The Looking Glass War (23 page)

Haldane was ill at ease on the journey to London. He was still waiting, apparently, for some unknown crisis in Leiser.

It was the same evening. Sarah was in bed. Her mother had brought her to London.

‘If you ever want me,’ he said, ‘I’ll come to you, wherever you are.’

‘You mean when I’m dying.’ Analysing, she added, ‘I’ll do the same for you, John. Now can I repeat my question?’

‘Monday. There’s a group of us going.’ It was like children: parallel playing.

‘Which part of Germany?’

‘Just Germany, West Germany. For a conference.’

‘More bodies?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sarah, do you think I want to keep it from you?’

‘Yes, John, I do,’ she said simply. ‘I think if you were allowed to tell me you wouldn’t care about the job. You’ve got a kind of licence I can’t share.’

‘I can only tell you it’s a big thing … a big operation. With agents. I’ve been training them.’

‘Who’s in charge?’

‘Haldane.’

‘Is that the one who confides in you about his wife? I think he’s utterly disgusting.’

‘No, that’s Woodford. This man’s quite different. Haldane’s odd. Donnish. Very good.’

‘But they’re all good, aren’t they? Woodford’s good too.’

Her mother came in with tea.

‘When are you getting up?’ he asked.

‘Monday, probably. It depends on the doctor.’

‘She’ll need quiet,’ her mother said, and went out.

‘If you believe in it, do it,’ Sarah said. ‘But don’t …’ she broke off, shook her head, little girl now.

‘You’re jealous. You’re jealous of my job and the secrecy. You don’t
want
me to believe in my work!’

‘Go on. Believe in it if you can.’

For a while they did not look at one another. ‘If it weren’t for Anthony I really would leave you,’ Sarah declared at last.

‘What for?’ Avery asked hopelessly, and then, seeing the opening, ‘Don’t let Anthony stop you.’

‘You never talk to me: any more than you talk to Anthony. He hardly knows you.’

‘What is there to talk about?’

‘Oh, God.’

‘I can’t talk about my work, you know that. I tell you more than I should as it is. That’s why you’re always sneering at the Department, isn’t it? You can’t understand it, you don’t want to; you don’t
like
it being secret but you despise me when I break the rules.’

‘Don’t go over that again.’

‘I’m not coming back,’ Avery said. ‘I’ve decided.’

‘This time, perhaps you’ll remember Anthony’s present.’

‘I bought him that milk lorry.’

They sat in silence again.

‘You ought to meet Leclerc,’ said Avery; ‘I think you ought to talk to him. He keeps suggesting it. Dinner … he might convince you.’

‘What of?’

She found a piece of cotton hanging from the seam of her bed-jacket. Sighing, she took a pair of nail scissors from the drawer in the bedside table and cut it off.

‘You should have drawn it through at the back,’ Avery said. ‘You ruin your clothes that way.’

‘What are they like?’ she asked. ‘The agents? Why do they do it?’

‘For loyalty, partly. Partly money, I suppose.’

‘You mean you bribe them?’

‘Oh shut up!’

‘Are they English?’

‘One of them is. Don’t ask me any more, Sarah; I can’t tell you.’ He advanced his head towards her. ‘Don’t ask me, Sweet.’ He took her hand; she let him.

‘And they’re all men?’

‘Yes.’

Suddenly she said, it was a complete break, no tears, no precision, but quickly, with compassion, as if the speeches were over and this were the choice: ‘John, I want to know, I’ve got to know, now, before you go. It’s an awful, unEnglish question, but all the time you’ve been telling me something, ever since you took this job. You’ve been telling me people don’t matter, that
I
don’t, Anthony doesn’t; that the agents don’t. You’ve been telling me you’ve found a vocation. Well, who calls you, that’s what I mean: what
sort
of vocation? That’s the question you never answer: that’s why you hide from me. Are you a martyr, John? Should I admire you for what you’re doing? Are you making sacrifices?’

Flatly, avoiding her, Avery replied, ‘It’s nothing like that. I’m doing a job. I’m a technician; part of the machine. You want me to say double-think, don’t you? You want to demonstrate the paradox.’

‘No. You’ve said what I want you to say. You’ve got to draw a circle and not go outside it. That’s not double-think, it’s unthink. It’s very humble of you. Do you really believe you’re that small?’

‘You’ve made me small. Don’t sneer. You’re making me small now.’

‘John, I swear it, I don’t mean to. When you came back earlier in the evening you looked as though you’d fallen in love. The kind of love that gives you comfort. You looked free and at peace. I thought for a moment you’d found a woman. That’s why I asked, really it is, whether they were all men … I thought you were in love. Now you tell me you’re nothing, and you seem proud of that too.’

He waited, then smiling, the smile he gave Leiser, he said, ‘Sarah, I missed you terribly. When I was in Oxford I went to the house, the house in Chandos Road, remember? It was fun there, wasn’t it?’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Real fun. I thought about it, our marriage and you. And Anthony. I love you, Sarah; I love you. For everything … the way you bring up our baby.’ A laugh. ‘You’re both so vulnerable, sometimes I can hardly tell you apart.’

She remained silent, so he continued, ‘I thought perhaps if we lived in the country, bought a house … I’m established now: Leclerc would arrange a loan. Then Anthony could run about more. It’s only a matter of increasing our range. Going to the theatre, like we used to at Oxford.’

She said absently, ‘Did we? We can’t go to the theatre in the country, can we?’

‘The Department gives me something, don’t you understand? It’s a real job. It’s important, Sarah.’

She pushed him gently away. ‘My mother’s asked us to Reigate for Christmas.’

‘That’ll be fine. Look … about the office. They owe me something now, after all I’ve done. They accept me on equal terms. As a colleague. I’m one of them.’

‘Then you’re not responsible, are you? Just one of the team. So there’s no sacrifice.’ They were back to the beginning. Avery, not realising this, continued softly, ‘I can tell him, can’t I? I can tell him you’ll come to dinner?’

‘For pity’s sake, John,’ she snapped, ‘don’t try to run me like one of your wretched agents.’

Haldane, meanwhile, sat at his desk, going through Gladstone’s report.

There had twice been manoeuvres in the Kalkstadt area; in 1952 and 1960. On the second occasion the Russians had staged an infantry attack on Rostock with heavy armoured support but no air cover. Little was known of the 1952 exercise, except that a large detachment of troops had occupied the town of Wolken. They were believed to be wearing magenta shoulder-boards. The report was unreliable. On both occasions the area had been declared closed; the restriction had been enforced as far as the northern coast. There followed a long recitation of the principal industries. There was some evidence – it came from the Circus, who refused to release the source – that a new refinery was being constructed on a plateau to the east of Wolken, and that the machinery for it had been transported from Leipzig. It was conceivable (but unlikely) that it had come by rail and been sent by way of Kalkstadt. There was no evidence of civil or industrial unrest, nor of any incident which could account for a temporary closure of the town.

A note from Registry lay in his in-tray. They had put up the files he had asked for, but some were Subscription Only; he would have to read them in the library.

He went downstairs, opened the combination lock on the steel door of General Registry, groped vainly for the light switch. Finally he made his way in the dark between the shelves to the small, windowless room at the back of the building where documents of special interest or secrecy were kept. It was pitch dark. He struck a match, put on the light. On the table were two sets of files:
Mayfly
, heavily restricted, now in its third volume, with a subscription list pasted on the cover, and Deception (
Soviet and East Germany
), an immaculately kept collection of papers and photographs in hard folders.

After glancing briefly at the Mayfly files he turned his attention to the folders, thumbing his way through the depressing miscellany of rogues, double agents and lunatics who in every conceivable corner of the earth, under every conceivable pretext, had attempted, sometimes successfully, to delude the Western intelligence agencies. There was the boring similarity of technique; the grain of truth carefully reconstructed, culled from newspaper reports and bazaar gossip; the follow-up, less carefully done, betraying the deceiver’s contempt for the deceived; and finally the flight of fancy, the stroke of artistic impertinence which wantonly terminated a relationship already under sentence.

On one report he found a flag with Gladstone’s initials; written above them in his cautious, rounded hand were the words: ‘Could be of interest to you.’

It was a refugee report of Soviet tank trials near Gustweiler. It was marked: ‘Should not issue. Fabrication.’ There followed a long justification citing passages in the report which had been abstracted almost verbatim from a 1949 Soviet military manual. The originator appeared to have enlarged every dimension by a third, and added some ingenious flavouring of his own. Attached were six photographs, very blurred, purporting to have been taken from a train with a telephoto lens. On the back of the photographs was written in McCulloch’s careful hand: ‘Claims to have used Exa-two camera, East German manufacture. Cheap housing. Exakta-range lens. Low shutter speed. Negatives very blurred owing to camera shake from train. Fishy.’ It was all very inconclusive. The same make of camera, that was all. He locked up the Registry and went home. Not his duty, Leclerc had said, to prove that Christ was born on Christmas Day; any more, Haldane reflected, than it was his business to prove that Taylor had been murdered.

Woodford’s wife added a little soda to her Scotch, a splash: it was habit rather than taste.

‘Sleep in the office, my foot,’ she said. ‘Do you get operational subsistence?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Well, it
isn’t
a conference then, is it? A conference isn’t operational. Not unless,’ she added with a giggle, ‘you’re having it in the Kremlin.’

‘All right, it’s not a conference. It’s an operation. That’s why I’m getting subsistence.’

She looked at him cruelly. She was a thin, childless woman, her eyes half shut from the smoke of the cigarette in her mouth.

‘There’s nothing going on at all. You’re making it up.’ She began laughing, a hard false laugh. ‘You poor sod,’ she said and laughed again, derisively. ‘How’s little Clarkie? You’re all scared of him, aren’t you? Why don’t you ever say anything against him? Jimmy Gorton used to:
he
saw through him.’

‘Don’t mention Jimmy Gorton to me!’

‘Jimmy’s
lovely
.’

‘Babs, I warn you!’

‘Poor Clarkie. Do you remember,’ his wife asked reflectively, ‘that nice little dinner he gave us in his club? The time he remembered it was our turn for welfare? Steak and kidney and frozen peas.’ She sipped her whisky. ‘And warm gin.’ Something struck her. ‘I wonder if he’s ever had a woman,’ she said. ‘Christ, I wonder why I never thought of that before?’

Woodford returned to safer ground.

‘All right, so nothing’s going on.’ He got up, a silly grin on his face, collected some matches from the desk.

‘You’re not smoking that damn pipe in here,’ she said automatically.

‘So nothing’s going on,’ he repeated smugly, and lit his pipe, sucking noisily.

‘God, I hate you.’

Woodford shook his head, still grinning. ‘Never mind,’ he urged, ‘just never mind. You said it, my dear, I didn’t. I’m not sleeping in the office so everything’s fine, isn’t it? So I didn’t go to Oxford either; I didn’t even go to the Ministry; I haven’t got a car to bring me home at night.’

She leant forward, her voice suddenly urgent, dangerous. ‘What’s happening?’ she hissed. ‘I’ve got a right to know, haven’t I? I’m your wife, aren’t I? You tell those little tarts in the office, don’t you? Well, tell me!’

‘We’re putting a man over the border,’ Woodford said. It was his moment of victory. ‘I’m in charge of the London end. There’s a crisis. There could even be a war. It’s a damn ticklish thing.’ The match had gone out, but he was still swinging it up and down with long movements of his arm, watching her with triumph in his eyes.

‘You bloody liar,’ she said. ‘Don’t give me that.’

Back in Oxford, the pub at the corner was three-quarters empty. They had the saloon bar to themselves. Leiser sipped a White Lady while the wireless operator drank best bitter at the Department’s expense.

‘Just take it gently, that’s all you got to do, Fred,’ he urged kindly. ‘You came up lovely on the last run through. We’ll hear you, don’t worry about that – you’re only eighty miles from the border. It’s a piece of cake as long as you remember your procedure. Take it gently on the tuning or we’re all done for.’

‘I’ll remember. Not to worry.’

‘Don’t get all bothered about the Jerries picking it up; you’re not sending love letters, just a handful of groups. Then a new call sign and a different frequency. They’ll never home in on that, not for the time you’re there.’

‘Perhaps they can, these days,’ Leiser said. ‘Maybe they got better since the war.’

‘There’ll be all sorts of other traffic getting in their hair; shipping, military, air control, Christ knows what. They’re not supermen, Fred; they’re like us. A dozy lot. Don’t worry.’

‘I’m not worried. They didn’t get me in the war; not for long.’

‘Now listen, Fred, how about this? One more drink and we’ll slip home and just have a nice run through with Mrs Hartbeck. No lights, mind. In the dark: she’s shy, see? Get it a hundred per cent before we turn in. Then tomorrow we’ll take it easy. After all, it’s Sunday tomorrow, isn’t it?’ he added solicitously.