Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  Too good to last, Flemyng told himself through those weeks, as he tried to erect a defence against the coming sadness, and he was right.

  By the time winter was waning, his emotions had lost their thunder. Days would go by without contact with Isabel, and he ducked two of her concerts on thin excuses. He moped with guilt as a result, and then began to develop, to his sinking alarm, a resistance to the music that she loved the most. Whose fault, he couldn’t tell. He had no explanation, but knew that her mysticism, which had dazzled him, turned into an affectation that disturbed him, and as a result his darkness, a natural gift betrayed by his hair and his eyes, seemed to his colleagues to deepen, even when he told them in answer to every probe that he’d never known such elation.

  Bolder spotted it first, with delight. ‘Too intense,’ he told Craven. ‘It will pass with the season, mark my words.’ He spread the word on the third floor and beyond, taking time to express his own regrets.

  For Flemyng, whose love life had been conventional and regular but never tumultuous, the experience of loss had a special pain. Freddy, inevitably, was his confessor.

  ‘I’ve never had a broken heart,’ Flemyng told him in early March, feeling a deep stab of embarrassment. ‘Maybe that’s my difficulty. I find it hard to understand the idea that something like this can just fade away.’

  In the end, Flemyng didn’t have to, because, even as he was drawing back in pain, Isabel rang the curtain down with a bump, announcing that she was off to New York and a recording contract that might be the making of her. It was over. The apartment would be let, no doubt to another musician, maybe with another lover in tow, and her Paris days were done. They spent one long and tearful night admitting their failures, and she was kind at the last. She played for him one more time on the rosewood Érard piano that she was going to ship across the sea from its Paris home. ‘I want to escape from everything,’ she told him. ‘That’s why I play in the way I do. You don’t. You’ll always be a servant – loyal and decent, brilliant sometimes, but trapped in the ways of the world. I’ve loved you, but we’d destroy each other, you and I. I promise you that.’

  And, leaving him a volume of Emily Dickinson, she said goodbye.

  His bruises had taken weeks to soften, and he still felt the pain when Bolder joked about his attractiveness. He wished all of it gone.

  Thrown by Craven’s kind but clumsy reference to his life beyond the office walls, he wanted to bring the meeting in the embassy to an end. He said he had to catch up with some reading. He’d spend the afternoon alone in his room. ‘I’m going to take the air for a few minutes first. In the garden.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Bolder. ‘Your usual place.’

  There was a bench where everyone knew Flemyng liked to sit under the trees, and on this day he wanted to relish the morning sun that spilled across the lawns. The rain had passed in the night. He’d heard the last run of water from the roof of his top-floor apartment just after three o’clock as he sat in the dark by the window and thought of his brother. There was a maze opening up before him, he was sure, so his first act through those long hours had been to try to recover the strength that he found in family reminiscence, taking him back to a time before he and Abel went their separate ways before finding, as the years went by, that they were treading the same path.

  He began an exercise that he’d often used before when he felt himself tumbling into a crisis.

  Quite deliberately, he placed himself on the landscape he’d known as a boy. He could smell the air, feel the breeze. Closing his eyes, he assembled a series of pictures that took him far away from Paris, then pictured himself at their heart. He was walking from the loch up the slope, through the woods and along the burn, then on to the hill through the bracken and back to the rambling house that was home. Altnabuie lay in the deep folds of the Perthshire hills where Flemyng knew all the tracks and savoured the vistas that opened up at every turn, the long view down the glen that ran westwards from loch to the high hills and the spiked mountains beyond, or the panorama of crags and moor to the north that hinted at an unending trail into the wild where you might succeed for a while in losing every contact with the here and now. The emptiness excited him, and so did the comforting road home to the house where his mother might be painting in her first-floor room and looking down the glen, or his brothers maybe scampering across the hall, playing with the brass orrery that mimed the movement of the planets and reminded him, in its simplistic depiction of infinity, of the preciousness of solitude. To think about brother Abel meant remembering first of all those golden days on the hill, maybe a rainy dawn by the lochside with rod and line, or a climb to the ridge behind the house and high above, with the undulating plateau spreading out to lift your eyes towards the misty rim of the mountains whose tops were always touched by clouds.

  He was trying to rediscover the source of his own happiness as a protection against what might lie ahead. There had been weeks of unease, brought on by the love affair gone sour but now evaporated with the coming of the Paris spring, and Flemyng was restoring his energy, drop by drop. It was needed now, even more. So he slipped into a practised routine to steady himself. Home and family were the start, and brought the required comfort, but then there was Craven.

  In Flemyng’s first palmy days in Berlin, Freddy had been a jovial master of the revels, turning the weary business of listening and watching, sometimes running, into a game that could bring fun to their rigid routine, reminding them that if they couldn’t laugh then they’d soon be devoured by the lives they’d chosen. They had a set of draughty, white rooms in the north-east corner of a building at the old Olympic Stadium, with army intelligence on the floor above and the French below. The iron seats and steps in the arena a short walk away seemed to acknowledge their unhappy history and remained bare and unwelcoming, a few of the terraced levels filling up once a month when the Americans threw together a football game, but that was all. The wooden walls of their offices wobbled, and they came and went from work on bleak walkways, but the dining hall in the old gymnasium became a playground for them all, which Flemyng cherished for its strangeness and the unlikely companionship that it sometimes offered. They drank next door in a purpose-built pub called the Somerset Arms, where they taught the Americans to play darts but the French rarely came. There were formal dealings with the Russians, which Craven said was a game of tin soldiers played out on city streets. He understood the advantages of the bizarre setting, and so upstairs, with his door closed and a couple of innocent squaddies on guard outside, he would gather his boys around him late in the afternoon and walk them through the day, like the teacher he was.

  In the freezing winter darkness, his nose was red as an apple and Sam Malachy would say that when he rubbed it a genie came out of the lamp. There were tales from the back rooms, and the street. The Russians were expecting a general from Moscow; a driver passed on a whisper about a convoy coming in from Warsaw; a sapper had got something from a girl; someone had dug up a dead letter box in the Tiergarten, and there was a watch on it. Craven’s French counterpart had a dose of the clap. Everything went into the pot. And the cast of characters that he brought out of the shadows was turned into a chorus line of jesters and heroes, all of them in his mind caught between a love of duty and a passion for the dance.

  Craven’s solemn moments, or his rage at a botched job or a broken promise, were lifted by his need for fun. There was always a party, or a wake.

  When Flemyng first faced the death of a friend, a young East German of spirit who had played with fire once too often and whom Craven told him one Friday morning had probably been shot, he had recited his litany of guilt to the old man.

  He said he thought he might never laugh again.

  ‘Of course you’ll laugh again,’ Freddy Craven said. ‘It’s just that you’ll never be young again.’

  And now Flemyng had betrayed him.

  FIVE

  Pierce Bridger was always going to spoil the party. Flemyng had never doub
ted it. His arrival in the embassy a few weeks before Christmas had brought a storm cloud over the city, one that Flemyng knew would find him some day. Their paths had taken them to different continents but the luck that kept them more or less apart for ten years was bound to run out.

  The gloom that Flemyng felt on the day his appointment appeared on the chancery noticeboard – Freddy Craven took him to a boozy lunch to give him the news, and held it back until the end – was born of guilt touched with anger. He tried to reason it away. Why should he resent the man’s presence after the years that had passed? He knew that he had tried the harder of the two to heal their breach, and if some of the hurt remained it was hardly his fault. So he told himself to be generous, and remember that it would be Bridger who would be the more uncomfortable as a result. But he didn’t quite believe himself.

  He had tried again. Weren’t they now grown up? Their past was slipping away, and Flemyng’s efforts to keep their old friendship alive might yet come good – there had been the persistent invitations from him for an early evening drink when they coincided in London, twice successful; a decent weekend drive into the hills when they were thrown together without warning in Hong Kong at the peak of a stormy, sultry July; a long dinner in Washington when Flemyng had imagined hopelessly for a few precious hours that the flush of their boyhood excitements was coming back to warm him.

  He knew it was because of the closeness they once shared that there was pain. If they had been rivals from the very start, it would have been easier.

  For two young men on national service, their first expedition into the cold had been thrilling. Quietly steered away from the regiments that their families had expected them to join, they found themselves seated like schoolboys in a former district hospital outside Cambridge where they studied Russian grammar for hours each day with two dozen others, tutored in conversation by an eccentric troupe of White Russians commanded by three old men who wore the scars of civil war like polished cap badges, and a chalk-faced woman they called the Countess, dressed from top to toe in black. She was said to be in permanent mourning for the Romanovs.

  Flemyng and Bridger laughed in the evenings, and cycled across the East Anglian plains into the fens. They drank ale together, and once swapped girlfriends without a hard word.

  A chill winter passed and the translators were given their orders, one by one. Some straight to Whitehall, so the word went, others home to their mother regiments, a handful to university departments, a couple to the BBC. Flemyng and Bridger were interviewed together, and despatched as a pair to the north. ‘Even colder than Cambridge,’ they were told, and little more. ‘Stay close.’ The next night they were picked up from a village station in the dark and driven to a craggy corner of the Fife coast, where they felt their first bite of the wind from the North Sea.

  Home was a bleak airfield near the shore where there were more classes, and a taste of action. They clamped Bakelite earphones to their heads and learned to pick up the chatter from Russian freighters and trawlers in the distance, waiting for the crackle and tales of battles with the sea, stories of the girls at home. Both of them had felt a shiver of excitement at each discovery of a listening ship in the fishing fleets, and the knowledge that they were in a game with men of their own age, who played with the same kind of dials that faced them in their prefab huts and lived with the same static hiss through the night. Sometimes they caught a puzzling exchange, a piece of chatter that seemed out of place, and buzzed for Jarvie, their leader, who encouraged excitement among them as a matter of policy, even when there seemed to be no reason. He would whip away their pencilled translations to be passed quickly up the line. For the best part of a year they were drawn into the dark, and they laughed.

  As a pair, they looked quite different. Bridger was half Irish but blond, red-cheeked and moon-faced, his features contrasting with Flemyng’s dark and slim-drawn face. He was the taller by a full two inches, and carried the bulk of a rugby flanker, which he was. They had been born at opposite ends of the country less than a month apart, which was part of their attraction – Flemyng in the central Highlands on a freezing Bonfire Night and Bridger three weeks later in a Suffolk village near the sea. And in the months when they spoke Russian together, childhood memories brought them close. The coming of war a few weeks before their ninth birthdays, the fall of France and the blitz, then early teenage years that were charged with family talk of soldiers and sailors far away, the ones whom they would never see. Their imaginations were fed on the same story.

  It was by chance that they were called to Whitehall together. In the last days of spring, they left Crail and their bare quarters at the airfield, saying farewell in the smoky snug bar at the back of the Marine Hotel where they’d curl up on cold evenings, and spent a long summer without contact. Flemyng went home, and Bridger travelled without a plan, determined to roam. Then they found themselves without warning side by side in the panelled waiting room behind the doors of the old War Office a few steps from Horse Guards on a bracing autumn Wednesday, summoned for interviews on the same day. They exchanged their new addresses, rattled through family gossip for comfort’s sake, and joked about Mr Goodwater, whom they had been asked to see – ‘I wonder what he’ll call himself tomorrow,’ Bridger said. They wished each other well; slapped backs. Each imagined a time when they’d be closer than ever, sharing new secrets.

  Flemyng missed him in the afternoon, and after his own second interview three days later in another building a short distance away, where he was given the promise of the career that he wanted, he left a message with Bridger’s landlady suggesting that they should meet in a pub off the King’s Road in the early evening. He waited an hour, and when Bridger arrived he saw a change that he hadn’t expected. His friend’s wide shoulders had sagged and the brightness that Flemyng loved in his face had dimmed.

  ‘Well, how did it go?’

  Bridger’s head was down and he pulled at his cheek. ‘Not well.’

  Flemyng said, ‘Tell me all.’

  ‘There’s not much to say, except that they’ve chosen you.’ Only his eyes came up. ‘Not me.’

  Flemyng signalled to the bar for two pints to be pulled. ‘What happened? You’re not out. I can’t believe that.’

  ‘It depends what you mean by out,’ said Bridger. ‘I’m going straight. They want me to learn Arabic. Maybe Chinese, bugger it. To be a Foreign Office regular.’

  Flemyng said, ‘Well done’, and raised his glass. There was no response. He waited, then said, ‘It wasn’t a choice between us, you know. That isn’t how they play it.’

  It all poured out. Bridger’s heart was set on a life behind the lines. He knew he was a clandestine adventurer by nature, and longed for permission to be a man of many names and faces. ‘I loved those nights when we listened to Ivan. Wondered who he was, what he was thinking. We picked up his spoor; followed it. I thought it was my life.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Flemyng said. ‘I know.’

  But in his kindness he felt pain. In a few minutes, he had been dragged down by guilt. It was Bridger who was showing energy, though it sprang from his anger. ‘They closed the door on me. Just like that.’ He slapped a hand on the table, spilling some beer. ‘Explain it.’

  ‘I can’t, Pierce.’ Fleming added gloomily, ‘I wasn’t there.’

  He was trying to contain the anger that was bubbling up, and which was unexpected. His spirits had been high, the prospect of the coming months in training an excitement that had kept him awake for two nights, and now he was accused of a betrayal of friendship. He struggled to conceal a rage that he feared might destroy everything, and said as quietly as he could, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘D’you know what he said – Goodwater, whoever he is – when I mentioned you? Not to fret. That I should realize that we’re now on different paths and I might be an ambassador in the end – probably would be. You never will, in your game. As if I give a damn about rank!’

  ‘Maybe you will, some day,’ Flemyng said.
<
br />   And they found they were played out so quickly. The friends realized that they shouldn’t stay. They’d get drunk and angrier, and where would that leave them?

  Understanding that it was better to go, Bridger said, ‘Perhaps I’ll ring you in a week or two.’

  ‘I’m not sure where I’ll be, or if you can,’ said Flemyng, which made it worse.

  They parted with a handshake that neither wanted and went their miserable ways.

  The following day, Flemyng rang the number he had been given in case of second thoughts, and asked if he might speak to Mr Goodwater. They met in a corner of the spies’ watering hole in the St Ermin’s Hotel, which Flemyng took as an act of kindness on Goodwater’s part because it was a sign of welcome to the fold, and he asked if he might put a question that stretched the rules.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘My friend Pierce Bridger. He’s upset. Shattered, really. He thinks he’s been rejected from the life that was… his calling.’

  ‘I shouldn’t talk about anyone who may or may not have been in my room,’ Goodwater said. He was a genial man, bald as an egg with a wide smile that revealed a twinkling gold tooth. ‘But you’re friends. I know of your time together, of course. Let me say what I can.

  ‘My colleagues and I find some men who are right for us, and we think we know them when we see them. We have to decide, and perhaps we get it wrong from time to time. I certainly have mistakes to my name. Also, and quite frequently, we spot those whom we know aren’t right. Not because they don’t have brains or cunning – maybe promising breeding. Not at all. It’s because they want it rather too much. They’ve fallen in love with the idea in a rush. D’you understand? We’re wary of too much emotion.’

  ‘Why?’ said Flemyng, feeling like a boy again.

  ‘Because we’ve learned to be. You’ll find out.’