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There are events in my life – only a few these days, it’s true – that admit of one version only. Our meeting is such an event. My telling of it never wavered in all the times they made me repeat it. It is a Saturday evening.
For a long moment in my memory Ed remains standing a couple of paces behind her, this six-foot-something, gawky, bespectacled young man with a sense of solitude about him and an embarrassed half-smile. I remember how two competing sources of light converged on him: the orange strip light from the bar, which endowed him with a celestial glow, and behind him the down lights from the swimming pool, which cast him in oversized silhouette. He steps forward and becomes real. Two big, ungainly steps, left foot, right foot, halt. Alice bustles off. I wait for him to speak. I adjust my features into a
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Eternal-student features
And the voice itself, of which by now I have a fair sample? In the time-honoured British parlour game of placing our compatriots on the social ladder by virtue of their diction I am at best a poor contestant, having spent too much of my life in foreign parts. But to the ear of my daughter Stephanie, a sworn leveller, my guess is that Ed’s diction would pass as just about all right, meaning no direct evidence of a private education. ‘May I ask where you play, Ed?’ I enquire, a standard question among us.
am in appearance and manner a British archetype, capable of fluent and persuasive argument in the short term. I adapt to circumstance and have no insuperable moral scruples. I can be irascible and am not by any means immune to female charms.
I can be headstrong and do not respond naturally to discipline. This can be both a defect and a virtue.
Upon his retirement from the army – swiftly enforced, since at the time of his infatuation my father possessed a wife and other encumbrances – the newlyweds settled in the Paris suburb of Neuilly in a pretty white house supplied by my maternal grandparents where I was soon born, thus enabling my mother to seek other diversions.
I have left till last the stately, all-wise person of my beloved language tutor, minder and de facto governess, Madame Galina, purportedly a dispossessed countess from the Volga region of Russia with claims to Romanov blood. How she ever arrived in our fractious household remains unclear to me, my best guess being that she was the cast-off mistress of a great-uncle on my mother’s side who, after fleeing Leningrad, as it then was, and making himself a second fortune as an art dealer, devoted his life to acquiring beautiful women.
My English on the other hand remains for better or worse my father’s. I am told it even has his Scottish cadences, if not the alcoholic roar that accompanied them.
I was deemed surplus to requirements
Dickensian phrase
From the moment my university tutor asked me shyly over a glass of warm white wine whether I had ever considered doing something ‘a bit hush-hush for your country’ my heart lifted in recognition and my mind went back to a dark apartment in Saint-Germain that Madame Galina and I had frequented every Sunday until my father’s death. It was there that I had first thrilled to the buzz of anti-Bolshevik conspiracy as my half-cousins, step-uncles and wild-eyed great-aunts exchanged whispered messages from the homeland that few of them had ever set foot in – before, waking to my presence, requiring me
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‘And so, Nat,’ says a grey-haired lady at the centre of the table. ‘Now that we’ve asked you all about yourself, is there something you’d like to ask us for a change?’ ‘Well, as a matter of fact there is,’ I reply, having first given a show of earnest reflection. ‘You’ve asked me whether you can depend on my loyalty, but can I depend on yours?’ She smiles, and soon everyone at the table is smiling with her: the same sad, clever, inward smile that is the closest the Service ever gets to a flag. Glib under pressure. Latent aggression good. Recommended.
On my father’s death a regiment of skeletons had broken loose from the family cupboard. Half-brothers and half-sisters I had never heard of were laying claim to an estate that over the last fourteen years had been disputed, litigated and picked clean by its Scottish trustees.
The natural-born agent-runner is his own man. He may take his orders from London, but in the field he is the master of his fate and the fate of his agents. And when his active years are done, there aren’t going to be many berths waiting for a journeyman spy in his late forties who detests deskwork and has the curriculum vitae of a middle-ranking diplomat who never made the grade.
It’s my guess that there’s a Dom somewhere in everyone’s life: the man – it always seems to be a man – who takes you aside, appoints you his only friend in the world, regales you with details of his private life you’d rather not hear, begs your advice, you give him none, he swears to follow it and next morning cuts you dead.
press on facetiously or playfully or angrily, I’m not sure which.
She loved me, but from a height.
She will also up her cultivation of the night porter
For a while Ed had been scowling into the middle distance and, judging by his rictal grimaces, debating some weighty matter with himself. ‘Mind if I ask you a question, Nat?’ he enquires in a blurt of sudden resolve.
is my considered opinion that for Britain and Europe, and for liberal democracy across the entire world as a whole, Britain’s departure from the European Union in the time of Donald Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none. And what I’m asking is: do you in broad principle agree with me, or have I offended you and would it be better if I got up and left now? Yes or no?’
my daughter – whose radical views on any known topic are a fact of family life – and plays a very decent game of badminton?
The biggest gift you can give the young is time, and it was always in my mind that I hadn’t given Steff enough of it, and perhaps Ed’s parents hadn’t been any too generous in that respect either.
He was young, highly intelligent within the margins of his fixed opinions,
Dom doesn’t do confrontation, which is something we both know. His life is a sideways advance between things he can’t face.
strapped from birth to the rollercoaster of contemporary Russian history.
The illegitimate street-child of a Tbilisi prostitute of Jewish origin and a Georgian Orthodox priest is secretly nurtured in the Christian faith, then spotted by his Marxist teachers as an outstanding pupil. He grows a second head and becomes an instant convert to Marxism–Leninism. At sixteen he is again spotted, this time by the KGB, trained as an undercover agent and tasked with the infiltration of Christian counter-revolutionary elements in northern Ossetia. As a former Christian and perhaps a present one, he is well qualified for the task. Many of those he informs on are shot. In
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Carlsbad, beloved spa of Russia’s nomenklatura since Peter the Great and today its wholly owned subsidiary.
the lifeless gaze of the two men ascend the royal gold stairway to the lobby and breathe in the aroma of human sweat, diesel oil, black tobacco and women’s scent that tells every Russian he is home.
You know what Trump is?’ ‘Tell me.’ ‘He’s Putin’s shithouse cleaner. He does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO. Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis, and to hell with the world order.
Nothing has changed in his silhouetted features. Nothing ever did. Only the alertness of his body tells me he is hearing me.
‘A little was too much, more was too little.
Who in this whole fucked-up universe is rich today and not a thief?
in a back street of some godforsaken Communist city listening to him pour out the story of a life too full of history for one man to bear alone.
The restaurant is almost deserted and the waiters are sleepy wasps.
am alone on the baking-hot pavement. It’s ten at night but the day’s heat is coming up at my face. Our tryst has ended so swiftly that, what with the wine and the heat, I am tempted to wonder whether it happened at all.
Britain is rolling out the red carpet to an American President who has come to sneer at our hard-won ties with Europe and humble the Prime Minister who invited him.
But I’m a field man, not a desk jockey, not a social carer. Haven outcast though I may be, but I am also the natural author of Operation Stardust. Who crucially debriefed Sergei, and scented blood? Who brought him down to London, made the forbidden pilgrimage to Arkady and thus delivered the conclusive evidence that this was not some run-of-the-mill game of Russian musical chairs but a high-end intelligence operation built around a potential or active British source of high value and run personally by Moscow Centre’s queen of illegals?
‘Any little boost you can give my boys and girls will be highly welcome and appreciated, Nat,’ he tells me in his homely cockney. ‘They are committed, but the work can be on the tedious side, especially with the heat we’ve got. You look a mite worried, if I may say so. Please remember that my boys and girls like a good face. Only they’re watchers, see, so it’s natural.’
A pleasure
‘It’s just lovely to see you all eager for your day,’ she tells me, putting down her Guardian newspaper. ‘Whatever it is you’re up to. I’m so very pleased for you, after all the dire thoughts you had about coming home to England and what to do when you got here. I just hope it’s not too desperately illegal, whatever you’re doing. Is it?’ The question, if I read it correctly, marks a substantial advance in our careful journey back to one another.
far removed from the clunking methods of the old KGB, speak our Western languages to mother-tongue standards and parrot to perfection our little ways.
Steff’s a child again, we tell each other gratefully. And Juno, as far as we dare believe, is a decent, sincere young man who makes a good show of loving our daughter, so world hold still.
You do not expect, minutes before the consummation of a nail-biting intelligence operation, to be seized by a surge of admiration for your fellow countrymen. But on our screens is London as we love it to be: multi-ethnic kids playing improvised netball, girls in summer dresses basking in rays of the endless sun, old folk sauntering arm in arm, mothers pushing prams, picnickers under spreading trees, outdoor chess, boules. A friendly bobby strolls comfortably among them. How long since we saw a bobby all alone?
Somebody is playing a guitar. It takes me a moment to remind myself that many of this happy throng were only thirty-six hours ago members of my congregation in the same desanctified tabernacle whose cumbersome spire this minute dominates the skyline.
Were you personally or were you at any point aware,’ he enquires with aggressive clarity,
A silence falls and Joe Lavender finally takes the floor. His voice leaves no prints. It has no social or regional origin. It is a homeless, plaintive, nasal drawl.
‘The man’s fucked up everything he’s touched in life, so he’ll be in great demand. Probably got a safe parliamentary seat waiting for him right now.’ We laugh wisely at the world’s wicked ways.
He quoted Goethe’s Faust at me. In the beginning was the deed. I asked him whether he had accomplices, he quoted Rilke at me: Ich bin der Eine.’
I’m at a loss to know the difference between what I feel and what I’m pretending to feel. I recover my forearm and we do another manly handshake, English-style.
Jon Oliver english
I have been sparing till now in my portrayal of Prue, but only because I was waiting for the clouds of our enforced estrangement to blow over and our regard for each other to emerge in its rightful colours, which thanks to Prue’s life-saving policy statement on the morning following my inquisition by my chers collègues it has now done. If our marriage is not generally understood, neither is Prue.
It’s morning. It has been morning for a long time: morning in the hill forests of Karlovy Vary, morning on a rain-drenched Yorkshire hilltop, on Ground Beta and the twin screens in the Operations room; morning on Primrose Hill, in the Haven, on court number one at the Athleticus. I have made the tea and squeezed the orange juice and come back to bed: our best time for taking the decisions we couldn’t take yesterday, or discovering what we’ll do at the weekend or where we’ll go on holiday.
