43
I HAVE DISCOVERED AF TER SIX MONTHS in solitary confinement, without so much as a glimpse of the sky, that my mind—body and soul—craves release into the out-of-doors. I dream of the sun and clouds and blue skies and the places I have known and loved. I find I can only summon the energy to write of places in sunlight, outdoors in the Berkshires, on the playing field or rowing on the river. And always the blue seas and skies of Greece, of Crete and Delos, chirp of crickets and smells of laurel and oleander, the humpbacked olive trees on Epano Englianos. So with Suzanne, it seems I only really knew her in the outdoors—where we made a virtue out of a necessity, given our joint infidelities. After the hospital and our one night at Hillders—after she was a married woman—it seemed to all come down to the garden in Cadogan Square. Later, it would be Elysium (the hotel rooms in New York blur into dark abstractions). For three months in the late spring and summer of 1944, before I left for France and Germany, Cadogan Square was our oasis in drab, bomb-scarred London. She would come up from Guilford, I from the OSS London office, and I’d let myself into the gardens with a key she provided. Often it was in the late afternoon, or evening, sometimes night. Often, too, I had to wait long hours there for her, or she for me, schedules and transportation always being problematic. I would lie back on the rectangular lawn, surrounded on all sides by a magnificent array of rhododendrons and lilacs, horse chestnuts and plane trees, and stare up at the pale sky framed by the profusion of tan gables and odd-shaped chimneys of the Dutch Revival town houses that populated the square like so many oversized fairy cottages from a child’s storybook. Even at the height of the Blitz, flowers grew in profusion, so Suzanne assured me, a note of sanity in the terrifying gloom—their floral scents an antidote to the stink of burning that burdened the air of the city. I remember lying in Suzanne’s arms at night, listening to the sinister buzz of V-I’s pass overhead in the weeks after the Normandy invasion; the drone of their engines would suddenly cut out, and we’d wait the interminable silent seconds—the distant and not so distant reverberations erupting from the earth at our backs like earthquakes on a planet not ours. I was going back to the killing, and she had always just come from the wounded—the burn cases her specialty—so we banished death in our wine-sodden lovemaking.
The children of Cadogan Square were long gone, sent away to distant countryside villages, like Charles Fairburn’s children, and a few off to America; even Winsted had three or four “British cousins” in its ranks during the war years. Suzanne’s house on the square was overseen by a fierce old Scottish housekeeper and very proper butler, and there was always the chance that Bobby or her mother might turn up without notice. So Suzanne preferred to arrive at home, change out of her uniform into a loose summer dress, no underwear, and have the housekeeper prepare a picnic with wine, sandwiches, and a thick plaid blanket. Once it was dark, and with all the surrounding houses under strict blackout precautions, Cadogan Gardens was ours. Suzanne would sometimes take whole blossoms of the California lilac that grew in profusion and rub them all over her body to rid herself of the stink of the hospital. She became pregnant. The baby would have been a boy, “my Cadogan Gardens boy,” she called him. He was conceived there but died from a miscarriage while I was following in Patton’s wake through France. Suzanne never got over it. It happened after Bobby was shot down over Leipzig—of all places—and Suzanne regarded it as God’s punishment—less for her infidelities than for hoping Bobby never made it out of his flaming bomber. I still see her face raised to the searchlight-illuminated sky and the silhouettes of a fairy-tale city as she desperately tried to hold back her screams of agonized release, as if for the son we would never have.
—excerpt from John Alden’s Pankrác Prison diary
On the way from Midhurst to Cambridge, I had to change trains between Waterloo and Paddington, and so had the cab drop me off at Cadogan Square for an hour. The enormous town house at the north end of the square that had belonged to Suzanne’s family, a confection of gables and polychrome brickwork, turrets and terra-cotta chimneys, had long since been divided into multiple luxury flats, mostly given over to international bankers and Saudi playboys. The curbs were lined with flashy Mercedes and BMWs. As the old gardener who let me into the gated park put it, “Guv’nor, makes you wonder who won the war.”
Suzanne’s California lilacs were still there, so the gardener assured me as I surveyed the forlorn bushes. The children have long since returned, and the bomb-damaged blocks nearby had been rebuilt with modern flats; the Scottish church at the end of Pont Street stood on what had been a block of rubble when Suzanne and my father had indulged in their assignations nearby. Young boys and girls from nearby Hill House School, dressed in their tan knickerbockers and mustard-colored jumpers and marching in lines two by two, regularly passed the gardens on their way to Hyde Park, little suspecting the mayhem of the gods that had once descended from the sky. As I walked the brick paths of the garden, I found myself gazing up at the oblong of winter sky bordered by a confection of leaded glass and softly blinking Christmas lights, and, as I did, seeing a woman’s orgasmic features poised against that London sky, as I had Laura’s face against the gray clouds through the French doors of our room above La Giudecca, and something, too, of that angelic release in the face of the figure in the Saint-Gaudens memorial.
I was both relieved and anxious about what had seemed like a reconciliation between mother and daughter after their long walk. A modus vivendi between conspirators? They didn’t say much around the Christmas tree as the presents were handed out, but I had a distinct feeling that a deal had been struck. And when Suzanne opened her present from Laura, a pair of leather gloves from Venice, she fairly flew into her daughter’s arms with thanks. It was almost touching.
How was it that every time I was around Suzanne, I felt as though there was a conspiracy afoot?
I think any memoirist—is that the right word for something scribbled into a child’s lined notebook?—is tempted to note the most influential men, or women, in his life. Too many, at this juncture, for me to safely list. But I might mention two, or rather, a brief meeting between two of them, one the greatest humanist intellect I ever knew, the other possessing the greatest intuitive insights into the nature of language, or should I say the architecture of human narrative? Nigel Bennett, my teacher and mentor, I had known since the thirties; we had collaborated on a number of journal articles on Bronze Age Greece. What set Nigel apart for me was how, behind all his blinding insights, there lay a brooding abyss of sadness for the horrors he had witnessed in the trenches, when he’d seen many of the finest men of his generation butchered: the experience—of love extirpated by high explosives and machine-gun fire—like an atmosphere of the mind, informed his every utterance. This labyrinth of degradation was the thing from which he sought to extricate his fellow man.
So unlike the prickly, introverted Michael Ventris, an amateur linguist, a professional architect, of whom the world knew nothing until his extraordinary cracking of Linear B a little more than a year ago. What made the meeting of these two so spectacular was the fusion before my dazzled eyes of Nigel’s unparalleled mastery of the facts and fancy of history, literature, and mythology, and Ventris’s grasp of the inner dynamics of a lost language, which only a man of perseverance, logic, and meticulous methodology—much less the fortitude to take great risks—could have pulled off. Realizing how Ventris had done it by throwing out the received wisdom—that Linear B was unrelated to Greek—made me realize that only risk takers could change the world. I had tried and failed; I had struggled doggedly for years but had failed to make the final leap—to give up everything for the prize. To watch these two men go at it in Nigel’s book-lined Cambridge study was to witness two of the finest intellectual talents of the age begin to merge and pull in tandem in hopes of revealing the lost civilization of Homer’s stories. Nigel, like his mentor, Arthur Evans, pined for Minoan Crete, believing it the source of our common humanity, the golden age, perhaps Plato’s Atlantis—as echoed in Homer’s land of the Phaeacians. Ventris cared only for facts and analysis. I prided myself on holding my own, and contributing a few telling insights, but the main show was not Nigel and Ventris, but in the darkness somewhere east of Berlin. I walked away from that Cambridge meeting floating on air, my head spinning at the possibilities that awaited.
—excerpt from John Alden’s Pankrác Prison diary
Later, as I walked the empty streets from the Cambridge train station to Corpus Christi College, I found the near silence oppressive, an echo of the quietude and distance I had detected in Laura at the Midhurst station when she dropped me off. She seemed jumpy when I touched her, as if something of her mother’s prickliness had rubbed off. And I was not a little apprehensive about meeting the “ancient” and “legendary” Nigel Bennett, as Charles had described his Cambridge mentor. Before I’d read about my father’s meeting with Ventris and Bennett in his Pankrác diary, I vaguely knew my father had studied with Bennett, an acolyte of Sir Arthur Evans and world authority on Minoan archaeology and ancient languages, but I had no idea Bennett had been the team leader behind the cracking of the German Enigma ciphers during the war, heading up the code breakers at Bletchley Park. After the war, Bennett had run MI5, British counterintelligence, before returning to his role as a master of Corpus Christi College in the early sixties.
Nor, for obvious reasons, could my father have mentioned those dangerous facts in his prison diary. But that he had included mention of this meeting at all spurred me on, torn between the fantasy and the hope, that my father had wanted me to know this man. And even the alacrity with which Charles Fairburn had put me in touch with Bennett, I now recognized as a kind of confession.
As my shoes crunched on the damp gravel of the quad, which framed that eerily immaculate rectangle of frosty green, reflecting milky glimmers in the ranks upon ranks of medieval leaded-glass windows—so reminiscent of Princeton’s collegiate Gothic—I couldn’t help wondering if this white-tower existence was really the scholarly life my father had so pined for. Or was it only in that moment during his clandestine stopover in Cambridge, which had totally escaped Elliot Goddard and the CIA investigators, when he realized the genius of Ventris and the window thrown wide onto the past, that he had opted for that reckless mission? His steps, my steps, and the thousands upon thousands of like-minded footsteps, if the cupped stone stairs were to be believed, spoke of a pilgrimage site and a far-seeing oracle. The master’s oak door was scored with rust stains and absorbed my tentative knocks like a feather pillow. Then a young woman with disheveled auburn hair and rheumy eyes let me in. She was wearing the rattiest gray cardigan I’d ever seen and carried an open paperback of Middlemarch. Clearly, I had interrupted her read.
“Thank God you could come on such short notice; the idea he might have no visitors on Christmas Day—besides me, who doesn’t count—was making me very sad. He’s simply outlived everybody. Now, if you haven’t seen him recently, you should know he’s a trifle forgetful and quite deaf—especially when he doesn’t care to hear what you’re telling him.” Her spiel was rattled off by rote. “Hearing aid gives him a headache, he says, but he got quite agitated when I mentioned your name—something about a chart.” She waved me around a corner toward a study crammed with more books in one space than I’d ever encountered, with the possible exception of Virgil Dabney’s study. “If you lean forward and speak directly to his face, he can hear quite well— actually, I’m convinced he can read lips, although he’d never admit it.
He’s just as happy to do all the talking anyway. A nod or shake of your head is often sufficient.” By then, we were through the doorway of Nigel Bennett’s study and were confronted with a minefield to be negotiated if those precious stacks of books interleafed with file cards were not to be toppled. The wan sunlight of late afternoon, shadowed by black clouds, filtered in by way of a bay window overlooking the quad. A smell of burning coal was pervasive. At first, I couldn’t spot the fireplace, which was screened by two massive armchairs with scrolling armrests. Glancing at the mantel, where a vigorously ticking Victorian clock chimed the hour, I could make out framed photos of khaki-clad soldiers bracketing the clock, along with a scattering of artifacts.
“The master”—and I noted the supercilious irony in her tone—“woke up with a bit of a cough this morning, a cold, perhaps, coming on, so there’s no saying how long he’s going to last—normally, it depends on how well his guests amuse.” Her accent suggested she was from the north of England, working-class but well educated, and I assumed she was a grad student putting in her hours as factotum. “But after Colonel Fairburn’s telephone call this morning, he’s been quite uppity. He’s been talking a blue streak about you, Mr. Alden; he’s been going on a fair dance.” She gave me a crooked-toothed, exasperated smile and weaved her way to the chair on the right. There she knelt like a supplicant to announce my arrival with slow, deliberate syllables. An arm appeared from around the back of the chair and waved me forward. I negotiated the roundabout route blazed moments before by Miriam—whose name I got later—and shook hands with this “extravagant genius of his generation,” as the Times obituary would state two weeks later, “spy master’s spy master . . . who had elaborated on Michael Ventris’s pioneering triumph in the translation of Linear B.” His hand was cold, limp, and liver-spotted, and his eyes bore into mine—eyes greatly magnified behind the thick lenses of his oversized tortoiseshell reading glasses. Gray eyes, truly gray, grayer than the grayest English winter day—and seeing right to the pithy core of his subject.
“John, you haven’t changed a farthing.” “It’s Peter. I’m his son, Peter.”
“Sit down, man—no ceremony, please.”
Twice I tried to release his hand, and twice it gripped tighter as he scrutinized my face, his kidney-colored lips pressed inward with concentration. His glasses were so large, like demitasse saucers—they might have passed as clown glasses at the circus—that they made it hard to fully register his broad yet delicately boned features. His wide brow constituted an expanse of wrinkled flesh, a snowfield of flesh at winter’s end, furrowed by wind and rain. His thin white hair flew about as if perpetually windblown.
“Peter,” I repeated, saying my name loudly at Miriam’s prompting; at this, she just smiled as she left me.
Nigel Bennett was one of the oldest-looking men I’d ever encountered. He was like an emblem of oldness, his skin so fine and luminous, like bone china, so delicate, in fact, that it seemed to emanate an inner light.
“Sit, sit . . . good, good, wondering when you’d turn up again. I hope you damn well returned that chart to Ventris—apoplectic he was.”
He laughed heartily, and I obeyed and swung myself into the neighboring chair, which I soon realized had been strategically placed to afford the master full scrutiny of his guests at close range. I bent forward, my mind going blank as I was overcome with conflicting sensations: Was my leg being pulled—some inside joke?
“But you had what you needed, I suppose,” he continued. “Did Hollar come through on his end? Everyone seemed well pleased with our catch.” A raspy wheeze hissed from his lavender-gray lips, like some archaic engine laboring to gather momentum.
“Karel Hollar, who”—I paused again, fearing to disclose my father’s role in the stealing of the Linear B tablets—“seemed to have come upon an unknown cache of Linear B tablets at Pylos?”
“Hollar’s tablets—from the throne room, wasn’t it?” An open book slipped unnoticed from his lap to the floor and a tweedy leather-patched arm rose in some agitation, conducting soundless violins for seconds, only to lose momentum and drop to his side.
“Miriam,” he whined, and then went into a fit of coughing, “get us some nice tea and biscuits like a good girl, the chocolate ones in the blue wrapper—honey biscuits—and the Darjeeling. Sustenance for our embattled American brother. I’ve a terrific appetite on my hands, if my memory serves me.”
A shout in the affirmative came from a nearby room.
Nigel Bennett adjusted his reading glasses and craned toward me. “Hollar was always a sneaking blaggard, but to hold those hundred and three tablets back for his private use was inexcusable.” His sagging limbo eyes watched me intently; I felt stripped naked. I licked my lips in desperation to find a promising point in which to slip the blade of my shovel. “What—cat got your tongue, you great lout of an American—trailing clouds of glory, is it? Expect the nations and peoples of the world to fall into your welcoming lap like manna from above.”
I tried a confident smile, confronted with what I took to be a favored mode of joshing from a legendary god of our profession, while the hands on the mantelpiece clock spun wildly. A little panicked, I twirled my mental dial, desperate for the right frequency. I knew this was my only chance, convinced that the possibly foolhardy mention in my father’s prison diary of his meeting with Bennett and Ventris in September 1953 had been for me, his posterity. Bennett’s name, like Philby’s, had been circled twice and checkmarked.
“I believe Sir Arthur Evans sequestered his Linear B from Knossos for many years, for his exclusive use.”
“Don’t mention those two names in the same breath. Hollar—he did have them?”
“Oh, he had them all right, all one hundred and three tablets, right where he said he did.”
“So the exchange for the names came off without a hitch?”
“The names . . . the names.” I felt some vague paternal injunction to keep my wits about me. “Yes, he knew the names, but without proof, purloined documents . . .”
“Where’d he hide the tablets—were they safe?” “Leipzig—the Museum of Antiquities in Leipzig.”
“You mean the good ole red, white, and blue didn’t bomb it flat? Or the Soviets didn’t make off with them?”
“Oh, I think your RAF boys weighed in plenty on Leipzig. And no, they’re safe. The Soviets would have had no idea what they were. Ingots of bullion would have been a different matter.”
“Safe—good, good.”
“Beautiful things, like the finest porcelain, handcrafted to last for eternity.”
“Really . . . so, not like Evans’s, from Knossos”—a stricken look came into his gray eyes—“crumbled to the touch, and your heart would sink to your toes.” He peered hard at me, as if there were something he couldn’t quite yet discern in my face. “And the names?”
“Names . . . on the tablets?”
“You found names written on the tablets?”
“Well, yes, a prince of Pylos, Lakedanos, and a Phaeacian princess, Philowona—as well as I could translate it.”
“Not Nausicaa, our lovely burner of ships?”
“Perhaps an earlier archaic version, perhaps Cretan in origins. With the Berlin Wall down, maybe we can go back and do some more work on Hollar’s tablets.”
“Berlin Wall—Kennedy’s folly. Kennedy—heh, there’s a foolish cad—get railroaded by Khrushchev like that. Then, without that wall, where would we be? Stabilized a very tricky situation. Wouldn’t want you Yanks getting us into another fight for which there could be no winners on this side of the pond.”
“What Frost said, something about walls making good neighbors.” “And I’ve uncovered—as I know you have—a few in my day. But did Hollar really let you see his little cache, his insurance—before he got out?”
I stared into those antediluvian gray eyes, paddling hard to stay afloat.
“I think he wanted to make sure the charts were the real thing—that they worked—before he gave up the names.”
“Well, he would—full of Hun precision. Did you really get your hands on the tablets; did you get to work with them?”
Bennett leaned within inches of my face. I gave him a reckless smile: the smile of an inveterate risk taker.
“Some were just inventories,” I said, “like the others from Pylos and Knossos, but there were a few tablets that seemed different, the symbols and syntax more complex, pointing to a narrative of a kind, a sailing voyage, perhaps a voyage to Crete, or even the island of the Phaeacians—”
“Good God, and fair Nausicaa?”
“Well, I’m still struggling with the translation—the code is damnably difficult and the syntax impossible. But definitely Knossos and the names of other cities and a seafarer or wayfarer. I’ve roughed out a translation.”
“Oh, you ambitious thing, and how unlike Hollar to show you the damn things, unless he thought he might need you—that’s how he always was, insisting on the holographs of the charts.”
“I know Ventris wasn’t pleased.”
“Won’t speak to any of us again—gone off in a pique.”
“But Nigel, we had no choice—right? That was the deal you negotiated,” I said. “And Hollar wanted to make damn sure they were the genuine article before he’d give us the names.”
“So, it must have been the tablets, then, which kept him from defecting sooner. He insisted he could finish with the tablets in a month, maybe six weeks, and then he’d be out—come home to us, as he put it.”
“Those Leipzig tablets were a lifetime’s work. But a defector—yes, that makes sense: a famous man who had deciphered the Linear B tablets he’d discovered—and, of course, he could just make something up about where he found them. Numbered among the immortals, like Evans and Schliemann. That’s what he wanted since childhood . . . even if I did have a bone or two to pick with him.”
I saw his face break into a smile of almost childlike grace at the Christmas present I was about to offer, his iron gray eyes filling as he turned to a more oblique angle, drawn to the warmth of the coal fire, perhaps distracted by something else that just arrived over the antenna.
“A bone or two—heh . . .”
“Yes, I took care of it my own way.” “You wicked boy.”
As I stared into Bennett’s ancient face touched with flame, I sensed a closed door swinging open to the light.
“You see,” I said, “I slipped a bunch of his tablets into my backpack when he wasn’t looking, the most propitious of the lot, with certain telltale hallmarks. It’s why it took me so long to get back to you. I will make a holograph”—I laughed, almost more amazed than the doddering Nigel Bennett—“a copy of my translation of those tablets for you tomorrow and put it in the mail first thing, for old times’ sake.”
“Could you—even before you publish!”
“It’s the least I could do for all you’ve done for me.”
“You were always my prince, my prince from Princeton, my favorite American cousin. And you know, such stories don’t come easily to a generation of diggers like us. Especially those of us who learned our trade at a tender age, at the end of such a tender age.” I saw his great eyes fill with tears and shift their focus to the silver-framed photos on the mantel. “Off to Ypres for a little sport, we thought.” His hands came together almost prayerfully, his fat fingertips rubbing just barely. “Bit of a chill today. Put a shovel of coal on the hob, there’s a good man.”
I moved from my seat to the fireplace, kneeling by a sack of glossy coal and a small hand shovel. Gingerly, I dug out a few chunks and spread them evenly upon the grate over the glowing but chalky remnants, the orange sparks that leaped stirring half-remembered images of other rooms hovering on the edge of recollection. As I stood, the objects on the mantelpiece fully caught my eye. There were faded sepia-gray photos of young soldiers in waders, knee-deep in flooded trenches, peering over battlements of earth and barbed wire. One of the photos, a studio portrait, I realized, was of the Great War poet Rupert Brooke, dressed not as a soldier, but in a shirt open at the throat . . . a beautiful young man with soulful eyes who had yet to know the trenches. Arranged around that mahogany clock of Victorian vintage were archaic artifacts: a tiny white marble figurine of Cycladic origin with exaggerated hips and breasts and a well-defined genital cleft (exquisite and worth hundreds of thousands in the antiquities market), a clay oil lamp common on Crete, a bronze Mycenaean spear point with a mottled green patina, and various potshards from Knossos of leaping dolphins and octopi and a large fragment of red-figure ware displaying heroes and gods in various acts of butchery and buggery. I picked up the Cycladic figurine and rubbed my thumb down the cool marble to the smooth cleft, feeling an immensity of blue spread before me . . . and my father’s hand reaching in the moonlight toward his lover. And a little prayer to Demeter to keep me in play.
Nigel Bennett’s voice startled me.
“We owe you much, helping to get those traitors out of Hollar. You were the only man who could do it—I was always convinced of that. He insisted, the dirty bugger.”
I returned to my chair and bent forward as his voice trailed off and he coughed into a large handkerchief. His old eyes were now fixed on the fire, as if fascinated to watch the new coals catch, their edges glowing, absorbing the heat and giving off new . . . the energy of a million-years-older sun.
“Oh, I suppose their names were the easy part . . . but evidence that will hold up in court is always the hard part, if you can’t catch them in a lie and get them for perjury.”
“All Cambridge men, too, though not Corpus Christi, the gods be praised. If they’d turned out to be my boys, I might have lost all hope.” “Of course, Maclean and Burgess had already fled to Moscow. Kim Philby was being interrogated by your men at MI5 . . . why couldn’t you break him, get a confession out of him? He’d been at it for almost two decades. You’d think someone in his past would have come forward and at least confirmed his Communist connections.”
At mention of the name Philby, I saw Nigel Bennett’s demeanor alter, his eyes flickering with an active light, and I knew he was seeing his nemesis once more, perhaps from behind the two-way mirror of the interrogation room.
“The cool aplomb of the man under fire, one had to admire it. He sloughed off our best people with the cunning ease of a Houdini; we didn’t have the straitjacket to hold him. Both Skardon and Dick White set their traps, and I don’t think Philby slipped up once. The man could utter a thousand lies, a thousand variations on the truth, and never forget . . . impressive that.”
It came to me in that instant, from the accounts I’d read in the papers when Philby had died in Moscow the year before, that Nigel Bennett had been dismissed as head of MI5 in 1963 because of Philby’s defection to Moscow from Beirut. Not only had MI6 returned Philby to the payroll and stationed him in Beirut but when they confronted him with new proof of his spying, he’d actually agreed to confess, only to slip away from under their noses and board a Russian ship arranged by his KGB handler in Beirut. A week later, he was safely ensconced in Moscow, proclaimed a hero of the Soviet Union. Talk about a fuckup to end all fuckups. It had ended Bennett’s career and pretty much ruined his reputation. A reputation that today stands even lower: Most historians agree that Nigel Bennett connived with MI6 to let Philby escape on purpose to avoid the embarrassment of a trial. Either that or MI6 made Bennett the fall guy for their own elitist ineptitude.
“Of course, Hollar must have known Philby, between Cambridge days and NKVD networks. And even if Philby didn’t run Hollar in occupied Greece as an SIS agent, he would have had access to his intelligence, which he could’ve then passed on to his NKVD handlers in London. Jesus—a double agent working for the Soviets and the British, except he was only working for the Soviets, and Moscow Center could double-check his intel and his loyalty against what they got through Philby—talk about a deer in the headlights: Hollar couldn’t put a toe wrong without calling down the wrath of the gods.”
“That’s why we sent you, to get him out, our star witness, a KGB
defector to expose Philby and put him away for good.”
In 1953, after Maclean and Burgess escaped to Moscow in 1951, Philby under virtual house arrest in London, and Anthony Blunt lying low at the Courtauld Institute, Hollar would have been able to reestablish contact with his MI5 handlers without fear of his potential defection being revealed by a Soviet mole inside British intelligence.
“I’m only sorry I got so delayed; there were complications. Hollar was just a tad conflicted in his loyalties, or, more to the point, terrified his link to SIS, MI6, and MI5 would be the death of him.
“Our deep sleeper, biding his time. . . . His loyalty, John, was always to us”—and Bennett swept his arm around his book-lined study—“to me, and to this and what we are about . . . to you as well, of course. With Philby under wraps and incommunicado with Moscow Center, Hollar should have been quite safe to plan his exit.”
I was stunned at this old man’s assurance—Karel Hollar’s loyalty to him personally—that the scholarly world and its values encompassed in his mind’s eye remained so sacrosanct, at the last, inviolate, even for a man like Hollar—a man like my father. Or was the problem in the parsing of those scholarly ideals?
“I think part of my difficulty was that Philby still had a piece of him. You see, Hollar knew Philby was being interrogated by MI5, that any moment they could break him and Philby might give up every Soviet agent he’d ever known—or that he might escape, as he eventually did. . . . No wonder Hollar wanted out.”
“Philby was out of circulation; we had him watched night and day. He couldn’t get within fifty feet of his handlers without us knowing— and he knew that, knew that if he was spotted, it would have been game, set, and match.”
My heart fell at his continued assurance.
“Except there was still Anthony Blunt outstanding—if Philby, had somehow gotten to Blunt, or Blunt to him . . .”
Something in his eyes extinguished and his head nodded, as if he was overcome with extreme exhaustion, or was it that I had questioned his professional competency?
As if reading my mind with absolute precision, he said, “Philby wouldn’t have dared meet, or try to meet with Blunt; it would have meant the conviction of both for treason. Odd thing is how both went down to ghosts out of their past in 1963, nemesis one and two biting them in their Red arses.”
My brain lit up like a Christmas tree and I momentarily lost my thread: Who was to ask the next question?
“A coincidence . . . or just time, allowing the rats to exit the sinking, stinking ship? It was an American who dropped the dime on Blunt, if my memory serves. But tell me about who confirmed Philby’s spying.”
Bennett’s head drooped farther, his eyes closing as if he was nodding off, his brain shutting down in face of the hard facts of how completely British security had been compromised.
“Oh!” I exclaimed in a lighter tone of voice, watching as his eyes shuddered back to life. “Nice of Charles to put us in touch.”
“Yes, yes, good of Charles . . . poor man, always a little paranoid that there were more Cambridge traitors in our midst.”
“Well, Charles should know; Suzanne Portman was his cousin, and the man she married, Bobby Williams, was another of Anthony Blunt’s recruits at Trinity College.”
“And you, John, our bulwark, our most trusted sleeper—keeping a close eye on Suzanne must have been jolly good sport.”
I took a couple of deep breaths, all I could do to keep calm. “Loyalty to you, Nigel, to this . . . Hollar and I . . . and Charles”—and I waved my hand as this ancient digger had done a minute before, very much needing the reassurance—“to everything that we are and stand for—scholars.”
“Of course, you and Hollar, our pocket aces in the hole, as you Yanks like to call it. Pity about Hollar getting delayed. He was looking forward to full defector status and that cushy villa in Greece. But you know better than any of us that he was a man of divided loyalties who could never trust anyone . . . except what he turned up from the silent earth, things that spoke ambition to his name.”
“But surely Suzanne Portman, who married my American cousin, must have given you some concern in the early going about Philby; at the very least, she could have testified that he’d recruited her. Why else have Charles and I kept an eye on her all these years?”
“Our ‘Firebird.’” “Firebird?”
“In the Soviet decrypts your boys brilliantly managed, that was her alias.”
“Of course, I’d forgotten.”
“Our darling Mata Hari was quite the seductress, like her namesake. Outside of Suzanne’s obvious charms, she was too caught up in her own career to bother with more than passing on her father’s files before the war and doing the occasional courier job. I thought once she’d married herself off to that rich American and flown the coop to the land of the free and brave, she’d give it up. Wasn’t it you who just told me that—‘harmless’, I think you said—or was it Charles?”
It was in that moment that I began to wonder if the whole point of the game had been to keep Suzanne on ice, keep her quiet . . . and let the Philby embarrassment to the British establishment just fade away. And if MI5 had picked my father precisely because, for both public and private reasons, he might very well have wanted to shoot Karel Hollar, a witness against Philby.
“Charles should know—he just married harmless Suzanne.”
“Well, that was quick work, poor man. Widow one day, married again the next. What happened to the American flier? And Charles is a careful man. Hold on . . . Miriam, where’s the tea, damn it—and didn’t I get an invitation to a wedding recently?” He tilted his face pensively. “Hillders, wasn’t it, beautiful spring day, bride as glorious as Gloriana in her prime—perhaps more Titania, queen of the fairies in that fairy garden—fair Albion, the very fairy tale we were fighting for.”
Yes, I thought, as Elliot might have it: “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” . . . “this scepter’d isle . . . this other Eden” . . .
“I was best man.”
“And didn’t she know it! Always the crowd pleaser that woman, a Titania relentless in pursuit of her man.” “My Calypso . . . but perfectly harmless.”
“Better bet than Hollar, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
I flinched, and from somewhere, an unknown, unacknowledged anger flared.
“Lucky Hollar . . . almost as lucky as Philby. If he’d gone back on our deal, I would have had to shoot the son of a bitch—maybe I should have, considering the ambush of our men and the massacre in Pylos.”
“But Philby was worth the candle . . . after all the damage he did to us in Albania, much less you in Korea.”
“Yes, I try to forget about the Albanians who died. It ruins one’s sleep. But then, better part of valor and all that—for all concerned, better such a mess not see the light of day.”
Bennett started up, as if waking from that very sleep. “But what did delay you after they executed Hollar? I remember something about a delay—did something delay you? The tablets you just mentioned, of course. We were all so concerned about your delayed return.”
“Time . . . I’m afraid Hollar took his time, but in the end, I think he came clean, in his way, navigating to the very end down a very narrow trail of conflicting loyalties.”
“Not to mention your fears about Eisenhower, that hair trigger John Foster Dulles—not to mention harebrained Allen, and his wildly faulty judgment. No wonder you were so paranoid about another dark ages, not that I wasn’t in on its inception: four years on the Western Front.”
“Well, just as well you had at least one Yank in harness, keep an eye on things in Washington.”
“Without real Americans like you keeping us up to scratch, who knows what troubles those Dulles boys might have gotten us into.”
“It was the least I could do to thank you for Greece, for Pylos.” “How is Allen, by the way?”
“Last I heard, he was doddering around, still chasing women.”
“You always were a quick learner. You had me worried in the early going. . . .” His voice fell off, as if he’d, too, lost the thread, as if he were distracted by the spreading flames in the coal fire. “An imperial power must at root be as ruthless as its best first sergeants—and even more brutal when it’s absolutely necessary. An uncongenial thing for a democratic people; you lack, don’t you see, the aristocratic hauteur of a ruling class. We worried if you had the belly to rule others. Takes a velvet glove, co-opting the elites—and an iron fist when required to keep the little people in line.”
“Not unlike the Athenians, I suppose, pushing around their erstwhile allies in the Delian League until they brought down their own ruin against Sparta.”
I found myself transfused with rare energy, my brain, for a few minutes yet, abuzz with the world of my father’s secret life, which resonated with my own secret failures in Vietnam: in life as in love. But I could also sense the slow ebbing away of that world, crumbling as the Berlin Wall had crumbled weeks before, as life drained from Bennett’s noble face—as the spirits of the dead had finally fled Odysseus’s gaze to Erebian gloom—his chin beginning a kind of mechanical nodding, entering a hypnotic trance, even as the coal fire flared, reflecting steaks of ruby red in his glassy eyes.
Something of my grandmother’s steadfast and loyal voice steadied mine in defense of the man I never knew and the country I yet loved.
“Well, at least you can’t blame us for blowing up the world—even if your Cambridge traitors did their jolly good best to pass every atomic secret we possessed to our competitors. Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers just managed to keep a lid on the worst, until Kennedy almost got us blown to kingdom come.”
His old eyes became fixed on the fire as there emerged another sound, a low-level roar that I realized was torrents of winter rain. I turned to the bay window, where sheets of rain blotted the milky green quad. He shifted himself closer to the warmth of the fire and again gathered the thread.
“The rain would drive you mad. And the mud, of course. But what I remember was the sound of their feet, as if American feet had a distinctive sound. It was a damp, vibrating pounding coming off the muddy road that stretched across the low black hills, where the dawn fogs rolled like phantom waves. No one marched like that anymore. They were trying to impress us. Bolt upright, too, sniffing the morning air like the queen’s horse guards on parade in Hyde Park. Hard to know whether to laugh or cry, those of us who hadn’t been out on the wires all night. Why should one hate their fresh-scrubbed faces? Especially since we knew what awaited them down the line. A few miles and a few days would change them forever, and they would lose those smiles and become like us . . . or worse.
“One of my sergeants shouted disgustedly, ‘Goin’ to tidy it all up fer us, gov’ner?’ We saw them smile and give us the thumbs-up. ‘Come with me, then,’ shouted my master sergeant. ‘Give you Yanks a guided tour, if you like—you’ll see, it’ll be just the thing.’ The man spat in the mud as their ranks swung past our position. ‘Who the ’ell do they think they are? Bloody tourists—that’s what.’ I remember the look on their faces as they saw our support trenches and barbed wire for the first time . . . as if they’d been transported back to some barbaric age of iron, or just the merest eccentricity of a doddering civilization. Off they marched for their little snatch at glory . . . a matter of months and it all just fell into your laps.”
Miriam finally arrived with a large tray of tea and chocolate biscuits. She gave me a knowing look and a wink for good measure as she poured our tea and handed Nigel Bennett his cup. In my mind, I kept seeing those endless white crosses on green.
“Are you cold?” she asked. “Want me to bring you your wrap?”
“No, no, dear.” He shook her off and rattled his cup and saucer in doing so. “That won’t be necessary. We’ve got our tea now and Johnny has put some more coals on the fire. Run along like a good girl and leave us to it.”
She handed me my cup and a biscuit and made a hasty retreat, weaving her way through the stacks of books. Nigel’s cup again shook as he carefully fitted it to his lips, savoring the sweetness.
“Elusive thing, the human soul, when you try to remember those you have lost, their faces, I mean. Like those chunks of coal you just popped in . . . black and impervious to speculation, then something touches off a spark, a stray memory—call it love, a bit of heat that finds its own, loyal to its own, illuminating that vital and unique life, its fuliginous center glowing—for seconds transparent, its essence finally exposed, but so dazzling that its essential mystery—that life of the soul, don’t you think?—remains obscure . . . that white star in the sky surrounded by the infinite night of ourselves . . . and like all things, headed for dusty oblivion.”
I handed him the plate of chocolate biscuits.
“Nigel, you missed your calling. . . . You should have been a poet, a teller of tales—not a digger, but the magnificent teacher you are. . . . Perhaps we all have.”
Nigel Bennett quickly grew tired and suggested dinner at his favorite restaurant after his nap. “The Eagle—Watson and Crick, talk about code breakers, downed their pints there.” This meant my staying the night at the Royal Cambridge Hotel, recommended by Miriam. The rain was miserable and travel a mess, and so I readily accepted, even though Nigel seemed pretty worn-out. By the time I’d showered at the hotel, Miriam called my room to say that she thought Nigel was too weak, and, in fact, she’d just put him to bed. “I feared he had a cold coming on.” She suggested I visit in the morning, when she hoped he might be better. I tried calling Hillders to let Laura know I was staying over, but the line was always busy. The hotel receptionist said there were ice storms in the south and telephone lines were down. After a restless night in my beautifully appointed, antiseptically clean room, waking to the rain and to dreams of shadowy rooms I couldn’t recognize, I called after breakfast and got a flustered Miriam, who was hoping I might be the doctor returning her call. Nigel was worse, she told me; he had a temperature and his mind was wandering. “That Alzheimer’s is a tricky devil, but he seems quite delirious.” I spent an anxious couple of hours wandering the Fitzwilliam Museum and then called again. The doctor had been by and was concerned it was pneumonia; if he wasn’t better by the end of the day, they’d put him in the hospital. I stopped by and sat by Nigel’s bed for a few minutes. His lethargic, dull eyes, shorn of glasses, were open and staring into space—the gray reflecting the white of the ceiling—his head composed on a fluffed pillow in his spartan bedroom. His breathing was labored. I don’t think he recognized me, and he didn’t respond to my voice. I said good-bye and pressed his cool hand on the blanket, feeling a terrible sense of loss, of time nipping at my heels, as caretakers of memory, one after the other, slipped away, closing doors as they went.
I spent an hour before my train walking around chilly Cambridge, lingering in the immaculate quad of Trinity College, as if that panoply of humanist endeavor and scholarly remove might yield some essential insight into the traitorous instincts that had produced the likes of Kim Philby and his spawn, a man I never knew or wanted to know but who terrified and fascinated me in equal measure, that such talent and beguiling brilliance could be turned from the values of Western civilization and embrace with steely-eyed commitment a boundlessly malignant evil. Something, I knew, had preoccupied my father— enough that he’d carelessly or purposely, named Philby in his Pankrác diary—who had felt the hot breath of his unctuous evil; as Elliot would have put it, “lilies that fester” . . . A specter, too, I realized, lingering like an unhealed wound, preying on Laura’s mind even though she dared not breathe a word of those fears to me.
From these hallowed halls of academe, not a little reminiscent of the Anglican Gothic of the Winsted chapel, had come a band of traitors, young men who came to believe, against all the evidence—certainly by the time of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact and Stalin’s terror—that they were enlisting their country on the side of the angels in Moscow. And between the atom bomb secrets passed on by Donald Maclean, the Allied strategy passed on verbatim by Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, revealing Eisenhower’s and Truman’s reluctance to drive on to Berlin and Prague, and Philby’s revelation of the decryption of Soviet ciphers by the NSC, thus leaving the United States blind to the invasion of South Korea, they nearly managed it: the fondest desires of their romantic youth, a decadent West under the boot of the Soviet Union. But then we had plenty of traitors on our side who’d managed as much, if not worse. As Virgil had always told me: “Alger Hiss . . . tip of the ice cube.”
Even with the recent fall of the Berlin Wall, I realized it had been a near-run thing, and I felt as never before the agonies of doubt and deception that had warped my father’s scholarly equanimity and that of his once-proud family—my grandmother’s “European diseases” echoing like a dreary refrain over scenes of barbed wire–encrusted earth, or reflected in the hazy light of a sluggish river on its way to the sea, those fiendish yet permeable boundaries that separate the free from the unfree, and the deceitful brilliance that could justify the enslavement of millions.
A dark age that might have trumped all dark ages.
And I thought again of all those white crosses in the MeuseArgonne cemetery, and all their millions of comrades, and how, if they’d lived, what a better world they’d have bequeathed to their children, and their children’s children.
When I exited the Midhurst station late that afternoon—I still hadn’t been able to get a call through—I was stunned to see through the mists that swirled in the small parking area next to the High Street my blue left-hand drive Land Rover: our time machine, our home, our chariot of escape. For a brief, wonderful moment, I thought Laura was there waiting to pick me up, but I found it empty, the doors unlocked, and the key on the seat. I looked around, went back into the station, checked the platforms, with the expectation she’d left the Land Rover for the warmth of the waiting room. She was nowhere to be found. The seven-minute drive through sunken, winding roads and up the steep drive of Hillders brought a change from damp mists to a couple of inches of wet snow that had transformed the house and grounds into a canvas of white. I opened the heavy front door, burdened on either side by ropy wisteria vines, and was immediately aware of distant voices arguing. I walked slowly and deliberately down the central hallway, feeling, more than ever, the interloper in those rooms and now a sneak, too, as I strained to make out the conversation.
“How could she—how could she just run off like that, after everything I’ve done for her?”Then the colonel: “You always bargain with her, scold her, fawn over her; no wonder she acts like she’s sixteen. And I’m regarded as a nonentity even in my own home, by my own daughter?”
As I entered the living room, the fire ablaze, the two contestants fell silent where they stood by the mantel. Then Suzanne made a rush for the door and, as she passed me, flung this in my face: “I suppose we have you to thank for all this.”
All I could get out of the colonel was that mother and daughter had had a huge fight over dinner the previous evening, during the ice storm, and first thing that morning, Laura had taken all her things and fled in my Land Rover and disappeared.
“Did she say anything about me?” I asked him. “Did she leave a note?”
“Her room is empty—not a word to any of us.” “Where did she go?”
“Your guess as good as mine. New York, her apartment. Suzanne is fit to be tied; she was sure they had an understanding.”
“What kind of understanding?”
Charles just shook his head, looked at his watch, and moved to the door. “I’ll go up to Suzanne and see what I can do. Dinner is in an hour. If I can lure her down to the table, I suggest you two should try to talk things through. I will absent myself after the first course. Quite frankly, I suspect you’ve now ended up being the problem. I had no idea.”
For the next hour, dismayed, hurt, I wandered from room to room, inventorying the books and collections, the fabulous watercolors and prints, trying to find distractions, but without Laura, I felt a numbing sense of panic: doors shutting like heart valves being clamped off one by one by one. A sentence out of Max’s Gardens of Saturn, ostensibly about the dancer’s mother, but apt for the heroine herself, kept running though my mind: She was the supernova in their galaxy, the sole source of light and energy in their outrushing star life. Run if you dare, people, sprint for the exits if you can, but beware: There is no light to shadow your steps in the outer darkness.
Dinner was an ordeal. Three at a table designed to seat thirty, as if all the guests had fled from the plague. Charles saw to it that the wine flowed, an accelerant to the flames of his new bride’s alcoholism. We drank a ’59 Pomerol—six bottles that required careful dusting just to access the corks—that deserved to be savored like the nectar of gods but which we guzzled like Bowery winos. Charles kept us afloat on tales of Lloyd George’s mistresses and Stanley Baldwin’s boorishness in the face of Hitler’s and Stalin’s evil leers. Every candle was lit, a bonfire of wax, so that the family portraits glittered on the paneled walls like jurors out of a Rembrantesque gloom. And then quite abruptly, the colonel got up, excused himself, and told us like a stern paterfamilias not to leave the table until we had “resolved whatever needs resolving. Obviously, I’m just a pawn in your mess.”
Suzanne laughed wildly as if she’d snapped to out of the ether, as she raised her glass to salute the departed.
“Peter can play Hamlet to my debauched Gertrude perhaps,” she called after him, “now that my beloved Claudius has exited the scene.”
I was tempted to ask her, in a jovial aside, if she’d been privy to Elliot’s theories on Edward de Vere, the seventeenth earl of Oxford, but I had sense enough to know that mention of his name would not help my cause. In the soft candlelight, she looked a lot better than when I’d seen her so overwrought in the living room. The lines on her face weren’t nearly so visible, the years disguised behind her elaborate makeup—nothing overdone, but it had been carefully and expertly applied by the new mistress of the house, the stage performer to the end. And compared to the faces in the portraits on the panel walls, she was still a cracking beauty. After the part I’d so easily assumed with Nigel Bennett, I was tempted to resume my role (not as a special friend to MI5) in order to find what my father had so loved in her . . . if it was, too, to be found in her daughter, who had just walked out of my life.
“I want you to know, Peter, I don’t blame you, don’t hate you; in fact, I want to commend you for saving my daughter. I really mean that. I’ve not seen her look as well in years. Almost like the daughter I remember when she first auditioned for ABT, what, almost exactly twenty years ago, the little bitch.”
Suzanne began carefully pouring the Pomerol, concentrating to keep her hand steady.
“Her dedication and discipline are almost scary,” I offered.
Suzanne lowered the bottle and delicately wiped the dust from her fingers with her napkin, dust that the colonel had missed when he’d opened the fourth bottle. Then she shoved it across the table to me.
“To be as good as she: It’s a calling, and very few are chosen.” She sipped the wine and sighed. “Ripe, a touch of mocha and hints of something I can’t quite put my finger on. All my Cambridge cousins knew their stupid wine.”
I took a sip. “Perhaps it needs to breathe.”
“I’ve told her, if she’s smart and careful, she may have three or four seasons left. Pick and choose the parts, go to your strengths, cover your weaknesses—where the younger girls can’t harm you. Fonteyn danced into her fifties.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing her dance.”
She looked at me sharply and took a deep breath. “Distractions are what got her into trouble before.”
“You mean Max?”
“She could have been the greatest dancer of her generation, right up there with Suzanne Farrell—how I loved her having my name—and Laura has a more beautiful line, much better feet, and something of the same spiritual quality. If only she hadn’t wasted herself on that boy.” Her voice was slurry, her lips pressed tight between sips of wine. “Talent like that is a gift, yes, from me, from who knows where. Good God, if you’d seen her as a little girl—when this wine was still young—she would walk into ballet class and take her place at the barre, and everything stopped. All the chattering little things just fell silent. She had that kind of presence, that kind of effect among her own kind.” She shook her head. “I’ve been at the Met when she had entire audiences in tears, for Macmillan’s Juliet.” She raised her long, delicate hand and closed her fingers. “Like that . . . thousands of people stirred to the bottom of their souls.”
“I hope I’ll have the chance.”
“Problem is, your generation has no idea what real sacrifice is about.” She raised her glass toward me to encourage me to refill mine, which I did. Her full lips formed a sarcastic pout; wet with wine, they had a peculiar liquid quality in the harder angles of her cheeks and chin. “Weddings were, well, sacrosanct in our day—new beginnings and all that, jolly good hopes for the future.”
I wanted to scream with frustration, to let loose with a barrage of invective, as my father had in a few letters, but something my grandmother had repeated to me held me back: “When a person is unhappy you must be firm but kind.”
“Listen, Prague was really my fault, not hers. I want you to know how much I care about her, admire her; she’s made everything possible
. . . to find out what really happened to my father.”
By the alarm that flared in her eyes, I knew I had a bargaining chip. What I didn’t know was how much Laura had already told her, much less gotten out of her.
“Oh, well, yes, she mentioned something along those lines.”
“There’s a side of her,” I said, “perhaps you’ve missed: a remarkable mind and moral passion. . . . She inspires me.”
“Oh, so now she’s your muse, is she?” She laughed and pulled herself up in her chair, shoulders set so the décolletage of her lavender silk evening dress fully set off her neck and the rising curve of her breasts. She patted her head as if to make sure her chignon was firmly in place—ready for business. “Problem is, she always had bad luck with men. It seems to run in the family . . . up to now.”
Behind her in the dull flickering light, we had an audience of soldiers, inventors, and statesmen—all safely behind varnish, spectral figures into whose line she had now managed to fully graft herself, and her daughter—the whole nine yards: Pomerol, candelabra by the dozen, and rooms in which to secrete regrets for eternity.
“Really, I thought she and Max hit it off pretty well. And no small thing,” I added, taking a page from Vlada, “to have her early life immortalized in the pages of one of the best-selling novels of our generation—you, too, in walk-ons around the edges.”
“That is hardly the kind of immortality—or did you say immorality?—she should have been seeking.”
“Well, it seems you’ve relieved her of the incubus of the Williamses—that’s certainly a fresh start at life.”
“Incubus, an interesting word for my dead husband and his pathetic brood, but perhaps more apt than any I could have come up with. Chip off the old block, I see: Your father couldn’t stand Bobby and he was always correcting me, adding to my vocabulary. I never went to college, after all, unlike my brother, Francis, and my brilliant Cambridge cousins; I was just a glamorous dancer—not much better than a chorus girl in many eyes, trying to make a mark on the world.”
“Then you should be proud of Laura—a voracious reader, and I never have to correct her on anything. But maybe she has Max to thank . . . a genius with words. Keeping up with him can’t have been a cakewalk.”
She stared at me boldly, brazenly as her tone grew angry.
“I don’t subscribe to the theory that pain is good because it deepens the artistic range. When you’ve seen the real thing, when you’ve tended burn victims as I did for five long years, and tried to console their wives and mothers . . . there is nothing noble to be got there. But don’t get me wrong; I liked Max, in a way; he was not an entirely frivolous artist, but he shied away from the seriousness of life, preferring sly humor to profundity, or bettering the human lot. I may dislike his novel for the unflattering light it casts on my daughter, but it’s not to say it’s inaccurate in many of its details; it’s just . . .” She seemed to halt before some looming crevasse. “I love my daughter, Peter, but I also know who comes first—her cruelties to me and Max were many.”
“You prefer socialist realism, then—all good things all the time?” “Don’t get clever with me, young man.”
I found her eyes beginning to settle on me with a furious intensity, as if she needed to fully read my face, her long nose and oval nostrils lifting ever so slightly, savoring the powerful scent of burning wax. I felt a hard stirring in my crotch. The candles fluttered and I shivered. Perhaps a cold draft from the banks of windows at the far end of the dining room, or from the huge empty fireplace decorated with Delft tiles, which could not be used, so Charles told us, until the chimney had been repointed.
“I find it hard to believe she would just up and leave without telling me—something,” I stammered.
Oh, the icy smile that hint of vulnerability produced. “Perhaps she’d just had enough—wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Are you warning me off her?”
“Max blamed her for his troubles; she blames herself for what happened.”
“Once upon a time, I took care of him, too.” At this, she snorted dismissively.
“I gather you’ve read your father’s letters to me, and mine to him; Laura’s cruelty—and crudity—knows no bounds. So, you know how your father put me through hell.”
“So, like father like son . . .”
“Look at it as if I’m saving your life, at least a heartache as great as mine. . . . I was absolutely faithful, in my way.”
“Is that why she left so abruptly, to save me?”
She laughed again, her glass and lips all atremble.
“You’re almost exactly the same age as your father was when he left me on September 7, 1953, or was it September 8? You see, it must have been well past midnight—past your bedtime—if not dawn, when he left my bed.”
“And his daughter? His wife and son . . . And I believe you fucked in the great outdoors, at Pine Meadow by Eden Lake.”
I kept my eyes trained on her face as I drained my glass and poured another, then pushed the bottle back across the table. Her eyes widened with a combustible mixture of alarm and ecstasy as she reached with barely intact aplomb for the bottle.
“Did she tell you how she stole my personal and private letters?” “You had them hidden.”
“Charles pleaded with her to come and see me at the Spaulding Rehab Hospital. She took the train from New York, popped her head around the door of my room for a quick word with Charles, grabbed a taxi to his house in Brookline, ransacked it until she found my things, and was on the next train back to New York.”
“There were things she needed to know.” She rolled her eyes.
“I’ve tried for a reconciliation, and I had a miserable wedding day without Laura here—not that she wouldn’t have managed to spoil it anyway, and for her father.” She smiled enigmatically, her expression more sorrowful than pensive. “I’ve had two miserable wedding days— and John certainly managed to royally spoil the first.” She glared at me, tendons in her long neck straining out as if to snap. “You’ll make it a bloody tradition.”
“You bloody well invited him.” “Did I?”
“‘This changes nothing, my love!’ Scribbled in your hand on the invitation.”
I saw her waver, wine sloshing, as she grabbed a linen napkin to wipe her hand. The score of candle flames, a tiny conflagration, merged in the brittle blue of her eyes, two points of light drowned in tears.
“Oh my God . . . I wanted him to come and save me, to blow it all up and take me away from everything, from the burn ward, from the war—where I could be myself again.”
“Where you could recruit him, or at least get out of him what you needed for your Soviet handlers.”
“Oh . . .” She cupped her lips with her palm as if terrified. “Is that why my daughter called me a liar—a fucking liar, I who rescued her from a manic-depressive and paranoid homosexual and his degenerate family. Who warned her off Max a dozen times.” She reached to a fiercely dripping candle and let the molten wax stream in smoky rivulets down her fingers, oblivious to the burning. “Can you imagine my surprise when John arrived and it turned out not only that he knew Bobby but that Bobby had invited him, as well, to be his best man?”
“That’s bullshit. You two had to have dreamed it all up in some scheme to milk him and the other guests for intelligence on the D-day landings. Why else would you have invited Kim Philby, the Macleans, and Anthony Blunt?”
She froze at the sound of those names, watching the whitening wax harden on her fingers. Just the hint of a smile indicated that perhaps she recognized a worthy opponent.
“My Cambridge crowd. All friends of our dead Francis, my brother.
We toasted him a dozen times if we toasted him once.”
“It wasn’t Kim Philby, was it, who recruited you, Firebird? Or did he seduce you first and then recruit you, or was it all the same thing in your Cambridge crowd?”
At the mention of Philby, she seemed to stiffen as if in the face of a hard wind, her eyes watering as she picked at the wax coating her hand. “The others, yes, that was Bobby’s idea, to compromise all the people he hated and who hated him. But not John—if only it were so. Bobby was in love with John. He pretended it was Elliot Goddard, but it was always John.”
“Pure coincidence, then, of all the Americans in England—all the lousy gin joints—during the war, that you were—what, lovers of both, or all three?”
“No, just your father.”
“You realize the statistical improbabilities of what you’re telling me?” “That’s just how John put it—this is truly a nightmare—you’re just like him.”
“Beyond baffling.” I drained my glass and motioned for the bottle. “So you admit it . . . you and Bobby were working for Soviet intelligence?”
“Actually, I first saw John years before in Venice, a glimpse, a smile, at Palazzo Barberini.”
“When he had to dive into the Grand Canal after Amaryllis Williams to save her from drowning.”
“Terrible thing . . . At night, he’d tell me about it sometimes, how she had a stranglehold on him in the muck at the bottom—pitchblack—how she almost managed to drown both of them. Can you imagine for a young man . . .”
“An artist, a Circe, a sorceress, a seducer of souls; and you, eighteen, your glory days, when you danced for the king, before Philby got his mucky claws into you, as well. Was it as early as Cambridge, or later, in London, when you were a star? Or later still?”
She wiped at her lips.
“Why is it I feel an echo? . . . Well, we were small fry. I did mostly courier work, and Bobby was too much of a coward and an idiot to be terribly useful—as desperately as he wanted to be. But I could never get John to believe me: that it had nothing whatsoever to do with him, that I would never do anything to compromise or endanger him—that I loved him too much for that. But after Elliot Goddard snitched on us, long after we’d been active, John read back into the past as if it had all been part of a grand conspiracy. He never really trusted me again and it just ate away at our love. It is one thing to lose love, to have it dim or be thrown over, but to have love smothered by distrust is an agony beyond bearing.”
“You confessed as much to him at Elysium sometime in the spring of 1947, before he went to Athens as CIA station chief, when he first broke it off with you. But in late 1947 and 1948, you were still meeting with Melinda Maclean in New York; you were still a courier for the KGB.”
“You and your father—he had no goddamn proof. Neither did the FBI or McCarthy or the CIA or anybody else. Without proof, it didn’t happen.”
“You were toxic to his career—in the early fifties: a CIA officer with a lover who was a Soviet fucking spy!”
“Havoc, sheer havoc. It twisted him into knots no matter what I did. I renounced the one thing that had meant so much to me. I swore on my life to him. I even offered to betray other agents to him—to prove my fidelity to our love.”
Hearing that, I lowered my glass. Desperate to keep my wits about me, I found myself staring straight into her eyes as I began a mental ransacking of room after room after room—terrified of the lust rising inside me.
“You offered Philby—Maclean had fled to Moscow by then?” “I told him I’d give them all up for him, if he’d marry me.”
“On your last night together, in the field by Eden Lake, under the great pine, the last of the first-growth white pine, the only one that remains in all of Elysium. You watched the dawn, the shadow of that huge tree ‘reaching out to Eden Lake like the hand of God.’”
Was it a hint of relief or horror on her face as I played back to her my father’s words in his Pankrác diary?
“Please, you’re terrifying me.”
I knew then Laura had made no mention of the Pankrác diary; like me, she was using it as a check to her mother’s lies.
“And it wasn’t just that Bobby was in the house; you had Charles up, of all people: Charles, who arrived for a meeting with my father to let him know that a person of great interest to British intelligence had offered a deal to defect, a high East German official, sick and exasperated by the Soviet repression of German workers—and a revolution gone sour—who was in possession of certain names, among other things, who was willing to defect and stand witness against Kim Philby, who was under interrogation in London.”
This all came clear in my head in the very seconds I spoke the words, as if the words weren’t even mine.
“Charles?”
The look of dismay on her face, whether real or feigned, worried me, that I’d let down my side of the bargain with Charles Fairburn. A room she hadn’t entered.
“Surely you knew he was keeping an eye on my father, a freelancer with MI5 . . . to keep an eye on the American cousins.”
I could see the upper curve of her breasts actually deflate as her diaphragm lost buoyancy. Something she hadn’t known, or, more probably, something she’d feared or sensed: My father, too, was freelancing for MI5. I might have added, “keeping an eye on you,” but I left that pin unpulled if it might save her marriage to Charles. She eyed me with the expression of a guilty child caught red-handed, then a moment later, raised a mock toast, only to make a slightly mystified inspection of the rubied liquid in her glass, as if the taste had gone off, or, like an alchemist, hoping to find some precious precipitant. She nodded her head in the recognition that we had, after all, arrived at the same place, and her gaze lengthened to encompass the windows at my back.
“There is an old saying that all is revealed on the marriage night, tout comprendre c’est tout pardoner . . . not just the past, mind you, but the future, as well. You see, when John arrived unexpectedly at the wedding, I had dear Cecily put him in one of the few unoccupied rooms, the room I always slept in as a child when I was down at Hillders for holidays. A magical room with pictures of dancers, and windows overlooking the gardens. On a spring night after a long winter, that room would be infused with scents of the countryside, of roses and freshly mown grass, and of wisteria and lilac once they were fully in bloom . . . like an aphrodisiac to a young woman.” She held a cork in the candle flame, watching the flame lick and burn, wafting the smoke back and forth as if holding a miniature incense burner. “From that room, I schemed as a little girl to be the next Pavlova and take to my bed the greatest lovers in the land—the power to bend them to my will. When I met John in the rehabilitation hospital in Guilford, I was not a virgin—far from it. I had been seduced by very experienced men when I was fifteen and sixteen. I had been adored by skilled lovers.
And I knew my capacity for joy and was never shy to have my fill. When I fell in love with John, with his beautiful hurt body, I found him to be a virgin—so he professed—unused to the ways of a woman’s body. But he took to my instruction like a champion. I brought him alive; we feasted, and fasted, and feasted again. Having his child became my way of saving him, saving us. . . . Perhaps you find this hard to understand.”
“No, not in the least.”
“There was no artifice, no ambition.” She shrugged helplessly. “I just loved him with all my heart. But we lost our first child.”
I found myself wanting to reach a hand across the table and take hers, but I steeled myself.
“So when you found out he was going back to Berlin, perhaps on a dangerous mission, perhaps a mission that would end in the conviction of Kim Philby, you offered—what?—to confess all you knew to MI5 and MI6, to give up Philby?”
“He didn’t have the guts to marry me—if he really loved me.”
“The end of his marriage, his career, his reputation—even Princeton. . . a hard bargain.”
“And a daughter . . .”
“When was the last time you saw Kim Philby, or slept with him—not in Washington in the spring of 1951, when he came under suspicion along with Maclean, when he desperately needed to get word to Maclean in London to warn him of his imminent arrest by MI5 on espionage charges?”
“We never met in Washington; I swore that to John—suicide to dare such a thing in the nest of the FBI.”
“In his letters, he mentioned lunches with Philby where Kim all but bragged about fucking you.”
“That was Kim’s way to get under the skin of the competition, to get at their vulnerabilities. Kim was married and had children. You must believe me. Without that trust, there is nothing.”
“You invited Philby to Hermitage the summer of ’51, along with my parents—just to make sure they—my father—got the message.”
“Fiddlesticks. Aileen and their children were there, as well. I’d barely gotten the stitches out after Laura.”
“Kim . . . this is what you do, your specialty—sneaking around, so to speak.”
“It was to make John jealous—his one weakness. Kim and I had known each other since Francis’s Cambridge days.”
“You lied about everything else, so why would you give up Philby, the lodestone of your Popular Front aspirations, your youthful flame of antifascism, the just cause of your glory days at Cambridge?”
An imperious, if sad, smile curled her lips.
“John didn’t love your mother. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. You must know that.”
“You had that, too, for purposes of blackmail.”
“Why would I stoop to blackmail, as you call it, about something as inconsequential as their marriage of convenience? John could be a real bastard at times. He could be steelier than his mother. Seems to run in your family, that bloody puritan streak of yours.”
“Refusing your offer and taking on that mission and never returning to you?”
“I offered him the crown jewels; he would have gone down in history. A love that triumphed over the evils of communism.”
“Like Elliot Goddard getting Bobby to expose Anthony Blunt—or was that your idea, as well?”
“You can’t imagine what I would have been giving up for your father—the danger, too. Moscow Center was expert at eliminating traitors, or potential traitors, or the completely innocent, if necessary, to protect their people. During the Alger Hiss trial, witnesses dropped like flies or simply disappeared. If you’ve never felt the anxiety of such terror, the sting of such guilt, of shame for disloyalty to your comrades, you can never know.”
“Well, all it took was a call to the Soviet embassy to take care of your previous husband.”
“Don’t act like a bastard; you don’t have it in you.”
“If not Washington, when—when was the last time you saw Philby?” “I never betrayed your father. . . . I never stopped loving him.”
I stared into the trembling glassy blue of her eyes, searching for that sympathetic spark, the moral courage, as I’d known it in her daughter, to do the right thing. If there was anything left to believe or if she was just a pro’s pro down to her prehensile toes.
Tears filled her eyes.
“Kim Philby, or my father?”
“I sought him out in London in the summer of 1954. John had been gone for ten months, just a silly postcard. I was terrified he was dead or imprisoned. I couldn’t contact anybody for information. His mother, his wife . . . What could I do? All our networks had been compromised by the FBI and shut down by Moscow. I was willing to do anything to save him.”
“There’s no way you could have gotten to Philby. MI5 was investigating him, interrogating him. They must have had him under constant surveillance. For you to have gone to him, a known KGB operative, would have meant his ruin. He wouldn’t have let you get within a mile of him.”
“I saw him in a pub near the Ruislip tube stop. He spent half the day making sure he wasn’t tailed, as did I. We even laughed at how badly MI5 handled the most basic tradecraft. But you’re right: He was already a ruined man, drinking too much, his wife, Aileen, going slowly mad, close to a nervous breakdown, and out of touch with his friends—so alone. He hadn’t been in direct touch with Moscow Center since 1951.” “No Soviet agent would dare go near him under those circumstances.” “All I wanted was to get help, find out . . . if he might put in a good word for John—get him back to me.”
“You can’t have been that stupid. Who could he have gone to, anyway? Besides, if the KGB knew that my father had conclusive evidence against Philby, they’d never have let him go.”
At this, she broke into tears, nodding, wringing her wax-covered hands like a bad parody of Lady Macbeth. We sat in silence for many minutes.
“Say what you will,” she finally choked out, “loyalty was the currency of the realm.” And she looked at me through mascara-running eyes. “This is hard for me. . . . You remind me of him in so many ways. I feel like you’re his avenging spirit.”
At that, I had to wipe my own tears.
“If anything of what you say is true”—and Elliot’s Cheshire cat grin swam up to me out of the penumbral darkness of hovering portraits: how history is always struggling to rewrite itself in the mind of the playwright—“why would you have had a signed copy of Kim Philby’s autobiography in your possession? Correct me if I’m wrong:
‘For Suzanne, A love never betrayed. And you, my darling, the best of all. Kim.’”
“Laura stole that, too—would steal my very soul if she could. Which,” Suzanne said, sighing and swiping at her streaming eyes, “she does every time she dances.”
“Such an endearment!”
“Kim was at heart an ironist; how else to stare into the abyss of his lies—the show trials, the executions and gulags—and never flinch.”
“You can’t have ventured to Moscow to get it, because they would never have let you near him. So he must have had the KGB deliver it to you personally, or was it a Federal Express gift of memory from an old man sitting in his book-lined study sipping Prince of Wales tea—a last hurrah for the road. Or a hint from your old handlers to finish off Bobby to save yourself.”
She looked straight through me until a shiver of cold or fear brought her back to where we sat across from each other.
“I imagine he did the same for every woman he’d known.”
“Even for the one, so I heard yesterday from the horse’s mouth, who arrived out of the blue in London in 1962 and visited an old Cambridge friend, a Rothschild scion no less, a bosom friend and colleague of Philby in SIS, and told him in quite exquisite detail how she had been recruited by Philby in the spring of 1938, when Stalin’s terror had taken its toll on London’s NKVD handlers . . . how badly he, so alone and needy, was desperate for someone to help out in the shortage.”
“Charles mentioned you’d been to visit that pathetic old man.” “What really fascinates me is the timing, and it perplexed that pathetic old man, as well, since it ‘eventuated,’ as he put it, in his demotion to master of Corpus Christi College after Philby’s clandestine escape from Beirut. But more to the point, from an entirely different source later that year, Anthony Blunt had been revealed as a spy by an American who had been recruited by him at Cambridge in 1937. Irony or coincidence . . . you and Bobby were both trying for a clean break from your past?”
Suzanne smiled easily, as if her self-confidence was returning now that all our cards were on the table.
“You silly child. Fucking Nigel and his imperialist minions”—she held her finger to lips as her voice dropped to a near whisper—“only wanted their self-satisfied incompetence to fade away.”
“Philby?”
“Everything in good time: That is how I’ve led my life.” She smiled so sweetly through her tears that I was tempted to utter an endearment. “You see, there was a recklessness in your father that defied all logic. I was reckless only within what I could control. A dancer has to be that way. Otherwise, the risks are too great. When you’ve performed the Rose Adagio before the king of England at Covent Garden, the shifting about of a few papers is child’s play.”
“Did he tell you about the risks he took in Greece, the massacre in Pylos—what he witnessed?”
“He didn’t need to, because his body told me all I needed to know. A dancer knows. But he recognized the temptation in himself as a weakness to which he was drawn. It was an addiction, tempting fate—call it what you will—that he developed as a young man to befuddle and challenge his best friend, if not his lover, Bobby, my late husband.”
It was then I realized that my father had never told her about Joanna and their child. How many rooms—with everything—they kept off-limits to each other.
“You’re avoiding the subject at hand.”
“I should tell you about the story about the rattlesnake they found as boys at Elysium.”
“Let’s go back to risks, cost-benefit analysis, probabilities—it’s all the rage in academia these days.”
She gestured across the table with her open palm.
“In 1962, when Laura was ten going on eighteen, I stopped coaching her full-time and put her in classes with other girls. It was something of a revelation, for the first time standing back from my creation and observing at a distance how she outshone the other girls . . . how she looked, how she ran rings around them—risking falls and humiliation at every turn to be better than the rest. That’s when I knew . . . when I took my revenge.”
“When you dropped a note to Elliot Goddard that Bobby might well be susceptible to a trade: Anthony for a place on the Winsted board.”
She smiled as she realized there were still depths I could not quite fathom.
“You do your father proud, that bloody puritan streak that never rests until you’ve had your chance to hammer in the last coffin nail, as well. But flexibility of mind, well . . . I was out to revenge the death of your father.”
It went right over my head, so much so that I found myself listening passively to a few more slurred tales of my father’s cruelties to Bobby Williams in their youth, trying to parse the edits as she creepily pulled lines of congealed wax from her hand like strips of flesh—ever the performer.
“I loved his strength, that he’d survived, that he learned his way around my body like the finest athlete—all the right instincts in a man.” I pulled the final cork and reached across the table to fill her glass. She held it out to me, drunk as she was, her hand steady and firm; her fingers were streaked with angry red, her eyes daring me on.
“You’re such a darling and so handsome . . . my darling.” She held her full glass high, anticipating the filling of mine, and mine reaching hers as I offered a toast.
“The fall of the Iron Curtain, and America, and second acts,” I proclaimed.
“Oh yes, that is the price you wish to extract, is it? With the Berlin Wall down and all in ruins, we must seem like fools to you and your kind. But giving them the bomb, you see, we saved the world from destruction; even John understood that in the end, the balance of terror, the Iron Curtain . . . all that stood between us and doom. And John and I held fast to one conviction: We never betrayed each other. Loyalty, you see, is everything. I owe him that much.” She shot me a searing look. “Do you understand, that what is his should shine forth . . . a light unto others?”
I knew she meant Laura, and without me. “I only want to set the record straight.” She laughed hysterically.
“You’re a historian: I forgot. And my record, what will the history books say about us?”
“How about I leave it all to Max.” “So gallant . . . mon amour.”
She struggled to her feet and fell back in her chair. I made a move to go around the table to help her.
“No, stay where you are, darling, lest mother seduce you. Unless you’re tempted to know what only your father knew. Charles will take care of everything: MI5 and MI6 prefer to keep all their dismal failures swept under the rug. And just so you know, forewarned is forearmed. Max protected her in that trashy novel; all the really naughty bits he put on me, adding to my villainous character, far worse than any conniving Queen Gertrude. It was my brilliant diva daughter who seduced—her partner but my lover—in her dressing room the night of her first triumph at the Met. And she didn’t even fancy him, but she sure showed me who was boss.”
I let her leave it at that for Charles’s sake; I let it go, the lie, the truth my father never revealed to her, that in turn for being allowed the mission to Pylos in 1943 by British intelligence (probably with the blessing of Nigel Bennett), he must have agreed to secretly help MI5 around the edges, which would come to include his love affair with Suzanne. Lying to and spying on each other may have been their ultimate aphrodisiac. A double agent’s stock-in-trade.
Even as she had the last word as she headed for her bedroom. “He was coming home . . . back to me.”