The Human Factor

  He had always known that one day this scene would have to be played out between them, but he had never been able to imagine the kind of words they would say to each other. She said, ‘Give me your whisky.’ He handed her his glass and she drank a finger from it. ‘Are you in danger?’ she asked. ‘I mean now. Tonight.’

  ‘I’ve been in danger all our life together.’

  ‘But is it worse now?’

  ‘Yes. I think they’ve discovered there’s a leak and I think they thought it was Davis. I don’t believe Davis died a natural death. Something Doctor Percival said . . .’

  ‘You think they killed him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it might have been you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you still going on with it?’

  ‘I wrote what I thought was my last report. I said good-bye to the whole business. But then – something else happened. With Muller. I had to let them know. I hope I have. I don’t know.’

  ‘How did the office discover the leak?’

  ‘I suppose they have a defector somewhere – probably in place – who had access to my reports and passed them back to London.’

  ‘But if he passes back this one?’

  ‘Oh, I know what you are going to say. Davis is dead. I’m the only man at the office who deals with Muller.’

  ‘Why have you gone on, Maurice? It’s suicide.’

  ‘It may save a lot of lives – lives of your people.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me of my people. I have no people any longer. You are “my people”.’ He thought, Surely that’s something out of the Bible. I’ve heard that before. Well, she’d been to a Methodist school.

  She put her arm round him and held the glass of whisky to his mouth. ‘I wish you hadn’t waited all these years to tell me.’

  ‘I was afraid to – Sarah.’ The Old Testament name came back to him with hers. It had been a woman called Ruth who had said what she had said – or something very like it.

  ‘Afraid of me and not of Them?’

  ‘Afraid for you. You can’t know how long it seemed, waiting for you in the Hotel Polana. I thought you’d never come. While it was daylight I used to watch car numbers through a pair of binoculars. Even numbers meant Muller had got you. Odd numbers that you were on the way. This time there’ll be no Hotel Polana and no Carson. It doesn’t happen twice the same way.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘The best thing would be for you to take Sam and go to my mother’s. Separate yourself from me. Pretend there’s been a bad quarrel and you are getting a divorce. If nothing happens I’ll stay here and we can come together again.’

  ‘What should I do all that time? Watch car numbers? Tell me the next best thing.’

  ‘If they are still looking after me – I don’t know whether they are – they promised me a safe escape route, but I’ll have to go alone. So that way too you must go to my mother with Sam. The only difference is we won’t be able to communicate. You won’t know what has happened – perhaps for a long time. I think I’d prefer the police to come – at least that way we’d see each other again in court.’

  ‘But Davis never reached a court, did he? No, if they are looking after you, go, Maurice. Then at least I’ll know you are safe.’

  ‘You haven’t said a word of blame, Sarah.’

  ‘What sort of word?’

  ‘Well, I’m what’s generally called a traitor.’

  ‘Who cares?’ she said. She put her hand in his: it was an act more intimate than a kiss – one can kiss a stranger. She said, ‘We have our own country. You and I and Sam. You’ve never betrayed that country, Maurice.’

  He said, ‘It’s no good worrying any more tonight. We’ve still time and we’ve got to sleep.’

  But when they were in bed, they made love at once without thinking, without speaking, as though it had been something they had agreed together an hour ago and all their discussion had only been a postponement of it. It had been months since they had come together in this way. Now that his secret was spoken love was released, and he fell asleep almost as soon as he withdrew. His last thought was: There is still time – it will be days, perhaps weeks, before any leak can be reported back. Tomorrow is Saturday. We have a whole week-end before us in which to decide.

  CHAPTER II

  SIR John Hargreaves sat in his study in the country reading Trollope. It should have been a period of almost perfect peace – the week-end calm, which only a duty officer was allowed to break with an urgent message, and urgent messages were of extreme rarity in the Secret Service – the hour of tea when his wife respected his absence, as she knew that Earl Grey in the afternoons spoilt for him the Cutty Sark at six. During his service in West Africa he had grown to appreciate the novels of Trollope, though he was not a novel reader. At moments of irritation, he had found The Warden and Barchester Towers reassuring books, they reinforced the patience which Africa required. Mr Slope would remind him of an importunate and self-righteous District Commissioner, and Mrs Proudie of the Governor’s wife. Now he found himself disturbed by a piece of fiction which should have soothed him in England as he had been soothed in Africa. The novel was called The Way We Live Now – somebody, he couldn’t remember who it was, had told him the novel had been turned into a good television series. He didn’t like television, yet he had been sure he would like the Trollope.

  So all that afternoon he felt for a while the same smooth pleasure he always received from Trollope – the sense of a calm Victorian world, where good was good and bad was bad and one could distinguish easily between them. He had no children who might have taught him differently – he had never wanted a child nor had his wife; they were at one in that, though perhaps for different reasons. He hadn’t wanted to add to his public responsibilities private responsibilities (children would have been a constant anxiety in Africa), and his wife – well – he would think with affection – she wished to guard her figure and her independence. Their mutual indifference to children reinforced their love for each other. While he read Trollope with a whisky at his elbow, she drank tea in her room with equal content. It was a week-end of peace for both of them – no shoot, no guests, darkness falling early in November over the park – he could even imagine himself in Africa, at some resthouse in the bush, on one of the long treks which he always enjoyed, far from headquarters. The cook would now be plucking a chicken behind the resthouse and the pie-dogs would be gathering in the hope of scraps . . . The lights in the distance where the motorway ran might well have been the lights of the village where the girls would be picking the lice out of each other’s hair.

  He was reading of old Melmotte – the swindler as his fellow members judged him. Melmotte took his place in the restaurant of the House of Commons – ‘It was impossible to expel him – almost as impossible to sit next him. Even the waiters were unwilling to serve him; but with patience and endurance he did at last get his dinner.’

  Hargreaves, unwillingly, felt drawn to Melmotte in his isolation, and he remembered with regret what he had said to Doctor Percival when Percival expressed a liking for Davis. He had used the word ‘traitor’ as Melmotte’s colleagues used the word ‘swindler’. He read on, ‘They who watched him declared among themselves that he was happy in his own audacity; – but in truth he was probably at that moment the most utterly wretched man in London.’ He had never known Davis – he wouldn’t have recognized him if he had met him in a corridor of the office. He thought: Perhaps I spoke hastily – I reacted stupidly – but it was Percival who eliminated him – I shouldn’t have left Percival in charge of the case . . . He went on reading: ‘But even he, with all the world now gone from him, with nothing before him but the extremest misery which the indignation of offended laws could inflict, was able to spend the last moments of his freedom in making a reputation at any rate for audacity.’ Poor devil, he thought, one has to grant him courage. Did Davis guess what potion Doctor Percival might be dropping into his whisky when he le
ft the room for a moment?

  It was then the telephone rang. He heard it intercepted by his wife in her room. She was trying to protect his peace better than Trollope had done, but all the same, owing to some urgency at the other end, she was forced to transfer the call. Unwillingly he lifted the receiver. A voice he didn’t recognize said, ‘Muller speaking.’

  He was still in the world of Melmotte. He said, ‘Muller?’

  ‘Cornelius Muller.’

  There was an uneasy pause and then the voice explained, ‘From Pretoria.’

  For a moment Sir John Hargreaves thought the stranger must be calling from the remote city, and then he remembered. ‘Yes. Yes. Of course. Can I be of any help?’ He added, ‘I hope Castle . . .’

  ‘I would like to talk to you, Sir John, about Castle.’

  ‘I’ll be in the office on Monday. If you’d ring my secretary . . .’ He looked at his watch. ‘She will still be at the office.’

  ‘You won’t be there tomorrow?’

  ‘No. I’m taking this week-end at home.’

  ‘Could I come and see you, Sir John?’

  ‘Is it so very urgent?’

  ‘I think it is. I have a strong feeling I’ve made a most serious mistake. I do want badly to talk to you, Sir John.’

  There goes Trollope, Hargreaves thought, and poor Mary – I try to keep the office away from us when we are here and yet it’s always intruding. He remembered the evening of the shoot when Daintry had been so difficult . . . He asked, ‘Have you a car?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  He thought, I can still have Saturday free if I’m reasonably hospitable tonight. He said, ‘It’s less than two hours drive if you’d care to come to dinner.’

  ‘Of course. It’s very kind of you, Sir John. I wouldn’t have disturbed you if I hadn’t thought it important. I . . .’

  ‘We may not be able to rustle up more than an omelette, Muller. Pot luck,’ he added.

  He put down the receiver, remembering the apocryphal story he knew they told about him and the cannibals. He went to the window and looked out. Africa receded. The lights were the lights of the motorway leading to London and the office. He felt the approaching suicide of Melmotte – there was no other solution. He went to the drawing-room: Mary was pouring out a cup of Earl Grey from the silver teapot which she had bought at a Christie sale. He said, ‘I’m sorry, Mary. We’ve got a guest for dinner.’

  ‘I was afraid of that. When he insisted on speaking to you . . . Who is it?’

  ‘The man BOSS has sent over from Pretoria.’

  ‘Couldn’t he wait till Monday?’

  ‘He said it was too urgent.’

  ‘I don’t like those apartheid buggers.’ Common English obscenities always sounded strange in her American accent.

  ‘Nor do I, but we have to work with them. I suppose we can rustle up something to eat.’

  ‘There’s some cold beef.’

  ‘That’s better than the omelette I promised him.’

  It was a stiff meal because no business could be talked, though Lady Hargreaves did her best, with the help of the Beaujolais, to find a possible subject. She confessed herself completely ignorant of Afrikaaner art and literature, but it was an ignorance which Muller appeared to share. He admitted there were some poets and novelists around – and he mentioned the Hertzog Prize, but he added that he had read none of them. ‘They are unreliable,’ he said, ‘most of them.’

  ‘Unreliable?’

  ‘They get mixed up in politics. There’s a poet in prison now for helping terrorists.’ Hargreaves tried to change the subject, but he could think of nothing in connection with South Africa but gold and diamonds – they were mixed up with politics too, just as much as the writers. The word diamonds suggested Namibia and he remembered that Oppenheimer, the millionaire, supported the progressive party. His Africa had been the impoverished Africa of the bush, but politics lay like the detritus of a mine over the south. He was glad when they could be alone with a bottle of whisky and two easy chairs – it was easier to talk of hard things in an easy chair – it was difficult, he had always found, to get angry in an easy chair.

  ‘You must forgive me,’ Hargreaves said, ‘for not having been in London to greet you. I had to go to Washington. One of those routine visits that one can’t avoid. I hope my people have been looking after you properly.’

  ‘I had to go off too,’ Muller said, ‘to Bonn.’

  ‘But not exactly a routine visit there, I imagine? The Concorde has brought London so damnably close to Washington – they almost expect you to drop over for lunch. I hope all went satisfactorily in Bonn – within reason, of course. But I suppose you’ve been discussing all that with our friend Castle.’

  ‘Your friend, I think, more than mine.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I know there was a little trouble between you years ago. But that’s ancient history surely.’

  ‘Is there such a thing, sir, as ancient history? The Irish don’t think so, and what you call the Boer War is still very much our war, but we call it the war of independence. I’m worried about Castle. That’s why I’m bothering you tonight. I’ve been indiscreet. I let him have some notes I made about the Bonn visit. Nothing very secret, of course, but all the same someone reading between the lines . . .’

  ‘My dear fellow, you can trust Castle. I wouldn’t have asked him to brief you if he wasn’t the best man . . .’

  ‘I went to have dinner with him at his home. I was surprised to find he was married to a black girl, the one who was the cause of what you call a little trouble. He even seems to have a child by her.’

  ‘We have no colour bar here, Muller, and she was very thoroughly vetted, I can assure you.’

  ‘All the same, it was the Communists who organized her escape. Castle was a great friend of Carson. I suppose you know that.’

  ‘We know all about Carson – and the escape. It was Castle’s job to have Communist contacts. Is Carson still a trouble to you?’

  ‘No. Carson died in prison – from pneumonia. I could see how upset Castle was when I told him.’

  ‘Why not? If they were friends?’ Hargreaves looked with regret at his Trollope where it lay beyond the bottle of Cutty Sark. Muller got abruptly to his feet and walked across the room. He halted before the photograph of a black man wearing a soft black hat of the kind missionaries used to wear. One side of his face was disfigured by lupus and he smiled at whoever held the camera with one side of his mouth only.

  ‘Poor fellow,’ Hargreaves said, ‘he was dying when I took that photograph. He knew it. He was a brave man like all the Krus. I wanted something to remember him by.’

  Muller said, ‘I haven’t made a full confession, sir. I gave Castle the wrong notes by accident. I’d made one lot to show him and one to draw on for my reports and I confused them. It’s true there’s nothing very secret – I wouldn’t have put anything very secret on paper over here – but there were some indiscreet phrases . . .’

  ‘Really, you don’t have to worry, Muller.’

  ‘I can’t help worrying, sir. In this country you live in such a different atmosphere. You have so little to fear compared with us. That black in the photograph – you liked him?’

  ‘He was a friend – a friend I loved.’

  ‘I can’t say that of a single black,’ Muller replied. He turned. On the opposite side of the room, on the wall, hung an African mask.

  ‘I don’t trust Castle.’ He said, ‘I can’t prove anything, but I have an intuition . . . I wish you had appointed someone else to brief me.’

  ‘There were only two men dealing with your material. Davis and Castle.’

  ‘Davis is the one who died?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You take things so lightly over here. I sometimes envy you. Things like a black child. You know, sir, in our experience there is no one more vulnerable than an officer in secret intelligence. We had a leak a few years back from BOSS – in the section which deals with the Communists. On
e of our most intelligent men. He too cultivated friendships – and the friendships took over. Carson was concerned in that case too. And there was another case – one of our officers was a brilliant chess player. Intelligence became to him just another game of chess. He was interested only when he was pitted against a really first-class player. In the end he grew dissatisfied. The games were too easy – so he took on his own side. I think he was very happy as long as the game lasted.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He’s dead now.’

  Hargreaves thought again of Melmotte. People talked of courage as a primary virtue. What of the courage of a known swindler and bankrupt taking his place in the dining-room of the House of Commons? Is courage a justification? Is courage in whatever cause a virtue? He said, ‘We are satisfied that Davis was the leak we had to close.’

  ‘A fortunate death?’

  ‘Cirrhosis of the liver.’

  ‘I told you Carson died of pneumonia.’

  ‘Castle, I happen to know, doesn’t play chess.’

  ‘There are other motives too. Love of money.’

  ‘That certainly doesn’t apply to Castle.’

  ‘He loves his wife,’ Muller said, ‘and his child.’

  ‘What of that?’

  ‘They are both black,’ Muller replied with simplicity, looking across the room at the photograph of the Kru chief upon the wall as though, thought Hargreaves, even I am not beyond his suspicion, which, like some searchlight on the Cape, swept the unfriendly seas beyond in search of enemy vessels.

  Muller said, ‘I hope to God you are right and the leak really was Davis. I don’t believe it was.’

  Hargreaves watched Muller drive away through the park in his black Mercedes. The lights slowed down and became stationary; he must have reached the lodge, where since the Irish bombings began, a man from the Special Branch had been stationed. The park seemed no longer to be an extension of the African bush – it was a small parcel of the Home Counties which had never been home to Hargreaves. It was nearly midnight. He went upstairs to his dressing-room, but he didn’t take off his clothes further than his shirt. He wrapped a towel round his neck and began to shave. He had shaved before dinner and it wasn’t a necessary act, but he could always think more clearly when he shaved. He tried to recall exactly the reasons Muller had given for suspecting Castle – his relations with Carson – those meant nothing. A black wife and child – Hargreaves remembered with sadness and a sense of loss the black mistress whom he had known many years ago before his marriage. She had died of blackwater fever and when she died he had felt as though a great part of his love for Africa had gone to the grave with her. Muller had spoken of intuition – ‘I can’t prove anything, but I have an intuition . . .’ Hargreaves was the last man to laugh at intuition. In Africa he had lived with intuition, he was accustomed to choose his boys by intuition – not by the tattered notebooks they carried with illegible references. Once his life had been saved by an intuition.