In such a place, this hypocritical Purgatory, Wheel was in his element. We twirled our glasses. Wheel had introduced me to a strong Canadian ale. We watched the dark foam ripple round the edges, smelling the sudden release of hops and barley that pricked our noses like an explosion in a brewery. Then he lifted his eyes to the moving scene in front of us like an old racegoer, weighing form.
‘That Russian there,’ he said, pointing to a peasant eminence who had stood up near us, ‘is known as the “Russian who said Yes”. Years ago — this is his second time here — he once said “Yes” by mistake at some quite unimportant committee on agricultural tariffs. He was sent home for a year. When he came back the same committee cheered him to the echo. It was uproarious. And that’s Omar Feki. The Banker. He won’t sit down. When he first got here, twenty years ago, on his first day, he sat down — there, on one of those sofas — and had his pocket picked by another Arab. A terrible business. It turned out the robber had been one of his customers in Beirut — some old disagreement about his account. So Feki’s been on his feet ever since. They call him “Once Bitten”.’
It was only then that I noticed the couple at a table opposite the bar, their backs to the sunny view, the rose gardens and the statue of Peace beyond. The bright light had shielded them from me until that moment, keeping them more or less in silhouette, so that I had to put my hand over my eyes briefly, pretending to look out on the river, before I could make them out clearly.
The man had his legs crossed, so that one foot swayed dangerously in the path of diplomats on their way to the coffee shop beyond the bar: a long, thin foot, bound in a fine dark worsted cloth and ending in a traditional, hand-made English laced shoe. He was conspicuously lean and tall, even while seated, and just as obviously English in a way — though he couldn’t have been more than forty — that was as old-fashioned and correct as his dress. A thin, firm face, something a little pinched about the lips; careful eyes and long flat ears — a certain chiselled hollowness touched up by a confident weariness: he might have taken drugs or been the last son of a profligate earl — chances very much favoured the latter.
But it wasn’t a wooden face by any means. Only its present outlines were fixed. For the moment it had simply withdrawn the currency of expression; it was resting, as if inwardly reflecting on its assets, leaving only a rough estimate of its worth on view, so that passers-by might be warned of the stakes involved before making an investment.
Yes, these barely animate remains seemed to say — I’m very ready to smile, and more besides: at the right sort of joke from the right sort of person; two events, which, as the expression confirmed, it considered extremely unlikely in the present circumstances. The man might have been in the hall of the Travellers’ Club facing at last a long and thankfully postponed lunch date with a provincial relative.
The woman was a little younger, halfway through thirty perhaps, and where he was a little wan and fluted, she had the bearing of someone likely to be generous to a fault. But with her height, for she was tall as well, the fractional plumpness about the hips and chest, far from being a disadvantage, gave her the virtues of a classical anatomy — the slightly exaggerated contours which artists used to attempt but human beings rarely achieve.
The two of them sat there, both with tubby crystals of light Scotch, with a confidence and ease that made everyone else in the long room seem misplaced. But it was a divided confidence. One could tell immediately: they were not self-, but other-seeking.
Wheel noticed them just after I did and raised his hand. The man stood up in answer and, leaning over the woman, took her glass. Her eyes followed him as he came towards us.
‘The Jacksons,’ Wheel said. ‘Compatriots of yours, Mr Graham. Guy’s with the politicals. Floor above us.’ And when her husband was being introduced to me the woman’s eyes met mine in a brief gaze, smiling a little social message, as if to say: ‘I’m glad you’ve met him, for now so much the more easily will you meet me.’
The three of us went back to join her at their table, our glasses refilled.
‘George Graham — just joined us from London. Guy Jackson — Helen Jackson,’ Wheel pointed each of them out with his arm to me, repeating the formalities of introduction with them both individually as though he was as much aware of their separateness as I had been.
‘Mr Graham is going to report on our reports — a new spy in the nest.’ Wheel looked at both of them and laughed, but got little response. Both of them were looking at me intently, as if I was an expected guest.
And of course I was expected, by him at least. I realised that at once: Jackson was my SIS contact with London, with McCoy and Harper. They had briefed me about him. And I saw those two rugged, despoiled faces, cracked and devious in their separate despairs, rising up like a shudder in the warm and alcoholic air.
As for Helen Jackson, her name rang out for me with an echo I couldn’t catch, until suddenly I saw how it summed up her classic proportions. But at that moment, though, just after we had been introduced, she reflected her Trojan namesake like a statue. The warmth of her overture was still there, brightly on her face, but it had developed no further. The expression of welcome had frozen everywhere on her skin, startled to death.
Wheel set her animation going again with some sly remark about her presence in the building and her husband took me up with an interest in which the quality of restraint was obviously feigned, as though he were trying to get me to sell him something he wanted badly without my realising this and putting too high a price on it.
‘Wheel told me you were coming over,’ he said agreeably, as if I were a neighbour of his and had just dropped by from the end of the street. ‘With the COI, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, Reports Officer. East Africa mainly.’
Jackson lifted his glass and I noticed a brassily gold signet ring on the marriage finger. It struck one as glaringly out of place with the rest of his restrained decor, like a dropped ‘h’ in the middle of a speech from the throne. It seemed precisely intended as a vulgar flourish, calling attention to itself; an obscenity in the middle of the general refinement which he had purposefully isolated. I felt suddenly that he wore it as a mark of failure and not of love, as evidence of an unachieved fidelity, like a campaign medal from a dirty war.
‘God knows what you’ll make of our UN reports,’ he went on, and I could hear Wheel’s inquiries of Helen Jackson from the other side of the table ‘… and the kids?’ Guy Jackson’s voice was soft, I realised now, like an old man’s; his words spaced out too, as though he was anxious to give himself the maximum amount of time for thought still compatible with coherent expression.
‘I’m above you — the SG’s political department. Very few reports come out of us, thank God. We keep it to ourselves. But the rest of the building is an absolute snowfall. No doubt Wheel has told you. You were on the Africa desk in London, weren’t you?’
‘Latterly, yes. East Africa, Malawi, a bit of Rhodesia.’
‘I know that part myself. I farmed there for a while. In the south. Where are you staying?’
“They’ve put me up temporarily at the Tudor Hotel round the corner. Till I get an apartment.’
I was still considering the problems of accommodation ahead, the dull business of phone calls, arguments and too much money, when I stopped thinking of everything, as if I’d been shot, all die senses shocked out of me, and I was still running like a chicken without a head.
Africa. It was Africa again. ‘I farmed there for a while.’ I fell on Jackson’s casual words like a man in a music quiz trying vainly to complete a verse in a popular song. ‘… farmed there for a while. In the south’ …? The south. Farming up-country? In the old Rhodesias or South Africa? And then the answer flew at me, the corresponding phrase, the next line of music: ‘Oncehe was someone in the country; now, just something in the city’ — the words of some married woman (‘He doesn’tknow’) in letters to George Graham. The letters I had read in Marylebone and on the boat over.