She’ll be walking to school by now. She’ll be about halfway up the concrete path between the Hampstead lido and the mansion flats. The big kids are chatting her up, the little ones are swinging on her fingers, and she thinks I’m talking Morris dancing with the British Council in Berlin.
Through the van’s rear windows Mundy begins to recognize the road to Oxford. He’s got an alpha double plus so they’re giving him a degree. Ilse is in her anchorite’s horse trailer telling him he’s a complete infant for sex. They enter rolling hills and pass between brick gateposts capped by sandstone griffins. The daylight switches on and off as beech trees close over them. The van stops, but only for the driver to be waved forward. No beech trees now, but paddocks with white fences, a cricket pavilion and a round pond. The van stops again, the rear doors fly open, a tight-lipped steward in a white jacket and sneakers commandeers Mundy’s knapsack and ushers him past a cluster of parked cars, along a flagstoned passage, up a back staircase to a servants’ corridor.
“My guest gets the bridal suite, Staff,” Amory tells the steward.
“Very good, sir. I’ll send the bride up directly.”
The bridal suite has a single narrow bed, a washbasin and jug, and a very small window looking onto an ivy-covered wall. In his last year as a school prefect, Mundy had a room just like it. More cars are arriving. He hears muted voices and footsteps on gravel. The greatest change in his life is about to begin. Behind closed doors, over four days of unrecorded time, the Born One of Us meets the family.
They are not the family he expected but that’s nothing new to him.
No grim-faced men with secretive glances measure him for the drop. No super-graduettes in twinsets and pearls tie him in knots with courtroom-style questions. They’re excited to meet him, proud, impressed by him, they want to shake his hand, and do. Decent, ordinary, jolly folk, at first reading—no names, but good faces, sensible shoes and scuffed brown briefcases that look anything but official, the womenfolk ranging from the slightly scatty—now where on earth did I put my purse?—to the quiet motherly type with dreamy wet eyes who listens to him dotingly for hours on end before drifting in with a question about something he’s totally forgotten until she puts her finger on it.
As to the male of the species—well, they too come in all shapes and sizes, but they’re a genus nonetheless. Midlife academics, you might say. Archaeologists working happily together on the same site. Medics, with that benign but purposeful detachment that says we go for the disease and not the man. Bony young men with bad suits and faraway eyes—Mundy imagines them as descendants of the classic school of Arabian explorer, crossing the Empty Quarter by camel with nothing but the stars, a bottle of lemonade and a bar of fruit-and-nut.
So what is it, he wonders, that paints them with a single brush, other than their flattering obsession with the person of Ted Mundy? It’s the unexpected belly laughs, the bounce, the shared enthusiasms, the slightly faster tongue and eye. It’s the nearly hidden spark of larceny. It’s the belonging together.
Backwards over his past they go, first with Amory’s debriefing in Berlin to guide them, then striking off in their own directions. All his personal history stretched out before him like a cadaver and, in the most tactful British way, dissected. But Mundy doesn’t mind this. He’s part of it, an alpha double plus player capped for England.
Connections about his life he’s never made before, dug out of the entrails of his memory and held up for him to inspect and comment on: Gosh, well, I suppose that’s true, or Come to think of it yes, bang on, in fact. And Amory always at his side, ready to catch him if he falls, and iron out any little misunderstandings in case our Edward here gets stroppy, which he sometimes does, because not everything that has to be asked makes comfortable fare. They never pretended it would, quite the contrary. That’s how families are.
“Nobody who’s done something as important as you have can survive this sort of mauling without a blush or two, Ted,” a motherly one warns him kindly.
“Agreed. Absolutely. Fire away, ma’am.”
Is she a shrink? How would he know? He wants to call her Flora or Betty or whatever her name would be if he knew it, but all he can think of in his good-spirited way is ma’am like the Queen, which raises a ripple of friendly laughter round the mahogany table.
So that’s the first day, and by the time it’s over except for a few last stragglers in the bar, they have celebrated the version of Ted Mundy that he afterwards thinks of as Mundy One: hero of Weimar, the Major’s loyal only son, former captain of cricket at his public school, doughty second-row rugby forward who went a bit pink in his undergraduate days—and what good man doesn’t?—but now the bugle’s sounded he’s rallied to the family regiment with the best of ’em.
But unfortunately that is only Mundy One. In spying, there is always a second version.
Can schizophrenia be induced?
Certainly it can, provided the patient is complicit.
In Weimar, Sasha gave Mundy a foretaste of what to expect. Here in Oxford, thanks to certain microfilmed instructions conveyed to Mr. Arnold in various concealment devices, they are serving up the whole unpleasant feast. If yesterday’s Mundy One represented the best of everything Mundy might aspire to, today’s Mundy Two is a caricature of everything that until a couple of years ago he feared he was becoming.
A Bolshie ex-schoolboy and ex-Oxford leftist-turned-anarchist dropout and Berlin rowdy who, after a well-merited beating, was run out of town at crack of dawn; an unqualified prep-school master expelled for venery who fell foul of a provincial newspaper before setting up as a failed writer in New Mexico, only to creep back to England and lose himself in the no-hope basements of the arts bureaucracy, a has-been to his grubby fingertips.
The image of himself in this insufficiently distorted mirror is at first so familiar that he can hardly contemplate it without screwing up his face in ridiculous expressions, pulling at his hair, blushing, groaning and shooting his arms around. How much of the portrait comes from his confessions to Amory, and how much from London’s researches over the last forty-eight hours, he has no means of knowing. It makes no odds: Mundy Two is too close to the bone, whether lovingly sketched by the dreamy-eyed ladies, or raunchily by a midlife academic in full flow.
A parsonical man in a Bible-black homburg has arrived by helicopter. Through the bay window of the conference room, Mundy watches him scurry across the lawn clutching his hat to his head and holding out his briefcase as a counterweight. The men stand up and a hush greets him as he enters. He takes his place at the center of the table. A respectful silence collects while he whisks a file from his briefcase and pores over it before bestowing a twinkly smile, first upon the gathering at large, and then upon Mundy.
“Ted,” he says. It is afternoon by now, and Mundy is washed-out: both elbows on the conference table and long hands wedged into his tousled hair. “A question of you, dear boy.”
“Any number,” Mundy replies.
“Did Kate ever mention to you that your father-in-law Des was a paid-up member of the British Communist Party till ’fifty-six?”—much as he might ask, does Kate like gardening?
“No, she absolutely didn’t.”
“Did Des?”
“No.”
“Not even over your Saturday night game of bar billiards?”—the twinkle very bright. “I’m shocked.”
“Not over our game of bar billiards or anywhere else.” And I’m shocked too, but Mundy is too loyal to Des to say so.
“The Soviet invasion of Hungary scuppered him, of course, as it scuppered a lot of them,” the Parson laments, consulting his file once more. “Still one never completely leaves the Party, does one? It’s always there, in the blood, in its way,” he adds, cheering up.
“I suppose it is,” Mundy agrees.
But the file is full of good things, the Parson’s smile suggests as he goes back to it. Des is only the beginning.
“And Ilse. What do you know of her politics—in fo
rmal terms, as it were?”
“She was a bit of everything. Anarchist, Trot, pacifist—I never really worked it out.”
“But she did. In 1972, under the influence of your successor, she became a fully paid-up member of the Leith branch of the Scottish Communist Party.”
“Well done her.”
“You’re being too modest. It was all your doing, I swear it was. You began the good work, your successor completed it. I see you as primarily responsible for leading her to the light.”
Mundy only shakes his head but the Parson is undaunted.
“Regarding your Dr. Mandelbaum, first name Hugo, your fellow refugee and inspiration at boarding school,” the Parson goes on, making a Norman arch out of his fingertips. “What did he teach you exactly?”
“German.”
“Yes, but what type of German?”
“Literature and language.”
“Nothing else?”
“What else should there be?”
“How about a little philosophy? Hegel, Herder, Marx, Engels?”
“God no!”
“Why God?” The Parson’s hooped eyebrows are cordially lifted.
“I wasn’t up to philosophy, that’s why. Not at that age. Not at any age. And least of all in German—I wouldn’t have made head nor tail of it. Not much better now. Ask Sasha.” And he puts the back of his hand to his mouth and lets out an uncertain bark.
“Then let me put it this way, Ted. I’m being contrary, but bear with me. Would I be right in saying Dr. Mandelbaum could have taught you philosophy? Had he wanted to. Had you been precocious.”
“Well—my hat!—on that basis, he could have taught me any bloody thing! The fact is, he didn’t. You asked me, I said no. Now you’re putting the same question hypothetically and I’m supposed to say yes.”
The Parson finds this huge fun. “So what we’re saying is, surely, that Dr. Mandelbaum could have brainwashed you with Marx, Engels or whoever he wished, and as long as you didn’t bubble to your peer group or the rest of the staff, nobody would have been a penny the wiser.”
“And I’m telling you it never happened. All he did—in the most indirect way—legitimately and professionally—nothing more to it than that—was breathe a kind of vague revolutionary vapor over me —” He dries, and goes back to massaging his scalp.
“Ted. Dear chap.”
“What?”
“This profession—yours by adoption—does not live in the real world. It visits it. However, in this case reality is on our side. The entire Mandelbaum clan were hoof-and-horn lefties, and all honor to them. Three of them fought with the Thälmann brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Hugo’s elder brother was in the Comintern. Stalin hanged him for his pains. Your very own Hugo joined the Communist Party in Leipzig in 1934 and went on paying his dues till he went to his reward in Bath General Hospital forty years later.”
“So?”
“So Sasha’s masters aren’t idiots. You met one. The good Professor. He may have his little ways but he’s nobody’s fool. He’ll want to know he’s catching a real fish. Or Sasha is. And the first thing he’ll do is turn you inside out. And what he’ll find—and his numberless mates will find—is a thick red line of radical involvement starting with Dr. Hugo Mandelbaum and continuing without a break through Ilse, Oxford and Sasha to the present day. Of course you didn’t join the Party! Why should you? You didn’t want to imperil your career. But your tutor was a Red, your first girlfriend is a Red, you’re a member of the St. Pancras Labor Party, which is good and left, you’re married to a woman of left-wing lineage whose father was a full-blown comrade till he lapsed in ’fifty-six. You’re a miracle, dear boy! If we’d had to invent you, you wouldn’t be half as convincing. You’ll be God’s gift to them. As, I have to say, you are to all of us.”
Seconded by all present, to jolly laughter from everyone except Mundy. Slowly he sits straight, pushes his hands over his hair to tidy it, and lays them softly on the table. He is smiling, a happy lad. He is gradually getting the hang of the family game. The failed writer is not failed after all. He is a creator like themselves. He is visiting reality, as they are, and plundering it for art’s sake.
“You’ve forgotten Ayah,” he says reproachfully.
They glance at one another uncertainly. Ire? Eire? Where’s the file on Eyer?
“There was this substitute mother I had in India,” Mundy goes on. Then amends the text: “Pakistan.”
Ah, that sort of ayah, their faces say in relief. Yes, yes of course. You mean a maid.
“What about her, Ted?” asks the Parson encouragingly.
“Her entire family was slaughtered in the massacres at Partition time. My father blamed Partition on British colonial misrule. She ended her days begging in the streets of Murree.”
Now it is the turn of the Parson and his crew to see the light. Marvelous, Ted, they agree. A sob story like that is just what they love! Ayah gets star billing. And soon they are all toiling together on Ayah under the working title of Early Influences, firing each other up with their ideas as they bash out the story line: how the infant Mundy was a social lie, born of a working-class mother and passed off as the son of an aristocrat; how he was adopted by this native peasant woman—Fat, Ted? Terrific, let’s blow her up like a balloon!—who gave nothing for his purported origins; and how this enormously fat peasant woman called Ayah—a nursemaid just like your mother, for Christ’s sake!—was herself the victim of colonial oppression. But without Ted, they all agree afterwards in the bar, they would never have got there: those extra touches made all the difference between something felt and just another run-of-the-mill bit of cover.
“We’re Carmelites,” Amory announces without embarrassment, as he and Mundy make an after-dinner tour of the grounds. “We can’t talk about what we do, we get no visible promotion, normal life goes out the window. Our wives have to pretend they’ve married failures and some believe it. But when the captains and the bullshit artists depart, we’ll be the boys and girls who made the difference. And by the looks of it, you’ll be another.”
But who is Mundy Three, when Mundys One and Two have gone to bed? Who is this third person who is neither of the other two, who lies awake while they sleep, and listens for the chimes of country bells he doesn’t hear? He is the silent spectator. He is the one member of the audience who doesn’t applaud the performances of his two familiars. He is made up of all the odd bits of his life that are left over after he has given the rest away.
Have there ever been so many busy hours in a young husband’s day?
Whether Mundy is slaving in the British Council’s headquarters in Trafalgar Square writing up his report on the Sweet Dole Company’s triumphant tour or preparing the ground for the Prague Festival of Dance, now less than four weeks away, or hurrying home for a Dads-2-Bee session at the South End Green Maternity Clinic or lending a hand with the school production of The Pirates of Penzance, he vows he was never in his life so stretched and—dare he say it?—useful.
And if there’s a spare moment, it’s nip into the woodshed with Des to do a bit of work on the baby’s cradle that Des and Ted together are running up for Kate as a surprise, and Kate’s mum, Bess, is crocheting the blanket for. Des has found this lovely batch of old applewood, you wouldn’t believe the grain or the color. The cradle has become a mystical object in Mundy’s order of things, a mixture of talisman and life goal: for Kate, for the baby, and for keeping everything on course. As always, Des likes to talk high politics.
“What would you do—you, Ted—supposing you had your hands on her—apart from the obvious—with that Margaret Thatcher?” he will muse as they labor.
But Mundy knows he must provide no answer because that’s Des’s job.
“Know what I’d do?” Des asks.
“Tell me.”
“I’d ship her off to a desert island with Arthur Scargill and leave them to get on with it.” And the notion of Margaret Thatcher enduring a forced marriage with the hated leader
of the miners’ union has him laughing so much that the cradle’s progress is delayed by several minutes.
Mundy has always liked Des, but since his recent visit to Oxford there is new spice to their relationship. How on earth would the old ex-Communist react, he wonders, if he found out that his son-in-law was spying on Mother Russia’s most obedient vassal? If Mundy knows anything, Des would ceremoniously take off his cap and shake him silently by the hand.
And the baby isn’t the only excitement on the horizon either. Only a few days ago, the Labor Party took a trouncing in the general election, and Kate lays the blame for this squarely on the militants and extremists who have infiltrated its ranks. To save the party she loves, she intends to put herself forward as the officially backed moderate candidate in the forthcoming council elections in direct competition with the Trots, Communists and closet anarchists who are the plague of St. Pancras. It takes her three days to break this news to Ted. She’s so worried he’ll worry. But she underrates his good heart. Within a week Mundy is sitting in the front stalls at St. Pancras Town Hall, willing her forward as she modestly declares her candidature in terse, cogent sentences that remind him of Sasha.
Mundy’s fairy godmother in the British Council’s personnel department would like to see him when he has a moment. She suggests around closing time when people are going home. She has her hands pressed flat on her desk like somebody who has promised to keep her temper. She enunciates her lines with care. She has obviously rehearsed them.
“How’s the writing going?”
“Well. You know. Coming along.”
“You had a novel in the pipeline.”
“Yes. Well, I’m afraid it still is.”
Small talk over. She takes a breath.
“When I was informed by higher authority that your presence was required in Berlin to clear up certain security matters relating to your tour, I was not unduly perturbed”—breath—“similar things have happened before. Experience has taught us to be incurious and wait for them to pass. However.”
Absolute Friends Page 17
