Burgess awoke to the boat gently rocking. They were in harbour. Saint-Malo, on the coast of Brittany.
From the top bunk a strangled voice, shot through with self-pity, moaned, “I feel sick.”
“Donald, we’ve docked. The boat isn’t even moving. And it’s past nine … if we don’t shake a leg we’ll miss the boat train.”
“I have to eat something. I have to—or my gut will just churn on empty.”
“Alright. We’ll grab breakfast and I do mean grab.”
But Maclean dawdled over bacon, eggs, and fried bread, asking for more bread and a second pot of tea.
Burgess gazed around. Few had disembarked. The mess—or whatever they called it—was still pretty full. He looked at older men, beaming with the lineaments of gratified desire at women half their age, and concluded Blunt had been right—a floating knocking shop in which two single men might as well be invisible and everyone else blind.
Burgess hoped they were deaf as well.
“Y’know,” Maclean was saying, “I can’t tell you the strain of the last few weeks. I’m so glad we’re out of England. If Five had nabbed me I wouldn’t have held out for five minutes, I’d have blabbed the lot. Really, I would.”
“Do shut up.”
They stepped ashore into a fine drizzle. Maclean’s only foresight was that he’d brought a hat, and Burgess hadn’t.
“Fuck. We’ve missed it. The bloody train’s gone.”
“It crawls,” Maclean said. “From here to Rennes. Only picks up speed between Le Mans and Chartres. If we can find a cab in the square there’s a good chance we can get to Rennes before the train does.”
They did, and in the back of the cab Maclean, looking over his shoulder, said, “This might even be better. Nobody’s seen us board a train, we just walked off into town like a couple of tourists.”
“Aren’t you being just a little paranoid?”
“Guy, you haven’t a clue what it’s been like. It wasn’t you the buggers were following around London. They were so close last week that when the cab I was in braked a bit sharpish the idiots ran into the back of us.”
“Is there a car behind us?”
“No, the road’s empty.”
“Then relax.”
But once he’d said it, Burgess knew he was no more relaxed himself. He’d left his suitcase on the Falaise. He could do without the tweed suit. It was just part of the Scottish illusion he’d fostered to the old duffers at the RAC. He’d packed it unconsciously, deceiving himself as well. What practical purpose could a tweed suit possibly have in France when it was nearly June? Pointless. And the three hundred nicker? Stuffed into a bulging wallet. He wasn’t leaving readies for some light-fingered steward to find. But—but his Complete Jane Austen was in the case too. If he got shut of Maclean at Rennes, he’d have nothing to read on the way back.
Rennes? Maclean? He should never have got into the damn cab. Once they got to Rennes, the man was whining.
“I can’t do this alone.”
Torn between “You’ll have to” and the fresh memory of “I’d have blabbed the lot,” Burgess bought two tickets to Paris and told himself that he’d get home via the Gare du Nord and Calais and think of something, some excuse, for the cruise proprietors, retrieve his case—tweed or no tweed—get back to Bond Street, and … and what? Resign before the FO fired him? Look for a job? Deny all knowledge of Maclean? It was not as if their names were linked like Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. Cambridge was more than fifteen years ago. Yes. Deny, deny, deny. Perhaps a job on a newspaper? Reviewing this and that for the Telegraph. Of course he’d be no more use to the Russians. The Russians? The Russians? And then a gentle tide of relief began to wash over him, as though instead of leaning back into the hard cushions of a second class SNCF compartment, he had slipped into a warm bath. No use to anyone at all—bliss.