She had all the rare finesse of a Park Avenue debutante who has passed thirty without a sigh, the skin fed with expensive lotions, hunger pampered with the right foods, at the right time, in the best auberges; the body massaged, formally and at night, in all the right places. There was, too, the untended confidence, something she tidied up now and then, brought up to date like a passport, in the happy social toils she made about midtown Manhattan: a beautiful person, a genuine ornament among the fun people.
She gave at a glance all the evidence of a graceful shallowness, a sense of tinkering with life, a surface concern — of days made up or exclusive engagements arranged through long telephone calls, noted in gilt-edged diaries, and experienced precisely, thirty minutes past the hour, each hour, on most evenings: drinks in a penthouse garden overlooking the park, dinner at Le Pavillon, and dancing at Arthur’s later. But never a drink too many, a row with the waiter, or music with the wrong man.
And yet none of this was true, not a moment of it; everything was different in her. All this sophistication was truly skin-deep. I knew this; I supposed Graham must have done as well. But I doubted if anyone else did. Her real existence had been carried out far from these glittering props. Her thoughts, her whole being, began when she had finished balancing the invitations and place names for dinner in Manhattan, and began instead to balance airline flights from Nairobi and old friends in Zambia against a meeting with her lover on Lake Malawi. She had never properly lived in the smart places: their apartment in the East Fifties, somewhere exclusive in Wimbledon, or an old-fashioned farmstead in the Colonies. These had been no more than poste-restante addresses, where her husband or friends might reach her between her real purposes in life — the odyssey she’d made through hotel bedrooms and National Parks with another man.
But why had the other man been with the KGB?
‘Graham, of course, didn’t know what your husband did — what he really does?’ I asked her. It was useful having the answers, the original source, so close to hand. An official investigation into the whole business, asking the same questions, would never have succeeded in a thousand years.
‘He knew he was in government. Of course he did.’
‘But just as a civil servant?’
‘You called it the “classic position” didn’t you? Well, it was. He didn’t tell me he was in British Intelligence. I didn’t tell him my husband was.’
‘How did you first meet him? How did you come to be at that African party in Westminster in 1965?’
‘Home leave in London. We’d come back from Nairobi that summer. Guy had connections with all the African desks in London — at the FO, the COI, with the Embassies. We were invited. One’s always meeting people at parties I’m afraid. Isn’t one?’
‘I’m sorry to pry.’
‘Fine. Go ahead. Fill in the spaces. You can’t imagine everything, can you? Even you?’
She was quizzical then, turning to look at me against the metal-blue water, a serious half-smile threatening the open American face. I noticed how completely she could change her expression, what a distance there was between her normally uncommitted, even naïve looks — too beautiful to touch, like a toothpaste or Coke advertisement in an old National Geographic magazine — and the deep lines of knowledge and loss she could take on in an instant, as though a map of Europe had suddenly been overlaid on one of the new world.
‘He was interested in paintings, wasn’t he?’
Two bicyclists, a middle-aged man and woman, both in Bermuda shorts and woollies and racing shoes, came towards us along the path, wheeling their expensive British machines. They were puffed and breathing heavily. Their faces shone silently with mild exertion, a happier conspiracy than ours that sharp morning.
‘Yes,’ she said when they’d passed, looking over her shoulder at them with kind curiosity. ‘He is.’
‘Modern painting. I’m afraid I’m not much good at it.’
‘Well, come on, for God’s sake. You can’t double for him all the way. You’re not even like him, physically I mean. I wonder why they ever chose you to impersonate him? Anyone who’d ever met Graham would know you were a phoney straight away.’
She had an uncomfortable ability with her innocuous banter — taking you straight from trivialities to a leading question. I had thought to quiz her without her knowing. But she was doing the same thing, more successfully, with me.
She said, ‘It can’t be anything very serious, whatever your London people are up to, if they chose you for the job. The only tiling you have in common with George Graham is his name. Who are you, Mr Graham? What’s your real name? Why you for this job — and what job? Don’t tell me — I know you can’t. But you can see my interest.’ Two policemen rode past us on two big chestnut mares. All four of them looked Irish. Again, she turned and stared back at them, over her shoulder, as if the physical gesture might be an aid to recalling the past, fathoming my secrets. ‘Someone in London must have thought you had a lot in common with George,’ she went on. ‘Mustn’t they? If not in looks, then in something else, something more important, where looks didn’t matter. Career, let’s say. Maybe your curriculum vitae matches his in some way, your personal background. Why choose you otherwise? There’s nothing in a name. But shared experience — that’s another thing. Suppose you and he had done some of the same kind of things, lived in the same places, knew the same people: then someone who didn’t know what George looked like — but knew his background — would take you for him, as soon as you confirmed all the other details.’
‘I can’t stop your imagination. You’re becoming a detective as well.’
‘George’s main career was in the Middle East, not Africa you know. He had fluent Arabic but not much Swahili. He was teaching with the British Council — in Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria — all through the fifties, before I met him. But you’ve never been within a million miles of those places, have you?’
Again, the suddenly overlaid smile that was not a smile but the shadow of knowledge — as though, without my saying a word, I had confirmed something for her which she had long suspected. ‘Yes,’ she might have been saying, ‘the day began too well, and, just as we both thought without saying it, it has rained before evening.’
‘No, not within a million miles,’ I said.
But it was no use. She could spot a lie at the same distance.
We walked all the way round the reservoir, coming out somewhere in the West Nineties on the Park. A few blocks up a small nonconformist church, wedged long ago between huge high-rise apartment buildings, looked out over the trees and grass, its nineteenth-century steeple a discouraged pin-prick in the surrounding canyon.
The play-school was in the basement, through some heavy oak doors, down cold steps. The church above seemed to have forgotten its function long ago. Prayer-books lay on the pews, as if they’d been left there by mistake, the only objects not sold in an auction a year before. But downstairs it was bright and warm, the area partitioned with long coloured curtains which ran about on overhead runners, displaying one group of infants, hiding another, like Chinese boxes.