Tightrope

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Well, Sam’s not a Russian spy, are you, Sam? And he’s not going to infect anyone.’

  Her husband looked at me through narrowed eyes, as though searching for Huns in the sun. ‘But you are at Cambridge, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not the university—’

  ‘Maybe it’s something in the air there. The Fens. Damp and deception.’

  ‘I’ve got a place at Oxford, actually.’

  ‘No better. Look at Marian and her family. Left wing lunatics, the lot of them.’ He laughed. It was a joke and we laughed with him. He went on to talk about his mother, how her ankle was, all that kind of thing. And work. And even cricket. I watched the two of them together, how they reacted to each other, how their glances went. From that very first conversation, I saw the gulf. Alan seemed a two-dimensional sort of chap, with sharply defined views, even on things he knew nothing about; Marian was different. She was complex, full of fears and full of courage, possessed of the third dimension of unknowability. I knew that she’d been stalked through the streets of Paris by the Gestapo yet kept her cool. I knew that she’d been interrogated – I presumed hideous physical torture – yet revealed nothing. I knew all that, or as much as my mother knew about it, but I sensed much more. She loved peace and hated it; adored freedom yet hankered after the constrictions of wartime. She was fond of Alan, and yet often expressed her impatience with him, sometimes even her dislike. She loved life and loathed it. I knew that. What I didn’t know was what was going on behind the scenes of her life at that time. Each person presents only a two-dimensional façade to the observer and the façade she presented allowed me no glance round the edges. At least, not then. So I had no idea about Absolon, no inkling of Fawley, no hint of the careful leak of documents that had passed through the conduit of Edward Sutro and Marian Walcott into the hands of Moscow Centre.

  I returned to Cambridge the next day feeling, in some ill-defined way, let down. ‘Come again,’ she’d said as I left their flat to walk to the Tube station. ‘Whenever you like. We enjoy company.’ But there was no arranged date, no promise to call, nothing to suggest that those words had been anything but an empty valediction. So I immersed myself in the intricacies of Russian grammar and the exquisite cadences of Akhmatova’s poetry, and tried to pretend I was not thinking of Marian Sutro all the time.

  Chilterns

  One day she and Absolon had a picnic in the Chiltern hills. It was a cool day, the air bright with the memory of a night-time shower. They took with them a Thermos flask of coffee and some sandwiches and climbed up through beech trees to a monument overlooking the Vale of Aylesbury. Rabbits scuttered out of the way as they walked up the slope. The grass was cropped close around the monument, almost as though it were mown. Above them white clouds bloomed in a blue enamel sky while away in the distance a giant cumulonimbus grew and blossomed like a cauliflower over Oxford.

  In Absolon’s presence she no longer thought of Benoît, or Clément, or Véronique, or Alan. They all seemed irrelevant. And she no longer contemplated death and betrayal but speculated instead on the possibility of staying with this man, Absolon, for the rest of her life, in Canada maybe, under an assumed name. Absurd, of course; but she had these thoughts.

  ‘Have you considered their offer?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’ve thought about it. It’s not easy.’

  ‘Of course it’s not easy.’

  ‘A lifetime of work. And belief. A lifetime of belief.’

  ‘People change their beliefs.’

  ‘I’d need to talk with somebody.’

  ‘I can arrange that.’

  The cloud had spread across the sky like a great anvil as she gathered up their things. At its heart there was a lightning flash. ‘Perhaps we’ll have a storm,’ she said.

  Was that an omen? They held hands like children as they walked down through the woods and there was a moment among the trees when her fear was overcome by a sudden, insistent shock of desire. A strange thing, like a charge of static electricity. An explosion of lust there among the beech trees. She wanted him. She wanted to lay down among the beech mast and pull her skirt up for him. Perhaps this very thought struck a reaction in his mind – some kind of action at a distance – for he turned to her and pushed her against a trunk and pressed his mouth on hers and scrabbled with his right hand among her clothes. But then there were sounds below them, children calling, an adult voice trying to bring order, dead branches breaking underfoot. They separated, composed themselves and walked quietly down the slope past the upcoming troop of boy scouts who giggled as they went by, knowing, as kids know, what was happening.

  ‘Nearly caught,’ Absolon said.

  She laughed with delight. ‘Would it have been a great scandal?’

  ‘A diplomatic incident. Soviet journalist caught with his pants down. War heroine exposed for a strumpet. Is that the word? Strumpet?’

  ‘It was, about two hundred years ago.’ And she felt it again, that shock of lust that she loved and hated – the kick that was like a drug, a surge of delight and liberation sweeping her up to the summit of sensation; and on the other side of the peak, the slope down which she slid into something resembling the shame. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. But there was no Father. There was no one. Just the echoing spaces inside. Ned had long ago explained to her that the atom itself is mainly empty space, all its mass concentrated into the tiny core of the nucleus. The rest of the atom is nothing at all. Matter itself is almost nothing at all. The material world is little more than an illusion – yet this desire was not an illusion.

  Down at the car park families were milling around getting out picnics. Two boys were assembling a kite out of bamboo struts and tissue paper. ‘That car,’ she said, not pointing or even looking in any particular direction. ‘The black Ford. Haven’t we seen it before?’

  Absolon shrugged. ‘It’s nothing.’

  But as they drove away the Ford pulled out behind them. It followed them for fifteen minutes as they made their way back to London in the sudden rain, and then it was no longer there. Absolon appeared unconcerned. She glanced back through the rear window to see if she could spot a different vehicle doing the same thing as the black Ford. That motorcycle, maybe, trailing a plume of spray? Or the van that stuttered through the traffic lights behind them as they drove along Western Avenue. Or the family saloon – a Morris – that seemed to stick on their tail for a few minutes before they reached Shepherd’s Bush. But she couldn’t be sure. Within a few minutes they were at his house, safe behind the net curtains, with the rain coming down and the radio playing to confuse any microphones.

  Later, when they were lying in bed in the reluctant moment before she had to get up and wash and get dressed, she whispered, her mouth close to his ear: ‘You know those photos …?’

  ‘Which photos?’

  ‘The ones of Ned.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I want you to get them for me. The negatives. He’s earned them, hasn’t he? It’s wrong to have them hanging over him, even if he doesn’t know they’re there. A Sword of Damocles even if he can’t see it.’

  ‘We’ve all got one of those hanging over us.’

  ‘Anyway, I want them.’

  ‘Is that why you’re doing this?’

  She pulled away from him to see his expression. ‘Are you serious? You know very well.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  She lay down beside him again, her mouth close to his ear once more. ‘I’m doing it,’ she whispered, ‘so that I can keep fucking you.’ The word she would never have used now thrilled her, the raw, splintered sound of it almost conjuring up the act, almost onomatopoeic. Alan and she had sex. With Absolon, she fucked. It was the difference between swimming in a pool and plunging into the ocean.

  ‘Can you get them for me?’

  ‘I’ll see,’ he said.

  An hour later she was making her way to the nearest Tube station, sure that she was not being followed, convinced that all was well, secur
e in her ability to look after herself in the ambiguous world of betrayal and deception, and confident above all that Absolon was willing to come over. Defect seemed the wrong word, having at its heart a deficiency, an insufficiency. Whereas for her, at that moment, he seemed complete.

  Tightrope

  It is difficult now to understand what the NORTON source really involved. Most of the immediate witnesses are dead – Edward Sutro of a brain tumour at the disturbingly young age of fifty-six – and all the relevant files on the Russian side are locked away in the registry of the GRU, which is still thriving and living on in Ulitsa Grizodubovoy in Moscow. We are not going to know their side of things until someone opens up the archives and who knows when that might be? So all I have before me are what I have gleaned from the main registry at Millbank.

  One of the registry clerks tracked everything down for me. She’s an enthusiastic woman – little more than a girl, really – who wears tight skirts and has a disarming sway of her hips when she walks. ‘Here you are, sir,’ she said, handing me the file with a little smile of triumph. ‘A bit dusty, but then it’s been hanging around for ages without anyone taking any notice of it.’ She might have been talking about me.

  The file is headed ‘Tightrope’, which gives a nice impression of the game that Marian Sutro was playing. It was the usual thing, dog-eared, battered, decorated with various labels like a well-travelled suitcase from the thirties. Inside were various bits and pieces – surveillance reports, interview summaries, some internal memos, a missive or two from Broadway which was where Six was quartered in those now distant days, and a partial account of an interview with Absolon himself.

  There’s an archaeology of old files. You scrape away at them as an archaeologist might scrape away at the earth of a dig. You peer at artefacts – the marginal notes, the initials, the redactions – and you try and work out what was going on all those years ago when the events they shadow possessed emotional impact. Alan Nunn May and Klaus Fuchs were once vicious, evil traitors. Now they just seem rather naive but essentially honourable, decent men trying to do what they saw as the best for the future of mankind. Perhaps that goes for Edward Sutro and his sister Marian. And maybe even David Absolon. They’d given him the codename OXLIP. Treat with utmost caution, one of the marginalia warned. It was signed Hollis.

  I interviewed OXLIP over a period of two and a half hours. During this time he appeared rather anxious but no more than might be expected under such circumstances. He frequently laughed, but without much humour, which I took to be a sign of nerves, and was often inclined to make somewhat exaggerated hand gestures to emphasise the point he was making. Our conversation initially centred on his personal history, which is covered elsewhere in this file and therefore which I will not repeat here. Suffice it to say that what he said appears to be entirely consistent with what we know of him from other sources.

  One point should be emphasised: he appeared somewhat upset when talking about his late wife (killed during the siege of Leningrad). This I take to be an indication of his continuing feelings for her, which may have bearing on his current situation viz a viz SWALLOW.

  Once we had dealt with that side of things we moved on to the current situation. Here he was very much vaguer, both about what he wanted and what he might provide us. Yes, he has been an active GRU officer for decades and is willing to confide in us about GRU practice throughout those parts of European operations he is familiar with but he is altogether unclear about how much of current operations he knows. Furthermore he is unclear about what he wants personally. Clearly he is not interested in money. Clearly he is interested in SWALLOW. He talked about a new life in Canada or something but whether he expects SWALLOW to be part of this is not clear. (N.B. she is married, and happily so as far as I am aware.) However, what OXLIP’S real motivation is remains obscure, possibly to himself as much as to us. When I suggested that he might continue as he has been in recent months, i.e. as an agent in place providing us with useful intelligence, he havered. And when I suggested the quality of his information might be improved, he became almost indignant. Did I realise the danger he was in, the risks he was taking? Questions like that. I informed him that I have been in this game since long before the war and don’t need lectures on the dangers involved.

  He also asked how could he trust us. I told him, as one intelligence officer to another, that he couldn’t. All he could rely on was the fact that we would work in our own best interests and it was not in our interests to endanger him in any way.

  We agreed to meet again in a fortnight. I didn’t want to push him any further than that and certainly didn’t want to go into specifics. It is my opinion that he is not yet ready to come over but is warming to the idea. In the meantime, SWALLOW can definitely act to bring him closer to our way of thinking.

  Swallow. Why do I find something faintly obscene about that codename? I’m afraid I can imagine her swallowing Absolon, hook, line and sinker.

  Cinema

  Nothing among the brittle bits of paper hidden away in those old and dusty manila folders gives any hint of what was to happen. Only imagination can fill the gaps. In the Peace Union office in Holborn Marian went about the ordinary things of life. Filing and phoning, that was what Miss Miller called it. The tedium of the quotidian that underpinned any anxiety that Marian felt. At home Alan was distant. He had his life, she hers. They were civil to one another but there was a divide between them, with politeness the currency of exchange across the border, and the apartment in South Kensington a neutral territory on which these careful transactions could be made.

  ‘Have you ever been unfaithful to me?’ he asked her once.

  She smiled and touched his face. ‘My darling Alan, if I had been, would I tell you?’ Then her smile became a laugh. ‘But of course I haven’t,’ she assured him.

  Was he gullible enough to accept this piece of sophistry? Who knows?

  The blow came in the form of a phone call to the office, passed on to Marian by a faintly curious Miss Miller, who mouthed ‘It’s a man’ as she handed the receiver over. On the other end of the line was Absolon’s neutral voice telling her to meet at the usual place at half past one.

  Marian felt a small tide of nausea swell up inside her. ‘All right,’ she said, and put the receiver down. There was no ‘usual place’. The ‘usual place’ was where they had agreed to rendezvous in an emergency. The time quoted would always be one hour after the time intended. She glanced at the wall clock and saw the minute hand approaching midday. ‘I’m going to take an early lunch,’ she told Miss Miller. ‘I’ll do this stuff later.’

  ‘Who was on the phone?’

  ‘Oh, that. Someone cancelling a meeting. He’ll ring me back.’

  She took the Tube. The Tube was the best way to throw off a follower, the place you could deploy the tricks of the trade with ease. Stepping onto the train shortly before the doors closed, then immediately off at the very last moment, was effective. Whoever was following was left behind, stuck among the commuters in the steel and glass worm as it disappeared down the sinkhole of the tunnel. But she could see no one behind her as she went down to the platform, no one trailing her as she emerged into the maze of Piccadilly Underground station. Up at the surface were the usual crowds, the traffic swirling round Eros, the lights – Wrigley’s gum, Wills’s Gold Flake cigarettes, Lemon Heart rum – sparking and flashing even in the middle of the day. She bought a ticket for the circle in the Pavilion cinema and felt her way through curtains into the clotted darkness. An usherette with a dimmed torch showed her to a seat. It was like finding your way through the city in the blackout, fearful of tripping, fearful of bumping into someone or something, fearful of what was just around the corner. As she took her place the main feature was already running, a film called The Thief according to the posters outside, with Ray Milland looking unshaven and desperate. For a while, letting her eyes accommodate to the dark, she watched the screen and tried to decipher what was happening. There was no dialogu
e, which seemed strange. Milland paced, stared at the wall of his room as though it was a prison cell, moved a chair, glanced at a newspaper. You could hear these things – the scrape of chair legs, the rustle of newsprint, the actor’s breathing – but nothing else except the music score that told you the emotion to feel, the rising desperation as he looked around his drab little cell, the climax as he slammed out of the room. Next he was running in a park somewhere. New York. There were skyscrapers in the background. New York, where she had never been but Clément had. Columbia was in New York, wasn’t it? Ray Milland ran as though trying to escape something, but there was nothing behind him, only passers-by glancing at him with curiosity. Walk, don’t run, she thought, trying to will him. Never look in a hurry, never show indecision. And then she remembered how she had run from Père Lachaise that time, run like the wind, run as though she had the hounds of hell on her tail.

  ‘They’ve recalled me.’

  Absolon’s whispered voice was directly behind her. She half turned and felt his face against her cheek. He was in the seat behind, leaning forward towards her.

  ‘Keep still and listen. I’m being posted. Immediately.’

  ‘Immediately? Where to?’

  ‘Back home.’

  ‘Are you in trouble?’

  He gave a little laugh. ‘You never know. Most likely to be jealousy. Anyway, someone will contact you. They’ll want to keep things going, keep Norton going.’

  She felt the panic bubble up inside her. ‘But you’re my contact. It’s your thing.’

  ‘Not any longer, I’m afraid. Maybe we haven’t been as clever as we thought. Unless …’

  ‘Unless?’

  ‘Nothing. Anyway, it’s too late now. I must go.’