This was the message, I was sure, that had cheated me, lain in wait for me all morning, the echoes of something unrevealed searching everywhere in the building for expression; a secret in the dry atmosphere hidden in the shoe-shine man’s harsh singing, which only I could interpret, which was for me alone.
And now it had come clear, in Jackson’s polite responses: ‘I used to farmthere for a while. Inthe south.’ He had given me a phrase in a vital lost language through which I could now elucidate a whole civilisation’s hieroglyphics. The puzzle resolved itself so simply and clearly that, before I thought of the long academic journey ahead towards full interpretation, I rushed headlong, an exultant professor, into translating the first sentence of the mysterious text: I could suddenly see this thin, amused man Guy Jackson — with his wife Helen — standing outside a colonial farmstead on the uplands, the huge skies reaching down over them, a blue canopy, smothering the fever and acacia trees that coloured an old lawn. They had just come back from doing something active — were standing there by the porch in old clothes, sweating, welcoming the evening.
I looked quickly across at Helen Jackson deeply gossiping with Wheel. I had forgotten: there was one other person who must have drawn from the morning something quite buried and forbidden: an equal secret. If she was the woman in the letters I was not the man she had written them to; her lovely messages had gone badly astray. Only she would know that, but she would know it well — too well, the memory spreading like a fire through so many hotel bedrooms. I was looking at a woman who had been waiting for her lover, and he had turned up all right, bright and early, untrue in everything except in name. And that was false, too — how she must have remembered — as false as all my body was to all of his.
Helen Jackson and George Graham: they had been the lovers in the story, in those letters, who had come to argue about the past and future of Africa and the same ruthless pendulum of happiness: ‘I am not afraid of the future …’; the ‘natural Tory’ whose confident politics had collapsed and the disappointed Marxist; it all fitted. I was sure of it. Her aristocratic curiosity exactly reflected Graham’s comments on her, while her suddenly frozen welcome after she heard my name confirmed all my own quick inventions.
Helen Jackson, the wife of my London contact, was my mistress. What was the rest of the equation? Had she any idea, for example, who George Graham really was? Was their relationship the only illicit thing they shared? Had she been covertly bound to him, hidden with him, for six years, without knowing his final identity? She must have been blind to that, I thought. Yet how had it all come about? How had a deep-cover KGB agent come to love the wife of a senior officer in British Intelligence? Initially one can think only of coincidence in such a strange meeting, but years in the same profession made me have my doubts.
Jackson and I chatted on about New York apartments, the relative merits and dangers of the East and West sides; they had a place in a new block on the East Side, off Second Avenue in the Fifties.
‘Wretchedly expensive and only really half safe — with the children. But there’s not much alternative. It’s only ten minutes’ walk here, which cuts out the transport business. You’ll come round — come for drinks this evening if you’re free. We’ve a few friends coming.’
I thanked him without saying yes or no. Already I felt myself an interloper, the lover gliding easily into the circle of the husband’s trust, the cheat who takes every liberty — another man’s wife, his gin — who tells his children a bedtime story before dinner, and makes clandestine arrangements for tomorrow with his wife while she tidies up afterwards in the kitchen.
Jackson was pushing me into a role I didn’t want. Yet this woman had been part of George Graham, the deepest thing in his life, possibly. I could not avoid the implications of this indefinitely. I saw at once that I should either have to sort things out with Helen Jackson, or explain the whole matter to her husband. But this latter course never struck me seriously; I was not going to betray this confidence of Graham’s no matter in how many other ways I was his stooge. She and I would speak about it by ourselves, I thought. I should tell her the position, she would have to accept it and keep her mouth shut about it — as she had done about Graham for six years previously. For that time she had withheld the fact of her real lover from her husband; now she could do the same with his pretender.
Wheel had gone on talking to her about her children, two girls, Sarah and Sheila, whose ages I couldn’t determine from the odd snatches of conversation — some question of a nanny or a teacher, I couldn’t make out which, so that they might have been two years old or twelve. And from her expression it seemed that Helen Jackson was as uninvolved in her conversation with Wheel as we two were on the other side of the table. The curious intensity had dropped from her eyes, the invitation had all been withdrawn, her flourishing airs quite subsided. Before, though cast in a classic mould, her buoyancy and vitality had lifted her far above those confines into a sphere of lightness and finesse. Now she seemed exhausted, a weight had fallen on all her natural virtues; she was hesitant in everything, as though quite overcome with mundane domestic worries. She turned to her husband: ‘Adam has the address — of that nursery school on the West side. We should go take a look at it.’
It was only then I realised she was American: the accents, the grammar, were light but distinct. Could this woman have lived in South Africa or the old Rhodesias? Perhaps I was quite wrong about her. Then she took a notebook from her bag and started to write down the address and I had no more doubts; the handwriting was the same as that in the letters — even the ink, a black ink — the same slanting, hurried, rather immature scrawl. She was leaning forward, using the space of table right in front of me, as though anxious that I should see her writing clearly, be able to compare the messages. She seemed wilfully to be offering me conclusive proof of our previous association, of her fidelity and my lies. When she had finished writing she looked up at me, but spoke to her husband: ‘Where’s Mr Graham staying?’
I repeated my piece about the Tudor Hotel, and she said at once like an old friend: ‘Oh, you can’t go on staying there. Friends of ours on the West Side have an apartment in an old block; it’s a co-op — they know the super; I’m sure you’d get something there. Wouldn’t he, Guy?’
‘Yes, might be a chance. Might be lucky.’
Shc looked down at the address she’d just taken from Wheel. ‘Their block’s not far from the nursery school — Ninety-second on Park. Come with me if you like, Mr Graham, while I take a look at the school.’
‘That’s an idea,’ Guy Jackson said nicely. ‘You don’t want to wander too much around the West Nineties on your own if you can help it. Even in daytime. Take him along, Helen.’
He might have been a mari complaisant furthering his wife’s cause. Yet I was sure it was a piece of genuine solicitude on his part, towards me at least. She alone was making the running — furthering her intended inquiries with me and wasting no time about it.
How much experience she must have had in that sort of thing, I thought — bluntly arranging meetings, deceiving her husband right under his nose with all the urgent rashness that love requires and forgives. And I didn’t blame her. She had not loved casually, that I knew. All her blatant intensity — the full weight of her happy curiosity that had filled her face until a few minutes before — had once devolved over another man, and had done so completely, without deviation or restraint; one could see that too — she would not play with any man.