A Spy by Nature (2001)

by Charles Cumming

  Stevenson’s tender eyes are sunk in rolls of ageing skin.

  ‘How do you think he would have felt about you becoming an SIS officer?’

  ‘I think he would have been very proud. Perhaps even a little envious.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s every young man’s dream, isn’t it, to join SIS, to serve his country. Dad wouldn’t have thought ideas like that were out of date, and neither do I. And I think he would have been good at the job. He was smart, concealed, he could keep a secret. In fact, sometimes I feel like I’m doing this for him, in his memory. That’s why it’s so important to me. I want to show him that I can be a success. I want to make him proud of me.’

  Stevenson looks perplexed and I feel that I may have gone too far.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, writing something down. ‘And Kate? How does she feel?’

  This may be a test: they will want to know if I have broken the Official Secrets Act.

  ‘I haven’t told her yet. I didn’t see that there was any point. Until I actually became one.’

  Stevenson smiles.

  ‘Don’t you think you ought to tell her?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s necessary at this stage. And I was advised against it by Mr Liddiard. But if I advance to the next level, then it would become increasingly difficult to keep things from her.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, giving nothing away. Stevenson looks at her watch and her eyebrows hop. ‘Good Lord, look at the time.’

  ‘Are we finished?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. I hadn’t realized how late it was.’

  ‘I thought the interview would last longer.’

  ‘It can do,’ she replies, uncrossing her legs and allowing her right foot to drop gently to the floor. ‘It depends on the candidate.’

  And abruptly I am concerned: the implication of this last remark is troubling. I should have been less candid, made her work harder for information. Stevenson looks too satisfied with what I have given her. She closes my file with knuckles that are swollen with arthritis.

  ‘So you’re happy with what I’ve told you? Everything’s OK?’

  That was a dumb thing to ask. I am letting my concern show.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she says, very calmly. ‘Do you have anything else you might want to ask?’

  ‘No,’ I say immediately. ‘Not that I can think of.’

  ‘Good.’

  She moves forward, beginning to stand. Things have shut down too quickly. She sets my file on a small table beside her chair.

  ‘I should have thought you were keen to be off. You must be tired after all your exertions.’

  ‘It’s been hard work. But I’ve enjoyed it.’

  Stevenson is on her feet, barely taller than the back of the chair. I stand up.

  ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you,’ she says, moving towards the door. There is a distance about her now, a sudden coldness. ‘Good luck.’

  What does she mean by that? Good luck with what? With SIS? With CEBDO?

  She is holding the door open, a pale tweed suit.

  What did she mean?

  Brightness in the corridor. As a reflex I look back into the office to check that I have left nothing behind. But there is only low light and Stevenson’s papers in a neat pile beside her chair. I want to go back in and start again. Without shaking her hand I move out into the corridor.

  ‘Goodbye, Mr Milius.’

  I turn around.

  ‘Yes. Goodbye.’

  I walk back down the corridor feeling light and stunned. Ogilvy, Elaine, the Hobbit and Ann are waiting for me in the common room. They stand up and approach me as I come in, a surge of kinship and relief, smiling broadly. This is the thrill of finishing, but I feel little of it. We have all done what we came here to do, but I experience no sense of solidarity.

  ‘What happened to ya, Alec?’ Ann asks, touching my arm.

  ‘I had a tough one with the shrink. Grilled me.’

  ‘You look knackered. Did it go badly?’

  ‘Difficult to say. Sorry to keep you waiting.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ Ogilvy says warmly. ‘Matt only finished ten minutes ago.’

  I look across at the Hobbit, whose nod confirms this.

  ‘Pub, then?’ Ogilvy asks.

  ‘You know what? I may just go home,’ I tell them, hoping they’ll just let me leave. ‘I have to have dinner with a friend later on and I’d like to have a shower, get my head together.’

  Elaine appears offended.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she says. ‘Just have a couple of drinks with us.’

  ‘I’d love to. Really. But I have so much I have to do before…’

  ‘What? Like having a shower? Like getting your head together?’

  Her mimicry irritates me, and only hardens my resolve.

  ‘No. You guys go ahead. I’m done for. I’ll see you all in the autumn.’

  I smile here and it works: the joke relaxes them.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Ogilvy says. He’s probably relieved. Centre stage will be his.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Either way,’ says Ann, and this seals it, ‘we should go now, ‘cos I’ve got a flight to Belfast at half-nine.’

  So we say our goodbyes and Sisby is over.

  8

  Pursuit of Happiness

  In the early hours of the following Sunday morning, I wake with a specific dream image of Kate being fucked by another man.

  She is in a strange, lightless room, almost suffocating with the pleasure of it. Her arched body is in a seizure of lust, but the lovemaking is so intense that she makes no sound. To desire and to be desired this much is inspiring in her a kind of awe. She has discovered a sexual pleasure far greater than the one that we shared in our innocence. She is relishing it because it has nothing to do with compromise or responsibility, nothing to do with the stagey romance of first love. She feared that she would never again experience the passion and tenderness that she knew in those first years with me. But now I look into her face and see that all of that has been consigned to the past.

  My room is in absolute darkness as these thoughts peck away at my heart. The shock of them has quickened my breathing to something approaching the panic of an asthma attack, and I have to sit up in bed and then walk slowly around the room, gathering myself together.

  I open the curtains and look outside. The colour of the sky is caught between the city’s reflected glow and the first light of dawn. She is out there with him somewhere, lying against pale sheets.

  I take out Kate’s T-shirt from the bottom of my chest of drawers and bury my face in its soft cotton folds. Her perfume has disappeared from it entirely. From a bottle of scent that I keep in the bathroom, I replenish the smell, tipping droplets of Chanel No. 19 on to the material before scrunching it up in a tight ball. It is the fourth time that I have had to do this since we separated. Time is passing by.

  I cannot get back to sleep, so I sit in the kitchen drinking coffee, my mind shuttling between memories of Kate and apprehension over the results of Sisby.

  Whatever happens now, win or lose, I can’t go back to CEBDO. Not after all this. I couldn’t shrink myself. So tomorrow, first thing, there’s something I must do.

  ‘Look, Nik, here’s the thing. I want to move on.’

  This has been coming for months. It feels good to be telling him.

  ‘You want to move on.’

  This isn’t said as a question. More as a statement. Nik swallowing the news whole.

  ‘I feel I’ve achieved everything that I can working for you. And things have got very bad between me and Anna. We can’t work together any more and it’s better that one of us should go.’

  I have brought him to a small greasy spoon on the Edgware Road. Ten a.m. Traffic and people clapping by outside. There’s a red plastic bottle containing ketchup - probably not Heinz - sitting on the table between us. Nik stares at it.

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  I had expected m
ore of a reaction, a trace of hurt.

  ‘I’ve been offered a chance to do something… larger. Something more meaningful. You know?’

  Nik shakes his head, still looking at the ketchup.

  ‘No, I don’t know. You tell me what that is, Alec. I’m not a mind reader.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve hurt your feelings. You’ve invested a lot of time in me and I’ve let you down.’

  Now he lifts his head and looks me straight in the eye. There may be pity in his leering, condescending grin.

  ‘Oh, Alec. That’s what I always hated about you. You always think you’re the most important person in the room. Let me tell you something. The world is bigger than you. You understand? You don’t hurt my feelings. You think something like you handing in your notice could hurt my feelings? You think I can’t go out on to that street right now and find someone to replace you? You think I can’t do that?’

  This is more like it. This is what I was expecting.

  ‘I’m sure you can, Nik. I’m sure you can. You’re amazing like that.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me, all right. I gave you a job of work. You come in to my offices and all you’re interested in doing is fucking my staff, fucking Anna. And now you say you cannot speak with her. This is your problem. I gave you a job of work. That is a precious thing…’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  I really draw out the ‘please’ here, and it deflects him. I often wonder when he is angry like this how much gets lost in translation, how much of what he wants to say is denied to him by his mediocre English.

  ‘This operation I have,’ he says, gesturing freely with his right hand. He’s about to embark on one of his delusional monologues. ‘You’re just a tiny fragment of something much larger. Something that you can’t even comprehend. I plan expansion, more offices, more people and workers. And do you know why you can’t comprehend that?’

  ‘Is it just too complicated for me, Nik? Is it just too global and secret and amazing?’

  ‘I tell you why. It’s not because I don’t allow you to comprehend it. No. It’s because you won’t allow yourself to see it. You see only what’s in front of your nose. You never see the bigger picture, the possibilities your work can offer. You and me, we could go places, make some money. The world is bigger than you, Alec. The world is bigger than you.’

  ‘What does that fucking mean, Nik? What exact brand of shit are you talking?’

  ‘You’re a clever boy. I thought this when I first met you. I still think it. But you need to take your head out of your arse. You’re soft.’

  It’s time to draw things to a close.

  ‘Nik, I’m not about to take life lessons from you. These plans, these ambitions you talk about. I can’t tell you how little I care about them. You’re not running Ogilvy and Mather. You’re a crook, a petty thief.’

  ‘You want to be careful what you -‘

  I interrupt him.

  ‘I don’t have much stuff at the office. Someone will come and get it next week.’

  ‘Fine.’

  And with that he stands up, pivots away from the table and walks out of the cafe, leaving me with the bill.

  Now it’s just a question of waiting for SIS to call.

  I don’t go outside for twenty-four hours in case the telephone rings, but by three o’clock on Tuesday I am growing impatient. The only person to have rung since lunchtime on Monday is Saul, who was just back from Spain. Perhaps SIS want us to call them.

  I dial Liddiard’s office and a woman answers.

  ‘Seven-two-oh-four.’

  They never say anything other than the number of the extension. It might just as well be a laundrette.

  ‘Patrick Liddiard, please.’

  ‘May I say who’s speaking?’

  ‘Alec Milius.’

  ‘Yes. Just one moment.’

  Five seconds of dead noise. Ten. Then a click and Liddiard picks up.

  ‘Alec.’

  ‘Good afternoon. How are you?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  I can’t tell anything by the tone of his voice. He’s cheery and polite, but that is his manner.

  ‘I was ringing about the results of Sisby.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Well say something, then. Tell me. Good or bad.

  ‘I wondered if you knew anything.’

  ‘Yes we do.’

  And there’s a terrible beat now, a gathering of courage before bad news.

  ‘I’m afraid that the Board felt you were not up to the very high standards required. I’m sorry, Alec, but we won’t be able to take your application any further.’

  My first instinct is that he has mistaken me for somebody else: the Hobbit, perhaps even Ogilvy. But there has been no confusion. Soon every glimpse of promise I have ever shown is ebbing away from me like a wound. Liddiard is talking but I cannot pick up the words: I feel debilitated, bone-weak, crushed. In the circumstances I should try to say something dignified, accept defeat graciously and withdraw. But I am too shocked to react. I stand in the hall holding the phone against my ear, ingesting failure. And because I am not saying anything, Liddiard tries to placate me.

  ‘Would you like me to indicate to you where we felt the weakness was in your application?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It was the group exercise primarily. The Board felt you did not display sufficient depth of knowledge about the subjects under discussion.’

  ‘Did anybody else make it through? Sam? Matthew?’

  This is all I want to know. Just tell me that I came the closest out of all of them.

  ‘For obvious reasons I can’t reveal that.’

  I think I detect contempt in the way he says this, as if my asking such a stupid question has only verified their decision not to hire me.

  ‘No, of course you can’t.’

  ‘But thank you for your enthusiastic participation in the recruitment procedure. We all very much enjoyed meeting you.’

  Oh, fuck off.

  ‘It’s nice of you to say so. Thank you.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  And the line goes dead. It’s over that quickly.

  9

  This Is Your Life

  My first instinct, and this shames me, is to ring Mum. No sooner have I put the phone down on Liddiard than I am picking it up again and dialling her number in Somerset. She never goes out in the afternoon. She’ll tell me everything’s all right.

  The number rings out shrill and clean. I can tell her everything, I can get it all off my chest. And I can do so in the full assurance that she will actually express relief at my failure: she might even be horrified to learn that I had even considered employment in such a murky organization. That her only child, her son, could have gone into such a thing without telling his mother…

  I hang up. She’ll never know. It’s as simple as that.

  Receiving bad news is always like this: there’s too much information to process, too much at stake that has been irretrievably lost. Something similar happened when Mum told me that my father had died. My mind went absolutely numb and there was nothing I could do to put his loss into perspective.

  The telephone rings, a volt of shock in my chest. I don’t even think about screening the call on my answering machine. I know it’s Hawkes.

  ‘Alec?’

  ‘Yes. Hello, Michael.’

  ‘I’ve just heard the news. I’m very sorry. I really thought you’d go the whole way.’

  ‘You weren’t the only one.’

  ‘They telephoned me about an hour ago.’

  ‘Why? Why did they call you? I thought you’d retired?’

  He stalls here, as if making something up.

  ‘Well, given that it was me who initiated your candidature, they wanted to keep me informed.’

  ‘But I thought you’d left? I thought you were in the oil business now.’

  ‘You never really leave, Alec. It’s an ongoing thing.’

  ‘So you’re not
doing that any more?’

  ‘Don’t be concerned about me. Let’s talk about your situation.’

  ‘OK.’

  His voice has thinned out, flustered, concealing something.

  ‘They suggested to me that your cognitive tests were fractionally below par. That’s all they said.’

  ‘They told me it was the group exercise, not the cognitive tests.’

  Another awkward pause.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. Said I wasn’t fully in control of my brief or something. Hadn’t covered all the angles.’

  ‘Well, yes, there was that too.’

  He has obviously squared what to tell me with Liddiard, but one of them has fucked up. It must have been the interview with Stevenson. They know I lied about Kate.

  ‘Did they give you any other reason why I failed?’

  ‘Don’t see it as a failure, Alec.’

  ‘That’s what it is, isn’t it?’

  Why can’t he just be honest about it? I’ve let him down. He recommended me and I’ve embarrassed him. I was so sure it was going to be all right.

  ‘The vast majority of candidates don’t even make it through to Sisby. To have progressed beyond the initial interviews is an achievement in itself.’

  ‘Well, it’s good of you to say so,’ I say, suddenly wanting to be rid of him. ‘Thanks for recommending me in the first place.’

  ‘Oh, not at all. What will you do now? Go back to your old job?’

  ‘Probably.’

  He pauses briefly before saying:

  ‘We haven’t exhausted every avenue, of course. There are alternatives.’

  But for now this is of no interest to me. I simply want the conversation to end.

  ‘You’ve done enough. Don’t worry. Thank you for everything.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ He sounds disappointed. ‘Think about it, Alec. And in the meantime, if there’s anything I can do, just let me know.’

  ‘That’s kind. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  A lie. Why would he bother contacting me again? My usefulness to him has passed.

  ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ I tell him.