‘What you’re angry at, Helen, is my loving you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I know the feeling, how much easier without that, with just the fun and the affectionate thing between us. And not the tense business under it all. I know that: the wasting sense when you’re thought of, not with me, which isn’t a feeling to live at all comfortably with, which is always pushing you to all sorts of desperation, which is not loving but more destroying, so that you would do anything to turn the tap off — but can’t. You’re sorry for that, Helen — those sort of feelings in each of us that we don’t talk about because there isn’t a future in it. I know. All we can do is live it now, and not think about it too much. And that’s marvellous. But it’s also very little.’
And she didn’t feel like crying then. The tears had drained away while he talked without ever falling, leaving her eyes tender and ticklish and dry. And she could look at him now, and she did quite easily, and without any more anger. And she said, ‘Where shall we have our picnic?’
9
The sign above the side door of the liquor store at the end of the single village street of Stonestead said ‘Rooms — Vacancies’. But the door was locked, so Alexei Flitlianov came round to the front, stepped up onto the small verandah that gave out onto the hot tarmac, and came into the shop. There was no one there either.
It was hot in the small quiet room — full of a long afternoon’s heat — with the quick ‘flap-flap-flap’ of tyres on huge trucks as they passed over the soft tar every few minutes outside. But outside there had been a breeze and on it now, coming from an open doorway that led to the back of the building, he smelt meat burning, the air singed with fat falling on charcoal, a dry smoky breath that he could almost taste in his mouth as it flowed through the room and out of the mosquito-wired front door.
A woman appeared in the corridor, passing from the kitchen to the garden, wiping her hands vigorously on a meat-stained apron. But she saw him. She was a small, delicate, spinsterish, shy-looking lady with glasses, wearing very new coloured plimsolls. Yes, she had a room: $2.50 by the night, or $14.00 the week. He took it for two nights, paying in advance.
‘Put your car out back,’ she said, not at all shy. ‘Down the side. There’s a lot at the end.’
‘Grigorian,’ he said, though he’d not been asked to sign anything and she seemed quite incurious about him. ‘Mr Grigorian. I’m from overseas. Come to look up some of my relatives round here.’
‘Oh yes? Not a name I’ve heard round these parts. But we’re new here. Only a couple of years. They’ll most ways know in the store down the street.’
She showed him up to his room.
He had followed the Jacksons and the Englishman up from New York that same afternoon, an hour behind them, in a hired Avis, for he’d known exactly where they were going — to the house at Belmont. He’d seen Helen and the children with their summer gear piling into the car outside their apartment in the East Fifties and had followed them down Second Avenue to the UN building where she’d picked up her husband and the other man outside the staff entrance.
He’d been nowhere near her mailbox at Grand Central post office, of course, and had sent nothing to it. Nor could he risk telephoning her — the phone would surely be tapped — for she was almost certainly being followed by someone else from the CIA or British Intelligence, as well as by Graham’s double, so that any direct approach to her in New York had been out of the question too. The only chance of making a safe contact with her, he felt, was in the wilds of the country, in the house upstate which she’d talked to him about in the past, where there was plenty of cover, where she went riding, where he might get a message to her and where there was a fair chance that any secondary surveillance might be dropped for the weekend. In any case, in those open spaces, he could see who might be following her — besides the other man, which he could not do in New York.
The other man — the man the British had put in Graham’s shoes. How had he got onto Helen, he wondered? Simply through her poste-restante address in New York? They’d got that information out of Graham in London of course, watched the mailbox and seen her pick something up from it quite recently, then followed her back home and identified her. The man couldn’t have found her any other way. And now they’d be looking for all that coded information which she possessed, were closing in for it. Where did she keep it? Whatever happened he would have to get that correspondence first.
But the other man — he, him, the unknown rather uncertain-looking Englishman wearing Graham’s clothes he’d followed all across the Atlantic — there was something strange there, beyond the man’s impersonation, which worried him. How had Helen become so immediately friendly with him? How had he picked up with her so soon, so easily, so conveniently?
He remembered the long lunch the two of them had had together in the Norman restaurant on the West Side and the street accident afterwards where he’d nearly been caught with the other man who’d been trailing her — a long meal of close chatter within a few days of meeting the woman. Was it all just sheer chance — or had the man some other personal or previous relationship with her? And in any case why had the British chosen the same man to replace Graham with and to follow her? Sheer administrative convenience perhaps? He could think of no other reason.
He unpacked his small suitcase, looked over the new Zeiss pocket binoculars, cleaned the lenses gently, and then found the little pipe at the bottom of the bag. Without thinking he put a cigarette into it and smoked it that way for the first time in fifteen years. He looked at the tiny piece of wood, the yellow bakelite stem, the minute cherry bowl, the ridiculous angle of the cigarette, the curling smoke. And he remembered briefly — a very mild memory with nothing harsh in it — the first time he’d smoked it. He remembered being in Beirut simply a man with her and not a KGB agent — the pipe was full of all that, so much easier a life, when a person had obsessed him and not an idea. And the temptation there’d been to follow that emotion through and not the dry toil of political theory. Of course with her he might have had both, the first nurturing the second — the salami curling in the sunshine of that olive-filled valley and the long haul of revolutionary change. But that would have all have had to take place in the West, as a defector, as an academic somewhere perhaps, as an outsider in any case, as one of so many dispossessed Marxists, intellectual agitators whose work could never be more than a frustrating, masturbatory itch, an idealistic commentary or forecast on a movement which you had to be inside ever to influence. A man thinking as he did, at the very centre of the KGB, was worth a hundred hopeful books from sympathisers in the West.
And so he had stayed in Russia — and left her outside in the world for other men to have lunch with, and long talks in small Norman restaurants on the West Side.
What had they talked about? He wished his long training could have told him what — that his profession as spy could have done this one thing for him, more important than all the other things at that moment: the words, the tone of voice, the angle of her face, the statements and hesitations — the tempting magic of two people at the start of even the most casual relationship; the unique stance they will take towards each other — the spoken thought, and the unspoken one behind that; the present fact between them; the next one already forming, jointly proposed, immediately agreed upon and defined, and the limitless variety of future moments. That was what lunch with her had been like in Beirut — the meetings in the early days. And he realised that he was thinking of Helen and this other man as potential lovers, not as quarry and hound. Or old lovers? — the thought suddenly struck him. He sensed — or did he imagine? — this extremity of familiarity between them, thought he saw in their behaviour the beginning of something, or the happy renewal of an old habit.