‘You mean they were both talking politics?’
‘Of course. That was in most of the reports I saw. A lot of it’s in the book: Maoism and the political future of Africa; Nyerere’s Chinese policy. They were both extremely left-wing about it all — not the doctrinaire, hard-line stuff but a “new Marxist interpretation for new conditions”, you know — they were very keen on Nyerere’s self-help programme, small autonomous communities and not big industries. Of course all this was a surprise — coming from her. She didn’t seem that sort at all — much more the high flyer, the jet-set girl in a suede overcoat and dark glasses with that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth American face.’
‘Yes, that’s her all right. You had the impression they were working together in some way — professionally?’
‘Yes. Well, I assumed so.’
‘And the KGB — was that ever mentioned, that they were involved in that together?’
‘Not that we ever heard. But whatever he was up to, she was too. That’s certain. There was an argument about the work they were doing one evening in Kisumu on the lake in an empty hotel. One of the agency men overheard the end of it. She didn’t agree with him about something — the Uganda plan I suppose. She wanted to get out of the whole thing.’
She got up to refill our glasses. ‘But it’s all years ago. How can it have to do with you now? Her husband, or whoever had those reports, must know all this too. It can’t be much of a secret somewhere. Where is the husband — are they still married?’
‘Her husband’s here. With British Intelligence, like me. He’s my “control” in fact. You’ll know the term — it goes with these martinis, “stirred and not shaken”.’ I took the glass from her.
‘You’re going too fast for me now,’ she said, ‘except’ — she stood there in the middle of the room still and straight as a totem-pole — ‘except in that case you must know all this already, that it wasn’t just a sexual liaison —’
‘But also a political one — you’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
I stood up and took my glass with me over to the windows. The big Pepsi-Cola sign had come on above a warehouse on the opposite bank, a coloured gash against the dust-filled, leaden sky. Other lights appeared as I watched, spreading over Queens and lights on the river, lights everywhere rising across the suburbs as darkness came. Everything that gives us our measure of time, our notions of vitality and decay, was visible before me as I watched.
And yet here I was trying to pick up the details, all the emotional weights and measures, of something that had passed more than two thousand days before — trying to grasp all the implications, the real flavour of Helen and Graham’s association, for even as I changed, pushed from one moment’s consciousness to another with the day, so their past in Africa so long before had taken on now a new accretion of reality, a new truth, an added dimension which affected me. Here was another vital facet, a link between their past and my future: Guy Jackson, Margaret Takazze had just made clear to me, must have known all about his wife’s political involvement. But that morning he had denied just this.
What on earth was he up to? Had he, in fact, been pursuing his wife, not for himself, but on behalf of British Intelligence — McCoy, Harper and the others in London knowing of her real involvement with Graham all the time, and sending me to New York to meet her, to sound her out in some way, to trap her? And if this was so, why had I not been told?
I had trusted Guy Jackson too as my only sure liaison in the whole matter — this Jackson, with his Foreign Office robes, old boy’s tie and high purposes, who now appeared as trustworthy as a ferret, who held truth like a colander: this Jackson who knew far more about his wife than just the fact that she was unfaithful to him, but had said nothing, who perhaps had no jealous obsessions about her at all but was simply hunting her down and using me as the pointer. And then there was Wheel who had introduced me to them both that first day at the UN — so conveniently as it now appeared. Wheel, who had never been upstate in Belmont … Indeed, indeed. Where did the expansive Wheel fit in? — the decent, funny man from the Mid-West, the big man from an older, more confident America?
Her eyes were so deep, I noticed, when I turned away from the window, seeing her standing behind me in the darkness which had come over the room: eyes buried away in her skull, the huge whites visible like light behind a mask.
‘What do you want to do?’ she said, walking slowly towards me. And then a different question, remembering my professional predicament as well as my presence with her: ‘What are you going to do?’
But she was in my arms before I could reply and by then my answer had become a question: ‘Are you sure you want this?’ Always the procrastinator, I thought; the pretended diffidence — as if I’d not wanted it myself after so long.
I could feel her smiling, her cheek crinkling next my ear. She smelt of wool, freshly washed, the smell of a warm linen-cupboard where someone had buried a bar of sweet soap deep in the clothes. We stood there easily, lightly pressed together like two vegetables slowly growing.
‘You’ve surely better things to do.’
‘I have. Not better, but other. I’m going out in an hour.’
I did nothing — and suddenly felt I could do nothing. Now that it was possible, the years of abstinence in Durham jail, and all the abandoned imaginings of those years were the only things that rose in me then. I had become someone, so successfully self-educated in the sexual that I had no arts in the real university. So I prevaricated once more.
‘Why me?’ I really believed the question. She didn’t reply. ‘You’re bleak about this in your novel. Is that why? A bleak thing …?’
She moved her head round to the other side of my face, her lips brushing my chin. ‘Not bleak, no. I was exact about it, I hope. We should be more exact.’
She lifted one of her long legs off the floor and, standing like a heron, she wound it slowly round behind the back of my thighs.
‘You mistrust it when it’s easy, don’t you?’
She let her leg slide to the floor.
‘It’s simply that I’m not used to it,’ I said.
‘Of course, you’re Mrs Jackson’s lover,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t quite realised all that that must mean for you both — in the way of mistaken identity, sexual disappointment, diminished performance.’
She rolled her pullover up her midriff towards her chest, one rusty skin peeling off to reveal another. Her small conical breasts rose with it, caught tightly by the fabric, before they fell outwards suddenly like pips from a squeezed fruit.
‘That doesn’t inhibit me.’
‘No.’ She paused, holding the jumper up, turning it the right way out again, shaking it. ‘No. It’s decisions that inhibit you,’ she went on. ‘I thought that was the basis of your kind of job — the quick decision.’
‘I’ve been out of my job for a long time. Anyway I’m sorry. Go ahead, don’t let me hold you up. You want to go out.’
She bent down, slipping her briefs off with one hand. ‘I want you to come in.’
She was right. I’d always been held up by the trappings of sex, the preludes, the difficulties. And no doubt that was why Helen Jackson, with her copious old wounds and blocks, appealed to me.
The pleasure always lay at several removes from the real pleasure — in all the meticulous inquiries I made as to its whereabouts. It reminded me of Jackson’s sad efforts to sustain his marriage by spying on it. And there was something of the same hopeless prevarication in Helen Jackson’s six-year affair, I suddenly thought, some block there as well. How unsatisfactorily intermittent it must all have been for her. How could she have supported it? Why hadn’t she gone to live with Graham? Unless it was that she craved precisely the intermittent and insecure in any relationship that was to be real for her.