by Joseph Hone
She had come out of Africa and into the white man’s world and had gone beyond the diseases of both: she had left the savagery and the cleverness equally – a person, one felt, who had thrown doubt and enmity and jealousy right away. She was dark from the Dark Continent but her vision was completely bright, an astonishingly clear heart in the darkness. It was a simple thing to tell the truth with her.
So I said, ‘I was never a spy. But now I’m involved in that stupid game, for boys with guns, and I don’t play it well. British Security are using me as a stalking-horse. George Graham, the real one, has been working for the Russians for years. They caught him in London a few weeks ago and replaced him with me – we share a similar sort of background – and I’ve been sent over here to wait for some of his Russian colleagues in a KGB network to contact me, and then hand over their names. There’s more to it. But that’s the essence – and I’m liable to get my head knocked off if the KGB or anyone else finds out.’ I looked at her seriously.
She laughed. ‘That’s the corniest story.’ But she believed me. ‘My God!’ She paused, considering, I suppose, the guns and golden Dunhills and all the rest of the childish impedimenta which my words must have conjured up for her – a world as unreal to her, I was sure, as it was to me. ‘Why risk telling me?’ she said.
‘You asked. And I need to know. I need to know as much as possible about Graham and his past – which is partly this woman.’
‘Your “life depends on it”.’
‘Perhaps. Insofar as my successful impersonation depends on it.’
‘Why? You’re not likely to run into this woman in New York are you?’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘She would have said just the same of you – if she’d known. I “ran into” Mrs Jackson on my first day here, just as I did with you that evening a few weeks ago.’
‘What a lot of accidents.’ She turned her glass slowly between her fingers, elbows leaning on either knee. Then she went on, even more precise in her words than before. ‘Yes, I know about them. Apart from what I saw of them myself when we were filming in Ethiopia, what’s in my book. My brother was the “detective” you spoke of – or one of them, they used several. That’s how I filled in a lot of my story.’
‘But – how? He can’t have been much more than a child at the time.’
‘So much the better. He may have looked that way – but he wasn’t. The whole thing appealed to him. Childish I suppose. I never followed the reason behind it all. Now I see it – it wasn’t a private inquiry this, but a government one.’
‘Apparently not. It was entirely private. Her husband had an obsession about her being with other men – and knowing all about it.’
‘An expensive sort of pornography. But the material we gathered wasn’t like that at all – not much sex: it was political.’
‘You mean they were both talking politics?’
‘Of course. That was in most of the reports I saw. A lot of it’s in the book: Maoism and the political future of Africa; Nyerere’s Chinese policy. They were both extremely left-wing about it all – not the doctrinaire, hard-line stuff but a “new Marxist interpretation for new conditions”, you know – they were very keen on Nyerere’s self-help programme, small autonomous communities and not big industries. Of course all this was a surprise – coming from her. She didn’t seem that sort at all – much more the high flyer, the jet-set girl in a suede overcoat and dark glasses with that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth American face.’
‘Yes, that’s her all right. You had the impression they were working together in some way – professionally?’
‘Yes. Well, I assumed so.’
‘And the KGB – was that ever mentioned, that they were involved in that together?’
‘Not that we ever heard. But whatever he was up to, she was too. That’s certain. There was an argument about the work they were doing one evening in Kisumu on the lake in an empty hotel. One of the agency men overheard the end of it. She didn’t agree with him about something – the Uganda plan I suppose. She wanted to get out of the whole thing.’
She got up to refill our glasses. ‘But it’s all years ago. How can it have to do with you now? Her husband, or whoever had those reports, must know all this too. It can’t be much of a secret somewhere. Where is the husband – are they still married?’
‘Her husband’s here. With British Intelligence, like me. He’s my “control” in fact. You’ll know the term – it goes with these martinis, “stirred and not shaken”.’ I took the glass from her.
‘You’re going too fast for me now,’ she said, ‘except’ – she stood there in the middle of the room still and straight as a totem-pole – ‘except in that case you must know all this already, that it wasn’t just a sexual liaison –’
‘But also a political one – you’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
I stood up and took my glass with me over to the windows. The big Pepsi-Cola sign had come on above a warehouse on the opposite bank, a coloured gash against the dust-filled, leaden sky. Other lights appeared as I watched, spreading over Queens and lights on the river, lights everywhere rising across the suburbs as darkness came. Everything that gives us our measure of time, our notions of vitality and decay, was visible before me as I watched.
And yet here I was trying to pick up the details, all the emotional weights and measures, of something that had passed more than two thousand days before – trying to grasp all the implications, the real flavour of Helen and Graham’s association, for even as I changed, pushed from one moment’s consciousness to another with the day, so their past in Africa so long before had taken on now a new accretion of reality, a new truth, an added dimension which affected me. Here was another vital facet, a link between their past and my future: Guy Jackson, Margaret Takazze had just made clear to me, must have known all about his wife’s political involvement. But that morning he had denied just this.
What on earth was he up to? Had he, in fact, been pursuing his wife, not for himself, but on behalf of British Intelligence – McCoy, Harper and the others in London knowing of her real involvement with Graham all the time, and sending me to New York to meet her, to sound her out in some way, to trap her? And if this was so, why had I not been told?
I had trusted Guy Jackson too as my only sure liaison in the whole matter – this Jackson, with his Foreign Office robes, old boy’s tie and high purposes, who now appeared as trustworthy as a ferret, who held truth like a colander: this Jackson who knew far more about his wife than just the fact that she was unfaithful to him, but had said nothing, who perhaps had no jealous obsessions about her at all but was simply hunting her down and using me as the pointer. And then there was Wheel who had introduced me to them both that first day at the UN – so conveniently as it now appeared. Wheel, who had never been upstate in Belmont … Indeed, indeed. Where did the expansive Wheel fit in? – the decent, funny man from the Mid-West, the big man from an older, more confident America?
Her eyes were so deep, I noticed, when I turned away from the window, seeing her standing behind me in the darkness which had come over the room: eyes buried away in her skull, the huge whites visible like light behind a mask.
‘What do you want to do?’ she said, walking slowly towards me. And then a different question, remembering my professional predicament as well as my presence with her: ‘What are you going to do?’
But she was in my arms before I could reply and by then my answer had become a question: ‘Are you sure you want this?’ Always the procrastinator, I thought; the pretended diffidence – as if I’d not wanted it myself after so long.
I could feel her smiling, her cheek crinkling next my ear. She smelt of wool, freshly washed, the smell of a warm linen-cupboard where someone had buried a bar of sweet soap deep in the clothes. We stood there easily, lightly pressed together like two vegetables slowly growing.
‘You’ve surely better things to do.’
‘I have. Not better, but other. I’m going o
ut in an hour.’
I did nothing – and suddenly felt I could do nothing. Now that it was possible, the years of abstinence in Durham jail, and all the abandoned imaginings of those years were the only things that rose in me then. I had become someone, so successfully self-educated in the sexual that I had no arts in the real university. So I prevaricated once more.
‘Why me?’ I really believed the question. She didn’t reply. ‘You’re bleak about this in your novel. Is that why? A bleak thing …?’
She moved her head round to the other side of my face, her lips brushing my chin. ‘Not bleak, no. I was exact about it, I hope. We should be more exact.’
She lifted one of her long legs off the floor and, standing like a heron, she wound it slowly round behind the back of my thighs.
‘You mistrust it when it’s easy, don’t you?’
She let her leg slide to the floor.
‘It’s simply that I’m not used to it,’ I said.
‘Of course, you’re Mrs Jackson’s lover,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t quite realised all that that must mean for you both – in the way of mistaken identity, sexual disappointment, diminished performance.’
She rolled her pullover up her midriff towards her chest, one rusty skin peeling off to reveal another. Her small conical breasts rose with it, caught tightly by the fabric, before they fell outwards suddenly like pips from a squeezed fruit.
‘That doesn’t inhibit me.’
‘No.’ She paused, holding the jumper up, turning it the right way out again, shaking it. ‘No. It’s decisions that inhibit you,’ she went on. ‘I thought that was the basis of your kind of job – the quick decision.’
‘I’ve been out of my job for a long time. Anyway I’m sorry. Go ahead, don’t let me hold you up. You want to go out.’
She bent down, slipping her briefs off with one hand. ‘I want you to come in.’
She was right. I’d always been held up by the trappings of sex, the preludes, the difficulties. And no doubt that was why Helen Jackson, with her copious old wounds and blocks, appealed to me.
The pleasure always lay at several removes from the real pleasure – in all the meticulous inquiries I made as to its whereabouts. It reminded me of Jackson’s sad efforts to sustain his marriage by spying on it. And there was something of the same hopeless prevarication in Helen Jackson’s six-year affair, I suddenly thought, some block there as well. How unsatisfactorily intermittent it must all have been for her. How could she have supported it? Why hadn’t she gone to live with Graham? Unless it was that she craved precisely the intermittent and insecure in any relationship that was to be real for her.
I stood in the dark room as if anchored to it, held fast by these dull speculations, the detective always sharp on the scene of the crime, who yet never knows the action, the shape, the real colour of the crime itself. And I would not have thrown off this mood of flatulent disengagement if the telephone hadn’t rung at that moment on one of the low tables in the main room.
She knelt on the floor beside it – pressed her knees together, thighs running in a smooth dark line to a small triangle of hair, her back rising upwards, arched slightly, the tummy rounded, pushing outwards, her waist narrowing dramatically, and then the abrupt conical breasts. She was like an art-deco design, a sculptured book-end, a copper-plated Diana from some suburban household between the wars.
‘Yes? Hello! Yes, fine – in an hour. Eight. No, there’s no need. As we arranged. I’ll meet you there. Fine. ’Bye.’
‘Who was that?’ The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. The inquiries, the doubts, were under way. She stood up and gripped my wrist sharply, gazing at me.
‘The man I’m going out with tonight.’
And then it was all right, when she came into my arms. I could feel her now for the first time – warm and electric. For she was not mine now, not my responsibility, my script. She was the object of someone else’s designs. And it was an easy thing then, playing the robber right under this man’s nose.
Her leg came up once more like the heron’s, and this time I wanted her without hesitation as she wrapped it round me, and we made love that way, standing like birds, almost motionless.
8
Belmont House lay at the foot of the Catskills in New York’s Ulster County, two hours’ drive up the Hudson Valley along the interstate parkway, then westwards along roads that became narrower and less frequented as they ran towards the hills.
The valley was a busy place with its six-lane highway running straight through to Chicago, and its supermarkets as big as villages on the outskirts of towns. But once off this main artery the countryside changed character gradually as it rose from the valley until an almost primeval America took over – a landscape of rugged woodlands, forested hills, high buffs, ravines, great boulders and torrents of water – inhabited only at the edges of the small roads, elderly people living in straggling villages with frame houses, all alike with mosquito-wired front porches and miniature lawns, and chickens wandering disconsolately in steep back patches.
Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, there were stone farm houses back from the road, with apple orchards and cows and barns and thirty acres of cultivated land. But these settlements too soon ran out into wilderness – thick underbrush with outcrops of rock and the bleached white wood skeletons of huge fallen trees like whale bones. It was a hidden land, seemingly unexplored, untouched by anything except extremes of weather: glaciers and blinding sun – inhabited, one felt sure, only by Indians, a lost tribe whose braves were sharpening their knives behind the rocks even now, waiting to fly through the air like bats onto the shoulders of the unwary voyager.
Belmont House lay ten miles or so beneath the highest of the Catskill peaks, on a ridge of land, once an Indian trail, bordering what was now a thickly forested national park. There was a village which we passed through a mile from it, Stonestead, a single street with a pretty white clapboard church, a general store, a liquor store and the district headquarters of the American Legion, the neatest building in the place with a flagpost and a clean-cropped young man lowering the colours as we came through in the bright afternoon light. We turned off the main road here and followed what would have been no more than a lane if it hadn’t been tarmacked.
The house itself was lost among huge elms and chestnuts at the end of a long curved drive, so that one came on it suddenly in a clearing of spreading lawns, dotted with maple groves and flowering shrubs. It was a long two-storied yellow clapboard mansion with attics and a steep hipped roof over the central block and green louvred storm shutters on either side of all the tall windows: classic American colonial, a transplantation from the plantation south, with its huge white-columned portico, triangular pediment and towering chimneys. Its proportions were solid and dignified, without being heavy, the landscaping carefully premeditated yet the effects informal, the views of the Catskill and Shawangunk mountains precisely commanding: love and thought had had an outing here – and money too – an old-fashioned American capitalism still buoyantly evident, which didn’t surprise me, for Helen Jackson’s grandfather, she’d told me on the drive up, who had created the place in the 1890s, had been a New York broker, a friend of Carnegie and Rockefeller, a vital cog in that huge monopolistic machine that had come to control America by the turn of the century.
And indeed if one takes account of familial opposition, the sometimes violent reaction between successive generations, Helen Jackson’s Marxist apostasy, if such it was, was quite conceivable: she had found distress in all this unearned bounty, fled the rich hearth for the hovels of the poor, left the castle for the cabin as Princesses do in fairy stories. And I believed that for a moment, as we got out of the car by the porch, just as one believes in fairy tales: by turning logic upside down. Seeing her in front of the great house, confidently stepping into her heritage, the idea of her hidden nature, of revolution beneath the eye-shadow – this seemed so unlikely a thought, so bizarre, that one felt it must be true.
Harold Perkins laid aside a book he’d been reading and came running down the porch steps to greet us – a small compactly built, bubbling man with white hair cut en brosse, wearing a yachting pullover and plimsolls. He looked like a retired tennis coach and not the son of a millionaire broker. And it was obvious almost immediately that he had reacted against the influence of his father not just by taking up the academic career which Helen had told me about, but by retaining, as he did now in his mid-sixties, the dress, the air of a college freshman, running down the library steps, breathlessly anxious for a game before sunset.
Yet there was, just beneath his friendly ebullience, something else that I noticed in that first moment and was later to confirm in strength: a diffidence, an excuse in his approach to us all on the gravel surround, as if he were butting in on a party he’d not been invited to: the marks on his small face – a shriven quality – of something which had hurt all his life; a disappointment in the mild blue eyes: patience unrewarded, efforts unrecognised, the real personality unachieved: these failures, which one glimpsed in his face, were not evident for one moment as self-pity but as the marks of an expected fate, now fulfilled and patiently borne – character flaws which had worked themselves to the surface over the years in small downfalls on the hurdles of the world.
Inside the porch was a large, octagonally-shaped hall, darkly panelled, with a chandelier dropping from the high ceiling, which ran across the width of the house to a verandah looking westwards down a sloping lawn and beyond that a meadow which the sun was beginning to leave, the sky above now pale blue and pink with a cold haze above the grass.
The birthday tea had been laid out on a round table in the middle of the hall with red crackers piled up on the circle of white linen and balloons laid along a wide Carrara marble mantelpiece, the coloured skins gently expanding above a grate of smouldering logs.
