But from my point of view none of these adventures was as exotic as the notebook she carried with her always, a childish pink plastic-covered thing with a short pencil tucked into the spine. For a while she wouldn’t say what she wrote, but one evening in a Muswell Hill pub she owned up to jotting down ‘the clever or funny or daft stuff’ people said. She also wrote ‘tiny stories about stories’ and otherwise just ‘thoughts’. The notebook was always within reach and she’d write in it mid-conversation. The other girls in the office teased her about it, and I was curious to know if she had wider writing ambitions. I talked to her about the books I was reading, and though she listened politely, even intently, she never offered an opinion of her own. I wasn’t sure she did any reading at all. Either that or she was protecting a big secret.
She lodged just a mile to the north of me in a tiny third-floor room that overlooked the thunderous Holloway Road. Within a week of introducing ourselves we started meeting in the evenings. Soon afterwards I discovered that our friendship had earned us the office nickname ‘Laurel and Hardy’, the reference being to our relative sizes, not a taste for slapstick. I didn’t tell Shirley. It never occurred to her that a night out should take place anywhere other than in pubs, by preference noisy ones with music. She had no interest in the places round Mayfair. Within a few months I was familiar with the human ecology, the gradations of decency and decay, of the pubs around Camden, Kentish Town and Islington.
It was in Kentish Town, on our first excursion, that I saw in an Irish pub a terrible fight. In films a punch to the jaw is banal but it’s extraordinary to witness in reality, though the sound, the bony crunch, is far more muted and wet. To a sheltered young woman, it looked reckless beyond belief, so careless of retaliation, of prospects, of life itself, those fists that wielded a pick-axe by day for Murphy the builders, pile-driving into a face. We watched from our bar stools. I saw something curve through the air past a beer-pump handle – a button or a tooth. More people were joining in, there was a fair amount of shouting, and the barman, a handy-looking fellow himself with a caduceus tattooed above his wrist, was speaking into the phone. Shirley put an arm about my shoulders and propelled me towards the door. Our rum and cokes with melting ice were behind us on the bar.
‘Police on their way, might want witnesses. Best to go.’ Out in the street we remembered her coat. ‘Ah forget it,’ she said with a wave of her hand. She was already walking on. ‘I ’
ate
that coat.’
We weren’t looking for men on our nights out. Instead, we talked a good deal – about our families, about our lives so far. She spoke of her Syrian doctor, I spoke of Jeremy Mott, but not of Tony Canning. Office gossip was strictly forbidden, even to us lowly beginners, and it was a matter of pride to obey instructions. Besides, I had the impression that Shirley was already doing more important work than me. It was bad form to ask. When our pub conversation was interrupted, when men did approach us, they came looking for me and got Shirley instead. I was content to be mute at her side as she took over. They couldn’t get past the banter and laughter, the bright chatty questions about what they did and where they were from, and they retreated after subsidising a round or two of rum and cokes. In the hippy pubs around Camden Lock, which was not yet a tourist attraction, the long-haired men were more insidious and persistent with softer come-ons about their inner feminine spirit, the collective unconscious,
the transit of Venus and related hokum. Shirley repelled them with uncomprehending friendliness while I shrank from these reminders of my sister.
We would be in that part of town for the music, drinking our way towards the Dublin Castle on Parkway. Shirley had a boyish passion for rock and roll and in the early seventies the best bands played in pubs, often cavernous Victorian establishments. I surprised myself by developing a passing taste for this racy, unpretentious music. My bedsit was dull and I was glad to have something to do in the evenings apart from reading novels. One evening, when we knew each other better, Shirley and I had a conversation about our ideal man. She told me about her dream, an introspective bony guy, just over six feet, jeans, black T-shirt, cropped hair and hollow cheeks and a guitar round his neck. We must have seen two dozen versions of this archetype as she escorted me to all pub venues between Canvey Island and Shepherd’s Bush. We heard Bees Make Honey (my favourite), Roogalator (hers) – and Dr Feelgood, Ducks Deluxe, Kilburn and the High Roads. Not like me at all, to be standing in a sweaty crowd with a half pint in my hand, my ears buzzing with the din. It gave me some innocent pleasure to think how horrified the counter-culture crowd around us would be, to know that we were the ultimate enemy from the ‘straight’ grey world of MI5. Laurel and Hardy, the new shock troops of internal security.
4
T
owards the end of winter in 1973 I received a letter forwarded by my mother from my old friend Jeremy Mott. He was still in Edinburgh, still happy with his doctoral work and his new life of semi-secretive affairs, each one ending, so he claimed, without much trouble or remorse. I read the letter one morning on my way to work on one of the rare occasions when I’d managed to push through the packed fetid carriage and find myself a seat. The important paragraph began halfway down the second page. To Jeremy it would have been no more than an item of serious gossip.
You remember my tutor, Tony Canning. We went to his rooms once for tea. Last September he left his wife, Frieda. They were married for more than thirty years. No explanation apparently. There’d been rumours around the college that he’d been seeing a younger woman out at his cottage in Suffolk. But that wasn’t it. The word was he dumped her too. I had a letter from a friend last month. He heard it from the Master’s mouth. All this has been an open secret around the college but no one thought to tell me. Canning was ill. Why not say it? He had something badly wrong and he was beyond treatment. In October he resigned his fellowship and took himself off to an island in the Baltic, where he rented a small house. He was looked after by a local woman, who may have been a little more than a housekeeper. Towards the end he was moved to a cottage hospital on another island. His son visited him there and Frieda went too. I’m assuming you didn’t see the obituary in
The Times
in February. I’m sure I would have heard from you if you had. I never knew he was in the SOE towards the end of the war. Quite the hero, parachuting into Bulgaria by night and getting seriously wounded in the chest during an ambush. Then four years in MI5 in the late forties. Our fathers’ generation – their lives were so much more meaningful than ours, don’t you think? Tony was awfully good to me. I wish someone had let me know. At least I could have written to him. Why don’t you come and cheer me up? There’s a sweet little spare room off the kitchen. But I think I’ve told you that before.
Why not say it?
Cancer. In the early seventies it was only just coming to an end, the time when people used to drop their voices at the word. Cancer was a disgrace, the victim’s that is, a form of failure, a smear and a dirty defect, of personality rather than flesh. Back then I’m sure I’d have taken for granted Tony’s need to creep away without explanation, to winter with his awful secret by a cold sea. The sand dunes of his childhood, bitter winds, treeless inland marshes, and Tony walking by the empty beach hunched in his donkey jacket with his shame, his nasty secret and his increasing need for another nap. Sleep coming in like a tide. Of course he needed to be alone. I’m sure I didn’t question any of that. What impressed and shocked me was the planning. Telling me to put my blouse in the laundry basket, then pretending to forget that he had in order to make himself obnoxious to me so I wouldn’t follow him and complicate his last months. Did it really have to be so elaborate? Or severe?
On my way to work I blushed to remember how I’d thought
my reasoning about feelings was superior to his. I blushed just before I started to cry. Passengers nearest me on the crowded Tube decently looked away. He must have known how much past I would have to rewrite when I heard the real story. There must have been some comfort in believing that I would forgive him then. That seemed very sad. But why had there been no posthumous letter, explaining, remembering something between us, saying goodbye, acknowledging me, giving me something to live with, anything to replace our last scene? For weeks afterwards I tormented myself with suspicions that such a letter would have been intercepted by the ‘housekeeper’ or Frieda.
Tony in exile, trudging the lonely beaches, without the playmate-brother who’d shared the carefree years – Terence Canning was killed in the D-Day landings – and without his college, his friends, his wife. Above all, without me. Tony could have been looked after by Frieda, he could have been in the cottage or in his bedroom at home, with his books, with visits from his friends and his son. Even I could have sneaked in somehow, disguised as a former student. Flowers, champagne, family and old friends, old photographs – wasn’t that how people try to organise their deaths, at least when they were not fighting for breath or writhing in pain or dumbly immobilised by terror?
In the weeks that followed, I replayed scores of small moments. Those afternoon naps that made me so impatient, that grey morning face I couldn’t bear to look at. At the time I’d thought it was simply how it had to be, when you were fifty-four. There was one exchange in particular I kept returning to – those few seconds in the bedroom by the laundry basket when he was telling me about Idi Amin and the expelled Ugandan Asians. It was a big story at the time. The vicious dictator was driving his countrymen out, they had British passports, and Ted Heath’s government, ignoring the outrage in the tabloids, was insisting, decently enough, that they must be allowed to settle here. That was Tony’s
view too. He interrupted himself and without drawing breath said quickly, ‘Just drop it in there with mine. We’ll be back soon.’ Just that, a mundane domestic instruction, and then he continued with his line of thought. Now wasn’t that ingenious, when his body was already failing and his plans were taking shape? To orchestrate the moment, see a chance and take it on the wing. Or work something up afterwards. Perhaps less of a trick, more a habit of mind picked up in his time with the SOE. A trick of the trade. As a device, a deception, it was cleverly managed. He threw me off and I was too injured to pursue him. I don’t think I really loved him at the time, during those months out at the cottage, but when I heard of his death I soon convinced myself that I did. The trick, his deceit, was far more duplicitous than any married man’s love affair. Even then, I admired him for it, but I couldn’t quite forgive him.
I went to Holborn public library, where back issues of
The Times
were kept, and looked up the obituary. Idiotically, I skimmed it, scanning it for my name, and then I started again. A whole life in a few columns, and not even a photograph. The Dragon School in Oxford, Marlborough, then Balliol, the Guards, action in the Western Desert, an unexplained gap, and then SOE as Jeremy had described it, followed by four years in the Security Service from 1948. How uncurious I’d been about Tony’s war and post war, though I knew he had good connections in MI5. The piece briefly summarised the fifties onwards – journalism, books, public service, Cambridge, death.
And for me, nothing changed. I went on working in Curzon Street while I tended the little shrine of my secret grief. Tony had chosen my profession for me, lent me his woods, ceps, opinions, worldliness. But I had no proof, no tokens, no photograph of him, no letters, not even a scrap of a note because our meetings were arranged by phone. Diligently, I’d returned all the books he lent me as I read them, except one, R.H. Tawney’s
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
. I looked
for it everywhere, and went back many times to search forlornly in the same places again. It had sun-faded soft green boards with a cup stain that looped through the author’s initials, and a simple ‘Canning’ in imperious purple ink on the first endpaper, and throughout, on almost every page, his marginalia in hard pencil. So precious. But it had melted away, as only books can, perhaps when I moved out of my Jesus Green room. My surviving keepsakes were a carelessly donated bookmark, of which more later, and my job. He had dispatched me to this grubby office in Leconfield House. I didn’t like it, but it was the legacy and I could not have tolerated being anywhere else.
Working patiently, without complaint, humbly submitting to the disparagements of Miss Ling – this was how I kept the flame. If I failed to be efficient, if I arrived late or complained or thought about leaving MI5, I would have been letting him down. I persuaded myself of a great love in ruins, and so I racked up the pain.
Akrasia
! Whenever I took extra care in turning some desk officer’s scrawl into an error-free typed memo in triplicate, it was because it was my duty to honour the memory of the man I had loved.
There were twelve in our intake, including three men. Of these, two were married businessmen in their thirties and of no interest to anyone. There was a third, Greatorex, on whom ambitious parents had conferred the name Maximilian. He was about thirty, had jutting ears and was extremely reticent, whether from shyness or superiority none of us was certain. He’d been transferred across from MI6 and was already desk officer status, merely sitting in with us new-joiners to see how our systems worked. The other two men, the business types, were also not so far now from officer status. Whatever I’d felt at the interview, I no longer minded so much. As our chaotic training proceeded, I absorbed the general spirit of the place and, taking my cue from the other girls, began to accept that in this small part
of the adult world, and unlike in the rest of the Civil Service, women were of a lower caste.
We were spending even more time now with the scores of other girls in the Registry, learning the strict rules of file retrieval and discovering, without being told, that there were concentric circles of security clearance and that we languished in outer darkness. The clattering temperamental trolleys on their tracks delivered files to the various departments around the building. Whenever one of them went wrong, Greatorex knew how to fix it with a set of miniature screwdrivers he kept on him. Among the more snobbish girls this earned him the nickname ‘Handyman’, confirming him as a ridiculous prospect. That was fortunate for me because, even in my condition of mourning, I was beginning to take an interest in Maximilian Greatorex.