Tapestry of Spies

Been reading your stuff in Signature. Damned good. I’m out for The Spectator myself.

Oh, and how’s the bloody awful Denis Mason? Hated that man.

Been absolutely topping with me, old sport ?

No, that wouldn’t work. So much between them. Julian, once I loved you and then you hurt me and now they’ve sent me out here to betray you. How on earth can I ever look upon your face? He took a deep breath, happy at least for the solitude. He flipped the cigarette out into the dark, wondering if he had the force to deal with Julian. Something powerful about Julian: it almost frightened him. The city, a few miles beyond, looked serene and peaceful in the moonlight. It looked like some sort of silly, romantic painting.

“Mr. Florry. Staring into the future?”

He turned. It was the girl.

“Yes, well, you’ve caught me at it.”

“How long now until we dock?”

“Well, not a goodly while. You can make out the quay. We slip through the breakwater, then wherever these Arab monkeys choose to tie up, and we’ll be on dry land.”

The moon touched her oval face and made it shine. She smiled and the moon turned her teeth blinding white, small perfect little pearls, little replicas of itself. Had she ever really smiled at him quite like this before? He didn’t think so. The radiance of her look overwhelmed him.

“You’ve changed your clothes.” She now had on some sort of purple dress.

“Yes. The adventure begins, that kind of silly nonsense.”

“It’s quite appropriate, I assure you.”

He could see her hand on the rail, her fair face in the white moonlight. He could smell her. It was lovely, something musky and rather dense. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but felt incapable of even commencing such a move. A squawking of Arabic rose from the bridge ? two sailors cursing each other.

“I’m actually glad I caught you here alone,” she said. “You’ve been awfully kind to me. I wanted to thank you for it.”

“Believe me, Miss Lilliford, it doesn’t take much effort to be kind to you.”

“No, you’re just one of the decent chaps of the world. I can tell. Fewer and fewer of them around, and you’re one.”

“You exaggerate my decency, Miss Lilliford. Scratch my surface and you’ll find the same brute underneath in any man.”

“I can’t begin to believe it.”

It occurred to him he ought to kiss her. He had, actually, never kissed a white woman before.

“There you are,” said Count Witte, coming out onto the deck. “Good heavens, I’ve just had the most terrible altercation with that awful old Gruenwald. The man is completely drunk. He smells as if he’s bathed in peppermint. He was trying to get my trunk up and banging it around terribly. It was most upsetting.”

Florry turned.

“Oh, he’s a harmless old fellow. Worthless, I suppose, but harmless,” said Florry tightly.

“Oh, I say ? am I disturbing you or something? I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Oh, no,” said Florry, “it’s nothing?”

“But it is. I can tell from the startled look on Miss Lilliford’s face. I shall beat a hasty retreat.”

“Please, Count Witte. Our conversation can wait. Mr. Florry and I have plenty of time ahead. Come out and watch the ship sail into the harbor.”

“Yes, do come on, Count Witte.”

“Well, you English are so wonderfully polite I don’t know if you mean it or not, but I will come. Yes. Do you know, we must get together for dinner in the week to come. There used to be some wonderful restaurants in Barcelona, though I shouldn’t be surprised if the revolutionaries have closed them all down in the spirit of equality. But?”

Amazingly, it had begun to rain!

Florry had the distinct impression that the air itself had suddenly liquefied and then, oddly, all sound had vanished from the earth: the slosh of the prow through the water, the clank and groan of the old engine, the chatter of Arabic from deep inside the ship.

Or no: there was sound. There was, in fact, nothing but sound, huge in his ears. Sound and liquid ? sound and water ? sound and chaos.

A shock seemed to slither through the guts of the ship. Its very relationship to the shiny sea began to alter crazily; the deck, which had until this second seemed as secure as the surface of the earth, issued a great animal shudder; Florry, in his mind, thought of a dying elephant he’d once seen, that moment when the bullet plunges home and every line is somehow terribly changed as the consciousness of doom suddenly imprints itself upon the beast. He stood bolted to the rail, trying to make sense of it all: water and roar, everywhere; Sylvia’s dress plastered with hideous immodesty against her body as the shock spread from the ship to her own face, in the form of total panic, which flashed whitely in the wet moonlight; old Witte, gobbling in terror like an ancient bird before the ax, his jowls heavy and flopping, his wet hair curled, his monocle fluttering about. And suddenly also a tide of demented, howling voices, a guttural mix of Arabic and Turkish and all the dialects of the Mediterranean.

And Florry, attempting in the first second, with what he felt was icy calm but was in fact the beginning of bone-deep panic, to sort all this out, became aware of yet another and perhaps more frightening phenomenon. That is, the angle of the deck to the horizon had begun to shift radically. We’re sinking, he realized. We’re sinking.

7 MI-6, LONDON

Major Holly-Browning took tea late at his headquarters that same night. He sat in his little fifth-floor office in the Broadway Building off a corridor that led only to a rear stairwell. Perhaps it looked a bit more like a publisher’s cubicle than a spy’s: he was surrounded by an almost endless collection of books and pamphlets of poetry, clipped newspaper reviews, glossy and not-so-glossy literary quarterlies, reproductions of paintings, tutors’ reports, the minutes of meetings of long-abandoned undergraduate political committees, broadsides, handbills, and the like. It all dated from the year 1931 at Cambridge University.

Where another, more sympathetic mind might have divined from the rubble a new generation of promising voices attempting to define and make itself heard, Major Holly-Browning saw most of it as infernal gibberish, a bloody Playfair cipher without a key, whose maze was therefore sealed off forever from his entrance. It represented a private language, a chattering of pansy aesthetes; it filled him, also, with melancholy.

He’d seen so many of these young fools’ fathers die in the ’14–’18 show, cut down by the German Maxims, or blown to shreds by Krupp explosives, or choked, their lungs browned and shriveled in the mustard, or mutilated by the serrated upper edges of the ghastly Hun bayonets. And for what? For this? For “In Excelsior Pale Grows the Mould”? For “Nocturne in Shades of Gray”? For “A New Theory of Spanish Radicalism”? For “The Pacifist’s Litany”? For Julian’s hated “Achilles, Fool”?

The poem, originally published in the February 1931 number of Denis Mason’s foolish rag The Spectator and later the title of Julian’s sole collection of verse, from Heinemann in November of the same year, was never far from the major’s consciousness. He could recite it.

Achilles, fool, on your wire,
the scream lost in your ripped lungs,
Achilles, fool, they took your lips,
Achilles, fool, you let them have your tongue.