‘Now I need a drink,’ I said pouring myself a good quarter-pint. ‘One thing, though, Reilly. I’m not going to start showing all the symptoms of bubonic plague as soon as I taste this, am I?’
To my surprise she didn’t reply with her usual cynicism but said, ‘I’m sorry about that. It was a disgusting thing to be doing to anyone.’
I raised my glass to my lips and said, ‘Here’s health.’
She dug further into her cupboard and came up with a small automatic which she slipped under her blouse. Our other weaponry had been dumped in the Tiber prior to departing from Rome.
‘Prettying yourself up,’ I said. ‘You must be going out.’
‘That’s right. I’ve got people to contact,’ she said. ‘Listen, Lem, this is serious. In here you’re safe, so stay in here. We’ll both be safe once I get word about Uncle Percy to someone I can trust. But he’s a very big gun and I’ll have to get some very big guns on our side before we can relax. So stay put, will you?’
‘Brownie’s honour,’ I said. ‘As long as you promise to bring me something to eat.’
She came across the room and gave me a quick peck on the cheek, like a husband on his morning way to the office.
‘I won’t be long,’ she said.
I set my whisky on the table, looked at my watch and gave her ten minutes.
Very carefully I opened the door about eighteen inches and slipped out on to the landing. Or rather I slipped my left leg out, but before my right could join it, there was a movement in the shadows of the stairs running up to the next floor and a sound like a deep exasperated sigh.
I froze. Reilly descended, gun in hand.
‘Lem Swift, you’re a trouble to me,’ she said. ‘I hoped I could trust you this once. Or at least trust you to drink your whisky.’
‘So there is something in it?’ I said.
‘Just a little sleeping potion,’ she said. ‘I should have known you wouldn’t take it.’
‘I should have known you wouldn’t trust me,’ I said.
She motioned with her gun and I slid back into the room. Reilly followed, pushing the door fully open to keep me under the restraint of her gun. The old hat-stand which I had balanced at an angle of seventy degress so that it rested against the edge of the door toppled slowly towards her and I gave her the glassful of tainted Tomatin in the face. Anyone who so mistreats that precious fluid deserves no less. Besides, I was hurt by her grave lack of trust.
As she grappled with the hat-stand and blinked at the whisky, I took the gun with my left hand and chopped at her neck with the edge of my right. I remembered my assault on her in Rome—this was getting to be a habit!—and didn’t want to repeat my fears of having fractured her skull.
Happily she went out like the cat on a summer’s night. I carried her to the bed, ripped all the bedding off and laid her on the thin hard mattress. Tying her up didn’t appeal. It could be dangerous and besides, I’d no certainty that I’d ever be returning and if this place were as safe as Reilly claimed she could lie here for days. But I didn’t want her coming after me as soon as she recovered. So I stripped all her clothes off, bundled them up with the bedding, and left the room.
Again, as in Rome, I glanced back, wishing I didn’t have to go. This time I had the sight of that splendidly rugged body naked on the bed to persuade me to stay. Sometimes, I thought, a man doesn’t have to do what a man has to do.
But I left.
I dumped all the bedding and Reilly’s clothes in a dustbin below the steps which ran up to the terrace house. And then I strode off toward the underground with no more urgency (I hoped) than what was proper to a man who was a little late (about twenty years) for an appointment with his godfather.
27
… with forked tongue …
Uncle Percy greeted me as if I’d just dropped in to see him during the school holidays as I used to do all those years ago.
‘Lem,’ he said, his round, benevolent face alight with pleasure, ‘I was hoping you’d call again. Come in. Come in. Sit you down.’
I came in and sat me down. The temperature was as high as ever and the room just as musty, though not with the depressing mustiness of squalor which I had just left in Earl’s Court, but with an odour compounded of old books, old leather, old mahogany, and extremely old cognac which glowed like evening sunlight in a crystal decanter in Percy’s hand.
‘You’ll join me in a snifter?’ he asked, setting out another glass alongside the one he had just been filling.
I didn’t reply but let the silence grow between us. At least I would have done but Percy poured the cognac and nodded and smiled as though I were making lively conversation. So finally I spoke.
‘Uncle Percy,’ I said seriously, ‘let me tell you what I know and about which I will brook no discussion or argument. You are or were something very important in British Security. You were and doubtless still are something even more important in Russian Security. It was by your contrivance that I was inveigled into leaving Margarita and sent to Italy to join in the hunt for my father. These things I know beyond denial.’
He put a balloon of brandy on the arm of my chair and said mildly, ‘Knowing all that, Lem, what on earth does it leave you to be inquisitive about?’
‘About why my mother died and why my father and I between us had to waste four decades of our lifetimes. That’s enough to stimulate a growing boy’s curiosity, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Point taken,’ he said, sinking into a huge leather armchair opposite me. ‘Lem, I was sorry to hear Billy was dead, believe me. That may not sound all that convincing in the circumstances, but it’s true. We went back a long, long way. I was genuinely fond of him. We were true friends.’
His curtains were drawn despite the fact that beneath his window Gloucester Place was still brimful of a summer evening as golden and warm as his excellent cognac. A reading lamp trained on the table beside his chair painted half his face with shadows. The old gas fire hissed and popped. Across its broad top lay a long, elaborately wrought brass toasting-fork with a handle shaped like a writhing snake from whose gaping mouth protruded two needle sharp prongs on which was impaled a muffin.
I drank in the scene with all its strange savour of English tradition and privilege and eccentricity and said, ‘Bullshit, Uncle Percy. I think you hated Pa. I think from your earliest acquaintance you probably envied and resented him and resolved to do everything in your power to destroy him.’
He looked at me in round-eyed, round-mouthed shock.
‘You’re so wrong, Lem,’ he protested. ‘Exile’s made a cynic out of you. I respected, admired, even hero-worshipped Billy. His qualities of mind and spirit shone like a beacon. Naturally they attracted attention from the same people who recruited me at Cambridge. They’d have swopped a dozen Anthony Blunts for Billy Bessacarr but after a few tentative approaches, they soon gave up. It was not that he was unsympathetic to radical ideas, it was just that it quickly became apparent he was incapable of subterfuge! He’d have had the lot of us declaring our new allegiance from the rooftops, with his own declaration topping the bill, of course. There was another thing. There was no way he would take orders. He had to feel independent. It’s a quality of the Bessacarr family which you will not find difficult to recognize, Lem. You need to be gently nudged. Anything stronger provokes immediate resistance. Well, Billy Bessacarr had far too much to offer to be abandoned completely. I was close to him and I was given the job of nudging. But my motives were pure, Lem. Admiration, affection, and a simple desire to have this man’s fine qualities working for the right side, the side to which he spiritually belonged.’
He spoke so earnestly I could almost believe him. But it still made me feel sick.
‘Tell me about these nudges,’ I said. ‘Start by telling me about my mother. You introduced her to Pa, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, that’s true. A fine woman. Fine woman. Fine.’
A feeling of revulsion so strong arose in me that it took a great effo
rt of will not to pull Reilly’s gun from my pocket and add another red O to this rotund rubicund face.
‘Were you and she lovers?’ I asked as unemotionally as I could manage.
‘Lovers?’ he said in alarm. ‘Surely you’ve heard some small rumour of my tastes in that area, Lem?’
‘For God’s sake, don’t treat me as a naïf!’ I shouted. ‘Everything about you is fraudulent. I know it. Understand me, Uncle Percy. I know it!’
‘My dear boy,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘My dear boy.’
He took the serpentine toasting-fork and held the muffin out to the fire. He looked hurt and bewildered. Muffin and snake, how well that odd conjunction summed him up, I thought.
‘You were with her the day she died,’ I said, regaining control. ‘You spent the weekend at Bessacarr House, then you drove back to town with her. I rang you here and you said Mama had just gone.’
‘That’s true, I remember,’ he said. He turned his mild gaze on me and added, ‘We were just talking, Lem. Just talking.’
‘But were you her lover?’ I repeated fiercely. ‘Come on! I have to know!’
‘Not then, believe me, dear boy. Not at all after they were married,’ he replied. ‘But I had been. Yes, I admit it. Once. A long, long time ago. A long, long time ago.’
His voice died away. There was smoke arising from the end of the toasting-fork.
I said, ‘Your muffin’s burning.’
‘Is it? Oh dear.’
He raised the fork to the vertical, smoke drifting up from the charred remains. He looked like the torchbearer at some Geriatric Olympic Games. With a sigh he removed the burnt muffin, extracted another from a large paper bag on the floor by his chair, impaled it and resumed toasting and talking together.
‘Of course, the thing about the Bessacarr mind is that, while it is so proud of its independence that it rejects any obvious attempt to influence it, at the same time it is so egotistically certain of its superiority that it never doubts the wisdom of its decisions once made. The trick is to let it imagine it’s in control. A quiet, unassuming friend can do a lot, of course, but when it comes to real professional nudging, you can’t beat a wife. So I gave him a wife. Yes, I feel I can safely take credit there. I gave him a wife.’
He finished toasting his second muffin and started a third. He gave me a smile full of avuncular benevolence but I caught the malicious glint in his eyes.
‘You gave him my mother?’ I said. ‘I hope you’re not trying to tell me Mama was a KGB agent?’
‘Oh no, positively not,’ he said, alarmed once more as I leaned forward aggressively. ‘But she was ferociously left-wing. So were we all in those days. That’s how I first met her, through my CP contacts. Not that she was ever a Party member. She was like your father, essentially an individualist, one who needed to be nudged rather than directed. But she was much more politically aware than your father was at that time. Obviously there was a deal of mutual attraction between them, but I think I helped make her aware of what a powerful force on the side of radical philosophy a man like Billy Bessacarr could be, and in that sense I gave her to him.’
I tried to digest this. He observed me with that same maliciously-edged amusement and continued toasting his muffins, expert now after that first conflagration.
‘You want me to believe that Pa was somehow controlled by Mama?’ I burst out incredulously.
‘Only in the loosest sense, just as she was controlled by me only in the loosest sense. One hint of the leading rein in either case and they’d have been off. As both Bessacarr and a Madariaga, Lem, surely you recognize the condition? I mean, the parallels are not far to seek.’
I thought at first he was referring simply to recent events and then it came to me.
‘Kate? You can’t mean Kate?’
‘She was one of my protégés, you’ll recall,’ he said with every appearance of self-satisfaction. ‘Don’t judge her harshly. When she found out she was pregnant by you, her first reaction was to say nothing and simply have a termination. But I said, ‘Why not marry him?’ She thought about it. She was never averse to the comforts of life, dear Kate. So she got a title and a steady income. And you got a wife and helpmeet.’
‘Helpmeet!’ I echoed bitterly. ‘Some help!’
‘More than you think,’ he said. ‘It was very useful having Kate keep us posted on your activities. Really, Lem, you’ve had ten years to think about it. You can’t still imagine that your tremendous success and charmed life as an illicit arms-dealer was all the result of your own cleverness, can you? Nearly every one of your deals won the approval of one or the other of my masters. You path was smoothed with the silkiest of brooms!’
I should have been dumbfounded, I suppose, but my past awareness of incredible luck in my dealings had prepared me in some part for this revelation. Kate’s role was harder to accept, but even here there had been preparation.
‘And Kate?’ I prompted, wanting to be sure I’d swallowed the whole draught. ‘Was she an agent?’
‘Oh no, not in the strict sense. More of an instrument. She worked in my department—my real department, I mean—as a collator and was flattered to be told off to keep an eye on you. I didn’t want someone too expert, you see. She never had any idea about my Russian connection, of course, but, alas for her, she did meet Major Krylov coming out of my apartment when she called round unexpectedly just before she left for Rome. She had been familiar with his file at one stage while he was one of the innumerable KGB small fry at their Embassy here. I was able to explain his presence easily enough, of course, but when she ran into him again in your sister’s apartment-block, well, he couldn’t risk letting her meet you and identify him, could he? Even your blinkered brain might have started glimpsing something odd.’
‘So she wasn’t in on all this?’ I said, watching the muffin pile grow. Was he expecting guests? Or did fear just make him hungry?
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It was just unfortunate that her anxieties about your daughter should have taken her to that place at that time.’
‘But she co-operated with you in hiding Angie in the first place,’ I said bitterly.
‘Why not?’ he said in surprise. ‘She became quite fond of you in those years of marriage, Lem, and your desertion of the pair of them genuinely shocked her. Also I fear that reports of your state of mind in exile were not reassuring, not reassuring at all.’
Dispassionately I said, ‘You bastard. I thought you were my one point of human contact with them. Why did you do it, Percy? What was in it for you, keeping us apart?’
He shrugged and said, ‘Letting you converse, even at a distance, would have involved some risk. I haven’t survived all these years without learning that you take no risk that can be avoided. The Bessacarr mind is flawed by the Bessacarr egotism and is therefore easily deceived. But it is none the less a sharp mind and needs to be starved of nourishing ideas if it is not to become dangerously active. You see how relatively easily you have accepted all you have learned in the past few days.’
‘The instruction’s been given in a hard school,’ I said. We seem to have drifted from my mother.’
‘Yes. This proves the point. Already, having looked at your own marriage relationship, you are now much better equipped to accept that that process of radicalization which had your father voting socialist in 1945 and promulgating dangerous ideas about the universal sharing of not only the wealth but the scientific knowledge of nations thereafter, was triggered by your mother. Of course, she had to play second fiddle. Billy would bear no rival near the throne. And in any case your mother was an instinctive rather than an intellectual political animal and thought like many that with the end of the war, Fascism was dead and nothing remained but to sit back and enjoy the fruits of victory.
‘Her job as far as your father was concerned was over. He was now a dissident. Oh yes, they love Western dissidents in Moscow just as much as they love Soviet dissidents in Fleet Street. Of course they’d have preferred him as a
n agent, working on some secret Government research project. But failing that, he had great propaganda value and when he finally defected, as well as the propaganda kudos, they would get his brain.’
‘His defection was planned?’ I said.
‘Projected,’ he corrected. ‘But it was a long-term project. Events, alas, overtook us and we had to improvise.’
‘And what were these events, Uncle Percy?’ I said gently.
He deposited another muffin on the pile which was assuming a Tower of Pisa-like elevation and inclination.
‘Your mother precipitated the crisis, I’m afraid,’ he said slowly. ‘In some ways I blame myself. She was living a pretty separate life from your father by now, of course. The newspapers loved it. The dissident scientist and the society queen! Well, it had been a fairly open marriage for some years. It was you who provided the main point of contact, Lem, the main bond of union. Odd, that. But Angelica still had a great deal of respect and admiration for your father. Affection too. She often talked to me about him and the direction he was moving in. She had become rather more moderate in her own views by now. I was able to hint at my real work in the Home Office—she never suspected my former radicalism had ever been anything more than the youthful fervour we had once shared—and to assure her I’d keep an eye on Billy’s well-being. And to keep her occupied I let her know there were all kinds of ways she could be useful to the cause of democracy in her own social circle. She ran with a very fast, very influential set, as you doubtless know.’
‘The Profumo gang?’ I said.
‘The ones you read about were merely the slow runners,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Well, she was pretty disillusioned with them at this time and felt qualms about passing on information, starting rumours, effecting introductions, that kind of thing. The trouble was, she knew a great deal about what was going on, probably as much as any single person other than myself. She was greatly disturbed by the whole Profumo affair, but it was the Ward trial and his suicide that really knocked her back. You may have noticed she was in a strange inward-looking mood at the end of that summer and into autumn. It came to a head that last weekend down at Bessacarr House.
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