The Human Factor

  ‘That was a terrible air crash last week,’ Mrs Castle said, and she dropped the lump sugar in, one for her, two for him.

  ‘Yes. It certainly was. Terrible.’ He tried to remember which company, where . . . TWA? Calcutta?

  ‘I couldn’t help thinking what would have happened to Sam if you and Sarah had been on board.’

  He remembered just in time. ‘But it happened in Bangladesh, Mother. Why on earth should we . . .?’

  ‘You are in the Foreign Office. They could send you anywhere.’

  ‘Oh no, they couldn’t. I’m chained to my desk in London, Mother. Anyway you know very well we’ve appointed you as guardian if anything ever happened.’

  ‘An old woman approaching ninety.’

  ‘Eighty-five, Mother, surely.’

  ‘Every week I read of old women killed in bus crashes.’

  ‘You never go in a bus.’

  ‘I see no reason why I should make a principle of not going in a bus.’

  ‘If anything should ever happen to you be sure we’ll appoint somebody reliable.’

  ‘It might be too late. One must prepare against simultaneous accidents. And in the case of Sam – well, there are special problems.’

  ‘I suppose you mean his colour.’

  ‘You can’t make him a Ward in Chancery. Many of those judges – your father always said that – are racialist. And then – has it occurred to you, dear, if we are all dead, there might be people – out there – who might claim him?’

  ‘Sarah has no parents.’

  ‘What you leave behind, however small, might be thought quite a fortune – I mean by someone out there. If the deaths are simultaneous, the eldest is judged to have died first, or so I’m told. My money would then be added to yours. Sarah must have some relations and they might claim . . .’

  ‘Mother, aren’t you being a bit racialist yourself?’

  ‘No, dear. I’m not at all racialist, though perhaps I’m old-fashioned and patriotic. Sam is English by birth whatever anyone may say.’

  ‘I’ll think about it, Mother.’ That statement was the end of most of their discussions, but it was always well to try a diversion too. ‘I’ve been wondering, Mother, whether to retire.’

  ‘They don’t give you a very good pension, do they?’

  ‘I’ve saved a little. We live very economically.’

  ‘The more you’ve saved the more reason for a spare guardian – just in case. I hope I’m as liberal as your father was, but I would hate to see Sam dragged back to South Africa . . .’

  ‘But you wouldn’t see it, Mother, if you were dead.’

  ‘I’m not so certain of things, dear, as all that. I’m not an atheist.’

  It was one of their most trying visits and he was only saved by Buller who returned with heavy determination from the garden and lumbered upstairs looking for the imprisoned Tinker Bell.

  ‘At least,’ Mrs Castle said, ‘I hope I will never have to be a guardian for Buller.’

  ‘I can promise you that, Mother. In the event of a fatal accident in Bangladesh which coincides with a Grandmothers’ Union bus crash in Sussex I have left strict directions for Buller to be put away – as painlessly as possible.’

  ‘It’s not the sort of dog that I would personally have chosen for my grandson. Watchdogs like Buller are always very colour-conscious. And Sam’s a nervous child. He reminds me of you at his age – except for the colour of course.’

  ‘Was I a nervous child?’

  ‘You always had an exaggerated sense of gratitude for the least kindness. It was a sort of insecurity, though why you should have felt insecure with me and your father . . . You once gave away a good fountain-pen to someone at school who had offered you a bun with a piece of chocolate inside.’

  ‘Oh well, Mother. I always insist on getting my money’s worth now.’

  ‘I wonder.’

  ‘And I’ve quite given up gratitude.’ But as he spoke he remembered Carson dead in prison, and he remembered what Sarah had said. He added, ‘Anyway, I don’t let it go too far. I demand more than a penny bun nowadays.’

  ‘There’s something I’ve always found strange about you. Since you met Sarah you never mention Mary. I was very fond of Mary. I wish you had had a child with her.’

  ‘I try to forget the dead,’ he said, but that wasn’t true. He had learnt early in his marriage that he was sterile, so there was no child, but they were happy. It was as much an only child as a wife who was blown to pieces by a buzz bomb in Oxford Street when he was safe in Lisbon, making a contact. He had failed to protect her, and he hadn’t died with her. That was why he never spoke of her even to Sarah.

  2

  ‘What always surprises me about your mother,’ Sarah said, when they began to go over in bed the record of their day in the country, ‘is that she accepts so easily the fact that Sam’s your child. Does it never occur to her that he’s very black to have a white father?’

  ‘She doesn’t seem to notice shades.’

  ‘Mr Muller did. I’m sure of that.’

  Downstairs the telephone rang. It was nearly midnight.

  ‘Oh hell,’ Castle said, ‘who would ring us at this hour? Your masked men again?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to answer?’

  The ringing stopped.

  ‘If it’s your masked men,’ Castle said, ‘we’ll have a chance to catch them.’

  The telephone rang a second time. Castle looked at his watch.

  ‘For God’s sake answer them.’

  ‘It’s certain to be a wrong number.’

  ‘I’ll answer it if you won’t.’

  ‘Put on your dressing-gown. You’ll catch cold.’ But as soon as she got out of bed the telephone stopped ringing.

  ‘It’s sure to ring again,’ Sarah said. ‘Don’t you remember last month – three times at one o’clock in the morning?’ But this time the telephone remained silent.

  There was a cry from across the passage. Sarah said, ‘Damn them, they’ve woken up Sam. Whoever they are.’

  ‘I’ll go to him. You’re shivering. Get back into bed.’

  Sam asked, ‘Was it burglars? Why didn’t Buller bark?’

  ‘Buller knew better. There are no burglars, Sam. It was just a friend of mine ringing up late.’

  ‘Was it that Mr Muller?’

  ‘No. He’s not a friend. Go to sleep. The telephone won’t ring again.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It rang more than once.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you never answered. So how do you know it was a friend?’

  ‘You ask too many questions, Sam.’

  ‘Was it a secret signal?’

  ‘Do you have secrets, Sam?’

  ‘Yes. Lots of them.’

  ‘Tell me one.’

  ‘I won’t. It wouldn’t be a secret if I told you.’

  ‘Well, I have my secrets too.’

  Sarah was still awake. ‘He’s all right now,’ Castle said. ‘He thought they were burglars ringing up.’

  ‘Perhaps they were. What did you tell him?’

  ‘Oh, I said they were secret signals.’

  ‘You always know how to calm him. You love him, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s strange. I never understand. I wish he were really your child.’

  ‘I don’t wish it. You know that.’

  ‘I’ve never really understood why.’

  ‘I’ve told you many times. I see enough of myself every day when I shave.’

  ‘All you see is a kind man, darling.’

  ‘I wouldn’t describe myself that way.’

  ‘For me a child of yours would have been something to live for when you are not there any more. You won’t live for ever.’

  ‘No, thank God for that.’ He brought the words out without thinking and regretted having spoken them. It was her sympathy which always made him commit himself too far; however much h
e tried to harden himself he was tempted to tell her everything. Sometimes he compared her cynically with a clever interrogator who uses sympathy and a timely cigarette.

  Sarah said, ‘I know you are worried. I wish you could tell me why – but I know you can’t. Perhaps one day . . . when you are free . . .’ She added sadly, ‘If you are ever free, Maurice.’

  CHAPTER V

  1

  CASTLE left his bicycle with the ticket collector at Berkhamsted station and went upstairs to the London platform. He knew nearly all the commuters by sight – he was even on nodding terms with a few of them. A cold October mist was lying in the grassy pool of the castle and dripping from the willows into the canal on the other side of the line. He walked the length of the platform and back; he thought he recognised all the faces except for one woman in a shabby rabbity fur – women were rare on this train. He watched her climb into a compartment and he chose the same one so as to watch her more closely. The men opened newspapers and the woman opened a paper-bound novel by Denise Robins. Castle began reading in Book II of War and Peace. It was a breach of security, even a small act of defiance, to read this book publicly for pleasure. ‘One step beyond that boundary line, which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead, lies uncertainty, suffering and death. And what is there? Who is there? – there beyond that field, that tree . . .’ He looked out of the window and seemed to see with the eyes of Tolstoy’s soldier the motionless spirit-level of the canal pointing towards Boxmoor. ‘That roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear and yet long to cross that line . . .’

  When the train stopped at Watford, Castle was the only one to leave the compartment. He stood beside the list of train departures and watched the last passenger go through the barrier – the woman was not among them. Outside the station he hesitated at the tail of the bus queue while he again noted the faces. Then he looked at his watch and with a studied gesture of impatience for any observer who cared to notice him walked on. Nobody followed him, he was sure of that, but all the same he was a little worried by the thought of the woman in the train and his petty defiance of the rules. One had to be meticulously careful. At the first post office to which he came he rang the office and asked for Cynthia – she always arrived half an hour at least before Watson or Davis or himself.

  He said, ‘Will you tell Watson I shall be in a little late? I’ve had to stop at Watford on the way to see a vet. Buller’s got an odd sort of rash. Tell Davis too.’ He considered for a moment whether it would be necessary for his alibi actually to visit the vet, but he decided that taking too much care could sometimes be as dangerous as taking too little – simplicity was always best, just as it paid to speak the truth whenever possible, for the truth is so much easier to memorize than a lie. He went into the third coffee bar on the list which he carried in his head and there he waited. He didn’t recognize the tall lean man who followed him, in an overcoat which had seen better days. The man stopped at his table and said, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you William Hatchard?’

  ‘No, my name’s Castle.’

  ‘I’m sorry. An extraordinary likeness.’

  Castle drank two cups of coffee and read The Times. He valued the air of respectability that paper always seemed to lend the reader. He saw the man tying up his shoelace fifty yards down the road, and he experienced a similar sense of security to that which he had once felt while he was being carried from his ward in a hospital towards a major operation – he found himself again an object on a conveyor belt which moved him to a destined end with no responsibility, to anyone or anything, even to his own body. Everything would be looked after for better or worse by somebody else. Somebody with the highest professional qualifications. That was the way death ought to come in the end, he thought, as he moved slowly and happily in the wake of the stranger. He always hoped that he would move towards death with the same sense that before long he would be released from anxiety for ever.

  The road they were now in, he noticed, was called Elm View, although there were no elms anywhere in sight or any other trees, and the house to which he was guided was as anonymous and uninteresting as his own. There were even rather similar stained glass panels in the front door. Perhaps a dentist had once worked there too. The lean man ahead of him stopped for a moment by an iron gate to a front garden which was about the size of a billiard table, and then walked on. There were three bells by the door, but only one had an indicating card – very worn with illegible writing ending in the words ‘ition Limited’. Castle rang the bell and saw that his guide had crossed Elm View and was walking back on the other side. When he was opposite the house he took a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his nose. It was probably an all-clear signal, for Castle almost immediately heard a creak-creak descending the stairs inside. He wondered whether ‘they’ had taken their precautions in order to protect him from a possible follower or to protect themselves against his possible treachery – or both of course. He didn’t care – he was on the conveyor belt.

  The door opened on a familiar face he had not expected to see – eyes of a very startling blue over a wide welcoming grin, a small scar on the left cheek which he knew dated from a wound inflicted on a child in Warsaw when the city fell to Hitler.

  ‘Boris,’ Castle exclaimed, ‘I thought I was never going to see you again.’

  ‘It’s good to see you, Maurice.’

  Strange, he thought, that Sarah and Boris were the only people in the world who ever called him Maurice. To his mother he was simply ‘dear’ in moments of affection, and at the office he lived among surnames or initials. Immediately he felt at home in this strange house which he had never visited before: a shabby house with worn carpeting on the stairs. For some reason he thought of his father. Perhaps when a child he had gone with him to see a patient in just such a house.

  From the first landing he followed Boris into a small square room with a desk, two chairs and a large picture on rollers which showed a numerous family eating in a garden at a table laden with an unusual variety of food. All the courses seemed to be simultaneously displayed – an apple pie stood beside a joint of roast beef, and a salmon and a plate of apples beside a soup tureen. There was a jug of water and a bottle of wine and a coffee pot. Several dictionaries lay on a shelf and a pointer leant against a blackboard on which was written a half-obliterated word in a language he couldn’t identify.

  ‘They decided to send me back after your last report,’ Boris said. ‘The one about Muller. I’m glad to be here. I like England so much better than France. How did you get on with Ivan?’

  ‘All right. But it wasn’t the same.’ He felt for a packet of cigarettes which was not there. ‘You know how Russians are. I had the impression that he didn’t trust me. And he was always wanting more than I ever promised to do for any of you. He even wanted me to try to change my section.’

  ‘I think it’s Marlboros you smoke?’ Boris said, holding out a packet. Castle took one.

  ‘Boris, did you know all the time you were here that Carson was dead?’

  ‘No. I didn’t know. Not until a few weeks ago. I don’t even know the details yet.’

  ‘He died in prison. From pneumonia. Or so they say. Ivan must surely have known – but they let me learn it first from Cornelius Muller.’

  ‘Was it such a great shock? In the circumstances. Once arrested – there’s never much hope.’

  ‘I know that, and yet I’d always believed that one day I would see him again – somewhere in safety far away from South Africa – perhaps in my home – and then I would be able to thank him for saving Sarah. Now he’s dead and gone without a word of thanks from me.’

  ‘All you’ve done for us has been a kind of thanks. He will have understood that. You don’t have to feel any regret.’

  ‘No? One can’t reason away regret – it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.’

  He thought, with a sense of revulsion: The situation’s impossible, there’s no one in the world
with whom I can talk of everything, except this man Boris whose real name even is unknown to me. He couldn’t talk to Davis – half his life was hidden from Davis, nor to Sarah who didn’t even know that Boris existed. One day he had even told Boris about the night in the Hotel Polana when he learned the truth about Sam. A control was a bit like a priest must be to a Catholic – a man who received one’s confession whatever it might be without emotion. He said, ‘When they changed my control and Ivan took over from you, I felt unbearably lonely. I could never speak about anything but business to Ivan.’

  ‘I’m sorry I had to go. I argued with them about it. I did my best to stay. But you know how it is in your own outfit. It’s the same in ours. We live in boxes and it’s they who choose the box.’ How often he had heard that comparison in his own office. Each side shares the same clichés.

  Castle said, ‘It’s time to change the book.’

  ‘Yes. Is that all? You gave an urgent signal on the phone. Is there more news of Porton?’

  ‘No. I’m not sure I trust their story.’

  They were sitting on uncomfortable chairs on either side of the desk like a master and a pupil. Only the pupil in this case was so much older than the master. Well, it happened, Castle supposed, in the confessional too that an old man spoke his sins to a priest young enough to be his son. With Ivan at their rare meetings the dialogue had always been short, information was passed, questionnaires were received, everything was strictly to the point. With Boris he had been able to relax. ‘Was France promotion for you?’ He took another cigarette.

  ‘I don’t know. One never does know, does one? Perhaps coming back here may be promotion. It may mean they took your last report very seriously, and thought I could deal with it better than Ivan. Or was Ivan compromised? You don’t believe the Porton story, but have you really hard evidence that your people suspect a leak?’

  ‘No. But in a game like ours one begins to trust one’s instincts and they’ve certainly made a routine check on the whole section.’

  ‘You say yourself routine.’

  ‘Yes, it could be routine, some of it’s quite open, but I believe it’s a bit more than that. I think Davis’s telephone is tapped and mine may be too, though I don’t believe so. Anyway we’d better drop those call-signals to my house. You’ve read the report I made on Muller’s visit and the Uncle Remus operation. I hope to God that’s been channelled differently on your side if there is a leak. I have a feeling they might be passing me a marked note.’