‘Does Christine know?’
‘Nobody knows, except you and whoever tipped you off, and God knows how they found out.’
‘Somebody always finds out, Bobby. You know that as well as I do.’
‘And you believed it?’
‘Look at your record, Bobby. What choice does that give us?’
‘This is nothing like that French woman, Nigel.’
‘From where we’re sitting it looks worse.’
‘You’ll have to explain that.’
‘Eva Balassi spent the war years in Moscow, during which time she got to know a number of men and women, both Hungarian and Russian, who have subsequently risen in the communist hierarchy, some in the Kremlin, some here. She’s right in the thick of it, Bobby. That’s not the kind of information we can ignore, is it?’
He sends London important news about what’s happening in Hungary and they won’t listen to him. Some unknown person passes them some gossip and they send out a top man to interrogate him. Either he’s going mad or the world’s turned upside down.
Carswell was right. Somebody had it in for him and no mistake.
*
He can’t sleep. It’s not just tonight, it’s every night now, whether he’s with Eva or not. Is it guilt? How long is it since his marriage made a claim on his conscience? So long, he’s forgotten. His relationship with Christine is a marriage of appearances, an empty shroud. Touch it and it would disintegrate, nothing left but dust. God knows, after more than twenty years of pretending, what is there left to be faithful to?
*
Silence. The creaking of the fan. The flare of the match as Carswell relights his pipe. He wipes his face with his handkerchief. The room is getting hotter.
He’s forgotten how Carswell uses silence to undermine your confidence. He sits there, a still, bulky presence, saying nothing, looking at you, pulling on his pipe. Evil-smelling Sobranie tobacco, awful stuff. His silence makes you question your reply. Have you missed something? Was your answer inadequate? That’s the danger. He gets you talking to fill in the gaps when he has said nothing, and that is when you give yourself away. Only not this time, my friend. I’m wise to all your tricks.
‘What do you know about Eva Balassi?’ Carswell asks.
‘Not a lot. We don’t talk much.’ Too busy fucking, he wants to say, but doesn’t.
‘We’ve done a bit of digging on her that you might find interesting.’
Digging where?
Carswell withdraws a typewritten sheet of paper from an envelope that sits on the table between them. Of course he’d find it interesting.
‘Parents are smallholders, both still alive. They live in a village near Vesprem, Catholics, poor background. Eva, the eldest of three, two brothers, does well at school, athletically as well as academically, fine swimmer and a talent for languages. When she’s sixteen, she’s selected to go to the Institute of Languages in Moscow. Her parents don’t want her to leave but she goes anyway. By this time she’s become an ardent communist, something to do with a boyfriend, we think. A few weeks later, war breaks out. She and others like her are stuck in Russia for the duration. In Moscow she betrays all the signs of an enthusiastic Party member, makes many useful contacts in the Soviet Party hierarchy. She works for Radio Moscow where, later on, she does some English-language broadcasts. Has an affair with a Russian army officer who leaves her pregnant but doesn’t marry her. That’s the daughter Dora. Good swimmer, too. Always beating the Russians, which they don’t like. Returns to Budapest in forty-six, one of a small, privileged group of communists who have Moscow’s confidence. Starts work as an interpreter, is chosen to represent Hungary in the forty-eight Olympic Games. Wins a gold medal. Becomes a State Heroine.’
‘What in?’ Martineau asks, already knowing the answer.
‘Freestyle. A year or so later gives up swimming competitively. Continues to work in the Party, using her connections as a basis for advancement, which is rapid.’
How the hell does Carswell know so much about her? Who’s his source?
‘What about a husband?’ Martineau asks. Since Carswell knows so much he might as well satisfy his curiosity.
‘Hasn’t she told you?’
How can he explain to Carswell that he never asks any questions because he’s afraid he might learn things he doesn’t want to know?
‘We don’t talk much, Nigel. Remember?’
‘No husbands now that we know of. There was one once, for a few months. We know he was a soldier. He seems to have buggered off somewhere, probably killed in action. I expect there were other relationships.’
‘There usually are.’
‘The problem, Bobby, isn’t who she sleeps with but her connection with the Party. Without warning, a year ago, everything comes unstuck. She no longer attends Party meetings, resigns her position on the union committee. Within a few weeks she’s detached herself from all her Party activities. We don’t know why. Either she falls out of love with the system, which given her background is highly unlikely, or she’s under instruction to distance herself. Starts mixing, discreetly, with groups of intellectuals, members of the Writers’ Union mostly, many of them known opponents of the regime. That raises questions. Has she been instructed to infiltrate local groups known to be hostile to the government? If she has, we must assume she’s working for the AVH.’
Where does association with foreigners come in all this? he wants to ask. But he says nothing because, when it comes down to it, he has nothing to say. He’s learned more about Eva in the last five minutes than in all the hours they’ve been together. The knowledge doesn’t leave him elated. Carswell knows too much and what he knows has an unavoidable logic. Eva is probably on the payroll of the secret police or she’s the mistress of a high-up official. That means he’s in it up to his eyeballs. He is overwhelmed by a sense of foreboding. He’s not going to get away with it this time. This is where the famous Martineau luck runs out, well and truly.
Bloody hell.
He hardly hears what Carswell is saying.
‘Then some little bird whispers in our ear that she’s sleeping with our man in Budapest. You can’t blame London for worrying, can you?’
There’s more to it than that, he wants to say. You can call me a fool for what I’ve done, but you need better evidence to call me a traitor. Carswell’s holding something back.
Carswell’s voice is colder now; he is distancing himself from Martineau. No surprises there. The evidence is coming out bit by bit. ‘Drip-feed what we know.’ That’s what they’ll have said to him before he left for Budapest. ‘If he thinks we know more than he does, then you won’t have to wait long for him to sing like a canary.’
‘What I don’t understand, Bobby, is how a man as experienced as you can fall for the oldest trick in the book.’
Understand what? Falling in love at his age? Sexual desire? Wanting a woman so much you thought you’d go mad if you didn’t have her? He’d met Nora Carswell once. A neat suburban bundle of penned disapproval. No children. A couple of cats on whom she lavished excessive affection. Knees lashed together with steel hawsers. (‘My husband doesn’t trouble me much.’) Did women like her have desires of their own? Carswell’s put up with her all these years with no hint he’s ever strayed. How can he know what he feels about Eva?
*
Distracted and helpless in the days after the weekend at her summer house, he smokes too much and drinks more than usual. This goes unnoticed at the embassy; it’s a habit others share. He loses weight – nobody notices that either. His mind wanders in meetings, past eccentricities proving the perfect cover for present erratic behaviour. On occasions, he is short with Hart. He shaves more carefully, eliminating the usual razor nicks on his chin, smudges of blood on his collar; brushes his hair more often to no visible effect; worries that he ought to get his crumpled suits pressed but doesn’t get round to doing anything about it, and thinks about buying some new shirts, which he doesn’t get round to doing anything about, either.
What he feels isn’t the last flicker of the candle before the flame dies – Martineau as ageing reprobate, clinging on to what’s left of his libido with the desperation of a drowning man. It is the realization of the dream he has sought since his youth but which has eluded him all his life until now. He has to know it is the same for her. If it is, then what? Then damn the consequences.
2
Pountney leaped from the taxi in York Road, ignoring the rain, and ran up the steps into Waterloo two at a time. He raced across the forecourt, his heart sinking as he heard the clang of a gate shutting and a whistle blown. His train? It couldn’t be. He’d seconds to spare. He arrived breathless at the entrance to the platform in time to see the lights of the carriage disappear agonizingly into the darkness of the wet night.
‘Damn. Damn.’
That was the last train. He’d have to go by taxi. He joined a queue and waited. A bad end to an even worse day.
‘Richmond,’ he told the driver.
‘That’ll be extra, sir.’
Who cares what it costs? Get me away from here as quick as you can. I want to bury today before it buries me.
Down into York Road, right over Westminster Bridge, there were still some lights on in his building (he could tell Harriet truthfully he wasn’t the last to leave; she was always saying no one worked as hard as he did), sharp left past the House (lights on there too, must be a late sitting) and then on to the Embankment for the long trek home. He sat back in the taxi, exhausted, diminished, close to defeat after the events of the day. Now he faced the prospect of Harriet awake when he returned. She was always awake when he was late and inevitably inquisitorial. He didn’t know which was worse; what had happened, or the interrogation to come.
*
‘This won’t wait, Gerry,’ Margaret said in her warning voice as soon as he arrived. ‘I think you’d better take it in now.’
He read Randall’s telegram and agreed. The day had been thrown off course before it had properly begun.
‘I think it’s good news,’ he told Watson-Jones, trying to sound positive. ‘Leman’s turned up, alive and well.’
‘Harry Watts won’t like that, will he? Serves him right. Nosy bastard.’ Watson-Jones didn’t look up from the document he was reading but he spoke with the triumphant tone of the victor. He’d got one over the Opposition witchfinder-general. ‘Where did he surface?’
‘Budapest.’
‘Budapest?’ The man was all attention now. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Read this.’ Pountney handed over the telegram.
‘What in God’s name is Leman doing in Hungary?’
‘We don’t know. No one’s been able to speak to him yet. He’s being held in custody. Randall says it doesn’t look good.’
‘I never thought the day would come when I’d see eye to eye with Archie Randall, but he’s right. It couldn’t look worse.’
Pountney saw the now familiar gesture Watson-Jones employed when under stress, a hand pushed repeatedly through his dark hair.
‘There’s going to be some heavy flak around when this one breaks and no mistake. We’ve got to prepare for a lot of ducking and diving.’ His instinct, as always, was fixed on how to limit political damage. Leman, the man suffering at the centre of the crisis, was forgotten. ‘We’ll need to distance ourselves from Leman, make sure there’s nothing that can connect him with us. You know the form, Gerry. He was on his own, an unknown quantity, nothing to do with us. Draft a statement for me, will you? I’ll have a word with the gaffer upstairs, then we’ll brief the press. We’ve got to keep our noses clean on this one.’
‘What about Leman?’
‘What about him?’ Watson-Jones sounded as if he couldn’t remember who Leman was.
‘What are we to do about him? We can’t leave him to rot.’
‘Tell Randall to find him a local lawyer. Not that it’ll do him much good. They’ll probably lock him away for the rest of the century, I shouldn’t wonder. Serves the stupid bugger right, doesn’t it? Teach him not to go wandering without permission.’
*
Tears ran down her face. There was no sound of sobbing, no movement of the shoulders, no anguish apparent in her expression; only a stream of tears from blinking eyes, a silent image of grief, confusion, incomprehension, fathomless anxiety.
‘What does it mean?’
They were the only words she had spoken since Anna had arrived in Strutton Ground. The cry of the oppressed since the world began. What does it mean?
‘Joe’s alive. We must be thankful for that.’ If he’s alive, we can hope, Anna wanted to tell them, though what for she didn’t know.
The idea that her son was in prison so far away in a communist country was terrifying Esther. Communists were devils, that was the limit of her knowledge. They’d never intruded into her life before so she’d never had to bother about them. After all, you didn’t meet communists between Strutton Ground and Warwick Way, did you?
‘In prison with those people, he’s as good as dead,’ Esther said mournfully. ‘Maybe we never see him again.’
‘Why is Joe in Budapest?’ Manny asked. He stood beside her, equally lost, silently shaking his head, desperate to understand the implications of what Anna had told them. ‘That’s what I don’t understand. What’s he doing there? This is a bad mess. What we going to do about it?’
I know and I don’t know, Anna wanted to say. What I do know I can’t tell you because you won’t understand and it won’t help.
‘We won’t know the answer to that until someone is able to speak to him.’
‘Who will speak to him?’
‘Someone from the embassy, I imagine.’
‘They’re no good, those people. They don’t care.’
Anna saw the helplessness on both their faces. The world they knew, its careful limits set by the customers who came to their shop with their worn-down shoes, the whine of Manny’s machine, the ring of the till, the familiar shouts of the traders in the market, the simple, uncomplicated relationships of their daily lives, the harmless barricades of habit and routine they had built up, had vanished, demolished in an instant by a distant event far beyond their power of reasoning or imagining.
The heartless world of politics and power had burst into their lives, destroying everything in its path. Suddenly, they were alone, abandoned by the few certainties their arduous lives had brought them. They stood on the edge of a precipice. Their only son, on whom they had pinned such hopes for the future, had been cruelly snatched from them. Now they were caught up in a terrible nightmare from which they would wake only to find themselves hopelessly lost in an unrecognizable terrain, the dreams for which they had both worked so hard in ruins at their feet.
‘What do we do?’ Esther asked, her voice tremulous, lost.
‘Now we know where he is, we can work to get him back here, can’t we?’ Anna said, trying to reinvest some sense of purpose into their shattered lives. But her words held no meaning because they were unable to hear them.
3
The line to Budapest was bad and he had to shout. No, Randall told him, they hadn’t seen Leman yet, though firm representations had been made to the ministry and they expected to be allowed a visit once the Hungarians had gone through the usual histrionic ritual of outraged innocence.
Unofficially he’d been told that Leman was to be charged with spying for the West, but paranoia was standard practice in cases like these. Spit in the street in this place and you risked being accused of working for the West. His best guess was that they should know the worst by the end of the week.
Yes, it would come to trial, he’d be surprised if it didn’t. Finding a stray Englishman inside their borders was an opportunity too good to miss. The Hungarians would certainly play to the Kremlin gallery on this one, so expect some excitement. He advised Pountney not to hold his breath over sending any observers out from London. He didn’t think the Hungaria
ns would wear that for a moment. He’d expect them to appoint a local defence lawyer, which was a damn sight more than they’d do for their own people they’d picked up with Leman. For all he knew, they’d probably shot them already.
At this stage there wasn’t much more to report but it was early days, wasn’t it? He’d keep in touch.
‘Oh, Christ,’ Pountney said to Margaret as he put down the telephone. ‘Randall sounded excited. I think he’s enjoying this.’
4
They break for lunch. Different types of sausage in a vinegar sauce and salad are brought up from the kitchens. There is no beer or wine, they drink mineral water and talk about their early days in the Service (‘Very different then, eh?’), the new Director-General (‘Hardly ever see him, Bobby. Not a mixer. Very much his own man’) and what is going on in the Middle East. Carswell disapproves of that.
‘Nasser’s a jumped-up nobody who wants to play ball with the big boys, make a name for himself. By taking him seriously we’ve built him up into something he isn’t, and now we’re reacting to the threat we’ve created. God’s knows what’s going to happen, but it’s got disaster written all over it.’
Martineau hadn’t heard Carswell question the party line before. The divisions in the Service must be deeper than he’d imagined. What was going on in London?
‘It’s not the Service that’s lost direction, it’s the country,’ Carswell answers. ‘We don’t know who we are any more. We’re giving up our empire and haven’t found anything to put in its place. We cling on to a political role whose economic and military justification vanished years ago. We deceive ourselves about our past and fool ourselves about our future. We peddle illusions, not power, and though we know the dangers we can’t stop ourselves because the truth is too painful to face. Whatever we do, the Americans and the Russians can do better. Yet we still demand to join their game. The fact is we can’t, but try arguing the case in London as a rational human being and see where it gets you. Self-delusion is addictive, Bobby. There’s a lot of it about.’
Secret Kingdom Page 22
