The Mission Song (8 page)
‘Using any medication at all, are we?’ she murmured suggestively. ‘How about contact lenses? No lubricants, little boxes?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, off you both go then,’ Mr Anderson declared, and if he had raised his right hand and bestowed one of Brother Michael’s floppy blessings on us, I would not have been surprised.
It is frankly a conundrum to me, observing these events from where I sit today, that as I followed Bridget down the stairs and back onto the pavement of South Audley Street, attired as I was in the garb of a secondary-school master up from the country, and with nothing to attach me to the world except a bunch of bogus business cards and the assurance that I was about to endure unfamiliar perils, I should have counted myself the most blessed fellow in London that night, if not the whole of England, the most intrepid patriot and secret servant, but such was indeed the case.
Fram
is the name of the boat designed by the famous Norwegian explorer Nansen, a top member of Brother Michael’s pantheon of men of action.
Fram
in the Norwegian language means
onwards
, and
Fram
was what inspired my dear late father to ride his heretic’s bicycle across the Pyrenees. And
Fram
willy-nilly had been my mood ever since I had received what Brother Michael in a different context had dubbed the Great Call.
Onwards
while I gathered my fortitude for the decision that lay ahead of me,
Onwards
while I earned my wings in my country’s silent war versus ruffians in the flesh,
Onwards
, and away from Penelope who had long been a stranger to me,
Onwards
while I mapped out my shining white path back to life with Hannah.
Onwards
, finally, to my mysterious new master, Maxie, and the even more mysterious consultant, Philip.
Given the extreme urgency of the operation and its importance, I expected to find Fred our white driver keenly revving his Mondeo at the kerbside, but what with a police cordon at Marble Arch and the traffic jams, Bridget assured me it was quicker to walk.
‘You don’t mind, do you, Salv?’ she asked, taking a firm grip on my arm, either because she was thinking I might make a run for it, which could not have been further from my mind, or because she was one of the touchy-feely brigade who pat your cheek and roll the palm of their hand around your back and you never know, or I don’t, whether they’re distributing the milk of human kindness or inviting you to bed.
‘Mind?’ I echoed. ‘It’s a glorious evening! I couldn’t borrow your phone a moment, could I? Penelope may not be picking up her messages.’
‘Sorry, darling. Against the regs, I’m afraid.’
Did I know where we were headed? Did I ask? I did not. The life of a secret agent is nothing if not a journey into the unknown, the life of a secret lover no less so. Off we strode with Bridget setting the pace and me with my second-hand shoes hacking at my ankle bones. In the evening sunlight my spirits rose further, assisted perhaps unconsciously by Bridget, who had hoisted my right forearm so high against her that it was nestling under her left breast, which by the feel of its undercurve was self-supporting. When Hannah has lit your lamp for you, it’s natural to see other women in its rays.
‘You really love her, don’t you?’ she marvelled as she steered me through a bunch of Friday-night merrymakers. ‘So many married couples I know, they just bitch at each other. It pisses me off. But you and Penelope aren’t like that, are you? It must be great.’
Her ear was six inches from my mouth and she was wearing a scent called Je Reviens, which is the weapon of choice of Penelope’s younger sister Gail. Gail, apple of her father’s eye, had married a car-park owner from the lower branches of the aristocracy. Penelope, by way of retaliation, had married me. Yet even today it would take a board of top Jesuits to explain what I did next.
For why does a newly anointed adulterer, who hours earlier has abandoned himself body, soul and origins to another woman for the first time in his five-year marriage, feel an irresistible urge to put his deceived wife on a pedestal? Is he trying to re-create the image of her that he has defiled? Is he re-creating the image of himself before he fell? Was my ever-present Catholic guilt catching up with me in the midst of my euphoria? Was praising Penelope to the skies the nearest I could get to praising Hannah without blowing my cover?
It had been my firm intention to draw Bridget out regarding my new employers, and by means of artful questions learn more about the composition of the anonymous Syndicate and its relationship with the many secret organs of the British State that toil night and day for our protection, far removed from the sight of your average punter’s eye. Yet as we threaded our way through near-stationary traffic I embarked upon a full-throated aria to my wife Penelope that proclaimed her the most attractive, exciting, sophisticated and faithful partner a top interpreter and secret soldier of the Crown could have, plus a brilliant journalist combining hard-nosed with compassionate, and this fantastic cook—which anyone would know verged upon the fanciful, seeing who did the cooking. Not everything that I said was totally positive, it couldn’t be. If you’re talking in the rush-hour to another woman about your wife, you can’t help opening up a bit about her negative aspects or you wouldn’t have an audience.
‘But how the hell did Mr and Mrs Right ever find each other in the first place? That’s what
I
want to know,’ Bridget protested, in the aggrieved tones of one who has followed the instructions on the packet without success.
‘Bridget,’ an alien voice inside me answered, ‘here is how.’
It is eight in the evening in Salvo’s dingy bachelor bedsit in Ealing, I tell her as we wait arm-in-arm for the pedestrian lights to change. Mr Amadeus Osman of the WorldWide and Legal Translation Agency is calling me from his malodorous office in the Tottenham Court Road. I am to go directly to Canary Wharf where a Great National Newspaper is offering megabucks for my services. These are still my days of struggle, and Mr Osman owns half of me.
In an hour I am seated in the newspaper’s luxurious offices with its editor one side of me and its shapely ace reporter—guess who?—the other. Before us squats her supergrass, a bearded Afro-Arab merchant seaman who for the price of what I’m earning in a year will dish the dirt on a ring of corrupt customs officers and policemen operating in Liverpool’s dockland. He speaks only meagre English, his mother tongue being a classical Tanzanian-flavoured Swahili. Our ace crime reporter and her editor are caught in the muckraker’s proverbial cleft stick: check out your source with the authorities and compromise the scoop; accept your source on trust and let the libel lawyers take you to the cleaners.
With Penelope’s consent I assume command of the interrogation. As the questioning flies back and forth, our supergrass alters and refines his story, adds new elements, retracts old ones. I make the rascal repeat himself. I point out his many discrepancies until, under my persistent cross-examination, he admits all. He is a con-artist, a fabricator. For fifty quid he will go away. The editor is jubilant in his gratitude. In one stroke, he says, I have spared their blushes and their bank account. Penelope, having overcome her humiliation, declares that she owes me a very large drink.
‘People expect their interpreters to be small, studious and bespectacled,’ I explained to Bridget modestly, laughing away Penelope’s rapt and, in retrospect, somewhat blatant interest in me from the start. ‘I suppose I just failed to come up to expectation.’
‘Or she just totally freaked out,’ Bridget suggested, tightening her grip on my hand.
Did I bubble out the rest to Bridget too? Appoint her my substitute confessor in Hannah’s absence? Unveil to her how, until I met Penelope, I was a twenty-three-year-old closet virgin, a dandy in my personal appearance but, underneath my carefully constructed façade, saddled with enough hang-ups to fill a walk-in cupboard?—that Brother Michael’s attentions and Père André’s before him had left me in a sexual twilight from which I feared to emerge?—that my dear late father’s guilt regarding his explosion of the senses had transferred itself wholesale and without deductions to his son?—and how as our taxi sped towards Penelope’s flat I had dreaded the moment when she would literally uncover my inadequacy, such was my timidity regarding the female sex?—and that thanks to her knowhow and micro-management all ended well?—
extremely
well—more well than she could ever have imagined, she assured me, Salvo being her dream mustang—the best in her stable, she might have added—her starred Alpha Male Plus? Or, as she later put it to her friend Paula when they thought I wasn’t listening, her
chocolate soldier
always standing to attention? And that one calendar week later, so blown away was he in all respects by his newfound and unquenchable prowess in the bedroom, so overwhelmed with gratitude and ready to confuse sexual accomplishment with great love, that Salvo with his customary impulsiveness and naivety proposed marriage to Penelope, only to be accepted on the spot? No. By a mercy, in that regard at least I managed to restrain myself. Neither did I get round to telling Bridget the price I had since paid, year by year, for this much needed therapy, but only because we had by then passed the Connaught Hotel and turned into the top end of Berkeley Square.
In my expansiveness of heart I was assuming, for no reason beyond the expectations we have of natural gravity, that our path would then take us down towards Piccadilly. But suddenly Bridget’s grip on my arm tightened and she wheeled me left up some steps to a grand front door that I failed to get the number of. The door closed behind us and there we were, standing in a velvet-curtained lobby occupied by two identical blond boys in blazers. I don’t remember her ringing a bell or knocking, so they must have been watching out for us on their closed-circuit screen. I remember they both wore grey flannels like mine, and their blazers had all three buttons fastened. And I remember wondering whether, in the world that they inhabited, this was regulation and I ought to be doing up the buttons of my Harris Tweed.
‘Skipper’s been delayed,’ the seated boy told Bridget without lifting his eyes from the black-and-white image of the door we had just passed through. ‘He’s on his sweet way, right? Ten to fifteen. Want to leave
him
here with us or wait it out?’
‘Wait,’ said Bridget.
The boy stretched out his hand for my bag. On Bridget’s nod I passed it to him.
The grand hall that we entered had a painted dome for a ceiling, with white nymphs, and white babies blowing trumpets, and a regal staircase that halfway up itself divided into two more staircases curving to a balcony with a row of doors, all closed. And at the foot of the staircase, on either side, two more doors, grand ones, capped by golden eagles with their wings spread. The right-hand door was closed off by a red silk rope with brass fittings. I never saw anyone go in or out of it. On the left-hand door a lighted red sign said
SILENCE CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS
without any punctuation, because I always notice punctuation. So if you wanted to be pedantic, you could interpret it as meaning that people were having a conference about silence: which only shows you how my personal state of mind was alternating between post-coital, skittish, out of it, and totally hyper. I’ve never done drugs, but if I had, this is how I imagine I would have been, which is why I needed to pin down everything around me before it transmogrified itself into something else.
Guarding the grand door stood a grey-headed bouncer who could have been Arab and must have been older than the two blond boys put together but was still very much a member of the pugilistic classes, having a flattened nose and dropped shoulders and hands cupped over his balls. I don’t remember climbing the regal staircase. If Bridget had been ahead of me in her skin-tight jeans I would have remembered, so we must have climbed side by side. And Bridget had been in this house before. She knew the geography and she knew the boys. She knew the Arab bouncer too, because she smiled at him and he smiled back at her in a soft, adoring manner before resuming his pugilistic glower. She knew without being told where you waited, which was halfway up the staircase before it divided, something you could never have guessed from below.
There were two easy chairs, a leather sofa with no arms, and glossy magazines offering private islands in the Caribbean and charter yachts complete with crew and helicopter, price on application. Picking one up, Bridget leafed through it, inviting me to do the same. Yet even while fantasising about which
Fram
Hannah and I would sail away on, I was tuning my mind’s ear to the boomy voices coming out of the conference room, because I’m a listener by nature and trained to it, not just by the Chat Room. No matter how confused I am, I listen and remember, it’s my job. Plus the fact that secret children in far-flung Mission houses learn to keep their ears pinned back if they want to know what’s likely to hit them next.
