Silence.
“What that means is that I want to spend the rest of my life with her. What that means is that I don’t think I’ll ever meet anybody like her ever again, whether I’m twenty-six, thirty-six or a dying man of ninety-one.”
Waterfield produced a rueful smile as Joe thought of God’s instruction to him. Marry this woman. She is the best thing that will ever happen to you. He knew that such thoughts were absurd, yet he could not shake them.
“You see that’s just it, Joe, that’s just it. One feels that way now, but will one feel that way in the future?”
Irritated by a creeping formality in Waterfield’s tone, Joe again paused for thought. It occurred to him-not for the first time-that Isabella was deeply unpopular within the walls of SIS. Why should that be? Whom had she offended? Was it simply that she was beautiful and charming and kind, and therefore coveted by dozens of unhappily married spooks who wished that they could live their lives all over again, preferably in her company? Why else had she not been accepted by them?
Then it became very plain to him, very quickly. Waterfield wanted to prevent the marriage in order to protect the integrity of RUN. He wanted to interfere with Joe’s private life in order to give SIS one less thing to worry about in the run-up to the handover. His advice and good counsel were simply political.
“I think I’m an old soul,” Joe said, trying to find a way round this. Waterfield’s encouraging smile convinced him to keep going. “I’ve always been decisive, I’ve always known what I want. And I want to take care of Isabella. I want us to be husband and wife. Maybe I’m being naive, maybe I’m too young to be thinking like this, maybe I’m just a lovestruck teenager who’ll learn a hard lesson. But I want to stop lying to her. I want my girlfriend to know what I do for a living. I’m sorry, I can see that that is going to present problems for you. I can see that you’ll be concerned about my cover and whether it’ll affect the quality of my work. But I’ve made my decision and I need the Office’s support. I love her.”
“Then you must marry her,” Waterfield said. “It’s as simple as that.”
“But why did you want to marry her?” I asked. “What was the fucking hurry?”
We are back in 2004 again, on the eve of his departure for Shanghai. I was opening my can of Guinness and Joe’s subsequent laughter smothered the hiss of the widget. He produced another one of those looks that appeared to question my innate common sense and shook his head.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “Isn’t it straightforward?”
It was obvious, to a certain extent. They were perfect for each other. Where Joe was often concealed and emotionally withdrawn, Isabella was open and honest. On those rare occasions when she became anxious or depressed, he knew how to listen to her and to soothe her worries. Isabella could be unpredictable, but not in a way that was threatening or unkind, and I think Joe fed off her impulsiveness and volatility. They made each other laugh, they had similar interests, they were both naturally inquisitive and adventurous people. Above all, there was an innate understanding between the two of them which made you jealous that there was not some sort of similar chemistry in your own life.
Nevertheless, in answer to Joe’s question, and in an effort to find out exactly what was going through his mind back in 1997, I said: “No, it’s not obvious. To be honest, it doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”
So Joe tried to explain himself. He had drunk the better part of a bottle of wine by then, which had loosened up his natural reticence.
“I had a drink the other day with a friend from university,” he began. “A guy called Jason. He’d only been married about six weeks and already had the shortest recorded incidence of the seven-year itch. He said to me, ‘Joe, in an ideal world no man would ever have conceived of the institution of marriage. It’s counter-intuitive. Why would we limit our options like that? Marriage is a feminist conspiracy designed to exercise control over men.’ ”
“Your friend’s got a point,” I said.
“My friend is an idiot,” Joe replied. “What would you have done in my place? Isabella and I had been together for more than two years. There were no other circumstances in which the Office would have tolerated me telling her about RUN. Waterfield would have handed me a P45 and told me to swim back to London.”
“So that was the reason?” I seized on this. “You did it just to ease your conscience? You felt so guilty about lying to Isabella that your only way out of it was to propose?”
I have already written about Joe’s temper, about the extent to which he had to be pushed before the lid came off, and for a split second here I wondered whether he was going to launch at me. My words were ill-chosen and his face tightened in anger. In an instant, all of the easygoing, wine-fuelled bonhomie of our conversation evaporated.
“Isn’t that reason enough?” he said. “Do you have any concept of what it’s like to grow up through your twenties living a lie to all but four or five people in the world?”
“Joe, I…”
Just as quickly, his anger abated and his face regained its tranquillity, as if he had subjected himself to a private admonition. “Forget I said that,” he insisted, waving a hand at me. “That’s not what I meant.” It was only the second time that Joe had ever voiced a complaint in my company about working under deep cover. On both occasions he had immediately retracted the grievance. After all, nobody had forced him to work for MI6; it was nobody’s fault but his own if he occasionally found the demands of the secret life overwhelming. The last thing Joe Lennox ever wanted was for people to feel sorry for him. “Everything about her was intoxicating to me,” he said, trying to return to the original subject. “Every day she said or did something that took my breath away. We were connected.” He stopped momentarily, as if trying to remember something. “There are some lines in T. S. Eliot. ‘We think the same thoughts without need of speech. And babble the same speech without need of meaning.’ Does that make sense? When I think back to it, there was a kind of perfect relaxation between us, an effortless timing. It’s very hard to explain. And I knew that I would never meet anybody who made me feel that way again.” He gestured at the walls of the kitchen in the Brook Green flat, as if they contained actual physical evidence of this theory. “So far that’s proved true,” he said.
“I guess what interests me is the timing,” I said. “You had the meeting with Waterfield about a month before the handover, right? Isabella wasn’t planning to leave Hong Kong. She had the job with the French television company, but there was no risk of her going to Paris or elsewhere. You were living together, you were getting on. Why the hurry?”
Joe picked up on the subtext of the question. “What’s relevant about the job?” he asked. “What are you getting at?”
I hesitated, because once again I was venturing into treacherous waters. Both of us reached for a packet of cigarettes that Joe had placed on the table in front of him. He got there first, offered one to me, and repeated the question.
“What do you mean?”
I poured the Guinness into a pint glass and waited for it to settle. “My theory about marriage is this,” I said.
Joe shuffled back in his chair, folded his arms and smiled. “I can’t wait to hear this one.”
I struggled on. “I think part of the reason why men finally decide to cash in their chips and settle down, apart from love and convention and pressure, is proprietorial.”
“Proprietorial in what sense?” He was frowning.
“In the sense that you want to take your girlfriend off the market. You want to make sure, once and for all, that nobody else can fuck her.”
This produced a deservedly contemptuous laugh. “Are you serious? Ownership? Isn’t that a bit passe, Will?” Then Joe saw my expression and realized what I was getting at.