by Joseph Hone
‘It’s not all that, not all to do with people – with being, living better, with one person rather than another. It was as much to do with a generally unlivable life. And that was unrealistic. That can’t be changed so easily. There’s no divorce from it – other than through madness perhaps.’
‘Not divorce – but you can change it, can’t you? Change the “generally unlivable”. That’s not unrealistic!’ And then I suddenly thought: ‘You’re political, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have thought it.’
She ground some pepper on her gigot, strong though its flavours were already. ‘No, it’s not that – nothing to do with Women’s Lib.’
‘I didn’t mean that, I meant – simply politics. How should we all be living, how to make that change.’
She looked at me sharply, as though I was a child and had found something I didn’t know was dangerous and was holding it towards her.
I thought of Graham’s Marxism, and the image she had given him once of the old-fashioned colonial Tory – their arguments about the future of happiness and the future of Africa. Yes, it seemed as if it might be a long story – but not too long, not for me.
She said: ‘It’s not only the poor that want to change the world, you know – or the intellectuals.’
I looked at her dress, her make-up, her general bearing – all the rich and careful choices about her person. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘It’s just a surprise – finding the rich wanting revolution.’
As soon as I’d said this I didn’t know quite what I meant. I couldn’t follow the implications of it. She noticed this momentary confusion and stepped in before I could clarify the thought.
‘That’s not it at all. I don’t want revolution. My God – I wanted that old bore of a thing – to be at ease, happy. That’s all. And I’ve spent time thinking of all the ways there are toward those ends. Some of the ways are political. Obviously, you don’t just sit still crying “poor little me”. You do something about it. You make the effort, you give, if you want any return. Well, almost all that sort of outward effort is political in some degree, though it may not appear so. Your happiness – or at least mine – depends a lot on society’s.’
‘The personal and the political, they must come together for you in some way? Like some people, they say, can only make love in moving vehicles. It’s very difficult.’
She laughed a little. ‘Why do you suddenly see me as a political animal, rather than as just – an animal? That’s the way I’d like to come together. If you want to know.’
‘That passage in your letter to Graham about Africa – what else could one think? It’s not an expected topic between lovers surely? – the relative demerits of the old colonialism and the new imperialism in the dark continent. I was surprised by it in the letter, and even more so now, seeing you: rich Manhattan girl, apartment on the East Fifties, married to a diplomat. Well, now that’s not the expected background for a person who suggests that every act has a political relevance, who feels that individual happiness must depend on the general well-being of society. That’s not usual at all. I thought people like you rang the bell for a drink when they felt out of sorts.’
The smile came again – the naïve one, in which knowledge and experience have been dismantled and hidden.
‘That’s pretty old-fashioned of you. Where have you been locked up all these years – the Tower of London? You seem to have the old chivalrous idea of women – helpless creatures you have to lay down cloaks for. Does money mean you can’t have a mind – does sex – I mean the gender – debar me from political interest, or action for that matter? Come on. I’ll really start to believe in Women’s Lib if you go on like that. The world has changed since you put your head in the sand, wherever that was; I’m not trying to change it, I’m just part of the change.’ She looked at me closely, shades of the detective creeping over her face again. ‘You’ve been away somewhere a long while, that’s the feeling you give me. The way you eat – as if you’d not eaten properly in years. And talking to me – and the way you look at me, as if you’d just emerged from a bout of some strange sleeping sickness and the last woman you’d seen was in corsets and curlers.’
‘Rip Van Winkle again you mean? “Change and decay in all around I see.” Or something. No, it’s not that. I’ve just been in England. This is America; it’s new to me. That’s all. A little cultural shock, I told you.’
How close she could come to the truth about me, I thought. And how far away, despite all the evidence in her letter to Graham, I was from her real verities.
‘Of course,’ she said suddenly, as though she had just then realised the sum of all our talk was diagnosing an illness we both shared but refused to admit to, ‘the most tiresome thing about both of us is our indulgence in the past – and in the future. And the little action we give to now. We miss out on that vital link – the present, the here-and-now.’
‘Was George Graham like that too?’
‘No. He was good at all three. He had hopes and memories everywhere, but he never let them slow him up.’
‘That’s just temperament isn’t it? Other people can complete us. We may have something special for them. What do you think you had for him?’
We were half-way through a bottle of light Beaujolais. I poured her another glass and it bubbled slightly. The chatter in the dark room was dying about us as people moved out back to work.
‘I’m sure I just had all the ordinary things for him. We didn’t have to talk about it. We had trust. We knew each other very well – and that didn’t kill the other thing, you know, the excitement. Just saying that now it sounds extraordinary, not ordinary. Of course affairs are far easier than most marriages, I know that. That’s really the whole point of them. But this one lasted. It might just as well have been a marriage.’
‘Yes, six years. They don’t usually last that long, I suppose. How was it your husband never came to find out about it, even suspect it. Or did he? Six years is a long time to pretend – and gallivanting round East Africa with Graham, how did you manage that without his knowing?’
‘We separated for six months in the mid-sixties, a year after we moved to Nairobi. I went round East Africa with Graham then. Afterwards my mother was ill before she died, upstate here, and I came back to help look after her.’
‘What brought you back to your husband then? Why didn’t you stay apart, get a divorce, marry Graham – or whatever you wanted to do together?’
‘Back in your best Sherlock Holmes mood, aren’t you?’
I thought I might have gone too far. But no, there came another of those easy smiles that she was so ready with, as if the worst of life could be dispelled by this – shining teeth, the Colgate gleam.
‘I was with child. Two childs in fact,’ she said, lightly, happily. ‘And they were his, not George’s.’
‘Twins?’
‘Yes. Sarah and Sheila. Twins. They’re almost five. They brought us together again, like the good books say. But it wasn’t really a happy ending. It began to die again, I’m afraid.’ She paused, almost visibly casting her mind back over the marriage. ‘Though there are many ways I’m perfectly fine with him, when he’s at ease – and not trying to possess me like a life-insurance policy.’
‘Your husband doesn’t look the unconfident sort. Rather the opposite.’
They’d brought some cheese, Brie and Caprice des Dieux, and a big wicker basket of fruit and she chose Brie and an apple.
‘He’s not. He has bouts of manic jealousy, that’s all – when he wakes up out of his work. He’s very English. He had to feel he owned me before he could love me – had to see me as a dependent relative before he could bed me. He’s frightened of me, I think, but won’t ever admit this. He never trusted me, because he didn’t dare to know me, couldn’t face what he might find. We were always that little bit off-beam with each other. And of course soon that means you’re going in totally different directions – heading straight for two different sets of rocks.’
‘Yes
, the oldest journey in the world. Did he have you followed then – or now?’
‘I thought he must be doing that once, in Nairobi. But he said no, of course not. And I never noticed anyone.’
‘You wouldn’t – if they were doing their job properly.’
‘Well, maybe he did. He should have been able to arrange it properly. After all he’s in the same silly business himself.’
Coffee came. She sniffed and then tasted some of my Calvados, not wanting any herself. ‘Burnt apples,’ she said listlessly. She had tired of all her lighter, happier attributes – of all those airs of bright invitation when, before lunch with whisky in her hand, she had seemed so at ease in the sway of the world, to be so happily anxious to take what it might bring in the way of present adventure or future reward.
She had dragged herself back into her past, and I had helped her willingly, and I regretted it now, ashamed at my curiosity that had dulled her. At the same time, though, I felt just as clearly that somehow she needed that past, to explain it, re-live it. She needed it more than drink; it was her drug, her tipple, and I had encouraged her, as she had wanted, in this real and secret excess.
She said, lighting one of her long thin cigarettes, ‘Now you know it all, really. Rather a sordid little tale, even without private eyes. I should have left him – organised the whole thing better. There were the children, I know. But we could have arranged something before about them if I’d really wanted. I was tired. And I shouldn’t have been tired,’ she said with sudden energy. ‘I was tired of another change after moving around the place for ten years. And he’s moving again now. Quite soon. Back to England, some new posting.’
‘London?’
‘No. Something in the country. A Foreign Office job, to do with communications. In the Cotswolds, Cheltenham. Do you know it?’
‘No.’
‘No. Anyway, there’s no good reason for leaving him now. Our mutual friend, Mr Graham – he’s disappeared. Dead for all I know. Or a dead end for me at any rate. I’m not likely to find him.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, you told me. You’re sorry. I know that. But I don’t know anything else about you.’
‘Wait. Wait and see.’
‘Wait and see what? You turned up from nowhere. You’re just as likely to disappear in the same way. The March Hare.’
‘Oh, I’ve come from somewhere, all right. And if I disappear I won’t know any more than you about it, I can tell you. I’m in the dark as much as you are. I’m not the conjuror in all this. I told you; I’m just the trick.’
She believed me. It wasn’t difficult. ‘Jesus God. I’d sooner you weren’t. Tricks, games – I’d sooner we were all out of that and could find some living to do.’
‘Yes.’
Her face had become dull, drawn. Nothing stirred in it – asleep, apart from the open eyes. I could sense very well her horror in the mysteries I had put around her. I was the false Prince Charming that could not kiss her back to life. George Graham had been that figure, the key to her bright future. I had set her adrift in the dark, far from land, and delivered her over, not to making up for the past in a new life, as she had wanted, but simply to remembering all the old dooms. I had condemned her to sudden age in the middle of a perfect maturity.
*
She left me outside the restaurant and took a cab back uptown to see her friends on the Park. And it was then, just afterwards, that I saw the man on the other side of the Avenue trying too eagerly to hail a cab going in the same direction. He had stepped a yard off the pavement by the cross street, with the lights green behind his back. The cab driver, crossing town with his foot down, didn’t give him a chance. The near-side fender hit the man in the legs, spinning him over like a ninepin.
I ran across to the accident, the taxi stalled in the middle of the crossroads, the body lying at the corner a few yards from the gutter – a tall fellow in a dark mackintosh, hatless, fair-haired. And that was the first thing I saw, before I’d even noticed the twisted leg tucked in behind him – the moustache, the fair-haired Pancho Villa whiskers. It was the man who had bumped into us two hours before, forty blocks uptown outside the church.
Coincidence? I hardly considered this after my conversation with Helen Jackson ten minutes before. The man had been following us all morning. And there must almost certainly be two men involved, I thought, if it was a proper surveillance – one for each of us in case we separated, or just a second man to relieve the first. We’d been about the city now for nearly five hours.
I could have lost him in the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk. But I wanted to see if I could identify any second pursuer. He’d surely come, if he existed, to help his colleague, I thought. Or would he have tried to follow Helen Jackson uptown? A difficult decision. But I thought he’d have realised it was too late to go after her. If there was a second man, he’d soon be here, somewhere in the crowd.
I hadn’t long. I bent over the figure in the road, pulled his wallet out and emptied the contents over his chest. Then I started to pick all the pieces of paper up again and put them back. Half-way through, I found his card: James Moloney, with the address and phone number of a New York private detective agency. I pushed it up my sleeve just as another man joined me with tufts of white hair sticking out from beneath a small black homburg, carrying a pack of sandwiches. And then the cab driver arrived. The three of us leant over the body. Pancho Villa was unconscious. There was a graze on the side of his head, but no bleeding. No more than a broken leg perhaps.
‘Jesus, that guy is lucky to be alive,’ the cab driver said. ‘Don’t move him. What are you doing?’ The homburg had seen the half-filled wallet on his chest and was looking through it. ‘Just checking his name and address – and his Blue Shield card. He’s going to need it. Go phone a hospital. Where’s the nearest?’
‘Hell, I don’t know,’ the driver said. ‘St Luke’s I guess, up on Morningside Drive. OK, you stay with him.’
A police car had stopped over by the restaurant and two patrolmen walked casually across the Avenue towards us. The cab was still in the middle of the crossroads.
‘Where’s the driver of that cab?’ the first patrolman shouted. ‘Let’s get it the hell out of here.’
‘He’s gone to phone the hospital,’ the homburg said. The first patrolman went to move the cab while the second bent over the body. ‘Who is he? What’s his name?’ He took his wallet and started shuffling through the papers and a few folded bills inside.
I eased my way out of the crowd, hurried across the Avenue and went back inside the restaurant. There was a piece of clear glass in the centre of the door and through it I saw the homburg in a moment, clear of the bunch of people now, sandwiches still gripped in his hand, looking wildly about for me. He was the second tail.
‘Yes, sir?’ The head waiter came up behind me. ‘Did you leave something?’
I patted my pockets. ‘Yes – I think I had a pack of cigarettes, I wonder if …’ I turned back and saw the man with white tufts of hair and a homburg running across the flow of cars on the Avenue, coming towards the restaurant.
But one of the patrolmen had seen him too and now he was yelling across the Avenue at him, waving a notebook. He followed him and stopped him just in front of the restaurant door. ‘Hey, fella – you a friend of his?’ The two men started to argue about the accident. ‘You know anything about him? They say you and another fellow saw it all happen – you were there from the start, the cabbie says The two men recrossed the Avenue. I let them get back to the crush of people before going to the telephone booth at the back of the restaurant. ‘Moloney here,’ I said, when I got through. ‘There’s been some trouble on the Jackson job. The fella who ordered the surveillance, the husband isn’t it, what’s his name? tall British fella –’ ‘Yeah, it’s the husband, sure it is,’ the other voice broke in. ‘Get on with it Moloney, what’s up?’ I started talking again but almost immediately cut myself off, letting a finger dance rapidly on th
e handset cradle.
5
‘Who are they then – if you say that our British SIS people over here aren’t tailing me?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have one of our men try and check the man out at St Luke’s Hospital if you like.’
Guy Jackson fiddled with his expansive, brassy wedding ring. I could hardly keep my eyes off the nervous performance in a man otherwise so bland and cool. His office was immediately above mine, on the floor above, the thirty-fourth, of the UN Secretariat building. Jackson – so carefully dressed, like a judge in mufti – gave the impression of a very meaningful worker for the organisation – of dedication to the ideals of the charter and competency in carrying them out. It was almost impossible to see this tired-faced, disdainful, lanky aristocrat in his pin-stripes and waistcoat as a British SIS officer. Still, I suppose it was as good a disguise as any – anything to get out of the old trench-coat image. I think he overdid it, though.
‘They may have someone following you,’ he said. ‘On orders from London, direct. But I’ve heard nothing about it. My instructions were simply to liaise with you, wait for information – if and when this ‘stayer’ chap made contact with the names of the KGB men Moscow wants to check on.’
‘But you know all about me as well, don’t you? Not George Graham – but Peter Marlow. I’ve just been let out of Durham Jail.’
‘Yes. I know. Of course.’ He seemed puzzled for a moment, looking at me carefully as though the implications of this double identity had only struck him for the first time now.
‘Had you ever heard of George Graham before?’ I asked. ‘The George Graham. He spent a lot of time in East Africa. In Nairobi and round about.’
‘No. Why should I have? Why do you ask? It’s a big place – East Africa.’
‘Small enough, too, for white people now. He was working over there quite a lot. Radio programmes, documentary films, for the COI. A government department. You were in the Foreign Office. I thought you might easily have run across him.’
