The Tamarind Seed (20 page)

‘You never slept with her? You promise me. Richard?'

‘I promise,' he said. ‘I had dinner with her a few times. I never even kissed the girl good night. Now listen, darling, you're going to take a Sleeping pill and get a good rest this morning. You musn't upset yourself, it might be bad for the baby. And I'm going to New York this afternoon and see what this is all about.' He paused for a moment, half forgetting about Rachel. There were two sharp frown lines between his eyes.

‘If this is a defector, it could be pretty serious if I refused to go. On the other hand if I helped to bring him over …'

He patted his wife, and kissed her cheek. His mind was already far away, exploring possibilities. A Russian from the Washington Embassy. Who the hell could it be?… He should get in touch with Loder right away, but he had already decided not to do that. He wasn't going to give the credit to ‘C' when it could well be claimed by him. He would bring in Loder later on, after he'd established his own part in it in official records. He could ask to see the Ambassador that night if this was a serious proposition. He got his wife a sleeping pill and a glass of water, and made her swallow it. That would keep her quiet for a while.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The lighter was not in his desk drawer. He took everything out and searched; he did the same with all the drawers. He looked under the chair, even moving the bookcase in case it had wedged underneath. He looked in every corner of the room, and then he began hunting for it in his bedroom. He could not find it. He spent ten minutes going through the pockets of his suits, even including his dressing gown, which he knew was a waste of time. Then he rang for the maid who cleaned his suite of rooms. She had not seen the lighter. She denied ever having seen it, and he knew that this was true. He never left it lying around; he always put it away in its cover in the Tiffany box and buried it at the back of a drawer. When he first got it, he used to keep the drawer locked, but after three years he had become careless and omitted that precaution. He stood in the middle of his study, and tried to think back to the last time he had used it. The occasion was only too clear. He had replaced it in the desk. He looked round once more, as if it might suddenly appear in the middle of the floor. Someone had gone to his desk and taken it. If it was stolen … He touched his forehead and his fingertips were damp with sweat. He grimaced with fastidious dislike and wiped his face and hands with his handkerchief. Nobody ever went into his study except the maid, and of course his wife. The maid had certainly not taken it; he was convinced that her denials were the truth.

That left his wife. And he needed the lighter that morning. Even if he hadn't needed it, he dared not leave the mystery unsolved. His mind reeled with panic for a moment, and then steadied. He was a sensitive man, but his earliest upbringing had taught him to despise and conquer fear. He went upstairs to his wife's bedroom and knocked.

She was dressed, standing in front of her dressing table, drawing on one glove. He noticed with senses sharpened by his predicament, that she was wearing a striking shade of violet with a wide brimmed hat like a sombrero.

‘Margaret,' he said. ‘I'm sorry to disturb you, but I've lost something. It's a lighter—you haven't seen it, have you?'

When she looked at him there was an expression on her face which he had never seen before. He had seen a variety of emotions there and he knew them all. Contempt and dislike were the most constant, with the occasional distortions of rage that transformed his wife from a beautiful woman into an ugly one. She didn't answer him; she waited, staring at him with that odd expression. She seemed to be holding herself together for some powerful physical effort. He was forced by her silence into repeating himself.

‘I've lost my lighter. I don't suppose you found it?'

She undid her handbag; she held out her closed hand and then opened it.

‘I found this,' she said. ‘It looks like a lighter, doesn't it? I was quite taken in. I've been using it, as a matter of fact. Till I tried to refill it with petrol and I pressed the wrong knob.'

With the lighter lying in the palm of her hand he could see what had happened. The shutter concealing the tiny camera eye was up; it appeared to be jammed at an angle.

‘I didn't realise what it was at first,' Margaret Stephenson said. ‘I tried unscrewing it. It's probably broken. So you won't be able to take photographs will you?'

‘No,' Fergus said. Had their relationship been different, he would have bluffed. The hidden camera could have been explained away; another woman would have accepted a variety of lies without connecting its possession with the truth. But twenty years on the defensive had removed the capacity to deceive with any confidence. She had always been the dominant partner, able to destroy him with a word or a glance, armed with the mortal weapon of knowledge which he himself had put into her hands. Whatever he said, she would know if it was a lie; she had the gift of ripping through defences, tearing the truth out like entrails. He might have satisfied her; with any other opponent his courage and intelligence would have supplied a feasable answer. But with Margaret he didn't even try. It was his role to be discovered by her and despised.

‘I should have kept that damned drawer locked,' he said. ‘I never thought you'd go to my study. It's my own fault.'

Margaret had kept control throughout. She was gripping the lighter so hard that the edges were cutting into her skin, but the same hectoring, contemptuous tone was in her voice as she asked the inevitable question.

‘What are you doing with a thing like this? What are you photographing secretly? What filth are you mixed up in this time?'

He didn't see the direction she was taking; his guilt was too obvious to him for him to understand that his wife was referring to sexual, rather than political, deviation.

‘It isn't filth,' he said. ‘But I don't expect you to understand. You've never had an ideal in your life.'

‘Ideal?' She was losing colour fast; against the harsh violet of her clothes, her face was ghastly.

‘Ideal,' Fergus repeated. ‘An abstract idea for the betterment of humanity. I've believed in it for a long time. You would call it filth, treason, anything you like, but I don't accept that it is. I think what I've been doing is right.'

While he spoke she had been standing; suddenly she felt as if her legs were broken. She dropped on to the dressing stool, and clutched at the table edge; the bottles ranged like soldiers across the glass surface rattled with the impact.

‘Treason,' had he whispered it. ‘Treason … Jesus Christ!
That's
what you're doing!' Her mouth had half opened; there was an expression of such horror in her eyes that Fergus was shocked.

‘Who's paying you?'

He shook his head. ‘Nobody's paying me, Margaret.' She didn't seem to have heard.

‘The Russians … is that who it is? I suppose it was being a bugger—that's what they had over you!'

‘No,' he answered. ‘You still don't understand; it's not blackmail. I'm not being forced to do anything. I'm doing it because I want to. I've believed in it since I was up at Cambridge.'

‘Believed in
what
?' She almost spat the last word at him; gradually she was recovering, shock was changing to a loathing so intense that he felt an impulse to recoil from her, as if she might spring from the seat and attack him with her long nails and her white teeth.

‘Communism,' he said, ‘I became a Communist. Long before I met you.' He made a gesture, which was almost sad. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘This is yet another dreadful shock for you. I only wish you could understand how I feel. I wish we'd ever been able to talk to each other about the things that mattered.'

He turned away from her; he felt weak and slightly sick. In spite of what she had inflicted on him, Fergus disliked hurting his wife. To his astonishment she burst into tears. It was years since he had seen her cry. The sight made him feel frightened, insecure. He came towards her, with his handkerchief. She lashed out, knocking it out of his hand.

‘Don't you come near me, don't you dare come near me! You bloody, dirty traitor! Traitor! A Communist—you stand there and say you were a Communist, and you ask me to try and understand?'

‘Don't shout,' he said. ‘Someone may hear you.'

‘Yes,' Margaret blazed at him. ‘Yes, someone might! Here, take the filthy thing!' She threw the little gold lighter at him. It missed and crashed against the wall behind. She turned back to the dressing table, and began to repair her make-up, savagely wrenching the drawers open, rubbing her wet cheeks with powder. Then she stood up. ‘Get out of my room,' she said. ‘I have an appointment with the Marches and I'm late already. Get out of my sight.'

He picked up the lighter; it was superbly made. The impact against the wall had not broken it open. A gold lighter, with a forged Tiffany mark. It was his own refinement, adopted by his superiors. He slipped it into his pocket and went out, closing the door quietly behind him. He never made noise if he could help it. His grandmother, a formidable Edwardian figure, once remarked of a grown man in his hearing, ‘No gentleman bangs doors'. With this the offender was dismissed forever. Fergus had never forgotten it. He went back to his study and sat down at the desk. He remembered his childhood very clearly. His mother and father were shadowy figures, encountered at set times between five and five-thirty; they seemed very tall and their attempts to introduce themselves outside the nursery embarrassed him. His nurse loomed large, the substitute mother to whom his parents had given him. Unlike, the monster nannies of popular biographies, whose inhumanities were blamed for the subsequent failings of their children, Fergus had no such excuse for the direction he had taken in adult life. He had been well cared for, loved within limits which depended upon his being good, and suffered no traumas in the process. In the years of his young manhood, when he had discovered his own nature, he had tried to analyse the motives which had driven him to a conviction so completely opposite to everything he was supposed to represent. The key to it was not his genuine humanism, or the atheism which he had adopted while he was still at school. With his temperament, he could just as easily have gone into the Church, where his career would have been comparably brilliant to the height it had reached in the Foreign Office. But there was nothing positive enough to attract him in the placid Christianity of the Anglican Church in the 1930s. A different environment and the opportunity could have converted him to that bastion of dogmatic strength, the Roman Catholic Church. But in Fergus's background Catholics were to be found in the same sphere as Non-Conformists, below stairs. He had often described himself as weak; this was not a just assessment. As a character, he needed a direction that satisfied both his intellect and his emotions; the system of class privilege and public service which was the framework of his early life was insufficient on both counts. Having found this authority and accepted it as a basis for living, Fergus Stephenson was capable of great courage, tenacity, and self sacrifice. But the need was still there, unfulfilled by the time he went up to university and discovered that besides this inner craving, he was also a homosexual.

Again, the pattern did not run. His seducer had no Left Wing leanings. He had no political opinions at all, and no convictions beyond the hedonistic. He would have laughed at Fergus's emotional gropings towards truth, had he known they existed. Fergus's conversion happened suddenly; it coincided with the wretched turmoil of his love affair, from which he was struggling to free himself. He met a well known Communist author at a party. It was during the time when half the aristocratic undergraduates were enthusiastic followers of Marx, and the Internationale was sung with passionate vigour at the end of debates. The author was one of many distinguished exponents of the wilder forms of Socialism who was fêted by the new enthusiasts. He was a revelation to Fergus Stephenson. He was an ugly man, but he had a fiery conviction about him which was extraordinarily attractive. He personified strength, and unquestionably, like the fanatically religious, it came from within. He invited Fergus out to dinner, and that was when his search for the meaning of life came to an end. He found faith. He also found a weapon with which to fight his own unhappiness and self disgust. He discovered a common bond with men and women of all classes and ages. Most important to him at this time, he had a place among them. In his own world, he felt an outcast, living a lie; the alternative was to abandon it completely and retire to the squalid twilight in which confessing homosexuals lived, subject to blackmail and public derision. The mincing extremists were utterly repulsive to him. He couldn't have lived among them without going mad. Now he could accept his role in the conventional world because he had a refuge, friends, and a goal in view. Also the secrecy appealed to him; it gave him that sensation he had always lacked in depth, a sense of belonging to a group. He left university with First Class honours, and within a year he was in the Army. He fought in North Africa and then in the Italian campaign. His brother officers remarked that for such a quiet man, Stephenson pursued the Nazi enemy as if it were a personal fight between them. He had entered the Foreign Office when he met and married Margaret. That tragic failure drove him deeper still into the catacombs of his political affiliations. So far the war had prevented conflict arising between his country's interests and his beliefs. But if the war gave them a common aim, the peace was a very short-lived truce, in which time Fergus sensed that the decision must soon be asked of him.

The Americans' attempt to revive the corpse of Nazi Germany was the end for him. Western society had outlawed itself by that action, using the same argument which had allowed the dreadful monster to emerge and try to devour the world—a strong Germany was the bulwark against Soviet Communism. Fergus didn't bother with his party contacts. He offered himself directly to the Russians.