by Simon Mawer
‘For the planners it’s just a bit of simple maths,’ Ned insisted. ‘When should we launch an attack that guarantees the largest number of Soviet dead against the least number of dead Americans? It was that kind of calculation Bertrand Russell was making, don’t you remember? When a bloody pacifist starts talking like that we really are in the shit.’
‘Ned!’
‘Merde, then. Does it sound nicer in French? Fuchs sees this. He’s just a decent man acting according to his conscience. How can that be wicked or evil?’
She let him go on like this for a bit before she spoke again, quietly, feeling the thrill of incipient confession. Because what was about to be said could never be unsaid. ‘Maybe you ought to, Ned.’
‘Ought to what?’
‘Once the whole Fuchs thing has died down, of course. Once they’ve put him in prison or whatever they are planning to do.’
‘What are you talking about, Squirrel?’
‘Maybe you ought to get in touch with the Russians.’
Ned laughed, that braying laugh. ‘You’re mad.’ But she could see the look of complicity in his eyes. She knew it well, throughout their childhood. A glimmer of anger, a glimmer of pride, a small flare of impulse. The possibility lay between them like a sexual proposition, almost too dangerous to explore.
*
She lay awake at night. Faces passed before her eyes – the dead of Ravensbrück wasted by disease and starvation, the dead of Auschwitz gassed and Hiroshima charred to cinders. How to stop it all? She saw death around the corner, smelled it on her skin, felt it deep in the core of her being. Hers had been a bitter, personal war and now it had become a bitter, personal peace.
Sleep was no relief because when she slept she dreamed. She dreamed of horror, of desolation, of a great light in the sky, brighter than a thousand suns, of a great darkness where shades lived out their days devoid of food, devoid of love, devoid of hope. During the days she watched the world teeter on the brink and wondered when it would step over.
But nothing happened. Life continued. She went about her business as the ever more important co-ordinator of events at the Peace Union. She listened to earnest talks by serious people who advocated everything from world government to subsistence farming, and then went home in the evening to hear Alan talk about his work and his plans for the future. She became practised in the art of dissimulation. She found that she could keep her life divided like the watertight compartments of a submarine, her work at the Peace Union sealed off from her marriage; occasional visits to Oxford sealed off from the world that Ned inhabited; her meetings with Fawley sealed off from everything.
‘They may approach you,’ Fawley warned her. ‘If they do, let me know immediately.’
‘Who may approach me? About what?’
There was something unusually ill-kempt about him, as though he had spent the night sitting up watching someone through binoculars from an observation post. Was that the kind of thing he did? Surely not. ‘You’re just what they’re after, aren’t you? Not a card-carrying member of the party. A fellow traveller. They like fellow travellers. So they may make a move. It may be a legal – someone from the embassy – or may be an illegal – someone operating under deep cover as an ordinary civilian. You’ll know when it happens.’
‘But how can I be of interest to anyone?’
He smiled patronisingly, as though he were used to dealing with people who didn’t really understand the world he moved in. ‘Not you, Marian. Your brother.’
‘Ned?’
‘Of course. Now Fuchs has been arrested, they’ll be looking for a replacement.’
‘And you’re suggesting Ned might—’
‘I’m just pointing out that having a fellow traveller as a sister might seem to open up possibilities to them. And if they do contact you, you’ll let me know straight away, won’t you?’
‘Certainly, I will.’ She paused to consider what he had said. ‘Is this why you recruited me, Mr Fawley?’
He gave off a faint air of self-satisfaction. ‘Irons in the fire, Marian. In this business you always have to keep irons in the fire.’
‘Is that what I am, an iron in the fire?’
‘Forged steel, my dear,’ he said.
Odette
Of course I knew none of this at the time. At the time I knew only about Marian, my mother’s friend whose past life seemed illuminated by strange lights – the brilliant chiaroscuro of adventure and derring-do, the pale fluorescent glare of despair, the shadowy mysteries of sex. Her visits punctuated my adolescence, bringing with them embarrassment and excitement in equal measure. I remember cycling round the driveway in front of the flats where we lived, with her on the crossbar of the bike. I remember the wrath of neighbours at the noise we made. I remember walking in the Parks when she challenged me to a running race, which she won with ease; and punting on the Cherwell when she collided our punt with a group of American tourists who received a blast of French invective for getting in the way. Rarely did her husband seem to be with her. Indeed often she complained of his absences, such as on the occasion when we went to watch, in a West End cinema, the film Odette. Apparently Marian had been invited to the premiere but had turned the offer down.
‘All those bloody journalists wagging their tails around Odette Sansom? No thanks. Anyway, if it’s half as bad as the book it’ll be a disaster.’ Nevertheless she wanted to see the film and her husband was away on some business trip or other – bouncing up the pyramid of his wretched tyre company, she said – so a few days after the premier my mother and I travelled up to London to join her, and sat through a showing of the clumsy farrago in which Anna Neagle and Trevor Howard attempt to impersonate Odette Sansom and Peter Churchill. It was, is, a sorry affair, symbolic of those post-war films when the brave Brits can do no wrong and the wicked Hun no right. Marius Goring gave his impression of how a clever German might look: all dark glasses and a sinister cigarette holder and even – does memory serve me right? – black leather gloves; while, on the other side of the great divide, Maurice Buckmaster ‘played himself on screen almost as badly as he played himself in real life’. Marian’s own words. At her former boss’s appearance her laughter rang through the auditorium, attracting furious looks from the rest of the audience and a demand for quiet from the usherette. But she didn’t laugh when they half drowned Anna Neagle in the baignoire, or tore her toenails out with pliers. Instead Marian sat staring straight ahead, gripping the arms of her seat like someone preparing herself for the electric chair. At that point I wondered if I would witness a repeat of her breakdown in the Oxford cinema five years earlier. Would I be called upon to comfort the hysterical woman, to put my arms around her and stroke her palsied cheek? But this time there was no drama. The ten months of Odette’s time in Ravensbrück were translated into a few minutes on the screen and Marian sat through it all without movement or sound. At the end, when Anna Neagle, in tears and without make-up, falls into the arms of Trevor Howard, who has shaved and changed and generally spruced himself up – and wasn’t weeping, of course – we made a dive for the exit.
It was early evening and raining. Despite the bright lights, Piccadilly looked inconsolably drab. A queue was forming up for the next showing. ‘I need a drink,’ Marian decided as we stood on the pavement debating what to do.
‘But Sam …’ My mother said.
‘Oh, Sam’s fine.’
I remember a taxi but not where it took us. I recall the interior but not the outside of some plush place that might have been a hotel, might have been a club, where the staff seemed to know her and there was, surprisingly, I thought, a certain amount of bowing and scraping before we were installed in leather armchairs in the corner of a bar. She drank gin and French, while I was limited to mere ginger beer. ‘Sam can have a sip,’ she said, offering me her glass over my mother’s protestations. There was a smudge of lipstick on the rim. I raised the glass to my mouth, wanting to turn it so that my own lips would meet the imprint of hers but not daring such boldness
. The drink brought that little shock of alcohol, that seductive bitterness, volatiles hitting the nose, hints of possibilities.
‘You’ll give him bad habits,’ Mother said.
‘How do you like it?’ Marian asked of me.
‘It’s good.’ I returned her glass reluctantly and looked with new satisfaction round this exotic den, scented with cigarettes and alcohol, into which I had been smuggled. On the wall nearby was a framed photograph of a woman in uniform. A heart-shaped face and a delicate little mouth. A studied innocence about her expression. Hair permed to give her a girlish look.
‘That’s her,’ Marian said.
‘Who?’ Anna Neagle was the first name that sprang to mind. The resemblance was there but the suggestion only brought a little twist of irony to Marian’s expression.
‘Maybe the casting wasn’t so bad after all. That’s Odette. Sansom as she was, Churchill as she is now. That’s her.’
There were other portrait photographs on the walls, of other men and women, some of them also in uniform. This place was, I understood vaguely, some kind of mausoleum for those people, the agents, the spies, whatever they were called. Was her own likeness there? I seized the moment, emboldened by my first sip of gin, and asked her.
She shrugged indifferently. ‘Somewhere, I expect.’
‘Did you do what Odette did?’
Marian gave a bitter laugh. ‘Do you mean, did I climb into bed with my circuit leader? Not quite.’
‘Marian!’ My mother appeared shocked on my behalf. She seemed to be doing everything on my behalf that evening.
‘Oh, he’s grown up enough, aren’t you, Sam? He and I understand each other, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said uncertainly. I wasn’t, of course, and I didn’t. I knew that climbing into bed signified having sex and I had grasped as much about reproduction as I could glean from the encyclopedia, but I understood nothing about the compulsions of love and lust, nothing about the currency of sex, the deals that are done between adults, the bargaining and the horse-trading. Nothing about the agony or the ecstasy.
‘There you are, Judith. You underestimate your offspring. He’s old enough to drink gin, he’s old enough to understand that people climb into bed with each other when they shouldn’t. The truth is, that’s how they arrested Odette – in bed with Peter Churchill. Not exactly how they showed it in the film, was it? Or in Jerrold Tickell’s book. And it was only the purest luck it wasn’t someone else – she went through men like a warm knife through butter.’
‘Marian, really!’
I was hot with embarrassment but I persisted, an awkward child determined not to be put off. ‘I meant the spying, going to France, all that. Is that what you did?’
Again the idea seemed to amuse her. ‘It was a long time ago, Sam. Water under the bridge.’
But it wasn’t really a long time ago. The film came out in 1950. So the events it portrayed took place just seven years earlier. I calculated the thing as I sat there between my mother and this woman of my dreams: when I was five years old and just starting to understand that there was some kind of war under way, Marian Sutro would have been having her toenails torn out like Odette Sansom.
Of course she didn’t have her toenails torn out. Her feet were slender, the toes long and straight, the nails unblemished, although sometimes crimson. But not with blood; with nail varnish. I can assure you of that.
*
‘Dear Marian,’ my mother said after that expedition to the cinema. ‘She’s so much happier than she used to be. I suppose time heals. And finding Alan seems to have done her the world of good, whatever we thought of him at the time.’
‘Don’t know how they stick together,’ my father said. They were talking in the sitting room. I was down the corridor in my bedroom, doing my homework. ‘He thinks Churchill is God and she’s somewhere to the left of Lenin.’
‘Not everything is about politics,’ mother answered.
‘You mean they enjoy the sex—’
Which was the moment when the door slammed, shutting me out of their conversation and leaving me only with the indistinct sound of my mother’s protests and my own fantasies.
Thus Marian would occasionally swim into my world, a bright, sometimes laughing presence who made me blush when she insisted that nous faisons la bise, whose politics were just this side of outrageous, who might, to the embarrassment of adults and adolescent boys, enjoy sex. In the meantime I got on with the business of growing up, acquiring all those attributes that render young boys disgusting, to themselves as much as to others. I smelled if I didn’t wash more frequently than I would have wished. Hair grew in predictable places. Limbs lengthened and puppy fat seemed to convert, by some alchemy that my physiologist father could probably have explained (but I wouldn’t have listened to), into sinew and muscle. I heard of her more than I saw her: she was doing this and that, working for some left-wing organisation or other in London; she was off to Paris, off to Geneva, places that seemed exotic to me, who had never stepped outside the borders of England. I knew nothing of the secrets that she carried with her, the drug that lifted her up and brought her down.
PART III
Absolon
On the Korean peninsula East and West were locked in a struggle to the death. On Trimouille Island in the Monte Bello group off Western Australia the United Kingdom set off its first atomic bomb. On Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific engineers began to assemble a complex device called Ivy Mike. And in London the Peace Union in conjunction with the Embassy of the Soviet Union organised an exhibition of Socialist-Realist Art.
Marian had done most of the work. She’d found a gallery in Duke Street, co-ordinated with the cultural attaché at the Soviet embassy, booked caterers for the opening reception, phoned round the newspapers and magazines, even overseen the unpacking and display of the artworks themselves. Now the space, previously used to house pallid imitations of Picasso or approximate representations of Cornish fishing villages, was hung about with smiling couples shovelling coal, and strapping blondes striding into a sunlit future. Among the guests were critics from the New Statesman and the Manchester Guardian. The journalist from Tribune was deep in argument with a colleague from the Evening Standard. A man who wrote for Horizon was peering at the paintings and making copious notes on his copy of the catalogue. And the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute – a man of impeccable sensitivity and, the public learned two decades later, a Soviet agent – was pontificating to a group of disciples about the influence of Picasso on Socialist Realism.
‘Quite a triumph, Mrs Walcott,’ Mr Roper told her. He was careful always to use her married name, ever since an embarrassing moment among the library shelves when, for a few fetid seconds, putty-like fingers had kneaded her breasts and ‘Marian’ had overtaken ‘Mrs Walcott’. On that occasion she had kneed him in the groin with sudden and startling efficiency, thus putting to an end any suggestion of breast-kneading or the use of first names. Now they were standing in front of Girls Working on the Collective Farm II by Aleksandr Deyneka and eyeing muscular femininity like visitors at a zoo examining a new species of primate. ‘A daunting prospect for Russian manhood,’ Roper decided.
It was then, just as he went off in search of important guests, that someone immediately behind her spoke her name. Not her married name, but her maiden name: ‘Marian Sutro.’
She turned.
A shock, followed immediately by a great imprecision of emotion: thrill mixed with disquiet; excitement mingled with something akin to fear; suspicion blended clumsily with the desire to laugh out loud. ‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘This is a bit awkward, isn’t it?’
‘Only as awkward as you want to make it.’ Absolon took two glasses of wine from the tray of a passing waiter and handed one to her.
‘I don’t really know what to make of it,’ she said. ‘That’s the problem. What on earth are you doing here?’
‘A posting.’ He held out both arms as if about to bow. �
��Behold, the new Press Officer at the Soviet embassy. Who is, at this moment, looking for a quote from Miss Sutro – or does he call her Mrs Walcott? – about her view of the success of this exhibition. Not whether it is a success. Success is guaranteed in the Soviet world. But what Miss Sutro thinks of the success.’
She considered his question. ‘What do you want me to say? The English intelligentsia demonstrates the same aesthetic interests as the peace-loving Russian peoples?’
‘That’ll do as a start.’
‘While decadent abstraction is consigned to the scrap heap of history.’
He laughed. ‘Excellent.’
He seemed older than before, and tougher. Or maybe her memory of Paris was corrupted. But there was the same irony gliding beneath the surface of his words, the same sense that he knew better than anyone what was going on, how everything was some kind of superficial game that hid powerful currents beneath. He laughed when she asked whether he was still single, as though she might be spying out the ground ahead. The life of a diplomat wasn’t really suited to domesticity, he told her. You met women all the time, but none you could marry.
Someone called her: ‘Mrs Walcott, if you have a moment …’
As she turned he touched her wrist. ‘Can we meet?’ Even among the crowd his closeness awoke in her that familiar compulsion, part cerebral, part organic: disturbing, as though she wasn’t entirely in control. ‘In private, I mean.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘I can give you my address.’
‘What are you suggesting? That we pick up where we left off?’
He ignored her question but gave her his card. The address was in Bayswater, in a street just off Moscow Road. ‘How’s that for irony?’
‘Mrs Walcott …?’ A volunteer was hovering. Some domestic disaster to report.
Absolon held her arm ‘Give me a ring and let me know when you can come round.’
GRU
