by Alan Judd
‘I’m warning you to give you time to think before Jeremy rings,’ Matthew had said. ‘You may not wish to reopen that particular can of worms. I hope you will, of course – not least because I have my own agenda, as ever.’ His chuckle had become a cough. ‘But if you do come back you’ll find the office much changed and you’ll hate it. Not only because of the merger. The old office you and I knew has succumbed to management blight: meetings, mission statements, jargon, targets, obsession with process, the mania for measurement. Everything that can be counted, is; which, almost by definition, is what doesn’t matter. Nothing of value can be measured, so it’s not valued.’
‘But you’re still there. You’re running it, aren’t you?’
‘I’m here, just. I’m still in charge, I’m responsible for the SIA but I don’t run it. Nobody runs it. It’s become a self-regarding, self-perpetuating bureaucracy, like all the others. If I insist on something – such as asking you back – it happens. Everything else is being delayed pending my imminent departure, for which they can barely wait.’
‘So the amalgamations haven’t worked?’
‘They have. That was their point, to make it as it is.’
‘Why did you stay on?’
‘Because I could see the awfulness coming and hoped to ameliorate it. I failed. Now it’s too late. We’ll discuss that when you come. If you come.’
‘Meanwhile I read that Nigel Measures has forsaken Europe to return to the bureaucracy and take over from you?’
‘That is why you are needed, Charles,’ Matthew had said.
The door-banger was banging less frequently now. Presumably it hurt your hands after a while. And, presumably, if you did too much of it in prison you would be silenced by the other prisoners. It was the prospect of living with them that worried Charles more than the law, or the system, or even the plot that had put him where he was.
He continued trying to reconstruct all that had happened in the few weeks since his return. When he reported to the new Head Office on Victoria Street he found a renovated 1960s building guarded by two armed policemen, who were drinking tea from plastic mugs and did not see him enter. In Visitor Reception there were red plastic seats and notices forbidding smoking or proclaiming the SIA an equal opportunities employer. Half a dozen people were waiting, four men and two women, all, like Charles, in suits. A man and a woman were negotiating with another woman behind a plate glass window, repeating their names and business into a microphone. Eventually Charles was summoned. The woman behind the glass had a round face and listened open-mouthed as he gave her his and Jeremy Wheeler’s names.
‘Photo ID, driving licence, passport, other government office pass or similar,’ she said.
‘Sorry, I didn’t know.’
‘You should’ve been told.’
‘Perhaps you could ring Jeremy Wheeler and tell him I’m here.’ If she would only close her mouth now and again, he thought, she could look like a goldfish.
‘Extension?’
‘Sorry.’
She sighed and turned to her screen. ‘Name?’ she asked again, then turned off the microphone and picked up the phone. When she’d finished she turned back and said something inaudible. He pointed at his ears and she switched on the microphone. ‘Take a seat.’
After a few minutes he was summoned back to the window to see an overweight, balding, florid man wearing jeans, a wide brown belt with a silver buckle and a pink shirt. He realised, rather than recognised, that it was Jeremy. Jeremy nodded to the woman and turned away, looking cross.
Charles was directed into a corridor, where his jacket and the book he was carrying were put through a machine by two men in white shirts and black ties. They put his mobile phone in a cage on the wall and gave him a ticket for it.
Jeremy’s handshake was limp, which seemed out of keeping with his manner. They probably had not shaken hands since the day they had reported for their training course, decades before. Jeremy led the way to the lifts. ‘We’ll have to get you a pass and all that, assuming you feel up to the job.’
They waited with two unshaven men in T-shirts and trainers and a similarly dressed but cleaner-looking woman escorting one of the other suited visitors. ‘Dress down Friday,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘Compulsory?’
‘Of course not, but everyone does, except for a few fuddy-duddies.’
In the lift were notices about a talk on emerging terrorist technologies and a lunchtime meeting of the gay and disability rights group.
‘It’s not just Fridays, as you’ll see,’ said Jeremy when the others had left the lift. ‘We’re much less formal than the old office. Quite rightly, have to move with the times, be more egalitarian. No time now for all that stuffiness and poncing about of your day.’
Jeremy’s talent for gratuitous offence had evidently not been discarded with his pin-stripes. It hadn’t mattered with his peers, who had never taken him seriously, but it might have with inferiors, Charles thought; and would have with agents, if he had ever run any.
‘We’ve changed operationally, too,’ Jeremy continued. ‘Much more coal-face work, direct approaches, take-it-or-leave-it. We get our hands and knees dirty now. All that faffing about pretending to be diplomats chatting up other diplomats, all those endless cultivations and natural cover operations leading nowhere – sort of thing you used to get involved in – all that’s gone. We just get on with the job now.’
They headed along a corridor decorated with child-like paintings of bushy-topped trees and crooked houses until they came to a large open-plan office crowded with desks, screens and printers. Televisions lined the walls, mostly showing football repeats with the sound turned down. It was busy and noisy and everyone was young.
Jeremy waved his arm. ‘The heart of Prevail. Our counter-terrorist – CT – strategy. Valerie’s very keen on CT.’
‘Valerie?’
‘Valerie Hubbard, our new security minister. We have our own now instead of messing about with the foreign secretary and home secretary. You must have read about her. Nigel – Nigel Measures – is very close to her. They go back a long way, politically. How he got the top job, I s’pose. Useful to have a CEO who’s politically well plugged-in.’
There was another corridor, then another open-plan office. Jeremy waved his arm again. ‘My empire. HR.’
‘Don’t you find it distracting, working like this?’
‘Encourages activity and communication.’
‘Need to know? Supposing you have to discuss something sensitive?’
Jeremy pointed to a round table and chairs in a corner. ‘Break-out area. You talk there. But all that need-to-know stuff you and I were brought up on just got in the way, really. As I said, we get on with the job now.’ He led Charles into a private office at the end of the room and closed the door.
‘You still have your own, then?’
‘Have to. Everything I do is confidential. I only deal with what’s important. If it’s not important it doesn’t reach me. Personally, I’d sooner be out there on the factory floor, but there we are. Can’t be forever discussing people’s futures in front of other people. Or telling them they haven’t got one, which happens more often now. Much better at getting rid of dead wood than we used to be.’ He chuckled. ‘Coffee? We make our own. No more secretaries waiting on us hand and foot like you’re used to. We’ll get it in a minute.’ He sat, his plump features briefly clouded by reflection. ‘Used to have some nice secretaries in the old SIS, though, didn’t we? Smart girls, capable, bright, attractive.’
‘We did.’
‘Many with naval connections. Or Scots. Very good people here now, though.’
‘I’m sure.’
Jeremy was lost in reflection for a few more seconds, then abruptly resumed, as if having to bring Charles back to the business in hand. ‘No, but the point is, this job. Reason you’re here. Gladiator. Why you? You may well ask. Recruited him, didn’t you? You were his first case officer, back when he used to report on the
IRA? Then Afghanistan and the Taliban and all that. Well, he’s still in business, reporting on international terrorism. Or was.’
‘Which international terrorists?’
‘Islamists. We’re not supposed to call them that – religious stigmatisation. Anyway, he’s gone missing and they want you to go back through the file – it’s such an old case, there’s still a paper one – to see if it offers any clues as to motive or contacts. Not my idea, frankly. Came from the chief himself, the old chief, about to be ex-chief. Apparently he knows the case – you were working for him when it started, something like that. Not often he intervenes now.’ He paused and became solemn. ‘You know he’s very ill?’
‘You mentioned it when you rang.’
‘Hardly comes to the office now. Not that he’d have lasted much longer, anyway. Can’t cope with change. Frankly, the sooner Nigel’s formally in the chair, the better. He’s effectively CEO as it is. CEO Dep is his title. As I said on the phone, no more of this old chief or C or CSS nonsense that you’re accustomed to. Time for a new broom. He wants to see you, though.’
‘Who?’
‘Both of them, actually.’ Jeremy’s solemnity, which Charles now remembered came over him whenever there was any mention of illness, had been replaced by irritation. ‘You might know why. I don’t. But then I’m only HR. We’ll go to Nigel’s office first. Matthew Abrahams wants to see you in his flat this afternoon.’
Nigel Measures’s office was on the top floor, with a view of Parliament Square and the roofscape of Westminster Abbey and school. It was quieter than the other floors; the carpets newer, the staff better dressed, the men shaved. From the outer office, marked CEO, they could see Nigel though the open door of his inner sanctum, talking on the phone. He was suited but tie-less, another new convention. Watching the still sharp and energetic figure as he spoke rapidly into the phone, gesticulating with his free hand, Charles recalled their last meeting. Nigel would do the same, he was sure. Unsatisfactory from both points of view, it had been a meeting that could have no successor; unless they both pretended to forget it, as they doubtless would now.
It had not been a dramatic meeting, they had had no great falling out, but its context had given it venom. They had seen nothing of each other following Oxford until after Charles had joined MI6. In his first post there he had had occasional dealings with Nigel’s Foreign Office department. There was no outward awkwardness; they simply resumed at the point they had left off as if nothing – including Nigel’s marriage to Sarah – had happened in the interval. Nigel had a slightly patronising attitude towards the Friends, as MI6 was known in the Foreign Office, but was on the whole more inclined to be helpful than not. During the next few years they lunched a few times in Westminster pubs, compared experiences, gossiped about mutual acquaintances, speculated about their respective futures. They were both, Charles concluded later, natural compartmentalisers, capable of sustaining a relationship in which everything important was sidelined. Although he was doing well in the Foreign Office, Nigel was still considering a political career.
‘One disadvantage of your service – which I briefly considered joining – is that it’s a very narrow pyramid,’ he said during one of their early lunches. ‘Very few top jobs compared with the Foreign Office. Fun for the first few years, no doubt, but thereafter narrow in scope, limited horizons and, frankly, rather a limited contribution to policy. If you want to influence things, particularly if you want to change them, you’re much better off where I am. Better off still in politics, of course. Especially if you’re in government.’
He would refer to Sarah occasionally and in passing, just as Charles had used to do with him. She was training with a City law firm and teaching part time at the law school she had attended. As soon as she was qualified, they would start a family, he said, making it sound like booking a holiday. The baby was never mentioned.
‘You must come to dinner sometime,’ he always said on parting. Charles always replied that he would love to and they would leave it at that. But one day – it would have been in the mid-eighties, Charles thought – Nigel surprised him by ringing him in his office. ‘Sarah and I are giving a small dinner party. We don’t do it very often. Just a couple of friends.’
The address was an Edwardian house in Clapham. Charles hesitated at the garden gate. The last time he had seen Sarah was the day after the birth. Surrounded by banks of flowers in a nursing home in Northumbria, she looked relaxed and radiant. In his hurried drive north, having pretended to his mother that he was going to a last-minute party at Nigel’s, he had spurned the about-to-rot cellophaned flowers at motorway service stations. By the time he reached Hexham there were no florists open, only a single off-licence. He considered champagne, but doubted its aptness, given the circumstances; also, whether it would be acceptable in a nursing home. He ended up with a shaming box of Black Magic chocolates which she received with humiliatingly good grace, tucking them behind a bunch of Interflora roses on the bedside table. He saw from the card that they were from Nigel. He could not imagine why it had not occurred to him to do the same. He had never felt more useless, nor more grubby.
Now, he could remember nothing of what he and Sarah had said to each other that evening. He did remember that she was friendlier, no doubt because more indifferent, than when they had last met a month before the birth, over tea and a slow walk around Bamburgh Castle. Her hostility then had at least been a positive reaction, an indication that he mattered; but this distancing politeness could have been deployed with anybody, which meant he had become nobody. Neither more nor less than he deserved, he remembered thinking.
He’d been directed to Baby Bourne on the way out. There was a room to the side of the ward filled with babies in cots, watched over by a nurse who smiled brightly.
‘Baby Bourne? This one here.’
There was a name tag tied to his wrist. He had wisps of dark hair and his eyes were closed. To Charles, all babies resembled each other or Winston Churchill. He didn’t expect to see himself reflected, and didn’t know what to look for, anyway. Nor could he see whether there was anything of Sarah. The nurse stood watch as he lingered by the cot, trying to imagine the unimaginable life to come. He laid the tip of his middle finger on the baby’s forehead and silently, as if in prayer, wished him well.
Lacking any immediate instinct for the paternal and conscious of no dynastic urge, Charles soon persuaded himself that life without family was probably more enjoyable, certainly freer, than life with. During the ten years in which he thought more or less daily of Baby Bourne it was not with longing, nor with any sense of progression; he merely registered the child’s existence, every day, finding nothing to think beyond the fact of it and no point in speculation that was limitless. He thought more particularly of Sarah, his heart crammed with the unsaid, with questions, memories, debates and imagined arguments, a decades-long interior dialogue that would never, he thought, be had. So he had put his heart aside.
Certainly, it would not be had across the dining table in Clapham that night. But seeing her again would be enough to be going on with.
He arrived to find two couples and a plump, pretty woman called Liz who was an economist with the Bank of England. She laughed easily and was quick and bright. Bank employees could have Bank of England accounts, she said, and over drinks recounted the problems she had convincing traders her cheques weren’t toy-town. Charles liked her and wished he could relax. He hadn’t yet seen Sarah because the door had been answered by Nigel. When eventually she came in from the kitchen they were all laughing at something Nigel had said.
‘Charles, how nice to see you again.’
She presented herself for cheek-kissing. She looked as he remembered, though in both dress and manner she was now the middle-class London hostess. He wondered how he seemed to her.
‘Charles and I met at Oxford through Sarah,’ Nigel explained. ‘Now it’s the Foreign Office that brings us together.’ Like most diplomats, he took seriously the obligati
on to maintain cover for the Friends.
Charles felt no more relaxed as the evening went on. He suspected no-one else did, either. There was a brittle tension that kept everyone talking as if in competition, with a lot of laughter but no humour. Liz played her part valiantly and he helped as best he could, thinking she would make someone a good and capable wife. Sarah seemed edgy and assertive, as if conversation needed sprinkling with the salt of contrariness. It was a tendency he remembered in her from before, but it had been less marked then. Nigel drew paradoxes and made verbal sallies which everyone laughed at. Charles did not see them address a word to each other, except once, when they were both in the kitchen between courses and he passed the door on the way to the loo. Nigel was standing holding the pile of dirty plates and she was on one knee before the open oven, wearing oven gloves, heedless of how far her skirt had ridden up her thigh.
‘Where shall I put them?’ Nigel asked.
‘Anywhere.’ She spoke shortly, without looking at him.
It meant nothing, of course; it was how people were under pressure, it was marriage. He didn’t like to hear her speak like that, but he wasn’t displeased.
There was another exchange, not involving her, that much later bubbled to the surface of his memory, under the pressure of a very different circumstance. It began over coffee, when Liz asked Nigel something technical about the Single Market negotiations which, as a junior member of the Foreign Office European Community team, he was helping to conclude in London and Brussels. As often, when asked a specific question, Nigel made a joke of it.
‘The first time I ever heard of the Single European Act I thought it was about legalising brothels. Long overdue.’ He laughed. ‘But I really can’t say, Liz, because it’s one of the areas we’re still grappling with, thanks to that old nanny goat in Downing Street. If it weren’t for that niggling bitch we’d have had it all wrapped up months ago.’
