The Long Room

by Francesca Kay

  Charlotte holds her tray of coffee cups high on one bent hand, the other hand on her hip, pretending she’s a waitress. ‘Oh good, coffee,’ Louise says. ‘Perfect timing Charlotte – it’s morning prayers!’ It is Louise’s custom to gather her flock about her every Monday morning to review the week that’s past and discuss the one ahead. It’s a time for concerns to be aired and problems shared, she says. ‘A problem shared is a problem halved.’ It’s also when coffee and washing-up rotas are decided, milk money collected, applications for leave considered, reminders issued and arrangements made. The Christmas party is on today’s agenda.

  They pull up their chairs around Louise’s desk at one end of the long room: Stephen, Charlotte, Damian, Harriet, Solly, Greta, Christophine; all the Group III listeners. Along the corridor, in rooms equipped like this one, the listeners of Groups I and II are also gathering. Ivan, Vladimir, Magda, Adam, Thad-deus, Rafiq, Mohammed, Werner, Carla, Natalia, Imran, Ana, Tomás, Edouard, Aoife, Martin. Into their headphones today and every day will pour a flood of Arabic and Farsi, accented English, Russian, Polish, German, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, a dozen other languages; the languages of people in distress, at war, in conflict; anxious words captured onto spools of tape, where putative death and destruction may unfold. Their targets know that their telephone calls are intercepted and so whatever clues they give are inadvertent. They speak only when they must. But one unguarded reference is enough. Experts in drawing inferences, the listeners of Groups I and II are forever conferring in hushed voices, typing frenetically and rushing their time-critical reports to the operatives and analysts who await them on the seventh floor, in rooms that are starkly lit and shrill with urgency and drama. In contrast the domestic worlds of the Group III listeners can feel a little dreary, although there are occasional excitements.

  *

  Rollo Buckingham’s office, although on that same seventh floor, is for the moment calm. It is also dimly lit; the neon lighting overhead has been switched off and all that remains is one old-fashioned lamp that casts a small gold circle on the abutting desks of the two men in the room. The other man looks just like Rollo, except that he is very dark, while Rollo has barley-coloured hair. Stephen has not been told the other’s name. This morning both men are at their desks; Rollo has his feet on his and his chair tilted at a dangerous angle. He is on the telephone but he puts the receiver down as soon as he sees Stephen at the open door.

  ‘What-ho,’ says Stephen.

  ‘Good morning,’ Rollo says.

  Stephen holds out the top copy of his report, keeping the carbon for himself. They need a copy each so that they can communicate with the least number of spoken words. If they must have a protracted or detailed discussion, they sequester themselves in the Cube, but that’s not practical on a daily basis. Most of the time they confine themselves to pointing at words or speaking in generalities, as everybody must in a place which cannot be guaranteed as safe from outside technical attack and where no one should be able accidentally to overhear an operational secret. Stephen has no idea whether the nameless man is on the PHOENIX list. Certainly he shows no interest in Stephen’s frequent visits to his colleague.

  While Rollo reads, Stephen, standing beside him at his desk, not invited to sit down, gazes at his golden head. Why does Rollo Buckingham make him feel like that whining schoolboy with his satchel, creeping like a snail? Rollo is about the same age as he is, possibly a little younger; he probably went to the same university – if indeed he got that far; it could be that he was in the Army – Stephen has not asked. Out of Eton, into Sandhurst, Stephen thinks; a short-service commission in a glamorous regiment, which, if it is the case, would make Rollo less well-educated than Stephen is, less well-qualified. It’s absurd to feel subordinate to Rollo. Stephen irritates himself by doing so. He pictures Rollo in the full-dress uniform of the Blues and Royals: a flower of England’s youth. He will certainly possess a shooting jacket.

  It does not take Rollo long to read through the report:

  Subject of interest arrived home at 19.33. Stated he had been working late and further delayed by faulty bicycle chain. Made one telephone call: to father. Arrangements made previously for Friday 10–Sunday 12 confirmed., (cf. tape dated 2 December). Subject (and wife) plan to arrive at Harcourt Mill by dinner-time. Watched television. Went to bed circa 23.00.

  One incoming telephone call at 17.54, unanswered (no one present in subject’s premises). Nothing further to report.

  ‘What did he do on Friday morning?’

  ‘I don’t know. We haven’t had those tapes yet. Nor the weekend’s either.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Technical hitch.’

  Rollo sighs and rubs his temples roughly. He wears a gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing else?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am.’

  ‘Well, but this is turning into a something of a headache. So far you’ve given me nothing that I couldn’t have worked out by myself. Are you absolutely sure that you couldn’t have missed anything that day?’

  Stephen struggles to conceal the impatience that he feels although Rollo is in fact still looking down at the report. ‘Of course I am,’ he says again.

  ‘You see, there may have been …’ Rollo begins to say but Stephen interrupts. ‘Look, I’m pretty sure that I’m not missing things even though I don’t know what you are expecting. Anyway, how do you know that he’s not doing whatever he’s doing when he is at work? I really should be part of the workplace coverage because I can’t otherwise give you the whole picture.’

  ‘We’ve discussed that before. It’s just not possible, I’m afraid.’

  ‘But you do have him covered here?’

  Rollo frowns furiously at Stephen. Apparently oblivious to the conversation, his dark-haired colleague continues to leaf through the Financial Times. ‘As I have already said, separate coverage; different arrangements altogether. It’s contact out of working hours that I’m expecting. So, anyway. Please keep paying close attention. We have less than a month before the investigation comes up for its first review and if there is nothing conclusive then the Director will almost certainly decide to revoke the licence.’

  This is the first that Stephen has heard about a deadline. That it may be imminent comes as a serious shock. How could he bear to be torn away from her so prematurely? He had supposed, and now instantly he sees how unthinking he has been, that this case would run for years on end, as others often did. After all, ODIN’s telephone has been permanently tapped since 1967. Stephen inherited him from his predecessor and expects to keep him until he gets promoted or retires or ODIN dies. As long as a snippet or two of intelligence emerges now and again, the quarterly extension will merely be rubber-stamped. The Jamaican revolutionary, OBERON, is Stephen’s exact contemporary; they will grow old together, like an elephant and his mahout. But now he realises that PHOENIX must be different. He’s an insider, he’s a colleague, he wears the badge of the Institute, he may even be here on this seventh floor. He could actually be in the next-door room. It’s an ugly thing to suspect a man of treachery and those who do will surely need to prove or to negate their chill suspicions soon. He can see why Rollo and his sub-director want a resolution fast.

  All right then, Stephen will provide one. He is not prepared to part with Helen for the sake of narrow-minded and prosaic truth. He had thought that time was on his side but now he knows it’s not and so he must move fast. And besides, if PHOENIX is a traitor – and there must be some good reason why he is under surveillance – he must obviously be caught. A man who seems to be a loyal friend, a loving husband, but in fact is something other – a whited sepulchre, a snake in the grass – cannot remain at large.

  ‘Well,’ he says, slowly, diffidently, ‘um there is one thing – I mean about his working late on Thursday evening. I didn’t pay all that much attention to it at the time but now I come to think of it, he didn’t really sound convincing when he tried to e
xplain that lateness to his wife.’

  ‘That could be important. Please keep listening very carefully.’

  ‘I will,’ says Stephen. ‘I will do my very best to get you what you need.’

  Rollo nods in acknowledgement, smiles his thin-lipped cavalry officer’s smile and picks up his cup of pale, milkless tea – a proper cup, blue-patterned, with a matching saucer; not a mug like the ones that are used by everybody else.

  *

  Rafiq’s birthday drinks don’t go quite according to plan because yesterday two Iranians blew themselves up in a car in Connaught Square, apparently with their own malfunctioning bomb. The Group I listeners are on high alert, with operatives and strategists breathing down their necks and Muriel’s lateness has made the situation worse. Even so, Rafiq finds time to buy his round. This is what the listeners do, on birthdays. They gather in the Institute’s bar, a dark, low-ceilinged room on the top floor of the building, next to the canteen. It is always full. As in every other room, the windows are shrouded by full-length curtains that are seldom washed. Cecil, the barman, is missing an arm and will not be rushed. Queues build up at lunchtimes. There are many regulars: men and women who come here every day and often stay on after work to drink their way through their undifferentiated years. They come from various departments of the Institute and are not allowed to talk about their work although, of course, they do, in ways that are lightly camouflaged. What else have they in common? Few of them would ever think of meeting outside the Institute. When they leave the bar, most of them go home to the suburbs of London where, if they are fortunate, their wives have dinner ready, or where they live alone. A few of them were heroes once – in wartime. About the things that they did then, they are reticent. There are some secrets still – not many – that are worth the keeping.

  Rafiq’s large order – nineteen drinks – takes Cecil a long time to fulfil and the regulars grow restive; they only have an hour in which to anaesthetise themselves against the afternoon. Pints of Young’s, gin and tonics, gin and limes, Britvic orange for Rafiq and Mohammed; Harriet asks for crème de menthe. Stephen drinks bitter because it is expected of a man, even though he does not really like its assertive taste. He’d rather have lager, or the gin that he can smell in Charlotte’s glass. The scent of it is medicinal and clean; a drink that smells like that must surely do you good. And the tonic, fizzing against a cube of ice. Juniper and quinine, lemon, spruce, clean and cold in this steamy place, which is loud with people, dark and full of smoke.

  The Group I listeners do not stay long after they have sung to Rafiq and presented him with a cigarette lighter and a birthday card, but the others, with nothing imperative to call them back, buy each other more drinks and spin the lunch hour out. Stephen switches to brandy. It scours his mouth and numbs it slightly; he feels the mixture of liquids swirling through his guts, his veins; his head is like a hot-air balloon, swelling steadily, straining to lift off. What will Helen be doing now, at one o’clock on Monday? Does she have her lunch in school? Does she sit at a refectory table amid laughing children, eating the food that school children eat: roly-poly pudding, shepherd’s pie? Dinner is what it’s called, in schools. Or does she favour a break at lunchtime, a walk and some fresh air? Why does he not know? There’s so much he does not know about her yet. On reflection he decides that she is more likely to go out than to stay in school; she is a woman who would need time away from noise and chatter, to collect her thoughts, to breathe, to be quiet for a while. Probably she makes good use of her time to do a little shopping. He sees her in her yellow dress, with a basket on her arm, strolling through a market where the stallholders all know her, love her and call her by her name. When she stops to buy a cauliflower, the greengrocer gives her a peach. She bites into its sweet ripeness and she smiles; she is garmented in light from her own beauty.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Charlotte complains. ‘Come on, guys, shall we go for lunch?’

  ‘There’ll be nothing left by now,’ says Damian. ‘Or if there is, it’ll be the swill that no one wants. Let’s go out and get a sandwich.’

  ‘Ooh yes. Yes let’s. Prawn mayonnaise! Ooh yum. I do need something to line my little tummy. You coming, Steve?’

  But there’s Louise, who stopped after two drinks and went sensibly to the canteen with Harriet, and is back now and beckoning from the door because it’s late and the tapes have come. And behind her Muriel, irate, because she has battled her way through ice and snow and missed the birthday drinks to register the tapes in record time, only to find most of the listeners absent.

  ‘We’ll have to make do with crisps,’ says Charlotte, sadly. She buys six packets from slow Cecil and that afternoon the long room reeks of vinegar and grease and bitter-breath.

  *

  The tension is apparent before either of them speaks. Stephen can feel it in the air and hear in the silence, in the over-careful way the front door closes, in the sound of something liquid filling a single glass instead of two.

  It’s almost eleven o’clock on Sunday night. The only words that PHOENIX says in the first half-hour after their return from the weekend at Harcourt Mill are: ‘It’s bloody freezing in this flat. Did you forget to set the timer?’ A while later Helen asks: ‘Do you want anything to eat? I could do scrambled eggs?’ Her voice is tentative and small.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Jamie replies, and Stephen knows his mouth is set in a straight, unyielding line. He speaks each of the three words with unnatural precision, the final consonant of the second word enunciated clearly, as if Helen were a foreigner with rudimentary English. His accent, always patrician, slides further up the scale. He informs his wife he’s tired, he’s going to bed; he has a busy day tomorrow and an early start. Stephen listens to him cleaning his teeth, spitting loudly, flushing the toilet, shutting the bedroom door. A gas boiler hisses in the background. It stops and there is quiet. Then the quiet is broken by a new sound: the sound of a woman crying.

  Stephen does not hesitate. He seizes the telephone and dials Rollo’s extension. Rollo is still in the office, thank goodness; Stephen does not want time for sober second thoughts. Breathlessly he pours out his invented story: ‘I’m doing Sunday’s tapes. The ones that were delayed today. The early evening tapes. We should have picked him up at his father’s house. We’ve missed it, I think. Well, we’ve missed something. You were suggesting that, I think, this morning. It was yesterday night.’

  ‘Slow down,’ says Rollo. ‘I’m getting confused. What are you talking about? But please be very careful. Remember that you are on the telephone.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m not going to say anything. I simply thought you ought to know immediately that there are two hours unaccounted for last night. You remember where he was for the weekend? So, okay, then his wife came home at 20.53, but she was on her own. He didn’t get back until 22.48.’

  ‘Stop right there. I’m coming downstairs to listen.’

  ‘There’s nothing to hear, she was alone, she didn’t speak, and besides I’m still working through the tape. He didn’t say anything either, when he eventually returned. He just told her that he wasn’t hungry and that in the morning he had an early start. Did he?’

  ‘I don’t know. What happened in the morning?’

  ‘I won’t know that until tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, Come to think of it, you’ve been pretty quick off the mark with Sunday evening.’

  ‘I’m giving it priority,’ says Stephen. ‘As always and as you know. Although this does mean I’ll have to work late if I’m to have a snowflake’s of catching up on the rest of my caseload. I’ll be on the late-list yet again.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll write Security a note to say I’ve asked you to work overtime; I think you get paid for extra hours, at your grade? Or do you get time off in lieu? Keep a note of the times, in any case, won’t you? But, back to the point. Didn’t she give any indication of what he might be doing?’

  ‘No. She didn’t speak. I told you.’ />
  ‘Maybe she got a lift with someone else and he stayed on at his parents’ a bit longer? Or he was offered a lift and she chose to drive herself. There’s only one car, I’m sure.’

  ‘I don’t think she drives.’

  ‘My guess is that there’ll be an explanation later. At least, I damn well hope there is. Because there’s nothing I can do, if not. I couldn’t have got cover over the weekend.’

  ‘I know. It’s rotten luck. But you could be right. There may be a completely innocent reason why he should send his wife ahead of him and come home by himself so late on a Sunday night.’

  ‘Everyone was late last night. The roads were bloody awful, with the snow.’

  ‘Not in Buckinghamshire, they weren’t. We must have been lucky, and escaped the worst.’

  ‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ says Rollo. ‘I’m meeting someone, sorry. Please catch me up ASAP, tomorrow.’

  ‘Wilco. Have a nice evening, Rollo.’

  Stephen’s heart is still pounding when he puts the receiver down. Bastard, bastard, bastard, he says, beneath his breath. He feels so impotent. Helen was weeping and there was nothing he could do. She went to bed around midnight, still sorrowful. She probably lay awake the whole night long, still crying, probably, but stifling her sobs so as not to wake her bastard of a husband. Tears on her pillow. Longing for someone she could turn to, a friend in her hour of need. But what was Stephen doing last night at that same time? He was snoring on his sofa after a slow drive back to London, having had to stop every few miles to clear his windscreen, the wipers on his Datsun having failed, having drunk all but a hand span of the Bell’s he bought on Friday. What good was he to Helen? He was no friend to her at all.