The Long Room

by Francesca Kay

  ‘Mum, you’re not exactly feeding the five thousand.’

  ‘I know that. But it would be dreadful if there weren’t enough.’

  Stephen can foresee it clearly. His mother and himself. This year, like last year and like next. His mother getting up at five to put the turkey in the oven, because it’s certain death if it doesn’t cook for a minimum of half the day. And the table that they only ever use on this occasion, decked with crackers and paper serviettes. Napkins. Mr Fisher, who used to be the chief accountant when Coralie worked at the Council, and who has been coming to them every year for ever, as he has no family of his own. He never married. In all these years he’s never changed; he must have been born ponderous and boring. And lonely. His unvarying gift of handkerchiefs for Stephen. Coralie’s unvarying gift of woollen gloves for him. The three of them around the table, toasting the season in sweet sherry. The ‘Well, it comes but once a year,’ that his mother will say when Stephen opens a bottle of wine and the scandalised delight that will greet the opening of a second. ‘Isn’t this nice,’ his mum will say but he will know that on this Christmas Day, as on every Christmas Day, and on every one of his birthdays, she will feel an absence. He knows, because he feels it too. What would it have been like, if she had lived, if he had had a sister? A twin sister. In the womb I knew you. Mon semblable, ma sœur. There would have been a girl who knew him as she knew herself, and who understood him as no one else has done – or no one yet. Sometimes he thinks she does know him, this ghost girl, that she’s a presence, not an absence, like the tremble in the air of heat haze or the slight breath stirred by a passing bird in flight.

  Sunday

  When he woke on Sunday morning to find that snow had already covered roofs and levelled roads and pavements, Stephen, foreseeing problems on the Great West Road, had again been in two minds about going to the Institute. But, looking out of his mother’s kitchen window at the little scrap of garden made beautiful by whiteness, untouched but for the tracery of a bird’s claw prints, he came to his decision. This is no time for drifting. You might dream of walking into that pure whiteness, lying down, drawing the coverlet of snow above your head and letting go, but you know you will not do it. Soon the prowling cats will come, and the hungry foxes, for the hunt goes on, and the unbold and the vacillators, they will be the losers. The empty page on which the dove has written now awaits the fox.

  ‘You must need your head examined,’ his mother said, when he told her what he was going to do. Coralie has an imprecise idea of her son’s occupation. Her impression is that he works on defence policies and strategies, which comes to much the same as responsibility for the nuclear deterrent. This being obviously a secret matter, she knows better than to ask for details. She was a FANY, don’t forget: there were things she heard during the war that she will go to her grave without revealing. Careless talk costs lives, as they used to say. And Stephen’s father – well, what he was doing in Berlin with the Engineers was so clandestine that he used to joke he’d have to kill her if she overheard him sleep-talk. He didn’t sleep-talk as a matter of fact. He didn’t even snore. A quiet sleeper, Spencer; he would lie there on his back beside her, like a fallen pine-log, his eyelids not quite shut and a tiny sliver of the whites still showing, as if he were a corpse. The Cold War. It didn’t get much colder than that December in Berlin.

  She waved Stephen off at the front door. It was early; she was still bundled in her quilted dressing gown with the tea-stains down the front. In spite of the cold that instantly sucked out whatever warmth there was in the small house, she waited at the open door and watched until he turned the corner and was out of sight. This is her unvarying habit and every time he leaves her Stephen has the same thought: this might be the last time that I see her.

  *

  The main entrance to the Institute, always manned on weekdays, was locked behind bars on Sunday morning. Stephen found a small side-entrance, rang a discreet bell and waited. At length, to the sound of stout bolts grating, the door was opened by a guard. He looked dubious. ‘I don’t have your name down here, on this duty roster.’

  ‘Well, I’m volunteering for special duty. Could I have a quick look at that list to see if my supervisor’s on it?’

  ‘No, sir, you cannot. What’s your supervisor’s name?’

  The guard ran his finger down the list looking for Louise, and Stephen, practised at reading upside-down, saw that her name was there. He looked for Rollo Buckingham and Jamie Greenwood too. Annoyingly, there were two pages of names, pinned together, and Louise’s was on the first. The guard left Stephen on the doorstep and went inside, presumably to telephone Louise. When he came back he nodded Stephen through, having checked the spelling of his name and written it down on a separate piece of paper of his own.

  Stephen climbed slowly up the stairs and on an impulse halted at the landing of the first floor, the domain of the Director and his private staff. As there was already something transgressive about being in this building on a Sunday, he pushed through the double doors, impelled by a desire to see this corridor of power that ordinarily he had no cause to visit. There was nobody about and no sound from behind the office doors but Stephen felt at once that this was a place apart. It looked different – every other corridor in the building was carpeted with grey tiles but here the floor was covered in continuous blue pile and the doors were varnished wood, not plastic. The air was different too. Elsewhere it smelled of stale smoke, damp clothes, dust, teleprinter ink and instant coffee but here it was cleaner, although strongly tinged with something indefinably metallic.

  As there was no one there, Stephen penetrated further in. It’s odd, he thought, to be spending so much time in empty stairwells, on deserted landings, looking at closed doors. If it goes on like this, he’ll start feeling like a ghost. He tried the handle of one door gently and, to his surprise, it gave. He pulled it closed it again; of course these offices are left unlocked, he realised – cleaners go into them at night, security guards patrol them. As in every office in the building, the surfaces will have been swept clean of personal belongings or anything which might identify the occupants. He could go into any one of them himself, sit on the chairs, leave a fingerprint on the shiny surface of a boardroom table, his spoor on the chill, exclusive air.

  Emboldened, he opened the nearest door the whole way and looked into a large room, empty in accordance with instructions, except for a desk, a telephone, a table, chairs and a wooden coat-stand, on which hung an overcoat; a man’s one, full-length and charcoal grey. Stephen lifted the coat from its peg. It felt warm and inviting to the touch. Its label showed that it was made by Aquascutum. He slipped his arms into the sleeves and shrugged it on. Sliding his hands into the silk-lined pockets he found in one a cotton handkerchief and a bus ticket, in the other a tightly folded scrap of paper. He took it out. Its edges were rubbed; it had been in that pocket for some time. Unfolding it he read the three words written on it: I LOVE YOU. He folded it up again and put it back.

  In this other man’s coat, he felt like another man. It was tempting to keep it on. But he was no thief. He did up all the buttons, undid them all again and took it off. It smelled faintly of its rightful wearer, and now it would also bear a secret trace of him.

  Leaving the first floor, he paused for a second on the stairs. Louise would be expecting him but he did not want to lose this temporary sense of sole possession and the power to be in spaces where he could not normally belong. He’d take his time and she’d suppose he’d met someone by the lifts and stopped to chat. Or that the lift was stuck. Like the needle of a compass inexorably drawn to magnetic north, Stephen continued to climb upwards to the seventh floor.

  Most of the doors on the seventh floor had been left open to reveal unremarkable rooms, fitted with the same grey metal and plastic furnishings, strip lights and carpet tiles that were ubiquitous except in the Director’s precincts. From the far end of the corridor came voices. Rollo Buckingham’s room was empty: there were just the two d
esks face-to-face. Rollo’s held his special lamp, his ashtray, his teacup and saucer. On the other desk – Greenwood’s desk – was a mug: white bone-china on which was printed a facsimile of a page from a nineteenth-century edition of The Times. ‘Accouchement of Her Majesty’, it said. Stephen picked it up. It had been rinsed but not washed, and the interior was deeply stained. Greenwood’s mug. The lips that touched that china rim kissed Helen’s mouth. To hold that object in his hand gave Stephen a shiver of revulsion, as if it were a shard of human bone.

  The top two drawers of the desk were locked; the bottom two were not. Stephen pulled them open, one after the other. The first contained a clothes brush, a London A–Z, a broken bicycle light, a packet of peanuts and a paperback copy of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. The other had nothing in it but a rolled-up pair of socks. Stephen skimmed hurriedly through the novel, searching for markings, underlinings or any other sign that Greenwood had been using it as the basis for a code but, although the book had evidently been read, he could see nothing untoward. It would take more time to examine the street atlas thoroughly. He slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  He had not been paying attention to the voices he had heard at the other end of the corridor. They had seemed safely distant. But now the undifferentiated sound was breaking up and, startlingly, Rollo Buckingham’s voice rose out of it and called: ‘Shall you be here in the morning, Marlow?’ Another male voice that Stephen did not recognise said something not quite audible in reply, a door banged shut and Stephen heard no more.

  But there were footsteps coming closer, scuffing along the carpet tiles in the corridor outside. Stephen shut the desk drawers as quickly and as quietly as he could and turned to face the door that he had left slightly ajar behind him. If it were to be pushed open, if Greenwood were to walk straight in, what would Stephen do? There was nowhere he could hide. Of course Greenwood was coming, it was his own office; could Stephen escape by saying that he had been hoping to find Rollo? On a Sunday morning? Icicles were spiking through his veins. Nightmare choices flickered through his brain and he was on the point of falling to the floor as if in a dead faint – or quite possibly a real one – when he sensed that whoever it was who was approaching was not going to stop. He stood transfixed and shaking, catching a passing flash of movement and dark clothing through the partly open door, hearing through the rasp of his own ragged, panicky breath the man’s footsteps carrying on towards the lift.

  *

  Downstairs, on the third floor, in the long room, Louise was at her desk, with her headphones on. She did not hear Stephen coming in. Damian was also there, and Harriet and Christophine. They were intent, bent over their machines, in a quiet as deep as the quiet of a cloister; the sibilance of the running tapes an undertone like the wind’s sigh in a grove of trees, or the constant sea. For a moment they seemed to him heroic, the four of them, on that Sunday morning, in their dedication and complete absorption.

  He touched Louise’s shoulder. She looked up, and Stephen saw the lines of tiredness round her eyes. He fought the urge to fall to his knees beside her and bury his head in her lap; he would have given a great deal for that solace and protection. Although somehow he had got himself out of Greenwood’s office and to his own, the past minutes were a blank.

  ‘Hello, love,’ Louise said. ‘It was nice of you to come.’

  There were piles of tapes waiting for attention. ‘They’re worried this might be the beginning of a new campaign,’ Louise explained. ‘And, what with the threat from Abu Nidal and the Iranian level at its highest ever, we’ve every reason to be fearful. We’re tasked to look for clues to the identities of perpetrators and to future targets. Actionable intelligence and corroborative evidence, in other words.’

  The requirement was familiar. Too often the intelligence that streamed through tangled wires or disaffected voices into the files of the Institute just stayed there, too difficult or too dangerous to use. To compromise a source would be to sacrifice it. In they poured – the suspicions, the allegations of treachery, the subversions – to be processed, analysed and stored away, unless some evidence to buttress them could be found by other means. There were exceptions, in extremes of life and death. But even then, not always. Calculations must be made: does the preservation of an especially fecund source outweigh the loss of an unimportant life; how many lives would have to be endangered to justify the loss of an irreplaceable source; how much is one life worth, in any case?

  Which is why the listeners are useful. Tapping telephones is routine, as those with things to hide will know, and the innocent believe. A telephone call that confirms the thing some frightened man has mumbled to an equally nervous go-between in a car parked off the road, or a pub out of the way, is what the analysts need. But it’s not that simple. What if the frightened man was lying in the first place? Or thought he told the truth but had it wrong? When a need to believe is strong enough, any act of the imagination or construct made of words can easily be proved.

  Gratefully Stephen sank into the hubbub of the taxi firm – the incomprehensible radio chunter, the pick-ups and the destinations – shelter from his own obsessions. This time he also had the owner’s home telephone line, largely taken up by his wife and her extended family. It was soon quite clear that if anyone there had foreknowledge of the bombing, they were keeping it strictly to themselves. Stephen scanned through the take from the night of the explosion and heard no reference to it at all. What a gulf there was between the world of the Institute and the world outside. In that world people were talking about Christmas and the weather; in this, behind the blast-proof walls and the protective blinds, no remark was innocent; no words were to be taken at face-value until they had been forensically examined.

  The five listeners worked without a break until the early evening. Then Louise removed her headphones and stood up. She scrunched her eyebrows together between thumb and finger, corrugating her forehead in an endearing gesture Stephen had observed before. ‘I’m tired,’ she said.

  Damian pulled a corner of a blind aside to look out of the window. ‘There’s a lot of snow,’ he said.

  ‘Bother,’ said Harriet. ‘The trains will be a nightmare. And it’s Sunday. They’re always bad on Sundays, anyway.’

  ‘You can stay here if you like,’ Louise said. ‘In the Annexe. I asked the housekeepers for a bed.’

  ‘No, I can’t, my contact lenses. Don’t you want the bed?’

  ‘I’ve got to go round to my mum’s. I always go to her on Sunday evenings. Come hell or high water, she depends on that. Damian? Stevie? Do you want to stay the night instead of trudging home through all that snow?’

  The two men looked at each other. ‘The buses’ll be running,’ Damian said.

  ‘I’ll stay if no one else wants to,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Have you slept in the Annexe before? It’s a bit spartan but you’ll be used to that, having been to boarding school. Don’t they always say that Eton prepares you perfectly for prison life? At least they give you sheets here, though you may have to make the bed. Right, so I’ll tell the guards that you’ll be staying.’

  *

  As soon as the others had left, Stephen regretted this decision. What was he doing here, imprisoned in the long room? After the gut-wrenching fright he had had on the seventh floor this morning, he didn’t dare go anywhere else. He was tired and he was hungry and his ears were ringing. It was infuriating to know that Friday’s tapes were bundled in a bag somewhere in the building, waiting, when he could have spent this extra time on them and kept in closer touch with Helen. Muriel had not been at work today but a stand-in registrar had processed the essential tapes. Perhaps, if that registrar had taken in the whole delivery, he would have left the rest, including PHOENIX, in Muriel’s room for her to sort on Monday. It just might be worth a look.

  Stephen locked the long room temporarily, in case of prowling guards. Muriel’s office, a cubbyhole wedged between this room and Group II’s, was fully lined with cabinets. In the long r
oom, all the combination locks were set to the same code, periodically decided by Louise. Was it possible that Muriel used it too? He tried the nearest lock. To his surprise it opened.

  The cabinet was packed with folders. He knew what they were; he’d seen them before: they were the investigative records, stored in alphabetical order, each one labelled with a coded case-name and a number. The number cross-referred to the number of the main file, kept centrally in the Institute’s underground repository. The function of these subsidiary files was technical: they held the operational plans, the specifications of intercept devices and the licences for each investigation, past and current. Together they constituted a comprehensive record of the Institute’s eavesdropping methods.

  These folders were for case-names from A to F. Stephen closed the cabinet, re-locked it and unlocked the next. G to O. The third must be the one he needed. It did hold cases P to Z. But there was no folder there for PHOENIX.

  He should have guessed that such a secret folder would not be kept in a cabinet accessible in theory to everyone in Group III. In practice Muriel’s room was out of bounds. She controlled all the paperwork as well as the tapes, and kept the pending files and minute-sheets; if you wanted to consult a record you were supposed to ask her. Listeners were only allowed to store current papers and up to two weeks’ worth of duplicate report sheets in their own cabinets, with their indexed casebooks. As a rule they had no access to the technical records.

  Dear old Muriel, with her powdery face and perpetual wreath of sweet perfume. Who outside the walls of the Institute would ever think that this ageing lady in her tailored skirts and rows of pearls was the custodian of so many secrets? But perhaps she did not read the documents she filed? Why would she, when she cared only for their safety, not their contents? She seemed to be as incurious about the cases as she was keen on gossip; she and Charlotte were forever chattering. Muriel might as well be stamping library books as registering secret tapes, although it had to be admitted that in her own slow way she was impressively efficient. She must have a separate system for the especially sensitive investigations. Where would she put those?