‘Listen, Croxley,’ I said. ‘I’m finished with being locked up. I’m doing the job, so let’s stop this zoo nonsense. I want some air, a drink. I’ll even settle for some olives.’
‘Why not?’
Croxley was like an absent-minded aunt being at last reminded of the real interest of her visit for her schoolboy nephew — a ten-shilling note to blow in the tuck shop. ‘I can tell you about the job outside. There’s a pub round the corner. Wine bar, too, if you like that sort of thing. And a good Greek restaurant next door.’
5
Graham’s apartment was at the top of a narrow, ill-lit, almost grubby staircase, on the first floor, above a firm of medical suppliers in Weymouth Street just off Marylebone High Street. The contrast was abrupt, not because Graham’s rooms were squalid, but because, in the darkness, with the scalpels and wheelchairs spotlit in the window, one seemed to walk into something sharp and anonymous as a hospital only to find oneself immediately translated into unkempt life.
One long front room looked over the street, with a large floppy sofa and two armchairs on an old but genuine Persian carpet. Three small rooms, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom gave off this to the back, their doors, together with the hall door, in a line along the wall like the set for a bedroom farce. At one end of the living-room half a dozen tea chests had been filled with books and papers and with small domestic objects — from the kitchen, the walls, shelves and tables. At the other end, a cabin trunk and three suitcases lay open and half packed with clothes. On a table next to the window were a duplicate set of keys, laundry book and parcel and a note from Pickfords confirming their arrival the next morning to remove the furniture and chests.
I turned the light on in the bedroom which was in the same confusion. The kitchen, on the other hand, was conspicuously clean and tidy. But then, of course, he had rarely used it.
The place had about it all the mundane doom of departure — old keys dug up from behind the fridge, last laundry lists and senseless, busy notes from Pickfords and the gas company. Graham had lived here for nearly ten years. It was hard to credit this in any measure of personal time. His jumbled possessions had reasserted all the predominance which they had had on Graham’s first confused day here, which they would always have in the end. They had been kept at bay by the force of his life in the place. Each moment he had spent there — active or even in sleep — the pots and pans, the furniture, the dirty shirts and the toothbrush had cowered from him, camouflaged in unwilling order. Now, as if sensing his demise, they had bloomed about the apartment with the speed and rapacity of weeds on a ruined estate. The armchair was an ambush finally that had once held him comfortably with a gin thinking of the evening — the sofa a booby-trap that had been carte blanche for many girls in all those ordered years.
Then the voice rose from the bedroom next door, suddenly and sharply, a man angry in a hard north-country way:
‘Tell her I’ve left the country!’
It was one of those few moments in my life that I wished I’d had a gun. Instead I looked around for something. There was nothing except a battery-operated gas light, like a child’s ray gun. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do with it.
‘Leave it,’ the man shouted again. ‘Keep away from the window. And stay there. If anyone comes, tell them to get out.’
He was expecting the gas man or Pickfords sooner than I was. What a fool I’d been — going straight into it again, the oldest trick in the world, taking you at the last moment just when you felt in the clear. The voice was McCoy’s of course. He’d left the other apartment hours before and had hidden in Graham’s bedroom. Now his real plan for me would emerge. He went on in a different voice, dramatically confiding, really establishing his role in some wretched play. I’d hardly have credited him with the imagination but excitement will reveal quite unexpected resources.
‘The windows were closed,’ the voice said heavily. ‘The heat struck up at them from the linoleum. There was a stink of rubber and wax. One curtain was slightly drawn.’
I looked around the kitchen. Everything was almost exactly as he said. I wondered how on earth he could see me through the wall.
‘All right, McCoy,’ I said, hoping to calm him. ‘Take it easy. I’m here. Come on out and tell me all about it.’
But instead he continued: ‘Gaunt reached out to pull it.’ I was sure now that McCoy had lost his head, become the mad paranoic that I’d felt had always lain at the bottom of his character.
‘The calendar on the wall advertised a firm of Dutch diplomatic importers …’
I moved my head a fraction. The calendar in Graham’s kitchen was by courtesy of a local delicatessen. McCoy seemed to have lost his grip completely. I stole towards the living-room and stopped just outside the bedroom door.
‘… it’s like a prison cell, he thought; the smell was foreign but he couldn’t place it.’
I swung the bedroom door open softly with my foot.
‘“Well I am surprised”, Gaunt was saying. “This is Mr Harting’s room. Very gadget-minded, Mr Harting is”.’
I went in and saw the radio next to Graham’s bed. It was a powerful mains receiver connected to the light switch which I had turned on at the door. BBC Radio 4: A Book at Bedtime. The announcer came in: ‘You can hear the next episode of John le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany tomorrow evening at eleven o’clock: episode three — The Memory Man.’
And I was sorry then, for a moment, that it hadn’t been McCoy — that I hadn’t come back among him and Harper and Croxley, into a world of devious ploys. For Graham’s apartment was appallingly arid, so empty of everything, that one might even have welcomed McCoy’s deceits into its vacuum as evidence, at least, of life. The place badly needed people, arguments, chatter, even lies. Now it was just four walls where all the clues, like Graham, had been packed up and put away.
I spent most of the next thirty-six hours unpacking them, looking for some real leads to the previous man. In the tea chests there were a great many papers, mostly copies of his African reports, but not many letters, apart from his mother and one or two other people.
There were some yellow Kodak folders with a collection of rather uninteresting photographs of Graham and his family, together with the original negatives — the two seemed not to have been touched since they’d come back from the chemists thirty years before: childhood cameos for the most part: Graham at the zoo, the boy and the monkeys both grinning badly; Graham shivering on a Scottish loch, a boy from one of Arthur Ransome’s stories.
There were other folders, too, packed tight with the detritus of life, odds and ends that are kept in the hope of a fascinating maturity — copies of his school magazine, a reference to his tennis skills in the junior championships, his University notes and the beginnings of a diary he’d kept on his first arrival in Beirut as a teacher. I thought this might prove significant but it stopped after the first few pages which included nothing but the usual traveller’s notes on the more obvious aspects of the city and its history. His university papers, too, suggested an intellectual approach which was traditional, even dulclass="underline" a model student marking time.
Graham from the first seemed intent on creating a very different image: something at once more formal and less true to himself — the image of a man with safe, unambitious appetites. He must, in fact, have entered his cover in boyhood — prolonged the natural adolescent differences with his parents in his hidden profession. And there were, of course, no documents on this lifelong disguise, no clues which suggested Graham’s real animation. He must have intentionally destroyed everything, the smallest item, which could give a lead to his real political character. The image here was of the completely reliable civil servant, the hack without inspiration or any other deviant quality. And yet one knew that he had been otherwise — that beyond his real politics he had been a happy man: a man sure in his own small pleasures, certain of the wider folly and frail in any other belief. And of this creed I could find nothing either, as though Graham had looked on such optimistic evidence as damning as the phone number of the Russian Embassy found in his notebook.