‘I’m Donald McCoy. You remember — your ACO in Holborn. You were in Library and Information. My office was on the floor below, next the annexe. You remember …’
I remembered the accents then. It was the only thing McCoy remained true to in the constant temporising and prevarication which was his life — the tough and broad, yet often elusive tones. McCoy the scholarship boy, Belfast man and non-conformist; of course I remembered him.
He sat on a chair now, next the bed, seeming perplexed; a traveller who had come home to find a relative far worse than he expected, having to think of undertakers instead of grapes.
‘I’m sorry to wake you. But it’s important. Would you like to sit up. Have some coffee? You used to smoke, didn’t you? Can I get you some cigarettes?’
I hadn’t smoked for a year either; taste had gone as well as dreams; all the interpretative senses. But he got up and went outside, returning with the doctor and a warder with a trolley of coffee, biscuits and two packets of Players. They must have been waiting outside, on cue. The trolley interested me, more than any of the people. It was new, lacquered in dull gold with a handled tray on top, like nothing we’d ever had in Durham. And I thought — he’s brought the lot up with him from Holborn, the ten o’clock coffee ritual, the trolleys in the corridor, the tough little Irish and Jamaican ladies hovering outside the senior offices waiting for the disdainful Tunbridge Wells secretaries to make an order. Again, I’d not thought about Holborn in a long while, and now each moment of McCoy’s presence brought something of it back. He was picking up the bits of a puzzle I’d once been part of and that had been smashed and thrown away years before; picking them up and offering them to me. A messenger would come in through the cell door at any moment with a pile of ‘Extras’ and ‘Ordinaries’, the flimsy internal memos with the different security ratings, and by mid-morning my copy of last Saturday’s Al Ahram would arrive with Heykal’s weekly message for the whole world.
The doctor said to McCoy: ‘Here you are, Mr Hewlett. Let me know if there’s anything else.’ And then to me, leaning down as though to a child: ‘This is Mr Hewlett. Come all the way from London to see you. So do be a bit bright about it. We’re doing our best.’ He fixed a brief smile onto his face, as quick as a franking machine running over an envelope with the message ‘So much for humanity’ and then he was gone.
Hewlett? I pushed myself up and got the pillow behind me, sensing a return of all the old anger in me, bitter ironies forming again: Hewlett. They couldn’t ever let up, could they? Couldn’t go ten miles out of London without aliases, subterfuges, games; letter drops, cut-outs, surveillances.
McCoy got up, meticulously, as if on cue for a master shot in a film, and walked over to the trolley. And his words came as if from a script too — well-worn, tired, the twelfth take of the same scene that morning in a B movie.
‘Hewlett, yes.’ He paused and poured. ‘Yes, indeed.’ He licked his top lip judiciously. ‘As far as they’re concerned I’m your accountant, come about your financial affairs. Hewlett — of Carter, Hewlett and Bagshawe, Red Lion Square.’ He was pleased with the conceit, isolating the idea to himself, like a stage-struck juvenile pondering a great character role. ‘They don’t know. About Holborn and that, except the governor.’
‘You are a fool, McCoy. A bloody fool. Besides, I’ve got no accountant.’
I hadn’t voiced such a direct opinion in years and my throat felt cracked and dry as though I’d made a long speech. I’d shocked myself far more than him. He put a cup of coffee on the table next to me and I wanted it now, like iced water, but didn’t dare, knowing I’d spill the thing in physical confusion. Thought had come again, a creaking process, unearthed feeling groping for words and finding true sentences first time round. I might not be so lucky again and feeling was still miles away from action.
‘They tell me you’ve been getting pretty low here, Marlow. Not — facing up, eh?’
‘Not —’ I’d wanted to say ‘Not taking it like a man’ but couldn’t. The ‘t’ on ‘taking’ threw me completely.
‘No need to force it, Marlow. I know what it must feel like. Just listen for a minute. I’m Hewlett because what I’ve got to suggest is just between you and I; no one else. So don’t rush it. I’ll be here overnight. We’ll be seeing as much of each other as you need. You see, they may have made a mistake, you see. All of them, I mean. About you, about your trial. And I want you to help us put it right.’
McCoy was a great believer in self-help. For him the sin would always remain, indelibly struck on the man, even if he were later proved guiltless. Even then, four years later, in the matter of my trial, it wasn’t a question of my having been right and everyone else wrong. His non-conformism demanded that he excuse his own mistakes in the matter by spreading the fault equally amongst everyone involved. No one could ever be free of blame in McCoy’s Old Testament canon; except himself, for he had seen the light and had a permanent message for all the fallen men of his department. McCoy believed deeply in other people’s original sin. How he must sometimes have longed for the original faith itself, where, bleeding, he could have put himself upon a cross.
‘You remember, at the trial? Your defence tried to show that Williams had been a double, a KGB man for years — how, when you learnt this in Egypt, Williams framed you by getting Moscow to abduct your wife and then displaying her in Moscow. At the time it all added up perfectly. Your guilt, I mean.’
‘Yes. Perfectly.’
McCoy ran on, encouraged. I stretched out a hand for the coffee. ‘Here, let me help.’
‘I’ll do it myself.’ And I did.
‘Well, we lost the whole Cairo-Albert circle out there. And only you had been in touch with them all. Then you turned up back in England, remarkably, in the circumstances. How could the Egyptians have missed you, we thought, when they got everyone else? Because the Russians organised your escape, you were one of them, being sent home to roost again. We couldn’t really come to any other conclusion. You were the deep-cover man in our section, not Williams.’
I liked McCoy’s extra-legal, seventeenth-century use of the word ‘we’ in his précis, as though judges, in matters where the security of the state was involved, were no more than venal hacks, bewigged, red-faced oafs who could be paid off later with a yard or two of ale and a night out with John Cleland. ‘Cairo-Albert circle’: the ridiculous code designation rang out for me that morning like a distant ‘Tally-Ho!’ heard by a vegetarian, an omen of danger and disgust, swelling on the wind again, attractive and repellent in equal measure. For it is the unpleasant parts of old life that really stay with us, even when we have learnt the tricks of denying them any currency.
Yet somehow one is grateful, too, for this horrifying renewed evidence of a life once badly lived; for these viscous images, once resurrected, burn with a fierce warmth, while others, which were purely happy, seem beyond recall. And I was grateful that morning for anything, however shabby, which linked me indubitably to a past existence, which proved I had lived once, however badly.
And that must have been exactly McCoy’s intention — the thought behind his précis, with which he had to jog my heart. I would be no use to him, I was dead unless he could re-invest me with my previous identity, tempt me with the evidence of an old role. He knew the rot, the pretence, of offering anybody the chance of ‘turning over a new leaf’. He knew that what we really want is a future in old and rash ways, subtle approval of a lost excess — knew, with the perception of a psychiatrist, that if we are all prisoners (and there could be no doubt about that in my case) the grudge we bear for this insists that, for release, we must take up where we left off, not start afresh. And so that morning he called up for me my old self, the men, and all the details of the Cairo-Albert circle four years before, all the shabby folly of those times, as one drags a rotten carcase across the land to stir a fox.