by Joseph Hone
She had had an affair. She had managed it well. It had begun quite simply, casually no doubt – in a room somewhere, a visit to someone or at a party. And once the mark had been made, a dam of mutual interest against the indifference of the world, love had grown and spread out behind them like a lake – over half a continent, through half a dozen years. So many women would have botched the whole thing long before, in a fraction of the space, would have turned the delicate business into a nightmare for everyone concerned. But she had pursued it tenaciously – sometimes, surely, recklessly – yet kept the balance perfectly. I was surprised that nothing had gone wrong until now, that so deep and passionate a layer of her personality had gone unnoticed for so long – by her husband, her friends, the gossips everywhere. It was almost as if – like Graham, like any of our sort who inhabit permanent cover – she had conducted this real business of her life with all the assiduity of a master-spy, like an agent whose marriage is nothing more than a deep cover for his real activities.
We left the Museum and crossed back into Central Park. We were still walking. She wound the red and white football-scarf about herself again and we moved up a short wooded slope towards a high wire fence. Beyond it lay a reservoir, a large mirror dumped in the middle of the dirty city, ruffled in the clear, blowy weather, vibrating gently with skyscrapers, flocks of seagulls far away patterning it like bits of torn paper as they floated and glided over it.
I was surprised by this woman with a boy’s scarf and expensive suede coat walking next the water in the middle of New York: an impeccable Foreign Office husband, just the right number of zero-population children, an apartment on the East Fifties; all this was so studiously correct, so much in the new convention. Yet it was not her: she was no English rose from the shires. She was an American who had gone out to Rhodesia, of all places, and somehow out there wound up with a Russian spy, of all people. Yet an inconsistent nature was the last thing one would have expected of her. There was, for all to see, something very formal in her bearing, in the traditional adornments of her marriage – just as there was in the dark textures of her face, where the shapes – the lips, the nose, the chin – were as classically content as some Umbrian madonna in the Uffizzi, and the skin – a browned, moist pearl – might have been old stone from a Carrara fountain.
She had all the rare finesse of a Park Avenue debutante who has passed thirty without a sigh, the skin fed with expensive lotions, hunger pampered with the right foods, at the right time, in the best auberges; the body massaged, formally and at night, in all the right places. There was, too, the untended confidence, something she tidied up now and then, brought up to date like a passport, in the happy social toils she made about midtown Manhattan: a beautiful person, a genuine ornament among the fun people.
She gave at a glance all the evidence of a graceful shallowness, a sense of tinkering with life, a surface concern – of days made up or exclusive engagements arranged through long telephone calls, noted in gilt-edged diaries, and experienced precisely, thirty minutes past the hour, each hour, on most evenings: drinks in a penthouse garden overlooking the park, dinner at Le Pavillon, and dancing at Arthur’s later. But never a drink too many, a row with the waiter, or music with the wrong man.
And yet none of this was true, not a moment of it; everything was different in her. All this sophistication was truly skin-deep. I knew this; I supposed Graham must have done as well. But I doubted if anyone else did. Her real existence had been carried out far from these glittering props. Her thoughts, her whole being, began when she had finished balancing the invitations and place names for dinner in Manhattan, and began instead to balance airline flights from Nairobi and old friends in Zambia against a meeting with her lover on Lake Malawi. She had never properly lived in the smart places: their apartment in the East Fifties, somewhere exclusive in Wimbledon, or an old-fashioned farmstead in the Colonies. These had been no more than poste-restante addresses, where her husband or friends might reach her between her real purposes in life – the odyssey she’d made through hotel bedrooms and National Parks with another man.
But why had the other man been with the KGB?
‘Graham, of course, didn’t know what your husband did – what he really does?’ I asked her. It was useful having the answers, the original source, so close to hand. An official investigation into the whole business, asking the same questions, would never have succeeded in a thousand years.
‘He knew he was in government. Of course he did.’
‘But just as a civil servant?’
‘You called it the “classic position” didn’t you? Well, it was. He didn’t tell me he was in British Intelligence. I didn’t tell him my husband was.’
‘How did you first meet him? How did you come to be at that African party in Westminster in 1965?’
‘Home leave in London. We’d come back from Nairobi that summer. Guy had connections with all the African desks in London – at the FO, the COI, with the Embassies. We were invited. One’s always meeting people at parties I’m afraid. Isn’t one?’
‘I’m sorry to pry.’
‘Fine. Go ahead. Fill in the spaces. You can’t imagine everything, can you? Even you?’
She was quizzical then, turning to look at me against the metal-blue water, a serious half-smile threatening the open American face. I noticed how completely she could change her expression, what a distance there was between her normally uncommitted, even naïve looks – too beautiful to touch, like a toothpaste or Coke advertisement in an old National Geographic magazine – and the deep lines of knowledge and loss she could take on in an instant, as though a map of Europe had suddenly been overlaid on one of the new world.
‘He was interested in paintings, wasn’t he?’
Two bicyclists, a middle-aged man and woman, both in Bermuda shorts and woollies and racing shoes, came towards us along the path, wheeling their expensive British machines. They were puffed and breathing heavily. Their faces shone silently with mild exertion, a happier conspiracy than ours that sharp morning.
‘Yes,’ she said when they’d passed, looking over her shoulder at them with kind curiosity. ‘He is.’
‘Modern painting. I’m afraid I’m not much good at it.’
‘Well, come on, for God’s sake. You can’t double for him all the way. You’re not even like him, physically I mean. I wonder why they ever chose you to impersonate him? Anyone who’d ever met Graham would know you were a phoney straight away.’
She had an uncomfortable ability with her innocuous banter – taking you straight from trivialities to a leading question. I had thought to quiz her without her knowing. But she was doing the same thing, more successfully, with me.
She said, ‘It can’t be anything very serious, whatever your London people are up to, if they chose you for the job. The only tiling you have in common with George Graham is his name. Who are you, Mr Graham? What’s your real name? Why you for this job – and what job? Don’t tell me – I know you can’t. But you can see my interest.’ Two policemen rode past us on two big chestnut mares. All four of them looked Irish. Again, she turned and stared back at them, over her shoulder, as if the physical gesture might be an aid to recalling the past, fathoming my secrets. ‘Someone in London must have thought you had a lot in common with George,’ she went on. ‘Mustn’t they? If not in looks, then in something else, something more important, where looks didn’t matter. Career, let’s say. Maybe your curriculum vitae matches his in some way, your personal background. Why choose you otherwise? There’s nothing in a name. But shared experience – that’s another thing. Suppose you and he had done some of the same kind of things, lived in the same places, knew the same people: then someone who didn’t know what George looked like – but knew his background – would take you for him, as soon as you confirmed all the other details.’
‘I can’t stop your imagination. You’re becoming a detective as well.’
‘George’s main career was in the Middle East, not Africa you kno
w. He had fluent Arabic but not much Swahili. He was teaching with the British Council – in Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria – all through the fifties, before I met him. But you’ve never been within a million miles of those places, have you?’
Again, the suddenly overlaid smile that was not a smile but the shadow of knowledge – as though, without my saying a word, I had confirmed something for her which she had long suspected. ‘Yes,’ she might have been saying, ‘the day began too well, and, just as we both thought without saying it, it has rained before evening.’
‘No, not within a million miles,’ I said.
But it was no use. She could spot a lie at the same distance.
*
We walked all the way round the reservoir, coming out somewhere in the West Nineties on the Park. A few blocks up a small nonconformist church, wedged long ago between huge high-rise apartment buildings, looked out over the trees and grass, its nineteenth-century steeple a discouraged pin-prick in the surrounding canyon.
The play-school was in the basement, through some heavy oak doors, down cold steps. The church above seemed to have forgotten its function long ago. Prayer-books lay on the pews, as if they’d been left there by mistake, the only objects not sold in an auction a year before. But downstairs it was bright and warm, the area partitioned with long coloured curtains which ran about on overhead runners, displaying one group of infants, hiding another, like Chinese boxes.
‘Mrs Jackson, Mr Jackson, Hi! Nice to see you,’ a young woman said in too affable a tone, I thought, until I remembered she was American. I was in America. Good humour was the premier badge of citizenship here. No matter what disasters happened elsewhere – in bed, in Viet Nam, with the blacks or whatever, a smile was the steeply inflated currency of the country, a cure for every ill.
‘You didn’t bring the children?’ the pert little woman said too curiously, looming up at us, wide-eyed, through saucer-shaped smoked glasses. Children, she seemed to suggest, would have committed us, like a prepayment, and as it was we might have been about to waste her time.
‘No,’ Helen Jackson said – not rudely, but saying no more, so that the effect was almost the same. She could disrupt an untoward inquiry in an instant, I realised, and I wondered at my own good fortune earlier.
We wandered round, through the curtains and partitions, gazing at mysterious coloured designs on the walls, puzzling educational shapes and strange toys which the children played with confidently.
‘What should I call you then?’ Helen said, when we were by ourselves, looking at a child massaging its face with a bright poster paint, like soap. ‘You’re not George Graham. Or Guy Jackson.’
‘The Third Man?’
‘Yes. The whole thing is nonsense enough.’ The child came towards us with the pot of paint, holding it as an offering in both hands above her face, looking up at us intently. It seemed she was intent on sharing the deluge with us. We went on again, behind another curtain like a maze, to a group playing with a basket full of fancy clothes, dressing up and discarding them carefully, like fastidious actors.
‘You said you were married. Weren’t there children?’
‘No. We never got that far.’
‘She was in the same business you told me – never time to get to bed?’
‘Oh, we managed that all right. We did that.’
‘It’s over now – I take it?’
‘Yes. You can take it.’
‘A “husband-and-wife” team, isn’t it called? That must have been something. I didn’t think such things really existed.’
‘Oh yes – the Krogers …’ But I couldn’t think of anyone else.
‘You must believe a lot – in what you do. Mixing work and play like that – for the “cause”.’
‘Dedicated, you mean.’
‘Yes. You don’t look the sort that’s just in it for the money.’
‘What’s your husband in it for? Not the money, I’m sure. But money for others. He believes in the West, doesn’t he? – a million dollars a minute for everyone who can grab it.’
‘No, he’s just an Intelligence Officer. A professional. You’ll see. You’re the one who really believes in it all – or who doesn’t believe a damn. I’m not sure which yet.’
‘I’m just a professional too. Doing a job that I don’t much like. But do well enough.’
‘No, you don’t do it well enough, that’s the whole point. You’re only doing it because you coincide with Graham in some way.’
‘If I told you all about myself would that make you feel better – if I told you how different I was from him?’
‘It might. But that wouldn’t be altogether true either. Because you aren’t that different from him. Oh, I don’t mean physically – you’re nothing like him in that way. But you share a sense of folly with him – treating the world as a spectator-sport, booing and catcalling everybody from your small corner.’
She annoyed me with her insight. ‘Expectations lying in the gutter, you mean? A wrong turning taken long ago? I’ve heard that before. A lot of people feel that these days: a sense of folly. Liberals without a belief in progress. We’re common as clay. That means nothing – sharing that with Graham.’
Luckily the little woman came back at that moment and started lecturing us on how their approach at the nursery differed from Spock’s – ‘You know, I think it’s that we’re much more tidy here, not that awful running round the place, doing what they want, allowing them to make a mess of everything …’
She hadn’t seen the child with the poster paint.
A sense of folly, indeed. How right Helen Jackson was. I thought of Harper’s silly, unformed Colonial face – never grown beyond pint pots with the rest of the Earl’s Court Australians – and McCoy’s Northern disappointment, his maiden-aunt profundities. The hail-fellow-well-met and the forgotten non-conformist. What a duo they made, two St Georges in dark glasses, holding up all the values of the West. Yes, it had been a spectator-sport for me, as I’d expected, with the Russians, it had been for Graham. But there was a difference, though. For both of us it was a game where the players could suddenly spring up from the arena, find you out from all the others, and savage you. That was in the rules as well. Graham had been caught when he must have thought himself forever free, like a Fenian traitor murdered in America years afterwards a world away from Dublin. And I was waiting now, a clear target on the skyline – waiting for this ‘stayer’, who might approach me amicably as arranged – or kill me. One could laugh at the folly but one was part of it; that was the snag. The fools had no manners; for them the end would always justify the means. They had no inhibitions.
‘Yes,’ the woman chattered on obsessively, ‘some people feel Dr Spock may be to blame – for the drug scene, for Viet Nam, by encouraging too permissive an attitude towards the young over the past generation
I thought again of running, before the stayer had time to fix me in his sights, for good or ill – run with the few dollars I had out of the firing line, into the anonymous multiplicity of life. Perhaps I could take up teaching somewhere again. Nothing could be more anonymous than that – an usher in some backward place in an even more backward school. No one would know me or find me there.
But I felt the heat of the basement just as I touched on thoughts of escape; the long morning’s walk began to tell, the legs already feeling wasted, strong with the rumour of coming weakness after the years of inactivity in Durham.
‘Discipline, organisation,’ the bossy woman went on, pulling on the words like a harsh bell, ‘not through force – but by firmness and example. We try to let them see that there is a limitation – from the beginning.’
She pulled back a long curtain without warning, displaying all one end of the basement. The rollers on the ceiling shrieked briefly, ringing as though bones were being cut behind my eardrums.
And then I was falling into the open space, as if a wall had given way in a tall building. I put my arms up to ward off the blow, my wrists trembling again
st my eyes. There were some old pews lined up against the end wall, children playing among them, and either they were coming closer to me or I was walking towards them. I couldn’t tell. Then both movements were happening together so that we seemed to converge.
The children were lined up in the pews now, staring at me silently, sitting properly in their desks. There was a blackboard just behind me. I had chalk in my hand and was laboriously explaining the implications of the three witches in Macbeth. The heat poured down into the room from above, from a sun that had perched for years just above the rafters, and the smell rose all about me – the dry dust of concrete and lime wash from long-burnt tropical buildings.
It was fifth-form English at the College in Cairo, fifteen years before. Samia, the bright girl in the front row, had her hand up – she always knew the answers; her mother was English, married to an Egyptian engineer from the refinery in Suez. Amin in the back row, the tall twenty-five-year-old schoolboy, had his hand up as well, making faces, preparing to embark on one of his elaborately wearisome jokes. The headmaster, mad Dr El Sayid, would be dictating the afternoon’s business to us in the staff room in fifteen minutes: ‘Marlow – football for you, on the lower field. The junior houses, Port Tewfik and Suez….’ And at last, after school, the evening, the empty evening, with Bridget. The drive into the city along the Nile, the pyramids on the far side of the river cut out in soft charcoal against the huge orange tablecloth of falling light; meeting her beyond the pillars of the Semiramis lobby, in the bar there, over Sudanis and gin, while the air-conditioning under the floorboards trembled in fits and starts; swaying the old room like mild water under a ship: meeting her, so quickly ruining the meeting, arguing with her …
I must have fallen into the first row of pews. I remember the children scattering, some laughing, others crying. I felt like a bird swooping on them, falling out of a huge blue sky, a kite over the Nile above Gezira island, attacking them. That was all.
