Absolute Friends (20 page)

She goes quiet a moment, then gives her stomach a friendly pat. "Well, that's all right, isn't it? As long as he doesn't decide to put in an early appearance."

"If she does, I'll be here before her," Mundy vows.

Which is a game they play. She says it's a boy, he says it's a girl. Sometimes, to vary the joke, they change roles.

7

THE PSYCHEDELIC BUS has lumbered out of view, the troupe's last tragic howls of farewell have merged into the din of traffic. Mundy and Amory are seated opposite each other in a soundproofed safe room across the corridor from Amory's bare office, a tape recorder turns on the cork table between them. Even as we speak, says Amory, the crock of gold is winging its way to London. The analysts can't wait to get their thieving hands on it. Meanwhile here's what they want from us by yesterday, says Amory: a self-portrait warts and all of Edward; a blow-by-blow account of the Sasha-Mundy love affair from first blush to Weimar; and a description of the man who calls himself Professor Wolfgang, omitting no detail however slight.

Dog tired and overstimulated at once, Mundy answers Amory's questions brilliantly for an hour, then raggedly for another, before he starts to doze off for want of oxygen in the womb. Back in the reception room where he waits for Amory to dispose of the tape, he falls fast asleep, barely wakes for the short car journey to wherever Amory is taking him, and comes round to discover that he is shaved and showered and holding a whiskey and soda in his hand, and standing at the lace-curtained window of a pleasant flat overlooking the Kleistpark, with sturdy representatives of Berlin's petit bourgeoisie, including many unawakened mothers with prams, strolling in the pleasant evening sunlight fifty feet below him. If he is an object of curiosity to Amory, he is a mystery to himself. The stress, the realization of what he has unleashed, and a bunch of accumulated anxieties that he has put aside till now, have left him drained and bewildered.

"So maybe it's time you called your Kate while I powder my nose," Amory suggests, with the smile that never leaves his face.

To which Mundy says, oh, well, yes, that's what's bothering him actually: Kate, and the problem of what exactly to tell her.

"Not a problem at all," Amory corrects him cheerfully. "Your conversation will be monitored by at least six intelligence services, so all you can do is play it down the middle."

"What middle?"

"You're being kept here by the British Council, reasons to follow. 'Held up, darling--trouble at mill--my lords and masters are begging me to stay on till it's sorted. _Tschüss,__ Edward.' She's a professional girl. She'll understand."

"Where am I staying?"

"Here. Tell her it's a bachelor officers' hostel, that'll put her mind at rest. Same number as on the phone. Don't gild the lily too much and she'll believe you."

And she does. While Amory powders his nose, Kate believes Mundy with a conviction that accuses him almost beyond bearing. Yet minutes later he's back in Amory's car swapping jokes with Cliff the sergeant at the wheel, and the next thing he knows he's sitting in this new fish place in the Grunewald that a lot of people don't know about yet, thank God, because Berlin's so bloody incestuous these days. And over dinner, which they enjoy head to head in a timbered cubicle darkened for lovers and conveniently bombarded with live music and hubbub, Mundy again magically recovers his spirits--so much so that, when Amory playfully asks him whether, as a confirmed lefty, he regrets forsaking the sanctuary of Communist Europe for the decadence of the capitalist West, Mundy startles not just Amory but himself with a full-throated condemnation of Soviet communism and all its works.

And perhaps he really feels all this, or perhaps he's having a last shudder as he looks back with horror on his foolhardiness. Either way, Amory is not about to let the moment pass.

"If you want it straight, Edward, you're a born One of Us," he says. "Onward and upward is the cry. So thanks and welcome aboard. Cheers."

And it is from there--Mundy is never afterwards sure why, but it seems at the time perfectly natural--that the conversation shifts to the strictly academic question of what a chap should or shouldn't reasonably tell his wife in _a situation like this,__ without anybody precisely identifying what situation they are referring to. And Amory's point, which he offers tentatively but on the strength of a certain amount of experience, Edward, is that burdening people one loves with information they don't need and can't do anything about is as hurtful--and self-indulgent--as not telling them anything at all, and arguably more so. But that's just Amory's personal view, and Edward may feel differently.

For example, if the person one is proposing to confide in is pregnant, Amory goes on lightly.

Or if they're naturally warmhearted and trusting, and haven't got the checks and balances to keep something as big as this bottled up inside them.

Or if they're someone of high principle, say, who might have problems reconciling their political beliefs with--well, certain activities directed against a certain enemy or ideology which they don't see in the same light as we do.

In short if they're Kate and have enough to worry about already, what with a school department to run, and a house to run, and a husband to take care of, and a first baby on the near horizon, and a bunch of Trotskyists to flush out of the St. Pancras Labor Party--because somewhere along the line, Mundy must have told Amory about them too.

The Kleistpark flat is not Amory's. And it's not a bachelor officers' hostel either. It's a place he keeps for what he calls the odd chum who's floating through town and doesn't necessarily want to announce his presence. And anyway Amory needs to get back to the office for an hour in case anything new has come in from London.

But Cliff here will be in the bedroom next to you if you need anything.

And Cliff always knows how to find me.

And if you're thinking of an early walk, which you tell me you're a devil for, I'm game. Meanwhile, get some sleep. And well done again.

I'll try.

Mundy lies wide awake--as awake as last night in Weimar--counting off the quarters and halves of West Berlin's oversynchronized clocks.

Cut and run, he tells himself. You don't need this stuff. You've got Kate, the baby, the job, the house. You're not a Taos layabout anymore, you've cleared the pit. You're Ted Mundy, cultural diplomat and father-to-be. Grab your bag, sneak downstairs without waking Cliff and hightail it to the airport.

But while he gives himself this advice he remembers, and elsewhere in his head was remembering all along, that Nick Amory has his passport--only a formality, Edward, you'll get it back in the morning.

And he also knows that, in handing over the passport, he was entirely alive to the significance of what he was doing, and so was Amory.

He was joining. A Born One of Us was signing up to His Own.

He wasn't submitting, he wasn't being press-ganged. He was saying, "I'm in," just as he was saying it over dinner when he was winging off about the awfulness of Communist life. He was offering himself as a playing member of Amory's team because that was how he saw himself in the flush of his success, and how Amory saw him too.

So just remind me, please, how I got into this mess in the first place. It wasn't Amory who recruited me, it was Sasha. Amory didn't dump a sackful of secrets in my lap and say, "Here, take this lot and give it to the British Secret Service."

Sasha did.

So am I doing this for Mother England, or for a self-flagellating anti-Lutheran on the run from God?

Answer: I'm not bloody well doing it at all. I'm jumping ship.

All right, Sasha's my friend. Not a friend I necessarily like, but a friend, a loyal one, and an old one, a friend who needs my protection. And, God knows, has had it. A friend who also happens to be a chaos addict, waging a fanatical one-man war against all forms of established order.

And now he's found himself another temple to pull down, so good luck to him. But he's not pulling me down with it.

Or Kate.

Or the baby.

Or the house. Or the job.

And that's what I'm going to be telling Amory in a couple of hours' time when I take him up on that early walk he was talking about. "Nick," I'll be saying. "You're a fine professional, I respect London, and yes, I totally agree, Soviet-style communism is a legitimate enemy and I wish you every success in your efforts to frustrate it. So if you'd kindly let me have my passport back and maybe rustle me up a car to the airport, you can make your own arrangements with Sasha and we'll shake hands and call it a day."

But there is no early walk. There is Nick Amory hovering over him in the gray light of dawn, telling him to get dressed _now.__

"Why? Where are we going?"

"Home. The shortest route."

"Why?"

"The analysts have given you an alpha double plus."

"What the hell's that?"

"Best there is. Vital to national security. Your chum must have been hamstering the stuff for years. They're asking whether you'd prefer a VC or a peerage."

To be conveyed.

To take no decisions.

To sit back and be a spectator to your own life. That's spying too, apparently.

Tempelhof airport, yet again, by early-morning Jeep, a different sergeant.

Goodbye, Cliff.

And goodbye to you, Ted, and good luck.

The RAF plane waiting, propellers turning, Amory the only other passenger. Hold tight, we're already taking off. The pilots don't look at us. Trained not to. Land at Northolt airport, step out of the plane straight into a green van with extended wing mirrors and two blackened windows in the rear doors.

She'll be walking to school by now. She'll be about halfway up the concrete path between the Hampstead lido and the mansion flats. The big kids are chatting her up, the little ones are swinging on her fingers, and she thinks I'm talking Morris dancing with the British Council in Berlin.

Through the van's rear windows Mundy begins to recognize the road to Oxford. He's got an alpha double plus so they're giving him a degree. Ilse is in her anchorite's horse trailer telling him he's a complete infant for sex. They enter rolling hills and pass between brick gateposts capped by sandstone griffins. The daylight switches on and off as beech trees close over them. The van stops, but only for the driver to be waved forward. No beech trees now, but paddocks with white fences, a cricket pavilion and a round pond. The van stops again, the rear doors fly open, a tight-lipped steward in a white jacket and sneakers commandeers Mundy's knapsack and ushers him past a cluster of parked cars, along a flagstoned passage, up a back staircase to a servants' corridor.

"My guest gets the bridal suite, Staff," Amory tells the steward.

"Very good, sir. I'll send the bride up directly."

The bridal suite has a single narrow bed, a washbasin and jug, and a very small window looking onto an ivy-covered wall. In his last year as a school prefect, Mundy had a room just like it. More cars are arriving. He hears muted voices and footsteps on gravel. The greatest change in his life is about to begin. Behind closed doors, over four days of unrecorded time, the Born One of Us meets the family.

They are not the family he expected but that's nothing new to him.

No grim-faced men with secretive glances measure him for the drop. No super-graduettes in twinsets and pearls tie him in knots with courtroom-style questions. They're excited to meet him, proud, impressed by him, they want to shake his hand, and do. Decent, ordinary, jolly folk, at first reading--no names, but good faces, sensible shoes and scuffed brown briefcases that look anything but official, the womenfolk ranging from the slightly scatty--now where on _earth__ did I put my purse?--to the quiet motherly type with dreamy wet eyes who listens to him dotingly for hours on end before drifting in with a question about something he's totally forgotten until she puts her finger on it.

As to the male of the species--well, they too come in all shapes and sizes, but they're a genus nonetheless. Midlife academics, you might say. Archaeologists working happily together on the same site. Medics, with that benign but purposeful detachment that says we go for the disease and not the man. Bony young men with bad suits and faraway eyes--Mundy imagines them as descendants of the classic school of Arabian explorer, crossing the Empty Quarter by camel with nothing but the stars, a bottle of lemonade and a bar of fruit-and-nut.

So what is it, he wonders, that paints them with a single brush, other than their flattering obsession with the person of Ted Mundy? It's the unexpected belly laughs, the bounce, the shared enthusiasms, the slightly faster tongue and eye. It's the nearly hidden spark of larceny. It's the belonging together.

Backwards over his past they go, first with Amory's debriefing in Berlin to guide them, then striking off in their own directions. All his personal history stretched out before him like a cadaver and, in the most tactful British way, dissected. But Mundy doesn't mind this. He's part of it, an alpha double plus player capped for England.

Connections about his life he's never made before, dug out of the entrails of his memory and held up for him to inspect and comment on: _Gosh, well, I suppose that's true,__ or _Come to think of it yes, bang on, in fact.__ And Amory always at his side, ready to catch him if he falls, and iron out any little misunderstandings in case our Edward here gets stroppy, which he sometimes does, because not everything that has to be asked makes comfortable fare. They never pretended it would, quite the contrary. That's how families are.

"Nobody who's done something as important as you have can survive this sort of mauling without a blush or two, Ted," a motherly one warns him kindly.

"Agreed. Absolutely. Fire away, ma'am."

Is she a shrink? How would he know? He wants to call her Flora or Betty or whatever her name would be if he knew it, but all he can think of in his good-spirited way is ma'am like the Queen, which raises a ripple of friendly laughter round the mahogany table.

So that's the first day, and by the time it's over except for a few last stragglers in the bar, they have celebrated the version of Ted Mundy that he afterwards thinks of as Mundy One: hero of Weimar, the Major's loyal only son, former captain of cricket at his public school, doughty second-row rugby forward who went a bit pink in his undergraduate days--and what good man doesn't?--but now the bugle's sounded he's rallied to the family regiment with the best of 'em.