The position at the moment is as follows. I joined the gastronomic cruise at Venice, as planned, and the Poly-olbion is now throbbing south-east in glorious summer Adriatic weather. Everything at Pulj is in order. D. R. arrived there three days ago to take over, and it was good to have a large vinous night and talk about old adventures. I am well, fit, except for my two chronic diseases of gluttony and satyriasis which, anyway, continue to cancel each other out. There will be little opportunity for either to be indulged on this outward voyage (we shall be in the Black Sea the day after tomorrow), but I dribble at the glutinous thought of the mission-accomplished, unbuttoned-with-relief week that will come after the turn-around. Istanbul, Corfu, Villefranche, Ibiza, Southampton. And then free, finished. Me, anyway. But what about poor Roper?
D.R. handed over, as arranged, the ampoules of PSTX; I have, of course, my own syringe. I know the procedure. A sort of proleptic wraith of poor Roper is already lying on the other bunk of this Bibby cabin. I explained to the purser that my friend Mr Innes had been called by unforeseen business to Murfiater but that he would be making his way by road or rail or ferry or something to Yarylyuk and would be joining us there. That was all right, he said, so long as it was clearly understood that there could be no rebate in respect of his missed fifteen hundred miles of cruising (meaning gorging and fornication). Very well, then. For Roper all things are ready, including a new identity. John Innes, except in fertilisers. The bearded face of that rubbery man from Metfiz looks sadly back at me from the Innes passport. He has been many things in his time, has he not, that all-purposes lay-figure. He has been a pimp from Mdina, a syphilitic computer-brain skulking in Palaiokastritsa, a kind of small Greek Orthodox deacon, R. J. Geist who had the formula, even a distinguished Ukrainian man of letters set upon for his allegations of pederasty in the Praesidium. And now he is John Innes, who is a sort of egg-cosy for soft-boiled Roper. I well understand, sir, Her Majesty's Government's palpitating need to have Roper back. Questions in the House, especially after Tass passed through the jubilant news of the breakthrough in rocket-fuel research and Euro-vision showed the Beast gliding through May-day Moscow. What I cannot so well understand is the choice of myself as the agent of Roper's repatriation, unless, of course, it is the pure, the ultimate trust which, if I were not modest, I would say I have earned in my fifteen years of work for the Department. But you must surely be aware of a residue of sympathy for a schoolfellow, the fact that until his defection we maintained a sort of exterior friendship, though with many lacunae (war, peace, his marriage, my posting to Pulj); his last communication with the West was a picture post-card to myself, the message cryptic and, so I gather, still being pored over by the cipher-boys: Two minutes to four-up all their pipes – martyrs' blood flows through them. Let us get certain things straight about Roper. Approach Number One will never work. I don't think for one moment that Roper can be persuaded to go back to anything. He has this scientist's thoroughness about disposing of the past. He never rummaged among old discarded answers. If he's a heretic at all it's your heresy he subscribes to – the belief that life can be better and man nobler. It's not up to me, of course, to say what a load of bloody nonsense that is. It's not up to me to have a philosophy at all, since I'm nothing more than a superior technician.
I understand the reason, sir, for two approaches to Roper, persuasion first and force after. There's the propaganda value of freedom of choice, even though the horse's-mouth official letters in my jacket-lining neigh fantastic offers. And then, after a month or so, the judgement. Anyway, I confront Roper. I prepare to confront him by being not myself but Mr Sebastian Jagger (the rubber man wasn't needed, of course, for my fake passport). Jagger, typewriter expert; why didn't you christen me Qwert Yuiop? Jagger goes ashore and, in some restaurant lavatory, is swiftly transformed into something plausible and quacking, totally Slavonic. And then, if things go as they ought to go, a swift taxi journey to wherever Roper is at that hour of night, to be peeled off from the rest of the delegates of the scientific sbyezd. And then it will be I, very much the past, very much the old ways, not merely smelling of a West that has given him no answers but smelling of himself, an old formula discarded.
You think he can be persuaded? Or rather, do you think I can find it in my heart to be all that persuasive? How far am I (I am able to speak boldly now, this being my last assignment) convinced enough to want to convince? It's all been a bloody big game – the genocidal formulae, the rocketry, the foolproof early warning devices mere counters in it. But nobody, sir, is going to kill anybody. This concept of a megadeath is as remotely unreal as specular stone or any other mediaeval nonsense. Some day anthropologists will comment in gently concealed wonder on the ludic element in our serious flirting with collective suicide. For my part, I've always played the game of being a good technician, superb at languages, agile, light-fingered, cool.
But otherwise I'm a void, a dark sack crammed with skills. I have a dream of life, but no one ideology will realise it for me better than any other. I mean a warm flat, a sufficiency of spirits, a record-player, the whole of The Ring on disc. I would be glad to be rid of my other appetites, since they represent disease, and disease, besides being expensive, robs one of self-sufficiency. A doctor I met in Mohammedia on that hashish-ring assignment persuaded me that a simple operation would take care of both, since they are somehow cognate. Ultimately I have a desire for a spacious loghouse on a vast Northern lake, conifers all about, all oxygen and chlorophyll, paddle-steamers honking through the mist. The bar on board the Männikkö is stocked with drinks of intriguing nomenclature – Juhan-nus, Huhtikuu, Edustaja, Kreikka, Silmäpari – and the captain, who has a large private income, is round-buyingly drunk but never offensive. They serve mouth-watering food-fish soused and salted, garnished with gherkins; slivers of hot spiced meat on toasted rye-and there are blonde pouting girls who twitch for savage anonymous love. Some day I will have that operation.
Look in my glands and not in the psychologist's report. I am mentally and morally sound. I tut-tut at St Augustine, with his 'O God make me pure but not yet'. Irresponsible, no appointment duly noted in the diary, the abrogation of free will. If you, sir, were really reading this, you would frown an instant, sniffing a connection between St Augustine (though of Canterbury, not Hippo, not less worthy but duller), Roper and myself. He was the patron saint of the Catholic college in Bradcaster where Roper and I were fellow-pupils. You have the name of the school in the files but you have not its smell, nor the smell of the city surrounding it. Bradcaster smelt of tanneries, breweries, dray-horses, canals, dirt in old crevices, brick-dust, the wood of tram-benches, hash, hot pies with gravy, cowheel stew, beer. It did not, sir, smell of Rupert Brooke's or your England. The school smelt of Catholicism, meaning the thick black cloth of clerical habits, stale incense, holy water, fasting breaths, stockfish, the tensions of celibacy. It was a day-school, but it had room for forty or so boarders. Roper and I were boarders, our homes being so far away, exiles from the South – Kent I, Dorset he – who had sat for scholarships and got them. The best Catholic schools are in the North, since the English Reformation, like blood from the feet when the arteries harden, could not push up so far so easily. And, of course, you have Catholic Liverpool, a kind of debased Dublin. There we were then, two Southern exiles among Old Catholics, transplanted Irish, the odd foreigner with a father in the consular service. We were Catholics, but we sounded Protestants with our long-aaaaa'd English; our tones were not those of pure-vowelled orthodoxy. And so Roper and I had to be friends. We had adjoining desks and beds. There was nothing homosexual about our relationship. I think we even found each other's flesh antipathetic, never wrestling as friends often do. I know I would cringe a little at Roper's whiteness, exposed for bed or the showers, fancying that a smell of decay came off it. As for heterosexuality, well, that was fornication, you see. The heterosexual act was a mortal sin outside the married state, that was made very clear. Except, we accepted, for such foreigners as had had Catholicism before we got it and hence had sort of founder members' special concessions.
Meaning swarthy foreigners like little Cristo Gomez, Alf Pereira, Pete Queval, Donkey Camus of the Lower Fifth. They had money, and they would buy women (the ones that hung round the corner of Merle Street and London Road) whom they would take to the derelict art-room, the cricket pavilion (a hairy boy called Jorge de Tormes was secretary to the First Eleven at that time), even the new chapel. That was discovered in flagrante and ended in a thrilling ceremony of expulsion. What must the Blessed Sacrament have thought, looking down on those moving buttocks in the aisle? It was surprising that so much was able to be got away with, considering how the Rector, Father Byrne, was so strong against sex. He would come round the dormitories some nights, smelling of neat J. J., feeling under the bedclothes for impure thoughts. On various occasions, having felt under the bedclothes with special lavishness, he would stand at the end of our dormitory to deliver a sermon on the evils of sex. He had a fine Irish instinct for the dramatic and, instead of turning on the lights, he would illuminate his ranting face with a pocket-torch, a decollated saint's head brave above a kind of hell-glow. One night he began with: 'This damnable sex, boys – ah, you do well to writhe in your beds at very mention of the word. All the evil of our modern times springs from unholy lust, the act of the dog and the bitch on the bouncing bed, limbs going like traction engines, the divine gift of articulate speech diminished to squeals and groans and pantings. It is terrible, terrible, an abomination before God and His Holy Mother. Lust is the fount of all other of the deadly sins, leading to pride of the flesh, covetousness of the flesh, anger in the thwarting of desire, gluttony to feed the spent body to be at it again, envy of the sexual prowess and sexual success of others, sloth to admit enervating day-dreams of lust. Only in the married state, by God's holy grace, is it sanctified, for then it becomes the means of begetting fresh souls for the peopling of the Kingdom of Heaven.'
He took a breath, and a voice from the dark took advantage of the breath to say: 'Mulligan begot a fresh soul and he wasn't married.' This was Roper, and what Roper said was true. Mulligan, long since expelled, had put a local girl in the family way; it was still well remembered.
'Who said that then?' called Father Byrne. 'What boy is talking after lights out?' And he machine-gunned the dark with his torch.
'Me,' said Roper stoutly. 'Sir,' he added. 'I only wanted to know,' he said, now illuminated. 'I don't see how an evil can be turned into a good by a ceremony. That would be like saying that the Devil can be turned into an angel again by just being blessed by a priest. I don't see it, sir.'
'Out, boy,' cried Father Byrne. 'Out of bed this instant.' His torch beckoned. 'You there at the end, turn on the lights.' Feet pattered and horrible raw yellow suddenly struck at our eyes. 'Now then,' cried Father Byrne to Roper, 'down on your knees, boy, and say a prayer for forgiveness. Who are you, worm, to doubt the omnipotence of Almighty God?'
'I wasn't doubting anything, sir,' said Roper, not yet out of bed. 'I was just interested in what you were saying, sir, even though it is a bit late.' And he thrust out a leg from the bed, as from a boat to test the temperature of the water.
'Out, boy,' shouted Father Byrne. 'Down on that floor and pray.'
'Pray for what, sir?' asked Roper, now standing, in faded blue shrunken pyjamas, between his bed and mine. 'For forgiveness because God's given me, in his infinite omnipotence, an enquiring mind?' He, like myself, was something over fifteen.
'No, boy,' said Father Byrne, with a swift Irish change to mellifluous quietness. 'Because you cast doubts on the miraculous, because you blasphemously suggest that God cannot' – crescendo – 'if He so wishes turn evil into good. Kneel, boy. Pray, boy.' (fff.)
'Why doesn't He then, sir?' asked Roper boldly, now down, though as if for an accolade, on his knees. 'Why can't we have what we all want – a universe that's really a unity?'
Ah, God help us, Roper and his unified universe. Father Byrne was now attacked by hiccups. He looked down sternly at Roper as though Roper, and not J. J., had brought them on. And then he looked up and round at us all. 'On your knees, all of you, hie,' he called. 'All of you, hie, pray. A spirit of evil stalks, hie, pardon, this dormitory.' So everybody got out of bed, all except one small boy who was asleep. 'Wake him, hie,' cried Father Byrne. 'Who is that boy there with no, hic, pyjama trousers? I can guess what you've been doing, boy. Hie'
'If somebody were to thump you on the back, ' said Roper kindly. 'Or nine sips of water, sir.'
'Almighty God,' began Father Byrne, 'Who knowest the secret thoughts of, hie, these boys' hearts-' And then he became aware of a certain element of unwilled irreverence, the hiccups breaking in like that. 'Pray on your own,' he cried. 'Get on with it.' And he hiccuped his way out. This was looked on as a sort of victory over authority for Roper.
He was having too many victories over authority, solely because of the exceptional gift of scientific enquiry he'd been demonstrating. I remember one fifth-form chemistry lesson in which Father Beauchamp, an English convert, had been dully revising the combining of elements into compounds. Roper suddenly asked: 'But why should sodium and chlorine want to combine to produce salt?'
The class laughed with pleasure at hope of a diversion. Father Beauchamp grinned sourly, saying, 'There can't be any question of wanting, Roper. Only animate things want.'
'I don't see that,' said Roper. 'Inanimate things must have wanted to become animate, otherwise life wouldn't have started on the earth. There must be a kind of free will in atoms.'
'Must there, Roper?' said Father Beauchamp. 'Aren't you rather tending to leave God out of the picture?'
'Oh, sir,' cried Roper impatiently, 'we ought not to bring God into a chemistry lesson.' Father Beauchamp chewed that for two seconds, then swallowed it. Tamely he said: 'You asked the question. See if you can answer it.'
I don't know when all this business of electrovalent methods of combination started, but Roper must, in those late nineteen-thirties, have known more than most schoolboys knew, and chemistry teachers for that matter. Not that Father Beauchamp knew much; he'd been learning the subject as he went along. What Roper said, I remember, was that the sodium atom had only one electron on its outer shell (nobody had ever taught us about outer shells) but that the chlorine atom had seven. A good stable number, he said, was eight and very popular with the constituents of matter. The two atoms, he said, deliberately came together to form a new substance with eight electrons on the outer shell. Then he said: 'They talk about holy numbers and whatnot – three and seven and nine and so on – but it looks as though eight is the really big number. What I mean is this: if you're going to bring God into chemistry, as you want to do, then eight must mean a lot to God. Take water, for instance, the substance that God made first, at least the Bible says about the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters. Well, you've got six outer electrons in the oxygen atom and only one in the hydrogen atom, and so you need two of those to one of oxygen to get water. God must have known all this, and yet you don't find eight being blown up as a big important number in the teachings of the Church. It's always the Holy Trinity and the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments. Eight comes nowhere.'
'There are,' said Father Beauchamp, 'the Eight Beatitudes.' Then he had a brief session of lip-biting, not sure whether he ought to send Roper to the Rector for blasphemous talk. Anyway, he let Roper alone, and the rest of us for that matter, bidding us read up the stuff in our books. A twitch started in his right eye and he couldn't stop it. It was Father Byrne in the dormitory all over again. The sending of Roper to the Rector over God and Science was deferred till a year later, when Roper and I were in the Sixth Form, he inevitably doing science, myself languages. He told me all about it in the refectory afterwards. We were eating a very thin Irish stew. Roper kept his voice down – it was a rather harsh voice – and one lock of his lank straw hair languished in the steam from his plate.
'He tried to get me to pray again, kneeling on the floor and all that nonsense. But I asked him what I was supposed to have done wrong.'
'What was it?'
'Oh, Beauchamp told him. We had a bit of tussle about physical and chemical change and then somehow we got on to the Host. Does Christ reside in the molecules themselves or only in the molecules organised into bread? And then I decided I'd had enough of pretending you can ask questions about some things and not about others. I'm not going to Mass any more.'
'You told Byrne that? J 'Yes. And that's when he shouted at me to get down on my knees. But you should have seen the sweat start out on him.'
'Ah.'
'I said what was the point of praying if I didn't believe there was anyone to pray to. And he said if I prayed I'd be vouchsafed an answer. A lot of bloody nonsense.'
'Don't be too sure. There are some very big brains in the Church, scientific brains too.'
'That's just what he said. But I told him again that there has to be one universe, not two. That science has to be allowed to knock at all doors.'
'What's he going to do with you?'
'There's not much he can do. He can't expel me, because that's no answer. Besides, he knows that I'll probably get a state scholarship, and there's not been one here for a hell of a long time. A bit of a dilemma.' Roper getting the better of authority again. 'And the exam isn't far off now, and he can't very well send me somewhere for special theological instruction. So there it is.'
There it was. I was still in the Church myself at that time. My own studies were technical and aesthetic, not posing any fundamental questions. I was studying Roman poets who glorified Roman conquerors or, in the long debilitating pax after conquest, pederasty and adultery and fornication. I was also reading, fretting at their masochistic chains, the correct tragedians of the Sun King. But there was one member of the staff who was Polish, a lay brother called – after the inventor of the Russian alphabet – Brother Cyril. He'd only come to the school three years before and there was nobody for him to teach, since he knew only Slavonic languages and a little English and very little German. But one day I found him reading what he told me was Pushkin. I took a liking to those solid black perversions of Greek letters and at once my future (though naturally, sir, I did not know this yet) was fixed. I romped through Russian and was allowed to take it as a main subject for the Higher School Certificate, dropping Modern History. Modern History, sir, has had its revenge since then.
I did not know at that time – the time of hearing Roper on the molecular structure of the Eucharist – how soon both our futures were about to begin. The year was 1939. Roper and I were both coming up to eighteen. Father Byrne had intimated, in various morning assemblies, that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was nothing more than God's own castigation of a race that had rejected the Light, a castigation in brown shirts with a crooked cross. 'They crucified our loving Saviour, boys.' (Roper, sitting next to me in the prefects' front row, said quietly, 'I thought it was the Romans who did that.') 'They are,' cried Father Byrne, 'a race on whom Original Sin sits heavy, much given to sexuality and money-making. Their law forbids neither incest nor usury.' And so on. Father Byrne had a long and rubbery body and more than he needed of neck. He now, with great skill, made himself both neckless and tubby and gave us a sort of Shylock performance, full of lisping dribbling and hand-rubbing. 'Dirty Chrithtianth,' he spat. 'You vill not cut off your forethkinth.' He loved to act. His best performance was of James I, and he would willingly spice any teacher's history lesson, whatever the period being taught, with a session of blubbering and slavering and doubtful Lallans. But his Jew was not bad. 'Oh yeth, ve vill do you all down, dirty Chrithtianth. You vill have none of my thpondulickth. Oy oy oy.'
Roper and I were too liberal to laugh at this. We understood that the Nazis were persecuting Catholics as well as Jews. We learned a bit about evil now from the newspapers, not from the religious tracts that stood in a special rack in the school library. Concentration camps fascinated us. Mashed bloody flesh. Bayonets stuck in the goolies. Sir, say what you will, we half-become what we hate. Would we, any of us, have had it otherwise, the film run back to the time when there were no gas-chambers and castrations without anaesthetic, then a new, sinless, reel put in the projector? We will these horrors to happen and then we want to feel good about not wreaking vengeance in kind.
Roper and I, instead of Father-Byrne-Shylock dribbling over the reports from black Germany, would have done better to sweat it all out in a decent bout of sex in the chapel. I said to Roper: 'What about good and evil?'
'It seems reasonable to suppose,' said Roper, chewing on a fibre of stewed mutton, 'that good is the general name we give to what we all aspire to, whatever thing it happens to be. I think it's all a matter of ignorance and the overcoming of ignorance. Evil comes out of ignorance.'
'The Germans are said to be the least ignorant people in the world.'
He had no real answer to that. But he said: 'There are particular fields of ignorance. They're politically ignorant, that's their trouble. Perhaps it's not their fault. The German states were very late in being unified, or something.' He was very vague about it all. 'And then there are all those forests, full of tree-gods.'
'You mean they have atavistic tendencies?'
He didn't know what the hell he meant. He knew nothing now except the trilogy of sciences he was studying for the Higher School Certificate. He was becoming both full and empty at the same time. He was turning into a thing, growing out of boyhood into thinghood, not manhood – a highly efficient artefact crammed with non-human knowledge.
'And,' I asked, 'what will you do when war breaks out? Just say that it's all a matter of ignorance and the poor sods can't help it? Because they'll be coming for us, you know. Poison gas and all.'
He suddenly seemed to realise that the war was going to touch him as well as other people. 'Oh,' he said, 'I hadn't thought about that. That's going to be a bit of a nuisance, isn't it? There's this question of my state scholarship, you see.' There was no doubt that he was going to get one of those; his examination results were going to be brilliant.
'Well,' I said, 'think about it. Think about the Jews. Einstein and Freud and so on. The Nazis regard science as a kind of international Jewish conspiracy.'
'They have some of the finest scientists in the world,' said Roper.
'Had,' I said. 'They're getting rid of most of them now. That's why they can't win. But it'll take a long time to persuade them they can't win.'
That was a lovely summer. Roper and I, with ten pounds each in our wallets, hitch-hiked through Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France. We had a month of bread and cheese and cheap wine, of the 'J'aime Berlin' pun about Chamberlain the umbrella man, of war talk under brilliant sun. We spent one night in our sleeping-bags near the teeth of the Maginot Line, feeling well protected. We were back in England three days before war broke out. Our examination results had come through in our absence in soon-to-be-locked-up Europe. I'd done well; Roper had done magnificently. There was some talk of my going to the School of Slavonic Studies in London; Roper had to wait for news of his scholarship. We were both drawn, during the interim time, to the only community we knew; we went back to school.
Father Byrne was now very good as Suffering Ireland. He came from Cork and hinted that his sister had been raped by the Black and Tans during the Troubles. 'Warmongering England,' he cried in morning assembly. Antichrist Germany never came into it. 'She has done it again, declaring war, backed by the Jews with their wads of greasy notes.' A brief impersonation of International Finance. 'This war, boys, is going to be a terrible thing. Europe will soon be swarming, if not swarming already, with ravaging and pillaging soldiery. It will be Ireland all over again, the leering and tramping louts, not a thought in their heads but this damnable sex, an abomination before Almighty God and His Blessed Mother.' Soon Roger Casement was brought in. And then he gave us the news that all scholarships were temporarily suspended. I said to Roper, after a morning of yawning lounging in the school library, 'Let's go out and get drunk.'
'Drunk? Can we?'
'_I__ certainly can. As for _may__, who's to stop us?'
Bitter beer was fivepence a pint in the public bars. We drank in the Clarendon, the George, the Cuddy, the King's Head, the Admiral Vernon. Bradcaster smelt of khaki and diesel-fuel. There was also a sort of headiness of promise of the night – this damnable sex. Did not the girls in the streets seem to flaunt more, more luscious-lipped, bigger-breasted? It wTas always unwise ever to think Father Byrne totally wrong about anything. Over my sixth pint I saw myself in uniform of a subaltern of the 1914-18 War, girls panting as they smelt the enemy blood coming off me as I passed the ticket-barrier at Victoria Station, London, home for a spot of leave. Hell in those trenches, girls. Tell us more. I said now to Roper: 'Going to volunteer. This dear country we all love so much.'
'Why?' swayed Roper. 'Why so much? What has it done for you or for me?'
'Freedom,' I said. 'It can't be so bad a bloody country if it lets buggers like Father Byrne attack it in morning assembly. You think about that. What are you going to choose – England or bloody Father Byrne?'
'And,' said Roper, 'I thought I'd be going to Oxford.'
'Well, you're not. Not yet you're not. They're going to have us both sooner or later. Best make it sooner. We're going to volunteer.'
But before we could go and do that, Roper was sick. He had no true hearty English beer-stomach. He was sick in a back-alley near the Admiral Vernon, and this rationalist moaned and groaned prayers like 'Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph' as he tried to get it all up. The scientific approach to life is not really appropriate to states of visceral anguish. I told Roper this while he was suffering, but he did not listen. He prayed however: 'Oh God God God. Oh suffering heart of Christ.' But the next day, very pale, he was prepared to go with me to a dirty little shop that had been turned into a recruiting centre. The cold deflation of crapula perhaps made him see himself as temporarily empty of a future; the only thing he could be filled with in these times was his generalised young man's destiny. And, of course, that went for me too.
'What will our parents say?' wondered Roper. 'We should really write and tell them what we're doing.'
'Reconcile yourself to the jettisoning of another responsibility,' I said, or words to that effect. 'We'll send them telegrams.' And off we went to see a sergeant with a dreadful cold. I put in for the Royal Corps of Signals. Roper couldn't make up his mind. He said: 'I don't want to kill.'
'You dod't have to,' said the sergeant. 'There's always the Bedics.' He meant the Medics. The Royal Army Medical Corps. RAMC. Rob all my comrades. Run Albert matron's coming. Roper bravely joined that mob.
It seems strange, looking back, that the British armed forces had as yet no room for genuine skills, except of the most elementary trigger-squeezing, button-pressing kind. All the time Roper was in the army, nobody ever once thought that here was a brain that could be utilised in the development of the most horrible offensive weapons. For that matter, my own ability to speak French and Russian quite well, and Polish moderately well, was seized on with no eagerness. I even had difficulty in transferring to the Intelligence Corps when it was formed in July, 1940. My officers spoke French with a public school accent; the British have always been suspicious of linguistic ability, associating it with spies, impresarios, waiters, and Jewish refugees: the polyglot can never be a gentleman. It was not until the Soviet Union became one of our allies that I was allowed to bring my Russian into the open, and then there was long delay before it was used. It was used when there was some sort of programme of Anglo-American aid to Russia; I was brought in as a junior assistant interpreter. This sounds big enough stuff for one still so young, but it was only to do with the provision of sports equipment for the ratings of Soviet naval vessels. There was a bigger job that at one time I thought I might get, something to do with the putting of a bay leaf in every tin of American-aid chopped pork, the Russians finding pig-meat so un-garnished unpalatable, myself to explain that this would slow up deliveries, each bay leaf having to be dropped in separately by hand, but I never got the job. And now back to Roper.
He wrote to me first of all from Aldershot, saying that a bomb had dropped near Boy ce Barracks and he'd been thinking more than usual about death. Or rather what Catholics call the Four Last Things Ever To Be Remembered: Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven. He'd succeeded, he said, in blotting those doctrines out pretty well when he'd been in the Science Sixth, but what he wanted to know was this: did these things perhaps exist – the after-death things, that was – for somebody who believed in them? He'd been pût in rather a false position, he thought, from the point of view of religion. When he'd arrived at the Depot as a recruit, they'd called out: 'RCs this side, Protestants that, fancy buggers in the middle.' His intention had been to declare himself an agnostic, but that would have put him right away among the United Board. So he said he was an RC – 'on the surface, the army being all surface'. When he became a sergeant he found himself possessed not merely of authority but of Catholic authority. There was this business of helping to march the men to Mass on Sunday mornings. And the priest in the town church was decent, friendly, English not Irish, and he asked Roper to use his influence to make more of the men go to communion. But, after this bomb had dropped near Boyce Barracks, which was very early in his army career, he'd been made aware of the talismanic power of having 'RC in his paybook. 'You're an RC,' some of his barrack-room-mates had said. 'Going to stick close to you we are next time one of those bastards drops.' What Roper said in his letter was: 'There seems to be a certain superstitious conviction among the men that the Catholics have more chance of "being all right" when death threatens. It's as though there's a hangover of guilt from the Reformation among the common people – "We didn't want to get away from the Old Religion really, see. We was quite happy as we was. It was them upper-class bastards, Henry VIII and whatnot, that made us break away, see." '
And poor Roper, cut off from his science – though he learned the tricks of his corps so well that he was very quickly promoted – and living more with his emotional and instinctive needs, began to be aware of emptiness. 'If only I could be re-converted or else converted to something else. What's the point of fighting this war if we don't believe that one way of life is better than another? And that's not the same as saying that our way is bad but the Nazi way is worse. That won't do. You can't fight negatively. A war should be a sort of crusade. But what for?'
And then, God help us, Roper started to read poetry. 'But,' he wrote, 'I can't get much out of this very difficult poetry. I've got a scientific brain, I suppose, and I like a word to mean one thing and one thing only. That's why I've been going back to people like Wordsworth, who really does say what he means, even though you can't always agree with what he says. But at least there's a man who made a religion for himself, and, when you come to think of it, it's a scientific religion in a way. Nature – trees and rivers and mountains and so on – is something that's really there, it encloses us. I think of those Nazi bastards coming over and blasting England, and I get a sort of picture of England suffering – I don't mean just the people and the cities they've built, but the trees and the countryside and the grass, and I feel more bitter than if it was Christ on His cross. Is this some sort of new religious sense I've got? Would you say it was irrational?'.
A delightful and inevitable progression from bare reason to sentimentality to sex. He wrote to me from Chesham in 1943, saying that he was doing some sort of course on Army Hygiene and, in his spare time, going out with a girl called Ethel. 'She's tall and fair and has blunt fingers and is very wholesome, and she works in a snack-bar on the High Street. Would you say I was late in losing my virginity? We go out into the fields and it's all very pleasant and not very exciting, and I don't feel any guilt at all. Would it be better if I did feel guilt? I seem to have come very close to England since I stopped believing in Catholicism, close to the heart or essential nature of England I mean. What I find there is a sublime kind of innocence. England would take neither Catholicism nor Puritanism for very long-those faiths built on sin just rolled off like water from a duck's back. And then, when I think of Nazi Germany, what do I find but another kind of innocence, a sort of malevolent innocence which enables them to perpetrate the most incredible atrocities and still see nothing wrong there. Is there anybody anywhere who is feeling guilt for this war? I lie in the cornfield with Ethel and, to spice it up with guilt, I imagine this is adultery – she isn't married – or incest, but it won't work. Of course, in a way it is incest, for we're all supposed to be bound together in a big happy family, brothers and sisters, directing our sexual hate, all hate being really sexual, against the enemy.'
The really significant letter from Roper came from defeated Germany. 'I shall never eat meat again,' he said, 'never as long as I live. The camp was full of meat, layers and layers of it, some of it still alive. Human meat, sweet surely because it was so near the bone, with the flies buzzing over it and grubs moving. The smell was of a massive cheese factory. We were the first in, and we wasted no time in squirting our patent Mark IV antiseptic sprays, retching while we did it. I had met this word necropolis before and thought it to be a sort of poetic term for describing a city at dead of night, a city of locked houses from which all the living seemed to have fled. Now I saw what a necropolis really was. How many dead or dying citizens did this contain? I had not thought it possible that so many dead could be brought together in one place, and all arranged and stacked so neatly, sometimes dead with still alive. I passed along the neat made-in-Germany streets that had house-high hedges of piled corpses on either side, spraying away, but the spray, for all its powerful smell of clean kitchen-sinks and lavatory-bowls, couldn't at all erase the stink of the dead.'
That, sir, was Roper – QMS Roper – in the spearhead of the invasions of cleaners-up after the German surrender. The letter, and the three letters that followed (he was just talking the anguish out on the paper), spoke of vomiting and a mad fear that the near-corpses would suddenly topple their fully dead brothers from the pile and come to lap up half-digested protein. They also told of nightmares of a sort we all had, all those of us who'd entered the death-camps and stood paralysed, our mouths in rictu but whether for retching or out of sheer incredulity the mouths them- selves could not at first tell. We had to gape; it was the only possible oral response to what we saw and smelt. We didn't want to believe, since belief that a civilised nation had been capable of all this must overturn everything we'd ever taken for granted about civilisation, progress, the elevating power of artistic, scientific, philosophical achievement (who could deny that the Germans were a great race?). For my part, I went in as sole sergeant-interpreter with a small Russo-American group (I have deliberately forgotten where the death-camp was) and found, what I should have known, that words, whether Russian or Anglo-American, were otiose.
Strangely, my own nightmares featured Roper more than myself, perhaps because Roper had written those letters. I could see him very clearly as I read them – pale, fattish, bespectacled (with those steel-rimmed respirator-spectacles that made the wearer look like an idiot child), a shaggy straw nape under the eaves of the steel helmet. In my dreams he did my moaning for me, vomiting up such dream-objects as the flywheels of clocks, black-letter books, wriggling snakes, and he sobbed very idiomatic German, full of words like Staunen (astonishment) and Sittlichkeit (morality) and Schicksal (destiny). His own nightmares were of the forced evening walk (a lovely sunset, the birds' last song) through groves of corpses, along with burrowing into hedges of blue flesh and (this was fairly common with all of us) actual necrophagy or corpse-eating. And then dreaming Roper allowed himself to appear as a sort of British Christ, John Bull Jesus crucified on his own Union Jack. The crucifixion was either punishment or expiation or identification – he couldn't tell which. He'd done very little reading outside of physics and chemistry and very simple poetry.
But guilt was in his letters. These crimes had been committed by members of the human race, no different from himself. 'We should never have let this happen,' he wrote. 'We're all responsible.' I wrote back: 'Don't be so bloody stupid. The Germans are responsible and only the Germans. Admittedly, a lot of them won't have that because a lot of them won't believe what's been done in their name. They'll have to be shown, all of them. You can start off with the German women.' That's what I'd been doing. In a way, with their deep belly-consciousness or whatever the hell it is, the German women were already lining up to be punished. They didn't think it was that, of course; they thought they were just on the chocolate-buying game like the women of any conquered country. But the deep processes of genetics were calling out for exogamy, fertilisation by foreign bodies, and the deeper moral processes were shrieking for punishment. Wait, though: aren't those aspects of the same thing? Isn't the angry punitive seed more potent than the good gentle stuff that dribbles out in the pink-sheeted marriage-bed? Isn't miscegenation a means of destroying ethnic identity and thus getting rid of national guilt? For my part, I didn't then ask such questions of the stocky women of Bremen. I got stuck into them, not sparing the rod. At the same time, showing my teeth and manhood, I was dimly aware that their menfolk, dead or merely absent, had got the better of me by making me one of themselves – brutal, lustful, something from a Gothic bestiary. Ah, what a bloody Manichean mess life is.
Poor Roper found a woman in Elmshorn. Or rather she found him. She married him. She needed the leisure of marriage to enforce a lesson diametrically opposite to the one I'd been trying to teach. Though Roper and I were both in the British Zone of Germany we never met, and it wasn't till the marriage was a couple of years old and the lessons well under way – back in England, in fact, with both of us civilians – that I was able to indulge my not very-strong masochistic propensities (vicarious, anyway) and see the Ehepaar (these lovely German words!) in cosy domestic bliss.
I remember the occasion well, sir. Roper said shyly, 'This is Brigitte,' having got the introductions arse-back-wards. He realised it and then said, in confusion, 'Darf ich vorstellen – What I mean is, this is my oldest friend. Denis Hillier, that is.'
Roper had been released from the army no earlier than anyone else, despite the scholarship that was awaiting him at Manchester University (not Oxford, after all) and his obvious potential usefulness in the great age of technological reconstruction that was, we were told, coming up. He was now in his third year. He and this Brigitte had had a twelve-month engagement, she waiting in Elmshorn with the ring on her finger, he getting his allowances and a flat sorted out in that grey city which, when you come to think of it, has always had some of the quality of a pre-Hitler Stadt – rich musical Jews, chophouses, beeriness, bourgeois solidity. I understand that that picture has now, since the immigration of former subject peoples longing to be back with their colonial oppressors, been much modified. It is now, so I gather, much more like a temperate Singapore. Perhaps the German image only came out fully for me when I saw Brigitte, almost indecently blonde, opulently busted, as full of sex as an egg of meat, and a good deal younger than Roper (we were both now twenty-eight; she couldn't have been more than twenty). She'd contrived to stuff the Didsbury flat with cosy Teutonic rubbish – fretwork clocks, an elaborate weatherhouse, a set of beer-mugs embossed with leather-breeched huntsmen and their simpering dirndl-clad girl-friends. Lying on the sideboard was a viola, which Roper, perhaps never having met one in England, insisted on calling a Bratsche, her dead father's, and she could play it well, said proud Roper – nothing classical, just old German songs. There seemed to be only one thing of Roper's in the stuffy Brigitte-smelling living-room, and that was something hanging on the wall, framed in passe-partout. It was the Roper family-tree. 'Well,' I said, going to look at it. 'I never realised you were so – is Rassenstolz the word?'
'Not race,' said Brigitte, whose eye on me had been, since my entry, a somewhat cold one. 'Family-proud.' For that matter, I hadn't taken to her at all.
'Brigitte's family goes back a long way,' said Roper. 'The Nazis did some people a sort of service in a manner of speaking, digging out their genealogical tables. Looking for Jewish blood, you know.' I said, still looking at past Ropers: 'No Jewish blood here, anyway. A bit of French and Irish, some evident Lancashire.' (Marchand, O'Shaugh-nessy, Bamber.) 'A long-lived family.' (1785-1862; 1830-1912; 1920 – This last was our Roper, Edwin.)
'Good healthy blood,' smirked Roper.
'And in my family no Jewish,' said Brigitte aggressively.
'Of course not,' I said, grinning. And then, 'This Roper died pretty young, didn't he?' There was a Tudor Roper called Edward-1530-1558. 'Still, the expectation wasn't all that long in those days.'
He was executed,' said this Roper. 'He died for his beliefs. It was my grandfather who dug up all this, you know. A hobby for his retirement. See, there he is – John Edwin Roper. Died at eighty-three.'
'One of the first Elizabethan martyrs,' I said. 'So you have a martyr in the family.'
He was a fool,' pronounced Roper, sneering. 'He could have shut up about it.'
'Like the Germans who saw it through,' I suggested.
'My father died,' said Brigitte. Then she marched out to the kitchen.
While she was clattering the supper things I had to congratulate Roper and say what a handsome, intelligent, pleasant girl she seemed to me to be. Roper said eagerly: 'Oh, there's no doubt about the intelligence' (as though there might be some doubt about the other qualities). 'She speaks remarkably good English, doesn't she? She's had a rough time, you know, what with the war. And her father was a very early casualty. In Poland it was, '39. But she's not a bit reproachful. Towards me, I mean, or towards the British generally.'
'The British were never in Poland.'
'Oh, well, you know what I mean, the Allies. It was all one war, wasn't it? All the Allies were responsible, really.'
'Look,' I said, giving him the hard eye, 'I don't get all this. You mean that your wife, as a representative of the German nation, very kindly forgives us for Hitler and the Nazis and the bloody awful things they did? Including the war they started?'
'He didn't start it, did he?' said Roper brightly. 'It was we who declared war on him.'
'Yes, to stop him taking the whole bloody world over. Damn it, man, you seem to have forgotten what you did six years' fighting for.'
'Oh, I didn't actually fight, did I?' said literalist Roper. 'I was there to help save lives.'
'Allied lives,' I said. 'That was a kind of fighting.'
'It was worth it, whatever it was,' said Roper. 'It led me to her. It led me straight to Brigitte.' And he looked for a moment as though he were listening to Beethoven.
I didn't like this one little bit, but I didn't dare say any- thing for the moment because Brigitte herself came in with the supper, or with the first instalments of it. It looked as though it was going to be a big cold help-your-self spread. She brought serially to the table smoked salmon (the salty canned kind), cold chicken, a big jellied ham (coffin-shaped from its tin), dishes of gherkins, pumpernickel, butter-a whole slab, not a rationed wisp-and four kinds of cheese. Roper opened bottled beer and made as to pour some for me into a stein. 'A glass, please,' I said. 'I much prefer a glass.'
'From a stein,' said Brigitte, 'it smacks better.'
'I prefer a glass,' I smiled. So Roper got me a glass with the name and coat-of-arms of a lager firm gilded on it. 'Well,' I said, doing the conventional yum-yum hand-rubbing before falling to, 'this looks a bit of all right. You're doing very nicely for yourselves, nicht wahr}' At that time British rations were smaller than they'd been even at the worst point of the war. We now had all the irksome appurtenances of war without any of its glamour. Roper said: 'It's from Brigitte's Uncle Otto. In America. He sends a food parcel every month.'
'God bless Uncle Otto,' I said, and, after this grace, I piled smoked salmon on to thickly buttered black bread.
'And you,' said Brigitte, with a governess directness, 'what is it that you do?' The tones of one who sees a slack lounging youth who has evaded call-up.
'I'm on a course,' I said. 'Slavonic languages and other things. I say no more.'
'It's for a department of the Foreign Office,' smiled Roper, looking, with his red round face and short-cropped hair and severely functional spectacles, as German as his wife. It was suddenly like being inside a German primer: Lesson III -Abendessen. After food Roper would probably light up a meerschaum.
'Is it for the Secret Police?' asked Brigitte, tucking in and already lightly dewed with fierce eater's sweat. 'My husband is soon to be a Doktor.' I didn't see the connection.
Roper explained that only in Germany was a doctorate the first degree. And then: 'We don't have secret police in England, at least I don't think so.'
'We don't,' I said. 'Take it from me.'
'My husband,' said Brigitte, 'studies the sciences.'
'Your husband,' I said, 'will be a very important man.' Roper was eating too hard to blush with pleasure. 'Science is going to be very important. The new and terrible weapons that science is capable of making are a great priority in the peaceful work of reconstruction. Rockets, not butter.'
'There is much butter on the table,' said Brigitte, stone-facedly chewing. And then: 'What you say I do not understand.'
'There's an Iron Curtain,' I told her. 'We're not too sure of Russia's intentions. To keep the peace we must watch out for war. We've learned a great deal since 1938.'
'Before you should have learned,' said Brigitte, now on the cheese course. 'Before England should this have known.' Roper kindly unscrambled that for her. 'It was Russia,' said Brigitte, 'that was the fiend.'
'Enemy?'
'Ja, ja, Feind. Enemy.' She tore at a piece of pumpernickel as though it were a transubstantiation of Stalin. 'This Germany did know. This England did know not.'
'And that's why Germany persecuted the Jews?'
'International Bolschevismus,' said Brigitte with satisfaction. Then Roper started, eloquently, going on at length. Brigitte, his teacher, listened, nodded approval, cued him sometimes, rarely corrected. Roper said: 'We, that is to say the British, must admit we have nearly everything to blame ourselves for. We were blind to it all.
Germany was trying to save Europe, no more. Mussolini had tried once, but with no help from those who should have helped. We had no conception of the power and ambition of the Soviet Union. We're learning now, but very late. Three men knew it well, but they were all reviled. Now only one of them is living. I refer,' he said, to enlighten my ignorance, 'to General Franco in Spain.'
'I know all about General bloody Franco,' I said coarsely. 'I did a year in Gibraltar, remember. Given the chance, he would have whipped through and taken the Rock. You're talking a lot of balls,' I added.
'It is you who talk the balls,' said Brigitte. She picked up words quickly, that girl. 'To my husband please listen.'
Roper talked on, growing more shiny as he talked. There was one thing, I thought in my innocence: here was a man who, when he got down to research, as he would very shortly, would be quite above suspicion – a man who would be susceptible to no blandishments of the one true fiend. What I didn't like was this business of England's guilt and need to expiate great wrong done to bloody Deutschland. I took as much as I could stand and then broke in with: 'Ah God, man, how can you justify all the atrocities, all the suppression of free thought and speech, the great men sent into exile when not clubbed to death – Thomas Mann, Freud-'
'Only the smutty writers,' said Brigitte, meaning schmutzig.
'If you're going to wage war,' said Roper, 'it's got to be total war. War means fighting an enemy, and the enemy isn't necessarily somewhere out there. He can be at home, you know, and he's at his most insidious then. But,' he conceded, 'do you think that anybody really enjoyed having to send great brains into exile? They wouldn't be argued with, many of them. Impossible, a lot of them, to convince. And time was very short.'
I was going to say something about ends not justifying means, but I remembered that it was right for prisoners-of-war to drop razor-blades into the enemy's pigswill and that, if they'd bombed Coventry, we'd bombed Dresden. That if they'd been wrong we'd been wrong too. That killing babies was no way to kill Hitler, who'd had to kill himself anyway at the end. That history was a mess. That Fascism had been the inevitable answer to Communism. That the Jews could sometimes be as Father Byrne had portrayed them. I shuddered. Was somebody brainwashing me? I looked at Brigitte, but she, replete, glowed only with sex. I clenched my teeth, wanting her on the floor then and there, Roper looking on. But I merely said: 'You've joined Father Byrne in condemning the warmongering English. And, of course, the money-grubbing Jews. You two would get on well together now.'
'That horrible Church,' said Roper passionately. 'Jewish meekness, turning the other cheek, draining the blood from the race. Nietzsche was right.' Brigitte nodded.
'What the hell do either of you know about Nietzsche?' I asked. 'I bet neither of you's ever read a word of Nietzsche.'
Brigitte began: 'My father-' Roper said, mumbling a bit: 'There was a very good summary of his philosophy in the Reader's Digest.' He was always honest. '-at school,' ended Brigitte. I said: 'Oh, my God. What do you want – blood and iron and black magic?'
'No,' he said. 'I want to get on with my work. The first thing is to get my degree. And then research. No,' he repeated, somewhat dispirited now (perhaps that was overeating, though: he'd tucked away half a chicken and a slab of ham and a bit each of the four kinds of cheese, all with bread in proportion). 'I don't want anything that causes war or could be used to make war more terrible than it's been already. All the dead, all the innocent children.'
'My father,' said Brigitte.
'Your father,' agreed Roper. It was as though they were toasting him. And for a moment it was as if the Second World War had been conjured expressly to kill off Herr Whoever-he-was.
'Yes,' I said. 'And my Uncle Jim, and the two children evacuated to my Aunt Florrie's house who found a bomb in a field, and all the poor bloody Jews and dissident intellectuals.'
'You say right,' said Brigitte. 'Bloody Jews.'
'We must never be allowed to start another war like that one,' said Roper. 'A great nation in ruins.'
'Not starving, though,' I said. 'Plenty of Danish butter and fat ham. The best-nourished bastards in Europe.'
'Please,' said Roper, 'do not call my wife's people bastards.'
'What is that word?' asked Brigitte. 'Many strange words he knows, your fiend.'
'Friend,' I amended.
'A great nation's bones picked over by Yanks and Bolshevists,' said Roper, 'and the French, a rag of a nation, and the British.' Strangely, two cathedral choirs sang in my head, antiphonally: Babylon the Great is fallen -If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. I said: 'You always wanted a unified universe. Tautology and all. Remember that no science now can be wholly for peace. Rockets are for outer space but also for knocking hell out of enemies. Rocket fuel can speed man into the earth or off it.'
'How did you know about rocket fuel?' asked Roper, wide-eyed. 'I never mentioned-'
'just a guess. Look,' I said, 'I think I'd better be going.'
'Yes,' said Brigitte very promptly, 'be going.' I looked at her, wondering whether to be nasty back, but her body got in the way. Perhaps I'd said enough already. Perhaps I'd been discourteous. I still had fragments of Uncle Otto's ham in my back teeth. Perhaps I was ungrateful. I said to Roper: 'It's a messy sort of journey back where I'm going.'
'I thought you were in Preston.'
'No, a country house some way outside. A matter of a last bus.'
'Well,' he said unhappily, 'it's been nice having you. You must come again some time.' I looked at Brigitte to see if she would corroborate that in smile, nod, word, but she sat stony. So I said: 'Danke schön, gnädige Frau. Ich habe sehr gut gegessen.' And then, like a fool, I added: 'Alles, alles über Deutschland.' Her eyes began to fill with angry tears. I got out without waiting to be shown out. Jolting on the bus into town, I kept seeing Brigitte's great Urmutter breasts wagging and jumping inside their white cotton blouse. Roper would undo a button, and then the catechism would start: 'Whose fault was it all?'-'England's, England's' (most breathily). It would continue, intensifying, to the point where she would lose interest in catechising. I turned myself into Roper. Oh yes, cupping a fine firm huge Teutonic breast I too would breathily revile England, would blame my own mother for the war, would say, preparing for the plunge, that not enough Jews had been plunged into gas-chambers. And afterwards I would take it all back, though not in any chill disgust of post coitum: rather I would call her an evil bitch, very hot, and strafe her. And then it would start again.
That was a significant event in Roper's life, sir. I mean his going into the death-camp and seeing evil for the first real time – not the pruriently reported evil of the Sunday rags, but stinking palpable evil. For the sake of scientific rationalism he'd jettisoned a whole system of thought capable of explaining it -1 mean Catholic Christianity; face to face with an irrational emptiness he'd made himself a sucker (ah, how literally) for the first coherent system of blame that had been presented to him. There's another letter I haven't mentioned, a letter in reply to that letter of mine advising him to get stuck into the German women: 'I've tried to do what you said. It's reminded me in a queer way of the old days of going to confession. Blasphemous, those still in the fold would think. I met this girl in a small beer-place, she was with a German man. I was a bit drunk and a bit more forward than I'd have normally been. The man sort of slunk off when I came to their table. I think it was her brother. Anyway, I bought her several beers and gave her three packets of Player's. To cut a long story short, before I properly knew what was happening I found we were lying on the grass in this sort of park place. It was a lovely evening -Mondschein, she kept saying. That was right for what they call LOVE. Then, when I saw part of her bared body under the moon, it all came over me – that camp and all that bare wasted flesh there, not at all like hers. I sort of grabbed hold of her in a kind of hate you could call it, and I even screamed at her while I was doing it. But she seemed to like it. "Wieder wieder wieder/' she seemed to keep on crying. And then it seemed to me that I'd done wrong to her, raped her even, but, worse than that, I was sort of corrupting her by all this, she took such pleasure in what was meant to be hate but became a great joy I was sharing with her. I loathe myself, I could kill myself, the guilt I feel is shocking.'
The day before I got this letter I received a telegram from Roper. It said: 'DESTROY LETTER WITHOUT READING PLEASE PLEASE WILL WRITE EXPLAINING.' He never did write explaining. What he did instead was to expiate his fancied wrong to the woman shrieking for more in the moonlight. Girl rather than woman. Brigitte must have been very young at that time.
It was a long time, time enough to forget Uncle Otto's smoked salmon and coffined ham and his niece's unpleasantness, before Roper and I met again. When we did meet again, he was, over-fulfilling his wife's prophecy, a real doctor, not just, like horrible dead Goebbels, a man with a first degree. He rang me up at home, very breathy and very close to the telephone, as though it were an erogenous zone of Brigitte's. Urgent, he said. He needed advice, help. I could guess what it was going to be. Wieder wieder wieder. Ach, the lovely bloody Mondschein. I suggested a Soho restaurant the following evening. A German restaurant, since he liked German things so much. There Doctor Roper, white hope of research in cheap rocket fuel, got very drunk on sparkling hock and moaned and whined. His wife was playing away. And he loved her so much still, he said, and he'd given her everything any decent woman could- 'What exactly has happened?' There was a vinous touch of satisfaction in my voice; I could hear it and it was hard to suppress.
'He was in the house one night when I got back late, a great red German lout, and he had his coat off and his shirt open, a big fair hairy chest, and he was drinking beer out of a can and he had his feet on the settee, and when I walked in he wasn't one bit abashed but just grinned at me. And she grinned too.'
Abashed. "Why didn't you bash him and kick him out?'
'He's a professional wrestler.'
'Oh.' I had a swift vision of Roper on the ropes, neatly cat-cradled in them, a parcelled crucifixion. 'How did all this start?'
'We took this house, you see, and it's in a fairly slummy part of London, because houses are the very devil to get in London but-'
'You've been in London long?'
'Oh yes.' He stared at me as though his coming to London had been headlined in the more reputable newspapers. 'Hard to get, as I say, but the Department helped and we didn't want a flat any more, and Brigitte said that she was to be an Englische Dame with stairs to go up and down-'
'Come to this wrestler.'
'We went into a pub for a drink, you see, in Islington it was, and then there was this big blond man talking bad English with a very strong Germarî accent. She spoke to him, talking about Heimweh – that's homesickness, she was homesick, you see, for somebody to speak German to, and she found that he came from about thirty miles from Elmshorn. So that was it pretty well. He's under contract to wrestle in England or something and he said he was lonely. A very big man and very strong.'
'Wrestlers usually are.'
'And very ugly. But we had him back for supper.' Roper spoke as though ugliness would not normally get you an invitation. 'And very – you know, absolutely no intelligence, with this big grin and his face all shiny.'
'That was after eating, I take it?'
'Oh no, all the time.' Roper was growing as obtuse as his wife to the tones of irony or sarcasm. 'But he did eat like a pig. Brigitte cut him more and more bread.'
'And she's rather taken to him, has she?'
Roper began to tremble. 'Taken to him! That's good, that is. I came home one night, late again, very tired, and you know what I found?'
'You tell me.'
'On the job.' Roper's voice rose. His hands clenched and unclenched. They seized the sparkling hock and poured a sizeable tremulous measure. Then, panting, he said, loudly so that people looked at him, 'On the bloody job. I saw them. His big bloody muscles all working away at it, enjoying it, and she was there underneath him crying out Schnell schnell schnell.' The solitary waiter, a German, took this for a summons and started to come too. I waved him away. To Roper I said: 'Oh no.'
'Oh bloody yes. And even he had the bloody grace to see this was all filthy and wrong and he didn't grin this time, oh no. He slunk out, carrying half his clothes. You know, it was as though he expected me to hit him.'
'You should have knocked the daylights out of him,' I said. An improbable idea. 'And so that's the end of that. I never thought that marriage would work, somehow.'
He looked at me wet-lipped. Part of his dithering now seemed out of shame. 'But it did, you know,' he mumbled. 'It took me a long time to forgive her. But, you see, seeing them like that -1 don't quite know how to put this. Well, it gave us a new lease of life, in a way.'
I understood. Horrible, but life remains life. A new lease of. 'You mean, even though you were tired coming back home at night, you were able to-'
'And she was sort of penitent.'
'So she should be. If I ever caught any wife of mine-'
'You wouldn't understand.' A flash of drunken sweetness peered, then went. 'You're not married.'
'All right. So now what's your trouble?'
'It didn't last all that long,' he mumbled. 'It was working late and not eating enough, I suppose. I've been having this bit of tummy trouble, canteen food.'
'This was all right, though, was it?'
'Oh yes.' We'd had Kalbsbraten followed by Obsttorte. Roper, in a distracted kind of passion, as though waging a secondary war at threshold level, had cleaned my plates as well as his own. 'She's been going on at me as an effete Englander, no ink in my pen, no pen at all, only a little Bleistift. Now I've become one of those who encouraged the Jews to engineer Germany's downfall.'
'Well, you always were, weren't you? As an Englishman, I mean?'
'I'd seen the light,' said Roper in dark gloom. 'That's what she used to say. Now she's brought this bloody big blond beast back again.'
'So there was a sort of interim, was there?'
'He was on the Continent, doing a kind of tour. Now he's in London, wrestling in the suburbs.'
'Has he been back in the house?'
'For a late supper. Not for anything else. But I can't vouch for what happens in the afternoons.'
'You condoned it, you bloody fool. They've both got you now.'
'He's not abashed any more. He grins and goes to the fridge to get more beer. She calls him Willi. But the name he wrestles under is Wurzel. On the posters it says Wurzel der Westdeutsche Teufel.'
'Wurzel the mangle.'
'The West German Devil is what it means.'
'I know, I know. What do you want me to do about it? I can't see that there's anything I can do.' But then-and they should have done this before – my professional ears pricked. 'Tell me,' I said, 'do you discuss your work with her at all? Does she know the sort of thing you're doing?'
'Never.'
'Does she ever ask? '
He thought for a moment. 'Only in the most general terms. She doesn't really understand what sort of work a scientist does. She didn't get much schooling, what with the war.'
'Do you bring papers home?'
'Well-' I'd made him just a little uneasy. 'She wouldn't understand them even if she could get at them. I keep them locked up, you see.'
'Oh, you innocent. Tell me, has she any relatives or friends in East Germany?'
'None that I know of. Look, if you think she's on the spying game you're greatly mistaken. Whatever's going on is sexual, you take my word for it. Sex.' This damnable. His mouth began to collapse. The whine came gargoyling out. 'It's not my fault if I get so tired in the evenings.'
'And on Sunday mornings too?'
'I don't wake early. She's up hours before I am.' Now the tears were ready to flood, and I was ready to get him out of here before the fierce fat manageress came. I grinned to myself, remembering Father Byrne sermonising in the dormitory. I paid the bill, leaving all the change, and said, as we left, me supporting his left elbow: 'I can make a professional job of this, you know. Watching them, I mean. And if you want evidence for a divorce-'
'I don't want a divorce. I want things to be as they used to be. I love her.'
We walked down Dean Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. 'There was a time,' I said, 'when you were always having a jab at authority. Very independent you were, Renaissance man, knocking at all doors. You seem to need to lean on something now. Somebody, I mean.'
'We all need to lean. I was very young and inexperienced then.'
'Why don't you go back into the Church?'
'Are you mad? One goes forward, not back. The Church is a lot of irrational nonsense. And you're a right sod to talk, aren't you?' The Bradcaster way of speech had burrowed deep into us, despite our Southern background. 'Been out of the Church yourself since God knows when.'
'Since taking up this kind of work, to be precise. A question of loyalties. In my dossier my religion is down as C of E. It's safe. It means nothing. It offends nobody. The Department has an annual church parade, believe it or not. When all's said and done, the Pope remains a foreigner.'
'Beat him up,' said Roper, not meaning the Pope. 'Teach him a lesson. You've done unarmed combat and judo and so forth. Knock his teeth in, the big blond swine.'
'In Brigitte's presence? That won't exactly endear you to her, will it? She called me your fiend, remember.'
'Get him alone, then. Outside at night. Back at wherever he lives.'
'I don't see how that's going to teach Brigitte a lesson. The true object of the exercise. Good God, this is really the war all over again, isn't it?'
We were approaching Piccadilly Underground. Roper stopped in the middle of the pavement and began to cry. Some young louts stared at him, but more in commiseration than in the traditional guffawing contempt. The sex-patterns were merging with this new generation. But not for Roper, not for me. Sex was, for us, still damnable. I persuaded him to wipe his eyes and give me his address. Then he tottered off underground to reach it, as though it were somewhere in hell.
I was going to do things my way, not Roper's. At that time my position in the Department, as you remember, sir, was still more or less probationary. It was not yourself but Major Goodridge who gave me permission – treating it rather like an exercise – to spy on Brigitte Roper, geboren Weidegrund, and this Wurzel man. I think I was even praised for initiative. Each afternoon after that Soho meeting I waited outside the Roper residence just off Islington High Street. It was a dingy bleak little terraced house, the windows unwashed perhaps because window-cleaners were too proud to call in this district. The dust-bins stood, all along that street, like dismal battered front-door sentinels. At one end of the street was a dairy, cloudy milk-bottles stacked outside; at the other was a dirty-magazine shop. As this was a working-class district, it was deserted in the day -except for curlered wives in slippers, shopping. Watching was difficult. But I only had to do three days of it. At last the Wurzel man came – muscular, ugly, complacent, dressed in a deplorable blue suit. He knocked, then looked up at the sky, whistling, sure of his welcome. The door was opened, though Brigitte did not show herself. Wurzel went in. I took a walk long enough to smoke a Handelsgold Brazilian cigar. Then, spitting out my butt, I too knocked. And again. And again. Bare feet coming downstairs. A voice speaking through the letter-slit, Brigitte, unswitched to English: 'Ja? Was ist'sf I said, in gruff demotic: 'Registered parcel, missis.' She opened up minimally. Ready for that, I pushed in, feeling the ineffectual counter-push of those large Teutonic breasts (though not seeing, not looking) as she cried after me marching up the stairs. A shout of bemused and part-fearful enquiry answered her. It was like two people playing at Alps. His sound, as well as a rank cigarette-smell, told me where the bedroom was. Poor Roper. The landing was full of books spilling from shelves. Brigitte was panting up after me. I entered the bedroom, crossing to its furthermost corner before turning to face them both. She, now in, clad only in a gaudy bathrobe, recognised me, the fiend. And now I took in the beast on the bed – gross, stupid, totally – like Noah – uncovered.
There was no spying going on here, that was certain. But could one ever be sure? I said very loudly: 'Go on, pig. Out. Out before I you into the street all naked kick, swine.'
He saw I was not the husband. He stood up on the bed, seeking balance as on a trampoline, totally and obscenely bare, his little bags swinging. He gorilla-spread his fat arms, grunting at me. He had some idea of leaping at me from the bed-foot, but I was too far away. And then, as in the ring, the bloody fool, he beckoned me in with his fingers. We were to engage to the crowd's roars and boos. I could see at once that he was fit only for rigged bouts, a throw-seller, spectacular enough with the Irish whip and the flying mare, the flying head scissors, the monkey climb, but no good at all in genuine shoot moves. A script-boy. Cats and big thing after with Tiger Pereira. 'Cats' meaning 'catspaw' meaning 'draw'. The 'big thing' an act of anger or marching off in a huff to the crowd's delight. I knew a little about wrestling.
He jumped from the bed. Brigitte's pots and jars shook on their dressing-table. Good God, I now noticed on the wall a group photograph of the Sixth Form at St Augustine's, Roper and I arm-folded side by side, Father Byrne smiling, damnable sex off his mind that day. And now Wurzel advanced, bad teeth snarling, theatrically terrible. We needed more space really. Relying too much on initial intimidation, Wurzel did not expect my sudden rush with a head-butt to the midriff. His arms were wide open, heaven help him. Surprised, he was taken aback by my rapid hug, from a kneeling position, of his left leg. He was about to chop at my nape, but I was ready for this. I leaned my whole weight and had him on his back, breathless. He was a horrible big soft fleshy feather-bed. I lay on him, his posture Mars Observed. He tried to get up, but I bore down hard. Then I dealt my speciality, a handedge on the larynx, einmal, zweimal, dreimal. By rights Brigitte should have been hammering me with a shoe or something, but 1 saw her bare feet by the door, quite immobile. 'Genug?' I asked. He gurgled what might have been 'Genug' but I gave him no benefit of the doubt. His thick arms lay quite flaccid, more ornament than use. I bit his left ear very viciously. He tried to howl, but coughs got in the way. I rose from the bed of him in a single nimble push, then he was after me, flailing and coughing, trying to howl expressions with Scheiss in them. On Brigitte's dressing-table was a pair of nail-scissors, so I picked these up and danced round him, lunging and puncturing. 'Genug?' I asked again.
This time he just stood, panting when not coughing, squinting at me warily. 'I go,' he said. 'I wish mine gelt.' So she took money, did she? 'Give it him,' I said. From the pocket of the bathrobe she drew out a few notes. He snatched them, spitting. I found an even better weapon on the dressing-table – a very long nail-file with a dagger-end. 'One minute to dress,' I said, 'and then out.' I began to count the seconds. He was pretty quick. He didn't bother to lace his shoes. 'And if you give the Herr Doktor any more trouble-' Brigitte's eyes were on me, not on him, I now had time to notice. She bade him no good-bye as I back-punched him, grumbling, out on to the landing. On the landing he saw Roper's books and, very vindictive, he swept his fist along a top shelf and sent some of them bumping and swishing to the floor. I said: 'Smutty swine, you. Uncultured shitheap,' and I kicked his arse, a large target. 'Make a fire, shall we? Burn them all?' He rounded and snarled at me in the landing-dark, so I thrust him downstairs. Bumping against the stairwell wall he dislodged a little picture that had been unhandily nailed not firmly rawlplugged. It was an old-fashioned woolly monochrome of Siegfried, his gob open for a hero's shout, his hand grasping Nothung. This angered me. Who were they in this house to think that Wagner was theirs? Wagner was mine. I banged Wurzel down the last few steps and then let him find his own way to the front door. Opening it, he turned to execrate a mouthful as elemental and nasty as a bowel movement. I raised my hand at him, and then he slammed out.
All this time I had had my raincoat on. Going back upstairs I took it off, as well as my jacket. Entering the bedroom for a new, but still cognate, purpose, I was already loosening my tie. As I'd expected, Brigitte was lying naked on the bed. In a very few seconds I was with her. It was altogether satisfactory, very gross and thorough. I rode into Germany again, a hell become all flowers and honey for the victor. She didn't want tenderness, victim self-elected, also the mother I and the enemy had been tussling to possess. I re-enacted the victory ride three times. Afterwards (it was now dark) she spoke only German to me, language of darkness. Should she make tea, would I like some schnapps?
'Did you always take money from him?' I asked. 'Do you want money from me now?'
'Not this time. But if you come again.'
We shared a black aromatic Handelsgold. 'You'll have to leave him, you know,' I said. 'This sort of thing won't do at all. Go back to Germany. They're building fine new Dirnenwohnheime there. Düsseldorf. Stuttgart. That's your line. A lot of money to be made. But leave poor Edwin alone.'
'I too have thought of that. But here in London is better. A little flat, no Dirnenwohnheim.' She did a theatrical shudder; I felt it in the dark. In the dark, above the bed, Roper and I looked out at our coming world, arms folded; Father Byrne had smiled through the act of light, the act of dusk, the act of darkness. Well, I too, were I Brigitte, would much prefer a flat and a poodle in warm sinful London to one of those cold regimented German whorehouses. I said: 'Have you any money?'
'I have saved some. But if I am divorced I am deported.'
'It's up to you. But for God's sake get out of his life. He's got work to do, important work.' Lying here, right hand splayed on her right breast, its nipple rousing itself from flaccidity, I felt both loyal and patriotic. 'Each of us must do,' I added sententiously, 'the thing that is given us to do.' My cigar had gone out; there was no point in feeling for the matches to relight it. Roper and British science were to be saved. I felt a gush of generosity. 'This,' I said, turning to her, 'can count as another visit.'
Did I do right to tell her to do what, and very soon after, she did? I did not see her again, though, had I had time and inclination to wander Soho or Notting Hill, I might well have spied her, smart with her little dog. I rang up Roper and told him of the discomfiture of Wurzel the West German Devil. He was elated. He thought a marriage could be saved through the elimination of what Brigitte would call the Hausfreund. He said nothing to Brigitte nor she to him of Wurzel's being kicked downstairs and out of doors. Let bygones be. Brigitte had been more tolerant, more loving (this seemed to me the best signal of the decision I had articulated for her); again (and this she might have done, had she not been going to leave) she told no lying story to Roper about attempted rape by his best friend or fiend (see: here is his cigar-butt, hurriedly crushed out). But, after a week, Roper came to my flat.
This I had expected. I had waited in every evening, expecting it, listening to Die Meistersinger. When Roper rang, Hans Sachs was opening Act III with his monologue about the whole world being mad: 'Wahn, wahn-'
'I can guess what she's done,' I said. 'She's gone back on the job. The job she'd already been doing in Germany.'
'There was no real proof of that,' he snivelled, grasping his whisky-glass as though to crush it. 'Poor little girl.'
'Poor little girl?'
'An orphan of the storm.' Oh my God. 'A war victim. We did this to her.'
'Who did? Did what?'
'Insecurity. Instability. The crash of all that meant anything. Germany, I mean. She doesn't know where she is or what she wants.'
'Oh, doesn't she? She doesn't want you, that's certain. Nor did she really want that bloody Wurzel. She just wants to do a job she can do.'
'Independence,' said Roper. 'Unsure of herself. She always talked about working, but she'd not been trained for anything. No education. That damnable war.'
That damnable. 'Oh my God, Roper, you're the end. You're totally incredible. She's just a natural prostitute, that's all. Good luck to her, if that's what she wants. But now you've got to forget all about her and get on with your work. If you're lonely, call on me any time. We'll go out and get drunk together in low pubs.'
'Drunk,' said Roper thickly. 'We're drunken beasts, that's what we are. Warmongers and ravishers and drunken beasts. But,' he said, when he'd taken a swig as though toasting that, 'she may come back. Yes, I'll be waiting for her. She'll come back crying, glad to be home again.'
'Get a divorce,' I said. 'Get a private detective on the job. They'll find her sooner or later. Evidence. No trouble at all.'
He shook his head. 'No divorce,' he said. 'That would be the final betrayal. Women are not what we are. They need protecting from the great destructive forces.'
I nodded and nodded, very grim. He'd mixed Brigitte up with the Virgin Mary (whom we'd all at school got into the habit of calling, as though she were a spy-ring or automation company, the BVM) and Gretchen in Goethe's Faust. 'Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan,' I quoted. But he didn't recognise the quotation.
What I should have foreknown, sir, was that Roper would be thrown into a great empty pit where nothing was really to be trusted any more, where there was no belief in anything. Anything? There was the value of his work, wasn't there? Roper, gently but firmly led by Professor Duckworth, was professionally absorbed in that, but there must have been great areas of his brain suffering from inanition. Brain? Perhaps heart or soul or something. Blame England, yes, for Brigitte's defection, but – let it come slowly-blame also the whole of Western Europe, blame even Germany for not being a good father to her. But you can't fill the irrational past with blame. You need something positive. We all need our irrational part to be busy with something harmless (the housewife's hands knitting while her eyes take the television in), letting our rational part get on with what, perhaps stupidly, we suppose to be the important purpose of life. Here, in brief, is the peril of being a scientist brought up on a fierce and brain-filling religion. He starts, in his late teens, by thinking that his new sceptical rationalism (bliss was it in that dawn to be alive) makes nonsense of Adam and Eve and transubstantiation and the Day of Judgement. And then, too late, he discovers that the doctrines don't really count; what counts is the willingness and ability to take evil seriously and to explain it. Supernature abhors a super-vacuum. When I returned from that Serbo-Croat refresher course you, sir, sent me on, I was pleased to find that Roper seemed to be living a nice, decent, normal, middle-class British life. I rang his home one evening to see how he was getting on, and I heard a voice somehow beer-flushed and, behind the voice, the noise of well-in-hand gaiety. A few people in, he said. Do come round, meet the boys and girls. News of Brigitte? News of who? Oh, her. No, no news. 'Come round,' he said, 'I've joined the Labour Party.'
'You've joined the-'
He rang off. He had joined the-Well, then, that was a relief. The NATO powers could breathe freely again. What could be safer than that he should be a member of the political party which provided either H. M. Government or Opposition? No more nasty guilt now, no more there – can – be – no – God – if – He – failed – to – strafe -England, breathed breathily as, each hand crammed with warm Brigitte, he dug his hot spoon into that delicious honey-pot. I went round. Lights and merriment in the bay-window. A dark-haired girl let me in. The hall-light was bright: she was slim and sallow, dressed for no nonsense in a tweed skirt and yellow jumper. 'Oh, you must be-' Roper came into the hall. 'Ah, there you are!' His hair, like that of some pioneer labour leader, was shaggy and tousled. The living-room and dining-room had only recently, he told me, been knocked into one: forgive the smell of size. These were his friends, he said: Brenda Canning, a merry ginger girl in flashing glasses and jingling trinket-bracelet; Shaw, shy, who worked with Roper; Peter, no, sorry, Paul Younghusband – a round man who smiled from striking a chord on a guitar; Jeremy Cavour, long, with a pipe, his ample grey hair parted on the left. Others. 'Not really a party,' said Roper. 'More of a study-group meeting.' There were cheese, bread, a carboy of pickles, bottles of light ale on the dining-table. 'What are you studying?' I asked. 'Oh,' said Roper, 'there's been a bit of talk about some of us scientists getting together to hammer out a sort of pamphlet. Socialism and Science. We hadn't really got down to the title, had we, Lucy?'
Lucy was the girl who had opened the door, unintro-duced to me perhaps because we'd already made functional contact, introductions perhaps being purely decorative or phatic. This Lucy was standing close to him and seemed to me, at that moment of being addressed, to touch him with a gentle thrust of the hip. Ah, I thought, they are friends. I looked at her with more attention, soon with something like favour – wide-mouthed (generous), gate-toothed (sensual), small-eyed (shrewd), high-browed. It was a neat figure; the voice was a decent kind of South London. An attractive girl on the whole, but breathing of no gross earth-mother like Brigitte. The house looked very tidy; Lucy had opened the front door; Lucy said to me now: 'Can I get you some beer? All we have, I'm afraid.' I noted the 'we', saying: 'In a stein, please.' Roper clouded over. 'Sorry, stupid of me,' I said. 'There aren't steins any more.' This was at once taken up by a small man in the corner, weak-and-intellectual-looking, rings under his eyes. He cried: 'The house of Stein is fallen. Ah, Gertrude, Gertrude.' The round man with the guitar, Peter or Paul or something, improvised a silly jingle to the tune of 'Chopsticks': 'Einstein and Weinstein and Kleinstein and Schweinstein and Meinstein and Deinstein and Seinstein and Rheinstein and-' Roper smirked at me: what witty and erudite friends he now had. They all seemed to be scientist's assistants, none of them under thirty, most of them adolescently content with an evening of singsong and light ale. Light ale was now given to me. 'Thank you,' I said. 'What will you have, Winny?' asked Lucy of Roper. A choice, was there? Beer was all they had, she'd said. 'Lemon barley water,' said Roper. 'A small glass.' Well, the loss of Brigitte hadn't sent him howling to the drink. Or perhaps it had; perhaps he was being looked after now.
'Winny she calls you,' I said, when Lucy had gone to the kitchen.
'That's short for Edwin,' said Roper, smiling.
'Oh, Roper, Roper, I've known your name is Edwin for the last twenty years.'
'As long as that? How time goes.'
'Have you done anything about a divorce yet?' I asked.
'Plenty of time,' he said. 'Three years for desertion. I see now it could never be the same again as it used to be. Have you ever read Heracleitus? Everything flows, he said. You can't step into the same river twice. A pity. A terrible, terrible pity. Poor little girl.' I got in quickly, forestalling the Weltschmerz, with: 'How about this little girl?'
Lucy? Oh, Lucy's been a very great help. Just a good friend, you know, nothing more. She cooks me the odd meal. Sometimes we have a meal out. A very intelligent girl.' This seemed to have something to do with her skill with a menu, but then he said: 'She works our computer for us. Don't you, Lucy?' he smiled, waterily, as he took lemon barley from her. 'Our computer.'
'That's right,' she said. I felt that perhaps she would have preferred Roper to designate their relationship not in professional terms. To me she said: 'Are you a member of the party?'
'Oh, I'm progressive. I believe in soaking the rich. But I also believe in Original Sin.'
'Poor old Hillier,' smirked Roper. 'Still not emancipated.'
'My belief,' I said, 'has nothing to do with Father Byrne. People tend to choose the worse way rather than the better.
That's something experience has taught me. I use the theological term for want of a better one.'
'It's all environment,' said Roper. 'All conditioning.' He would have said more, but Lucy told him to save it. 'Everybody wants to sing,' she said. 'Don't you think we ought to have business first?'
'Business.' The word made Roper very serious and chin-jutting. 'We have a bit of discussion,' he told me. 'Brenda there takes the main conclusions down in shorthand. You'll stay, won't you? You may have some useful ideas to contribute. A fresh mind, you see. Perhaps we in the group are growing a little too familiar with each other's. Minds, I mean. But,' he chuckled, 'don't say anything about Original Sin.'
When the discussion started (and it was a very earnest sixth-form-type discussion, full of fundamentals), I found myself switching on the professional ear. But any hammering-out of the position of science and technology in a progressive society had to be above suspicion. Britain, whatever party happened to be in power, was now committed to socialism. This group was concerned with laying down a series of articles for a Socialist scientist's creed. The pipeman Cavour was presumably to do the actual writing of the proposed pamphlet, since he tried to fix all conclusions in a ponderous literary form, going er and ar in search of the mot juste, correcting people's grammar. 'Something like this,' he said. 'We er hold that the past is dead and the future is er upon us. Meaning the Scientific Revolution. We think in world terms, not er the antique terms of nationalism. Ultimately we envisage a World State and World Science. Ar.' Brenda, her token-bracelet jangling, was getting it all down. Lucy sat in one of the two moquette-covered armchairs, Roper on the arm. He seemed happy. He seemed to have got over sin. He was safe, sir.
Of course he was safe, cuddled by a humanitarian and rational philosophy which occasionally gives Britain a government. The whole Roper case, if I may call it that at that stage, was perhaps ready to bubble with a political extremism that, during a long Tory summer, sought fulfilment in a country that wasn't merely doctrinaire about a World State and World Science. Must a man be blamed for being logical? I don't know how far Lucy, who seemed to be a very serious girl, helped. I was out of England long before Roper. What I'm trying to say, sir (or would be trying to say if I were saying it), is that you can't condemn a man because an ineluctable process carries him. If you wanted Roper's logic – and you did and still do – you have to swallow it all. That is why I can't attempt any serious moral persuasion when, the day after tomorrow, late at night, I eventually reach him. The bribes, of course, he'll, and very rightly, scorn. It will have to be the ampoule, the forcible abduction of a Soviet citizen temporarily disguised as a drunken British tourist. And I'm doing this for the money.
I'm doing this for the money, for the terminal bonus (I am most bribable now) which, in my retirement, I shall need. If it were not for the retirement I should not be proposing to play a mean trick on a friend. But, as I've already told you in a real letter – dispatched, received, ruminated, replied to -1 am retiring precisely because I'm sick and tired of having to play mean tricks. You might as well, while my hand is in, have the lot.
Lot what? Lot the next to the last in this shame's auction to bidding oblivion of the shabby contents of my long-leased spy-house. You have my report of the successful betrayal of Martinuzzi, very brief, totally factual. The lying code-message about Martinuzzi's being on the double game was, as we knew it would be, intercepted. When Martinuzzi was taken over to Rumania he expected, I suppose, praise, bonuses, promotion. We know what he got.
End of Martinuzzi. Of Signora Martinuzzi and the three bambini in Trieste also the end, but that, of course, irrelevant. The explosion of a paraffin stove in the little Casa Martinuzzi on the Via della Barriera Vecchia and the burning alive of mother and eldest child, as well as the cat and her kittens, was just an unfortunate accident. A spy should not give hostages to fortune: that's what whoever was responsible really meant. I was sick; I vomited a bellyload into the gutter. What made my shame worse was the visit of some British louts with guitars and emetic little songs; they filled the Opera House with infantile screamers. Their income, I read, amounted to something like two million lire a week; Martinuzzi was lucky to get half of that sum a year. All right, Martinuzzi was the enemy, but to whom do you think I felt closer? My very good fiend, Brigitte might have said. I spent some of my own few million lire on arranging for the adoption of the remaining two of the enemy's children; both need the most delicate plastic surgery. I don't mind games, but when they get too dirty I don't think I want to play any more.
You won't receive this letter, for this letter has not been written. But, if I get Roper back to you, and if you do to Roper what I fear you will, despite the promises in the letters in my coat-lining, I shall at least have rehearsed some of the content of his defence. The time is now two minutes to four. I shall forgo tea and a tabnab and not eat much dinner. To my satyriasis I say 'Down, sir, down.' I must be fit for the day after tomorrow, recognising my duty to my retirement. A little nap now, then. As ever, or rather not as ever, D.H. (729).