He laughed. I laughed too, and he suggested we take a walk before dinner. It was still just winter, but the earth was thawing, as if spring lay just beneath the surface. We talked about other things - about England, and the Civil Service, and the way things had changed.
"Most of us, you know, have spent our lives escaping from the thirties," he told me, as we looked back down the valley toward his house.
"We were all so exquisitely happy then. It was our world. But we lost it in 1939, and we've been looking to escape ever since."
He pointed to the farmhouse, shrouded in late-afternoon mist.
"That's my escape..." he said.
That evening we had a splendid dinner, and afterward retired to his study with the port. Proctor was drunk, and I could see he was finding my visit a strain. He knew that sooner or later I would return to Burgess.
For a while he seemed to doze off over his port, and woke up perspiring heavily. He began to dab his forehead nervously with his handkerchief.
"Why do you think it was Guy never bothered to approach you?" I asked as I filled his glass again.
Proctor gulped his down, and poured himself another.
"I admired Guy very much," he said, after a pause. "People forget, you know, just how gifted Guy was. They don't remember how he was before the war. The looks, the vitality, the intellect. They just think of him afterward."
I said nothing, waiting for him to fill the silence.
He began again, talking more urgently.
"You see, I had no secrets from him. Whenever I had a problem, no matter how secret, I used to discuss it with him, and his advice was always sound. I think the real truth of the matter is that Guy had no need to recruit me. He could get to know anything he wanted. All he had to do was ask."
"What about 1951?" I asked, anxious to press him while he was talking.
"No, no, no," he clucked, "you've got that all wrong. I left in 1950 for personal reasons, nothing to do with this - to do with Varda, my first wife. She committed suicide, you know, in 1951."
"Did you see Guy before he went?"
"No - but my wife did, about six weeks before. She and her father were very close to him. I was in Copenhagen at the time."
"And she killed herself afterward?"
"Not long after, yes..."
He sat up and looked at me, suddenly sober.
"I'd rather not talk about it, if you don't mind. But there's no connection, I promise you."
He slumped back again in the chair, disheveled like a defrocked priest.
"They were both terrible, shocking events," he said quietly. "A year or two later, when I recovered, Edward Bridges invited me back into the Civil Service, and I came back to England." (Edward Bridges was then Permanent Secretary at the Treasury and Head of the Home Civil Service.)
I never did discover why Proctor's first wife, Varda, committed suicide, or what she and Guy Burgess discussed. The truth about Proctor was difficult to judge. I was inclined to believe his claim that he was never formally recruited, while disbelieving his assertion that Burgess had nothing to do with his departure to Denmark in 1950. But whatever the case, I am absolutely sure that during the time he was Baldwin's private secretary, and probably right up until 1950, he shared with Guy every secret which crossed his desk.
The next time I saw Blunt I told him about my discussion with Proctor.
"You didn't tell us about him, Anthony," I said, reproachful rather than angry. It always upset Blunt more if he felt the deceit was a matter between friends.
"You kept quiet again - to protect him."
He got up and went to the window, and gazed through it as if he could see back into the past.
"What about Dennis?" I asked again.
"All I can say is he must have been the best source Guy ever had. But I didn't know what role he was playing," he said finally. "All I knew was that he was still in Government..."
"But you could have guessed..." I sighed with irritation.
Blunt pulled the curtains, as if faintly disappointed with the noise and dust and fashions of the square outside.
"Unless you lived through it, Peter, you cannot understand..."
"Oh, I lived through it, Anthony," I said, suddenly angry. "I know more about the thirties probably than you will ever know. I remember my father driving himself mad with drink, because he couldn't get a job. I remember losing my education, my world, everything. I know all about the thirties..."
One of the most interesting things to emerge in the D3 researches was the existence of the Oxford Ring. In the past, Soviet recruitment was associated mainly with Cambridge University, but once Blunt opened up, it was obvious that Burgess and James Klugman had targeted Oxford in the same way. The first hard source on the Oxford Ring came from a colleague of Blunt's at the Courtauld Institute, Phoebe Pool. Blunt admitted that she had been his courier during the 1930s, and I was anxious to interview her. She and Blunt were close; they had even written a book together on Picasso.
Blunt told me she was a neurotic, and already in the process of a nervous breakdown. He said that she would clam up, or worse, if I spoke to her directly, so he organized a cutout for me-another senior figure at the Courtauld, Anita Brookner, to whom I could relay questions for Pool. A degree of deception was inevitable. Pool was told that new inquiries were being made into the 1930s, and Anthony wanted to know if there was anybody else he should warn.
Phoebe Pool told Anita Brookner that she used to run messages for Otto to two brothers, Peter and Bernard Floud. Peter, the former Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, was dead, but his brother Bernard was a senior Labor MP. Pool also said a young woman, Jennifer Fisher Williams, was involved, and urged Brookner to ensure that "Andy Cohen," the senior diplomat Sir Andrew Cohen, was warned too, as he also was at risk. All these names were well known to me. All except Andrew Cohen (Cohen was an Apostle and Cambridge student) were connected with the Clarendon, a left-wing dining and discussion club in Oxford during the 1930s, but this was the first hard evidence that the club had been a center for Soviet espionage recruitment.
Ironically, Jennifer Fisher Williams was married to a former war time MI5 officer, Herbert Hart, by the time her name emerged, so I visited her husband at Oxford, where he was pursuing a distinguished academic career as Professor of Jurisprudence, and asked him if he would approach his wife on my behalf. He rang her up there and then, assured her there was no threat to her position, and she agreed to meet me.
Jennifer Hart was a fussy, middle-class woman, too old, I thought, for the fashionably short skirt and white net stockings she was wearing. She told her story quite straightforwardly, but had a condescending, disapproving manner, as if she equated my interest in the left-wing politics of the 1930s with looking up ladies' skirts. To her, it was rather vulgar and ungentlemanly.
She said she was an open Party member in the 1930s, and was approached by a Russian, who from her description was definitely Otto. Otto instructed her to go underground, and she used to meet him clandestinely at Kew Gardens. She told us that she was merely part of the Party underground, and that she gave up meeting Otto when she joined the Home Office in 1938, where she worked in a highly sensitive department which processed applications for telephone intercepts. She told us, too, that she had never passed on any secret information.