It wasn’t so very different these days, I thought. The fevers and the maxim guns had gone, and nanny had died weeping for the brave and foolish. But the umpires were still around in Whitehall, men like Williams, and far from liberal. And in Washington. And Moscow. There wasn’t the sound of any whistles now. They knocked on the door late at night; and there was still no boat home.
The Blue Nile Province had become an acrid-smelling barracks, or a nissen hut in Heliopolis — or in Athens or in Saigon. But the men died just the same, on the direct current, with ruptured kidneys or gangreened shins. The brave and foolish went to the wall, just as they had always done, but at midnight now, not high noon; in a cellar, not an empty quarter. And there wouldn’t be any memorial; no one would weep, for no one would ever know. It was a foolish story about history.
Something scraped over the glass in a corner window, high up; a shadow flicked across a row of yellow pews like a bird flying quickly over furrowed stubble. I turned and saw a lizard, six inches of still, mottled-green flesh, splayed out on the Gordon memorial window, a tiny cross of Lorraine stamped in the sun above the legend “I have done my duty for our country”. I moved down a row of benches to take a closer look at it.
Charles General Gordon, C.B.,
1833–1885
I thought the lizard had moved a second time when I heard the scraping sound again. But it was in just the same position when I looked up — a misplaced heraldic device, an idea the artist had forgotten to rub out in the cartoon of the window. I looked to my right.
Henry was standing beside a pillar at the top of the wall aisle, just beneath psalm numbers for the previous Sunday. For an instant I thought he might have been one of the Church-wardens. He was wearing a navy blazer I’d not remembered him in, and his hair toppled about in wild growths, grey matted strands, some upright, some flattened like an unsettled harvest. His eyes sloped down on either side of his face, with tiredness or drink, as if someone had tried to make him up as an oriental and got it wrong from the start. There was nothing sinister or hunted about him; there never had been. When Henry was worried he simply looked in need of a bath. A shave and a haircut wouldn’t have been wasted either. He seemed to me defiantly conspicuous.
“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were one of the sidesmen or something.”
He came towards me, those busy small steps neatly and exactly marking out the space between us as though he were measuring a pitch.
“Didn’t mean to give you a fright.” I put out a hand in astonishment, but he didn’t see it. “I saw you walking along the corniche, couldn’t think what you were coming in here for.”
“I came to see the Provost.”
“Didn’t know you’d taken to good works.”
“I may be able to get a lift out of here with him. He’s going to Libya. By car.”
Henry considered the idea and I looked at him, waiting. I wanted to see what he had in mind. But he said nothing.
“It seems there’s only you and I left.”
“You think there’d be room?” He smiled briefly, an expression half meant, half not; waiting to see how the land lay as well.
“I didn’t know you wanted to go back. In that direction.”
“Where are the others then?”
“The Colonel disappeared last night. Bridget this morning. I don’t know where they went. I thought she might be with you. The others — Usher, Cherry, Marcus — they were picked up earlier still. Probably in Heliopolis now.”
“In the Army Hospital at Maadi. But that’s another story.”
He brushed his hair back, put a finger in one eye, wiping sleep away. His glasses had broken, I noticed, and he’d mended the hinge with tape. We started to walk down towards the font at the west end of the Cathedral.
“Why didn’t you go straight to the Russian Embassy — when you got the wrong end of the stick from Dr. Novak?”
Henry stopped and began fiddling with the metal ring on top of the covered bowl.
“You’ve really been working.”
“I haven’t done a stroke. You’ll have to go somewhere. Won’t you?”
“I don’t have to go anywhere. That’s the nice thing. I don’t have to spin off anywhere and get broken up. I just have to stay put. Wait till they’ve forgotten about me. Then I can move off. Not somewhere Williams knows of, or Moscow. Or you. Leave the busybodies out.”
“The toytown, you told me — last week.”
“And you came running with a miniature baton and a set of traffic lights. That was a trick to buy from Williams — invoking the old pals act.”
“I’ve been just as cunning as you.”
“Why haven’t you ‘turned me over’ then?”
“If you thought that, you’d hardly have followed me.”
“I didn’t think it. I was curious. Can’t seem to drop the habit. What was Williams up to? Why did he send you?”
I told him nothing of the microfilm. I supposed, even then, that Henry might make it back to Moscow and would warn them that I had my theories about Williams — and I wanted to be left to deal with Williams entirely on my own.
“He thought you might have had an accident, that you’d just disappeared, been abducted or something. I thought you might have come here — so he sent me after you, said I had good ‘connections’ in the place. What did you come here for?”
“Some cockeyed idea Williams had about subverting the ASU. I knew he was on to me the moment he suggested it.”
“On to your being with Moscow? Listen, if you’ve spent twenty years doubling for the KGB you might as well get out of it in one piece. Take the pickings, go home. Go to Moscow, for God’s sake. Don’t hang around here, you’ll get nothing but fifteen years for that, or a bump on the head in some alley. They can get you out of here with no difficulty. Go. Good seats at the Bolshoi, a pass to the dollar shop. Take it. And stop frigging around the Nile in dark glasses. They shoot people out here for that sort of thing, you know.”
“Good news from Her Majesty’s Government. I never expected to hear the like. Aiding and abetting treason. You’d get fifteen years yourself.”
“If Williams is on to you — run. You could be on a plane out of here tonight.”
Henry was indignant. “You met Novak, didn’t you? He’s the Moscow Resident here. One made for the hospital, not the Embassy; that was the way out for people like us. And when I used it, I found him coming the other way. If a Resident wants to come over, finds things that bad — you think I want to swap places?”
The Cathedral door creaked — a whine of pity that seemed to last forever.
An old suffragi in a skull cap and patched galibeah crept into the arena and made his way gradually towards us, pretending carefully to dust the immense spaces which separated us. While he was still some distance away I turned and scowled at him, but he took this as his welcoming cue; yellow-faced and obsequious, he saluted smartly, and padded forward in the busy, unstoppable way these men have; a manner which fawns and insists in exactly equal measure.
“Good morning, sah! I will show you Gordon’s Window, King Farouk’s Golden Gates and very interesting things. Come with me.”
“No. No, thank you. We’re just looking round on our own.” I tried to tip him off but he brushed past us, wiping his nose with a sleeve, the bright dark eyes close together, glittering like a conqueror passing over the border who knows the few essential phrases of command but nothing else in the language of the people he has set upon.