Making Enemies (24 page)

‘My parents were peasants. They believed in the dream of true socialism. My mother died of starvation when our smallholding was absorbed into a collective farm. You see now what we are fighting against? How we must resist the corruption that surrounds us?’

‘We?’ she says weakly. Andropov smiles.

‘We are in this together now,’ he says. ‘We know too much about each other not to be comrades in arms.’

His words make her shiver. He is warning her. Miskin was right. Her heart sinks.

Andropov the Enemy. No, much more dangerous than that.

Andropov the Ally.

Tony Meadows and I were looking through the early edition of the
Evening Standard
when Beryl put her head round my door.

‘Charlie’s been on the blower, Danny,’ she said. ‘He’s with Mr Watson-Jones’ (In all the time I knew her, Beryl never called him Simon.) ‘He wants you to drop everything and join them. Thomas will take you over. He’s waiting outside now.’

Was it Charlie or Watson-Jones who didn’t want me leaning my bike against the railing outside the house in South Street?

I sat in the back of the Rolls and tried to work out why I’d been summoned. Charlie never discussed his weekly meetings with Watson-Jones; we assumed the agenda was about political management, which was nothing to do with the day-to-day workings of Eccleston Street. One of the earliest lessons I learned was that Charlie liked to keep the compartments of his life separate. Manchester and London never met, nor did home and politics. Charlie had a wife, but we knew nothing about her and never met her. It would take a lot to make him break this particular habit.

If Watson-Jones wanted my presence, there had to be a reason, however unpredictable he might be (Beryl’s phrase), or unmanageable (Charlie’s phrase, overheard once). That’s where I came unstuck. After years in the army I might know little about politics but I was beginning to know Watson-Jones. He did nothing without a reason though his motives were sometimes obscure. Perhaps he wanted me there to observe, to listen; perhaps he wanted to prepare me for something in the future. Throughout the short journey I could not get rid of the uneasy feeling that he wanted something I would be reluctant to give. By the time I reached South Street I was on my guard.

Meredith answered the door. ‘They’re waiting for you, Danny.’

She looked pale and thinner than when I had last seen her. But her smile was as broad as I remembered it, and her welcome as warm. I would have preferred to have spent the afternoon talking to her than sitting in the study listening to her husband.

‘Go on in. I’ll bring some tea before long.’

I knocked on the study door and went in.

‘Danny. Good of you to come. Sit yourself down. Charlie here and I were having a talk. We thought you could help us.’

I looked at Charlie. He didn’t seem too pleased but his expression gave little away. I was sure it had not been his idea to summon me to South Street and he’d rather I wasn’t there.

‘We’re reviewing progress, Danny. Prudent after nearly three months of operation, don’t you think? How we’re doing, where we’re going, that sort of thing. Yes?’

I nodded my approval as I was expected to do. It allowed Watson-Jones time for one of his pauses.

‘We’ve been looking at the newsletter.’ Copies were spread all over the dining-room table. ‘I was saying to Charlie here, jolly good, off to a strong start, well done to you and the boys. Well done.’

I knew the Watson-Jones style by now. Start with praise, soften up the resistance, get your opponent’s eye off the ball (there were only friends or enemies in Simon’s world and sometimes they changed sides with breathtaking speed), then go in with the big stick when they’re least expecting it. I tensed myself for the blow. When it came it wasn’t from any direction I’d expected.

‘One observation though.’ He had stationed himself at the table, arms outstretched, head thrust forward, surveying the newsletters as if he was searching for a typographical error. ‘I’m not seeing enough anti-Soviet material. Nowhere near enough. We’re letting the Reds off the hook. That’s bad, Charlie. This isn’t the time to go soft on the Soviets.’

That was it. He wanted me to hear his criticism of Charlie. He was sure Charlie would filter his objections when he reported the meeting to me. I was there to witness the full strength of his displeasure.

‘That’s a bit hard, Simon,’ Charlie said. I was surprised at the lack of edge to his response.

‘They’re the enemy, Charlie. Bad, evil people.’ He had come back into the centre of the room now and was standing in front of Charlie and myself. ‘We’ve got to kick them where it hurts. That’s
what we’re after, isn’t it? Getting back at the bastards. You agree with that, don’t you, Danny?’

This was the first crack in the relationship between Charlie Faulkner and Watson-Jones since I’d started working with them. Watson-Jones wasn’t interested in my opinion. What he wanted was me as his man in the office, someone to keep Charlie up to the mark. I was being asked quite openly to change sides. I was surprised Watson-Jones imagined I would.

‘Don’t get me wrong. Lots of good stuff here,’ he said, not waiting for me to reply. ‘The economy. Beveridge. Education.’ He gestured towards the table. ‘Solid issues, all of them. But think back to the early days, Charlie. Remember what excited us then? We wanted to tell the truth about the Soviets. That’s what I’m after, Charlie. Red lights for danger. I’m looking for the signs but I’m not seeing any.’

In a way I wasn’t surprised at his criticism. Charlie had sold the venture to me because he’d agreed with my warnings about the Russians. Apart from Monty, Watson-Jones and Charlie Faulkner were the only people to take seriously the view I’d come to adopt in Berlin. Initially, when I started at Eccleston Street, I had been disappointed that the Soviet Union had featured so little in what we were doing. I hadn’t thought it right then, certainly not while I was learning the ropes, to raise my concerns. Now it seemed Simon had got there before me. I had a sneaking suspicion he was right. The newsletter
was
soft on the Soviets. We could have hit much harder. But I wasn’t here to show my disloyalty to Charlie. This wasn’t going to be an easy meeting.

‘While we were off fighting the Nazis,’ Watson-Jones said, getting into his stride, his voice rising with feeling, ‘The communists were slipping their people in here, not just the trades unions, left-wing groups, that’s old hat, but the upper echelons, the universities, the civil service, our intelligence services, the army, the police force.’

‘That’s propaganda, Simon. You’ve got no reliable evidence to support that view.’

‘Soviet sympathizers are littered throughout this damned socialist country. That’s the point. The danger’s here, now, all around us, everywhere. We’re no longer safe in our own beds. The bastards are taking over.’

It was an extraordinary assertion, one I assumed Charlie would reject. To my surprise he didn’t. His reply was defensive.

‘We can’t invent news for the sake of it,’ Charlie said stiffly.

‘I know it’s hard, Charlie, and you’ve done a great job, you and the boys.’ His words were silky, disingenuous. He was leading Charlie somewhere, I couldn’t tell where but I sensed it was dangerous. ‘The dangers we saw haven’t gone away, they’ve got worse, much worse. We’ve got to wake up the world, Charlie. That’s our mission. Alert them to the true nature of the Soviet beast. The enemy banging his rifle butt on the door is threatening enough. But some of them have slipped through the crack, and that’s worse. If we close our eyes to what’s happening, we’re guilty of helping the enemy’s cause.’

If there was to be an explosion, this was the moment. Watson-Jones’s challenge was aimed at the heart of Charlie’s decency. He was asking him to be someone he wasn’t. I couldn’t understand Simon’s purpose. Charlie wasn’t a man to be pushed around in this way, which is why Simon had wanted him to run Eccleston Street in the first place. How could Simon imagine Charlie would cave in and agree to something he already knew he’d never do?

‘What do you suggest?’ The voice was ice-cold, the body perfectly still, the eyes looked up from the wheelchair directly at Simon. The challenge was returned.

‘Dig deeper, Charlie. Look harder.’

‘Dig where?’

I could see Charlie was going to express his displeasure at being rapped over the knuckles in my presence by making Watson-Jones spell out every inch of the way he wanted us to go. But he wasn’t about to lose his temper. I admired his self-restraint and wondered if it was the right tactic.

‘The country is spilling over with spies, subversives, sympathizers, men and women who, if Stalin knocked at the door, would ask him in for a cup of tea, and nobody’s doing anything about it. We need names, dates, facts, unarguable evidence.’

‘We’re publishing a political newsletter, Simon, not an investigative broadsheet.’

‘I want to see the flag flown, Charlie. I want the world to know our newsletter is patriotic, what we write is for the good of the country. I want every sentence to declare unequivocally where we stand on the Soviet issue.’

(‘The man’s mad,’ Charlie said to me on the way back to Eccleston Street. ‘Obsessed. He’s lost all sense of proportion.’ Somehow he didn’t sound very confident about it.)

‘Don’t nudge the reader in the ribs, Charlie. Shove a pointed instrument up him till he bleeds. Look at this, our headlines should shout. Look at that. Look at the truth.’ He paused a moment to draw breath, then went on. ‘We’ve got to shock him out of his complacency. Make sure he sees the Soviets are here, standing in the bus queue beside us, not somewhere out of sight across the sea. We’ve got to bring our people to their senses. Get the urgency of our message across.’

(‘Get him to hate the Reds and vote Tory,’ Charlie said later. ‘Simon’s recipe for peace of mind.’)

‘You and the boys can do it, Charlie. I know you can.’

Smiles, bangs on the arm, warm encouragement and we were ushered out into the afternoon and the waiting Thomas. Not even time for tea and another word with Meredith.

‘If you’re wondering what that was,’ Charlie said as the Rolls turned into South Audley Street, ‘it was a bollocking by any other name.’

‘What can you do about it?’ I asked.

‘Simon’s the paymaster, which limits our freedom to act independently. But he’s wrong, the Soviets aren’t lurking under every stone as he wants us to believe. They aren’t waiting to take over the country as Simon implies. That’s dangerous nonsense. If we don’t keep some kind of balance, our readers will ignore what we say, and that will be worse still.’

Charlie was thoughtful as we rounded Hyde Park Corner on our way back to Victoria.

‘We’ll do something in the next issue. Tony will write a piece about new times, new enemies. The need to be watchful. Warning signs of danger. How to police the peace. That’ll keep Simon happy and out of our hair for a while. In the meantime something else will come up to take his interest.’

I hoped he was right. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there was more to Simon’s position than Charlie recognized, and we that we hadn’t heard the last of it by any means.

*

*

I read my father’s piece on Philip Ridout’s death with growing anger. How could he so misrepresent Ridout’s view on the need to build up our arsenal of nuclear weapons against the ever-present threats of the enemy? He must have known that Ridout believed in what he was doing, that in the last months of his life he used all his remaining energies to try to complete the task he had undertaken. He had a clear vision, as men facing the inevitability of their own death often do, which was that the Soviets were a dangerous enemy and that force should be met with force. Ridout was a scientist, not a humanitarian.

Now my father was using his death to promote a different and contradictory point of view. He was betraying Ridout’s political position. He must have known better than anyone that Ridout saw
the Russians as the enemy who had to be defeated and that the only weapon they understood was force.

My father had knowingly distorted the truth. I wondered what could have brought him to that.

*

‘That wasn’t the real Philip talking,’ my father said. ‘What I wrote was consistent with the views he held all the time we worked together, when he was fit. My piece was true to the man as I knew him. His illness changed him.’

We were having a drink at his club. My father had telephoned earlier in the day to say that he was staying overnight in London, and why didn’t we have dinner? It was an unexpected overture and I had agreed. We had got on to the subject of Ridout almost at once. I said how sorry I was about his death, my father repeated how serious a loss he was to British science and then I had thoughtlessly raised the issue of Ridout’s political views.

‘When I saw him in Addenbrooke’s he was strongly in favour of building up our nuclear armoury against the Soviets. He saw them as a real threat.’

That had elicited the unanswerable assertion from my father that he knew Ridout better than I did and that any changes in his views were the aberrations of a dying man. Once I might have pursued the argument; now I preferred to drop the matter. There was no point in quarrelling this early in the evening.