‘I know. She told me.’
‘You haven’t wasted much time, have you?’ He was suddenly brisk, affronted.
‘Listen, I only met your wife yesterday. You don’t think —’
‘Oh, it can happen in far less time than that, Marlow,’ he broke in. ‘My wife can be in bed with someone within an hour of meeting them,’ he went on eagerly, as though commending one of her virtues.
‘Women can, but seldom do.’ I laughed slightly. But he didn’t take it well. I could see he was badly smitten. ‘It usually takes longer than that, even these days,’ I added, trying to placate him. But this idea of sex delayed pleased him no more than the idea of a quick bang, and he said almost angrily: ‘But in any case, it wasn’t you. It was the real George Graham they were following.’
I smiled again. How quickly this haughty man had tumbled into a world of bedroom farce — of sleuths, French maids and trousers falling down — drawn to these mockeries of eavesdropping and double identity to avoid the tragedy of it all. And he was right: farce makes infidelity bearable — cauterises it, cheapens it, brings a belly laugh to kill it. Guy Jackson had found the Iago he needed in the squalid truths of a private eye. But it had kept his sanity, else he might have killed her, I thought. The outwardly calm and detached offer the best chances in that line. He was one of those husbands, I supposed, who at all costs have to ‘know’ of infidelity — who can only possess their women properly on tape or through detective-agency reports, always at second hand: men who cannot see or feel their wives except through the eyes — and in the arms — of another.
‘But,’ I said, ‘you knew the real George Graham had been taken, two weeks ago in London — that I’d replaced him. London explained all that to you.’
‘I was still interested. It’s become a habit.’
‘When did you first know about it — about him?’
‘Six years ago, just after she first met him, on one of our leaves in London. And afterwards in Nairobi, when we separated.’
‘You mean — you sent someone after them on that trip they made around East Africa?’ I was really surprised.
‘Yes — as far as anybody could follow them — in the circumstances. It’s pretty open country.’
To say the least, I thought. Taking the territorial imperative too far altogether.
‘God, what a habit,’ I said.
‘A habit of our trade, Marlow, or just — a bad habit?’ Jackson asked easily.
‘Neither,’ I lied. ‘I understand the professional habit and the personal temptation well enough. I meant what a habit in the circumstances. Your wife has been running round with a senior KGB officer for six years. And your private eyes never got that information for you.’
‘No, never. Just the evidence of personal, not a political infidelity,’ he said unctuously.
‘And what do you think now? Don’t you think she’s involved politically with him as well?’
‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s never been any evidence. Absolutely none. Just coincidence. Pure coincidence.’
‘I wish I could be as sure. I don’t trust coincidence in this business. It was just a “coincidence” — my own wife turning up in Moscow by chance one day — that sent me down for twenty-eight years.’
Light pierced the gaps in the tall buildings to either side of us, bright crystal knives of afternoon sun slanting from the west over the East River. The air-conditioning sighed from grilles beneath the sealed windows. I was tired again, suffocating in the false climate.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘the windows don’t open. Need a special key.’ He got up and turned the machinery down, then he came back towards me, clasping his hands religiously. ‘If you want to be sure — why don’t you try and find out yourself? You’re in a much better position, after all, than any agency, government or private. You’re George Graham, her lover.’ He paused, as if considering the excitement of the idea. ‘It must have been a cruel surprise — when you turned up here and not him. She must be curious, to say the least, about your provenance, about what’s happened to him. Doesn’t that give you quite a lever with her?’
‘Yes, I’d thought of that.’ What I really thought was that he wanted me to pimp for him now, to feed his jealous obsessions. ‘You forget, though, that’s not what I’m here for — to carry on your private eyeing for you.’
‘Oh, I don’t know — since you mention the political factor; this could be relevant to your job here: as well as being lovers she might just have been one of Graham’s KGB contacts. Even the “stayer” we’re all looking for.’
I remembered her conversation in the restaurant — how individual happiness must have links with a wider, social contentment. Guy Jackson’s idea hadn’t struck me before. But it did now. It was just conceivable, in the way that so much else in her life, that had seemed inconceivable, I now knew to be true.
‘It’s worth a try — looking at the whole thing in that way,’ he said.
‘You want it “that way”? That she should turn out to be a KGB agent? You want the punishment as well as the peeping?’
‘Of course not.’ He was suddenly back-tracking. ‘We’ve children, a family. I’ve a career. All that would be ruined.’
But he did want to see it that way, I think — in the corners, at the very far edges of his psychological horizon. A destructive sexuality lay at the heart of his confidence. This emotional masochism that made him tick, which gave him an obsessional vivacity, whenever he talked about his wife — was the same quality that was gradually eating away at him. He was a man living on a drug, and dying of it at the same time.
Yet, I thought, his curiosity about his wife was not so different from my own — we shared an interest in her; he seemed almost as ignorant as I was about her real nature, her past. So that all he had been really doing was encouraging me, for his own purposes, in a pursuit I had decided upon myself already.
‘Well, she shouldn’t know of all this in any case,’ he said, sitting down at his desk, picking up an FAO report, returning to his role as guardian of the world’s conscience. ‘I’m sure she’s never been — politically involved with him.’
‘Just her lover, not her commissar. I agree.’
‘There’s no need to chase after that hare. It was a bizarre thought, that’s all. You understand — living with a woman who —’ he paused, at a loss.
‘Has so many other lives?’
‘Yes‚’ he nodded. ‘Exactly. One becomes prey to the worst emotions.’ He spoke like a Victorian paterfamilias tempted by a shopgirl in the Bayswater Road. ‘And of course there’s another point, Marlow: without ever having been politically involved with him, she may, unwittingly, have passed on information — about my work, with the Foreign Office and so on. He may have used her.’
‘Nothing of that emerged when they interrogated him in London. I was told specifically — that he wasn’t involved with any women. Besides, London would have been on to you at once, surely, if he’d told them about her?’
‘Yes, they would. I’d thought of that. I’m sure it was nothing more than a genuine relationship. All the worse in one way, all the better in another. But we should keep it to ourselves in any case, and I’ll call the man off. Forget the whole business.’
He and I were joined in a conspiracy now, for of course London ought to have been informed of this development at once, whether it was pure coincidence or not. But that was his decision. He was the liaison officer; I was just the stalking horse. And how, I wondered, should anyone ever know the truth of their relationship? If London, with all their tortuous tricks, had failed even to extract the fact of her existence from Graham, how should Jackson and I ever expect to discover whether they had ever been anything more than lovers? — or find out, which we seemed to want even more, the exact nature and emotional weight of their love? That part of her was surely safe from all our prying eyes — an affair securely locked in time, as it was distant in Africa. She had lost that love herself; how should we ever find it?