On this third week Philby felt able to give a small cocktail party of his own. He invited Freddie Frobisher and Randy Grant, and their wives, and a number of hangers-on, as well as Fielding. Grant arrived late with a junior Minister — a small prune-faced man who’d been in the Royal Navy and got quietly drunk — while the rest of the party went with a swing. Philby had managed to get hold of some Scotch, through a contact of Frobisher’s; and there was also French brandy and Havana cigars, acquired by a friend of Fielding’s from Cape Town.
Philby was careful not to get too drunk himself: not that he feared giving himself away, only that he might transgress some subtle border-line of behaviour that would offend his guests. He followed Horne’s advice: ‘You’ll be expected to drink like a fish, but hold your drink like a man. They expect you to get decently drunk.’
Apart from parties, his life was a quiet one. He even took to smoking a pipe — which he hadn’t done since before the war — and went so far as to pay large sums for his favourite English tobacco. His most immediate problem was getting hold of the news. In Moscow no one had frowned at his habit of collecting his airmail edition of The Times each day; but here he had to be more careful. A few British papers were to be found, usually a couple of days late, in the big newsagents, and these were bought up as soon as they arrived; but most were subscribed to by known or suspected opponents of the régime. Philby got round this dilemma by ordering the Daily Telegraph, which was considered to be reasonably respectable, and had it openly delivered to him at The Abominables’ Club, which occupied spacious premises opposite Meikle’s. He told his fellow ‘Snowmen’ that he couldn’t do without the British sporting news — an explanation that was accepted without reservation.
Otherwise, he played a shrewd game of bridge, tolerable backgammon, and was even persuaded to try his hand, with less success, at golf. As far as he knew, his old reliable charm was still working and everyone he met liked him and asked to see more of him.
By the end of his first month in Rhodesia he had made probably more friends than at any time in his life, and was accepted as a true Rhodesian gentleman.
Then, in his fifth week, he received a telegram at the Poste Restante, dispatched from Geneva the night before: SEE YOU HOTEL POLANA LOURENÇO MARQUES FRIDAY 8 PM — CHARLES. The message was in English.
Friday was two days ahead, which gave him time to apply for his Portuguese visa to Mozambique; then he booked a flight for Friday afternoon on Rhodesian Airways. He also telephoned the Polana Hotel to be told that a room had already been booked for him by a Monsieur Cassis, who was also staying in the hotel on Friday. Pol’s effrontery rather shocked Philby, who had been steeped in the lore of security all his adult life. Pol was a conspicuous person in any community; and his face had already been splashed across the world’s Press in connection with the Troika-Caravelle incident. Yet he now dared to expose himself on Philby’s doorstep, when a letter, or even an intermediary, would have surely done the job as well. Unless, of course, Pol had some special reason for coming so far.
Philby also realized that Pol’s hold over him was as firm as ever, and not for one moment did he seriously entertain the idea of not going to the rendezvous; for he knew that if he spurned Pol now, his continued existence in Rhodesia would not only be rendered impotent — it might be put in real danger.
He told no one of his visit to Mozambique — not even Fielding, who in any case had left the day before on a two-week visit to a remote but fashionable hotel called Hillcrest, just north of Umtali, close to the Mozambique border. Fielding had been particularly depressed lately; he had been hitting the bottle hard, and friends had urged that a stay in the mountains might do him good.
At 4.30 on Friday afternoon Philby stepped off the Boeing 707 — one of the regime’s triumphs of Sanction-Busting — and walked through the sticky heat of Lourenço Marques’ Vasco da Gama Airport. It had been raining and a yellow haze hung over the heaving, grey-green skin of the Indian Ocean. By the time he reached the terminal he was sweating. He was also struck by the number of black and brown faces mingling with the sun-tanned new arrivals; and realized, with a sense of shock, how subtly he had been infected by the semi-Apartheid of Rhodesia, where non-Europeans merely formed a neutral background, as impersonal as a bus queue glimpsed from the back of a comfortable car. He even found himself glancing suspiciously at the Portuguese Immigration officer — a sallow man with crisp black hair and distinctly simian features.
The twenty-minute taxi-ride into the city took him along the coastal plain, burnt brown by the long summer, past groups of handsome African girls in tribal costume offering themselves laughingly to the White visitors.
Philby had heard that Lourenço Marques has the reputation of being the Paris of the southern hemisphere; but his first impressions were of another ragged modern metropolis — shantytowns crumbling at the feet of high-rise blocks, most of them unfinished, like steel skeletons straddling the few old Portuguese houses whose stone frontages now looked forlorn and abandoned.
The European Continental myth persisted only along the wide muggy
