‘Who is it?’ I shouted to the Times man.
‘Hector Dexter. He has chosen Freedom. He and his wife are expected here from Orly any minute now.’
‘Remind me –’ I shouted.
‘That American who went to Russia just before Burgess and Maclean did.’
I vaguely remembered. As everybody seemed so excited I could see that he must be very important. The noise abated when the policemen got off their bicycles. Davey said: ‘You must remember, Fanny – there was a huge fuss at the time. His wife is English – your Aunt Emily knew her mother.’
More police dashed up, clearing the way for a motor. It stopped before the hotel; the journalists were held back; a policeman opened the door of the car and out of it struggled a large Teddy-bear of an American in a crumpled beige suit, a coat over his arm, holding a brief-case. He stood on the pavement, blinking and swallowing, green in the face; I felt sorry for him, he looked so ill. Some of the journalists shouted questions while others flashed and snapped away with their cameras. ‘So what was it like, Heck?’ ‘Come on, Heck, how was the Soviet Union?’ ‘Why did you leave, Heck? Let’s have a statement.’
Mr Dexter stood there, silent, swaying on his feet. A man pushed a microphone under his nose. ‘Give us your impressions, Heck, what’s the life like, out there?’
At last he opened his mouth. ‘Fierce!’ he said. Then he added, in a rush, ‘Pardon me, gentlemen, I am still suffering from motion discomfort.’ He hurried into the hotel.
‘Suffering from what?’ said Davey, interested.
‘It means air sickness,’ said the Times man. ‘I wonder when we shall get a statement. Dexter used to be a tremendous chatterbox – he must be feeling very sick indeed to be so taciturn all of a sudden.’
A large pink knee loomed in the doorway of the motor. It was followed by a woman as unmistakably English as Dexter was American. She merely said ‘Shits’ to the snapping and flashing photographers. Using the New Statesman as a screen she ran after her husband. Her place was taken by a fat, pudding-faced lad who stood posing and grinning and chewing gum until everybody lost interest in him. I saw that Mockbar’s elbows were getting into motion, followed by the rheumaticky superannuated stable-boy action of his lower limbs, the whole directed at me. ‘Come on,’ I said to Davey, ‘we must get out of this, quick –’
Philip was invited to the Jungfleisch dinner as well as Davey and next morning he came to report. The return of the Dexters had been, of course, the sole topic of conversation. When it transpired that Davey had actually witnessed it he became the hero of the evening.
‘They are puzzled, poor dears,’ said Philip.
‘Who – the Jungfleisches?’
‘All the Americans here. Don’t know how to take the news. Is it Good or Bad? What does it mean? How does Mr Khrushchev evaluate it? What will the State Department say? The agony for our friends is should they send flowers or not? You know how they can’t bear not to be loved, even by Dexter – it’s ghastly for them to feel they are not welcoming old Heck as they ought to – at the same time it was very, very wrong of him to leave the Western Camp and it wouldn’t do for them to appear to condone. The magic, meaningless word Solidarity is one of their runes; old Heck has not been solid and that’s dreadfully un-American of him. But one must remember old Heck has now chosen Freedom, he has come back to the Western Camp of his own accord and they would like to reward him for that. So they are in an utter fix. In the end it was decided that Mildred must have a dinner party for policy makers; Jo Alsop, Elsa Maxwell, Mr Gallagher and Mr Shean are all flying over for it – but most of them can’t get here before the end of the week. We shan’t know any more until they have been consulted. Meanwhile there’s the question of the flowers. Either you send at once or not at all; what are they to do? Davey suggested sending bunches with no cards, so that presently, if they want to, they can say, “Did you get my roses all right, Heck?”
‘Isn’t Davey wonderful?’
‘It went down very badly. They were sharked.’
Davey got to work on his godson. Dr Lecœur came and took many tests, David cooperating quite satisfactorily. The Americans at Mrs Jungfleisch’s dinner had been unanimous in recommending Dr Jore, head psycho-analyst to N.A.T.O. David brought him to the Salon Vert to have a word with me before taking him up to see his patient. He wanted to get the background first. He was a gangling young man, perhaps really much older than he looked. Davey seemed to like him; I tried to put prejudice out of my mind and do the same. When I had told him all I knew about my son, going back to babyhood, even trying to remember how I had taught him to use a pot (‘I suppose I smacked him’), Dr Jore cleared his throat.
‘As I see it then, Mrs Ambassadress, though of course I may be wrong since no system of psychiatry is as yet I believe infallible, the human element playing, as it must play in all human affairs, its part, since we are only endeavouring towards daylight and though I think I may say that the system by which I personally am guided is now very largely perfectioned, the foregoing reservation must be very distinctly borne in mind. With this reservation, then, very distinctly borne in mind, what I am about to say may be deemed to approximate the facts as they most probably
