Troy drove out to Mimram. It was the first time he’d driven without Mary McDiarmuid since the night Rork had been killed. It was not like riding a bike – he had forgotten so much of what natural drivers liked to take as instinct. He heard himself crunching through gear changes, and learned from the honking of half a dozen motorists on the North Circular Road that his steering was none too good either. But it had symbolic value – to be back at the wheel of his own car, with no need for glasses and to drive as badly as the law allowed.
The polling station at which his card told him to present himself was the Blue Boar in Mimram village. The political machine had taken over the snug, a room scarcely big enough for the job – a good queue would see people lined up into the street, just as there were now. He found himself standing behind Frank Trubshawe, clutching his helmet as if it was a flowerpot full of something precious. Troy peeked over – it was full of leeks, freshly dug and caked with earth. Trubshawe had been harvesting them. They were early this year. Troy’s didn’t look as though they’d be ready for Christmas. Trubshawe turned to see who was being so nosy, looked at Troy, looked up at the gathering clouds in the dusky sky and said, ‘Looks like it’s finally breaking.’
Troy looked up. He was right. The heatwave and the Indian summer that had blended almost seamlessly into it were coming to an end with the brewing of a mighty storm, a burgeoning mass of bulbous nimbostratus, glowing silver at the edges, that threatened at any moment to form a face to huff and puff with.
‘Never known a year like it,’ Trubshawe said, then added, ‘Of course I have, roaring summers, baking summers, but you know what I mean. It’s been a year this has.’
‘Indeed I do, Mr Trubshawe. It has been a year.’
Troy wondered if Trubshawe would make any reference to the matters they might be deemed to have in common, the ‘ambergooities’, which had made the year what it was far more than the weather had, but he didn’t. He was off-duty, and it was typical of Trubshawe to have a clearly defined sense of on and off duty. When Troy suggested they move round to the public and have a drink Trubshawe, being off duty, agreed, and they passed an hour discussing what little else they had in common: the cultivation of the leek – Trubshawe had taken first prize with his leeks at the last Mimram horticultural show, and Troy had managed the feat the year before; the husbandry of the pig – Trubshawe lined up with Lord Emsworth in keeping Whites; and the quality of the local brew, in which Troy successfully faked an interest.
Troy wondered if the taking off of the copper’s helmet had not been just for a handy receptacle, not just the mereness of symbolism, whether Trubshawe might not have developed a trick Troy had never managed at any point of his life both before and since he had become a copper: could out of sight really be out of mind?
He was home well before ten. He knew the way things were going for Labour, and thought better of putting on the television. It was still ‘new’ and he had not and never would get used to it. He lit a fire in his study, switched the wireless to the Third Programme – a concert recorded the month before at the end of the Henry Wood Proms, snippets of Delius, A Song of Summer and one of those things he wrote in Florida that still sounded more English than American, that made Troy think of that last, lazy, casual, illicit, erotic night with Foxx – no, out of sight was almost never out of mind. He settled back in an armchair, saw the black clouds roll by his window, heard Delius drowned in thunder, rain pelting down like shrapnel on the rooftops, waited for the greater storm to burst within the hustings.
Cid came in just after midnight. ‘I’ve had enough. I made my excuses and left.’
‘I’m sure Rod can stand on a podium without you.’
‘I feel rotten about it. You know, loyal wifie at his side as he makes his victory-cum-thank-you speech and all that. God knows, I’ve done that every time since – when? 1950? But not tonight. Not the mood he’s in. I left Nattie behind with a rosette and told her to look supportive. In a bad light the press might even think she’s me. You know, it’s at times like this it crosses my mind – how much more of this can I put up with? I have fantasies of “Nice day at the office, dear?” “Oh, yes, Spiggot and I ordered a job lot of paperclips and Wiggins has been promoted to regional manager,” and I say, “Jolly good darling. It’s Cook’s day off so I caught the 12.15 into Chipping Burnley, had lunch at the Kardomah, changed my library books, bumped into Mary Moppet, bought a leg of lamb, came home and made shepherd’s pie. It’ll be ready in half an hour.” And then I put his slippers on for him and he does The Times sodding crossword over a dry sherry and the whole world starts to look like the closing scenes from Brief Encounter, “Oh, Cid, you’re such a silly old sausage” – anything, anything so mundane, anything so cripplingly, mind-rottingly normal would be better than having to go through all this … all this … all this fucking shit.’
It was so unlike his sister-in-law to speak ‘Troy’. She had wrestled with the words before giving in to them, and when she had she reminded him of no one quite so much as Kate Cormack. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘No, Freddie. I’d like to go to bed and wake up to find we’re in power at last. But that isn’t going to happen so I’ll settle for a good night’s sleep instead. They’re expecting a result before three. If you’re staying up, try and keep Rod up until rage has given way to guilt. Let normal service resume. He’s always more amenable when he’s feeling guilty.’
‘You married the right brother. I don’t do guilt.’
‘So you tell me. Night-night, Freddie.’
Rod came home in fury at two-thirty in the morning. ‘We’re going to lose. We’re going to fucking lose!’
‘But you’re OK? You won?’
‘I won, Labour’s lost. What bloody use is that?’
Troy had a bottle of Château Margaux Grand Cru 1945 uncorked and breathing by the fire. He handed a glass to Rod. ‘Drown your sorrows.’
Rod took one swig and kept right on course. ‘Three victories in a row, and each time the buggers increase their majority. That’s – that’s unprecedented. What the bloody hell do we have to do to get elected? What do we have to do? If we promise them jam tomorrow then we’re tight-fisted Reds asking them to pay for a future they can’t even imagine. If we say jam today, then they tell us we’re cooking the books and can’t possibly pay for jam today without asking them to pay higher taxes. What do the British want? What do we have to do?’
‘Have you thought of changing your name to “the Conservative Party”?’
‘Freddie, if all you can do is take the piss I’m going to knock your fucking block off!’
‘No, there’s two things I can do. I can pour wine and I can vote. I came up to vote for you, if you recall.’
Rod swigged, handed his glass back to Troy, said, ‘Fill ‘er up, waiter.’ And flopped into an armchair, wrestling with his tie. When it came loose he leaped up again, tore off both tie and jacket, stamped on both and flopped back down with his hand out for the wine glass. ‘And I’m grateful, believe me, I’m grateful. It’s just that’s it’s all so . . . fucking deadly.’
Troy sat down opposite. It was too good a claret to swig. He rolled it around on his tongue, hoping Rod would slow down and get rat-arsed at a more civilised pace.
‘You know – it was Ike. He fucked it for us. Macmillan got a joint telly broadcast. All I got was a lawn littered with fucking golf balls. Ike made him look like . . . Like what, for God’s sake?’
‘A statesman.’
‘That’s it. A statesman. What every sodding PM wants to be – more than a politician, a statesman. And Ike handed it to Mac on a plate.’
‘Perhaps next time you should get the President to come over and root for you.’
‘Next time. 1964? Good God, Freddie, that’s like a science-fiction number. 1964 isn’t five years away, it’s an age away. We’ll all be bloody robots by then – tin hearts, tin brains, tin cocks. 1964 -Jesus Christ! Do you know, I can still remember the first year I was conscious of having a tag to it. I was five. I’d drifted through life, the longest part of life, it seems, with the outside world scarcely touching me. Knew it was there, out there on the horizon somewhere, things like the King dying – the old man took me to watch the parade . . . Can’t remember a sodding thing about it, wish I could, the Kaiser was there, the Tsar, all those Balkan monarchs who got kyboshed – but, no, the first year I can remember as a year is 1914. I remember asking him, “Dad, what year is it?” and the answer, “1914, my boy. The second of January.”’
‘Hardly a year to forget.’
‘Quite. But I’m telling you now that all that pre-1917 stuff seems to me a damn sight closer than the prospect of 1964. What a preposterous bloody date.’
Rod reminded him of Kate Cormack. He was sure she’d said something very like this, some sad song of the creeping tread of time.
‘You’d think the world would end before we got to a figure as crazy as that. Yet that’s our next crack at getting into power. Unbelievable, un-fucking-believable. We’ll still have Mac bumbling his way through his repertoire like George Robey on tour, a trunkful of daft hats and comic trousers – and the Americans’ll have Cormack or Nixon. Men in their forties. A whole new generation. We’ll look like fucking dinosaurs.’
‘Well, it might be Nixon, if Ike comes out for him.’
‘Ike hates Nixon. If Nixon were on fire Ike wouldn’t piss on him.’
‘But it won’t be Cormack.’
‘Aah, I see. You have inside information?’
Troy said nothing.
They’d got halfway down the third bottle, Rod very much the worse for wear, maudlin and dishevelled, well on the road to guilt, when he said, ‘Shpoon.’
‘What about him?’
‘What do you intend to do? You’re surely not going to leave thingsh as they . . . are?’
‘It all depends if you win or lose.’
Rod waved a hand across the space between them as though cutting ribbons – slicing through the ambiguity. ‘We’ve already lost. The country has gone to hell in a handcart. We are . . . bolloxed. Banjaxed, buggered and bolloxed.’
‘You will agree – a spook, and at that a spook of dubious sexual mores, in opposition is one thing. In the Cabinet quite another.’
‘Sho, you’ll shay nothing?’
‘Rod, let us agree – we both of us underestimated Ted Steele. We looked at the rubbish in the papers and we took him at face value. OK – he asked for that. He cried out to be “Lord Spoon” and we stuck it to him. He worked as hard at the image of the self-made man who knows how to spend money as he did at making the money in the first place. We all fell for the illusion he spun round the dreadfully vulgar wife and her twice-time vulgar car. But . . . there was more to him than that. He’d been through more than we either of us knew. More than we cared to imagine. And it didn’t even dawn on me until the night I had him sitting in here, the evening of Ike’s reunion, refusing to answer my questions. It had never occurred to me that this might by no means be the worst interrogation Spoon had suffered. Stupid of me. There he was, chatting to Mala Caan, and we both knew what her experience of the war was, we both know how she earned her VC. Spoon was far, far tougher than I’d ever guessed. Yet . . . the Ryans terrified him. He told me so when we went upstairs. He’d no idea they killed the boys they brought him just for sport. But he knew they’d kill him if they didn’t get what they wanted. He was more scared of them than he ever had been of the Gestapo. He told me what they were up to, and then he made it perfectly clear he’d go to jail before he’d testify against them. He said he’d faced SS thugs armed with pliers and a blow-lamp and felt less scared. But it wasn’t just words. It wasn’t just what he was telling me. He rolled up his shirt and showed me the scar tissue down his spine where the Gestapo had taken a blow-lamp to him. Burns the size of half-crowns. Made his back look like the twelve spot in dominoes. And he took off his shoes and showed me the toes they’d broken with pliers. He spared me the dropping of his trousers to show me where they’d crushed one of his balls. I took his word for that. He said the only key to surviving was to convince them you knew nothing. He did. They stopped pulling him to pieces, and stuck him on a train to Belsen, from which he escaped. And when he’d finished telling me all this, he said, “What else can you do to me, Mr Troy? What can you do that is worse than the Gestapo, that is worse than Patrick and Lorcan Ryan?’”
Rod uttered a sotto voce ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Now, in its way the same may be true of old Bobby Collington -they scared him shitless is the cliché – and what the deal was with Maurice, we’ll never know. Maurice would be a hard man to intimidate, but we all have our breaking point. I saw Spoon’s that night – I’ve never seen emotional collapse and self-control in such equal measures before.
‘The upshot of all this is that the decision isn’t mine, it’s yours. Spoon has been a spy for someone all his life. It’s his modus operandi. He doesn’t know any other. In that sense he’s no different from tens of thousands of others who lived through the war. What they did then has achieved the level of an addiction. They do what they do because they can do no other. I suspect the Americans don’t think much of him as a spy, but it’s enough of what used to be to satisfy the craving he has. You’re a bit like that yourself. Part of you is still Wing Commander Troy. No bad thing at all. But it’s perverse in Spoon. It’s an addiction. To spy is what makes him what he is. It’s become his identity. Money, fame, success – God knows he has all three aplenty – all those are insignificant compared to the sheer frisson of the secret life that spying confers upon him. I’d even venture, despite all the assurances I’ve had as to the reality of his homosexuality – he is no mere dabbler, after all – that the appeal for him lies in the fact that such sex must always be secret sex. He enjoys the clandestine world of the bugger and enjoys just as much the lies of a marriage lived in public. The presentation of a false front to the world. He’s a foreigner who passes for English, the queer who passes for married, the member of Her Majesty’s House of Lords who serves a foreign republic. A spy down to his socks. You and I used to joke that he was probably the only Labour MP who voted Tory. The joke’s on us. Nothing about the man was real.
‘There are still only half a dozen people who know he’s a spy – you, Gaitskell and me, and three members of my team at the Yard who read the letter I showed you. The letter isn’t in any Scotland Yard file, it’s in my desk drawer just over there. Your secret can stay a secret. I have no case against Spoon that I would ever wish to bring. But it remains – he’s a prime candidate for blackmail. Do you really think this mad scheme will work? Do you think Spoon is consistent enough or simple enough to be an unwitting conduit? Do you really want him anywhere near power? For that matter do you want him anywhere near your party? The ball, as the Americans say, is in your court.’
Rod said nothing. A rare enough event in itself.