‘What’s happening to you?’
She said, ‘Jakarta.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The end of the world,’ she said. ‘Farther than Basra. Please go in.’ A man wearing a black monocle sat all by himself behind a desk. He said, ‘Sit down, Wormold.’
‘I prefer to stand.’
‘Oh, that’s a quotation, isn’t it?’
‘Quotation?’
‘I’m sure I remember hearing that in some play -amateur theatricals. A great many years ago, of course.’
Wormold sat down. He said, ‘You’ve no right to send her to Jakarta.’
‘Send who to Jakarta?’
‘Beatrice.’
‘Who’s she? Oh, that secretary of yours. How I hate these Christian names. You’ll have to see Miss Jenkinson about that. She’s in charge of the pool, not me, thank God.’
‘She had nothing to do with anything.’
‘Anything? Listen, Wormold. We’ve decided to shut down your post, and the question arises what are we to do with you?’ It was coming now. Judging from the face of the Colonel who had been one of his judges, he felt that what came would not be pleasant. The Chief took out his black monocle and Wormold was surprised by the baby-blue eye. He said, ‘We thought the best thing for you under the circumstances would be to stay at home -on our training staff. Lecturing. How to run a station abroad. That kind of thing. ‘ He seemed to be swallowing something very disagreeable. He added, ‘Of course, as we always do when a man retires from a post abroad, we’ll recommend you for a decoration. I think in your case -you were not there very long -we can hardly suggest anything higher than an O. B. E.’
They greeted each other formally in a wilderness of sage-green chairs in an inexpensive hotel near Gower Street called the Pendennis. ‘I don’t think I can get you a drink,’ he said. ‘It’s Temperance.’
‘Why did you come here then?’
‘I used to come with my parents when I was a boy. I hadn’t realized about the temperance. It didn’t trouble me then. Beatrice, what’s happened? Are they mad?’
‘They are pretty mad with both of us. They thought I should have spotted what was going on. The Chief had summoned quite a meeting. His liaisons were all there, with the War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry. They had all your reports out in front of them and they went through them one by one. Communist infiltration in the Government -nobody minded a memo to the Foreign Office cancelling that one. There were economic reports -they agreed they should be disavowed too. Only the Board of Trade would mind. Nobody got real touchy until the Service reports came up. There was one about disaffection in the navy and another about refuelling bases for submarines. The Commander said, “There must be some truth in these.”
‘I said, “Look at the source. He doesn’t exist.”
“We shall look such fools,” the Commander said. “They are going to be as pleased as Punch in Naval Intelligence.”
‘But that was nothing to what they felt when the constructions were discussed.’
‘They’d really swallowed those drawings?’
‘It was then they turned on poor Henry.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t call him Henry.’
‘They said first of all that he had never reported you sold vacuum cleaners but that you were a kind of merchant-king. The Chief didn’t join in that hunt. He looked embarrassed for some reason, and anyway Henry -I mean Hawthorne produced the file and all the details were on it. Of course that had never gone farther than Miss Jenkinson’s pool. Then they said he ought to have recognized the parts of a vacuum cleaner when he saw them. So he said he had, but there was no reason why the principle of a vacuum cleaner might not be applied to a weapon. After that they really howled for your blood, all except the Chief. There were moments when I thought he saw the funny side. He said to them, “What we have to do is quite simple. We have to notify the Admiralty, the War Office and the Air Ministry that all reports from Havana for the last six months are totally unreliable.”
‘But, Beatrice, they’ve offered me a job.’
‘That’s easily explained. The Commander crumbled first. Perhaps at sea one learns to take a long view. He said it would ruin the Service as far as the Admiralty was concerned. In future they would rely only on Naval Intelligence. Then the Colonel said, “If I tell the War Office, we may as well pack up.’ It was quite an impasse until the Chief suggested that perhaps the simplest plan was to circulate one more report from 59200/5 -that the constructions had proved a failure and had been dismantled. There remained of course you. The Chief felt you had had valuable experience which should be kept for the use of the department rather than for the popular press. Too many people had written reminiscences lately of the Secret Service. Somebody mentioned the Official Secrets Act, but the Chief thought it might not cover your case. You should have seen them when they were balked of a victim. Of course they turned on me, but I wasn’t going to be cross-examined by that gang. So I spoke out.’ ‘What on earth did you say?’
‘I told them even if I’d known I wouldn’t have stopped you. I said you were working for something important, not for someone’s notion of a global war that may never happen. That fool dressed up as a Colonel said something about “your country”. I said, “What do you mean by his country? A flag someone invented two hundred years ago? The Bench of Bishops arguing about divorce and the House of Commons shouting Ya at each other across the floor? Or do you mean the T. U. C. and British Railways and the Co-op? You probably think it’s your regiment if you ever stop to think, but we haven’t got a regiment he and I. ” They tried to interrupt and I said, “Oh, I forgot. There’s something greater than one’s country, isn’t there? You taught us that with your League of Nations and your Atlantic Pact, NATO and UNO and SEATO. But they don’t mean any more to most of us than all the other letters, U. S. A. and U. S. S. R. And we don’t believe you any more when you say you want peace and justice and freedom. What kind of freedom? You want your careers.” I said I sympathized with the French officers in 1940 who looked after their families; they didn’t anyway put their careers first. A country is more a family than a Parliamentary system.’ ‘My God, you said all that?’
‘Yes. It was quite a speech.’
‘Did you believe it?’
‘Not all of it. They haven’t left us much to believe, have they? even disbelief. I can’t believe in anything bigger than a home, or anything vaguer than a human being.’
‘Any human being?’
She walked quickly away without answering among the sage-green chairs and he saw that she had talked herself to the edge of tears. Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution. He watched her move away across the dreary room and he thought: Darling is a manner of speech, fourteen years between us, Milly -one shouldn’t do anything to shock one’s child or to injure the faith one doesn’t share. She had reached the door before he joined her.
He said, ‘I’ve looked up Jakarta in all the reference-books. You can’t go there. It’s a terrible place.’
‘I haven’t any choice. I tried to stay in the pool., ‘Did you want the pool?’
‘We could have met at the Corner House sometimes and gone to a movie.’
‘A ghastly life -you said it.’
‘You would have been part of it.’
‘Beatrice, I’m fourteen years older than you.’
‘What the hell does that matter? I know what really worries you. It’s not age, it’s Milly.’
‘She has to learn her father’s human too.’
‘She told me once it wouldn’t do my loving you.’
‘It’s got to do. I can’t love you as a one-way traffic.’
‘It won’t be easy telling her.’
‘It may not be very easy to stay with me after a few years.’ She said, ‘My darling, don’t worry about that any longer. You won’t be left twice.’