Then We Take Berlin (51 page)

“I don’t have any glasses,” Wilderness said.

The girl held up a brown paper bag, shook it gently so that he could hear the chink of glass on glass.

“House-warming present,” she said.

Burne-Jones didn’t wait to be invited in and set off up the stairs with “You know Judy of course” tossed over his shoulder, and Wilderness found himself face-to-face with Judy Burne-Jones for the first time.

“Known her for years,” he said to Burne-Jones’s ascending rump—and to her, “I’ve read all your books. Almost the same as knowing you.”

“Really? Which was your favourite?”

“
Vanity Fair
. I found I could really identify with the heroine.”

“Ah . . . but it’s a novel without a hero. You may not have noticed, but I have better manners than my father. Do invite me in, Sergeant Holderness.”

“Do come inside, Miss Burne-Jones.”

She kissed him on the cheek and ran up the stairs after her father.

§168

Burne-Jones gave him a year in London. Wilderness did not think of it as a favour. He had enough work to do to prove that was not the case, and much of it was mundane observation work.

As rationing fizzled away to nothing and Britain began to recognise that it wasn’t really broke after all, Wilderness acquired furniture—including a double bed all to himself. It was another symbolic freedom—to stretch out his long legs and feel the bed go on for ever.

Burne-Jones had made him get a phone, indeed had expedited his getting a phone by pulling strings to get around the GPO waiting list. Nor did he have to a endure a party line—“Can’t have every bugger in London listening in, now can we? National security has to mean something.”

About once every six weeks an invitation to eat at Campden Hill Square would arrive. The phone would ring, at home or in the office—occasionally Burne-Jones would appear in person, with the habitual phrase, “Feel like taking pot luck with me and Madge tonight?” He never got more notice than that. And he never said no. Odds on Judy would be there, and on the nights when Judy cooked, good food replaced Madge’s rather perfunctory pots of luck.

Judy was a devotee of the work of Elizabeth David, and smiled like arrayed artillery when her father greeted a
navarin printanier
with “Mutton stew again,” or
beignets de sardines
avec pommes anna
as “Fish and chips.”

Wilderness ate everything she put in front of him.

He learnt to like olives.

He learnt to like garlic—that it was not something you rubbed around the inside of a salad bowl to impart the ghost of flavour—it was something you mashed with the flat side of the knife and threw in by the handful.

He learnt to like Judy.

He was aware of the line. However much Burne-Jones rubbed at it and blurred it, and he had been doing that since 1945, it was still there.

It seemed to him that he could blow everything if he made a play for Judy Jones. So he didn’t.

He was preparing for a posting to Helsinki . . . (“Finland? Why are we spying on the Finns? What did the fucking Finns ever do to us?” “Think of their next-door neighbours, Joe, think of one of the most heavily defended boundaries in the world.”) when Judy rang him in Hampstead, about a week after the coronation of the new queen.

“Joe, I finish my BBC traineeship next month.”

“Congratulations.”

“No, I mean . . . I’ll have a proper job and a proper salary.”

“I say again congratulations.”

“Do try and get the point, Joe! I mean . . . I don’t have to go on living with Ma and Pa.”

“Great, but I don’t want your old room back.”

“No, but I want yours.”

“What?”

“Pa tells me you’re being posted abroad by the not-so-secret service. Joe, rent me your house. I’ll be Madge and Alec’s little girl for ever if I stay with them.”

“But that’s what they want you to do. Stay.”

“I can’t.”

“And I can’t rent you the house. If your father has told you anything about what we do, then the uncertainty of it all must be apparent. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I never know.”

“Then just rent me one room. The box room if you like. The big bedroom can stay as it is, and you can turn up whenever you like.”

He did not return to London for over eight months. One night in the spring of 1954, he paid off a cab at midnight, let himself in to find the house empty, fell into bed, fell asleep and woke around seven to find Judy Jones sleeping next to him—her clothes scattered across his all over the floor, as though they had embraced instead of the flesh within.

He made coffee. Brought the tray back to bed and nudged her into waking.

“Have you been sleeping in my bed all the time I’ve been gone?”

“Yep. Tit for tat. You slept in mine for however many years.”

“Are you going to make a habit of this?”

“’Fraid so. Been a long time coming hasn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“Talk about hard to get. You were almost impossible to get. I left books for you, I left billets-doux, I cooked for you, I got you playing blindman’s buff at the old ’uns Christmas party just so I could get you to feel me up . . . short of just taking off all my clothes and making a complete fool of myself I did everything I could to get your attention, Joe.”

Wilderness looked over the top of his coffee cup at the bra that had landed on top of his shirt, at the stockings trailing across the carpet, the suspender belt clinging like cobweb to the doorknob.

“But . . . you did take all your clothes off.”

“I suppose I did.”

“Then call me Wilderness. Every woman in my life has.”

§169

The next night, still without her clothes, wrapped around him in post-coital sloth, Judy said, “What exactly is it you do for my dad?”

“I’m sure if he wanted you to know he’d tell you.”

“But, sweetest, it’s you I’m asking. You’re no more an RAF sergeant than my dad’s still a Guards officer . . .”

“’Cept when it comes to pay. Your father’s motto is ‘rank doesn’t matter’ and mine is ‘pay does matter.’ But . . . since you ask. I’m MI6’s resident cat burglar.”

She hit him, laughed and hit him with a pillow.

It was an old one but a good one. Tell the truth and defy belief.

§170

And so, on this day in the early August of 1955 Wilderness was to be found making his way from Notting Hill Gate Underground station to Campden Hill Square to test the line to destruction. It might resist like concrete and tungsten, it might vanish in a puff of smoke, when he asked Lt Colonel Burne-Jones for the hand of his eldest daughter in marriage.

Burne-Jones said, “What kept you?” as soon as Wilderness had asked.

Madge said, “I think I’ll leave the two of you to it” and headed for the kitchen.

Wilderness had not thought that it would be otherwise.

A quarter of an hour later with a couple of shots of Burne-Jones’s 1939 Laphroaig single malt inside him he went in search of Madge and found her indulging in one of her bad habits—smoking a king-size cigarette and knocking the ash off into the saucer of a half-drunk cup of tea.

“Well, Joe.”

“Well, Madge.”

“I don’t know whether to read respect for tradition or a bit of a mickey-take into your rather old-fashioned way of doing things, but I can guess at Alec’s response. He met you word for word, tit for tat, and asked if you could ‘keep Judy in the manner to which she is accustomed,’ didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you say?’

“I told him that what I was paid was known to him to the last farthing, as it was set by him. I’m on a sergeant’s pay, plus some. But I’m unencumbered by debt, everything is paid for, and he knows that because he’s been privy to my house buying since the day I first saw Perrin’s Walk. I was slightly better off when Judy paid me rent, almost needless to say. But what’s mine is hers.”

“And what is yours, Joe? Quite the question to be asking a professional thief you will agree. But I don’t think the answer matters all that much.

“Joe, if I were to say to you that you were not what I wanted for my daughter it would be because one never ceases to want, to yearn, to dream on behalf of one’s children. One learns early on that it is impossible not to make plans but also to bend when they don’t work out. Not to bend is to invite frustration.

“And if you were to ask me what it was I did want for Judy, I doubt I could answer you. My mother did what her parents asked of her, expected of her. Married well. Married into the aristocracy. Married an absolute shit. And the fact that my father was a shit became a family shibboleth. It was never mentioned. But if I’d brought home a prospective who was an habitual drunk and far too free with his fists, I think Ma would have shot him dead. I was not to do as she had done.

“Perhaps all I want for my daughter is for her not to marry a shit. I didn’t marry a shit. And I know you’re not a shit. But I also know what you do for England. What you do for England is legitimised by the fact that you do it for England—but tell me, what else do you do that might not be for England?”

He’d expected this, not perhaps expected it to be phrased so well, for the private and public lives to be intertwined so neatly, but sooner or later she would be the one to ask the questions Burne-Jones couldn’t be arsed with.

“I haven’t pulled a private job in years. Not since Cambridge in fact, and even then it was matter of vengeance rather than profit. My rather peculiar talents are, for the time being, at the service of Alec and Her Majesty. Many things are tempting. I still size up opportunities, I mentally ‘case the joint’ rather a lot. It’s almost impossible not to walk into a room and look for the safe or tot up the value of the silverware. But that’s just a hobby, keeping my mind sharp. And of course it’s all temptation, but I’m not Oscar Wilde. I can resist temptation.”

Madge smiled at this.

“Can you resist temptation, Joe, can you really? And why do you say ‘for the time being’?”

“I won’t be doing this for ever. Sooner or later Secret England will be through with me or I with it.”

“And then, what will you do then?”

“I don’t know. That’s the risk I take, and the risk Judy shares.”

“And Berlin, Joe. What was Berlin all about?”

At last.

“Oh . . . that wasn’t thieving . . . that was . . . that was like watching a horse race and knowing it wouldn’t be interesting without a bet on the side . . . Alec had left me on my own for a year . . . it was simply the only game in town.”

“A game that ended with you getting a bullet in your belly.”

“Don’t worry about that, Madge. No one will ever get the drop on me again. From now on I shoot first and ask questions later.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Is that Roy Rogers or Hopalong Cassidy you’re quoting?”

At that they both burst out laughing.

Madge stood up.

“Joe, give your new mother-in-law a hug.”

And not once had she asked about his “people.”

§171

He bought a ring from a Piggy-wig—they took it away and were married next day by the Turkey who lives on the hill. That was the way it seemed to Wilderness—they had set sail for unknown shores, young lovers in a pea-green boat, and landed as Mr. and Mrs. Holderness. It was all dream-like, too dream-like to be quite believable as real.

§172

The honeymoon was brief. A single weekend.

On the morning of Monday September 5, the telephone at the side of the bed, installed at Burne-Jones’s insistence, rang until Judy picked it up and shoved it at Wilderness with a muttered “Pa,” and sank back beneath the sheets.

“Get out to Heathrow, you’re booked on the eleven o’clock to Orly.”

“What’s up?”

“Karel Szabo got out of prison last week. He got on a ferry to Calais on Saturday. No problem with that. Full remission after all. From there he caught a train to Paris. French lost him at the Gare du Nord. Silly sods at the Deuxième were looking out for a single man—and he’s travelling with a woman.”

“What woman?”

“All in the file. There’ll be a courier on your doorstep in five minutes. Chop-chop, old man.”

Wilderness leaned over Judy and dropped the phone back into its cradle. Whispered in what he thought might be her ear, hidden by the sheets.

“I think we might really be married after all. He just called me ‘old man.’”

“Well,” said in an irate if muffled voice. “Perhaps one old man ought to give a bit of a break to another old man and leave him alone on his fucking honeymoon!”

“There’s worse. He’s sending me to Paris.”

He headed for the bathroom, just as she threw back the sheets and yelled, “Well, fuck you . . . old man!”

He read the file in the back of a cab, on the way to Heathrow.