I ceased to care then.
I learnt the final trick of prison life: how to sleep twelve or fifteen hours a day. I became a vegetable, without pain, and had to be literally forced to my feet by warders with cold sponges, waking into the terror which every moment of consciousness had become, to defecate, to eat, to prove to the prison commissioners and the taxpayers that there was life yet, one live prisoner present and accounted for. To live was the only pain then; to get through those few waking hours was like living an imminent death, due at any moment, which one loathed yet longed for. And they realised this, of course, so that it became far more important that I should stay alive than that they should prevent my escaping. Gradually my cell and everything I might use in it turned softer, was padded in foam rubber, while implements of every kind turned to wood or polythene. The fibrous grit, the hardness, was taken out of everything — so that in keeping me alive they sent me back to the womb; finally I was sleeping nearly all the time on a rubber sheet, half drugged under a quilted Swedish duvet. Even the moody, inventive Swedes, they knew, hadn’t yet learnt how to strangle themselves with an eiderdown.
Latterly, they had moved me from my cell in the middle of ‘E’ wing to an improvised hospital ward at the end of the corridor — two cells with the wall between bashed out — and two beds, one for me and the other, empty, for the train robber, who had kept his mind intact with purposeful dreams of escape and the money somewhere under a stone in the Surrey woods. This fellow, with fourteen years in front of him, lived at the far end of the corridor, taking adult education courses in Spanish and Business Management and beating off offers from the popular Sundays to do a weekly column of investment advice. I suppose he’d already bought a suite of offices in the big new Alcoa building on Copacabana beach and was considering copper futures in the light of Allende’s recent victory on the other coast. While for my part, when I was not asleep, my only thought was to get to sleep.
I lay on my stomach and face, struggling in various positions, legs straddling imaginary fences, trying to ease the permanent feeling of cramp and strain in every muscle, arms crabbed over my head, sweating and shivering, like a man locked in a permanent hangover, longing for oblivion. For exercise I was forced up and held by two warders and frogmarched up and down the corridor, while the train robber played bar-football with another warden at one end, the two of them looking at me with real horror as I came towards them and left again, a Lazarus, a perpetual yo-yo.
I remember from that time, really the only clear thing, the viscous metallic clamour of the football machine and the invigorating cries of the two men, the displaced Cockney warder and the train robber, so that when my back was turned, going away from them, I was easily carried into the frenzied world of a real game, the swaying mass of red and white Arsenal hats and scarves, like curling surf, when there were near-goals. The robber was a Londoner too, from Islington. And warders are human enough, especially on a basic of £21 a week with six children and the mother-in-law in the back room. And their charge must often have seemed to them a living proof of the chance of eight home draws on next week’s pools. He had half a million under a stone somewhere outside, all the fun of the world in six years’ time, with remission — and good luck to him.
I, on the other hand, was a ‘traitor’ which was something they didn’t really follow. My ‘crimes’ — the political charges, giving ‘succour and support to Her Majesty’s enemies’, like a cow, the clause in the Official Secrets Act under which I’d been sent down for twenty-eight years four years before — all this was gobbledegook to them. I’d been a spy, a double agent with the KGB, I’d betrayed the Queen. These bare bones, which they knew of, meant nothing to them, since there’d been no sex or guns, or champagne or swimming pools involved. I was a contradiction in terms for them — a dull spy, as far removed from their routine as an atom scientist might have been. Thus the only badge they could pin on me was that of confidence trickster and intellectual from a class way above them. I was someone — a real rogue, top of the ladder — in that criminal category of fraudulent stockbrokers and crooked captains of industry; old-school-tie boys, class enemies and remittance men from the Home Counties Jaguar-and-pine belt; cads whose richly deserved comeuppance was appropriately equalled only by the length and severity of their punishment.
And if I didn’t occupy the worst prison category, that of child molester or murderer, it was simply because they thought I was homosexual. Spies who were caught, without trying to shoot their way out, were always queer; they had vexatious, doting old mothers in Bexhill and spent their money on puce-coloured socks and Mantovani instead of dark glasses and golden Dunhills.
2
When he came he said ‘Good morning.’
It sounded like an old radio comic — ‘Goodmorning — Goodmorning!’ until I realised he’d simply been repeating the phrase over and over, leaning across my bed, trying to wake me, for I’d been deeply asleep.
‘Good morning, Marlow. How are things? How are you?’
What a grandmother of a man McCoy had always been. The more he observed the proprieties the more dangerously stupid one knew he was being — or going to be. In those days, when he planned things for Williams in Holborn, how well I had come to know his hopeless foolishness, his sycophantic flourishes, his acid disdain for people in the field.
And I should have remembered McCoy at once for all these lying niceties if I’d not become so numbed in the four years since I’d left his Mid-East section — that awful anonymous building in Holborn whose only virtue lay in that Henekey’s long wine bar was only ten minutes walk down the Strand. But now his polite inquiries had the intense familiarity of a recurrent dream; remembered accents from a real character, clouded in sleep-thoughts, that one tried desperately to place in a real world.
‘Hello, Marlow. I’ve come to see you — if I may …’
I thought I was dreaming, and it was this that woke me, startled. During the first few years in Durham I’d dreamt indeed; a whole extra-territorial life; serial dreams and play-of-the-month productions; engrossing entertainments which one could question and relate the morning after like a Christie addict, or Maigret querying the stain on the brothel curtains.
‘Mr Marlow …’
A face. Round. A chin too many. Older than the bland doctor who came to see me most days, talking behind the screen about sugar content and drip feeds. A tightly knotted, striped old boy’s tie; white detached collar, dark suit; austerity in everything, except the face which rose up from the tight neck like a pastry; puffy, substantial but without any definition.