I chose this village specially, nearly four years ago, for its isolation — when they ‘retired’ me, after the fracas with the KGB in Cheltenham. McCoy had seen it differently, though, and had offered to recommend me for an MBE on the Foreign Office List, since for him, needless to say, the whole business had ended in vast success. Instead I took the £15,000 gratuity they had offered and told McCoy I hoped never to see or hear from him again.
‘Don’t be like that, Marlow,’ he’d said, in his ugly Belfast voice, words and tones no real Foreign Office man would have used, for of course we had both worked for a far less intelligible government department: the — and I find it hard even to write the words — the Service: DI6 as they call it now. British Intelligence: the Middle East Section in that terrible glass tower in Holborn.
It was accepted by the small farming community that I was an academic of some sort, a suggestion I planted soon after I first came, when I told the Postmistress, Mrs Bentley, I was researching the story of one of the English Crusades, a sort of medieval Regimental History, as I put it, of their campaigns in the Near East. Subsequently, neither she nor the other villagers enquired further about my work, doing no more than to wish me well at it from time to time.
I was not, I should say, entirely a recluse. Once a girl friend I’d known in Paris years before came and stayed with me, arriving with her husband, an over-educated young man who held a position in the Banque de France, in a large silver Citröen which blocked half the village street for a weekend, while they spoke to me at length and in French of their recent journey among the Danakil tribe in the lowlands of Ethiopia. After I’d seen them off in Oxford I happened to spot a second-hand abridgement of Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples and read it for a week.
Better friends came too: at fairly long intervals and yet repetitively, for I have never been part of any wide circles. It was the walking I enjoyed most after my leg wound healed. The physiotherapist had recommended it. But I soon found it pure pleasure and took to the hills like an alcoholic, strolling the old Roman roads and empty lanes in every weather.
Yet, as they say of childbirth, one comes to forget even the worst kind of pain and one day a few weeks ago I realised I might be coming to an end of my rural needs. I had started, not talking to myself, but worse — holding imaginary parties in the small dining room of the cottage: scintillating affairs with old friends, many of them dead, which spilled happily over into the other rooms of the place as I wandered through them, sherry glass in hand, imagining it zibib or some other sharp foreign drink from long ago.
On that particular evening, I had begun to recreate the annual reception for the Queen’s Birthday at the old British Residency on the Nile, where I had worked in the mid-fifties. By sunset I had summoned up a bevy of dark Nubian waiters, each slashed at the waist with royal blue cummerbunds, carrying silver trays of iced martinis high over their heads, pushing through the guests under the flame trees on the long lawn which, before the corniche road was built, went all the way down to the river in those days.
At the end of the evening, the furniture all askew and the sherry bottle empty, I felt a terribly sharp bite of social disappointment that my friends had left. I felt, in my small cottage, the weight of huge empty spaces around me, echoing reception rooms and verandahs, and smelt the mud of the low water riding on the breeze over the Nile and heard the evening cry of the Muezzin, harshly amplified from the mosque tower by Kasr-el-Nil bridge …
I realised when I woke with a headache next morning that I had cured myself at last — but that if I stayed much longer in the country I should get ill again.
That was last week: I tried to forget about it and I returned to my book. But this morning the fire has come back and I have drunk nothing. Tomorrow, I know, I shall go to London.
There was a reason, had I needed one: my solicitor, who also handled my finances, such as they were, had written some time before, suggesting a visit to discuss the possibility of some ‘judicious re-investment’ as he put it — an unnecessary thought to my mind, since what little money I had, in the hands of a well known Irish brewery, appeared judiciously placed already.
Barker, an Englishman of a lost kind who had only one eye, tended to the legal problems and finances of many retired people from the Service: he had once been vaguely attached to it himself, in 1942, as a Captain in charge of a commando company, before being invalided out, with partial vision, after a sten gun had blown-up in his face, on secret manoeuvres in Scotland before the Dieppe raid. His had been a short, inglorious war. Subsequently he had tried to recompense for this by maintaining contact with a world of derring-do in the shape of elderly Brigadiers with tax problems and younger men in the SIS whose marriages had gone astray.
He had moved offices since I had last seen him and sat now, back to the window, on the top floor of an old Georgian building in Jockey’s Fields up from High Holborn: a judicious man indeed, surrounded now with his comfortable club furniture, but still with the remnants of unsatisfied activity in his face. He fidgeted while he talked, charging and releasing the silver cap of a ball-point like a rifle bolt.
‘I rather think Metal Box might be worthwhile,’ he said, gazing to one side of his desk where a stack of old tin deed boxes ran half way up the wall.
I followed his gaze, misunderstanding him. ‘Metal box? I don’t have any —’
‘Oh, no. I meant the company who make them: containers, foil, wrappings of all sorts.’
‘I see. What’s wrong with the brewery?’
‘Nothing. But I hear — confidentially — there’s to be a new rights issue with MB: two for one. If one bought in now… It might keep you going for another year.’
‘At most?’
‘At most, if that.’ Barker was like a doctor staving off bad news: one suspected that he had something worse up his sleeve. ‘Inflation. Your money is not what it was and really a year is too long. It may run out sooner. Had you thought of any kind of — work?’ he added very diffidently. ‘You used to, didn’t you? The Service …’
I shook my head. ‘I’ll have to think of something,’ I said, ‘but not that.’
‘Of course your cottage must have increased in value — a great deal. You could sell —’
‘No, not that either. That’s the last thing I want. London again, a flat, a job.’
‘Well …’ Barker paused, letting the future hang in the air like a bankruptcy. ‘We’ll have to think of something.’
I’ve forgotten what else we spoke about that morning, except that we agreed to move some money on to Metal Box in a last bid for solvency, since what struck me after some minutes in Barker’s new office, and absorbed me more and more while I was there, was the view from his window: towering up over the old slate roofs of Gray’s Inn, not more than a few hundred yards away, was the monstrous glass block I’d worked in for ten years: naval recruitment at the front with sundry other government offices upstairs, including my own in the Middle East Section of Intelligence.
Indeed from where I sat I could actually see the window of my old office in Information & Library, the eighth floor, fourth along, where I had thumbed through Al Ahram on damp Monday mornings, waiting for Nellie with the coffee trolley, or gazed out all afternoon at the concrete mess they were making round St Paul’s throughout the sixties, before checking my watch against opening time.