The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘But you haven’t.’

  ‘Exactly. And that’s the danger. He’s pushing it all the time. It’s the potential that attracts in these circumstances; not the reality. That kills the obsession.’

  ‘You mean we should climb into bed together in front of him. And then live in peace?’

  ‘No. I meant that Guy is the loose end between us. Whatever we have to complete he may –’

  ‘Screw it up?’

  I thought for a second that it was Helen who had spoken. And I looked across to her. But she was looking the other way. And then I saw Guy.

  He was standing in the shadows at the end of the street, at the far end of the attic just above the stairway, towering over the first of the gas lamps, a tall leggy figure changed now incongruously into his pin-stripe suit for dinner, a distinguished monster making an entry in some horror movie.

  And now Helen turned on him in a vicious way, a ruthless manner I’d not seen in her before, poking her head out of the window and hitting him with words, bitter accents, a loathing that seemed far too strong for the little houses, a fury that would split them open like an earthquake. All the years of her marriage seemed to explode inside her now – the first words a gaudy rocket signalling the start of a violent carnival.

  ‘Bastard. Motherfucker. Aren’t you? Say so, for God’s sake. No life of my own – without you. Anywhere. Always creeping up behind me – looking, listening, peeping. Trying to run my life for me – what I should do, and think, and who I should meet. All the time, forever. And all over Africa too. Even there, I hear. In a million miles of space you still have to live off me like a vegetable. Everywhere. And now in the attic. It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? – all along. Getting us up here somewhere quiet so you could spy on us. All right then: I can do it here with him now, right now here in front of you – that’s what you want. And maybe then you’ll leave me in peace and go away.’

  She had lost control, taking command instead of a terrible flirtatious anger, imperious and wanton – her face sparkling, a bright offering, looking at me with an absolutely determined desire. She stood up in the little room, began to unbutton her blouse and take off her skirt.

  ‘For God’s sake, Helen, stop it,’ I shouted across the road above the noise of the cistern. Guy had come forward now. ‘You’re mad,’ he. said. ‘I simply came up to join you both.’ He knelt down on the sidewalk so that he could look in the window and try to calm her. She bent down to meet him with her blouse half open and hit him on the face – two, three times. He took it and then hit her back just as hard. I tried to get out of my house to separate them but it wasn’t easy with the small door opening inwards, my pocket catching on it, and by the time I was out on the street they were at it hammer and tongs. Or rather poker. She had picked up the small metal poker that went with the drawing-room grate and was trying to get at him with it through the window, the two of them playing Punch and Judy. But Guy had leant back now and the bludgeon flayed wildly in the air in front of his nose.

  Then she stopped. It was the moment for collapse or tears. But neither came from her. Instead she put the poker down and looked at the two of us bitterly: Anna Magnani at the end of a barney with her lover – blouse awry, hair tossed about, red weals rising on her cheeks. But they were not acting. This was terribly real – and quite ludicrous in the miniature setting. But they neither of them seemed in the least aware of this last point – the two of them shaking, still locked in the horrific surprise of their acts, contemplating their violence now, unfulfilled by it, wondering how to extend it in word or deed so that each, if it were possible, could part satisfied having killed the other.

  ‘You’ve owned me for too long, Guy,’ she said, making his name an insult not an appelation. ‘I’ll do what I want, wherever, with whoever’

  He laughed without humour. ‘You’ve always done that, Helen. Think of something new. This is certainly a waste of time – I told you, I just came up the stairs. I’d no idea –’

  She aimed to hit him again.

  ‘Look, not this – stop it,’ I said. But they weren’t listening. I had come to that country in a marriage where an outsider, no matter how understanding or sympathetic, has no visa and where he can really only do the inhabitants a disservice with advice, where his papers of entry can only be forged. The bitter conflicts, the blame or lack of praise, together with the many decencies and times of real happiness in a long association – all this is usually an impossible count for the participants to add up and come to any mutual understanding over. For an outsider it is a vast impenetrable algebraic display only a fraction of which he can begin to equate. The rest, though he may think otherwise, is mere guesswork.

  Yet how much I had wanted to know it all – all Helen’s various and previous lives that Guy had just spoken of: that passionate curiosity of hers that had dispossessed him, given him the sickness of a leper, an outcast – forever looking in through windows. And yes, she had once done just the same thing – felt bitterly excluded from her family. But because of this she had come to look out on all the world while he, his obsessions far gone and lost to optimism, had come only to look in on her. They could never meet again now in any fair balance, I thought, he trying so hard to find her and she fleeing from him – lost to each other in a dreadful game of mental hide and seek.

  ‘It’s your life, Helen,’ Guy went on in a reasonable tone. He could afford it. He was in the driver’s seat for the moment. ‘Has been for years. I’ve had little to do with it. I’ve told you – settle up about the children and leave any time you want. I don’t own you. That’s terribly obvious. And, yes, I tried to. But that’s over. You wanted it once, remember? But for a long time you’ve wanted both – security and freedom. And we’ve not had the patience or the temperament to manage both, have we? But you’ll have to choose now.’

  ‘You’ve spied on me,’ she said with wide eyes, staring at him, pouring an intense hatred into him, ‘and had your fill. And now I can go, can I? I’ve performed for you, fulfilled your dirty fantasies. And now I can just fuck off? Well I won’t. This is my house, our house. The fucking off is for you, Guy. Not me.’

  ‘Is it? You really think so? Use your head, Helen. Reason. Or you won’t survive anything. This will be the last of your nine lives. I am the “loose end” between you two. It’s not just our marriage we’re talking about or the children: it’s our separate professions. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘Blackmailer as well as voyeur.’

  ‘And you’re a promiscuous cheat, Helen. And a traitor.’

  She was terribly pained, as if an all-absorbing illness had reached a terminal stage in her; and his frail reason was foundering on the tide of a returning jealous mania – the two of them gouging out the carcase of the other, knowing exactly where the maggots lay.

  ‘You knew all about her politics?’ I put in, trying to divert them, sitting down on the steps of my brownstone. ‘Why didn’t you ever say anything about it?’

  ‘All the rope I needed to hang myself, that’s why,’ Helen said. ‘That would have been the final thrill for him: seeing me put away for ten years – the climax of his joyous punishment.’

  ‘I would have gone as well,’ Guy laughed, edging back into calmer water.

  ‘Why should you?’ I asked.

  ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I’d never have wanted to see you in prison. Never. You forget that, Helen – there was always love enough for that. And it’s not blackmail. I want to see us all out of this safely, if it’s possible. That’s why you must reason, Helen, not fight. It’s not just us. There are others.’

  ‘Fine,’ she said, still fighting. ‘And all these years you’ve just sat and watched me – me and the real George Graham. And never told me. That was very reasonable, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What else? I should have told my department about your political affiliations with Graham? Or simply stopped you sleeping with him? I couldn’t do either.’

  ‘You got pleasure in doing neither. Th
at’s what I can’t stand. You lower everything, make everything stink.’

  ‘Of course you were so fine with your infidelities, weren’t you? Perfectly marvellous. It was such a good, proud thing, wasn’t it? – deceiving me. And your country. You had it both ways, of course, didn’t you? There was idealism too – sucking him off for the good of the party.’

  I listened to them, tearing each other apart, both right and both wrong, both stamping the seals of irretrievable failure viciously on their marriage.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Graham at the time?’ he added. ‘Who knows, but we might easily have sorted things out, when it was beginning. When it was all beginning.’

  ‘That would have hurt you. And I didn’t want to. I had love enough for that then too.’

  ‘You had so much of it. The loaves and fishes – for a multitude. The Miracle-Worker you are. With men. But not with me.’

  ‘You fell down a hole in yourself a long time ago.’

  ‘“Do it. But don’t tell me about it.” That’s what you wanted me to say, was it?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I just wish you’d taken a proper look at the world. Had been an ordinary man instead of playing the feudal Lord with a chastity belt.’

  ‘Ordinary men just let their wives sleep around, do they? I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘No, but they grow up. They get to see themselves as not being unique and indispensable. Because women aren’t. And can’t be made that way.’

  ‘The lecture is too late, Helen. I might have made it before, sharing you around –’

  ‘– Instead of making me into an exhibition –’

  ‘But I don’t think I would have done. That’s the pity. But there you are. A bad flaw.’

  ‘You thought the two of us would look at each other for ever – no other world but ours. No growth, no change, no decay?’

  ‘No, Helen. But that was the direction.’

  ‘What idealism! What perfection! A touch of the poet there, not the spy.’

  ‘What’s the point, Helen?’ I said, angry now myself. ‘You don’t have to make a book and print the hurt –’

  ‘She will,’ Guy said, a hopeless edge coming into his voice. ‘She will. The bitch is on wheels now.’

  He wanted properly to commemorate the pain too, I realised now – make this last scene a very good one, a final climax worthy of all the gradual hurt that had gone before. They had worn each other slowly away over the years, two acids dripping on the other’s ego. Now they were pouring it straight from the bottle.

  The two of them paused for a moment – a moment’s half-time. And in the pause we heard the twins shouting, happy and strident and splashy, in the bath on the floor beneath us, their excited cries barging into the angry silence of the attic. Helen came out of the little doorway, straightening her skirt and blouse. Then she started up again, a skilful player getting the ball off straight away in the second half.

  ‘Could you really have thought that – that I was to be your little woman forever – houseproud and bound: a showpiece in the Ideal Marriage Exhibition? That I was to live in your hand and mind, for ever and ever, Amen; by courtesy of you, and you alone, and nobody else? all absorbed – in your absorptions? My thoughts just the left-overs of yours? My life just a satellite round you? – living in the gate lodge of your grand estate: you set me up in your world with such certainty didn’t you, Guy? – like a museum piece. “Please do not touch. Only one owner” – trying to keep me and sell me at the same time. You couldn’t bear my happiness. But really all I wanted was something apart from you a little, something quite my own – to be recognised by others, to recognise myself. And instead of liking this, and being happy for my happiness, you got a lot of men to spy on me, so that you could destroy me, kill the person who’d escaped, the good thing I’d become.

  ‘You possessed me all right in the end, Guy – to extinction. You ate your way right through me – the old me. And there’s nothing left now but another me, a different person altogether. And I’m here in front of you. And that you won’t touch, Guy, not a bit of it, not a morsel.’

  Guy walked slowly up to the end of the little street, passing above the miniature gas lamps, until he was a shadow against the shadows of Brooklyn Bridge. He cackled, a dry, throaty rattle, like a pantomime ogre. Then he cleared his throat nervously, and spoke carefully but without any feeling, a judge trying to pronounce on impossibly conflicting claims.

  ‘All that, Helen – all that’s true. One truth. Yours, Helen. I have some truths as well. But you’ve forgotten those, if you ever really knew them.’

  It was strange, I thought, how they had both taken to using each other’s Christian names so carefully, as though they were impeccable footnote references guaranteeing the truth of the text – as the only way, every other link broken, of ensuring that these painful messages found their target. Apart from their names they were strangers meeting in this children’s street. And worse: ‘Guy’ and ‘Helen’ designated wraiths without a body. Yet ghosts from a past in which both had once filled the other’s skin happily and exclusively. And that bounty had passed into, and out of, these very shapes in front of me; a chemical experiment that had started so well had ended disastrously. And I was appalled at this, quickly, looking at these two parcels of flesh, still thinking, and alive and therefore beautiful – something queasy coming into my own gut as I thought about it – that these good flavours of a shared life together had so completely leaked out of two otherwise perfectly made forms, nothing remaining but a wilful cruelty. I felt suddenly that there was no luck in human beings anywhere, that there was something quite shocking hidden in the original mould.

  ‘Look,’ I said, standing up and putting my hand on the roof of the brownstone, ‘What does it matter. We have to understand now, not yesterday. And Guy does. He’s here and has heard –’

  ‘“Promiscuous cheat and traitor” indeed,’ Helen interrupted. ‘It was simply living a life that you denied me –’

  ‘Is that it? Going off with other men behind my back and working for the Russians – I denied you that? Well why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘All right – I’m a whore and a traitor,’ Helen said quietly. ‘Okay. But it wasn’t like that at all.’

  ‘Of course not – all for the purest motives: the great God Lenin and so it was perfectly all right for you to hop into bed with the whole communist party if you wanted.’ Guy smiled, almost laughed. ‘It’s laughable. Farcical. No one would believe it. And to suggest that I drove you to it – well, that’s just cloud-cuckoo land. What are you doing for them anyway? Not pumping me, as I remember. So what else? Sleeping round with diplomats, colleagues of mine? You’re not trained for much else, are you?’

  ‘You’re not going to know.’

  ‘Has she told you?’ Guy turned to me. ‘Or are you really working for the KGB as well?’

  ‘No. And I’m not.’

  ‘Think she’s the person we’re looking for by any chance? “The stayer”?’

  ‘No. She says not. And I believe her.’ I looked over at Helen. Her face was taut and creased, all the easy curves gone, showing her age at last in the dull light. The beaten look of a slave up for auction. She was frightened – frightened of losing. And it did look bad against her.

  ‘You’ve told her, have you, about what you’re here for, who you are?’

  ‘There seemed no point not to. She knew from the beginning I wasn’t George Graham.’

  ‘That’s wonderful. Now she just tells her KGB contacts here all about it – if she hasn’t done it already. And that’s the end – of you particularly.’

  ‘She says she isn’t going to. She has some other work to do. She’s not interested.’

  ‘And you believe her? Do you know anything about the KGB? They don’t hire that kind of charity, I can assure you.’

  ‘Yes, I do believe her. And it is wonderful, isn’t it? Our business is all a lot of silly nonsense anyway – and it’s a good thing that two of us at least seem t
o realise that – that the personal commitment is far more important. And you’re in it too, Guy. You knew about her – and you didn’t tell.’

  ‘I don’t put much store by us three against the Russian, British and American intelligence services.’

  ‘Why not? – if we do keep our mouths shut. That’s the last thing they can expect – trust in such circumstances. So now that each of us knows all about the other why don’t we all get on with our various jobs? And live our lives. And maybe one day we can just do the living and throw the other rot over – the dark glasses game. Any other ideas?’ I looked at both of them.

  ‘It’s crazy,’ Guy said. ‘Mad.’

  ‘Why? Any alternative is going to mean a long time down for all of us. And that’s not fun. I know.’

  But Guy wasn’t convinced. ‘Crazy.’ He repeated the word to himself, walking up and down between us. ‘Mad.’

  Yet he must have seen that mine was the only course – we had to trust each other. But I felt something else was worrying him – something still on his mind, unexpressed and therefore dangerous. But of course there were so many things that could go wrong, even with trust, and I supposed he must just be thinking of this.

  A moment later the twins charged up the narrow stairway in dressing-gowns, two blond-fringed round faces exploding with excitement. They ran along the cobbled street between us towards their father shouting.

  ‘Daddy! Play us the fiddle, will you? Will you do that dance with us? Will he, Ma?’ They turned towards her. ‘And you do the piano – please! Let’s do that, can’t we? Yes! The Flibbertygibbit – that one. Can’t we?’