Part 26 (2/2)

At the same terrible pace, he bent his swelled body to the floor and rolled back a corner of the tufted Wilton carpet.

”I haven't got a knife actually, Ned,” he confessed.

Neither had I, but I dared not leave him, I dared not break my command over him. I crouched beside him. He was peering vaguely at a loose floorboard, trying to raise it with his thick fingertips. Clenching my fist, I punched one end of the board, and had the satisfaction of seeing the other end lift.

”Help yourself,” I said.

It was old stuff, I could have guessed, nothing they cared about any more - a rig of grey boxes, a squash transmitter, a lash-up to be fitted to his receiver. Yet he handed it to me proudly, in its tangled mess.

A terrible anxiety had entered his eyes. ”All I am now, you see, Ned, I'm a hole,” he explained. ”I don't mean to be morbid, do I, but I don't exist. This house isn't anything either. I used to love it. It looked after me, same as I looked after it. We'd have been nothing without each other, this house and me. It's hard for you to understand that, I dare say, if you have a wife, what a house is. She'd come between you. You and the house, I mean. Your wife. You and him. Modrian. I loved him, Ned. I was infatuated. 'You're too much, Cyril,' he used to say. 'Cool down. Relax. Take a holiday. You're hallucinating.' I couldn't. Sergei was my holiday.”

”Camera,” I ordered.

He didn't read me at once. He was obsessed with Modrian. He looked at me, but it was Modrian he saw.

”Don't be like that,” he said, not understanding.

”Camera!” I yelled. ”For Christ's sake, Cyril, don't you ever have a weekend?”

He stood at his wardrobe. Camelot sword blades carved on oak doors. ”Camera!”

I shouted louder as he still hesitated. ”How can you slip film to a good friend at the opera if you haven't photographed your files in the first place?”

”Take it easy, Ned. Cool down, will you? Please.”

Grinning in a superior way, he reached a hand into the wardrobe. But his eyes were ogling me, saying ”Now watch this.”

He groped in the wardrobe, smiling at me mysteriously. He pulled out a pair of opera gla.s.ses and trained them on me, first the right way, then back to front. Then he handed them to me so that I could do the same to him. I took them in my hands and felt their unnatural weight at once. I turned the central dial until it clicked. He was nodding at me, encouraging me, saying ”Yes, Ned, that's the way.”

He grabbed a book from the bookshelf and opened it at the centre, All the World's Dancers, ill.u.s.trated. A young girl was doing a pas de chat. Sally too had been at ballet school. He unbuckled the neck strap and I saw that the short end did duty as a measuring chain. He took the binoculars from me and trained them on the book, measured the distance and turned the dial till it clicked.

”See?” he said proudly. ”Comprenez, do you? They made it specially. For me. For opera nights. Sergei designed it personally. There's a lot of idleness in Russia, but Sergei had to have the best. I'd stay in late at the Tank. I'd photograph the whole weekly float for him if I felt like it, then give him the film while we were sitting in the stalls. I'd give it to him in one of the arias, usually - it was a sort of joke between us.”

He handed the binoculars back to me and drifted down the room, scrabbling his fingertips on his bare scalp as if he had a full head of hair. Then he held out his hands like someone testing the atmosphere for rain.

”Sergei had the best of me, Ned, and he's gone. C'est la vie, I say. Now it's up to you. Have you got the courage? Have you got the wit? That's why I wrote to you. I had to. I was empty. I didn't know you, but I needed you. I wanted a good man who understood me. A man I could trust again. It's up to you, Ned. Now's your chance. Jump out of yourself and live, I say, while there is yet time. That wife of yours is a bit of a bully, by the sound of her. You'd be well advised to tell her to live her own life instead of yours. I should have advertised, shouldn't I?”

A terrible smile, which he turned full upon me. ”Single man, non-smoker, fond of music and wit. I peruse those columns sometimes-who doesn't? I contemplate replying sometimes, except I'd never know how to break it off if I wasn't suited. So I wrote you a letter, didn't I? It was like writing to G.o.d in a way, till you came along in your shabby coat and asked a lot of spotty questions, no doubt drafted by HQ It's time you stood on your own feet, Ned, same as me. You're cowed, that's your trouble. Your wife is partly to blame, in my opinion. I listened to your voice while you were apologising and I was not impressed. You won't reach out to take. Still, I reckon I could make something of you, and you could make something of me, too. You could help me dig my pool. I could show you music. That's evens, right? n.o.body's impervious to music. I only did it because of Gorst.” His voice leapt in horror. ”Ned! Leave that alone, do you mind! Take your thieving hands off my property, Ned. Now!” I was fingering his Markus typewriter. It was in the wardrobe where he kept his opera gla.s.ses, stowed under a few s.h.i.+rts. Signed A. Patriot, I thought. ”A” standing for Anyone's, I thought. Anyone who loved him. I'd guessed already and he'd told me already, but the sight of it had excited both of us with a sense of ending.

”So why did you break it off with Sergei?” I asked him, still fingering the keys.

But this time he didn't rise to my flattery. ”I didn't break it off. He did. I haven't ended it now, not if you're stepping into his shoes. Put that away. Cover it over the way you found it, thank you.”

I did as he asked. I hid the evidence of the typewriter.

”What did he say?” I asked carelessly. ”How did he break it to you? Or did he write and run?”

I was thinking of Sally again.

”Not a lot. You don't need a lot of words when someone's stuck in London and you're in Moscow. The silence speaks for itself.”

He wandered over to his radio and sat before it. I followed close on his heels, ready to restrain him.

”Let's plug her in, shall we, have a nice listen. I could still get a 'Come back, Cyril,' you never know.”

I watched him set up his transmitter, then fling open the leaded window and toss out the hairline-aerial, which was like a fis.h.i.+ng line with a lead sinker but no hook. I watched him peer at his signals plan and type out SOS and his callsign on his squash recorder. Then he linked the recorder to the transmitter and, with a whizz, sent it into the ether. He did this several times before he switched over to receive, but nothing came and he didn't expect it to; he was showing me that it never would again.

”He did tell me it was over,” he said, staring at the dials. ”I'm not accusing him. He did say.”

”What was over? Spying?”

”Oh no, not spying, that'll go on for ever, won't it? Communism, really. He said Communism was just another minority religion these days, but we hadn't woken up to the fact. 'Time to hang up your boots, Cyril. Better not come to Russia if you're rumbled, Cyril. You'd be a bit of an embarra.s.sment to the new climate. We might have to give you back as a gesture. We're out of date, you see, you and me. Moscow Centre's decided. It's hard currency that talks to Moscow these days. They need all the pounds and dollars they can get. So I'm afraid we're on the shelf, you and me, we're de trop and slightly deja vu, not to say a rather large embarra.s.sment to all concerned. Moscow can't afford to be seen running Foreign Office cypher clerks with access to top secret and above, and they rather regard you and me as more of a liability than an a.s.set, which is the reason why they're calling me home. My advice to you, Cyril, therefore, is to take a nice long holiday, see a doctor and get some sun and rest, because between you and me you're showing signs of being slightly barking. We'd like to do right by you but we're a bit strapped for hard currency, to be frank. If you'd like a modest couple of thousand, I'm sure we can do you a small something in a Swiss bank, but the larger sums are unavailable till further notice.'

He was like a different person talking to me, to be honest, Ned,” he continued, in a tone of valiant incomprehension. ”We'd been these great friends and he didn't want me any more. 'Don't take life so hard, Cyril,' he says. He keeps telling me I'm under strain, too many people inside my head. He's right really, I suppose. I lived the wrong life, that's all. You don't know till it's too late, though, do you, sometimes? You think you're one person, you turn out to be another, same as opera. Still, not to worry, I say. Fight another day. Say not the struggle naught availeth. All grist to the mill. Yes.”

He had pulled back his soft shoulders and inflated himself somehow, seeing himself as a person superior to events. ”Right, then,” he said, and we returned spryly to the drawing room.

We had finished. All that remained was to mop up the missing answers and obtain an inventory of what he had betrayed.

We had finished, but it was I, not Frewin, who was resisting the final step. Sitting on the arm of the sofa, he turned his head away from me, smiling over-brightly and offering me his long neck for the knife. But he was waiting for a strike that I was refusing to deliver. His round bald head was craned tensely upward while he leaned away from me as if saying, ”Do it now, hit me here.”

But I couldn't do it. I made no move towards him. I had the notebook in my hand, and enough written down for him to sign and destroy. himself. But I didn't move. I was on his stupid side, not theirs. Yet what side was that? Was love an ideology? Was loyalty a political party? Or had we, in our rush to divide the world, divided it the wrong way, failing to notice that the real battle lay between those who were still searching, and those who, in order to prevail, had reduced their vulnerability to the lowest common factor of indifference? I was on the brink of destroying a man for love. I had led him to the steps of his own scaffold, pretending we were taking a Sunday stroll together.

”Cyril?”

I had to repeat his name.

”What is it?”

”I'm supposed to take a signed statement from you.”

”You can tell HQ that I was furthering understanding between great nations,” he said helpfully. I had the feeling that if he had been able, he would have told them for me. ”Tell them I was putting an end to the mindless and incredible hostility I had observed for many years in the Tank. That should keep them quiet.”

”Well, they did guess it would be something like that,” I said. ”It's just that there's a bit more to it than you understand.”

”Also, put in that I wish for a posting. I should like to leave the Tank forthwith and earn out my retirement in a non-cla.s.sified appointment. I'll accept demotion, I've decided. I'm not short of a bob or two. I'm not proud. A change of work is better than a holiday, I say. Where are you going, Ned? The facilities are the other way.”

I was heading for the door. I was heading for sanity and escape. It was as if my world had reduced itself to this dreadful room. ”Just back to the office, Cyril. For an hour or so. I can't produce your statement out of a hat for you, you know. It's got to be properly drawn up on the right forms and so forth. Never mind about the weekend. I never like weekends anyway, to be truthful. Holes in the universe, if you want my secret opinion, weekends are.”

Why was I speaking with his cadences? ”Not to worry, Cyril. I'll see myself out. You get some rest.”

I wanted to escape before they came. Looking past Frewin's head to the window, I could see Monty and two of his boys climbing out of their van, and a black police car pulling up outside the house-for the Service, thank G.o.d, has no powers of arrest.

But Frewin was talking again, the way the dying go on talking after you think they're dead.

”I can't be left alone, Ned, you see. Not any more. I can't explain it to a stranger, Ned, what I've done, not all over again, no one can.”

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