Occasionally, in the late afternoon, we would be ‘invited’ to attend a lecture. It would have been unthinkable not to go. The subject never wandered far from communism, its theory and practice, the geo-political struggle, the naked intent of the Soviet Union to attain world dominance. I’m making these talks sound more interesting than they were. The theory and practice element was by far the largest, and most of that was theory. This was because the talks were given by an ex-RAF man, Archibald Jowell, who had gone into the whole thing, perhaps in an evening class, and was anxious to share what he knew of dialectics and related concepts. If you were to close your eyes, as many did, you could easily imagine that you were at a Communist Party meeting in somewhere like Stroud, for it was not Jowell’s intention or remit to demolish Marxist–Leninist thought, or even express scepticism. He wanted us to understand the mind of the enemy ‘from the inside’, and to know thoroughly the theoretical base from which it worked. Coming at the end of a day of typing and of trying to learn what constituted a file-worthy fact in the mind of the fearsome Miss Ling, Jowell’s earnest, haranguing delivery had a deadly, soporific effect on
most of the intake. Everyone believed that to be caught out in a shameful moment when neck muscles relax and the head snaps forward might damage career prospects. But believing was not quite enough. Heavy eyelids in the late afternoon had their own logic, their own peculiar weight.
So what was wrong with me that I sat upright and alert for the entire hour on the edge of my chair, legs crossed, notebook pressed against my bare knee as I wrote my notes? I was a mathematician and a former chess player, and I was a girl in need of comfort. Dialectical materialism was a safely enclosed system, like the vetting procedures, but more rigorous and intricate. More like an equation of Leibniz or Hilbert. Human aspirations, societies, history, and a method of analysis in an entanglement as expressive and inhumanly perfect as a Bach fugue. Who could sleep through it? The answer was everyone but myself and Greatorex. He would sit a knight’s move ahead of me and to my left, with the visible page of his notebook covered in dense loopy writing.
Once, my attention drifted from the lecture as I considered him. It was the case that his ears protruded from strange hillocks of bone at the sides of his skull and those ears were awfully pink. But the effect was much exaggerated by his old-fashioned haircut, the standard military short back and sides, a style which revealed a deep groove down his nape. He reminded me of Jeremy and, less comfortably, of some of the undergraduate mathematicians at Cambridge, the ones who had humiliated me in tutorials. But his facial appearance was misleading, for his body looked lean and strong. In my thoughts I restyled his hair, growing it out so that it filled the space between the tips of his ears and his head, and covered the top of his collar, perfectly permissible now even in Leconfield House. The mustard-coloured check tweed jacket should go. Even from my oblique angle I could see that his tie knot was too small. He needed to start calling himself Max and keep his screwdrivers in a drawer. He was writing in brown ink. That too would have to change.
‘And so I return to my starting point,’ ex-Flight Commander Jowell was saying in conclusion. ‘Ultimately the power and endurance of Marxism, as with any other theoretical scheme, rests with its capacity to seduce intelligent men and women. And this one most certainly can. Thank you.’
Our bleary group roused itself to stand respectfully as the lecturer left the room. When he was gone Max turned and looked right at me. It was as if the vertical groove at the base of his skull was telepathically sensitive. He knew I’d been rearranging his entire being.
I was the one who looked away.
He indicated the pen in my hand. ‘Taking lots of notes.’ I said, ‘It was fascinating.’
He started to say something, then changed his mind and with an impatient downward gesture with his hand he turned from me and left the room.
But we became friends. Because he reminded me of Jeremy, I lazily assumed that he preferred men, though I hoped I was wrong. I hardly expected him to speak of it, especially in these offices. The security world despised homosexuals, at least outwardly, which made them vulnerable to blackmail, which made them unemployable in the intelligence services and therefore despicable. But while I fantasised about Max I could at least tell myself that I must be getting over Tony. And Max, as I tried to make everyone call him, was a good addition. I thought at first we might make a threesome around town with Shirley, but she told me he was creepy and not to be trusted. And he didn’t like pubs or cigarette smoke, or loud music, so we often sat after work on a bench in Hyde Park or Berkeley Square. He couldn’t talk about it and I wouldn’t ask, but my impression was that he’d worked for a while at Cheltenham, in signals intelligence. He was thirty-two and lived alone in one part of the wing of a country house near Egham, on a bend in the Thames. He said more than once I should come and visit, but there was never a specific invitation. He came from a family of academics, was educated at Winchester and
Harvard, where he did a law degree and then another in psychology, but he was haunted by the idea that he had made the wrong choices, that he should have been studying something practical like engineering. At one point he had thought of apprenticing himself to a watch designer in Geneva, but his parents talked him out of it. His father was a philosopher, his mother a social anthropologist, and Maximilian was their only child. They wanted him to have a life of the mind and thought he shouldn’t be fiddling about with his hands. After a short unhappy spell teaching at a crammer, some freelance journalism and travelling, he came into the Service through a business friend of an uncle.
It was a warm spring that year and our friendship blossomed with the trees and shrubs around our various benches. Early on, in my eagerness, I ran ahead of our intimacy and asked if pressure from academic parents bearing down on an only child might have caused him to be shy. The question offended him, as though I’d insulted his family. He had a typically English distaste for psychological explanation. His manner was stiff as he explained that he didn’t recognise himself in the term. If he held back with strangers it was because he believed that it was best to go carefully until he understood what he was dealing with. He was perfectly at ease with people he knew and liked. And so it turned out. Gently prompted, I told him everything – my family, my Cambridge, my poor maths degree, my column in
?Quis?
.
‘I heard about your column,’ he said, to my surprise. Then he added something that pleased me. ‘The word around the place is that you’ve read everything worth reading. You’re up on modern literature and all that.’
It was a release to talk to someone at last about Tony. Max had even heard of him, and remembered a government commission, a history book and one or two other scraps, one of which was a public argument over funding for the arts.
‘What did you say his island was called?’
At that point, my mind emptied. I had known the name
so well. It was synonymous with death. I said, ‘It’s suddenly gone from me.’
‘Finnish? Swedish?’
‘Finnish. In the Åland archipelago.’
‘Was it Lemland?’
‘Doesn’t sound right. It’ll come to me.’
‘Let me know when it does.’
I was surprised by his insistence. ‘Why does it matter?’
‘D’you know, I’ve been around the Baltic a bit. Tens of thousands of islands. One of the best-kept secrets of modern tourism. Thank God everybody flees south in summer. Clearly, your Canning was a man of taste.’
We left it at that. But a month or so later, we were sitting in Berkeley Square trying to reconstruct the lyrics of the famous song about a nightingale singing there. Max had told me he was a self-taught pianist who liked to play show tunes and soppy crooning songs from the forties and fifties, music as unfashionable then as his haircut. I happened to know this particular song from a school revue. We were partly singing, partly speaking the charming words,
I may be right, I may be wrong/But I’m perfectly willing to swear/That when you turned and smiled at me/A nightingale …
when Max broke off and said, ‘Was it Kumlinge?’
‘Yes, that’s it. How did you know?’
‘Well, I’ve heard it’s very beautiful.’
‘I think he liked the isolation.’
‘He must have.’
As the spring wore on I grew even fonder of Max, to the point of mild obsession. When I wasn’t with him, when I was out in the evening with Shirley, I felt incomplete and restless. It was a relief to be back at work, where I could see him across the desks, his head bent over his papers. But that was never enough and soon I would be trying to arrange our next encounter. It had to be faced, I had a taste for a certain ill-dressed, old-fashioned kind of man (Tony didn’t count), big-boned and thin and awkwardly intelligent. There was
something remote and upright in Max’s manner. His automatic restraint made me feel clumsy and overemphatic. I worried that he didn’t actually like me and was too civil to say so. I imagined that he had all manner of private rules, hidden notions of correctness that I was constantly transgressing. My unease sharpened my interest in him. What animated him, the subject that breathed warmth into his manner, was Soviet communism. He was a Cold Warrior of a superior sort. Where others loathed and raged, Max believed that good intentions had combined with human nature to devise a tragedy of sullen entrapment. The happiness and fulfilment of hundreds of millions across the Russian empire had been fatally compromised. No one, not even its leaders, would have chosen what they now had. The trick was to offer escape by degrees, without loss of face, by patient coaxing and incentives, by building trust while standing firm against what he called a truly terrible idea.
He was certainly not the sort I could question about his love life. I wondered if he had a male lover living with him in Egham. I even formed an idea of going down there to take a look. That’s how bad things were getting. Wanting what I assumed I could not have heightened my feelings. But I also wondered if he might, like Jeremy, be able to give a woman pleasure without getting much for himself. Not ideal, not reciprocal, but it wouldn’t be so bad for me. Better than pointless longing.
We were walking in the park one early evening after work. The subject was the Provisional IRA – I suspected he had some insider knowledge. He was telling me about an article he’d read when, on an impulse, I took his arm and asked if he wanted to kiss me.
‘Not particularly.’
‘I’d like you to.’
We stopped in the centre of the path where it went between two trees, obliging people to squeeze around us. It was a deep, passionate kiss, or a good imitation of one. I thought
he might be compensating for a lack of desire. When he drew away, I tried to pull him back towards me, but he resisted.
‘That’s it for now,’ he said, touching the tip of my nose with his forefinger, acting the firm parent talking down to a demanding child. So, playing along, I made a sulky moue and meekly put my hand in his and we walked on. I knew the kiss was going to make things harder for me, but at least we were holding hands for the first time. He disengaged a few minutes later.
We sat on the grass, well away from other people, and returned to the Provos. There had been bombs in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard the previous month. The Service was continuing to reorganise itself. A handful, the more promising handful, Shirley included, of our intake had been moved on from nursery-level Registry work, and had probably been absorbed into the new concern. Rooms had been taken over, meetings went on late behind closed doors. I had been left behind. I displaced my frustration by complaining, as I had before, about being stuck with the old battle. The lectures were fascinating in the way a dead language was. The world was securely settled into its two camps, I argued. Soviet communism had as much evangelical fervour for expansion as you’d find in the Church of England. The Russian empire was repressive and corrupt, but comatose. The new threat was terrorism. I’d read an article in
Time
magazine and regarded myself as well informed. It wasn’t just the Provisional IRA, or the various Palestinian groups. Underground anarchist and far-left factions across mainland Europe were already setting off bombs and kidnapping politicians and industrialists. The Red Brigades, the Baader–Meinhof Group, and in South America the Tupamaros and scores like them, in the United States the Symbionese Liberation Army – these blood-thirsty nihilists and narcissists were well connected across borders and soon they’d represent an internal threat here. We’d had the Angry Brigade, others far worse would follow. What were we doing, still piling most of our resources
into cat-and-mouse business with irrelevant time-servers in Soviet trade delegations?
Most of our resources? What could a mere trainee know about allocations within the Service? But I tried to make myself sound confident. I was stirred up by a kiss, I wanted to impress Max. He was watching me closely, tolerantly amused.
‘I’m glad you’re up on your grisly factions. But, Serena, the year before last we threw out a hundred and five Soviet agents. They were crawling all over us. Educating Whitehall to do the right thing was a big moment for the Service. The gossip was that it was awfully difficult to bring the Home Secretary on board.’
‘He was Tony’s friend until they …’
‘It all came out of Oleg Lyalin’s defection. He was supposed to be responsible for organising sabotage in the UK in the event of a crisis. There was a statement in the Commons. You must have read about it at the time.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
Of course I didn’t. The expulsions had failed to make it into my
?Quis?
columns. I didn’t then have Tony around to make me read newspapers.
‘My point is,’ Max said, ‘that comatose isn’t quite right, is it?’
He was still regarding me in a particular way, as if he expected the conversation to lead somewhere significant.
I said, ‘I suppose not.’ I was feeling uneasy, all the more so because I sensed that he intended me to be. Our friendship was so recent and sudden. I knew nothing about him and now he looked like a stranger to me, his outsized ears cupped in my direction like radar dishes to catch my softest, least honest whisper, his thin, intense face tightly concentrated on mine. I worried that he wanted something from me and that, even if he got it, I wouldn’t know what it was.