He exhaled and impulsively strode across the street, hoping he appeared to have some purpose besides hiding from the disapproving public view. On the far side of the street he walked under the Roman arch into the Botanical Gardens, bright green ranks of shrubs and midget trees spread across four acres under the empty blue sky, and he crouched by one of the flowering herbs beside the footpath as though to read the description on the little sign in front of it, though in fact he couldn’t focus on the letters.
Andrew Hale, barrister, he thought in bitter bewilderment; foreign correspondent Hale of the Times; the great Oxford dons Lewis, Tolkien, Bowra, Hale. Sweet fuck-all seems more like it.
He straightened abruptly and took several deep breaths, not wanting anyone to see tears in his eyes here.
Eyes; those were Slavic eyes, he thought, in the instant before someone behind him touched his elbow; and when he turned around without surprise it was the woman in the plaid skirt standing there, still with the look of a dubious purchaser. She appeared to be in her thirties.
“I’ve seen you in the Party meetings,” she said.
He was fairly sure she had never been to a meeting he had attended, but he nodded. “Not unlikely,” he said. His heart was thumping under the expulsion papers in his coat pocket. “I’d advise you not to go to any in London.”
“I heard of your misfortune,” she said with a nod, gripping his elbow and leading him along the crushed-stone path. “We are all allies against the monster Germany. How strange that cooperation should be called espionage, and a crime! We’re all working for world peace.” She spoke with no accent, but he thought he detected the spiky cadence of eastern Europe.
“I-wasn’t even doing espionage,” Hale stammered.
“To belong to the International Workers’ Party is implicitly to commit what they call espionage,” she told him sternly. “We’re citizens of a bigger thing than any nineteenth-century empires, aren’t we?”
We want you to be persuaded by this person. But Don’t act. “I’ve hoped to be,” he said. “Things look unpromising right now.”
“Knowing the danger now, are you still with us?” She had stopped walking and was staring intently into his eyes. “Now?”
“Yes,” he told her, and he was surprised at the assurance with which he said it; she did represent his only hope of eventual reinstatement at Magdalen, but he had spoken from a sudden conviction that he had been waiting for this en garde ever since visiting the SIS headquarters at the age of seven; a conviction that all along he had been more a member of the world that included Theodora and this woman than of the world of St. John’s and the City of London School and Oxford.
She nodded, and they resumed walking between the rows of flowers. “Do you know what they do in Blenheim Palace?” she asked.
Hale glanced at her, but she was looking ahead. Blenheim Palace was six miles north of Oxford. “The, uh, Duke of Marlborough lives there.”
“He has turned it for wartime spy purposes over to MI5, a branch of the British secret service. We have comrades working there, covertly.” She opened her purse and tilted it toward him; he could see a folded buff envelope tucked in there. “In this envelope is a list, copied from the MI5 Registry files, of Comintern agents known by the British to be working in London. I am not a person who ordinarily meets comrades face-to-face, as I am doing now with you; this is important. We need to convey this list right away to a still-unsuspected agent in London, so that Moscow Centre will know who must be reassigned, where fresh agents must be put in place. Also here in photographic miniature are full specifications of the new Napier Sabre aero-engine that is powering the Hawker Typhoon aircraft; the British government has classified these specifications as ‘most-secret,’ not to be shared with allies. It is Soviet Russia that now is doing the greatest work of fighting Germany, at Riga and Minsk and Kiev; if-espionage-helps the Soviets to do this, is it right to impede it?”
“No,” said Hale, trying to look resolute and not to think of the undergraduate who had advocated the destruction of all the Oxford colleges.
“I cannot leave here today,” the woman said. “We want you to take a train to London, now. I will give you a hundred pounds for the travel and inconvenience. Tonight at eight o’clock you are to be standing under the-Eros?-statue in Piccadilly Square, you know what that is? Good. Hold a belt, you know?-for trousers?-in your right hand. A man carrying some fruit, an orange perhaps, will approach you and ask you where you bought the belt; you will tell him that you bought it in an ironmonger’s shop in Paris, and then you will ask him where you can buy an orange like his; he will offer to sell it to you for a penny. Hand this envelope to him then. He will have further work for you.”
“Just…go, right now?” said Hale, wondering what would become of his trunk. “This seems awfully precipitate-”
She interrupted him with, “Where did you buy the belt?”
“In-an ironmonger’s shop,” he said. “In Paris.”
“You were born in Palestine, I think,” said the woman.
He blinked at her in surprise, wondering if Theodora would be unhappy to know that she was aware of this. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know that?”
Without a smile she said, “A little bird told me. Here.” She handed him the buff envelope, and he folded it more sharply and tucked it into his coat pocket next to the letter from his tutor. “And here’s a hundred pounds,” she went on, handing him a letter-sized envelope. “I’ll need you to sign a receipt for it.”
In spite of Theodora’s vapory assurances, Hale was numbingly aware that this constituted real, deliberate espionage, documentable treason; and he could feel the sudden heat in his face. “My-real name?”
She had obviously noted his involuntary blush, and for the first time she smiled at him. “Yes, comrade,” she said softly, “your real name. Don’t worry, I won’t let it fall into the wrong hands.”
And what, he wondered a moment later as he signed Andrew Hale in the notebook she had unwedged from her purse, would constitute the wrong hands, here?
I’m on somebody’s rolls now.
God help me, he thought.
THREE
But cannot the government protect? We of the game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book. That is all. Thou art safe in the te-rain, at least. Live a year at the great game and tell me that again!
– Rudyard Kipling, Kim
The driver of the Peugeot swung in to a jolting halt in front of Overton’s oyster bar in Terminus Place, and the now bespectacled and moustached Hale followed her curt directions and sprinted through the restaurant and out the back, then down a breezeway to Victoria Street, where the specified black BMW motorcycle hummed at the curb. The rider was anonymous under a visored black helmet, and Hale swung a leg over the seat and sat down. Luckily the rider waited until Hale had got his feet onto the pegs and got a grip on his leather jacket before he let the clutch spring out and gunned the machine away up Victoria Street, weaving between the slower cars like a barracuda.
In spite of the glasses, the headwind battered tears out of the corners of Hale’s eyes as the motorcycle left behind the mediocre modern buildings of 1963 London and leaned alarmingly fast to the right around the north side of Westminster Abbey and then left up St. Margaret and Parliament streets to Whitehall; Hale pressed his face against his own shoulder to keep the moustache from being peeled off. When they passed the Cenotaph monument in the middle of the street, the rider began rapidly downshifting, and he pulled in to the curb by the new Cabinet Office in the old Treasury building, not far from Downing Street. As Hale shakily got off the back of the machine, his sweaty trousers clinging to his thighs, the rider nodded toward the entry stairs.