E-Book, Englisch, 314 Seiten
Elliott I Spy
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-29973-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The Secret Life of a British Agent
E-Book, Englisch, 314 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-29973-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Geoffrey Elliott
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
This is how it was, as best I can tell.
Kavan, sometimes known as Joe, drove across the Austrian border into Hungary on 8 December 1946 – his thirty-eighth birthday, though that was happenstance. ‘Jo napot kivanok. Az utlevelt, legyen szives.’ Asking an important-looking foreigner for his passport, the scruffy border guard was warily polite. ‘Tessek,’ the driver replied neutrally, handing over his British passport, its dark blue cover and gilded coat of arms as worn as the injunction from the Foreign Secretary inside the front cover requesting and requiring in haughty italics that, as one of the King’s subjects, the bearer should be allowed to pass, ‘without let or hindrance’. As the guard could not read English, or indeed much of anything else, the impotent echo of Empire rather went over his head.
Except when it meant going back into England, crossing any frontier was a birthday present in itself. The rites of passage across the fifty yards of damp tarmac, the thud of stamp on passport, the frowning, suspicious looks of the officials in the limbo between this world and the next, had become an invigorating act of absolution and self-renewal. Love gone rancid, shabby deceits, scrapes over money which, untended, festered like sores into lasting embarrassments, all the crap could be left behind, unwanted small change on the powder-flecked glass top of the dressing-table after another night of sweaty, yeasty promises.
When the red-and-white pole swung back down into its iron cradle, it sterilised memory. He was once again the actor striding nonchalantly on to a new stage, another opening of another show, his personality shaped by the script, fact and fiction tweaked into new alignments. There had been so many first nights: London, to less than rave reviews, then the Ambleresque amble through Zagreb, Sofia, Cairo, Malta, Sarajevo, Spangenberg Castle, Hamburg … and now Budapest.
London never worked for long, however sincerely he promised himself that he would try harder. Sonia putting what her twittering bloody girlfriends called ‘a brave face on things’, twisting her handkerchief and sobbing that he could have all the freedom he wanted, all the women in the world, if only he would promise that at the end of it all he would come back to her and the three children. Promises were easy enough. He had made many. Remembering what you had promised, and to whom, was not so easy. But the poor cow just didn’t see it. Nor did her parents, lobbing their moralising mortar shells at him from behind their cigarette smokescreen, all Russian doom and gloom. For Christ’s sake, who did they think they were, presuming to know or, even worse, to lay down the law to him on how family life should be lived? ‘Vee sink Sonia vud be khappier if you vud be more time at home,’ they eyed him reproachfully, coughing up the guttural Slav Hs like a droshky driver getting ready to spit.
Climbing the three cold flights of stairs to see his own mother in her two rooms of awkward memories, the traffic rumbling its way towards Highgate, the kettle forever whistling gently on the Belling stove out on the landing kitchen. When he last took her out for her ritual whisky and orange at The Greyhound, that ratty little man had pushed a County Court debt summons at him along the beer-slicked bar. He had looked up at him almost apologetically when, in a flash of rage and shame, Kavan had shoved him roughly away and he had stumbled to the floor. ‘Only doing my job, old son,’ he cringed. The next day his mother and sister had scraped together £7 13s to keep the bailiffs off his back for a few days.
Sure, the furtive involvement with ‘the Firm’, as Antony Terry and the others liked to call it, exchanging arch looks, brought a touch of flesh and blood to his flaccid London life. But when you were just one of their Joes, an ‘Honourable Correspondent’ rather than an insider, and once you had got over being impressed by their flattery and flummeries, the chummy dinners, all silver, mahogany port and war stories in the discreet Artillery Mansions flat, an Alex Korda vision of a British gentleman’s pied-à-terre, even that side of things was better abroad. London was myth; abroad, where the action was, lay reality. Far better too than the weekend courses being preached at about the Communist menace and communications in those stuffy secret classrooms in the King’s Road, still shored up after a wartime bomb blast and occupied, according to a small black-and-white plaque on the wall, by the Central Asian Research Bureau, whose blue-jacketed janitors deterred casual callers with the tough politeness of retired policemen.
By contrast, the firm with a small ‘f’ whose slowly rising junior sales manager he ostensibly had been since 1936, and on whose behalf he was now just as ostensibly entering Hungary, was mind-numbingly boring, unless, like the career-minded Johnnies, you could simulate a grand passion for soaps, detergents, edible oils, sausages and ice-cream. Though the firm was a sprawling and highly profitable multi-national enterprise, working for them in London meant little more than a metronomic commute in and out of Blackfriars Station, marooned among mackintoshed managers and accountants hiding their lives from each other behind the Daily Telegraph, their briefcases more likely to hide pallid pornography that they dared not leave at home, Shippam’s fishpaste sandwiches and a spare collar, than grand plans for rebuilding the world’s washing powder industry.
Inside the granite monument to margarine, the meaning of life boiled down to shuffling papers and playing committee games with a platoon of snooty sober-suited old-young men, the vividness of their old school ties in inverse proportion to the schools’ reputation, and humourless Dutchmen, rimless glasses and a whiff of herring, seconded by the bargeload from The Hague, where the real power centre of the firm lay, to keep an eye on the British. ‘In matters of commerce,’ an office wag had once recited to him at a sales lunch, ‘the fault of the Dutch is giving too little and asking too much.’
When he recycled the quip to Terry and an owl-eyed bon viveur from the Firm, with a knowing chuckle over a tabletop of pink gins at the Travellers’, the owl-eyed one had trumped him, remarking with carefully cultivated mock diffidence that the nineteenth-century quip was nothing to do with trade, but a fine example of l’esprit de l’escalier by Lord Canning, after some very hard bargaining with a fabled Dutch courtesan, whose obdurate refusal to reduce the price of the ultimate favours at her disposal had forced an indigent and by now desperate Foreign Secretary to settle for a still costly bird in the hand rather than something more deeply satisfying in the bush. Sessions like this were fun, though gin with a dose of Angostura bitters took a lot of getting used to, and if you could keep your end up and conceal with a quizzical eyebrow the fact that you hadn’t got a bloody clue who Lord Canning was.
Drinking the evenings away with his brothers Leo and Basil in The Coal Hole on the Strand was a more deliberate, far less lighthearted defence mechanism, putting off until the last train of the day another round of razor-backed recrimination, shouting, screaming and the inevitable tears, followed by the stiffness and silence of the bedroom, the children lying awake next door, all ears and ignorance. God rot them, each and every one. At least marriage was one prison sentence from which, with luck, you could get time off for bad behaviour.
With the blessing of its London Chairman, a close friend of the shifty-eyed military man who ran the Firm itself, rejoicing in his title of ‘Chief’, the firm with a small ‘f’ cheerfully paid his salary, let him make what he could of a job in export sales and, sometimes because he deserved it and sometimes to reinforce his cover, even threw him the occasional promotional bone. From his earliest days well before the war, its Personnel Department had grown used to professing polite confusion about his precise whereabouts to Sonia, or indeed any of the duns or other women’s husbands who came looking for him.
The dour gang in the executive suite at Blackfriars had even professed to be enthusiastic about the Firm’s idea, discreetly floated from Broadway Buildings via the bar at White’s, that he should be posted to Budapest, convincing themselves that whatever else he might get up to, they could get some real value if he applied even a part of his energy and his language skills to revitalise their war-smashed business.
It being a commercial world, their motives were not entirely altruistic. One well-manicured hand washed another. Helping the Firm with cover and logistical support, including the transmission, cloaked in the humdrum traffic of business, of anything from men to money, put the firm with a small ‘f’ in a strong position to ask for and expect to get quiet government help in other areas. No small thing at a time of shortages, restrictions, licences and pervasive bureaucracy. The Chairman, not a stupid man, was given to boasting in complete confidence to his wife, who told only her closest bridge friends, that overall his shareholders came out ahead from the series of Faustian compacts at which he had connived over the years.
Though the Hamilton clock on the Studebaker’s battered walnut...
