The British Embassy in Helsinki was beautiful. A rose-pink house, the “Villa Damsen,” on the Baltic seashore at Kaivopuisto. The British had owned it almost since the Grand Duchy of Finland had been formally recognised as an independent state at the end of the Great War. Wilderness had never seen it. He wondered if he’d ever get to see it. All the mundane stuff of “chancery”—communications, archiving, missing passports, stranded tourists … spying—was conducted out of more mundane offices at 34 Korkeavuorenkatu in the centre of the city. Receptions were held at the Villa Damsen—those sorts of evenings when women wore long frocks and men wore medals, if they had them, or sashes, if they came from the sort of country that thought men in sashes didn’t look like buffoons.
Wilderness probably never would get to see the Villa Damsen. He had no medals—he’d never understood the logic of medals … did you get them for getting shot at or merely for surviving, whether shot at or not? His dad had medals, but then his dad had been a homicidal maniac. And Wilderness certainly didn’t own a buffoon sash. The poshest garment in his wardrobe was his dinner jacket, one of Alec’s cast-offs. What Ambassador would invite a Second Secretary in a secondhand dinner jacket to socialise? What ambassador would invite an MI6 officer to socialise? What ambassador in his right mind would invite an MI6 officer under a cloud of suspicion to socialise, with or without his own dinner jacket, sash or medals?
It was a short walk in summer sunshine from Helsinki central station to Korkeavuorenkatu. He sat a while in a park he’d never learned the name of, looked around, pondered, remembered his previous visits to Finland.
Helsinki probably wasn’t the most boring city in the world, but it might be a contender. He’d never found much to like or dislike about the place. Hardly a recommendation. The newer bits were on a grid system. Hardly a recommendation—yet, as a tram whizzed by on the Esplanade (a word more readily associated with a rare childhood trip to the seaside at Southend) he thought of trams … and cobblestones … and trams and cobblestones and realised any city that still had both would never feel wholly alien. London had no trams now and only a handful of cobblestones, but the sight of a rattling iron galleon gliding on rails set in cobblestones was another glimpse of a vanished childhood. Perhaps he’d get to like Helsinki. If this was a punishment posting, there were surely worse places he could have been sent?
Burne-Jones had sent him here in ’59. The last of a series of visits, which had mostly consisted of waiting, of cooling his heels in any number of the city’s plethora of bars, watching Frank Spoleto get drunk. Waiting for some kind of border incident to manifest itself or utterly fail to manifest itself.
In ’59 Wilderness and Frank had been the reception for a Soviet defector … or was it ’58? No matter. It was … what? Ancient history. He hadn’t seen Frank for at least six months and with any luck he’d never see him again.
He looked at the Finns, silent on park benches, heads tilted to the sun, eyes closed, oblivious to the screeching trams. Doing nothing, saying nothing. Simply happy to be in summer sunshine. Happy as pigs in shit. They did that a lot, he recalled. And in autumn a sea mist could wrap itself around the city, and that too reminded him of London, of the “yellow fog that rubbed its back upon the windowpanes.” Sea mist smelled a lot better and didn’t stick to the back of your throat like chewing gum.
So far, so good.