The Trinity Six

Chapter 15

‘Walking the cat back?’

‘An old spying term, isn’t it?’ Neame could see that Gaddis was confused. ‘Tracing a man’s steps. Taking a jigsaw apart so that you can put it back together.’

He wiped his nose a second time on the carefully folded handkerchief. ‘Perhaps it’s best if we go back to the winter of 1933.’

‘Whatever is easiest for you.’

Neame leaned back in his chair, preparing to begin. But his balance was off. Gaddis had to reach out to steady him and felt the rough tweed of Neame’s suit as it stretched tight against the hunch of his back. When, finally, Neame was comfortable, he folded his arms across his chest and glanced briefly towards the aisle.

‘How much do you know about Eddie’s time at Cambridge? How much have you been able to discover?’

‘Very little.’

Neame pursed his lips. He was perhaps wondering where to begin.

‘Eddie and I went up at the same time,’ he said. ‘Met on the first day. Both of us eighteen, both of us from fairly similar backgrounds.’

‘What kind of backgrounds?’

Neame’s response was quick. ‘Like yours, I should imagine, Doctor. Aspirational middle class. What difference does it make?’

Gaddis was about to point out that it was Neame, and not he, who had raised the issue of class, but thought better of it. Best just to ignore his little slights and quips; they were evidence of the old man’s frustration at his ailing health, not criticisms to be taken seriously.

‘Could you tell me anything else about Crane’s family?’ he asked. Behind him, towards the main entrance, a party of perhaps twenty tourists were gathered in a loose group, listening intently to a guide. ‘How did you first come to be introduced to him?’

‘Oh, that’s quite straightforward.’ Neame’s tone implied that Gaddis was the only man in Winchester Cathedral who did not know the story. ‘We were both inveterate lovers of crossword puzzles. I came across Eddie and a copy of the London Illustrated News one evening in the junior common room. He was stuck on a rather ingenious clue. I helped him with it. Would you like to hear what it was?’

Gaddis reckoned Neame was going to tell him anyway, so he nodded.

‘“Are set back for a number of years.”’

‘How many letters?’

‘Three.’

Gaddis had a knack for crosswords and solved the clue in the time it took Neame to check the time on his wristwatch.

‘Era.’

‘Very good, Doctor, very good.’ Neame sounded impressed, but a restlessness in his hands betrayed his irritation. It was as if the speed of Gaddis’s mind was a threat to his intellectual superiority. ‘Well, after that introduction, the two of us became firm friends. Eddie’s father had been killed in the war, as had mine. There were rumours, never confirmed, that the senior Mr Crane had taken his own life. You might like to look into that, chat up a military historian or two. See what they make of it.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Gaddis told him.

‘Eddie’s mother, Susan, then remarried, a man whom Eddie detested.’ Neame’s mouth had tightened, but folds of skin hung loose beneath his chin. ‘His name escapes me, for some reason. I never met him. Scoundrel, by all accounts.’

‘Rather like Philby’s father.’

Gaddis hadn’t meant to draw other members of the Cambridge Ring into the conversation so quickly, but was pleased by the impact of his observation. Neame was nodding in agreement.

‘Precisely. Both absolute monsters. Kim’s father was an epic charlatan. Converted to Islam, if you can believe it, even took the name Abdullah and married a Saudi slave girl. Rumour has it he worked as a spy for the Saudi monarchy.’

‘I’ve heard that,’ Gaddis said. ‘ Cherchez le pere. ’

Neame understood the implications of the remark and again nodded his agreement.

‘Indeed. Every member of the Trinity cell, to a greater or lesser extent, had complicated, in some cases non-existent, relationships with their fathers. Guy’s died when he was very young, ditto Anthony’s. Maclean was the same. What would they call Sir Donald nowadays? “An absentee father”?’ Neame gave the phrase the same withering tone of dismissal that he had reserved for the word ‘subconsciously’. ‘Strict Presbyterian, too. More interested in furthering his political career than he was in looking out for the welfare of his own son. In my experience, men are all, to a greater or lesser extent, at war with their fathers. Would you agree, Doctor?’

Gaddis wasn’t one for sharing family confidences, so he proffered a joke instead.

‘You’re a Freudian after all, Tom.’

Neame did not react. It struck Gaddis that he was as covetous of his moods as a small child.

‘Tell me about Cambridge at that time,’ he asked, skidding over the awkwardness. ‘What were your impressions of the place?’

The question appeared to lift the old man’s spirits, because he turned to face him and smiled through his clear blue eyes.

‘Well, of course there has been a good deal of nonsense spoken about that period. If certain “experts” are to be believed, we spent our entire time at Cambridge eating cucumber sandwiches, punting along the Cam and singing “Jerusalem” in chapel. Believe me, times were a lot tougher than that. Of course, there were any number of highly privileged undergraduates from wealthy backgrounds in situ, but it wasn’t all Brideshead Revisited and picnics on the lawn.’

‘Of course.’ Gaddis was wondering why Neame felt the need to set the record straight.

‘But one thing is certainly true. Oxford and Cambridge in the pre-war years were both absolutely riddled with Communists. Any self-respecting young man — or woman, for that matter — with even the vaguest sense of social justice was profoundly sceptical about the direction Western capitalism was taking. This wasn’t too long after the Great Depression, don’t forget. Unemployment was running at three million. Throw into the mix the lovely Adolf and you had a climate of apprehension unmatched by anything since.’

‘Go on,’ said Gaddis. The lovely Adolf was a phrase he might steal for a lecture.

‘Well, it’s quite simple.’ Neame touched the perfect Windsor knot on his wool tie. There was a small stain on the fabric halfway down. ‘All of us became rather enamoured of the Russian experiment. Some more enamoured than others.’

‘You’re talking about Eddie?’

‘Eddie, certainly. But everyone in my circle of acquaintance was touched by an interest in Marx. To be a Communist in 1933 was as unremarkable as taking mustard with roast beef. We were everywhere. You couldn’t move for people who wanted to buck the system.’

‘People like Burgess and Maclean? People like Philby and Blunt?’

Neame shot him a sideways glance and Gaddis was concerned that he would now digress into yet more petty power games. Two tourists had appeared at the end of their row of seats wearing tracksuit trousers and bulging money belts, thousand-euro Nikons trained at the ceiling. They were speaking loudly to one another in German and Neame waited until they had moved along the aisle before continuing.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Guy and Anthony were particularly visible in the Party. Donald was a great protestor. Always manning the barricades, always first in the queue when there was an opportunity for dissent.’

‘But not Crane?’

Neame paused, seemingly concerned to render as accurate an account of his friend’s behaviour during this period as was possible at a distance of over seventy years.

‘Eddie was more subtle,’ he said finally. ‘Eddie kept his head down.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He was known to Blunt, certainly, because he was a student in one of Anthony’s French classes, but he wasn’t active. He didn’t come into the orbit of Maurice Dobb, for example, who was the don responsible for pushing Guy in the direction of the Party. He never officially joined the Communists, either.’

This astonished Gaddis, not least because membership would have been a pre-requisite of working for the NKVD, the arm of Soviet foreign intelligence in operation in the UK at the time.

‘You look surprised, Doctor.’

Again, a pain appeared to jag across Neame’s back, cutting the end off the question. The old man bent forward slowly, wincing.

‘Are you all right?’ Gaddis was obliged to make sure that Neame was comfortable, yet he was loath to give him an opportunity to bring the interview to an end. It had taken an eternity to reach this point. They might never meet again. He had to try to extract as much information as possible.

‘I am fine,’ Neame reassured him, making a determined gesture with his hand. Gaddis noticed that he was once again squeezing it into a fist, fighting off the arthritis. ‘Look, I tried on many occasions to persuade Eddie to join the Party. Many of us did.’

‘But without success?’

‘Without success.’ Neame’s voiced had softened, almost into regret, but suddenly he was energized again, seized by the urge to defend Crane and to put his argument across more forcefully.

‘I concluded, largely in retrospect, that there was more than one way to skin a cat. One does not have to be a member of the Labour Party in order to vote for a Labour candidate. One can hold right-wing views in England without subscribing to the Daily Mail. Do you follow?’

‘I follow.’

‘Eddie was a subtle animal. He wasn’t much for making an exhibition of himself. He played what you might call a long game. Now, did he do that because he didn’t want anything on his record that might jeopardize any future involvement in public service, or did he do that because he was a rather shy young man and, at that tender age, perhaps lacking in the sort of self-confidence which distinguished his more celebrated colleagues in the cell?’

‘What do you think?’

Neame weighed up his answer, and took his time about it. Almost half a minute passed before he responded.

‘I think a fairly hefty dose of the latter. To my mind, Eddie had no real ambition to join the Foreign Office, no heart set on a career in government. Bear in mind that he was only eighteen and just out of school. He wasn’t like Kim, who made a great song and dance about everything. Heavens, as I recall, Kim signed up for CUSS thirty seconds after landing in Cambridge.’

‘CUSS?’

‘The Cambridge University Socialist Society. He was so over-the-top the Soviets wondered if he might have been a plant.’

‘And Burgess?’

The mention of his name had a strange, almost melancholy effect on Neame, who looked into his lap and brought his hands together, gently knitting the fingers. In the distance, a young girl laughed.

‘Guy is certainly central to all this,’ he said quietly. ‘He had a huge impact on everybody, not just Eddie. In fact, Eddie writes at length about him in the memoirs. I myself have certainly thought back many times to the conversations I enjoyed with Guy.’

The memoirs. How could Gaddis get hold of them? It seemed a cruel twist of fate that Neame should be sitting on a document which would not only validate ATTILA but radically enhance the quality and historical importance of his own book. There was something of the narcissist in Neame; he was eager to play up his own role in the affair but also keen to taunt Gaddis with his proximity to Crane’s autobiography. Increasingly, it appeared that there would be a drip-feed of information, possibly over many weeks, and nothing Gaddis could do to control it.

‘So you were involved in the political scene yourself?’ he asked. ‘You were studying French as well? You were socializing with Eddie?’

Neame halted the flow of questions with a pained sigh and Gaddis realized that he had moved too fast. He had to learn to allow the story to emerge at its own pace. Neame would continue to manipulate him, certainly, but if Gaddis was patient, he would eventually be rewarded with a complete picture of Crane’s time at Cambridge.

‘Eddie and Guy were the two I was closest to, certainly at Trinity,’ he said. ‘I eventually lost touch with Burgess during the war, although of course one kept up with his exploits. The interesting thing was that he and Eddie were in many ways polar opposites. Where Eddie was self-contained, disciplined, very much a realist, Guy was perpetually drunk, always wearing filthy clothes, living on high ideals. But a marvellous talker. Such control of the language, you know?’

‘I’ve heard,’ Gaddis said. Something regretful in the tone of Neame’s recollections caused him to wonder if he and Burgess had been lovers. The old man’s next remark did nothing to lessen this suspicion.

‘Guy was also, of course, a famous philanderer. What Kim was to the girls, Guy was to the boys. And not just pretty little Cambridge undergraduates. He liked rough trade: truck drivers, working men. Couldn’t get enough of that sort of thing.’

‘Do you think he was involved with Eddie?’

Gaddis might as well have asked if Neame himself was gay.

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Was Eddie homosexual? He had no children. He never married. I wondered if he was ever romantically involved with Blunt or Burgess?’ He longed to add: ‘Or you, Tom?’ but lacked the courage.

‘How on earth am I supposed to know?’ Neame seemed more embarrassed than angry, as if Gaddis had crossed some threshold of decency.

‘There’s a theory in one of the Blunt biographies that Blunt’s sexuality may have had an influence on his preparedness to betray his country. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain in the 1930s. Therefore any homosexual was, by definition, regarded as a criminal outsider by the state.’

Neame straightened the fabric of his trousers and stared into his lap. ‘That seems a bit far-fetched to me.’ He tried to divert Gaddis with an anecdote. ‘Eddie and I arrived in Guy’s third year. Both of us immediately fell under his spell. It was Guy, for example, who organized the waiters’ strike. Do you know about that?’

‘No.’ Gaddis was lying, but he wanted to hear Neame’s version of events.

‘Quite straightforward, really. At that time, many of the staff who worked behind the scenes at Trinity weren’t paid a salary during the holidays. Guy believed, with some justification, that this was outrageous and, with Eddie’s assistance, persuaded them to down tools.’

‘How did they do that?’

Neame looked annoyed to have been interrupted.

‘Because Guy and Eddie were both, in their different ways, absolutely marvellous with people. Guy could tell you that the sun wasn’t going to come up tomorrow morning and you’d believe him. Eddie was the same. There were any number of reluctant souls among the waiters and kitchen staff but he convinced them not only that it would be in their best interests to strike, but that they would also be in no danger of losing their jobs. He had no guarantee of this, of course, but that was the calibre of the man. If Eddie told you something, you believed him. The whole saga was a rare example of him sticking his head above the parapet. Very few people really knew how central Eddie had been to orchestrating the whole thing.’

‘So who knew the full truth? Burgess? Blunt?’

‘Blunt certainly. He and Guy were inseparable and, as far as I know, on the lookout for recruits all the time. No doubt they tipped off their NKVD controller that Eddie was cut from the right cloth.’

‘That’s all it took? Surely membership of the Party was a pre-requisite for the Russians?’

‘If you say so.’

Gaddis pushed again.

‘Does Eddie write about his recruitment in the document? Does he shed any light on that?’

It was better to refer to the memoirs simply as a document; Gaddis didn’t want to give Neame the impression that he was sitting on material of incalculable value to his investigation.

‘Well, you see, that’s where it gets interesting. The Soviets did a very clever thing, which was probably the reason Eddie was able to survive undetected for as long as he did.’ Another party of tourists, this time Japanese, shuffled past the pew. ‘A gentleman by the name of Arnold Deutsch was tipped off about Eddie by Guy. Have you heard of Deutsch?’

Gaddis had certainly heard of him. Deutsch — known by the codename ‘OTTO’ — had been responsible for the recruitment of the Ring of Five.

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, Deutsch recruited Eddie, but without telling Burgess or Blunt.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Moscow was worried that the network was already too big. They had Kim, they had Anthony, Guy, Donald and John. All it would take was for one of them to crack and the Brits would be able to dismantle the entire cell. So Eddie was set up on his own. In due course, Cairncross became what they call “conscious” that Crane was an asset, but none of the others, not even Guy, had a clue what was going on. Eddie was given the codename ATTILA. Deutsch told Burgess that he had no interest in working for the Party and that was that. Everybody moved on.’

Gaddis reached out and ran his hand along the wrought-iron radiator beside his chair. He was trying to work out the implications of what Neame had revealed, trying to walk the cat back.

‘That makes sense,’ he muttered, but Neame interrupted him.

‘As things turned out, the Soviets had actually done MI5 a favour.’

‘How’s that?’

The old man appeared to amuse himself with a private thought. It was clear that he enjoyed toying with Gaddis’s appetite for information. ‘Well, that’s another part of the story,’ he replied softly. ‘I’d be jumping ahead if I told you.’

‘Jump away.’

Neame smiled. ‘Oxford first.’

‘Oxford?’

‘Didn’t you know, Doctor?’ Neame turned in his seat, first to the left, then to the right, reassuring himself that they were not being observed. Gaddis could feel another secret coming. ‘The Russians sent Eddie to Oxford.’