‘Yes, we were in Nairobi. Guy had an attachment there from the Foreign Office — leased as an adviser to the Kenya government. He took up with Whitehall when he stopped farming. Though in fact he was always with the FO — in one way or another.’
After the zoo we had taken a cab further up Fifth Avenue to the Guggenheim Museum and were now wandering round Frank Lloyd Wright’s strange inverted cone, pacing his gentle ramps slowly upwards and outwards, looking half-heartedly at the paintings. I wondered why it was that she would speak to me only while on the move — and always moving from one place to another — and I thought it might have been in order to frustrate some marital eavesdropper. Her husband might just have hired someone to follow us, might have long suspected her infidelity. He might even have learnt privately all about George Graham before being told by McCoy to be my contact in New York. But often as I glanced behind us that morning I never saw anyone. Of course agents will do exactly the same thing — this constant walking — when, through some slip-up, they are forced into open contact. So I supposed that from both our points of view this keeping on the hop was fair enough: I was the agent, she the mistress. We both had plenty to hide — she in the search for her lover, I in preventing her finding him. But for the moment, as though fearing the worst, Helen Jackson kept off any detailed approach to his whereabouts. We talked, simply, of our own approaches.
‘So you went back to meet Graham in Malawi?’ I said. ‘Long after you’d left that part of the world.’
‘Yes, I met him there. Among other places, I was going back to see friends in Zambia anyway. He was researching a programme in Malawi. We met up. It wasn’t difficult.’
‘No, of course not.’
She had all of Africa to be unfaithful in — those huge spaces where two such white lovers would surely have stood out as clearly as black magic at the North Pole. It may not have been difficult but it must have been risky — with her husband in Jomo’s government in Nairobi, a town that was the sounding-drum for all the far-flung gossip of East Africa. But one took risks in that sort of situation. I had forgotten that. And in a strange way the closer you went to the fire in such circumstances the safer you were. That was an old saw, tribal or civilised. Compromise was the only really dangerous thing between lovers.
‘I thought the long trip you made was in East Africa — Uganda, Kenya — Tsavo National Park, for example?’ I looked at her with a notebook in my eyes, like a police constable, a bad replacement for a small part in The Mousetrap.
‘There were several long trips.’
‘You walked to the top of a small hill, didn’t you — in Tsavo? — near an old mining village, with a Jack Hawkins figure in a bush-hat who talked about beating hippos on the nose with a walking stick on the banks of the Nile …’
It was my turn to ask her if she remembered things properly.
I started to push the matter myself now, feeling a need to display my ‘homework’. But more, I think, I was experiencing the beginnings of a mild jealousy, the jealousy of a new lover, who, even at a first meeting, wants to possess all the knowledge, all the intimacies of the woman’s previous affairs. Even then I wanted the entire baggage of Helen Jackson’s recollected experience.
‘Yes, I thought you’d have gotten onto that last letter. That was stupid of me.’
‘You didn’t say anything rash. No one could have identified you from it — no address, signature, nothing. You had someone post it in Uxbridge.’ Then it struck me. ‘London Airport, of course.’
We had stopped by a group of Klees; dark lines, blots, jagged edges, nightmares. She turned away from it, with relief. But it was because of what I’d just said.
‘I knew Graham was coming over here — we were going to meet. But you mean you didn’t know about me? Who I was — where I was?’
‘How could I have? It was pure chance — my meeting you here on my first day.’
‘What about the others — the people — the people who sent you here?’
‘They couldn’t have known about you either. They never mentioned you in connection with Graham. And I didn’t show them your letter. It struck me as something completely personal, nothing to do with what I was doing for them.’
‘Was doing?’
‘Am doing.’
‘What are you doing then?’
‘That’s covered by the Official Secrets’ Act.’
‘I know. Guy is in the same business, the same games.’
‘I thought they never told their wives.’
‘You can’t ever have had a wife, then.’
‘Oh, I did. She was in the same silly business too.’
We’d moved off Klee and on to some important-looking groups by Chagall, Delaunay, Léger and Jackson Pollock. She had unwound her red and white scarf completely now, taken it off, and was carrying it in her hand, all bunched up like a football. Then she opened the top of her suede coat.
‘No, it’s really quite simple,’ I said. Then I thought of Graham’s shoes on the table in Marylebone. ‘Well, my part is fairly simple. It’s just bad luck that I should bump into you like —’
‘Listen,’ she put in quietly, but digging her fingers into the wool. ‘The only simple things are these: you’re impersonating George Graham. You’ve done a lot of homework on it; you’ve been helped — by experts. You’re tied up with British Intelligence in some way; Guy is too. George and I were — well, how would you describe it? You’ve read the letters.’
‘Yes. An affair?’ I paused, showing her loss of a proper language to describe these things. ‘What else could you call it. I don’t like the word.’
‘I love him.’
I let her keep the present tense. It was fair. It did proper justice to all that I had learnt of her and George Graham, everything that had passed between them, even though I was sure that, technically, the grammar was now quite incorrect; it had been overtaken by events, though she knew nothing of it, willing as ever to live in the present to the very last.
We had moved into an Annexe — the Tannhauser Collection, off the second floor, and were looking at a Manet: ‘Before the Mirror’.
‘Anyway, these things are clear enough,’ she went on. ‘You’ve come to New York as George Graham and so you know all about — us.’
‘Yes.’
‘My “infidelity”. That’s the word I don’t like either. All the same, it would do me no good in most quarters — if people knew. But listen, you’ve stolen someone else’s life — worse, don’t you think, than taking someone else’s wife? And you can’t tell me anything at all about that because of the Queen of England.’
‘Yes. The Crown. That’s quite right.’
‘Which points to only one thing, of course — otherwise you could tell me what’s happened to him, about something “entirely personal”, as you said yourself, just a little adultery after all, nothing really Top Secret. But you can’t — so it’s quite clear: George Graham must be with British Intelligence as well, and you’ve got to protect him and the “organisation”.’
‘So?’
She looked a little blank. ‘I never thought —’
‘How should you? You were in the classic position. Agents don’t go round telling their mistresses what they really do, do they?’
We inspected a Pisarro — ‘Les Coteaux de l’Hermitage’ — and then moved on to Renoir’s ‘Woman with a Parrot’.
‘What’s happened to him? Where is he?’
‘In London. I should think he’s all right. I never met him.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. I told you. I can’t tell you.’
Even Renoir couldn’t hold her. She walked on. She tossed her hair.