Arcadia (21 page)

He was the impresario of these strange evenings, the comradeship of people who knew that they would soon be enemies. After the Russian had talked of how he had learned German, and the Frenchman of life in a prison camp, and the American of his parents’ route to the US from Europe, and his travels all the way back again, then Lytten told his tale, about kings and battles, the fantastical tales of Britain and the myths of the Mediterranean, putting in enough of each so that at various times each man nodded into his drink in melancholy recognition, for they were all quite drunk by the time he started, and even drunker by the time he finished.

If that was not the reason someone might remember him as the Storyteller, then other reasons, less admirable, might be responsible. For the silent war of East and West was already beginning and Lytten was there to sow uncertainty and distrust. He had done a good job, until he gave up in disgust at his task and at himself.

Now he was being summoned back to that world. He would meet this man in Paradise. Besides, he had little enough to do at the moment and he was curious as to how it would turn out. Then he could wash his hands of it all.

He would ask Rosie to look in to see if Professor Jenkins had returned – if he ever did the animal was bound to be ill-humoured, demanding and hungry. Then he would take the morning train to London, consult with the powers that be, and get this tiresome business under way.

*

Whenever Lytten went to London he avoided the nine-thirty train, as it was generally full of people he knew and he could sometimes not avoid being dragged into a conversation with someone whose name he could not remember. Most observed the unwritten rules; you would nod, smile, exchange a few words, then ignore each other totally for the rest of the journey. Occasionally, though, there would be someone who did not understand that morning train journeys were for the purposes of contemplation, not idle chatter. Just in case, Lytten always took the ten o’clock. Now he had to go twice in two days, and he was annoyed at the waste of time.

The first day he went to see Portmore, an occasion which always made him feel slightly like an eager schoolboy hoping for praise. The old man wanted to know every last detail, and Lytten thought it best to clear the little operation with him. So he discreetly went and listened carefully as Portmore, ever more garrulous as he aged, ranged over missions great and small, recent and ancient, and in the end told him to go ahead.

‘Then I will leave for Paris tomorrow,’ Lytten said.

‘What is the meaning of this mysterious message?’

‘I believe it is from a man I once knew.’

‘What does he want, do you think?’

‘I’ve no idea. A chat about old times? A job offer?’

Portmore smiled thinly. ‘Why would the Soviets want any more employees here? They’ve got enough already. How are your enquiries?’

‘I have been through the records of seven of the eight people you think are most likely to be traitors. All can be cleared.’

‘That leaves Sam, does it? You left him to last?’

Lytten hesitated, then nodded. ‘If there really is a traitor, as you seem to think. Are you sure you are correct?’

‘Every time we get a defector, he is arrested and shot first. Every time we run an operation, our people are picked up or watched. Our contacts in Hungary are in prison. The Americans won’t tell us anything any more. I am sure, as you must be.’

Portmore leaned back in his chair and stretched. ‘I am constantly being told it is time to retire, hand over to someone else. They are right. But I do not wish to leave the Service in this state. I’ve spent my entire life working for it, and I will not risk handing it over to a traitor. There is one, Henry, and I need you to keep looking until he is found. If we are not trusted, then we cannot work.’

‘What if I do not succeed?’

‘Then I will have to bypass all the most obvious candidates, just in case. Go for someone else. I have someone in mind who would suit. He’s not ideal, but I cannot take the risk.’

Lytten nodded. It was a distasteful business, and he hated every moment of it. But who else could do it? Only he knew enough, and only he was above suspicion because he had left so many years back.

‘Very well.’

‘Keep me informed, if you will. I shall sit here and wait. You go off to Paris and have a good time. I hardly need to remind you how important this might be.’

Lytten thought about that meeting a great deal, as he lumbered back on the train, ate breakfast the next morning, and locked the house to go off yet again. So much so he didn’t even notice the man standing on the pavement watching him as he heaved his bike round and began to push it towards the street.

*

Lytten stopped, uncertainly, as he saw the curious fellow standing there, staring at him, in the middle of the driveway. He looked frightened to death.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

No reply. Just a slightly crazy stare, which faded suddenly as the eyes focused on him.

‘No!’ he almost shouted. ‘Of course not! Why should you?’

‘Well then … would you mind getting out of my way?’

‘Oh, sorry! So sorry.’ He jumped sideways, looking red in the face and flustered. Then he opened and shut his mouth several times and eventually blurted out: ‘Are you Henry Lytten?’

‘Yes,’ Lytten said. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, turned on his heel and ran up the road, as fast as his legs could carry him.

*

Lytten dismissed the incident from his mind. Oxford was, after all, full of strange folk whose grasp of the social niceties was often tenuous. The man had been no more awkward, rude or deranged than many of his colleagues who would twitch in embarrassment when meeting someone. Persimmon, for example.

On the boat train to Paris, because he knew it would put him to sleep, Lytten read the man’s latest instalment. What better way of casting off dull care? Just about anything, in fact, but he had promised. Chapter 12 of Persimmon’s lengthy diatribe extolling the virtues of Modern Scientific Management. Or rather, his work of science fiction, which seemed, in fact, to have little science and no fiction in it. Rather Persimmon, whose enthusiasm for Central Planning made him such a danger at the dinner table, and whose swivel-eyed intensity made him such an uncomfortable part of the Saturday conversations in the pub, was writing a story of such indescribable tedium that anyone who read it would feel like killing themselves. If he was correct that the future of humanity lay in carefully organised scientific efficiency, then killing yourself now would probably be a good idea.

Persimmon was a youngish man, thin, gawky, severe in appearance, who did everything in annoying moderation. He never ate too much or drank too much. He never laughed, and smiling sometimes seemed painful to him. His thin lips had trouble parting far enough to let words out, or food in. For the most part he would sit through dinners silently, eyes flickering over colleagues, and, even if he did speak, it was so quietly that only the grim precision
of his enunciation made anything he said comprehensible. His colleagues put up with him but no one thought he was the greatest asset to the place and some wondered why on earth they had ever elected him. Since when was politics a subject anyway? The new generation of serious folk seemed to have an inferiority complex about never having been in a war and so made up for it with radical politics, reluctant to accept that their parents had made the world a better place. Maybe not; maybe that was just Lytten feeling old and jaded.

Letting him join the Saturday group had been a mistake. Previously it had been a group of like-minded, easy-going men who would drink their beer and smoke their pipes, comfortable in their common experiences and outlook. Persimmon changed it all. He wanted to introduce rules, set the agenda in advance, ensure everyone had an equal chance of speaking. He wanted a chairman to run what had been a random conversation and turn it into a meeting. Soon he would want a secretary and minutes written up, no doubt. Persimmon had started coming on Saturdays, clutching ever more pages fresh from the typewriter. Lytten didn’t really know why; it was not as if he could abide any criticism. He was there to teach them, not to learn something from their responses. It was pure cowardice on their part – cowardice masquerading as politeness – that they did not tell him to go away and leave them in peace.

Occasionally Lytten’s dutiful politeness created such inner tension that he could not avoid taking revenge. When he was feeling impishly malicious, it was irresistibly easy to goad Persimmon.

‘How is the science fiction?’ he might ask innocently.

‘We do not say that. We say speculative fiction.’

Off he would go, bathing Lytten in a sea of censorious severity, lecturing him about fiction at the service of education, exploring human potential. Think of satellites, first dreamt of in a short story …

‘Why write a novel then?’

‘It is a way of educating the masses,’ Persimmon would reply.

‘To make great thought available in ways they can understand. Fiction does not interest me. As a didactic vehicle, however, it has its uses.’

‘You are not afraid your readers might see what you are doing and prefer something which doesn’t want to teach them a lesson?’

‘No. Eventually it will be required reading in schools.’

‘Will there not always be rebels and outlaws, poets and dreamers?’

‘I intend to put such people in so the contrast between antisocial disruptivism and constructive behaviour is clear. They will come to a nasty end. We have tamed the outside world through science. Why cannot we tame the inner one as well?’

‘Then what of beauty and madness? Would you eliminate them as well?’

‘Most certainly. Madness will be eliminated in our lifetime by drugs.’

‘I suppose Plato would agree with you. I always thought his world sounded quite dreadful. I will just have to hope that we blow ourselves up before we get to your state of perfection.’

Persimmon permitted himself a smile. ‘That is why the control of technology must rest with those who understand it.’

‘Not politicians, then?’

‘They will be swept aside and replaced by a meritocracy, chosen for ability and dedicated to achieving the best for society.’

*

He slept a little on the boat train, lulled to sleep by Persimmon’s prose. In some ways it was flattering, although annoyingly so. Persimmon had listened to Lytten’s careful exposition about creating Anterwold from the ground up and had decided to do the same. But, through an extraordinary feat of imagination, he had taken the very worst of communism and the very worst of capitalism and fused them together into a monstrous whole. Lytten plodded through, hoping for even the faintest glimmer of a story,
a joke, a bit of whimsy, but there was nothing. How he pitied the man’s students.

This occupied him until the bed in the sleeping compartment of the train was prepared and he lay down on the fresh linen sheets and drifted off to sleep. In the morning he took the Métro to the centre of the city, having his ticket clipped by the old lady who had been in the same position the last time he had come to Paris. Then onto the ancient wooden train, thick with the pungent smells of garlic, sweat and Gitanes.

Considering the circumstances, it was strange that he thought neither of his purpose nor his surroundings. Paris was a grimy place; the buildings crumbling and black from neglect, the streets dirty. Sometimes you could see the skeleton of a once fine building, a glimpse of a splendid vista, but by and large it was sad and neglected, somewhat like London, which also showed the signs of decrepitude on every soot-covered wall.

The meeting place was a dingy room in the Hotel du Paradis in another bedraggled part of the city near the place des Vosges, its former grandeur now ruined and derelict. Lytten approached it carefully, old habits coming back to him reluctantly and without pleasure. He was not happy to remember how to avoid being noticed, how to check the way ahead and the path behind. He took no pride in his skill, rather as one takes no pride in the ability to breathe or to walk. It was just a way of life and a way of staying alive.

Why had he introduced an apparition into his story, and why did that continue to bother him? He must be getting old, and lazy. The thought was even in his mind as he walked, quietly and with ears alert for any unusual sound, up the two flights of cold, damp stairs to the room. No sound of footsteps in another room, nothing obviously out of place or strange. The concierge had given no look that was out of the ordinary.

*

Lytten knew who he was meeting, of course; it was going to be the man who had told tales of wolves and forests, and who had listened intently as he had spun his yarns in turn. Why? Because a dreaminess in his eyes made him a good choice, that was all. The others had been too steadfast, too rooted in the ground. Only the man known as Volkov would have conceived of calling a meeting with the Storyteller. Once Lytten had talked to him of Paris, of magnificence and decay, of grand hotels like the Ritz, and seedy, squalid ones, like the Paradis. The name had appealed to him. He had chuckled appreciatively at the idea of Paradise being filled with prostitutes. If only, he had said with a laugh. If only.

Volkov opened the door not with hesitation, but normally and calmly. Foolish; he should be more careful. What if it had not been Lytten? What if instead of a book in his hand he had had something more dangerous?

He stood there, a cautious smile on his face, very different from the man Lytten remembered with his fair, cropped hair, the short stocky stature, the sad eyes that would fix you intently, then dart away. His face was unlined, almost fresh, as though he had led a life without concern. Lytten remembered also the impish grin, the other Volkov, jolly and exuberant, the caricature Russian. He gestured for Lytten to come in, throwing the door wide to show there was no one else there.

It is an important Russian who can go out alone in a western city. A trusted one; the only other people around – apart from the raddled women smoking away their loneliness in every arch of the crumbling square – were those shadows Lytten had sensed as he walked from his hotel; sensed but never seen or heard. There were no Russian minders, but …