It ended. A simple failure of the imagination. I came to inhabit the cliché: I couldn’t accept another man’s future with her, someone unknown, the stranger who would climb on my shoulders into the light, smiling, after a strong gin and a romp, appreciating the river view; the man who would replace me in those empty afternoons when there was nothing to do except the one thing we had done so well. I shouldn’t have worried about strangers; I knew the men well enough at the time, and came to know them even better. In other circumstances I should never have charged Bridget with infidelity. Fidelity was really her strong point.
The three of us had a drink in the Continental the day I left to get my plane to London, Henry with us, as I thought, in the guise of a friendly receiver for a bankrupt. It was early summer, with the usual warnings of savage heat to come — the crowded first class carriages to Alex, the flocks of shimmering cars on their way out over the bridge through Dokki to the desert road, while those who remained in town became animals, searching out intuitively the darkest corners, the deepest shade, emerging only at nightfall to feed and ravage. We had Zibib and talked about the weather; polite inconsequential chatter. We left each other as perfect strangers.
Henry had said he would get Usher to recommend me for a job with Mid-East Intelligence in London, something quiet, “Information Only”. I told him not to bother, that I was thinking of something else altogether. “Besides,” I’d said, “you don’t know about it, but I met someone, a Colonel Hamdy …” And I told him what had happened six months before. He laughed.
“Hamdy? Military Intelligence? As long as it wasn’t the Political Intelligence, they’re more serious. But Hamdy, he’s doing that all the time. It’s happened to most of us out here at one time or another — happens to almost everyone in this business; subversion, blackmail, infiltration — we played a game with each other out here, his set-up against ours. I shouldn’t worry about that.”
I didn’t. I never mentioned the fact when Williams first interviewed me. But of course I joined headquarters establishment in London before the rot set in, when there were still things to hide, secrets to betray, and little or no screening. I got in just before the vets arrived, before the doors were finally bolted on the deserted stables.
Why? Why did I bother with a pursuit that had already wrecked one good part of my life? In those weeks in Cairo I had acquired a taste for conspiracy, and deceit, almost a craving, a loyalty towards betrayal. This ridiculous sense of vengeance didn’t last but it was enough to carry me to Holborn, to make me almost a professional in a trade I had scorned before. One speaks of “turning” a man in our line of country — turning him into a double through psychological or physical pressure; of making him deny his own “side”. But the expression is misleading in that context; one is “turned” in this way from the very beginning, through some reverse or imagined slight, or some long-nurtured sense of injustice; it can start in childhood, or later, through a childish response; the seed blooms in secrecy that is the nature of the business, doing much ill; one is “turned” only from the business of sensible life.
BOOK THREE
LONDON AND CAIRO, MAY 1967
1
Williams was talking to Marcus, his deputy and head of the new security bureau within the section. Marcus, though only six months started on his career as ferret in Mid-East Intelligence, already had a nickname throughout the department — “The Grip”, the one who didn’t let go. They were in Williams’s small office at the back of the tall building in Holborn, which he preferred to his quarters at the front, looking over the courtyard and the huge Hepworth abstract which he couldn’t abide. Contemporary sculpture sent him into a fury, ever since he’d first gazed at Reg Butler’s “Unknown Political Prisoner” in the Tate.
“Our only problem is that we don’t know — do we? — if Edwards and Marlow know. We don’t know the real nature of our “agreement” with them. Still, it won’t much matter. That’s the beauty of the plan.
Williams took up the file which lay in front of him and ran his fingers gently over the red cardboard folder as if there’d been dust on it — the file marked “MOUSE”.
Williams had never been one for code names; it had been Marcus’s idea. He was new to the business. If he wanted it that way — why not?
Williams put the file away in his safe, got up and walked over to the hatstand where he fingered his hat and coat absent-mindedly for a moment, looking out of the window towards the glimpse of St. Paul’s between the tall white buildings which threw back the early May sunset in a blaze of light. He turned away from the vision with bored resignation.
“I suppose I shall have to put in an appearance at the liaison meeting downstairs. The Americans would take it badly if I didn’t. The usual lot this time, are they? Dutton and Elder — the ‘callous gentlemen’. They’re so keen on protocol. Like we used to be. Care to drop by with me, Marcus?”
The two men left the eighth-floor office. The lifts were busy so they walked down the stairs to the liaison annexe three floors below.
“I never asked you, Marcus — why ‘Mouse’? Why that for the code name? The usual connotations — ‘cat and mouse’?”
“Partly. It’s the poem by Burns.” And Marcus recited a verse as they moved through the dusty shafts of sunlight from the stair windows between the floors, his dull, classless accent massacring the original lines:
“Wee, sleekit, cowrin, timirous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie,
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!..”
The tread of their feet echoed down the vault of the stairwell, the slow irregular smack of leather on concrete, like a horse dragging along a road at the end of the day.
“Yes, I know. I’m not quite sure I see the point, though.”
“Edwards is the mouse, isn’t he? It’s obvious, isn’t it? When you come to look at the plan. Because he doesn’t see it. He can’t.”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I wouldn’t have thought if it. The title, I mean.”
Williams suddenly remembered the Russia doll his mother had given him to play with as a child — the brightly coloured barrel-like figures all with the same frozen expression, one inside the other, and another inside that, getting smaller and smaller. And he remembered the feeling of despair that had come over him whenever he played with the toy, the fearful idea that real children, too, went on for ever, one inside the other, in the body of their mother, for he had been an only child at the time: the knowledge, which must have been born in him then, of the endless ramifications of deceit, the tricks which lay up every sleeve; the voices beyond the nursery at the end of the landing, the doctor’s voice, the nurse’s, someone else’s — his mother perhaps, a shout of pain, and the screaming infant; the feeling that you could never be sure of anything, returned to him now for an instant before he heard the bland accommodating drawl of Dutton speaking to McCoy at the entrance to the liaison annexe. And his cold memories of the past were washed away in a tide of even stronger resentment.
2
The United Arab Airlines Comet had stopped at Munich on its way to Cairo and for the first time in years Edwards felt near panic when he was in a position to reflect it.