Our Kind of Traitor

‘Abroad mainly.’

‘Is it distorting?’

‘Come again?’

‘The work. Does it warp your mind? Are you aware of – well – deformation professionnelle?’

‘You mean, am I psycho?’

‘Nothing as drastic as that. Just – well, how it affects you over the long term?’

Luke’s head remained down, but his pencil had stopped roaming, and there was challenge in his stillness.

‘In the long term?’ he repeated, in studious puzzlement. ‘In the long term we’ll all be dead, I imagine.’

‘I simply meant: how does it grab you, representing a country that can’t pay its bills?’ Perry explained, aware too late that he was slipping out of his depth. ‘Good intelligence being about the only thing that gets us a seat at the international top table these days, I read somewhere,’ he blundered on. ‘It must be rather a strain on the people who have to provide it, that’s all. Punching above one’s weight,’ he added, in an unintentional reference to Luke’s diminutive stature which he immediately regretted.

Their troubled exchange was interrupted by the shuffle of slow, soft footsteps like bedroom slippers along the ceiling before beginning a cautious descent of the basement stairs. As if to order, Luke stood up, strode over to a sideboard, picked up a tray of malt whisky, mineral water and three glasses, and set it on the table.

The footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. The door opened. Perry rose instinctively to his feet. A mutual inspection ensued. The two men were of equal height, which for both was unusual. Without his stoop, Hector might have been the taller. With his classic broad brow and flowing white hair tossed back in two untidy waves, he resembled to Perry’s eye a Head of College of the old, dotty sort. He was in his mid-fifties, by Perry’s guess, but dressed for eternity in a mangy brown sports coat with leather patches at the elbow and leather edges to the cuffs. The shapeless grey flannels could have been Perry’s own. So could the battered Hush Puppy shoes. The artless, horn-rimmed spectacles could have been rescued from Perry’s father’s attic box.

Finally, but long after time, Hector spoke:

‘Wilfred bloody Owen,’ he pronounced, in a voice that contrived to be both vigorous and reverential. ‘Edmund bloody Blunden. Siegfried bloody Sassoon. Robert bloody Graves. Et al.’

‘What about them?’ the bewildered Perry asked, before he had given himself time to think.

‘Your fabulous fucking article about them in the London Review of Books last autumn! “The sacrifice of brave men does not justify the pursuit of an unjust cause. P. Makepiece scripsit.” Bloody marvellous!’

‘Well, thank you,’ said Perry helplessly, and felt an idiot for not having made the connection fast enough.

The silence returned while Hector continued his admiring inspection of his prize.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what you are, Mr Perry Makepiece, sir,’ he asserted, as if he’d reached the conclusion they had both been waiting for. ‘You’re an absolute fucking hero, is what you are’ – seizing Perry’s hand in a flaccid double grip and giving it a limp shake – ‘and that’s not smoke up your arse. We know what you think of us. Some of us think it too, and we’re right. Trouble is, we’re the only show in town. Government’s a fuck-up, half the Civil Service is out to lunch. The Foreign Office is as much use as a wet dream, the country’s stony-broke and the bankers are taking our money and giving us the finger. What are we supposed to do about it? Complain to Mummy or fix it?’ – not waiting for Perry’s answer – ‘I’ll bet you shitted blood before you came to us. But you came. Just a token’ – he had released Perry’s hand and was addressing Luke on the subject of malt whisky – ‘for Perry, minimal. Lot of water and enough of the hard stuff to loosen his girdle. Mind if I squat next to Luke or are we too much like when-did-you-last-see-your-father? Bugger Adam, my name’s Meredith. Hector Meredith. We talked on the phone yesterday. Flat in Knightsbridge, wife and two veg, now grown up. Arctic cottage in Norfolk and I’m in the phone book in both places. Luke, who are you when you’re not being some other swine?’

‘Luke Weaver, actually. We live up beyond Gail on Parliament Hill. Last posting Central America. Second marriage, one common son aged ten just got into University College School, Hampstead, so we’re thrilled to bits.’

‘And no tough questions till the end,’ Hector ordered.

Luke poured three minuscule shots of whisky. Perry sat sharply down again and waited. A-list Hector sat directly opposite him, B-list Luke a little to one side.

‘Well, fuck,’ said Hector happily.

‘Fuck indeed,’ Perry agreed, bemused.

* * *

But the truth was, Hector’s rallying cry could not have been more timely or invigorating for Perry, nor his ecstatic entry better calculated. Consigned to the black hole left by Gail’s enforced departure – enforced by himself, never mind the reasons – his divided heart had abandoned itself to every shade of self-anger and remorse.

He should never have agreed to come here, with or without her.

He should have handed over his document and told these people: ‘That’s it. You’re on your own. I am, therefore I don’t spy.’

Did it matter that for a whole night long he had pounded the threadbare carpet of his Oxford digs, debating the step he knew – but didn’t wish to know – he was bound to take?

Or that his late father, low churchman, freethinker and embattled pacifist, had marched, written and raged against all things evil, from nuclear arms to the war on Iraq, more than once ending up in a police cell for his trouble?

Or that his paternal grandfather, a humble mason by trade and avowed Socialist, had lost a leg and an eye fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War?

Or that Irish colleen Siobhan, the Makepiece family treasure of twenty years and four hours a week, had been bullied into making deliveries of the contents of his father’s wastepaper basket to a plainclothes detective of the Hertfordshire constabulary? – a burden that had weighed so heavily on her that one day in floods of tears she had confessed all to Perry’s mother, never to be seen near the house again, despite his mother’s entreaties?

Or that only a month ago Perry himself had composed a full-page advertisement in the Oxford Times, endorsed by a hastily assembled body of his own creation calling itself ‘Academics against Torture’, urging action against Britain’s Secret Government and the assault-by-stealth on our most hard-fought civil liberties?

Well, to Perry these things had mattered immensely.

And they had continued to matter on the morning after his long night of vacillation when, at eight o’clock, with a ring-bound lecture notebook jammed under his armpit, he had willed himself to set course across the quadrangle of the ancient Oxford college he was shortly to leave for ever, and ascend the worm-eaten wooden staircase leading to the rooms of Basil Flynn, Director of Studies, Doctor of Law, ten minutes after requesting a quick word with him on a private and confidential matter.

* * *

Only three years divided the two men, but Flynn, in Perry’s judgement, was already the ultimate university committee whore. ‘I can squeeze you in if you come at once,’ he had said officiously, ‘I’ve a meeting of Council at nine, and they tend to last.’ He was wearing a dark suit and black shoes with polished side-buckles. Only his carefully brushed shoulder-length hair separated him from the full-dress uniform of orthodoxy. Perry had not considered how he would begin his conversation with Flynn, and his opening words, he would now concede, were hastily chosen:

‘Last term you solicited one of my students,’ he blurted, barely across the threshold.

‘I did what?’

‘A half-Egyptian boy. Dick Benson. Egyptian mother, English father. Arabic speaker. He wanted a research grant but you suggested he might like to talk to certain people you knew in London instead. He didn’t grasp what you meant. He asked my advice.’

‘Which was?’