Part 23 (1/2)

Do I have to tell you how I spent that interminable night? Have you, never telephoned your own son, listened to his unhappy jibes and had to remind yourself that he is yours? Talked frankly to an understanding wife about your inadequacies, not knowing what on earth they were? Have you never reached out for your mistress, cried ”I love you” and remained a mystified spectator to her untroubled fulfilment, before leaving her once more, to walk the London streets as if they were a foreign city? Have you never, from all the other sounds of dawn, picked out the wet chuckle of a magpie and fixed on it for your whole life long while you lie wide-eyed on your beastly single bed? I arrived at Frewin's house at half past nine, having dressed myself as boringly as I could contrive, and that must have been boringly indeed, for I am not a natty dresser at the best of times, though Sally has appalling ideas about how she might improve my style. Frewin and I had agreed on ten but I told myself I wanted the element of surprise. Perhaps the truth was, I needed his company. A postman's van was parked up the street. A builder's truck with an aerial stood beyond it, telling me Monty's men were at their posts.

I forget what month it was but I know it was autumn, both in my private life and in the prim cul-de-sac of steep brick houses. For I see a disc of white sun hanging behind the pollarded chestnut trees that had given the place its name, and I smell to this day the scent of bonfires and autumn air in my nostrils urging me to leave London, leave the Service, take to Sally and the world's real countryside. And I remember the whirr of small birds as they lifted from Frewin's telephone line on their way to somewhere better. And a cat in the next-door garden rising on its rear paws to box a drowsy b.u.t.terfly.

I dropped the latch to the garden gate and crunched up the prim gravel path to the Seven Dwarfs semi-detached, with its bottle-gla.s.s windows and thatched porch. I reached out my hand for the bell, but the front door flew away from me. It was ribbed, and studded with fake coach bolts, and it shot back as if it had been blasted by a street bomb, almost sucking me after it into the dark tiled hall. Then the door stood still, and Frewin stood beside it, a bald centurion to his own endangered house.

He was taller than I had realised by a wrestler's head. His thick shoulders were braced to receive my attack, his eyes were fixed on me in scared hostility. Yet even at this first moment of encounter I sensed no contest in him, only a sort of heroic vulnerability made tragic by his bulk. I entered his house, and knew I was entering a madness. I had known it all night long. In desperation we find a natural kins.h.i.+p with the mad. I had known that for much longer.

”Captain York? Yes, well, welcome, sir. Welcome indeed. Personnel of their goodness did advise me you were coming. They don't always. But this time they did. Come in, please. You have your duty to do, Captain, as I have mine.”

His vast, soggy hands were lifted for my coat but seemed unable to grapple with it. So they hovered above my neck as if to strangle or embrace me while he went on talking. ”We're all on the same side and no hard feelings, I say. I liken your job to airport security, personally, it's the same parameters. If they don't search me, they won't search the villains either, will they? It's the logical approach to the matter, in my view.”

Heaven knows what lost original he thought he was copying as he delivered these over-prepared words, but at least they freed him from his frozen state. His hands descended to my coat and helped me out of it, and I can feel now the reverence with which they did so, as if unveiling something exciting to us both.

”You fly a lot then, do you, Mr. Frewin?” I asked.

He hung my coat on a hanger, and the hanger on a vile reproduction coat-tree. I waited for an answer but none came. I was thinking of his air travel to Salzburg, and I wondered whether he was too, and whether his conscience was speaking out of him in the tension of my arrival. He marched ahead of me to the drawing room, where by the light of the leaded bay window I was able to examine him at my ease, for he was already busy with the next article of his urgent hospitality: this time, an electric coffee percolator filled but not switched on-did I want the milk, or the sugar or the both, Captain? And the milk, Captain, was it hot or cold? And how about a home-made biscuit for you, Captain?

”You really made them yourself?” I asked as I fished one from the jar.

”Any fool who can read can cook,” said Frewin, with a chaotic grin of superiority, and I could see at once why Gorst would loathe him.

”Well, I can read, but I certainly can't cook,” I replied, with a rueful shake of my head.

”What's your first name, Captain?”

”Ned,” I replied.

”Well, that's because you're married, Ned, I expect. Your wife has robbed you of your self-sufficiency. I've seen it too often in my life. In comes the wife, out goes the independence. I'm Cyril.”

And you're ducking my question about your air travel, I thought, refusing to allow him this attempted incursion into my private territory.

”If I 'ran this country,” Frewin announced over his shoulder to me while he poured, ”which I am pleased to say I shall never have the opportunity to do'! his voice was acquiring the didactic drumbeat of his conversation with the engineers-”I would make an absolute law that everyone, regardless of colour, s.e.x or creed, would take cooking as an obligatory subject while at school.”

”Good idea,” I said, accepting a mug of coffee, ”very sound,” and helped myself to sugar from the yellow beehive pot, which nestled like a missile in his damp paw. He had turned to me all at once, shoulders, waist and head together. His bare eyes, unfringed and unprotected, gazed down on me with a radiant and doting innocence.

”Play any games at all, Ned?” he enquired softly, tipping his head to one side for added confidentiality.

”A spot of golf, Cyril,” I lied. ”How about you?”

”Hobbies at all, Ned?”

”Well, I do like to do the odd watercolour when I'm on holiday,” I. said, borrowing again from Mabel.

”Drive a car, do you, Ned? I expect you boys have to have all the skills at your fingertips, don't you?”

”Just an old Rover.”

”What year is it, then? What vintage, Ned? There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle, they say.”

His energy was not just in his person, I realised as I gave him the first date that occurred to me; it spilled into every object that came within his sphere. Into the reproduction horse-bra.s.ses that glistened like military cap-badges from his vigorous polis.h.i.+ng. Into the polished fire grate and wood floor and the resplendent surface of his dining table. Into the very chair where I now sat and meekly sipped my coffee, for its arms were concealed in linen covers so pressed and spotless that I was reluctant to put hands on them. And I knew without his telling me that, cleaning woman or none, he tended all these things himself, that he was their servant and dictator, in the kingdom of his boundless wasted energy.

”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 n.o.body 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 cla.s.sical. And in the corner, the gramophone itself, a splendid teak affair with more control b.u.t.tons 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 La.s.selles 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 s.h.i.+fts. And 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.

”Ali 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. ”G.o.d'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.