Church Row, NW3
It was near four in the afternoon when Troy got back to his father’s town house in Hampstead. He still felt tiddly and hoped it didn’t show. He’d no fondness for beer but had been told that a chap doesn’t let a chap drink alone, so he’d drunk what Burgess drank, and to his detriment.
Rod and his father were in the old man’s study. Men there were who held their studies to be hallowed ground. Alex was not among them. His room was open to all and sundry, a hub of activity from which he could retreat regardless of what was taking place right under his nose—and while being far from a model of neatness, he always seemed to know where everything was. The walls lined with books of every language the old man spoke, every surface littered with souvenirs of his past lives … the gun with which he claimed to have shot his way out of Russia … the typewriter on which he had recorded Lawrence’s entry into Damascus, the signed copy of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams inscribed “Dream on” … and the art … a life-size bronze copy of Donatello’s David … an original, if small, Van Gogh … a South Seas nude by Gauguin … half a dozen pale Turner watercolours—so pale, so watery you might look in vain for the colour. As a boy Troy had poked around in every corner, he felt he had got to know his father as much by reading the objects in his life as by listening to him. His father was standing behind his desk now … with that look on his face he had when he regretted giving up smoking.
Rod was fuming.
“You’ve been with that bugger, Burgess!”
“Eh?”
“Sasha saw the two of you together. Swanning up Cork Street. Arm in arm.”
“We were most certainly not arm in arm, and I haven’t a clue what you mean by swanning.”
“Freddie, are you completely bloody naïve? You’re courting the company of one of the most notorious buggers in London!”
“Ah. Sorry. When you called him a bugger just now I thought you were just being coarse, I didn’t take it literally.”
Alex intervened.
“Boys. Stop. This is hardly the point.”
Rod turned on him, puffed up in self-righteousness like a squawking pigeon.
“I rather think it is. Freddie, if ‘bugger’ is too ambiguous for you, how about arse bandit?”
“Something new every day if not every hour. I’ve only just learnt ‘rough trade.’”
The booze swam north and bumped into Troy’s head. He sat down on the nearest chair and burped softly into a clenched fist.
“But, yes. I think I understand you,” he all but whispered. “I had begun to wonder.”
“To wonder? He’s as queer as a coot.”
Alex spoke up again, more forcibly.
“I say again, this is not the point, and if you do not permit me to get to the point we’ll still be here at midnight. Now, do as your brother has done. Sit down and hear me out.”
With bad graces and a sour face, Rod took the armchair next to Troy.
“Freddie, I cannot tell you how to choose your friends. Everything Rod has told you is true …”
“Everything? It amounts to one prejudicial opinion that might be a fact.”
“Hear me out, my boy. Burgess is a homosexual. I knew that when I hired him. It doesn’t matter. He is also a Soviet agent and that does matter.”
Rod and Troy looked at each other. Silent and wide-eyed.
“And I did not know that when I hired him.”
“How can you be sure?” Rod asked. “I know he was in the Communist Party when we were at Cambridge. He makes no bones about it, even admitted it at dinner the other night. Dozens of blokes were. It hardly amounts to more than being in the Boy Scouts. A phase some of us have to go through.”
“I would agree with that. But Nikolai does not. Nikolai says the inherent contradictions in Burgess’s arguments smack of a man told to disassociate himself.”
Troy said, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
“Exactly. Burgess is burrowing like a badger.”
“Mole,” said Troy. “Like a mole.”
“As you wish. He’s stopped fighting England because he’s been told to join it. He’s reinventing himself with every word he utters.”
“All this from one conversation?” said Rod.
“No. Nikolai has his sources. I do not ask what they are. Links to the old country I’d rather not know about.”
“So what are you going to do? Sack him?”
“No. He’s rather good at what he does. I see no reason to sack him.”
“Then why are we sitting here? Why did you tell me to get Freddie in here as soon as he got home?”
Troy said, “Surely just to give you the opportunity to tell me not to consort with queers? Or what was it you called him? A bum bandit?”
“Fuck off.”
“Boys, please. That is but a fraction of the truth. The bigger picture is this. As long as we know what Burgess is, we can and must be careful. We are vulnerable. We have been since the day we landed in this country twenty-five years ago. Every Russian, however well-received, is an object of suspicion. They buy my newspapers, they read my books, they pile on the honours … I can lunch at the Garrick, prop up the bar at the RAC club, I can consort with Churchill, with Macmillan, with Eden … but if I, if any of us, consort with a Russian spy we can never forget that he is a Russian spy and that we as a family are at risk from both sides.”
Eventually Rod broke a silence that Troy never would.
“You believe Nikolai?”
“Of course.”
“Then one question remains. Who do we tell?”
“Rod, we have no idea what is going to happen in the next five years. The map of the world might rearrange itself. Or Hitler might rearrange it personally. We do not know what side Russia will take … what deals Stalin might make …”
“I say again. Who do we tell?”
“Tell? We tell no one.”