“Kate, if you want me to go, I’ll go. But please, don’t sit there with this air of disappointment, this condescension, because I didn’t come here for that. I genuinely believe that I would never have done this if we were still together.”
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare blame this on me.”
“You’re right. I shouldn’t blame you. It’s not your fault. I would have done it anyway. Just like I slept with someone behind your back. It’s in my genes, you say. And for the last time, I’m sorry that I took you for granted. I’m sorry I wasn’t the person you thought you deserved. You had dreams for me that I couldn’t fulfill, and I fucked up. And now I’ve got involved in a murky business that you find reprehensible. I don’t blame you.”
She looks up at me, twitching with moral authority. Nothing that I say will ever satisfy her. Let’s have this out.
“If I thought this would happen, do you think I would have done it? Do you? Do you think that if I knew it would come to something like this that I wouldn’t have put a stop to it? It was straightforward in the planning, that’s all I can tell you. I was doing a job that I thought was useful and loyal and significant.”
“Straightforward in the planning?” Her laugh here is contemptuous, the slender jaw gaped with sarcasm. “Jesus. Straightforward in the planning?”
“Let’s not do that thing where we pick each other’s sentences apart, okay? It’s demeaning.”
“You never think, Alec. That’s just it with you. That’s just exactly the problem. It’s what happened with us, it’s what’s happening now. You take things on with no thought to the consequences, with nothing in your mind but how it can make you feel better about yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s an affair with a girl at your fucking office or some needless industrial espionage that leads to an innocent guy getting the shit kicked out of him. It’s always the same thing. You can’t live life without turning it into a lie.”
“That isn’t the case. It’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad?” she says. “You never stopped lying to me. For the last six months we were together, we barely slept together…”
Here we go. Actress time.
“Get over it, Kate. It’s history.”
“And when we did, those few times, I had to shut my eyes, I had to hold off the scream in my head. I did it for you. I let you fuck me because somewhere I still felt love for you, all the time knowing that that love had been corrupted, bit by bit, until all I felt was pity. Toward the end I could barely look at you. I couldn’t touch you. And I’m not sure you even noticed that. I would lie beside you in bed and actually dread your weight, your smell. And do you know why? Because you were soaked in lies. Deceit was all over you. I should have been the first person, the only person, that you might have been open with. But instead, I was the one person that you lied to more or less the whole time.”
I have heard all this before. The words have changed, but the well-worn message remains exactly the same. It is her standard tactic, a withering assault on my masculinity, disowning our sex life to wound me. My regrets about JUSTIFY, my fears for Cohen, are of no consequence to her. She does not see herself as my friend. There is still too much that she feels enraged by. Nothing has changed, nothing at all. It is still impossible to talk to Kate without her twisting a subject until it becomes a conversation about her. This is the selfishness in her that I had forgotten.
She is still not finished. She puts her tea on the small table beside the sofa and shakes her head with disappointment.
“In the beginning, when we first met, I saw you like someone might see a jigsaw. Just starting off. You were seventeen and I didn’t know how you would work out, the shape of you. And then, as I got to know you, as the jigsaw came together, I saw that you were just made up of lies. Not big lies, not all the infidelities or womanizing or cheating or anything really dangerous, but weak, cowardly, fearful lies. And you lied because you were afraid of me. You were afraid of everybody. To console me you would open your mouth and something sweet and caring would come out, but I couldn’t know if it was deeply felt. I couldn’t know if you really meant it or if you just liked the sound of those words in the room, the way the sentences altered my face. I felt that you were never with me. You couldn’t let me near you, you couldn’t let anyone near you. Your whole life is just a process of holding people off in case they have an effect on you.”
I do not deserve this. She has never found it in herself to forgive me. The damage to her self-esteem was just too great. I came here today on an impulse, to tell her things as a friend that I had never told anyone else. And yet she wants to use my confession as an excuse to criticize me for things that happened between us more than two years ago. The only thing that is of any interest to Kate is Kate. I had forgotten that.
“I’m going to go,” I tell her very firmly, with no doubt in my mind that this is the right thing to do. “I don’t have time to be talking about this. I need to find out about Harry and then get home. I’m sorry you weren’t able to see the bigger picture, I really am. But I’m trusting you not to speak to anybody about what I’ve told you. You’ve given me your word, and I trust you. Because if you do, it would certainly mean the end of my career. I could even be killed.”
She smirks at this. She does not want to believe any of it.
“I’m serious,” I tell her. “So that’s it. You’ve got it?”
“Yes,” she says, exasperated.
“Good. Because I’m trusting you.”
I travel home numbed by all the bad decisions I have made, each falling on the heels of the other. Young and blind to consequence, I have done and said things that have led me to the point at which I now find myself. This afternoon was just another example, a pointless tracking back into the past.
When Kate and I were together, there was such arrogance in me, an inability to see things for what they were. I just threw everything we had away on a whim and never properly fought to get her back. And then with Hawkes, what was it? Vanity? Is that all it was, a craving for recognition? What do Saul and Kate know that I do not, that they can make the right decisions, that they can appear to live life in the way that it is meant to be lived?
More waiting now. Nothing to be done. Always the ball in someone else’s court. So I open a bottle of wine and read for five hours straight about Philby.
I cannot conceive of the scale of his deceit. The entire span of a life lived as a vast deception-to friends, to family, perhaps even to wives. I have done it for less than two years, and the relentless demands of total secrecy have been overwhelming. What must have been going through his mind as he contemplated all of that coming to an end?
Earlier in his career, British intelligence had been convinced that Philby was the Third Man, even to the point of asking for his resignation. Yet they held off, because the consequences of publicly revealing an enemy within outweighed the practical necessity of unmasking him. The shame would have been too much for the establishment to endure. Philby, Burgess, and Maclean all survived undetected for so long precisely for this reason, precisely because of their gentlemanly polish, their wit and erudition. In short, no one believed it possible that such men would betray their country. They induced a sort of class blindness in the intelligence community.
In spite of their suspicions, SIS allowed Philby to operate in Lebanon for some time, using journalism as cover. While still on the SIS payroll he filed for The Observer, in between feeding cocktail party gossip to low-level KGB agents in Beirut. Throughout all this, SIS acted as if Philby was a problem that would eventually disappear. Which in the end, of course, is exactly what he did.
When they were sure, when they knew that they had their man, they sent Philby’s best friend-his Saul-to Beirut to flush him out. Nicholas Elliott, also SIS, was under instruction to offer him immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession. He was given twenty-four hours to reveal the full extent of his activities, but over that period was left to his own devices. What is astonishing to me is that on the night of Elliott’s visit, Philby attended a dinner party at the residence of the first secretary to the British embassy, and then drank himself into a coma on cheap Lebanese whiskey. When he woke up, he made the decision to defect. He contacted his KGB controller, was given false papers as a Russian sailor and spirited back to Moscow on a freight ship before anyone had time to notice.
