Part 23 (2/2)

”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 G.o.d-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 half hearted 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 friends.h.i.+p or peace groups?”

I continued, affecting disappointment. ”Fellow-travelling organisations? Taken out members.h.i.+p to any h.o.m.os.e.xual or otherwise deviant-oriented clubs, formed a secret pa.s.sion 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 5, 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 mult.i.tude of images at once, I saw before me, not Frewin, but a typist I had once interrogated in our Emba.s.sy 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 rea.s.suring 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. ”b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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.

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