Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  Burgess almost winced at the word home, but forced a smile and said, “Yes. Of course.”

  Blunt removed his hands.

  Then Burgess held out his hand.

  “Goodbye, Anthony.”

  Blunt shook it, lightly, cold-fingered, like a leaf that had floated down from an autumn canopy.

  “I think you mean au revoir.”

  §24

  The RAC Club: An Hour Later

  Ever since he’d thought up the scheme, Blunt had told him not to blab about it. In fact, he’d said, “Put them off the scent, Guy. I don’t think they’re watching you, but they’re most certainly watching Maclean. Leave a false trail.”

  This would be the fun part. Rather like a party game for the under-twelves.

  Burgess hailed a cab in Oxford Street and was dropped off at his club—one of his clubs—the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall. It was coming up to five o’clock—five o’clock on a summer Friday … half the skivers in half the ministries in Whitehall would be knocking off early and slipping into the club for a snifter or two before the homeward commute back to the rolling pin. He’d have plenty of witnesses.

  He tackled Willie, surname unknown, who’d served him drinks, steered him into cabs when pissed, and on occasion reminded him to button up his flies, since before the war.

  “Maps, Willie.”

  “Maps, sir?”

  “Yes. North of England … Scotland … or are they the same thing?”

  “As a native Dundonian, sir, I can assure you they are quite different places.”

  “But roughly in the same direction?”

  “Quite, sir. Scotland is second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning.”

  “Can’t miss it, eh?”

  “Yes, sir. Hasn’t moved in years.”

  Willie took maps from a rack by the main desk, and gently spread them out in front of Burgess.

  “Bartholomew’s, Ordnance Survey, MacTavish’s Highlands and Islands, and of course our own RAC edition.”

  “Jolly good. I’ll be in the Long Bar. Large Scotch and soda when you’ve a mo’, Willie.”

  None of the small tables were large enough, so he laid his first map on the floor and knelt down, unfolded it to the size of a tablecloth, stiff and starched. He thought of watching his mother’s cook cut out a dress pattern on her day off—shears pinking, fat arse in the air. He must look much the same. He glanced up. Sure enough, eyes were staring and eyebrows rising over the tops of glasses.

  He knew sod all about Britain north of Cambridge. Willie appeared with his Scotch and politely pointed out that he had the Highlands map upside down.

  “A motoring holiday, sir?”

  “Oh yes. Been meaning to take one for ages. Then I met this nice young American on the Queen Mary, coming over, and we hit upon the same idea—Scotland and points north. He seemed very keen on seeing a place called Inversomething. Do you know it?”

  “Possibly. But going to Scotland in search of Inversomething is rather like going to Wales and asking for Abersomething. It’s close to ubiquitous.”

  “Really? Where would you recommend?”

  “Skye, sir. Quite beautiful in May. The wild thyme is about to flower. Stay till June and the island will be an eiderdown of mauve.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Motor to Mallaig and take the ferry.”

  “Mallaig?”

  Willie put his finger on Mallaig.

  “Ah, I get it. The Skye boat. Speed bonny boat like a … something something.”

  “Bird on the wing, sir.”

  §25

  Burgess packed for the weekend. A cruise on the Falaise. Overnight from Southampton, a couple of stopovers at French resorts, and back on Monday morning. Dinner jacket. Tweed suit, three hundred quid in white fivers—far more than was necessary, but he’d have to change some of that into francs—new razor, old badger-hair brush … and his Complete Jane Austen. Two things an Englishman should never go abroad without—Jane Austen and a badger-hair shaving brush. Even so, there was still spare room in the suitcase. Perhaps a bit of George Eliot, but Middlemarch weighed as much as two bricks, and pocket-sized and light as it was, Silas Marner had never been his favourite. He picked up the bill Troy had read out to him. It was certainly from a hotel—even he could make out that word—but he wouldn’t put it past Troy to have made up the rest as a leg-pull. He stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

  §26

  Tatsfield, Surrey: Later the Same Evening

  In his time, Burgess had driven a Rolls-Royce—lurid in gold—and a Lincoln—ludicrous in the way all American cars were ludicrous, too much of this, too much of that. Both of which made getting into an Austin A40 feel like trying to shove a pork sausage into a matchbox. But it was what the doctor—in this case, the professor—had ordered … nondescript. So many of them on the English roads as to be utterly unremarkable.

  Burgess could imagine why Maclean wished to live in the “mundanes,” not suburb, not country, and above all not city. Once he’d established to his own lack of satisfaction that he wasn’t queer, quim was bound to get him. Marriage to Melinda. Two kids. A large, ugly house in Tatsfield, Surrey. It all went with the ostensible Foreign Office job in Whitehall and a daily commute into Charing Cross.

  Maclean was certain beyond any doubt that a couple of plods from Special Branch followed him all around London, but equally certain that they stopped following once he’d boarded his train each evening, whether from caution or sheer laziness neither he nor Burgess knew.

  “I’ll pick you up. Before eight,” Burgess had said.

  “Needs must I suppose, but could we make it around nine?”

  “OK, but that’s cutting it rather fine.”

  “There is a complication. It’s my birthday. Melinda will have cooked something special.”

  “Can’t be helped. Dinner in Surrey? Breakfast in Wormwood Scrubs?”

  “I know. I don’t need to be persuaded, but Melinda will have something to say.”

  What she said, between clenched teeth, was, “I blame you, you bastard.” As soon as he was across the threshold.

  “Roger Styles,” Burgess replied heartily. “Old pal of Donald’s from way back when.”

  He leaned in. Whispered.

  “Play the game. The house is probably bugged. Pretend we’ve never met. Do not use my name.”

  Melinda scowled. But her words smiled.

  “Oh, yes, Roger. Donald often talks about you. Let me give him a shout. He’s just upstairs, saying goodnight to the children.”

  “Couldn’t miss his birthday, could I? We’ll just nip out to the local for a pint or two.”

  Her eyes burned him alive.

  “He’d love that. But, Roger, don’t make it too late.”

  §27

  Maclean slung a small bag onto the back seat. No more than you’d take to the tennis club of an afternoon.

  “Is that all?” Burgess said. “I’ve got a whole suitcase.”

  Maclean ignored this, gave him one of his cold-fish looks, the pouty bottom lip poutier than ever.

  “What’s all this Roger Styles nonsense?”

  “Oh. Just thinking on my toes. After all, it’s going to be a mysterious affair, isn’t it?”

  “If we miss this boat it’s going to be a deadly affair.”

  §28

  Burgess awoke to the boat gently rocking. They were in harbour. Saint-Malo, on the coast of Brittany.

  From the top bunk a strangled voice, shot through with self-pity, moaned, “I feel sick.”

  “Donald, we’ve docked. The boat isn’t even moving. And it’s past nine … if we don’t shake a leg we’ll miss the boat train.”

  “I have to eat something. I have to—or my gut will just churn on empty.”

  “Alright. We’ll grab breakfast and I do mean grab.”

  But Maclean dawdled over bacon, eggs, and fried bread, asking for more bread and a second pot of tea.

  Burgess gazed arou
nd. Few had disembarked. The mess—or whatever they called it—was still pretty full. He looked at older men, beaming with the lineaments of gratified desire at women half their age, and concluded Blunt had been right—a floating knocking shop in which two single men might as well be invisible and everyone else blind.

  Burgess hoped they were deaf as well.

  “Y’know,” Maclean was saying, “I can’t tell you the strain of the last few weeks. I’m so glad we’re out of England. If Five had nabbed me I wouldn’t have held out for five minutes, I’d have blabbed the lot. Really, I would.”

  “Do shut up.”

  They stepped ashore into a fine drizzle. Maclean’s only foresight was that he’d brought a hat, and Burgess hadn’t.

  “Fuck. We’ve missed it. The bloody train’s gone.”

  “It crawls,” Maclean said. “From here to Rennes. Only picks up speed between Le Mans and Chartres. If we can find a cab in the square there’s a good chance we can get to Rennes before the train does.”

  They did, and in the back of the cab Maclean, looking over his shoulder, said, “This might even be better. Nobody’s seen us board a train, we just walked off into town like a couple of tourists.”

  “Aren’t you being just a little paranoid?”

  “Guy, you haven’t a clue what it’s been like. It wasn’t you the buggers were following around London. They were so close last week that when the cab I was in braked a bit sharpish the idiots ran into the back of us.”

  “Is there a car behind us?”

  “No, the road’s empty.”

  “Then relax.”

  But once he’d said it, Burgess knew he was no more relaxed himself. He’d left his suitcase on the Falaise. He could do without the tweed suit. It was just part of the Scottish illusion he’d fostered to the old duffers at the RAC. He’d packed it unconsciously, deceiving himself as well. What practical purpose could a tweed suit possibly have in France when it was nearly June? Pointless. And the three hundred nicker? Stuffed into a bulging wallet. He wasn’t leaving readies for some light-fingered steward to find. But—but his Complete Jane Austen was in the case too. If he got shut of Maclean at Rennes, he’d have nothing to read on the way back.

  Rennes? Maclean? He should never have got into the damn cab. Once they got to Rennes, the man was whining.

  “I can’t do this alone.”

  Torn between “You’ll have to” and the fresh memory of “I’d have blabbed the lot,” Burgess bought two tickets to Paris and told himself that he’d get home via the Gare du Nord and Calais and think of something, some excuse, for the cruise proprietors, retrieve his case—tweed or no tweed—get back to Bond Street, and … and what? Resign before the FO fired him? Look for a job? Deny all knowledge of Maclean? It was not as if their names were linked like Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. Cambridge was more than fifteen years ago. Yes. Deny, deny, deny. Perhaps a job on a newspaper? Reviewing this and that for the Telegraph. Of course he’d be no more use to the Russians. The Russians? The Russians? And then a gentle tide of relief began to wash over him, as though instead of leaning back into the hard cushions of a second class SNCF compartment, he had slipped into a warm bath. No use to anyone at all—bliss.

  §29

  It was less than three miles from the Gare Montparnasse to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Ten minutes in a taxi, but Maclean was hungry again.

  “I must have lunch. Perhaps I have an ulcer? Why shouldn’t I have a fucking ulcer? Don’t I deserve an ulcer? I think I’ve earned an ulcer.”

  Burgess really didn’t mind. Montparnasse was littered with good restaurants, and if his memory of Moscow served him well, he would not be the one to deny Maclean his last decent meal. He even encouraged him to ask for a pudding and coffee.

  “You’ve never been to Russia before, have you?”

  “Of course I bloody haven’t.”

  “Then have two of everything, and read the menu as though it were a novel. Think of each dish as a character. An unforgettable character, like Natasha in War and Peace. Or Becky Sharp. Or, better still, Julien Sorel. A model for us all. You’ll need a storehouse of menu memories to get by in Moscow. Lay in some mental foie gras, a whopping great dish of beef bourguignon, a couple of soufflés, lay down a few cases of decent claret … a bottle or two of Armagnac … all in some dusty corner of the mind.”

  Maclean tucked into soupe à l’oignon, jarret de porc, and tarte au chocolat avec crème anglaise … with a bottle of Burgundy … and three cups of coffee. Burgess ordered just the soup, pushed it away half-finished, and smoked half a dozen cigarettes with no hint of impatience. As far as he was concerned, they could sit there forever. Lunch in Paris. There was nowhere he wanted to be. Who knew … sit there long enough and his appetite might return? And if the sun broke through they might hop from one pavement café to another—the moveable feast.

  §30

  While Maclean bought his ticket for Berne, Burgess sat on a bench. Rain pelted down on the glass roof, trains roared and belched, whistles blew—and in between it all he could hear silence, like punctuation … the commas and colons of minute nothingness.

  He stared up at the roof.

  He wondered if he should ever have told Troy about his visit to Ascot. Stupid, really. He didn’t know why he’d gone there. Still less why he’d told Troy. What might Troy with his Freudian tendencies read into it? And then he thought of his last meeting with Blunt. He should have told him about the guitar case full of love letters—love letters like sticks of dynamite, enough to blow London society apart. And then he wondered why he was wondering. And suddenly he knew. Part of him wanted to go with Maclean. A small, hidden part of him, another dusty corner of the mind, one he didn’t understand. That which killed the kitten.

  He lowered his eyes. A small, good-looking woman had seated herself next to him. Beautiful conker-coloured eyes and tits Jane Russell might envy.

  She handed him a railway ticket.

  “He won’t make it alone,” she said simply.

  He looked at it.

  Berne, 2ème classe

  Typical Russian stinginess.

  “And you are?”

  “Let’s just say ‘Peter’ sent me.”

  “Peter,” the code name of his KGB control in London, Yuri Modin.

  Burgess took the ticket in both hands and slowly began to tear it down the middle. When he’d put a surprisingly noisy one-inch tear in the ticket he looked her in the eye.

  “OK. OK. Stop! I’m Larissa Fyodorovna Toskevich. I’m a KGB major … and they call me … Tosca.”

  It required a lot of thought. He gave it none—so many emotions in play.

  “Berne,” Burgess said. “Berne and not an inch farther.”

  “Deal,” she said.

  Maclean was approaching. The look of a drowned dog. A streak of crapulous misery in wet gaberdine. They stood up. Burgess slipped the ticket in his pocket.

  “If I’d known how far I was going I’d have had a proper lunch,” he said.

  She smiled and walked away without so much as a glance at Maclean.

  Burgess wondered how long the journey was to Berne—eight hours? Ten? Twelve? Twelve hours alone with a man about as much fun as a dead codfish. Stuck on trains as a boy, he and his brother would play “I Spy,” but it hardly seemed less than ironic now—and they’d be fed up with it before they reached the Paris suburbs.

  “How long have we got?”

  Maclean shot back his cuff and looked at his wristwatch, still on English time.

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  “Good. I’m just nipping off to see if I can buy a toothbrush.”

  §31

  Maclean seemed about to deliquesce—twitching rather than trembling, and ghostly pale. It was like having a little brother in tow, a Burgess minor, only allowed out if he wore a scarf and kept his chest warm, a child who couldn’t quite play the game … couldn’t catch the ball or kick it. He let Burgess do everything from buying snacks on the train to flag
ging the taxi in Berne, to talking to the Russian officials at the Soviet Embassy.

  Burgess was startled. They were expected. He thought they’d improvised the route, yet here was a smiling Soviet attaché who knew who they were and asked them to kindly wait a few minutes. Then it dawned on him, the woman who’d turned up in Paris … Major Tosca or something like that … she’d given him the ticket. The Russians had known all along they were heading for Berne.

  Maclean sat nursing his solipsism. Burgess stood and smoked. Ten minutes later the attaché returned and handed him two British passports.

  “Two?” Burgess said. “I’m not going on to Moscow. Look at him. One long streak of jaundice. He’s all yours.”

  The man said nothing, just pointed to the two heavies by the door—two six-foot slabs of Slavic muscle and brutality who looked as though smiling hadn’t been invented east of Berlin, and who hadn’t been there five minutes ago.

  Burgess opened the passport.

  Mr. D. W. Craig—an old photograph of Maclean, occupation: “teacher,” next of kin: Mary, wife, in Edinburgh.

  Mr. T. P. Dalton—himself, a slightly more recent photograph, occupation: “journalist,” next of kin: Gladys, mother, in Harpenden.

  Maclean appeared at his shoulder. He snapped the passport shut and handed it to him.

  “Be grateful for small mercies, Donald. At least they made you Scottish.”

  He turned to the attaché, still smiling as though welcoming them to a five-star hotel not a one-star state.

  “And how far will these fakes get us?”

  “All the way, Mr. Dalton. They’re fakes, but they are good fakes. You will take the train on to Zurich. At Zurich, you will catch a plane to Stockholm. Here are your tickets. The plane makes one stop before Sweden—Prague. Get off at Prague. You will be met.”

  “And that’s … it?”

  Maclean snatched the tickets away.

  “And the rest is history. For Christ’s sake, stop arguing, Guy. I am exhausted, one hundred per cent knackered. Let’s go. Just go. Moscow or Mongolia. I don’t fucking care.”