‘Mrs Jackson, Mr Jackson, Hi! Nice to see you,’ a young woman said in too affable a tone, I thought, until I remembered she was American. I was in America. Good humour was the premier badge of citizenship here. No matter what disasters happened elsewhere — in bed, in Viet Nam, with the blacks or whatever, a smile was the steeply inflated currency of the country, a cure for every ill.
‘You didn’t bring the children?’ the pert little woman said too curiously, looming up at us, wide-eyed, through saucer-shaped smoked glasses. Children, she seemed to suggest, would have committed us, like a prepayment, and as it was we might have been about to waste her time.
‘No,’ Helen Jackson said — not rudely, but saying no more, so that the effect was almost the same. She could disrupt an untoward inquiry in an instant, I realised, and I wondered at my own good fortune earlier.
We wandered round, through the curtains and partitions, gazing at mysterious coloured designs on the walls, puzzling educational shapes and strange toys which the children played with confidently.
‘What should I call you then?’ Helen said, when we were by ourselves, looking at a child massaging its face with a bright poster paint, like soap. ‘You’re not George Graham. Or Guy Jackson.’
‘The Third Man?’
‘Yes. The whole thing is nonsense enough.’ The child came towards us with the pot of paint, holding it as an offering in both hands above her face, looking up at us intently. It seemed she was intent on sharing the deluge with us. We went on again, behind another curtain like a maze, to a group playing with a basket full of fancy clothes, dressing up and discarding them carefully, like fastidious actors.
‘You said you were married. Weren’t there children?’
‘No. We never got that far.’
‘She was in the same business you told me — never time to get to bed?’
‘Oh, we managed that all right. We did that.’
‘It’s over now — I take it?’
‘Yes. You can take it.’
‘A “husband-and-wife” team, isn’t it called? That must have been something. I didn’t think such things really existed.’
‘Oh yes — the Krogers …’ But I couldn’t think of anyone else.
‘You must believe a lot — in what you do. Mixing work and play like that — for the “cause”.’
‘Dedicated, you mean.’
‘Yes. You don’t look the sort that’s just in it for the money.’
‘What’s your husband in it for? Not the money, I’m sure. But money for others. He believes in the West, doesn’t he? — a million dollars a minute for everyone who can grab it.’
‘No, he’s just an Intelligence Officer. A professional. You’ll see. You’re the one who really believes in it all — or who doesn’t believe a damn. I’m not sure which yet.’
‘I’m just a professional too. Doing a job that I don’t much like. But do well enough.’
‘No, you don’t do it well enough, that’s the whole point. You’re only doing it because you coincide with Graham in some way.’
‘If I told you all about myself would that make you feel better — if I told you how different I was from him?’
‘It might. But that wouldn’t be altogether true either. Because you aren’t that different from him. Oh, I don’t mean physically — you’re nothing like him in that way. But you share a sense of folly with him — treating the world as a spectator-sport, booing and catcalling everybody from your small corner.’
She annoyed me with her insight. ‘Expectations lying in the gutter, you mean? A wrong turning taken long ago? I’ve heard that before. A lot of people feel that these days: a sense of folly. Liberals without a belief in progress. We’re common as clay. That means nothing — sharing that with Graham.’
Luckily the little woman came back at that moment and started lecturing us on how their approach at the nursery differed from Spock’s — ‘You know, I think it’s that we’re much more tidy here, not that awful running round the place, doing what they want, allowing them to make a mess of everything …’
She hadn’t seen the child with the poster paint.
A sense of folly, indeed. How right Helen Jackson was. I thought of Harper’s silly, unformed Colonial face — never grown beyond pint pots with the rest of the Earl’s Court Australians — and McCoy’s Northern disappointment, his maiden-aunt profundities. The hail-fellow-well-met and the forgotten non-conformist. What a duo they made, two St Georges in dark glasses, holding up all the values of the West. Yes, it had been a spectator-sport for me, as I’d expected, with the Russians, it had been for Graham. But there was a difference, though. For both of us it was a game where the players could suddenly spring up from the arena, find you out from all the others, and savage you. That was in the rules as well. Graham had been caught when he must have thought himself forever free, like a Fenian traitor murdered in America years afterwards a world away from Dublin. And I was waiting now, a clear target on the skyline — waiting for this ‘stayer’, who might approach me amicably as arranged — or kill me. One could laugh at the folly but one was part of it; that was the snag. The fools had no manners; for them the end would always justify the means. They had no inhibitions.
‘Yes,’ the woman chattered on obsessively, ‘some people feel Dr Spock may be to blame — for the drug scene, for Viet Nam, by encouraging too permissive an attitude towards the young over the past generation
I thought again of running, before the stayer had time to fix me in his sights, for good or ill — run with the few dollars I had out of the firing line, into the anonymous multiplicity of life. Perhaps I could take up teaching somewhere again. Nothing could be more anonymous than that — an usher in some backward place in an even more backward school. No one would know me or find me there.
But I felt the heat of the basement just as I touched on thoughts of escape; the long morning’s walk began to tell, the legs already feeling wasted, strong with the rumour of coming weakness after the years of inactivity in Durham.
‘Discipline, organisation,’ the bossy woman went on, pulling on the words like a harsh bell, ‘not through force — but by firmness and example. We try to let them see that there is a limitation — from the beginning.’
She pulled back a long curtain without warning, displaying all one end of the basement. The rollers on the ceiling shrieked briefly, ringing as though bones were being cut behind my eardrums.
And then I was falling into the open space, as if a wall had given way in a tall building. I put my arms up to ward off the blow, my wrists trembling against my eyes. There were some old pews lined up against the end wall, children playing among them, and either they were coming closer to me or I was walking towards them. I couldn’t tell. Then both movements were happening together so that we seemed to converge.
The children were lined up in the pews now, staring at me silently, sitting properly in their desks. There was a blackboard just behind me. I had chalk in my hand and was laboriously explaining the implications of the three witches in Macbeth. The heat poured down into the room from above, from a sun that had perched for years just above the rafters, and the smell rose all about me — the dry dust of concrete and lime wash from long-burnt tropical buildings.
It was fifth-form English at the College in Cairo, fifteen years before. Samia, the bright girl in the front row, had her hand up — she always knew the answers; her mother was English, married to an Egyptian engineer from the refinery in Suez. Amin in the back row, the tall twenty-five-year-old schoolboy, had his hand up as well, making faces, preparing to embark on one of his elaborately wearisome jokes. The headmaster, mad Dr El Sayid, would be dictating the afternoon’s business to us in the staff room in fifteen minutes: ‘Marlow — football for you, on the lower field. The junior houses, Port Tewfik and Suez….’ And at last, after school, the evening, the empty evening, with Bridget. The drive into the city along the Nile, the pyramids on the far side of the river cut out in soft charcoal against the huge orange tablecloth of falling light; meeting her beyond the pillars of the Semiramis lobby, in the bar there, over Sudanis and gin, while the air-conditioning under the floorboards trembled in fits and starts; swaying the old room like mild water under a ship: meeting her, so quickly ruining the meeting, arguing with her …