The Bear's Tears (29 page)

And, after Mummy's death, grandmother had taken Robert
Castleford up
like a beacon with which to lead her granddaughter. Her memories of her
father formed an enchanted circle from which she could not escape. Had
never wanted to.

Handel was being played on the radio. There were crumbs of toast
on
the front page of The Sunday Times and on the lap of her
dressing-gown. And the remains of a Valium sleep in her head, squeezing
like a closing vice. She had never needed Valium since her marriage to
Paul, and had only taken to it originally in the aftermath of a
previous affair, when the pain and blackness of the first weeks had
seemed like an echo of her mother's quiet madness. It was late. Almost
midday.

The Insight article, a Sunday Times
exclusive,
became smudgy print once more. There was a damp spot where a tear had
fallen. She still felt the first moment of shock at her father's
picture, at Aubrey's picture, at an unidentified silhouette between the
two snapshots, and at the headline, Menage a trois? Beneath
that, even more pompously, The meaning of treason?

A warm man. Her grandmother had ignored her questions. Her
beloved
and only son's sexual peccadilloes were of no significance, and
obviously allowable in such an able, brilliant, ambitious man. But,
like dark jewels, sly and covert pieces of gossip had decorated her
adolescence. His name had been associated with an abortion, an
almost-expulsion from one school, desperate, ineffectual blackmail by
one married woman, affairs…

Robert Castleford had attracted sexual indiscretion, and had
always
charmed it into harmlessness.

There was something else on the front page, too - something
concerning 1974 and Germany, under the headline, Who else has been
betrayed? She had begun to read it as a distraction - World Cup,
Olympic massacre, advisory role for Aubrey, investigation, Gunther
Guillaume… she could make little sense of it, and it possessed no
interest for her. Her eyes and her mind and her memory continually
returned to the Insight article. She could not bear to turn
to page eighteen for a fuller account. There was sufficient on the
front page - her father and Aubrey involved in some sordid sexual
triangle in Berlin with the wife of a sought-after Nazi war criminal… ?

Lurid, melodramatic - attested to by a former intelligence agent
in
Berlin, someone who knew the protagonists well. Now living in
retirement on Guernsey, so the article claimed. Sexual jealousy, rage,
quarrels, despair, hatred, violence.

She understood the emotions. Her own sexual experience confirmed
that it was possible; emotions in riot and disorder, passion amounting
almost to madness. Her father could have died in such circumstances.
Aubrey could have  had  killed him over a woman. It was so
much more convincing, so much more real than the world of callous
treasons and betrayals, of politics and intelligence work and the Cold
War. And it made more sense than person or persons unknown. The latter
seemed like a senseless and more contemporary piece of violence such as
the two and a half lines in the extreme left-hand column of the front
page, accorded to an old woman's death at the hands of muggers.

Margaret's loss had begun in 1951, and she knew she had never
recovered from it. It was as if she had contracted some childhood
disease as an adult when the consequences were much more serious, even
fatal. Her mother had deluded her for five years, and when the truth
dawned and could no longer be avoided, her mother went slowly and
utterly mad and killed herself. Margaret had found herself abandoned in
a way she could not have imagined possible. Since that moment of the
skull grinning from the newspaper, held in some German workman's hands,
she had been completely and utterly alone. Rich eventually, by report
beautiful, intelligent, possessed of energy and a capacity for work and
enjoyment - but solitary, isolated, bereaved; alone.

Until Paul. Father-lover-husband Paul. Paul, in unholy,
unforgiveable alliance with her father's murderer. After more than
thirty years he had appeared and now had removed himself from her. For
that, for the deception of hope followed by betrayal, she could never
forgive him.

She let the paper fall to the carpet. She sniffed loudly,
sitting
erect - she remembered her mother doing the same, in the same stiffly
defiant posture and now she realised that she, too, had been fending
off painful realities. She would not cry again. She would, instead,
finish her toast.

The Handel was solemn, like a pathway into grief, so she left
her
chair and switched it off. The transistor radio - which Paul never used
to listen to music, always preferring his stereo equipment in the study
- was on the dark Georgian oak sideboard. Apart from the small
dining-table, it was the only piece of furniture in the alcove that
constituted their breakfast area. The wood gleamed like satin, like a
mirror. Her fingers touched it. It was carved, narrow-legged,
three-drawered; a piece her father had acquired before the war. Almost
everything - everything with any pride of place - had been collected by
her father. She felt herself to be only another of his possessions, one
of the prize pieces. Her father still owned her, even now, when she
possessed his furniture and his money.

She returned to her chair. The toast broke and crumbled under
the
pressure of her knife. There was sticky marmalade on her fingers. Her
eyes became wet —

The telephone rang.

She looked up from her plate, startled and almost as if rebuked
for
her poor table manners. She stood up and removed the extension receiver
from the wall, flicking her hair away from her cheek before holding the
telephone to her ear.

"Yes?" Only as she spoke did she realise it might be someone she
did
not wish to speak to, a friend appalled and considerate because of the
article and whose sympathy was unwanted. Then she heard Paul's voice.

"Margaret - are you all right?" he asked breathlessly, as if she
had
been the one endangered.

"Paul —!" she blurted in reply. "Are you all right?" The Valium
headache tightened in her temples. She had taken the tablets in her
misery, but in her fear, too. He had talked of danger —

"Yes, I'm all right. I'm in London, I must see you…"

Her exhalation of relief, the trembling of her body, the lump in
her
throat all transformed themselves, the instant after she knew he was
alive and safe, into an angry echo of her recriminations. Paul was
still Aubrey's ally.

"Have you given it up?" she demanded.

"What —? I haven't found out the truth, if that's what you mean.
Darling, can I come and see you, talk to you?"

"No, Paul —"

"Margaret, I have to!"

"You're in London, you must have seen —?"

"I have seen. It's nonsense - utter nonsense."

"It isn't!"

"You don't know Aubrey —!" Massinger protested. Stephens, the
butler, opened the door, hesitated for an instant, then discreetly
withdrew. Margaret could hear her own breathing, as well as the noise
of a passing car. Then only the noise of the distance between herself
and her husband. He was still speaking, still protesting Aubrey's
innocence, but she could hear more clearly the whisper of the static
and its measurement of distance. "You don't know Aubrey, darling, or
you'd never believe that nonsense." There was a false, urgent attempt
at jocularity; it was garish and ugly, like too much rouge on a
wrinkled cheek. "You can't take that seriously…" Then, "Darling? Are
you there?"

"Yes, I'm here," she replied wearily, staring at the blank wall.
"You're safe, you say? You'll be safe now?"

"No," he said softly.

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean. I'm in too deep now. Whether I like it or not, I'm
in.
I've aroused - interest." He sounded grim. There was a tone she had not
heard before in his voice; something that belonged to his past, to that
world he had once shared with Aubrey - the great, stupid, heroic,
filthy game of spying. He was demanding she take it seriously. To him,
it was far more real than the idea that people could kill for love, out
of sexual jealousy or desire.

"Oh, God…" It was expressed in a shuddering sigh, as a protest.

The grinning skull. In her world, people could die for the
change in
their handbags or for the desire they could not satisfy or have
reciprocated; in Paul's world, people died because they intrigued, they
turned over stones, they desired the truth. The skull; her father's
grinning bones.

"Let me see you," he pleaded. 

"No!" She could not - yet she wanted him to be safe; above all,
safe. "You must talk to Andrew Babbington - you must! Tell
him you're in danger - please talk to him!"

"I can't - Margaret, I simply can't talk to anyone about this."

"Then leave me alone!" she wailed, thrusting the receiver away
from
her, clattering it onto its rest on the wall, leaning her head against
it as her body slumped. The receiver joggled off and the telephone
purred. Paul had evidently rung off. The tears coursed down her cheeks.
She stared at her future mirrored on the blank wall of the alcove.

"I must ask you, Mr Hyde, if you have any suggestions as to how
we
are to capture your Colonel Petrunin?" Miandad's tone was reproving,
even recriminatory.

"What the hell else could I do?" Hyde protested sullenly, I
squatting on his haunches, his back pressed against the wall of the
earthen-floored, chilly room. The pale blue of the sky was visible
through the lattice-work of the broken roof. "You know damn well he had
me by the short and curlies." Hyde stared into Miandad's face. It was
evident that the Pakistani, too, was recollecting Mohammed Jan's words;
his ultimatum. The Pathan chieftain had stood over them, tall in the
firelight as their discussions ended, and he had spoken to Miandad in
Pushtu. Hyde had recognised the trap in the Pathan's tone, even before
Miandad translated.

"He will take you to the border, and across it. He will help
you,
show you where to find your Colonel Petrunin, and he will show you all
the difficulties. In return for his help, you will guarantee to capture
the Russian and to hand him over to the justice of Mohammed Jan and his
tribe. This will pay for the deaths of his sons. It is the Pathan code
of Pushtunwali, where the vendetta is the highest loyalty.
Mohammed Jan asks you to choose - to go or to stay. Do you understand,
Mr Hyde? Do you know what this means? If you want his help, you must
promise him the capture of Petrunin."

All the while, Mohammed Jan had stood over them, immobile as a
carved figure, the long Lee Enfield rifle with its gold inlay cradled
in his arms. Hyde avoided looking at him, avoided too the circle of
faces around the fire; Mohammed Jan's council of elders. Nevertheless,
as soon as Miandad had finished his translation and given his warning,
Hyde had replied.

"Tell him yes. I promise he will have Petrunin for his
justice."
There had been no other way. He had not dared to even hesitate.

To be trusted, to gain their help, he had had to commit himself
at
once. He wanted them to endanger themselves on his behalf. He had had
to agree.

"I agree," Miandad said. "There was nothing else you could do.
But,
you have no idea of how to lay hands upon the Russian?"

Hyde turned to the Pakistani. "Look," he said, "there's you and
me
and a gang of brave nutters. They're prepared to stay inside
Afghanistan until the job's done. For the moment I've managed to stall
them with the idea of an ambush." He grinned mirthlessly. "They'll get
some new guns and who knows - we might get some hard news of Petrunin."

"You're an optimist, Mr Hyde."

"Am I? I'm bloody trapped, that's what I am, sport."

"Perhaps."

"At least they'll wait. Wait until Petrunin comes out to play."

"I know much about your Russian. He is unlikely to allow himself
to
be captured. By helicopter, he has at least two heavily-armed gunship
escorts, by road he travels in a heavy convoy. He is virtually
impregnable. He spends a great deal of his time at Soviet army
headquarters when he is in Kabul, and the rest of the time at the
embassy - very little time at the embassy, actually. You see, he knows
how much he is hated, how deep the desire to punish him is."

"All right, all right…" Hyde sighed. "I know we're in the shit.
Thanks for jumping in with me."

"There are obligations."

"To Aubrey you mean?"

"And to men who served with me. It is not only Pathans who have
been
burned by your Russian's napalm." Miandad's face was grim. Hyde lowered
his head, looking at the baggy trousers and sheepskin jacket that were
part of his disguise. He rubbed his unshaven skin and sighed.

"I realise now how you knew what would happen." He looked at
Miandad
again. The Pakistani, similarly disguised as a Pathan warrior, was
softly rubbing his chest and shoulders. Hyde remembered that the man
had been discreet, almost coy, when they had changed into their Pathan
costumes. Burned —? Hyde left the subject of Miandad's experiences in
Afghanistan, but he could not ignore Petrunin. "How has it happened?"

"The Russian?" Miandad shrugged. "It is not a nice war here. Not
cricket - not even ice hockey." Miandad smiled. "Your Russian was sent
here in disgrace, was he not?" Hyde nodded. "He
is
a very bitter man. This is a war of bitterness. It was easy for him, I
suspect. It is always easy to degenerate." Miandad shivered and
stretched out his hands to the small fire around which they crouched.

They were alone in the ruin of the Afghan fort. They had crossed
the
border before daybreak, a party of thirty picked men, all well-armed
and provisioned. After miles of high, snowbound passes they had come
down, before midday, to this abandoned fort, trudging through a pine
forest to reach its shelter. A bitter wind had searched their clothing
throughout the journey. Hyde had reached the fort exhausted and chilled
to the bone. He had eaten ravenously, then slowly thawed in front of a
small fire. The wind moaned and shrieked around the partially-ruined
walls and barracks and stables. Mohammed Jan had seemed to find some
source of satisfaction in the Australian's weariness. Then the Pathans
had left, to scout the road between Kabul and Jalalabad.