“What did you call me?” I said. “My name is not John.”
“For us you are. For our meetings.”
“Nonsense. I’m not going to have some ridiculous code name foisted on me. I won’t be able to remember it. You’ll telephone me and I’ll say, There’s no John here, and hang up. It’s impossible. John, indeed!”
He sighed. I could see I was a disappointment to him. No doubt he had been looking forward to a pleasant hour in the company of a British gentleman, a university type, diffident and courtly, who just happened to have access to the secrets of the Cavendish Laboratory and would pass them over with charming absent-mindedness, in the manner of an impromptu tutorial. I ordered another vodka and drank it off; it seemed to go straight upwards rather than down, and my head swam and I had the sensation of levitating for a second an inch above the floor. The fat old man with the dog subsided at a table in the corner and began to cough laboriously, making a noise like that of a suction pump in action; the dog meanwhile was studying Iosif and me, head to one side and an ear-flap dangling, like that terrier on the record label. Iosif hunched his back against the animal’s alert gaze and, passing a hand across the lower half of his face in what comedians call a slow burn, said something incomprehensible.
“I can’t hear you if you speak like that,” I said.
In a spasm of anger, immediately checked, he clutched my arm—a surprising and, I confess, frightening, iron grip—and put his face close beside mine, looking over my shoulder and swivelling his mouth towards my ear.
“The Syndics,” he hissed, and a prickle of spittle settled on my cheek.
“The what?”
I laughed. I was a little tipsy already, and everything had begun to seem at once hilarious and faintly desperate. Iosif in a hot whisper explained, amid tics and twitches and whistling breaths, like a chorister telling the boy next to him a dirty joke, that Moscow desired to procure a transcript of the deliberations of the Cambridge Syndics, under the illusion that this venerable body was some sort of clandestine union of the great and powerful of our powerful and great university, a cross between the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion.
“For God’s sake,” I said, “they’re just a committee of the university senate!”
He waggled a portentous eyebrow.
“Exactly.”
“They conduct the business of the university. Butchers’ bills. The wine cellar. That’s all they do.”
He shook his head slowly from side to side, pursing his lips and letting his eyelids slowly drop. He knew what he knew. Oxbridge was running the country, and the Syndics were running half of Oxbridge: how could an account of their doings be anything less than fascinating to our masters in Moscow? I sighed. This was not an auspicious beginning to my career as a secret agent. There is a study to be written of the effect on the history of Europe in our century of the inability of England’s enemies to understand this perverse, stubborn, sly and absurd nation. Much of my time and energy over the next decade and a half would be spent trying to teach Moscow, and the likes of Iosif, to distinguish between form and content in English life (trust an Irishman to know the difference). Their misconceptions were shamingly ludicrous. When Moscow Centre heard I was a regular visitor at Windsor, that I was friendly with HM, and was often bade stay on in the evenings to play at after-dinner games with his wife—who was also related to me, however distantly—they were beside themselves, believing that one of their men had penetrated to the very seat of power in the country. Accustomed to tsardom, old style and new, they could not understand that our sceptred ruler does not rule, but is only a sort of surrogate parent of the nation, and not for a moment to be taken seriously. At the end of the war, when Labour got in, I suspect Moscow believed it would be only a matter of time before the royal family, little princesses and all, would be taken to the Palace basement and put up against the wall. Attlee, of course, they could not fathom, and their bafflement only increased when I pointed out to them that he took his politics less from Marx than from Morris and Mill (Oleg wanted to know if these were people in the government). When the Conservatives got back they assumed the election had been rigged, unable to believe that the working class, after all they had learned in the war, would freely vote for the return of a right-wing government (“My dear Oleg, there is no stouter Tory than the English working man”). Boy was infuriated and depressed by these failures of comprehension; I, however, had sympathy for the Comrades. Like them, I too came of an extreme and instinctual race. No doubt this is why Leo Rothenstein and I got on better with them than genuine Englishmen like Boy and Alastair: we shared the innate, bleak romanticism of our two very different races, the legacy of dispossession, and, especially, the lively anticipation of eventual revenge, which, when it came to politics, could be made to pass for optimism.
Meanwhile Iosif is still standing before me, like a ventriloquist’s dummy, with his too-long cuffs and his facial muscles that seem worked by wires, attentive and hopeful as that old man’s dog, and since I am tired of him, and depressed, and sorry I ever allowed Hartmann to persuade me to throw in my lot with the likes of this absurd, this impossible person, I tell him that, yes, I will get hold of a copy of the minutes of the next Syndics meeting, if that is what he really wants, and he gives a serious, swift little nod, the kind of nod I would become familiar with later on, from self-important chumps in war rooms and secret briefing centres when I came over from the Department to deliver some perfectly useless piece of classified information. All the commentators nowadays, all the wiseacres in books and in the newspapers, underestimate the adventure-story element in the world of espionage. Because real secrets are betrayed, because torturers exist, because men die—Iosif was to end up, like so many other minor servants of the system, with an NKVD bullet in the back of his head—they imagine that spies are somehow both irresponsible and inhumanly malign, like the lesser devils who carry out great Satan’s commands, when really what we most resembled were those brave but playful, always resourceful chaps in school stories, the Bobs and Dicks and Jims who are good at cricket and get up to harmless but ingenious pranks and in the end unmask the Headmaster as an international criminal, while at the same time managing to get enough clandestine swotting done to come first in their exams and win the scholarships and so save their nice, penurious parents the burden of paying to send them to one of Our Great Universities. That, anyway, is how we saw ourselves, though of course we would not have put it in those terms. We considered ourselves to be good, that is the point. It is hard to recapture now the heady flavour of those pre-war days when the world was going to hell with bells banging and whistles madly shrilling and we alone among our fellows knew exactly what our task was. Oh, I am well aware that young men were going off to Spain to fight, and forming trades unions, and getting up petitions, and so on, but that kind of thing, though necessary, was stop-gap action; secretly, we regarded these poor eager fellows as little more than cannon-fodder, or interfering do-gooders. What we had, and they lacked, was the necessary historical perspective; while the Spanish Brigaders shouted about the need to stop Franco, we were already planning for the transition period after the defeat of Hitler, when with a gentle shove from Moscow, and from us, the war-damaged regimes of Western Europe would fall down domino-fashion—yes, we were early proponents of that now discredited theory—and the Revolution would spread like a bloodstain from the Balkans to the coast of Connemara. And yet, at the same time, how detached we were. Somehow, despite all our talk and even some action, the great events of the time trundled past us, vivid, gaudily coloured, too real to be real, like the props of a travelling theatre being carted away on the back of a lorry, off to some other town. I was working in my rooms at Trinity when I heard the announcement of the fall of Barcelona on the wireless that was playing loudly in the room of my next-door neighbour—Welshman, some sort of physicist, liked dance-band music, told me all about the latest wizardry being worked at the Cavendish—and I continued calmly studying through my magnifying
glass a reproduction of the curious pair of severed heads lying on a cloth in the foreground of Poussin’s The Capture of Jerusalem by Titus, as if the two events, the real and the depicted, were equally far off from me in antiquity, the one as fixed and finished as the other, all frozen cry and rampant steed and stylised, gorgeous cruelty. You see…?
There is one final image of Iosif I want to sketch before I pack him away for good in his tissue paper alongside so many other of the best-forgotten characters with whom my life is littered. As he was leaving the pub—he had insisted we go out separately—the old man’s little dog trotted forward, coiling and uncoiling itself in that enthusiastic doggy way, as if its body, taut as a sausage, were somehow spring-loaded, and tried to rub itself against his ankle, only to be rebuffed by a deft, sideways kick from a polished toecap. The animal gave a squeal, more in sorrow than pain, and skittered away, its claws clicking on the floor tiles, and sat down again between its master’s spread feet, blinking and rapidly licking its lips in puzzlement and consternation. Iosif went out, briefly letting in sunlight that played, unspurnably, at his ankles, and the old man glanced at me from under his brows with a sort of grinning scowl, and for a moment I saw what he thought he was seeing in me: another of the petty, impatient, harsh-eyed ones, the dog-kickers, the elbowers-through, the pushers-out-of-the-way, and I wanted to say to him, No, no, I am not like that, I am not like him! and then I thought, But perhaps I am? I catch that same look nowadays when some Cold War veteran or self-appointed patriotic guardian of Western Values recognises me in the street and metaphorically spits upon me.
Anyway. Thus began my career as a working spy. I recalled Felix Hartmann’s hope that we scions of the loftier classes would provide Moscow with a completed jigsaw-puzzle picture of the English establishment (I had not had the heart to enquire if he had ever considered the subjects the manufacturers of such puzzles choose for illustration, but I had an image of a bunkerful of crop-headed commissars gravely poring over a caramel and sugarstick-pink scene complete with cottage and roses and rippling rill and ringleted little girl with a basket of buttercups on her dimpled arm: England, our England!). Diligently I began to accept the dinner invitations that previously I would have declined with a shudder, and found myself discussing water-colours and the price of poultry with the moustached, slightly mad-eyed wife of a Cabinet minister, or listening, befuddled with brandy and cigar smoke, while a peer of the realm with brick-red jowls and a monocle, gesturing expansively, expounded to the table on the devilishly clever methods the Jews and Freemasons had employed to infiltrate every level of government, to the point where they were now ready to seize power and murder the King. I wrote up exhaustive accounts of these occasions—discovering, by the way, an unexpected flair for narrative; some of these early reports were positively racy, if somewhat over-coloured—and passed them on to Iosif, who would scan them rapidly, frowning, and breathing loudly through his nostrils, and then stow them in an inner pocket and cast a masked glance about the bar and begin to talk with laboured blandness about the weather. Once in a while I gleaned a bit of information or gossip that elicited one of Iosif’s rare, lip-biting, nervous little smiles. What Moscow considered to be my greatest, early triumph was the long and, to me, extremely tedious conversation I had at a Trinity Feast with a Private Secretary at the War Office, a portly, sleek-headed man with a small moustache, who as he prattled on reminded me of those blithe gaffe-makers in the Bateman cartoons; as the night ground along he became increasingly, solemnly, comically drunk—his dicky kept flying up, as in a music-hall farce—and told me, in indiscreet detail, how unprepared for war our armed forces were, that the armaments industry was a joke and that the government had not the will or the means to do anything to rectify the situation. I could see that Iosif, sitting at a low table in a corner of The Hare and Hounds in Highbury, crouched intently over my report, could not decide whether he should be appalled or jubilant at the implications for Europe in general, and Russia in particular, of what he was reading. What he seemed unaware of was that every newsboy in the country already knew how scandalously ill-equipped we were for war, and how spineless the government was.
This naivety on the part of Moscow and its emissaries was a cause of deep misgiving to all of us on our side; much of what passed with them for intelligence was freely available to the public. Didn’t they ever, I asked Felix Hartmann in exasperation, read the papers or listen to the ten o’clock news on the wireless? “What do your people do at the embassy all day, apart from issuing laughable communiqués about Russia’s industrial output and refusing entry visas to defence correspondents of the Daily Express?” He smiled, and shrugged, and looked at the sky and began to whistle through his teeth. We were walking by the frozen Serpentine. It was January, the air was dense with mauve-white frost-smoke, and the ducks were waddling unsteadily about on the ice, baffled and disgruntled by this inexplicable solidification of their liquid world. After two years of duty Iosif had been abruptly recalled; I can still see the sickly sheen of sweat on his already cadaverous brow the day when he told me that this was to be our final meeting. We shook hands and in the doorway—The King’s Head, Highgate—he turned back and shot me a furtive, imploring glance, silently asking me I do not know what awful, impossible question.
“Life at the embassy is somewhat… subdued, just now,” Hartmann said.
Since Iosif’s abrupt departure I had been telephoning the embassy repeatedly, but had heard nothing until today, when Hartmann had just turned up, dressed in black as usual, wearing a black hat with the brim turned low at the front. When I asked what was going on, he had only smiled and put a finger to his lips and led me into the street and towards the park. Now he stopped and looked across the iron-coloured ice, rocking back and forth on his heels, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his long overcoat.
“Moscow has gone silent,” he said. “I send my messages along the usual channels, but nothing comes back. I am like a person who has survived an accident. Or like a person waiting for an accident to happen. It is a very strange sensation.”
On the bank near us a small boy attended by a black-stockinged nurse was throwing crusts of bread to the ducks; the child laughed throatily in delight to see the birds ignominiously slipping and slithering, their wings thrashing, as they chased the wildly skidding morsels. We turned and walked on. At the other side of the lake, on Rotten Row, a group of riders was jostling along untidily amid white bursts of horse-breath. In silence we reached the bridge, and there we stopped. Distant behind the tops of the black trees around us the shrouded forms of London loomed. Hartmann, dreamily smiling, stood with his head tilted to one side, as if listening for some small, expected sound.
“I am going back,” he said. “They have told me I must come back.”
High up in the frozen mist, above the spires and the chimney pots, I seemed to see something hover for a second, a giant figure, all silver and gold and dully ashine. I heard myself swallow.
“I say, old man,” I said, “is that wise, do you think? They tell me the climate over there is not at all congenial, these days. Quite the coldest it’s been for a long time.”
He turned away from me and glanced skyward, as if he too had sensed some hovering portent.
“Oh, it will be all right,” he said absently. “They say they want me to make a personal report, that’s all.”
I nodded. Strange, how like incipient laughter dismay can feel. We set off across the bridge.
“You could always stay here,” I said. “I mean, they can’t make you go, can they?”
He laughed, and linked his arm through mine.
“This is what I like about you,” he said, “all of you. Matters are so simple.” Our footsteps rang on the bridge like axe-blows. He pressed my arm against his ribs. “I must go,” he said. “Otherwise there is… nothing. Do you see?”
We left the bridge still arm in arm and stood on the brow of the park’s gentle rise and surveyed the city crouched before us motionless
in the mist.
“I shall miss London,” Hartmann said. “Kensington Gore, the Brompton Road, Tooting Bee—is there really a place called Tooting Bee? And Beauchamp Place, which only yesterday I at last learned how to pronounce in the correct way. Such a waste, all this valuable knowledge.”
He squeezed my arm again, and glanced quickly at me side-wise, and I felt something in him falter, as if a part of an inner mechanism had suddenly, finally, run down.
“Listen,” I said, “the thing is, you mustn’t go; we won’t let you, you know.”
He only smiled, and turned and limped away, back in the direction we had come, over the bridge, under the massy black mist-draped trees, and I never saw him again.
7
I tried for years to find out what had become of him. The Comrades were tight-lipped; when they drop you, you disappear between the floorboards. Tatters of rumour did drift back. Someone had seen him in the Lubyanka, in bad shape, missing an eye; another claimed he was at Moscow Centre, under surveillance but running the Lisbon desk; he was in Siberia; in Tokyo; in the Caucasus; his corpse had been spotted in the back of a car on Dzerzhinski Street. These whispers might have been coming to me from the dark side of the moon. Russia was that far away; it was always that far away. The couple of weeks I had spent there had only served to make the place more distant for me. This is a curious fact about us—I think it is curious—that the country to which we had committed ourselves was a blur in our minds, the Promised Land we would never reach, and never wanted to reach. None of us would have dreamed of going to live there voluntarily; later on, Boy, though he tried to hide it, was aghast when he came to realise that he had no choice but to defect. The opposition seemed far more familiar with the place than we were. There were people in the Department, desk men who had never been east of the Elbe, who talked as if they were in and out of the Lubyanka every day, strolling up Dzerzhinski Street—which I hardly knew how to pronounce— for a copy of Pravda and a packet of whatever was the most popular brand of cigarettes in Moscow in those days.
The Untouchable Page 16
