‘That’s not quite what your file says, Ant,’ he says with a sceptical tilt of his head. So he’s seen my PF after all. Then his manner changes completely and he looks around the room as if he’s just arrived.
‘Do they do food here?’ he asks loudly.
‘I haven’t got much of an appetite,’ I say.
Seethrough goes to the bar and orders two more beers, and I watch as he engages the barman in conversation, laughing with him as though the two of them are old friends. He has the gift of immense and apparently spontaneous charm. He can convince a complete stranger of nearly anything with what looks like untainted sincerity, and adapt his conversation to whatever subject comes up, even if he knows nothing about it. I can see he’s deliberately misleading the barman with an invented story about his reasons for being in the area, something about buying a yurt for his kids to play in. At the end of this contrived encounter, he reaches into his wallet for a note and hands it over with a theatrical flourish.
As I watch him, my thoughts are shunting back to the chapter I’ve allowed myself to forget. I didn’t fail. I wanted to join the Firm because I’d seen the effects of war first hand and believed that the weaknesses in intelligence that led to conflict could only be shored up by the more diligent use of human assets. I’d gone through the conventional channels, cleared the vetting and selection hurdles, signed Section 5 over tea in a room overlooking the Mall, and sat my qualifying tests in a gloomy office near Admiralty Arch. But the events of my personal life sent me spinning in a different direction. I was in the midst of my divorce at the time and my wife had told me I’d never see my children again if I was posted overseas. I had two young daughters and the prospect of not seeing them was too much. Then my wife had moved back to America with the girls, and my life felt as though it had been cut into small pieces.
When the trap came, I decided to walk into it rather than admit to the ongoing humiliations of my private life. A month after my QTs, while I was still under review, an old friend had contacted me out of the blue. He worked in the City and enjoyed the lifestyle that went with it. He’d introduced me to a new and distracting world, given me flying lessons in his private plane, lent me money and generally raised my spirits. Then came the offer of dinner with a married couple who liked, as he’d put it, to swing.
I’d known it was a set-up, and was deeply disappointed that my prospective employers had managed to persuade a friend to deceive me. The woman propositioned me the same evening, and I’d taken her up on the offer knowing that it would destroy my chances of a career in the Service. She looked a bit like Madonna, I now remember. But an aspiring Intelligence Branch officer can’t afford to be susceptible to sexual entrapment. He might one day be drugged while his computer is searched, or seduced into giving away secrets. The risk is too high. Shortly afterwards a curt letter had informed me that I had no future in the Service. As I’d expected.
‘Sorry,’ says Seethrough, after I briefly explain my motives for sabotaging my own career. ‘I don’t buy it. They assessed you in the old-fashioned way, and you fell for it. Don’t tell me you saw it coming. Nobody outwits the Firm.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ I say. ‘People have been known to run imaginary sources and been paid handsomely for it.’
‘Only if it suits us, Ant. Look. Someone wants you on board and I’m willing to approve it. If you don’t want the op you can forget we ever met and go back to building ponds.’
‘Landscaping,’ I correct him. ‘Ponds are only a part of what I do, but they’re arguably the most fascinating aspect.’
‘Don’t fuck about, Ant. This affects you.’
I enjoy our sparring, but he sounds serious.
‘So where do we go from here?’ I ask.
‘Talk about it outside,’ he says. As he glances at his watch he sees that his shirt cuff is wet with beer, and curses quietly.
‘There’s a sale on at Turnbull and Asser,’ I tell him.
‘Ended last week,’ he corrects me. ‘How would you know, anyway? Can you
afford
to buy shirts in Jermyn Street? Building homes for newts?’
‘Actually I have them made by my tailor in Rome.’ It isn’t entirely true. I only had the one shirt made because it cost so much.
‘You haven’t changed, Ant,’ he says thoughtfully as we stand up, and for a moment the mask drops and I’m reminded of the young soldier I had so much fun with. ‘But it’s nice to see you.’
We walk through the corridor to the car park, where I unlock Gerhardt. Seethrough climbs into the passenger seat and looks disapprovingly over the dashboard, then tugs absent-mindedly on one of the differential lock levers.
‘What’s wrong with an English car?’ he asks. ‘Why can’t you just have a Land Rover like a normal person?’
I ignore the question, although it’s true I occasionally long for a different car. A later-model version of Gerhardt, with full-time four-wheel drive and electronic centre-diff control.
‘Are you going to tell me about the op or not?’ I ask.
He sighs to himself, as if making way again for the serious side of his personality. He looks at me, and then out of the windscreen towards some far-off place.
‘Not right now. You’re going to go home and carry on as normal, building ponds or doing whatever it is you do. You don’t call anyone, you don’t tell anyone, you don’t write anything down. A week today, you come to Legoland at midday.’
‘Is that what they call it? Legoland?’ A picture of the Secret Intelligence Service headquarters, perched on the lip of the Thames beneath the southern end of Vauxhall Bridge, flashes into my head. It does look a bit like a giant Lego construction.
‘You go to the main entrance,’ says Seethrough, ignoring my interruption, ‘and ask for Macavity at reception. Introduce yourself as Plato, and someone will come for you.’
‘Macavity? Plato? They’re T. S. Eliot’s cats, aren’t they? That’s very original.’
‘Quite,’ he replies, ruffled.
He opens the door and turns to me just before stepping out.
‘And for God’s sake, Ant, just don’t blab about it in the meantime. Otherwise,’ he adds with a schoolteacherish look, ‘Macavity won’t be there.’
He’s alluding to the poem, a fragment of which now returns to me.
You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in a square
But when a crime’s discovered, Macavity’s not there!
The door bangs shut, and his manner changes again as he gives an uncharacteristically cheerful wave as if seeing off an old friend. For the benefit, I suppose, of whoever he thinks might be watching. Perhaps it’s his habitual tradecraft kicking in. The grey BMW slides quietly and swiftly away like a shark into deep water, and I’m alone again.
It’s only lunchtime, but already the day seems long. I head home, briefly entertaining the fantasy that as I turn into my drive I’ll see a red Alfa Romeo parked there, and the beautiful Ziyba will be waiting for me nearby.
I don’t, and she isn’t.
4
In the course of the following week I make two journeys. The first needs an accomplice. An old friend in London is happy to oblige. We’ve long ago agreed on an innocuous code word signifying alarm that can be slipped into a telephone conversation, so his suggestion that we have dinner together in London that evening sounds spontaneous enough to anyone who might be listening. It also allows me to name the restaurant, the location of which means I can walk credibly past a certain street corner in Maida Vale and, in the act of posting a letter, leave a chalk mark for an elderly lady to see on her daily walk the following morning. It’s old-fashioned, but it works, and allows me to avoid making a phone call which Seethrough’s minions are no doubt already authorised to intercept.
Halfway along Pall Mall, and sandwiched between what its occupants consider to be lesser places, stands a stone building said to be inspired by Michelangelo’s Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Nine steps lead up to dark heavy doors. It’s late morning. I check the time and walk up into the imposing entrance, where the porter, as porters are wont to do in such establishments, looks me up and down with a dour expression of enquiry.
‘Baroness K—— is expecting me in the library,’ I say.
He glances down at the papers on the kiosk counter and looks up again with a marginally more friendly expression.
‘Very good, sir.’
I walk up the second set of steps into the flamboyant atrium. Glancing overhead I can see the graceful arcs of lead-crystal lozenges in the roof and the dark and slender Ionic columns of the upper gallery. I turn left towards the stairs, passing beneath the grand oil paintings on the walls and the marble facings in deep red and green, until I reach the cavernous opulence of the library. After the rush of traffic on the street below, the long room seems magically quiet. A few members glance discreetly up through the ritual dimness at the entry of a stranger, then return to their subdued conversations.
At the eastern end of the room stands the woman I’ve come to see, studying the spines of a row of leather-bound volumes beside the bay of a tall window. She turns and peers over her glasses just as I enter, and steps forward to meet me.
‘My dear boy,’ she says as we embrace. ‘You look more like your father every time I see you.’ And you, I think to myself, look older. It’s only been a month since our last meeting, but the radiotherapy has taken its toll on her body. She’s grown noticeably thinner, and there’s a visible space between the collar of her black cashmere sweater and the sinews of her neck. There’s a growing stoop to her bird-like frame, the bones of which seem too narrow and fragile to contain the sum of her life’s experience. Yet her movements are nimble and precise, and her voice is still charged with the quiet authority and confidence of an adviser to ministers and confidante to heads of state, and of her lifetime calling of scholar and spy. She ushers me to a marble fireplace and her voice lowers as we settle into a pair of red leather armchairs beneath a worn and austere-looking marble bust of Milton.
‘Your signal was awfully faint; I wasn’t sure if it was you. Or perhaps it’s my glasses. I lose them so often nowadays.’
‘They don’t make chalk like they used to,’ I suggest.
She presses a discreet button by the fireplace. A waiter appears a few moments later and she orders her usual, a whisky and soda with no ice. I ask for the same.
‘You’re well,’ I say.
‘Eighty-seven isn’t a bad innings, if you think about it. I do have trouble with opening things, which is the worst aspect of getting old, but other than that everything seems to be working.’ A gentle smile comes over her gaunt features. ‘You must enjoy your youth while you have it. Did I tell you the president of Naronda offered me a state funeral? I don’t suppose one can take him up on it. He was a child when we all had to leave but it seems he never forgot the constitution I drafted rather in his favour.’
‘I trust you’ll keep him waiting,’ I said.
We chat for a while and, postponing the inevitable, catch up on personal news. Then she puts her glass gently onto the small table between us. Her cheeks and the skin beneath her eyes droop noticeably downwards and give her a bloodhound’s perpetually sad look of enquiry. But the clear grey steely quality of her gaze remains unchanged, and now her eyes fall undistractedly on me.
‘But we have more important things to talk about. Tell me.’
I tell every detail of my encounter with Seethrough, the operation he’s proposed and the decision I’ll soon be forced to make. The Baroness listens intently, and when I’ve told her everything, she nods gravely and gazes towards the window, reciting in a quiet voice,
‘Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.’
‘Your memory always astonishes me,’ I say.
‘In our day your father and I had to memorise everything before a mission. He had the advantage of perfect French – not like me. I shall never forget the occasion when he asked a German soldier for directions. We were somewhere in the Vosges. The soldier was perfectly civil, but of course he didn’t know our guns were pointed at him in our pockets. If he’d spoken to me, we would’ve had it. I came from Section D and I don’t suppose my Arabic would have got us very far.’
‘Section D?’
‘Did I say that? It’s such a long time ago now. I don’t suppose St Ermin’s even exists any longer. But your father was a brave man. And a patriot, though he would never admit it. After the Blitz his attitude towards the Germans changed. I don’t suppose he ever forgave them, but he never let revenge get in the way. You must above all do the same.’
‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ I say, which is untrue.
‘But you must be prepared. Perhaps you know the story of Ali and the knight? Rumi tells it in the
Mathnawi
.’
I haven’t heard it, though I know of the reverence in which the famous poet is held in the Persian-speaking world. It’s an odd moment to be recounting an eastern fable, but the Baroness always has her reasons.
‘I’ll tell you, but then we must have some lunch.’ She studies the backs of her hands thoughtfully for a moment, then clasps them neatly together and lets them come to rest on her lap.
‘You know that the fourth caliph, Ali, was said to have been a courageous fighter as well as a political leader – not like today’s, I need hardly say,’ she snorts. ‘Well. Ali is on the battlefield and engages a Christian knight. They fight, and the Christian falls to the ground. Ali is about to kill him when the knight, in a final act of defiance, spits in his face. But instead of lopping off his head, Ali sheathes his sword, and lets the knight go free. Now, the knight is a bit surprised by this and asks why on earth he didn’t kill him when he had the chance. “Because if I’d killed you at that moment,” says the great warrior, “it would have been from anger, and against the principles of war.” The knight is so impressed he converts to Islam. It’s a good story, and of course the Shi’a love it.’ The Baroness sighs. ‘The man who strives for freedom doesn’t allow himself to be provoked, even in the heat of battle. At least that’s how I understand it. Freedom. You must strive for the same thing.’ She pauses. ‘Things will happen quickly now that they’ve found a role for you. It suits our purpose, and you must play the part.’