"Major, " Sladen said, "if there is even a hint that our chief negotiator had, ah, eaten a part of one of their countrymen…" He had a lot of difficulty in saying that.
"Suppose he promised to sick him up again?" Maxim said coldly.
"Bon appйtit" Agnes murmured.
Sladen sat up straight as if somebody had pinched his bottom. George looked from Maxim to Agnes, honestly appalled. "Where do people like you two come from? I have never heard any two remarks in my life…"
"You're getting your colour back, duckie," Agnes said.
George sat throbbing and steaming a little.
"Wars are messy things," Maxim said.
"Thank you, Major." Sladen gazed at him as he would at a broken sewer. "If we put out a press release saying that wars are messy things, that should avert any slight agitation our cross-Channel friends might feel. I trust you'll let us quote you?" He stood up. "George, I'd better get back to the pit-head. We'll liaise very soon on this. Give my love to Annette. I can find my own way…" his voice faded into the glum twilight as he stalked through to the next room.
"No Cabinet Office Christmas card for you, this year," Agnes told Maxim.
George got up slowly, turned on three lights in big simple shades, and pulled the long drapes closed. In the golden light, the room looked a little younger, but not much.
"He's a pompous old fart," George said, "but in this instance…" He looked at his watch; it wasn't yet five o'clock. "Does anyone feel like a real drink?" he asked wistfully.
They shook their heads. George hesitated, then went across to a break-front chiffonier in the corner by the fireplace and took out a bottle of The Famous Grouse, a tumbler and a bottle of Malvern water.
"I don't know much about this," Maxim said, "but I don't see who would publish the letter. It can't be proveable unless de Carette admits it, and he's already lied to us about it. So wouldn't they just set a new record for libel damages?"
"Try sueing Pravda in Moscow," Agnes suggested.
"Try sueing Der Spiegel in Hamburg, for that matter." George ambled back with his drink and a little coaster to protect the table. "No – but there are underground magazines all over Europe who'd use it, and you can't sue them because they just fade away like smoke and start up again as something else. But that isn't the real question. If Moscow can persuade the French that this might be published about the Brit they're negotiating with, then they wouldn't touch Tyler with a ten-foot gaffe. They've got voters to think of, as well."
"There is one other little danger." Agnes said quietly. "Publishing this letter would be firing off all your ammunition in one broadside, and Moscow doesn't work like that, not usually. If I were them, I'd use it to put the screws on Tyler. I'd whisper to him, first. So if the letter just might exist and Moscow just might have it, how do we know Tyler isn't already their joe?"
The idea hung over them, like a thunderstorm reluctant to break.
George slumped down, clenching his glass with both hands. "That does it. Luxembourg is off. It has to be."
Maxim waited for Agnes, but she was staring blindly at a picture over the fireplace, a very detailed view of a dead hare and several flowers. He said pleasantly: "You're surrendering rather quickly, aren't you?"
"Harry, in politics, it is better never to have loved at all than to have loved and lost."
"Then Moscow wins without firing a shot. Probably without even knowing they've won, since they most likely haven't got the letter, and won't understand why you've pulled out of the Luxembourg talks."
"You're in deep waters, Harry," Agnes said, without looking at him.
"I'll try and remember to hold my breath." Maxim went on watching George, his face expressionless and his eyes cold. "You're making sure the French would believe anything – anything – Moscow says about Tyler, whether they've got the letter or just dreamed something up on the spot. They could say he was gay and Paris would have to believe it, because we've dropped him from the first team."
Agnes opened her mouth, then shut it again. George grunted, staring at the backs of his hands and finding no encouragement there in the wrinkles and blotches. Some things were irreversible. Life was irreversible. He wished he were Maxim's age.
"Harry – I don't take these decisions-"
"You're giving the advice."
"It's for the Headmaster to decide."
"So what can we lose that we aren't throwing away now?"
"Harry, this is a matter of national defence."
"What in the hell do you think Army officers are for?"
"Show-jumping," Agnes said, and as Maxim snapped out of his chair she knew he was going to hit her and possibly kill her. Her training was no use against his training.
Then he stopped, just as abruptly as he'd started.
"I'm sorry, Harry," she mumbled breathlessly. "It was a bloody stupid thing to say. I'm sorry."
George gave a long, long sigh that ended as a groan. "You weren't called in to advise at these levels, Harry."
Maxim nodded, looking down at his shoes and blinking quickly. "Then as a voter and a taxpayer… You must know what Tyler's going to propose at Luxembourg, and he obviously won't go there alone. If Moscow's pulling his strings and he proposes something different, you'll know straight away. And as far as a scandal goes, you have to balance that against the value of an agreement with the French. I dare say it's a risk. But if you don't fight any battles, you won't win any wars."
"That doesn't sound much like the viewpoint of the average taxpayer." He looked up at Agnes. "Since it appears to be the open season, would Little Miss Muffet care to take a shot?"
She frowned and said slowly: "You always have to work with flawed material. There may still be a few saints around – I like to believe there are – but they don't go into politics or nuclear strategy."
For a long time, George turned the heavy cut-glass tumbler in his chubby hands. Then he said simply: "Those are honest points of view. I'll put them to the Headmaster along with whatever else I give him."
29
George often wondered what the PM would have decided. As it was, two days later, Moscow decided for him.
Professor John White Tyler hadn't slept in college that night. Even so, he would normally have been back in his rooms with plenty of time to make coffee, skim through the morning papers and perhaps hear the radio news headlines before his ten o'clock lecture. But the girl he had woken up with was doing a thesis on Hindu literature, and their farewell was a long and complicated act that Tyler thought he had once seen carved in full frontal colour on a Katmandu temple. He was delighted with a girl of such dedication, but it did mean that he only had time to change his shirt, find the file for that lecture, and hurry out again. He had shaved the evening before. He always did.
"The most carefully conceived and most believable nuclear targetting policy carries with it no guarantee that any government or leader will actually implement it at the moment of decision. You may build the most perfect rifle for hunting dangerous game, precisely fitted to your customer's arm length and the weight of trigger pull he prefers – but you cannot build in any device that will make him aim straight and squeeze the trigger at the moment the tiger charges."
He laid his hands flat on the side of the lectern and glanced up at the undergraduates stacked in front of him. There were more of them than usual, gazing blankly down from behind their curved stalls made of cheap wood the vivid orange colour of unfried fishcakes. Perhaps somebody else had been recommending this lecture to his own students.
"Nor should you be able to," he said clearly.