After her complete exoneration and quick all-powerful promotion she could, of course, have demanded the file whenever she’d wanted, without any question or challenge. But by then her feelings about Charlie had gone through several phases, becoming confused and intermingled. Natalia Nikandrova Fedova, someone always able without any prevarication instantly to make a professional decision, in this, the most private part of her private life, found herself helplessly lost, unable to decide how she felt.
In the initial weeks and months of her promotion Natalia had hated Charlie. Or believed she had. There had been times when she’d physically wept, with aching frustration, at what she’d lost forever by his not keeping the meeting at which she had finally been prepared to turn her back forever upon the Soviet Union and the KGB – and Eduard – just to be with him. Mentally she had raged against him, thinking of him as a coward, not allowing herself to find any excuse for him.
Realizing she was pregnant could have hardened the contempt, but ironically it lessened the feeling: not, in the beginning, into complete forgiveness but tempered at least with some understanding of why Charlie had held back – professional judgement always having to be more important than personal emotions – and certainly no longer thinking him a coward.
In a country where termination is quite casually used as a method of birth-control, it would have been extremely easy for Natalia to have had an abortion. She had scarcely considered it. It was just as easy, at the echelon she now occupied, to have and to keep a baby: not that there would have been any stigma attached – and with so few friends, even acquaintances, that hardly mattered anyway – but she had still been officially a married woman within a satisfactory time-frame of the birth, with no cause to justify or explain.
It was during her confinement, with the opportunity to think of little else, that she confronted the impossibility of hating Charlie: of ever hating him. Alone in the privileged private ward of the privileged security agency hospital, the perfectly born, beautifully formed Alexandra beside her, Natalia finally tried to come to terms with how she truly felt. Huge sadness, the most obvious. Bitter disappointment that would always be there. But most of all, above all, the love: a love that overwhelmed everything, consumed everything.
Which gave her the strongest reason possible for not going to the archives. Having acknowledged her true feelings, Natalia equally recognized that she had to find some way of compartmenting the emotion, locking it securely inside her, like a miser hoarding the most precious treasure. Because unlike a gloating miser, she could never retrieve that lost treasure: never again know the pleasure or the beauty. It was difficult, but Natalia grew to think she could make the sadness and the disappointment bearable, as the weeks went into months and Alexandra became the focus of her entire existence: someone upon whom Natalia could lavish the love she could give to no one else, someone who would always be her unbreakable link to the man she would never see again.
In the final analysis there was no useful, sensible reason to recover Charlie’s private records, to disturb from the securely locked emotional compartments all the heartache Natalia hoped she now had under unshakeable control.
Or was there?
The reflective question – after the other reflective question when she’d failed to discover the whereabouts of Eduard – did not come simply or without contradiction, because nothing came simply or without contradiction when she thought about Charlie Muffin. But Natalia knew she did now have her feelings locked, bolted and barred forever.
It wouldn’t be trying to find him, wherever he was, whatever he was doing. That would have been preposterous. It would be finding out as much as she could about the father of her child. One day, inevitably, Alexandra would want to know. Natalia was not sure, at this stage, how or whether she would be able to tell their daughter the truth. Almost certainly not. But at least she owed it to the child to be able to answer the questions that might be asked.
The red-starred, Top Priority designation on the bulky, concertina-sectioned folder was overstamped with a discarding ‘Erase – Grade IV marking, indicating minimal remaining importance. Only important to me, thought Natalia. She realized, with surprise, that she was frightened, without knowing what to be apprehensive about.
The moment she opened the file Natalia was aware her emotions were not that tightly controlled and that the mere sight of him, even in snatched and grainily blurred photographs, was enough to jar her composure. It was the standard assembly, with photographs in the first section. There was a total of five, arranged in dated sequence, the final two far better quality than the others: she didn’t need the dates to know they had been taken when they had been reunited in London, when she had become unknowingly pregnant. In one of the other, earlier pictures Charlie was actually bending, soothing fingers inside the heel of a sagging left shoe. Natalia began to hurry the photographs back into their pocket, not needing any physical reminder of how he’d looked. But then stopped, expertise taking over from emotion. The pictures were unquestionably of Charlie Muffin, whom she believed she would have known and recognized anywhere. Unquestionably identified, in addition, by their being in an officially created file designated by the man’s name and description. Yet none, not even the later ones, were by themselves sufficient definitely to identify him: simply by the way he was standing or holding himself or half-concealing his face in a head-twisted posture, two could arguably and easily have been of quite a different man.
The first written material was almost twenty years old, paper already yellowed and brittle at the edges.
Charlie had told her of this first episode, but not in detaiclass="underline" the Cold War at its most frigid, Alexei Berenkov already suspected as the London-based Control for one of the most successful Soviet cells in Europe in the late 1960s. Now here, before her, were the details. All of them, chronologically set out, easy to comprehend. It had been a Berlin Wall crossing by Charlie and two other SIS officers, to collect the proof legally to bring Berenkov to triaclass="underline" proof they’d got, because there was a full transcript of the interrogation of the later discovered East German double who’d passed it all over. The next documents in the bundle were the flimsy paper cables, setting out the time – even the vehicle – in which the then unknown Charlie would be making the return, a return that British intelligence and the American CIA had sacrificially leaked to distract from the coordinated crossing back of his two colleagues, with the evidential proof. But it hadn’t been the always cautious, always self-protective Charlie who’d driven the car: it had blown up in the Border Guard crossfire, destroying the identity of whoever the driver had been, providing the diversion for Charlie also safely to cross back to the West by U-Bahn. According to the archive, Charlie had been asked, subsequently, but always refused to supply the name of who he had duped to protect himself.
There was a gap here in the chronology: an actual notation, attested by a signature Natalia could not read, conceding that the interception had been a failure and that the London cell had been wrapped up, Alexei Berenkov with it. The sparse details of Berenkov’s in-camera trial was just a single page concluding with the forty-year sentence.
And then more cable flimsies, from the Soviet embassies in London and Vienna, at first highly suspect but anonymous approaches finally confirmed to be from a man called Charlie Muffin who wasn’t offering secrets or defection. Just a way to wreak retribution upon those prepared to let him be captured or killed, a scheme that eventually enabled Berenkov to be swapped in exchange for the SIS and CIA Directors held in humiliating Soviet detention.