More and more often, during Barker’s meticulous financial suggestions and provisos, my eye would wander back to the glass façade over his shoulder. And I found, having first recognised it with distaste, that I had begun to think about it with fascination, as a man experiences an extraordinary sense of déjà vu, which haunts him for the rest of the day. I was drawn by incidental memory deep inside the building, through the security checks with Quinlan, the old Irish Service Corps sergeant in the hall, up the murmuring lifts and along the windowless corridors, permanently invested with a lavender-smelling disinfectant they flushed the latrines with, hearing the ‘thwack-thwack’ of busy typewriters running up top copies ‘For Your Eyes Only’ with a single flimsy for registry that more often than not in those days would find its way to Dzherzhinsky Street by the end of the week.
It was an eerie feeling, sitting safe in Barker’s big red leather chair, huddled among his reassuring nineteenth-century deed boxes, their white lettering naming old families in Herefordshire and great houses in the south-west, while looking out at this glass castle gleaming in the sunlight, an architectural havoc, where all the bad fairies lived and I had worked passage for a rotten decade that had ended nearly ten years before.
Henry, in his old tortoiseshell specs, had gone from that eighth floor in 1967, sent packing by Williams on his last long journey down the Nile — and so had I, sold out by the same man, from that meagre office with its scratched walnut furniture, half carpet and hatstand I never used, finding solace by comparison in the hospital wing of Durham Jail. Even the duds who left the building in one piece had few reasons to be grateful to anyone in it, while the best usually found death or exile in the small print of their contract half-way through their time there.
And yet, as I say, I was drawn to it. Even the worst memorials serve to remind us that, as well as the pain, we have lived once, and seen happiness with friends in certain streets when it was evening, had lunch with them on good days or weekend picnics in a Bloomsbury square: that there was some pleasure despite the horror of the times.
Drinks with Henry, for instance, in that wine bar down the Strand: the champagne which he always ordered, back from some mission, running his finger down the frosted side like a child playing on a clouded window-pane, celebrating a safe return from some folly in the east — the married commuters from Sevenoaks and their secretaries sipping sherry and whispering sweet mischief over candle-lit barrels while we spoke of more distant intimacies: Ahmed’s cloudy news from behind the bar at the Cairo Semiramis and what had passed that week by the pool at the Gezira club.
These days one can find the past preserved in squalid modern brick and glass as much as in old deed boxes — and so it lay now, across the roofs from me, like a temptation one knew was wrong and thus could not resist.
The wine bar was empty at 11.30, after I’d left Barker’s and walked down to the Strand in the hot summer sunshine. The candles on the barrels were unlit and the manager, an accommodating and sleekly brilliantined Jeeves whom I had known well in the past, must long since have died or moved. But otherwise the place seemed exactly the same as it had been ten years before, almost to the day, when I had last sat there with Henry, swapping gentle taunts about the fatuous vacuity of our lives.
Even the salt biscuits were the same — too dry and crumbly for pleasure, tasting of old paper.
And one never forgets a smell, which brought it all back quicker than anything — a musty sourness embedded in the wood and in the furnishings, of wine spilt over many years, that had remained like a coward in the room long after all the happy tribe had left.
I took a glass of Beaune with me and sat down in the far corner. I thought of my finances and of Barker’s polite warnings. I prayed I wouldn’t have to leave my cottage, which already, after only a few hours in London, beckoned me like a woman. A job, as Barker had hinted? I was unemployable.
I gazed at the snack menu to take my mind off the idea: ‘Paté de foie à la Maison: 95p’ — a nerveless mix of liver and old bottle-ends still doing time after more than ten years at three times the price. The place began to sicken me with its bland constancy, a stage set always for the same production, with the same props and the same cast waiting for curtain-up at lunchtime: the silly bowler-hatted city men strayed adventurously beyond Throgmorton Street, lunching with fast women — account executives probably — long nosed and 40 who laughed too much; gossip writers from the staider papers, a lone bishop, his purple bib showing like a sore thumb, and country gentlemen in tweeds, up in town for the day without a table in Simpsons, who took the set lunch upstairs in the small restaurant after two rash glasses of South African amontillado below.
They were beginning to come in all round me now and I was just about to leave, thinking of a more piquant lunch in Soho and some easy film in Leicester Square afterwards.
I saw him almost from the moment he pushed open the glass doors, coming in out of the sunshine like a harassed refugee: the thin figure sloping up to the bar, in his dark and slightly grubby pinstripe suit, and the old navy blue pullover, same as ever, tight around his neck, so that just the knot of some regimental tie peeped out, like an apology, which none the less could be fully displayed in an emergency and astound everyone with the truth. For Basil Fielding actually had all the right credentials. He hadn’t changed either in ten years, I couldn’t see his face clearly as he moved behind some people to make his order at the bar. But I could remember it well enough, now that the man himself had given me the outlines: the always badly shaved cheeks and chin, stubbled like fine white sandpaper, the slightly blue, spittle-encrusted lips, the ears which drooped thinly down either side of the large face rather like an elephant’s, the air of apologetic dejection. Fielding looked so shifty you couldn’t believe it of him. The devious expression was like a bad caricature, for his eyes always hovered on the edge of such real laughter it made him seem incapable of dishonesty or malice. Or so I had thought in those former years.
Basil had been the wandering minstrel of our Mid-East Section in the old days, almost a licensed jester, a sad man who yet rejoiced. His job had been ill-defined, most particularly by himself. But it had been in Protocol, even he knew that. It was his function to control liaison and run such formal paperwork as existed between our own and other allied intelligence services, particularly with the CIA. Though I remember once he had lunched at the Soviet Embassy, on some diplomatic pretext or other — for he was officially on the Foreign Office list — and had returned that afternoon with a more than useful piece of information about the rocket base in Baikonur, extracted by Basil from a surprised military attaché, like a poacher tickling a trout.
There wasn’t really much doubt about it: behind the inefficient footling exterior, Fielding possessed some nameless gift, a man who could lull people with his inanities while all the time calculating just how much he could rob them of without their noticing. While he hummed and hawed and groaned with platitudes, I remember — as though hurtling through some cosmic black hole — that was when he was at his most dangerous, when he had noticed some great potential out of the corner of his eye — some bureaucratic advantage — and was beginning his stalk towards it.
He hasn’t seen me yet, I thought. ‘Don’t talk to him,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t start anything. He hasn’t seen you.’ And I turned away from him and blew my nose.
Perhaps this sound alerted him, some sharp aural file index of his identifying me from afar. For the next thing I knew he was beside me, standing diffidently over me, holding two glasses of wine in his age-marked hands — one at such an angle that some drops fell onto my table. I thought he might be drunk for a moment, or hungover.