The Long Room
Page 26
Stephen heard the implied threat and it chilled him to the bone. But he stood his ground. ‘I will drive you to Orford because that is not too far out of my way. But I can only stop there for a minute. If I leave you there, will you get yourself back home?’
‘No, actually I think I will be washed up on a beach.’
‘Stranded. Yes, you might.’
‘Not precisely safe then, not for you, and nor for me?’
‘All right. I’ll take you back to London. We must get going now.’
‘Stephen, you are a brick. I knew that you would get it.’
*
They left the motel room without seeing anyone at all. There was one other car in the car park and for a moment Stephen thought he saw a flash of movement at a window of the inn but when he looked again there was no one there. If the world had ended in the night, and he and Alberic were the sole survivors, he would not have been entirely surprised. The day was clear but the air so cold it hurt. The car was suffering too and to begin with would not start: the engine stuttering and dying again and again and each time making Stephen feel more trapped and hopeless. Alberic, having said nothing, got out, opened the bonnet and did something to the spark plugs which brought the car shuddering back to life. ‘I am a jack of all trades,’ he said, fastidiously wiping oil off his fingers.
Alberic was right that there would be people out and about in Orford. Not many – some on their own with dogs, a family, two couples heading for the river – but all of them smiling and greeting each other as they passed, as if Christmas made strangers into friends. Stephen and Alberic parked at the quay. ‘Will this do?’ Stephen asked.
‘Please, let us walk just a few yards along that way, where there is a better view.’
A view of what? Of a stony place, a wasteland, the junkyard of cold warriors and, beyond it, the implacable sea. A place prohibited within the meaning of the Official Secrets Act, the sort of place that fascinates the foot soldiers of secret war. A place those soldiers could not reach without the help of some unwitting fool to give them cover. Stephen saw it now through Alberic’s sharp gaze. Now he knew why Alberic would not give his own name or use his own car, why he chose to stay out of the way, a rat hidden in a sewer. He closed his eyes so that he would not see the man taking a miniature camera from his pocket and pointing it across the water.
They had walked some distance towards the massy church, uphill, and were out of sight of the quay. ‘Hurry up,’ Stephen said, starting to go back the way they’d come. His guts were liquefying in fear but he would not have Alberic observe it. He would stay outwardly composed and get away from here as fast as possible. Once he had left Alberic in London, he would not see him again.
When the quay came into view, Stephen saw two cars parked right next to his. There had been no other cars when he and Alberic arrived. Three men were standing by them. Dog walkers from out of town, he hoped, or perhaps they could be sailors. But when he came close enough, he saw that one of them was a uniformed policeman.
Stephen nodded casually to the men as he and Alberic drew near them. One, in a plain dark double-breasted jacket, stretched out his arm to bar the way. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said, his voice courteous and calm. ‘Is this your car? In which case, could you kindly come with us? Without your friend. We would like to ask you a few questions, so if you would please get into that black car over there.’
Alberic, beside him, was trying to shake off the uniformed policeman’s firm grip on his shoulder, and furiously protesting outrage and innocence in a rush of muddled words that included immunity and holiday snaps and seagulls but Stephen already knew there was no point resisting. The evidence was there. He could see the operative on duty in the Institute this morning taking the telephone call from the police and making his way down to the underground repository where thousands of names are held on alphabetically ordered cards: Donaldson, S. S., red-carded to show that he is a member of the Institute. There will be protocols in place to deal with this emergency. The film in Alberic’s camera will be developed straightaway. The searchers will be sent to Stephen’s flat where they will find the folders and the tapes lying where he left them, in plain view. What can be said in his defence? Treachery once was punishable by death.
Stephen saw all this with total clarity but right there on the quay Helen was disappearing before his eyes like a white bird against a wild wave’s crest, like summer snow, and he knew that he would not see her again. She would live her whole life without him and never even know of his existence except as a minor story in the news.
Alberic, still protesting, was being bundled into one of the cars; a driver was waiting in the other, with a rear door open. Without a word Stephen got in, while the plain-clothes officer watched him carefully and the cold wind blew across the shingle spit on the far side of the water.
Friday
In the long room it is quiet, on a morning in late winter, on the last day of the year. At their isolated desks the seven listeners keep their shocked thoughts to themselves, incapable so soon of putting words to them. Charlotte’s eyes are very red. Louise has a note in front of her of the many times that Stephen Spencer Donaldson signed the late list without authority and the folders that Muriel is missing. Damian will never know if he did the right thing or if he should have kept his suspicions to himself; Steve will get a minimum of twenty years, they say, and more if he’s unlucky.
Elsewhere in the Institute, Security is checking through its partial records of the times when L/III/SSD was seen in places where he had no excuse to be. On the seventh floor, Rollo Buckingham is reviewing the reports he knows were falsified because the information they contain directly contradicts the first-hand evidence obtained by Marlow McPherson, his colleague and close friend.
Several thousand miles away, in a windowless room in an inconspicuous building in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, an analyst is writing a report on the British Government’s undeclared attitudes to the islands that it calls the Falklands and she calls Las Malvinas. All that she knows of the source of the intelligence that will justify invasion plans early in the spring is that it is secret. And, in the long room, Christophine still wonders about the parcel she was given when she returned to work on Tuesday, and the square of silk in iridescent blues that the parcel contained. Soft to the touch and beautiful and obviously expensive – what was in his mind? she asks herself. There was so much love behind that gift, and imagination; what in heaven’s name was wrong with that young man?
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Anna Webber, Hannah Griffiths, Victoria Millar and Arabella Currie for their advice, encouragement and warm support.
Quotations are taken from the following sources. In addition there are references in the text to the Bible and to the works of Baudelaire, Byron, Dante, Donne, Herrick, Keats, Marvell, Marlowe, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare and Shelley.
p. 34 My mother wore a yellow dress, gentle, gently, gentleness: from Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autobiography’, in Collected Poems (Faber, 2007). Courtesy of David Higham Associates.
p. 161 Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm: from W. H. Auden’s ‘Lullaby’, in Collected Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson (Faber, 2007) © The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
p. 245 First chill, then stupor, then the letting go: from Emily Dickinson’s ‘After great pain a formal feeling comes’. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson.
p. 245 sapphires
and garlic in the mud: from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, in Four Quartets (Faber, 2001) © The Estate of T. S. Eliot; reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd
NOTE: The calendar for 1981 has been shifted slightly to allow Christmas Day to fall on a Saturday.
About the Author
Francesca Kay’s first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers and was nominated for the Authors’ Club First Novel Award and for Best First Book in the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Europe and South Asia Region). Her second novel, The Translation of the Bones, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in Oxford.
Copyright
First published in 2016
by Faber & Faber Limited
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© Francesca Kay, 2016
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ISBN 978–0–571–32253–4