by Joseph Hone
‘Was going back?’
‘Yes. Marlow will be taking his place.’
‘And Jackson? What’ll become of –’
‘We’ll arrange all that. Nothing for you to do there.’ Popovich looked at Harper carefully. ‘You just talk to Marlow as arranged when you see him. Then go back to London. And wait. We’re going to need you back in England when the whole thing starts moving.’ Popovich finished with his teeth, rinsed out his toothbrush and spat vigorously into the flow of water.
‘And what about Marlow?’ Harper asked. ‘How will you persuade him?’
‘I think he will be persuaded by Jackson’s fate.’
‘I see.’ And Harper did see now, and he sighed.
‘Good.’ Popovich replaced the toothbrush on the rack above the basin. ‘Good, good, good.’ Then he looked at his face studiously in the mirror, rubbing his chin gently. He turned to Harper invitingly. ‘I like that after-shave. What’s it called? I must try and get some.’
13
It all happened very quickly – that evening in the UN building a few weeks later, late summer, the sun still blazing damply everywhere outside, but cool as ever in the false weather of our huge aluminium shrine.
Helen had left several weeks previously with the children with nothing of my business with her resolved. I had seen her only once more alone after our weekend upstate, and that only for ten minutes in the Delegates’ Lounge before Guy had joined us. And though I took the address she was going to, a rented house somewhere outside Cheltenham, and said I would look them both up if and when I got back to England myself, I didn’t really expect to see her again. Graham was dead to her, and, I inferred, I would be too as far as keeping quiet about her real work was concerned. I never told her about the man I’d seen with binoculars on our ride upstate. Instead I suggested that it might be best if I simply kept out of the way. It was a low-keyed parting, but one of mutual trust at least. I was not to be involved there. Hopefully, indeed, after my talk with Harper when he’d suddenly turned up to quiz me a month before, I was to be out of the whole business by the end of August, if no one in New York contacted me, and back to London to some undecided future.
Helen Jackson was out of my life and in our last conversation I’d simply feared for her future with Guy – the long days coming to them both, full of enmity and hopeless disgust. Why didn’t they separate or divorce, I asked her again?
‘The children,’ she said, without conviction.
‘But if you go on destroying each other like this, what use will either of you be to them?’
‘Yes, I know. Maybe a month apart will help.’
She was prevaricating, postponing. She said, ‘It’s difficult – you wouldn’t know – to throw everything away of a family, a relationship, even when it’s been as bad as ours. It’s really difficult.’
And yet I knew that in the days when Graham had stood happily on her horizon she had wanted just that, was willing to lose everything in the way of family mementoes. It was simply that now she had full knowledge of her isolation, and this was why she would stay with Guy. She had no one to go to. And she was a woman, I had recognised, who moved always towards people, who fulfilled herself with them more than with ideas or things. And then, too, she was very tired at that moment of stage-managing her life and I think she felt the need for fate to take a hand in her affairs for a while.
On that last evening the offices were nearly all empty on my floor. But I’d stayed behind, having had a message left on my desk – from Guy’s secretary as I thought – saying that Guy would like to see me before he left and would come by around six o’clock.
It was Guy’s very last moment with the UN. There’d been a small drinks party for him the previous evening. And that day he’d simply come in to tidy up, get his papers, and sign off. He was flying back to London first thing next morning. The rest of his furniture and effects were coming over by ship later.
Of course, with Guy they’d chosen exactly the right moment to move, when he’d finally left his office on the floor above mine, had all his papers with him and so on. And they knew I’d be expecting to see him before he left, would find nothing strange in the message from his secretary.
But when he came into my office he was with two other men – right behind him, pushing him into the room quickly and then locking the door. They were both in smart dark suits, very properly dressed, one of them carrying a briefcase, the other with very long, sinewy arms, almost to the point of deformity, like a nineteenth-century prizefighter. Their faces were anonymous, bureaucratic, perfectly part of the building – calm and without any expression: two government servants from one of the ‘great powers’ holding their cards close to their chests before the 1014th meeting of the Decolonisation Committee. And I thought for a moment, with their locking the door, that they must be colleagues of Jackson’s from Intelligence in London come to question me again about my non-existent progress in New York.
I thought this, at least, until one of them drew a gun and pointed it at me and the other started to undress Jackson. He took his coat off first – Guy was in one of his finest pin-stripes – and the moment he laid his hands on the lapels Guy started to protest, quietly and politely at first, as though making a small but important criticism to the secretary of his London Club.
‘No. No, please!’ Now he was utterly shocked by the effrontery of this initial touch – this touching him, this intimate proximity without so much as a by-your-leave. He didn’t seem to mind the rest of the disrobing so much.
But it was quite terrible to watch, this indignity in this formal man who had so carefully dressed himself that morning, as he did every morning – terrible to see this sartorial destruction, for clothes were something which Guy had put a lot of his life into – Savile Row coat, waistcoat and trousers, the pale blue sea-island cotton shirt, the fine silk old-boys’ tie, gold cuff-links, the hand-made dimpled leather shoes: they all piled up on my desk against his intermittent, pleading voice: ‘No. No! For God’s sake, what are you doing?’ – as if he thought he was going to be raped by them. And indeed at that point I had no idea what they were up to.
Yet, in some sense I knew, seeing Guy being stripped: for I had watched the destruction of a man long before the real end, the desecration of life before life in the flesh was gone: a lifeless skeleton when he was finally nude, six feet of naked emptiness, his neatly groomed hair tossed around, the elegant face disrupted fearfully, fallen, as though bones had been broken in it, and red: the whole of his face from the neck upwards turned a bright, blushing red – all his lanky poise utterly destroyed as he looked around him with a sort of terrified prudery, as though Matron had suddenly come up on him in the shower after cricket thirty years before.
I saw all this and was so saddened by it that I hardly noticed when the other man with the awful gangly arms came over and started to undress me. But I’d had the message by then and did it for him. It never occurred to me to make any struggle. I suppose that was wrong.
‘Get into his clothes,’ he said when I’d finished, Guy and I both naked now, the two men facing each of us, all of us standing for a moment like statues in some obscene ballet, two nude and two blue-suited dancers.
We changed clothes. And I realised then what was happening to me, simply a more violent change of role, from George Graham into Guy Jackson now. But what was happening to Jackson? I put on all his things, and he mine. And they fitted both of us surprisingly well. Except for the smell – the faint odour in Guy’s clothes; his hair, his skin, his sweat mixed with the rumour of some old-fashioned hair oil. There was something awfully unreal about that for a moment – his shirt and underclothes warm about me – still warm from his warmth: a properly stolen life, this time; violently robbed in front of me, so that I felt I was part of the crime.
They had taken his wedding ring off him last thing, the brassy signet ring that he wore like a memento of failure, and I put it on, the prizefighter handing it to me, poking it up towards my face
, like the best man in a nightmare wedding.
And Guy, I saw, had everything of me – or rather of George Graham: his old black Mentmore fountain pen, the gold square-faced Hamilton watch, the long-stemmed briar pipe and the aromatic Dutch tobacco. Guy became George Graham in front of my eyes, the lover replacing the husband, who in turn was replaced by me. Three men had gone into two; and one of us was going to be caught without an identity when the music stopped. Finally, they checked everything, went through all our pockets, to see that Guy had all my papers, my wallet and UN identification and so on, and that I had all his.
Then the prizefighter said to me, ‘Now watch. Watch this carefully.’
And there is that moment now which one doesn’t care to remember, which one simply doesn’t, because it is like recreating the death of oneself, seeing the extinction of my body with his, the death of both of us, so that my memory of it, in some ways, is that of a ghost looking back on his own funeral. I went with Guy then and what was left of me afterwards was an angry wraith.
One of the men opened the aluminium casement looking out over the East River with a key and a muggy breath streamed in from outside like a door opening into a furnace. And suddenly then, at the same instant, Guy and I both knew what the whole thing was all about, when the prizefighter took him by the shoulders, turned him round and faced him towards the window. We both knew it all then, very quickly and completely – when I looked at Guy, when he knew he was dying, was going to die: when he crumpled up on the floor; when they picked him up and I shouted, and the other man gagged me and held me from behind: when Guy was dragged over to the window, and started to cry, a great sobbing cry, a disastrous anguish on his face: when he clung to everything on the way, every bit of furniture, being dragged now, feet-first across the room; and finally – his head out in space yet still, like a trapeze artist, trying to hold on desperately to the metal window-ledge until his fingers were prised up – the faint squeak he gave as he fell away.
We both knew everything then, shared everything as the men intended, Guy’s eyes fixed to mine during all that awful passage across the room – violent, outraged eyes: and yet somehow with love too, a desperate and unseemly gentleness glowing through his normally austere and cynical features, a statement of love and redemption that had only now suddenly become clear to him at this last moment, and which he wanted to pass on to me before he died, in a great hurry to get rid of it before the music stopped and he went. He was pulled across the office floor, a dead man, yet full of life. Exactly as they had intended, the two men left me with a unique taste of death in my mouth – not only his death, any death, but my own as well.
*
And then we were away, one of the men on either side of me, pushing me down the empty corridor towards the elevator banks in the middle of the building, where a third man was waiting for us, holding the doors apart from the controls inside, and the four of us went down without stopping to the underground car park giving out on to the East River side.
They had a car there next to the elevator ramp. And there were several other groups of people around, getting their keys and cars out, going home. And I shouted and tried to run. But they had me in the back of the car before I got anywhere, hitting me with something over the ear as I was being pushed in. And when someone came over towards us I could hear the prizefighter speaking as I drifted into a dark world of ringing stars: ‘He’ll be all right. Had a few too many. We’ll get him home.’
Home, I realised when I regained consciousness going up First Avenue, would of course be the Jacksons’ modern apartment on East 57th Street and Second.
*
‘Ah, Jackson,’ the little man said, welcoming me into Jackson’s large but now almost empty apartment six floors up in a modern co-operative block looking down Second Avenue.
‘Good evening, Mr Jackson.’
He was standing in half shadow over by a drinks tray in the corner of the main room just off the hall. The carpet had been taken up and most of the furniture pushed into another corner waiting to be crated. The floor was of blocked pine and slippery. A stack of pictures, Redouté rose prints for the most part, had been piled up on a huge oatmeal sofa in the middle of the room. On one arm of it were a number of Jackson’s overcoats and mackintoshes, all the perfectly tailored summer and winter protection that Guy had acquired against the varying rigours of the New York climate. What a careful man he’d been, I thought, prepared for every sartorial eventuality – except changing clothes with me.
The only light in the room was from a standard lamp, with a huge pumpkin-like Chinese paper lantern on top, and this had been placed in front of the sofa, between me and the small blue-suited fellow fiddling with the drinks so that I could make out hardly anything of his features.
He spoke in Russian and the prizefighter cleared the Redouté roses off the sofa and moved me over towards it.
‘Sit down, Mr Jackson. Relax,’ the voice came from behind the lamp. Ice fell into a glass. ‘Whisky? Or cognac? All there is, I’m afraid.’
I didn’t reply. The prizefighter left me and returned with a glass of amber liquid. ‘Take it. Have some,’ the voice advised. ‘You need it. It’s not an easy business this, I know. And yet,’ he added carefully, turning towards me in the shadows, a strange, soft, sympathetic tone coming into his voice, ‘you’ll have to admit you do have some experience of it all – this changing roles, characters. It’s not the first time, is it? So this shouldn’t be too difficult.’
I sat down and at once I started to shake. My stomach and the inside of my arms seemed to vibrate together, and then my shoulders, and I felt a violent nausea rise inside me, a long-delayed sickness now come to full term. I leant my head back hoping to stay it. But the first spurt of vomit rose up anyway and lay in my mouth, a lumpy bitter fluid. And then I couldn’t help myself with it and I bent forward hopelessly. But they’d seen what was happening and as I retched I found the prizefighter holding one of the deep-framed Redouté roses in front of me like a tray, and I came on it, puking violently, sweating, my stomach going inside-out, seeing the stream of seedy yellow fluid covering all the red flower. I slipped off the sofa then and was down on my hands and knees on the blocked pine floor, and another print was pushed in front of me, a fine sprig, some golden thorny species, and in a moment it too was like a dog’s breakfast.
‘This is a farce,’ I said when the sickness was over and they were helping me back on the sofa, one of them sponging my forehead with a damp cloth. ‘Utterly stupid, impossible. I’m sorry.’ Suddenly, I found myself addressing these thugs quite openly, in almost a friendly way, as if they were colleagues. It seemed I wanted to thank them for their help in my sudden travail: I had done something stupid, taken too much drink at a party. I was not angry; I was apologetic.
I felt very weak and I had forgotten why I was here or who I was. Marlow, Graham, Jackson? The names ran vaguely and unimportantly round my head, like children in a playground being watched by a mysterious anonymous presence. It simply wasn’t important. As long as the three children were happy. Someone else was responsible for them. The person I had been or might become had been wiped clean away, purged out of me with the sickness. And what was left of me at that moment, was nothing, nobody, void.
So that when the man beyond the lamp eventually began to speak I grasped his words willingly, as a landline back to life – any conscious life, which I suddenly craved, just as I had in Durham jail months before when McCoy had first voiced his mean proposals. I could live Jackson’s life as a recompense – for his failure and mine – in such a way that would vindicate both of us and destroy them. So instead of arguing when I’d recovered, I said calmly: ‘What is it? Tell me what you want of Jackson?’
‘I have a plan,’ the man said in the shadows, speaking the words slowly, almost in a lilt, like a singer taking the first words of a song without music, ‘a plan for all of us –’
‘An offer I can’t refuse,’ I broke in, taking the advantage. And I could feel
them looking at me in some surprise.
And when I heard what the plan was I was happy in a way, a hard and brutal way perhaps, but one needed something of that – for the first thing I thought now, after he had given me the outlines of it all, was that now I was Helen Jackson’s husband. My association with her had been licensed here at last, a wedding by proxy. I was her husband and her lover all in one. And thus surely, I felt, when we met again, I could not help but find out all about her. For now I should be privy, quite naturally, both to the history of her marriage and to all the long processes of her affair. Surely, I thought, she could not deny me that knowledge any longer?
*
That night I slept in the Jacksons’ big double bed, his fine black leather suitcases half packed all around me, all the bits and pieces of his departure scattered about the room waiting to come together in me.
We had spent the hours before going through all Guy’s effects, his papers from Cheltenham, his new identity card with my photograph on it now, his passport which had been changed in the same way. Another man had arrived with these half-way through the evening, some kind of electronics expert, and he spent a long time with familiarising me, as far as he could, with the job Guy was to have done back in England.
I had told the blue-suited man that I thought his plan would fail very early on, that the communications experts in Cheltenham would surely sec through my lack of expertise at once. But he disagreed, while the man who had briefed me said, ‘If you memorise these basic details we’ve gone over – here in these papers – and say nothing else, don’t attempt to offer any thoughts of your own, you’ll be all right. In any case, we know that Jackson would have been given a two-week induction course with this new system. So they’ll be teaching you the business. They won’t expect you to know anything about it. As to the general procedure in this building – codes, cyphers, cryptanalysis – you should have nothing to do with this at all: you’re being specially posted as a trainee to this electronic one-time pad unit.’
