by John Lawton
One of Judy’s ways to structure Christmas was to decline all her mother’s invitations to spend it back in Campden Hill Square. That visit she and Wilderness could usually hold off till the day after Boxing Day, when a representative handful of presents and babies would be scooped up and dumped in the back of a cab.
“Why does it feel as though we’ve done this dozens of times? It’s their third Christmas. We’ve done this precisely twice.”
“Dunno,” Wilderness replied. “How often have you imagined it?”
“A lot. I suppose. And I suppose there’ll come a point when I’ll miss the time when we could spend three days completely alone without phone or post, and burping babies will not seem like the bliss it is now.”
“Bliss?”
“If bliss can be said to be pleasure beyond your imagination’s a priori notion of what pleasure is, yes. Not that bringing them up single-handed doesn’t have its ups and downs. You were gone an age.”
Wilderness knew where this was leading, and looked out of the cab window rather than catch Judy’s eye.
“Has Pa told you how long you’ll be at home?”
“No. But he will.”
§87
The moment came sooner than he had anticipated.
Madge had served up curried leftovers. Goose this, spud that, something green, something stuffed. The remains of a Fortnum’s Christmas pudding that might once have been a moon of Jupiter.
Then she plonked down a decanter of Armagnac, looking relieved when every head shook in response to her “Coffee, anyone?”
Burne-Jones got to his feet, reached for the decanter and said, “Joe, let’s adjourn to my study for a while, shall we?”
“You’ve got it all wrong, Pa.” Judy said. “Ma and I are supposed to withdraw while the gentlemen reorganise the League of Nations or compare todgers or whatever.”
“I shall ignore that.”
“And why do you call it a study? Do you actually study in there?”
Madge chipped in, “I once caught your father with his shoes and socks off, staring at his feet. So I assume he studies feet. Does that answer your question?”
“Partly. When he presents his paper on ‘Feet’ to the Linnaean Society I might be convinced. Particularly if it undermines the theory of evolution.”
With the study door closed, Burne-Jones said, “What’s got into her?”
Wilderness said, “She’s anticipating what you’re going to say.”
“I see. That obvious, is it?”
“You said yourself, Thwaite will be after my guts in the New Year. So she’s expecting another foreign posting.”
Burne-Jones prodded the fire to life with a poker—the half-hearted glow of the smokeless briquettes that were all London’s smog laws would allow. He plonked himself down in one fireside chair and waved Wilderness into the other one. Wilderness didn’t care what Alec studied or whether he studied at all. He could simply sit, just be, in a room like this and roll the clock back eighty years—a padded cell for the sophisticated man, deep chairs, heavy velvet curtains, shelf upon shelf of books, a harmonium no one ever played.
Burne-Jones poured out two hefty Armagnacs.
Wilderness wondered if he was going to take his slippers and socks off, but he didn’t. He sipped once at his Armagnac, sighed with pleasure and said, “She’s right of course. Pity of it is that you really should be at home with your daughters, enjoying them while they’re enjoyable. When they’re older … well there are times I think Judy could suck the fun out of Sunday Night at the London Palladium. However, be that as it may … you can’t stay in England just yet. But it won’t be a posting. Not as such. Tell me, Joe. How good’s your Czech?”
“Patchy. I tend to get by in German. Not the most popular language in Czechoslovakia, but I don’t get punched in the jaw for speaking it.”
“I want you back there before whatever it is that’s going to blow blows. But we can spare a few weeks for you to scrub up.”
“OK … but Cambridge University is still in England or did it move while I was away?”
“Of course you can’t go to Cambridge. No, no … it’s Dublin. We’ve done a deal with the Russian and Slavonic faculty at Trinity. Matter o’ fact we set up it up after Hungary in ’56, when Cambridge simply couldn’t cope with the number of new recruits we were sending them. You start the week after next. If Thwaite asks, you’re still abroad. No need for him to know where or why. And he’d be an idiot to ask either and risk being reminded that the service he scrutinises has the word secret in front of it. You’ll be nicely off radar and you can come and go without showing a passport. That’s one reason I had Ernie pick you up at the airport. No one saw your passport, so no one who doesn’t need to know knows you’re here.”
“The invisible man.”
“Quite.”
§88
He travelled under his own name and enrolled under his own name. When he checked in with Eddie and Alice Pettifer before setting off for Euston and Holyhead for the crossing to Dún Laoghaire, Alice gave him his cover folder, the address of the lodging they’d found for him, a street map of Dublin and a bankers’ letter to enable him to draw expenses and salary in punts from the National Bank of Ireland in O’Connell Street.
“And,” she said, as he stuffed papers unread into his briefcase. “Leave the gun.”
“What gun?”
She spun the briefcase round to face her and pulled out his Smith & Wesson before he could even reach out a hand to stop her.
“Exactly,” she said. “What gun?”
“Alice …”
“No Joe. No soft soap. I’m following orders and so should you. You don’t need a gun.”
“I rather think I do.”
“You’re a student. Students don’t carry guns. They carry biros. And … just think of the trouble guns have got you into.”
“Think of the trouble they’ve got me out of.”
“Burne-Jones’s orders, Joe. You’re not allowed so much as a pea shooter.”
Wilderness looked to Eddie. Eddie strived for expressionless blank and said, “Coffee, anyone?”
§89
The MS Inishmaan ploughed through rough seas.
Wilderness slept.
Wilderness dreamed.
Dreamed dreams that might have haunted Macbeth or Richard III.
Not that anyone told him to “despair and die,” but the dead wanted words with him all the same.
Yuri Myshkin dead in his armchair at the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, dead but speaking, “Another fine mess, eh Joe?”
His father walking out into the North Sea stark naked, repeatedly as though in a time loop, “Make a better job of the life thing than I did, son. Life thing. Life thing. Life life life.”
And his grandfather, who had fallen from a rooftop in Hampstead, glass cascading all around him, with not a cry nor a word. Yet in dreams Wilderness heard the old man calling his name over and over again, “Joe, Joe, Joe.” In a slow diminuendo mimicking the fall.
And the living. Kostya sinking into the frozen lake, “I’m just a fucking Schieber! Schieber! Schieber!”
Oddly, the one man he had killed in the twenty years since Burne-Jones had rescued him from the glasshouse, the KGB agent he’d shot dead in Vienna back in ’55, failed to put in an appearance in his dreams. For once the man had no echo. No accusation. Wilderness was quite certain—well almost certain—he felt no guilt about the killing. “Him or me” seemed perfectly adequate. His intermittent recurrence was hardly proof of conscience, merely of memory.
But waking, Wilderness wondered … about himself. About the KGB agent whose name he had never known. And he wondered about the others. Was a conscience really needed? There was nothing he could have done to save Yuri or his grandfather, there was nothing he would have done to save his father … and Kostya? Well, he had saved Kostya. After he’d nearly killed him.
§90
A cab took him through hypnotic, prismatic drizzle from the port
to the address Alice had given him: Duke Street, just south of the Liffey, halfway between St. Stephen’s Green and Trinity College. It was a four-storey Georgian house that had seen better days—peeling paint the colour of verdigris, and a front door that looked as though it had withstood assault with a battering ram. It was also next to a pub, and as Wilderness paid off the cabbie, the name struck him as familiar: Davy Byrne’s. Hadn’t Leopold Bloom killed time there listening to the inane ramblings of Nosey Flynn?
He yanked on the bellpull and heard a distant ring deep inside the house.
At least two minutes passed. Bolts slid back. A key turned. A blue eye peered out.
“Would it be Mr. Holderness?”
Then the door opened wider. A small, rotund, smiling man in carpet slippers and a cardigan worn through at the elbows.
“My, but you’re late. We were expecting you two hours ago.”
“Bit of a rough crossing,” Wilderness said.
“You must be perishing. Bring yerself in and get warm.”
He closed the door, slid the bolts back into place, drew a heavy woollen curtain across. Held out a hand.
“Bob Fitzsimmons,” he said. “I’ll show you to yer room and then you can meet the missis.”
Wilderness concluded the outside of the house was deceptive. Inside, it was clean, warm, well-maintained if archaic—a surviving fragment of the last century, dark, brown and heavy. Fitzsimmons led him to the top floor, to a big room facing onto Duke Street. Any misgivings Wilderness might have had, those inevitable comparisons to his freezing digs in Cambridge back in ’46, evaporated. A vast bed, a quilt the size of Latvia, a basin, his own bath and loo, a creaking, talkative iron radiator that was almost too hot to touch. It wasn’t home. It might be a home from home. Just as well, Burne-Jones was being cagy about how long he’d be in Dublin.
“What brings you to Ireland if I might be so bold?”
“Oh, I’m studying Czech at Trinity.”
“And what line would you be in?”
“I’m with ICI,” Wilderness replied, adhering to the cover Alice had laid down for him. “We’re very keen to expand into Eastern Europe. I’m with the paint division in Basingstoke.”
“Oh … paint. Well I never. What kind o’ paint?”
“Er …”
“Son, you just fell at the first fence and you’re sittin’ on yer arse on the turf at Leopardstown. If that’s yer cover, you need to put a few hours into the mugging up. ICI, you say? Would that be ICI 5 or ICI 6?”
Thank God for small mercies. The man hadn’t asked where Basingstoke was. He was going to kill Alice for this.
“It’s alright. I was with SOE in the last war. Your man considers me very reliable.”
“Your man,” Wilderness thought, was so vague it could mean anything or anyone from Alice to Burne-Jones to C to the prime minister.
“Are all your lodgers in my line of work?”
“Not all, but a fair few. Gladys and I have had the odd ICI gunman stay over the years. It’s all a matter of choosing your friends and when you choose your friends you also choose your enemies. Pity of it is you can’t choose your neighbours. Ask anyone from Poland. The English can be a right bunch of bastards, but I’d choose them any day over Germans or Russians.”
Yes, he was definitely going to kill Alice.
“But … that’s by the bye. Your secrets are safe with us, so come on down and meet Gladys. She’ll have put the kettle on when she heard the bell ring.”
§91
All Wilderness knew about paint was gloss or emulsion. Brush or roller.
Fitzsimmons had a point with paint. He’d been the first to ask. He wouldn’t be the last. Wilderness had no idea what paint was even made of. Dead horses, like glue? Crude oil, like plastic?
The Fitzsimmonses kept a prewar encyclopaedia in the parlour. Twenty-six volumes, Aardvark to Zyzzyva. Wilderness duly mugged up under P … and setting off for his first day at Trinity felt he might well be able hold his own on paint … gypsum, clay, resin, solvent, pigment et alia … at least until an apposite moment arose to change the subject. Paint had one thing greatly in its favour: boring. Watching it dry … talking about it … boring. No one would ask more than a couple of questions before switching to cricket or football … or the existence of a deity.
He’d tucked his briefcase under his arm and was wrestling with the array of bolts on the front door when Fitzsimmons appeared.
“Young Alice called. I’ve a message for you.”
“OK.”
“No rackets, she said. Tell him no rackets. Does that mean anything?”
“Probably,” Wilderness replied.
No guns, no rackets. I might as well be selling fucking paint.
§92
Czech was not the easiest language Wilderness had ever taken on, but then no language had ever struck him as too difficult. He’d yet to wrestle with Mandarin or Japanese and thankfully could not conceive of the circumstances in which Burne-Jones would require him to.
He wasn’t the oldest student in the class—there were two women in their fifties, and whilst it was an unwritten rule (although he’d bet money someone had written it down somewhere) that you didn’t ask why anyone else was doing what they were doing, it seemed very likely that they were “Ladies who Listened,” at Caversham, the BBC’s “listening post” in Berkshire. If he was learning Czech because Czechoslovakia was assuming greater importance in the great snowball fight that was postwar Europe, it was a penny to a pound Caversham and the BBC (for BBC read Foreign Office, read Government, read MI6) were upping the level of their monitoring too. Sooner or later he’d be sent into Czechoslovakia to do God-knows-what—shoot lots of people, save Fort Knox, wreck Crab Quay—and they’d be back in Berkshire, wearing headphones and listening to the Czech version of The Archers.
It was hard to make new friends. So he didn’t try.
He hadn’t been told of any other spooks on the course, so assumed there were none, and if there were what would they have to say to each other?
It was hard to make new friends. So he made none. He established a random pattern of pubs and bars—not random enough to avoid the “enemy” (whoever that was) but perhaps enough not to be perceived as a regular and get drawn into conversations that, being Irish, would inevitably be rather nosy and might even find paint interesting, and being Wilderness, would inevitably be lies from start to finish.
He’d sit in Bailey’s or Davy Byrne’s nursing a half of Guinness, silently cramming Czech verbs, starting with the most important:
miluji tě,
miluješ,
on nebo ona miluje …
And when, after cramming the principal parts of thje verb to love, he felt the need of a good glass of wine, or perhaps just a rug with no sawdust, or even a rug, he’d switch to the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel at St. Stephen’s Green, order a half bottle of claret and cram again. I spy:
špehuji,
špehujete,
on nebo ona špeha
Within a month or so he was happy, or at least happy with Czech.
One night—it might have been a Wednesday, a night when pubs were less than full as wage packets waned—he sat in Davy Byrne’s. With a beer. He didn’t much like beer. He liked verbs. Nouns changed a bit, except in English where a noun was so stubborn as to yield only to a plural. Verbs … verbs … were motile, life-giving:
jím příliš mnoho banánů,
jíte příliš mnoho banánů,
on nebo ona jí příliš mnoho banánů
Which led with a certain inevitability to:
Ano, nemáme banány.
No bananas indeed.
Then: a figure looming over him.
Something oddly familiar about this.
“Kein Wort auf Russisch.”
(Not one word in Russian.)
Odder still.
“Why, Bernard? What do the Irish think you are?”
“One of them. One so unfortunate as to lose his a
ccent after so many years in England.”
“A West Brit?”
“Exactly.”
“Why not sit down. We can talk in any language we might have in common.”
“German will do.”
“Good. Bernard, what are you doing here?”
“Please call me Jim. It’s the name you stuck me with. And I teach in the Faculty of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies. The same department you are in. I am a tutor in the Russian language.”
“Of course.”
“Joe, what are you doing here?”
“Learning Czech. But you know that.”
“You’re not here for me?”
“Why would I be here for you? Bernard Alleyn is in Moscow, I saw him cross the Glienicke Bridge with my own eyes. If he didn’t, well … we’d both be in the shit, wouldn’t we?”
Bernard sat. Bernard sagged. Relief all but dripped from his pores.
Wilderness stuck up an arm for the barman.
“Whiskey, large. For my friend. I think he’s feeling faint.”
With his hand wrapped around a glass of Old Paddy, Bernard perked up a little but still seemed unwilling to say more.
Wilderness knew almost everything there was to know about Bernard Alleyn, formerly Leonid Liubimov, now living under the name of James Wilde—a rechristening by Wilderness back in Berlin a couple of years ago. What he didn’t know about was the brief life since.
Bernard looked well. He must be little short of fifty and had led a life of such duplicity, such risk, that it might well have etched itself into his face. It hadn’t. His hair was greying, but in the way that elicited “distinguished” rather than “old”—if anything he was growing to bear more than a passing resemblance to Burne-Jones.
