‘She used you good, Marlow,’ Harper went on, anxious and concerned for me now, and not dismissive. ‘Cut you up into little pieces. Couldn’t you have guessed — seen it coming?’
I couldn’t look at him. My thigh was numb but lower down in the calf something had begun to throb. ‘Maybe,’ I said.
‘Tell me,’ Harper asked, with one of his crumpled smiles, ‘you weren’t just pretending to be man and wife up there? You slept with her, I hope.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘Why not?’ I said angrily, as though I’d simply forced her to share a physical whim with me.
‘You liked her a little too, though. I can see it in you, Marlow.’ I looked at him with distaste. ‘That’s why you won’t accept it — that she pushed you down the river. There can’t be any other reason: the facts speak for themselves. Shouldn’t get involved that way with Russian agents, Marlow. That’s Rule One. But how should you have known? You’ve no experience in this business.’
And then I was really angry — at him or Helen, I didn’t know which. At both of them, I thought: angry at the truth.
‘Yes, but why shoot him, Alexei? Why?’ Helen asked.
‘I had to. How could you trust him?’ He looked at her in astonishment.
I did, she thought, I did.
‘He’d have ditched you at the end — after they’d got the names from you and taken me. I had to get him out of the way at once, without his having a chance to offer talk or arguments, to hold us up. He was a double agent all along. And would have been at the end too — for all he’s fooled you in the meanwhile. Couldn’t you have seen it coming, Helen? I’ve been following him for weeks, months — since he left London — while I was trying to get in touch with you. I saw you both upstate in New York one morning riding. I followed you there. I wondered how in hell he’d got into your family circle so quickly, and then in a flash you were in his arms.’
‘That didn’t mean anything. I was worried, that’s all.”
‘Of course you’ve been too long in the open, without anybody, any links with us that would have kept you going. I understand that. But falling for a British agent; that’s too much. That’s Rule One — not to.’
‘I didn’t know he was a double agent,’ she said. ‘I just believed the KGB were using him to get the technical information here, like I told you.’
‘That was one line, yes. But the British were using him as well — all the time: to get you and me together when you handed over the names. That’s obvious.’
Was it? she wondered. Had Marlow lied to her? Had there been nothing true in him during those days in the hills — and before in America when they had talked for so long — in Central Park, the Norman restaurant and upstate? Had his whole bearing towards her, from the beginning, been a crucial degree out of true, driving her towards the rocks, to this betrayal which Alexei had just prevented?
She was totally confused.
She had trusted and loved both these men. And now Alexei was killing Marlow in her mind, just as he had tried to kill him in reality. Was it jealousy or truth? Surely, after so long apart, Alexei could not have been jealous of her? He’d never been that sort of man. And there were no grounds for that now — the whole business for him with these names was a matter, precisely, of life and death for many people, including himself. Besides, he was vastly experienced in the business of subterfuge. And so she began to think that perhaps he was right. Or, at least, if he were not exactly right, she had begun to doubt Marlow. What she had seen as his naïveté, his inexperience in the work, his being framed by British Intelligence and forced into the New York job, as a tool — all this bruised innocence had been a very clever front, perhaps.
And then she remembered the extraordinary coincidence of their first meeting, the moment he’d got to New York in the guise of George Graham. He’d said the British had never known anything about her, that they’d never picked up that information from Graham. But of course, they had. And her meeting with Marlow had been no coincidence at all. It had all been arranged. He’d been planted on her — to get the names and, in the event, Alexei as well. Marlow was really as clever an operator as Alexei. And now that she was with Alexei she felt the truth of all this kindle in her and burst into flame in the suddenly renewed warmth of his presence.
In the hotel, fifteen minutes before, she had tried to do something for Marlow, struggling on the floor, before he passed out. But Alexei had pulled her away. They’d left the place by the french windows at the end of the corridor, hurried across the dark lawn under the huge ilex tree, and now they were walking along the small suburban road back towards town, to a church by the traffic-lights further up where they were to meet Mrs Grace and the two children.
He’d told her about Mrs Grace: how, when he’d been unable to get through the KGB cordon to her at the house in the hills, he’d followed the woman back one evening, found out where she lived, studied her carefully, and then taken the decision to approach her. And he’d been right. She was a member of his dissident group, recruited years before by one of his deputies in Russia. And the rest had been easy; the woman had no taste for kidnapping in any case. The only problem had been getting Helen out, for they couldn’t have all escaped with Mrs Grace together. But Marlow had done the trick there. After all, he’d been as anxious as anyone for her to get out so that the British could take her and the names and himself — in the clear, without a shooting-match, a diplomatic incident up in the hills. And wasn’t that just what Marlow had done — he’d asked Helen — the moment he’d found a telephone box? Phoned up HQ in London and told them everything was ready and given them the address of the studio hideout in the town.
‘But why did he bolt from the pub then?’ Helen had asked.
‘Another bluff. What kind, I don’t know. Don’t you see it, Helen? He double-crossed you all the way along. You must see it.’
She believed him now. And indeed, Marlow had said it himself, hadn’t he? — had condemned himself — when he’d told her on the hills how there was dissolution in every new face you met. He’d simply been excusing his treachery, warning her of it in advance.
Trees hung deeply over a high stone wall all along one side of the road, and the street lamps were hazy yellow globes, strung up high at intervals in the leaves — dark, heart-shaped patterns waving slightly in the warm air, moving over this abrupt, awkward, angular face which she had not seen in years, yet which was the same face, exactly so, as in those previous times; which had survived and was an indubitable presence, here in this suddenly glum autumn evening on this suburban road.
His face. A good face. Its lack of conventional symmetry had so affected her in the past, had made the matrix of her love for him so much more precise, that now, as she looked at it closely again, she was able to trace and renew those old emotions for him in herself instantly, as though she had found in his physiognomy a long-lost map describing the treasures of her life and could now at last resurrect them.
An ear-lobe still curled outwards in a minute, strange way; the wrinkles on his forehead were deeper but not more numerous; a front tooth was still chipped: she had travelled intimately about this body once. And then she had come to think, in his long absences, that these physical characteristics didn’t matter: you could forget them. You had to. Affection lived in the spirit, not in fact. But now she realised how the spirit was so often dependent on the unique configurations of flesh and bone: a precise reality, a moment when you looked at, touched, a living, present face — and knew it was yours. And such loss — the touch of someone’s hair — could well be the only real loss, she thought.