A Spy By Nature (24 page)

Which is Fortner’s cue.

“Dunno why I bother,” he says, getting up from the table with the slowness of a geriatric. His voice is a low grunt. “Goddamn pills never do any good.”

And with that he lumbers toward the entrance hall. He makes this look so natural that the others would never suspect a thing.

Dave carries on: “I often think, would Bernardo Bertolucci have half the reputation he has if his name were Bernard Bell or…or Bob Bower or something?”

From the hall I can hear the slap of my briefcase falling onto the carpet, and the successive snaps of the brass catches flying open.

“I mean don’t you think that the success he’s enjoyed has something to do with the allure of the name ‘Bernardo Bertolucci’? He already sounds like a great movie director before he’s even shot a frame of film.”

There’s a rustle of papers in the hall, clearly audible to all of us and not at all like the sound of a pill bottle or a foil pack of antibiotics. Then the briefcase is closed. Almost immediately another case, clearly Fortner’s, is opened. The sound of this is much fainter. Only someone who was deliberately listening would hear it. Fortner must have held the catches with his fingers, drawing them up slowly to smother any sound. I look at Saul and Susannah, but they have been sidetracked by Dave, who has segued into
Last Tango in Paris.
I listen for further noises, but Dave’s voice smothers everything. Katharine catches my eye, but the expression on her face does not change.

Then, at a convenient break in the conversation, Saul says, “I’ll get pudding. Will Fortner want any, Kathy?”

This could be dangerous. If he heads out into the hall, he may see Fortner. I try to think of a way to delay him, but Katharine reacts more quickly.

“Hey,” she says, thinking on her feet. “Before you do that, just tell me about something. It’s been bugging me all night. You see that book there?”

“Which one?”

Saul is wavering near the door, looking back at her.

“On the second shelf.”

“Here?”

Saul points to a book with an orange spine, coming back into the room.

“No, just a little farther along. To the right.”

“The one by James Michener?”

“That’s it, yes.”

By now we have all swiveled and are looking at the book in question.

“That’s right. Now, was he British?”

“Michener?”

“Yes,” Katharine says.

“I don’t know,” Saul admits. “Why?”

“Because I have an ongoing argument with my father that he’s from Connecticut.”

Saul doesn’t know that Katharine’s father is dead.

“I’ve no idea,” Dave says. “I’m fairly sure he’s British.”

Fortner comes back into the dining room.

“No idea about what?” he says confidently, a spring in his step. Everything must have gone smoothly.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Katharine tells him, settling back into her chair with a faint grin. “D’you want any dessert, honey?”

There is pudding, there is cheese, there is coffee.

My sense of relief at the success of the handover has made adrenaline gradually dissipate from me like a deep, muscle-softening massage. For the first time in hours, I begin to relax. Out of this comes a tiredness that flattens me toward eleven o’clock like jet lag. Katharine notices this and offers me more coffee. I drink it and pick at the pudding, a chocolate goo that goes some way to restoring my energy, but it remains difficult to involve myself in the party.

At midnight, Katharine begins to fade and is soon making excuses to leave, which Fortner is only too keen to pick up on. He came here for the briefcase, after all, not the conversation. Having stood up, he walks over and kisses Susannah twice on the cheek and shakes Dave’s hand, telling them what a pleasure it’s been to make their acquaintance.

“Good-bye, young man,” he says to me, placing his arm on my shoulder. “We’ll be seeing you soon, I hope.”

“I asked him for supper next week,” Katharine says, disengaging from her farewell to Dave.

“Terrific. See you then.”

Saul then walks them to the front door—I remain where I am, listening to Dave talk about his job—and he sees them out. When Saul comes back, he smokes a joint with Dave in the sitting room while Susannah makes a vague attempt at clearing up. By one o’clock, the two of them have gone out into the hall arm in arm with warm smiles and promises of meeting again that I do not deserve and do not believe.

Saul now goes for a pee and I sit on the sofa. It’s late and he’s stoned, and, when he comes back, he doesn’t want to talk. I was expecting a long, involved chat into the small hours, but he just wants to sit in front of the television watching a videotape of
Match of the Day.
As the cassette is rewinding he asks me what I thought of Susannah, and I say how nice she seemed, how funny and smart and easy, and that seems to satisfy him.

On the sofa, beer in hand, Saul follows the match between Chelsea and Manchester United with the attentiveness of the lifelong fan. I half watch it, my mind wandering back through the events of the day. Fortner will be home by now, going through the contents of the file, preparing the information before handing it over to his case officer in the morning. Will Katharine help him with this or leave him to it? A car horn sounds long and hard in Queen’s Club Gardens as a Manchester United player is tracked closely down the wing by a defender stooped low like a piano player.

“Andy fucking Cole,” Saul mutters. “I know caged hens who are more creative in the box.”

Ten minutes later, as I am getting up to go to bed, Saul mutes the sound of the television and looks up at me.

“Alec?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Sorry I had a go at you before. About Abnex. I think it’s great you’re doing so well there, doing something you believe in. A lot of people would give their arse to be in your position.”

“Don’t bother…”

“No, hear me out,” he says, raising his hand. He’s more drunk than I had realized. “I don’t have any right to criticize you for working hard, for spending time with people in the business. And I like Fort and Kathy, they’re not the issue. I’m just reacting to how little time all of us have now, away from our careers. It’s taken me a while to adjust to the fact that we can’t always be fucking about like we used to. I don’t really know when the fun stopped, you know? We’ve all had to get a lot more serious.”

I nod.

“Truth is, I admire you,” he says. “You were in a bad place after not getting into the Foreign Office, and you sorted yourself out.”

Now is when it is most difficult. Now is when none of it seems worthwhile at all.

“Thanks,” is all I can say. “That means a lot to me.”

He leans back and I decide to call it a night.

“I’m bushed,” I tell him. “Going to get some sleep.”

“Sure,” he replies. “See you in the morning.”

And he turns back to the TV.

I sleep in the room where I always stay, a study with a futon in it, the walls lined with paperbacks and hefty academic tomes left over from Saul’s days at LSE. I take down a paperback copy of
Out of Africa
and climb into bed, wearing boxer shorts and an old white T-shirt. From down the hall I can hear the roar of a goal-celebrating crowd and Saul quietly shouting, “Yes!” to himself as someone scores. I lie there for a while, trying to read, but my eyes grow tired after a single page and I put out the bedside light.

Then, of course, I cannot sleep.

Every night now for more than a year the pattern has been the same: an urgent need to rest, ignored by my wandering mind, raking over every imaginable thought and anxiety, solving nothing. To sleep so little, so agitatedly, has become commonplace. Yet, somehow, my body has adjusted to being starved of rest. I still manage to work, think, exercise, and lie, but at some basic level I have forgotten how to
feel.
The jadedness is gradually erasing my better instincts, any capacity I once possessed to evaluate consequence and implication. It is as if every time I am woken up at three in the morning by that awful, caving sense of worry that creeps around my subconscious, some better part of me begins to fail. Even a few straight hours of sleep will always be broken before dawn by mind racings, concerns somehow magnified by the quiet and black of the night.

So, as ever, I turn to sex to try to shut it all out, lying there in the dark with the noise of the TV in the distance and some girl fucking me to sleep. She’s never anyone I care about, never Kate. Only the ones I tried to have, but couldn’t, even some woman I saw at a bus stop who gave me the eye. Every now and again I relive an actual sexual encounter and try to make it better than it was: screwing someone from years back, or Anna again. Tonight it’s her, with her showered skin and tits bouncing uselessly above me, that look of sated lust in her eyes that I failed to recognize as malice. Nothing works, though. I hear Saul shut off the TV at around two o’clock and follow the noise of his footsteps going up and down the passage. He visits the bathroom, washes, then turns out all the lights. The flat is quiet.

I find myself thinking back to when I broke up with Kate. Saul and I would spend long hours in a Brazilian bar in Earls Court trying to dream up ways for me to win her back. These talks were mostly serious and full of regret, as the realization that I had thrown away my one pure chance of a kind of happiness gradually dawned on me. But they were also punctuated with laughter and optimism. This was all thanks to Saul—I was a mess. Quietly and selflessly he had watched and understood Kate to a point where he knew us both intimately. And now that understanding was paying off. He could explain her apparent cruelty, he could see when I was allowing a particular line of thought to become warped or exaggerated. It was uplifting in itself just to talk to somebody who also knew and loved her. And he never once tried to make me get over her. In his heart he knew that we should be together, and he wasn’t about to conceal that from me. I respected him for that.

Three months later, with ridiculous symmetry, Saul’s long-term girlfriend turned around and told him that she was seeing another man. And so we went back to that same bar, only now it was my turn to be the good friend, to be as wise and understanding as Saul had been to me. We sat with our bottles of beer, late-night traffic sliding by outside, and tried to make sense of what had happened. From his coat pocket Saul took out a letter she had written to him, parts of which he allowed me to read. “How sad that two people who once cared for each other so much can end up like this,” it said. “Take care of yourself” and “I will always love you.” The awful platitudes of separation.

More than anything else, I think, Saul was astonished by the speed with which it had finished. They had been together, on and off, since school. To my knowledge, she was the first girl he had ever slept with.

What he needed then was for me to keep my mouth shut and just drink a beer with him. But I felt some sort of obligation to cure and began bombarding him with half-baked advice and banalities. I tried to tell him that all his fears and insecurities were not worth worrying over, that he should try to shut out all the mental pictures of her infidelity. I told him that the anguish we feel in the immediate aftermath of heartbreak only dissipates in time into prejudice and misinformation. Best to ignore it. None of this seemed to make any impression on him. He looked at me almost with pity. I wanted, absurdly, a transcript of the advice he had given me to read out to him.

The truth of that situation was that he had already made up his mind what to do. He had stopped loving her the moment she had told him about her affair. Very quickly, she had become reprehensible to him. Saul’s numbness gave way to a strange kind of relief in a matter of days, as if he was pleased to be rid of someone who was so devoid of basic decency. This strength astonished me. I had thought it would be years before he got over her, that the breakup would be something from which he would never properly recover. But I was wrong.

This memory is in my head for the better part of an hour, all the sides of it, the implications. Then I review the night’s events once again, unable to shut them out, unable just to put it all to one side.

I do not once look at my watch—I learned that long ago—but it must be after four when I finally manage to sleep.

Early the next morning, I call Hawkes at his house in the country from a telephone box in Barons Court.

“Could I speak to Paul Watson, please?”

“You have the wrong number,” he says, following procedure. Then he calls back immediately, using a secure line.

“Alec. What is it?”

He sounds remote, detached.

“I needed to ask you something.”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever get caught up in the drama of it?”

“What do you mean?” he says, as if the question were ridiculous.

“Did you ever do things in the course of your work that you didn’t really need to do? Did you make things more difficult for yourself because you were deceived by the glamour of espionage?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

“Let me give you an example. Last night, I made the first drop—”

“Yes,” he interrupts nervously. He has always been wary of who may be listening in. His has been a lifetime of paring words back, of bending them into ambiguities and codes.

“I was only following instructions, but the Americans seemed to have made things more complicated, more risky than was necessary. Maybe it was a test. I brought a briefcase to Saul’s flat—”

“Alec, we can’t talk about this.”

“What do you mean?” My voice must sound petulant and spoiled. Like the game is over.

“It is not advisable for us to speak anymore.”

“Since when?”

“I’m going to be out of contact for some time. You’ll be all right. Just retain anonymity. You’ve been told what to do in an emergency. Go to Lithiby. Do not contact me again. You’re doing fine, Alec. You must learn how to do this thing on your own.”