There was still the best part of a week to go before that Sunday morning when Chamberlain came on the wireless to tell us we were at war, but it is that endless, oneiric Tuesday, the day my son was born and I was issued with my first military uniform, that I think of as the real opening of hostilities, for me. Still hungover, and using up who knows what unreplenishable reserves of energy, I left the hospital and took a taxi straight to Waterloo, and was in Aldershot by four in the afternoon. Why does that town always smell of horses? I trudged through the hot streets to the bus station, sweating pure alcohol, and fell asleep on the bus and had to be shaken awake by the conductor (“Bloody hell, squire, I thought you was dead!”). Bingley Manor was an unlovely red-brick nineteenth-century Gothic pile, standing in a large flat park, with isolated stands of yew and weeping willow, like an extensive, ill-kept cemetery. It had been requisitioned from the relicts of some grand family, Catholics, I believe, who had been rehoused somewhere in darkest Somerset. I grew depressed at once when I saw the place. The thick gold light of evening only served to deepen the funereal atmosphere. There was an insolent corporal sitting in the great entrance hall—flagstones, antlers, crossed spears and a fur-covered shield—with his feet on a metal desk, smoking a cigarette. I filled out a form and was handed an already grubby identity card. Then I was walking up flights of stairs and along bare corridors, each one narrower and shabbier than the last, in the company of an ill-tempered, red-faced sergeant major who, despite my attempts to make conversation, maintained a kind of fuming silence, as if he were under some form of private interdiction. I told him I had just become a father. I don’t know why I said it—a fatuous notion of the lower classes having a weakness for children, I suppose. Anyway, it didn’t work. He gave a snort of angry laughter, his moustache twitching. “Congratulations, sir, I’m sure,” he said, without looking at me. At least, I thought, he called me sir, despite—in fact, because of—my civilian suit.
I was presented with an ill-fitting uniform—I can still feel the tickle and chafe of that hairy serge—and the sergeant major showed me to my bunk in what must once have been the ballroom, a long, high, many-windowed hall with a polished oak floor and plaster flora on the ceiling. There were thirty bunks, set out in three neat rows; across those nearest the windows, delicate gold shapes of sunlight lay like broken box kites. I felt as lost and weepy as a small boy on his first day at boarding school. The sergeant major noted my distress with satisfaction.
“You’re in luck, sir,” he said. “Dinner is still being served. Come down when you’re changed.” He suppressed a smirk, the angry thicket of his moustache twitching again. “Just uniform; we don’t dress here.”
A big servants’ room in the basement had been converted into a mess hall. My fellow recruits were already at feed. It was a disconcertingly monastic-seeming scene, with stone floor and wooden benches, and shafts of vesperal sunlight in the mullioned windows, and monklike figures hunched over their bowls of gruel. A few heads turned when I came in, and someone sent up a derisive cheer for the newcomer. I found a place beside a man named Baxter, a brutally handsome, black-haired fellow bursting out of his uniform, who introduced himself at once and shook my hand, making my knuckles creak, and challenged me to say what I thought he did for a living in Civvy Street. I made a couple of hopeless guesses, at which he smiled and nodded happily, closing his womanly, long-lashed eyes. He was, it turned out, a contraceptives salesman. “I travel all over—British rubbers are greatly in demand, you’d be surprised. What am I doing here? Well, it’s the lingo, see; I can speak six languages— seven, if you count Hindi, which I don’t.” The soup, a thin, brown sludge with floating lozenges of fat, smelled of wet dog. Baxter lapped it up, then planted his elbows on the table and lit a cigarette. “What about you,” he said, blowing vigorous clouds of smoke, “what’s your line? No, wait, let me guess. Civil servant? Schoolmaster?” When I told him, he grinned uneasily, as if he thought I was pulling his leg, and turned his attention to the person on his other side. After a while he turned back to me, though, looking more uneasy than ever. “Christ,” he muttered, “I thought you were bad, but this geezer”—indicating his neighbour with a sideways slide of eyes and mouth—“he’s an unfrocked bloody priest!”
I never saw Baxter again after that evening. Quite a number of our company were to disappear silently like that over the first few weeks. We were not told what had become of them, and we never mentioned the subject amongst ourselves; we were like the inmates of a sanatorium, waking each morning to find another bed empty, and wondering which of us the silent killer would carry off next. Many of the ones that remained seemed even less prepossessing than the rejects. They were academics, and language teachers from the grammar schools, travelling salesmen like Baxter, and a few indeterminates, shifty characters who tended to lurk, and smiled at one with vague intent, like nervous queers out for a night’s cottaging. As time went on a strange web of alliances and enmities began to weave itself amongst us. Ties of class, profession, shared interests, were all undone. In fact, the wider the disparity in background between us, the better we got on. I was far more at ease with the likes of Baxter than with those who came from my own world. I wish I could say that this arbitrary mingling of the classes fostered a democratic atmosphere (not, I hasten to say, that I cared—or care—much for democracy). When I first arrived, the sergeant major had treated me with resentful deference, but once I was in uniform there was no more sirring, and on the parade ground he screamed in my face in what he thought was an Irish accent, spraying me with spit, as if I were the rawest working-class recruit hauled in from the slums. Almost immediately, however, I was promoted—by the influence of what agency I did not know—to the rank of captain, and the poor wretch had to go back to that peculiar, stolid-faced fawning which unofficial army protocol demands.
We started straight off on basic training, which to my surprise I found that I enjoyed. The bone-tiredness that felled one at the end of a day of square-bashing and kit inspection and swabbing-out of floors was almost erotic, a voluptuous, swooning lapse into oblivion. We were instructed in the art of hand-to-hand combat, which we went at with the loud enthusiasm of small boys. I particularly enjoyed bayonet practice, the licence it afforded to shriek at the top of one’s lungs, as one deftly disembowelled an imaginary and yet strangely, shiveringly palpable enemy. We were taught map-reading. In the evenings, despite exhaustion, we studied rudimentary encoding techniques and the rules of surveillance. I made a parachute jump; as I leapt from the plane and the icy air caught me I was filled with a kind of exalted, almost holy terror, inexplicably pleasurable. I discovered a stamina in myself I had not known I was capable of, especially on the long treks we were forced to make over the Downs in the hay-smelling, late-summer heat. My comrades chafed under these impositions, but I saw them as the stages of a kind of purification rite. The sense of the monastic I had detected in the mess that first evening persisted; I might have been a lay brother, a worker in the fields, one of those for whom humble toil is the truest form of prayer. Like all the males of my class, I had hardly known how to tie my own shoelaces; now I was mastering all sorts of interesting and useful skills I would never have had the opportunity to learn in civilian life. It all seemed wonderful fun, really.
I was taught, for instance, how to drive a lorry. I barely knew how to drive a motor car, and this great fuming monster, with its blunt front end and shuddering rear parts, was as stubborn and unwieldy as a carthorse, yet what a thrill it was to ease out the clutch and plunge down on the quivering, two-foot-long gear-stick and feel the cogs meshing and the whole huge machine surging forward as if its soul had come alive under my hands. I was captivated. There was a staff car, too, which we could borrow, on a strict rotational basis. It was an ancient grey-blue Wolseley, high and narrow, with walnut fascia and a wooden steering wheel and an ebony choke button which I always forgot to push in, so that whenever I took my foot off the accelerator the engine whined as if in pain and gouts of angry blue smoke belched out behind; the floor on the driver’s side was so worn it was hardly more than a filigree of rust, and if I looked down between my knees when I was driving I could see the road rushing under me like a river in spate. The poor thing came to a sad end. One night, when it was not his turn, a chartered accountant—he spoke fluent Polish—sneaked the keys from the wall cabinet in the Base Commander’s room and drove into Aldershot to see a girl he was sweet on, got drunk, and crashed into a tree on the way back, and was killed. He was our first fatality of the war. To my shame, I confess I grieved more for the car than for the accountant.
In our little settlement we had scant contact with the outside world. Once a week we were allowed to telephone our wives or girlfriends. On Saturday nights, we were told, we might venture into Aldershot, though under no circumstances were we to congregate together, or even to acknowledge that we knew each other, should we meet by chance in pub or dance hall; the result was a weekly invasion of the town by solitary drinkers and hapless wallflowers, all pining for the company of comrades whom during the rest of the week they spent their time trying to avoid.
I had of course no communication at all with Moscow, or even the London embassy. I assumed that my career as a double agent was at an end. I was not sorry. In retrospect, all that now seemed unreal, a game I used to play which I had now grown out of.
The announcement that we were at war was greeted at Bingley Manor in a curiously lackadaisical fashion, as if it had nothing particularly to do with us. When the news came we were crowded into the mess hall, which served also as a chapel— Brigadier Bradshaw, our commanding officer, had made attendance at Sunday service compulsory, in order that our morale should be kept up, as he said, though with little conviction. A young chaplain, troubled and inarticulate, was struggling with a complicated military metaphor involving St. Michael and his flaming sword, when a runner arrived with a message for the Brigadier, who stood up, lifting a hand to silence the padre, and turned to the congregation and announced that the Prime Minister was about to address the nation. An enormous wireless set was wheeled forward on a tea trolley and, after a scrabbling search for a socket, was plugged in with great solemnity. The set, like a cockeyed idol, slowly opened its jade-green tuning eye as the valves warmed up, and, after clearing its throat with a series of goitrous hawks, settled down to a mantra-like hum. We waited, shifting our feet; someone whispered something, someone stifled a laugh. The Brigadier, the back of his neck reddening, went forward on tiptoe and bent to the instrument and twiddled the knobs, showing us his broad, khaki-clad backside. The wireless squeaked and babbled, blubbing its lip, and suddenly there was Chamberlain’s voice, crabbed, querulous, exhausted, like the voice of God himself, helpless in the face of his ungovernable creation, to tell us that the world was coming to an end.
When I had first gone to work at the Department—though work is a strong word for what went on in the Languages section—no one had thought to enquire into my political past. I was the son of a bishop—albeit an Irish bishop—an Old Malburian and a Cambridge man. That I was an internationally recognised scholar might have raised doubts in some quarters—the Institute, being full of refugee foreigners, had always been viewed with suspicion in security circles. On the other hand, I was received at Windsor not only in the print room and the tower library, but in the family wing, too, and if pressed I’m sure I could have got HM to vouch for me personally. (The successful spy must be able to live authentically in each of his multiple lives. The popular image of us as smiling hypocrites boiling with secret hatred of our country and its people and institutions is misconceived. I genuinely liked and admired HM and, perhaps more impressively, made no attempt to hide from him my disdain for his feather-brained wife, who consistently failed to remember that she and I were related. The fact is, I was both a Marxist and a Royalist. This is something that Mrs. W., who possesses the subtlest mind in that intellectually undistinguished family, clearly if tacitly understood. I did not have to pretend to be loyal; I was loyal, in my fashion.) Was I overconfident? Only Boy could get away with that gloating, schoolboy swagger into which the successful agent, smugly clutching his secrets, can so easily fall. When I was summoned to the Brigadier’s office a couple of weeks after the official outbreak of war, I imagined it was to be told that I had been selected for some special assignment. The first cold tentacles of alarm uncoiled themselves in my innards when I noticed his reluctance to meet my eye.
“Ah, Maskell,” he said, delving among the documents on his desk, like a large, tawny bird hunting for worms under a drift of dead leaves. “You’re wanted up in London.” He glanced in the direction of my midriff and frowned. “Stand easy.”
“Oh, sorry, sir.” I had forgotten to salute.
His office was in the former gun room; there were hunting prints on the walls, and I seemed to detect a faint lingering tang of fin and bloodied feather. Through the window behind him I could see a hapless squad of my colleagues in camouflage gear crawling on their knees and elbows towards the house in a simulated clandestine attack, a sight that was comic and at the same time unnerving.
“Ah, here it is,” the Brigadier said, lifting a letter out of the strew of papers before him. He held it close to his nose to read it, moving his head from side to side as he followed the lines, mumbling under his breath. “… Day release … immediate … no escort required … Escort? Escort? … Sixteen hundred hours …” He lowered the sheet and for the first time looked at me directly, his big blue jaw set and nostrils flared, showing alarmingly black, deep cavities. “What the hell have you been up to, Maskell?”
“Nothing, sir, that I know of.”
He threw the letter back on the pile and sat casting about him furiously, his hands clasped so tightly together the knuckles whitened.
“Bloody people,” he muttered. “What do they think we’re running down here, some kind of vetting station? Tell Mytchett from me he’d better stop sending me duds or we may as well shut up shop.”
“I will, sir.”
“You think this funny, Maskell?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. There’s a train at noon. You won’t”—with an angry snicker—“require an escort.”
Glorious day. What a September that was. The station smelled of sun-warmed cinders and cut grass. Soldiers milled on the platforms, stooped in that characteristic, disgruntled S-shaped stance, with their kitbags hoisted on one shoulder, and nursing a fag-end in their fists. I bought a copy of the previous day’s Times and sat blindly pretending to read it in a three-quarters empty first-class carriage. I felt hot all over, yet there was a small cold weight of foreboding inside me, as if an ice cube had been dropped into the pit of my stomach. A young woman sitting opposite me, wearing tortoiseshell spectacles and a black dress and heavy-heeled black shoes—the type that have latterly come back into fashion, I notice—kept glancing at me with an expression of baleful vacancy, as if she were not seeing me but someone I reminded her of. The train meandered along at an agonisingly slow pace, pausing irresolutely at each station, sighing and shuffling, with the air of having forgotten something and wondering whether to go back and fetch it. All the same, I arrived in London with an hour to spare. I took the opportunity to bring my uniform to Denbys to have it altered. I thought of telephoning Vivienne in Oxford, but decided against it; I could not have borne that fondly scathing tone. When I left the tailor’s and was coming out of St. James’s into Piccadilly I almost bumped into the bespectacled young woman from the train. She looked through me and hurried past. A coincidence, I told myself, but I could not help recalling the Brigadier’s snicker at the word escort. Another ice cube dropped inside me with a tingling little plop.
How lovely London seemed, vivid, and yet mysteriously insubstantial, like the cities in one’s dreams. The air was soft and clear, with half the motor cars and buses off the roads—I had not known such vast, delicate skies since my childhood—and there was a general air of pensiveness, the opposite of that hectic atmosphere of suspense that had prevailed in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of hostilities. In Regent Street, banks of sandbags had been erected in front of the shops, sprayed with concrete and painted in carnival shades of red and blue.
When I entered his office Billy Mytchett fairly bounced up to greet me, as if propelled by a spring in the seat of his chair. This show of warmth made me more worried than ever. He pulled up a chair for me, and pressed me to take a cigarette, a cup of tea, a drink, even—“though come to think of it, there isn’t any drink in the building, except in the Controller’s office, so I don’t know why I offer, ha ha.” Like Brigadier Bradshaw, he too avoided looking at me directly, and instead made a great business of moving things about on his desk, producing all the while a low, unhappy whirring sound from the back of his throat.
“How are you getting on down at the Manor?” he said. “Find it interesting?”
“Very.”
“Good, good.” A pause, in which even the frozen stones of the arches and the flying buttresses outside the window seemed to participate, hanging in suspenseful wait. He sighed, and picked up his cold pipe and gazed at it gloomily. “The thing is, old man, one of our people has been going through your files— purely routine, you understand—and has come up with… well, with a trace, actually.”
“A trace?” I said; the word sounded vaguely, frighteningly medical.
“Yes. It seems—” He threw down the pipe and turned sideways in his chair, throwing out his stubby little legs before him and sinking his chin on his chest, and stared broodingly at his toecaps, his lower lip protruding. “It seems you were something of a Bolshie.”
I laughed.
“Oh, that. Wasn’t everyone?”
He gave me a startled glance.
“I wasn’t.” He turned back to the desk again, all business suddenly, and took up a mimeographed report and thumbed through it until he found what he was looking for. “There was this trip to Russia that you went on, you and Bannister and these Cambridge people. Yes?”
“Well, yes. But I’ve been to Germany, too; that doesn’t make me a Nazi.”
He blinked.
“That’s true,” he said, impressed despite himself. “That is true.” He consulted the report again. “But look here, what about this stuff you wrote, this art criticism in—what was it?—the Spectator: “A civilisation in decay… baneful influence of American values… unstoppable march of international socialism…” What’s all that got to do with art?—not, mind you, that I’m claiming to know anything about art.”
I heaved a heavy sigh, meant to denote boredom, disdain, haughty amusement, but also a determination to be patient and a willingness to try to set out complex matters in simple terms. It is an attitude—patrician, condescending, cold but not unkind— that I have found most effective, in a tight corner.
“Those pieces were written,” I said, “when the Spanish civil war was starting. Do you recall that time, the atmosphere of desperation, of despair, almost? It seems a long time ago now, I know. But the issue was simple: Fascism or Socialism. One had to choose. And of course the choice was inevitable, for us.”
“But-”
“And as it proves, we were right. England is now at war with the Fascists, after all.”
“But Stalin-”
“—Has bought a little time, that’s all. Russia will be in the fight with us before the year is out. Oh but look”—I lifted a languid hand, waving all this trivia aside—“the point is, Billy, I know I was mistaken, but not for the reason you think. I was never a Communist—I mean, I was never a member of the Party—and that trip to Russia that has so exercised your bloodhounds only served to confirm all my doubts about the Soviet system. But at the time, three years ago, when I was about twenty years younger than I am now, and Spain was the temperature chart of Europe, I thought it was my duty, my moral duty, as did a great many others, to throw whatever weight I had into the battle against evil, the nature of which, for once, seemed perfectly clear and obvious. Instead of going off to Spain to fight, as I probably should have done, I made the one sacrifice it was in my power to make: I abandoned aesthetic purity in favour of an overtly political stance.”
“Aesthetic purity,” Billy said, nodding vigorously and putting on a deep frown. I had taken a calculated risk in calling him by his first name, thinking it would surely be the kind of thing he would expect a chap to do in the midst of a frank and emotional confession such as I was pretending to make.
“Yes,” I said, solemn, rueful, appealingly contrite, “aesthetic purity, the one thing a critic must hold on to, if he is to be any good at all. So yes, you are right, and your scouts are right: I am guilty of treachery, but in an artistic, not a political, sense. If that makes me a security risk—if you think a man who betrays his aesthetic convictions is likely also to betray his country—then so be it. I’ll collect my gear from Bingley Manor and see if I can’t join the ARP or the Fire Service. For I’m determined to do some good, in however humble a capacity.”
Billy Mytchett was still gravely nodding, still frowning. Absorbed in thought, he reached out for his pipe and set it in his mouth and began slowly sucking on it. I waited, gazing out of the window; nothing like a dreamy demeanour for allaying suspicion. At last Mytchett stirred himself, and gave his shoulders a great shake, like a swimmer surfacing, and pushed the mimeographed report away from him with the side of his hand.
“Look here,” he said, “this is all nonsense. You’ve no idea how much of this bumf I have to wade through in a week. I wake up in a blue funk at night, asking myself if this is how we’re going to fight the war, with reports and queries and signatures required in triplicate. God! And then I’m asked to haul in perfectly decent chaps like you and put them through the wringer over something they said to their prefect when they were at school. It was bad enough before the war, but now …!”
“Well,” I said, magnanimously, “it’s not unreasonable, after all. There must be spies about.”
Oops. He gave me a quick, sharp look, to which I returned the blandest of bland stares, trying to control a telltale nerve under my right eye which tends to twitch when I am nervous.
“There are,” he said grimly. “—And Bingley Manor’s full of ’em!” He gave a muffled shout of laughter and smacked his hands together, then immediately grew sober again. “Listen, old chap,” he said gruffly, “you go back down there and finish your training. I have a job for you, a very nice little number, you’ll like it. Hush! Not a word for now. All in good time.” He stood up and came around the desk and hustled me to the door. “Don’t worry, I’ll give old Bradshaw a tinkle and tell him we’ve vetted you and found you stainless as a choirboy—though when I think of some of the choirboys I’ve known …”
He shook my hand hurriedly, eager to be rid of me. I lingered, pulling on my gloves.
“You mentioned Boy Bannister,” I said. “Is he …?”
Mytchett stared.
“What—under suspicion? Lord, no. He’s one of our stars. Absolute wizard. No, no, old Bannister’s absolutely sound.”
How Boy laughed, when I phoned him from the flat later and told him he was one of Billy Mytchett’s stars. “What an ass,” he said. Behind the laughter I thought I detected a note of constraint. “By the way,” he said, stagily loud, “Nick is here. Hold on, he wants a word.”
When Nick came on the line he too was laughing.
“Been through the third degree, have you? Yes, Billy told me, I phoned him. Hardly the Grand Inquisitor, is he. I’m going to make sure that trace disappears from your file, by the way—I know a girl in Registry. It’s the kind of thing could dog you for years. And we wouldn’t want that. Especially as you and I are off on a jaunt any day now, all expenses paid.”
“A jaunt?”
“That’s right, old bean. Didn’t Billy tell you? No? Well, in that case I’d better keep mum too; idle talk costs whatsit. Oar revwar!”
And he hung up, laughing still and humming the “Marseillaise.”
In a letter to his friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou in 1649, Poussin, referring to the execution of Charles I, makes the following observation: “It is a true pleasure to live in a century in which such great events take place, provided that one can take shelter in some little corner and watch the play in comfort.” The remark is expressive of the quietism of the later Stoics, and of Seneca in particular. There are times when I wish I had lived more in accordance with such a principle. Yet who could have remained inactive in this ferocious century? Zeno and the earlier philosophers of his school held that the individual has a clear duty to take a hand in the events of his time and seek to mould them to the public good. This is another, more vigorous form of Stoicism. In my life I have exemplified both phases of the philosophy. When I was required to, I acted, in full knowledge of the ambiguity inherent in that verb, and now I have come to rest—or no, not rest: stillness. Yes: I have come to stillness.
Today, however, I am all agitation. The Death of Seneca is going for cleaning and valuation. Am I making a mistake? The valuers are very dependable, very discreet, they know me well, yet I cannot suppress the unfocused doubts that keep flying up in me darkly like a flock of restless starlings at the approach of night. What if the cleaners damage it, or in some other way deprive me of it, my last solace? The Irish say, when a child turns from its parents, that it is making strange; it comes from the belief that fairy folk, a jealous tribe, would steal a too-fair human babe and leave a changeling in its place. What if my picture comes back and I find that it is making strange? What if I look up from my desk some day and see a changeling before me?
It is still on the wall; I cannot summon up the courage to lift it down. It looks at me as my six-year-old son did that day when I told him he was to be sent to boarding school. It is a product of the artist’s last years, the period of the magnificent, late flowering of his genius, of The Seasons, of Apollo and Daphne, and the Hagar fragment. I have dated it tentatively to 1642. It is unusual among these final works, which taken together form a symphonic meditation on the grandeur and power of nature in her different aspects, shifting as it does from landscape to interior, from the outer to the inner world, from public life to the domestic. Here nature is present only in the placid view of distant hills and forest framed in the window above the philosopher’s couch. The light in which the scene is bathed has an unearthly quality, as if it were not daylight, but some other, paradisal radiance. Although its subject is tragic, the picture communicates a sense of serenity and simple grandeur that is deeply, deeply moving. The effect is achieved through the subtle and masterful organisation of colours, these blues and golds, and not-quite-blues and not-quite-golds, that lead the eye from the dying man in his marmoreal pose—already his own effigy, as it were— through the two slaves, and the officer of the Guard, awkward as a warhorse in his buckles and helmet, to the figure of the philosopher’s wife, to the servant girl preparing the bath in which the philosopher will presently be immersed, and on at last to the window and the vast, calm world beyond, where death awaits. I am afraid.