And he turns back to the TV.
I sleep in the room where I always stay, a study with a futon in it, the walls lined with paperbacks and hefty academic tomes left over from Saul’s days at LSE. I take down a paperback copy of Out of Africa and climb into bed, wearing boxer shorts and an old white T-shirt. From down the hall I can hear the roar of a goal-celebrating crowd and Saul quietly shouting, “Yes!” to himself as someone scores. I lie there for a while, trying to read, but my eyes grow tired after a single page and I put out the bedside light.
Then, of course, I cannot sleep.
Every night now for more than a year the pattern has been the same: an urgent need to rest, ignored by my wandering mind, raking over every imaginable thought and anxiety, solving nothing. To sleep so little, so agitatedly, has become commonplace. Yet, somehow, my body has adjusted to being starved of rest. I still manage to work, think, exercise, and lie, but at some basic level I have forgotten how to feel. The jadedness is gradually erasing my better instincts, any capacity I once possessed to evaluate consequence and implication. It is as if every time I am woken up at three in the morning by that awful, caving sense of worry that creeps around my subconscious, some better part of me begins to fail. Even a few straight hours of sleep will always be broken before dawn by mind racings, concerns somehow magnified by the quiet and black of the night.
So, as ever, I turn to sex to try to shut it all out, lying there in the dark with the noise of the TV in the distance and some girl fucking me to sleep. She’s never anyone I care about, never Kate. Only the ones I tried to have, but couldn’t, even some woman I saw at a bus stop who gave me the eye. Every now and again I relive an actual sexual encounter and try to make it better than it was: screwing someone from years back, or Anna again. Tonight it’s her, with her showered skin and tits bouncing uselessly above me, that look of sated lust in her eyes that I failed to recognize as malice. Nothing works, though. I hear Saul shut off the TV at around two o’clock and follow the noise of his footsteps going up and down the passage. He visits the bathroom, washes, then turns out all the lights. The flat is quiet.
I find myself thinking back to when I broke up with Kate. Saul and I would spend long hours in a Brazilian bar in Earls Court trying to dream up ways for me to win her back. These talks were mostly serious and full of regret, as the realization that I had thrown away my one pure chance of a kind of happiness gradually dawned on me. But they were also punctuated with laughter and optimism. This was all thanks to Saul-I was a mess. Quietly and selflessly he had watched and understood Kate to a point where he knew us both intimately. And now that understanding was paying off. He could explain her apparent cruelty, he could see when I was allowing a particular line of thought to become warped or exaggerated. It was uplifting in itself just to talk to somebody who also knew and loved her. And he never once tried to make me get over her. In his heart he knew that we should be together, and he wasn’t about to conceal that from me. I respected him for that.
Three months later, with ridiculous symmetry, Saul’s long-term girlfriend turned around and told him that she was seeing another man. And so we went back to that same bar, only now it was my turn to be the good friend, to be as wise and understanding as Saul had been to me. We sat with our bottles of beer, late-night traffic sliding by outside, and tried to make sense of what had happened. From his coat pocket Saul took out a letter she had written to him, parts of which he allowed me to read. “How sad that two people who once cared for each other so much can end up like this,” it said. “Take care of yourself” and “I will always love you.” The awful platitudes of separation.
More than anything else, I think, Saul was astonished by the speed with which it had finished. They had been together, on and off, since school. To my knowledge, she was the first girl he had ever slept with.
What he needed then was for me to keep my mouth shut and just drink a beer with him. But I felt some sort of obligation to cure and began bombarding him with half-baked advice and banalities. I tried to tell him that all his fears and insecurities were not worth worrying over, that he should try to shut out all the mental pictures of her infidelity. I told him that the anguish we feel in the immediate aftermath of heartbreak only dissipates in time into prejudice and misinformation. Best to ignore it. None of this seemed to make any impression on him. He looked at me almost with pity. I wanted, absurdly, a transcript of the advice he had given me to read out to him.
The truth of that situation was that he had already made up his mind what to do. He had stopped loving her the moment she had told him about her affair. Very quickly, she had become reprehensible to him. Saul’s numbness gave way to a strange kind of relief in a matter of days, as if he was pleased to be rid of someone who was so devoid of basic decency. This strength astonished me. I had thought it would be years before he got over her, that the breakup would be something from which he would never properly recover. But I was wrong.
This memory is in my head for the better part of an hour, all the sides of it, the implications. Then I review the night’s events once again, unable to shut them out, unable just to put it all to one side.
I do not once look at my watch-I learned that long ago-but it must be after four when I finally manage to sleep.
Early the next morning, I call Hawkes at his house in the country from a telephone box in Barons Court.
“Could I speak to Paul Watson, please?”
“You have the wrong number,” he says, following procedure. Then he calls back immediately, using a secure line.
“Alec. What is it?”
He sounds remote, detached.
“I needed to ask you something.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever get caught up in the drama of it?”
“What do you mean?” he says, as if the question were ridiculous.
“Did you ever do things in the course of your work that you didn’t really need to do? Did you make things more difficult for yourself because you were deceived by the glamour of espionage?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”
“Let me give you an example. Last night, I made the first drop-”
“Yes,” he interrupts nervously. He has always been wary of who may be listening in. His has been a lifetime of paring words back, of bending them into ambiguities and codes.
“I was only following instructions, but the Americans seemed to have made things more complicated, more risky than was necessary. Maybe it was a test. I brought a briefcase to Saul’s flat-”
“Alec, we can’t talk about this.”
“What do you mean?” My voice must sound petulant and spoiled. Like the game is over.
“It is not advisable for us to speak anymore.”
“Since when?”
“I’m going to be out of contact for some time. You’ll be all right. Just retain anonymity. You’ve been told what to do in an emergency. Go to Lithiby. Do not contact me again. You’re doing fine, Alec. You must learn how to do this thing on your own.”
24
The year draws to an end.
There are four more drops, one roughly every month, for each of which I am paid ten thousand pounds sterling, deposited in an escrow account in Philadelphia. I will have access to the money when the Americans have the data from 5F371.
The first handover takes place at a West End theater, a simple exchange almost as soon as the house lights have gone down. The next two occur at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush, and the fourth inside Fortner’s car on the way to Andromeda’s Christmas party. That was last week.
Were they straightforward? Yes and no. The actual transactions are always fairly simple: well planned, isolated, unobserved by third parties. There is the small problem of obtaining suitable information, or of getting
