: it’s our separate professions. Don’t forget that.’

‘Blackmailer as well as voyeur.’

‘And you’re a promiscuous cheat, Helen. And a traitor.’

She was terribly pained, as if an all-absorbing illness had reached a terminal stage in her; and his frail reason was foundering on the tide of a returning jealous mania — the two of them gouging out the carcase of the other, knowing exactly where the maggots lay.

‘You knew all about her politics?’ I put in, trying to divert them, sitting down on the steps of my brownstone. ‘Why didn’t you ever say anything about it?’

‘All the rope I needed to hang myself, that’s why,’ Helen said. ‘That would have been the final thrill for him: seeing me put away for ten years — the climax of his joyous punishment.’

‘I would have gone as well,’ Guy laughed, edging back into calmer water.

‘Why should you?’ I asked.

‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I’d never have wanted to see you in prison. Never. You forget that, Helen — there was always love enough for that. And it’s not blackmail. I want to see us all out of this safely, if it’s possible. That’s why you must reason, Helen, not fight. It’s not just us. There are others.’

‘Fine,’ she said, still fighting. ‘And all these years you’ve just sat and watched me — me and the real George Graham. And never told me. That was very reasonable, wasn’t it?’

‘What else? I should have told my department about your political affiliations with Graham? Or simply stopped you sleeping with him? I couldn’t do either.’

‘You got pleasure in doing neither. That’s what I can’t stand. You lower everything, make everything stink.’

‘Of course you were so fine with your infidelities, weren’t you? Perfectly marvellous. It was such a good, proud thing, wasn’t it? — deceiving me. And your country. You had it both ways, of course, didn’t you? There was idealism too — sucking him off for the good of the party.’

I listened to them, tearing each other apart, both right and both wrong, both stamping the seals of irretrievable failure viciously on their marriage.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Graham at the time?’ he added. ‘Who knows, but we might easily have sorted things out, when it was beginning. When it was all beginning.’

‘That would have hurt you. And I didn’t want to. I had love enough for that then too.’

‘You had so much of it. The loaves and fishes — for a multitude. The Miracle-Worker you are. With men. But not with me.’

‘You fell down a hole in yourself a long time ago.’

‘“Do it. But don’t tell me about it.” That’s what you wanted me to say, was it?’ he asked.

‘No. I just wish you’d taken a proper look at the world. Had been an ordinary man instead of playing the feudal Lord with a chastity belt.’

‘Ordinary men just let their wives sleep around, do they? I hadn’t heard.’

‘No, but they grow up. They get to see themselves as not being unique and indispensable. Because women aren’t. And can’t be made that way.’

‘The lecture is too late, Helen. I might have made it before, sharing you around —’

‘— Instead of making me into an exhibition —’

‘But I don’t think I would have done. That’s the pity. But there you are. A bad flaw.’

‘You thought the two of us would look at each other for ever — no other world but ours. No growth, no change, no decay?’

‘No, Helen. But that was the direction.’

‘What idealism! What perfection! A touch of the poet there, not the spy.’

‘What’s the point, Helen?’ I said, angry now myself. ‘You don’t have to make a book and print the hurt —’

‘She will,’ Guy said, a hopeless edge coming into his voice. ‘She will. The bitch is on wheels now.’

He wanted properly to commemorate the pain too, I realised now — make this last scene a very good one, a final climax worthy of all the gradual hurt that had gone before. They had worn each other slowly away over the years, two acids dripping on the other’s ego. Now they were pouring it straight from the bottle.

The two of them paused for a moment — a moment’s half-time. And in the pause we heard the twins shouting, happy and strident and splashy, in the bath on the floor beneath us, their excited cries barging into the angry silence of the attic. Helen came out of the little doorway, straightening her skirt and blouse. Then she started up again, a skilful player getting the ball off straight away in the second half.

‘Could you really have thought that — that I was to be your little woman forever — houseproud and bound: a showpiece in the Ideal Marriage Exhibition? That I was to live in your hand and mind, for ever and ever, Amen; by courtesy of you, and you alone, and nobody else? all absorbed — in your absorptions? My thoughts just the left-overs of yours? My life just a satellite round you? — living in the gate lodge of your grand estate: you set me up in your world with such certainty didn’t you, Guy? — like a museum piece. “Please do not touch. Only one owner” — trying to keep me and sell me at the same time. You couldn’t bear my happiness. But really all I wanted was something apart from you a little, something quite my own — to be recognised by others, to recognise myself. And instead of liking this, and being happy for my happiness, you got a lot of men to spy on me, so that you could destroy me, kill the person who’d escaped, the good thing I’d become.

‘You possessed me all right in the end, Guy — to extinction. You ate your way right through me — the old me. And there’s nothing left now but another me, a different person altogether. And I’m here in front of you. And that you won’t touch, Guy, not a bit of it, not a morsel.’

Guy walked slowly up to the end of the little street, passing above the miniature gas lamps, until he was a shadow against the shadows of Brooklyn Bridge. He cackled, a dry, throaty rattle, like a pantomime ogre. Then he cleared his throat nervously, and spoke carefully but without any feeling, a judge trying to pronounce on impossibly conflicting claims.

‘All that, Helen — all that’s true. One truth. Yours, Helen. I have some truths as well. But you’ve forgotten those, if you ever really knew them.’

It was strange, I thought, how they had both taken to using each other’s Christian names so carefully, as though they were impeccable footnote references guaranteeing the truth of the text — as the only way, every other link broken, of ensuring that these painful messages found their target. Apart from their names they were strangers meeting in this children’s street. And worse: ‘Guy’ and ‘Helen’ designated wraiths without a body. Yet ghosts from a past in which both had once filled the other’s skin happily and exclusively. And that bounty had passed into, and out of, these very shapes in front of me; a chemical experiment that had started so well had ended disastrously. And I was appalled at this, quickly, looking at these two parcels of flesh, still thinking, and alive and therefore beautiful — something queasy coming into my own gut as I thought about it — that these good flavours of a shared life together had so completely leaked out of two otherwise perfectly made forms, nothing remaining but a wilful cruelty. I felt suddenly that there was no luck in human beings anywhere, that there was something quite shocking hidden in the original mould.

‘Look,’ I said, standing up and putting my hand on the roof of the brownstone, ‘What does it matter. We have to understand now, not yesterday. And Guy does. He’s here and has heard —’

‘“Promiscuous cheat and traitor” indeed,’ Helen interrupted. ‘It was simply living a life that you denied me —’

‘Is that it? Going off with other men behind my back and working for the Russians — I denied you that? Well why shouldn’t I?’

‘All right — I’m a whore and a traitor,’ Helen said quietly. ‘Okay. But it wasn’t like that at all.’

‘Of course not — all for the purest motives: the great God Lenin and so it was perfectly all right for you to hop into bed with the whole communist party if you wanted.’ Guy smiled, almost laughed. ‘It’s laughable. Farcical. No one would believe it. And to suggest that I drove you to it — well, that’s just cloud-cuckoo land. What are you doing for them anyway? Not pumping me, as I remember. So what else? Sleeping round with diplomats, colleagues of mine? You’re not trained for much else, are you?’

‘You’re not going to know.’

‘Has she told you?’ Guy turned to me. ‘Or are you really working for the KGB as well?’

‘No. And I’m not.’

‘Think she’s the person we’re looking for by any chance? “The stayer”?’

‘No. She says not. And I believe her.’ I looked over at Helen. Her face was taut and creased, all the easy curves gone, showing her age at last in the dull light. The beaten look of a slave up for auction. She was frightened — frightened of losing. And it did look bad against her.

‘You’ve told her, have you, about what you’re here for, who you are?’

‘There seemed no point not to. She knew from the beginning I wasn’t George Graham.’

‘That’s wonderful. Now she just tells her KGB contacts here all about it — if she hasn’t done it already. And that’s the end — of you particularly.’

‘She says she isn’t going to. She has some other work to do. She’s not interested.’

‘And you believe her? Do you know anything about the KGB? They don’t hire that kind of charity, I can assure you.’

‘Yes, I do believe her. And it is wonderful, isn’t it? Our business is all a lot of silly nonsense anyway — and it’s a good thing that two of us at least seem to realise that — that the personal commitment is far more important. And you’re in it too, Guy. You knew about her — and you didn’t tell.’

‘I don’t put much store by us three against the Russian, British and American intelligence services.’

‘Why not? — if we do keep our mouths shut. That’s the last thing they can expect — trust in such circumstances. So now that each of us knows all about the other why don’t we all get on with our various jobs? And live our lives. And maybe one day we can just do the living and throw the other rot over — the dark glasses game. Any other ideas?’ I looked at both of them.

‘It’s crazy,’ Guy said. ‘Mad.’

‘Why? Any alternative is going to mean a long time down for all of us. And that’s not fun. I know.’

But Guy wasn’t convinced. ‘Crazy.’ He repeated the word to himself, walking up and down between us. ‘Mad.’

Yet he must have seen that mine was the only course — we had to trust each other. But I felt something else was worrying him — something still on his mind, unexpressed and therefore dangerous. But of course there were so many things that could go wrong, even with trust, and I supposed he must just be thinking of this.

A moment later the twins charged up the narrow stairway in dressing-gowns, two blond-fringed round faces exploding with excitement. They ran along the cobbled street between us towards their father shouting.

‘Daddy! Play us the fiddle, will you? Will you do that dance with us? Will he, Ma?’ They turned towards her. ‘And you do the piano — please! Let’s do that, can’t we? Yes! The Flibbertygibbit — that one. Can’t we?’

They jumped into our bitter atmosphere and made it plain and sweet in a moment: an irrepressible demand for now, a stinging comment on the folly of our ways — if proof were needed, I thought. All such thoughts: the inventions of a happy childishness. And how dull we three were — infantile unliving adults: what fatuous toils we were engaged in, what sour intellects and dry ideals, flesh withering on three old sticks.

Guy opened a small fiddle case that had been stored among the rafters. Helen was persuaded back to the piano in the miniature drawing-room. And then the two children and their father began to hop about the street with strange bouncy steps to a scratchy jig. It was something the family had obviously worked up before, steps of their own invention, awkward and unbalanced, from no book of the dance, yet polished in their own way, and well remembered: an almost tuneless music, yet a perfectly shared harmony, unique to these four people — a family now quite without dissidence, generations firmly locked, the drawbridge up, secure in their own imaginative country, distant from me, inhabiting themselves properly at last.

It was a strange dance indeed, formal yet artless — the children holding hands, circling their father, bending their knees, stammering on their feet, then jumping a little in the air: some sort of familial rite from a lost civilisation discovered in a series of mysterious, angular drawings in a temple fresco. There was an extraordinary sense of propriety about it, of an essential but undiscovered meaning — an overwhelming reason in the movements that escaped all my grammar. It was something in code, the communication of a tribe, an urgent celebration of survival.

They bounced on like mechanical toys, silhouetted against the gas lights, shadows against Brooklyn bridge — Guy the Pied Piper in the pin-stripe suit, no longer distraught and monstrous but a composed, deeply intent figure, fingers darting about the strings of the funny tune; Helen invisible but there precisely on the dot, hitting all the right notes between the fiddle. Where are we, I thought? And what on earth have we all been talking about? And I felt, looking at their unfathomable gyrations, that perhaps all of us were going to have some luck after all.

12

Harper arrived at the East Side air terminal off 42nd Street in New York, sour and grimy after the long flight from London. He took a cab to the Hilton on West 53rd, and signed in. His room was 2057. He didn’t bother to unpack or wash, just took his shaving things with him in his pocket, came down two flights on the stairs, then walked towards the lift banks. A maid came towards him with a trolley of linen just as he came to room 1819. He had to double back after she had gone, slapping his pockets as if he’d forgotten something. The door was unlocked. He went in through the narrow hall. Andrei Popovich was lying back, feet up on the big bed, watching Ronald Coleman in Random Harvest on a big TV set.

The two men watched the film for a moment without saying anything, both apparently engrossed in the drama as if they’d been together in the room all afternoon. Then Harper looked up at the ceiling questioningly, cupping a hand over one ear. Popovich got up, nodding his head. He spoke to Harper very quietly, a whisper almost completely drowned in the noise from the TV. ‘Yes. There’s a Russian agricultural delegation buying wheat on the 30th floor. But I’ll tell you about it. Come into the bathroom.’

‘I’ve got to shave anyway,’ Harper said. Popovich went ahead of him into the cubicle, ran the bath taps gently and after that the wash-basin. Harper got his kit out, took off his shirt, doused his face, and started to work up a good lather.

Andrei Popovich was a small, dapper man, in the bottom part of a tightly fitting navy blue synthetic fibre suit; a firm, broad-boned, high-cheeked, Slavonic face; fiftyish, but looking younger with dark sparse hair standing up a little and then running straight back — thin strands with a lot of empty space underneath so that you could quite clearly see most of his scalp: compact, sure of himself, yet without any air of command or superiority — he was like an accountant at the back of a board meeting who knows the company figures better than any of the directors and will quite soon be taking over from them. The eyes were faint blue and very steady — the nose, chin and everything else about him neatly and inconspicuously formed. He looked entirely the busy, anonymous Russian bureaucrat which he was — one of half a dozen attachés at the New York Consulate.

In his communication with Harper, though, he displayed one individual trait — the sense of a mother conducting a good-humoured game with a fretful child, a playful femininity, which Harper, who had dealt with him before, disliked considerably. He might have been flirting with him, Harper thought, but he could never be sure, for Popovich was never blunt about it. It was a gossamer-thin quality in the Russian — this knowing sensuousness — a hint like very faint perfume in the air: a twinkle in the blue eyes, a sudden gentle but unexpected movement, a minute roll of the lips, a quick softness in his perfect English pronunciation. And it kept Harper uneasy with him whenever they had met. The man swelled with a quality of secret, ultimate knowledge — easily borne, temptingly hinted at to favourites, potentially dangerous. And Harper could never decide if there were any sexual overtones in these marks of a hidden character, or if, as was quite logical, they were simply the fruit of his position as the most senior KGB officer in America.

‘Good,’ Popovich said firmly, watching Harper intently as he started to shave. ‘Good, good.’

Harper looked at him curiously in the mirror. ‘Good what?’ he asked above the soft rush of bath water. Popovich was standing very close to him now, hardly two feet away from his face, so that his voice could be heard. But was that the only reason for his proximity, Harper wondered?

‘Everything is good. But we must not rush it.’

‘Where is he then?’ Harper finished lathering his beard. But Popovich delayed. He kept looking at Harper, smiling.

‘Flitlianov? Or your man Marlow?’ he said at length. ‘They are both upstate in New York at this moment. Our men are there. They are both together.’

‘Together?’

Again Popovich paused, twinkling. ‘No, not together. In the same place.’

Harper frowned, and turned with his razor to consider a suitable route through his stubbled pock-marks. ‘And what about the letter drop in Grand Central?’ he asked. ‘Anything there. The woman? Have you any lead on her?’

‘We have her too. She is there as well. All three of them,’ Popovich said neatly.

‘Christ!’ Harper turned half-way through a scrape. ‘The three of them. I needn’t have bothered to come then. Are you sure it’s the right woman?’

‘Yes. As soon as Flitlianov followed them up to the country last Friday. Why else would he go? And he’s been tailing her before.’

‘What woman? Who?’

‘Mrs Jackson.’

‘Mrs who?’ Harper stopped everything.

‘The wife of your SIS liaison officer here — Guy Jackson.’

‘No.’ Harper showed an awful dismay through the white streaks of lather.

‘Yes, yes, Harper. We’ve checked her out. She lived in Beirut when Flitlianov was there in the mid-fifties. And of course George Graham was there before that. It all fits. That mail, the names we want, must be somewhere up in their house in the country. Mrs Jackson is the end of the letter drop all right.’

Harper felt real disappointment. His own plans for getting Marlow to New York had been quite incidental to the main action, he realised now. He was redundant: of course Guy Jackson had been useless — the contact with Marlow which they had wanted him to pin-point had been his wife.

‘It’s all over then,’ Harper said, thinking of Holborn again, and failure, and McCoy. ‘You just wait till she hands the stuff over to Flitlianov. And take him. It’s all over really.’

‘Just beginning, I think, Harper. No despair,’ he said, smiling softly. ‘Starting — just starting.’ He repeated the word, as though encouraging a child to resume a game he’s lost interest in. Then he opened the top of Harper’s after-shave lotion and smelt it. ‘Good. Very nice,’ he said solicitously.

‘How? It’s all wrapped up. Apart from Jackson,’ Harper said petulantly. ‘Jackson’s a whole new script. I’d never have thought he was working for the KGB — or her.’

‘He’s not,’ Popovich said, putting a dab of the undistinguished pine cologne on his finger tips. ‘That’s where it begins: Guy Jackson is working for the Americans, the CIA.’

Harper had just finished shaving and now he turned and looked at Popovich angrily. ‘May I?’ He took his lotion back and put it on the shelf without using it. ‘Thanks — well, that’ll be your affair, won’t it. I can start packing again.’

‘Don’t be difficult, Harper.’ Popovich was suddenly very calm, staring at him. Then he relaxed, his serious message received and understood. ‘You’ll be needed. I want you to know all about it. We’ll need you back in England. I’ll tell you: there are two points here, both connected, and you’ll be able to help, you’ll be very necessary indeed, when the time comes. One — we’ve no idea whereabouts these papers she has are hidden. And no idea when or how she’ll hand them over. It’s all sheer chance there. Open to any bad luck. Very difficult. And secondly, Guy Jackson; he’s been given a very interesting assignment by the CIA. He’s being posted back to England in a month, to Cheltenham —’

‘I knew that,’ Harper put in casually, trying to rescue something for himself from the whole business. ‘That he was going —’

‘You don’t know. Listen and I’ll tell you.’ Popovich moved away.

Harper put away his shaving gear and they went back into the bedroom where Random Harvest was coming to an end. Popovich turned the channel selector on the large TV set and at once a picture of the front lobby of the hotel appeared. Another twist displayed the entrance on 53rd Street. A third movement gave only a dark screen but now there were voices over it in Russian, a spirited conversation full of agricultural facts and figures. A fourth time — and then they heard the drawl of American voices, then a long pause. Then: ‘OK, this is the wheat deal again. Get Adam back will you? He’s in the lobby. He wants to have it all first hand.’

Popovich turned the volume down. ‘We’ve adapted this set for ourselves,’ he said very softly. ‘And we’ve had a little help on the other side from one of their electronics people. You see what we’re into here? All the private circuits in the building: the hotel’s closed-circuit TV system, the FBI bugging lines, and also a return line to a hidden micro in their central recording rooms in the basement. We can play it all back through this set, if we keep the volume low enough. So there’s no feedback.’

Popovich moved the selector again. They were back on the main lobby downstairs. ‘Now watch — you’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Watch who they get. They’ve just called for him in the recording room. He’s in the lounge — there, to the left.’

Harper watched carefully. A man crossed the screen from reception and returned a moment later with another American — a big, tall, balding man, genial in a creased Cabot Lodge tropical outfit, abundantly American, folding up the Leisure and Arts section of the New York Sunday Times.

‘There he is. That’s him. Adam Wheel.’

‘So?’ Harper was completely at sea.

‘He’s Guy Jackson’s CIA control. Works with him at the UN. Russian specialist. That’s why he’s here. Listening in on this wheat deal we’re fixing with the Americans. Well, he’s the fellow that’s set up this plan with Jackson in England. And that’s what we want — really as much as we want Flitlianov. And I think we can get both together — two birds, one stone. Put on your shirt and I’ll tell you about it.’

‘What deal? What deal in Cheltenham?’

‘Communications. A new system they have been working at the Foreign Office Communications headquarters there. So far an unbreakable system of satellite-directed code transmissions. The Americans want it — that’s why they got Jackson on it. They found out he was being posted there. And we want it, too, of course. That’s where you come in. And Mr Marlow.’

‘How did they get Jackson?’

‘The oldest way. The oldest profession. Blackmail, call-girls in New York. Jackson has some very peculiar habits. They photographed him, taped him, the usual things. He was very susceptible.’

‘Photographed him with them?’

‘Well, that and looking at them.’

‘Is that a crime?’

‘He thought so.’

‘How did you come on all this?’ Harper asked.

‘You don’t really need to know, Harper. But — through this.’ Popovich tapped the television set. ‘Here in the hotel — this is where they set the whole thing up. Call-girls, photographs, everything. We listened in.’

Harper turned his collar down, straightened his tie and looked out at the patch of leaden summer sky. ‘Something is wrong.’ He turned to Popovich. ‘An experienced officer like Jackson would never have fallen for that old trick in the first place. And if he had he’d have told us in London. There must have been something else.’

‘There was. The CIA told him they’d found out his wife worked for the KGB — that they’d get him as an accessory on that if he didn’t cooperate.’

‘How did they find that out?’

‘I don’t think they did. They invented it.’

‘Come on. She does work for the KGB. It couldn’t be coincidence. And in any case, when you heard that, why didn’t you close with her sooner?’

‘We did, Harper. We checked her out completely. But we’d nothing on her in Moscow — no traces, no associations with us. We went right through her. It wasn’t until Flitlianov arrived here and started to follow her that we started to add things up. Until then we assumed that the CIA were bluffing, or had cooked up some evidence. You see, they wanted Jackson badly: the British aren’t sharing this information with anyone. And Jackson, they knew, was going back to England — the one man who could get them into the centre of this business.’

‘Well how in hell do we get the information? Turn Jackson a second time?’

‘He wouldn’t buy it a second time. But that’s beside the point — which is that I don’t think for a moment that Jackson is going to go along with the Americans anyway. He’ll drop them, but not until he’s clear of them, out of America and back home. He is far too experienced an operator. On the other hand that’s just the quality which your man Marlow lacks — from what you’ve told us. There’s where we can bring pressure, with twenty years jail hanging over him.’

Harper looked numb, quite distant.

‘They’re really quite like one another, too,’ Popovich went on. ‘Not that it matters. But it helps.’ He went over to his coat and produced two photographs, New York street shots, of Marlow and Jackson. He gave them to Harper.

‘Well, the same height —’ Harper said.

‘Same age, build, weight, thinning hair, rather English-looking,’ Popovich continued.

‘I don’t see it.’ Harper paused. Then it hit him. ‘You’re not thinking of —’

‘Yes. Yes, of course I am. They switched him for George Graham; we’ll switch him for Jackson.’

Harper laughed. ‘Not in a million years! It won’t work. They must know the man they’re getting in Cheltenham, know what he looks like. And you forget, Jackson’s married — he’ll be going back with his wife and family. What are they going to say about taking a new husband back with them?’

‘We’ve checked, Harper,’ Popovich said, calm again now, quietly hard. ‘And you’ll do some more for us, personnel details and so on in Cheltenham — and as far as we know they don’t know anything about Jackson in Cheltenham. His work with British Intelligence has been entirely in Africa, a few months in London and here with the UN. And as for his wife, well she’s with us, isn’t she? She can be made to respond. Of course it’s a big risk. Someone may know Jackson in Cheltenham. Or they may check Marlow against a photograph of Jackson when he arrives. He may never get beyond the front gate. But it’s no more of a risk than the British took in substituting Marlow for Graham in the first place. In this business small risks never pay. Big ones sometimes do.’

‘And Flitlianov? The names of his group? I thought that was the most important thing.’

‘Well, he fits in with this too. Think about it: how can we move on those letters? Force her now? No. The Jackson deal would fall through. Force Flitlianov? How? We’ve no idea when he’s going to get them from her. Go through the house upstate — or her apartment here? Impossible. So what? Well, there’s one time we know she’ll have those papers: when she moves back to England — to some empty house or apartment in Cheltenham. That’s certain. She’ll take them with her. And that’s when we can get them. And take Flitlianov as well. Since of course he’ll follow her back there.’

‘What if Flitlianov gets the letters from her before she leaves? He may even have had them off her already, if he’s up there now.’

‘No. Not on our information. Our men say he’s just sounding the ground out this weekend. And he won’t have the time to get it before she leaves — she’s leaving next week, getting out of the summer here, going ahead to England with the children. Her husband is not joining her for several weeks.’

‘The whole thing seems risky and unlikely to me, Andrei.’ Harper moved away a little, but Popovich drew up with him at once, gesturing towards the bathroom. They ran the taps again and Popovich took the opportunity of brushing his teeth.

‘First of all,’ Harper went on, ‘Flitlianov can still get these letters over here —’

‘We’re onto him all the time. If he does, we’ll take them off him here. And go ahead with Marlow and the Cheltenham deal as planned.’

‘What is this deal? What are you after there?’

‘You don’t need to know, Harper — just that it’s the crucial data on this new electronic one-time pad they’ve developed there. And if we get it — it’s the Rosetta Stone for us.’

‘A needle in a heavily guarded haystack, Andrei.’

‘Of course. But that’s the luck of Jackson. He was going back to learn about this very process in Cheltenham.’

‘Was going back?’

‘Yes. Marlow will be taking his place.’

‘And Jackson? What’ll become of —’

‘We’ll arrange all that. Nothing for you to do there.’ Popovich looked at Harper carefully. ‘You just talk to Marlow as arranged when you see him. Then go back to London. And wait. We’re going to need you back in England when the whole thing starts moving.’ Popovich finished with his teeth, rinsed out his toothbrush and spat vigorously into the flow of water.

‘And what about Marlow?’ Harper asked. ‘How will you persuade him?’

‘I think he will be persuaded by Jackson’s fate.’

‘I see.’ And Harper did see now, and he sighed.

‘Good.’ Popovich replaced the toothbrush on the rack above the basin. ‘Good, good, good.’ Then he looked at his face studiously in the mirror, rubbing his chin gently. He turned to Harper invitingly. ‘I like that after-shave. What’s it called? I must try and get some.’

13

It all happened very quickly — that evening in the UN building a few weeks later, late summer, the sun still blazing damply everywhere outside, but cool as ever in the false weather of our huge aluminium shrine.

Helen had left several weeks previously with the children with nothing of my business with her resolved. I had seen her only once more alone after our weekend upstate, and that only for ten minutes in the Delegates’ Lounge before Guy had joined us. And though I took the address she was going to, a rented house somewhere outside Cheltenham, and said I would look them both up if and when I got back to England myself, I didn’t really expect to see her again. Graham was dead to her, and, I inferred, I would be too as far as keeping quiet about her real work was concerned. I never told her about the man I’d seen with binoculars on our ride upstate. Instead I suggested that it might be best if I simply kept out of the way. It was a low-keyed parting, but one of mutual trust at least. I was not to be involved there. Hopefully, indeed, after my talk with Harper when he’d suddenly turned up to quiz me a month before, I was to be out of the whole business by the end of August, if no one in New York contacted me, and back to London to some undecided future.

Helen Jackson was out of my life and in our last conversation I’d simply feared for her future with Guy — the long days coming to them both, full of enmity and hopeless disgust. Why didn’t they separate or divorce, I asked her again?

‘The children,’ she said, without conviction.

‘But if you go on destroying each other like this, what use will either of you be to them?’

‘Yes, I know. Maybe a month apart will help.’

She was prevaricating, postponing. She said, ‘It’s difficult — you wouldn’t know — to throw everything away of a family, a relationship, even when it’s been as bad as ours. It’s really difficult.’

And yet I knew that in the days when Graham had stood happily on her horizon she had wanted just that, was willing to lose everything in the way of family mementoes. It was simply that now she had full knowledge of her isolation, and this was why she would stay with Guy. She had no one to go to. And she was a woman, I had recognised, who moved always towards people, who fulfilled herself with them more than with ideas or things. And then, too, she was very tired at that moment of stage-managing her life and I think she felt the need for fate to take a hand in her affairs for a while.

On that last evening the offices were nearly all empty on my floor. But I’d stayed behind, having had a message left on my desk — from Guy’s secretary as I thought — saying that Guy would like to see me before he left and would come by around six o’clock.

It was Guy’s very last moment with the UN. There’d been a small drinks party for him the previous evening. And that day he’d simply come in to tidy up, get his papers, and sign off. He was flying back to London first thing next morning. The rest of his furniture and effects were coming over by ship later.

Of course, with Guy they’d chosen exactly the right moment to move, when he’d finally left his office on the floor above mine, had all his papers with him and so on. And they knew I’d be expecting to see him before he left, would find nothing strange in the message from his secretary.

But when he came into my office he was with two other men — right behind him, pushing him into the room quickly and then locking the door. They were both in smart dark suits, very properly dressed, one of them carrying a briefcase, the other with very long, sinewy arms, almost to the point of deformity, like a nineteenth-century prizefighter. Their faces were anonymous, bureaucratic, perfectly part of the building — calm and without any expression: two government servants from one of the ‘great powers’ holding their cards close to their chests before the 1014th meeting of the Decolonisation Committee. And I thought for a moment, with their locking the door, that they must be colleagues of Jackson’s from Intelligence in London come to question me again about my non-existent progress in New York.

I thought this, at least, until one of them drew a gun and pointed it at me and the other started to undress Jackson. He took his coat off first — Guy was in one of his finest pin-stripes — and the moment he laid his hands on the lapels Guy started to protest, quietly and politely at first, as though making a small but important criticism to the secretary of his London Club.

‘No. No, please!’ Now he was utterly shocked by the effrontery of this initial touch — this touching him, this intimate proximity without so much as a by-your-leave. He didn’t seem to mind the rest of the disrobing so much.

But it was quite terrible to watch, this indignity in this formal man who had so carefully dressed himself that morning, as he did every morning — terrible to see this sartorial destruction, for clothes were something which Guy had put a lot of his life into — Savile Row coat, waistcoat and trousers, the pale blue sea-island cotton shirt, the fine silk old-boys’ tie, gold cuff-links, the hand-made dimpled leather shoes: they all piled up on my desk against his intermittent, pleading voice: ‘No. No! For God’s sake, what are you doing?’ — as if he thought he was going to be raped by them. And indeed at that point I had no idea what they were up to.

Yet, in some sense I knew, seeing Guy being stripped: for I had watched the destruction of a man long before the real end, the desecration of life before life in the flesh was gone: a lifeless skeleton when he was finally nude, six feet of naked emptiness, his neatly groomed hair tossed around, the elegant face disrupted fearfully, fallen, as though bones had been broken in it, and red: the whole of his face from the neck upwards turned a bright, blushing red — all his lanky poise utterly destroyed as he looked around him with a sort of terrified prudery, as though Matron had suddenly come up on him in the shower after cricket thirty years before.

I saw all this and was so saddened by it that I hardly noticed when the other man with the awful gangly arms came over and started to undress me. But I’d had the message by then and did it for him. It never occurred to me to make any struggle. I suppose that was wrong.

‘Get into his clothes,’ he said when I’d finished, Guy and I both naked now, the two men facing each of us, all of us standing for a moment like statues in some obscene ballet, two nude and two blue-suited dancers.

We changed clothes. And I realised then what was happening to me, simply a more violent change of role, from George Graham into Guy Jackson now. But what was happening to Jackson? I put on all his things, and he mine. And they fitted both of us surprisingly well. Except for the smell — the faint odour in Guy’s clothes; his hair, his skin, his sweat mixed with the rumour of some old-fashioned hair oil. There was something awfully unreal about that for a moment — his shirt and underclothes warm about me — still warm from his warmth: a properly stolen life, this time; violently robbed in front of me, so that I felt I was part of the crime.

They had taken his wedding ring off him last thing, the brassy signet ring that he wore like a memento of failure, and I put it on, the prizefighter handing it to me, poking it up towards my face, like the best man in a nightmare wedding.

And Guy, I saw, had everything of me — or rather of George Graham: his old black Mentmore fountain pen, the gold square-faced Hamilton watch, the long-stemmed briar pipe and the aromatic Dutch tobacco. Guy became George Graham in front of my eyes, the lover replacing the husband, who in turn was replaced by me. Three men had gone into two; and one of us was going to be caught without an identity when the music stopped. Finally, they checked everything, went through all our pockets, to see that Guy had all my papers, my wallet and UN identification and so on, and that I had all his.

Then the prizefighter said to me, ‘Now watch. Watch this carefully.’

And there is that moment now which one doesn’t care to remember, which one simply doesn’t, because it is like recreating the death of oneself, seeing the extinction of my body with his, the death of both of us, so that my memory of it, in some ways, is that of a ghost looking back on his own funeral. I went with Guy then and what was left of me afterwards was an angry wraith.

One of the men opened the aluminium casement looking out over the East River with a key and a muggy breath streamed in from outside like a door opening into a furnace. And suddenly then, at the same instant, Guy and I both knew what the whole thing was all about, when the prizefighter took him by the shoulders, turned him round and faced him towards the window. We both knew it all then, very quickly and completely — when I looked at Guy, when he knew he was dying, was going to die: when he crumpled up on the floor; when they picked him up and I shouted, and the other man gagged me and held me from behind: when Guy was dragged over to the window, and started to cry, a great sobbing cry, a disastrous anguish on his face: when he clung to everything on the way, every bit of furniture, being dragged now, feet-first across the room; and finally — his head out in space yet still, like a trapeze artist, trying to hold on desperately to the metal window-ledge until his fingers were prised up — the faint squeak he gave as he fell away.

We both knew everything then, shared everything as the men intended, Guy’s eyes fixed to mine during all that awful passage across the room — violent, outraged eyes: and yet somehow with love too, a desperate and unseemly gentleness glowing through his normally austere and cynical features, a statement of love and redemption that had only now suddenly become clear to him at this last moment, and which he wanted to pass on to me before he died, in a great hurry to get rid of it before the music stopped and he went. He was pulled across the office floor, a dead man, yet full of life. Exactly as they had intended, the two men left me with a unique taste of death in my mouth — not only his death, any death, but my own as well.

And then we were away, one of the men on either side of me, pushing me down the empty corridor towards the elevator banks in the middle of the building, where a third man was waiting for us, holding the doors apart from the controls inside, and the four of us went down without stopping to the underground car park giving out on to the East River side.

They had a car there next to the elevator ramp. And there were several other groups of people around, getting their keys and cars out, going home. And I shouted and tried to run. But they had me in the back of the car before I got anywhere, hitting me with something over the ear as I was being pushed in. And when someone came over towards us I could hear the prizefighter speaking as I drifted into a dark world of ringing stars: ‘He’ll be all right. Had a few too many. We’ll get him home.’

Home, I realised when I regained consciousness going up First Avenue, would of course be the Jacksons’ modern apartment on East 57th Street and Second.

‘Ah, Jackson,’ the little man said, welcoming me into Jackson’s large but now almost empty apartment six floors up in a modern co-operative block looking down Second Avenue.

‘Good evening, Mr Jackson.’

He was standing in half shadow over by a drinks tray in the corner of the main room just off the hall. The carpet had been taken up and most of the furniture pushed into another corner waiting to be crated. The floor was of blocked pine and slippery. A stack of pictures, Redouté rose prints for the most part, had been piled up on a huge oatmeal sofa in the middle of the room. On one arm of it were a number of Jackson’s overcoats and mackintoshes, all the perfectly tailored summer and winter protection that Guy had acquired against the varying rigours of the New York climate. What a careful man he’d been, I thought, prepared for every sartorial eventuality — except changing clothes with me.

The only light in the room was from a standard lamp, with a huge pumpkin-like Chinese paper lantern on top, and this had been placed in front of the sofa, between me and the small blue-suited fellow fiddling with the drinks so that I could make out hardly anything of his features.

He spoke in Russian and the prizefighter cleared the Redouté roses off the sofa and moved me over towards it.

‘Sit down, Mr Jackson. Relax,’ the voice came from behind the lamp. Ice fell into a glass. ‘Whisky? Or cognac? All there is, I’m afraid.’

I didn’t reply. The prizefighter left me and returned with a glass of amber liquid. ‘Take it. Have some,’ the voice advised. ‘You need it. It’s not an easy business this, I know. And yet,’ he added carefully, turning towards me in the shadows, a strange, soft, sympathetic tone coming into his voice, ‘you’ll have to admit you do have some experience of it all — this changing roles, characters. It’s not the first time, is it? So this shouldn’t be too difficult.’

I sat down and at once I started to shake. My stomach and the inside of my arms seemed to vibrate together, and then my shoulders, and I felt a violent nausea rise inside me, a long-delayed sickness now come to full term. I leant my head back hoping to stay it. But the first spurt of vomit rose up anyway and lay in my mouth, a lumpy bitter fluid. And then I couldn’t help myself with it and I bent forward hopelessly. But they’d seen what was happening and as I retched I found the prizefighter holding one of the deep-framed Redouté roses in front of me like a tray, and I came on it, puking violently, sweating, my stomach going inside-out, seeing the stream of seedy yellow fluid covering all the red flower. I slipped off the sofa then and was down on my hands and knees on the blocked pine floor, and another print was pushed in front of me, a fine sprig, some golden thorny species, and in a moment it too was like a dog’s breakfast.

‘This is a farce,’ I said when the sickness was over and they were helping me back on the sofa, one of them sponging my forehead with a damp cloth. ‘Utterly stupid, impossible. I’m sorry.’ Suddenly, I found myself addressing these thugs quite openly, in almost a friendly way, as if they were colleagues. It seemed I wanted to thank them for their help in my sudden travail: I had done something stupid, taken too much drink at a party. I was not angry; I was apologetic.

I felt very weak and I had forgotten why I was here or who I was. Marlow, Graham, Jackson? The names ran vaguely and unimportantly round my head, like children in a playground being watched by a mysterious anonymous presence. It simply wasn’t important. As long as the three children were happy. Someone else was responsible for them. The person I had been or might become had been wiped clean away, purged out of me with the sickness. And what was left of me at that moment, was nothing, nobody, void.

So that when the man beyond the lamp eventually began to speak I grasped his words willingly, as a landline back to life — any conscious life, which I suddenly craved, just as I had in Durham jail months before when McCoy had first voiced his mean proposals. I could live Jackson’s life as a recompense — for his failure and mine — in such a way that would vindicate both of us and destroy them. So instead of arguing when I’d recovered, I said calmly: ‘What is it? Tell me what you want of Jackson?’

‘I have a plan,’ the man said in the shadows, speaking the words slowly, almost in a lilt, like a singer taking the first words of a song without music, ‘a plan for all of us —’

‘An offer I can’t refuse,’ I broke in, taking the advantage. And I could feel them looking at me in some surprise.

And when I heard what the plan was I was happy in a way, a hard and brutal way perhaps, but one needed something of that — for the first thing I thought now, after he had given me the outlines of it all, was that now I was Helen Jackson’s husband. My association with her had been licensed here at last, a wedding by proxy. I was her husband and her lover all in one. And thus surely, I felt, when we met again, I could not help but find out all about her. For now I should be privy, quite naturally, both to the history of her marriage and to all the long processes of her affair. Surely, I thought, she could not deny me that knowledge any longer?

That night I slept in the Jacksons’ big double bed, his fine black leather suitcases half packed all around me, all the bits and pieces of his departure scattered about the room waiting to come together in me.

We had spent the hours before going through all Guy’s effects, his papers from Cheltenham, his new identity card with my photograph on it now, his passport which had been changed in the same way. Another man had arrived with these half-way through the evening, some kind of electronics expert, and he spent a long time with familiarising me, as far as he could, with the job Guy was to have done back in England.

I had told the blue-suited man that I thought his plan would fail very early on, that the communications experts in Cheltenham would surely sec through my lack of expertise at once. But he disagreed, while the man who had briefed me said, ‘If you memorise these basic details we’ve gone over — here in these papers — and say nothing else, don’t attempt to offer any thoughts of your own, you’ll be all right. In any case, we know that Jackson would have been given a two-week induction course with this new system. So they’ll be teaching you the business. They won’t expect you to know anything about it. As to the general procedure in this building — codes, cyphers, cryptanalysis — you should have nothing to do with this at all: you’re being specially posted as a trainee to this electronic one-time pad unit.’

‘And you really think no one in this place is going to know me?’ I’d said at the time, talking across to the little man, still in the shadows. ‘Nobody from personnel in Cheltenham? Surely Guy Jackson must have been interviewed by someone down there?’

‘No. He was interviewed and cleared for the posting by the Foreign Office Communications section in London when he was last on leave there. And he’s since been checked up again, and debriefed on his New York posting by your friend Harper when he was over here. Jackson has no unfinished business in London or New York. He’s completely cleared to start the course.’

‘All right. But what about my “wife” — have you thought about her? How she’s going to react to my sudden presence and her husband’s death? Take it all quite calmly, you suppose? She may do something quite wild.’

‘Mrs Jackson has been estranged from her husband for several years. You can look at the evidence of that here later. You will tell her when you meet all that we’ve told you. She’ll collaborate. She too will have no safe alternative.’

‘And what about my “suicide” here in New York this evening? The section in London is going to want to check Jackson out on that when he gets back. He was my control, remember. Or someone here in New York, now. The UN people will have been onto the British Consulate already.’

‘I’m sure they have. But as far as they’re concerned you’re just an ordinary British citizen. Jackson was the only person in America who really knew what you were doing here. The Consulate will make the usual investigations — with your hotel, a report to your bogus address in London. It will be some time before anyone in your London section knows you’ve killed yourself. And when they do, and want to talk to you about your “death”, we have means of ensuring that the inquiry will amount to nothing.’

‘How? The first person they’ll send down to Cheltenham to see Jackson will be my section chief, McCoy — or more likely his deputy, Harper. And Harper is certainly going to know that I’m not Jackson.’

‘Don’t worry about that. Leave it to us.’

And I said then, I remember, looking along every avenue while I had the chance: ‘What happens if I don’t go along with you? How can you kill me if I tell them everything when I get back — and they put me in a top-security prison again where I came from. What then?’

‘We’ll kill Mrs Jackson instead,’ the man said carefully. ‘And surely you can’t let her die, can you? With no husband and two young children to look after. I’m sure you’ll see that. And remember there will be people of ours with you both all the time in Cheltenham — waiting and watching, all that kind of business. We’ve not gone into this lightly. Any ideas you have about getting out of this on your own will result in certain disaster for Mrs Jackson and her children. And the same applies if you try and run together. Try running with two small children — you won’t get far. Leave them behind anywhere, and we will find out where they are — and their lives will be held against your return and carrying on the job, Mr Marlow. It is as simple as that. Over-dramatic, you may think, but as far as we are concerned an absolutely precise intention. You were meant to see clearly what happened to Mr Jackson this evening. Just remember what you saw.’

‘And if I succeed,’ I asked. ‘If I get you what you want?’

‘You’ll be free then, won’t you? Perhaps you’ll find you like the work in Cheltenham. Or like being Mrs Jackson’s husband. Who knows?’

Of course I knew he was lying. For the information to be of any use to the Russians it would have to be extracted from Cheltenham without the people there ever knowing it was gone. And the only way of making sure they never did know would be to get rid of me and Helen afterwards in any case — kill us in some way made to seem an accident, a car crash, a fire or some such. Our deaths would have to be part of any successful deal.

‘Perhaps you fancy Mrs Jackson already,’ the little man continued. ‘She seems to have been quite free with her favours.’

‘How do you know?’ I turned to him, very surprised at this sudden revival of Helen’s infidelities, this intimacy with her affairs in the words of a total stranger who, he seemed to suggest, had long ago known more about her than I ever had.

‘I told you — we have evidence. Some reports we found in his suitcase.’ He spoke to one of the other men in Russian and I was brought back a green folder with a number of typewritten, yellowing sheets inside.

They were the reports the detectives in East Africa had made out for Guy on his wife’s affair with Graham six years before — the reports which Guy had told me he had destroyed but hadn’t. I glanced through them. They seemed all the shabbier now, the hard, business-like words describing a passion fulfilled between two people for the delectation of a third. And I saw them as Guy’s death-warrant somehow; it was this obsession that no one could live with, but which he had been unable to lose, which had killed him: that spying on real life — however divisive — and not his official espionage, which had led to his end.

It was obvious, with his keeping this evidence close to him, the memory of her infidelity always green in the green folder, that he had never intended, would never have been able, to forgive or forget — that his obsessive illness had condemned him to hold everything against her to the end: the literal documents of their failure and her success, with which he could continue to indict her throughout the remains of their marriage. He had wanted to punish himself, I suppose, more than her: that ‘deep sense of failure’ he had told me about a month before upstate. And her words too came back to me: ‘You fell down a hole in yourself a long time ago.’ Jackson was involved in that old bitter story: if love was not mutual, then at least the punishment would be.

And that was something I might somehow make up for with her, on Guy’s behalf, I thought — put his marriage right for him — which was so important a thing, I felt, that a man might sense the happy change even in his grave.

I glanced at one of the reports, dated ‘Nairobi, 17th September, 1965.’

… he signed the register at the Tsavo National Park game-lodge as ‘Mr and Mrs Graham’ at 4.35 p.m. on September 10th. The two parties then went immediately to cabin number 27 at the end of the northern spur. They returned to the lounge of the main building at 6.05 p.m. where they ordered drinks — two local Crown lagers for him and two whisky-waters for her. Afterwards they had the set dinner on the terrace, with a single flask of Chianti. They adjourned to their cabin at 10.25 p.m. Our man was unable to …

How prosaic. Yet Guy’s jealous obsession had thrived on just this sort of thing, I thought, since before we can properly imagine any act of infidelity we must have the precise bricks and mortar of the setting.

And in this way Helen’s past rose up for me again in these reports, as it must have done for Guy. Here was an outline of all those mysterious intentions in her life, a rough map of the forces which had ruined him and whose effects I was now to inherit. Somewhere behind these bleak pages, as beyond the arid descriptions of Margaret Takazze’s novel, lay the real woman, untouched. Imprisoned by these walls of contrivance and deceit was a beleaguered mind, full of joy, frantically unexpressed.

‘Read it all,’ the little man advised. ‘Carefully. On your journey. They give great insight into the woman you’re married to — the woman you’re seeing tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon. Your wife.’

14

It was an absolutely still and fine afternoon when I got to England next day, watching the manicured land run away from the train I’d picked up at Reading for Cheltenham, sitting in an empty first-class compartment in one of Guy’s best Savile Row pin-stripes, wearing an equally anonymous striped old boys’ tie: an endless hazy blue sky over the neat green pastures and gentle tree-filled rises of the Thames Valley, the corn run to a final blackened gold and ready to burst, the leaves of huge chestnuts by the river a dusty, pendulous green. We got to Cheltenham two hours later.

I had heard about Regency Cheltenham, the Spa town, the Promenade, the fine trees and gracious terraces, but had never been there. And it was a place, I saw from the taxi on my way from the station, which just, but only just, retained an air of Georgian grandeur, aristocratic conceits, the graceful, decorative arts of a pleasure-filled era, a hundred and fifty years before.

Presently we emerged from the town centre, past a garden pub at a busy crossroads, a children’s hospital, a straggle of ugly pebble-dashed suburban villas which gradually died out as the road went higher. And then quite suddenly, the buildings ended and we were in the yellow evening country, with a farm and fields and a herd of Friesians away to our left, running down the hill to where the hazy town lay like a street-plan beneath us.

And now, about half a mile away, beneath a reservoir and next to a large cemetery, I saw something I thought I recognised from a series of photographs I’d been shown by the Russians in New York: a group of war-time Nissen huts surrounded by a high fence, a large cark park, and in the centre, a long, three-storied redbrick building with a lot of glass windows and a tall, power-station chimney at one end: a building like a strange ship moored far away from the roads of the town, tucked into the side of the chalk escarpment. I thought of asking the driver what it was. But there was no need. It could only be the Government Communications Headquarters in Oakley Park. The Russians had carefully pointed it out on a map they’d shown me in New York — an expanse of anonymous buildings on the outer suburbs of the town, between the reservoir and the cemetery.

And now I knew too how far we’d got on our journey, for they’d shown me, on the same map, where the house in the hills was which the Jacksons had taken, about three miles above the town. It would have to be there, up in front of us, in the ridge of thick trees that lay on the horizon, and it would have a perfect view, I realised, not only of the town but also of my future office.

And then, as I realised how close I must be now to Helen, I was suddenly terrified. The whole perfect landscape threatened me, and I knew that the coming words could only be words of pain. The journey was at an end, when one had slept with tiredness, suspended above action. And now the only action I wanted was that of escape; I longed to tell the taxi man to drive on forever. I looked back down the hill. And, yes, there was a car behind us, a Jaguar saloon a hundred yards away. Was it following us? I couldn’t tell. But it seemed to push us forward inexorably. And I had a sudden vision of firing at it, blowing it clean out of the golden day, as if in a film or a story. But in such fiction one would have had a gun, of course, and realising that I didn’t, I felt the full weight of the reality that I was living through.

The road narrowed and twisted and became very steep. The Jaguar had dropped away behind us and then I couldn’t see it any more. We passed into the tree belt I’d seen from below: at first, immediately beside the road, a long line of ancient, twisted copper beeches, and beyond them a mixture of woods, deciduous and conifer — old ruined copses, and a new forest, a plantation of fir that seemed to run over most of the brow of the hill. It was a strangely deserted area for somewhere so close to the town, without farms or habitation, almost dark in the bright evening light. And dead still. The driver paused at a small crossroads near the top. Ahead of us was open common, but we were still in the trees, their shadows casting long marks on the dazzling road beyond. He wound down the window. A bird twittered suddenly. And I could hear it, quite clearly, running away into the woods, its foot-steps like an animal crackling over the dry mould of leaves.

‘It must be down there,’ he said, looking along a stony track that led off to our left, gradually sloping down the hill again.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure.’

He drove down into the woods again and after about a quarter of a mile I saw the house to our right in a clearing of old trees, a fenced paddock in front, with the fir plantation rising immediately behind it.

It was set back about a hundred yards above the road, with a pathway leading up to it between two rows of crab-apple trees; a long low converted Cotswold barn, covered at one end with a brilliant, coppery red virginia creeper, with windows all along its length, a wooden terrace giving out over the town and a small lawn at one end where the front door was with a lot of roses and glowing autumn shrubs bordering what I could see of the turf. A drift of grey smoke rose from some hidden, smouldering fire at the far end of the lawn, barely moving against the late sky, pale blue above the horizon of firs. And now, with the noise of our arrival, an extraordinary cackling broke out in the orchard and paddock which surrounded the house and I saw a flock of handsome plump, white geese, suddenly roused and strident, craning their necks and tilting their beaks in outrage, looking at us with deeply offended eyes, complaining bitterly at our intrusion in a long rising symphony of alarm.

I got out of the car and helped with my luggage, and I was shaking now and my hands were trembling as I paid the man. He offered to help me up the steep pathway but I said no. And he turned in the garageway and drove off back along the dusty road, the exhaust dying, the smell of burnt petrol rising in the still air.

And then I heard the cries that I had not wanted to hear — the beginning of what for another man would have been the first notes in a singing homecoming — the first words, in happier circumstances, that begin every book of family reunion.

‘Daddy! Daddy! It’s Daddy — he’s here, Daddy!’

The twins were standing at the top of the pathway, undecided for a moment, in their brown corduroy dungarees I remembered from upstate New York, topped off with big round faces and fair-fringed, rakish hair. Then seeing my dark suit for the first time, they both moved at once, quickly, anxiously, tumbling down the shallow rough steps to meet me. And I moved towards them.

I suppose they were about five yards away from me before they realised I wasn’t their father, merely the image of him. But they didn’t really stop. They paused for an instant in their rush, and looked at me quizzically, fiddling with their thumbs, suddenly sucking them. Then they recognised me as the bedtime story man from that weekend upstate, for they came on quite happily, one of them saying ‘Have you brought another Babar Book?’ And the other said, ‘Yes — have you?’ And now they were both very close, looking up at me — bronzed, wide American faces, eyes as clear as water, noses turned up, and one of them — I couldn’t tell which — touched my suit. ‘You’re in Daddy’s clothes, aren’t you?’ she said knowingly, stroking the cuff. ‘They’re fine aren’t they?’ She smiled, looking all over me now. ‘And his tie, and his shoes, and his bags,’ she went on in wondrous appraisal. ‘And you’ve got his ring as well!’ She was particularly intrigued by this fact, touching the brassy metal very delicately. And then the other child looked at me, much more seriously and questioningly, unable for a moment to make any sense of this mysterious transformation. And then, finding the answer she needed, she turned to her sister.

‘He isn’t Daddy. But he is. He’s another Daddy. Our Daddy must be wearing his clothes. Don’t you see?’ And she looked behind me, peering between the crab-apple trees. ‘He’s hiding some place, I bet. We’re going to have a game.’

‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘That’s it. But he’s not here just yet. I came first to start it off.’

And with this answer they were quite happy, and they jumped up at me and clutched at my arms. And I lifted them off the ground, the two of them together, riding one on each arm, and I held them to me and bounced them a little. And then Helen appeared at the top of the pathway, without recognising who it was, I think, for my face was hidden by the movements of the children. I left my luggage where it was and walked up towards her.

There are some encounters which are not meetings in the accepted sense at all, in which the exchange of every accepted emotion in the event — surprise, distaste, interest, happiness — never takes place: which are not meetings but speechless mysteries in which the two people involved — so shocked, so instantly changed, their expectations so completely altered — lose touch utterly with present time or concern, and where they drift forwards and backwards aimlessly through the whole life of their minds, looking for a touchstone, a signal from reality, which will return them to some understanding, immediacy, sanity.

And for the first few minutes this is what happened between Helen and me. We behaved in a trance of awful formality.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello. How are you?’

Apart from this we were speechless, looking at each other only with the vaguest interest, unfocused, unconcerned, the twins running round us shouting eagerly.

She had been gardening or raking, with rubber gloves on, rusty cord jeans and a white Arran knit pullover spotted with leaves and mould. She took the gloves off and brushed herself down and pushed her dark hair back behind her ears, her face pale in the light, all its questing incisiveness gone. And we just stood there on the paved terrace with aubretia growing out between the cracks, between the lawn and the small church-like porch and double hall-door, the sun low now, but still brilliant away to the west over the town, with a pale blue sky running down towards the horizon, melting into pink and then gold. I looked round at the wide view, and frowned and was almost pompous when I spoke to her.

‘It really is a splendid place you’ve got here,’ I said, like an auctioneer. ‘Marvellous, How did you get it?’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ She looked over the town, pursing her lips, frowning herself now, as if trying to remember something. Then, after a long pause: ‘Oh, how did we get it? Yes — well, they told us about it. Someone — Mr Nichols in the housing section at Oakley Park. He wrote to Guy about it in New York.’

She turned now and began to look at me clearly for the first time, as if the mention of Guy’s name had given her a first clue to present reality. She looked at me with an amazed intensity, an expression that carried no other emotion. Something started to burn behind the skin of her face, a gradually rising heat in her skull which put a fire in her eyes, coloured her cheeks, and seemed to fill out her whole being with flame, with a questioning but wordless force. So that I said, feeling she was accusing me unjustly and wishing to retaliate, ‘I thought you might have met me at the station.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, almost apologetic. ‘I’ve never met Guy at stations or airports. It was something we agreed on years ago. You know — not unless I had to. I’m very bad at comings and goings like that.’

And there was a tinge of exclusion then — even then: one among a thousand small things between them which I knew nothing about: all the minutiae of their life together, the details they had shared without enmity, the little agreements which at one time they had made with so easy an acceptance and understanding.

She had a trug with her on the ground full of freshly picked lavender and another basket full of crab apples. I picked them up and sniffed at them both; the first sweet and dry, the other moist and tart.

‘I was getting bunches for the bedroom,’ she said. ‘And Mrs Grace is going to make some crab-apple jelly with me.’

‘Who?’

‘The lady we have helping.’

‘Oh. I’ll get my bags.’

They were half-way down the pathway and as I turned to get them I saw someone in the shadow of the hall beyond the porch.

‘Mrs Grace, this is my husband, Guy,’ Helen said when I got back and had put my bags down in the hall. We shook hands. She was a large, middle-aged, yet clearly very alert woman who moved quickly on her feet; a good face, strong and full of character, intent eyes, well-kept fluffy dark hair, a fine aquiline nose. There was something obscurely passionate and unfulfilled about her, a mood of poetry almost, which she wished to communicate, and had failed only for lack of an understanding audience. She had obvious finesse and intelligence, and long unmarked fingers, one with a gold cameo ring on it. She was like no daily help I’d ever seen.

‘I’m very pleased to meet you Mr Jackson,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting Helen’s husband very much.’ She turned to Helen with a friendly, tender look. ‘We have got on so well together.’

Helen came with me. There was a landing to the side of the building with a run of small windows looking out on the fir plantation up the hill to our right, and our bedroom doors in a line to our left. She paused for a moment, between the first two doors — undecided for an instant. Then she opened the nearest one to the staircase and we went in. It was a spare room, very neat with a dark blue fitted carpet and two single beds with patterned blue and white coverlets, curtains to match, a steeply slanting ceiling and a dormer window looking down on the valley. I could just see the top floor and the tall chimney of the Government Communications building, the red-brick glowing in the evening sun.

‘I suppose you’d better use — here?’ She turned, perplexed, uncertain as I was of my role and placing in the house. ‘Mrs Grace goes home. But there are the children.’

‘Of course.’

I put my luggage down. Where could I begin, I wondered? How did one start — what were the right words? I started to fiddle with the locks on the cases and she went over to a dresser beneath the window and started to arrange the lavender stalks in a roughly glazed Italian jug. She seemed completely her old competent self now, the sophisticated Manhattan socialite, adept in all the social virtues, every nuance of formal greeting: a friend had come to stay for a few days, and all the hospitality would be gracious and perfectly ordered.

‘I —’

‘I —’

We both spoke at once. She turned from the window and came towards me — and then, very formally with a hint of annoyance, she said, ‘Where is Guy? What stupid game are you both up to now?’

‘I — we,’ I stammered. I was intimidated by the sudden school mistress in her. ‘Look, could we talk about this later, when the children are in bed. It’s very serious. There’s no game.’

‘All right, but roughly what? Where is he? What are you doing in his clothes? What are you doing’ — her voice rose suddenly with incredulous anger — ‘in his suit, his shirt, his shoes. And his wedding ring.’ She grabbed the lapels on the coat and pulled them, shaking me. ‘What in God’s name are you up to?’

I felt she’d be hitting me in a second. ‘Now? You’re sure you want it now?’ She nodded. I took the ring off and gave it to her.

‘Guy is dead.’ And then I rushed on before she had time to say anything. ‘He was pushed out of the window of my office in the UN yesterday evening in New York. By your organisation, the KGB. In my bloody clothes. And that’s why I’m wearing his. It’s up thirty-two floors, you know, my room — and I’m supposed to have killed myself: a pulpy mess on top of the cafeteria roof. But that was Guy, I’m afraid, though they wouldn’t have recognised either of us after that tumble. They want me for his job — to get some information for them, in that building. Down there.’

And now I was angry too — at the inescapable hurt that I was causing her, though she didn’t show it.

‘They put me into his clothes, dragged him to the window, made me watch everything, then took me back to your apartment, briefed me, and I took over everything of Guy from there.’ I paused. She said nothing. She held his ring, turning it over slowly in her hand, her face perfectly composed, expressionless, her eyes on mine but unfocused, looking through me.

I was shaking now again — and suddenly completely exhausted, a shivering overwhelming nauseous fatigue. I lit a cigarette.

‘You need a drink,’ she said. ‘You must. I’ll go get something.’

When she got back with a bottle of whisky from somewhere, and two toothbrush glasses from the bathroom, she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I was sitting on the bed, my head in my hands, barely able to move. I tried to smile.

‘You’re sorry? It’s the other way round, Helen.’

‘No. I couldn’t have seen him killed, couldn’t have stood that. Not the actual sight of it, that would have killed me. You had to see all that.’

‘Yes. He looked at me …’ But I didn’t go on.

‘Exactly,’ she said. I could hear the sound of the children downstairs, shouting over their tea. ‘There would have been such pain in that look for me, as if I’d killed the marriage and he was being sacrificed into the bargain — as if I were physically killing him as well. You know the feelings sometimes in a bad marriage, actually wishing the other person were dead. Well, it would have been that, going through that in reality, seeing it happen. And you know, it might have been me who had to watch that, they might have wanted to use me in the same way. Instead, you were the one.’

She sat down on the bed opposite, and drank with me, and she was warmer now, and still extraordinarily composed.

‘Times when you wanted him dead. Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Yes, there were. But not real death. I wanted some act, some action in our relationship, some decision for good or bad: a development of the marriage or an ending to it — not just tagging along together, unfriendly, as strangers, for the sake of the children. And that’s happened now. Something’s happened.’

‘The most appalling sort of action though, isn’t it?’

Now she smiled, fingering the ring. And I couldn’t restrain the comment then, seeing this smile and remembering Guy’s very different expression as he went to the window, the always disdainful, isolated face so suddenly flooded at the last with all the essential warmth of life. I said, ‘You’re being a little cold-hearted about it all, aren’t you?’

‘Peter, I’m not thinking about it. Yet. It’s just an event somewhere, a war, a casualty, a story you’ve told me. It’s quite unreal. Quite.’

‘And you smile about it? He didn’t need to die, you know. You could have got a divorce. I always told you.’

She didn’t reply. ‘I was thinking about irony,’ she said at last slowly, considering the words carefully as they appeared, confirming that each bore the exact weight of her thought. ‘Someone once told me I didn’t have that quality — that I was too much involved in hope, in the here and now. Well, I’m not any more, am I? “Ironic reflection” he said — that that was needed just as much as the singing and dancing.’

‘So what?’ I didn’t understand.

‘I have to smile — looking at you in Guy’s clothes, and seeing, thinking, how you’ve come from being my lover to being my husband, without ever having been either: yet still the image of the two people I shared most with — but without our knowing anything about each other, or even having really touched in any way. You see? What kind of reality is it that makes such things happen? I don’t know. It’s not real. Yet.’

She put her hand across the space between the beds and touched mine, just running her index finger lightly along my knuckles.

‘Later,’ she said. ‘Of course. Everything later. The house may be wired. Let’s see how Mrs Grace does her apple jelly.’

We went downstairs to the kitchen. In a muslin bag slung between two chairs, the first cooking of crab-apple jelly dripped slowly into a big pan: an hour-glass, an essence of ordinary life, a perfect domestic calendar, counterpointing all our terrible deceits.

Afterwards, when the sun finally went and Mrs Grace drove off into the twilit woods and I’d read the twins another bedtime story, I went into the garden and while Helen tended the bonfire, gathering the remaining weeds and leaves of the afternoon together and poking up the flames, I told her all the other details of my own tale, which she then accepted as completely real — the mask changing quickly as she listened, the tragic entirely replacing the comic.

We came in and out of the drawing-room several times during the evening fetching drinks — a comfortable split-level room with a bookcase full of the owner’s military memoirs dividing it, a brown carpet, russet curtains, a green sofa and a big open hearth, a roughly cut Cotswold stone fireplace with a vase of bracken in it: a slightly cluttered, homely, intimate room, made for winter evenings, for talk and drink and people together high on the hill, hidden in the trees, locked securely away from the world.

But now as we talked, whispering in the house, with barely louder voices outside, the wretched details of my story poisoned the mood: soured everything of the cosy architecture and the yellow rose bushes — strangely luminous now in the half-light. And we drank: drank fast and badly. And it didn’t calm us, simply sharpened our nerves, so that we moved all the more distractedly from the garden to the house and back again. Helen pacing to and fro from the drinks table: Helen thinking of lighting a fire, of phoning someone in America, of cooking supper. But she did none of these things — trying through all these novel happy actions to escape back into ordinary life, away from this increasing horror. But there was no escape that I could see yet, and I told her, the two of us standing over the smoke, watching the odd small eruptions of flame as the fire gathered strength.

‘They’re here somewhere — around us, bugging us, following us, all the time,’ I said. ‘And we’re down a lane, miles from anywhere. They can cut us off completely, watch our comings and goings, every move. There’ll be somebody watching the house — now, this moment.’

And then I suddenly remembered Mrs Grace.

‘The woman, for example — what do you know of her? Where is she from? Her accent …?’

‘Has she? I thought it was an English accent.’

‘No. From Europe somewhere.’

‘She’s a dancing teacher in the town. Ballroom dancing. She has a studio somewhere. But it’s doing rather badly. No one wants to learn the old fashioned steps anymore.’

‘One of them — a KGB appointee?’

‘How? She told me she’s been living here for years, since the war.’

‘They have stringers in a place like this where there are important government departments. A permanent resident. They could have placed her here years ago.’

‘But surely …? No, she’s not the sort, she’s so nice.’

‘Why not? A lot of Communists are nice.’ I looked at Helen. ‘And some are even good at making crab-apple jelly. And the foxtrot.’

‘But I got her from the government people here.’

‘How?’

‘She’d given her name to them as someone willing to do housekeeping and baby-minding during the day. So how could she be with them?’

‘Simply turning down other jobs she was offered — and waiting for you to arrive; then saying she was available for work, and did they have any — knowing you’d need someone. They’re not fools. They’re doing everything on this job very thoroughly.’

‘We have a week to think before you start your job. You’re on leave, remember.’ She drank some more whisky.

‘A holiday! Marvellous.’ I smiled. ‘They’ll follow us anywhere we go. You and I could lose them, maybe. But with the two children it’s not very likely. And you’ve no one here in England you could leave them with. And anyway, go where? And into what future? Family life on the run? Or you could go back to America on your own. But they’d find you there easily enough. They have the ends all tied up. And yet — as I told you — we have to get out. Even if I succeed in getting them this machine they are still going to have to get rid of us afterwards: the information would be no use to them otherwise. So we have to lose them. And I’m no good at guns or fast cars. Are you?’

‘No. Surely we have to tell your people here? That’s a way out. They can help us.’

‘Yes. I’d thought of that. Dump ourselves on them — all four of us. It would have to be that. We can’t phone. That’s surely tapped. I might be able to get down there and tell them,’ I said, looking at the Government Communications HQ beyond the reservoir. ‘But that place has nothing to do with counter-espionage. They’d laugh at me. It would have to be London, my old section there. McCoy, or a fellow called Harper, my immediate control. I could contact them somehow. And maybe have them turn the whole KGB plan round — get their men. Play along with the KGB.’

‘But they’ll have thought of that.’ Helen waved a hand slowly through a curl of smoke and then smelt her fingers. The lights of the town were more visible now, a hazy glow beginning to form in the dusk of the valley beneath us. ‘That’s just what they’ll be expecting. They know we can’t run. So they must assume we’ll try and tell.’

‘How can they stop it? I know we can’t phone from here. But I can surely get to somewhere long enough to make a call without their knowing.’

‘Yes, of course. But that’s just it — it doesn’t make sense.’ She turned to me urgently. ‘Why did they go ahead with the plan, knowing, as they must have done, of that one obvious loophole: that you would tell your people in London, this man Harper or whoever, and that then there would be a good chance of their having their whole scheme played back to them. What makes them so confident, with that huge crack in their plan?’

‘I don’t know. They said they’d kill us — you and me or both if anything went wrong. I suppose they were relying on that: it’s quite an effective lever, don’t you think? That’s why they got me to watch them killing Guy.’

‘Yes, but you only have to make one phone call. And make sure you’re not seen — a shop or hotel in town, or some house over the hill here. That can’t be impossible.’

‘Why not?’ I suddenly thought ‘They may intend keeping all of us in the house locked up, prisoners, from now until I take the job up. Block the road. Someone with a gun. Have Mrs Grace bring the food. Very easy. They’ve probably got some sort of look-out post up there in the plantation. And the telephone wires go along the edge of the trees by the road. They could be monitoring it. Or even simpler, just cut the thing off now that I’ve arrived. Have you tried the phone recently?’

‘Yes. This morning.’

‘Let’s try it now.’

We went inside and she picked up the handset. It was quite dead.

‘I wonder when they’ll show their hand?’ I said.

We went out into the garden again and looked around: the lights bright over the town now in the full night, the dark plantation above us, the shadowy rows of apple trees in the paddock, the end of summer, a hint of fine sharpness in the air, and a lot of stars cluttering the sky.

And as we listened the air was suddenly pierced with a sharp cackle of alarm: the geese below the house had been roused by something: a fox or some human intrusion? Their cries rose, then wavered and died.

We were both frightened now, moving over to the flower-border looking down on the road, a rose bush just in front of us, a strong infinitely sweet smell on still air. Then we moved to the other side of the lawn and peered up through the long lines of dark fir.

And it was this simple, sudden feeling of fear, which we shared then, I think, which finally confirmed for both of us all the other details of my story — which at times, in the telling, had seemed fantastic to me as it must have done for Helen. But now we both knew the full truth of the whole business, knew it before it happened: we were trapped.

‘Of course the phone could just be out of order — that’s always happening in England. And that was a fox,’ Helen said.

‘Yes, it could be just that.’

But neither of us believed it. We were trying to support ourselves with words, avoiding the issue, postponing the truth, weary with drink and with my terrible travellers’ tales. And it was this feeling of being caught, yet not admitting it, that brought us together in the darkness. Already feeling victims of some outrage in the morning — the arrival of a new and treacherous Mrs Grace and a man with a gun — we both of us must have decided to combat this evil rising about us with some shared action: a statement that would assert, whatever happened later, that we two, at least, knew the prosperity of affection, could lay our hands firmly on the roots of decent life.

I turned to Helen, seeing her outlined vaguely against the light of the fire, the white face with its dark frame of falling hair, the rough white pullover. And wordlessly, with so much ease, we took each other in our arms, ears side by side, and stayed that way, strange at first with the feeling of being close, but growing quickly familiar with the idea as we gave it flesh.

No, there was no sense of shared pity in what we did: it was completely a positive thing, confirmation of a future, not a past. The past, hers and mine, had simply been an argument with the station officials. Now we had gained our tickets, it didn’t matter where. We had been married in that station and had never left it; we had spent all the time arguing and it had hurt; we had denied each other and lied to everyone. We had fought and schemed over everything and the only things we’d held in common were enmity and distrust. But that was all over now: that previous man was dead and so was the illness that had killed him. Guy was gone and my own obsessive curiosities about Helen had somehow died with him. He and I had shared that disease together — and both of us had been thrown from that window for our trouble.

‘Guy had no love for me,’ she said, crouching down now over the last of the flames. ‘Just endless anger and bad temper — possessing me. What did I see in George?’ She considered the question, ‘George cared. But it didn’t fall on me like a rock — the caring.’

‘Of course. But he was outside. That always helps. He kept being new for you, a little rich and strange and rare. Odd weeks, days, moments. Come on, you know that. You never lived with George, achieved what you wanted so much. And people can get tired of success together, as well as failure. You could have come apart with Graham too. There’s dissolution in every new face you meet. That’s all it amounts to. And the vanity of thinking otherwise, of needing to be unique and indispensable. And we’re not. And we don’t care for that truth.’

Helen looked at the fire, sitting on the ground, her knees drawn up resting her arms and head on them, her long thighs rising almost vertically, the rusty cord trousers golden against the dying flames.

‘He wanted to know everything about me, Guy. It was never enough to possess now — when we had each other in the present, willingly. He wanted my whole past as well. I can see that so clearly now. And he was right in a way, of course. There was something essential hidden in me. And I shouldn’t have married him, knowing I couldn’t share that with him. But I loved him in the beginning. And needed him. That was very strong. And I forgot all the manifestoes then in Africa — riding and looking at the animals, peering down craters, that fresh world coining all around you, and all you had to do was look at it and touch it. You didn’t think about it all. I forgot the political involvement in Africa.’

‘Involvement with Alexei Flitlianov?’

She looked up at me and said quickly, ‘Yes. Yes, with Alexei.’ And she kept on looking at me questioningly, as if in her use of his Christian name alone, in giving me this personal clue, I would be able to reach back into her past and immediately recreate all the facts and nuances of her relationship with him. But I couldn’t.

And I didn’t really want to now, having tried to do that for so long. I wanted to let Helen be, as she was, the full person then, at that instant, when she contained everything of any importance. Her past, which had so absorbed us both, was now available to me; she would tell me all about it if I asked her. And so I no longer felt the need for it. Curiosity dies completely in the sense of sure possession. And I must have felt that then with Helen: a pact arrived at wordlessly, a secret exchanged, agreements between us now and in the future, lightly, easily confirmed. We had passed, the two of us, without saying anything, into that area of a relationship where everything that before had been very unlikely, hedged round by mutual indecision, was now perfectly possible and expected.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was sure Flitlianov must have been involved with you, and with Graham: I told you that evening upstate — that he’d probably recruited you both in Beirut. But apart from that, I don’t know —’

‘Yes, you’re right,’ she interrupted urgently, as if she had at last found the right audience for a speech she had suppressed for years. ‘Yes, it was Alexei, when I was at the University there. And it doesn’t matter now — that you should know.’

‘That you and he were —’

‘Yes. Him. Before anyone.’

‘It wasn’t just political?’

‘No. It was both.’

‘As with Graham. You’ve been lucky.’

‘As lucky as a woman’s story. But it was true. You believe that?’

‘Yes, I do. Fact always stranger than. Why not? But what happened?’

‘I went on working for Alexei.’

‘For the KGB?’

‘For a part of the KGB. None you’ve ever heard about.’

‘The thing you said you couldn’t tell me about — the work you had to complete in America, which had nothing to do with me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, what is it?’

She didn’t reply. And then I remembered the man I’d seen in the dank, overgrown laneway upstate in New York when I’d fallen off my horse — the man in the green anorak with binoculars, staring after us, but not seeing me in the ditch. And it was this image of spying on us that brought the figure so suddenly and clearly back to me — that spying on ordinary life so close to Guy’s identical pursuits which we had just been talking about.

I said: ‘What does Flitlianov look like? Short, fiftyish, hollow-eyed, tufts of white hair over the ears?’

‘Yes.’ She spoke softly. ‘You’ve seen him?’

And then I remembered. ‘Twice. The first time, the day we lunched together in New York. And then that day we were riding. Each time he was following us.’

I told her what had happened when I’d fallen off the horse.

And then she told me the whole of her story — the story of a dissident group within the KGB, which Flitlianov headed, which George Graham had been a deputy in, and whose total complement of names was known only to her. She said, finishing: ‘And Alexei’s being there, upstate, hiding, can only mean they’ve found out about him in Moscow, that he’s on the run and wants those names — wants them before the others get them.’

‘The KGB knows you have them?’

‘How can they? Alexei was the only one who knew I was the post-box. And he can’t have told them, if he’s escaped. George knew the address of the mailbox in Grand Central — but he never knew it was me behind it.’

‘My London section could have got the number out of him when they grilled him, watched the box, and seen you going to it — before I got to New York.’

‘Possibly. But how could the KGB get to know that?’

‘Someone in London, working for them. It’s happened before.’

‘Well, if either the British or the KGB knew I had those names why didn’t they go for me upstate, or the apartment in New York? They’ve had plenty of opportunity and time.’

‘Yes, but would they have found it? Belmont’s a big place and how could they rifle through your apartment?’ And then it struck me. ‘Of course, they were waiting for you to leave America, to come into an empty house over here before they moved on you. They could find those papers easily enough here, take the place apart if you didn’t tell them. And they’d know for certain that you’d have brought them with you. And you have taken them, haven’t you — those names? They’re here, aren’t they?’

She nodded.

‘Well, if that’s so, then Flitlianov must be somewhere around here as well. He’d certainly have followed you over, not having made contact in America. He must be here. As well as the KGB or the British. They’re all after the same thing. And why not? You’re sitting on history — the most explosive sort of information. Nothing like it can ever have got out of Russia before. It could alter the future of the whole country. How many names — hundreds, thousands?’

‘They’re in code. So I don’t know. But there are plenty of them. So hundreds at least, yes.’

‘Of dissident KGB men — and others, no doubt, in the political hierarchy: the Central Committee, the armed forces.’

‘I should think so. It’s certainly a movement quite outside the acknowledged dissidents, the Chronicle of Current Affairs people.’

‘If they know you’ve got those names they’ll do anything to get them from you, you know.’

‘Yes, of course they will.’

‘And exactly the same goes for my section, here in London.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course, it’s up to you what you do with them. But don’t tell me where they are.’

‘No. All I want to do is give them to Alexei, if he’s here.’

‘You may not get the chance. The KGB are probably expecting just that — for him to make contact with you over here. Then get rid of you both when they’ve got the names. Perhaps you should destroy them. Those people’s lives won’t be worth much if the KGB gets hold of that list.’

‘If I do, no one can ever start the movement up again. It can only be linked together through me.’

‘It’s up to you,’ I said hopelessly.

‘I’ll wait. Alexei might still get through to us. But what about this electronic business here, your taking Guy’s job?’

‘A sideshow, an excuse. Or else two birds with one stone.’

It was getting late. We looked round at the woods again — looking for, and thinking of another person now — an old love returned, perhaps watching us at that moment as he had upstate — hating me, anxious for Helen’s renewed attention. She was in an impossible position.

I wanted to make love with Helen that night. But I was too tired, completely finished, so that we just kissed indecisively on the landing, and I fell asleep almost as soon as I got into bed.

And then, for some reason, I woke. It was nearly one o’clock. My bedroom door was open, the landing light on: I could hear a tap running somewhere. I got up, walked along the passageway and found Helen in the bathroom cleaning her teeth.

She turned, wearing a long, blue and white striped cotton night-dress, crisp and collarless. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you. I looked in. You were fast asleep.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Yes.’

She finished rinsing her mouth out.

‘Do you want to sleep with me?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

She put the toothbrush back in the rack.

And sleep we did when we had made love, with the children’s door open next to her bedroom, listening for cries that never came — though it was no great love-making, more a succession of tired questions and responses, the nervousness or desperation which we might otherwise have felt quite drained from us in our fatigue.

And I felt as we did it that, for her, I was not now in any sense a replacement for her lover or her husband. For she looked at me openly all the while, her face clear in the landing light, with an expression of great novelty, finding something quite new in the experience, something which she had not touched before. Here she was not casting her mind back or forwards as she held me. She was in no trouble with memory or expectation. It was now, and now only once, and that was everything.

A key which she had, she used then, which made her love-making for me a strange act in a sweet place, far from disruption or tragedy — and removed, even, from sexual desire. She seemed pressed by something else. Our bodies locked together didn’t matter. There was some greater pleasure beyond that which she found, and held, and gave — the series of vital messages falling lightly but indecipherably on me as I watched her.

Words were useless to explain it then, when we lay apart and I looked at her, one leg, so long in the bed, lying diagonally across it, the other crooked up like a cyclist’s against the sheet, arms behind her head so that her breasts became long slopes, the flesh at her waist tightening as she twisted, a bone appearing, as she reached for a towel on the bedside table.

Words were no good. I said, ‘I love you.’

I’d been avoiding that. But it had been there quite some while.

And there was no need to say anything else, for she turned back to me, doing nothing with the towel, and looked at me very carefully.

They came next morning — Mrs Grace and the man with the gun.

We’d had breakfast, and were happy, eating cornflakes and looking out over the sun-filled valley, the twins worrying us with plans to fill the marvellous day: a walk over the hill, toyshops in the town, a visit to a zoo. And we’d said yes, if possible, perhaps. And then she and I were unhappy, wondering what other overriding duties the day might bring that would deny every happy plan.

The phone was still dead.

The twins saw them first, playing outside on the lawn, and started shouting. When I went out they were half-way down the steps towards them. And they came back together, two shining and two rather sombre faces, the twins dancing round Mrs Grace and pointing out the other man to me: ‘Look!’ they said, ‘Another Daddy.’

Mrs Grace was visibly upset for a moment, though I noticed she took care to hide the fact from the man, looking at Helen for an instant with great feeling, an expression of resignation and sadness, as if she were about to be made prisoner and not us.

He was tall and blue-eyed, fresh-faced, in his mid-thirties, Nordic-looking and extremely polite — his thin fair hair blowing slightly in the hill breeze as he stood by the porch carrying a box of groceries. He looked like a figure in a romantic winter holiday skiing poster. I thought of going for him there and then, while his arms were full. But he looked at me as I thought of this, an easy, understanding expression crossing his face — almost a smile, as if to say: ‘Do you really want a fight in front of the children? And if you did over-power me, which is very unlikely, there are others. So why bother? It would be inadvisable and above all, impolite.’

‘May we go inside?’ he asked. How well he spoke English, formally, deprecatingly, without trace of accent. He was like a very well-brought-up child who hides his real nature in placatory, conventional phrases, his vicious potential perfectly camouflaged.

He talked to us in the drawing-room, while Mrs Grace busied herself in the kitchen with the twins. Helen and I stood by the fireplace while he stayed by the closed door, leaning against it at first, then pacing round the end of the room slowly.

‘You don’t really think you can keep all four of us cooped up here for a week, do you?’ Helen said at once, ‘Like chickens.’

‘No, of course not,’ he said evenly, not at all surprised by her deductions. ‘Your children may go out with Mrs Grace. You may do the same, while your children stay here with Mr Marlow. And Mr Marlow may come out with me, if he chooses.’

‘And you’ll be here all the time?’ I asked.

‘I’ll be around. And there are others.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Of course nothing!’ Helen suddenly shouted. ‘Of course I’ll do nothing of the sort. We were going out this morning. And I’m going.’

The man turned to her in surprise and his reply was genuinely solicitous. ‘I am very sorry.’ He looked over the town from the big windows. ‘Separately, yes. Together, no.’

Helen moved towards him. ‘We’re not going to run away — with two young children. You can follow us. We won’t telephone.’

She was lying. She was suddenly desperate. And I saw how the idea of our doing something happy — then, at that moment, that morning — was very strong in her, that she had forgotten everything else, looking out on the valley, on all its pressing invitations to life. Her face was intense in its longing, as if, with a sudden change of fortune, she could achieve the whole world in the coming hour. Now that it was about to be denied to her she longed to be released immediately; all the paraphernalia of a free existence rose before her, as it might for a prisoner, unaware of his incarceration until the very last moment when the key is actually turned in the cell door.

The man saw this, as I did, and he said again, with real courtesy: ‘I am not responsible for the orders, Mrs Jackson. You will know that. Let us get on together as well as we can. I know that it is not pleasant. Obviously. But it must be finished.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s finish with this. We’re trapped until I start my job down there. Mrs Grace will feed us. And you’ll stop us from doing anything stupid. You and your friends. We understand, it’s perfectly simple. Let’s leave it at that.’

‘Thank you, Mr Marlow,’ he said, with meaning. ‘I will make everything as easy and pleasant as I can for you.’ And I felt he meant that too.

‘Would it be of use if Mrs Grace took the children out now? A walk, a zoo perhaps? And you both — will you let me know of anything, anything you want at all, which we can get you in the town?’

We said nothing. His pleasant, accommodating tones were too much like those of a warder recommending to the condemned man that he eat a hearty breakfast.

Mrs Grace took the children out and the man took a book of military memoirs into the garden and sat in the sun reading it on a seat by the steps. We could see him from the corner of the kitchen window. Helen was making coffee.

‘So,’ I said. ‘A plan of campaign?’

We laughed. The situation was so peaceful, so ludicrous; it was unreal.

‘How many men do you suppose they have here?’ she asked.

‘They must be using outsiders from another country, or deep-cover illegals in England, like Mrs Grace. They’d avoid sending anyone from the Embassy or Trade Missions, who could be followed down here. Though there may be one or two of them organising it: Cheltenham is a big town, a holiday place, lots of hotels, quite a few tourists still. Easy to place strangers here. I should say they have at least a dozen people on it. Probably in three groups, with cars, and some central liaison point — a hotel where they can leave messages. What about the area round here — the lane, where does it lead up to?’

‘A common on top of the hill, with a golf course: the twelfth green.’

‘And the plantation?’

‘It must lead back to the common as well — further up.’

‘And in front?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is there? I don’t see it.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the third morning, Mrs Grace spoke to us.

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

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

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

‘Yes. I brought some tomatoes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I thought the end always justified the means?’

She laughed. ‘Not in this case.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But the man?’

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

‘So?’

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

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

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

‘It’s complicated. Not exactly.’

‘You’re with the Americans?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we made it — getting into the cover of a beech wood, resting a moment before running on along the side of the hill, rising slightly now, until we reached the new fir trees where we could go faster, moving through the green alleys over a sun-speckled carpet of moss and old fir needles.

We came out of the woods near the clubhouse of the golf course. Outside the staff entrance to the clubhouse I saw several bicycles. We might have taken a car but they were all parked right in front of the windows, and the road from here, I knew, must in any case be downhill all the way to the town.

Besides, it was an afternoon for cycling: soft and fresh and sunny. The drive gave out onto a main road very nearly at the apex of the hill. We turned left, pedalled upwards a bit, and it was brakes from then on, seeing the town round a bend three or four miles away in the valley, rushing towards it, past spacious Victorian villas on the left, the Malvern hills across the hazy distances away to our right.

We forgot pursuit and future then, forgot everything. And we flew, or seemed to fly, and the sensations were utterly new to me, as if I’d never been alive — of wind and balance and smooth motion, in which one is completely part of the land and atmosphere of the world for once: no longer an intruder, but someone naturally expected, a guest accepting gratefully all the pressing invitations of air, clarity and movement; perfectly poised, the stomach sinking with the slopes, the gut expanding, adrenalin running — a natural gyroscope keeping us rock-steady as we dived on the town, happy partners in the clear weather.

There was a phone box at the foot of the hill and I got through to my section in Holborn, reversing the charges, speaking to the duty officer. But McCoy was away, he said, on leave.

‘Let me speak to Harper then,’ I said. ‘John Harper, his deputy.’

‘I can’t do that, sir,’ the bland voice said. ‘Can’t give you his private number.’

‘Then get him to phone me, for God’s sake. At this number. It’s urgent.’

We hung about, trying to keep out of sight behind the kiosk until the phone rang behind the glass five minutes later.

‘Harper here. Who’s that?’ The Australian voice was impertinent and harsh, ringing down the line at me, looking for a fight.

‘Marlow. Peter Marlow.’

‘Oh yes — who? Marlow? But we heard you were dead — last week in New York.’

‘That was Guy Jackson.’ I began to explain what had happened, that the KGB were after me. But after a minute he interrupted.

‘Look, this is an open line. I’ll get down there with some men right away. Are you on your own?’

‘No, with Mrs Jackson. I told you.’

‘Right, well stay with her. Keep off the streets, out of sight Where will you be?’

‘A police station — or the Communications HQ here.’

‘Your KGB people will have thought just the same thing. You’ll find them there before you, waiting. Go anywhere else. It’ll be a couple of hours before we can get down, even if I can lay on a plane. You’ll have to wait somewhere — hidden.’

I gave him the address of Mrs Grace’s dancing academy in Pitville and told him about the Western Area Ballroom Dancing Certificate Examinations at seven o’clock that evening.

‘That sounds fine,’ he said, and he really seemed pleased. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can. At any rate before they start dancing. And keep together,’ he added. I didn’t quite follow him. Did he think Helen and I were going to part? That might have been the case. But he knew nothing of her activities with the KGB, I hadn’t told him. Solicitude perhaps? I couldn’t expect that of Harper. It worried me a little. But as I came out of the box I said to Helen, ‘I think it’s going to be all right.’

The studio was in Pitville Mews and it took us some time to find it. It lay behind one of the few restored terraces in the area, a narrow, empty cul-de-sac, which we cycled past several times before going down. Mrs Grace’s business was in the middle of it: ‘The Pitville Dancing Academy’ in Festival of Britain lettering on a long board above the doorway: a smart black door with brass fittings. Three or four garages had been run together and converted, we saw when we’d let ourselves in, into one long studio, with a hall, reception area, and changing rooms at one end.

There was a smell of floor polish and french chalk and some other sweeter smell, a combination of various old and cheap perfumes lying on the air. And the light was very pale and unexacting in the narrow mews, giving the long studio with its white, pine polished floor, lemon-coloured walls and mirrors, a submarine quality, a sense of fragile, colourless space.

We stepped on the shiny floor for a moment, very quietly. But even so delicate a movement reverberated about the room on the sprung boards. There was an old coloured photograph of the Queen at one end of the room, next to a record-player with a lot of Victor Silvester numbers stacked beside it.

‘Did you ever dance?’ Helen asked.

‘We were taught in my prep school. Every Saturday morning. Girls came. It was very popular.’

‘I like it. I used to.’

‘I’ve forgotten the steps though.’

‘Afterwards, perhaps?’

I smiled. ‘After what?’

She turned to me. ‘If we get out of this, what will you do?’

‘If. God knows. Back in jail probably.’

‘You could still get away now — on your own.’

I laughed. ‘It’s too much like the Thirty-Nine Steps already. And I’m tired of running. We’re together. Let’s see how long we can stay that way. With these names you have — the British might do some sort of deal with you, give you anonymous asylum.’

‘If I do that, won’t they think you’ve done something of your original job for them as well: not the names of the real KGB people in America, but this dissident group? They could be far more important to the West — to know who these people are, to help them.’

‘Maybe. Do you want to do that? Are you sure?’

‘Yes. What else can I do? Alexei’s not going to get to us now. They’ll be here in a couple of hours. So why don’t we work on the idea together — give them the names?’

She looked at me carefully, suggesting a future, all that future that she had once been so ready with.

‘All right. We could do that. If you’re sure.’

‘Yes.’

There was silence. She kissed me briefly, stood close to me, quite still. We were waiting for the music, about to dance. We might have been. And I saw the two of us, and the two children, living somewhere in London — a terraced house in Regent’s Park would have suited — with Mrs Grace as housekeeper. And all of us happy, of course.

‘Well, it might work,’ I said, letting this crazy vision grow in my mind, burgeon irresponsibly, seeing the red sailing boats on the lake in the park, and the zoo the other side of it, myself the recovered paterfamilias taking the twins for summer walks up Primrose Hill, skating on the lake over icy winter weekends. Yes, I would buy a pair of skates in Lillywhites, the assistant suitably deferential, and learn the skimming business, awkward at first, but soon finding the knack, the balance, moving smoothly into a happy and responsible middle life. And I thought it’s never what we are but what we never could be that keeps us going.

There was an airing-cupboard in the lavatory of the gents changing room, and we climbed the shelves past the cistern, pushed out a panel above it, pulled ourselves up, then screwed the shutter down again from the top.

A rough room had been laid out under the rafters, with boards on the ceiling joists, a camp bed, books, tins of food, a big polythene jerry-can of water, an electric ring with a tin kettle and a single 40-watt bedside light.

At the far end of the attic a small curtained window had been let into one side of the wall. Opening it slightly I looked out onto a wide lead gutter with a steeply slated room immediately beyond which would shield any exit from the rear windows of the big terraced houses to the left on the far side of the mews. To the right I could see the small backyard of a pub, with the ladies and gents lavatories to either side of it, and a lot of aluminium beer casks and wooden cider crates in the middle: everything as Mrs Grace had described. A man came out as I was watching, a big farmer chap with a peaked tweed cap, just his head visible as he went for a leak, but I had to duck down all the same. Our cosy retreat was somewhere to leave in the dark rather than the light.

‘Did you tell Harper that we were going to be up here?’ Helen said when I got back. She was picking through Mrs Grace’s reading matter: a number of old copies of the National Geographic magazine and an early text by Victor Silvester: First Steps in Ballroom Dancing.

‘Yes.’

‘And what about the twins? Did you tell him where they’d gone — about Mrs Grace?’

‘No. Just that they’d gone with someone to a hotel outside town.’

‘What did he say?’

‘To keep off the streets. Oh — and to keep together. We’ll pick up the children as soon as he comes. Don’t worry.’ She looked at me doubtfully in the hot gloom, a smell of baked wood everywhere. The slates above us were still hot to touch after the brilliant day. ‘They’ll be there,’ I went on. ‘They weren’t going to follow Mrs Grace to the hotel. That car we saw — after the tractor, in front of the house — that was the one they kept at the end of the lane for us. Not the children. And we’ll hear Harper downstairs as soon as he comes. We’re only up here in case the KGB call by.’

They called an hour later. It was 6.30 — half an hour to go before the dancing started. First we heard several successive keys groping the hall door lock, then quiet footsteps in the reception area, then — nothing. I was tempted to call out, fearing it was Harper and his men and that now they would leave without knowing we were there. A minute passed. I looked at Helen, whispering, ‘Shall I call?’ And if she had nodded a second sooner than she did I would have. My mouth was just opening. And then her hand was across it in the same instant, gagging me desperately, as the voice rose clear as a bell from the studio immediately beneath us.

‘Nichevo …’ Then two more voices in Russian, talking. And now the three of them were walking about the place, moving tilings, looking. One of them came into the gents changing room, then the lavatory. Silence. Then the airing-cupboard door opened.

Helen’s arm lay across my chest. I started to push her away, trying to get at the revolver. But the footsteps went back into the hallway, then into the studio where the voices started again.

‘Nichevo …’ Followed by a lot more in the same vein. And then the word appeared, the name, emerging from the Russian dialogue as clearly as if the man concerned was being introduced at the Kremlin.

‘… Harper …’

And just after that the other name, less well accented, but clear enough: ‘… Moorend Park Hotel …’ Then they left, the hall door closing softly, footsteps dying away down the mews.

Helen’s arm dropped away from me and I found I was holding the revolver after all, but had no memory of how it had got there.

‘Christ. It was Harper. With the KGB. All along. I’m sorry.’

She said nothing, looking at me in the gloom; she turned away, went over to the trap-door and started to undo the screws.

‘Wait. It’s no use. They’ll have someone at the hotel already — if they know about it. Harper must have had them check all the hotels on the outskirts of the town. But the twins will be all right. They won’t move on them —’

‘Of course they will. They probably have. Hostages. We’ll find a note when we get there.’

‘All right. But let’s think. You still have those names. And that’s what they want. The twins will be safe for the moment — as long as you have the names. I can get somebody else down from London — now that I know it’s Harper —’

‘Yes — and have a shooting-match somewhere. With the twins in between.’

‘All right, but —’

‘Well, we can’t simply stay here. We must do something. Anything. Telephone. Come on.’

But we couldn’t leave through the studio, for just then the first of the dancers arrived, someone in charge of the music it seemed, and as we started to squeeze through the window making for the pub, the bouncy sounds of a Silvester quick-step rose up into the attic as he checked the machinery in the studio, some happy old melody imprisoned now in a strict tempo.

It was cool outside on the roof where we crouched until the light began to fade. And then it was safe to move and we were down the short drop into the pub yard and lurking among the cider crates in the half light.

The back door opened. Two men came out, slightly tipsy. There was music inside, a piano being hammered, people singing, a lot of chatter and laughter, with broken bursts of huge gaiety in the steady hum, as if everyone inside were being systematically tickled.

We went through into the crowded saloon bar. It was an old provincial city pub, a small Victorian ale-house happily forgotten in these narrow streets in the inner town, with the original porcelain-handled beer-pulls, curved mahogany counter, and a series of dirty seaside postcards pinned up next to the dart-board. And it was packed tight with elderly folk, part of some group it seemed, very merry, the men in their best dark crumpled Sunday suits holding straight glass pints of bitter, and the women, squat, with bright-hued mackintoshes and unsuitable hats, full of Guinness. A seedy, narrow-faced man, cigarette ash trickling over his double-breasted suit — a caricature piano-player — was playing the piano, thumping out a fifties Jimmy Young number.

‘They tried to tell us we’re too young …

Too young to rea-ly be in love …’

The crinkled faces beamed, sang, swallowed, belched and swayed.

We pushed through this happy alcoholic euphoria, this old England briefly revitalised in merry song and strong ale at the end of a Sunday charabanc outing to Weston-super-Mare, into the public bar which gave out onto the street. And this was crowded too, with quieter regulars and with a group of men in smart blue suits drinking at the end of the bar by the doorway. The suits, I thought. Suits. What are they doing here?

But by then it was too late.

The first man at the counter had turned and was looking at me. It was Harper, the pock-marked face expanding in astonishment, a glass of gin and tonic raised to his lips. The second man looked up over a glass of light ale. It was Croxley. Detective Chief Superintendent Croxley of the Special Branch. And beyond him there was a third figure, tough, well-built, who wasn’t drinking and had obviously just arrived in the bar. Three devious emblems of somebody else’s law and order. I had come home again. I knew it now. Back where I’d started.

‘Marlow!’ Harper almost shouted, like a bully, putting a hand on me. ‘How in God’s name did you get here?’ He took no notice of Helen. I was suddenly angry.

‘Harper,’ I said, ‘you little —’ But I stopped. ‘You tell me — how did you get here? Why didn’t you pick us up?’

The tune had changed next door. They were singing ‘Good-bye Dolly Gray.’

‘Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you …’ The piano going very strongly.

‘We couldn’t get down the mews. They were there before us — saw them go down as we arrived. We got them as they came out, end of the street in their car. But you weren’t with them. Or back at the studio.’

‘How do you mean “them”?’ I was going to add: you’re with them. But I stopped in time. That knowledge was something I might need later.

Harper didn’t reply. I looked at Croxley. He smiled. ‘What’s this, then,’ I asked him. ‘The Last Round-Up?’ He nodded, deprecatingly.

‘How are you, Mr Marlow? We’d heard you were dead.’

‘I’m fine. Or I hope I am. This is Mrs Jackson.’

But Harper broke in suddenly, appraising her like a bar-fly muscling in on interesting company. ‘Hello. How are you, Mrs Jackson?’ He might have gone on: And the children — keeping well?

‘And your children,’ he said. ‘Where are they?’

‘A hotel outside town,’ I interrupted. ‘I told you.’

I stared at him. He sipped his gin.

‘Yes, of course. But which hotel? Where?’

‘What are you up to, Harper?’ I asked. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Do?’ He turned and looked over into the saloon bar, listening to the music wistfully for a moment, as though the tune had stirred some old colonial memory in him, tales of derring-do: the Boer War, Anzac Day, of times when the far-flung Empire had saved the sceptred Isle.

‘… Goodbye DOLLY GRAY! …’

They ended it with cheers, roused old voices — suddenly, vehemently unwearied.

‘Do?’ He turned back. ‘Round up these KGB operatives you’ve put us onto. That’s the first thing — now you’re safe. We’ve taken three of them. But there must be a crowd of them in town. There’s a show on tonight in the Town Hall, some Russian guitar stuff. So God knows how many men they may have here. We were just considering it — making plans.’

The young Special Branch man broke in to Croxley. ‘Yes, sir. The extra men are on their way — got it on the radio. Coming through Northleach now. Should be here in twenty minutes. And the caravan has been set up behind the Town Hall.’

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Storm the building? Very good for Anglo-Soviet relations.’

Croxley smiled again, his little sweet weary smile. ‘Not exactly.’ A man of few words. I remembered that. Except when they were needed.

Harper said, ‘We were going over there now — thought they might have taken you there somehow. We have the place surrounded: the plan was to make a few “inquiries” among the cast after the show. Cleared at the highest level, this. The PM. You won’t have heard, but there’s a bit of a purge in the works with these KGB fellows.’ He turned to Helen. ‘Anyway, your children are just as important. We should make sure they’re safe first. So let’s pick them up at that hotel now.’

I could see what Harper wanted: to play a double game right to the end: arresting a few KGB men for the sake of a far grander design — getting the names of all their dissident members from Helen. Obviously he must have known about them, known she was the woman behind the mailbox in Grand Central station. He’d been part — the English part — of this whole KGB plan for me all along. Now he was closing in, making sure of the kill, part of a pincer movement: if the KGB men already in Cheltenham didn’t get the papers off Helen, he would, which would amount to just the same thing. And if I’d said to Croxley that Harper was a KGB man himself he wouldn’t believe me. No one would. They never did. There could be no help from that quarter. So Harper was heading us both now towards some other plan, a situation somewhere in the city where Helen would be confronted with the deal: the names she held in exchange for her children.

They were onto another song in the saloon — the mood besotted and elegaic: ‘Roses are blooo-ming in Picardy …’

‘Come on,’ Harper said. ‘Let’s go. We’ve no time. Where are the children?’ He was threatening now. And there wasn’t much time.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘But just a quick one. I need it.’

‘Brandy?’ Harper turned away to order, and when he turned back I had the revolver out, pointing at him. Croxley looked at the weapon with great boredom, as if it was a dirty postcard I was trying to sell him. But he put his hand out, restraining the young policeman who had made a slight move forward. I liked Croxley. He’d always made the effort to try and see my point of view.

‘Thank you, Croxley. Get him to give me the keys of the car he came here in please.’

Croxley complied. So did the young policeman.

‘Stay here till you’ve finished your drinks,’ I said. ‘Don’t hurry.’

The car had only gone half-way down the narrow street when the engine suddenly stalled, then stopped. I tried the starter once, twice, but nothing. Yet there couldn’t have been anything wrong with it. There must have been some anti-theft device, an automatic cut-out on the ignition, some technical pre-condition which I had omitted to fulfil. And there was no time now to try again.

The door of the pub opened a hundred yards behind us. And in front, at the end of the street, a Panda police car appeared.

We were out of the car and running. There was a narrow alleyway twenty yards ahead of us to the right and we made for it. It led between two back garden walls to a piece of open, waste land, the site of some fine old urban estate now razed to the ground, with piles of brick and broken masonry everywhere.

We could hear them clearly now behind us. And then suddenly, looming up in the soft darkness in front of us was the shell of a whole house, still standing, a white stuccoed Italianate villa that had not yet come under the hammer.

At the side were steps leading down to the basement area and a door hanging drunkenly forward out of the deep shadows. Inside it was totally dark with a strong smell of fungus and old damp, and a more recent odour, dry and peppery, of lime dust and plaster rubble. We crouched just inside, backs against the wall, not daring to move further in or strike a light.

And now we could hear them running forward all round us, on either side of the house. But for some reason they had no torches and must have been as blind as we were. Someone stopped at the top of the basement steps. But then his footsteps moved away with the sound of half a dozen running feet and we breathed again.

‘Where do you think the Moorend Park Hotel is?’ I asked. ‘To the east of the town, off the Swindon road Mrs Grace said. We’re heading westwards. We’ll have to double back. The hotel is the first thing. And the second is to get rid of that packet of names, drop it somewhere. And pick it up again afterwards. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Are you sure this is right at all?’

‘What else? Harper is with the KGB, not against them. He would have pushed us into their hands somehow; then “rescued” us and the children when they’d got those names off you.’

‘Listen, why don’t we give it up — I can’t risk the twins like this. Let’s give the KGB the names and get the children back. There’s no alternative really.’

I paused, thinking: the children versus hundreds of lives in Russia. But of course she was right. There was no alternative.

‘There isn’t anything else, is there?’ she said, a strangely conversational, easy voice coming from a black void, a hole in the air. And suddenly I felt the need to confirm her physical existence and I put my hand out and it touched her breast for an instant and then I found her arm and squeezed it.

‘No, of course not. There’s nothing else, Helen. Come on.’

And I felt we’d come to the end then, given up the battle, that the story was over: I trusted her completely at that moment, was completely convinced that she was right. How right and true she was, I thought. We could find the children and give the names up and then we could stop running for ever. And perhaps we would live together. Or perhaps we wouldn’t. That didn’t matter. But at least we would never do this again. Let them have their world of politics and spies, their long battles of belief. We would belong to ourselves from now on, lose the horrors that are due to great ideas: we would take the little roads that led somewhere.

So we went back the way we’d come, creeping through the alleyway, and there, in front of us, where we’d left it, was the police car. Empty. And I suddenly thought: what if I turn the ignition key anti-clockwise first, then in the normal direction? I got in and tried this and the engine fired and kept on running.

We came to the High Street, were forced right on a one-way system, then left up the long Promenade of the town, the lamps bright all along its sloping length under the huge canopy of chestnuts. But where to — which way now?

There was a uniformed policeman on the kerb half-way up by a set of traffic lights. I took the chance. Our car was unmarked. He gave us very precise directions to the hotel.

We went left off the Promenade and to our right we saw the floodlit Town Hall, a great Edwardian rump of blackened stone standing back from the road, with a poster outside — ‘The Kirov Dance Troupe and Balalaika Ensemble’. Harper had said the place was surrounded but no one stopped us or followed us as we passed it.

The hotel was a mile or two further on, a strange two-storeyed Chinese-styled building with a pagoda-like roof and delicately carved wooden eaves — just off a by-road, behind a row of new pseudo-Georgian villas.

The receptionist was very helpful. Yes, a woman and the two children were in number 14, at the end of a ground-floor corridor. At least they weren’t in the lounge in front of us. Of course they might be eating: the dining-room was on the left just before the bedrooms.

We looked in the dining-room — full of quiet, elderly people murmuring over Dover sole and roast chicken — then we moved on towards some french windows at the end of the corridor. Number 14 was the last bedroom on the right. Helen gestured me to go in first.

I knocked. Nothing. I tried the handle and went in.

The bedside light was on and a man was standing next it, behind the bed, facing me with a revolver, a silencer at the end of it: a small, intelligent-faced man with deep-set eyes, in his fifties with ruffs of white hair about his ears. He saw Helen immediately behind me, and he began to move his gun about, looking at her, waving her out of the way. Then he fired. I heard a slight ‘Pop’ the same moment as the bullet hit me somewhere in the thigh. There was no pain at first, just a quick stab like a syringe needle going in. And I was down on the floor, writhing, yet still there wasn’t pain; one was waiting for it somehow. And then it came, as if another bullet had hit me — a sharp and colossal pain, a succession of jabs, as though my whole thigh were being pressed down onto a row of knives.

Harper was leaning over me when I came to. I was lying on the bed of the same room. Croxley was standing behind him, and there was a doctor there, packing up his bag.

‘What happened?’ I asked after a minute. My mouth tasted of some kind of disinfectant. My trousers had been cut and my thigh was bandaged and numb.

‘Happened?’ Harper said pityingly. ‘You madman. You walked straight into it. I’d have told you if you’d given me half a chance without the woman, if you hadn’t jumped us in the pub; your friend Helen Jackson is with the KGB. She was using you all down the line, stringing you along. And you fell for it. If you’d stayed with us in the pub we’d have had them both — her and the other fellow she was meeting here.’

‘What other fellow?’

‘The man who shot you — Alexei Flitlianov, head of the KGB’s Second Directorate, on the run. That’s who she was making for all the time. She works with him. She has some names for him. We’ve known for some time. That’s why I told you to stick with her.’

‘And her children — the woman they were with?’

‘Well, they’re not here, are they?’ Harper said, looking round the room. ‘They’ve all gone. You one-man army! Never mind. All the roads out of the town are blocked. We’ll have them. They can’t get far with two children in tow.’

Croxley left the room with the doctor.

I said, ‘You’re lying, Harper. You’re making it up.’

He managed a look of very genuine astonishment. ‘Am I? Then that’s an imaginary bullet the doctor took out of your leg.’ He picked up a smudge of lead from the bedside table. ‘All right then, if I’m wrong, you tell me what happened.’

‘I came into the room. And he shot me —’

‘Yes? You had your own gun out, of course?’

‘No. I wasn’t expecting —’

‘Of course you weren’t. But he was. Got you first time round. It was all fixed. You walked into the room first, didn’t you — because she asked you to, didn’t she?’

And she had, I remembered. I nodded.

‘Look,’ he said, like a teacher spelling it out for a dunderhead, ‘you’ve been living in the Jacksons’ house above the town, haven’t you? And the place has been surrounded by the KGB. They got rid of Jackson in New York and put you in his place to get hold of this new code process here. That’s the gist of what you told me on the phone. But the real thing they wanted was a collection of names from Mrs Jackson — unreliable KGB operatives all over the world — which she’d been keeping for Flitlianov. And all she wanted was to get these to him — and get herself and her children safely out of the place at the same time if possible. You were the means. How did she do it? What happened?’

Harper was lying. He must have been. Hadn’t she said … No, not that. We’d said very little up in the hills. Much more, hadn’t we completely trusted and understood each other? Of course, it could all have been counterfeit.

‘She must have used you, Marlow,’ Harper went on, the clever Iago I thought at first, until I began to wonder. If I didn’t believe him I’d begun to doubt Helen. ‘Can’t you see?’ He was studious now, an earnest commentator on the arts of betrayal. And then I remembered Mrs Grace — that sweet smile full of some shared confidence which she had given Helen on my first day in the hills and her subsequent — and to me, almost unbelievable — recantation of her faith. Harper’s theory fitted there all right: she had been in league with Helen all along. She was a member of Flitlianov’s dissident group. That would fit her very well. She had been in contact with him on the outside; they had arranged the whole escape together — all three of them: she would take the children out and I would take Helen, for we would never have made it altogether. And afterwards I would have to be dispensed with. With a bullet. It seemed unfair. Yet it had been a bullet. There was no doubt about that. I didn’t trust Harper. But, yes, I had begun to distrust Helen — and, yes, she had gestured me into the room first, then got out of the way as he fired. That was certain too.

‘Well, so she used me. So what?’ I said brashly. And then I thought of the few days on the hill together, the easy things we’d done, the brilliant light and the leaves turning — all that sanity, affection and fun up there in the woods, and the fire in the evening. And I thought, no, it couldn’t be. How could she fake all that?

And then I thought, why not? She could. Hadn’t she spent a lifetime faking things with people? A fake marriage with her husband. And in her belief a whole faked face to all the world. Hadn’t she always inhabited permanent cover, absolutely according to the book, lied convincingly about everything? — about her politics as about her lovers.

Her belief, which was no doubt genuine, and the secrecy with which she’d had to hold it, had led her to infect and destroy every close relationship with the same illicit urges — to sacrifice any present truth, a happy body or thought, for a clandestine political ideal. Things had to be secret for her before they could be real and so she could not sustain love in any open reality. She was a woman who only really thrived on the intermittent and clandestine in any affair, who required eventual failure and betrayal in love as others seek orgasm as a culmination.

Or perhaps, simply, she had just wanted to be with Flitlianov again. Perhaps it had only really ever worked with him: a father, a body and a belief all wrapped up in one — and everything in her life since had simply been done in memory of him. Graham, Guy and I — we had simply been bystanders, stepping-stones to that end, to that eventual reconciliation with the one man who had really mattered to her. These were theories. And Harper could have been bluffing and lying. But whatever her motives there was no doubt that I’d been shot, that she’d left me and gone off with Flitlianov. That was no theory.

‘She used you good, Marlow,’ Harper went on, anxious and concerned for me now, and not dismissive. ‘Cut you up into little pieces. Couldn’t you have guessed — seen it coming?’

I couldn’t look at him. My thigh was numb but lower down in the calf something had begun to throb. ‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘Tell me,’ Harper asked, with one of his crumpled smiles, ‘you weren’t just pretending to be man and wife up there? You slept with her, I hope.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘You did, didn’t you?’

‘Why not?’ I said angrily, as though I’d simply forced her to share a physical whim with me.

‘You liked her a little too, though. I can see it in you, Marlow.’ I looked at him with distaste. ‘That’s why you won’t accept it — that she pushed you down the river. There can’t be any other reason: the facts speak for themselves. Shouldn’t get involved that way with Russian agents, Marlow. That’s Rule One. But how should you have known? You’ve no experience in this business.’

And then I was really angry — at him or Helen, I didn’t know which. At both of them, I thought: angry at the truth.

‘Yes, but why shoot him, Alexei? Why?’ Helen asked.

‘I had to. How could you trust him?’ He looked at her in astonishment.

I did, she thought, I did.

‘He’d have ditched you at the end — after they’d got the names from you and taken me. I had to get him out of the way at once, without his having a chance to offer talk or arguments, to hold us up. He was a double agent all along. And would have been at the end too — for all he’s fooled you in the meanwhile. Couldn’t you have seen it coming, Helen? I’ve been following him for weeks, months — since he left London — while I was trying to get in touch with you. I saw you both upstate in New York one morning riding. I followed you there. I wondered how in hell he’d got into your family circle so quickly, and then in a flash you were in his arms.’

‘That didn’t mean anything. I was worried, that’s all.”

‘Of course you’ve been too long in the open, without anybody, any links with us that would have kept you going. I understand that. But falling for a British agent; that’s too much. That’s Rule One — not to.’

‘I didn’t know he was a double agent,’ she said. ‘I just believed the KGB were using him to get the technical information here, like I told you.’

‘That was one line, yes. But the British were using him as well — all the time: to get you and me together when you handed over the names. That’s obvious.’

Was it? she wondered. Had Marlow lied to her? Had there been nothing true in him during those days in the hills — and before in America when they had talked for so long — in Central Park, the Norman restaurant and upstate? Had his whole bearing towards her, from the beginning, been a crucial degree out of true, driving her towards the rocks, to this betrayal which Alexei had just prevented?

She was totally confused.

She had trusted and loved both these men. And now Alexei was killing Marlow in her mind, just as he had tried to kill him in reality. Was it jealousy or truth? Surely, after so long apart, Alexei could not have been jealous of her? He’d never been that sort of man. And there were no grounds for that now — the whole business for him with these names was a matter, precisely, of life and death for many people, including himself. Besides, he was vastly experienced in the business of subterfuge. And so she began to think that perhaps he was right. Or, at least, if he were not exactly right, she had begun to doubt Marlow. What she had seen as his naïveté, his inexperience in the work, his being framed by British Intelligence and forced into the New York job, as a tool — all this bruised innocence had been a very clever front, perhaps.

And then she remembered the extraordinary coincidence of their first meeting, the moment he’d got to New York in the guise of George Graham. He’d said the British had never known anything about her, that they’d never picked up that information from Graham. But of course, they had. And her meeting with Marlow had been no coincidence at all. It had all been arranged. He’d been planted on her — to get the names and, in the event, Alexei as well. Marlow was really as clever an operator as Alexei. And now that she was with Alexei she felt the truth of all this kindle in her and burst into flame in the suddenly renewed warmth of his presence.

In the hotel, fifteen minutes before, she had tried to do something for Marlow, struggling on the floor, before he passed out. But Alexei had pulled her away. They’d left the place by the french windows at the end of the corridor, hurried across the dark lawn under the huge ilex tree, and now they were walking along the small suburban road back towards town, to a church by the traffic-lights further up where they were to meet Mrs Grace and the two children.

He’d told her about Mrs Grace: how, when he’d been unable to get through the KGB cordon to her at the house in the hills, he’d followed the woman back one evening, found out where she lived, studied her carefully, and then taken the decision to approach her. And he’d been right. She was a member of his dissident group, recruited years before by one of his deputies in Russia. And the rest had been easy; the woman had no taste for kidnapping in any case. The only problem had been getting Helen out, for they couldn’t have all escaped with Mrs Grace together. But Marlow had done the trick there. After all, he’d been as anxious as anyone for her to get out so that the British could take her and the names and himself — in the clear, without a shooting-match, a diplomatic incident up in the hills. And wasn’t that just what Marlow had done — he’d asked Helen — the moment he’d found a telephone box? Phoned up HQ in London and told them everything was ready and given them the address of the studio hideout in the town.

‘But why did he bolt from the pub then?’ Helen had asked.

‘Another bluff. What kind, I don’t know. Don’t you see it, Helen? He double-crossed you all the way along. You must see it.’

She believed him now. And indeed, Marlow had said it himself, hadn’t he? — had condemned himself — when he’d told her on the hills how there was dissolution in every new face you met. He’d simply been excusing his treachery, warning her of it in advance.

Trees hung deeply over a high stone wall all along one side of the road, and the street lamps were hazy yellow globes, strung up high at intervals in the leaves — dark, heart-shaped patterns waving slightly in the warm air, moving over this abrupt, awkward, angular face which she had not seen in years, yet which was the same face, exactly so, as in those previous times; which had survived and was an indubitable presence, here in this suddenly glum autumn evening on this suburban road.

His face. A good face. Its lack of conventional symmetry had so affected her in the past, had made the matrix of her love for him so much more precise, that now, as she looked at it closely again, she was able to trace and renew those old emotions for him in herself instantly, as though she had found in his physiognomy a long-lost map describing the treasures of her life and could now at last resurrect them.

An ear-lobe still curled outwards in a minute, strange way; the wrinkles on his forehead were deeper but not more numerous; a front tooth was still chipped: she had travelled intimately about this body once. And then she had come to think, in his long absences, that these physical characteristics didn’t matter: you could forget them. You had to. Affection lived in the spirit, not in fact. But now she realised how the spirit was so often dependent on the unique configurations of flesh and bone: a precise reality, a moment when you looked at, touched, a living, present face — and knew it was yours. And such loss — the touch of someone’s hair — could well be the only real loss, she thought.

She felt her stomach move with this sudden renewal of emotion — at this realisation, which she had suppressed, of how imperative immediate presence was in love; of how, just as it often started with a shared look across a room, so it survived, or could be regained in a moment, long afterwards, with this same simplicity of an intense regard.

So her affection died for Marlow as it rose for Alexei: Marlow began to disappear and Alexei swung towards her, like the wooden figures on a miniature Swiss chalet that came out for sun, or rain. And the articles of trust were transferred from one to the other, as the deeds of a dead man’s estate are passed to a living heir.

The church was coming up on their left, Catholic, a long, modern building, characterless as a Nissen hut, in reconstituted Cotswold stone, the Christian vernacular of the seventies, where the setting had to be as bland and undisturbing as the new Liturgy.

As they got to the gateway of the church, a police car swung round the traffic-lights ahead of them and stopped on the corner. Two plain-clothes men got out. They could see Mrs Grace and the two children sitting in her car, parked on the far side of the chapel next to the presbytery.

Alexei looked up the road. The men hadn’t seen them yet but they would at any moment.

‘Go inside, Helen. Quick. I’ll bring the others.’

In a minute the five people, a perfect Sunday family, with Auntie, were sitting in one of the back rows. The mass had already begun. The children sniffed the air appreciatively, their eyes fixed on the altar and the movements of the priest as on some charade, a dumb crambo whose meaning would at any moment become clear to them, when they could then laugh and cheer.

Helen and Alexei were at the end of the row, by the windows, in a distant hollow of the chapel. The congregation knelt in front of them for the Consecration. But the children stayed on their feet, happy infidels, peering intently over the edge of the pew.

‘Where are we going?’ she whispered to Alexei, their heads bowed, close together.

He shook his head, without saying anything. The priest prepared the Host. At last he whispered back, ‘Out of here. You have the names.’

‘We’re not all going to get away. The roads will be blocked. The children. We can’t run forever. Couldn’t you give the names to the British? Get them to help in the future?’

‘No. They wouldn’t believe it.’

The priest lifted the Host above the altar. A bell tinkled quickly — and then again, an impatient demand from some impossible old woman.

‘You’re beginning to believe like they do.’ He tilted his head briefly in the direction of the altar. ‘In failure. But we know all about that. That’s obvious everywhere. You don’t have to come to believe in it. You do something about it. I told you years ago. I said, “You believe in these political facts now; remember that when you begin to despair of them — as you will.” As you have.’

‘I still believe in those facts. But children are facts too. And so are road blocks.’

‘We’ll have to get out. The names you have — we’re responsible for hundreds of people: that’s a whole world in our hands.’

‘And so is this — us, here, now. That’s a world as well.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said with tiredness. The little bell rang again, insistently, another mysterious demand. ‘And you’ll lose it — if you stay.’

‘I’ll lose it either way, Alexei. We were lucky — sharing each other as well as a belief. But they don’t often go together. And not now. You go on your own with the names.’ She took out the plastic envelope tucked in behind her trouser belt, and passed it to him. ‘They can’t do much to me.’

‘They can. Prison. You’ll lose your children. And haven’t you lost enough already?’

‘Yes. But I knew the risks when I started. Be realistic: those names are more important than me. You know that, Alexei.’

‘Yes, I know that.’

‘I want to go with you. But it wouldn’t work. I want to very much. But you must go on your own.’

She smiled — a rapid, intense smile, compacting the message, making it a sudden, boundless gift, through which she could tell him that she felt hope, and was not sad, in this divided future; a smile that would confirm her renewal with him as much as their imminent separation — which would tell him, without doubts, that she had re-achieved all the forward parts in her nature; that she had found again — here with him at this moment — the world, that proper world, which they had both sought for so long, where charity and affection ruled, where prayer was continuous and not distantly intermittent. And to find that world you had to lose it first. Wasn’t that what they said?

‘You must go, Alexei,’ she said quite simply.

Harper travelled inside with me in the ambulance from the hotel. He didn’t want to let me out of his sight, I thought — I was the one man who might know too much. I wondered if he’d try and kill me. We drove to the side of the Town Hall to a police caravan hidden in the trees, a temporary command post, where he got out to see how the road blocks were getting on.

And now I could hear the balalaikas quite clearly on the still air, coming from the Town Hall beside us, a long restrained vibrato on many instruments, which rose in pitch gradually, until the tune was suddenly released and a sad and restless music spread over the night.

‘Nothing,’ Harper said when he got back into the ambulance, sitting on the bunk opposite me. ‘Nothing yet.’ His face began to crinkle, filling up with a sly smile. ‘But they’ll come. We’ll get them.’ He was so happy.

I said, ‘Now there’s only me to worry about.’

‘You?’ He reached out his arm and fingered the tap on an oxygen cylinder strapped to the partition at the end of the ambulance. He lifted the mask up and put it against his own face and stared at me, unblinking, like some fearful prehistoric fish revived from the depths.

‘One can die of too much oxygen, I suppose,’ he said, dropping the mask, ‘as well as too little.’

‘Might be tricky at the post mortem though.’

‘Would it — in your case? Delayed shock, a sudden seizure. I had to give you oxygen quickly … Would it?’

We looked at each other carefully, like boxers between rounds.

Harper put the mask back. ‘I don’t have to run the risk. I know what you think about me, Marlow. But it’s just your word against mine. And after I’ve shopped hundreds of KGB men tonight who is going to believe you then? No one.’

‘How are you going to get those names?’ I asked. ‘They’re not going to leave the town all together. They’ll separate. And in any case they’re not going to give the names to you — of all people — whatever happens.’

‘I’ll get them.’

I wanted to keep Harper talking. He was too confident. He was bound to relax — for an instant, at the wrong moment. Then I might get him. He thought I was an invalid. But I hadn’t been that badly wounded. I could move, I was sure — move fast for a few seconds at least.

‘They’ll give themselves up — the women and children. But he won’t. And it’s quite a big town, inside your road blocks.’

‘He can’t hang around in someone’s back garden for ever.’

‘And you can’t stop every car leaving town for ever either.’

‘No.’

‘It may not be that easy, Harper. You may never get those names. I hope you don’t.’

‘Ah, Marlow, I should never have suggested you for this job in the first place.’ Harper shook his head in mock despair. ‘You believe in it all. In the rights and wrongs. But there aren’t any in this business. It’s fatal to believe anything about it. You get your head chopped off.’

Flitlianov moved carefully through the municipal gardens that lay at the back of the Town Hall, round a fountain, along neat paths, beside a wilting succession of herbaceous borders. Clouds had come in with the evening and for the first time in a week the night was dark.

Ahead of him, between clumps of evergreens, he could see the stage door, to the right of the building, with a man posted outside. But to the left, on the other side of the hall, was another doorway with a pile of beer crates stacked beside it. A man came out, pushing a trolley of empty bottles. Flitlianov cut across the grass towards the catering entrance.

Once inside the building, he walked through a pantry, across a corridor, and up some steps to a door which led backstage. He opened it and the music hit him, flowing over him, a Georgian peasant dance he remembered well, a bright and stormy affair, where two circles merged and then flowed away from each other, the men moving outwards, stamping their feet, the girls clustering in the centre clapping their hands. He knew the shapes of it all exactly without seeing anything behind the back curtain. A Russian approached him. Flitlianov showed him his card. ‘Embassy Security. I’ve just come down from London. Just a check-up. I’ll be leaving with you after the show.’ The man nodded blankly. Flitlianov listened happily to the music. He was home again.

The next time Harper left the ambulance I reached up for the small brass fire-extinguisher above my head and hid it beneath the blanket, holding the plunger tap firmly, and pointing the thing to where Harper had been sitting opposite me.

And when he came back and was sitting comfortably and had lit a cigarette, had talked some more, and was saying: ‘No, you’ve had a lot of bad breaks, Marlow —’ I emptied the canister of foam straight into his face. And then I was up, hovering on my good leg, falling towards him, the canister raised until I cracked him over the head with it. I was getting quite good at chopping people’s heads off.

Immediately I was finished with Harper the back doors of the ambulance flew open and Croxley was there with two plain-clothes men. They looked disappointed, I remember. One man stayed behind with Harper, while the other two carried me across to the police caravan. All three of them had been waiting just outside I realised. They must have been there all the time.

‘Harper is with them, Croxley. With the KGB,’ I said when they’d got me on a chair in the caravan. Croxley looked embarrassed. ‘Yes, Marlow,’ he sighed, politely. ‘We knew that. We —’

The skin at the back of my neck and in the small of my back pimpled in an instant and my stomach turned violently.

‘Well, what the fucking hell have you been doing then?’

‘It wasn’t my —’ Croxley stopped and shrugged his shoulders. ‘The idea was that he’d hang himself, if we gave him enough rope. We —’

‘What rope? How?’ Croxley looked over my shoulder.

‘You were the rope, Marlow,’ a voice said.

I turned. McCoy was standing in the doorway, his puffy face gleaming from some exertion, folds of skin seeping out over his starched collar and tightly knotted old boys’ tie. He came in and looked at my leg with distaste. ‘We knew about Harper. But couldn’t really prove anything.’ McCoy was suddenly an awful version of Hercule Poirot, assembling the candidates for murder in the library, about to superintend the final denouement. We had moved from The Thirty-Nine Steps to Agatha Christie. It was all still so unreal, still a fiction to me. But not for much longer, I thought. The fiction was running out fast.

‘So?’ I asked, working now for the truth.

‘We’d been watching him quite a while, tapping his phone. And when you called him this afternoon telling him about Guy Jackson in New York and how you’d got away from the KGB — out of that house in the hills, we thought he’d probably try and get rid of you then. You were screwing all their plans up. But once you ran from the pub, we were sure he’d go for you. Because somehow you knew about him then, didn’t you? That he was a double with the KGB. And he knew that you knew. So we gave him his head with you after that — left you alone together — in the hotel room, in the ambulance. And hoped he’d get on with it. Instead you bungled it — tried to kill him. If only you’d let him do it, then we’d have had cast-iron evidence.’

‘Thanks.’

Croxley looked sad, one of his crestfallen looks, as though he knew for certain now the ale was off.

‘You stupid fucker, McCoy.’

McCoy took no notice. He moved over to the sergeant on the radio desk. Some information was coming in, a voice crackling on the receiver. McCoy listened carefully.

‘We’d have stopped him actually killing you,’ Croxley put in, by way of mitigation. ‘We were just outside.’

‘Thanks again.’

McCoy came back.

‘Well, you have Harper now,’ I said. ‘A week with Croxley here, and he’ll spill everything. But what about the others? You know about these names? Flitlianov must have them now — a liberal group within the KGB, dissidents. They’re important.’

‘Yes,’ McCoy said wearily, ‘we know about the names. But they’re not liberal dissidents, Marlow. Our politicals here checked. They’re just unreliable KGB agents, the names we sent you over to New York for in the first place. Nothing to do with liberalism. Mrs Jackson sold you that idea. I suppose she thought we might take them over and believe we were running them back against Moscow. But it would have been the other way round: we’d have bought ourselves a brigade of double agents, instead of the one or two like Harper we have anyway. “Liberal dissidents” my foot. I can tell you — when we get those names we’ll pack them out of the country smartish.’

‘You knew about Mrs Jackson then — all along?’

‘Yes.’

‘About her and George Graham?’

‘Yes. Graham told us about her as well as the names — in the end. And of course we’d read her letter to Graham that morning in Marylebone before you did.’

‘So I was planted on her — from the start? You knew she was with the KGB?’

‘Well, obviously we couldn’t have told you, Marlow. We had to get you to trust each other, so that we could keep tabs on her, through you. Guy Jackson was no use. We knew that. He was working for the Americans. So you were the crucial link there. And it would have gone fine — we’d have had all the information about her out of you — and got those names a lot earlier — if the KGB hadn’t decided to switch you and Jackson in New York and start this Cheltenham deal.’

‘You knew about that too?’

‘Yes. And we decided to ride with it. Jackson was no loss. And it looked like an interesting situation, full of possibilities from our point of view: whatever happened when you got back to England we were going to lay our hands on a lot of KGB men in this country — legals and illegals. To handle you they were going to have to come out of their holes and be counted. And they have, Marlow, they have: half a dozen so far — and more to come, many more, before the night is out. So you’ve done all right, Marlow. Even though you did your best to screw it all up. Don’t despair.’

‘I don’t, McCoy. Only of you.’

McCoy got out a handkerchief and began to wipe his hands with it carefully. ‘Don’t be like that. We have to do a job. And you’re here — alive, in one piece.’

‘No thanks to you.’

‘One doesn’t thank anyone in this business. It’s quite thankless.’

‘So you knew everything, all along,’ I said. My leg had begun to throb and ache.

‘We had to, didn’t we? That’s what it’s all about. Sometimes people are used in the process. But that’s just as true of ordinary life. You’ll see — if you get back into it.’

‘If?’

‘Who knows?’ McCoy finished his toilet. ‘If we get these names tonight they may consider your slate clean, Marlow — that you’ve worked your passage. A free pardon, even compensation.’

Compensation. I remembered my tirade against McCoy in Durham jail months before, my anger at four years lost behind those granite walls. What would compensate me for this — these months as a patsy on everyone’s behalf: Helen’s, McCoy’s, the KGB’s?

But no, I didn’t need any compensation for it now, I thought. The hell with it. It hadn’t been funny. But it wasn’t really tragic either. A bad tragi-comedy. I had been forced into a number of roles and now I could drop them. It hadn’t been a good production, it was folding. The audience had only been mildly amused. The backers were withdrawing their money. It was time to wipe the greasepaint off, tip the stage door man, and make my way quietly home. There certainly wasn’t going to be any party.

I said, ‘Well, there’s time yet, isn’t there? Flitlianov may get away. You may never get those names.’

And I hoped that he would get away, that someone would come out of it all clutching something decent, the deeds of a worthwhile future. For I believed Helen at least in that: that these names represented something valuable in Russia: a force against the indifference and brutality of that world. And I believed what she’d said about Flitlianov too, that he had something vital to offer, a balanced commentary on the appalling scene, something sane and passionate to invest in the confused affairs of men.

And what did it matter if Helen had used me to escape back into this hopelessly optimistic adventure? She would pay more than I would in the end for her daring. She would be caught in full flight, while I would be returned to some shallow existence. Those forward parts in her nature, the driving engines of attack and laughter, would lead her to a final disaster. I, who had risen with her a little in the sky, attached to her like a glider, would now float down again into the listless winds of indecision and compromise, where the air had no buoyancy. Yes, she would pay, while I was still fumbling for the small change in my pocket.

I said, ‘Flitlianov may still screw it all up for you, McCoy. And I hope he does.’

McCoy nodded his head several times, as if at last confirming something long suspected. ‘You’re a good fellow, Marlow. You really ought to have got a job with Oxfam or Shelter. Out of harm’s way. We’ve got Flitlianov already — or as near as makes no difference. He’s in the Town Hall at the moment. Just had it from one of our men backstage. Last thing I thought Flitlianov would do. But I see it now. He must have thought he could get away with the dancers and musicians — they wouldn’t know anything about him — in the coach after the show. And even if we’d spotted him he’d know we couldn’t touch him amongst that lot — cause a terrible political rumpus. And the PM wants all this kept completely under wraps for the moment, till we get those names.’

‘So?’

‘So — we’re going to have to separate them, aren’t we? Before they leave the hall and hop on the coach. Not too difficult. We’ve a lot of men in there. The finale could be the moment.’ McCoy got his glasses out and consulted a programme with distaste. ‘The finale, yes. “Gopak Dance” — whatever that might be. The whole company is on stage then. And Flitlianov will be somewhere alone behind the scenes. Just a matter of timing. I’ll tell the men.’ McCoy stood up. ‘Now there’s only your other friends to worry about, Marlow. Your wife and children, I should say. That must have been a lark.’ He smiled at me like a man on a winning streak at the races. ‘And you think we used you. But don’t worry — they’ll come safely home, wagging their tails behind them.’

Ten minutes later they brought Helen, Mrs Grace and the children into the caravan. They sat up at one end, next to the door, a woman police officer tending them. I was up at the other end, on a bunk, by the radio equipment, immobilised — else I should have got out of the place at once. The police doctor was giving me a sedative. And of course, it must have seemed to Helen as if I was very much with the police — the agent provocateur come home to roost.

Helen’s hair was wet, though there had been no rain — dark and glistening, as if she’d just come out of a shower. The policewoman gave her a towel. There were cups of tea. And silence. Helen looked at me briefly with indifference. Not hate — that would have been better. That would have meant something, that I existed for her still, as I didn’t any longer in this empty regard. I thought of saying something. But I knew it would do no good now. Excuses, she would have thought. Lies and excuses. I was the little robber, her look said, a cheat from the beginning, who had wormed my way into her trust and then sold her down the river, or tried to.

I looked at her, and she was still so fine, so clear a person, that I began to doubt that she had ever intentionally betrayed me. I should like to have talked to her about that. But, my God, hadn’t we talked enough? And it had got us nowhere but here — to this huge division, where any words said would be the wrong ones. We had been driven into an implacable enmity towards each other.

We had no reserves in our relationship, which might have saved things. Trust, which needed time, hadn’t had a minute. She and I had travelled across the whole spectrum of an affair in a matter of a few days, hours even — had experienced the happiness and the pain, the beginning and the end, almost simultaneously, without ever having had the chance to live things in between, to save ourselves from a bad end. But could we have done that in reality, I wondered, if there’d been the chance — even in Regent’s Park with Mrs Grace as housekeeper and the children boating on the lake? Could we have saved each other from the familiarity and boredom that eat away the poetry of even the happiest association? An end had overtaken all our surprises. Expectation had been killed, all the mechanics of happiness had been smashed. ‘Shall we do this tomorrow, next week, or next year? Or shall we do that? Will you phone me? Shall we meet?’ The mundane arrangements that are yet so bright, so imperative in love had been struck off the calendar. The future had shut up shop and sane adventure had been locked away for the duration.

She had written to Graham, I remembered, how we think we have experienced the past, because we have lived it, willy nilly. But how there were so many turnings off it which we knew about but had never travelled: the little roads that went somewhere — and how she had wanted to live now, with him, all that was unlived then. And that she felt she had the gifts for this. And she had. She might have done it with me.

And I was angry then — not at her, but at the loss of this. And I looked at her with this anger, which she could not have understood. She could only have taken it as evidence of a mutual disgust. And perhaps that pleased her, thinking my enmity as great as hers, that our disgust balanced out — so to end things neatly, which is the last ambition of two people who have come apart: to leave something neat and tidy between them, even if only hatred.

So there was silence, an empty space, where words had died and anger bloomed — and where that fabulous regard which two people can share, that calm offering of self, so unmistakable in promise and beyond all language, had gone too. That vision between us had become despicable. The radio behind me crackled and perhaps the wind changed, for I could hear the balalaikas from the hall again now, rising and falling sweetly. But neither message pleased — the words and music from a cooling, sour world.

The twins had been looking at me, I suddenly noticed. And of course I realised I was still in their father’s clothes — his shirt and old school tie and coat and ruined trousers.

They tried to walk over to me but Helen and the policewoman held them back. They were tired and the pain of all these confused events was beginning to show in their faces. The game was wearing thin. But they had recognised me — brightly and eagerly — and were sorry now that they couldn’t come over to me.

‘But that’s the Daddy we play with,’ one of them said. ‘Not our real one, but the one that tells us stories, Mummy. Can’t we have a story?’

‘No, not now,’ Helen said, smiling at them, touching their hair, stroking their cheeks, intensely familial, in these last moments. ‘Later perhaps. When we get home.’

And that was the saddest story I ever heard.

I hobbled over to the doorway of the caravan, but could see nothing of the rear action inside the huge building.

I don’t know exactly how they got Flitlianov. But they got him, of course. And they got the names, for by the end of the month the whole thing blew up and more than a hundred Russian diplomats and trade officials were expelled from the country.

I tried to imagine Flitlianov’s last moments. Like something from a Hitchcock film, I supposed: the men creeping up through the audience, along the aisles, and the others coming in by the stage door at the back. A pincer movement. Perhaps he’d hidden in a lavatory and had tried to flush the names away? Perhaps he’d put up a fight — fisticuffs or guns? — one wouldn’t have heard anything above the din on stage. It was ludicrous, I thought — a man being trapped like this. It always was. Sheer fantasy. Perhaps it had happened like the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera — Flitlianov swinging across the stage on a chandelier, losing himself among the players, then a frantic chase about and behind the stage. The comedy of this idea appealed to me. And I longed for a comic life. And not the strident music, so full of vehement intention, which we heard throughout the finale — the Gopak Dance: feet stamping, shouting, endless clapping, the clash of swords. It all went on for a long time, before it ended and a tremendous applause broke out over the evening. Bravo …

They brought him out through a side door quite close to the caravan — while the applause was at its height — so that it seemed that Flitlianov was the reason for the frenzied appreciation, a hero being hurried away from the field of his glory.

Helen and the others had been taken away just before and I’d hobbled over to the doorway of the caravan to watch. And now I saw them both for an instant before they were put into separate cars, and though I couldn’t make out anything in their faces, I saw them wave to each other before the cars drove off and turned into the lights under the huge chestnut trees along the Promenade.

McCoy came back into the caravan to pick up his things — happy, savouring already a tremendous future: the bureaucratic commendations, possibly a medal from the Queen.

‘All over, Marlow. Finished. Safe and sound. And you’ve helped. At least, I’ll say you did. A few days in hospital and then I’m sure we can let you out to grass.’

I looked at McCoy — the puffy, ruined face proud now and full of all the silly rewards he worked for.

‘We’ve got them altogether, now. Every one. All happily resolved. Don’t you see?’ he said, as though he was offering me at last the incontrovertible evidence, the veracity of faith I had long denied.

I smiled at McCoy then. The only thing that had been resolved was our absence from each other.

‘All together, McCoy, of course,’ I said, ‘as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Fucking Amen.’

McCoy looked at me curiously.

‘Don’t be like that, Marlow,’ he said.