The Mask of Memory

by Victor Canning

  I ought to go to a doctor, I suppose. Surely it couldn’t be the c. of l. How could it be yet? Sometimes I feel quite angry that I can’t talk to Bernard about it. He phoned this evening – he may be home next weekend or the following. He’s got to go abroad for some conference and can’t be sure. If I had any courage he’d come back and find me gone … but where would I go? And where would I find the courage? I’m hopeless and useless in doing things. Sometimes I get the feeling that Bernard would like to come back and find me gone…

  Mrs Panton broke the smallest of the set of silver lustre jugs doing the dining-room. She made a great fuss about it, so I made all the right noises. I think, though, I was a little upset. The set was quite expensive and was one of the last things Bernard bought me when he used to bring things like that unexpectedly … Ten years ago. Now it’s just formal Christmas and anniversary stuff. Nice to have a man again who just brings you things because he’s seen them and thought of you.

  Gave the sweets to the Sacred Heart children on the beach. Thank God the visitors have gone and we have the beach and the dunes to ourselves.

  Chapter Two

  Quint was working steadily through the pile of files which had accumulated on his desk during the three days he had been away. There were the usual intelligence reports, inter-department minutes and the propaganda analyses based on the European weekend press. The same dreary routine stuff. His head still nourished a fine ache from last night’s whisky. All in the cause of duty … though he had taken time out at the end for his own purely personal pleasures. He didn’t imagine it would have gone unnoted. The woman herself could already have passed it on. Well, Warboys and Tucker were tolerant men. After four years with them he was beginning to read them nicely. Tolerant men – who would wipe you off the map if you broke a known code, stepped over the clearly drawn line. He had no desire to be wiped out. One day he wanted to sit where Tucker sat, and later – why not? – where Warboys sat.

  The yellow light over the door flicked on and off in rhythm with Warboys’ buzzer. Tucker pushed his chair back and stood up. He glanced across at Quint and caught his eye.

  ‘I gather, Roger, you slightly extended your professional brief last night?’

  Quint smiled. There was no reproof in the tones. News travelled fast – but only because somewhere the woman fitted into the pattern of which he was a small piece.

  He said easily, ‘ My brief was physical and personal characteristics. You have to get under a blanket to do a good job in those areas – sometimes.’

  ‘You’re a cheeky young sod.’

  Tucker smoothed a large hand over his thinning dark hair, fastened the buttons of his open blazer and twitched his tie straight. His moving right hand flicked and adjusted the set of the silk handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  A big man, a finicky, amiable man with a heart like a lump of ice. But if he wanted it, you had to like him. Quint liked him anyway. In twenty years’ time he would happily settle for being where Tucker was now, for being what he was – more his own master than anyone else in the department except Warboys. Nearing sixty, ex-Navy – long ago – a large, loosely built man with a brain and a memory that could have brought him to the top in any line he had chosen. Quint had an idea that, like himself, somewhere in the past the choosing had been done for him, leaving him no room to manoeuvre. It was not an unusual recruiting drill and, surprisingly, seldom left hard feelings.

  ‘When you do your report keep the details clinical. Warboys likes to imagine his own romantic touches. And don’t see her again. We’ve got all the photographs we want.’

  ‘Photographs?’ Quint’s surprise was genuine. The bastards. Of course, he should have known.

  Tucker chuckled, moving to the door. ‘Now, I presume, you’re only pretending to be naive.’

  ‘Of course.’

  With Tucker gone, Quint scratched absently at his leg. Though he knew it was without reason, he was suddenly angry. Not because of the way it had been done, or that it had been done, but because even after his few years here he should have known that it would be done, just as in the future other things would be done to surprise and prepare him, to test and assess him. There might be a genuine motive behind it, probably was, but the chief one had been to go on training him, to show him how much he was controlled and manipulated when they had a mind to assess him periodically. His moment of surprise was a mistake. He should have, covered it, been unemotional. That was what was expected of him.

  The bastards. He smiled suddenly. He loved them both. They were what he wanted now to become. Thirty years ago it would have been Tucker sitting in this seat, facing some similar moment. Had he shown surprise? He doubted it. Tucker, for all that big loose-limbed amiability, was an ice-cold solitary. No wonder he had never married.

  Warboys sat at a large, highly-polished, kidney-shaped desk. A vase of tawny-red and yellow chrysanthemums stood on one side of it. The vase was Georgian cut-glass. There were two scallop-shaped silver ashtrays on small ball legs. The walls of the room were covered with a pearl-pink damask paper. There were no pictures, and no windows. A lustre chandelier of Bavarian glass hung from the centre of the ceiling. It was the only light in the room. The floor was covered with hand-crafted Norfolk rush matting. Facing the desk was a shield-backed Hepplewhite armchair.

  From behind the desk, where he sat in another Hepplewhite chair, Warboys said, ‘Morning, Bernard.’

  Bernard Tucker sat down in the spare chair.

  ‘Morning, Percy.’

  ‘Quint in?’

  ‘Yes, he’s back.’

  ‘You told him about the photographs?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘Well?’

  Warboys reached across the desk and nipped off a leaf from one of the chrysanthemums. Its surface was marked with the workings of some leaf-tunnelling insect. A strand of his loose white hair fell in a curved line over his right eye. He pushed it back with an almost feminine gesture. His eyes were polished, worn hazel, the skin over his thin, drawn face a moonscape of chalky white. His morning-coat was humped up at the back of his neck like a horse collar. He had had the same tailor since he was sixteen and the man had never mastered the long, emaciated vagaries of his bony, spindly body. Tucker sometimes played with the conceit that if someone set off a firecracker behind him without warning he would jump clear of his clothes in one bound.

  ‘He said that he imagined something of the sort had gone on.’

  ‘Did he now? What a kindly old gent you are this morning, Bernard.’

  Tucker grinned, pulled at his fleshy nose, and said, ‘Well, it’s probably exactly what you said to old Milverton when it happened to me and you sat here.’

  Warboys chuckled. ‘It was indeed. Ganging up against our masters. Working-class solidarity. Which is exactly what I want to talk to you about. I was summoned to lunch at Chequers on Sunday. Socially, that will never happen until I retire and get my K. Not that I care – the food is mediocre. Present were the PM, one newspaper proprietor who shall remain nameless, and one of our premier dukes. A chatty little bunch of buggers…’

  Tucker smiled. Warboys had a fine range of mess-deck language when he needed it. He had served under him more years ago than he cared to remember – not because of the time element but because of the loss of a sweet, carefree innocence which now, in rare moments, he recalled as a nostalgic balm. In this life he doubted whether there was any man or woman who did not have similar moments. They were unimportant, they carried no weight, but they were worth turning over for a moment or two like curiously marbled pebbles treasure-plucked from some childhood beach.

  ‘The PM disappeared when coffee was served. He said he wanted to put in a little time – seldom available to him – working on a monograph of British shrews. It could have been his idea of a joke. You never know with him. Bloodthirsty little buggers, shrews. A short life and a productive one. I gather that the female while suckling one litter can be pregnant with another and already have conceived th
e third. Stoats, if you remember the simile, are hopelessly outgunned by them…’

  Tucker, the movement a symbol of his standing here, pulled one of the ashtrays close to him and lit a cigarette. He recognized the preamble. It was unusual and deliberate, and it meant that Warboys didn’t like the brief he had been given and preferred to keep it at arm’s length for a while.

  ‘The Duke, not over-neglecting his Havana and brandy, held the floor. Stripped to not too bare details his monologue went something like this. In all the major trade unions the Left Wing elements for some years now have been keeping up a growing and relentless pressure for militancy. They see themselves as a Third Force. Control the Labour Party or to hell with it. This you might say is a traditional and publicly accepted role. Something which is part of the normal pattern of trade unionism, an element which all governments are well used to and which they can more or less confidently anticipate in political terms. How am I sounding?’

  ‘Like a TV political pundit. But you’re warming up, Percy.’

  ‘Thank you, Bernard. The essential policy behind this solid Left Wing union section is not, of course, aimed against economic ills – real or imagined – but it is a political strategy. If they don’t like a law – democratically imposed on the country – they feel they have the right to ignore it, disobey it, kick it overboard and to hell with whoever gets hurt. I’m trying to make this sordid little account simple so I’m sure it’s not necessary for me to go into a detailed review – which the good Duke, did – of the present situation in this country; a lust for economic growth, a fear of the inflation bogy, regular and crippling strikes every winter – the miners, the dockers, the postmen, the electricity power boys and all the rest of the merry clan. The main point is that some time next year, sooner or later, there must be a General Election. It was made discreetly clear, too, that for all the sounding out of the experts, the opinion polls and the various other sacrificial gut examinations the high priests of the media and politics have made, there is a large element of doubt about the confidently predicted outcome. The good old common sense of the man in the street is not to be relied on – if it ever was. What is wanted is an overwhelming victory, when the citizenry stand up in unbroken ranks and are counted, all bloody good men and true. Is the picture taking shape?’

  Tucker blew his cigarette smoke idly towards the chrysanthemums. The action reminded him of Margaret and the first years of his marriage when he had been a keen gardener. Smoking a pipe which he hated he had gone round puffing great clouds at aphis-smothered blooms. A fruitless exercise but one which pleased Margaret. Pleasure now was dead. He and Warboys and time, with its attendant dirty acts, had killed it. He should never have left the sea, never have allowed himself to be ensnared…

  Quietly, holding easily the imagery of nights at sea as officer of the watch, the slow wheeling of the stars marking time and its small happinesses as he spoke, he said, ‘They want – or they think they’ve got – a powder keg. They want to blow the power – particularly of the Left – of the unions sky-high for years. You touch the keg off a week or so before the election and up she goes.’

  Warboys nodded. Tucker had his rare faults, but he was his star pupil. He was a creditable achievement, a near perfect creation – the best, anyway, in the whole place, and – out of affection and unreturned love – he had made him so. He said, ‘So let’s go to the heart of the matter.’

  Tucker stubbed out his cigarette in the dead centre of the silver ashtray to avoid tipping it, a neat, precise movement of his big fingers. Good sailors, like good fishermen, have good hands. He said, ‘There’s a big payment involved?’

  ‘Yes. A hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘Officially funded?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s why the newspaper proprietor was there – he’s buying publication rights?’

  Warboys nodded. ‘Came from some Overseas tin shack. He’d run full frontals of his wife and daughters to up circulation another bloody twenty thousand. The PM probably has the same feeling about him as I have. He needs him, but prefers the company of his shrews.’

  ‘And the Duke?’

  ‘He keeps a very old and dog-eared Almanach de Gotha with the Bible at his bedside.’

  Tucker lit another cigarette and tilted his chair back slightly to stare at the chandelier.

  Warboys said, ‘ That chair cost me a hundred guineas years ago. If you break the back I’ll put it on your wardroom tally.’

  Ignoring this, Tucker said, ‘ If we touch this and it gets out you’ll never get a K and we shall both have a dishonourable little footnote in the history books. We shouldn’t play private games with dukes and newspaper proprietors. The Duke knows that, so does the newspaper proprietor, so do you and so does the PM.’

  Warboys chuckled. ‘All the right noises. But the PM knows nothing. He left us for his shrews after lunch. We had a chat. Warboys felt that there was a fair chance that the project could be well within the scope of his Department. Warboys didn’t think so – but a quiet hint from the PM before he left made it clear that this was no time for niceness over scruples. So – you’re sitting there now, Bernard, because it’s your baby. Some time within the next month you’ll be gives a rendezvous. You’ve all the qualifications for vetting whatever is handed to you. Naturally that will come from the Duke’s side, though in the event of an upset nobody would ever be able to prove it. You go through this stuff. You say genuine or fake. If it’s genuine you bring it back here. No payment will be made unless yon give the word.’

  ‘Opposition?’

  ‘None in the sense you mean. I gather only one man from the other side knows this stuff is for sale – and he’s the one selling it. Nobody’s going to jump you but—’

  ‘But, of course, I presume someone might.’

  ‘You would anyway. You’ve got to check the stuff on the spot before you approve the sale. Then I want you to go to ground for a couple of days, put the material in order and cover it with a report and analysis of the political implications and project the possible lines of refutation from the other side. That mustn’t be done here on our paper or our machines. Do it somewhere clean so that if trouble comes we can look innocent. Naturally we will hold all the stuff. Even though they will have paid for it, the newspaper won’t get it until the PM decides that it is going to be used.’

  ‘They could be a hundred thousand pounds up the spout.’

  Warboys nodded. ‘So what? They’ll get it into their bookkeeping somewhere as a tax loss.’

  ‘One man’s providing this stuff?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Tucker dibbled with the end of his fresh cigarette into the ashes of the old one, making a little silver lagoon surrounded by lava-coloured dunes. They’d done this kind of thing before. Neither of them liked it.

  ‘Union man?’

  ‘A fair bet.’

  ‘They’re tough boys. Sooner or later he’ll get the chop. The money won’t protect him.’

  ‘His problem. We don’t play nursemaid. He must have gone into all this.’

  There was a little silence between them, the beginning of a familiar ritual. They faced one another across the desk, holding each other’s eyes. There was a dark, drain-like autumnal smell from the chrysanthemums. The smoke from Tucker’s cigarette curled like a disappearing signal between them. Slowly they both smiled.

  Tucker said, knowing nothing could alter his brief, ‘Why me? It all seems very simple. Something that Quint could cut a few more teeth on.’

  ‘The Duke wouldn’t wear him. Or the PM. I gather, too, there is a language problem about some of the staff. That puts it in your field not his…’

  Momentarily Tucker lost the few following words as dirty, grey water sheared over the bows of a destroyer, icing shrouds and rails, and the gale flattened the smoke from the stacks into a racing ribbon low over the white wake. God, he thought, endows some of us with rare talents which lead us into strange places. Why should a youth of seventeen have
suddenly wanted to read Tolstoy, Gorki and Lermontov in the original? Only God knew, without, it seemed, being accountable for what followed.

  ‘… besides, if it all turns out well, then – at some distant, not too distant, date the PM will show his gratitude. In five years’ time you could be retired – Sir Bernard Tucker. A fat pension, a nice seat on the board of some government agency…’ Warboys grinned. ‘You might decide to stop being a bachelor … marry some nice widow or divorcee ten years younger. Anyway, it’s now your baby.’

  Tucker stood up and flicked ash from the front of his blazer.

  ‘Will the word come from you?’

  ‘No. You’ll get an invitation to spend a country weekend somewhere.’

  Quint looked up as Tucker came back into the room. Visits to Warboys were seldom on routine matters. When Tucker came back from a chat with the old man he always knew at once whether he was involved too. Tucker would give him a little nod and a wink, sit at his desk and say with a deliberate heartiness, ‘Sailing orders, me lad. Draw up a chair.’

  There was nothing for him this morning. Tucker went straight to his desk and sat down. He put a hand to the outside telephone and began to dial a number. Quint dropped his eyes to the papers on his desk. He had watched Tucker dialing outside numbers many times. From the movement of his finger he knew the regular ones. He knew, too, that Tucker must know he knew them and didn’t care. If Tucker had cared, wanted any secrecy, he would never have got within a mile of knowing.

  Tucker spoke briefly, but the flexion and timbre of his voice – as always on this number – made it clear to Quint that there was a woman on the other end. A simple curiosity made Quint wish that he could speak the Slav languages as well as most of the Latin ones. For all he knew Tucker could have been giving instructions for his laundry or being amorous and affectionate – though affection was not something Quint readily associated with the man.