The Envoy (23 page)

After a few minutes Kit silently slipped out the back of the church. He didn’t belong there. As he began walking down the hill to the quay, the chorus began Britten’s setting of
Eternal Father
. The voices behind were roaring louder than an angry sea – for every one of them had known the words by heart since childhood.

Kit shielded his eyes from the sun and looked out beyond Orford Ness – beyond the mean ugliness of the bomb makers – at the gleaming relentless sea. The voices now stormed louder,
O hear
us
… How many of theirs lay out beneath those waves? They alone knew because this mad island belonged to them – and them alone.

Kit rowed back to the boat. He was going to spend the next two days exploring. The weather was now warmer and the wind had dropped. Kit cast off and drifted from the mooring under sail. A half-mile below Orford, the river was split in two by an island full of lagoons and loud bird life, Kit steered into the branch that bent inland to the west. The river there twisted from bend to bend and required frequent gybes. At each change of course there was a solid thunk of block and tackle as the boom swung from one side to the other. Kit had a chart spread on his knees. He was looking for a tributary river called the Butley, but it seemed difficult to find. At last, he spotted a place where the river wall fell away. The entrance was marked by two withies – narrow sticks stuck in the mud – almost invisible to someone without local knowledge. Kit was beginning to realise that sailing in Suffolk was a business just as secretive as being a spy.

Once inside the Butley, it was easy to see where to steer. On the left bank was an abandoned brick dock that was crumbling into ruin. According to the chart, there had been a brisk
nineteenth-century
trade swapping London horse manure for Suffolk wheat and barley. But the river had long since returned to splendid
isolation
. There was little wind now, but
Louise
continued to glide upstream on the last of the rising tide. Kit felt the boat was being drawn forward by an invisible thread.

The river seemed in turns desolate, wild and mysterious. A mile from the entrance, the land on both sides of the river rose and became thickly wooded. There was a valley with a grazing herd of roe deer that scattered to cover at the sight of a sail. Kit finally decided to drop anchor when he saw a shed and jetty. Both
structures
looked long abandoned and deserted. In any case, it was so unexpected – like discovering a hunter’s hut in a wild rainforest.

As soon as the boat was fast and the sails furled, Kit decided to explore. He was happy. He couldn’t remember the last time he had played. Kit cast off the tender and rowed towards the jetty. He noticed a bank thick with mussels, but it was too late in the season to eat them. There were, however, broad beds of samphire. Kit grounded the boat and cut three bundles to add to his supper, then continued to the jetty. He made fast and climbed on to the boards – making sure not to put his foot through a rotten plank.

The shed had been built on an island of marshy land amid a lawn of sea lavender. It was connected to the mainland proper by plank bridges that leapfrogged from islet to islet until they reached the riverbank. What a fantastic hiding place. Kit tried the shed door. There was a padlock, but the clasp was fitted to wood that had turned rotten and hung uselessly against the door frame. He opened the door. Aside from the dust, cobwebs and
desiccated
wasp nests, it wasn’t in bad repair. There were old cane
fishing
rods, nets, table, chairs and a tea service. The calico curtains had rotted away to transparent lace. Kit closed his eyes and had a vision of moustached gentlemen in boaters, Edwardian ladies with hoop skirts and high buttoned boots, a flurry of parasols and a bounding Labrador. For a second, he felt a kiss and a loose lock of hair brush his cheek. He reached out, but no one was there – just gull cries and plummeting swallows. None of it was real, only the pain lingered. Kit rowed back to
Louise
and went for a swim.

Kit cooked a meal of omelette, samphire, fried potatoes and green salad. Afterwards, he sat in the cockpit as the tide ebbed and the boat settled into the mud. He had brought along George Crabbe’s poem ‘The Borough’. Peter Grimes, an Aldeburgh
fisherman
, had been shunned for suspected murder.

Kit put down the book and watched a pair of oyster-catchers strut across the exposed mud. Their black and white plumage and the way they swayed on their long legs made Kit think of drunken gents in evening dress. Their braying communal piping sounded like a whole club bellowing, ‘Waiter, more champagne, more champagne …’

That night Kit lay in the forward berth with the hatch cover open so he could watch the wheeling stars. He liked the rough kiss of the wool blankets and the gurgle of water against the hull as the tide rose and refloated the boat. And for the first time, Kit heard the night call of the curlew:
curr-leek-leek, curr-leek-leek
. It was a plaintive mournful sound and the oyster-catchers didn’t seem to like it much. The oyster-catchers retaliated with their
more champagne
piping at full throat. This, in turn, brought in more and louder curlew:
curr leek-leek-leek, cu-r-r-r-r-leek
!
Kit didn’t want to sleep. He wanted to stay awake all night listening to England.

During his first day back in the office Kit stared at his overflowing in-tray. He had begun to hate his job with a passion and
wondered
how much more he could offload on Perry. Kit
remembered
visiting George at his office at the Pentagon a few months before his uncle was due to retire. George’s in-tray at the time was even more overflowing. Kit remembered all the documents festooned with red TOP SECRET tags, urgent notices and
complex
distribution lists that needed initialling and passing on. Kit remembered that George had looked at his watch and said, ‘Gosh, it’s already quarter past four. Time for a drink.’ He then picked up his in-tray and emptied it into the burn bag for the daily incineration. George saw the amazed look on Kit’s face and said, ‘If it’s important enough, it will come round again.’ Then he pulled open a desk drawer and took out two glasses and a bottle of bourbon.

But Kit knew that things in London were different. The issues that the Dulles brothers had outlined in Washington were moving to the point where they were going to boil over and burn hands. The Portsmouth operation was still a raw wound too. Prime Minister Eden was pilloried in Parliament and had finally
admitted
, ‘It would not be in the public interest to disclose the
circumstances
in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death.’ On the surface, it was an extraordinary and frank
confession
that dirty tricks had occurred. It was interesting, thought Kit, that Eden had more or less admitted that Crabb was dead. The more he thought about it, the less certain he was that Crabb had perished. Was the Prime Minister laying a false trail? Or, thought Kit, am I deceiving myself to avoid guilt for another death?

Kit opened the daily briefing folder prepared by his own staff. It was a news digest that saved him wasting time reading
newspapers
. Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin were splitting up; Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were getting hitched. The American military assistance group in Vietnam had suffered their first death. An airman, Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr, had been murdered by another US serviceman. Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ was now a ‘golden record’. French paratroopers had launched a clean-up operation in Algiers by blowing up two buildings in the Casbah. An acquaintance from the French Embassy had recently told Kit that their officers in Algeria had become fond of quoting Abbé Arnaud Amoury, the bishop who led the thirteenth-century crusade against the Albigensians. At the sack of Bézier, a general had asked the Abbé how they could tell the difference between ‘
les bons catholiques
’ and ‘
les hérétiques
’. Abbé Arnaud replied, ‘
Tuez les tous
– kill them all, God will sort them out in heaven.’

Kit flipped through the rest of the news and turned to the
confidential
briefing pages at the back. Vyacheslav Molotov had been sacked as Soviet Foreign Minister. Kit was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. There were rumours that Molotov had tried to get rid of Khrushchev and that he supported the heresy of a united Germany. Kit continued reading. According to a
Pravda
article, Molotov hadn’t been fired after all – he had simply been ‘reassigned as Ambassador to Outer Mongolia’. It reminded Kit of one of Vasili’s indiscreet revelations. During a visit to Burma, Khrushchev was given a jungle tour using traditional transport. As they trundled off, Molotov remarked to an aid: ‘Look at that – an elephant riding an elephant.’ A wisecrack too far. Kit decided to go for a walk in the June sunshine – it would be nice to see Vasili again.

Kensington Gardens was full of nannies pushing prams. Kit wondered if the French au pair from the Portsmouth train was among them. He was surprised by how much he wanted to see her again. As Kit continued walking towards the Peter Pan statue, the pram traffic increased. He looked at the circling nannies and tried to spot one that looked French. Then what? ‘Do you know by any chance a Mademoiselle Françoise …’ No, it was a stupid idea. In any case, he found what he was looking for. The chalk mark on the rubbish bin looked fresh. It meant confession time at Brompton Oratory.

Kit spotted Vasili in the Marian side chapel where he had seen him last. Vasili was reading a book and his lips were moving. It looked almost as if he was praying. Kit slid into the pew next to the Russian. Vasili continued to read and to mouth the words. Kit glanced at the book. Despite the Cyrillic letters, he could see that the text was typeset as poetry. Vasili closed the book and said, ‘Pushkin.’

Kit had been ready to make some joke about the embassy in Ulan Bator, but sensed that the mood wasn’t appropriate. They shook hands and sat in silence. Finally Vasili said, ‘I often wait here expecting to see you, but you never come. I’ve been told not to ring the embassy any more.’

‘Even from a public phone?’

‘Yes. Since the Portsmouth business, everyone is nervous.’

‘What happened to Crabb?’

Vasili shrugged his shoulders, then said, ‘Let’s go for a drive in the country. I want to see fields and cows – and pretty milkmaids like in the novels of Thomas Hardy.’

‘It’s against the rules.’

‘Well, let’s just go for a walk.’

The two walked north towards Hyde Park. The streets were busy and neither said a word until they were sitting on a bench by the Serpentine watching the ducks. ‘The limpet mines,’ said Vasili, ‘were American ones.’

‘I’m not surprised. You didn’t really think that MI6 would use British mines – it was a false flag op. If anything went wrong, they wanted us to get blamed.’