The Human Factor (26 page)

A patient who didn't know the ropes. He drew the curtain to behind him and stood hesitating in the little cramped space which was left. How to begin? The faint smell of eau-de-cologne must have been left by one of the women. A shutter clattered open and he could see a sharp profile like a stage detective's. The profile coughed, and muttered something.

Castle said, ‘I want to talk to you.'

‘What are you standing there for like that?' the profile said. ‘Have you lost the use of your knees?'

‘I only want to talk to you,' Castle said.

‘You aren't here to talk to me,' the profile said. There was a chink-chink-chink. The man had a rosary in his lap and seemed to be using it like a chain of worry beads. ‘You are here to talk to God.'

‘No, I'm not. I'm just here to talk.'

The priest looked reluctantly round. His eyes were bloodshot. Castle had an impression that he had fallen by a grim coincidence on another victim of loneliness and silence like himself.

‘Kneel down, man, what sort of a Catholic do you think you are?'

‘I'm not a Catholic.'

‘Then what business have you here?'

‘I want to talk, that's all.'

‘If you want instruction you can leave your name and address at the presbytery.'

‘I don't want instruction.'

‘You are wasting my time,' the priest said.

‘Don't the secrets of the confessional apply to non-Catholics?'

‘You should go to a priest of your own Church.'

‘I haven't got a Church.'

‘Then I think what you need is a doctor,' the priest said. He slammed the shutter to, and Castle left the box. It was an absurd end, he thought, to an absurd action. How could he have expected the man to understand him even if he had been allowed to talk? He had far too long a history to tell, begun so many years ago in a strange country.

2

Sarah came out to greet him as he was hanging his coat in the hall. She asked, ‘Has something happened?'

‘No.'

‘You've never been as late as this without telephoning.'

‘Oh, I've been going here and there, trying to see people. I couldn't find any of them in. I suppose they are all taking long week-ends.'

‘Will you have your whisky? Or do you want dinner straight away?'

‘Whisky. Make it a large one.'

‘Larger than usual?'

‘Yes, and no soda.'

‘Something
has
happened.'

‘Nothing important. But it's cold and wet almost like winter. Is Sam asleep?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where's Buller?'

‘Looking for cats in the garden.'

He sat down in the usual chair and the usual silence fell between them. Normally he felt the silence like a comforting shawl thrown round his shoulders. Silence was relaxation, silence meant that words were unnecessary between the two of them – their love was too established to need assurance: they had taken out a life policy in their love. But this night, with the original of Muller's notes in his pocket and his copy of it by this time in the hands of young Halliday, silence was like a vacuum in which he couldn't breathe: silence was a lack of everything, even trust, it was a foretaste of the tomb.

‘Another whisky, Sarah.'

‘You
are
drinking too much. Remember poor Davis.'

‘He didn't die of drink.'

‘But I thought . . .'

‘You thought like all the others did. And you're wrong. If it's too much trouble to give me another whisky, say so and I'll help myself.'

‘I only said remember Davis . . .'

‘I don't want to be looked after, Sarah. You are Sam's mother, not mine.'

‘Yes, I
am
his mother and you aren't even his father.'

They looked at each other with astonishment and dismay. Sarah said, ‘I didn't mean . . .'

‘It's not your fault.'

‘I'm sorry.'

He said, ‘This is what the future will be like if we can't talk. You asked me what I'd been doing. I've been looking for someone to talk to all this evening, but no one was there.'

‘Talk about what?'

The question silenced him.

‘Why can't you talk to
me
? Because They forbid it, I suppose. The Official Secrets Act – all that stupidity.'

‘It's not them.'

‘Then who?'

‘When we came to England, Sarah, Carson sent someone to see me. He had saved you and Sam. All he asked in return was a little help. I was grateful and I agreed.'

‘What's wrong with that?'

‘My mother told me that when I was a child I always gave away too much in a swap, but it wasn't too much for the man who had saved you from BOSS. So there it is – I became what they call a double agent, Sarah. I rate a lifetime in jail.'

He had always known that one day this scene would have to be played out between them, but he had never been able to imagine the kind of words they would say to each other. She said, ‘Give me your whisky.' He handed her his glass and she drank a finger from it. ‘Are you in danger?' she asked. ‘I mean now. Tonight.'

‘I've been in danger all our life together.'

‘But is it worse now?'

‘Yes. I think they've discovered there's a leak and I think they thought it was Davis. I don't believe Davis died a natural death. Something Doctor Percival said . . .'

‘You think they killed him?'

‘Yes.'

‘So it might have been you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you still going on with it?'

‘I wrote what I thought was my last report. I said good-bye to the whole business. But then – something else happened. With Muller. I had to let them know. I hope I have. I don't know.'

‘How did the office discover the leak?'

‘I suppose they have a defector somewhere – probably in place – who had access to my reports and passed them back to London.'

‘But if he passes back this one?'

‘Oh, I know what you are going to say. Davis is dead. I'm the only man at the office who deals with Muller.'

‘Why have you gone on, Maurice? It's suicide.'

‘It may save a lot of lives – lives of your people.'

‘Don't talk to me of my people. I have no people any longer. You are “my people”.' He thought, Surely that's something out of the Bible. I've heard that before. Well, she'd been to a Methodist school.

She put her arm round him and held the glass of whisky to his mouth. ‘I wish you hadn't waited all these years to tell me.'

‘I was afraid to – Sarah.' The Old Testament name came back to him with hers. It had been a woman called Ruth who had said what she had said – or something very like it.

‘Afraid of me and not of Them?'

‘Afraid for you. You can't know how long it seemed, waiting for you in the Hotel Polana. I thought you'd never come. While it was daylight I used to watch car numbers through a pair of binoculars. Even numbers meant Muller had got you. Odd numbers that you were on the way. This time there'll be no Hotel Polana and no Carson. It doesn't happen twice the same way.'

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘The best thing would be for you to take Sam and go to my mother's. Separate yourself from me. Pretend there's been a bad quarrel and you are getting a divorce. If nothing happens I'll stay here and we can come together again.'

‘What should I do all that time? Watch car numbers? Tell me the next best thing.'

‘If they are still looking after me – I don't know whether they are – they promised me a safe escape route, but I'll have to go alone. So that way too you must go to my mother with Sam. The only difference is we won't be able to communicate. You won't know what has happened – perhaps for a long time. I think I'd prefer the police to come – at least that way we'd see each other again in court.'

‘But Davis never reached a court, did he? No, if they are looking after you, go, Maurice. Then at least I'll know you are safe.'

‘You haven't said a word of blame, Sarah.'

‘What sort of word?'

‘Well, I'm what's generally called a traitor.'

‘Who cares?' she said. She put her hand in his: it was an act more intimate than a kiss – one can kiss a stranger. She said, ‘We have our own country. You and I and Sam. You've never betrayed that country, Maurice.'

He said, ‘It's no good worrying any more tonight. We've still time and we've got to sleep.'

But when they were in bed, they made love at once without thinking, without speaking, as though it had been something they had agreed together an hour ago and all their discussion had only been a postponement of it. It had been months since they had come together in this way. Now that his secret was spoken love was released, and he fell asleep almost as soon as he withdrew. His last thought was: There is still time – it will be days, perhaps weeks, before any leak can be reported back. Tomorrow is Saturday. We have a whole week-end before us in which to decide.

CHAPTER II

S
IR
John Hargreaves sat in his study in the country reading Trollope. It should have been a period of almost perfect peace – the week-end calm, which only a duty officer was allowed to break with an urgent message, and urgent messages were of extreme rarity in the Secret Service – the hour of tea when his wife respected his absence, as she knew that Earl Grey in the afternoons spoilt for him the Cutty Sark at six. During his service in West Africa he had grown to appreciate the novels of Trollope, though he was not a novel reader. At moments of irritation, he had found
The Warden
and
Barchester Towers
reassuring books, they reinforced the patience which Africa required. Mr Slope would remind him of an importunate and self-righteous District Commissioner, and Mrs Proudie of the Governor's wife. Now he found himself disturbed by a piece of fiction which should have soothed him in England as he had been soothed in Africa. The novel was called
The Way We Live Now
– somebody, he couldn't remember who it was, had told him the novel had been turned into a good television series. He didn't like television, yet he had been sure he would like the Trollope.

So all that afternoon he felt for a while the same smooth pleasure he always received from Trollope – the sense of a calm Victorian world, where good was good and bad was bad and one could distinguish easily between them. He had no children who might have taught him differently – he had never wanted a child nor had his wife; they were at one in that, though perhaps for different reasons. He hadn't wanted to add to his public responsibilities private responsibilities (children would have been a constant anxiety in Africa), and his wife – well – he would think with affection – she wished to guard her figure and her independence. Their mutual indifference to children reinforced their love for each other. While he read Trollope with a whisky at his elbow, she drank tea in her room with equal content. It was a week-end of peace for both of them – no shoot, no guests, darkness falling early in November over the park – he could even imagine himself in Africa, at some resthouse in the bush, on one of the long treks which he always enjoyed, far from headquarters. The cook would now be plucking a chicken behind the resthouse and the pie-dogs would be gathering in the hope of scraps . . . The lights in the distance where the motorway ran might well have been the lights of the village where the girls would be picking the lice out of each other's hair.

He was reading of old Melmotte – the swindler as his fellow members judged him. Melmotte took his place in the restaurant of the House of Commons – ‘It was impossible to expel him – almost as impossible to sit next him. Even the waiters were unwilling to serve him; but with patience and endurance he did at last get his dinner.'

Hargreaves, unwillingly, felt drawn to Melmotte in his isolation, and he remembered with regret what he had said to Doctor Percival when Percival expressed a liking for Davis. He had used the word ‘traitor' as Melmotte's colleagues used the word ‘swindler'. He read on, ‘They who watched him declared among themselves that he was happy in his own audacity; – but in truth he was probably at that moment the most utterly wretched man in London.' He had never known Davis – he wouldn't have recognized him if he had met him in a corridor of the office. He thought: Perhaps I spoke hastily – I reacted stupidly – but it was Percival who eliminated him – I shouldn't have left Percival in charge of the case . . . He went on reading: ‘But even he, with all the world now gone from him, with nothing before him but the extremest misery which the indignation of offended laws could inflict, was able to spend the last moments of his freedom in making a reputation at any rate for audacity.' Poor devil, he thought, one has to grant him courage. Did Davis guess what potion Doctor Percival might be dropping into his whisky when he left the room for a moment?

It was then the telephone rang. He heard it intercepted by his wife in her room. She was trying to protect his peace better than Trollope had done, but all the same, owing to some urgency at the other end, she was forced to transfer the call. Unwillingly he lifted the receiver. A voice he didn't recognize said, ‘Muller speaking.'

He was still in the world of Melmotte. He said, ‘Muller?'

‘Cornelius Muller.'

There was an uneasy pause and then the voice explained, ‘From Pretoria.'

For a moment Sir John Hargreaves thought the stranger must be calling from the remote city, and then he remembered. ‘Yes. Yes. Of course. Can I be of any help?' He added, ‘I hope Castle . . .'