Six weeks later, desperation led him to act irrationally. Against all better judgment he asked once more to be transferred to Intelligence and was gobsmacked to find himself summoned to an interview at the War Office in London. London… Whitehall… the hub of the universe.
Simply stepping out of a cab so close to the Cenotaph- England’s memorial to her dead, at least her own white dead, of countless imperial ventures-gave him a thrill. It was all he could do not to salute.
Down all the corridors and in the right door to face a lieutenant colonel, then he saluted. But, he could not fail to notice, he was saluting not some secret agent in civilian dress, not Bulldog Drummond or James Bond, but another Ordnance officer just like himself.
“You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, haven’t you?” Lieutenant Colonel Breen said when they’d zipped through the introductions.
“I have?”
Breen flourished a sheet of smudgy-carboned typed paper.
“Your old CO in Tripoli tells me you did a first-class job running the mess. And I think you’re just the chap we need here.”
Silence being the better part of discretion, and discretion being the better part of an old cliché, George said nothing and let Breen amble to his point.
“A good man is hard to find.”
Well-he knew that, he just wasn’t wholly certain he’d ever qualified as a “good man.” It went with “first-class mind” (said of eggheads) or “very able”(said of politicians) and was the vocabulary of a world he moved in without ever touching.
“And we need a good man right here.”
Oh Christ-they weren’t making him mess officer? Not again!
“Er… actually, sir, I was under the impression that I was being interviewed for a post in Intelligence.”
“Eh? What?”
“I have fluent Russian, sir, and I… “
“Well, you won’t be needing it here… ha… ha… ha!”
“Mess officer?”
Breen seemed momentarily baffled.
“Mess officer? Mess officer? Oh, I get it. Yes, I suppose you will be, in a way, it’s just that the mess you’ll be supplying will be the entire British Army ‘East of Suez.’ And you’ll get your third pip. Congratulations, Captain.”
Intelligence was not mentioned again except as an abstract quality that went along with “good man” and “first-class mind.”
Sylvia would not hear of living in Hendon or Finchley. The army had houses in north London, but she would not even look. So they moved to West Byfleet in Surrey, onto a hermetically sealed army estate of identical houses, and as far as George could see, identical wives, attending identical coffee mornings.
“Even the bloody furniture’s identical!”
“It’s what one knows,” she said. “And it’s a fair and decent world without envy. After all, the thing about the forces is that everyone knows what everyone else earns. Goes with the rank, you can look it up in an almanac if you want. It takes the bitterness out of life.”
George thought of all those endless pink gins he and Ollerenshaw had knocked back out in Libya, and how what had made them palatable was the bitters.
George hung up his uniform, went into plain clothes, War Office Staff Captain (Ord) General Stores, let his hair grow a little longer, and became a commuter-the 7:57 a.m. to Waterloo, and the 5:27 p.m. back again. It was far from Russia.
Many of his colleagues played poker on the train, many more did crosswords, and a few read. George read, he got through most of Dostoevsky in the original, the books disguised with the dust jacket from a Harold Robbins or an Irwin Shaw, and when he wasn’t reading stared out of the window at the suburbs of south London-Streatham, Tooting, Wimbledon- and posh “villages” of Surrey-Surbiton, Esher, Weybridge- and imagined them all blown to buggery.
The only break in the routine was getting rat-arsed at the office party a few days before Christmas 1962, falling asleep on the train, and being woken by a cleaner to find himself in a railway siding in Guildford at dawn the next morning.
It didn’t feel foolish-it felt raffish, almost daring, a touch of Errol Flynn debauchery-but as 1963 dawned, England was becoming a much more raffish and daring place, and Errol Flynn would soon come to seem like the role model for an entire nation.
It was all down to one person, really-a nineteen-year-old named Christine Keeler. Miss Keeler had had an affair with George’s boss, the top man, the minister of war, the Rt. Hon. John (Umpteenth Baron) Profumo (of Italy), MP (Stratford-on-Avon, Con.), OBE. Miss Keeler had simultaneously had an affair with Yevgeni Ivanov, an “attaché of the Soviet embassy” (newspeak for spy)-and the ensuing scandal had rocked Britain, come close to toppling the government, led to a trumped-up prosecution (for pimping) of a society doctor, his subsequent suicide, and the resignation of the aforementioned John Profumo.
At the War Office, there were two notable reactions. Alarm that the class divide had been dropped long enough to allow a toff like Profumo to take up with a girl of neither breeding nor education, whose parents lived in a converted wooden railway carriage, that a great party (Conservative) could be brought down by a woman of easy virtue (Keeler)-and paranoia that the Russians could get that close.
For a while Christine Keeler was regarded as the most dangerous woman in England. George adored her. If he thought he’d get away with it he’d have pinned her picture to his office wall.
It was possible that his lust for a pinup girl he had never met was what led him into folly.
The dust had scarcely settled on the Profumo affair. Lord Denning had published his report entitled unambiguously “Lord Denning’s Report” and found himself the author of an unwitting best seller when it sold four thousand copies in the first hour and the queues outside Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in Kingsway stretched around the block and into Drury Lane, and the country had a new prime minister in the cadaverous shape of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had resigned an earldom for the chance to live at No. 10.
George coveted a copy of the Denning Report, but it was understood to be very bad form for a serving officer, let alone one at the ministry that had been if not at the heart of the scandal then most certainly close to the liver and kidneys, to be seen in the queue.
His friend Ted-Captain Edward Ffyffe-Robertson RAOC- got him a copy, and George refrained from asking how. It was better than any novel-a marvelous tale of pot-smoking West Indians, masked men, naked orgies, beautiful, available women, and high society. He read it and reread it, and since he and Sylvia had now taken not only separate beds but also separate rooms, slept with it under his pillow.
About six months later Ted was propping up the wall in George’s office, having nothing better to do than jingle the coins in his pocket or play pocket billiards whilst making the smallest of small talk.
Elsie the tea lady parked her trolley by the open door.
“You’re early,” Ted said.
“Ain’t even started on teas yet. They got me ‘anding out the post while old Albert’s orf sick. What a diabolical bleedin’ liberty. Ain’t they never ‘card of demarcation? Lucky I don’t have the union on ‘em.”
Then she slung a single, large brown envelope onto George’s desk.
“I see you got yer promotion then, Mr. ‘Orsefiddle. All right for some.”
She pushed her trolley on. George looked at the envelope.
“Lieutenant Colonel HG Horsfield.”
“It’s got to be a mistake, surely?”
Ted peered over.
“It is, old man. Hugh Horsfield. Half-colonel in Artillery. He’s on the fourth floor. Daft old Elsie’s given you his post.”
“There’s another Horsfield?”