She said, ‘Not a single photograph. Have you no private life?’
‘I don’t think I have much. Except for Milly. And Dr Hasselbacher.’
‘London doesn’t like Dr Hasselbacher.’
‘London can go to hell,’ Wormold said. He suddenly wanted to describe to her the ruin of Dr Hasselbacher’s flat and the destruction of his futile experiments. He said, ‘It’s people like your folk in London…. I’m sorry. You are one of them.’
‘So are you.’
‘Yes, of course. So am I.’
Rudy called from the other room, ‘I’ve got it fixed.’
‘I wish you weren’t one of them,’ Wormold said.
‘It’s a living,’ she said.
‘It’s not a real living. All this spying. Spying on what? Secret agents discovering what everybody knows already..
‘Or just making it up,’ she said. He stopped short, and she went on without a change of voice, ‘There are lots of other jobs that aren’t real. Designing a new plastic soapbox, making pokerwork jokes for public-houses, writing advertising slogans, being an M. P., talking to UNESCO conferences. But the money’s real. What happens after work is real. I mean, your daughter is real and her seventeenth birthday is real.’
‘What do you do after work?’
‘Nothing much now, but when I was in love Ľ. we went to cinemas and
drank coffee in Expresso bars and sat on summer evenings in the Park.’
‘What happened?’
‘It takes two to keep something real. He was acting all the time. He thought he was the great lover. Sometimes I almost wished he would turn impotent for a while just so that he’d lose his confidence. You can’t love and be as confident as he was. If you love you are afraid of losing it, aren’t you?’ She said, ‘Oh hell, why am I telling you all this? Let’s go and make microphotographs and code some cables.’ She looked through the door. ‘Rudy’s lying on his bed. I suppose he’s feeling airsick again. Can you be airsick all this while? Haven’t you got a room where there isn’t a bed? Beds always make one talk.’ She opened another door. ‘Table laid for lunch. Cold meat and salad. Two places. Who does all this? A little fairy?’
‘A woman comes in for two hours in the morning.’
‘And the room beyond?’
‘That’s Milly’s. It’s got a bed in it too.’
Chapter 3
The situation, whichever way he looked at it, was uncomfortable. Wormold was in the habit now of drawing occasional expenses for Engineer Cifuentes and the professor, and monthly salaries for himself, the Chief Engineer of the Juan Belmonte and Teresa, the nude dancer. The drunken air-pilot was usually paid in whisky. The money Wormold accumulated he put into his deposit-account one day it would make a dowry for Milly. Naturally to justify these payments he had to compose a regular supply of reports. With the help of a large map, the weekly number of Time, which gave generous space to Cuba in its section on the Western Hemisphere, various economic publications issued by the Government, above all with the help of his imagination, he had been able to arrange at least one report a week, and until the arrival of Beatrice he had kept his Saturday evenings free for homework. The professor was the economic authority, and Engineer Cifuentes dealt with the mysterious constructions in the mountains of Oriente (his reports were sometimes confirmed and sometimes contradicted by the Cubana pilot a contradiction had a flavour of authenticity). The chief engineer supplied descriptions of labour conditions in Santiago, Matanzas and Cienfuegos and reported on the growth of unrest in the navy. As for the nude dancer, she supplied spicy details of the private lives and sexual eccentricities of the Defence Minister and the Director of Posts and Telegraphs. Her reports closely resembled articles about film stars in Confidential, for Wormold’s imagination in this direction was not very strong. Now that Beatrice was here, Wormold had a great deal more to worry about than his Saturday evening exercises. There was not only the basic training which Beatrice insisted on giving him in microphotography, there were also the cables he had to think up in order to keep Rudy happy, and the more cables Wormold sent the more he received. Every week now London bothered him for photographs of the installations in Oriente, and every week Beatrice became more impatient to take over the contact with his agents. It was against all the rules, she told him, for the head of a station to meet his own sources. Once he took her to dinner at the Country Club and, as bad luck would have it, Engineer Cifuentes was paged. A very tall lean man with a squint rose from a table near-by. ‘Is that Cifuentes?’ Beatrice asked sharply.
‘Yes.’
‘But you told me he was sixty-five.’
‘He looks young for his age.’
‘And you said he had a paunch.’
‘Not paunch ponch. It’s the local dialect for squint.’ It was a very narrow squeak.
After that she began to interest herself in a more romantic figure of Wormold’s imagination the pilot of Cubana. She worked enthusiastically to make his entry in the index complete and wanted the most personal details. Raul Dominguez certainly had pathos. He had lost his wife in a massacre during the Spanish civil war and had become disillusioned with both sides, with his Communist friends in particular. The more Beatrice asked Wormold about him, the more his character developed, and the more anxious she became to contact him. Sometimes Wormold felt a twinge of jealousy towards Raul and he tried to blacken the picture. ‘He gets through a bottle of whisky a day,’ he said. ‘It’s his escape from loneliness and memory,’ Beatrice said. ‘Don’t you ever want to escape?’
‘I suppose we all do sometimes.’
‘I know what that kind of loneliness is like,’ she said with sympathy.
‘Does he drink all day?’
‘No. The worst hour is two in the morning. When he wakes then, he can’t sleep for thinking, so he drinks instead.’ It astonished Wormold how quickly he could reply to any questions about his characters; they seemed to live on the threshold of consciousness -he had only to turn a light on and there they were, frozen in some characteristic action. Soon after Beatrice arrived Raul had a birthday and she suggested they should give him a case of champagne. ‘He won’t touch it,’ Wormold said, he didn’t know why. ‘He suffers from acidity. If he drinks champagne he comes out in spots. Now the professor on the other hand won’t drink anything else.’
‘An expensive taste.’
‘A depraved taste,’ Wormold said without taking any thought. ‘He prefers Spanish champagne.’ Sometimes he was scared at the way these people grew in the dark without his knowledge. What was Teresa doing down there, out of sight? He didn’t care to think. Her unabashed description of what life was like with her two lovers sometimes shocked him. But the immediate problem was Raul. There were moments when Wormold thought that it might have been easier if he had recruited real agents.
Wormold always thought best in his bath. He was aware one morning, when he was concentrating hard, of indignant noises, a fist beat on the door a number of times, somebody stamped on the stairs, but a creative moment had arrived and he paid no attention to the world beyond the steam. Raul had been dismissed by the Cubana air line for drunkenness. He was desperate; he was without a job; there had been an unpleasant interview between him and Captain Segura, who threatened…. ‘Are you all right?’ Beatrice called from outside. ‘Are you dying? Shall I break down the door?’
He wrapped a towel round his middle and emerged into his bedroom, which was now his office.
‘Milly went off in a rage,’ Beatrice said. ‘She missed her bath.’ ‘This is one of those moments,’ Wormold said, ‘which might change the course of history. Where is Rudy?’
‘You know you gave him week-end leave.’
‘Never mind. We’ll have to send the cable through the Consulate. Get out the codebook.’