party of perhaps twenty tourists were gathered in a loose group, listening intently to a guide. ‘How did you first come to be introduced to him?’
‘Oh, that’s quite straightforward.’ Neame’s tone implied that Gaddis was the only man in Winchester Cathedral who did not know the story. ‘We were both inveterate lovers of crossword puzzles. I came across Eddie and a copy of the London Illustrated News one evening in the junior common room. He was stuck on a rather ingenious clue. I helped him with it. Would you like to hear what it was?’
Gaddis reckoned Neame was going to tell him anyway, so he nodded.
‘“Are set back for a number of years.”’
‘How many letters?’
‘Three.’
Gaddis had a knack for crosswords and solved the clue in the time it took Neame to check the time on his wristwatch.
‘Era.’
‘Very good, Doctor, very good.’ Neame sounded impressed, but a restlessness in his hands betrayed his irritation. It was as if the speed of Gaddis’s mind was a threat to his intellectual superiority. ‘Well, after that introduction, the two of us became firm friends. Eddie’s father had been killed in the war, as had mine. There were rumours, never confirmed, that the senior Mr Crane had taken his own life. You might like to look into that, chat up a military historian or two. See what they make of it.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Gaddis told him.
‘Eddie’s mother, Susan, then remarried, a man whom Eddie detested.’ Neame’s mouth had tightened, but folds of skin hung loose beneath his chin. ‘His name escapes me, for some reason. I never met him. Scoundrel, by all accounts.’
‘Rather like Philby’s father.’
Gaddis hadn’t meant to draw other members of the Cambridge Ring into the conversation so quickly, but was pleased by the impact of his observation. Neame was nodding in agreement.
‘Precisely. Both absolute monsters. Kim’s father was an epic charlatan. Converted to Islam, if you can believe it, even took the name Abdullah and married a Saudi slave girl. Rumour has it he worked as a spy for the Saudi monarchy.’
‘I’ve heard that,’ Gaddis said. ‘ Cherchez le pere. ’
Neame understood the implications of the remark and again nodded his agreement.
‘Indeed. Every member of the Trinity cell, to a greater or lesser extent, had complicated, in some cases non- existent, relationships with their fathers. Guy’s died when he was very young, ditto Anthony’s. Maclean was the same. What would they call Sir Donald nowadays? “An absentee father”?’ Neame gave the phrase the same withering tone of dismissal that he had reserved for the word ‘subconsciously’. ‘Strict Presbyterian, too. More interested in furthering his political career than he was in looking out for the welfare of his own son. In my experience, men are all, to a greater or lesser extent, at war with their fathers. Would you agree, Doctor?’
Gaddis wasn’t one for sharing family confidences, so he proffered a joke instead.
‘You’re a Freudian after all, Tom.’
Neame did not react. It struck Gaddis that he was as covetous of his moods as a small child.
‘Tell me about Cambridge at that time,’ he asked, skidding over the awkwardness. ‘What were your impressions of the place?’
The question appeared to lift the old man’s spirits, because he turned to face him and smiled through his clear blue eyes.
‘Well, of course there has been a good deal of nonsense spoken about that period. If certain “experts” are to be believed, we spent our entire time at Cambridge eating cucumber sandwiches, punting along the Cam and singing “Jerusalem” in chapel. Believe me, times were a lot tougher than that. Of course, there were any number of highly privileged undergraduates from wealthy backgrounds in situ, but it wasn’t all Brideshead Revisited and picnics on the lawn.’
‘Of course.’ Gaddis was wondering why Neame felt the need to set the record straight.
‘But one thing is certainly true. Oxford and Cambridge in the pre-war years were both absolutely riddled with Communists. Any self-respecting young man — or woman, for that matter — with even the vaguest sense of social justice was profoundly sceptical about the direction Western capitalism was taking. This wasn’t too long after the Great Depression, don’t forget. Unemployment was running at three million. Throw into the mix the lovely Adolf and you had a climate of apprehension unmatched by anything since.’
‘Go on,’ said Gaddis. The lovely Adolf was a phrase he might steal for a lecture.
‘Well, it’s quite simple.’ Neame touched the perfect Windsor knot on his wool tie. There was a small stain on the fabric halfway down. ‘All of us became rather enamoured of the Russian experiment. Some more enamoured than others.’
‘You’re talking about Eddie?’
‘Eddie, certainly. But everyone in my circle of acquaintance was touched by an interest in Marx. To be a Communist in 1933 was as unremarkable as taking mustard with roast beef. We were everywhere. You couldn’t move for people who wanted to buck the system.’
‘People like Burgess and Maclean? People like Philby and Blunt?’
Neame shot him a sideways glance and Gaddis was concerned that he would now digress into yet more petty power games. Two tourists had appeared at the end of their row of seats wearing tracksuit trousers and bulging money belts, thousand-euro Nikons trained at the ceiling. They were speaking loudly to one another in German and Neame waited until they had moved along the aisle before continuing.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Guy and Anthony were particularly visible in the Party. Donald was a great protestor. Always manning the barricades, always first in the queue when there was an opportunity for dissent.’
‘But not Crane?’
Neame paused, seemingly concerned to render as accurate an account of his friend’s behaviour during this period as was possible at a distance of over seventy years.
‘Eddie was more subtle,’ he said finally. ‘Eddie kept his head down.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He was known to Blunt, certainly, because he was a student in one of Anthony’s French classes, but he wasn’t active. He didn’t come into the orbit of Maurice Dobb, for example, who was the don responsible for pushing Guy in the direction of the Party. He never officially joined the Communists, either.’
This astonished Gaddis, not least because membership would have been a pre-requisite of working for the NKVD, the arm of Soviet foreign intelligence in operation in the UK at the time.
‘You look surprised, Doctor.’
Again, a pain appeared to jag across Neame’s back, cutting the end off the question. The old man bent forward slowly, wincing.
‘Are you all right?’ Gaddis was obliged to make sure that Neame was comfortable, yet he was loath to give him an opportunity to bring the interview to an end. It had taken an eternity to reach this point. They might never meet again. He had to try to extract as much information as possible.
‘I am fine,’ Neame reassured him, making a determined gesture with his hand. Gaddis noticed that he was once again squeezing it into a fist, fighting off the arthritis. ‘Look, I tried on many occasions to persuade Eddie to join the Party. Many of us did.’
‘But without success?’
‘Without success.’ Neame’s voiced had softened, almost into regret, but suddenly he was energized again, seized by the urge to defend Crane and to put his argument across more forcefully.
‘I concluded, largely in retrospect, that there was more than one way to skin a cat. One does not have to be a member of the Labour Party in order to vote for a Labour candidate. One can hold right-wing views in England without subscribing to the Daily Mail. Do you follow?’
‘I follow.’
‘Eddie was a subtle animal. He wasn’t much for making an exhibition of himself. He played what you might call a long game. Now, did he do that because he didn’t want anything on his record that might jeopardize any future involvement in public service, or did he do that because he was a rather shy young man and, at that tender age, perhaps lacking in the sort of self-confidence which distinguished his more celebrated colleagues in the
