*
Helen would not have been the only woman who cried herself to sleep on Sunday night, as Stephen knows. Indeed she was not the only woman who cried in Stephen’s hearing. On Sunday evening, ODIN’s wife, at her wits’ end, telephoned her son in Canada, a rare occurrence, and sobbed so hard that she could barely squeeze her words out. Stephen had listened to them both: the helpless mother and her son, helpless also, because so far away. Oh Mum, he kept on saying: oh Mum. For really there was nothing else that he could say to console her for the sleepless nights, the repeated fits and the sheer, unending misery of it all. After a few heart-rending minutes Mrs ODIN had pulled herself together, recollected the cost of a transatlantic call, and brought the conversation to a hurried end, still sniffing. To spare her feelings Stephen merely noted the fact of the call and not its contents.
Did the ODINS’ son, Emmanuel, feel wracked by guilt when he put the telephone down, in the hall of his house in Calgary, 4,000 miles away from the small flat on the Peabody Estate in Vauxhall where he was born and lived until he was old enough to find his own way out? Stephen saw that upbringing in his mind, more or less contemporary with his own: Emmanuel trying to shape a normal boyhood for himself in a household necessarily centred round an invalid sister, and any time left over given not to him but to a cause. Had he suspected even then that the cause was lost? Had he resented the poor pale thing pinioned to a wheelchair or had he loved her without question? His own sister, after all; that must count for something.
Deepening the melancholy of the afternoon was a telephone call that VULCAN made to the General Secretary of the Communist Party about an article he disagreed with in Saturday’s Morning Star. His rambling points were hard to follow. The younger man had humoured the elder and jollied him along while dismissing out of hand the things he said. It is VULCAN’s role as father-figure to the Secretary and advisor to others of the hierarchy that justifies the strategists’ continuing interest in him, but that call suggested he might not be taken seriously much longer. To Stephen’s ear there was also a worrying deterioration in the old man’s health. These December days without heating must be taking their toll on him. VULCAN does not complain but Stephen is aware that until the boiler is mended he has no other source of warmth than a kettle and some blankets. That Sunday he sounded very tired, and underlying his usual pneumatic wheeze was a liquid, gurgling sound. This Stephen reported.
By the time he got back to his flat on Monday evening, Stephen was enveloped in sadness that clung like winter mist and would not be dispelled. He sought distractions – food, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on television, the rest of the bottle of whisky – but they only worsened the sick headache he had had since lunchtime. On top of beer and brandy, more alcohol, canned laughter and the kebab he had bought from the van next to the station churned into a nauseating mess. He could feel it coagulating in his stomach: a swill of murky liquid, seasoned with hopelessness, lumpy with globules of undigested fat.
Beneath it is something else, nagging like an incipient infection, an abscessed tooth, like the intermittent shrilling that he suffers in his ears. This feeling of anxiety is different. Is its cause the untruth he told Rollo? Or the unhappiness of Helen? Yes, he thinks, it must be that, and his powerlessness to help her.
A million women weeping in the night, and their children too. Stephen needs no reminding of the inconsolable tears of children that soak through their pillows and pool in the hollows of their ears. In his own bed that night his feet were cold and his nose too, and clammy, like a dog’s. He slid a hand down his pyjama trousers to touch himself interrogatively but there was no immediate response and he was too lonely to provoke one. In the silence of the night he said Helen’s name out loud, to interrupt that silence, to hear her name, for the companionship of a human voice.
Tuesday
On Tuesday morning the routine work of the Group III listeners is suspended because, in the middle of the night before, Department Four got wind of an impending IRA attack. Details are missing; the target is unknown. The Department’s operatives will not divulge the source of the intelligence but the listeners can guess: somewhere, in a London pub perhaps, or the back room of a terraced house in a small provincial town, someone will have overheard a hint or careless word and in a panic called for an urgent meeting with his go-between, a man whose real name he will never know but whom for at least a year or two he is obliged to trust. There’s nothing else that he can do, even though he knows the man with the alias is feigning friendship; he’s long since sold the pass and the men who think that they’re his real friends would kill him if they knew.
All the domestic listeners are required to help their colleagues in Group II to comb through the past three days of take from every relevant telephone line and eavesdropping device in search of further leads. The operation is codenamed CUCHULAINN. Charlotte, Damian and Harriet, who have worked on these targets in the past, are dispatched to secret places; Stephen, Solly, Greta and Christophine are asked to scan through dozens of tapes, listening for hesitations, strange turns of phrase, unexplained commands and half-voiced things. Any other day, Stephen would have welcomed this dramatic change from his usual caseload. Too much of his time is drowsily spent keeping half an ear on the maunderings of old men and hapless ideologues. But this morning his sole concern is Helen and it is painful to be made to put the PHOENIX tapes on hold. However, there’s no choice. Today there is a job to do where, as Louise declares, the stakes could be life or death.
Helen’s voice is like the sound of the sea or a river nearby, like a soft wind breathing on fresh leaves in spring – there, always, in the background of his hearing, there like the almost-silent beat of his own heart. Hush, he tells her, I will listen later, when I can. She will understand the need for this delay. Meanwhile, the work is difficult but also quite absorbing. Stephen does not know these people; their accents and their patterns of speech are new. How can he tell if that person whispering anxiously about a wedding is using a crude code or is in fact the best man of the groom? Long experience helps: in any voice, in any language, the practised ear can hear the sounds of tension.
Christophine finds it hard to tune her ear to Ulster voices and when she hears something that she can’t make out, she pauses her tape and asks Stephen for his help. Christophine, somewhat reserved, an elegant woman with a blue gleam to her skin and traces in her voice of the French that is her mother tongue, doesn’t often pay much heed to Stephen. That she should do so now makes him glow with pleasure. When he moves her headphones to his ears, they are still warm. Leaning in to share the headphones, he breathes in the scent she wears. Her smile is lovely when she thanks him.
All through the day the long room is alive with excited operatives and strategists dashing in and out in pursuit of news. Outside, in this city and beyond, trackers will be trailing suspects, inconspicuous in drab clothing, experts at blending into any scene. All new recruits to the Institute receive some basic training in surveillance, mainly intended to teach them counter-measures. Stephen still recalls the main precepts: don’t keep turning round to look behind you. Don’t keep dodging pointlessly in and out of doors. His instructor had been the Institute’s head tracker and it was obvious why he held that post. In the classroom he was indistinguishable from all the other middle-aged white men who largely constituted the staff of the Institute; in the side-streets of Camden, where the students went for practical demonstrations, he was equally camouflaged. He was a man whom no one would notice, or afterwards be able to describe, a chameleon, a creature virtually invisible in any habitat.
The new recruits were told to pretend that they were on their way to a meeting with an informer whose very life would hang on their ability to shake off any tail. Allotted two hours of an afternoon, they wandered separately through streets and into shops and pubs, trying to seem casual but purposeful, trying vainly to avoid a glance over their shoulders. Each one had arrived at the designated meeting point to find their pretend informer
in handcuffs, and a team of trackers with a complete list of their movements.
Although he performed no better than the other students, Stephen had been captivated by this aspect of the course. So much of the course had otherwise consisted of injunctions about security and paperwork. There had been whole days on the correct procedures for handling files, registering documents, minuting meetings, locking cabinets, deflecting intrusive questions, adding extra years to pensions, and the rainbow of official forms: blue for authority to search the central index, green for action on a file, violet for mandatory notification of any suspect contact.
Three weeks into the course, Stephen was beginning to feel he had made a grave mistake. He hadn’t objected to knowing so little about the Institute in advance of joining; that was understandable – you couldn’t expect to discover its secrets before you had signed up. But, even after he had been officially inducted and had sworn an oath to keep all he was about to learn strictly to himself in perpetuity, nothing was vouchsafed that would not have been in keeping with the protocols of the dullest government department. After the enticing first contact by letter – a letter with no heading other than a PO Box address, delivered by hand to his pigeonhole in college – after the first interview, at the Randolph Hotel, the second in the Oxford and Cambridge Club, the third with a panel of three men in an anonymous building near Hyde Park, the listening tests, the verbal dexterity tests, the questions – have you ever had sex with a man, or had the urge to? – was this the anticlimactic finish? A future pushing paper in an insignificant little outpost and nothing to look forward to but an index-linked and enhanced pension? All work and no play at all. It was not for that that he had answered the seductive letter of invitation and the later questions about his sexuality, drug-taking and political affiliations; his life to that point had already been quite dull enough.
The final week of the training course came just in time to stop him handing in his resignation. It was as if the instructors had concealed till then the true nature of the work in order to elicit a deep gasp of amazement when at last they raised the curtain. Mobile surveillance, static surveillance, eaves-dropping, concealment devices, hidden cameras, invisible writing, radio communications, the best ways of steaming open letters, the discreet delivery of documents via dustbins or in the pages of newspapers dropped on benches, signals, ciphers and code-breaking, lock-picking, clandestine searches, informer recruitment, informer handling and case histories. Above all, case histories. Real, true-life stories. Real photographs of real people, real voices saved on tape, real objects, real traitors.
Five days full of hypnotising anecdote and information flourished before the dazzled students by a cast of instructors who tacitly implied that they had personally witnessed every one of these encounters, successfully employed these methods, upheld the nation’s safety, as in due course their pupils, if properly attentive, would also go on to do. And yet these magicians looked so ordinary, dull even: grey men, balding and overweight men, and one middle-aged woman with a tight bonnet of blonde hair. The sense that they were people in disguise thrilled Stephen. As they were, so was he: a man beneath whose unremarkable surface lay an extraordinary capacity for action and an extraordinary knowledge of arcane and vital things.
In the last hour of the training course the instructors all at once retracted, suddenly at pains to emphasise that this, a fraction of the Institute’s procedures, was all they were permitted to divulge. We have taught you what you need to know for the purposes of security, they said; better to know less than more. Half-truths are more dangerous than lies. Those who were to be operatives in the field would have further specialist training; for everybody else an outline was enough. Stephen had been very disappointed. He felt that having promised to bare all, the instructors had lowered too soon the curtain they had lifted – but they had at least allowed a glimpse into the world of secret tradecraft, and even in the long room the things that he had briefly seen might conceivably be useful.
For the whole of Tuesday the listeners sift through hours of speech, looking for essential nuggets. Speech, or rather, spoken words and half-words, mumbles, words in broken strings and fragments, sometimes making sense in context, sometimes not. Few targets speak in sentences, consecutive and fully thought-out in advance, subject, verb and object marshalled, the ending foreseen before the first word is pronounced. No one does; especially not on the telephone. Everyone abandons words midway, trails off, uses hesitating words to shape the thought that was unformed when they began to speak, and studs their talk with sounds that have their origins in another form of language, the one that speaks with hands and eyes, through gesture, movement and expression, that can’t exist on any page or be transcribed, the one that is the ground of true communication. Want of this visual lexicon can make conversations overheard on telephones difficult to decrypt. There are simple conversations obviously – between people who have never met, and are speaking merely to trade information, and between people who meet each other often. Telephone calls are expensive, to be kept to the point and made only when needs must, but when meeting face-to-face is just not possible and messages are complex, there’s no alternative. Therefore another kind of call: longer, more intimate, more softly voiced, punctuated by sighing breaths and wordless sounds, and silences sometimes. And listeners become interpreters of silence.
It’s harder still to make good sense of the product of an eavesdropping device. Talk in offices and homes goes on against myriad sounds, and a speaker only needs to turn away from the implanted microphone or to stray beyond the compass of its reach for words to change to babble. In any case, even when the words themselves are clear, the flow will stutter. Spoken thoughts are constantly diverted, by distractions, televisions, babies, doorbells, other people. It often strikes Stephen how carelessly people interrupt each other and finish off each other’s sentences as if the yet unspoken words were totally foreknown. And how often they are wrong, anticipating one conclusion when the speaker intended quite another. Dialogue in life is nothing like dialogue in transcript. There are times when Stephen thinks himself to be only person in the world who truly listens. And monologue the one true form of speech. A man speaking to himself in an empty room.
But there are exceptions, he has noticed. When two people are alone together in a car, they do sometimes speak with rare and concentrated intensity, and they also listen. He hasn’t overheard many such conversations; his are not the kind of targets who demand a level of surveillance so intense that their cars need to be bugged, but he has helped out his colleagues when they are extra-busy. For some reason he remembers one of these times especially: a man, a South African, suspected of gun-running. He was Solly’s case. An entrapment operation was in progress, it had reached a critical stage; the man had to be watched every minute of the night and day. Solly, having to cover the telephones and the home, had delegated the car to Stephen.
Most days the target made short journeys on his own, with the radio on. There had been hours of Radio 3 to scan. But then, after an exasperating time when the target failed to rise to any bait that he was offered and the trackers kept on losing him, he casually mentioned to a friend that he was driving to Dover the next day. The operatives exulted: a fresh trap was sprung.
The easiest way to eavesdrop in real-time on a conversation in a moving car is to follow the car at a distance of no more than a mile. For the first and so far only time in his career, Stephen found himself in the back of a Ford Transit, with a relay microphone and a radio link to the mobile trackers. They were past Dartford before there was anything to hear. The target’s wife was driving, their baby daughter in the back seat, fussing loudly. Only when she eventually dropped off to sleep did the target speak. Nothing that he said had any bearing on the case; to Solly’s embarrassment it transpired that the reason for the journey was to collect the suspect’s sister from the port. While the child slept and the woman focused on the road, the man described his sister as if he needed to recreate her after absence
, to make her real by remembering, to explain her to the sister-in-law she had not yet met. Two sets of road sounds, the car’s and the van’s, and the man talking: his sister, her sweetness as a child, how she had looked out for him at school, the fraught relationship with their father, her first serious boyfriend, the horror of her injury by fire. He spoke of scarring but he did not say where she was scarred. Miri. Her name was Miri; she had been married but the marriage did not last. She had liked unusual foods when she was small: black coffee, anchovies, those sour dried plums you buy in Chinese shops. She kept terrapins and a cat.
To this day Stephen remembers Miri. He heard her voice on the journey back but by then the baby was noisily awake again and the talk was all of family news and travel. Of course he never saw her but he does sometimes wish he knew where she had gone and what she’s doing now.
For that particular couple, the suspected gun-runner and his wife, uninterrupted time with each other must have been precious; they would have made the most of any journey when their child was quiet. But it wasn’t that which explained the intensity and coherence of that hour, to Stephen’s mind. No, it had more to do with the intimacy of two people in a private space, sitting side-by-side, the one’s attention mainly elsewhere, the other freed from eye-contact and licensed to confide. Licensed to stay silent also, by the passing road. A small space and the listener’s gaze averted, as in the confessionals of Stephen’s early youth. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. The child with his head bowed before the grille, the man’s face turned away; a list of faults in thoughts and words, of things the child has left undone, the forgiving murmur of the adult.
It has been a long time since Stephen thought of making his confession and, if there ever were a time when he could have disburdened himself in a car, it was also long ago. His regular passenger these days is his mother. And yet, on that short trip to Dover, he felt some share in the couple’s closeness. In step with the suspect’s wife, he made sounds of listening and assent; he asked questions. And he wondered if there was another factor at work then – that of destination. The most ordinary of journeys has a beginning and an end – East Acton to Didcot, Walthamstow to Dover. Does the promise of a full stop encourage the telling of a story, does narrative nee boundaries? The start defined and the finish in sight: ‘The End’ in ornate writing on a hand-drawn scroll as it appears above the closing credits of old films?
The Long Room Page 5
