He was well dressed, if still somewhat doubtful in the matter of shoes, when he called on Signora Saraceni at her house in South London. A note from the Meister, smuggled from Paris, had asked him to do so.
The Signora was very English, but perhaps some life in Italy had given her the swooning, fruity manner which she probably thought proper in the wife of an artist. She was confiding.
“Sometimes I wonder if, when this dreadful war is over, Tancred and I will live together again. It will have to be here. I keep my English passport still, you know. I never really liked Rome. And that apartment—well, it really was a bit much, wasn’t it? I mean, what domesticity can survive in the middle of so much history? There wasn’t a chair that didn’t have a lineage, and one really cannot relax perched on a lineage, can one? Not, you must understand, that there was any unkindness between Tancred and me. The war has kept us apart, but before that he visited me every year, and we were lovers. Oh, indeed we were! But I don’t suppose Tancred could ever settle happily in this house, and I love it. These chintzes, and this marvellous pickled-wood furniture—isn’t it divine? Really, Mr. Cornish, artist though you are, and friend of Tancred’s, isn’t it divine? From Heal’s, every stick of it, and nothing more than a few years old. One ought to live in one’s age, don’t you think? But I do hope we may live together again.”
Her wish was not to be granted. A few weeks later a stray bomb, which was probably meant for the City, wiped out the Signora’s street, and the Signora as well, and it was Francis’s miserable job to write to the Meister about it, and find a way of reaching him.
“She was the blood of my heart,” wrote the Meister in the reply which at last found its way to Francis, “and I truly believe that she would say the same of me. But Art, my dear Cornish, is a cruel obsession, as you may yet learn.”
This letter came shortly before Uncle Jack called Francis to him, and at last gave notice that he had never really forgotten about him. Forgetting was not Colonel Copplestone’s way.
“You know that we are going to win this war, don’t you? Oh yes we are, appearances to the contrary. It will take a while, but it’s perfectly clear that we shall win, in so far as anybody wins. The Americans and the Russians will probably be the big winners. And victory will bring some tricky problems, and we shall have to get to work on them now, or be caught unprepared. One of them will be the Art thing.
“It’s important, you know. Psychologically. A kind of barometer of psychological and spiritual strength. The losers mustn’t seem to be getting away with a lot of spiritual swag, or they’ll look too much like winners. So we must be ready to recover a lot of stuff that has gone astray—looted, quite frankly—during the fighting. That’s why I’m sending you to South Wales to work with some people who have been keeping an eye on all that. You have a name, you see. That Letztpfennig business gave you a name, but not too big a name, and you must be ready to move as soon as the time is right. Glad to see you’ve done something about your clothes. You had better do a little more in that direction. Mustn’t go to conference tables and sit on commissions looking like a loser, must you?”
Two weeks later Francis was in a quiet place near Cardiff, where what had been a manor-house was now, without attracting too much notice, a part of MI5’s curious domain. There, during some of the harshest days of the war, he studied for the coming victory.
It was here, so far from London, that he gained a better idea than ever before of what he was working for, and who he was working with. In London he had been a lowly kind of agent, a snoop, hoofing around dark streets making notes of the journeys and walks and appointments of suspects. He had studied to acquire the knack of invisibility. He learned the psychological hazard of the snoop’s trade; anybody one follows for a few days begins to look furtive. He had begun to feel foolish, but it was not for him to ask questions; his job was to lurk in doorways and around corners, to peep into shop windows at the image of the suspect as he passed, to take care that he did not himself attract suspicion, for a few of Uncle Jack’s snoops had made themselves ridiculous by reporting on unknown colleagues. In his long hours of waiting he had begun to hate his work, to hate all “systems” and all nationalism. He had begun, indeed, to fall into the state of mind that makes a snoop a possible recruit for the enemy; the lure of becoming a double agent. For what high principle can a man cling to when he has been brought to the lowly employment and personal bankruptcy of a snoop?
In Cardiff he had the job of interviewing many snoops, and weighing them in the balance of his information and judgement. Some of them had been working in MI6, the overseas branch. Again and again Ruth’s voice sounded in his head, in a wisdom pieced together from many of their conversations.
“Some of our best agents are very bad boys, Frank, and some of the worst are members of the Homintern—you know, the great international brotherhood of homosexuals. Imagine squealing on somebody you had gone to bed with! But a lot of it’s done, and more by the men than the women, I believe. Really, they need more women in the secret-service game: men are such frightful goofs. You can trust a woman—except in love, maybe—because women are proud of what they know, but men are proud of what they can tell. It’s a nasty world, and you and I are too innocent ever to get any of the top jobs in the profession.”
Yet there he was, in Cardiff, in a job which, if not anywhere near the top, seemed pretty important. Had he sunk so low? Or had Ruth simply spoken from the goodness other decent heart, without really knowing what she was talking about?
As well as the job, he had to find time for some of the obligations, and the nuisances, of common life. Roderick Glasson wrote to him about once a month, bemoaning the lot of the agriculturist in wartime, and hinting strongly that if more money were not forthcoming which would make possible really big reforms on his estate, all would be lost, and Francis would have his own close-fistedness to blame for bringing the family to ruin. Aunt Prudence wrote less often, but perhaps more pointedly, to report on the growth and progress of Little Charlie, for whom more money was needed if the child were to be brought up in a manner befitting a Cornish. It was in one of these that Aunt Prudence said frankly that it was time Little Charlie had a proper home with parents in it, and should not Francis and Ismay reconsider their position?
This letter was followed in a few days by one from Ismay herself, written from Manchester, saying nothing about Little Charlie, or a proper home, or that she had his address from her mother. But stating plainly that she was very hard up, and did Francis feel like doing anything about it?
So Francis absented himself from his work for a few days, making the roundabout journey, doubly difficult in wartime, from Cardiff to Manchester, and met Ismay again, after almost ten years, over a bad dinner in a good hotel.
“I should judge that this substance had once been whale,” he said, turning over the stuff on his plate. But Ismay was not fastidious; she was eating with avidity. She was very thin and, though still a beauty in her own particular way, she was now bony, almost gaunt, and her hair looked as if she might have cut it herself. Her clothes were grubby and of several dark colours, and everything about her spoke of a woman devoted to a cause.
So it was: Ismay was now a full-time zealot, but for what it was hard to tell. Hints that she dropped suggested that she was doing everything in her power to bring about a Revolt of the Workers. Such a revolt, in all the warring countries, would force the conflict to a halt in a matter of weeks, and substitute a Workers’ International that would create order and justice in a much-wronged world.
“You don’t have to go into detail,” said Francis. “As I came through London I was allowed, as a great favour, to look at the file on you at our offices. How you have kept out of jail I don’t really know, but my guess is that you are too small fry to worry about.”