Secret Kingdom (8 page)

‘God knows,’ Hart said later, ‘he never drew breath, he had opinions on everything. I thought he’d got sunstroke.’

The day drags. He is distracted, unable to concentrate. He looks at his watch continually. His mind floats above his desk in a land where each sensation he feels has its origin in Eva. He can smell her wherever he goes, sense the touch of her skin on his hands, the soft warmth of her lips on his. He can see her eyes lighting up, the sudden shifts of mood from solemnity to laughter and back again. His sense of her overwhelms his being.

Does he stop, even for a moment during this fevered day, to consider what he’s letting himself in for? If he does, it’s quickly forgotten. He can offer no resistance to the emotional excitement that seems to lift him so that he can see over the wall that has surrounded his life up to now into a world of new delights. Now is not the time to call a halt to an adventure that has not yet begun. Who knows where he may be led, what secrets he may learn? He is driven on by the delirium of his own euphoria.

He is outside her apartment twenty minutes early, furious with himself that he has brought nothing with him, no wine, no flowers, and now the market is closed. How could he be so thoughtless? He walks down Vaci Street, turns right into Fovam Square and then up on to the Szabadsag Bridge, with its four eagles in flight above each of the green towers, the strength of their wings perpetually straining, he imagines, to keep the iron bridge from falling into the Danube. Halfway across, he leans up against the rail and watches the great river flow slowly by.

She has a daughter. Therefore, she is married. Or has been married. She wore no ring, he noticed, but that isn’t unusual these days. Many younger women no longer wear rings. Some stupid communist convention. Just as barmy as their economic theories. Perhaps she’d taken off the ring because she was divorced. Surely she wouldn’t ask him back to her apartment if she had a husband? It was her idea, he remembers, not his, that he should come to her flat for dinner. There are any number of mysteries, he says to himself, which perhaps the night will reveal. He looks at his watch. Time to go. If he walks slowly he will arrive on the dot.

*

She is tidying the small apartment, laying the table, preparing the dinner. Her mind is full of the Englishman. What will he think of her when he comes tonight? What will he make of who she is, how
she lives? She tries to imagine her sitting room through his English eyes. She sees its plain, functional furniture, its worn covers, her old, dull curtains, a framed Olympic Games poster on the wall (London, 29 July to 14 August), the books on the shelf. Lenin’s
The
State
and
Revolution,
Marx’s
The
Communist
Manifesto,
Stalin’s essay
On
Dialectical
and
Historical
Materialism.
If only she had time to hide them. Will he use these titles as evidence against her? When he does, will he recognize that the barriers to their friendship are insurmountable?

Or will his eyes drift on to the photographs, Dora as a baby, Dora aged three, Dora with her grandparents, Dora with Julia before she left for the Games, their arms around each other? How young and excited they look.

Julia.
Julia.

The past breaks through her dreaming and reasserts its cruel hold on her. Today is the first morning in more than a year that she has woken up without thinking of Julia. She is immediately consumed by guilt. How could that happen? How could she betray her promises? Her mood changes.

The Englishman is a dream, and consciously and rightly she murdered her own dreams months ago. There can be no place for dreams or Englishmen in her life. She has other, more pressing commitments. Promises made that must be honoured. It is too late to cancel the invitation for dinner. But after tonight, that will be it. She will never see him again. She hugs herself in despair.

‘Mama,’ Dora calls, ‘there’s someone at the door.’

*

‘This is my daughter, Dora,’ she said. A tall, thin girl was standing behind her. Dora looked at Martineau shyly, smiled briefly, said something to her mother, smiled again at Martineau and left. ‘Dora goes to her night studies. She has important exams soon that she must pass if she wants to go to medical school. She will return later.’

She had prepared an arrangement of local sausage and salami, full of pepper and garlic, which made him thirsty. He drank two glasses of wine before she served him with stuffed pork in a paprika sauce and pickled cabbage followed by chocolate-filled pancakes. She watched him eat with pleasure. When they had finished, she refused to let him clear away, smiling at his protests. She poured him some brandy and, because the evening was so warm, apologizing that she
had no fan, suggested they sit out on the balcony, high up on the fourth floor, looking out over the dark street below.

‘Maybe it will be cooler outside.’

He calculated the hours they had spent together and realized that in all that time he had learned next to nothing about her. Except, of course, that she was a swimmer, had competed in the Olympic Games and had had a daughter when she must have been very young.

‘Did you win a medal?’ he asked suddenly, voicing the thoughts in his mind.

‘A medal?’

‘In London.’

She laughed. ‘Yes, a gold. I won the freestyle final.’

He knew who she was now, a Heroine of the State, a woman who had privileges and a charmed life. Someone who would be used by the state as an example to others. A part of the structure that kept the communists in power. His heart sank.

‘And London? Did you like London?’ Why couldn’t he bring himself to say what he wanted to say?

‘I did not manage to see that much. We were not allowed to go about by ourselves. We were always accompanied by the officials of our team.’

Always those bloody goons wherever you went, smiling, shameless men in ill-fitting suits who assumed an identity to fit the occasion. Physicists one day, swimming coaches the next, hardly bothering to disguise themselves. In the communist bloc, swimmers and physicists were state employees, living and working under the ever-watchful eye of the secret police, to ensure they neither did nor said anything out of line. He’d met them in Moscow and here in Budapest. Bastards always.

‘There was so much destruction in London. So many buildings without walls or roofs. I was surprised.’

We fought too long on our own to keep our world alive, he wanted to say, and now we’re too worn out to repair the damage the enemy inflicted. He said nothing. The night was too warm for morose speculation.

‘But I practise my English. That is good at least.’

‘Where did you learn to speak English so well?’

‘Moscow.’

Moscow?

‘I studied at the Institute of Languages there.’

‘Why not in Budapest? Couldn’t you study here?’

‘I was chosen to go to Moscow. My parents were upset. They had never left their village all their lives, but I did not want to follow their example, I wanted to see the world. Soon after I got there, the war came and I could not return until 1946. I went for one year and stayed for six.’

She was a Moscow communist, not someone paying lip-service to the regime in power. During the years in Moscow, she would have built useful connections with the Party hierarchy through her work. She would have returned home full of enthusiasm to turn the world upside down in order to build a modern Marxist state. She had to be a convinced communist. A glimpse at the books on her shelves confirmed his fears. He saw his future with her, whatever that future was, slipping away from his grasp.

‘After the war?’ He wanted to know what she believed in but she took him literally.

‘I returned to Budapest. I was lucky. I could swim and I could speak English, and I had connections from Moscow. That helped me. Now,’ she said, touching his hands, ‘no more questions. Soon Dora will be back. It is time you returned to your home.’

His heart raced. He leaned towards her and kissed her. She accepted his kiss but did not respond.

‘Eva.’ She was standing up, evading his grasp. ‘Eva.’

She took his hands, held them for a moment as if wondering what to do with them, and then slowly pulled them around her waist. He drew her towards him. She leaned her body against his, and he felt her softness. At this moment he wanted her more than he had wanted any woman in his life.

‘Bobby.’ She laughed. ‘I have not called you that before. Why are you doing this?’

‘Because I love you.’ He had spoken the words before he knew what he was saying. She released his hands and stepped back.

‘That is impossible,’ she said. ‘Quite impossible. We do not know each other.’

Bloody idiot. He had gone too fast. Blown it. Damn.

‘I know,’ he said, suddenly apologetic. ‘It’s impossible. Of course I see that. I’m sorry. I should never have said anything. I had no right to. I don’t know what came over me.’ He made to go.

‘No.’ She was smiling at him again. His confidence returned. ‘Say it to me again. It sounded so beautiful in English.’

‘I love you, Eva.’

She stared at him, then threw herself into his arms, kissing him passionately. ‘I cannot believe an Englishman has said that to me.’

Holding her tight, he kissed her again and again. After a time she wriggled free. ‘Now we must stop,’ she said.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘We cannot sleep together, Bobby. You know that.’

‘Why not?’

She laughed. ‘I have one bedroom I share with my daughter. One sitting room, where the spare bed is also the sofa. A kitchen so small you can hardly see it, a tiny bathroom. Now do you see?’

He laughed with her then at the absurdity of it all. To be defeated by circumstances.

‘Will it always be like this?’

‘I hope not,’ she said, and kissed him once more as the key turned in the lock and Dora returned.

‘Mr Lander apologizes,’ a morning-coated servant told him in a conspiratorial voice as he came up the steps into the lobby. ‘He telephoned to say he’ll be a few minutes late. Perhaps you’d like to wait in the library, sir.’

Pountney would have preferred the bar but that, it seemed, was out of bounds unless accompanied by a club member. He was shown into a deserted, cheerless room with high-backed leather chairs, bookshelves that reached to the ceiling filled with leather-bound books, which, judging by the dust, it appeared no one ever read, a few sombre portraits of men he’d never heard of, a table in the window covered with carefully folded newspapers and magazines, a smell of dust, decay and stale cigar smoke. Soulless and empty. What was the attraction of places like this? Why was membership so highly prized by Lander and others like him?

Mystified, he sat down and read the
Telegraph,
wishing he had done the sensible thing and declined Lander’s invitation. He could guess what the conversation would be about and it was a subject he wanted to avoid.

It was nearly half past one before Lander appeared. ‘You must have given me up for dead, Gerry, I do apologize. God, what a morning it’s been. Let’s go and eat.’

Gossip accompanied the soup, Suez arrived with the roast beef. Lander revisited all the familiar arguments, offering nothing new. Pountney listened, saying little until challenged to reply.

‘What kind of threat is Nasser beside the Soviets?’ he asked. ‘While we’re looking the other way, the Soviets could be getting up to all kinds of mischief behind our back. We’re in danger of forgetting who the real enemy is.’

Lander disagreed. ‘You don’t treat with pocket Hitlers, Gerry. You put them in their place. Surely that’s a lesson we’ve all learned.’

‘Nasser’s not in that league.’

‘Try telling that to Downing Street.’

Whitehall was awash with rumours, though he was sceptical about their origin, preferring to see them as the creations of wish-fulfilment than leaks of policy. If Nasser were to move against British interests in Egypt – a euphemism for nationalizing the Canal – then the SIS would be instructed to assassinate him. Troops were being assembled in Cyprus, ready to teach the upstart a lesson from which he’d emerge with more than a bloody nose. Whatever Watson-Jones might say, the idea of going to war with Egypt was stretching credulity too far. He trusted the Government enough to know that could never happen.

‘The Prime Minister has this thing against Nasser. He won’t hear his name mentioned. It’s got personal.’ The rumours, someone told him, emanated from Number Ten. Pountney remained unconvinced. If this was an attempt to build a consensus in favour of military intervention, he wasn’t buying it. Nor, he imagined, were many others.

‘Nasser’s a challenge we’ve got to meet,’ Lander was saying, ‘if we’re to show the rest of the world we’re still in the big league.’

‘You don’t really believe that nonsense, do you, David?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

Despite all the clues around him, he had misjudged Lander. His pattern of beliefs, his certainties that we were still a major power, remained unchallenged by events. His money and his class insulated him and others like him from any threatening reality. This club was his world in microcosm, an orderly society that continued its old ways undisturbed behind closed doors, whatever the commotion outside in the street. No wonder Lander asked him to lunch here, and no wonder he felt out of place. The gulf between them, their lives, experiences, beliefs, gaped open at their feet. It had never been so wide.

‘Is it realistic to imagine that either the Russians or the Americans think of us in those terms?’

‘If you’re saying we don’t count any more, you’re wrong,’ Lander said sharply.

Lander couldn’t accept that so much of what they did every day of their working lives was little more than a game of bluff to conceal the condition of decline into which the country had fallen. If Pountney was to say what he believed, he would have to emerge undisguised from his bunker, guns blazing. How he disliked being put on the spot like this.

‘The world is divided into two camps,’ he replied, ‘and we’re not the dominant partner in either. Isn’t it better to own up to that and operate from a position we can legitimately defend, rather than deluding ourselves that we hold a power that everyone knows we don’t?’

The atmosphere had shifted from chilliness to ice. Lander, no longer interested in finishing what remained on his plate, lit a cigarette.

‘If I believed that,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to face myself in the shaving mirror each morning.’ All pretence of reconciliation was finally absent from his voice. ‘We are and must remain a great power. I’m with Watson-Jones on that, and so is everyone I know. You aren’t suggesting we allow an upstart like Nasser to knock us from the top table, are you?’

The arguments boiled angrily in his mind, too many to make sense of in the heat of the moment. In ways Pountney didn’t fully understand, Lander’s easy assurance intimidated him. In his presence he felt insubstantial, weak, devoid of the self-control that was his hallmark in the office. It was an emotional response, he knew that, but one he found himself unable to fight. Too shaken to reply, he stared blankly at Lander, hoping his silence would push him into saying something.

‘Look, Gerry,’ Lander said, ‘it’s all very noble, sticking your head above the parapet, but where’s the gain? This isn’t a time for heroics. You’re not going to change anything on your own. Opposing Suez is a lost cause. You must see that, surely.’

There were arguments to use against him but he couldn’t marshal them. Infuriatingly, they evaded his grasp.

‘Risking your career for a policy that’s not going to change isn’t worth it.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Pountney said, hating himself for saying it. It wasn’t what he believed nor what he wanted to say, but too long on Lander’s territory and he began to lose his nerve. Better to end
it quietly now, ready to fight another day, if you had to. That was as good a way out as any.

‘Perhaps you’re right.’

How he hated himself for saying it.

The telex machine burst into life, the printer’s sudden chattering breaking the silence. Martineau looked up as the coded message began to come through. He knew the opening words by heart.

‘Top Secret (
every
message
began
that
way
).
For information only. The contents of this document may not be disclosed to anyone other than a duly authorized recipient. No extract from …’

‘No extract from, or summary of, or reference to its contents,’ he said under his breath, ‘may be made except under such conditions as may be generally or specially approved by the Director-General, Secret Intelligence Service. And so on and so forth.’

That was followed by all the usual administrative garbage, the date, the number of the telex, the names and departments of those to whom copies of the telex had been sent. The same old crew: Director; Directorate C; Deputy Director; C, Nigel Carswell, none less, good old Nigel. How they loved his kind in London; Carl Brotherton, a new name, he’d no idea who he was; the SIS representative on SSC. What the hell was SSC? You needed a dictionary these days to keep up with all the acronyms they invented. Probably deliberate policy to confuse the Sovs. It certainly confused him. Last of all, who’d sent the telegram: Duty Officer, London, always anonymous, probably some boy genius in short trousers they’d pulled off his mother’s tit a couple of weeks ago, and to whom. In this case, R. Martineau, Budapest. Yours truly.

All right. Let’s see what London has to say for itself today.

Damn them.

Every time he reported on the situation in Hungary, he got the same reply.
Take
no
action.
Do
nothing.
Sit
on
your
hands.
No further questions. No reaction. No advice. Did they take no notice of him
because they didn’t believe what he told them? Couldn’t they cope with the truth any more? Perhaps it was policy now to ignore what you didn’t want to hear. He scanned the bleak message of the telex again. Apparently so. On all fronts.

Why not tell him not to bother, that they weren’t interested in what was happening in Hungary? It would save a lot of unnecessary work, possibly even some lives. Merton House was fixated on Suez, like everyone else at home. What the hell were they trying to do to him? And what about his Borises? They were risking their lives for this lot in London. Why didn’t they give a thought to them? Bastards, the lot of them.

Why
bother
? Except you had to bother. That was the point. That was why you were here, in Budapest. To do something that had to be done. It was only a question of time, surely, before London woke up and heard what you were saying.

‘I know Joe’s in Budapest and that something bad has happened to him,’ Esther had said with striking certainty as they walked from Lincoln’s Inn to Kingsway.

How she knew she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Anna, and Anna knew that nothing she could say would shake the older woman’s conviction. She wanted to trust Esther’s intuition, but believing without evidence was alien to her. Despite her father’s remonstrations against her doubting nature when she was young – ‘Listen to your heart, Anna, trust what it tells you’ – she had defended herself against his forceful irrationality by seeking refuge in her own haven of good sense. Security lay in organization, preparation, reason. Instinct had no part in that. You couldn’t know something was true simply because that was what your heart told you. That was absurd, impossible. Seeing it with your own eyes was what counted. Verification.

Yet she found herself drawing comfort from Esther’s words. In her moments of doubt, now all too frequent, she wanted to believe that at least Joe was alive. Esther gave her something to hope for.

‘That man knows more than he say.’

Esther was right about Sykes too. He knew far more than he was
telling them. The difficulty was, his defences were too secure for her to penetrate. He’d been ready for their visit, he’d worked on his position, he’d known what he wanted to tell them, and though he appeared to be very open with them, in fact he’d given nothing away. She and Esther had been wholly unprepared. They’d said nothing that he couldn’t deal with. They’d presented him with no surprises, letting him dictate the interview. She couldn’t let that happen again.

She spent the afternoon on the telephone, hoping some enquiry would yield a clue that might help her begin to unravel the mystery of what had happened to Joe. But she learned nothing, not even from Joe’s companion at the Institute, a conspiratorial White Russian who in his guttural English complained to her that since Joe’s absence, his workload had doubled without his pay going up. Instead of worrying about Joe, what could she do to help him?

There were too many blank walls, too many dead ends. She was missing something obvious, overlooking a simple truth, probably because she was trying too hard. She always tried too hard. She was thinking within limits that were too narrow. Relax, she told herself Don’t strain at it. Let herself flow with the problems, don’t try to fight them. Then something might turn up. How easy it was to say that, she thought, fighting back tears, how hard to achieve.

Then she remembered Sykes’s one unscripted remark, that his brother-in-law worked at the Foreign Office. It wasn’t much but it was all she had. She held on to it with all the power at her command.

Hart stood at the window of his apartment and watched the electrical storm rage round the city. For the last hour the thunder had been rolling in from the east behind waves of black clouds. The sky had gone dark long before dusk. Now the city across the Danube was obscured by blinding sheets of rain. Budapest was under siege from a storm bent on its imminent destruction.

It wasn’t working out as he’d expected. From the moment of his arrival, Martineau had treated him as a raw recruit, ignoring what the months of training at New Maiden had taught him, techniques and skills Martineau knew nothing about but which Hart was bursting
to put to the test. (When Martineau had joined the Service, training was rudimentary.) Not surprisingly, Martineau hadn’t wanned to his remark that he’d joined the Service because he’d failed to get into the Foreign Office. Was he now being punished for a momentary indiscretion by a man of a different generation, who simply didn’t understand that after the intensive weeks at the Vicarage all his energies were tuned and ready for battle? He was ready to be let loose on the enemy. Why didn’t Martineau give him his head?

He was to spend his first weeks ‘getting his feet under the desk’, Martineau had instructed. The consular duties he was engaged in were necessary to ‘develop his cover’, a euphemism, as Hart saw it, for administration, filing, typing, answering the telephone, making tea, office work and office hours. He might as well have been clerking in Leadenhall Street. The only difference was, in Budapest you couldn’t talk about what you were doing. He assumed clerks in Leadenhall Street were under no such restraining order. What had he learned that he could betray? Did it matter if the Sovs knew how many sugars Martineau took in his tea?

‘We’re fighting an undeclared war against a formidable enemy,’ Martineau said. ‘He is as intent on preventing us from reading his mind as we are on learning his secrets. Any information, however trivial it may seem to us, is grist to the Soviet mill.’

So Martineau’s two lumps of Tate & Lyle’s best granulated were classified information, though for the life of him Hart couldn’t work out why. During his time at the Vicarage, they had concentrated on matters of an altogether higher seriousness. Whichever way he looked at it, he could hardly call what he was doing the secret life. His training had omitted the one significant truth he’d learned in his first week on duty in Budapest, that working for the Inland Revenue would be more exciting.