The Secret Pilgrim (41 page)

“Where do you live then, Ned?”

“Me? Oh well, London, really.”

“What part then, Ned? What district? Somewhere nice, or do you have to be slightly anonymous for your work?”

“Well, we're not really allowed to say, I'm afraid.”

“London born, are you? Hastings, me.”

“Sort of suburbs. You know. Pinner, say.”

“You must retain your discretion, Ned. Always. Your discretion is your dignity. Let nobody take it from you. It's your professional integrity, discretion is. Remember that. It could come in handy.”

“Thanks,” I said, affecting a sheepish laugh. “I will.”

He was feeding on me with his eyes. He reminded me of my dog Lizzie when she watches me for a signal—unblinking body ready to go. “Shall we start, then?” he said. “Want to sound the ‘off '? As soon as it's official, tell me. ‘Cyril. The red light's on.' That's all you have to say.”

I laughed, shaking my head again, as if to say he was a card.

“It's only routine, Cyril,” I said. “My goodness, you must know the questions by heart after all these years. Mind if I smoke?” I laboriously lit my pipe and dropped the match into the ashtray he was pressing on me. Then I resumed my study of his room. Along
the walls, do-it-yourself shelves filled with do-it-yourself books, every one of them of global resonance:
The World's One Hundred Greatest Men; Gems of All the World's Literature; Music of the Great Ages in Three Volumes.
Next to them, his gramophone records in cases, all classical. And in the corner, the gramophone itself, a splendid teak affair with more control buttons than a simpleton like myself could master.

“Well now, if you like painting watercolours, Ned, why don't you try the music too?” he suggested, following my eye. “It's the finest consolation in the world, good music is, properly played, if you choose right. I could put you on the right lines if you wanted”

I puffed for a while. A pipe is a great weapon for playing slow against someone else's haste. “I rather think I'm tone deaf, actually, Cyril. I have made the occasional effort, but I don't know, I sort of lose heart really . . .”

My heresy—drawn, I am afraid, from inconclusive debates I had had with Sally—was already too much for him. He had sprung to his feet, his face a mask of horror and concern as he seized the biscuit jar and thrust it at me as if only food would save me.

“Now, Ned, that is not
right,
if I may say so! There is no such
thing
as a tone-deaf
person
! Take two, go on, there's plenty more in the kitchen.”

“I'll stick to my pipe if you don't mind.”

“Tone deafness, Ned, is merely a
term,
an expression, I will go so far as to say an
excuse,
designed to cover up, to disguise; a purely
temporary,
self-imposed
psychological
resistance to a certain world which your conscious mind is refusing you permission to enter! It is
merely
a fear of the unknown which is holding you
back.
Let me give you the example of certain acquaintances of mine . . .”

He ran on and I let him, while he dabbed at me with his forefinger, and with the other hand clutched the biscuit jar against his heart. I listened to him, I watched him, I expressed my admiration at the appropriate moments. I fished for my black notebook and removed the garter of black elastic from it as a signal to him that
I was ready to begin, but he ignored me and ranted on. I imagined Mary Lasselles in her lair, smiling dreamily while her loved one lectured me. And Monty's boys and girls in their surveillance vans outside, cursing him and yawning while they waited to change shifts. For all I knew, Burr too—all of them hostages to Frewin's endless anecdote about a married couple he had had for neighbours when he lived in Surbiton, whom he had taught to share his musical appreciation.

“Anyway, I can tell my masters at PVHQ that music is still your great love,” I suggested with a smile when he had finished.

“PV” for Positive Vetting, you understand, and “HQ” for Headquarters. My part as the downtrodden security workhorse required a higher authority than my own. Then, opening the notebook on my knee, I spread the pages, and with my unpainted government-issue pencil wrote the name FREWIN at the top of the left-hand page.

“Ah well, if you're talking about
love,
Ned—you
could
say music
was
my great love, yes. And music, to quote the bard, is the
food
of love. However, I'd
prefer
to say, it depends how you
define
love. What
is
love? That's your real question, Ned.
Define love.”

God's coincidences are sometimes too vulgar to be borne. “Well, I suppose
I
define it rather broadly,” I said doubtfully, my pencil poised. “How do
you
define it?”

He shook his head and began energetically stirring his coffee, all his thick fingers gathered round the neck of one tiny Apostle spoon.

“Is this on the record?” he asked.

“It could be. Please yourself.”

“Commitment is how I define love. A great
number
of people speak of
love
as if it were some kind of
nirvana.
It isn't. I happen to know that. Love is not
separate
from life. It's not
beyond
it or
superior
to it. Love is
within
life. Love is totally
integral
to life, and what you get
out
of it depends on the ways and means whereby you invest your
efforts
and your loyalty. Our Lord taught us that
perfectly
clearly,
not that I'm a God-man personally, I'm a rationalist. Love is
sacrifice
and love is hard work. Love is
also
sweat and tears, exactly as your great music has to be in order to qualify. By that token, yes, I'll grant you, Ned,
music
is my first love, if you follow me.”

I was following him only too well. I had made similar halfhearted representations to Sally, only to have them swept aside. I knew also that in his beleaguered state of mind there was no such thing to him as a casual question, let alone a casual answer—any more than there was to me, even if my systems of concealment were more sophisticated than his.

“I don't think I'll write that down,” I said. “I think I'll regard it as what we call deep background.” In earnest of which, I pencilled a couple of words in the notebook, as a memo to myself and a sign to him that we were going on the record. “All right, let's do the meat-and-potatoes-work first,” I suggested, “or PVHQ will say I'm dragging my feet as usual. Have you joined the Communist Party since you were last spoken to by one of our representatives, Cyril, or have you managed to restrain yourself?”

“I have not,” he said, with a smirk.

“Haven't joined or haven't, restrained yourself?”

A broader smirk. “The first. I like you, Ned. I cherish wit when I find it, I always have done. Not that we're overburdened with it at my place of work. Where wit's concerned, I'd be inclined to refer to the Tank as a total desert.”

“No friendship or peace groups?” I continued, affecting disappointment. “Fellow-travelling organisations? Taken out membership to any homosexual or otherwise deviant-oriented clubs, formed a secret passion for any under-age choirboys lately?”

“No to the lot, thank you,” said Frewin, now smiling broadly.

“Run up vast debts, causing you to live beyond your means? Set up some tasteful redhead in the style to which she is not accustomed? Acquired a Ferrari motorcar on the hire purchase?”

“My needs remain as modest as they have always been, thank you. I am not of a materialist or self-indulgent nature, as you may
have gathered. I rather abhor materialism, frankly. There's too much of it these days. Far.”

“And no to the rest?”

“All no.”

I was jotting all the time, making annotations against an imaginary checklist.

“So you wouldn't be flogging secrets for money then,” I commented, turning a page and adding a couple of ticks. “And you have not launched yourself upon a course of foreign language instruction without first obtaining the consent of your employing department in writing, I take it?” My pencil was poised once more. “Sanskrit? Hebrew? Urdu? Serbo-Croat?” I suggested. “Russian?”

He was standing very still and staring at me, but I pretended to be unaware of this.

“Hottentot?” I continued facetiously. “Estonian?”

“Since when's
that
been on the list?” Frewin demanded aggressively.

“Hottentot?”

I waited.

“Languages. A language isn't a defect. It's an attribute. An accomplishment! You don't have to list all your accomplishments, just to get cleared!”

I tilted back my head in reminiscence. “Addendum to the Positive Vetting procedure, November, 1967,” I recited. “I always remember that one. Fireworks Day. Special circular to all employing departments, yours included, requiring advance notice in writing of all intended language instruction courses. Recommended by Judicial Steering Committee, approved by Cabinet.”

He had turned his back to me. “I regard this as a totally out-of-court question and I refuse to answer it in any shape or form. Write that down.”

I puffed through my pipe smoke.

“I said write it down!”

“I wouldn't say that, Cyril, if I were you. They'll be cross with you.”

“Let them be.”

I drew on my pipe again. “I'll put it to you the way HQ put it to me, shall I? ‘What's all this nonsense Cyril's been getting up to with his chums Boris and Olga?' they said. ‘Ask him that one— then see what he comes up with.'”

Still turned away from me, he was scowling indignantly from place to place around the room, appealing to his polished world to witness my profanity. I waited for the explosion I was sure would come. But instead he peered at me in hurt reproach.
Us,
he was saying,
friends—and you do this to me.
And in the way that the brain in stress can handle a multitude of images at once, I saw before me, not Frewin, but a typist I had once interrogated in our Embassy in Ankara: how she had rolled back the sleeve of her cardigan and thrust out her arm at me and showed me the festering cigarette burns she had inflicted on herself the night before our interview. “Don't you think you have made me suffer enough?” she asked. Yet it was not I who had made her suffer; it was the twenty-five-year-old Polish diplomat for whom she had sacrificed every secret she possessed.

I took my pipe from my mouth and gave him a reassuring laugh. “Come on, Cyril. Aren't Boris and Olga two of the characters on this Russian course you're doing on the sly? Papering their house together? Going off to stay at Auntie Tanya's dacha, all that? You're doing the standard Radio Moscow language course, five days a week, 6 a.m. sharp, that's what they told me. ‘Ask him about Boris and Olga,' they say. ‘Ask him why he's learning Russian on the q.t.' So I'm asking you. That's all.”

“They'd no business knowing I was doing that course,” he muttered, still grappling with the implications of my question. “Bloody sniffer dogs. It was private. Privately selected, privately pursued. They can get lost. So can you.”

I laughed. But I was also put out. “Now don't be like that, Cyril. You know the rules as well as I do. It's not your style to ignore a regulation. It's not mine either. Russian is Russian, and reporting is
reporting. It's only a matter of getting it down in writing. I didn't make up the regulations. I get a brief, the same as anyone else.” I was talking to his back again. He had taken refuge at the bay window, and was gazing out at the rectangle that was his garden.

“What's their names?” he demanded.

“Olga and Boris,” I repeated patiently.

This enraged him. “The people who brief you, idiot! I'm going to enter a complaint about them! Snooping, that's what it is. It's bloody brutal in this day and age. I'm holding you to blame too, frankly. What's their names?”

I still didn't answer him. I preferred to let the fury bank up in him.

“Number one,” he announced in a louder voice, still staring at his mud patch. “Are you writing this down? Number one, I am not taking a language course within the meaning of the Act. A language course is going to a school or class, it is sitting on a bench with a bunch of snivelling typists with bad breath, it is submitting to the sneers of an uncouth instructor. Number two. I
do,
however, listen to
radio,
it being one of my
continuing
pleasures to scan the wavebands for examples of the quaint or esoteric. Write that down and I'll sign it. Finish, okay? Then take yourself off. I'm done with you, thank you up to here. Nothing personal. It's them.”

“Which was how you stumbled on Boris and Olga,” I suggested helpfully, writing again. “Got it. You scanned the wavebands and there they were. Boris and Olga. Nothing wrong in that, Cyril. Stick with it and you might even land yourself a language allowance, if you pass the test. It's only a few bob, I suppose, but it's better in your pocket than theirs, I always say.” I continued writing, but slowly, letting him hear the maddening scratch of my government-issue pencil. “It's always the
not
reporting that bothers them most,” I confided, apologising for the foibles of my masters. “‘If he hasn't told us about Olga and Boris, what else hasn't he told us?' You can't blame them, I suppose. Their jobs are on the line, same as ours.”

Turn another page. Lick tip of pencil. Make another annotation. I was beginning to feel the excitement of the chase. Love as commitment, he had said, love as part of life, love as effort, love as sacrifice. But love for whom? I drew a heavy pencil line and turned a page.