Keightley laid his head on one side and looked at me. ‘Ah,’ he said again. He looked like the wine waiter at the Tour d’Argent being asked for a bottle of Tizer. ‘That’s what you’ll have to tell me, sir, what sort of stuff.’
‘Then let’s for a minute say “Ships in bottles”,’ I said.
‘Warships, sir?’
‘Yes, nuclear submarines, sea-borne missile platforms, floating Coca-Cola depot boats, Life magazine colour-section printing-machine barges, thinking men’s filter replacement transports, psychological-obsolescence tankers, and deep-frozen do-nut supply ships.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Keightley pretended that his pipe had gone out and clamped a match-box over the bowl to make a great show of fanning it back to red sparking life. His cheeks popped in and out. He looked up, smiled weakly and said, ‘You’d probably like to hear it, sir.’ He opened the film tin and removed a reel of ¼ in recording tape.
‘Remember though, sir, I’m not saying they did originate from the occupiers.’
‘They?’ I stared insolently. ‘You mean this tape and the film you sent Ross at the War House?’
It wrecked Keightley. Mind you, I don’t blame him. He was just trying to keep everyone happy; but not blaming him and not preventing a future incident of the same kind is a different thing again. Keightley’s loosely captive eyeballs circuited their red bloodshot linings. We sat silently for perhaps thirty seconds, then I said, ‘Listen, Keightley, Ross’s department is all military. Anything that passes your eyeballs or eardrums and has even a sniff of civilian in it comes to Dalby, or as the situation is at present, to me, or failing that, Alice. If I ever have cause to think that you are funnelling information of any sort at all, Keightley, any sort at all, into unauthorized channels, you’ll find yourself lance-corporal in charge of restricted documents in the officers’ mess, Aden. Unless I can think of something worse. I won’t ever repeat this threat, Keightley, but don’t imagine it’s not going to be forever hanging over your bonce like Damocles’ chopper. Now let’s see what you found at the bottom of the garden. And don’t start tapping your bloody finger-tips again.’
He played the tape through on the big grey Ferrograph. The sound was of an abstract quality. It was like a Rowton House production of the ‘Messiah’ heard through a wall and played at half speed.
‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’ I asked.
‘Human voices, these people say.’
I listened to the undulating and horrisonous mewl, to the bleating, braying, yelping howl, and found it as difficult to listen to as it was to label. I nodded. ‘It doesn’t do a thing for me,’ I told him, ‘but I’ll take it away and think about it. It might grow on me.’
Keightley gave me the reel and the tin, and a quiet good-bye.
1 Forensic Science.
The next day I didn’t go into the office in the morning. I drifted up to the Charing Cross Road on a number 1 bus, then cut off across Soho. I wanted to get a few groceries, some coffee, aubergines, andouillettes, some black bread, that sort of thing. The girl in the delicatessen had trimmed her eyebrows – I didn’t like them so much like that. She looked constantly surprised. With the clientele in that shop perhaps she was. I decided to have a cup of coffee in Led’s. The coffee may not be so good there – but the cheesecake was fine and I like the customers.
It seemed gloomy inside after the hot sunshine. I kicked the threadbare section of carpeting and eased myself into one of their rickety wooden chairs. Two Cona coffee-pots were bubbling away noisily.
My coffee came. I relaxed with the Daily Express. A hearsay report from a reliable source said that a girl featured weekly in a badly made TV series was likely to have a child.
A policeman earning £570 p.a. attacked by youths with knives outside a cinema where a nineteen-year-old rock-an’-roll singer was making a personal appearance for £600.
‘Would Jim Walker play for Surrey?’ There was a picture of Jim Walker, and 600 words. It didn’t say whether he would or not.
‘Warm sunny weather expected to continue. Cologne and Athens record temperature for time of year.’
‘British heavy electrical gear still world’s best,’ some Briton in the electrical trade had said. I held a quiet requiem for so many trees that had died in vain.
I sat there for half an hour or so. I smoked my Gauloises and thought about Keightley and Ross, and how someone smarter than I would handle Chico. Murray was the only one of the whole setup I’d want as a personal friend, and he was only in on the deal by accident. He had neither screening nor training as an operative. I thought about my desk where there would be the usual run of junk to read and initial before getting to anything important. The sight of that desk haunted me.
Most mornings I had a rough file of material from Washington – Defense Dept DSO SD CIC.1 Once a week I had what was called a ‘digest’ of the ‘National Intelligence Estimate’, the thing they give to the President. The ‘digest’ meant I got a copy of the parts of it that they decided to let me see.
Then there were six to eight foolscap sheets of translations of passages from the foreign papers – Pravda, People’s Daily, the main paper of the Chinese Communist régime, and Red Flag, the theoretical organ of the Chinese Central Committee, and perhaps a few Yugoslav, Latvian or Hungarian accounts.
All this stuff had piled up on me the last few days. I decided to let it go another day. This was a warm London summer’s day, the sooty trees were in sooty leaf, and the girls were in light cotton dresses. I felt relaxed and simple. I called for another cup of thin coffee and leaned back reflectively.
She came into Led’s old broken doorway and into my life like the Royal Scot, but without all the steam and noise. She was dark, calm and dangerous-looking. Under her pinned-back hair her face was childishly wide-eyed as she stood momentarily blinded by the change of light.
Slowly and unflinchingly she looked around, meeting the insolent intensity of Led’s loose-lipped Lotharios, then came to sit at my small, circular, plastic-topped table. She ordered a black coffee and croissant. Her face was taut like a cast of an Aztec god; everything that was static in her features was belied by the soft, woolly, quick eyes into which the beholder sank unprotesting. Her hair, coarse and oriental in texture, was drawn back into a vortex on the crown of her head. She drank the brown coffee slowly.
She was wearing that ‘little black sleeveless dress’ that every woman has in reserve for cocktail parties, funerals and first nights. Her slim white arms shone against the dull material, and her hands were long and slender, the nails cut short and varnished in a natural colour. I watched her even, very white teeth bite into the croissant. She could have been top kick in the Bolshoi, Sweden’s first woman ship’s captain, private secretary to Chouen-lai, or Sammy Davis’s press agent. She didn’t pat her hair, produce a mirror, apply lipstick or flutter her eyelashes. She opened a conversation in a tentative English way. Her name was Jean Tonnesen. She was my new assistant.
Alice,
