London Match
‘The rumour is that Frank will get his K. and then retire.’
‘And so Bret plans to sit in Berlin until his retirement comes round and hope that he’ll get a K. too?’ It seemed unlikely. Bret’s social life centred on the swanky jet setters of London South West One. I couldn’t see him sweating it out in Berlin.
‘Why not?’ said Dicky, who seemed to get a flushed face whenever the subject of knighthoods came up.
‘Why not?’ I repeated. ‘Bret can’t speak the language, for one thing.’
‘Come along, Bernard!’ said Dicky, whose command of German was about on a par with Bret’s. ‘He’ll be running the show; he won’t be required to pass himself off as a bricklayer from Prenzlauer Berg.’
A palpable hit for Dicky. Bernard Samson had spent his youth masquerading as just such lowly coarse-accented East German citizens.
‘It’s not just a matter of throwing gracious dinner parties in that big house in the Grunewald,’ I said. ‘Whoever takes over in Berlin has to know the streets and alleys. He’ll also need to know the crooks and hustlers who come in to sell bits and pieces of intelligence.’
‘That’s what you say,’ said Dicky, pouring himself more coffee. He held up the jug. ‘More for you?’ And when I shook my head he continued: ‘That’s because you fancy yourself doing Frank’s job … don’t deny it, you know it’s true. You’ve always wanted Berlin. But times have changed, Bernard. The days of rough-and-tumble stuff are over and done with. That was okay in your father’s time, when we were a de facto occupying power. But now – whatever the lawyers say – the Germans have to be treated as equal partners. What the Berlin job needs is a smoothie like Bret, someone who can charm the natives and get things done by gentle persuasion.’
‘Can I change my mind about coffee?’ I said. I suspected that Dicky’s views were those prevailing among the top-floor mandarins. There was no way I’d be on a short list of smoothies who got things done by means of gentle persuasion, so this was goodbye to my chances of Berlin.
‘Don’t be so damned gloomy about it,’ said Dicky as he poured coffee. ‘It’s mostly dregs, I’m afraid. You didn’t really think you were in line for Frank’s job, did you?’ He smiled at the idea.
‘There isn’t enough money in Central Funding to entice me back to Berlin on any permanent basis. I spent half my life there. I deserve my London posting and I’m hanging on to it.’
‘London is the only place to be,’ said Dicky. But I wasn’t fooling him. My indignation was too strong and my explanation too long. A public school man like Dicky would have done a better job of concealing his bitterness. He would have smiled coldly and said that a Berlin posting would be ‘super’ in such a way that it seemed he didn’t care.
I’d only been in my office for about ten minutes when I heard Dicky coming down the corridor. Dicky and I must have been the only ones still working, apart from the night-duty people, and his footsteps sounded unnaturally sharp, as sounds do at night. And I could always recognize the sound of Dicky’s high-heeled cowboy boots.
‘Do you know what those stupid sods have done?’ he asked, standing in the doorway, arms akimbo and feet apart, like Wyatt Earp coming into the saloon at Tombstone. I knew he would get on the phone to Berlin as soon as I left the office; it was always easier to meddle in other people’s work than to get on with his own.
‘Released him?’
‘Right,’ he said. My accurate guess angered him even more, as if he thought I might have been party to this development. ‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t know. But with you standing there blowing your top it wasn’t difficult to guess.’
‘They released him an hour ago. Direct instructions from Bonn. The government can’t survive another scandal, is the line they’re taking. How can they let politics interfere with our work?’
I noted the nice turn of phrase: ‘our work’.
‘It’s all politics,’ I said calmly. ‘Espionage is about politics. Remove the politics and you don’t need espionage or any of the paraphernalia of it.’
‘By paraphernalia you mean us. I suppose. Well, I knew you’d have some bloody smart answer.’
‘We don’t run the world, Dicky. We can pick it over and then report on it. After that it’s up to the politicians.’
‘I suppose so.’ The anger was draining out of him now. He was often given to these violent explosions, but they didn’t last long providing he had someone to shout at.
‘Your secretary gone?’ I asked.
He nodded. That explained everything – usually it was his poor secretary who got the brunt of Dicky’s fury when the world didn’t run to his complete satisfaction. ‘I’m going too,’ he said, looking at his watch.
‘I’ve got a lot more work to do,’ I told him. I got up from my desk and put papers into the secure filing cabinet and turned the combination lock. Dicky still stood there. I looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
‘And that bloody Miller woman,’ said Dicky. ‘She tried to knock herself off.’
‘They didn’t release her too?’
‘No, of course not. But they let her keep her sleeping tablets. Can you imagine that sort of stupidity? She said they were aspirins and that she needed them for period pains. They believed her, and as soon as they left her alone for five minutes she swallowed the whole bottle of them.’
‘And?’
‘She’s in the Steglitz Clinic. They pumped her stomach; it sounds as if she’ll be okay. But I ask you … God knows when she’ll be fit enough for more interrogation.’
‘I’d let it go, Dicky.’
But he stood there, obviously unwilling to depart without some further word of consolation. ‘And it would all happen tonight,’ he added petulantly, ‘just when I’m going out to dinner.’
I looked at him and nodded. So I was right about an assignation. He bit his lip, angry at having let slip his secret. ‘That’s strictly between you and me of course.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ I said.
And the Controller of German Stations marched off to his dinner date. It was sobering to realize that the man in the front line of the western world’s intelligence system couldn’t even keep his own infidelities secret.
When Dicky Cruyer had gone I went downstairs to the film department and took a reel of film from the rack that was waiting for the filing clerk. It was still in the wrapping paper with the courier’s marks on it. I placed the film in position on the editing bench and laced it up. Then I dimmed the lights and watched the screen.
The titles were in Hungarian and so was the commentary. It was film of a security conference that had just taken place in Budapest. There was nothing very secret; the film had been made by the Hungarian Film Service for distribution to news agencies. This copy was to be used for identification purposes, so that we had up-to-date pictures of their officials.
The conference building was a fine old mansion in a well-kept park. The film crew had done exactly what was expected of them: they’d filmed the big black shiny cars arriving, they’d got pictures of Army officers and civilians walking up the marble steps and the inevitable shot of delegates round a huge table, smiling amicably at each other.
I kept the film running until the camera panned around the table. It came to a nameplate Fiona Samson and there was my wife – more beautiful than ever, perfectly groomed, and smiling for the cameraman. I stopped the film. The commentary growled to a halt and she froze, her hand awkwardly splayed, her face strained, and her smile false. I don’t know how long I sat there looking at her. But suddenly the door of the editing room banged open and flooded everything with bright yellow light from the corridor.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Samson. I thought everyone had finished work.’
‘It’s not work,’ I said. ‘Just something I remembered.’
3
So Dicky, having scoffed at the notion that I was being kept away from Stinnes, had virtually ordered me not to go near him. Well, that was all right. For the first time in months I was able to get my desk more or less clear. I worked from nine to five and even found myself able to join in some of those earnest conversations about what had been on TV the previous evening.
And at last I was able to spend more time with my children. For the past six months I had been almost a stranger to them. They never asked about Fiona, but now, when we’d finished putting up the paper decorations for Christmas, I sat them down and told them that their mother was safe and well but that she’d had to go abroad to work.
‘I know,’ said Billy. ‘She’s in Germany with the Russians.’
‘Who told you that?’ I said.
I hadn’t told him. I hadn’t told anyone. Just after Fiona’s defection, the Director-General had addressed all the staff in the downstairs dining room – the D-G was an Army man with undisguised admiration for the late Field Marshal Montgomery’s techniques with the lower ranks – and told us that no mention of Fiona’s defection was to be included in any written reports, and it was on no account to be discussed outside the building. The Prime Minister had been told, and anyone who mattered at the Foreign Office knew by means of the daily report. Otherwise the whole business was to be ‘kept to ourselves’.
‘Grandpa told us,’ said Billy.
Well, that was someone the D-G hadn’t reckoned with: my irrepressible father-in-law, David Kimber-Hutchinson, by his own admission a self-made man.
‘What else did he tell you?’ I asked.
‘I can’t remember,’ said Billy. He was a bright child, academic, calculating and naturally inquisitive. His memory was formidable. I wondered if it was his way of saying that he didn’t much want to talk about it.
‘He said that Mummy may not be back for a long time,’ said Sally. She was younger than Billy, generous but introverted in that mysterious way that so many second children are, and closer to her mother. Sally was never moody in the way Billy could be, but she was more sensitive. She had taken her mother’s absence much better than I’d feared, but I was still concerned about her.
‘That’s what I was going to tell you,’ I said. I was relieved that the children were taking this discussion about their mother’s disappearance so calmly. Fiona had always arranged their outings and gone to immense trouble to organize every last detail of their parties. My efforts were a poor substitute, and we all knew it.
‘Mummy is really there to spy for us isn’t she, Daddy?’ said Billy.
‘Ummm,’ I said. It was a difficult one to respond to. I was afraid that Fiona or her KGB colleagues would grab the children and take them to her in East Berlin or Moscow or somewhere, as she once tried to. If she tried again, I didn’t want to make it easier for her to succeed, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to warn them against their own mother. ‘No one knows,’ I said vaguely.
‘Sure, it’s a secret,’ said Billy with that confident shrug of the shoulders used by Dicky Cruyer to help emphasize the obvious. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell.’
‘It’s better just to say she’s gone away,’ I said.
‘Grandpa said we’re to say Mummy’s in hospital in Switzerland.’
It was typical of David to invent his own loony deception story and involve my children in it.
‘The fact is that Mummy and I have separated,’ I said in a rush. ‘And I’ve asked a lady from my office to come round and see us this afternoon.’
There was a long silence. Billy looked at Sally and Sally looked at her new shoes.
‘Aren’t you going to ask her name?’ I said desperately.
Sally looked at me with her big blue eyes. ‘Will she be staying?’ she said.
‘We don’t need anyone else to live here. You have Nanny to look after you,’ I said, avoiding the question.
‘Will she use our bathroom?’ said Sally.
‘No. I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Nanny hates visitors using our bathroom.’
This was a new insight into Nanny, a quiet plump girl from a Devon village who spoke in whispers, was transfixed by all TV programmes, ate chocolates by the truckload, and never complained. ‘Well, I’ll make sure she uses my bathroom,’ I promised.
‘Must she come today?’ said Billy.
‘I invited her for tea so that we could all be together,’ I said. ‘Then, when you go to bed, I’m taking her to dinner in a restaurant.’
‘I wish we could all go out to dinner in a restaurant,’ said Billy, who had recently acquired a blue blazer and long trousers and wanted to wear them to good effect.
‘Which restaurant?’ said Sally.
‘The Greek restaurant where Billy had his birthday.’
‘The waiters sang “Happy Birthday” for him.’
‘So I heard.’
‘You were away.’
‘I was in Berlin.’
‘Why don’t you tell them it’s your girlfriend’s birthday,’ said Sally. ‘They’ll be awfully nice to her, and they’d never find out.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I said. ‘She’s just a friend.’
‘She’s his boyfriend,’ said Billy. Sally laughed.
‘She’s just a friend,’ I said soberly.
‘All my lovers and I are just good friends,’ said Sally, putting on her ‘Hollywood’ voice.
‘She heard that in a film,’ Billy explained.
‘Her name is Gloria,’ I said.
‘We’ve nothing for tea,’ said Sally. ‘Not even biscuits.’
‘Nanny will make toast,’ said Billy to reassure me. ‘She always makes toast when there’s nothing for tea. Toast with butter and jam. It’s quite nice really.’
‘I believe she will be bringing a cake.’
‘Auntie Tessa brings the best cakes,’ said Sally. ‘She gets them from a shop near Harrods.’
‘That’s because Auntie Tessa is very rich,’ said Billy. ‘She has a Rolls-Royce.’
‘She comes here in a Volkswagen,’ said Sally.
‘That’s because she doesn’t want to be flash,’ said Billy. ‘I heard her say that on the phone once.’
‘I think she’s very flash,’ said Sally in a voice heavy with admiration. ‘Couldn’t Auntie Tessa be your girlfriend, Daddy?’
‘Auntie Tessa is married to Uncle George,’ I said before things got out of hand.
‘But Auntie Tessa isn’t faithful to him,’ Sally told Billy. Before I could contradict this uncontradictable fact, Sally after a glance at me added, ‘I heard Daddy tell Mummy that one day when I shouldn’t have been listening.’
‘What kind of cake will she bring?’ said Billy.
‘Will she bring chocolate layer cake?’ said Sally.
‘I like rum babas best,’ said Billy. ‘Especially when they have lots of rum on them.’
They were still discussing their favourite cakes – a discussion that can go on for a very long time – when the doorbell rang.
Gloria Zsuzsa Kent was a tall and very beautiful blonde, whose twentieth birthday was soon approaching. She was what the service called an ‘Executive Officer’ which meant in theory that she could be promoted to Director-General. Armed with good marks from school and fluent Hungarian learned from her parents, she joined the Department on the vague promise of being given paid leave to go to university. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Dicky Cruyer had got his Army service – and Bret his studies at Oxford – credited towards promotion. Now financial cutbacks made it look as if she was stuck with nothing beyond a second-rate office job.
She took off her expensive fur-lined suede coat and the children gave whoops of joy on discovering that she’d brought the rum babas and chocolate layer cake that were their favourites.
‘You’re a mind reader,’ I said. I kissed her. Under the children’s gaze I made sure it was no more than the sort of peck you get along with the Legion of Honour.
She smiled as the children gave her a kiss of thanks before they went off to set the table for tea. ‘I adore your children, Bernard.’
‘You chose their favourite cakes,’ I said.
‘I have two young sisters. I know what children like.’
She sat down near the fire and warmed her hands. Already the afternoon light was fading and the room was dark. There was just a rim of daylight on her straw-coloured hair and the red glow of the fire’s light on her hands and face.
Nanny came in and exchanged amiably noisy greetings with Gloria. They had spoken on the phone several times and the similarity in their ages gave them enough in common to allay my fears about Nanny’s reaction to the news that I had a ‘girlfriend’.
To me Nanny said, ‘The children want to make toast by the fire in here, but I can easily do it in the toaster.’
‘Let’s all sit by the fire and have tea,’ I said.
Nanny looked at me and said nothing.
‘What’s wrong, Nanny?’
‘It would be better if we eat in the kitchen. The children will make a lot of crumbs and mess on the carpets and Mrs Dias won’t come in again to clean until Tuesday.’
‘You’re a fusspot, Nanny,’ I said.
‘I’ll tidy up, Doris,’ Gloria told Nanny. Doris! Good grief, those two were getting along too nicely!
‘And Mr Samson,’ said Nanny tentatively. ‘The children were invited to spend the evening with one of Billy’s school friends. The Dubois family. They live near Swiss Cottage. I promised to phone them before five.’
‘Sure, that’s okay. If the children want to go. Are you going too?’
‘Yes, I’d like to. They have Singin’ in the Rain on video, and they’ll serve soup and a snack meal afterwards. Other children will be there. We’d be back rather late, but the children could sleep late tomorrow.’
‘Well, drive carefully, Nanny. The town’s full of drunk drivers on a Saturday night.’
I heard cheers from the kitchen when Nanny went back and announced my decision. And tea was a delight. The children recited ‘If’ for Gloria, and Billy did three new magic tricks he’d been practising for the school Christmas concert.
‘As I remember it,’ I said, ‘I’d promised to take you to the Greek restaurant for dinner, have a drink or two at Les Ambassadeurs, and then drive you home to your parents.’
‘This is better,’ she said. We were in bed. I said nothing. ‘It is better, isn’t it?’ she asked anxiously.
I kissed her. ‘It’s madness and you know it.’
‘Nanny and the children won’t be back for hours.’
‘I mean you and me. When will you realize that I’m twenty years older than you are?’
‘I love you and you love me.’
‘I didn’t say I loved you,’ I said.
She pulled a face. She resented the fact that I wouldn’t say I loved her, but I was adamant; she was so young that I felt I was taking advantage of her. It was absurd, but refusing to tell her that I loved her enabled me to hang onto a last shred of self-respect.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. She pulled the bedclothes over our heads to make a tent. ‘I know you love me, but you don’t want to admit it.’
‘Do your parents suspect that we’re having an affair?’
‘Are you still frightened that my father will come after you?’
‘You’re damned right I am.’
‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said. The more I tried to explain my feelings to her, the more amused she always got. She laughed and snuggled down in the bed, pressing against me.
‘You’re only ten years older than little Sally.’
She grew tired of the tent game and threw the bedclothes back. ‘Your daughter is eight. Apart from the inaccurate mathematics of that allegation, you’ll have to come to terms with the fact that when your lovely daughter is ten years older she will be a grown woman too. Much sooner than that, in fact. You’re an old fogy, Bernard.’
‘I have Dicky telling me that I’m fat and flabby and you telling me that I’m an old fogy. It’s enough to crush a man’s ego.’
‘Not an ego like yours, darling.’
‘Come here,’ I said. I hugged her tight and kissed her.
The truth was that I was falling in love with her. I thought of her too much; soon everyone at the office would guess what was between us. Worse, I was becoming frightened at the prospect of this impossible affair coming to an end. And that, I suppose, is love.
‘I’ve been filing for Dicky all week.’
‘I know, and I’m jealous.’
‘Dicky is such an idiot,’ she said for no apparent reason. ‘I used to think he was so clever, but he’s such a fool.’ She was amused and scornful, but I didn’t miss the element of affection in her voice. Dicky seemed to bring out the maternal instinct in all women, even in his wife.
‘You’re telling me. I work for him.’
‘Did you ever think of getting out of the Department, Bernard?’
‘Over and over again. But what would I do?’
‘You could do almost anything,’ she said with the adoring intensity and the sincere belief that are the marks of those who are very young.
‘I’m forty,’ I said. ‘Companies don’t want promising “young” men of forty. They don’t fit into the pension scheme and they’re too old to be infant prodigies.’
‘I shall get out soon,’ she said. ‘Those bastards will never give me paid leave to go to Cambridge, and if I don’t go up next year I’m not sure when I’ll get another place.’
‘Have they told you they won’t give you paid leave?’
‘They asked me if unpaid leave would suit me just as well. Morgan, actually; that little Welsh shit who does all the dirty work for the D-G’s office.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him to get stuffed.’
‘In those very words?’
‘No point in beating about the bush, is there?’
‘None at all, darling,’ I said.
‘I can’t stand Morgan,’ she said. ‘And he’s no friend of yours either.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I heard him talking to Bret Rensselaer last week. They were talking about you. I heard Morgan say he felt sorry for you really because there was no real future for you in the Department now that your wife’s gone over to the Russians.’
‘What did Bret say?’
‘He’s always very just, very dispassionate, very honourable and sincere; he’s the beautiful American, Bret Rensselaer. He said that the German Section would go to pieces without you. Morgan said the German Section isn’t the only Section in the Department and Bret said, “No, just the most important one”.’
‘How did Morgan take that?’
‘He said that when the Stinnes debriefing is completed Bret might think again.’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘What’s that bastard talking about?’
‘Don’t get upset, Bernie. It’s just Morgan putting the poison in. You know what he’s like.’
‘Frank Harrington said Morgan is the Martin Bormann of London South West One.’ I laughed.
‘Explain the joke to me.’
‘Martin Bormann was Hitler’s secretary, but by controlling the paperwork of Hitler’s office and by deciding who was permitted to have an audience with Hitler, Bormann became the power behind the throne. He decided everything that happened. People who upset Bormann never got to see Hitler and their influence and importance waned and waned.’
‘And Morgan controls the D-G like that?’
‘The D-G is not well,’ I said.
‘He’s as nutty as a fruitcake,’ said Gloria.
‘He has good days and bad days,’ I said. I was sorry for the D-G; he’d been good in his day – tough when it was necessary, but always scrupulously honest. ‘But by taking on the job of being the D-G’s hatchet man – a job no one else wanted – Morgan has become a formidable power in that building. And he’s done it in a very short time.’
‘How long has he been in the Department?’
‘I don’t know exactly – two years, three at the most. Now he’s talking to old-timers like Bret Rensselaer and Frank Harrington as man to man.’
‘That’s right. I heard him ask Bret about taking charge of the Stinnes debriefing. Bret said he had no time. Morgan said it wouldn’t be time-consuming; it was just a matter of holding the reins so that the Department knew what was happening, from day to day, over at London Debriefing Centre. You’d have thought Morgan was the D-G the way he was saying it.’
‘And how did Bret react to that?’
‘He asked for time to think it over, and it was decided that he’d let Morgan know next week. And then Bret asked if anyone knew when Frank Harrington was retiring, and Morgan said nothing was fixed. Bret said, “Nothing?” in a funny voice and they laughed. I don’t know what that was about.’