Declare (8 page)

The older man was laughing, his eyes wide open. “Oh my! He is touchy about his
dreams
, after all, isn’t he!
Allahumma!
But we can put that off for a while, for a few hundred yards here.” He had resumed picking his way over the canted pavement fragments, walking toward the sun that shone way out there over the bombed docks, and Hale exhaled and then plodded along beside him.

“Plans,” Theodora went on, “for you. It’s not so much
our
plans that are at issue.” He was staring at the ground as he walked, and he held up a hand to forestall interruption. “I don’t think I’ll say much more than this: you speak and read German, you’ve subscribed to technical wireless magazines, and you’ve been arrested at a Communist Party meeting. I believe I can promise you that you’ll soon be approached by—well, by a recruiter. We want you to be persuaded by this person. Don’t
act
, that is don’t pretend to hate England or anything of that sort; just be what you seem genuinely to
be, a politically ignorant young man who’s drifted into communism because it’s the fashion, resentful now at being detained by the police and expelled from college for what strikes you as a trivial offense.” He was looking away from Hale, squinting toward the rising sun. “Probably you’ll be leaving the country illegally. There will in that case be a warrant issued for your arrest, charges of treason and whatnot. We’ll see that it’s all dismissed, afterward.”

“I’m to be… a
spy?”
Having grasped the concept and come up with the word, Hale was too exhausted to go on and make a judgment about it.

“Would it upset you to be?”

“Ask me after I’ve had about twelve hours of sleep,” said Hale absently, “and a big plate of eggs and bacon and grilled tomatoes, and a couple-or-three pints.” Then he blinked around at the craters and the outlines of foundations, the rectangular pits of forlorn cellars, and his yawn was more from sudden nervousness than from exhaustion. This broken city was London, this besieged country was his own England, the England of Malory and More and Kipling and Chesterton—of lamp lit nights with the rain thrashing down beyond the leaded-glass windows over miles of dark Cotswold hills, of sunny canoeing on the placid Windrush, the England his poor Tory mother had loved—and he couldn’t pretend that he didn’t ache to defend it against any further injury.

“No, actually,” he said then. “No, I don’t think it would upset me, working for the Crown.”

Theodora had crouched beside a bush dotted with pale-yellow flowers. “All these flowers are supposed to be extinct,” he said, “grown from seeds that were preserved under the old floors, freed at last and thrown onto plowed ground, rich now with ash.” His gaze was oddly intent when he squinted up at Hale. “Do you know what this flower is?
Sisymbrium irio
, known as the London Rocket. It bloomed all over the City right after the Great Fire of 1666.” He picked two of the little flowers and handed one to Hale after he straightened up.

“London recovered from that,” observed Hale, dutifully sniffing the thing. “They rebuilt her.”

“Perhaps it was the flowers that sustained her life. Some can do that, I think.” Theodora glanced back, so Hale did too—the four surveillance men were following them at a distance. “Of course,” said Theodora, “you won’t say anything to this recruiter about
me
, nor about having been to that building where we met. You’re a very clean player—your mother was admirably thorough, for an amateur, about leaving no tracks; even ‘Hale’ isn’t the name under which she joined her religious order. Oh I say, you did know about that, didn’t you?” When Hale smiled wanly and nodded, the older man went on, “Well, we’ve advanced a pawn here, and it’s Red’s turn to move. You won’t see me again for a while, after this morning; they can’t possibly be aware of you yet, which is why I’m able to talk to you face-to-face. Whenever you come back, we’ll meet again and I’ll have a lot of questions for you.”

“ ‘Come back,’ ” echoed Hale. “From where?”

Theodora gave him an irritable look. “From wherever they
send
you, where did you think? You’ll know when it’s time to make your way back to England, and if you’re clever you’ll even find a way. I will almost certainly be aware of it when you return, and meet you; but if I can’t meet you, wait for me—that is, don’t tell
anyone
about me, nor about your secret purposes. Not even Churchill.”

Perhaps from memory, Hale heard in his head a young woman’s voice say, in French,
You were born to this
—and he shivered, not entirely in alarm. “What
are
my… ‘secret purposes’?”

“Tell me about your dreams.”

Hale sighed, then deliberately tucked the stem of his little London Rocket into the buttonhole of his lapel. “All right.” This seemed to be a morning outside of time, in which anything at all could be said, no matter how crazy-sounding, without immediacy nor fear of skepticism or judgment. “Do you remember the ‘wheels within wheels’ in Ezekiel… ?”

Two mornings later Hale’s trunk was packed and stowed in the porter’s lodge at Magdalen; the lorry that was to take him and his things back to Chipping Campden wasn’t due for half an hour, and
as he paced the sunny Broad Street pavement he was careful not to meet the eyes of any of the apparently carefree students who strolled past. The formal letter of dismissal from his tutor was tucked in his coat pocket—what use now had been all his study of the Caxton
Morte d’Arthur
, the pageantry in
The Faerie Queene
?

When he did inadvertently glance at one of the passing faces, it was because he had noticed that a slim woman in a plaid skirt with a leather purse was for the second time walking past where he stood—and he found himself meeting a pair of brown eyes over high slanted cheekbones in a face framed with short dark hair. Her gaze was coldly quizzical, and he looked away instantly, certain that she must somehow know of his disgrace.

He exhaled and impulsively strode across the street, hoping he appeared to have some purpose besides hiding from the disapproving public view. On the far side of the street he walked under the Roman arch into the Botanical Gardens, bright green ranks of shrubs and midget trees spread across four acres under the empty blue sky, and he crouched by one of the flowering herbs beside the footpath as though to read the description on the little sign in front of it, though in fact he couldn’t focus on the letters.

Andrew Hale, barrister, he thought in bitter bewilderment; foreign correspondent Hale of the
Times;
the great Oxford dons Lewis, Tolkien, Bowra, Hale. Sweet fuck-all seems more like it.

He straightened abruptly and took several deep breaths, not wanting anyone to see tears in his eyes here.

Eyes; those were
Slavic
eyes, he thought, in the instant before someone behind him touched his elbow; and when he turned around without surprise it was the woman in the plaid skirt standing there, still with the look of a dubious purchaser. She appeared to be in her thirties.

“I’ve seen you in the Party meetings,” she said.

He was fairly sure she had never been to a meeting he had attended, but he nodded. “Not unlikely,” he said. His heart was thumping under the expulsion papers in his coat pocket. “I’d advise you not to go to any in London.”

“I heard of your misfortune,” she said with a nod, gripping his
elbow and leading him along the crushed-stone path. “We are all allies against the monster Germany. How strange that cooperation should be called espionage, and a crime! We’re all working for world peace.” She spoke with no accent, but he thought he detected the spiky cadence of eastern Europe.

“I—wasn’t even doing espionage,” Hale stammered. “To belong to the International Workers’ Party is implicitly to commit what they call espionage,” she told him sternly. “We’re citizens of a bigger thing than any nineteenth-century empires, aren’t we?”

We want you to be persuaded by this person.
But
Don’t act.
“I’ve hoped to be,” he said. “Things look unpromising right now.”

“Knowing the danger now, are you still with us?” She had stopped walking and was staring intently into his eyes. “Now?”

“Yes,” he told her, and he was surprised at the assurance with which he said it; she did represent his only hope of eventual re instatement at Magdalen, but he had spoken from a sudden conviction that he had been waiting for this
en garde
ever since visiting the SIS headquarters at the age of seven; a conviction that all along he had been more a member of the world that included Theodora and this woman than of the world of St. John’s and the City of London School and Oxford.

She nodded, and they resumed walking between the rows of flowers. “Do you know what they do in Blenheim Palace?” she asked.

Hale glanced at her, but she was looking ahead. Blenheim Palace was six miles north of Oxford. “The, uh, Duke of Marlborough lives there.”

“He has turned it for wartime spy purposes over to MI5, a branch of the British secret service. We have comrades working there, covertly.” She opened her purse and tilted it toward him; he could see a folded buff envelope tucked in there. “In this envelope is a list, copied from the MI5 Registry files, of Comintern agents known by the British to be working in London. I am not a person who ordinarily meets comrades face-to-face, as I am doing now with you; this is important. We need to convey this list right away
to a still-unsuspected agent in London, so that Moscow Centre will know who must be reassigned, where fresh agents must be put in place. Also here in photographic miniature are full specifications of the new Napier Sabre aero-engine that is powering the Hawker Typhoon aircraft; the British government has classified these specifications as ‘most-secret,’ not to be shared with allies. It is Soviet Russia that now is doing the greatest work of fighting Germany, at Riga and Minsk and Kiev; if—
espionage
—helps the Soviets to do this, is it right to impede it?”

“No,” said Hale, trying to look resolute and not to think of the undergraduate who had advocated the destruction of all the Oxford colleges.

“I
cannot leave here today,” the woman said. “We want
you
to take a train to London, now. I will give you a hundred pounds for the travel and inconvenience. Tonight at eight o’clock you are to be standing under the—Eros?—statue in Piccadilly Square, you know what that is? Good. Hold a belt, you know?—for trousers?—in your right hand. A man carrying some fruit, an orange perhaps, will approach you and ask you where you bought the belt; you will tell him that you bought it in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris, and then you will ask him where you can buy an orange like his; he will offer to sell it to you for a penny. Hand this envelope to him then. He will have further work for you.”

“Just… go, right now?” said Hale, wondering what would become of his trunk. “This seems awfully precipitate—”

She interrupted him with, “Where did you buy the belt?”

“In—an ironmonger’s shop,” he said. “In Paris.”

“You were born in Palestine, I think,” said the woman.

He blinked at her in surprise, wondering if Theodora would be unhappy to know that she was aware of this. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know that?”

Without a smile she said, “A little bird told me. Here.” She handed him the buff envelope, and he folded it more sharply and tucked it into his coat pocket next to the letter from his tutor. “And here’s a hundred pounds,” she went on, handing him a letter-sized envelope. “I’ll need you to sign a receipt for it.”

In spite of Theodora’s vapory assurances, Hale was numbingly aware that this constituted real, deliberate espionage, documentable treason; and he could feel the sudden heat in his face. “My—real name?”

She had obviously noted his involuntary blush, and for the first time she smiled at him. “Yes, comrade,” she said softly, “your real name. Don’t worry, I won’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”

And what, he wondered a moment later as he signed
Andrew Hale
in the notebook she had unwedged from her purse, would constitute the wrong hands, here?

I’m on
somebody’s
rolls now.

God help me, he thought.

London, 1963

But cannot the government protect?

We of the game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our

names are blotted from the book. That is all.