Fram is the name of the boat designed by the famous Norwegian explorer Nansen, a top member of Brother Michael's pantheon of men of action. Fram in the Norwegian language means onwards, and Fram was what inspired my dear late father to ride his heretic's bicycle across the Pyrenees. And Fram willy-nilly had been my mood ever since I had received what Brother Michael in a different context had dubbed the Great Call. Onwards while I gathered my fortitude for the decision that lay ahead of me, Onwards while I earned my wings in my country's silent war versus ruffians in the flesh, Onwards, and away from Penelope who had long been a stranger to me, Onwards while I mapped out my shining white path back to life with Hannah. Onwards, finally, to my mysterious new master, Maxie, and the even more mysterious consultant, Philip.
Given the extreme urgency of the operation and its importance, I expected to find Fred our white driver keenly revving his Mondeo at the kerbside, but what with a police cordon at Marble Arch and the traffic jams, Bridget assured me it was quicker to walk.
“You don't mind, do you, Salv?” she asked, taking a firm grip on my arm, either because she was thinking I might make a run for it, which could not have been further from my mind, or because she was one of the touchy-feely brigade who pat your cheek and roll the palm of their hand around your back and you never know, or I don't, whether they're distributing the milk of human kindness or inviting you to bed.
“Mind?” I echoed. “It's a glorious evening! I couldn't borrow your phone a moment, could I? Penelope may not be picking up her messages.”
“Sorry, darling. Against the regs, I'm afraid.”
Did I know where we were headed? Did I ask? I did not. The life of a secret agent is nothing if not a journey into the unknown, the life of a secret lover no less so. Off we strode with Bridget setting the pace and me with my second-hand shoes hacking at my ankle bones. In the evening sunlight my spirits rose further, assisted perhaps unconsciously by Bridget, who had hoisted my right forearm so high against her that it was nestling under her left breast, which by the feel of its under-curve was self-supporting. When Hannah has lit your lamp for you, it's natural to see other women in its rays.
“You really love her, don't you?” she marvelled as she steered me through a bunch of Friday-night merrymakers. “So many married couples I know, they just bitch at each other. It pisses me off. But you and Penelope aren't like that, are you? It must be great.”
Her ear was six inches from my mouth and she was wearing a scent called Je Reviens, which is the weapon of choice of Penelope's younger sister Gail. Gail, apple of her father's eye, had married a car-park owner from the lower branches of the aristocracy. Penelope, by way of retaliation, had married me. Yet even today it would take a board of top Jesuits to explain what I did next.
For why does a newly anointed adulterer, who hours earlier has abandoned himself body, soul and origins to another woman for the first time in his five-year marriage, feel an irresistible urge to put his deceived wife on a pedestal? Is he trying to re-create the image of her that he has defiled? Is he re-creating the image of himself before he fell? Was my ever-present Catholic guilt catching up with me in the midst of my euphoria? Was praising Penelope to the skies the nearest I could get to praising Hannah without blowing my cover?
It had been my firm intention to draw Bridget out regarding my new employers, and by means of artful questions learn more about the composition of the anonymous Syndicate and its relationship with the many secret organs of the British State that toil night and day for our protection, far removed from the sight of your average punter's eye. Yet as we threaded our way through near-stationary traffic I embarked upon a full-throated aria to my wife Penelope that proclaimed her the most attractive, exciting, sophisticated and faithful partner a top interpreter and secret soldier of the Crown could have, plus a brilliant journalist combining hard-nosed with compassionate, and this fantastic cook — which anyone would know verged upon the fanciful, seeing who did the cooking. Not everything that I said was totally positive, it couldn't be. If you're talking in the rush-hour to another woman about your wife, you can't help opening up a bit about her negative aspects or you wouldn't have an audience.
“But how the hell did Mr and Mrs Right ever find each other in the first place? That's what I want to know,” Bridget protested, in the aggrieved tones of one who has followed the instructions on the packet without success. “Bridget,” an alien voice inside me answered, “here is how.”
• • •
It is eight in the evening in Salvo's dingy bachelor bedsit in Ealing, I tell her as we wait arm-in-arm for the pedestrian lights to change. Mr Amadeus Osman of the WorldWide and Legal Translation Agency is calling me from his malodorous office in the Tottenham Court Road. I am to go direcdy to Canary Wharf where a Great National Newspaper is offering megabucks for my services. These are still my days of struggle, and Mr Osman owns half of me.
In an hour I am seated in the newspaper's luxurious offices with its editor one side of me and its shapely ace reporter — guess who? — the other. Before us squats her supergrass, a bearded Afro-Arab merchant seaman who for the price of what I'm earning in a year will dish the dirt on a ring of corrupt customs officers and policemen operating in Liverpool's dockland. He speaks only meagre English, his mother tongue being a classical Tanzanian-flavoured Swahili. Our ace crime reporter and her editor are caught in the muckraker's proverbial cleft stick: check out your source with the authorities and compromise the scoop; accept your source on trust and let the libel lawyers take you to the cleaners.
With Penelope's consent I assume command of the interrogation. As the questioning flies back and forth, our supergrass alters and refines his story, adds new elements, retracts old ones. I make the rascal repeat himself. I point out his many discrepancies until, under my persistent cross-examination, he admits all. He is a con-artist, a fabricator. For fifty quid he will go away. The editor is jubilant in his gratitude. In one stroke, he says, I have spared their blushes and their bank account.
Penelope, having overcome her humiliation, declares that she owes me a very large drink.
“People expect their interpreters to be small, studious and bespectacled,” I explained to Bridget modesdy, laughing away Penelope's rapt and, in retrospect, somewhat blatant interest in me from the start. “I suppose I just failed to come up to expectation.”
“Or she just totally freaked out,” Bridget suggested, tightening her grip on my hand.
Did I bubble out the rest to Bridget too? Appoint her my substitute confessor in Hannah's absence? Unveil to her how, until I met Penelope, I was a twenty-three-year-old closet virgin, a dandy in my personal appearance but, underneath my carefully constructed facade, saddled with enough hang-ups to fill a walk-in cupboard? — that Brother Michael's attentions and Pere Andre's before him had left me in a sexual twilight from which I feared to emerge? — that my dear late father's guilt regarding his explosion of the senses had transferred itself wholesale and without deductions to his son? — and how as our taxi sped towards Penelope's flat I had dreaded the moment when she would literally uncover my inadequacy, such was my timidity regarding the female sex? — and that thanks to her knowhow and micro-management all ended well? — extremely well — more well than she could ever have imagined, she assured me, Salvo being her dream mustang — the best in her stable, she might have added — her starred Alpha Male Plus? Or, as she later put it to her friend Paula when they thought I wasn't listening, her chocolate soldier always standing to attention? And that one calendar week later, so blown away was he in all respects by his newfound and unquenchable prowess in the bedroom, so overwhelmed with gratitude and ready to confuse sexual accomplishment with great love, that Salvo with his customary impulsiveness and naivety proposed marriage to Penelope, only to be accepted on the spot? No. By a mercy, in that regard at least I managed to restrain myself. Neither did I get round to telling Bridget the price I had since paid, year by year, for this much needed therapy, but only because we had by t
hen passed the Connaught Hotel and turned into the top end of Berkeley Square.
• • •
In my expansiveness of heart I was assuming, for no reason beyond the expectations we have of natural gravity, that our path would then take us down towards Piccadilly. But suddenly Bridget's grip on my arm tightened and she wheeled me left up some steps to a grand front door that I failed to get the number of. The door closed behind us and there we were, standing in a velvet-curtained lobby occupied by two identical blond boys in blazers. I don't remember her ringing a bell or knocking, so they must have been watching out for us on their closed-circuit screen. I remember they both wore grey flannels like mine, and their blazers had all three buttons fastened. And I remember wondering whether, in the world that they inhabited, this was regulation and I ought to be doing up the buttons of my Harris Tweed.
“Skipper's been delayed,” the seated boy told Bridget without lifting his eyes from the black-and-white image of the door we had just passed through. “He's on his sweet way, right? Ten to fifteen. Want to leave him here with us or wait it out?”
“Wait,” said Bridget. The boy stretched out his hand for my bag. On Bridget's nod I passed it to him. The grand hall that we entered had a painted dome for a ceiling, with white nymphs, and white babies blowing trumpets, and a regal staircase that halfway up itself divided into two more staircases curving to a balcony with a row of doors, all closed. And at the foot of the staircase, on either side, two more doors, grand ones, capped by golden eagles with their wings spread. The right-hand door was closed off by a red silk rope with brass fittings. I never saw anyone go in or out of it. On the left-hand door a lighted red sign said SILENCE CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS without any punctuation, because I always notice punctuation. So if you wanted to be pedantic, you could interpret it as meaning that people were having a conference about silence: which only shows you how my personal state of mind was alternating between post-coital, skittish, out of it, and totally hyper. I've never done drugs, but if I had, this is how I imagine I would have been, which is why I needed to pin down everything around me before it transmogrified itself into something else.
Guarding the grand door stood a grey-headed bouncer who could have been Arab and must have been older than the two blond boys put together but was still very much a member of the pugilistic classes, having a flattened nose and dropped shoulders and hands cupped over his balls. I don't remember climbing the regal staircase. If Bridget had been ahead of me in her skin-tight jeans I would have remembered, so we must have climbed side by side. And Bridget had been in this house before. She knew the geography and she knew the boys. She knew the Arab bouncer too, because she smiled at him and he smiled back at her in a soft, adoring manner before resuming his pugilistic glower. She knew without being told where you waited, which was halfway up the staircase before it divided, something you could never have guessed from below.
There were two easy chairs, a leather sofa with no arms, and glossy magazines offering private islands in the Caribbean and charter yachts complete with crew and helicopter, price on application. Picking one up, Bridget leafed through it, inviting me to do the same. Yet even while fantasising about which Fram Hannah and I would sail away on, I was tuning my mind's ear to the boomy voices coming out of the conference room, because I'm a listener by nature and trained to it, not just by the Chat Room. No matter how confused I am, I listen and remember, it's my job. Plus the fact that secret children in far-flung Mission houses learn to keep their ears pinned back if they want to know what's likely to hit them next.
And as I listened I began to pick up the see-saw whine of fax machines working overtime in the rooms above us and the chirp of telephones too quickly smothered, and the fraught silences when nothing happened but the whole house held its breath. Each couple of minutes or less, a young female assistant came scuttling past us down our staircase to deliver a message to the bouncer, who opened his door six inches and slipped the message to someone inside before shutting it and putting his hands back over his balls.
Meanwhile the voices were still coming out of the conference room. They were male voices and each was important in the sense that this was a meeting of men who punched at their own weight, as opposed to one supremo talking to his underlings. I also noted that, although the sound of the words was English, the voices speaking them were of varying nationalities and cadences, now from the Indian subcontinent, now Euro-American or white African colonial, much in the manner of high-level conferences I am occasionally privileged to attend where platform speeches are delivered in English, but your off stage discussions are conducted in the tongues of individual delegates, with the interpreters acting as the essential bridges between God's striving souls.
There was one voice, however, that seemed to be addressing me personally. It was native English, upper-class, and compelling in its tonal rise and fall. So finely were my antennae tuned that after a couple of minutes of what I call my third ear I had convinced myself it was the voice of a gentleman I was familiar with and respected, even if I hadn't caught a single word of what it was saying. And I was still hunting in my memory for its owner when my attention was diverted by a thunderclap below me as the door to the lobby flew open to admit the cadaverous, breathless figure of Mr Julius Bogarde, alias Bogey, my late mathematics teacher and chief luminary of the Sanctuary's ill-fated Outward Bound Club. The fact that Bogey had perished ten years ago while leading a party of terrified schoolchildren up the wrong side of a mountain in the Cairngorms only compounded my surprise at his reincarnation.
“Maxie,” I heard Bridget breathe in reproachful awe as she sprang to her feet. “You mad sod. Who's the lucky girl this time?”
And all right, he wasn't Bogey.
And I doubt whether Bogey's girls, if he had any, counted themselves lucky, rather the reverse. But he had Bogey's gangly wrists, and Bogey's manic stride and hellbent look about him, and Bogey's haywire mop of sandy hair blown to one side by a prevailing wind and stuck there, and rosy bursts of colour on his upper cheeks. And Bogey's sun-bleached khaki canvas bag, like a wartime gasmask case in old movies, swinging from his shoulder. His spectacles, like Bogey's, doubled the circumference of his faraway blue eyes, switching on and off as he loped towards us under the chandelier. And if Bogey had ever come to London, which was against his principles, this was undoubtedly the outfit he would have selected: a mangled go-anywhere, wash-it-yourself, fawn-coloured tropical suit with a Fair Isle sleeveless pullover and buckskin shoes with the nap worn off. And if Bogey had ever had to storm the regal staircase to our waiting area, this was how he would have done it: three weightless bounds with his gasmask case slapping at his side.
“My fucking pushbike,” he complained furiously, giving Bridget a perfunctory kiss which seemed to mean more to her than it did to him. “Slap in the middle of Hyde Park. Back tyre shot to pieces. Couple of tarts laughed themselves sick. Are you the languages?”
He had swung suddenly round on me. I'm not used to words of that strength from clients, nor to repeating them in the presence of ladies, but I will say at once that the man described by Mr Anderson as my fellow genius in the field was like no client I'd ever met, which I knew even before he fixed me with Bogey's diluted stare.
“He's Brian, darling,” Bridget said quickly, fearing perhaps that I might say something different. “Brian Sinclair. Jack knows all about him.”
A man's voice was yelling up at us and it was the same voice I had been relating to.
“Maxie! Hell are you, man? It's all hands to the pump.”
But Maxie paid the voice no attention and by the time I looked down, its owner had once more disappeared.
“Know what this caper's about, Sinclair?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“That old fart Anderson didn't tell you?”
“Darling,” Bridget protested.
“He said he didn't know either, sir.”
“And it's French, Lingala and Swahili-plus, right?”
“Co
rrect, sir.”
“Bembe?”
“Is not a problem, sir.”
“Shi?”
“I also have Shi.”
“Kinyarwanda?”
“Ask him what he doesn't speak, darling,” Bridget advised. “It's quicker.”
“I was interpreting Kinyarwanda only yesterday evening, sir,” I replied, sending messages of love to Hannah.
“Fucking marvellous,” he mused, continuing to peer at me as if I were some exciting new species. “Where does it all come from?”
“My father was an African missionary,” I explained, remembering too late that Mr Anderson had told me I was the son of a mining engineer. It was on the tip of my tongue to add Catholic so that he would know the whole story, but Bridget was looking daggers at me so I decided to hold it back for later.
“And your French is a hundred per cent, right?”
Flattered as I was by the positive nature of his interrogation, I had to demur. “I never claim a hundred per cent, sir. I strive for perfection, but there's always room for improvement” which is what I say to all my clients, from the mightiest to the humblest, but when I said it to Maxie, it acquired a brave ring for me.
“Well, my French is failed O level,” he riposted. His floating gaze had not left mine for an instant. “And you're game, right? You don't mind pushing the envelope?”
“Not if it's good for the country, sir,” I replied, echoing my response to Mr Anderson. “Good for the country, good for Congo, good for Africa,” he assured me.
And was gone, but not before I had notched up other points of interest regarding my new employer. He wore a diver's watch on his left wrist and on the other a bracelet of gold links. His right hand, judging by its texture, was bulletproof. A woman's lips brushed my temple and for a moment I convinced myself they were Hannah's but they were Bridget's, kissing me goodbye. I don't know how long I waited after that. Or what I found to think about that lasted more than two seconds. Naturally I was pasturing on my newfound leader and all that had passed between us in our brief exchange. Bembe, I kept repeating to myself. Bembe always made me smile. It was what we Mission school kids yelled at each other, out on the red mud-patch, playing splash-soccer in the teeming rain.