The Untouchable (25 page)

We started straight off on basic training, which to my surprise I found that I enjoyed. The bone-tiredness that felled one at the end of a day of square-bashing and kit inspection and swabbing-out of floors was almost erotic, a voluptuous, swooning lapse into oblivion. We were instructed in the art of hand-to-hand combat, which we went at with the loud enthusiasm of small boys. I particularly enjoyed bayonet practice, the licence it afforded to shriek at the top of one’s lungs, as one deftly disembowelled an imaginary and yet strangely, shiveringly palpable enemy. We were taught map-reading. In the evenings, despite exhaustion, we studied rudimentary encoding techniques and the rules of surveillance. I made a parachute jump; as I leapt from the plane and the icy air caught me I was filled with a kind of exalted, almost holy terror, inexplicably pleasurable. I discovered a stamina in myself I had not known I was capable of, especially on the long treks we were forced to make over the Downs in the hay-smelling, late-summer heat. My comrades chafed under these impositions, but I saw them as the stages of a kind of purification rite. The sense of the monastic I had detected in the mess that first evening persisted; I might have been a lay brother, a worker in the fields, one of those for whom humble toil is the truest form of prayer. Like all the males of my class, I had hardly known how to tie my own shoelaces; now I was mastering all sorts of interesting and useful skills I would never have had the opportunity to learn in civilian life. It all seemed wonderful fun, really.

I was taught, for instance, how to drive a lorry. I barely knew how to drive a motor car, and this great fuming monster, with its blunt front end and shuddering rear parts, was as stubborn and unwieldy as a carthorse, yet what a thrill it was to ease out the clutch and plunge down on the quivering, two-foot-long gear-stick and feel the cogs meshing and the whole huge machine surging forward as if its soul had come alive under my hands. I was captivated. There was a staff car, too, which we could borrow, on a strict rotational basis. It was an ancient grey-blue
Wolseley, high and narrow, with walnut fascia and a wooden steering wheel and an ebony choke button which I always forgot to push in, so that whenever I took my foot off the accelerator the engine whined as if in pain and gouts of angry blue smoke belched out behind; the floor on the driver’s side was so worn it was hardly more than a filigree of rust, and if I looked down between my knees when I was driving I could see the road rushing under me like a river in spate. The poor thing came to a sad end. One night, when it was not his turn, a chartered accountant—he spoke fluent Polish—sneaked the keys from the wall cabinet in the Base Commander’s room and drove into Aldershot to see a girl he was sweet on, got drunk, and crashed into a tree on the way back, and was killed. He was our first fatality of the war. To my shame, I confess I grieved more for the car than for the accountant.

In our little settlement we had scant contact with the outside world. Once a week we were allowed to telephone our wives or girlfriends. On Saturday nights, we were told, we might venture into Aldershot, though under no circumstances were we to congregate together, or even to acknowledge that we knew each other, should we meet by chance in pub or dance hall; the result was a weekly invasion of the town by solitary drinkers and hapless wallflowers, all pining for the company of comrades whom during the rest of the week they spent their time trying to avoid.

I had of course no communication at all with Moscow, or even the London embassy. I assumed that my career as a double agent was at an end. I was not sorry. In retrospect, all that now seemed unreal, a game I used to play which I had now grown out of.

The announcement that we were at war was greeted at Bingley Manor in a curiously lackadaisical fashion, as if it had nothing particularly to do with us. When the news came we were crowded into the mess hall, which served also as a chapel— Brigadier Bradshaw, our commanding officer, had made attendance at Sunday service compulsory, in order that our morale should be kept up, as he said, though with little conviction. A young chaplain, troubled and inarticulate, was struggling with a complicated military metaphor involving St. Michael and his flaming sword, when a runner arrived with a message for the
Brigadier, who stood up, lifting a hand to silence the padre, and turned to the congregation and announced that the Prime Minister was about to address the nation. An enormous wireless set was wheeled forward on a tea trolley and, after a scrabbling search for a socket, was plugged in with great solemnity. The set, like a cockeyed idol, slowly opened its jade-green tuning eye as the valves warmed up, and, after clearing its throat with a series of goitrous hawks, settled down to a mantra-like hum. We waited, shifting our feet; someone whispered something, someone stifled a laugh. The Brigadier, the back of his neck reddening, went forward on tiptoe and bent to the instrument and twiddled the knobs, showing us his broad, khaki-clad backside. The wireless squeaked and babbled, blubbing its lip, and suddenly there was Chamberlain’s voice, crabbed, querulous, exhausted, like the voice of God himself, helpless in the face of his ungovernable creation, to tell us that the world was coming to an end.

When I had first gone to work at the Department—though
work
is a strong word for what went on in the Languages section—no one had thought to enquire into my political past. I was the son of a bishop—albeit an
Irish
bishop—an Old Malburian and a Cambridge man. That I was an internationally recognised scholar might have raised doubts in some quarters—the Institute, being full of refugee foreigners, had always been viewed with suspicion in security circles. On the other hand, I was received at Windsor not only in the print room and the tower library, but in the family wing, too, and if pressed I’m sure I could have got HM to vouch for me personally. (The successful spy must be able to live authentically in each of his multiple lives. The popular image of us as smiling hypocrites boiling with secret hatred of our country and its people and institutions is misconceived. I genuinely liked and admired HM and, perhaps more impressively, made no attempt to hide from him my disdain for his feather-brained wife, who consistently failed to remember that she and I were related. The fact is, I was both a Marxist and a Royalist. This is something that Mrs. W., who possesses the subtlest mind in that intellectually undistinguished family, clearly if tacitly understood. I did not have
to pretend to be loyal; I
was
loyal, in my fashion.) Was I overconfident? Only Boy could get away with that gloating, schoolboy swagger into which the successful agent, smugly clutching his secrets, can so easily fall. When I was summoned to the Brigadier’s office a couple of weeks after the official outbreak of war, I imagined it was to be told that I had been selected for some special assignment. The first cold tentacles of alarm uncoiled themselves in my innards when I noticed his reluctance to meet my eye.

“Ah, Maskell,” he said, delving among the documents on his desk, like a large, tawny bird hunting for worms under a drift of dead leaves. “You’re wanted up in London.” He glanced in the direction of my midriff and frowned. “Stand easy.”

“Oh, sorry, sir.” I had forgotten to salute.

His office was in the former gun room; there were hunting prints on the walls, and I seemed to detect a faint lingering tang of fin and bloodied feather. Through the window behind him I could see a hapless squad of my colleagues in camouflage gear crawling on their knees and elbows towards the house in a simulated clandestine attack, a sight that was comic and at the same time unnerving.

“Ah, here it is,” the Brigadier said, lifting a letter out of the strew of papers before him. He held it close to his nose to read it, moving his head from side to side as he followed the lines, mumbling under his breath. “…
Day release
…
immediate
…
no escort required
… Escort? Escort? …
Sixteen hundred hours
…” He lowered the sheet and for the first time looked at me directly, his big blue jaw set and nostrils flared, showing alarmingly black, deep cavities. “What the hell have you been up to, Maskell?”

“Nothing, sir, that I know of.”

He threw the letter back on the pile and sat casting about him furiously, his hands clasped so tightly together the knuckles whitened.

“Bloody people,” he muttered. “What do they think we’re running down here, some kind of vetting station? Tell Mytchett from me he’d better stop sending me duds or we may as well shut up shop.”

“I will, sir.”

He glanced at me sharply.

“You think this funny, Maskell?”

“No, sir.”

“Good. There’s a train at noon. You won’t”—with an angry snicker—“require an escort.”

Glorious day. What a September that was. The station smelled of sun-warmed cinders and cut grass. Soldiers milled on the platforms, stooped in that characteristic, disgruntled S-shaped stance, with their kitbags hoisted on one shoulder, and nursing a fag-end in their fists. I bought a copy of the previous day’s
Times
and sat blindly pretending to read it in a three-quarters empty first-class carriage. I felt hot all over, yet there was a small cold weight of foreboding inside me, as if an ice cube had been dropped into the pit of my stomach. A young woman sitting opposite me, wearing tortoiseshell spectacles and a black dress and heavy-heeled black shoes—the type that have latterly come back into fashion, I notice—kept glancing at me with an expression of baleful vacancy, as if she were not seeing me but someone I reminded her of. The train meandered along at an agonisingly slow pace, pausing irresolutely at each station, sighing and shuffling, with the air of having forgotten something and wondering whether to go back and fetch it. All the same, I arrived in London with an hour to spare. I took the opportunity to bring my uniform to Denbys to have it altered. I thought of telephoning Vivienne in Oxford, but decided against it; I could not have borne that fondly scathing tone. When I left the tailor’s and was coming out of St. James’s into Piccadilly I almost bumped into the bespectacled young woman from the train. She looked through me and hurried past. A coincidence, I told myself, but I could not help recalling the Brigadier’s snicker at the word
escort.
Another ice cube dropped inside me with a tingling little plop.

How lovely London seemed, vivid, and yet mysteriously insubstantial, like the cities in one’s dreams. The air was soft and clear, with half the motor cars and buses off the roads—I had not known such vast, delicate skies since my childhood—and there was a general air of pensiveness, the opposite of that hectic atmosphere of suspense that had prevailed in the weeks leading up to
the outbreak of hostilities. In Regent Street, banks of sandbags had been erected in front of the shops, sprayed with concrete and painted in carnival shades of red and blue.

When I entered his office Billy Mytchett fairly bounced up to greet me, as if propelled by a spring in the seat of his chair. This show of warmth made me more worried than ever. He pulled up a chair for me, and pressed me to take a cigarette, a cup of tea, a drink, even—“though come to think of it, there isn’t any drink in the building, except in the Controller’s office, so I don’t know why I offer, ha ha.” Like Brigadier Bradshaw, he too avoided looking at me directly, and instead made a great business of moving things about on his desk, producing all the while a low, unhappy whirring sound from the back of his throat.

“How are you getting on down at the Manor?” he said. “Find it interesting?”

“Very.”

“Good, good.” A pause, in which even the frozen stones of the arches and the flying buttresses outside the window seemed to participate, hanging in suspenseful wait. He sighed, and picked up his cold pipe and gazed at it gloomily. “The thing is, old man, one of our people has been going through your files— purely routine, you understand—and has come up with… well, with a trace, actually.”

“A trace?” I said; the word sounded vaguely, frighteningly medical.

“Yes. It seems—” He threw down the pipe and turned sideways in his chair, throwing out his stubby little legs before him and sinking his chin on his chest, and stared broodingly at his toecaps, his lower lip protruding. “It seems you were something of a Bolshie.”

I laughed.

“Oh, that. Wasn’t everyone?”

He gave me a startled glance.

“
I
wasn’t.” He turned back to the desk again, all business suddenly, and took up a mimeographed report and thumbed through it until he found what he was looking for. “There was this trip to Russia that you went on, you and Bannister and these Cambridge people. Yes?”

“Well, yes. But I’ve been to Germany, too; that doesn’t make me a Nazi.”

He blinked.

“That’s true,” he said, impressed despite himself. “That is true.” He consulted the report again. “But look here, what about this stuff you wrote, this art criticism in—what was it?—the
Spectator: “A civilisation in decay
…
baneful influence of American values
…
unstoppable march of international socialism
…” What’s all that got to do with art?—not, mind you, that I’m claiming to know anything about art.”

I heaved a heavy sigh, meant to denote boredom, disdain, haughty amusement, but also a determination to be patient and a willingness to try to set out complex matters in simple terms. It is an attitude—patrician, condescending, cold but not unkind— that I have found most effective, in a tight corner.

“Those pieces were written,” I said, “when the Spanish civil war was starting. Do you recall that time, the atmosphere of desperation, of despair, almost? It seems a long time ago now, I know. But the issue was simple: Fascism or Socialism. One had to choose. And of course the choice was inevitable, for us.”

“But-”

“And as it proves, we were right. England is now at war with the Fascists, after all.”

“But Stalin-”

“—Has bought a little time, that’s all. Russia will be in the fight with us before the year is out. Oh but look”—I lifted a languid hand, waving all this trivia aside—“the point is, Billy, I know I was mistaken, but not for the reason you think. I was never a Communist—I mean, I was never a member of the Party—and that trip to Russia that has so exercised your bloodhounds only served to confirm all my doubts about the Soviet system. But at the time, three years ago, when I was about twenty years younger than I am now, and Spain was the temperature chart of Europe, I thought it was my duty, my
moral
duty, as did a great many others, to throw whatever weight I had into the battle against evil, the nature of which, for once, seemed perfectly clear and obvious. Instead of going off to Spain to fight, as I probably should have done, I made the one sacrifice it was in
my power to make: I abandoned aesthetic purity in favour of an overtly political stance.”