Your Face Tomorrow. Fever And Spear (39 page)

'This ability or gift was very useful during the war, indeed, in time of war it always proves invaluable, which is why the powers-that-be of the day did their best to organise and channel it, they combed the population for it, because they quickly came to realise how very few people had that gift or faculty, possibly even fewer then than now, war has an incredibly distorting effect on people's perceptions, half the people see ghosts and witches everywhere and the other half merely perfect their habitual tendency to see nothing at all, and do their best not even to see that. But it was the war that brought it to the forefront, ideas only surface when we need them, even the very simplest of ideas,' Wheeler had murmured to me in the garden, while we strolled slowly along by the river, waiting for lunch. 'It's just a shame that the idea didn't come up a few months earlier, who knows, Val, my wife Valerie, might not have died. But unfortunately, by the time someone had thought of it, she was already dead. I'm not sure who it was, Menzies or Ve-Ve Vivian, or Cowgill or Hollis or even Philby (I don't think it was Jack Curry, no, I'd rule him out), they were all vying with each other to be the most inventive, they've always prided themselves on that in MI5 and MI6, they kept a watchful eye on what their colleagues did, even ended up spying on each other, it probably still happens. It's likely that it was Churchill himself who had the idea, he was the brightest and boldest of the lot, the least afraid of ridicule. Not that it matters. It's impossible ever to know the true paternity of these things, and no one cares, apart from the candidates claiming to have given birth to that brief diversion from dusty death in our now distant yesterdays,' said Wheeler, adapting Shakespeare's famous words with a touch of bitter humour, 'everyone tells their story and no one believes a word of it or pays the slightest attention. Whatever the truth of the matter, it all started with the campaign against careless talk, have you heard of that?' It rang a bell that expression, literally
'charla despreocupada'
or
'negligente'
or
'descuidada'
or
'conversation imprudente',
it was difficult to find a satisfactory and exact translation, I related it to what in Spanish we term
'hablar a la ligera',
although it isn't quite that either, or
'cotilleo'
or
'chismorreo'
or
'habladurtas'.
I shook my head: I didn't, at any rate, know of a campaign by that name. Nor, at the time, did I know any of the names that Wheeler had trotted out, apart from that of Churchill, of course, and of Kim Philby (that other foreign or bogus Englishman, born in India and the son of an explorer and orientalist who was, in turn, a native of Ceylon and who, in his forties, converted to Islam), who had also been in Spain during the Civil War as the
Times
correspondent on the side of the insurrectionists, but apparently under orders (from the Soviets, not the British) to take advantage of his proximity to assassinate Franco (he failed, of course, and didn't even try very hard: now for that he really should have been punished). Only later did I learn that they had all been civil servants or spies with grave responsibilities, just as it also took me a while to discover, for example, (I'm not going to pretend to any God-given knowledge) that the first surname mentioned by Wheeler was written Menzies, even though he pronounced it as 'Mingiss'. 'You haven't, eh?' Wheeler went on, at the same time opening his folder and rummaging around in it. 'It began during the war, they plastered the whole country with posters, notices and illustrated examples, with radio and press announcements, using drawings by Eric Fraser and many others, Eric Kennington, Wilkinson, Beggarstaff (I've got a few of them here, see?), when we were all convinced and obsessed by the idea that England, Scotland and Wales were infested with Nazi spies, many of them as British as anyone else by birth, education and interests, people who had been bought, fanatical people under a spell, treacherous people, sick, infected people. Everyone distrusted everyone else, especially once the campaign started, with very uneven results in practice (we were, after all, fighting an invincible foe), but it was quite effective mentally or psychologically: people were suspicious of their neighbour, their relative, their teacher, their colleague, the shopkeeper, the doctor, their wife, their husband, and many took advantage of such easy, widespread suspicions, perfectly understandable given the climate at the time, to get rid of a hated spouse. You might not be able to prove that you were living with a German undercover agent or infiltrator, but mere insuperable doubt was enough of an obstacle to prevent you remaining by the side of the supposed monster you had detected, in other words, it provided sufficient grounds for divorce. How could you share a pillow, night after night, with someone about whom you harboured such very grave doubts, with someone so fearsome that he or she would not hesitate to kill you if they suspected they had been unmasked or were under threat? That was what people thought enemy spies were like, whether young or old, male or female, British or foreign, they were all ruthless individuals, with no scruples, no limits, always ready to inflict the greatest possible harm, direct or indirect, on the rearguard or at the front, on group morale or on military equipment, on the civilian population or the troops, it didn't matter. And that wasn't an entirely wrong-headed idea either. People exaggerated their fears in order not entirely to believe in them, to conclude, after all, that nothing could possibly be as malign as they imagined, it's something we all do, deliberately, but apparently unconsciously, thinking the worst, in ridiculous, paranoid fashion, imagining the most gruesome things merely to end up dismissing them in our heart of hearts: at the end of that process, that awful mental journey, shall we say, we always tell ourselves: oh, it won't be that bad. The funny or dismal fact is that the truth usually is just as bad, if not worse. In my experience and to my knowledge, reality often matches the most cruel of presentiments, and even, sometimes, surpasses them, that is, it provides a precise match for those ideas rejected at the very height or peak of fear, for ideas that were ultimately dismissed as the crazed, immoderate nightmares of anxiety and the imagination. Numerous Nazi agents on British soil did, of course, kill anyone they had to, anyone who posed the slightest threat to them, as did our agents in occupied Europe, ours being mainly but not exclusively members of the SOE. In time of peace it's impossible to understand or to know what war is like, it really is inconceivable, it's not even possible to remember the wars one has actually experienced, those that happened and happened right here, even wars in which one took part; just as in time of war it's impossible to remember or to conceive of peace. People don't realise to what extent the one negates the other, how one state suppresses, repels and excludes the other from our memory and drives it out of our imagination and our thoughts (like pain and pleasure when they are no longer present), or, at most, converts it into something fictitious, you have the feeling that you've never really known or experienced what is, at any given moment, absent; and when absent, always assuming that it existed before, it doesn't function in the same way, it doesn't resemble the past or whatever else is now gone, it's more like a novel or a film. It 'becomes unreal, a lie. And as regards war, it just seems unbelievable to us, all that waste.' I was tempted to ask Wheeler if he too had killed, in MI6 (a bag of meat, a bloodstain), perhaps in the Caribbean, or in West Africa, or in South-East Asia; or before that, in Spain. But he did not allow time for that temptation to become fact, because he barely paused before adding: 'We find it unutterably hard to believe it afterwards, as soon as war is over; the moment we're faced by defeat or victory, especially victory. They're like watertight compartments, the state of peace and the state of war. Such a waste.' And then he immediately returned to what he had mentioned earlier: 'Look at this, have you ever seen this before?'

Wheeler took out of his file a yellowing newspaper cutting

showing a drawing on which the first thing that leapt out at you was the large swastika in the middle, like a hairy spider, and the web that the spider had woven, which wrapped around or, rather, trapped inside it a number of scenes.
'Information to the Enemy,'
it said in large letters, the tide of a play presumably, to judge by the small print at the bottom, which said: 'This play by G. R. Rainier, which illustrates how careless talk, however innocent it may seem at the time, might be pieced together by the enemy and give away a vital secret, will be broadcast again tonight at 10.00.' There were four scenes: three men talking in a pub over a game of darts, the man lurking behind them must be the spy, given that he has a hooked nose, an artist's long hair and prissy beard, and is wearing what appears to be a monocle; a soldier is sitting on a train talking to a blonde lady, she must be the spy, not just by a process of elimination, but also given her elegant appearance; two couples are talking in the street, one composed of two men and the other of a man and a woman: the respective spies must be the man in the bow tie and the man in the scarf, although here it wasn't quite so clear (but it seemed to me that they were the ones doing the listening); lastly, a pilot is welcomed home, doubtless by his parents, and alongside them stands a young woman in apron and cap: she is clearly the spy, since she is young, an employee and an intruder. In addition, at the top and the bottom, there was a plane, the one at the top positioned very close to a mysterious van (possibly just a front) with the words 'Laundry' painted on its side.

'No, I haven't,' I said, and after carefully studying the drawing by Eric Fraser, I turned the cutting over, as I always do with old cuttings.
Radio Times, 2
May 1941. It appeared to be part of the schedule for that week, for the BBC, I assumed, which, at the time, broadcast only radio. The complete tide of this didactic play by Mr Rainier (his name sounded more German than English, or perhaps he was a Monegasque) was, I saw,
Fifth Column: Information to the Enemy.
That expression, 'fifth column', had originated, I believe, in my city, in Madrid, which was besieged for three years by Franco and his troops and his German aviators and his Moroccan guards, and infested by his own fifth columnists, we swiftly exported both terms to other languages and other places: in May 1941, it had been a mere twenty-five months since some of us had met with defeat and others with victory, my parents were amongst the former, as was I when I was born (there are more losses amongst the vanquished and those losses last longer). Included in that radio schedule of sixty long years ago (one's eyes are always drawn to words in one's own language) was a performance by 'Don Felipe and the Cuban Caballeros, with Dorothe Morrow', they were due to be on for half an hour before the close of programming at eleven o'clock: 'Time, Big Ben: Close down'. Where would they be now, Don Felipe and the Cuban Caballeros and the inappropriately named Dorothe Morrow, presumably the vocalist? Where would they be, whether alive or dead? Who knows if they would have managed to perform that night or if they would have been prevented from doing so by a Luftwaffe bombing raid, planned and directed by fifth columnists and informers and spies from our territory. Who knows if they even survived that day.

'What about this? And this? Look at this, and this, and this.' Wheeler continued to take drawings from his file, in colour now and not originals this time, but cut out of magazines or possibly books, or else postcards and playing-cards from the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth Road and from other institutions, they must sell them now as nostalgic souvenirs or as curios, there was a whole pack of cards illustrated with them, it's odd how the useful and even essential things in one's own life become ornaments and archaeology when that life is still not yet over, I thought of Wheeler's life and thought too that I would one day see, in catalogues and in exhibitions, objects and newspapers and photographs and books whose actual creation or taking or writing I had witnessed, if I lived long enough or not even necessarily that long, everything becomes remote so quickly. That museum, the Imperial War Museum, was very close to the headquarters or head office of MI6, that is, the Secret Intelligence Service or SIS, in Vauxhall Cross, which was far from being architecturally secret, it verged, rather, on the flamboyant, on the prominent rather than the discreet, a ziggurat, a lighthouse; and it was very close to the building with no name to which I went every morning over what seemed to me a long period, even though I didn't know then that it would be for me another place of work, of which I've already had quite a few.

'Do you collect them, Peter?' I asked as I studied them. We sat for a moment on the chairs Wheeler had in his garden, they were protected by canvas or waterproof covers and arranged around a small table, he got the chairs out in early spring and took them in again in late autumn, when the days began to grow shorter, but he and Mrs Berry kept them covered up depending on what the day was like, on most days, in fact; the weather is always so changeable in England; that's why they have the expression 'as changeable as the weather', which they apply, for example, to very fickle people. We sat down directly on the canvas covers, the colour of pale gabardine, they were perfectly dry, a pause so that we could more easily sort out and arrange the drawings on the table, which was also covered, the tables and chairs disguised as modern sculptures, or tethered ghosts. There had been similar furniture in Rylands's garden, I recalled, in his nearby garden beside this same river.