Part 3 (2/2)
I told him about Ben's drinking, though again I think he knew. How Ben normally drank little and often nothing at all, until an evening would come along - say, a Thursday and the weekend already looming - when he would drink insatiably, Scotch, vodka, anything, a shot for Ben, a shot for Arno. Then reel off to bed, speechless but inoffensive. And how on the morning after, he looked as if he had undergone a fortnight's cure at a health farm.
”And there was really n.o.body but you?” Smiley mused. ”Poor you, what a burden, coping with all that charm alone.”
I reminisced, I wandered, I told him everything as it came to me, but I knew he was still waiting for me to tell him something I was keeping back, if we could find out what it was. Was I conscious of withholding? I can only reply to you as I afterwards replied to myself: I did not know I knew. It took me a full twenty-four hours more of self interrogation to winkle my secret out of its dark corner. At four a.m., he told me to go home and get some sleep. I was not to stray from my telephone without telling Personnel what I was up to.
”They'll be watching your flat, naturally,” he warned me as we waited for my cab. ”You won't take it personally, will you? If you imagine being on the loose yourself, there are really very few ports you'd feel safe to head for in a storm. Your flat could rank high on Ben's list. a.s.suming there isn't anybody else except his father. But he wouldn't go to him, would he? He'd be ashamed. He'd want you. So they watch your flat. It's natural.”
”I understand,” I said as a fresh wave of disgust swept over me. ”After all, there's no one of his age whom he seems to like better than you.”
”It's all right. I understand,” I repeated.
”On the other hand of course, he's not a fool, so he'll know how we're reasoning. And he could hardly imagine you would hide him in your priest-hole without telling us. Well, you wouldn't, would you?”
”No. I couldn't.”
”Which if he's halfway rational he would also know, and that would rule you out for him. Still, he might drop by for advice or a.s.sistance, I suppose. Or a drink. It's unlikely, but it's not an a.s.sumption we can ignore. You must be far, far and away his best friend. n.o.body to compare with you. Is there?”
I was wis.h.i.+ng very much he would stop talking like this. Until now, he had shown the greatest delicacy in avoiding the topic of Ben's declared love for me. Suddenly he seemed determined to reopen the wound.
”Of course he may have written to other people apart from you,” he remarked speculatively. ”Men or women, both. It's not so unlikely. There are times when one's so desperate that one declares one's love to all sorts of people. If one knows one's dying or contemplating some desperate act. The difference in their case would be, he posted the letters. Still, we can't go round Ben's chums asking them whether he's written them a steamy letter recently - it wouldn't be secure. Besides, where would one start? That's the question. You have to put yourself in Ben's position.”
Did he deliberately plant the germ of self-knowledge in me? Later, I was certain he did. I remember his troubled, perspicacious gaze upon me as he saw me to the cab. I remember looking back as we turned the corner, and seeing his stocky figure standing in the centre of the street as he peered after me, ramming his last words into my departing head. ”You have to put yourself in Ben's position.”
I was in vortex. My day had begun in the small hours in South Audley Street and continued with barely pause for sleep through the Panda's monkey and Ben's letter until now. Smiley's coffee and my sense of being the prisoner of outrageous circ.u.mstance had done the rest. But the name of Stefanie, I swear it, was still nowhere in my head - not at the front, not at the back. Stefanie still did not exist. I have never, I am sure, forgotten anyone so thoroughly.
Back in my flat, my periodical spurts of revulsion at Ben's pa.s.sion gave way to concern for his safety. In the living room I stared theatrically at the sofa where he had so often stretched out after a long day's street training in Lambeth: ”Think I'll bunk down here if you don't mind, old boy. Jollier than home tonight. Arno can sleep at home. Ben sleeps here.”
In the kitchen I laid the palm of my hand on the old iron oven where I had fried him his midnight eggs: ”Christ Almighty, Ned, is that a stove? Looks more like what we lost the Crimean War with!”
I remembered his voice, long after I had switched out my bedside light, rattling one crazy idea after another at me through the thin part.i.tion-the shared words we had, our insider language.
”You know what we ought to do with Brother Na.s.ser?”
”No, Ben.”
”Give him Israel. Know what we ought to do with the Jews?”
”No, Ben.”
”Give them Egypt.”
”Why, Ben?”
”People are only satisfied with what doesn't belong to them. Know the story of the scorpion and the frog crossing the Nile?”
”Yes, I do. Now shut up and go to sleep.”
Then he'd tell me the story, nevertheless, as a Sarratt case history. The scorpion as penetration agent, needing to contact his stay-behind team on the opposite bank. The frog as double agent, pretending to buy the scorpion's cover story, then blowing it to his paymasters.
And in the morning he was gone, leaving behind him a one-line note saying, ”See you at Borstal,” which was his name for Sarratt. ”Love, Ben.”
Had we talked about Stefanie on those occasions? We hadn't. Stefanie was someone we discussed in motion, glancingly, not side by side through a stationary wall. Stefanie was a phantom shared on the run, an enigma too delightful to dissect. So perhaps that's why I didn't think of her. Or not yet. Not knowingly. There was no dramatic moment when a great light went up and I sprang from my bath shouting, ”Stefanie!”
It simply didn't happen that way, for the reason I am trying to explain to you; somewhere in the no-man's land between confession and self preservation, Stefanie floated like a mythic creature who only existed when she was owned up to. As best I remember, the notion of her first came back to me as I was tidying up the mess left by Personnel. Stumbling on my last year's diary, I began flipping through it, thinking how much more of life we live than we remember. And in the month of June, I came on a line drawn diagonally through the two middle weeks, and the numeral ”8 written neatly beside it - meaning Camp 8, North Argyll, where we did our paramilitary training. And I began to think - or perhaps merely to sense - yes, of course, Stefanie.
And from there, still without any sudden Archimedean revelation, I found myself reliving our night drive over the moonlit Highlands: Ben at the wheel of the open Triumph roadster, and myself beside him making chatty conversation in order to keep him awake, because we were both happily exhausted after a week of pretending we were in the Albanian mountains raising a guerrilla army. And the June air rus.h.i.+ng over our faces.
The rest of the intake were travelling back to London on the Sarratt bus. But Ben and I had Stefanie's Triumph roadster because Steff was a sport, Steff was selfless, Steff had driven it all the way from Oban to Glasgow just so that Ben could borrow it for the week and bring it back to her when the course restarted. And that was how Stefanie came back to me - exactly as she had come to me in the car - amorphously, a t.i.tillating concept, a shared woman Ben's.
”So who or what is Stefanie, or do I get the usual loud silence?” I asked him as I pulled open the glove compartment and looked in vain for traces of her.
For a while I got the loud silence.
”Stefanie is alight to the unG.o.dly and a paragon to the virtuous,” he replied gravely. And then, more deprecatingly: ”Steff's from the Hun side of the family.”
He was from it himself, he liked to say in his more acerbic moods. Steff was from the Arno side, he was saying.
”Is she pretty?” I asked.
”Don't be vulgar.”
”Beautiful?”
”Less vulgar, but still not there.”
”What is she, then?”
”She is perfection. She is luminous. She is peerless.”
”So beautiful, then?”
”No, you lout. Exquisite. Sans pared. Intelligent beyond the dreams of Personnel.”
”And otherwise-to you-what is she? Apart from being a Hun and the owner of this car?”
”She is my mother's eighteenth cousin dozens of times removed. After the war she came and lived with us in Shrops.h.i.+re and we grew up together.”
”So she's your age, then?”
”If the eternal is to be measured, yes.”
”Your proxy sister, as it were?”
”She was. For a few years. We ran wild together, picked mushrooms in the dawn, touched wee-wees. Then I went off to boarding school and she returned to Munich to resume being a Hun. End of childhood idyll and back to Daddy and England.”
I had never known him so forthcoming about any woman, nor about himself.
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