The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  We took a bus up to the Grand Army Plaza, got off and walked into Central Park. Within moments we came to a zoo, right in the middle of it. I hadn’t expected it; there were no turnstiles, it was free: a small but well-organised zoo. She seemed as surprised by it as I was. Africa was waiting round every comer for us that morning.

  ‘The sea-lions are great,’ she called back to me.

  We had stopped by a pool, edged all the way round by a happy crowd. I could hear huge wallops on the water, followed by fountains of spray rising above the spectators’ heads. Black and shiny shapes like wet gumboots jumped about between the crush of people. She had forced herself right up to the rails, for a proper view – always pushing forward, I thought, taking on any new thing to its limits, no matter what the physical discomfort or what other pressing concerns she might have: giving up everything for the moment, just as Graham had done – for the girl in Marylebone High Street with the awkward umbrella who Harper had thought was a contact; bent forward in eager chat with the turbaned Sikh on the Delhi-Calcutta express; the long discussion about how to cook Boeuf Stroganoff in Chez Victor which Harper had recorded. Everything that was now, was now only once, and you cut away every other part of life, before and after, in order to test it fully: the horrors that are due to great ideas; the little roads that went somewhere: how alike she and Graham were in this approach, their appetite for uncluttered experience. I envied them their continual availability. In the face of so much choice, and so much more that is simply chosen for us, they seemed to know unerringly the right paths to take – the journeys that would reward them, justly and with ease, without vanity or egoism. I tended to think too much – saw always the alternatives – and prison had strongly reinforced this bad habit.

  ‘You don’t like them, then?’ She came back to where I was hovering on the outskirts of the crowd, a biscuit man with a barrow beside me, with a decayed monkey on a string, trying to sell me a pretzel.

  ‘I’ve never liked the sea. Too cold, too big. And slippery. And salt in your mouth. And rough.’

  ‘Perhaps you like lakes? Unless you don’t like water at all. When were you born?’

  The barrow man finally managed to sell me a pretzel. Two pretzels. I gave her one. I felt like an uncle with a godchild. ‘February.’

  ‘Water, then. A watery sign. You must like water.’

  ‘Yes, all right. I like lakes. They’re quieter at least.’

  ‘Lake Nyasa?’

  ‘Lake Malawi you mean.’

  ‘Yes – well you must have liked that when you were in Malawi. It was tremendous – all those blue mountains round it, like Scotland. Don’t you remember? We used to go there for holidays. One couldn’t swim in it of course.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I remembered that problem very well from my days in Egypt – the snail-infested water of the canals and lakes there where the liver bugs thrived, common all over Africa in still water: Bilharzia.

  ‘Bilharzia,’ I said. ‘That was the trouble, I remember, in Lake Victoria too, in Uganda – couldn’t swim – had to rub yourself all over in engine grease if you went out in a boat. Gets right through the skin.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  We walked on, into the lion house. She was silent now, throwing a tail of her scarf round her neck again in another loop as if a cold wind had come up and not the warm meaty aroma, the acid wafts of old urine, that now surrounded us. We looked at one of the huge animals asleep under a dead tree trunk, dead like it. Then she spoke, neither of us looking at the other, our eyes embedded in the tawny beast.

  She said: ‘The only point about Lake Malawi – anyone who’d been in the country would know it – is that you can swim in it. That’s why we went there for holidays. The current from the Shire river keeps the water moving and the weeds away. It’s practically the only lake in Africa that is bilharzia-free.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Oh dear, I am sorry.’

  The animal stirred, flicked its tail an inch, looked at us for a dull moment, before dispensing with the view and turning over flat on its other side.

  *

  ‘George knew that lake in Malawi,’ she went on. ‘I met him there once. We swam in it. There was a scrubby sort of Holiday Inn place above Fort Johnston on the western shore. No one ever went there, not after the break-up of the Federation. It was empty. We spent a week there doing nothing.’

  ‘How did you manage that? Graham left Africa in 1961, came back to London.’

  ‘He came back to Africa quite often afterwards. I thought you’d done your homework.’

  ‘Yes, but you’d left Rhodesia by then, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, we were in Nairobi. Guy had an attachment there from the Foreign Office – leased as an adviser to the Kenya government. He took up with Whitehall when he stopped farming. Though in fact he was always with the FO – in one way or another.’

  After the zoo we had taken a cab further up Fifth Avenue to the Guggenheim Museum and were now wandering round Frank Lloyd Wright’s strange inverted cone, pacing his gentle ramps slowly upwards and outwards, looking half-heartedly at the paintings. I wondered why it was that she would speak to me only while on the move – and always moving from one place to another – and I thought it might have been in order to frustrate some marital eavesdropper. Her husband might just have hired someone to follow us, might have long suspected her infidelity. He might even have learnt privately all about George Graham before being told by McCoy to be my contact in New York. But often as I glanced behind us that morning I never saw anyone. Of course agents will do exactly the same thing – this constant walking – when, through some slip-up, they are forced into open contact. So I supposed that from both our points of view this keeping on the hop was fair enough: I was the agent, she the mistress. We both had plenty to hide – she in the search for her lover, I in preventing her finding him. But for the moment, as though fearing the worst, Helen Jackson kept off any detailed approach to his whereabouts. We talked, simply, of our own approaches.

  ‘So you went back to meet Graham in Malawi?’ I said. ‘Long after you’d left that part of the world.’

  ‘Yes, I met him there. Among other places, I was going back to see friends in Zambia anyway. He was researching a programme in Malawi. We met up. It wasn’t difficult.’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  She had all of Africa to be unfaithful in – those huge spaces where two such white lovers would surely have stood out as clearly as black magic at the North Pole. It may not have been difficult but it must have been risky – with her husband in Jomo’s government in Nairobi, a town that was the sounding-drum for all the far-flung gossip of East Africa. But one took risks in that sort of situation. I had forgotten that. And in a strange way the closer you went to the fire in such circumstances the safer you were. That was an old saw, tribal or civilised. Compromise was the only really dangerous thing between lovers.

  ‘I thought the long trip you made was in East Africa – Uganda, Kenya – Tsavo National Park, for example?’ I looked at her with a notebook in my eyes, like a police constable, a bad replacement for a small part in The Mousetrap.

  ‘There were several long trips.’

  ‘You walked to the top of a small hill, didn’t you – in Tsavo? – near an old mining village, with a Jack Hawkins figure in a bush-hat who talked about beating hippos on the nose with a walking stick on the banks of the Nile …’

  It was my turn to ask her if she remembered things properly.

  I started to push the matter myself now, feeling a need to display my ‘homework’. But more, I think, I was experiencing the beginnings of a mild jealousy, the jealousy of a new lover, who, even at a first meeting, wants to possess all the knowledge, all the intimacies of the woman’s previous affairs. Even then I wanted the entire baggage of Helen Jackson’s recollected experience.

  ‘Yes, I thought you’d have gotten onto that last letter. That was stupid of me.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything rash. No
one could have identified you from it – no address, signature, nothing. You had someone post it in Uxbridge.’ Then it struck me. ‘London Airport, of course.’

  We had stopped by a group of Klees; dark lines, blots, jagged edges, nightmares. She turned away from it, with relief. But it was because of what I’d just said.

  ‘I knew Graham was coming over here – we were going to meet. But you mean you didn’t know about me? Who I was – where I was?’

  ‘How could I have? It was pure chance – my meeting you here on my first day.’

  ‘What about the others – the people – the people who sent you here?’

  ‘They couldn’t have known about you either. They never mentioned you in connection with Graham. And I didn’t show them your letter. It struck me as something completely personal, nothing to do with what I was doing for them.’

  ‘Was doing?’

  ‘Am doing.’

  ‘What are you doing then?’

  ‘That’s covered by the Official Secrets’ Act.’

  ‘I know. Guy is in the same business, the same games.’

  ‘I thought they never told their wives.’

  ‘You can’t ever have had a wife, then.’

  ‘Oh, I did. She was in the same silly business too.’

  We’d moved off Klee and on to some important-looking groups by Chagall, Delaunay, Léger and Jackson Pollock. She had unwound her red and white scarf completely now, taken it off, and was carrying it in her hand, all bunched up like a football. Then she opened the top of her suede coat.

  ‘No, it’s really quite simple,’ I said. Then I thought of Graham’s shoes on the table in Marylebone. ‘Well, my part is fairly simple. It’s just bad luck that I should bump into you like –’

  ‘Listen,’ she put in quietly, but digging her fingers into the wool. ‘The only simple things are these: you’re impersonating George Graham. You’ve done a lot of homework on it; you’ve been helped – by experts. You’re tied up with British Intelligence in some way; Guy is too. George and I were – well, how would you describe it? You’ve read the letters.’

  ‘Yes. An affair?’ I paused, showing her loss of a proper language to describe these things. ‘What else could you call it. I don’t like the word.’

  ‘I love him.’

  I let her keep the present tense. It was fair. It did proper justice to all that I had learnt of her and George Graham, everything that had passed between them, even though I was sure that, technically, the grammar was now quite incorrect; it had been overtaken by events, though she knew nothing of it, willing as ever to live in the present to the very last.

  We had moved into an Annexe – the Tannhauser Collection, off the second floor, and were looking at a Manet: ‘Before the Mirror’.

  ‘Anyway, these things are clear enough,’ she went on. ‘You’ve come to New York as George Graham and so you know all about – us.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My “infidelity”. That’s the word I don’t like either. All the same, it would do me no good in most quarters – if people knew. But listen, you’ve stolen someone else’s life – worse, don’t you think, than taking someone else’s wife? And you can’t tell me anything at all about that because of the Queen of England.’

  ‘Yes. The Crown. That’s quite right.’

  ‘Which points to only one thing, of course – otherwise you could tell me what’s happened to him, about something “entirely personal”, as you said yourself, just a little adultery after all, nothing really Top Secret. But you can’t – so it’s quite clear: George Graham must be with British Intelligence as well, and you’ve got to protect him and the “organisation”.’

  ‘So?’

  She looked a little blank. ‘I never thought –’

  ‘How should you? You were in the classic position. Agents don’t go round telling their mistresses what they really do, do they?’

  We inspected a Pisarro – ‘Les Coteaux de l’Hermitage’ – and then moved on to Renoir’s ‘Woman with a Parrot’.

  ‘What’s happened to him? Where is he?’

  ‘In London. I should think he’s all right. I never met him.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And nothing. I told you. I can’t tell you.’

  Even Renoir couldn’t hold her. She walked on. She tossed her hair.

  ‘Why did you tell me anything to begin with then?’ she said at the next picture.

  ‘To get the situation straight, if I could. You knew – you were the only person – to know about me. I had to talk to you. But what can you do? If you press the issue about my impersonation you’ll explode your marriage and your husband’s job – at the very least. And you’ll be absolutely no nearer to George Graham. But what I really wanted to say to you was this: I’ll say nothing at all about what I know about you and him, not to your husband, not to anyone in London. That’s the bargain – if you let me finish my business here. And maybe when it’s all over you can pick up things again, where you were with him –’ I couldn’t go on with the lie and I think she noticed.

  ‘That’s very likely, of course, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t honestly know.’

  ‘Rather a one-sided bargain, isn’t it? – and nothing really at the end to keep it for, from my point of view. Just to keep you in one piece – while he ends up in pieces.’

  ‘I would tell you. If it didn’t matter. I’d tell you about him. I know what you must feel. I’m sorry.’

  ‘“If it didn’t matter,” you say. Who do you think this matters so much to, this man – if not to me?’

  We walked on, not seeing the pictures at all. She was glowering. Then she began to hang back, isolating herself, looking at odd pictures alone. Soon we were yards apart, so that eventually I turned and walked back, angry, coming towards her like an unwanted consolation prize.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t you think I’ve the right to try and get out of this in one piece too? I didn’t propose myself for this job. Doesn’t that strike you? I didn’t fix up this stupid business in London – any of it. I meant I was sorry – for me as well, if you like. I hate all this just as much as vou do – as much. I think. as Graham hated it all too.’

  ‘Hated?’

  ‘Hates.’ How quickly one lied, saving myself, not him.

  ‘And you think if we work together all of us might get out in one piece?’ she said dully.

  ‘Yes.’

  Her face brightened. I’d struck something hopeful in her again, that optimism she was so ready with – the warm parts that went with all her forward bias. ‘That’s quite possible,’ I said.

  ‘All right. Let’s do that. And thank you for the sorry.’

  *

  We were conspirators, then. But I loathed the conspiracy. It would bring no new or happier state; it was a lie. She would play along with me only because I had offered her the chance of taking up with Graham at some future point – a point which I knew could have no existence. Graham had been a senior KGB officer and she didn’t know it. If he survived at all he would be sent down for as many years as I had been. He was lost to her, I thought, as firmly as death. A marriage between them would never be arranged. That freedom together, which she had sought so carefully, so vehemently, with such secrecy in her letters to him – when she could leave Guy, the question of the children properly settled – had, for all her care and vivid imagination, no possible end in reality.

  And one day she would find this out, sharply and conclusively, all within a minute. That would be the worst thing – the moment when she discovered that all her efforts, her love, had proved as useful as careless, spendthrift fancies, while the years of careful passage she had made about his body had the same value as a one-night stand – the fumbling explosions of sex after a party.

  Hard-headed, calculating, in the arrangements of her love for so long, she had thrown foresight away, now that it could arrange nothing, bring no tangible, immediate benefit. All it could give her was doubt in his existence, whic
h was impossible. She had to believe just this one thing – that she would see him again. Hope is such an available commodity, so readily dispensed. By definition, it needs no proof of origin, no warranty of satisfaction. And so I had been able to dole it out to her just then, like a money-changer in old Port Said, bribing her with the promise of a renewed emotion which I knew could never again have any currency.

  An affair of her sort is like a revolution after a hundred years of repressive peace. The odds are all against it. It requires more organisation than a marriage to achieve half the trust and only a fraction of the physical availability. And apart from the need, the belief, the resources are non-existent. Such a liaison survives as a constant minus factor – a beleaguered force making odd successful forays but always threatened with retreat and rout. Its defeat is far more likely than the end of formal ties where convention, habit, economics and children form an often impregnable rear-guard. An affair may thrive for a while on its implicit disadvantages, like a guerrilla army. But if it loses, it loses everything. Unlike a marriage, there are no reserve troops, no stores, no headquarters and no constitution to fall back on. There are no long-held lies or truths. To survive, the people in this dream of a free country must keep constantly on the move, never two nights sleeping in the same place – must constantly disband and re-group and the password has to be changed at every meeting.

  Strategy, persistence, imagination, patience, trust in absence – the ability to bring everything to bear in a sudden short moment of engagement, to slip away without loss, to lie up in the long intervals without complaint or murmur: this was the field manual she and Graham had shared, the handbook of their affection.

  And I praised her for that, for her skill in this campaign, for we must all hope for the success of passion, just as we must suffer its ruthless ways and means. To possess the quality at all is to possess it too abundantly, to willingly betray one person so as to fulfil it with another – to be capable of dividing it, sharing it, and multiplying it many times with many people. Like faith, it is a gift that will serve a multitude, with all the deceptive increase of the loaves and fishes.