Legacy

by Alan Judd

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll arrange a nasty surprise for you later, won’t we, Becks?’ He laughed.

  ‘I’ve a bone to pick with you,’ Rebecca said quietly to Charles.

  The phrase had uneasy resonances from childhood and youth, when it was used by parents and teachers to presage something more serious than the playfulness suggested. The last time he had heard it was on his father’s lips, when his father had learned that Charles was – against all expectation – joining the army, but not the Royal Engineers, his father’s corps. His father had used the phrase jocularly but beneath it, Charles realised, there was some hurt. ‘What?’

  ‘You shot me.’

  ‘Not you. Just your picture.’

  They were taught elementary two-handed instinctive shooting with standard Browning 9mm pistols by Little Tom, the towering ex-Marine.

  ‘Makes a break from sitting on your bums and listening,’ Gerry said.

  The morning of Charles’s return Little Tom had inserted a full-faced picture of a smiling Rebecca amongst the films and stills of armed men they had to hit. Everyone had withheld fire except Charles, who had shot her in the mouth and left eye.

  ‘I thought I was meant to.’

  ‘No one else did.’

  ‘It was a manifestation of secret desire.’

  ‘Not a very nice way of showing it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Little Tom says you’ve used a Browning before so I suppose you’re allowed to show off.’

  ‘Well, that was in Belfast. A place apart. Seems a long time ago.’

  After dinner there was a case history concerning a senior Soviet bloc official who had survived undetected for thirty years as an agent and whose career was crowned by his secret exfiltration and retirement, along with the latest diplomatic ciphers. Charles sat near the back with his pipe – a habit he had recently affected partly because of a sense that he lacked habits – unlit. It reminded him of Hookey’s unlit pipe during their discussion. Perhaps the lighting of pipes whilst working was a sign of boredom and disengagement, something you didn’t do if you were stimulated. Roger, he noticed, notoriously prone to postprandial drowsiness, had left his cigarettes open but untouched.

  The story was told by the last of the agent’s many case officers, a tall, saturnine, good-looking man, now in Personnel. At the end he read extracts from the agent’s comments on his handling over thirty years. The most serious criticism was of the frequency of changes of case officer, mostly dictated by the bureaucracy of postings and careers rather than by the demands of the case itself, which was undeniably important.

  ‘On the one hand,’ concluded the case officer, ‘there’s some truth in the service’s dictum that no agent should be considered properly recruited unless he or she accepts handover to a new case officer, demonstrating that the relationship is by then with the service rather than the individual. Nor should any agent dictate someone’s career. On the other, an intelligence service which gives greater priority to its own administrative tidiness than to its casework is arguably not fully serious.’

  Fully serious or not, secret service was turning out, Charles reflected, to be a pretty good choice. He enjoyed the course and liked the people, while the work so far had given him no cause for the excited unease he’d felt before his first interview. People he knew who’d gone into business or other professions seemed more routinely exploitative and unscrupulous than this. It answered, in fact, with everything he’d liked about the army – patriotic endeavour in a cause in which he could believe, a sense of belonging, the subtle satisfactions of service – but without the detailed domination and invasiveness of military life. Now, in the intelligence world, he felt he was at the heart of the Cold War. He did not think of himself as extreme or aggressive but he’d always had a desire to seek out the front line, wherever it was; a desire to be there, and to be able to feel later that he had been there. He sensed the same in some of those around him.

  They were let off soon after lunch on Friday. Charles was to spend the weekend at his mother’s house in Buckinghamshire and he looked forward to the leisurely drive in the Rover he had inherited from his father. It was the big P5, the ministerial Rover with the thirsty V8 engine and enough wood and leather inside to furnish a London club. ‘The drawing room on wheels,’ his father had approvingly dubbed it. Charles kept meaning to exchange it for something more suited to his age, pocket and unaccompanied status, but there had been little time for looking around. Anyway, it had been his father’s.

  ‘Going all the way in that?’ asked Desmond Kimmeridge, whose two-seater Mercedes was parked nearby at the edge of the parade ground.

  ‘About five or ten miles. Then the AA pick me up. You?’

  ‘House party in Shropshire, with prospects.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘There’s only one and she’s very need-to-know. Hope you make it.’

  ‘Hope you do.’

  Desmond grinned as his car hood slid silently down.

  Conscious of the amount of washing he was bringing home, Charles stopped in Marlow to buy flowers for his mother. His sister, Mary, was also to be there and, as it was the first he had seen of her since her engagement, he bought her some roses. There was a good tobacconist near the florist, so he bought an experimental tin of Balkan Sobranie and an unnecessary new pipe, his third since the course had started. He felt agreeably relaxed and alive, with the light-heartedness that comes of youth, health, independence, financial sufficiency, a sense of purpose and as yet no burdensome responsibility.

  His widowed mother had remained in the family home, a 1920s house off a track in the Chiltern hills behind Marlow and Henley, backing westwards over the child’s-picture-book Hambleden valley. His parents had bought it soon after the Second World War. His father, a surveyor, insisted that good houses of the twenties and thirties were the best of any period, combining Edwardian spaciousness, detail and craftsmanship with better understanding of materials, heating and plumb-ing.‘Georgian for damp elegance,’ he would say, ‘Victorian for freezing solidity, but these have warmth and dryness as well as grace and space. As places to live in, you can’t beat ’em.’

  His father’s presence in the house was still palpable. His deer-stalker on the peg behind the scullery door, the boot-puller he had made outside it, his study, his shed. It was impossible to be in the house without recalling his passion for every detail of it, his devotion to the garden, his meticulously maintained tools, his local knowledge, his beechwood tramps with successive spaniels. Charles often wondered what he would have thought of his son’s new occupation, had he told him. Probably there would have been no need; it had been an old friend or former colleague of his father’s – his status always unclear – who had first mentioned the office to Charles and it was unlikely he had done so without his father’s knowledge. His father had spent many years as a government surveyor and after his death Charles had discovered that much of his work was connected with building or altering secret establishments. He might even have known the Castle. Charles had told his mother, though not so far his sister who, like the rest of the world, was supposed to think he was in the Foreign Office.

  His mother’s hair was uniformly grey now, and her delicate, wrinkled features were suffused with an anxious goodwill that seemed to be increasing with age. During dinner on Friday conversation was entirely about Mary’s planned wedding. Charles contributed one or two suggestions – unadopted – while keeping to himself reflections on how much of this there would be over the next six months. Then, he supposed, there would be years of baby-fuss. Still, happy engrossment was generally a good thing and his future brother-in-law had seemed pleasant, so far as he remembered. He was a lawyer in the same City firm as Mary.

  ‘Where did you say David was this weekend?’ he asked as they settled with their coffees before the beech-log fire.

  Mary stared. ‘David? I haven’t mentioned David. I’ve no idea what he’s doing.’

&nbs
p; ‘James, he means,’ said their mother quickly.

  David, Charles remembered, was the previous boyfriend.

  ‘Don’t you dare confuse them when he’s here,’ said Mary, her eyes darkening with indignation. ‘I don’t see how you could, anyway. They’re so totally different.’

  Charles was still well adrift. ‘Of course they are, I know. Can’t think why I said David.’

  ‘It’s about time you got another girlfriend, isn’t it? So long as she’s not like the Awful Alison. I think we should vet her first.’

  ‘I’m working on one but she’s married, with children.’

  ‘Oh no, Charles,’ said his mother.

  ‘Better that than have your own with the Awful Alison. Imagine.’ Mary shuddered.

  He discovered later from his mother that James was ‘in the City’ and that they had met, twice, when Mary had had friends down.

  ‘Ah, so there were others there.’

  ‘A whole lot of them came down for lunch and you all went for a walk afterwards, leaving me to clear up. Except that you didn’t because you went off to see Alison.’

  He remembered the weekend now. It hadn’t been Alison but another girl he’d never mentioned. He still had no memory of James.

  On the Saturday he cleaned and tinkered with the Rover, then resumed his slow sorting of his father’s shed, which had gradually and unspokenly become his own. Hidden behind a hedge at the back of the double garage, the shed smelt of wood, engine oil and musty overalls and was crammed with tools, spanners, screwdrivers, awls, hammers, vices, clamps, pumps, hoses, braces, brushes, drills, oils, solvents, fuel cans and old batteries. Whiskey flake pipe tobacco tins contained screws, nails, nuts, jubilee clips, car lightbulbs and anything else that would fit. Many of the carpentry tools were old enough to have value but Charles would no more have sold them than his father’s photographs. The shed was infused with his father’s presence and Charles’s intermittent sorting – little more than a process of picking up and handling things before replacing them in a slightly different order – was part mourning and part adjustment. He felt he was both preserving his father’s inheritance and making it his own.

  In late afternoon, beneath dark unbroken cloud, he went for a run. He loved the patchwork quality of the Chilterns, with their towering beeches, hills, valleys, sudden declivities and surprising vistas. Little Switzerland, his father used to call it, invariably adding that it was just about as expensive. He still ran in army boots, slithering in the chalky mud of logging tracks, his breath like gouts of steam. The last part of the run was across a ploughed field back up the hill, the clinging mud weighing on his boots, his heart thumping and his legs so leaden it was impossible to think of anything but keeping going. When he reached the top the clouds parted across the Hambleden valley and the sun briefly touched the hills. He faced the view, gulping air, hands on head to lift his rib cage from his lungs.

  He didn’t feel he was running for or from anything now, but still he kept doing it. Physical exhaustion was gratifying; it took him out of himself, out of everything. Nevertheless, he had given himself a purpose in running that day, and had failed. He had meant to decide during the run whether to ring Rebecca and suggest an early dinner on Sunday evening. The thought had been hovering throughout the drive from the Castle the day before. He didn’t have her home number but the office switchboard would connect him. Dinner on Sunday gave focus to the weekend and was more relaxed, less a declaration of intent, than dinner on Saturday.

  But he had not decided. He suspected it was contemplation of the event rather than the event itself that he enjoyed. He wanted something to look forward to but, otherwise, why was he taking Rebecca to dinner? The others, if they found out about it, would assume he was making a play for her, as might she. And as he might, indeed. Or might not. He decided to decide during his bath, while watching the glow of sun ebb from the room. He next decided to decide with a cup of tea in his hand, telling himself he did not actually have to decide until his hand was on the phone. While making the tea he reflected that he would normally have described himself as decisive.

  His mother came into the kitchen. ‘Oh, Charles, I forgot to tell you. Someone from your office rang when you were out. They want you to ring back.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I wrote it down. Where did I put it? It’s not by the phone. I think I thought I’d better hide it.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  ‘Here it is, by the Marmite. I knew Marmite would remind me, you see, because you were bound to want some. A man called Hugo March. Here’s his number. He didn’t say what it was about and I didn’t ask. He sounded very important – well, at least, he sounded like that. You know what I mean. You don’t come across many Hugos nowadays.’

  The study extension was more private. He shut the door. ‘Hallo?’ Anna’s voice had a slight catch in it as she pronounced the ‘h’. ‘Hugo’s out, doing his duty with the girls. He won’t be long.’ There was a slight pause. ‘It’s nice to speak to you again.’ He asked how her midweek dinner party had gone. ‘You must come one week,’ she said, ‘if you’re not too busy. Though I’m sure you’ve got many more exciting things to do.’

  ‘I’d love to.’ He felt now that he had been decisively right not to ring Rebecca.

  Hugo returned while they were talking. ‘Fancy a run?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve just had one.’

  ‘Have another at six thirty tomorrow morning in the park. We’ve just learned from Chef that Lover Boy is going for one. Ideal chance for you to bump him with no one else about.’ ‘Chef’ was the name given to the telephone intercept material. ‘We need to have a chat first about what you’re going to say and so on. No chance you could come round here tonight, I s’pose?’

  ‘Fine.’

  His mother was resigned to work taking priority over dinner. He promised he would be back that night or the next day.

  Hugo’s house was a substantial chunk of Wandsworth Edwardiana, three-storeyed, high-ceilinged, with a neglected front garden and stained-glass door. The hall was cluttered with children’s toys and shoes. Hugo twice tripped on a large doll while ushering Charles in. ‘Anna, for goodness’ sake!’ he called. ‘She’s upstairs putting the children to bed. Be down soon. Drink?’

  They drank dry white wine while discussing what Charles should do. Lover Boy’s usual route was a slow jog in a wide circle, nothing too taxing. Charles would intercept him and feign surprised recognition. It would be a success if he could get him to exchange addresses and telephone numbers, a bonus if they actually arranged to meet again. That was unlikely, on first encounter, and Charles shouldn’t push even on Lover Boy’s address if he sensed reluctance. They could always contrive another encounter.

  ‘It goes without saying you mustn’t hint at his girlfriend or anything. This must appear a completely fortuitous and unthreatening encounter, nothing he need feel uneasy about reporting to the embassy security officer, because he will report, if he’s got any sense. They’ll suspect provocation, of course, because that’s their job, and anyway they’re like that, and the other way round in Moscow it would be, of course. Well, it is here, of course, this time, but normally it wouldn’t be, if you see what I mean. Anyway, what we must hope is that they’ll let it run long enough for us to show him that you know what he’s up to. Then you can talk on different terms, if he wants. Or not. Nothing lost if he doesn’t and no need for Foreign Office clearance at this stage since we’re not making a pitch or doing anything that could result in a protest.’

  After making an appropriate number of protests, and Anna an appropriate number of disclaimers about the meal, Charles stayed for dinner. It was spaghetti bolognese.

  ‘We have proper lunches at weekends,’ said Hugo, ‘so it’s always something like spag bog in the evening. Did you do much First World War in the army?’

  Hugo viewed military service as primarily a course of study. He was an authority on the First World War, though he preferred the term ‘enth
usiast’, and while Anna cooked he showed Charles his books. He was wearing cavalry twills, sports jacket and tie, which Charles interpreted as an expression of identity with earlier generations until Hugo mentioned that he had been to Saturday Mass that evening.

  ‘It’s good for the girls,’ added Hugo, as if asked to explain. ‘Gives them the possibility of choice later. They enjoy it. They like dressing up. Anna doesn’t. Go to church, I mean. Likes dressing up.’ He laughed abruptly, standing very close.

  Dinner was in the kitchen at the back of the house, which had been two rooms. Looking for something to compliment without exposing his domestic ignorance, Charles chose the pine table.

  ‘Deal,’ Hugo corrected. ‘That’s what more honest, less pretentious generations called it. It means any cheap white wood, which usually happens to be pine. The whole pine business is a wonderful example of something old dressed up as something new. Fashion, that’s all.’

  ‘Fashion maybe but at least it’s a cheerful one,’ said Anna. ‘Better than the earlier fashion in houses like this for painting everything brown.’

  ‘Not the kitchen table. That would have been plain and scrubbed daily by the lady of the house.’

  ‘By her scullery maid, more like.’

  ‘True. It would be nice to have staff again.’

  ‘Then you’d better get another posting.’

  Hugo poured more wine. ‘Not that we’d have been eating in the kitchen. Earlier generations would not have understood our mania for the vernacular, for exposed brickwork, unpainted wood, paying vast sums for places where animals lived and calling them mews houses and living in them ourselves and all the rest of it.’

  ‘We could move into the dining room if you prefer,’ said Anna.

  Hugo put his hand on Charles’s arm. ‘Talking of which, there is a wonderful table in there. Bet you can’t guess what it is. Come and see.’ He stood, wiping his mouth with his napkin.