Red Anger (2 page)

‘You received no advice from your bank that a sum of £2,000 had been transferred to your credit?’

‘Not that I remember.’

‘It would have been your duty, I presume, to report such a large payment from an unknown source to the Head of your Department?’

‘Of course, if I had known it was there.’

‘I must ask you again if you did not receive an advice from the bank that it was there.’

‘I don’t know. I mean—I might have done.’

‘Could you be more precise?’

‘Well, I might have thought a letter from the bank was about my overdraft and just stuffed it in a drawer.’

‘In any case your bank statement at the end of the month would have shown your account was in credit.’

‘I didn’t look at it.’

‘Stuffed it in the same drawer, I suppose?’

‘Well—I’m afraid—yes. I know it sounds silly but I always do when I’m badly over the overdraft limit.’

‘Did you not notice that no cheque of yours was dishonoured?’

‘Yes, but I supposed the Manager was being reasonable. He never bothered half as much about my overdraft as I did. And I knew he would telephone me if I had really gone too far and that
then I would have to do something.’

‘What, for example?’

‘Well, there’s always something one can do.’

‘Yes, Mr. Rory, no doubt there is. Have you any idea where this money came from?’

‘Not the least.’

‘I am instructed that it was passed through two foreign banks before reaching yours and that the order originated in a numbered account at a Swiss bank. I shall pass you a slip of paper
with the number of that account. Please tell the Tribunal if it means anything to you.’

‘Good God—why didn’t they pay cash?’

Willie, that was the impulsive exclamation which sank him. It sounded as if he was regretting that the bribe had not been paid in cash; but the question, in that moment of
surprise and prostration, was addressed to himself, not to the Tribunal. What he meant was that if the spy-masters had paid cash in the normal way there would have been no trace of the origin of
the payment; therefore they intended it to be traced—not too simply but after weeks of clever investigation.

The Tribunal allowed him to explain what he meant, and he did it badly and incoherently. When he claimed that the payment was an attempt to discredit him he was asked what the object of that
could be, since everything he knew or suspected would already be on record in the files. He was then asked if he could give the name of any responsible person who knew of and could confirm this
infantile habit of stuffing his bank statements into a drawer unread.

He could not, and that was the end. The duty of the Tribunal was to report; it had no power to decide criminal liability. So Alwyn was not immediately arrested. But he was bound to be put on
trial with the public spitting at the Black Maria which carried him to court. The escape of Mornix was entirely due to the orders he had given, overruling Special Branch, and the evidence that he
had prearranged the visit to Whatcombe Street was convincing.

You who knew him so well will always understand why he bolted while there was still time. Alwyn had the foolish pride of a man of honour which makes him retreat rather than fight when that
honour is questioned. Whether he was right or wrong none of us can say. His behaviour with his bank accounts was unbelievable for a responsible government servant. Officially unbelievable, I mean.
Yet sheer, sober, human idiocy is the commonest thing in the world, and during the happy years I lived in England I was continually astounded by the serene eccentricities of my friends and
neighbours. No doubt they said the same of me.

And here is something you don’t know. I remember that when Alwyn was ten years old his mother insisted that he would be a poet—an opinion based on nothing at all but his obstinate
belief in fairies. That imagination of his—the readiness to look beyond the factual—must have made him an outstanding security officer, but doesn’t it also account for his refusal
to face facts in private life? Money was just one of such facts. He treated it without respect because he loathed it.

I have of course an ulterior motive in allowing or persuading you to drag this unsavoury business out into the light. You will have read the daily revelations of arrogance, dishonesty and
contempt for Law in departments of our government, leaving us without even the illusion that there is honour among thieves. We in America are going through one of our periodical revolutions when we
clean out the stables more thoroughly than any other country would ever dare. Because I know that, my pride in my country is unaffected. But now is the time to drive home the lesson that the end
never justifies the means.

O
n that evening of July 1st which decided then and there the course of all my future life I was innocently waiting in my little box of an
office for the arrival of my employer to sign the correspondence entrusted to me as personal assistant. There was one letter which I had typed and then signed with my own name, for the persistent
exchanges of affection between Councillor Sokes and his latest immature tart were carried on through me. Herbert Sokes, I remember, was in his most poetical mood; he described in enthusiastic
detail the charms and timidities which his little darling had artistically displayed during his last visit to London and his expectations for their next meeting. This remarkable correspondence
which mixed depravity, fatherliness and even a dash of religion to taste suggested to me that he got as much pleasure from Miss Tacket’s absence as he did from her presence.

Dangerous letters they would have been if Sokes had put his own name to them, but I willingly obliged him. I was a lost dog, accepting Sokes as master and Caulby as home.

It was a revolting town, developed by the railway in the eighteen-seventies. Nine-tenths of it was composed of red brick houses, each with three front windows and a door. Gaiety was represented
only in the frontage of the pubs, the most palatial being entirely faced by two different shades of mauve tiles; dignity, wherever required, was underlined by Gothic windows of stone or variegated
brick. After so much solidity the mass Utopia of the High Street, lined by the glass and concrete of the usual multiple stores, was a relief.

Caulby was depressing but to be endured, for it meant to me a home and the possibility of a career. I gave it such affection as I could. A very different England it appeared from that which I
had known up to the age of twelve, but I was obstinately determined to accept with open arms any and every aspect of my country.

My father farmed in Wiltshire. He was a man of dreams, almost a mystic in his feeling of union with the earth and with all the unknown cultivators of the past whose rolling green tombs and
sacred stones littered parts of his land. They must always have felt their way by trial and error, and so very often did he. Long before maize was common in English gardens he took a chance with
it, reckoning that it could be grown well enough in the soft valley of the Kennet and that he could not lose on an acre or two of his own chicken food with an expanding London market as a possible
side-line. I never knew what report of miracle corn took him to Romania instead of the United States; it may have been the advice of the vicar whose brother imported caviare. At any rate he
returned home after eight weeks with a bushel of seed and a young Romanian wife as well. The maize showed a very small profit and the whirlwind marriage produced me.

Life, green and pleasant, might have so continued if my adventurous father had not insisted on driving a tractor on too steep a slope where his neighbours would have been content to leave the
tussocky grass alone or plough it up with horses. His widow tried to carry on alone. She was a merry, pretty woman, efficient too, and even in the market helped by everyone; but it was as if our
too insular livestock would not respond to foreign care. Fowl pest and an outbreak of gid among the sheep finished her, and the sale of the farm hardly did more than pay the debts. She had no other
profession and no way of providing for the pair of us, but in Romania there was still a resourceful family which appeared to be easily coping with communism.

In 1954 she returned home with me and soon married a consultant geologist, a jolly fellow who fully appreciated my difficulties and brought me up to get the best out of my adopted country: in
fact, to accept what must be accepted and enjoy whatever could be enjoyed. Having preserved with the utmost tact his reputation as a sound party member and being on excellent terms with Russian
colleagues he got himself posted to Egypt to work on the Assuan Dam. Since my mother had recently died—her heart not equal to her gay vitality—he managed to take me with him. He had a
theory that the dam was going to play merry hell with the Nile Delta and suggested that some young agronomists should take a look at the problem in the ground. As I was then at an admirable
Agricultural College—a keen student but in no way an expert—I was chosen to be one of the team. Family connections are as useful behind the Iron Curtain as anywhere else.

To me Egypt was the fabulous scene of British victories, wicked imperialists or not. But I found that I was not allowed to see much of the country or to mix freely with its people; the Russian
colony was more closed and self-sufficient than the British had ever been. Boredom with the whole deadening system became intolerable. On an official visit to Cairo I slipped away to the British
Consulate where I presented my birth certificate.

Of course, it was still far from plain sailing. Since I was close on nineteen I was entitled to my passport after details of my story had been confirmed, but I refused to have it sent to me for
fear of compromising my sympathetic stepfather. So three months later I escaped—at least that was what I called my unauthorised dash to Cairo—and fortunately found my passport ready and
waiting.

So there I was, unquestionably British but with no means of earning a living. The foreign merchants who would gladly have employed me had all been expelled; the native Egyptians had little use
for a waif of dubious antecedents who could not speak Arabic. For two years I was a hanger-on of hotels and travel agencies, making just enough from small tips and split commissions to eat once a
day and pay the rent of a bug-ridden room. There is no need to go into the shame and misery of it all. From this existence without a future or any chance of affording my passage to England I was
rescued by the police who ran me in together with a few other forgotten, destitute British subjects. We were shipped home at our government’s expense.

Due to my languages and do-anything appearance I landed a job as the lower sort of courier to a travel agency, which led me out of England almost as soon as I returned to it. For six months I
stayed in Paris, attending incredulously to the stereotyped requirements of motor-coach tourists from the Midlands. In one such party was Herbert Sokes, demonstrating that he was just one of the
boys though well able to afford greater comfort. I was useful to him—seeing to his personal tastes and, more important, ensuring his privacy—so he offered me a trial as personal
assistant. The orphan from Egypt, who had the sense to say nothing of his embarrassing Romanian background, accepted gratefully. This was the stake in my own country which I wanted. Councillor
Herbert Sokes, O.B.E., a small manufacturer of automobile accessories, seemed to me solid ground from which to climb the ladder of conventional living.

I spent two years in—or rather just outside—the factory of Sokes Ltd. Besides his managerial office Sokes had another, which he called the Parlour, where he received his private and
political visitors. It was in a small cottage adjoining the factory with its own front door opening on to a quiet alley. I at first assumed that the most important piece of furniture in the Parlour
was likely to be the comfortable couch. I was quite wrong. In his own community Herbert Sokes’s private intrigues were all directed towards increasing his private capital.

This small town boss is of no real importance to my story, but without him I cannot explain myself. He was a director of the local mortgage company and had a sleeping interest in an estate
agency. As leader of the Conservative opposition on the Borough Council and a close friend—outside the council chamber—of the Labour chairman of the Housing Committee, he knew of all
likely developments within the town. But his integrity was unquestionable. He always declared his interest, refusing to vote on any issue where private advantage might conflict with public service.
Sokes was never corrupt and avoided any shadow of suspicion when he corrupted.

I thought I understood my employer and enjoyed our enigmatic relationship. He made a cheerful pretence of treating me as an unprincipled black sheep to whom anything might be confessed, and
occasionally added to my small salary a cash bonus when I was bound to know a little—it was never everything—of the means by which a handsome profit had been secured. Sometimes I acted
as runner between Councillor Sokes and his supposedly bitter opponent Alderman Gunsbotham. I was not shocked. My country-bred integrity had been overlaid by all I had observed since the age of
twelve. What else could politicians be but crooks? Only newspapers pretended to be horrified. For me the essential was that I had come home at last and that my affection for my employer was
returned.

On that evening when he and I finally parted he did not follow his usual practice of approving or altering the private correspondence in my claustrophobic office but asked me to come into the
Parlour. It was impossible to tell whether he was worried or not, for he kept up his Rotary and Committee manners with everyone except his wife—always jolly and never warm. His neat, oval
face was a very clean-shaven mask, pale except where red and blue veins bore witness to the quantity of whisky and water which had to be consumed for the sake of good fellowship and never
noticeably affected him.