Albany was a district behind Piccadilly occupied by one mansion house. As such, the building was known as Albany, never the Albany. Nicky had talked to Jago about the place, trying to persuade him to visit. Jago had always resisted. Now fear had delivered him to the doorstep.
‘The big house was divided into apartments in the eighteenth century, though we call them sets,’ explained Nicky.
Nicky’s set was on the ground floor, off the Ropewalk. The Ropewalk led from an interior corridor occupied by porters out into the shared gardens in a central quadrangle. Jago thought it resembled a Roman atrium.
Nicky’s rooms on the ground floor were everything the self-conscious flat of the spy-don wasn’t. Three centuries had lent objects to furnish it, all from other homes of the Godwin family. Jago wondered if there was a single item in it that had been bought specifically for it. The armchairs were all leather and ranged from club to wing, from Chesterfield to bucket.
‘I’m sorry to put you out,’ said Jago.
‘Don’t be,’ Nicky smiled. ‘It’s time you stayed for supper and breakfast.’
Jago felt like a girl under an obligation. Nicky had saved his life. Should he offer himself in return? And who would he be if he did? He inspected the set, the location of the seduction that Nicky obviously intended. The rooms were large but few. A spiral staircase in the lobby outside the kitchen led up to what had once been the valet’s room, but which the golden boy now used as his bedroom. The original bedroom on the ground floor was the dining room and home to a long mahogany table that Nicky’s mother insisted he needed. On one wall, a marble fireplace contained a glowing coal fire that Jago was grateful for; the nights were drawing in. The heat, and the deep chairs with their saggy embrace, were almost his undoing. When Nicky spoke, it made Jago jump. ‘What did the commissar have to say?’
Jago yawned himself awake. ‘Apparently, the badge we took off that man you killed belongs to a fascist organisation called the Link. The members of which seem to be out to get me.’
‘They won’t find you here; the most discreet address in London. This is where the sons of the aristocracy have traditionally sewn their wild oats. Byron brought girls back here disguised as pageboys – or was it the other way around?’
The name of one of the right-wing groups had been rolling around his head since the Don had mentioned them. Jago hadn’t said anything to him but he did to Nicky. ‘Have you heard of the English Mistery, spelled M.i.s.t.e.r.y?’
Nicky had arrived back from Scotland while Jago was with the Don. He’d obviously bathed and was now ensconced in a silk brocade dressing gown, looking as elegant as someone Joshua Reynolds might have painted. In the flickering light from the fire he almost seemed to shimmer, Jago thought, like a mirage, like something beautiful that isn’t really there. Something or someone out of Jago’s reach.
‘The English Mistery, what’s that?’
‘My late in-laws were members. It’s a yeomen-of-old-England sort of outfit, and that was the Dunns. Their home was their garden. They loved the war because they got an allotment. I had no idea it was anti-Semitic or that they were fascists. I just thought they were suburban.’
‘Same thing old man. What happened to them?’
‘My in-laws? Air raid. The Blitz. House, garden, pond with a gnome fishing, all gone. What did you do with the body?’
‘Buried it. Plenty of places to bury a body in the Borders. Beautiful part of the world. Do you know it?’
‘Not really.’
‘We should go there together, when all this is over.’
Together. Temptation and fear arrived in Jago’s heart. He shook himself free by reaching for duty. ‘I have to protect my people. I have to protect Foxley. They’re over there at this very minute, facing torture if discovered. The Link will do anything to uncover their identities and then they’ll tell their friends in the Gestapo. Without Foxley to watch Hitler’s back, he’ll be killed. There’ll be a premature peace and then another war – or perhaps with all these fascist groups, we might just slide into the arms of the Germans and form a right-wing northern European super-state. Or – I don’t know, I’m so tired.’
‘Poor Jago. It’s cruel but it’s necessary; I learned that in Spain. The worst time in my life was trudging over the Pyrenees, beaten, the fascists victorious.’
Jago thought the shadows of the flames licking Nicky’s face seemed for a moment to be real and consuming him. ‘Why did you go to Spain? Why did you cut Oxford? You never seemed political to me, more – if you don’t mind me saying – cricket than causes?’
‘Why do you say that? I mean what does any man leading a pointless life need but a cause.’ Nicky began to laugh then stopped. He looked at Jago. ‘I couldn’t stay at the university. It didn’t matter to me; I’m not a scholar and I didn’t need a degree to enter a profession. I’m of independent means. Of course, I’m not really independent; I’m a member of a family. In the Godwin tribe, I’m liked but unregarded. I’m not even the heir’s spare as I have two older brothers, both of whom have sons. I’m as far from the succession as the tweeny-maid; even the bootboy is probably further up the pole than I am. The family were hoping for a girl to make an advantageous marriage alliance. Well they got that and more with my two younger sisters. But what about me, the useless mouth in the middle? I live off the interest of a pot of shares left to me by an uncle, that will on my death revert to the family. I exist in this grace-and-favour set that again belongs to the family, and which will, in the fullness of time, go to house the next Godwin oddball. I was a failure at birth, a mistake, and nothing I can do in life can reverse that under the system that keeps me as a neglected pet. I went to Spain to fight my family – and, of course, for that other reason men run away to war – to forget.’
Jago considered Nicky. ‘Someone at Oxford?’
‘Unrequited love is so queer, don’t you think? I was down in the dumps when I came up. Pleased school was over forever but I wasn’t a grammar school boy; Oxford wasn’t going to be my big thing. It wasn’t going to change my life, it was merely something we did.’
‘Did you despise the grammar school lads?’
Nicky shook his head and his blond curls bounced in the firelight, his eyes danced like sapphires. ‘They thought we did, but they were wrong. Different cultures, that was all. They were quiet and studious and we were loud and hearty. We were noisier, but we’d grown up in bigger rooms. We were more feral; they were more cherished. But I for one admired what they’d achieved and it was another reason I felt like a useless mouth; occupying a place that someone else might have really valued. Then I fell for one of them.’
Jago waited while Nicky stared away into another universe.
‘I never told him and he turned out not to be a grammar school boy. He was one of us, except for some extraordinary reason he’d gone to the girls’ public school. Rumour had it he’d shagged himself stupid there. I don’t think you had?’
Jago murmured his reply, ‘No.’
‘I knew I was queer by then. I had a feeling you were, but you sent out the wrong signals. You seemed hot to join all the manly societies. Didn’t you take up rugby?’
‘Tried to. Eighteen is too old to start putting your head between another man’s thighs without feeling a little odd.’
‘Then you joined the corps and then the TA proper.’
‘Trying desperately to be something I wasn’t.’
‘I couldn’t work you out. You fascinated me. I loved it that you had black hair yet blue eyes. The slight protrusion of your top teeth made me want to hug you and look after you.’
‘The girls at school said it made me look gormless.’
Nicky took his hand. ‘Your eyes are too awake for that. I don’t think I’d seen eyes so alive. Darting everywhere, sometimes landing on me, and then your smile would light up the world.’
Jago smiled. ‘I was terrified of you.’
‘Same here. We can’t share unless we’re sure, can we, people like us? It’s not just no thanks. It’s fuck offyou filthy pervert.’
Jago leaned forward and, against the orders of his more rational self, ran a hand through Nicky’s hair.
‘Well one day, feeling the ache worse than usual, I took myself off to the cinema. The newsreel showed one of those hunger marches from the north arriving in Whitehall. They flashed a big map up on the screen, showing all the counties they’d walked across, and I sat there, listing all the properties my family had in each of them. They didn’t cross a single county in which we didn’t have a hunting lodge, or a shooting box, or a fishing beat. We had large stately homes, dower houses, even a castle somewhere. It’s not a difficult moral question: should one family own so much, while those families didn’t have enough to eat? What was remarkable was that I had been cocooned from that thought for eighteen years. I had been immersed in privilege all my life and I hadn’t realised it. I knew then that Oxford had nothing more to teach me. The next item on the newsreel, a story about the civil war in Spain, was a mere footnote to my thought process. Within a week I was there.’
‘Forgetting me.’
‘Sadly, no. Trying to stay alive. Trying to do my bit. But no, never forgetting you. And as it turns out, unrequited love experienced at a distance is far less painful than it is close to. The memory of you became a comfort to me during some very uncomfortable times.’
How strange, Jago thought; he’d been to Spain in the mind of another. He said, ‘Then one day I’m walking down a Whitehall corridor and who’s walking up it but you.’
Nicky’s face closed, eyes shut, lips pursed, head down. ‘I feel so wretched about that. It was a set-up of course.’
Jago had once enjoyed the memory of that meeting – not any more. ‘One of the Don’s machinations?’
Nicky sniffed. ‘The Don, he’s a gollumpus. A creature. Clumsy. All head and no grace. There were scholarship boys like him at College House, clever chaps but they couldn’t catch at cricket. You probably had boys the same at your school – no of course you wouldn’t. Silly me. I expect your chums were tea-party elegant.’
Jago laughed. ‘You don’t know girls at boarding school. Believe me, they go through a suet-pudding-in-gymslip phase. The mistresses fight the flab with deportment drill and waltz classes. They even organise games specifically tailored to instil a little grace…’
‘Be that as it may,’ Nicky interrupted, ‘your report crossed the Don’s desk via the Kremlin and he went mad; bounced off the furniture, danced on the crockery and shouted we needed to talk to you. I wanted to make the approach.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Ordered not to.’
Orders, the lubricant of war.
‘The police raid those cottaging toilets regularly. The Don, who doesn’t approve of my homosexuality, didn’t want a first-rate asset ruined by being exposed as a sodomite. I was supposed to keep my hands clean and Austen, who is more expendable, was given the mission. After all, he’d already ascertained on an earlier meeting that you really were a ducky-boy.’
Jago remembered Austen coming into the gents’ half a minute after him. The look. The message in the eyes. Available. Nicky was talking. ‘Honestly old man, you could set your clock by your libido. You should be careful. Same time every Friday night – same toilets.’
Jago supposed he was right. A part of his brain was interested in that predictability and wondered how much promiscuous sex was linked to the excitement of ritual.
‘Austen said the original liaison had gone well, and that you might welcome seeing him again if the approach was discreet. So, the Don told Austen to arrange a meeting. To begin with, it was all the Don and Austen, plotting and planning. I felt excluded and, well – jealous. Against orders I contrived to bump into you, in that Whitehall corridor.’
‘You played your part well.’
‘I wasn’t acting, Jago. My delight in seeing you, being near you, wasn’t pretended. I was hauled over the coals for it but I didn’t care.’
Jago had been thrilled too. A man whom he believed hardly registered his existence up at Oxford, was, on their fresh encounter, so happy to see him. He had been flattered, and then almost captured and carried off by Nicky with his physicality and energy. He’d been taken to a small private dining room of a restaurant in St James’s. They had talked and talked and this, more than the alcohol, had fuelled the excitement. Jago had been trying to express his admiration for Nicky’s war record and had been stopped in his tracks.
‘Up off your knees, Jago. I’m not deserving of your homage. There’s something about me that would sicken you.’
Jago wondered if Nicky too had suffered a loss of moral fibre, a moment of cowardice instantly regretted. But it hadn’t been about battle or fortitude in an open boat. Nicky had told him what he was. Across a table in a room with Regency-stripe wallpaper and a Victorian sideboard that didn’t approve of the turn the conversation was taking, Nicky told him.
‘You just came out with it, put into words what I could never say,’ Jago said.
Before them the fire coughed on a cinder of coal. Nicky looked into the blaze and then back at Jago. ‘There was so much dishonesty you weren’t aware of. I had to make some present of the truth to you. I needed to give you a little power, so at least I couldn’t be a part of blackmailing you.’
It had been thrilling. The small, fussy dining room had vanished. They sat in the clouds. They dined under the stars, or so it seemed. At Nicky’s confession, Jago’s own had tumbled out. He broke his silence. Jago remembered. ‘You took me to your club after, and insisted I join the Rockingham.’
‘I knew eventually it would all come out – that you’d been played. But I wanted to make my mark with you before that. I wanted you to judge me on my terms and not the Don’s. Impossible I know, but I had to try.’
Nicky sat back away from Jago, as if awaiting a verdict.
Jago felt the heat of the blaze through his clothes. The roasting room reaching down into his lungs. He was a man who had been cold for years, suddenly discovering fire. ‘Nicky, I’m so very glad you tried.’ They leaned into each other and hugged, a kiss a possibility not realised. Then they sat back, away from each other, and Jago wondered where this was going. And of course, there was still the war.
‘You killed that man, Nicky.’
‘I think I had to, don’t you?’
Jago knew it could be his body out under the turf of the Borders. ‘It was the right thing to do. It’s just another thing I haven’t mastered – the killing touch.’
Nicky sighed a word as explanation. ‘Spain.’
‘You must have been quite a catch to the communists out there. And you believe it – workers of the world unite?’
‘What else is there? The feudal system replaced by capitalism?’
Jago shrugged. ‘Democracy?’
‘A dead duck, old boy. In its final days. A weak, ineffectual, but thankfully brief experiment in niceness.’
Jago discovered he wanted to do almost anything else but talk politics. He caught Nicky’s eyes looking up. Jago understood Nicky’s drift before he spoke. ‘Time to tread the spiral staircase to the heavens.’
But before they went to the bedroom, Jago took Nicky’s face in his hands and said, ‘You’re not a useless mouth,’ before kissing it. Then he allowed himself to be led up the stairs, round and round, up and up, as in some strange dance, a religious quadrille, weaving a spell that ordained Jago should give himself to Nicky.