The Human Factor

  3

  Nonetheless she felt a little let down when she identified him where he waited for her at the end of a long glassy glittering room at Brummell’s. He wasn’t, after all, a Wimpole Street specialist: he was more like an old-fashioned family doctor with his silver-rimmed spectacles and a small rounded paunch which seemed to prop itself on the edge of the table when he rose to greet her. He was holding an outsize menu in his hand in place of a prescription. He said, ‘I’m so glad you had the courage to come here.’

  ‘Why courage?’

  ‘Well, this is one of the places the Irish like to bomb. They’ve thrown a small one already, but unlike the blitz their bombs are quite liable to hit the same place twice.’ He gave her a menu to read: a whole page was given up she saw to what were called Starters. The whole menu, which bore the title Bill of Fare above a portrait, seemed almost as long as Mrs Castle’s local telephone directory. Doctor Percival said helpfully, ‘I’d advise you against the smoked trout – it’s always a bit dry here.’

  ‘I haven’t got much appetite.’

  ‘Let’s wake it up, then, while we consider matters. A glass of sherry?’

  ‘I’d rather have a whisky if you don’t mind.’ When asked to choose, she said, ‘J. & B.’

  ‘You order for me,’ she implored Doctor Percival. The sooner all these preliminaries were over, the sooner she would have the news she waited for with a hunger she hadn’t got for food. While he made his decision she looked around her. There was a dubious and glossy portrait on the wall labelled George Bryan Brummell – it was the same portrait as on the menu – and the furnishing was in impeccable and tiring good taste – you felt no possible expense had been spared and no criticism would be sanctioned: the few customers were all men and they all looked alike as though they had come out of the chorus of an old-fashioned musical comedy: black hair, neither too long nor too short, dark suits and waistcoats. Their tables were set discreetly apart and the two tables nearest to Doctor Percival’s were empty – she wondered whether this was by design or chance. She noticed for the first time how all the windows were wired.

  ‘In a place like this,’ Doctor Percival said, ‘It’s best to go English and I would suggest the Lancashire hot pot.’

  ‘Anything you say.’ But for a long time he said nothing except some words to the waiter about the wine. At last he turned his attention and his silver-rimmed glasses towards her with a long sigh, ‘Well, the hard work’s done. It’s up to them now,’ and he took a sip of his sherry. ‘You must have been having a very anxious time, Mrs Castle.’ He put out a hand and touched her arm as though he really were her family doctor.

  ‘Anxious?’

  ‘Not knowing from day to day . . .’

  ‘If you mean Maurice . . .’

  ‘We were all very fond of Maurice.’

  ‘You speak as though he were dead. In the past tense.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. Of course we are still fond of him – but he’s taken a different road and I’m afraid a very dangerous one. We all hope you won’t get involved.’

  ‘How can I? We’re separated.’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. It was the obvious thing to do. It would have been a little conspicuous to have gone away together. I don’t think Immigration would have been quite so foolish as all that. You are a very attractive woman and then your colour . . .’ He said, ‘Of course we know he hasn’t telephoned you at home, but there are so many ways of sending messages – a public telephone box, an intermediary – we couldn’t monitor all his friends, even if we knew them all.’ He pushed aside his sherry and made room for the hot pot. She began to feel more at ease now that the subject was laid plainly there on the table before them – like the hot pot. She said, ‘You think I’m a traitor too?’

  ‘Oh, in the firm, you know, we don’t use a word like traitor. That’s for the newspapers. You are African – I don’t say South African – and so is your child. Maurice must have been a good deal influenced by that. Let’s say – he chose a different loyalty.’ He took a taste of the hot pot. ‘Be careful.’

  ‘Careful?’

  ‘I mean the carrots are very hot.’ If this was really an interrogation it was a very different method to that practised by the Security Police in Johannesburg or Pretoria. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘what do you intend to do – when he does communicate?’

  She gave up caution. As long as she was cautious she would learn nothing. She said, ‘I shall do what he tells me to do.’

  Doctor Percival said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve said that. It means we can be frank with each other. Of course we know, and I expect you know, that he’s arrived safely in Moscow.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure about God, but you can certainly thank the KGB. (One mustn’t be dogmatic – they may be on the same side, of course.) I imagine that sooner or later he’ll ask you to join him there.’

  ‘And I’ll go.’

  ‘With your child?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Doctor Percival plunged again into his hot pot. He was obviously a man who enjoyed his food. She became more reckless in her relief at knowing that Maurice was safe. She said, ‘You can’t stop me going.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so sure of that. You know, at the office we have quite a file on you. You were very friendly in South Africa with a man called Carson. A Communist agent.’

  ‘Of course I was. I was helping Maurice – for your service, though I didn’t know it then. He told me it was for a book on apartheid he was writing.’

  ‘And Maurice perhaps was even then helping Carson. And Maurice is now in Moscow. It’s not strictly speaking our business, of course, but MI5 might well feel you ought to be investigated – in depth. If you’ll let an old man advise you – an old man who was a friend of Maurice . . .’

  A memory flashed into her mind of a shambling figure in a teddy-bear coat playing hide-and-seek with Sam among the wintry trees. ‘And of Davis,’ she said, ‘you were a friend of Davis too, weren’t you?’

  A spoonful of gravy was stopped on the way to Doctor Percival’s mouth.

  ‘Yes. Poor Davis. It was a sad death for a man still young.’

  ‘I don’t drink port,’ Sarah said.

  ‘My dear girl, how irrelevant can you be? Let’s wait to decide about port until we get to the cheese – they have excellent Wensleydale. All I was going to say was do be reasonable. Stay quietly in the country with your mother-in-law and your child . . .’

  ‘Maurice’s child.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What do you mean, perhaps?’

  ‘You’ve met this man Cornelius Muller, a rather unsympathetic type from BOSS. And what a name! He’s under the impression that the real father – my dear, you must forgive a little plain speaking – I don’t want you to make the sort of mistake Maurice has made –’

  ‘You aren’t being very plain.’

  ‘Muller believes that the father was one of your own people.’

  ‘Oh, I know the one he means – even if it was true he’s dead.’

  ‘He isn’t dead.’

  ‘Of course he’s dead. He was killed in a riot.’

  ‘Did you see his body?’

  ‘No, but . . .’

  ‘Muller says he’s safely under lock and key. He’s a lifer – so Muller says.’

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Muller says this fellow is prepared to claim paternity.’

  ‘Muller’s lying.’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s quite possible. The man may well be a stooge. I haven’t been into the legal aspects yet myself, but I doubt if he could prove anything in our courts. Is the child on your passport?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Has he a passport?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you’d have to apply for a passport to take him out of this country. That means a lot of bureaucratic rigmarole. The passport people can sometimes be very, very slow.’

  ‘What bastards you are. You kill
ed Carson. You killed Davis. And now. . .’

  ‘Carson died of pneumonia. Poor Davis – that was cirrhosis.’

  ‘Muller says it was pneumonia. You say it was cirrhosis, and now you are threatening me and Sam.’

  ‘Not threatening, my dear, advising.’

  ‘Your advice . . .’

  She had to break off. The waiter had come to clear their plates. Doctor Percival’s was clean enough, but most of her portion had remained uneaten.

  ‘What about an old English apple pie with cloves and a bit of cheese?’ Doctor Percival asked, leaning seductively forward and speaking in a low voice as though he were naming the price he was prepared to pay for certain favours.

  ‘No. Nothing. I don’t want any more.’

  ‘Oh dear, the bill then,’ Doctor Percival told the waiter with disappointment, and when the waiter had gone he reproached her, ‘Mrs Castle, you mustn’t get angry. There’s nothing personal in all this. If you get angry you are sure to make the wrong decision. It’s just an affair of boxes,’ he began to elaborate, and then broke off as though for once he was finding that metaphor inapplicable.

  ‘Sam is my child and I shall take him wherever I want. To Moscow, to Timbuctoo, to . . .’

  ‘You can’t take Sam until he has a passport, and I’m anxious to keep MI5 from taking any preventive action against you. If they learned you were applying for a passport . . . and they would learn . . .’

  She walked out, she walked out on everything, leaving Doctor Percival to wait behind for the bill. If she had stayed a moment longer she wasn’t sure that she could have trusted herself with the knife which remained by her plate for the cheese. She had once seen a white man just as well fed as Doctor Percival stabbed in a public garden in Johannesburg. It had looked such a very easy thing to do. From the door she looked back at him. The wire grille over the window behind made him appear to be sitting at a desk in a police station. Obviously he had followed her with his eyes, and now he raised an index finger and shook it gently to and fro in her direction. It could be taken for an admonition or a warning. She didn’t care which.

  CHAPTER II

  1

  FROM the window on the twelfth floor of the great grey building Castle could see the red star over the University. There was a certain beauty in the view as there is in all cities at night. Only the daylight was drab. They had made it clear to him, particularly Ivan who had met his plane in Prague and accompanied him to a debriefing in some place near Irkutsk with an unpronounceable name, that he was extraordinarily lucky in his apartment. It had belonged, both rooms of it with a kitchen and a private shower, to a comrade recently dead who had nearly succeeded before his death in furnishing it completely. An empty apartment as a rule contained only a radiator – everything else even to the toilet had to be bought. That was not easy and wasted a great deal of time and energy. Castle wondered sometimes if that was why the comrade had died, worn out by his long hunt for the green wicker armchair, the brown sofa hard as a board, without cushions, the table which looked as though it had been stained a nearly even colour by the application of gravy. The television set, the latest black and white model, was a gift of the government. Ivan had carefully explained that when they first visited the apartment. In his manner he hinted his personal doubt whether it had been truly earned. Ivan seemed to Castle no more likeable here than he had been in London. Perhaps he resented his recall and blamed it on Castle.

  The most valuable object in the apartment seemed to be the telephone. It was covered with dust and disconnected, but all the same it had a symbolic value. One day, perhaps soon, it could be put to use. He would speak through it to Sarah – to hear her voice meant everything to him, whatever comedy they would have to play for the listeners, and there certainly would be listeners. To hear her would make the long wait bearable. Once he broached the matter to Ivan. He had noticed Ivan preferred to talk out of doors even on the coldest day, and as it was Ivan’s job to show him around the city he took an opportunity outside the great GUM department store (a place where he felt almost at home because it reminded him of photographs he had seen of the Crystal Palace). He asked, ‘Is it possible, do you think, to have my telephone connected?’ They had gone to GUM to find Castle a fur-lined overcoat – the temperature was twenty-three degrees.

  ‘I’ll ask,’ Ivan said, ‘but for the moment I suppose they want to keep you under wrappers.’

  ‘Is that a long process?’

  ‘It was in the case of Bellamy, but you’re not such an important case. We can’t get much publicity out of you.’

  ‘Who’s Bellamy?’

  ‘You must remember Bellamy. A most important man in your British Council. In West Berlin. That was always a cover, wasn’t it, like the Peace Corps?’

  Castle didn’t bother to deny it – it was none of his business.

  ‘Oh yes, I think I remember now.’ It had happened at the time of his greatest anxiety, while he waited for news of Sarah in Lourenço Marques, and he couldn’t recall the details of Bellamy’s defection. Why did one defect from the British Council and what value or harm would such a defection have to anyone? He asked, ‘Is he still alive?’ It all seemed such a long time ago.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He lives on our gratitude.’ Ivan added, ‘As you do. Oh, we invented a job for him. He advises our publications division. He has a dacha in the country. It’s a better life than he would have had at home with a pension. I suppose they will do the same for you.’

  ‘Reading books in a dacha in the country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are there many of us –I mean living like that on your gratitude?’

  ‘I know at least six. There was Cruickshank and Bates – you’ll remember them – they were from your service. You’ll run into them I expect in the Aragvi, our Georgian restaurant – they say the wine’s good there – I can’t afford it – and you will see them at the Bolshoi, when they take the wrappers off.’

  They passed the Lenin Library – ‘You’ll find them there too.’ He added with venom, ‘Reading the English papers.’

  Ivan had found him a large stout middle-aged woman as a daily who would also help him to learn a little Russian. She gave a Russian name to everything in the flat, pointing a blunt finger at everything in turn, and she was very fussy about pronunciation. Although she was several years younger than Castle she treated him as though he were a child, with an admonitory sternness which slowly melted into a sort of maternal affection as he became more house-trained. When Ivan was otherwise occupied she would enlarge the scope of her lessons, taking him with her in search of food at the Central Market and down into the Metro. (She wrote figures on a scrap of paper to explain the prices and the fares.) After a while she began to show him photographs of her family – her husband a young man in uniform, taken somewhere in a public park with a cardboard outline of the Kremlin behind his head. He wore his uniform in an untidy way (you could see he wasn’t used to it), and he smiled at the camera with a look of great tenderness – perhaps she had been standing behind the photographer. He had been killed, she conveyed to him, at Stalingrad. In return he produced for her a snapshot of Sarah and Sam which he hadn’t confessed to Mr Halliday that he had secreted in his shoe. She showed surprise that they were black, and for a little while afterwards her manner to him seemed more distant – she was not so much shocked as lost, he had broken her sense of order. In that she resembled his mother. After a few days all was well again, but during those few he felt an exile inside his exile and his longing for Sarah was intensified.

  He had been in Moscow now for two weeks, and he had bought with the money Ivan had given him a few extras for the flat. He had even found school editions in English of Shakespeare’s plays, two novels of Dickens, Oliver Twist and Hard Times, Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe. The snow was ankle deep in the side streets and he had less and less inclination to go sightseeing with Ivan or even on an educational tour with Anna ??
? she was called Anna. In the evening he would warm some soup and sit huddled near the radiator, with the dusty disconnected telephone at his elbow, and read Robinson Crusoe. Sometimes he could hear Crusoe speaking, as though on a tape recorder, with his own voice: ‘I drew up the state of my affairs in writing; not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few heirs, as to deliver my thoughts from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my mind.’

  Crusoe divided the comforts and miseries of his situation into Good and Evil and under the heading Evil he wrote: ‘I have no soul to speak to, or relieve me.’ Under the opposing Good he counted ‘so many necessary things’ which he had obtained from the wreck ‘as will either supply my wants, or enable me to supply myself even as long as I live.’ Well, he had the green wicker armchair, the gravy-stained table, the uncomfortable sofa, and the radiator which warmed him now. They would have been sufficient if Sarah had been there – she was used to far worse conditions and he remembered some of the grim rooms in which they had been forced to meet and make love in dubious hotels without a colour bar in the poorer quarters of Johannesburg. He remembered one room in particular without furniture of any kind where they had been happy enough on the floor. Next day when Ivan made his snide references to ‘gratitude’ he broke furiously out: ‘You call this gratitude.’

  ‘Not so many people who live alone possess a kitchen and shower all to themselves . . . and two rooms.’

  ‘I’m not complaining of that. But they promised me I wouldn’t be alone. They promised me that my wife and child would follow.’

  The intensity of his anger disquieted Ivan. Ivan said, ‘It takes time.’

  ‘I don’t even have any work. I’m a man on the dole. Is that your bloody socialism?’