‘Why did you tell me anything to begin with then?’ she said at the next picture.
‘To get the situation straight, if I could. You knew — you were the only person — to know about me. I had to talk to you. But what can you do? If you press the issue about my impersonation you’ll explode your marriage and your husband’s job — at the very least. And you’ll be absolutely no nearer to George Graham. But what I really wanted to say to you was this: I’ll say nothing at all about what I know about you and him, not to your husband, not to anyone in London. That’s the bargain — if you let me finish my business here. And maybe when it’s all over you can pick up things again, where you were with him —’ I couldn’t go on with the lie and I think she noticed.
‘That’s very likely, of course, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t honestly know.’
‘Rather a one-sided bargain, isn’t it? — and nothing really at the end to keep it for, from my point of view. Just to keep you in one piece — while he ends up in pieces.’
‘I would tell you. If it didn’t matter. I’d tell you about him. I know what you must feel. I’m sorry.’
‘“If it didn’t matter,” you say. Who do you think this matters so much to, this man — if not to me?’
We walked on, not seeing the pictures at all. She was glowering. Then she began to hang back, isolating herself, looking at odd pictures alone. Soon we were yards apart, so that eventually I turned and walked back, angry, coming towards her like an unwanted consolation prize.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘don’t you think I’ve the right to try and get out of this in one piece too? I didn’t propose myself for this job. Doesn’t that strike you? I didn’t fix up this stupid business in London — any of it. I meant I was sorry — for me as well, if you like. I hate all this just as much as vou do — as much. I think. as Graham hated it all too.’
‘Hated?’
‘Hates.’ How quickly one lied, saving myself, not him.
‘And you think if we work together all of us might get out in one piece?’ she said dully.
‘Yes.’
Her face brightened. I’d struck something hopeful in her again, that optimism she was so ready with — the warm parts that went with all her forward bias. ‘That’s quite possible,’ I said.
‘All right. Let’s do that. And thank you for the sorry.’
We were conspirators, then. But I loathed the conspiracy. It would bring no new or happier state; it was a lie. She would play along with me only because I had offered her the chance of taking up with Graham at some future point — a point which I knew could have no existence. Graham had been a senior KGB officer and she didn’t know it. If he survived at all he would be sent down for as many years as I had been. He was lost to her, I thought, as firmly as death. A marriage between them would never be arranged. That freedom together, which she had sought so carefully, so vehemently, with such secrecy in her letters to him — when she could leave Guy, the question of the children properly settled — had, for all her care and vivid imagination, no possible end in reality.
And one day she would find this out, sharply and conclusively, all within a minute. That would be the worst thing — the moment when she discovered that all her efforts, her love, had proved as useful as careless, spendthrift fancies, while the years of careful passage she had made about his body had the same value as a one-night stand — the fumbling explosions of sex after a party.
Hard-headed, calculating, in the arrangements of her love for so long, she had thrown foresight away, now that it could arrange nothing, bring no tangible, immediate benefit. All it could give her was doubt in his existence, which was impossible. She had to believe just this one thing — that she would see him again. Hope is such an available commodity, so readily dispensed. By definition, it needs no proof of origin, no warranty of satisfaction. And so I had been able to dole it out to her just then, like a money-changer in old Port Said, bribing her with the promise of a renewed emotion which I knew could never again have any currency.
An affair of her sort is like a revolution after a hundred years of repressive peace. The odds are all against it. It requires more organisation than a marriage to achieve half the trust and only a fraction of the physical availability. And apart from the need, the belief, the resources are non-existent. Such a liaison survives as a constant minus factor — a beleaguered force making odd successful forays but always threatened with retreat and rout. Its defeat is far more likely than the end of formal ties where convention, habit, economics and children form an often impregnable rear-guard. An affair may thrive for a while on its implicit disadvantages, like a guerrilla army. But if it loses, it loses everything. Unlike a marriage, there are no reserve troops, no stores, no headquarters and no constitution to fall back on. There are no long-held lies or truths. To survive, the people in this dream of a free country must keep constantly on the move, never two nights sleeping in the same place — must constantly disband and re-group and the password has to be changed at every meeting.
Strategy, persistence, imagination, patience, trust in absence — the ability to bring everything to bear in a sudden short moment of engagement, to slip away without loss, to lie up in the long intervals without complaint or murmur: this was the field manual she and Graham had shared, the handbook of their affection.
And I praised her for that, for her skill in this campaign, for we must all hope for the success of passion, just as we must suffer its ruthless ways and means. To possess the quality at all is to possess it too abundantly, to willingly betray one person so as to fulfil it with another — to be capable of dividing it, sharing it, and multiplying it many times with many people. Like faith, it is a gift that will serve a multitude, with all the deceptive increase of the loaves and fishes.
She had had an affair. She had managed it well. It had begun quite simply, casually no doubt — in a room somewhere, a visit to someone or at a party. And once the mark had been made, a dam of mutual interest against the indifference of the world, love had grown and spread out behind them like a lake — over half a continent, through half a dozen years. So many women would have botched the whole thing long before, in a fraction of the space, would have turned the delicate business into a nightmare for everyone concerned. But she had pursued it tenaciously — sometimes, surely, recklessly — yet kept the balance perfectly. I was surprised that nothing had gone wrong until now, that so deep and passionate a layer of her personality had gone unnoticed for so long — by her husband, her friends, the gossips everywhere. It was almost as if — like Graham, like any of our sort who inhabit permanent cover — she had conducted this real business of her life with all the assiduity of a master-spy, like an agent whose marriage is nothing more than a deep cover for his real activities.
We left the Museum and crossed back into Central Park. We were still walking. She wound the red and white football-scarf about herself again and we moved up a short wooded slope towards a high wire fence. Beyond it lay a reservoir, a large mirror dumped in the middle of the dirty city, ruffled in the clear, blowy weather, vibrating gently with skyscrapers, flocks of seagulls far away patterning it like bits of torn paper as they floated and glided over it.
I was surprised by this woman with a boy’s scarf and expensive suede coat walking next the water in the middle of New York: an impeccable Foreign Office husband, just the right number of zero-population children, an apartment on the East Fifties; all this was so studiously correct, so much in the new convention. Yet it was not her: she was no English rose from the shires. She was an American who had gone out to Rhodesia, of all places, and somehow out there wound up with a Russian spy, of all people. Yet an inconsistent nature was the last thing one would have expected of her. There was, for all to see, something very formal in her bearing, in the traditional adornments of her marriage — just as there was in the dark textures of her face, where the shapes — the lips, the nose, the chin — were as classically content as some Umbrian madonna in the Uffizzi, and the skin — a browned, moist pearl — might have been old stone from a Carrara fountain.