Besides, it was an afternoon for cycling: soft and fresh and sunny. The drive gave out onto a main road very nearly at the apex of the hill. We turned left, pedalled upwards a bit, and it was brakes from then on, seeing the town round a bend three or four miles away in the valley, rushing towards it, past spacious Victorian villas on the left, the Malvern hills across the hazy distances away to our right.
We forgot pursuit and future then, forgot everything. And we flew, or seemed to fly, and the sensations were utterly new to me, as if I’d never been alive — of wind and balance and smooth motion, in which one is completely part of the land and atmosphere of the world for once: no longer an intruder, but someone naturally expected, a guest accepting gratefully all the pressing invitations of air, clarity and movement; perfectly poised, the stomach sinking with the slopes, the gut expanding, adrenalin running — a natural gyroscope keeping us rock-steady as we dived on the town, happy partners in the clear weather.
There was a phone box at the foot of the hill and I got through to my section in Holborn, reversing the charges, speaking to the duty officer. But McCoy was away, he said, on leave.
‘Let me speak to Harper then,’ I said. ‘John Harper, his deputy.’
‘I can’t do that, sir,’ the bland voice said. ‘Can’t give you his private number.’
‘Then get him to phone me, for God’s sake. At this number. It’s urgent.’
We hung about, trying to keep out of sight behind the kiosk until the phone rang behind the glass five minutes later.
‘Harper here. Who’s that?’ The Australian voice was impertinent and harsh, ringing down the line at me, looking for a fight.
‘Marlow. Peter Marlow.’
‘Oh yes — who? Marlow? But we heard you were dead — last week in New York.’
‘That was Guy Jackson.’ I began to explain what had happened, that the KGB were after me. But after a minute he interrupted.
‘Look, this is an open line. I’ll get down there with some men right away. Are you on your own?’
‘No, with Mrs Jackson. I told you.’
‘Right, well stay with her. Keep off the streets, out of sight Where will you be?’
‘A police station — or the Communications HQ here.’
‘Your KGB people will have thought just the same thing. You’ll find them there before you, waiting. Go anywhere else. It’ll be a couple of hours before we can get down, even if I can lay on a plane. You’ll have to wait somewhere — hidden.’
I gave him the address of Mrs Grace’s dancing academy in Pitville and told him about the Western Area Ballroom Dancing Certificate Examinations at seven o’clock that evening.
‘That sounds fine,’ he said, and he really seemed pleased. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can. At any rate before they start dancing. And keep together,’ he added. I didn’t quite follow him. Did he think Helen and I were going to part? That might have been the case. But he knew nothing of her activities with the KGB, I hadn’t told him. Solicitude perhaps? I couldn’t expect that of Harper. It worried me a little. But as I came out of the box I said to Helen, ‘I think it’s going to be all right.’
The studio was in Pitville Mews and it took us some time to find it. It lay behind one of the few restored terraces in the area, a narrow, empty cul-de-sac, which we cycled past several times before going down. Mrs Grace’s business was in the middle of it: ‘The Pitville Dancing Academy’ in Festival of Britain lettering on a long board above the doorway: a smart black door with brass fittings. Three or four garages had been run together and converted, we saw when we’d let ourselves in, into one long studio, with a hall, reception area, and changing rooms at one end.
There was a smell of floor polish and french chalk and some other sweeter smell, a combination of various old and cheap perfumes lying on the air. And the light was very pale and unexacting in the narrow mews, giving the long studio with its white, pine polished floor, lemon-coloured walls and mirrors, a submarine quality, a sense of fragile, colourless space.
We stepped on the shiny floor for a moment, very quietly. But even so delicate a movement reverberated about the room on the sprung boards. There was an old coloured photograph of the Queen at one end of the room, next to a record-player with a lot of Victor Silvester numbers stacked beside it.
‘Did you ever dance?’ Helen asked.
‘We were taught in my prep school. Every Saturday morning. Girls came. It was very popular.’
‘I like it. I used to.’
‘I’ve forgotten the steps though.’
‘Afterwards, perhaps?’
I smiled. ‘After what?’
She turned to me. ‘If we get out of this, what will you do?’
‘If. God knows. Back in jail probably.’
‘You could still get away now — on your own.’
I laughed. ‘It’s too much like the Thirty-Nine Steps already. And I’m tired of running. We’re together. Let’s see how long we can stay that way. With these names you have — the British might do some sort of deal with you, give you anonymous asylum.’
‘If I do that, won’t they think you’ve done something of your original job for them as welclass="underline" not the names of the real KGB people in America, but this dissident group? They could be far more important to the West — to know who these people are, to help them.’
‘Maybe. Do you want to do that? Are you sure?’
‘Yes. What else can I do? Alexei’s not going to get to us now. They’ll be here in a couple of hours. So why don’t we work on the idea together — give them the names?’
She looked at me carefully, suggesting a future, all that future that she had once been so ready with.
‘All right. We could do that. If you’re sure.’
‘Yes.’
There was silence. She kissed me briefly, stood close to me, quite still. We were waiting for the music, about to dance. We might have been. And I saw the two of us, and the two children, living somewhere in London — a terraced house in Regent’s Park would have suited — with Mrs Grace as housekeeper. And all of us happy, of course.
‘Well, it might work,’ I said, letting this crazy vision grow in my mind, burgeon irresponsibly, seeing the red sailing boats on the lake in the park, and the zoo the other side of it, myself the recovered paterfamilias taking the twins for summer walks up Primrose Hill, skating on the lake over icy winter weekends. Yes, I would buy a pair of skates in Lillywhites, the assistant suitably deferential, and learn the skimming business, awkward at first, but soon finding the knack, the balance, moving smoothly into a happy and responsible middle life. And I thought it’s never what we are but what we never could be that keeps us going.
There was an airing-cupboard in the lavatory of the gents changing room, and we climbed the shelves past the cistern, pushed out a panel above it, pulled ourselves up, then screwed the shutter down again from the top.
A rough room had been laid out under the rafters, with boards on the ceiling joists, a camp bed, books, tins of food, a big polythene jerry-can of water, an electric ring with a tin kettle and a single 40-watt bedside light.
At the far end of the attic a small curtained window had been let into one side of the wall. Opening it slightly I looked out onto a wide lead gutter with a steeply slated room immediately beyond which would shield any exit from the rear windows of the big terraced houses to the left on the far side of the mews. To the right I could see the small backyard of a pub, with the ladies and gents lavatories to either side of it, and a lot of aluminium beer casks and wooden cider crates in the middle: everything as Mrs Grace had described. A man came out as I was watching, a big farmer chap with a peaked tweed cap, just his head visible as he went for a leak, but I had to duck down all the same. Our cosy retreat was somewhere to leave in the dark rather than the light.