Young Philby (8 page)

In my apartment, we existed in a kind of suspended animation. Kim sat next to my phonograph, his head in his hands, listening to scratchy records of Beethoven sonatas, each of which, to the professor’s dismay, he could identify by its opus number. When we ran out of coal, we started breaking up furniture and burning bits of it in the stove. First went the legs and backs of chairs. We burned the curtain rods, the drawers in the dressers, then the dressers themselves, even the wooden cooking spoons. We burned the frames of my grandfather’s paintings I’d rolled up and pawned to raise money for German refugees flooding into Vienna after the Reichstag fire. We burned the frames of the two small charcoal designs I’d bought in Paris—I would have pawned these, too, but they were signed by someone the pawnbroker never heard of named Modigliani and had no value.

Sonja appeared late one night, her face stained with dirt, her eyelids swollen from unshed tears. Because of the cold, she never removed her overcoat so the boys didn’t get to see if she was still wearing her low-cut blouse. Pity. It might have warmed them a bit. When I told her how Kim and me, we’d watched the attack on the barricades from the roof, she said the comrade I’d seen throwing a can of kerosene at a tank wasn’t Dietrich, the way I thought. Poor Dietrich, she said, along with the young Sergius, who never stopped taunting his executioners, had been dragged from a coal bin and taken to a city park and shot into a newly dug trench by a firing squad made up of Fascist women. When I asked how she knew that, she smiled a bizarre smile and said, “Dietrich came to me in a dream and told me.”

Late one night a week or so after the February events, Kim came to me in a dream—so I thought until I felt his breath in my hair. I couldn’t see his face but I could feel the tension in his body. We could still hear sporadic rifle fire in the city and I supposed he was going to say something about being unable to sleep because of it. “We must leave” is what he said.

“Leave the apartment?”

“Leave the apartment. Leave Vienna. Leave Austria.”

“With your British passport, you could leave. I would never make it past the frontier.”

“We’ll get you a British p-passport.”

“How?”

“Wives of British citizens are given British p-passports. I stopped by the embassy this afternoon to verify this.”

“We’re not married.”

“Things are calming down in Vienna. Shops, offices are starting to open for b-business. So is the town hall. I went there after I went to the embassy. I spoke to the clerk who does marriages. I slipped him five pounds, I said I would give him another fiver when he performed the ceremony. He said he c-can marry us in three minutes—matter of signing and stamping a piece of p-paper. We could be there when they open for business at eight. We could be at the embassy by eight-thirty. With a signed and stamped certificate of m-marriage, we could get you a British p-passport and be on the way to Italy by nine.”

When I didn’t immediately say anything, he said, “Right. Someone has just suggested m-marriage. You could have the d-decency to react.”

“What about the professor and the others?”

“They have a better chance of surviving if you’re not here when the police break in the door.”

“I am not against marrying you, Kim, but I prefer to stick it out in Vienna.”

“You can’t, Litzi. You were arrested once so they know you’re a Communist. They may even know you give reports to a woman with a man’s name who doesn’t deliver flowers in winter. Your name will be on lists. It’s only a matter of time b-before they come around looking for you. On top of that you’re Jewish. Everybody knows Hitler intends to annex Austria. Anschluss is only a question of time. He wants to get his pound of flesh from the Jews who refused to let him study in the Vienna Art Academy. Ah, if only they’d admitted him, he might be an artist starving in a garret in Vienna instead of Chancellor of Germany in B-Berlin. Litzi, if Dollfuss doesn’t kill you for being a Communist, Hitler will kill you for being Jewish.”

In the darkness, Kim kissed me. I distinctly recall his lips were
not
trembling. Mine were. He had taken charge of his life and mine. We were married at eight-fifteen the next morning by a town hall clerk who badly needed the talents of a dentist. I signed the register identifying myself as a student without religious affiliation. Kim claimed to be a British tourist. Next to “Religion” he wrote, in English, “None that I am aware of.” At nine the British Consul handed me a brand-new British passport with an old photograph of me glued onto one page—I had dredged it up from the metal box under the bed; it was me before I’d seen piles of shoes with limbs still attached to them. There was no mistaking the innocence in my eighteen-year-old eyes. In the photograph my hair was shoulder length and sun-bleached. The consul, a kindly gentleman who was counting the days until he could return to Scotland, asked me if blond was the original color. I told him I had dyed my hair so often I wasn’t sure. He said not to worry, that if the frontier police noticed the discrepancy, they wouldn’t find it remarkable that I had transformed myself into a redhead. All the girls were doing it these days, he said. He wished us good luck and Godspeed. I told him I didn’t believe in God. Kim coughed up a laugh and said he did believe in speed. The Consul said he did, too. He saluted the newlyweds from the small balcony over the embassy’s polished brass entrance as we saddled up in the courtyard below. Kim wore his rucksack on his chest, I wore mine on my back. It contained clothing and (in the hope they might one day be worth something) my two small rolled-up Modiglianis. I hung on to Kim’s shoulder straps as he stomped the motorcycle into life.

Was it the airstream in my face that brought tears to my eyes as we headed through the achingly familiar boulevards of my beloved Vienna toward England, a country nine hundred miles away, give or take, that I could scarcely imagine?

2: LONDON, APRIL 1934

Where a Chap from Cambridge Has the Bright Idea of Spying for the Reds

Bugger if I remember who came up with the idea of organizing a welcome home bash for Kim. The word spread that the sod was back in town with a Magyar wife in tow and suddenly the party was on the agendum. One of Philby’s Cambridge chums offered his mother’s Cadogan flat—she was said to be traveling on the Continent with her husband and his lover at the time. At the appointed hour Don Maclean came round. Good fellow, Maclean. He’d put on weight since Cambridge, where he earned a first in foreign languages. Straight as a ramrod, sexually speaking, but I don’t hold that against a chap. He and Kim had had a falling-out at university, never did find out over what, think it had to do with Maclean’s having joined the fledgling Communist cell at Cambridge whilst Kim, for reasons beknownst only to himself, never actually pocketed a party card. That asshole Anthony Blunt crashed the party. He was wearing a starched
col cassé
, you’d have thought the twit was the King of England; he wasn’t bashful about claiming to be a distant cousin of the Queen, he certainly dressed to fit the role he’d assigned himself. Would have turned him away except he was clutching a bottle of half-decent whiskey. Anthony made something of a splash at Cambridge in French art and you could count on him to tone up the conversation if, as was often the case, I toned it down. Bob Wright, Kim’s coal miner mate—Kim had lodged with Wright in Huthwaite when they were both reading economics—appeared with two Malthusian League ladies, one on each arm. He’d picked them up at a stationer’s shop on Kensington High, they’d just come away from a forum on constipation, or was it contraception? With their little yellow badges, Malthusian Leaguers, like the suffragettes before them, were fair game if you were heterosexual. It was common knowledge they preached birth control in order to practice free love. (At the nightly poker games during our Cambridge undergraduate days, there had been a running argument over whether Malthusians wore knickers. As none of us had been able to offer eyewitness evidence, the question had never been resolved to anybody’s satisfaction.) Two girls from Newnham, reeking of water closet (which is to say,
working class
) perfume, appeared on the threshold claiming to have been invited by someone whose name slipped their minds. Vaguely recognized the one who introduced herself as Mildred, she looked to be up the spout and got brassed off when one of the Malthusian ladies asked her when the baby was due. “Piss off, huh—I’m not
pregnant
,” she snapped. “I’m starting the Hollywood grapefruit diet straightaway breakfast tomorrow.” I should say here that the mere sight of Newnham girls filled those of us from Cambridge with wistfulness for our misspent youth—wearing identical white blouses and pleated skirts, they had filled the front rows of lectures at Trinity on the dialectical idealism of Hegel. It was a time-honored tradition in those hallowed halls that Newnham girls were duff and no Trinity boy who prized his reputation would deign to talk to one. As the welcome home bash in Cadogan was off campus both in terms of geography and time, I thought it would be tolerable to chat up Mildred before she transformed herself into a grapefruit.

Broke the ice with “Don’t you think it curious that men shake hands with the same hand they use to wipe their asses?”

“But surely that’s the point,” she said brightly.

I inquired as to whether she’d read Lawrence’s
Pornography and Obscenity
.

“Lawrence of Arabia wrote a book on pornography?”

“That’s D. H. Lawrence, love.”

When she confessed she wasn’t familiar with the book in question, I shared with her the theory making the rounds of London public houses that pornography was literature intended to be read with one hand. Encouraged by the blush spreading across Mildred’s Midland cheeks—a reaction typical of girls with a modest university education—I confided my earnest conviction that Mussolini was queer. I suggested that if one really wanted to distract him from his lustful designs on Ethiopia, all one need do was parade some beautiful fairy across the steps of the Capitol in Rome. Mildred wanted to know if I would be willing to sacrifice myself. “I am as much a patriot as the next faggot,” I said huffily.

“Jolly good show,” she said. “I shall put forward your name if they call for volunteers. By the by, what is your name?”

“Guy Burgess.”

“
The
Guy Burgess? Oh dear, I’m embarrassed to be seen talking to you. Whatever you have might rub off on me.”

Whilst talking to Mildred, I’d noticed a most delectable boy climbing the spiral stairs to the sitting room. Anthony, who had already spoken to said boy downstairs, whispered in my ear that he was an unemployed actor working as an usher in the West End. The poor fellow looked to be lost in the shuffle. The usher-slash-actor, his hair slicked back with sweet-smelling pomade, eventually gravitated in my direction as if by inadvertence. We beat about the bush for a suitable interval.

“Guy,” I said.

“Jeffrey,” he said. “What do you do?”

“I do anybody who needs doing.”

“I mean by way of work.”

“Indeed, work. At the moment I am weighing several options. My hope is to snag something in the F.O. Like almost everyone at Trinity, I read economics but switched to politics when politics became fashionable. Where did you go to school?”

“I didn’t. Never made it past Sixth Form.”

“Blessing in disguise, I should think,” I said. “Too much knowledge can bloat the brain.”

“Surely carnal knowledge will be the exception to your rule.”

“Depends on whom you’re carnal with,” I said. “Are you by any stretch of the imagination a Socialist?”

“I am more bleeding heart liberal than Socialist.”

“I grasp the bleeding heart part of the equation,” I said. “Pray tell what exactly do you mean by
liberal
?”

“Pretty straightforward. A liberal is someone who is not revolted when he discovers his closest friend is a closet heterosexual.” He punched me playfully on the shoulder, which was more than enough encouragement to keep me focused on him despite his having spilt gin on the lapel of my new blazer.

“I myself don’t disparage closet heterosexuality,” I confessed. “Been known to shag the occasional female if the bloke she’s with is pretty enough.”

“Females bitch about men thinking with their dicks. Do you?”

“Obliged to. I’m twenty-three this month and I’ve already fucked my brains out.”

Eventually I smiled a certain smile and he bared his teeth in agreement and trailed after me to the W.C. at the end of the hallway where I delivered on the smile’s promise and gave him a blow job. I’d been so eager I’d forgotten to latch the lavatory door. We were at it in the shower stall when one of the Malthusian League ladies burst in. She didn’t bat an eye when she spied me squatting back on my heels so as not to soil my trousers, my fingers wrapped around the cock in my mouth. (I belong to the school of fellatio that holds that good hand work is every bit as indispensable as good tongue work. Swallowing is an ineluctable part of my ethic.)

“You might have knocked,” my usher-slash-actor said crossly to the suffragette.

“Mea maxima culpa,”
the girl said in a syrupy voice thickened by Anthony Blunt’s whiskey, “but I desperately need to piddle.”

The usher-slash-actor, buttoning his fly, and I, patting dry my lips on a silk handkerchief, emerged from the shower stall and planted ourselves in front of the Malthusian Leaguer with the intention of monitoring her response to this particular call of nature.

“Don’t pretend you have never seen a girl urinate,” she exclaimed, flipping up the back hem of her skirt and parachuting onto the toilet seat.

“Need to settle an old argument,” I explained.

“What argument?” she demanded, closing her eyes in bliss as the pressure eased on her bladder.

“Whether League stalwarts like yourself wear knickers.”

“We are freethinkers in our deeds and the garments we choose not to wear reflect this,” the girl allowed.

“No knickers?” concluded the usher-slash-actor.