The Long Room (11 page)

On Wednesday night Helen was talking about young men on hunger strike, starving themselves for their quixotic cause. ‘I just can’t get them out of my mind,’ she said. ‘Those images, they haunt me.’ They were having a conversation over dinner, she,
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and a third, another man. There had been a telephone call from a call-box at 18.55:
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to his wife asking if he could bring Michael home with him. They had bumped into each other at the traffic lights – not literally, of course – had been to have a quick drink, really good to see him after too long, now he’s at a loose end, just broken up with that boyfriend whom we didn’t care for, he’d love to see Helen, would she mind? No, of course not, she’d love to see him too. They could pick something up on the way back if they needed more for supper? No, no, she’s going to make risotto; it will stretch.

When Jamie and the man called Michael arrived at the flat and Michael greeted Helen, Stephen recognised his voice. Out of context it was difficult to place. An actor familiar from film or television? Someone from the Institute? And then he remembered, and with that memory came a sharp reminder of a steep stone staircase, an archway open to the air, a wooden board with his own name inscribed on it in neat italics, other names, and that name:
M. W. R. Bennet-Gilmour
. Loud and confident voices shouting in the night, young men laughing
loudly. Could they really have laughed that much, for so much of the time? Did they ever stop to listen to themselves? Did they ever cry? Their footsteps on the staircase as they ran up and down at speed, forever late, forever urgent, forever in a rush to get to pubs and theatres and parties. To the river, on summer mornings. Smell of sweat and games kit, smell of mud, of cold air, dampness, beer and marijuana.

Stephen sets the memory aside to concentrate on what the three are saying. Jamie, having not had time for lunch because things at work are hectic, says he’s ravenous; Michael, are you starving too? Michael, lightly, says that’s a word his mother did not let him use when he was a child if what he meant to say was he was hungry. She knew hunger, and she never forgot the things she saw in Poland during the war. And besides, there’s no one more likely to be a language purist than someone who learned English later on in life.

‘Jamie’s mother’s favourite adjective is “blood-stained”,’ Helen says.

‘But everybody says things like that,’ says Jamie. ‘We say we’re dying for a drink, could kill for a cigarette. Words are metaphors, you know.’

‘I think they should be truthful,’ Helen says. Stephen can hear the sound of cutlery, of metal against metal, as Helen is speaking; the three are in the kitchen area, at a little distance from the microphone – against the noise of cooking some of their words are lost. ‘It’s to die for,’ Michael says of something Stephen did not catch, and the other two laugh. Later, when they are eating, he goes on:

‘Everyone who survived the war has hang-ups about food. My mother, yes, of course. She knew that people really could
kill for a crust of bread. But other people too, even those who didn’t have such a hellish time.’

‘Yes,’ Helen agrees, ‘my dad really used to hate it when we didn’t finish the food we had on our plates. He’d eat our left-overs himself rather than see them go to waste.’

‘It’s to do with wanting to be safe, isn’t it?’ Michael says. ‘You only feel safe when you know you won’t go hungry, when there’s always enough food.’

‘My father told me about a man, in fact his oldest chum, they’d been in the Army together, young subalterns in the war, you know; anyway, they shared a house together, with some other men. And one day, they were looking for this bloke and he’d vanished; they couldn’t find him anywhere, although they called and called for him. So, they were just about to leave, for the pub or whatever, without him, when somebody opened the airing cupboard, one of the ones that are actually the size of a small room, and there he was, hunched up on a slatted shelf, with a saucepan of potatoes. He’d hidden away to scoff them by himself.’

‘Raw?’

‘No, of course not. Boiled, I suppose.’

‘Poor devil. He must have been mortified when they caught him.’

‘My father found it comic,’ Jamie says.

‘I don’t think that sort of thing is funny at all,’ Helen demurs. ‘I’ll never forget, when I was a little girl, seeing an old woman sitting on a window ledge outside a shop, all by herself, eating a packet of butter. Rectangular and yellow, wrapped in silver foil. Her attention was completely focused on it; she was like a miser with her treasure, hungrily licking away. I thought it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.’

‘Why sad?’

‘Because it was butter? Because she was old and on her own? Later I came to think that it was probably not butter but ice cream.’

‘Did that change the memory? Did it no longer seem so sad? When you realised she was simply an old biddy giving herself a little treat?’

‘No. Butter or ice cream, it didn’t change the way she was huddled over it, in her shabby winter coat, shielding it as if it might be stolen from her. Anyway, even a young and happy woman eating ice cream on her own would make me feel sad.’

‘That’s silly!’

‘Seagulls steal ice cream from children at the seaside.’

‘It’s a primal urge. The fear of starving is our oldest fear.’

‘Is that why hungers strikes are so disturbing? Because they show that for believers there is something even more important than that basic need?’

‘I can’t get them out of my mind. Those images …’

The talk goes on. Stephen, invisible fourth at the table, today’s man at the day-before-yesterday’s meal, listens carefully to every word. Bobby Sands, victims, heroes, the beauty of the hero, Bobby Sands the image of Christ, and Che Guevara, dying for a cause. To care enough about a cause to give your life for it? Any cause, you name it.
Pro patria mori?
Not us, not any more, no thank you.

‘To starve to death. Ah, how terrible. Would you know that the end was coming, or would you be unconscious long before you reached that stage?’

‘Like a prisoner on Death Row. Isn’t that the cruellest thing, to let a man know in advance the moment of his death? The
key turning in the lock of the cell door at exactly ten to seven.’

‘And the saddest thing, the condemned man’s final meal.’

‘Steak and pizza, usually. And a Coke. Not what I’d choose. What would you choose, Helen?’

‘How could anybody want to eat, on the eve of death?’

It takes as long to listen as the exchange itself took, protracted over drinks, risotto, cheese, more wine, and coffee, going on till nearly midnight. It was considerate of Michael Bennet-Gilmour to leave before the clock struck twelve, Stephen thinks, before this tape ran out and the new one began, with the inevitable hiatus. But, while Helen and Jamie are still talking, he is interrupted anyway, by Rollo Buckingham materialising through the long room’s permanent haze of cigarette smoke with yesterday’s report sheet in his hand.

‘Cube?’ says Stephen, forlornly.

‘Haven’t time. I’ve been in Wales all morning and I must get back tonight.’

‘Wales?’

‘Wales,’ Rollo says, impatiently. Naturally Rollo has other cases to investigate, about which Stephen does not know. In Stephen’s imagination Rollo thinks of nobody but
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. But in fact he knows the opposite is true: Rollo is a busy man; the Institute is at as great a risk of penetration as an ancient beam of wood is from the worm. Rollo does not have time for small talk now, or ever.

‘To get to the point,’ he says, ‘let’s be very careful what we say, although as everyone in here is wearing headphones, we’re as safe as anywhere, I guess.’

He does not say, because he does not have to, that walls have ears, or may do, even in the Institute, in spite of all the measures
that are taken to sweep them clean. It’s a mantra of Security’s, constantly repeated, emblazoned on posters on noticeboards everywhere.

Now Rollo waves the report sheet in Stephen’s face. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he says. A chilly wave of fear ripples all through Stephen but he keeps his head.

‘What doesn’t make sense?’

‘Well, in the first place, how did the wife know he wasn’t going to turn up at the theatre? Did he ring her at home?’

Stephen pauses to consider. Buckingham could easily obtain a log of telephone calls; he cannot take the risk.

‘No,’ he answers truthfully. ‘But there is a possibility that he called his friend John Cummins. The wife was home only very briefly after work; it takes a long time to get to Greenwich. Anyway we don’t know that she did know, before the play began.’

‘But if that were the case how would he know when to meet for dinner? Or where to go?’

‘Yes, he must have telephoned Cummins. From a call-box. Or he could have guessed the time the play would end and waited for the others outside the theatre.’

‘And there was no explanation at all of why he missed the play?’

‘Only the reason that you have there. That “unforseen emergency”. Was there one on Tuesday evening? I thought that you’d be bound to know.’

Rollo ignores this hint. ‘So, basically you are saying that for the second time this week the subject went AWOL for several hours and we can’t account for a single one?’

‘In essence that is right.’

‘But how come? How come we only ever hear about it afterwards, that he isn’t where you told me he would be?’

‘Look here,’ says Stephen, mustering injured pride. ‘This is not an Alpha investigation. There’s a time-lag of at least a day. As you very well know. That is why you have to deploy the trackers.’

‘But I don’t have the trackers. Or only on occasion. Not often enough. Beside, as it’s obviously out of the question to let the whole team of trackers into the know on a case as sensitive as this one, there are restrictions. Ergo, there are only two trackers on the special list. And two people can’t possibly track a suspect for twenty-four hours a day, and seven days a week. That is why we are relying on you. You are supposed to give us warning of his movements in advance.’

‘I do! Whenever I can. It’s not my fault if he keeps changing his plans at the eleventh hour.’

‘It’s absurd. We can’t pin enough on him for Category Alpha and yet without a Category A we’ll never get enough to nail him.’

‘I could track him if you like. I mean, on an informal basis.’

Rollo laughs outright. ‘You could track him? You?’

‘I did rather well on my training course, you know.’

‘No doubt. Of course you did. But this calls for specialists. You must be forgetting how delicate this is. I mean you wouldn’t ask a tracker to do double-duty as a listener, would you? What’s he doing now, I mean last night?’

‘Actually it’s the night before. Wednesday. I haven’t got round to yesterday – a personal emergency cropped up. He’s having supper quietly at home with his wife and another male. Forename Michael, surname unknown.’ Instinct warns him not to
say that he can identify this man himself. It’s important to keep any hint of a personal connection away from Rollo.

Rollo looks alert. ‘No more particulars? No clues? Does he have a Spanish accent?’

‘He sounds quite English to me. I think he’s an old friend of
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’s; he certainly knows the wife. But I’m only halfway through the evening; you stopped me in the middle; that’s the tape there on the machine.’

‘May I have a listen?’

Stephen rewinds the tape back to the conversation over dinner and passes the headphones to Rollo who, having refused a seat, has been standing over him all this time. Rollo stretches the wires to his ears and listens attentively for a few minutes. Then he pulls the headphones off. ‘What a lot of crap these people talk,’ he says. ‘All that balls-aching poppycock about death. What sort of girl is she? Heidegger, for crying out loud!’ He flourishes yesterday’s report and in the process crumples it. ‘And that’s another thing that doesn’t make sense. That play. It’s not about the root causes of treacherous conduct. It’s about homosexuality at Eton. And I don’t think it’s sold out. I’m going to see it myself, on Monday, as a matter of fact.’

‘Have a good weekend,’ says Stephen. Rollo, foregoing a reciprocal exchange of courtesies, turns as if to leave but is struck by a sudden afterthought. ‘I don’t think I’m going to get the extension that we talked about on Wednesday,’ he says. ‘We’ve had that case conference. Sub-director Six already thinks that we are on a hiding to nothing. We’re going to look like real charlies if we keep our sights on this one when the issue’s somewhere else. Because of Christmas, the date of the review board’s not yet fixed.’

It’s like being shown the scaffold and told you’ll have to mount it unless you can magic up some proof to save yourself. Stephen had believed he’d bought a stay of execution but Rollo has kicked away the stool beneath his feet; it seems that the seeds of doubt he has been sowing have not taken root. He desperately needs help. He is praying for it while he finds the place where he stopped the tape when Rollo interrupted him and, when he does, he hears Helen saying that the next few days are busy and they must be sure their diaries match. She is making him a gift; it as is though she wants to let him to know where she will be. She’s giving him her present. Tomorrow evening they’ll be at home; of course they will – Stephen saw her going there; it’s
Brideshead
. On Friday the school term ends but she has to be back the next day for the children’s carol service, which begins at ten o’clock in the morning. Yes, apparently it’s always on a Saturday for the sake of all the mummies and daddies who can’t take time off work. No, he doesn’t have to come. There’s George and Gina’s party on Friday night. Yes, she has remembered that he has a work commitment then and will get to the party late. She’ll make her own way there, or maybe she’ll go with Allegra, who has been invited too. Don’t forget you said you’d meet me after the carol service; you said we’d go to Harvey Nicks, we still have to do your brother and your father, for whom it is impossible to find a present, and you did say you would come with me: what
do
you give the man who has everything he wants? I loathe shopping, Jamie is in the middle of saying, when midnight comes and the recording stops.