The Spy's Wife, page 16
“Decide what?”
“That she was genuine.”
“That? I never did. I still haven’t.”
“What? But you rang her to warn her before you went.”
“Why not? Either she was genuine all-for-love, in which case she deserved a warning; or else she—and the tip-off—had been planted; in which case they would know I was running. I thought telling her might make her show her hand, but it didn’t.”
“She’s been watched, then?” It suddenly struck Molly that he’d shown very little curiosity about Hibbert’s appearance in Bucharest.
“Distantly. There was too much activity to risk getting close. Even more so with you. That’s why there was this palaver with the holiday package. I told them Bucharest was as far as I would go without contacting you.”
“You must be important,” she said, half mocking.
“Not really,” he said. “It suits the Rumanians to keep me here as long as possible. They’re trying not too subtly to pump me! They’ve been flirting with the Chinese lately, and there’s not much love lost between Bucharest and Moscow. But they wouldn’t risk an open break, so it’s useful for them to be able to cite my romantic obduracy as the reason for the delay. I’m just using the situation to get my own way, which is to say, to get this chance to talk to you. Once in Moscow, who knows? Then I’ll be the loyal servant of the State.”
He spoke without much irony, and she remembered Llewellyn making his personal statement in Oslo as though he knew he might not have such a chance for free speech again. Yet still he went.
“You tried to ring me,” she said.
“Yes. I got rather drunk and very lonely one night. I almost made it too, but the shutter came down at the last minute. Still, it convinced them I was serious about seeing you.”
“And if I hadn’t come?”
“You came,” he evaded. His drink had arrived. He was toying with the glass. She decided that when it was flipped to the back of his throat, the battle would be on.
But not yet. A little while longer. But not in silence, silence was the mother of thought, the enemy of peace.
“I think she is genuine,” said Molly.
“Why?”
“She attacked me. Nearly killed me with a knife.”
Sam was disappointingly unimpressed by this melodramatic news.
“How near was nearly?”
Piqued, she told him about the severed cardigan.
“That would fit both an amateur near miss and an expert near miss,” he answered. “You say Wallace was there. What was he doing?”
“He was in the living-room. I think he found the travel stuff in the bureau.”
“Ah,” he said. “Well, there you are!”
“Where?” she asked. “Where are we?”
They sat in silence for a moment. The table umbrella was fixed so that Molly was in the shade, Sam in the sunshine which touched the ends of his grey hair with a golden halo. The silence stretched on, not to be broken nor to be borne.
“Sam,” she said.
“Molly,” he said.
They had both spoken at the same time. Neither continued.
Then Sam flipped the burning liquor to the back of his throat.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“To begin at the beginning,” he Said. “God knows where that is, though! The fifties perhaps. Yes …”
“No,” said Molly firmly. “A bit earlier than that, please. I want it all today. No more surprise parties.”
“How much earlier?”
“How about the womb?”
He looked at her in puzzlement, then started to grin.
“I’m with you!” he said. “No, it’s all right. I’m not Ivan Skavinsky Skivar! I’m Samuel Keynes Keatley of Wellington, Salop, all right. Your genuine Shropshire lad!”
It was an old joke between them. She had borrowed the poems to understand it. She had found their studied pessimism morbid and indulgent, but Sam had been a real enthusiast.
“All right,” she said. “I just wanted to establish whether you were a traitor or merely a spy. Carry on.”
That got the mood right once more. His face set, and he spoke now with power and authority and none of the little mannerisms of hesitation and out-loud thinking with which he usually embellished his public utterances.
“It was Hungary that showed me what I believed. I was still at Durham. I wasn’t a C.P. member, but I felt a strong intellectual and emotional commitment to their ideas. After Hungary, all around me I saw fellow travellers and a lot of your actual card-carriers rushing to get off the bus with cries of disgust and outrage. To my surprise, I felt neither. I felt I ought to feel them, but I didn’t. So while the rest queued up to resign, I went along to join. That’s when it started. I was advised not to take out a formal and public membership.”
“Advised? Who by?” interrupted Molly.
He looked at her with contempt.
“Don’t be stupid,” he said.
“You think I’d tell them?” she asked, hurt in spite of herself.
“Men have told me more important things for less important reasons than you might imagine you’ve got,” he answered. “So I did nothing openly. I’d no idea then that I’d been recruited, you understand. There was a sense of commitment which was deeply satisfying, that was all. I had vague notions of becoming a research scientist, but I wasn’t really original enough to do anything important, and a year in industry trying to make soap powder wash whiter soon disenchanted me. So I drifted into scientific journalism. You know all this.”
“I’ve never heard it quite this way before,” said Molly. She felt cool and businesslike, like a magistrate on the bench, recognizing the existence of the human emotional response but willing herself to keep it separate from her judgement.
“That’s when they began to sound me out in earnest. I was older now, and wiser. I soon grasped what was going on. So I told them to forget the subtle probing. If there was anything I could do to help the Party, they just had to ask. You should get that quite clear, Molly. I wasn’t drafted. I volunteered.”
“Great,” said Molly. “The bravest and the best always do.”
He looked at her without much expression except for a slight narrowing of the eyes, but that might just have been in reaction to the sun which was now full in his face.
He lifted his hand and signalled to the waiter again.
“Now I see why we’re talking here,” said Molly.Room service is so much quicker than at the hotel.”
“I wanted to talk privately,” he said.
She looked around and laughed, then she took his meaning and stopped.
“Je-sus!” she said. “Is it true? And this is what you’ve run away to!”
“Don’t be naïve, Molly,” he said wearily. “I’d do the same in England. If you’ve got any sense, so will you. If you go back.”
“What?” she said, suddenly frightened.
Now there was expression on his face, and in his voice as he leaned forward and spoke to her low and rapidly.
“This is what you’ve come all this way to talk about, isn’t it? Us. Our future, or our futures, if that’s the way you see it? But you don’t seem very keen to get to the point, Molly. You keep on ducking away every time we get near. Are you scared? All right, so I’m scared too. But we’ve got to talk about it. Look, I’m telling you how I got into this, but I see that’s not important now. It just developed, like any job does. And at first it was just exciting, knowing something that all around me didn’t know. Kid’s stuff. Then it became routine for a while. And then the terror started. I reached thirty and that was my birthday present. I suppose it’s always a watershed, a time for review. You know what happened on my thirtieth birthday? Labour won the election! The Tories were out after thirteen years. As for C.P. candidates, they were few and far between, and they all lost their deposits. Well, it was a move to the left, a step in the right direction, and I suppose I should have been glad. But I wasn’t. I saw as clearly as was possible that nothing would ever change in England. There, gradualism means standing still, and revolution means compromise! So I was working for nothing in my lifetime, and that lifetime was going to be spent living a secret, till I was detected, and chased, and perhaps caught and imprisoned—or worse … ”
“Worse? Come on!” said Molly. “We don’t even hang murderers nowadays!”
He laughed and drank from the latest glass which the waiter had insinuated between them as he spoke.
“No,” he said. “Not by the thumbs, certainly. I’m sorry, I was getting carried away. Look, all I’m saying is, I began to feel lonely and afraid. And four years later I met you. Do you know, by that time I was beginning to get careless, almost deliberately taking unnecessary risks as though I wanted to get caught! But after I’d met you, I began to be careful again. By God, I began to be so careful. I suppose, in a way, you’re responsible for any undermining of the State I may have managed in the last ten years!”
He grinned at her with all the youthful pleasure he’d always displayed in a paradox. She didn’t respond. Strangely, she was finding it rather hard to concentrate. It was like talking to a rather boring acquaintance at a party where the line of conversation was hardly worth following through the labyrinth of noise. But here there was no very great noise except for the traffic in the street and the determined chatter of a pair of birds looking for crumbs between the tables.
Sam had always been sensitive to her moods, and now he saw that he was losing her, for the grin vanished and his fingers were in his hair again, compulsively ruffling and combing it so that the heavy locks moved in the sunlight like surges in a broken sea.
“I’m sorry,” he said, in a voice so low she could hardly catch the words. “I wanted you. It was selfish beyond computation. But I deceived myself too. With you, I honestly believed I would never let it happen. Getting caught, I mean. I don’t believe in anything hereafter, and if there is, well, I hope we’ll be able to laugh at what passes for sins here. No, a lifetime seemed enough, and I thought we could have it. I should have known … I suppose I did know, but with you … I don’t think I ever really let you know how completely and utterly happy I was with you. Every minute of those years. I didn’t dare! You’d have thought I was certifiable; or pretending. No, what I was pretending to be was an easygoing, unenergetic, placidly content suburban husband! That was my real secret, Molly. That’s how I’ve really deceived you. I dissembled my love. Like a superstitious peasant, I think I believed that if I advertised my joy, the gods would take it away. Well, I don’t have to dissemble any more. OK. So you’ve found what I am. A spy. A traitor. Find as well that I’m a man who loves you more than perhaps you ever imagined. What I’m going to ask you is monstrous. I want you to stay with me, Molly. I want you to settle down with me to whatever kind of life lies ahead. I was selfish before. When you realized what had happened, you must have thought I was the biggest, most selfish bastard in the universe. Now you see you’ve only scratched the surface. I want you to give up your friends, your family, your country. All I offer is love. All I promise, from now on, is truth. There. End of message. Over.”
He moved his chair abruptly around the curve of the table so that he joined her in the shade. She continued to stare ahead into the space he had vacated as though a strong after-image still pressed on her eye.
“What’s the signal you make to the waiter?” she asked in a voice which sounded to her as if it came from an ancient phonograph.
He must have beckoned this time, for the waiter came across, and Sam spoke to him briefly. Molly took a deep breath and tried to catch her thoughts. She had rehearsed the scene in many ways. In none of them had she expected to be so moved.
“I suppose I should be grateful that you didn’t try to convert me,” she said, trying to lighten the mood and play for time.
He didn’t reply, and when she looked at him he was frowning. At first she thought it was at her attempted levity, but when he spoke she saw that it was directed inwards.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her. “I didn’t mean to make such a blatantly emotional appeal.”
“You mean, you were faking?”
He shook his head impatiently.
“Of course not. I mean every word of it. But it’s not what I want you to base your ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on.”
“Oh, I see,” said Molly. “It is going to be the dialectic approach after all.”
He smiled wanly. The waiter arrived with her drink. He brought nothing for Sam.
“I’m going now, love,” he said.
She looked at him in alarm. Surely he wasn’t going to demand her answer instantly. She had known what that answer would be when she arrived in Bucharest. And she still felt she knew what it was. But now there were acres of talk to traverse before she could honestly feel she had reached that destination.
“We’ll talk again,” he said reassuringly, as though sensing her thought. Perversely, the reassurance irritated her.
“Will we?” she said. “I’ve got a plane seat booked for lunchtime tomorrow.”
“Yes, I know. Tonight perhaps. I’ll get in touch if I can. But otherwise, in the morning.”
“Where? When? I’m fed up with hanging around like a flunkey in an ante-chamber. Let’s have a bit of this famous equality.”
He hesitated.
“All right. Here again. Ten-thirty. No, better make it ten.”
“Don’t be late,” she said. “I won’t have much time.”
He stood up and said, “I’m a bit pushed too,” not looking at her.
She followed his gaze. The emaciated man was standing by the white car on the road which ran past the terrace, pointing significantly at his wristwatch.
Molly reached up and put her hand on Sam’s ann. It was the first voluntary contact she had made with him, she realized.
“Sam,” she said softly. “Us apart, are things OK for you? I mean, generally. You know, the future … ?”
“There’s no way I’d go back, if that’s what you mean, love,” he answered. “Am I sure I’ve done the right thing? That’s a romantic, bourgeois question if ever I heard one! We live circumstantially, Molly, not absolutely. In the circumstances, I’ve done the only thing. That’ll have to suffice.”
Suddenly he bent down and kissed her with untypical fierceness.
“Hold it!” she said. “You’re jumping the gun.”
“Next time we meet, what you may say … “ He paused, then resumed. “At this moment, a kiss seemed just possible. In the circumstances, it was the only thing! Take care.”
He walked away. She didn’t watch him go.
The rest of the day she spent in a sort of tourist trance, drifting round the town, staring at buildings which seemed to tremble in the burning air, sitting in parks where the grass stretched as fixed and hard as a Glitterwax model. She even bought souvenirs; for her father a gunmetal cigarette-lighter and for her mother a stole of fine lace which she would never wear but which would be all the more valued and admired for its impracticality. She also examined a bright peasant neckerchief which she thought would go well with Trevor’s colouring, considered the thought with mingled surprise and horror, but bought it anyway. The trance was turning into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. She moved rapidly from shop to shop, buying things she didn’t want, such as postcards, just to have an excuse to talk and laugh with those shopkeepers who had a smattering of English. She tried on hats and cheap jewellery, striking extravagant poses before foxed mirrors, to the applause of eager sellers. She grew hot and thirsty and sat alone at a café table, drinking glass after glass of cold lemon juice till a couple of bold-eyed young men at a neighbouring table tried to engage her in a conversation whose words she did not understand but whose intention required no interpreter. Laughing, she rose and left. They rose too and followed her. She stopped in the middle of the street, turned, put her hands on her hips in her best fishwife pose and shouted, “Why don’t you two sod off!”
They too halted, looked abashed, turned and went away, glancing over their shoulders from time to time with a defiance that increased with distance. She watched them out of sight, unmindful of the curiosity she was causing among other passers-by. The thought occurred to her that perhaps the boys had belonged to OGPU or SMERSH or whatever set of initials currently ran the lives of people like Sam, and she found herself laughing once more. Even as she laughed, another part of her mind was wondering if this giddiness (in every sense) meant she was becoming ill, while a third area was regarding sombrely and seriously the problem of her relationship with her husband. Determinedly, she shut this away and concentrated on the giddiness.
Diagnosis was not difficult when she glanced at her watch. It was nearly six o’clock. She had had very little breakfast and nothing since except for whisky and lemon juice, as she roamed around under a burning sun.
It was time to go back to the hotel.
The first person she saw as she entered the foyer was Wallace. He had evidently been watching for her. It must have been a long watch.
“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded roughly.
She felt so washed-out now that all she could do was regard him with a disinterest which was probably more infuriating than anger and say, “I think that’s my business, don’t you?”
“Not when it involves me, I don’t,” he snapped.
“You invited yourself here,” she said wearily. “Any involvement is your own choice.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t invite a gang of goons from the KGB admiration society to interrogate me and Sally Ann for two hours this morning! You’ve been with Sam, haven’t you? And this was a nice little diversionary tactic to keep me out of the way!”
Molly considered. It made sense.
“Yes. I suppose it must have been,” she said. “Take it up with your M.P. Excuse me.”
She tried to walk by him, but he put his hand on her arm.
“Hold on!” he said.
She swayed slightly as she paused and he looked at her closely, anger fading from his face.
“Are you all right?’ he said.
