Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear

by Javier Marías

  ‘Lionel?’ I asked. Another rhetorical question, although less so this time. I was surprised by that third name, which had always seemed so actorly, doubtless because of Lionel Barrymore, and because of Lionel Atwill, who played archenemy Professor Moriarty to the great Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, and because of Lionel Stander who was persecuted in America by Senator McCarthy and had to go into exile in England in order to continue working (and become a bogus Englishman). And then there was Lionel Johnson, but he was a poet friend of Wilde and Yeats, a man from whom John Gawsworth claimed descendance (John Gawsworth, the literary pseudonym of the man who was in real life Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, that secretive writer, beggar and king, with whom I had been rather obsessed during my time teaching in Oxford all those years ago: his fanciful ancestry also included Jacobite nobles, namely, the Stuarts, the dramatist Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary, and the supposed ‘Dark Lady’ of the sonnets, Mary Fitton, the courtesan). ‘Lionel?’ I said again with just a hint of mockery, which did not escape Wheeler.

  ‘Yes, Lionel. I never use it, though, but there’s nothing wrong with it, is there? Anyway, don’t get distracted by trivia, that’s not what matters, that isn’t what I want you to see. Read on.’

  I returned to the biographical note, but I had to stop almost at once and look up again, after reading the facts about his birth, which said: ‘Born 24 October 1913, in Christchurch, New Zealand. Eldest son of Hugh Bernard Rylands and of the late Rita Muriel, née Wheeler. Adopted the surname Wheeler by deed poll in 1929.’

  ‘Rylands?’ This time there was nothing rhetorical about the question, just spontaneous, sincere astonishment. ‘Rylands?’ I repeated. There must have been a look of distrust in my eyes, and perhaps a suggestion of reproach. ‘It’s not, it can’t be, can it? It can’t just be coincidence.’

  The look that Wheeler gave me reflected a mixture of patience and impatience, or of annoyance and paternalism, as if he had known I would stop there, at his father’s unexpected surname, Rylands, and as if he accepted and understood my reaction, but also as if the matter bored him, or he saw it merely as a tiresome stage that had to be gone through before he could focus on whatever it was he really wanted to get to grips with. To judge by his expression, he could easily have said: ‘No, that’s not what matters either, Jacobo. Read on.’ And he almost did, although not immediately, he showed me some consideration; but not without first making a vague attempt to avoid my reproaches:

  ‘Oh, come on, you’re not going to tell me you didn’t know.’

  ‘Peter.’ My tone was one of clear warning and overt reproach, like the one I used with my children sometimes when they insisted on ignoring me so they wouldn’t have to do as they were told.

  ‘Well, I thought you knew, I could have sworn you did. In fact, I find it very odd that you don’t.’

  ‘Please, Peter. No one knows, not in Oxford. Or if they do, they keep very quiet about it, in fact, they’ve been unusually discreet. Do you think that if Aidan Kavanagh or Cromer-Blake had known about it, or Dewar or Rook or Carr, or Crowther-Hunt, or even Clare Bayes, do you think they wouldn’t have told me?’ They were old friends or colleagues from my time in Oxford, some less prone to gossip than others. Clare Bayes had been my lover too, I hadn’t seen her or heard anything about her in ages, nor about her little boy Eric, who would no longer be a little boy, not now, he would have grown up. Perhaps I wouldn’t even like her any more, my distant lover, if I saw her. Perhaps she wouldn’t like me. Best not to see each other, best not. ‘Did you know, Mrs Berry?’

  Mrs Berry started a little, but did not hesitate to say:

  ‘Oh, yes, I knew. But bear in mind, Jack, that I’ve worked for both brothers. And I tend to keep things to myself.’ She, like all English people who had difficulty in pronouncing the name Jacques and who did not know that the name could be converted into Spanish as Jaime or Jacobo or Diego, always called me Jack (a phonetic approximation), the diminutive of John or Juan, but not of James. When they stopped addressing me as ‘Mr Deza’ (as happened quite quickly), Tupra and Mulryan also called me Jack. Not Rendel though, he wasn’t on such familiar terms with anyone, at least not in the building with no name and no obvious function. And young Nuix, like Luisa, inclined to Jaime, or sometimes to my surname only, plain Deza, as Luisa did too.

  ‘Brothers,’ I murmured, and on this occasion, I managed not to turn my repetition into a question. ‘Brothers, eh? You know perfectly well, Peter, that I knew nothing about it. I didn’t even know you were born in New Zealand until you mentioned it to me for the first time a few days ago, on the phone.’ As I was speaking, memories of Rylands came rushing in on me, sometimes memories surface with such terrible speed. ‘So Toby …’ I said, rousing myself, ‘… but, he was supposed to have been born in South Africa, and I thought it must be true because once I heard him mention in passing that he didn’t leave that continent, Africa, I mean, until he was sixteen. The same age that you were when you arrived here, which you also mentioned in passing for the first time during that phone conversation of a matter of days ago. You’re not going to tell me now that you were twins, are you?’

  Wheeler turned to look at me, but without speaking, his eyes said that he wasn’t up to the labour of listening to reproaches or half-ironies, not that morning, he had other things on his mind, or on the repertoire drawn up for that performance.

  ‘Well, if you really didn’t know … I suppose you simply never asked me,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never concealed the fact. Toby might have preferred to, he may have concealed it from you, but I didn’t. And I don’t really know why I should have told you anyway.’ He said these words in the same impassive, almost self-exculpatory tone, but I picked up on it, recognised it: it was intended to bring me up short. ‘No, we weren’t twins. I was nearly a year older. And now I’m considerably older still.’

  I knew what Wheeler was like when something made him feel uncomfortable or when he became evasive, it was a waste of time insisting, you merely risked irritating him, he always decided the topic of conversation.

  ‘All right, Peter. If you would be kind enough to explain, I’m all ears, curiosity and interest. I assume that’s what you wanted me to see in Who’s Who, and I trust you’ll tell me why. Why now, I mean.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he replied. ‘I genuinely thought you knew all about that, otherwise I would never have risked us running aground here. No. There’s something else I want to talk to you about, although it does indirectly have to do with Toby, in a way. Last night, if you recall, I put off telling you something until today. Read on, please, you haven’t finished yet.’ And with an imperative forefinger which moved up and down as if it had a life of its own (it now dropped almost vertically), he touched the large volume open before me.

  ‘Peter, you can’t just leave me dangling like that,’ I ventured to protest.

  ‘It will all become clear later on, Jacobo, don’t worry, you’ll find out. It’s a trivial story, though; you’ll be disappointed. Anyway, carry on. And read it out loud, will you. I don’t want you to read the whole thing, that would be a terrible bore. So I’ll tell you when to stop.’

  I returned to the biographical note, to the next section, which was ‘Education’. And I read out loud and in English, omitting all the incomprehensible abbreviations and acronyms:

  ‘Cheltenham College; Queen’s College, Oxford; Lecturer of St John’s College, 1937–53, and Queen’s College, 1938–45. Enlisted, 1940.’ And I could not help but stop again, even though he had not yet told me to. I looked up. ‘I didn’t know you enlisted in 1940,’ I said. ‘And I see there’s no mention anywhere of 1936. Was that perhaps when you were in Spain? A lot of the British people who went there left at the beginning or towards the middle of 1937, terrified or else wounded, they didn’t last, well, George Orwell was one of them.’ Then I remembered that, just in case and without success, I had also looked for the surname Rylands in the indices of names in the books I had consulted during t
he night, so his possible first or real name, Peter Rylands, had not been the one he had used in my country’s war either. Or perhaps it had, but he had done nothing so outstanding there that he would merit a mention in the history books, and I had only allowed myself to imagine otherwise for my own amusement.

  Wheeler seemed to read my thoughts, as well as my inopportune question.

  ‘Many never left, there they still are, terrified and wounded. Wounded unto death,’ he replied. ‘But please, let’s not talk about the Spanish Civil War now, however immersed you were in it last night. Almost no one used their real name there, nor did a lot of people in the Second World War. Not even Orwell was called George Orwell, if you remember.’ I didn’t remember, and seeing that I had forgotten, he added: ‘His real name was Blair, Eric Blair, I knew him slightly during the war, he was in the BBC’s India Section. Eric Arthur Blair. He was born in Bengal and had lived in Burma in his youth, he knew the East well. He was ten years older than me. Now I’m infinitely older. He died young, as you know, didn’t even make it to fifty.’ — ‘Another one,’ I thought, ‘another foreign Britisher or bogus Englishman.’ — ‘Anyway, carry on reading, otherwise we’ll never get to what I want to talk about.’

  ‘Sorry, Peter.’ And I read: ‘Commissioned Intelligence Corps, December 1940; Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, 1945; specially employed in Caribbean, West Africa and South-East Asia, 1942–46. Fellow of Queen’s College, 1946–53…’

  ‘That’s enough,’ he said in English, which was the language we were speaking, to do otherwise would have been a discourtesy to Mrs Berry, although I found it slightly odd that she had not left the table, as she usually did, even during more conventional conversations or ones that had no clear direction, not that I knew yet which direction this one was heading in. So this was what Wheeler wanted to show me: ‘Commissioned Intelligence Corps, December 1940 (‘Cuerpo de Informatión’ in Spanish, not ‘Cuerpo de Inteligencia’ as a bad translator might render it, not that it matters, both refer to the Secret Service, MI5 and MI6, the initials mean Military Intelligence, a contradiction in terms some might say, the British equivalent of the Soviets’ GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MGD, KGB, it has been called so many things over the years: MI5 for internal matters and MI6 for external ones, the first focused on the national and the second on the international); ‘Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel, 1945; specially employed in Caribbean, West Africa and South-East Asia, 1942–46’. That was what I had just read. ‘The rest doesn’t concern us now,’ he added, ‘it’s all about awards and publications and jobs, blah-blah-blah.’

  ‘Toby worked for MI5 too, or so people said when I was teaching here,’ I said. ‘And he did actually confirm that to me once.’

  ‘He talked to you about it?’ asked Wheeler. ‘That’s strange. That’s very strange indeed, you must be one of the few people he did talk to. He was in MI6 actually, we both were during the war, as was nearly everyone in Oxford and Cambridge, I mean those of us with enough training and confidence and who knew languages; besides, we would have been much less use at the front, although some of us did spend time there too. Being recruited or summoned by MI6 or SOE soon ceased to be anything very special, in fact, they started appointing us to responsible positions and tasks.’ He realised that I was not familiar with the last acronym he had mentioned, so he explained: ‘Special Operations Executive, it only existed during the war, between 1940 and 1945. No, I lie, it was officially dismantled in 1946. Fully and completely, well, I suppose that nothing that exists is ever fully and completely dismantled. They were executioners, and fairly inept ones too: MI6 was devoted to research and intelligence, well, call it espionage and premeditated deceit; the SOE to sabotage, subversion, murder, destruction and terror.’

  ‘Murder?’ I’m afraid that when confronted by this word, no one can possibly restrain themselves and keep quiet, even less when confronted by its companion ‘terror’.

  ‘Yes, of course. They bumped off Heydrich, for example, the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, in 1942, it was one of their major successes, they were so proud of it. Two Czech resisters actually hurled the grenades at his car and machine-gunned it, but the operation was masterminded by Colonel Spooner, one of the SOE’s top men. With, as it happens, little foresight, poor judgement and only average implementation, you may have heard about this episode or seen it in films, I don’t know how much you know about the Second World War. Heydrich wasn’t in fact mortally wounded; people thought he would pull through, and one hundred hostages were shot at dusk each day of his convalescence (although it turned out to be his death agony). He took a whole week to die, imagine, and they say he only died in the end because the poison in the bullets was so slow to take effect. That was the German story anyway: they said the bullets had been impregnated with botulin brought from America by the SOE, I don’t know though, maybe the Nazi doctors messed things up and invented the story to save their own necks. If the story is true, though, and Frank Spooner did poison the ammunition, he could have smeared it with something a bit deadlier and faster-acting, don’t you think, curare perhaps, like the Indians use on their arrows and spears.’ And Wheeler laughed a brief, mirthless laugh: for the first time his laugh reminded me of Rylands’s laugh, which was short and dry and slightly diabolical and not aspirated (ha, ha, ha), but plosive, with a clear alveolar t, as the t always is in English: Ta, ta, ta, he said. Ta, ta, ta. ‘Of course the same thing would have happened if it had been quick. When Heydrich did finally die, the Nazis exterminated the entire population of Lidice, the village the SOE’s agents had parachuted into in order to direct the assassination in situ. Not a soul was left alive, but that wasn’t enough for the Nazis, they reduced the place to rubble, they levelled it, erased it from the map, it was so odd that strong spatial sense of theirs, unhealthy, the malice they felt towards places, as if they believed in the genius loci, a kind of spatial hatred.’ — ‘Franco was the same,’ I thought, ‘and above all he hated my city, Madrid, because it had rejected him and refused to surrender to him until the bitter end.’ — ‘They were a pretty inept bunch, the men from the SOE, they often acted without establishing first whether the action was worth the consequences. Some soldiers hated them, despised them even. A few months ago I read in a book by Knightley that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, dubbed them amateurish, ignorant, irresponsible and mendacious. Others said still worse things. In fact, their most beneficial effect was psychological, which was not without importance: knowing of their existence and their exploits (which were more legend than truth) raised the morale of the occupied countries, where they credited them with powers they lacked, and with far more intelligence, infallibility and cunning than they ever had. They made a lot of mistakes. But, as we know, people believe what they need to believe, and everything has its moment to be believed. Where were we? Why were we talking about that?’

  ‘You were telling me about the people in Oxford and Cambridge who entered MI6 and the SOE.’ Someone simply has to mention or explain a name for one to start using it almost with familiarity. Wheeler had used the same words Tupra had used, ‘everything has its moment to be believed’, I wondered if it was a motto, known to both. While Wheeler was talking I had been glancing over the rest of his biographical note which no longer concerned us: a man laden with distinctions and honours, Spanish, Portuguese, British, American, Commander of the Order of Isabel the Catholic, of the Order of the Infante Don Henrique. Amongst his writings, I noticed this title from 1955: The English Intervention in Spain and Portugal in the Time of Edward III and Richard II. — ‘He’s spent his entire life studying his country’s interference abroad,’ I thought, ‘from the fourteenth century, from the Black Prince on, perhaps he got interested after his time in MI6.’ — ‘You said Toby belonged to the former.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that’s right. Well, you know our privileged reputation: they think of us as prepared and qualified in principle for any activity, regardless of whether it bears any relation to our studies or our
particular disciplines. And this university has spent too many centuries intervening, via its offspring, in the government of this country for us to refuse to collaborate when it most needed us. Not that we had any choice, it wasn’t like in peacetime. Although there were people who did, who refused, and they paid for it, paid very dearly. All their lives. There were double agents and traitors too, you’ll have heard of Philby, Burgess, Maclean and Blunt, the scandal gradually dribbled out during the ’50s and ’60s, and even into the ’70s, because no one knew anything about Blunt until 1979, when Mrs Thatcher decided to break the pact she had inherited and to make public what he had confessed in secret fifteen years before, thus completely destroying him and stripping him of everything, starting, ridiculously enough, with his title. Anyway, there were so many people involved, it’s hardly surprising that four traitors should have emerged from our universities, fortunately the four came from the other place, not ours, and that’s worked silendy in our favour for the last half-century.’ — ‘Here too,’ I thought, ‘that spatial malice, the punishment of place.’ — ‘Well, I say four: the Four of Fame from the Ring of Five, but there must have been many more.’ — I didn’t understand what he was referring to, but this time I gave no sign of my ignorance, not even by my expression, I didn’t want to have to interrupt again. ‘Ring’ in English can also mean the kind of ring you wear on your finger. — ‘I joined, Toby joined, as did so many others, and it’s remained quite common practice, even after the war, they’ve always needed all kinds of expertise and have sought it out in the best and most appropriate places. They’ve always needed linguists, decoders, people who knew languages: I don’t think there’s anyone in the sub-faculty of Slavonic Languages who hasn’t done some work for them at some time. Not in the field, of course, they haven’t gone on missions, anyone working in Slavonic languages was already too marked out by his profession to be useful to them there, it would have been tantamount to sending a spy with a sign on his forehead saying “Spy”. But they have used them to do translations, to act as interpreters, to break codes, authenticate recordings or polish accents, to carry out phone taps and interrogations, in Vauxhall Cross or in Baker Street. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course, now they don’t need them so much, it’s the turn of Arabists and Islamic scholars, they have no idea yet just what’s hit them, they won’t get a moment’s peace.’ — I thought of Rook with his massive head, the eternal translator of Tolstoy and the alleged and unlikely friend of Vladimir Nabokov, and about Dewar, a.k.a. the Ripper, the Butcher, the Hammer and the Inquisitor (poor Dewar and his insomnia, and how unfair all those nicknames were), a Hispanist who, as I discovered, could also read Pushkin in Russian, delighting in those iambic stanzas, either read out loud or to himself. Old acquaintances from the city of Oxford in which I had lived for two years — although I was only ever passing through — and with almost all of whom I had had no further contact once I returned to Madrid. Cromer-Blake and Rylands, with whom I had been friendliest, were both dead. Clare Bayes was back with her husband, Edward Bayes, or else with a new lover, but there would definitely be no room for me as a friend, there would be no reason, our affair had been entirely secret. I was in sporadic contact with Kavanagh, the head of my sub-faculty, an amusing man and a great hypochondriac, which is perhaps why he wrote his horror novels under that pseudonym, two different forms of an addiction to fear. And Wheeler. Except that he really dated from after my time there, he was more like an inheritance from Rylands, his successor, his substitute or replacement in my life, I realised now the family nature of it, of that inheritance and that succession I mean. Wheeler remained thinking for a moment (perhaps he was feeling sorry for some Arabist acquaintance of his, and of his imminent fate under siege from MI6), and then returned to something from earlier in the conversation, saying: ‘It’s very odd that Toby should have told you about that. He didn’t like anyone to know, he didn’t even like thinking about it. Nor do I actually, so don’t go imagining that I’m going to regale you with stories of my adventures in the Caribbean or in West Africa or in South-East Asia, according to Who’s Who’s rather imprecise accusations. What did he tell you? Can you remember how it came up?’