‘Look. I’m sorry it’s late and everything.’
Everything?
‘Hector wants to talk to both of us tomorrow morning at nine.’
‘Hector does?’
‘Yes.’
Stay rational. In a mad world, stick to what you know. ‘I can’t. I know it’s Sunday, but I’m working. Samson v. Samson never sleeps.’
‘Then call Chambers and say you’re sick. It matters, Gail. More than Samson v. Samson. Truly.’
‘According to Hector?’
‘According to both of us, actually.’
6
‘His name will be Hector, by the way,’ said adept little Luke, glancing up from his copy of the buff folder.
‘Is that a warning or a divine ordinance?’ Perry asked from inside his spread hands, long after Luke had given up expecting a reply.
In the age since Gail’s departure, Perry had not moved from the table, neither lifting his head nor stirring from his place beside her empty chair.
‘Where’s Yvonne?’
‘Gone home,’ said Luke, back in his folder.
‘Sent or gone?’
No answer.
‘Is Hector your supreme leader?’
‘Let’s say I’m B-list, he’s A-list’ – pencilling a mark.
‘So Hector’s your boss?’
‘Another way of putting it.’
And another way of not answering the question.
Actually, Perry had to concede, on all the evidence available so far, Luke was someone he could get along with. No high-flyer, maybe. B-list, just as he had said of himself. A bit plummy, perhaps, a bit public school, but a good man on a rope for all that.
‘Has Hector been listening to us?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Watching us?’
‘Sometimes it’s better just to listen. Like a radio play.’ And after a pause: ‘Smashing girl, your Gail. Been together long?’
‘Five years.’
‘Wow.’
‘Why wow?’
‘Well, I suppose I feel a bit Dima-like. Marry her quick.’
This was holy ground, and Perry considered telling him so, then forgave him.
‘How long have you been doing this work?’ he asked Luke instead.
‘Twenty years, give or take.’
‘Home or abroad?’
‘Abroad mainly.’
‘Is it distorting?’
‘Come again?’
‘The work. Does it warp your mind? Are you aware of – well – déformation professionnelle?’
‘You mean, am I psycho?’
‘Nothing as drastic as that. Just – well, how it affects you over the long term?’
Luke’s head remained down, but his pencil had stopped roaming, and there was challenge in his stillness.
‘In the long term?’ he repeated, in studious puzzlement. ‘In the long term we’ll all be dead, I imagine.’
‘I simply meant: how does it grab you, representing a country that can’t pay its bills?’ Perry explained, aware too late that he was slipping out of his depth. ‘Good intelligence being about the only thing that gets us a seat at the international top table these days, I read somewhere,’ he blundered on. ‘It must be rather a strain on the people who have to provide it, that’s all. Punching above one’s weight,’ he added, in an unintentional reference to Luke’s diminutive stature which he immediately regretted.
Their troubled exchange was interrupted by the shuffle of slow, soft footsteps like bedroom slippers along the ceiling before beginning a cautious descent of the basement stairs. As if to order, Luke stood up, strode over to a sideboard, picked up a tray of malt whisky, mineral water and three glasses, and set it on the table.
The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. The door opened. Perry rose instinctively to his feet. A mutual inspection ensued. The two men were of equal height, which for both was unusual. Without his stoop, Hector might have been the taller. With his classic broad brow and flowing white hair tossed back in two untidy waves, he resembled to Perry’s eye a Head of College of the old, dotty sort. He was in his mid-fifties, by Perry’s guess, but dressed for eternity in a mangy brown sports coat with leather patches at the elbow and leather edges to the cuffs. The shapeless grey flannels could have been Perry’s own. So could the battered Hush Puppy shoes. The artless, horn-rimmed spectacles could have been rescued from Perry’s father’s attic box.
Finally, but long after time, Hector spoke:
‘Wilfred bloody Owen,’ he pronounced, in a voice that contrived to be both vigorous and reverential. ‘Edmund bloody Blunden. Siegfried bloody Sassoon. Robert bloody Graves. Et al.’
‘What about them?’ the bewildered Perry asked, before he had given himself time to think.
‘Your fabulous fucking article about them in the London Review of Books last autumn! “The sacrifice of brave men does not justify the pursuit of an unjust cause. P. Makepiece scripsit.” Bloody marvellous!’
‘Well, thank you,’ said Perry helplessly, and felt an idiot for not having made the connection fast enough.
The silence returned while Hector continued his admiring inspection of his prize.
‘Well, I’ll tell you what you are, Mr Perry Makepiece, sir,’ he asserted, as if he’d reached the conclusion they had both been waiting for. ‘You’re an absolute fucking hero, is what you are’ – seizing Perry’s hand in a flaccid double grip and giving it a limp shake – ‘and that’s not smoke up your arse. We know what you think of us. Some of us think it too, and we’re right. Trouble is, we’re the only show in town. Government’s a fuck-up, half the Civil Service is out to lunch. The Foreign Office is as much use as a wet dream, the country’s stony-broke and the bankers are taking our money and giving us the finger. What are we supposed to do about it? Complain to Mummy or fix it?’ – not waiting for Perry’s answer – ‘I’ll bet you shitted blood before you came to us. But you came. Just a token’ – he had released Perry’s hand and was addressing Luke on the subject of malt whisky – ‘for Perry, minimal. Lot of water and enough of the hard stuff to loosen his girdle. Mind if I squat next to Luke or are we too much like when-did-you-last-see-your-father? Bugger Adam, my name’s Meredith. Hector Meredith. We talked on the phone yesterday. Flat in Knightsbridge, wife and two veg, now grown up. Arctic cottage in Norfolk and I’m in the phone book in both places. Luke, who are you when you’re not being some other swine?’
‘Luke Weaver, actually. We live up beyond Gail on Parliament Hill. Last posting Central America. Second marriage, one common son aged ten just got into University College School, Hampstead, so we’re thrilled to bits.’
‘And no tough questions till the end,’ Hector ordered.
Luke poured three minuscule shots of whisky. Perry sat sharply down again and waited. A-list Hector sat directly opposite him, B-list Luke a little to one side.
‘Well, fuck,’ said Hector happily.
‘Fuck indeed,’ Perry agreed, bemused.
*
But the truth was, Hector’s rallying cry could not have been more timely or invigorating for Perry, nor his ecstatic entry better calculated. Consigned to the black hole left by Gail’s enforced departure – enforced by himself, never mind the reasons – his divided heart had abandoned itself to every shade of self-anger and remorse.
He should never have agreed to come here, with or without her.
He should have handed over his document and told these people: ‘That’s it. You’re on your own. I am, therefore I don’t spy.’
Did it matter that for a whole night long he had pounded the threadbare carpet of his Oxford digs, debating the step he knew – but didn’t wish to know – he was bound to take?
Or that his late father, low churchman, freethinker and embattled pacifist, had marched, written and raged against all things evil, from nuclear arms to the war on Iraq, more tha
n once ending up in a police cell for his trouble?
Or that his paternal grandfather, a humble mason by trade and avowed Socialist, had lost a leg and an eye fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War?
Or that Irish colleen Siobhan, the Makepiece family treasure of twenty years and four hours a week, had been bullied into making deliveries of the contents of his father’s wastepaper basket to a plainclothes detective of the Hertfordshire constabulary? – a burden that had weighed so heavily on her that one day in floods of tears she had confessed all to Perry’s mother, never to be seen near the house again, despite his mother’s entreaties?
Or that only a month ago Perry himself had composed a full-page advertisement in the Oxford Times, endorsed by a hastily assembled body of his own creation calling itself ‘Academics against Torture’, urging action against Britain’s Secret Government and the assault-by-stealth on our most hard-fought civil liberties?
Well, to Perry these things had mattered immensely.
And they had continued to matter on the morning after his long night of vacillation when, at eight o’clock, with a ring-bound lecture notebook jammed under his armpit, he had willed himself to set course across the quadrangle of the ancient Oxford college he was shortly to leave for ever, and ascend the worm-eaten wooden staircase leading to the rooms of Basil Flynn, Director of Studies, Doctor of Law, ten minutes after requesting a quick word with him on a private and confidential matter.
*
Only three years divided the two men, but Flynn, in Perry’s judgement, was already the ultimate university committee whore. ‘I can squeeze you in if you come at once,’ he had said officiously, ‘I’ve a meeting of Council at nine, and they tend to last.’ He was wearing a dark suit and black shoes with polished side-buckles. Only his carefully brushed shoulder-length hair separated him from the full-dress uniform of orthodoxy. Perry had not considered how he would begin his conversation with Flynn, and his opening words, he would now concede, were hastily chosen:
‘Last term you solicited one of my students,’ he blurted, barely across the threshold.
‘I did what?’
‘A half-Egyptian boy. Dick Benson. Egyptian mother, English father. Arabic speaker. He wanted a research grant but you suggested he might like to talk to certain people you knew in London instead. He didn’t grasp what you meant. He asked my advice.’
‘Which was?’
‘If the certain people in London were who I thought they were, tread carefully. I wanted to tell him not to touch them with a bargepole, but didn’t feel I could say that. It was his choice, not mine. Am I right?’
‘What about?’
‘That you recruit for them. You talent-spot.’
‘Them being who, exactly?’
‘The spies. Dick Benson didn’t know which lot he was up for, so how should I? I’m not accusing you. I’m asking you. Is it true? That you’re in touch with them? Or was Benson fantasizing?’
‘Why are you here and what do you want?’
At this point Perry nearly left the room. He wished he had. He actually turned and headed for the door, then stopped himself and turned back.
‘I need to be put in touch with your certain people in London,’ he said, keeping the crimson notebook under his arm and waiting for the question ‘why?’
‘Thinking of joining them? I know they take all sorts these days but Christ, you?’
Again Perry nearly headed for the door. Again he wished he had. But no, he checked himself and took a breath and this time managed to find the right words:
‘I have stumbled by chance on some information’ – with his long, uneasy fingers administering a tap to the notebook, which emitted a ping – ‘unsolicited, unwanted and –’ he hesitated a long time before using the word – ‘secret.’
‘Who says so?’
‘I do.’
‘Why?’
‘If true, it could put lives at risk. Maybe save lives as well. It’s not my subject.’
‘Neither is it mine, I’m glad to say. I talent-spot. I baby-snatch. My certain people have a perfectly good website. They also put cretinous advertisements about themselves in the heritage press. Either route is open to you.’
‘My material is too urgent for that.’
‘Urgent as well as secret?’
‘If it’s anything at all, it’s very urgent indeed.’
‘The nation’s fortunes hang by a thread? And that’s the Little Red Book you’re clutching under your arm, presumably.’
‘It’s a document of record.’
They surveyed each other in mutual distaste.
‘You’re not seriously proposing to give it to me, are you?’
‘I am. Yes. Why not?’
‘Dump your urgent secrets on Flynn? Who will stick a postage stamp on them and send them to his certain people in London?’
‘Something like that. Why should I know how you people operate?’
‘While you go off in search of your immortal soul?’
‘I’ll do what I do. They can do what they do. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Everything is wrong with it. In this game, which isn’t a game at all, the messenger is at least half as important as the message, and sometimes he’s the whole message on his own. Where are you off to now? I mean, this minute?’
‘Back to my rooms.’
‘Do you have a mobile telephone?’
‘Of course I bloody do.’
‘Write the number down for me here, please’ – handing him a piece of paper – ‘I never commit anything to memory, it’s insecure. You have a satisfactory signal for your mobile telephone in your rooms, I trust? The walls are not too thick or anything?’
‘I get a perfectly good signal, thank you.’
‘Take your Little Red Book. Go back to your rooms and you will receive a call from somebody calling himself or herself Adam. A Mr or Ms Adam. I shall need a soundbite.’
‘Need what?’
‘Something to make them horny. I can’t just say, “I’ve got a Bollinger Bolshevik on my hands who thinks he’s stumbled on a world conspiracy.” I’ve got to tell them what it’s about.’
Swallowing his outrage, Perry made his first conscious effort to produce a cover story.
‘Tell them it’s about a crooked Russian banker who calls himself Dima,’ he said, after other routes had mysteriously failed him. ‘He wants to cut a deal with them. It’s short for Dmitri, in case they don’t know.’
‘Sounds irresistible,’ said Flynn sarcastically, picking up a pencil and scribbling on the same piece of paper.
Perry had been back in his room only an hour before his mobile was ringing, and he was listening to the same skittish, slightly husky male voice that had this minute addressed him here in the basement room.
‘Perry Makepiece? Marvellous. Name of Adam. Just got your message. Mind if I ask you a couple of quickie questions to make sure we’re both worrying at the same bone? No need to mention our chum’s name. Just need to make sure he’s the same chum. Does he have a wife by any chance?’
‘He does.’
‘Fat, blonde party? Barmaid sort of type?’
‘Dark-haired and emaciated.’
‘And the precise circumstances of your bumping into our chum? The when and how?’
‘Antigua. On a tennis court.’
‘Who won?’
‘I did.’
‘Marvellous. Third quickie coming up. How soon can you get up to London on our tab, and how soon can we get our hands on this dodgy dossier of yours?’
‘Door to door, about two hours, I suppose. There’s also a small package. I’ve pasted it inside the dossier.’
‘Firmly?’
‘I think so.’
‘Well make sure you have. Write ADAM on the outside cover in large black letters – use a laundry marker or something. Then wave it arou
nd at reception till somebody notices you.’
Laundry marker? The voice of an old bachelor? Or a sly reference to Dima’s dubious financial practices?
*
Enlivened by the presence of Hector lounging four feet from him, Perry was speaking swiftly and intensely, not into the middle air where academics find their traditional refuge, but straight into Hector’s eagle-eyed face; and less directly to dapper Luke, seated to attention at Hector’s side.
With no Gail to restrain him, he felt free to relate to both men. He was confessing himself to them as Dima had confessed himself to Perry: man to man and face to face. He was creating a synergy of confession. He was retrieving dialogue with the accuracy with which he retrieved all writing, good or bad, not pausing to correct himself.
Unlike Gail, who loved nothing better than to take off people’s voices, he either couldn’t, or some foolish pride wouldn’t let him. But in his memory he still heard Dima’s clotted Russian accents; and in his inner eye saw the sweated face so close to his own that, any nearer, the two of them would have been banging foreheads. He was smelling, even as he described them, the fumes of vodka on Dima’s rasping breath. He was watching him refill his glass, glower at it, then pounce and empty it at a swallow. He was feeling himself slide into involuntary kinship with him: the swift and necessary bonding that comes of emergency on the cliff face.
‘But not what we’d call rat-arsed?’ suggested Hector, taking a sip of his malt. ‘More your social drinker at the top of his form, you’d say?’
Absolutely, Perry agreed: not muddled, maudlin, slurred, just comfortable:
‘If we’d been playing tennis next morning, I’ll bet he’d have played his usual game. He’s got a huge engine and it runs on alcohol. He’s proud of that.’
Perry sounded as if he was proud of it too.
‘Or if we misquote the Master’ – Hector, it turned out, was a fellow devotee of P. G. Wodehouse – ‘the kind of chap who was born a couple of drinks below par?’
‘Precisely, Bertie,’ Perry agreed in his best Wodehousian, and they found time for a quick laugh, supported by B-list Luke who with Hector’s arrival had otherwise assumed the role of silent partner.