‘Nothing so funny as horseplay — as horseplay with death.’
‘Yes … Well, then. Let’s take a look. The face is a more difficult business.’ We moved towards a series of enlarged full-face and profile shots of Graham. Harper looked from me to them. ‘Nothing much there I’m afraid. A fuller face altogether. And more hair. Prison doesn’t help, of course, with you. And Graham was leading the good life by all accounts. Eating in all the best places in town; cinemas, theatres, museums, art galleries — the lot. You’ve seen the details already, haven’t you? — the Special Branch reports?’
‘Yes. But you’re not going to try and fake my face, are you?’
‘We thought of it. But there’s no point. No, the point of all this is that we have to make you feel completely in his shoes. Confidence in that is everything. Second skin — and you’ve got to really feel at home in it. Now, to do that you’ve somehow got to get to like this man. Then you’ll come to look like him. To all intents and purposes. Sympathy is the second thing, Marlow. And let’s hope that’s not too difficult. He seems to have been quite a likeable fellow, by all accounts. Apart from his politics, of course.’
I looked into the large eyes, the curiously circular, rather than oval lids in the photograph, the police measurements graded off round the edge of the print. Other than being a necessary part of the many parts that go towards making up something called a face, Graham’s eyes expressed nothing; nor did the other parts. He looked straight through the lens towards me with all the expression of a painted balloon. Yet a pin-prick would prove this bag less than insubstantial; it had no existence. This man had already destroyed his identity and I felt angry at the mechanisms in the world that had brought this about. Graham had nothing left to leave anyone. If I stepped into his shoes there would be nothing there: no one would be forced out, for he had released himself forever some time before from every pleasure and pain.
Harper bent down to pick up another photograph that had fallen, pinning it back on the board. I thought for a second that it was a different man. But it was Graham, talking to a turbanned Sikh, standing up in the corridor of a train.
‘A year ago. Some COI work with Indian railways. Reporting on the new Delhi — Calcutta Express. Can you imagine? Never at a loss for good cover, this fellow.’
Here the skin had every natural ornament. By comparison with the first photograph this one was a moving picture; one felt all the mobility that had gone into his life before and after the captured instant: gestures, words, the hard bright light through the window, the folds in the turban — each was part of a continuing fabric, and in Graham’s face one clearly saw all the happy marks of a long endearment with these moments, a firmly held commitment to the briefest values. His whole bearing, somewhere in India, was a forward position in a world where others often turned and ran, his expression an exposed asset in the general conspiracy — so much so that through his smile at that moment one could almost hear the words, coming out of the two mouths that hot afternoon:
‘Only thing you don’t have on the train is a bar.’
‘Well, that’s why we’re going to Calcutta.’
It was a good photograph. In the other a whole life-style had leaked away. And in the comparison all Graham’s politics slipped away for me too.
I didn’t care how many manifestoes he’d swallowed. I saw him now as one of those few expatriate communists who don’t give the movement a bad name, deviant because he was a person concerned with people not committees, a character out of a lost book on the faith. I wondered only where his blindness lay that had allowed him permanently to compromise his intelligence and affection, for he must have known the communist reality better than most — known that, before the millennium, his men would ruin Man in getting there, just as the other men would.
Perhaps it wasn’t blindness, but a sad knowledge of this that made him smile for the moment, flashing through the famine lands of Bihar state — and the same true sense of the priorities that took him in search of Romanian Art at the British Museum, Bratby in Wimbledon and snails at L’Etoile. Perhaps he had seen the bitter culs de sac a long way off, the horrors that are due to great ideas, and had quietly resigned his politics over the years. Instead, long before, he had launched himself on the little roads that went somewhere — to museums in the London suburbs, to the restaurants in Charlotte Street.
It wasn’t a question, I felt then, of replacing him, of copying his guile, for that had only been his cover in life. Instead I would pick up his life where he had dropped it and live it for him, like a memorial. I would continue something, replace nothing. Now I had no real need of Harper and McCoy; I was no longer on their side, I was on Graham’s. And I knew, in those terms, I could make myself indistinguishable from him though physically we so little resembled each other. It was an idea that I had to take over, not a body. What I needed now were the real details of this man’s life, the clear shapes of his affection, not this cold data that Harper had put about the room like a black museum.
‘Have to put a bit of weight on,’ Harper said. ‘You’ll have time on the boat. Graham was partial. You look as if you’d spent a year in bed.’
‘I have.’ We’d moved over to another board, headed ‘Eating Habits’.
‘It’s all here. Born with a silver fork in his mouth.’
‘Olives?’ I said, looking at one of the first items.
‘Yes,’ Harper said slowly. ‘Little bastard always went Continental. You don’t have to.’
‘I like olives.’
A cloud ran across the silly shapes of Harper’s face.
‘You’re welcome. You’re welcome to it,’ he said savagely.
‘You said I ought to try and like him. “Sympathy”, you said.’
‘That was my advice to you. I don’t have to take it myself.’ Harper moved off round the room pointing out the other boards.
‘“Physical Characteristics, Family Background, Education, Career, Personal Habits, Hobbies, Peculiarities” — some sound tracks, even a film show — the lot. You and I will take a rough look at it now. Then this evening we’ll break each classification down with the experts — McCoy and the man who took him, fellow from Special Branch.’
We’d stopped by the board marked ‘Peculiarities’.
‘No. Not queer,’ Harper said, as if some axiomatic law of nature had been detonated. ‘On the other hand very few women. And then only casuals. Hardly more than tarts.’
‘Perhaps he was Irish. Or Australian.’
Harper scowled against my smile.
Under ‘Peculiarities’ I read off the names of the various Art galleries and museums I’d heard about from McCoy. And at the end was the fact that he subscribed to Country Life.
‘Now that was peculiar,’ Harper said.
‘Must have been for the saleroom notes at the end,’ I said. ‘And the pictures of antiques in country mansions.’ Country Life had been one of the most popular magazines amongst the old lags in Durham.
‘Wrong. He got it for his mother in South Africa. Sends it to her every week. You’ll be writing to her. Let’s go back to the beginning.’
We moved up to ‘Background, Education and Career’ at the end of the room where the sideboard would have been.
George Graham. Born 14 July 1929. Royal Free Hospital, Islington, of Mary and John Graham, 32 Canonbury Sq., W.C.1. Father was Master Printer with Seale&Co., small firm of fine-art printers in South Kensington.John Graham enlisted with Argylland Sutherland Highlanders as an N.C.O. in 1939. Served with them in North Africa, Lybia and Egypt and was killed in action, Western Desert, May 1943. With the help of a grant from the Worshipful Guild of Master Printers, George Graham attended St.Paul’s School, Hammersmith, taking a scholarship from there to St. Andrew’s University in 1948, reading Englishand Modern Languages. Graduated in 1952. Joined British Council in same year and was posted to Beirut where he spent one year teaching Englishin the British School. In September, 1953 was transferred to the British School, Heliopolis, Cairo, where he taught for 2 years. From September, 1955 until he left Egypt during the Suez campaign of November 1956, he was Senior English Master at Victoria College, Cairo. Subsequently he worked as a teacher and University professor in East Africa attached to the British Counciclass="underline" at Nairobi, Makerere College, Uganda, and finally at colleges in what were then Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. At the break up of the Federation of these countries in 1961 he returned to London where he took up work as a junior Reports Officer at the Central Office of Information attached to their East African section, where he was responsible, among other things, for various film, TV and radio documentaries. Since 1968 he had been responsible for advising Information Controller, COI, on general policy matters relating to British propaganda in the Middle East, Africa and India. In this capacity he was away from London for several long periods…