The Human Factor

  ‘What is it?’

  There was no reply, but when he turned on the light, he could see that her eyes were wide with fear.

  ‘You’ve had another nightmare. It’s only a nightmare.’

  She said, ‘It was terrible.’

  ‘Tell me. A dream never comes back if you tell it quickly before you forget.’

  He could feel how she trembled against his side. He began to catch her fear. ‘It’s only a dream, Sarah. Just tell me. Get rid of it.’

  She said, ‘I was in a railway train. It was moving off. You were left on the platform. I was alone. You had the tickets. Sam was with you. He didn’t seem to care. I didn’t even know where we were supposed to be going. And I could hear the ticket collector in the next compartment. I knew I was in the wrong coach, reserved for Whites.’

  ‘Now you’ve told it the dream won’t come back.’

  ‘I knew he’d say, Get out of there. You’ve no business there. This is a White coach.’

  ‘It’s only a dream, Sarah’.

  ‘Yes. I know. I’m sorry I woke you. You need your sleep.’

  ‘It was a bit like the dreams Sam had. Remember?’

  ‘Sam and I are colour conscious, aren’t we? It haunts us both in sleep. Sometimes I wonder whether you love me only because of my colour. If you were black you wouldn’t love a white woman only because she was white, would you?’

  ‘No. I’m not a South African off on a week-end in Swaziland. I knew you for nearly a year before I fell in love. It came slowly. All those months when we worked secretly together. I was a so-called diplomat, safe as houses. You ran all the risks. I didn’t have nightmares, but I used to lie awake, wondering whether you’d come to our next rendezvous or whether you’d disappear and I’d never know what happened to you. Just a message perhaps from one of the others saying that the line was closed.’

  ‘So you worried about the line.’

  ‘No. I worried about what would happen to you. I’d loved you for months. I knew I couldn’t go on living if you disappeared. Now we are safe.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Haven’t I proved it over seven years?’

  ‘I don’t mean that you love me. I mean are you sure we are safe?’

  To that question there was no easy answer. The last encoded report with the final word ‘good-bye’ had been premature and the passage he had chosen, ‘I have lifted my hand and let it fall’, was no mark of freedom in the world of Uncle Remus.

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER I

  1

  DARKNESS had fallen early with the mist and the drizzle of November, when he left the telephone box. There had been no reply to any of his signals. In Old Compton Street the blurred red light of the sign ‘Books’, marking where Halliday Junior carried on his dubious trade, shone down the pavement with less than its normal effrontery; Halliday Senior in the shop across the way stooped as usual under a single globe, economizing fuel. When Castle came into the shop the old man touched a switch without raising his head so as to light up on either side the shelves of outmoded classics.

  ‘You don’t waste your electricity,’ Castle said.

  ‘Ah! It’s you, sir. Yes, I do my little bit to help the Government, and anyway I don’t get many real customers after five. A few shy sellers, but their books are seldom in good enough condition, and I have to send them away disappointed – they think there’s value in any book that’s a hundred years old. I’m sorry, sir, about the delay over the Trollope if that’s what you are seeking. There’s been difficulty about the second copy – it was on television once, that’s the trouble – even the Penguins are sold out.’

  ‘There’s no hurry now. One copy will do. I came in to tell you that. My friend has gone to live abroad.’

  ‘Ah, you’ll miss your literary evenings, sir. I was saying to my son only the other day . . .’

  ‘It’s odd, Mr Halliday, but I’ve never met your son. Is he in? I thought I might discuss with him some books I can spare. I’ve rather grown out of my taste for curiosa. Age, I suppose. Would I find him in?’

  ‘You won’t, sir, not now. To tell you the truth he’s got himself into a bit of trouble. From doing too well. He opened another shop last month in Newington Butts and the police there are far less understanding than those here – or more expensive if you care to be cynical. He had to attend the magistrate’s court all the afternoon about some of those silly magazines of his and he’s not back yet.’

  ‘I hope his difficulties don’t make trouble for you, Mr Halliday.’

  ‘Oh dear me, no. The police are very sympathetic. I really think they’re sorry for me having a son in that way of business. I tell them, if I was young, I might be doing the same thing, and they laugh.’

  It had always seemed strange to Castle that ‘they’ had chosen so dubious an intermediary as young Halliday, whose shop might be searched at any time by the police. Perhaps, he thought, it was a kind of double bluff. The Vice Squad would hardly be trained in the niceties of intelligence. It was even possible that Halliday Junior was as unaware as his father of the use to which he was being put. That was what he wanted very much to know, for he was going to entrust him with what amounted to his life.

  He stared across the road at the scarlet sign and the girlie magazines in the window and wondered at the strange emotion that was driving him to take so open a risk. Boris would not have approved, but now he had sent ‘them’ his last report and resignation he felt an irresistible desire to communicate directly by word of mouth, without the intervention of safe drops and book codes and elaborate signals on public telephones.

  ‘You’ve no idea when he’ll return?’ he asked Mr Halliday.

  ‘No idea, sir. Couldn’t I perhaps help you myself?’

  ‘No, no, I won’t bother you.’ He had no code of telephone rings to attract the attention of Halliday Junior. They had been kept so scrupulously apart he sometimes wondered whether their only meeting might be scheduled for the final emergency.

  He asked, ‘Has your son by any chance a scarlet Toyota?’

  ‘No, but he sometimes uses mine in the country – for sales, sir. He helps me there now and then, for I can’t get about as much as I used to do. Why did you ask?’

  ‘I thought I saw one outside the shop once.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be ours. Not in town it wouldn’t. With all the traffic jams it wouldn’t be economic. We have to do our best to economize when the Government asks.’

  ‘Well, I hope the magistrate has not been too severe with him.’

  ‘It’s a kind thought, sir. I’ll tell him you called.’

  ‘As it happens I brought a note with me you might let him have. It’s confidential, mind. I wouldn’t want people to know the kind of books I collected when I was young.’

  ‘You can trust me, sir. I’ve never failed you yet. And the Trollope?’

  ‘Oh, forget the Trollope.’

  At Euston, Castle took a ticket to Watford – he didn’t want to show his season to and from Berkhamsted. Ticket collectors have a memory for seasons. In the train he read, to keep his mind occupied, a morning paper which had been left behind on the next seat. It contained an interview with a film star whom he had never seen (the cinema at Berkhamsted had been turned into a Bingo hall). Apparently the actor had married for a second time. Or was it a third? He had told the reporter during an interview several years before that he was finished with marriage. ‘So you’ve changed your mind?’ the gossip writer impudently asked.

  Castle read the interview to the last word. Here was a man who could talk to a reporter about the most private things in his life: ‘I was very poor when I married my first wife. She didn’t understand . . . our sex life went all wrong. It’s different with Naomi. Naomi knows that when I come back exhausted from the studio . . . whenever we can we take a week’s holiday all alone in some quiet spot like St Tropez and work it all off.’ I’m hypocritical to blame him, Castle thought: I am going to tal
k if I can to Boris: a moment arrives when one has to talk.

  At Watford he went carefully through his previous routine, hesitating at the bus stop, finally walking on, waiting round the next corner for any followers. He reached the coffee shop, but he didn’t go in but walked straight on. Last time he had been guided by the man with the loose shoelace, but now he had no guide. Did he turn left or right at the corner? All the streets in this part of Watford looked alike – rows of identical gabled houses with small front gardens planted with rose trees that dripped with moisture – one house joined to another by a garage for one car.

  He took another cast at random, and another, but he found always the same houses, sometimes in streets, sometimes in crescents, and he felt himself mocked by the similarity of the names – Laurel Drive, Oaklands, The Shrubbery – to the name he was seeking, Elm View. Once a policeman seeing him at a loss asked whether he could be of help. Muller’s original notes seemed to weigh like a revolver in his pocket and he said no, that he was only looking for a To Let notice in the area. The policeman told him that there were two of these some three or four turns to the left, and by a coincidence the third brought him into Elm View. He hadn’t remembered the number, but a lamp in the street shone on to the stained glass of a door and he recognized that. There was no light in any window, and it was without much hope that, peering closely, he made out the mutilated card ‘ition Limited’ and rang the bell. It was unlikely Boris would be here at this hour; indeed, he might not be in England at all. He had severed his connection with them, so why should they preserve a dangerous channel open? He tried the bell a second time, but there was no reply. He would have welcomed at that moment even Ivan who had tried to blackmail him. There was no one – literally no one – left to whom he could speak.

  He had passed a telephone box on his way and now he returned to it. At a house across the road he could see through the uncurtained window a family sitting down to a high tea or an early dinner: a father and two teenage children, a boy and a girl, took their seats, the mother entered carrying a dish, and the father seemed to be saying grace, for the children bowed their heads. He remembered that custom in his childhood but thought it had died out a long time ago – perhaps they were Roman Catholics, customs seemed to survive much longer with them. He began to dial the only number left for him to try, a number to be used only in the final emergency, replacing the receiver at intervals which he timed on his watch. After he had dialled five times with no response he left the box. It was as though he had cried aloud five times in the empty street for help – and he had no idea whether he had been heard. Perhaps after his final report all lines of communication had been cut for ever.

  He looked across the road. The father made a joke and the mother smiled her approval and the girl winked at the boy, as much as to say ‘The old boy’s at it again.’ Castle went on down the road towards the station – nobody followed him, no one looked at him through a window as he went by, nobody passed him. He felt invisible, set down in a strange world where there were no other human beings to recognize him as one of themselves.

  He stopped at the end of the street which was called The Shrubbery beside a hideous church so new it might have been constructed overnight with the glittering bricks of a build-it-yourself kit. The lights were on inside and the same emotion of loneliness which had driven him to Halliday’s drove him to the building. He recognized from the gaudy bedizened altar and the sentimental statues that it was a Roman Catholic church. There was no sturdy band of bourgeois faithful standing shoulder to shoulder singing of a green hill far away. One old man slumbered over his umbrella knob not far from the altar, and two women who might have been sisters in their similar subfusc clothing waited by what he guessed was a confessional box. A woman in a macintosh came out from behind a curtain and a woman without one went in. It was like a weather house indicating rain. Castle sat down not far away. He felt tired – the hour had struck long past for his triple J. & B.; Sarah would be growing anxious, and as he listened to the low hum of conversation in the box the desire to talk openly, without reserve, after seven years of silence grew in him. Boris has been totally withdrawn, he thought, I shall never be able to speak again – unless, of course, I end up in the dock. I could make what they call a ‘confession’ there – in camera, of course, the trial would be in camera.

  The second woman emerged, and the third went in. The other two had got rid briskly enough of their secrets – in camera. They were kneeling separately down before their respective altars with looks of smug satisfaction at a duty well performed. When the third woman emerged there was no one left waiting but himself. The old man had woken and accompanied one of the women out. Between a crack in the priest’s curtain he caught a glimpse of a long white face; he heard a throat being cleared of the November damp. Castle thought: I want to talk; why don’t I talk? A priest like that has to keep my secret. Boris had said to him, ‘Come to me whenever you feel you have to talk: it’s a smaller risk,’ but he was convinced Boris had gone for ever. To talk was a therapeutic act – he moved slowly towards the box like a patient who is visiting a psychiatrist for the first time with trepidation.

  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 th
em. 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.’