The Sixth Directorate

by Joseph Hone

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, almost apologetic. ‘I’ve never met Guy at stations or airports. It was something we agreed on years ago. You know – not unless I had to. I’m very bad at comings and goings like that.’

  And there was a tinge of exclusion then – even then: one among a thousand small things between them which I knew nothing about: all the minutiae of their life together, the details they had shared without enmity, the little agreements which at one time they had made with so easy an acceptance and understanding.

  She had a trug with her on the ground full of freshly picked lavender and another basket full of crab apples. I picked them up and sniffed at them both; the first sweet and dry, the other moist and tart.

  ‘I was getting bunches for the bedroom,’ she said. ‘And Mrs Grace is going to make some crab-apple jelly with me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The lady we have helping.’

  ‘Oh. I’ll get my bags.’

  They were half-way down the pathway and as I turned to get them I saw someone in the shadow of the hall beyond the porch.

  *

  ‘Mrs Grace, this is my husband, Guy,’ Helen said when I got back and had put my bags down in the hall. We shook hands. She was a large, middle-aged, yet clearly very alert woman who moved quickly on her feet; a good face, strong and full of character, intent eyes, well-kept fluffy dark hair, a fine aquiline nose. There was something obscurely passionate and unfulfilled about her, a mood of poetry almost, which she wished to communicate, and had failed only for lack of an understanding audience. She had obvious finesse and intelligence, and long unmarked fingers, one with a gold cameo ring on it. She was like no daily help I’d ever seen.

  ‘I’m very pleased to meet you Mr Jackson,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting Helen’s husband very much.’ She turned to Helen with a friendly, tender look. ‘We have got on so well together.’

  Helen came with me. There was a landing to the side of the building with a run of small windows looking out on the fir plantation up the hill to our right, and our bedroom doors in a line to our left. She paused for a moment, between the first two doors – undecided for an instant. Then she opened the nearest one to the staircase and we went in. It was a spare room, very neat with a dark blue fitted carpet and two single beds with patterned blue and white coverlets, curtains to match, a steeply slanting ceiling and a dormer window looking down on the valley. I could just see the top floor and the tall chimney of the Government Communications building, the red-brick glowing in the evening sun.

  ‘I suppose you’d better use – here?’ She turned, perplexed, uncertain as I was of my role and placing in the house. ‘Mrs Grace goes home. But there are the children.’

  ‘Of course.’

  I put my luggage down. Where could I begin, I wondered? How did one start – what were the right words? I started to fiddle with the locks on the cases and she went over to a dresser beneath the window and started to arrange the lavender stalks in a roughly glazed Italian jug. She seemed completely her old competent self now, the sophisticated Manhattan socialite, adept in all the social virtues, every nuance of formal greeting: a friend had come to stay for a few days, and all the hospitality would be gracious and perfectly ordered.

  ‘I –’

  ‘I –’

  We both spoke at once. She turned from the window and came towards me – and then, very formally with a hint of annoyance, she said, ‘Where is Guy? What stupid game are you both up to now?’

  ‘I – we,’ I stammered. I was intimidated by the sudden school mistress in her. ‘Look, could we talk about this later, when the children are in bed. It’s very serious. There’s no game.’

  ‘All right, but roughly what? Where is he? What are you doing in his clothes? What are you doing’ – her voice rose suddenly with incredulous anger – ‘in his suit, his shirt, his shoes. And his wedding ring.’ She grabbed the lapels on the coat and pulled them, shaking me. ‘What in God’s name are you up to?’

  I felt she’d be hitting me in a second. ‘Now? You’re sure you want it now?’ She nodded. I took the ring off and gave it to her.

  ‘Guy is dead.’ And then I rushed on before she had time to say anything. ‘He was pushed out of the window of my office in the UN yesterday evening in New York. By your organisation, the KGB. In my bloody clothes. And that’s why I’m wearing his. It’s up thirty-two floors, you know, my room – and I’m supposed to have killed myself: a pulpy mess on top of the cafeteria roof. But that was Guy, I’m afraid, though they wouldn’t have recognised either of us after that tumble. They want me for his job – to get some information for them, in that building. Down there.’

  And now I was angry too – at the inescapable hurt that I was causing her, though she didn’t show it.

  ‘They put me into his clothes, dragged him to the window, made me watch everything, then took me back to your apartment, briefed me, and I took over everything of Guy from there.’ I paused. She said nothing. She held his ring, turning it over slowly in her hand, her face perfectly composed, expressionless, her eyes on mine but unfocused, looking through me.

  I was shaking now again – and suddenly completely exhausted, a shivering overwhelming nauseous fatigue. I lit a cigarette.

  ‘You need a drink,’ she said. ‘You must. I’ll go get something.’

  When she got back with a bottle of whisky from somewhere, and two toothbrush glasses from the bathroom, she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I was sitting on the bed, my head in my hands, barely able to move. I tried to smile.

  ‘You’re sorry? It’s the other way round, Helen.’

  ‘No. I couldn’t have seen him killed, couldn’t have stood that. Not the actual sight of it, that would have killed me. You had to see all that.’

  ‘Yes. He looked at me …’ But I didn’t go on.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. I could hear the sound of the children downstairs, shouting over their tea. ‘There would have been such pain in that look for me, as if I’d killed the marriage and he was being sacrificed into the bargain – as if I were physically killing him as well. You know the feelings sometimes in a bad marriage, actually wishing the other person were dead. Well, it would have been that, going through that in reality, seeing it happen. And you know, it might have been me who had to watch that, they might have wanted to use me in the same way. Instead, you were the one.’

  She sat down on the bed opposite, and drank with me, and she was warmer now, and still extraordinarily composed.

  ‘Times when you wanted him dead. Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Yes, there were. But not real death. I wanted some act, some action in our relationship, some decision for good or bad: a development of the marriage or an ending to it – not just tagging along together, unfriendly, as strangers, for the sake of the children. And that’s happened now. Something’s happened.’

  ‘The most appalling sort of action though, isn’t it?’

  Now she smiled, fingering the ring. And I couldn’t restrain the comment then, seeing this smile and remembering Guy’s very different expression as he went to the window, the always disdainful, isolated face so suddenly flooded at the last with all the essential warmth of life. I said, ‘You’re being a little cold-hearted about it all, aren’t you?’

  ‘Peter, I’m not thinking about it. Yet. It’s just an event somewhere, a war, a casualty, a story you’ve told me. It’s quite unreal. Quite.’

  ‘And you smile about it? He didn’t need to die, you know. You could have got a divorce. I always told you.’

  She didn’t reply. ‘I was thinking about irony,’ she said at last slowly, considering the words carefully as they appeared, confirming that each bore the exact weight of her thought. ‘Someone once told me I didn’t have that quality – that I was too much involved in hope, in the here and now. Well, I’m not any more, am I? “Ironic reflection” he said – that that was needed just as much as the singing and dancing.’

  ‘So what?’ I didn’
t understand.

  ‘I have to smile – looking at you in Guy’s clothes, and seeing, thinking, how you’ve come from being my lover to being my husband, without ever having been either: yet still the image of the two people I shared most with – but without our knowing anything about each other, or even having really touched in any way. You see? What kind of reality is it that makes such things happen? I don’t know. It’s not real. Yet.’

  She put her hand across the space between the beds and touched mine, just running her index finger lightly along my knuckles.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Of course. Everything later. The house may be wired. Let’s see how Mrs Grace does her apple jelly.’

  We went downstairs to the kitchen. In a muslin bag slung between two chairs, the first cooking of crab-apple jelly dripped slowly into a big pan: an hour-glass, an essence of ordinary life, a perfect domestic calendar, counterpointing all our terrible deceits.

  *

  Afterwards, when the sun finally went and Mrs Grace drove off into the twilit woods and I’d read the twins another bedtime story, I went into the garden and while Helen tended the bonfire, gathering the remaining weeds and leaves of the afternoon together and poking up the flames, I told her all the other details of my own tale, which she then accepted as completely real – the mask changing quickly as she listened, the tragic entirely replacing the comic.

  We came in and out of the drawing-room several times during the evening fetching drinks – a comfortable split-level room with a bookcase full of the owner’s military memoirs dividing it, a brown carpet, russet curtains, a green sofa and a big open hearth, a roughly cut Cotswold stone fireplace with a vase of bracken in it: a slightly cluttered, homely, intimate room, made for winter evenings, for talk and drink and people together high on the hill, hidden in the trees, locked securely away from the world.

  But now as we talked, whispering in the house, with barely louder voices outside, the wretched details of my story poisoned the mood: soured everything of the cosy architecture and the yellow rose bushes – strangely luminous now in the half-light. And we drank: drank fast and badly. And it didn’t calm us, simply sharpened our nerves, so that we moved all the more distractedly from the garden to the house and back again. Helen pacing to and fro from the drinks table: Helen thinking of lighting a fire, of phoning someone in America, of cooking supper. But she did none of these things – trying through all these novel happy actions to escape back into ordinary life, away from this increasing horror. But there was no escape that I could see yet, and I told her, the two of us standing over the smoke, watching the odd small eruptions of flame as the fire gathered strength.

  ‘They’re here somewhere – around us, bugging us, following us, all the time,’ I said. ‘And we’re down a lane, miles from anywhere. They can cut us off completely, watch our comings and goings, every move. There’ll be somebody watching the house – now, this moment.’

  And then I suddenly remembered Mrs Grace.

  ‘The woman, for example – what do you know of her? Where is she from? Her accent …?’

  ‘Has she? I thought it was an English accent.’

  ‘No. From Europe somewhere.’

  ‘She’s a dancing teacher in the town. Ballroom dancing. She has a studio somewhere. But it’s doing rather badly. No one wants to learn the old fashioned steps anymore.’

  ‘One of them – a KGB appointee?’

  ‘How? She told me she’s been living here for years, since the war.’

  ‘They have stringers in a place like this where there are important government departments. A permanent resident. They could have placed her here years ago.’

  ‘But surely …? No, she’s not the sort, she’s so nice.’

  ‘Why not? A lot of Communists are nice.’ I looked at Helen. ‘And some are even good at making crab-apple jelly. And the foxtrot.’

  ‘But I got her from the government people here.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She’d given her name to them as someone willing to do housekeeping and baby-minding during the day. So how could she be with them?’

  ‘Simply turning down other jobs she was offered – and waiting for you to arrive; then saying she was available for work, and did they have any – knowing you’d need someone. They’re not fools. They’re doing everything on this job very thoroughly.’

  ‘We have a week to think before you start your job. You’re on leave, remember.’ She drank some more whisky.

  ‘A holiday! Marvellous.’ I smiled. ‘They’ll follow us anywhere we go. You and I could lose them, maybe. But with the two children it’s not very likely. And you’ve no one here in England you could leave them with. And anyway, go where? And into what future? Family life on the run? Or you could go back to America on your own. But they’d find you there easily enough. They have the ends all tied up. And yet – as I told you – we have to get out. Even if I succeed in getting them this machine they are still going to have to get rid of us afterwards: the information would be no use to them otherwise. So we have to lose them. And I’m no good at guns or fast cars. Are you?’

  ‘No. Surely we have to tell your people here? That’s a way out. They can help us.’

  ‘Yes. I’d thought of that. Dump ourselves on them – all four of us. It would have to be that. We can’t phone. That’s surely tapped. I might be able to get down there and tell them,’ I said, looking at the Government Communications HQ beyond the reservoir. ‘But that place has nothing to do with counter-espionage. They’d laugh at me. It would have to be London, my old section there. McCoy, or a fellow called Harper, my immediate control. I could contact them somehow. And maybe have them turn the whole KGB plan round – get their men. Play along with the KGB.’

  ‘But they’ll have thought of that.’ Helen waved a hand slowly through a curl of smoke and then smelt her fingers. The lights of the town were more visible now, a hazy glow beginning to form in the dusk of the valley beneath us. ‘That’s just what they’ll be expecting. They know we can’t run. So they must assume we’ll try and tell.’

  ‘How can they stop it? I know we can’t phone from here. But I can surely get to somewhere long enough to make a call without their knowing.’

  ‘Yes, of course. But that’s just it – it doesn’t make sense.’ She turned to me urgently. ‘Why did they go ahead with the plan, knowing, as they must have done, of that one obvious loophole: that you would tell your people in London, this man Harper or whoever, and that then there would be a good chance of their having their whole scheme played back to them. What makes them so confident, with that huge crack in their plan?’

  ‘I don’t know. They said they’d kill us – you and me or both if anything went wrong. I suppose they were relying on that: it’s quite an effective lever, don’t you think? That’s why they got me to watch them killing Guy.’

  ‘Yes, but you only have to make one phone call. And make sure you’re not seen – a shop or hotel in town, or some house over the hill here. That can’t be impossible.’

  ‘Why not?’ I suddenly thought ‘They may intend keeping all of us in the house locked up, prisoners, from now until I take the job up. Block the road. Someone with a gun. Have Mrs Grace bring the food. Very easy. They’ve probably got some sort of look-out post up there in the plantation. And the telephone wires go along the edge of the trees by the road. They could be monitoring it. Or even simpler, just cut the thing off now that I’ve arrived. Have you tried the phone recently?’

  ‘Yes. This morning.’

  ‘Let’s try it now.’

  We went inside and she picked up the handset. It was quite dead.

  *

  ‘I wonder when they’ll show their hand?’ I said.

  We went out into the garden again and looked around: the lights bright over the town now in the full night, the dark plantation above us, the shadowy rows of apple trees in the paddock, the end of summer, a hint of fine sharpness in the air, and a lot of stars cluttering the sky.

  And
as we listened the air was suddenly pierced with a sharp cackle of alarm: the geese below the house had been roused by something: a fox or some human intrusion? Their cries rose, then wavered and died.

  We were both frightened now, moving over to the flower-border looking down on the road, a rose bush just in front of us, a strong infinitely sweet smell on still air. Then we moved to the other side of the lawn and peered up through the long lines of dark fir.

  And it was this simple, sudden feeling of fear, which we shared then, I think, which finally confirmed for both of us all the other details of my story – which at times, in the telling, had seemed fantastic to me as it must have done for Helen. But now we both knew the full truth of the whole business, knew it before it happened: we were trapped.

  ‘Of course the phone could just be out of order – that’s always happening in England. And that was a fox,’ Helen said.

  ‘Yes, it could be just that.’

  But neither of us believed it. We were trying to support ourselves with words, avoiding the issue, postponing the truth, weary with drink and with my terrible travellers’ tales. And it was this feeling of being caught, yet not admitting it, that brought us together in the darkness. Already feeling victims of some outrage in the morning – the arrival of a new and treacherous Mrs Grace and a man with a gun – we both of us must have decided to combat this evil rising about us with some shared action: a statement that would assert, whatever happened later, that we two, at least, knew the prosperity of affection, could lay our hands firmly on the roots of decent life.

  I turned to Helen, seeing her outlined vaguely against the light of the fire, the white face with its dark frame of falling hair, the rough white pullover. And wordlessly, with so much ease, we took each other in our arms, ears side by side, and stayed that way, strange at first with the feeling of being close, but growing quickly familiar with the idea as we gave it flesh.