The Untouchable

5

Dear Miss Vandeleur. I have been neglecting you, I know. More, I have been avoiding you: I was here this morning when you called, but did not answer the bell. I knew it was you because I had seen you from the window, crossing the square, in the rain (what is it young women have against the employment of umbrellas?). I felt like an elderly spinster (but then, when do I not feel like an elderly spinster?), peeping out from behind lace curtains at a world of which she is growing increasingly afraid. I have not been well. Heartsick, is the word. Too much brooding, here, under the lamp, just me and the scratching of my pen, and the distracting noise of the birds in the trees outside, where spring has come to a frantic head and toppled over into full-throated Keatsian summer. Such rude good weather strikes me as heartless; I have always been prone to the pathetic fallacy. I took things too quickly, I think; I should have allowed myself time to recuperate after that public exposure and the resulting humiliation. It is like having had an operation, or what it must be like to have been shot; you come round and you think, Well, this is not so bad, I’m still here, and there is hardly any pain—why are all these people about me behaving in such an exaggerated way? And you feel almost euphoric. It is because the system has not absorbed the shock, or because the shock is acting as an anaesthetic. But this little interval of exhilaration ends, the excited attendants rush off to the scene of some new emergency, and then comes night and darkness and the dawning astonishment of pain.

I was genuinely surprised when they stripped me of the knighthood, and Cambridge revoked the honorary doctorate, and the Institute delicately indicated that my continued presence there, even for the purposes of research, would not be welcomed. (I have heard nothing from the Palace; Mrs. W. does hate a scandal.) What have I done, to be so reviled, in a nation of traitors, who daily betray friends, wives, children, tax inspectors? I am being disingenuous, I know. I think what they find so shocking is that someone—one of their own, that is—should actually have held to an ideal. And I did hold to it, even in the face of my own innate, all-corroding scepticism. I did not deceive myself as to the nature of the choice I had made. I was not like Boy, with his puerile conviction of the perfectibility of man, and not like Querell, either, wandering the world and dropping in to argue fine points of dogma over the Bishop of Bongoland’s best port. Oh, no doubt for me Marxism was a recrudescence, in a not greatly altered form, of the faith of my fathers; any back-street Freudian could tease that one out. But what comfort does belief offer, when it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in the real world? The fact that you place your bet on red does not mean that the black is not still there.

I often think how differently things might have gone for me if I had not encountered Felix Hartmann when I did. Naturally, I fell a little in love with him. You will not have heard of this person. He was one of Moscow’s most impressive people, both an ideologue and a dedicated activist (dear me, how easily one falls into the jargon of the Sunday papers!). His front was a fur trading business in the vicinity of Brick Lane, or some such insalubrious place, which gave him frequent opportunities for travel, both within the country and abroad. (I trust, Miss V., you are taking notes.) He was a Hungarian national of German and Slav extraction: father a soldier, mother a Serb, or a Slovenian, something like that. It was said, though I do not know where the story originated (it may even be true), that he had been ordained a Catholic priest and had served in the Great War as a chaplain in the Austro-Hungarian army; when I asked him once about this period of his life he would say nothing and only gave me one of his studiedly enigmatic smiles. He had suffered a shrapnel wound—“in a skirmish in the Carpathians”—which had left him with an attractive Byronic limp. He was tall, straight-backed, with glossy blue-black hair, soft eyes, an engaging, if somewhat laboured, ironical smile. He could have been one of those Prussian princes out of the last century, all gold braid and duelling scars, so beloved of operetta composers. He claimed he had been captured in battle by the Russian army, and when the Revolution came had joined the Reds and fought in the civil war. All this gave him the faintly preposterous air of fortitude and self-importance of the Man Who Has Seen Action. In his own eyes, I suspect, he was not the Student Prince, but one of those tormented warrior priests of the Counter-Reformation, trailing his bloodied sword through the smoking ruins of sacked towns.

It was Alastair Sykes who introduced me to him. Summer of 1936.1 had travelled up to Cambridge in the middle of August— I still had rooms at Trinity—to finish work on a long essay on the drawings of Poussin. The weather was hot, and London impossible, and I had a deadline from Brevoort & Klein. War had broken out in Spain, and people were excitedly preparing to go off and fight. I must say it never occurred to me to join them. Not that I was afraid—as I was later to discover, I was physically not uncourageous, except on one unfortunately memorable occasion—or that I did not appreciate the significance of what was happening in Spain. It is just that I have never been one for the grand gesture. The John Cornford type of manufactured hero struck me as self-regarding and, if I may be allowed the oxymoron, profoundly frivolous. For an Englishman to rush out and get his head shot off in some arroyo in Seville or wherever seemed to me merely an extreme form of rhetoric, excessive, wasteful, futile. The man of action would despise me for such sentiments—I would not have dreamed of expressing them to Felix Hartmann, for example—but I have a different definition of what constitutes effective action. The worm in the bud is more thorough than the wind that shakes the bough. This is what the spy knows. It is what I know.

Alastair, of course, was in a high state of excitement over the events in Spain. The remarkable thing about the Spanish war—about all ideological wars, I suppose—was the fiery single-mindedness, not to say simple-mindedness, that it produced in otherwise quite sophisticated people. All doubts were banished, all questions answered, all quibbling done with. Franco was Moloch and the Popular Front were the children in white whom the West was offering to the fiend in heartless and craven sacrifice. The fact that Stalin, while flying to the aid of the Spanish Loyalists, was at the same time systematically exterminating all opposition to his rule at home, was conveniently ignored. I was a Marxist, yes, but I never had anything other than contempt for the Iron Man; such an unappetising person.

“Come on, Victor!” Alastair said, wrenching the stem of his pipe from its socket and shaking dribbles of black goo out of it. “These are dangerous times. The Revolution has to be protected.”

I sighed and smiled.

“The city must be destroyed in order to save it, is that what you mean?”

We were sitting in deckchairs in the sun in the little back garden below the windows of his rooms in Trinity. Alastair tended the garden himself and was touchingly proud of it. There were roses and snapdragons, and the lawn was as smooth as a billiard table. He poured out tea from a blue pot, daintily holding the lid in place with a fingertip, and slowly, gloomily, shook his head.

“Sometimes I wonder about your commitment to the cause, Victor.”

“Yes,” I said, “and if we were in Moscow you could denounce me to the secret police.” He gave me a wounded look. “Oh, Alastair,” I said wearily, “for goodness’ sake, you know as well as I what’s going on over there. We’re not blind, we’re not fools.”

He poured tea into his saucer and slurped it up through exaggeratedly pouted lips; it was one of his ways of demonstrating class solidarity; it struck me as ostentatious and, I’m afraid, slightly repulsive.

“Yes, but what we are is believers,” he said, and smacked his lips and smiled, and leaned back on the faded striped canvas of the deckchair, balancing the cup and saucer on the shelf of his little pot belly. He looked so smug, in his sleeveless Fair Isle pullover and brown boots, that I wanted to hit him.

“You sound like a priest,” I said.

He grinned at me, showing the gap between his rabbity front teeth.

“Funny you should say that,” he said. “There’s a chap coming round shortly who used to be a priest. You’ll like him.”

“You forget,” I said sourly, “I come from a family of clergymen.”

“Well, you’ll have a lot to talk about then, won’t you.”

Presently Alastair’s gyp appeared, a cringing, forelock-pulling semi-dwarf—God, how I despised those people!—to announce that there was a visitor. Felix Hartmann wore black: black suit, black shirt, and, remarkably in the surroundings, a pair of narrow, patent-leather black shoes as delicate as dancing pumps. As he crossed the lawn to meet us I noticed how he tried to hide his limp. Alastair introduced us and we shook hands. I should like to be able to say that a spark of excited recognition of each other’s potential passed between us, but I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect. His handshake, a brief pressure quickly released, communicated nothing other than a mild and not wholly impolite indifference. (Yet what a strange ceremony it is, shaking hands; I always see it in heraldic terms: solemn, antiquated, a little ridiculous, slightly indecent, and yet, for all that, peculiarly affecting.) Felix’s soft, Slavic eyes, the colour of toffee—that toffee which, when I would come home from Miss Molyneaux’s school on winter evenings, Hettie used to help me make from burnt sugar poured out in a pan—rested on my face a moment, and then he turned them vaguely aside. It was one of his tactics to seem always just a bit distracted; he would pause for a second in the middle of a sentence and frown, then give himself a sort of infinitesimal shake, and go on again. He had a habit also, when being spoken to, no matter how earnestly, of turning very slowly on his heel and limping a little way away, head bowed, and then stopping to stand with his back turned and hands clasped behind him, so that one could not be sure that he was still listening to what one was saying, or had sunk into altogether more profound communings with himself. I could never finally decide whether these mannerisms were genuine, or if he was merely trying things out, rehearsing in mid-play, as it were, like an actor walking into the wings to have a quick practice of a particularly tricky move while the rest of the cast went on with the drama. (I hope you do not wonder, Miss V., at my use of the word genuine in this context; if you do, you understand nothing about us and our little world.)

“Felix is in furs,” Alastair said, and giggled.

Hartmann smiled wanly.

“You are such a wit, Alastair,” he said.

We stood about awkwardly on the grass, the three of us, there being only two deckchairs, and Felix Hartmann studied the glossy toes of his shoes. Presently Alastair, squinting in the sunlight, put down his cup and muttered something about fetching another chair, and scuttled off. Hartmann shifted his gaze to the roses and sighed. We listened to the buzz of summer about us.

“You are the art critic?” he said.

“More an historian.”

“But of art?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, looking now in the vicinity of my knees.

“I know something of art,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” I waited, but he offered nothing more. “I have a great fondness for the German baroque,” I said, speaking over-loudly. “Do you know that style at all?”

He shook his head.

“I am not German,” he said, with a lugubrious intonation, frowning to one side.

And we were silent again. I wondered if I had offended him somehow, or if I were being a bore, and I felt faintly annoyed; we cannot all be winged in skirmishes in the Carpathians. Alastair came back with a third deckchair and set it up with much struggling and cursing, pinching his thumb badly in the process. He offered to make a fresh pot of tea but Hartmann silently declined, with a throwaway motion of his left hand. We sat down. Alastair heaved a happy sigh; gardeners have a particularly irritating way of sighing when they contemplate their handiwork.

“Hard to think of Spain and a war starting,” he said, “while we sit here in the sun.” He touched the sleeve of Felix’s black suit. “Aren’t you hot, old chap?”

“Yes,” Hartmann said, nodding again with that peculiar mixture of indifference and frowning solemnity.

Pause. The bells of King’s began to chime, the bronzen strokes beating thickly high up through the dense blue air.

“Alastair thinks we should all go to Spain and fight Franco,” I said lightly, and was startled and even a little unnerved when Hartmann lifted his gaze and fixed it on me briefly, with a positively theatrical intensity.

“And perhaps he is right?” he said.

If not a Hun, I thought, then Austrian, surely—somewhere German-speaking, at any rate; all that gloom and soulfulness could only be the result of an upbringing among compound words.

Alastair sat forward earnestly and clasped his hands between his knees, putting on that look, like that of a constipated bulldog, that always heralded an attack of polemics. Before he could get started, however, Hartmann said to me:

“Your theory of art: what is it?”

Strange now to think how natural a question like that seemed then. In those days we were constantly asking each other such things, demanding explanations, justifications; challenging; defending; attacking. Everything was gloriously open to question. Even the most dogmatic Marxists among us knew the giddy and intoxicating excitement of exposing to doubt all that we were supposed to believe in, of taking our essential faith, like a delicate and fantastically intricate piece of spun glass, and letting it drop into the slippery and possibly malevolent hands of a fellow ideologue. It fed the illusion that words are actions. We were young.

“Oh, don’t get him started,” said Alastair. “We’ll have significant form and the autonomy of the object until the cows come home. His only belief is in the uselessness of art.”

“I prefer the word inutility,” I said. “And anyway, my position has shifted on that, as on much else.”

There was a beat of silence and the atmosphere thickened briefly. I glanced from one of them to the other, seeming to detect an invisible something passing between them, not so much a signal as a sort of silent token, like one of those almost impalpable acknowledgements that adulterers exchange when they are in company. The phenomenon was strange to me still but would become increasingly familiar the deeper I penetrated into the secret world. It marks that moment when a group of initiates, in the midst of the usual prattle, begin to go to work on a potential recruit. It was always the same: the pause, the brief tumescence in the air, then the smooth resumption of whatever the subject was, though all, even the target, were aware that in fact the subject had been irretrievably changed. Later, when I was an initiate myself, this little secret flurry of speculative activity always stirred me deeply. Nothing so tentative, nothing so thrilling, excepting, of course, certain manoeuvres in the sexual chase.

I knew what was going on; I knew I was being recruited. It was exciting and alarming and slightly ludicrous, like being summoned from the sideline to play in the senior-school game. It was amusing. This word no longer carries the weight that it did for us. Amusement was not amusement, but a test of the authenticity of a thing, a verification of its worth. The most serious matters amused us. This was something the Felix Hartmanns never understood.

“Yes,” I said, “it is the case that I did once argue for the primacy of pure form. So much in art is merely anecdotal, which is what attracts the bourgeois sentimentalist. I wanted something harsh and studied, the truly lifelike: Poussin, Cezanne, Picasso. But these new movements—this surrealism, these arid abstractions—what do they have to do with the actual world, in which men live and work and die?”

Alastair did a soundless slow handclap. Hartmann, frowning thoughtfully at my ankle, ignored him.

“Bonnard?” he said. Bonnard was all the rage just then.

“Domestic bliss. Saturday night sex.”

“Matisse?”

“Hand-tinted postcards.”

“Diego Rivera?”

“A true painter of the people, of course. A great painter.”

He ignored the lip-biting little smile I could not suppress; I remember catching Bernard Berenson smiling like that once, when he was making a blatantly false attribution of a tawdry piece of fakery some unfortunate American was about to purchase at a fabulous price.

“As great as… Poussin?” he said.

I shrugged. So he knew my interests. Someone had been talking to him. I looked at Alastair, but he was engrossed in examining his sore thumb.

“The question does not arise,” I said. “Comparative criticism is essentially Fascist. Our task”—how gently I applied the pressure on that our—“is to emphasise the progressive elements in art. In times such as this, surely that is the critic’s first and most important duty.”

There followed another significant silence, while Alastair sucked his thumb and Hartmann sat and nodded to himself and I gazed off, showing him my profile, all proletarian modesty and firmness of resolve, looking, I felt sure, like one of those figures in fanned-out relief on the pedestal of a socialist-realist monument. It is odd, how the small dishonesties are the ones that snag in the silk of the mind. Diego Rivera—God! Alastair was watching me now with a sly grin.

“More to the point,” he said to Hartmann, “Victor’s looking forward to being made Minister of Culture when the Revolution comes, so he can ransack the stately homes of England.”

“Indeed,” I said, prim as a postmistress, “I see no reason why masterpieces pillaged by our hunting fathers in successive European wars should not be taken back for the people and housed in a central gallery.”

Alastair heaved himself forward again, his deckchair groaning, and tapped Hartmann on the knee. “You see?” he said happily. It was obvious he was referring to something more than my curatorial ambitions; Alastair prided himself on his talent-spotting abilities. Hartmann frowned, a pained little frown like that of a great singer when his accompanist hits a wrong note, and this time made a point of paying him no heed.

“So, then,” he said to me slowly, with a judicious tilt of the head, “you are opposed to the bourgeois interpretation of art as luxury—”

“Bitterly opposed.”

“—and consider the artist to have a clear political duty.”

“Like the rest of us,” I said, “the artist must contribute to the great forward movement of history.”

Oh, I was shameless, like a hoyden set on losing her virginity.

“Or…?” he said.

“Or he becomes redundant, and his art descends to the level of mere decoration and self-indulgent revery…”

Everything went still then, subsided softly to a stop, and I was left hanging in vague consternation; I had thought we were in the middle and not at the end of this interesting discussion. Hartmann was looking at me directly for what seemed the first time, and I realised two things: first, that he had not for a moment been taken in by my stout declarations of political rectitude, and, second, that instead of being disappointed or offended, he was on the contrary gratified that I had lied to him, or at least that I had offered a carefully tinted version of what might be the truth. Now, this is difficult; this is the nub of the matter, in a way. It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you give yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer’s conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo’s operating table. That is how it is, for the likes of us—I mean the likes of Felix Hartmann, and myself, though not, perhaps, Alastair, who was essentially an innocent, with an innocent’s faith in the justice and inevitability of the cause. So when Hartmann looked at me that day, in the lemon-and-blue light of Psyche’s sun-dazzled garden in Cambridge, as the Falangist guns were firing five hundred miles to the south of us, he saw that I was exactly what was required: harder than Alastair, more biddable than Boy, a casuist who would split an ideological hair to an infinitesimal extreme of thinness—in other words, a man in need of a faith (No one more devout than a sceptic on his knees— Querell dixit), and so there was nothing left to say. Hartmann distrusted words, and made it a point of pride never to use more of them than the occasion required.

Alastair suddenly stood up and began fussily gathering the teacups, making a great show of not treading on our toes, and walked off, muttering, with a sort of resentful flounce, bearing the tea tray aloft before him like a grievance: I suppose he too was a little in love with Felix—more than a little, probably—and was jealous, now that his matchmaking exercise had proved so successful so quickly. Hartmann, however, seemed hardly to notice his going. He was leaning forward intently, head bowed, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped (it must be a mark of true grace to be able to sit in a deckchair without looking like a discommoded frog). After a moment he glanced up at me sideways with a crooked, oddly feral smile.

“You know Boy Bannister, of course,” he said.

“Of course; everyone knows Boy.”

He nodded, still with that fierce leer, an eyetooth glinting.

“He is going to make a journey to Russia,” he said. “It’s time for him to become disenchanted with the Soviet system.” By now his look was positively wolfish. “Perhaps you would care to accompany him? I could arrange it. We—they—have many art treasures. In public galleries, of course.”

We both laughed at once, which left me feeling uneasy. It will sound strange, coming from me, but the complicity suggested by that kind of thing—the soft laugh exchanged, the quick pressure of the hand, the covert wink—always strikes me as faintly improper, and shaming, a small conspiracy got up against a world altogether more open and decent than I or my accomplice in intimacy could ever hope to be. Despite all Felix Hartmann’s dark charm and elegant intensity, I really preferred the goons and the thugs with whom I had to deal later on, such as poor Oleg Kropotsky, with his awful suits and his pasty face like that of a debauched baby; at least they made no bones about the ugliness of the struggle in which we were unlikely partners. But that was much later; as yet the eager virgin was only at the kissing stage, and still intact. I smiled back into Felix Hartmann’s face and with an insouciance I did not fully feel said that yes, a couple of weeks in the arms of great Mother Rus might be just the thing to harden up my ideological position and strengthen my ties of solidarity with the proletariat. At this his look turned wary—the Comrades never were very strong in the irony department—and he frowned again at his shiny toecaps and began to speak earnestly of his experiences in the war against the Whites: the burned villages, the raped children, the old man he had come upon one rainy evening somewhere in the Crimea, crucified on his own barn door, and still alive.

“I shot him through the heart,” he said, making a pistol of finger and thumb and silently firing it. “There was nothing else to do for him. I see his eyes still in my dreams.”

I nodded, and I too looked grimly at my shoes, to show how thoroughly ashamed I was of that facetious reference to Holy Mother Russia; but just below the lid of my sobriety there was squeezed a cackle of disgraceful laughter, as if there were an evil, merry little elf curled up inside me, hand clapped to mouth and cheeks bulging and weasel eyes malignantly aglitter. It was not that I thought the horrors of war were funny, or Hartmann completely ridiculous; that was not the sort of laughter that was threatening to break out. Perhaps laughter is the wrong word. What I felt at moments such as this—and there would be many such: solemn, silent, fraught with portent—was a kind of hysteria, made up of equal parts of disgust and shame and appalling mirth. I cannot explain it—or could, perhaps, but do not want to. (One can know too much about oneself, that is a thing I have learned.) Someone has written somewhere, I wish I could remember who, of the sensation of gleeful anticipatory horror he experiences in the concert hall when in the middle of a movement the orchestra grinds to a halt and the virtuoso draws back his arm preparatory to plunging his bow into the quivering heart of the cadenza. Although the writer is a cynic, and as a Marxist (am I a Marxist, still?) I should disapprove of him, I know exactly what he means and secretly applaud his baleful honesty. Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one’s feet.

Alastair came back. Seeing Hartmann and me sunk in what must have looked like silent communion, and perhaps was, he grew more cross than ever.

“Well,” he said, “have you decided the future of art?”

When neither of us responded—Hartmann looked up at him with a vacant frown as if trying to remember who he was—he threw himself down on the deckchair, which gave a loud, pained grunt of protest, and clamped his stubby arms across his chest and glared at a bush of shell-pink roses.

“What do you think, Alastair?” I said. “Mr. Hartmann—”

“Felix,” Hartmann said smoothly, “please.”

“—has offered me a trip to Russia.”

There was something about Alastair—the combination of that not quite convincing bulldog ferocity and an almost girlish tentativeness, not to mention the hobnailed boots and hairy tweeds—that made it impossible to resist being cruel to him.

“Oh?” he said. He would not look at me, but folded his arms more tightly still, while under his glare the roses seemed to blush a deeper shade of pink. “How interesting for you.”

“Yes,” I said blithely, “Boy and I are going to go.”

“And one or two others,” Hartmann murmured, looking at his fingernails.

“Boy, eh?” Alastair said, and essayed a nasty little laugh. “He’ll probably get you both arrested on your first night in Moscow.”

“Yes,” I said, faltering a little (Others?—what others?), “I’m sure we’ll have some amusing times.”

Hartmann was still examining his nails.

“Of course, we shall arrange guides for you, and so on,” he said.

Yes, Comrade Hartmann, I’m sure you will.

Did I mention that we were all smoking away like railway engines? Everyone smoked then, we stumbled about everywhere in clouds of tobacco fumes. I recall with a pang, in this Puritan age, the Watteauesque delicacy of those grey-blue, gauzy billows we breathed out everywhere on the air, suggestive of twilight and misted grass and thickening shadows under great trees—although Alastair’s belching pipe was more the Potteries than Versailles.

“I’d like to see Russia,” Alastair said, his irritation giving way to wistfulness. “Moscow, the Nevsky Prospect…”

Hartmann coughed.

“Perhaps,” he said, “another time…”

Alastair did a sort of flip and wriggle, as if the canvas of his chair had turned into a trampoline.

“Oh, I say, old chap,” he said, “I didn’t mean… I mean I…”

Where exactly had it occurred, I wondered, the moment when Hartmann and I had joined in tacit alliance against poor Alastair? Or was it only me?—I am not sure that Hartmann was capable of keeping in mind anyone or anything that was not the immediate object of his attention. Yes, probably it was just me, pirouetting alone there, a Nijinsky of vanity and petty spitefulness. I do not want to exaggerate the matter, but I cannot help wondering if the disappointment he suffered that day—no gallops across the steppes, no earnest talks with horny-handed sons of the soil, no stroll down Moscowburg’s Nevsky Prospect with a handsome spoiled priest by his side—was not a biggish pebble lobbed on to the steadily accumulating mountain of woe that Psyche would disappear under twenty years later, crouched on his bunk in his dank room and gnawing on a poisoned apple. I have said it before, I shall say it again: it is the minor treacheries that weigh most heavily on the heart.

“Tell me,” I said to Hartmann, when Alastair had stopped bouncing on the springs of his embarrassment, “how many will be travelling?”

I had a terrible vision of myself being shown around a tractor factory in the company of psoriatic City clerks and dumpy, fur-hatted spinsters from the Midlands, and cloth-capped Welsh miners who after borscht and bear-paw dinners in our hotel would entertain us with evenings of glee-singing. Do not imagine, Miss Vandeleur, that Marxists, at least the ones of my variety, are gregarious. Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance. Hartmann smiled, and showed me his upturned innocent hands.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just some people. You will find them interesting.”

I would not.

“Party people?” I said.

(By the way, Miss V., you do know, don’t you, that I was never a Party member? None of us was. Even at Cambridge in my—picture an ironic smile here—firebrand days, the question of joining never arose. The Apostles was Party enough for us. We were undercover agents before we had heard of the Comintern or had a Soviet recruiter whispering blandishments in our ears.)

Hartmann shook his head, still smiling, and lightly let drop his dark-shadowed, long-lashed eyelids.

“Just… people,” he said. “Trust me.”

Ah, trust: now there is a word to which I could devote a page or two, its shades and gradations, the nuances it took on or shed according to circumstance. In my time I have put my trust in some of the most egregious scoundrels one could ever hope not to meet, while there were things in my life, and I am not speaking only of sins, that I would not have revealed to my own father. In this I was not so different from other people, burdened with far fewer secrets than I was, as a moment’s reflection will show. Would you, dear Miss Vandeleur, tell the Admiral of what you and your young man get up to below decks in Golders Green of a night? If my life has taught me anything it is that in these matters there are no absolutes, of trust, or belief, or anything else. And a good thing, too. (No, I suppose I am not a Marxist, still.)

Above us in the dream-blue zenith a tiny silver plane was laboriously buzzing. I thought of bombs falling on the white towns of Spain and was struck, as earlier Alastair had been, by the hardly comprehensible incongruity of time and circumstance; how could I be here, while all that was happening there? Yet I could feel nothing for the victims; distant deaths are weightless.

Alastair attempted to introduce the topic of Ireland and Sinn Fein, but was ignored, and went back to sulking again, and refolded his arms and glared off, trying, it seemed, to wither those poor roses on their stems.

“Tell me,” I said to Hartmann, “what did you mean when you said it was time for Boy to become disenchanted with Marxism?”

Hartmann had a peculiar way of holding a cigarette, in his left hand, between the third and middle fingers and cocked against his thumb, so that when he lifted it to his lips he seemed to be not smoking, but taking a tiny sip of something from a slim, white phial. A standing shape of smoke, the same shade of silver-grey as the aeroplane, that was gone now, drifted sideways away from us on the pulsing light of noon.

“Mr. Bannister is a… a person of consequence, shall we say,” Hartmann said carefully, squinting into the middle distance. “His connections are excellent. His family, his friends—”

“Not forgetting his boyfriends,” Alastair said sourly, and, I could see, immediately regretted it. Hartmann did his smiling nod again, with eyelids lowered, dismissing him.

“The advantage of him for us—you understand by now, I am sure, who it is I mean when I say us?—the advantage is that he can move easily at any level of society, from the Admiralty to the pubs of the East End. That is important, in a country such as this, in which the class divisions are so strong.” Abruptly he sat up straight and clapped his hands on his knees. “So we have plans for him. It will be, of course, a long-term campaign. And the first thing, the truly important thing, is for him to be seen to abandon his past beliefs. You understand?” I understood. I said nothing. He glanced at me. “You have doubts?”

“I imagine,” Alastair said, trying to sound arch, “that Victor, like me, finds it hard to believe that Boy will be capable of the kind of discipline necessary for the campaign of dissimulation you have in mind.”

Hartmann pursed his lips and examined the ashy tip of his cigarette.

“Perhaps,” he said mildly, “you do not know him as well as you think you do. He is a man of many sides.”

“As we all are,” I said.

He nodded with excessive courtesy.

“But yes. That is why we are here”—by which he meant, that is why I am here—“having this important conversation, which to the ears of the uninitiated would seem no more than an aimless chat between three civilised gentlemen in this charming garden on a beautiful summer day.”

Suddenly I found his Mitteleuropan unctuousness intensely irritating.

“Am I one of the initiated?” I said.

He turned his head slowly and let his glance slide over me from toe to brow.

“I am trusting that you are,” he said. “Or that you will be…”

There it was again, that word: trust. Yet I could not resist that hooded, meaning gaze. Slender, black suited, with his pale, priestly hands clasped before him, he sat in the sunlight not so much watching as attending me, waiting for… for what? For me to surrender to him. Fleetingly, unnervingly, I understood what it would be like to be a woman whom he desired. My own gaze faltered and slipped as the ratchets of my self-possession disengaged for a second with a soft jolt, and I brushed busily at a nonexistent patch of dust on the sleeve of my jacket and in a voice that sounded to my ears like a querulous squeak I said:

“I hope your trust is not misplaced.”

Hartmann smiled and relaxed and sat back on his chair with a look of satisfaction, and I turned my face aside, feeling gulpy and shy all of a sudden. Yes, how deceptively light they are, the truly decisive steps we take in life.

“Your ship will sail in three weeks’ time from London port,” he said. “Amsterdam, Helsinki, Leningrad. She is called the Liberation. A good name, don’t you think?”

A good name, but a poor thing. The Liberation was a blunt-ended, low-slung merchant vessel carrying a cargo of pig iron, whatever that is, destined for the People’s smelters. The North Sea was rough, a jostling waste of clay-coloured waves, each one half the size of a house, through which the little ship snuffled and heaved, like an iron pig, indeed, going along with its snout rising and falling in the troughs and tail invisibly twirling behind us. Our captain was a black-bearded Dutchman of vast girth who had spent the early years of his career in the East Indies engaged in activities which from his colourful but deliberately vague descriptions of them sounded to me suspiciously like the slave trade. He spoke of the Soviet Union with jovial detestation. His crew, made up of a medley of races, were a slovenly, furtive, piratical-looking bunch. Boy could hardly believe his luck; he spent most of the voyage below decks, changing bunks and partners with each watch. We would catch the noise of drunken revels rising from the bowels of the ship, with Boy’s voice dominant, singing sea shanties and roaring for rum. “What a filthy gang!” he would croak happily, emerging red-eyed and barefoot on to the passenger deck in search of cigarettes and something to eat. “Talk about close quarters!” It always baffled me, how Boy could get away with so much. Despite his disgraceful doings on that voyage, he remained a favourite at Captain Kloos’s table, and even when a complaint was lodged against him by one of the younger crewmen, a Friesian Islander pining for his girl, the matter was hushed up.

“It’s that famous charm of his,” Archie Fletcher said sourly. “Some day it will let him down, when he’s old and fat and clapped-out.”

Fletcher, himself a charmless hetero, was disapproving of our party in general, considering it far too frolicsome for a delegation handpicked by the Comintern to be the spearhead of its English undercover drive. (Yes, Miss V., I mean Sir Archibald Fletcher, who today is one of the most poisonous spokesmen of the Tory right; how we do oscillate, we ideologues.) There was also a couple of Cambridge dons—pipes, dandruff, woollen mufflers— whom I knew slightly; Bill Darling, a sociologist from the LSE, who even then I could see was too neurotic and excitable to be a spy; and a rather pompous young aristo named Belvoir, the same Toby Belvoir who in the sixties would renounce his title to serve in a Labour cabinet, for which piece of Socialist good faith he was rewarded with a junior ministry in charge of sport or some such. So there we were, a boatload of superannuated boys, bucketing through autumn storms along the Skagerrak and down into the Baltic, on our way to encounter the future at first-hand. Needless to say, what I see is a Ship of Fools by one of the anonymous medieval masters, with curly whitecaps and a stylised porpoise bustling through the waves, and our party, in robes and funny hats, crowded on the poop deck, peering eastwards, an emblem of hope and fortitude and, yes, innocence.

I know that this, my first and last visit to Russia, should have been, and perhaps was, one of the formative experiences of my life, yet my recollections of it are curiously blurred, like the features of a weather-worn statue; the form is still there, the impression of significance and stony weight: only the details are largely gone. Petersburg was an astonishment, of course. I had the sense, looking down those noble prospects (poor Psyche!), of a flare of trumpets sounding all around me, announcing the commencement of some grand imperial venture: the declaration of a war, the inauguration of a peace. Years later, when the Comrades were urging me to defect, I passed a sleepless night weighing in the scales the losing of the Louvre against the gaining of the Hermitage, and the choice, I can tell you, was not as straightforward as I might have expected.

In Moscow there were few architectural magnificences to distract one’s attention from the people passing by in those impossibly wide, sleet-grey streets. The weather was unseasonably cold, with a wind in which one could feel already the glass-sharp edge of winter. We had been warned of shortages, and although the worst of the famines in the countryside were over by then, even the most enthusiastic among our party found it hard, in contemplating those hunched crowds, not to recognise the marks of deprivation and dull fear. Yes, Miss V., I can be honest: Stalin’s Russia was a horrible place. But we understood that what was happening here was only a start, you see. The temporal factor is what you must always keep in mind if you wish to understand us and our politics. The present we could forgive for the sake of the future. And then, it was a matter of choosing; as we trooped past the glorious monuments of Peter’s northern Venice, or tossed in our lumpy beds in the Moscova Nova, or stared in a bored stupor through the grimy windows of a rattling railway carriage at mile after mile of empty fields on the way south to Kiev, we could hear in our mind’s ear, off to the west, faintly but with unignorable distinctness, the stamp and rattle of drilling armies. Hitler or Stalin: could life be simpler?

And there was art. Here, I told myself, here, for the first time since the Italian Renaissance, art had become a public medium, available to all, a lamp to illumine even the humblest of lives. By art, I need not tell you, I meant the art of the past: socialist-realism I passed over in tactful silence. (An aphorism: Kitsch is to art as physics is to mathematics—its technology.) But can you imagine my excitement at the possibilities that seemed to open before me in Russia? Art liberated for the populace—Poussin for the Proletariat! Here was being built a society which would apply to its own workings the rules of order and harmony by which art operates; a society in which the artist would no longer be dilettante or romantic rebel, pariah or parasite; a society whose art would be more deeply rooted in ordinary life than any since medieval times. What a prospect, for a sensibility as hungry for certainties as mine was!

I recall a discussion on the topic that I had with Boy on the last night before we docked in Leningrad. I say discussion, but really it was one of Boy’s lectures, for he was drunk and in hectoring mood as he expounded what he grandly called his Theory of the Decline of Art under Bourgeois Values, which I had heard many times before, and which anyway I think was largely filched from a refugee Czech professor of aesthetics whom he had hired to give a talk on the BBC but whose accent was so impenetrable the talk could not be broadcast. It was hardly original, consisting mainly of sweeping generalisations on the glory of the Renaissance and the humanistic self-delusions of the Enlightenment, and all boiled down in the end to the thesis that in our time only the totalitarian state could legitimately assume the role of patron of the arts. I believed it, of course—I still do, surprising as it may seem—but that night, stimulated, I suppose, by Hollands gin and the needle-sharp northern air, I thought it a lot of fatuous twaddle, and said so. Really, I was not prepared to be lectured to by the likes of Boy Bannister, especially on art. He stopped, and glared at me. He had taken on that bulbous, froggy look—thick lips thicker than ever, eyes bulging and slightly crossed—that the combination of drink and polemics always produced in him. He was sitting cross-legged on the end of my bunk in shirt-sleeves, his braces loosed and his flies half unbuttoned; his big feet were bare and crusted with dirt.

“Trespassing on your territory, am I?” he said, all scowl and slur. “Touchy old Vic.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s the trouble,” I said.

As so often when he was stood up to, he chose not to fight. The bloodshot scowl slackened and slid.

“America,” he said after a while, nodding ponderously to himself. “America is the real bloody enemy. Art, culture, all that: nothing. America will sweep it all away, into the trash-can. You’ll see.”

An enormous whey-faced moon—which, I noticed, bore a striking resemblance to his own large pale head and swollen visage—was swinging gently in the porthole at his shoulder. The wind had abated and the night was calm, with the mildest of breezes. The sky at midnight was still light at the edges. I have always been susceptible to the romance of shipboard.

“What about the Germans?” I said. “You don’t think they are a threat?”

“Oh, the Germans,” he growled, with a drunkenly mountainous shrug. “We’ll have to fight them, of course. First they’ll beat us, then the Americans will beat them, and that’ll be that. We’ll be just another Yank state.”

“That’s what Querell thinks, too.”

He batted the air with a big soiled hand.

“Querell—pah.”

The ship’s hooter blared; we were approaching landfall.

“And there’s Russia, of course,” I said.

He nodded, slowly, solemnly.

“Well, it’s the only hope, old chap, isn’t it?” I should remark that from the start of the voyage Boy and I had found ourselves somewhat estranged. I believe Boy had been annoyed to discover that I was to accompany him on this momentous visit. He had thought he had been the only one of our circle to be chosen. He glanced at me now, sullen and suspicious, from under his brows. “Don’t you think it’s the only hope?”

“Of course.”

We were silent for a time, nursing our tooth-glasses of gin, then Boy in a tone that was too casual said:

“Have you a contact in Moscow?”

“No,” I answered, immediately on the alert. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged again.

“Oh, I just wondered if Hartmann had given you a name, or something. You know: a contact. Nothing like that?”

“No.”

“Hmm.”

He brooded glumly. Boy adored the trappings of the secret world, the code names and letter-drops and the rest. Brought up on Buchan and Henty, he saw his life in the lurid terms of an old-fashioned thriller and himself dashing through the preposterous plot heedless of all perils. In this fantasy he was always the hero, of course, never the villain in the pay of a foreign power.

He need not have felt cast down. No sooner had we arrived in the capital—tank-grey sky, great sloping spaces spectrally peopled with ugly, disproportionate statuary, and always that constant, icy wind cutting into one’s face like a flung handful of ground glass—than he disappeared for an afternoon, and turned up at dinnertime looking insufferably pleased with himself. When I asked where he had been he only grinned and tapped a finger along the side of his nose, and peered in happy horror at his plate and said loudly:

“Good Christ, is this to eat, or has it been eaten already?”

My turn came to be singled out. It was on our last night in Moscow. I was walking back to the hotel, having been at the Kremlin Palace for most of the day. As always after a long time spent among pictures (or an hour in bed with a boy), I felt lightheaded and tottery, and at first did not register the motor car chugging along beside me at walking speed. (Really, that is the kind of thing they did; I suspect they got it from Hollywood movies, of which they were depressingly fond.) Then, with the car still moving, the door opened and a tall, thin young man in a tightly belted, ankle-length black leather overcoat stepped nimbly on to the pavement and approached me rapidly at a sort of stiff-armed march, his heels coming down so violently on the pavement it seemed they must strike sparks from the stone. He wore a soft hat and black leather gloves. He had a narrow, hard face, but his eyes were large and soft and amber-coloured, and made me think, incongruously, of my stepmother’s warm, wistful gaze. A hot qualm of fear was spreading slowly upwards from the base of my spine. He addressed me in a harsh growl— all Russians sounded like drunks to me—and I began flusteredly to protest that I did not understand the language, but then realised that he was speaking in English, or an approximation of it. Would I please to come with him. He had car. He indicated car, which had come to a stop and, the engine still going, stood shuddering like a hot horse.

“This is my hotel,” I said, in a loud, foolish voice. “I am staying here.” I pointed to the marble entryway, where the doorman, a blue-chinned heavy in a dirty brown uniform, stood looking on with knowing amusement. I do not know what sort of sanctuary I thought I was claiming. “My passport is in my room,” I said; it sounded as if I were reading from a phrase-book. “I can fetch it if you wish.”

The man in the leather coat laughed. Now, I must say something about this laugh, which was peculiar to Soviet officialdom, and especially prevalent among the security establishment. It varied from Leathercoat’s brief, bitten-off snicker to the melodeon wheeze of the ones at the top, but essentially it was the same wherever one heard it. It was not the mirthless snarl of the Gestapo man, nor the fat chuckle of a Chinese torturer. There was real, if bleak, amusement in it, almost, one might say, a kind of attenuated delight; Here’s another one, it seemed to say, another poor dolt who thinks he has some weight in the world. The chief ingredient of this laugh, however, was a sort of bored weariness. The one who laughed had seen everything, every form of bluster and bombast, every failed attempt at cajoling and ingratiation; had seen it, and then had seen the abasements, the tears, had heard the cries for mercy and the heels clattering backwards over the flagstones and the cell doors banging shut. I exaggerate. I mean, I am exaggerating my perspicacity. It is only with hindsight that I am able to dismantle this laugh into its component parts.

The car was a big black ugly high-built thing, shaped like one of those loaves that in my childhood were called turnovers, with a domed roof and a long, dented snout. The driver, who seemed hardly more than a boy, did not turn to look at me, but loosed the brake a second before I was seated, so that I was thrown back on the upholstery, my head hobbling and heart crouched in fright in a corner of its cage, as we shot off along the wide avenue at a lumbering but reckless speed. Leathercoat took off his hat and held it primly on his lap. His short fair hair was damp with sweat, so that the pink scalp showed through, and was moulded by the crown of the hat into a pointed shape which was almost endearing. A bit of dried shaving soap, speckled with straw-coloured stubble, was lodged under his left earlobe. Buildings rose up in the windscreen, vast, blank-faced and, to my eyes, increasingly menacing, and then collapsed silently behind us.

“Where are you taking me?” I said.

I might not have spoken. Leathercoat was sitting bolt upright, watching the passing scene with lively interest, as if he, and not I, were the visitor. I leaned back on the seat—the upholstery smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke and something that seemed to be piss—and folded my arms. A curious calm had overtaken me. I seemed to be floating a foot above myself, supported somehow by the onward movement of the car, like a bird suspended on an air thermal. I wish I could believe this was a sign of moral bravery, but the most it seemed to be was indifference. Or is indifference another name for bravery? At last we pulled off the street and crossed a cobbled square, the tyres burbling and squeaking, and I saw the onion domes gleaming in the steel-grey twilight and realised with a start, and an unexpected, apprehensive thrill, that I was being brought back to the Kremlin.

Though not to the art gallery. We drew to a lurching stop in a crooked courtyard and, while the boy driver—who may well have been a little old man—continued sitting with the back of his head firmly turned to me, Leathercoat jumped out and hurried around to my side at a canted run and wrenched open the door before I could find the handle myself. I stepped out calmly, feeling a bit like an elderly and no longer grand lady arriving by taxi at Ascot. Immediately, as if the touch of my foot on the cobbles had operated a hidden spring, a great high set of double doors in front of me was thrown open and I found myself blinking in an expressionist wedge of somehow glutinous electric light. I hesitated, and turned my head, I don’t know why— perhaps in a last wild search for a means of escape—and glanced upwards, past the high, dark-windowed walls of the surrounding buildings, that seemed to lean inwards at their tops, and saw the sky, delicate, pale and depthless, where a solitary crystalline star, like a star on a Christmas card, like the star of Bethlehem itself, stood with its stiletto point poised on an onion dome, and in that moment I realised with a sharp, precise shock that I was about to step out of one life and into another. Then a richly accented voice said warmly, “Professor Maskell, please!” and I turned to find a short, dapper, balding man in an ill-fitting, tightly buttoned three-piece suit approaching me from the doorway with both stubby little hands outstretched. He was a dead ringer for the older Martin Heidegger, with a smudge of moustache and a sinisterly avuncular smile and little black eyes shiny as marbles. Never taking those eyes off mine, he fumbled for my hand and pressed it fervently between both of his. “Welcome, comrade, welcome,” he said breathily, “welcome to the Kremlin!” And I was ushered inside, and felt a tingling sensation in the middle of my back, as if that star had dropped out of the sky and stabbed me between the shoulder blades.

Mouldy corridors, ill lit, with someone standing in every other doorway—sag-suited officials, clerks in drooping cardigans, secretary-looking middle-aged women—all smiling the same worrying smile as Heidegger, and nodding mute greetings and encouragement, as if I had won a prize and was on my way to be presented with it (I had something of the same experience years later, when I was escorted through the Palace to kneel before Mrs. W. and her sword). Heidegger walked at my side, gripping my arm above the elbow and murmuring rapidly in my ear. Although his English was faultless—another mark of the sinister—his accent was so thick I could not properly understand what he was saying, and in my agitation and apprehensiveness was hardly listening, anyway. We arrived at another pair of tall double doors—I was, I realised, nervously humming a snatch of Mussorgsky in my head—and Leathercoat, who had been loping nonchalantly behind us with his hat in his hand, stepped forward quickly and, like a harem guard, shoulders and head down and both arms thrust out stiffly, pushed the doors open on a vast, high-ceilinged, brown-painted room hung with an enormous chandelier that was a kind of monstrous, multiple parody of the star I had seen outside in the square. Dwarf people, or so they seemed, stood about the parquet floor, uneasily nursing empty glasses; at our appearance they all turned and for a moment seemed on the point of breaking into applause.

“You see?” Heidegger whispered in my ear, in delight and triumph, as if the room and its inhabitants were all his own work and I had been sceptical of his powers. “Let me introduce you…”

I met in rapid succession the Commissar of Soviet Culture and his wife, the mayor of somewhere ending in “ovsk,” a white-haired judge of noble mien whose name I seemed to remember from reports of the show trials, and a stout, stern young woman whom I spoke to for some minutes under the impression that she was something high up in the Ministry of Science and Technology, but who turned out to be the official interpreter assigned to me for the evening. I was given a glass of sticky pink champagne—“Georgian,” the Culture Commissar’s wife said, and made a sour face—which was the signal for a general refilling of glasses, and as the attendants like first-aid workers went round with their bottles, the tension eased and a relieved, happy hum swelled in the room.

Talk. Tedium. Jaw-ache from ceaseless smiling. Standing tensely beside me, my interpreter has begun to sweat as she struggles with the definite article, manfully stacking up sentences like so many big unhandy boxes. Her rapid-fire interventions are as much a hindrance as a help to understanding: I cannot rid myself of the sense of being dogged by an impossibly rude companion for whose behaviour I should be apologising to the people struggling to get a word in edgeways as she gabbles on. I am rescued from her briefly by a shambling giant of a man in horn-rimmed spectacles, who clamps a big square hairy paw on my wrist and leads me into a corner, where, glancing behind him first over one shoulder and then the other, he reaches into an inside pocket—dear God, what is he going to produce?—and brings out a worn, fat leather wallet from which he lifts reverently a set of dog-eared photographs of what I take to be his wife and a grown-up son and shows them to me and waits in silence, panting softly with emotion, while I admire them. The woman wears a print dress and half turns her face away from the camera in shyness; the crop-haired young man, arms folded across his chest as if he were strapped in a straitjacket, glares into the lens, stern and vigilant, a son of the Revolution.

“Very nice,” I say helplessly, nodding like a doll. “Are they here tonight, your family?”

He shakes his head, gulping back a sob.

“Lost,” he says thickly, stabbing a meaty finger at the figure of the son. “Gone.”

I do not think I want to know what he means.

Then Heidegger appears silently at my shoulder again—very soft-footed, is Heidegger—and the snaps are hastily put away, and I am led off to the other side of the room, where a door that I had taken for a part of the panelling opens, and here is another ill-lit corridor, and suddenly my heart is in my mouth as I realise with incontrovertible certainty that it is Him I am about to meet. But I am wrong. At the end of the corridor is an office, or study— big desk with green-shaded lamp, shelves of books no one has ever read, a ticker-tape machine, inactive but tense with potential, on a stand in the corner—the kind of room that in films the important man slips away to, leaving his sleek wife to entertain the guests while he makes a vital telephone call, standing silk-suited, sombre and cigaretted in the light from a half-open doorway (yes, I used to go to the pictures a lot, when they were still in black-and-white; my Patrick was a great enthusiast, and even subscribed to a magazine called, if I remember correctly, Picturegoer, which I sometimes furtively flicked through). I think the room is empty until there steps forward from the shadows another plumpish, balding little man, who might be Heidegger’s older brother. He is dressed in one of those square, shiny suits that Soviet officials seem to have specially made for them, and wears spectacles, which, remembering them, he whips off quickly and slips into his jacket pocket, as if they are a shameful sign of weakness and decadence. He must be a man of some consequence, for I can feel Heidegger trembling faintly beside me in reigned-in excitement, like a steeplechaser waiting for the off. Once again there is no introduction, and Comrade Pinstripe does not offer to shake hands, but smiles the kind of rapidly nodding, excessively enthusiastic smile that tells me he does not speak English. Then he delivers himself, in a rolling, rapid voice, of a lengthy and, I guess, elaborately embellished address. I notice again how Russians, when they speak, seem not only drunk but at the same time look as if they are juggling a hot potato in their mouths. This is true also of working people in the part of Ireland where I was brought up; for a mad moment I wonder if I might mention this—to me interesting— correspondence, perhaps offering it as evidence of an essential class solidarity stretching from the glens of Antrim to the slopes of the Urals. Ending his peroration with a sort of trilled verbal flourish, Pinstripe makes a stiff little bow and steps one pace backwards, smugly, like a star pupil at a school speech-day. There follows an awful silence. My stomach pings and rumbles, Heidegger’s shoes creak. Pinstripe, with eyebrows lifted, is smiling and nodding again, with some impatience. I realise with a start that he is awaiting a reply.

“Ah,” I say stumblingly, “yes, well, ah.” Then pause. “I am—” My voice is too high-pitched; I adjust it to a rumbling baritone. “I am extremely proud and honoured to be here, in this historic place, seat of so many of our hopes. Of the hopes of so many of us.” I am doing quite well; I begin to relax. “The Kremlin-”

Here Heidegger silences me by putting a hand on my arm and giving it a not unfriendly but definitely admonitory squeeze. He says something in Russian, at which Pinstripe looks a little piqued, though he goes to the desk and from a drawer takes out a vodka bottle and three tiny glasses, which he lines up on the desktop and with tremulous care fills them to the brim. I venture a cautious sip and wince as the cold, silvery fire slithers down my oesophagus. The two Russians, however, give a sort of shout and in unison knock back their shots with a quick toss of the head, their neck tendons cracking. On the third round Heidegger turns to me and with a roguish smile cries out, “King George Six!” and I choke on my drink and have to have my back slapped. Then the audience is at an end. The vodka bottle is put away, along with the glasses, unwashed, and Pinstripe bows to me once more and retreats backwards out of the lamplight as if on castors, and Heidegger takes my arm again and steers me to the door, walking along quickly very close up against me, his yeasty breath caressing my cheek. The great hall is empty under its menacingly icy chandelier; not a trace of the party remains, save for a sweetish after-smell of champagne. Heidegger looks gratified, whether at the success of the occasion or the thoroughness with which it has been brought to a close, I do not know. We walk back along the damp-smelling corridor to the front door. He tells me, in an excited, feathery whisper, of a visit he once paid to Manchester. “Such a beautiful, beautiful city. The Corn Exchange! The Free Trade Hall! Magnificent!” Leathercoat is waiting for us at the door, slouched in his long coat and still holding his hat. Heidegger, his thoughts already elsewhere, shakes my hand, smiles, bows, and—surely I am mistaken?—clicks his heels, and propels me out into the glimmering night, where my single star, my talisman, has paled into a myriad of its fellows.

The return trip was a far jollier affair than the voyage out. It did not start auspiciously: we were flown to Leningrad by military transport, and then went on by train to Helsinki. Finland smelled offish and fir trees. I felt wretched. We joined an English cruise ship which had been visiting the Baltic ports. On board we found a few acquaintances from London, including the Lydon sisters, scatterbrained as ever and with that faint aura of debauchery that I always suspected they had not really earned. There was a jazz band on board, and in the evenings after dinner we danced in the cocktail lounge, and Sylvia Lydon put her cool hand in mine and pressed the sharp little points of her breasts against my shirt-front, and for a night or two it seemed something might come of it, but nothing did. By day the pair of Cambridge dons, who despite deep academic differences—something to do with Hegel’s concept of the Absolute—had stuck exclusively to each other’s company throughout the trip, paced the deck in all weathers with their pipes and mufflers, while Boy sat in the bar propositioning the waiters, and arguing politics with young Lord Belvoir, whose strongest impression of Russia had been a distinct sense of the shadow of the guillotine, with a consequent falling-off in his enthusiasm for the cause. This placed Boy in a quandary; normally he would have countered any sign of apostasy with a storm of argument and exhortation, but since on Felix Hartmann’s advice he was himself supposed to be displaying signs of disenchantment with the Soviet system he had to perform an elaborate game of verbal hide-and-seek, and the strain was showing.

“What the hell is Bannister playing at?” Archie Fletcher wanted to know, his little pink face pinched with outrage.

“It’s the shock,” I said. “You know what they say: you should never wake a sleepwalker.”

“What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Archie had always disliked me.

“The dream has ended for him. He has seen the future and it doesn’t work. Don’t you feel that, too?”

“No, I damn well don’t.”

“Well,” with a show of weary regret, “I do.”

Archie gave me an apoplectic stare and strode off. Boy, sweating in desperation, winked at me miserably over young Belvoir’s shoulder.

I never did discover the identity of Heidegger or his big brother. Boy was no help. I had assumed that he, too, on his missing afternoon, had been accosted by Leathercoat and taken to meet them, but he denied it (“Oh no, old man,” he said with a smirk, “I’m sure the ones I talked to were much higher up.”). Year after year I scanned the newspaper photographs of Politburo members on their balcony at the May Day parades, but in vain. Certain gaps along the rows of squat heads and daintily waving hands gave me pause: had Pinstripe stood there, before he was airbrushed out? I even took the opportunity, after the war, of attending one or two stiflingly boring receptions, at the Foreign Office or the Palace, for visiting Soviet delegations, in the hope of spotting a familiar pate, balder now, or a grizzled toothbrush moustache. It was no good. Those two had disappeared, as if they had been conjured into existence solely to officiate at my ceremonial induction into the arcanum, and afterwards had been disposed of, silently and efficiently. I quizzed Felix Hartmann about them, but he only shrugged; Felix was already feeling the breath of the airbrush on his own face. Whenever I thought of that mysterious pair, in the years when I was active as an agent, I experienced a faint tremor of apprehension, like the flat smack caused in the air by an unheard, distant explosion.

I was secretly as glad as Lord Belvoir to be leaving Russia behind, though I grieved to think that I would never again see the Poussins at the Hermitage or the Cézannes at the Pushkin— or, indeed, that anonymous icon, at once poignant and stoical, darkly aglow in the depths of a tiny church I had hidden in for half an hour when I had managed to give our Intourist guide the slip one breezy sunlit morning at a crossroads in the midst of vast, barren cornfields somewhere south of Moscow. The little white ship that we took out of Helsinki, with its jazzy glitter and tinkling glasses and the Lydon girls’ hard, bright, careless laughter, was an antechamber to a world that in my heart I knew I would never want to give up. Russia, I realised, was finished; what seemed like a beginning was really an end, as a wake can look like a party. Oh, probably, I told myself, the Revolution would succeed, would be made to succeed—I recalled Leather-coat’s grim little laugh—but all the same, the country was doomed. It had suffered too much history. In the ship’s lounge one evening I stopped to look idly at a framed map of Europe on the wall and thought the Soviet Union looked like nothing so much as a big old dying dog with its head hanging, peering westward, all rheum and slobber, barking its last barks. Boy would have been scandalised, but when I thought of Russia I knew that, unlike him, I did not have to feign disenchantment. You will laugh, Miss Vandeleur (if you do laugh, for I have never heard you do so), but what I discovered, as we ploughed our way through the Baltic’s increasingly wintry waves, was that I was— as was Boy, indeed; as we all were—nothing less than an old-fashioned patriot.

6

I arrived back from Russia into a smoky English autumn and went straight to Cambridge. The weather on the fens was gloomy and wet; fine rain fell over the town like drifts of silver webbing. My white-walled rooms wore a pursed, disapproving aspect, seeming to hunch a cold shoulder against me, as if they knew where I had been and what I had been up to. I had always liked this time of year, with its sense of quickening expectation, so much more manageable than spring’s false alarms, but now the prospect of winter was suddenly dispiriting. I had finished my long essay on the Poussin drawings at Windsor and could not disguise from myself the fact that it was a poor, dry thing. I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship—if decision is the word—was the result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision. What I mean to say is, did the pursuit of accuracy and what I call the right knowledge of things quench the fires of passion in me? The fires of passion: there sounds the voice of a spoiled romantic.

I suppose that is what I meant when, at the outset, Miss Vandeleur asked me why I became a spy and I answered, before I had given myself time to think, that it was essentially a frivolous impulse: a flight from ennui and a search for diversion. The life of action, heedless, mind-numbing action, that is what I had always hankered after. Yet I had not succeeded in defining what, for me, might constitute action, until Felix Hartmann turned up and solved the question for me.

“Think of it,” he said smoothly, “as another form of academic work. You are trained in research; well, research for us.”

We were in The Fox in Roundleigh. He had motored up from London in the afternoon and picked me up at my rooms. I had not invited him in, from a combination of shyness and distrust— distrust of myself, that is. The little world with which I had surrounded myself—my books, my prints, my Bonington, my Death of Seneca—was a delicate construct, and I feared it might not bear without injury the weight of Felix’s scrutiny. His car was an unexpectedly fancy model, low and sleek with spoked wheels and worryingly eager-looking globe headlights, over the chrome cheeks of which, as we approached, our curved reflections slid, rippling amid a speckle of raindrops. The back seat was piled with mink coats, the polished fur agleam and sinister; they looked like a large dead soft brown bloodless beast thrown there, a yak, or yeti, or whatever it is called. Hartmann saw me looking at them, and sighed sepulchrally and said, “Business.” The bucket seat clasped me in a muscular embrace. There was a warm, womanly afterbreath of perfume; Hartmann’s love life was as covert as his spying. He drove through the rain-smeared streets at a sustained forty—that was terrifically fast in those days—skidding on the cobbles, and almost ran down one of my graduate students who was crossing the road outside Peterhouse. Beyond the town the fields were retreating into a sodden twilight. Suddenly, as I looked out at the rain and the crepuscular bundles of shadow falling away on either side of our steadily strengthening, burrowing headlights, a wave of homesickness rose up and drenched me in an extravagant wash of sorrow that lasted for a second and then dispersed as quickly as it had gathered. When, next morning, a telegram arrived to tell me that my father had suffered his first heart attack the previous day, I wondered with a shiver if somehow it was an intuition of his distress that I had felt, if it was at the same moment that he was being stricken that, out on the wet road, the thought of Ireland and home had come to me unbidden and my heart, too, in its own way, had suffered a minor seizure. (What an incorrigible solipsist I am!)

Hartmann that day was in a strange mood, a sort of slow-burning, troubled euphoria—lately, with so much talk of drugs, I have wondered if he may have been an addict—and was avid for details of my pilgrimage to Russia. I tried to sound enthusiastic, but I could tell I was disappointing him. As I spoke, he grew increasingly restless, fiddling with the gearstick and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. We came to a crossroads and he pulled the car to a lurching stop and got out and stamped into the middle of the road and stood looking in all directions, as if in desperate search of an escape route, with his fists in his overcoat pockets and his lips moving, billowed about by dark-silver wraiths of rain. Because of his bad leg he leaned at a slight angle, so that he seemed to be canted sideways against a strong wind. I waited with misgiving, not knowing quite what to do. When he came back he sat for a long moment staring through the windscreen, suddenly haggard and hollow-seeming. A tracery of raindrops fine as lace was delicately draped across the shoulders of his coat. I could smell the wetted wool. He began to speak in a gabbling way about the risks he was taking, the pressures he was under, stopping abruptly every so often and sighing angrily and staring out at the rain. This was not at all like him.

“I can trust no one,” he muttered. “No one.”

“I don’t think you need fear any of us,” I said mildly, “Boy or Alastair, Leo—me.”

He went on looking out at the deepening dark as if he had not heard me, then stirred.

“What? No, no, I don’t mean you. I mean”—he gestured— “over there.” I thought of Leathercoat and his faceless driver, and recalled, with a not quite explicable shudder, the speck of shaving soap under Leathercoat’s earlobe. Hartmann gave a brief laugh that sounded like a cough. “Perhaps I should defect,” he said, “what do you think?” It did not seem entirely a joke.

We drove on then to Roundleigh and parked in the village square. It was fully dark by now, and the lamps under the trees stood glowing whitely in the fine rain, like big, streaming seed-heads. The Fox in those days—I wonder if it is still there?—was a tall, teetering, crooked place, with a public bar and a chophouse, and rooms upstairs where travelling salesmen and illicit couples sometimes stayed. The ceilings, stained by centuries of tobacco smoke, were a wonderfully delicate, honeysuckle shade of yellowy-brown. There were fish mounted in glass cases on the wall, and a stuffed fox cub under a bell jar. Hartmann, I could see, found it all irresistibly charming; he had a weakness for English kitsch—they all had. The publican, Noakes, was a big brute with meaty arms and broad side-whiskers and a brow furrowed like a badly ploughed field; he made me think of a pugilist from Regency times, one of those bruisers who might have gone a few rounds with Lord Byron. He had a fierce, ferrety little wife who nagged him in public, and whom, so it was said, he beat in private. We used the place for years, right up to the war, for meetings and letter drops and even once in a while for conferences with embassy people or visiting agents, but each time we gathered there Noakes behaved as if he had never laid eyes on us before. I suspect, from the sardonic way in which he surveyed us from behind his row of beer-pulls, that he thought we were what the papers would have called a homosexual ring; a case, to some extent, of misplaced prescience.

“But tell me what it is I’m expected to do,” I said to Hartmann, when we had settled ourselves with our halves of bitter on high-backed benches facing each other on either side of the coke fire. (Coke: that is something else that has gone; if I try, I can still smell the fumes and feel their acid prickle at the back of my palate.)

“Do?” he said, putting on an arch, amused expression; his earlier, violent mood had subsided and he was his smooth self again. “You do not do anything, really.” He took a draught of beer and with relish licked the fringe of foam from his upper lip. His blue-black oiled hair was combed starkly back from his forehead, giving him the pert, suave look of a raptor. He had rubber galoshes on over his dancer’s dainty shoes. It was said that he wore a hairnet in bed. “Your value for us is that you are at the heart of the English establishment—”

“I am?”

“—and from the information you and Boy Bannister and the others supply to us we shall be able to build a picture of the power bases of this country.” He loved these expositions, the setting out of aims and objectives, the homilies on strategy; every spy is part priest, part pedant. “It is like—what is it called…?”

“A jigsaw puzzle?”

“Yes!” He frowned. “How did you know that was what I meant?”

“Oh, just a guess.”

I sipped my beer; I only ever drank beer when I was with the Comrades—class solidarity and all that; I was as bad as Alastair, in my way. A miniature but distinctly detailed horned red devil was glowing and grinning at me from the pulsing heart of the fire.

“So,” I said, “I am to be a sort of social diarist, am I? The Kremlin’s answer to William Hickey.”

At mention of the Kremlin he flinched, and glanced over at the bar, where Noakes was polishing a glass and whistling silently, his puckered big lips swivelled to one side.

“Please,” Hartmann whispered, “who is William Hickey?”

“A joke,” I said wearily, “just a joke. I had rather thought I would be required to do more than pass on cocktail party gossip. Where is my code book, my cyanide pill? Sorry—another joke.”

He frowned and began to say something but thought better of it, and instead smiled his crookedest, most winning smile, and did his exaggerated European shrug.

“Everything,” he said, “must go so slowly in this strange business of ours. In Vienna once I had the task of watching one man for a year—a whole year! Then it turned out he was the wrong man. So you see.”

I laughed, which I should not have done, and he gave me a reproachful look. Then he began to speak very earnestly of how the English aristocracy was riddled with Fascist sympathisers, and passed me a list of the names of a number of people in whom Moscow was particularly interested. I glanced down the list and stopped myself from laughing again.

“Felix,” I said, “these people are of no consequence. They’re just common-or-garden reactionaries; cranks; dinner-party speech-makers.”

He shrugged, and said nothing, and looked away. I felt a familiar depression descending upon me. Espionage has something of the quality of a dream. In the spy’s world, as in dreams, the terrain is always uncertain. You put your foot on what looks like solid ground and it gives way under you and you go into a kind of free fall, turning slowly tail over tip and clutching on to things that are themselves falling. This instability, this myriadness that the world takes on, is both the attraction and the terror of being a spy. Attraction, because in the midst of such uncertainty you are never required to be yourself; whatever you do, there is another, alternative you standing invisibly to one side, observing, evaluating, remembering. This is the secret power of the spy, different from the power that orders armies into battle; it is purely personal; it is the power to be and not be, to detach oneself from oneself, to be oneself and at the same time another. The trouble is, if I were always at least two versions of myself, so all others must be similarly twinned with themselves in this awful, slippery way. And so, laughable as it seemed, it was not impossible that the people on Felix’s list might be not only the society hostesses and double-barrelled bores whom I thought I knew, but a ruthless and efficient ring of Fascists poised to wrest power from the elected government and set an abdicated king back on a swastika-draped throne. And there lay the fascination, and the fear—not of plots and pacts and royal shenanigans (I could never take the Duke or that awful Simpson woman seriously), but of the possibility that nothing, absolutely nothing, is as it seems.

“Look here, Felix,” I said, “are you seriously proposing that I should spend my time attending dinners and going to weekend house parties so that I can report back to you on what I overheard Fruity Metcalfe telling Nancy Astor about the German armaments industry? Do you have any idea what conversations are like on these occasions?”

He considered his beer glass. Light from the fire lay along his jaw like a polished, dark-pink scar. This evening his eyes had a distinctly Eastern cast; did mine look Irish, to him, I wonder?

“No, I do not know what these occasions are like,” he said stiffly. “A fur trader from the East End of London is not likely to be invited for weekends to Cliveden.”

“It’s Clivden,” I said absently. “It’s pronounced Clivden.”

“Thank you.”

We supped the last of our warm beer in silence, me irritated and Hartmann bridling. A few locals had come in and sat about lumpily in the reddish gloom, their ovine, steamy smell insinuating itself amid the coke fumes. The early-evening murmur in English public houses, so wan and weary, so circumspect, always depresses me. Not that I go into public houses very often, nowadays. I sometimes find myself yearning for the ramshackle hilarity of the pubs of my childhood. When I was a boy in Carrickdrum I often ventured at night into Irishtown, a half acre of higgledy-piggledy shacks behind the seafront where the Catholic poor lived in what seemed to me euphoric squalor. There was a pub in every alleyway, low, one-roomed establishments whose front windows were painted with a lacy brown effect almost to the top, where a strip of buttery, smoke-clogged light, jolly, furtive, enticing, shone out blearily into the dark. I would creep up to Murphy’s Lounge or Maloney’s Select Bar and stand outside the shut door, my heart beating in my throat— it was known for a fact that if the Catholics caught a Protestant child he would be spirited away and buried alive in a shallow grave in the hills above the town—and listen to the din inside, the laughter and the shouted oaths and jagged snatches of song, while a white moon hung above me on its invisible gibbet, sliming the cobbles of the alley with a suggestive smear of tarnished pewter. These pubs made me think of weather-beaten galleons, shut fast against the sea of night, bobbing along in mutinous merriment, the crew drunk, the captain in chains, and I, the dauntless cabin boy, ready to plunge into the midst of the roisterers and seize the key to the musket chest. Ah, the romance of forbidden, brute worlds!

“Tell me, Victor,” Hartmann said, and I could tell, by the breathy, consonantal way he uttered my name (“Vikh-torr…”), that he was about to shift into the realm of the personal, “why do you do this?”

I sighed. I had thought he would ask it, sooner or later.

“Oh, the rottenness of the system,” I said gaily. “Miners’ wages, children with rickets—you know. Here, let me buy you a whiskey; this beer is so dreary.”

He held up his glass to the weak light and contemplated it solemnly.

“Yes,” he said, with a mournful catch. “But it reminds me of home.”

Dear me; I could almost hear the twang of a phantom zither. When I brought back the whiskey he looked at it doubtfully, sipped, and winced; no doubt he would have preferred plum brandy, or whatever it is they drink on rainy autumn nights on the shores of Lake Balaton. He drank again, more deeply this time, and huddled tightly into himself, elbows pressed to his ribs and his legs twined about each other corkscrew fashion with one slender foot tucked behind an ankle like a cocked trigger. They do love a cosy chat, these international spies.

“And you,” I said, “why do you do it?”

“England is not my country—”

“Nor mine.”

He shrugged grumpily.

“But it is your home,” he said, with a stubborn set of the jaw. “This is where you live, where your friends are. Cambridge, London…” He made a sweeping gesture with his glass, and the measure of whiskey tilted and in its depths a sulphurous gemlike fire flashed. “Home.”

Another phantom slither of strings. I sighed.

“Do you get homesick?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“I have no home.”

“No,” I said, “I suppose you haven’t. I should have thought that would make you feel quite… free?”

He leaned back on the bench seat, his face sinking into darkness.

“Boy Bannister gives us information that he gets from his father,” he said.

“Boy’s father? Boy’s father is dead.”

“His stepfather, then.”

“Retired, surely?”

“He still has contacts at the Admiralty.” He paused. “Would you,” softly, “would you do that?”

“Betray my father? I doubt if the secrets of the bishopric of Down and Dromore would be of great interest to our masters.”

“But would you?”

The upper part of his torso was swallowed in shadow, so that all I could see were his corkscrewed legs and one hand resting on his thigh with a cigarette clipped between thumb and middle fingers. He took a sip of whiskey, and the rim of the glass clinked tinnily against his teeth.

“Of course I would,” I said, “if it were necessary. Wouldn’t you?”

When we left the pub the rain had stopped. The night was blowy and bad-tempered, and the vast, wet darkness felt hollowed out by the wind. Sodden sycamore leaves lolloped about the road like injured toads. Hartmann turned up the collar of his coat and shivered. “Ach, this weather!” He was on his way back to London, to catch the sleeper to Paris. He liked trains. I imagined him on the Blue Train with a gun in his hand and a girl in his bunk. Our footsteps plashed on the pavement, and as we walked from the light of one lamp to another our shadows stood up hastily to meet us and then fell down on their backs behind us.

“Felix,” I said. “I’m not at all adventurous, you know; you mustn’t expect heroics.”

We reached the car. An overhanging tree gave itself a doggy shake and a random splatter of raindrops fell on me, rattling on the brim of my hat. I suddenly saw the Back Road in Carrick-drum, and remembered myself walking with my father one wet November night like this when I was a boy: the steamy light of the infrequent gas lamps, and the undersides of the dark trees thrashing in what seemed an anguish of their own, and the sudden, inexplicable swelling of ardour inside me that made me want to howl in ecstatic sorrow, yearning for something nameless, which must have been the future, I suppose.

“As a matter of fact, there is something we want you to do,” Hartmann said.

We were standing on either side of the car, facing each other across the glistening roof.

“Yes?”

“We want you to become an agent of Military Intelligence.”

Another gust of wind, another spatter of raindrops.

“Oh, Felix,” I said, “tell me that’s a joke.”

He got into the car and slammed the door. He drove for some miles in an angry silence, very fast, gouging about with the gear-stick as if he were trying to dislodge something from the innards of the car.

“All right, tell me, then,” I said at last. “How am I supposed to get into the Secret Service?”

“Talk to the people at your college. Professor Hope-White, for instance. The physicist Crowther.”

“Crowther?” I said. “Crowther is a spy master? He couldn’t be. And Hope-White? He’s a scholar of Romance languages, for God’s sake! He writes lyric verses about boys in Provencal dialect.” Hartmann shrugged, smiling now; he liked to surprise. In the glow of the dashboard lights his face had a greenish, death’s-head pallor. A fox appeared on the road in front of us and stared in venomous surprise at the headlights before putting down its tail and sliding off at a low run into the dark verge. And I remember now a rabbit hopping out of a hedge and gaping at two young men walking towards it up a hill road. “I’m sorry, Felix,” I said, looking out at the night rushing helplessly at us in the windscreen, “but I can’t see myself passing my days decoding estimates of German rolling stock in the company of former Eton prefects and retired Indian Army officers. I have better things to do. I am a scholar.”

He shrugged again.

“All right,” he said.

It was a phenomenon with which I was to become familiar, this way they had of trying out something and then dropping it when it met even the mildest resistance. I remember Oleg in a great flap rushing around to Poland Street one day during the war after he had discovered that Boy and I were sharing rooms there (“Agents cannot live together like this, it is impossible!”) and then staying to get weepily, Slavicly drunk with Boy and flopping on the couch in the living room for the night. Now Hartmann said:

“A new case officer will be arriving soon.”

I turned to him, startled.

“And what about you?”

He kept his eyes fixed on the road.

“It seems they have begun to suspect me,” he said.

“Suspect you? Of what?”

He shrugged.

“Of everything,” he said. “Of nothing. They come to suspect everyone, in the end.”

I thought for a moment.

“You know,” I said, “I wouldn’t have agreed to work for them, if they had sent a Russian.”

He nodded.

“This one will be Russian,” he said grimly.

We were silent. In the dark sky before us a low, big-bellied bank of cinder-black cloud reflected the lights of Cambridge.

“No,” I said presently, “it won’t do. You’ll have to tell them it won’t do. I’ll deal with them through you, or not at all.”

He gave a melancholy laugh.

“Tell them?” he said. “Ah, Victor, you don’t know them. Believe me, you do not know them.”

“Nevertheless, you must tell them: I will only work with you.”

I have forgotten the Russian’s name. Skryne always refused to believe this, but it is true. His code name was Iosif, which struck me as dangerously obvious (the first time we made contact I asked if I might call him Joe, but he did not think it funny). He is one of the many persons from my past upon whom I do not care to dwell overmuch; the thought of him ripples across my consciousness like a draught across the back of a fever patient. He was a nondescript but dogged little sharp-faced man, who reminded me eerily of a Latin master, harsh of tongue and a fine mimic, especially of the Northern Irish accent, who had made life hell for me in my first year at Marlborough. At Iosif’s insistence, our meetings took place in various pubs in the more respectable of London’s suburbs, a different one each time. I believe he secretly liked these ghastly establishments; I suppose he, like Felix Hartmann, saw them as typical manifestations of an idealised England, with their horse brasses and dart boards and cravatted, ruddy-hued proprietors, who all looked to me like the kind of cheery chap who would have his wife coming along nicely in an acid bath upstairs. A belief in this mythical version of John Bull was one of the few things that the Russian and the German ruling elites and their lackeys had in common in the thirties. Iosif was proud of what he imagined was his ability to pass for a native Englander. He wore tweeds and brown brogues and sleeveless grey pullovers and smoked Capstan cigarettes. The effect was of a diligently fashioned but hopelessly inaccurate imitation of a human being, something a scouting party from another world might send ahead to mingle with Earthlings and transmit back vital data—which, when I think of it, is pretty much an accurate description of what he was. His accent was laughable, though he imagined it was flawless.

For our first meeting I was summoned one cold bright afternoon early in December to a pub beside a park in Putney. I arrived late and Iosif was furious. As soon as he had identified himself—furtive nod, strained smile, no handshake—I demanded to know why Felix Hartmann was not there.

“He has other duties now.”

“What sort of duties?”

He shrugged a bony shoulder. He was standing with me at the bar, with a glass of fizzy lemonade in his hand.

“At the embassy,” he said. “Papers. Signals.”

“He’s at the embassy now?”

“He was brought in. For his protection; the police were beginning to investigate him.”

“What became of his fur business?”

He shook his head, annoyed, pretending impatience.

“Fur business? What is this fur business? I know nothing about this.”

“Oh, never mind.”

He wanted us to go to a “quiet table in the corner”—the place was empty—but I would not budge. Although I do not care for the stuff, I ordered vodka, just to see him flinch.

“Na zdrovye!” I said, and knocked back the measure Russian style, remembering the brothers Heidegger. Iosif’s glittery little eyes had narrowed to slits. “I told Felix I would work only with him,” I said.

He darted a sharp glance in the direction of the barman.

“You are not in Cambridge now, John,” he said. “You cannot choose your colleagues.”

The door opened and a ragged old boy with a dog came in, preceded by a pallid splash of winter sunlight.

“What did you call me?” I said. “My name is not John.”

“For us you are. For our meetings.”

“Nonsense. I’m not going to have some ridiculous code name foisted on me. I won’t be able to remember it. You’ll telephone me and I’ll say, There’s no John here, and hang up. It’s impossible. John, indeed!”

He sighed. I could see I was a disappointment to him. No doubt he had been looking forward to a pleasant hour in the company of a British gentleman, a university type, diffident and courtly, who just happened to have access to the secrets of the Cavendish Laboratory and would pass them over with charming absent-mindedness, in the manner of an impromptu tutorial. I ordered another vodka and drank it off; it seemed to go straight upwards rather than down, and my head swam and I had the sensation of levitating for a second an inch above the floor. The fat old man with the dog subsided at a table in the corner and began to cough laboriously, making a noise like that of a suction pump in action; the dog meanwhile was studying Iosif and me, head to one side and an ear-flap dangling, like that terrier on the record label. Iosif hunched his back against the animal’s alert gaze and, passing a hand across the lower half of his face in what comedians call a slow burn, said something incomprehensible.

“I can’t hear you if you speak like that,” I said.

In a spasm of anger, immediately checked, he clutched my arm—a surprising and, I confess, frightening, iron grip—and put his face close beside mine, looking over my shoulder and swivelling his mouth towards my ear.

“The Syndics,” he hissed, and a prickle of spittle settled on my cheek.

“The what?”

I laughed. I was a little tipsy already, and everything had begun to seem at once hilarious and faintly desperate. Iosif in a hot whisper explained, amid tics and twitches and whistling breaths, like a chorister telling the boy next to him a dirty joke, that Moscow desired to procure a transcript of the deliberations of the Cambridge Syndics, under the illusion that this venerable body was some sort of clandestine union of the great and powerful of our powerful and great university, a cross between the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion.

“For God’s sake,” I said, “they’re just a committee of the university senate!”

He waggled a portentous eyebrow.

“Exactly.”

“They conduct the business of the university. Butchers’ bills. The wine cellar. That’s all they do.”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, pursing his lips and letting his eyelids slowly drop. He knew what he knew. Oxbridge was running the country, and the Syndics were running half of Oxbridge: how could an account of their doings be anything less than fascinating to our masters in Moscow? I sighed. This was not an auspicious beginning to my career as a secret agent. There is a study to be written of the effect on the history of Europe in our century of the inability of England’s enemies to understand this perverse, stubborn, sly and absurd nation. Much of my time and energy over the next decade and a half would be spent trying to teach Moscow, and the likes of Iosif, to distinguish between form and content in English life (trust an Irishman to know the difference). Their misconceptions were shamingly ludicrous. When Moscow Centre heard I was a regular visitor at Windsor, that I was friendly with HM, and was often bade stay on in the evenings to play at after-dinner games with his wife—who was also related to me, however distantly—they were beside themselves, believing that one of their men had penetrated to the very seat of power in the country. Accustomed to tsardom, old style and new, they could not understand that our sceptred ruler does not rule, but is only a sort of surrogate parent of the nation, and not for a moment to be taken seriously. At the end of the war, when Labour got in, I suspect Moscow believed it would be only a matter of time before the royal family, little princesses and all, would be taken to the Palace basement and put up against the wall. Attlee, of course, they could not fathom, and their bafflement only increased when I pointed out to them that he took his politics less from Marx than from Morris and Mill (Oleg wanted to know if these were people in the government). When the Conservatives got back they assumed the election had been rigged, unable to believe that the working class, after all they had learned in the war, would freely vote for the return of a right-wing government (“My dear Oleg, there is no stouter Tory than the English working man”). Boy was infuriated and depressed by these failures of comprehension; I, however, had sympathy for the Comrades. Like them, I too came of an extreme and instinctual race. No doubt this is why Leo Rothenstein and I got on better with them than genuine Englishmen like Boy and Alastair: we shared the innate, bleak romanticism of our two very different races, the legacy of dispossession, and, especially, the lively anticipation of eventual revenge, which, when it came to politics, could be made to pass for optimism.

Meanwhile Iosif is still standing before me, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, with his too-long cuffs and his facial muscles that seem worked by wires, attentive and hopeful as that old man’s dog, and since I am tired of him, and depressed, and sorry I ever allowed Hartmann to persuade me to throw in my lot with the likes of this absurd, this impossible person, I tell him that, yes, I will get hold of a copy of the minutes of the next Syndics meeting, if that is what he really wants, and he gives a serious, swift little nod, the kind of nod I would become familiar with later on, from self-important chumps in war rooms and secret briefing centres when I came over from the Department to deliver some perfectly useless piece of classified information. All the commentators nowadays, all the wiseacres in books and in the newspapers, underestimate the adventure-story element in the world of espionage. Because real secrets are betrayed, because torturers exist, because men die—Iosif was to end up, like so many other minor servants of the system, with an NKVD bullet in the back of his head—they imagine that spies are somehow both irresponsible and inhumanly malign, like the lesser devils who carry out great Satan’s commands, when really what we most resembled were those brave but playful, always resourceful chaps in school stories, the Bobs and Dicks and Jims who are good at cricket and get up to harmless but ingenious pranks and in the end unmask the Headmaster as an international criminal, while at the same time managing to get enough clandestine swotting done to come first in their exams and win the scholarships and so save their nice, penurious parents the burden of paying to send them to one of Our Great Universities. That, anyway, is how we saw ourselves, though of course we would not have put it in those terms. We considered ourselves to be good, that is the point. It is hard to recapture now the heady flavour of those pre-war days when the world was going to hell with bells banging and whistles madly shrilling and we alone among our fellows knew exactly what our task was. Oh, I am well aware that young men were going off to Spain to fight, and forming trades unions, and getting up petitions, and so on, but that kind of thing, though necessary, was stop-gap action; secretly, we regarded these poor eager fellows as little more than cannon-fodder, or interfering do-gooders. What we had, and they lacked, was the necessary historical perspective; while the Spanish Brigaders shouted about the need to stop Franco, we were already planning for the transition period after the defeat of Hitler, when with a gentle shove from Moscow, and from us, the war-damaged regimes of Western Europe would fall down domino-fashion—yes, we were early proponents of that now discredited theory—and the Revolution would spread like a bloodstain from the Balkans to the coast of Connemara. And yet, at the same time, how detached we were. Somehow, despite all our talk and even some action, the great events of the time trundled past us, vivid, gaudily coloured, too real to be real, like the props of a travelling theatre being carted away on the back of a lorry, off to some other town. I was working in my rooms at Trinity when I heard the announcement of the fall of Barcelona on the wireless that was playing loudly in the room of my next-door neighbour—Welshman, some sort of physicist, liked dance-band music, told me all about the latest wizardry being worked at the Cavendish—and I continued calmly studying through my magnifying glass a reproduction of the curious pair of severed heads lying on a cloth in the foreground of Poussin’s The Capture of Jerusalem by Titus, as if the two events, the real and the depicted, were equally far off from me in antiquity, the one as fixed and finished as the other, all frozen cry and rampant steed and stylised, gorgeous cruelty. You see…?

There is one final image of Iosif I want to sketch before I pack him away for good in his tissue paper alongside so many other of the best-forgotten characters with whom my life is littered. As he was leaving the pub—he had insisted we go out separately—the old man’s little dog trotted forward, coiling and uncoiling itself in that enthusiastic doggy way, as if its body, taut as a sausage, were somehow spring-loaded, and tried to rub itself against his ankle, only to be rebuffed by a deft, sideways kick from a polished toecap. The animal gave a squeal, more in sorrow than pain, and skittered away, its claws clicking on the floor tiles, and sat down again between its master’s spread feet, blinking and rapidly licking its lips in puzzlement and consternation. Iosif went out, briefly letting in sunlight that played, unspurnably, at his ankles, and the old man glanced at me from under his brows with a sort of grinning scowl, and for a moment I saw what he thought he was seeing in me: another of the petty, impatient, harsh-eyed ones, the dog-kickers, the elbowers-through, the pushers-out-of-the-way, and I wanted to say to him, No, no, I am not like that, I am not like him! and then I thought, But perhaps I am? I catch that same look nowadays when some Cold War veteran or self-appointed patriotic guardian of Western Values recognises me in the street and metaphorically spits upon me.

Anyway. Thus began my career as a working spy. I recalled Felix Hartmann’s hope that we scions of the loftier classes would provide Moscow with a completed jigsaw-puzzle picture of the English establishment (I had not had the heart to enquire if he had ever considered the subjects the manufacturers of such puzzles choose for illustration, but I had an image of a bunkerful of crop-headed commissars gravely poring over a caramel and sugarstick-pink scene complete with cottage and roses and rippling rill and ringleted little girl with a basket of buttercups on her dimpled arm: England, our England!). Diligently I began to accept the dinner invitations that previously I would have declined with a shudder, and found myself discussing water-colours and the price of poultry with the moustached, slightly mad-eyed wife of a Cabinet minister, or listening, befuddled with brandy and cigar smoke, while a peer of the realm with brick-red jowls and a monocle, gesturing expansively, expounded to the table on the devilishly clever methods the Jews and Freemasons had employed to infiltrate every level of government, to the point where they were now ready to seize power and murder the King. I wrote up exhaustive accounts of these occasions—discovering, by the way, an unexpected flair for narrative; some of these early reports were positively racy, if somewhat over-coloured—and passed them on to Iosif, who would scan them rapidly, frowning, and breathing loudly through his nostrils, and then stow them in an inner pocket and cast a masked glance about the bar and begin to talk with laboured blandness about the weather. Once in a while I gleaned a bit of information or gossip that elicited one of Iosif’s rare, lip-biting, nervous little smiles. What Moscow considered to be my greatest, early triumph was the long and, to me, extremely tedious conversation I had at a Trinity Feast with a Private Secretary at the War Office, a portly, sleek-headed man with a small moustache, who as he prattled on reminded me of those blithe gaffe-makers in the Bateman cartoons; as the night ground along he became increasingly, solemnly, comically drunk—his dicky kept flying up, as in a music-hall farce—and told me, in indiscreet detail, how unprepared for war our armed forces were, that the armaments industry was a joke and that the government had not the will or the means to do anything to rectify the situation. I could see that Iosif, sitting at a low table in a corner of The Hare and Hounds in Highbury, crouched intently over my report, could not decide whether he should be appalled or jubilant at the implications for Europe in general, and Russia in particular, of what he was reading. What he seemed unaware of was that every newsboy in the country already knew how scandalously ill-equipped we were for war, and how spineless the government was.

This naivety on the part of Moscow and its emissaries was a cause of deep misgiving to all of us on our side; much of what passed with them for intelligence was freely available to the public. Didn’t they ever, I asked Felix Hartmann in exasperation, read the papers or listen to the ten o’clock news on the wireless? “What do your people do at the embassy all day, apart from issuing laughable communiqués about Russia’s industrial output and refusing entry visas to defence correspondents of the Daily Express?” He smiled, and shrugged, and looked at the sky and began to whistle through his teeth. We were walking by the frozen Serpentine. It was January, the air was dense with mauve-white frost-smoke, and the ducks were waddling unsteadily about on the ice, baffled and disgruntled by this inexplicable solidification of their liquid world. After two years of duty Iosif had been abruptly recalled; I can still see the sickly sheen of sweat on his already cadaverous brow the day when he told me that this was to be our final meeting. We shook hands and in the doorway—The King’s Head, Highgate—he turned back and shot me a furtive, imploring glance, silently asking me I do not know what awful, impossible question.

“Life at the embassy is somewhat… subdued, just now,” Hartmann said.

Since Iosif’s abrupt departure I had been telephoning the embassy repeatedly, but had heard nothing until today, when Hartmann had just turned up, dressed in black as usual, wearing a black hat with the brim turned low at the front. When I asked what was going on, he had only smiled and put a finger to his lips and led me into the street and towards the park. Now he stopped and looked across the iron-coloured ice, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his long overcoat.

“Moscow has gone silent,” he said. “I send my messages along the usual channels, but nothing comes back. I am like a person who has survived an accident. Or like a person waiting for an accident to happen. It is a very strange sensation.”

On the bank near us a small boy attended by a black-stockinged nurse was throwing crusts of bread to the ducks; the child laughed throatily in delight to see the birds ignominiously slipping and slithering, their wings thrashing, as they chased the wildly skidding morsels. We turned and walked on. At the other side of the lake, on Rotten Row, a group of riders was jostling along untidily amid white bursts of horse-breath. In silence we reached the bridge, and there we stopped. Distant behind the tops of the black trees around us the shrouded forms of London loomed. Hartmann, dreamily smiling, stood with his head tilted to one side, as if listening for some small, expected sound.

“I am going back,” he said. “They have told me I must come back.”

High up in the frozen mist, above the spires and the chimney pots, I seemed to see something hover for a second, a giant figure, all silver and gold and dully ashine. I heard myself swallow.

“I say, old man,” I said, “is that wise, do you think? They tell me the climate over there is not at all congenial, these days. Quite the coldest it’s been for a long time.”

He turned away from me and glanced skyward, as if he too had sensed some hovering portent.

“Oh, it will be all right,” he said absently. “They say they want me to make a personal report, that’s all.”

I nodded. Strange, how like incipient laughter dismay can feel. We set off across the bridge.

“You could always stay here,” I said. “I mean, they can’t make you go, can they?”

He laughed, and linked his arm through mine.

“This is what I like about you,” he said, “all of you. Matters are so simple.” Our footsteps rang on the bridge like axe-blows. He pressed my arm against his ribs. “I must go,” he said. “Otherwise there is… nothing. Do you see?”

We left the bridge still arm in arm and stood on the brow of the park’s gentle rise and surveyed the city crouched before us motionless in the mist.

“I shall miss London,” Hartmann said. “Kensington Gore, the Brompton Road, Tooting Bee—is there really a place called Tooting Bee? And Beauchamp Place, which only yesterday I at last learned how to pronounce in the correct way. Such a waste, all this valuable knowledge.”

He squeezed my arm again, and glanced quickly at me side-wise, and I felt something in him falter, as if a part of an inner mechanism had suddenly, finally, run down.

“Listen,” I said, “the thing is, you mustn’t go; we won’t let you, you know.”

He only smiled, and turned and limped away, back in the direction we had come, over the bridge, under the massy black mist-draped trees, and I never saw him again.

7

I tried for years to find out what had become of him. The Comrades were tight-lipped; when they drop you, you disappear between the floorboards. Tatters of rumour did drift back. Someone had seen him in the Lubyanka, in bad shape, missing an eye; another claimed he was at Moscow Centre, under surveillance but running the Lisbon desk; he was in Siberia; in Tokyo; in the Caucasus; his corpse had been spotted in the back of a car on Dzerzhinski Street. These whispers might have been coming to me from the dark side of the moon. Russia was that far away; it was always that far away. The couple of weeks I had spent there had only served to make the place more distant for me. This is a curious fact about us—I think it is curious—that the country to which we had committed ourselves was a blur in our minds, the Promised Land we would never reach, and never wanted to reach. None of us would have dreamed of going to live there voluntarily; later on, Boy, though he tried to hide it, was aghast when he came to realise that he had no choice but to defect. The opposition seemed far more familiar with the place than we were. There were people in the Department, desk men who had never been east of the Elbe, who talked as if they were in and out of the Lubyanka every day, strolling up Dzerzhinski Street—which I hardly knew how to pronounce— for a copy of Pravda and a packet of whatever was the most popular brand of cigarettes in Moscow in those days.

Why did he go back? He knew as well as I did what awaited him—I had read the accounts of the show trials, hunched over newspapers in solitary horror behind locked doors, my hands damp and face on fire, like an appalled adolescent devouring a manual of obstetrics. He could have made a run for it, he had the contacts, the escape routes, he could have got to Switzerland, or South America. But no; he went back. Why? I brooded on the question; I still do. I have the uneasy conviction that if I could answer it, I could answer a great many other things, too, not only about Felix Hartmann, but about myself. The blank bafflement that comes over me like a fog when I contemplate that final, fateful decision that he made is an awful indictment of a lack of something in me, something perfectly ordinary, the common fellow-feeling that others seem to come by naturally. I would try out the kind of thought experiment old Charkin, my philosophy tutor at Trinity, used to urge us to conduct, imagining myself as best I could into Felix Hartmann’s mind and then plotting a plausible course of action for myself in the same circumstances. But it was no good, I could never get farther than the moment when the choice became unavoidable, whether to face one’s fate, or cut and run. How would it feel to have come to that pass, to be required to sacrifice one’s life for the sake of a cause—and not even for the cause itself, but only to save its face, as it were, to save the phenomena, as the old cosmologists used to say? To know that one would most likely end up in a pit in a forest with a thousand other riddled corpses, and yet to go back, regardless: was that courage, or just pride, foolhardiness, quixotic stubbornness? I felt guilty now for having laughed behind my hand at his poses and pretensions. Like a suicide—which, essentially, he was—he had both earned and verified his own legend. I would lie awake at night thinking of him, a formless heap of pain and despair in the corner of a lightless cell, shivering under a filthy blanket, listening to the skitter of rats’ claws and the water pipes clanking and a young man somewhere crying for his mother. But even that I could not make real, and always it turned into melodrama, an image out of a cheap adventure yarn.

Boy laughed at me.

“You’re going soft, Victor,” he said. “Bloody man could be anywhere. They come and go like gypsies, you know that.” We were in Perpignan, in a brasserie by the river. It was August, the last weeks before the war. Purple shadows under the plane trees, and shimmying lozenges of water-light on the grey-green undersides of their big, torpid leaves. We had motored down from Calais in Boy’s white roadster, and were already chafing under the burden of each other’s company. I found exhausting his appetite for boys and drink, and he thought me an old maid. I had decided to go on the trip because Nick was supposed to be with us, but “something had come up,” and instead he had flown to Germany again on some secret mission or other. Now Boy gave me one of his surly, smear-eyed looks. “Obviously you’re smitten, Vic. Hartmann the heart-throb. It must have been the priestly touch, the laying on of hands. In love with your father when you were a lad, were you? Gives a new meaning to the word bishopric.”

He poured himself the last of the wine and called for another bottle.

“I suppose you don’t mind at all who they shoot,” I said, “or how many.”

“Christ, Vic, you’re such a moaner.”

But he would not meet my eye. It was a bad time for the true believers such as Boy. The London embassy was practically unmanned. One case officer after another—Iosif, Felix Hartmann, half a dozen others—had been recalled and not replaced, leaving us to shift for ourselves as best we might. Lately the stuff I had been pilfering from the Department files, the kind of thing which used to send Felix Hartmann into transports—probably he was exaggerating its worth, out of old-world politeness—I now delivered through a dead-letter drop in an Irish pub in Kilburn, and could not be sure that it was getting through, or, if it was, that anyone was reading it. I do not know why I kept at it, really. If it had not been for the war I might have given up. We had to spur ourselves on, like lost explorers reminding each other of the joys of home. It was hard work. Alastair Sykes had recently published a hopeless piece of self-deluding twaddle in the Spectator arguing the necessity for the Moscow purges in the face of the Fascist threat; I laughed as I read it, imagining him up there in his rooms in Trinity, crouched over that antique typewriter of his, tapping away like mad with two fingers, brow furrowed and the bristles standing up on his head and his pipe firing off showers of sparks.

Boy forked up a melting wedge of cheese. “Ah, what a stink!” he exclaimed. “Saveur de matelot… “He stopped, and frowned, staring past my shoulder. “I say,” he said, “look at that.” I looked. Shadows and smoke, curved shine on the fat flank of a coffee machine, the silhouette of the head and slender neck of a girl laughing into her hand, and, behind her young man’s head, the window, framing a big, impressionist view of tree and sun-struck stone and dazzled water. This is what we remember, the inconsequential clutter of things. “There, you fool!” Boy hissed, pointing with his fork. At the table next to us a very fat bald man in pince-nez sat with chubby thighs splayed and his snout lifted, short-sightedly reading a copy of Le Figaro and moving his lips silently as he read. The front-page headline, in frightened black type, stood a good three inches high. Boy got up blunderingly, shedding napkin and breadcrumbs from his lap, and made a sort of lunge.

“Votre journal, monsieur, vous permettez…?”

The fat man removed his pince-nez and stared at Boy, and frowned, the skin above his delicately whorled ears crinkling into three crescent-shaped, parallel wrinkles.

“Mais non,” he said, wagging a doughy finger, “ce n’est pas le journal d’aujourd’hui, mais d’hier.” With a fingernail he tapped the front page. “C’est d’hier. You understand? Is the journal of yesterday.”

Boy, purple-lipped, his eyes bulging—no one as violent as a clown in a rage—tried to snatch the paper out of his hands. The fat man resisted, and the front page tore down the middle, splitting the headline in two, thus sundering briefly the Hitler-Stalin pact, which had been signed in Moscow two days before. Forever after, that momentous alliance, the seeming betrayal of all we believed in, was to be associated in my mind with the look of that fat old fellow’s pince-nez and oedemic thighs, with the sunlight on the river, with the soiled-socks smell of Camembert.

We went straight to our hotel and collected our bags and set off northwards. We hardly spoke. What we were most keenly conscious of was a sense of deep embarrassment; we were like a pair of siblings whose revered father had just been caught in an act of gross indecency in a public place. By nightfall we had reached Lyon, where we found rooms in a spectral hotel on a wooded road outside the town, and ate dinner in a vast, deserted, ill-lit dining room where leather-covered armchairs lurked in the shadowy corners like the ghosts of former guests, and madame la propriétaire herself, a stately grande dame in black bombazine and fingerless lace gloves, came and sat with us and informed us that Lyon was le centre de la magie of France, and that there was a Jewish cabal in the town that celebrated black masses every Saturday evening in a certain notorious house by the river (“Avec des femmes nues messieurs!”). I spent a restless night in a lumpy, canopied bed, dozing and dreaming (naked harpies, Hitler in a wizard’s spangled hat, that kind of thing), and rose at dawn and sat by the window huddled in a quilt and watched an enormous white sun coming up stealthily through greeny-black trees on a hill behind the hotel. I could hear Boy moving about in his room next to mine, and although I am sure he knew that I too was awake, he did not knock on the wall and summon me to come and have a drink with him, as he would have on any other morning, for he always hated to be alone and sleepless.

At Calais we passed a fretful Sunday walking about the makeshift town and drinking too much wine at a bar where Boy had taken a fancy to the owner’s teenage son. Next day we could not get a place on the ferry for Boy’s roadster, and he left it behind on the dock, to be dispatched on the next sailing; it stood there looking oddly self-conscious as we pulled away, as if it were aware that it was prefiguring another, more celebrated occasion when Boy would abandon his motor car on a quayside. On the crossing to Dover the talk was all of war, and everywhere there was that grim little laugh, chin up and eyebrows ironically twitching, that is one of the things I best remember from that eerily jaunty, desperate time. Nick was there to meet us at Charing Cross. He had joined up the previous month—the Department had arranged a commission for him—and he was in his captain’s uniform, looking very smart and satisfied with himself. He stepped forward out of an angry billow of steam on the platform, like a memory of Flanders. He sported a thin moustache I had not seen before, which looked like a pair of soft black feathers turned up at the tips, and which I thought a mistake. He was in one of his hearty moods.

“Hullo, you two! I say, Victor, you look distinctly peaky; is it the old mal de mer or are you sick at what your Uncle Joe has gorn and done?”

“Oh, give over, Nick.”

He laughed, and took my bag from me and slung it on his shoulder. The station was loud and hot, and smelled of steam and coal-gas and men. There were uniforms everywhere. Those last days before war was declared have stayed with me vividly, the crowds, the sun and smoke, the endless arrivals and departures, the shouts of the newsboys—they had never done such brisk business—the bars full to the doors, and everyone bright-eyed with a sort of hectic, happy fear. We came out of the station into the cacophonous glare of the August afternoon. Taxis in the Strand swarmed and hooted like a herd in rut, their roofs blackly shining in the sun. Nick had his car, and would not hear of it when Boy said he would make his own way home.

“I’m off duty—let’s go to the Gryphon and get drunk.”

Boy shrugged. His attitude to Nick—sullen, circumspect, even a touch deferential—used to be a puzzlement to me. Nick put our bags into the boot and did that trick he had of seeming to skip off both feet at once to land in a sort of languid slouch behind the steering wheel. I said I should see Baby.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “of course: the little wife. Or not so little, actually. She says she feels like a barrage balloon. I tell her barrage balloons are light, and she must weigh at least a hundredweight. You are a hound, you know, Victor, going off like that just when she’s ready to pop. Anyway, she’s at my place, unravelling the day’s woof and weft and eagerly awaiting the return of her footloose hero.”

We drove up Charing Cross Road and at Cambridge Circus almost ran under the back of an army lorry packed with jeering Tommies.

“General mobilisation,” I said.

“It’s going to be bloody, without an eastern front, you know,” Nick said, trying to look stern, an effect which that moustache did nothing to help.

Boy, in the back seat, gave a sarcastic snort. Nick looked at him in the driving mirror and turned to me.

“What’s the Party line, Vic?”

I shrugged.

“We find our friends where we can,” I said. “Winston has Roosevelt, after all.”

Nick gave a comic groan.

“Oh, Lor’!” he said. “Urizen speaks.”

Poland Street was uncharacteristically quiet under the torpor of the summer afternoon. When we were getting out of the car we heard the sound of jazz above us. We climbed to Nick’s rooms and found Baby, in a smock, big-bellied, sitting in a wicker armchair by the window with her knees splayed, a dozen records strewn at her feet and Nick’s gramophone going full blast. I leaned down and kissed her cheek. She smelled, not unpleasantly, of milk, and something like stale flower-water. She was a week overdue; I had hoped to miss the birth.

“Nice trip?” she said. “So glad for you. Boy, darling: kiss-kiss.”

Boy lumbered to his knees before her and pressed his face against the great taut mound of her belly, mewling in mock adoration, while she gripped him by the ears and laughed. Boy was good with women. I wondered idly, as I often did, if he and Baby might have had an affair, in one of his hetero phases. She pushed his face away, and he rolled over and sat at her feet with an elbow propped on her knee.

“Your husband missed you horribly,” he said. “I heard him every night, weeping something awful.”

She pulled his hair.

“I’m sure,” she said. “It’s obvious you’ve both had a terrible time. How tanned you are. Quite lust-making, really; I wish I didn’t look such a frump.”

Nick was pacing restlessly. He glared at the gramophone.

“Mind if I turn off this nigger racket?” he said. “I can’t hear myself think.”

He lifted the playing arm and let the needle shriek across the grooves.

“Pig!” Baby said, indolently.

“Sow.” He dropped the record into its brown-paper sleeve and tossed it aside. “Let’s have some gin.”

“Oh, yeth pleath,” Baby said. “Nice dwink for mummy. Or should I? Isn’t it gin that shop-girls take to bring it off? Suppose it’s too late for me to abort, though.”

Boy clasped her knees. “Never say die, ducky!”

And so the evening had begun. Nick and Baby danced together for a bit, and we finished the bottle of gin, and Nick changed out of his uniform and we all went down to The Coach and Horses and had some more drinks. Later we went for dinner to the Savoy, where Boy behaved badly, and Baby egged him on, clapping her hands like a seal and laughing, and the people at the next table called the head waiter and complained about us. I tried to join in this ugly fun—we were children of the twenties, after all—but my heart was not in it. I was thirty-two, and on the verge of fatherhood; I was a scholar of no little reputation (how delicately the language allows one to express these things), but that was not sufficient recompense for the fact that I would never be a mathematician, or an artist, which were the only employments I considered worthy of my intellect (it’s true, I did). It is hard, when one has to live a life always at an angle, as it were, to the life one thinks one might be living. I could not wait for the war to start.

Nick was subdued also, slumped sideways on his chair with an elbow on the table and his forehead propped on an index finger, watching the antics of Boy and his sister with dull-eyed distaste.

“Are you still playing at spies?” I said.

He turned his sullen gaze on me.

“Aren’t you?”

“Oh, but I’m in Languages, that hardly counts. I picture you exchanging briefcases on a station platform in Istanbul, that kind of thing. Lots of derring-do.”

He scowled.

“Don’t you think the time for smart-aleckry is past?”

How lovably ridiculous he sounded when he said such things. And he knew it. What a calculator he was.

“I’m just envious,” I said, “dull dog that I am.”

He shrugged. His oiled black hair had the same dark lustre as his evening jacket.

“You could do something,” he said, “get into something else. It will be all change any day now. All sorts of opportunities opening up.”

“Such as?”

Boy was balancing a wineglass on his chin. When he spoke, his clenched, disembodied voice seemed to come down from the ceiling.

“Why don’t you fix him up as an MP?” he said.

Baby with an evil smile was tickling Boy’s stretched throat to make him let the glass fall.

“I don’t think Victor would be much good at politics,” she said. “I can’t picture him at the hustings, or making his maiden speech in the House.”

“He means the Military Police,” Nick said. “New outfit. Billy Mytchett is in charge. Do give it up, Baby, will you? We’ll have broken glass all over the table.”

“Spoilsport.”

Boy flipped the wineglass off his chin and caught it deftly. He called for a bottle of champagne. Already I could feel tomorrow morning’s headache starting up. I touched Baby’s arm; how silky and taut her skin was in this late stage of her pregnancy.

“I think it’s time we went home,” I said.

“Gosh,” she said to the table, “doesn’t he sound like a father already?”

I realised that I was drunk, in a dull, unwilling sort of way; my lips were numb, and my cheeks felt as if they were coated with some brittle, shiny stuff, a dried-out spume. I was always interested in the effects of drunkenness, wondering, I suppose, if one day I would drink a glass too many and blurt out all my secrets. And then, when I am drunk I think this must be what it is like for other people all the time: impetuous, clumsy, sentimental, dim. Baby and Boy were playing a game with matches and coffee spoons, leaning with their heads together and giggling. Nick had lit up a grotesquely fat cigar. The champagne had a tacky texture.

“Listen,” I said to him, “tell me about this Military Police business. Would it be amusing?”

He considered, squinting through a blear of smoke.

“I should think so,” he said doubtfully.

“How can I get in?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I can fix that. I’ll have a word with Billy Mytchett. I often run into him about the place.”

“What about my”—I shrugged—“my past?”

“You mean the left-wing stuff? But you’ve given up all that, haven’t you? Especially now.”

“Why don’t you just join the army, like everyone else?” Baby said, giving me an unsteady, out-of-focus stare. “That brigadier that Daddy knows could get you in. If they took Nick they’ll take anyone.”

“He hankers after the cloak and the dagger,” Boy said. “Don’t you, Vic?”

Nick glanced about at the nearby tables.

“Pipe down, will you, Boy?” he said. “We don’t want half of London knowing our business.”

Baby shook her head in disgust.

“What a lot of boy scouts you all are.”

“Boysh scoush?” Boy said. “What are boysh scoush?”

Baby struck him on the arm.

“Look here,” Nick said to me, “come round in the morning to our side of the house and we’ll find Mytchett and I’ll introduce you. He’s pretty straight, is old Billy. He’ll see you right.”

Another bottle of champagne arrived.

“Blimey,” Baby said presently, “I don’t arf feel bad.” She was sitting with her elbows on the table, twisting a handkerchief in her fingers. She was pale, and her eyes were dull and somehow straying, as if they were trying to find a way to turn and look at something inside her head. “Blimey,” she said again, and drew a breath in sharply. Then she hauled herself to her feet and stood swaying, one hand on the back of her chair and the other pressed tight under the slope of her belly. “Powder my nose,” she muttered, and started toward the ladies. I stood up to help her, but she pushed me aside and made her way off by herself between the tables, tottering on her incongruously shapely ankles—the bones there always made me think of butterflies—and slender high heels.

“Do sit down, Victor,” Nick muttered irritably. “People are staring.”

I sat. We drank some more champagne. After what seemed a long time Baby came back, stepping gingerly and holding in place a fixed, ashen smile. When she reached the table she put down a hand to steady herself and stood surveying us with an air of bright surprise.

“Who’d have believed it?” she said. “There is water. It does break.”

Our son was born in the small hours of the following morning. I did not register the exact time of his birth—I was still half tight— and afterwards it did not seem tactful to ask. I suppose that might be considered the first instance of that general neglect of my son which he has always tacitly accused me of. When I heard his first cry I was pacing and smoking, as expectant fathers are supposed to do, outside the delivery room—no nonsense in those days of dragging the father in to witness the birth—and I experienced a jolt, a kind of leap, in the region of my diaphragm, as if all along there had been new life growing in me, too, unnoticed until now. I wish I could say that I felt joy, excitement, the giddy realisation of being all of a sudden spiritually increased—and I must have, surely I must have—but what I recall most clearly is a sensation of dullness, of heaviness, as if this birth had somehow really added to me, I mean to my physical self, as if Vivienne had passed over to me an unhandy extra weight that from now on I would have to carry about with me everywhere. The real infant, on the other hand, weighed almost nothing. I held him in my arms with awkward tenderness, trying to think of something to say. It was only when I tasted warm salt water dribbling in at the corners of my mouth that I realised I was weeping. Vivienne, groggy on her still bloodied bed, her eyes red-rimmed and her hair lank with sweat, tactfully ignored my tears.

“Well,” she said thickly, working her tongue, grey-hued and interestingly fat, over her cracked lips, “at least people will have to call me by my proper name from now on. Who could speak of Baby’s baby and keep a straight face?”

The sun was well up when I got home—home then was a flat in Bayswater that we were to keep until well into the war, though neither of us spent much time there—but the park with its newly dug, zigzag trenches was still greyed with dew and there were wisps of mist under the boughs of the already faltering trees. I lay on a sofa and tried to sleep, but the night’s drink was still working in me and my mind was racing. I got up and drank coffee laced with brandy, and sat in the kitchen watching the pigeons on the fire escape preening and pushing at each other. The morning silence coming in from the streets brought with it a curious sense of lightness, as if the world were dreamily afloat, waiting for the day’s noise to get going and give everything its proper weight. When I had finished eating I could not think what else to do. I drifted about the flat like an uneasy ghost. Vivienne’s absence was more like a presence. The gaps on the walls added to the melancholy sense of things being somehow there and not there—anticipating air raids, I had got the Institute to let me store my pictures, including The Death of Seneca, in the basement vault. It was morning, and I was a father, but I seemed to be at an ending rather than a beginning. I listened to the seven o’clock news on the wireless. It was all bad. I sat down on the sofa again, just to rest for a moment and nurse my throbbing brow, and three hours later found myself struggling out of sleep, with burning eyelids and a stiff neck and a horrible coating of dried gum on my tongue. I remember it as mysteriously significant, that little sleep; it seemed a stepping out of the world, and out of myself, like the sleep the hero in a magical tale might be granted before setting off on his perilous adventures. I shaved, trying not to meet my eyes in the mirror, and went down to Whitehall to talk to Billy Mytchett.

He was a young man of thirty-five, one of those eternal public-school types who were to come into their own in the early years of the war. He was a short, sturdy little fellow, with a touchingly open, pink face, and a shock of coarse blond hair that hung low on his forehead and rose into a complicated whorl on the crown of his head, giving him the aspect of an untidy stook of wheat. He wore tweeds, and an Eton tie with a knot that looked as if it had been tied for him by his mother on his first day at school and had not been undone since. He affected a tobacco pipe, which did not suit him and which he clearly could not manage, and kept poking at it and tamping it and plying it ineffectually with sputtering matches. His cramped office looked out on a startlingly noble prospect of arches and buttressed roofs and imperial-blue sky. He was Deputy Controller of Military Intelligence; it was hard to believe.

“‘Lo, Billy,” Nick said, and perched himself on a corner of Mytchett’s desk, swinging one leg. I had called him from the flat, and he had been waiting for me at the security desk when I arrived, and had grinned at my drawn countenance and puffy eyes; Nick no longer suffered from hangovers: that kind of thing was for Other Ranks. “Billy, this is Maskell,” he said now, “chap I was telling you about. I’ll expect you to treat him as you would any brother-in-law of mine.”

Mytchett hopped up, knocking a sheaf of papers off the desk, and shook hands with me vigorously.

“Splendid!” he said, grinning with mouth and eyes and ears. “Absolutely!”

Nick deftly scooped up the papers Billy had spilled and put them back on the desk. He was always doing that, tidying things, setting things to right, as if it were his special task to smooth away without fuss the little catastrophes that others less graceful than he could not help causing as they stumbled their way through the world.

“If you’re thinking he looks green around the gills,” he said, “it’s because he has been up all night—my sis, who is married to him, God help her, produced their first nipper a few hours ago.”

Mytchett’s grin grew even wider and he pumped my hand again, with renewed forcefulness, though an uneasy, furtive something had come into his look; babies, now, babies were not a subject a chap should be asked to consider at the kind of moment in history at which we now found ourselves.

“Splendid!” he said again, fairly barking the word. “Boy, was it? Jolly good. Boys are best, all round. Do sit. Have a fag?” He retreated behind the desk and sat down again. “Now—Nick tells me you’re fed up being a pen-pusher? Understandable. I hope to get out in the field myself, ASAP.”

“You think there will be war?” I said. It was a question I liked to ask these days, for it never failed to produce an amusing response. Billy Mytchett’s reaction was particularly gratifying, as he mugged at me in pop-eyed, pitying surprise, and smacked a hand down on the desk and looked about him at an imaginary audience, calling its attention to my naivety.

“No question, old man. Matter of days. We may have let Johnny Czecko down—disgracefully, if you want to know moy’umble opinion—but we’re not going to desert the Poles. Friend Adolf is in for a nasty surprise this time.”

Nick, still swinging his leg, was beaming down on Mytchett proudly, as if he had invented him.

“And Billy’s boys,” he said, “are going to be at the forefront of the surprise party. Right, Bill?”

Mytchett, sucking at his pipe, nodded happily, and folded his arms tight about his chest as if to keep himself from jumping up and capering a few steps of a jig.

“We’ve got a place down near Aldershot,” he said. “Big old house and grounds. That’s where you’ll do your basic training.”

There was a silence, through which they both sat and smiled at me.

“Basic training?” I said, faintly.

“Fraid so,” Mytchett said. “You’re in the army now, and all that. Well, not the army, exactly, but as near as dammit. See, what we are is Field Security, which is a branch of the Corps of Military Police. Lot of nonsense, these fancy monikers, but there you are.” He got up again and began pacing the patch of floor in front of his desk, pipe clamped in his teeth and one hand behind him pressed to the small of his back, a bearing he must have borrowed from some hero of his youth, an admired military uncle or an old headmaster; everything about Billy Mytchett had come from somewhere else. Nick winked at me. “You’re in Languages, yes?” Mytchett said. “That’s good, that’s good. How are you with the old parley-voo?”

“French? I can get by.”

“He’s being modest,” Nick said. “He speaks it like a native.”

“Excellent. Because we’re going to need French speakers. This is classified, you understand, but since you’re already in the Department, I can tell you: as soon as the balloon goes up, a sizeable expedition of our troops will be dispatched over there to stiffen the morale of the Froggies—you know what they’re like. Our chaps will need keeping an eye on—possible infiltration, vetting of letters, that kind of thing—which is where we come in. Know Normandy at all, that area? Good. I haven’t said so”— he closed one eye and pointed a finger at me as if it were the barrel of a gun—“but I think it’s not impossible that you might be stationed not a million miles from that neck of the woods. So: get your kit together, kiss the wife and sprog day-day, and get yourself down to Bingley Manor by the first available train.”

Startled, I looked from Mytchett to Nick and back again.

“Today?” I said.

Mytchett nodded.

“Certainly. If not before.”

“But,” I said, “what about… what about my present posting?”

“I told you I’d fix that,” Nick said. “I spoke this morning to your head of section. You’re released as of”—he consulted his watch—“as of now, actually.”

Mytchett threw himself down at his desk again and rubbed his hands and chuckled.

“Nick’s a doer,” he said. “We’ll all need to be doers, soon.” He frowned suddenly. “But hang on: what about a conflict of loyalties?”

I stared.

“A conflict of…?”

“Yes. You’re Irish, aren’t you?”

“Well, I… Of course I…”

Nick leaned forward and patted me gently on the shoulder.

“He’s pulling your leg, Victor.”

Mytchett spluttered delightedly.

“Sorry, old chap,” he said. “Terrible tease, I am. You should have known me at school, I was a terror.” He stood up, and offered me his hand across the desk. “Welcome aboard. You won’t regret it. And France, they tell me, is really not at all a bad place to be, in the autumn.”

When we got outside, Nick took me to Rainer’s in Jermyn Street to buy me a celebratory cup of tea “—Or char,” he said, “as I suppose we shall have to call it from now on. The fighting man’s nectar.”

A beam of thick yellow sunlight beat on the table between us, vibrating in time with the throbbing in my temples. Despite the dreamy, late-summer softness of the day, the cars passing by in the street seemed to me to have a hunched, anxious aspect.

“Jesus Christ, Nick,” I said, “are they all going to be like that?”

“Billy, you mean? Oh, Billy’s all right.”

“He’s a bloody child!”

He laughed, and nodded, rolling the tip of his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray to shape it into a cone.

“Yes, he is a bit hard to take. But he’s useful.” He glanced at me and away, smiling and biting his lip. “The war will make him grow up.” The waitress brought our tea. Absent-mindedly he gave her a dazzling smile; he was always practising, was Nick. “So,” he said when the woman had gone, “what are you going to call this boy of yours?”

Vivienne, when I arrived to see her at the hospital at noon, had undergone a transformation. She was sitting up in bed wearing a pearl-white satin bed-jacket and buffing her nails. Her hair was waved (“Sacha himself came in to do me”) and she had put on lipstick, and there were florin-sized dabs of rouge on her cheekbones.

“You look like a harlequin,” I said.

She made a mouth at me.

“Better than a harlot, I suppose. Or is that what you meant to say?”

There were flowers everywhere, on the window sill, on the bedside table, even on the floor, some bunches still in their tissue paper; their musky perfume cloyed the air of the room. I walked to the window and stood with my hands in my pockets looking out at a blackened brick wall webbed over with a complicated geometry of drainpipes. Diagonals of sunlight and shadow on the brick bespoke the hot summer noon going on elsewhere.

“How is the… how is the baby?” I said.

“The what? Dear me, for a moment I didn’t know what you meant. He’s here, if you must see him.” She pushed aside a hanging frond of fern to reveal a cot with a blue blanket, above the fold of which there was visible a vague small patch of angry pink. I did not move from the window. She smiled at me, an eyebrow twitching. “Yes, irresistible, isn’t he. And yet when you saw him first you wept. Or was that just from all the champagne you drank last night?”

I came and sat on the side of the bed and leaned down and gingerly drew back the blanket and contemplated the infant’s hot cheek and miniature, rosebud mouth. He was asleep, and breathing very fast, a tiny, soft engine. I felt… shy, is the only word. Vivienne sighed.

“Have we made a mistake,” she said, “bringing another poor mite into this awful world?” I told her about my interview with Billy Mytchett, and that I would be going away. She hardly listened, and went on gazing pensively at the child. “I’ve decided on a name,” she said, “did I tell you? Daddy will be disappointed, and I suppose your father will be too. But I do think it’s wrong to burden a child with the name of a grandparent. So much to live up to—or so little. Bad either way.”

An ambulance siren started up close by, very loud, and somehow comic, and stopped as abruptly as it had started.

“Practising, perhaps,” I said.

“Mm. We had blackout drill last night. It was all very exciting and cosy. Like school. I’m sure they had a lovely time in the public wards, being cheery and so on. The nurses thought it was all a great lark.”

I took her hand. It was a little swollen, and feverishly hot. I could feel the blood swarming under the skin.

“I shan’t be far away,” I said. “Hampshire. Just down the road, really.”

She nodded, nibbling distractedly at her lip. Still she kept her gaze fixed on the child.

“Perhaps I shall go home,” she said.

“I’ll get someone in to look after you.”

Delicately, and as if she were unaware of doing it, she withdrew her hand from mine.

“No, I mean Oxford. I spoke to Mummy on the telephone. They’ll come down to collect me. You needn’t worry.”

“I do worry,” I said, and sounded to myself at once hangdog and truculent.

“Yes, darling,” she said absently. “Of course you do.”

I had not thought all this would be so difficult.

“Nick sends his love,” I said, this time sounding annoyed, though she seemed not to notice.

“Oh yes?” she said. “I had rather thought he might come round to view his nephew. Strange, these new terms we’re going to have to get used to. Nephew, I mean. Uncle. Son. Mother… Father.” She gave me a sort of tentative half smile, as if to apologise for something. “Boy sent a telegram,” she said, “look: We knew you had it in you. I wonder if that’s original?”

“Nick will probably get in to see you before too long,” I said.

“Yes. I suppose he’s terribly busy, with the army and so on. It suits him, doesn’t it—being a soldier? I expect it will suit you, too.”

“I won’t be a soldier, exactly; more a sort of policeman.”

She found that amusing.

“I’m sure you’ll look very dashing, in your uniform.” How eerie they are, those silences that fall between intimates, making them strangers to each other, and themselves. At such moments anything might happen. I might have stood up, slowly, without a word, as the sleepwalker stands up, and gone out of that room, out of that life, never to return, and it seemed as if it would have been all right, that no one would have noticed, or cared. But I did not get up, I did not leave, and we sat for a long while, curiously at rest with ourselves and each other, cocooned inside that membrane of silence, which Vivienne when she spoke seemed not to break but somehow slip into, as she would have slipped into some dense, enveloping medium, the glair parting and then closing stickily behind her. “Do you remember,” she said softly, “that night at Nick’s flat, when I was dressed as a boy, and you and Querell turned up drunk, and Querell tried to start a row about something or other?” I nodded; I remembered. “You sat on the floor beside my chair and told me about that theory of Blake’s, that we build imaginary statues of ourselves and try to behave according to their example.”

“Diderot,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“The idea of the statues. It was Diderot’s, not Blake’s.”

“Yes. But that was the gist of it, wasn’t it? Erecting statues of ourselves in our heads? I thought you were so clever, so… passionate. My wild Irishman. And then later—just at dawn, it must have been—when you telephoned and asked me to marry you, it was the most surprising thing and yet I wasn’t in the least surprised.”

She shook her head in hazy amazement, gazing into the past.

“Why do you think of that now?” I said.

She drew up her legs under the sheet, with a grimace of pain which she instantly repressed, and put her arms around her knees and hugged herself pensively.

“Oh, it was just…” She glanced at me wryly. “I was just thinking, I never seem to see you any more, just your statue.”

I might have told her then, about Felix Hartmann, and Boy and Alastair and Leo Rothenstein, about that whole other life I had been leading for years without her knowing anything of it. But I could not bring myself to step over that brink. I never did tell her, not any of it, in all the years. Perhaps I should have? Perhaps things would have been different between us. But I did not trust her; I was afraid that she would tell Nick, and I could not have borne it if Nick were to know. And in the end, it was she who told me, all there was to know

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled, and lowered my eyes.

She gave a glittering laugh.

“Sorry, yes,” she said. “Everyone is sorry. It must be the times.”

I was suddenly impatient to be away. The smell of the flowers, and behind that the hospital smell—ether, boiled food, faeces—and the flocculent warmth of the room were making me nauseous. I thought of Ireland, the wind-harrowed fields above Carrickdrum and the dull-blue surface of the sea stretched tight all the way to Belfast with its gantries and spires and flat, black hills. Hettie had written me one of her rare letters recently, worrying over the prospect of war and fretting about Baby’s pregnancy. It was like a document out of the last century, the heavy, gum-smelling paper embossed with a stylised representation of St. Nicholas’s, and Hettie’s genteel and faintly mad handwriting, all hatted t’s and startled o’s and spiky, outflung ascenders. I hope Vivienne is not uncomfortable. I hope you will take care of yourself and that you are eating well at this worrying time for Diet is most Important. Your Father continues poorly. We have had some Rain at last but not enough everything is so dry and the garden in a Bad Way… I had a fantasy, a sort of daydream I indulged in now and then, that if things got bad—if someone betrayed me, or if I got caught through some piece of carelessness of my own—I would somehow make my way to Ireland and hide out up there in the hills, in a shelter under the rocks, among the whin bushes, and Hettie would come up every day in the pony-and-trap with a basket of food for me covered with a white napkin, and would sit with me while I ate, and listen to my story, my confession, the litany of my sins.

“I must go,” I said. “When will your parents come down?”

Vivienne blinked, and roused herself; what was her dream of escape, I wonder?

“What?” she said. “Oh, before the weekend.” In his cot the child made a sound in his sleep like a rusty hinge being opened. “We must think about the christening; you never know, these days.” Vivienne still held on, with a tenacity that irritated me, to a few tattered remnants of Christianity; it was a constant source of friction between her and her mother. “It should be in Oxford, I think, don’t you?”

I shrugged.

“What are you going to call him, by the way?” I said.

I must have sounded peeved, for she reached forward quickly and laid a hand over mine and in a mortified tone in which she could not quite suppress a tinkle of amusement said:

“My dear, you didn’t want him to be called Victor, did you?”

“No; he would be picked on dreadfully in school by his German prefects if we lose the war.”

I kissed her cool pale brow. As she leaned toward me to receive the kiss, the neck of her bed-jacket opened a little way and I glimpsed her swollen, silvery breasts, and a surge of something, a sort of anguished pity, rose in me hotly like gorge.

“Darling,” I said, “I… I want…”

I was half kneeling on the edge of the bed and in danger of toppling over; she held on to my elbow to steady me, and reached up a hand and touched my cheek.

“I know,” she murmured, “I know.” I stepped back, buttoning my jacket and brushing at the pockets. She held her head to one side and regarded me quizzically. “Won’t it be odd,” she said, “in the coming weeks, all that emotion, those tearful partings? Quite medieval, really. Do you feel like a knight about to go forth and do battle?”

“I’ll telephone you when I get down there,” I said. “If I can, that is. They may not allow us to call out.”

“Gosh, it does sound thrilling. Will you have a pistol and invisible ink and things? I always wanted to be a spy, you know. To have secrets.”

She kissed her fingertips at me in farewell. As I was closing the door behind me I heard the child beginning to cry. I should have told her; yes, I should have told her what I was. Who I was. But then, she should have told me, too, sooner than she did.

Old age, as someone whom I love once said, is not a venture to be embarked on lightly. Today I went to see my doctor, the first such visit since my disgrace. He was a little cool, I thought, but not hostile. I wonder what his politics are, or if he has any. He’s a bit of a dry old article, to be honest, tall and gaunt, like me, but with a very good line in suits: I feel quite shabby beside his dark, measured, faintly weary elegance. In the midst of the usual poking and prodding he startled me by saying suddenly, but in a tone of complete detachment, “Sorry to hear about that business over your spying for the Russians; must have been an annoyance.” Well, yes, an annoyance: not a word anyone else would have thought of employing in the circumstances. While I was putting on my trousers he sat down at his desk and began writing in my file.

“You’re in pretty good shape,” he said absently, “considering.”

His pen made a scratching sound.

“Am I going to die?” I said.

He continued writing for a minute, and I thought he might not have heard, but then he paused and lifted his head and looked upward as if searching for just the right formula of words.

“Well, we shall all die, you know,” he said. “I realise that’s not a satisfactory answer, but it’s the only one I can give. It’s the only one I ever give.”

“Considering,” I said.

He glanced at me with a wintry smile. And then, returning to his writing, he said the oddest thing:

“I should have thought you had died already, in a way.”

I knew what he meant, of course—public humiliation on the scale that I have experienced it is indeed a version of death, a practice run at extinction, as it were—but it’s not the kind of thing you expect to hear from a Harley Street consultant, is it.

8

There was still the best part of a week to go before that Sunday morning when Chamberlain came on the wireless to tell us we were at war, but it is that endless, oneiric Tuesday, the day my son was born and I was issued with my first military uniform, that I think of as the real opening of hostilities, for me. Still hungover, and using up who knows what unreplenishable reserves of energy, I left the hospital and took a taxi straight to Waterloo, and was in Aldershot by four in the afternoon. Why does that town always smell of horses? I trudged through the hot streets to the bus station, sweating pure alcohol, and fell asleep on the bus and had to be shaken awake by the conductor (“Bloody hell, squire, I thought you was dead!”). Bingley Manor was an unlovely red-brick nineteenth-century Gothic pile, standing in a large flat park, with isolated stands of yew and weeping willow, like an extensive, ill-kept cemetery. It had been requisitioned from the relicts of some grand family, Catholics, I believe, who had been rehoused somewhere in darkest Somerset. I grew depressed at once when I saw the place. The thick gold light of evening only served to deepen the funereal atmosphere. There was an insolent corporal sitting in the great entrance hall—flagstones, antlers, crossed spears and a fur-covered shield—with his feet on a metal desk, smoking a cigarette. I filled out a form and was handed an already grubby identity card. Then I was walking up flights of stairs and along bare corridors, each one narrower and shabbier than the last, in the company of an ill-tempered, red-faced sergeant major who, despite my attempts to make conversation, maintained a kind of fuming silence, as if he were under some form of private interdiction. I told him I had just become a father. I don’t know why I said it—a fatuous notion of the lower classes having a weakness for children, I suppose. Anyway, it didn’t work. He gave a snort of angry laughter, his moustache twitching. “Congratulations, sir, I’m sure,” he said, without looking at me. At least, I thought, he called me sir, despite—in fact, because of—my civilian suit.

I was presented with an ill-fitting uniform—I can still feel the tickle and chafe of that hairy serge—and the sergeant major showed me to my bunk in what must once have been the ballroom, a long, high, many-windowed hall with a polished oak floor and plaster flora on the ceiling. There were thirty bunks, set out in three neat rows; across those nearest the windows, delicate gold shapes of sunlight lay like broken box kites. I felt as lost and weepy as a small boy on his first day at boarding school. The sergeant major noted my distress with satisfaction.

“You’re in luck, sir,” he said. “Dinner is still being served. Come down when you’re changed.” He suppressed a smirk, the angry thicket of his moustache twitching again. “Just uniform; we don’t dress here.”

A big servants’ room in the basement had been converted into a mess hall. My fellow recruits were already at feed. It was a disconcertingly monastic-seeming scene, with stone floor and wooden benches, and shafts of vesperal sunlight in the mullioned windows, and monklike figures hunched over their bowls of gruel. A few heads turned when I came in, and someone sent up a derisive cheer for the newcomer. I found a place beside a man named Baxter, a brutally handsome, black-haired fellow bursting out of his uniform, who introduced himself at once and shook my hand, making my knuckles creak, and challenged me to say what I thought he did for a living in Civvy Street. I made a couple of hopeless guesses, at which he smiled and nodded happily, closing his womanly, long-lashed eyes. He was, it turned out, a contraceptives salesman. “I travel all over—British rubbers are greatly in demand, you’d be surprised. What am I doing here? Well, it’s the lingo, see; I can speak six languages— seven, if you count Hindi, which I don’t.” The soup, a thin, brown sludge with floating lozenges of fat, smelled of wet dog. Baxter lapped it up, then planted his elbows on the table and lit a cigarette. “What about you,” he said, blowing vigorous clouds of smoke, “what’s your line? No, wait, let me guess. Civil servant? Schoolmaster?” When I told him, he grinned uneasily, as if he thought I was pulling his leg, and turned his attention to the person on his other side. After a while he turned back to me, though, looking more uneasy than ever. “Christ,” he muttered, “I thought you were bad, but this geezer”—indicating his neighbour with a sideways slide of eyes and mouth—“he’s an unfrocked bloody priest!”

I never saw Baxter again after that evening. Quite a number of our company were to disappear silently like that over the first few weeks. We were not told what had become of them, and we never mentioned the subject amongst ourselves; we were like the inmates of a sanatorium, waking each morning to find another bed empty, and wondering which of us the silent killer would carry off next. Many of the ones that remained seemed even less prepossessing than the rejects. They were academics, and language teachers from the grammar schools, travelling salesmen like Baxter, and a few indeterminates, shifty characters who tended to lurk, and smiled at one with vague intent, like nervous queers out for a night’s cottaging. As time went on a strange web of alliances and enmities began to weave itself amongst us. Ties of class, profession, shared interests, were all undone. In fact, the wider the disparity in background between us, the better we got on. I was far more at ease with the likes of Baxter than with those who came from my own world. I wish I could say that this arbitrary mingling of the classes fostered a democratic atmosphere (not, I hasten to say, that I cared—or care—much for democracy). When I first arrived, the sergeant major had treated me with resentful deference, but once I was in uniform there was no more sirring, and on the parade ground he screamed in my face in what he thought was an Irish accent, spraying me with spit, as if I were the rawest working-class recruit hauled in from the slums. Almost immediately, however, I was promoted—by the influence of what agency I did not know—to the rank of captain, and the poor wretch had to go back to that peculiar, stolid-faced fawning which unofficial army protocol demands.

We started straight off on basic training, which to my surprise I found that I enjoyed. The bone-tiredness that felled one at the end of a day of square-bashing and kit inspection and swabbing-out of floors was almost erotic, a voluptuous, swooning lapse into oblivion. We were instructed in the art of hand-to-hand combat, which we went at with the loud enthusiasm of small boys. I particularly enjoyed bayonet practice, the licence it afforded to shriek at the top of one’s lungs, as one deftly disembowelled an imaginary and yet strangely, shiveringly palpable enemy. We were taught map-reading. In the evenings, despite exhaustion, we studied rudimentary encoding techniques and the rules of surveillance. I made a parachute jump; as I leapt from the plane and the icy air caught me I was filled with a kind of exalted, almost holy terror, inexplicably pleasurable. I discovered a stamina in myself I had not known I was capable of, especially on the long treks we were forced to make over the Downs in the hay-smelling, late-summer heat. My comrades chafed under these impositions, but I saw them as the stages of a kind of purification rite. The sense of the monastic I had detected in the mess that first evening persisted; I might have been a lay brother, a worker in the fields, one of those for whom humble toil is the truest form of prayer. Like all the males of my class, I had hardly known how to tie my own shoelaces; now I was mastering all sorts of interesting and useful skills I would never have had the opportunity to learn in civilian life. It all seemed wonderful fun, really.

I was taught, for instance, how to drive a lorry. I barely knew how to drive a motor car, and this great fuming monster, with its blunt front end and shuddering rear parts, was as stubborn and unwieldy as a carthorse, yet what a thrill it was to ease out the clutch and plunge down on the quivering, two-foot-long gear-stick and feel the cogs meshing and the whole huge machine surging forward as if its soul had come alive under my hands. I was captivated. There was a staff car, too, which we could borrow, on a strict rotational basis. It was an ancient grey-blue Wolseley, high and narrow, with walnut fascia and a wooden steering wheel and an ebony choke button which I always forgot to push in, so that whenever I took my foot off the accelerator the engine whined as if in pain and gouts of angry blue smoke belched out behind; the floor on the driver’s side was so worn it was hardly more than a filigree of rust, and if I looked down between my knees when I was driving I could see the road rushing under me like a river in spate. The poor thing came to a sad end. One night, when it was not his turn, a chartered accountant—he spoke fluent Polish—sneaked the keys from the wall cabinet in the Base Commander’s room and drove into Aldershot to see a girl he was sweet on, got drunk, and crashed into a tree on the way back, and was killed. He was our first fatality of the war. To my shame, I confess I grieved more for the car than for the accountant.

In our little settlement we had scant contact with the outside world. Once a week we were allowed to telephone our wives or girlfriends. On Saturday nights, we were told, we might venture into Aldershot, though under no circumstances were we to congregate together, or even to acknowledge that we knew each other, should we meet by chance in pub or dance hall; the result was a weekly invasion of the town by solitary drinkers and hapless wallflowers, all pining for the company of comrades whom during the rest of the week they spent their time trying to avoid.

I had of course no communication at all with Moscow, or even the London embassy. I assumed that my career as a double agent was at an end. I was not sorry. In retrospect, all that now seemed unreal, a game I used to play which I had now grown out of.

The announcement that we were at war was greeted at Bingley Manor in a curiously lackadaisical fashion, as if it had nothing particularly to do with us. When the news came we were crowded into the mess hall, which served also as a chapel— Brigadier Bradshaw, our commanding officer, had made attendance at Sunday service compulsory, in order that our morale should be kept up, as he said, though with little conviction. A young chaplain, troubled and inarticulate, was struggling with a complicated military metaphor involving St. Michael and his flaming sword, when a runner arrived with a message for the Brigadier, who stood up, lifting a hand to silence the padre, and turned to the congregation and announced that the Prime Minister was about to address the nation. An enormous wireless set was wheeled forward on a tea trolley and, after a scrabbling search for a socket, was plugged in with great solemnity. The set, like a cockeyed idol, slowly opened its jade-green tuning eye as the valves warmed up, and, after clearing its throat with a series of goitrous hawks, settled down to a mantra-like hum. We waited, shifting our feet; someone whispered something, someone stifled a laugh. The Brigadier, the back of his neck reddening, went forward on tiptoe and bent to the instrument and twiddled the knobs, showing us his broad, khaki-clad backside. The wireless squeaked and babbled, blubbing its lip, and suddenly there was Chamberlain’s voice, crabbed, querulous, exhausted, like the voice of God himself, helpless in the face of his ungovernable creation, to tell us that the world was coming to an end.

When I had first gone to work at the Department—though work is a strong word for what went on in the Languages section—no one had thought to enquire into my political past. I was the son of a bishop—albeit an Irish bishop—an Old Malburian and a Cambridge man. That I was an internationally recognised scholar might have raised doubts in some quarters—the Institute, being full of refugee foreigners, had always been viewed with suspicion in security circles. On the other hand, I was received at Windsor not only in the print room and the tower library, but in the family wing, too, and if pressed I’m sure I could have got HM to vouch for me personally. (The successful spy must be able to live authentically in each of his multiple lives. The popular image of us as smiling hypocrites boiling with secret hatred of our country and its people and institutions is misconceived. I genuinely liked and admired HM and, perhaps more impressively, made no attempt to hide from him my disdain for his feather-brained wife, who consistently failed to remember that she and I were related. The fact is, I was both a Marxist and a Royalist. This is something that Mrs. W., who possesses the subtlest mind in that intellectually undistinguished family, clearly if tacitly understood. I did not have to pretend to be loyal; I was loyal, in my fashion.) Was I overconfident? Only Boy could get away with that gloating, schoolboy swagger into which the successful agent, smugly clutching his secrets, can so easily fall. When I was summoned to the Brigadier’s office a couple of weeks after the official outbreak of war, I imagined it was to be told that I had been selected for some special assignment. The first cold tentacles of alarm uncoiled themselves in my innards when I noticed his reluctance to meet my eye.

“Ah, Maskell,” he said, delving among the documents on his desk, like a large, tawny bird hunting for worms under a drift of dead leaves. “You’re wanted up in London.” He glanced in the direction of my midriff and frowned. “Stand easy.”

“Oh, sorry, sir.” I had forgotten to salute.

His office was in the former gun room; there were hunting prints on the walls, and I seemed to detect a faint lingering tang of fin and bloodied feather. Through the window behind him I could see a hapless squad of my colleagues in camouflage gear crawling on their knees and elbows towards the house in a simulated clandestine attack, a sight that was comic and at the same time unnerving.

“Ah, here it is,” the Brigadier said, lifting a letter out of the strew of papers before him. He held it close to his nose to read it, moving his head from side to side as he followed the lines, mumbling under his breath. “… Day release… immediate… no escort required… Escort? Escort?… Sixteen hundred hours…” He lowered the sheet and for the first time looked at me directly, his big blue jaw set and nostrils flared, showing alarmingly black, deep cavities. “What the hell have you been up to, Maskell?”

“Nothing, sir, that I know of.”

He threw the letter back on the pile and sat casting about him furiously, his hands clasped so tightly together the knuckles whitened.

“Bloody people,” he muttered. “What do they think we’re running down here, some kind of vetting station? Tell Mytchett from me he’d better stop sending me duds or we may as well shut up shop.”

“I will, sir.”

He glanced at me sharply.

“You think this funny, Maskell?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. There’s a train at noon. You won’t”—with an angry snicker—“require an escort.”

Glorious day. What a September that was. The station smelled of sun-warmed cinders and cut grass. Soldiers milled on the platforms, stooped in that characteristic, disgruntled S-shaped stance, with their kitbags hoisted on one shoulder, and nursing a fag-end in their fists. I bought a copy of the previous day’s Times and sat blindly pretending to read it in a three-quarters empty first-class carriage. I felt hot all over, yet there was a small cold weight of foreboding inside me, as if an ice cube had been dropped into the pit of my stomach. A young woman sitting opposite me, wearing tortoiseshell spectacles and a black dress and heavy-heeled black shoes—the type that have latterly come back into fashion, I notice—kept glancing at me with an expression of baleful vacancy, as if she were not seeing me but someone I reminded her of. The train meandered along at an agonisingly slow pace, pausing irresolutely at each station, sighing and shuffling, with the air of having forgotten something and wondering whether to go back and fetch it. All the same, I arrived in London with an hour to spare. I took the opportunity to bring my uniform to Denbys to have it altered. I thought of telephoning Vivienne in Oxford, but decided against it; I could not have borne that fondly scathing tone. When I left the tailor’s and was coming out of St. James’s into Piccadilly I almost bumped into the bespectacled young woman from the train. She looked through me and hurried past. A coincidence, I told myself, but I could not help recalling the Brigadier’s snicker at the word escort. Another ice cube dropped inside me with a tingling little plop.

How lovely London seemed, vivid, and yet mysteriously insubstantial, like the cities in one’s dreams. The air was soft and clear, with half the motor cars and buses off the roads—I had not known such vast, delicate skies since my childhood—and there was a general air of pensiveness, the opposite of that hectic atmosphere of suspense that had prevailed in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of hostilities. In Regent Street, banks of sandbags had been erected in front of the shops, sprayed with concrete and painted in carnival shades of red and blue.

When I entered his office Billy Mytchett fairly bounced up to greet me, as if propelled by a spring in the seat of his chair. This show of warmth made me more worried than ever. He pulled up a chair for me, and pressed me to take a cigarette, a cup of tea, a drink, even—“though come to think of it, there isn’t any drink in the building, except in the Controller’s office, so I don’t know why I offer, ha ha.” Like Brigadier Bradshaw, he too avoided looking at me directly, and instead made a great business of moving things about on his desk, producing all the while a low, unhappy whirring sound from the back of his throat.

“How are you getting on down at the Manor?” he said. “Find it interesting?”

“Very.”

“Good, good.” A pause, in which even the frozen stones of the arches and the flying buttresses outside the window seemed to participate, hanging in suspenseful wait. He sighed, and picked up his cold pipe and gazed at it gloomily. “The thing is, old man, one of our people has been going through your files— purely routine, you understand—and has come up with… well, with a trace, actually.”

“A trace?” I said; the word sounded vaguely, frighteningly medical.

“Yes. It seems—” He threw down the pipe and turned sideways in his chair, throwing out his stubby little legs before him and sinking his chin on his chest, and stared broodingly at his toecaps, his lower lip protruding. “It seems you were something of a Bolshie.”

I laughed.

“Oh, that. Wasn’t everyone?”

He gave me a startled glance.

“I wasn’t.” He turned back to the desk again, all business suddenly, and took up a mimeographed report and thumbed through it until he found what he was looking for. “There was this trip to Russia that you went on, you and Bannister and these Cambridge people. Yes?”

“Well, yes. But I’ve been to Germany, too; that doesn’t make me a Nazi.”

He blinked.

“That’s true,” he said, impressed despite himself. “That is true.” He consulted the report again. “But look here, what about this stuff you wrote, this art criticism in—what was it?—the Spectator: “A civilisation in decay… baneful influence of American values… unstoppable march of international socialism…” What’s all that got to do with art?—not, mind you, that I’m claiming to know anything about art.”

I heaved a heavy sigh, meant to denote boredom, disdain, haughty amusement, but also a determination to be patient and a willingness to try to set out complex matters in simple terms. It is an attitude—patrician, condescending, cold but not unkind— that I have found most effective, in a tight corner.

“Those pieces were written,” I said, “when the Spanish civil war was starting. Do you recall that time, the atmosphere of desperation, of despair, almost? It seems a long time ago now, I know. But the issue was simple: Fascism or Socialism. One had to choose. And of course the choice was inevitable, for us.”

“But-”

“And as it proves, we were right. England is now at war with the Fascists, after all.”

“But Stalin-”

“—Has bought a little time, that’s all. Russia will be in the fight with us before the year is out. Oh but look”—I lifted a languid hand, waving all this trivia aside—“the point is, Billy, I know I was mistaken, but not for the reason you think. I was never a Communist—I mean, I was never a member of the Party—and that trip to Russia that has so exercised your bloodhounds only served to confirm all my doubts about the Soviet system. But at the time, three years ago, when I was about twenty years younger than I am now, and Spain was the temperature chart of Europe, I thought it was my duty, my moral duty, as did a great many others, to throw whatever weight I had into the battle against evil, the nature of which, for once, seemed perfectly clear and obvious. Instead of going off to Spain to fight, as I probably should have done, I made the one sacrifice it was in my power to make: I abandoned aesthetic purity in favour of an overtly political stance.”

“Aesthetic purity,” Billy said, nodding vigorously and putting on a deep frown. I had taken a calculated risk in calling him by his first name, thinking it would surely be the kind of thing he would expect a chap to do in the midst of a frank and emotional confession such as I was pretending to make.

“Yes,” I said, solemn, rueful, appealingly contrite, “aesthetic purity, the one thing a critic must hold on to, if he is to be any good at all. So yes, you are right, and your scouts are right: I am guilty of treachery, but in an artistic, not a political, sense. If that makes me a security risk—if you think a man who betrays his aesthetic convictions is likely also to betray his country—then so be it. I’ll collect my gear from Bingley Manor and see if I can’t join the ARP or the Fire Service. For I’m determined to do some good, in however humble a capacity.”

Billy Mytchett was still gravely nodding, still frowning. Absorbed in thought, he reached out for his pipe and set it in his mouth and began slowly sucking on it. I waited, gazing out of the window; nothing like a dreamy demeanour for allaying suspicion. At last Mytchett stirred himself, and gave his shoulders a great shake, like a swimmer surfacing, and pushed the mimeographed report away from him with the side of his hand.

“Look here,” he said, “this is all nonsense. You’ve no idea how much of this bumf I have to wade through in a week. I wake up in a blue funk at night, asking myself if this is how we’re going to fight the war, with reports and queries and signatures required in triplicate. God! And then I’m asked to haul in perfectly decent chaps like you and put them through the wringer over something they said to their prefect when they were at school. It was bad enough before the war, but now…!”

“Well,” I said, magnanimously, “it’s not unreasonable, after all. There must be spies about.”

Oops. He gave me a quick, sharp look, to which I returned the blandest of bland stares, trying to control a telltale nerve under my right eye which tends to twitch when I am nervous.

“There are,” he said grimly. “—And Bingley Manor’s full of ’em!” He gave a muffled shout of laughter and smacked his hands together, then immediately grew sober again. “Listen, old chap,” he said gruffly, “you go back down there and finish your training. I have a job for you, a very nice little number, you’ll like it. Hush! Not a word for now. All in good time.” He stood up and came around the desk and hustled me to the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll give old Bradshaw a tinkle and tell him we’ve vetted you and found you stainless as a choirboy—though when I think of some of the choirboys I’ve known…”

He shook my hand hurriedly, eager to be rid of me. I lingered, pulling on my gloves.

“You mentioned Boy Bannister,” I said. “Is he…?”

Mytchett stared.

“What—under suspicion? Lord, no. He’s one of our stars. Absolute wizard. No, no, old Bannister’s absolutely sound.”

How Boy laughed, when I phoned him from the flat later and told him he was one of Billy Mytchett’s stars. “What an ass,” he said. Behind the laughter I thought I detected a note of constraint. “By the way,” he said, stagily loud, “Nick is here. Hold on, he wants a word.”

When Nick came on the line he too was laughing.

“Been through the third degree, have you? Yes, Billy told me, I phoned him. Hardly the Grand Inquisitor, is he. I’m going to make sure that trace disappears from your file, by the way—I know a girl in Registry. It’s the kind of thing could dog you for years. And we wouldn’t want that. Especially as you and I are off on a jaunt any day now, all expenses paid.”

“A jaunt?”

“That’s right, old bean. Didn’t Billy tell you? No? Well, in that case I’d better keep mum too; idle talk costs whatsit. Oar revwar!”

And he hung up, laughing still and humming the “Marseillaise.”

In a letter to his friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou in 1649, Poussin, referring to the execution of Charles I, makes the following observation: “It is a true pleasure to live in a century in which such great events take place, provided that one can take shelter in some little corner and watch the play in comfort.” The remark is expressive of the quietism of the later Stoics, and of Seneca in particular. There are times when I wish I had lived more in accordance with such a principle. Yet who could have remained inactive in this ferocious century? Zeno and the earlier philosophers of his school held that the individual has a clear duty to take a hand in the events of his time and seek to mould them to the public good. This is another, more vigorous form of Stoicism. In my life I have exemplified both phases of the philosophy. When I was required to, I acted, in full knowledge of the ambiguity inherent in that verb, and now I have come to rest—or no, not rest: stillness. Yes: I have come to stillness.

Today, however, I am all agitation. The Death of Seneca is going for cleaning and valuation. Am I making a mistake? The valuers are very dependable, very discreet, they know me well, yet I cannot suppress the unfocused doubts that keep flying up in me darkly like a flock of restless starlings at the approach of night. What if the cleaners damage it, or in some other way deprive me of it, my last solace? The Irish say, when a child turns from its parents, that it is making strange; it comes from the belief that fairy folk, a jealous tribe, would steal a too-fair human babe and leave a changeling in its place. What if my picture comes back and I find that it is making strange? What if I look up from my desk some day and see a changeling before me?

It is still on the wall; I cannot summon up the courage to lift it down. It looks at me as my six-year-old son did that day when I told him he was to be sent to boarding school. It is a product of the artist’s last years, the period of the magnificent, late flowering of his genius, of The Seasons, of Apollo and Daphne, and the Hagar fragment. I have dated it tentatively to 1642. It is unusual among these final works, which taken together form a symphonic meditation on the grandeur and power of nature in her different aspects, shifting as it does from landscape to interior, from the outer to the inner world, from public life to the domestic. Here nature is present only in the placid view of distant hills and forest framed in the window above the philosopher’s couch. The light in which the scene is bathed has an unearthly quality, as if it were not daylight, but some other, paradisal radiance. Although its subject is tragic, the picture communicates a sense of serenity and simple grandeur that is deeply, deeply moving. The effect is achieved through the subtle and masterful organisation of colours, these blues and golds, and not-quite-blues and not-quite-golds, that lead the eye from the dying man in his marmoreal pose—already his own effigy, as it were— through the two slaves, and the officer of the Guard, awkward as a warhorse in his buckles and helmet, to the figure of the philosopher’s wife, to the servant girl preparing the bath in which the philosopher will presently be immersed, and on at last to the window and the vast, calm world beyond, where death awaits. I am afraid.

9

I have spent a pleasant morning telling Miss Vandeleur about my time in the war. She wrote it all down. She is a great taker of notes. Inevitably, we have fallen into the manner of tutor and student; there is the same mixture of intimacy and indefinable unease that I remember from my teaching days; also, she betrays that thin edge of resentment that is the mark of the postgraduate chafing under the yoke of a deference which she feels by rights should no longer be required of her. I enjoy her visits, in my muted way. She is the only company I have, now. She sits before me on a low chair, with her reporter’s spiral-bound notebook open on her knees and her head bent, showing me the smooth twin wings of her hair and the painfully straight parting which is the colour of slightly soiled snow. She writes at a remarkable pace, with a kind of desperate concentration; I have the impression that at any moment she might lose control of her writing hand and begin to scribble all over the page; it is quite exciting. And of course, I do love the sound of my own voice.

We speculated about the origin of the phrase, a good war. I said I was not sure that I had ever heard it used outside of books or the theatre. The people who wrote for the pictures were especially fond of it. In the films of the late forties and the fifties, pomaded, soft-faced chaps in cravats were always pausing by the fireplace to knock out implausible pipes and ask over their shoulders, “Had a good war, did you?” at which the other chap, with moustache and cut-glass tumbler from which he never drank, would give one of those very English shrugs and make a little moue of distaste, in which we were supposed to see expressed the memory of hand-to-hand combat in the Ardennes, or a night landing on Crete, or a best friend’s Spitfire going down in a spiral of smoke and flame over the Channel.

“And what about you?” Miss Vandeleur said, without looking up from her notes. “Did you have a good war?”

I laughed, but then paused, struck.

“Well, you know,” I said, “I do believe I did. Despite the fact that it began for me in an atmosphere of farce. French farce, at that.”

It was Miss Vandeleur who remarked how many of my memories of Nick Brevoort involve sea journeys. This is true, I have noticed it myself. I do not know the reason for it. I should like to be able to see something grand and heroic in it—the black ships and the bloodied foreshore and Ilium’s fires on the horizon—but I am afraid the atmosphere of these recollections is not so much Homer as Hollywood. Even the crossing we made together to France early in December 1939 had a touch of ersatz, nickel-and-velvet romance to it. The night was preternaturally calm, and our troopship, a converted steamer which before the outbreak of war had ferried day trippers between Wales and the Isle of Man, glided intently as a knife through a milky, unreally moonlit sea. We passed the greater part of the voyage stretched out on wooden deckchairs in the stern, wrapped in our greatcoats and with our caps pulled low over our eyes. The pulsing tips of our cigarettes and the flying breaths of smoke we released to the night air seemed absurdly melodramatic. On board with us was a squad of raw—it is the only word—recruits on their way to join the Expeditionary Force. They had taken over the lounge, where they sprawled amid their strewn kit, staring before them in slack-jawed boredom, looking more like the stragglers from a rout than a troop on its way to join battle. All that could animate them, it seemed, was the frequent ceremony of tea and sandwiches. Did Odysseus’s men look like this as they sat down on the sand to their haunches of roast bullock and goblets of seadark wine? When Nick and I took a turn about the deck and glanced in through the portholes, it was like looking in at a children’s party, the boy-men half happy and half worried as they watched the ship’s stewards—still in their white coats—progress among them disgustedly with mighty tea-kettles and trays of corned-beef sandwiches.

“There it is,” Nick said. “Your proletariat.”

“What a snob you are,” I said.

We were terribly excited, for all the studied world-weariness of our demeanour. From Billy Mytchett’s winks and hints we imagined we were being sent to France on a secret and possibly dangerous mission; we had not actually spoken, even to ourselves, the thrilling formula, infiltrating enemy lines, but each knew the words were trembling on the tip of the other’s tongue. In the final weeks at Bingley Manor I had conceived a great curiosity as to what it would be like actually to kill a man. While swabbing out floors or polishing my Sam Browne, I would conjure up scenes of sleek, balletic violence. It was very stirring; I was like a schoolboy entertaining dirty thoughts. Usually these imaginary, clean killings took place at night, and involved sentries. I saw myself rising up out of the darkness, deft and silent as a cat, and at the last moment saying something, making some sound, just to give poor Fritz a chance. He would whirl about, fumbling for his rifle, his eyes flashing in equine fear, and I would smile at him, briefly, coldly, before the knife went in and he collapsed on the grass in a puddle of his own black blood and expired with a soft, gargling sound, his eyes blank now and already filming over, while the reflection of an approaching searchlight steadily dilated, like another, astonished, cyclopian eye, on the brow of his helmet. I hasten to say that I never got to kill anyone, not with my bare hands, anyway. I did have a revolver, of which I was very proud. It was a six-round, .455 Webley Mark VI Service revolver, eleven and a quarter inches long, thirty-eight ounces, UK manufacture, what our shooting instructor at Bingley called a man-stopper. Never have I held anything so serious in my hand (with one obvious exception, of course). It came with a rather complicated holster, to which it was attached by a leather lanyard which in steamy conditions gave off a rawhide stink that seemed to me the very smell of manly daring and adventure. Although I would have been happy to fire a shot, or many shots, in anger (Wild Bill Maskell on the rampage), the opportunity did not come my way. The weapon is still somewhere about. I must see if I can find it; I’m sure Miss Vandeleur would be interested to have a look at it, if that does not sound too tiresomely Freudian.

What was I saying? This tendency to ramble is worrying. I sometimes think I am going gaga.

We spent five months in France, Nick and I, stationed in Boulogne. It was all a grave disappointment. Our job was just what Billy Mytchett had said it would be: to keep watch on the doings of the men of the Expeditionary Force in our area. “Bloody snoops, that’s all we are,” Nick said disgustedly. Officially, we had been assigned to guard against infiltration by spies, on the basis, I suppose, that it takes one to know one; in fact, we found ourselves dividing our energies between day-today security administration, and eavesdropping on the private lives of the battalion. I confess I derived a certain nasty enjoyment from the task of censoring the men’s letters home; a prurient interest in other’s people’s privacy is one of the first requirements for a good spy. But this pleasure soon palled. I have a high regard for the English fighting man—I do, really— but his prose style, I am afraid, is not among his more admirable qualities. (“Dear Mavis, What a crummy place this Bolonge is. Frogs everywhere and not a decent pint to be had. Are you wearing your lacy knickers tonight I wonder? Not a sign of Jerry”—the excisions, of course, are the work of my blue pencil.)

Boulogne. There are people, I have no doubt, wine-bibbers and apple-tart-fanciers, not to mention dirty-weekenders, whose blood races at the name of that untidy little port, but when I hear it, what I recall, with a shudder, is the particular mixture of boredom, misery and intermittent rage in which I passed those five months there. Because of my proficiency in the language, it was natural that I should take on the unofficial role of liaison officer with the French authorities, military and civilian. What a wretched specimen your typical Frenchman is—how could Poussin have let himself be born into such a dull-witted, reactionary race? And among the subspecies, none is more wretched than the small-town official. The military were all right—touchy, of course, and always on the lookout for slights to the nobility of their person and their calling—and I could manage even the four separate branches of the police I was compelled to deal with, but the burghers of Boulogne defeated me utterly. There is a particular attitude the French male strikes when he has decided to stand on his dignity and withdraw cooperation; it is a matter of the most minute inflections—the head tilted slightly to the left, the chin lifted a millimetre, the gaze directed carefully into the middle distance—but it is unmistakable, and the determination it silently expresses is adamantine.

Nick derived much amusement from my difficulties. It was in France that he first began to call me “Doc,” and address me in the facetious tones of a schoolboy ragging a hapless master. I suffered his jibes with forbearance; it is the price one pays for intellectual superiority. We both held the rank of captain, but by a mysterious hierarchical sleight-of-hand on his part, the trick of which still puzzles me, it was understood between us from the start that he was the superior officer. Ostensibly, of course, he was a regular soldier—our links with the Department were kept secret even from fellow officers in our area, although it quickly got about that I was one of the Bingley Boys, a breed held in contempt by the men of the Expeditionary Force, among whom we moved like—well, like spies. Nick had pulled strings and got us a billet together down a cobbled side street on the hill near the cathedral, in a crooked little house wedged between a butcher’s and a baker’s. The house was owned by the town mayor. The gossip was that he had used it before the war to keep a succession of mistresses in, and certainly there was something delicately lewd, something Petit Trianonish, about those narrow, high rooms with their many small-paned windows and doll’s-house furniture. Nick immediately added to the bijou atmosphere by taking a mistress, a Mme. Joliet, one of those bright, brittle, immaculately got-up women in their late thirties that France seems to generate fully developed, with all their sophistication and polish in place, as if they had never been young. Nick would smuggle her in at night through the little back garden that gave on to a lilac-covered lane, and she would put on an apron and cook a meal for the three of us—omelette aux fines herbes was her speciality—while I sat at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table uneasily fingering a glass of sweet Sauterne, and Nick stood at the sink with his tunic unbuttoned and a hand in his pocket and his ankles crossed, smoking a cigarette and winking at me as poor Anne-Marie prattled on about London fashions, and the Duchess of Windsor, and the outing she had made to Ascot one mythologised perfect English summer afternoon an indeterminate number of years before. “This war,” she would cry, “this terrible, terrible war!,” throwing her eyes to the ceiling and making a comical square mouth, as if she were bemoaning some aberration of the weather. I felt sorry for her. Behind the fine glaze of her exterior there was detectable the lurking fear of the beautiful woman who already feels under her immaculately shod feet the first steepening incline of age. Nick’s name for her was Spoils-of-War. I do not care to speculate as to the precise nature of their liaison. There were nights when I had to cover my head with a pillow so as not to hear the noises coming from Nick’s room, and on more than one occasion Mme. Joliet displayed in the morning the bruised mouth and blackened eye that were the testaments to a slavish devotion, and which no amount of expertly applied maquillage could disguise.

It was a strange little ménage, the atmosphere aquiver with unspoken intimacies and constantly fraught with the suspense of held-back tears. There was something pleasurably uncanny about this almost-life we were half leading. For me, it was a sketch, a cartoon version, of that idealised connubial domesticity I was never to experience in real life. Naturally, Mme. Joliet and I formed an alliance—in Nick we even had a child, of sorts. We felt, she and I, like a pair of innocent sibling-lovers out of a fairy-tale, happy at our tasks, she with her whisk and I with my blue pencil, there in our gingerbread house in the depths of the rue du Cloître. The town had battened itself down against winter and the war. The days were short, hardly days at all, more like drawn-out, brumous twilights. Great leaden sea-clouds came shouldering in from the north, and the wind sighed and whispered in the casements, making the flames of Mme. Joliet’s candles stagger—she was a great one for the romantic touch, and a bougie burned at every repast. When I think back to then I recall the smell of beeswax and the needle-sharp sting of her perfume and, in the background, the flabby after-odour of domestic gas—so much of our time there was lived in the kitchen—and the muffled stink of drains, and the crushed-chrysanthemum staleness that rose from the tiled floors, always clammy with condensation, as if the house itself were permanently in a cold sweat.

Often Nick would leave the two of us together, going off after dinner on some supposed official errand, and coming back long after midnight, glazed and grinning, in a mood of dangerous gaiety, by which time Mme. Joliet and I, leaning on our elbows in a warm dome of candlelight and Gauloise smoke, would have got cosily tipsy on that pear liqueur she liked, and which I drank only to keep her company, for it tasted to me like nail varnish. In these nocturnal tête-à-têtes she and I hardly spoke about ourselves at all. A couple of tentative questions from me on the subject of M. Joliet were met with a tightening of the lips and that almost imperceptible but wholly contemptuous shrug with which French women dismiss the failings of their menfolk. I told her a little about Vivienne, and our son, and she returned frequently to the topic, not, I think, because they were my wife and child, but because they were Nick’s sister and nephew. For Nick was all that we talked about, really, even when the subject under discussion seemed to have nothing whatever to do with him. Mme. Joliet, I quickly realised, was far out of her depth. What had started as a manageable little affaire with the handsome and careless English captain had changed into something perilously like love, and love, for her, had the destructive force of a phenomenon of nature, like lightning, or a summer storm, something to shelter from lest life and all that made it tolerable be left a blasted, smoking ruin. When she spoke of him she gave off a sort of anguished radiance which she tried in vain to subdue; there in our miniature candlelit arena she struck her desperate poses, struggling not to show her terror, like a circus performer caught in a cage with a supposedly tame animal that had suddenly turned wild. And once or twice, after yet another glass of Poire William, the sad smell of Anne-Marie’s fear and longing would turn into a pure whiff of the erotic, and then it would seem that I should dash into the cage and join her, so that in each other’s arms we might together face down the ravening beast. But nothing happened, the moment always passed, and we would lean away from each other, out of the candlelight, and sit gazing into our liqueur glasses, blank, motionless, at once regretful and relieved.

It would not have occurred to Nick to be jealous of us. He knew how firmly he had us in his grip; he had only to flex his claws and blood would spring from both our bosoms. I believe it amused him to leave us together at night like that, to see what we might do, what strategies of escape we might attempt.

Of the war we saw no sign. For days at a stretch I would forget the reason for our being in France. Encountering squads of soldiers on the roads, or earnestly at their exercises in the fields and among the fruited orchards, I would find myself admiring the orderliness, the homeliness of it all, this right and proper occupation of men, as if it were not a military venture they were engaged in at all, but some vast, philanthropic work detail. Once a fortnight I drove down with Corporal Haig to the Expeditionary Force HQ at Arras, supposedly to deliver a report on activity in our sector, but since there was no activity, there was nothing to report, and the night before each trip I would spend weary hours racking my brains to put together a few plausible but meaningless pages, which would disappear without trace into the innards of the military machine. I have always been fascinated by the hunger for documentation shared by all great institutions, especially those run by supposed men of action, such as the Army, or the Secret Service. I cannot count the times I was able to foil this or that inconvenient development at the Department, not by removing or suppressing documents, but by adding new ones to an already bulging file.

Have I mentioned Corporal Haig before, I wonder? He was my batman, a music-hall version of an East Ender, all grins and winks and rollings of the eyes. At times he played the part so exaggeratedly well that I suspected he had studied it up, for behind the cheeky-chappie facade there was something uneasy about him, something lost, and fearful. Haig—his first name, unlikely though it sounds, was Roland—was short and compact, with big shoulders and tiny feet, like a boxer, and a gap in his front teeth and ears that stuck out. He seemed to have been in the army since childhood. Boy, who came down for a visit at Christmas from Dunkirk, where he was posted in some propagandist capacity, took a great shine to him. He called him The Field Marshal, and spent the holiday trying to seduce him. Perhaps he succeeded?—that might explain the evasive, guilty side of Haig’s performance. I wonder what became of him, and if he survived the war. I have the feeling he did not. He was the kind of minor character that the gods test their blades on, before proceeding to deal with the Hectors and the Agamemnons.

Like the majority of the men in the Force, Haig regarded the war as a ludicrous but not entirely unenjoyable waste of time, another of those tremendous mad schemes which the Powers That Be choose to dream up, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to disrupt the otherwise placid lives of the lower ranks. The French expedition he considered particularly daft, even by Their standards. He was like a marooned day tripper, half indignant at the pointlessness of it all, and half amused by the atmosphere of unending, if dull, holiday. And of course, he was glad of the opportunity to grumble. As we sped in our little black Austin (it always reminded me of a bustling and very determined, shiny black beetle) along those narrow roads between swishing colonnades of plane trees, he would indulge in a kind of sustained aria of complaint: mucky food, stinking lavs that were no more than holes in the ground, bints who didn’t speak a word of English and seemed to be laughing at him all the time, and who were probably poxed, anyway, the half of them (“I tell you, sir, I wouldn’t touch the quim over here if they paid me”).

On one of those jaunts to Arras we stopped at a village, I think it was Hesdin, and I took him to a restaurant on the river that Boy had recommended. The day was icy. We were the only customers. The dining room was small, low-ceilinged and somewhat dirty, and the fat old biddy who ran the place had the look of a slattern, but there was a nice wood fire, and we could hear the river clattering over stones below the rimed window, and the menu was a masterpiece. Haig was uneasy; I could see he was not at all sure that he approved of this informal mingling of the ranks. With his cap off he looked somehow shorn and vulnerable, and his ears seemed to stick out even more than usual. He kept smoothing his brilliantined hair and sniffing nervously. I had an urge to pat the back of one of his surprisingly delicate, almost girlish hands (how on earth did it take me so long to realise I was queer?). He engaged in a brief snow-fight with his napkin, then sat for a long time glaring helplessly at the menu. I suggested we start with oysters and he gulped in dismay, his adam’s apple bouncing like a ball on a bat.

“What, Haig,” I said, “never eaten an oyster? We shall have to remedy that.”

I spent a pleasant five minutes in conference with madame la patronne, who with much theatrical shrugging and kissing of bunched fingers persuaded me to take the sorrel soup and the boeuf en daube. “All right with you, Haig?” I said, and Haig nodded, and gulped again. He wanted beer, but I would not allow it, and ordered us both a glass of the rather good local white to wash down the oysters. I pretended not to notice him waiting to see which pieces of cutlery I would pick up first. He fumbled with the oyster shells, making them clack like false teeth, and had trouble forking up the frilled, glandular morsels.

“Well?” I said. “What do you think?”

He managed a sickly smile.

“It reminds me of…” He blushed, displaying an unaccustomed prudery. “Well, I don’t like to say, sir. Only it’s cold.”

We ate in silence for a while, but I could feel him laboriously working himself up to something. We were finishing our soup before he finally got there.

“Mind my enquiring, sir, but were you called up or did you join?”

“Good heavens,” I said, “what a question. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I just wondered, you being Irish and all.”

I registered the familiar faint shock, like a soot-fall in a chimney.

“Do I seem very Irish to you, Haig?”

He looked at me askance, and chuckled.

“Oh, no, sir, no,” he said, and lowered his face over his soup plate. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

There flashed into my mind then a clear and detailed picture of him, sitting in the canteen at HQ with his fellow drivers, a mug in one hand and a fag in the other, putting on a snooty face and mimicking my accent: But my dear Haig, I’m hardly Oirish at all, at all.

I wonder if Boy did manage to seduce him? Such questions are troubling, to an old man. The boeuf en daube, I remember, was excellent.

Having forsworn the services on offer from the local women, Haig could be of little assistance to me in my most taxing problem, which was the need for the provision of a second brothel in Boulogne for the benefit of Expeditionary Force personnel. With the arrival of the Force, the town’s one such establishment—a warren of dingy rooms above a barber’s shop round the corner from where Nick and I were quartered, presided over by a mole-speckled madam who, in silk kimono and drooping henna-coloured wig, bore a marked resemblance to Oscar Wilde in his later years—had risen, or reclined, energetically to the great increase in demand, but within a short time Mme. Mouton’s gallant filles publiques were overwhelmed, and amateurs stepped in to absorb the overflow of business. Soon every other bar and bakery had a room upstairs with a girl in it. There were fights, and accusations of cheating and theft, and a wide-scale spread of disease. I cannot recollect how the matter came to be my responsibility. I spent fruitless weeks traipsing between police headquarters and the mairie. I tried to enlist the support of the town’s doctors. I even spoke to the parish priest, a foxy old boy with a game eye who proved to be suspiciously familiar with the workings of Mme. Mouton’s establishment. I felt like a character in a Feydeau comedy, revolving desperately through one set of misunderstandings after another, colliding everywhere with stock characters, all of them blandly knowing, openly contemptuous and wholly intransigent.

“War is hell, all right,” Nick said, and laughed. “Why don’t you get Anne-Marie to help you? I think she’d make quite a good madam.”

Mme. Joliet’s English was weak, and when she heard Nick speak her name in conversation with me, she had a way of smiling inquiringly, tilting her head and lifting up her fine little nose, in an unintended parody of a stage coquette.

“Nick thinks you might help me with Mme. Mouton and her girls,” I said to her in French. “I mean, he thinks you might be able to… that you…”

Her smile died, and she took off her apron, fumbling with the strings, and hurried from the kitchen.

“Oh, Doc, you are an ass,” Nick said, and smiled at me merrily.

I followed Anne-Marie. She was standing by the window in the little front parlour. Only a Frenchwoman can wring her hands convincingly. A shining tear trembled at the corner of each eye. She had swapped the soubrette role for that of Phèdre now.

“He cares nothing for me,” she said, in a voice that wobbled. “Nothing.”

It was mid-morning, and a shaft of thin, whitish spring sunlight was piercing the brown window of the épicerie on the other side of the street. I could hear the gulls down at the harbour shrieking, and suddenly, with heart-shaking vividness, I saw Nick and myself standing on the seafront at Carrickdrum not much more than a year ago, in another life.

“I don’t think he cares much for anyone,” I said. It was not what I had meant to say. She nodded, still with her face turned to the window. She sighed, and the sigh turned into a dry little sob.

“It is so difficult,” she murmured. “So difficult.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling helpless and miserable; I am never any good in the presence of others’ pain. After a moment of silence Mme. Joliet laughed, and turned her head and looked at me, her eyes glistening with sorrow, and said:

“Well, perhaps I shall have better luck when the Germans come. Except…” She faltered. “Except that I am Jewish.”

Miss Vandeleur has got hold of some silly story about my bravery under fire. I have tried to explain to her that the concept of bravery is entirely spurious. We are what we are, we do what we do. At school, when I first read Homer, what struck me about Achilles was his bone-headed stupidity. I was not stupid, and I was afraid, but I had sufficient self-control not to show it, except once (twice, actually, but the second time there was no one to see, so it doesn’t count). I performed no daring acts, did not throw myself on the grenade, or run out into no man’s land to rescue Haig from the Huns. Simply, I was there, and I kept my head. It was nothing to boast about. Anyway, the shameful scramble for home that was Dunkirk had too strong an overtone of slapstick to allow one at the time seriously to consider the possibility of violent death. If bravery means the ability to laugh in the face of danger, then you may call me brave, but only because that face always seemed to me to have a clownish cast.

We knew the Germans were coming. Even before they launched their assault and the French Army collapsed, it had been obvious that nothing would stop the German armour except the Channel, and by now even that seemed not much wider than a castle moat. I was asleep on the morning when the Panzers arrived at the outskirts of the town. The noise of Haig stamping up the stairs to my room was louder than that of the German guns. He was in uniform, but a piece of his pyjamas was visible above the collar of his tunic. He hung on to the doorframe, wild-eyed and gasping; I had not noticed before how much like a fish he looked, with those pop-eyes and protuberant mouth and fin-like ears.

“It’s the Jerries, sir—they’re bloody here!”

I sat up, primly pulling the blanket to my chin.

“You’re improperly dressed, Haig,” I said, indicating the telltale edge of striped cotton at his neck. He gave a sort of desperate grin and shook himself like a trout on a hook.

“Oh, sir, they’ll be here in an hour,” he said, in an imploring whine, like a schoolboy urging on a laggardly gamesmaster.

“Then we had better look sharp, hadn’t we. Or do you feel we should stop and make a stand against the tanks? I rather think I have misplaced my pistol.”

It was a bracingly beautiful May morning, all glitter and flash in the foreground, the smoke-grey distances cool and still. Haig was waiting in the Austin with the motor running. I am always strangely moved by the smell of exhaust fumes on the morning air. The little car was shuddering like a calf, as if it knew what its fate was shortly to be. Nick was lounging in the front passenger seat with his cap rakishly tilted and his collar unbuttoned. I climbed into the back seat and we shot off down the hill towards the harbour. When we slowed to take a corner an old man leaning on a crutch shouted something, and spat at us.

“Grand day for a rout,” I said.

Nick laughed.

“You took your time,” he said. “What were you doing-praying?”

“I needed to shave.”

He looked to Haig and nodded grimly. “The German army is about to descend on us, and he has to have a shave.” He swivelled toward me again, pointing. “And what’s that?”

“A swagger stick.”

“I rather thought that’s what it was.”

We came upon a squad of our men marching raggedly down the hill. They looked at us with sullen resentment as we passed by.

“Where are the others?” I asked.

“Most of the men went up to Dunkirk,” Haig said. “They’ve sent a liner from Dover. The Queen Mary, they say. Lucky blighters.”

Nick was peering through the back window at the stragglers.

“Perhaps we should have spoken to them,” he said. “They seemed quite demoralised.”

“One of them was carrying what looked like a ham,” I said.

“Oh dear, I do hope they haven’t been looting. People tend to mind that sort of thing, especially the French.”

There was a thud nearby, we felt it through the throbbing of the engine, and a moment later a hail of fine debris tinkled on the roof of the car. Haig drew his neck down between his shoulders like a tortoise.

“Why are they firing at us?” Nick said. “Don’t they realise we’ve turned tail?”

“It’s just exuberance,” I said. “You know what the Germans are like.”

The harbour had a wonderfully festive look, with crowds of men milling about the quayside and craft of all kinds bobbing and jostling on the sea. The water was a stylised shade of cobalt blue and the sky was stuck all over with scraps of cottony cloud.

“You managed to say your goodbyes to Mme. Joliet?” I said.

Nick shrugged, and kept the back of his head turned toward me.

“Couldn’t seem to find her,” he said.

By now we were nosing our way through the crowds on the quay, Haig leaning on the horn and cursing to himself in a low mutter. I spotted a fellow I had been to school with, and made Haig stop.

“Hello, Sloper,” I said.

“Oh, hello, Maskell.”

We had not seen each other since we were seventeen. He put an elbow on the door and leaned his big pale head down at the window. I introduced Nick, and they shook hands awkwardly across the back of Nick’s seat.

“I should be saluting, of course,” Nick said. It was only then that I noticed the major’s insignia on Sloper’s shoulder.

“Sorry, sir,” I said, and sketched a salute. He had been my senior at school, too.

With a shriek a shell landed in the harbour, sending up a tremendous waterspout and making the stones of the quayside shudder.

“Any chance of our getting off today, sir, do you think?” Nick said.

Sloper looked down, and bit his lip.

“There’s only one old tub left,” he said, “and no one’s taking that because—”

A soldier with a picturesquely bandaged forehead came trotting up, clutching a signals sheet, and yelled:

“Message from Dover, sir. We’re to evacuate at once.”

“Is that so, Watkins?” Sloper said, taking the signal and frowning at it. “Well well.”

“Where can we find this boat, sir?” Nick said.

Sloper gestured vaguely and went back to his reading. I told Haig to drive on.

“Sloppy Sloper a major,” I said. “Well I never.”

The boat was a Breton trawler with a wreath of roses painted on the bow. It wallowed languidly on its tethers; there was no one on board. The squad we had passed on the hill had arrived, and stood dejectedly on the quay, their kit at their feet, gazing mournfully in the direction of England.

“Here, you, Grimes,” I said to one of them. “Weren’t you a fisherman?” He was a squat young man, keg-shaped and bandy, with a red face and a lick of blond hair plastered across the top of his skull. “Can you drive this thing?”

He could, and presently we were puttering our way out of the harbour toward the open sea. The boat wallowed and swayed like an old cow slopping her way across a field of mud. In the wheelhouse Grimes stood braced on his bowed legs, whistling happily. By now there were two or three shells coming every minute. Haig was crouched in the stern, cupping a cigarette and shivering.

“Cheer up, Haig,” I said. “She had to go, you know that.” We had ditched the Austin in the harbour. He had watched in sad disbelief as the little car tipped over the harbour wall and plunged nose-first into the oily water and sank with a great gulp. “You wouldn’t have wanted Jerry to get hold of her, would you?”

He gave me a kicked-dog look and said nothing and went back to his ashen brooding. I edged my way sidewise along the crowded walkway to the front of the boat, where Nick was sitting on the deck with his back against the gunwale, his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced together, squinting thoughtfully at the sky. A shell landed thirty yards off to the left of us with a curiously understated plop.

“I’ve been doing a calculation,” Nick said. “Taking into account the frequency of firing, and the distance we have to go before we’re out of range, I’d put our chances at two to one against.”

I sat down by his side.

“These shells seem rather tame to me,” I said. “Do you think one of them would sink us?”

He glanced at me sidelong and chuckled.

“Well, considering the stuff that’s stored below-decks, I think it’s a fair assumption.”

Why is it, I wonder, that the sea smells of tar? Or is it just that boats smell that way, and we imagine it is the sea? Life is full of mysteries.

“What,” I said, “is down there?” He shrugged.

“Four tons of high explosives, actually. This is a demolitions ship. Didn’t you know?”

Lately I have developed a very faint, generalised tremor. It is a strange and, I am surprised to note, not entirely unpleasant sensation. In bed at night when I cannot sleep I am most keenly aware of it, a kind of undulant, underwater shimmer that seems to originate somewhere low down in my breast, around the area of the diaphragm, and flow outwards to the very tips of my fingers and my poor cold toes. I think of a low-voltage electric current running through a vat of some thick, warm, purplish liquid. Perhaps it is the first, shivery sign of the onset of Parkinson’s disease? The bleak comedy of this possibility is not lost on me: nature being conservative, two major ailments simultaneously attacking a single organism would seem prodigal, to say the least. One would have thought cancer quite enough to be going on with. But even if it is the advance announcement of one of these newfangled maladies (does Alzheimer’s disease give you the shakes?), I am convinced that somehow this quaver had its origins in that moment on the retreat from Boulogne when I realised that I was sitting on a floating bomb. That is when the tuning fork of terror was first struck, I believe, and the vibrations have only now descended to a pitch detectable to my merely human receptors. You think I am being fanciful? Profound effects are always well under way, surely, before we register them, with our puny powers of feeling and recognition. I am thinking of my father’s amused wonderment when, in his sixties, after he had suffered his first coronary attack, the doctors told him that his condition was the result of damage caused to the ventricles of his heart by a bout of rheumatic fever he had suffered in early childhood. So it is entirely possible that this tremor that has afflicted me now, at the age of seventy-two, is the manifestation, after a forty-year lapse, of the fear that came over me but which I could not show that day in Boulogne harbour as we heaved our way homeward in gay spring sunshine with the tank shells and the seagulls shrieking around us.

I have paused for a long time between the last paragraph and this one. I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really do occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant. Yet I cannot shake the belief that something happened to me that day which changed me, as love, or illness, or great loss are said to change us, shifting us a vital degree or two, so that we view the world from a new perspective. I took on fear, as one takes on knowledge. Indeed, it did seem a form of sudden, incontrovertible knowing. My immediate sensations, when Nick gaily told me about the dynamite in the hold, were, first, an intense pressure in my chest which was, I realised, the urge to burst into laughter; if I had laughed, I should probably very soon have been screaming. Next, there flashed into my mind a fantastically clear and vivid image of The Death of Seneca, complete with its frame—English, late eighteenth-century, but good—and a patch of the north-lit wall in the Gloucester Terrace flat where it used to hang, and even the little lacquered table that always stood beneath it. I should have thought of wife and child, of father and brother, death, judgement and resurrection, but I did not; I thought, God forgive me, of what I truly loved. Things, for me, have always been of more import than people.

That kind of sweaty, bladder-tightening terror is not like, for instance, the dull dread that I feel nowadays when I contemplate the painful and extremely messy death that I know awaits me, sooner rather than later. What made it different was the element of chance. I have never been a gambler, but I can understand how it must feel when at the end of its counter-clockwise run the little wooden ball, making a rattle that is distractingly reminiscent of the nursery, jumps tantalisingly in and out of the slots of the roulette wheel, first the red and then the black and then the red again, with everything hanging on its whim, money, the wife’s pearl necklace, the children’s education, the deeds to the chateau in the hills, not to mention that little pied-à-terre behind the tabac on the sea front that no one is supposed to know about. The suspense, the anguish of it, the almost sexual expectancy— now? is it going to be now? is it now?—and all the time that fevered, horror-stricken sense of everything being about to change, completely, unrecognisably, for ever. That is what it is to be truly, horribly, jubilantly alive, in the magnesium glare of intensest terror.

Nick of course was not afraid. Or if he was, the effect on him was even more remarkable than it was on me. He was exultant. A kind of radiance came off him, as if he were inwardly on fire. I could smell him; above the smell of the sea and the salt reek of the deck-boards where we sat, I could smell him, and I sucked it in, the raw stink of him, sweat and leather and wet wool and the rank afterburn of the flask of coffee he had drunk in the jeep an hour ago outside the house in rue du Cloître while he and Haig waited for me and the German tanks began firing on the town. I wanted to take his hands in mine, I wanted to clasp him to me, to immolate myself in that fire. I cannot tell you how embarrassed I feel now, warbling this queasy Liebestod, but it is not often in life that one finds oneself so quakingly close to violent death. I hoped my terror was not visible. I smiled at him, and shrugged, trying to seem ironical and insouciant, as an officer should be, though for all the stiffness of my upper lip, I had to bite the lower one to keep it from trembling. When at last we had pulled beyond the range of the guns, and the men were cheering and dancing about the deck, Nick’s eyes went dead, and he turned away from me and watched the sea, frowning, silent, spent, and I thanked God for his obliviousness to the feelings of anyone save himself.

London too was silent. Six months before, the mood of the place had been almost festive. The bombers had not come, the storm troopers had not taken the south coast, and everything had seemed as light and distant and unreal as the elephantine barrage balloons floating above the city like an image out of Magritte. Now all that was changed, and a thoughtful, oppressive silence hung everywhere. I crossed the park, under the hazy, murmurous trees, still feeling the sway of the deck under my feet, and in my light-headed state I thought it possible that I might be dead after all, and these green acres the Elysian Fields. Black-clad nannies stark as Erinyes plied their prams. Near Clarendon Gate a big man on a little horse thudded past, a centaur in a bowler hat. In Gloucester Terrace a driverless taxi stood gasping in the sun, one of its rear doors inexplicably hanging open in suggestive invitation. I climbed the stairs to the flat and my feet seemed turned to lead and my heart to stone. Surely Odysseus himself, back from the war, must have experienced such a moment of strange dread on the threshold of home. I stopped in the hallway outside the familiar door and seemed to myself trapped at the point of intolerable pressure where two planets touched, and something swelled inside me and for a moment I could not breathe. The gristly feel of the key going into the lock made me shiver.

The flat had a different smell. Before, it had smelled of the dust of books, centuries-old pigment, bed-must, and a faint, sharp, exotic tang that I suppose must have been just gin—I used to drink a lot of it, even then. Now there was added wool and milk and watery faeces, and something like the stomach-turning pong of school dinners. Vivienne was in the living room, sitting in sunlight on the floor in front of the sofa in a puddle of strewn magazines with her stockinged feet tucked under her. She might have been posing for one of those sentimental wartime daubs— Waiting for a Letter, or The Home Fires Burning—which. Brendan Bracken at the Ministry of Information used to commission from Royal Academy hacks. She was wearing a voluminous pleated skirt and a salmon-pink blouse. I noted her scarlet mouth and matching nails and experienced a silky, libidinous shiver. I set my cap down on the table and began to say something but she shot up a silencing hand and contorted her face into a look of horror.

“Ssh!” she hissed, nodding in the direction of the bedroom. “You’ll wake the slumbering fiend.”

I went to the sideboard.

“Want a drink?” I said. “I do.”

She had everything ready: the blued gin in its high-shouldered bottle, the slices of bitter lemon, the cut-glass bowl of ice cubes. She lit a cigarette. I could feel her cool gaze, and lifted a shoulder defensively against it.

“How smart you look,” she said, “in your uniform.”

“I don’t feel smart.”

“Don’t snap, dear.”

“Sorry.”

I brought her the drink. She lifted both hands to receive it, looking up at me with a pursed, quizzical smile.

“Darling, are you shaking?” she said.

“Bit of a chill. It was nippy in the Channel.” I went and stood by the fireplace, leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece. Sunlight and leaves thronged the window. The street outside hummed to itself, dazed with the first full intimations of summer. The ice cubes congregated excitedly in my glass, tinkling and cracking. Silence. Vivienne put her drink down on the carpet beside her and looked carefully at the tip of her cigarette, nodding to herself.

“Yes,” she said, in a flat voice, “I’m very well, thank you. The war hardly impinges. It’s not as much fun, of course, with everybody amusing being away, or frightfully busy at their hush-hush jobs in the War Office. I go up to Oxford every other weekend. My parents ask after you. I tell them, no, he has not written; I’m sure he must be terribly busy, rooting out Nazi agents and so on.” She was still examining the ash of her cigarette. “And yes, your son too is very well. His name is Julian, by the way, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I should have written, I know. It was just…”

I went and sat down on the sofa and she leaned against me with an arm on my knees and looked up at me. She lifted a hand and laid the back of it against my forehead, as if to test for a sign of fever.

“Oh, don’t look so grim, darling,” she said. “It’s how we are, that’s all. Now, tell me about the war. How many Germans did you kill?”

I slipped a hand inside her blouse and touched her breasts; they were chill and unfamiliar, the tips coarsened from feeding the child. I rehearsed for her the escape from Boulogne. She listened distractedly, picking at a loose tuft in the carpet.

“I can’t believe it was this morning,” I said. “It seems like a lifetime ago. Nick thought it was all great fun. Sometimes I wonder if he’s really human.”

“Yes,” she said absently. We were very still. I could feel the slight rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed. I took my hand from her blouse and she stood up and brought my glass to the sideboard and made me another drink. Something had ended, just like that, we had both registered it, a last, thin thread severing. “By the way,” she said brightly, not looking at me, “someone has been telephoning for you. A Russian, by the sound of him. Something-lotsky, or potsky; I wrote it down. He was terribly insistent. What odd acquaintances you have.”

“Someone from the Department, I imagine,” I said. “What did you say his name was?”

She went to the kitchen and returned with a crumpled envelope and smoothed it out and squinted at it; she was shortsighted, but too vain to wear spectacles.

“Kropotsky,” she said. “Oleg Kropotsky.”

“Never heard of him.”

Which was true.

Julian woke up from his nap, with the hair-raising, drawn-out wail that he employed throughout his infancy, an attenuated but extraordinarily penetrating banshee cry the sound of which never failed to send a shiver rippling along my scalp and down the back of my neck; Nick said it was the poor child’s Irish ancestry coming out.

“Oh, blimey,” Vivienne said, hurrying to the bedroom, “there goes the siren.”

Julian, even at nine months, had Nick’s crow-black hair and Vivienne’s lustrous, unwavering gaze. The one he most resembled, though, as I saw now with a shock, was Freddie. As an adult he looks more like his poor late uncle than ever, with that big Caesarean head and those weightlifter’s shoulders, so incongruous in a City gent. I wonder if he sees the resemblance? Probably not; Freddie does not figure much in the family’s photograph albums. Now he squirmed inside the wrappings of his blanket, smacking his lips and blinking. He smelled like hot bread. My son.

“How big he’s grown,” I said.

Vivienne nodded seriously.

“Yes, they do that, babies. Grow, I mean. Others have remarked it, down the generations.”

Presently Nick arrived, tipsy and in truculent high spirits. He was dressed in black tie and tails, his bow tie askew, like the sails of a stalled windmill.

“It’s still afternoon,” Vivienne said, frowning at his dress. “Hadn’t you noticed?”

Nick threw himself on to the sofa and scowled.

“Sick of that bloody uniform,” he said. “Thought I’d put on something entirely different. Have you got any champagne? I’ve been drinking champagne with Leo Rothenstein. Bloody Jew-boy.” He wanted to hold the child but Vivienne would not let him. He scowled more blackly still and slumped back on the cushions. “Did Victor tell you we were nearly blown up? I expect he’s been very offhand about it, but it was a damn close thing. You’d have got him back in a gunny-sack, what they could find of him.”

The telephone rang. Vivienne took the child from my arms.

“That will be your Mr. Kropotsky,” she said.

Nick sat up and peered blearily, weaving his head from side to side. He seemed drunker now than he had been when he arrived.

“Eh?” he said. “Mr. Who?”

“Some Russian that Victor is in league with,” Vivienne said. “A spy, most likely.”

But it was Querell.

“Listen, Maskell,” he said, “you used to be a mathematician, isn’t that right?”

He was all business, yet as always I had the impression that he was laughing somehow, in that sour, muffled way that he had.

“Not really,” I said carefully. “Not what you’d call a mathematician. Why?”

“There’s a general alert out for people who are good with numbers. Can’t say more on the phone. Meet me in an hour at the Gryphon.”

“I’ve just got back,” I said. “Nick is here.”

There was a pause, filled with ethereal fizzes and clicks.

“Don’t bring that bastard.” A pause, with breathing. “Sorry, he’s your in-law, I forgot. But don’t bring him.”

Nick was at the sideboard noisily delving among the bottles.

“Who was that?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Querell,” I said. “He sent you his regards.”

The child, swaddled in Vivienne’s arms, began to cry again, but pensively this time, with a kind of wistfulness.

The Gryphon Club in Dean Street really was an awful dive. Much sentimental nonsense has been talked about it latterly, but the truth is it was little more than a shebeen where unemployed actors and poets with time on their hands could while away the afternoons in drinking and back-stabbing. One of that old rip Betty Bowler’s many lovers, a gangland boss, so it was said, had paid her off after a botched abortion by setting her up in the club and finagling an all-day licence from someone in his pay at Scotland Yard. (Take note, Miss V.; Ancient Soho is always good for a colourful page or two.) Betty was still a handsome woman, big and blowsy, with curls and creamy skin and a fat, puckered little mouth—a sort of good-looking Dylan Thomas—and the fact that she had a wooden leg only enhanced her aura of slightly overripe magnificence. She was a little too self-consciously a character for my taste (it takes one actor to spot another). She was no fool, though; I always felt she had the measure of me, somehow. The club was a dank basement underneath a porn shop. Betty, who was a suburbanite at heart, favoured pink-shaded lamps and fringed tablecloths. Tony, the queer barman, could run up a decent sandwich, if he was in a good mood, and there was a doltish boy who for a penny tip would fetch in a plate of oysters from the fish place across the street. Goodness, how archaic and quaint and almost innocent it all seems now; Dickens’s London lasted right up to the Blitz. Querell caught quite well the wartime atmosphere of the city in that thriller of his about the murderer with the club foot. What was it called? Now and in the Hour, something pretentiously Papist like that.

He was at the bar when I arrived, I spotted him at once despite being purblind in the gloom after the sunny street. How did he manage always to make it seem as if one had in some way compromised oneself merely by having agreed to meet him? That tilted, white-lipped smile was particularly unsettling today. He was looking more prosperous than when I had last seen him; his suit, as ever tight as a snake’s skin, was expensively cut, and he was wearing a tie-pin set with what looked like a real diamond.

“Have a martini,” he said. “One of the Yanks from the embassy told me the proper way to make them, and I’ve been instructing Tony here. The secret is to run the vermouth over the ice cubes and then throw the ice away. Has the taste of a reserved sin—simony, incest, one of those really interesting ones. Chin-chin.”

I smiled at him coldly. I understood, of course, that this bright talk was meant to be a parody of the trivial world of cocktails and heartless banter to which I supposedly belonged. I asked for a gin and tonic. Tony, who enjoyed watching Querell in operation, shot him a sly little grin of acknowledgement, like a magician showing the corner of a card before palming it.

“I hear you were in France,” Querell said, regarding me over the rim of his glass with a glint of amusement.

“Got back this morning. Bit of a flap, all right.”

“Our finest hour.”

“Um. What about you?”

“Oh, no chance of heroics for me. I’m just a desk man.”

Tony placed my drink before me, setting the glass down on its cork coaster with a deft little flourish of the wrist, as if he were giving a start to a spinning-top. Boy claimed that Tony—all quiff and crooked teeth and lardy pallor—was a demon in bed. One gin-numbed afternoon during the Suez crisis I made a pass at him, and was rebuffed with a scornful laugh. Sometimes I think I should have stuck to women.

Querell and I went and sat at a table in a corner under a small, rather good watercolour nude by someone whose signature I could not read—Betty Bowler had an eye for a picture, and sometimes would take work from indigent club members in return for a cleared slate; when she died in the sixties I bought a couple of things from her collection. She turned out to have a son, a plump, unhappy-looking fellow with bad breath and a wheeze; also, he had a limp, a curious echo of his mother’s wooden leg, I thought. He drove a damned hard bargain, but still, on the Institute’s behalf I got that early Francis Bacon out of him for a song.

“Did it ever occur to you,” Querell said, surveying the room with its scattering of shadowed, solitary drinkers, “that this business is just an excuse for people like you and me to spend our afternoons in places like this?”

“Which business?”

He gave me a wry look. Presently he said:

“They’re setting up a code-breaking centre. Place near Oxford. Very hush-hush. They’re looking for people with a mathematical bent—chess players, puzzle solvers, Times crossword addicts, that sort of thing. Mad professors. They’ve asked me to ask around.”

It was a conceit of Querell’s to behave as if his connection with the Department were entirely casual, a matter of his being called upon once in a way to do a favour, or carry a message.

“It doesn’t sound like my kind of thing,” I said; never show eagerness, that is one of the first rules.

“Not suggesting it would be,” he said. “You’re no Albert Einstein, are you. No, I just thought you might be able to suggest some names. I don’t know many Cambridge men: not the boffins, anyway.”

“Well,” I said, “there’s Alastair Sykes, he’s one of the best maths people I know of.” I pointed to his empty glass. “Want another?”

When I came back with our drinks Querell was gazing before him vacantly and picking his teeth with a matchstick. When two agents, even from the same side, begin to discuss important business, an odd effect occurs, a kind of general deceleration, as if the wave pattern of everything, the ordinary noise of self and the world, had lengthened to twice its normal frequency; through these broad highs and troughs one seems to drift, with aimless intent, buoyant and taut as a hair suspended in water. Querell said:

“As a matter of fact, Sykes is already in. He’s going to be a top man in the operation.”

“Good.”

Yes, indeed.

“Another leftie, is he?” Querell said.

“He was never in the Party, if that’s what you mean.”

He chuckled.

“No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean.” He fished the olive from his drink and nibbled on it thoughtfully. “Not that it matters much; even the Comrades are being called on to do their bit for the realm. He needs keeping an eye on, though.” He gave me a malignant, sidelong leer. “All you lot do.” He finished his drink with a snap of the wrist and stood up. “Come and see me tomorrow in the office and I’ll put you in the picture. The Department is setting up a special section to monitor the decrypts. You might want to give them a hand. Not much chance of anything swashbuckling, but you’ve probably had enough of that, after France.”

“It really wasn’t much fun, you know, France,” I said. “Not at the end, anyway.”

He stood, on the point of going, one hand in his jacket pocket, looking down at me with the pursed remains of that evil smile.

“Oh, I know that,” he said softly, in a tone of intimate contempt. “Everyone knows that.”

When Oleg Davidovich Kropotsky waddled into my life, the first thing that struck me was how remarkable an embodiment he was of his name, with its crowding syllables, its preponderance of fat o’s and d’s, that jaggedly angled capital K— he had something of the air of one of Kafka’s clerks, did Oleg—and the pot, as in pot belly, sitting plump in the middle. He was not much above five feet tall. Little tubular legs, a broad, low-slung torso and spreading blue-grey jowls that sat toad-fashion on his shirt collar, all made it seem as if he might once have been tall and thin but over the years had succumbed in a spectacular manner to the compressive effects of gravity, Boy used to tease him by telling him he was turning into a Chinaman—Oleg despised all Orientals—and it is true that he did bear a resemblance to one of those fat little squatting jade figures that Big Beaver used to collect. Sweat was his medium; even on the coldest days he was coated in a dully shining, putty-grey film of moisture, as if he had just been lifted out of a tank of embalming fluid. He wore a soiled mac and a squashed brown hat, and shapeless electric-blue suits with concertina trousers. When he sat down—with Oleg, the act of sitting down seemed a form of general collapse—he always kicked off his shoes, and they would stand splayed before him with their laces trailing and tongues hanging out, scuffed, cracked, turned up at the toes Turkish-slipper fashion, the very emblems of his dolefulness and physical distress.

His cover was a second-hand bookshop in a side street off Long Acre. He knew nothing about books, and was rarely at the shop, which hardly mattered, since the place attracted few customers. He detested London, because of its rigid class distinctions and the hypocrisy of its ruling elite, so he said; I suspect the real reason was that he was afraid of the place, its wealth and assurance, its cold-eyed men and svelte, terrifying women. Boy and I introduced him to the East End, where he was more at ease amid the squalor and the raucousness, and for our meetings we settled on a workman’s cafe in the Mile End Road, with steamy windows and spit on the floor and a big brown-stained tea-urn that rumbled in its depths, like a steel stomach, all day long.

Our first encounter took place in Covent Garden. I told him of my interesting conversation with Querell at the Gryphon Club.

“Place called Bletchley Park,” I said. “Monitoring German signals traffic.”

Oleg was inclined to be suspicious.

“And this man has offered you a job?”

“Well, hardly a job.”

I had seen right away that Oleg was not greatly impressed with me. I think the Comrades all found me a little—how shall I say?—a little uncanny. I suspect I exude a faint odour of sanctity, inherited from a long line of clerical forebears, which Oleg and his like would have mistaken for a sign of zealotry, and which would worry them, for they were practical men, and chary of ideology. They were happier with Boy’s avidity and schoolboy hunger for action, and even with Leo Rothenstein’s patrician disdain—though of course, being good Russians, they were all of them vigorously anti-Semitic. As we walked together round and round the market in the sunshine, smelling the pleasurably nauseating, greeny smells from the vegetable stalls, Oleg launched into an earnest apologia for the Nazi-Stalin pact. I listened politely, going along with my hands clasped at my back and an ear judiciously inclined to his tortured elucidations, all the while amusing myself by studying the antics of the sparrows hopping about nimbly under our feet. When he had done, I said:

“Look here, Mr. Kropotkin—”

“Hector, please; Hector is my code name.”

“Yes, well-”

“And Kropotsky is my own name.”

“Well, Mr…. Hector, I want to make something clear. I don’t at all care for your country, I’m afraid, or for your leaders. Forgive me for saying so, but it’s true. I believe in the Revolution, of course; I just wish it had happened somewhere else. Sorry.”

Oleg only nodded, smiling to himself. His head was big and round, like the globe on the pillar of a gate.

“Where do you think the Revolution should have happened?” he said. “In America?”

I laughed.

“To anticipate Brecht,” I said, “I think America and Russia are both whores—but my whore is pregnant.”

He stopped, and stood, a finger and thumb palping his babyish lower lip, and gave a kind of burbling snort, which it took me a moment to identify as laughter.

“John, you are right. Russia is an old whore.”

Two sparrows were fighting under a barrowload of cabbages, going at each other like a pair of amputated, feathery claws. Oleg turned aside to buy a bag of apples, counting out the pennies from a little leather purse, softly snorting still and shaking his head, his hat pushed back. I could see him as a schoolboy, fat, funny, troubled, the butt of playground jokes. We walked on again. I watched him sidelong as he ate his apple, the pink prehensile lips and yellow teeth mumbling the white mush, and was reminded of Carrickdrum and Andy Wilson’s pony, which used to turn its mouth inside out at me and try to bite my face.

“A whore, yes,” he said happily. “And if they heard me saying it…” He put a finger to his temple. “Bang.” And laughed again.

Another IRA bomb in Oxford Street tonight. No one killed, but a glorious amount of damage and disruption. How determined they are. All that rage, that race-hatred. We should have been like that. We should have had no mercy, no qualms. We would have brought down a whole world.

10

It was during one of the first of the great daylight bombing raids on London that I received the news of my father’s death. I am convinced this is the reason that I was never as frightened in the Blitz as I should have been. The shock somehow deadened my susceptibility to terror. I like to think of it as my father’s final kindness to me. I had returned to Gloucester Terrace after delivering a lecture at the Institute when the telegram arrived. I was in uniform—I always wore my uniform when lecturing, being an incorrigible dresser-up—and the telegraph boy eyed my captain’s pips enviously. In fact, he was not a boy but a cadaverous oldster with a smoker’s cough and a Hitlerian cowlick. He also had a lazy eye, so that when I looked up from the stark news—Father dead stop Hermione Maskell—I thought that he was giving me a broad, conspiratorial wink. Death chooses the most unprepossessing messengers. We could hear the bombs exploding, a muffled crumpling sound like that of something vast and wooden falling slowly down a series of stone steps, and under our feet the floor quaked. He cocked an ear and grinned.

“Old Adolf’s paying us a daylight visit,” he said cheerfully. I gave him a shilling. He nodded at the telegram in my hand. “Not bad news, I hope, sir?”

“No no,” I heard myself say. “My father has died.”

I went back into the flat. The door closed behind me with a solemn thud; how obligingly at times like this the most commonplace procedures take on an air of pomp and finality. I sat down slowly on a straight-backed chair, hands on my knees and my feet planted side by side on the carpet; what is that Egyptian god, the dog-headed one? The afternoon around me had settled into a dreamy stillness, except for the sunlight falling in the window, a pale-gold tube of teeming particles. And still the bombs were falling afar in dulled funereal cannonades. Father. A weight of guilt and dry grief descended on me, and I shouldered it wearily. How familiar it seemed! It was like putting on an old overcoat. Was I somehow remembering back to my mother’s death, thirty years before?

But the person I found myself thinking of, to my surprise, was Vivienne, as if it were she and not my father I had lost. She was in Oxford, with the child. I attempted to telephone her, but the lines were down. I sat for a while listening to the bombing. I tried to imagine the people dying—now, at this moment, and close by—but could not. I recalled a phrase from my lecture that morning: The problem for Poussin in the depiction of suffering is how to stylise it, as the rules of classical art demand, while yet making it immediately felt.

That night I took the mail boat to Dublin. The crossing was unseasonably rough. I spent it in the bar, in the company of English travelling salesmen and Irish hod carriers mad on porter. I got vilely drunk, and tried to make maudlin conversation with the barman, who was from Tipperary, and whose mother had recently died. I leaned my forehead on the back of my wrist and wept, in that odd, detached way one does when one is drunk; it only made me feel worse. We arrived in Kingstown at three in the morning. I collapsed on a bench under a tree on the harbourfront. The wind had died, and I sat in the soft cool late-summer darkness and listened in melancholy rapture to a lone bird warbling in the leaves above me. I dozed for a while, and presently at my back the dawn came up, and I woke in anguish, not knowing for a moment where I was or what I should be doing. I found a taxi, the driver still half asleep, and travelled into the city, where I had to sit for another hour nursing my burgeoning hangover in a deserted and eerily echoing railway station while I waited for the first train to Belfast. On the platform, ill-tempered, putteed pigeons swaggered about under my feet, and a strong, heatless sun beat upon the grimed glass roof high above me. These are the moments that lodge in the memory.

It was afternoon by the time I got to Carrickdrum. I was numb from travelling and the night’s drinking. Andy Wilson was at the station with the pony-and-trap. He greeted me warily, avoiding my eye.

“Didn’t think I would outlast him,” he said, “I surely didn’t.”

We set off up the West Road. The gorse; the pony’s straw-and-sacking smell; the ash-blue sea.

“How is Mrs. Maskell?” I said. For answer Andy only shrugged. “And Freddie? Does he realise what’s happened?”

“Och, he knows, right enough; how would he not?”

He talked enthusiastically about the war. Everyone was saying, he said, that Belfast and the shipyards would be bombed; he spoke of the prospect in a tone of gleeful expectation, as of a promised treat of fireworks and staying up all night.

“There was a raid on London yesterday,” I said. “In daylight.”

“Aye, so we heard on the wireless.” He gave a wistful sigh. “A terrible thing.”

The house as always startled me with its familiarity: all still there, all still going on, careless of my absence. As I alighted on the gravel below the front steps, Andy unprecedentedly offered me a helping hand. His palm seemed made of warm, malleable stone. I realised that in his eyes I was the master of St. Nicholas’s now.

I found Hettie in the big stone-flagged back kitchen, sitting on a spindle-backed chair listlessly shelling peas into a battered saucepan. Her hair, those big auburn tresses of which she had once been guiltily proud, had turned into a matted nest, with grey wisps dangling over her forehead and trailing down the back of her cardigan. She was wearing a sack-shaped brown dress and those fur-lined ankle-boots that are exclusive to decaying old women. She greeted me without surprise and cracked open another pea-pod. I leaned down awkwardly and kissed her forehead, and she shied away from me in a sort of sullen alarm, like a beast of burden more used to blows than endearments. I smelled her smell.

“Hettie,” I said, “how are you?”

She nodded dully, giving a tremendous sniff. A tear rolled down at the side of her fat nose and plopped into the saucepan on her lap.

“You’re good to have come,”, she said. “Was it dangerous, travelling?”

“No. The bombings have only been in London.”

“I read in the newspaper about these submarines.”

“Not in the Irish Sea, I think, Hettie. Not yet, anyway.”

She made a sound that was half sigh, half sob, hunching her back and letting it fall slack again, a big old bag of bones. I looked beyond her through the window to the garden, where the sunlight glistened in the leaves of the sycamore standing there in its solitude, vastly atremble, its green already tinged with autumnal grey. One day when I was small I fell out of that tree, and lay motionless in the lush grass in a kind of misty languor, with a numbed arm twisted under me, watching Hettie running in slow motion towards me across the lawn, barefoot, her arms outstretched, like one of Picasso’s mighty maenads, and in that moment I experienced an inexplicable and perfect happiness, such as I had not known before, nor have since, and for which even a broken arm seemed a not unreasonable price to pay.

“How are you, Hettie?” I said again. “How are you managing?” She seemed not to hear me. I took the saucepan from her and set it on the table. She continued to sit with shoulders hunched and head bowed, a sorrowing old buffalo, picking distractedly at her fingernails. “Where’s Freddie?” I said. “Is he all right?”

She lifted her eyes to the sunlight and September’s fading green in the window.

“He was so calm,” she said, “so calm and good.” For a moment I thought she was speaking of my brother. She heaved another sighing sob. “He was there in the garden, you know, putting out scraps for a fox that comes down at night from the hills. I saw him bending over, and he gave a kind of start, as if he had remembered something important. And then he just fell down.” I saw her again, billowing towards me across the lawn, bare arms outstretched, her big white legs flexing and her feet hardly seeming to touch the grass over which she ran. “He held my hand. He told me not to worry myself. I hardly knew it when he was gone.” She put her hands on her knees and heaved herself to her feet and went to the sink and ran the cold tap and pressed wetted fingers hard into the sockets of her eyes. “You were good to come,” she said again. “We know how busy you must be, with the war on.”

She made tea for us, moving from sink to table to sideboard at a flat-footed, leaden pace. A friend of hers, she told me, had taken Freddie to the seaside for the afternoon—Freddie had always been fascinated by the sea, and would sit on the shingle for hours gazing out with rapt attention over this strange, unknowable, shifting element, as if he had once seen something rising out of it, a sea monster, or a tridented god, and was patiently waiting for it to appear again.

“Have you spoken to him about… about Father?” I said.

She peered at me in momentary puzzlement.

“Oh, but he was here,” she said. “We were both here. He came and sat beside your father on the lawn, and held his hand as well. He knew what was happening. He cried. He wouldn’t come away, I had to get Andy to help me make him go indoors while we waited for the ambulance. And when they were taking your father away he wanted to go with him.”

The teapot smoked in the pale light from the window; soon it would be full autumn. I had a sudden vision of a world in flames.

“We shall have to think about his future, now,” I said.

She became very busy with the tea things.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “we’ll need to find a position for him.”

I thought of Freddie sitting splay-legged on the seashore, in his jersey and his stained trousers, his face lifted to the horizon, grinning happily into that vast emptiness.

“Yes, of course,” I said, faintly. “A position.”

I went for a walk, alone, up in the hills. Even on the clearest days the sunlight here seemed hazy and somehow aswarm, falling like gauze over rocks and bushes, thickening to a milky blur the tremulous blue distances. How cunningly the grieving heart seeks comfort for itself, conjuring up the softest of sorrows, the most sweetly piercing recollections, in which it is always summer, replete with birdsong and the impossible radiance of a transfigured past. I leaned on a rock and gently wept, and saw myself, leaning, weeping, and was at once gratified and ashamed.

When I returned to the house Hettie was plying the teapot again and the kitchen seemed filled with people. Hettie’s friend was there, a Mrs. Blenkinsop, tall, thin, pale visaged, in a frightening hat, and Freddie, sitting with an ankle crossed on a knee and his right arm flung over the back of his chair, looking uncannily like my father in one of his rare relaxed moments. Most startling of all was the presence of Andy Wilson. He was sitting at the table with a mug of tea before him, hardly recognisable with his cap off, his bald pate pale as a blanched leek above his narrow little weather-beaten weaselly face. I had never in my life known him to come inside the house, and now that he had got in I did not like his defiantly easy, proprietorial air. I gave him a hard look, at which he refused to flinch, and he made no move to rise. The Blenkinsop woman in turn was looking hard at me, and seeming not to approve of what she saw. It is always the most unexpected people who see through one. She offered me brisk condolences and went back to talking of church matters to Hettie, who, it was evident, was not listening. Freddie was shooting me shy glances from under colourless lashes. The corner of his mouth was gnawed to pulp, always a sign in him of acute distress. I laid a hand on his shoulder, and he went into a paroxysm of affection, shivering like a gun dog, and stroking my hand convulsively with his own.

“We had a grand time at the seaside,” Mrs. Blenkinsop said to me loudly in her knife-edged, Presbyterian voice. “Isn’t that right, Freddie?”

Freddie did not look at her, but another, different sort of spasm passed through him, and I knew exactly what he thought of Mrs. Blenkinsop.

“Aye,” said Andy, “he do love the strand.”

The funeral was a grim affair, even for a funeral, with urns of flesh-smelling trumpet lilies in the church, and quavery organ music, and much stylised lamentation by a succession of alternately rotund and shrivelled churchmen. Hettie stood in the front pew with Freddie clinging to her arm; they were like a pair of lost, ancient children. Now and then Freddie would send up one of his werewolf ululations to the varnished rafters, and the congregation would stir uneasily, hymnals fluttering. The weather, though fine before and after, laid on a pretty little sun-shower for the interment. Afterwards, as we walked back to the motor cars along an avenue of dripping yews, I engaged in covert consultation with a jolly old hypocrite by the name of Wetherby, who was to be my father’s successor to the bishopric, and whom I knew to have special responsibility for a number of Belfast’s charitable institutions. When he understood my purpose he tried to sidle away from me, but I would not let him go until I had got out of him what I needed to know, along with a reluctant promise of help. Back at the rectory I shut myself into my father’s study with the telephone, and by dinnertime that evening I had the plan ready to put to Hettie. She could not take it in at first.

“You know there is no other way,” I told her. “He’ll be taken care of there; they have facilities.”

We were in the upstairs drawing room. Hettie in her widow’s weeds had a monumental aspect, sitting squarely in an armchair by the window, like the figure of an ancient idol on display on a temple altar, with a rhomb of late sunlight smouldering redly on the carpet at her feet. She gazed at me unblinkingly from under hanging straggles of hair, frowning in an effort of concentration, and agitatedly twining and twining her fingers, as if she were wielding a pair of knitting needles.

“Facilities,” she said; it might have been a word in a foreign language.

“Yes,” I said. “They’ll look after him. It will be for the best. I spoke to Canon Wetherby, and I telephoned the Home. I can bring him in today.”

She opened her eyes very wide.

“Today…?”

“There is no reason to delay. You have enough to cope with.”

“But-”

“And besides, I must get back to London.”

She turned her great head slowly—I could almost hear the gears working—and looked out unseeing at the hills and a distant thin brushstroke of purplish sea. Mingled gorse and heather glowed on the hillsides.

“That’s what Myra Blenkinsop says too,” Hettie said, grown sullen now.

“What does Myra Blenkinsop say?”

She turned her head to look at me again, with a kind of puzzled curiosity, as if I were someone she thought she had known but now did not recognise at all.

“She says what you say, that poor Freddie should be in a Home.”

We were silent then, and sat for a long time, looking away from each other, adrift in ourselves. I wonder what it will be like to die. I imagine it as a slow, helpless stumbling into deeper and deeper confusion, a kind of mute, maundering drunkenness from which there will be no sobering up. Did my father really hold Hettie’s hand and tell her not to worry herself, or did she invent the scene? How do we die? I should like to know. I should like to be prepared.

On the next day I had Andy bring out the Daimler—the Bishop’s Car, as even we in the family had always called it—from the tumbledown shed behind the house, where for most of the year it bided its time in clay-smelling darkness, vast, sleek and intent, like a wild beast that had blundered into captivity and could only be let out, coughing and growling, on occasions of rare significance. Andy treated it as a sentient being, manipulating it delicately and with circumspection, sitting bolt upright and clutching the wheel and the gearstick as if they were a chair and pistol. Freddie became greatly excited, and stumped about the lawn in agitated circles, grinning and crowing. He associated the car with Christmas, and summer jaunts, and those colourful church ceremonials which he loved, and which I suspect he thought were laid on specially for his delight. Hettie brought the suitcase she had packed for him. It was an old one, stuck all over with faded travel labels, testaments of my father’s Wanderjahre; Freddie fingered them wonderingly, as if they were the petals of rare plants from foreign lands plastered to the leather. Hettie wore a black straw hat and black gloves; she clambered into the back seat and settled herself with henlike subsidences, sweating and sighing. I had a bad moment when I got behind the wheel and Freddie leaned over from the passenger seat and put his head lovingly on my shoulder and pressed his straw-dry hair against my cheek. My nostrils filled up with his milk-and-biscuits smell—Freddie never lost the smell of childhood—and my hands faltered on the controls. But then I saw Andy Wilson standing on the grass watching me with spiteful surmise, and I put my foot down on the accelerator with merciless force, and the vast old motor surged forward on the gravel, and in the mirror I saw the house abruptly shrinking to a miniature of itself, complete with toy trees and cotton wool clouds and a toy-sized Andy Wilson with one arm lifted in hieratic and, so it seemed, scornful farewell.

The day was bright, the blue air shimmering with freshets of wind. As we progressed sedately southwards along the Lough Freddie looked out with lively interest at the scenery. Every so often a doggy shiver of excitement would make his knees knock. What can he have been anticipating? My mind kept touching the thought of the prospect before him and flinching away from it like a snail from salt. In the back seat Hettie was muttering under her breath and heaving little sighs. It struck me that soon I might well be travelling this road again, with her beside me this time, and her things in a bag in the boot, on the way to another betrayal dressed up as necessity. I saw my father’s face before me, half smiling in his tentative, quizzical way, and then turning sadly aside, and fading.

The Nursing Home, as it was misleadingly referred to, was big and square, made of dark brick, standing in a dispiritingly well-tended garden in a sombre cul de sac off the Malone Road. As we turned in at the gate Freddie leaned close to the windscreen to look up at the stern frontage of the place, and I thought I detected in him the first tremor of unease. He turned to me with an enquiring smile.

“This is where you’re going to live now, Freddie,” I said. He nodded vehemently, making gagging noises. It was always impossible to know how much he might understand of what was being said to him. “But only if you like it,” I added, cravenly.

In the vestibule were cracked tiles, brown shadows, a big clay pot of dried-out geraniums; there we were greeted by a sort of nun, or lay sister, in a grey wool outfit and a complicated wimple, something like a bee-keeper’s headdress, in which her small sharp beaky face, the face of a baby owl, was rigidly framed. (Where on earth did a nun come from?—was the place run by Catholics? Surely not; my memory must be up to its old tricks again.) Freddie did not like the look of her at all, and balked, and I had to take him by one quivering arm and press him forward. I was by now in a state of truculent ill-temper. This is, I have noticed, a common response in me when there is something unpleasant to be done. Freddie in particular always provoked my ire. Even when we were children, and he used to stumble along beside me in the mornings to Miss Molyneaux’s infant school, I would have worked myself into such a rage by the time we got there that I would hardly notice the other children gloating at the spectacle of the rector’s snooty son hustling his imbecile brother into the classroom by the scruff of his neck.

The Sister led us down a hallway, up a sombre staircase, along a green-painted corridor with a window at the far end through the frosted panes of which the sun shone whitely, the light of another world. Hettie and the Sister seemed to know each other—Hettie in her heyday had been on countless boards of visitors of institutions such as this—and they walked ahead of Freddie and me, talking about the weather, the Sister brisk and faintly contemptuous, Hettie at once vague and frantic, tottering in her unaccustomed outdoor shoes. Halfway down the corridor we stopped, and while I waited politely as the Sister searched importantly among the keys on a big metal ring attached to her belt, another self inside me yearned toward that window with its milky effulgence, that seemed the very promise of escape and freedom.

“And this,” said the Sister, hauling open a dirty-cream door, “this will be Frankie’s room.”

Metal cot with folded blanket, a rudimentary chair; on the blank white wall a framed daguerreotype of a frock-coated worthy with mutton-chop whiskers. I noted the wire mesh outside the window, the Bakelite bowl and pitcher on the wash-stand, the metal loops along the frame of the cot where restraining bands could be attached. Freddie stepped forward tentatively, clutching the suitcase before him in both arms and peering about him in apprehensive wonder. I looked at the back of his head, the delicate, unblemished neck, the pink ears and little whorl of hair at the crown, and had to close my eyes for a moment. He was quite quiet. He looked back at me over his shoulder and smiled, his tongue lolling out briefly and then popping back in. This was his being-good mode; he knew something large was expected of him. Behind me Hettie sighed in unfocused distress.

“He’ll be grand, here,” the Sister said. “We’ll take the best of care of him.” She turned to Hettie confidingly. “The Bishop, you know, was very good to us.”

Hettie, wandering lost somewhere inside herself, stared at the woman in wild-eyed incomprehension. Freddie sat on the bed and began to bounce up and down happily, still clutching the suitcase to him as if it were a big, awkward baby. The bedsprings jangled angrily. The Sister went forward and touched him on the shoulder, not without kindness, and immediately he was still, and sat gazing up at her meekly, smiling his slow-blinking smile, his blood-pink lower lip hanging loose.

“Come along with me now,” she shouted at him cheerily, “and we’ll show you the rest of the house.”

Then it was the corridor again, with its smudged thumbprint of white light at the window end, and as we went towards the stairs the Sister came close to me and murmured, “The poor chap, has he no words at all?”

At the foot of the stairs our little party—the Sister and me, with Hettie behind us, and Freddie, unburdened of his suitcase now, trotting at her heels and holding on to the sleeve of her coat with a finger and thumb—turned towards the interior of the house, from whence there began to come to us a noise, a muffled tumult, as of many large children at boisterous and unruly play. Freddie heard it, and set up a low, worried moaning. We stopped at a broad set of double doors, from behind which the hubbub was emanating, and the Sister, pausing for effect, looked at us over her shoulder with a tight-lipped little smile, her eyes fairly sparkling, as if she were about to give us a wonderful treat, and whispered:

“This is what we call the Common Room.”

She threw open the doors on a scene that was bizarre and at the same time eerily, though inexplicably, familiar. What struck me first was the sunlight, great pale meshes of it falling down from a long row of tall, many-paned arched windows that seemed, although we were on the ground floor, to give on to nothing but an empty expanse of white, strangely shining sky. The floor was of bare wood, which intensified the uproar, adding a deep drum-rolling effect. The people in the room were of all ages, men and women, girls, youths, but in the first moment, by some trick of expectation, I suppose, to me they all seemed to be youngish men, all of Freddie’s age, with the same big hands and straw-coloured hair and agonisedly blithe, vacant smiles. They were dressed in white smocks (like doctors!) and wore no shoes, only thick woollen socks. They milled about in an oddly arbitrary, disarranged way, as if just a moment before our entrance something had fallen into their midst and scattered them like ninepins out of strictly ordered ranks. The noise was that of a menagerie. We stood in the doorway, staring, ignored by all save one or two distracted souls who peered at us suspiciously as if convinced we were no more than uncommonly solid-looking specimens of the usual daytime apparitions. Freddie was silent, his eyes wide, glazed with awe and a kind of manic delight—so many, and so mad! The Sister beamed at us, her plump, mottled little hands clasped under her breast; she might have been a mother showing off with rueful pride her numerous and happily undisciplined progeny.

But why did it all seem so familiar? What was it in the scene that made me think I had been here before—or, more accurately, what was it made me think that I, or some essential part of me, had always been here? The room looked like nothing so much as the inside of my own head: bone white, lit by a mad radiance, and thronged with lost and aimlessly wandering figures who might be the myriad rejected versions of my self, of my soul. A small man approached me, cherubic, pinkly bald, with baby-blue eyes and tufts of woolly grey curls above his ears, conspiratorially smiling, one eyebrow roguishly arched, and took me delicately by the lapel and said:

“I’m here for safe keeping, you know. Everyone is afraid.”

The Sister stepped forward and lowered an arm between us like a level-crossing gate.

“Now now, Mr. McMurty,” she said with grim good humour, “none of that, thank you very much.”

Mr. McMurty smiled again at me, and with a regretful shrug stepped backward into the milling throng. I would not have been surprised to see sprouting from his back a pair of miniature golden wings.

“Come along now, Frankie,” the Sister was saying to Freddie, “come along and we’ll get you settled in.”

He leaned toward her docilely, but then, as if he had bethought himself, he gave a violent start and shied away from her, goggling, and shaking his head, and making a choking noise at the back of his throat. He clutched at me, sinking his shockingly strong fingers into my arm. He had realised at last what was happening, that this was no treat laid on for him, a sort of pantomime, or an anarchic version of the circus, but that here was where he was to be abandoned, the bold corner where, for misdemeanours he could not recall committing, he was to be made to stand for the rest of his life. That blustering anger boiled up inside me all the stronger, and I felt violently sorry for myself, and cruelly wronged. Hettie then, to the surprise of all, gave herself a sort of rattly shake, like one waking with an effort from a drugged sleep, and without a word took Freddie firmly by the hand and led him back along the hall and up the stairs to his room. I followed, and loitered in the corridor, watching through the half-open door as she and the Sister busied themselves unpacking Freddie’s bag and putting his things away. Freddie wandered about the room for a while, crooning to himself, then stopped at the bed and sat down, holding his back very straight, and with his knees together and his hands placed flat on the mattress at his sides. And then, having settled himself, the good boy once more, he lifted his eyes and looked at me where I stood cowering in the doorway, and smiled his most ingenuous, most beatific, smile, and seemed—surely I imagined it?—seemed to nod, once, as if to say, Yes, yes, don’t worry, I understand.

I travelled back to Dublin that evening and took the mailboat to Holyhead. Troop movements had disrupted the trains, and I did not get to London until eight o’clock in the morning. I telephoned Oleg from Euston, waking him up, and summoned him to meet me at Rainer’s. The day was crisp and clear, and the fighter planes were out already, their contrails scattered in the zenith like knotted pipe-cleaners. In Tottenham Court Road the traffic was being diverted around a hole in the middle of the street from which the back end of an unexploded bomb stuck up at a drunken angle. The size of the thing was remarkable. It was also remarkably ugly. This weapon had nothing of the sleek, Luciferian elegance of my revolver. It was just a big stubby iron canister with tail fins shaped like a jumbo biscuit tin. The taxi driver chuckled at the sight. Outside the blasted wreckage of John Lewis, naked plaster mannequins were strewn on the pavement like so many bloodless corpses. “Madame Tussaud’s copped it last night,” the driver said. “You should have seen it: Hitler’s head under some queen’s arm!”

Oleg was at a corner table, with a cup of tea and a cigarette, looking greyly unwell; he was not a morning man. He was wearing his macintosh, and his squashed hat sat on the table beside a smeared, rolled-up copy of the Daily Mail. He had the look of a run-down Napoleon, with those puffy blue jowls and soft-boiled eyes and greasy widow’s peak. I sat down. He considered me warily.

“Well, John?” he said. “You have something for me?”

I asked the waitress for coffee and a bun. There was no coffee, of course.

“Listen, Oleg,” I said, “I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me by that ridiculous name. No one is paying us the slightest attention; no one ever does.”

He only smiled his fat, roguish smile.

“You are always so angry,” he said fondly.

The girl brought thin tea and a bun stuck with a glace cherry. Oleg eyed the bun hungrily. I said:

“There is an agent of ours—I mean, of the Department’s— on the Moscow Politburo staff. He has been in place for five or six years. His name is Petrov. He’s one of Mikoyan’s private secretaries.”

Oleg greeted this news with disconcerting equanimity. He stirred his tea slowly, gazing thoughtfully into the cup. He sighed. His sausagey fingers were deeply stained by nicotine; one does not see that kind of stain any more, even on the fingers of the heaviest smokers—I wonder why?

“Petrov,” he said, turning over the syllables. “Petrov…” He glanced up at me. “How long have you known this?”

“Why? What does it matter?” He lifted his shoulders and turned down his frog’s mouth at the corners. “I’ve known since I joined the Department,” I said. He nodded again, his jowls wobbling, and went back to studying the tea in his cup.

“You know what will happen, when I tell Moscow,” he said.

“They’ll shoot him, I imagine?”

Another big shrug, with a glistening, mauve lower lip stuck out.

“Eventually, yes,” he said.

“Eventually.”

He turned up his eggy eyes to mine and again did that smile of a dissolute baby.

“Are you sorry now,” softly, “that you told me?”

I shrugged impatiently.

“He’s a spy,” I said. “He knew the risks.”

Still smiling, Oleg slowly shook his head.

“So angry,” he murmured. “So angry.” I turned away from him, and was startled by my own spectral reflection in the window beside me. Such a look in those eyes! “Well, don’t worry, John,” he said. “We already know about this Petrov.”

I stared.

“Who told you?—Boy?”

He could resist no longer, and reached out and delicately tweaked the cherry from my untouched bun and popped it into his mouth.

“Perhaps,” he said happily. “Perhaps.”

When I got to Poland Street the house reeked of cigarette smoke and bodies and stale beer. There had been a party the night before. Empty bottles everywhere, fag ends ground into the carpets, on the bathroom floor a puddle of carrot-coloured puke. I went about opening windows. In the parlour I found a large, blond young man—he turned out to be a Latvian seaman— asleep in his overcoat in an armchair. Boy too was asleep. I cleared a space in the kitchen and made tea and sat drinking it and watching a patch of sunlight move across the floor. Presently Nick arrived, with Sylvia Lydon in tow. He was in uniform.

“Where have you been?” he said.

“In Ireland.”

“Oh, yes. Sorry about your dad.”

Sylvia kept shooting sly little glances at me, biting her lip to keep from giggling. They had both been up all night.

“Doing?” Nick said. “Oh, nothing. Just ragging about.”

Sylvia spluttered.

“Well, you both look remarkably fresh,” I said.

I had a very bad headache. Nick searched about for something to eat, while Sylvia leaned against the table and played with the string of pearls at her neck. She was wearing a green satin gown and elbow-length white gloves.

“Oh, Nicky,” she said, “we may as well tell him.”

Nicky.

“Tell me what?”

I recalled dancing with Sylvia Lydon on shipboard as we plunged through the Baltic, her sharp, foxy scent, the feel of her meagre breasts against me.

“Go on,” she said.

Nick avoided my eye. He opened a bread bin and peered into it gloomily. Sylvia went to him and draped an arm across his shoulder and looked at me again and smiled her thin-lipped, triumphant smile. I stood up. Pounding headache now; really, very bad.

“Well, congratulations,” I said. He had not given me a word of warning, not a word. “I’ll see if I can borrow some champagne from Boy, shall I?”

A charming interlude: dinner last night with my children—I mean, my grown-up son and daughter. It was my birthday yesterday. They took me to one of those ghastly grand hotels off Berkeley Square. It was not my choice. I suppose it is the kind of place where Julian brings his more important clients, mostly Arabs, apparently, these days. The dead air in the darkly lit vestibule was thick with the cloying, cottony smell of over-rich food. We were met in the entrance to the dining room by a sleek-headed, fawning head waiter with a marionette’s blank smile and furtive eyes, who greeted Julian with a special intimacy, spotting what he surmised was a big tipper (he was wrong). When we were seated he stood over us flourishing an outsize menu like a ringmaster cracking his whip. Julian ordered a glass of mineral water; I asked for an extra-dry martini. “… And for the lady?” Poor Blanche was so intimidated by now she could hardly look at the fellow. She sat hunched in a flattened Z-shape, her broad back bowed and her head drawn down between her shoulders, trying in vain to make herself small. She was wearing an unbecoming dress made from yards and yards of startling crimson stuff. Her hair stood up like clumps of wire.

“Well,” I said, “this is nice.”

Blanche shot me one of her quick, worriedly conspiratorial smiles; Blanche always enjoys it when I am provocative, though she pretends to disapprove. Julian harrumphed, ponderously shrugging, and inserted a finger under the rim of his too-tight shirt collar and gave it a tremendous, eye-popping tug. At an adjoining table an amply fleshed woman in a strapless gown was beginning to recognise me.

“Saw Mummy today,” Julian said.

“Oh, yes? And is she well?”

He glanced at me with a mixture of reproach and distress, and that peculiar beseeching that he directs at me mutely when the subject of his mother comes up. Vivienne resides now in a nursing home in North Oxford, a victim of chronic melancholia. I prefer not to visit her; she finds my presence upsetting.

“She’s not well, actually,” Julian said. “She has been refusing her meals.”

“Well, she never was a big eater, you know.”

“This is different. The doctors are quite worried.”

“A very stubborn woman, your mother.”

His jaw was beginning to work.

“She sent you her love,” Blanche said quickly. (A likely story.) Blanche has an affecting way of making sudden, eager little feints, like a mouse dashing out of its hole to seize on a bit of cheese, and then as quickly drawing back into herself again with a gulp of fright. She works in a school for children with special needs (i.e., mad). She will never marry, now; I can see her at sixty, all brawn and Labradors, doing good works, like poor Hettie, and laughed at behind her back by Julian’s bratty children. My poor girl. Sometimes I am glad that I shall soon be gone. “I told her we were seeing you tonight,” Blanche said. “She said she wished she could be here.”

I made no comment.

Soup was a clear, thin, tasteless broth. I pushed the plate away, deciding to wait for my sole. Blanche too was having the fish, but Julian in his manly, masterful way had ordered baron of beef. Really, his resemblance to poor Freddie is remarkable. I asked him how things were in the City and he looked at me warily; he imagines I am waiting in confident anticipation for the inevitable collapse of capitalism. I must be a grave embarrassment to him, among his stockbroking colleagues. I do appreciate his filial loyalty, really I do—no one would have blamed him, least of all myself, if he had broken with me after my public exposure—but I cannot resist teasing him, he is so entertainingly teasable.

“Your Uncle Nick,” I said, “was at one time an adviser to the Rothenstein family, did you know that? Before the war. It was one of his more bizarre employments. They sent him to Germany to assess the Nazi threat to their holdings. Of course, we were all spies in those days.”

The word brought a silence down over the table like an awning. Blanche bit her lip, and Julian coughed and frowned and attacked a slice of beef. Heh heh. It is one of the few privileges of old age to be allowed to behave appallingly to one’s children.

“Didn’t Lord Rothenstein buy that picture, The Death of Cicero, for you?” Julian said.

“Yes,” I said shortly. “But I paid him back the loan. One would not want to be in debt to a Rothenstein. And it’s Seneca, not Cicero.”

A frightening thought occurred to me: had the Poussin been a plant, a lure, a way of putting me in their debt? Had they got Wally Cohen to leave it there among the gallery dross, where I would be bound to nose it out? The picture could have been from Rothenstein’s private collection, he would have been well able to spare it. I recalled the peculiar look he and Boy had exchanged on the pavement that summer evening outside Alighieri’s, and Rothenstein laughing his big soft laugh and turning away. I sat aghast, with Julian’s voice buzzing incomprehensibly in my ear, as the thing opened before my appalled imagination like a chrysalis and the whole horrible nasty little plot crawled out. But then, as quickly as it had unfolded, it collapsed again, the wings were furled, the casings fell to dust, and the dust dispersed. Nonsense, nonsense; pure paranoia. I was able to breathe again. I leaned back on my chair and smiled weakly. Julian had asked me a question and was waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry,” I said, “what were you saying…?”

“Oh, nothing.”

That woman at the table next to us had at last identified me, and was speaking eagerly into the ear of the elderly gent to her left, her bulbous eyes fixed on me excitedly and the tops of her pale plump breasts aquiver. Nice to think one can still cause a flutter. “Funny,” I said, “that Leo was never exposed.”

Julian stared.

“You mean he…?”

“Oh yes, he was one of us. Never very active, more a sort of eminence. Our masters in Moscow were leery of him, him being a Jew and them being—well, Russians; but they valued his connections. And then there was all that money— Blanche, my dear, are you all right?”

“Yes, yes, it’s just a bone… it’s got stuck…”

Julian had stopped eating, and was sitting with his knife and fork upright in his fists, glowering at his blood-stained plate.

“Is this true,” he said, “or just one of your jokes?”

“Would I lie about such a thing?”

He looked at my smirk and chose not to answer; instead he asked:

“Uncle Nick—did he know? About Rothenstein, I mean.”

Blanche, purple-faced, was still coughing and thumping herself in the chest.

“I never asked him,” I said. “Nick was not terribly observant, you know. Vain people tend not to be. Blanche, do drink some water.”

Julian bent thoughtfully to his food again, showing me the top of Freddie’s head, the same coarse-textured hair and broad crown. Strange the things the genes choose to replicate.

“He wasn’t one of you,” he said, “was he—Uncle Nick?”

The Sancerre Julian had ordered was really quite good, though he knows I do not like Sancerre.

“Poor Nick,” I said. “All those years and he never noticed a thing. Vanity, you see. Whatever he looked at turned immediately into a mirror. But, ah, such charm!” Julian stopped chewing, keeping his eyes fixed on his plate. I chuckled. “No,” I said, “don’t worry, he was always profoundly, depressingly hetero.”

Another terrible silence. Had I gone too far? Julian has never reconciled himself to my queerness—well, I would hardly have expected him to: what son would? The thought of even a heterosexual parent’s sexuality is squirm-making enough. And then, he is very loyal to his mother. Blanche is more tolerant of me than Julian is; women don’t really take sex seriously. She is very tender and considerate of my feelings—for I do have feelings, despite appearances to the contrary—but I’m sure she too must think I betrayed her mother. Oh, families!

“Have you talked to Uncle Nick?” she said now. “I mean, since…?”

“No, no. Nick and I have not spoken for many years. I was something of a missing rung on the ladder of his success. It was necessary for him to step over me.”

For some reason Blanche reached out and gave my hand a squeeze, her eyes going shiny; she is such a soft poor thing, much too good-hearted, really, for a daughter of mine. Julian noted the gesture, and frowned. He said:

“Did he know about… about you?”

“About me being a spy?” He flinched; I was feeling really quite mischievous by now, thanks to my having drunk most of the bottle of wine. I told myself to go carefully. The lady of the heaving embonpoint was agog. “Oh, no,” I said. “Why would you think that? I’m sure he would have said. He was very straightforward, you know, very bluff and honest, at least in those days—they do say he has been involved in some murky doings on the way to his present position of power and influence. He was always a bit of a Fascist, was old Nick.”

Julian snickered, surprising me; he has never been noted for his sense of humour.

“Would that prevent him from working for the Russians?” he said.

I turned the wineglass in my fingers, admiring the brassy, fiery sunburst burning in its depths.

“Of course,” I said mildly, “you find it hard to distinguish between opposing ideologies. Capital is colour-blind.” Stung, he was about to respond, but instead looked down at his plate again, breathing an angry sigh through his nostrils. Blanche gave me another beseeching, sorrowful look. “Come,” I said, “let me buy you both a drink. Julian: a brandy?” I caught the glance that they exchanged: they had agreed a time limit for the evening. I thought of the flat, with its desk and lamp, of the window holding back the glossy black night. Blanche began to say something but I interrupted her. “And tell me, Julian, how is…?” I always have trouble remembering his wife’s name. “How is Pamela?” I should have asked after the children, too, but I did not wish to have that subject opened up. The thought of grandchildren I find peculiarly dispiriting, and not for the obvious reasons. “She’s thriving, I hope?”

He nodded grimly and said nothing. He knows what I think of Pamela. She keeps horses. Abruptly, as if the mention of his wife were a signal, he brought the meal to a close, putting down his napkin with grave finality, while Blanche leaned down hurriedly and scrabbled about under her chair for her handbag; he always did bully her. He and I had a brief tussle over the bill; I let him win. In the lobby he helped me on with my overcoat. I felt suddenly old and pettish and wronged. The night was raw. As we walked along the pavement Blanche linked her arm in mine, but I held myself stiffly away from her. Julian’s big black car raced purringly through the darkened streets—Julian becomes uncharacteristically impetuous when he gets behind the wheel. In Portland Place a heap of rags was thrown on the steps leading up to my door; when I stepped out of the car the rags stirred and a terrible, ruined face looked up at me blearily.

“Look,” I said to Julian, “there’s the result of your capitalism for you!”

I do not know what came over me, shouting in the street like that. It was not at all like me. Julian had not got out, and sat now staring dourly through the windscreen and tapping out an impatient rhythm with his fingers on the wheel. We said our stiff goodnights. At the corner, though, the car stopped with a squeal and the door was thrust open and Blanche came running back down the middle of the road. Where did she get those big feet from?—not my side, anyway. I already had the key in the lock. She struggled up the steps, panting. “I just wanted to…” she said, “I just wanted…” She stopped, and looked at the ground. Then she gave a great shrug, and a sort of exasperated, lost laugh, and kissed me quickly on the cheek and turned away. At the foot of the steps she paused, and bent over her purse, becoming Vivienne’s mother for a second. A blackened hand reached up from the bundle of rags and she placed a coin in it. She glanced back at me and smiled, bravely, sadly and, I thought, with the hint of an apology—for what, I could not say— and then hurried away towards the waiting car.

What is it, I ask myself, what is it that everyone knows, that I do not know?

This morning early, before some busybody should come and move him on, I went down to have a look at that wretch on the steps. He was awake, reclining in his filthy cocoon, his frightful eyes fixed on horrors in the air that only he could see. Indeterminate age, cropped grey hair, scabs all over, mouth blackly agape. I spoke to him but he did not respond; I think he could not hear me. I cast about for something I might do to help him, but soon gave up, in the glum, hopeless way that one does. I was about to turn away when I saw something stir under his chin, inside the collar of his buttoned-up overcoat. It was a little dog, a pup, I think, mangy brown, with big sad eager eyes and a torn ear. It licked its lips at me and squirmed ingratiatingly. Its tongue was shocking in its stark, pink cleanness. A man and his dog. Good God. Everyone must have something to love, some little scrap of life. I went back up the steps, ashamed to have to acknowledge that I felt more sorrow for the dog than I did for the man. What a thing it is, the human heart.

11

Miss Vandeleur has I think been listening to wild stories about life at the Poland Street house during the war, for whenever I make mention of the place I seem to detect in her a muffled shudder of disapproval and maidenly pudeur. It is true, there were some memorable debauches there when the Blitz was on, but for goodness’ sake, Miss V., at that time London generally, at least at the level of our class, had the atmosphere of an Italian city state in the days of the Black Death. Although she would never admit it, liberated young woman that she is, what my biographer really reprehends is not the sexual licence of those days, but the nature of the sexuality. Like so many others, she imagines the house was inhabited exclusively by queers. I remind her that our landlord, Leo Rothenstein, was as red-blooded a hetero as his Jewish blood would allow—and there was Nick, after all; need I say more? I admit that when Boy moved in, there were always questionable young men about the place, although occasionally of a morning I would meet some dazed girl stumbling out of his room with her hair in knots and carrying her stockings over her arm.

Danny Perkins was one of Boy’s discoveries.

The house was tall and narrow, and seemed to lean a little outwards over the street. Blake must have seen angels prancing in the sunlight flashing down from those high windows. The living accommodation comprised three floors above a doctor’s surgery. The doctor was an elusive figure; Boy insisted that he was an abortionist. Leo, despite his grandee’s manner, had a taste for louche living, and had bought the house as a refuge from the stultifying magnificence of the family mansion in Portman Square. At that time, though, he was rarely in Poland Street, having moved with his new and already pregnant wife to the safety of his place in the country. I had a bedroom on the second floor, across the corridor from the tiny dressing room where Boy lived in awesome squalor. Above us was Nick’s flat. I still had the place in Bayswater, but bombs had fallen near Lancaster Gate and on the west side of Sussex Square, and Vivienne had decamped with the child to her parents’ house in Oxford for the duration. I missed them, in periodic bouts of loneliness and self-pity, but I will not pretend that I was not on the whole content with the arrangement.

In the mornings I was lecturing on Borromini at the Institute—what a sense of urgency and profound pathos was lent to these occasions by the sound of bombs falling on the city—and in the afternoons I was at my desk in the Department. The crypt-analysts at Bletchley Park had broken the Luftwaffe signal codes and I was able to pass a great deal of valuable information to Oleg on the strength and tactics of the German Air Force. (No, Miss V., however you may urge me, I shall not deign to engage with criticism of my dealings with a country which at the time was supposedly in league with Hitler against us; surely by now it is clear where my loyalties would always lie, whatever worthless treaty this or that vile tyrant might put his name to.) I was, I realised, happy. Amidst the schoolroom smells of the Department—pencil shavings, cheap paper, the mouth-drying reek of ink—or pacing under the great windows of the Institute’s third-floor lecture room, looking down on one of Vanbrugh’s finest courtyards and paying out to an attentive handful of students the measured ribbon of my thoughts on the great themes of seventeeth-century art, I was, yes, happy. As I have already remarked, I did not fear the bombing; I confess I even exulted a little, in secret, at the spectacle of such enormous, ungovernable destruction. Are you shocked? My dear, you cannot imagine the strangeness of those times. No one now speaks about the sense of vast comedy that the Blitz engendered. I don’t mean the flying chamber pots or the severed legs thrown up on to rooftops, all that mere grotesquerie. But sometimes in the running rumble of a stick of bombs detonating along a nearby avenue one seemed to hear a kind of—what shall I call it?—a kind of celestial laughter, as of a delighted child-god looking down on the glory of these things that he had wrought. Oh, sometimes, Miss Vandeleur—Serena—sometimes I think I am no more than a cut-price Caligula, wishing the world had a single throat, so that I might throttle it at one go.

The summer is ending. So too with my season. At the close of these reddened evenings especially I feel the proximal dark. My tremor, my tumour.

London in the Blitz. Yes. Everyone had a story, an incident. The minesweepers on the Thames. The hundreds of barrels of paint in a burning warehouse going up like rockets. The woman with her skirt blown off staggering down Bond Street in her suspenders, her husband skipping along backwards in front of her with his jacket vainly held out to her like a bullfighter’s cape. After a stray bomb fell on the zoo, Nick, returning at dawn from a trip to Oxford, swore he had seen a pair of zebras trotting down the middle of Prince Albert Road; he remarked their fine black manes, their delicate hoofs.

Und so wetter…

I was in the kitchen one morning shortly after my return from Ireland when Boy came down to breakfast in his dressing gown, barefoot and hungover. He made fried bread and drank champagne from a tumbler. He reeked of semen and stale garlic.

“You chose a bloody good time to skulk off,” he said. “The Germans haven’t stopped since you left. Boom boom boom, day and night.”

“My father died,” I said, “did I mention it?”

“Pah!—call that an excuse?” He considered me with a merrily spiteful smile; he was half drunk already. “You do look a toothsome old thing in that uniform, you know. Such a waste. I met a chap the other day in the bar at the Reform. Spitfire pilot, hardly more than a schoolboy. He’d been out that morning flying sorties. Got shot down over the Channel, baled out, was picked up by a lifeboat, would you believe, and there he was, three hours later, having a Pimm’s. Scared eyes, big grin, very fetching bandage over one eye. We went to Ma Bailey’s and took a room. Christ, it was like fucking a young horse, all nerves and teeth and flying lather. It was his first time, too—and his last, most likely. This war: it’s an ill wind, I say.” He sat chewing and watched me while I prepared my breakfast. My finicking ways with these things always amused him. “By the by,” he said, “there’s a job going that I think might be right up your street. There are these couriers for so-called friendly governments that travel up to Edinburgh on the night train every week to get their dispatches sent out by the navy. We’ve been told to get a look at their stuff. Frogs and Turks and so on; a tricky lot.” He poured himself another measure of champagne. The foam overflowed and he scooped it up from the greasy table top and sucked it from his fingers. “Nick, of all people, has come up with a plan,” he said. “Very clever, really, I was amazed. He’s got this chap, some sort of bootmaker or master cobbler or whatever, who’ll unpick the stitches of the dispatch bags, leaving the seals in place, you see; you take a look at the documents, committing the juicy bits to your famous photographic memory, then slip them back into the bags, and Nobbs or Dobbs the cobbler will redo the stitching and no one will be the wiser—except us, that is.”

I studied a puddle of watered sunlight on the floor at my feet. There is something about midmorning, something dulled and headachy, that I always find both depressing and obscurely affecting.

“And who is us?” I said.

“Well, the Department, of course. And anyone else we might care to take into our confidence.” He winked. “What do you think? Super wheeze, what?”

He grinned woozily, tick-tocking his head from side to side like a happy flapper; he was having trouble keeping his eyes in focus.

“How do we get the bags away from the couriers?” I said.

“Eh?” He blinked. “Yes, well, that’s where Danny comes in.”

“Danny?”

“Danny Perkins. He can get anyone to do anything. You’ll see.”

Sometimes Boy displayed an impressive prophetic gift.

“Danny Perkins,” I said. “Where on earth did you turn up a person with a name like that?”

Boy laughed, and the laugh turned into one of his horrible, twangy coughs.

“Christ, Vic,” he said, smiting himself on the chest with a flattened fist, “you’re such a prig.” He stood up. “Come on,” he said, breathing heavily down his big, pitted nose. “You can find out his pedigree for yourself.”

He swept ahead of me unsteadily up the stairs, and threw open the door of his bedroom. The first thing that struck me was the marked amelioration of the usual feral stink in the room. Boy’s smell was still there—body grime, garlic, a rancid, cheesy something the possible sources of which the mind did not care to seek after—but underneath it there was a softer though no less pungent savour, as if a flock of pigeons, say, had been introduced into a lion house. Boy’s bed was a mattress thrown on the floor, and lying there now in a nest of wadded blankets and soiled sheets was a short, compact young man with that special kind of very white skin, suety and almost translucent, that used to be the sure mark of the working class. He was wearing a vest and khaki trousers and unlaced army boots. He had one arm behind his head and an ankle crossed on a lifted knee, and he was reading a copy of Titbits. I found myself looking at the humid, blue-shadowed hollow of his armpit. His head was a size too small for his broad shoulders and thick trunk of neck, and the disproportion lent him a delicate, almost girlish aspect. His very fine, very black hair was cropped short at the sides, and fell across his pale and, I am sorry to say, acne-stippled forehead in a darkly gleaming scoop, and I found myself recalling that Edenic moment when I had first caught sight of the Beaver, asleep in the orchard in his father’s garden in Oxford, years before.

“Ten-shun, Private Perkins!” Boy shouted. “Don’t you see there’s an officer present? This is Captain Maskell. Let’s have a salute there.”

Danny only smiled at him lazily, and put aside the paper and rolled himself on to his knees and squatted amidst the disordered bed things, quite at his ease, looking me up and down with frank, friendly interest.

“Pleased, I’m sure,” he said. “Mr. Bannister’s told me all about you, so he has.”

His voice was a sort of soft purr, so that everything he said seemed a shared confidence. He had a Welsh accent that seemed almost a parody. Boy laughed.

“Don’t believe it, Victor,” he said, “he’s a hopeless liar. I’ve never mentioned your name to him.”

Danny smiled again, not minding at all, and went on with his examination of me; his regard was that of a benevolent opponent in a wrestling match, searching out the hold that would bring me down with the least discomfort to us both. I realised that my palms were damp.

Lumberingly, laughing, Boy sat himself down cross-legged on the mattress and put his arm around Danny’s waist. Boy’s dressing gown had fallen open over his knees, and I tried not to look at his big flaccid sex lolling in its bush.

“I’ve been telling Captain Maskell about our plan to nobble the couriers,” he said. “He wants to know how we’re going to get the bags away from them. I said that was your department.”

Danny shrugged, making the bunched muscles of his shoulders ripple.

“Well, we’ll just have to ask them nicely, won’t we,” he said, in his cooing voice.

Boy laughed, and coughed again, and again struck himself on the breastbone.

“Look you, bach,” he said, imitating Danny’s accent, “just you hand over those papers now and I’ll give you a big juicy kiss.”

He made a fumbling attempt to embrace Danny, who dealt him a good-natured push with his hip, and he went sprawling on the bed, still laughing and coughing, his gown undone and his hairy legs bicycling in the air. Danny Perkins gazed upon the spectacle and shook his head.

“Isn’t he a terrible sot, Captain Maskell?”

“Victor,” I said. “Call me Victor.”

Presently Boy fell into a tipsy slumber, his big head resting babyishly on his joined hands and his hirsute backside sticking up. Danny laid a blanket over him tenderly, and together we went down to the kitchen, where Danny, still in his vest, poured himself a mug of tepid tea and stirred four big spoonfuls of sugar into it.

“Oh, I am parched,” he said. “He made me drink that champagne last night, and it never agrees with me.” The patch of sunlight had moved from the floor to the chair, and he was bathed in it now, a grinning, big-shouldered, dingy angel. He lifted an eye towards the ceiling. “Have you known him for long, then?”

“We were at Cambridge together,” I said. “We’re old friends.”

“Are you another leftie, like him?”

“Is he a leftie?” For answer he only shook his head and chuckled. “And you,” I said, “how long have you known him?”

He picked at a pimple on his arm.

“Well, I’m a singer, see.”

“A singer!” I said. “Good Lord…”

He smiled at me quizzically, without resentment, letting the silence last. “My dad used to sing in chapel,” he said. “Lovely sweet voice he had.”

I blushed. “I’m sorry,” I said, and he nodded, taking it as his due, which it was.

“I got a place in the chorus of Chu Chin Chow” he said. “It was lovely. That was how I met Mr. Bannister. He was in his car at the stage door one night. He was waiting for someone else but then he saw me, and, well…” He gave a sort of roguish, melancholy grin. “Romantic, isn’t it.” He grew pensive, and sat with hunched shoulders, supping his tea and gazing wistfully into the footlit depths of his memories. “Then this blooming war started up,” he said, “and that was the end of me on the boards.” He gloomed for a while, then brightened. “But we’ll have some fun with this courier lark, won’t we? I’ve always been fond of trains.”

Nick arrived then. He was got up in loud checks and a yellow waistcoat, and was carrying a rolled umbrella in one hand and a brown trilby hat in the other.

“Weekend at Maules,” he said. “Winston was there.” He cast a sour glance in Danny’s direction. “I see you two have met. By the way, Vic, Baby was looking for you.”

“Yes?”

He looked at the teapot. “Is that char still hot? Pour us out a cup, Perkins, like a good chap, will you? Christ, my head. We were drinking brandy until four in the morning.”

“You and Winston?”

He gave me one of his wooden stares.

“He had gone to bed,” he said.

Danny passed him the tea and he leaned against the sink with his ankles crossed, nursing the smoking mug in both hands. Soft morning, the pale sunlight of September, and, like a mirage shimmering at the very edge of vision, the limitless possibilities of the future; where do they come from, these moments of unlooked-for happiness?

“Leo Rothenstein says he had a long talk with the PM before the rest of us arrived,” Nick said, in his serious voice. “It seems we’ve won the air war, despite appearances to the contrary.”

“Well, good for us,” Danny said. Nick looked at him sharply, but Danny only smiled back at him blandly.

Boy reappeared from upstairs, and stood swaying in the doorway. The cord of his dressing gown was still undone, but he had put on a pair of drooping grey underpants.

“For Christ’s sake, Beaver,” he said, “have you been to a fancy-dress party? You look like a bookie. Hasn’t anyone ever told you Jews are not allowed to wear tweeds? There’s an ordinance against it.”

“You’re drunk,” Nick said, “and it’s not half-eleven yet. And for God’s sake put on some clothes, can’t you?”

Boy, swaying, hesitated, regarding Nick with an unsteady, sullen stare, then muttered something and stumbled away upstairs again, and presently we heard him above us, kicking things and swearing drunkenly.

“Oh, listen to that,” Danny Perkins said, shaking his head.

“Go and smooth his brow, will you?” Nick said, and Danny shrugged amiably and went out, whistling, and thumped up the stairs in his outsize boots. Nick turned to me. “You’ve talked to Perkins about the couriers and so on?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you really dream up the scheme?”

He looked at me suspiciously.

“Yes; why?”

“Oh, I just wondered. Ingenious, if it works.”

He snorted.

“Of course it will work. Why wouldn’t it?” He came and sat in Danny’s chair and put his head in his hands. “Do you think,” he said weakly, “you could make me some more tea? My head really is splitting.”

I went to the sink and filled the kettle. I remember the moment: the nickel glint of light on the kettle’s cheek, the greyish whiff from the drain, and, through the window above the sink, the red-brick backs of houses on Berwick Street.

“What did Vivienne want with me?” I said.

Nick gave a gloomy laugh. “I think you’ve put her in pod again, old boy.” The kettle clanged against the tap. He looked at me through his fingers with a death’s-head grin. “Or someone has, anyway.”

And so, for the second time in my life, I found myself, in autumn, on a train bound for Oxford, with a difficult encounter in view; before, it was Mrs. Beaver I had been going to see, before the whole thing started, and now it was her daughter. Funny, that: I still thought of Vivienne as one of the Brevoorts. A daughter, that is; a sister; wife was a word to which I had never quite become reconciled. The train was slow, and extremely smelly— where did the notion of the romance of steam travel come from, I wonder?—and the first-class seats had all been taken by the time I got to the ticket window. Every compartment had its contingent of soldiers, other ranks, mostly, with the odd bored officer smoking jadedly and watching in bitter wistfulness the sunlit fields of England flowing past. I had settled down as best I could to work—I was revising the Borromini lectures, which I hoped to persuade Big Beaver to bring out in book form—when someone folded himself sinuously into the seat beside me and said:

“Ah, the admirable detachment of the scholar.”

It was Querell. I was not pleased to see him, and must have shown it, for he smiled thinly in satisfaction, and crossed his arms and his long, spidery legs and settled back happily in the seat. I told him I was going to Oxford. “And you?”

He shrugged. “Oh, further than that. But I’ll be changing there.” Bletchley, then, I thought, with a twinge of jealousy. “How do you find the work now, in your section?”

“Fascinating.”

He turned his head and leaned a little way forward to look at me.

“That’s good,” he said, with no particular emphasis. “I hear you’re sharing a billet these days with Bannister and Nick Brevoort.”

“I have a room in Leo Rothenstein’s place in Poland Street,” I said, sounding defensive even to my own ears. He nodded, tapping a long finger on the barrel of his cigarette.

“Wife left you, has she?”

“No. She’s in Oxford, with our child. I’m on my way to see her.”

Why did I always feel it necessary to explain myself to him? Anyway, he was not listening.

“Bannister’s a bit of a worry, don’t you think?” he said.

Cows, a farmer on a tractor, the sudden, sun-dazzled windows of a factory.

“A worry?”

Querell shifted, and threw back his head and emitted a rapid thin stream of smoke towards the carriage ceiling.

“I hear him around town, at the Reform, or in the Gryphon. Always drunk, always shouting about this or that. One day it’s Goebbels, who he says he hopes will take over the BBC when the Germans win, the next it’s what a sound chap Stalin is. I can’t make him out.” He turned his head again to look at me. “Can you?”

“It’s just talk,” I said. “He’s quite sound.”

“You think so?” he said thoughtfully. “Well, I’m glad to hear it.” He mused for a while, working at his cigarette. “Mind you, I do wonder what you fellows would consider sound.” He smiled his lizard smile, and then leaned forward again, craning towards the window. “Here we are,” he said, “Oxford.” He looked at the papers on my knee. “You didn’t get any work done, did you. Sorry.” He watched me while I gathered up my things. I had got down to the platform when he appeared in the door behind me. “By the way,” he said, “give my regards to your wife. I hear she’s expecting again.”

I was leaving the station when I saw him. He had got off the train after all, and was hanging back in the ticket office, pretending to read the timetable.

Vivienne was reclining in a deckchair on the lawn, with a tartan rug over her knees and a sheaf of glossy magazines on the grass beside her. At her feet there was a tray with the remains of tea things, jam and buttered bread and a pot of clotted cream; apparently her condition had not affected her appetite. The bruised hollows under her eyes were a deeper shade of mauve than usual, and her black hair, Nick’s hair, had shed something of its lustre. She greeted me with a smile, extending a cool, queenly hand for me to kiss. That smile: one plucked and painted eyebrow arched, the lips compressed as if to prevent an outbreak of the mocking laughter that was already there, that was always there, in her eyes. “Do I look pale and interesting?” she said. “Tell me I do.” I stood before her awkwardly on the grass. From the corner of my eye I could see her mother lurking among the flowerbeds at the side of the house, pretending she had not yet noticed my arrival. I wondered if Big Beaver was home; he had already written to me moaning about paper rationing and the loss of his best compositors to the army.

“How smart you look,” Vivienne said, lifting an arm to shade her eyes and scanning me up and down. “Quite the steadfast soldier.”

“That’s what Boy Bannister says, too.”

“Does he? I thought he preferred the rougher types.” She moved the magazines to make a space for me on the grass beside her chair. “Sit; tell me all the gossip. I suppose everybody is being terribly brave despite the bombs. Even the Palace is not immune. Wasn’t it gulp-inducing how the Queen made common cause with the plucky East Enders? I feel such a shirker, cowering up here; I shouldn’t be surprised if one of the Oxford matrons presses a yellow feather on me in the High some morning. Or was it white feathers they used to hand out to the conchies last time round? Perhaps I should hang a placard about my neck advertising my condition. Breeding for Britain, you know.”

Idly I watched my mother-in-law creeping along a bed of dahlias, plucking up snails and tossing them into a bucket of brine.

“Querell was on the train,” I said. “Have you been seeing him?”

“Seeing him?” She laughed. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I just wondered. He knew about the… he knew you were…”

“Oh, Nick will have told him.”

How cool she was! Mrs. Beaver put down her bucket and straightened up with a hand pressed to the small of her back, and looked all about with a great show of absent-mindedness, still ignoring me.

“Nick?” I said. “Why would Nick tell him?”

“He’s going about telling everyone. He thinks it’s a scream, for some reason. I wish I could see the funny side of it.”

“But why would he tell Querell? I thought they detested each other.”

“Oh, no; they’re thick as thieves, those two, aren’t they?” She turned in the chair to look at me. “What did you mean, have I been seeing Querell?” I said nothing, and her face emptied and grew hard. “You don’t want this child, do you,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s true, isn’t it.”

I shrugged.

“The times are hardly propitious,” I said, “with this war, and worse to come, probably, when it’s over.”

She studied me, smiling.

“What a heartless beast you are, Victor,” she said, wonderingly.

I looked away.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She sighed, and picked with scarlet fingernails at the rug on her lap.

“So am I,” she said. Faintly we could hear the bell for evensong at Christ Church. “It’s going to be a girl.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.” She sighed again, so lightly it was almost a laugh. “Poor little blighter.”

Big Beaver, wearing plus-fours and a sort of shooting jacket—what a ridiculous man—came out of the conservatory, apparently intending to say something to his wife, who was on her knees now, delving in the clay with a trowel, her broad behind turned towards the lawn; seeing Vivienne and me, he stepped back smartly into the doorway and faded like a shadow behind glass and greenery.

“Have you been to the flat?” Vivienne said. “It hasn’t been blown up or anything?”

“No. I mean, it hasn’t been bombed. Of course I’ve been there.”

“Because I rather had the impression from Nick that you were spending most of your time nowadays at Poland Street. I suppose the parties must be fun. Nick tells me you raid the doctor’s surgery for rubber bones to bite on when the bombings start.” She paused. “I hate it here, you know,” she said with quiet vehemence. “I feel like someone in the Bible, sent unto the house of her fathers to atone for her uncleanness. I want my life. This is not my life.”

Mrs. Beaver, straightening up again to ease her back, and unable decently to go on pretending I was not there, gave an exaggerated start, peering at me, and waved her trowel.

“Do you think,” I said quickly, “you might… terminate it?”

Vivienne gave me that look again, stonier than before.

“She,” she said. “Or he, if by some mad chance my feminine intuition is mistaken. But not it; don’t say it.”

“Because,” I went on doggedly, “something that has no past is not alive yet, is it. Life is memory; life is the past.”

“Goodness,” she said brightly, her eyes sparkling with tears, “such a perfect statement of your philosophy! Whereas to human beings, darling, life is the present, the present and the future. Don’t you see?” Mrs. B. had lumbered to her feet and was bearing down on us, her great skirts billowing. Vivienne was still regarding me brightly, the tears standing in her eyes. “I’ve just realised something,” she said. “You came up here to ask for a divorce, didn’t you.” She gave a little silvery laugh. “You did; I can see it in your eyes.”

“Victor!” Mrs. Beaver cried. “What a lovely surprise!”

I stayed to dinner. All the talk was of Nick’s engagement. The senior Beavers were quietly exultant: Sylvia Lydon, a prospective heiress, was a catch, even if she was a trifle shop-soiled. Julian, a year old now, cried piteously when I picked him up and sat him on my knee. Everyone was embarrassed, and tried to cover it with laughter and baby-talk. The child would not be mollified, and in the end I relinquished him to his mother. I remarked how much he looked like Nick—he didn’t, really, but I thought the Beavers would be pleased—at which Vivienne for some reason gave me a bleak stare. Big Beaver spoke bitterly of the French collapse; he seemed to regard it as a personal affront, as if General Blanchard’s First Army had shirked its main duty, which, surely, was to act as a buffer between the advancing German forces and the purlieus of North Oxford. I said I understood that Hitler had changed his mind and would not now attempt an invasion. Big Beaver scowled. “Attempt?” he said loudly. “Attempt? The south-east coast is being defended by retired insurance clerks armed with wooden rifles. The Germans could row over in rubber dinghies after lunch and be in London by dinner time.” He had worked himself into a high state of agitation; he sat fuming at the head of the table, convulsively rolling pellets of bread in his long brown fingers; I had been casting about for a way to introduce the topic of my Borromini book; now, gloomily, I thought better of it. Mrs. B. attempted to lay her hand comfortingly on his, but he shook her off impatiently. “Europe is finished,” he said, glaring about at us and grimly nodding. “Finished.” The child, nestled proprietorially against his mother’s breast, sucked his thumb and watched me with steady, unblinking resentment. I found myself inwardly giving a kind of wolf-howl—Oh God, release me, release me!—and glanced about guiltily, not sure that my silent cry had not been intense enough to be heard. When I was leaving, Vivienne stood with me on the front steps while Big Beaver, grumbling about his petrol ration, got out the car to drive me to the station.

“I won’t do it, you know,” she said. She was smiling, but a nerve was twitching in her eyelid.

“You won’t do what?”

(Release me!)

“I won’t divorce you.” She touched my hand. “Poor darling, I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

How nice!—Miss Vandeleur has given me an Xmas (her spelling) present of a bottle of wine. I could not wait for her to leave so that I might unwrap it. Bulgarian claret. I sometimes suspect her of a sense of humour. Or am I being churlish? The gesture may have been quite sincere. Should I tell her what my wine merchant once told me, that the South Africans sell their wine clandestinely in bulk to the Bulgars, who bottle it under their own more politically acceptable labels and sell it on to all those unsuspecting left-wing liberals in the West? But of course I shan’t. What a cantankerous old so-and-so I am, even to think of it.

12

We made a splendid team, Danny Perkins, Albert Clegg and me. Albert had served his apprenticeship at Lobb’s the bootmaker; he was one of those vernacular geniuses that the working class used to produce in abundance before the advent of universal literacy. He was a tiny fellow, shorter even than Danny, and much slighter. When the three of us were together, proceeding in single file down a railway platform, say, we must have looked like an illustration from a natural history textbook, showing the evolution of man from primitive but not unattractive pygmy, through sturdy villein, to the blandly upright, married and mortgaged Homo sapiens of the modern day. Albert did love his craft, though it tormented and maddened him, too. He was a maniacal perfectionist. When he was at work he had two states: profound, well-nigh autistic concentration, and frustrated rage. Nothing was ever right for him, or right enough; the equipment he had to work with was always shoddy, the threads too coarse or too fine, the needles blunt, the awls made from inferior steel. Nor was there ever enough time to complete the job to the standard that he imagined would have satisfied him.

He and Danny squabbled constantly, in hissing undertones; if I had not been there I believe they would have descended to scuffles. It was not my rank that inhibited them, I think, but that reserve, that genteel unwillingness to show themselves up in the presence of their betters, which used to be one of the more attractive traits of their kind. Danny would stand in the doorway of our compartment, shifting agitatedly from foot to foot and doing that tense, almost soundless whistle that he did, while Albert, perched on the swaying seat opposite me like a furious, khaki-clad elf, with the dispatch bag of the Polish government-in-exile on his knee, unpicked a line of stitching he had just painstakingly completed, preparatory to starting the job all over again. Meanwhile, in the next compartment, Jaroslav the courier, comatose on the vodka and best Baltic caviare with which Danny had been plying him all evening, would be turning over in his couchette, dreaming of duels and cavalry charges, or whatever it is the minor Polish nobility dreams about.

We supplied more than strong drink and lavish foodstuffs. There was a young woman called Kirstie who travelled with us, a delicate little person with vivid red hair and porcelain skin and a marvellously refined Edinburgh accent. I do not remember where we had found her. Boy nicknamed her the Venus Fly Trap. In her way she was as dedicated to her craft as Albert was to his. She would appear in the corridor of the train after a hard night spent entertaining an eighteen-stone Estonian dispatch carrier, and look as if she had been doing no more than enjoying a pleasant hour of mild gossip with a wee friend in a tea shop on Prince’s Street. When her services were not required she would sit with me, taking sips from my whiskey flask (“What my Daddy would say if he knew I was drinking Irish!”) and telling me about her plans to open a haberdashery shop when the war was over and she had earned enough to purchase a lease. She was an unofficial adjunct to our team—Billy Mytchett would have been scandalised—and I funded her, quite generously, out of what I listed as operational expenses. I had to keep her out of the way of Albert, too, for he also was something of a puritan. I do not know what he imagined was happening on those nights when Kirstie was rejected and Danny instead slipped into the next-door compartment and did not reappear until dawn was breaking over the Southern Uplands.

We had some close shaves. There was the Turk who, after only a few minutes with Kirstie, appeared in the corridor in his underwear just as Albert was getting to work on the fellow’s dispatch case with his bradawl and his blade. Luckily, the Turk had prostate trouble, and by the time he came back from emptying a bladder that must have been the size of a football, looking pained and suspicious in equal measure, Albert had done up the few stitches he had unpicked, and I was able to convince Abdul that of course my man had not been tampering with his bag but, on the contrary, was merely making sure that it was all intact and sound. In some instances, however, we had to employ extreme measures. I discovered I had a talent to threaten. Even when there was little real damage we could have done, there was something in the smoothly suggestive way I delivered the menaces that proved gratifyingly persuasive. Blackmail, especially the sexual kind, was more effective in those straidaced times than it would be now. And it was more effective still when Danny and not Kirstie was the bait. There was an unfortunate Portuguese, I remember, a middle-aged fellow of aristocratic bearing by the name of Fonseca, who came a terrible cropper. I was taking a long time over his papers, having only a rudimentary grasp of the language, when I became aware of an alteration in the atmosphere in the compartment, and Albert coughed and I looked up to find Senhor Fonseca, in a dressing gown of the most wonderful blue silk, blue as the sky in a Book of Hours, standing in the corridor, watching me. I bade him come in. I invited him to sit. He declined. He was courteous, but his otherwise sallow face was grey with anger. Danny, who had spent a strenuous couple of hours with him earlier, was sleeping in a compartment further along. I sent Albert to fetch him. He came in yawning and scratching his belly. Having told Albert to go out into the corridor for a smoke, I sat for a moment in silence, considering the toe of my shoe. Such pauses, I found, always had an unnerving effect on even the most outraged of our—victims, I was going to say, and I suppose it is the only word. Fonseca began haughtily to demand an explanation, but I interrupted him. I mentioned the laws against homosexuality. I mentioned his wife, his children—“Two, is that right?” We knew all about him. Danny yawned. “Would it not be best,” I said, “if what has happened tonight, everything that has happened tonight, were to be forgotten? I guarantee you absolute discretion, of course. You have my word as an officer.”

Black rain was falling out of the darkness outside, flying raggedly against the lighted window of the speeding train. I imagined fields, crouched farms, great trees thick with darkness heaving in the wind; and I thought how this moment—night, storm, this lighted, hurtling little world in which we were sealed—would never come again, and I was pierced with strange sorrow. The imagination has no sense of the inappropriate. Fonseca was staring at me. It struck me how much he resembled Droeshout’s portrait of Shakespeare, with his domed forehead and concave cheeks and watchful, wary eyes. I squared the documents on my knee and slipped them back into the dispatch case.

“I’ll have Private Clegg here sew this up,” I said. “He’s very expert; no one will know.”

Fonseca gave me a queer, wild look.

“No,” he said, “no one will know.” He turned to Danny. “May I speak to you?”

Danny did one of his bashful, shoulder-rolling shrugs, and they stepped out into the corridor, and Fonseca looked at me again over his shoulder and slid the door shut behind them. Presently Albert Clegg returned.

“What’s the matter with the dago, sir?” he said. “He’s down there by the lav with Perkins. I think he’s crying.” He gave a snuffly little laugh. “See that thing he was wearing, that blue thing? Looked like a frigging ponce in it.” He grimaced.” “Scuse the language, sir.”

Three hours later we arrived, pulling into Edinburgh under a soiled and angry sky. I sent Clegg to wake Fonseca. In a moment he was back, looking green, and said I had better come and see for myself. The Portuguese was on the floor of his compartment, wedged in the narrow space beside the made-up bed, a large section of his Bardic pate shot away and his magnificent blue gown spattered with blood and bits of brain. A pistol had slipped from his grasp; I noticed his long, slender hands. Later, after our people had removed the body and cleared up the mess and we were on our way back to London, I asked Danny what Fonseca had said to him in the corridor; he made a wry face and looked out at the sodden landscape through which our troop-laden train was crawling.

“Told me he loved me, that sort of thing,” he said. “Asked me to remember him. Soppy stuff.”

I watched him carefully.

“Perkins, did you know what he was going to do?”

“Oh, no, sir,” he said, shocked. “Anyway, we can’t worry about that kind of thing, now, can we? There’s a war on, after all.” Such clear, clean eyes, glossy brown, with bluish whites, and long, sable lashes. I recalled him, in his vest, dropping on one knee beside Fonseca’s body and tenderly lifting the poor fellow’s hands and folding them on his bloodstained breast.

I passed on to Oleg anything from the diplomatic pouches that I thought would be of interest to Moscow—it was not easy to tell whether this or that choice morsel would excite the Comrades or provoke one of their sulky silences. I do not wish to boast, but I think I may say that the service I provided from this source was not inconsiderable. I gave regularly updated estimates, more or less reliable, of the disposition and readiness of the various enemy forces ranged along Russia’s border from Estonia to the Black Sea. I supplied the names and often the whereabouts of foreign agents at work in Russia, as well as lists of anti-Soviet activists in Hungary, Lithuania, Ukrainian Poland—I had no illusions as to the likely fate of these unfortunate people. Also, I ensured that Moscow’s dispatches remained inviolate by spreading the story that the Soviets’ own pouches were booby-trapped and would blow up in the face of anyone who tampered with them; a simple ruse, but surprisingly effective. Moscow’s Bomb-Bags became a staple of Department mythology, and stories even began to circulate of inquisitive couriers being found sprawled under a snowfall of tattered documents with their hands and half their heads blown off.

What Moscow was most interested in, however, was the flood of signals intelligence coming out of Bletchley Park. I had access to a great deal of this material from my desk at the Department, but there were obvious gaps, where some of the more sensitive intercepts had been withheld. At Oleg’s urging I sought to get myself assigned to Bletchley as a cryptanalyst, citing my linguistic skills, my gift for mathematics, my training as a decoder of the arcane language of pictorial art, my phenomenal memory. I confess I rather fancied myself as a Bletchley boffin. I urged Nick to put in a word for me with the mysterious friends in high places he claimed to have, but without result. I began to wonder if I should be worried: that trace against me from my Cambridge days, that little five-pointed red star that Billy Mytchett’s researchers had spotted in the firmament of my files, was it still twinkling there, despite Nick’s promise to have it extinguished?

I went to Querell and asked if he would recommend me for a transfer. He leaned back on his chair and put one long, narrow foot on the corner of his desk and looked at me for a moment in silence. Querell’s silences always carried the implication of suppressed laughter.

“They don’t take just anybody, you know,” he said. “These people are the very best—really first-class brains. Besides, they’re working themselves to death, eighteen-hour shifts, seven days a week; that wouldn’t be your kind of thing, would it?” I was walking away when he called after me. “Why don’t you talk to your chum Sykes? He’s a power in the land up there.”

Alastair when I telephoned him sounded at once vague and hysterical. He was not glad to hear from me.

“Oh, come on, Psyche,” I said, “you can take an hour off from your crossword puzzles. I’ll buy you a pint.”

I could hear him breathing, and I pictured him, peering desperately into the receiver like a trapped rabbit and running stubby fingers through his spiked hair.

“You don’t know what it’s like up here, Vic. It’s a bloody madhouse.”

I drove up in one of the Department cars. It was early spring, but the roads were treacherous with ice. I crawled into Bletchley at twilight in a freezing fog. The pair of guards at the gate were a long time in letting me through. They were young men, pustular, the backs of their necks shaved and sore looking, their caps seeming much too big for their narrow, hollow-templed heads; as they examined my papers, frowning and scratching their downy jaws, they might have been a couple of schoolboys worrying over their homework. Behind them the huts squatted in the fog, and here and there a window was weakly aglow with sallow lamplight. Alastair met me in the canteen, a long, low shack smelling of boiled tea and chip fat. A few solitary souls were scattered among the tables, slumped like guys over mugs of tea and full ashtrays.

“Well, you chaps are really sprawling in the lap of luxury up here, aren’t you,” I said.

Alastair looked wretched. He was thin and stooped, and his skin had a greyish, moist patina. When he lit his pipe the match shook in his fingers.

“It’s pretty rudimentary, all right,” he said, a little huffily, as if he were head of house and I had cast aspersions on the school. “We’re promised improvements, but you know how it is. Churchill himself came up and gave us one of his pep talks—vital work, listening in on the enemy’s thoughts, all that. Ugly little bloke, up close. Hadn’t a clue what we actually do here. I tried to explain a bit of it but I could see it was going in one ear and out the other.” He looked about the room and sighed. “Funny,” he said, “the noise is the worst thing, those ruddy machines rat-ding and sputtering twenty-four hours a day.”

“I see some of the material you produce,” I said, “though not all.” He gave me a sharp look. “Listen,” I said, “let’s go to the pub, this place is awful.”

But the pub was not much better, although there was a fire. Alastair drank beer, dipping a prehensile lip into the suds and sucking up cheekfuls of the watery, warm brew, his adam’s apple hobbling. He wanted to know how the war was going. “I don’t mean the propaganda they put in the papers. What’s really happening? We never hear a thing, up here. Bloody ironic, isn’t it.”

“It’s going to be a long one,” I said. “Years, they say; maybe a decade.”

“Christ.” He cupped his forehead in his hands and gazed gloomily at the patch of ringed and scarred counter between his elbows. “I won’t last it.” He lifted his head and looked about cautiously. “Victor,” he whispered, “when do you think they’ll come in?”

“They?”

“You know what I mean.” He smiled anxiously. “Are they ready, do you think? You’ve been there. If they break…”

“They won’t break,” I said. I put a hand on his arm. “Not when they have us to help them: Boy, me… you.”

His stuck his mouth into his beer again and took a long swallow.

“Don’t know about that,” he said. “Me, I mean.”

We stayed for an hour. He would not talk about his work, no matter how many pints I plied him with. He asked about Felix Hartmann.

“Gone,” I said. “Back to base.”

“His choice?”

“No; he was recalled.”

That brought an awkward silence.

Alastair was due to start his shift at nine. When he climbed down from the stool he was unsteady on his feet. In the car he sat slumped beside me with his short little arms tightly folded, sighing and softly belching. At the gate, a new guard detail, who looked even younger than the first pair, peered in at us and, seeing Alastair, waved us through.

“Not supposed to do that,” Alastair said thickly. “I’ll have to report them in the morning.” He giggled. “We might have been a couple of spies!”

I offered to drop him at his quarters—it was bitterly cold by now, and the blackout was in force—but he insisted that we stop before we got there, for he wanted to show me something. We pulled up at one of the larger huts. As we approached the door I heard, or rather felt, through the soles of my shoes, a muffled, thunderous din. Inside, the decoding machines, bronze-coloured, each one as big as a wardrobe, were churning and pounding in a kind of comic earnestness, like big dull foolish animals ranged about a circus ring performing their frantic, monotonous tricks. Alastair pulled one of them open to show me the rows of wheels spinning and clacking on their rods. “Ugly beggars, aren’t they,” Alastair shouted happily. We went outside again, into the burningly cold air. Alastair lost his footing and would have fallen over if I had not held on to him. For a moment we grappled unhandily in the dark. He smelled of beer and unwashed clothes and old pipe smoke.

“You know, Psyche,” I said in a fervent voice, “I wish they could find a use for me up here.”

Alastair giggled again, and detached himself from me and walked away, staggering a little. “Why don’t you put in for a transfer?” he said over his shoulder. He laughed again. I failed to see what was funny.

I caught up with him, and we went along together blindly through the darkness and the motionless fog.

“When all this is over,” he said grandly, “I shall go to America, where I’ll become famous. Oops, here’s my squat.”

He let himself into the hut and switched on the light; I had an impression of chaos and squalor. He remembered the blackout, and turned off the light again. I was suddenly tired of him, of his weariness and his bad breath and his air of obscure anguish. Yet we went on standing there, I on the cinder path and he in the deeper darkness of the doorway.

“Alastair,” I said, “you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to row in.”

“No.”

He sounded like a recalcitrant child.

“Then get me in here. I won’t involve you, once I’m here. Just get me in.”

He was silent for so long I wondered if he had fallen asleep on his feet. Then he sighed heavily, and dimly I could see him shaking his head.

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s not… it’s just not…” Another sigh, and then a tremendous sniff; was he weeping? Close by, on another pathway, someone unseen went by, whistling a snatch of the overture to Tannhäuser. I listened to the crunching footsteps fade. I turned away. As I walked off along the path he said behind me out of the darkness: “Tell them I’m sorry, Victor.”

Nevertheless, someone did help me. Suddenly the flow of Bletchley material crossing my desk became a flood, as if someone at the source had opened a sluice-gate. Years later, when I encountered Alastair by chance one day in the Strand, I asked him if he had changed his mind after I had driven up to see him that evening. He denied it. By then he had been to America. “And are you famous?” I asked, and he nodded judiciously and said that he supposed he was, in certain specialised circles. We were silent for a while, watching the traffic, and then he shuffled up close to me, suddenly agitated.

“You didn’t tell them about Bletchley, did you?” he said. “I mean, you didn’t tell them about the machines and all that, surely?”

“Good heavens, Psyche,” I said, “what you must think of me! Besides, you refused to cooperate, remember?”

It was the Bletchley leaks which led eventually to my greatest triumph, the part I played in the great tank battle of the Kursk Salient in the summer of 1943. I shall not bore you with the details, Miss V.; probably these ancient fights seem to you as far off as the Punic wars. Suffice to say that it was a matter of a new German tank design, details of which I got via Bletchley and passed on to Oleg. I am told, and modesty will not prevent me from believing it, that it was thanks in no small part to my intervention that the Russian forces prevailed in that momentous engagement. For these and other contributions to the Soviet war effort—I am determined to keep some secrets to myself—I was presented with the Order of the Red Banner, one of the highest Soviet decorations. I was sceptical, of course, and when, at a table by the window of our caff in the Mile End Road, in the drifting, brass-coloured sunlight of a late-summer evening, Oleg produced a shoddily made wooden box and, glancing about cautiously, opened it to show me the unreal-looking medal—so shiny and unfingered, like a false coin preserved in the police museum as evidence of a foiled counterfeiter’s flashy skill—I was surprised to discover that I was moved. I lifted the medal briefly from its bed of crimson velvet, and, although I had only the vaguest idea of where Kursk was, for a moment I saw the scene, as in one of those old scratchy, noisy propaganda pictures Mosfilm used to churn out: the Soviet tanks racing across the battlefield, a helmeted hero in the turret of each one, with smoke flying, and a huge, transparent flag rippling in front of everything, and an invisible choir of mighty basses bellowing out a victory hymn. Then Oleg reverently closed the lid and stowed the box away in an inner pocket of his shiny blue suit; there was of course no question of my keeping the medal. “Perhaps,” Oleg said quietly, with wheezy wistfulness, “perhaps, someday, in Moscow…” What a hope, Oleg; what a hope.

On the 10th of May, 1941 (those were the days of Significant Dates), I went to Oxford to see Vivienne. She had just borne our second child. The weather was warm, and we sat in the sunlit conservatory, with the baby in a Moses basket beside us shaded by a potted palm and Julian sprawled on a rug at our feet playing with his building blocks. “How nice,” Vivienne said brightly, looking about her at the scene. “One might almost think we were a family.” The maid brought us tea, and Mrs. Beaver kept popping in and out nervously to observe us, as if she feared the familial scene must necessarily break down into some terrible altercation, perhaps with attendant violence. I wondered what account of our marriage Vivienne gave to her parents. Perhaps none; she never was one to explain herself. Big Beaver also made an appearance, shifty as always, and stood and absentmindedly ate a biscuit, and said that he and I must have a serious talk (“On business, that is,” he added hastily, with an anxious roll of the eye), but not today, as he had to go to London. Maliciously, I offered him a lift, and looked on with enjoyment as he performed his snake dance of demurral and squirming apology; the prospect of a couple of hours on the road together was as welcome to him as it would have been to me.

“How I envy you big brave men,” Vivienne said, “free to venture into the very heart of the inferno. I wouldn’t mind watching a few buildings burn to the ground, I’m sure it must be terribly thrilling. Does one hear the cries of the dying, or are they drowned out by the fire sirens and so on?”

“They say the raids are coming to an end,” I said. “Hitler is going to attack Russia.”

“Is that so?” Big Beaver said, brushing biscuit crumbs from the front of his waistcoat. “That will be a relief.”

“Not for the Russians,” I said.

He gave me a glum look. Vivienne laughed.

“Didn’t you know, Daddy?—Victor is a secret admirer of Stalin.”

He smiled at her with his teeth, and then grew brisk, rubbing his hands together sinuously.

“Well,” he said, “I must be off. Vivienne, do rest. Victor, perhaps we shall meet in London”—a man-of-the-world chuckle— “groping our way like blind men through the blackout.” Gingerly he laid a hand on Julian’s head—the child, taciturn already, ignored him—and leaned over to peer into the baby’s basket, his long nose quivering at the tip. “Darling girl,” he breathed. “Beautiful, beautiful.” Then, drolly waving a dusky hand, he gave each of us in turn a sort of glazed, smiling glance, and departed, tiptoeing past the sleeping baby with a finger to his lips in extravagant dumbshow. In the early hours of the following morning, as he was walking down a side street off Charing Cross Road, for what purpose no one knew or cared to speculate, he was struck on the forehead by a very large piece of shrapnel that was flung over the rooftops from a bomb exploding in Shaftesbury Avenue, and died on the pavement, where his body was discovered by a professional young lady as she was making her way home after a night’s work in an establishment in Greek Street. I picture poor Max, sauntering along gaily, whistling a tune, hands in pockets and hat on the back of his head, an ageing flâneur whose very own Belle Époque was about to be brought to an abrupt close by a hurtling piece of Luftwaffe materiel. I wonder what time it was exactly when he died; I am interested, because in those same early hours I too underwent a profound and transformative experience.

The attack that night was the last great air raid of the Blitz. Driving down from Oxford, I was stopped at a police barrier on Hampstead Heath. I got out of the car and stood in the moonlight, the ground shuddering under my feet, and looked down, fascinated, on the city half submerged in a sea of flame. The sky was hung with the tracery of anti-aircraft fire, and searchlight beams swung and swayed, now and then snagging on one of the bombers, a stubby, comical-looking thing, reduced by distance to the size of a toy and seemingly held aloft by the dense ice-white beam fixed on it. “Twilight of the gods, sir, eh?” an eerily cheerful policeman beside me remarked. “Good old St. Paul’s is still standing, though.” I showed him my Department pass, and he scrutinised it by the light of his torch with amiable scepticism. In the end, however, he let me through. “You really intending to drive down into that, sir?” he said.

I should have been thinking of Bosch, of Grünewald and Altdorfer of Regensburg, those great apocalyptics, but really, I cannot remember anything in particular going through my mind, except what might be the best route to take to Poland Street. When I got there, after many vicissitudes, and stopped the car, the full weight of the noise fell on me, making my eardrums vibrate painfully. On the pavement, I looked up and saw in the direction of Bloomsbury a ragged trail of bombs tumbling flabbily down the vertical chute of a searchlight beam. Blake would have been fascinated by the Blitz. As I was letting myself into the house, it struck me that I had never seen anything so bizarre as this key going into this lock. The livid sky shed a tender pink glow on the back of my hand. Inside, the entire house was trembling, minutely, rapidly, like a dog dragged out of an icy river. A lamp was burning in the first-floor sitting room, but the room was empty. The chairs and sofa crouched in what seemed an apprehensive silence, their arms braced, as if at any moment they might get up and scuttle for safety. These raids could be extremely tedious, and one of the abiding problems was to find a way to pass the time. Reading was difficult, and if the bombing was close by it was impossible to listen to music on the gramophone, not only because of the racket, but because the shocks kept making the needle jump out of the groove of the record. Sometimes I would browse through a volume of Poussin reproductions; the classical stillness of the compositions was a calmative, but I was conscious how banal, not to say absurd, it would be for me to be killed with such a book in my hands (Boy always had a laugh about a doctor he once knew who had been found dead of a heart attack, sitting in an armchair with a medical textbook on his lap open at a chapter dealing with the subject of angina pectoris). Drink, of course, was a possibility, but I always found that hangovers were worse than usual on the mornings after raids, I suppose because one’s drunken sleep had been all din and flashing lights and shaking bedsprings. So I was pacing the sitting room, somewhat at a loss, when Danny Perkins came down, in striped calico pyjamas and slippers and Boy’s ratty dressing gown, from which the cord was missing. His eyes were swollen and his hair was on end. He was annoyed.

“Asleep, I was,” he said, “and those blooming bombs woke me up.” He might have been referring to the doings of a noisy neighbour. He stood, scratching, and peered at me. “Been to see the wifey, have you?”

“I have a new daughter,” I said.

“Oh, that’s nice.” He looked about the shadowed room vaguely, stretching sleep-gummed lips and running an explorative grey tongue-tip over his teeth. “I wonder if the pox-doctor’s office has any sleeping pills in it. I could break open a cabinet, maybe?” A tremendous explosion occurred close by, and the floor buckled and sagged alarmingly and the windows boomed and rattled. “Listen to that,” Danny said peevishly, clicking his tongue, and briefly, although I had never met the woman, I could clearly see his mother in him.

“Aren’t you at all afraid, Danny?” I said.

He considered the question.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think so. Not what you’d call properly afraid. I do get nervous, like, sometimes.”

I laughed.

“Boy should put you on the wireless,” I said, “broadcasting to Germany. You’d be a perfect counter to Lord Haw Haw. Why don’t we sit down, since it doesn’t seem either of us is going to be able to sleep tonight.”

Danny sat on the sofa, and I took an armchair on the other side of the fireplace. There were charred papers in the grate, like a bunch of soot-black roses; I admired the convoluted, whorled and pleated shapes, their rich velvet texture. Boy often burned sensitive documents here. He had no sense of security.

“Is Boy in?” I asked.

Danny made a put-upon face, throwing up his eyes. The dressing gown had fallen open, and the buttonless fly of his pyjamas revealed a patch of mossy darkness.

“Oh, don’t talk to me about him,” he said. “Drunk again, and passed out up there, snoring like a hog. I say to him, I say, Mr. Bannister, you’ll have to leave your liver to science.” To the east of us another stick of bombs went off, crackcrack crackcrack craack. Danny grew pensive. “When we were children,” he said, “our dad used to tell us to count how many seconds it took for the thunder to come after a flash of lightning, and that way we’d know how many miles away the storm was. Seems silly now, doesn’t it. But we believed him.”

“Is that what you always call him?” I said. He looked at me, his eyes refocusing as he came back from the valleys. “Boy,” I said. “Do you always call him Mr. Bannister?”

He did not answer, only gave one of his sly, lewd little smiles.

“Like a cup of tea?” he said.

“No.” The silence in the room was a pool of calm in the midst of a raging storm. Danny softly hummed a snatch of song. “I wonder what it would be like,” I said, “if a bomb were to hit the house now. I mean, I wonder if one would know, in the second before everything collapsed?”

“Makes you think, sir, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Danny, it makes you think.”

He smiled that blameless smile of his again.

“And tell me, sir, what would you be thinking now—apart, like, from worrying about a bomb falling on our heads?”

Suddenly it felt as if there were a marble in my throat; I heard myself swallow.

“I’m thinking,” I said, “that I would not like to die before I have lived.”

He shook his head and gave a wondering little whistle.

“Oh, that’s terrible. Have you not lived, sir?”

“There are things I haven’t done.”

“Well now, that’s true of all of us, sir, isn’t it? Why don’t you come over here and sit beside me.”

“No,” I said, “it’s not true of everyone. Not of Boy, or of you, either, I suspect. Is there room for me to sit there?”

“Well, there’s lots of things I haven’t done,” he said. “Lots of things.” He put out a hand and patted the space beside him. I stood up, feeling impossibly tall and teetering, as if I were on stilts. I did not so much sit beside him as tumble down on to the cushions in a heap. He had a faintly meaty, faintly rancid smell; from childhood suddenly I remembered the stink that marauding foxes used to leave behind in the garden in the early morning. I kissed him awkwardly on the mouth (bristles!), and he laughed, and pulled back his face and looked at me, quizzical and amused, and shook his head. “Oh, Captain,” he said softly.

I tried to take his hand, but that did not work. I touched his shoulder and was startled by the hardness of it, the hardness, and the unaccustomed muscular responsiveness; I might have been feeling a horse’s flank. He waited, tolerant, mocking, fond.

“I don’t know… what you do,” I said.

He laughed again, and took me by the wrist and gave it a yank.

“Come here, then,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

And he did.

Do not trouble yourself, Miss V., there will be no graphic descriptions of The Act, of bodies pounding in unison, of the cries and the clawings, the delighted easings, the familiar spasm in unfamiliar surroundings, and then the gentle falling into calm—no, no, none of that. I am a gentleman of the old school, awkward in such matters, a touch prudish, even. The bombs of course lent drama to the occasion, but to tell the truth, these stage effects were a bit overdone, a bit vulgarly Wagnerian, as that unlikely Hampstead policeman earlier in the night had understood. The city quaked, and I quaked, both of us under an irresistible but very different manner of assault. I had no sense of entering into a foreign or an unknown land. True, lovemaking with Danny Perkins was a wholly dissimilar experience from the cool and always faintly preoccupied ministrations of my wife, but I knew where I was; oh yes, I knew where I was. I thought it highly probable that I would not survive this night, in which the intensity of the passion I was experiencing seemed as likely to do for me as the bombs raining down on the city, but I contemplated the prospect with perfect detachment; death was a bored and slightly resentful attendant, sitting impatiently at the other side of the room, waiting for Danny and me to finish so that I might be taken up and led away to the final exit. I felt no shame in the things I was doing, and was having done to me, none of that awful sense of transgression that I might have expected. I do not think I felt any real pleasure, either, that first time. In fact, I felt like nothing so much as the volunteer in a crude and remarkably vigorous medical experiment. I hope Danny would forgive me for making this comparison, but it is, I am afraid, accurate. In subsequent encounters he inflicted such exquisite, tender torments on me that I would have wept at his feet and cried out for more—there was a particular thickening effect at the root of my tongue, an ecstatic, panicky sensation of choking, that only Danny could produce in me—but that time, as the bombs fell and thousands died around us, I was the splayed specimen and he was the vivisector.

Afterwards—what a pity, in a way, that there must always be an afterwards—Danny made us a pot of strong tea, and we sat in the kitchen drinking it, he wearing my jacket, that was much too long for him in the sleeves, and me huddled in Boy’s grey dressing gown, shamefaced, and ridiculously pleased with myself, as the dawn struggled to break, and the all-clear sounded, and a sort of ringing silence descended, as if a vast chandelier had come crashing down somewhere close by and smashed into pieces.

“That was a bad one,” Danny said, “that raid. I don’t think there’ll be much left standing after that.”

I was shocked. Indeed, it is not too much to say that I was outraged. This was the first time he had spoken since we had left the sofa, and all he could come out with were these wretched banalities. What did I care if the entire realm had been flattened! I watched him with sulky curiosity and a swelling sense of umbrage, waiting in vain for him to register the momentousness of the occasion. It is a reaction I in after-years was to see often in other first-timers. They look at you and think, How can he sit there, so offhand, so unmoved, so firmly back in the ordinary, when this amazing thing has happened to me? When I have had a great deal of pleasure from them, or they are very beautiful, or married and anxious (all this in the wholly inappropriate present tense, I notice), I try for their sake to pretend that I too feel that something great and transfiguring has occurred, after which neither of us will be the same ever again. And it is true, for them it has been a revelation, a transformation, a light-stricken falling down in the dust of the road; for me, however, it has been just a… well, I shall not use the word, which anyway I am sure Miss V. thinks only properly applies, if properly is the way to put it, to what she and her plumber, or whatever he is, I have forgotten, do together on their pull-out divan after the pub on a Saturday night.

Immediately, like a fond old roué, I sought to introduce Danny to what used to be called the finer things of life. I brought him—my God, I burn with shame to think of it-—I brought him to the Institute and made him sit and listen while I lectured on Poussin’s second period in Rome, on Claude Lorrain and the cult of landscape, on Francois Mansart and the French baroque style. While I spoke, his attention would decline in three distinct stages. For five minutes or so he would sit up very straight with his hands folded in his lap, watching me with the concentration of a retriever on point; then would come a long central period of increasing agitation, during which he would study the other students, or lean over at the window to follow the progress of someone crossing the courtyard below, or bite his nails with tiny, darting movements, like a jeweller cutting and shaping a row of precious stones; after that, until the end of the lecture, he would sink into a trance of boredom, head sunk on neck, his eyelids drooping at the corners and his lips slackly parted. I covered up my disappointment in him on these occasions as best I could. Yet he did so try to keep up, to seem interested and impressed. He would turn to me afterwards and say, “What you said about the Greek stuff in that picture, the one with the fellow in the skirt—you know, that one by what’s-his-name—that was very good, that was; I thought that was very good.” And he would frown, and nod gravely, and look at his boots.

I would not give up. I pressed books on him, including, not without shyness, Art Theory of the Renaissance, my favourite among my own works. I urged him to read Plutarch, Vasari, Pater, Roger Fry. I gave him reproductions of Poussin and Ingres to pin up on the wall in the little boxroom off Boy’s bedroom that was his private place. I took him to hear Myra Hess playing Bach at lunchtime in the National Gallery. He endured all these trials with a sort of rueful tolerance, laughing at himself, and at me for my delusions and childish desires. One Sunday afternoon we went together to the Institute and descended through the deserted building to the vaults in the basement, where with all the solemnity of a high priest inducting an ephebe into the mysteries of the cult, I unwrapped my Death of Seneca from its burlap shroud and held it up for his admiration. Long silence; then: “Why is that woman in the middle there showing off her titties?”

The price he exacted for submitting himself to so much culture was the frequent excursions that we made together into the world of popular entertainment. I had to accompany him regularly to the theatre, to musicals and farces and comedy reviews. Afterwards we would go to a pub and he would give me a detailed critique of the show. He was a harsh critic. His most scathing denunciations were reserved for the male soloists and the boys in the chorus. “Couldn’t sing for toffee, that one—hear him trying to do that high note at the end? Pathetic, I call it.” He was very fond of the music hall, too, and at least once a week I would find myself squirming on a hard seat at the Chelsea Palace of Varieties or the Metropolitan in the Edgware Road, while fat women in floppy hats sang risqué ballads, and sweating magicians fumbled with scarves and ping-pong balls, and check-suited Mephistophelian comedians flung themselves about the stage on rubber legs, making double entendres, and shouting catch-phrases I could not understand but which sent the audiences into swaying transports of mirth.

Boy too had a weakness for the music hall, and often accompanied us on these jaunts Up West. He loved the noise and the laughter, the brute euphoria of the crowd. He would bob and stamp beside me in his seat, cheering the fat singers and joining in the refrains with them, hugging himself with glee at the comedians’ blue jokes, making wolf whistles at the mighty-thighed, no longer young girls in the chorus. It was as well the darkness hid the rictus of contempt with which I regarded him as he swayed and shouted. Another attraction of these occasions for him was the rich opportunities there were after the show for him to pick up lonely young men. Boy knew about Danny and me, of course—Danny had told him what had occurred as soon as he had woken up that morning from his drunken stupor. I imagine they both had a good laugh. I had waited, not without trepidation, for Boy’s reaction; I don’t know what I had expected him to do, but Danny was supposed to be his lover, after all. I need not have worried. As soon as he heard, Boy came lumbering down the stairs and clasped me in a close and noisome embrace and gave me a fat wet kiss full on the lips. “Welcome to the Homintern, darling,” he said. “I always knew, you know; something in those soulful eyes.” And he cackled.

What really worried me, of course, was what Nick would think. Even the possibility that he would tell Vivienne was nothing compared with the prospect of his disapproval or, worse still, his ridicule. I should say that at that stage I did not for a moment think that I had turned overnight into a fully fledged queer. I was a married man, wasn’t I, with two young children? This fling with Danny I took to be an aberration, an experiment in living, an exotic indulgence licensed by the times, the sort of thing that so many others of my acquaintance had gone through at school but which I with characteristic tardiness had only arrived at in my thirties. True, I was startled, not to say shaken, by the emotional and physical intensity of these new experiences, but that too I could take as merely another symptom of the general feverishness of the extraordinary times through which we were living. I suppose these were the kind of things I planned to say to Nick if he should challenge me. I saw myself in a Noel Coward pose, world-weary, polished, briskly turning aside his remonstrations with the flick of an invisible ebony cigarette holder. (“For goodness’ sake, dear boy, don’t be so conventional!”) But he did not challenge me. On the contrary, he observed a total silence, which was more alarming than any expression of abhorrence would have been. It was not just that he never said anything: he did not register by the slightest sign what he was thinking. It was as if he had not noticed—in fact, sometimes I wondered if perhaps the thing was entirely beyond his comprehension, and that it was this that kept him from seeing what was happening, and from attacking me, or turning from me in disgust. As the years went on, and I acknowledged my true nature to him, if not in so many words then certainly in unignorable deeds, we developed a tacit understanding which, so I thought, embraced not only our friendship but my relations, as he saw them, with Vivienne and the children and the Brevoort family in general. I can never decide which I am more of, an innocent or a fool. Equal parts of both, perhaps.

The day after that night of revelation is lit in my memory with a garish, hallucinatory glare. At mid-morning, when Danny had gone back to his room to sleep—Danny loved to lie in bed in the daytime, wrapped in voluptuous, wool-warm communion with himself—and I was bracing myself to step out into what I was convinced would be an utterly devastated city, a telephone call came, from a person whose identity I never did manage to trace, and even whose gender was uncertain to me, but who seemed to be a Brevoort relation of some sort, to inform me of the discovery earlier that morning in Lisle Street of the body of my father-in-law, sprawled on the pavement in a tacky puddle of his own blood. I assumed a felony had been committed—that sprawl, that spilled blood—and asked if the police had been called, which provoked a puzzled, crackly silence on the line, followed by what I thought was a snort of laughter, but was probably a sob, and a long, gabbled explanation in which the words flying shrapnel seemed to me to strike an incongruously comic note. More phone calls followed (how had the telephone lines survived such a night?). Vivienne rang from Oxford. She sounded tight-lipped and accusatory, as if she were holding me at least partly to blame for the tragedy, which perhaps she was, since I was the only immediately available representative of the vast machine of war in which her father had been inadvertently caught and crushed. Her mother came on the line, urgent and incoherent, saying she had known, had known all along; I took her to mean she had foreseen Max’s death and was adducing it as another confirmation of her gift of second sight. I listened to her blathering, making sympathetic noises now and then, which was all that was required of me; I was still in a state of love-drunk euphoria which nothing could fully penetrate. I thought, with callous irritation, of the lecture? had been meant to be embarking on at this very moment to my class at the Institute; Big Beaver’s death, on top of the air raids, was going to mean a serious disruption of my teaching schedule in the immediate future. Then there was the question of my books: would I have to find a new publisher now, or could I count on the practically senile Immanuel Klein to continue his late partner’s support of me? Really, it was all extremely inconvenient.

Vivienne had commanded me to find Nick and tell him the news. He was not in the house, and I could not reach him at the Department. It took me until lunchtime to track him down, at the Hungaria, where at one end of the dining room a noisy crowd was happily at feed, while at the other, blue-aproned waiters were sweeping up the glass and splinters from a window that had been blown in by one of last night’s bombs. Nick, in uniform, was lunching with Sylvia Lydon and her sister. I hung back in the doorway for a moment, watching him talk, and smile, and turn his head sideways and up in that characteristic way of his, as if to toss back from his forehead the glossy black wing of hair that was no longer there, except in my memory (he was already balding; it rather suited him, I thought, but he was very touchy on the matter, for he had been vain of his hair). There was sunshine on the table, and the girls—Sylvia languorously feline in Nick’s presence, Lydia officially a spinster by now but giddier than ever—were laughing at a joke that Nick had made, and suddenly I wanted to turn and walk away rapidly—I could see myself striding out the door and down the stairs—and leave it to someone else to extinguish that frail square of sunlight on the table, where Nick’s hand rested, holding a cigarette from the tip of which there rose a thin, frost-blue plume of smoke, sinuous, hurrying, like a chain of shivery question marks. Nick turned his head then and saw me, and although his smile remained in place, something behind it faltered, and shrank. He rose, and came across the dining room, keeping his gaze on me, one hand in a pocket, the other trailing his cigarette. When he reached the doorway where I was standing he stopped short a pace and held his head to one side and looked at me, smiling, tense, apprehensive, defiantly nonchalant, all at the same time.

“Victor,” he said, in a wondering, wary sort of way, as if I were an old and not much treasured friend come back unexpectedly after a long absence.

“Bad news, old man,” I said.

That fearful something behind his gaze shrank further still into itself. He gave himself a little shake, frowning in puzzlement, and glanced beyond my shoulder, as if expecting to see someone else advancing on him.

“But why did they send you?” he said.

“Vivienne asked me to find you.”

His frown deepened. “Vivienne…?”

“It’s your father,” I said. “He was in London last night. He was caught in the bombing. I’m sorry.” He turned aside for a moment, jerkily, and released a quick, hissing breath, that might almost have been a sigh of relief. I stepped forward and put my hands on his arms above the elbows. “I’m sorry, Nick,” I said again. I realised I had an erection. He nodded distractedly, and turned to me and slowly laid his forehead on my shoulder. I was still holding him by the arms. From their table the Lydon sisters looked on in unaccustomed solemnity, and Sylvia stood up and I watched her walking toward us in slow motion, shimmering through alternating diagonal slashes of sunlight and shadow, a hand raised, her lips parted to speak. Nick was trembling. I wished that the moment might never end.

Max’s corpse had already been officially identified by that mysterious, disembodied Brevoort—who can it have been?—whom I had spoken to on the telephone, but Nick was determined to see his father a last time. While he sat in silence with the Lydons in the Hungaria, each of them holding one of Nick’s hands and gazing at him with sympathy in which there was, on Lydia’s part at least, a frank admixture of lust, I made another series of difficult and frustrating telephone calls to various centres of so-called authority, which resulted in the grudging admission that if the body of a person called Brevoort had been discovered in Lisle Street, which all my respondents seemed to doubt—Lisle Street had not been bombed, I was told, and what was that name again?—then it was likely to have been taken to Charing Cross station, which was being used this morning as a temporary morgue. So Nick and I walked up Whitehall in the hard-edged spring sunlight, past the statue of Charles I encased in its protective galvanised privy. On all sides were giant mounds of rubble over which ambulance men and Home Guard recruits were scrambling like ragpickers. In the Strand a cascading water main was incongruously suggestive of Versailles. Yet the destruction, however extensive, was curiously disappointing; the streets seemed not ruined, but rearranged, as if a vast rebuilding scheme were under way. I had, I realised, put too much hope in the air war; what the newspapers nowadays like to call the fabric of society is depressingly strong.

“Funny thing,” Nick was saying, “a father’s death. You lost yours—what was that like?”

“Awful. And yet a kind of release, too.”

We stopped where a small crowd had gathered to peer into a crater in the roadway. Down in the hole two sappers were contemplating in head-scratching dismay a huge, plump bomb, like a giant grub, lying on its side half buried in the clay.

“I thought it would be me who would cop it,” Nick said. “I used to picture Max and poor Ma trailing along to view the bloodied remains.” He paused. “I’m not sure that I can look at him,” he said. “I know I was all for it, but now I’ve lost my nerve. Terrible, isn’t it.”

“We’re almost there,” I said.

He nodded, still absently watching the sappers as they got down gingerly to work.

“I wonder what it would be like,” he said, “if that thing were to go off now.”

“Yes, the same thought occurred to me last night.”

Last night.

“Would we know we were dying,” he said, “or would there just be a flash, and then nothing?”

In the station, an ARP warden directed us to the farthest platform, where the corpses, a great many of them, were laid out side by side in neat rows under canvas sheets. A nurse wearing a tin helmet and a sort of bandolier escorted us down the lines. She was a large, distracted woman, and reminded me of Hettie as she had been in her younger years. As we walked along she counted off numbers under her breath, and at last pounced on one of the shrouded forms and pulled back the canvas sheet. Max wore a troubled expression, as if he were in the throes of a perplexing dream. The mark on his forehead where the shrapnel had struck was surprisingly small and neat, more like a surgical incision than a wound. Nick knelt awkwardly and leaned down and kissed his father’s cheek; when he stood up again, I tried not to notice him giving his lips a furtive wipe with the back of his hand.

“I need a drink,” he said. “Do you think there are any pubs still standing?” The nurse gave him a bleak, disapproving stare.

We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get drunk, not very successfully. The Gryphon was crowded, the atmosphere even more hysterical than usual. Querell was there, and came and sat at our table. He was predicting a general collapse of morale followed immediately by widespread anarchy and internecine fighting. “There’ll be killing in the streets,” he said, “you wait and see.” He viewed the prospect with obvious satisfaction. Nick did not tell him about his father’s death. I kept thinking of Danny, and each time I did I experienced a secret surge of elation that was all the sweeter for being, in the circumstances, so shaming.

Later, Vivienne telephoned; she had come down to London, and was at Poland Street.

“How did you know where to find us?” I said.

“Telepathy. It’s in the blood. Is Nick all right?”

The telephone was hot and sticky in my hand. I was wondering if Danny were still in the house; I had an image of him appearing in the sitting room in his vest, and of Vivienne and him settling down on the sofa—that sofa—for a nice long chat.

“Nick is not all right,” I said. “No one is all right.”

She was silent for a moment.

“What are you so happy about, Victor? Has Daddy left you something in his will?”

When Nick and I got to Poland Street it was not Danny who was with her, but Boy. They had drunk most of a bottle of champagne. Boy rose and embraced Nick, with unaccustomed awkwardness. Vivienne’s eyes were red rimmed, though she smiled at me brightly. When she patted the place beside her on the sofa I recalled Danny doing the same thing the night before, and I looked away.

“Are you blushing, Victor?” she said. “What have you been up to?”

Boy was in full evening dress, except for a pair of carpet slippers.

“Corns,” he said, lifting a foot. “Killing me. But it doesn’t matter, it’s only the BBC, no one will notice.”

Presently Leo Rothenstein arrived, and the Lydons, accompanied by a pair of awkward young RAF pilots, and a woman called Belinda, a washed-out blonde with peculiar, violet eyes, who claimed to be a close friend of Vivienne’s, though I had never encountered her before. The blackout shades were drawn, and Boy forgot about the BBC and instead fetched more champagne, and then someone put on a jazz record, and the party was under way. Later, I came upon Leo Rothenstein in the kitchen, in ponderously playful conversation with the by now drunken blonde Belinda. He gave me his most domineering smile and said:

“You must feel quite at home, Maskell—it’s an Irish wake.”

And later still, when still more guests had arrived, I found myself yet again trapped with Querell, who backed me into a corner and lectured me about religion. “Yes, yes, Christianity is the religion of the slave, of the foot soldier, of the poor and the weak—but of course, you don’t consider such people to be people at all, really, do you, you and your pals the Übermenschen.” I half listened to him, nodding and shaking my head at what seemed appropriate moments. I was wondering again where Danny was—I had not stopped wondering that all day— and what he might be doing. I remembered the steely-soft feel of his shoulder, the hot, hard little bristles on his upper lip, and savoured again at the back of my throat the thick, fish-and-sawdust taste of his semen. “At least I believe in something,” Querell was saying, pushing his face close to mine and goggling at me drunkenly. “At least I have faith.”

Danny did not come home that night, or the following night, or the night after that. I held off for as long as I could, and then went to Boy. At first he could not grasp what I was concerned about, and said I should not worry, that Danny knew his way in the world, and could be depended on to look after himself. Then he peered at me more closely, and laughed, not without sympathy, and patted my hand. “Poor Vic,” he said, “you have a lot to learn; our kind can’t afford that sort of jealousy.” And the following week, when I found Boy one afternoon in bed with Danny, I stood in the doorway and could think of nothing to say, could think of nothing to think. Danny, lying on his side, did not realise I was there until Boy said cheerfully, “Wotcher, Vic, old son,” and then he stirred, and turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder and smiled sleepily, as if I were someone he had known a long time ago, and of whom he retained only a confused and vaguely tender impression. Then something opened in me, briefly, frighteningly, as if a little window had been thrown open on to a vast, far, dark, deserted plain.