The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  I was reminded of all that – and of some of the happy early years I had with him when we were a good deal more merry than we are now. He was someone in the country then, now just something in this city. He and I so nearly stayed out in Rhodesia there, farming and shooting, an animal life in every sense. And there are regrets, I’d be pretending otherwise – not for the better, because more simple life – it was a pretty mindless sort of existence we had – but regrets for all the horizons of the time. That was 10, 15 years ago, of course, before Sharpeville, before Vorster and the concrete mixers took over, before we knew much about Africa, knew or cared anything about the dark side of it, as we have to now.

  We had an unreasoning Arcadia: for you Africa is a laboratory where the whole future of the continent has to be displayed, tested, catalogued. But in fact what you propagandists are doing there is making up the gunpowder, preparing the blood baths. I’m not running away from what will happen in Africa as a result of the old comfortable colonial paternalism and your new ‘development’. Just the opposite: I know what will happen: that when they have finished killing themselves out there as a result of both our efforts, whoever is left afterwards will really start concreting the grass. That’s what ‘progress’ will have amounted to, democracy or whatever other name you give the lie: somebody will be ‘free’ all right: the wrong people, in a world not worth living in.

  I was surprised at this ideology. The affair seemed to have had far wider dimensions than those of a double bed. I had pictured a woman formidable in desire, perhaps, but not in political spirit. It seemed an unlikely relationship, this between a Marxist and an old-fashioned colonial Tory. Yet was she that? She seemed to be correcting my thoughts on her even as I read her letter, as though she were close to me, hearing her voice in the next room:

  Thursday

  I am not afraid of the future. I am not the ‘Natural Tory’ you once called me. It’s simply a determination to be happy, and having come half-way through life I’ve proved certain ways to this end, travelled some of them, and don’t believe I’ve got anywhere near the end yet. And those ways, that map, is for me most often in the past; in things half done then, not in new shapes and forms. We think we have experienced the past just because, willy nilly, we have lived through it, that we have completed it. But we haven’t. There were hundreds of turnings off the main street which we knew about then and never took. I want to take them now – not to re-live anything – this has nothing to do with nostalgia – but to live now all that was unlived then.

  Pickfords removal van interrupted me later that afternoon, clearing the place out, leaving only the basic furniture that had come with the flat. Afterwards I didn’t feel like going on with the letters. I packed them up in his suitcase, along with the rest of Graham’s data. There was a last meeting with McCoy and Croxley opposite at their look-out post and then the Southampton boat train first thing next morning.

  ‘Well,’ McCoy said pompously in the fading light, ‘anything new in your researches?’

  We were sitting at the dining-room table again, surrounded by Graham’s shadowy remains. Croxley got up and turned the light on. Graham’s shoes were on the table.

  ‘Nothing,’ I lied. ‘But I see you’ve filled in a missing piece.’ I saw Graham’s bare feet now at the end of a body hanging from a rope.

  ‘But you are getting the hang of the man?’ McCoy said abruptly.

  ‘Oh yes. I’m beginning to see him very well.’

  We went over all my routines again, checking everything once more. It was Croxley who nearly upset things at the end. ‘The postman,’ he said. ‘What did he bring Graham this morning? The strike’s finished. We saw him come.’

  ‘Yes. A lot of bills.’ I reached inside my coat, ‘I nearly forgot. And a letter from his mother.’

  ‘We’ll settle those.’ I handed the envelopes over, and Croxley looked through them.

  ‘Not much in eight weeks’ post,’ I said. But I didn’t press my luck.

  ‘He wasn’t the writing type,’ Croxley said. ‘In his position you don’t commit yourself, least of all to written confidences.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Just bills from the Gas Board.’

  ‘And his old mother in Durban.’

  I was sorry to deceive Croxley.

  ‘Come on,’ McCoy broke in. ‘You’re not writing an obituary of Graham. Get into his shoes, Marlow. And go!’

  *

  The ship left at midday. Yachts were far out in front of us, coloured triangles heeling right over in a sharp wind and spray of Southampton water that did nothing for us at all. We had gone far beyond the natural elements in our steel hulk, were already a world within a world. The yachtsmen were real: they would go and they would turn round when the afternoon began to die far out, coming up the water in the evening on another tide, leaving the salt on their lips, like the memory of a kiss, tasting it as an elixir they’d missed all winter, the acid flakes summoning up long after nightfall in the club all the risks and pleasures of the day.

  But for me the huge ship was a prison again, of another sort, and I gazed as longingly at the sea that morning as I’d watched the sky move past my Durham window. It was one of those moments when, in middle life, one makes a promise to renew the buried athlete in oneself, swears brief fealty to some natural order, thinking, just for a few minutes or so before sleep, that tomorrow one will break the cage of self, leap out of it at a bound – into falconry, mountain climbing, yachting or even golf. So, even in escape, in gliding down the water, feeling the first small butts and tremors of the channel, I wanted some other and greater escape.

  I didn’t bother with lunch that day. I was so tired. Instead I lay down in my cabin amidships and took out the woman’s letters again.

  … we walked to the top of a hill in Tsavo Park, with the warden and his stories about hippos on the banks of the Nile, where he used to be. Do you remember? How he and his wife met one walking by the river and hit it with his walking stick on the nose – and then hit it a second time. ‘Now I’m absolutely certain,’ he said, ‘that if you stand up and face these animals nine times out of ten they’ll break.’ A Jack Hawkins figure in an old bush hat and a Land Rover. The air was so crisp in the evenings, when it got cold and dark within half an hour, and the cedar roared in the grate, the Tilley lamps hissed, and people chatted and laughed over their beers before dinner …

  I couldn’t quite make it out-the writer’s style, the knowledge; this recurrent African theme. There were the obvious images of space and freedom and something lost. But that wasn’t all. What had they been up to? A shooting safari? Who was this woman, what was she like? What else had happened in Tsavo National Park – and what, precisely, had happened at all the other times they’d spent together which I didn’t know about? I was already beginning to suffer the onset of that blatant curiosity that comes with shipboard, or any other enclosed life, though it might have been nothing more than the dregs of my profession stirring again, the never-dying taste for the curious that is the essence of the trade.

  Falling in and out of sleep as the ship slid down the channel, the waves starting to boom gently on its flanks, I tried to fill in the gaps in her letters as in Graham’s notes and memos, trying to properly compose their affair like a Maupassant story or a new Brief Encounter.

  I had to complete Graham’s reality in myself, polish it, make it shine perfectly. I had so far an unformed part, handed out by the script editor, the lines of character briefly drawn, and for my own survival I had to research the role to its limits. Very well, then. I would start by inhabiting Graham’s most intimate secrets – by imagining, inventing them.

  … We had met that spring six years ago just after I’d come back from a trip to Kenya: under the chandeliers in the huge salon on the first floor in Whitehall: glasses falling about the place, the long table at one end littered with bottles, half a curtain drawn against the glare of evening light from the river; Africans standing up everywhere through
the arid chatter, as significant on the horizons of the room as baobab trees on their own plainsland: the rich African’s Africa; the shapely, dusky confidence. And this woman had somehow stood out from all this, talking to Belafonte from the Voice of Kenya Radio who was doing a script with me. She had risen above this expensive gathering so that I had noticed her as easily as a potentate on a throne as I walked towards her with my secretary …

  At what point had I realised that she was married, that her husband wasn’t with her? – when she had said something and looked at me candidly, pushing her hair backwards over each ear in the quick movements I was afterwards to become so familiar with, fingers moving from the parting in the middle of her forehead, raking the dark strands sharply several times either side as though seeking a way through undergrowth, looking for a path which she had to follow urgently. There was something of a hurry in her. The eyes always moved, were always swinging or lifting, like a commander at the head of an armoured brigade pressing into new country. She was commanding then? Yes, but with a deprecation, almost an apology, as though she had taken over the lead perforce, simply because the other officers had fallen by the way. Something around five feet nine inches, then, in a red and gilt brocade Kashmiri waistcoat, a smock dress with a lace bodice. Why not?

  In the days that followed, in the empty spaces of grey and uneventful ocean, in the short times between one meal and another, in the good moments after dinner when I was by myself in one of the six bars, I passed the time by living the on-and-off incidents of the affair, building detailed pictures of the abrupt times we had spent together. This after all, I thought, was a story I had been licensed to invent. Luckily she and I had never managed to spend long in each other’s company – I should have needed a world trip to deliberate that – so there was no need to construct a continuous tale, with its flats and soggy shallows. I need invest only in quick and startling snapshots of desire, swinging the glass hurriedly over the bad times, quickly isolating the heart that mattered. I could indulge the slender moments, the thefts from ordinary time, which are the flavour of such secret appetites. I didn’t bother with the corollary: the husband rifling through her desk and laundry, the detective lurking in the laurel driveway. I contrived a properly salty and reckless scenario, such as any proper affair demands.

  … we were eating together, somewhere outside London, an inn not far from the river which we’d been out on in a boat that afternoon. She had grazed her finger on the gunwale, or a splinter from the oar had pierced it just below the knuckle, and she’d bandaged the cut, from the hotel’s first-aid kit, wrapping up the fine bone of her long middle finger in a neat cocoon. And that night, lying on her back, hands raised across the pillow as in some vicious hold-up, the white cotton roll stood out awkwardly, temptingly, the last piece of clothing in a long desired nakedness.

  For most of the first two days at sea I played with this woman, trying to piece together her relationship with Graham, with me – unwilling to free her from my imagination until I had properly completed her, fulfilled her destiny as a real person. Her reality had come to obsess me.

  But then on the third evening, with more wine than I needed for dinner, I realised it was pointless, useless. I could invent only her physical traits, and some few imagined circumstances in which she had her being – nothing more. She was as void of any actual character as Graham was of his own identity. Only I was real. I had spent so long inventing affection and involvement in the isolation of Durham jail that I had been unable to stop the process in my first days outside.

  Blue weather came half-way across the ocean as we cut through the gulf stream on the southerly route. I spent the first part of the morning walking the deserted decks and the second on a deck chair reading some of the books Graham had packed for his journey. Anthony Burgess’s Malayan trilogy, The Long Day Wanes, proved rewarding; Joyce Cary’s The Case for African Freedom I found less easy going. I kept well clear of organised ‘games’ in the afternoon and the casino in the evening. Instead I visited the cinema, the swimming-pool and the sauna, and rode much on a mechanical bicycle in the gym.

  And I realised that the first few days out from Durham had been the dangerous time, when the sense of freedom had almost overcome me, inducing impossible visions, of falconry and bright women. I had gone on, as I had done in prison, imagining life, reaching out for it in places where it could not have existed: I had let my imagination run away with me. Now, gently, I was learning to see and take things as they were, to be happy in reality – alone, slipping off the skin of the past as we sighted land and glided through the Narrows towards Manhattan, a free man for the moment on the ship; unattached, unencumbered and unobserved.

  *

  Alexei Flitlianov had watched the man carefully, from a distance, during his last days in London, when he had seen him taking over Graham’s identity, and throughout the voyage across the Atlantic. He could see him again now, standing up with a crowd of other passengers by the starboard rail as the huge ship slid beneath the Verrazzano bridge, the city rising brilliantly in the distance.

  Who was he? What was he up to? What would his contacts be? He would go on following him very carefully until he found out. For in him now, not Graham, lay all the dangerous keys to his future.

  Book Four

  1

  The city had climbed up in front of us long before, when we’d passed under the Verrazzano bridge eight miles out; the towers, the points, all the steps and cliffs of Manhattan growing up on the horizon, poking gradually into the sun, like an ultimate geography lesson – some final, arrogant proof in steel and concrete that the world was round. From a distance the city was a very expensive educational game, a toy not like other toys.

  And one had seen those towers so often in so many images – in polychrome and black and white, moving or with music – that all of us standing on the forward deck that morning had the expression of picture dealers scrutinising a proffered masterpiece, leaving a polite interval before crying ‘Fake!’

  These preconceptions were a pity since, from a distance, in the sharp light over a gently slapping metal-blue sea, the place looked better than any of its pictures, like the one advertisement layout that had escaped all the exaggerated attentions of the years, come free of Madison Avenue, the press, all the published myths and horrors of the city.

  Sharp winds had rubbed the skyline clean, light glittered on the edges of the buildings and all I saw was a place where I was unknown, where unknown people bore ceaselessly up and down those cavernous alleys, between bars and restaurants and offices, all busy with an intent that had nothing to do with me.

  The city stood up like a rich menu I could afford at last after a long denial.

  The first feeling in the streets was like meeting a girl somewhere, in a group, swapping something, giving and taking, creating an appetite, sharing a look and a mood which you know will take you together before nightfall. There was something inevitable and long-expected, something one had missed, in New York.

  The noise and rush from the cab, the filth of the dockside streets, were words quickly spoken, suddenly desired intimacies, saying it was right, and right, we wanted it now. The clatter was like whispers, the flashing signs sure signals of an impending affair. And there was nothing of the ugliness of an old whore for someone who would take anything, but the true excitement of coming to a new land, a territory of undiscovered tribes.

  We had been sailing for many days about an uncharted sea when on the feast of St Brendan, towards noon, an island appeared set in a metal bay. We found it to be place of the carob tree, with vines and sweet water, a land different from all our knowledge. And being soured in the known world, and anxious in our time, and fraught with journeying, we took rest in this new place …

  The island was an empty map as I crossed it that afternoon. All I had heard or learnt, everything I had imagined – the scalps of other people’s experience, the rag-bag of guidelines that we rattle on our belts throughout most of life – all these rece
ived notions disappeared at the cross-park exit above the Plaza Hotel, waiting for the lights to change. I was looking at two men in homburgs and thick-soled brogues talking on the sidewalk. The collars of their straight black coats were turned up under their ears, their faces almost completely hidden from the wind. They stood there quietly, firmly, communicating: two slabs of black marble. And I realised I couldn’t imagine what they were saying, couldn’t invent a language for them, couldn’t invest any of my experience of mankind in them – to tell me what their business might have been, or anything of the fabric of their lives. It was as if an anthropologist had been given the opportunity of observing the nature, the language, the social rites of a tribe so far removed from his own experience, and all the learning of the world, that he was forced to conclude that their society was not only unique but linked directly with pre-history.

  Out of all mankind I couldn’t place these two men at all. Nothing I had taken up in forty years through the world had prepared me for them. The basic usages and assumptions which linked man – even savage with literate man – were absent here. Yet I was not gazing at robots; these two had life.

  And then I knew what it was. There was nothing absent in them. They were as ordinary as any men. It was I who had lost something at last – a received vision of mankind. For so long in life, in my job, I had been taught to categorise and define, to value or hate something only when I could name it, to fear always the unknowable and unnameable. And these two men had sprung up at me from the sidewalk without definition, identity. There was no meaning I could attach to them, as when one gazes so long at an object that the language we have ceases to justify it, as a fork will lose its forkiness and the world itself become mysterious and chaotic once we have broken through the barriers of common usage. In just the same way I had looked so long, so casually at men that they had lost their true capacity and potential. I had come to assume simply their existence and death and had forgotten that one is obliged to them in other ways, that they themselves have other moments.