And something worried me in all this information I’d absorbed and partly forgotten, something which Guy had just now hinted at — some vital connection between his words and Graham’s file. What was it? Quaker girls, mission schools? No. Beirut? Yes, something there. And then I had it: some ‘Armenian-American’ she’d been infatuated with. Those words. That was it. And now it came back to me clearly, urgently, my stomach turning: George Graham had been recruited into the KGB in 1952 by Alexei Flitlianov — Croxley had told me all about him — the local Beirut Resident. And Flitlianov at the time had been ‘posing as an Armenian-American teaching at the American University’.
The chain was now suddenly clear, though the links weren’t; several years after Graham’s recruitment by Flitlianov Helen had had an affair with this same man in Beirut, and several more after that she had done the same thing with George Graham. But did all three know that this had happened?
The water was cooling in the big bath upstairs. Helen pushed the hot tap with her toes, moving her foot quickly away from the sudden trickle of very hot water, bending her knee upwards sharply, legs apart, twisting her body out of the way of the fiery current …
Twisting, dreaming, talking …
She had woken very early that morning in the hotel in Addis, sweating in the small double bed, and had looked across at George — thinking him awake too, for though he had his back towards her, he was writhing about, struggling restlessly. But when she leant over him, the sheet thrown away far down his body, she saw that his eyes were closed — tightly closed, with crow’s feet wrinkling away from them on either side. His face had the tense disappointment of someone trying not to cry: his normally relaxed body, his limbs which flowed so readily in any kind of movement, now seemed animated by some awkward, kicking demon. His hand came down searching for the sheet, trying to pull it up over him — to hide, to bury himself in it, legs drawn up all ready for the womb.
She took the sheet herself and drew it up over him gently, her hand touching his chest. But he pushed her away, struggling for some freedom from her, mumbling incoherently in a resentful tongue, words whose tone was both expiatory and guilty.
An anguish filled his sleeping mind that she had never come across before, transmitting itself to her urgently but indistinctly, a Mayday message from someone sinking far down over the horizon, the desperate intention lost in the static of a nightmare.
But she thought she knew what the message was. She had touched his real life with her words in the bar downstairs the previous evening, found his most secret place. She had been right. He was with Moscow.
She left the bed silently and turned on the tepid shower in the small cubicle at the end of the room. And then he woke turning quickly on his back and lying quite still after the torment of his sleep, propped up a little, arms arched behind his head, blinking at her in the shower, a happy form again in the early morning light, listening to the trickle of water on the tiles.
‘I thought it was raining. A shower,’ he said.
She smiled, feeling within her the hardening excitement of desire and sure reward, the same sense of imminent pleasure that she had felt at the Whitehall party after she’d first met him, seeing him walk across the room towards her, rescuing her from the Belafonte man from the Voice of Kenya Radio. And just as they had come together physically so quickly and easily after that, so she felt now a certainty that they could share each other in another way, a mental release as sharply pleasurable as the sexual.
‘I’m sweating,’ he said.
‘Were you dreaming? A nightmare? You were pushing and shoving about — possessed. I’ve never seen you like that.’
‘No. No dream I can remember.’ He looked at the sheets about him, rumpled and tossed in the shapes of an Arctic landscape, his knees rising steeply in the middle of it. ‘Just very hot for some reason.’
The water danced on her shoulders, catching the bottom of her hair, turning the ends of it into a lot of swimming black elvers trying to fall down her back in the rush of water.
‘You were killing yourself, darling. Because you won’t say. But you mustn’t. Because you can say. Now.’
‘What?’ He wiped his eyes, starting to move again restlessly in the bed. ‘What was I saying — was I talking in my sleep?’
‘Nothing I could follow. But I know. I’m sure I do.’
‘Not that again. Not the bloody Russian.’
She moved her head around the flow of water, letting it come over the front of her body, looking at him through the rain fall.
‘I work with them too.’
‘You have such fantasies.’ He relaxed again, taking the sheet up and flapping it several times, aerating the bed. ‘But go on then,’ he continued, amusing himself with the conspiracy. ‘Which Directorate of the KGB? Who is your control? — isn’t that what it’s called? — and what’s your target? And your poison pill when they get you — you’ve got that, I hope?’ He paused, looking at her happily, and then with annoyance when she didn’t reply. ‘What are you doing to me? What game are you trying to play? It’s bloody stupid.’
She dried herself at the end of the bed and then came forward, pushing down his knees, lying on top of him with the sheet between them.
‘Why a game?’ Then she considered her question, arching her body against his. ‘Well, a game in the sense that we shouldn’t get all dreary and upset about it.’ She didn’t kiss him. She wanted to look at him — every moment. So she let her face move gently with her body, coming to him with her eyes, then drifting away again.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘this is quite crazy: if I did work for the Russians, your lying on top of me like this, quizzing me. That’s real Mata Hari. I wouldn’t tell you a word, would I?’
He touched her shoulder, then ran one finger down judiciously to the point of her breast as she leant away from him. The sun had burst on the window, a streak of gold across the curtain.
‘You don’t have to tell me. Let me tell you,’ she said.
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘You think I really have such fantasies — as that?’
‘No, funnily enough — you’re rather serious. That’s what worries me.’
‘You really think I’m a plant — from the other side?’
‘It’s not unknown — is it?’
She pushed herself up from him for an instant with one arm and pulled the sheet down from between them with the other.
‘And this is the seduction scene?’ he went on, looking at her with interest, with a calm surprise. ‘This is where I “tell all”.’
‘No. This is just the seduction scene.’
He was hard then beneath her, his skin damp and warm against hers, her body bruised with cold water. She touched him and it was hers — an object as freely available, as openly acknowledged as his index finger might have been. It had been like that from the beginning — always like that, making love, as easy as falling off a hundred logs together. They loved very openly, happy with every skill, without secrets or stress. And so, just as surely she thought, his other life could now be brought into the light with loving.
He put his finger on the tip of her nose, pushing it gently upwards. ‘I don’t believe it. You know I don’t. An all-American girl, bright wide face, long mouth, smile like a toothpaste —’
‘Advertisement — you bastard!’ She clutched his shoulders and moved onto him. There was soap there too, which had not all come away in the shower, so that he came into her without any effort.
‘Married to a Whitehall diplomat, too. You really expect me to believe you work for the Russians? You work for the British. You’ve been sent to seduce me. Well, I’m not telling. So there.’