The Secret Pilgrim (40 page)

“Mary, who the hell's that?”

“His teachers, darling. Radio Moscow's Olga and Boris, five days a week, 6 a.m. sharp. This is yesterday morning.”

“You mean he's teaching himself
Russian
?”

“Well, he listens to it, darling. How much of it is going into his little head is anybody's guess. Every morning, sharp at six, Cyril does his Olga and Boris. They're visiting the Kremlin today. Yesterday they were shopping at Gum.”

I heard Frewin mutter unintelligibly in the bath, I heard him call out “Mother” in the night, while he tossed restlessly in bed: FREWIN Ella, I remembered, deceased, mother to FREWIN Cyril Arthur, q.v. I have never understood why Registry insists on opening personal files for the dead relatives of suspected spies.

I listened to him arguing with the British Telecom engineers' department after he had waited the statutory twenty minutes to be connected with them. His voice was edgy, full of unexpected emphases.

“Well,
next
time you elect to identify a
fault
on my line, I would be
highly
grateful if you would kindly inform
me
as the subscriber
prior
to barging into my house when my
cleaning w
oman happens to be in, and leaving particles of
wire
on the carpets and
boot
marks on the kitchen
floor . . .
”

I listened to him phone the Covent Garden opera house to say he would not be taking up his subscription ticket this Friday. This time his tone was self-pitying. He explained that he was ill. The kind lady on the other end said there was a lot of it about.

I listened to him talking to the butcher in anticipation of my visit, which Foreign Office Personnel had set for tomorrow morning at his house.

“Mr. Steele, this is Mr. Cyril Frewin. Good morning. I shall
not
be able to come
in
to you on Saturday, owing to the fact that I have a conference at my
house.
I would therefore be
grateful
if you would kindly deliver four
good
lamb chops for me on the Friday evening as you pass by on your way home. Will that be convenient, Mr. Steele? Also a jar of your pre-mixed mint
sauce.
No, I have red currant jelly already, thank you. Will you attach your
bill,
please?”

To my over-acute ear, he sounded like a man preparing to abandon ship.

“I'll take the engineers again, please, Mary,” I said. Having twice more listened to Frewin's dogmatic tones of complaint to British Telecom, I gave her a distracted kiss and stepped into the evening air. Sally had said, “Come round,” but I was in no mood to spend an evening professing love to her and listening to music I secretly detested.

I returned to the Pool. The Service laboratories had completed their examination of the anonymous letter. A Markus electronic, model number so-and-so, probably Belgian manufacture, new or little used, was the best they could suggest. They believed they would be able to identify another document issuing from the same machine. Could I get one? End of report. The laboratories were still wrestling with the characteristics of the new generation of machines.

I rang Monty at his lair in Baron's Court. Frewin's complaint to the engineers was still ringing in my memory: his pauses, like unnatural commas, his use of the word
highly
, his habit of punching the unlikely word to achieve vindictive emphasis.

“Did your fellows notice a typewriter in Cyril's house, Monty, by any chance, while they were kindly mending his telephone?” I asked.

“No, Ned. There was no typewriter, Ned—not one they saw, put it that way.”

“Could they have missed it?”

“Easily, Ned. It was soft-pedalling only. No opening desks or cupboards, no photographing, not too much familiarity with his cleaning lady either, or she'll worry afterwards. It was ‘See what you can, get out fast, and be sure you leave a mess or he'll smell a rat.' ”

I thought of phoning Burr, but I didn't. My case officer's possessiveness was taking over, and I was damned if I was going to share Frewin with anyone, not even the man who had entrusted him to me. A hundred twisted threads were running through my head, from Modrian to Gorst to Boris and Olga to Christmas to Salzburg to Sally. In the end, I wrote Burr a minute setting out most of what I had discovered and confirming that I would “make a first reconnaissance” of Frewin tomorrow morning when I interviewed him for his routine vetting clearance.

To go home? To go to Sally? Home was a hateful little service flat in St. James's, where I was supposed to be sorting myself out— though that's the last thing any man does when he sits alone with a bottle of Scotch and a reproduction painting of “The Laughing Cavalier” dithering between his dreams of freedom and his addiction to what holds him prisoner. Sally was my Alternative Life, but I knew already I was too set to jump the wall and reach it.

Preferring to remain at my desk, therefore, I fetched myself a whisky from the safe and browsed through Modrian's file. It told me nothing I didn't already know, but I wanted him at the front of my head. Sergei Modrian, tried and tested Moscow Centre professional. A charmer, a bit of a dancer, a befriender, a smiling Armenian with a mercury tongue. I had liked him. He had liked me. In our profession, since we may like no one beyond a point, we can forgive a lot for charm.

My direct line was ringing. I thought for a moment it would be Sally, for contrary to regulations I had given her the number. It was Toby and he sounded pleased with himself. He usually did. He didn't mention Frewin by name. He didn't mention Salzburg. I guessed he was ringing from his flat, and I'd a shrewd notion he was in bed and not alone.

“Ned? Your man's a joke. Books himself a single room for two weeks, checks in, pays his two weeks in advance, give the staff their Christmas box, pats the kids, makes nice to everybody. Next morning he disappears, does it every year. Ned, can you hear me? Listen, the guy's crazy. No phone calls out, one meal, two
Apfelsaft,
no explanations, taxi to the station. Keep my room, don't let it, maybe I'll be back tomorrow, maybe in a few days, I don't know. After twelve days, back he comes, no explanations, tips the staff some more, everybody happy like a heathen. They call him ‘the ghost.' Ned, you got to talk nice to Burr for me. You owe me now. Toby works his fingers to the bone, tell him. Old star like you, a young fellow like Burr, he'll listen to you, costs you nothing. I need another man out here, maybe two. Tell him, Ned, hear me? Cheers.”

I stared at the wall, the one I couldn't scale; I stared at Modrian's file, I remembered Monty's dictum about too easy. I suddenly wanted Sally terribly, and had some cloudy notion that by solving the mystery of Frewin I would convert my recurring spurts for freedom into one bold leap. But as I reached for the phone to talk to her, it started to ring again.

“They fit,” said Monty in a flat voice. He had managed to check Frewin's opera attendance. “It's Sergei and Cyril every time. When
he
goes, so does
he.
When
he
doesn't, neither does
he.
Maybe that's why
he
doesn't go any more. Got it?”

“And the seats?” I asked.

“Side by side, darling. What do you expect? Front to back?

“Thanks, Monty,” I said

Do I have to tell you how I spent that interminable night? Have you never telephoned your own son, listened to his unhappy jibes and had to remind yourself that he is yours? Talked frankly to an understanding wife about your in adequacies, not knowing what on earth they were? Have you never reached out for your mistress, cried “I love you” and remained a mystified spectator to
her untroubled fulfillment, before leaving her once more, to walk the London streets as if they were a foreign city? Have you never, from all the other sounds of dawn, picked out the wet chuckle of a magpie and fixed on it for your whole life long while you lie wide-eyed on your beastly single bed?

I arrived at Frewin's house at half past nine, having dressed myself as boringly as I could contrive, and that must have been boringly indeed, for I am not a natty dresser at the best of times, though Sally has appalling ideas about how she might improve my style. Frewin and I had agreed on ten but I told myself I wanted the element of surprise. Perhaps the truth was, I needed his company. A postman's van was parked up the street. A builder's truck with an aerial stood beyond it, telling me Monty's men were at their posts.

I forgot what month it was but I know it was autumn, both in my private life and in the prim cul-de-sac of steep brick houses. For I see a disc of white sun hanging behind the pollarded chestnut trees that had given the place its name, and I smell to this day the scent of bonfires and autumn air in my nostrils urging me to leave London, leave the Service, take to Sally and the world's real countryside. And I remember the whirr of small birds as they lifted from Frewin's telephone line on their way to somewhere better. And a cat in the next-door garden rising on its rear paws to box a drowsy butterfly.

I dropped the latch to the garden gate and crunched up the prim gravel path to the Seven Dwarfs semi-detached, with its bottleglass windows and thatched porch. I reached out my hand for the bell, but the front door flew away from me. It was ribbed, and studded with fake coach bolts, and it shot back as if it had been blasted by a street bomb, almost sucking me after it into the dark tiled hall. Then the door stood still, and Frewin stood beside it, a bald centurion to his own endangered house.

He was taller than I had realised by a wrestler's head. His thick shoulders were braced to receive my attack, his eyes were fixed on me in scared hostility. Yet even at this first moment of encounter
I sensed no contest in him, only a sort of heroic vulnerability made tragic by his bulk. I entered his house, and knew I was entering a madness. I had known it all night long. In desperation we find a natural kinship with the mad. I had known that for much longer.

“Captain York? Yes, well, welcome, sir. Welcome indeed. Personnel of their goodness
did
advise me you were coming. They don't always. But this time they did. Come in, please. You have your
duty
to do, Captain, as I have mine.” His vast, soggy hands were lifted for my coat but seemed unable to grapple with it. So they hovered above my neck as if to strangle or embrace me while he went on talking. “We're all on the same side and no hard feelings, I say. I liken your job to airport security, personally, it's the same parameters. If they don't search
me,
they won't search the villains either, will they? It's the logical approach to the matter, in my view.”

Heaven knows what lost original he thought he was copying as he delivered these over-prepared words, but at least they freed him from his frozen state. His hands descended to my coat and helped me out of it, and I can feel now the reverence with which they did so, as if unveiling something exciting to us both.

“You fly a lot then, do you, Mr. Frewin?” I asked.

He hung my coat on a hanger, and the hanger on a vile reproduction coat-tree. I waited for an answer but none came. I was thinking of his air travel to Salzburg, and I wonder whether he was too, and whether his conscience was speaking out of him in the tension of my arrival. He marched ahead of me to the drawing room, where by the light of the leaded bay window I was able to examine him at my ease, for he was already busy with the next article of his urgent hospitality: this time, an electric coffee percolator filled but not switched on—did I want the milk, or the sugar or the both, Captain? And the milk, Captain, was it hot or cold? And how about home-made biscuit for you, Captain?

“You really made them yourself?” I asked as I fished one from the jar.

“Any fool who can read can cook,” said Frewin, with a chaotic grin of superiority, and I could see at once why Gorst would loathe him.

“Well, I can read, but I certainly can't cook,” I replied, with rueful shake of my head.

“What's your first name, Captain?”

“Ned,” I replied.

“Well, that's because you're married, Ned, I expect. Your wife has robbed you of your self-sufficiency. I've seen it too often in life. In comes the wife, out goes the independence. I'm Cyril.”

And you're ducking my question about your air travel, I thought, refusing to allow him this attempted incursion into my private territory.

“If
I
ran this country,” Frewin announced over his shoulder to me while he poured, “which I am
pleased
to say l shall never have the opportunity to
do
”
—
his voice was acquiring the didactic drumbeat of his conversation with the engineers—“I would make an
absolute
law that
everyone,
regardless of colour, sex or creed, would take
cooking
as an obligatory subject
while
at school.”

“Good idea,” I said, accepting a mug of coffee, “very sound,” and helped myself to sugar from the yellow beehive pot, which nestled like a missile in his damp paw. He had turned to me all at once, shoulders, waist and head together. His bare eyes, unfringed and unprotected, gazed down on me with a radiant and doting innocence.

“Play any games at all, Ned?” he enquired softly, tipping his head to one side for added confidentiality.

“A spot of golf, Cyril,” I lied. “How about you?”

“Hobbies at all, Ned?”

“Well, I do like to do the odd watercolour when I'm on holiday,” I said, borrowing again from Mabel.

“Drive a car, do you, Ned? I expect you boys have to have all the skills at your fingertips, don't you?”

“Just an old Rover.”

“What year is it, then? What vintage, Ned? There's many a good tune played on an old fiddle, they say.”

His energy was not just in his person, I realised as I gave him the first date that occurred to me; it spilled into every object that came within his sphere. Into the reproduction horse-brasses that glistened like military cap-badges from his vigorous polishing. Into the polished fire grate and wood fire and the resplendent surface of his dining table. Into the very chair where I now sat and meekly sipped my coffee, for its arms were concealed in linen covers so pressed and spotless that I was reluctant to put hands on them. And I knew without his telling me that, cleaning woman or none, he tended all these things himself, that he was their servant and dictator, in the kingdom of his boundless wasted energy.