Making Enemies (20 page)

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No,’ she said, sitting up and leaning over me. ‘No guilt. No sorry. I have said I love you. I have shown I love you. You are here beside me now, in my bed, this is my body you have made love to, this is my heart that is beating here,’ and she took my hand and held it to her breast.

She put her arms on my shoulders and pushed me back into the pillows.

‘You have shown me that you love me too, I know that. I would like to hear you say it, but I know it is difficult for you. I will have to believe in your silence.’

I tried to put my arms around her but she pushed me away. For the first time I saw that behind the laughter, there was uncertainty too.

I looked into her blue eyes, saw her soft golden hair falling around her face and felt the warmth of her body over mine. In that moment I experienced an intensity of feeling stronger than anything I had known before. Then something broke inside me, and I felt like I was bursting out of the restraint that had held me captive all my life. For the first time I became someone I could recognize without shame, someone I could face without fear. I had discovered myself in her embrace.

‘Tanya.’

All the love and emotion that I had withheld from others all my life poured out of me then. I told her that I loved her, that I had never loved anyone else; that with her I was complete, whole; that
with her I was someone I had not believed I could ever be.

She held me in the dark, speaking to me in Finnish. I could not understand the words but I sensed what she was saying, and I wanted to weep with happiness.

‘In the war,’ she said later, ‘I learned to ignore the future. Remembering yesterday meant that I was still alive. And there was
now,
what I was doing, where I was doing it, that meant I was alive too. But I never thought about anything after that because I could never be sure that I would be there to live through it. Be happy now. That is what matters. It is a useful lesson.’

‘I can’t leave you like this. I can’t walk out of here not knowing if I will ever see you again.’

‘I don’t want you to. It would break my heart if you did. But I do not know what to say.’

Nor did I. Our lives were being pulled apart before they had a chance to come together. It seemed impossible, wrong.

‘I will come back. As soon as I can.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘We both know that will not be possible. Don’t say it. Don’t think it.’

‘I won’t go then.’

‘Stay here and live with me? I would like that, but it is impossible. It is not safe for you here. The Russians will soon know that Mika was involved in Krasov’s escape. They will put pressure on our government – they are expert at that – and before long the police will start to look and it is not hard to find an Englishman in Helsinki, even in winter.’

‘I will write to you, every day, every week, twice a day. You will be drowned in a sea of my letters.’

She laughed and put her fingers to my lips.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We will not write to each other. We do not need letters to remind us of what we already know.’

‘What can we do?’

‘You will go away now. Don’t come back in the winter. Don’t write to me. Don’t send messages. Remember me, and I will remember you. We will be together in our minds. Come back in the summer. One day there will be a knock at the door and I will open it and you will be there. We will go to the lakes. There I will look after you and love you and you will love me. That is when we will start our life together.’

She traced the contours of my face with her fingers.

‘I will wait a year,’ she said. ‘If you do not come back in a year, then I will know that you no longer want me.’

I told her that was impossible, I would always love her. I would say her name a thousand times a day and when the days grew longer I would return.

‘I will wait a year,’ she said again. ‘Not a single day more.’

I left the army in March to work for Charlie Faulkner. The disease that had begun to cripple him since we’d first met had struck another blow at the end of January, and by the time I joined him in Eccleston Street he was in a wheelchair. Each morning, at nine sharp, his chauffeur Thomas would bring the Rolls to a halt outside the office and Charlie would be delivered into the hands of the redoubtable Beryl, who had been with him since his early days in Manchester.

On Mondays we would have what Charlie called his ‘prayer meeting’. We would analyse the political news in the Sunday papers, review the past week’s events and refine our own timetable of work for the coming week. Each Monday afternoon, Charlie was driven to South Street for his regular meeting with Watson-Jones. We never knew what was said there nor how much of our work was influenced by their discussion. We imagined that some hard talking had gone on about spheres of influence and that Charlie had won. Whether that was true or not, it was what we wanted to believe, and Charlie never did anything to discourage us. Watson-Jones never came to Eccleston Street.

Charlie’s great gift was his memory. He would sit listening to us, head bowed, drawing star shapes in pencil on a pad, never taking notes. That did not prevent him from recalling with alarming accuracy conversations that might have taken place a week or more before, when we had made promises which for some reason or other were now not being met. We learned a number of lessons in the early days. It was simply not worth arousing the other side of Charlie Faulkner, when the sophistication he had acquired during his years in London was ditched in favour of what Beryl described as his ‘plain face’. He could be downright crude if he chose, but you were never
left in any doubt about what he wanted or where he stood, and when you delivered he was never short in his praise.

There were three of us besides Beryl: myself and two researchers, Roger Blake and Tony Meadows, both recently down from Oxford, too young to have fought in the war. They were the writers on the team (‘my bright young men’, as Charlie called them) drafting speeches for Watson-Jones, creating the copy for the newsletter we established, packaging the endless research projects into pamphlets and reports. I was what Charlie described as the ‘team leader’, by dint of my age and experience, though I was the oldest by only three or four years. I was never excluded from any political discussion, but I found I never had very much to say, and I don’t think Charlie expected me to contribute. But once a course of action had been decided, he looked to me to make it happen.

It was an unlikely structure, but it worked because we were all ‘Charlie’s boys’. He was the driving force in our lives, a man even then in his last years with a quite extraordinary level of energy and commitment. We soon understood why Beryl had spent her life with him. If you got on with Charlie – and many didn’t – you came to love him. I wasn’t alone in wishing I’d known him in his prime.

*

I found those first weeks of civilian life very difficult. As the train pulled out of Charlottenburg station I had imagined I would be able to cast off the taste and smell of Berlin and all that it represented in my life, but memories of my time in occupied Germany persisted. I felt uncomfortable, uprooted, unable to settle. I was haunted by the despairing faces of the Germans I’d rejected in the months I’d been there. The London I returned to was not the city I had known in the past. Many of the landmarks had gone, obliterated for ever in the bombing, but the changes went deeper as I and others like me tried to reassemble our lives. Wartime privations continued though we were no longer at war. Our experiences in uniform made the customs and attitudes of the society we had fought to preserve seem hopelessly out of date. We searched for new certainties, only to find they were not there. If we wanted them, we would have to make them ourselves. It was a mystifying and unsettling time, made stranger because I no longer had the comforting support of khaki and rank to sustain the decisions I needed to take. All of a sudden
I was on my own. It was what I had wanted, but coming to terms with it was nowhere near as straightforward as I had expected.

I rented a small flat in Strutton Ground, near Great Smith Street in Westminster, three rooms above a cobbler. I got to know Manny Leman and his long-suffering wife Esther because Manny, a Latvian Jew who had been brought to this country when he was ten, was unashamedly curious.

‘What you do in your work, then, guv?’ he would ask. ‘Sounds like an easy life to me, reading and writing all day.’

‘Leave the poor man alone,’ Esther would call out from the depths behind the shop. ‘He’s got better things to do than listen to you.’

‘This is man-to-man talk,’ Manny would shout above the noise of his machinery. ‘You stick to your kitchen, woman.’ He would wink at me and continue to ask questions.

Esther would emerge with her shopping basket. ‘He’s a terrible man. Don’t listen to him,’ she’d say to me. ‘I don’t know why I married him.’

They had a son, Joe, who was the fulfilment of all their dreams. He was a brilliant linguist and had won a scholarship to Cambridge to read Russian. ‘He make ’is mark, that boy, I tell you,’ Manny said, working on a leather sole. ‘Where all those brains come from, I never know, not from his mother and me, that’s for sure.’

They were good to me, Esther particularly, looking after me while her son was away, feeding me, taking messages, doing my washing, cleaning the flat when she thought it needed to be cleaned. She never said much, but sometimes when Manny was busy in the shop she would ask me into her kitchen for a cup of tea and she would listen to me talk, nodding, encouraging me to continue. I sometimes imagined she was the mother I had lost when I was thirteen. I know she saw me as an orphan, someone who needed caring for and that was the role God had created for her, to care for the men in her life. I was simply a late arrival.

*

I saw little of my father after my return from Berlin. On the rare occasions I went to Cambridge he appeared withdrawn and preoccupied. He never mentioned Krasov’s visit nor its aftermath and nor, loyally, did Celia. But I detected a new urgency in his newspaper articles. He was openly arguing for the international scientific community to organize itself in opposition to the use of nuclear weapons
by governments. He wanted to see set up a new, politically neutral international authority into whose control governments would surrender these weapons. His vision was idealistic and hopelessly impractical. I read the occasional flurries of outrage his increasingly radical opinions stimulated in the letter columns of his newspaper. If the letters illustrated anything, it was how isolated he was in his views.

My father sat on a number of Government scientific committees but he seldom got in touch with me when he was in London. When we did meet, he asked no questions about my job. He disapproved of my working for Watson-Jones (‘very third-rate man, can’t think what you see in him’ was his only comment when I told him what I planned to do after leaving the army), and he wanted his disapproval to hurt, and it did. I was affected by his silence and he knew it. In the few conversations we had together, he steered well away from any endorsement of the life I had chosen. In return, I stayed away from Cambridge.

I never told him about my trip to Finland nor that I had seen Krasov. The heightened atmosphere of that strange night meeting lost its threat on my return home. Sitting in my office in Eccleston Street, the urgency and importance of what he had said looked very small and its truth was questionable. Had Krasov really said those words? I convinced myself he had, but I felt increasingly that his real purpose had been to emphasize his own importance, to show that he still counted. There were moments when my anger with my father almost prompted me to tell him who Krasov was and what he had done, but I didn’t, not least because I doubted if my father would have let himself understand what I was talking about. Krasov wasn’t a weapon to use against him.

*

Perhaps it was more in my mind than anything else, but I felt that my relationship with Monty was strained. He had telephoned me when I got back from Helsinki, to fix a time when he would come to Berlin to discuss my Finnish visit. But he cancelled each arrangement we made and when I pressed him he had changed his mind. ‘Put it on paper,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you think.’

I was left with the impression that he had lost interest, that the importance Krasov had assumed a few weeks before had been overtaken by events I knew nothing of, relegating me to a reminder of
a past whose relevance had faded. I was irritated because Finland seemed no longer to matter to him, while to me the country had become the embodiment of all my dreams.

I kept my report to Monty as brief as I could make it.

I know Monty got the letter because he telephoned to tell me so. He said he understood how difficult it must have been for me in Finland, on my own like that. (No mention of Hammerson. I wondered if he knew.) He was grateful for what I had done. (What had I done, I wondered? but he didn’t say.) I asked if he wanted to meet to discuss what I’d written. No need, he said, the matter was closed now, he had moved on to other things. New times, new agendas. We would get together soon enough, have a pint and a bite to eat, talk it all through. He’d get in touch when I was back in London, I could be sure of that.
Auf Wiedersehen
.

He didn’t get in touch after my return from Berlin, and I found it difficult to make contact with him. When we finally met for a drink in a gloomy pub in Whitehall, he arrived late, apologetic and distracted, his attention clearly somewhere else.

‘Krasov’s with the Americans now,’ he said. ‘No doubt he’s spinning them a few yarns.’

‘Will they believe them?’

‘God knows,’ he said. ‘It depends how much they want to believe him. They’ve not had much luck with defectors recently.’

I took that to mean he hoped they’d buy what Krasov had to sell, however dubious the merchandise. He seemed oddly amused at the prospect. Was ensuring the Americans bought counterfeit goods his payback for the humiliation he’d suffered after Senator Shearing’s visit? If that was so, had he got me to Finland to ensure that Krasov the liar got to America?

‘What about Krasov’s opposition theory?’ I asked, keeping a lid on my suspicion that Monty was using Krasov for his own private revenge on the Americans. (Surely this was too extreme?) ‘Rivals to Stalin?’

This was the only element in Krasov’s story that might have had a grain of truth about it.

‘That?’ Was it my imagination or was Monty being deliberately evasive? ‘Baloney. Don’t believe a word of it. Our people in Moscow took one look at it and laughed their heads off.’

Somewhere in the snowy wastes of that distant land we had faced Soviet bullets, Hammerson had been wounded and captured, Krasov had escaped by the skin of his teeth, we had all lived briefly at the edge of our lives and for what? The risks we had taken had achieved nothing. Finland was a pointless exercise. It was a bleak moment in our relationship.

‘I’m sorry,’ Monty said, looking at his watch. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere else. The enemy never sleeps.’

‘You’re OK, are you?’ I asked as we got up to leave. I remembered his remarks as we walked through the melting snow on a cold Berlin night.
I’m in the shit, Danny. Well and truly up to my neck
. What had become of all that anxiety?

‘I’m all right,’ Monty said. ‘Just about. I’ll be in touch.’

I telephoned him a couple of times after that but when we talked he again seemed preoccupied, and though we made arrangements to meet, he left messages cancelling on both occasions. I didn’t see him for a while.

*

And Hammerson? For months afterwards I kept seeing his fall through the snow, his inert body gathering speed as it slid down the hill. Was he alive? I prayed so. Was anything being done to release him? My one attempt to find out, through an American military contact in Berlin, met with puzzlement and incomprehension. Major Hammerson had been recalled to Washington; no one knew when he was due back in Berlin. Was it a conspiracy of silence? I imagined that the Americans were so terrified the Russians might hold one of their serving officers in captivity that they had decided to make Hammerson invisible.