She moved on him now, his head sliding down the pillow, his eyes closing, thinking.
‘You have no evidence. And I have no evidence,’ he said happily, turning his head away. ‘So what’s it all about? Want to play at being spies? Is that it? Some frustrated sense of adventure? All right, then, if that’s what you want — who recruited you, where?’
She pushed on him harder, more urgently. ‘The KGB Resident. In Beirut.’
‘When?’
‘1957.’
He opened his eyes, but didn’t turn round. She stopped moving. She was excited, close to the end.
‘What was his name?’
She lifted herself up from him and looked with fascination down along his body to where they were together, her hair falling damply on his shoulders.
‘Alexei Flitlianov,’ she said, her throat constricting, her stomach beginning to rise in her body. And then suddenly the tension broke far inside her, and she had to come — falling down on him, pushing him into her deeply and violently until her body seemed to turn inside out and tip upside down, a steep plunge that lasted for a long time and no time at all — there was no measure she could give to it, it was so full, so spinning, so draining.
‘Alexei Flitlianov.’ She said again, ‘Alexei —’ letting all the tension flow from her as the truth emerged, like a birth, so that the name rose up for her, a repeated affirmation, a new sound, a new life in the sunlit room, as sharp and real as the physical truth she had just experienced, and thus, so linked with it, something which could not now ever be doubted, or denied.
He turned round now, amazed, gripping her, head straining backwards, his whole body beginning to tremble against hers, arching himself, then coming — at last, she felt, responding to her truth, sharing her spirit.
But what he said surprised her.
‘Not him, surely. Surely not — no, no,’ as the long spasm died in him.
Then they lay together, absolutely still, without speaking, knowing the truth though they had spoken nothing of it yet, listening to the rising voices on the street outside, the porters and taxi drivers outside the hotel arguing on the new day, the clip-clop tympani of many hooves going to market.
At breakfast that morning, at a corner table over milky bitter coffee, the men clearing out the ashes of the eucalyptus fire in the Ritz Bar next door, he asked her in tired astonishment: ‘How did it all begin? Alexei Flitlianov and you? You of all people. What made you believe in this, in all this — that world. Moscow.’ He stopped, lost for a moment in the enormous implications. ‘In something people don’t really believe in any more.’
She started to tell him, shielding the morning sun from her eyes.
Harold Perkins drank three martinis quietly but quickly before dinner and by mid-way through the meal, his hand beginning to slide clumsily round his claret glass on the long polished dining table, he was studiously, carefully drunk.
It had been a beautifully laid table — English silver, red Bohemian glass finger-bowls, tall clear celery glasses, Waterford decanters, a big spreading vase of wildflowers in the middle. And to begin with Harold had presided over it all with happy regality. But now he was a small, beaten emperor, his white crew-cut head swaying low over the half-eaten remains of his food, delving into unhappy memory.
‘Marshall Aid gave us ideas above our station,’ he said with sad venom. ‘That was where it began — we couldn’t stop at the soup-kitchen, had to police the charity as well. Suddenly, there was a “moral responsibility” that went with the handouts. The next thing we were the defenders of the “Free World” and guns replaced the butter.’
He had been talking of the Middle East, of his life in Beirut, but now he had brought his frustrations into a global context.
‘You know, I’m not too old. But I’ve seen all I want to see — so I’m old that way — McCarthy, McCarran, Nixon and the rest. When you start to police the world there’s something rotten under the carpet at home. And so you have to have a moral justification to support your guilt — encourage hysterical grass-roots self-righteousness. And that brings out your witch hunters, and all the other two-bit men suddenly stricken by high principle, my God.’ He tailed off, wiping his chin.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Guy murmured. ‘Indeed.’
‘And as for your United Nations,’ Harold got onto his high horse again, looking hard at Guy. ‘That collection of … of … the underdeveloped world, indeed. What cheek!’
‘The less developed, we call it —’
‘Sitting on their asses in six hundred committees, singing while the world burns. Why in hell should they want our development? What’s it really done for us?’
‘Coffee?’ Helen stood up. Harold continued to browbeat Guy. ‘Yes,’ I said, getting up and following her into the kitchen. The housekeeper had disappeared, leaving the coffee cups on a tray and a big dishwasher warbling in the corner.
‘He lost his job you see,’ Helen said, quite suddenly, putting the kettle on, opening a fresh tin of Yuban Columbian Rich Blend, and sniffing it. ‘His opinions. Those ones. He was in Washington. An under-secretary in the State Department’s Middle East Bureau — Eisenhower’s first administration. A little Left in the thirties, communist friends then, though he was never in the party. But McCarthy got onto him, dragged it all up in a congressional committee; wanted him to name his friends. He took the Fifth, refused. And he was ruined, fired, kaput. No one here would give him another job — nothing in Washington, nothing academic. Finally, he got a post at the American University in Beirut and we all went out there. It wasn’t the money. He just wanted the work — the position to work for those opinions. He was no Communist, but he might just as well have been — he’d have suffered no more. He might as well have gone the whole way.’
She stood over the double sink, warming a big earthenware coffee pot under the tap, the busy domestic movements of a social woman, a hostess handling everything with supreme confidence — wrapping up her father’s political past as easily as she went about making coffee.
And I thought I saw it then: the beginning — or perhaps just the final confirmation — of her beliefs: she had taken up her father’s failure, fifteen years before in Beirut, and made a success of it. Senator McCarthy had ruined her father’s career, but made hers, delivering her into the hands of Moscow while attempting to save his country from the same scourge.
‘What an awful business,’ I said, trying to get through one of those moments when there is really nothing to say.
She turned. ‘Yes. You probably knew all about it anyway.’ The kettle boiled. She made the coffee, pouring the water straight over the warmed grounds. ‘Knew about me, about Father, about everything.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I feel it. Felt it all along. You know everything about Graham, you’ve taken him apart and put on all the bits and pieces yourself so you must know about me — how could you not?’
Suddenly she was slack, empty, the coffee brewing on the table between us, all the social energy gone, her face tired, troubled — the one where she put on experience and knowledge and was no longer an advertisement for success and innocence. ‘Why have I been pretending with you all this time? You must know, mustn’t you? And I’m tired, really tired.’
‘Know what?’
She was tired beyond anger, which would have been there otherwise. ‘Why don’t you tell them — your own people — and have them tell the Americans? Isn’t that your real job over here? — to check me out, to find all Graham’s contacts, the people he would have dealt with over here, who wouldn’t know what he looked like?’