The Looking Glass War (20 page)

‘He remembered you, didn’t he?’

‘Of course he did: then why did he hurt me?’

‘He didn’t mean to.’

‘Look, it’s all right, see.’ He was still upset.

They got out at the terminus and began trudging through the rain. Avery said, ‘It’s because he wasn’t one of us; that’s why you didn’t like him.’

Leiser laughed, slipped his arm through Avery’s. The rain, drifting in slow waves across the empty street, ran down their faces and trickled into the collars of their mackintoshes. Avery pressed his arm to his side, holding Leiser’s hand captive, and they continued their walk in shared contentment, forgetting the rain or playing with it, treading in the deepest parts and not caring about their clothes.

‘Is the Captain pleased, John?’

‘Very. He says it’s going fine. We begin the wireless soon, just the elementary stuff. Jack Johnson’s expected tomorrow.’

‘It’s coming back to me, John, the shooting and that. I hadn’t forgotten.’ He smiled. ‘The old three-eight.’

‘Nine-millimetre. You’re doing fine, Fred. Just fine. The Captain said so.’

‘Is that what he said, John, the Captain?’

‘Of course. And he’s told London. London’s pleased too. We’re only afraid you’re a bit too …’

‘Too what?’

‘Well – too English.’

Leiser laughed. ‘Not to worry, John.’

The inside of Avery’s arm, where he held Leiser’s hand, felt dry and warm.

They spent a morning on cyphers. Haldane acted as instructor. He had brought pieces of silk cloth imprinted with a cypher of the type Leiser would use, and a chart backed with cardboard for converting letters into numerals. He put the chart on the chimney-piece, wedging it behind the marble clock, and lectured them, rather as Leclerc would have done, but without affectation. Avery and Leiser sat at the table, pencils in hand, and under Haldane’s tuition converted one passage after another into numbers according to the chart, deducted the result from figures on the silk cloth, finally re-translating into letters. It was a process which demanded application rather than concentration, and perhaps because Leiser was trying too hard he became bothered and erratic.

‘We’ll have a timed run over twenty groups,’ Haldane said, and dictated from the sheet of paper in his hand a message of eleven words with the signature Mayfly. ‘From next week you will have to manage without the chart. I shall put it in your room and you must commit it to memory. Go!’

He pressed the stopwatch and walked to the window while the two men worked feverishly at the table, muttering almost in unison while they jotted elementary calculations on the scrap paper in front of them. Avery could detect the increasing flurry of Leiser’s movements, the suppressed sighs and imprecations, the angry erasures; deliberately slowing down, he glanced over the other’s arm to ascertain his progress and noticed that the stub of pencil buried in his little hand was smeared with sweat. Without a word, he silently changed his paper for Leiser’s. Haldane, turning round, might not have seen.

Even in these first few days, it had become apparent that Leiser looked to Haldane as an ailing man looks to his doctor; a sinner to his priest. There was something terrible about a man who derived his strength from such a sickly body.

Haldane affected to ignore him. He adhered stubbornly to the habits of his private life. He never failed to complete his crossword. A case of burgundy was delivered from the town, half-bottles, and he drank one alone at each meal while they listened to the tapes. So complete, indeed, was his withdrawal that one might have thought him revolted by the man’s proximity. Yet the more elusive, the more aloof Haldane became, the more surely he drew Leiser after him. Leiser, by some obscure standards of his own, had cast him as the English gentleman, and whatever Haldane did or said only served, in the eyes of the other, to fortify him in the part.

Haldane grew in stature. In London he was a slow-walking man; he picked his way pedantically along the corridors as if he were looking for footholds; clerks and secretaries would hover impatiently behind him, lacking the courage to pass. In Oxford he betrayed an agility which would have astonished his London colleagues. His parched frame had revived, he held himself erect. Even his hostility acquired the mark of command. Only the cough remained, that racked, abandoned sob too heavy for such a narrow chest, bringing dabs of red to his thin cheeks and causing Leiser the mute concern of a pupil for his admired master.

‘Is the Captain sick?’ he once asked Avery, picking up an old copy of Haldane’s
Times
.

‘He never speaks of it.’

‘I suppose that would be bad form.’ His attention was suddenly arrested by the newspaper. It was unopened. Only the crossword had been done, the margins round it sparsely annotated with permutations of a nine-letter anagram. He showed it to Avery in bewilderment.

‘He doesn’t read it,’ he said. ‘He’s only done the competition.’

That night, when they went to bed, Leiser took it with him, furtively as if it contained some secret which study could reveal.

So far as Avery could judge, Haldane was content with Leiser’s progress. In the great variety of activities to which Leiser was now subjected, they had been able to observe him more closely; with the corrosive perception of the weak they discovered his failings and tested his power. He acquired, as they gained his trust, a disarming frankness; he loved to confide. He was their creature; he gave them everything, and they stored it away as the poor do. They saw that the Department had provided direction for his energy: like a man of uncommon sexual appetite, Leiser had found in his new employment a love which he could illustrate with his gifts. They saw that he took pleasure in their command, giving in return his strength as homage for fulfilment. They even knew perhaps that between them they constituted for Leiser the poles of absolute authority: the one by his bitter adherence to standards which Leiser could never achieve, the other by his youthful accessibility, the apparent sweetness and dependence of his nature.

He liked to talk to Avery. He talked about his women or the war. He assumed – it was irritating for Avery, but nothing more – that a man in his middle thirties, whether married or not, led an intense and varied love life. Later in the evening when the two of them had put on their coats and hurried to the pub at the end of the road, he would lean his elbows on the small table, thrust his bright face forward and relate the smallest detail of his exploits, his hand beside his chin, his slim fingertips rapidly parting and closing in unconscious imitation of his mouth. It was not vanity which made him thus but friendship. These betrayals and confessions, whether truth or fantasy, were the simple coinage of their intimacy. He never mentioned Betty.

Avery came to know Leiser’s face with an accuracy no longer related to memory. He noticed how its features seemed structurally to alter shape according to his mood, how when he was tired or depressed at the end of a long day the skin on his cheekbones was drawn upwards rather than down, and the corners of his eyes and mouth rose tautly so that his expression was at once more Slav and less familiar.

He had acquired from his neighbourhood or his clients certain turns of phrase which, though wholly without meaning, impressed his foreign ear. He would speak, for instance, of ‘some measure of satisfaction’, using an impersonal construction for the sake of dignity. He had assimilated also a variety of clichés. Expressions like ‘not to worry’, ‘don’t rock the boat’, ‘let the dog see the rabbit’, came to him continually, as if he were aspiring after a way of life which he only imperfectly understood, and these were the offerings that would buy him in. Some expressions, Avery remarked, were out of date.

Once or twice Avery suspected that Haldane resented his intimacy with Leiser. At other times it seemed that Haldane was deploying emotions in Avery over which he himself no longer disposed. One evening at the beginning of the second week, while Leiser was engaged in that lengthy toilet which preceded almost any recreational engagement, Avery asked Haldane whether he did not wish to go out himself.

‘What do you expect me to do? Make a pilgrimage to the shrine of my youth?’

‘I thought you might have friends there; people you still know.’

‘If I do, it would be insecure to visit them. I am here under another name.’

‘I’m sorry. Of course.’

‘Besides’ – a dour smile – ‘we are not all so prolific in our friendships.’

‘You told me to stay with him!’ Avery said hotly.

‘Precisely; and you have. It would be churlish of me to complain. You do it admirably.’

‘Do what?’

‘Obey instructions.’

At that moment the door bell rang and Avery went downstairs to answer it. By the light of the streetlamp he could see the familiar shape of a Department van in the road. A small, homely figure stood on the doorstep. He was wearing a brown suit and overcoat. There was a high shine on the toes of his brown shoes. He might have come to read the meter.

‘Jack Johnson’s my name,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Johnson’s Fair Deal, that’s me.’

‘Come in,’ Avery said.

‘This is the right place, isn’t it? Captain Hawkins … and all that?’

He carried a soft leather bag which he laid carefully on the floor as if it contained all he possessed. Half closing his umbrella he shook it expertly to rid it of the rain, then placed it on the stand beneath his overcoat.

‘I’m John.’

Johnson took his hand and squeezed it warmly.

‘Very pleased to meet you. The Boss has talked a lot about you. You’re quite the blue-eyed boy, I hear.’

They laughed.

He took Avery by the arm in a quick confiding gesture. ‘Using your own name, are you?’

‘Yes. Christian name.’

‘And the Captain?’

‘Hawkins.’

‘What’s he like, Mayfly? How’s he bearing up?’

‘Fine. Just fine.’

‘I hear he’s quite a one for the girls.’

While Johnson and Haldane talked in the drawing-room Avery slipped upstairs to Leiser.

‘It’s no go, Fred. Jack’s come.’

‘Who’s Jack?’

‘Jack Johnson, the wireless chap.’

‘I thought we didn’t start that till next week.’

‘Just the elementary this week, to get your hand in. Come down and say hullo.’

He was wearing a dark suit and held a nail file in one hand.

‘What about going out, then?’

‘I told you; we can’t tonight, Fred; Jack’s here.’

Leiser went downstairs and shook Johnson briefly by the hand, without formality, as if he did not care for latecomers. They talked awkwardly for a quarter of an hour until Leiser, protesting tiredness, went sullenly to bed.

Johnson made his first report. ‘He’s slow,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t worked a key for a long time, mind. But I daren’t try him on a set till he’s quicker on the key. I know it’s all of twenty years, sir; you can’t blame him. But he
is
slow, sir, very.’ He had an attentive, nursery-rhyme way of talking as if he spent much time in the company of children. ‘The Boss says I’m to play him all the time – when he starts the job, too. I understand we’re all going over to Germany, sir.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we shall have to get to know each other,’ he insisted, ‘Mayfly and me. We ought to be together a lot, sir, the moment I begin working him on the set. It’s like handwriting, this game, we’ve got to get used to one another’s handwriting. Then there’s schedules, times for coming up and that; signal plans for his frequencies. Safety devices. That’s a lot to learn in a fortnight.’

‘Safety devices?’ Avery asked.

‘Deliberate mistakes, sir; like a misspelling in a particular group, an E for an A or something of that kind. If he wants to tell us he’s been caught and is transmitting under control, he’ll miss the safety device.’ He turned to Haldane. ‘You know the kind of thing, Captain.’

‘There was talk in London of teaching him high-speed transmission on tape. Do you know what became of that idea?’

‘The Boss did mention it to me, sir. I understand the equipment wasn’t available. I can’t say I know much about it, really; since my time, the transistorised stuff. The Boss said we were to stick to the old methods but change the frequency every two and a half minutes, sir; I understand the Jerries are very hot on the direction-finding these days.’

‘What set did they send down? It seemed very heavy for him to carry about.’

‘It’s the kind Mayfly used in the war, sir, that’s the beauty of it. The old B2 in the waterproof casing. If we’ve only got a couple of weeks there doesn’t hardly seem time to go over anything else. Not that he’s ready to work it yet—’

‘What does it weigh?’

‘About fifty pound, sir, all in. The ordinary suitcase set. It’s the waterproofing that adds the weight, but he’s got to have it if he’s going over rough country. Specially at this time of year.’ He hesitated. ‘But he’s slow on his Morse, sir.’

‘Quite. Do you think you can bring him up to scratch in the time?’

‘Can’t tell yet, sir. Not till we really get cracking on the set. Not till the second period, when he’s had his little bit of leave. I’m just letting him handle the buzzer at present.’

‘Thank you,’ said Haldane.

At the end of the first two weeks they gave him forty-eight hours’ leave of absence. He had not asked for it and when they offered it to him he seemed puzzled. In no circumstances was he to visit his own neighbourhood. He could depart for London on the Friday but he said he preferred to go on Saturday. He could return on Monday morning but he said it depended and he might come back late on Sunday. They stressed that he was to keep clear of anyone who might know him, and in some curious fashion this seemed to console him.

Avery, worried, went to Haldane.

‘I don’t think we should send him off into the blue. You’ve told him he can’t go back to South Park; or visit his friends, even if he’s got any; I don’t see quite where he can go.’

‘You think he’ll be lonely?’

Avery blushed. ‘I think he’ll just want to come back all the time.’

‘We can hardly object to that.’

They gave him subsistence money in old notes, fives and ones. He wanted to refuse it, but Haldane pressed it on him as if a principle were involved. They offered to book him a room but he declined. Haldane assumed he was going to London, so in the end he went, as if he owed it to them.