The Human Factor

by Graham Greene

  ‘You promised.’

  ‘I know we promised. In good faith. It might still be possible to smuggle her out if she left the child behind, but she says she won’t do that. He’s not happy at school. He’s not happy with your mother.’

  The duty free plastic bag waited on the table. There was always whisky – the medicine against despair. Castle said, ‘Why did you fetch me out? I wasn’t in immediate danger. I thought I was, but you must have known . . .’

  ‘You sent the emergency signal. We answered it.’

  Castle tore the plastic, opened the whisky, the label J. & B. hurt him like a sad memory. He poured out two large measures. ‘I have no soda.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Castle said, ‘Take the chair. The sofa’s as hard as a school bench.’ He took a drink. Even the flavour of J. & B. hurt him. If only Boris had brought him a different whisky – Haig, White Horse, Vat 69, Grant’s – he recited to himself the names of the whiskies which meant nothing to him, to keep his mind blank and his despair at bay until the J. & B. began to work – Johnnie Walker, Queen Anne, Teacher’s. Boris misunderstood his silence. He said, ‘You do not have to worry about microphones. Here in Moscow, you might say we are safe at the centre of the cyclone.’ He added, ‘It was very important for us to get you out.’

  ‘Why? Muller’s notes were safe with old Halliday.’

  ‘You have never been given the real picture, have you? Those bits of economic information you sent us had no value in themselves at all.’

  ‘Then why . . .?’

  ‘I know I am not very clear. I am not used to whisky. Let me try to explain. Your people imagined they had an agent in place, here in Moscow. But it was we who had planted him on them. What you gave us he passed back to them. Your reports authenticated him in the eyes of your service, they could check them and all the time he was passing them other information which we wanted them to believe. That was the real value of your reports. A nice piece of deception. But then came the Muller affair and Uncle Remus. We decided the best way to counter Uncle Remus was publicity – we couldn’t do that and leave you in London. You had to be our source – you brought Muller’s notes with you.’

  ‘They’ll know I brought news of the leak too.’

  ‘Exactly. We couldn’t carry on a game like that much longer. Their agent in Moscow will disappear into a great silence. Perhaps in a few months rumours will come to your people of a secret trial. It will make them all the more certain that all the information he gave them was true.’

  ‘I thought I was only helping Sarah’s people.’

  ‘You were doing much more than that. And tomorrow you meet the Press.’

  ‘Suppose I refuse to talk unless you bring Sarah . . .’

  ‘We’ll do without you, but you couldn’t expect us then to solve the Sarah problem. We are grateful to you, Maurice, but gratitude like love needs to be renewed daily or it’s liable to die away.’

  ‘You are talking as Ivan used to talk.’

  ‘No, not like Ivan. I am your friend. I want to stay your friend. One needs a friend badly to make a new life in a new country.’

  Now the offer of friendship had the sound of a menace or a warning. The night in Watford came back to him when he searched in vain for the shabby tutorial flat with the Berlitz picture on the wall. It seemed to him that all his life after he joined the service in his twenties he had been unable to speak. Like a Trappist he had chosen the profession of silence, and now he recognized too late that it had been a mistaken vocation.

  ‘Take another drink, Maurice. Things are not so bad. You just have to be patient, that’s all.’

  Castle took the drink.

  CHAPTER III

  1

  THE doctor confirmed Sarah’s fears for Sam, but it was Mrs Castle who had been the first to recognize the nature of his cough. The old don’t need medical training – they seem to accumulate diagnoses through a lifetime of experience instead of through six years of intensive training. The doctor was no more than a kind of legal requirement – to put his signature at the end of her prescription. He was a young man who treated Mrs Castle with great respect as though she were an eminent specialist from whom he could learn a lot. He asked Sarah, ‘Do you have much whooping cough – I mean at home?’ By home he obviously meant to indicate Africa.

  ‘I don’t know. Is it dangerous?’ she asked.

  ‘Not dangerous.’ He added, ‘But a rather long quarantine’ – a sentence which was not reassuring. Without Maurice it proved more difficult to disguise her anxiety because it wasn’t shared. Mrs Castle was quite calm – if a little irritated at the break in routine. If there had not been that stupid quarrel, she obviously thought, Sam could have had his sickness well away in Berkhamsted, and she could have conveyed the necessary advice over the telephone. She left the two of them, throwing a kiss in Sam’s direction with an old leaf-like hand, and went downstairs to watch the television.

  ‘Can’t I be ill at home?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No. You must stay in.’

  ‘I wish Buller were here to talk to.’ He missed Buller more than Maurice.

  ‘Shall I read to you?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Then you must go to sleep.’

  She had packed a few books at random in the hurry of departure, among them what Sam always called the Garden book. He liked it a great deal better than she did – her memories of childhood contained no garden: the hard light had struck off roofs of corrugated iron on to a playground of baked clay. Even with the Methodists there had been no grass. She opened the book. The television voice muttered on below in the sitting-room. It couldn’t be mistaken even at a distance for a living voice – it was a voice like a tin of sardines. Packaged.

  Before she even opened the book Sam was already asleep with one arm flung out of the bed, as his habit was, for Buller to lick. She thought: Oh yes, I love him, of course I love him, but he’s like the handcuffs of the Security Police around my wrists. It would be weeks before she was released, and even then . . . She was back at Brummell’s staring down the glittering restaurant papered with expense accounts to where Doctor Percival raised his warning finger. She thought: Could they even have arranged this?

  She closed the door softly and went downstairs. The tinned voice had been cut off and Mrs Castle stood waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I missed the news,’ Sarah said. ‘He wanted me to read to him, but he’s asleep now.’ Mrs Castle glared past her as though at a horror only she could see.

  ‘Maurice is in Moscow,’ Mrs Castle said.

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘There he was on the screen with a lot of journalists. Justifying himself. He had the nerve, the effrontery . . . Was that why you quarrelled with him? Oh, you did right to leave him.’

  ‘That wasn’t the reason,’ Sarah said. ‘We only pretended to quarrel. He didn’t want me involved.’

  ‘Were you involved?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank God for that. I wouldn’t want to turn you out of the house with the child ill.’

  ‘Would you have turned Maurice out if you had known?’

  ‘No. I’d have kept him just long enough to call the police.’ She turned and walked back into the sitting-room – she walked all the way across it until she stumbled against the television set like a blind woman. She was as good as blind, Sarah saw – her eyes were closed. She put a hand on Mrs Castle’s arm.

  ‘Sit down. It’s been a shock.’

  Mrs Castle opened her eyes. Sarah had expected to see them wet with tears, but they were dry, dry and merciless. ‘Maurice is a traitor,’ Mrs Castle said.

  ‘Try to understand, Mrs Castle. It’s my fault. Not Maurice’s.’

  ‘You said you were not involved.’

  ‘He was trying to help my people. If he hadn’t loved me and Sam . . . It was the price he paid to save us. You can’t imagine here in England the kind of horrors he saved us from.’

  ‘
A traitor!’

  She lost control at the reiteration. ‘All right – a traitor then. A traitor to whom? To Muller and his friends? To the Security Police?’

  ‘I have no idea who Muller is. He’s a traitor to his country.’

  ‘Oh, his country,’ she said in despair at all the easy clichés which go to form a judgement. ‘He said once I was his country – and Sam.’

  ‘I’m glad his father’s dead.’

  It was yet another cliché. In a crisis perhaps it is old clichés one clings to, like a child to a parent.

  ‘Perhaps his father would have understood better than you.’

  It was a senseless quarrel like the one she had that last evening with Maurice. She said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.’ She was ready to surrender anything for a little peace. ‘I’ll leave as soon as Sam is better.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘To Moscow. If they’ll let me.’

  ‘You won’t take Sam. Sam is my grandson. I’m his guardian,’ Mrs Castle said.

  ‘Only if Maurice and I are dead.’

  ‘Sam is a British subject. I’ll have him made a Ward in Chancery. I’ll see my lawyer tomorrow.’

  Sarah hadn’t the faintest notion what a Ward in Chancery was. It was, she supposed, one more obstacle which even the voice that had spoken to her over the telephone of a public call box had not taken into account. The voice had apologized: the voice claimed, just as Doctor Percival had done, to be a friend of Maurice, but she trusted it more, even with its caution and its ambiguity and its trace of something foreign in the tone.

  The voice apologized for the fact that she was not already on the way to join her husband. It could be arranged almost at once if she would go alone – the child made it almost impossible for her to pass unscrutinized, however effective any passport they arranged might seem to be.

  She had told him in the flat voice of despair, ‘I can’t leave Sam alone,’ and the voice assured her that ‘in time’ a way would be found for Sam. If she would trust him . . . The man began to give guarded indications of how and when they could meet, just some hand-luggage – a warm coat – everything she lacked could be bought at the other end – but ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I can’t go without Sam’ and she dropped the receiver. Now there was his sickness and there was the mysterious phrase which haunted her all the way to the bedroom, ‘a Ward in Chancery’. It sounded like a room in a hospital. Could a child be forced into a hospital as he could be forced into a school?

  2

  There was nobody to ask. In all England she knew no one except Mrs Castle, the butcher, the greengrocer, the librarian, the school-mistress – and of course Mr Bottomley who had been constantly cropping up, on the doorstep, in the High Street, even on the telephone. He had lived so long on his African mission that perhaps he felt really at home only with her. He was very kind and very inquisitive and he dropped little pious platitudes. She wondered what he would say if she asked him for help to escape from England.

  On the morning after the press conference Doctor Percival telephoned for what seemed an odd reason. Apparently some money was due to Maurice and they wanted the number of his bank account so that they might pay it in they seemed to be scrupulously honest in small things, though she wondered afterwards if they were afraid that money difficulties might drive her to some desperate course. It might be a sort of bribe to keep her in place. Doctor Percival said to her, still in the family doctor voice, ‘I’m so glad you are being sensible, my dear. Go on being sensible,’ rather as he might have advised ‘Go on with the antibiotics’.

  And then at seven in the evening when Sam was asleep and Mrs Castle was in her room, ‘tidying’ as she called it, for dinner, the telephone rang. It was a likely hour for Mr Bottomley, but it was Maurice. The line was so clear that he might have been speaking from the next room. She said with astonishment, ‘Maurice, where are you?’

  ‘You know where I am. I love you, Sarah.’

  ‘I love you, Maurice.’

  He explained, ‘We must talk quickly, one never knows when they may cut the line. How’s Sam?’

  ‘Not well. Nothing serious.’

  ‘Boris said he was well.’

  ‘I didn’t tell him. It was only one more difficulty. There are an awful lot of difficulties.’

  ‘Yes. I know. Give Sam my love.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘We needn’t go on pretending any more. They’ll always be listening.’

  There was a pause. She thought he had gone away or that the line had been cut. Then he said, ‘I miss you terribly, Sarah.’

  ‘Oh, so do I. So do I, but I can’t leave Sam behind.’

  ‘Of course you can’t. I can understand that.’

  She said on an impulse she immediately regretted, ‘When he’s a little older . . . ’ It sounded like the promise of a distant future when they would both be old. ‘Be patient.’

  ‘Yes – Boris says the same. I’ll be patient. How’s Mother?’

  ‘I’d rather not talk about her. Talk about us. Tell me how you are.’

  ‘Oh, everyone is very kind. They have given me a sort of job. They are grateful to me. For a lot more than I ever intended to do.’ He said something she didn’t understand because of a crackle on the line – something about a fountain-pen and a bun which had a bar of chocolate in it. ‘My mother wasn’t far wrong.’

  She asked, ‘Have you friends?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m not alone, don’t worry, Sarah. There’s an Englishman who used to be in the British Council. He’s invited me to his dacha in the country when the spring comes. When the spring comes,’ he repeated in a voice which she hardly recognized – it was the voice of an old man who couldn’t count with certainty on any spring to come.

  She said, ‘Maurice, Maurice, please go on hoping,’ but in the long unbroken silence which followed she realized that the line to Moscow was dead.

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  Copyright © Graham Greene 1978

  Introduction copyright © Colm Tóibín 2005

  First published in Great Brita
in in 1978 by The Bodley Head

  First published by Vintage in 1999

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