‘I got the impression that Captain Segura considered you were causing a lot of trouble here. I think if you refused to go home you might find yourself in serious trouble with the authorities, and under the circumstances of course I could do nothing to help you. Nothing at all. Captain Segura even suspects you of having forged some kind of document which he says you claim to have found in his possession. The whole subject is distasteful to me, Wormold. I can’t tell you how distasteful it is. The correct sources for information abroad are the embassies. We have our attachés for that purpose. This so-called secret information is a trouble to every ambassador.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I don’t know whether you’ve heard – it’s been kept out of the papers – but an Englishman was shot the night before last. Captain Segura hinted that he was not unconnected with you.’
‘I met him once at lunch, sir.’
‘You had better go home, Wormold, on the first plane you can manage – the sooner the better for me – and discuss it with your people – whoever they are.’
‘Yes sir.’
3
The K.L.M. plane was due to take off at three-thirty in the morning for Amsterdam by way of Montreal. Wormold had no desire to travel to Kingston, where Hawthorne might have instructions to meet him. The office had been closed with a final cable and Rudy and his suitcase were routed to Jamaica. The code-books were burnt with the help of the celluloid sheets. Beatrice was to go with Rudy. Lopez was left in charge of the vacuum cleaners. All the personal possessions he valued Wormold got into one crate, which he arranged to send by sea. The horse was sold – to Captain Segura.
Beatrice helped him pack. The last object in the crate was the statue of St Seraphina.
‘Milly must be very unhappy,’ Beatrice said.
‘She’s wonderfully resigned. She says like Sir Humphrey Gilbert that God is just as close to her in England as in Cuba.’
‘It wasn’t quite what Gilbert said.’
There was a pile of unsecret rubbish left to be burnt.
Beatrice said, ‘What a lot of photographs you had tucked away – of her.’
‘I used to feel it was like killing someone to tear up a photograph. Of course I know now that it’s quite different.’
‘What’s this red box?’
‘She gave me some cuff-links once. They were stolen, but I kept the box. I don’t know why. In a way I’m glad to see all this stuff go.’
‘The end of a life.’
‘Of two lives.’
‘What’s this?’
‘An old programme.’
‘Not so old. The Tropicana. May I keep it?’
‘You are too young to keep things,’ Wormold said. ‘They accumulate too much. Soon you find you have nowhere left to live among the junk-boxes.’
‘I’ll risk it. That was a wonderful evening.’
Milly and Wormold saw her off at the airport. Rudy disappeared unobtrusively following the man with the enormous suitcase. It was a hot afternoon and people stood around drinking daiquiries. Even since Captain Segura’s proposal of marriage Milly’s duenna had disappeared, but after her disappearance the child, whom he had hoped to see again, who had set fire to Thomas Earl Parkman, junior, had not returned. It was as though Milly had outgrown both characters simultaneously. She said with grown-up tact, ‘I want to find some magazines for Beatrice,’ and busied herself at a bookstall with her back turned.
‘I’m sorry,’ Wormold said. ‘I’ll tell them when I get back that you know nothing. I wonder where you’ll be sent next.’
‘The Persian Gulf perhaps. Basra.’
‘Why the Persian Gulf?’
‘It’s their idea of purgatory. Regeneration through sweat and tears. Do Phastkleaners have an agency at Basra?’
‘I’m afraid Phastkleaners won’t keep me on.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I’ve got enough, thanks to poor Raul, for Milly’s year in Switzerland. After that I don’t know.’
‘You could open one of those practical joke shops – you know, the bloodstained thumb and the spilt ink and the fly on the lump of sugar. How ghastly goings-away are. Please don’t wait any longer.’
‘Shall I see you again?’
‘I’ll try not to go to Basra. I’ll try to stay in the typists’ pool with Angelica and Ethel and Miss Jenkinson. When I’m lucky I shall be off at six and we could meet at the Corner House for a cheap snack and go to the movies. It’s one of those ghastly lives, isn’t it, like UNESCO and modern writers in conference? It’s been fun here with you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now go away.’
He went to the magazine stall and found Milly. ‘We’re off,’ he said.
‘But, Beatrice – she hasn’t got her magazines.’
‘She doesn’t want them.’
‘I didn’t say good-bye.’
‘Too late. She’s passed the emigration now. You’ll see her in London. Perhaps.’
4
It was as if they spent all their remaining time in airports. Now it was the K.L.M. flight and it was three in the morning and the sky was pink with the reflection of neon-lighted stands and landing-flares, and it was Captain Segura who was doing the ‘seeing off’. He tried to make the official occasion seem as private as possible, but it was still a little like a deportation. Segura said reproachfully, ‘You drove me to this.’
‘Your methods are gentler than Carter’s or Dr Braun’s. What are you doing about Dr Braun?’
‘He finds it necessary to return to Switzerland on a matter to do with his precision-instruments.’
‘With a passage booked on to Moscow?’
‘Not necessarily. Perhaps Bonn. Or Washington. Or even Bucharest. I don’t know. Whoever they are they are pleased, I believe, with your drawings.’
‘Drawings?’
‘Of the constructions in Oriente. He will also take the credit for getting rid of a dangerous agent.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. Cuba will be a little quieter without you both, but I shall miss Milly.’
‘Milly would never have married you, Segura. She doesn’t really like cigarette-cases made of human skin.’
‘Did you ever hear whose skin?’
‘No.’
‘A police-officer who tortured my father to death. You see, he was a poor man. He belonged to the torturable class.’
Milly joined them, carrying Time, Life, Paris-Match and Quick. It was nearly 3.15 and there was a band of grey in the sky over the flare-path where the false dawn had begun. The pilots moved out to the plane and the air-hostesses followed. He knew the three of them by sight; they had sat with Beatrice at the Tropicana weeks ago. A loudspeaker announced in English and Spanish the departure of flight 396 to Montreal and Amsterdam.
‘I have a present for each of you,’ Segura said. He gave them two little packets. They opened them while the plane wheeled over Havana; the chain of lights along the marine parade swung out of sight and the sea fell like a curtain on all that past. In Wormold’s packet was a miniature bottle of Grant’s Standfast, and a bullet which had been fired from a police-gun. In Milly’s was a small silver horseshoe inscribed with her initials.
‘Why the bullet?’ Milly asked.
‘Oh, a joke in rather doubtful taste. All the same, he wasn’t a bad chap,’ Wormold said.
‘But not right for a husband,’ the grown-up Milly replied.
EPILOGUE IN LONDON
1
They had looked at him curiously when he gave his name, and then they had put him into a lift and taken him, a little to his surprise, down and not up. Now he sat in a long basement-corridor watching a red light over a door; when it turned green, they had told him, he could go in, but not before. People who paid no attention to the light went in and went out; some of them carried papers and some of them brief-cases, and one was in uniform, a colonel. Nobody looked at him; he felt that he embarrassed them. They ignored him as one ignores a malformed man. But p
resumably it was not his limp.
Hawthorne came down the passage from the lift. He looked rumpled as though he had slept in his clothes; perhaps he had been on an all-night plane from Jamaica. He too would have ignored Wormold if Wormold had not spoken.
‘Hullo, Hawthorne.’
‘Oh, you, Wormold.’
‘Did Beatrice arrive safely?’
‘Yes. Naturally.’
‘Where is she, Hawthorne?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘What’s happening here? It looks like a court-martial.’
‘It is a court-martial,’ Hawthorne said frostily and went into the room with the light. The clock stood at 11.25. He had been summoned for eleven.
He wondered whether there was anything they could do to him beyond sacking him, which presumably they had already done. That was probably what they were trying to decide in there. They could hardly charge him under the Official Secrets Act. He had invented secrets, he hadn’t given them away. Presumably they could make it difficult for him if he tried to find a job abroad, and jobs at home were not easy to come by at his age, but he had no intention of giving them back their money. That was for Milly; he felt now as though he had earned it in his capacity as a target for Carter’s poison and Carter’s bullet.
At 11.35 the Colonel came out; he looked hot and angry as he strode towards the lift. There goes a hanging judge, thought Wormold. A man in a tweed jacket emerged next. He had blue eyes very deeply sunk and he needed no uniform to mark him as a sailor. He looked at Wormold accidentally and looked quickly away again like a man of integrity. He called out ‘Wait for me, Colonel’ and went down the passage with a very slight roll as though he were back on a bridge in rough weather. Hawthorne came next, in conversation with a very young man, and then Wormold was suddenly breathless because the light was green and Beatrice was there.
‘You are to go in,’ she said.
‘What’s the verdict?’
‘I can’t speak to you now. Where are you staying?’
He told her.
‘I’ll come to you at six. If I can.’
‘Am I to be shot at dawn?’
‘Don’t worry. Go in now. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’
‘What’s happening to you?’
She said, ‘Jakarta.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The end of the world,’ she said. ‘Farther than Basra. Please go in.’
A man wearing a black monocle sat all by himself behind a desk. He said, ‘Sit down, Wormold.’
‘I prefer to stand.’
‘Oh, that’s a quotation, isn’t it?’
‘Quotation?’
‘I’m sure I remember hearing that in some play – amateur theatricals. A great many years ago, of course.’
Wormold sat down. He said, ‘You’ve no right to send her to Jakarta.’
‘Send who to Jakarta?’
‘Beatrice.’
‘Who’s she? Oh, that secretary of yours. How I hate these Christian names. You’ll have to see Miss Jenkinson about that. She’s in charge of the pool, not me, thank God.’
‘She had nothing to do with anything.’
‘Anything? Listen, Wormold. We’ve decided to shut down your post, and the question arises – what are we to do with you?’ It was coming now. Judging from the face of the Colonel who had been one of his judges, he felt that what came would not be pleasant. The Chief took out his black monocle and Wormold was surprised by the baby-blue eye. He said, ‘We thought the best thing for you under the circumstances would be to stay at home – on our training staff. Lecturing. How to run a station abroad. That kind of thing.’ He seemed to be swallowing something very disagreeable. He added, ‘Of course, as we always do when a man retires from a post abroad, we’ll recommend you for a decoration. I think in your case – you were not there very long – we can hardly suggest anything higher than an O.B.E.’
2
They greeted each other formally in a wilderness of sage-green chairs in an inexpensive hotel near Gower Street called the Pendennis. ‘I don’t think I can get you a drink,’ he said. ‘It’s Temperance.’
‘Why did you come here then?’
‘I used to come with my parents when I was a boy. I hadn’t realized about the temperance. It didn’t trouble me then. Beatrice, what’s happened? Are they mad?’
‘They are pretty mad with both of us. They thought I should have spotted what was going on. The Chief had summoned quite a meeting. His liaisons were all there, with the War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry. They had all your reports out in front of them and they went through them one by one. Communist infiltration in the Government – nobody minded a memo, to the Foreign Office cancelling that one. There were economic reports – they agreed they should be disavowed too. Only the Board of Trade would mind. Nobody got really touchy until the Service reports came up. There was one about disaffection in the navy and another about refuelling bases for submarines. The Commander said, “There must be some truth in these.”
‘I said, “Look at the source. He doesn’t exist.”
‘ “We shall look such fools,” the Commander said. “They are going to be as pleased as Punch in Naval Intelligence.”
‘But that was nothing to what they felt when the constructions were discussed.’
‘They’d really swallowed those drawings?’
‘It was then they turned on poor Henry.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him Henry.’
‘They said first of all that he had never reported you sold vacuum cleaners but that you were a kind of merchant-king. The Chief didn’t join in that hunt. He looked embarrassed for some reason, and anyway Henry – I mean Hawthorne – produced the file and all the details were on it. Of course that had never gone farther than Miss Jenkinson’s pool. Then they said he ought to have recognized the parts of a vacuum cleaner when he saw them. So he said he had, but there was no reason why the principle of a vacuum cleaner might not be applied to a weapon. After that they really howled for your blood, all except the Chief. There were moments when I thought he saw the funny side. He said to them, “What we have to do is quite simple. We have to notify the Admiralty, the War Office and the Air Ministry that all reports from Havana for the last six months are totally unreliable.” ’
‘But, Beatrice, they’ve offered me a job.’
‘That’s easily explained. The Commander crumbled first. Perhaps at sea one learns to take a long view. He said it would ruin the Service as far as the Admiralty was concerned. In future they would rely only on Naval Intelligence. Then the Colonel said, “If I tell the War Office, we may as well pack up.” It was quite an impasse until the Chief suggested that perhaps the simplest plan was to circulate one more report from 59200/5 – that the constructions had proved a failure and had been dismantled. There remained of course you. The Chief felt you had had valuable experience which should be kept for the use of the department rather than for the popular press. Too many people had written reminiscences lately of the Secret Service. Somebody mentioned the Official Secrets Act, but the Chief thought it might not cover your case. You should have seen them when they were balked of a victim. Of course they turned on me, but I wasn’t going to be cross-examined by that gang. So I spoke out.’
‘What on earth did you say?’
‘I told them even if I’d known I wouldn’t have stopped you. I said you were working for something important, not for someone’s notion of a global war that may never happen. That fool dressed up as a Colonel said something about “your country”. I said, “What do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the T.U.C. and British Railways and the Co-op? You probably think it’s your regiment if you ever stop to think, but we haven’t got a regiment – he and I.” They tried to interrupt and I said, “Oh, I forgot. There’s something greater than one’s country, is
n’t there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact, NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. And we don’t believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom. What kind of freedom? You want your careers.” I said I sympathized with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn’t anyway put their careers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary system.’
‘My God, you said all that?’
‘Yes. It was quite a speech.’
‘Did you believe it?’
‘Not all of it. They haven’t left us much to believe, have they? – even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.’
‘Any human being?’
She walked quickly away without answering among the sage-green chairs and he saw that she had talked herself to the edge of tears. Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution. He watched her move away across the dreary room and he thought: Darling is a manner of speech, fourteen years between us, Milly – one shouldn’t do anything to shock one’s child or to injure the faith one doesn’t share. She had reached the door before he joined her.
He said, ‘I’ve looked up Jakarta in all the reference-books. You can’t go there. It’s a terrible place.’