The Untouchable

13

It is time for me to speak of Patrick Quilly, my quondam catamite, cook and general housekeeper. I miss him terribly, even still. When I think of him I go hot with guilt and shame, I am not quite sure why. I torment myself with the question of whether he fell or jumped, or even if—dear God!—he might have been pushed. I met him when he was working as a sales assistant in a jewellery shop in the Burlington Arcade. I had dropped in one day to buy a rather nice silver tiepin I had spotted in the window; it was intended as a gift for Nick to mark the occasion of his maiden speech in the House, but I ended up giving it to Patrick, in celebration of another, quite unmaidenly accession, when he came that night into my bed. He was tall, as tall as I am, and very handsome, in a sulky, glowering sort of way. His upper torso was remarkable, all muscle and stretched tendons and excitingly wiry body hair, but his legs were comically thin, and he was knock-kneed, a matter about which he was particularly sensitive, as I discovered when I was unwise enough to make a light-hearted allusion to it (he sulked for a whole day and half a night, but as dawn was breaking we made up, very tenderly; I could not have been more… accommodating). He was, like me, an Ulsterman—Protestant, of course, despite the Christian name— and had joined the army at an early age to get himself out of the Belfast slum where he was born. He went to France in 1940 with the Expeditionary Force; I often wonder if I came across his letters home, in my capacity as censor. When the Germans invaded, he was captured at Louvain and spent the rest of the war in what seems to have been a not at all disagreeable prison camp in the Black Forest.

After our first night together he moved in with me straight away—I still had the top-floor flat at the Institute then—and immediately set about reordering my domestic life. He was a tireless tidier-up, which suited me, for I am something of an obsessive myself, in that way (queers seem to come in only two varieties, the sloven, like Boy, or the monk, like me). He was quite uneducated, and of course, as was my way, I could not resist trying to introduce him to Culture. The poor boy really did work at it, much more diligently than Danny ever had, but still got nowhere, and was laughed at for his pains by my friends and colleagues. He minded this terribly, and smashed a cut-glass decanter one day in tearful rage after Nick had amused himself throughout a luncheon at the flat by imitating Patrick’s Belfast accent and addressing cod questions to him on the subject of seventeenth-century painting, about which, I should point out, Nick knew somewhat less than Patrick did.

Patrick had a great love of good clothes, and frequented my tailor with enthusiasm and a blithe disregard for the state of my account. But I could not resist indulging him, and besides, he was achingly desirable in a well-cut suit. There were many places to which I could not bring him, of course, for no matter how presentable he might look, he had only to open his mouth to reveal what he was. This was a recurring cause of friction between us, though his resentment was much alleviated when I took the risk and allowed him to accompany me to the Palace on the day my knighthood was conferred. Mrs. W. even had a word for him, and you can imagine the effect. (I often wonder, by the way, if Mrs. W. is aware of her iconic status among the queer fraternity. Certainly her mother in her day revelled in the role of the queers’ goddess, and was fond of making jokes about being the one real royal among a palace full of queens. Mrs. W.’s humour, however, is less broad, though she does like to tease, in her straight-faced way. Dear me, I miss her, too.)

The advent of Patrick marked the beginning of a new phase of my life—the middle period, one might say—a time of rest and reflection and deep study which I was glad of after the hectic years of the war. The London scene had quietened dramatically anyway, especially after Boy went to America, though the tales of his doings that came back to us from across the Atlantic livened up many an otherwise dull dinner party. In the main, I was uxoriously content. That is only a technical misuse of the adverb. Patrick had all the best qualities of a wife, and was blessedly lacking in two of the worst: he was neither female, nor fertile (I ask myself, in these days of protest and the pursuit of so-called liberation, if women fully realise how deeply, viscerally, sorrowfully, men hate them). He took very good care of me. He was an amusing companion, an excellent cook, and a superb if unadventurous lover. He was also a resourceful pander. Utterly free of sexual jealousy, he brought me boys with the shy eagerness of a cat depositing half-chewed mice at its master’s feet. He was something of a voyeur, too, and it took me some time to get over my instinctive prudery and let him watch while I cavorted in bed with these half-wild creatures.

The staff at the Institute accepted Patrick’s presence in my life without remark. Of course, we were exquisitely discreet, at least during the hours when the galleries were open to the public. Patrick loved to throw parties, a few of which did become worryingly rowdy, for his friends tended to be on the rough side. The following morning, though, by the time my hangover and I had struggled up, the flat would be set completely to rights, the stragglers ejected, the cigarette stubs and the empty beer bottles cleared away, the carpets swept, the atmosphere as cool and calm as the bluish interior of Seneca’s bedroom in the Poussin above my desk, which had not, after all, been stolen by one of the guests, or smashed in a romp, as I in my drunken nightmares had envisioned it would be.

Vivienne never came to the flat. I met her in Harrods one day when I was with Patrick, and after I had made the mumbled introductions we stood talking for a minute, and I was the only one who was embarrassed. Nick thought Patrick a joke. I had hoped he would be jealous—Nick, I mean. Yes, pathetic, I know. Patrick on the other hand took a great shine to Nick, and had an irritating way when he came to visit of following him about, like a large, friendly and not very bright dog. It did not seem to matter how badly Nick behaved, Patrick always forgave him. Nick was advancing into middle age at a stately, seigneurial pace. He had put on flesh, but what would have been a coarsening in others was in him the assumption of a lordly mantle. He was no longer the downy, fascinatingly demonic beauty he had been in his twenties; let us be honest, he looked like a typical High Tory grandee, portly, pinstriped, with that marvellous, all-over pale-gold sheen that the very rich and powerful acquire with the years, I do not know how. That youthful pomposity, which I used to find both comic and endearing, had, like his physical self, grown steadily heavier, squashing the last traces of a sense of humour that anyway had never been one of his stronger qualities. Where once he asserted, with the enthusiasm and certainty of youth, now he pontificated, fastening on to one with the fixed, menacing stare of the bully, daring one to contradict him. He had progressed through the years, a one-man caravan, accumulating the precious goods of life, money, power, renown, a wife and children—two big bright girls, one the image of their mother, the other of her Aunt Lydia—and now wherever he appeared he carried the weight of these riches with him, like an Eastern potentate padding along in front of his retinue of veiled women and burdened slaves. Yet I still loved him, helplessly, hopelessly, ashamed of myself, laughing at myself, a prim, middle-aged scholar pining after this overfed, overconfident, pompous pillar of the Establishment. How deluded I was. Love, I have always found, is most intense when its object is unworthy of it.

At the end of one of those drunken, revelrous parties at the flat I confessed everything to Patrick about my other secret life. He laughed. This was not the response I had expected. He said he had not had such a good laugh since the day his commanding officer in France was shot in the backside by a German machine-gunner. He had known that I had been something significant in the shadowy world of the Department, but that I had also been working for Moscow he thought a grand joke. He knew what it was to live clandestinely, of course. He wanted all the details; he was greatly excited, and was particularly ardent in bed afterwards. I should not have told him all those things. I got carried away. I even named names, Boy, Alastair, Leo Rothenstein. It was foolish and boastful of me, but oh, I did enjoy myself, just letting it all spill out.

We had a row, Patrick and I, on the night that he died. This is a source of continuing, hardly bearable remorse for me. There had been squabbles before, of course, but this was the first real, stand-up, no-holds-barred fight I had permitted between us; the first, and the last. I cannot remember how it started—something trivial, I’m sure. Before we knew it we were going at it hammer-and-tongs, raving at each other, lost to ourselves in an exultant transport of fury, like a pair of demented, doomed lovers at the climax of a bad opera. I wish I had known of the real doom that awaited poor Patrick just a few hours later, for then I would not have said such dreadful, dreadful things to him, and he would not have sat up brooding into the early hours, would not have got drunk on my best brandy, would not have staggered out on to the balcony and plummeted through the whistling dark to his death four flights below in the moonlit courtyard. I was asleep when he fell. I wish I could report some bodeful dream, or say that I started awake in inexplicable dread at the moment of his death, but I cannot. I slept on, and he lay there on the stones, his poor neck broken, with no one to see him die or hear his last breath. The porter found him, when he was doing his morning rounds; the sound of the fellow’s boots on the stairs woke me. “Beg pardon, sir, I’m afraid there’s been an accident…”

At the time I was undergoing yet another round of interrogations by the Department, and curiously enough, this turned out to my advantage, for Billy Mytchett and his people were as anxious as I was to keep the matter quiet. They thought that after years of questioning I was about to crack and tell all, and the last thing they wanted was the canaille of the press sniffing about. So someone had a word with the police and, later, with the coroner, and in the end not a mention of the matter appeared in the papers. I was so relieved; a scandal like that would have gone down very badly at the Palace, where I was still pleasurably ensconced. I stayed inside the flat for weeks, frightened of outdoors. Miss McIntosh, my secretary, brought me groceries and bottles of gin, carrying them up all those flights of stairs herself, despite her years and her arthritis, bless her virgin’s kindly heart. I soon realised, however, that I would have to give up the flat. Patrick’s mark was everywhere; how I wept, bent double at the kitchen table, rolling my forehead on my fist, when I picked up a tumbler one day and found his five fingerprints clearly visible on the fluted sides. I found something else, too. When eventually I worked up the courage to go out on to the balcony, I noticed that the catch on the French window was broken, in such a way that it seemed it might have been forced. I asked Skryne if the heavies had been in the flat, rummaging for evidence against me, but he swore he had sent no snoopers in at all. I believed him. Yet the doubt lingers in my mind; did Patrick come upon an intruder in the flat that night, some stealthy searcher who left no trace, unless you count a smashed body lying all aheap in the silence and the moonlight? Surely I am being fanciful? Patrick, ah, poor Patsy!

By the time hostilities in Europe were drawing to a noisy close I held the rank of major and had taken part in some of the most significant Allied intelligence offensives of the war (imagine here a simper of modesty, a gruff clearing of the throat). Despite my diligence, however, and my successes, I was never able to climb to the very highest reaches of the Department hierarchy. This was, I confess, a source of resentment and humiliation. Nick was at the top, and Querell, and Leo Rothenstein, and even Boy was sometimes given a hand and hauled up to take part in the Olympian deliberations on the Fifth Floor. (What a comedy they must have played out up there, the four of them!) I could not understand why I was excluded. Hints were dropped which suggested that I was seen to be a shade too raffish, that I enjoyed the deceptions and the double-bluffs too much to be taken completely seriously. I thought that rich, especially when I considered Nick’s capriciousness and frequent negligence in matters of security. And if I was regarded as dangerously louche, what about Boy? No, I decided: the real reason I was consistently blackballed was that I was being punished for my sexual deviation. Nick may never have mentioned my affair with Danny Perkins, or the many other such affairs I had enjoyed après Danny, but he was, after all, my wife’s brother, and the uncle of my children. The fact of his own scandalous liaisons—for example, the simultaneous affairs he had carried on with the Lydon sisters right up to and, some said, well after his marriage to Sylvia—did not count, apparently. I need hardly say that I refrained from voicing these complaints. One must not whine. It is the first rule of the Stoics.

Deep down I was afraid that my exclusion from the Fifth Floor might be due to something far more sinister than mere prejudice, or a poisoned word from Nick. My fear was fed by the persistence of that curious echo, that faint sonar blip, which I seemed to catch at certain significant turns in my term of service at the Department. Sometimes I would stop dead in my tracks, like a traveller halting on a country road at night, convinced he is being followed, though when he stops, the footsteps he imagines behind him stop as well. The strangest aspect of it was that I could not distinguish whether this shadowy stalker, if he existed, was friend or foe. Things came into my possession, pieces of information, documents, maps, names, which it was no real business of mine to have; these unlooked for, choice trouvailles made Oleg nervous, though he always allowed his greed to overcome his misgivings. There was an opposite effect, too, when this or that scrap of information that Moscow had asked for, often very low-grade stuff, would suddenly acquire a security classification that put it beyond my reach. In all of this I thought I detected a whimsically malicious note; it was as if I were being made to dance for someone’s amusement, and no matter how I might struggle, the strings, impossibly delicate and fine, remained tightly attached to my ankles and my wrists.

I suspected everyone. For a time I even suspected Nick. During the war, one fog-muffled afternoon deep in winter, when I was with Oleg in Rainer’s—-yes, we went on meeting there almost to the end, even though it was just around the corner from the Department—I saw Nick in the street passing by the smeary window and could have sworn that he had spotted me, though he gave no sign and just pulled down his hat brim and disappeared into the fog. I went on tenterhooks for days afterwards, but nothing happened. I told myself it was all nonsense. Was it likely that Nick would go in for the kind of cat-and-mouse game that I suspected was being played with me—would he have had the subtlety, the wit, for it? No, I said, no, if Nick were to spot one of his top people, even if it was his brother-in-law, hugger-muggering with a Soviet controller—and Oleg was known to pretty well everyone by now—he would have pulled out his Service revolver and strode into the tea shop Richard Hannay fashion, pushing chairs and waitresses aside, and marched me off to be dealt with by the Department’s internal security people. The straight-as-a-die, no-nonsense man of impulse and precipitate action, that was the image of himself that Nick chose to put forward.

Boy, then? No: he might have started the thing as a practical joke, but he would have tired of it rapidly. Leo Rothenstein was a more likely suspect. That kind of elegantly contemptuous game would have appealed to a Levantine parvenu and money-aristocrat like him, but I did not believe he had the subtlety for it, either, nor the sense of mischievousness, despite his parties and his ponderous jests and his boogie-woogie piano playing. Billy Mytchett, needless to say, I did not consider at all. So that left Querell. It would have been perfectly in character for him to make a plaything of me and push me this way and that, just to amuse himself. I remember him once saying, when he was drunk, that a sense of humour is nothing but the other face of despair; I believe that was true of him, although I am not sure that humour is the word to apply to that malignantly playful way he had of toying with the world. Despair is not quite the word either, though I cannot think what is. I never thought that he believed in anything, really, despite all his high talk of faith and prayer and sanctifying grace.

In my calmer moments I accepted that these fears and suspicions were a delusion. No one was able to think straight in those last, frantic years of the war, and I had more to be frantic about than most. My life had become a kind of hectic play-acting in which I took all the parts. It might have been more tolerable had I been allowed to see my predicament in a tragic, or at least a serious, light, if I could have been Hamlet, driven by torn loyalties to tricks and disguises and feigned madness; but no, I was more like one of the clowns, scampering in and out of the wings and desperately doing quick-changes, putting on one mask only to whip it off immediately and replace it with another, while all the time, out beyond the footlights, the phantom audience of my worst imaginings hugged itself in ghastly glee. Boy, who revelled in the theatricality and peril of the double life, used to laugh at me (“Oh, God, here’s Shivershanks with his scruples again!”), and sometimes I suspected that even Oleg was mocking me for my worries and my caution. But mine was more than a double life. By day I was husband and father, art historian, teacher, discreet and hard-working agent of the Department; then night fell, and Mr. Hyde went out prowling, in mad excitement, with his dark desires and his country’s secrets clutched to his breast. When I began to go in search of men it was all already familiar to me: the covert, speculative glance, the underhand sign, the blank exchange of passwords, the hurried, hot unburdening—all, all familiar. Even the territory was the same, the public lavatories, the grim, suburban pubs, the garbage-strewn back-alleyways, and, in summer, the city’s dreamy, tenderly green, innocent parks, whose clement air I sullied with my secret whisperings. Often, at pub closing time, I would find myself sidling up to some likely looking red-knuckled soldier or twitching, Crombie-coated travelling salesman in this or that George, or Coach, or Fox and Hounds, at the very same corner of the bar where earlier in the day I had stood with Oleg and passed to him a roll of film or a sheaf of what the Department supposed were top-secret documents.

Art was the only thing in my life that was untainted. At the Institute I would sometimes slip away from my students and go down to the basement and take out something, not any of the big pieces, not my Seneca, still in storage there, not one of the great Cézannes, but a Tiepolo sketch, say, or Sassoferrato’s Virgin in Prayer, and bathe my senses, swollen with guilt and dread, in the picture’s serenity and orderliness, giving myself up wholly to its insistent silence. I know, and who should know better, that art is supposed to teach us to see the world in all its solidity and truth, but in those years it was the possibility of transcendence, even for the space of a quarter of an hour, that I sought after repeatedly, like a prelate returning nightly to the brothel. And yet, the magic never quite worked. There was something wrong, something too deliberate, too self-conscious, in these occasions of intense contemplation. A suspicion of fraudulence always attended the moment. I seemed to be looking not at the pictures, but at myself looking at them. And they in turn looked back at me, resentful, somehow, and stubbornly withholding that benison of tranquillity and brief escape that I so earnestly desired of them. Unsettled, inexplicably chagrined, I would at last give up and cover up the painting and put it away, in embarrassed haste, as if I had been guilty of an indecency. The dreadful thought comes to me that perhaps I do not understand art at all, that what I see in it and seek in it is not there, or, if it is, that I have put it there. Have I any authenticity at all? Or have I double dealt for so long that my true self has been forfeit? My true self. Ah.

In those years Vivienne and I did not see much of each other. With money left her by her father she had bought a small house in Mayfair, where she led what to me was a mysterious but seemingly contented life. There was a nanny for the children, and a maid for her. She had her friends, and, I imagine, her lovers; we did not speak of such things. She accepted my sexual defection without comment; I think she found it amusing. We treated each other courteously, with cool regard, and always a certain cautiousness. Our exchanges were not so much conversations as a kind of brittle raillery, like fencing matches between two fond but wary friends. As the years went on her melancholy deepened; she nursed it like a cancer. We each had our losses. She grieved a long time for her father, in her shrouded way; I had not realised how close they had been, and was obscurely shocked. Her mother died, too, after years of spectral communication with the departed Big Beaver. And poor Freddie died. He survived six months in that so-called Home and then quietly succumbed to some kind of pulmonary infection—it was never made clear what exactly it was that had killed him. “Och, it was the heart that broke,” Andy Wilson said to me at the funeral. “He was pining, like an old dog that you’d send away from his own place.” And he gave me a slyly venomous glance. Hettie that day was more dazed than ever. At the graveside she plucked at my sleeve agitatedly and said in a hoarse stage-whisper, “But we’ve done all this already!” She thought it was my father’s funeral we were attending. That winter she fell one morning on the icy front step of St. Nicholas’s and broke her hip. From the hospital she was moved directly to a nursing home, where, to everyone’s surprise and no little dismay, including, I suspect, her own, she lived for another five years, confused, sometimes troublesome, lost in the far past of her childhood. When she died at last, I entrusted a local agent with the sale of the house; there are things even a heart as hard as mine cannot endure. On the afternoon of the auction I read in a biography of Blake the poet’s own account of how he had walked out of his cottage on his first morning in sweet Felpham and heard the ploughman’s boy say to the ploughman, Father, the Gate is Open, and I felt that somehow my own father was sending me a message, though what its import might be, I could not tell.

Boy and I went on a pub crawl the day the news came of Hitler’s death. It was May Day. We started at the Gryphon and staggered on to the Reform, with an interlude at a public lavatory in Hyde Park, the big one near Speakers Corner, which was to be a favourite hunting ground of mine in later years. That first time I was too timid, despite the many gins I had already drunk, to do anything but watch the furtive comings and goings. I kept a lookout while Boy and a burly young Guardsman with red hair and extraordinarily pretty ears made noisy and, by the sound of it, not very satisfactory love in one of the stalls. While I was standing guard, an emaciated individual in a mac and a derby came in and cocked an eye in the direction of the ill-fitting door from behind which could be clearly heard, amid groans and stifled cries, the dead-fish slap of Boy’s stout thighs against the red-haired young man’s buttocks. I thought the fellow must be a detective, and my heart set up that curious, light, tripping measure which in the years ahead I would come to know so well in such circumstances, the source of which was a mixture of fear, wild hilarity and a wholly wanton exultation. The loiterer proved not to be a copper, however, and, after glancing once more wistfully towards the stall door and then, despondently, at me—he knew me for a beginner, I’m sure—he buttoned up his flies and ducked out into the night. (By the way, I greatly deplored, towards the end of the good old 1950s, the universal adoption of the zip-fastened fly; true, the zip greatly enhances access, especially if one is in the throes of amor tremens, but I used to love to see that delicate tweaking action of the hand as it undid the always slightly awkward buttons, the thumb and index finger busy as mice while what the Americans delightfully call the pinkie held itself aloof, conjuring for a delicious, absurd moment an agitated society matron reaching tremulously for her teacup.)

I woke next morning on the sofa in Poland Street, crapulous and, as always after a night out with Boy, filled with a smouldering, objectless anxiety. The telephone was harshing beside my ear. It was Billy Mytchett, with an urgent summons. He would not say what the matter was, but he sounded excited. When I came into his office he stood up and trotted around from his side of the desk and shook my hand vehemently, making little huffing noises and looking past my shoulder in a sort of agitated daze. He was by now Controller of the Department. He was still an ass.

“It’s the Palace,” he said, in a fraught whisper. “They—he— he wants you to come round at once.”

“Oh, is that all,” I said, picking a loose thread from my cuff; it struck me how much I should miss being in uniform. I thought of mentioning to Billy that the Queen was a relative, but thought I might have done so already, and did not wish to seem to be harping on the connection. “It’s probably about those damn drawings at Windsor that I’m still supposed to be cataloguing for him.”

Billy shook his head; excitable, hirsute and ingratiatingly eager, he always reminded me of a dog, though I could never decide which breed, exactly.

“No no,” he said, “no—he wants you to go on some kind of mission for him.” He opened his eyes wide. “Very delicate, he says.”

“To where?”

“Germany, old chap—bloody Bavaria. What about that, eh?”

A Department car, with chauffeur, was assigned to take me to the Palace, an indication in itself, in those days of severe petrol rationing, of how impressed Billy was by this royal summons. My driver brought us in by the Horse Guards gate, where a rather brutish but good-looking sentry in full fig, busby and all, sneered at my pass and motioned us on. All this seemed peculiarly familiar, and presently I realised why: I was remembering the day more than a decade before when I had been driven into the Kremlin yard on my way, so I thought, to meet the Father of the People. The anterooms of power are all alike. Not, mind you, that the Palace had much power left, though HM still retained—or believed he did, anyway—considerably more clout than his daughter Mrs. W. has today. He is not highly regarded, I know, but in my opinion he was one of the shrewder of the latter-day monarchs.

“It will be the devil of a thing,” he said, “if these Labour chaps get in, as looks increasingly likely.” We were in one of the great, glacial reception rooms which are a depressing feature of that depressing palace. He was standing at the window, hands clasped at his back, frowning out over the Palace Gardens awash with watery sunlight. In a vast fireplace a tiny coal fire was burning, and there was a vase of wilted daffodils on the mantelpiece. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “What do you think, Maskell?—you’re a sound Tory, aren’t you?”

I was seated, in exquisite discomfort, on a delicate gilt Louis Quinze chair, with my legs crossed and hands resting one upon the other on my knee, looking rather prissy, I suspected, though I could not think how better to comport myself in the circumstances: tiny chair, freezing limbs, propinquity of the sovereign. HM was in his we-don’t-stand-on-ceremony-here mood, which I always found hard to endure.

“I think I’m more of a Whig than a Tory, sir,” I said. His left eyebrow shot up, and I added: “A loyal one, of course.”

He turned back to the window with a deeper frown; this was not, I told myself gloomily, an auspicious start to the audience.

“Of course, the country’s lost the run of itself,” he said testily; his stammer was hardly noticeable when he was exercised like this. “How would it not, after what we have had to endure in these last five years? Mind you, I often think it’s not the war itself but its consequences that have had the most profound effects. Women in the factories, for instance. Oh, I’ve seen them, in their trousers, smoking cigarettes and giving cheek. I said from the start no good would come of it—and now look where we are!”

He fell into a brooding silence. I waited, breathing shallowly from the top of my lungs. He was wearing an impeccably cut three-piece suit of smooth tweed, with a regimental tie; such ease, such negligent grace, even in a bad mood—you really cannot beat royalty for poise in adversity. He was fifty, but looked older. His heart even then must have been beginning to fail.

“Mr. Attlee,” I said with judicious care, “seems a reasonable man.”

He shrugged.

“Oh, Attlee’s all right; I can work with Attlee. But the ones around him…!” He gave himself an angry shake, then sighed, and turned and walked to the fireplace and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece and looked resignedly at a far corner of the ceiling. “Well, we shall have to work with all of them, shan’t we. We wouldn’t want to hand them an excuse to abolish the monarchy.” He lowered his eyes abruptly from the ceiling and gave me a merry stare. “Or would we? What says the loyal Whig?”

“I hardly think, sir,” I said, “that Clem Attlee, or for that matter anyone in his party, would attempt, or even wish, to abolish the throne.”

“Who knows, who knows? Anything is possible in the future—and they are the future.”

“For a time, perhaps,” I said. “The life of a government is short; the throne endures.” Really, the thought of the moderate Left in power for any appreciable interval made me shudder inwardly. Hot, hangover breath rasped in my gullet like a flare from a furnace. “People are realistic; they will not be fooled by promises of jam for all, especially when even the bread has not yet materialised.”

He chuckled wanly.

“Very good, that,” he said. “Very droll.”

His gaze drifted ceilingwards again; he was in danger of becoming bored. I sat more purposefully upright.

“The Controller, sir, Commander Mytchett, mentioned something about Germany…?”

“Yes, yes, quite.” He seized a second gilt chair and set it down in front of me and sat, elbows on knees and hands clasped before him, and looked at me earnestly. “I want to ask you a favour, Victor. I want you to go to Bavaria, to Regensburg—do you know the place?—and fetch back some papers that a cousin of ours is holding for us. Willi—that’s our cousin—is a kind of self-appointed family archivist. We had all got rather into the habit— a bad habit, I dare say—of giving him… documents, and so on, for safe keeping, and then of course the war came and there was no way of retrieving them, even if Willi would have been prepared to release them: he’s a bit of a terror, is old Willi, when it comes to his precious archive.” He paused, in difficulty, it seemed, and sat motionless for a long moment with his head bowed, frowning at his hands. He had never before addressed me by my Christian name (and was never to do so again, by the way). I was pleased, of course, and flattered, I think I may even have blushed a bit, not unbecomingly, I hope, but I was shocked, too, and not a little put out. As I think I have remarked already, I am a staunch Royalist, as all good Marxists are at heart, and I did not like to hear a king… well, lowering himself in this way. Those papers, I thought, must be very delicate indeed. HM was still frowning stolidly at his linked fingers. “I remember when you were out at Windsor,” he said, “working on those drawings of ours—by the way, have you finished that catalogue yet?”

“No, sir. It’s time-consuming work. And there was the war…”

“Oh lord yes, yes, I understand. I was just enquiring, you know. Just… enquiring.” Abruptly he stood up, almost flinging himself from the chair, which tottered briefly on its graceful little legs. He began pacing up and down before me, softly punching a fist into the palm of his hand. A king in a dither is a memorable spectacle. “These, ah, documents,” he said. “There are letters from my great-grandmother to her daughter Friederike, and some from my mother to her German cousins. Just family papers, you understand, but not the kind of thing we would wish to see falling into the hands of some American newspaper fellow, shall we say, who wouldn’t be bound to silence by English law. Apparently the American army has taken over Schloss Altberg and turned it into some sort of recreation centre for their troops; I hope Willi had the sense to lock away the family jewels—and as to how he’s managing his mother in the circumstances, one hardly likes to think. You’ll meet her, the Countess, no doubt.” He gave the ghost of a shudder, and sucked in his breath sharply, as at the memory of something sore. “A formidable person.”

I watched him pacing, and pondered the interesting possibilities of this errand I was to be sent on. I know I shouldn’t have, but I could not resist pressing a little, ever so gently, on what was obviously a bruised and tender area.

“I think it would be best, sir,” I said slowly, in a tone of obsequious solicitude, “if I were to know in some more detail which are the papers that the Palace is most anxious to retrieve. I have found, in the field”—I liked that touch—“that the more information one has, the more likely one is to bring off successfully the task in hand.”

He heaved a heavy sigh, and stopped pacing and sat himself down unhappily on a sofa opposite the fireplace, pressing the knuckle of an index finger to his thought-tightened lips and looking off towards the windows. A fine profile, if rather weak. I wondered if he had any queer leanings—I haven’t known a royal yet who did not. I was thinking especially of those summer camps for working class lads of which he was so enthusiastic a supporter. I noticed he was wearing thick woollen socks, which looked as if they might have been hand-knitted, not very skilfully; perhaps one of the princesses had made them for him—the elder, I thought, for somehow I could not picture the younger one busy with needles and pattern book. Now he sighed again, more heavily still.

“Every family has its difficulties,” he said, “its black sheep, and whatnot. My brother…” Yet another sigh; yes, I had rather thought his brother would make an appearance before too long. “My brother behaved very foolishly in the years before the war. He was terribly put out, you know, by the… the abdication, and all that; felt the family, and the country, had let him down. I suppose he wanted revenge, poor chap. Those meetings with Hitler—very foolish, very foolish. And it was Willi, you see, our cousin Willi, a much cleverer man than poor Edward, who was the intermediary between the Nazi leaders and my brother and his… his wife.”

His stammer was becoming steadily more pronounced.

“And you think,” I said gently, “that there may be… documents, relating to those meetings? Records? Transcripts, even?”

He cast a glance in my direction, tentative, pleading, almost shy, his eyes drooping with misery, and nodded.

“We know there are,” he said, in a hushed, husky voice, like that of a child at bedtime frightened at the prospect of the dark. “We are trusting you, Mr. Maskell, to retrieve them; we are confident you are the man for the job; we know you will be discreet.”

I nodded in my turn, putting on a deep frown to indicate dependability and bulldoggish resolve. Oh, mum’s the word, your majesty; mum’s the word.

I was flown to Germany on an RAF cargo plane, strapped precariously to a makeshift seat amid slumped mailbags and crates of beer that chattered like teeth. Amazing devastation below, charred forests and blackened fields and roofless cities agape. At the airfield outside Nuremberg I was met by a decidedly sinister Army intelligence officer with a ragged moustache and a mad smile. He told me his name was Captain Smith, but his look said he did not expect to be believed. He greeted everything I said with bitter amusement and a sceptical twitch of the moustache, assuming, I suppose, that I too must be lying about my identity and my purpose, out of professional habit, if nothing else. Not that I was required to say more than the minimum: Smith quickly let me know how grandly, sneeringly indifferent he was to me and whatever it was I was really up to. He had a jeep, in which we drove at terrifying speed through the shattered streets of the city and out into the country. The late spring sun shone heartlessly on the untended fields. The driver was a fat corporal with little piggy ears and rounded, babyish shoulders; the stubbled back of his neck was layered in pachydermal folds. I am always attracted to drivers; there is something strangely stirring in that intent, unmoving way they sit over the wheel, so stern and somehow stately, keeping themselves to themselves, seeming to pay out the miles behind them like so many measured lengths of invisible steel cable. Smith and he treated each other with a sort of angered, high ironic contemptuousness, bickering in venomous undertones, like an unhappy husband and wife out for a Sunday drive. We travelled the ninety kilometres to Regensburg in little more than an hour.

“I’ll give old Adolf that,” Smith said, “he could build a damn fine road.”

“Yes,” I said, “rather like the Romans,” and was taken aback when Smith turned all the way round in his seat to stare at me with an expression of mock-amazed, fiercely smiling derision.

“Oh yes,” he snarled, his voice strangulated with inexplicable wrath, “the Romans and their roads!”

Here we are in Regensburg, an odd little town, its spindly, square towers, many of them topped with enormous storks’ nests, more suggestive of North Africa than the heart of Europe, an impression intensified for me, when I first arrived, by a Moorish sickle of moon hanging askew in the velvety, pale-purple evening sky. I was billeted in a small, dingy hotel called The Turk’s Head. Smith dropped me unceremoniously at the door and he and his driver roared away, the jeep giving a tremendous fart of exhaust smoke as it rounded the corner of the street on two wheels. Forlornly I carried in my bags. There were American soldiers everywhere, in the bar, in the dining room, some even sitting on the stairs, smoking and drinking and noisily playing poker. Their mood was one of dazed euphoria; they were like children who had got overtired at bedtime and were refusing to go to sleep. Children, yes: it was like the Children’s Crusade, with the difference that this ragtag army of overfed striplings would not be devoured by rotten old ogrish Europe, but vice versa. But don’t get me wrong, as they say themselves: I did not hate the Americans; in fact, I found them perfectly congenial, in their unheeding, heartless way. In the sixties I made a number of trips to the United States—lecture tours, consultations—and once, unlikely as it may seem, I taught for a semester at a Middle Western college, where by day I expounded to a roomful of fanatically diligent note takers on the splendours of seventeenth-century French art, and in the evenings went out to drink beer with those same students, by now relaxed and doggily amiable. I recall one particularly convivial occasion at the Rodeo Saloon which ended with me calling upon my old music hall days with Danny Perkins, and standing on a table and singing “Burlington Bertie,” with appropriate gestures, to the noisy if surprised approval of my students and half a dozen cowboy-booted old-timers who were propping up the bar. Oh yes, Miss V., I am a myriad-sided man. And it was not just the American individual that won my admiration (though I more than admired one or two of my students, especially a young, honey-hued football player with flaxen hair and extraordinary cerulean eyes who surprised me, and himself, with the gauche intensity of his ardour on the old leather couch in my locked office one steamy afternoon when a giant summer storm was stamping thunderously across the campus and the rain-light flickered excitedly between the turned-down wooden slats of the rattling window blinds) but the American system itself, so demanding, so merciless, undeluded as to the fundamental murderousness and venality of humankind and at the same time so grimly, unflaggingly optimistic. More heresy, I know, more apostasy; soon I shall have no beliefs left at all, only a cluster of fiercely held denials.

At The Turk’s Head there was no dinner to be had: in Bavaria they dine at noon and are in bed by nine. I prowled the streets and at last found a Bierschenke that was open, and sat for a long time feeling sorry for myself, and drank enormous beakers of blond ale and ate platefuls of evil little linked sausages that looked like dried and shrivelled dog turds. The captain of the cargo plane came in, and before we could avoid it we caught each other’s eye, and so, being well-bred chaps, we were compelled to spend the evening together. He turned out to have been a scholar long ago in peacetime, a specialist in medieval manuscripts. He was a large, diffident person with sad eyes, exuding an air of great weariness. In later years I ran into him again, one damp summer day at the Queen’s Garden Party. He introduced me to his wife, Lady Mary, pale, phthisic, nervous as a greyhound, with close-set eyes and a thin pale nose and a faintly demented laugh. I do not know how she and I got on to the topic of Prince George—very handsome, very queer, killed in an RAF crash in the war—but it became quickly and embarrassingly apparent to all three of us that at the time of the Prince’s death Lady M. and I had both been his lover.

Now he asked in his diffident way what I was doing in Germany.

“Sorry,” I said, “hush-hush and all that.”

He nodded, frowning, trying not to seem offended. We passed the rest of the evening discussing incunabula, a subject on which he was wearisomely well informed.

Early next morning Captain Smith arrived at the hotel in the jeep with the same fat driver and drove me out to Altberg, an unreally picturesque village clinging to the edge of a rocky eminence above the Danube and overlooked by the castle, a tall, turreted nineteenth-century horror, of no architectural interest. There was a drawbridge spanning a deep cleft in the rock, and above the gate a stone plaque bore a carved posy of Tudor roses. In the narrow, lopsided courtyard a pair of hunting dogs, enormous, starved-looking brutes, pricked up their ears and regarded us with truculent surprise. Once again Smith dropped me off with the air of a man brushing something unwholesome from his hands; as the jeep rattled away over the drawbridge I fancied I heard wafting back a cackle of derisive laughter.

The palace was in the command of Major Alice Stirling, a brisk, high-shouldered, hard-eyed woman in her thirties, remarkably good-looking, with red hair and very pale skin and a saddle of freckles on the bridge of her nose that should have softened her expression but did not. I found her disconcertingly attractive, I, who had not been stirred by a woman in years; it must have been those wide, vulnerable-looking shoulders. She shook hands energetically, yanking my arm up and down as if she were working the handle of a water pump; I felt I was being not so much greeted as cautioned. She was from Kansas; she had always wanted to visit Europe, since she was a little girl, but it had taken a war to get her here—wasn’t that something? In the raftered entrance hall a series of begrimed family portraits leaned out at a sharp angle from the walls as if to allow their startled subjects a better view of these recent incomprehensible comings and goings in the family home. There were some massive pieces of dully glistening black furniture. In the middle of the floor stood a ping-pong table, looking oddly self-conscious and forsaken.

“Yes, the facilities here are not what you’d call great,” Major Stirling said, throwing up her eyes and pulling her lower jaw down sideways in an expression meant to portray despair, cheerfulness and pluck, all at the same time. “Still, we manage to show the boys a good time.” Here a knowing twinkle in acknowledgement of the double entendre. “Spirit is the thing, and we have plenty of that. Some of our guests have been shot up pretty badly, but that doesn’t stop them making their contribution. And what,” without missing a beat, “can we do for you, Major Maskell?”

“I should prefer to speak to Prince Wilhelm,” I said. “The matter is delicate. Is he about?”

Major Stirling remained perfectly motionless, canted forward a little toward me, like one of the portraits above her, with her head pertly inclined, gazing blankly at a point in space behind my left shoulder, her fixed smile gradually going rigid and yet seeming somehow to vibrate, as I imagine a wineglass must do in the second before the soprano’s high C shatters it.

“I think,” she said, sweetly, ominously, “I can answer any questions you might have.”

I mentioned vaguely the archive, the royal papers. “Were you not informed of my coming?”

Major Stirling shrugged.

“Someone sent a signal, yes,” she said. “It’s in my office somewhere.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “we should find it and you can read it again. It might clarify matters.”

At this she gave a throaty laugh and tossed her head, making her russet bangs bounce.

“Clarify!” she said. “Golly, you English do have a sense of humour. I’ve never seen a signal yet from your people that didn’t just add to everyone’s confusion.”

Nevertheless she led me to her office, a stone-floored baronial hall with a carved and varnished ceiling and yet more execrable giant pieces of mock-baroque furniture (“Don’t you just love it?” with another square-mouthed, sliding-jawed grimace). The signal was found and read; the Major, frowning at it, shook her head in slow, disbelieving wonderment.

“Maybe the decoders used the wrong code books,” she said.

“I have come,” I said gently, “specifically at the request of the King. King George the Sixth, that is. Of England.”

“Yes, that’s what it says here, Major Maskell.” I wished she would stop addressing me by my rank. The alliteration was unfortunate, and seemed to me to smack of Gilbert and Sullivan. “But I can’t release a used envelope from this castle without authorisation from US Army headquarters in Frankfurt.” A toothed grin. “You know how it is.”

“Surely,” I said in my most reasonable tones, “if the Prince— or, indeed, his mother, who I understand is head of the family now—were to authorise removal of the documents, you could have no objection…? These are private papers, after all.”

Major Stirling gave a positively mannish snort.

“Nothing private about this place any more, Major,” she said, putting on a Wild West drawl, “no sirree.” Prince Wilhelm, she informed me, and his mother, the Countess Margarete, were confined to special quarters. “We don’t call it house arrest, you understand, but let’s just say they won’t be going over to England to visit with their cousins at Buckingham Palace for a while. Not till our boys in the de-Nazification programme get through with them.” She nodded with humorous solemnity, and winked.

“Still, if I might speak to the Prince…?”

Certainly, she said; nothing easier; she would show me the way. She stood up, smoothing her skirt at the front, so that the outlines of her suspender clips showed through. Goodness, I thought, with amused consternation, can it be that I am reverting?

The Prince bore a fascinating resemblance to an elderly battle-scarred crocodile. He had a thick trunk, and short, tapering legs ending in feet so small, in their delicate, pointed-toed, slipperlike shoes, that he seemed to be not standing, but balancing upright on a strong, stubby tail. His head was large and square, and curiously flat at the front and sides; his hair was shaved high up at the temples, with an oiled black saurian slick combed back fiercely from his forehead. His face was pitted and scaly, and cross-hatched with old duelling scars. He wore a monocle, which flashed urgently, like a covert distress signal, as he tottered forward to meet me, a big, beringed, liver-spotted hand held out before him, palm down, as if he expected it to be kissed. He had the distraught, desperately smiling manner of a man who has suddenly found himself at the mercy of people whom in the old days he would not have deigned to notice if they had fallen under the hoofs of his horse. He must have been alerted to my coming, for he was dressed—trussed, might be a better word— in frock coat and striped trousers, with a row of decorations pinned to his breast, among which I identified the Iron Cross and the Order of the Garter. The room in which he received me was in the upper reaches of the castle, a long, low-ceilinged garret with two squat windows at the far end looking out on a fir-clad hillside. The floorboards were bare, and the few pieces of gimcrack furniture wore the contingent look of things unceremoniously shifted out of long-accustomed surroundings and dumped here.

“Welcome to Schloss Altberg, Major Maskell,” he said, in accentless English. His voice was reedy and unexpectedly high-pitched, the result, I was told later, of a wound to the throat incurred in some immemorial battle—I pictured chainmail and lance and flashing tarnhelm—and when he spoke he drew his lips back over his big yellowed teeth in a sort of snarling smile. “I wish I could have received you properly into my home, but in these times we are all at the mercy of circumstance.”

Gravely, exploratively, he continued slowly shaking hands with me, like a doctor testing for temperature and pulse, and then circumstance in the shape of Major Stirling stepped forward and made a boxing referee’s chopping motion with her hand, and at once he released me and stepped back a pace, as if to avoid a smack.

“Major Maskell has been sent here by Buckingham Palace,” the Major said, with a sceptical smirk.

“Ah yes,” said the Prince, without any emphasis at all.

Then we moved into another low room—these must formerly have been the children’s quarters—to meet the Countess. She was seated in an armchair with her back, to the window, large, leather-skinned, fascinatingly ugly, smelling of face powder and unwashed lace. She was straight out of Grimm—every German prince should have a mother like this. She examined me keenly, at once curious and disdainful. Major Stirling she ignored, with magnificent indifference. She asked me about life at Windsor and Balmoral now. She had been to these places many times, of course, before—she lifted a claw and made a dismissive gesture, as if throwing something away over her shoulder—before all this nonsense. The Prince had taken up a heraldic stance behind her chair, and now she twisted her great head and looked up at him with a mixture of exasperation and scorn and barked at him to order luncheon to be served. She turned partly in Major Stirling’s direction but would not look at her. “If,” she said loudly, “we are allowed to entertain guests in our own dining room, that is?”

The Major shrugged, and winked at me again.

The meal was served in a vast, timbered hall with mullioned windows overlooking the courtyard. Liveried footmen came and went wordlessly on creaking shoon, and the pair of hunting dogs padded about under the table, snapping up dropped scraps and collapsing noisily on to their haunches now and then to scratch their fleas. We ate some kind of cold game, venison, I think, with dumplings, which looked like the testicles of a giant albino, and were so dense and sticky that after my knife had gone through them the lips of the wound would shut again with a repulsive, kissing sound. Half a dozen members of the Prince’s family appeared. There was a large, stately woman, with the prominent chest and bright cheeks and glassy stare of a ship’s figurehead, who must have been the Prinzessin, and her adult daughter, a washed-out version of her mother, white-faced and unreachably distant, with ash-blonde plaits coiled at the sides of her head like a pair of earphones. Two sturdy, crop-headed boys, big-bottomed and virtually neckless, were evidently, if implausibly, the young Princess’s sons. Every so often they would scramble down from their chairs and set to wrestling with each other like bear cubs, rolling about the floor, their shrieks flying up to the timbered ceiling and falling back again, nerve-janglingly. The Countess sat at the head of the table with me on her left hand and the Prince on the other, while Major Stirling was banished below the salt. To my left there was an unidentified, very deaf old man, who spoke to me in largely incomprehensible dialect on the subject, if I understood him correctly, of the proper method of killing and butchering wild boar. Opposite me sat a shaggy young man with a twitch, dressed in a kind of dusty clerical garb, who addressed not a word to me and who, when I tried to talk to him, stared at me wildly, his eyes rolling, as if he might be about to jump up from the table and take to his heels. It occurred to me that on other planets there might be organisms of such delicate refinement that to them human life, even at its most developed, would surely seem a state of unremitting agony and insanity and squalor.

Luncheon ended, or I should say, petered out, and my deaf neighbour excused himself with apologetic leers and mutterings and withdrew, and the bear cubs were led away by their wild-eyed keeper, their spectral mother following after, seeming not to walk out the door but fade through it, and the Countess on her stick gondoliered off to her afternoon nap, a hand clamped on the Prince’s arm, and I was left with Major Stirling and the boar hounds, noisily sleeping now—the dogs, that is.

“Some set-up, eh?” the Major said, looking about with cheerful disdain.

A footman refilled our hock glasses, and she moved up the table and sat beside me, one of those big shoulders almost touching mine. She had a faint sharp piney smell. I imagined myself being overborne by her in some vague, cruel, irresistible fashion. I loosened my tie. Discovering that I was Irish, she said that Ireland was another place she had always wanted to visit. She claimed she had an Irish grandmother. I seized on this, and discoursed at some length on the charms of my native land. I really did work very hard, but to no avail; when, delicately, I brought up the subject of the royal papers again, she laid a hand on my wrist—a flash, a fizz—and gave me her iciest smile and said:

“Major Maskell, we’re waiting for Frankfurt to contact us, all right? Meantime, why don’t you relax and enjoy the beauties of Bavaria?” Another jauntily lewd twinkle. “I hear you’re staying at The Turk’s Head? Lots of our boys billeted there. Must be a real lively spot.”

Of course, I blushed.

I found Captain Smith waiting for me on the steps above the courtyard, wrapped up in his greatcoat and smoking a cigarette; as I came up, a flaw of smoke swirled briefly about his head, as if it had come out of his ears. He was looking particularly fierce and bristly this afternoon. “Get what you came for?” he asked, and grinned with satisfaction at my glum demeanour. The dogs were morosely prowling, and at two little windows high up in the wing opposite us the globular heads of the bear cubs appeared, gloatingly grinning down on us. Smith exhaled another ragged cloud of smoke and put two fingers into his mouth and produced a piercing whistle. Immediately the jeep came roaring through the gate and cut a semi-circular sweep across the courtyard, scattering the dogs, and drew up at the foot of the steps with a screech of smoking tyres. The driver looked at neither of us. “Bloody tyke,” Smith muttered, and gave a bark of laughter.

We were about to depart when the little pale Princess came sidling out on to the steps with her mouse-claws clasped under her meagre bosom and, eyes modestly cast down, addressed me obliquely, in German, in a papery voice so faint that at first I could hardly catch what she was saying. Her grandmother wished to speak to me. She would show me the way.

“Wait here, Smith, will you?” I said.

We climbed, the Princess Rapunzel and I, through a maze of stone back-staircases and mildewed corridors, in silence, except for a faint crepitation made by the Princess’s petticoats. At length she stopped, and I looked up, and there was the Countess, on the landing above us, leaning over the banister rail with a lace shawl wrapped about her, beckoning through the gloom with a crook’d finger and jerky, upward sweeps of her arm, like a figure in a clock tower. By the time I got up to her level, she had retreated to her room, with what must have been remarkable spryness, and was reclining now against a bank of pillows on a vast, ornate bed. She wore a faded brocade bed gown, and her shawl, and an antique little cap. She gazed at me stonily as I stood in the doorway feeling somehow villainous, and without a word pointed a finger in the direction of a large, deep cupboard in a corner. The Princess moved past me and went to the cupboard and drew open the doors and stood back, folding her pale thin hands on her breast again. Inside the cupboard was a chest, a solid wooden affair with brass hinges and an ancient padlock; the fastening was further secured with two thick leather straps lashed tight and stoutly buckled. The Princess murmured something and went out. From the bed the Countess watched me with a fierce, watery eye. I advanced toward her, my eyes fastened upon her gaze.

“Danke schön, gnädige Gräfin,” I said, and even made her a little bow. “Your cousins in England will be extremely appreciative.” I thought of mentioning my relation by marriage to the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, but her look was not encouraging. “I shall tell His Majesty how helpful you were.”

I have never been able quite to carry off these emblematic gestures—more than once I caught out Mrs. W. in that characteristic po-faced little smirk of hers, when I was in the midst of attempting some courtly flourish—and the Countess was not one to miss the hairline cracks in the enamel of even the most polished performance. Still she did not speak, but yet she made a reply, by means of a subtle transformation of her gaze, which thickened somehow, her face filling up like a wineskin with a sort of glutinous, an almost tumescent, contempt, before which I blenched, and took a faltering step backward, as if something might suddenly come squirting out of her to burn and blind me. She shrugged, making the bedsprings creak.

“My son will not forgive me,” she said, and gave a thin, throaty laugh. “Tell that to our cousin the King.”

The Princess returned, bringing Captain Smith and the driver, whose name (it has just come back to me; one’s memory is such a hoarder) was Dixon. Smith regarded the scene— frightened Princess, dowager in mob-cap, chest of family secrets—with wolfish amusement, his eyebrows and his moustache twitching. Between the three of us we lifted up the chest, which was extremely heavy and awkward to hold, and staggered with it out the door and down the stairs, Smith swearing and Dixon effortfully snorting through distended, porcine nostrils, with the Princess following murmurously behind us. We stowed our booty on the back of the jeep. Who says I am not a man of action? I half expected that Major Stirling would come flying down the steps and bring me to the ground in a football tackle, but there was no sign of her; I was disappointed; my wrist still tingled where she had touched it. As we were driving out of the courtyard, I looked up at the windows where the children had appeared earlier, and saw the Prince looking down on us impassively. What was he thinking, I wonder?

“Hope they haven’t raised the bloody drawbridge,” Smith said, and gave a squawk of mad laughter, and snatched off Dixon’s cap and began to beat him hilariously about the head with it.

On the outskirts of Regensburg I had Dixon pull up at the side of the road and stand guard while Smith and I jemmied open the chest. The papers were neatly sorted and stored in oilskin pouches. I looked forward to an evening’s entertaining reading in my room at The Turk’s Head. Smith raised a questioning eyebrow; I winked at him. And later, in a public urinal in the town square, among delicious smells, I encountered a blond young man in a tattered uniform who detained me with an evil smile, laying a thin hand on my wrist and quite banishing all memory of Major Stirling’s mannish touch. He claimed he was a deserter, and that he had been on the run for months. He was appealingly emaciated. As he knelt and ministered to me I ran my trembling fingers through his hair thick with dirt and fondled his neat little ears—I always had a weakness for these strange organs, on close inspection so excitingly repulsive, with their frills and delicate pink volutes, like primitive genitalia that have fallen into disuse—and goggled in blissful stupor at a shaft of sunlight falling athwart the beautiful, glistening, grass-green slime growing on the wall behind him, above the clogged trench, and in my head everything swirled, Smith’s mad eye and the Prince’s scaly hand and Major Stirling’s boyish shoulders, all swirled and spasmed and sank, into the hot throat of the whirlpool.

I have been brooding on the word malignant. Naturally it has a special resonance for me. I looked it up just now; really, the dictionary is full of delightful surprises. Malignant, according to the OED, derives from “late L. malignantem, malignare, -ari,” and its first cited definition is, “Disposed to rebel; disaffected, malcontent.” However, I am also informed that the word was applied “between 1641 and 1690 by the supporters of the Parliament and the Commonwealth to their adversaries.” In other words, a “malignant” was a Cavalier, or a Royalist. This discovery provoked in me a delighted chuckle. A malcontent, and a Royalist. How accommodating the language is. Other definitions are: “having an evil influence”; “keenly desirous of the misfortune of another, or of others generally”; and of course, this time according to Chambers, “tending to cause death, or to go from bad to worse, esp. cancerous.” Mr. Chambers never was one to beat about the bush.

14

I have always derived a deep satisfaction from working in places that were made for repose. When the title of Keeper of the King’s Pictures was conferred on me, directly after my triumphant homecoming from Regensburg (HM was gruffly grateful; I was modesty itself, of course), the Royal collection was still in underground storage in North Wales, and my first task was to oversee the return of the pictures and their rehanging in Buckingham Palace, at Windsor, and at Hampton Court. How I treasure now the recollection of the peace and pleasure of those days: the hushed voices in great rooms; the Vermeer light, a kind of gold gas, spreading its rich effulgence down from leaded panes; the perspiring young men, in shirt-sleeves and long aprons, solemnly trotting back and forth like sedan-chair porters, bearing between them a Holbein grandee or Velazquez queen; and I in the midst of all this muted bustle, with my clipboard and my dusty checklists, eyes uplifted and best foot forward, The King’s Man at His Duties, consulted by all, deferred to by all, a master among men. (Oh, indulge me, Miss V., I am old and sick, it comforts me to recall the days of my glory.)

There were, of course, other, less transcendent advantages to my elevated position in the Royal household. At the time, I was embroiled in a tiresome, often ugly, though not uninvigorating power struggle at the Institute, where a lifelong overindulgence in port and a resultant fit of apoplexy had suddenly left the Director’s chair vacant. I explained the matter to HM, and shyly indicated that I would not object were he to bring his influence to bear on the Trustees when they came to make their choice of a successor. This was the post I had always aimed to secure; it was, you might say, my life’s ambition; indeed, even above my scholarly achievements, it is for my work as head of the Institute that I expect to be remembered, after these present unpleasantnesses have been forgotten. When I took over, the place was moribund, a dusty refuge for superannuated university lecturers and third-rate connoisseurs, and a sort of ghetto for fugitive European Jews too clever for their down-at-heel boots. I soon knocked it into shape. By the beginning of the 1950s it was recognised as one of the greatest—no, I shall say it: as the greatest centre of art teaching in the West. My activities as an agent were nothing compared to the wholesale infiltration of the world of art scholarship achieved by the young men and women whose sensibilities I shaped in my years at the Institute. Look at any of the significant galleries in Europe or America and you will find my people at the top, or if not at the top, then determinedly scaling the rigging, with cutlasses in their teeth.

And then, I loved the place, I mean the surroundings, the building itself, one of Vanbrugh’s most inspired designs, at once airy and wonderfully grounded, imposing yet indulgent, delicate yet infused with manly vigour, an example of English architecture at its finest. By day I found soothing the atmosphere of studiousness and quiet learning, the sense one had all around of young heads bent over old books. My students had an earnestness and grace that one does not encounter in their present-day successors. The girls fell in love with me, the young men were restrainedly admiring. I suppose I must have seemed something of a legend to them, not only a champion of art but, if rumour were to be believed, a veteran of those clandestine operations that had contributed so much to our victory in the war. And then, at night the place was mine, a vast town house entirely at my disposal. I would sit in my flat on the top floor, reading, or listening to the gramophone—I have hardly mentioned my love of music, have I?—calm, reflective, sustained aloft, as it were, by the thronging silence peculiar to the spaces in which great art resides. Later, Patrick would come home from his nocturnal rambles, perhaps with a couple of ruffianly young men in tow, whom I would set loose in the galleries, among the spectral pictures, and watch them frisk and tumble in the chiaroscuro lamplight like so many Caravaggian fauns. What a risk I took—my God, when I think of it, the damage they could have wrought! But then, it was precisely in the danger of it that the pleasure lay. I would not wish to give the impression that my time at the Institute was all high talk and low frolics. There was a great deal of bothersome and time-consuming administration to be seen to. My detractors muttered that I was incapable of delegating duties, but how is one expected to delegate to cretins? In an institution such as ours—closed, intense, hot with messianic fervour: I was moulding an international generation of art historians, after all—a single controlling sensibility was an absolute requirement. When I became Director, I immediately set about imposing my will on every corner of the Institute. There was nothing too trivial to merit my attention. I am thinking of Miss Winterbotham. Oh dear yes. Her name was the least of her misfortunes. She was a large person in her fifties, with tree-trunk legs and a mighty bust and myopic, frightened eyes, and also, incidentally, the most incongruously beautiful, slender hands. She was a minor scholar—baroque altarpieces of South Germany—and an enthusiast for madrigals; I think it was madrigals. She lived with her mother in a large house on the Finchley Road. I suspect she had never been loved. Her ineradicable unhappiness she disguised under a gratingly hearty cheerfulness. One day, in my office, while we were discussing some not very important piece of Institute business, she suddenly broke down and began to weep. I was aghast, of course. She stood before my desk, helpless in her cardigan and sensible skirt, shoulders shaking and great fat tears blurting from her squeezed-up eyes. I made her sit down and drink some whiskey, and after long and tedious cajoling I got out of her what the matter was. A bright young scholar in the same field as hers, who had lately joined us, had at once set about undermining Miss Winterbotham’s position. The old academic story, but a particularly cruel version of it. I called in the younger woman, the clever daughter of French refugees. She did not deny Miss Winterbotham’s charges, and smiled in my face in that feline way that French girls do, confident I would approve her ruthlessness. Her confidence was misplaced. Of course, after Mile. Rogent’s abrupt departure from our midst, I had to deal with Miss Winterbotham’s speechlessly rapturous gratitude, which came in the form of coy little gifts, such as homemade cakes, and bottles of noisome aftershave lotion that I passed on to Patrick, and, every Christmas, a violently hideous necktie from Pink’s. Eventually her mother became incapacitated, and Miss Winterbotham had to give up her career to look after the invalid, as daughters did, in those days. I never saw her again, and after a year or two the plum cakes and the silk ties stopped coming. Why do I remember her, why do I bother to speak of her? Why do I speak of any of them, these nebulous figures milling restlessly, unappeasably, on the margins of my life? Here at my desk, in this lamplight, I feel like Odysseus in Hades, pressed upon by shades beseeching a little warmth, a little of my life’s blood, so that they might live again, however briefly. What am I doing here, straying amongst these importunate wraiths? A moment ago I tasted on my palate— tasted, not imagined—the stingy-sweet flavour of those boiled blackcurrant drops that I used to suck trudging home from infant school on autumn afternoons along the Back Road at Carrickdrum a lifetime ago; where was it stored, that taste, through all those years? These things will be gone when I go. How can that be, how can so much be lost? The gods can afford to be wasteful, but not us, surely?

My mind is wandering. This must be the anteroom of death.

Those were the years of some of my most intense work, when I conceived and began to write my definitive monograph on Nicholas Poussin. It was to take me nearly twenty years to finish. Certain pygmies skulking in the groves of academe have dared to question the book’s scholarly foundations, but I shall treat them with the silent disdain they deserve. I do not know of any other work, and nor do they, which comprehensively, exhaustively and—I shall dare to say it—magisterially captures the essence of an artist and his art as this one does. One might say, I have invented Poussin. I frequently think this is the chief function of the art historian, to synthesise, to concentrate, to fix his subject, to pull together into a unity all the disparate strands of character and inspiration and achievement that make up this singular being, the painter at his easel. After me, Poussin is not, cannot be, what he was before me. This is my power. I am wholly conscious of it. From the start, from the time at Cambridge when I knew I could not be a mathematician, I saw in Poussin a paradigm of myself: the stoical bent, the rage for calm, the unshakeable belief in the transformative power of art. I understood him, as no one else understood him, and, for that matter, as I understood no one else. How I used to sneer at those critics—the Marxists especially, I am afraid—who spent their energies searching for the meaning of his work, for those occult formulas upon which he was supposed to have built his forms. The fact is, of course, there is no meaning. Significance, yes; affects; authority; mystery—magic, if you wish—but no meaning. The figures in the Arcadia are not pointing to some fatuous parable about mortality and the soul and salvation; they simply are. Their meaning is that they are there. This is the fundamental fact of artistic creation, the putting in place of something where otherwise there would be nothing. (Why did he paint it?— Because it was not there.) In the ever shifting, myriad worlds through which I moved, Poussin was the singular, unchanging, wholly authentic thing. Which is why I had to attempt to destroy him. —What? Why did I say that? I did not expect to say that. What can I mean by it? Leave it; it is too disturbing. The hour is late. Ghosts ring me round, gibbering. Away.

Perhaps the most significant, personal, result of my Royal elevation was that it enabled me to give up being a spy. I know everyone believes that I never stopped; there is a convention in the popular mind which insists that such a thing is impossible, that the secret agent is tied to his work by a blood oath from which only death will release him. This is fantasy, or wishful thinking, or both. In fact, in my case, retirement from active service was surprisingly, not to say disconcertingly, easy. The Department was one thing; with the end of the war, amateur agents such as myself were being gently but insistently encouraged to bow out. The Americans, who now hold power, were demanding that professionals be put in charge, company men like themselves, whom they could bully and coerce, not mavericks like Boy or, to a far less colourful extent, me. On the other hand, we were exactly the kind of agents—familiar, trusted, dedicated—that Moscow desired to keep in place, now that the Gold War had set in, and we were urged, and sometimes, indeed, threatened, to hold on at all costs to our connections with the Department. Oleg, however, was oddly complaisant when I told him that I wished to be released. “I’m sick of the game,” I said, “literally sick of it. The strain is making me ill.” He shrugged, and I pressed on, complaining that war work, and the difficulty of serving two opposing systems in their uneasy alliance against a third, had put intolerable pressure on my nerves. I suppose I did rather pile it on. I ended by warning that I was close to cracking. This was Moscow’s nightmare, that one of us would lose his nerve and put the entire network at risk. Like all totalitarians, they had a very low regard for those who helped them most. In truth, my nerve was not about to crack. What I had felt most strongly at the end of the war, what we had all felt, was a sudden sense of deflation. For myself, I dated the onset of this depression to the morning following the announcement of Hitler’s death, when after that night of celebratory boozing with Boy I had woken up on the sofa in Poland Street with the taste of wetted ashes in my mouth and felt as Jack the Giant Killer must have felt, when the beanstalk came crashing down and the man-eating monster lay dead at his feet. After such trials and such triumphs, what could the world in peacetime offer us?

“But this is not peace,” Oleg said, with another listless shrug. “Now the real war is starting.”

It was a summer afternoon, and we were sitting in a cinema in Ruislip. The lights had just come up between features. I remember the sombre, shadowless glow descending from the vaulted ceiling, the hot, dead air, the prickly feel of the nap of the seat covers and a broken spring sticking in the back of my thigh—I suppose sprung cinema seats went before your time, Miss V.?—and that oddly weightless, muffled sensation that you only got in picture-houses, in those days of double bills, in the intervals between features. It was Oleg’s idea that we should meet in cinemas. They offered excellent cover, it is true, but the real reason was that he was a passionate fan of the movies, especially the smooth American comedies of the day, with their sleek-haired, effeminate men and marvellous, mannish, silk-gowned women over whom he sighed like a love-sick prince-turned-frog, gazing up at them, these Claudettes and Gretas and Deannas, in a kind of entranced anguish, as they swam before him in their shimmering tanks of soot-and-silver light. He and Patrick would have got on famously.

“I rather think, Oleg,” I said, “that one war is enough for me; I’ve done my bit.”

He nodded unhappily, the fat at either side of his neck froggily wobbling, and began to drone on about the nuclear threat and the need for the Soviets to get their hands on the secrets of the West’s atomic weapons technology. Such talk made me feel quite antiquated; I had still not got over my amazement at the V2s.

“That’s the business of your people in America,” I said.

“Yes, Virgil is being sent there.”

Virgil was Boy’s code name. I laughed.

“What—Boy in America? You must be joking.”

He nodded again; it seemed to be turning into a kind of tic.

“Castor has been told to find a posting for him at the embassy.”

I laughed again. Castor was Philip MacLeish, otherwise known as the Dour Scot, who the previous year had managed to get himself appointed first secretary in Washington, from where he was reporting regularly to Moscow. I had met him a couple of times, in the war, when he was something minor at the Department, and had disliked him, finding his solemnity of manner ridiculous, and his fanatical Marxism unbearably tiresome.

“Boy will drive him mad,” I said. “They’ll both be sent home in disgrace.” Odd, how accurate the more offhand prophecies can prove to be. “And I suppose you want me to act as their control from here, do you?” I imagined it, the endless eavesdropping, the combing through signals, the casually probing conversations with visiting Americans, the whole horrible tightrope-walking effort of keeping agents in place in foreign territory. “Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t do it.”

The house lights were dimming, the dusty plush curtains were creakily opening. Oleg said nothing, gazing up expectantly at the preliminary crackle of scratched white light fizzing and boiling on the screen.

“I have been appointed Keeper of the King’s Pictures,” I said, “did I tell you?” He turned his eyes unwillingly from Jean Harlow’s satin-sheathed backside and peered at me incredulously in the watery glow from the screen. “No, Oleg,” I said wearily, “not this kind of picture: paintings. You know: art. I shall be working in the Palace, at the King’s right hand. Do you see? That’s what you can tell your masters in Moscow: that you have a source right beside the throne, a former agent at the very seat of power. They’ll be terribly impressed. You’ll probably get a medal. And I shall get my freedom. What do you say?”

He said nothing, only turned back to the screen. I was a little piqued; I thought he could at least have argued with me.

“Here,” I said, and pressed into his moist warm paw the miniature camera he had issued me with years ago. “I never learned how to use it properly, anyway.” In the flickering light from the screen—what a grating voice that Harlow woman had— he looked at the camera and then at me, babyishly solemn, but still did not speak. “I’m sorry,” I said, but it came out sounding cross. I stood up, and patted him on the shoulder. He made a half-hearted attempt to seize my hand, but I withdrew it quickly, and turned and made my way stumblingly out of the place. The noise of traffic in the sunlit street seemed a kind of sardonic cheer. I felt at once buoyant and leaden, as if in shrugging off the burden I had borne for years I had suddenly become aware again of the long-forgotten weight of my own, all too familiar self.

At first I did not believe that Moscow would let me go, or not so easily, at least. Aside from any other consideration, my vanity was wounded. Had I been of so little worth to them, that they should drop me so unceremoniously? I waited confidently and in trepidation for the first signs of pressure being applied. I wondered how I would stand up to blackmail. Would I be prepared to risk my position in the world in order merely to be free? Perhaps I should not have made so bold a break, I told myself, perhaps I should have gone on supplying them with scraps of Department gossip, which I could have gleaned from Boy and the others and which no doubt would have kept them happy. They had the power to ruin me. I knew they would not reveal the work I had done for them—if they let one thread go, the whole network would unravel—but they could easily find a means of exposing me as a queer. Public disgrace I might have been able to bear, but I did not at all relish the prospect of a stretch in prison. Yet the days passed, and the weeks, then the months, and nothing happened. I drank a great deal; there were days when I was drunk before ten o’clock in the morning. When I went out on the prowl at night I was more frightened than ever; the sex and the spying had sustained a kind of equilibrium, each a cover for the other. Loitering in wait for Oleg, I was guilty but also innocent, since I was spying, riot soliciting, while in my tense vigils on the shadowy steps of the city’s public lavatories I was only another queer, not a betrayer of my country’s most precious secrets. Do you see? When you live the kind of life that I was living, reason makes many questionable deals with itself.

I wondered what story Oleg had told Moscow. I was tempted to contact him again, so that I might ask him. I pictured him in the Kremlin, standing in the middle of the shiny floor in one of those vast high featureless rooms, unhappily wheezing, twisting his hat in his hands, while a shadowy Politburo listened in terrible silence from behind its long table as he made his bumbling excuses for me. All fantasy, of course. My case was probably dealt with by a third secretary at the London embassy. They did not need me—they never had, really, not in the way I believed— and so they simply cut the link. They always were practical fellows, unlike the mad fantasists who ran the Department. They even made a gesture of appreciation for my years of loyal service: six months after that meeting in the Odeon in Ruislip, Oleg contacted me to say that Moscow wished to offer me a gift of money, I think it was five thousand pounds. I refused—none of us ever made a penny out of our work for Russia—and tried not to feel slighted. I told Boy that I was out, but he did not believe me, suspecting that I was only going into deeper cover, a suspicion he thought vindicated years later when everything fell apart and I was the one who was called in to deal with the mess.

There was no formal procedure for resigning from the Department, either; I simply drifted away, as so many others had done in the past year. I met Billy Mytchett by chance one evening in a pub in Piccadilly and we were both embarrassed, like a pair of former schoolmates who had not seen each other since the days of pranks and scrapes. I ran across Querell, too, at the Gryphon. He claimed to have left the Department before I did. As always, I found myself immediately on the defensive before that thinly smiling, measuring, pale gaze. Boy, who was about to leave for Washington, had just returned from a tumultuous binge across North Africa—on which he had been accompanied by his mother, of all people, a still spry and famously handsome woman only slightly less given to outrageous behaviour than her son— and Querell had all the details: how Boy had got drunk at an embassy cocktail party in Rabat and pissed out of the window into a bed of bougainvillaea in full view of the ambassador’s wife, that kind of thing.

“Seems he sat for a whole evening in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo telling anyone who would listen that he’s been a Russian spy for years.”

“Yes,” I said, “it’s an old joke. He likes to shock.” “If I put him into a book no one would believe in him.” “Oh, I don’t know; he would certainly add colour.” He glanced at me sharply and grinned; his bleak little novels had at last caught on, reflecting as they did the spiritual exhaustion of the times, and he was enjoying sudden and lavish success, which was a surprise to everyone except him. “You think my stuff lacks colour?” he said. I shrugged.

“I don’t read much, in that line.”

We came across each other again the following week, at the farewell party for Boy that Leo Rothenstein threw in the Poland Street house. The occasion later became legendary, but what I retain most strongly is the memory of the headache that began as soon as I arrived and that did not leave me until well into the following day. Everyone was there, of course. Even Vivienne ventured down from her Mayfair retreat. She gave me her cool cheek to kiss, and for the rest of the night we avoided each other. As usual, the party started without preliminaries, all instant noise and smoke and the tingling stink of alcohol. Leo Rothenstein played jazz on the piano, and a girl danced on a table, showing her stocking-tops. On the way from the Foreign Office Boy had picked up two young thugs, who stood about nursing cigarette ends in cupped hands and watching the increasingly intoxicated goings-on with a mixture of slit-eyed contempt and rather affecting uncertainty. Later, they started a fight with each other, more for something to do than out of anger, I think, though one of them was knifed, not seriously. (Later still, so I heard, they both went home with one of my colleagues from the Institute, a harmless connoisseur and small-time collector, who woke up the next afternoon to find the thugs gone, and with them everything of value in the flat.)

Querell cornered me in the kitchen. His eyes had that odd glitter, like marine phosphorescence, that they took on when he had been drinking heavily; it was the only physical sign of inebriation I could ever detect in him.

“I hear Queen Mary sent you a present of a handbag,” he said. “Is it true?”

“A reticule,” I said stiffly. “Georgian; quite a good piece. It was an expression of gratitude. I had put her in the way of a bargain—a Turner, as it happens. I don’t know what everyone finds so funny.”

Nick came by, morosely tipsy; Sylvia had just produced their first child, and he was still supposedly celebrating the birth. He stopped, and stood swaying, regarding me with a soiled glare, breathing noisily, his jaw working.

“I hear you’ve left the Department,” he said. “Another bloody rat diving off the poor old ship and leaving the rest of us to keep her afloat.”

“Steady on, old chap,” Querell said, smirking. “There might be spies about.”

Nick scowled at him.

“Not a decent bloody patriot among the lot of you. What will you do when the Russian tanks come rolling across the Elbe, eh? What will you do then?”

“Do give over, Nick,” I said. “You’re drunk.”

“I may be drunk, but I know what’s what. There’s bloody Boy hiving off to bloody America. What’s the good of going to America?”

“I thought it was you who organised it,” Querell said.

Beside us, a young woman in a pink dress began to be sick into the sink.

“Organised what?” Nick said indignantly. “What did I organise?”

Querell, laughing softly, played with his cigarette, twirling it between fingers and thumb.

“Oh, I heard you were the one who arranged for Bannister to go to Washington, that’s all,” he said. He was enjoying himself. “Did I hear wrong?”

Nick was watching with bleary interest the vomiting girl.

“What influence have I got?” he said. “What influence has any of us got, now that the bloody Bolshies have taken over.”

Vivienne was passing by, and Querell reached out and caught her wrist deftly in his thin, bony, bloodless hand.

“Come on, Viv,” he said, “aren’t you going to talk to us?”

I watched them. No one ever called her Viv.

“Oh, I thought you must be discussing men’s things,” she said, “you all looked so earnest and conspiratorial. Victor, you do seem grim—has Querell been teasing you again? How is poor Sylvia, Nick? Childbirth can be so draining, I find. Goodness, what has that young woman been eating? Seems to be all tomato skins. It is tomato, isn’t it, and not blood? Haemorrhages in one so young are not a good sign. I must go back; I was speaking to such an interesting man. A negro. He seemed very angry about something. Which reminds me, did you hear what Boy replied when that Mytchett person was urging caution on him in his new life in the New World? Mytchett said that where Americans are concerned, one mustn’t on any account bring up matters of race, homosexuality or Communism, and Boy said, What you’re telling me is not to make a pass at Paul Robeson.”

“Wonderful woman,” Querell said when she had gone. He put a hand on my arm. “You’re not divorced yet, are you?”

And Nick gave a loud, slurred laugh.

At midnight I found myself trapped in uneasy conversation with Leo Rothenstein. We were on the landing outside Boy’s room, with drunken people sitting on the stairs above and below us.

“They say you’re leaving the ranks,” he said. “Bowing out gracefully, eh? Well, you’re probably right. Not much left for us here, is there? Boy’s had the right idea—America is the place. And of course, you have your work; I see your name about frequently. They want me to be something on the Board of Trade. Can you imagine it? Our friends will be pleased, I suppose, given their passion for tractors and suchlike. But it’s hardly Bletchley Park, is it. One does miss the old days. Much more fun, and that nice warm sense of really doing something for the cause.”

He produced an impossibly slender gold cigarette case and opened it with an elegant flick of his thumb, and I saw again a sunlit garden room in Oxford long ago and the young Beaver opening another cigarette box with just that gesture, and something happened inside my chest, as if it had begun to drizzle in there. I realised I must be drunk.

“Nick is going to stand for parliament,” I said.

Leo chuckled softly.

“Yes, so I hear. Bit of a joke, don’t you think? At least they’ve found him a safe seat, so humiliation will be avoided. I can just see him on the hustings.”

Briefly, gratifyingly, I imagined myself landing a punch in the middle of Leo’s big sallow face and smashing his raptor’s nose.

“He may surprise us all,” I said.

Leo gazed at me for a moment with peculiar, boggle-eyed intensity, and then laughed heartily, in his humourless way.

“Oh, he may,” he said, nodding vigorously. “He may indeed!”

Below us, someone struck a shaky chord on the piano, and Boy began to sing an obscene version of “The Man I Love.”

Everybody nowadays disparages the 1950s, saying what a dreary decade it was—and they are right, if you think of McCarthyism, and Korea, the Hungarian rebellion, all that serious, historical stuff; I suspect, however, that it is not public but private affairs that people are complaining of. Quite simply, I think they did not get enough of sex. All that fumbling with corsetry and woollen undergarments, all those grim couplings in the back seats of motor cars, the complaints and tears and resentful silences, while the wireless crooned callously of everlasting love— faugh! what dinginess, what soul-sapping desperation. The best that could be hoped for was a shabby deal marked by the exchange of a cheap ring, followed by a life of furtive relievings on one side and of ill-paid prostitution on the other. Whereas— O my friends!—to be queer was very bliss. The fifties was the last great age of queerdom. All the talk now is of freedom and pride (pride!), but these young hotheads in their pink bell-bottoms, clamouring for the right to do it in the streets if they feel like it, do not seem to appreciate, or at least seem to wish to deny, the aphrodisiac properties of secrecy and fear. At night before I went out cottaging I would have to spend an hour downing jorums of gin to steady my nerves and steel myself for the perils that lay ahead. The possibility of being beaten up, robbed, infected with disease, was as nothing compared with the prospect of arrest and public disgrace. And the higher one had climbed in society, the farther one would fall. I had recurring, sweat-inducing images of the Palace gates clanging shut against me, or of myself tumbling head over heels down the steps of the Institute and Porter the porter—yes, but it had long ago ceased to be amusing—above me in the doorway brushing his hands and turning away with a sneer. Yet what a sweet edge these terrors gave to my adventures in the night, what throat-thickening excitement they provoked. I loved the fashions of the fifties, the wonderful three-piece suits, the rich cotton shirts and silk bow ties and chunky, handmade shoes. I loved all the appurtenances of life in those days that are so sneered at now, the cuboid white armchairs, the crystal ashtrays, the moulded-wood wireless sets with their glowing valves and mysteriously erotic mesh fronts—and the motor cars, of course, sleek, black, big-bottomed, like the negro jazzmen whom on occasion I used to be lucky enough to pick up at the stage door of the London Hippodrome. When I look back, these are the things I remember most vividly, not the great public events, not the politics—which was not politics at all, only a hysterical squaring up for more war—and not even, I am sorry to say, the doings of my children, so uncertain and needful in their fatherless teens; above all, I remember the fizz and swirl of the queer life, the white-silk-scarfed enchantment of it all, the squabbles and sorrows, the menace, the unspeakable, always abundant pleasures. This was what Boy missed so much, in his American exile (“I am like Ruth,” he wrote to me, “amid the alien cornballs”). Nothing could make up for the fact of not being in London, not the Cadillacs or the Camels or the crew-cutted football players of the New World. Perhaps, if he had not gone to America, if he had got out, like me, or remained and gone on doing desultory work for Oleg, he might not have brought all that trouble on himself, might have ended up a sprightly old queen toddling between the Reform Club and the public lavatory beside Green Park Tube station. But Boy suffered from an incurable commitment to the cause. Pitiful, really. I have always thought Boy went a little mad in America. He was being watched all the time—the FBI had always been suspicious of him, not seeing the point of the joke—and he was drinking too much. We were used to his enormities—the brawls, the three-day binges, the public displays of satyriasis—but now the stories grew darker, the deeds more desperate. At a party thrown for our embassy people by one of Washington’s legendary hostesses—I am glad to say I have forgotten her name—he made a clumsy pass at a young man in full view of the other guests, and when the poor fellow demurred Boy knocked him down. He drove in that ridiculous car of his—a pink convertible, with a genuine Klaxon horn which he employed with enthusiasm at every intersection—at breakneck speeds all over Washington and the surrounding states, collecting speeding tickets, three or four a day, which he would tear up under the noses of the traffic policemen, claiming diplomatic immunity.

Poor Boy; he did not realise how dated he had become. This kind of thing might have been amusing back in the twenties, when we were so easily amused, but now his indiscretions were merely embarrassing. Oh, of course we went on regaling each other with accounts of his latest scrapes, and we would laugh, and shake our heads, saying, Good old Boy, he never changes! But then a silence would fall, and someone would cough and someone else would begin loudly ordering another round, and quietly the subject would be dropped.

And then, one humid evening in late July, I came out of the Institute and found myself staring at a splotch of crushed chalk on the rain-washed, steaming pavement. In the old days this had been Oleg’s signal to summon me to a rendezvous. The sight of that white stain provoked in me a medley of sensations: alarm, of course, quickening to fright; curiosity, and a kind of childish expectancy; but, most strongly, and most surprisingly, nostalgia, fed no doubt by the evening smell of summer rain on the pavement and the oceanic hushing of the plane trees above me. I walked along for a little way, with my raincoat over my arm, outwardly calm, while my thoughts were in turmoil; then, feeling not a little ridiculous, I ducked into a phone box—check the street corners, the windows opposite, that parked car—and dialled the old number, and stood in hot suspense listening to the blood beating in my temples. The voice that answered was unfamiliar, but my call had been expected. Regent’s Park, at seven: the old routine. While the strange voice was relaying its instructions—how blank and timbreless they are, those drilled Russian voices—I thought I heard Oleg chuckle in the background. I hung up and left the booth, dry mouthed and a little dizzy, and hailed a taxi. The old routine.

Oleg seemed pudgier, but otherwise he was unchanged since I had last seen him. He was wearing his blue suit, his grey mac, his brown hat. He greeted me warmly, ducking his Christmas-pudding head and making happy burbling noises. Regent’s Park was all hazy golds and pale grey-greens in the soft summer evening. There was the smell of recent rain on grass. We met by the Zoo, as always in former days, and struck off in the direction of the lake. Dreamy lovers drifted across the greensward arm in arm. Children ran and shrieked. A lady walked a little dog. “Like Watteau,” I said. “A painter. French. What do you like, Oleg? I mean, what are you interested in?” Oleg only waggled his head and did that bubbly chuckle again.

“Castor wants to go,” he said. “He says it is time to go.”

I thought of MacLeish tramping the windy grey wastes of Moscow. Well, he might feel quite at home there—he was born in Aberdeen, after all.

“And Boy?” I said.

Grown men were sailing model boats on the lake. A quite beautiful young man in a white shirt and corduroy trousers, a ghost out of my youth, was lounging in a deckchair, moodily smoking a cigarette.

“Yes, Virgil too,” Oleg said. “They will go together.”

I sighed.

“So,” I said, “it’s come to this. I never really believed it would, you know.” I looked at the young man in the deckchair; he caught my eye and smiled, insolent and inviting, and a familiar something happened in my throat. “Why have you come to me?” I said to Oleg.

He turned on me his blankest, most blameless bug-eyed stare.

“We have to get them to France,” he said, “or northern Spain, maybe. Anywhere on the Continent. After that it will be easy.”

Moscow had suggested sending a submarine to pick the pair up from the shores of some Highland lough. I had a vision of Boy and the Dour Scot stumbling in the dark over wet rocks, their city shoes sodden, trying to get their flashlight to work, while out in the night the submarine captain scoured the shore for their signal, muttering Russian oaths.

“For goodness’ sake, Oleg,” I said, “surely you can come up with something less melodramatic than a submarine? Why can’t they just take the ferry to Dieppe?—or one of those boats that cruise along the French coast for forty-eight hours? Businessmen use them for dirty weekends with their secretaries. They call into St. Malo, places like that; no one ever bothers to check papers or count the passenger lists.”

Oleg suddenly reached out and squeezed my arm; he had never touched me before; odd sensation.

“You see, John, why I came to you?” he said fondly. “Such a cool head.” I could not suppress a smirk; the need to be needed, you see, that was always my weakness. We walked on. The low sun shone on the molten water beside us, throwing up flakes of gold light. Oleg giggled, snuffling through his flat, piggy nose. “And tell me, John,” he said roguishly, “have you been with your secretary on these boats?” And then he remembered, and blushed, and hurried on ahead of me, waddling along like a fat old babushka.

Boy came back. I telephoned him at the Poland Street flat. He sounded worryingly hearty. “Tip-top, old chap, never better, glad to be home, bloody Americans.” We met at the Gryphon. He was bloated and hunched, and his skin had a fishy sheen. He reeked of drink and American cigarettes. I noticed the torn skin around his fingernails and thought of Freddie. He was rigged out in tight tartan slacks, tennis shoes, a Hawaiian shirt of scarlets and vivid greens; a fawn stetson hat with a leather band sat on the bar by his elbow like a giant, malign mushroom. “Have a drink, for Christ’s sake. We’ll get completely blotto, shall we? My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness, et cetera.” He laughed and coughed. “Have you seen Nick? How is he, I missed him. Missed you all. They don’t know how to have fun over there. Work work work, worry worry worry. And there I was, Boyston Alastair St. John Bannister, trapped in a madhouse with nothing to do but drink myself silly and bugger black men. I had to get out; you see that, don’t you? I had to get out.”

“Heavens,” I said, “is that really your name—Boyston? I never knew.”

Betty Bowler was on her stool behind the bar, smoking cocktail cigarettes and clanking her bracelets. Betty by now had become the kind of big, blowsy disaster that buxom young beauties always turn into. In her prime she had been famously painted by Mark Gertler—cream flesh, blue eyes, burnt-sienna nipples, a pyramid of portentous apples in a pink bowl—but now, as she waddled into her late fifties, the Bloomsbury look was all lost, sunken in fat, and she had become one of Lucian Freud’s potato people. I was always a little afraid of her. She had a tendency to go too far, lurching from raillery into sudden bursts of venomous abuse. It was a conceit of hers to pretend to believe there was no such thing as homosexuality.

“Thought as how you was going to bring home a war bride, Boy Bannister,” she said, doing her cockney voice. “One of those Yank heiresses, nice big blonde with plenty of assets behind her.”

“Betty,” Boy said, “you should be in the pantomime.”

“So should you, tub-of-guts. You could play the Dame, except you don’t look man enough for the part.”

Querell turned up, wearing a crumpled white linen suit and two-tone shoes. He was in his Solitary Traveller phase. He was about to leave for Liberia, or maybe it was Ethiopia; somewhere distant, hot and uncivilised, anyway. It was said he was fleeing an unhappy love affair—Love’s Labour had just come out—but he had probably started the rumour himself. He sat between us at the bar looking bored and world-weary and drinking triple gins. I watched a smoky pale patch of sunlight at the foot of the steps inside the door, and thought how stealthily the world goes about its business, trying not to be noticed.

“Well, Bannister,” Querell said, “the Americans finally rumbled you, did they?”

Boy gave him a sullen, slithery look.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I hear Hoover kicked you out. You know he’s a notorious queen. They always have a kink, don’t they, the Hoovers and the Berias.”

Much later—the light at the foot of the steps had turned red-gold—Nick came in, with Leo Rothenstein, both in evening dress, sleek and faintly ridiculous, like a pair of toffs in a Punch cartoon. I was surprised to see them here. Since his election Nick had steered clear of the old dives, and Leo Rothenstein, whose father was on his deathbed, was about to inherit a peerage and the family’s banks. “Just like old times,” I said, and they both regarded me in silence with a peculiar, flat stare. I suppose I was drunk. Nick peevishly ordered a bottle of champagne. He was wearing a crimson cummerbund; he never did have any taste. We lifted our glasses and toasted Boy’s return. Our hearts were not in it. When we had finished the first bottle, Betty Bowler brought out another, on the house.

“Absent friends!” Leo Rothenstein said, and looked at me over the rim of his glass and winked.

“Christ,” Boy mumbled, pressing a fat, sunburned arm to his eyes, “I think I’m going to blub.”

Then Oleg telephoned. The code word was Icarus. Somewhat unfortunate, I agree.

15

Odd, the air of melancholy burlesque the whole thing had. It was all absurdly simple. Boy made an excuse, and we left the Gryphon together and I drove him to Poland Street. Above the twilit streets the sky was a tender deep dark blue, like an upside-down river. In the flat I waited, sitting by myself on the sofa, while he got his things together. The champagne was still fizzing in my sinuses, and I too felt weepy, in a distracted sort of way, and kept heaving great sobby sighs and slowly blinking and peering about me, like a drunken tortoise. Vividly I recalled tussling here with Danny Perkins, and experienced an awful pang, like a spasm of physical pain. I could hear Boy crashing around upstairs, talking to himself and groaning. Presently he came down, carrying an ancient gladstone bag.

“Wanted to bring everything,” he said mournfully. “Left it all, in the end. How do I look?”

He was dressed in a dark-grey three-piece suit, striped shirt, cufflinks, school tie with gold pin.

“You look ridiculous,” I said. “The Comrades will be wonderfully impressed.”

We went down the stairs, wordless and solemn, like a pair of disappointed undertakers.

“I’ve locked the flat,” Boy said. “Danny Perkins has a key. I’ll keep this one, if you don’t mind. Souvenir, you know.”

“You’re not coming back, then?” I said lightly, and he gave me a wounded look and went on, past the doctor’s surgery, and out into the glimmering night. God knows why I was feeling so frolicsome.

Again, I drove the big white car eating up the miles with callous eagerness. As we were crossing the river I wound down my window and the night howled and leaped into the car. I looked down past the bridge and saw a red ship at anchor there, and something about the scene—the glossy darkness, the bulging, restless river, that fauve-bright vessel—sent a shiver through me, and suddenly, with a tigerish thrill, I saw my life as grand and dark and doomed. Then we left the bridge and plunged among warehouses and weed-grown bomb-sites again.

Beside me, Boy was weeping, in silence, with a hand over his eyes.

Soon we were speeding over the Downs. In my memory of it, this part of the journey is all a smooth irresistible headlong dash through the startled, silvery night. I see the car swirling along, headlights sweeping over tree-trunks and moss-grown signposts, and Boy and me, two grim-faced figures tensed behind the windscreen, lit from below, jaws set and eyes fixed unblinkingly upon the onrushing road. I too have read my Buchan and my Henty.

“Wish it was day,” Boy said. “This is probably my last sight of Blighty.”

Philip MacLeish was at his mother’s place in Kent, a genuine rose-covered cottage complete with wooden gate and gravel path and bottle-glass windows all aglow. Antonia MacLeish opened the door to us and without a word showed us into the living room. She was a tall, angular woman with a great mane of black hair. She seemed always to be brooding on some smouldering private resentment. I associated her with horses, though I had never seen her mounted on one. MacLeish was sitting in an armchair, morosely drunk, staring into a cold grate. He was wearing an old pair of flannel trousers and an incongruous, canary-yellow cardigan. He glanced up unenthusiastically at Boy and me, said nothing, and went back to his contemplation of the fireplace.

“The children are asleep,” Antonia said, not looking at us. “I won’t offer you a drink.”

Boy, ignoring her, cleared his throat.

“I say, Phil,” he said, “we need to have a talk. Get your coat, there’s a good chap.”

MacLeish nodded, slowly, miserably, and stood up, his knee joints creaking. His wife turned aside and walked to the window, took a cigarette from a silver box on the table there, lit it, and stood, elbow in hand, gazing out into the impenetrable dark. I saw us all there, clear and unreal as if we were on a stage. MacLeish looked at her in baggy-eyed anguish and lifted a beseeching hand towards her.

“Tony,” he said.

She made no reply, and did not turn, and he let fall his hand.

“Time to go, old man,” Boy said. He was tapping his foot on the carpet. “Just a chat, that’s all.”

I had an urge to laugh.

MacLeish put on a camel-hair overcoat, and we went out. He had not even packed a bag. At the front door he paused, and slipped back into the hall. Boy and I looked at each other glumly, expecting sobs, shouts, hurled recriminations. In a moment he was back, however, carrying a furled umbrella. He looked at us sheepishly.

“Well, you never know,” he said.

It was midnight when we got to Folkestone. The night had turned windy, and the little ship, lit like a Christmas tree, was bobbing and rearing on the swell.

“Christ,” Boy said, “it looks bloody small. There’s bound to be someone on board who’ll know us.”

“Tell them you’re on a secret mission,” I said, and MacLeish glared at me.

There was the question of Boy’s car. No one had thought what to do with it; obviously I could not drive it back to London. He loved the thing, and got quite agitated contemplating its possible fates. In the end he decided he would simply leave it on the quayside.

“That way, I can think of it as being here always, waiting for me.”

“Dear me, Boy,” I said, “I never knew you were such a sentimental old thing.”

He grinned mournfully and wiped his nose with his knuckles.

“Betty Bowler was right,” he said. “I’m not man enough.” We stood irresolute, the three of us, at the end of the gangplank, our trouser legs whipping in the warm night wind and the light from the lamps shivering at our feet. On board, a bell clanged dolefully. “The watches of the night,” Boy said, and tried to laugh.

MacLeish, lost somewhere in the tormented deeps of himself, was staring at the narrow channel of darkly roiling waters between the ship’s flank and the dock. I thought he might be contemplating throwing himself in.

“Well then,” I said briskly.

We shook hands awkwardly, the three of us. I thought of giving Boy a kiss, but could not bring myself to do it, with the Dour Scot looking on.

“Say goodbye to Vivienne for me,” Boy said. “And the children. I shall miss seeing them grow up.”

I shrugged. “So will I.”

He went up the gangplank, heavy-footed, lugging his bag. He turned.

“Pop over and see us sometime,” he said. “All that caviare, that good vodka.”

“Of course. I’ll sail out on the Liberation.”

I could see him not remembering. He was thinking of something else.

“And Victor—” he said; the wind caught the skirts of his overcoat and flapped them. “Forgive me.”

Before I could respond—how would I have responded?— MacLeish beside me suddenly stirred himself and fixed a hand urgently on my arm.

“Listen, Maskell,” he said, in a voice that shook, “I never liked you—still don’t, really—but I appreciate this, I mean your helping me like this. I want you to know that. I appreciate it.”

He stood a moment, nodding, those crazed Presbyterian eyes fixed on mine, then he turned and lurched up the gangplank. Finding Boy blocking his way, he gave him a hard push in the back and said something sharply which I did not catch. In my last sight of them they were standing side by side at the metal rail, and all I could see were their heads and shoulders; they were looking down at me, like a pair of Politburo members viewing the May Day parade, MacLeish expressionless, and Boy slowly, wistfully waving.

I caught the mail train back to London, and as we clattered along—why do trains always seem so much noisier at night?— the last effects of the alcohol in my blood drained all away, and I panicked. Thank God there was no one in the compartment to see me huddled in a corner of the seat, grey-faced, stark-eyed, my hands shaking and jaw involuntarily working. It was not arrest that I feared, not exposure, not even prison; that is, I did fear these things, but not in any immediate, felt way. I was just frightened, frightened of everything. My mind whizzed, all out of kilter, as if some component inside it had come loose and was flapping madly, like a broken fan belt. It is a good thing I was trapped on a train, or I do not know what I might have done— gone haring back to the quayside, perhaps, and leaped on board that ship with Boy and MacLeish as it pulled out to sea and so-called freedom. The thought of London filled me with terror. I had a Blakean vision of the city, all eerily aglow and thronged with aimlessly toiling figures into whose boiling midst the swaying, shuddering train would soon eject me. A sense of desolation and irremediable woe took hold of me, and brought me back all the way to the nights of my earliest childhood, when I would lie in bed in the swooping candlelight, while Freddie crooned in his cot and Nanny Hargreaves preached to us of hellfire and the fate of sinners; and now, hurtling through the dark towards London and the suddenly real possibility of damnation, in this world if not the next, I prayed. I did, Miss V., I prayed, incoherently, wriggling in terror and shame, but pray I did. And to my surprise, I was comforted. Somehow, the great Nobodaddy in the sky reached down a marmoreal hand and laid it on my burning brow and soothed me. When the train pulled into Charing Cross at three in the morning I had got my nerves back under control. As I walked along the empty platform, past the panting, sweating engine, squaring my shoulders and clearing my throat, I scoffed at myself for my fears of the night. What had I expected, I asked myself—a posse of police waiting for me at the ticket barrier?

I found a taxi and went home. Sleep was impossible. Patrick was in Ireland, on his yearly visit to see his aged mother. I was glad; I could not have faced the prospect of trying to account for my overnight absence—he always knew when I was lying, which must make him unique in my life. How he would have enjoyed it all, though; later, when he heard what I had been up to, he laughed and laughed. Never took me really seriously, did Patrick. I drank a cup of black coffee, but it gave me palpitations, and then I downed a beaker of brandy, and that made the palpitations worse. I stood at the window in the living room and watched the summer dawn come up bloodily over the rooftops of Bloomsbury. The birds had woken, and were making a frightful racket. I had a fluttery, hollow sensation, that was not just the effect of the caffeine; it was the same feeling that I used to have when I was still with Vivienne and would come home in the small hours after a night of trawling through the public lavatories. In every wrongdoer there lurks the desire to be caught.

At nine I called the number Boy had given me for Danny Perkins and arranged to meet him in Poland Street. I slipped out of the house, feeling watched. Lemon-sharp sunlight, the smoky summer smell of London. I had not shaved. I felt like one of Querell’s surreptitious villains.

Danny Perkins was working for a bookie now, in what capacity I did not care to enquire, and was all swagger and hair oil, like a real cockney. When I arrived at the house he was lounging in the doorway in the sun smoking a cigarette with studied panache. Sharp suit, loud tie, black suede shoes with crepe soles an inch thick. The sight of him stirred up in me the old stew of emotions. He had been my first queer love, and the one who first tied me to the stake of jealousy; it was hard to know which was the more profound experience. We were flustered at first, not knowing what to do: shaking hands seemed somehow absurd, and an embrace was out of the question. In the end he contented himself with punching me softly on the upper arm, and doing that boxer’s sideways ducking motion of his head and shoulders that I remembered so well.

“Hello, Vic,” he said jauntily, “you’re looking fit.”

“And so are you, Danny. Not a day older.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I was thirty-five last week. Where does it go to, eh?”

“Still got an eye on the stage?”

“No, no; my professional days are over. I do a bit of warbling still, but it’s mostly in the bath, now.”

We went into the house. The hall retained a medicinal smell, though the dodgy doctor was long gone. Where his surgery had been was a betting office now—“One of ours,” Danny said, with a proprietorial frown—and the floor was strewn with cigarette ends and soiled racing sheets. What had been my life was disappearing under time’s detritus. We climbed the stairs, Danny going ahead and I trying not to look at his narrow, neatly packed bum. In the parlour I watched his eyes slide over the sofa without a flicker of remembrance.

He had not yet mentioned Boy.

I found a half-full bottle of Scotch and we had a drink, standing in silence by the parlour window looking down into the narrow, sun-bright street. They would be in Paris by now, probably; I pictured Boy in the bar of the Gare du Nord, with an absinthe and a Gauloise, while the Dour Scot paced the pavement outside. We would all be hauled in, of course. I flinched at the prospect; I had been an interrogator, I knew what it would be like. But I was not afraid; no, I was not afraid.

I poured Danny and myself another whisky.

Boy’s room bore the signs of his precipitate departure: books thrown everywhere, the grate stuffed with half-burned papers, a white shirt spreadeagled on the floor suggestive of the chalk marks at the scene of a murder. In a wardrobe I found the old brown leather suitcase with the brass corners in which he kept his love letters. Trust Boy not to bother taking them with him. He was never one for blackmail. Unlike me.

“Were you looking for something in particular, then?” Danny Perkins asked. He was standing in the bedroom doorway, nonchalantly wielding another cigarette. I shrugged. Danny gave an odd little laugh. “He’s gone, isn’t he,” he said.

“Yes, Danny, he’s gone.”

“Will he be back?”

“I shouldn’t think so, no. He’s gone rather a long way off.”

He nodded.

“We’ll miss him, won’t we,” he said. “He was always a laugh.” He took a drag of his cigarette, and coughed for half a minute; he never could smoke properly. I picked up a letter and read: My dearest Boy, you missed a real knees-up at the palace last night, with all the lads in full regalia and Dickie simply rampant… “Funny, that, when you think of it,” Danny said hoarsely, “the good time we had, things being so bad, what with the war and all. It’s like we hardly noticed. But it’s all over now, isn’t it?”

“What’s that, Danny?”

“I say, it’s all over. Mr. Bannister gone, the old place empty…”

“Yes, I suppose you’re right; it is over.”

Extraordinary, how careless people could be; half the letters seemed to be on House of Commons notepaper; there was even one with a Lambeth Palace crest.

“Well,” Danny said, “I better be going: things to do, bets to be made good, that kind of thing.” He winked, grinning. He turned to go, then paused. “Listen, Victor, if there’s anything I can do, give me a bell. I know a lot of people, see.”

“Oh, yes? What sort of people?”

“Well, if you were ever to get yourself in trouble, like Mr. Bannister has, you might be in need of shelter, say, or transport…”

“Thank you, Danny. I’m grateful.”

He winked again, and sketched a mock salute, and was gone.

I spent the better part of the afternoon going over the flat. Incriminating material everywhere, of course; I burnt most of it. The flames made so much heat I had to throw open the windows. Why does the smell of burning paper always remind me of childhood? I was taking a last, beady look around when I heard footsteps on the stairs. Danny coming back to offer me a hot tip, perhaps? I walked out on to the landing. A window there, that I had never noticed in all the years I had lodged in the house, gave on to a distant haze of summer greenery, a patch of park, or public gardens, with trees, and toylike figures at work, or play, or simply idle, I could not tell which; I can still see that view, perfect in all its miniature detail, a little window looking out into a lost world.

“Danny?” I called down. “Is that you?”

It was not.

Everything was done with politeness and decorum; you could never fault the Department on its manners. The first one up the stairs was Moxton, from Security; I knew him slightly, a sandy-haired, weasel-faced fellow with oddly inexpressive eyes. He stopped on the return and twisted his head back to look up at me, one hand holding his hat, the other resting lightly on the banister rail. “Hello, Maskell,” he said pleasantly. “You’re the very chap we wanted to see.” Behind him came a large, bearish young man with a baby face splotched with pimples; Security, I thought, with remarkable inconsequence, always did get the least appetising recruits. “This is Brocklebank,” Moxton said, and his lips twitched.

So here it was at last. I was not even surprised; what I felt was a huge settling sensation, as if a tremendous weight inside me had shifted, dropping an inch with a soundless crash. Moxton and the boy Brocklebank had reached the landing. Brocklebank gave me a measuring look, narrowing his eyes in the way the thrillers told him to. A new recruit, brought out for a bit of training in the field. I smiled at him.

“Phew,” Moxton said, “isn’t it hot.” He glanced past my shoulder into the bedroom. “Been tidying up, have you? Bannister always was a slovenly sod. Having a bonfire, too, by the smell. What do they call it? Felo de se?”

“Auto-da-fé, actually, sir,” Brocklebank said, in a surprisingly plummy accent; I would not have taken him for a public-school type.

“That’s right,” Moxton said, without looking at him. “Burning of heretics.” He strolled into the bedroom and stopped in the middle of the floor and surveyed the disarray. Security people love this kind of thing; justifies their existence, after all. Beside me Brocklebank stood breathing, a big, soft engine, smelling of sweat and expensive cologne. “I imagine you’ve tied everything up here?” Moxton said, looking at me sideways from inside the room with those dead eyes, “the loose ends, and so on?” He stood a moment longer, pondering, then roused himself and came back out on the landing. “Look here,” he said, “why don’t you come down with us to the office. We can have a chat. You haven’t been round to the old place in ages.”

“Are you arresting me?” I said, and was surprised by the cracked flute-note that sounded in my voice.

Moxton put on a look of bland startlement.

“Well now, what an idea! Takes the rozzers to do that. No, no—as I say, just a chat. The Chief wants a word.” He squeezed out a chill, flinty smile. “They’ve called in Skryne, too. Bit of a flap on, as you can imagine. They’ll be fretting if we delay.” He touched my arm, as if to reassure me, then nodded to Brocklebank. “Lead on, Rodney, will you?” As we went down the stairs in the wake of Brocklebank’s fat back, Moxton hummed to himself and tossed his hat lightly in his hand. “You’re a Cambridge man, aren’t you?” he said. “Like Bannister?”

“We were up together, yes.”

“I was at Birmingham.” Another wintry glitter. “Not the same thing at all, eh?”

Brocklebank drove the car while Moxton and I sat in the back seat side by side, with our faces turned from each other, looking out of our respective windows. How calm the streets seemed, a glassy, distant anti-world, adrift with the dense soft smoke of summer. My mind churned sluggishly, in a kind of hindered, underwater panic, like a fish entangled in a net.

“You realise,” I said, “I have no idea what’s going on.”

Moxton did not turn from the window, and only chuckled. He was right, of course: you must start acting the moment they challenge you, not when you are already in the car, with the cuffs on. Or rather, you must never stop acting, not for an instant, even when you are alone, in a locked room, with the lights off and the blankets over your head.

Billy Mytchett had the wounded, anguished look of a fifth-former who has heard a rumour in the dorm that his mother has bolted and his father’s firm gone smash. “Christ, Maskell,” he said, “this is a hell of a business.” I had never heard him swear before; it seemed encouraging, for some reason. We were in a safe house in a suburban avenue somewhere south of the river. Safe houses always seem to me to have something of an ecclesiastical atmosphere; a domestic setting that is not lived in must remind me of my father’s study, which he never used except on Saturday nights when he was preparing the next day’s sermon. There was always a chill in that room, and a faint, flat stink generated, I suppose, by years of devout labour, impassioned self-delusion, and the ever-present fear of a loss of faith. It was the same fusty smell that trickled like dust in my nostrils now as I sat on a hard chair in the middle of a brown-painted parlour, with Moxton and Brocklebank loitering silently behind me in the umber gloom, and Billy Mytchett pacing up and down in front of me on the threadbare carpet with his fists jammed in the pockets of his old tweed jacket, doing tight turns at every third pace, like an agitated sentry who suspects the assassin has already slipped past him and is even now forcing his way into the king’s bedchamber. Skryne, on the other hand, was quite comfy and at his ease, sitting in an armchair at an angle to me, spruce as a visiting uncle in his neat suit and speckled tie and argyle socks, his perennial pipe going nicely. I had known him only by repute. Uneducated, but very sharp, so they said. He had been a policeman in Palestine. He did not worry me. In fact, none of it worried me; I was almost enjoying it all, as if it were a bit of foolery laid on for my entertainment and I had no real part to play in it except that of a mildly interested spectator. Then Skryne began to speak, in his pleasant, mild, pigeon-fancier’s voice. They knew all about me, he said, my work during the war for the Bolsheviks (that was the term he used—so quaint, so charmingly old-world!), my meetings with Oleg, everything. “MacLeish, Bannister and you,” he said. “Others as well, of course; but you were the three.” Silence. He waited, chin tilted, eyebrows lifted, smiling. You will think me ridiculously fanciful, I know, but I felt exactly as I had felt that morning many years before when I had woken up in the dawn light and knew that I would marry Baby: I had the same sense of levitating, somehow, as if a seraphic version of myself were rising up out of me, gilded and afire, into the suddenly shining air. Skryne softly slapped a hand down on his knee. “Come on, now,” he said good-humouredly, “aren’t you going to say anything?”

I stood up—I mean my real, corporeal, stark and sweating self—and walked to the window. Outside, there was a monkey-puzzle tree, looking very black and mad in the sun, and a discouraged strip of grass with a flowerless border. In the house opposite, a fat man was leaning out of a narrow upstairs window; he was so still, and filled the window frame so fully, that I wondered if he had become wedged there and was waiting for someone to come along behind him and give him a tug. Slowly I took a cigarette out of my case—whatever became of that, I wonder—and lit it; the gesture seemed to me impossibly theatrical. Odd, the lights one sees oneself in on such occasions.? hardly knew myself. “Billy,” I said, without turning, “do you remember that day at the end of the war, when you called me round to the Department and told me the Palace needed me to run an errand in Bavaria…?” I threw my unsmoked cigarette into the fireplace and returned to the straight-backed chair— how disapproving a chair like that can look—and sat down, crossing my knees and resting my folded hands on them. All this had happened before; I wondered where. Billy was looking at me with a puzzled frown. I described my trip to Regensburg, how I had smuggled out the chest, and what was in it. “Blackmail,” I said, “has never seemed to me an ugly word. Quite the opposite, in fact.” There was the noise of a lawnmower, the old-fashioned kind that you had to push. I looked to the window. The fat man opposite had extricated himself from the upstairs window, and was shearing his lawn now, pushing the machine with a curiously antique action, bending low from the waist with arms stretched out stiff and one stout leg extended behind him. The word felucca came to my mind. Idle fancies, Miss V., idle fancies in the midst of crisis, it is ever thus with me. Billy Mytchett brought out his cold pipe and sucked on it, like a baby with its soother; in the pipe department, Mytchett was no match for Skryne.

“Blackmail,” he said, flatly.

I toyed with my cigarette case—what would I do without my props?—and selected another cigarette and tapped it on the lid. No one taps cigarettes like that any more; why did we do it, anyway?

“All I want,” I said, “is for my life to go on as it is, in the same placid, unexcited way. I stay at the Institute, I keep my position at the Palace, and I still get the knighthood that HM has privately promised me. In return for this, I guarantee silence on everything I know.”

I was remarkably cool, if I say so myself. I have a way at times like that of going quite still all over, a protective instinct which is at once primitive and highly developed. I imagine my O Measceoil ancestors out on the bracken in pursuit of the great elk, hunter and hound together stopping dead at point as their poor prey lifts its magnificently burdened head and regards them out of one tragic, tear-streaked eye. There was another silence, and Skryne and Billy Mytchett looked at each other, and it seemed as if they might laugh. Billy cleared his throat.

“Look here, Victor,” he said, “there’s no need for this kind of nonsense. We’re all grown-ups. That Regensburg stuff has been known about for years; no one is interested in that.” And straight away I understood. They wanted a deal, just as I did. Immunity for me was immunity for them. The flight of Boy and MacLeish was scandal enough to be going on with. I was disconcerted; more, I was dismayed. I had slapped down my trump card, and the rest of the table could hardly suppress a snigger. “You’ll have to cooperate, though,” Billy was saying with a great show of sternness. “You’ll have to talk to Skryne here and his people.” Skryne nodded, fairly glowing at the prospect of the fascinating conversations he and I would have in the coming months and years—our liaison was to last, on and off, for two and a half decades.

“But of course,” I said, making what I considered a gallant stab at insouciance; really, their cynical practicality had shocked me. “I shall tell Mr. Skryne such things, why, they will make his eyes pop.”

Billy jabbed the stem of his pipe at me. “And you’ll have to keep your mouth shut,” he said. “No running with stories to your pansy pals.”

“Oh, Billy,” I said.

He turned away with a disgusted grimace, as if to spit.

We broke up then, and Brocklebank was detailed to drive me home. They could not get rid of me fast enough. I tarried, dissatisfied. Everything felt so flat and anticlimactic. In the hallway I stopped beside a dusty aspidistra in a tarnished brass pot and turned to Billy.

“By the way,” I said, “as a matter of interest: who was it betrayed me?”

Skryne and Billy looked at each other. Skryne smiled, tolerant, dismissive, as if I were a favourite nephew who had asked for one treat too much.

“Oh, now, Dr. Maskell,” he said, “that would be telling, wouldn’t it.”

The evening air was heavy with the smell of cut grass. Brocklebank, stout Rodney, walking ahead of me to the garden gate, gave a yawn that made his jaw muscles crack. On the journey home he became quite talkative; no one really minds a bit of treachery, no one on the inside, I mean. I could tell there were all sorts of things he was dying to ask me. When we got to the flat I invited him up to see my Poussin; it was a device I often employed, with more success than you might expect. The majority of my invitees did not know, or care, what I was talking about, and God knows what they expected to see when I threw open the study door like a proud impresario and presented to them the spectacle of Seneca’s stylised exsanguination. French-speakers probably thought I was asking them in to a chicken dinner. Rodney, however, was a bit of a snob, and pretended to know something about art. He carried his great bulk carefully, going about daintily on creaking tiptoe, as if the flat were a china shop. He proved to be something of a bull in the bedroom, too, with that big back, those unexpectedly narrow thighs. Pity about the pimples, though.

He left at dawn, creeping out of my bed and gathering up his clothes—dropping a shoe with a crash, of course—while I pretended tactfully to be asleep. I wondered if he would tell anyone he had been with me. Talk about a breach of security—as Boy might have said. I was missing Boy already. I lay awake watching the room whiten, beset by a profound and not quite explicable sadness. Then I got up, and changed the sheets—more than once I had caught Patrick, for all his vaunted freedom from jealousy, going over the bedclothes with the beady eye of a suspicious landlady—and went down and got out the car, in those days a big old Hillman of which I was very fond, and set off westward across the city. I did not know where I was going; I was dizzy from lack of sleep. The streets were all harsh sunlight and long, slender sharp shadows. After a while it seemed to start to rain, impossibly, out of a cloudless sky, and when I put on the wipers they did no good, and I realised that I was weeping. This was a surprise. I stopped the car and got out a handkerchief and swabbed my face, feeling ridiculous. Presently the tears stopped, and I sat for a while with my head leaning on the back of the seat, sniffling and gulping. A milkman passing by looked in at me with lively interest; I must have livened up his round for him. It was a fine morning, truly lovely. The sun. The little white puffs of cloud. The birds. I was about to drive on again when it struck me that the street was familiar, and I saw, with a small shock, that I had stopped a few doors away from Vivienne’s house. Homing: the word came to me in all its ambiguity, its fatuous yearning. When had Vivienne’s house, any house she had ever inhabited, been home to me?

She must have been awake—she never was much of a sleeper—for when I rang the bell she came down at once and opened the door. Vaguely I wondered if she could be accustomed to receiving callers at this hour of the day—and was that a look of disappointment that crossed her face when she saw that it was me and not some far more interesting other? She was wearing a bright-blue gown—with a jolt I saw again Senhor Fonseca sprawled in his blood—and silk slippers, and her hair was tied up in an unbecoming knot. She had not put on her make-up, which gave her a blurred and almost apprehensive expression; if she had been expecting a visitor, it must have been an old and trusted someone, for the world was not often permitted to see Vivienne without her face.

“Victor!” she said. “Good heavens, what a nice surprise. I thought you must be the postman.” The hall, filled with morning light, had the look of a long glass box suspended in sunlit space. Crimson roses crowding in a bowl seemed to throb in their depths, like slow hearts. Vivienne closed the door and hesitated for a moment in amused perplexity. “Is it very late for you,” she said, “or very early? You’re not drunk, are you? It’s just that you look a bit… odd. You do realise it’s five o’clock in the morning?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking of. I was passing, and…”

“Yes. Well, come into the kitchen. The children are asleep.” I thought of Antonia MacLeish: should I telephone her? And say what? “One hardly knows what to offer, at this hour of the morning,” Vivienne said, going ahead of me and opening the kitchen door. “In the old days we would have had champagne. Speaking of which, how is Boy?”

“He’s… away.”

“I haven’t seen him in such a long time. Haven’t seen anyone, really, from that world. I do seem to have lost contact. Do you think it means I shall turn into a lonely old woman, the Miss Havisham of South Audley Street? I feel positively ancient. If it weren’t for the children I’m sure I shouldn’t go out at all. Would you like some tea?” She turned interrogatively from the sink with the kettle in her hand. I said nothing. She laughed softly and shook her head. “Do tell me what the matter is, Victor. You look like a little boy who’s been caught stealing apples. Are you in trouble? Have you made some awful mistake, misattributed one of the King’s pictures, or something?”

I was about to say something, I hardly knew what, when suddenly I began to weep again, helplessly, in a great splurge of misery and objectless rage. I could not stop. I just stood there, in the middle of the floor, in the gaseous light of morning, choking on phlegm, my shoulders shaking, grinding my teeth and bunching my fists, with my eyes squeezed shut and the hot tears spurting down my shirt-front. There was an awful, indecent pleasure in it. It was like that glorious transgressional moment when as a child dreaming in bed I would give way and wet myself, copiously, scaldingly, unstoppably. At first Vivienne did nothing, but stood, startled and uncertain, with a hand to her lip. Then she came forward, shimmeringly, and put her arms about me and made me rest my forehead on her shoulder. Through the stuff of the dressing gown I could smell the faint staleness of the night on her skin.

“My darling,” she said, “whatever is the matter?”

She made me sit me down at the table, and fetched me a fresh handkerchief, and busied herself preparing the tea while I sat and snuffled.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Don’t know what came over me.”

She sat down and regarded me across the table.

“Poor dear,” she said, “you really are in a state.”

I told her about Boy and MacLeish and the dash to Folkestone. I was breathless and afraid, like the messenger kneeling at the king’s feet telling him of the rout of his army, but I could not help myself, the words spilled out as the tears had done, unstoppably. Vivienne sat quite still, watching me, with almost clinical attention, and said nothing until I had finished.

“Boy has gone off with the Dour Scot?” she said then. “But it’s impossible. They can’t stand each other.”

“I rather think they’ll probably separate, you know, once they get to… where they’re going.”

“To Moscow, you mean. That is where they’ve gone, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose so.”

She nodded, still with her eyes on mine.

“And you?” she said.

“Me?”

“Why have you not gone with them?”

“Why should I do that? I just gave them a lift down to the coast. Boy asked me. He was my friend.”

“Was?”

“Well, he’s gone now. I doubt we shall ever see him again.”

She poured the tea, watching the twisting amber arc clatter into the cups. I asked if she would give me something to lace it with, but she was not listening.

“You always lied to me,” she said pensively. “From the very start, you lied. Why should I forgive that now?”

I stared at her.

“Lied to you?” I said. “What did I lie about?”

“About everything. Is your tea all right? Perhaps you’d like some breakfast? I’m beginning to feel quite peckish, myself. Shocks always make me hungry—do you find that? Let me fry some eggs or something.” She did not move, but sat with her fingers resting on the handle of the teapot, gazing before her and slowly nodding. “So Boy is gone,” she said. “I should like to have been able to say goodbye.” She blinked, and turned her gaze on me again. “You knew he was planning to bolt, didn’t you.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t even know he had a reason to bolt.”

“You knew, and you didn’t tell anyone. Such… such discretion!”

Her eyes glittered. I looked away from her.

“You’re being ridiculous,” I said. “I knew nothing.”

She went on staring at me in silence, and clenched her fist and laid it on the table before her, like a weapon. Then, suddenly, she laughed.

“Oh, Victor,” she said, and she relaxed her fist and lifted her hand and laid it tenderly along the length of my cheek, as she had so many times before had cause to do. “Poor, poor Victor. You’re right, you knew nothing, even less than you thought you did. He kept it all from you.”

The tea tasted of clay. In the silence I could clearly hear the pips for the six o’clock news from a wireless set in the house next door. I had not realised there were so many early risers in May-fair. A jade figurine of a pot-bellied monk—one of Big Beaver’s pieces—sat smirking to itself on the window sill beside me. Things, in their silence, endure so much better than people.

Chrysalis.

“He?” I said dully. “What are you saying? What he?”

I could not bear her pitying smile.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “It was him. It was always him…”

I really must look out that pistol.

They kept coming back to me, year after year; whenever there was a flap on, when some new gaping hole was found in the State’s so-called security, Skryne would wander into my life again, diffident, deferential, relentless as ever. During our interrogations—I say our, because I always think of them as something that we shared, like a series of tutorials, or a course of spiritual exercises—he would maunder on for hours in that dry, mild, schoolmasterly way that he had, asking the same question over and over, in slightly altered forms, and then all at once he would seize on a name, a word, an involuntary flicker of response in me that I had hardly been aware of, and everything would shift, and the questioning would go off in an entirely new direction. Yet it was all very relaxed and mannerly and, well, chummy. In time we even took to exchanging Christmas cards— honestly, we did. He was a match for me in patience, in concentration, in his eye for the telling detail, in his ability to take a fragment and build up a picture of the whole; but in the end I was the one with the greater endurance. In all that time—I wonder how many hours we spent together: a thousand, two thousand?—I do not think I ever gave him anything he could not have got elsewhere. I named only the dead, or those who had been so peripheral to our circle that I knew the Department would not bother with them, or not for long, anyway. Chess is too serious, too warlike, an analogy for what we were engaged in. A cat-and-mouse game, then—but who was the mouse, and who the cat?

I remember the first time Skryne came to the flat. He had been angling for a long time, not very subtly, to get in and have a look at what he called my gaff. I objected that it would be an unconscionable invasion of privacy if he were to question me in my home, but in the end I weakened and said that he might come round for a sherry at six some evening. I suppose I thought I might get an advantage by granting his harmless and in a way quite touching wish: the cocktail hour is a tricky and uncertain part of the social day for persons of his class, who think of it as teatime, and fret, I find, when they have to forgo this important repast. However, he seemed perfectly at ease. Perhaps he was a little intimidated by the empty, echoing galleries as we ascended through them, but once inside the flat he began to make himself at home right away. He was even about to light up his pipe, without asking my leave, but I stopped him, saying the fumes would be bad for the pictures, as indeed they might have been, for the black shag that he smoked gave off an acrid stink that shrivelled my nostrils and made my eyes prickle. I caught him taking a quick look round; he seemed not very impressed— indeed, I think he was disappointed. I wonder what he had been expecting? Purple silk hangings, perhaps, and a catamite posed upon a chaise longue (Patrick had not been well pleased when I asked him to absent himself for the duration of the visit, and had taken himself off to the pictures in a sulk). He became animated, though, when he spotted the little Degas drawing I had borrowed from the French Room downstairs to hang over the fireplace; I have never succeeded in liking the work of this painter, and had brought the piece up to live with it for a while in the hope that it might win me over. (It did not.)

“That’s a lovely thing, isn’t it,” he said, pointing the stem of his cold pipe at it. “Degas. Beautiful.” He blinked shyly. “I dabble a bit myself, you know.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Watercolours. It’s just a hobby, though my missus will insist on getting my things framed and hanging them about the place. As a matter of fact, I did a copy of that very one, from a book. Mine’s only on cardboard, though.”

“So is the original.”

“Oh.”

“And it’s Degas, by the way; the s is pronounced.”

We drank our sherry in the study. He did not remark the Poussin. There were two chairs—one of them already waiting for you, Miss V., although it did not know it—yet we remained standing. I wondered what account of me he would give his missus. The dry type, Mabel; and stuck-up, too. It was a chrome and copper evening in October. Boy and the Dour Scot had made their first appearance in Moscow to talk to reporters, spouting a lot of solemn claptrap about peace and fraternity and world revolution; Party Congress stuff, written for them, probably, by our friends in the Kremlin. The thing was televised, apparently in a snowstorm—I owned a primitive set by then; it was supposed to be for Patrick’s amusement, but I was already a secret addict—and I found it a depressing and slightly nauseating spectacle. Heartbreaking, really, that all that passion, that conviction, should have shrunk to this, two raddled, middle-aged men sitting at a bare table in a windowless room in the Lubyanka, putting on a brave face and desperately smiling, trying to convince themselves and the world that they had come home at long last to the Promised Land. I dreaded to think how Boy might be faring. I remembered, that night in the thirties when I was whisked off to the Kremlin, the wife of the Commissar of Soviet Culture looking at the champagne in my glass with a curled lip and saying, “Georgian.” A fellow from the British embassy claimed to have spotted Boy one night in a Moscow hotel, slumped at the bar with his forehead on his arm, noisily weeping. I hoped that they were whiskey tears.

“Think they’re happy, your two chums?” Skryne said. “Not much in the way of beer and skittles over there.”

“Caviare is more their taste,” I said coldly, “and there is plenty of that.”

He was toying with things on my desk; I had an urge to slap his hand away. I do hate people to fiddle.

“Would you go over?” he said.

I took a sip of sherry. It was very good; I hoped Skryne could appreciate it.

“They urged me to,” I said. They had; Oleg had been anxiously solicitous. “I asked them, if I went, could they arrange regular working visits for me to the National Gallery and the Louvre? They consulted Moscow and came back very apologetic. No sense of irony, the Russians. Just like the Americans, in that.”

“You don’t like Americans, do you.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’re perfectly decent people, individually. It’s just that I’m not a democrat, you see; I fear mob rule.”

“What about the dictatorship of the proletariat?”

“Oh please,” I said, “let us not descend to polemics. Some more sherry? It’s not at all bad, you know.”

I poured. I like the oleaginous quality of this drink, but otherwise even the best of it has a bitter edge that reminds me of some unpleasant taste from childhood—Nanny Hargreaves’s castor oil, perhaps. No, I prefer gin, with its mysterious hints of frost and forest, metal and flame. In the first days after Boy’s flight I practically bathed in the stuff from first thing in the morning until the dead hours of the night. My poor liver. Probably it was then, all those years ago, that the cells essayed the first drunken steps of their dervish dance that is now consuming my insides. Skryne stood gazing glassy-eyed before him, the thimble of drink seemingly forgotten in his fingers. He often went blank like that; it was unnerving. Concentration? Deep thought? A trap for the unwary, perhaps?—one did tend to let one’s vigilance slip when he went absent in this way. Late light from the window was throwing a nickel-bright sheen across the surface of the Poussin, picking out the points of the pigment and shading in the hollows. Someone at the valuers has raised a question as to its authenticity; preposterous, of course.

“Consider this picture,” I said. “It is called The Death of Seneca. It was painted in the middle of the seventeenth century by Nicholas Poussin. You are something of an artist, you tell me: the civilisation that this picture represents, isn’t it worth fighting for?” I noticed the faint shiver on the surface of the sherry in the glass I was holding; I had thought I was quite calm. “The Spartan youth,” I said, “complained to his mother that his sword was too short, and her only reply was, Step closer.”

Skryne gave a curious, creaky sigh. I had to acknowledge, there in the confined space of the study, that he exuded a faint but definite smell: tobacco, naturally, but something behind that as well, something drab and unsavoury; something very—well, very Hackney.

“Wouldn’t it be better, Dr. Maskell,” he said, “if we were to sit down now, here, and get it all over and done with?”

“I told you, I am not willing to undergo interrogation in my own home.”

“Not interrogation. Just a… just a general clearing up, you might say. I’m a Catholic—well, my mother was a Catholic; Irish, like you. I still remember how it used to feel, when I was a lad, to come out of the confession box, that feeling of… lightness. Know what I mean?”

“I have told you everything I know,” I said.

He smiled, and gently shook his head, and set his glass down carefully on a corner of my desk. He had not touched the sherry.

“No,” he said. “You’ve told us everything that we know.”

I sighed. Was there to be no end to this?

“What you are asking me to do is betray my friends,” I said. “I won’t do that.”

“You’ve betrayed everything else.” Still smiling, still gently avuncular.

“But what you mean by everything,” I said, “is nothing to me. To be capable of betraying something you must first believe in it.” I too put down my glass, with a clunk of finality. “And now, Mr. Skryne, I think, really…”

In the hall I handed him his hat. He had a way of putting it on, fitting it carefully to his head with rotating motions, using both hands and crouching forward a little, that seemed as if he were screwing the lid on to a container of some precious, volatile stuff. At the door he paused.

“By the way, did you see that thing that Bannister said when he met the chap from the Daily Mail in Moscow? We haven’t let him publish it yet.”

“Then how would I have seen it?”

He smiled cannily, as if I had made a sly and telling point.

“I wrote it down,” he said, “I think I have it here.” He produced a bulging wallet and extracted from it a slip of paper carefully folded. I could see he had planned this little gesture, even down to the last-minute timing; after all, he was a fellow thespian. He put on a pair of wire-frame spectacles, threading the earpieces carefully behind his ears and adjusting the bridge, then cleared his throat preparatory to reading aloud. “Don’t think I’m starry-eyed about this place, he says. I miss my friends. I’m lonely sometimes. But here I’m lonely for the unimportant things. In England I was lonely for what is really important—for Socialism. Sad, eh?” He proffered the slip. “Here, why don’t you keep it?”

“No, thank you. The Daily Mail is not my paper.”

He nodded, thinking, his gaze fixed on the knot of my tie.

“Are you lonely for Socialism, Dr. Maskell?” he said gently.

I could hear the clank and gurgle of the lift ascending; it would be Patrick returning from the pictures, probably still in a huff. Life can be very trying, sometimes.

“I’m not lonely for anything,” I said. “I have done my work. That’s all that matters.”

“And your friends,” he said softly. “Don’t forget your friends. They matter, don’t they?”

16

Miss Vandeleur has just left, in rather hangdog fashion, I’m afraid. She will not be seeing me again; or, more accurately, I shall not be seeing her. Her visit was a moving occasion; last things, and so on—and not so on. I had bought a cake—it turned out to be somewhat stale—and put a small candle on it. I have a special licence to be silly, now. She eyed the cake suspiciously, in some bafflement. Our first anniversary, I said, handing her a glass of champagne with what I judged to be just the right shading of old-world gallantry; I would not want her to think I harbour any feelings of rancour against her. But in fact, as she pointed out when she checked back to the beginning of her by now dog-eared notebook, this was not the date on which she first came to me. I waved aside these petty details. We were sitting in the study. Although she did not seem to notice it, I was acutely conscious of the awful blank space on the wall where the Poussin should have been hanging. Miss V. was in her greatcoat, yet still seemed cold, as she always does; her mechanic must have the devil of a time warming her up—girls always blame their young men for the prevailing temperature, don’t ask me how I know. She also had on her leather skirt, as of old. How account for the pathos of people’s clothes? I envisioned her in her room in Golders Green, in the grey light and fetid air of morning, with a mug of cold coffee on the dressing table, creakily getting into that skirt and contemplating another day of… of what? Perhaps there is no such room in Golders Green. Perhaps it is all an invention, her father the Admiral, her uncouth mechanic, the glum commutings on the Northern Line, my biography. I asked her how the book was coming along and she gave me a resentful stare, looking like a sullen schoolgirl who has been caught smoking behind the bicycle shed. I assured her I did not feel harshly toward her, and she put on a show of incomprehension, saying she was sure she did not know what I was talking about. We regarded each other for a moment in silence, I smiling, she with a cross frown. Oh, Miss Vandeleur, my dear Serena. If these really are her names.

“Despite appearances,” I said, indicating the champagne bottle and the ruined cake with its Pisan candle, “I am officially in mourning.” I watched her closely for a reaction; none came, as I had expected; she already knew. “Yes,” I said, “you see, my wife died.”

Silence for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” she said faintly, looking at my hands.

April. Such wonderful skies today, great drifting ice-mountains of cloud, and beyond them that delicate, breakable blue, and the sunlight going on and off as if a capricious someone somewhere had control of a switch. I do not like the springtime; have I said that before? Too disturbing, too distressing, all this new life blindly astir. I feel left behind, half buried, all withered bough and gnarled root. Something is stirring in me, though. I often fancy, at night especially, that I can feel it in there, not the pain, I mean, but the thing itself, malignantly flourishing, flexing its pincers. Well, I shall soon put a stop to its growth. Mouth very dry now, all of a sudden. Strange effects. I am quite calm.

“It was dreadfully sad,” I said. “It seems she starved herself to death. Refused to eat, just turned her face to the wall, as they used to say. Such desperateness to die! She wouldn’t let them send for me; said I should be left in peace. She was always more considerate than I; braver, too. The funeral was yesterday. I am still a trifle upset, as you can see.”

Why, with death attendant upon me at every moment, tirelessly prowling the rickety defences of my life, am I still surprised when it makes a kill? I had always taken it for granted that Vivienne would outlive me. And yet when Julian telephoned, I knew, before he said it, that she was gone. We stood for a long moment, listening to each other breathing through the ether.

“It’s better this way,” he said.

Why do the young always think it better that the old should be dead? The question answers itself, I suppose.

“Yes,” I said, “better.”

She had requested to be buried by the Jewish rite. I was astonished. When we were married first she used to take the children to church services, especially when she was in Oxford, but that, I realised now, must have been merely to annoy her mother. I never knew she cared for the God of her fathers. No accounting for people, no accounting. There were more surprises at the funeral. Nick wore a yarmulke, and so did Julian, and during the prayers, the Kaddish or whatever it’s called, I saw Nick’s lips moving as he joined in with the cantor. Where did all this devoutness come from all of a sudden? But obviously it was not sudden.

The cemetery was on the outer fringes of north London. It took us more than an hour to get there, despite the indecent speed at which the hearse cut its way through the northbound traffic. It was a harsh, blustery grey day with squalls of rain and a gash of infernal, yellowish light lying along the horizon. In the car I sat in the back seat, feeling shrivelled and cowed. Beside me Blanche sobbed to herself, her face all blotched and swollen. Julian sat stiffly upright at the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road. The empty seat beside him was lugubriously symbolic of his mother’s absence. Nick travelled alone, with his chauffeur. At one stage in the journey, when we were briefly on the motorway and our two cars drew level, I saw that he was working, papers and gold pen in hand, the Ministerial red box open beside him on the seat. He felt my eyes on him, and looked up at me unseeingly for a moment, remote, expressionless, his thoughts importantly elsewhere. Even now, when he is in his seventies, corpulent, bald, his face all fallen and his eyes rheumy and pouched, I can still see in him the beauty he once was; is it real, or do I put it there? That was what I was for, that was always my task, to keep his image in place, to kneel before him humbly with head bowed and hold the mirror up to him, and in turn to hold his image up to the world’s inspection.

As we were pulling in at the gates of the cemetery, Blanche made a fumbling attempt to take my hand, but I pretended not to notice. I do not care to be touched.

For a second I did not recognise Querell. It was not that he had changed very much, but he was the last person I had expected to see here. What cheek! He was thin-haired, a little stooped, yet still possessed of a watchful, sinister elegance. Or no, not elegance, that is not the word; just sleekness, rather, at once devilish and tawdry, and an air always of malevolent anticipation, like that of an expert swimmer, say, calmly looking on as a clumsy novice ventures flounderingly out of his depth. He carries the aura of his fame with ease. I was always jealous of him. When the ceremony was finished he came and shook my hand perfunctorily. We had not seen each other for more than a quarter of a century, yet he carried off the moment as if we had been in the habit of bumping into each other every day.

“Trust the Jews,” he said, “they always come back to their own in the end. Just like us—Catholics, I mean.” He was wearing a padded windbreaker over his suit. “I feel the cold more, nowadays. My blood has gone thin from living so long in the south. You don’t look too bad, Victor; perfidy keeps one young, eh?” I could not recall him ever before using my first name. I introduced him to Blanche and Julian. He gave them each in turn a keen, long look. “I knew you when you were in your cradles.” Julian was curtly polite. I do admire his reserve, so rare a thing those days. “You have your mother’s eyes,” Querell said, and Julian gave that stiff little nod of his, which to me always seems to be accompanied by a phantom clicking of the heels. My poor, lost son. Querell had turned his attention on Blanche. She was all of a quiver, flustered in the presence of such a celebrity. She withdrew her hand from his as if his touch had burned her. I wonder if they know about Querell, she and Julian? It is not the kind of thing one asks one’s children, even when they are grown up.

“When do you go back?” I said.

Querell gave me a stare.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

The spring wind gusted in the still-bare trees and a handful of rain spattered the wall of the marble temple behind us. Julian attempted to slide a supportive hand under my arm but I shook him off violently. For a moment I clearly saw Vivienne walking toward me, weaving her way among the headstones in her tubular black silk dress and flapper’s high heels. Nick had already sped off in his car, without a word to anyone. Querell was talking about taxis.

“Oh, no no,” I said, “let us give you a lift.” Julian opened his mouth but said nothing. Querell frowned. “I insist,” I said. One can have fun even at a funeral.

We fairly dashed back into the city, Querell and I in the back seat now, and Blanche and Julian in front, the two of them sitting like effigies, listening intently to the silence behind them. Querell watched with narrow-eyed interest—ever the novelist— the dreary suburban streets going past, the corner groceries, the launderettes, the brand-new but already dingy shopping malls with their garish window displays and blown litter.

“England,” he said, and snickered.

At St. Giles Circus we were brought to a halt by a traffic jam. It was as if we had blundered into the smouldering centre of a herd of big, shiny, shuddering animals.

“Listen, Querell,” I said, “come for a drink.”

How like the old days it sounded! Querell gave me an ironical stare. Julian was already edging the car towards the kerb. On the pavement the wind swirled about us callously. While Querell was doing up the complicated zipper of his coat I watched the car nose its way back into the traffic, brother and sister leaning toward each other now in animated talk. Those are the really secret lives, the lives of one’s children.

“Anxious to be away,” I said. “We have become the tedious old.”

Querell nodded.

“I was just thinking,” he said, “my mistress is younger than your daughter.”

We turned into Soho. The day had brightened, and now a strong sun appeared, shouldering its way out of the clouds, and the sky above the narrow streets seemed immensely high and somehow vigorously in flight. The wind swooped and lunged, wringing the necks of the daffodils in the Square. On the corner of Wardour Street a crone in cocoa-coloured stockings and a shroudlike coat was shrieking abuse at the passers-by. White flecks on her lips, the grief-maddened eyes. The sun flashed suddenly, outlandishly, on a sheet of glass on the back of a lorry. Two club girls went past, in fake-fur coats and three-inch heels. Querell eyed them with sour amusement.

“London was always a parody of itself,” he said. “Ridiculous, ugly, cold country. You should have got out when you could.”

We walked down Poland Street. After Boy’s flight, Leo Rothenstein had sold the house. The upper storeys had been converted into offices. We stood on the pavement looking up at the familiar windows. Why can’t the past ever leave off, why must it be forever pawing at us, like a wheedling child. We walked on, saying nothing. Miniature wind-devils danced on the pavement, lifting dust and scraps of paper in swaying spirals. I was feeling quite light-headed.

The old pub had a pinball machine now. It was noisily attended by a gang of shaven-headed young men wearing broad braces and lace-up boots. Querell and I sat in prostatic discomfort on low stools at a small table at the back and drank gin, watching the boot-boys about their raucous game, the vague old daytime topers at the bar. Ghosts glimmered in the shadows. Phantom laughter. The past, the past.

“Would you come back?” I said. “Do you not miss it, any of it?”

He was not listening.

“You know,” he said, “Vivienne and I had an affair.” He glanced at me quickly and away again, frowning. He turned his cigarette this way and that in his fingers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was when you were first married. She was lonely.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.” He stared, in gratifying startlement. I shrugged. “Vivienne told me.”

A bus went past outside with an elephantine blare and made floor and seat and table faintly shudder, and stark pale faces on the top deck gaped in at us fleetingly in what seemed a sort of amazement. Querell with pursed lips expelled a thin quick cone of smoke towards the ceiling; there were patches of whitish stubble on his badly shaved old turkey’s neck.

“When?” he said.

“What?”

“When did she tell you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters.”

His hands, I noticed, were trembling a little; the smoke as it rose from his cigarette wavered in the same rapid rhythm. The smoke was blue before he inhaled it, and afterwards grey.

“Oh, a long time ago,” I said. “The day after Boy defected. The day after you and the others decided to betray me to the Department.”

An argument had started at the pinball machine, and two of the young men were engaged in a mock fight, feinting and jabbing and making dangerous-looking little kicks at each other’s shins, while their companions jeeringly urged them on. Querell drank his drink and exhaled a sort of whistly sigh. He took our glasses and went to the bar. I looked at him in his vulgar padded coat and suede shoes. The mystery of other people yawned before me, as if a door caught by the wind had been flung open on to dark and storm. Another bus went by, and another set of dull, astonished faces looked in at us from on high. Querell came back with the drinks, and when he was settling himself on the stool again I caught a whiff of something off him, an internal emanation, cheesy and raw; perhaps he is sick, too. I certainly hope so. He frowned into his glass, as if he had spotted something floating in it. A patch of pink, the size of a shilling, had appeared high up on each of his cheekbones; what was it—anger? excitement? Surely not shame?

“How did you know?” he said, in a thickened voice. “I mean, about…”

“Vivienne, of course. Who else? She told me everything there was to know, that day. She was my wife, you see.”

He drank deep and sat bending his glass this way and that, watching the last silver bead of liquor rolling around the bottom.

“I wanted to keep you out of it, you know,” he said. “I wanted to give them Rothenstein, or Alastair Sykes. But no, they said it would have to be you.”

I laughed.

“I’ve just realised,” I said, “this is what you came back for, isn’t it. To tell me about you and Vivienne, and about… this. What a disappointment for you, that I should know it all already.”

His lips, contracting with age, had acquired tiny, deeply etched striations all along their edges, which gave his mouth a spinsterish cast. That is how I must look, too. What would those young men have seen, if they had turned on us their menacing attention? A pair of sad old withered eunuchs, with their gin and their cigarettes, their ancient secrets, ancient pain. I signalled to the barman. He was a slender, pale youth, a Bronzino type, drawn and somewhat debauched-looking; when I paid for the drinks I brushed his cool, damp fingers with mine, and he gave me a wan glance. In the midst of death, life. Querell was regarding me with a grim eye, feeling along his lower lip with the tip of his tongue. I tried to imagine him and Vivienne together. He blinked slowly, old saurian eyelids drooping. I smelled his mortal smell again.

“We had to give them someone,” he said.

Well, I was always able to see that, of course. There had to have been a London end to the operation, someone to receive the material MacLeish and Bannister were sending from Washington and pass it on to Oleg. It was the least the Department would have expected; the least they would have settled for.

“Yes,” I said, “and you gave them me.”

Abruptly the dangerous young men departed, and the abandoned pinball machine seemed to take on a hurt, puzzled look, like that of a dog with no one left to throw sticks for it. Talk, smoke, the desultory clatter of glasses.

“I suppose you were in before me?” I said.

He nodded.

“I had a cell going when I was at Oxford,” he said. “I was still an undergraduate.”

He could not keep the boastful note out of his voice.

I stood up. Suddenly I wanted to be away from him. It was not anger that was spurring me, but a kind of impatience; something else was finished with.

“I really am sorry,” I said, “that you didn’t get to see me squirm.”

Outside, on the pavement, I felt dizzy again, and thought for a moment I might fall over. Querell was waving for a taxi; could not get away quickly enough, now that his attempt at revenge had backfired on him. I put a hand on his arm: papery flesh under his coat, and a thin old bone, like a primitive weapon.

“It was you,” I said, “wasn’t it, who gave my name to that fellow who was writing the book—the one who was going to expose me?”

He stared at me.

“Why would I do that?”

A taxi pulled up. He moved toward it, trying to shake off my hand, but I clutched him all the more tightly. I was surprised at my own strength. The taxi driver turned with interest to watch us, two half-sozzled old geezers furiously grappling.

“Who, then?” I said.

As if I didn’t know.

He shrugged, and smiled, showing me his old, yellowed teeth, and said nothing. I released him, and stepped back, and he stooped and got into the taxi and pulled the door shut behind him. As the taxi drove away I saw his pale long face in the rear window, looking back at me. He seemed to be laughing.

Suddenly it strikes me: are my children mine?

Just now a most unpleasant exchange over the telephone with an impudent young man at the valuers. Outrageous imputations. He actually used the word fake. Do you realise, I said, who I am? And I swear I heard him stifle a snigger. I told him to return the painting to me at once. I had already decided to whom I shall bequeath it; I do not think I need to change my mind.

He answered the telephone himself, on the first ring. Had he been waiting for me to call? Perhaps Querell tipped him off, a last piece of mischief-making before he flew south again to the sun and his child mistress. I was terribly nervous, and stammered like a fool. I asked if I might come round. There was a long pause, then he simply said yes, and hung up. I spent the next half-hour going through the flat in search of the Webley, and found it at last, with a cry of triumph, at the back of a bureau drawer, wrapped in an old shirt which, I realised with an absent-minded pang, had been one of Patrick’s. Strange sensation, hefting the weapon in my hand. How antiquated it seems, like one of those domestic gadgets you see in displays of Victoriana, ponderous, weighty, of uncertain use. But no, not uncertain, certainly not uncertain. It has not been oiled since the war, but I expect it will work. Two rounds only—what can have become of the other four?—but that will be more than sufficient. I could not find the holster for it, and was in a quandary how to carry it, since it was too big for my pocket, and when I tucked it into my waistband it slithered down inside the leg of my trousers and fetched me a nasty crack on the instep. A wonder it didn’t go off. That would not do; I had suffered enough ignominy without shooting myself in the foot. In the end I wrapped it up again in the shirt—broad pink stripes, plain white collar; Patsy went in for that kind of thing—and put it in my string bag. Umbrella, raincoat, latchkey. It was not until I got down to the street that I noticed I was wearing slippers. No matter.

The taxi driver was one of those tiresome monologuists: weather, traffic, Pakis, bleeding pedestrians. How unprepossessing they are, the helmsmen that are sent to ferry us through the most momentous passages of our lives. I diverted myself by imagining the consternated howls that will rise from certain stagnant backwaters of academe over a posthumous article of mine on the erotic symbolism in Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus—I wonder, by the way, why in this picture the artist chose to portray Narcissus without nipples?—that will appear shortly in an adventurous and somewhat irreverent new American art journal. I do like to shock, even still. The sun was occluded and Holland Park had a sullen, brooding aspect, despite all those big cream mansions and toy-coloured motor cars. I got down with relief from the taxi and gave the fellow a shilling tip, or five pee, as we must say now; he looked at the coin in disgust and swore under his breath and dieseled away. I grinned; offending taxi drivers is one of life’s small pleasures. Wet patches on the pavement and a smell of rain and rot. A lilac bush beside the front door was about to blossom. A furtive thrush flitted among the leaves, keeping a beady eye on me as I waited. The maid was a Filipina, a tiny, dark, infinitely sad-seeming person who said something incomprehensible and stood aside meekly as I stepped into the hall. Marble floor, Italian table, big copper bowl of daffodils, a convex mirror in a baroque gilt frame. I caught the nurse, I mean the maid, looking dubiously at my string bag, my slippers, my funereal umbrella. She spoke again, again incomprehensibly, and, pointing the way with a little brown bat’s claw, led me off into the silent interior of the house. As I walked past the mirror my reflection fleetingly grew a monstrous head while the rest of me tapered off into a sort of complicated umbilical tail.

Pale rooms, dim pictures, a magnificent Turkey carpet all gules and purples and desert browns. Imelda’s rubber soles discreetly squeaked. We entered an octagonal conservatory with potted plants, their unreally green, polished leaves intently leaning, and she opened a glass door on to the garden and stood back, smiling a mournful, encouraging smile. I stepped past her and out. A path of paving stones set flush in the grass led across the lawn to a great dense dark-green stand of laurel. There was a sudden swish of sunlight and something quivered in the air, quivered, and sank. I walked along the path. Wind, cloud, a swooping bird. Nick was waiting in the watery light under the laurels. Very still, hands in pockets, watching me. White shirt, black trousers, unsuitable shoes. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up.

Here it is: The Agony in the Garden.

“Hello, Victor.”

Now, after all, I could not think what to say. I said:

“How is Sylvia?”

He gave me a quick, hard look, as if I had made a tasteless allusion.

“She’s in the country. She prefers it there, these days.”

“I see.” A fearless robin dropped from a twig on to the grass close by Nick’s foot and seized a speck of something and flew up soundlessly into the tree again. Nick looked cold. Was it for me he had got himself up in this nice silk shirt, these slim-fitting slacks and slip-on shoes (with a decorative gold buckle on the instep, of course) and posed himself here against all this green? Another actor, playing his part, not very convincingly. “I’m dying, you know,” I said.

He looked away, frowning.

“Yes, I heard. Sorry.”

Shadow, sun a second, then shadow again. Such agitated weather. Somewhere a blackbird began to cluck warningly; there must have been magpies nearby; I know about magpies.

“Who told you?” I said.

“Julian.”

“Ah. See a lot of him, do you?”

“Quite a bit.”

“You must be a father figure for him,” I said.

“Something like that.”

He was eyeing my slippers, my string bag.

“Well, I’m glad,” I said. “A man needs a father.”

He gave me another hard look.

“Are you drunk?” he said.

“Certainly not. Just somewhat wrought. I have been hearing things.”

“Yes,” he said grimly, “I saw Querell talking to you at the funeral. Interesting chat, was it?”

“It was.”

I crossed my ankles and leaned on the umbrella, trying to seem nonchalant; the ferrule sank into the grass and I almost lost my balance. I am at an age when one does tend to fall down. I’m afraid I rather lost control, then, and began to upbraid him, coming out with all sorts of awful things—recriminations, insults, threats—that were no sooner said than I regretted them. But I could not stop; it all came out in a scalding, shameful flood, a lifetime of bitterness and jealousy and pain, gushing out, like—forgive me—like vomit. I think I may even have unsheathed my brolly from the clay and brandished it at him threateningly. What now of my stoic resolve? Nick just stood and listened, watching me with mild attention, waiting for me to finish, as if I were a wilful child having a foot-stamping tantrum.

“You’ve even subverted my son!” I cried.

He lifted an eyebrow, trying not to smile.

“Subverted?”

“Yes, yes!—with your filthy Jewish nonsense. I saw you together at the funeral, praying.”

I would have gone on, but I choked on spit and had to cough and cough, beating myself on the chest. Abruptly my tremor started up, as if a vague small engine inside me had been switched on.

“Let’s go into the house,” Nick said. He shivered in his shirtsleeves. “We’re too old for this.”

Apple trees, April, a young man in a hammock; yes, it must have been April, that first time. Why did I think it was high summer? My memory is not as good as it is supposed to be. I may have misrecalled everything, got all the details wrong. What do you think, Miss V.?

In the conservatory we sat in wicker armchairs on either side of a low wicker table. The maid came and Nick asked for tea.

“Gin, for me,” I said, “if you don’t mind.” I smiled at the maid; I was quite calm again, after my little moment of catharsis in the garden. “Bring the bottle, dear, will you?”

Nick studied the garden, his elbows on the arms of his chair and his fingertips joined before him. A tiny speck of wet laurel leaf clung to his balding brow, seeming symbolic of something or other. A gust of wind sprinted through the willows and a moment later smacked its palms against the glass beside me. A rain shower started, but faltered almost at once. All sorts of things were going through my head, bits and scraps of the past, as if a maddened projectionist in there were throwing together a jumble of old, flickering film clips. I recalled a midsummer night party that Leo Rothenstein gave in the great park at Maules fifty years ago, the masquers strolling under the murmurous trees, and frock-coated footmen gravely pacing the greensward with bottles of champagne wrapped in wetted napkins; the soft, still darkness, and stars, and skittering bats, and a vast, osseous moon. On an ornate bench beside a grassy bank a boy and girl were kissing, the girl with one glimmering breast bared. For a moment now I was there again. I was with Nick, and Nick was with me, and the future was limitless. The maid returned with a tray then, and I started awake again into the awful present.

Only yesterday all this happened; hard to credit.

While Nick—old, paunched, pouchy Nick—was pouring his tea, I grasped the gin bottle by the neck and glugged out a good half-tumblerful.

“Do you remember,” I said, “that summer when we first came down to London, and we used to walk through Soho at night, reciting Blake aloud, to the amusement of the tarts? The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. He was our hero, do you remember? Scourge of hypocrisy, the champion of freedom and truth.”

“We were usually drunk, as I recall,” he said, and laughed; Nick does not really laugh, it is only a noise that he makes which he has learned to imitate from others. Thoughtfully he stirred his tea, round and round. Those hands. “The tygers of wrath,” he said. “Is that what you thought we were?”

I drank my gin. Cold fire, hot slivers of ice. The furled umbrella, which I had leaned against the arm of my chair, fell on the marble floor with a muffled clatter. My props were not behaving themselves at all today.

“Yeats insisted Blake was Irish, you know,” I said. “Imagine that—London Blake, an Irishman! I’ve been thinking of that time when he and his friend Stothard sailed up the Medway on a sketching trip, and were arrested on suspicion of spying for the French. Blake got into a great state of agitation, convinced some false friend had denounced him to the authorities. Silly, of course.”

Nick sighed, making a sound like something deflating, and leaned back in his chair, the woven wicker crackling under him like a bonfire. The cup and saucer were balanced on his knee; he seemed to be studying the cup’s design. The silence beat like a heart.

“I had to be shielded,” he said at last, weary and impatient. “You know that.”

“Did you?” I said. “Do I?”

“I was the one who was going to be in government. If we hadn’t given you to them, they would have got to me sooner or later. It was a collective decision. There was nothing personal in it.”

“No,” I said, “nothing personal.”

He looked at me stonily.

“You did all right,” he said. “You got your job, your place at the Palace. You got your knighthood.”

“I haven’t got it any more.”

“You were always too fond of honours, and having letters after your name, all that capitalist rot.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got someone coming shortly.”

“When did you start?” I said. “Was it Felix Hartmann, or before that?”

He shrugged.

“Oh, before. Long before. With Querell. He and I went in together. Even though he always hated me, I don’t know why.”

“And are you still working for them?”

“Of course.”

He smiled, with lips shut tight and the tip of his nose depressed; age has accentuated his Jewishness, yet the one he has come most to resemble is his gentile father—that sinuous look, the pointed bald pate, those watchful, hooded eyes. The rain, having taken a deep breath, started up again with determination. I have always loved the sound of rain on glass. Tremor getting very bad now, hands all ashake and one leg going like the arm of a sewing machine.

“Was it Vivienne who told you?” he said. “I always suspected she had. And you never let on, all these years. What a sly old body you are, Doc.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He transferred the cup and saucer carefully to the table and sat for a moment, thinking.

“Do you remember Boulogne,” he said, “that last morning, on the ammunition ship, when you lost your nerve? I knew then I could never trust you. Besides, you weren’t serious; you were just in it for amusement, and something you could pretend to believe in.” He looked at me. “I tried to make it up to you. I helped you. I passed you all that stuff from Bletchley for you to impress Oleg with. And when you wanted to get out and devote yourself to”—a faint smirk—“art, I was there. Why do you think they let you go? Because they had me.”

I poured another mighty gin. I was realising that I preferred it without tonic; it was brighter, more emphatic, steely-sharp. A bit late to be acquiring new tastes.

“Who else knew?” I said.

“What? Oh, everyone, really.”

“Sylvia, for instance? Did you tell Sylvia?”

“She guessed. We didn’t discuss it.” He glanced at me and gave a rueful shrug, biting his lip. “She felt sorry for you.”

“Why did you give my name to that fellow?” I said. “Why did you have to betray me a second time? Why couldn’t you have left me in peace?”

He heaved a sigh and shifted in his chair. He had the bored, impatient air of a man being forced to listen to an unwelcome declaration of love. As he was, I suppose.

“They were after me again.” He smiled; it was Vivienne’s icy glitter. “I’ve told you,” he said. “I have to be protected.” He looked at his watch. “And now, really—”

“What if I talk to the papers?” I said. “What if I call them up today and tell them everything.”

He shook his head.

“You won’t do that.”

“I could tell Julian. That would dull some of his filial admiration.”

“You won’t do that, either.” Distantly we heard the doorbell ring. He stood up, and bent and retrieved my umbrella. “Your socks are wet,” he said. “Why are you wearing slippers, in this weather?”

“Bunions,” I said, and laughed, a touch hysterically, I fear; it was the gin, no doubt. He was looking at the string bag again. I shook it. “I brought a gun,” I said.

He glanced aside, clicking his tongue in annoyance.

“Are they taking care of you?” he said. “The Department, I mean. Pensions, that kind of thing?” I said nothing. We set off through the house. As we walked, he turned from the waist up and looked into my face. “Listen, Victor, I—”

“Don’t, Nick,” I said. “Don’t.”

He began to say something more, but changed his mind. I could feel the presence of someone else in the house. (Was it you, my dear? Come, was it you, skulking in one of those gilded antechambers?) The maid—why do I keep wanting to call her the nurse?—materialised out of the shadows in the hall and opened the front door for me. I went out quickly on to the step. The rain had stopped again, the lilac leaves were dripping. Nick put a hand on my shoulder but I squirmed away from his touch.

“By the way,” I said, “I’m leaving you the Poussin.”

He nodded, not surprised at all; that bit of laurel was still stuck to his brow. And to think I once thought him a god. He stepped back and lifted his arm in a curious, grave salute that seemed less a farewell than a sort of sardonic blessing. I walked away rapidly down the wet street, through sunlight and fleet shadow, swinging my umbrella, the string bag dangling at my side. At every other step the bag and its burden banged against my shin; I did not mind.

I hope Miss Vandeleur will not be too disappointed when she comes around to do the final clearing-up—I have no doubt it will be she that he will send. Most of the sensitive things I have already destroyed; there is a very efficient incinerator in the basement. As to this—what, this memoir? this fictional memoir?—I shall leave it to her to decide how best to dispose of it. I imagine she will bring it straight to him. He always did have his girls. How could I ever have thought that it was Skryne who had put her on to me? I got so many things so drearily wrong. Now we are sitting here, Webley and myself, in silent commune. Some playwright of the nineteenth century, I cannot recall for the moment who it was, wittily observed that if a revolver appears in the first act it is bound to go off in the third. Well, le dernier acte est sanglant… So much for my Pascalian wager; a vulgar concept, anyway.

What a noble sky, this evening, pale blue to cobalt to rich purple, and the great bergs of cloud, colour of dirty ice, with soft copper edgings, progressing from west to east, distant, stately, soundless. It is the kind of sky that Poussin loved to set above his lofty dramas of death and love and loss. There are any number of clear patches; I am waiting for a bird-shaped one.

In the head or through the heart? Now, there is a dilemma.

Father, the gate is open.