It was already dark when he arrived next evening in a hired Datsun at the address which Frobisher had given him, in the smart suburb of Highlands.
A pair of Africans in gold-braided tunics and red tarbouches stood inside the door and bowed him through, without even asking his name. The party was already well under way. A crowd of at least two hundred stretched from a large patio, with buffet-table and barbecue, across the lawn to the swimming-pool which was garlanded with coloured lights. Another African in braided tunic handed him a whisky and he began to move cautiously round the edge of the throng. Some of the men wore dinner-jackets, but most were either in tropical suits or blazers and grey flannels. There were also many RAF moustaches, and from the snatches of conversation he heard, Philby concluded that most of them were as common as dirt. A cut above second-hand car-dealers and scrap-merchants, but only just. What he used to call the Saloon-Bar Road-Hog types — appearing now like ageing ghosts from the England of the Thirties.
The women, in unseemly contrast, were very up-to-date: a lot of long-legged girls in miniskirts and kaftans, the older women in trouser-suits or dresses that were too young for them, their complexions taut and leathery from too much sun and dieting.
Philby at last found Freddie Frobisher among a group by the swimming-pool. The bank manager greeted him like an old friend, hailing him as ‘Our latest Abominable — Duncan Saunders — and he’s loaded!’ Frobisher’s face was dark and moist, as he pulled Philby towards him and introduced him to their host.
Randolph Grant was an enormous man with rough handsome features, in a dinner-jacket that could only have been cut by the best of London tailors. Philby sensed at once the raffish nonchalance of the well-bred bounder: now holding forth with the ease of a seasoned socialite. Grant turned from his audience, which included several very pretty girls, and looked at Philby.
‘Another Abominable come in from the cold?’ he roared; and biting into a cigar, he wrung Philby’s hand. ‘What’s your line? Copper? Tobacco?’
Suddenly Philby was stopped by his stammer. Despite Grant’s boisterous exterior, his eyes were small and shrewd; he didn’t look like a man who missed much. Philby covered his embarrassment with a gulp of whisky, then began answering the question just as Horne had instructed him. Grant asked a few questions, but they were mostly laconic, tossed at him as though to keep the conversation going. Philby replied to all of them with Horne’s meticulous catechism; and Grant soon seemed to lose interest.
Philby’s ordeal ended when a girl in a see-through blouse cried: ‘Tell Mr Saunders how you came to Africa, Randy! About the boat trip when you were skint!’
‘No jumbo-jets in those days,’ said Grant, draining his glass. ‘I got a French tub out of Marseilles to Mombasa — steerage, with about four hundred stinking wogs with their prayer-mats, all locked below decks like cattle. I was the only White man there. But on the second day the skipper took pity on me and gave me a third-class cabin, sharing with three Benedictine monks. When they weren’t saying their breviaries or being seasick, we all played gin-rummy, and because they were skint, like me, we played for Benedictine. They had a whole crate of the stuff, and they were damned bad players. I was soon drinking two bottles a day.’ He broke off, looking round him. ‘Where are those bloody munts? I need a refuel.’ A man at the back hurried off towards the patio.
Philby found himself next to a middle-aged man in a well-worn dinner-jacket, standing with his feet apart, like a sailor on a heaving deck.
‘First time you’ve met Randy, Mr Saunders?’ he asked, in a thick voice.
‘That’s right,’ said Philby. ‘I’m new here.’
‘He’s a shit,’ the man said, and drank some whisky. ‘My name’s Fielding, by the way. James Fielding. People call me Jimmy. I’m an Abominable like you. Glad to meet you.’ He put out his free hand and lurched slightly.
He was about the same build as Philby, with the same lined face and scruffy grey hair, and his voice was slurred and cultured. Philby recognized an awful mirror-image of himself and felt an uneasy empathy with the man. Not only was there this physical similarity between them; there was also the coincidence that ‘Fielding’ was the name Philby had chosen for his phoney British passport, with which he’d boarded the Troika-Caravelle in Leningrad and reached the sanctuary of the West. But there was another bond he shared with Fielding. They both disliked Randolph Grant. Philby had hated Grant on sight — hated him with those deep reflex instincts of the class-struggle that had been instilled in him far back in the Thirties, and which had marked his social conscience like a tattoo ever since. What had really appalled him about Grant was the way the man had been so ready — like everyone else in this country — to accept him as one of their own. Accept him into this fraternity of brash middlebrow bullies whom Philby had been fighting all his life. My God, he thought, I can’t be as bad as that!
He and Fielding stayed by the pool drinking, while the party swayed and cavorted round the glow of the charcoal fire, like a ritual dance to the pious attendance of the African servants who kept them freely supplied with the contraband whisky from Beira.
James Fielding was not a stimulating companion, and finally went to sleep in a long chair by the pool. Philby made his way over to the barbecue and had a few more drinks with Frobisher and his gang, while their host was absorbed with the attentions of a tall red-head — despite the presence of his latest
