‘No. Not these ones. There’s another horse over the way, an old thing that barely moves. You’ll be all right.’
Helen hadn’t gone in for the riding garb, I was glad to see — the dreadful black boots and jodhpurs business, the whip and saucy cap: just in Levis and a shirt, as I was myself. But she was very professional about all the rest of the mysterious business — testing the girths, adjusting bridles, dispensing with martingales.
My horse indeed was quite an old thing, with a downy sheen of white the length of its nose, something like a small Shire cart-horse with tufty hair round its hooves and the melancholy expression of a seasoned drinker. But it had a powerful-looking rump and was in no way decrepit. I was prepared to believe in its age but not therefore in any serious mechanical failure — slightly less horsepower, simply, by comparison with Helen’s super charger.
But there was no way out now — Guy’s ridiculous idea had become a fact with the groom busying himself with my stirrups, Helen telling me how to sit, and Guy himself pondering the whole scene with silent approval. What a bore his fantasies were, I thought — a dangerous bore; nothing so funny as horseplay — as horseplay with death.
And yet there was a feeling of sharp enjoyment — getting up on the beast and sitting in the saddle before anything happened, smelling the saddle-soaped leather and the damp cheesy smell of horse, my head ten feet up looking straight at the low gutters of the stable, the smooth crown of Guy’s head, and finding Helen parallel to me, the two of us suddenly in a quite unexpected position, strangely suspended above the ground. And I’d have been perfectly happy to have stayed that way and just walked round the yard for a bit and then got off and gone home. But of course that wasn’t the idea at all, and off we went, out the archway and along the back drive that led through neatly planted maples and old elms down towards the farm.
And this part was easy enough, and happy, at walking pace beside the other horse, on the sure surface, the morning air coming on my face, marvellously cool and lively, an element as clear and constant as water — and looking up at the very high skies with great white clouds that reduced the proportions of everything on the land — land that was wilderness and blue hills in front of us, and to our right Hereford cattle, the dairy and barns made to seem like models from a child’s farm kit. Birds started from the hedge, some of them so brightly coloured with red wings, and one with a scarlet tail, that I feared the horses might bolt.
It was magnificent, untouched country, rich in foliage, colour, form — rampant in everything. It was as if a classic English parkland had exploded and run wild over a thousand acres: a world unfound, it seemed, where people had not come.
I said, ‘Guy seems terribly concerned to get us off alone together.’
‘Yes — pimping for me. One of his problems.’
My horse was falling behind. ‘What do you do to make it go faster?’
‘Kick it — gently.’
I kicked. Nothing happened. She looked back. ‘Harder.’
I kicked it harder. Nothing.
‘Knows you don’t know how to ride. They sense it at once.’
‘Thanks.’
She reined in, waiting for me.
‘Isn’t that rather uncomfortable?’ I asked.
‘What? You’ve got to sit up straight, not slouch. Keep your knees in line with your toes.’
‘No, I meant the pimping.’
‘Yes. But there’s always got to be something in someone, hasn’t there? — some flaw. Better to have it in the open. He really does it quite openly. That’s something.’
She looked over at me, questioningly, perfectly upright yet relaxed, as if I was the only person now who was hiding anything. And of course that was true. She pressed the advantage.
‘How is your work going? Think you’ll be able to finish it and get back home?’
‘No. Nothing’s happened.’
‘We agreed — you remember, in Central Park — to work together so that both of us might get out of this business: “in one piece” you said — you with your work done and me with — I don’t know what now. Have you forgotten? That’s what I was saying last night too. Don’t let the reins slack — hold them firmly, hands just above the withers.’
We moved off the back drive towards the hills to the north along a narrow, heavily overgrown lane, a rutted old cart track with rotten branches and sometimes whole tree-trunks fallen along our path, and elders and a great deal of tangle from other trees above us.
‘No, I remember.’ I sighed mentally. The fine day seemed less good and the air was dank and almost wintery and rotten-smelling in the covered laneway. ‘You want a progress report, you and the KGB. For me to hand you on a plate all my stupid arrangements. That’s ridiculous.’
She bent away from a large briar, then held it back for me as I passed. Her shirt was dotted with some kind of greenfly and they must have got into her hair too for she started to scratch her head. ‘Look, you could have gone back to New York last night and told your people about me,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t. And nor will I. I promise — even if I had someone to tell.’
Well, why not this conspiracy as good as any, I thought? Just she and I. I knew a great deal about her now — and felt no more need to tell them about it in London than I had at the beginning when I’d read her letters. And as for her betraying me — that was a hurdle of trust I had to take blindly or not at all. I didn’t go on her looks or her words. They meant very little in the decision. It was a matter of simple choice on my part and nothing else, a gamble one way or the other — something for life or against it.
So I told her. And it was quite easy once I started — very easy, really, telling this second woman all about myself. I suppose I must have a penchant for that sort of confidence.
I told her about Durham jail, coming to London, being forced into Graham’s shoes and being packed off to New York to wait for the contact, the ‘stayer’ with the names of suspect KGB agents — told her the whole thing, and it sounded a wonderfully stupid charade in the telling.
‘Graham was going to set up a KGB satellite circle over here — part of their internal security division,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s what you’re in too? You’re the “stayer” surely?’
‘No. Absolutely not.’
‘You’ve got all the qualifications they told me to expect — someone quite unexpected, outside all the usual grubby circles, not active in any way, just a post-box, with practically unbreakable cover: Manhattan socialite, yet Marxist — that’s all you.’
‘It’s not. I’m not your contact. I promise.’
‘No.’ And I believed her words and her face then. ‘No, I suppose not. That would be too easy — you could give me the names I need then, couldn’t you, and I could go home with them and get a medal.’
‘I’ve nothing to do with that KGB security circle.’
‘But Graham had. And you were linked with him — and don’t tell me you neither of you knew the other was in the KGB.’
Either her face was colouring or the green light was getting darker. She didn’t answer my point and I let it be. The answer was obvious: her silence confirmed it. Instead she asked, ‘And Graham — what will they do with him?’
‘If no one contacts me they’ll try him and put him away — and use him as a future bargaining counter with Moscow if one of our men gets picked up there. That’s what they usually do.’
‘That’s what you call my “getting out in one piece” is it?’
‘What do you expect? I’m amazed you’re still here — that they didn’t manage to get your name from him in the first place. They seem to have got everything else out of him.’