East of Suez, West of Charing Cross Road Read online

  EAST OF SUEZ, WEST OF CHARING CROSS ROAD

  John Lawton

  Also by John Lawton

  1963

  Black Out

  Old Flames

  A Little White Death

  Riptide

  Blue Rondo

  Second Violin

  A Lily of the Field

  Sweet Sunday

  Then We Take Berlin

  The Unfortunate Englishman

  Friends and Traitors

  EAST OF SUEZ, WEST OF CHARING CROSS ROAD

  John Lawton

  Grove Press UK

  First published in 2010 in Agents of Treachery: Spy Stories, edited by Otto Penzler, published by Corvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  This E-book edition published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

  Copyright © John Lawton, 2010

  The moral right of John Lawton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 925 6

  Grove Press

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  www.groveatlantic.com

  EAST OF SUEZ, WEST OF CHARING CROSS ROAD

  John Lawton

  UNHAPPINESS DOES NOT fall on a man from the sky like a branch struck by lightning, it is more like rising damp. It creeps up day by day, unfelt or ignored until it is too late. And if it’s true that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, then the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts in Tolstoy’s equation, because George Horsfield was unhappy in a way that could only be described as commonplace. He had married young, and he had not married well.

  IN 1948 HE had answered the call to arms. At the age of eighteen he hadn’t much choice. National Service—the draft—the only occasion in its thousand-year history that England had had peacetime conscription. It was considered a necessary precaution in a world in which, to quote the U.S. Secretary of State, England had lost an empire and not yet found a role. Not that England knew this—England’s attitude was that we had crushed old Adolf, and we’d be buggered if we’d now lose an empire—it would take more than little brown men in loincloths . . . okay, so we lost India . . . or Johnny Arab with a couple of petrol bombs or those Bolshie Jews in their damn kibbutzes—okay, so we’d cut and run in Palestine, but dammit man, one has to draw the line somewhere. And the line was east of Suez, somewhere east of Suez, anywhere east of Suez—a sort of movable feast really.

  George had expected to do his two years square-bashing or polishing coal. Instead, to both his surprise and pleasure, he was considered officer material by the War Office Selection Board. Not too short in the leg, no dropped aitches, a passing knowledge of the proper use of a knife and fork, and no pretensions to be an intellectual. He was offered a short-service commission, rapidly trained at Eaton Hall in Cheshire—a beggar man’s Sandhurst—and put back on the parade ground not as a private but as Second Lieutenant HG Horsfield RAOC.

  Why RAOC? Because the light of ambition had flickered in George’s poorly exercised mind—he meant to turn this short-service commission into a career—and he had worked out that promotion was faster in the technical corps than in the infantry regiments, and he had chosen the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, the “suppliers,” whose most dangerous activity was that they supplied some of the chaps who took apart unexploded bombs, but, that allowed for, an outfit in which one was unlikely to get blown up, shot at, or otherwise injured in anything resembling combat.

  GEORGE’S EFFORTS NOTWITHSTANDING, England did lose an empire, and the bits it didn’t lose England gave away with bad grace. By the end of the next decade a British prime minister could stand up in front of an audience of white South Africans, until that moment regarded as our “kith and kin,” and inform them that “a wind of change is blowing through the continent.” He meant, “the black man will take charge,” but as ever with Mr. Macmillan, it was too subtle a remark to be effective. Like his “you’ve never had it so good,” it was much quoted and little understood.

  George did not have it so good. In fact, the 1950s were little else but a disappointment to him. He seemed to be festering in the backwaters of England—Nottingham, Bicester—postings relieved only, if at all, by interludes in the backwater of Europe known as Belgium. The second pip on his shoulder grew so slowly it was tempting to force it under a bucket like rhubarb. It was 1953 before the pip bore fruit. Just in time for the coronation.

  They gave him a few years to get used to his promotion—he boxed the compass of obscure English bases—then Lieutenant Horsfield was delighted with the prospect of a posting to Libya, at least until he got there. He had thought of it in terms of the campaigns of the Second World War that he’d followed with newspaper clippings, a large corkboard, and drawing pins when he was a boy—Monty, the eccentric, lisping Englishman, versus Rommel, the old Desert Fox, the romantic, halfway-decent German. Benghazi, Tobruk, El Alamein—the first land victory of the war. The first real action since the Battle of Britain.

  There was plenty of evidence of the war around Fort Kasala (known to the British as 595 Ordnance Depot, but built by the Italians during their brief, barmy empire in Africa). Mostly it was scrap metal. Bits of tanks and artillery half-buried in the sand. A sort of modern version of the legs of Ozymandias. And the fort itself looked as though it had taken a bit of a bashing in its time. But the action had long since settled down to the slow motion favored by camels and even more so by donkeys. It took less than a week for it to dawn on George that he had once more drawn the short straw. There was only one word for the Kingdom of Libya—boring. A realm of sand and camel shit.

  He found he could get through a day’s paperwork by about eleven in the morning. He found that his clerk-corporal could get through it by ten, and since it was received wisdom in Her Majesty’s Forces that the devil made work for idle hands, he inquired politely of Corporal Ollerenshaw, “What do you do with the rest of the day?”

  Ollerenshaw, not having bothered either to stand or salute on the arrival of an officer, was still behind his desk. He held up the book he had been reading—Teach Yourself Italian.

  “Come sta?”

  “Sorry, corporal, I don’t quite . . .”

  “It means, ‘How are you, sir?’ In Italian. I’m studying for my O level exam in Italian.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir. I do a couple of exams a year. Helps to pass the time. I’ve got Maths, English, History, Physics, Biology, French, German, and Russian—this year I’ll take Italian and Art History.”

  “Good Lord, how long have you been here?”

  “Four years, sir. I think it was a curse from the bad fairy at my christening. I would either sleep for a century until kissed by a prince or get four years in fuckin’ Libya. ’Scuse my French, sir.”

  Ollerenshaw rooted around in his desk drawer and took out two books—Teach Yourself Russian and a Russian-English, English-Russian dictiona
ry.

  “Why don’t you give it a whirl, sir? It’s better than goin’ bonkers or shaggin’ camels.”

  George took the books, and for a week or more they sat unopened on his desk.

  It was hearing Ollerenshaw through the partition—“Una bottiglia di vino rosso, per favore”—“Mia moglie vorrebbe gli spaghetti alle vongole”—that finally prompted him to open them. The alphabet was a surprise, so odd it might as well have been Greek, and as he read on he realized it was Greek, and he learned the story of how two Orthodox priests from Greece had created the world’s first artificial alphabet for a previously illiterate culture by adapting their own to the needs of the Russian language. And from that moment George was hooked.

  Two years later, and the end of George’s tour of duty in sight, he had passed his O level and A level Russian and was passing fluent—passing only in that he had just Ollerenshaw to converse with in Russian and might, should he meet a real Russki for a bit of a chat, be found to be unequivocally fluent.

  Most afternoons the two of them would sit in George’s office in sanctioned idleness speaking Russian, addressing each other as “comrade,” and drinking strong black tea to get into the spirit of things Russian.

  “Tell me, tovarich,” Ollerenshaw said, “why have you just stuck with Russian? While you’ve been teaching yourself Russian I’ve passed Italian, Art History, Swedish, and Technical Drawing.”

  George had a ready answer for this.

  “Libya suits you. You’re happy doing nothing at the bumhole of nowhere. Nobody to pester you but me—a weekly wage and all found petrol you can flog to the wogs—you’re in lazy bugger’s heaven. You’ve got skiving down to a fine art. And I wish you well of it. But I want more. I don’t want to be a lieutenant all my life, and I certainly don’t want to be pushing around dockets for pith helmets, army boots, and jerry cans for much longer. Russian is what will get me out of it.”

  “How d’you reckon that?”

  “I’ve applied for a transfer to Military Intelligence.”

  “Fuck me! You mean MI5 and all them spooks an’ that?”

  “They need Russian speakers. Russian is my ticket.”

  MI5 DID NOT want George. His next home posting, still a lowly first lieutenant at the age of twenty-nine, was to Command Ordnance Depot Upton Bassett on the coast of Lincolnshire—flat, sandy, cold, and miserable. The only possible connection with things Russian was that the wind, which blew bitterly off the North Sea all year round, probably started off somewhere in the Urals.

  He hated it.

  The saving grace was that a decent-but-dull old bloke—Major Denis Cockburn, a veteran of World War II, with a good track record in bomb disposal—took him up.

  “We can always use a fourth at bridge.”

  George came from a family that thought three-card brag was the height of sophistication but readily turned his hand to the pseudo-intellectual pastime of the upper classes.

  He partnered the major’s wife, Sylvia—the major usually partnered Sylvia’s unmarried sister, Grace.

  George, far from being the most perceptive of men, at least deduced that a slow process of matchmaking had been begun. He didn’t want this. Grace was at least ten years older than him and far and away the less attractive of the two sisters. The major had got the pick of the bunch, but that wasn’t saying much.

  George pretended to be blind to hints and deaf to suggestions. Evenings with the Cockburns were just about the only damn thing that stopped him from leaving all his clothes on a beach and disappearing into the North Sea forever. He’d hang on to them. He’d ignore anything that changed the status quo.

  Alas, he could not ignore death.

  When the major died of a sudden and unexpected heart attack in September 1959, seemingly devoid of any family but Sylvia and Grace, it fell to George to have the grieving widow on his arm at the funeral.

  “You were his best friend,” Sylvia told him.

  No, thought George, I was his only friend, and that’s not the same thing at all.

  A string of unwilling subalterns was dragooned into replacing Denis at the bridge table. George continued to do his bit. After all, it was scarcely any hardship, he was fond of Sylvia in his way, and it could not be long before red tape broke up bridge nights forever when the army asked for the house back and shuffled her off somewhere with a pension.

  But the breakup came in the most unanticipated way. He’d seen off Grace with a practiced display of indifference, but it had not occurred to him that he might need to see off Sylvia, too.

  On February 29th, 1960, she sat him down on the flowery sofa in the boxy sitting room of her standard army house, told him how grateful she had been for his care and company since the death of her husband, and George, not seeing where this was leading, said that he had grown fond of her and was happy to do anything for her.

  It was then that she proposed to him.

  She was, he thought, about forty-five or -six, although she looked older, and whilst a bit broad in the beam was not unattractive.

  This had little to do with his acceptance. It was not her body that tipped the balance, it was her character. Sylvia could be a bit of a dragon when she wanted, and George was simply too scared to say no. He could have said something about haste or mourning or with real wit have quoted Hamlet, saying that the “funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.” But he didn’t.

  “I’m not a young thing anymore,” she said. “It need not be a marriage of passion. There’s much to be said for companionship.”

  George was not well acquainted with passion. There’d been the odd dusky prostitute out in Libya, a one-night fling with an NAAFI woman in Aldershot . . . but little else. He had not given up on passion, because he did not consider that he had yet begun with it.

  They were married as soon as the banns had been read, and he walked out of church under a tunnel of swords in his blue dress uniform, the Madame Bovary of Upton Bassett, down a path that led to twin beds, Ovaltine, and hairnets worn overnight. He had not given up on passion, but it was beginning to look as though passion had given up on him.

  SIX WEEKS LATER, desperation led him to act irrationally. Against all better judgment he asked once more to be transferred to Intelligence and was gobsmacked to find himself summoned to an interview at the War Office in London. London . . . Whitehall . . . the hub of the universe.

  Simply stepping out of a cab so close to the Cenotaph—England’s memorial to her dead, at least her own white dead, of countless imperial ventures—gave him a thrill. It was all he could do not to salute.

  Down all the corridors and in the right door to face a lieutenant colonel, then he saluted. But, he could not fail to notice, he was saluting not some secret agent in civilian dress, not Bulldog Drummond or James Bond, but another Ordnance officer just like himself.

  “You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, haven’t you?” Lieutenant Colonel Breen said when they’d zipped through the introductions.

  “I have?”

  Breen flourished a sheet of smudgy-carboned typed paper.

  “Your old CO in Tripoli tells me you did a first-class job running the mess. And I think you’re just the chap we need here.”

  Silence being the better part of discretion, and discretion being the better part of an old cliché, George said nothing and let Breen amble to his point.

  “A good man is hard to find.”

  Well—he knew that, he just wasn’t wholly certain he’d ever qualified as a “good man.” It went with “ first-class mind” (said of eggheads) or “very able”(said of politicians) and was the vocabulary of a world he moved in without ever touching.

  “And we need a good man right here.”

  Oh Christ—they weren’t making him mess officer? Not again!

  “Er . . . actually, sir, I was under the impression that I was being interviewed for a post in Intelligence.”

  “Eh? What?”

  “I have fluent Russian, sir, an
d I . . . ”

  “Well, you won’t be needing it here . . . ha . . . ha . . . ha!”

  “Mess officer?”

  Breen seemed momentarily baffled.

  “Mess officer? Mess officer? Oh, I get it. Yes, I suppose you will be, in a way, it’s just that the mess you’ll be supplying will be the entire British Army ‘East of Suez.’ And you’ll get your third pip. Congratulations, Captain.”

  Intelligence was not mentioned again except as an abstract quality that went along with “good man” and “ first-class mind.”

  SYLVIA WOULD NOT hear of living in Hendon or Finchley. The army had houses in north London, but she would not even look. So they moved to West Byfleet in Surrey, onto a hermetically sealed army estate of identical houses, and as far as George could see, identical wives, attending identical coffee mornings.

  “Even the bloody furniture’s identical!”

  “It’s what one knows,” she said. “And it’s a fair and decent world without envy. After all, the thing about the forces is that everyone knows what everyone else earns. Goes with the rank, you can look it up in an almanac if you want. It takes the bitterness out of life.”

  George thought of all those endless pink gins he and Ollerenshaw had knocked back out in Libya, and how what had made them palatable was the bitters.

  George hung up his uniform, went into plain clothes, War Office Staff Captain (Ord) General Stores, let his hair grow a little longer, and became a commuter—the 7:57 a.m. to Waterloo, and the 5:27 p.m. back again. It was far from Russia.

  Many of his colleagues played poker on the train, many more did crosswords, and a few read. George read, he got through most of Dostoevsky in the original, the books disguised with the dust jacket from a Harold Robbins or an Irwin Shaw, and when he wasn’t reading stared out of the window at the suburbs of south London—Streatham, Tooting, Wimbledon—and posh “villages” of Surrey—Surbiton, Esher, Weybridge—and imagined them all blown to buggery.

  The only break in the routine was getting rat-arsed at the office party a few days before Christmas 1962, falling asleep on the train, and being woken by a cleaner to find himself in a railway siding in Guildford at dawn the next morning.