The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘And you really think no one in this place is going to know me?’ I’d said at the time, talking across to the little man, still in the shadows. ‘Nobody from personnel in Cheltenham? Surely Guy Jackson must have been interviewed by someone down there?’

  ‘No. He was interviewed and cleared for the posting by the Foreign Office Communications section in London when he was last on leave there. And he’s since been checked up again, and debriefed on his New York posting by your friend Harper when he was over here. Jackson has no unfinished business in London or New York. He’s completely cleared to start the course.’

  ‘All right. But what about my “wife” – have you thought about her? How she’s going to react to my sudden presence and her husband’s death? Take it all quite calmly, you suppose? She may do something quite wild.’

  ‘Mrs Jackson has been estranged from her husband for several years. You can look at the evidence of that here later. You will tell her when you meet all that we’ve told you. She’ll collaborate. She too will have no safe alternative.’

  ‘And what about my “suicide” here in New York this evening? The section in London is going to want to check Jackson out on that when he gets back. He was my control, remember. Or someone here in New York, now. The UN people will have been onto the British Consulate already.’

  ‘I’m sure they have. But as far as they’re concerned you’re just an ordinary British citizen. Jackson was the only person in America who really knew what you were doing here. The Consulate will make the usual investigations – with your hotel, a report to your bogus address in London. It will be some time before anyone in your London section knows you’ve killed yourself. And when they do, and want to talk to you about your “death”, we have means of ensuring that the inquiry will amount to nothing.’

  ‘How? The first person they’ll send down to Cheltenham to see Jackson will be my section chief, McCoy – or more likely his deputy, Harper. And Harper is certainly going to know that I’m not Jackson.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Leave it to us.’

  And I said then, I remember, looking along every avenue while I had the chance: ‘What happens if I don’t go along with you? How can you kill me if I tell them everything when I get back – and they put me in a top-security prison again where I came from. What then?’

  ‘We’ll kill Mrs Jackson instead,’ the man said carefully. ‘And surely you can’t let her die, can you? With no husband and two young children to look after. I’m sure you’ll see that. And remember there will be people of ours with you both all the time in Cheltenham – waiting and watching, all that kind of business. We’ve not gone into this lightly. Any ideas you have about getting out of this on your own will result in certain disaster for Mrs Jackson and her children. And the same applies if you try and run together. Try running with two small children – you won’t get far. Leave them behind anywhere, and we will find out where they are – and their lives will be held against your return and carrying on the job, Mr Marlow. It is as simple as that. Over-dramatic, you may think, but as far as we are concerned an absolutely precise intention. You were meant to see clearly what happened to Mr Jackson this evening. Just remember what you saw.’

  ‘And if I succeed,’ I asked. ‘If I get you what you want?’

  ‘You’ll be free then, won’t you? Perhaps you’ll find you like the work in Cheltenham. Or like being Mrs Jackson’s husband. Who knows?’

  Of course I knew he was lying. For the information to be of any use to the Russians it would have to be extracted from Cheltenham without the people there ever knowing it was gone. And the only way of making sure they never did know would be to get rid of me and Helen afterwards in any case – kill us in some way made to seem an accident, a car crash, a fire or some such. Our deaths would have to be part of any successful deal.

  ‘Perhaps you fancy Mrs Jackson already,’ the little man continued. ‘She seems to have been quite free with her favours.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I turned to him, very surprised at this sudden revival of Helen’s infidelities, this intimacy with her affairs in the words of a total stranger who, he seemed to suggest, had long ago known more about her than I ever had.

  ‘I told you – we have evidence. Some reports we found in his suitcase.’ He spoke to one of the other men in Russian and I was brought back a green folder with a number of typewritten, yellowing sheets inside.

  They were the reports the detectives in East Africa had made out for Guy on his wife’s affair with Graham six years before – the reports which Guy had told me he had destroyed but hadn’t. I glanced through them. They seemed all the shabbier now, the hard, business-like words describing a passion fulfilled between two people for the delectation of a third. And I saw them as Guy’s death-warrant somehow; it was this obsession that no one could live with, but which he had been unable to lose, which had killed him: that spying on real life – however divisive – and not his official espionage, which had led to his end.

  It was obvious, with his keeping this evidence close to him, the memory of her infidelity always green in the green folder, that he had never intended, would never have been able, to forgive or forget – that his obsessive illness had condemned him to hold everything against her to the end: the literal documents of their failure and her success, with which he could continue to indict her throughout the remains of their marriage. He had wanted to punish himself, I suppose, more than her: that ‘deep sense of failure’ he had told me about a month before upstate. And her words too came back to me: ‘You fell down a hole in yourself a long time ago.’ Jackson was involved in that old bitter story: if love was not mutual, then at least the punishment would be.

  And that was something I might somehow make up for with her, on Guy’s behalf, I thought – put his marriage right for him – which was so important a thing, I felt, that a man might sense the happy change even in his grave.

  I glanced at one of the reports, dated ‘Nairobi, 17th September, 1965.’

  … he signed the register at the Tsavo National Park game-lodge as ‘Mr and Mrs Graham’ at 4.35 p.m. on September 10th. The two parties then went immediately to cabin number 27 at the end of the northern spur. They returned to the lounge of the main building at 6.05 p.m. where they ordered drinks – two local Crown lagers for him and two whisky-waters for her. Afterwards they had the set dinner on the terrace, with a single flask of Chianti. They adjourned to their cabin at 10.25 p.m. Our man was unable to …

  How prosaic. Yet Guy’s jealous obsession had thrived on just this sort of thing, I thought, since before we can properly imagine any act of infidelity we must have the precise bricks and mortar of the setting.

  And in this way Helen’s past rose up for me again in these reports, as it must have done for Guy. Here was an outline of all those mysterious intentions in her life, a rough map of the forces which had ruined him and whose effects I was now to inherit. Somewhere behind these bleak pages, as beyond the arid descriptions of Margaret Takazze’s novel, lay the real woman, untouched. Imprisoned by these walls of contrivance and deceit was a beleaguered mind, full of joy, frantically unexpressed.

  ‘Read it all,’ the little man advised. ‘Carefully. On your journey. They give great insight into the woman you’re married to – the woman you’re seeing tomorrow. Tomorrow afternoon. Your wife.’

  14

  It was an absolutely still and fine afternoon when I got to England next day, watching the manicured land run away from the train I’d picked up at Reading for Cheltenham, sitting in an empty first-class compartment in one of Guy’s best Savile Row pin-stripes, wearing an equally anonymous striped old boys’ tie: an endless hazy blue sky over the neat green pastures and gentle tree-filled rises of the Thames Valley, the corn run to a final blackened gold and ready to burst, the leaves of huge chestnuts by the river a dusty, pendulous green. We got to Cheltenham two hours later.

  I had heard about Regency Cheltenham, the Spa town, the Promenade, the fine trees and gracious
terraces, but had never been there. And it was a place, I saw from the taxi on my way from the station, which just, but only just, retained an air of Georgian grandeur, aristocratic conceits, the graceful, decorative arts of a pleasure-filled era, a hundred and fifty years before.

  Presently we emerged from the town centre, past a garden pub at a busy crossroads, a children’s hospital, a straggle of ugly pebble-dashed suburban villas which gradually died out as the road went higher. And then quite suddenly, the buildings ended and we were in the yellow evening country, with a farm and fields and a herd of Friesians away to our left, running down the hill to where the hazy town lay like a street-plan beneath us.

  And now, about half a mile away, beneath a reservoir and next to a large cemetery, I saw something I thought I recognised from a series of photographs I’d been shown by the Russians in New York: a group of war-time Nissen huts surrounded by a high fence, a large cark park, and in the centre, a long, three-storied redbrick building with a lot of glass windows and a tall, power-station chimney at one end: a building like a strange ship moored far away from the roads of the town, tucked into the side of the chalk escarpment. I thought of asking the driver what it was. But there was no need. It could only be the Government Communications Headquarters in Oakley Park. The Russians had carefully pointed it out on a map they’d shown me in New York – an expanse of anonymous buildings on the outer suburbs of the town, between the reservoir and the cemetery.

  And now I knew too how far we’d got on our journey, for they’d shown me, on the same map, where the house in the hills was which the Jacksons had taken, about three miles above the town. It would have to be there, up in front of us, in the ridge of thick trees that lay on the horizon, and it would have a perfect view, I realised, not only of the town but also of my future office.

  And then, as I realised how close I must be now to Helen, I was suddenly terrified. The whole perfect landscape threatened me, and I knew that the coming words could only be words of pain. The journey was at an end, when one had slept with tiredness, suspended above action. And now the only action I wanted was that of escape; I longed to tell the taxi man to drive on forever. I looked back down the hill. And, yes, there was a car behind us, a Jaguar saloon a hundred yards away. Was it following us? I couldn’t tell. But it seemed to push us forward inexorably. And I had a sudden vision of firing at it, blowing it clean out of the golden day, as if in a film or a story. But in such fiction one would have had a gun, of course, and realising that I didn’t, I felt the full weight of the reality that I was living through.

  The road narrowed and twisted and became very steep. The Jaguar had dropped away behind us and then I couldn’t see it any more. We passed into the tree belt I’d seen from below: at first, immediately beside the road, a long line of ancient, twisted copper beeches, and beyond them a mixture of woods, deciduous and conifer – old ruined copses, and a new forest, a plantation of fir that seemed to run over most of the brow of the hill. It was a strangely deserted area for somewhere so close to the town, without farms or habitation, almost dark in the bright evening light. And dead still. The driver paused at a small crossroads near the top. Ahead of us was open common, but we were still in the trees, their shadows casting long marks on the dazzling road beyond. He wound down the window. A bird twittered suddenly. And I could hear it, quite clearly, running away into the woods, its foot-steps like an animal crackling over the dry mould of leaves.

  ‘It must be down there,’ he said, looking along a stony track that led off to our left, gradually sloping down the hill again.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sure.’

  He drove down into the woods again and after about a quarter of a mile I saw the house to our right in a clearing of old trees, a fenced paddock in front, with the fir plantation rising immediately behind it.

  It was set back about a hundred yards above the road, with a pathway leading up to it between two rows of crab-apple trees; a long low converted Cotswold barn, covered at one end with a brilliant, coppery red virginia creeper, with windows all along its length, a wooden terrace giving out over the town and a small lawn at one end where the front door was with a lot of roses and glowing autumn shrubs bordering what I could see of the turf. A drift of grey smoke rose from some hidden, smouldering fire at the far end of the lawn, barely moving against the late sky, pale blue above the horizon of firs. And now, with the noise of our arrival, an extraordinary cackling broke out in the orchard and paddock which surrounded the house and I saw a flock of handsome plump, white geese, suddenly roused and strident, craning their necks and tilting their beaks in outrage, looking at us with deeply offended eyes, complaining bitterly at our intrusion in a long rising symphony of alarm.

  I got out of the car and helped with my luggage, and I was shaking now and my hands were trembling as I paid the man. He offered to help me up the steep pathway but I said no. And he turned in the garageway and drove off back along the dusty road, the exhaust dying, the smell of burnt petrol rising in the still air.

  And then I heard the cries that I had not wanted to hear – the beginning of what for another man would have been the first notes in a singing homecoming – the first words, in happier circumstances, that begin every book of family reunion.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! It’s Daddy – he’s here, Daddy!’

  The twins were standing at the top of the pathway, undecided for a moment, in their brown corduroy dungarees I remembered from upstate New York, topped off with big round faces and fair-fringed, rakish hair. Then seeing my dark suit for the first time, they both moved at once, quickly, anxiously, tumbling down the shallow rough steps to meet me. And I moved towards them.

  I suppose they were about five yards away from me before they realised I wasn’t their father, merely the image of him. But they didn’t really stop. They paused for an instant in their rush, and looked at me quizzically, fiddling with their thumbs, suddenly sucking them. Then they recognised me as the bedtime story man from that weekend upstate, for they came on quite happily, one of them saying ‘Have you brought another Babar Book?’ And the other said, ‘Yes – have you?’ And now they were both very close, looking up at me – bronzed, wide American faces, eyes as clear as water, noses turned up, and one of them – I couldn’t tell which – touched my suit. ‘You’re in Daddy’s clothes, aren’t you?’ she said knowingly, stroking the cuff. ‘They’re fine aren’t they?’ She smiled, looking all over me now. ‘And his tie, and his shoes, and his bags,’ she went on in wondrous appraisal. ‘And you’ve got his ring as well!’ She was particularly intrigued by this fact, touching the brassy metal very delicately. And then the other child looked at me, much more seriously and questioningly, unable for a moment to make any sense of this mysterious transformation. And then, finding the answer she needed, she turned to her sister.

  ‘He isn’t Daddy. But he is. He’s another Daddy. Our Daddy must be wearing his clothes. Don’t you see?’ And she looked behind me, peering between the crab-apple trees. ‘He’s hiding some place, I bet. We’re going to have a game.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘That’s it. But he’s not here just yet. I came first to start it off.’

  And with this answer they were quite happy, and they jumped up at me and clutched at my arms. And I lifted them off the ground, the two of them together, riding one on each arm, and I held them to me and bounced them a little. And then Helen appeared at the top of the pathway, without recognising who it was, I think, for my face was hidden by the movements of the children. I left my luggage where it was and walked up towards her.

  There are some encounters which are not meetings in the accepted sense at all, in which the exchange of every accepted emotion in the event – surprise, distaste, interest, happiness – never takes place: which are not meetings but speechless mysteries in which the two people involved – so shocked, so instantly changed, their expectations so completely altered – lose touch utterly with present time or concern, and where they drift forwards and backwards aimlessl
y through the whole life of their minds, looking for a touchstone, a signal from reality, which will return them to some understanding, immediacy, sanity.

  And for the first few minutes this is what happened between Helen and me. We behaved in a trance of awful formality.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello. How are you?’

  Apart from this we were speechless, looking at each other only with the vaguest interest, unfocused, unconcerned, the twins running round us shouting eagerly.

  She had been gardening or raking, with rubber gloves on, rusty cord jeans and a white Arran knit pullover spotted with leaves and mould. She took the gloves off and brushed herself down and pushed her dark hair back behind her ears, her face pale in the light, all its questing incisiveness gone. And we just stood there on the paved terrace with aubretia growing out between the cracks, between the lawn and the small church-like porch and double hall-door, the sun low now, but still brilliant away to the west over the town, with a pale blue sky running down towards the horizon, melting into pink and then gold. I looked round at the wide view, and frowned and was almost pompous when I spoke to her.

  ‘It really is a splendid place you’ve got here,’ I said, like an auctioneer. ‘Marvellous, How did you get it?’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ She looked over the town, pursing her lips, frowning herself now, as if trying to remember something. Then, after a long pause: ‘Oh, how did we get it? Yes – well, they told us about it. Someone – Mr Nichols in the housing section at Oakley Park. He wrote to Guy about it in New York.’

  She turned now and began to look at me clearly for the first time, as if the mention of Guy’s name had given her a first clue to present reality. She looked at me with an amazed intensity, an expression that carried no other emotion. Something started to burn behind the skin of her face, a gradually rising heat in her skull which put a fire in her eyes, coloured her cheeks, and seemed to fill out her whole being with flame, with a questioning but wordless force. So that I said, feeling she was accusing me unjustly and wishing to retaliate, ‘I thought you might have met me at the station.’