Burgess spent the weekend of Friday 18th to Monday 21st May with Peter Pollock in Hertfordshire. Pollock remembered Burgess ‘whilst there behaved very oddly indeed. He was taking codeine tablets, he drank a lot though not excessively and was extremely sleepless, wandering about the house at night. He was obviously very unwell.’1
At the same time Esther Whitfield had written to Burgess c/o Reform Club asking what she should do about the Lincoln adding a postscript which she asked him to destroy ‘when you go to Michael Berry do be clean (nails, hands, face etc), clothes’ signing off ‘Dear sweet, bless you. Lots of love, Esther.’
She then continued clearly responding to his marriage proposal:
Nothing in our relationship has been exactly traditional … It’s not so much the actual bed but everything – the attention, care and interest – that it engenders that I myself wd want and that I don’t think you wd give. Being a woman I cd give all that without the bed, but for a man I suppose it is different – all those things only come as a result of the bed. How mis and badly circumstanced everything is. But I suppose nothing wd be more mis than being unhappily married. I wd far rather keep you always as a good and loving friend. Guy there is one thing I wd like to know about this bed. Has it always been like that with you or is recent or is it just me? I hope this is not a very impertinent question.2
On Monday 21 May Bernard Miller arrived in London, staying first at the Russell and then Green Park hotel, and was entertained several times by Burgess at the Reform Club and Gargoyle and introduced to various of his friends, including Jack Hewit, who was told the two men would be going away for a weekend together. That week Hewit noticed that Burgess was in a strange mood. ‘He was smoking a great deal and he was back on Nembutal. I had a day off on the Tuesday and during the morning he made a telephone call to Lady Maclean, Donald Maclean’s mother, and he asked her for Donald’s home telephone number. He said he had a message for Donald from his brother Alan, whom he had met before he sailed from America.’3
On Tuesday he visited Tomas and Hilda Harris. Burgess had previously been barred from their house, largely owing to Hilda’s intense dislike of him, but he had been allowed ‘to work his passage back’. When asked about Kim Philby, he had put his hands to his head and said, ‘Don’t speak to me of Kim – nobody could have been more wonderful to me’, and then burst into tears.4
‘He was still in an odd mood on Wednesday, fluctuating between bouts of good humour and moments of sentimentality’, remembered Hewit:
I put it down to the fact that he had decided to resign from the Foreign Office. That evening we dined at home. We had smoked eel, which he bought at Fortnum & Mason, and a shepherd’s pie which I had made, and a great deal of red wine … Then, quite suddenly, he said, ‘I’m not going away with Bernard this weekend.’ ‘Why ever not?’ I asked. I thought for one happy moment that he was going to ask me to go with him instead. ‘I have to do something else. There is an old friend of mine at the FO in serious trouble and I’m going to use the other ticket to help him get away from it for a while.’ We were both a bit tight by this time, as we had consumed quite a lot of red wine. We talked about it. ‘Why you?’ I asked him. ‘Because I’m the only one he will trust,’ was the answer. ‘How long will you be away?’ I asked. ‘If all goes well, I should be back on Monday, but if I decide to go on to Paris from St Malo, I will let you know.’ The Falaise was due to sail on Friday at midnight from Southampton to St Malo and return via Jersey. Then quite suddenly and for no reason that I can give I said, ‘It’s Donald Maclean, isn’t it?’ He never answered.5
On Thursday 24th, after lunch with Donald Maclean at the Reform Club, he went down to see his old history teacher, Robert Birley, now headmaster of Eton, to ask his advice. He claimed the Salisbury family had asked him to complete the life of the Victorian prime minister Lord Salisbury, which Salisbury’s daughter had left unfinished, but he was hesitating. ‘“Well, you see, Salisbury was a convinced Christian and I am a complete agnostic. I think that matters. What do you advise?” Birley replied, “The only thing I can suggest you can do is talk to the present Lord Salisbury and put that to him.” He thanked me. We discussed other subjects … then Guy left.’6
He then paid a nostalgic visit to his childhood home in Ascot, asking if he could look around, the first time he’d visited the house since his mother had moved out over ten years before. Little had changed, with the bell pulls for Mr Nigel and Mr Guy’s rooms still prominent at the entrance. He looked around the house, signed the visitors’ book and returned to London.7 He then saw Peter Pollock, who had left his Rolls-Royce parked behind Burgess’s flat, and put a call into Stephen Spender asking if he could speak ‘very urgently’ to W.H. Auden, who was staying with him. Natasha Spender explained he was not there and Burgess said he would ring back.
That night he met Fanny Carby for a drink at the Players Theatre, telling her he had been learning Russian, which he thought might lead to a job on the Daily Telegraph’s diplomatic staff before going on to have dinner with Peter Pollock, Andrew Revai and Bernard Miller.8 Hewit was out to dinner that night, but returned at 10 p.m. to find Burgess having an argument. ‘I listened outside Guy’s door and heard Guy speaking his brand of French to someone who answered in French, but was obviously neither French nor English. The argument was really quite fierce and I thought that Guy had brought back someone who was spoiling for a fight, so I knocked at the door and asked Guy if he needed anything. He said he didn’t … I didn’t hear anything else, nor did I hear his visitor leave.’9
Hewit later wrote of how, on Friday 25th, ‘I made tea as usual about 8 a.m. and took it in to him. He was alone in bed reading. The curtains were closed and the bedside lamp was on. The ashtray was overflowing. I realised that he had had one of his very frequent sleepless nights. I opened the curtains, emptied the ashtray, plumped up his pillows, planted a kiss on his forehead and said, “I’ll see you later.” He didn’t say anything.’10
Burgess spent the morning telephoning old friends. He tried Wystan Auden again, in the hope of arranging to stay with him on Ischia, where he now lived, and this time Stephen Spender took the call. Burgess told him, at length, how much he had enjoyed Spender’s recently published autobiography, World Within World, which discussed his disenchantment with the Communist Party during the late 1930s. Spender found the praise ‘strange’, as it was the first conversation he could recall having with Burgess in five years. When Auden came home late that night, Spender told him that Burgess wanted him to call back. ‘Do I have to?’ Auden drawled. ‘He’s always drunk.’ He did not call back.11
Burgess then talked to Margie Rees on the telephone for about twenty minutes, which was so incoherent and made such little sense that she assumed he was either drunk or under the influence of drugs, and did not really pay much attention to what he was saying. ‘Among other things, he had said that he was about to do something which would surprise and shock many people, but he was sure it was the right thing to do.’ He had gone on to say that he would not see them for some time and that this was really for the best, because they no longer saw eye to eye politically, but that Goronwy would understand what he was going to do, and indeed was the only one of his friends who would.12
At about the same time on the morning of 25 May, the Foreign Secretary, Herbert Morrison, approved a timetable for suggesting to the US security authorities that Maclean be interrogated the following month, when his wife was in hospital having her baby.13
Later that morning Burgess went to the Continental Booking Office at Victoria and booked a two-berth cabin for a weekend cruise to St Malo for him and Bernard Miller, but Miller knew nothing of this. He had only just come from France and had no wish to go back. Nor was he a homosexual, nor the owner of an off-Broadway theatre. He was, in fact, a medical student spending a semester at the University of Geneva and, according to his later FBI interview, he had come to London simply because Burgess had promised to introduce him to a friend, who was a doctor at London’s Middlesex Hospital.14
He hired a cream Austin A-40 saloon from Welbeck Motors in Crawford Street and saw Blunt at the Courtauld in Portman Square. He then went on to the Reform Club, where he had lunch then saw Bernard Miller. As part of his deliberate laying of a false trail, Burgess ostentatiously looked at road maps of the north of England, discussing the merits of various routes with one of the club servants, and letting it be known he was planning on going to the Lake District or Scotland.
Later that afternoon with Miller he bought a suitcase, shirt, socks, a black soft hat and umbrella at Gieves in Old Bond Street.
Returning to New Bond Street, he packed a tweed suit, some nylon shirts, shoes, socks, dinner jacket, shaving kit, £300, some savings certificates and the collected novels of Jane Austen, as ‘I never travel without it’, and just before 6 p.m., he set off on what would be the first stage in his journey into exile.15
Meanwhile Maclean had been celebrating his thirty-eighth birthday with friends at two restaurants in Central London, before returning to the Foreign Office. As he crossed the Foreign Office courtyard about 6 p.m. he unexpectedly ran into the Deputy Under-Secretary of State, Roger Makins, who was also leaving, and they exchanged a few casual remarks during which Maclean mentioned he wouldn’t be in the next day. Makins, who was aware of the investigations, had no wish to give Maclean any grounds for suspicion and assumed that the surveillance stretched to Tatsfield. Nevertheless, he returned to the Foreign Office to check with Carey-Foster, or his secretary, that Maclean had indeed taken the day off, but both had already gone home. Maclean, followed by the watchers, caught his usual train home from Charing Cross.
Shortly after Maclean arrived home, Burgess drove through the gates of Beaconshaw, the four-bedroomed house that the Macleans had bought on their return from Cairo, and was introduced as Roger Styles – the name was taken from two Agatha Christie books, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The two men had a quick supper and then told Melinda they had to meet a man in Andover. Whilst Burgess waited in the hall, Maclean said goodbye to his two young sons, before leaving about 9 p.m. Taking turns driving, the two men sped the ninety miles along the back roads to Southampton. Just before midnight, the car screeched to a halt on Southampton dock. Abandoning it, they ran up the gangplank as it was being raised. ‘Back Monday,’ shouted Burgess.
In fact, the two men had not gone unnoticed. Maclean, whose name was on a watch list, had been clocked by an immigration official, and he immediately rang MI5’s operational headquarters in London, Leconfield House, where a number of officers were still planning the Monday interview. Alerts were put out to British intelligence officers on the Continent, but the French police, for fear of a leak, were not informed. Without a warrant to arrest the two men, there was little the British authorities could do.16
The Falaise reached St Malo at 9 a.m. on the Saturday morning. It was raining, so only a few of the two hundred passengers aboard alighted. Burgess and Maclean remained lingering over a breakfast of eggs and bacon and then went ashore, leaving in their cabins the luggage they had brought with them. As they had missed the 11.20 a.m. boat-train to Paris, a taxi-driver called Albert Gilbert drove them to Rennes, where he dropped them off in the main square, and they caught up with the train. That was the last anyone from the West was to see of them for five years.17