Red Anger (5 page)

As I was lifted into the ambulance I thought it had been a most convincing defection to the West, well worth being frozen and half drowned since first light. To be rescued by some knowledgeable
local fisherman soon after I had dropped into position would not have been so satisfactory as my discovery by holiday-makers of such solid character that they were hopping around the beach before
breakfast.

The ambulance decanted me into a comfortable hospital bed, where the house physician, speaking very slowly and clearly, told me that I was a brave fellow and that there seemed to be nothing
wrong with me which a day’s rest would not put right. He gave orders that I was to have all the breakfast I could eat and remain undisturbed till evening when the police would want a chat
with me, but I should not be afraid of that. Relaxing with a cigarette after porridge, bacon and eggs I decided that I was not afraid—not yet at any rate. Then gloriously warm I drifted into
sleep and dreamed uneasily that I was winding an elongated Herbert Sokes into a forest of seaweed.

I woke up in the afternoon to find the doctor leaning over me.

‘How are we feeling now?’

I opened my mouth, swallowed the perfect English which nearly came out and instead pointed a finger down my gullet.

‘Hongry!’

‘What again? Well, let’s have a look at you.’

Doctor and nurse spent half an hour on my lungs, heart and blood pressure. I was alarmed less they might find something really wrong with me. I had quite enough to do watching the road without
listening to the engine.

‘We’ll keep him here tonight, just in case,’ the doctor said. ‘But there’s no reason why he should not get up and talk to the police.’

In hospital dressing-gown and pyjamas I was escorted to a waiting-room where I was handed over to a police inspector and a tall, worn, aggressive civilian who turned out to be a Russian
interpreter and of a type to justify revolution. It seemed best to deflate the fellow, so I just smiled, nodded and looked alternately obstinate and intelligent in the wrong places. After the
Russian had worked himself into a temper with this illiterate peasant or probable spy he gave up.

‘It r-r-refuses to say anything,’ he reported.

‘You’ll have to tell us all about it some time, you know,’ said the Inspector kindly.

‘Me Romanian—spik—no—Rush,’ I brought out with an effort.

The interpreter looked a fool. The Inspector hid a grin. I burst into rapid French which I spoke with the lifeless accent of any middle-class, educated Romanian. No catching me out there. Any
knowledgeable linguist would spot me at once as coming from somewhere at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

I told my story: how, seeing the gay lights of Dover and Folkestone across the calm water, I had quietly and impulsively slipped into the sea from the
Nadezhda Krupskaya
and swum ashore.
It was the only ship of which I knew the name. She was the mother ship and there had been a photograph of her in the evening paper. The Inspector took it all down. Evidently he understood French,
though unwilling to speak it. The Russian did the questioning. His manners did not improve. He made it clear that he despised all Romanians, white, red or indifferent.

The next day I went to gaol pending further enquiries. It seemed to me no worse than a bad hotel on a wet day—always assuming that it could be treated as a temporary inconvenience. To be
compelled to accept it as home for many months—which had been more than a possibility when dealing with a shameless Sokes—would have been an appalling fate. I wondered why punishment by
boredom should be considered more humane than quicker tortures.

I was photographed and my finger prints were taken. That could be the end of the game if Adrian Gurney’s prints were also collected from any convenient surface in his Caulby lodgings; but
the risk, I felt, was small. Caulby police were notable for the excellent organisation of dances and frequent changes of Chief Constable. In a plain case of suicide they were not likely to sprinkle
powder on tooth glasses.

I was happier about the photograph in which I had managed to pose as proud, sullen and solid. The result should be a fair picture of a foreign trawlerman with a nasty hang-over, not very like a
smiling youth with dark moustache and hair falling over one eyebrow—which was how I would appear if there were any snaps of me available. The only official photograph of Adrian Gurney would
be the duplicate of his passport photo. That, if fished out from Foreign Office archives, showed an exhausted, undernourished outcast, all eyes, with the artificial smirk insisted upon by a cheap
Cairo photographer.

My second interrogation was by a courteous Romanian exile. Preliminary chatting showed that he was devoted to every stream and village of his own Wallachia. He said frankly that he could not see
why a man who was neither rich nor in danger of arrest should want to leave it. This quite sincere approach had a cunning all of its own, for it forced the refugee to show how white-hot his
indignation really was.

I decided against any indignation at all.

‘If I didn’t escape, I should have had to get married,’ I said.

‘You had—well, anticipated matrimony?’

‘Regularly on Tuesday evenings. And she was a very earnest, trusted party member.’

‘Flashing eyes and economics?’

‘Exactly. So one longed to infect her with the taint of frivolity.’

‘You were successful?’

‘Well, occasionally,’ I replied, grossly exaggerating a youthful affair in Assuan days. ‘But the trouble was that she was growing suspicious. And she wasn’t a girl to
scratch or throw things. I could see her slapping a report on her boss’s desk and then I might find myself with a ten years’ sentence merely because I’d enjoyed a charming
Saturday between two Tuesdays.’

‘So you very wisely chose freedom,’ the Romanian agreed. ‘But why England?’

‘France was too far to swim.’

‘I shouldn’t say that to the Security Officer if I were you.’

‘Democracy, you think?’

‘Democracy, certainly.’

‘Will he believe it?’

‘No. But it’s the right thing to say. Mention your perverse taste for political girl-friends of course!’

‘It’s very good of you to trust me.’

‘I trust the national character, my dear Mr. Petrescu. Communism will do very well for Bulgars, but for a Romanian it is inhuman. And now be good enough to tell me what a clerk from the
Sulina fisheries was doing on a Russian trawler!’

I had my story ready for that question. I invented a cousin who was a marine biologist engaged in experimental fish farming. The cousin wanted to study Atlantic species and had no difficulty in
getting permission to join the Russian fleet. At my urgent request, I had been taken along as interpreter.

‘But you said you did not understand Russian.’

‘Well, what would you have said when faced with some­thing like a Tsarist colonel with a knout? I am Romanian and proud of it.’

‘Where did you learn Russian?’

‘In college.’

I was on safe ground at last for I could talk of my education as it had been and as it would have continued if I had not gone to Egypt—which of course I never mentioned. The interview
resolved itself into a pleasant chat which might—if there had been anything to drink—have equally well taken place in a Bucarest café.

His report released me from gaol. I was put up at a hostel and provided with clothes at government expense. Two days later I was escorted to London and underwent a further and very lengthy
interrogation, conducted this time partly in Russian and partly in French by a cordial Englishman who appeared satisfied, assured me that I would find nothing but good will and wished me luck.

I was indeed impressed by the good will. A simple, furnished room was found for me in the house of a French-speaking landlady and work which allowed me to keep my own hours and to feel of
service to my true country. I was employed by the Institute of Foreign Affairs to translate magazine articles from Russian and Romanian into French. The librarian to whom I delivered my fair copies
explained that they were required for educational departments of the E.E.C. That was the reason why the translations were not directly into English. It seemed odd, but who was I to question it or
have suspicions?

I joined an English class for immigrants to which I had been recommended by the police, but dropped the lessons as soon as I discovered that nobody was interested in my presence or absence; it
was too much of a strain to keep up sham ignorance and a consistently bad accent. What I had not foreseen was my loneliness, except for casual contacts in restaurants or on the street. Patience, I
told myself, was the only remedy. I had only to stick it out for a few more weeks and then I would be free to slide off into rural England and vanish.

Of Sokes and Caulby I knew nothing and was too cautious to make enquiries. There had been short paragraphs in one evening and two morning papers reporting the suicide of Adrian Gurney with a
mention of the car but nothing about the motive. Evidently the suicide of an insignificant clerk was not news so long as the police kept the more puzzling features to themselves. My past must have
come out as soon as Sokes stated that he had met his personal assistant in Paris. Therefore I must have a passport, and reference to the Foreign Office would produce my history. But it seemed most
unlikely that the routine answer to a police enquiry, perhaps dealt with by a clerk on a printed form, could lead to anyone spotting the possible connection between Gurney and Petrescu.

At any rate all danger at Caulby would be over by now and Sokes’s accounts in faultless order. The police, helped by some ingenious psychiatrist, might well decide that Adrian Gurney,
frustrated outcast from Egypt and the streets of Paris, had been so upset by reading and signing his employer’s love letters that he had suffered from the delusion that he himself was the
lover and Sokes his powerful rival.

In spite of loneliness I was comforted by a feeling that I was never isolated from my fellows. Strangers in pubs would invite me to have a drink. Occasionally on the street people would ask me
the time or—excusing themselves politely—the way to some street of which I had never heard. I put this down to something attractive about my face or perhaps an unaggressive bearing.
After all, if you want to know the way or the time you have a choice of dozens of passers-by and you choose unconsciously to appeal to the chap who looks least occupied and reasonably obliging. It
seemed to my inexperienced mind a sort of compliment.

After six weeks the translation job dried up. I was told that for the present there were no suitable documents, that when there were any the Library would get in touch with me and that meanwhile
I should apply to my nearest Labour Exchange for work. The Exchange offered only manual labour but could not compel me to accept it; they advised me to take more trouble with my English if I wanted
an office job. I was broke, worried and came to the conclusion that my face showed it, for the flattering casual contacts had become noticeably less.

I was wasting an afternoon—from the business point of view—in the National Portrait Gallery when I was joined by a well-dressed, obviously cultured citizen in his late forties. He
remarked pleasantly that the typical English face had not changed much since the eighteenth century. I guessed that he himself was not English though his accent was perfect. After we had exchanged
a few commonplaces he asked me what country I came from. When I replied that I was Romanian he broke enthusiastically into the language and we went at it like a couple of long-lost exiles. He was
very free with information about himself, giving his name as Marghiloman, of an old political family. He had escaped, he said, in the short interim between the liberation of the country by the
Russians and the final take-over when the Iron Curtain came down; now that things were much easier, he had no trouble in corresponding with relations and was on friendly terms with the personnel of
the London Embassy. He believed he could safely go back for a long stay whenever he liked.

On my part I did not tell the story of how I had arrived in England. Although Petrescu had only been news for a day, he might remember and draw me into difficult explanations. So I said my name
was Prefacutu and left my past vague, allowing him to think that my family lived in Paris and I had received special permission to join them there.

We got on splendidly and I was impressed by his general air of sophistication and his courtesy to the much younger man. In some ways I was still very simple. I had certainly shown a lot of
panicky ingenuity in my own affairs but had rushed all my fences without stopping to think what might be on the other side. Looking back, I find my mixture of low cunning and over-confidence
exactly like that of a growing boy.

We strolled across Trafalgar Square together and settled down at a quiet corner table in the saloon bar of a nearby pub. He appeared fascinated by the stories I could tell him, mostly humorous,
of life under the present régime and relations with the Russians.

‘It sounds as if you spoke Russian,’ he said.

‘I do. Fluently but not very well.’

He then hesitated as if thinking something over and deciding at last to take the plunge.

‘Would you do something for me? Frankly, it is for them. But there’s nothing whatever which need bother your conscience.’

I asked him what it was. He replied that he wanted a message delivered. He could ask anybody to do it—or anybody who was not in an official position—but to carry conviction the
messenger should be an obvious foreigner from eastern Europe. A Romanian would do perfectly.

Carrying messages for Russians was too much even for my sweet innocence. I told him that I did not like it at all, but if he cared to give me the details I would at least listen.

‘It’s about that rat Alwyn Rory. He was clever enough to get clear and is safely in Moscow.’

I had read of the escape of Lieutenant Mornix from 42 Whatcombe Street just before leaving Caulby. It must have increased the profits of the daily press to such an extent that they could afford
to turn down advertisements. The story had everything—fornication in high places, spies a-spying, committees a-sitting, a minister resigning and the disappearance of Alwyn Rory, a civil
servant belonging to MI5. Newspapers insisted that he had escaped to Russia, but the Russians had never claimed that he did.