The Long Room

by Francesca Kay

  It was almost half past six. He gulped the last of his drink and considered his next step. He could stay here, with his empty glass, and hope that Buckingham would not need the gents’. If he did, he would have to push straight past him. But if Stephen did not make a move quite soon, he would miss the concert. Perhaps that was the better choice? Alternatively, he could turn his collar up and sidle out, hoping that Rollo would not notice. If he were seen, would Rollo acknowledge or ignore him? Then it occurred to him that Rollo might be working. He could be in this forbidden place for operational reasons, in which case he would definitely not acknowledge Stephen, although he might report him to Security tomorrow. But why would he be with PHOENIX? Was he using PHOENIX as a decoy? Or tricking PHOENIX into thinking he was still a trusted colleague? Or detaining PHOENIX for a while in order to give Technical the clear run of his flat or their shared office at the Institute? Perhaps there were investigators at this very moment searching through his drawers for illicit material or hidden codes, as Stephen himself had done. If he stayed here, unseen, and watched the men, he might learn more about this enigmatic case.

  Each time someone entered or left the pub, the door banged loudly and cold air whistled in. It was that blast of air which announced the arrival of Sub-director Six a few minutes later. He did not come right in but stayed by the door, holding it open, summoning Rollo and Greenwood with a crooked forefinger. Immediately they put their glasses down on the nearest table and followed their leader out.

  How tiresome this evening was turning out to be. Stephen considered tracking the three men but on balance decided against it. Twenty to seven. Did he have still have time to get to Oxford Street? Yes, if the concert did not begin until half past and he took the Tube, he probably did.

  He went to Bond Street, fairly confident that he knew the way from there. On the way he tried to remember if he had ever been to a concert of classical music before. When he was at school perhaps? Music did not exist for Stephen as a child, except as hymns, theme-tunes and advertising jingles. Had he ever heard his mother sing? Did she sing when she was by herself? Helen had opened his heart to the possibilities of music. Was it Chopin, Alberic had said, or was it Brahms or Liszt? Helen plays a piece of Brahms – an intermezzo – and when he first her heard playing it, he had been entranced. He did not know its name then but as chance would have it the piece was on one of his new records; someday he will ask her to play it just for him. There will be a long room, bare but for a white sofa and a grand piano, French windows open to the night, and the curtains billowing, and she will rise and move to the piano, her lovely fingers on the keys, a drift of jasmine on the air.

  It came as a surprise and an interruption to his thoughts to find Alberic waiting impatiently beneath the glass portico of the Wigmore Hall.

  ‘Ah, there you are at long bloody last, my friend! I had given you up for lost and was on the point of going in when I said to myself: just give him two more minutes! And it’s a good thing that I did!’

  ‘I’m sorry. Did you say 7.15? Delays on the Jubilee Line; the snow …’

  ‘Of course, of course! It is ghastly weather! Cats and dogs! No, as it is snow not rain we should better say polar bears and penguins. Come, let us take our seats, the performance is about to start. I already bought a programme.’

  Stephen followed the hurrying Alberic into the small, warm and very red concert hall. They found their seats in the middle of a row towards the back. Lights shone on a glittering cupola above the stage and Stephen’s impression was of an ecclesiastical space until he saw that the figure he had taken for the risen Christ was some other form of deity in a monstrance of gold rays, attended by maidens bare but for their hair or wings. Even so, there was an air of worship.

  Alberic held the programme up for Stephen to read: Franz Schubert – Winterreise D. 911.

  ‘But you said Brahms,’ he whispered.

  ‘So I got it wrong,’ Alberic whispered back. ‘But this is better, no? More suitable for the season. Ssh!’

  Stephen, silenced, settled in his seat as a man and a woman in evening dress walked onto the stage. He had no foreknowledge of what he was to hear; he didn’t know the significance of the title.

  The woman took her place at the piano. She paused there for a moment, staying very still. The man stood, also without moving, his head bowed; their stillness like a fine mesh falling invisibly upon the audience and drawing it together, tensed and reverent and hushed. Into that stillness dropped the first slow, quiet notes of the piano and the man straightened his shoulders, breathed in deeply, and sang.

  He sang without a break for an hour or more, an hour in which Stephen lost all consciousness of time. He was transfixed. Never in his life before had he been so affected by something he could not translate nor put in words. He did not know the meaning of the words the man was singing but he understood them. He understood the singer’s sadness, his loneliness, his sense of alienation. He knew this was a journey of a kind and that its end was madness. At times the piano part seemed almost to console, twining with the voice like a companion on his way, but at others it kept its distance. It was unbelievable how desolate this music was. As it neared its end Stephen’s eyes were full of tears and he could not stop them falling. Slow, haunted chords. One last despairing question, one final, quiet, inconclusive note. The loud applause that followed it was as rude an awakening as a drench of icy water, shocking Stephen back into the present. He wanted it to stop. How could he make so sudden a transition from the reverie he had been in to the conviviality of the cheering people round him? He became abruptly aware again of Alberic, but he could not trust himself to speak.

  On stage the pianist and the tenor – that same man who had sung so truthfully of death – were also smiling, bowing and behaving as if the world were a welcoming and happy place. The singer stretched his hands out to the audience and it answered him with even louder clapping.

  Alberic turned to Stephen. ‘The best thing about the piece is that it’s short. My favourite kind of gig. Have you heard it before? It’s good, no? Winter journey. It makes me think of the retreat from Moscow. Napoleon’s troops wore sackcloth on their feet instead of boots, trodding on deep snow. Here, you can keep the programme. It has the lyrics in it. Do you know the German? Have you eaten yet?’

  Stephen, still in a daze, considered this last question. Had he eaten yet? Yet? Since when? Perhaps not since that piece of toast at breakfast. He did remember that he had not had time for lunch. Had he forgotten to be hungry? ‘Er, no,’ he said.

  ‘Me neither. Nothing, not one bite, after my boiled egg this morning. Go to work on an egg, as I always say! And soldiers! Haha, no? I was flat out all day and now I could murder a horse. Would you join me for dinner? I detest eating on my own.’

  ‘Well, yes, all right,’ Stephen said.

  The snow had ceased falling and the night was clear and bright; a full moon Stephen saw, to lighten the longest night. As if he had heard Stephen’s thoughts, Alberic said, ‘Look, how white the moon, how beautiful on snow.’ He knew a good place in Covent Garden near the Strand, he went there often; it was only a short walk away from here. Evidently he also knew the way through Soho’s back streets, although it seemed to Stephen that he chose a complicated route. Do not dodge pointlessly in and out of doorways, he reminded himself for no particular reason.

  The restaurant was large, decorated lavishly with paintings thickly hung, with mounted antlers and stuffed game birds, and would clearly be expensive. Stephen wondered awkwardly if Alberic might expect him to pick up the bill but he, mind-reading for the second time, said as they were seated in a quiet corner, ‘You should know that I am my own manager when it comes to my expense account, which gives me an advantage over you, I guess. It is one of the rewards of a life in business. God knows that they are few. Every time I come here I order the same thing, the terrine and the steak béarnaise, but you might like the oysters, or the duck – have a look at the menu. Let’s have some champagne.’


  Champagne comes ice-cold in flutes and words tumble out of Alberic apparently haphazardly, not expecting answers: Müller, Schiller, poems he had to learn by heart when he was at school, Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, do you know the German? The people of the north are always hungry for the south and who can blame them when they live for months on end in total darkness; can you think how dark it was in the times before electricity or gas? On nights without the moon? In northern lands, those long, long nights, no light at all, is it any wonder that the stories are of ghosts and hellish things? Have you ever been in a place where there is no light, where you truly cannot see your hand in front of face, as the saying goes? Yes, I myself have seen that dark: you may as well be in your grave. Except there are the Northern Lights, of course. Have you ever seen them? Incredible, quite incredible, the colours and the shapes, the night sky full of living light, I saw it from a ship, if you saw it you would believe in magic. Red lights and gold and green, and flying in the sky like, what’s that creature called, a dragon. Red and green. The colours of Christmas, no? In Christmas I do not believe but still I think it right to have some colour in the winter. Do you go to many parties? But yes, of course you do, young man.

  More champagne before the food arrives; sweet wine with foie gras says Alberic, ordering a bottle of Gewürtztraminer, a name that Stephen has read in books but never before heard said. ‘At home, when I was young, we would drink a good Tokaj,’ Alberic continues. ‘You know, in the old times, in this country, but of course you know this already, at Christmastime kings were made to serve their servants and servants were made kings. Or lords maybe. Yes, that is the word, lords, lords of misrule. A great custom, I always say, we should bring it back into every office, every Christmas party, what do you think?’

  Stephen says he doubts the Director would approve, and wishes that unsaid, but Alberic lets it go without remark. He does not wait for a waiter to pour wine but fills Stephen’s glass and his; the cold white wine and, later, the warm red. Meat, tender in the mouth. The taste of blood. ‘The point is that the ordinary rules of normal life, I mean the rules of everyday, they can be broken, how do you say, suspended, and that’s good, that’s healthy. You know I think of those soldiers in the trenches in the war who sang ‘Stille Nacht’ to the enemy on Christmas Eve and played football. But afterwards, the next day, they started to kill each other once again.’

  A pause. More wine. You really have to try the crème brûlée. It is brought to Stephen in a fine white dish, candlelight strikes off silver, glass, the glassy sugar slivers into shards, sweetness on the tongue, intense. On the other side of the room a beautiful woman is eating the same thing – or what looks like the same thing to Stephen; a white dish – she slides a spoon slowly into her mouth, relishing the slick of it; he watches her take the cream onto her tongue and suck the smooth base of the spoon; he does the same. More wine. Coffee and Armagnac, were there ever words as liquid and as lovely as those two? A poem.

  Alberic lifts his glass to clink it against Stephen’s: ‘Here’s to you, Stephen, my friend,’ he says. ‘Shteefen,’ a softening of the consonants, an elongated vowel. Stephen looks at him. His features are somehow undefined; if Stephen were later to be asked for a description, he would find it hard to give. A man of indeterminate age, of indeterminate origin, his hair much the same no-colour as his skin. Despite his constant animation there is something slightly forlorn about the man. ‘To you,’ Stephen responds. ‘And to a happy Christmas.’

  ‘So, what do you do on Christmas Day? Do you spend it with family or friends? With your girlfriend? You have a girlfriend, no?’

  In Stephen’s pocket the crescent moon of gold and pearl glows as if it were alight in its little casket. Does he have a girlfriend? He looks at Alberic and Alberic smiles back. ‘There is someone I love,’ he says, ‘but it is complicated.’

  ‘A boy, therefore …?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Ah, I see. She’s married. That is the way so often. You know, sometimes I think that marriage is essential, not to married people but to lovers. The truth is that love cannot survive longer than a few years in a marriage. Oh yes, in the beginning the husband and wife, yes they are in love and they tell each other – actually they believe – that love will last for ever. But then the ordinary things, they come along – work and getting out of bed on Monday mornings, paying the gas bill, children, buying school shoes, not tonight I have a headache, those unpleasing noises – what’s the word – slopping, squishing? – when he drinks his tea. And then, if they are lucky, the man and woman become friends. But if unlucky, enemies. Either way, the time has come for another to step in. To rescue. This is what I try to say: marriage is essential because adultery is the truest form of love and the one is impossible without the other. Ask the poets. You were never married, were you?’

  ‘No. But you are?’

  ‘Yes. And I will say my wife is my best friend. But as for love … or lovers … ’

  ‘Shall I show you what I bought today for her Christmas present?’

  Stephen slips the box from his breast pocket and passes it over the table to Alberic.

  ‘But it is already wrapped!’

  ‘Yes, but you can open it. I will wrap it up again, in some other paper.’

  ‘No, no, it will be impossible to make it so nice again. Describe it to me, please.’

  The words themselves are jewels in Stephen’s mouth. A crescent moon, and gold and pearl. Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright; he says her name, he tells her name out loud. Helen, Helen, Helen. And Alberic is smiling still but not looking straight at Stephen, looking down instead at the pipe which he is carefully filling. His concentration is all on it: on tamping down the tobacco shreds, on striking first one match and then another, the small flame burning, breathing deeply in. Eyes averted; it’s the invitation of the father-confessor or the driver; it’s an invitation that Stephen, in the warmth of this man’s company, with his fingers laced around a goblet full of liquid fire that tastes of incense, grapes and Christmas, in these rich surroundings, unhesitatingly accepts.

  He tells Alberic the story. Not the entire story – he is not a fool – he omits to say that he knows Helen only through the medium of a secret investigation. Nor does he mention eavesdropping but to make some sense of the affair, he does hint that Helen’s husband is a suspect in a case of espionage. He describes in full an unhappy marriage, Helen’s solitude, the arrogance and the snobbishness of the husband and his own precipitous falling into love. He tells of watching Helen in her pale coat walking alone across a park.

  While he speaks he listens to himself. It is a long time since he heard his own voice at such uninterrupted length. The story he is telling strikes him as finely structured and compelling but it appears that Alberic is only giving it half an ear. He nods from time to time encouragingly, but also keeps glancing round the restaurant as if looking for a waiter; he re-lights his pipe and fiddles with a knife. It is only when the story ends that he looks up and meets Stephen’s eyes full on.

  ‘You must be adventurous,’ he says. ‘So where is the lady now?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes, at this moment, now.’

  As this is a question that Stephen has asked himself so many times, he marvels to hear it asked by someone else. If he needed a sign to set the seal on a new friendship, this is it. He stops to think. Where is Helen now? It is past eleven on 21 December, midwinter’s eve. She is at her mother’s house. When Helen is in London, Stephen can picture what she’s doing but, knowing nothing of where her mother lives, tonight he has only a shadowy idea. Perhaps she is just now getting into bed in the room where she slept when she was a little girl, where her dolls and childhood toys are on the shelves and the curtains are sprigged with pale pink roses. She has on a long-sleeved nightdress of white cotton and her feet are bare.

  ‘She is staying at her mother’s house in a place called Orford, which is in the county of Suffolk, on the east coast of
England,’ he tells Alberic.

  A small shift is apparent; Alberic’s attention stiffens almost imperceptibly and becomes acute. ‘Orford,’ he repeats. ‘Of course I know of it. As I suppose you do?’

  This Stephen fails to understand. Why should Alberic think he must know Orford? Why does Alberic? He had never heard of the place before Helen mentioned it. Now its sole significance to him is its connection with her. His puzzlement is evident to Alberic.

  ‘Working in Defence? Do you never have to visit Orford Ness?’

  Stephen rallies quickly. Orford Ness means nothing to him either but, conscious of the need always to maintain his cover, he shakes his head in a knowledgeable manner and informs Alberic that such places do not feature in his particular line of work.

  ‘Yes, well, I hear it is a place that is famous for the birds, for waterfowl,’ says Alberic. He is himself a great enthusiast for birds, he adds, calling for the bill. He spends as much time as he can with his binoculars in places like the Heath; he once saw a bittern. When the bill comes he does not examine it but slides a quantity of cash beneath it, refusing Stephen’s offer to split it with an airy wave.

  They wait by the restaurant door while a waiter goes to get their coats. ‘I must remember my umbrella,’ Alberic remarks. Then, as if suddenly struck by a good idea, he seizes Stephen by the shoulders, ‘We should go!’ he says. ‘To Orford Ness!’

  ‘What, now?’