And it was this simple, sudden feeling of fear, which we shared then, I think, which finally confirmed for both of us all the other details of my story — which at times, in the telling, had seemed fantastic to me as it must have done for Helen. But now we both knew the full truth of the whole business, knew it before it happened: we were trapped.
‘Of course the phone could just be out of order — that’s always happening in England. And that was a fox,’ Helen said.
‘Yes, it could be just that.’
But neither of us believed it. We were trying to support ourselves with words, avoiding the issue, postponing the truth, weary with drink and with my terrible travellers’ tales. And it was this feeling of being caught, yet not admitting it, that brought us together in the darkness. Already feeling victims of some outrage in the morning — the arrival of a new and treacherous Mrs Grace and a man with a gun — we both of us must have decided to combat this evil rising about us with some shared action: a statement that would assert, whatever happened later, that we two, at least, knew the prosperity of affection, could lay our hands firmly on the roots of decent life.
I turned to Helen, seeing her outlined vaguely against the light of the fire, the white face with its dark frame of falling hair, the rough white pullover. And wordlessly, with so much ease, we took each other in our arms, ears side by side, and stayed that way, strange at first with the feeling of being close, but growing quickly familiar with the idea as we gave it flesh.
No, there was no sense of shared pity in what we did: it was completely a positive thing, confirmation of a future, not a past. The past, hers and mine, had simply been an argument with the station officials. Now we had gained our tickets, it didn’t matter where. We had been married in that station and had never left it; we had spent all the time arguing and it had hurt; we had denied each other and lied to everyone. We had fought and schemed over everything and the only things we’d held in common were enmity and distrust. But that was all over now: that previous man was dead and so was the illness that had killed him. Guy was gone and my own obsessive curiosities about Helen had somehow died with him. He and I had shared that disease together — and both of us had been thrown from that window for our trouble.
‘Guy had no love for me,’ she said, crouching down now over the last of the flames. ‘Just endless anger and bad temper — possessing me. What did I see in George?’ She considered the question, ‘George cared. But it didn’t fall on me like a rock — the caring.’
‘Of course. But he was outside. That always helps. He kept being new for you, a little rich and strange and rare. Odd weeks, days, moments. Come on, you know that. You never lived with George, achieved what you wanted so much. And people can get tired of success together, as well as failure. You could have come apart with Graham too. There’s dissolution in every new face you meet. That’s all it amounts to. And the vanity of thinking otherwise, of needing to be unique and indispensable. And we’re not. And we don’t care for that truth.’
Helen looked at the fire, sitting on the ground, her knees drawn up resting her arms and head on them, her long thighs rising almost vertically, the rusty cord trousers golden against the dying flames.
‘He wanted to know everything about me, Guy. It was never enough to possess now — when we had each other in the present, willingly. He wanted my whole past as well. I can see that so clearly now. And he was right in a way, of course. There was something essential hidden in me. And I shouldn’t have married him, knowing I couldn’t share that with him. But I loved him in the beginning. And needed him. That was very strong. And I forgot all the manifestoes then in Africa — riding and looking at the animals, peering down craters, that fresh world coining all around you, and all you had to do was look at it and touch it. You didn’t think about it all. I forgot the political involvement in Africa.’
‘Involvement with Alexei Flitlianov?’
She looked up at me and said quickly, ‘Yes. Yes, with Alexei.’ And she kept on looking at me questioningly, as if in her use of his Christian name alone, in giving me this personal clue, I would be able to reach back into her past and immediately recreate all the facts and nuances of her relationship with him. But I couldn’t.
And I didn’t really want to now, having tried to do that for so long. I wanted to let Helen be, as she was, the full person then, at that instant, when she contained everything of any importance. Her past, which had so absorbed us both, was now available to me; she would tell me all about it if I asked her. And so I no longer felt the need for it. Curiosity dies completely in the sense of sure possession. And I must have felt that then with Helen: a pact arrived at wordlessly, a secret exchanged, agreements between us now and in the future, lightly, easily confirmed. We had passed, the two of us, without saying anything, into that area of a relationship where everything that before had been very unlikely, hedged round by mutual indecision, was now perfectly possible and expected.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was sure Flitlianov must have been involved with you, and with Graham: I told you that evening upstate — that he’d probably recruited you both in Beirut. But apart from that, I don’t know —’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ she interrupted urgently, as if she had at last found the right audience for a speech she had suppressed for years. ‘Yes, it was Alexei, when I was at the University there. And it doesn’t matter now — that you should know.’
‘That you and he were —’
‘Yes. Him. Before anyone.’
‘It wasn’t just political?’
‘No. It was both.’
‘As with Graham. You’ve been lucky.’
‘As lucky as a woman’s story. But it was true. You believe that?’
‘Yes, I do. Fact always stranger than. Why not? But what happened?’
‘I went on working for Alexei.’
‘For the KGB?’
‘For a part of the KGB. None you’ve ever heard about.’
‘The thing you said you couldn’t tell me about — the work you had to complete in America, which had nothing to do with me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, what is it?’
She didn’t reply. And then I remembered the man I’d seen in the dank, overgrown laneway upstate in New York when I’d fallen off my horse — the man in the green anorak with binoculars, staring after us, but not seeing me in the ditch. And it was this image of spying on us that brought the figure so suddenly and clearly back to me — that spying on ordinary life so close to Guy’s identical pursuits which we had just been talking about.
I said: ‘What does Flitlianov look like? Short, fiftyish, hollow-eyed, tufts of white hair over the ears?’
‘Yes.’ She spoke softly. ‘You’ve seen him?’
And then I remembered. ‘Twice. The first time, the day we lunched together in New York. And then that day we were riding. Each time he was following us.’
I told her what had happened when I’d fallen off the horse.
And then she told me the whole of her story — the story of a dissident group within the KGB, which Flitlianov headed, which George Graham had been a deputy in, and whose total complement of names was known only to her. She said, finishing: ‘And Alexei’s being there, upstate, hiding, can only mean they’ve found out about him in Moscow, that he’s on the run and wants those names — wants them before the others get them.’
‘The KGB knows you have them?’