‘All that, Helen — all that’s true. One truth. Yours, Helen. I have some truths as well. But you’ve forgotten those, if you ever really knew them.’
It was strange, I thought, how they had both taken to using each other’s Christian names so carefully, as though they were impeccable footnote references guaranteeing the truth of the text — as the only way, every other link broken, of ensuring that these painful messages found their target. Apart from their names they were strangers meeting in this children’s street. And worse: ‘Guy’ and ‘Helen’ designated wraiths without a body. Yet ghosts from a past in which both had once filled the other’s skin happily and exclusively. And that bounty had passed into, and out of, these very shapes in front of me; a chemical experiment that had started so well had ended disastrously. And I was appalled at this, quickly, looking at these two parcels of flesh, still thinking, and alive and therefore beautiful — something queasy coming into my own gut as I thought about it — that these good flavours of a shared life together had so completely leaked out of two otherwise perfectly made forms, nothing remaining but a wilful cruelty. I felt suddenly that there was no luck in human beings anywhere, that there was something quite shocking hidden in the original mould.
‘Look,’ I said, standing up and putting my hand on the roof of the brownstone, ‘What does it matter. We have to understand now, not yesterday. And Guy does. He’s here and has heard —’
‘“Promiscuous cheat and traitor” indeed,’ Helen interrupted. ‘It was simply living a life that you denied me —’
‘Is that it? Going off with other men behind my back and working for the Russians — I denied you that? Well why shouldn’t I?’
‘All right — I’m a whore and a traitor,’ Helen said quietly. ‘Okay. But it wasn’t like that at all.’
‘Of course not — all for the purest motives: the great God Lenin and so it was perfectly all right for you to hop into bed with the whole communist party if you wanted.’ Guy smiled, almost laughed. ‘It’s laughable. Farcical. No one would believe it. And to suggest that I drove you to it — well, that’s just cloud-cuckoo land. What are you doing for them anyway? Not pumping me, as I remember. So what else? Sleeping round with diplomats, colleagues of mine? You’re not trained for much else, are you?’
‘You’re not going to know.’
‘Has she told you?’ Guy turned to me. ‘Or are you really working for the KGB as well?’
‘No. And I’m not.’
‘Think she’s the person we’re looking for by any chance? “The stayer”?’
‘No. She says not. And I believe her.’ I looked over at Helen. Her face was taut and creased, all the easy curves gone, showing her age at last in the dull light. The beaten look of a slave up for auction. She was frightened — frightened of losing. And it did look bad against her.
‘You’ve told her, have you, about what you’re here for, who you are?’
‘There seemed no point not to. She knew from the beginning I wasn’t George Graham.’
‘That’s wonderful. Now she just tells her KGB contacts here all about it — if she hasn’t done it already. And that’s the end — of you particularly.’
‘She says she isn’t going to. She has some other work to do. She’s not interested.’
‘And you believe her? Do you know anything about the KGB? They don’t hire that kind of charity, I can assure you.’
‘Yes, I do believe her. And it is wonderful, isn’t it? Our business is all a lot of silly nonsense anyway — and it’s a good thing that two of us at least seem to realise that — that the personal commitment is far more important. And you’re in it too, Guy. You knew about her — and you didn’t tell.’
‘I don’t put much store by us three against the Russian, British and American intelligence services.’
‘Why not? — if we do keep our mouths shut. That’s the last thing they can expect — trust in such circumstances. So now that each of us knows all about the other why don’t we all get on with our various jobs? And live our lives. And maybe one day we can just do the living and throw the other rot over — the dark glasses game. Any other ideas?’ I looked at both of them.
‘It’s crazy,’ Guy said. ‘Mad.’
‘Why? Any alternative is going to mean a long time down for all of us. And that’s not fun. I know.’
But Guy wasn’t convinced. ‘Crazy.’ He repeated the word to himself, walking up and down between us. ‘Mad.’
Yet he must have seen that mine was the only course — we had to trust each other. But I felt something else was worrying him — something still on his mind, unexpressed and therefore dangerous. But of course there were so many things that could go wrong, even with trust, and I supposed he must just be thinking of this.
A moment later the twins charged up the narrow stairway in dressing-gowns, two blond-fringed round faces exploding with excitement. They ran along the cobbled street between us towards their father shouting.
‘Daddy! Play us the fiddle, will you? Will you do that dance with us? Will he, Ma?’ They turned towards her. ‘And you do the piano — please! Let’s do that, can’t we? Yes! The Flibbertygibbit — that one. Can’t we?’
They jumped into our bitter atmosphere and made it plain and sweet in a moment: an irrepressible demand for now, a stinging comment on the folly of our ways — if proof were needed, I thought. All such thoughts: the inventions of a happy childishness. And how dull we three were — infantile unliving adults: what fatuous toils we were engaged in, what sour intellects and dry ideals, flesh withering on three old sticks.
Guy opened a small fiddle case that had been stored among the rafters. Helen was persuaded back to the piano in the miniature drawing-room. And then the two children and their father began to hop about the street with strange bouncy steps to a scratchy jig. It was something the family had obviously worked up before, steps of their own invention, awkward and unbalanced, from no book of the dance, yet polished in their own way, and well remembered: an almost tuneless music, yet a perfectly shared harmony, unique to these four people — a family now quite without dissidence, generations firmly locked, the drawbridge up, secure in their own imaginative country, distant from me, inhabiting themselves properly at last.
It was a strange dance indeed, formal yet artless — the children holding hands, circling their father, bending their knees, stammering on their feet, then jumping a little in the air: some sort of familial rite from a lost civilisation discovered in a series of mysterious, angular drawings in a temple fresco. There was an extraordinary sense of propriety about it, of an essential but undiscovered meaning — an overwhelming reason in the movements that escaped all my grammar. It was something in code, the communication of a tribe, an urgent celebration of survival.
They bounced on like mechanical toys, silhouetted against the gas lights, shadows against Brooklyn bridge — Guy the Pied Piper in the pin-stripe suit, no longer distraught and monstrous but a composed, deeply intent figure, fingers darting about the strings of the funny tune; Helen invisible but there precisely on the dot, hitting all the right notes between the fiddle. Where are we, I thought? And what on earth have we all been talking about? And I felt, looking at their unfathomable gyrations, that perhaps all of us were going to have some luck after all.
12
Harper arrived at the East Side air terminal off 42nd Street in New York, sour and grimy after the long flight from London. He took a cab to the Hilton on West 53rd, and signed in. His room was 2057. He didn’t bother to unpack or wash, just took his shaving things with him in his pocket, came down two flights on the stairs, then walked towards the lift banks. A maid came towards him with a trolley of linen just as he came to room 1819. He had to double back after she had gone, slapping his pockets as if he’d forgotten something. The door was unlocked. He went in through the narrow hall. Andrei Popovich was lying back, feet up on the big bed, watching Ronald Coleman in Random Harvest on a big TV set.