So he was gone — dead for her now, and she knew it at last, without doubts any more. And I thought her face showed some relief in this knowledge finally accepted, so that the tense expectancy in her expression that had hovered there from the beginning disappeared and the lines in her face became moulded in a calm way, like a child asleep after a long and boisterous party. She got off her horse and led it round a dead trunk, which had fallen diagonally along our path. I did the same. And now there was a lot of dead timber in front of us, whitened where it faced the air in jagged ribs, and covered in moss and deep grass underfoot. We picked our way along the ruined path, leading the horses through the olive light.
‘Where does this lead to?’
‘Edge of the national park — there’s a good ride there.’
Something cracked in the thick underbrush to our left.
‘Deer,’ she said. ‘Or something.’ She was thinking of something else, still picking at the greenflies.
‘Not bears, I hope. People are always getting munched up by grizzlies out here aren’t they?’
‘In Yellowstone. Not the Catskills. Why don’t you run? I would.’
‘I’d thought of that. But I want to live for a change. In the world, drinking the wine. Not scurrying about or locked up. Surely you’ve got some names you could give me — just a few suspect KGB fellows? Then I could take home the bacon and spend the rest of my life in the Cumberland Hotel.’
Her face woke up a little — first with surprise, and then, seeing my smile, with one of her own: a little wan, it’s true — but she was trying.
‘Listen, what are you called? I never thought —’
‘Marlow, Peter —’
‘Well, listen, Peter, I’ve not told you everything. I can’t. But it’s nothing to do with your job, I promise, no danger to you —’
‘Don’t worry.’ I was suddenly angry at her reticence after my own confession. ‘I know — it’s to do with Graham. And with his boss in Moscow. The man who recruited him in Beirut: Alexei Flitlianov, isn’t it? Because you were in Beirut when he was, just after Graham had been there. And that makes three of you. And you’re all linked in some way — isn’t that it? — and it’s not to do with this KGB internal security organisation, is it? Or so you say. Then what is it? You tell me.’
She stopped the horse and looked at me wildly. If she’d had a stick with her I’m sure she’d have come at me with it.
‘Come on. Don’t make a scene. It’s the holy hour, time for confession. Why not do it properly?’
‘The British knew all along, then — about the three of us?’
‘No. They can’t have linked you with any of this. They’d have told me. I got it from Guy last night — an infatuation you had with a professor in Beirut — an “Armenian-American” he said. Well, of course, that was Flitlianov’s cover then. They got that out of Graham. I knew that. I just put the two together.’
‘And what else have you put together?’ Her horse started to nibble at her elbow. She pushed it away.
‘Well, since you ask —’ We were getting dramatic, but I didn’t want it that way, so I changed course. ‘No, I’m sorry. But he knows about you and George Graham too.’
‘Christ. Just that we were together — or the political thing as well?’
‘Both, I think. He had a lot of private eyes out after the two of you on that trip you had together in East Africa. And here in New York.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘So he says. And I think it’s true. I saw one of them that day we had a meal on the West Side. From a detective agency here. Not a government man. But Guy said not to tell you, so you’d better forget all about it. He’s stopped it now.’
She was shaking in the green chill, the sun no more than an odd bright dazzle between the leaves. We had no coats. I put my hands high up on both her arms and pressed them together, and then shook her body gently, as though rubbing a fire stick.
‘But how can he know this — and not tell your people in London? He works for them after all.’
‘Yes — but you’re his wife. It’s quite natural isn’t it? He doesn’t want to turn you in. It would ruin his own career too — quite apart from whatever he feels for you.’
‘I’ll take your first suggestion. And it’s not altogether natural; he feels for me — in this way: you with your arms round me. That’s the only way he feels for me.’
‘Yes. He told me all about that too. You shouldn’t be too hard on him —’
Another stick snapped somewhere behind us. ‘Think he’s out after us here as well?’ I asked. ‘With a spyglass, foaming at the mouth?’
She laughed then, and came for a moment completely in my arms. But without anything else. There was no need in us for that — thinking more about what all three of us had lost rather than what we two might gain. We had no freedom to come into our own, both of us still tied to others, half-way through a puzzle, living with ignorance as much as insight.
‘I wonder why we haven’t both been picked up long ago,’ I said, ‘with everyone knowing so much.’
‘I don’t think we’ve started knowing,’ she said. But her horse seemed restless over something, dipping his head and pricking his cars and smelling the dank air, so we moved on.
Alexei Flitlianov had been some distance behind them all the while, moving parallel to the lane through the thick bushes and scrub that bordered it. Twice he’d stumbled on hidden branches and stopped, the horses’ hoof beats disappearing into the sunlit green silence ahead of him. But he wasn’t too worried. There were animals about, chipmunks and squirrels and others he couldn’t see, making odd starts and forays, crackling the undergrowth just as he had done. Besides, in the few glimpses he’d had of the couple he’d seen how completely preoccupied they were with each other, deep in talk, quite unsuspecting.
They’d dismounted and finally stopped, and he’d been a little above them then, on a slight rise over the lane, and he’d been able to watch them for a minute with his binoculars through a gap in the trees — watched him hold her first, shaking her a little, and then the two of them together in each other’s arms.
Their words were lost to him, just odd murmurs, but the message was clear enough: she had taken up with this plant from British Intelligence just as he had suspected — some sort of affair, old or new he didn’t know. But did she know what the man’s real job was? That was the point. And if she knew who he was, that he was no UN pen-pusher, what had she told him? When you were close to someone like that, he thought wearily, you told them everything — didn’t you?
Or did you? Perhaps she wasn’t attached to him in that way at all. Perhaps it was nothing more for her than a casual liaison, run to a weekend, scratching a sexual itch. Yet she wasn’t like that. Or hadn’t been. He was annoyed and uncertain.
Had she betrayed him or not? — that was what it all boiled down to.
And because he had so clearly seen them close together in the attitudes of potential infidelity — to her husband in one way and to him in another — he found himself believing that she had told the man everything, that the years had been too long for her, exposed and isolated, and that her faith in him and all his doings had waned or died.
And he knew so well how that could happen — nothing dramatic, no overnight recantation, but a gradual erosion through absence from the centre of things: not an end of belief necessarily, but a terrible weakness in it through too long and empty a familiarity with the creed. A woman, he knew, with a failing marriage, may take up something illicit and passionate with another man for a while, and love him perfectly, and so regain, and even find a fuller love for her husband when she returns to him. But, in his politics, once you had left you could not come back again to any stronger or more appropriate belief. There was no return ticket to Moscow. And so he saw in their acts at the end of his binoculars the breaking-out of individual happiness and the dissolution of a political ideal. And most people would have said that was fair enough; the two things couldn’t go together; it was a hopeless task to try and link them, and he had simply been very lucky once. But now he saw how every ideal begins and ends in the realisation of eccentric self-will.