by Joseph Hone
‘Marlow?’ Philby was surprised. ‘Hardly an officer. More a clerk. He was in Information and Library. And he’s in jail now, isn’t he? A long sentence. We used him to get Williams clear three or four years back.’
‘Yes – but they’re going to spring him quickly. Point is he doesn’t seem the best choice for this sort of job.’
‘A complete amateur – from the little I know of him.’
‘That’s the problem. A weak link. You have a phrase for it, don’t you’ – and he went on in English – ‘“Fools jump in when angels go to bed.”’
Philby looked at Andropov with some embarrassment. ‘Yes, well, er – perhaps. On the other hand, look on the bright side: he’s served us far better than he has the British in the past – as regards Williams for example. He’s natural fall-guy material – I suppose that’s why they thought of him. After all, replacing a KGB officer in this way, if the contacts he’s after discover the deception – that’s not a healthy future.’
The two men nodded in agreement. The afternoon had died outside the window. The dark had run in over the city like an accident.
Book Three
1
The heavy prison buildings had ceased to interest me some while back. Before, during the first months – first couple of years indeed – I’d struggled against the bars as it were, knowing it was quite the wrong thing to do, that survival came from blocking out all the terrible minutiae of the place, all the insulting brick, and thinking of anything else.
Originally, to set against the hopeless impotent struggle I made against my anger, there had been twenty or so other prisoners in the new security wing, who, even if one saw them rarely, one could occupy one’s thoughts with. At exercise or in chapel – my goodness, how we all believed then – there was little opportunity for talk, but one soon got round that. The trick was to memorise the odd words, particular faces, momentary vignettes: how one man held his dinner knife like a penholder, another lifted a cup like a Duchess, a third spoke in the purest tones of Stockbroker Surrey. And then one would take this visual and aural booty back to one’s cell, to feed on it, rationing it out, during the eighteen hours solitary we did every day then. One’s company, in those few moments of company, became transfers which one took back and coloured in one’s mind, vehemently, with daring strokes and bright hues, giving the train robbers and rapists a brilliance which, despite their previous activities, they never possessed inside. Men who had hiked a million from a mail train and had had the imagination to invest most of it in Post Office bonds before they were caught, here became monumental nonentities, empty spirits, razed tablets. So that afterwards – at the end of table tennis or Steptoe and Son in the hall – I would bring these skeletons back with me to my cell and put flesh on them bit by bit, and then set them moving as bearable, even interesting companions.
I would take a single characteristic of a man I’d exchanged no more than a few words to at exercise, a child murderer perhaps – a habit, say, of rocking on the balls of his feet, hands dug deep into his jacket pockets, and from this isolated trait I would form a whole new character and set him free in some happy context.
From such unpromising material one formed a whole repertory of imagined characters and serial dramas and I eventually learnt to occupy myself continuously with my unknown friends about the building in this way. All one needed, like a sleeping pill, was that one initial characteristic, some dull reality – a certain hairstyle or an extended ear lobe – which then became a talisman for all sorts of high and quiet adventure. Some people, I learnt – often those of an academic or artistic bent – think of nothing but violent sport in prison, motor racing and such like, pursuits which they had no interest in whatsoever when they were free. I on the other hand, who had once been fond of such athletic activities, would create fantasies of leisured, rather donnish talk in musty circumstances – a recreation I should have loathed in the real world.
A long prison sentence, inexorably, invents and opens up all the possibilities of the world for you – a lifetime’s subscription to the National Geographic magazine running through one’s head night after night. That, indeed, is the punishment. One creates the Monaco Grand Prix or the easy chat at the high table with a sharpness and reality which is only matched by the subsequent realisation that such things can never be part of your future. Thus one comes to regret one’s imagination. And the hours that you had looked forward to, alone with it, building the world, become hours dogged with the knowledge of a sour end – like evenings with a girl that you enjoy as much as ever in an affair that she has told you has no future.
So it had been for me in Durham. In the first two years there had been my anger; anger at being framed by Williams to save his skin – an anger so fierce that for days on end I thought it would literally eat me away with its violence, an anger that was absolutely isolated, a monument on an empty plain. And because of it I couldn’t talk, or eat or sleep then. Later, when I had come more to ‘accept matters’ (yes, learning to live in prison is like coming to terms with the loss of someone loved, even though it was oneself) there had been the brief company of the others, and, for all its dying falls, there were the invented Odysseys and conversations I’d made with them. But then Mountbatten’s ‘top-security’ reforms were questioned; his idea of corralling so many dangerous louts together seemed an increased risk, and one by one my library of characters was dispersed to other jails so that eventually, by the spring of 1971, there were only half a dozen of us left in ‘E’ wing and finally only one other man, one of the train robbers, whom I barely saw at all.
I ceased to care then.
I learnt the final trick of prison life: how to sleep twelve or fifteen hours a day. I became a vegetable, without pain, and had to be literally forced to my feet by warders with cold sponges, waking into the terror which every moment of consciousness had become, to defecate, to eat, to prove to the prison commissioners and the taxpayers that there was life yet, one live prisoner present and accounted for. To live was the only pain then; to get through those few waking hours was like living an imminent death, due at any moment, which one loathed yet longed for. And they realised this, of course, so that it became far more important that I should stay alive than that they should prevent my escaping. Gradually my cell and everything I might use in it turned softer, was padded in foam rubber, while implements of every kind turned to wood or polythene. The fibrous grit, the hardness, was taken out of everything – so that in keeping me alive they sent me back to the womb; finally I was sleeping nearly all the time on a rubber sheet, half drugged under a quilted Swedish duvet. Even the moody, inventive Swedes, they knew, hadn’t yet learnt how to strangle themselves with an eiderdown.
Latterly, they had moved me from my cell in the middle of ‘E’ wing to an improvised hospital ward at the end of the corridor – two cells with the wall between bashed out – and two beds, one for me and the other, empty, for the train robber, who had kept his mind intact with purposeful dreams of escape and the money somewhere under a stone in the Surrey woods. This fellow, with fourteen years in front of him, lived at the far end of the corridor, taking adult education courses in Spanish and Business Management and beating off offers from the popular Sundays to do a weekly column of investment advice. I suppose he’d already bought a suite of offices in the big new Alcoa building on Copacabana beach and was considering copper futures in the light of Allende’s recent victory on the other coast. While for my part, when I was not asleep, my only thought was to get to sleep.
I lay on my stomach and face, struggling in various positions, legs straddling imaginary fences, trying to ease the permanent feeling of cramp and strain in every muscle, arms crabbed over my head, sweating and shivering, like a man locked in a permanent hangover, longing for oblivion. For exercise I was forced up and held by two warders and frogmarched up and down the corridor, while the train robber played bar-football with another warden at one end, the two of them looking at me with real horror as I came towards
them and left again, a Lazarus, a perpetual yo-yo.
I remember from that time, really the only clear thing, the viscous metallic clamour of the football machine and the invigorating cries of the two men, the displaced Cockney warder and the train robber, so that when my back was turned, going away from them, I was easily carried into the frenzied world of a real game, the swaying mass of red and white Arsenal hats and scarves, like curling surf, when there were near-goals. The robber was a Londoner too, from Islington. And warders are human enough, especially on a basic of £21 a week with six children and the mother-in-law in the back room. And their charge must often have seemed to them a living proof of the chance of eight home draws on next week’s pools. He had half a million under a stone somewhere outside, all the fun of the world in six years’ time, with remission – and good luck to him.
I, on the other hand, was a ‘traitor’ which was something they didn’t really follow. My ‘crimes’ – the political charges, giving ‘succour and support to Her Majesty’s enemies’, like a cow, the clause in the Official Secrets Act under which I’d been sent down for twenty-eight years four years before – all this was gobbledegook to them. I’d been a spy, a double agent with the KGB, I’d betrayed the Queen. These bare bones, which they knew of, meant nothing to them, since there’d been no sex or guns, or champagne or swimming pools involved. I was a contradiction in terms for them – a dull spy, as far removed from their routine as an atom scientist might have been. Thus the only badge they could pin on me was that of confidence trickster and intellectual from a class way above them. I was someone – a real rogue, top of the ladder – in that criminal category of fraudulent stockbrokers and crooked captains of industry; old-school-tie boys, class enemies and remittance men from the Home Counties Jaguar-and-pine belt; cads whose richly deserved comeuppance was appropriately equalled only by the length and severity of their punishment.
And if I didn’t occupy the worst prison category, that of child molester or murderer, it was simply because they thought I was homosexual. Spies who were caught, without trying to shoot their way out, were always queer; they had vexatious, doting old mothers in Bexhill and spent their money on puce-coloured socks and Mantovani instead of dark glasses and golden Dunhills.
2
When he came he said ‘Good morning.’
It sounded like an old radio comic – ‘Goodmorning – Goodmorning!’ until I realised he’d simply been repeating the phrase over and over, leaning across my bed, trying to wake me, for I’d been deeply asleep.
‘Good morning, Marlow. How are things? How are you?’
What a grandmother of a man McCoy had always been. The more he observed the proprieties the more dangerously stupid one knew he was being – or going to be. In those days, when he planned things for Williams in Holborn, how well I had come to know his hopeless foolishness, his sycophantic flourishes, his acid disdain for people in the field.
And I should have remembered McCoy at once for all these lying niceties if I’d not become so numbed in the four years since I’d left his Mid-East section – that awful anonymous building in Holborn whose only virtue lay in that Henekey’s long wine bar was only ten minutes walk down the Strand. But now his polite inquiries had the intense familiarity of a recurrent dream; remembered accents from a real character, clouded in sleep-thoughts, that one tried desperately to place in a real world.
‘Hello, Marlow. I’ve come to see you – if I may …’
I thought I was dreaming, and it was this that woke me, startled. During the first few years in Durham I’d dreamt indeed; a whole extra-territorial life; serial dreams and play-of-the-month productions; engrossing entertainments which one could question and relate the morning after like a Christie addict, or Maigret querying the stain on the brothel curtains.
‘Mr Marlow …’
A face. Round. A chin too many. Older than the bland doctor who came to see me most days, talking behind the screen about sugar content and drip feeds. A tightly knotted, striped old boy’s tie; white detached collar, dark suit; austerity in everything, except the face which rose up from the tight neck like a pastry; puffy, substantial but without any definition.
‘I’m Donald McCoy. You remember – your ACO in Holborn. You were in Library and Information. My office was on the floor below, next the annexe. You remember …’
I remembered the accents then. It was the only thing McCoy remained true to in the constant temporising and prevarication which was his life – the tough and broad, yet often elusive tones. McCoy the scholarship boy, Belfast man and non-conformist; of course I remembered him.
He sat on a chair now, next the bed, seeming perplexed; a traveller who had come home to find a relative far worse than he expected, having to think of undertakers instead of grapes.
‘I’m sorry to wake you. But it’s important. Would you like to sit up. Have some coffee? You used to smoke, didn’t you? Can I get you some cigarettes?’
I hadn’t smoked for a year either; taste had gone as well as dreams; all the interpretative senses. But he got up and went outside, returning with the doctor and a warder with a trolley of coffee, biscuits and two packets of Players. They must have been waiting outside, on cue. The trolley interested me, more than any of the people. It was new, lacquered in dull gold with a handled tray on top, like nothing we’d ever had in Durham. And I thought – he’s brought the lot up with him from Holborn, the ten o’clock coffee ritual, the trolleys in the corridor, the tough little Irish and Jamaican ladies hovering outside the senior offices waiting for the disdainful Tunbridge Wells secretaries to make an order. Again, I’d not thought about Holborn in a long while, and now each moment of McCoy’s presence brought something of it back. He was picking up the bits of a puzzle I’d once been part of and that had been smashed and thrown away years before; picking them up and offering them to me. A messenger would come in through the cell door at any moment with a pile of ‘Extras’ and ‘Ordinaries’, the flimsy internal memos with the different security ratings, and by mid-morning my copy of last Saturday’s Al Ahram would arrive with Heykal’s weekly message for the whole world.
The doctor said to McCoy: ‘Here you are, Mr Hewlett. Let me know if there’s anything else.’ And then to me, leaning down as though to a child: ‘This is Mr Hewlett. Come all the way from London to see you. So do be a bit bright about it. We’re doing our best.’ He fixed a brief smile onto his face, as quick as a franking machine running over an envelope with the message ‘So much for humanity’ and then he was gone.
Hewlett? I pushed myself up and got the pillow behind me, sensing a return of all the old anger in me, bitter ironies forming again: Hewlett. They couldn’t ever let up, could they? Couldn’t go ten miles out of London without aliases, subterfuges, games; letter drops, cut-outs, surveillances.
McCoy got up, meticulously, as if on cue for a master shot in a film, and walked over to the trolley. And his words came as if from a script too – well-worn, tired, the twelfth take of the same scene that morning in a B movie.
‘Hewlett, yes.’ He paused and poured. ‘Yes, indeed.’ He licked his top lip judiciously. ‘As far as they’re concerned I’m your accountant, come about your financial affairs. Hewlett – of Carter, Hewlett and Bagshawe, Red Lion Square.’ He was pleased with the conceit, isolating the idea to himself, like a stage-struck juvenile pondering a great character role. ‘They don’t know. About Holborn and that, except the governor.’
‘You are a fool, McCoy. A bloody fool. Besides, I’ve got no accountant.’
I hadn’t voiced such a direct opinion in years and my throat felt cracked and dry as though I’d made a long speech. I’d shocked myself far more than him. He put a cup of coffee on the table next to me and I wanted it now, like iced water, but didn’t dare, knowing I’d spill the thing in physical confusion. Thought had come again, a creaking process, unearthed feeling groping for words and finding true sentences first time round. I might not be so lucky again and feeling was still miles away from actio
n.
‘They tell me you’ve been getting pretty low here, Marlow. Not – facing up, eh?’
‘Not –’ I’d wanted to say ‘Not taking it like a man’ but couldn’t. The ‘t’ on ‘taking’ threw me completely.
‘No need to force it, Marlow. I know what it must feel like. Just listen for a minute. I’m Hewlett because what I’ve got to suggest is just between you and I; no one else. So don’t rush it. I’ll be here overnight. We’ll be seeing as much of each other as you need. You see, they may have made a mistake, you see. All of them, I mean. About you, about your trial. And I want you to help us put it right.’
McCoy was a great believer in self-help. For him the sin would always remain, indelibly struck on the man, even if he were later proved guiltless. Even then, four years later, in the matter of my trial, it wasn’t a question of my having been right and everyone else wrong. His non-conformism demanded that he excuse his own mistakes in the matter by spreading the fault equally amongst everyone involved. No one could ever be free of blame in McCoy’s Old Testament canon; except himself, for he had seen the light and had a permanent message for all the fallen men of his department. McCoy believed deeply in other people’s original sin. How he must sometimes have longed for the original faith itself, where, bleeding, he could have put himself upon a cross.
‘You remember, at the trial? Your defence tried to show that Williams had been a double, a KGB man for years – how, when you learnt this in Egypt, Williams framed you by getting Moscow to abduct your wife and then displaying her in Moscow. At the time it all added up perfectly. Your guilt, I mean.’
‘Yes. Perfectly.’
McCoy ran on, encouraged. I stretched out a hand for the coffee. ‘Here, let me help.’
