Legacy (16 page)

He stared again at his reflection and resisted the urge to draw the curtains. He was a sniper’s perfect target and since Belfast he had found it impossible to relax before uncurtained
windows at night, even though the darkness bred only rain in the Hambleden valley. And nowadays the poor could keep dry.

What had he really known of this man, that other blurred reflection who had sat at that desk? They had been open with each other, he used to think, up to a point, nothing too personal. Neither
had wanted that but both – he used to think – shared a tacit understanding that they could be if need be. That’s why little had been said. They discussed things, issues, nothing
nearer. It was comradely, based on the assumption that intimate sympathy was there, if called for. Well, it hadn’t been, it now appeared. If he had called for it he’d have got only its
simulacrum. No matter how helpful or restorative that might have been, it could not have been real because his father was deliberately, systematically, routinely betraying him, his mother, his
sister, almost everyone he knew, and all they stood for. And now he was beyond reach. Charles understood that the past was past, of course, but until it included death he’d had no feel for
its finality, for the cold absence of possibility.

He picked up the worn old penny by the inkstand. Britannia had faded around the edges, the head of George V was recognisable but his name worn away. The date – 1918, the year of his
father’s birth – could just be made out. His father had always carried this penny. Charles found it when emptying pockets by the still-warm body in the hospital, as recommended by the
nurses. He had meant to pocket it himself but it seemed too blatant an act of possession; now, he thought, he had been too nice. He tried to recall all he could of gathering his father’s
effects but could remember nothing that he might now recognise as contact arrangements, odd numbers, notes, concealment devices. Few agents trusted everything to memory. The more he considered such
practicalities, with the rain still beating against the windows and the room colder now that the heating had gone off, the more his emotions were dissolved and rendered down into a sub-strata of
granite. He would be cold, hard, unremitting, just – considerations of the office, MI5 or whatever notwithstanding – in his mission to establish the truth. As he let it take hold it
felt like a liberation. When he stood he pocketed the penny.

His mother was pleased by his Saturday morning offer of a pub lunch after a little gentle shopping in Marlow or Henley. After a breakfast walk, without taking one of his father’s sticks,
Charles tried to remember Gerry’s lectures on preparing for agent meetings. Have a clear aim, a reason for meeting, know what it is you want to come away with; if you can’t state your
aim in a sentence, don’t put the agent to the risk of meeting. Think of everything, every reaction, however unlikely, everything that could go wrong, however unwelcome. Have a response to
hand, no matter how trite or temporary, because it’s bound to be better than blankness or panic. There was an office superstition to the effect that if you anticipated a disaster it
wouldn’t happen, as in a sense it didn’t, because if you had a way of coping, things tended not to go seriously wrong. The corollary of this was that what scuppered you would be
something you hadn’t thought of – the sudden death of the agent in your hotel room, for example – and so you chased your tail in ever-decreasing circles trying to anticipate ever
less likely scenarios. Supposing it was you that died, Roger had asked, provoking laughter. It had happened, Gerry said. A case officer had died in a safe house in South Africa, during the meeting.
The lesson of that was not to carry anything that would compromise the agent.

Remember, too, that the agent was also a human being, who had a life outside spying. As should you, if you were sensible. Let the agent see that you were human. Be professional at all times, but
show that you have a soul, a heart, some humour. And, finally, having thought of all this well in advance, forget it. Don’t go to the meeting with your head bursting with all you intend to
say, since you might not then attend to what’s before you. Empty your head, relax, do something different. So long as you had thought of it, it would be there when you needed it, would come
when bidden.

So he thought as he prepared for lunch with his mother, treading the sodden footpath down and up through the woods, past the convent and back across the fields towards Frieth. Only by thinking
of it in this way could he contemplate asking the unaskable: did you know Dad was a spy? If you didn’t, how could you not have? Were you – are you – one too? What can you remember
about people he mentioned, trips he took, things he brought home from work? Did he ever mention Russia, or communism, or spies? Did he ever say anything about a nest-egg?

The office – and particularly MI5 – wouldn’t approve, of course. The investigation was at a very early stage and warning his mother, if she did turn out to be involved, would
be tantamount to sabotage. Even if she were it would probably not end in court, yet he was determined that, if she had anything to say, she should say it first to him. She was his mother. This, he
would argue in his defence, was why he had done it. But what really drove him, he knew, was a combustible mixture of shame and pride, the determination that it was his case, that he would fix it
– whatever that meant.

When he got back from his walk he suspended further thought by taking an axe to the beech logs in the woodshed until it was time to drive to Marlow. The town was busy and after minor household
shopping his mother toured the several small, expensive ladies’ dress shops. She was always saying how very good they were, and how opulent everyone seemed to be these days. At least, in
Marlow and Henley. She shortened the inspection of one, though, because of Charles’s yawning.

‘I wish you wouldn’t make it so obvious. You’re as bad as your father.’

‘I can’t help it. It’s shops. As soon as I go into a shop I start yawning.’

‘Unless it’s a bookshop or a car showroom.’

‘Or a pipe shop now. Why don’t I go over there and you come and get me when you’ve finished.’

She bought herself a green silk scarf in the autumn sale and they drove up to Fawley on the far side of the valley, where there was a pub in which they were unlikely to meet anyone they knew.
They were early enough to take their pick of the tables. The fire, recently lit, flamed and crackled.

‘I do wish I could get ours to go as well as that,’ she said. ‘Your father could but he approached it as civil engineering. I was never allowed to touch it.’

‘It should be better now I’ve split the logs.’

‘I thought that’s what you must be doing. Thank you, dear.’

They ordered ploughman’s lunches, she with white wine and he with Guinness. He had decided to question her over lunch, and in public, because a meal was a useful distraction, something to
be doing while other things went on. Being in public made it harder to retreat into emotion.

‘I was trying to remember when you and Dad bought our house,’ he began.

‘Before you were born. At the end of – no, just after – the war. We had no money, of course – hardly anyone did then – and although houses were cheap you still
couldn’t get them if you didn’t have any. At the same time there was a tremendous shortage of housing because of all the men coming back from the war and getting married and wanting
their own places rather than living with their in-laws, which is what most people used to do and still happened very often. In fact, we did to start with – well, we had ever since we were
married in 1943, whenever Dad was on leave. We lived with his parents in Bristol first and then with Nanny and Granddad in High Wycombe. We were living with them for quite a long time after you
were born.’

‘But how did you get the house?’

She dabbed her lips with the napkin. Her eyes always shone with interest when she looked back. ‘Oh, it was such good luck. Well, luck and your father’s friendly persistence. It
belonged to a widower, Colonel Capper, who was a miserable old stick or so it seemed, but he’d been badly injured in the first war. He always limped and his face was sort of sliced off on one
side, just tight skin. Horrible. Not his fault, poor man, but no one seemed to like him except your father. He got to know him because we often used to come for walks out here and if Colonel Capper
was in the garden your father would stop and talk to him. At first, you see, he still used to wear his army greatcoat – saving his demob one for best – and Colonel Capper had been in
the Royal Engineers in the first war and I think that was how they got talking. After you were born your father used to come out here more often by himself and I think they must have talked about
the house because I know he told Colonel Capper that it was the sort of house we’d love to have if ever we could afford one. And then one day he came home and said Colonel Capper was going
into a home in Marlow – no, Henley, because that’s where we used to forward letters – and he’d like us to buy it. Can’t say I blame him. It seemed an enormous sum of
money, far more than we could afford, but somehow we did it.’

‘But how?’ His father always refused money, Viktor said, but Charles had to know. ‘More wine?’

‘Just a small one.’

Life was in its fullness for her then, Charles thought, when they were both about his own age, perhaps younger; but really older, in the ways that mattered. Early responsibility saw to that.
‘But how did you raise the money?’

‘I can’t remember the details. We got what seemed a huge mortgage, I know that, but your father had a good job so that wasn’t such a problem as the deposit. No one in the
family had any to spare and I know he had to scrabble around a bit, a lot. I think the bank was helpful and I think he had to sell his old car but that couldn’t have raised much and he
probably spent it all on his motorbike and sidecar.’ She looked thoughtful, clutching her napkin in her lap. ‘I’m sorry, dear, I really don’t know. I must have known at the
time but I really can’t think now. It was so long ago. I expect it will come to me.’

Charles tried to look at her as if she were not his mother, an ageing widow who these days sought to hide her scrawny throat. That afternoon she was thoughtful, relaxed, a mother contentedly
talking to her son, happy above all, perhaps, not to be alone. His parents’ marriage had been good, whatever that meant. It had survived, anyway, and although there were arguments he
remembered no terrible scenes, no violence. Except, he now recalled, when he was very young. He was playing in the hall and heard his father shouting at her in the kitchen. At least once he had
heard them both shouting when he and Mary were upstairs in bed. He had put his head under the bedclothes, crying. Mary had slept through it. For some years after that, whenever they so much as
argued, it made him feel sick.

They had been faithful, so far as he knew, and there was no doubting her grief when his father died. Naturally they would have had secrets in common, as marriages must, and secrets from each
other, as people must. Now, however, it seemed that widowhood suited her; at least, she didn’t complain, though neither did she rejoice. It was as if she had simply acquiesced in it, neither
finding in it a release, nor pining. She probably longed for grandchildren, but probably didn’t dare mention it. Not to him, anyway.

Looking at her, listening to her, he couldn’t believe that she concealed a great secret, had shared his father’s great lie and was now living it alone. He could believe in a certain
credulity, perhaps even a willingness born of loyalty to be duped on certain terms, but not in her guilt, not in a sustained, active, calculated double life. She could achieve that only by
forgetting one half of her life, he was sure. Yet the thought of it ate away at him.

Afterwards, driving slowly along the lane behind a tractor, he asked, ‘Did Dad ever mention having anything to do with what I do – intelligence – while he was in the army, or
afterwards?’

‘Spying, you mean?’ Her expression was vague and unconcerned. ‘Well, only on the fringes, I think. He had to talk to security people. Quite a lot of his work was secret, you
see. But he never said much about it. I don’t think it worried him. I mean, I don’t think he ever had anything to do with microdots or secret rays or whatever they use. Much as he would
have relished all that, I’m sure.’

The tractor gathered speed and threw up clods of mud. Charles dropped back. ‘Who did he talk to, then?’

‘I don’t really know, I never met any of them.’ She sounded no more concerned than if they were discussing his father’s parish council duties.

‘But were they – did he ever actually say who they were, these people?’

‘Well, MI5, isn’t that what they call themselves? I think that’s what he once said they were. Or maybe it was MI6. I don’t know why they have these numbers.’

Of course, his father would have to have talked to MI5 about his work in the secure areas of embassies and other establishments. He would have talked to the branch – was it C Branch?
– responsible for physical security. He would also have had to talk to the office, or at least to stations overseas. This would have greatly enhanced his access, in KGB eyes, and provided
convenient cover, so far as an unsuspecting wife was concerned, for agent meetings.

He went no further. If his mother were dissembling, then her reactions suggested a deception too deeply and determinedly buried to be yielded up to her son on the way back from the pub. But he
couldn’t believe she was.

It was with the sense of a burden eased, if not lifted, that he sat down to watch the rugby international that afternoon. England were due their annual slaughter by the Welsh and the game soon
settled into the familiar pattern of Welsh verve and inspiration versus a stolid English scrum, adequate but uninspired half-backs and talented but neglected three-quarters. Wales had just scored
from an early penalty when his mother put her head round the door.

‘Your office on the phone.’

It was one of the operators. ‘Mr Thoroughgood? The office here. We’ve just taken a call on a special line for Mr Peter Lovejoy from Chantal. Please could he ring her. Does that make
sense?’