A Train of Powder (42 page)

The automobile that was to take the family back to Wandsworth had to be fetched, and they waited on a bench in the vestibule, a gloomy oblong hall struck by sideways shafts of dusty light. Mrs. Marshall’s dusky pallor and the white curls round her dark head shone in the shadows; she was of a different and more dramatic substance than the vague figures about her. The journals in which her son’s plight was discussed and deplored were to publish page photographs exploiting another such contrast of human whiteness against obscurity, another such melodramatic example of chiaroscuro. The young son of Sir David Kelly was during that morning married at Brompton Oratory to one of the eight children of Lord Howard of Glossop and his wife, the eleventh Baroness Beaumont. There were eight bridesmaids drawn from the old Catholic families; and they had been photographed as they waited for the bride, sitting on a bench in the aisle. Their young faces and bare arms, their light dresses and the fillets in their hair, the sheaves of flowers on their laps, were bright against the blackness of the church. To the instructed they represented enclosed purity, an almost insolent cultivation of integrity not possible to those who had to go about the world on its business. But it was painful to think how differently they would appear to Mrs. Marshall should her eyes fall on that photograph. For according to the fantasy which had given her comfort, these young girls were smeared with guilt by association, fatally compromised by contact with the world of diplomacy, which had revolted her son’s fastidiousness and driven him into dangerous courses.

Most trials result from a collision between a fantasy and reality. In this trial the fantasies were growing rankly and were potent and disturbing, because they made allusions to reality ranker than any disclosed during the proceedings which were supposed to establish what was real. There was this wild indictment of the diplomatic world as an Alsatia; but this pointed a finger, if a shaking one, in the direction of the truth. A diplomat had behaved badly, and his misbehaviour was due to the nature of diplomacy. Kuznetsov had done worse than merely fail to coach Marshall in what he ought to say. It had been in his power to get Marshall acquitted, and he had not done it. For if he had come forward as a witness and had assured the court that he had in fact found pleasure in young Marshall’s company, and had been edified by his views on the division of Germany and Korea and Malaya, and had exchanged cultural information on Moscow with him on a park bench, it would have been difficult for a jury to convict Marshall, particularly if Kuznetsov had spoken with a certain warmth. But nothing had been heard of Kuznetsov since a couple of days after Marshall’s arrest, when a Soviet Security officer had called at his apartment and driven him and his wife and his little boy to the Soviet Embassy, where he had remained ever since.

That was considered by many to absolve him from blame for his desertion of his friend. They went on to say, “Poor chap, he’ll be sent home now, and then his days won’t be long in the land, considering how he bungled the job.” But that conclusion was perhaps not entirely correct. It is possible to regard the trial as the result of reckless incompetence, which ventured on a change of plan when it was too late; to suppose that the acquaintance began in honest friendship, at which time Kuznetsov saw no reason why he should not be seen with Marshall in London restaurants, and that the thought of espionage only developed later, and drove the two to suburban trysts which offered real cover and would have been safe enough if they had not already attracted the attention of the Security organizations. But the trail they left round the suburbs leads away from that supposition.

It was on April 25 that Kuznetsov and Marshall met at Kingston, that charming riverside town where the Thames looks like the Seine, and the flowers and shrubs and trees grow richly in the good alluvial soil. The two men met in the town centre, which is on flat ground near the river, and there Marshall was unfortunate, for he became involved in the temperamental peculiarities of a family named Bentall.

Eighty-five years ago a young man named Frank Bentall, the son of a storekeeper in a small East Anglian port, was given some money by his father and told that now he was twenty-five he must buy himself a store of his own. He bought a blanket store in Kingston High Street, and did so well in his first year that he bought the business next door and engaged two assistants. He, and his son Leonard after him, prospered mightily, and were devoured by an ambition. They wanted the little store which had been bought in 1867 to grow until it filled the eye, the eye of the individual, of the town, of the county. Nothing else would do. It had to be that store magnified. Otherwise they would surely have moved to another site, which must have been more convenient, wherever it was, for no other part of the town was so cluttered up with properties resistant to transfer, such as schools, vicarages, church halls, and public houses. But they wanted the visible miracle, so they built new quarters for the educational and ecclesiastical authorities and went on bidding through the decades for the other coveted premises, joining the separated houses as they absorbed them by a network of underground passages and overhead galleries. Had they been Americans they would have built a skyscraper, as like as not in a prairie town, and against all reason, with nothing between them and the horizon but cheap land, just for the hell of it, just to make the town more interesting by topping it with a challenge to probability. But the soil on the site to which the Bentalls were tied by their infatuation is for fifteen feet down a water-logged soup of Thameside sand and gravel, which had to be converted by chemical means to artificial sandstone before it could carry a modern building only a few stories high. They had to build their skyscraper horizontally.

When Leonard had wholly conquered the block in the main street where the store had started, his ambition went round the corner, and he began to acquire properties in a narrow and gloomy lane called Wood Street. One of his colleagues objected that there were no shops there and it was impossible to imagine that it could ever become a shopping centre. Leonard answered, “If you live long enough you will see in Wood Street one of the finest buildings in the county and the road one of the best in town.” He went on to recite what was afterwards identified as a quotation from Emerson: “If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” Thus he showed, as his colleague was later to comment, a remarkable prophetic gift.

Today the Bentall store is by English standards a very impressive concern. It employs three thousand people, and it has crept all along one side of Wood Street, which makes a right-angled turn, so that it now covers three of the four sides of a large island site. This expansion has only been possible because it draws on much more than local trade. The merchandise is good and solid, but the place is also a good entertainment in itself, there is a curious circus air about it, and therefore many customers come from all the towns and villages for a long way out on the country side of Kingston, and quite a number from London itself. This means that there are always crowds of far more than the usual suburban density looking at the windows with the leisureliness of shoppers out on an expedition.

Across the road from the store in Wood Street, just opposite the right-angled turn, the Bentalls have bought an odd site to use as a garage and a car-park, and in order not to waste a speck of street frontage they have built on it a two-story building, which is the Normandie Restaurant. Like everything the Bentalls have created, it takes the eye. It is not beautiful, it is not ugly, but it hits the retina, it has to be noticed. It is set catercornered to the store opposite, so anybody who wants to watch it can hide among the window-shopping crowds on both legs of Wood Street. No continuous pavement runs past the restaurant. To the left of the restaurant is the entrance to the garage and car-park, to the right the exit. To get to the restaurant it is necessary to cross the street at one of three points, all close together. These crossings would never be used by any pedestrian who had not the intention of going to the Normandie. There could not be an easier place to watch.

On April 25, when Marshall and Kuznetsov visited Kingston, it was Friday, a popular shopping day, and there were plenty of people on the pavements to give cover for detectives. The pair went into the Normandie at one o’clock. The sole entrance opens into a bar, from which a narrow staircase with a sharp turn leads into the restaurant itself. There is no other way of getting in or out of the room. Upstairs the men took a table facing the door, which was visible from every other part of the room, for it is not large. Marshall’s party, though he did not know it, occupied a seventh of the available accommodation. For there were twenty-one tables, and he and Kuznetsov had one table, the officers from the Special Branch were sitting at another, and a third was taken by the party of police from the Soviet Embassy, who, though Marshall did not seem to know it, were always present at these meetings.

Marshall must have been very happy at this lunch. He was with his friend. He was defying authority. Possibly he thought that he was saving the world. Certainly the Normandie’s claim to be contemporary and dashing would please the part of him that pouted against Wandsworth because the Railway Hotel did not do a dinner. The food at the Normandie is well cooked and quite imaginative by English standards. If Marshall paid for the drinks, as he said in the witness box he always did on these occasions, he may have gratified his taste for spending money, for there are some good wines on the list.

After having eaten their meal in this goldfish bowl Marshall and Kuznetsov walked away down a narrow street known as Water Lane, in which no boy of ten playing at sleuthing could have lost his quarry. They had before them an unusually large choice of retreats where they could have talked quietly and kept at a distance from any eavesdropper. A short bus ride would have taken them to Richmond Park, and within walking distance, just over Kingston Bridge on the other side of the Thames, were Bushey Park and Hampton Court Park. Instead the two men went to Canbury Gardens.

This is a riverside strip of greenery which solves a problem grave enough for a town relying for much of its income on people who come to enjoy its prettiness but also has its industries. Canbury Gardens masks the gasworks and electricity plants of the town and distracts the attention of the pedestrian from the covered dock where the barges discharge their cargoes of coal into an elevator. The Gardens run along the river for less than a quarter of a mile, and the depth is never more than a hundred and fifty yards and is at some places as little as fifty. There is a line of plane trees on the garden side of the towpath, with benches between them where one can sit and look over the glassy Thames at the opposite bank, where the weeping willows droop to their reflections, and the Georgian mansions are mellow in the green shade of the tall wet-rooted trees. But there are never at any time many people sitting about in Canbury Gardens. Mothers with babies and very young children find pleasure there, and so do the elderly. But it is the river that captures the fancy here, and most people follow the towpath, looking inland only occasionally to see the bright flowers and shrubs. There are tennis courts on the town edge of the Gardens, but the players usually enter them by a special gate.

If the two men had taken a bus to Richmond Park or had crossed the river to Hampton Court or Bushey, they could have found an open space and set down their coats on the grass and spread out maps as if they were hikers talking of routes, and it would have been hard for the detectives to find an excuse for getting near enough to see what they were doing. In Canbury Gardens they sat down on one of the benches between the plane trees. They were therefore silhouetted against the waters of the Thames, and, as the bank faces westward, against the afternoon light. Marshall’s sloping shoulders and his long narrow head must have been crassly identifiable, and when he took papers out of his pockets and showed them to his companion, and when he drew maps for him, not a shade of the explanatory gestures could have been missed. It was ten days after Easter Monday, on which date Canbury Gardens goes into its summer routine, so there were piles of deck chairs set at various points from which visitors could pick up as many chairs as they needed and set them down where they pleased. The detectives following the pair could have stationed themselves on the lawns behind Marshall and Kuznetsov, at any distance from them which seemed most prudent, without doing anything which seemed remarkable. There were only two or three benches which could not have been covered by people sitting on deck chairs behind them, and these were overlooked by the windows of a tea house, which was open.

We know little about the next meeting of the two men, which took place on May 19, not very far from Marshall’s home, just outside Wandsworth in Wimbledon. The evidence regarding it was given in closed court, and Marshall could not remember the name of the restaurant where they ate. But it appeared that they met in the open street in heavy rain. There comes to mind a note made by Ragov, the organizer of the Canadian spy ring, on the margin of a contact’s report on a meeting with the scientist Durnford-Smith: “Was a torrential downpour; but he nevertheless came. Give instructions not come in the future in such weather, it is not natural.” Marshall and Kuznetsov did not even behave as two men keeping an appointment in a storm would be expected to behave; they did not give each other a perfunctory greeting and then hurry off to shelter. It seemed to the watchers that they went through a curious conspiratorial ritual, that they met and passed without a sign of recognition, then turned back and went off together into a doorway. Marshall denied this, and indeed, from his demeanour in the witness box, it could be believed that at that moment, peevish under the pelting rain, tense in his knowledge that he was defying authority, he might have weaved and fluttered so that the watchers were perplexed into inventing interpretations of his conduct which had no real basis. As Kuznetsov must have noticed long before, Marshall was constitutionally unfit for underground work. Yet on June 13 the two men met at a trysting place which was even more exposed than the Normandie and Canbury Gardens, which could have been chosen, surely, only by someone who was saying, “Take him. Oh, will you never take him? Take him, take him now.”