Friends and Traitors Page 3

  Rod was fuming.

  “You’ve been with that bugger, Burgess!”

  “Eh?”

  “Sasha saw the two of you together. Swanning up Cork Street. Arm in arm.”

  “We were most certainly not arm in arm, and I haven’t a clue what you mean by swanning.”

  “Freddie, are you completely bloody naïve? You’re courting the company of one of the most notorious buggers in London!”

  “Ah. Sorry. When you called him a bugger just now I thought you were just being coarse, I didn’t take it literally.”

  Alex intervened.

  “Boys. Stop. This is hardly the point.”

  Rod turned on him, puffed up in self-righteousness like a squawking pigeon.

  “I rather think it is. Freddie, if ‘bugger’ is too ambiguous for you, how about arse bandit?”

  “Something new every day if not every hour. I’ve only just learnt ‘rough trade.’”

  The booze swam north and bumped into Troy’s head. He sat down on the nearest chair and burped softly into a clenched fist.

  “But, yes. I think I understand you,” he all but whispered. “I had begun to wonder.”

  “To wonder? He’s as queer as a coot.”

  Alex spoke up again, more forcibly.

  “I say again, this is not the point, and if you do not permit me to get to the point we’ll still be here at midnight. Now, do as your brother has done. Sit down and hear me out.”

  With bad graces and a sour face, Rod took the armchair next to Troy.

  “Freddie, I cannot tell you how to choose your friends. Everything Rod has told you is true …”

  “Everything? It amounts to one prejudicial opinion that might be a fact.”

  “Hear me out, my boy. Burgess is a homosexual. I knew that when I hired him. It doesn’t matter. He is also a Soviet agent and that does matter.”

  Rod and Troy looked at each other. Silent and wide-eyed.

  “And I did not know that when I hired him.”

  “How can you be sure?” Rod asked. “I know he was in the Communist Party when we were at Cambridge. He makes no bones about it, even admitted it at dinner the other night. Dozens of blokes were. It hardly amounts to more than being in the Boy Scouts. A phase some of us have to go through.”

  “I would agree with that. But Nikolai does not. Nikolai says the inherent contradictions in Burgess’s arguments smack of a man told to disassociate himself.”

  Troy said, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

  “Exactly. Burgess is burrowing like a badger.”

  “Mole,” said Troy. “Like a mole.”

  “As you wish. He’s stopped fighting England because he’s been told to join it. He’s reinventing himself with every word he utters.”

  “All this from one conversation?” said Rod.

  “No. Nikolai has his sources. I do not ask what they are. Links to the old country I’d rather not know about.”

  “So what are you going to do? Sack him?”

  “No. He’s rather good at what he does. I see no reason to sack him.”

  “Then why are we sitting here? Why did you tell me to get Freddie in here as soon as he got home?”

  Troy said, “Surely just to give you the opportunity to tell me not to consort with queers? Or what was it you called him? A bum bandit?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Boys, please. That is but a fraction of the truth. The bigger picture is this. As long as we know what Burgess is, we can and must be careful. We are vulnerable. We have been since the day we landed in this country twenty-five years ago. Every Russian, however well-received, is an object of suspicion. They buy my newspapers, they read my books, they pile on the honours … I can lunch at the Garrick, prop up the bar at the RAC club, I can consort with Churchill, with Macmillan, with Eden … but if I, if any of us, consort with a Russian spy we can never forget that he is a Russian spy and that we as a family are at risk from both sides.”

  Eventually Rod broke a silence that Troy never would.

  “You believe Nikolai?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then one question remains. Who do we tell?”

  “Rod, we have no idea what is going to happen in the next five years. The map of the world might rearrange itself. Or Hitler might rearrange it personally. We do not know what side Russia will take … what deals Stalin might make …”

  “I say again. Who do we tell?”

  “Tell? We tell no one.”

  §7

  In the absence of a verandah Troy took to the back garden. Not so much the London pocket handkerchief as the London tablecloth. Hollyhocks instead of willows. A lone hooting owl, a visitor from the nearby churchyard, where he no doubt feasted on London’s abundant rats, instead of the competitive barking of Hertfordshire foxes. A warm August dusk. He’d sat here countless times. It might even be part of his first memory, and it was certainly part of a thousand subsequent childhood memories. A sickly child, wrapped up like a railway parcel awaiting collection by the porter, blanketed and cushioned while his grandfather read Russian folk tales aloud to him.

  He had no memories that were not English. His brother and sisters had been born on the long five-year trek around Europe while his father made up his mind where they might settle. Rod even professed to have memories of their days in Paris, although Troy was not wholly certain he believed him.

  Rod flopped down next to him now. Mellowed by food and drink.

  “Where’s Dad?” Troy asked.

  “Gone back to messing about at his desk.”

  A pause. A silence. Another one Troy would not fill.

  “Look. About what happened earlier. I’m sorry.”

  Troy hated Rod’s apologies. The man could make decency oppressive.

  “I was overreacting …”

  “Rod. Do shut up. You’re drowning out the owl.”

  “I was only trying to protect you.”

  “What? From the queers?”

  “Yes. You don’t know how you appear to people. Women want to mother you …”

  “Well … you got the tall gene. I can’t help being short.”

  Rod all but ignored this.

  “And you can’t help looking cute.”

  “Cute? You think I’m cute?”

  “Of course I don’t. Don’t be an ass. I’m well aware that you are a malevolent little prick with a capacity to go … what’s the word … rogue?”

  “I’d prefer feral. Or do you want me to fetch you the Oxford Dictionary of Fraternal Abuse?”

  “Whatever … women want to mother you … men … well, a certain kind of man … wants to fuck you.”

  A pause. A silence Troy had every intention of filling as soon as he’d strung Rod out for a minute or two.

  “I’d prefer the other way around.”

  Rod appeared to be thinking about this. Then he smiled, and the smile became a grin, the grin became a giggle.

  Troy knew he could wring yet more contrition out of his brother, but could see no point in so doing. If Rod had relaxed enough to laugh then it was a hatchet successfully buried. Until the next time.

  “Speaking of protection,” Troy said. “There was really nothing I didn’t know, couldn’t have guessed at, in what the old man said about our vulnerability, as he put it … it almost didn’t need saying, and but for this new development, he might well not have put it into words. But it does give rise to wonder.”

  “Not quite with you here, Freddie.”

  “Are you the one who’s pissed now?”

  Rod equivocated with his left hand, like a rudder.

  “Così così. I can still spigga da Inglish.”

  “What does he think he did when he whipped us all into exile? What is he manifesting when he talks of it. Guilt?”

  “Well … I’ve known him twenty-five years … you a tad less … but I determined long ago that the characteristic the two of you share almost completely is you don’t feel guilt. It can be scary some
times. You exude a total confidence that whatever course of action you have embarked on is unarguably the right course of action. No regrets, no guilt, no looking back.”

  “He looks back all the time. His entire narrative is one great big act of retrospection.”

  “But devoid of guilt. It is the narrative that matters to him. It’s not looking back in the sense that the English would normally understand it. The telling of the story is no indication that he is reappraising himself or any of his actions.”

  “Well … he got that from his dad. All he ever did was tell stories.”

  “I missed most of them. School, university, so on …”

  “I think I copped the lot. I was his captive audience … and after that I was Dad’s captive audience. The lot of the last-born. The lot of the sickly child. To be forcibly entertained and educated at home by a man who knew everything and never shut up. But … we are off the point. How does he see us? I see an us, you see an us, but surely not the same us. What is the Troy family to him? What is this risk he now seems to have become so acutely aware of?”

  “He’s not just become aware of it. It’s the ongoing condition of exile.”

  “Then what do you make of all the risks he’s taken in the past?”

  “Such as? Sorry, silly question. I mean pick one. Fukkit. There’ve been dozens.”

  “How about … 1924?”

  “I wasn’t exactly politically savvy in 1924.”

  “Nor me. I was eight, but I knew what he was doing. I sat next to him while he typed his editorial. He even had me correct his spelling.”

  “Oh. That. The fucking Zinoviev letter.”

  “That would be my idea of risk. Putting his name to an editorial denouncing it as a fake after the Mail—or was it the Express? I probably never knew. As I said, I was only eight—after whichever right-wing rag published the letter.”

  “He wasn’t the only one to call it a fake, and it was a fake. Either anti-Soviet Russian exiles or our own dear secret services faked it. If we live long enough we may even find out which.”

  “All the same, he stuck his neck out.”

  “I think Dad would call that a calculated, perhaps even a contained risk. He said what half the country thought, plenty of people backed him, and he said it from behind the shield of money and a title. I don’t know which the English respect more.”

  “And that’s another thing … the title, which has suddenly become ‘piling on the honours.’ All a bit baffling.”

  “A baronetcy is an honour.”

  “OK. One honour. Hardly a pile.”

  “A slight exaggeration. Understandable given how close he sailed to the wind in getting it.”

  “When was it? During the war?”

  “1919. Lloyd George whacking out the awards. And the truth about that and countless other knighthoods and peerages nearly came out a couple of years ago.”

  “Truth?”

  “He bought the baronetcy off LG through a middleman named Maundy Gregory. Chap set up a pretty lucrative business as LG’s middleman, and quite literally brokered deals for titles. The old man paid £5,000. Most of which ended up in the coffers of the Liberal Party. I think he got a bargain. Ten years later the price would have more than doubled.”

  Troy felt he should be shocked by this, but the only shock he felt was at not knowing sooner.

  “1919?”

  “Yep. You’d have been about three, going on four.”

  “And in what way was this ‘sailing close to the wind’? It sounds as though half the toffs in England paid for it.”

  “A couple of years ago Maundy Gregory approached the wrong bloke. Some naval officer, personal friend of Mountbatten. He shopped him. Solicitor-General had no choice but to prosecute and the new toffs of old England went into panic. Our dad was a new toff, but he doesn’t bother much with panic. He told me it was a storm in a teacup and that an English principle was ‘you consume your own smoke.’”

  “I’ll have to look that up in Brewer’s.”

  “Be my guest, but the old man was right. Maundy Gregory cut a deal. Consumed his smoke. Pleaded guilty and in exchange he got eight weeks in the Scrubs and named no names. If he had … well, we’d have been exposed, vulnerable as the old man chooses to emphasise. There would have been risk.”

  “Embarrassment might be a better word.”

  “He’s sticking with risk, because he is risk-averse. It was why he wanted the damn title in the first place.”

  “It made us more English?”

  “On the button, Fred. We could not shuffle off our origins but we could obscure them, we could waft a smoke screen around them. It was a shrewd move. He could have bought a barony or a viscountcy, but that would have seated him on the red leather benches, the fake lord, betrayed at every move by his accent. A baronetcy was perfect. No territory, no obligations, no ermine. No less the Russian in his own eyes, a bit more English to the English. Sir Alex Troy—pillar of the community. Not so much a press baron as a press baronet. Free to write his own editorials and denounce whomsoever whensoever. I can think of only one down side.”

  “Which is.”

  “In ten or twenty years I’ll inherit the fucking thing.”

  Troy mused awhile.

  “A point of order if I may, eldest son and heir.”

  “Certainly, last-born son of no significance.”

  “If we are becoming more English as the years pass, the student princes of the class system … at what point do the English consume their own smoke screens?”

  This set Rod laughing like an idiot, fit to drown out the hoots of even the loudest owl.

  Troy brought him back to earth in two terse syllables.

  “Burgess.”

  “Oh fuck. Burgess? Is this still about bloody Burgess? I think this is where I came in.”

  “Do you seriously think he’s a risk? Is he not too much the clown to be a liability to anyone but himself?”

  “He’s not a clown. He’s a gobshite. He was one of the ‘apostles’ at Cambridge. A self-electing coven of gobshites. He’s a filthy, arrogant gobshite. And I refer to his personal habits not his sexual preference.”

  “Yes. Masha did have something to say about his fingernails.”

  “I can imagine. A remark as filthy as Burgess’s nails.”

  “Yep.”

  “Then I don’t want to know. And the short answer to your original question is yes. Burgess is a risk. If the old man says he’s a risk, he’s a risk.”

  “Suppose,” Troy went on, “that Burgess were a German spy rather than a Russian spy. Would he be less of a risk?”

  “It says something about the state of England that he probably would be. It may be acceptable to admire Hitler, much as all those railway timetable idiots have admired Mussolini. You can’t admire Stalin. If you do, you’re at worst a Commie, at best a fellow traveller. And it might go without saying that as Russian exiles we cannot fellow-travel. It is not an option permitted to us.”

  “Is it not better to fellow-travel hopefully than to arrive?”

  Rod suppressed a smile.

  Troy pursued the argument.

  “It remains, however, that for the moment, and it may be a very long moment, Burgess is an aspiring hack of some talent, a patchy pianist blessed with the curiosity of a kitten but cursed with the manners of a slob, who went to the right school and the right university. Just like you.”

  “Not just like me. Not just like you. He’s English. The English will never trust us. They’ll like us. They’ll never trust us. Right now, they trust Burgess. Burgess is one of their own.”

  “But … it’s why the old man sent us to that bloody school. Not to be educated, but to become ‘one of their own,’ to become old Harrovians. Ever after.”

  Rod was wearing his old Harrovian tie just about half-mast, much as Burgess always seemed to be wearing his old Etonian tie. He flipped the sharp end, looked momentarily at the pattern—the light from the room behind him just enough to pic
k out the silver stripes.

  “Why do you wear that damn tie?”

  “I suppose I like it. I’ve got plenty of others, but four days out of five I seem to pick this one. I’m not making any statement.”

  “Really?”

  “I can’t argue this one with you, Freddie. Of course it was another attempt to make us more English, which, in your case, clearly didn’t work. I cannot deny I quite liked my time at Harrow.”

  “And I hated it.”

  “As you are ever wont to tell me. But … but … it doesn’t mean I bought the package. I have the kit …”

  Rod waved the end of his tie.

  “… I forsook the caboodle.”

  “And you now would have me forsake Burgess.”

  “Forsake? You’ve not known him two minutes!”

  “True. But four days out of five I quite like him.”

  “After all I’ve said?”

  “Yep. Arse bandit, arrogant gobshite, queer as a coot … have I missed anything out?”

  “You omitted ‘Russian agent.’”

  “Oh, so I did.”

  “Be as cheeky, as sarcastic as you like, Freddie … but don’t let this man be your undoing.”

  Rod stared hard at him. Troy said nothing. Noted that Rod had swapped the plural “our” that had dominated their conversation, for the singular “your.” It was no longer about the Troy family, it was about Troy.

  “Do you have any plans to see him again?”

  Troy said nothing. Rod waited. Troy wondered if he might just bugger off, but he kept up the stare … looking nowhere near as pissed as he had fifteen minutes ago.

  “No,” said Troy at last. “I haven’t.”

  And he recalled how he and Burgess had parted outside the Burlington.

  Burgess had said, “Let’s make it soon, eh?”

  And Troy had replied, “Soon it shall be.”

  It wasn’t. Looking back, years later, Troy tried to remember when “soon” had arisen, when he had next met Burgess. It had not been soon. It had been years. It had been 1939 or 1940. The world had been rearranged. There might even have been a war on.

  §8

  Mayfair: Thursday, September 26, 1940

  There was a war on. It had lasted a year already and, until the fall of France in May, had seemed remote and unreal.