by Joseph Hone
This was the message, I was sure, that had cheated me, lain in wait for me all morning, the echoes of something unrevealed searching everywhere in the building for expression; a secret in the dry atmosphere hidden in the shoe-shine man’s harsh singing, which only I could interpret, which was for me alone.
And now it had come clear, in Jackson’s polite responses: ‘I used to farm there for a while. In the south.’ He had given me a phrase in a vital lost language through which I could now elucidate a whole civilisation’s hieroglyphics. The puzzle resolved itself so simply and clearly that, before I thought of the long academic journey ahead towards full interpretation, I rushed headlong, an exultant professor, into translating the first sentence of the mysterious text: I could suddenly see this thin, amused man Guy Jackson – with his wife Helen – standing outside a colonial farmstead on the uplands, the huge skies reaching down over them, a blue canopy, smothering the fever and acacia trees that coloured an old lawn. They had just come back from doing something active – were standing there by the porch in old clothes, sweating, welcoming the evening.
I looked quickly across at Helen Jackson deeply gossiping with Wheel. I had forgotten: there was one other person who must have drawn from the morning something quite buried and forbidden: an equal secret. If she was the woman in the letters I was not the man she had written them to; her lovely messages had gone badly astray. Only she would know that, but she would know it well – too well, the memory spreading like a fire through so many hotel bedrooms. I was looking at a woman who had been waiting for her lover, and he had turned up all right, bright and early, untrue in everything except in name. And that was false, too – how she must have remembered – as false as all my body was to all of his.
Helen Jackson and George Graham: they had been the lovers in the story, in those letters, who had come to argue about the past and future of Africa and the same ruthless pendulum of happiness: ‘I am not afraid of the future …’; the ‘natural Tory’ whose confident politics had collapsed and the disappointed Marxist; it all fitted. I was sure of it. Her aristocratic curiosity exactly reflected Graham’s comments on her, while her suddenly frozen welcome after she heard my name confirmed all my own quick inventions.
Helen Jackson, the wife of my London contact, was my mistress. What was the rest of the equation? Had she any idea, for example, who George Graham really was? Was their relationship the only illicit thing they shared? Had she been covertly bound to him, hidden with him, for six years, without knowing his final identity? She must have been blind to that, I thought. Yet how had it all come about? How had a deep-cover KGB agent come to love the wife of a senior officer in British Intelligence? Initially one can think only of coincidence in such a strange meeting, but years in the same profession made me have my doubts.
Jackson and I chatted on about New York apartments, the relative merits and dangers of the East and West sides; they had a place in a new block on the East Side, off Second Avenue in the Fifties.
‘Wretchedly expensive and only really half safe – with the children. But there’s not much alternative. It’s only ten minutes’ walk here, which cuts out the transport business. You’ll come round – come for drinks this evening if you’re free. We’ve a few friends coming.’
I thanked him without saying yes or no. Already I felt myself an interloper, the lover gliding easily into the circle of the husband’s trust, the cheat who takes every liberty – another man’s wife, his gin – who tells his children a bedtime story before dinner, and makes clandestine arrangements for tomorrow with his wife while she tidies up afterwards in the kitchen.
Jackson was pushing me into a role I didn’t want. Yet this woman had been part of George Graham, the deepest thing in his life, possibly. I could not avoid the implications of this indefinitely. I saw at once that I should either have to sort things out with Helen Jackson, or explain the whole matter to her husband. But this latter course never struck me seriously; I was not going to betray this confidence of Graham’s no matter in how many other ways I was his stooge. She and I would speak about it by ourselves, I thought. I should tell her the position, she would have to accept it and keep her mouth shut about it – as she had done about Graham for six years previously. For that time she had withheld the fact of her real lover from her husband; now she could do the same with his pretender.
Wheel had gone on talking to her about her children, two girls, Sarah and Sheila, whose ages I couldn’t determine from the odd snatches of conversation – some question of a nanny or a teacher, I couldn’t make out which, so that they might have been two years old or twelve. And from her expression it seemed that Helen Jackson was as uninvolved in her conversation with Wheel as we two were on the other side of the table. The curious intensity had dropped from her eyes, the invitation had all been withdrawn, her flourishing airs quite subsided. Before, though cast in a classic mould, her buoyancy and vitality had lifted her far above those confines into a sphere of lightness and finesse. Now she seemed exhausted, a weight had fallen on all her natural virtues; she was hesitant in everything, as though quite overcome with mundane domestic worries. She turned to her husband: ‘Adam has the address – of that nursery school on the West side. We should go take a look at it.’
It was only then I realised she was American: the accents, the grammar, were light but distinct. Could this woman have lived in South Africa or the old Rhodesias? Perhaps I was quite wrong about her. Then she took a notebook from her bag and started to write down the address and I had no more doubts; the handwriting was the same as that in the letters – even the ink, a black ink – the same slanting, hurried, rather immature scrawl. She was leaning forward, using the space of table right in front of me, as though anxious that I should see her writing clearly, be able to compare the messages. She seemed wilfully to be offering me conclusive proof of our previous association, of her fidelity and my lies. When she had finished writing she looked up at me, but spoke to her husband: ‘Where’s Mr Graham staying?’
I repeated my piece about the Tudor Hotel, and she said at once like an old friend: ‘Oh, you can’t go on staying there. Friends of ours on the West Side have an apartment in an old block; it’s a co-op – they know the super; I’m sure you’d get something there. Wouldn’t he, Guy?’
‘Yes, might be a chance. Might be lucky.’
Shc looked down at the address she’d just taken from Wheel. ‘Their block’s not far from the nursery school – Ninety-second on Park. Come with me if you like, Mr Graham, while I take a look at the school.’
‘That’s an idea,’ Guy Jackson said nicely. ‘You don’t want to wander too much around the West Nineties on your own if you can help it. Even in daytime. Take him along, Helen.’
He might have been a mari complaisant furthering his wife’s cause. Yet I was sure it was a piece of genuine solicitude on his part, towards me at least. She alone was making the running – furthering her intended inquiries with me and wasting no time about it.
How much experience she must have had in that sort of thing, I thought – bluntly arranging meetings, deceiving her husband right under his nose with all the urgent rashness that love requires and forgives. And I didn’t blame her. She had not loved casually, that I knew. All her blatant intensity – the full weight of her happy curiosity that had filled her face until a few minutes before – had once devolved over another man, and had done so completely, without deviation or restraint; one could see that too – she would not play with any man.
I thanked her for her offer and then turned away at something Wheel had started to propound about muggings on the West Side.
And then I looked back at her for a second, for no reason, and found her looking at me, quite openly, her face puzzled in a quiet way, the lines of interest reviving minutely, with sadness, looking at me as any woman might on a messenger who had come to tell her that her hopes were dead. There was no purpose behind her gaze, no future; it was nothing more than a brief query, the formalities of identity, a w
oman gazing on a body in a mortuary.
Yet it was a face I recognised now, shorn of all its happy drama: it was the one I had invented myself after reading her letters on the boat journey over, trying to invest Graham with a realistic sexuality: Helen Jackson was very nearly the woman I had walked towards at the crowded party in Westminster – that spring, six years ago when I’d just got back from Kenya: 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….
I remembered my inventions on the boat: ‘She was tall and rounded in a way that could never for a moment be described as fat…. 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 division pressing into a new country
And this was Helen Jackson – the woman in front of me now – in many essentials: the long falls of hair sweeping down either side of her face … Had I, during those few moments on the boat, in some way really come to inhabit the remains of George Graham without knowing it? He would have known exactly what she looked like – the dark hauteur, the brown eyes sprinkled, broken here and there, with some even darker element – the constant attacks and surprises she made with her features: her permanent forwardness and willingness. Graham would have known these battle formations uniquely well, as an old soldier from that happy campaign. But not I. And I have no belief in transfiguration either. I had walked straight into an ambush on my first morning ashore and that new identity, that cover I had so carefully built up, was now all gone.
3
I didn’t go to the Jacksons’ apartment that night for drinks – pleading tiredness after the long day. And that was true, at least. I would have postponed forever, if I had been able, this meeting alone with Helen Jackson. I had no taste for it and even less for its outcome. It could not be other than something awkward, at the least, for both of us – for her in a personal way and with me professionally. At worst, it could have a disastrous end for both of us.
I had thought about it on and off, lying on my hotel bed that evening – thought of alternatives to my seeing her, but had found none.
And in any case, I wanted an end to running, to escaping. The whole point of my taking over Graham’s identity was to stop the dissolution, the canker, the treachery and all the other needless horrors which are the usual ends to our silly profession. I had said originally that I would pick up the remnants of Graham’s life and fulfil it for him, complete it – deny the forces that had ruined him and very nearly done the same for me. I should have then to meet Helen Jackson; I should regard our impending confidences as a second lesson in the ways of the real world.
*
We met downstairs in the main lobby of the Secretariat Building next morning. She and Guy had walked over from their apartment in the East Fifties and the three of us stood there, by the elevator banks, the secretariat staff moving past us towards the large Southern ladies who operated the machinery and the cooler supervisors who marshalled the passengers outside their allotted traps.
Even on my second day in the building, I felt a sudden huge luck in not having to go with them all, upwards into their dry glass cells, these hopeless workers of the world. I could go out and spend the crisp morning flat-hunting with a woman in a suede overcoat and a long red and white woollen scarf whose tails fell down, one in front, one behind; like the start of a school reunion, when we are all older and richer and better dressed and can spend the day as we will, without orders or denials. Even the business ahead could not dampen the moment’s happy expectation I felt then, Guy Jackson and the others disappearing into the air-conditioning, we into the real weather outside.
‘Do you like walking?’ she asked. I pushed the glass doors open for her, against the run of fretful people.
‘Yes, I do. I used to walk a lot.’
‘Guy likes the office. He used not to. He likes to get to his office. He was more active once. Where did you do your walking? Round Westminster?’
We had stopped at the pedestrian crossing outside the UN entrance looking over First Avenue.
‘I was in the field a lot – as well as a desk. In East Africa – doing TV programmes, compiling reports: that was the active part of the job.’
‘Yes, I know. Guy told me.’
A roaring stream of cars and lorries sprang up from the underpass to our right and we could hear each other no longer.
‘You used to live in Africa, didn’t you?’ I said when we’d got to the far side of the Avenue and had started to walk up 42nd Street.
‘Just after we were married. In Northern Rhodesia – now Zambia.’ She turned, and looked back at the long line of national flags in front of the Secretariat. ‘I can’t see the flag.’ She gazed at the colours cracking in the wind, shading her eyes from the sun coming off the river between the Con Ed chimneys. ‘Green and black and white – I think.’
‘It should be easy.’ I said. ‘Z. It must be the last flag on the line.’
‘What about Zanzibar?’
‘Part of the Republic of Tanzania.’
‘You know all about Africa.’
‘No. Just the alphabet.’
She turned back and we went on. Yes, we might have been starting out on a school reunion – tempting and teasing each other, seeing where the ground lay after so many years.
‘We call “Z” “Zee” over here – took me quite a while to learn your way.’
‘Why did you bother?’
‘Oh, they were very particular – Guy’s relations in Africa, his friends. They didn’t know what he was doing marrying an American in the first place. The usual thing – he should have married a Country Life girl and taken her to live on a thousand acres in Gloucestershire.’
The huge glass wall of a building loomed up on our right – fifty square yards of glass set between dark stone pillars and copper casements. Inside I could see nothing but a dense greenery – tall flowering cherries, palm-like trees with falling rubbery leaves, ferns, a carpet of exotic shrubs and bushes, a hothouse jungle with pools of water and little streams a few feet from the street. I stopped to look at it.
‘The Ford Foundation,’ she said. ‘Were you long in Africa?’ We both gazed through the glass at this immense natural contrivance; even Arcadia was not beyond the concrete and glass ambitions of Manhattan. Had I been long in Africa? All right – I would play the game as long as she wanted; in any case, I wasn’t going to have the whole business out with her in the middle of 42nd Street. She wanted to make final confirmation of my credentials, of course, make quite certain that I was the real shadow of her lover before inquiring about what had happened to his substance. I had no objections.
‘In East Africa, yes. I went there first after Suez in ’57, taught for several years in Nairobi, then the University at Kampala, finally in Nyasaland – more or less in a sort of technical college in Blantyre. It’s Malawi now. That was in the early sixties.’ I knew Graham’s curriculum vitae off pat and looking into all the rampant tropical greenery, I felt for a second as if I’d actually experienced Graham’s Africa – instead of just a holiday there once, in Nairobi at one of the near game parks, from Cairo in the fifties.
‘Nyasaland was just next to us. I mean – about five hundred miles away. But that’s next-door in Africa. We left when the Federation broke up, and went to Kenya with Jomo. Guy was always very multi-racial.’ She smiled slightly.
‘Yes, I left Malawi then, too. Came back to London.’
It was a ridiculous charade. I couldn’t look at her.
‘With the British Council, weren’t you?’
She could so easily have said ‘were you?’ but she had to press it. I could so easily, so properly, have said ‘How do you know?’ since I’d said nothing of this to her husband the previous day. All he knew was that I was an ex-COI man. But of course I knew how she knew and I let her keep her games. I knew how she must feel – wanting quickly, desperately to hear all – what h
ad happened to George Graham, and why. And I knew, for all her headlong questions, the restraints she must have been imposing on herself. We hadn’t begun yet; we were in the middle of 42nd Street.
‘Yes, I was with the British Council in Africa. What did you – he do – in Rhodesia? Mining?’
She smiled properly now for a moment, for the first time that day, like a woman forcing herself to be brave at a railway station. But not a true smile, merely proof of her knowledge that such an expression had a real existence, a smile like the badge of an organisation you have been expelled from.
‘He looks like a miner, doesn’t he?’
‘Farming, then – tobacco or cattle. Up country. A colonial farmstead. Not posh, but quite old, with a long wooden verandah, and fever trees round the lawn. Orange-blossom climbing the front wall and a big acacia tree outside the kitchen door.’ I gazed at the green jungle in front of me, all the rubbery paraphernalia of the trees motionless beyond the glass. Moisture ran down the huge windows in small rivulcts. ‘The garden must have smelt like a ladies’ hairdresser’s on a hot evening.’ I turned and looked at her. The smile had been held but was now an expression of open-eyed surprise as well.
‘Not quite. But almost. How do you know? You sound like a detective.’
‘Not really.’
‘Not even in the same line of country?’
‘Anyone who imagines too much is a detective.’
We walked on up 42nd Street – through the canyon, grey and busy and useless, the bright light of the morning now almost defunct as if the street were a long way underground and the real land began at the top of the buildings.
