The Long Room (6 page)

It has been a long time since Stephen thought of making his confession and, if there ever were a time when he could have disburdened himself in a car, it was also long ago. His regular passenger these days is his mother. And yet, on that short trip to Dover, he felt some share in the couple’s closeness. In step with the suspect’s wife, he made sounds of listening and assent; he asked questions. And he wondered if there was another factor at work then – that of destination. The most ordinary of journeys has a beginning and an end – East Acton to Didcot, Walthamstow to Dover. Does the promise of a full stop encourage the telling of a story, does narrative nee
boundaries? The start defined and the finish in sight: ‘The End’ in ornate writing on a hand-drawn scroll as it appears above the closing credits of old films?

One of the people Stephen is listening to today runs a taxi firm. It’s his office that is wired and not his cars, although, for all that Stephen knows, there may be tracking devices in them too. The tapes pile up: Saturday evening, Sunday, Monday; the take from Monday night to Tuesday morning arrives in the late afternoon. By then Stephen is dizzy from hours of ringing telephones, radio messages, background chatter. Unfamiliar voices and unfamiliar places: Crossmaglen, Coalisland, Silverstream, Loughgall. How can he make sense of them when he does not know what he is looking for? It’s a labyrinth, or maybe it’s a nightmare party game: a player rings up for a cab, giving his or her current location and desired destination, the controller passes the request to one or more of the drivers on the road, the one who answers fastest wins the job. Round and round the directions go: Lisnadill, Craigavon, Donaghmore, and as they do they get more garbled: calling number three, the controller says, and number three’s reply, through traffic noise, through static, through the fragile wiring of a secret listening device is impossible to hear. As in a bad dream, the player whose task it is to find the hidden key feels a rising sense of panic. These were messages sent yesterday and the day before; current then, in the present tense. Elsewhere, in undisclosed locations, Charlotte, Harriet and Damian will have their ears pressed to voices likewise speaking in the present or the future, whereas for those whom Stephen is struggling to understand, the future then is now the past. And in other unknown places unobtrusive men and women will be loitering in cars, at bus
stops, at shop windows, in the ditches of country lanes, and all of them on the lookout for something they can only hope that they will recognise if it ever it comes. Stephen is not at all sure that he will. But, if he misses the crucial hint and an ambassador or an MP dies, if a bomb explodes beneath a policeman’s car, a platoon of British soldiers is blown to smithereens of bone, it will be his fault. There will be an inquiry, the tapes that he is scanning now will be re-scanned, his culpable incompetence will be revealed and he, Stephen, Step hen Waddlecock, will have been responsible for the deaths of innocent men.

It’s desperate. But looked at in another way, it’s not. Stephen has been here before, albeit not very often; he has seen other emergencies come and go, in a small way he can claim to have played some part in their success. Or, at any rate, to have been uninvolved so far in any failure. The game goes on – the Chinese whispers, the misunderstandings and the misdirections, the disinformation, the bewildering time lags, the words half-heard, the pauses and the silence – and it seldom comes to a definitive conclusion.

Nor does it today. A few minutes before seven o’clock, by which time the listeners have been working flat out for hours, removing their headphones only to take instructions or when interrupted by operatives or Muriel, a go-between puts his head round the door of the long room to call
CUCHULAINN
off. A false alarm, he announces, breezily, that’s how it goes, so often. He cannot go into details, obviously, but he can say that the informer seems to have got the wrong end of the stick. Easy to do, of course, blokes can’t be expected to go marching round asking direct questions about bombs. Go-betweens can’t arrange a meeting at the drop of a hat. Thanks most awfully,
anyway. You’ve been absolutely brilliant today. Real stars.

The
PHOENIX
tapes are in Stephen’s in-tray. He saw Muriel deliver them, on her slow, painstaking rounds, distributing her envelopes, stopping to talk to anyone who would take their headphones off for just a minute. Damian is the one she loves the best. Sunday midnight to Monday noon, Monday noon to midnight, Monday midnight to Tuesday morning: it has been a torment to leave those envelopes unopened through the exhausting hours of unremitting work. Rollo Buckingham has also been impatient: Stephen saw him striding into the long room in the morning but Louise saw him too and shooed him off. Attack warnings trump all but Alpha investigations, she will have reminded him. She will not have given him more detail – Rollo is an operative in Department Six, not Department Four; he has no need to know that information. Even in his distracted state, Stephen, watching this exchange from the far end of the room, noted the precise and beautiful cut of Rollo’s suit. He wears his clothes so well. How is it that his jackets fall in a perfect line from shoulder to hem, the waistbands of his trousers neither gape nor pinch and his collars are forever crisp? It was some comfort to see him being dismissed so roundly.

Stephen breathes out deeply through his mouth. He will help the others to finish off the otiose reports and then he will join Helen. He will tell Louise that these
PHOENIX
tapes can’t wait a minute longer and it is imperative therefore that he should stay on late.

But he hasn’t taken Louise’s care for the welfare of her team into account. This has been a very long day, a difficult day, and she wants them to be rewarded. She forbids more work. She
brushes away Stephen’s earnest protestations; she has squared things with Rollo, she assures him, he is to put all his tapes away until tomorrow. Meanwhile Charlotte and Damian come trailing back, a little wan and deflated. Harriet has sloped off.

‘I’m ravenous,’ says Charlotte. ‘And cheesed off. Me and Cecilia were going to meet in the lunch hour to do our Christmas shopping. She’s going away tomorrow. Now I’ll have to do it on my own.’ She does not need to explain Cecilia, they all know she is her flatmate.

‘Never mind,’ Louise says soothingly. ‘I’ve got Resources to agree to an extra hour for lunch tomorrow
and
the overtime. Because it’s nearly Christmas! So you’ll have loads of time, Lottie, to buy even more expensive presents! Now then, it’s late, I’m tired and I can’t face going home and cooking. Anyone want to join me for a cheap and cheerful dinner?’

‘Ooh,’ Charlotte says, more happily, ‘that is a great idea. I couldn’t half murder an Indian!’

‘Um, well, that would be super but I must just finish off …’ Stephen begins before Louise interrupts him.

‘But me no buts, sweetie, I’ve already told you I’ve squared it with your man upstairs. I told him you’d have the whole day to yourself tomorrow. If we leave now, we’ll escape the late list.’

There’s no escape. Under the circumstances Stephen cannot stay on behind his colleagues. Damian makes his excuses: he has a ticket for
Tristan and Isolde
and if he dashes will just make it before the curtain rises. Christophine has a family to feed and Solly a wife who will expect him but Greta, Charlotte and Louise, like Stephen, live alone; there will be no one waiting hungrily for their return. Together they lock away the tape-recorders, files and papers, check the cabinets, turn off the
lights and leave the long room to walk through thin rain to an Indian restaurant Louise knows near Victoria. Gin is the thing to drink with Indian food, says Greta. She and the other women talk, and Stephen hears them without listening, his thoughts entirely on Helen. Where is she this evening, could she have escaped from
PHOENIX
, will she remember to eat? Chicken biryani and lamb dhansak; in the rosy glow of the little restaurant grease shines on Charlotte’s lips.

The morning began badly. After a night of broken sleep and anxious dreams that were hard to tell apart from waking thoughts, Stephen had slept through the screech of his alarm clock and had to rush to get to work. In a dream that seemed to repeat itself with variations on a constant loop like a demonic piece of music, he had been a witness to successive acts of violence and each time found himself unable to make the necessary 999 call that would bring the outrage to a stop. A man in a mask was skewering a woman with a metal rod, a man held a gun to a baby’s head and Stephen, standing right beside a telephone, could not force his index finger into the correct number on the dial. Or, having inserted a finger, could not rotate the dial. Or, although on a fully working telephone, accurately sequence the essential numbers. Or remember what the numbers were. His head was thick with fitful waking and yesterday evening’s gin, his stomach gassy from the food he’d eaten. There were delays on the Central Line and his train was packed. Between Notting Hill Gate and Queensway he had felt a sudden upheaval in the gut, presaging an urgent need for evacuation. He had willed his bowels to settle. Having already emptied them at home, and with no breakfast since, he couldn’t possible need to go again. Something squirted inside him and popped wetly, like an eructation of marsh gas in a bog. Mind over matter, he told himself, as his mother always used to say of
childhood pains. Mind over matter. If you bid it to be gone, it will. It worked: he felt secure enough to change trains as usual at Bond Street.

Just out of that station, buried in one of London’s deepest tunnels, the equally crowded train that Stephen had joined came to a lurching halt and all the lights went out. It stayed at a dark standstill for what felt like an eternity, the crammed-together passengers becoming restive, nervous, the blackness hot and thick as bearskin, Stephen’s belly horribly and noisily protesting. To soil himself on the Underground, to sense his sphincter muscle loosen and the noxious stream spurt out, his shit splattering the stockinged legs of the woman in a green coat who was pressed against him, indelibly staining his own legs, squelching into his shoes: more stuff of nightmare. His fellow passengers cringing from the foetid stink in justifiable disgust.

Stephen was feeling very shaky by the time he reached the Institute. There were queues of people waiting for their badges to be checked and waiting for the lifts; he couldn’t trust himself that long but careered up the six flights of stairs, clenching his buttocks and his stomach, praying that the toilets on the third-floor landing would be unoccupied. He has an only child’s dislike of crapping within earshot of another. They were, and he flung himself into a cubicle, arriving in the nick of time. Splatterings above and below the white porcelain rim but nothing on his underpants, he noted with relief; he did his best to wipe up the mess so that no one else would see it. While he was scrubbing himself and the seat, someone entered the toilet but left it rapidly, repelled, Stephen supposed, by his revolting stench. He stayed sitting in the cubicle
a while; it was quiet in there, and cool and light.

Now after this, after abstinence prolonged, at last, the lady of consolation. Helen. Helen who, like any other earthly creature, perforce must eat and then excrete. He remembers playground titters about poo and pee and bums and asking his mother if Jesus went to the toilet too, like normal people, like the Queen. In response she scolded him for being blasphemous. He remembers learning that word from her and savouring the slither of it on his tongue, its snaky sibilants and its thrilling sense of sin. Although he can smile now at the guilelessness of the child, he still believes that bodily functions can be problematic. There are things that women ought to do alone, their ceremonies and secret rites, which should not be seen by lovers.

Louise is waiting to grab him as soon as he appears at the door of the long room. ‘You’re late,’ she says. ‘We’ve some catching up to do for Department Four. It turns out that things were not as straightforward as we were led to hope. We won’t get that extra hour for lunch today, I’m sorry to say, though they’ll let us carry it over. But before we get on with our work, we need to have another little meeting about the Christmas party. I’m about to have a chat with Ana and Ivan and I propose to say that we’ll be responsible for the food. It’s so much less hassle than doing the drink. And besides, if we don’t do the catering, we’ll be at the mercy of Group II and there’ll be nothing to eat but crisps.’

‘And blinis,’ Charlotte says, putting a lugubrious emphasis on the liquid ‘l’. ‘Actually I seem to recall that they were rather good.’

‘But there weren’t enough of them to soak up Edouard’s punch.’

‘Oh yeah, that’s right. Edouard’s toxic mixture! I’m surprised we can remember anything at all about last year, after we’d drunk that.’

Stephen, not listening, tries to edge away. ‘I’m happy to do whatever I’m told,’ he says. ‘If you could maybe have the meeting without me? It’s just that I’m so behind because of yesterday. I promised Buckingham. He’ll flay me. Could I possibly do his tapes first and then
CUCHULAINN
?’

‘Look,’ says Louise. ‘I don’t know much about the
PHOENIX
thing but I do know that it’s going nowhere. Sub-director Six’s secretary told me in the lift that they’re about to have a case conference any minute now. Sorry, I was meant to tell you. She’s arranging it this week.’

‘Excuse me,’ Stephen protests, ‘it is Sub-director Six’s secretary who is ill-informed. We’re on the verge of a breakthrough, as a matter of fact.’ The level of his voice is rising, although he tries to keep it steady. Charlotte is looking at him with amused surprise; Louise is laughing too. ‘Okay, okay,’ she says, ‘keep your hair on. We’ll make the meeting snappy.’

But by the time all the Group III listeners are assembled and everyone has a cup of tea or coffee and a biscuit and the list has been drawn up of who is to bring sausage rolls and mince pies, the morning is half gone. ‘We’ll have to make the sandwiches in the kitchen here,’ Louise declares. ‘They go all dry and curly if you do them at home the night before and they sit around all day.’

Stephen, still not listening, thinks of Helen in the staff room of her school, enduring a correspondingly frustrating time. She is not a woman who fusses over sandwiches; she knows what is essential and what is not. At this moment her attention will
be on the choir of children who, under her gentle tutelage, sing like angels, in the pure lancing treble of small children that arrows to the soul. If she could hear what he has to put up with, she would surely sympathise. ‘I’ll take charge of cheese and biscuits,’ he announces, ‘if that’s all right by everybody else.’

And, finally, at long last, yesterday’s three orange-label tapes, safe within their separate envelopes, waiting in his in-tray like the answer to a wish. Stephen slides the first into the machine, puts his headphones on and listens. Quiet until Monday morning, the day before yesterday: good morning, my beautiful Helen.

‘Come back to bed,’ the man was saying and the woman laughed but she said nothing and there came a sound that was gelatinous, like the sound of a sea creature being sundered from a rock. Suction and a sigh. It’s disgusting and it takes a while to comprehend what’s happening. ‘Let go of me,’ she says but she’s still laughing. ‘You know I can’t. I can’t be late.’

Stephen shivers with disgust and shock. She’s not crying, she is laughing. Instead of leaving silently for work, she is letting her husband maul her, submitting to his kisses, soliciting them perhaps. Come back to bed? What does this imply? And how can it mean what it must mean, after the night before? What could have happened in the night between wife and husband? The answer can only be that the husband tricked the wife. He must have spun a web of lies to turn her disposition so fast from sadness to good cheer. If good cheer is what it was. Is there a note almost of hysteria in Helen’s voice? Could her laughter be concealing horror? Stephen thinks of hostages who, having somehow raised the alarm, are compelled to tell the policeman at the door that all is well, for terror of
the gunman invisible within who has their frightened children bound and gagged. A woman’s eyes frantically signal fear while her mouth speaks words of reassurance. For a wild moment he wonders if Helen is signalling to him. But then that sense of impotence that sickened him when he heard her weeping in the night descends on him again.

He stops the tape. This is unbearable. He can’t go on listening but he must go on listening, he can’t go to her, he can’t do anything, he is as helpless as a fledgling in a storm. The irrational and suppressed anxiety he has suffered all his life – that he is in some way incomplete, the wounded remnant of a thing that should be whole, returns now strengthened like a thug with a jack-hammer and threatens to undo him. But he can’t just lay his head down on his desk and shut the world out, as he wants to do, for Charlotte will ask him what the matter is, and in any case analysts and strategists are waiting for today’s reports, as is Rollo. He has to be resolute and switch the tape back on.

As always Helen leaves the flat before her husband; school days begin earlier than days at the Institute. After she has gone, Stephen is forced to listen to
PHOENIX
in the bathroom with the door wide open, splashing, gargling, pissing. Then he makes himself a pot of coffee, and rustles through the newspaper that is delivered to the door, before he leaves for work. He and Helen read the
Guardian
and so does Stephen, although he buys his copy at the station. He used to enjoy hearing the couple talk about the news that he himself had read the day before, and to find he often shared their views. But he dissociates himself from
PHOENIX
now; nothing that he says or thinks can be trustworthy or true.

Stephen notes the time that
PHOENIX
leaves: 09.27. There will be no more until Helen comes back home. The tape will go on whirring to its midday end, recording the sounds of the outside world but they will not mean anything at all.

The second of Monday’s tapes is still sealed in its envelope. Now it seems more like a creature poised to bite than an object of desire. But Stephen knows that he must hear it before he reports to Rollo.

Monday evening. Helen is halfway through a piece that Stephen thinks could be by Chopin when
PHOENIX
returns early. She stops playing; Stephen listens to the man’s tread on the wooden floor, the sound of his keys and outer clothing being deposited by the door. And Helen then exclaiming on an indrawn breath: ‘How lovely!’

‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ says Jamie. ‘I was horribly bad-tempered.’

‘It doesn’t matter … I love you … You didn’t need to buy me flowers.’

‘But I thought you’d like them. And I thought we might go out for supper tonight, unless you …’

‘Well, there is that quiche we bought at …’

‘But that’ll keep. Oh come on. Let’s go out. I’ve had a hard day, now what I’d like is to look at my love by candlelight and thank my lucky stars.’

Helen doesn’t say anything but she reaches towards Jamie, or perhaps Jamie holds out his arms to her. Stephen screws his eyes tight shut and blocks his ears to the sound of their embrace. To the breath, the kiss, the sound of curtains being drawn. To the sound the man makes: half groan, half sob. To the woman gasping yes. To Jamie singing while he runs a bath.
Helen must be in the bedroom getting dressed; Stephen can no longer hear her but he can see her at her mirror, widening her eyes and looking upwards as she paints her lashes. It’s a clouded mirror; the reflection that it shows is soft and hazy.

Later Helen and Jamie, having had a glass of wine, and chattering, elated, leave and Stephen is alone. The scent that Helen wears is lingering on the air. There will be a trail of it above the staircase she runs down. She has wrapped a cashmere scarf around her neck; when she takes it off and hands it with her coat to the waiter in the restaurant, the fragrance will catch in his throat like a memory of love and when he thinks no one is watching, he will bury his face in the soft grey wool to breathe it in.

In the upstairs flat, someone has turned a television on too loud and the sound is registered. Stephen, in despondency, his head bowed, is still listening to the distorted noise when he senses a shadow falling across his desk. He looks up to see Rollo Buckingham in a dark-blue overcoat, a fine spray of raindrops still clinging to his shoulders, so that they seem silver-spangled. ‘Is it raining?’ Stephen says.

‘Drizzling,’ says Rollo. ‘Look, I’ve booked the Cube. We need to talk and we can’t do that in here. Meet me there in ten? I need to get a cup of coffee first; I’m gasping.’

‘Yes, all right, but I have to tell you that I’m still on Monday evening … It’s been manic in here, you know. Wouldn’t it be better if we were to talk later when I’ve caught up with yesterday?’

‘No, not really. I have to brief the trackers today.’

‘All right,’ Stephen says again, having no real choice. His heart sinks further at the prospect of incarceration in that suffocating
cell. ‘Hurry back,’ Louise instructs. ‘You’re needed for
CUCHULAINN
.’

Louise does not know how that name is said, Stephen says to himself. He does, though; he heard it spoken by an Irish poet who was lecturing in Oxford. He remembers the man lingering over the lyrical sound. Water flowing over rock, the sound was – mountain water, cool and clear. Stephen must have been studying Yeats, he supposes now, to have been at that particular lecture; yes, it was Yeats, the soft Celtic light, the myth-making, the lines that still come back to him at times.

The lift, descending, stops at the first floor to admit three men, one of whom Stephen recognises as Sub-director Six. He is a tall man with a fine head of carefully combed white hair and a curiously girlish mouth. They are remote figures, at least to Stephen, these sub-directors, who make up the board of the Institute but, although Stephen is not known to him, this one nods in polite acknowledgement as he steps in.