Unprepared for this discussion, Mundy waits for the however.
“When I was informed by the same authority that you were to be given Prague, I came to the conclusion, wrongly as I now know, that you were pulling strings. So I refused to play”—breath—“only to be instructed by a still higher authority, not only to do as I was told, but to obey virtually without question any further instruction relating to your future, unless that instruction is so blatantly at odds with our personnel policy as to be ostentatious to an outside eye.” Long pause. “Short of resigning, which seems excessive in view of the fact that what you are doing is apparently vital to the public interest, I have no alternative but to buckle under what I regard as—unpardonable intolerable meddling in the Council’s affairs.” There. She’s said it. “May I ask you one question?”
“Absolutely,” says Mundy, with none of his usual verve. “Fire away.” Play it dumb, Amory has strenuously advised him. She’s as leaky as a basket. She’s not allowed to know a bloody thing.
“Clearly you don’t have to reply. Equally clearly I shouldn’t be asking it. Are you a Trojan horse?”
“A what?”
“At the time when you joined our organization, were you already—I don’t even know what the word is—and I’m sure if I did know, I wouldn’t be allowed to say it—I believe the expression is, doing a little of this and that for them?”
“No. I wasn’t. Not for anybody.”
“And what has happened since—whatever it is, which obviously I can’t know and don’t want to—has that happened by accident, or by design, would you say?”
“Total accident,” Mundy blurts, keeping his head down in order to examine his hands. “Fluke of life. One in a million chance. Frightfully sorry about it.”
“And do you wish—please don’t answer this if it’s too painful—do you secretly rather wish it hadn’t happened at all?”
“Now and then, I suppose.”
“Then I’m sorry too, Ted. I thought I was helping you by overlooking the fact that you’ve no degree. Now it seems I’ve only landed you in trouble. Still, I suppose we’re all working for the same queen. Though in your case she can’t know, can she?”
“I suppose not.”
“I feel so badly, just giving you a roof. It just seems such a waste somehow. Will you—and I’m sure you can’t tell me—will you get promotion from somewhere else?”
Returning home by the slowest possible route, Mundy ponders the high cost of living a double life for his country. He likes Personnel, and has come to count on her goodwill. Now it seems he must get along without it. He’s beginning to understand what Amory meant when he said that normal life went out the window. But by the time he gets home he has cheered up.
Who wants a normal life, anyway?
British Council memo from Head of Personnel Department to E. A. Mundy marked “Private and Confidential”:
We are informed that your presence is requested at an out-of-town Arts Festival Organizers’ Convention at the McCullough Hall, Edinburgh, from 9 to 16 May, in preparation for your attendance at the Prague Festival of Dance. We understand that travel, accommodation and subsistence will be borne by the organizers. Salary and leave entitlements will be subject to review.
“We call it the School of Deportment,” Amory explains as they ride round Hyde Park munching smoked salmon sandwiches in a black cab driven by Cliff, his sergeant. “They’ll tell you the ten best things to do in Prague when it rains, and a few things about how to cross the road on your own.”
“Will you be there?”
“Darling. Would I leave you at a time like this?”
Kate is less enthusiastic. “A whole week talking about festivals?” she marvels, taking a break from composing A Personal Promise to My Supporters. “You arts bureaucrats are worse than the United Nations!”
It’s a midweek afternoon, a fine spring day, and the eve of Mundy’s departure for Scotland. Kate’s official nomination arrived in the post this morning. She rings Mundy at the Council. She’s perfectly calm but she needs him at once. He leaves his meeting and rushes home to find her standing white-faced but composed on the path to the front door. He takes her arm and coaxes her as far as the porch where she stops dead, like a horse refusing the fence. She has the teething knuckle of her right forefinger jammed in her mouth.
“I disturbed them. They weren’t expecting me. I was supposed to have classes all day,” she says without expression. “One of my girls won a top scholarship to Leeds so the head announced a half-holiday for the sixth.”
Mundy puts an arm round her to hold her more tightly.
“I walked home. I opened the front gate. I saw shadows in the window. In the living room.”
“Through the net curtains?”
“They had the door to the kitchen open. They were moving back and forth across the doorway.”
“So more than one.”
“Two. Maybe three. They were light.”
“Light shadows?”
“Light on their feet. She saw me. The woman did. Girl. She was wearing a sort of catsuit. I saw her head turn, then she must have dived for the floor and crawled into the kitchen. The door to the back garden was open.” Kate could be giving evidence in court, she’s so precise. “I ran round the back in case I could see them. A van was driving away but I was too late to get its number.”
“What sort of van?”
“Green. Black windows in the back doors.”
“Mirrors?”
“I didn’t look. What do mirrors matter? It was just a glimpse, for God’s sake. For all I know the van had nothing to do with it.”
“Old van or new one?”
“Ted, stop interrogating me, will you? If it was conspicuously old or new, I would have said so. It was neither.”
“What did the police say?”
“They put me through to the CID and the sergeant asked if anything was stolen. I said no. He said they’d come when they could.”
They go into the living room. The desk is an antique kneehole job they bought for a song from a crook in Camden Town. Des says it’s so hot he’s surprised it hasn’t caught fire. It has a flat top with imitation leather and a pillar of drawers on either side. The left pillar is Mundy’s, the right pillar is Kate’s. He pulls open his three drawers, one after the other, snap, snap.
Old typescripts, some with their rejection slips still attached.
Jottings for a new play he has in mind.
The file marked FILE that contains his mother’s letters to the Major and the minutes of the Major’s court-martial and the group photograph of the victorious Stanhopes.
Displaced, all of them.
Displaced, but not disordered. Or almost not.
Shoved back, almost in their right sequence, by somebody who wanted to make them look as though they hadn’t been disturbed in the first place.
Kate is watching him, waiting for him to speak.
“Mind?” he asks.
She shakes her head. He pulls open the top drawer on her side. She is breathing heavily. He fears she may faint. He should know her better: she’s angry.
“The bastards put them back upside down,” she says.
Her sixth-form exercise books go in the bottom drawer because it’s the deepest, she explains in clipped sentences. Work to be corrected by Wednesday goes on top of work to be corrected by Friday. That’s why I dish out color-coded exercise books to my students. Yellow, you’re a Wednesday student. Red, you’re a Friday. The bloody burglars turned them upside down.
“But why would a bunch of Trots be interested in your students’ essays?” Mundy reasons.
“They wouldn’t. They were going for Labor Party stuff.”
When the police arrive at ten o’clock the same night, they are not much help.
“Know what my wife does, sir, when she’s in the family way?” the sergeant asks over the cup of tea Mundy makes, while Kate puts her feet up in the bedroom.
“I’m afraid I don�
�t.”
“Eats the toilet soap. I have to hide it or she’d be blowing bubbles all night. Still, I suppose we could arrest everyone with a green van with black windows. That would be a start.”
Watching the police drive away, Mundy privately debates whether to make use of the emergency number Amory has given him, but what does he hope to gain? The sergeant, though odious, was right. Thousands of people own green vans.
Kate’s right. It was the Trots.
It was a couple of thieving kids, and she disturbed them before they could take anything.
It was a normal incident in a normal life, and the only thing that isn’t normal is me.
8
“YOU ARE TIRED, Teddy?” asks the ponderous, ginger-headed Lothar, ordering up another round of pilsners.
“Oh, just a bit stretched, Lothar, nothing terminal,” Mundy confesses. “We did a lot of dancing today,” he adds, to overappreciative laughter.
“Tired but happy,” Frau Doktor Bahr suggests primly from the head of the table, and her young neighbor, the intellectual Horst, seconds this.
Sasha says nothing. He sits, chin in hand, frowning into the middle distance. He has pulled his beret low over his brow, perhaps for irony. It’s their second evening together, so Mundy is familiar with the pecking order. Lothar is Sasha’s minder. Horst, the blond intellectual, is Lothar’s minder. The stern Frau Doktor Bahr from the East German Embassy here in Prague is minding all three of them. And all four of them are minding Ted Mundy.
The third day of the Prague Festival of Dance has just ended. They are sitting in the cellar bar of a conference hotel at the edge of town, a Soviet-style monster of glass and steel, but the cellar is supposed to re-create Hapsburg times, with fat stone pillars and frescoes of knights and maidens. A few late drinkers sit at other tables, a few girls drink cola out of straws, still hoping to catch a foreigner. In a far corner a middle-aged couple are drinking tea, and they have been drinking the same tea in the same tender way for half an hour.
You’ll be followed and that’s par for the course, Edward. It will be professional surveillance, so the important thing for you is not to be aware of it. They’ll shake out your room, so don’t be too tidy or they’ll think you’re playing games with them. If they make eye contact with you by mistake, best to smile vaguely and tell yourself you bumped into them at a party somewhere. Your most convincing weapon is your innocence. With me?
With you, Nick.
In the last seventy-two hours Mundy has sat through bone-wearying displays of sword dancing, folk dancing, tribal dancing, country dancing and Morris dancing. He has clapped his hands off for Cossacks, Georgians, Palestinians doing the dabke, and numberless enactments of scenes from Swan Lake, Coppélia and Nutcracker in a packed baroque theater with no ventilation. He has drunk warm white wine in half a dozen national tents, and in the British tent he has bantered with the usual good chaps and dutiful wives, including a chubby first secretary with circular spectacles who says he once opened the batting for Harrow and Mundy bowled him out first ball, which is the agreed recognition signal. He has been plagued by loudspeaker systems that don’t work, scenery going to the wrong theater and stars refusing to perform because there is no hot water in their hotel. And betweenwhiles he has grudgingly allowed himself to be wooed by Sasha and his outriders. Last night they wanted him to go with them to a private party in town and when Mundy declined, saying he must tend his flock, Lothar suggested a nightclub. Mundy declined that too.
Make the buggers sweat for you, Edward. The only reason they’ve come to Prague is to get inside your knickers. But you don’t know that. You don’t know anything except Sasha’s your old buddy. You’re mixed up, unhappy, drinking a bit, a loner. You’re all over them one minute and cagey the next. That’s the way Sasha’s sold you to them, and that’s who he wants you to be.
Thus Nick Amory, Ted Mundy’s drama coach, at the Edinburgh School of Deportment, relaying the stage directions of Sasha our Producer.
Lothar is trying to draw Mundy out, assisted by Frau Doktor Bahr. They tried to draw him out last night, at this same table and at this same hour, and in the same contrived atmosphere of weary geniality. In the low moments of his drinking curve, Mundy has been monosyllabic. In high moments he has regaled them with embroidered tales of his anticolonial past and, to the huge amusement of his audience and his own secret shame, Ayah’s enormous bottom. He has described the horrors of a bourgeois English education and let slip the magic name of Dr. Hugo Mandelbaum, the man who first got him thinking, but nobody has taken him up on it. They won’t, of course. They’re spies.
“So what do you think about England’s great lurch to the right, Teddy? Does Mrs. Thatcher’s brand of belligerent capitalism alarm you a little, or are you a natural friend of the free market economy?”
The question is so cumbersome, and Lothar’s archness so insinuating, that Mundy disdains a reasoned reply.
“Not a lurch, old boy. Not even a twitch, actually. They’ve changed the name on the shop front, and that’s about all that’s happened.”
Frau Doktor Bahr manages her banalities better. “But if America is going to the right, and Britain also, and the right is gaining ground all over Western Europe, don’t you shudder a little for the future of world peace?”
Horst, who fancies himself an expert on all things British, needs to parade his knowledge.
“Could the mine closures lead to actual revolution, Teddy?—somewhat on the lines of the hunger marches of the thirties maybe, then spinning totally out of control? Can you give us a few tips about how the British man in the street is reacting at the moment?”
They are getting nowhere, and must be aware of it. Mundy is yawning and Lothar is about to order up another round of drinks when Sasha emerges like a jack-in-the-box from his stupor.
“Teddy.”
“What?”
“This is total bullshit, actually.”
“What is?”
“Have you brought your bicycle?”
“Of course I haven’t.”
Suddenly Sasha is standing, hands wide, appealing to all of them. “He’s a cyclist, didn’t you know? He’s crazy. You know what this crazy man did in West Berlin? We rode bicycles round the streets. We spray-painted the old Nazi houses, then rode like hell to get away from the pigs. And I had to go with him—me, with my legs, on a bloody bicycle!—to look after him. Teddy organized it all. He was a genius. Weren’t you, Teddy? Are you trying to pretend you have forgotten?”
Mundy’s hand is rising to hide a rueful smile. “Of course I haven’t. Don’t be bloody silly. Best fun we ever had,” he asserts, determinedly sharing the willful distortion of history.
Sasha’s toughest job will be getting you on your own, Amory is saying. He’ll work on it but you’re going to have to help him. You’re a restless sod, remember? Always wanting to go for a walk, run round the park, jump on a bike.
“Teddy. We have a date tomorrow,” Sasha is announcing excitedly. “Three o’clock outside the hotel. In Berlin we did nighttime. Here we do daytime.”
“Sasha. Honestly. For God’s sake. I’ve got a hundred and six neurotic British artists to worry about. I can’t make three o’clock or any other o’clock. You know that.”
“Artists survive. We don’t. We get out of town, the two of us. I steal the bicycles, you bring the whiskey. We talk about God and the world, like the old days. Fuck it.”
“Sasha—listen to me.”
“What?”
Mundy is pleading now. He’s the one person at the table who isn’t smiling. “I’ve got modern ballet all afternoon. And I’ve got the British Embassy reception in the evening and mad dancers round the clock. I can’t just —”
“You are being a total arsehole as usual. Modern ballet is pretentious shit. Skip the ballet, I’ll get you back to town in time for the Queen. Don’t argue.”
Sasha has carried the company. Frau Doktor Bahr is beaming her blessing, Lothar is chuckling, Horst is saying he
will come too, but Lothar is wagging his finger in an avuncular way and saying these boys deserve a bit of time on their own.
And the great thing about bicycles, Edward, is they’re hell on wheels to follow.
Hotel rooms are not sanctuaries, Edward. They’re glass boxes. They’re where they watch you and search you and listen to you and smell you.
And marriage is not a sanctuary either, or not for the British Council has-been, closet radical and resentful failed writer who haunts the basements of the arts bureaucracy. His phone calls to Kate must reflect this. First thing this morning he filled in a laborious application form at hotel reception: foreign number to be called, foreign party to be spoken to, purpose of foreign call, proposed duration of foreign call, practically the content of the foreign call in advance—which strikes him as pretty bloody silly, seeing that they’ll all be listening in, and ready to cut him off if the talk gets dirty. Crouched on the bed, with the silent phone beside him, he discovers he is shivering. When the phone finally rings it screams so loud he imagines it’s about to commit suicide by hurling itself off the bed. Speaking into the mouthpiece, he notices that his voice is higher and slower. Kate notices it too, and wonders whether he is ill.
“No fine, really. Just a bit danced out. Miranda’s being an absolute bitch, as usual.”
Miranda his boss, the regional supervisor. He asks after the baby. It’s kicking, she says. Jolly hard too: maybe one day he’ll play football for Doncaster. Maybe one day she will, he agrees in a lackluster voice, but the joke, like Mundy, sounds flat. And how are all the drama kings and queens of St. Pancras? he asks. They’re all fine, thank you, she replies, irritated by his low spirits. And has Ted met anyone nice, she asks pointedly, or done anything amusing?
Well. Not really.
You don’t mention Sasha to her EVER, Amory is saying. Sasha belongs to your secret heart. Maybe you’ve got a crush on him, maybe you want to keep him to yourself. Maybe you’re already thinking exactly what they hope you’re thinking: that you want to jump over the Wall and sign up with them.
Absolute Friends Page 18
