The Unfortunate Englishman Read online

  “Us. Such an odd word.”

  “Us. Such a nice word.”

  §100

  Judy, product of a girls’ boarding school that prided itself on lacrosse, tennis, and cricket, had excellent hand-eye coordination and took a childish delight in being able to lob her knickers onto the lampshade, backhanded, looking over her shoulder.

  An hour later, Wilderness found himself staring up at today’s red skimpies, in a gentle, but wakeful post-coital sloth. Hands locked behind his head. His wife curled into a ball next to him.

  Her head popped up from beneath the sheets.

  “Good shot, eh?”

  “The things you learnt at that school.”

  “I never told you about the farting contests, did I?”

  “No. And don’t tell me now.”

  “Or the things Sarah Hammond-Smith could do with ping-pong balls?”

  “I have better, more interesting things to think about than your wasted adolescence.”

  “Such as?”

  “Are we serious now?”

  “Yes. We have entered serious mode. I heard the click.”

  “I’ve been asking myself . . . for ages now . . . what am I to Alec? What have I become?”

  “Well . . . you were hired for your natural criminal tendencies, sweetie.”

  “That’s a bit bloody harsh.”

  “OK, in the interests of marital harmony and the defence of truth, remark withdrawn and I leave it to you to find a definition.”

  “Could you try to be less BBC?”

  “Only kidding.”

  “I’d’ve said I used to be his hands, feet, and eyes . . . and yes, I did shin up drainpipes, crack safes, and nick stuff on his behalf.”

  “Told you.”

  “It was the ‘natural’ I was contesting, not the ‘criminal.’ Anyway. What have I been the last couple of years, what have I become? I’ve become his memory . . . I’m his walking filing cabinet, his Encyclopædia Cocknicca, his expert on things Russian.”

  “And you don’t like that?”

  “Judy . . . it’s a desk job.”

  “So you like being out and about . . . toting a gun . . . spying on people . . . nicking things?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  She snuggled up, made him unlock his hands and lie on his side, embraced his back and arse, spoons in the cutlery drawer, her head pressed between his shoulder blades.

  “Then I suppose we have to find some other occupation in which your talents, natural or not, will be appreciated and paid for.”

  “Y’know. There are times I hate you.”

  “Fibber.”

  “Go to sleep.”

  §101

  West Berlin: June 1963

  Reprise

  “Sign on the dotted, Joe, and all this will just go away.”

  Wilderness read the page in front of him.

  “So . . . I’m re-enlisting?”

  Burne-Jones said nothing. Just stared back at him, accepting no contradiction.

  He’d drawn a line that day out on Bernauer Straße . . . and now it was being handed back to him with dots . . . lots of dots . . .

  “Sign on the dotted, Joe, and all this will just go away.”

  And it did.

  IV

  Bogusnik

  Old age is the most unexpected of all things

  that can happen to a man.

  —Leon Trotsky

  §102

  London: June 1965

  It doesn’t matter what day

  Wilderness had few memories of his mother. None of them fond. He had more of his father, all of them lethal. His mother had died in the Blitz when he was thirteen, and if the ideal condition in which to meet one’s maker is, as cliché has it, to die “on the job,” then Lily Holderness had died happy, “on the job” . . . alas the job was propping up a bar and knocking back gin. The absence of fresh lime in wartime had caused her no end of annoyance.

  His father, Herbert Henry Asquith Holderness, known as Harry, or, if he was out of earshot, as “that big bastard,” had been a maniac capable of psychopathic violence, and hence had served His Majesty well throughout the Second World War.

  About a year after the war ended Wilderness had watched his father walk bollock-naked into the North Sea, never to be seen again. His last words echoed in Wilderness’s mind as vividly as all the beatings—“hope you make a better job of this life thing than I could”—and that was the only positive thing he had salvaged from the brief encounter with Harry Holderness that had passed for childhood.

  The relationships that had mattered to the young Wilderness had been with his maternal grandfather—a small-time crook who had taught Wilderness all he knew about burglary and safe-cracking before meeting a timely end falling from a Hampstead rooftop less than a mile from where Joe and Judy now lived—and with the old man’s . . . what to call her? Abner and Merle had never married, she was half his age . . . ­mistress seemed wide of the mark, floozy too rude . . . with the old man’s “concubine,” Merle, a good-looking London prozzie who had seen fit to deflower Wilderness for free on VE night.

  All in all, there were no fitting paradigms in his personal history to prepare him for parenthood. All the same, parenthood fell upon him on April 1, 1964, in the shape of twin girls. Wilderness and Judy readily agreed on names, neither having the desire to perpetuate any family forenames—so Joan (the elder by seven minutes) and Molly Holderness, known, in utter secrecy, to their parents as “our foolish girls.”

  Lady Margaret Burne-Jones, known to her husband as Madge, except when he was cross with her—a rare occurrence, most of what little anger he had being reserved for his daughters—when he would adopt a formal and rather arch “Margaret,” was the better example. Madge had brought up four daughters and Judy, being the eldest, was the first to make her a grandmother.

  “I was born to play this part, Joe,” Madge said far too often.

  And he would think that perhaps he wasn’t, and that all he could do, the best he could do, was live up to the last wish of a dying bastard and make a better job of the life thing.

  They sat in the kitchen one warm summer’s afternoon, at Campden Hill Square.

  The life thing in full swing.

  He had set the new lives in their high chairs. Madge had set Beatrix Potter bunny bowls in front of them with an assortment of sliced and chopped fruit. Joan had woofed hers down as though she hadn’t eaten in a week. Molly was dissecting the banana in search of a backbone, and looked up disappointed when she found none.

  “Fish,” she said.

  “No,” Wilderness replied. “Banana.”

  “Banananananan.”

  “Close enough. Now eat what you just killed. Rule of the game, Molly. Don’t kill what you can’t eat.”

  “You know, Joe,” Madge said, leaning back to indulge one of her many vices, the filter-tipped king-size cigarette. “You’re a damn sight better at this than I had thought you’d be.”

  “Better than Alec?”

  “Not sure comparisons help. He had amazing patience with our girls. Just as he has with yours, but he’s a great tendency to be off in the clouds. That he’s in ‘the game’ as you call it . . .”

  “No. I take no credit for that. I pinched it. Kipling, I think.”

  “That he’s in it at all never ceases to baffle me. I mean just look at him, just listen to him. Wouldn’t you take him for a professor of classics rather than a spook?”

  “Perhaps Her Majesty needs the odd professor behind that particular desk. Can’t all be in the field.”

  “No, I suppose not. I could never see Alec playing baccarat, wondering about the mix of his martini or holding a gun. But you were in the field weren’t you, Joe?”

  “Yes, and inasmuch as I like martinis at all I pre
fer them stirred not shaken.”

  “Do you miss it, Joe? Do you miss ‘the game’?”

  “No,” he lied. “I don’t.”

  Molly burped. Burping gave way to giggling, readily amused at the noises she could make, and when one of the girls giggled the other always joined in. Laughter was addictive—every joke a shared joke. Something Wilderness had never known as a kid.

  “It’s been a good year,” he added. “One the best.”

  And that was no lie.

  §103

  London: November 1965

  Queen Anne’s Gate

  Suddenly the ghost of Nell was in the room—looking over his shoulder. Hands moving swiftly, invisibly above his head. Do the living have ghosts? Wilderness thought there must surely be a word for it. He had a vague recollection of something like “avatar.” Any minute now he’d get up, cross the room and heft a dictionary off the shelf and look—but for the moment he was transfixed by the work of his own hands, not ghost hands. He had rearranged all his pens and pencils in order of length. It had to be him. Or it had to be Nell. He had stacked all his files according to colour coding—from Who Gives a Fuck to Top Secret. And the contents of his rotary paperclip holder were arranged clockwise 1–12, small to large. Yes—Nell Breakheart was in the room with him. The hands were his, the strings were hers, pulling him this way and that like some loose, shambling Pinocchio.

  The temptation was to treat the pile of folders like a house of cards, behave like a spoilt child and send the lot flying—the floor strewn with secrets from the price of tea in the NAAFI canteen in Bielefeld to the “your guess is as good as mine” location of Russian nuclear submarines in the Denmark Strait.

  The Cold War had become a bore. Wilderness a puppet. The puppetmaster not so much his long-lost lover Nell as his employer and father-in-law Lt Col Alec Burne-Jones, nominally of the Coldstream Guards much as Wilderness himself was still nominally an RAF sergeant. None of it meant a thing and he was baffled that SIS held on to any notion of rank among those recruited from the armed forces, when no such thing would matter with the legions of toffs recruited straight from the universities, the BBC, or the Foreign Office. It was not a world of pips and stripes, but smoke and mirrors. What he wouldn’t give for a whiff of smoke or a reflection glimpsed in the mirror. Anything not to be stuck behind a desk doing paper penance for past sins.

  Fukkit. Fukkit. Fukkit. He knocked the folders to the floor, just as Alice Pettifer, his secretary, opened the door.

  “Oh God. Are you in one of those moods again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well you can bloody well pick them up yourself this time. I’m not ruining another pair of tights scrabbling around on the parquet just ’cos you’ve thrown your rattle out of the pram.”

  Tights. Ye gods, whatever happened to stockings and the irresistible allure of seams that seemed to lead somewhere?

  “He wants you.”

  “Lost the use of his legs has he?”

  “For God’s sake, Joe. Try not to rubbish everything. He’s the boss; he wants you. That’s all there is to it. Now, go on, bugger off and I might just clean up your tantrum.”

  Burne-Jones was two doors down the corridor.

  He didn’t look up as Wilderness came in. Long legs up on one corner of the desk, busily annotating something or other in the verdigris shade of ink he favoured—his notes in green, his superior’s in red and Wilderness’s, when on rare occasion required, in blue pencil, creating a rainbow of confusion and hesitation. Wilderness had known documents circulate at several levels only to come back to him with “What’s the chap with the blue pencil on about?” or “Blue cannot be serious” and “Has Blue actually read FO472/1?”

  Wilderness pulled out a chair and waited.

  Every meeting with Burne-Jones reminded him of the first. The day, long ago and yesterday, when he had pulled Wilderness from the RAF glasshouse and offered him a choice between military prison—and its endless square-bashing—and learning Russian and German at Cambridge. Such a choice. Wilderness had hesitated, on the grounds that eagerness was not next to godliness and gratitude a vice, just long enough to annoy Burne-Jones. Ever since they had got on rather well. In 1955 Wilderness had married Judy. He had never been wholly sure of his acceptance, his “fit,” but had recognised that the problem, if such it be, was probably of his own making. Burne-Jones was a toff. It was hard not to assume that toff and snob were the same thing. It meant examining, repressing, dismissing the accrued wisdom of an East End childhood and the ever-expanding knowledge gleaned in a life of crime. But he’d never have been any use to Burne-Jones without his criminal tendencies and talents. They were as valuable an asset as his German . . . or his Russian.

  “Have you ever come across General Bogusnik?”

  “Bogusnik? Are you sure you’ve got that right?”

  Burne-Jones scribbled the name down in Russian and showed it to him: БОГУСНИК.

  “Nothing wrong with my pronunciation is there? I may be bit rusty and I’ve never had the gift for languages you have . . . but . . .”

  “But? But Bogusnik? The bogus bloke? You can’t be serious. He might just as well call himself General Faker.”

  “Hmm,” Burne-Jones mused. “Never occurred to me to look at it that way. Of course it would be pronounced Boggus rather than ­Bogus . . . and it hardly means the same thing does it?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything . . . it would be something like ПОДДЕЛНИК in Russian. The joke’s in English, which is what makes me think it’s fake. Pointedly aimed at us. In short, a trap.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “He’s real?”

  “So far as we can tell.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He started showing up in reports from our men in Moscow in ’56, just after Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress. No mention of him before that and no one has yet been able to get us anything more than a blurred snapshot. Could be any little fat bloke. God knows Russia seems to be full of little fat blokes. And this little fat bloke has been in charge of Geoffrey Masefield for the last three years.”

  “Oh hell, not that useless twat.”

  “Really, Joe? Let’s have a little respect for one of our own currently residing at Comrade Brezhnev’s pleasure.”

  “It’s because he’s a twat that he got nicked. Talk about cloak and dagger. Masefield swirled the cloak, brandished the dagger, and if he’d had a big black hat they’d have spotted him the split second he got off the bloody plane.”

  “We all make mistakes, and perhaps recruiting Geoffrey was one of mine. Nevertheless, we do not abandon our own, do we?”

  There had been, Wilderness knew, many an occasion when the Service had done just that. The ethic in play here was not the public one but Burne-Jones’s private one. In Berlin in ’48 he could have left Wilderness to his uncertain fate. He had not. He had rescued him, promoted him, with “Fuck up one more time, Joe, and I’ll let them have you.”

  “Am I to take it General Faker wants to do a deal?”

  “Yeees. Not sure what. But old Geoffrey is the card he’s slapping on the table. We give him what he wants and we get Geoffrey back.”

  “What have we got that he wants?”

  “I’m assuming until Bogusnik says otherwise that it would be like for like.”

  “Comrade Liubimov?”

  “Well, they’re not getting George Blake.”

  “All the same, Liubimov’s a much bigger fish than Masefield.”

  “When I said like for like, Joe, I wasn’t expecting a quid pro kopeck.”

  “Liubimov got fifteen years, he’s served nearly half. He’ll be eligible for parole soon. Masefield got life. Who knows if they’d ever let him out?”

  “Which is why I’m not playing big fish little fish. If the trade-off is Liubimov, so be it.�
��

  There had been trade-offs before. The British would meet the Russians at the Staaken checkpoint on a bleak, absurdly straight stretch of the seemingly infinite Heerstraße where the DDR met the British Sector of West Berlin with a concrete wall. The Americans would meet them at Potsdam where the Glienicke Bridge spanned the Havel, between a “free” American Sector and a communist East Germany. For the last couple of years both had served as a handy meeting points for the exchange of prisoners. In 1962, the Americans had received Gary Powers, pilot of the U-2 spy plane shot down over the USSR, in exchange for Rudolf Abel, a second generation Anglo-Russian busted as a spy in Texas in 1957. Only last year the British had had Greville Wynne, a spy Wilderness thought of as almost as hapless as Geoffrey Masefield, returned to them in exchange for Gordon Lonsdale, a “super-spy” serving twenty-five years in a British prison. A walk across a line had set them free. Wilderness had seen the Glienicke Bridge only from the Berlin side. It had redefined distance in a way the checkpoint at Staaken didn’t. Short, and steely, it had looked to him like the longest, ugliest walk on earth. Stark, almost bare—no floodlights, no lookout towers. It put the “cold” in Cold War. Staaken would be at least quick. Liubimov would hop from one car to another and never feel the cold.

  “Do you fancy a bit of a trip, Joe?”

  “You mean a swap at the Staaken checkpoint?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of anything just yet. I was thinking we should get to know General Bogusnik and hear what he wants rather than over-anticipate. He’s offering to meet.”

  Good bloody grief.

  “You mean you want me in Moscow?”

  “As you have made abundantly clear over the last year, you want to get back in the field. Does it actually matter where?”

  Wilderness said nothing.

  “And . . . off the record, you’re wasted behind a desk . . . it was just a necessary precaution . . . for a while.”

  “So what you’re saying is that having grounded me for more than two years because you couldn’t have me flogged in public any more, you now want me to go to Moscow?”