Spinks had been in charge of some senior boys on a mountaineering trip in Wales during the Easter holidays, and this was the unpacked remains of their week in the hills. I left the bag where it was, assuming that Spinks, when he’d sobered up, would return for it.
In the same room, behind a locked metal grill, was the school’s archery equipment, half a dozen junior flat bows, with arrows to match, and the same number of more powerful, fibreglass, recurve bows, 25- and 30-pounders, for the seniors. One of these, the biggest of them, belonged to Spinks, a 32-pounder which he used on the longer ranges and which I’d come to shoot with fairly well myself over the past year. I had duplicate keys now, both to this archery equipment and to the sports room itself. So it was that Spinks’ alcoholic and sexual excesses led directly to my own survival a week later.
But before then the headmaster had asked to see me.
‘About Spinks,’ he said, getting up suddenly from the big mahogany table. His study, the best front room of an older Georgian building in the school, looked out over the playing fields. A house cricket match was in progress on one of the far pitches, the white clad figures distant moving spots on the green sward. The headmaster, at the window now with binoculars, gazed at the players lovingly. He’d been something of a cricketer himself, apparently, in his youth, playing for his county.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What about Spinks?’ I bad things to do, indeed I should have been out umpiring one end of the cricket match at that very moment. I liked my cricket, too.
The headmaster turned. ‘I don’t want it voiced around: that he was … drunk in charge.’
‘Oh, was he? I didn’t know.’
‘Yes. That wretched car of his.’
‘His car? I understood it all had to do with Matron — in his car.’
The Head looked at me quickly. ‘You heard that?’ he said, alarmed.
‘It’s a rumour.’
‘Worse still.’ The head pulled at one of his long earlobes mournfully.
‘I liked Spinks,’ I said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry he’s gone. He was very good with the boys, even when he was drunk.’
‘No good at cricket, though.’
I didn’t point out — and I should have done — that the Head himself, fanatic that he was, normally tried to deal with most of the cricket, certainly with the seniors, leaving Spinks and me to manage all the unwilling or incapable other boys. Spinks himself had told me he’d never been given a chance with the cricket.
I hadn’t respected the Headmaster much before. Now I suddenly disliked him. Spinks had had to do with life, at least, drinking and copulating and thumping most arrows into the gold at fifty metres on a good day. This man and his third-rate school were both concerned only with appearances.
I said to Laura when I got home that evening. ‘The Head’s a fool.’ She was out in the back garden by the stable, helping Clare with the pony.
‘And his school is worse,’ I went on. ‘If you can’t get into Eton or Winchester why bother with any of these other tatty sort of places at all?’
She said nothing. So I added, with a touch of annoyance, ‘I’ll have to get another job.’
‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘What?’
It was the old story. Apart from the nonsense of espionage and now fourth-form English, I was unemployable. Oh, I might have held down some awful job in London in advertising or some such. But in the middle of the country?
‘You’ve almost finished that book, haven’t you? About your time in Egypt,’ Laura said.
‘Yes. But they don’t publish books like mine any more: colonial memoirs, amateur history. There’s no market. Only for sex or violence — or Edwardian country diaries.’
I looked out over the pasture behind the cottage, the fine, early evening light piercing through the great lime tree next the church, edging all the fresh green leaves with gold. More than forty I thought, with nothing, professionally, to show for it. A feeling of disappointed ambition came over me. But for what, I wondered? What had I ever really wanted to be? A taxi driver, yes, when I was a frustrated, motor-mad boy during the war and had noticed that, besides doctors, only taxi drivers could get petrol and drive freely all over the place. But apart from that, afterwards? I realised that I’d never wanted to do very much in the world as it had become. I’d fallen into my few jobs or, as with my work in British Intelligence, they’d been forced on me.
I’d seen behind the curtains of British political power — seen the moral vacuum there, the casual mayhem, the violence to no end. And since then I’d compromised with the public face of our morality, too, in the minor public school where I worked, and I saw that now in all its pretentious hypocrisy.
There weren’t any more dashing people left in England, I suddenly decided; only crafty ones. The idealists, the witty drunks, the eccentrics, they were all gone. Decent fools like Spinks, for example, they got the chop every day, while the cunning, the dull and the vulgar prospered. The small men had come to rule.
And since I wasn’t a crusader, lacking the heroic almost entirely, there wasn’t much left for me to do in England, I realised. Without Laura and Clare I would have sold up and gone out to the south somewhere, France or even further afield. But with them I had everything, I saw that then, and the school didn’t matter.
Laura said, ‘Well, you’ll have to stay where you are then, won’t you? For the time being.’
Our lazy Welsh pony leant against the stable door, dozing in the sunlight, almost asleep even though Clare was using the curry-comb, working it vigorously down its flank. She talked to the animal as she combed out the last of its winter coat. He was called ‘Banbury’.
‘Blueberry, Bunbury, Bellberry,’ she chanted with each stroke. She named him differently almost every day. Minty, our wire-haired terrier, had joined us and was lying out now, knowing it to be quite safe, in a sunny spot right beneath the pony’s belly.
Laura said, ‘Why don’t we have a drink when I’m finished here — and forget about the stupid school.’
With happiness, how easy it was not to care a damn in the end about failed ambition or the state of the nation. ‘For the time being,’ Laura had said. And that, certainly, I knew now, was everything.
Of course, what I’ve asked myself since is why David Marcus should have suddenly decided to kill me more than two years after I’d finished all my dangerous business with him. So why take so long to move against me?
I can think of only one answer: as Head of Service now, he’d got wind that I’d started to write about my chequered career in British Intelligence, and thought that I was about to join the ranks of those little sneaks, as he would have seen it, who told tales out of class. Yet there must have been more to it than this: many others, in fact and fiction, had thus publicly betrayed the faith and survived. And especially so, since I’d only written about the very beginning of my career in Cairo, as a schoolteacher, when I’d first become involved in the old Mid-East section there, more than twenty years before. I’d sent a few sample chapters about this to a London publisher some months before. I’d thought it was innocuous stuff, those early days in Cairo, the life of that burnt city just before Suez: how I’d met my first wife there: before she ended up in Moscow a few years later working for the other side. A broken marriage — as well as a smashed and betrayed British network in Egypt. But it was all very old stuff.
Well, it struck me that some publisher’s reader or editor must have seen this autobiographical material and chatted about it, in a London club, to a friend still in the game, who in turn had mentioned it to Marcus or someone close to him.