The Human Factor

by Graham Greene

  ‘I’m a double agent for Russia,’ Davis said, ‘and if you value your life, you must give me fifty yards start.’ He burst through the bracken and ran clumsily in his heavy overcoat through the beech woods. Sam pursued him up one slope, down another. Davis reached a bank above the Ashridge road where he had left his scarlet Jaguar. He pointed his fountain-pen at Sam and shouted a message as mutilated as one of Cynthia’s cables, ‘Picnic . . . love . . . Sarah,’ and then he was gone with a loud explosion from his exhaust.

  ‘Ask him to come again,’ Sam said, ‘please ask him to come again.’

  ‘Of course. Why not? When the spring comes.’

  ‘The spring’s a long way off,’ Sam said. ‘I’ll be at school.’

  ‘There’ll always be week-ends,’ Castle replied but without conviction. He remembered too well how slowly time limps by in childhood. A car passed them, heading towards London, a black car – perhaps it was a Mercedes, but Castle knew very little about cars.

  ‘I like Mr Davis,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yes, so do I.’

  ‘Nobody plays hide-and-seek as well as he does. Not even you.’

  2

  ‘I find I’m not making much headway with War and Peace, Mr Halliday.’

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear. It’s a great book if you only have the patience. Have you reached the retreat from Moscow?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a terrible story.’

  ‘It seems a lot less terrible to us today, doesn’t it? After all, the French were soldiers – and snow isn’t as bad as napalm. You fall asleep, so they say – you don’t burn alive.’

  ‘Yes, when I think of all those poor children in Vietnam . . . I wanted to join some of the marches they used to have here, but my son would never let me. He’s nervous of the police in that little shop of his, though what harm he does with a naughty book or two I can’t see. As I always say – the men that buy them – well, you can’t very well do much harm to them, can you?’

  ‘No, they are not clean young Americans doing their duty like the napalm bombers were,’ Castle said. Sometimes he found it impossible not to show one splinter of the submerged iceberg life he led.

  ‘And yet there wasn’t a thing any of us could have done,’ Halliday said. ‘The Government talk about democracy, but what notice did the Government ever take of all our banners and slogans? Except at election time. It helped them choose which promises to break, that’s all. Next day we used to read in the paper how another innocent village had been wiped out in error. Oh, they’ll be doing the same thing in South Africa before long. First it was the little yellow babies – no more yellow than we are – and then it will be the little black babies . . .’

  ‘Let’s change the subject,’ Castle said. ‘Recommend me something to read that isn’t about war.’

  ‘There’s always Trollope,’ Mr Halliday said. ‘My son’s very fond of Trollope. Though it doesn’t really go with the kind of things he sells, does it?’

  ‘I’ve never read Trollope. Isn’t he a bit ecclesiastical? Anyway, ask your son to choose me one and post it home.’

  ‘Your friend didn’t like War and Peace either?’

  ‘No. In fact he got tired of it before I did. Too much war for him too, perhaps.’

  ‘I could easily slip across the road and have a word with my son. I know he prefers the political novels – or what he calls the sociological. I’ve heard him speak of The Way We Live Now. A good title, sir. Always contemporary. Do you want to take it home tonight?’

  ‘No, not today.’

  ‘It will be two copies as usual, sir, I suppose? I envy you having a friend with whom you can discuss literature. Too few people nowadays are interested in literature.’

  After Castle had left Mr Halliday’s shop he walked to Piccadilly Circus station and went to find a telephone. He chose an end box and looked through the glass at his only neighbour: she was a fat spotty girl who giggled and sucked a gum while she listened to something gratifying. A voice said, ‘Hello,’ and Castle said, ‘I’m sorry, wrong number again,’ and left the box. The girl was parking her gum on the back of the telephone directory while she got down to a long satisfactory conversation. He waited by a ticket machine and watched her for a little while to make sure she had no interest in him.

  3

  ‘What are you doing?’ Sarah asked. ‘Didn’t you hear me call?’

  She looked at the book on his desk and said, ‘War and Peace. I thought you were getting tired of War and Peace.’

  He gathered up a sheet of paper, folded it and put it in his pocket.

  ‘I’m trying my hand at an essay.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘No. Only if it comes off.’

  ‘Where will you send it?’

  ‘The New Statesman . . . Encounter . . . who knows?’

  ‘It’s a very long time since you wrote anything. I’m glad you are starting again.’

  ‘Yes. I seem doomed always to try again.’

  CHAPTER III

  1

  CASTLE helped himself to another whisky. Sarah had been upstairs a long time with Sam, and he was alone, waiting for the bell to ring, waiting . . . His mind wandered to that other occasion when he had waited for at least three-quarters of an hour, in the office of Cornelius Muller. He had been given a copy of the Rand Daily Mail to read – an odd choice since the paper was the enemy of most things that BOSS, the organization which employed Muller, supported. He had already read that day’s issue with his breakfast, but now he reread every page with no other purpose than just to pass the time. Whenever he looked up at the clock he met the eyes of one of the two junior officials who sat stiffly behind their desks and perhaps took it in turn to watch him. Did they expect him to pull out a razor blade and slit open a vein? But torture, he told himself, was always left to the Security Police – or so he believed. And in his case, after all, there could be no fear of torture from any service – he was protected by diplomatic privilege; he was one of the untorturables. No diplomatic privilege, however, could be extended to include Sarah; he had learned during the last year in South Africa the age-old lesson that fear and love are indivisible.

  Castle finished his whisky and poured himself another small one. He had to be careful.

  Sarah called down to him, ‘What are you doing, darling?’

  ‘Just waiting for Mr Muller,’ he replied, ‘and drinking another whisky.’

  ‘Not too many, darling.’ They had decided that he should welcome Muller first alone. Muller would no doubt arrive from London in an embassy car. A black Mercedes like the big officials all used in South Africa? ‘Get over the first embarrassments,’ C had said, ‘and leave serious business, of course, for the office. At home you are more likely to pick up a useful indication . . . I mean of what we have and they haven’t. But for God’s sake, Castle, keep your cool.’ And now he struggled to keep his cool with the help of a third whisky while he listened and listened for the sound of a car, any car, but there was little traffic at this hour in King’s Road – all the commuters had long since arrived safely home.

  If fear and love are indivisible, so too are fear and hate. Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates. When he had been allowed at last to drop the Rand Daily Mail and they interrupted his fourth reading of the same leading article, with its useless routine protest against the evil of petty apartheid, he was deeply aware of his cowardice. Three years of life in South Africa and six months of love for Sarah had turned him, he knew well, into a coward.

  Two men waited for him in the inner office: Mr Muller sat behind a large desk of the finest South African wood which bore nothing but a blank blotting pad and a highly polished pen-stand and one file suggestively open. He was a man a little younger than Castle, approaching fifty perhaps, and he had the kind of face which in ordinary circumstances Castle would have found it easy to forget: an indoors face, as smooth and pale as a bank clerk’s or a junior civil servant’s, a face unmarked by the torments of a
ny belief, human or religious, a face which was ready to receive orders and obey them promptly without question, a conformist face. Certainly not the face of a bully – though that described the features of the second man in uniform who sat with his legs slung with insolence over the arm of an easy chair as though he wanted to show he was any man’s equal; his face had not avoided the sun: it had a kind of infernal flush as though it had been exposed too long to a heat which would have been much too fierce for ordinary men. Muller’s glasses had gold rims; it was a gold-rimmed country.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Muller told Castle with just sufficient politeness to pass as courtesy, but the only seat left to him take was a hard narrow chair as little made for comfort as a chair in a church – if he should be required to kneel, there was no hassock available on the hard floor to support his knees. He sat in silence and the two men, the pale one and the heated one, looked back at him and said nothing. Castle wondered how long the silence would continue. Cornelius Muller had a sheet detached from the file in front of him, and after a while he began to tap it with the end of his gold ball-point pen, always in the same place, as though he were hammering in a pin. The small tap tap tap recorded the length of silence like the tick of a watch. The other man scratched his skin above his sock, and so it went on, tap tap and scratch scratch.

  At last Muller consented to speak. ‘I’m glad you found it possible to call, Mr Castle.’

  ‘Yes, it wasn’t very convenient, but, well, here I am.’

  ‘We wanted to avoid making an unnecessary scandal by writing to your ambassador.’

  It was Castle’s turn now to remain silent, while he tried to make out what they meant by the word scandal.

  ‘Captain Van Donck – this is Captain Van Donck – has brought the matter to us here. He felt it would be more suitably dealt with by us than by the Security Police – because of your position at the British Embassy. You’ve been under observation, Mr Castle, for a long time, but an arrest in your case, I feel, would serve no practical purpose – your embassy would claim diplomatic privilege. Of course we could always dispute it before a magistrate and then they would certainly have to send you home. That would probably be the end of your career, wouldn’t it?’

  Castle said nothing.

  ‘You’ve been very imprudent, even stupid,’ Cornelius Muller said, ‘but then I don’t myself consider that stupidity ought to be punished as a crime. Captain Van Donck and the Security Police, though, take a different view, a legalistic view – and they may be right. He would prefer to go through the form of arrest and charge you in court. He feels that diplomatic privileges are often unduly stretched as far as the junior employees of an embassy are concerned. He would like to fight the case as a matter of principle.’

  The hard chair was becoming painful, and Castle wanted to shift his thigh, but he thought the movement might be taken as a sign of weakness. He was trying very hard to make out what it was they really knew. How many of his agents, he wondered, were incriminated? His own relative safety made him feel shame. In a genuine war an officer can always die with his men and so keep his self-respect.

  ‘Start talking, Castle,’ Captain Van Donck demanded. He swung his legs off the arm of his chair and prepared to rise – or so it seemed – it was probably bluff. He opened and closed one fist and stared at his signet ring. Then he began to polish the gold ring with a finger as though it were a gun which had to be kept well oiled. In this country you couldn’t escape gold. It was in the dust of the cities, artists used it as paint, it would be quite natural for the police to use it for beating in a man’s face.

  ‘Talk about what?’ Castle asked.

  ‘You are like most Englishmen who come to the Republic,’ Muller said, ‘you feel a certain automatic sympathy for black Africans. We can understand your feeling. All the more because we are Africans ourselves. We have lived here for three hundred years. The Bantu are newcomers like yourselves. But I don’t need to give you a history lesson. As I said, we understand your point of view, even though it’s a very ignorant one, but when it leads a man to grow emotional, then it becomes dangerous, and when you reach the point of breaking the law . . .’

  ‘Which law?’

  ‘I think you know very well which law.’

  ‘It’s true I’m planning a study on apartheid, the Embassy have no objection, but it’s a serious sociological one – quite objective – and it’s still in my head. You hardly have the right to censor it yet. Anyway it won’t be published, I imagine, in this country.’

  ‘If you want to fuck a black whore,’ Captain Van Donck interrupted with impatience, ‘why don’t you go to a whore-house in Lesotho or Swaziland? They are still part of your so-called Commonwealth.’

  Then it was that for the first time Castle realized Sarah, not he, was the one who was in danger.

  ‘I’m too old to be interested in whores,’ he said.

  ‘Where were you on the nights of February 4th and 7th? The afternoon of February 21st?’

  ‘You obviously know – or think that you know,’ Castle said. ‘I keep my engagement book in my office.’

  He hadn’t seen Sarah for forty-eight hours. Was she already in the hands of men like Captain Van Donck? His fear and his hate grew simultaneously. He forgot that in theory he was a diplomat, however junior. ‘What the hell are you talking about? And you?’ he added to Cornelius Muller. ‘You too, what do you want me for?’

  Captain Van Donck was a brutal and simple man who believed in something, however repugnant – he was one of those one could forgive. What Castle could never bring himself to forgive was this smooth educated officer of BOSS. It was men of this kind – men with the education to know what they were about – that made a hell in heaven’s despite. He thought of what his Communist friend Carson had so often said to him – ‘Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel, our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt.’

  Muller said, ‘You must know very well that you’ve broken the Race Relations Act with that Bantu girl-friend of yours.’ He spoke in a tone of reasonable reproach, like a bank clerk who points out to an unimportant customer an unacceptable overdraft. ‘You must be aware that if it wasn’t for diplomatic privilege you’d be in prison now.’

  ‘Where have you hidden her?’ Captain Van Donck demanded, and Castle at the question felt immense relief.

  ‘Hidden her?’

  Captain Van Donck was on his feet, rubbing at his gold ring. He even spat on it.

  ‘That’s all right, Captain,’ Muller said. ‘I will look after Mr Castle. I won’t take up any more of your time. Thank you for all the help you’ve given our department. I want to talk to Mr Castle alone.’

  When the door closed Castle found himself facing, as Carson would have said, the real enemy. Muller went on, ‘You mustn’t mind Captain Van Donck. Men like that can see no further than their noses. There are other ways of settling this affair more reasonably than a prosecution which will ruin you and not help us.’

  ‘I can hear a car.’ A woman’s voice called to him out of the present.

  It was Sarah speaking to him from the top of the stairs. He went to the window. A black Mercedes was edging its way up the indistinguishable commuters’ houses in King’s Road. The driver was obviously looking for a number, but as usual several of the street lamps had fused.

  ‘It’s Mr Muller all right,’ Castle called back. When he put down his whisky he found his hand shaking from holding the glass too rigidly.

  At the sound of the bell Buller began to bark, but, after Castle opened the door, Buller fawned on the stranger with a total lack of discrimination and left a trail of affectionate spittle on Cornelius Muller’s trousers. ‘Nice dog, nice dog,’ Muller said with caution.

  The years had made a noticeable change in Muller – his hair was almost white now and his face was far less smooth. He no longer looked like a civil servant who knew only the proper answers. Since they last met something had happened to him: he looke
d more human – perhaps it was that he had taken on with promotion greater responsibilities and with them uncertainties and unanswered questions.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Castle. I’m sorry I’m so late. The traffic was bad in Watford – I think the place was called Watford.’

  You might almost have taken him now for a shy man, or perhaps it was only that he was at a loss without his familiar office and his desk of beautiful wood and the presence of two junior colleagues in an outer room. The black Mercedes slid away – the chauffeur had gone to find his dinner. Muller was on his own in a strange town, in a foreign land, where the post boxes bore the initials of a sovereign E II, and there was no statue of Kruger in any market place.

  Castle poured out two glasses of whisky. ‘It’s a long time since we met last,’ Muller said.

  ‘Seven years?’

  ‘It’s good of you to ask me to have dinner at your own home.’

  ‘C thought it was the best idea. To break the ice. It seems we have to work closely together. On Uncle Remus.’

  Muller’s eyes shifted to the telephone, to the lamp on the table, to a vase of flowers.

  ‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. If we are bugged here it’s only by my own people,’ Castle said, ‘and anyway I’m pretty sure we are not.’ He raised his glass. ‘To our last meeting. Do you remember you suggested then I might agree to work for you? Well, here I am. We are working together. Historical irony or predestination? Your Dutch church believes in that.’

  ‘Of course in those days I hadn’t an idea of your real position,’ Muller said. ‘If I’d known I wouldn’t have threatened you about that wretched Bantu girl. I realize now she was only one of your agents. We might even have worked her together. But, you see, I took you for one of those high-minded anti-apartheid sentimentalists. I was taken completely by surprise when your chief told me you were the man I was to see about Uncle Remus. I hope you don’t bear me any grudge. After all you and I are professionals, and we are on the same side now.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we are.’